The Journeying Boy (31 page)

The place never sleeps, for none would sleep securely in their beds if it did. Cadover brushed past two colleagues, their heads together over a plate of ham rolls.

‘To me,’ said one of these, ‘it sounded like
hump
. And the poor devil could get out nothing else.’

Memory tugged at Cadover. It brought him up with a jerk, like an actual tether. And as he thus stopped in his tracks the second of his colleagues spoke. ‘It explained itself a minute later; if you’d stopped you’d have heard.
Humphrey
. That’s what he was trying to say. Something nasty on his conscience, if you ask me.’

Cadover sat down abruptly. Coffee slopped in his saucer. He returned it carefully to the cup and stretched out a still trembling hand for a sandwich. ‘Would you mind,’ he asked, ‘sharing the joke?’

The first of his colleagues glanced up at him. ‘Hullo, Cadover – hard at it keeping London pure? Poor old Hudspith was the chap for that.’

‘Or solving horrid murders in ducal halls?’ The second man chuckled. ‘Appleby’s mantle must fall somewhere, one supposes. And you, my dear Cadover–’

Cadover, holding his sandwich suspended in air, stretched out his other hand in a clutch suddenly as compelling as the ancient mariner’s. ‘Seriously,’ he said, ‘what was that about
Humphrey
and
hump
?’

‘Certainly nothing by way of a joke to share.’ The first man spoke soberly. ‘I expect the poor chap’s dead by now.’

‘Nasty specimen called Soapy Clodd.’ The second man put down his cup. ‘Teen-age blackmailer, of all filthy trades. But he’s got it now. Groaning in casualty. And any minute he’ll be howling in hell. I hope it’s hotter than the coffee they manage in this blasted cellar.’

Cadover, like one to whom has been granted a sudden mystical assurance of revelation, momentarily bowed his head. But, being economically disposed, he made the same motion serve for a gulp at his own coffee. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘There’s something odd here. It sounds like linking up with an affair I’m busy on now. Tell me about it.’

‘There’s very little to tell. They’d been after this fellow Clodd for a long time, and at last they had enough for a fair chance of a conviction. So they picked him up. And then he bolted, made a run for it, and found himself underneath a bus. If you go up now – and if he’s not, as I say, dead – you’ll hear him moaning away about Humphrey Somebody – one of his victims lying particularly heavy on his conscience, I suppose.’

And Cadover went up. Tiled walls, glass shelves, chromium plate, the smell of ether and iodine: it was a chamber that had seen a large number of bad ends and a few surprisingly good ones. And, clearly, there was soon to be another end now. Soapy Clodd was a grey, contorted face on a pillow; a single skinny arm over which a police surgeon bent with a hypodermic syringe. His eyes were closed. There was the sweat of agony on his forehead; it collected in the wrinkles there and ploughed tiny furrows in the dirt.

‘He’ll have another period of consciousness soon.’ The surgeon spoke impassively. ‘And then he’ll be out of it. He doesn’t look as if life had enriched him, poor devil – or he it. Give me a call.’ The surgeon went out. Cadover and an orderly were left together by the bedside.

Cadover stood motionless and absorbed. He remembered the coincidence of his driver’s having remarked this wretched creature Clodd on the previous night. Was he really a fragment of the puzzle? If so, there seemed only one place into which he could be dropped…and yet it was a place into which he would not properly fit.

A long time passed and still Cadover waited, obscurely compelled to the conviction that he was not wasting time. And at length the dying man’s eyes opened. Cadover sat down beside the bed. ‘Clodd,’ he said distinctly, ‘what about this Humphrey?’

A faint indrawn breath was the immediate answer, and Clodd moved his head uneasily on the pillow, as if straining to hear something that came to him from very far away. Words formed themselves upon his lips – they were faintly blue – but no sound came.

‘Humphrey,’ said Cadover loudly. ‘Speak up.’

‘They’re after him, the bastards.’ Clodd’s was a barely audible whisper. ‘They’re after my boy.’

‘Your boy?’ Cadover was disconcerted. ‘You have a son called Humphrey?’

