The Ministry of Fear Read online

  ‘Why, it’s a madhouse,’ his mother cried.

  ‘Oh, it’s much quieter there,’ he said. ‘I know. They put me in one for a time. Everybody was very kind there. They made me a librarian . . .’ He tried to express clearly the difference between the madhouse and this. ‘Everybody in the place was very – reasonable.’ He said fiercely, as though he hated her instead of loving her, ‘Let me lend you the History of Contemporary Society. It’s in hundreds of volumes, but most of them are sold in cheap editions: Death in Piccadilly, The Ambassador’s Diamonds, The Theft of the Naval Papers, Diplomacy, Seven Days’ Leave, The Four Just Men . . .’

  He had worked the dream to suit himself, but now the dream began to regain control. He was no longer on the lawn; he was in the field behind the house where the donkey grazed which used to take their laundry to the other end of the village on Mondays. He was playing in a haystack with the vicar’s son and a strange boy with a foreign accent and a dog called Spot. The dog caught a rat and tossed it, and the rat tried to crawl away with a broken back, and the dog made little playful excited rushes. Suddenly he couldn’t bear the sight of the rat’s pain any more; he picked up a cricket-bat and struck the rat on the head over and over again; he wouldn’t stop for fear it was still alive, though he heard his nurse call out, ‘Stop it, Arthur. How can you? Stop it,’ and all the time Hilfe watched him with exhilaration. When he stopped he wouldn’t look at the rat; he ran away across the field and hid. But you always had to come out of hiding some time, and presently his nurse was saying, ‘I won’t tell your mother, but don’t you ever do it again. Why, she thinks you wouldn’t hurt a fly. What came over you I don’t know.’ Not one of them guessed that what had come over him was the horrible and horrifying emotion of pity.

  That was partly dream and partly memory, but the next was altogether dream. He lay on his side breathing heavily while the big guns opened up in North London, and his mind wandered again freely in that strange world where the past and future leave equal traces, and the geography may belong to twenty years ago or to next year. He was waiting for someone at a gate in a lane: over a high hedge came the sound of laughter and the dull thud of tennis-balls, and between the leaves he could see moth-like movements of white dresses. It was evening and it would soon be too dark to play, and someone would come out and he waited dumb with love. His heart beat with a boy’s excitement, but it was the despair of a grown man that he felt when a stranger touched his shoulder and said, ‘Take him away.’ He didn’t wake; this time he was in the main street of a small country town where he had sometimes, when a boy, stayed with an elder sister of his mother’s. He was standing outside the inn yard of the King’s Arms, and up the yard he could see the lit windows of the barn in which dances were held on Saturday nights. He had a pair of pumps under his arm and he was waiting for a girl much older than himself who would presently come out of her cloakroom and take his arm and go up the yard with him. All the next few hours were with him in the street: the small crowded hall full of the familiar peaceful faces – the chemist and his wife, the daughters of the headmaster, the bank manager and the dentist with his blue chin and his look of experience, the paper streamers of blue and green and scarlet, the small local orchestra, the sense of a life good and quiet and enduring, with only the gentle tug of impatience and young passion to disturb it for the while and make it doubly dear for ever after. And then without warning the dream twisted towards nightmare; somebody was crying in the dark with terror – not the young woman he was waiting there to meet, whom he hadn’t yet dared to kiss and probably never would, but someone whom he knew better even than his parents, who belonged to a different world altogether, to the sad world of shared love. A policeman stood at his elbow and said in a woman’s voice, ‘You had better join our little group,’ and urged him remorselessly towards a urinal where a rat bled to death in the slate trough. The music had stopped, the lights had gone, and he couldn’t remember why he had come to this dark vile corner, where even the ground whined when he pressed it, as if it had learnt the trick of suffering. He said, ‘Please let me go away from here,’ and the policeman said, ‘Where do you want to go to, dear?’ He said, ‘Home,’ and the policeman said, ‘This is home. There isn’t anywhere else at all,’ and whenever he tried to move his feet the earth whined back at him: he couldn’t move an inch without causing pain.

