The Clocks (18 page)

T
he hotel I was staying in was a poky little place by the station. It served a decent grill but that was all that could be said for it. Except, of course, that it was cheap.

At ten o'clock the following morning I rang the Cavendish Secretarial Bureau and said that I wanted a shorthand typist to take down some letters and retype a business agreement. My name was Douglas Weatherby and I was staying at the Clarendon Hotel (extraordinarily tatty hotels always have grand names). Was Miss Sheila Webb available? A friend of mine had found her very efficient.

I was in luck. Sheila could come straight away. She had, however, an appointment at twelve o'clock. I said that I would have finished with her well before that as I had an appointment myself.

I was outside the swing doors of the Clarendon when Sheila appeared. I stepped forward.

“Mr. Douglas Weatherby at your service,” I said.

“Was it
you
rang up?”

“It was.”

“But you can't do things like that.” She looked scandalized.

“Why not? I'm prepared to pay the Cavendish Bureau for your services. What does it matter to them if we spend your valuable and expensive time in the Buttercup Café just across the street instead of dictating dull letters beginning ‘Yours of the 3rd prontissimo to hand,' etc. Come on, let's go and drink indifferent coffee in peaceful surroundings.”

The Buttercup Café lived up to its name by being violently and aggressively yellow. Formica tabletops, plastic cushions and cups and saucers were all canary colour.

I ordered coffee and scones for two. It was early enough for us to have the place practically to ourselves.

When the waitress had taken the order and gone away, we looked across the table at each other.

“Are you all right, Sheila?”

“What do you mean—am I all right?”

Her eyes had such dark circles under them that they looked violet rather than blue.

“Have you been having a bad time?”

“Yes—no—I don't know. I thought you had gone away?”

“I had. I've come back.”

“Why?”

“You know why.”

Her eyes dropped.

“I'm afraid of him,” she said after a pause of at least a minute, which is a long time.

“Who are you afraid of?”

“That friend of yours—that inspector. He thinks … he thinks I killed that man, and that I killed Edna too….”

“Oh, that's just his manner,” I said reassuringly. “He always goes about looking as though he suspected everybody.”

“No, Colin, it's not like that at all. It's no good saying things just to cheer me up. He's thought that I had something to do with it right from the beginning.”

“My dear girl, there's no evidence against you. Just because you were there on the spot that day, because someone put you on the spot….”

She interrupted.

“He thinks I put myself on the spot. He thinks it's all a trumped-up story. He thinks that Edna in some way knew about it. He thinks that Edna recognized my voice on the telephone pretending to be Miss Pebmarsh.”

“
Was
it your voice?” I asked.

“No, of course it wasn't. I
never
made that telephone call. I've always told you so.”

“Look here, Sheila,” I said. “Whatever you tell anyone else, you've got to tell
me
the truth.”

“So you don't believe a word I say!”

“Yes, I do. You
might
have made that telephone call that day for some quite innocent reason. Someone may have
asked
you to make it, perhaps told you it was part of a joke, and then you got scared and once you'd lied about it, you had to go on lying. Was it like that?”

“No, no,
no!
How often have I got to tell you?”

“It's all very well, Sheila, but there's
something
you're not telling
me. I want you to trust me. If Hardcastle
has
got something against you, something that he hasn't told me about—”

She interrupted again.

“Do you expect him to tell you everything?”

“Well, there's no reason why he shouldn't. We're roughly members of the same profession.”

The waitress brought our order at this point. The coffee was as pale as the latest fashionable shade of mink.

“I didn't know you had anything to do with the police,” Sheila said, slowly stirring her coffee round and round.

“It's not exactly the police. It's an entirely different branch. But what I was getting at was, that if Dick
doesn't
tell me things he knows about you, it's for a special reason. It's because he thinks I'm interested in you. Well, I am interested in you. I'm more than that. I'm
for
you, Sheila, whatever you've done. You came out of that house that day scared to death. You were really scared. You weren't pretending. You couldn't have acted a part the way you did.”

“Of course I was scared. I was terrified.”

“Was it only finding the dead body that scared you? Or was there something else?”

“What else should there be?”

I braced myself.

“Why did you pinch that clock with Rosemary written across it?”

“What do you mean? Why should I pinch it?”

“I'm asking you
why
you did.”

“I never touched it.”

