Ricketts, in the event, did not telephone till we had been back a week; until, in fact, the morning of the day when Stanley and Elaine Bristow were due back.
It was one of the longest weeks of my life. Just as, on holiday, the first days pass slowly, so that after three days it seems as though one had been away a week, so now, after our return, the days seemed to drag interminably.
On the one hand, I was watching the letter box and listening for a threatening voice on the telephone; on the other, I was waiting impatiently for Major Ricketts to get in touch with me.
Then, quite suddenly, he was on the ’phone, and arranging to meet me that same evening in the downstairs bar of the Ritz Hotel.
He was a tall, grey-haired man of about fifty, slim, with a good complexion, a straight nose, and a youthful smile. He wore a light tweed suit, a cream-coloured shirt, and a Gunners tie, and from time to time, as we talked, he made quick notes on the back of an envelope with an old-fashioned gold propelling pencil.
It is hard to describe the surge of relief I felt at being able to talk to somebody who took the matter seriously.
He began by saying that he had heard the rough outlines of my story, “indirectly from Mr. Bristow,” as he put it, and asked me to repeat it very briefly. He listened attentively, and when I had given him a condensed version, he nodded his head enthusiastically.
“You know, of course, that some foreign governments go in for blackmail for espionage purposes?”
I stared at him and said:
“You’re not suggesting that Mrs. Dawson, of the Bower Hotel, Burlington, was a spy, are you?”
“Rather the contrary.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that I believe your theory about Mrs. Dawson.”
“You do?”
I was watching him closely, waiting for the qualification. After a few seconds it came:
“Up to a point,” he said.
“What point?” I asked, almost as soon as the words were out of his mouth.
“Up to the point where attempts were made to bribe, cajole, or threaten her into handing over the complete details of her blackmail victims-according to my theory, that is.”
“Go on,” I said.
“She had a warped mind, all right. Obsessed with the idea of hitting back at the criminal world. But when it came to hitting at her own country, the answer was, no. They made the wrong approach, I expect.”
“Wrong approach?”
“‘Help us destroy the class system which produced criminals and killed your husband’-that sort of thing. But it didn’t work, did it?”
“No, it didn’t work, assuming that was the line. That and money, I suppose?”
“They would have offered her compensation for loss of income, so to speak,” said Ricketts grimly. “They’re realistic, you know. Then came the final offer.”
“In Pompeii,” I muttered, and looked around at the luxurious decoration and thought of the dusty earth of Pompeii.
“In Pompeii,” Ricketts said, and signalled for another drink for us. I said:
“Why kill her?”
“My department thinks,” he began, and stopped.
“What is your department?” I asked.
“Does it matter?”
I shook my head, regretting my tactless question.
“My department thinks she was killed because somebody else came forward, offering the required information-for the same money.”
“Who?” I asked, as if I hadn’t guessed.
“Some intimate, personal assistant, who had access to her records, and who has probably now disappeared abroad.”
I gazed into my whisky and soda. Then I said:
“Is Mrs. Gray still at the Bower Hotel?”
“Mrs. Gray is not still at that hotel. She has left the country.”
“The muffin-faced old traitor,” I said.
“We have no proof,” said Ricketts primly.
“And me?”
“It’s anybody’s guess.”
“Well, go on-guess,” I pressed him.
“I guess your intervention came at a delicate, inconvenient juncture. A year, perhaps six months later, they might not have minded. I guess that all these threats had a purpose.”
“I’m glad of that. That makes my day,” I said bitterly, but he didn’t smile. He said:
“These incidents were laid on so that if you discovered anything awkward neither the police nor anybody else would take you seriously. Your reputation would be that of a mentally unstable person. Understand?”
I nodded. But I said:
“Why not crooks? Why not commercial blackmail, a going concern, profitable, ready-made?”
“No mere criminal organisation would go to this trouble or expense. They’d have killed you.”
“Why didn’t this lot?”
“This lot, as you call them, they don’t kill much, not if they can avoid it.” He hesitated. Then he added: “But they will if they must. That’s the view of my department.”
“Meaning?” I asked, unnecessarily.
“Meaning they’ve been patient with you. Meaning it’s as well we met.”
I took a deep slug of whisky.
“It’s as well we met,” I said.
“You have been, and are, up against a hostile Intelligence Service, you realise that?”
I nodded, but said that I couldn’t see either Miss Brett, or poor Bunface, or even chunky Bardoni gathering valuable secrets.
