The Ministry of Fear (27 page)

‘“I've no hope at all.” That's what he said. “Personally I've no hope.”'

They stood in a little ugly crowded hall as though it wasn't worth the bother of going any farther. It was more like a parting than a reunion – a parting too sorrowful to have any grace. She wore the same blue trousers she had worn at the hotel; he had forgotten how small she was. With the scarf knotted at her neck she looked heart-breakingly impromptu. All around them were brass trays, warming-pans, knick-knacks, an old oak chest, a Swiss cuckoo clock carved with heavy trailing creeper. He said, ‘Last night was not good either. I was there too. Did you know that Dr Forester was dead – and Poole?'

‘No.'

He said, ‘Aren't you sorry – such a massacre of your friends?'

‘No,' she said, ‘I'm glad.' It was then that he began to hope. She said gently, ‘My dear, you have everything mixed up in your head, your poor head. You don't know who are your friends and who are your enemies. That's the way they always work, isn't it?'

‘They used you to watch me, didn't they, down there at Dr Forester's, to see when my memory would begin to return? Then they'd have put me in the sick bay like poor Stone.'

‘You're so right and so wrong,' she said wearily. ‘I don't suppose we'll ever get it straight now. It's true I watched you for them. I didn't want your memory to return any more than they did. I didn't want you hurt.' She said with sharp anxiety, ‘Do you remember everything now?'

‘I remember a lot and I've learned a lot. Enough to know I'm not a murderer.'

She said, ‘Thank God.'

‘But you knew I wasn't?'

‘Yes,' she said, ‘of course. I knew it. I just meant – oh, that I'm glad
you
know.' She said slowly, ‘I like you happy. It's how you ought to be.'

He said as gently as he could, ‘I love you. You know that. I want to believe you are my friend. Where are the photographs?'

A painted bird burst raspingly out of the hideous carved clock case and cuckooed the half-hour. He had time to think between the cuckoos that another night would soon be on them. Would that contain horror too? The door clicked shut and she said simply, ‘He has them.'

‘He?'

‘My brother.' He still held the note to the milkman in his hand. She said. ‘You are so fond of investigation, aren't you? The first time I saw you you came to the office about a cake. You were so determined to get to the bottom of things. You've got to the bottom now.'

‘I remember. He seemed so helpful. He took me to that house . . .'

She took the words out of his mouth. ‘He staged a murder for you and helped you to escape. But afterwards he thought it safer to have you murdered. That was my fault. You told me you'd written a letter to the police, and I told him.'

‘Why?'

‘I didn't want to get him into trouble for just frightening you. I never guessed he could be so thorough.'

‘But you were in that room when I came with the suitcase?' he said. He couldn't work it out. ‘You were nearly killed too.'

‘Yes. He hadn't forgotten, you see, that I telephoned to you at Mrs Bellairs.
You
told him that. I wasn't on his side any longer – not against you. He told me to go and meet you – and persuade you not to send the letter. And then he just sat back in another flat and waited.'

He accused her, ‘But you are alive.'

‘Yes,' she said, ‘I'm alive, thanks to you. I'm even on probation again – he won't kill his sister if he doesn't feel it's necessary. He calls that family feeling. I was only a danger because of you. This isn't
my
country. Why should I have wanted your memory to return? You were happy without it. I don't care a damn about England. I want you to be happy, that's all. The trouble is he understands such a lot.'

He said obstinately, ‘It doesn't make sense. Why am I alive?'

‘He's economical.' She said, ‘They are all economical. You'll never understand them if you don't understand that.' She repeated wryly, like a formula, ‘The maximum of terror for the minimum time directed against the fewest objects.'

He was bewildered: he didn't know what to do. He was learning the lesson most people learn very young, that things never work out in the expected way. This wasn't an exciting adventure, and he wasn't a hero, and it was even possible that this was not a tragedy. He became aware of the note to the milkman. ‘He's going away?'

