Take My Life (7 page)

‘Then there are these two letters,' he said, frowning his re-concentration at the deal table. ‘Written to the dead woman five years ago and found in the lining of her violin case. Finally, there's this pencil, which you admit to having in your possession as late as yesterday. Yet it was lying on the floor of the room where this young woman was murdered.'

Nick shrugged his shoulders rather hopelessly. ‘ It's all very unfortunate, I agree. Why she should have kept the letters all this time I can't think. But surely the explanation of the pencil suggests itself? Have you never loaned a pencil for someone to scribble something down and then forgotten to get it back?'

‘I'm afraid it's not for us to supply the explanations, Mr Talbot. If that's the truth, then I am just as anxious to establish it as you are. Now I hope you'll not object to taking part in an identity parade? Just nine or ten of you dressed exactly alike in mackintoshes and felt hats.'

‘What about this?' Nick fingered the neat bandage on his forehead.'

‘Oh, all the others will be bandaged just the same. There'll be nothing to fear on that account.'

The other shrugged again. ‘When do we start?'

Archer got up. ‘I'll get Sergeant Standish.'

Five minutes later, Nick was standing with nine other strange men, all wearing mackintoshes and all bandaged over the left temple. Yet there was something distinctive about him which seemed to set him apart from the rest. He'd got the stamp of command and the stamp of culture. At a word from the sergeant they all put on dark grey hats and he then went round adjusting them to the same angle. Then they filed out into a big bare room like a polling booth and stood against one wall under the lights.

Three men came in through another door.

There was silence. After a few moments a voice, hoarse with years of beer-drinking, said: ‘Can I get a bit nearer, guv'nor?'

One of the men at the other end came half-way down the room, stood there uncertainly, feeling his neck-band, sucking at his moustache.

‘Will you all turn round, please,' Archer said.

When they faced the room again the man with the big moustache had come quite close to them and after some moments his eyes fastened on Nick Talbot, Talbot stared back at him bleakly.

‘Blimey, I think that's 'im,' Grieve said, pointing. Conviction hardened, hesitation fled. ‘Yes, that's 'im. That tall one, guv'nor. That one there. I reckon that's 'im.'

‘Are you sure?' Archer was behind him, his tired features tightened up at this moment of decision.

‘Yus,' said Grieve. ‘That's 'im, I reckon.'

It was all smaller and more shabby than she had expected of the most famous police station in London. The dreary, bare office place with policemen behind the counter, the smell of disinfectant; the little, ragged, dirty man waiting with a smouldering cigarette in his mouth directly under the ‘
SMOKING PROHIBITED
' notice; the noise one's feet made on the tiled floor. It might have been a converted nineteenth-century council school.

As she came in she had seen the bills of the coming night's opera outside the scene of last night's triumph. The two things faced each other in her mind. The patient respectable queue waiting to book seats; the middle-aged tart deliberately getting out of a taxi at the police station and flouncing off down the street under the eyes of the constable at the door. The majesty of success and the majesty of the law.

But last night's was true, worked for through years; this was false, undeserved, would be quickly cast off by common sense. As soon as she saw him she would know it was going to be all right …

As the warder unlocked the door, she tightened her grip on her gloves and wondered what word she should say. But when she went in, and Nick stood up and came towards her, she knew that no word was necessary.

For a few moments they clung to each other, and despite the happiness of the reconciliation she felt at once that this thing was not going to be blown away. She was surprised at the curious strained look in his eyes, the tight little lines about his mouth. She saw the ordeal he had been through, the humiliation and anger and impotence, the first fine threads of fear trying to weave themselves about his mind. He had knocked about the world a good bit, but this was something outside his experience. Like most normal men he had a considerable respect for the law – though he might not betray it to a questioning police officer. He felt this as if he had been brought up on some fake charge for court martial.

‘Phil,' he said after a moment.

‘Oh, Nick, I … It's been like a nightmare. What
is
it all about? Last night –'

‘It's just a damned silly mistake,' he said, ‘but I don't pretend to be amused.'

