The following morning I got up about eight-fifteen, as is my custom. I take about an hour and a half to have a bath, shave, dress, and eat a light breakfast. This is a long time, but during that period I read one morning paper in my bath, and another over breakfast. So that by about ten o’clock, I have, so to speak, cleared the deck, and absorbed as much of the day’s news as I wish, and am ready for work.
I was trying to write an article for a Sunday newspaper, but found it impossible to concentrate. One of the things which worried me was whether to tell Juliet of the previous evening’s incidents. In the end, I decided against it.
I felt that the crunch was still to come; that when it did I would need all the strength I could build up beforehand; that to tell all things to Juliet would involve keeping her courage up as well as my own. It was a cold-blooded assessment, and probably an incorrect one.
I met her for lunch for a drink and a smoked salmon sandwich. I thought she might feel a little embarrassed by the subject of her adoption, and that the best thing to do was to grab this whole subject by the throat at once. So immediately we met I gave a broad smile, and said:
“Fond as I am of your father and mother by adoption, I must admit that I never could imagine how they produced anybody as attractive as you, my darling, and I am absolutely delighted that they didn’t!”
I have perhaps given the impression that in those days she was all mystery and brooding thoughtfulness. Such was far from the case. Most of the time she was extremely vivacious, and laughed easily and today she looked radiant after a long night’s sleep. She appeared by now to think that my troubles were an amateurish and over-melodramatic attempt to prevent an investigation of Mrs. Dawson’s life and death, simply because some members of her family or friends might be embarrassed.
“I expect the whole thing will die down in time. I mean, once they see you are not going to be intimidated, darling, they’ll just stop all this nonsense,” she said.
I forebore to tell her that Mrs. Dawson had no family to speak of, and few friends.
I recalled the men on the pavement, the flashing torch in my flat, the telephone call when nobody spoke, and said yes, yes, yes, I was sure she was right.
We only had a short meeting because she had a hair appointment at two o’clock. It was a happy meeting. I look back on it now and savour it, and remember it with tenderness.
In the afternoon I went to the London Library and took out some books on early Roman history, because I was still tampering with the idea of setting a crime in the Sibylline Caves, silly though it sounds. Then I had a hair-cut in Trumpers, and went home and found my evening paper thrust into the letter box, and there was Bunface, a single-column picture, in the middle of a front-page story.
She stared out of the page at me just as she had stared at me on the train from Brighton, when she wasn’t dabbing at her eyes with the grubby handkerchief. The same round, uninteresting face, the same short cropped hair; all a little muzzy, all rather blurred, as snapshots are when they are enlarged beyond the capacity of the negative.
She had been strangled the previous evening in a narrow alley called Paradise Lane off Notting Hill Gate. Police were attempting to establish her identity. There were hints that she had been murdered by a mentally unbalanced person, though the headlines did not go so far as to invoke a “maniac killer.”
I let myself in, and went straight over and mixed myself a whisky and soda, and thought, well, she knows now, she knows now all right, whether there is a life after death, and whether she will see her friend again. She had been toying with the idea of suicide, whether seriously or not one could not say, but that wasn’t necessary, as it turned out, that wasn’t necessary at all. Somebody else had done the job for her.
In these cases it is a delicate newspaper habit to talk about “good-time girls” rather than prostitutes, but even the newspapers, having seen her photograph, hadn’t been able to justify the description of “good-time girl.” She was described as “an unknown middle-aged woman.” Police were anxious to talk to anybody who recognised her from the photograph. I wondered how the police had obtained the photograph, and assumed that they had found a snapshot in her handbag, perhaps a holiday snapshot of herself and her dead friend, and had enlarged it.
This then was the wretched, despairing old doll who had given me a letter containing veiled threats. This was the unhappy soul who had complained about me to the police. This was a woman who, I felt sure, was of such a weak and mediocre mentality that she had got caught up in machinations of which she knew little. Or did she? Either way, the result was the same for me, and now the result was the same for her. Knowing nothing of the stresses to which the jungle predators had subjected her, I cannot find it in my heart to say she should have stood firm.
