The Ministry of Fear (22 page)

‘I don't know what I am.'

‘This face for instance . . .'

It was the photograph over which Rowe had hesitated: he hesitated again.

‘What profession do you think
he
followed?' Mr Prentice asked.

The pencil clipped in the breast-pocket: the depressed suit: the air of a man always expecting a rebuff: the little lines of knowledge round the eyes – when he examined it closely he felt no doubt at all. ‘A private detective,' he said.

‘Right the first time. And this little anonymous man had his little anonymous name . . .'

Rowe smiled. ‘Jones I should imagine.'

‘You wouldn't think it, Mr Rowe, but you and he – let's call him Jones – had something in common. You both disappeared. But you've come back. What was the name of the agency which employed him, Beavis?'

‘I don't remember, sir. I could go and look it up.'

‘It doesn't matter. The only one I can remember is the Clifford. It wasn't that.'

‘Not the Orthotex?' Rowe asked. ‘I once had a friend . . .' and stopped.

‘It comes back, doesn't it, Mr Rowe. His name was Jones, you see. And he did belong to the Orthotex. What made you go there? We can tell you even if you don't remember. You thought that someone had tried to murder you – about a cake. You had won the cake unfairly at a fair (what a pun!) because a certain Mrs Bellairs had told you the weight. You went to find out where Mrs Bellairs lived – from the offices of the Fund for the Mothers of the Free Nations (if I've got the outlandish name correct) and Jones followed, just to keep an eye on them – and you. But you must have given him the slip somehow, Mr Rowe, because Jones never came back, and when you telephoned next day to Mr Rennit you said you were wanted for murder.'

Rowe sat with his hand over his eyes – trying to remember? trying not to remember? – while the voice drove carefully and precisely on.

‘And yet no murder had been committed in London during the previous twenty-four hours – so far as we knew – unless poor Jones had gone that way. You obviously knew something, perhaps you knew everything: we advertised for you and you didn't come forward. Until today, when you arrive in a beard you certainly used not to wear, saying you had lost your memory, but remembering at least that you had been accused of murder – only you picked out a man we know is alive. How does it all strike you, Mr Rowe?'

Rowe said, ‘I'm waiting for the handcuffs,' and smiled unhappily.

‘You can hardly blame our friend Graves,' Mr Prentice said.

‘Is life really like this?' Rowe asked. Mr Prentice leant forward with an interested air, as though he were always ready to abandon the particular in favour of the general argument. He said, ‘This is life, so I suppose one can say it's like life.'

‘It isn't how I had imagined it,' Rowe said. He went on, ‘You see, I'm a learner. I'm right at the beginning, trying to find my way about. I thought life was much simpler and – grander. I suppose that's how it strikes a boy. I was brought up on stories of Captain Scott writing his last letters home. Oates walking into the blizzard, I've forgotten who losing his hands from his experiments with radium, Damien among the lepers . . .' The memories which are overlaid by the life one lives came freshly back in the little stuffy office in the great grey Yard. It was a relief to talk. ‘There was a book called the
Book of Golden Deeds
by a woman called Yonge . . .
The Little Duke
 . . .' He said, ‘If you were suddenly taken from that world into this job you are doing now you'd feel bewildered. Jones and the cake, the sick bay, poor Stone . . . all this talk of a man called Hitler . . . your files of wretched faces, the cruelty and meaninglessness . . . It's as if one had been sent on a journey with the wrong map. I'm ready to do everything you want, but remember I don't know my way about. Everybody else has changed gradually and learnt. This whole business of war and hate – even that's strange. I haven't been worked up to it. I expect much the best thing would be to hang me.'

‘Yes,' Mr Prentice said eagerly, ‘yes, it's a most interesting case. I can see that to you,' he became startlingly colloquial, ‘this is rather a dingy hole. We've come to terms with it of course.'

‘What frightens me,' Rowe said, ‘is knowing how I came to terms with it before my memory went. When I came in to London today I hadn't realized there would be so many ruins. Nothing will seem as strange as that. God knows what kind of a ruin I am myself. Perhaps I
am
a murderer?'

