The Ministry of Fear Read online

  ‘I know him,’ Rowe said. ‘He’s a private detective. He’s being paid to keep an eye on me.’

  ‘By Jove,’ young Hilfe said – even his exclamations were a little Victorian – ‘you do take this seriously. We’re allies now you know – you aren’t “holding out” on us, are you?’

  ‘There is something I haven’t mentioned.’ Rowe hesitated.

  ‘Yes?’ Hilfe came quickly back and with his hand again on his sister’s shoulder waited with an appearance of anxiety. ‘Something which will wipe out Canon Topling?’

  ‘I think there was something in the cake.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know. But he crumbled every slice he took.’

  ‘It may have been habit,’ Miss Hilfe said.

  ‘Habit!’ her brother teased her.

  She said with sudden anger, ‘One of these old English characteristics you study so carefully.’

  Rowe tried to explain to Miss Hilfe, ‘It’s nothing to do with me. I don’t want their cake, but they tried, I’m sure they tried, to kill me. I know it sounds unlikely, now, in daylight, but if you had seen that wretched little cripple pouring in the milk, and then waiting, watching, crumbling the cake . . .’

  ‘And you really believe,’ Miss Hilfe said, ‘that Canon Topling’s friend . . .’

  ‘Don’t listen to her,’ Hilfe said. ‘Why not Canon Topling’s friend? There’s no longer a thing called a criminal class. We can tell you that. There were lots of people in Austria you’d have said couldn’t . . . well, do the things we saw them do. Cultured people, pleasant people, people you had sat next to at dinner.’

  ‘Mr Rennit,’ Rowe said, ‘the head of the Orthotex Detective Agency, told me today that he’d never met a murderer. He said they were rare and not the best people.’

  ‘Why, they are dirt cheap,’ Hilfe said, ‘nowadays. I know myself at least six murderers. One was a cabinet minister, another was a heart specialist, the third a bank manager, an insurance agent . . .’

  ‘Stop,’ Miss Hilfe said, ‘please stop.’

  ‘The difference,’ Hilfe said, ‘is that in these days it really pays to murder, and when a thing pays it becomes respectable. The rich abortionist becomes a gynaecologist and the rich thief a bank director. Your friend is out of date.’ He went on explaining gently, his very pale blue eyes unshocked and unshockable. ‘Your old-fashioned murderer killed from fear, from hate – or even from love, Mr Rowe, very seldom for substantial profit. None of these reasons is quite – respectable. But to murder for position – that’s different, because when you’ve gained the position nobody ‘has a right to criticize the means. Nobody will refuse to meet you if the position’s high enough. Think of how many of your statesmen have shaken hands with Hitler. But, of course, to murder for fear or from love, Canon Topling wouldn’t do that. If he killed his wife he’d lose his preferment,’ and he smiled at Rowe with a blithe innocence of what he was saying.

  When he came out of what wasn’t called a prison, when His Majesty’s pleasure had formally and quickly run its course, it had seemed to Rowe that he had emerged into quite a different world – a secret world of assumed names, of knowing nobody, of avoiding faces, of men who leave a bar unobtrusively when other people enter. One lived where least questions were asked, in furnished rooms. It was the kind of world that people who attended garden fêtes, who went to Matins, who spent week-ends in the country and played bridge for low stakes and had an account at a good grocer’s, knew nothing about. It wasn’t exactly a criminal world, though eddying along its dim and muted corridors you might possibly rub shoulders with genteel forgers who had never actually been charged or the corrupter of a child. One attended cinemas at ten in the morning with other men in macintoshes who had somehow to pass the time away. One sat at home and read The Old Curiosity Shop all the evening. When he had first believed that someone intended to murder him, he had felt a sort of shocked indignation; the act of murder belonged to him like a personal characteristic, and not the inhabitants of the old peaceful places from which he was an exile, and of which Mrs Bellairs, the lady in the floppy hat and the clergyman called Sinclair were so obviously inhabitants. The one thing a murderer should be able to count himself safe from was murder – by one of these.

  But he was more shocked now at being told by a young man of great experience that there was no division between the worlds. The insect underneath the stone has a right to feel safe from the trampling superior boot.

  Miss Hilfe told him, ‘You mustn’t listen.’ She was watching him with what looked like sympathy. But that was impossible.

