The Ministry of Fear

  Mrs Bellairs said nothing.

  ‘I’ve brought you a visitor, ma’am,’ Mr Prentice said and stepping to one side allowed her to see Rowe.

  It is a disquieting experience to find yourself an object of terror: no wonder the novelty of it intoxicates some men. To Rowe it was horrible – as though he had suddenly found himself capable of an atrocity. Mrs Bellairs began to choke, sitting grotesquely at the table-head; it was as if she had swallowed a fish-bone at a select dinner-party. She must have been holding herself in with a great effort, and the shock had upset the muscles of her throat.

  Mr Prentice was the only one equal to the occasion. He wormed round the table and slapped her jovially on the back. ‘Choke up, ma’am,’ he said, ‘choke up. You’ll be all right.’

  ‘I’ve never seen the man,’ she moaned, ‘never.’

  ‘Why, you told his fortune,’ Mr Prentice said. ‘Don’t you remember that?’

  A glint of desperate hope slid across the old congested eyes. She said, ‘If all this fuss is about a little fortune-telling . . . I only do it for charity.’

  ‘Of course, we understand that,’ Mr Prentice said.

  ‘And I never tell the future.’

  ‘Ah, if we could see into the future . . .’

  ‘Only character.’

  ‘And the weight of cakes,’ Mr Prentice said, and all the hope went suddenly out. It was too late now for silence.

  ‘And your little séances,’ Mr Prentice went cheerily on, as though they shared a joke between them.

  ‘In the interests of science,’ Mrs Bellairs said.

  ‘Does your little group still meet?’

  ‘On Wednesdays.’

  ‘Many absentees?’

  ‘They are all personal friends,’ Mrs Bellairs said vaguely; now that the questions seemed again on safer ground, she put up one plump powdered hand and adjusted the turban.

  ‘Mr Cost now . . . he can hardly attend any longer.’

  Mrs Bellairs said carefully, ‘Of course, I recognize this gentleman now. The beard confused me. That was a silly joke of Mr Cost’s. I knew nothing about it. I was far, far away.’

  ‘Far away?’

  ‘Where the Blessed are.’

  ‘Oh yes, yes. Mr Cost won’t play such jokes again.’

  ‘It was meant quite innocently, I’m sure. Perhaps he resented two strangers . . . We are a very compact little group. And Mr Cost was never a real believer.’

  ‘Let’s hope he is now.’ Mr Prentice did not seem worried at the moment by what he had called the terrible passion of pity. He said, ‘You must try to get into touch with him, Mrs Bellairs, and ask him why he cut his throat this morning.’

  Into the goggle-eyed awful silence broke the ringing of the telephone. It rang and rang on the desk, and there were too many people in the little crowded room to get to it quickly. A memory shifted like an uneasy sleeper . . . this had happened before.

  ‘Wait a moment,’ Mr Prentice said. ‘You answer it, ma’am.’

  She repeated, ‘Cut his throat . . .’

  ‘It was all he had left to do. Except live and hang.’

  The telephone cried on. It was as though someone far away had his mind fixed on that room, working out the reason for that silence.

  ‘Answer it, ma’am,’ Mr Prentice said again.

  Mrs Bellairs was not made of the same stuff as the tailor. She heaved herself obediently up, jangling a little as she moved. She got momentarily stuck between the table and the wall, and the turban slipped over one eye. She said, ‘Hullo. Who’s there?’

  The three men in the room stayed motionless, holding their breaths. Suddenly Mrs Bellairs seemed to recover; it was as if she felt her power – the only one there who could speak. She said, ‘It’s Dr Forester. What shall I say to him?’ speaking over her shoulder with her mouth close to the receiver. She glinted at them, maliciously, intelligently, with her stupidity strung up like a piece of camouflage she couldn’t be bothered to perfect. Mr Prentice took the receiver from her hand and rang off. He said, ‘This isn’t going to help you.’

  She bridled, ‘I was only asking . . .’

  Mr Prentice said, ‘Get a fast car from the Yard. God knows what those local police are doing. They should have been at the house by this time.’ He told a second man, ‘See that this lady doesn’t cut her throat. We’ve got other uses for it.’

