It's a Battlefield Read online

  ‘What are your arrangements?’

  ‘I’ve got two men watching the house. I don’t want any trouble with firearms. The landlady’s going to let us in quietly and we’ll nab him before he gets to his gun. We’re leaving in half an hour.’

  The Assistant Commissioner looked at his watch. ‘I’ll be with you in twenty minutes.’

  ‘It’s quite unnecessary, sir,’ the voice said more suspiciously than ever.

  ‘It’s all right. You’ll take control. I only want to see how things are done over here. One must – er – know the ropes. What’s that you said?’

  ‘Nothing, sir.’

  ‘Oh, and Crosse. Will you see to this at once? About Drover. The Minister wants to gauge the effect of a reprieve. Get the stations to make inquiries. Quietly. Send in confidential reports. They – er – won’t be held, held responsible for mistakes. You might get something out of the Press. Do what you can. I leave it to you, but let me have the – er – reports. Get to it at once. We’ve only got a few days.’

  The Assistant Commissioner rang off. He knew quite well what Crosse was saying now, his complaints and criticisms travelling down the narrow corridors, in and out of the little glass waiting-rooms. ‘Have you heard the latest? Do you know what he’s up to now? Interfering. Finger in every pie. Can’t leave a man to his job.’ He had turned too quickly from the telephone and for a moment he held to the edge of the table, with his head a little bent. Any quick movement made him dizzy. There was nothing wrong with him except age. After fifty-six years the world was likely to make any man dizzy.

  Soon the gourds and the tobacco racks and the native weapons steadied, but the Assistant Commissioner felt curiously unwilling to leave his flat and return to the Yard. ‘Interfering. Fingers in every pie.’ Six months of continuous criticism and obstruction were wearing his nerves thin. In the East he had always interfered; he had been expected to interfere; they had needed his advice. The three-year spells of duty allowed no one to dig himself in, but the little glass rooms along the passages at Scotland Yard were like the deep dugouts of an intricate trench system. He couldn’t ask a question without troubling some inspector’s self-importance. They could not understand his motives. He was not threatening them; he had not been appointed to ‘clean up’ the Yard; he had been appointed to a job and he only wanted to learn his job. He opened the door of the dining-room and said a little wearily to Mrs Simpson in the kitchen: ‘I shall not want, not, not, that’s to say I’m – er – going out.’

  ‘An’ what about this supper? Here I’ve been slavin’ away, out of hours, when I’m wanted at home, and all the thanks I get –’

  ‘Eat it yourself, Mrs Simpson.’

  She emerged from the kitchen, small, grey and furious, wiping her hands on her apron. Behind her was a wavering of steam and a smell of burning food. Mrs Simpson was not a good cook, but the Assistant Commissioner did not notice his food. He ate, turned sideways, with his eyes on a newspaper or a report; when he occasionally remarked that he had had a good dinner, he meant that the report or the newspaper had pleased him.

  ‘Good night, Mrs Simpson.’ But her fury and her fidelity held him with his hand on the door; he could not turn his back before allowing her her ‘say’. She was old and withered, angry and unreasonable, but he recognized a quality he shared; it might be described loosely as love, as obstinacy, as loneliness, or even as desperation. The more one was alone, the more one clung to one’s job, the only thing it was certainly right to do, the only human value valid for every change of government, and for every change of heart. ‘It’s them murderers,’ Mrs Simpson said with hatred. ‘I’d like to see ’em all strung up and finished with. That Drover.’ She quivered in the steam under the weight of the years, and death lent her hatred and contempt its own blindness and incongruity. ‘Good food wasted.’

  At the Yard he found that his directions had already been carried out. They were careful never to give him reason for legitimate complaints; they sprang to his orders as they would never have sprung to the orders of a man they liked. Then there would have been a certain give and take, an occasional pardonable slackness, but with him they were careful that the only grounds of complaint should be theirs for his intrusion. The stations had already been informed of his instructions regarding Drover. They had even kept the tobacconist at the Yard in case the Assistant Commissioner wished to see him, and a careful report on the developments in the Paddington murder lay already on his desk. He tried in vain to break through their politeness and disapproval. ‘I’m not troubling to read this, Crosse. It’s your job. I’m your, your – er – subordinate tonight. I merely want to – want to learn.’ Superintendent Crosse’s face was as blank as a whitewashed wall.