  ‘Of course,’ Hilfe said easily, ‘I exaggerate. But all the same you have to be prepared in these days for criminals – everywhere. They call it having ideals. They’ll even talk about murder being the most merciful thing.’

  Rowe looked quickly up, but there was no personal meaning in the pale blue theoretical eyes. ‘You mean the Prussians?’ Rowe asked.

  ‘Yes, if you like, the Prussians. Or the Nazis. The Fascists. The Reds, the Whites . . .’

  A telephone rang on Miss Hilfe’s desk. She said, ‘It’s Lady Dunwoody.’

  Hilfe, leaning quickly sideways, said, ‘We are so grateful for your offer, Lady Dunwoody. We can never have too many woollies. Yes, if you wouldn’t mind sending them to this office, or shall we collect? You’ll send your chauffeur. Thank you. Good-bye.’ He said to Rowe, with a rather wry smile, ‘It’s an odd way for someone of my age to fight a war, isn’t it? collecting woollies from charitable old dowagers. But it’s useful, I’m allowed to do it, and it’s something not to be interned. Only – you do understand, don’t you – a story like yours excites me. It seems to give one an opportunity, well, to take a more violent line.’ He smiled at his sister and said with affection, ‘Of course she calls me a romantic.’

  But the odd thing was she called him nothing at all. It was almost as if she not only disapproved of him, but had disowned him, wouldn’t co-operate in anything – outside the woollies. She seemed to Rowe to lack her brother’s charm and ease; the experience which had given him an amusing nihilistic abandon had left her brooding on some deeper, more unhappy level. He felt no longer sure that they were both without scars. Her brother had the ideas, but she felt them. When Rowe looked at her it was as if his own unhappiness recognized a friend and signalled, signalled, but got no reply.

  ‘And now,’ Hilfe said, ‘what next?’

  ‘Leave it alone.’ Miss Hilfe addressed herself directly to Rowe – the reply when it did at last come was simply to say that communication was at an end.

  ‘No, no,’ Hilfe said, ‘we can’t do that. This is war.’

  ‘How do you know,’ Miss Hilfe said, still speaking only to Rowe, ‘that even if there is something behind it, it isn’t just – theft, drugs, things like that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Rowe said, ‘and I don’t care. I’m angry, that’s all.’

  ‘What is your theory, though?’ Hilfe asked. ‘About the cake?’

  ‘It might have contained a message, mightn’t it?’

  Both the Hilfes were silent for a moment as though that were an idea which had to be absorbed. Then Hilfe said, ‘I’ll go with you to Mrs Bellairs.’

  ‘You can’t leave the office, Willi,’ Miss Hilfe said. ‘I’ll go with Mr Rowe. You have an appointment.’

  ‘Oh, only with Trench. You can handle Trench for me, Anna.’ He said with glee, ‘This is important. There may be trouble.’

  ‘We could take Mr Rowe’s detective.’

  ‘And warn the lady? He sticks out a yard. No,’ Hilfe said, ‘we must very gently drop him. I’m used to dropping spies. It’s a thing one has learned since 1933.’

  ‘But I don’t know what you want to say to Mr Trench.’

  ‘Just stave him off. Say we’ll settle at the beginning of the month. You’ll forgive us talking business, Mr Rowe.’

  ‘Why not let Mr Rowe go alone?’

  Perhaps, Rowe thought, she does after all
believe there’s something in it; perhaps she fears for her brother. She was saying, ‘You don’t both of you want to make fools of yourselves, Willi.’

  Hilfe ignored his sister completely. He said to Rowe, ‘Just a moment while I write a note for Trench,’ and disappeared behind the screen.

  When they left the office together it was by another door; dropping Jones was as simple as that, for he had no reason to suppose that his employer would try to evade him. Hilfe called a taxi, and as they drove down the street, Rowe was able to see how the shabby figure kept his vigil, lighting yet another cigarette with his eyes obliquely on the great ornate entrance, like a faithful hound who will stay interminably outside his master’s door. Rowe said, ‘I wish we had let him know.’

  ‘Better not,’ Hilfe said. ‘We can pick him up afterwards. We shan’t be long,’ and the figure slanted out of sight as the taxi wheeled away; he was lost amongst the buses and bicycles, absorbed among all the other loitering seedy London figures, never to be seen again by anyone who knew him.

