A Gun for Sale (25 page)

The valet, white-faced by the wall, said, ‘For God’s sake, give it up. They’ll get you anyway. He was right. It
was
the girl. I heard them on the ’phone.’

I’ve got to be quick, Raven thought, when the door gives, I must shoot first. But too many ideas besieged his brain at once. He couldn’t see clearly enough through the mask and he undid it clumsily with one hand and dropped it on the floor.

The valet could see now the raw inflamed lip, the dark and miserable eyes. He said, ‘There’s the window. Get on to the roof.’ He was talking to a man whose understanding was dulled, who didn’t know whether he wished to make an effort or not, who moved his face so slowly to see the window that it was the valet who noticed first the painter’s platform swinging down the wide tall pane. Mather was on the platform, but the detective had not allowed for his own inexperience. The little platform swung this way and that; he held a rope with one hand and reached for the window with the other; he had no hand free for his revolver as Raven turned. He dangled outside the window six floors above the narrow Tanneries, a defenceless mark for Raven’s pistol.

Raven watched him with bemused eyes, trying to take aim. It wasn’t a difficult shot, but it was almost as if he had lost interest in killing. He was only aware of a pain and despair which was more like a complete weariness than anything else. He couldn’t work up any sourness, any bitterness, at his betrayal. The dark Weevil under the storm of frozen rain flowed between him and any human enemy.
Ah, Christ! that it were possible
, but he had been marked from his birth for this end, to be betrayed in turn by everyone until every avenue into life was safely closed : by his mother bleeding in the basement, by the chaplain at the home, by the shady doctor off Charlotte Street. How could he have expected to have escaped the commonest betrayal of all: to go soft on a skirt? Even Kite would have been alive now if it hadn’t been for a skirt. They all went soft at some time or another: Penrith and Carter, Jossy and Ballard, Barker and the Great Dane. He took aim slowly,
absent
-mindedly, with a curious humility, with almost a sense of companionship in his loneliness: the Trooper and Mayhew. They had all thought at one time or another that their skirt was better than other men’s skirts, that there was something exalted in
their
relation. The only problem when you were once born was to get out of life more neatly and expeditiously than you had entered it. For the first time the idea of his mother’s suicide came to him without bitterness, as he reluctantly fixed his aim and Saunders shot him in the back through the opening door. Death came to him in the form of unbearable pain. It was as if he had to deliver this pain as a woman delivers a child, and he sobbed and moaned in the effort. At last it came out of him and he followed his only child into a vast desolation.

Chapter 8

1

THE SMELL OF
food came through into the lounge whenever somebody passed in or out of the restaurant. The local Rotarians were having a lunch in one of the private rooms upstairs and when the door opened Ruby could hear a cork pop and the scrap of a limerick. It was five-past one. Ruby went out and chatted to the porter. She said, ‘The worst of it is I’m one of the girls who turn up on the stroke. One o’clock he said and here I am panting for a good meal. I know a girl ought to keep a man waiting, but what do you do if you’re hungry? He might go in and start.’ She said, ‘The trouble is I’m unlucky. I’m the kind of girl who daren’t have a bit of fun because she’d be dead sure to get a baby. Well, I don’t mean I’ve had a baby, but I did catch mumps once. Would you believe a grown man could give a girl mumps? But I’m that kind of girl.’ She said, ‘You look fine in all that gold braid with those medals. You might say something.’

The market was more than usually full, for everyone had come out late to do their last Christmas shopping now that the gas practice was over. Only Mrs Alfred Piker, as Lady Mayoress,
had
set an example by shopping in a mask. Now she was walking home, and Chinky trotted beside her, trailing his low fur and the feathers on his legs in the cold slush, carrying her mask between his teeth. He stopped by a lamp-post and dropped it in a puddle. ‘O, Chinky, you bad little thing,’ Mrs Piker said. The porter in his uniform glared out over the market. He wore the Mons medal and the Military Medal. He had been three times wounded. He swung the glass door as the business men came in for their lunch, the head traveller of Crosthwaite and Crosthwaite, the managing director of the big grocery business in the High Street. Once he darted out into the road and disentangled a fat man from a taxi. Then he came back and stood beside Ruby and listened to her with expressionless good humour.

