A Fragment of Fear (12 page)

“We were just making a few general remarks, Mr. Compton. I don’t think you have any call to suggest we meant them personally.”

“No call at all,” said the sergeant.

I turned away from them and walked to the opposite side of the room. As I did so, I heard the superintendent say:

“I have to inform you, Mr. Compton, that if you would rather say nothing, and await the arrival of a legal adviser, that is your right.”

I swung round and looked at them, the tall, grey one, and the shorter fawn one, so different in appearance, so different in manner: one apparently kindly, one mostly harsh and rasping. A good orchestration. Lifting you up and slapping you down. But both tired and over-worked. I think it explained a good deal.

I shook my head.

“I know all that. I don’t need a legal adviser to recall to me what I was doing for a couple of hours last night.”

“Well, let’s have it then,” said the sergeant with surprising directness. “Let’s have the times and places, then we can pack it up for the moment.”

He went over to the table by the window, sat down briskly, and flipped open his notebook.

“At eleven-thirty, I was still talking to my future father-in-law.”

“Okay,” he said. “At eleven-thirty you were still with him.”

“At eleven-forty-five, I left him and walked down Kensington Church Street. At around midnight, or a bit before I was here.”

“Here?”

“Yes, here waiting around, making out a statement for some plain-clothes police officer. It took about an hour. Just before one o’clock I was with your officers at my house.”

“Not our officers. Kensington officers. We’re Scotland Yard.”

“Well, police officers.”

“Finding nothing and nobody?”

“Finding nothing and nobody.”

“And after that?” asked the superintendent, in his quiet voice. “After that, what?”

“After about one-thirty, nothing. I was in bed. But that covers the period, that covers me till one-thirty in the morning.”

“That’s right,” said the sergeant, looking up from his book. “That covers you till one-thirty in the morning, that’s okay, sir. That covers the gentleman till one-thirty in the morning,” repeated the sergeant, looking at the superintendent.

I should have let well alone, but I can never resist a crack. It’s probably the Irish streak in my blood, not the Dutch or the English.

“So you can go and see them and check up,” I said coldly. “Apart from a few minutes walking down Church Street when I was observed by two men you don’t think exist, you can go and see them. Ask them more questions, check the times again, get more signed statements, do what you damned well like.”

“We’ll do that thing,” said the sergeant, cheerfully. “We’ll do just that thing, sir.”

But I still couldn’t let well alone, because I was still resentful of their implications.

“Unless you think the plain-clothes officer in this station who took my statement was a figment of my imagination? Unless you think the uniformed officers who searched my flat at my request are non-existent?” I said sarcastically. “And the patrol car was a sort of ghost car? I’m going now,” I added. “I came here with goodwill, but I would have done better to stay away.”

The sergeant got up hurriedly from his chair, and moved to the door. His purpose might have been to open the door for me, but I knew it wasn’t. If anything, his object was to keep it closed.

“And at three o’clock this morning?” asked the superintendent quickly. “Say between one-thirty and three o’clock?”

“What’s three o’clock got to do with it, superintendent?”

“That’s about when she died—give a bit, take a bit, sir.”

“He’s been edging up to it, so as not to tax your memory too much at one and the same time,” said the sergeant.

Y
ou’re all right between eleven-thirty and one-thirty, now what about one-thirty to three o’clock? What about then?”

“I was in bed, in bed and probably asleep.”

“Anybody else in the flat, Mr. Compton?”

“No.”

“Anybody to support that statement?” asked the sergeant.

“Probably.”

“Name? And address, if you know it?”

I shook my head, and began to walk towards them, towards the door. I had come of my own accord, I could go of my own accord, unless they were going to arrest me on the spot and prefer a charge. I knew it, and they knew it. More important, they knew that I knew it.

“I don’t know the names and addresses. The witnesses I mean are the people who have got me under observation. Me and the flat. Day and night.”

“Oh, that lot,” said the sergeant.

The superintendent said gently:

“The ones who are persecuting you? The people whose voices you hear on the telephone, who type messages to you on your own typewriter, and try to attack you in the street?”

I nodded. I found myself unable to say more, and walked out without being obstructed in any way.

I think they were glad to be rid of me. At any rate for the moment.

Outside the light was failing now. I stood on the steps of the police station, breathing deeply, watching the traffic move slowly past, thinking about the man calling himself Sergeant Matthews, trying to discern somewhere some clue, and finding no answer.

