Fog of Doubt (27 page)

An hour later, chilled and depressed, the bright eagerness faded, anxiety and irresolution setting in, and yet still with a conviction in her heart that what one so ardently desired could not, surely, be denied, she went out to the gate for the tenth time and listened, peering up the shrouded road, for the footsteps that would bring him looming up through the fog, to her. Not a sound, not a footfall, not a human voice; even the ceaseless rumble of London traffic was muffled and still. She crept along the pavement a little, feeling her way with a hand against the walls of the little front gardens of the Maida Vale houses. I'll go to the cross-roads, she thought. I can't miss him that way. It would do not the slightest good, but anything was better than waiting at home; and, after all, she might easily meet him and have just that moment more of time with him.

A little way up the hill at the cross-roads, there was a telephone booth. The thought came into her mind that she might ring him up and see if by any chance he had had to turn back and go home. She hadn't liked to go upstairs and ring, because Mrs. E. was there with her boy friend; and anyway, she hadn't dared to leave the basement door, in case he knocked and, receiving no answer, went away. She fumbled her way up the hill to the call-box, feeling in her handbag for pennies. There was somebody in the box. She went on up the hill a little way and waited. In a minute or two I'll go down and cough outside the door, she thought. It's probably only a Tender Couple gone in there out of the fog, to neck. On a bad night, you could never get
into
a Maida Vale telephone booth, they were all full of necking couples.…

And sure enough, there were two people in the booth. She h'mm'ed at the door, and a man's voice said, ‘Oh, lor', someone wants to use the 'phone,' and added in a would-be American accent that they would have to break it up, Sugar, and go out into the cold, cold night. And a girl's voice said, ‘Well, it's been nice knowing you,' also in a pseudo-American accent, and they came out and, arms entwined, started off, without a glance at intruding Melissa, down the little hill. And the man's voice said, What now? and the girl's voice said that ackcherly she simply
must
go now, because she was hours late for her appointment already and it was all his fault. And he said well then, where should he ring her up to-morrow? and she said that by to-morrow she would be overcome with shame at her shocking behaviour, and certainly would never be able to look him in the face; and they must just be passing ships or whatever that thing was, and not try and find out who each other was, because honestly, she was
not
a person who picked up people in fogs and—and had petting parties in telephone booths. And he said where
did
she have her petting parties, then, because he'd like to be there some time; and added that come on, he'd see her to wherever she was going, because he'd crashed his date anyway and might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.… The pseudo-American accents faded as they wandered off down the hill and disappeared into the fog; and the last of Melissa's poor little field-flowers crumpled and died beneath the clop, clop, clop of Rosie's high-heeled shoes.

She went into the call-box and dialled a different number. No use ringing up Stanislas now; she knew for certain that he was not at home.

Damien Jones, however, was at home. He was having a meeting, said Damien's mother, who never could remember that a Branch Leader, even a Twig Leader, did not care to have his activities noised haphazardly abroad. ‘Well, never mind the meeting,' said Melissa. ‘I want to talk to him.'

But Mrs. Jones at least knew better than to disturb a meeting. ‘You must,' said Melissa. ‘Tell him it's a Comrade. In most terrible trouble.'

Damien, who to do him justice, could love his fellow men and wish to force them to share everything equally between them, without having to call them by fancy names, came out at once to see who this self-styled comrade-in-distress might be. To him, Melissa, weeping bitterly, choked out a garbled story of deception and betrayal, no names mentioned; only dark hints of nobility from overseas. ‘I'll come as soon as I can,' said Damien, and went back, rather awed, to his Meeting. The Austrian refugees were of opinion that he should rush off at once to the rescue of the seduced lady; a warm gush of tears filled their soft brown eyes at the thought of beauty deserted and in distress. The Welsh intellectual, having satisfied himself that the parties in the case were of differing sexes, lost interest in the matter and said coldly that the Party Came First; the disgruntled adolescents, having equally assured themselves that only one man was involved and he an effete foreign aristo at that, were clamorous in offers to come along and,
en masse
, support their Leader, if there was a fight. It was twenty-past nine when Damien finally got rid of them all and arrived, through the fog, at Maida Vale.

