The Suburbs of Hell (19 page)

Dave was a long time in replying, but at last said in an unsteady voice: ‘Over the sink.’ When he opened his mouth a little blood from his nose, invisible in the beard, showed on his teeth.

‘Sorry,’ Frank said, with a straight face. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you.’

He went out to the kitchen, and carefully examined and bathed his cut lip. When he returned, he found Dave on his feet before the fire, his hands on the mantelshelf and his head, bowed over the glow, turned aside to a corner of the room.

‘Well, I’m off,’ Frank said, and opened the door. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow evening, I expect.’

There was a wrench of the glossy black head, and Dave was looking at him, sidelong. It was a look so candid and uncomplicated that Frank was taken aback by it, and made a movement as if to return. But the glowering, fire-dancing eyes under the black forelock presented too serious a problem. So he raised a finger to say goodbye, and went out with a bang of the door into the street hissing with sleet.

Is there a murderer here? No;—yes; I am.

Richard III

A streetlamp is fixed to the wall near his front door, and in the pinkish light the door gleams, with wet and varnish. The sleet has almost passed, but revives now and again in rattling flurries. The wind is so uncertain of its direction that a stiff piece of paper scrapes itself back and forth, back and forth, over the same short section of road.

He comes, bulky and black in his heavy clothes, from around a corner, and halts a yard short of his door, fumbling in his pockets. He is ponderous and slow tonight. He has been drinking, today and for several days, and his movements are careful, like an old man’s. He is very tired. He wishes to be tired before he enters that house.

He has found his bunch of keys. They swing from his fingers.

What does he hear, I wonder, in the first instant? Something, probably, like the flight of a hardshelled insect, a zing in the air beside him. The keys clink on to the pavement, and he is on his knees, groping for them. For a few seconds his distracted face is turned full on me, whom he cannot see.

He has found his keys and is on his feet. Another leaden insect takes flight, and smashes itself against brick near his shoulder. I think from his face that he gives a sob, but cannot hear, because of the chattering irruption of a motorbike into the next street, drowning the second shot.

His shaking hands have found the keyhole. The doorway gapes black, then is again a gleaming barrier, on which fingertips of sleet faintly drum for a moment, close to his ear.

He sat in a chair in his front room, with the curtains drawn, and he was shaking. What he felt was above all amazement. Nothing that had happened in the months before, not even what had happened in that room within the week, had prepared him to entertain the notion which was suddenly a truth: that out there in the dark was a person who desired to take away his life.

In the pubs he had lately left men had been kindly with him, but guarded. At the New Moon, where old Arthur the landlord and Charlie the crane-driver had been holding a wake for Harry, there had been a reserve which he could not miss. They felt, and hardly bothered to hide their feeling, that he had never been Harry’s true friend. And he was set apart by something else: not the suspicion (nothing so firm as that) but by the possibility that he was the not-quite-killer of his wife.

It seemed to him that he had been a little mad since the police had let him see that they could conceive of something so inconceivable. Then his suspicions of Harry, always real enough, though weakened by any meeting with him, had become a crazy fantasy fed by rage. He had resented Harry for years. Harry was a fool, but could not be made to feel it. When taken advantage of, he would shrug that off as a fact of life. And the respect and affection he commanded among his own kind was incomprehensible to the lone wolf. So that when Frank De Vere had persuaded himself that Harry was in every action of his life deceitful, masked, calculating and cruel, the conviction had expressed itself in him as a violent excitement. The picture of Harry (who, clearly, would be laughing) writing a threat on his windowpane was a picture that stirred him in the pit of the stomach; so cynically, so dangerously the murderer had announced himself, claiming Frank De Vere as an accessory with a sort of brutal caress.

But the game had changed; the rules, as he saw them, of the game had changed. A mild censoriousness which had always irritated him in Harry’s character had reappeared; the man who had led Harry’s protégé into wrong paths was marked down to be punished. And by one shot in a banal room that man had been brought close to destruction.

