He met Poole on the way back. Poole, too, must have seen. All the fancies and resentments of the last few days came back to Johns. Sitting in a passion of remorse in the lounge, he couldn’t explain how all these indications had crystallized into the belief that the doctor was planning Stone’s death. He remembered theoretical conversations he had often had with the doctor on the subject of euthanasia: arguments with the doctor, who was quite unmoved by the story of the Nazi elimination of old people and incurables. The doctor had once said, ‘It’s what any State medical service has sooner or later got to face. If you are going to be kept alive in institutions run by and paid for by the State, you must accept the State’s right to economize when necessary . . .’ He intruded on a colloquy between Poole and Forester, which was abruptly broken off, he became more and more restless and uneasy, it was as if the house were infected by the future: fear was already present in the passages. At tea Dr Forester made some remark about ‘poor Stone’.
‘Why poor Stone?’ Johns asked sharply and accusingly.
‘He’s in great pain,’ Dr Forester said. ‘A tumour . . . Death is the greatest mercy we can ask for him.’
He went restlessly out into the garden in the dusk; in the moonlight the sundial was like a small sheeted figure of someone already dead at the entrance to the rose garden. Suddenly he heard Stone crying out . . . His account became more confused than ever. Apparently he ran straight to his room and got out the gun. It was just like Johns, that he had mislaid the key and found it at last in his pocket. He heard Stone cry out again. He ran through the lounge, into the other wing, made for the stairs – the sickly confected smell of chloroform was in the passage, and Dr Forester stood on guard at the foot of the stairs. He said crossly and nervously, ‘What do you want, Johns?’ and Johns, who still believed in the misguided purity of the doctor’s fanaticism, saw only one solution: he shot the doctor. Poole, with his twisted shoulder and his malign conceited face, backed away from the top of the stairs – and he shot him, too, in a rage because he guessed he was too late.
Then, of course, the police were at the door. He went to meet them, for apparently the servants had all been given the evening off, and it was that small banal fact of which he had read in so many murder stories that brought the squalid truth home to him. Dr Forester was still alive, and the local police thought it only right to send for the parson . . . That was all. It was extraordinary the devastation that could be worked in one evening in what had once seemed a kind of earthy paradise. A flight of bombers could not have eliminated peace more thoroughly than had three men.
The search was then begun. The house was ransacked. More police were sent for. Lights were switched on and off restlessly through the early morning hours in upstairs rooms. Mr Prentice said, ‘If we could find even a single print . . .’ but there was nothing. At one point of the long night watch Rowe found himself back in the room where Digby had slept. He thought of Digby now as a stranger – a rather gross, complacent, parasitic stranger whose happiness had lain in too great an ignorance. Happiness should always be qualified by a knowledge of misery. There on the book-shelf stood the Tolstoy with the pencil-marks rubbed out. Knowledge was the great thing . . . not abstract knowledge in which Dr Forester had been so rich, the theories which lead one enticingly on with their appearance of nobility, of transcendent virtue, but detailed passionate trivial human knowledge. He opened the Tolstoy again: ‘What seemed to me good and lofty – love of fatherland, of one’s own people – became to me repulsive and pitiable. What seemed to me bad and shameful – rejection of fatherland and cosmopolitanism – now appeared to me on the contrary good and noble.’ Idealism had ended up with a bullet in the stomach at the foot of the stairs; the idealist had been caught out in treachery and murder. Rowe didn’t believe they had had to blackmail him much. They had only to appeal to his virtues, his intellectual pride, his abstract love of humanity. One can’t love humanity. One can only love people.
‘Nothing,’ Mr Prentice said. He drooped disconsolately across the room on his stiff lean legs and drew the curtain a little aside. Only one star was visible now: the others had faded into the lightening sky. ‘So much time wasted,’ Mr Prentice said.
‘Three dead and one in prison.’
