My Name is Michael Sibley (6 page)

Now you can hardly see that there were ever any lawns or flower beds. Grass grows, knee high in summer, from the house to the water’s edge, and only a stone sundial, and a Grecian statue, rising above the wilderness, show that once it might have been something different. Across the lake, you can still find traces of tall poles and sagging, rusting wire netting, where the young pheasants were reared, and where the keepers hung the vermin which they shot. The head keeper is dead, and I believe the second keeper is living in two rooms in Bristol, earning his livelihood as a none too expert mechanic in a garage. The horse boxes are in ruins, the glasshouses shattered, and the vegetable garden choked with weeds.

But when I went there during those last school holidays, for what was to prove my last visit, though I could not suspect it, the place was still in its heyday. My aunt had inherited the estate from her father, because she was the eldest daughter. She had had a short matrimonial life of about ten years, which had given her the right to call herself Lady Bankhurst. I never knew her husband. He was an impoverished Oxfordshire baronet, a man who was happier in a town than in the country, and who was generally considered by the locals to be a pretty poor fish. Certainly my Aunt Nell dominated him as she dominated everybody else; and when death separated them, possibly with feelings of slight relief on both sides, she took over once again the undivided ordering of the place with her accustomed vigour.

She was on the steps to greet me when I arrived.

“Well, young man, how are you? Got your rugger cap yet?”

“No. I play for the House, though.”

“Not good enough!” she boomed. “Not good enough by a long chalk! What’s the trouble? Afraid to tackle ’em low, or something?”

I saw the chauffeur and butler smiling discreetly.

“No,” I replied lamely, “not really.”

“Going to get into the cricket eleven?”

“Well, no. My eyes are not good enough, really. About the rugger: I’m not heavy enough for the school pack, and not fast enough for a three-quarter.”

“Oh,” she said without much interest, and led the way into the drawing room, followed by two cocker spaniels, a fox terrier and me.

“Well, are you in the Sixth?” she asked, as she sat down at the teatable.

“No,” I said again, blushing crimson. She gave one of her loud, healthy laughs.

“God bless my soul, Michael, what
are
you good at?”

“Well, nothing really. I mean, I am not
particularly
good at anything.”

She handed me a dish of scones and began to pour out the tea. She seemed to be trying to think of something upon which to congratulate me. At last she looked up and asked, “Well, are you a prefect?”

I shook my head. She said nothing. She seemed to be bored with the whole conversation, and I don’t blame her.

“Unless you get your colours,” I said after a pause, “you only become a prefect in order of seniority. If I stayed on after the summer term, I would probably be a prefect in the autumn. Lots of chaps leave in the summer.”

But she was trying to make one of the spaniels beg for a bit of scone and made no answer. I felt my toes curling up in my shoes; I felt hot and uncomfortable. I wanted very much to stand well in her eyes, and I never seemed to be able to. I guessed that, with my pale town complexion, short-sighted eyes and inability to ride a horse with much skill, I cut a poor figure in her opinion. The footman came softly into the room and stood by me.

“May I have the keys to your trunk, sir,” he said. I handed them to him, and he went out.

I could imagine the snooty look he would give my ready-made suits, my shirts which Aunt Edith darned and darned again, and my thick woollen socks. He would remember from past experience that he was not going to get much of a tip.

I knew from what Prosset, who often stayed at big houses in Ireland, had said, that it was customary to give the butler a pound, the footman who looked after you ten shillings, and the chauffeur at least five shillings. But of course that was ludicrous in Aunt Edith’s eyes. She provided me with seven-and-sixpence for the butler, five shillings for the footman, and said it was absurd for a boy of my age to have to tip the chauffeur at all.

But in spite of it all I was glad to be there. I spent every moment I could out of doors, killing birds and beasts without the slightest compunction or any feeling other than intense satisfaction when my shots went home. If I wounded one I put it out of its pain as quickly as possible. I did not finish if off with my hands, but fired a further shot.

On Sundays, when shooting was forbidden, I used to accompany my aunt on her rounds when she visited the outlying parts of the estate. It was during these walks that latterly she had endeavoured to strengthen the structure of my character, a character which her natural shrewdness had already divined as unheroic, to say the least, over-sensitive and inclined to envy and spiritual meanness. Prosset would have been her ideal. She was always telling me to stand up for myself.

