The Ministry of Fear (10 page)

‘Worse things have happened than that.'

‘Jones is my right arm,' Mr Rennit said. ‘What have you done with him?'

‘I went and saw Mrs Bellairs . . .'

‘That's neither here nor there. I want Jones.'

‘And a man was killed.'

‘What?'

‘And the police think I murdered him.'

There was another wail up the line. The small shifty man was being carried out of his depth; all through his life he had swum safely about among his prickly little adulteries, his compromising letters, but the tide was washing him out to where the bigger fishes hunted. He moaned, ‘I never wanted to take up your case.'

‘You've got to advise me, Rennit. I'll come and see you.'

‘No.' He could hear the breath catch down the line. The voice imperceptibly altered. ‘When?'

‘At ten o'clock. Rennit, are you still there?' He had to explain to somebody. ‘I didn't do it, Rennit. You must believe that. I don't make a habit of murder.' He always bit on the word murder as you bite a sore spot on the tongue; he never used the word without self-accusation. The law had taken a merciful view: himself he took the merciless one. Perhaps if they had hanged him he would have found excuses for himself between the trap-door and the bottom of the drop, but they had given him a lifetime to analyse his motives in.

He analysed now – an unshaven man in dusty clothes sitting in the Tube between Stockwell and Tottenham Court Road. (He had to go a roundabout route because the Tube had been closed at many stations.) The dreams of the previous night had set his mind in reverse. He remembered himself twenty years ago day-dreaming and in love; he remembered without self-pity, as one might watch the development of a biological specimen. He had in those days imagined himself capable of extraordinary heroisms and endurances which would make the girl he loved forget the awkward hands and the spotty chin of adolescence. Everything had seemed possible. One could laugh at day-dreams, but so long as you had the capacity to day-dream, there was a chance that you might develop some of the qualities of which you dreamed. It was like the religious discipline: words however emptily repeated can in time form a habit, a kind of unnoticed sediment at the bottom of the mind – until one day to your own surprise you find yourself acting on the belief you thought you didn't believe in. Since the death of his wife Rowe had never daydreamed; all through the trial he had never even dreamed of an acquittal. It was as if that side of the brain had been dried up; he was no longer capable of sacrifice, courage, virtue, because he no longer dreamed of them. He was aware of the loss – the world had dropped a dimension and become paper-thin. He wanted to dream, but all he could practise now was despair, and the kind of cunning which warned him to approach Mr Rennit with circumspection.

2

Nearly opposite Mr Rennit's was an auction-room which specialised in books. It was possible from before the shelves nearest the door to keep an eye on the entrance to Mr Rennit's block. The weekly auction was to take place next day, and visitors flowed in with catalogues; an unshaven chin and a wrinkled suit were not out of place here. A man with a ragged moustache and an out-at-elbows jacket, the pockets bulging with sandwiches, looked carefully through a folio volume of landscape gardening: a Bishop – or he might have been a Dean – was examining a set of the Waverley novels: a big white beard brushed the libidinous pages of an illustrated Brantôme. Nobody here was standardized; in tea-shops and theatres people are cut to the pattern of their environment, but in this auction-room the goods were too various to appeal to any one type. Here was pornography – eighteenth-century French with beautiful little steel engravings celebrating the copulations of elegant over-clothed people on Pompadour couches, here were all the Victorian novelists, the memoirs of obscure pig-stickers, the eccentric philosophies and theologies of the seventeenth century – Newton on the geographical position of Hell, and Jeremiah Whiteley on the Path of Perfection. There was a smell of neglected books, of the straw from packing cases and of clothes which had been too often rained upon. Standing by the shelves containing lots one to thirty-five Rowe was able to see anyone who came in or out by the door Mr Rennit used.

