The Ministry of Fear

  ‘She was forbidden to.’ Mr Prentice raised an eyebrow. ‘They wanted – so they told us – my memory to come back naturally and slowly of itself. No hypnotism, no psychoanalysis.’

  Mr Prentice beamed at him and swayed a little on his shooting-stick; you felt he was taking a well-earned rest in the middle of a successful shoot. ‘Yes, it wouldn’t have done, would it, if it had come back too quickly . . . Although of course there was always the sick bay.’

  ‘If only you’d tell me what it’s all about.’

  Mr Prentice stroked his moustache; he had the fainéant air of Arthur Balfour, but you felt that he knew it. He had stylized himself – life was easier that way. He had chosen a physical mould just as a writer chooses a technical form. ‘Now were you ever a habitué of the Regal Court?’

  ‘It’s a hotel?’

  ‘You remember that much.’

  ‘Well, it’s an easy guess.’

  Mr Prentice closed his eyes; it was perhaps an affectation, but who could live without affectations?

  ‘Why do you ask about the Regal Court?’

  ‘It’s a shot in the dark,’ Mr Prentice said. ‘We have so little time.’

  ‘Time for what?’

  ‘To find a needle in a haystack.’

  3

  One wouldn’t have said that Mr Prentice was capable of much exertion; rough shooting, you would have said, was beyond him. From the house to the brake and from the brake to the butts was about as far as you could expect him to walk in a day. And yet during the next few hours he showed himself capable of great exertion, and the shooting was indubitably rough . . .

  He had dropped his enigmatic statement into the air and was out of the room almost before the complete phrase had formed, his long legs moving stiffly, like stilts. Rowe was left alone with Beavis and the day wore slowly on. The sun’s early promise had been false; a cold unseasonable drizzle fell like dust outside the window. After a long time they brought him some cold pie and tea on a tray.

  Beavis was not inclined to conversation. It was as though his words might be used in evidence, and Rowe only once attempted to break the silence. He said, ‘I wish I knew what it was all about’ and watched Beavis’s long-toothed mouth open and clap to like a rabbit snare. ‘Official secrets,’ Beavis said and stared with flat eyes at the blank wall.

  Then suddenly Mr Prentice was with them again, rushing into the room in his stiff casual stride, followed by a man in black who held a bowler hat in front of him with both hands like a basin of water and panted a little in the trail of Mr Prentice. He came to a stop inside the door and glared at Rowe. He said, ‘That’s the scoundrel. I haven’t a doubt of it. I can see through the beard. It’s a disguise.’

  Mr Prentice gave a giggle. ‘That’s excellent,’ he said. ‘The pieces are really fitting.’

  The man with the bowler said, ‘He carried in the suitcase and he wanted just to leave it. But I had my instructions. I told him he must wait for Mr Travers. He didn’t want to wait. Of course he didn’t want to, knowing what was inside . . . Something must have gone wrong. He didn’t get Mr Travers, but he nearly got the poor girl . . . and when the confusion was over, he’d gone.’

  ‘I don’t remember ever seeing him before,’ Rowe said.

  The man gesticulated passionately with his bowler, ‘I’ll swear to him in any court of law.’

  Beavis watched with his mouth a little open and Mr Prentice giggled again. ‘No time,’ he said. ‘No time for squabbles. You two can get to know each other later. I need you both now.’

  ‘If you’d tell me a little,’ Rowe pleaded. To have come all this way, he thought, to meet a charge of murder and to find only a deeper confusion . . .

  ‘In the taxi,’ Mr Prentice said. ‘I’ll explain in the taxi.’ He made for the door.

  ‘Aren’t you going to charge him?’ the man asked, panting in pursuit.

  Mr Prentice without looking round said, ‘Presently, presently, perhaps . . .’ and then darkly, ‘Who?’

  They swept into the court-yard and out into broad stony Northumberland Avenue, policemen saluting: into a taxi and off along the ruined front of the Strand: the empty eyes of an insurance building: boarded windows: sweet-shops with one dish of mauve cachous in the window.

  Mr Prentice said in a low voice, ‘I just want you two gentlemen to behave naturally. We are going to a city tailor’s where I’m being measured for a suit. I shall go in first and after a few minutes you, Rowe, and last you, Mr Davis,’ and he touched the bowler hat with the tip of a finger where it balanced on the stranger’s lap.

