A Fragment of Fear (8 page)

“It’s not as simple as that,” I said again. “It’s difficult to explain. I travelled down with her and listened to a lot of emotional trouble, and she talked of suicide.”

“A bit unstable mentally, I suppose, like they thought down at the police station, between you and me. I mean, she wasn’t no beauty, I’m told, and directly I saw you, and this flat, if I may say so, I thought ‘Well, if he wanted to start any nonsense like that he would choose something a bit different from her.’ Not that you can always tell, of course.”

He had reached the door and had his hand on the door knob. He had a fixed idea of how things were, and he wasn’t interested, and I felt I had to talk rapidly to detain him.

“She gave me a note in a buff envelope. Just before we parted in Victoria Station. I want to show it to you. There’s a very odd thing about it.”

I picked up the note on my desk, and he came over reluctantly.

“You don’t want to give your name and address to odd people you meet on trains, if I may say so, sir, not if they seem a bit cranky. It always leads to trouble of some sort. I suppose you felt sorry for her.”

I handed him the note, and said:

“I didn’t give her my name and address—that’s another point I might mention. But read that, and then I’ll tell you about it.”

He stood by the window, holding the note a long way from his face, as long-sighted middle-aged people do when they can’t be bothered to get out their spectacles, and when the telephone rang I left him frowning down at it.

It was Juliet’s father, again, confirming that I was going to meet her at the airport at four-thirty that afternoon, and not at the air terminal. I listened to the man’s snuffly voice droning on about the evening’s arrangements.

“So you’ll be back here about six o’clock, old man?”

“That’s right, squire,” I said.

“Then we’ll go straight out to dinner, after a drink, old boy?”

“Splendid.”

“Look forward to seeing you, old boy.”

“Me too,” I said.

He always called me “old boy.” He tagged it on at the end of almost every sentence he spoke to me.

“That was my future father-in-law,” I said, as I put the receiver down. “He doesn’t like leaving things to chance. He’s a great organiser. He’ll tell you so himself, if you ask him, or even if you don’t ask him.”

I didn’t think the remark witty, but I thought it merited a polite smile. However, he didn’t smile.

“This note you’ve shown me,” he said. I could detect the awakened interest in his voice. “This note you said she gave you, sir. I’ve been looking at the type and I happened to glance at the type of this bit of writing you’ve left in your typewriter, and at the typing paper.”

I nodded eagerly.

“That’s right. It’s the same. So is the typing paper, and so is the envelope. That’s what I wanted to tell you.”

“What did you want to tell me, sir?”

“That the note she gave me was typed on my machine, and on my typing paper, and put into one of my envelopes.”

He looked at me, puzzled, trying to sort out the implications.

“That’s what’s so odd,” I added.

“This message you typed,” he began, but I cut him short.

“I don’t think you quite understand what I’m getting at. I didn’t type it.”

“You didn’t say that when you gave it to me to read, sir.”

“I was going to but the ’phone rang.”

He picked up the piece of paper again, and glanced at my typewriter again, because I think he felt he ought to do something. He said gloomily:

“Well, I don’t know what you’re getting at, sir. Are you suggesting that this lady who complained about you somehow got into this flat, got hold of your name and address, typed this stuff out, took it all the way down to the seaside, came up in the train with you, then gave it to you at Victoria Station, and then came and complained about you at the police station? Is that what you’re trying to say?”

“Well, not necessarily.”

“What do you mean, not necessarily, sir?”

“What I say, not necessarily. Maybe she did get into this flat and maybe she didn’t. Personally, I don’t think she did.”

“Then who are you suggesting did, sir?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“No, I don’t know—that’s the point.”

The thing was beginning to resemble a bad cross-talk act.

I was getting irritated, and he saw it, and that is bad when you are dealing with the police. He passed his tongue over his lips and said:

“There’s no need to get annoyed, sir. You raised this matter, I didn’t.”

“I’m not getting annoyed.”

“We were quite content to take your word in this other matter against hers—failing independent evidence, and in view of other circumstances. There was no call to show me this piece of paper.”

In effect, he was telling me that he thought I had faked the whole thing in order, in some obscure way, to discredit the woman.

“Of course there was a reason to show you the paper!” I insisted loudly. “It shows that some unauthorised person has been into this flat. If that’s not a matter for the police, perhaps you’ll tell me what is?”

He stiffened, but to do him credit he kept his temper. Police get accustomed to dealing with excited citizens.

“Anything stolen, sir?” he asked mildly.

“Nothing.”

“Anything disturbed—contents of drawers on the floor, cupboard doors open, anything like that, sir?”

I shook my head.

“Any signs of a forcible entry by the door or windows?”

“No.”

“Anybody have a key of the flat apart from yourself, sir?”

“Only the woman who cleans the flat—and she wouldn’t write that pompous sort of stuff, why should she? And my fiancée, she’s got a key, but if you want an alibi for her, she’s been in America for a month.”

“This Mrs. Dawson mentioned in the note, was she known to your daily woman or to your fiancée?”

“Of course she wasn’t.”

“I was only asking, sir.”

“Yes, well, she wasn’t.”

“That’s all right then,” he said in the patient tone of one who was not only keeping his temper but wanted you to realise it. “Who is this Mrs. Dawson, anyway?”

“She was murdered in Italy recently.”

“Murdered, was she?”

“It was in the papers at the time.”

“I don’t read the newspapers much—except the football pages. Was she a friend of yours?”

