A Fragment of Fear (10 page)

“People do funny things when they’re walking.”

“That’s right. But he was approaching me at quite a sharp angle from the pavement edge.”

I saw him turning the thought over in his mind, seeking some other plausible idea.

“Maybe he also wanted a light.”

“Two people without a light for their cigarettes, in the same short, deserted street, at the same time? Well, anyway, why didn’t he ask for one?”

“Maybe because you were waving this knobkerrie thing in his face.”

“Maybe,” I said patiently.

I began to wish I hadn’t gone to the police station. You have the notion that you can wander into a police station and say, “I think two chaps were going to attack me ten minutes ago, off Wright’s Lane. I thought you might like to know.” But it doesn’t work out like that. You’re lucky if you get away within the hour.

It had taken some time to hack out what he wanted me to put on paper. The little interview room, with its glaring strip lighting, was hot, stuffy and foul with the reek of stale tobacco smoke.

“I thought I’d report the incident,” I said. “We’re always being told to report unusual or suspicious things to the police. So I thought I’d mention it. Particularly as there is a bit of background which you won’t let me mention.”

“I’m not stopping you telling me anything, sir,” he said stiffly. “What else do you want to tell me?”

I was obstinate now. “It doesn’t matter. I’ve mentioned it all already to one of your people. Just put this new report in. I’m not going over the whole story again. The reports will connect up some time, provided you have some sort of carding system. Some time they’ll connect up.” I added sourly, “Sooner or later they will, I expect, tomorrow or the next day, this year or next.”

He began to weaken.

“You’re right to report this matter, sir. It’s good of you to call, sir. I’ll make a note of what you’ve just said.”

We got to our feet. He didn’t mean what he said, and he knew I knew he didn’t mean it, but convention was satisfied. He relaxed and smiled.

“Maybe in ten minutes time I’ll be taking a statement from a tall chap in a short raincoat saying he’s been threatened by a gentleman carrying a knobkerrie. That’s the way it goes.”

“Well, you know my address,” I said, and did not smile.

I came out of the police station. A uniformed police officer was walking slowly round my car, almost audibly sniffing, as a dog will walk around another dog.

“Is this your car, sir?”

I nodded.

“I’ve been in the police station giving some information.”

“You should have left your sidelights on, sir.”

“Well, it’s under a street lamp. I didn’t think you had to leave sidelights on in London, anyway.”

I knew what he was beating up to, but again the conventions had to be maintained.

“When a car is left on a bus route, the lights must be switched on, sir, whatever other lighting is provided in the street.”

“I didn’t know that,” I lied wearily.

“Yes, sir. Good night.”

“Good night—thank you.”

He trudged heavily into the station. Probably he, too, was tired and bored. I drove round to Stratford Road.

My flat is above an ironmonger’s shop. It suits me, for there is nobody above me, and the buildings on either side consist only of business premises. So when I type late at night I disturb nobody.

The flat is not much to look at from the outside, but it is all right inside, though I say it myself.

There is a large living-room, a large bedroom, and two smaller rooms; one of them I use as a study, and the other is the room Juliet proposed to use as a dining-room, thus leaving no spare bedroom for anybody to stay in, which suited me admirably.

There are one or two quite nice pieces of antique furniture, given me by my father when my mother died, and he decided to live in a Hampshire inn and spend his time fishing and, I suppose, dreaming of the past. But he only survived her two years.

He had also given me a few pieces of Georgian silver, and some fine eighteenth-century sporting prints; though as to the latter, I know that from the moment she saw them Juliet had secretly made up her mind to replace them, no doubt as tactfully as possible.

She also had one or two ideas for new colour schemes when she moved in, but she was discreet enough not to dwell too much on the subject.

Sporting prints or not, and colour schemes or not, it was a good home for a bride to come to.

One is tempted to amend that last sentence, and say that it was a good home for a bride to come to provided she could see it.

I arrived back from the police station at one o’clock, parked the car in an empty space some yards up the road, and walked to my front door and let myself in, thinking that soon the rooms would be alive with Juliet’s possessions as well as mine.