  He woke and the sirens were sounding the All Clear. One or two people in the shelter sat up for a moment to listen, and then lay down again. Nobody moved to go home: this was their home now. They were quite accustomed to sleeping underground; it had become as much part of life as the Saturday night film or the Sunday service had ever been. This was the world they knew.

  Chapter 6

  OUT OF TOUCH

  ‘You will find every door guarded.’

  The Little Duke

  1

  ROWE had breakfast in an A.B.C. in Clapham High Street. Boards had taken the place of windows and the top floor had gone; it was like a shack put up in an earthquake town for relief work. For the enemy had done a lot of damage in Clapham. London was no longer one great city: it was a collection of small towns. People went to Hampstead or St John’s Wood for a quiet weekend, and if you lived in Holborn you hadn’t time between the sirens to visit friends as far away as Kensington. So special characteristics developed, and in Clapham where day raids were frequent there was a hunted look which was absent from Westminster, where the night raids were heavier but the shelters were better. The waitress who brought Rowe’s toast and coffee looked jumpy and pallid, as if she had lived too much on the run; she had an air of listening whenever gears shrieked. Gray’s Inn and Russell Square were noted for a more reckless spirit, but only because they had the day to recover in.

  The night raid, the papers said, had been on a small scale. A number of bombs had been dropped, and there had been a number of casualties, some of them fatal. The morning communiqué was like the closing ritual of a midnight Mass. The sacrifice was complete and the papers pronounced in calm invariable words the ‘Ite Missa Est.’ Not even in the smallest type under a single headline was there any reference to an ‘Alleged Murder at a Séance’; nobody troubled about single deaths. Rowe felt a kind of indignation. He had made the headlines once, but his own disaster, if it had happened now, would have been given no space at all. He had almost a sense of desertion; nobody was troubling to pursue so insignificant a case in the middle of a daily massacre. Perhaps a few elderly men in the C.I.D., who were too old to realize how the world had passed them by, were still allowed by patient and kindly superiors to busy themselves in little rooms with the trivialities of a murder. They probably wrote minutes to each other; they might even be allowed to visit the scene of the ‘crime’, but he could hardly believe that the results of their inquiries were read with more interest than the scribblings of those eccentric clergymen who were still arguing about evolution in country vicarages. ‘Old So-and-So,’ he could imagine a senior officer saying, ‘poor old thing, we let him have a few murder cases now and then. In his day, you know, we used to pay quite a lot of attention to murder, and it makes him feel that he’s still of use. The results – Oh well, of course, he never dreams that we haven’t time to read his reports.’

  Rowe, sipping his coffee, seeking over and over again for the smallest paragraph, felt a kinship with the detective inspectors, the Big Five, My Famous Cases; he was a murderer and old-fashioned, he belonged to their world – and whoever had murdered Cost belonged there too. He felt a slight resentment against Willi Hilfe, who treated murder as a joke with a tang to it. But Hilfe’s sister hadn’t treated it as a joke; she had warned him, she had talked as if death were still a thing that mattered. Like a lonely animal he scented the companionship of his own kind.

  The pale waitress kept an eye on him; he had had no chance of shaving, so that he looked like one of those who leave without paying. It was astonishing what a single night in a public shelter could do to you; he could smell disinfectant on his cl
othes as though he had spent the night in a workhouse infirmary.

  He paid his bill and asked the waitress, ‘Have you a telephone?’ She indicated one near the cash desk, and he dialled Rennit. It was risky, but something had to be done. Of course, the hour was too early. He could hear the bell ringing uselessly in the empty room and he wondered whether the sausage-roll still lay beside it on the saucer. It was always in these days questionable whether a telephone bell would ring at all, because overnight a building might have ceased to exist. He knew now that part of the world was the same: Orthotex still stood.

