No Escape (14 page)

Very quickly she opened various drawers where she kept her photographic equipment and stores. As she feared, here was the meaning of the raid. Every film she had, unused, waiting for development, developed and cut and stored in packets, was gone. The treasures collected for over a year had disappeared.

She was at once furiously angry. Dashing out of the flat, leaving the front door open, she clattered down to the ground floor where the owner of the whole house lived. She rang the bell violently.

Mild Mrs Stephens opened her door.

“I've been burgled!” Jane said, wildly. “Did anyone call today when we were out?”

“Burgled? What d' you mean?”

“Did Mary let anyone in? Did you?”

“No. No, of course not. Nobody's been today except the window cleaners. I must say I wasn't expecting them so soon after the last time.”

“
Window cleaners
?”

Jane was off up the stairs, slamming her own front door, running to the telephone, before Mrs Stephens, totally bewildered, had retreated into her own flat.

While she waited for Superintendent Garrod to arrive, with the fingerprint expert he proposed to bring with him, Jane moved restlessly about the flat, afraid to touch anything lest she should spoil some trace of the invaders. On her second visit to the hall she saw in the letter box a white envelope, which had certainly not been there before. She snatched it out. Inside there was a brief note that read, ‘Urgent. Ring me tonight,' followed by a London telephone number. It was unsigned.

Jane pulled open the door of the flat. As she did so the outer front door below clicked shut. She raced back to the sitting-room. A dark figure was outside the gate; a pale blob of a face looked up at her and turned immediately away, unrecognised, unrecognisable.

With the note in her hand Jane went once more to the telephone. She dialled the exchange and numbers on the paper and waited. The bell rang at the other end but no one answered it.

At Garrod's suggestion Jane rang the number on the note again after an hour. This time a voice answered the call, the same urgent, rough voice she had heard in the passage of Tom's flat after the party.

“Who are you?” Jane demanded.

“Never mind that. I must see you.”

“Why didn't you wait when you left the card. I was in. I think I saw you in the road.”

“You don't live alone, do you? I must see you alone.”

“Why? What's all this in aid of?”

There was a pause. Jane thought she heard heavy breathing at the other end.

“It's about—Sheila.”

“
What
about her? You said this before at the party, didn't you? You
are
the same person, aren't you? And at the hospital main door?”

“Yes, I am. When can I see you and where?”

“Look,” said Jane firmly. “I'm not going to have you coming to my flat unless Mary is there too. The only other place I'll see you is the hospital. With so many people about all the time a conversation between a patient and a member of the staff is about the most private you can find and it can be held in public, too. No one listens; they're all much too set on their own troubles.”

Again there was a pause. Jane saw that Garrod was now standing just behind her, listening to her end of the call. She put her hand over the mouthpiece and said, softly, “It
is
that student or artist or whatever. The scruffy one at the party.”

“Are you there?” the harsh voice began again.

“Of course. Waiting for you.”

“Sorry. I was thinking.”

“Perhaps you'd make up your mind. This call is ticking up, rather.”

“Sorry,” the voice said again and then, in a rush, “O.K. At the hospital.”

“At midday tomorrow. Twelve, noon, at the Out Patient Staff canteen. No, you won't want to ask for that. Come to the Radiography Department and sit on one of the benches for waiting patients. If a nurse or anyone asks you what you're there for, just say Miss Wheelan told you to wait for her. Got that?”

“Yes. Twelve tomorrow morning outside your department. To wait for Miss Wheelan. I'll be there. ' Bye.”

“Wait!” Jane cried. “You still haven't told me your name!”

But he had rung off; her receiver was already buzzing gently. She put it down and turned to Superintendent Garrod.

“He wants to see me urgently. I've arranged to meet him—”

“At noon tomorrow outside the Radiography Department. Yes.”

“It wasn't Gerry—I mean, Mr Stone.”

“I'm aware of that. Has Stone been on to you today at all?”