‘’E was
my
boy – not theirs.’ Weak indignation breathed in the dying man’s voice. ‘And a fine lad, too. Couldn’t arf write you a narsty letter, ’e couldn’t – though I sez it that’s a bit of an ’and at it myself. “Beware” – that’s wot ’e wrote me. And just a kid with no proper eddikation. Couldn’t even spell. “I’ll ‘ave yer put in goal”, ’e wrote – just like that. A good one, that was. “I’ll punch yer bleeding nose”, ’e wrote. I tell yer, I didn’t arf like young ’Umphrey. But I’d ’ave got ’im in the end, same as I’ve got lots with more spunk nor ’im. Then them blurry bashtards come along. What’s their gime? That’s what I’d like to know. Two lots of them, there were, and both up to something dirty over that poor kid. Made me sick, it did.’

‘Two lots?’ Cadover bent forward eagerly. ‘You’re sure of that?’

‘I tell yer I was working that kid ’ard, and there wasn’t much I didn’t see. Two lots of crooks – narsty common crooks – up to something against that poor kid. And one lot ’ad a kid of their own. ’Opped out of a car, ’e did, and ran after the young chap was going to be a tutor or the like, and I’m blarsted if ’e didn’t ’old himself out as ’Umphrey ’imself. And me listening down an area steps. Thought it might do me a bit o’ good. “Are you my new tutor?” That’s what the common little crook said, bold as brarse. Blurry himpersonation in broad daylight, that’s what it was. I arsk you, what’s the police coming to? Sitting back on their great be’inds while we pays taxes for them through the nose.’

‘Who are these people? What is this Humphrey’s other name?’ Cadover spoke gently now, as if afraid that a vehement word might send Soapy Clodd a fatal second too soon to his last account.

And, plainly, the dying man did not hear. He lay quite motionless for a long time – only something, a sort of darkening or filming, was happening to his eyes. At last his voice came in a whisper even fainter than before. ‘Hashamed of nothing I say or do…hashamed of nothing I say or do.’

It was, Cadover thought, a singularly strange profession for such a man. But a moment later he realized that it was quotation to which he was listening again.

‘And there’s not many as writes that, there ain’t… “Hashamed of nothing I say or do…” And then a flourish, as you might call it, at the end… ’Umphrey… ’Umphrey Hedwyn ’Onyel Paxton.’

Cadover turned from the bedside and ran. Big Ben was tolling one of the small hours as he reached the open air and tumbled into his waiting car.

Driving fast through deserted streets, Cadover at first asked himself the wrong question. Why should the eminent Sir Bernard Paxton wish to conceal the truth about his son’s holiday plans? Had the boy, who had been for some reason regarded as a likely victim by the blackmailer Clodd, been involved in trouble so serious that his father had judged it necessary to safeguard his imminent escape from the country by telling a pack of lies? And had the trouble, in fact, been something very serious indeed – the sort of thing that might lead to a man’s murder – and had there been an elaborate plan to baffle pursuit by creating a false Humphrey to lay a false trail? It was a hypothesis leaving a dozen questions unanswered, but it lasted Cadover through his brief dash across the West End of London and was in his mind still as he pressed the front-door bell at the top of Sir Bernard’s stately steps. All patience had for the moment left him; the little button under his thumb was entirely inadequate to his feelings; he regretted that he could not prelude the stiff questions he was about to ask by tugging vigorously at a more primitive device calculated to make a much greater row. Probably, indeed, he would by this present means rouse nobody. And he was about to make night hideous by hammering loudly on the door – it would have pleased him to make with one of his stout boots a decided impression on that too pristine paint – when the offending barrier vanished before him and he found himself confronted by the butler whom he had encountered on the previous night. The man looked at him without visible surprise, and made no demur when he marched past him into the hall.

‘I am Detective-Inspector Cadover. Rouse your master, please, and say that I must see him at once on a matter of the utmost urgency.’

The man bowed imperturbably. His dignity was by no means disturbed by his having just scrambled out of bed; perhaps – Cadover inconsequently thought – it was fortified by a dressing-gown entirely appropriate in its sombre splendour. ‘Very good, sir. Will you please step into the library?’

It was, Cadover remembered, the Spanish room. He entered it and the door closed softly behind him. He waited.

