The Ministry of Fear Read online

  More recent friends he had had, of course: perhaps half a dozen. Then he married and his friends became his wife’s friends even more than his own. Tom Curtis, Crooks, Perry and Vane . . . Naturally they had faded away after his arrest. Only poor silly Henry Wilcox continued to stand by, because, he said, ‘I know you are innocent. You wouldn’t hurt a fly’ – that ominous phrase which had been said about him too often. He remembered how Wilcox had looked when he said, ‘But I’m not innocent. I did kill her.’ After that there wasn’t even Wilcox or his small domineering wife who played hockey. (Their mantelpiece was crowded with the silver trophies of her prowess.)

  The plain-clothes man looked impatient. He had obviously read every word of his paper because it was still open at the same place. The clock said five past ten. Rowe closed his catalogue, after marking a few lots at random, and walked out into the street. The plain-clothes man said, ‘Excuse me,’ and Rowe’s heart missed a beat.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’ve come out without a match.’

  ‘You can keep the box,’ Rowe said.

  ‘I couldn’t do that, not in these days.’ He looked over Rowe’s shoulder, up the street to the ruins of the Safe Deposit, where safes stood about like the above-ground tombs in Latin cemeteries, then followed with his eye a middle-aged clerk trailing his umbrella past Rennit’s door.

  ‘Waiting for someone?’ Rowe asked.

  ‘Oh, just a friend,’ the detective said clumsily. ‘He’s late.’

  ‘Good morning.’

  ‘Good morning, sir.’ The ‘sir’ was an error in tactics, like the soft hat at too official an angle and the unchanging page of the Daily Mirror. They don’t trouble to send their best men for mere murder, Rowe thought, touching the little sore again with his tongue.

  What next? He found himself, not for the first time, regretting Henry Wilcox. There were men who lived voluntarily in deserts, but they had their God to commune with. For nearly ten years he had felt no need of friends – one woman could include any number of friends. He wondered where Henry was in wartime. Perry would have joined up and so would Curtis. He imagined Henry as an air-raid warden, fussy and laughed at when all was quiet, a bit scared now during the long exposed vigils on the deserted pavements, but carrying on in dungarees that didn’t suit him and a helmet a size too large. God damn it, he thought, coming out on the ruined corner of High Holborn, I’ve done my best to take part too. It’s not my fault I’m not fit enough for the army, and as for the damned heroes of civil defence – the little clerks and prudes and what-have-yous – they didn’t want me: not when they found I had done time – even time in an asylum wasn’t respectable enough for Post Four or Post Two or Post any number. And now they’ve thrown me out of their war altogether; they want me for a murder I didn’t do. What chance would they give me with my record?

  He thought: Why should I bother about that cake any more? It’s nothing to do with me: it’s their war, not mine. Why shouldn’t I just go into hiding until everything’s blown over (surely in wartime a murder does blow over). It’s not my war; I seem to have stumbled into the firing-line, that’s all. I’ll get out of London and let the fools scrap it out, and the fools die. . . . There may have been nothing important in the cake; it may have contained only a paper cap, a motto, a lucky sixpence. Perhaps that hunchback hadn’t meant a thing: perhaps the taste was imagination: perhaps the whole scene never happened at all as I remember it. Blast often did odd things, and it certainly wasn’t beyond its power to shake a brain that had too much to brood about already . . .

  As if he were escaping from some bore who walked beside him explaining things he had no interest in, he dived suddenly into a telephone-box and rang a number. A stern dowager voice admonished him down the phone as though he had no right on the line at all, ‘This is the Free Mothers. Who is that, please?’

  ‘I want to speak to Miss Hilfe.’

  ‘Who is that?’

  ‘A friend of hers.’ A disapproving grunt twanged the wires. He said sharply, ‘Put me through, please,’ and almost at once he heard the voice which if he had shut his eyes and eliminated the telephone-box and ruined Holborn he could have believed was his wife’s. There was really no resemblance, but it was so long since he had spoken to a woman, except his landlady or a girl behind a counter, that any feminine voice took him back . . . ‘Please. Who is that?’

