The Gigantic Shadow (14 page)

There was a long moment in which Crambo’s curious, light-coloured eyes stared into Hunter’s. Then the detective laughed, an easy, vulgar laugh that destroyed the tension between them. ‘Do you know, I’m beginning to put on the pressure like a real American detective. The AC said to me the other day, “Crambo,” he said, “You’ve been reading too many of these American thrillers. You’re beginning to talk out of the corner of your mouth. Watch it, Crambo,” he said, “or you’ll never get promotion.” Quite right, too, but you know what it is. Sometimes your feelings run away with you.’

To this illusionist’s patter he made no reply, suspecting it to be a cover for some question meant to disconcert him. But no question came. Humming a little, Crambo turned his back, went to the window again.

‘You mean there’s nothing else you want to ask?’

The detective turned round. He was smiling. ‘Not another thing. You might let me know where I can get in touch with you. Don’t want to lose contact, you know.’

He gave the address and telephone number of Anna’s flat. ‘Is that all? I’m free to go now.’ Somehow, he could not believe it.

Crambo responded with his odiously self-satisfied, falsely friendly smile. ‘Of course.’

Hunter said goodbye to Moorhouse, who did not answer. Walking out of the house, hurrying away across the Square, he felt as if he had been released again from prison.

The flat was in Hallam Street, on the second floor. He put his finger on the bell, and kept it there until Roger Sennett opened the door. His dark face looked not only sullen, but angry. ‘Yes?’

‘My name is Hunter. I want to talk to you.’

The young man looked at him. ‘If you’re selling something, I don’t want to buy it.’

‘It’s about Anthea, Anthea Moorhouse.’

Sennett stared at him from dark deep-set eyes. ‘All right. Come in.’

Books and papers were scattered about the living room. Hunter looked round for some sign of Anthea here, a hairslide or a handkerchief, but saw none.

Sennett said abruptly, ‘I’m going out to dinner in a quarter of an hour, so it’ll have to be quick. Have we met before? I seem to know your face.’

‘I was in a Pimlico club that was raided one night. I helped Anthea – Miss Moorhouse – get away.’

‘You were the good Samaritan.’ Sennett laughed. His manner had thawed a little. ‘Have a drink.’

Sipping his sherry, Hunter said, ‘You know she has disappeared – been kidnapped?’

‘I read the papers, yes.’

‘You don’t seem to be very upset.’

Sennett peered at him as though he were trying to find the answer to a puzzle. ‘Should I be?’

‘You were more or less engaged, isn’t that so?’

‘Did she tell you that?’ Sennett pushed aside newspapers and put down his sherry glass on a table. ‘I haven’t heard anything yet to convince me that you have any right to ask questions.’

The doorbell rang. Sennett got up to answer it. Hunter had a sudden feeling that Anthea had rung the bell, a conviction so strong that it was difficult to restrain himself from going to the door of the room in which he sat. When Sennett came back, however, he was accompanied by a tall young girl with a good figure, whose blonde hair was pulled back in a pony tail.

‘Rosemary, this is Mr Hunter, who’s come to ask some questions about Anthea. He seems to think I’m engaged to her.’ The girl laughed lightly, a pleasant sound. Sennett peered again. There was a kind of lowering distinction in his face. ‘Rosemary Felton and I got ourselves engaged last week.’

‘I know you,’ the girl said suddenly. ‘You’re that TV man who resigned because of some old scandal. It was a dirty trick they played on you, I thought, digging up all that old stuff.’

‘Thank you. And congratulations.’ Hunter looked from one to the other of them. He did not doubt what Sennett had said, and was puzzled. ‘But I understood – after all, you came to the dance hall with Anthea.’

‘Let’s get this straight, though I still don’t know what business it is of yours.’ Sennett sounded a little exasperated, but not at all embarrassed. ‘I’ve known Anthea since she was a kid. She lived only a few miles away from our place in Hampshire. Did she tell you that?’

‘No.’

‘Well, it’s so. Her stepfather’s been pretty keen that I should look after her, keep her out of trouble, that sort of thing. I tagged along to the dance hall to keep her out of trouble, though in the end I got into some myself. Her stepfather – Lord Moorhouse – was keen that we should get married. Was that what Anthea told you?’

‘I suppose so,’ he said uncertainly. What exactly had Anthea told him? Nothing, it was true, that exactly contradicted what Sennett was saying, yet somehow what she said had possessed a different meaning. ‘But you were never engaged?’