Surprising as it may seem, it took me some minutes to appreciate how I was concerned. This is doubtless because a crime writer, though he may write of crimes, normally has had little personal involvement in such matters. In some ways he can be a proper little innocent.
When realisation dawned it came as a shock. This woman had laid a complaint against me, alleging that I had made improper suggestions to her in a train. Her photograph would indicate that such suggestions might have been very peculiar indeed, because she obviously had no pretensions at all to normal sex appeal. Her photograph would be recognised at the local police station, and her complaint on record.
She had been killed, it was hinted, by an unbalanced killer, not by a sex maniac, or by a berserk assassin lusting for blood, or by a robber, but by somebody who was peculiar in some unspecified way.
I was very anxious to get to the police station, before a police officer called on me. I kept telling myself that I was not nervous because I had nothing to be nervous about, but that it would look better if I came forward, as a volunteer with information, rather than if I sat back until I was approached.
I was waiting to cross Earls Court Road from Scarsdale Villas when a man’s voice said, “Excuse me, sir.” He only wanted to know the way to the Old Brompton Road. Yet the incident set my heart pounding, because I was so keen to report to the police station before the police called on me.
What exactly I was going to say about poor old Bunface, which I hadn’t said already the previous day to Sergeant Matthews, I did not know.
In the event, I just walked in and up to the Enquiries counter. I had to wait a few minutes while a poorly dressed middle-aged woman gave her name and address and details of a purse which she had lost from her handbag. It was two minutes to six by the big white clock on the wall.
By five minutes past six she had finished describing in some detail the circumstances leading up to her loss. The station sergeant was a bright-looking, fair-haired man in his thirties. Her tale would make no difference. Either the purse would be found and handed in, or it wouldn’t. But he listened patiently, sensing that in pouring out the details she was finding relief, even misguidedly believing that she was contributing something towards the recovery of her purse. He was doing a first-class public relations job. The police are very good at this sort of thing. It is an ancillary part of their work which is not sufficiently recognised, a psychotherapy for people in distress akin to that provided by the priest in the confessional.
As she turned away from the counter, he looked at me and said, “Yes, sir?” in the cheerful manner of a greengrocer dealing with the next customer in the queue. I watched the woman go out of the door, and heard the sergeant say, “Yes, sir?” again.
As he did so, another woman, younger, carrying a small dog, came through the door. I would rather have spoken to him on my own, but I could not delay any more. I said, as quietly as I could:
“There’s a case in the papers about a murdered woman being found in Paradise Lane. I would like to have a word with somebody about her.”
“I see, sir,” he said, with as much interest as if I had been reporting a stolen bicycle. He reached for a piece of paper.
“May I have your name, sir?”
“James Compton.”
“Address?”
“274 Stratford Road-round the corner from here.”
“I take it you have some information you wish to give, sir?”
“Yes, more or less.”
“Could you give me some rough idea of the nature of the information, sir? You’ll understand that in cases of this kind we get a lot of-”
I misunderstood what he was going to say:
“Yes, I know, cranks and crackpots.”
He smiled and said:
“Well, yes-but I was going to say a lot of duplicated information, not that we aren’t glad to have it, of course, but it’s just a question of who should see you, sir.”
“Well, I travelled from Brighton with her in a train the evening before yesterday,” I began. He interrupted me.
“Ah, now you’re cooking with gas, sir!”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I mean that’s interesting, sir. Just one minute-”
He made to move away from the counter. The woman with the dog had been pretending to read some police notices on the wall. She turned away from them and moved with studied casualness over to the counter. This was something she could not miss.
“Actually, Sergeant Matthews from this police station knows the story. I just thought if there were any other small details-you know? Well, I just thought I’d call in-in case, as it were.”
“Sergeant Matthews knows the story?”
