The Ministry of Fear Read online

  ‘Are you ringing up the police?’ Rowe asked, ‘or a doctor?’

  ‘A theatre,’ Mr Rennit said despairingly, ‘I just remembered my wife . . .’

  ‘You are married, are you, in spite of all your experience?’

  ‘Yes.’ An awful disinclination to talk convulsed Mr Rennit’s features as a thin faint voice came up the wires. He said, ‘Two seats – in the front row,’ and clapped the receiver down again.

  ‘The theatre?’

  ‘The theatre.’

  ‘And they didn’t even want your name? Why not be reasonable?’ Rowe said. ‘After all, I had to tell you. You have to have all the facts. It wouldn’t be fair otherwise. It might have to be taken into consideration, mightn’t it, if you work for me.’

  ‘Into consideration?’

  ‘I mean – it might have a bearing. That’s something I discovered when they tried me – that everything may have a bearing. The fact that I had lunch on a certain day alone at the Holborn Restaurant. Why was I alone, they asked me. I said I liked being alone sometimes, and you should have seen the way they nodded at the jury. It had a bearing.’ His hands began to shake again. ‘As if I really wanted to be alone for life . . .’

  Mr Rennit cleared a dry throat.

  ‘Even the fact that my wife kept love-birds . . .’

  ‘You are married?’

  ‘It was my wife I murdered.’ He found it hard to put things in the right order; people oughtn’t to ask unnecessary questions: he really hadn’t meant to startle Mr Rennit again. He said, ‘You needn’t worry. The police know all about it.’

  ‘You were acquitted?’

  ‘I was detained during His Majesty’s pleasure. It was quite a short pleasure: I wasn’t mad, you see. They just had to find an excuse.’ He said with loathing, ‘They pitied me, so that’s why I’m alive. The papers all called it a mercy killing.’ He moved his hand in front of his face as though he were troubled by a thread of cobweb. ‘Mercy to her or mercy to me. They didn’t say. And I don’t know myself.’

  ‘I really don’t think,’ Mr Rennit said, swallowing for breath in the middle of a sentence and keeping a chair between them, ‘I can undertake . . . It’s out of my line.’

  ‘I’ll pay more,’ Rowe said. ‘It always comes down to that, doesn’t it?’ and as soon as he felt cupidity stirring in the little dusty room, over the half-eaten sausage-roll and the saucer and the tattered telephone-directory, he knew he had gained his point. Mr Rennit after all could not afford to be nice. Rowe said, ‘A murderer is rather like a peer: he pays more because of his tide. One tries to travel incognito, but it usually comes out . . .’

  Chapter 3

  FRONTAL ASSAULT

  ‘It were hard he should not have one faithful comrade and friend with him.’

  The Little Duke

  1

  ROWE went straight from Orthotex to the Free Mothers. He had signed a contract with Mr Rennit to pay him fifty pounds a week for a period of four weeks to carry out investigations; Mr Rennit had explained that the expenses would be heavy – Orthotex employed only the most experienced agents – and the one agent he had been permitted to see before he left the office was certainly experienced. (Mr Rennit introduced him as A.2, but before long he was absent-mindedly addressing him as Jones.) Jones was small and at first sight insignificant, with his thin pointed nose, his soft brown hat with a stained ribbon, his grey suit which might have been quite a different colour years ago, and the pencil and pen on fasteners in the breast pocket. But when you looked a second time you saw experience; you saw it in the small cunning rather frightened eyes, the weak defensive mouth, the wrinkles of anxiety on the forehead – experience of innumerable hotel corridors, of bribed chamber-maids and angry managers, experience of the insult which could not be resented, the threat which had to be ignored, the promise which was never kept. Murder had a kind of dignity compared with this muted second-hand experience of scared secretive passions.

  An argument developed almost at once in which Jones played no part, standing close to the wall holding his old brown hat, looking and listening as though he were outside a hotel door. Mr Rennit, who obviously considered the whole investigation the fantastic fad of an unbalanced man, argued that Rowe himself should not take part. ‘Just leave it to me and A.2,’ he said. ‘If it’s a confidence trick . . .’