‘Yes.'

‘With the photographs, of course.'

‘Yes.'

‘We've got to stop him,' he said. The ‘we' like the French
tu
spoken for the first time conveyed everything.

‘Yes.'

‘Where is he now?'

She said, ‘He's here.'

It was like exerting a great pressure against a door and finding it ajar all the time. ‘Here?'

She jerked her head. ‘He's asleep. He had a long day with Lady Dunwoody about woollies.'

‘But he'll have heard us.'

‘Oh no,' she said. ‘He's out of hearing, and he sleeps so sound. That's economy too. As deep a sleep and as little of it . . .'

‘How you hate him,' he said with surprise.

‘He's made such a mess,' she said, ‘of everything. He's so fine, so intelligent – and yet there's only this fear. That's all he makes.'

‘Where is he?'

She said, ‘Through there is the living-room and beyond that is his bedroom.'

‘Can I use the telephone?'

‘It's not safe. It's in the living-room and the bedroom door's ajar.'

‘Where's he going?'

‘He has permission to go to Ireland – for the Free Mothers. It wasn't easy to get, but your friends have made such a sweep. Lady Dunwoody worked it. You see, he's been so grateful for her woollies. He gets the train tonight.' She said, ‘What are you going to do?'

‘I don't know.'

He looked helplessly round. A heavy brass candlestick stood on the oak chest; it glittered with polish; no wax had ever sullied it. He picked it up. ‘He tried to kill me,' he explained weakly.

‘He's asleep. That's murder.'

‘I won't hit first.'

She said, ‘He used to be sweet to me when I cut my knees. Children always cut their knees . . . Life is horrible, wicked.'

He put the candlestick down again.

‘No,' she said. ‘Take it. You mustn't be hurt. He's only my brother, isn't he?' she asked, with obscure bitterness. ‘Take it. Please.' When he made no move to take it, she picked it up herself; her face was stiff and schooled and childish and histrionic. It was like watching a small girl play Lady Macbeth. You wanted to shield her from the knowledge that these things were really true.

She led the way holding the candlestick upright as though it were a rehearsal: only on the night itself would the candle be lit. Everything in the flat was hideous except herself; it gave him more than ever the sense that they were both strangers here. The heavy furniture must have been put in by a company, bought by an official buyer at cut rates, or perhaps ordered by telephone – suite 56a of the autumn catalogue. Only a bunch of flowers and a few books and a newspaper and a man's sock in holes showed that people lived here. It was the sock which made him pause; it seemed to speak of long mutual evenings, of two people knowing each other over many years. He thought for the first time, ‘It's her brother who's going to die.' Spies, like murderers, were hanged, and in this case there was no distinction. He lay asleep in there and the gallows was being built outside.

They moved stealthily across the anonymous room towards a door ajar. She pushed it gently with her hand and stood back so that he might see. It was the immemorial gesture of a woman who shows to a guest after dinner her child asleep.

Hilfe lay on the bed on his back without his jacket, his shirt open at the neck. He was deeply and completely at peace, and so defenceless that he seemed to be innocent. His very pale gold hair lay in a hot streak across his face as though he had lain down after a game. He looked very young; he didn't, lying there, belong to the same world as Cost bleeding by the mirror, and Stone in the strait-jacket. One was half-impelled to believe, ‘It's propaganda, just propaganda: he isn't capable . . .' The face seemed to Rowe very beautiful, more beautiful than his sister's, which could be marred by grief or pity. Watching the sleeping man he could realize a little of the force and the grace and the attraction of nihilism – of not caring for anything, of having no rules and feeling no love. Life became simple . . . He had been reading when he fell asleep; a book lay on the bed and one hand still held the pages open. It was like the tomb of a young student; bending down you could read on the marble page the epitaph chosen for him, a verse:

The knuckles hid the rest.

It was as if he were the only violence in the world and when he slept there was peace everywhere.