“You went back into that room because you'd left your gloves there, you said. You weren't wearing any gloves that day. A fine
September day. I've never seen you wear gloves. All right then, you went back into that room and you picked up that clock. Don't lie to me about that. That's what you did, isn't it?”

She was silent for a moment or two, crumbling up the scones on her plate.

“All right,” she said in a voice that was almost a whisper. “All right. I did. I picked up the clock and I shoved it into my bag and I came out again.”

“But why did you do it?”

“Because of the name—Rosemary. It's my name.”

“Your name is Rosemary, not Sheila?”

“It's both. Rosemary Sheila.”

“And that was enough, just that? The fact that you'd the same name as was written on one of those clocks?”

She heard my disbelief, but she stuck to it.

“I was scared, I tell you.”

I looked at her. Sheila was
my
girl—the girl I wanted—and wanted for keeps. But it wasn't any use having illusions about her. Sheila was a liar and probably always would be a liar. It was her way of fighting for survival—the quick easy glib denial. It was a child's weapon—and she'd probably never got out of using it. If I wanted Sheila I must accept her as she was—be at hand to prop up the weak places. We've all got our weak places. Mine were different from Sheila's but they were there.

I made up my mind and attacked. It was the only way.

“It was
your
clock, wasn't it?” I said. “It belonged to you?”

She gasped.

“How did you know?”

“Tell me about it.”

The story tumbled out then in a helter-skelter of words. She'd had the clock nearly all her life. Until she was about six years old she'd always gone by the name of Rosemary—but she hated it and had insisted on being called Sheila. Lately the clock had been giving trouble. She'd taken it with her to leave at a clock-repairing shop not far from the Bureau. But she'd left it somewhere—in the bus, perhaps, or in the milk bar where she went for a sandwich at lunchtime.

“How long was this before the murder at 19, Wilbraham Crescent?”

About a week, she thought. She hadn't bothered much, because the clock was old and always going wrong and it would really be better to get a new one.

And then:

“I didn't notice it at first,” she said. “Not when I went into the room. And then I—found the dead man. I was paralysed. I straightened up after touching him and I just stood there staring and my clock was facing me on a table by the fire—
my
clock—and there was blood on my hand—and then she came in and I forgot everything because she was going to tread on him. And—and so—I bolted. To get away—that's all I wanted.”

I nodded.

“And later?”

“I began to think. She said
she
hadn't telephoned for me—then who had—who'd got me there and put
my
clock there? I—I said that about leaving gloves and—and stuffed it into my bag. I suppose it was—stupid of me.”

“You couldn't have done anything sillier,” I told her. “In some ways, Sheila, you've got no sense at all.”

“But someone is trying to involve me. That postcard. It must have been sent by someone who knows I took that clock. And the postcard itself—the Old Bailey. If my father was a criminal—”

“What do you know about your father and mother?”

“My father and mother died in an accident when I was a baby. That's what my aunt told me, what I've always been told. But she never speaks about them, she never tells me anything
about
them. Sometimes, once or twice when I asked, she's told me things about them that aren't the same as what she's told me before. So I've always known, you see, that there's something
wrong.
”

“Go on.”

“So I think that perhaps my father was some kind of criminal—perhaps even, a murderer. Or perhaps it was my mother. People don't say your parents are dead and can't or won't tell you anything about those parents, unless the real reason is something—something that they think would be too awful for you to know.”

“So you got yourself all worked up. It's probably quite simple. You may just have been an illegitimate child.”

“I thought of that, too. People do sometimes try and hide that kind of thing from children. It's very stupid. They'd much better just tell them the real truth. It doesn't matter as much nowadays. But the whole point is, you see, that I don't
know.
I don't know what's
behind
all this. Why was I called Rosemary? It's not a family name. It means remembrance, doesn't it?”

“Which could be a nice meaning,” I pointed out.

“Yes, it could … But I don't feel it was. Anyway, after the inspector had asked me questions that day, I began to think. Why had someone wanted to get me there? To get me there with a strange man who was dead? Or was it the dead man who had
wanted me to meet him there? Was he, perhaps—my father, and he wanted me to do something for him? And then someone had come along and killed him instead. Or did someone want to make out from the beginning that it was I who had killed him? Oh, I was all mixed up, frightened. It seemed somehow as if everything was being made to point at
me.
Getting me there, and a dead man and my name—Rosemary—on my own clock that didn't belong there. So I got in a panic and did something that was stupid, as you say.”