Mr Prentice reopened the file and said rapidly, ‘Oh, we no longer think you killed Jones.' He was like a man who has looked over a wall, seen something disagreeable and now walks rapidly, purposefully, away, talking as he goes. ‘The question is – what made you lose your memory? What do you know about that?'

‘Only what I've been told.'

‘And what have you been told?'

‘That it was a bomb. It gave me this scar.'

‘Were you alone?'

Before he could brake his tongue he said, ‘No.'

‘Who was with you?'

‘A girl.' It was too late now; he had to bring her in, and after all if he were not a murderer, why should it matter that her brother had aided his escape? ‘Anna Hilfe.' The plain words were sweet on the tongue.

‘Why were you with her?'

‘I think we were lovers.'

‘You think?'

‘I don't remember.'

‘What does she say about it?'

‘She says I saved her life.'

‘The Free Mothers,' Mr Prentice brooded. ‘Has she explained how you got to Dr Forester's?'

‘She was forbidden to.' Mr Prentice raised an eyebrow. ‘They wanted – so they told us – my memory to come back naturally and slowly of itself. No hypnotism, no psychoanalysis.'

Mr Prentice beamed at him and swayed a little on his shooting-stick; you felt he was taking a well-earned rest in the middle of a successful shoot. ‘Yes, it wouldn't have done, would it, if it had come back too quickly . . . Although of course there was always the sick bay.'

‘If only you'd tell me what it's all about.'

Mr Prentice stroked his moustache; he had the
fainéant
air of Arthur Balfour, but you felt that he knew it. He had stylized himself – life was easier that way. He had chosen a physical mould just as a writer chooses a technical form. ‘Now were you ever a habitué of the Regal Court?'

‘It's a hotel?'

‘You remember that much.'

‘Well, it's an easy guess.'

Mr Prentice closed his eyes; it was perhaps an affectation, but who could live without affectations?

‘Why do you ask about the Regal Court?'

‘It's a shot in the dark,' Mr Prentice said. ‘We have so little time.'

‘Time for what?'

‘To find a needle in a haystack.'

3

One wouldn't have said that Mr Prentice was capable of much exertion; rough shooting, you would have said, was beyond him. From the house to the brake and from the brake to the butts was about as far as you could expect him to walk in a day. And yet during the next few hours he showed himself capable of great exertion, and the shooting was indubitably rough . . .

He had dropped his enigmatic statement into the air and was out of the room almost before the complete phrase had formed, his long legs moving stiffly, like stilts. Rowe was left alone with Beavis and the day wore slowly on. The sun's early promise had been false; a cold unseasonable drizzle fell like dust outside the window. After a long time they brought him some cold pie and tea on a tray.

Beavis was not inclined to conversation. It was as though
his
words might be used in evidence, and Rowe only once attempted to break the silence. He said, ‘I wish I knew what it was all about' and watched Beavis's long-toothed mouth open and clap to like a rabbit snare. ‘Official secrets,' Beavis said and stared with flat eyes at the blank wall.

Then suddenly Mr Prentice was with them again, rushing into the room in his stiff casual stride, followed by a man in black who held a bowler hat in front of him with both hands like a basin of water and panted a little in the trail of Mr Prentice. He came to a stop inside the door and glared at Rowe. He said, ‘That's the scoundrel. I haven't a doubt of it. I can see through the beard. It's a disguise.'

Mr Prentice gave a giggle. ‘That's excellent,' he said. ‘The pieces are really fitting.'

The man with the bowler said, ‘He carried in the suitcase and he wanted just to leave it. But I had my instructions. I told him he must wait for Mr Travers. He didn't want to wait. Of course he didn't want to, knowing what was inside . . . Something must have gone wrong. He didn't get Mr Travers, but he nearly got the poor girl . . . and when the confusion was over, he'd gone.'

‘I don't remember ever seeing him before,' Rowe said.

The man gesticulated passionately with his bowler, ‘I'll swear to him in any court of law.'

Beavis watched with his mouth a little open and Mr Prentice giggled again. ‘No time,' he said. ‘No time for squabbles. You two can get to know each other later. I need you both now.'

