Appointment with Yesterday (19 page)

“
A
H
,
THERE
YOU
are, Mrs Er! I wonder if
you
can help me? People keep ringing up and asking for a Mrs Barnes! All yesterday, and now they’ve started again today. I can’t get on with
anything
!
You
don’t know anything about a Mrs Barnes, do you, Mrs Er? It’s not someone
you
know?”

Mrs Graham was sitting with her hand resting irritably on the telephone, looking harassed and aggrieved. She always reacted to having her time unexpectedly taken up as another woman might to having her handbag stolen, and she was looking at Milly, who had just arrived, with a mixture of appeal and accusation.

“No,” said Milly. It was not so much a lie as an automatic reaction, like blinking the eyes in response to sudden
movement.
The turmoil of shock and alarm which had flooded over her at Mrs Graham’s words had rendered her quite incapable, for the moment, of deciding whether to lie or not to lie. The weighing-up of the question whether it was more dangerous to deny her identity than to admit it, was simply beyond her. So, “No,” she said, and watched the room spin round her, with Mrs Graham’s face revolving in the
foreground
, like a white ping-pong ball on the end of a string. Gradually, the whirling furniture slowed down, came to a standstill. Mrs Graham’s face came to rest too, came into focus, and Milly began to hear the words formed by her moving lips.

“It couldn’t be more inconvenient!” she was grumbling. “I’m just starting to summarise the Class C2 responses, and I seem to be twenty interviews short! Twenty! It will invalidate the whole survey! And all that fool of a Miss Bracken can say is that she thinks they were all sent in!
Thinks!
—I ask you! And then she has the cheek to suggest that I should simply extrapolate from the interviews I
have
got!
Extrapolate!
Me!
I may not be the most punctilious researcher in the world, Mrs Er, but that’s one thing I’ll never do. I’ll never extrapolate!”

One felt there should have been a roar of applause at this heroic declaration: but all Milly could find to say was “No”. “No, I should think not, indeed!” she amended hastily, as Mrs Graham’s raised eyebrows warned her that her response had been altogether too tepid. To find herself accused of condoning the evils of extrapolation as well as of murdering her husband was
too
much, and for a moment she just stood there, while her problems swayed like shadowy swing-boats in
front of her, huge and ungraspable, and steadily gathering momentum.

They were closing in on her. They were moving in for the kill. No use, any longer, pretending that someone wanted to offer her a job, sell her an encyclopaedia, or ask her opinion about a new washing-up liquid. Indeed, it wasn’t just “someone” any longer, it was a whole host of them, assembling to hunt her down. “People keep ringing up,” Mrs Graham had said: even allowing for exaggeration, the words could hardly refer to fewer than three. They knew where she worked now, as well as where she lived. And that Mr Loops yesterday … he was in the plot with the rest of them, of course he was: which meant they had tracked her down to Mrs Day’s as well …

“In the plot”—“tracked her down”—“They”—“Them”—Where had she heard these words before? In the urgency of her panic, Milly did not pursue the thought. The important thing, now, was to plan her getaway—either a simple physical one in the form of packing up and getting on a train, or a more subtle one based on lies, and more lies, told with expertise and panache.

Who better qualified than her for such a task? Toughened as she was by a prolonged survival-course in deception, she would be able to out-lie the lot of them; against her
impassioned
falsehoods they would break themselves as against a rock, and she would be free….

But how much did they already know? The first principle of successful lying is to assemble in front of you all the data already irrevocably in the hands of your opponent, and see how it can be rearranged to your advantage. You can’t subtract anything, of course, but you can add bits: and if you are clever you can twist a bit here, alter a sequence there, until the whole tenor of the thing seems to be changed, and they are left staring in blank dismay at the case they thought they had against you, and wondering what has hit them.

But first, you have to find out exactly what their case
is
: what data they have so far succeeded in assembling against you….

“
Data
isn’t the problem!” Mrs Graham was proclaiming (how had she got on to this from the extrapolations?). “Any fool can collect the
data.
It’s the interpretation that counts, especially with the D-E’s. As I keep trying to make Miss Bracken understand, the ‘Don’t know’s’ aren’t just …”

“No, indeed!” said Milly heartily—and Mrs Graham stared at her, startled, but vaguely pleased by support from this unexpected quarter. “I do so agree with you, it’s what I’ve always thought myself,” continued Milly recklessly. “But this woman who rang up, this Mrs Barnes, did she say what she wanted?”

Milly had deliberately muddled the issue, got it all wrong, so that Mrs Graham should overlook her odd persistence in the pleasure of putting her right. There are moments when an ounce of confusion is worth pounds of apology and
explanation
.