“Small fry,” said Ricketts. “Afraid of your investigations for their own personal reasons. Afraid of their past catching up.”
“Afraid of a desolate future,” I murmured, and he nodded.
“But here and there among Mrs. Dawson’s victims there must be others, equally afraid, but more importantly situated. She’d been at it a long time, Mr. Compton.”
“Why me?” I asked after a pause. “Why did they think I’d find out things the Italian and British police wouldn’t find out?”
Ricketts smiled.
“Divided police forces, divided responsibilities, divided access to information, I think that’s the answer, don’t you? The Italian police were in charge of investigations. They had no reason to know the cause and motive lay buried in her past, in England. Doubtless they sent a routine request for background information to Scotland Yard-and that’s probably just what they got, general background information and no more. The British police probably thought the motive and clues were to be found in Italy. Why shouldn’t they think so? Anyway, it wasn’t their case. Then you, bumbling along obstinately, began to creep up on things, and that wouldn’t do, would it?”
I watched him call for the bill.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked.
“Nothing,” said Ricketts gravely. “I think it’s a bit out of your league table. You don’t want the whole thing to start up again.”
Once again, and for the last time in this affair, I felt the old, old bloody-mindedness boiling up inside me.
“Oh, I’m not going to drop it now, not now that I’ve got some idea of what it’s all about. I’ll go on sniffing around a bit,” I muttered.
“I can’t stop you,” said Ricketts, and smiled again. “But if there’s any trouble let me know.”
“Too damn true, I will,” I said.
When we parted I had agreed to write down on paper every smallest detail of what I could remember of the affair, and deliver the document to his personal address the following morning. He thought it safer not to call at my house.
I took a taxi home, rejoicing that I had not succumbed to the temptation to put the red geranium in the front window.
Juliet was delighted, too, and we worked on the document until two o’clock in the morning.
At ten o’clock I drove round to Hurley Mews, of Belgrave Square, and found his number, 25, and saw it painted on the door.
At first I thought I had gone to the wrong house. The window panes were broken or missing. The interior looked gutted, the paper hanging in shreds on the walls.
When I had checked the number with the address he had written for me I thought I might as well ring the bell, but it didn’t work, of course, so I knocked. It was quiet in the mews, and very deserted, considering the time of day.
When there was no reply, I tried the door, and found it unlocked. I went in, not knowing quite what to do.
In the event, I didn’t have to do anything much, except gaze for a moment at the dusty, uncarpeted stairs, because inside, on the floor, was a buff-coloured envelope addressed to me.
It was typed on my own machine, of course, like the other notes, prepared in advance for just such a contingency. The message was quite short:
I told you the truth. We have been very patient with you. It is as well we met.
Ricketts.
I stared at it, feeling suddenly sick. And then dizzy; and then neither sick nor dizzy but just numb, my brain refusing to function clearly.
Then my heart started beating very fast indeed. I did not tremble, but I heard my heart beats growing louder and louder in my ears.
After a while I tried to think.
I saw now the three lines of defence.
First, the self-generated attempts by the little fish to save themselves; then the partial truth, revealed by Col. Pearson; finally the full truth, told me to my face, blatantly, by the man calling himself Ricketts.
I stared down at the note again, re-reading it, while the fear pain, which is not exactly a pain, but more of a muscular contraction, caught me in the stomach.
Outside, a late autumn breeze blew gustily, the hanging, shredded wallpaper rustled. A little trickle of plaster detached by the wind dropped at my feet, as if it had fallen from the nest of some animal.
The peasant, even the humblest peasant, particularly the humblest peasant, thinks he is safe in his obscurity and comparative anonymity. Let me be, he says, let me till the soil and I will mind no other business but my own, but he never was, never is and never will be safe, I thought.
One innocent, unlucky step, even on the well-trodden paths, and he comes within the scrutiny of the eyes in the surrounding jungle, and if he is alert he can hear the faint crackle of twigs and the slither of the hidden bodies in the undergrowth. He does well to shift his spear forward, and make the sign of the Cross, or glance towards Mecca, or finger his sacred, pagan amulet.
Men must fight, and some will win and some will lose, as I had lost.
For the greater the cause, in the end, the greater the tyranny which it erects to defend itself. Before the noble and good concept of complete democracy a man might travel where he wished in the world, without much let or hindrance, whereas now he was boxed in by frontiers, passports, and visas and walls, and interdicts, and laws, and police, to preserve the liberty and freedom of the individual.
