The Ministry of Fear Page 6

  ‘They’ll try to get you in the dark,’ the voice said, and then the door opened. It was Hilfe.

  He said, ‘Come along. They are all waiting. Who was it?’

  Rowe said, ‘When you were writing your note I left a message with Mrs Dermody, in case anyone wanted me urgently.’

  ‘And somebody did?’

  ‘It was Jones – the detective.’

  ‘Jones?’ Hilfe said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And Jones had important news?’

  ‘Not exactly. He was worried at losing me. But Mr Rennit wants me at his office.’

  ‘The faithful Rennit. We’ll go straight there – afterwards.’

  ‘After what?’

  Hilfe’s eyes expressed excitement and malice. ‘Something we can’t miss – “at any price”.’ He added in a lower voice, ‘I begin to believe we were wrong. It’s lots of fun, but it’s not – dangerous.’

  He laid a confiding hand in Rowe’s arm and gently urged him ‘Keep a straight face, Mr Rowe, if you can. You mustn’t laugh. She is a friend of Canon Topling.’

  The room when they came back was obviously arranged for something. A rough circle had been formed with the chairs, and everyone had an air of impatience politely subdued. ‘Just sit down, Mr Rowe, next Mr Cost,’ said Mrs Bellairs, ‘and then we’ll turn out the lights.’

  In nightmares one knows the cupboard door will open: one knows that what will emerge is horrible: one doesn’t know what it is . . .

  Mrs Bellairs said again, ‘If you’ll just sit down, so that we can turn out the lights.’

  He said, ‘I’m sorry. I’ve got to go.’

  ‘Oh, you can’t go now,’ Mrs Bellairs cried. ‘Can he, Mr Hilfe?’

  Rowe looked at Hilfe, but the pale blue eyes sparkled back at him without understanding. ‘Of course, he mustn’t go,’ Hilfe said. ‘We’ll both wait. What did we come for?’ An eyelid momentarily flickered as Mrs Bellairs with a gesture of appalling coyness locked the door and dropped the key down her blouse and shook her fingers at them. ‘We always lock the door,’ she said, ‘to satisfy Mr Cost.’

  In a dream you cannot escape: the feet are leaden-weighted: you cannot stir from before the ominous door which almost imperceptibly moves. It is the same in life; sometimes it is more difficult to make a scene than to die. A memory came back to him of someone else who wasn’t certain, wouldn’t make a scene, gave herself sadly up and took the milk . . . He moved through the circle and sat down on Cost’s left like a criminal taking his place in an identity parade. On his own left side was Miss Pantil. Dr Forester was on one side of Mrs Bellairs and Hilfe on the other. He hadn’t time to see how the others were distributed before the light went out. ‘Now,’ Mrs Bellairs said, ‘we’ll all hold hands.’

  The blackout curtains had been drawn and the darkness was almost complete. Cost’s hand felt hot and clammy, and Miss Pantil’s hot and dry. This was the first séance he had ever attended, but it wasn’t the spirits he feared. He wished Hilfe was beside him, and he was aware all the time of the dark empty space of the room behind his back, in which anything might happen. He tried to loosen his hands, but they were firmly gripped. There was complete silence in the room. A drop of sweat formed above his right eye and trickled down. He couldn’t brush it away: it hung on his eyelid and tickled him. Somewhere in another room a gramophone began to play.

  It played and played – something sweet and onomatopoeic by Mendelssohn, full of waves breaking in echoing caverns. There was a pause and the needle was switched back and the melody began again. The same waves broke interminably into the same hollow. Over and over again. Underneath the music he became aware of breathing on all sides of him – all kinds of anxieties, suspenses, excitements controlling the various lungs. Miss Pantil’s had an odd dry whistle in it, Cost’s was heavy and regular, but not so heavy as another breath which laboured in the dark, he couldn’t tell whose. All the time he listened and waited. Would he hear a step behind him and have time to snatch away his hands? He no longer doubted at all the urgency of that warning – ‘They’ll try to get you in the dark.’ This was danger: this suspense was what somebody else had experienced, watching from day to day his pity grow to the monstrous proportions necessary to action.

  ‘Yes,’ a voice called suddenly, ‘yes, I can’t hear?’ and Miss Pantil’s breath whistled and Mendelssohn’s waves moaned and withdrew. Very far away a taxi-horn cried through an empty world.