“No.” Jane's eyes lit up in anger again. “Too busy ruining my poor films, I expect,” she said. “Or rather his beastly friends, I suppose.”

The superintendent nodded.

“I'm afraid we've nothing to go on here,” he said. “If it was a set of bogus window cleaners who got in through your window and swiped the films, they were professionals and wore gloves. On the other hand there were some prints outside the windows. Difficult to say whether they are old or recent. We haven't had much rain lately, have we?”

“Mostly fog,” Jane said, dispiritedly.

“I suppose,” Garrod began again, “none of that bunch could have got hold of your keys at any time? I don't mean stolen them. Just had an opportunity to handle them.”

Jane exclaimed angrily.

“I must be getting senile!” she cried. “Gerry took my coat and bag at the party when we got there. He took them away—”

Garrod was reproachful.

“You told me you missed a film out of the bag. You didn't say you'd given up the bag for the whole evening.”

“We weren't there the whole evening,” Jane said, crossly. “I generally leave my bag with my coat, unless it's a proper evening bag. I don't take a lot of money to parties. Sometimes almost none if someone is driving me there. Anyway I wouldn't have imagined at the start of that particular party that anyone would want to take an impression of my door keys.”

“More than one key?”

“The main door and the flat.”

“I see.”

There was a pause. The superintendent was looking thoughtful.

“So one or more of that lot may have got in simply by opening the door,” he said, slowly. “Another little headache for us, Miss Wheelan.”

“What about
me
?” she said, indignantly. “It's not a very encouraging thought that they can come in here any time they feel like it.”

“It is not. I said the other day we might have to suggest you take a bit of sick leave or part of your holiday. I'm not sure I oughtn't to press it now.”

“Don't you dare!” said Jane. “You asked me to see Gerry Stone again and that's what I'm going to do, when he condescends to reappear.”

Garrod did not press his suggestion. But he determined to brief his subordinates more fully about their watch on the house in Arcadia Road. It seemed to him to be extremely likely that Gerry had arranged to take an impression of Jane's keys while she was parted from her handbag. He had visited the flat. He knew its geography. With a key to let himself in he could go over her room and leave again without being noticed by anyone. Especially by anyone who did not know he was not one of the tenants.

When the superintendent had gone, Jane rang up the hospital to give Tim the latest news. He was interested, excited, indignant as she told her story. At the end she said, “I've been thinking. If Gerry is so keen on finding this film and hasn't, of course, found it here, he may decide Sheila had it on her, after all. In which case he may expect the police have it, don't you think?”

“Yes. But the police haven't moved yet—in any direction—so he may wonder if Sheila had it so well hidden they didn't find it. In which case—”

“Her parents might have got it!”

“That was what I was about to say—”

“Sorry. D'you know, I think I ought to go and see them.”

“At Reading?”

“Yes. The address was in one of the papers, wasn't it?”

“I've got it.”

“I'm free tomorrow afternoon. I think I'll go down. It would be a help to them, perhaps, to hear about her stay in hospital and what we tried to do for her and why she left.”

There was a little pause, then Tim said, “Don't ring off. I'm looking at my diary. Yes. I've nothing on tomorrow afternoon, either. I'll run you down.”

“Mightn't you be wanted?”

“Oh, balls to that! I'm not a slave, even if the powers that be like to think I am. The others can cope. They could even get Beech-Thomas to do some unprepared work for once.”

“If you say so. I'd love to be driven down.”

“Right. Two o' clock outside the old Path Lab. No need to advertise.”

Jane laughed as she hung up. Tim was sweet. Very cautious, very practical. Did he really want to see the Burgess parents? Or did he want to have her as a companion for the afternoon? Or—and the thought sent a little shiver of fear through her—did he dislike the idea of her travelling to Reading alone by train? As Sheila had done.

At twelve o' clock exactly the next morning Jane left the department and moved towards the benches along the corridor. A few figures sat there, waiting. They straightened up hopefully when they saw her, but getting no response from her subsided, muttering to one another their various dissatisfactions.

