Bones in the Barrow (2 page)

Later, he spent five uncomfortable minutes with the head clerk of his department.

“The others managed to do better than you, Byrnes,” this individual stated coldly. “And many of them have further to come.”

“The train kept stopping, sir,” Terry said truthfully.

“Don't be childish. Of course it did. And it was late starting, no doubt. But you knew there was fog. You could have left home earlier.”

“I left half an hour early,” Terry said, this time improving a little on the truth.

“What time did your train get to Waterloo? It was your usual train, getting in late, I suppose?”

Terry had no idea which train it had been. Together with all the other businessmen waiting on the platform, he had got into the first one that came into Toxley Green. So he nodded to the second question, ignoring the first.

“What time did it get to Waterloo?”

Again Terry had not the faintest idea. He only knew what time it was when he finally reached Bank Station, and realized that he was over an hour and a half late at the office. He made a rapid calculation and said, “Ten o' clock, sir.”

The head clerk seemed to be satisfied, at last, or bored, or conscious of the pointlessness of his questions. The boy was only seventeen, after all, in his first year there; he was a good enough boy as a rule. He said: “Very well, Byrnes. Another time in case of fog, allow yourself an extra hour. Never take advantage of weather conditions to show slackness. You only let down the others.”

“Yes, sir. Very sorry, sir.”

Terry went back to his desk, much less contrite than before the interview, but feeling like a near-criminal. If he told his amazing story here, he felt, he would be in danger of being arrested on the spot. It was bad enough to let the others down, whatever that meant, and he suspected that it meant very little. It would let down the whole principle of Life Insurance, as conducted so discreetly and so expensively in that labyrinth of offices, to be mixed up, however distantly and impersonally, with a murder.

But his conscience would not let him rest. He went out to lunch with his friends at the office, but could not share, as usual, in the general discussion of Football League prospects, players, and transfers. He could see only staring eyes and plucking fingers. His friends thought he had taken his lateness and its results to heart, and tried to make him laugh it off. But he stayed serious and preoccupied, only able to forget his problem by sinking himself in his afternoon's work.

The head clerk found him still at his desk when the others had gone.

“I wanted to make up, sir,” Terry explained. It was only partly true. He wanted, above all, to delay what he knew he must do next.

“Have you finished?”

The head clerk, inwardly pleased with his junior, kept his stern looks unaltered.

“Nearly, sir.”

“You can stay another quarter of an hour. I don't want you here after that. The place will be shut. I shall have left myself. Fifteen minutes only, remember.”

“Thank you, sir.”

He had to leave when the time was up. While he was fetching his raincoat from the cloakroom, he made a bargain with himself. If the fog was as bad as ever, he would grope his way to the Underground and go straight home. If it had cleared—

He came out into the street. Above the houses a black pall hung thickly. Church spires disappeared into its depths, and the roofs of the taller houses. But below in the street there was only a light mist. The buses drove past at their usual pace. The shops and advertisements were bright on the other side of the road.

Terry crossed to the stop and climbed on to a Whitehall bus.

Waiting at Scotland Yard, his information, which had swelled to such enormous proportions, suddenly deflated. He felt the same sense of unreality that he had experienced directly after the incident, when he had turned to look round the carriageful of ordinary people amongst whom he stood. What did it really amount to, after all? Someone had socked a woman on the head. A quarrel, probably. Had she really been hurt? Had the blow really touched her, or had she ducked? Women were often hysterical—so he had read, and been told by his friends. It was none of his business, anyhow. He was a fool to be there. Telling on people. The crime of crimes, all his life. Telling a copper, too. The final betrayal. But deep in his right-feeling soul, Terry, the essential law-abider, knew that he had to go through with it. Murder was murder. Against all his specious arguments, he knew in his heart that he had seen a kill.

By the time he was called into a quiet office room to tell his story to Chief-Inspector Johnson, his inner conviction had re-established itself completely. The inspector's bland lack of excitement served to increase it.

