Fellow Passenger (5 page)

‘May I write down the name?’ I asked.

The court was full of newspaper reporters dashing off sheets of shorthand in hysterical excitement. I did not want to compromise the unsuspected and respectable Peruvian citizen who had been my immediate boss.

I was permitted to write the name down, and it was handed up to the magistrates. The prosecuting counsel, through whom it passed, looked disappointed. I knew what was coming then.

‘And above this gentleman?’

‘Christopher Conrad Emmassin.’

That was the end of me. Chris was a brilliant but irresponsible diplomat who ought to have been a soldier. Sitting at a desk - though it must have been a fascinating desk - exasperated him. After the war he simply disappeared without scandal, without excitement, and turned up again quite openly in Moscow. I only met him half a dozen times, and I have no reason to believe he was a communist then. It may have been close acquaintance with the negro worker and the Indian peon which upset him. He was watching Latin America through the eyes of a too liberal, too sentimental Englishman.

Counsel for the Crown just looked at the magistrates and sat down. Myself, I hadn’t anywhere to look. By accident I met Sir Alexander’s eyes, and he must have seen the despair in mine. He shrugged his shoulders and slightly raised one white eyebrow. I suspect he meant that he was inclined to believe me, but that not even the Almighty could do anything for such a lunatic.

I allowed myself a last glance at Dr Cornelia. To my astonishment she was anxious to catch my eye, and blazing with indignation which a slight gesture of her hand directed at the Court. By what feminine clairvoyance she had persuaded herself that I was innocent I cannot imagine. She may have felt instinctively that no communist would fall so far from earnestness as to interrupt his mission by the little courtesies I had offered her.

The Court sent me for trial on a charge of entering to commit a felony, and it was suggested that further charges might be preferred. I do not think there was much doubt in anyone’s mind that the indictment would be High Treason by the time my case came on the Assizes. In my mind there was no doubt at all. I was only praying that I could reach Ecuador and remain there, like my father, for ever after.

My case had taken up the whole of the afternoon. The pubs were now open and the court cleared very quickly. It was a warm, clear evening after rain. Thirst, regret and desperation combined to keep me keenly aware of my last moments of freedom and of any chance of prolonging them. It seemed a remote chance. I was handcuffed to a constable, and I had in attendance a plain-clothes detective. We remained in a sort of condemned cell below the dock until the magistrates and officials had gone, and then marched out through the empty courtroom.

It was a friendly little court, so far as architecture was concerned; it had no private and underground door through which to hustle the unfortunate back to gaol. Everyone came and went by way of the spacious, stone-flagged, mediaeval hall. The public used an imposing flight of steps to the street. Prisoners and police used a narrower flight which led to a side courtyard where the Black Maria was parked.

On and below the steps of this discreeter exit I could see the pack of press photographers; but they had to wait. A door opened on the opposite side of the hall, and a young man, whom I recognized as one of the reporters in court, beckoned excitedly from inside the room. There was a photographer with him. My detective whipped us through the door and shut it.

I can usually recognize a bit of roguery when I smell it. That detective had struck me as a crook from the start. I don’t mean that he could be bribed. He was too unctuously smart to risk it. But he was the sort of careerist who would always be working at some scheme for getting himself noticed or rewarded by means which would make any decent policeman sick.

‘Son, we’ve got to make it snappy,’ the reporter said to me. ‘Here’s my card!’

The Sunday paper which he represented was the one which specializes in sanctimonious filth. When its readers complain - in pitifully sincere and illiterate letters - the editor publishes their opinions and adds a footnote to say that it is the duty of a British newspaper to publish the facts without fear or favour. That shuts the poor little blighters up.

‘Want us to pay for your defence at the Assizes?’ he asked.

‘I don’t mind if you do,’ I said, looking cautiously over the lay-out of the room.

That bright young reporter had been scattering his employers’ money around. The porter ought to have been in the room, and he carefully was not. The detective and the constable - he was looking a bit uneasy - should not have been there, and they were. The porter’s uniform coat and overalls hung on pegs. There was a half-open broom cupboard, full of untidy brushes and cleaning materials. A wide lattice window gave on to an inner courtyard where the bicycles of the municipal employees were ranged in racks. The window could not be more than twelve feet above the ground, though God knew what there was directly underneath.

‘Sign that,’ said the reporter, ‘and we’ll get you the best Counsel available.’

By habit I glanced at the contract which he slapped down in front of me. He seemed surprised at my reading it with attention. He even addressed me by name, instead of ’son’.

‘It just gives us the exclusive right to print your life story, Mr Howard-Wolferstan,’ he explained.

I reckoned that I had better appear a sporting prisoner - elastic, easy and with a proper British respect for ‘avin’ me nyme in the pypers. It surprised me that they should want it. Spies, after all, come a good second to sex, and are not sympathetic to the average reader. I suppose there was a shortage of material. For the last week or two there had been no spectacular murders, and neither Canterbury nor Rome had had any eccentrically erring priests.

I signed his contract without protest, for at bottom he was a man of enterprise after my own heart, he would have been entertaining in a bar or as a companion in any illegality. But I could not stick his tame photographer, who had the artificial good-fellowship of some mackerel living on the earnings of a prostitute, and just the right face for it. However, I was polite, even cheerful. I did what he told me and showed an interest in his camera. Thank God I had the sense to put on a wide, film-star grin!

There was half a plan forming. I played the publicity hound. The reporter, who had seen me and listened to me in court, was puzzled, but the photographer naturally assumed that I had a mind like his own. I asked if I couldn’t make a picture of both of them.

‘A new idea,’ I said. ‘You can plaster it on the front page. Our representatives taken by the accused himself.’

