The Ministry of Fear

  He turned a page and read casually under a photograph: ‘Arthur Rowe whom the police are anxious to interview in connection . . .’ He wasn’t interested in crime. The photograph showed a lean shabby clean-shaven man. All photographs of criminals looked much alike – perhaps it was the spots, the pointilliste technique of the newspaper photograph. There was so much of the past he had to learn that he couldn’t be bothered to learn the criminals, at any rate of the domestic kind.

  A board creaked and he turned. Johns hovered and blinked in the doorway. ‘Good evening, Johns,’ Digby said.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Reading the papers,’ Digby said.

  ‘But you heard the doctor say . . .’

  ‘This isn’t a prison, Johns,’ Digby said, ‘except for poor Stone. It’s a very charming nursing home and I’m a private patient with nothing wrong except loss of memory due to a bomb . . .’ He realized that Johns was listening to him with intensity. ‘Isn’t that about it?’ he asked.

  ‘It must be, mustn’t it,’ Johns said.

  ‘So we must keep a sense of proportion, and there’s no earthly reason why, if I don’t feel like sleep, I shouldn’t stroll down the passage to your room for a chat and to read . . .’

  ‘When you put it like that,’ Johns said, ‘it sounds so simple.’

  ‘The doctor makes you see it differently, doesn’t he?’

  ‘All the same a patient ought to follow the treatment . . .’

  ‘Or change his doctor. You know I’ve decided to change my doctor.’

  ‘To leave?’ Johns asked. There was fear in his voice.

  ‘To leave.’

  ‘Please don’t do anything rash,’ Johns said. ‘The doctor’s a great man. He’s suffered a lot . . . and that may have made him a bit . . . eccentric. But you can’t do better than stay here, really you can’t.’

  ‘I’m going, Johns.’

  ‘Just another month,’ Johns entreated. ‘You’ve been doing so well. Until that girl came. Just a month. I’ll speak to the doctor. He’ll let you have the papers again. Perhaps he’ll even let her come. Only let me put it to him. I know the way. He’s so sensitive: he takes offence.’

  ‘Johns,’ Digby asked gently, ‘why should you be afraid of my going?’

  The unrimmed glasses caught the light and set it flickering along the wall. Johns said uncontrollably, ‘I’m not afraid of your going. I’m afraid – I’m afraid of his not letting you go.’ Very far away they both heard the purr-purr of a car.

  ‘What’s wrong with the doctor?’ Johns shook his head and the reflection danced again upon the wall. ‘There’s something wrong,’ Digby pressed him. ‘Poor Stone saw something odd and so he’s put away . . .’

  ‘For his own good,’ Johns said imploringly. ‘Dr Forester knows. He’s such a great man, Digby.’

  ‘For his own good be damned. I’ve been to the sick bay and talked to him . . .’

  ‘You’ve been there?’ Johns said.

  ‘Haven’t you – ever?’

  ‘It’s forbidden,’ Johns said.

  ‘Do you always do exactly what Dr Forester tells you?’

  ‘He’s a great doctor, Digby. You don’t understand: brains are the most delicate mechanisms. The least thing to upset the equilibrium and everything goes wrong. You have to trust the doctor.’

  ‘I don’t trust him.’

  ‘You mustn’t say that. If you knew how skilful he is, the endless care he takes. He’s trying to shelter you until you are really strong enough . . .’

  ‘Stone saw something odd and Stone’s put away.’

  ‘No, no.’ Johns put out a weak hand and laid it on the newspapers like a badgered politician gaining confidence from the dispatch box. ‘If you only knew, Digby. They’ve made him suffer so with their jealousies and misunderstandings, but he’s so great and good and kind . . .’

  ‘Ask Stone about that.’

  ‘If you only knew . . .’

  A soft savage voice said, ‘I think he’ll have to know.’ It was Dr Forester, and again that sense of possible and yet inconceivable sanctions set Digby’s heart beating.

  Johns said, ‘Dr Forester, I didn’t give him leave . . .’

