The Tiger In the Smoke (5 page)

Just above it, like an appropriate theme-song, sounded the thumping of the street band. There was nothing of the dispirited drone there. It triumphed in the thick air, an almighty affront of a noise, importunate and vigorous.

The knot of men who were playing were half in the gutter and half on the pavement. They were moving along steadily, as the law insists, and the rattle of their collecting boxes was as noisy as their tune. They were some little way away and it was not possible to distinguish individuals, but there was a ruthless urgency in their movements and the stream of foot passengers narrowed as it flowed past the bunch. Luke jerked his chin towards them.

‘See that? Demanding with menaces. What else is it? Gimme, gimme!' He thrust a long curved hand under Campion's nose and achieved an expression of rapacity which was startling. ‘We can't touch 'em. Keep moving, that's all we can say. If a cat made a row like that we'd kill it.'

Campion laughed. He liked Luke.

‘I remember after the First World War those bands were pretty shocking,' he remarked, ‘but I thought the Welfare State had rather seen to that sort of thing. They are ex-Service, I suppose?'

‘Who isn't?' Luke was irritable. ‘I bet you every man under sixty in this street is ex-Service, and half the women too. That little band of brothers is only ex-Service among other things. Haven't you seen them about? They tramp all over the town, West End mostly. Nothing's known against any of 'em, as we say, but they're not exactly pretty to look at.'

He drew a balloon shape in the air with his hands and screwed his eyes up to beady pinpoints.

‘They all wear tickets round their necks. One says “No Pension”. Nor have I, of course. Then there's “Invalid” and “One Arm”, Poor bloke – but he can get a new one from the old National Health free. Where is it? “No Head” would make you look quicker. Not one says “Unemployed”, I notice. That
would
be asking for it. They're only beggars. Every big city produces 'em. They've got a fine old ex-Service song there, anyway. Remember it?'

‘I've been trying to. Was it called “Waiting”?'

Luke stood listening, an odd expression on his face. The band was moving very slowly.

‘“I'll be
wai
-tin' for you!”' he bellowed suddenly just under his breath. ‘“
At
the old oak tree-ah! I'll be
wai
-tin' for you. Just you wait for me-ah! Turn up your lips, waggle your hips, and we'll all be set for chapel. So softly we'll glide, where water-weeds hide, and willows make little waves dapple.” Most poetic, I don't think, but those aren't the words those beauties are remembering.'

‘No.' Mr Campion's neat memory had turned up the reference card at last. ‘“Button your purse, shout for Nurse, I've brought my brace and tackle.”'

The D.D.C.I. laughed. It was a queer little grunt, not entirely of amusement. ‘That's a respectable one of its class. But those boys down there aren't thinking along those lines. You can tell it by the way they're playing.' He thrust his vivid face close to Campion's own. ‘“I'll be
wai
-tin' for you,
At
Oflag Seventy-three-ah! I'll be
wai
-tin' for you, don't look out for me-ah! Lift up your froat you'll bleed like a goat,
whoops
your adam's apple!”'

Mr Campion's eyebrows rose a fraction and he did not smile. If Luke had hoped to shock he had succeeded. The words had not been inspired, but from behind them there had flashed out for an instant the reality of the thing which had been chasing them all the afternoon. He was aware of it in the street now, stark under the blanket of the gloom. For the first time that day he recognized it and it sent a thin trickle down his spine.

‘Violence,' he said aloud.

‘That's it, chum.' Luke had seen their chance and they were edging swiftly through the traffic. ‘That's it,' he repeated as they reached the pavement. ‘It's always there in London under the good temper. D'you remember in the blitz, “I wouldn't be dead for a pound”? That wasn't half a joke then. It tickled us, just touched the spot. Poor old George, blood streaming down his face! Laugh! I thought we'd bust our braces.'

He paused to assist a woman to disentangle his long legs from her steel go-cart, flashed a joyous smile at her, and pressed on happily.

‘I laughed myself,' he said.

Mr Campion listened to him gravely. He had his own brand of humour but this was not it. The band and its bellow had become hateful to him, and the fog bone-chilling and menacing.