The detective believed in keeping in with the press. He was all for it, so long as we wasted no time. He told the constable to turn me loose, and the photographer gave me his camera. They all stayed pretty close, however, although I was obviously a harmless and model prisoner.

I took a snap, and then complained that I did not think heads and shoulders were going to be really effective. So I grouped them round the door - to allay any possible suspicion - and myself went to the far corner of the room. At last I quickly tried them sitting at the table, with myself at the side of the window. That, I said, was perfect. And then, without any warning, I fell backwards out of the window, grabbing the upright to steady myself.

I am no acrobat. I do not think I could either have planned or taken the risk if I had not been overcome by the atmosphere which surrounded me - of a certain slimy kindliness, of petty crookedness, of British tastes as reflected in the papers which the masses are supposed - wrongly, I think - to admire. All that, far more than the shock of finding myself a spy and a communist, drove me into not caring if I broke my neck.

As it was, I merely twisted my right arm and bumped my head. The municipal ash-cans were underneath. The one I hit had its lid on, and I practically bounced off it on to the nearest bicycle. The detective hit an ash-can with its lid off. It took him a couple of seconds to climb out.

There was an alley leading out of the yard into one of the main streets of Saxminster. I took it, just missing the bumper of a horrified driver. Corners, as in most country towns, were close together. I turned three of them at random, and then looked back. There was no one in immediate pursuit. I turned a fourth corner, and found myself in a narrow road with backs of ancient buildings on one side and an endless row of cottages on the other. Here I was certain to be trapped if I tried mere speed; so I propped my bicycle against the kerb outside a greengrocer’s shop, with the delivery boy’s bicycle to keep it company, and dived into a narrow archway which passed under the buildings on my right. Two minutes since I hit the ash-can? I do not think it can have been more.

The passage led into the cathedral close. There were already signs that Saxminster resented the affront to its administration. Huddled against the wall, I watched a constable dash into the saloon bar of the leading hotel. He didn’t want a drink; he was alerting the authorities. An excited group poured out of the bar into the street. Had I really been a communist I should have described them as typical fascist hyenas; they’d have sat on my head at once, and that, to judge by the expanse of some of their riding breeches, would have been the end of me. The Black Maria - no time yet to call up any other police car - was cruising between the cathedral lawns and the lovely fat houses of church dignitaries. A constable was at the corner of the next street; another was running to take his post at the main door of the cathedral. I don’t know whether I was expected to take sanctuary or hide in it or blow it up, but evidently the close was the net into which I was to be driven. Naturally enough. If the main outlets from the town were blocked, all other roads led to the cathedral. And there, in fact, I was.

Within the next minute someone was sure to go through the dark length of the passage and discover me. My only possible refuge was a door with a brass plate on it, marked chapter offices. I entered with reverent assurance, as if I had been booking orders for a cheap line in chasubles. The attitude was wasted, for there was no one to receive me. On the ground floor were two offices, from one of which came the sound of a typewriter. The other had a little frosted glass window and a notice:
For Attention, Please Ring.
I decided against Attention, though considering it as a possibility. In these canonical offices no one would know my face, and with a good enough story I might have been allowed to sit down and wait for the Dean. The bicycle - an old, black one - was unlikely to attract attention, and, with luck, it would not be found and identified by its owner for some hours.

The stairs, however, were more tempting. I went up. There were three doors on the landing. Two of them looked businesslike and unceremonious; but the third, a double door of black oak, was ecclesiastic. You could bet that there was emptiness behind - in a worldly sense, I mean. I opened it, ready to retire hastily with an excuse, and found a very fine seventeenth-century hall with a long table down the middle. There the Dean presumably presided over his chapter.

It was too late for any directors’ meeting, and so, if canons kept the same hours, their board-room seemed to offer shelter for the night. But there was no cover. The curtains, of faded magnificence and rich in folds, would not do; it might be somebody’s duty to come in and draw them. From the walls portraits of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century churchmen looked down upon me. They had the casual air of aristocrats who had merely dressed up in bands and black for the purpose of being painted. I was fortified by their approval.

At the far end of the room was a gallery with a little curving staircase leading to it - a real, Carolean show-piece, with all the balustrades delightfully carved. I explored it, stepping over a rope of red velvet which hung across the foot of the stairs. Against a side wall were a few stools and benches - probably for musicians - which would do for a hiding-place so long as the person who pulled the curtains and gave the hall its good-night inspection did not deliberately search for me. At the back of the gallery and in the centre of its panelling was a small door. I thought I had better make sure that no one would come in by that, so I turned the wrought-iron handle and gave a firm pull, slightly lifting the door to keep it silent.

It was locked, but the mortice which projected from the panelling seemed to be loose. One is always vaguely fascinated by doors which are supposed to be secure, and are not; so I fiddled with the mortice and found that it could be lifted out of its seating. The flange at the bottom, which should have been sunk into the wood to a depth of two or three inches, had been filed away so that only an eighth of an inch remained.

The door led to a deep, cool cupboard in the thickness of the stone wall, fitted with racks for bottles. The set-up was obvious. The chapter’s butler or the Dean himself kept the key of this little cellar, but somebody else had decided that the servant was as worthy as the master. His neat bit of jobbery, which showed signs of considerable age, had never been detected. It was not surprising. Who in so smoothly run an establishment would tug or rattle at the door - which might have torn the lower flange of the mortice clear out of the wood - or who would lift the door, as I had done, and spot that the mortice was loose? Like had spoken to like across the decades.

I looked for whisky. When a man is hot, thirsty and distracted, there is nothing else. It is the sole creation of the British Isles of universal, irreplaceable value. Parliamentary government? For most countries, an illusion. Bits of machinery? Every sane man wishes they had never been invented. Shakespeare? We could get along very well with Cervantes and Rabelais. But a world without whisky would be the poorer by an essential pleasure.