And under some monarchies it was permissible to cry, “Down with the monarchy!” and under some democracies it was forbidden to cry “Down with democracy!” and under dictatorships it was forbidden to cry “Down with dictatorships!” and it was all, all in the interests of the freedom of the individual.
So the peasant must be vigilant, taking care not to be pushed around, and if necessary the peasant must fight, as he always has done, even though his fight end in martyrdom, or is brief and un-heroic, as mine had been. It all helps.
Did I really think all this, as I read the note from the man calling himself Ricketts?
Certainly not.
It was thought out and disentangled afterwards. But at such moments there is an exploding germ, a chaotic, expanding universe of logic and emotion, which contains within itself the essentials for future dissection, and this I experienced.
This, too, I did think, in sadness and despair: the tribe is so busy protecting the tribe, that it has no time to protect the individual.
Then I felt upon my neck an increasing coolness, as the street door was opened more widely. But before I could turn round I was struck on the nape of the neck, not by an instrument, but by a hand which hurled me so violently forward that I staggered and fell at the foot of the stairs.
I looked up from the dust, still clutching the note in one hand, and in the other doorway I saw Ricketts, still wearing his Gunners tie, and the man who called himself Sergeant Matthews, with his good-natured, brown bovine eyes, and two other men, one in a knee-length leather jacket, whom I recognised.
Ricketts said:
“You haven’t been playing fair with us, have you?”
I made no reply.
It is tempting to put into my mouth, in retrospect, some telling riposte. But I said nothing, because I was too afraid. I would like to explain that feeling. It was partly a natural fear of death, but partly also because I had a vision of Juliet waiting for me, and the hours passing, and Juliet still waiting.
“We have been very patient-haven’t we?” said Ricketts, and kicked me in the ribs. “Well, haven’t we?” he asked again, and kicked me again.
I nodded. He said:
“I can slug you and gag you and tie you, and put you in a crate which is upstairs, or you can come voluntarily with us in the back of the van outside. Which do you want?”
“I’ll come,” I said.
“Well, get up then. Go on, get up.”
I got to my feet slowly. Grimy. Dazed. Beyond hope. Thinking of the red geranium.
I heard him say:
“This man’s got a pistol with a silencer.”
I nodded.
I stumbled towards the door, and the group parted, and then closed round me. Outside stood a nondescript green van. I had not heard it draw up. I climbed into the back. There was no partition between the back and the driver’s seat. I waited for the others to get in.
The van had no side windows, and there were no seats at the back. Brown-eyed Matthews and a fourth character, a squat, sallow-skinned type, waited to climb in after me. Sallow-Face motioned me to sit on the floor. Brown-Eyes slumped down opposite me. He caught my eye for a second, gave an almost apologetic half-smile, shrugged, and looked away. I saw Leather-Jacket open the driver’s door, and Ricketts by the opposite door. Ricketts was saying something to Sallow-Face, who had paused by the rear door of the van.
Through the windscreen I saw a big, dark-blue van manoeuvring to turn in the narrow mews about twenty yards away. It seemed to be having some difficulty. In fact, when it was broadside on it stayed that way, as though the engine had stalled, though in fact the engine had probably been switched off, because almost at once four men in plain clothes jumped out of the back and began to approach us at a sort of half-run, half-walk speed.
Leather-Jacket glanced at them, then flicked his head round and looked in the other direction, and then shouted something, and looking through the rear of the van I saw the exit from the opposite end of the mews blocked by two black cars, shining, meticulously clean, side by side, fronts pointed towards us. Four other plain-clothes men were approaching from that direction, at the same half-run, half-walk speed. I could see them quite clearly because Sallow-Face was no longer blocking the view at the rear of the van.
Ricketts and Leather-Jacket had slid momentarily out of sight, but I heard the thud of their feet as they pounded back to the house. It took Brown-Eyes a few seconds to gather what was happening. He was fumbling with a cigarette packet at the time. Maybe he didn’t understand the language, anyway.
This was a pity for him, one way and another.
By the time he got around to bundling himself out of the van and legging it towards the house, the first shots were being fired, and I saw one of the Special Branch officers stagger and fall.
English cops don’t normally carry arms. Perhaps in a country where, unlike America, the citizenry do not have a traditional right to bear arms, the cops think they should set an example. But now and again, if real trouble is possible, pistols will grudgingly and sparingly be issued. The present lot had one gun for each team of four, and as they didn’t much like seeing a colleague picked off, they began to shoot back.