  He would not believe that Rowe’s life had been threatened. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘we’ll look into the chemists’ books – not that there’ll be anything to find.’

  ‘It made me angry,’ Rowe repeated. ‘He said he’d checked up – and yet he had the nerve.’ An idea came to him and he went excitedly on, ‘It was the same drug. People would have said it was suicide, that I’d managed to keep some of it hidden . . .’

  ‘If there’s anything in your idea,’ Mr Rennit said, ‘the cake was given to the wrong man. We’ve only got to find the right one. It’s a simple matter of tracing. Jones and I know all about tracing. We start from Mrs Bellairs. She told you the weight, but why did she tell you the weight? Because she mistook you in the dark for the other man. There must be some resemblance . . .’ Mr Rennit exchanged a look with Jones. ‘It all boils down to finding Mrs Bellairs. That’s not very difficult. Jones will do that.’

  ‘It would be easiest of all for me to ask for her – at the Free Mothers.’

  ‘I’d advise you to let Jones see to it.’

  ‘They’d think he was a tout.’

  ‘It wouldn’t do at all for a client to make his own investigations, not at all.’

  ‘If there’s nothing in my story,’ Rowe said, ‘they’ll give me Mrs Bellairs’ address. If I’m right they’ll try to kill me, because, though the cake’s gone, I know there was a cake, and that there are people who want the cake. There’s the work for Jones, to keep his eye on me.’

  Jones shifted his hat uneasily and tried to catch his employer’s eye. He cleared his throat and Mr Rennit asked, ‘What is it, A.2?’

  ‘Won’t do, sir,’ Jones said.

  ‘No?’

  ‘Unprofessional, sir.’

  ‘I agree with Jones,’ Mr Rennit said.

  All the same, in spite of Jones, Rowe had his way. He came out into the shattered street and made his sombre way between the ruins of Holborn. In his lonely state to have confessed his identity to someone was almost like making a friend. Always before it had been discovered, even at the warden’s post; it came out sooner or later, like cowardice. They were extraordinary the tricks and turns of fate, the way conversations came round, the long memories some people had for names. Now in the strange torn landscape where London shops were reduced to a stone ground-plan like those of Pompeii he moved with familiarity; he was part of this destruction as he was no longer part of the past – the long weekends in the country, the laughter up lanes in the evening, the swallows gathering on telegraph wires, peace.

  Peace had come to an end quite suddenly on an August the thirty-first – the world waited another year. He moved like a bit of stone among the other stones – he was protectively coloured, and he felt at times, breaking the surface of his remorse, a kind of evil pride like that a leopard might feel moving in harmony with all the other spots on the world’s surface, only with greater power. He had not been a criminal when he murdered; it was afterwards that he began to grow into criminality like a habit of thought. That these men should have tried to kill him who had succeeded at one blow in destroying beauty, goodness, peace – it was a form of impertinence. There were times when he felt the whole world’s criminality was his; and then suddenly at some trivial sight – a woman’s bag, a face on an elevator going up as he went down, a picture in a paper – all the pride seeped out of him. He was aware only of the stupidity of his act; he wanted to creep out of sight and weep; he wanted to forget that he had ever been happy. A voice would whisper, ‘You say you killed for pity; why don’t you have pity on yourself?’ Why not indeed? except that it is easier to kill someone you love than to kill yourself. />
  2

  The Free Mothers had taken over an empty office in a huge white modern block off the Strand. It was like going into a mechanised mortuary with a separate lift for every slab. Rowe moved steadily upwards in silence for five floors: a long passage, frosted glass, somebody in pince-nez stepped into the lift carrying a file marked ‘Most Immediate’ and they moved on smoothly upwards. A door on the seventh floor was marked ‘Comforts for Mothers of the Free Nations. Inquiries.’

  He began to believe that after all Mr Rennit was right. The stark efficient middle-class woman who sat at a typewriter was so obviously incorruptible and unpaid. She wore a little button to show she was honorary. ‘Yes?’ she asked sharply and all his anger and pride drained away. He tried to remember what the stranger had said – about the cake not being intended for him. There was really nothing sinister in the phrase so far as he could now remember it, and as for the taste, hadn’t he often woken at night with that upon his tongue?