  ‘Speak louder,’ the voice said. It was Mrs Bellairs, with a difference: a Mrs Bellairs drugged with an idea, with an imagined contact beyond the little dark constricted world in which they sat. He wasn’t interested in any of that: it was a human movement he waited for. Mrs Bellairs said in a husky voice, One of you is an enemy. He won’t let it come through.’ Something – a chair, a table? – cracked, and Rowe’s fingers instinctively strained against Miss Pantil’s. That wasn’t a spirit. That was the human agency which shook tambourines or scattered flowers or imitated a child’s touch upon the cheek – it was the dangerous element, but his hands were held.

  ‘There is an enemy here,’ the voice said. ‘Somebody who doesn’t believe, whose motives are evil . . .’ Rowe could feel Cost’s fingers tighten round his. He wondered whether Hilfe was still completely oblivious to what was happening: he wanted to shout to him for help, but convention held him as firmly as Cost’s hand. Again a board creaked. Why all this mummery, he thought, if they are all in it? But perhaps they were not all in it. For anything he knew he was surrounded by friends – but he didn’t know which they were.

  ‘Arthur.’

  He pulled at the hands holding him: that wasn’t Mrs Bellairs’ voice.

  ‘Arthur.’

  The flat hopeless voice might really have come from beneath the heavy graveyard slab.

  ‘Arthur, why did you kill . . .’ The voice moaned away into silence, and he struggled against the hands. It wasn’t that he recognized the voice: it was no more his wife’s than any woman’s dying out in infinite hopelessness, pain and reproach: it was that the voice had recognized him. A light moved near the ceiling, feeling its way along the walls, and he cried, ‘Don’t. Don’t.’

  ‘Arthur,’ the voice whispered.

  He forgot everything, he no longer listened for secretive movements, the creak of boards. He simply implored, ‘Stop it, please stop it,’ and felt Cost rise from the seat beside him and pull at his hand and then release it, throw the hand violently away, as though it were something he didn’t like to hold. Even Miss Pantil let him go, and he heard Hilfe say, ‘This isn’t funny. Put on the light.’

  It dazzled him, going suddenly on. They all sat there with joined hands watching him; he had broken the circle – only Mrs Bellairs seemed to see nothing, with her head down and her eyes closed and her breathing heavy. ‘Well,’ Hilfe said, trying to raise a laugh, ‘that was certainly quite an act,’ but Mr Newey said, ‘Cost. Look at Cost,’ and Rowe looked with all the others at his neighbour. He was taking no more interest in anything, leaning forward across the table with his face sunk on the French polish.

  ‘Get a doctor,’ Hilfe said.

  ‘I’m a doctor,’ Dr Forester said. He released the hands on either side of him, and everyone became conscious of sitting there like children playing a game and surreptitiously let each other go. He said gently, ‘A doctor’s no good, I’m afraid. The only thing to do is to call the police.’

  Mrs Bellairs had half-woken up and sat with leery eyes and her tongue a little protruding.

  ‘It must be his heart,’ Mr Newey said. ‘Couldn’t stand the excitement.’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ Dr Forester said. ‘He has been murdered.’ His old noble face was bent above the body; one long sensitive delicate hand dabbled and came up stained like a beautiful insect that feeds incongruously on carrion.

  ‘Impossible,’ Mr Newey said, ‘the door was locked.’

  ‘It’s a pity,’ Dr Forester said, ‘but there’s a very simple explanation of that.
One of us did it.’

  ‘But we were all,’ Hilfe said, ‘holding . . .’ Then they all looked at Rowe.

  ‘He snatched away his hand,’ Miss Pantil said.

  Dr Forester said softly, ‘I’m not going to touch the body again before the police come. Cost was stabbed with a kind of schoolboy’s knife . . .’

  Rowe put his hand quickly to an empty pocket and saw a room full of eyes noting the movement.

  ‘We must get Mrs Bellairs out of this,’ Dr Forester said. Any séance is a strain, but this one . . .’ He and Hilfe between them raised the turbaned bulk; the hand which had so delicately dabbled in Cost’s blood retrieved the key of the room with equal delicacy. ‘The rest of you,’ Dr Forester said, ‘had better stay here, I think. I’ll telephone to Notting Hill police station, and then we’ll both be back.’

  For a long while there was silence after they had gone; nobody looked at Rowe, but Miss Pantil had slid her chair well away from him, so that he now sat alone beside the corpse, as though they were two friends who had got together at a party. Presently Mr Newey said, ‘I’ll never catch my train unless they hurry.’ Anxiety fought with horror – any moment the sirens might go – he caressed his sandalled foot across his knee, and young Maude said hotly, ‘I don’t know why you should stay,’ glaring at Rowe.