I was lying on the floor of the van by this time to avoid ricochets. Pretty dazed and confused. But I could see the door of the house closing just as Brown-Eyes was scuttling up the steps. He collapsed in a heap on the doorstep. Maybe they didn’t know he was so near, maybe they did, and didn’t care because he was British and they weren’t, I thought. Expendable Brown-Eyes.
Now there was a lull for a minute or two, as though everybody was thinking things out. The Special Branch police had grabbed their wounded colleague, and were standing flat against the doors of neighbouring houses. People in the little mews houses were opening windows and peering out. A loud-hailer on one of the police cars started up:
“Keep away from your windows, please! Please stay indoors! Keep away from your windows and stay indoors, please!”
There was another short pause and then it started up again: “To House No. 25, Hurley Mews-come out with your hands raised. The house is surrounded. You cannot escape. Come out with your hands raised at once.”
When there was no response after a full minute, they repeated the words, this time adding: “If you do not come out, we shall fire smoke and tear-gas and come and get you. You may be shot. Escape is impossible.”
But there was no response. At both ends of the mews I saw a small crowd being kept back by uniformed police.
The police waited five minutes without saying or doing anything. This is sound psychologically. It gives time for feelings of defiance to cool off.
At the end of that time they repeated the instructions, very slowly, adding, “You have sixty seconds to obey this order.”
But while the loud-hailer was still booming, and without the use of tear-gas or smoke, two officers were edging along close to the wall, guns in hands, until they reached the door. Here they paused and were joined by two more, one carrying an axe.
I watched the big axe rise and fall once on the wood around the lock and heard the crash as the shoulders of two fourteen-stone Special Branch officers completed the job, and I saw them disappear inside and waited for the sound of shots and shouts. None came. Nothing seemed to happen in the house.
But something happened outside the house all right. Two police officers rushed the van a few moments after the others had rushed the house. One of them, as I rose to my feet, bending low because of the van roof, flung himself at my legs in a football tackle, bringing me crashing to the floor. He was taking no chances.
“God Almighty, are you daft? Have you gone off your rocker?” I shouted.
“Probably,” he said. “Come on, hop out, there’s a good chap.”
“What the hell have I done?”
“You’re being detained on suspicion of passing information of possible use to a potential enemy, contrary to the Official Secrets Acts-something like that; come on, get cracking.”
I saw him pick up the envelope containing the document I had prepared for Ricketts. Somebody must have brought it into the green van. Maybe Brown-Eyes Matthews. If so, it was the last thing he carried. Later I saw his body being borne to an ambulance. He hadn’t been shot by police bullets as he tried to get into the house. He had been shot in the chest from inside the closing door. A man who might talk too much, on his own, inside Britain, and be an encumbrance outside Britain. Expendable, and better dead. Meanwhile, Ricketts and Leather-Jacket and Sallow-Face had vanished.
I thought something was wrong when a man I later knew as Chief Inspector Hope came out of the house alone. He looked grim.
I saw him run to the two police cars, and immediately their engines started and they roared off, sirens sounding, braying like castrated donkeys. The uniformed police at one end of the mews pushed the crowd back to let them race through and round the corner to the main road, tyres screeching.
House No. 25 had no rear exit. It backed on to another house. It could not be surrounded in the real sense of the word. No. 26 was the same. But No. 27 had a back door leading to an alley. Ricketts had a five-year lease on all three, through an innocent nominee who had sub-let the houses to him. Two roughly made communicating doors, for just such an emergency, connected the three houses. The birds had flown through the alley. All except the dead pigeon.
There are many little private landing places in Britain from which a small aeroplane can take off, and others on the Continent where it can land. Chief Inspector Hope did not bother to alert Interpol. He didn’t need to. He knew exactly where Ricketts was heading, and the time and place of his rendezvous in forty-eight hours’ time.
He telephoned the Naples police, and booked two seats on a Comet, one for himself and one for an Italian-speaking sergeant on his staff.
I offered to go if the police would pay my fare, on the feeble excuse that I might help in identifying people, but it wouldn’t wash. He said he’d had them under observation long enough for his purposes. The police are a bit mean about spending public money.