  ‘Is that Miss Hilfe?’

  ‘Yes. Who are you?’

  He said as if his name were a household word, ‘I’m Rowe.’

  There was such a long pause that he thought she had put the receiver back. He said, ‘Hullo. Are you there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I wanted to talk to you.’

  ‘You shouldn’t ring me.’

  ‘I’ve nobody else to ring – except your brother. Is he there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You heard what happened?’

  ‘He told me.’

  ‘You had expected something, hadn’t you?’

  ‘Not that. Something worse.’ She explained, ‘I didn’t know him.’

  ‘I brought you some worries, didn’t I, when I came in yesterday?’

  ‘Nothing worries my brother.’

  ‘I rang up Rennit.’

  ‘Oh, no, no. You shouldn’t have done that.’

  ‘I haven’t learnt the technique yet. You can guess what happened.’

  ‘Yes. The police.’

  ‘You know what your brother wants me to do?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Their conversation was like a letter which has to pass a censorship. He had an overpowering desire to talk to someone frankly. He said, ‘Would you meet me somewhere – for five minutes?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I can’t. I can’t get away.’

  ‘Just for two minutes.’

  ‘It’s not possible.’

  It suddenly became of great importance to him. ‘Please,’ he said.

  ‘It wouldn’t be safe. My brother would be angry.’

  He said, ‘I’m so alone. I don’t know what’s happening. I’ve got nobody to advise me. There are so many questions . . .’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Can I write to you . . . or him?’

  She said, ‘Just send your address here – to me. No need to sign the note – or sign it with any name you like.’

  Refugees had such stratagems on the tip of the tongue; it was a familiar way of life. He wondered whether if he were to ask her about money she would have an answer equally ready. He felt like a child who is lost and finds an adult hand to hold, a hand that guides him understandingly homewards . . . He became reckless of the imaginary censor. He said, ‘There’s nothing in the papers.’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I’ve written a letter to the police.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘you shouldn’t have done that. Have you posted it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Wait and see,’ she said. ‘Perhaps there won’t be any need. Just wait and see.’

  ‘Do you think it would be safe to go to my bank?’

  ‘You are so helpless,’ she said, ‘so helpless. Of course you mustn’t. They will watch for you there.’

  ‘Then how can I live . . . ?’

  ‘Haven’t you a friend who would cash you a cheque?’

  Suddenly he didn’t want to admit to her that there was no one at all. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes. I suppose so.’

  ‘Well then . . . Just keep away,’ she said so gently that he had to strain his ears.

  ‘I’ll keep away.’

  She had rung off. He put the receiver down and moved back into Holborn, keeping away. Just ahead of him, with bulging pockets, went one of the bookworms from the auction-room.

  ‘Haven’t you a friend?’ she had said. Refugees had always friends; people smuggled letters, arranged passports, bribed officials; in that enormous underground land as wide as a continent there was companionship. In England one hadn’t yet learned the technique. Whom could he as
k to take one of his cheques? Not a tradesman. Since he began to live alone he had dealt with shops only through his landlady. He thought for the second time that day of his former friends. It hadn’t occurred to Anna Hilfe that a refugee might be friendless. A refugee always has a party – or a race.

  He thought of Perry and Vane: not a chance even if he had known how to find them. Crooks, Boyle, Curtis . . . Curtis was quite capable of knocking him down. He had simple standards, primitive ways and immense complacency. Simplicity in friends had always attracted Rowe: it was a complement to his own qualities. There remained Henry Wilcox. There was just a chance there . . . if the hockey-playing wife didn’t interfere. Their two wives had had nothing in common. Rude health and violent pain were too opposed, but a kind of self-protective instinct would have made Mrs Wilcox hate him. Once a man started killing his wife, she would have ungrammatically thought, you couldn’t tell where it would stop.