“Who?” Mrs Graham looked vague for a moment. “Oh, you mean all those wrong numbers! No, Mrs Er, it wasn’t the Barnes woman who was
ringing,
it was …” here she paused, studying Milly’s IQ as one might study the physique of the man who has come to move the grand piano.

“Oh, well,” she concluded, with a sigh that conveyed more clearly than words the boredom she felt at the prospect of trying to make such as Milly understand. “Never mind. It’s not important. Though I do wish people would listen to reason, I really do. That man this morning, he just wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer, he kept saying he
knew
she was here. Apparently the woman has run away, or something, and he all but accused me of harbouring her!
Me!
As if I’ve got nothing better to do!”—here she rattled a fresh page into the
typewriter
, signifying unassailable busy-ness.

“And now, Mrs Er, if you
wouldn’t
mind …? I’m an hour behind already, it’s been just one thing after another the whole morning….”

Milly gave up, and retired, chastened, to get on with her work. Through the ceaseless clackety-clack of the typewriter behind the closed door, she kept listening for the telephone,
but it only rang once. From the bored, slightly aggrieved tones of Mrs Graham’s voice, it might have been absolutely
anything
: Professor Graham saying that he was going to be late (or early) for lunch: someone wanting to borrow a book: or perhaps a friend or relative in sudden, desperate trouble, and expecting Mrs Graham to interrupt her typing to listen to it. Mrs Graham’s vast and unselective capacity for boredom could have embraced the lot. Milly listened through the door until her ears sang and her very jawbones were tense, but she could pick up no clues. And after a while, soothed by the droning of the Hoover and by all her familiar tasks, Milly gradually gave up thinking about the problem. Anyway, there was nothing she could usefully do. As with any cat-and-mouse game, the mouse stands to gain most by remaining in his usual hole, alert and inconspicuous, relying on his smallness, and on his intimate knowledge of the terrain. It is the cat who must stick his neck out, make the rules, and generally get things going.

M
ILLY STOOD FOR
a number of minutes after she had arrived at Mrs Day’s, staring down at the telephone and wondering if she would feel safer if she took the receiver off or if she didn’t. The pale winter sun, higher and higher every day now, was flooding in through the wide window, showing up every finger-mark, every dingy streak, on the elegant white instrument. Milly noticed, wonderingly, that her fingers were fidgeting to get at it with a damp cloth, just as if nothing had happened. They seemed as if they were separate animals altogether, quite unconnected with herself, and with her seething brain, lashing itself into a fever of indecision as to whether to leave the thing alone to do its worst, or to silence it, as could so easily be done. It was like deciding whether to give tranquillisers to a savage
guard-dog. To do so, you have to go uncomfortably close, and yet not to do so may result in being torn to pieces later on. There is no way of guessing in advance which will work best: no evidence one way or the other. No one knows, least of all the guard-dog.

Milly picked up the receiver and laid it gently on the polished table, and at once it began muttering at her in feeble protest. Straightaway, like an over-anxious mother with her crying baby, she snatched it up and restored it to its proper place: then wished she had left it off after all. The whimpering would have stopped in the end. Off with it, then—the spoilt thing! —let it whine itself to sleep, with her safely out of hearing! She would shut the door on it, she would run to the other end of the flat and switch the Hoover on till it was all over! Then, at last, her nerves would begin to relax, and she would be able to get on with her work safe in the knowledge that the telephone not only
wouldn’t
ring, it couldn’t!

Safe? What sort of head-in-the-sand logic was this? By disconnecting the telephone she was cutting herself off from the
awareness
of danger, not from danger itself. The danger was still there. Biting its nails, perhaps, in some nearby telephone box—maybe only a stone’s throw away—and
getting
more and more impatient with the monotonous
line-engaged
tone. Tactics would be changed … and the first she would know of anything amiss would be the sound of the lift moaning to a halt out there across the landing.

By then, it would be too late. Whereas if she left the telephone in working order, she would at least get some sort of advance warning—enough, surely, to enable her to go racing down those six flights of softly carpeted stairs (no lifts, thank you! —she felt trapped enough already!) and out into the wild, wide, windswept world, where surely she would have the same fifty-fifty chance of freedom as a deer, or a fox, or any other hunted thing?

Already she could feel flight mustering in her limbs, speeding-up her heartbeat. Her hand, as she re-connected
the telephone yet again, was trembling with a build-up of muscular energy as yet un-needed. From her brain the alert had gone forth, and throughout her body general mobilisation had begun: Milly found it hard, with this turmoil of activity going on within, to slow herself down to the pace of dusting … of handling ornaments … of washing up wine-glasses, putting them away on the high shelf of the cupboard. A slender glass stem snapped, brittle as ice, and tinkled sadly to the floor … Milly felt herself moving among Mrs Day’s fragile possessions like a battering ram. Already the sensitivity had gone from her fingertips, the delicacy from her movements: all her finer sensibilities were already in cold-storage, packed away to leave room for the essentials—strength, speed and cunning.