‘They can find a dozen to take their place. I want the films: the top man.’ He said, ‘They’ve been using photographic chemicals in the basin in Poole’s room. That’s where they developed the film, probably. I don’t suppose they’d print more than one at a time. They’d want to trust as few people as possible, and so long as they have the negative . . .’ He added sadly, ‘Poole was a first-class photographer. He specialized in the life history of the bee. Wonderful studies. I’ve seen some of them. I want you to come over now to the island. I’m afraid we may find something unpleasant there for you to identify . . .’
They stood where Stone had stood; three little red lights ahead across the pond gave it in the three-quarter dark an illimitable air as of a harbour just before dawn with the riding lamps of steamers gathering for a convoy. Mr Prentice waded out and Rowe followed him; there was a thin skin of water over nine inches of mud. The red lights were lanterns – the kind of lanterns which are strung at night where roads are broken. Three policemen were digging in the centre of the tiny island. There was hardly a foothold for two more men. ‘This was what Stone saw,’ Rowe said. ‘Men digging.’
‘Yes.’
‘What do you expect . . . ?’ He stopped; there was something strained in the attitude of the diggers. They put in their spades carefully as though they might break something fragile, and they seemed to turn up the earth with reluctance. The dark scene reminded him of something: something distant and sombre. Then he remembered a dark Victorian engraving in a book his mother had taken away from him: men in cloaks digging at night in a graveyard with the moonlight glinting on a spade.
Mr Prentice said, ‘There’s somebody you’ve forgotten – unaccounted for.’
Now as each spade cut down he waited himself with apprehension: he was held by the fear of disgust.
‘How do you know where to dig?’
‘They left marks. They were amateurs at this. I suppose that was why they were scared of what Stone saw.’
One spade made an ugly scrunching sound in the soft earth.
‘Careful,’ Mr Prentice said. The man wielding it stopped and wiped sweat off his face, although the night was cold. Then he drew the tool slowly out of the earth and looked at the blade. ‘Start again on this side,’ Mr Prentice said. ‘Take it gently. Don’t go deep.’ The other men stopped digging and watched, but you could tell they didn’t want to watch.
The man digging said, ‘Here it is.’ He left the spade standing in the ground and began to move the earth with his fingers, gently as though he were planting seedlings. He said with relief, It's only a box.’
He took his spade again, and with one strong effort lifted the box out of its bed. It was the kind of wooden box which holds groceries, and the lid was loosely nailed down. He prised it open with the edge of the blade and another man brought a lamp nearer. Then one by one an odd sad assortment of objects was lifted out: they were like the relics a company commander sends home when one of his men has been killed. But there was this difference: there were no letters or photographs.
‘Nothing they could burn,’ Mr Prentice said.
These were what an ordinary fire would reject: a fountain-pen clip, another clip which had probably held a pencil.
‘It’s not easy to burn things,’ Mr Prentice said, ‘in an all-electric house.’
A pocket-watch. He nicked open the heavy back and read aloud: ‘F.G.J., from N.L.J. on our silver wedding, 3.8.15.’ Below was added: ‘To my dear son in memory of his father, 1919.’
‘A good regular time-piece,’ Mr Prentice said.
Two plaited metal arm-bands came next. Then the metal buckles off a pair of sock-suspenders. And then a whole collection of buttons – like pearl buttons off a vest, large ugly brown
buttons off a suit, brace buttons, pants buttons, trouser buttons – one could never have believed that one man’s single change of clothes required so much holding together. Waistcoat buttons. Shirt buttons. Cuff buttons. Then the metal parts of a pair of braces. So is a poor human creature joined respectably together like a doll: take him apart and you are left with a grocery box full of assorted catches and buckles and buttons.
At the bottom there was a pair of heavy old-fashioned boots with big nails worn with so much pavement tramping, so much standing at street corners.
‘I wonder,’ Mr Prentice said, ‘what they did with the rest of him.’
‘Who was he?’
‘He was Jones.’
Chapter 3
WRONG NUMBERS
‘A very slippery, tremendous, quaking road it was.’
The Little Duke
ROWE was growing up; every hour was bringing him nearer to hailing distance of his real age. Little patches of memory returned; he could hear Mr Rennit’s voice saying, ‘I agree with Jones,’ and he saw again a saucer with a sausage-roll upon it beside a telephone. Pity stirred, but immaturity fought hard; the sense of adventure struggled with common sense as though it were on the side of happiness, and common sense were allied to possible miseries, disappointments, disclosures . . .