  They packed into a single car. The great lit globe of the Coliseum balanced above the restaurants and the cafés and the public-houses in St Martin’s Lane. Round and round Trafalgar Square the buses went like circus horses. The high squeal of the Wolseley’s hooter pierced through a traffic block; cars ground their brakes, a policeman raised his hand, and they were shaken out into Charing Cross Road temporarily bare of traffic. The whores flowed down one pavement and up another; flat dago faces printed on song sheets filled the window of a music shop and a salesman inside played with passionate melancholy: ‘My Baby Don’t Care’. A row of men peered into peepshows, and ‘A Night in Paris’ and ‘What the Butler Saw’ and ‘For Women Only’ rattled and whined and jolted and stuck. Somebody was firing a rifle in a fun booth for cigarette packets and china vases.

  ‘Have you brought a gun, sir?’ Crosse asked.

  ‘I don’t possess one,’ the Assistant Commissioner said.

  A gust of wind and rain brushed the windows in St Giles’s Circus and lifted the posters of a man selling papers by Lyons Corner House, so that for a moment, while a bus delayed them, the Assistant Commissioner caught a résumé of the evening’s news, poster after poster flapping up: ‘Home to Lossiemouth’, ‘3.30 Results’, ‘Insured?’ ‘Appeal Fails’, ‘Midday Runners’; then falling again, like time burying the old news deep.

  ‘You ought to have brought a gun, sir.’

  The car dived left by Goodge Street Station, and then right, up Charlotte Street.

  ‘I’ve never felt the need of one yet.’

  The Superintendent swallowed. He wanted to say something disparaging, something which would put the East and its jungles in a proper place in the hierarchy of danger. ‘He’s got a gun, sir.’

  ‘He’ll be afraid to use it,’ the Assistant Commissioner said. He had walked for twenty miles through the jungle with a walking-stick and he wasn’t going to carry a revolver within two miles of Scotland Yard. He did not believe that the man who had killed Mrs Janet Crowle and later cut up the body and stowed it in a trunk in the left luggage department at Paddington was a braver man than the murderer who had set fire to his own hut and died in the flames to escape capture. If one could go out against men like that with a walking stick, one did not need a weapon in London.

  The car came out for a moment into the Euston Road, sent its shrill warning past the furniture dealers’ and wireless shops and one-night hotels to the constable on point duty, then swerved across the lit garish road into the darkness again. A man stepped out from a tobacconist’s and waved to them, and the car slid to the kerb and stopped. Behind them Euston Road flickered and grumbled, but in the street no one spoke, no one moved except the man who fumbled at the door of the car. Crosse helped him from inside and leaning across asked softly: ‘Well?’

  ‘He’s going out,’ the man said. ‘He’s asked the landlady for hot water and a clean towel. She told him she’d have to boil a kettle and slipped downstairs and told Jenks.’

  ‘We’d better get him in the house,’ Crosse said. ‘Which is it?’

  ‘You’ll see Jenks in the doorway fifty yards down on the left-hand side.’

  ‘Which is the room?’

  ‘Top floor. Back room. There’s a fire escape up the back outside the
window. He hasn’t drawn the curtains, the landlady says. He never draws ’em before supper. He’s a man of habits.’

  ‘Does he face the window?’

  ‘His arm-chair faces the door.’

  ‘Has he had the hot water?’

  ‘Jenks’ll signal when she takes it up,’ and while he spoke a tiny flame shone in the street and went out. ‘There,’ the man said. ‘She’s taking up the water now.’

  ‘Come on,’ Crosse said, ‘out of the car. Two men stand in the doorway where Jenks is, one round to the back door, one up the fire escape. I’ll go up the stairs with Jenks. How do you reach the fire escape?’

  ‘A passage on the right of the front door,’ the man said, ‘takes you to the back yard. You can’t help seeing the fire escape.’

  ‘I’ll go up the fire escape,’ the Assistant Commissioner said.

