“Physically, he’s a good deal older than his age.”
Was he really ill?
“No, I can’t say that. But I can’t say either that he’s a specially good life.”
Was he in a condition to take serious strain?
That the doctor couldn’t guess. Passant was a happy man. His arteries, though, were hardening: his blood pressure, despite medication, stayed high.
“He’s his own worst enemy, you know.” The voice was kind, that of someone fond of George. “He’s a very self-indulgent chap, isn’t he? We all like a drop to drink, but I fancy that he takes more than most of us. And I’m certain that he eats too much. If you could persuade him to lose a couple of stone, he might live ten years longer. He ought to have a wife to look after him, of course.” It was all compassionate, brotherly, down-to-earth: but this was one patient out of many, he had no idea of George’s secret life. Nevertheless, he went on talking. It was a relief to know that George had someone who thought about him. “He’s a good soul, isn’t he? Do what you can to make him sensible, won’t you?”
It was a relief to the doctor, maybe, that there was someone who thought about George. Yet, an hour later, standing in the outer office at Eden & Sharples, where I had often waited for him, I was asking questions as though this were a routine visit to a solicitor’s. Mr Eden was expecting me? Mr Eden was sorry, the secretary said, he had been called away at short notice. Could I see someone else? Yes, Mr Sharples would be free in a minute. I looked round the office: still frowsty, shelves of books, metal boxes with clients’ names painted in white. Although the practice was going on, I should have guessed that it had diminished, that there must be twenty bigger firms in the town by now.
The present Eden was the nephew of the senior partner whom I had known. Neither of them had been over-energetic; this one (though I wasn’t quite a stranger) was avoiding a distasteful interview that afternoon. Probably George had always inflated the standing of the firm. It must have made, I thought mechanically, a fair living for the two partners, not much more.
The inner door opened, and a big man, taller than I was and much more massive in the shoulders, stood on the threshold. He uttered my name as though it were a question.
“Come you in,” he said.
It was meant to sound cordial. In effect, it sounded like the standard greeting of someone indrawn.
I sat down in an armchair in his office, which had once been Martineau’s. More shelves of law books. Double windows, so that there was no noise from the street beneath.
Sharples took the chair behind his desk. He was in his forties, handsome in a sombre, deep-orbited fashion. He had the forearms of a first-class batsman, and the hair grew thick and dark down to the back of his hands.
“Well–” he addressed me by name again, gazing at me under his eyebrows – “what can we do for you?”
He seemed both formal and awkward.
I said: “I think I mentioned in my letter, anyway I’m fairly sure that Aubrey Eden knows, that I’m a friend of George Passant’s.”
Sharples said: “Mr Passant left our employment some time ago.”
That told me enough of his attitude to George.
“If it weren’t for that connection,” I said, choosing the words, “I shouldn’t have any right to be here at all.”
“We’re very glad to see you. Any time you care to come.”
“You are acting for these two women, Passant’s niece and the other one, aren’t you?”
He looked at me with deep, sad eyes. He detested George, but he was determined to be courteous to me. In his own manner, he was a courteous and not unfriendly man. On the other hand, he was equally determined not to say a word out of place.
After a pause, he replied: “That is not quite accurate.”
“What isn’t quite accurate?”
“We are acting for Miss Ross, that’s true.” That was the minimum he could tell me: it wasn’t a professional secret, it would be on the record by now. “But we’re not acting for Miss Pateman.”
“You mean, you’ve passed that on to another solicitor?”
“You will find that another firm is handling her case.”
“Why is that?”
“You’re familiar with our trade, Sir Lewis.”
In fact, the answer was obvious. There might be a conflict of interest between the two. It was standard procedure to give them different lawyers from the start.
“Can you tell me this,” I said (it was like talking to a wall), “have you briefed counsel yet?”
He paused again, then said: “Yes.”
“Who?”
Once more he was working out that I could get the information elsewhere. At length he produced a name, Ted Benskin. It was a name that I recognised, for during the few years I practised at the Bar, I had been a member of the Midland Circuit, and still, rather as men read about their old school, I watched for news of it. Not that Benskin had been a contemporary of mine. He was one of the crop of young men who had become barristers after the war and who were now making reputations for themselves.