  Chapter 4

  AN EVENING WITH MRS BELLAIRS

  ‘There be dragons of wrong here and everywhere, quite as venomous as any in my Sagas.’

  The Little Duke

  Mrs Bellairs’ house was a house of character; that is to say it was old and unrenovated, standing behind its little patch of dry and weedy garden among the To Let boards on the slope of Campden Hill. A piece of statuary lay back in a thin thorny hedge like a large block of pumice stone, chipped and grey with neglect, and when you rang the bell under the early Victorian portico, you seemed to hear the sound pursuing the human inhabitants into back rooms as though what was left of life had ebbed up the passages.

  The snowy-white cuffs and the snowy-white apron of the maid who opened the door came as a surprise. She was keeping up appearances as the house wasn’t, though she looked nearly as old. Her face was talcumed and wrinkled and austere like a nun’s. Hilfe said, ‘Is Mrs Bellairs at home?’

  The old maid watched them with the kind of shrewdness people learn in convents. She said, ‘Have you an appointment?’

  ‘Why no,’ Hilfe said, ‘we were just calling. I’m a friend of Canon Topling’s.’

  ‘You see,’ the maid explained, ‘this is one of her evenings.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘If you are not one of the group . . .’

  An elderly man with a face of extraordinary nobility and thick white hair came up the path. ‘Good evening, sir,’ the maid said. ‘Will you come right in?’ He was obviously one of the group, for she showed him into a room on the right and they heard her announce, ‘Dr Forester.’ Then she came back to guard the door.

  Hilfe said, ‘Perhaps if you would take my name to Mrs Bellairs, we might join the group. Hilfe – a friend of Canon Topling’s.’

  ‘I’ll ask her,’ the maid said dubiously.

  But the result was after all favourable. Mrs Bellairs herself swam into the little jumbled hall. She wore a Liberty dress of shot silk and a toque and she held out both hands as though to welcome them simultaneously. ‘Any friend of Canon Topling . . .’ she said.

  ‘My name is Hilfe. Of the Free Mothers Fund. And this is Mr Rowe.’

  Rowe watched for a sign of recognition, but there was none. Her broad white face seemed to live in worlds beyond them.

  ‘If you’d join our group,’ she said, ‘we welcome newcomers. So long as there’s no settled hostility.’

  ‘Oh, none, none,’ Hilfe said.

  She swayed in front of them like a figure-head into a drawing-room all orange curtain and blue cushion, as though it had been furnished once and for all in the twenties. Blue blackout globes made the room dim like an Oriental café. There were indications among the trays and occasional tables that it was Mrs Beliairs who had supplied the fête with some of its Benares work.

  Half a dozen people were in the room, and one of them immediately attracted Rowe’s attention – a tall, broad, black-haired man; he couldn’t think why, until he realized that it was his normality which stood out. ‘Mr Cost,’ Mrs Bellairs was saying, ‘this is . . .’

  ‘Mr Rowe.’ Hilfe supplied the name, and the introductions went round with a prim formality. One wondered why Cost was here, in the company of Dr Forester with his weak mouth and his nobility; Miss Pantil, a dark young-middle-aged woman with blackheads and a hungry eye; Mr Newey – ‘Mr Frederick Newey’ – Mrs Bellairs made a point of the first name – who wore sandals and no socks and had a grey shock of hair; Mr Maude, a short-sighted young man who kept as close as he could to Mr Newey and fed him devotedly with thin bread and butter, and Collier, who obviously belonged to a different class and had worked himself in with some skill. He was patronized, but at the same time he was admired. He was a breath of the larger life and they were interested. He had been a hotel waiter and a tramp and a stoker, and he had published a book – so Mrs Bellairs whispered to Rowe – of the most fascinating poetry, rough but spiritual. ‘He uses words,’ Mrs Bellairs said, ‘that have never been used in poetry before.’ There seemed to be some antagonism between him and Mr Newey.

  All this scene became clear to Rowe over the cups of very weak China tea which were brought round by the austere parlourmaid.

  ‘And what,’ Mrs Bellairs asked, ‘do you do, Mr Rowe?’ She had been explaining Collier in an undertone – calling him plain Collier because he was a Player and not a Gentleman.