‘Or near to it. Now, Mr Hunter, I’m taking a girl I
am
engaged to out to dinner. The door’s behind you.’

‘Roger, you’re so
rude,’
Rosemary Felton said. ‘Five minutes don’t matter that much. Can’t you see Mr Hunter is worried?’

The young man turned to her quite furiously. ‘And why the hell should I care if he is worried. I don’t know who he is, and I don’t want to know. What right has he got to come in here asking me a lot of questions about my relations with Anthea? If you hadn’t been here I’d have thrown him out on his neck.’

The girl was two inches taller than Sennett. She looked at him adoringly, and said to Hunter, ‘It might help if you explained. You do see that.’

Hunter looked at their faces, Sennett’s dark and flushed, the face of a Victorian Colonial administrator determined to stand no nonsense, the girl’s features half-formed, malleable, with the kind of delicacy that is finally etched into characterful lines by some deep sexual relationship. ‘I’m in love with Anthea. I think she is in love with me. We were – are – going away together. I’m trying to find her.’ It was the truth, he thought, the truth as far as it went and as far as he knew it, although it omitted so much.

Rosemary Felton looked at him with melting eyes. ‘That’s terrible. I only just knew her myself, but that’s just terrible, isn’t it, Roger?’

‘Just terrible,’ Roger Sennett repeated with heavy irony. ‘I don’t know how to contain myself. That night in Pimlico was the first time you met her, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Pretty quick decisions made on either side, weren’t they?’

‘Roger, don’t be so cynical. I’m sorry,’ she said to Hunter.

‘You needn’t apologise for somebody else’s bad manners.’ Hunter could feel the revolver, hard and comforting, in his hip pocket.

‘He’s not usually like this,’ the girl assured him earnestly. ‘But Anthea always has that kind of influence on people. I mean, an unsettling influence. She’s that kind of girl.’

‘Oh, shut up,’ Sennett said. Abruptly he asked Hunter, ‘How well do you know Anthea?’

‘I don’t know what you mean. I told you, we’re in love with each other.’

‘Christ, I’m not talking about that. You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?’ Hunter shook his head. ‘Put it this way. Did it surprise you that she was kidnapped?’ Before he could answer this risible question, Sennett went on, ‘I wasn’t surprised.’

‘You weren’t,’ Hunter echoed. It seemed to him that this could mean only one thing, that Sennett knew of the kidnap plot.

‘I knew something about the company she kept.’

He stupidly echoed again, ‘The company she kept.’

‘I see you don’t know what I mean. I’d better tell you. At least, I suppose so. I never could tell whether I was doing right or wrong. The fact is, Anthea’s had a pretty rough time. She’s given other people a rough time, too.’

‘What sort of rough time?’

Sennett filled their glasses again before he answered. ‘She’s been in a home.’

‘In a home?’

‘For drug addiction. Cocaine and marijuana mostly. Surely you realised – after all, you saw enough of her by your own account.’

The drops into depression, the nerves and fits of the jitters, the bright irresponsible gaiety and inability to concentrate, now they all clicked into place. And the things she had said about her stepfather,
I fool him, I do what I want. ‘
I didn’t realise,’ he said. Something occurred to him and he said it, hesitantly yet with a sort of hopefulness. ‘There were no marks. I mean, did she have injections?’

‘Sometimes,’ Sennett said gloomily. ‘Where the real addicts have them. Between the toes.’ He leaned forward. Now that the thing had been said he talked eagerly, like a man anxious to vindicate himself.

‘She came out eight months ago, supposed to be cured, and there was a sort of arrangement between my father and Moorhouse that I would look after her as much as I could. Go around with her, you know, make sure she didn’t meet any undesirable acquaintances. Doesn’t look as though I did very well, does it?’

‘Roger, darling, you never told me that,’ the girl said.

‘Should I have done?’ He frowned at the sherry glass in his hand, and did not look at Hunter. ‘It was a hell of a job, I can tell you that. Don’t know why I let myself in for it in the first place, except that I knew Anthea when we were both kids, as I told you, and liked her. She had a pretty ghastly time then. Really, she never got over her mother marrying again.’

‘You knew her mother?’

‘I used to go over the Manor and play with Anthea. She always wanted to play games about the theatre, pretending we were actor and actress. I thought it was pretty crazy then. I didn’t know about her father.’

‘Her father?’ the girl said.

‘He was a theatrical producer. She had a terrific thing about him. I thought she was a bit of a bore, I remember, but I felt sorry for her. She was a pinched, ugly little thing.’

‘She is beautiful,’ Hunter said.