  He went back to his table and ordered another coffee and some notepaper. The waitress regarded him with increasing suspicion. Even in a crumbling world the conventions held; to order again after payment was unorthodox, but to ask for notepaper was continental. She could give him a leaf from her order pad, that was all. Conventions were far more rooted than morality; he had himself found that it was easier to allow oneself to be murdered than to break up a social gathering. He began to write carefully in spidery hand an account of everything that had happened. Something had got to be done; he wasn’t going to remain permanently in hiding for a crime he hadn’t committed, while the real criminals got away with – whatever it was they were trying to get away with. In his account he left out Hilfe’s name – you never knew what false ideas the police might get, and he didn’t want his only ally put behind bars. He was already deciding to post his narrative straight to Scotland Yard.

  When he had finished it, he read it over while the waitress watched; the story was a terribly thin one – a cake, a visitor, a taste he thought he remembered, until you got to Cost’s body and all the evidence pointing at himself. Perhaps after all he would do better not to post it to the police, but rather to some friend . . . But he had no friend, unless he counted Hilfe . . . or Rennit. He made for the door and the waitress stopped him. ‘You haven’t paid for your coffee.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I forgot.’

  She took the money with an air of triumph; she had been right all the time. She watched him through the window from between the empty cake-stands making his uncertain way up Clapham High Street.

  Promptly at nine o’clock he rang again – from close by Stockwell Station – and again the empty room drummed on his ear. By nine-fifteen, when he rang a third time, Mr Rennit had returned. He heard his sharp anxious voice saying, ‘Yes. Who’s there?’

  ‘This is Rowe.’

  ‘What have you done with Jones?’ Mr Rennit accused him.

  ‘I left him yesterday,’ Rowe said, ‘outside . . .’

  ‘He hasn’t come back,’ Mr Rennit said.

  ‘Maybe he’s shadowing . . .’

  ‘I owe him a week’s wages. He said he’d be back last night. It’s not natural.’ Mr Rennit wailed up the phone, ‘Jones wouldn’t stay away, not with me owing him money.’

  ‘Worse things have happened than that.’

  ‘Jones is my right arm,’ Mr Rennit said. ‘What have you done with him?’

  ‘I went and saw Mrs Bellairs . . .’

  ‘That’s neither here nor there. I want Jones.’

  ‘And a man was killed.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘And the police think I murdered him.’

  There was another wail up the line. The small shifty man was being carried out of his depth; all through his life he had swum safely about among his prickly little adulteries, his compromising letters, but the tide was washing him out to where the bigger fishes hunted. He moaned, ‘I never wanted to take up your case.’

  ‘You’ve got to advise me, Rennit. I’ll come and see you.’

  ‘No.’ He could hear the breath catch down the line. The voice imperceptibly altered. ‘When?’

  ‘At ten o’clock. Rennit, are you still there?’ He had to explain to somebody. ‘I didn’t do it, Rennit. You must believe that. I don’t make a habit of murder.’ He always bit on the word murder as you bite a sore spot on the tongue; he never used the word without self-accusation. The law had taken a merciful view: himself he took the merciless one. Perhaps if they had hanged him he would have found excuses for himself between the trap-door and the bottom of the drop, but they had given him a lifetime to analyse his motives in.

  He analysed now – an unshaven man in dusty clothes sitting in the Tube between Stockwell and Tottenham Court Road. (He had to go a roundabout route because the Tube had been closed at many stations.) The dreams of the previous night had set his mind in reverse. He remembered himself twenty years ago day-dreaming and in love; he remembered without self-pity, as one might watch the development of a biological specimen. He had in those days imagined himself capable of extraordinary heroisms and endurances which would make the girl he loved forget the awkward hands and the spotty chin of adolescence. Everything had seemed possible. One could laugh at day-dreams, but so long as you had the capacity to day-dream, there was a chance that you might develop some of the qualities of which you dreamed. It was like the religious discipline: words however emptily repeated can in time form a habit, a kind of unnoticed sediment at the bottom of the mind – until one day to your own surprise you find yourself acting on the belief you thought you didn’t believe in. Since the death of his wife Rowe had never daydreamed; all through the trial he had never even dreamed of an acquittal. It was as if that side of the brain had been dried up; he was no longer capable of sacrifice, courage, virtue, because he no longer dreamed of them. He was aware of the loss – the world had dropped a dimension and become paper-thin. He wanted to dream, but all he could practise now was despair, and the kind of cunning which warned him to approach Mr Rennit with circumspection.

