The Ministry of Fear (25 page)

They had had to step over Dr Forester's body; it lay at the bottom of the stairs. A sixth snare had entangled the doctor: not love of country but love of one's fellow-man, a love which had astonishingly flamed into action in the heart of respectable, hero-worshipping Johns. The doctor had been too sure of Johns: he had not realized that respect is really less reliable than fear: a man may be more ready to kill one he respects than to betray him to the police. When Johns shut his eyes and pulled the trigger of the revolver which had once been confiscated from Davis and had lain locked away for months in a drawer, he was not ruining the man he respected – he was saving him from the interminable proceedings of the law courts, from the crudities of prosecuting counsel, the unfathomable ignorances of the judge, and the indignity of depending on the shallow opinion of twelve men picked at random. If love of his fellow-man refused to allow him to be a sleeping partner in the elimination of Stone, love also dictated the form of his refusal.

Dr Forester had shown himself disturbed from the moment of Rowe's escape. He had been inexplicably reluctant to call in the police, and he seemed worried about the fate of Stone. There were consultations with Poole from which Johns was excluded, and during the afternoon there was a trunk call to London . . . Johns took a letter to the post and couldn't help noticing the watcher outside the gate. In the village he saw a police car from the country town. He began to wonder . . .

He met Poole on the way back. Poole, too, must have seen. All the fancies and resentments of the last few days came back to Johns. Sitting in a passion of remorse in the lounge, he couldn't explain how all these indications had crystallized into the belief that the doctor was planning Stone's death. He remembered theoretical conversations he had often had with the doctor on the subject of euthanasia: arguments with the doctor, who was quite unmoved by the story of the Nazi elimination of old people and incurables. The doctor had once said, ‘It's what any State medical service has sooner or later got to face. If you are going to be kept alive in institutions run by and paid for by the State, you must accept the State's right to economize when necessary . . .' He intruded on a colloquy between Poole and Forester, which was abruptly broken off, he became more and more restless and uneasy, it was as if the house were infected by the future: fear was already present in the passages. At tea Dr Forester made some remark about ‘poor Stone'.

‘Why poor Stone?' Johns asked sharply and accusingly.

‘He's in great pain,' Dr Forester said. ‘A tumour . . . Death is the greatest mercy we can ask for him.'

He went restlessly out into the garden in the dusk; in the moonlight the sundial was like a small sheeted figure of someone already dead at the entrance to the rose garden. Suddenly he heard Stone crying out . . . His account became more confused than ever. Apparently he ran straight to his room and got out the gun. It was just like Johns, that he had mislaid the key and found it at last in his pocket. He heard Stone cry out again. He ran through the lounge, into the other wing, made for the stairs – the sickly confected smell of chloroform was in the passage, and Dr Forester stood on guard at the foot of the stairs. He said crossly and nervously, ‘What do you want, Johns?' and Johns, who still believed in the misguided purity of the doctor's fanaticism, saw only one solution: he shot the doctor. Poole, with his twisted shoulder and his malign conceited face, backed away from the top of the stairs – and he shot him, too, in a rage because he guessed he was too late.

Then, of course, the police were at the door. He went to meet them, for apparently the servants had all been given the evening off, and it was that small banal fact of which he had read in so many murder stories that brought the squalid truth home to him. Dr Forester was still alive, and the local police thought it only right to send for the parson . . . That was all. It was extraordinary the devastation that could be worked in one evening in what had once seemed a kind of earthy paradise. A flight of bombers could not have eliminated peace more thoroughly than had three men.