“He called yesterday morning.”
“Yesterday morning, sir? The murder wasn’t committed till the late evening, sir.”
“He called about another aspect of the case-connected but different.”
“Connected but different?”
“That’s right.”
The woman with the dog was stroking its head, pretending to be preoccupied with it, looking down at it. She was on my right side. I could almost see her left ear growing bigger. I wasn’t going to say any more. Nothing about the pavement incident, or the lights in my flat, and the abortive search. She’d had enough free entertainment.
“Just a minute, sir,” said the sergeant again, and disappeared into the back of the station.
After a few minutes he came back.
“Would you go into the waiting-room, sir? I’ll show you where it is.”
“I know where it is, I was there yesterday evening.”
“I see, sir.”
He gave me a thoughtful look, but he didn’t ask why. He insisted on accompanying me to the waiting-room. I had a feeling he was afraid I might change my mind. As he shut the door behind me, I noticed that he could see the door from the Enquiries counter. I began to fill my pipe, and had hardly got the tobacco burning smoothly before a young plain-clothes detective came in.
He was tall and dark, with black curly hair and a fresh complexion. All bright and breezy and friendly, he was, and he slumped himself down on to a chair on the opposite side of the little table, and slapped a notebook and pencil down on to the table and said cheerily:
“Good evening, sir, you’re Mr. Compton, I believe? What is it you want to tell us, sir?”
“I don’t particularly wish to tell you anything. I just thought I’d call in and remind you that I met this murdered woman on a train from Brighton the evening before last. You know about it.”
“We know about it?”
“Yes, they know about it here. She called later that evening and alleged I had made improper suggestions to her. Poor old thing,” I added. “Poor old thing. I wouldn’t think anybody had ever made suggestions to her improper or otherwise. Anyway, the station sergeant took note of her complaint, and your Sergeant Matthews called on me yesterday morning to tell me about it. I gathered that the desk sergeant here had already formed an opinion that she was-well, you know, a bit of a crackpot, but they felt they had to inform me officially and get a formal denial from me, and all that sort of thing.”
“I see, sir.”
He wasn’t taking any notes at all.
“I mentioned one or two other things to Sergeant Matthews.”
“What sort of things, sir?”
But I wasn’t buying that one.
“Look,” I said, “it’s a long story. This woman gave me a message typed on my own typewriter and on my own typing paper. But it’s all very complicated, and linked up with other things, and so I told all to Sergeant Matthews. I just called in here in case there was some other details you people wanted to know.”
I watched him doodling with his cheap government pencil on a blank page of his notebook. After a while he said:
“Well, we appreciate that, sir, we appreciate that very much. Just for the record, perhaps you would give me a detailed description of the woman you travelled with from Brighton.”
I described her without hesitation and without difficulty. When I had finished he said:
“Well, sir, the best thing I can do is to attach a note to the sergeant’s report, saying you called, and if there’s anything further we want, we’ll get in touch with you. Right?”
“Fine,” I said, and got to my feet. But he hesitated.
“Perhaps I’d better just look for the old sergeant’s report, sir, as I haven’t seen it. It’s a big station here, we don’t see everybody else’s reports. I mean, that wouldn’t be on the cards, would it? I mean, we can’t see everybody’s reports, can we? Otherwise we’d spend all our day reading. See what I mean? I mean, there might be some point or other we could clarify at once. So if you wouldn’t mind just hanging on a minute, sir?”
I liked his eager, babbling incoherent manner. It was nice and friendly.
“It might save us troubling you further,” he added, as an afterthought.
“Certainly, if you wish,” I said, and sat down again. He went out of the room. He was a pleasant, ingenuous character, probably a young uniformed officer on probation to be a detective.
I waited for ten minutes. When the door opened again two other plain-clothes men came in. They were different.
One of them announced himself briefly as the superintendent in charge of what he called “the Paradise case.” Later, he referred to the other man as “sergeant.”