“If I go and bend down in Trafalgar Square,” she would say, waving her ash stick belligerently, “anybody will kick my bottom for me.”

Once, when I was younger, she said, “Hit a bully in the wind and he’ll double up, and then you can sock him on the chin.”

I once tried this out at my preparatory school, but the bully was only irritated by my first blow, and gave me a good hiding before I could get in a second.

She always talked good straight English, and once almost blasted a waiter out of a hotel lounge when he asked her at teatime whether she would like some
gateau. “Gateau!”
she roared. “It’s cake, isn’t it? Why call it
gateau,
man?
Gateau,
indeed!”

Another time, making a rare appointment to have her hair done, she lost her temper with the store’s telephone operator because he said he would put her through to the “ladies’ salon.”

“Salon?”
She stamped her foot.
“Salon!
I want the hairdresser. He’s a hairdresser, isn’t he? A barber, isn’t he?
Salon,
indeed!”

Two days before I came back to London, something occurred which although it was only of a trivial nature left a curiously lasting impression on my mind, though I do not see why it should have done.

I had spent the afternoon walking around with my gun on the lookout for vermin. It was the close season for game, and targets were therefore scarce. Apart from an abortive shot at a stoat, I had not had any sport. Before turning back for tea, I decided as a last hope to try a small coppice which stood on a raised piece of ground on an outlying part of the estate. It was round and isolated, mostly composed of conifers, and I knew from experience that such places were seldom inhabited by game or vermin, at any rate on Aunt Nell’s estate; though now and again you might startle a pigeon out of the tree tops, or hear a jay calling in its harsh, rasping tones.

It was a grey day, and a little wind was rising as I walked over and climbed the wooden fence with which the covert was surrounded. It was dark and sombre among the trees, and the pine needles with which the ground was thickly strewn seemed to deaden all noise except the occasional rustle of the wind in the branches. The place was at first sight utterly deserted and seemed to me oppressive and forbidding. I had often passed by on the outside of this little wood, but although I had peered into it, it had never seemed worthwhile to penetrate inside it. It was obviously a hopeless place for game, and I started to walk across it without the slightest hope of seeing anything.

Suddenly, I saw a very large bird with black plumage and black beak sitting on a low branch. It sat perfectly still, about fifteen yards away, apparently listening, its head thrust forward as though about to take flight. I did not know what kind of bird it was, but the thought leaped to my mind that it was a carrion crow. I saw it drop down on to a still lower branch. In a flash my gun was up to my shoulder, and I fired. Yet I recall that before I pressed the trigger I hesitated for a split second, not because I felt unsure of my aim, but because some unformed doubt entered my mind; then I fired. It fell to the ground, but at once began to hop silently away. I fired again and killed it.

Throughout there had been no sound except the crash of the explosions and the echoes of the noise through the dark trees. There had been no sound when it dropped to a lower bough, no fluttering of wings when it fell, no crackling of twigs or leaves as it hopped away.

I did not go and examine the bird, and I had no desire to carry it back to hang in the gamekeepers’ “larder” with the other vermin. I went out of the wood feeling uneasy, though I could not account for the feeling. I had shot hundreds of things as a boy, including large rooks, but I felt that this great black bird, frequenting alone the solitary wood on the hill, had about it something which was malevolent.

I felt I had done something I should not have done. I was sorry I had shot it, and hastened back to the house for tea and human company. Prosset would never have understood this feeling, and neither, of course, would the Chief Detective Inspector who interviewed me about his death.

I shall always remember the last few moments of that stay at Aunt Nell’s place. We stood on the steps as the chauffeur and the footman loaded my trunk on to the back of the car.

The two spaniels were chasing each other about the drive. In the parkland opposite a mare was grazing while her foal followed her, now nuzzling at her side, now gazing with ears erect at the new world around it. Outside the coverts, in the distance, little brown humps which looked like newly turned earth showed where rabbits were eating the fresh spring grass.

My Aunt Nell stood there, dressed in her country tweeds, the sunshine falling on her iron-grey hair and healthy, weather-beaten face. For her, I thought, the years stretched placidly ahead; each day bringing the exhilaration of life on a big estate; each night the peacefulness of deep sleep; the sweet air drifting through the open windows and only the sounds of the country, the startled cry of a waterhen on the lake, or of a cock pheasant in the coverts, to disturb the stillness.

