No Escape (11 page)

Fumbling behind her back as he came towards her she cried out, “I haven't got it! I swear I haven't! Jane may have it or Gerry. Gerry more likely. I don't know—”

He hit her across the mouth with the back of his hand so that her head struck the carriage window. But her fumbling hand had met the groove of the door handle and her resolve, helped by his blow, which flung her off balance, brought the door open with a jerk. She swung with it and was gone. The door struck the outside of the carriage, rebounded, helped by the wind and crashed back into place.

The man was stunned for a few seconds. His slow brain had not foreseen this possibility, which was doubly disastrous. If she was dead—could she be otherwise at the speed the train was travelling, then there would be inquiries. If she had not died there would still be inquiries and she would grass this time, the lousy bitch. In any case they would find the film. He had been sent to get it, no holds barred. He had failed. It didn't do to fail the boss. Just keep his mouth shut and fade.

Working very quickly, sweating now in his fear and haste, he re-packed the suitcases, folding the clothes, making a reasonably tidy job of it. When he had finished he fastened them—they were not locked, since Sheila had not replaced her lost keys—threw them up to the rack and going to the door on the corridor side, shot up the blinds. After that he took Sheila's vacant seat, pulled out his newspaper again and began once more to read.

The others trooped back and took their places. The woman opposite Sheila's former place leaned forward and said in an anxious voice, “The girl?”

“She left,” he said, not lowering his paper. “Left of 'er own accord.”

“But I didn't see—”

“Be quiet.” said the old man near the other door.

“Spread out to fill the carriage. The guard is on his way for the tickets.”

They moved to obey him. Four a side, quiet, respectable, though the young couple were rather pale, they presented a very commonplace appearance to the guard who inspected their tickets. After he left the carriage nobody spoke. Ten minutes later the train drew in to Reading.

They all left the carriage. The young couple moved into the dining car to continue their journey west, the others left the train and the station. Later that day they would return, to travel back to London on new single tickets, at different times during the afternoon and evening.

But the man who had failed left the station yard, watched the others go into the town and then, entering the Southern Railway part of the station, travelled by slow train to Guildford, where he picked up a fast train to Waterloo, went by tube to Euston, by train to Holyhead and by boat to Ireland. Having been born in that country, though he had lived for ten years in England, he had no difficulty with his powerful frame and recognised accent in finding a job in Dublin. He was not proud of his failure nor pleased at leaving his few possessions in England. He was even more cast down when he remembered that in his surprise, call it shock if you like, at Sheila's sudden exit, he had not taken the trouble to rub his prints off the suitcases. But thinking it over, he decided that he was less afraid of the Law in England than he was of his former employer.

As the days passed and his work began to bore him with its regularity of effort, he lost his fear of both and began to plan other activities.

When Jane's passion of tears had passed, she lifted her head, dried her eyes, poured herself some tea and read again the paragraph in her evening paper that had caused her sudden storm of grief.

Sheila was dead. Her body had been found beside the down line, where it had been observed about noon by the stoker of a goods train proceeding slowly west. She had been taken to Reading, since her ticket showed it was her destination. Her parents were traced in that city; they identified her; they had expected to see her soon, though not on that particular day.

The girl's identity had been quickly proved, the report continued, from papers found on her person, notably a letter addressed vaguely to ‘Doctor in Charge', written by a medical registrar at the West Kensington Hospital, London, and a copy of a form stating that she had taken her own discharge from the hospital. An accident was possible, the paragraph finished, discreetly.

Mary thought otherwise.

“Obvious nut case, poor thing,” she said, comforting her friend. “You couldn't have helped her more than you did. No one can these days, can they? I mean, the doctors won't certify them on principle. So they all go about killing themselves or other people.'

“It isn't quite as bad as that. More cases are improved than used to be, when they were all shut up indefinitely.”

“But the danger remains. What about your registrar? He might have been drowned. People do drown trying to save suicides. I think it's crazy. If they want to be dead, why shouldn't they?”

“Aren't you contradicting yourself?” Jane answered and with tears gathering in her eyes again, went on, “Anyway, I don't think she did. She was frightened of something and she wouldn't tell us. If only she had. She must have been pretty desperate to jump out of a moving train.”

Mary said no more. She really knew nothing about the case, which seemed to her to be both pathetic and sordid, but not to concern her friend too closely. So she left Jane to recover by herself and set about cooking something really attractive for supper. When she had this well in hand she poured herself some sherry and a good stiff gin for Jane, which soon persuaded the latter to take a less apocalyptic view of the world.

The hospital, the next morning, was humming with the news and with very varied assessments of it. There were those who shrugged it off as typical suicidal behaviour about which nothing could ever be done. Others were indignant, because they believed it could have been prevented by more effort on the part of those in charge. Even Miss Gleaning, Jane found, was worried at the failure of the psychiatrist, who had seen the girl.

“If he wasn't sure about her, couldn't he have sent her for observation to a mental bed somewhere?”

“He said he
was
sure,” Jane told her, miserably conscious of her own shortcomings. “He didn't think she was a real suicide at all. He thought it was hysteria.”

“Then she ought to have been made to give her proper home address and her parents should have been brought here to take her away. We aren't a home for nervous debility or for bad girls either, nor are we a social settlement. We're a hospital.”

Sister in Alexandra ward agreed with this and was inclined to blame Jane for not disclosing the Burgesses' address in Reading.

“I know,” Jane answered. “I've been kicking myself ever since I posted her letter. But I thought they'd be sure to come. I didn't know she hadn't told them where she was or what had happened or anything. And she only gave me the letter on condition I didn't show it to
anyone
. So I only glanced at the address and didn't make a note of it, mental or otherwise. I can't forgive myself.”

