“I’m not getting annoyed.”

  “We were quite content to take your word in this other matter against hers-failing independent evidence, and in view of other circumstances. There was no call to show me this piece of paper.”

  In effect, he was telling me that he thought I had faked the whole thing in order, in some obscure way, to discredit the woman.

  “Of course there was a reason to show you the paper!” I insisted loudly. “It shows that some unauthorised person has been into this flat. If that’s not a matter for the police, perhaps you’ll tell me what is?”

  He stiffened, but to do him credit he kept his temper. Police get accustomed to dealing with excited citizens.

  “Anything stolen, sir?” he asked mildly.

  “Nothing.”

  “Anything disturbed-contents of drawers on the floor, cupboard doors open, anything like that, sir?”

  I shook my head.

  “Any signs of a forcible entry by the door or windows?”

  “No.”

  “Anybody have a key of the flat apart from yourself, sir?”

  “Only the woman who cleans the flat-and she wouldn’t write that pompous sort of stuff, why should she? And my fiancee, she’s got a key, but if you want an alibi for her, she’s been in America for a month.”

  “This Mrs. Dawson mentioned in the note, was she known to your daily woman or to your fiancee?”

  “Of course she wasn’t.”

  “I was only asking, sir.”

  “Yes, well, she wasn’t.”

  “That’s all right then,” he said in the patient tone of one who was not only keeping his temper but wanted you to realise it. “Who is this Mrs. Dawson, anyway?”

  “She was murdered in Italy recently.”

  “Murdered, was she?”

  “It was in the papers at the time.”

  “I don’t read the newspapers much-except the football pages. Was she a friend of yours?”

  “No, she wasn’t. But I’m preparing something about the case. I write crime articles and crime novels. I’ve been trying to find out something about her background, and it’s been hard work. I’ve had the idea that people have been trying to obstruct me, but it was just an idea. Now comes this note. So I was right.”

  “Who would try to obstruct you, sir, as you call it?”

  “I don’t know. That’s the point, I don’t know who-or why. And another thing-somebody unknown to me rang me up early this morning and asked if I’d got that note, and then tried to badger me along the same lines.”

  “I see, sir.”

  He looked down at his blue helmet, and began to polish the badge with his right thumb. Then he said:

  “You write what you call crime novels-thrillers, as it were, mystery stories?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  I saw what was in his mind. He had changed his ground, or at least extended it. He was now fumbling towards some theory that I might have typed the note myself and created some mystery for some obscure reason connected with a thriller story. But he was too punctilious to say so. He just nodded his head thoughtfully and said, “Ah.” Then he straightened himself up.

  “Well, sir, in regard to the other matter, I will report that you categorically deny the accusation. In regard to the matter we have just discussed, I take it you wish me formally to report your own complaint? Or do you wish to reconsider it?”

  He was offering me a let out.

  I replied obstinately.

  “I would like you to report it. I realise that little can be done, but I would like it reported.”

  “Very well, sir. I’ll take this message you say was typed by some unknown intruder, and I will formally report the matter, as you wish.”

  He folded the paper up neatly and placed it in his notebook. He didn’t sigh resignedly, but it was the loudest non-sigh I’ve ever heard.

  “Good day, sir.”

  “What’s your name, Sergeant?”

  “Matthews, sir, Sergeant Matthews, but you don’t need to worry about me not reporting what you want. That’s what we’re paid for, sir.”

  “I wasn’t worrying.”

  “That’s all right then, isn’t it, sir?”

  He put on his helmet and let himself out without turning round. I felt he considered me to be a disappointment, a man towards whom the Force had adopted a tolerant attitude, towards whom he, in particular, had assumed a kindly, avuncular role; a man who had invented a silly story, and persisted in it, despite a chance to retract with good grace.

  I heard the street door close downstairs, and walked to the window, and saw him cycling off towards the police station.