I hate noise, especially abrupt noise, so I always close a door quietly. I closed the street door quietly. The blue stair carpet was before me, and I went up the stairs to the flat, weary but satisfied that up to now I had done all that I could.

About four steps from the top I stopped and stared down at the carpet, and more particularly at about half-an-inch of cigarette ash which lay there.

I stood looking down at the ash.

I never leave my flat or any other building smoking a cigarette, and I never go indoors smoking one. There is a simple explanation for this: the only thing which tastes good in the open air, to my mind, is a pipe. So I stood staring down at the ash. Then I looked up at the door of the flat. I remember noting how the polished wood and the brass knocker gleamed in the light of the stairway.

I climbed the last four steps to the flat. Outside the door I gently switched off the stairs light and listened to my heart beating.

After a while I silently lifted the flap of the letter box. The flat door opened on to a very short hallway, and beyond was the living-room. Off the living-room, to the right, was the study.

I saw nobody, and pondered how much the incident earlier in the evening must have affected my nerves. I lowered the flap of the letter box, feeling rather a fool.

There was nothing left to do now but go in.

Yet I stood listening for a few seconds, regulating my breathing, glad that Juliet could not see me. Then I fumbled in the darkness for the flat key, fingering the keys on the ring, not bothering to switch on the light again, and as I did so a faint, half-stifled cough from inside the flat stilled my movements and breathing. I told myself that noises are deceptive, especially at night, and raised the letter-box flap again.

Whoever it was, he was not in the living-room. But I could see the reflected flashes of his torch as he moved about the study.

I do not think I am more cowardly than the next man, but I may be more cautious and calculating, and possibly more imaginative. I assumed that only one man was inside the flat, and I was tempted, now that the uncertainty was over, to rush in and tackle him. But what if there were two?

Perhaps subconsciously the deciding factor was the thought of my marriage, and common prudence. I tiptoed down the stairs, softly closed the street door, and walked quickly to the telephone booths in Marloes Road. As so often, the first one I entered was out of order, the box refusing to accept a coin. The floor was littered with refuse. I do not know why these booths are so often filthy and out of order.

I swore, flung myself out of the booth and into the other one. This one was filthy, too, but when I lifted the receiver I heard the dialling tone, and thanked heaven that I had four pennies, and that the box would receive them.

I put them in, then realised that you do not need coins to dial “999.” Fearful that the coins might upset the routine, I pressed button “B,” recovered the coins, and then dialled “999,” and got through to Scotland Yard. An impersonal voice said:

“Scotland Yard—can I help you?”

“I want to report—”

“Where are you calling from, please, sir?”

“From the ’phone booths in Marloes Road. My name is James Compton, 274 Stratford Road, Kensington.”

“One minute, please, sir.”

There was a pause of a few seconds. Then he said quietly, almost soothingly: “What is the trouble, sir?”

“There are intruders in my flat. Perhaps you could send somebody round,” I said succinctly.

“One minute, sir.”

I waited. After a short pause, the voice returned.

“We will send a police car round, sir. It should be round in about three or four minutes. Right?”

“Right.”

“Now if you’ll go back to your flat, and wait outside, I expect the police car will be there as soon as you are. Right?”

He spoke soothingly. He was good at his job. Nor was he far out in his calculation. The car was not there when I got back, but it arrived about two minutes later; not with a jangling of bells, as in a chase, but almost noiselessly. It must have free-wheeled the last ten or fifteen yards. It drew up at the edge of the pavement with no more sound than a faint crunch.

There were two uniformed officers, and one plain-clothes detective. They climbed quietly out and stood in a bunch for a moment, looking up at my flat windows. Then they came over to where I stood near the doorway. The sergeant spoke quietly.

“He won’t want to jump from the windows, sir. Too high. Any other way of escape round the back?”

I shook my head.

“Then we should be all right, sir. Perhaps you’ll let us in.”

I let them in through the street door, and switched on the light, and we all trooped up the thick blue carpet. Even though there was no way of escape, save down the stairs past us, we still moved quietly. I do not know why.