‘If you'd tell me a little,' Rowe pleaded. To have come all this way, he thought, to meet a charge of murder and to find only a deeper confusion . . .

‘In the taxi,' Mr Prentice said. ‘I'll explain in the taxi.' He made for the door.

‘Aren't you going to charge him?' the man asked, panting in pursuit.

Mr Prentice without looking round said, ‘Presently, presently, perhaps . . .' and then darkly, ‘Who?'

They swept into the court-yard and out into broad stony Northumberland Avenue, policemen saluting: into a taxi and off along the ruined front of the Strand: the empty eyes of an insurance building: boarded windows: sweet-shops with one dish of mauve cachous in the window.

Mr Prentice said in a low voice, ‘I just want you two gentlemen to behave naturally. We are going to a city tailor's where I'm being measured for a suit. I shall go in first and after a few minutes you, Rowe, and last you, Mr Davis,' and he touched the bowler hat with the tip of a finger where it balanced on the stranger's lap.

‘But what's it all about, sir?' Davis asked. He had edged away from Rowe, and Mr Prentice curled his long legs across the taxi, sitting opposite them in a tip-up.

‘Never mind. Just keep your eyes open and see if there's anyone in the shop you recognize.' The mischief faded from his eyes as the taxi looped round the gutted shell of St Clement Danes. He said, ‘The place will be surrounded. You needn't be afraid . . .'

Rowe said, ‘I'm not afraid. I only want to know . . .' staring out at odd devastated boarded-up London.

‘It's really serious,' Mr Prentice said. ‘I don't know quite how serious. But you might say that we all depend on it.' He shuddered away from what was almost an emotional statement, giggled, touched doubtfully the silky ends of his moustache and said, with sadness in his voice, ‘You know there are always weaknesses that have to be covered up. If the Germans had known after Dunkirk just how weak . . . There are still weaknesses of which if they knew the exact facts . . .' The ruins around St Paul's unfolded; the obliterated acres of Paternoster Row. He said, ‘This would be nothing to it. Nothing.' He went slowly on, ‘Perhaps I was wrong to say there was no danger. If we are on the right track, of course, there must be danger, mustn't there? It's worth – oh, a thousand lives to them.'

‘If I can be of any use,' Rowe said. ‘This is so strange to me. I didn't imagine war was this,' staring out at desolation. Jerusalem must have looked something like this in the mind's eye of Christ when he wept . . .

‘I'm not scared,' the man with the bowler said sharply, defensively.

‘We are looking,' Mr Prentice said, clasping his bony knees and vibrating with the taxi, ‘for a little roll of film – probably a good deal smaller than a cotton reel. Smaller than those little rolls you put in Leica cameras. You must have read the questions in Parliament about certain papers which were missing for an hour. It was hushed up publicly. It doesn't help anybody to ruin confidence in a big name – and it doesn't help us to have the public and the press muddying up the trail. I tell you two only because – well, we could have you put quietly away for the duration if there was any leakage. It happened twice – the first time the roll was hidden in a cake and the cake was to be fetched from a certain fête. But you won it,' Mr Prentice nodded at Rowe, ‘the password as it were was given to the wrong man.'

‘Mrs Bellairs?' Rowe said.

‘She's being looked after at this minute.' He went on explaining with vague gestures of his thin useless-looking hands, ‘That attempt failed. A bomb that hit your house destroyed the cake and everything – and probably saved your life. But they didn't like the way you followed the case up. They tried to frighten you into hiding – but for some reason that was not enough. Of course they meant to blow you into pieces, but when they found you'd lost your memory, that was good enough. It was better than killing you, because by disappearing you took the blame for the bomb – as well as for Jones.'

‘But why the girl?'

‘We'll leave out the mysteries,' Mr Prentice said. ‘Perhaps because her brother helped you. They aren't above revenge. There isn't time for all that now.' They were at the Mansion House. ‘What we know is this – they had to wait until the next chance came. Another big name and another fool. He had this in common with the first fool – he went to the same tailor.' The taxi drew up at the corner of a city street.