  But what excuse could he give Henry? He was aware of the bulge in his breast pocket where his statement lay, but he couldn’t tell Henry the truth: no more than the police would Henry believe that he had been present at a murder as an onlooker. He must wait till after the banks closed – that was early enough in wartime, and then invent some urgent reason.

  What? He thought about it all through lunch in an Oxford Street Lyons, and got no clue. Perhaps it was better to leave it to what people called the inspiration of the moment, or, better still, give it up, give himself up. It only occurred to him as he was paying his bill that probably he wouldn’t be able to find Henry anyway. Henry had lived in Battersea, and Battersea was not a good district to live in now. He might not even be alive – twenty thousand people were dead already. He looked him up in a telephone book. He was there.

  That meant nothing, he told himself; the blitz was newer than the edition. All the same, he dialled the number just to see – it was as if all his contacts now had to be down a telephone line. He was almost afraid to hear the ringing tone, and when it came he put the receiver down quickly and with pain. He had rung Henry up so often – before things happened. Well, he had to make up his mind now: the flat was still there, though Henry mightn’t be in it. He couldn’t brandish a cheque down a telephone line; this time the contact had got to be physical. And he hadn’t seen Henry since the day before the trial.

  He would almost have preferred to throw his hand in altogether.

  He caught a number 19 bus from Piccadilly. After the ruins of St James’s Church one passed at that early date into peaceful country. Knightsbridge and Sloane Street were not at war, but Chelsea was, and Battersea was in the front line. It was an odd front line that twisted like the track of a hurricane and left patches of peace. Battersea, Holborn, the East End, the front line curled in and out of them . . . and yet to a casual eye Poplar High Street had hardly known the enemy, and there were pieces of Battersea where the public house stood at the corner with the dairy and the baker beside it, and as far as you could see there were no ruins anywhere.

  It was like that in Wilcox’s street; the big middle-class flats stood rectangular and gaunt like railway hotels, completely undamaged, looking out over the park. There were To Let boards up all the way down, and Rowe half hoped he would find one outside No. 63. But there was none. In the hall was a frame in which occupants could show whether they were in or out, but the fact that the Wilcox’s was marked In meant nothing at all, even if they still lived there, for Henry had a theory that to mark the board Out was to invite burglary. Henry’s caution had always imposed on his friends a long tramp upstairs to the top floor (there were no lifts).

  The stairs were at the back of the flats looking towards Chelsea, and as you climbed above the second floor and your view lifted, the war came back into sight. Most of the church spires seemed to have been snapped off two-thirds up like sugar-sticks, and there was an appearance of slum clearance where there hadn’t really been any slums.

  It was painful to come in sight of the familiar 63. He used to pity Henry because of his masterful wife, his conventional career, the fact that his work – chartered accountancy – seemed to offer no escape; four hundred a year of Rowe’s own had seemed like wealth, and he had for Henry some of the feeling a rich man might have for a poor relation. He used to give Henry things. Perhaps that was why Mrs Wilcox hadn’t liked him. He smiled with affection when he saw a little plaque on the door marked A.R.P. Warden: it was exactly as he had pictured. But his finger hesitated on the bell.

  3

  He hadn’t had time to ring when the door opened and there was Henry. An oddly altered Henry. He had always been a neat little man – his wife had seen to that. Now he was in dirty blue dungarees, and he was unshaven. He walked past Rowe as though he didn’t see him and leant over the well of the staircase. ‘They aren’t here,’ he said.

  A middle-aged woman with red eyes who looked like a cook followed him out and said, ‘It’s not time, Henry. It’s really not time.’ For a moment – so altered was Henry – Rowe wondered whether the war had done this to Henry’s wife too.

  Henry suddenly became aware of him – or half aware of him. He said, ‘Oh, Arthur . . . good of you to come,’ as though they’d met yesterday. Then he dived back into his little dark hall and became a shadowy abstracted figure beside a grandfather clock.