My first impression of the superintendent was of a tall, well-built man in his early fifties, with grey eyes, a good head of grey hair, dressed in a grey suit. His face seemed grey, too. It was a strong face, with a good brow and a firm but not cruel mouth. The nose was a little too long, and the chin was pointed rather than square, but it was a pleasant enough, intelligent face. He spoke good English with a strong voice, and had a slight north-country accent.
The sergeant, on the other hand, gave an impression of fawnness. He was shorter and stouter than the superintendent, and had a round, bullet head, a short nose, and a jaw and underlip which protruded aggressively. His hair was spread in bootlace style over a nearly bald skull, and was brown except for the grey bits above his ears. He had brown eyes, and wore a brown suit, and had a putty-coloured complexion. He was of about the same age as the superintendent but, I think, lacked the former’s education and general intellect. He was more of the “old sweat” type of N.C.O. which one used to find in the Army.
They had, however, one dreadful thing in common-fatigue. It was not the superficial fatigue which can be shed by a good nine hours’ sleep. It was something far deeper, something that had been built up over a long period of years. Just as the dirt and grime of certain industrial cities seems to become ingrained in the skins of the workers, so the greyness and the lines of fatigue were implanted on the faces of these two detectives. Their appearance spoke more forcefully than any leading article of a Force below establishment, of cancelled week-ends and shortened holidays, of long nights and days at work, and little appreciation, and no joy.
The superintendent held some typescript in his hand. He said:
“Good evening. You’re Mr. James Compton, of 274 Stratford Road?”
“That’s right. I just called in-”
“Yes, sir, thank you very much,” he said quickly. “There are one or two points I want to clear up.”
“Carry on,” I said.
He gave me the impression of a man in a hurry, which is never very complimentary.
“Last night you were returning home, according to this station report, when you allege you were threatened by two men, at present unidentified. Right?”
“I thought only one man was actually threatening me. The other man-”
But he wouldn’t let me finish.
“Well, anyway, you thought you were being threatened?”
“Correct,” I said shortly.
“You reported the incident. Very properly. You then went to your flat in Stratford Road, where your suspicions were aroused, and you thought some person or persons unknown were in the flat. But a search showed your suspicions were apparently unfounded. Right?”
“Yes-you could put it that way.”
The tired lines round his mouth deepened. He said:
“Look, sir, I don’t want to put it any way except the correct way.”
“Well, that’s right,” I said reluctantly. “But I think my suspicions were right, and I think it’s connected with this woman in the train who complained about me.”
He interrupted me again.
“Tell me about her, sir.”
“There’s not much to tell, and I’ve told Sergeant Matthews already.”
He sat down opposite me. The sergeant shouted through the doorway, “Bert, bring another chair in, will you?” The superintendent waited until the sergeant was seated. Then he said:
“Tell me the story briefly, right from the beginning, sir.”
“Going right back? Back to Mrs. Dawson and Pompeii?”
“Who’s Mrs. Dawson?” he asked.
I guessed that Sergeant Matthews had not bothered to put in a report about anything other than the matter about which he had called.
I had a feeling he wouldn’t do more than briefly mention what I had told him, because of the bored way he had put poor Bunface’s communication in his notebook. But I hadn’t expected him to put in no report at all.
There was nothing for it but to go over the whole thing again. I saw the bald-headed sergeant scribbling shorthand notes. When I had finished there was a silence.
The superintendent was picking at the wooden table with a pin he had found lying on it.
“Can you think of any reason why this unfortunate woman should have made any complaint against you, sir?”
“Certainly not, except that she was in a highly emotional state, and probably neurotic.”
“Can you think of any reason why this woman, whom you had met for the first time, should know your name and address, unless you gave it to her for some purpose, and if you gave it to her, why did you?”
“I dealt with that point with Sergeant Matthews,” I said. The fawn-coloured sergeant spoke for the first time. He had a rasping voice which contrasted with the superintendent’s soft tones. He sounded as though he had spent much of his life shouting at dogs, or horses, or men.