Her distress was so evident that Sister began to relent.

“Well, it looks as if our Dr Foley was wrong this time,” she said. “So you mustn't blame yourself too much. People are entitled to use their free will, even against themselves. You can't manage everyone's life, though the politicians seem to think they have a right to try.”

Sister meant well, Jane thought, going back to her department, but she was really only papering over the cracks in a system that had failed. Too many unrelated minds had been exercised over the problem of Sheila Burgess. No one had tried quite hard enough, no one had fitted all the aspects of her case together. Above all, no one had really cared, except perhaps herself and Tim Long and neither of them had cared enough.

Tim went to the X-ray Department at the end of the morning to find Jane. He learned that she shared his own feelings of frustration and guilt and was comforted by this. His friends at the hospital had told him the night before, when he was on duty, that he was making a fool of himself. Or else suffering from wounded vanity in finding that the girl he had nobly rescued was so ungrateful as to finish what he had postponed for her.

Jane, too, was comforted and relieved to find someone who shared her haunting belief that Sheila's death was not self-determined.

“I've got a film I found in her room,” she told him, eager to confide another source of her anxiety. “I haven't told anyone about it, yet. Ought I to send it to her people or what? I meant to give it to her, but I forgot that evening I fetched her luggage—”

‘You were a bit preoccupied, I imagine,” said Tim drily.

“You mean Gerry Stone? I only met him that afternoon.”

“Quick work,” said Tim.

“About that film,” Jane's voice held a warning. Tim accepted it, amused.

“Yes, what about it?”

“I've got it here. I wondered if it would show—”

He stared at her.

“Develop it, you mean? Isn't it developed?”

“No. It's a funny sort of spool. Trade kind, I suppose. I've never seen one like it in the shops and there isn't even a maker's name on it. Only a number on the strip of greeny-blue paper round it.”

“
Blue
! Perhaps it's a blue film! By all means let's develop it.”

“Don't be an idiot!” Jane was annoyed by his flippancy. “Nudes aren't blue.”

“What a name for a song! Nudes aren't blue, do you think that's true? If only of you, tum, tum, ti-tum. Few, mew, queue—”

“Oh, shut up!”

“No, really, did she model for the nude?”

“Yes, she did.”

Jane was furious. She thought she had found an ally, but he was only a buffoon.

Tim shook his head at her, then laid a hand on her arm. “After the Gleaning is finished and the chaff distributed^—no, seriously—when the rest have gone home, this evening, stay on and I'll come here, sixish. We'll have a look at that film. It might be useful. The Law has been on to us, you know. Yesterday afternoon, actually. They didn't lose much time after they found her body. I think the film will have to go to them. But we may as well have a peek for our own interest.”

“Yes. Before they come to me. I wonder why they missed me out yesterday?”

“It was all terribly hush-hush. They saw Foley and the other brass who had seen her, not even me, except about the river incident. I was told nothing. I got what I did from the evening papers.”

“Like me.”

Late that afternoon, when the department was empty, Jane lingered, putting in time correcting and checking the order of the files. Some of her junior colleagues, she knew, had a very poor grasp of the alphabet.

From time to time a nurse put her head round the door to ask for Miss Gleaning. Each time Jane said, “Gone home. Can I help you?” but each time the nurse disappeared. Twice Jane went out into the corridor where the chairs for patients led in a long row back to the main Out-Patient waiting hall. No one was sitting there. The stream had dried up for the day, she hoped; the evening's accidents had not arrived yet.

Tim hurried in half an hour later than the time he had suggested, apologising cheerfully but giving no explanation. She did not expect any. Time depended on the work in that place, not the other way round.

She already had Sheila's film in her pocket so she led the way into the dark room. This was by way of a narrow, angled passage, designed to cut off all light. Jane moved along it briskly, knowing every inch of the way in the black dark. But Tim, though he had been there often before, had to grope along, a hand on the wall.

Jane switched on a dim red light and Tim saw the row of sinks, the taps, the frames in which wet films were hung to dry, the rack above the sinks to which the frames were clipped. He stood back out of the way while Jane busied herself with preparing to develop the small spool in her pocket.

As the picture grew Tim moved forward to look over her shoulder.

“It seems to be a sequence,” Jane said, “but it isn't ciné film. The figures— Oh!”

“Christ!” said Tim.

Obscenity was a word that had been in very common use for many years. Both of them had grown up with it and were not ignorant of its various commercial realisations. Out of normal curiosity they had both read smutty novels, but being neither prudes nor perverts had found them disappointing, good for neither a thrill nor a laugh.

But this was different. Jane did not need a print from these negatives to recognise the naked Sheila. Dogs in the street, cats on the roof, Sheila and this muscular unknown—

She was shocked, genuinely shocked for the first time in years. Medical training, medical knowledge, the scientific attitude of mind were all very well, she thought, but I like to have my demonstrations clean.

Her hands were shaking a little as she clipped the strip of film to the rack. She could not look at Tim.

“Blue as the summer sky,” he said. “I wasn't far out, was I?”

Jane's mind was working again.

“She must have stolen it,” she said. “She couldn't bear them to have that record of her. So they killed her.”

“Let's get out into the light,” said Tim. “The atmosphere in here is altogether too lurid.”

He took Jane's hand in his and led her back into the cold bright light of the department. She was still shaking a little. He found her a chair, made her sit down and then moved away to switch on a table lamp with a long flexible stand. He bent it into a convenient position to examine the object he held in his hand.

“What are you doing?” Jane asked, trying to blot out the recurring pictures of Sheila and her partner.

“It's the spool that film was wound on,” Tim answered. “Come and look.”

She went to him at once.

“Yes. That's why the actual film seemed to be a bit loosely wound. There must have been something to stick it on, though.”