  It occurred to Rowe that he had not said one word to defend himself: the sense of guilt for a different crime stopped his mouth. Besides, what could he, a stranger, say to Miss Pantil, Mr Newey and young Maude to convince them that in fact it was one of their friends who had murdered? He took a quick look at Cost, half expecting him to come alive again and laugh at them – ‘one of my tests’, but nobody could have been deader than Cost was now. He thought: somebody here has killed him – it was fantastic, more fantastic really than that he should have done it himself. After all, he belonged to the region of murder – he was a native of that country. As the police will know, he thought, as the police will know.

  The door opened and Hilfe returned. He said, ‘Dr Forester is looking after Mrs Bellairs. I have telephoned to the police.’ His eyes were saying something to Rowe which Rowe couldn’t understand. Rowe thought: I must see him alone, surely he can’t believe . . .

  He said, ‘Would anybody object if I went to the lavatory and was sick?’

  Miss Pantil said, ‘I don’t think anybody ought to leave this room till the police come.’

  ‘I think,’ Hilfe said, ‘somebody should go with you. As a formality, of course.’

  ‘Why beat about the bush,’ Miss Pantil said. ‘Whose knife is it?’

  ‘Perhaps Mr Newey,’ Hilfe said, ‘wouldn’t mind going with Mr Rowe . . .’

  ‘I won’t be drawn in,’ Newey said. ‘This has nothing to do with me. I only want to catch my train.’

  ‘Perhaps I had better go then,’ Hilfe said, ‘if you will trust me.’ No one objected.

  The lavatory was on the first floor. They could hear from the landing the steady soothing rhythm of Dr Forester’s voice in Mrs Bellairs’ bedroom. ‘I’m all right,’ Rowe whispered. ‘But Hilfe, I didn’t do it.’

  There was something shocking in the sense of exhilaration Hilfe conveyed at a time like this. ‘Of course you didn’t,’ he said. ‘This is the Real Thing.’

  ‘But why? Who did it?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I’m going to find out.’ He put his hand on Rowe’s arm with a friendliness that was very comforting, urging him into the lavatory and locking the door behind them. ‘Only, old fellow, you must be off out of this. They’ll hang you if they can. Anyway, they’ll shut you up for weeks. It’s so convenient for Them.’

  ‘What can I do? It’s my knife.’

  ‘They are devils, aren’t they,’ Hilfe said with the same light-hearted relish he might have used for a children’s clever prank. ‘We’ve just got to keep you out of the way till Mr Rennit and I . . . By the way, better tell me who rang you up.’

  ‘It was your sister.’

  ‘My sister . . .’ Hilfe grinned at him. ‘Good for her, she must have got hold of something. I wonder just where. She warned you, did she?’

  ‘Yes, but I was not to tell you.’

  ‘Never mind that. I shan’t eat her, shall I?’ The pale blue eyes became suddenly lost in speculation.

  Rowe tried to recall them. ‘Where can I go?’

  ‘Oh, just underground,’ Hilfe said casually. He seemed in no hurry at all. ‘It’s the fashion of our decade. Communists are always doing it. Don’t you know how?’

  ‘This isn’t a joke.’

  ‘Listen,’ Hilfe said. ‘The end we are working for isn’t a joke, but if we are going to keep our nerve we’ve got to keep our sense of humour. You see, They have none. Give me only a week. Keep out of the way as long as that.’

  ‘The police will be here soon.’

  Hilfe said, ‘It’s only a small drop from this window to the flower-bed. It’s nearly dark outside and in ten minutes the sirens will be going. Thank God, one can set one’s clock by them.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Pull the plug as you open the window. No one will hear you then. Wait till the cistern refills, then pull the plug again and knock me out “good and hard”. It’s the best alibi you can give me. After all, I’m an enemy alien.’

  Chapter 5

  BETWEEN SLEEPING AND WAKING

  ‘They came to a great forest, which seemed to have no path through it.’

  The Little Duke

  THERE are dreams which belong only partly to the unconscious; these are the dreams we remember on waking so vividly that we deliberately continue them, and so fall asleep again and wake and sleep and the dream goes on without interruption, with a thread of logic the pure dream doesn’t possess.

  Rowe was exhausted and frightened; he had made tracks half across London while the nightly raid got under way. It was an empty London with only occasional bursts of noise and activity. An umbrella shop was burning at the corner of Oxford Street; in Wardour Street he walked through a cloud of grit: a man with a grey dusty face leant against a wall and laughed and a warden said sharply, ‘That’s enough now. It’s nothing to laugh about.’ None of these things mattered. They were like something written; they didn’t belong to his own life and he paid them no attention. But he had to find a bed, and so somewhere south of the river he obeyed Hilfe’s advice and at last went underground.