It was immaturity which made him keep back the secret of the telephone number, the number he had so nearly made out in Cost’s shop. He knew the exchange was B A T, and he knew the first three numbers were 271: only the last had escaped him. The information might be valueless – or invaluable. Whichever it was, he hugged it to himself. Mr Prentice had had his chance and failed; now it was his turn. He wanted to boast like a boy to Anna – ‘I did it.’
About four-thirty in the morning they had been joined by a young man called Brothers. With his umbrella and his moustache and his black hat he had obviously modelled himself upon Mr Prentice. Perhaps in twenty years the portrait would have been adequately copied; it lacked at present the patina of age – the cracks of sadness, disappointment, resignation. Mr Prentice wearily surrendered the picked bones of investigation to Brothers and offered Rowe a seat in the car going back to London. He pulled his hat over his eyes, sank deep into the seat and said, ‘We are beaten,’ as they splashed down a country lane with the moonlight flat on the puddles.
‘What are you going to do about it?’
‘Go to sleep.’ Perhaps to his fine palate the sentence sounded over-conscious, for without opening his eyes he added, ‘One must avoid self-importance, you see. In five hundred years’ time, to the historian writing the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, this little episode would not exist. There will be plenty of other causes. You and me and poor Jones will not even figure in a footnote. It will be all economics, politics, battles.’
‘What do you think they did to Jones?’
‘I don’t suppose we shall ever know. In time of war, so many bodies are unidentifiable. So many bodies,’ he said sleepily, ‘waiting for a convenient blitz.’ Suddenly, surprisingly and rather shockingly, he began to snore.
They came into London with the early workers; along the industrial roads men and women were emerging from underground; neat elderly men carrying attaché-cases and rolled umbrellas appeared from public shelters. In Gower Street they were sweeping up glass, and a building smoked into the new day like a candle which some late reveller has forgotten to snuff. It was odd to think that the usual battle had been going on while they stood on the island in the pond and heard only the scrape of the spade. A notice turned them from their course, and on a rope strung across the road already flapped a few hand-written labels. ‘Barclay’s Bank. Please inquire at. . . .’ ‘The Cornwallis Dairy. New address . . .’ ‘Marquis’s Fish Saloon . . .’ On a long, quiet, empty expanse of pavement a policeman and a warden strolled in lazy proprietory conversation like gamekeepers on their estate – a notice read, ‘Unexploded Bomb’. This was the same route they had taken last night, but it had been elaborately and trivially changed. What a lot of activity, Rowe thought, there had been in a few hours – the sticking up of notices, the altering of traffic, the getting to know a slightly different London. He noticed the briskness, the cheerfulness on the faces; you got the impression that this was an early hour of a national holiday. It was simply, he supposed, the effect of finding oneself alive.
Mr Prentice muttered and woke. He told the driver the address of a small hotel near Hyde Park Corner – ‘if it’s still there,’ and insisted punctiliously on arranging Rowe’s room with the manager. It was only after he had waved his hand from the car – ‘I’ll ring you later, dear fellow’ – that Rowe realized his courtesy, of course, had an object. He had been lodged where they could reach him; he had been thrust securely into the right pigeon-hole, and would presently, when they required him, be pulled out again. If he tried to leave it would be reported at once. Mr Prentice had even lent him five pounds – you couldn’t go far on five pounds.
Rowe had a small early breakfast. The gas-main apparently had been hit, and the gas wouldn’t light properly. It wasn’t hardly more than a smell, the waitress told him – not enough to boil a kettle or make toast. But there was milk and post-toasties and bread and marmalade – quite an Arcadian meal, and afterwards he walked across the Park in the cool early sun and noticed, looking back over the long empty plain, that he was not followed. He began to whistle the only tune he knew; he felt a kind of serene excitement and well-being, for he was not a murderer. The forgotten years hardly troubled him more than they had done in the first weeks at Dr Forester’s home. How good it was, he thought, to play an adult part in life again, and veered with his boy’s secret into Bayswater towards a telephone-box.