“No, she wasn’t. But I’m preparing something about the case. I write crime articles and crime novels. I’ve been trying to find out something about her background, and it’s been hard work. I’ve had the idea that people have been trying to obstruct me, but it was just an idea. Now comes this note. So I was right.”

“Who would try to obstruct you, sir, as you call it?”

“I don’t know. That’s the point, I don’t know who—or why. And another thing—somebody unknown to me rang me up early this morning and asked if I’d got that note, and then tried to badger me along the same lines.”

“I see, sir.”

He looked down at his blue helmet, and began to polish the badge with his right thumb. Then he said:

“You write what you call crime novels—thrillers, as it were, mystery stories?”

“Yes, I do.”

I saw what was in his mind. He had changed his ground, or at least extended it. He was now fumbling towards some theory that I might have typed the note myself and created some mystery for some obscure reason connected with a thriller story. But he was too punctilious to say so. He just nodded his head thoughtfully and said, “Ah.” Then he straightened himself up.

“Well, sir, in regard to the other matter, I will report that you categorically deny the accusation. In regard to the matter we have just discussed, I take it you wish me formally to report your own complaint? Or do you wish to reconsider it?”

He was offering me a let out.

I replied obstinately.

“I would like you to report it. I realise that little can be done, but I would like it reported.”

“Very well, sir. I’ll take this message you say was typed by some unknown intruder, and I will formally report the matter, as you wish.”

He folded the paper up neatly and placed it in his notebook. He didn’t sigh resignedly, but it was the loudest non-sigh I’ve ever heard.

“Good day, sir.”

“What’s your name, Sergeant?”

“Matthews, sir, Sergeant Matthews, but you don’t need to worry about me not reporting what you want. That’s what we’re paid for, sir.”

“I wasn’t worrying.”

“That’s all right then, isn’t it, sir?”

He put on his helmet and let himself out without turning round. I felt he considered me to be a disappointment, a man towards whom the Force had adopted a tolerant attitude, towards whom he, in particular, had assumed a kindly, avuncular role; a man who had invented a silly story, and persisted in it, despite a chance to retract with good grace.

I heard the street door close downstairs, and walked to the window, and saw him cycling off towards the police station.

The pigeon, which I had nicknamed Tommy the Hen, because I did not know its sex, was back on the roof guttering opposite, staring across with beady eyes.

I guessed that Tommy the Hen was not the only one observing me, but I felt some relief because I had reported matters to Sergeant Matthews. He had taken my story with about a pound of salt, but at least I had lodged it with him.

As to the sad sack in the train, whom I now thought of as Bunface, the reason for her actions completely eluded me.

Quite clearly the police were wrong in their estimate of her.

Her thoughts, conscious and subconscious, were concerned with death and self-destruction and the hereafter, not with men and sex fantasies and wishful imaginings.

She was not neurotic in the way they thought. Her grief was genuine. Therefore she had lodged a complaint because she had been ordered to do so. And yet I could swear she had liked me and had been grateful to me for listening to her woes.

I imagined her checking my name and address from some scruffy piece of paper she had been given, dragging it out of her shabby handbag, holding it with her coarse, red hands in the light of a lamp standard near the police station, peering myopically at the writing.

Then, reluctantly, and because she had to, she would have gone in, well knowing what the station sergeant would think.

Poor embarrassed Bunface, I thought, poor pathetic victim.

But whose victim?

I spent part of the day trying to work, and part of it trying to puzzle out another problem. Whoever had instructed Bunface must have known that the police would take no action. Was the complaint therefore in the nature of a feint, a vicious, probing dab in the air, such as a tiger will sometimes make with its paw?

I now thought it was. But there was more to it than that.

After a couple of gins and tonic and a sandwich for lunch I felt better, for luckily I have a sectionalised mind, and my thoughts were now on Juliet and her arrival. Indeed, I was cheerful and excited as I drove to London Airport.

But I forgot that as a secretary to the Minister she might be carrying a spare briefcase or two, and travelling with him, all the way, right back to the Ministry, with the rest of the cohort of civil servants who have to accompany Ministers when they move around these days.

So my trip to the airport was wasted. All I could do was wave, and follow in my car at a discreet distance. However, I picked her up in Whitehall in the end, and although she was deadly tired, the evening proceeded inexorably to its conclusion, as planned in all its details by Stanley Bristow.

For the first part of the evening my heart bled for poor little Juliet. Her father plied her with questions in his snuffly voice, and her mother posed supplementary questions in the energetic, bustling tones of a television interviewer. If she had answered them all, the entire confidential secrets of the Washington conferences would have been round the London clubs, and many other places, too, within forty-eight hours. But they were no match for her, tired though she was.

In the end, Stanley Bristow snuffled his way to a halt, with a plaintive protest that she never told them anything. By that time, I don’t think Juliet was even listening properly. She was picking at her fish in the murky candle light of the Charlotte Street restaurant. Once or twice she looked up and caught my eye, and gave one of her secretive little half-smiles, and then looked down again.

Stanley had bought champagne to celebrate her return. He was never mean with drinks. By the middle of the meal she looked a little better. So far, I had said nothing about the woman in the train from Brighton, the message, the police visit, or the telephone call.

Now I thought I might as well do so. I was banking on a lighthearted reaction from Stanley, mellow with drink. Lighthearted it certainly was. I hoped it would set the tone for the women. He gave one of the muffled guffaws which served him for a laugh.