The Ministry of Fear (23 page)

‘We foot it from here,' Mr Prentice said. A man on the opposite kerb began to walk up the street as they alighted.

‘Do you carry a revolver?' the man in the bowler hat asked nervously.

‘I wouldn't know how to use it,' Mr Prentice said. ‘If there's trouble of that kind just lie flat.'

‘You had no right to bring me into this.'

Mr Prentice turned sharply. ‘Oh yes,' he said, ‘every right. Nobody's got a right to his life these days. My dear chap, you are conscripted for your country.' They stood grouped on the pavement: bank messengers with chained boxes went by in top hats: stenographers and clerks hurried past returning late from their lunch. There were no ruins to be seen; it was like peace. Mr Prentice said, ‘If those photographs leave the country, there'll be a lot of suicides . . . at least that's what happened in France.'

‘How do you know they haven't left?' Rowe asked.

‘We don't. We just hope, that's all. We'll know the worst soon enough.' He said, ‘Watch when I go in. Give me five minutes with our man in the fitting-room, and then you, Rowe, come in and ask for me. I want to have him where I can watch him – in all the mirrors. Then, Davis, you count a hundred and follow.
You
are going to be too much of a coincidence. You are going to be the last straw.'

They watched the stiff old-fashioned figure make his way up the street; he was just the kind of man to have a city tailor – somebody reliable and not expensive whom he could recommend to his son. Presently about fifty yards along he turned in: a man stood at the next corner and lit a cigarette. A motor-car drew up next door and a woman got out to do some shopping, leaving a man at the wheel.

Rowe said, ‘It's time for me to be moving.' His pulse beat with excitement; it was as if he had come to this adventure unsaddened, with the freshness of a boy. He looked suspiciously at Davis, who stood there with a nerve twitching at his cheek. He said, ‘A hundred and you follow.' Davis said nothing. ‘You understand. You count a hundred.'

‘Oh,' Davis said furiously, ‘this play-acting. I'm a plain man.'

‘Those were his orders.'

‘Who's he to give me orders?'

Rowe couldn't stay to argue: time was up.

War had hit the tailoring business hard. A few rolls of grey inferior cloth lay on the counter; the shelves were nearly empty. A man in a frock-coat with a tired, lined, anxious face said, ‘What can we do for you, sir?'

‘I came here,' Rowe said, ‘to meet a friend.' He looked down the narrow aisle between the little mirrored cubicles. ‘I expect he's being fitted now.'

‘Will you take a chair, sir?' and ‘Mr Ford,' he called, ‘Mr Ford.' Out from one of the cubicles, a tape measure slung round his neck, a little bouquet of pins in his lapel, solid, city-like, came Cost, whom he had last seen dead in his chair when the lights went out. Like a piece of a jig-saw puzzle which clicks into place and makes sense of a whole confusing block, that solid figure took up its place in his memory with the man from Welwyn and the proletarian poet and Anna's brother. What had Mrs Bellairs called him? He remembered the whole phrase ‘Our business man'.

Rowe stood up as though this were someone of great importance who must be greeted punctiliously, but there seemed to be no recognition in the stolid respectable eyes. ‘Yes, Mr Bridges?' Those were the first words he had ever heard him speak; his whole function before had been one of death.

‘This gentleman has come to meet the other gentleman.'

The eyes swivelled slowly and rested; no sign of recognition broke their large grey calm – or did they rest a shade longer than was absolutely necessary? ‘I have nearly taken the gentleman's measurements. If you would not mind waiting two minutes . . .' Two minutes Rowe thought, and then the other, the straw which will really break you down.

Mr Ford – if this was now to be his name – walked slowly up to the counter; everything he did, you felt, was carefully pondered; his suits must always be well-built. There was no room in that precision for the eccentricity, the wayward act, and yet what a wild oddity lay hidden under the skin. He saw Dr Forester dabbling his fingers in what looked like blood.

A telephone stood on the counter; Mr Ford picked up the receiver and dialled. The dial faced Rowe. He watched with care each time where the finger fitted. B. A. T. He felt sure of the letters; but one number he missed, suddenly wavering and catching the serene ponderous gaze of Mr Ford as he dialled. He was unsure of himself; he wished Mr Prentice would appear.