He had collected at the hotel a store of pennies. He was filled with exhilaration, pressing in the first pair and dialling. A voice said briskly, ‘The Hygienic Baking Company at your service,’ and he rang off. It was only then he began to realize the difficulties ahead: he couldn’t expect to know Cost’s customer by a sixth sense. He dialled again and an old voice said, ‘Hullo.’ He said, ‘Excuse me. Who is that, please?’
‘Who do you want?’ the voice said obstinately – it was so old that it had lost sexual character and you couldn’t tell whether it was a man’s or a woman’s.
‘This is Exchange,’ Rowe said; the idea came to him at the moment of perplexity, as though his brain had kept it in readiness all the while. ‘We are checking up on all subscribers since last night’s raid.’
‘Why?’
‘The automatic system has been disarranged. A bomb on the district exchange. Is that Mr Isaacs of Prince of Wales Road?’
‘No, it isn’t. This is Wilson.’
‘Ah, you see, according to our dialling you should be Mr Isaacs.’
He rang off again; he wasn’t any the wiser; after all, even a Hygienic Bakery might conceal Mr Cost’s customer – it was even possible that his conversation had been a genuine one. But no, that he did not believe, hearing again the sad stoical voice of the tailor, ‘Personally I have no hope. No hope at all.’ Personally – the emphasis had lain there. He had conveyed as clearly as he dared that it was for him alone the battle was over.
He went on pressing in his pennies; reason told him that it was useless, that the only course was to let Mr Prentice into his secret – and yet he couldn’t believe that somehow over the wire some sense would not be conveyed to him, the vocal impression of a will and violence sufficient to cause so many deaths – poor Stone asphyxiated in the sick bay, Forester and Poole shot down upon the stairs, Cost with the shears through his neck, Jones . . . The cause was surely too vast to come up the wire only as a commonplace voice saying, ‘Westminster Bank speaking.’
Suddenly he remembered that Mr Cost had not asked for any individual. He had simply dialled a number and had begun to speak as soon as he heard a voice reply. That meant he could not be speaking to a business address – where some employee would have to be brought to the phone.
‘Hullo.’
A voice took any possible question out of his mouth. ‘Oh, Ernest,’ a torrential voice said, ‘I knew you’d ring. You dear sympathetic thing. I suppose David’s told you Minny’s gone. Last night in the raid, it was awful. We heard her voice calling to us from outside, but, of course there was nothing we could do. We couldn’t leave our shelter. And then a land-mine dropped – it must have been a land-mine. Three houses went, a huge hole. And this morning not a sign of Minny. David still hopes of course, but I knew at the time, Ernest, there was something elegiac in her mew . . .’
It was fascinating, but he had work to do. He rang off.
The telephone-box was getting stiflingly hot. He had already used up a shillingsworth of coppers; surely among these last four numbers a voice would speak and he would know. ‘Police Station, Mafeking Road.’ Back on to the rest with the receiver. Three numbers left. Against all reason he was convinced that one of these days three . . . His face was damp with sweat. He wiped it dry, and immediately the beads formed again. He felt suddenly an apprehension; the dryness of his throat, his heavily beating heart warned him that this voice might present too terrible an issue. There had been five deaths already . . . His head swam with relief when a voice said ‘Gas Light and Coke Company.’ He could still walk out and leave it to Mr Prentice. After all, how did he know that the voice he was seeking was not that of the operator at the Hygienic Baking Company – or even Ernest’s friend?
But if he went to Mr Prentice he would find it hard to explain his silence all these invaluable hours. He was not, after all, a boy: he was a middle-aged man. He had started something and he must go on. And yet he still hesitated while the sweat got into his eyes. Two numbers left: a fifty per cent chance. He would try one, and if that number conveyed nothing at all, he would walk out of the box and wash his hands of the whole business. Perhaps his eyes and his wits had deceived him in Mr Cost’s shop. His finger went reluctantly through the familiar acts: BAT 271: which number now? He put his sleeve against his face and wiped, then dialled.