The Chinese Egg (17 page)

“I know! A bus. Or a train. We could've been sitting in the seat in front of them. . . .”

“And heard them quarrelling and not thought much about it till now. . . .”

“Till we heard the appeal on the radio this morning.”

“We'll have to make up our minds where the bus was going. We've got to have it all worked out. Or the train.”

“Train,” Vicky said.

“Why?”

“Because if it was a bus and we say which one, they could get hold of the conductor, and he could say there wasn't a baby on it then. But no one could say there wasn't a baby on a tube train.”

“That's brilliant,” Stephen said.

“Let's say the Victoria Line. That goes a long way, it could be anywhere.”

“No, you can't.”

“Why not?”

“The way the carriages are built. You can't sit in front of anyone.”

“Which line, then?”

“I think the Northern. It's longer than the Victoria. Anyway it isn't much of a clue, because they might not have been going to a station on that line. Like us. We changed on to the Piccadilly at Leicester Square. They could've changed too.”

It took time. As Stephen said, it was complicated working out a story that held together, that couldn't be faulted. But when it was ready it sounded a good deal more credible than the account of the flashes.

“How are we going to explain that we aren't absolutely sure of what they look like?” Stephen said finally.

“If they were sitting behind us, we'd only have sort of looked at them when we got out. You don't notice much, looking quick, like that,” Vicky said.

They'd rung 999—“I've always wanted to,” Vicky said, and Stephen said, “Go on, then. Have fun!”—they were put through to something called Information and asked questions which seemed to them to have very little to do with what they had to say. Their names, their addresses, the names of their parents. Their
ages, their schools. “What about the maiden name of my grandmother?” Stephen said impatiently to the sound over the instrument of the scratching ballpoint taking down all particulars. “Pardon?” said the voice the other end, and Stephen said, “Sorry. Nothing. Sorry.”

“Would you be able to go to the Kensington station?” the voice asked.

“Which station? High Street or. . .”

“The police station. Earl's Court Road. Thirty-one bus goes right past it. The Detective Chief Superintendent in charge of the case is working there. He might want to put a few questions to you.”

“You mean go there now?” Stephen asked.

“Where are you speaking from?”

“Hampstead Heath. Well, Southend Green actually. . . .”

“Should take you about forty minutes. No, Sunday, a bit more. I'll ring Kensington and say you'll be over, shall I?”

“I suppose so,” Stephen said, but the line was already dead.

In the Kensington police station they found a young, dark-haired sergeant at the counter expecting them. He asked the same questions and wrote down the answers, but very quickly, searching them with bright dark eyes, smiling occasionally at Vicky. From him they were passed on to a higher-up officer in a room with several desks, walls covered with maps and charts. “It's like Z Cars!” Vicky whispered as they went in, and Stephen whispered back, “Of course. They do their homework.” Here they sat silent while a big burly man with knobbly knuckles and curly brown hair, so exuberant and wiry it seemed trying to become airborne, read through the notes brought up by the dark-haired sergeant from the front counter. Behind them a woman police officer sat at one of the desks, relaxed but alert. Here, at last, they told their story, almost without interruption; the burly detective sergeant asked the fewest possible questions, never interrupted, listened intently. Stephen, who did most of the talking, felt that beneath the wiry hair, there was a critical mind, weighing up every statement, watching for inaccuracies and uncertainties. It was nerve-racking, as bad as an examination. Stephen could tell from the way she fidgeted that Vicky was nervous, though she was all right
when she was actually answering a question. She answered straight and short, no hesitation. He was proud of her. After what seemed a long time, wiry-hair looked across at the woman officer and said, “Chief Superintendent Price'll want to hear this,” and she nodded back, “Yes.” So on to another room and another listener. This time he was in plain clothes, a tall lean man with greying hair and a lined face stamped with fatigue. More questions. Innumerable, endless questions about every detail of that train journey, every event that had led up to that key line, “You said you wouldn't hurt her!” Just as well they'd agreed on their story, Stephen thought, and just as well too they hadn't come with the unbelievable truth. At least now they were being taken seriously. But it was exhausting, keeping a watch on everything you said, trying to make sure you didn't contradict yourself. After more than half an hour of it, Stephen's brain felt woolly, he found he was taking longer over each answer, his thinking was confused. Price must have noticed. He stopped suddenly, in the middle of a sentence and asked one of the waiting sergeants to bring tea. It was hot and strong and sweet and did Stephen a lot of good. While he was drinking it, Price asked, “You'd recognize those two again, would you?”