‘Hullo,' Mr Ford said, ‘hullo. This is Pauling and Crosthwaite.'

Along the length of the window towards the door dragged the unwilling form of the man with the bowler hat: Rowe's hands tightened in his lap. Mr Bridges was sadly straightening the meagre rolls of cloth, his back turned. His listless hands were like a poignant criticism in the
Tailor and Cutter
.

‘The suit was dispatched this morning, sir,' Mr Ford was saying, ‘I trust in time for your journey.' He clucked his satisfaction calmly and inhumanly down the telephone, ‘Thank you very much, sir. I felt very satisfied myself at the last fitting.' His eyes shifted to the clanging door as Davis looked in with a kind of wretched swagger. ‘Oh, yes, sir. I think when you've worn it once, you'll find the shoulders will settle . . .' Mr Prentice's whole elaborate plot was a failure: that nerve had not broken.

‘Mr Travers,' Davis exclaimed with astonishment.

Carefully putting his hand over the mouthpiece of the telephone Mr Ford said, ‘I beg your pardon, sir?'

‘You are Mr Travers.' Then Davis, meeting those clear calm eyes, added weakly, ‘Aren't you?'

‘No, sir.'

‘I thought . . .'

‘Mr Bridges, would you mind attending to this gentleman?'

‘Certainly, Mr Ford.'

The hand left the receiver and Mr Ford quietly, firmly, authoritatively continued to speak up the wire. ‘No, sir. I find at the last moment that we shall not be able to repeat the trousers. It's not a matter of coupons, no. We can obtain no more of that pattern from the manufacturers – no more at all.' Again his eyes met Rowe's and wandered like a blind man's hand delicately along the contours of his face. ‘Personally, sir, I have no hope. No hope at all.' He put the receiver down and moved a little way along the counter. ‘If you can spare these a moment, Mr Bridges . . .' He picked up a pair of cutting-shears.

‘Certainly, Mr Ford.'

Without another word he passed Rowe, not looking at him again, and moved down the aisle, without hurry, serious, professional, as heavy as stone. Rowe quickly rose: something, he felt, must be done, be said, if the whole plan were not to end in fiasco. ‘Cost,' he called after the figure, ‘Cost.' It was only then that the extreme calm and deliberation of the figure with the shears struck him as strange. He called out ‘Prentice' sharply in warning as the fitter turned aside into a cubicle.

But it was not the cubicle from which Mr Prentice emerged. He came bewilderedly out in his silk shirt-sleeves from the opposite end of the aisle. ‘What is it?' he asked, but Rowe was already at the other door straining to get in. Over his shoulder he could see the shocked face of Mr Bridges, Davis's goggling eyes. ‘Quick,' he said, ‘your hat,' and grabbed the bowler and crashed it through the glass of the door.

Under the icicles of splintered glass he could see Cost-Travers-Ford. He sat in the arm-chair for clients opposite the tall triple mirror, leaning forward, his throat transfixed, with the cutting-shears held firmly upright between his knees. It was a Roman death.

Rowe thought: this time I
have
killed him, and heard that quiet respectful but authoritative voice speaking down the telephone. ‘Personally I have no hope. No hope at all.'

Chapter 2

MOPPING UP

1

M
RS
Bellairs had less dignity.

They had driven straight to Campden Hill, leaving Davis with his wrecked bowler. Mr Prentice was worried and depressed. ‘It does no good,' he said. ‘We want them alive and talking.'

Rowe said, ‘He must have had great courage. I don't know why that's so surprising. One doesn't associate it with tailors . . . except for that one in the story who killed a giant. I suppose you'd say this one was on the side of the giants. I wonder why.'

Mr Prentice burst suddenly out as they drove up through the Park in the thin windy rain. ‘Pity is a terrible thing. People talk about the passion of love. Pity is the worst passion of all: we don't outlive it like sex.'

‘After all, it's war,' Rowe said with a kind of exhilaration. The old fake truism like a piece of common pyrites in the hands of a child split open and showed its sparkling core to him. He was taking part . . .

Mr Prentice looked at him oddly, with curiosity. ‘You don't feel it, do you? Adolescents don't feel pity. It's a mature passion.'