Only, the chastiser had not been Harry. How expertly Frank De Vere had been conned by the country boy. A few hours before, Dave had turned his head to glare at him, and he had seen in the look, besides loathing, an accusation. Dave too, he had thought, more with depression than with anger, had convicted him. A suspicion signalled till then by awkward silences had been changed (he had thought) by fury into certainty. And he had walked away from that charge with something in him like boyish hurt.

But how he had been deceived. As an admirer of duplicity, he had to admire that. He had played the fool faultlessly, that inarticulate boy with his yokel’s trappings of manhood.

He could see, with great clarity, the boy-man’s face in the little yard, puzzling over the rifle. Had that been another deception? He thought that it must have been, because surely Dave Stutton had found the hiding-place long before, before he lived in that house, probably on some autumn day when Harry had hired him to saw up firewood. He had seen under the wood three loosened flagstones, heard a hollowness, and made the find. With his smooth brow wrinkled and his innocent eyes wide, as at a later time.

Of course he was not mad, because madness implied excitement, emotion. What he was was preternaturally simple. Having the arm, he would go out and prove its power, always with a childish wonder in it.

Only once (thought the dupe) he destroyed with a motive. I am that motive. She will die because he wanted my whole attention.

He got up and, taking a whisky bottle from a table, swallowed a few gulps from it. Just that much he allowed himself. He had grown perfectly sober, but would risk no more.

He looked down at himself, at his clothes. Jeans, fisherman’s jersey, donkey-jacket: anonymous. Men like himself walked purposefully through the streets at all hours: fishermen, crewmen from the
St Felix
, lifeboatmen. And he had a woollen cap in the hall. Fetching it, he tried it on in front of the mirror over the fireplace. With cap pulled down and collar pulled up he was concealed but unremarkable, a fisherman dressed for the weather.

He glanced at his watch, and sat down again, still wearing the cap. He was picturing the movements he would make at three o’clock. He had had, a few days before, a suspicion that the police were watching him, but a few defiant experiments he had made had seemed to disprove that. In any case, he did not care. He said aloud: ‘I don’t care.’

He saw himself going out by his back door, one pane of which was new glass still dirty from handling. He saw himself lithely scaling a wall, crossing a black yard, swarming up another wall and dropping into a black alley. Later there would be a few streetlamps, but he would pass under them with an urgent, preoccupied air, like a man with a cold night’s work behind him and his bed ahead, face lowered from the weather, gloved hands swinging free.

At the thought of gloves he got up again from his chair. He snatched one small swig of whisky from the bottle, then went to the kitchen and began to rummage in drawers.

Methinks when he is slain to get some

hypocrite, some dangerous wretch that’s muffled

o’er with feigned holiness, to swear he

heard the duke on some steep cliff lament

his wife’s dishonour, and in an agony of

his heart’s torture, hurled his groaning

sides into the swollen sea.

Malevole in
The Malcontent

In the high room lamplight thrown upward from the street falls in a narrow rhombus on a white wall and is diffused vaguely into corners. The glass of a framed photograph gleams. There is little furniture. What draws most of the light is a pale counterpane on the bed, beneath which the shape of the sleeper makes a long ridge and a shadowed hollow.

It is his habit to sleep with the blankets drawn over his face. All that can be seen of him is a crest of jet-black hair on the pillow. Even if his head were not muffled, even if he were awake, he could not have heard the brief barking, soon hushed, of the dog two floors below, or the stealthy shifting of timbers in the little yard. He is dreaming; he whimpers. And the stairs are sound and do not give under stockinged feet.

The clothes of the man who comes in are a blackness in the faintly shining room. Only his hands catch the light, grotesquely bright in gloves of yellow rubber.

He squats on one heel at the head of the bed, and with great care lifts a corner of the covers. He studies the sleeping face. The lips are parted. In the earlobe that is visible is the glimmer of a gold stud.

Gently, but with steady force, he presses on the sleeper’s shoulder. But the sleeper, with all the inertia of his body, resists, and the intruder draws back his hand. While he is reconsidering, there is a sudden enormous sound from a ship’s siren; and the sleeper stirs and rolls over on to his back.