Just on the level of his eyes was a Roman missal of no particular value included in Lot 20 with Religious Books Various. A big round clock, which itself had once formed part of an auction, as you could tell from the torn label below the dial, pointed 9.45 above the auctioneer's desk. Rowe opened the missal at random, keeping three-quarters of his attention for the house across the street. The missal was ornamented with ugly coloured capitals; oddly enough, it was the only thing that spoke of war in the old quiet room. Open it where you would, you came on prayers for deliverance, the angry nations, the unjust, the wicked, the adversary like a roaring lion . . . The words stuck out between the decorated borders like cannon out of a flower-bed. ‘Let not man prevail,' he read – and the truth of the appeal chimed like music. For in all the world outside that room man had indeed prevailed; he had himself prevailed. It wasn't only evil men who did these things. Courage smashes a cathedral, endurance lets a city starve, pity kills . . . we are trapped and betrayed by our virtues. It might be that whoever killed Cost had for that instant given his goodness rein, and Rennit, perhaps for the first time in his life, was behaving like a good citizen by betraying his client. You couldn't mistake the police officer who had taken his stand behind a newspaper just outside the auction-room.

He was reading the
Daily Mirror
. Rowe could see the print over his shoulder with Zec's cartoon filling most of the page. Once, elusively, from an upper window Mr Rennit peered anxiously out and withdrew. The clock in the auction-room said five minutes to ten. The grey day full of last night's débris and the smell of damp plaster crept on. Even Mr Rennit's desertion made Rowe feel a degree more abandoned.

There had been a time when he had friends, not many because he was not gregarious – but for that very reason in his few friendships he had plunged deeply. At school there had been three: they had shared hopes, biscuits, measureless ambitions, but now he couldn't remember their names or their faces. Once he had been addressed suddenly in Piccadilly Circus by an extraordinary grey-haired man with a flower in his button-hole and a double-breasted waistcoat and an odd finicky manner, an air of uncertain and rather seedy prosperity. ‘Why, if it isn't Boojie,' the stranger said, and led the way to the bar of the Piccadilly Hotel, while Rowe sought in vain for some figure in the lower fourth – in black Sunday trousers or football shorts, inky or mud-stained – who might be connected with this over-plausible man who now tried unsuccessfully to borrow a fiver, then slid away to the gents and was no more seen, leaving the bill for Boojie to pay.

More recent friends he had had, of course: perhaps half a dozen. Then he married and his friends became his wife's friends even more than his own. Tom Curtis, Crooks, Perry and Vane . . . Naturally they had faded away after his arrest. Only poor silly Henry Wilcox continued to stand by, because, he said, ‘I know you are innocent. You wouldn't hurt a fly' – that ominous phrase which had been said about him too often. He remembered how Wilcox had looked when he said, ‘But I'm not innocent. I did kill her.' After that there wasn't even Wilcox or his small domineering wife who played hockey. (Their mantelpiece was crowded with the silver trophies of her prowess.)

The plain-clothes man looked impatient. He had obviously read every word of his paper because it was still open at the same place. The clock said five past ten. Rowe closed his catalogue, after marking a few lots at random, and walked out into the street. The plain-clothes man said, ‘Excuse me,' and Rowe's heart missed a beat.

‘Yes?'

‘I've come out without a match.'

‘You can keep the box,' Rowe said.

‘I couldn't do that, not in these days.' He looked over Rowe's shoulder, up the street to the ruins of the Safe Deposit, where safes stood about like the above-ground tombs in Latin cemeteries, then followed with his eye a middle-aged clerk trailing his umbrella past Rennit's door.

‘Waiting for someone?' Rowe asked.

‘Oh, just a friend,' the detective said clumsily. ‘He's late.'

‘Good morning.'

‘Good morning, sir.' The ‘sir' was an error in tactics, like the soft hat at too official an angle and the unchanging page of the
Daily Mirror
. They don't trouble to send their best men for mere murder, Rowe thought, touching the little sore again with his tongue.