  2

  Nearly opposite Mr Rennit’s was an auction-room which specialised in books. It was possible from before the shelves nearest the door to keep an eye on the entrance to Mr Rennit’s block. The weekly auction was to take place next day, and visitors flowed in with catalogues; an unshaven chin and a wrinkled suit were not out of place here. A man with a ragged moustache and an out-at-elbows jacket, the pockets bulging with sandwiches, looked carefully through a folio volume of landscape gardening: a Bishop – or he might have been a Dean – was examining a set of the Waverley novels: a big white beard brushed the libidinous pages of an illustrated Brantôme. Nobody here was standardized; in tea-shops and theatres people are cut to the pattern of their environment, but in this auction-room the goods were too various to appeal to any one type. Here was pornography – eighteenth-century French with beautiful little steel engravings celebrating the copulations of elegant over-clothed people on Pompadour couches, here were all the Victorian novelists, the memoirs of obscure pig-stickers, the eccentric philosophies and theologies of the seventeenth century – Newton on the geographical position of Hell, and Jeremiah Whiteley on the Path of Perfection. There was a smell of neglected books, of the straw from packing cases and of clothes which had been too often rained upon. Standing by the shelves containing lots one to thirty-five Rowe was able to see anyone who came in or out by the door Mr Rennit used.

  Just on the level of his eyes was a Roman missal of no particular value included in Lot 20 with Religious Books Various. A big round clock, which itself had once formed part of an auction, as you could tell from the torn label below the dial, pointed 9.45 above the auctioneer’s desk. Rowe opened the missal at random, keeping three-quarters of his attention for the house across the street. The missal was ornamented with ugly coloured capitals; oddly enough, it was the only thing that spoke of war in the old quiet room. Open it where you would, you came on prayers for deliverance, the angry nations, the unjust, the wicked, the adversary like a roaring lion . . . The words stuck out between the decorated borders like cannon out of a flower-bed. ‘Let not man prevail,’ he read – and the truth of the appeal chimed like music. For in all the world outside that room man had indeed prevailed; he had himself prevailed. It wasn’t only evil men who did these things. Courage smashes a cathedral, endurance lets a city starve, pity kills . . .
we are trapped and betrayed by our virtues. It might be that whoever killed Cost had for that instant given his goodness rein, and Rennit, perhaps for the first time in his life, was behaving like a good citizen by betraying his client. You couldn’t mistake the police officer who had taken his stand behind a newspaper just outside the auction-room.

  He was reading the Daily Mirror. Rowe could see the print over his shoulder with Zec’s cartoon filling most of the page. Once, elusively, from an upper window Mr Rennit peered anxiously out and withdrew. The clock in the auction-room said five minutes to ten. The grey day full of last night’s débris and the smell of damp plaster crept on. Even Mr Rennit’s desertion made Rowe feel a degree more abandoned.

  There had been a time when he had friends, not many because he was not gregarious – but for that very reason in his few friendships he had plunged deeply. At school there had been three: they had shared hopes, biscuits, measureless ambitions, but now he couldn’t remember their names or their faces. Once he had been addressed suddenly in Piccadilly Circus by an extraordinary grey-haired man with a flower in his button-hole and a double-breasted waistcoat and an odd finicky manner, an air of uncertain and rather seedy prosperity. ‘Why, if it isn’t Boojie,’ the stranger said, and led the way to the bar of the Piccadilly Hotel, while Rowe sought in vain for some figure in the lower fourth – in black Sunday trousers or football shorts, inky or mud-stained – who might be connected with this over-plausible man who now tried unsuccessfully to borrow a fiver, then slid away to the gents and was no more seen, leaving the bill for Boojie to pay.