  ‘You’d better stay in the street,’ Crosse said. ‘But I haven’t got the time to argue now. Come on quietly.’ They crossed the road and followed him down the pavement, a line of heavy men in soft hats walking cumbrously on tiptoe; only the Assistant Commissioner at the tail of the procession walked with natural lightness, all the useless flesh burned away by fever. A taxi went soberly by towards Euston and a young man in horn-rimmed glasses leant out of the window and stared at them with his mouth open. ‘Hi!’ he said in a tipsy voice, ‘Hi!’; they walked on self-consciously like a row of ducks, while the taxi receded and the young man still leant from the window and called: ‘Hi!’ drunk and puzzled and amused; as the taxi turned into Euston Road he hammered on the glass and called to the driver to look: ‘Lot of funny men,’ they heard him shout. Lights behind upper windows shrouded in lace curtains never touched the dark channel in which they walked. They were buried twenty feet deep in a night world of their own; above their heads the lights behind closed panes, at their backs a gleam and murmur, the faint evocation of a world in uproar till the midnight closing hour. Somebody whispered from a doorway: ‘He’s washing now.’

  Crosse halted them and whispered back: ‘How long have we got?’

  ‘He always washes well when he goes out of an evening, the landlady says. Down to the waist. She says he’s always been a one for cleanliness.’

  The Assistant Commissioner smiled, treading softly down a brick-paved passage to the back door. (Behind him he could hear Crosse put up his safety catch.) With his hands on the iron rail of the fire escape, he thought of innumerable clerics rising in innumerable pulpits to talk of cleanliness as next to godliness (the rails struck cold through his gloves, and it was difficult to mount quietly, the nails on his shoes striking the steel steps), praising the clean body as an indication of the clean mind. He thought of Crippen shaving carefully every day of his trial, particular about small things. It was these contradictions, the moral maxims which did not apply, that made it impossible for a man to found his life on any higher motive than doing his job. A life spent with criminals would never fail to strip the maxims of priests and teachers from the underlying chaos.

  The moon burnt for a moment through the clouded sky and silvered the rails and the steps of the fire escape, showed the huddle of chimney pots above him, and dimmed the light in the top room. It travelled between the clouds with the swiftness of a car, and the whole globe heeled over with it. The Assistant Commissioner clutched the rail and lowered his head, attacked again by dizziness. Every attack was followed by a great fear, not the fear of death, but the fear of enforced retirement, a fear which he fought with his efficiency, his hesitations which conserved his energy, and his meticulousness. With that chill at his brain he mounted the last steps.

  A man was talking. He could hear the voice before he could see the face. The window above was open.

  ‘Come to Jesus,’ the voice said. ‘Come to Jesus.’ The Assistant Commissioner mounted slowly; there was no lamp in the yard below, there was darkness everywhere now that the moon had gone, except where the bulb in the room lit a few feet of steel platform and a step or two. ‘Oh, come to Jesus all of you. Come to Jesus.’ The Assistant Commissioner was alone with the voice. The policeman at the back door, in the pool of night, made no sound; the house had swallowed up Crosse and his companions. ‘Don’t think I don’t understand you. Oh, I’ve sinned too, friends, believe me, I’ve sinned too.’ The Assistant Commissioner’s shoe struck a spark on the penultimate step, but the voice with its absurd unction and its intolerable theatricality went on. ‘I’ve got a bleeding heart, friends. If you could see inside –’

  The Assistant Commissioner stood on the platform and stared in. He gripped his stick and listened for Crosse’s coming. He did not believe that the man would shoot, but he was a little disturbed by the flow of sweet words. The man stood before a mirror buttoning a jacket with a high collar across a great naked chest, tufted between the breasts with red hair. The Assistant Commissioner was puzzled for a moment at the blue braided uniform, but then he noticed on a chair a cap with a red band. ‘I’ve been as big a sinner as any of you. But I’ve come to Jesus and I’ve been forgiven.’ The Assistant Commissioner swung his stick, listening for the feet upon the stairs, and the man moved and pursed his lips and turned his head to see that he was clean behind the ears. When he spoke he circled his lips as if to whistle, and the words popped out one by one like little sticky sweets.

  ‘Oh, if you only knew, friends, the sweetness of forgiveness, the balm, the peace.’ It was impossible to doubt his sincerity. He was as sincere as the actor-manager aware for an act, for a scene, for a soliloquy’s length, of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, before the packed stalls and the respectful ‘gods’.

  ‘When you feel the flames of Hell, friends, tearing at your heart, don’t say, “It’s too late”. Then’s the moment to come to Jesus, and oh, the balm of it and the peace.’

  The Assistant Commissioner wondered: Has he locked the door? He’ll break for the window. Where’s he put his revolver?