  ‘Oh,’ Rowe said, watching her over his tea-cup, trying to make out the meaning of her group, trying in vain to see her in a dangerous rôle, ‘I sit and think.’

  It seemed to be the right as well as the truthful answer. He was encircled by Mrs Bellairs’ enthusiasm as though by a warm arm. ‘I shall call you our philosopher,’ she said. ‘We have our poet, our critic . . .’

  ‘What is Mr Cost?’

  ‘He is Big Business,’ Mrs Bellairs said. ‘He works in the City. I call him our mystery man. I sometimes feel he is a hostile influence.’

  ‘And Miss Pantil?’

  ‘She has quite extraordinary powers of painting the inner world. She sees it as colours and circles, rhythmical arrangements, and sometimes oblongs.’

  It was fantastic to believe that Mrs Bellairs could have anything to do with crime – or any of her group. He would have made some excuse and gone if it had not been for Hilfe. These people – whatever Hilfe might say – did not belong under the stone with him.

  He asked vaguely, ‘You meet here every week?’

  ‘Always on Wednesdays. Of course we have very little time because of the raids. Mr Newey’s wife likes him to be back at Welwyn before the raids start. And perhaps that’s why the results are bad. They can’t be driven, you know.’ She smiled. ‘We can’t promise a stranger anything.’

  He couldn’t make out what it was all about. Hilfe seemed to have left the room with Cost. Mrs Bellairs said, ‘Ah, the conspirators. Mr Cost is always thinking up a test.’

  Rowe tried out a question tentatively. ‘And the results are sometimes bad?’

  ‘So bad I could cry . . . if I knew at the time. But there are other times – oh, you’d be surprised how good they are.’

  A telephone was ringing in another room. Mrs Bellairs said, ‘Who can that naughty person be? All my friends know they mustn’t ring me on Wednesdays.’

  The old parlourmaid had entered. She said with distaste, ‘Somebody is calling Mr Rowe.’

  Rowe said, ‘But I can’t understand it. Nobody knows . . .’

  ‘Would you mind,’ Mrs Bellairs said, ‘being very quick?’

  Hilfe was in the hall talking earnestly to Cost. He asked, ‘For you?’ He too was discomposed. Rowe left a track of censorious silence behind him: they watched him following the maid. He felt as though he had made a scene in church and was now being conducted away. He could hear behind him nothing but the tinkle of tea-cups being laid away.

  He thought: perhaps it’s Mr Rennit, but how can he have found me? or Jones? He leant across Mrs Bellairs’ desk in a small
packed dining-room. He said, ‘Hullo,’ and wondered again how he could have been traced. ‘Hullo.’

  But it wasn’t Mr Rennit. At first he didn’t recognize the voice – a woman’s. ‘Mr Rowe?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you alone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The voice was blurred; it was as if a handkerchief had been stretched across the mouthpiece. She couldn’t know, he thought, that there were no other women’s voices to confuse with hers.

  ‘Please will you leave the house as soon as you can?’

  ‘It’s Miss Hilfe, isn’t it?’

  The voice said impatiently, ‘Yes. Yes. All right. It is.’

  ‘Do you want to speak to your brother?’

  ‘Please do not tell him. And leave. Leave quickly.’

  He was for a moment amused. The idea of any danger in Mrs Bellairs’ company was absurd. He realized how nearly he had been converted to Mr Rennit’s way of thinking. Then he remembered that Miss Hilfe had shared those views. Something had converted her – the opposite way. He said, ‘What about your brother?’

  ‘If you go away, he’ll go too.’

  The dimmed urgent voice fretted at his nerves. He found himself edging round the desk so that he could face the door, and then he moved again, because his back was to a window. ‘Why don’t you tell this to your brother?’

  ‘He would want to stay all the more.’ That was true. He wondered how thin the walls were. The room was uncomfortably crowded with trashy furniture: one wanted space to move about – the voice was disturbingly convincing – to manoeuvre in. He said, ‘Is Jones still outside – the detective?’

  There was a long pause: presumably she had gone to the window. Then the voice sprang at him unexpectedly loud – she had taken away the handkerchief. ‘There’s nobody there.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Nobody.’

  He felt deserted and indignant. What business had Jones to leave his watch? Somebody was approaching down the passage. He said, ‘I must ring off.’