I walked to the edge of the pavement, waiting for a gap in the traffic. Suddenly I saw what I thought might be an opportunity to nip across the road. A blue car was following a bus, with some distance in between. I believed I could make it, and took a step into the roadway, but the car was travelling faster than I had at first realised, and I stepped back and waited, and between the narrowing distance as the car closed up to the bus, I happened to glance at the corner of a side road some way up Earls Court Road.

It seemed to me that the men standing at the corner were looking in my direction. One was tall and wore drain-pipe trousers, and a short, dark, knee-length mackintosh-type coat. The other was of medium height and stockily built.

Then the traffic closed in. When it thinned again the corner was deserted except for a woman passing with a child.

I looked back at the police station, but I knew it was out of the question, I couldn’t go back in there and say I thought I had just seen the two men who had menaced me on my way back from Juliet’s home. I hesitated, but for no more than a few seconds.

I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t face them again.

I consoled myself with the thought that I was probably mistaken, and that it was two other men, but I knew it was lack of moral courage.

I could imagine the sergeant now saying, “Proper old persecution complex that one has, sir. Proper ripe one, that one is. Well, we get ’em all, don’t we, sir? We get ’em all, the short and the tall, and a few nuts thrown in for good measure.”

There was no question of going back.

All right, so the tired and over-worked superintendent and sergeant took a rugged, conventional view of me. Maybe they weren’t as tactful as they might have been.

But now I knew, in effect, what it was like to have no police force to which one could appeal.

Now I knew what it was like to have the jungle about you, as you walked along the dangerous paths, and you were on your own, and there were eyes upon you, and there was no police force to which you could run for protection.

I appreciate these things now, but at the time I nurtured harsh feelings.

I went back to the flat and washed, and the evening paper with poor Bunface’s picture on the front page was where I had left it, and I picked it up, and when I left the flat to call for Juliet I double mortice–locked the door.

In addition to the Yale-type lock I had a double mortice affair, though I had never used it. You turn the key twice in the mortice lock, and by and large it is burglar proof, short of cutting out the lock or battering down the door.

We went to Soho, to an Italian restaurant for dinner. One of the things which had surprised me was the calm way Juliet had accepted the news of the complaint laid against me by poor Bunface. I did not understand one of the simplest facts of life. If a woman loves you, then you are in the right if it is a question of simple, straightforward matters, and anybody who complains about you is a liar. There is no argument about it.

Juliet made no reference to anything of significance as we drove to Soho. This surprised and pleased me.

When we were seated in the restaurant I said: “Have you seen the evening papers? There was a murder quite near you.”

She nodded equably.

That’s one of the things about modern life. Murder means nothing, unless it affects you personally. In Anglo-Saxon times, when peasants were thin on the ground, murder was a serious matter. It was the loss of a pair of hands to the community. The hue and cry was raised, and everybody by law had to drop what they were doing and bring the criminal to book. Things are different now, because there are so many of us. We can afford losses.

“Seen her picture?” I asked.

She was looking at the menu, preoccupied. She nodded. I said:

“That was the woman on the train from Burlington and Brighton.”

She put the menu down and took off her dark framed spectacles, and stared across the table at me, her face magnolia-pale in the lamp light.

“Are you sure?”

“Certainly I am.”

“You must go to the police, darling.”

“I’ve been.”

“What did they say?”

“Various things. They said she had never made a complaint against me, for one thing.”

“But what about the—?”

“What are you having as a first course?”

A waiter was standing by her shoulder. We chose our food and the waiter moved away.

“They said the man who called on me wasn’t a police officer,” I went on. “They hardly believed a word I said, except that I had been in the train with her.”

She stared down at the table cloth, picking at a roll of bread with her left hand.

“Didn’t you ask them for help or advice, or something?”

“More or less, yes.”

“Well, I mean, what did they
say?
They can’t have just said, ‘we don’t believe you,’ they must have said
something,
put forward some theory. I mean, this is serious!”

I shrugged and ordered a carafe of red wine from the wine waiter.

“They kind of skated around things.”

“They can’t skate round them, darling.”

“Well, they did.”

“Didn’t you press them for heaven’s sake?”

“What for, sweetheart?”

“Well—investigations. And protection.”

“Investigations of what? Protection against what? A message typed on my own typewriter which I can’t produce? A ’phone call from an unknown man? Thugs who didn’t attack me? People who come into my flat and aren’t seen? Old ladies who won’t co-operate? Men who hire policemen’s uniforms—if he did hire it?”

She didn’t answer, and did not have to, because the spaghetti bolognese arrived. She bent over it, but after a few seconds she gave me one of her quick, silent, secretive looks.

“Don’t go and get all withdrawn,” I protested. “You don’t understand.”