‘I expect,' Rowe said, ‘that I led a dull humdrum sober life, and so all this excites me. Now that I know I'm not a murderer I can enjoy . . .' He broke off at sight of the dimly remembered house like the scene of a dream: that unweeded little garden with the grey fallen piece of statuary and the small iron gate that creaked. All the blinds were down as though somebody had died, and the door stood open; you expected to see auction tickets on the furniture. ‘We pulled her in,' Mr Prentice said, ‘simultaneously.'

There was silence about the place; a man in a dark suit who might have been an undertaker stood in the hall. He opened a door for Mr Prentice and they went in. It wasn't the drawing-room that Rowe vaguely remembered, but a small dining-room crammed full with ugly chairs and a too-large table and a desk. Mrs Bellairs sat in an arm-chair at the head of the table with a pasty grey closed face, wearing a black turban; the man at the door said, ‘She won't say a thing.'

‘Well, ma'am,' Mr Prentice greeted her with a kind of gallant jauntiness.

Mrs Bellairs said nothing.

‘I've brought you a visitor, ma'am,' Mr Prentice said and stepping to one side allowed her to see Rowe.

It is a disquieting experience to find yourself an object of terror: no wonder the novelty of it intoxicates some men. To Rowe it was horrible – as though he had suddenly found himself capable of an atrocity. Mrs Bellairs began to choke, sitting grotesquely at the table-head; it was as if she had swallowed a fish-bone at a select dinner-party. She must have been holding herself in with a great effort, and the shock had upset the muscles of her throat.

Mr Prentice was the only one equal to the occasion. He wormed round the table and slapped her jovially on the back. ‘Choke up, ma'am,' he said, ‘choke up. You'll be all right.'

‘I've never seen the man,' she moaned, ‘never.'

‘Why, you told his fortune,' Mr Prentice said. ‘Don't you remember that?'

A glint of desperate hope slid across the old congested eyes. She said, ‘If all this fuss is about a little fortune-telling . . . I only do it for charity.'

‘Of course, we understand that,' Mr Prentice said.

‘And I never tell the future.'

‘Ah, if we could see into the future . . .'

‘Only character.'

‘And the weight of cakes,' Mr Prentice said, and all the hope went suddenly out. It was too late now for silence.

‘And your little séances,' Mr Prentice went cheerily on, as though they shared a joke between them.

‘In the interests of science,' Mrs Bellairs said.

‘Does your little group still meet?'

‘On Wednesdays.'

‘Many absentees?'

‘They are all personal friends,' Mrs Bellairs said vaguely; now that the questions seemed again on safer ground, she put up one plump powdered hand and adjusted the turban.

‘Mr Cost now . . . he can hardly attend any longer.'

Mrs Bellairs said carefully, ‘Of course, I recognize this gentleman now. The beard confused me. That was a silly joke of Mr Cost's. I knew nothing about it. I was far, far away.'

‘Far away?'

‘Where the Blessed are.'

‘Oh yes, yes. Mr Cost won't play such jokes again.'

‘It was meant quite innocently, I'm sure. Perhaps he resented two strangers . . . We are a very compact little group. And Mr Cost was never a real believer.'

‘Let's hope he is now.' Mr Prentice did not seem worried at the moment by what he had called the terrible passion of pity. He said, ‘You must try to get into touch with him, Mrs Bellairs, and ask him why he cut his throat this morning.'

Into the goggle-eyed awful silence broke the ringing of the telephone. It rang and rang on the desk, and there were too many people in the little crowded room to get to it quickly. A memory shifted like an uneasy sleeper . . . this had happened before.

‘Wait a moment,' Mr Prentice said. ‘You answer it, ma'am.'

She repeated, ‘Cut his throat . . .'

‘It was all he had left to do. Except live and hang.'

The telephone cried on. It was as though someone far away had his mind fixed on that room, working out the reason for that silence.

‘Answer it, ma'am,' Mr Prentice said again.

Mrs Bellairs was not made of the same stuff as the tailor. She heaved herself obediently up, jangling a little as she moved. She got momentarily stuck between the table and the wall, and the turban slipped over one eye. She said, ‘Hullo. Who's there?'