Fear to Tread (3 page)

“I’ve got a boy here who looks as if he might be useful to you. I’m no art expert, as you know, but he draws a neat, clean line and has lots of self-confidence. He’s leaving here in July. Would your people like to take him on? The only thing is, I’m afraid there’s no question of apprenticeship. His family have got no money at all, so he’ll have to be paid something, even when he’s learning. I expect he can run errands and pour out the tea. How’s Wright getting on? Best wishes to your wife and family.”

The letter was addressed to the Managing Director of Lithography and Artists Services Ltd. It was on occasions such as this that Mr. Wetherall, who was an inverted snob of a not uncommon type, was thankful that he had been at Oxford and had made, and kept, a few useful friends.

After tea, which was brought in by Miss Donovan – her heart was kind, but her taste in pastries was more flamboyant than Mr. Wetherall’s – and after dealing with the not unjustified complaints of Mr. Edgecumb that the Examination Sub-Committee had introduced Elementary Physics into the curriculum whilst the Finance Sub-Committee had allowed no expenditure of any sort on equipment, and after devoting an hour to the special coaching of four candidates for future University Scholarships, and after reading and signing fifteen papers produced by Miss Donovan, Mr. Wetherall sat back in his chair, looked at the clock which now said half-past six, and sighed once more.

He was wondering, and not for the first time, whether he was really suited to his job. He liked boys. He enjoyed teaching, particularly the teaching of the less precise subjects, like history and English. On the other hand he found the routine of administration and management increasingly distasteful. Committees terrified him.

Having allowed plenty of time, he naturally picked up a bus at once, and arrived at Deptford Broadway with ten minutes to spare. All its lights were blazing, but Luigi’s had a deserted look, and when he got inside he saw that only one of the tables was occupied by a depressed-looking couple who were talking in whispers. Three months before, at that hour, the place would have been crowded.

Mr. Wetherall sat down at his usual table, opposite the service door, and picked up the handwritten menu. So far as he could judge the food was as varied and attractive as ever. At that moment Luigi came through the door. His name, actually, was Castelbonato but the South Bank called him Luigi on the same principle that led them to call all German waiters Fritz and all French hairdressers Alphonse. His family had been in England for two generations. His turn of phrase was still apt to be foreign, particularly when he was excited, but his accent was purest cockney.

“What’s up, Luigi? Have you been frightening the customers away?” Then he saw the look on the little man’s face and felt sorry for him.

“What’ll it be, Mr. Wetherall?”

“I think I’ll wait for my wife.”

The couple at the other table signalled their bill. Luigi went over to them. When he came back he did a thing he had never done before and which, in a trained restaurateur, gave a little indication of how upset he was. He sat down in the chair opposite Mr. Wetherall.

“You can have what you like,” he said. “Chicken – duck – I’m shutting up tomorrow.”

“What’s it all about?”

“No customers.” Luigi waved his hand round the empty room. The bright lights. The clean cloths. The fresh flowers.

“What’s it all about,” said Mr. Wetherall again.

Luigi took a deep breath.

“They bin saying my food’s dirty. They bin coming along here making a fuss. Fortnight ago they come along and find a dead beetle in my ravioli. In
my
ravioli. Who would be likely to put such filth in, I ask you, them or me? They throw it in my face. A whole plateful—”

“Who—?” began Mr. Wetherall.

“Do not ask who. Ask why. I’m tell you. I used to take food from them. There’s no secret. Bacon and sugar. All took it, you understand. I wasn’t the only one. If we couldn’t get it other place, we had to get it from them. Then I wanted to stop, you understand?”

“I don’t—”

“They asked too much. Bacon and sugar and butter and tinned meat are good, but they are not good at five and six, six and seven shillings a pound. You can reckon it up for yourself, Mr. Wetherall, you know what I charge. In the West End, perhaps. That’s West End prices. Not here. So I said I must stop. Then they warned me—”

Luigi suddenly cut off the torrent of his speech, and Mr. Wetherall at last got the chance to say: “Who are these people you’re talking about, Luigi?”

Luigi was not listening. He had his head half turned, and in the silence that followed they both heard, beyond the service door, the outer door of the kitchen open and shut softly.