“He took silk not long ago, didn’t he?” I said.
For once Sharples could answer without brooding. In 1960, he said. He then added that Benskin was well-thought of.
I asked: “Have they got a counsel for Miss Pateman (I was falling into Sharples’ formality) yet?”
“I’m afraid I oughtn’t to answer that.”
That seemed like the end of the road. I tried one more slant: had he any idea, assuming that the case went for trial, who would be leading for the Crown? The question was not innocent. If the case was grave enough, or had roused enough horror, then the Attorney-General might elect to appear himself. Sharples was on guard.
“It isn’t very profitable to speculate, I should have thought,” he said. “We’d better cross that bridge when we come to it.”
Against the far wall, visible to both of us, stood an old grandfather clock. It said a quarter to four. I had been shown into the room at 3.35. The interview was over. He seemed more embarrassed than at the start, now that we were both silent: I found it hard to jerk myself away. I turned to the window on my right, watching the traffic pass soundlessly below, where the tramlines used to run, and pointed to the building opposite. I told Sharples that I had worked there as a youth. “Did you, by Jove?” he said with excessive interest and enthusiasm.
When I went out into the street, my timetable had gone all wrong: my next date, the only one that evening before I went to my father’s, was not until six o’clock. There was a stretch of empty time to kill, and I didn’t want a stretch of empty time. Absently (I didn’t expect much from the next meeting, I didn’t know where to find hard news, it was a foggy meaningless suspense, without the edge of personal anxiety) I walked a few hundred yards into Granby Street, in search of a café that I remembered. There was still a café nearby, but neon strips blared across the ceiling, people were queuing up to serve themselves. Close by, a block of offices was going up, the landmarks were disappearing, this street was reaching above the human scale. I went on another few hundred yards and crossed into the market place. There, all seemed familiar. The shops grew brighter as the afternoon darkened: doors pushed open, smells poured out, smells of bacon, cheese, fruit, which didn’t recall anything special to me – perhaps there was too much to recall. For an instant all this gave me a sense of having cares sponged away. Best of all, the old grinding machine was working on, the smell of roast coffee beans flooded out, bringing reassurance and something like joy.
But even there, where we had once entered past the machine and into the café, there was no café left. I walked along the pavement, opposite the market stalls. Alongside me, facing me, women in fur coats, redolent of bourgeois well-being, just as the whole scene was, were bustling along. The cafés of my youth might have vanished, but such women had to go somewhere, after their shopping, for a cup of tea: so I finished up in a multiple store, scented and heated as Harrods, where I found a restaurant full of well-dressed women, most of them middle-aged, myself the only man. There was not a face in the room that I recognised, though once I might have passed some of those faces in the streets.
Over my tea, reading the local evening paper, I was preparing myself for Maxwell. It was one way of pushing away the suspense, any practical thought was better than none. Otherwise, I hadn’t any reason to think he would help me. In the days after Christmas, beating round for any kind of action, I had remembered that he had become the head of the local CID. I had known him, very slightly, when I was pleading one or two criminal cases and he was a young detective-sergeant. Then I had met him again, during the war, after he had been transferred to the special branch. Why he had moved again, back to ordinary police work, I hadn’t any idea. I hadn’t seen him since just after the war; this present job must be the last of his career.
There were bound to be half-a-dozen of his subordinates busy on a case like this. The police weren’t stingy about manpower. It would be detective-inspectors who had done the investigations, not their boss. He might not know much, but he would certainly know something. That was no reason, though, why he should talk to me. I was not a special friend of his. Further, I should have to declare that I had some sort of interest. He was far too shrewd, and also too inquisitive, a man not to discover it. If I had been there out of random or even out of sadistic curiosity, I should have stood a better chance.
I had asked him to meet me at a pub in the market place. There, in the saloon bar, immediately after opening time, I waited. But I didn’t have to wait long. The door swung open, and Maxwell entered with a swirl and a rush of air. He was a man both fat and muscular, very quick on small, strong, high-arched feet. He turned so fast, eyes flashing right and left until he saw me, that the air seemed to spin round him. “Good evening, sir,” he said. “How are you getting on?”