‘Twenty-past nine?' said Charlesworth. ‘You're sure of the time?' The 'phone call to Tedward had finally been established as having been made at eighteen minutes past.

‘Actually it was twenty-two minutes past,' said Damien. ‘I looked at my watch while I was waiting for her to open the door, because it had taken me such a hell of a time to get there.' He added very seriously that he had been ‘afraid of suicide'; she sounded in a frightful state.

Sergeant Bedd noted down 9.22 p.m. in his notebook. Mr. Granger thought to himself that it was all very well for these police fellows, they were used to standing on their two feet all day; but couldn't they, for God's sake, find somewhere to sit down. Where all this was getting his client, he could not see; and meanwhile, the court had long ago reassembled after the luncheon adjournment and heaven knew what evidence that girl was giving in there. As long as she did not go back on her story of Tedward and Rosie coming in together, and finding the body in the hall.…

‘Are you telling me,' said Charlesworth, ‘that you were in the house that night?'

‘Only about ten minutes,' said Damien. He added kindly that the police couldn't possibly ever have found that out: nobody except Melissa knew that he had been there; the Meeting had not heard her name, his mother did not even know who it was who had rung him up; in the thick fog, no one could have seen him come and go; even if there had been fingerprints or anything like that—well, he had been in the house that morning, anyway. ‘It wasn't your fault; you couldn't possibly have known.'

‘Thank you,' said Charlesworth. ‘You set my mind at rest. I hope my superiors will take the same view.'

‘What happened when you got to the girl's flat?' said Mr. Granger who wanted to get back to court and at the moment preferred expedition to an exchange of jolly ironies.

‘Well, she was most frightfully hysterical—you've seen how she can get—and I couldn't make head or tail out of what she was saying. But you see, Rosie had told me about her, so I realized what was up. What you've never realized,' said Damien with simple scorn, ‘is that it wasn't Rosie at all, that Raoul Vernet came about. It was Melissa.'

‘
Melissa?
' said Charlesworth, absolutely thunderstruck.

‘Well, yes. I suppose she must have known him Abroad; she'd been Abroad a good bit,' said Damien, who had not been Abroad at all, ‘and I suppose he's been coming over here and seeing her, because it was too long ago that she was Abroad, for her to be having a baby now, if you see what I mean. So anyway, Rosie told me about her, and I said to send her along to Us, and we'd soon fix her up with a job in the Party or something, because we're very keen on children being born outside the shackles of the old conventions and all that, only I haven't got time to go into it now.…'

‘Thank God,' said Mr. Granger, looking at his watch.

‘… and so, of course, when she found herself deserted and betrayed, she turned to me.'

‘I see.' Mr. Charlesworth stood, hands in pockets, teetering back and forth from toe to heel. He said at last: ‘And of course, at the same time, Rosie was having a baby too?'

‘I suppose that would be what made Melissa confide in her,' said Damien; and he folded his firm young lips over the disillusion, the shock and the heartbreak, of Rosie's defection and Rosie's death, which only the personal terror and dread of the past hideous weeks could have done anything to allay.

‘Did Rosie—when she told you about Melissa—actually mention Melissa's name to you?'

Damien considered. ‘I don't think she actually did; she just said “a friend”, you know how women do. But she said that I knew the friend very well and she said she'd been Abroad and various things like that. So of course I realized at once that it was Melissa.'

‘Rosie had been abroad too,' suggested Charlesworth, ‘and much more recently. And you knew her very well too,
did
n't you? Has it never occurred to you, perhaps thinking about it since, that Rosie was telling you about herself? That she wasn't talking about Raoul Vernet and Melissa at all?'

‘Oh, no,' said Damien simply. ‘Of course not. I mean, if it wasn't Melissa—why should she have killed the guy?'