  ‘I’ve felt the flames, but I’ve been forgiven. I’ve felt the flames, but I feel the peace.’ He held back his lips and examined his teeth and gums, while his voice absent-mindedly hummed: ‘Peace and balm, peace and balm.’ He drew a loose match from his pocket and picked his teeth, then rubbed them up and down with his handkerchief. ‘Peace and balm, peace and balm,’ he said, buttoning up his pockets, laying large plump hands across his scalp, smoothing the brossed reddish hair with a bishop’s benedictory and confirming touch.

  Somebody outside pulled at the door.

  The man turned; peace and balm withered on his lips. ‘Who’s that?’ Nobody troubled to answer, but the lock shook and shivered. The Salvationist turned to the window and saw in the splash of light on the steel platform the Assistant Commissioner swinging his stick in his right hand, his legs a little apart expecting a charge. Before the lock broke he was at his bed, fumbling under the pillow; while the door poised ajar before the crash, he was back at the window with the revolver pointed. ‘Get off that escape.’

  The Assistant Commissioner watched him, swung his stick, saw for a moment not the brossed hair and the fat desperate face, but an old woman, who had been too close with her money, raising her hands and screaming, while the steam from Paddington Station rose across the window and a goods train plodding down to Westbourne Grove hooted on a higher note than she could reach, so that no one heard her; any more than later the couple who lived below had heard the dreadful little sounds of sawing.

  ‘Get off that –’ but the door was open and he swung to meet it, unable to make up his mind at whom to shoot, still dithering and undecided when the handcuffs were on his wrists. The Assistant Commissioner climbed in through the open window, Jenks examined the gun with curiosity, weighing it in his hand, opening the magazine, Crosse put the key of the cuffs in his pocket and said: ‘You’re under arrest on a charge of murdering Mrs Janet Crowle at Paddington on the 4th. Anything you say –’

  Jenks said: ‘It’s a 1916 type. They’re slow on the trigger.’

  ‘Come on,
’ Crosse said, ‘put on his cap.’ The room was full of men picking things up. Somebody put the cap on the man’s head. ‘Collins, you stay and clear up with Jenks,’ Crosse said. He pushed the man between the shoulders so that he stumbled. ‘Get on, can’t you. You’ll be keeping us up late enough as it is.’ The man lowered himself painfully down the stairs as if he had been beaten. ‘You ought to be ashamed,’ he said, ‘hitting me.’ He began to speak again in an undertone of Jesus and how he had been forgiven. ‘Holy martyrs,’ he said, and on the bottom step, ‘company of the blessed.’ He was impregnably entrenched against shame or retribution; he was touched only by a little momentary fear.

  ‘Are you coming back to the Yard, sir?’ Crosse asked.

  ‘No,’ the Assistant Commissioner said. ‘No. I’ll see your report in the morning. I want to look, to look through the Streatham papers tonight.’ He drew his coat carefully past the splintered woodwork and remembered what the secretary had said, sipping sherry in the Berkeley, ‘It’s a battlefield.’ But he had been referring to something else, the Assistant Commissioner could not remember what. I suppose, he thought, this is a victory, but there’s no such thing as a decisive victory. He looked at his watch and calculated that he might perhaps allow himself twenty minutes for a little food before he sat down to the Streatham papers; the time would not be quite wasted, over his food he could consider Drover.

  3

  MR SURROGATE rose later than usual. At 8.30 Davis came in and drew the blinds, and a flow of pale autumnal sun filled the wash-basin and spread across the bed. Mr Surrogate grunted and turned on his side. He did not wake again until eleven.

  The machines in the match factory stopped working for five minutes while everyone drank a glass of milk and pretended to eat a dry water biscuit. Some slipped it into their pockets to throw away in the lavatory at lunch time, others dropped it on the floor among the litter of discarded boxes.

  Conder sucked a sweet and stared into the melancholy future. ‘Take this to the subs,’ he said, and watched his exclusive story disappear in the hands of a messenger down the stairs; soon it would be leaden type and soon a column of print, and twenty-four hours later it would be pulp. It did not seem fair to Conder that the products of his brain should be condemned to the same cycle as his body. Something should be left. His body must decay, but some permanent echo should remain of the defective bathroom, the child with whooping cough. He began to write, again without thinking: ‘Reds clash behind locked Doors’. No story left his hands with the truth unheightened. Condemned to the recording of trivialities, he saw the only hope of a posthumous immortality in a picturesque lie which might catch a historian’s notice as it lay buried in an old file.