One tattooed arm is thrown outside the bedclothes. It is reaching, scratching. The intruder perceives that the sleeper has an erection, and wonders what will become of that, in a minute or two.

He rises to his feet and stands stooped over the bed, shifting the rifle to his right hand. With his left, softly, he pinches the sleeper’s nostrils.

The head moves on the pillow, then utters a choking snore.

Now there is a hole in the black beard. The muzzle of the rifle slides into it. One yellow finger moves.

From
The Tornwich & Stourford Packet
:

SLAYER FOUND SLAIN!

‘OUR NIGHT OF TERROR ENDS’—MAYOR

There was a lark, there were two larks, out of sight in a clear sky, and in the sunlight the smell of new grass mixed warmly with the cool tang of sea. Blackthorn bushes had stars of white, above yellow stars of celandine. Where the meadows ended, in saltings furred with sea-purslane cut by shining creeks, the water was drowsily blue and lulled a few swans; gulls planing over them and over the barley-green fields of the far shore.

Walking the farm track, he was restless with energies. The morning sun was in his face, and the day had made him aware of being in the very prime of life. In that weather he could not doubt that great things lay ahead for a man of thirty-four still so filled with juice and cunning.

Leaving the track, skirting new barley, he plunged into the wood. The trees above him, most of them sweet chestnuts, were bare, though hazed with reddish buds, and the sun fell full on the wood’s floor of grey-brown leaves and green wood-anemone, where a few white flowers had already appeared in advance of the snowdrifts which would follow.

The wood moaned and soothed with the voices of wood-pigeons, and he had an idle thought of his rifle and his marksmanship. But the rifle was gone, he would not see it again. It was stamped by the prints of his dead fingers as another man’s possession.

He went on through the wood, hands in his pockets, kicking old leaves, whistling. The anemones were left behind and gave way to dog’s mercury and wood spurge, the chestnuts yielded to a meaner growth in which the green-yellow catkins of pussy-willow struck a note out of place. There, where the ground was rougher, primroses were flowering and bluebell-leaves spread out their straps.

When the cuckoo called he stopped, and felt a moment of desolation. The woods were suddenly so vast, the way out of them so long. To be alone was no hardship; but who could be certain that he was alone? That very place, all country peace, had witnessed a bloody and unsolved murder five years before. While the moment lasted, he could see nothing ahead of him but a lifetime of walking past trees and doorways hiding assassins and spies: lethal tongues, condemning eyes, working, so casually, for his destruction. That, he had to believe for as long as the vision was on him, was the life of a man among mankind.

But the birds and the warm grassy air and the glimpses and whiffs of the sea turned his mood around, and the first optimism came back. Clambering down an earth cliff to a sandy beach, he felt secure again in his solitude, confident in his agility. He stood in the shadow of a tree clamorous with rooks and looked out over the flat-calm water, thinking about a second life at sea, more testing and varied than before. I will come through, he told himself. I have; I have come through.

A springlike mist hung over the town, smoky and light, at street-level scarcely more than a haze, though the spire of the church was blotted out by it. Because of the warmth of the day the presence of the sea was strong in the air, as a cool contact with the skin.

‘Frank,’ said the small boy idling at a corner. The syllable, accompanied by a curt nod, was a greeting not unfriendly, and the murderer returned it in the same spirit.

‘Killer.’

‘You’re well pissed,’ said the child, ‘ant you?’

‘Not a bit of it,’ said Frank, rather testily. ‘I’ve had a great morning in the country, and now I’m just—relaxed.’

‘Relaxed as a newt,’ said the boy, ‘if you ask me. Are you goin to Harry’s?’

‘You ask a lot of questions,’ Frank said. ‘Yes, I’m going to Harry’s. Because Jim Ufford, the brother, asked me to look after things for a while. I go there every evening, to feed the animals.’

‘I shouldn’t like to go in that house,’ said Killer. ‘But I s’pose—’

‘Yeah,’ Frank said, ‘you’re right. It’s pretty much the same at mine.’

He could see the next question forming, and forestalled it by walking on. There was nothing to tell about his wife. She was as near death and as far from it as usual.