The search was then begun. The house was ransacked. More police were sent for. Lights were switched on and off restlessly through the early morning hours in upstairs rooms. Mr Prentice said, ‘If we could find even a single print . . .' but there was nothing. At one point of the long night watch Rowe found himself back in the room where Digby had slept. He thought of Digby now as a stranger – a rather gross, complacent, parasitic stranger whose happiness had lain in too great an ignorance. Happiness should always be qualified by a knowledge of misery. There on the book-shelf stood the Tolstoy with the pencil-marks rubbed out. Knowledge was the great thing . . . not abstract knowledge in which Dr Forester had been so rich, the theories which lead one enticingly on with their appearance of nobility, of transcendent virtue, but detailed passionate trivial human knowledge. He opened the Tolstoy again: ‘What seemed to me good and lofty – love of fatherland, of one's own people – became to me repulsive and pitiable. What seemed to me bad and shameful – rejection of fatherland and cosmopolitanism – now appeared to me on the contrary good and noble.' Idealism had ended up with a bullet in the stomach at the foot of the stairs; the idealist had been caught out in treachery and murder. Rowe didn't believe they had had to blackmail him much. They had only to appeal to his virtues, his intellectual pride, his abstract love of humanity. One can't love humanity. One can only love people.

‘Nothing,' Mr Prentice said. He drooped disconsolately across the room on his stiff lean legs and drew the curtain a little aside. Only one star was visible now: the others had faded into the lightening sky. ‘So much time wasted,' Mr Prentice said.

‘Three dead and one in prison.'

‘They can find a dozen to take their place. I want the films: the top man.' He said, ‘They've been using photographic chemicals in the basin in Poole's room. That's where they developed the film, probably. I don't suppose they'd print more than one at a time. They'd want to trust as few people as possible, and so long as they have the negative . . .' He added sadly, ‘Poole was a first-class photographer. He specialized in the life history of the bee. Wonderful studies. I've seen some of them. I want you to come over now to the island. I'm afraid we may find something unpleasant there for you to identify . . .'

They stood where Stone had stood; three little red lights ahead across the pond gave it in the three-quarter dark an illimitable air as of a harbour just before dawn with the riding lamps of steamers gathering for a convoy. Mr Prentice waded out and Rowe followed him; there was a thin skin of water over nine inches of mud. The red lights were lanterns – the kind of lanterns which are strung at night where roads are broken. Three policemen were digging in the centre of the tiny island. There was hardly a foothold for two more men. ‘This was what Stone saw,' Rowe said. ‘Men digging.'

‘Yes.'

‘What do you expect . . . ?' He stopped; there was something strained in the attitude of the diggers. They put in their spades carefully as though they might break something fragile, and they seemed to turn up the earth with reluctance. The dark scene reminded him of something: something distant and sombre. Then he remembered a dark Victorian engraving in a book his mother had taken away from him: men in cloaks digging at night in a graveyard with the moonlight glinting on a spade.

Mr Prentice said, ‘There's somebody you've forgotten – unaccounted for.'

Now as each spade cut down he waited himself with apprehension: he was held by the fear of disgust.

‘How do you know where to dig?'

‘They left marks. They were amateurs at this. I suppose that was why they were scared of what Stone saw.'

One spade made an ugly scrunching sound in the soft earth.

‘Careful,' Mr Prentice said. The man wielding it stopped and wiped sweat off his face, although the night was cold. Then he drew the tool slowly out of the earth and looked at the blade. ‘Start again on this side,' Mr Prentice said. ‘Take it gently. Don't go deep.' The other men stopped digging and watched, but you could tell they didn't want to watch.

The man digging said, ‘Here it is.' He left the spade standing in the ground and began to move the earth with his fingers, gently as though he were planting seedlings. He said with relief, It's only a box.'

He took his spade again, and with one strong effort lifted the box out of its bed. It was the kind of wooden box which holds groceries, and the lid was loosely nailed down. He prised it open with the edge of the blade and another man brought a lamp nearer. Then one by one an odd sad assortment of objects was lifted out: they were like the relics a company commander sends home when one of his men has been killed. But there was this difference: there were no letters or photographs.

‘Nothing they could burn,' Mr Prentice said.

These were what an ordinary fire would reject: a fountain-pen clip, another clip which had probably held a pencil.

‘It's not easy to burn things,' Mr Prentice said, ‘in an all-electric house.'

A pocket-watch. He nicked open the heavy back and read aloud: ‘F.G.J., from N.L.J. on our silver wedding, 3.8.15.' Below was added: ‘To my dear son in memory of his father, 1919.'