I always counted each day in that house. I would say to myself: I’ve still got two days, I’ve still got a full day and a night; and even the night before I had to return to the house in Earl’s Court I would say: Well, I’ve still got all tomorrow morning and lunchtime. But for Aunt Nell, I thought, there was no need to count. For her, life is luxurious and unruffled. Only time was to reveal how wrong I was.

Now the trunk was on the car, and my packet of sandwiches and book were on the back seat, and the chauffeur was holding the door open. Aunt Nell and I never kissed each other. I shook hands with her and thanked her for my stay.

“Not a bit, old lad,” she said, giving me a pat on the back and then, a thing she had never done before, a friendly squeeze round the shoulders.

“Come and see me next holidays,” she added.

“These are my last school holidays,” I replied with a smile.

“Bless my soul, so they are! Well, come and see me again soon, eh?”

“I’d love to. And thanks again.”

I got into the car. The chauffeur shut the door and went round to the driving seat. There was a glass partition between him and myself. Suddenly my aunt stepped forward, put her foot on the running board, and thrust her head into the back of the car.

“Don’t forget to fight ’em,” she murmured.

“Fight who?”

“Fight everybody—and everything! Don’t worry if you are not brilliant. Just go on fighting. You’re never beaten till you’re dead, Mike. Never let anything or anybody get you down.”

She stepped back from the car and stood smiling and nodding good-humouredly, and pugnaciously hitting the palm of her left hand with her right fist. The car moved off, passed under the stable archway, under the stable clock, and into the south drive. I remember the time exactly, it was 2:35 p.m.

I never saw Aunt Nell again. But the fault for that lay with me.

A
s I listened to the cats in Harrington Gardens I began to have my first slight doubts as to whether I had really acted in Kate’s best interests or my own. My Aunt Nell would have advised me to tell the truth, and to hell with them, and I rather wished that I had done so, and that I had not inveigled Kate into evasions. But I comforted myself with the thought that I had only acted for the best as it had seemed at the moment.

“Nobody can do more than that,” I said aloud. Perhaps the finality of the words, spoken aloud, had some psychological effect for I fell asleep shortly afterwards.

But that night I had a strange and troubling dream, from which I awoke bathed in perspiration and fumbling for the bedside lamp. The dream had no relationship to current events, as far as I could tell, and not a great deal, as it turned out, to future events, but it had a curiously depressing effect, and one which remained with me for a long time, and I think it may therefore have contributed in some degree to my later actions.

I dreamed that I was in a large and unidentified house in the country with Kate. There was a fearful feeling of menace from an unseen horror, such as one not infrequently encounters in a dream. At the end, I was standing watching Kate being driven from the house by this unseen influence. As she fled, hands covering her face, she was compelled to run the gauntlet between a double row of black birds, resembling cockatoos, chained to perches. The birds screeched and mocked her, flapping their wings, stretching their necks out at her, crests raised; jeering and rocking backwards and forwards. I remember thinking in the dream that Kate somehow symbolized light being vanquished by darkness. My terror was due to the knowledge that at the end of the row of dark birds lay madness, or death, or both. I tried to link the dream with my experience in the little coppice, as a boy, when I had shot the carrion crow, if it was a crow, but beyond the fact that the birds were black there was no obvious connection.

I woke up the next morning feeling tired and depressed. But I was busier than usual at the office, and as the day went by I had little time to reconsider the events of the previous evening or the dream. Nevertheless, I went about my work without zest, longing for the evening, when I was due to meet Kate again.

After work I hurried home, ate a hasty meal, and took a taxi to Manchester Square. Kate met me on the landing and led me into her room.

I kissed her and noted with relief that she seemed quite cheerful and happy. I sat down in her armchair and pulled her down on to my knee, noting again how thin and frail she was; indeed, although she was thirty, she seemed hardly more than a child. It seemed intolerable that she should have been living alone in London, fending for herself when she was sick, with nobody to comfort her when she was depressed; and, without necessarily being conceited, I realized what it meant to her to love and to be loved by somebody who would henceforth try to bring her so much that she had missed in life.

“How did you find the police?” I asked.

She laughed. “Perfectly charming. Especially the elder one, the Inspector. I thought he was rather an old dear.”