‘Your head,' she said, glancing up, and the colour coming to her face again.

‘Oh, that's all right.' He made a grimace. ‘Two stitches at the Fitzroy Street Hospital by a surgeon hardly out of his teens who might have been sewing up his brother's shirt …'

‘What happened after you left?'

‘I walked, and walked, trying to get rid of the spleen that had somehow come between us. For a time the cut stopped bleeding, but then it began again and I went to have it seen to. The surgeon phoned the police, and just, as I was leaving this man Archer turned up and began asking questions. It's a complete mystery to me.'

His bitter dejected manner alarmed her.

‘Well, it can only be a misunderstanding for a short time. The English police don't make silly mistakes for long. It's unpleasant, but there's no reason to be
really
alarmed.'

‘That's what I've been telling myself until a few minutes ago,' he said.

‘What d'you mean?'

He shrugged. ‘They've had an identity parade. Ten of us up against a wall. Some man from this boarding house where Elizabeth Rusman died thinks he's identified me as a man he saw coming out of her room last night.'

She felt as if something had laid cold fingers on her heart.

‘Nick … How could that be …? You didn't go?'

‘At that time of night? Of course not. I never wanted to see her again.'

‘There must have been someone there like you. A superficial likeness, anyway.'

‘You see, it all fits in; the cut forehead and everything.'

‘But I can confirm your story of what really happened.'

‘Having denied it first, as I did.' Talbot sighed. ‘Never in my life, Philippa, have I felt so much like a liar as I did last night when I started telling them the truth about our quarrel. They just stood there with dead-pan faces writing it all down. I believe they'd have respected me more if I'd kept to my accident story.'

‘But surely they can't keep you here!' Philippa said. ‘ What right have they to put you in a cell!'

‘It isn't a cell. This is the room where people are detained for questioning. Fortunately I don't get claustrophobia.'

‘Won't they release you on bail?'

‘Not yet. The thing for us to do now is get a solicitor.'

She smiled briefly. ‘I'd forgotten. I have one outside.'

He smiled back at her a moment. ‘I shall be in good hands with you to look after my interests. Why had this to happen, Philippa? Have you see your notices? There are two here – they couldn't be better.'

She stared at the paper he was holding out to her. ‘After you left last night, Nick, I was so ashamed.'

‘Look,' he said. ‘ You see what Wightman says: “ Continental newcomers, for longer than it is comfortable to remember, have tried to capture our approval with detested tremolos, with taking too short a view of their phrases and with loud and noisy dramatic tantrums which completely ruin their accuracy of pitch. Our joy then last night was the more sincere in finding among this youthful and eager company a soprano who combines roundness and purity of tone with an overall evenness of scale –”'

‘I meant to ask you to try to forget what had happened,' she said. ‘But it's impossible now, for all this has grown out of it. I must have been mad.'

‘We both acted like spoilt children,' he said. ‘Which I suppose we are: spoiled by fate. I'm really much the most to blame; I was insufferably irritable and stuffy and pompous. With a dozen words I could have stopped it all.'

‘I wasn't really ever seriously jealous of that girl,' she said. ‘That's the silly part of it. And I knew very well that you had some good reason for leaving the box which had nothing to do with her.'

‘Lou Friedman was on the telephone from New York,' he told her. ‘He'd forgotten our operas started so early. He can arrange an American contract for you if this season is a success.'

There was silence for several seconds.

‘That makes me feel
very
small,' she said in a low voice.

‘Don't you see? And me also. I had only to tell you, to kill the quarrel stone dead.'

‘I never gave you a chance.'

He took her face in his hands and kissed her.

‘Last night was yesterday, and no good comes of crying over it. It can't be helped. Today we've got to face this boring interlude. Your success is the stable, important thing. This can only put us out for a few days. Somewhere there's another man. They already know he's a bit like me and has a bandaged head. They're bound to trace him pretty quickly. Now let's have this lawyer in and see what he has to suggest.'

