The Gigantic Shadow (10 page)

On the following morning, Tuesday morning, he decided quite suddenly that he could not adhere to the timetable agreed with Anthea. According to this timetable he should have sent off that morning the second ransom note, telling Lord Moorhouse to draw thirty thousand pounds out of the bank, and threatening to kill Anthea if he informed the police. Then on Wednesday morning he was to telephone and instruct Moorhouse about delivery of the money.

But why, he asked himself, should he wait until Wednesday, why not telephone Moorhouse this morning, and get things moving? He knew the answer to this argument. The second letter would put Moorhouse really on the rack, and the extra twenty-four hours would soften him up so that he would be ready to pay up without question. He appreciated the force of this argument, but found himself disinclined – or should he say unable? – to regard it. The meeting with Jerry Wilton, harmless and obviously coincidental as it had been, had upset him, and at breakfast time on Tuesday something else happened, something by no means so trivial, which sealed his resolution.

The dining room at the Cosmos, which had sometimes a spurious gaiety about it at night, was a mausoleum in the morning. The only people who ever came down to breakfast were a very old Russian exile with a long white beard stained yellow round the mouth by nicotine, and an elegant young Indian homosexual, who said that he was doing research for a book about the changes in English social habits during the last ten years but, Hunter suspected, stayed in the Cosmos because he could bring back his friends there without any uncomfortable questions. A nod passed for greeting to them, and then Hunter sat down to his breakfast of coffee and cold, slightly soggy toast and marmalade.

Usually the waiter on in the mornings was Alphonse, who had some kind of ague so that his approach was always signified by a rattling of plates and cups which, miraculously, never fell to the floor. Today, however, the other waiter, Bert, was on duty. Bert was a Cockney with slickly brushed black hair, a snub nose, and merry little dark eyes. He brushed crumbs off the table, a few on to Hunter’s clothes, poured his coffee, slid the marmalade off the tray on to the table, with a casual grace that was somehow insulting. Then he stood by the table and murmured something which Hunter, occupied with looking in the morning paper to see if there was anything about Anthea’s disappearance, did not properly hear. There was nothing in the paper. It was hardly possible that there could be anything.

‘What was that?’ he asked.

‘I said, shall we have the pleasure of seeing Miss Anthea today?’

For a moment Hunter was incapable of movement. His knife, engaged in buttering a piece of toast, stayed still, the hand holding the knife gripping it almost convulsively. He stared at the paper in front of him, on which the print had suddenly become unreadable. He was surprised by the calmness of his own voice as he said, ‘What’s that?’

Now he looked up at Bert’s face, on which the characteristic knowing look had changed to a triumphant smirk. The waiter went across to one corner of the room and came back with an old, dog-eared
Tatler.
With a clean, neatly-trimmed nail he pointed to a picture at the bottom right-hand corner of one page. It showed Anthea in riding clothes, smiling and looking very fresh and young. Roger Sennett stood glowering by her side. The caption said, ‘Glamorous Miss Anthea Moorhouse and the Honourable Roger Sennett enjoy a joke at a meeting of the East Hampshires near Alresford.’

‘I thought you’d be interested,’ Bert said. ‘Seeing you and the lady are such friends.’

Hunter admired his own composure. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Am I supposed to know who this is?’

‘Oh, come off it,’ Bert said, but his voice was uncertain. Hunter gathered strength from it.

‘Look here, young man,’ he said, ‘What are you trying to do?’

‘Just thought you’d be interested. Wondered what her dad would think if he knew she came to see you at the old Cosmos, that’s all.’

‘I’ve never seen this girl before. Do you understand that?’

‘If you say so.’

Hunter tapped the photograph with his finger. ‘But if I had –
if
I had – it would be very silly of you to try to blackmail me about it. Was that what you had in mind?’ He stared, directly and unflinchingly, at Bert. Under his hard gaze – or was it simply the use of the word
blackmail –
the young waiter shifted uncomfortably.

‘Course not, Mr Smith. Just thought you’d be interested, that’s all.’ A little more confidently he went on, ‘You got to admit she looks like –’

‘I don’t admit anything,’ Hunter said sharply. ‘And I should advise you to keep your mouth shut. Anything else would be silly. It might even be dangerous.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean this. Don’t think I’d hesitate to go to the police if you tried any funny business. That’s all.’ He dismissively returned to the paper, and to his coffee and toast.

Upstairs afterwards in his room he tried to assess the damage. He had shared, more or less, Anthea’s certainty that no one could link them together – and now here was the link firmly established. What a curse it is, he thought, that the would-be criminal classes read the
Tatler.
And how comic it was that Bert should have recognised Anthea, but not Hunter himself, whose photograph had recently been in the national press.

Bert would not be scared for long. Within a couple of days he would have returned to the attack. And when the time came, when the plot had been carried out, and Anthea had not returned, and the news of the kidnapping was in the papers, he would open his mouth and sing loud and strong. Hunter would then be identified as a suspect. By that time, to be sure, he and Anthea should be out of the country.