When the telephone finally did ring, it was almost a relief. Milly knew, now, exactly what she was going to say to them: she was inspired, the lies almost told themselves. No, she would tell them, she wasn’t Mrs Barnes, Mrs Barnes was no longer working here. Oh, yes, there
had
been a Mrs Barnes, certainly there had, she had worked here until—when was it? Two?—three?—weeks ago. Would that be the Mrs Barnes they were looking for? And no, she was very sorry, she couldn’t tell them where Mrs Barnes was working now she had moved—gone after a job in Birmingham, someone had said. There’d been some sort of trouble about her references, or something, and she’s had to leave in a hurry….

That would fox them! A big place, Birmingham. They could hunt down Barnes-es there for weeks on end, and as fast as they eliminated one lot, another batch would appear … Barnes after Barnes, rolling in without pause over the smoky Midland horizon.

And meantime, the Seacliffe police would have stopped bothering. Once the search had moved out of their district, they would surely lose interest … they must have plenty else on their minds, with hooligans smashing up deckchairs, and everything. And as for the big men in London—Scotland Yard, or whoever it was—surely their enthusiasm, too, would
flag once the trail had grown as cold as this? London … Seacliffe … Birmingham … and already the dockleaves and the nettles beginning to sprout on Gilbert’s grave, somewhere or other in the crowded, neglected cemetery you could just see from the top of the bus as you travelled towards Morden.

They didn’t solve all their murder cases: how could they? No doubt they did their best, but you can no more trace every murder to its bitter source than you can trace the course of a stream beyond the place where it merges into marshland, spreading out into a formless no-man’s-land of bog, and reeds, and treacherous patches where, if you are not careful, you can sink nearly to the waist.

Surely Gilbert’s murder stood as good a chance of going unsolved as any? There was nothing newsworthy about it, nothing obviously bizarre to challenge the ingenuity of police or detectives, or to stir the popular imagination. The victim was not a beautiful young girl: the suspect was not a member of high society. If Milly could only put them all off the scent for even a few days, she would be safe. Their other files would begin to pile up … their in-trays to overflow…. After all, the police are only human, and in any human transaction, if you can once get muddle and procrastination working on your side, you’re home.

“Barnes? Mrs Barnes? No, I’m afraid not….” Now that it came to the point, Milly found herself gabbling nervously. The lies, spoken out loud, sounded less convincing than they had in the imagination, and she was hurrying to get to the end of her rehearsed speech before her nerve cracked. “No, I’m afraid there’s no one of that name here at the moment. But there was a Mrs Barnes working here not long ago. I wonder if that’s the one you mean? She left—let me see—two or three weeks ago, I think it must be. Someone told me she was moving—to Birmingham, I think they said….”

“Barney!
Have you gone nuts, or something? What the hell do you think you’re playing at?”

“
Jacko!
” The relief was so great that for a moment it was
indistinguishable from the terror that had preceded it, and Milly just stared at the pink wallpaper in front of her, and waited for her blood to start flowing again, and for her brain to start comprehending the miraculous new turn of affairs. “Jacko! Why didn’t you—? Your voice sounded all—! Oh, Jacko, I’m so
thankful
! I thought you were—!”

“Yes. You sounded like that’s what you thought,” Jacko commented drily, his voice sounding very small and far away. “Look, Barney, what the hell’s going on? Have you got the sack, or something? We rang you about sixty thousand times this morning, and the hag kept saying you didn’t exist….”

“Jacko! At Mrs Graham’s, you mean? So it was
you,
then, all the time! Oh, but how marvellous …!” The relief, the sudden lifting of fear, was almost more than Milly could sustain. The pale sunlight seemed to dance in the room, the very air shimmered with freedom, such freedom as she had never thought to breathe again.

Was it three breaths of it she drew, or four? Then Jacko’s voice again:

“… and so we tried to put him off, just like we did the Town Hall wallah yesterday, but it was hopeless. He just wouldn’t believe us when we said we’d never heard of you; and you see, Barney, by that time the Mums was poking her nose out of the kitchen, wanting to know what it was all about, so we just couldn’t keep it up any longer. Well, I mean. But I wouldn’t worry too much, Barney, really I wouldn’t. He seems terribly harmless, this one, like he couldn’t hurt a fly if you paid him. He must be about a hundred for a start, you should just have seen his mop of snow-white hair. Said his name was Soames.”