As she went to the door she was thinking: a man with an injured head and murder on his conscience will lie low, desperately low, fox in hole, hiding his hurt at any cost, while another man takes the suspicion and the consequences.

Two and a half miles away, Mr Sidney Fleming was trying out his handwriting. He sat at a desk in his hotel bedroom – with its well-worn hair-cord carpet, its chromium fittings, its shabbily genteel eiderdown – and the pile of half-burnt cigarettes in the ash-tray and the scattered sheets of note-paper showed the difficulties he had been put to.

Yet to look at him one would have thought him an intelligent and educated man.

‘Dear Dr Wishart,' he began laboriously for the seventh time. ‘ I am writing to tell you …'

He was interrupted by a rap on the door and the rattle of a master key in the lock. Quickly he picked up a newspaper and dropped it over the letters. He stood up as a porter came in. The porter blinked uncertainly at his back.

‘You've got some luggage, haven't you, sir?'

‘You're early,' snapped Fleming. ‘ I told them eleven-thirty.'

‘Oh … sorry …' The man turned to go out.

‘Wait,' said Fleming. ‘You can take that. I'll bring the small case. Here.' He handed the man a coin, without properly turning to face him.

‘Thank you, sir,' said the porter more affably.

‘And get me a taxi at eleven-thirty. I've a train to catch.'

‘Yes, sir.' The man went out.

Fool! Why be frightened of three pieces of sticking-plaster? – it isn't even in the papers yet. Why tell the porter needlessly about catching a train? Why be irritable and edgy? Because twelve hours ago exactly you were stopping the flow of blood to her brain and air to her lungs; brown kid gloves on the smooth white throat, which wasn't really smooth at all when you pressed into the bone and the sinew and the veins. How she'd struggled, the bitch; he'd known of course she was strong. He'd never have had the anger to kill her if she'd kept quiet; it would have fizzled out like a damp squib in spite of all she'd said and meant to do; his anger was like that, peaks and valleys; but she'd fought and kicked and tried to scream; he was bruised and blue and had been sick a couple of streets away.

He turned back to the table, fingering his head.

Another letter. ‘Dear Mrs MacArdle,' he began this time; and went right through to the end. It was better; yes, it would do, would have to. His watch – it was eleven-fifteen; sweat broke on his face; a quarter of an hour and the hardest yet to write.

Desperation gave him courage and he finished the second with a few minutes to spare. He addressed, stamped and sealed both, stuffed the wasted pieces of notepaper into his case and looked around. He picked up the ash-tray and emptied half the ends out of the window on to the lead roof beneath. He looked round again. No blood on the pillow. He'd had sense enough to avoid that. He put on his hat and raincoat, pulling his hat a little more than usual over one eye. He picked up his bag and was about to leave when, with a grunt of alarm, he remembered the waste-paper basket. He went across and stared down in cold anger and frustration at the stained cotton-wool. There was too much to carry in his pockets and these hotels provided you with everything except a fireplace. He picked up a piece of the wool and carried it over to the wash-basin, but in time his commonsense warned him that it would take too long to burn there and would fill the room with smoke. At last he opened his case and stuffed the wool down on top of the notepaper. This time he was really off.

Downstairs he paid his bill and got into the waiting taxi. The commissionaire, expecting his tip, hovered round the door and so had to hear him say ‘King's Cross'. Not that it mattered. Who'd be likely to remember so commonplace a destination?

In the taxi he leaned back and realized he might have been running. Fool again. Nerves. He lit a cigarette. That was better. Not really a nervous man. It would pass in a day or two. What a weight she'd been, dragging to the bed; her shoe had caught in the carpet. He'd dream of that. But his coolness then had paid. Run, he'd thought, run; all that noise; but instead he'd listened and held firm. That had taken courage. Cold courage. Some day he'd be proud of that.

And then the meeting at the foot of the stairs …

Half-way to the station he saw a paper-man on a corner and spoke through to the driver. While out he posted one of the letters and then sat back, opening out the newspaper in haste.