I can imagine the sort of report they wrote later:

When they had gone, I stood by the window gazing out into the night. The windows of the houses on the opposite side of the road were dark, and the street was deserted, and I knew that neither of those factors meant a thing. Somebody or something was there.

I wondered what would have happened if I had not dialled “999,” if I had risked it and gone into the flat. I still wonder. I drew the curtains. Now all they had to watch was the front door. I was deadly tired, and went to bed, and fell asleep in a short while. But previous to going to bed I minutely examined my typewriter and typing paper and envelopes. I had set them in a special way.

They had not been disturbed.
That
was quite certain.

At four-thirty in the morning the telephone rang by my bedside, and I thought I knew what to expect. But when I lifted the receiver nobody would speak to me.

After a while there was a click, and the dialling tone was renewed.

T
he following morning I got up about eight-fifteen, as is my custom. I take about an hour and a half to have a bath, shave, dress, and eat a light breakfast. This is a long time, but during that period I read one morning paper in my bath, and another over breakfast. So that by about ten o’clock, I have, so to speak, cleared the deck, and absorbed as much of the day’s news as I wish, and am ready for work.

I was trying to write an article for a Sunday newspaper, but found it impossible to concentrate. One of the things which worried me was whether to tell Juliet of the previous evening’s incidents. In the end, I decided against it.

I felt that the crunch was still to come; that when it did I would need all the strength I could build up beforehand; that to tell all things to Juliet would involve keeping her courage up as well as my own. It was a cold-blooded assessment, and probably an incorrect one.

I met her for lunch for a drink and a smoked salmon sandwich. I thought she might feel a little embarrassed by the subject of her adoption, and that the best thing to do was to grab this whole subject by the throat at once. So immediately we met I gave a broad smile, and said:

“Fond as I am of your father and mother by adoption, I must admit that I never could imagine how they produced anybody as attractive as you, my darling, and I am absolutely delighted that they didn’t!”

I have perhaps given the impression that in those days she was all mystery and brooding thoughtfulness. Such was far from the case. Most of the time she was extremely vivacious, and laughed easily and today she looked radiant after a long night’s sleep. She appeared by now to think that my troubles were an amateurish and over-melodramatic attempt to prevent an investigation of Mrs. Dawson’s life and death, simply because some members of her family or friends might be embarrassed.

“I expect the whole thing will die down in time. I mean, once they see you are not going to be intimidated, darling, they’ll just stop all this nonsense,” she said.

I forebore to tell her that Mrs. Dawson had no family to speak of, and few friends.

I recalled the men on the pavement, the flashing torch in my flat, the telephone call when nobody spoke, and said yes, yes, yes, I was sure she was right.

We only had a short meeting because she had a hair appointment at two o’clock. It was a happy meeting. I look back on it now and savour it, and remember it with tenderness.

In the afternoon I went to the London Library and took out some books on early Roman history, because I was still tampering with the idea of setting a crime in the Sibylline Caves, silly though it sounds. Then I had a hair-cut in Trumpers, and went home and found my evening paper thrust into the letter box, and there was Bunface, a single-column picture, in the middle of a front-page story.

She stared out of the page at me just as she had stared at me on the train from Brighton, when she wasn’t dabbing at her eyes with the grubby handkerchief. The same round, uninteresting face, the same short cropped hair; all a little muzzy, all rather blurred, as snapshots are when they are enlarged beyond the capacity of the negative.

She had been strangled the previous evening in a narrow alley called Paradise Lane off Notting Hill Gate. Police were attempting to establish her identity. There were hints that she had been murdered by a mentally unbalanced person, though the headlines did not go so far as to invoke a “maniac killer.”

I let myself in, and went straight over and mixed myself a whisky and soda, and thought, well, she knows now, she knows now all right, whether there is a life after death, and whether she will see her friend again. She had been toying with the idea of suicide, whether seriously or not one could not say, but that wasn’t necessary, as it turned out, that wasn’t necessary at all. Somebody else had done the job for her.

