The Whisper in the Gloom

  “The poor little chap’s feeling cold,” she said. “A nice warm supper in his little tum-tum—that’s what he wants.”

  “Gug, gug, gug,” said Bert, slightly overplaying his part.

  The old women retired, locking the door again, and presently reappeared with a tray of very tolerable grub. As Bert consumed it, he asked if he could write a letter to his mother; she’d be worrying about him; just to tell her he’d arrived safely.

  “We’ll see,” the woman replied, a momentary look of bewilderment in her old gray eyes. “Tomorrow, perhaps, if you’re a good boy.”

  When she had gone out with the tray. Bert inspected his prision. Admirably stocked as it was for infant tastes, it offered precious little for his own recreation. He took a book from a shelf. Like the toys, it was brand new; but, discovering it to be a nauseating tale about some flopsy bunnies, Bert put it back. He tried all the books—not for reading purposes now, but looking for clues. Not one of them, however, had an owner’s name on the flyleaf.

  Bert felt very sleepy. Perhaps he was asleep—had been asleep for hours: the whole thing was like a dream, vivid and mad. He started undressing. The bed had been turned down. On the pillow lay a nightdress of sorts. Bert lifted it, and a spasm of fear shook him. The nightdress was less than two feet long—a baby’s. He took a grip on himself. Either he was dreaming, or not; he couldn’t do anything about it, either way; and at least he was alive. He found a basin behind a screen, splashed his face with cold water, and got into bed in his pants.

  He went to sleep without difficulty. He dreamed that he was an aged Nanny in old-fashioned cap and apron, being pursued through Kensington Gardens by a horde of naked and infuriated babies, all shooting from the hip. As he stepped into his model speedboat and accelerated across the Round Pond, leaving the naked babies dancing with rage on the shore, the engine blew up, and Bert awoke to daylight, with the noise of an explosion still ringing in his ears. He rubbed his eyes. Propping himself up in bed, he heard another shot, quite near. Or was it someone cracking a whip?

  10

  Brisk Business in the Portobello Road

  AT ABOUT THE same hour as Bert woke up in his nursery prison, Nigel Strangeways awoke in a private room of the hospital. He had recovered consciousness the previous evening, but soon gone off into a natural sleep. Apart from the sensation, when he attempted to move, of an inexpert carver at work inside his skull, he felt reasonably himself again. It was a time for thought rather than action, so he lay still, patiently groping for the bits of the puzzle which yesterday’s assault had swept off his mind, and piecing them together. The result was curiously interesting. On the other hand, like the result of a falsely conceived proposition, it seemed fit only to be labeled with a final “Which Is Absurd.”

  A nurse came in, took his temperature, and departed, poker-backed and poker-faced. Presently the doctor arrived, accompanied by a sister. Nigel’s bandages were removed, his head carefully inspected and several tests taken. Absorbed by his problem, Nigel was hardly aware what they were doing.

  “You’ll be all right,” said the doctor finally. “A few days’ rest, then go slow for a week—”

  “I’ve got to see someone,” said Nigel.

  The sister gave him a disapproving look, the doctor a very keen one; he had been told a little of the background of this case.

  “I think Mr. Strangeways might have a visitor. Say ten minutes. Who do you want to see?”

  “Miss Clare Massinger.”

  Sister said, “She has rung up to inquire about you. Also Lady Durbar.”

  “And if Inspector Wright turns up, I must see him too.”

  Sister bridled at the patient’s authoritative tone. She was accustomed to patients taking orders, not giving them. But the doctor only said, “If you’re prepared to risk a set-back, Mr. Strangeways.”

  “I have to take risks just now.”

  “I understand. We’ll fix it up for you.”

  At ten-thirty a magnificent floral tribute arrived, with Lady Durbar’s card on it. Half an hour later, Clare Massinger was shown in.

  “Oh, Nigel, you look like Lazarus risen from the dead,” were her first words. She just touched the bandages swathing his head, and sat down beside him. “Are you really better? Where did all those vulgar flowers come from?”

  “Lady Durbar.”

  “Oh.”

  “Listen, Clare, we’ve only got ten minutes. I want you to tell me exactly what happened when I got coshed.”

  “Aren’t you glad to see me?”