I shook my head at her.

“You've been reading or typing too many thrillers and mystery stories,” I said accusingly. “What about Edna? Haven't you any idea at all what she'd got into her head about you? Why did she come all the way to your house to talk to you when she saw you every day at the office?”

“I've no idea. She couldn't have thought
I
had anything to do with the murder. She couldn't.”

“Could it have been something she overheard and made a mistake about?”

“There was nothing, I tell you. Nothing!”

I wondered. I couldn't help wondering … Even now, I didn't trust Sheila to tell the truth.

“Have you got any personal enemies? Disgruntled young men, jealous girls, someone or other a bit unbalanced who might have it in for you?”

It sounded most unconvincing as I said it.

“Of course not.”

So there it was. Even now I wasn't sure about that clock. It was a fantastic story. 413. What did those figures mean? Why write
them on a postcard with the word: REMEMBER unless they would mean
something
to the person to whom the postcard was sent?

I sighed, paid the bill and got up.

“Don't worry,” I said. (Surely the most fatuous words in the English or any other language.) “The Colin Lamb Personal Service is on the job. You're going to be all right, and we're going to be married and live happily ever after on practically nothing a year. By the way,” I said, unable to stop myself, though I knew it would have been better to end on the romantic note, but the Colin Lamb Personal Curiosity drove me on. “What have you actually done with that clock? Hidden it in your stocking drawer?”

She waited just a moment before she said:

“I put it in the dustbin of the house next door.”

I was quite impressed. It was simple and probably effective. To think of that had been clever of her. Perhaps I had underestimated Sheila.

I

W
hen Sheila had gone, I went across to the Clarendon, packed my bag and left it ready with the porter. It was the kind of hotel where they are particular about your checking out before noon.

Then I set out. My route took me past the police station, and after hesitating a moment, I went in. I asked for Hardcastle and he was there. I found him frowning down at a letter in his hand.

“I'm off again this evening, Dick,” I said. “Back to London.”

He looked up at me with a thoughtful expression.

“Will you take a piece of advice from me?”

“No,” I said immediately.

He paid no attention. People never do when they want to give you advice.

“I should get away—and stay away—if you know what's best for you.”

“Nobody can judge what's best for anyone else.”

“I doubt that.”

“I'll tell you something, Dick. When I've tidied up my present assignment, I'm quitting. At least—I think I am.”

“Why?”

“I'm like an old-fashioned Victorian clergyman. I have Doubts.”

“Give yourself time.”

I wasn't sure what he meant by that. I asked him what he himself was looking so worried about.

“Read that.” He passed me the letter he had been studying.

“She writes a nice dashing hand,” I said, “though I've never really fancied purple ink. Did the deceased have a scar?”

“He had a scar all right. Just where she says.”

“Didn't she see it when she was shown the body?”

Hardcastle shook his head.

“The ear covers it. You have to bend the ear forward before you can see it.”

“Then that's all right. Nice piece of corroboration. What's eating you?”

Hardcastle said gloomily that this case was the devil! He asked if I would be seeing my French or Belgian friend in London.

“Probably. Why?”

“I mentioned him to the chief constable who says he remembers him quite well—that Girl Guide murder case. I was to extend a very cordial welcome to him if he is thinking of coming down here.”

“Not he,” I said. “The man is practically a limpet.”

II

It was a quarter past twelve when I rang the bell at 62, Wilbraham Crescent. Mrs. Ramsay opened the door. She hardly raised her eyes to look at me.

“What is it?” she said.

“Can I speak to you for a moment? I was here about ten days ago. You may not remember.”

She lifted her eyes to study me further. A faint frown appeared between her eyebrows.

“You came—you were with the police inspector, weren't you?”

“That's right, Mrs. Ramsay. Can I come in?”

“If you want to, I suppose. One doesn't refuse to let the police in. They'd take a very poor view of it if you did.”

She led the way into the sitting room, made a brusque gesture towards a chair and sat down opposite me. There had been a faint acerbity in her voice, but her manner now resumed a listlessness which I had not noted in it previously.

I said:

“It seems quiet here today … I suppose your boys have gone back to school?”