“I'm not sure. We really only just glanced at them,” Stephen said.

“Would you?” Price asked Vicky.

“I might.”

“I'd like to take you along to the Yard and show you some pictures we keep there. It needn't take long.”

“Right away?” Stephen asked, dismayed. He'd thought their ordeal must be nearly at an end.

“Yes. Is anyone going to worry if you don't get home for another hour or so? You could ring up if you like.”

They were driven very fast through the empty Sunday streets to St. James's Park, signed in at the entrance of New Scotland Yard's imposing block, taken by Price to see the officer in charge of the “pictures”. “Witness albums. That's what we call them. Rogues' Gallery's what you probably know them as,” the competent, small, carroty-haired officer said, and then started asking his own questions. He wanted detailed descriptions of the man and the
girl with the baby. Age? Colour of eyes, hair, complexion; height. Stephen looked quickly at Vicky, hoping she'd remember they were supposed only to have seen the pair sitting down. Fat, thin, medium? Heavily or slightly built? Shape of eyebrows, nose, mouth? Outline of face? It was like feeding information into a computer, you could almost see the cogs turning and the counters falling under the carroty hair. And the result was amazing. The photographs Stephen and Vicky were shown were all of faces not unlike those two they'd seen. Muddling, to have to look at so many so much the same, and yet there were very few over which they hesitated. One or two Stephen looked at twice, girls with enormous dark rings round their eyes, Cupid's Bow mouths and long hair that was so curly it was almost frizzy, but not quite. There were plenty of them, but none of them dead right. He was examining one to try to define what it was that made her different from the girl he'd seen, when Vicky exclaimed, and the sergeant and Stephen moved over to her and looked at the picture she was pointing to.

“Is that him?” Stephen asked.

“I think so. It's like what I remember.”

“You're right he has got funny hair.”

The face that looked up at them was narrow and bony. The eyes were a little too close together, the nose was small and pointed above a tight, spiteful mouth. The hair, which was sparse, grew in tufts, as thin as a newborn baby's in some places on the scalp, thicker in others. It looked, Stephen thought, moth-eaten and rather nasty.

“That's the one you fancy?” the sergeant said. He looked up the name and read it out. “James Henry Purfitt. Armed robbery with violence, threatening behaviour. Had an address in Walthamstow five years ago. Did a stretch of three years. Nothing definite since. Suspected of being in with a lot of boys who ran a protection racket, but it wasn't proved against him.”

“Does it sound as if it could have been him?” Vicky asked.

“Can't tell. You'd have to talk to one of the officers who knows him. Doesn't look very pleasant to me, but you never know. You'd swear to the identification, would you, Miss?”

“I think it's him. Only I didn't look at him for long.”

“Supposed identification, we'll call it. Well, thank you, Miss. We'll keep in touch. If there's anything new comes up, we'll let you know. If there should be a question of another identification, we can find you at this address, can we?”

They left the Yard convinced that they'd only been half believed and that they wouldn't hear any more. It all seemed very flat and unsatisfactory. But at least Chris could no longer reproach them. Vicky told her as they went to bed, after an evening made uncomfortable by the necessity of inventing yet another story to explain how she'd come to be out most of the day without warning and without Chris. Mrs. Stanford was on edge, unusual in that comfortable woman, and Mr. Stanford was sharp. He told Vicky off for coming in late, which was fair enough. She took that in good part, but floundered when he wanted to know whom she'd been with. She told him, Stephen, and that they'd been for a walk round Parliament Square and hadn't noticed the time. She said she was sorry, but it didn't help. Mr. Stanford wanted to know why she couldn't go around with a boy of her own sort, like Chris did. Chris began to defend Stephen and there was the makings of a row. Mrs. Stanford stopped it by saying she had a headache and was going to bed and that the girls had better go up too. They left Mr. Stanford sitting gloomily in front of the television. Vicky couldn't remember a more thundery evening.