‘Oh lord, yes, there's violence about.' Luke's wide shoulders were winnowing a path for himself through the crowd. ‘You can't miss it. I shouldn't be surprised if we don't get quite a whiff of it the moment we get inside. That shady little mouse we just caught was frightened of somebody, wasn't he? Hullo, what's up?'

Campion had paused and was looking over his shoulder. He was holding up the stream and half a dozen people jostled him.

‘It was nothing,' he said at last as he moved on again, ‘at least, I don't think so. I thought I caught a glimpse of Geoffrey Levett just then. I must have been mistaken.'

Luke turned into a narrow archway set deep in the blank side of a new building.

‘Everyone looks alike in the fog,' he said cheerfully. ‘You can follow your own Ma home in it, certain that she's the girl next door. If Mr Levett is about here at all he's probably inside, asking a few important questions while we're still getting over the road. Now, Mr Campion, we'll have to treat this lad very gently. We'll just turn him quietly inside out. After all, we haven't a thing on him, have we – yet?'

—

THE FOG WAS
thicker than ever in St Petersgate Square, but there its brown folds hid no violence. Rather it was cosy, hardly cold, gentle, almost protective. The little close was well hidden even on the brightest of days. Ten years before even the enemy had not found it, and so, almost alone in the district, the quiet houses remained much as they had always been. By yet another oversight the railings round the tiny square in the centre had been spared by the scrap merchants, and the magnolia, two or three graceful laburnums, and a tulip tree, had overgrown unmolested. It was one of the smallest squares of its kind in the city. There were seven houses on each of two opposite sides, a wall on the third which shut out the steep drop into Portminster Row and the shops, and, on the fourth, the sharp-spired church of St Peter of the Gate, its rectory and two minute glebe cottages adjoining. The square was a cul-de-sac. The only road led in by the wall so that all wheeled traffic had to return by the way it had come, but for foot passengers only there was a flight of steps at the other end. The church stood very high, and between its narrow stone yard and the rectory's Regency block the stone stairs wound up steeply to a wide residential avenue behind. The stairs were worn and highly dangerous despite the bracket street lamp on the churchyard wall, but they were much used in daytime by shoppers, who treated the square as a short cut to civilization from the stucco wastes of fading grandeur which had once looked down on ‘trade'. Yet tonight when visibility was down to nil, the rectory might have been alone upon a moor.

It was a pleasant cube of a house possessing two main storeys, a half-basement, and a fine range of attics just above the cornice. There were lights in every window, and the two which flanked the squat porch showed red and warm-looking in the mist.

Old Canon Avril had lived so long in the square that changing times had altered his domestic arrangements without haste or upheaval. He lived on the ground floor very comfortably, while his old verger, William Talisman, made his home in the basement and Mrs Talisman looked after them both. In the fine rooms above, Meg had her self-contained apartment, and the attics had been converted into a pleasant cottagey dwelling for tenants of whom everybody was fond. It had all come about quietly and easily and he knew very well how lucky he was.

In his early days the living had been a fashionable one and he had been glad of the glebe cottages to house the overflow of his servants, but he had not enjoyed it and the newer arrangements seemed to him infinitely more luxurious. At the moment he was standing where he always had stood, on the rug before the living-room fire. It was the room he had brought his bride to thirty years before, and since then, if only for reasons more financial than sentimental, nothing in it had ever been changed. It had become a little worn in the interim but the good things in it, the walnut bookcase with the ivory chessmen displayed, the bureau with thirteen panes in each glass door, the Queen Anne chair with the seven-foot back, the Persian rug which had been a wedding present from his younger sister, Mr Campion's mother, had all mellowed just as he had, with care and use and quiet living.

At the moment he was broken-hearted. Meg had returned with her story and he had found it so bewildering that his incredulity had made her cry. She had gone upstairs and he was left sorrowing but still very puzzled. His books were in the other room in comfortable chaos, waiting for him to return to their sanity and peace, but he was resisting them valiantly.