  “Yes, my dear, of course. But—”

  Clare turned away her head. “Well, you might have said so. If you really are ill, you oughtn’t to—”

  “Darling Clare, why are women always so irritable when their—when men are ill? Exasperated, brusque, and skeptical?”

  She paused a moment; then, still looking away, came out with, “Because we’re afraid you might die. You give us a fright, and fright for—for someone you’re fond of—always makes you irritable afterward.”

  “The doctor said I’d be all right, if I followed his instructures closely. He said I must be sure to kiss the first visitor who arrived.”

  “Did Hesione bring those vile flowers in person?”

  “No. I still require the prescribed treatment.”

  Clare’s lips on his were like moths, trembling and velvety. Two tears fell on his face.

  “Now, you ministering angel, tell me what happened.”

  “I do love you when you’re being business-like and bracing,” she said dreamily. Then she told him about the fight in the courtyard and Alec Gray’s intervention.

  “So you saved my life?”

  “I suppose I did.”

  “You and the unprepossessing Mr. Gray.”

  Absently, she played with Nigel’s fingers. “I’ve been thinking,” she said. “When the fight was over, I made an idiotic remark to him about his sunburn.”

  Nigel began to laugh, but it sent a knife through his head.

  “He accounted for it by saying he’d driven back from Southampton that morning. The inside of his right forearm was red with sunburn; and there was a triangle of it at the base of his throat, with one side of it running up the left side of his neck. So he must have been lying, mustn’t he?”

  “I’m sorry. My head can’t be working properly.”

  “In the morning, my poor slow-witted sleuth, the sun is moving from east to south.”

  “The sun doesn’t move.”

  “Shut up. You know what I mean. So, if you were driving an open car, with your shirt sleeves rolled up, from Southampton to London, it would strike the right side of your neck and the inside of your left forearm.”

  “By Jove, Clare, you’re right! You’re a wonder. To get sunburned in those places, he must have been driving from, let’s see—” Nigel sat us in bed, grasping an imaginary steering wheel—“from the East coast direction. From Norfolk or Suffolk. He didn’t say when he’d started?”

  “No. But he told me he’d just got back for lunch.”

  “It’d take several hours to produce sunburn that bad. Whatever bit of no good he was up to, he must have come at least a hundred miles—probably more. If he started from somewhere in Suffolk after breakfast, at ten o’clock say, he’d get back to London for lunch.”

  “But he could have been driving all night as well—from Stockton-on-Tees.”

  “Don’t be depressing. I’m an invalid. Has there been anything in the papers about a spectacular robbery in the Constable country—or Stockton-on-Tees?”

  “Well, actually I did buy a newspaper this morning,” said Clare, with the proud but dubious tone of a suburban housewife announcing to hubby that she has purchased some exotic delicacy for his supper. She rummaged in her bag, gave Nigel a folded paper, and moved away to look at the card which Lady Durbar had sent with her flowers.

  Wishing you a speedy recovery. Must see you soon, it said.

  Clare turned round, to see Nigel, gray
-faced, staring at the front page of the newspaper.

  “Darling, what is it?” She was at his side in one swift movement.

  “They’ve got him.” Nigel indicated a photograph. “This is the boy I was looking for. He’s been kidnaped. From where he was staying, with an uncle and aunt, near Chelmsford. Essex. But it was last night.”

  The sister came in, to say that Miss Massinger’s ten-minute visit was up.

  When Inspector Wright looked in, at lunchtime, the newspaper was still on Nigel’s bed.

  “So you’ve seen it, sir.”

  “Yes. That’s the boy all right. We’ve missed the bus.”

  “And we had our hands on him yesterday morning,” said Wright bitterly. He told Nigel about his hunch, and the Sergeant’s abortive interview with the boy. “Someone must have followed him and his mother down to Essex. Then, when the radio appeal went out—yes, we decided to broadcast for the boy yesterday—they knew they had to move fast. Chap dressed up as a policeman arrives at the farm; inquires for boy. Young Bert admits he’s the lad in question—why the hell he should lie to my Sergeant in the morning but come clean the same night, I don’t know. Bert had said nothing about it to his uncle or aunt. Phony cop says the Super at Chelmsford wants to ask boy a few questions. Police car at end of lane. Fetch him back in an hour. Hour passes. No boy. Uncle rings up Chelmsford police. Curtain. A blasted smooth bit of work, so now, what?”