It had not occurred to me that the pebble-eyed Inspector could be seen in that light, but I assumed he had put himself out to be charming. I was glad. I told her the sort of questions the Inspector had put to me about Prosset, and it seemed that her own interview had followed similar lines.

“They talked about you, too,” she added. “They said what a nice change it was to question somebody who could give concise, factual answers. They said they supposed it was because you are a newspaperman.”

“Did they ask you who it was telephoning you last night?”

She nodded. “They asked in a casual sort of way if it was you, and I told them, no, it was a girl I knew at my office.”

“And they seemed to believe you?”

“Absolutely. Of course, they asked whether John Prosset had any enemies that I knew of, and I said that as far as I knew he hadn’t.”

“Did they ask you how well you knew him?”

“Oh, yes, and I said I did not know him very well; and that’s true, really, isn’t it? I never knew him well, did I, Mike?”

She sat up and looked at me anxiously. I put my arms round her and said, “That’s a hundred per cent true, Katie. You never knew him well, never.”

She got up and went to the gas ring and put some water and coffee in a saucepan.

“So that was about all, was it?” I said.

“Well, we chatted a bit about the case, of course. I gathered that they have absolutely no clues to go on. They’re just groping in thin air, hoping they’ll come across something. Herbert Day has given them the names of a number of business acquaintances, and they’re going through them one by one, but they don’t seem very hopeful. I forgot to tell you one thing they asked. They asked why you hadn’t gone down to Ockleton last Saturday as arranged. Because, of course, I let them understand that you had been in London all weekend. That was what you wanted, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said uncertainly, “but—”

“They said it must have been fate which stopped you, because if you had gone down Prosset would probably be alive now. The Inspector said you must be feeling rotten about it, as Prosset was your friend.”

“How the devil did he know about the invitation? How did he know Prosset had invited me?”

Kate looked around. “Prosset must have mentioned it to Herbert Day, and the Inspector must have got it from him.”

It sounded a plausible idea. “What did you answer—I mean about my not going down?”

“I just said that as we had both been down so recently, and as I couldn’t go because I had to meet a cousin in London, you decided in the end that you’d rather stay in town. Why? There was nothing unusual about his question really, was there?”

“No, of course not.”

She turned round from the gas ring and stared at me, frowning slightly.

“I had to make up some excuse, didn’t I? It came so suddenly. I did right, didn’t I, Mike?”

“Of course you did right, darling. You couldn’t have done anything else. You answered absolutely correctly.”

She looked relieved. “I thought you sounded a bit doubtful.”

“Did I? I didn’t intend to.”

I told her in some detail about my reasons for withholding information from the police, pointing out that the gamble was well worthwhile in view of what it would save us in the way of further questioning and possible attendance at the inquest. I made out a good case, and almost removed from my own mind any doubts I may have had. Yet the uneasy feeling remained that I might have done better to be frank.

Kate took the coffee off the ring and poured it into two cups. She handed one to me and offered me the sugar. Then she pulled a cushion down on to the floor and sat on it at my side, in the way she so often did. Eventually she said, “Mike, if you like, I wouldn’t mind too much about telling them about that evening with Prosset. It’s not too late. I could ring them up now or first thing in the morning, and ask them to come round. I’m sure they would.”

“I’m sure they would, too.”

“You could tell them everything, too. Don’t you think it might be better? Then we’d be absolutely clear.”

I stroked her hair, and she reached up and caught hold of my hand and laid her thin face against it. She said, “I only want to do what you want me to do. You know best.”

For a few seconds I was tempted to agree with her suggestion. Then I had a mental picture of her standing up in public answering questions and parrying innuendoes. I thought of her reading the newspaper accounts and seeing her picture. I imagined the curious looks of other members of the staff at her office, the inquisitive questions of other secretaries, the giggles and whispers which would stop when she entered a room, and the attempts of older members of the staff to be natural in their manner towards her.

It was not hard to imagine some of the things they would say: “My dear, Kate of all people; she’s the last person I would have thought of. I always say it’s these quiet ones who are the worst. Still waters run deep, dear. It’s not as if she was a beauty, dear, even her friends couldn’t call her that, dear. Well, it just shows there’s hope for us all, dear, doesn’t it?”

I couldn’t have that, not about little Kate.