Jane moved slowly to the end of the row, then walked over to the general out-patients' waiting hall. There was no scruffy figure anywhere. Shabby ones in plenty, but their well-worn clothes had been brushed for this occasion, their faces were clean, however worn by anxiety and disease. She looked in vain for the tangled hair, the fuzzy beard, the filthy sweater. The young man had not kept his appointment.

Though her impatience grew as the minutes passed, Jane waited a full hour. Then, remembering that Tim wanted to leave at two, she went away to have her lunch.

She ate quickly, wondering all the time why the young man had not kept his appointment. Was it an artist's inability to move by the clock? Or had he been prevented from coming by other people, importunate friends, perhaps? Or perhaps forcibly held back? In which case it would be a mistake to ring him up, as she was half inclined to do.

In the end she took no action about him. He had asked to see her and had not appeared. That was the end of it. But her thoughts went back to her own activities and they had not left her when she joined Tim on the rough neglected path beside the disused former Path Lab, and he found her subdued, less than responsive to his warm greeting, and silent when she took her place beside him.

But as he drove off towards the west she settled back in her seat, relaxed with a sigh and said, happily, “You're doing a very good deed driving me down, I was really quite a bit scared of going by train.”

He glanced round at her quickly.

“I wasn't thinking of thugs when I suggested it,” he said. “I was thinking of coppers.”

“Oh. Yes, of course. They're supposed to be keeping an eye on me. But only if I meet Gerry, and he hasn't uttered since the day before yesterday.”

“I didn't mean that, quite, either. I was thinking of what Garrod said about not interfering.”

“
Interfering
? Oh, I see what you mean. But surely going down to see the Burgesses to say how sorry we are and all that isn't interfering with police action?”

“It could be. It all depends on what they tell us. And what we tell them, doesn't it?”

His honesty was infectious. Jane agreed. They decided that they didn't care what the police thought of their action and that they would find out as much as possible about Sheila's life during the last few years.

But in this they were disappointed. The Burgess parents were surprised, gratified and touched by the visit. Mrs Burgess, after a few formal exchanges, mastered her growing emotion sufficiently to ask Jane to go upstairs with her.

“Father would like to hear the medical side from Dr Long,” she said. “I don't think I could stand it again. Not after the inquest.”

‘That must have been terrible for you,” said Jane, following her out of the room.

Mrs Burgess led the way upstairs. The house was one of the extensive Edwardian suburban development on the Wokingham side of the town. It was small but not quite as box-like as its successors of the twenties and thirties, nor so well planned as the really modern homes of the late forties and fifties. Mr Burgess was a clerk in an insurance office. One of the many conscientious white collar workers whose salary had not risen over the years at the pace dictated by the big unions for their members' wages. Great care, Jane thought, was needed in this house to keep up the standard below which Mrs Burgess refused to fall. It was evident in the carefully darned curtains at the staircase window and the neatly patched cover of the bed in Sheila's room.

Mrs Burgess moved to the mantelpiece and there turned to face her.

“Sheila wasn't happy at home,” she said. “We were too quiet for her. She was an only child, you understand. My little boy died before she was born.”

“I'm sorry,” Jane said. She shrank from hearing any more. At the hospital she had come across so many tragedies of precisely this kind. The small, far too small, family of the highly respectable, obsessively careful office worker; parents reasonably healthy, but not over-robust; perhaps the grandchildren of the industrial revolution, suffering still from a legacy of that over-crowded and under-fed generation. These Burgesses looked elderly, perhaps they had married late. And so, of their two children, the boy had died in childhood and the girl had—

“Sheila would go to London,” Mrs Burgess was continuing. “That was where you first knew her, wasn't it, Miss Wheelan?”

“Yes. At our preliminary training course.”

“She could have worked in the hospital here,” Mrs Burgess went on. “They're always short of staff. I know the money isn't much, but living at home would have made it up to what she got at that Bream's, having to pay for her room and her food and everything.”