“You say you saw this attack take place in a house overlooking the railway line?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Through a gap in the fog?”

Terry nodded.

“Your train was near enough for you to see the expression on the woman's face?”

“Oh, yes.”

“But surely the Toxley Green trains never run on the line next to the parapet. I travel that way myself. You must have been two or even three lines off. The fog was thick enough to hold up your train to the extent you describe, yet the temporary gap in the fog allowed you to see across a distance of not less than fifty yards, and to see clearly?”

“I don't know about all that. I'm telling you what I saw.”

Chief-Inspector Johnson looked across the table at the thin-necked boy on the other side. The youngster believed in his story, hallucination or otherwise. It was not a hoax, unless the kid had unlimited powers of deception. He was not trying to argue: he was describing something he had seen and accepted at its face value, terrible as that might be. The inspector softened in his manner.

“I'm not trying to catch you out,” he said, “but I'll be frank with you. We have not been called in over anything remotely resembling this crime of yours. It's approximately nine hours since it happened, according to you. The body should have been found by now. Or the injured person attended to. I think you said you heard the woman scream for help.”

“Saw,” corrected Terry patiently. “I didn't hear anything. The window was shut, and then the fog smothers noise, doesn't it? I saw her mouth open, and her neck go stiff, like when anyone yells.”

“I see. You can't describe the assailant?”

“No. I only saw a hand with something in it.”

“Something?”

“I was looking at
her
,” said Terry desperately. “I only saw
him
out of the corner of my eye, sort of. If you'd seen her expression you'd know what I mean. I couldn't 've looked anywhere else.”

He felt the sweat break out on his forehead as he remembered the horror of that moment. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his face. Johnson called for a subordinate and gave instructions. Then he turned back to Terry.

“I am checking up with the hospitals,” he said, “and with our latest information. Something may have come in about it by now. Did you find it in the papers this afternoon?”

“I didn't try,” Terry answered.

It had simply not occurred to him to look. His Sensation was a real one; it had nothing to do with the gossip drama he was accustomed to reading with such pleasure on his way home from work.

Again the inspector was surprised, impressed, and in a curious way, touched, by Terry's answer. The boy must have something, he decided. He hoped it was not a mental disease.

“Well, now,” he said, “it ought to be fairly simple to fix the position of the place and check it afterwards with the railway people. What train did you get from Toxley Green?”

“Eight-thirty. The trains were all late, so I don't know—”

“Eight-thirty, Toxley Green,” said Johnson, making a note of it. “Do you mean the time was eight-thirty, or is that the normal time of the train you go by?”

“The normal time of the train. But you see, on account of the fog it was after nine that—”

“What time did you make Waterloo?”

“Ten,” said Terry, and immediately saw himself plunged into a pit of complicated lies. Ten was the time he had noted when he finally went down into the Underground, but it was not the time he had arrived at the station. There had been his frantic meditation on Waterloo Bridge in between. He simply did not know the correct time of his train's arrival. And he could not take back what he had said. For this copper would want to check it and would do so with the boss, and he had told the boss ten at Waterloo, which fitted in with his undoubted arrival at the office at ten-twenty. So the lie must rest. Anyway, he didn't know which train it had been. He had got into the first one that came, sometime between nine and half-past. No one was bothering with the exact time; there was no point. They were late, and they couldn't do a darned thing about it.

“Did you pass Vauxhall Junction before or after this incident?” the inspector was asking; he seemed to be repeating the question.

“After. No. I don't know,” Terry answered hurriedly. He remembered thinking that the houses were the ones before Vauxhall, but he could not recollect passing the station.

“What d'you mean?”

“I thought they were those near the line, after Nine Elms, but I couldn't really see. I only saw two or three of them, and not clearly then. After I saw what I've told you, I didn't look at anything else.”

“And after you moved on?”

“I don't know.” Terry turned his eyes from the inspector.