  He proceeded to go through the house from room to room as destructively as a tornado; he was white and angry. He said to Rowe, ‘I’m worried about your friend – what’s his name? – Stone.’ He said, ‘The old bitch,’ and the word sounded odd on the Edwardian lips. In Mrs Bellairs’ bedroom he didn’t leave a pot of cream unchurned – and there were a great many. He tore open her pillows himself with vicious pleasure. There was a little lubricious book called Love in the Orient on a bed-table by a pink-shaded lamp – he tore off the binding and broke the china base of the lamp. Only the sound of a car’s horn stopped the destruction. He said, ‘I’ll want you with me – for identifications,’ and took the stairs in three strides and a jump. Mrs Bellairs was weeping now in the drawing-room, and one of the detectives had made her a cup of tea.

  ‘Stop that nonsense,’ Mr Prentice said. It was as if he were determined to give an example of thoroughness to weak assistants. ‘There’s nothing wrong with her. If she won’t talk, skin this house alive.’ He seemed consumed by a passion of hatred and perhaps despair. He took up the cup from which Mrs Bellairs had been about to drink and emptied the contents on the carpet. Mrs Bellairs wailed at him, ‘You’ve got no right . . .’

  He said sharply, ‘Is this your best tea-service, ma’am?’ wincing ever so slightly at the gaudy Prussian blue.

  ‘Put it down,’ Mrs Bellairs implored, but he had already smashed the cup against the wall. He explained to his man, ‘The handles are hollow. We don’t know how small these films are. You’ve got to skin the place.’

  ‘You’ll suffer for this,’ Mrs Bellairs said tritely.

  ‘Oh no, ma’am, it’s you who’ll suffer. Giving information to the enemy is a hanging offence.’

  ‘They don’t hang women. Not in this war.’

  ‘We may hang more people, ma’am,’ Mr Prentice said, speaking back at her from the passage, ‘than the papers tell you about.’

  2

  It was a long and gloomy ride. A sense of failure and apprehension must have oppressed Mr Prentice; he sat curled in the corner of the car humming lugubriously. It became evening before they had unwound themselves from the dirty edge of London, and night before they reached the first hedge. Looking back, one could see only an illuminated sky – bright lanes and blobs of light like city squares, as though the inhabited world were up above and down below only the dark unlighted heavens.

  It was a long and gloomy ride, but all the time Rowe repressed for the sake of his companion a sense of exhilaration: he was happily drunk with danger and action. This was more like the life he had imagined years ago. He was helping in a great struggle, and when he saw Anna again he could claim to have played a part against her enemies. He didn’t worry very much about Stone; none of the books of adventure one read as a boy had an unhappy ending. And none of them was disturbed by a sense of pity for the beaten side. The ruins from which they emerged were only a heroic back-cloth to his personal adventure; they had no more reality than the photographs in a propaganda album: the remains of an iron bedstead on the third floor of a smashed tenement only said, ‘They shall not pass,’ not ‘We shall never sleep in this room, in this home, again.’ He didn’t understand suffering because he had forgotten that he had ever suffered.

  Rowe said, ‘After all, nothing can have happened there. The local police . . .’

  Mr Prentice observed bitterly, ‘England is a very beautiful country. The Norman churches, the old graves, the village green and the public-house, the policeman’s home with his patch of garden. He wins a prize every year for his cabbages . . .’

  ‘But the county police . . .’


  ‘The Chief Constable served twenty years ago in the Indian Army. A fine fellow. Has a good palate for port. Talks too much about his regiment, but you can depend on him for a subscription to any good cause. The superintendent . . . he was a good man once, but they’d have retired him from the Metropolitan Police after a few years’ service without a pension, so the first chance he got he transferred to the county. You see, being an honest man, he didn’t want to lay by in bribes from bookmakers for his old age. Only, of course, in a small county there’s not much to keep a man sharp. Running in drunks. Petty pilfering. The judge at the assizes compliments the county on its clean record.’

  ‘You know the men?’

  ‘I don’t know these men, but if you know England you can guess it all. And then suddenly into this peace – even in war-time it’s still peace – comes the clever, the warped, the completely unscrupulous, ambitious, educated criminal. Not a criminal at all, as the county knows crime. He doesn’t steal and he doesn’t get drunk – and if he murders, they haven’t had a murder for fifty years and can’t recognize it.’

  ‘What do you expect to find?’ Rowe asked.