In these cases it is a delicate newspaper habit to talk about “good-time girls” rather than prostitutes, but even the newspapers, having seen her photograph, hadn’t been able to justify the description of “good-time girl.” She was described as “an unknown middle-aged woman.” Police were anxious to talk to anybody who recognised her from the photograph. I wondered how the police had obtained the photograph, and assumed that they had found a snapshot in her handbag, perhaps a holiday snapshot of herself and her dead friend, and had enlarged it.

This then was the wretched, despairing old doll who had given me a letter containing veiled threats. This was the unhappy soul who had complained about me to the police. This was a woman who, I felt sure, was of such a weak and mediocre mentality that she had got caught up in machinations of which she knew little. Or did she? Either way, the result was the same for me, and now the result was the same for her. Knowing nothing of the stresses to which the jungle predators had subjected her, I cannot find it in my heart to say she should have stood firm.

Surprising as it may seem, it took me some minutes to appreciate how I was concerned. This is doubtless because a crime writer, though he may write of crimes, normally has had little personal involvement in such matters. In some ways he can be a proper little innocent.

When realisation dawned it came as a shock. This woman had laid a complaint against me, alleging that I had made improper suggestions to her in a train. Her photograph would indicate that such suggestions might have been very peculiar indeed, because she obviously had no pretensions at all to normal sex appeal. Her photograph would be recognised at the local police station, and her complaint on record.

She had been killed, it was hinted, by an unbalanced killer, not by a sex maniac, or by a berserk assassin lusting for blood, or by a robber, but by somebody who was peculiar in some unspecified way.

I was very anxious to get to the police station, before a police officer called on me. I kept telling myself that I was not nervous because I had nothing to be nervous about, but that it would look better if I came forward, as a volunteer with information, rather than if I sat back until I was approached.

I was waiting to cross Earls Court Road from Scarsdale Villas when a man’s voice said, “Excuse me, sir.” He only wanted to know the way to the Old Brompton Road. Yet the incident set my heart pounding, because I was so keen to report to the police station before the police called on me.

What exactly I was going to say about poor old Bunface, which I hadn’t said already the previous day to Sergeant Matthews, I did not know.

In the event, I just walked in and up to the Enquiries counter. I had to wait a few minutes while a poorly dressed middle-aged woman gave her name and address and details of a purse which she had lost from her handbag. It was two minutes to six by the big white clock on the wall.

By five minutes past six she had finished describing in some detail the circumstances leading up to her loss. The station sergeant was a bright-looking, fair-haired man in his thirties. Her tale would make no difference. Either the purse would be found and handed in, or it wouldn’t. But he listened patiently, sensing that in pouring out the details she was finding relief, even misguidedly believing that she was contributing something towards the recovery of her purse. He was doing a first-class public relations job. The police are very good at this sort of thing. It is an ancillary part of their work which is not sufficiently recognised, a psychotherapy for people in distress akin to that provided by the priest in the confessional.

As she turned away from the counter, he looked at me and said, “Yes, sir?” in the cheerful manner of a greengrocer dealing with the next customer in the queue. I watched the woman go out of the door, and heard the sergeant say, “Yes, sir?” again.

As he did so, another woman, younger, carrying a small dog, came through the door. I would rather have spoken to him on my own, but I could not delay any more. I said, as quietly as I could:

“There’s a case in the papers about a murdered woman being found in Paradise Lane. I would like to have a word with somebody about her.”

“I see, sir,” he said, with as much interest as if I had been reporting a stolen bicycle. He reached for a piece of paper.

“May I have your name, sir?”

“James Compton.”

“Address?”

“274 Stratford Road—round the corner from here.”

“I take it you have some information you wish to give, sir?”

“Yes, more or less.”

“Could you give me some rough idea of the nature of the information, sir? You’ll understand that in cases of this kind we get a lot of—”

I misunderstood what he was going to say:

“Yes, I know, cranks and crackpots.”

He smiled and said:

“Well, yes—but I was going to say a lot of duplicated information, not that we aren’t glad to have it, of course, but it’s just a question of who should see you, sir.”