  ‘If you’d come in,’ the woman said, ‘I don’t think they’ll be long now.’

  He followed her in and noticed that she left the door open, as though others were expected; he was getting used now to life taking him up and planting him down without his own volition in surroundings where only he was not at home. On the oak chest – made, he remembered, to Mrs Wilcox’s order by the Tudor Manufacturing Company – a pair of dungarees was neatly folded with a steel hat on top. He was reminded of prison, where you left your own clothes behind. In the dimness Henry repeated, ‘Good of you, Arthur,’ and fled again.

  The middle-aged woman said, ‘Any friend of Henry’s is welcome. I am Mrs Wilcox.’ She seemed to read his astonishment even in the dark, and explained, ‘Henry’s mother.’ She said, ‘Come and wait inside. I don’t suppose they’ll be long. It’s so dark here. The blackout, you know. Most of the glass is gone.’ She led the way into what Rowe remembered was the dining-room. There were glasses laid out as though there was going to be a party. It seemed an odd time of day . . . too late or too early. Henry was there; he gave the effect of having been driven into a corner, of having fled here. On the mantelpiece behind him were four silver cups with the names of teams engraved in double entry under a date: to have drunk out of one of them would have been like drinking out of an account book.

  Rowe, looking at the glasses, said, ‘I didn’t mean to intrude,’ and Henry remarked for the third time, as though it were a phrase he didn’t have to use his brain in forming, ‘Good of you . . .’ He seemed to have no memory left of that prison scene on which their friendship had foundered. Mrs Wilcox said, ‘It’s so good the way Henry’s old friends are all rallying to him.’ Then Rowe, who had been on the point of inquiring after Henry’s wife, suddenly understood. Death was responsible for the glasses, the unshaven chin, the waiting . . . even for what had puzzled him most of all, the look of youth on Henry’s face. People say that sorrow ages, but just as often sorrow makes a man younger – ridding him of responsibility, giving in its place the lost unanchored look of adolescence.

  He said, ‘I didn’t know. I wouldn’t have come if I’d known.’

  Mrs Wilcox said with gloomy pride, ‘It was in all the papers.’

  Henry stood in his corner; his teeth chattered while Mrs Wilcox went remorselessly on – she had had a good cry, her son was hers again. ‘We are proud of Doris. The whole post is doing her honour. We are going to lay her uniform – her clean uniform – on the coffin, and the clergyman is going to read about “Greater love hath no man”.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Henry.’

  ‘She was crazy,’ Henry said angrily. ‘She had no right . . . I told her the wall would collapse.’


  ‘But we are proud of her, Henry,’ his mother said, ‘we are proud of her.’

  ‘I should have stopped her,’ Henry said. ‘I suppose,’ his voice went high with rage and grief, ‘she thought she’d win another of those blasted pots.’

  ‘She was playing for England, Henry,’ Mrs Wilcox said. She turned to Rowe and said, ‘I think we ought to lay a hockey-stick beside the uniform, but Henry won’t have it.’

  ‘I’ll be off,’ Rowe said. ‘I’d never have come if . . .’

  ‘No,’ Henry said, ‘you stay. You know how it is . . .’ He stopped and looked at Rowe as though he realized him fully for the first time. He said, ‘I killed my wife too. I could have held her, knocked her down . . .’

  ‘You don’t know what you are saying, Henry,’ his mother said. ‘What will this gentleman think . . . ?’

  ‘This is Arthur Rowe, mother.’

  ‘Oh,’ Mrs Wilcox said, ‘oh,’ and at that moment up the street came the slow sad sound of wheels and feet.

  ‘How dare he . . . ?’ Mrs Wilcox said.

  ‘He’s my oldest friend, mother,’ Henry said. Somebody was coming up the stairs. ‘Why did you come, Arthur?’ Henry said.

  ‘To get you to cash me a cheque.’

  ‘The impudence,’ Mrs Wilcox said.

  ‘I didn’t know about this . . .’

  ‘How much, old man?’