  The pigeon, which I had nicknamed Tommy the Hen, because I did not know its sex, was back on the roof guttering opposite, staring across with beady eyes.

  I guessed that Tommy the Hen was not the only one observing me, but I felt some relief because I had reported matters to Sergeant Matthews. He had taken my story with about a pound of salt, but at least I had lodged it with him.

  As to the sad sack in the train, whom I now thought of as Bunface, the reason for her actions completely eluded me.

  Quite clearly the police were wrong in their estimate of her.

  Her thoughts, conscious and subconscious, were concerned with death and self-destruction and the hereafter, not with men and sex fantasies and wishful imaginings.

  She was not neurotic in the way they thought. Her grief was genuine. Therefore she had lodged a complaint because she had been ordered to do so. And yet I could swear she had liked me and had been grateful to me for listening to her woes.

  I imagined her checking my name and address from some scruffy piece of paper she had been given, dragging it out of her shabby handbag, holding it with her coarse, red hands in the light of a lamp standard near the police station, peering myopically at the writing.

  Then, reluctantly, and because she had to, she would have gone in, well knowing what the station sergeant would think.

  Poor embarrassed Bunface, I thought, poor pathetic victim.

  But whose victim?

  I spent part of the day trying to work, and part of it trying to puzzle out another problem. Whoever had instructed Bunface must have known that the police would take no action. Was the complaint therefore in the nature of a feint, a vicious, probing dab in the air, such as a tiger will sometimes make with its paw?

  I now thought it was. But there was more to it than that.

  After a couple of gins and tonic and a sandwich for lunch I felt better, for luckily I have a sectionalised mind, and my thoughts were now on Juliet and her arrival. Indeed, I was cheerful and excited as I drove to London Airport.

  But I forgot that as a secretary to the Minister she might be carrying a spare briefcase or two, and travelling with him, all the way, right back to the Ministry, with the rest of the cohort of civil servants who have to accompany Ministers when they move around these days.

  So my trip to the airport was wasted. All I could do was wave, and follow in my car at a discreet distance. However, I picked her up in Whitehall in the end, and although she was deadly tired, the evening proceeded inexorably to its conclusion, as planned in all its details by Stanley Bristow.

  For the first part of the evening my heart bled for poor little Juliet. Her father plied her with questions in his snuffly voice, and her mother posed supplementary questions in the energetic, bustling tones of a television interviewer. If she had answered them all, the entire confidential secrets of the Washington conferences would have been round the London clubs, and many other places, too, within forty-eight hours. But they were no match for her, tired though she was.

  In the end, Stanley Bristow snuffled his way to a halt, with a plaintive protest that she never told them anything. By that time, I don’t think Juliet was even listening properly. She was picking at her fish in the murky candle light of the Charlotte Street restaurant. Once or twice she looked up and caught my eye, and gave one of her secretive little half-smiles, and then looked down again.

  Stanley had bought champagne to celebrate her return. He was never mean with drinks. By the middle of the meal she looked a little better. So far, I had said nothing about the woman in the train from Brighton, the message, the police visit, or the telephone call.

  Now I thought I might as well do so. I was banking on a lighthearted reaction from Stanley, mellow with drink. Lighthearted it certainly was. I hoped it would set the tone for the women. He gave one of the muffled guffaws which served him for a laugh.

  “Somebody’s pulling your leg, old boy.”

  “Probably.”

  “Of course they are, old boy!”

  “Why?”

  “Why? I don’t know why, old boy. Why does anybody play a practical joke. Damn silly, if you ask me, old boy.”

  I nodded.

  “You’re probably right. It’s a bit elaborate, it’s spread over a wide area, and I don’t see the point of it, but-”

  “There never is much point in a practical joke, old boy.”

  I felt that at any moment he was going to tell me stories of practical jokers who had dug up holes in main thoroughfares, of undergraduates who had dressed up as visiting Indian potentates and inspected guards of honour, and other tales from the hoary old repertoire of practical jokers.