“Well, I travelled from Brighton with her in a train the evening before yesterday,” I began. He interrupted me.

“Ah, now you’re cooking with gas, sir!”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I mean that’s interesting, sir. Just one minute—”

He made to move away from the counter. The woman with the dog had been pretending to read some police notices on the wall. She turned away from them and moved with studied casualness over to the counter. This was something she could not miss.

“Actually, Sergeant Matthews from this police station knows the story. I just thought if there were any other small details—you know? Well, I just thought I’d call in—in case, as it were.”

“Sergeant Matthews knows the story?”

“He called yesterday morning.”

“Yesterday morning, sir? The murder wasn’t committed till the late evening, sir.”

“He called about another aspect of the case—connected but different.”

“Connected but different?”

“That’s right.”

The woman with the dog was stroking its head, pretending to be preoccupied with it, looking down at it. She was on my right side. I could almost see her left ear growing bigger. I wasn’t going to say any more. Nothing about the pavement incident, or the lights in my flat, and the abortive search. She’d had enough free entertainment.

“Just a minute, sir,” said the sergeant again, and disappeared into the back of the station.

After a few minutes he came back.

“Would you go into the waiting-room, sir? I’ll show you where it is.”

“I know where it is, I was there yesterday evening.”

“I see, sir.”

He gave me a thoughtful look, but he didn’t ask why. He insisted on accompanying me to the waiting-room. I had a feeling he was afraid I might change my mind. As he shut the door behind me, I noticed that he could see the door from the Enquiries counter. I began to fill my pipe, and had hardly got the tobacco burning smoothly before a young plain-clothes detective came in.

He was tall and dark, with black curly hair and a fresh complexion. All bright and breezy and friendly, he was, and he slumped himself down on to a chair on the opposite side of the little table, and slapped a notebook and pencil down on to the table and said cheerily:

“Good evening, sir, you’re Mr. Compton, I believe? What is it you want to tell us, sir?”

“I don’t particularly wish to tell you anything. I just thought I’d call in and remind you that I met this murdered woman on a train from Brighton the evening before last. You know about it.”

“We know about it?”

“Yes, they know about it here. She called later that evening and alleged I had made improper suggestions to her. Poor old thing,” I added. “Poor old thing. I wouldn’t think anybody had ever made suggestions to her improper or otherwise. Anyway, the station sergeant took note of her complaint, and your Sergeant Matthews called on me yesterday morning to tell me about it. I gathered that the desk sergeant here had already formed an opinion that she was—well, you know, a bit of a crackpot, but they felt they had to inform me officially and get a formal denial from me, and all that sort of thing.”

“I see, sir.”

He wasn’t taking any notes at all.

“I mentioned one or two other things to Sergeant Matthews.”

“What sort of things, sir?”

But I wasn’t buying that one.

“Look,” I said, “it’s a long story. This woman gave me a message typed on my own typewriter and on my own typing paper. But it’s all very complicated, and linked up with other things, and so I told all to Sergeant Matthews. I just called in here in case there was some other details you people wanted to know.”

I watched him doodling with his cheap government pencil on a blank page of his notebook. After a while he said:

“Well, we appreciate that, sir, we appreciate that very much. Just for the record, perhaps you would give me a detailed description of the woman you travelled with from Brighton.”

I described her without hesitation and without difficulty. When I had finished he said:

“Well, sir, the best thing I can do is to attach a note to the sergeant’s report, saying you called, and if there’s anything further we want, we’ll get in touch with you. Right?”

“Fine,” I said, and got to my feet. But he hesitated.

“Perhaps I’d better just look for the old sergeant’s report, sir, as I haven’t seen it. It’s a big station here, we don’t see everybody else’s reports. I mean, that wouldn’t be on the cards, would it? I mean, we can’t see everybody’s reports, can we? Otherwise we’d spend all our day reading. See what I mean? I mean, there might be some point or other we could clarify at once. So if you wouldn’t mind just hanging on a minute, sir?”