  ‘Yes?’ the woman repeated briskly.

  ‘I came,’ Rowe said, ‘to try and find out the address of a Mrs Bellairs.’

  ‘No lady of that name works here.’

  ‘It was in connection with the fête.’

  ‘Oh, they were all voluntary helpers. We can’t possibly disclose addresses of voluntary helpers.’

  ‘Apparently,’ Rowe said, ‘a mistake was made. I was given a cake which didn’t belong to me . . .’

  ‘I’ll inquire,’ the stark lady said and went into an inner room. He had just long enough to wonder whether after all he had been wise. He should have brought A.2 up with him. But then the normality of everything came back; he was the only abnormal thing there. The honorary helper stood in the doorway and said, ‘Will you come through, please?’ He took a quick glance at her typewriter as he went by; he could read ‘The Dowager Lady Cradbrooke thanks Mrs J. A. Smythe-Philipps for her kind gift of tea and flour . . .’ Then he went in.

  He had never become accustomed to chance stabs: only when the loved person is out of reach does love become complete. The colour of the hair and the size of the body – something very small and neat and incapable, you would say, of inflicting pain – this was enough to make him hesitate just inside the room. There were no other resemblances, but when the girl spoke – in the slightest of foreign accents – he felt the kind of astonishment one feels at a party hearing the woman one loves talking in a stranger’s tone to a stranger. It was not an uncommon occurrence; he would follow people into shops, he would wait at street corners because of a small resemblance, just as though the woman he loved was only lost and might be discovered any day in a crowd.

  She said, ‘You came about a cake?’

  He watched her closely: they had so little in common compared with the great difference, that one was alive and the other dead. He said, ‘A man came to see me last night – I suppose from this office.’

  He fumbled for words because it was just as absurd to think that this girl might be mixed up in a crime as to think of Alice – except as a victim. ‘I had won a cake in a raffle at your fête – but there seemed to be some mistake.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘A bomb fell before I could make out what it was he wanted to tell me.’

  ‘But no one could have come from here,’ she said. ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘Very small and dark with twisted shoulders – practically a cripple.’

  ‘There is no one like that here.’

  ‘I thought perhaps that if I found Mrs Bellairs . . .’ The name seemed to convey nothing. ‘One of the helpers at the fête.’

  ‘They were all volunteers,’ the girl explained. ‘I dare say we could find the address for you through the organizers, but is it so – important?’

  A screen divided the room in two; he had imagined they were alone, but as the girl spoke a young man came round the screen. He had the same fine features as the girl; she introduced him, ‘This is my brother, Mr . . .’

  ‘Rowe.’

  ‘Somebody called on Mr Rowe to ask about a cake. I don’t quite understand. It seems he won it at our fête.’

  ‘Now let me see, who could that possibly be?’ The young man spoke excellent English; only a certain caution and precision marked him as a foreigner. It was as if he had come from an old-fashioned family among whom it was important to speak clearly and use the correct words; his care had an effect of charm, not of pedantry. He stood with his hand laid lightly and affectionately on his sister’s shoulder as though they formed together a Victorian family group. ‘Was he one of your countrymen, Mr Rowe? In this office we are most of us foreigners, you know.’ Smiling he took Rowe into his confidence. ‘If health or nationality prevent us fighting for you, we have to do something. My sister and I are – technically – Austrian.’

  ‘This man was English.’

  ‘He must have been one of the voluntary helpers. We have so many – I don’t know half of them by name. You want to return a prize, is that it? A cake?’

  Rowe said cautiously, ‘I wanted to inquire about it.’

  ‘Well, Mr Rowe, if I were you, I should be unscrupulous. I should just “hang on” to the cake.’ When he used a colloquialism you could hear the inverted commas drop gently and apologetically around it.

  ‘The trouble is,’ Rowe said, ‘the cake’s no longer there. My house was bombed last night.’

  ‘I’m sorry. About your house, I mean. The cake can’t seem very important now, surely?’

  They were charming, they were obviously honest, but they had caught him neatly and effectively in an inconsistency.

  ‘I shouldn’t bother,’ the girl said, ‘if I were you.’