I said, “It’s not necessary, Kate, but you are sweet to suggest it. It’s just like you, dear Kate.”

When I left her, I was once more glad that I had acted as I had done. My doubts of the previous night vanished. I was convinced that in the circumstances it was the best thing to do. I drove back to Harrington Gardens with a light heart.

Ethel the maid sometimes used to turn my bed down at night, and if I was working she would bring me a cup of tea at about ten thirty. This was not included in the service, of course, but was a custom which had gradually grown up. I was on good terms with Ethel, and I have no doubt that her actions in this respect were prompted as much by kindliness of heart as by the reasonable tips I used to give her. I learnt early in life that it is a good economic policy to tip people well.

When I saw that lights were on in my bedroom I assumed it was Ethel, but I was mistaken. The Chief Detective Inspector and the Sergeant rose to their feet when I opened the door.

“Well, well, don’t you boys ever go to bed?” I asked.

“I’m sorry to worry you so late at night,” said the Inspector.

“That’s all right.”

“There are just one or two points which have cropped up.”

I went over to the corner cupboard. “Whisky and soda, as before, Inspector?”

“Not tonight, thanks, sir.” The Sergeant also declined.

“What about a beer, then?”

“No thanks, sir. We had one on the way, as a matter of fact.”

I poured myself out a glass of light ale, and sat down. The Sergeant took up his former position on the sofa and opened his notebook.

“Well, as I say, sir, we’re sorry to have to bother you again, but if you could just tell us one or two things it might be helpful. It’s not an easy case.”

“It is definitely a case, then?”

“Well, we’re working on the assumption that there is something a bit fishy, sir. Now first of all, sir, do you happen to know anything about Mr. Prosset’s financial position?”

“Well, no, I don’t; not very much. He seemed to have enough, though. As a matter of fact, now you come to mention it, he seemed to be a bit better off the last month or two. He exchanged his old car for a better one, and leased his cottage by the sea. Surely Mr. Day could help you there? They were partners.”

“As a matter of fact, we’ve had a sniff around there,” said the Inspector after some hesitation. “This is all off the record, of course, sir, as far as newspapers go?”

“Of course.”

“As a matter of fact, they don’t seem to have been doing very well lately. Nothing startling. But they hoped it was only a temporary setback, according to this chap Day. But he said Mr. Prosset had been lucky with horses recently. Was he fond of gambling?”

“Yes; he was,” I answered. “He had a couple of bets or more every day.”

“So that might explain his recent financial improvement?”

“It might. But it’s funny he didn’t mention it to me. Most people like to talk about it when they win a packet on a horse.”

The Inspector smiled. He had not brought his file along with him. He just sat watching me without blinking his tawny-coloured eyes. His arms were stretched along the side of the chair, and he looked relaxed, but I knew he wasn’t.

“Mr. Prosset was perhaps the sort of person who didn’t tell people everything he did?”

“Perhaps,” I replied.

“And that wouldn’t exactly make him unique, would it, sir?”

“No.” It seemed a pointless sort of remark, and I waited for the next question. But he sat looking at me for a few seconds saying nothing.

“No, it wouldn’t, Mr. Sibley,” he remarked at length.

“Wouldn’t what?”

“I said that perhaps Mr. Prosset was the sort of person who did not tell everybody everything he did, and that that did not make him unique. For instance, sir, it would have been a bit more helpful if you yourself had told us that you had cancelled a proposed visit to Mr. Prosset the day before he was killed. There was no need to hush that up, sir. That was silly, sir, if I may say so, and might have caused us a lot of trouble one way and another. Why didn’t you tell us, sir? There was nothing to worry about.”

I leaned forward and said quickly, “I know there was nothing to worry about, and as a matter of fact I meant to tell you. But we only had a comparatively short talk, and just when I had it on the tip of my tongue to tell you, you asked me some question about his relatives. I told you about his family in Ireland, and then you asked another question, and I forgot about the other thing completely.”

“You forgot about it completely?”

“Yes.”

“It was a funny thing to forget, wasn’t it, sir?”

“Things like that can easily happen.”

He took no notice of the remark. “Your friend Mr. Prosset gets killed, sir. You must have thought that if you had been there he would be alive today. You must have regretted not going. Yet you forget to tell us. It was a funny thing to forget, sir, wasn’t it?”