The Ministry of Fear (9 page)

He woke up to the dim lurid underground place – somebody had tied a red silk scarf over the bare globe to shield it. All along the walls the bodies lay two deep, while outside the raid rumbled and receded. This was a quiet night: any raid which happened a mile away wasn't a raid at all. An old man snored across the aisle and at the end of the shelter two lovers lay on a mattress with their hands and knees touching.

Rowe thought: this would be a dream, too, to her; she wouldn't believe it. She had died before the first great war, when aeroplanes – strange crates of wood – just staggered across the Channel. She could no more have imagined this than that her small son in his brown corduroy knickers and his blue jersey with his pale serious face – he could see himself like a stranger in the yellowing snapshots of her album – should grow up to be a murderer. Lying on his back he caught the dream and held it – pushed the vicar's wife back into the shadow of the pine – and argued with his mother.

‘This isn't real life any more,' he said. ‘Tea on the lawn, evensong, croquet, the old ladies calling, the gentle unmalicious gossip, the gardener trundling the wheelbarrow full of leaves and grass. People write about it as if it still went on; lady novelists describe it over and over again in books of the month, but it's not there any more.'

His mother smiled at him in a scared way but let him talk; he was the master of the dream now. He said, ‘I'm wanted for a murder I didn't do. People want to kill me because I know too much. I'm hiding underground, and up above the Germans are methodically smashing London to bits all round me. You remember St Clement's – the bells of St Clement's. They've smashed that – St James's, Piccadilly, the Burlington Arcade, Garland's Hotel, where we stayed for the pantomime, Maples and John Lewis. It sounds like a thriller, doesn't it, but the thrillers are like life – more like life than you are, this lawn, your sandwiches, that pine. You used to laugh at the books Miss Savage read – about spies, and murders, and violence, and wild motor-car chases, but dear, that's real life: it's what we've all made of the world since you died. I'm your little Arthur who wouldn't hurt a beetle and I'm a murderer too. The world has been remade by William Le Queux.' He couldn't bear the frightened eyes which he had himself printed on the cement wall; he put his mouth to the steel frame of his bunk and kissed the white cold cheek. ‘My dear, my dear, my dear. I'm glad you are dead. Only do you know about it? do you know?' He was filled with horror at the thought of what a child becomes, and what the dead must feel watching the change from innocence to guilt and powerless to stop it.

‘Why, it's a madhouse,' his mother cried.

‘Oh, it's much quieter there,' he said. ‘I know. They put me in one for a time. Everybody was very kind there. They made me a librarian . . .' He tried to express clearly the difference between the madhouse and this. ‘Everybody in the place was very – reasonable.' He said fiercely, as though he hated her instead of loving her, ‘Let me lend you the History of Contemporary Society. It's in hundreds of volumes, but most of them are sold in cheap editions:
Death in Piccadilly, The Ambassador's Diamonds, The Theft of the Naval Papers, Diplomacy, Seven Days' Leave, The Four Just Men
 . . .'

He had worked the dream to suit himself, but now the dream began to regain control. He was no longer on the lawn; he was in the field behind the house where the donkey grazed which used to take their laundry to the other end of the village on Mondays. He was playing in a haystack with the vicar's son and a strange boy with a foreign accent and a dog called Spot. The dog caught a rat and tossed it, and the rat tried to crawl away with a broken back, and the dog made little playful excited rushes. Suddenly he couldn't bear the sight of the rat's pain any more; he picked up a cricket-bat and struck the rat on the head over and over again; he wouldn't stop for fear it was still alive, though he heard his nurse call out, ‘Stop it, Arthur. How can you? Stop it,' and all the time Hilfe watched him with exhilaration. When he stopped he wouldn't look at the rat; he ran away across the field and hid. But you always had to come out of hiding some time, and presently his nurse was saying, ‘I won't tell your mother, but don't you ever do it again. Why, she thinks you wouldn't hurt a fly. What came over you I don't know.' Not one of them guessed that what had come over him was the horrible and horrifying emotion of pity.