  “Find the other boy instead. Foxy. I’m convinced he knows this Bert, and he may know about Dai Williams’ message. No doubt the gang, whoever they are, have extracted it from Bert by now. That’s all the more reason for us to get hold of it.”

  “Foxy. Yes. Mrs. Hale must know him, if he’s a friend of her son’s. She’s gone down to her sister in Essex this morning.” The Inspector told Nigel about the discovery of the Quack’s body, and the writing on the wall. Nigel informed him of Clare’s detective effort.

  “Where was Gray last night?” he asked.

  “At The High Dive, from six-thirty till about midnight. A pity, because—apart from the mustache—he roughly answers to the uncle’s description of the phony cop. But we’ll put his alibi through the mangle, and we’ll investigate his movements on Thursday night as well. That was a clever bit of work by Miss Massinger. Any theories, sir?”

  “We’ve got to assume there are links between Dai Williams, the Quack, Gray, Bert Hale, and Foxy. Otherwise we’ll go mad. Now, we know Gray was in London on Thursday afternoon. That evening, or night, he must have driven the best part of a hundred miles out of London—far enough to allow for his getting badly sunburned driving back the next morning. He says it was Southampton. We think it was not. O.K. If Gray is the man Dai Williams was after, Gray was behind his murder. He must have some sort of organization, which duly bumped off Dai’s murderer when he looked like becoming a danger to it. I don’t think Gray shot the Quack himself; he’d hardly drive a hundred miles just to throw his revolver into the North Sea. But he might well have driven the actual killer out of London that night—down to Harwhich, say, where he could catch a boat for the continent or Scandinavia.”

  “We’ll have to arrange for you to be coshed at regular intervals, sir,” said Wright, with his attractive, brief flash of a smile. “It seems to clear your mind. Well, I think I’ve got all those points. Enough work to keep fifty men busy, and I’ve got—” The Inspector shrugged. “Time you had your sleep, sir. I’ll be off.”

  “When you find Foxy, let me see him. I’ve done nothing yet. You know, Wright—”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “There must be bigger things at stake than the success of a gang of housebreakers.”

  “That’s what has me worried….”

  Copper’s father, the Detective-Sergeant, had been transferred a couple of weeks before to another Division. His family remained at Notting Hill till he could find a house in his new area, and he only saw them on his few irregular hours off. Glancing at the newspaper this morning, he had recognized Bert’s photograph as that of one of his son’s young friends. No urgent action seemed to be called for; he was going home later for the night, and would discuss it with his son then—not that the boy could know anything about Bert’s disappearance.

  Mrs. Hale, contacted by the county police at her sister’s farm, had given them Foxy’s name and address. As soon as Inspector Wright received the information from them, he sent a man to the address, who was told by Foxy’s mother that her son was helping his father at the barrow in Portobello Road. She offered him one of her innumerable brood, a redhead of eight called Gloria, to take him to the pitch and identify Foxy.

  Earlier in the day, Foxy and Copper had foregathered, to deal with the situation arising from the newspaper accounts they had read of Bert’s disappearance. Unaware that he had been betrayed by Copper’s jeu d’esprit, written upon the kitchen wall of the derelict house, Foxy advocated a policy of masterly inaction. Foxy’s general attitude toward the constabularly was that, if they could not be confined to barracks, they should be confined to directing traffic and other such harmless necessary pursuits: having in his possession now the letters he had stolen from Alec Gray and the jade idol, he would certainly be accused of stealing from Lady Durbar; having been guilty of housebreaking, and, in Copper’s view, of withholding information about a murder he had witnessed—if not of being an accessory after the fact (the anonymous letter could only be considered as a slight palliative of his guilt), Foxy was more averse than ever to any contact with the police. Besides, he had argued to Copper, how could it help Bert now? Foxy had said at the start that Dai Williams’ message was a warning to Bert that he would be kidnaped. Well, he had been kidnaped. So what?