  ‘But what’s it all about, sir?’ Davis asked. He had edged away from Rowe, and Mr Prentice curled his long legs across the taxi, sitting opposite them in a tip-up.

  ‘Never mind. Just keep your eyes open and see if there’s anyone in the shop you recognize.’ The mischief faded from his eyes as the taxi looped round the gutted shell of St Clement Danes. He said, ‘The place will be surrounded. You needn’t be afraid . . .’

  Rowe said, ‘I’m not afraid. I only want to know . . .’ staring out at odd devastated boarded-up London.

  ‘It’s really serious,’ Mr Prentice said. ‘I don’t know quite how serious. But you might say that we all depend on it.’ He shuddered away from what was almost an emotional statement, giggled, touched doubtfully the silky ends of his moustache and said, with sadness in his voice, ‘You know there are always weaknesses that have to be covered up. If the Germans had known after Dunkirk just how weak . . . There are still weaknesses of which if they knew the exact facts . . .’ The ruins around St Paul’s unfolded; the obliterated acres of Paternoster Row. He said, ‘This would be nothing to it. Nothing.’ He went slowly on, ‘Perhaps I was wrong to say there was no danger. If we are on the right track, of course, there must be danger, mustn’t there? It’s worth – oh, a thousand lives to them.’

  ‘If I can be of any use,’ Rowe said. ‘This is so strange to me. I didn’t imagine war was this,’ staring out at desolation. Jerusalem must have looked something like this in the mind’s eye of Christ when he wept . . .

  ‘I’m not scared,’ the man with the bowler said sharply, defensively.

  ‘We are looking,’ Mr Prentice said, clasping his bony knees and vibrating with the taxi, ‘for a little roll of film – probably a good deal smaller than a cotton reel. Smaller than those little rolls you put in Leica cameras. You must have read the questions in Parliament about certain papers which were missing for an hour. It was hushed up publicly. It doesn’t help anybody to ruin confidence in a big name – and it doesn’t help us to have the public and the press muddying up the trail. I tell you two only because – well, we could have you put quietly away for the duration if there was any leakage. It happened twice – the first time the roll was hidden in a cake and the cake was to be fetched from a certain fête. But you won it,’ Mr Prentice nodded at Rowe, ‘the password as it were was given to the wrong man.’

  ‘Mrs Bellairs?’ Rowe said.

  ‘She’s being looked after at this minute.’ He went on explaining with vague gestures of his thin useless-looking hands, ‘That attempt failed. A bomb that hit your house destroyed the cake and everything – and probably saved your life. But they didn’t like the way you followed the case up. They tried to frighten you into hiding – but for some reason that was not enough. Of course they meant to blow you into pieces, but when they found you’d lost your memory, that was good enough. It was better than killing you, because by disappearing you took the blame for the bomb – as well as for Jones.’

  ‘But why the girl?’

  ‘We’ll leave out the mysteries,’ Mr Prentice said. ‘Perhaps because her brother helped you. They aren’t above revenge. There isn’t time for all that now.’ They were at the Mansion House. ‘What we know is this – they had to wait until the next chance came. Another big name and another fool. He had this in common with the first fool – he went to the same tailor.’ The taxi drew up at the corner of a city street.

/>   ‘We foot it from here,’ Mr Prentice said. A man on the opposite kerb began to walk up the street as they alighted.

  ‘Do you carry a revolver?’ the man in the bowler hat asked nervously.

  ‘I wouldn’t know how to use it,’ Mr Prentice said. ‘If there’s trouble of that kind just lie flat.’

  ‘You had no right to bring me into this.’

  Mr Prentice turned sharply. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘every right. Nobody’s got a right to his life these days. My dear chap, you are conscripted for your country.’ They stood grouped on the pavement: bank messengers with chained boxes went by in top hats: stenographers and clerks hurried past returning late from their lunch. There were no ruins to be seen; it was like peace. Mr Prentice said, ‘If those photographs leave the country, there’ll be a lot of suicides . . . at least that’s what happened in France.’

  ‘How do you know they haven’t left?’ Rowe asked.

  ‘We don’t. We just hope, that’s all. We’ll know the worst soon enough.’ He said, ‘Watch when I go in. Give me five minutes with our man in the fitting-room, and then you, Rowe, come in and ask for me. I want to have him where I can watch him – in all the mirrors. Then, Davis, you count a hundred and follow. You are going to be too much of a coincidence. You are going to be the last straw.’

