Death of a Ghost (31 page)

They came back to the lights, which did not please him so much now, since their motion was giddy rather than the delirious speeding onward which they had affected before. Also, there were more people about. The theatre crowds filled the streets uncomfortably and they and the unsteady pavements made progress unpleasant.

Suddenly, he was aware of a familiar smell. It was the hot used air belching out of a Tube station. The vast bright mouth seemed to suck the crowd down and himself and Max along with it.

In the doorway of the lift some inner sense warned him of impending danger, and he stood still, swaying unhappily, but the crowd thrust him on and supported him with its vast sides throughout the descent, which was like the descent into hell.

Afterwards, too, it swept him along giddily down the steep path to the iron trellis which parted wide open before its stream like the gates of a surrendering city.

Max was on his left, holding his arm, and a vast man in a tweed cap fought his way on the other side.

The crowd was so great that they missed the first train, which thundered out of the tunnel. In fact, Max, dragging on his arm, prevented Mr Campion from attempting to catch it, and they, with all those in their immediate vicinity, moved forward to the edge of the platform to wait for the next.

Meanwhile, another lift load of homing playgoers had been jettisoned on to the narrow way behind them, and the centre of the long platform was a solid mass of straining people.

In front of the exits, at intervals where the doors of the trains were estimated to pause, were short iron railings made for such occasions, little barriers to prevent outgoing passengers from being forced back into the train by the sheer weight of the incoming mass, but Campion and his guide avoided this protection and stood midway between two barriers on the very edge of the granite. Before them yawned the track with the raised live rail in the centre and the curving poster-covered wall beyond.

Campion was giddy. The world reeled and swayed like a plane in bumpy air. His intense physical discomfort was intensified by the heat and the breathing, rustling crowd like some great weary animal behind him.

Yet his wretchedness was not all of the body. His subconscious mind was struggling to tell him something, to warn him of something. It made him feel futile and afraid.

Max nudged him.

‘Look at that poster. Can you see it?'

He raised his heavy eyes from the track at his feet, and stared in front of him.

An insurance firm had commissioned an artist to draw a series of rounded doorways, one inside the other, stretching, it seemed, to infinity. An inscription, ‘
The Arches of the Years
', sprawled across the design, but even the lettering had been drawn to heighten the illusion. The first
T
was at least a couple of feet high and the last
S
only just readable. The curve of the wall increased the oddly inviting effect, and unconsciously the drunken man swayed towards it.

‘Can you count the arches?' Max whispered, and slipped behind him, the better to indicate what he meant by pointing over his shoulder.

Campion had to move forward a little to make room for him, and Max's place was instantly filled by another traveller forced from behind. He seemed to move instinctively, since he did not take his eyes from the evening paper he held.

Count the arches. Count the arches. Count the arches. Mr Campion tried.

One, two, three, and three more, and three more, and four, and –. One and two more and three and six – twelve, thirteen, fourteen –. One again, one and two –.

He stretched out his hand to help him to count. From the distance came the roar of the train.

One and two and five more … One –.

People farther down the platform were looking at him, some laughing, some nervous.

One arch again and two – he must get closer.

The train was screaming now; nearer and nearer and nearer.

One and two and three more –. He was almost amongst them now –.

Campion saw the train, saw the great eye in the cab, saw the whole fiendish business, the devilry of the second degree of subtlety; saw the faces in the witness-box, Farquharson, the policeman, the butler, old Chatters.
‘He was certainly drunk.' ‘He fell down.' ‘He was not himself.' ‘He was trying to get to Bushey.'

He staggered back and met resistance; more than resistance – force.

The man was pushing him. He was falling. Someone screamed….

A great weight struck him in the stomach and jerked him up. It was the arm of the man with the newspaper. The train passed him like a monster and screamed and stood still. There was commotion behind him. Max. Max and a screaming crowd. Max in the arms of the man with the cloth cap.