  ‘That’s all right Johns,’ Dr Forester said, ‘you are very loyal, I know. I like loyalty.’ He began to take off the gloves he had been wearing in the car; he drew them slowly off the long beautiful fingers. ‘I remember after Conway’s suicide how you stood by me. I don’t forget a friend. Have you ever told Digby about Conway’s suicide?’

  ‘Never,’ Johns protested.

  ‘But he should know, Johns. It’s a case in point. Conway also suffered from loss of memory. Life, you see, had become too much for him – and loss of memory was his escape. I tried to make him strong, to stiffen his resistance, so that when his memory came back, he would be able to meet his very difficult situation. The time I spent, wasted on Conway. Johns will tell you I was very patient – he was unbearably impertinent. But I’m human, Digby, and one day I lost my temper. I do lose my temper – very seldom, but sometimes. I told Conway everything, and he killed himself that night. You see, his mind hadn’t been given time to heal. There was a lot of trouble, but Johns stood by me. He realizes that to be a good psychologist you sometimes have to share the mental weaknesses of the patient: one cannot be quite sane all the time. That’s what gives one sympathy – and the other thing.’

  He spoke gently and calmly, as though he were lecturing on an abstract subject, but the long surgical fingers had taken up one of the newspapers and was tearing it in long strips.

  Digby said, ‘But my case is different, Dr Forester. It was only a bomb that destroyed my memory. Not trouble.’

  ‘Do you really believe that?’ Dr Forester said. ‘And I suppose you think it was just gunfire, concussion, which drove Stone out of his mind? That isn’t how the mind works. We make our own insanity. Stone failed – shamefully, so now he explains everything by treachery. But it wasn’t anybody else’s treachery that left his friend Barnes . . .’

  ‘And you have a revelation up your sleeve for me too, Dr Forester?’ He remembered the pencil-marks in the Tolstoy rubbed out by a man without the courage of his opinions and that heartened him. He asked, ‘What were you doing with Poole in the dark when Stone found you?’ He had meant it only as a piece of impertinent defiance; he had believed that the scene existed only in Stone’s persecuted imagination – like the enemy digging on the island. He hadn’t expected to halt Dr Forester in the middle of his soft tirade. The silence was disagreeable. He tailed weakly off, ‘And digging . . .’

  The noble old face watched him, the mouth a little open: a tiny dribble ran down the chin.

  Johns said, ‘Please go to bed, Digby. Let’s talk in the morning.’

  ‘I’m quite ready to go to bed,’ Digby said. He felt suddenly ridiculous in his trailing dressing-gown and his heelless slippers; he was apprehensive too – it was like turning his back on a man with a gun.

  ‘Wait,’ Dr Forester said. ‘I haven’t told you yet. When you know you can choose between Conway’s method and Stone’s method. There’s room in the sick bay . . .’

  ‘You ought to be there yourself, Dr Forester.’

  ‘You’re a fool,’ Dr Forester said. ‘A fool in love . . . I watch my patients. I know. What’s the good of you being in love? You don’t even know your real name.’ He tore a piece out of one of the papers and held it out to Digby. ‘There you are. That’s you. A murderer. Go and think about that.’

  It was the photograph he hadn’t bothered to examine. The thing was absurd. He said, ‘That’s not me.’

  ‘Go and look in the glass then,’ Dr Forester said. ‘And then begin to remember. You’ve got a lot to remember.’

  Johns protested. ‘Doctor, that’s not the way . . .’

  ‘He asked for it,’ Dr Forester said, ‘just like Conway did.’

  But Digby heard no more of what Johns had to say: he was running down the pasage toward
s his room; half-way he tripped on his dressing-gown cord and fell. He hardly felt the shock. He got to his feet a little giddy — that was all. He wanted a looking-glass.