‘Ten minutes late,’ Ruby said, ‘I thought he was a man a girl could trust. I ought to have touched wood or crossed my fingers. It serves me right. I’d rather have lost my honour than that steak. Do you know him? He flings his weight about a lot. Called Davis.’

‘He’s always in here with girls,’ the porter said.

A little man in pince-nez bustled by. ‘A Merry Christmas, Hallows.’

‘A Merry Christmas to you, sir.’ The porter said, ‘You wouldn’t have got far with him.’

‘I haven’t got as far as the soup,’ Ruby said.

A newsboy went by calling out a special midday edition of the
News
, the evening edition of the
Journal
, and a few minutes later another newsboy went past with a special edition of the
Post
, the evening edition of the more aristocratic
Guardian
. It was impossible to hear what they were shouting and the north-east wind flapped their posters, so that on one it was only possible to read the syllable ‘– gedy’ and on the other the syllable ‘– der’.

‘There are limits,’ Ruby said, ‘a girl can’t afford to make herself cheap. Ten minutes’ wait is the outside limit.’

‘You’ve waited more than that now,’ the porter said.

Ruby said, ‘I’m like that. You’d say I fling myself at men, wouldn’t you? That’s what I think, but I never seem to hit
them
.’ She added with deep gloom, ‘The trouble is I’m the kind that’s born to make a man happy. It’s written all over me. It keeps them away. I don’t blame them. I shouldn’t like it myself.’

‘There goes the Chief Constable,’ the porter said. ‘Off to get a drink at the police station. His wife won’t let him have them at home. The best of the season to you, sir.’

‘He seems in a hurry.’ A newspaper poster flapped ‘Trag –’ at them. ‘Is he the kind that would buy a girl a good rump steak with onions and fried potatoes?’

‘I tell you what,’ the porter said. ‘You wait around another five minutes and then I shall be going off for lunch.’

‘That’s a date,’ Ruby said. She crossed her fingers and touched wood. Then she went and sat inside and carried on a long conversation with an imaginary theatrical producer whom she imagined rather like Mr Davis, but a Mr Davis who kept his engagements. The producer called her a little woman with talent, asked her to dinner, took her back to a luxurious flat and gave her several cocktails. He asked her what she would think of a West-End engagement at fifteen pounds a week and said he wanted to show her his flat. Ruby’s dark plump gloomy face lightened; she swung one leg excitedly and attracted the angry attention of a business man who was making notes of the midday prices. He found another chair and muttered to himself. Ruby, too, muttered to herself. She was saying, ‘This is the dining-room. And through there is the bathroom. And this – elegant, isn’t it? – is the bedroom.’ Ruby said promptly that she’d like the fifteen pounds a week, but need she have the West-End engagement? Then she looked at the clock and went outside. The porter was waiting for her.

‘What?’ Ruby said. ‘Have I got to go out with that uniform?’

‘I only get twenty minutes,’ the porter said.

‘No rump steak then,’ Ruby said. ‘Well, I suppose sausages would do.’

They sat at a lunch counter on the other side of the market and had sausages and coffee. ‘That uniform,’ Ruby said,
‘makes
me embarrassed. Everyone’ll think you’re a guardsman going with a girl for a change.’

‘Did you hear the shooting?’ the man behind the counter said.

‘What shooting?’

‘Just round the corner from you at Midland Steel. Three dead. That old devil Sir Marcus, and two others.’ He laid the midday paper open on the counter, and the old wicked face of Sir Marcus, the plump anxious features of Mr Davis, stared up at them beyond the sausages, the coffee cups, the pepper-pot, beside the hot-water urn. ‘So that’s why he didn’t come,’ Ruby said. She was silent for a while reading.

‘I wonder what this Raven was after,’ the porter said. ‘Look here,’ and he pointed to a small paragraph at the foot of the column which announced that the head of the special political department of Scotland Yard had arrived by air and gone straight to the offices of Midland Steel. ‘It doesn’t mean a thing to me,’ Ruby said.

The porter turned the pages looking for something. He said, ‘Funny thing, isn’t it? Here we are just going to war again, and they fill up the front page with a murder. It’s driven the war on to a back page.’

‘Perhaps there won’t be a war.’