Normally he was the happiest of men. He asked so little of life that its frugal bounty amazed and delighted him. The older he grew and the poorer he became, the calmer and more contented appeared his fine gentle face. He was an impossible person in many ways, with an approach to life which was clear-sighted yet slightly off centre, and therefore disconcerting to most of his colleagues. No one feared him, simple people loved and protected him as if he were daft, and he had exasperated more good churchmen than any other parson alive.

The great Doctor Potter, who was for a brief time Bishop of London, had been at Cambridge with him in the nineties and had once heard him deliver a scintillating sermon on an abstruse heresy which but twelve men in England could possibly have appreciated, to a congregation of four shopkeepers and their families, five small boys, and a deaf old lady. When he had remonstrated that no one could possibly have followed him, Avril had clasped his arm and chuckled contentedly, ‘Of course not, my dear fellow. But how wonderful for him if by chance one of them did!'

He believed in miracles and frequently observed them, and nothing astonished him. His imagination was as wild as a small boy's and his faith ultimate. In ordinary life he was, quite frankly. hardly safe out.

He was a big man with a great frame, untidy white hair, and the ease of manner of one to whom every stranger is probably due to become an old friend. His distress just now was all the more poignant.

‘She
saw
him,' he repeated, his voice urgent. ‘She saw and recognized him and ran to him across the station. You heard her say that, Amanda.'

The only other person in the room, the Lady Amanda, sister to the Earl of Pontisbright, wife to Albert Campion, director of the key firm of Alandel Aircraft Limited and white hope among Britain's back-room boys, sat in the high chair. She was embroidering the word ‘Sheriff' in very large letters on a small green shirt. The red hair of the Pontisbrights, which in medieval legend is said to swallow the fire of rubies, was cut neatly round her small head and under it her brown eyes were thoughtful in her heart-shaped face.

She had explained the business very carefully to him twice already, but the cream of her forehead remained unruffled and her clear voice preserved that quality of adventurous common sense which was her chief characteristic.

‘But when they caught up with him he wasn't Martin at all. I've done that, haven't you, Uncle Hubert? Especially on railway stations. It's the noise. You can't hear at all, so you don't see too well either.'

The old man shook his head uneasily. ‘But when she first saw him she was sure,' he insisted. ‘She says so. I'm so frightened of this, Amanda, that I'm clinging to it like a drowning man to handfuls of sea.'

Amanda's thin brown fingers turned the wool deftly.

‘I don't think the man they caught changed clothes with Martin in a train full of people in a few seconds, do you?' she remarked.

He laughed. It was an abrupt crow directed at himself.

‘Check,' he said. ‘No. No, perhaps not. Although, you know, Amanda, people do do the most extraordinary things. But you're right. That's wild. That really is absurd. Unless by chance there were two men.'

‘No, Uncle.' She led him away from that loophole with an experienced hand. ‘No. There was only one man and he was not Martin, but he looked like Martin from a distance, and he wore clothes like Martin and he must have moved and walked exactly like Martin, or Meg would not have been deceived. Therefore he is someone who knew Martin, and …'

‘Good heavens!' He was looking at her in horror, pain and dismay on his fine face. ‘You don't mean that poor boy is in the background somewhere, in some institution, perhaps? Perhaps unrecognizable himself, but teaching someone else, instructing someone?'

‘No, my dear.' Amanda's tenacity could match his own. ‘Martin is dead. He was killed in the war. This man who is impersonating him must have known him before. Do you remember how you showed me how Henry Irving walked? You could do that now, but you can't have seen him for forty or fifty years. When Albert comes in I think we'll find that this man knew Martin long ago, perhaps in France before the war.'

The old man sighed. His own imaginings had shaken him and he was only half comforted.

‘Perhaps so. Yes, perhaps so. And what about this photograph in here? This is the same man in the same masquerade, is it?'

His eye had caught the new copy of the
Tatler
lying open on the couch before him and he bent down to retrieve it. For the first time Amanda frowned.

‘That really is bad luck,' she said. ‘When Mrs Featherstone telephoned this afternoon and told me and I looked it up, I was awfully sick about it. It was jolly clever of him, whoever he is, and very, very naughty.'