  Rowe watched them hesitatingly. But it is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself. For more than a year now Rowe had been so imprisoned – there had been no change of cell, no exercise-yard, no unfamiliar warder to break the monotony of solitary confinement. A moment comes to a man when a prison-break must be made whatever the risk. Now cautiously he tried for freedom. These two had lived through terror themselves, but they had emerged without any ugly psychological scar. He said, ‘As a matter of fact it wasn’t simply the cake which was worrying me.’

  They watched him with a frank and friendly interest; you felt that in spite of the last years there was still the bloom of youth on them – they still expected life to offer them other things than pain and boredom and distrust and hate. The young man said, ‘Won’t you sit down and tell us . . . ?’ They reminded him of children who liked stories. They couldn’t have accumulated more than fifty years’ experience between them. He felt immeasurably older.

  Rowe said, ‘I got the impression that whoever wanted that cake was ready to be – well, violent.’ He told them of the visit and the stranger’s vehemence and the odd taste in his tea. The young man’s very pale blue eyes sparkled with his interest and excitement. He said, ‘It’s a fascinating story. Have you any idea who’s behind it – or what? How does Mrs Bellairs come into it?’

  He wished now that he hadn’t been to Mr Rennit – these were the allies he needed, not the dingy Jones and his sceptical employer.

  ‘Mrs Bellairs told my fortune at the fête, and told me the weight of the cake – which wasn’t the right weight.’

  ‘It’s extraordinary,’ the young man said enthusiastically.

  The girl said, ‘It doesn’t make sense.’ She added almost in Mr Rennit’s words, ‘It was probably all a misunderstanding.’

  ‘Misunderstanding,’ her brother said and then dropped his inverted commas round the antiquated slang, ‘ “my eye”.’ He turned to Rowe with an expression of glee. ‘Count this Society, Mr Rowe, as far as the secretary’s concerned at your service. This is really interesting.’ He held out his hand. ‘My name – our name is Hilfe. Where do we begin?’

  The girl sat silent. Rowe said, ‘Your sister doesn’t agree.’

  ‘Oh,’ the young man said, ‘she’ll
come round. She always does in the end. She thinks I’m a romantic. She’s had to get me out of too many scrapes.’ He became momentarily serious. ‘She got me out of Austria.’ But nothing could damp his enthusiasm for long. ‘That’s another story. Do we begin with Mrs Bellairs? Have you any idea what it’s all about? I’ll get our grim volunteer in the next room on the hunt,’ and opening the door he called through. ‘Dear Mrs Dermody, do you think you could find the address of one of our voluntary helpers called Mrs Bellairs?’ He explained to Rowe, ‘The difficulty is she’s probably just the friend of a friend – not a regular helper. Try Canon Topling,’ he suggested to Mrs Dermody.

  The greater the young man’s enthusiasm, the more fantastic the whole incident became. Rowe began to see it through Mr Rennit’s eyes – Mrs Dermody, Canon Topling . . .

  He said, ‘Perhaps after all your sister’s right.’

  But young Hilfe swept on. ‘She may be, of course she may be. But how dull if she is. I’d much rather think, until we know, that there’s some enormous conspiracy . . .’

  Mrs Dermody put her head in at the door and said, ‘Canon Topling gave me the address. It’s 5 Park Crescent.’

  ‘If she’s a friend of Canon Topling,’ Rowe began and caught Miss Hilfe’s eye. She gave him a secret nod as much as to say – now you’re on the right track.

  ‘Oh, but let’s “hang on” to the stranger,’ Hilfe said.

  ‘There may be a thousand reasons,’ Miss Hilfe said.

  ‘Surely not a thousand, Anna,’ her brother mocked. He asked Rowe, ‘Isn’t there anything else you can remember which will convince her?’ His keenness was more damping than her scepticism. The whole affair became a game one couldn’t take seriously.

  ‘Nothing,’ Rowe said.

  Hilfe was at the window looking out. He said, ‘Come here a moment, Mr Rowe. Do you see that little man down there – in the shabby brown hat? He arrived just after you, and he seems to be staying . . . There he goes now, up and down. Pretends to light a cigarette. He does that too often. And that’s the second evening paper he’s bought. He never comes quite opposite, you see. It almost looks as if you are being trailed.’