My Name is Michael Sibley (25 page)

I was not feeling sorry for her. I was feeling sorry for myself. I think that if I had killed Prosset in reality I might have felt less upset; and that to an imaginative man who is innocent the shadow of the gallows is many times more terrifying than to others, and that the idea that you are comforted because you have a clear conscience is mostly nonsense.

She stepped quickly to one side and passed me. I took one or two steps after her. I knew perfectly well from her earlier remarks that she must have told the police of my early hatred for Prosset, yet somehow I wished to hear it from her own lips. But I was to be denied this.

“Wait a minute!” I called. “Kate!” I suppose I had been saying “Kate” so often in recent months that in my agitation it was the first name that sprang to my lips. She stopped and turned round.

“So that’s her bloody name, is it?” she shouted at me. “Well, she’s welcome to you—money, police and everything. She can keep you, the bitch!”

That was the end. She walked off, and I let her go. Upon reflection, I think that on the whole she came out of the talk well, even though later she played me what I think was an unnecessarily dirty trick. I have often wondered whether she would have made a different answer to the money offer if I had reached her before the police and gossip had upset her.

To act ruthlessly or cruelly, or to degrade yourself in any way and finally to attain your objective is one thing, and the fruits of such actions may or may not turn to ashes in your mouth, according to your temperament. But to act in some such way, and then to fail, is hard. It is a punishment in itself. During the journey back to London I certainly received a measure of any retribution due to me as a result of the way I had acted towards Cynthia in the past.

The visit to Palesby, conceived in panic and attended with inevitable humiliations, had merely served to confirm my fears. I hated myself because I had lost my head and gone rushing up there with this crazy notion of patching up some sort of friendship with her by means of money. I had learnt that she had not forgotten my remarks about Prosset; that she had almost certainly repeated them to the police; and that no offer I could make her could prevent her from being, in effect, a hostile witness.

Yet the trip had one good result. I found myself physically exhausted and incapable of further emotion, and now in a position where I was compelled to look facts in the face without further self-deception; instead of trying to run away from realities or bolster myself up with false hopes, I had to grapple with things as they were. I remembered Aunt Nell’s words again: You’re never beaten till you’re dead. Never let anything or anybody get you down.

When I remembered her words, and when I had reviewed the facts, a sense of calm came upon me. There was nothing more I could do now except fight in a straightforward manner. There were no twists or turns, no tricks, clever or sordid, which would avail me.

I knew exactly what I would do; I had a plan, the details of which I thought out on the return journey, and, having made up my mind, I no longer felt worried. The strange, dull ache in my stomach disappeared. I felt relaxed and almost at peace. During the last three hours of the journey I slept soundly.

Although I did not get to bed until one o’clock in the morning, I awoke at a quarter to eight feeling refreshed and eager, as usual, to do what I had in mind without delay. After breakfast I telephoned Kate and arranged to see her in the evening. In order to explain at the office my absence on the previous day, I said my aunt had broken her hip and I had had to rush her to hospital and home again with a nurse. Charlie Baines was formally sympathetic. And from an office telephone cubicle I rang Scotland Yard and asked to speak to the Inspector.

He was out, but the Sergeant took the call. He expected the Inspector in about midday. He said that if I wished to see him and explain certain matters, he was quite certain that the Inspector would be glad to arrange to see me during my lunch hour, say at 1:30. This suited me, because I had a loose sort of job in the afternoon which could be done more or less as and when I liked.

I arrived at the Yard at twenty-five minutes past one. The Inspector must have warned the front hall constable that I was expected, for I was shown straight up to his room without even being required to fill in the usual form.

The Inspector greeted me in a jovial manner when I entered his room. Doubtless he felt himself somewhat in the position of a host. He shook hands. He said it was nice to see me again, and what had I been doing lately? This struck me as funny, since he must have had several reports about my movements in his file. Then I realized that he certainly did not have a report about the previous day’s journey, so I didn’t think it quite so funny after all.

He offered me a cigarette out of an old-fashioned gunmetal case. “Half a mo’. We’ll just get the old Sergeant along,” he said, and pressed a buzzer. He offered me a light and finally settled back into his chair.

The weather, he thought, looked a bit on the rainy side. Did I not agree? I said it did. However, he pointed out, it would do some good in the country; gardens were dry, very dry. Yes, gardeners would welcome some rain. Did I garden? No; he didn’t suppose I did. He supposed I had no opportunity for it. He had a garden himself, not a big one, mind you, but enough for a few vegetables and some flowers for the missus. Out near the Sutton bypass. He remembered the district when it had been quite rural, and look at it now: what a change, goodness me, what a change! And he wasn’t at all sure it was for the better. The Sergeant came in while he was inviting me to look at Sutton, and sat down. He had the inevitable notebook.

“Well, never mind about Sutton,” said the Inspector. “I believe you’ve got something to tell us, Mr. Sibley, if what the Sergeant says is correct.”

“Yes, I have,” I said. “First, I want to correct something I said in my statement.”

The Inspector said, “Have a look in that folder, Sergeant. Get Mr. Sibley’s statement, will you?”

The Sergeant fetched it off a filing cabinet, and the Inspector glanced through it.

“What is it you wanted to correct, sir?” he asked.

“There’s a bit in it where I said my relations with Mr. Prosset were always friendly. In some ways that’s true; in others it isn’t.”

The Inspector had ceased to be the benevolent uncle. He had fallen back into his role of alert police officer and was looking at me with his steady, unblinking eyes.

“It’s a simple enough sentence, sir. I should have thought it was either true or it wasn’t.”

“Well, then I suppose it isn’t true. At any rate, it needs elaboration.”