  “There’s no end to some people’s childishness,” said Elaine Bristow brightly. “Even Stanley, when we were first married, used to tinker about with people’s cars when they came to dinner, and remove some bit of the engine, and then while they were ringing up for help he used to sneak out and put it back again, didn’t you Stanley?”

  “I expect you’re both right,” I said quickly. “I expect it’s something like that.”

  I felt instinctively that I had to tell them about it, in case it went on. I suppose I knew instinctively that it would go on. Now I had told them. Now I could change the subject.

  “What’s going to win the November Handicap?” I asked.

  He looked pleased. He began to tell me, at some length, going through the merits of the main equine contenders one by one, almost leg by leg. I lit a cigarette and settled back, nodding from time to time. His wife sat back, too, bored but resigned.

  Juliet was fiddling about with her coffee cup. Her skin and dark hair looked paler and more exciting, in the subdued lighting of even that mediocre Soho restaurant. She wasn’t wearing her glasses.

  Once or twice she looked at me without moving her head, moving her eyes only, using the shy secretive glance which hitherto had always excited me. Tonight her glance didn’t excite me. Her eyes were worried. She had caught my true mood.

  Juliet said she would go straight to bed when we got back to her parents’ flat. The fatigue caused by the work of the Washington conference and the Atlantic flight had finally caught up with her. I would have been content to take the taxi on, back to my own flat, but Stanley insisted that I should come in for a final drink and paid off the driver.

  One of Juliet’s two pieces of luggage still stood in the hall, and I followed her along the passage, carrying it for her. In her bedroom, I put it down, and saw she was staggering with exhaustion and although we had hardly had a moment to ourselves since her return, I just murmured a few words and kissed her, and gave her a warm hug, and said I would see her at lunchtime next day, and made for the bedroom door.

  But as I drew away from her, she caught hold of me and I turned round. I thought she wanted me to kiss her again, and was rather touched, and I did, and she didn’t object, but it wasn’t why she had detained me. After I had kissed her again, she looked at me, and then away, in the withdrawn manner peculiar to her, and said quietly:

  “You are worried. I mean, you really are a bit, aren’t you?”

  “No, not really. No, I’m not worried. It’s a bit bewildering, and it’s all rather childish and melodramatic, and I don’t understand why they don’t want me to go on with this story, whoever they are. But I’m not worried, because I don’t see what there is to be worried about.”

  “Isn’t that a reason to be worried?”

  I laughed and said:

  “Now don’t you try and scare me, darling.”

  “I’m not trying to scare you.”

  “Good.”

  “It’s just that-these times we live in.”

  “What about these times?”

  “One feels there’s so much evil around one. So much hidden danger. You know? Bits and pieces appear in the papers. Killings and kidnappings, and inexplicable scandals, and treachery, and cold, cold hate, and those are only the bits you see, you never know where it’s going to erupt next, or why it happens.”

  “There always have been these things.”

  Suddenly she started to cry. I put my arm round her. I had never seen her cry before and I didn’t like it.

  “Come along, darling, pop into bed, and forget these things.”

  “How can I forget them, when they may be touching you and me? Clawing at what may be our only chance of happiness in this life, threatening our marriage.”

  She dabbed her eyes with the handkerchief I offered her.

  “Why not drop it, darling?” she said.

  “Drop what?”

  “Drop the story of Lucy Dawson.”

  I stared at her, feeling the obstinacy which has done me so much good and harm in life almost literally congealing my mind.

  “Good God, whose side are you on?” I muttered.

  She began to sob in earnest now.

  “Whose side are you on?” I said again.

  “Yours, darling. Ours,” she whispered. “I just want to be happy, that’s all.”

  “If I knew the reason why they want me to drop it, I might-or I might not. But I don’t. So I won’t.”

  She turned away and murmured, “Men, men.”