They were silent over their sausages. It seemed odd to Ruby that Mr Davis, who had sat on the box with her and looked at the Christmas tree, should be dead, so violently and painfully dead. Perhaps he had meant to keep the date. He wasn’t a bad sort. She said, ‘I feel sort of sorry for him.’

‘Who? Raven?’

‘Oh no, not him. Mr Davis, I mean.’

‘I know how you feel. I almost feel sorry too – for the old man. I was in Midland Steel myself once. He had his moments. He used to send round turkeys at Christmas. He wasn’t too bad. It’s more than they do at the hotel.’

‘Well,’ Ruby said, draining her coffee, ‘life goes on.’

‘Have another cup.’

‘I don’t want to sting you.’

‘That’s all right.’ Ruby leant against him on the high stool;
their
heads touched; they were a little quietened because each had known a man who was suddenly dead, but the knowledge they shared gave them a sense of companionship which was oddly sweet and reassuring. It was like feeling safe, like feeling in love without the passion, the uncertainty, the pain.

2

Saunders asked a clerk in Midland Steel the way to a lavatory. He washed his hands and thought, ‘That job’s over.’ It hadn’t been a satisfactory job; what had begun as a plain robbery had ended with two murders and the death of the murderer. There was a mystery about the whole affair; everything hadn’t come out. Mather was up there on the top floor now with the head of the political department; they were going through Sir Marcus’s private papers. It really seemed as if the girl’s story might be true.

The girl worried Saunders more than anything. He couldn’t help admiring her courage and impertinence at the same time as he hated her for making Mather suffer. He was ready to hate anyone who hurt Mather. ‘She’ll have to be taken to the Yard,’ Mather said. ‘There may be a charge against her. Put her in a locked carriage on the three-five. I don’t want to see her until this thing’s cleared up.’ The only cheerful thing about the whole business was that the constable whom Raven had shot in the coal-yard was pulling through.

Saunders came out of Midland Steel into the Tanneries with an odd sensation of having nothing to do. He went into a public-house at the corner of the market and had half a pint of bitter and two cold sausages. It was as if life had sunk again to the normal level, was flowing quietly by once more between its banks. A card hanging behind the bar next a few cinema posters caught his eye. ‘A New Cure for Stammerers.’ Mr Montague Phelps, M.A., was holding a public meeting in the Masonic Hall to explain his new treatment. Entrance was free, but there would be a silver collection. Two o’clock sharp. At one cinema Eddie Cantor. At another George Arliss. Saunders didn’t want to go back to the police station until it
was
time to take the girl to the train. He had tried a good many cures for stammering; he might as well try one more.

It was a large hall. On the walls hung large photographs of masonic dignitaries. They all wore ribbons and badges of strange significance. There was an air of oppressive well-being, of successful groceries, about the photographs. They hung, the well-fed, the successful, the assured, over the small gathering of misfits, in old mackintoshes, in rather faded mauve felt hats, in school ties. Saunders entered behind a fat furtive woman and a steward stammered at him, ‘T-t-t –?’ ‘One,’ Saunders said. He sat down near the front and heard a stammered conversation going on behind him, like the twitters of two Chinamen. Little bursts of impetuous talk and then the fatal impediment. There were about fifty people in the hall. They eyed each other rather as an ugly man eyes himself in shop windows: from this angle, he thinks, I am really not too bad. They gained a sense of companionship; their mutual lack of communication was in itself like a communication. They waited together for a miracle.

Saunders waited with them: waited as he had waited on the windless side of the coal truck, with the same patience. He wasn’t unhappy. He knew that he probably exaggerated the value of what he lacked; even if he could speak freely, without care to avoid the dentals which betrayed him, he would probably find it no easier to express his admiration and his affection. The power to speak didn’t give you words.

Mr Montague Phelps, M.A., came on to the platform. He wore a frock-coat and his hair was dark and oiled. His blue chin was lightly powdered and he carried himself with a rather aggressive sangfroid, as much as to say to the depressed inhibited gathering, ‘See what you too might become with a little more self-confidence, after a few lessons from me.’ He was a man of about forty-two who had lived well, who obviously had a private life. One thought in his presence of comfortable beds and heavy meals and Brighton hotels. For a moment he reminded Saunders of Mr Davis who had bustled so importantly into the offices of Midland Steel that morning and had died very painfully and suddenly half an hour later.