“Why don't you know?”

“I wasn't looking out the window. Not afterwards.”

Johnson rested his chin on his hand. The lad had been upset, properly upset, and did not want to acknowledge it.

“I suppose you said nothing at the time to the other people you were with?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“They'd have thought I was scatty.”

There was a silence. Then the inspector said briskly, “Well,” and rose to his feet, which made Terry get up too. “If we make anything out of this we'll get in touch with you. Just as well not to spread it about, you know. Rumours have to start somewhere, and the press is always hungry, and expects us to feed it. Besides, people are apt to jump to funny conclusions. So be careful.”

“You don't think I'm making it up, do you?” Terry asked. “Or seeing things?”

“I don't,” said the inspector. “But other people might. Don't worry, son. You saw something real, all right. But you may be exaggerating the meaning of what you saw.”

“It was murder,” said Terry.

“O.K. We'll contact you in due course.”

Terry was shown out of the Yard. At Westminster Station he bought three evening papers. A girl had been found strangled on a heath, four people had been killed on the roads, two in plane crashes. One child, unattended, had fallen into an ornamental lake and been drowned, and another, similarly neglected, off the parapet of a third-floor balcony, and been crushed. But no one had found, or reported finding, the body of a woman with her head sunk on a grimy windowsill, in a room near Vauxhall Junction, overlooking the suburban line from Toxley Green to Waterloo.

Nor did the police find any trace of a crime committed on that foggy day in November.

The Insurance Company agreed with the stated time of Terry Byrnes's arrival at the office. The Railway Authority identified the train he must have caught and corroborated the fact of its stopping on the Wimbledon side of Vauxhall. The upper windows of the houses Terry had described were clearly visible two sets of rails away. Of the occupied houses in the row, three were accustomed to letting the top room on the railway side. But in two the lodgers had clearly no connection with Terry's victim, and in any case had been there for a considerable time, and the third was occupied by two brothers. No one in the row had ever seen a woman with curly dark hair framing her face, and large dark eyes and a wide mouth and a pale skin and long bony hands, as Terry had described her. No one had heard any sort of disturbance or quarrel. They all remembered the morning of the fog quite clearly. The railway was noisy enough, what with the fog signals and that. As for a scream, women were always yelling out, weren't they?

The inquiry, meeting this sort of half derisory, half indignant response, was not pursued with enthusiasm. Only Chief-Inspector Johnson, who had been so strangely impressed by Terry's manner, took it at all seriously. He was not allowed to give it much time, however.

“It's rather more important to find murderers who have left us the body to work on,” Detective-Superintendent Mitchell told him.

“I'm certain the boy knew what he was talking about.”

“If he did we shall hear more of it. The woman must have had friends or relations of some kind. Sooner or later she'll be posted as missing.”

“They aren't always. We find plenty that are never claimed.”

“You can't have it both ways,” said Mitchell, obscurely. “File it for reference. You never know your luck.”

Terry waited in a fever of impatience for a week. Then he inquired at the Yard and was told to wait till he heard, and not to bother them. This was put in kindly and formal terms by Chief-Inspector Johnson. On his way out he saw the sad little row of notices about persons missing. He studied it carefully. Most of them had been found in the river: none resembled the image in his mind.

After another fortnight had gone by, with no news, he found the burden of his secret becoming unbearably heavy. He wanted to fall in with Chief-Inspector Johnson's wishes, because he was grateful to the Inspector for not making fun of his story. So he decided not to tell his girl friend. In any case women were too excitable for such news, and she would be angry with him for not telling it to her while it was hot. There was one friend, however, who would be safe with the secret. This was Cyril Collings, who had left the Grammar the same term as himself, and was set on making a career in science, though at present he was no more than a lab boy, washing test tubes, and setting up apparatus, and running messages, at St. Edmund's Hospital. He decided to tell Cyril the whole story and to ask his advice.