They watched him and he woke. People betray themselves when they wake; sometimes they wake with a cry from an ugly dream: sometimes they turn from one side to the other and shake the head and burrow as if they are afraid to leave sleep. Hilfe just woke; his lids puckered for a moment like a child's when the nurse draws the curtain and the light comes in; then they were wide open and he was looking at them with complete self-possession. The pale blue eyes held full knowledge of the situation; there was nothing to explain. He smiled and Rowe caught himself in the act of smiling back. It was the kind of trick a boy plays suddenly, capitulating, admitting everything, so that the whole offence seems small and the fuss absurd. There are moments of surrender when it is so much easier to love one's enemy than to remember . . .

Rowe said weakly, ‘The photographs. . . .'

‘The photographs.' He smiled frankly up. ‘Yes, I've got them.' He must have known that everything was up – including life, but he still retained the air of badinage, the dated colloquialisms which made his speech a kind of light dance of inverted commas. ‘Admit,' he said, ‘I've led you “up the garden”. And now I'm “in the cart”.' He looked at the candlestick which his sister stiffly held and said, ‘I surrender,' with amusement, lying on his back on the bed, as though they had all three been playing a game.

‘Where are they?'

He said, ‘Let's strike a bargain. Let's “swop”,' as though he were suggesting the exchange of foreign stamps for toffee.

Rowe said, ‘There's no need for me to exchange anything. You're through.'

‘My sister loves you a lot, doesn't she?' He refused to take the situation seriously. ‘Surely you wouldn't want to eliminate your brother-in-law?'

‘You didn't mind trying to eliminate your sister.'

He said blandly and unconvincingly, ‘Oh, that was a tragic necessity,' and gave a sudden grin which made the whole affair of the suitcase and the bomb about as important as a booby-trap on the stairs. He seemed to accuse them of a lack of humour; it was not the kind of thing they ought to have taken to heart.

‘Let's be sensible civilized people,' he said, ‘and come to an agreement. Do put down the candlestick, Anna: I can't hurt you here even if I wanted to.' He made no attempt to get up, lying on the bed, displaying his powerlessness like evidence.

‘There's no basis for an agreement,' Rowe said. ‘I want the photographs, and then the police want you. You didn't talk about terms to Stone – or Jones.'

‘I know nothing about all that,' Hilfe said. ‘I can't be responsible – can I? – for all my people do. That isn't reasonable, Rowe.' He asked, ‘Do you read poetry? There's a poem here which seems to meet the case . . .' He sat up, lifted the book and dropped it again. With a gun in his hand he said, ‘Just stay still. You see there's still something to talk about.'

Rowe said, ‘I've been wondering where you kept it.'

‘Now we can bargain sensibly. We're both in a hole.'

‘I still don't see,' Rowe said, ‘what you've got to offer. You don't really imagine, do you, that you can shoot us both, and then get to Ireland. These walls are thin as paper. You are known as the tenant. The police would be waiting for you at the port.'

‘But if I'm going to die anyway, I might just as well – mightn't I? – have a massacre.'

‘It wouldn't be economical.'

He considered the objection half-seriously and then said with a grin, ‘No, but don't you think it would be rather grand?'

‘It doesn't much matter to me how I stop you. Being killed would be quite useful.'

Hilfe exclaimed, ‘Do you mean your memory's come back?'

‘I don't know what that's got to do with it.'

‘Such a lot. Your past history is really sensational. I went into it all carefully and so did Anna. It explained so much I didn't understand at first when I heard from Poole what you were like. The kind of room you were living in, the kind of man you were. You were the sort of man I thought I could deal with quite easily until you lost your memory. That didn't work out right. You got so many illusions of grandeur, heroism, self-sacrifice, patriotism . . .' Hilfe grinned at him. ‘Here's a bargain for you. My safety against your past. I'll tell you who you were. No trickery. I'll give you all the references. But that won't be necessary. Your own brain will tell you I'm not inventing.'