‘If you like that nervous, snorting, high-stepping type. Personally I’m not attracted.’ Sennett put a hand on the girl’s arm, and smiled at her.

‘She told me about her father. And she said she ran away from home to join a circus.’

‘That’s right. There was a hell of a hullabaloo. Reward, police search over six counties, that sort of thing. I didn’t see her around that time, but I should guess she enjoyed it.’

‘She told me that her stepfather…’ He stopped. There seemed a kind of betrayal of Anthea in what he had been about to say.

‘About him making a pass at her?’ Rosemary Felton gasped. ‘Oh, yes, it’s true.’

‘True?’

‘True that she said it, I mean. Whether it actually happened – how should I know? If you ask me I should guess that Anthea made it up. She’s got a great imagination.’ Rosemary Felton was wide-eyed.

‘But it’s an awful thing to say.’

‘I dare say. Perhaps it didn’t happen. I don’t know. But it’s no use blaming Anthea, blaming anybody, is it? It’s the way we are that makes things happen to us.’

And what makes us the way we are, Hunter thought? Aloud he said, ‘When did she start to take drugs?’

Sennett shook his head. ‘Don’t know much about that, something to do with a jazz group she was mixed up with. She was having an affair, I think it was the trombonist, and I understand it was through him. But I don’t know the details. Her stepfather had set her up in a flat and given her an allowance. Then the trombonist, or saxophonist, or whatever he was, left her, and from what I heard she really went haywire after that. Had what they call a nervous breakdown. After she took the cure he made her live at home, cut off her allowance, and I was called in. Doctor Sennett.’ He laughed, not happily.

‘Poor Anthea.’ Rosemary Felton’s eyes were filled with tears.

‘Poor everybody. It’s time we went to dinner.’

‘Just another minute – five minutes,’ Hunter said pleadingly. ‘You say that’s the story, but it’s not quite the story. What about your looking after her, how did that work out?’

‘I did what I could,’ Sennett said defensively.

‘But it didn’t work out?’

‘How the hell could it work out? I think she tried for a few weeks. After that she began to get drugs again. I knew she was getting them, but what could I do about it? If anyone wants to get drugs, they will.’

‘Even without money?’

‘I don’t know where she got the money. Or how. I wouldn’t like to guess.’

Hunter said nothing. Sennett got up, walked over to the mantelpiece, thumped his fist against it. ‘You’re going to say I might have done something, but what the hell could I do? Tell Moorhouse, and make her more unhappy than she was? I wouldn’t do that. It’s a bloody awful thing, I can tell you, when you can see somebody going down the slope and you know there’s nothing you can do about it.’

Wasn’t this what Hunter felt about himself, that he was going down the slope? But now he said, ‘There’s always something you can do about it. Anthea’s in love with me.’

Somehow these words came out almost in the form of a question, but Sennett did not seem to notice it. He only said broodingly, ‘She’s been in love before. More than once.’

‘What do you think has happened to her?’

‘I don’t know. This kidnapping stunt is just the crazy sort of idea she might think up herself to get money out of her father.’ The shock of this remark transfixed Hunter for a moment. ‘But I suppose that’s not it. She wouldn’t play it up this far. She must have got mixed up with another lot of dope peddlers, I suppose. That’s what I meant when I said I know the company she keeps. When you really get tangled up with boys like that you can’t tell how it will end, except that it’s pretty certain to end badly.’

‘Poor Anthea,’ the girl said again. She added admiringly, ‘You’re hard, Roger.’

‘It’s life that’s hard, not me. But I hope it’s a long time before you have to find it out.’ To Hunter he said abruptly. ‘I don’t know what you’re looking for. I don’t suppose I’ve been much help.’

‘I’m looking for Anthea.’

‘Are you?’ Sennett’s eyes, deep-set and dark, looked hard at him. ‘I hope you’re not disappointed when you find her.’

Eight o’clock. He had four hours in which to find Anthea, and to catch the plane for Tangier. But did he want to find her, now that the pattern of events had unfolded so far?
Anthea is in love with me.
Were the words true? Anthea has used me, he might as well have said, as a tool with which to pry money out of her father. She used me quite deliberately to get the money, and then who knows what she intended? Perhaps to use her part of it for buying drugs, perhaps to go abroad with me, steal the money, and then join her real lover, the man who supplied her with drugs for nothing. Was Bill Hunter, either way, conceivably anything more than a pawn in the game?