“Well, carry on, sir, and we’ll see how we can put it.”

“The fact is that at school, although I went about with him, I did not really like him. I went around with him and another boy. I liked the other one all right. Mind you, at first I liked Prosset, too, but not towards the end. In fact I disliked him intensely, but nobody knew it.”

In telling him this, I was, of course, merely making a virtue of something which I knew he had already learnt from Cynthia. It is a trick which is well known to the police, but I was unaware of that.

“But you went on seeing him after you left school, sir?”

“He was a difficult man to say no to; that’s why.”

“All the advances came from his side?”

“That’s right.”

“I see, sir.” It was quite clear he did not see at all.

“Did you still dislike him when you met him recently? I am just asking so that we can think of some way of putting it nice and neatly in the statement.”

“Yes. At heart, I think I still rather disliked him.”

The Inspector nodded. “But not quite as much as at school?”

“On the whole, no.”

“Why on the whole?”

“Sometimes I thought he was trying to flirt with Miss Marsden. Then I disliked him as much as ever, if not more. Naturally. I am being quite frank.”

“Yes, sir. Saves a lot of trouble, as I think I mentioned last time.”

“In fact, I had already decided to break off relations with him.”

“Because Miss Marsden spent some time in his room, sir? You remember the entry about ‘K’ in his diary, of course, sir?”

“I told you at the time that that almost certainly means nothing. There are thousands of people in London whose names begin with K.”

“Did the quarrel you had with him the last time you saw him finally decide you, sir?”

“It wasn’t a quarrel. It was a political argument. We both got a bit heated, that’s all.”

“Anyway, you decided before he was killed that you didn’t want to go on seeing him. You decided to break things off. And then,” said the Inspector with a faint smile, “the job was done for you, so to speak. Not that one wants to joke about things like that, of course. Well, now, I wonder why you made that statement about invariably being friendly with him. You signed at the bottom that—”

“That it was true,” I interrupted. “I know that. In a way, it was true. I never had an open row with him. You can’t call a political disagreement in which you both get a bit excited a real row, can you? So to all intents and purposes my relations with him were friendly.”

The Inspector said nothing. He leaned forward and carefully removed some ash from his cigarette into an ashtray on his desk.

The Sergeant said with his soft Welsh intonation, “No, sir. Your relations with him were not friendly, sir. They only appeared to be. That’s rather different, isn’t it, sir?”

“That’s right,” said the Inspector. He nodded his head.

“Your relations with him only appeared to be friendly, so the statement was not true, sir. Now then,” he went on cheerfully, “let’s see how we can phrase your correction.”

“There’s one more thing you might as well know, Inspector. Up to the day before yesterday, I used to carry a knuckleduster around.”

I glanced at them both. The Sergeant was staring down at his notebook. His face was expressionless. In fact, it was too expressionless. It would have been more natural for him to glance up and show some interest. The Inspector did better. He raised his eyebrows in simulated surprise.

“A knuckleduster? That’s a nasty sort of thing to have. May I ask you why you had it, sir?”

I told him how I had bought the thing one school holiday. It all sounded so unlikely that I felt embarrassed by the silence which greeted my words. The Sergeant was looking at me thoughtfully, his dark, intelligent eyes on my face. He put his pencil down and leaned back and said, “So you’ve had it for about thirteen years, sir?”

“About that.”

“It must have amused your friends.”

“My friends didn’t know. Nobody knew I had it. I thought it was rather silly and I didn’t tell anybody. When I grew older I went on carrying it. It became a sort of habit, a kind of talisman, in a way. You know how it is when you get used to something?”

“What was the name of the chap who was with you when you bought it?” asked the Inspector.

“Crane. I think his Christian name was Philip.”

“Where does he live?” asked the Sergeant.

“I don’t know where he is now.”

“What did he say? I mean when you bought it?” The Sergeant was looking down at his notebook again. He appeared to have ceased taking notes and was doodling.

“He didn’t say anything. He didn’t know. I’ve told you, nobody knew I’d bought it. I’ve told you that already,” I repeated irritably.

“There’s no need to get huffy, sir,” said the Inspector.

“I wasn’t getting huffy.”

“All right, sir, you weren’t. Now, where were we? Well, what shop did you buy it in?”

“A kind of field-sports shop in the main street, where you could buy fishing tackle and nets for ferreting and things like that.”

“And you bought this to defend yourself against a ghost?” The Sergeant looked up with a faint smile on his sallow face.

“I was hardly more than a boy. You needn’t tell me it sounds silly, because I know that.”

“I was not about to make any comment at all, sir. But nobody knew you had it, not even Miss Marsden?”

“Or Miss Cynthia Harrison?” added the Inspector. Perhaps he thought the revelation that they knew about her would jolt me.

“Not even Miss Marsden or Miss Harrison,” I said carefully. Neither of them said anything for about half a minute. The Sergeant resumed his doodling in his notebook. The Inspector had stubbed out his cigarette and was filling his pipe out of a well-worn rubber pouch. He teased some tobacco into the bowl and prodded it down with his square, pink fingers, then dragged some more out and prodded that down. He examined it critically, fumbled for his matches and lit it.

“All right,” he said at length. “Let’s leave it at that. Where is it now, this knuckleduster?”

“I threw it into a refuse basket the night before last.”

“Why did you throw it away after all these years?” asked the Sergeant.

“Because I suddenly realized what implications could be attached to it, what anybody might think, what you people might think, if it comes to that, of a person who carries a thing like that around and gets mixed up in something like Prosset’s death. I’m still being frank, you notice.”

“Well, well,” the Sergeant said smoothly. “I see what you mean, sir.”