In all his mental vicissitudes Mr Campion had never remembered the subject of his morning's chat with the Inspector – the plain-clothes men who had been following him patiently ever since he left Scotland Yard.

–

‘A
LMOND
paste,' said Inspector Oates. ‘That's what it is, almond paste. What a clever, clever devil.'

He was standing by the desk in the sitting-room at Bottle Street, prodding a sticky cherry with a nail file.

It was past two in the afternoon of the following day, and he had already spent half an hour in the flat.

Mr Campion was himself again in all but one particular; his naturally affable temper had undergone a complete change, and it was a bitterly angry man who confronted his friend.

‘Now you know everything,' he said shortly. ‘I've told you my story and you have your men's reports, I suppose.'

A faint smile passed over the Inspector's face.

‘I have,' he said. ‘One day you shall see them, but not now. You wouldn't appreciate them. In honest P.C. English the history of your night out makes good reading, especially the beginning. There's quite a lot you seem to have missed yourself. You were tight.'

‘Tight!' said Mr Campion with disgust.

The Inspector did not smile.

‘If ever you get nearer to death than you were last night you'll be able to steal his scythe,' he said, seriously. ‘Harris says the train brushed his sleeve when he caught you and the resistance from behind was extraordinary. For a moment, he says, he thought he must go over with you. That chap Fustian –'

He shook his head as words failed him.

‘He beat me,' said Mr Campion briefly. ‘Beat me with all the cards in my hand. I was taken in by that fake poisoning, taken in by the old second degree of subtlety trick. It didn't dawn on me until I was too hopelessly tight to do anything except make a fool of myself.'

‘Beat you?' enquired the Inspector. ‘You're alive, aren't you? Harris and Richards were there, weren't they, even if you had forgotten them? You were dragged out from under a train and Fustian is under arrest. What more do you want?'

‘Under arrest, is he?' Mr Campion brightened. ‘What charge?'

‘Attempted murder. That's enough to go on with.'

Campion sat down.

‘I'm still a little vague,' he said apologetically. ‘But, frankly, on the face of the evidence, I don't see how you dared do that. As far as I can see, the case must resolve into my word against his. The fact that I had a couple of plain-clothes men trailing me shows that I had the idea in my head all day. It seems to me that his solicitor could make out a very good case against me for attempting to frame him. He's beaten us again, Stanislaus. Don't you see it?'

‘Well, he's been charged,' said Oates obstinately. ‘He came up before Mr Masters this morning and now he's detained. I want you to come down and see him.'

‘But, damn it, man –' Mr Campion was still irritable – ‘unless you tell the whole story, which is impossible, there won't be any earthly reason apparent to explain why I had the idea he was out after my blood. As for witnesses of the actual pushing, we all know the value of police evidence in a question of that sort, and as for independent testimony I should think practically everyone on that platform was shoving the man in front of him.'

The Inspector did not comment on this disquieting argument.

He put the remains of the cherry back into its envelope and pocketed it.

‘I may as well have this analysed,' he remarked. ‘But I think there's no doubt about it being non-poisonous, if not particularly wholesome. Are you coming down to see him? We've got him at the Yard at the moment.'

‘The Yard? Whatever for?'

‘After coming up this morning he wanted to make a statement, and what with one thing and another it seemed the best place to take him.'

The Inspector seemed to be intentionally uncommunicative.

‘A statement! Good heavens, has he made a statement?' Campion was becoming bewildered. ‘What sort of a statement?'

‘A long one.'

‘Look here, Stanislaus, are you telling me that he's confessed?'

‘Not exactly. At least, I don't know.'

Mr Campion's ill temper increased.

‘What's the matter with you this morning?' he demanded. ‘You're as secretive as a green detective on his first case.'

Oates remained affable.

‘It's afternoon now,' he observed. ‘Come along down and see Fustian.'

Campion rang for his hat and gloves.

‘I don't want to see him,' he said. ‘It may be childish, but I feel so vicious that I doubt if I shall be able to keep my hands off him.'