He assured himself that the incident did not matter, although he knew that it did. In fact, as he vaguely understood, he was no longer really capable of assessing accurately what did or what didn’t matter. To falter now, to give up the plot, meant the end of his life with Anthea – a life which was as yet no more than a promise of beaches where the sand was finer and the sea bluer than it ever was in reality, of little towns where people were anonymous and the sun always shone. Was all that only a vision? Even so, it was impossible for him to give it up. He could imagine the contempt with which Anthea would hear him when he told her that the plan had proved too risky, that he had had to abandon it. The thought that his relationship with her might end was more than he could bear. And if he was not to give up then he must go on, and go on quickly.

At half-past ten that morning he was in a call box at Victoria Station. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and held it in front of his mouth. He hoped that this would blur his voice while still leaving it audible. The solemn voice of a subordinate spoke to him and asked his business, when he pressed button A.

‘Tell Lord Moorhouse that I wrote him a letter yesterday about his daughter.’

There was a pause. Then came a voice which he recognised as Moorhouse’s. The voice said simply, ‘Yes?’

The words came easily enough. ‘You got my letter.’

The birdlike tones he remembered were impatient now, even autocratic. If there was alarm in the voice Hunter could not hear it. ‘About my daughter. Yes, I did. Is this some sort of practical joke?’

He said slowly, ‘It’s not a joke. Have you informed the police?’

The voice snapped back at him. ‘Certainly not. I regard the whole thing as a piece of nonsense.’

‘Did you think the earring was nonsense?’ He waited for a reply to that, but none came. ‘You’d better take us seriously if you want to see your daughter again.’

‘Of course I want to see her again, man. Get down to brass tacks.’

This reversal of the normal roles of kidnapper and victim had disconcerted Hunter. Now it angered him. He took away the handkerchief, and spoke loudly. ‘Listen to me and don’t interrupt. If you want to see her again, this is what you must do. Withdraw thirty thousand pounds from the bank today in one pound notes. You understand that, in one pound notes. Not new ones, and they mustn’t run consecutively. Put the money in a zipping canvas bag. Then wait for further instructions. Someone will telephone you this evening. Is that clear?’

For the first time the birdlike tones were subdued. ‘I understand, yes. But I’m not at all sure I can get that amount of money by tomorrow –’

‘You’d better get it if you want to see her.’

‘What about my daughter – Anthea. Is she well?’

Deliberately he said, ‘Your daughter is well. So far she is unharmed. She will remain unharmed if you do as we say.’

Now Moorhouse’s voice unmistakably faltered. ‘You really mean it isn’t a practical joke? You’d tell me if it were a joke, you wouldn’t keep it up this long.’

‘It’s no joke of any sort,’ Hunter said. ‘Do as we say. Get out the money and wait for a message. One more thing. We are watching you. If you tell the police, we shall know. Then the deal will be off, and I wouldn’t like to say what will happen.’

He put down the receiver, stepped out of the telephone box, and walked with an apparent decisiveness but with actual lack of purpose, down Victoria Street, and left into the park.

He told himself that he had carried it off pretty well, but he felt shame and fear rather than self-satisfaction. To make Moorhouse’s tone change from autocratic disbelief to something like submissiveness had had a kind of pleasure in it, but the pleasure was a degraded one. Anthea had apparently been able to think of her stepfather simply as a machine from whom money might be extracted, but for Hunter he had become a man whose feelings were being brutally exploited. He found the act of exploitation much more unpleasant than he had expected.

Fear was mixed with the sense of shame. It was all very well for Anthea to say blithely that they were not committing a crime, but what was demanding money with menaces but a crime? And although she might be right in saying that her father would never prosecute his stepdaughter, what reason was there to suppose that he would be given similar immunity? Walking through the park, standing on the bridge and staring at the children dropping bread to ducks, he saw the jaws of a trap closing on him, a trap which he was operating himself.

Yet, as he had also realised earlier that day, it was impossible for him to stop what he was doing, without losing Anthea. He remembered words which he had read long ago, ‘There is a point beyond which there is no turning back. This is the point that must be reached.’ Hunter felt that he had reached it.

Hunter was a great reader of brass plates outside office buildings, a wonderer about the secrets hidden (as it seemed to him) behind such names as the National Strain Removers Association, or the Council for the Commercial use of Inorganic Materials, or the League of Steady Walkers. Now, as he walked idly out of the park and turned into a street just off Lower Regent Street, he read the plates in the doorways of the solid Victorian buildings, and was stopped by one particularly shining and beautiful and, to judge by its unscratched nature, new, that said PFC, 1st Floor. In smaller capitals, which descended finally to upper and lower case, the plate said PATRIOTIC FELLOWSHIP CIRCLE for Preserving the Bonds of Empire. He remembered the man with the Adam’s apple, the moment outside the house when Anthea had looked at him without acknowledgement.