  They watched the stiff old-fashioned figure make his way up the street; he was just the kind of man to have a city tailor – somebody reliable and not expensive whom he could recommend to his son. Presently about fifty yards along he turned in: a man stood at the next corner and lit a cigarette. A motor-car drew up next door and a woman got out to do some shopping, leaving a man at the wheel.

  Rowe said, ‘It’s time for me to be moving.’ His pulse beat with excitement; it was as if he had come to this adventure unsaddened, with the freshness of a boy. He looked suspiciously at Davis, who stood there with a nerve twitching at his cheek. He said, ‘A hundred and you follow.’ Davis said nothing. ‘You understand. You count a hundred.’

  ‘Oh,’ Davis said furiously, ‘this play-acting. I’m a plain man.’

  ‘Those were his orders.’

  ‘Who’s he to give me orders?’

  Rowe couldn’t stay to argue: time was up.

  War had hit the tailoring business hard. A few rolls of grey inferior cloth lay on the counter; the shelves were nearly empty. A man in a frock-coat with a tired, lined, anxious face said, ‘What can we do for you, sir?’

  ‘I came here,’ Rowe said, ‘to meet a friend.’ He looked down the narrow aisle between the little mirrored cubicles. ‘I expect he’s being fitted now.’

  ‘Will you take a chair, sir?’ and ‘Mr Ford,’ he called, ‘Mr Ford.’ Out from one of the cubicles, a tape measure slung round his neck, a little bouquet of pins in his lapel, solid, city-like, came Cost, whom he had last seen dead in his chair when the lights went out. Like a piece of a jig-saw puzzle which clicks into place and makes sense of a whole confusing block, that solid figure took up its place in his memory with the man from Welwyn and the proletarian poet and Anna’s brother. What had Mrs Bellairs called him? He remembered the whole phrase ‘Our business man’.

  Rowe stood up as though this were someone of great importance who must be greeted punctiliously, but there seemed to be no recognition in the stolid respectable eyes. ‘Yes, Mr Bridges?’ Those were the first words he had ever heard him speak; his whole function before had been one of death.

  ‘This gentleman has come to meet the other gentleman.’

  The eyes swivelled slowly and rested; no sign of recognition broke their large grey calm – or did they rest a shade longer than was absolutely necessary? ‘I have nearly taken the gentleman’s measurements. If you would not mind waiting two minutes . . .’ Two minutes Rowe thought, and then the other, the straw which will really break you down.

  Mr Ford – if this was now to be his name – walked slowly up to the counter; everything he did, you felt, was carefully pondered; his suits must always be well-built. There was no room in that precision for the eccentricity, the wayward act, and yet what a wild oddity lay hidden under the skin. He saw Dr Forester dabbling his fingers in what looked like blood.

  A telephone stood on the counter; Mr Ford picked up the receiver and dialled. The dial faced Rowe. He watched with care each time where the finger fitted. B. A. T. He felt sure of the letters; but one number he missed, suddenly wavering and catching the serene ponderous gaze of Mr Ford as he dialled. He was unsure of himself; he wished Mr Prentice would appear.

  ‘Hullo,’ Mr Ford said, ‘hullo. This is Pauling and Crosthwaite.’

  Along the length of the window towards the door dragged the unwilling form of the man with the bowler hat: Rowe’s hands tightened in his lap. Mr Bridges was sadly straightening the meagre rolls of cloth, his back turned. His listless hands were like a poignant criticism in the Tailor and Cutter.

  ‘The suit was dispatched this morning, sir,’ Mr Ford was saying, ‘I trust in time for your journey.’ He clucked his satisfaction calmly and inhumanly down the telephone, ‘Thank you very much, sir. I felt very satisfied myself at the last fitting.’ His eyes shifted to the clanging door as Davis looked in with a kind of wretched swagger. ‘Oh, yes, sir. I think when you’ve worn it once, you’ll find the shoulders will settle . . .’ Mr Prentice’s whole elaborate plot was a failure: that nerve had not broken.

  ‘Mr Travers,’ Davis exclaimed with astonishment.