“The superintendent here, he isn’t Sergeant Matthews, sir. He is just asking-”
“I know what the superintendent wants to know, and the answer is, I didn’t give her my name and address and I don’t know how she got it.”
I liked the grey superintendent, but I didn’t like the fawn-coloured sergeant with his jutting jaw and lower lip.
“About this message you think was written on your machine and paper,” began the sergeant.
“I don’t think it was written on my machine. I know it was. So does Sergeant Matthews, and so would you, if he’d written a proper report. And if you’d read it, of course.”
“Why should the message have been typed on your machine, and taken down to the coast, and then brought up again, why shouldn’t it have just been put through your letter box or posted?” asked the superintendent gently.
He had his left elbow on the table, his left hand supporting his head, and was looking thoughtfully. I shook my head helplessly.
“I don’t know,” I said, “I just don’t know. It doesn’t make sense.”
“No, it doesn’t,” said the sergeant.
The superintendent made no comment.
Suddenly the whole thing infuriated me.
“Anyway, why should anyone wish to prevent me probing into Mrs. Dawson’s background? Why should they cook up all this bloody nonsense?”
“There’s a woman been killed,” said the sergeant flatly. “You come along here, and you say, yes, I travelled up with her in the train, the evening before she was killed, and she must have been very neurotic, you say, otherwise she wouldn’t have made up some story about me, you say. Right? And when we ask you a few simple questions, what happens? You bang the table. You get all touchy. Why?”
I didn’t answer. When I spoke I looked at the superintendent, as if he had asked the questions.
“I am not getting touchy.”
“I’m sure you’re not,” he said. “Sergeant, Mr. Compton is not getting touchy, why should he be touchy? He just misunderstood you.”
He looked at me with his calm, tired eyes.
“Mr. Compton, I don’t think you quite understand.”
“No, I don’t,” I said, “I don’t understand. I don’t understand anything. I only know what I know, and that’s what I’ve told Sergeant Matthews, and now you, and I called in here voluntarily to try to help you, and you go on at me. You go on at me so,” I added indignantly.
“We’re not going on at you,” said the sergeant, in his rasping voice. “The superintendent here, he’s just trying to clear up a few points. He’s a busy man, you want to understand that. When a case like this happens, he’s a busy man.”
The superintendent said:
“I am going to ask you again a question I asked you earlier, but on a broader basis. I asked you whether you could think of any reason why this woman should have lodged a complaint against you-I now ask you whether you can think of any reason why you should imagine that this woman lodged a complaint against you?”
I stared at him, bewildered.
“Would you mind repeating that?”
“Can you think of any reason why you should imagine that this woman made an allegation against you, Mr. Compton?”
I sat back in my chair and looked at him again.
“Imagine it?”
He had turned half sideways to me and was filling his pipe from a grey rubber pouch.
“That, and other things.”
“What things?”
“Can you think of any reason why two alleged thugs should try to intimidate you?”
“Only in connection with what I’ve told you.”
“Can you think of any reason why a mysterious, unknown man should telephone you.”
“Look,” I said, “it’s no good going on like that-you’ve got to accept the whole story in its entirety or not at all.”
The sergeant had stopped writing shorthand. He was doodling idly. The superintendent had put a second match to his pipe. He said:
“The point is this, Mr. Compton. We cannot find any trace of a woman lodging a complaint against you at this station, or in fact at any station in the Metropolitan area.”
The sergeant said:
“That’s why the superintendent asked whether-”
He stopped speaking, but went on doodling, without looking up.
“Whether what, for God’s sake?” I asked loudly.
“That’s why I asked whether you thought she might have done-even if she didn’t, sir,” said the superintendent.
“Your records,” I said quickly, “your records must be wrong. If you’ll look through your records-”
“The other point is this,” interrupted the superintendent, “we have no Sergeant Matthews at this station. And haven’t had for years.”