On the first floor there was a room that said ‘Private’, and another with a glass door lettered in black, ‘Enquiries. Please Knock and Enter.’

He knocked and entered. A woman in her forties, with wisps of grey hair hanging down on either side of a red shapeless face, was busy at a typewriter. She looked up in a manner that he guessed was permanently flustered.

‘Can I help you?’

‘Perhaps you can. I wanted to find out something about the objects of the Fellowship.’

‘Yes, yes. Just a moment. Now where –’ Her desk was littered with papers, and she began to search among them. The room was large, light, airy, the oak desk and steel filing cabinets looked new. Two doors led out of the room, both lettered in gold. On one the lettering said
Mr L G Rawlinson,
on the other
Mr H A Pine.

The red-faced woman’s search among the papers became a hen-like scrabbling. She brushed ineffectively at one of the wisps of hair, muttered, ‘If you’ll excuse me,’ and went into Mr Rawlinson’s room. When she came back the man with the Adam’s apple was with her. He smiled at Hunter, showing a fine mouthful of false teeth.

‘You wanted to know about the PFC, Mr – ah –’

‘Smith.’

‘I am the secretary of the Circle. Here is a little – ah – brochure, which sets out our primary aims and objects, the preservation and indeed – ah – strengthening of the bonds of Empire. We have monthly meetings at which all our friends are welcome. Inter-cultural exchange visits are paid. A young party came over from Rhodesia this year, and we shall be sending a group out there in the autumn.’

‘A sort of Scout movement?’ Hunter suggested. Mr Rawlinson gobbled. ‘By no means. Have you any conception of the inroads made by international Communism in the Colonies? Few people have, I find. The PFC is combating the growth of Communism by sending out speakers to different parts of Empire, speakers who emphasise the Empire ideal. In this country we are carrying out a campaign, an – ah
– intensive
campaign, of circularisation. A selected list of
important
people has been chosen, and we are trying to make them aware of the extent of the danger. Would it surprise you to know that the Foreign Office is riddled with Communists, Mr Smith?’

‘It would, yes.’

‘Yet that is the case, I assure you. We have evidence to prove it.’ A slight white foam showed on Mr Rawlinson’s lips. He wiped it away with a handkerchief, and looked triumphantly at Hunter.

The door on the other side of the room opened and a thin, dark young man stood there, looking from one to the other of them. Rawlinson beamed.

‘Arthur. We were just – ah – talking about the fine work the Circle was doing out in South Africa and Australia. This is Mr Pine, our – ah – Colonial organiser, who has been out to
both
countries this year, Mr – ah – Smith.’

The young man came forward smiling. He had an actor’s voice, deep and melodious. ‘You are interested in the Fellowship Circle, Mr Smith.’

‘Yes.’ Recklessly he said, ‘A friend of mine named Anthea Moorhouse mentioned it to me.’

‘Ah, yes.’ Rawlinson nodded, pleased. ‘She is one of our most
tireless
supporters, isn’t she, Miss Framling?’

The middle-aged woman had been brooding over her typewriter. Thus appealed to, she nodded emphatically.

‘I wish there were more like her, she is really wonderful. And her stepfather too – you know, he is our Chairman.’

‘Yes. I heard him speak the other day. Anthea is an active worker for the Circle, then.’

‘Did she tell you that?’ There was an expression of puzzlement on Pine’s thin, nervously handsome face.

‘Yes, but she didn’t say exactly what she did.’

‘She helps Arthur mostly,’ Rawlinson said. ‘Another of his functions is that of raising funds, and she really has been
wonderfully
good about that. There are certain people whom we can always rely on for a monthly contribution if they are
personally
approached. She calls on them regularly, really never lets a month go by without seeing them.’

‘I wonder if it would be possible for me to lend a hand with that kind of work,’ Hunter said. ‘If I joined, that is.’

One side of Pine’s face moved slightly, in a nervous tic.

‘Why, yes.’ Rawlinson looked baffled. ‘It’s really Arthur’s province but – ah – I feel sure there would be no objection. You are a friend of Miss Moorhouse’s – of Anthea’s.’ Hunter nodded.

‘There was something I wanted to see you about, Leslie,’ Pine said abruptly. ‘In connection with the group visit for New Zealand. It’s rather urgent.’

‘Oh, yes. Yes.’ Rawlinson dabbed again at his lips, held out a hand. ‘You’ll read the brochure, Mr Smith, and let us know your feelings. Do let us know if there’s any other – ah – information you need.’

‘I’ll let you know.’ Hunter was suddenly in a hurry to get out of the office.

‘And as far as working on the fund-raising scheme goes, I feel sure it would be possible to – eh, Arthur?’

Pine did not reply. He nodded goodbye to Hunter, and moved to the door of Rawlinson’s office.

Out in the street again Hunter read a few lines of the brochure and then threw it in the gutter. The way in which Anthea had occupied her time in the past was not, after all, his affair.