  Carefully putting his hand over the mouthpiece of the telephone Mr Ford said, ‘I beg your pardon, sir?’

  ‘You are Mr Travers.’ Then Davis, meeting those clear calm eyes, added weakly, ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘I thought . . .’

  ‘Mr Bridges, would you mind attending to this gentleman?’

  ‘Certainly, Mr Ford.’

  The hand left the receiver and Mr Ford quietly, firmly, authoritatively continued to speak up the wire. ‘No, sir. I find at the last moment that we shall not be able to repeat the trousers. It’s not a matter of coupons, no. We can obtain no more of that pattern from the manufacturers – no more at all.’ Again his eyes met Rowe’s and wandered like a blind man’s hand delicately along the contours of his face. ‘Personally, sir, I have no hope. No hope at all.’ He put the receiver down and moved a little way along the counter. ‘If you can spare these a moment, Mr Bridges . . .’ He picked up a pair of cutting-shears.

  ‘Certainly, Mr Ford.’

  Without another word he passed Rowe, not looking at him again, and moved down the aisle, without hurry, serious, professional, as heavy as stone. Rowe quickly rose: something, he felt, must be done, be said, if the whole plan were not to end in fiasco. ‘Cost,’ he called after the figure, ‘Cost.’ It was only then that the extreme calm and deliberation of the figure with the shears struck him as strange. He called out ‘Prentice’ sharply in warning as the fitter turned aside into a cubicle.

  But it was not the cubicle from which Mr Prentice emerged. He came bewilderedly out in his silk shirt-sleeves from the opposite end of the aisle. ‘What is it?’ he asked, but Rowe was already at the other door straining to get in. Over his shoulder he could see the shocked face of Mr Bridges, Davis’s goggling eyes. ‘Quick,’ he said, ‘your hat,’ and grabbed the bowler and crashed it through the glass of the door.

  Under the icicles of splintered glass he could see Cost-Travers-Ford. He sat in the arm-chair for clients opposite the tall triple mirror, leaning forward, his throat transfixed, with the cutting-shears held firmly upright between his knees. It was a Roman death.

  Rowe thought: this time I have killed him, and heard that quiet respectful but authoritative voice speaking down the telephone. ‘Personally I have no hope. No hope at all.’

  Chapter 2

  MOPPING UP

  ‘You had best yield.’

  The Little Duke

  1

  MRS Bellairs had less dignity.

  They had driven straight to Campden Hill, leaving
Davis with his wrecked bowler. Mr Prentice was worried and depressed. ‘It does no good,’ he said. ‘We want them alive and talking.’

  Rowe said, ‘He must have had great courage. I don’t know why that’s so surprising. One doesn’t associate it with tailors . . . except for that one in the story who killed a giant. I suppose you’d say this one was on the side of the giants. I wonder why.’

  Mr Prentice burst suddenly out as they drove up through the Park in the thin windy rain. ‘Pity is a terrible thing. People talk about the passion of love. Pity is the worst passion of all: we don’t outlive it like sex.’

  ‘After all, it’s war,’ Rowe said with a kind of exhilaration. The old fake truism like a piece of common pyrites in the hands of a child split open and showed its sparkling core to him. He was taking part . . .

  Mr Prentice looked at him oddly, with curiosity. ‘You don’t feel it, do you? Adolescents don’t feel pity. It’s a mature passion.’

  ‘I expect,’ Rowe said, ‘that I led a dull humdrum sober life, and so all this excites me. Now that I know I’m not a murderer I can enjoy . . .’ He broke off at sight of the dimly remembered house like the scene of a dream: that unweeded little garden with the grey fallen piece of statuary and the small iron gate that creaked. All the blinds were down as though somebody had died, and the door stood open; you expected to see auction tickets on the furniture. ‘We pulled her in,’ Mr Prentice said, ‘simultaneously.’

  There was silence about the place; a man in a dark suit who might have been an undertaker stood in the hall. He opened a door for Mr Prentice and they went in. It wasn’t the drawing-room that Rowe vaguely remembered, but a small dining-room crammed full with ugly chairs and a too-large table and a desk. Mrs Bellairs sat in an arm-chair at the head of the table with a pasty grey closed face, wearing a black turban; the man at the door said, ‘She won’t say a thing.’

  ‘Well, ma’am,’ Mr Prentice greeted her with a kind of gallant jauntiness.