“No, I don’t understand. Something ought to be done. You ought to have demanded it.”

“Look, to the police a crime has two motives—a money motive in one form or another, or a sex motive of some sort. They asked, in effect, if I could supply a motive for them to work on. And I can’t. If money or sex comes into it, it’s so well hidden that I can’t begin to see it.”

She bent down and picked up the evening paper which I had placed on the floor by the table, and looked at the picture.

“There might be a sex angle, from what you told me,” she murmured. “I suppose it’s possible.”

I hesitated, thinking over what she had said.

“There might be,” I conceded reluctantly. “I suppose there just might be, in a twisted sort of way. But I doubt it.”

“So do I,” said Juliet.

“Individual jealousy perhaps? A coincidence.”

Juliet nodded. I said:

“You should have seen her, darling, all overwrought and preoccupied with her own sad world. I think she almost forgot why she had been told to travel with me, I think at the end she almost forgot to give me the envelope. I think they had some sort of hold on her at one time, but now—”

I paused, trying to work it out, trying to think it through.

“Now she was almost free,” said Juliet in such a low voice that I could hardly catch the words.

“Her tragedy, her grief and her sorrow, which seemed to her pointless—had liberated her.”

In that cheap Italian restaurant I had caught a faint gleam of something valuable. Juliet had caught it, too, and was looking at me with shining eyes.

The waiter arrived with the next course.

You can’t go on thinking about the Infinite with a grilled sole and chips in front of you. The moment passed. But I often recall it with a whiff of the old excitement. It has been a solace to me at times.

“That’s why they killed her,” said Juliet.

“Because she was free, or overwrought, or both, and couldn’t be trusted.”

“And might talk,” added Juliet. “And might talk particularly to you.”

She had put on her glasses to eat her fish, and the dark frames contrasted with her pale skin.

“About what, for God’s sake?”

Juliet shook her head. We were back to square one. We ate in silence.

“That’s why they may kill
you,
if you go on, darling, they’re afraid of what you might discover,” she said at last.

I guessed she had been using the seconds to gather her self-control. She gave me one of her fleeting glances over the top of her spectacles, and then looked down again.

“Oh, rot!” I said, and laughed. “This is a civilised country.”

“That’s what
she
thought. Maybe Mrs. Dawson thought Italy was a civilised country, too. Both strangled. A sort of roving executioner?”

She had pushed aside her food, and put down her knife and fork. I saw her upper lip trembling. I said:

“Look, if they’d wanted to do me in, they could have done so two or three times already.”

She shook her head violently.

“I’m sure they don’t
want
to kill you! Why should they?—you’re so silly sometimes. Killing people is dangerous.”

“Well, then, there you are!”

“But they will in the end—in the end they will, if they can’t frighten you enough.”

“Do you want me to be frightened enough? Is that what you really want?”

“I don’t want it. But I could love you just as much, darling. You understand that? I want us to be happy and—unfrightened, and undead. I just want you to pretend to be frightened.”

“And give in,” I said. “Is that it?”

“And give in,” she said. “If you’ve got the courage to.”

“I don’t think it’s fair to put it that way.”

“I don’t suppose you do.”

We stared across the table at each other, defiantly, each a little hurt.

“I’ll think it over,” I said at length.

I could feel bits and pieces of emotion churning around inside me, Irish combativeness, Boer obstinacy and tenacity, and the cool Anglo-Saxon tendency to compromise. To be of mixed blood is a mixed blessing.

“I’ll think it over,” I said again.

“That means you’ll just go on as before.”

She looked helplessly round the restaurant, adjusting her glasses, as if somewhere she might find aid and inspiration.

“It’s silly,” she murmured. “The world is full of ideas and things to write about. I think you’ve become obsessed with this idea.”

“That’s not the point.”

“What is the point?”

“I just don’t like—being pushed around, that’s all.”

“That’s what I mean. Obstinacy, or pride, or something men seem to specialise in—it’s made you obsessed.”

“I said I would think it over. Anyway, I can’t do anything at the moment. It’s all one way. I can’t telephone anyone, I can’t write anywhere. I’ve got no contact.”

“You will have—they’ll try and bend you, and if you won’t bend, they’ll just lose patience, they’ll just—”

She didn’t finish the sentence. I asked her if she wanted fruit or coffee, because one had to say something.

She got abruptly to her feet. She said she was tired, and that she wanted to go home, and on the way out of the restaurant I heard her say something to the effect that one couldn’t tell when the last chance would come, one couldn’t tell at which precise point they would decide to finish the whole business off.