He waited for perhaps five minutes, not displeased at having this interval in which to arrange his ideas and calm down. But presently he found that he was far from calming down; on the contrary, he felt an obscure pricking of impatience and even alarm. The house was quite silent. He listened in vain for a footstep, for the soft opening or closing of a bedroom door. He got to his feet and prowled. He stared at a picture confronting him from the end of the room. And as he did this there came back to him powerfully the first occasion upon which, tenuously but hauntingly, he had experienced the feeling of something eluding him that he ought to have held. Something that somebody had said…something that somebody had
failed
to say…a single word that had not been spoken…

Velazquez
. That was it. The owner of this splendid thing had said it was there because of its likeness to his son. And then – as if by way of placing it – he had said that it was an old picture – very old indeed. It was a remark absurdly wide of anything that could, in its context, be uttered by a person of genuine cultivation in such things. And Cadover had missed it. He had missed the moment at which a monstrous and daring imposture had given itself away. And here was why the notion of impersonation had haunted him in some connexion other than that of the two lads with the two bowler hats. Sir Bernard Paxton, the owner of this august and sleeping mansion, was one on whom he had never yet set eyes. Sir Bernard had not told fibs about his son. Somebody else – having more colour as an eminent scientist than as an owner of Old Masters – had done that for him.

Cadover strode to the door and threw it open. The hall was in darkness. He brought out a pocket torch and let its beam play until it picked out the light switches. He flicked them on and an aggressively imposing world sprang into being around him. It was like one of those exaggeratedly spacious halls in the movies, with a great curving staircase on which female stars might display their gorgeous gowns or alluring nether limbs. Cadover glanced rapidly about him and discerned, among the numerous expensive and exotic objects displayed, one of homely domestic use, yet of proportions so noble as to be not inadequate to its surroundings. It was a gong – such a gong, it might be supposed, as had once thundered down the remotest corridors of some vast Tibetan lamasery. And Cadover, perhaps because his vanity was wounded at having been egregiously fooled, was prompted to have his moment of drama out of this plodding and harassing affair. He picked up the gong stick and plied it with a will.

The effect exceeded even his exasperated expectation. It was like being himself the stone cast into a still pool; great waves – and they seemed of sheer, quintessential energy rather than of mere sound – pulsed and beat outwards from him in widening circles. When he paused, laying a hand on the great bronze disc to still it, he was aware of numerous doors being thrown open, and of alarmed feet running, in some remote quarter of the house. That, no doubt, was the servants – or what was left of them. But he was aware, too, of something else. A light had flicked on at the head of the staircase, and a single tall figure stood there regarding him. And suddenly Cadover heard over again, on his inner ear, all the gloriously outrageous tumult he had just created. But it had shrunk to a tiny, foolish, and impertinent noise.
This
was Paxton. There could be no doubt about that.

‘Who are you, and what the devil do you mean?’

The words were such as any indignant householder might have used. They were accompanied, moreover, by the thrusting forward of an object altogether familiar to Cadover’s experience: namely, an automatic pistol. But for a full second longer, and as he laid down the gong stick, he preserved the simple sense of a unique event. He had never before looked straight at genius, and he might never do so again.

‘I am a police officer, and I have taken the quickest means I could to rouse you to a matter of extreme urgency.’

For a split second the tremendous presence that was Sir Bernard Paxton wavered. It was, Cadover saw, unreadiness, irresolution; it was certainly no sort of uneasy conscience. And the impression was instantly gone. The tall figure half turned to some invisible corridor down which several pairs of feet could be heard hurrying. ‘Go back to your rooms,’ he said in a level voice. ‘Tell the women that there is no danger of any sort. It has been’ – and his glance came back to Cadover – ‘a mere prank.’

The footsteps died away, and as they did so Sir Bernard came steadily down the staircase. He looked hard at Cadover, the pistol still in his hand. ‘Your credentials,’ he said briefly.

Cadover showed them. Sir Bernard looked at them for what they were worth. It was still the man he was sizing up. ‘Please come into my study,’ he said. Cadover followed him and was presently aware of light-coloured walls, Chinese paintings, glowing lacquers. Sir Bernard faced him squarely. ‘Well?’ he asked.

‘I called here last night to interview you on a matter that might concern the safety of your son. I was shown into another room – I think, your library – and there I was interviewed by a person who purported to be yourself.’

‘I see.’ Very quietly, Sir Bernard Paxton turned aside and sat down. The movement, Cadover realized, covered the instant intellectual comprehension of a totally unsuspected danger. Because that danger touched his son, the man was shaken to the depths by it. But he was certainly not going to make an outcry. ‘Jollard – my butler?’ he asked.