  The lean bearded face looked out at him in the familiar room. There was a smell of cut flowers. This was where he had been happy. How could he believe what the doctor had said? There must be a mistake. It didn’t connect . . . At first he could hardly see the photograph; his heart beat and his head was confused. This isn’t me, he thought, as that lean shaven other face with the unhappy eyes and the shabby suit came into focus. They didn’t fit; the memories he had of twenty years ago and Arthur Rowe whom the police wanted to interview in connection with – but Dr Forester had torn the paper too carelessly. In those twenty years he couldn’t have gone astray as far as this. He thought: Whatever they say, this man standing here is me. I’m not changed because I lose my memory. This photograph and Anna Hilfe didn’t fit, he protested, and suddenly he remembered what had puzzled him and he had quite forgotten, Anna’s voice saying, ‘It’s my job, Arthur.’ He put his hand up to his chin and hid the beard; the long twisted nose told its tale, and the eyes which were unhappy enough now. He steadied himself with his hands on the dressing-table and thought: Yes, I’m Arthur Rowe. He began to talk to himself under his breath, But I’m not Conway. I shan’t kill myself.

  He was Arthur Rowe with a difference. He was next door to his own youth; he had started again from there. He said, In a moment it’s going to come back, but I’m not Conway – and I won’t be Stone. I’ve escaped for long enough: my brain will stand it. It wasn’t all fear that he felt; he felt also the untired courage and the chivalry of adolescence. He was no longer too old and too habit-ridden to start again. He shut his eyes and thought of Poole, and an odd medley of impressions fought at the gateway of his unconsciousness to be let out: a book called The Little Duke and the word Naples – see Naples and die – and Poole again, Poole sitting crouched in a chair in a little dark dingy room eating cake, and Dr Forester, Dr Forester stooping over something dark and bleeding. . . . The memories thickened – a woman’s face came up for a moment with immense sadness and then sank again like someone drowned, out of sight; his head was racked with pain as other memories struggled to get out like a child out of its mother’s body. He put his hands on the dressing-table and held to it; he said to himself over and over again, ‘I must stand up. I must stand up,’ as though there were some healing virtue in simply remaining on his feet while his brain reeled with the horror of returning life.

  BOOK THREE

  Bits and Pieces

  Chapter 1

  THE ROMAN DEATH

  ‘A business that could scarcely have been pleasant.’

  The Little Duke

  1

  ROWE followed the man in the blue uniform up the stone stairs and along a corridor lined with doors; some of them were open, and he could see that they led into little rooms all the same shape and size like confessionals. A table and three chairs: there was never anything else, and the chairs were hard and upright. The man opened one door – but there seemed no reason why he should not have opened any of the others – and said, ‘Wait here, sir.’

  It was early in the morning; the steel rim of the window enclosed a grey cold sky. The last stars had only just gone out. He sat with his hands between his knees in a dull tired patience; he wasn’t important, he hadn’t become an explorer; he was just a criminal. The effect of reaching this place had exhausted him; he couldn’t even remember with any clearness what he had done – only the long walk through the dark countryside to the station, trembling when the cows coughed behind the hedgerows and an owl shrieked, pacing up and down upon the platform till the train came, the smell of grass and steam. The collector had wanted his ticket and he had none nor had he any money to pay with. He knew his name or thought he knew his name, but he had no address to give. The man had been very kind and gentle; perhaps he looked sick. He had asked him if he had no friends to whom he was going, and he replied that he had no friends . . . ‘I want to see the police,’ he said, and the collector rebuked him mildly, ‘You don’t have to go all the way to London for that, sir.’

  There was a moment of dreadful suspense when he thought he would be returned like a truant child. The collector said, ‘You are one of Dr Forester’s patients, aren’t you, sir? Now if you get out at the next station, they’ll telephone for a car. It won’t take more than thirty minutes.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You lost your way, sir, I expect, but you don’t need to worry with a gentleman like Dr Forester.’

  He gathered all the energy of which he was capable and said, ‘I am going to Scotland Yard. I’m wanted there. If you stop me, it’s your responsibility.’

  At the next stop – which was only a halt, a few feet of platform and a wooden shed among dark level fields – he saw Johns; they must have gone to his room and found it empty and Johns had driven over. Johns saw him at once and came with strained naturalness to the door of the compartment; the guard hovered in the background.

  ‘Hullo, old man,’ Johns said uneasily, ‘just hop out. I’ve got the car here – it won’t take a moment to get home.’

  ‘I’m not coming.’

  ‘The doctor’s very distressed. He’d had a long day and he lost his temper. He didn’t mean half of what he said.’