Luigi jumped to his feet and went out through the serving door.

At that moment Mrs. Wetherall arrived, five minutes late and full of insincere apologies.

They had, as Luigi had promised, an excellent dinner, but Mr. Wetherall did not find himself enjoying it.

Next morning Mr. Wetherall asked Miss Donovan for her elder brother’s address.

“Patsy?” said Miss Donovan. “Why, he lives home now, Mr. Wetherall.”

He was on the point of expressing his surprise when his experience of the South Bank and its problems checked him. There could be reasons why Patsy Donovan and his young wife would have given up their house and gone back to live with one or other of their families; but Peggy might not want to discuss them.

Patsy was a detective-sergeant, attached for C.I.D. duties to Borough Police Station. Mr. Wetherall had known him, as a boy, in the mid ‘thirties, at the Battersea School at which he had been teaching. Battersea had been Mr. Wetherall’s first impact with the light-hearted, tough-minded, precocious young male who hangs out south of the river. When the wheels of circumstance had brought Mr. Wetherall to the South Borough Secondary School and Sergeant Donovan to the Borough Police Station they had improved this acquaintanceship. More than once they had been able to be useful to one another. It was nearly a year since they had last had occasion to meet.

“Will he be off duty now?”

“He’ll be asleep right now,” said Peggy. “He’ll be up by eleven. Should I ask him to come round—?”

“No. I’m off until lunch. I’ll go and see him.”

As Peggy was on her way out she stopped for a moment at the door and said: “It’s some time since you seen Patsy last, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll find him changed a bit.”

“We are none of us static,” said Mr. Wetherall.

“I suppose that’s right.”

“A doctor once told me that you change your blood and your character completely every seven years.”

“There now!” said Miss Donovan. “I’d better fetch you those milk returns and you can sign them up before you go.”

The Donovan house was one in a row of the oldest houses in the district, a miracle of eroded brick, decaying wood and blackened stone, a sepulchre, whitened daily by the power of Mrs. Donovan’s arm. Mr. Wetherall went round to the back and found the sergeant at breakfast in the kitchen. He was alone in the house, for his mother, though over sixty, still went out to do a morning’s work at a block of offices near the Elephant, and Mr. Donovan had long ago drunk himself into an expensive grave.

“Why, come in.”

Mr. Wetherall got his first shock when Sergeant Donovan spoke, and another when he got up and the light fell on his face.

“I’m sorry. I seem to be disturbing your breakfast.”

“That’s all right, Mr. Wetherall. Pleased to see you. Sit down.”

The voice was hard. The red-headed boy and the big, well-made, pleasant young man had both gone. In their place was this heavy, and somehow rather dangerous-looking person.

“Some time since I’ve had the pleasure of seeing you, Mr. Wetherall.”

“I expect we’ve both been busy.”

Mr. Wetherall was playing for time. He was wondering whether the new Sergeant Donovan could help him. Might it be better to temporise – something about Sammy or Peggy – anything would do. He was aware that the sergeant was looking at him steadily over his tea-cup.

In the end he said: “I came across something last night that I didn’t much like. There wasn’t anything I could do about it, but I felt it might help if I passed it on. It was at Luigi’s—”

He told the whole story.

It was difficult to say if Sergeant Donovan was interested or not. He sat very still whilst Mr. Wetherall was talking and at the end he said:

“Your idea about this, is it that someone’s been starting a whisper about Luigi’s food?”

“That’s what he says.”

“To run him out of business?”

“I suppose so.”

“Anyone whose restaurant does bad, Mr. Wetherall, could think up a story like that. It’d be a sort of excuse, wouldn’t it?”

“But he said they actually came and pretended to find insects and dirt in his food. They made a fuss in public. That sort of thing—”

“Why would they do that?”

“He said that he used to get food from these people – black market stuff, I suppose. Then they put their prices up, and he couldn’t pay. So they said, if he didn’t pay they would drive him out of business.”

“Well now,” said Sergeant Donovan. “Who are ‘they’? Who are these people he’s talking about?”

“He didn’t say.”

“Any suggestions?”

“No. He just said ‘they’ and ‘them’. You could see he was nervous about them. In fact, if he hadn’t been so angry about it I don’t think he would have said anything.”