But I heard what happened, of course, and I can just imagine old muffin-faced Mrs. Caroline Gray stumping up from the little railway station, fighting off guides, through the gloomy Porta Marina of Pompeii, along the Via Marina, then turning left, past the Forum, along by the Insula Occidentalis and out by the Porta Ercolano to the Way of the Tombs. Shortly, turning left, then right, she would have been almost there, at the House of the Mysteries.
A long walk for an elderly woman, short, bandy-legged, and solidly built, fattened on Bower Hotel food. Ricketts could have directed her by a shorter route, but as her mission was to retrieve a certain address book from Bardoni’s hotel, I think he chose the longer route because it led her past House No. 27, in Section 12, where Mrs. Dawson had died. A kind of reminder to her not to have second thoughts.
The Way of the Tombs also made her pensive. She saw the great monumental mausoleum of the family Istacides, with a round colonnade on top, the marble tomb of Munatius Faustus with its bas-relief of a tempest-tossed ship and struggling crew, the semicircular exedra of Mamia Publius, a priestess of the people, on land voted for the purpose by the Senate, and the imposing last resting places of Marcus Porcius, and of Aulus Umbricius Scaurus, magistrate and merchant, to whom the Senate had not only voted land for the monument, but 200 sesterces for funeral money, and an equestrian statue in the Forum. All these honours are engraved on the sepulchre. An important man, Scaurus. She saw these and many other tombs.
The early Romans took the ashes of their dead to places outside the city and built their monuments, often with seats for visitors or passers-by, near to roads which would be thronged with travellers. Here the lingering spirits of the dead could happily listen to the chit-chat of the living. A nice thought, but Mrs. Caroline Gray was not in the mood for chit-chat, either with the living or the dead.
The main reason for this was the fact that she had not brought the address book with her.
I like to think of her standing in the initiation chamber where the Dionysiac mysteries were enacted, gazing around at the fresco with its life-size female figures which give some clue to the nature of the initiation ceremony.
Dumpy, beady-eyed, incongruous in such surroundings, she was alone, for it was late in the day. I can confirm, as can most others who have been there, that this room exudes an atmosphere of age-old occultism which is by no means due to the fresco with its portrayal of the ceremony, its Mistress in charge, its masks of Bacchus and Ariadne, its flagellation, and frenzied dance by the nude girl initiate.
She had about five minutes to decide whether she would like to have been an initiate herself. Then she heard footsteps and turned and saw Leather-Jacket and Sallow-Face.
Whether Ricketts was suspicious, whether he had noted that there were rather more so-called guards than usual around the House of the Mysteries, it is not now possible to say. He remained by the exit; till his bodyguard, perhaps, had tested the ground.
When the Italian police closed in on Mrs. Gray and the other two, he turned and ran for it, doubtless because in Italy he did not have the same diplomatic privilege as in England.
The Italian police did not use their guns until, in the Way of the Tombs, he began to use his.
He fell and died by the tomb of Aulus Veius, a magistrate, appropriately enough.
It is always hard for a writer to rehabilitate a villain, or a person he has regarded as a villain, even a minor one. One has lived with the villain, one has set ideas about the villain, one is loath to discard them.
But facts are facts, and facts from Chief Inspector Hope cannot be ignored.
I am bound therefore to record that Mrs. Caroline Gray, now living quietly once more at the Bower Hotel, was not a money-grabbing traitor. I must state, though reluctantly, that she knew nothing of Mrs. Dawson’s activities, and that the tip-off came first from a terrified Bardoni to the Italian police, who passed it on to England.
Thereafter, Mrs. Caroline Gray acted under directions from the Special Branch of Scotland Yard. They have little to do with Criminal Investigations Departments, such as the police who interviewed me.
They detect espionage and such important things. They don’t deal in petty crime like murders, bank robberies, and train robberies.
They are cats that walk alone.
For me, the slice of terror, which is all that it was, lay in the thickness of the slice: the peasant is surrounded by more than he imagines. Behind the eyes which observe him are yet others, which observe those eyes in their turn, and behind the predators slithering in the undergrowth are yet others, stalking the predators. The slice is thick and fearful.
We live in dangerous times. All one can do is keep the spear ready, and a feeble thing it is, touch the amulet, and hope for the best, and trust that, as in my case, the tribe can after all protect not only the tribe but the individual.
There is no harm in hoping.
To be on the safe side, I always, even now, keep a red geranium on the window sill.
Note
Since I have to make the best I can of my dolt of a so-called father-in-law, and ghastly mother-in-law, I have changed all the names and one or two other circumstances in this story. It is not even published under my own name.