  ‘Almost anything except what we are looking for. A small roll of film.’

  ‘They may have got innumerable copies by this time.’

  ‘They may have, but they haven’t innumerable ways of getting them out of the country. Find the man who’s going to do the smuggling – and the organizer. It doesn’t matter about the rest.’

  ‘Do you think Dr Forester . . . ?’

  ‘Dr Forester,’ Mr Prentice said, ‘is a victim – oh, a dangerous victim, no doubt, but he’s not the victimizer. He’s one of the used, the blackmailed. That doesn’t mean, of course, that he isn’t the courier. If he is, we are in luck. He couldn’t get away . . . unless these country police . . .’ Again the gloom of defeat descended on him.

  ‘He might pass it on.’

  ‘It isn’t so easy,’ Mr Prentice said. ‘There are not many of these people at large. Remember, to get out of the country now you must have a very good excuse. If only the country police . . .’

  ‘Is it so desperately important?’

  Mr Prentice thought gloomily, ‘We’ve made so many mistakes since this war began, and they’ve made so few. Perhaps this one will be the last we’ll make. To trust a man like Dunwoody with anything secret . . .’

  ‘Dunwoody?’

  ‘I shouldn’t have let it out, but one gets impatient. Have you heard the name? They hushed it up because he’s the son of the grand old man.’

  ‘No, I’ve never heard of him . . . I think I’ve never heard of him.’

  A screech owl cried over the dark flat fields; their dimmed headlights just touched the near hedge and penetrated no farther into the wide region of night: it was like the coloured fringe along the unexplored spaces of a map. Over there among the unknown tribes a woman was giving birth, rats were nosing among sacks of meal, an old man was dying, two people were seeing each other for the first time by the light of a lamp; everything in that darkness was of such deep importance that their errand could not equal it – this violent superficial chase, this cardboard adventure hurtling at seventy miles an hour along the edge of the profound natural common experiences of men. Rowe felt a longing to get back into that world: into the world of homes and children and quiet love and the ordinary unspecified fears and anxieties the neighbour shared; he carried the thought of Anna like a concealed letter promising just that: the longing was like the first stirring of maturity when the rare experience suddenly ceases to be desirable.

  ‘We shall know the worst soon,’ Mr Prentice said. ‘If we don’t find it here’ – his hunched hopeless figure expressed the weariness of giving up.

  Somebody a long way ahead was waving a torch up and down, up and down. ‘What the hell are they playing at?’ Mr Prentice said. ‘Advertising . . . They can’t trust a stranger to find his way through their country without a compass.’

  They drew slowly along a high wall and halted outside big heraldic gates. It was unfamiliar to Rowe; he was looking from the outside at something he had only seen from within. The top of a cedar against the sky was not the same cedar that cast a shadow round the bole. A policeman stood at the car door and said, ‘What name, sir?’

  Mr Prentice showed a card, ‘Everything all right?’

  ‘Not exactly, sir. You’ll find the superintendent inside.’

  They left the car and trailed, a little secretive dubious group, between the great gates. They had no air of authority; they were stiff with the long ride and subdued in spirit: they looked like a party of awed sightseers taken by the butler round the family seat. The policeman kept on saying, ‘This way, sir,’ and flashing his torch, but there was only one way.

  It seemed odd to Rowe, returning like this. The big house was silent – and the fountain was silent too. Somebody must have turned off the switch which regulated the flow. There were lights on in only two of the rooms. This was the place where for months he had lain happily in an extraordinary peace; this scene had been grafted by the odd operation of a bomb on to his childhood. Half his remembered life lay here. Now that he came back like an enemy, he felt a sense of shame. He said, ‘If you don’t mind, I’d rather not see Dr Forester . . .’

  The policeman with the torch said, ‘You needn’t be afraid, sir, he’s quite tidy.’

  Mr Prentice had not been listening. ‘That car,’ he said, ‘who does it belong to?’

  A Ford V8 stood in the drive – that wasn’t the one he meant, but an old tattered car with cracked and stained windscreen – one of those cars that stand with a hundred others in lonely spoilt fields along the highway – yours for five pounds if you can get it to move away.

  ‘That, sir – that’s the reverend’s.’

  Mr Prentice said sharply, ‘Are you holding a party?’