‘We'll risk that,' said the Inspector. ‘Come along.'

They went out, and ten minutes later, in a long concrete corridor lined with many small and heavy doors, they passed a little hurrying man with a hooked nose and gold pince-nez. He looked both pale and startled, and, shooting a glance at Campion, would have passed by with his policeman guide had not Oates stopped him.

He was J. K. Pendle, the solicitor. Campion recognized him and felt resigned. Max had a legal loophole and it looked as though he had already found it.

‘All right, Mr Pendle.' Oates was finishing a murmured conversation. ‘In my office upstairs in ten minutes.'

He returned to Campion. Just before they reached a door near the end of the row, before which a large helmetless police constable sat on a ridiculously inadequate chair, two men, conversing animatedly but in low tones, came out. Campion thought he recognized one of them, but the name had escaped him.

Oates had a few minutes' chat with the newcomers, and as Campion drew away he heard his own name and the phrase ‘responsible for bringing the charge'.

‘I see.' The man whose name and calling he had forgotten looked after him with the same half curious, half secretive expression which had characterized Mr Pendle's glance. Then he lowered his voice and went on talking earnestly to the Inspector.

‘All right, sir.' Oates spoke clearly. ‘I shan't be a moment. In ten minutes, then, in my office. Mr Pendle is already there.'

Mr Campion turned to the Inspector as he came up.

‘Do you know, Stanislaus, I don't think I'll see him after all,' he said. ‘I still feel unreasonable. What good can it do anyway?'

The Inspector did not seem to hear.

He signalled to the constable who had risen at their approach, and the door was unfastened.

Mr Campion was still angry. The emotion of personal hatred, which is after all practically unknown among sophisticated folk, had descended upon him, making him ashamed. Slowly he went in to his enemy.

Max was the first thing he saw, the first and the only thing. Campion was naturally observant, and training had intensified this attribute so that whole scenes were wont to photograph themselves on his mind in minute detail, but on this occasion he saw but one thing only, one thing lifted out of its surroundings.

He never knew what the room was like. The heavily barred window, the two men in white coats sitting silent in the shadows, the protected light were all lost upon him. He did not see them.

From the floor all that remained of Max Fustian smiled slyly at him with drooling lips.

Mr Campion stood very still. His anger dropped from him. In its place came the strange horror which is purely instinctive, a primitive horror of that which is not a right thing.

The creature spoke, soft, slurred, meaningless sounds delivered with awful secret confiding.

The Inspector took Campion's arm and led him into the passage again.

‘Sorry to spring it on you,' he said, apologetically. ‘He's worse than he was when I left. They found him when they took him some food in the cells this morning. He was truculent last night, so they left him there to cool his heels. He was only taken before the magistrate because they thought he was foxing. He wasn't quite like he is now, of course, but pretty bad. He says he's Lorenzo de Medici. Says he's known it for some time.'

Mr Campion did not speak.

‘They're like that, you know,' the Inspector went on slowly. ‘As long as all goes smoothly they get away with it, but as soon as they come up against something they can't sweep aside, a police-station cell for instance, they go over the edge and – there you are.'

Mr Campion wiped his face. He had remembered now who the man in the passage had been.

‘What will happen?' he asked unsteadily.

‘Infirmary – Pentonville – remanded until fit to plead. Waiting for the ambulance now,' said Oates, briefly. ‘There's his statement, you see. Five thousand words of it. It took them all the morning to get it down. He confesses to everything: your murder, too, incidentally, and also instigating the assassination of Girolamo Riario, a prince of Romagna – but that was in the fifteenth century.'

‘When he recovers,' said Mr Campion, ‘will you press the charge?'

Oates shook his head.

‘He won't recover. Did you see old Braybridge just now? He's been in to see him. He was very guarded, of course – all these specialists are – but he said “undoubtedly genuine mania”, and I saw his face. Fustian will get worse and worse and finally curl up and die. I've seen scores of 'em.'