That was partly dream and partly memory, but the next was altogether dream. He lay on his side breathing heavily while the big guns opened up in North London, and his mind wandered again freely in that strange world where the past and future leave equal traces, and the geography may belong to twenty years ago or to next year. He was waiting for someone at a gate in a lane: over a high hedge came the sound of laughter and the dull thud of tennis-balls, and between the leaves he could see moth-like movements of white dresses. It was evening and it would soon be too dark to play, and someone would come out and he waited dumb with love. His heart beat with a boy's excitement, but it was the despair of a grown man that he felt when a stranger touched his shoulder and said, ‘Take him away.' He didn't wake; this time he was in the main street of a small country town where he had sometimes, when a boy, stayed with an elder sister of his mother's. He was standing outside the inn yard of the King's Arms, and up the yard he could see the lit windows of the barn in which dances were held on Saturday nights. He had a pair of pumps under his arm and he was waiting for a girl much older than himself who would presently come out of her cloakroom and take his arm and go up the yard with him. All the next few hours were with him in the street: the small crowded hall full of the familiar peaceful faces – the chemist and his wife, the daughters of the headmaster, the bank manager and the dentist with his blue chin and his look of experience, the paper streamers of blue and green and scarlet, the small local orchestra, the sense of a life good and quiet and enduring, with only the gentle tug of impatience and young passion to disturb it for the while and make it doubly dear for ever after. And then without warning the dream twisted towards nightmare; somebody was crying in the dark with terror – not the young woman he was waiting there to meet, whom he hadn't yet dared to kiss and probably never would, but someone whom he knew better even than his parents, who belonged to a different world altogether, to the sad world of shared love. A policeman stood at his elbow and said in a woman's voice, ‘You had better join our little group,' and urged him remorselessly towards a urinal where a rat bled to death in the slate trough. The music had stopped, the lights had gone, and he couldn't remember why he had come to this dark vile corner, where even the ground whined when he pressed it, as if it had learnt the trick of suffering. He said, ‘Please let me go away from here,' and the policeman said, ‘Where do you want to go to, dear?' He said, ‘Home,' and the policeman said, ‘This is home. There isn't anywhere else at all,' and whenever he tried to move his feet the earth whined back at him: he couldn't move an inch without causing pain.

He woke and the sirens were sounding the All Clear. One or two people in the shelter sat up for a moment to listen, and then lay down again. Nobody moved to go home: this was their home now. They were quite accustomed to sleeping underground; it had become as much part of life as the Saturday night film or the Sunday service had ever been. This was the world
they
knew.

Chapter 6

OUT OF TOUCH

1

R
OWE
had breakfast in an A.B.C. in Clapham High Street. Boards had taken the place of windows and the top floor had gone; it was like a shack put up in an earthquake town for relief work. For the enemy had done a lot of damage in Clapham. London was no longer one great city: it was a collection of small towns. People went to Hampstead or St John's Wood for a quiet weekend, and if you lived in Holborn you hadn't time between the sirens to visit friends as far away as Kensington. So special characteristics developed, and in Clapham where day raids were frequent there was a hunted look which was absent from Westminster, where the night raids were heavier but the shelters were better. The waitress who brought Rowe's toast and coffee looked jumpy and pallid, as if she had lived too much on the run; she had an air of listening whenever gears shrieked. Gray's Inn and Russell Square were noted for a more reckless spirit, but only because they had the day to recover in.