And if he could no longer honestly believe that Anthea was in love with him, had he ever been in love with Anthea? Was the feeling he had for her based on anything more than the fascination of sex, social position, the unknown? Against such rational arguments he could put only memories of Anthea as she had looked at and talked to him less than a week ago. Anthea in the white sleeveless frock at Richmond, showing him the den with a schoolgirl’s pride, drawing on a stocking as she sat on the edge of the bed.

Such images persisted, and were stronger than rational argument. He stepped out of the cool dark evening into the synthetic warmth of a telephone box, and dialled Westmark’s number.

Westmark answered on the first ring, and stopped Hunter as soon as he began to speak. ‘Come over to see me, will you?’

‘What’s it all about? Has anything –’

‘I said come over. I shall be expecting you.’

This time, the third time, the smell of luxury in the apartments caught in his throat. He could not separate his awareness of this smell from Westmark, who opened the door to him with a blank unsmiling face. There was no sign of the Chinese girl.

Westmark did not offer Madeira. When they were in the great room that overlooked the Park he pointed to the rosewood table. The money was on it, stacked neatly in piles.

Hunter stared in bewilderment. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘There is your money. You can take it away.’

‘Why?’

‘I asked if the money was hot. You said no. The money is hot.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I do not take things on trust. I have a technician, an expert you might call him, who works on these things. Have you handled the money yourself? There is a stain on it that comes off on the hands.’

He looked down at his own hands. The fingertips were smudged with yellow. He tried without success to rub it off on his handkerchief. Westmark watched him with a kind of satisfaction.

‘My man tells me that the stain is not injurious, it is some form of chemically-treated dust with which the notes have been impregnated. It will disappear from the fingers, he thinks, in a couple of days. Fortunately I have not handled the money myself.’ He looked at his own fingers, plump and well-manicured, the cuticles pressed back.

‘Is it all like this?’

‘All that we have tested.’

So it had been as he guessed. Moorhouse had approached the police immediately. They had arranged to give him this money which would incriminate anybody who tried to get rid of it. Had there been a detective watching outside Knightsbridge station, a man who had followed them in, and to whom somehow Hunter had given the slip? That did not matter much now. The chemically-treated notes explained why no statement had been made public about the kidnap money. The police everywhere would have been notified to look out for the notes. Banks had no doubt been instructed to watch for them. The money was useless to him. It lay on the table there, money that looked green and fresh, and in fact was rotten.

‘What are you waiting for?’ Westmark’s voice was harsh. ‘I don’t want it here. Take it away. There is a suitcase on the floor and a pair of gloves on the table.’

The suitcase was cheap, shiny, new. He snapped the lock of it open. ‘How long does this dust last?’ he asked the currency dealer.

‘I’ve told you, on the hands perhaps two days.’

‘And on the notes?’

‘My man is not sure. Weeks, certainly. Perhaps months. I know what you are thinking. I will have nothing to do with it. Take the money away.’

‘You’ve got places. You could keep the stuff until –’

‘No.’ Westmark looked at a wristwatch in which small diamonds glistened round the dial. ‘I want you out of here in five minutes.’

He doesn’t like it either, Hunter thought, the smell money has when it’s gone rotten. He pulled on the gloves slowly, gloves deliciously soft and flexible, and began to pack away the money again in the shiny suitcase. Westmark watched in silence until he had put back half the packets. Then he said, ‘You shouldn’t have tried it, Hunter.’

His head jerked up. ‘What?’

‘I don’t know what you have tried, and I don’t want to know. But you won’t do it. You’re not made for it.’

The money was almost all in now. He dropped the last ten wads casually into the case, a mere matter of a thousand pounds, and closed it. ‘I might as well burn the stuff,’ he said viciously.

‘Do as you wish. But you will not burn it here.’ Westmark spoke slowly. ‘As far as I am concerned I have not seen that money. It has never been in this apartment. You have never been here. Do you understand?’

‘Yes.’

‘I have my reputation to consider.’ He relaxed suddenly, and became almost the old bland Westmark. ‘Will you drink a glass of Madeira?’

‘Thank you, no.’

‘What are you going to do now?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, although he did know.

‘You are not in need of any – of any money?’ Westmark drew a gold-edged wallet from his pocket, opened it to reveal a large packet of notes, then began to laugh. Hunter laughed too. It was a good, though obvious joke.

The smell of money was with him all the way down in the lift. No doubt it came from the suitcase. It was not until he was out in the street that he remembered the peculiar concentration with which Crambo had looked at him. Hunter had thought the detective was looking at some mark on his clothing. He realised now that Crambo must have been looking at his hands.