What next? He found himself, not for the first time, regretting Henry Wilcox. There were men who lived voluntarily in deserts, but they had their God to commune with. For nearly ten years he had felt no need of friends – one woman could include any number of friends. He wondered where Henry was in wartime. Perry would have joined up and so would Curtis. He imagined Henry as an air-raid warden, fussy and laughed at when all was quiet, a bit scared now during the long exposed vigils on the deserted pavements, but carrying on in dungarees that didn't suit him and a helmet a size too large. God damn it, he thought, coming out on the ruined corner of High Holborn, I've done my best to take part too. It's not my fault I'm not fit enough for the army, and as for the damned heroes of civil defence – the little clerks and prudes and what-have-yous – they didn't want me: not when they found I had done time – even time in an asylum wasn't respectable enough for Post Four or Post Two or Post any number. And now they've thrown me out of their war altogether; they want me for a murder I didn't do. What chance would they give me with my record?

He thought: Why should I bother about that cake any more? It's nothing to do with me: it's their war, not mine. Why shouldn't I just go into hiding until everything's blown over (surely in wartime a murder does blow over). It's not my war; I seem to have stumbled into the firing-line, that's all. I'll get out of London and let the fools scrap it out, and the fools die. . . . There may have been nothing important in the cake; it may have contained only a paper cap, a motto, a lucky sixpence. Perhaps that hunchback hadn't meant a thing: perhaps the taste was imagination: perhaps the whole scene never happened at all as I remember it. Blast often did odd things, and it certainly wasn't beyond its power to shake a brain that had too much to brood about already . . .

As if he were escaping from some bore who walked beside him explaining things he had no interest in, he dived suddenly into a telephone-box and rang a number. A stern dowager voice admonished him down the phone as though he had no right on the line at all, ‘This is the Free Mothers. Who is that, please?'

‘I want to speak to Miss Hilfe.'

‘Who is that?'

‘A friend of hers.' A disapproving grunt twanged the wires. He said sharply, ‘Put me through, please,' and almost at once he heard the voice which if he had shut his eyes and eliminated the telephone-box and ruined Holborn he could have believed was his wife's. There was really no resemblance, but it was so long since he had spoken to a woman, except his landlady or a girl behind a counter, that any feminine voice took him back . . . ‘Please. Who is that?'

‘Is that Miss Hilfe?'

‘Yes. Who are you?'

He said as if his name were a household word, ‘I'm Rowe.'

There was such a long pause that he thought she had put the receiver back. He said, ‘Hullo. Are you there?'

‘Yes.'

‘I wanted to talk to you.'

‘You shouldn't ring me.'

‘I've nobody else to ring – except your brother. Is he there?'

‘No.'

‘You heard what happened?'

‘He told me.'

‘You had expected something, hadn't you?'

‘Not that. Something worse.' She explained, ‘I didn't know
him
.'

‘I brought you some worries, didn't I, when I came in yesterday?'

‘Nothing worries my brother.'

‘I rang up Rennit.'

‘Oh, no, no. You shouldn't have done that.'

‘I haven't learnt the technique yet. You can guess what happened.'

‘Yes. The police.'

‘You know what your brother wants me to do?'

‘Yes.'

Their conversation was like a letter which has to pass a censorship. He had an overpowering desire to talk to someone frankly. He said, ‘Would you meet me somewhere – for five minutes?'

‘No,' she said. ‘I can't. I can't get away.'

‘Just for two minutes.'

‘It's not possible.'

It suddenly became of great importance to him. ‘Please,' he said.

‘It wouldn't be safe. My brother would be angry.'

He said, ‘I'm so alone. I don't know what's happening. I've got nobody to advise me. There are so many questions . . .'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘Can I write to you . . . or him?'

She said, ‘Just send your address here – to me. No need to sign the note – or sign it with any name you like.'

Refugees had such stratagems on the tip of the tongue; it was a familiar way of life. He wondered whether if he were to ask her about money she would have an answer equally ready. He felt like a child who is lost and finds an adult hand to hold, a hand that guides him understandingly homewards . . . He became reckless of the imaginary censor. He said, ‘There's nothing in the papers.'

‘Nothing.'

‘I've written a letter to the police.'

‘Oh,' she said, ‘you shouldn't have done that. Have you posted it?'