Chris's reaction to the great news was disappointing too. She was pleased, but not as much pleased as Vicky had expected. She said, “Good. That's marvellous,” but stopped there, not asking the questions Vicky wanted to answer, and without any of the warm sympathy and bounce that she generally showed. Vicky was forced to tell the whole story straight off without the interruption of eager questions. Like this it seemed short and bald and very inconclusive.

“Aren't you pleased we went like you said?” she asked at the end.

“‘Course I am. You had to, didn't you?”

“Stephen said we had to.”

Silence.

“Chris?”

“What?”

“You angry we didn't ask you to come too? Stephen thought if there was the three of us again, like when we went to that house, they wouldn't listen.”

“No. I don't mind.”

“But you're glad we went?”

“Told you I was.”

They were in bed by this time. Chris lay with her back to Vicky. She picked up a book and made as if she were going to read.

“Chris. What's the matter?”

“Why should anything be the matter?”

“You sound different, that's why. Are you cross with me?”

“No, I'm not.”

“I would have told you before we went, only there wasn't a chance. Dad was there all the time, and you know how he is about Stephen.”

“It doesn't matter. I guessed anyway.”

“What did you do while we were there?”

“I went out.”

“With Paul?”

No answer.

“With Paul, Chrissie?”

Chris said, “Turn off the light, Vicky, will you? I think I've caught Mum's head.” Vicky turned off the light, but she couldn't go to sleep at once. And she listened in the darkness to Chris's long deep breaths and couldn't make up her mind whether they were muffled sobs. Once she said, “Chris?” but there was no answer. She lay awake for what seemed like hours.

Mrs. Plum sometimes treated herself to a glass of port or half a pint of Guinness in the pub on the corner at the end of the day. She had cronies there with whom she gossiped about the weather and the local characters. Other middle-aged friends of hers exchanged their views on the Government and the shocking prices of everything in the shops and about their grown-up children and their precious grandchildren, and they swopped memories, often well-edited so that they became more impressive and more glamorous, or more terrible than the real facts would have been. Most of them were only semi-retired, like Mrs. Plum; they let lodgings, they had part-time jobs in the shops, one was a lollipop man and several were traffic wardens. They talked a great deal and they didn't listen very carefully to what the others had to say, but there was a general feeling of amiability and good will which prevented them from interrupting each other's stories too often or engrossing the general attention for too long. And by and large they absorbed, without listening, the trend of the information, so that everyone was always up to date with the condition of each other's ailments and children's marital status and number of offspring. Since most of Mrs. Plum's tenants were single ladies and gentlemen who went out to work all day, these meetings provided her with the company she loved. During the long day with no one to speak to, she looked forward to the evenings when she could find relief in the spate of words which had to be dammed up so many long working hours.

This Monday evening, Mrs. Hedges had a long story about her sister's husband's interesting operation in one of the big London
hospitals. What the surgeon had said and what Mrs. Hedges' sister had told him to his face, and the appearance of whatever it was they'd taken out of his stomach, occupied the first half hour of pleasurable horror. Then Mrs. Morley wanted to tell them about the customer she'd served in the department store where she worked who had tried to get out of the store without paying. And Mr. Griggs, the elderly widower, who was supposed by the other ladies to have a soft spot for Mrs. Plum, wanted to talk about some bill that was just going to be put through Parliament and made law; he got very indignant about it, and Mrs. Morley joined in and there was quite a tussle between them. After which it was Mrs. Plum's turn to relate anything of interest in her life; but she felt that her tenants and even the happy married lives of her two daughters were rather small beer after shouting surgeons and dishonest shoppers, so she only just mentioned that she'd let her front double on the first floor to a young couple with a baby, and that the baby cried a lot and the girl didn't seem to know the first thing about looking after it, and then she was ready to move on to more general topics. But it was, surprisingly, Mr. Griggs who took her up, reminding her of her duty as a citizen to keep abreast of the news and to relate it to her own life.