  From down the passage Stanley’s snuffly voice called me. He said something about, come on you two lovebirds, it’s time Juliet was in bed. Something nauseating, anyway.

  I kissed her again. She did her best to respond, but her heart was not in it. I went along to the sitting room, and found Stanley alone. He said Elaine had gone to bed. I wanted to go to bed, too, but he was standing by the drinks tray, fiddling about with his cutglass whisky decanter, and tumblers, and soda syphon. I thought he was going to say, “Well, what about a nightcap, old boy?” but he didn’t. He said, “What about one for the road, old boy?” To make it worse, he said, “If you drink, don’t drive-if you drive, don’t drink. Well, you aren’t driving, old boy.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “I’m walking back. I’ll have a small one.”

  I lit a cigarette and sighed. He handed me a whisky.

  “Tired, old boy?”

  “No, not really.”

  I wasn’t feeling particularly tired. I was just dismayed, once again, at the prospect of endless periodic drinks with Stanley, of being pinned in corners by him, of looking up at him and into his protruding watery grey eyes with their touch of ex-ophthalmic goitre, while he smoothed his sparse hair with one hand, held a glass in the other, and told me yet another feeble, smutty story.

  “Well, drink up, old boy-all the best!”

  I drank half the tumbler of whisky and soda without a pause.

  The sooner it was finished, the sooner I could go. He was standing by the mantelpiece, his back to me, and without looking round he said:

  “Look, old boy, there’s something I think you should know.”

  His voice was as snuffly as ever, but lacked the normal lighthearted overtones.

  “It’s about Juliet, old boy.”

  CHAPTER 5

  What about Juliet?”

  “I expect she’d tell you herself, if she hasn’t done so already. I suppose she hasn’t?”

  “Hasn’t told me what, for heaven’s sake? How do I know?” I asked, and couldn’t keep the irritation out of my voice.

  It was late, and I know now that subconsciously I was beginning to worry about Juliet’s attitude.

  “I can’t tell you whether she has or whether she hasn’t, unless you tell what she might or might not have told me, or be about to tell me, can I? Well, can I?”

  He turned round from the mantelpiece and gawked down at me, tall and spindly, and I noticed that his tow-coloured moustache had not turned as grey as his thin hair. He looked, as he sometimes implied to other people that he was, like a former member of a crack cavalry regiment officered by rich young men, though I knew from Elaine Bristow that in fact he had been in the Pay Corps during the last war.

  “Well, it’s only fair you should know, old boy-in point of fact, Juliet is not really our daughter. She’s an adopted child.”

  He looked anxiously at me, swirling his whisky in his glass. He looked really worried. I could have laughed in his face.

  So far from feeling dismay, I was aware of a surge of relief that Juliet was not the result of the marriage of this uninteresting couple; and mingled with the relief, piercing through it, here and there, I began to ponder certain things, such as her dark, withdrawn attractiveness, her mixture of gaiety and seriousness, the touch of mystery about her, the occasional secretive look. Were they due to her blood or to the knowledge she had of herself? Had she, in fact, suspected the truth long before they confirmed it? An overheard remark, a hastily broken off conversation, can reveal more to a child than adults realise. Children are no fools.

  None of her characteristics could have stemmed from the Bristows, and I should have known it; and even if, as I had thought, she had had some more interesting ancestor, the dull Bristow blood would have thinned it beyond hope.

  “My dear Stanley, what on earth does that matter?” I said lightly, and realised that in my relief that Juliet was a full-blooded non-Bristow I had for the first time called him by his Christian name.

  “I hoped you’d say that, old boy. I’d have said the same myself. I’ll tell you about her parents, I’ll tell you something she doesn’t know herself.”

  “You don’t need to.”

  “It’s only fair, old boy.”

  He went ostentatiously to the door, opened it quietly, an inch or two, as if to make sure that nobody was coming along the passage, then closed it and walked back to the fireplace.

 

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