“Yes. It does make a difference.” She went on, “I suppose you want to ask some more questions, do you, about this last murder? The girl who was killed in the telephone box.”

“No, not exactly that. I'm not really connected with the police, you know.”

She looked faintly surprised.

“I thought you were Sergeant—Lamb, wasn't it?”

“My name is Lamb, yes, but I work in an entirely different department.”

The listlessness vanished from Mrs. Ramsay's manner. She gave me a quick, hard, direct stare.

“Oh,” she said, “well, what is it?”

“Your husband is still abroad?”

“Yes.”

“He's been gone rather a long time, hasn't he, Mrs. Ramsay? And gone rather a long way?”

“What do you know about it?”

“Well, he's gone beyond the Iron Curtain, hasn't he?”

She was silent for a moment or two, and then she said in a quiet, toneless voice:

“Yes. Yes, that's quite right.”

“Did you know he was going?”

“More or less.” She paused a minute and then said, “He wanted me to join him there.”

“Had he been thinking of it for some time?”

“I suppose so. He didn't tell me until lately.”

“You are not in sympathy with his views?”

“I was once, I suppose. But you must know that already … You check up pretty thoroughly on things like that, don't you? Go back into the past, find out who was a fellow traveller, who was a party member, all that sort of thing.”

“You might be able to give us information that would be very useful to us,” I said.

She shook her head.

“No. I can't do that. I don't mean that I won't. You see, he never told me anything definite. I didn't want to know. I was sick and tired of the whole thing! When Michael told me that he was leaving this country, clearing out, and going to Moscow, it didn't really startle me. I had to decide then, what
I
wanted to do.”

“And you decided you were not sufficiently in sympathy with your husband's aims?”

“No, I wouldn't put it like that at all! My view is entirely personal. I believe it always is with women in the end, unless of course one is a fanatic. And then women can be
very
fanatical, but I wasn't. I've never been anything more than mildly left-wing.”

“Was your husband mixed up in the Larkin business?”

“I don't know. I suppose he might have been. He never told me anything or spoke to me about it.”

She looked at me suddenly with more animation.

“We'd better get it quite clear, Mr. Lamb. Or Mr. Wolf in Lamb's clothing, or whatever you are. I loved my husband, I might have been fond enough of him to go with him to Moscow, whether I agreed with what his politics were or not. He wanted me to bring the boys. I didn't want to bring the boys! It was as simple as that.
And so I decided I'd have to stay with them. Whether I shall ever see Michael again or not I don't know. He's got to choose his way of life and I've got to choose mine, but I did know one thing quite definitely. After he talked about it to me. I wanted the boys brought up here in their own country. They're English. I want them to be brought up as ordinary English boys.”

“I see.”

“And that I think is all,” said Mrs. Ramsay, as she got up.

There was now a sudden decision in her manner.

“It must have been a hard choice,” I said gently. “I'm very sorry for you.”

I was, too. Perhaps the real sympathy in my voice got through to her. She smiled very slightly.

“Perhaps you really are … I suppose in your job you have to try and get more or less under people's skins, know what they're feeling and thinking. It's been rather a knockout blow for me, but I'm over the worst of it … I've got to make plans now, what to do, where to go, whether to stay here or go somewhere else. I shall have to get a job. I used to do secretarial work once. Probably I'll take a refresher course in shorthand and typing.”

“Well, don't go and work for the Cavendish Bureau,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Girls who are employed there seem to have rather unfortunate things happen to them.”

“If you think I know anything at all about that, you're wrong. I don't.”

I wished her luck and went. I hadn't learnt anything from her. I hadn't really thought I should. But one has to tidy up the loose ends.

III

Going out of the gate I almost cannoned into Mrs. McNaughton. She was carrying a shopping bag and seemed very wobbly on her feet.

“Let me,” I said and took it from her. She was inclined to clutch it from me at first, then she leaned her head forward, peering at me, and relaxed her grip.

“You're the young man from the police,” she said. “I didn't recognize you at first.”

I carried the shopping bag to her front door and she teetered beside me. The shopping bag was unexpectedly heavy. I wondered what was in it. Pounds of potatoes?

“Don't ring,” she said. “The door isn't locked.”

Nobody's door seemed ever to be locked in Wilbraham Crescent.

“And how are you getting on with things?” she asked chattily. “He seems to have married very much below him.”

I didn't know what she was talking about.