  ‘Oh no, sir. But as one of them was still alive, we thought it only right to let the vicar know.’

  ‘Things seem to have happened,’ Mr Prentice said gloomily. It had been raining and the constable tried to guide them with his torch between the puddles in the churned-up gravel and up the stone steps to the hall door.

  In the lounge where the illustrated papers had lain in glossy stacks, where Davis had been accustomed to weep in a corner and the two nervous men had fumed over the chess pieces, Johns sat in an arm-chair with his head in his hands. Rowe went to him; he said, ‘Johns’, and Johns looked up. He said, ‘He was such a great man . . . such a great man . . .’

  ‘Was?’

  ‘I killed him.’

  3

  It had been a massacre on an Elizabethan scale. Rowe was the only untroubled man there – until he saw Stone. The bodies lay where they had been discovered: Stone bound in his strait-waistcoat with the sponge of anaesthetic on the floor beside him and the body twisted in a hopeless attempt to use his hands. ‘He hadn’t a chance,’ Rowe said. This was the passage he had crept up excited like a boy breaking a school rule; in the same passage, looking in through the open door, he grew up – learned that adventure didn’t follow the literary pattern, that there weren’t always happy endings, felt the awful stirring of pity that told him something had got to be done, that you couldn’t let things stay as they were, with the innocent struggling in fear for breath and dying pointlessly. He said slowly, ‘I’d like . . . how I’d like . . .’ and felt cruelty waking beside pity, its old and tried companion.

  ‘We must be thankful,’ an unfamiliar voice said, ‘that he felt no pain.’ The stupid complacent and inaccurate phrase stroked at their raw nerves.

  Mr Prentice said, ‘Who the hell are you?’ He apologized reluctantly, ‘I’m sorry. I suppose you are the vicar.’

  ‘Yes. My name’s Sinclair.’

  ‘You’ve got no business here.’

  ‘I had business,’ Mr Sinclair corrected him. ‘Dr Forester was still alive when they called me. He was one of my parishioners.’ He added in a tone of gentle remonstrance, ‘You
know – we are allowed on a battlefield.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I daresay. But there are no inquests on those bodies. Is that your car at the door?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, if you wouldn’t mind going back to the vicarage and staying there till we are through with this . . .’

  ‘Certainly. I wouldn’t want to be in the way.’

  Rowe watched him: the cylindrical black figure, the round collar glinting under the electric light, the hearty intellectual face. Mr Sinclair said to him slowly, ‘Haven’t we met . . . ?’ confronting him with an odd bold stare.

  ‘No,’ Rowe said.

  ‘Perhaps you were one of the patients here?’

  ‘I was.’

  Mr Sinclair said with nervous enthusiasm, ‘There. That must be it. I felt sure that somewhere . . . On one of the doctor’s social evenings, I dare say. Good night.’

  Rowe turned away and considered again the man who had felt no pain. He remembered him stepping into the mud, desperately anxious, then fleeing like a scared child towards the vegetable garden. He had always believed in treachery. He hadn’t been so mad after all.

  They had had to step over Dr Forester’s body; it lay at the bottom of the stairs. A sixth snare had entangled the doctor: not love of country but love of one’s fellow-man, a love which had astonishingly flamed into action in the heart of respectable, hero-worshipping Johns. The doctor had been too sure of Johns: he had not realized that respect is really less reliable than fear: a man may be more ready to kill one he respects than to betray him to the police. When Johns shut his eyes and pulled the trigger of the revolver which had once been confiscated from Davis and had lain locked away for months in a drawer, he was not ruining the man he respected – he was saving him from the interminable proceedings of the law courts, from the crudities of prosecuting counsel, the unfathomable ignorances of the judge, and the indignity of depending on the shallow opinion of twelve men picked at random. If love of his fellow-man refused to allow him to be a sleeping partner in the elimination of Stone, love also dictated the form of his refusal.

  Dr Forester had shown himself disturbed from the moment of Rowe’s escape. He had been inexplicably reluctant to call in the police, and he seemed worried about the fate of Stone. There were consultations with Poole from which Johns was excluded, and during the afternoon there was a trunk call to London . . . Johns took a letter to the post and couldn’t help noticing the watcher outside the gate. In the village he saw a police car from the country town. He began to wonder . . .