I said, come and have a drink.
We sat in an alcove, tankards on the table in front of us. When he lifted his tankard, wishing me good health, Maxwell’s eyes were sighting me. He had a strange resemblance to my old colleague Gilbert Cooke. Maxwell, too, was smooth-faced and plethoric, so much so that a doctor might have worried, though he was particularly active for a man in his mid-fifties. His great beak nose protruded violently from the smooth large face. His eyes were of the colour that people called cornflower blue, and so wide open that they might have been propped. The resemblance to Gilbert was so strong that it had previously, and had again that night, a curious effect on me: it made me feel that I knew him better than I did. Because I had an affection for Gilbert, I felt a kind of warmth, for which in reality I had no genuine cause, for this man. In upbringing, though, they weren’t at all the same. Gilbert was the son of a general, while Maxwell’s mother had been a charwoman in Battersea. He had himself started as a policeman on the beat, and one could still hear relics, by now subdued, of a south-of-the-river accent.
“Are you getting on all right?” he began – and then didn’t know what to call me. When we had some dealings together in the war, he had come to use my Christian name. Now my style had changed; he was uneasy, and cross with me because he was uneasy. That was the last thing I wanted, to begin the evening. Not for the first time, I cursed these English complications. I told him, as roughly as I could, to drop all that. Underneath his inquisitive good manners, he could be rough himself, as well as proud. He gave a high-pitched laugh, drained his tankard, called me plain Lewis, and whisked off to fetch two more pints, although I was only half-through mine.
He went on with his enquiries about my fortunes. I retaliated by asking about his; all was well, he had just had a grandson. But with Maxwell the questions tended to flow one way.
“What are you here for, anyhow?” his eyes were unblinking and wide.
“That’s almost what I’ve come to ask you.”
“What’s that, then?”
“Your people have been dealing with this murder, haven’t they? I mean, the boy who disappeared.”
He stared at me.
“What’s the point?” he asked.
I thought it better not to hedge. “I happen to know a relative of one of those young women–”
“Do you, by God?”
Across the table his big face was looking at me, open, not expressionless, but with an expression I couldn’t read. His reactions, like his movements, were very quick. He was wondering whether to tell me that he couldn’t speak. Yes or no. I had no idea of the motives either way.
As though there hadn’t been a hesitation, he said: “You’d better come to the office. Too many people here.”
He looked round the bar with his acquisitive glance, the same glance, I guessed, that he had used as a detective in London pubs, picking up gossip, talking to his informers, just as much immersed in the profession of crime as if he were a criminal himself. Nowadays he was too conspicuous a figure to do that magpie collecting job. Yet the habit was ingrained. Leave him here, and he would find someone who would gossip, and information, irrespective of value (perhaps about the domestic habits of commercial travellers), would be docketed away.
“When you’ve finished your beer–” Now that he had made up his mind, he was eager to be off.
Through the familiar market place he walked with short quick steps, faster than I should have chosen. Then up the street where the recognition symbols were disappearing: the pavements were crowded, every third or fourth face seemed to be coloured; I mentioned to Maxwell that when I was a boy it was an oddity to see a dark skin in the town.
“Mostly Pakistanis,” said Maxwell. “Don’t give much trouble.”
Keeping up his skimming steps, he was telling me, as it were simultaneously, that the police headquarters weren’t far off and that the town had less than the nation’s average of crime. On one side of the street were a few shops whose names hadn’t changed: on the other, a building vast by the side of its neighbours, bare and functional. Maxwell jerked his thumb.
“Here we are,” he said, taking my arm and steering me across, as though the traffic didn’t exist.
In the great entrance hall, policemen said Good evening, Superintendent. The lift was painted white, so was the fourth floor corridor. Maxwell opened a door, whisked through a stark office where sat men in plain clothes, opened another door into his own room. After all the austerity, it was like going into a boudoir. The furniture, I imagined, was official issue, though at that, he had a couple of armchairs. There were flowers on his desk and on a long committee table. Flanking the vase on his desk stood two photographs, one of a middle-aged woman and one of a baby.