The night raid, the papers said, had been on a small scale. A number of bombs had been dropped, and there had been a number of casualties, some of them fatal. The morning communiqué was like the closing ritual of a midnight Mass. The sacrifice was complete and the papers pronounced in calm invariable words the ‘Ite Missa Est.' Not even in the smallest type under a single headline was there any reference to an ‘Alleged Murder at a Séance'; nobody troubled about single deaths. Rowe felt a kind of indignation. He had made the headlines once, but his own disaster, if it had happened now, would have been given no space at all. He had almost a sense of desertion; nobody was troubling to pursue so insignificant a case in the middle of a daily massacre. Perhaps a few elderly men in the C.I.D., who were too old to realize how the world had passed them by, were still allowed by patient and kindly superiors to busy themselves in little rooms with the trivialities of a murder. They probably wrote minutes to each other; they might even be allowed to visit the scene of the ‘crime', but he could hardly believe that the results of their inquiries were read with more interest than the scribblings of those eccentric clergymen who were still arguing about evolution in country vicarages. ‘Old So-and-So,' he could imagine a senior officer saying, ‘poor old thing, we let him have a few murder cases now and then. In his day, you know, we used to pay quite a lot of attention to murder, and it makes him feel that he's still of use. The results – Oh well, of course, he never dreams that we haven't time to read his reports.'

Rowe, sipping his coffee, seeking over and over again for the smallest paragraph, felt a kinship with the detective inspectors, the Big Five,
My Famous Cases
; he was a murderer and old-fashioned, he belonged to their world – and whoever had murdered Cost belonged there too. He felt a slight resentment against Willi Hilfe, who treated murder as a joke with a tang to it. But Hilfe's sister hadn't treated it as a joke; she had warned him, she had talked as if death were still a thing that mattered. Like a lonely animal he scented the companionship of his own kind.

The pale waitress kept an eye on him; he had had no chance of shaving, so that he looked like one of those who leave without paying. It was astonishing what a single night in a public shelter could do to you; he could smell disinfectant on his clothes as though he had spent the night in a workhouse infirmary.

He paid his bill and asked the waitress, ‘Have you a telephone?' She indicated one near the cash desk, and he dialled Rennit. It was risky, but something had to be done. Of course, the hour was too early. He could hear the bell ringing uselessly in the empty room and he wondered whether the sausage-roll still lay beside it on the saucer. It was always in these days questionable whether a telephone bell would ring at all, because overnight a building might have ceased to exist. He knew now that part of the world was the same: Orthotex still stood.

He went back to his table and ordered another coffee and some notepaper. The waitress regarded him with increasing suspicion. Even in a crumbling world the conventions held; to order again after payment was unorthodox, but to ask for notepaper was continental. She could give him a leaf from her order pad, that was all. Conventions were far more rooted than morality; he had himself found that it was easier to allow oneself to be murdered than to break up a social gathering. He began to write carefully in spidery hand an account of everything that had happened. Something had got to be done; he wasn't going to remain permanently in hiding for a crime he hadn't committed, while the real criminals got away with – whatever it was they were trying to get away with. In his account he left out Hilfe's name – you never knew what false ideas the police might get, and he didn't want his only ally put behind bars. He was already deciding to post his narrative straight to Scotland Yard.

When he had finished it, he read it over while the waitress watched; the story was a terribly thin one – a cake, a visitor, a taste he thought he remembered, until you got to Cost's body and all the evidence pointing at himself. Perhaps after all he would do better not to post it to the police, but rather to some friend . . . But he had no friend, unless he counted Hilfe . . . or Rennit. He made for the door and the waitress stopped him. ‘You haven't paid for your coffee.'

‘I'm sorry. I forgot.'

She took the money with an air of triumph; she had been right all the time. She watched him through the window from between the empty cake-stands making his uncertain way up Clapham High Street.

Promptly at nine o'clock he rang again – from close by Stockwell Station – and again the empty room drummed on his ear. By nine-fifteen, when he rang a third time, Mr Rennit had returned. He heard his sharp anxious voice saying, ‘Yes. Who's there?'

‘This is Rowe.'

‘What have you done with Jones?' Mr Rennit accused him.

‘I left him yesterday,' Rowe said, ‘outside . . .'

‘He hasn't come back,' Mr Rennit said.

‘Maybe he's shadowing . . .'

‘I owe him a week's wages. He said he'd be back last night. It's not natural.' Mr Rennit wailed up the phone, ‘Jones wouldn't stay away, not with me owing him money.'