  ‘I’m not coming.’

  The guard came nearer to show that he was willing to lend a hand if force were necessary. Rowe said furiously, ‘You haven’t certified me yet. You can’t drag me out of the train,’ and the guard edged up. He said softly to Johns, ‘The gentleman hasn’t got a ticket.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Johns said surprisingly, ‘there’s nothing wrong.’ He leant forward and said in a whisper, ‘Good luck, old man.’ The train drew away, laying its steam like a screen across the car, the shed, the figure which didn’t dare to wave.

  Now all the trouble was over; all that was left was a trial for murder.

  Rowe sat on; the steely sky paled and a few taxis hooted. A small fat distrait man in a double-breasted waistcoat opened the door once, took a look at him and said, ‘Where’s Beale?’ but didn’t wait for an answer. The long wounded cry of a boat came up from the Pool. Somebody went whistling down the corridor outside, once there was the chink-chink of tea-cups, and a faint smell of kipper blew in from a distance.

  The little stout man came briskly in again; he had a round over-sized face and a small fair moustache. He carried the slip Rowe had filled in down below. ‘So you are Mr Rowe,’ he said sternly. ‘We are glad you’ve come to see us at last.’ He rang a bell and a uniformed constable answered it. He said, ‘Is Beavis on duty? Tell him to come along.’

  He sat down and crossed his neat plump thighs and looked at his nails. They were very well kept. He looked at them from every angle and seemed worried about the cuticle of his left thumb. He said nothing. It was obvious that he wouldn’t talk without a witness. Then a big man in a ready-to-wear suit came with a pad and a pencil and took the third chair. His ears were enormous and stuck out straight from his skull and he had an odd air of muted shame like a bull who has begun to realize that he is out of place in a china shop. When he held the pencil to the pad you expected one or the other to suffer in his awkward grasp, and you felt too that he knew and feared the event.

  ‘Well,’ the dapper man said, sighed, and tucked his nails away for preservation under his thighs. He said, ‘You’ve come here, Mr Rowe, of your own accord to volunteer a statement?’

  Rowe said, ‘I saw a photograph in the paper . . .’

  ‘We’ve been asking you to come forward for months.’

  ‘I knew it for the first time last night.’

  ‘You seem to have lived a bit out the world.’

  ‘I’ve been in a nursing home. You see . . .’

  Every time he spoke the pencil squeaked on the paper, making a stiff consecutive narrative out of his haphazard sentences.

  ‘What nursing home?’

/>   ‘It was kept by a Dr Forester.’ He gave the name of the railway station. He knew no other name. He explained, ‘Apparently there was a raid.’ He touched the scar on his forehead. ‘I lost my memory. I found myself at this place knowing nothing – except bits of my childhood. They told me my name was Richard Digby. I didn’t even recognize the photograph at first. You see, this beard . . .’

  ‘And your memory has come back now, I hope?’ the little man asked sharply, with a touch – a very faint touch – of sarcasm.

  ‘I can remember something, but not much.’

  ‘A very convenient sort of memory.’

  ‘I am trying,’ Rowe said with a flash of anger, ‘to tell you all I know . . . In English law isn’t a man supposed to be innocent until you prove him guilty? I’m ready to tell you everything I can remember about the murder, but I’m not a murderer.’

  The plump man began to smile. He drew out his hands and looked at his nails and tucked them back again. ‘That’s interesting, Mr Rowe,’ he said. ‘You mentioned murder, but I have said nothing about murder to you, and no paper has mentioned the word murder . . . yet.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘We play strictly fair. Read out his statement so far, Beavis.’

  Beavis obeyed, blushing nervously, as though he were an overgrown schoolboy at a lectern reading Deuteronomy. ‘I Arthur Rowe, have made this statement voluntarily. Last night, when I saw a photograph of myself in a newspaper, I knew for the first time that the police wanted to interview me. I have been in a nursing home kept by a Dr Forester for the last four months, suffering from loss of memory due to an air-raid. My memory is not fully restored, but I wish to tell everything I know in connection with the murder of . . .’

  The detective stopped Beavis. He said, ‘That’s quite fair, isn’t it?’