“I can believe that bit all right,” said Donovan, with rather a tight smile. “Did he actually say that it was black market food he’d been buying.”

“Not in so many words – I mean, I couldn’t swear to it in a court of law.”

“You won’t be asked to do that,” said the sergeant, reading Mr. Wetherall’s thoughts accurately. “It’s not Mister Luigi What’s-is-name you’ve got to worry about. He’s just the meat in the trap. He’s the worm on the hook. Once people like him start fooling round with funny stuff they always end up in trouble, one side or the other. It’s the people who supply the Luigis that I’d like to have a quiet word with. Or the people who supply
them.
Just a quiet word.”

As he spoke he moved across to the window, so that the light fell on a white line of scar which ran down, stretched and taut, from cheekbone to chin, so that for a moment, the jaw seemed to hang from it, like a puppet’s jaw on a thread. When the sergeant turned back into the room he spoke more mildly.

“So far as doing anything about this goes,” he said, “I’m ‘L’ Division. Luigi’s place in Deptford Broadway, that’s ‘R’.”

“Is it?” said Mr. Wetherall. The geography he had been taught had not included the frontiers of the London Police Authorities.

“However, I’ll see if anything can be done. I might put a word in the right quarter. But my best advice to you, Mr. Wetherall, is to leave it alone. They’re not a nice crowd the people behind this. Not a nice crowd at all.”

“Thank you,” said Mr. Wetherall. “I’m sure if anything can be done you’ll do it.”

As soon as he got back to the school he sent for Peggy.

“What’s it all about?” he said.

“All what, Mr. Wetherall?”

“Your brother – living at home. What’s happened to his wife? And what’s happened to him. He looks ten years older than when I saw him last – you must know what I mean. If you think,” he added with belated caution, “that it’s none of my business, say so. But I’ve known you all for a very long time, and if it’s just that he’s had a row with his wife, or something like that, and there’s anything I can do to help—”

“It’s not a row, Mr. Wetherall. She’s dead.”

“Good heavens,” said Wetherall stupidly. “I am sorry. I’d no idea. Of course, that explains it. What a pity. Such a nice girl.”

He found that Peggy was looking at him, in the steady way that her brother had done. He felt a growing sense of embarrassment.

“Silly of me,” he said, “jumping to conclusions. You must forgive me. What happened to her? It was very sudden, wasn’t it?”

“She didn’t just die,” said Peggy slowly. “She was killed.”

“Killed?” Mr. Wetherall was really startled.

“I don’t think there’s any reason I shouldn’t tell you about it. It was in the papers. You know they had one of the houses in Lower Marsh. Some men broke in one night. I expect they knew Patsy was away on duty. Doris was alone in the house. They tied her up and gagged her with a towel. They bust the home up. They didn’t take much. Just some papers and a little money.”

Peggy stopped, and Mr. Wetherall tried to say something, but failed. The truth was that the idea of violence frightened him. At second hand it made him feel rather sick.

“They tied the towel over her mouth too tight. She was suffocated. She was dead when Patsy got home to her.”

“How horrible. How absolutely horrible. Did they catch the people who did it?”

“They haven’t caught them yet.”

“Have they any idea—?”

“Patsy says he knows who it was. But he can’t prove it. You know his job is something to do with stealing from the railways, and the long distance lorries—”

“If he knows,” said Mr. Wetherall, very much distressed. “If he knows, surely—”

“Knowing isn’t proving. There was one particular lot he was mixed up with. He didn’t say much about it. He’d been pretending to take bribes, and they thought he was bought and sold so they got talking a bit freely in front of him. What they did was meant as a sort of warning to him not to pass it on – they never meant to kill Doris.”

“It was murder, whether they meant to kill her or not.”

“I suppose it was,” said Peggy. She seemed unexcited about this aspect of it. For a moment Mr. Wetherall wondered if she might have been making the story up. He dismissed that thought. Nobody could have made up a thing like that.

“Has he told anyone about his suspicions?? If the police only knew, surely they could do something. It would give them a line to go on.”

“They had an inspector from Scotland Yard on it. He didn’t get very far.”