‘A good regular time-piece,' Mr Prentice said.

Two plaited metal arm-bands came next. Then the metal buckles off a pair of sock-suspenders. And then a whole collection of buttons – like pearl buttons off a vest, large ugly brown buttons off a suit, brace buttons, pants buttons, trouser buttons – one could never have believed that one man's single change of clothes required so much holding together. Waistcoat buttons. Shirt buttons. Cuff buttons. Then the metal parts of a pair of braces. So is a poor human creature joined respectably together like a doll: take him apart and you are left with a grocery box full of assorted catches and buckles and buttons.

At the bottom there was a pair of heavy old-fashioned boots with big nails worn with so much pavement tramping, so much standing at street corners.

‘I wonder,' Mr Prentice said, ‘what they did with the rest of him.'

‘Who was he?'

‘He was Jones.'

Chapter 3

WRONG NUMBERS

R
OWE
was growing up; every hour was bringing him nearer to hailing distance of his real age. Little patches of memory returned; he could hear Mr Rennit's voice saying, ‘I agree with Jones,' and he saw again a saucer with a sausage-roll upon it beside a telephone. Pity stirred, but immaturity fought hard; the sense of adventure struggled with common sense as though it were on the side of happiness, and common sense were allied to possible miseries, disappointments, disclosures . . .

It was immaturity which made him keep back the secret of the telephone number, the number he had so nearly made out in Cost's shop. He knew the exchange was B A T, and he knew the first three numbers were 271: only the last had escaped him. The information might be valueless – or invaluable. Whichever it was, he hugged it to himself. Mr Prentice had had his chance and failed; now it was his turn. He wanted to boast like a boy to Anna – ‘I did it.'

About four-thirty in the morning they had been joined by a young man called Brothers. With his umbrella and his moustache and his black hat he had obviously modelled himself upon Mr Prentice. Perhaps in twenty years the portrait would have been adequately copied; it lacked at present the patina of age – the cracks of sadness, disappointment, resignation. Mr Prentice wearily surrendered the picked bones of investigation to Brothers and offered Rowe a seat in the car going back to London. He pulled his hat over his eyes, sank deep into the seat and said, ‘We are beaten,' as they splashed down a country lane with the moonlight flat on the puddles.

‘What are you going to do about it?'

‘Go to sleep.' Perhaps to his fine palate the sentence sounded over-conscious, for without opening his eyes he added, ‘One must avoid self-importance, you see. In five hundred years' time, to the historian writing the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, this little episode would not exist. There will be plenty of other causes. You and me and poor Jones will not even figure in a footnote. It will be all economics, politics, battles.'

‘What do you think they did to Jones?'

‘I don't suppose we shall ever know. In time of war, so many bodies are unidentifiable. So many bodies,' he said sleepily, ‘waiting for a convenient blitz.' Suddenly, surprisingly and rather shockingly, he began to snore.

They came into London with the early workers; along the industrial roads men and women were emerging from underground; neat elderly men carrying attaché-cases and rolled umbrellas appeared from public shelters. In Gower Street they were sweeping up glass, and a building smoked into the new day like a candle which some late reveller has forgotten to snuff. It was odd to think that the usual battle had been going on while they stood on the island in the pond and heard only the scrape of the spade. A notice turned them from their course, and on a rope strung across the road already flapped a few hand-written labels. ‘Barclay's Bank. Please inquire at. . . .' ‘The Cornwallis Dairy. New address . . .' ‘Marquis's Fish Saloon . . .' On a long, quiet, empty expanse of pavement a policeman and a warden strolled in lazy proprietory conversation like gamekeepers on their estate – a notice read, ‘Unexploded Bomb'. This was the same route they had taken last night, but it had been elaborately and trivially changed. What a lot of activity, Rowe thought, there had been in a few hours – the sticking up of notices, the altering of traffic, the getting to know a slightly different London. He noticed the briskness, the cheerfulness on the faces; you got the impression that this was an early hour of a national holiday. It was simply, he supposed, the effect of finding oneself alive.