And so, point, counterpoint, the duel went on; Melissa in the witness-box, gabble, gabble, gabble, her white face turned up to the gallery; Damien in his huddle in the chilly corner outside the court.… The poor little, pitiful impromptu plan of revenge upon Rosie, by taking away Rosie's ‘steady'; the appeal to his chivalry—dark hints of passion and pain and despair, the mysterious background, the incognito, the air of cloaks and moustachios, the final betrayal.… All unaware that Damien believed himself in the secrets of her ‘past', Melissa wept and clung and confided, and vowed that all men were brutes, were devils, were fiends, all except Damien. Damien was the only decent man she ever had met, and to no other man would she ever speak again.…

There was a sound at the basement door and she lifted her head sharply, listening. Stanislas! It was Stanislas, come back, perhaps with lies on his lips, but at least come back to his own true love.…! She left Damien abruptly and rushed out into the corridor, slamming the door of her room behind her. Stanislas! Stanislas!

But it was only Gabriel, the poodle, pawing at the door because he wanted to go out. She stood for a moment, sick and dizzy with the shock of it, the bitter disappointment, the self-abasement, the shame. ‘All right,' she said at last, to the poodle. ‘I'll take you.' She did not trouble about a coat, let her perish, let her die, of bronchitis or pneumonia and put an end to the bitterness of life. No one would care, and certainly she would not. She shuffled her way along the short drive-in to the garage, and turned out into the street.

Damien, so suddenly released from hysterical clingings, blew out his breath and rubbed his chin and paused to wonder what he had let himself in for. Women often had these
volte-faces
or whatever they were called, and if he was not jolly careful, he would find that reaction had set in and, on the rebound, she was transferring her affections to
him
. And of course with all that hysteria and things she was probably most frightfully passionate; for a moment he wondered whether, while preserving his pure love for Rosie, he might not indulge in something a little more reciprocal with Melissa. Chaps were always doing that kind of thing and they seemed to get away with it; the Austrian comrades made an absolute thing of it, they picked girls up on buses and in tubes and at parties with the greatest of ease, and seduced them, and deserted them too, for that matter, and the girls seemed all for it and gaily came back for more.… Still, if this was an example of Melissa seduced and deserted, perhaps he had better keep off! What the hell had she rushed out to do now, yelping ‘Stanislas' like that, at the top of her voice? Dashed off to shoot the feller, Damien thought, grinning, and opened the door and put his head out into the passage to see what went on.

There was nobody there. He called, ‘Hey—Melissa?' but she did not reply. There was a light, on the ground floor above and he went gingerly up the basement stairs and peeked into the hall.

Melissa, half-way down the little garage drive, saw the blurred square of light as the front door was flung open and the fog-dimmed figure came tumbling down the front steps and along the little path and down the few more steps to the gate. The sound of his footsteps grew fainter and fainter; running, stumbling, faltering down the road away from the house.

And the meeting next evening on the bench up in Hamilton Terrace, outside the church. ‘Haven't the police been to your house, Damien?' ‘No, why should they, unless you went and said …?' ‘I haven't breathed to a soul that you were there last night.…' ‘What did they say to
you
, Melissa, about yourself?' ‘They didn't say much, they just asked me where I'd spent the evening.…' And
she
had told them lies about where she had spent the evening, and
he
had told her to say nothing about his having been at the house; and so they had parted, he thrusting his hands into his pockets so that he might not have to touch the hand of a murderess; she running back to catch him humbly by the sleeve and say ‘thank you'—not thank you because of his compassion in not ‘splitting' on her to the police, but thank you because, in his chivalry and manhood, he had killed the man he believed to have done her wrong.

‘What about your coat and hat?' said Charlesworth. ‘You didn't leave them at the house.'

‘I didn't have a hat, I never do; and she hadn't given me time to take my coat off—I still had it on,'

‘I see. And Mr. Hervey's shoes? Where does Mr. Hervey come into all this? Or is he a white rabbit?'

‘A white rabbit?' said Damien. ‘No, he's one of our lodgers.'

‘And these are his shoes?'

‘They are now.'

‘But at the time of the murder, they were yours—is that what you mean?'