“Who did—I've been away,” I explained.

“Oh, I see.
Shadowing
someone, I suppose. I meant that Mrs. Rival. I went to the inquest. Such a
common
-looking woman. I must say she didn't seem much upset by her husband's death.”

“She hadn't see him for fifteen years,” I explained.

“Angus and I have been married for twenty years.” She sighed. “It's a long time. And so much gardening now that he isn't at the university … It makes it difficult to know what to do with oneself.”

At that moment, Mr. McNaughton, spade in hand, came round the corner of the house.

“Oh, you're back, my dear. Let me take the things—”

“Just put it in the kitchen,” said Mrs. McNaughton to me swiftly—her elbow nudged me. “Just the Cornflakes and the eggs and a melon,” she said to her husband, smiling brightly.

I deposited the bag on the kitchen table. It clinked.

Cornflakes, my foot! I let my spy's instincts take over. Under a camouflage of sheet gelatine were three bottles of whisky.

I understood why Mrs. McNaughton was sometimes so bright and garrulous and why she was occasionally a little unsteady on her feet. And possibly why McNaughton had resigned his Chair.

It was a morning for neighbours. I met Mr. Bland as I was going along the crescent towards Albany Road. Mr. Bland seemed in very good form. He recognized me at once.

“How are you? How's crime? Got your dead body identified, I see. Seems to have treated that wife of his rather badly. By the way, excuse me, you're not one of the locals, are you?”

I said evasively I had come down from London.

“So the Yard was interested, was it?”

“Well—” I drew the word out in a noncommittal way.

“I understand. Mustn't tell tales out of school. You weren't at the inquest, though.”

I said I had been abroad.

“So have I, my boy. So have I!” He winked at me.

“Gay Paree?” I asked, winking back.

“Wish it had been. No, only a day trip to Boulogne.”

He dug me in the side with his elbow (quite like Mrs. McNaughton!).

“Didn't take the wife. Teamed up with a very nice little bit. Blonde. Quite a hot number.”

“Business trip?” I said. We both laughed like men of the world.

He went on towards No. 61 and I walked on towards Albany Road.

I was dissatisfied with myself. As Poirot had said, there should have been more to be got out of the neighbours. It was positively unnatural that
nobody
should have seen anything! Perhaps Hardcastle had asked the wrong questions. But could I think of any better ones? As I turned into Albany Road I made a mental list of questions. It went something like this:

I turned to the left again. Now I was walking along Wilbraham Crescent just as I had walked on September 9th. Should I call on Miss Pebmarsh? Ring the bell and say—well, what should I say?

Call on Miss Waterhouse? But what on earth could I say to
her?

Mrs. Hemming perhaps? It wouldn't much matter what one said to Mrs. Hemming. She wouldn't be listening, and what
she
said, however haphazard and irrelevant,
might
lead to something.

I walked along, mentally noting the numbers as I had before. Had the late Mr. Curry come along here, also noting numbers, until he came to the number he meant to visit?

Wilbraham Crescent had never looked primmer. I almost found myself exclaiming in Victorian fashion, “Oh! if these stones could speak!” It was a favourite quotation in those days, so it seemed. But stones don't speak, no more do bricks and mortar, nor even plaster nor stucco. Wilbraham Crescent remained silently itself. Old-
fashioned, aloof, rather shabby, and not given to conversation. Disapproving, I was sure, of itinerant prowlers who didn't even know what they were looking for.

There were few people about, a couple of boys on bicycles passed me, two women with shopping bags. The houses themselves might have been embalmed like mummies for all the signs of life there were in them. I knew why that was. It was already, or close upon, the sacred hour of one, an hour sanctified by English traditions to the consuming of a midday meal. In one or two houses I could see through the uncurtained windows a group of one or two people round a dining table, but even that was exceedingly rare. Either the windows were discreetly screened with nylon netting, as opposed to the once popular Nottingham lace, or—which was far more probable—anyone who was at home was eating in the “modern” kitchen, according to the custom of the 1960's.

It was, I reflected, a perfect hour of day for a murder. Had the murderer thought of that, I wondered? Was it part of the murderer's plan? I came at last to No. 19.

Like so many other moronic members of the populace I stood and stared. There was, by now, no other human being in sight. “No neighbours,” I said sadly, “no intelligent onlookers.”