  So they ought to tell the police about the red-faced man, the spiv outside the Post Office, the young gent with the buttonhole, protested Copper. They needn’t say any more; but the above characters must be mixed up in the kidnaping—they were, or ought to be, Wanted Men. Foxy said that one thing would lead to another, and if you started spieling to the dicks, the next thing you found yourself in the cooler. Copper, who had a healthy respect for his dad, began to waver. His initial skepticism about the Dai Williams’ message had recently returned. It was too much to swallow, that a dying man would write down the name and age of a boy he had never met, and give the paper to the boy. Bert must have made it up. It wouldn’t have been the first time Bert’s powerful imagination had hypnotized his friends into crediting the incredible. Copper decided privately that he would tell his father about the “message,” and strongly put forward his own view that Bert must have substituted it for the real one he had received.

  After their midday meal, the two boys walked along to Portobello Road. On a Saturday afternoon, the Portobello Road ceases to be a thoroughfare and becomes a dense cross section of London life with the animation of an Oriental bazaar. The upper end is lined with booths at which are sold antiques of every degree of modernity, Victorian jewelry, cutlery, bits of lace and silk squares, clocks and watches, books, vases ranging in aesthetic quality from the hideous to the inconceivable—a long array of junk in which the occasional elegant piece shines out, to the connoisseur’s eye, like a diamond on a dunghill.

  Here, the crowd is as variegated as the articles for sale. Engaged couples looking for a bargain; Americans bemused by the wealth of the genuine antiques; ballet students in stovepipe trousers; hairy young painters and their sloppy-looking mistresses; aged, eccentric ladies—decayed gentlewomen from Bayswater bedsitting rooms—padding along in plimsolls, with all their wardrobe on their backs, muttering and crazily peering ahead into some unfathomable vista. Sprinkled amongst the throng, one saw the drape suits and eye-searing ties of the wide boys. Children, avoiding collisions by some instinctual radar, pursued one another through the crowd. At their stalls sat the dealers, inscrutably eyeing prospective customers, separating the sheep from the goats—the real buyers from the finger-and-pass-on brigade—with the skill of long experience.

  Foxy and Copper th
readed their way down the curving hill toward their objective. As one descends, the market changes character: the decorative gradually gives way to the purely utilitarian, knickknacks to household necessities, obese vases to second-hand corsets. The boys stopped for a moment to watch some entertainers, performing in a side street for the benefit of a row of children who sat on pavement and railings. The entertainment consisted of a fiddler, a drummer, a cornet player, and the life and soul of the party—a tiny, dark-faced man dressed in a top hat adorned with feathers, a clergyman’s collar and frock coat, riding breeches and plimsolls, who capered indefatigably, chaffed the audience, told jokes unsuitable both for it and his collar, and led them in community song. The children were eating it. Foxy and Copper gave the show a dirty look and passed on.

  Now the crowd was thicker than ever. All the housewives of London seemed to have congregated here. The fruit and vegetable barrows were doing a roaring trade. At the next intersection a Communist Party meeting endeavored to compete. The speaker, watched by two yawning constables and a Special Branch man impenetrably disguised as a spiv, was thundering to an audience of at least twenty that they, the irresistible working classes, the heirs of the future, must express their solidarity with their Russian comrades in this time of sharpening capitalist contradictions and demand that the Tory government take a stand against the American warmongers, and clear out of Africa (“What about Scotland?” asked a stentorian voice from the crowd), and throw in their lot with the glorious Soviet Union whose representatives were now in London (“What about Churchill?” “What about freedom of speech?” “What about Father Christmas?” bellowed several British workers).

  Foxy, somewhat impressed by the oration, bought an ice-cream cone, elbowed his way to the rostrum, and placed the cone on the palm of the speaker, which was outstretched in a rhetorical gesture.

  “Good for the choobs, chum,” he said.

  The boys now repaired to the fruit barrow owned by Foxy’s father. An apparently infinite succession of red-haired children—Foxy’s brothers and sisters—emerged from the press, like a recurring decimal, to greet him. His dad flipped a hand. Foxy set to work weighing out orders for the customers, and Copper bagged them up. Foxy was a well-known figure here: barrow boys winked at him, or made the arcane gestures of their calling; passers-by recognized the hoarse, shrill voice he lifted to advertise the family wares. It was during a lull in business, some twenty minutes later, that Foxy, lighting a cigarette butt and glancing up the street, saw his sister Gloria approaching, hand in hand with a character whom his trained eye instantly recognized as a plain-clothes Busy. Foxy dived underneath the barrow.