  He lay on the upper tier of a canvas bunk and dreamed that he was walking up a long hot road near Trumpington scuffing the white chalk-dust with his shoe caps. Then he was having tea on the lawn at home behind the red brick wall and his mother was lying back in a garden chair eating a cucumber sandwich. A bright blue croquet-ball lay at her feet, and she was smiling and paying him the half-attention a parent pays a child. The summer lay all around them, and evening was coming on. He was saying, ‘Mother, I murdered her . . .’ and his mother said, ‘Don’t be silly, dear. Have one of these nice sandwiches.’

  ‘But Mother,’ he said, ‘I did. I did.’ It seemed terribly important to him to convince her; if she were convinced, she could do something about it, she could tell him it didn’t matter and it would matter no longer, but he had to convince her first. But she turned away her head and called out in a little vexed voice to someone who wasn’t there, ‘You must remember to dust the piano.’

  ‘Mother, please listen to me,’ but he suddenly realized that he was a child, so how could he make her believe? He was not yet eight years old, he could see the nursery window on the second floor with the bars across, and presently the old nurse would put her face to the glass and signal to him to come in. ‘Mother,’ he said, ‘I’ve killed my wife, and the police want me.’ His mother smiled and shook her head and said, ‘My little boy couldn’t kill anyone.’

  Time was short; from the other end of the long peaceful lawn, beyond the croquet hoops and out of the shadow of the great somnolent pine, came the vicar’s wife carrying a basket of apples. Before she reached them he must convince his moth
er, but he had only childish words. ‘I have. I have.’

  His mother leant back smiling in the deck-chair, and said, ‘My little boy wouldn’t hurt a beetle.’ (It was a way she had, always to get the conventional phrase just wrong.)

  ‘But that’s why,’ he said. ‘That’s why,’ and his mother waved to the vicar’s wife and said, ‘It’s a dream, dear, a nasty dream.’

  He woke up to the dim lurid underground place – somebody had tied a red silk scarf over the bare globe to shield it. All along the walls the bodies lay two deep, while outside the raid rumbled and receded. This was a quiet night: any raid which happened a mile away wasn’t a raid at all. An old man snored across the aisle and at the end of the shelter two lovers lay on a mattress with their hands and knees touching.

  Rowe thought: this would be a dream, too, to her; she wouldn’t believe it. She had died before the first great war, when aeroplanes – strange crates of wood – just staggered across the Channel. She could no more have imagined this than that her small son in his brown corduroy knickers and his blue jersey with his pale serious face – he could see himself like a stranger in the yellowing snapshots of her album – should grow up to be a murderer. Lying on his back he caught the dream and held it – pushed the vicar’s wife back into the shadow of the pine – and argued with his mother.

  ‘This isn’t real life any more,’ he said. ‘Tea on the lawn, evensong, croquet, the old ladies calling, the gentle unmalicious gossip, the gardener trundling the wheelbarrow full of leaves and grass. People write about it as if it still went on; lady novelists describe it over and over again in books of the month, but it’s not there any more.’

  His mother smiled at him in a scared way but let him talk; he was the master of the dream now. He said, ‘I’m wanted for a murder I didn’t do. People want to kill me because I know too much. I’m hiding underground, and up above the Germans are methodically smashing London to bits all round me. You remember St Clement’s – the bells of St Clement’s. They’ve smashed that – St James’s, Piccadilly, the Burlington Arcade, Garland’s Hotel, where we stayed for the pantomime, Maples and John Lewis. It sounds like a thriller, doesn’t it, but the thrillers are like life – more like life than you are, this lawn, your sandwiches, that pine. You used to laugh at the books Miss Savage read – about spies, and murders, and violence, and wild motor-car chases, but dear, that’s real life: it’s what we’ve all made of the world since you died. I’m your little Arthur who wouldn’t hurt a beetle and I’m a murderer too. The world has been remade by William Le Queux.’ He couldn’t bear the frightened eyes which he had himself printed on the cement wall; he put his mouth to the steel frame of his bunk and kissed the white cold cheek. ‘My dear, my dear, my dear. I’m glad you are dead. Only do you know about it? do you know?’ He was filled with horror at the thought of what a child becomes, and what the dead must feel watching the change from innocence to guilt and powerless to stop it.