The Ministry of Fear (28 page)

‘He's just lying,' Anna said. ‘Don't listen to him.'

‘She doesn't want you to hear, does she? Doesn't that make you curious? She wants you as you are, you see, and not as you were.'

Rowe said, ‘I only want the photographs.'

‘You can read about yourself in the newspapers. You were really quite famous. She's afraid you'll feel too grand for her when you know.'

Rowe said, ‘If you give me the photographs . . .'

‘And tell you your story?'

He seemed to feel some of Rowe's excitement. He shifted a little on his elbow and his gaze moved for a moment. The wrist-bone cracked as Anna swung the candlestick down, and the gun lay on the bed. She took it up and said, ‘There's no need to bargain with him.'

He was moaning and doubled with pain; his face was white with it. Both their faces were white. For a moment Rowe thought she would go on her knees to him, take his head on her shoulder, surrender the gun to his other hand . . . ‘Anna,' Hilfe whispered, ‘Anna.'

She said, ‘Willi,' and rocked a little on her feet.

‘Give me the gun,' Rowe said.

She looked at him as if he were a stranger who shouldn't have been in the room at all; her ears seemed filled with the whimper from the bed. Rowe put out his hand and she backed away, so that she stood beside her brother. ‘Go outside,' she said, ‘and wait. Go outside.' In their pain they were like twins. She pointed the gun at him and moaned, ‘Go outside.'

He said, ‘Don't let him talk you round. He tried to kill you,' but seeing the family face in front of him his words sounded flat. It was as if they were so akin that either had the right to kill the other; it was only a form of suicide.

‘Please don't go on talking,' she said. ‘It doesn't do any good.' Sweat stood on both their faces: he felt helpless.

‘Only promise,' he said, ‘you won't let him go.'

She moved her shoulders and said, ‘I promise.' When he went she closed and locked the door behind him.

For a long time afterwards he could hear nothing – except once the closing of a cupboard door and the chink of china. He imagined she was bandaging Hilfe's wrist; he was probably safe enough, incapable of further flight. Rowe realized that now if he wished he could telephone to Mr Prentice and have the police surround the flat – he was no longer anxious for glory; the sense of adventure had leaked away and left only the sense of human pain. But he felt that he was bound by her promise; he had to trust her, if life was to go on.

A quarter of an hour dragged by and the room was full of dusk. There had been low voices in the bedroom: he felt uneasy. Was Hilfe talking her round? He was aware of a painful jealousy; they had been so alike and he had been shut out like a stranger. He went to the window and drawing the blackout curtain a little aside looked out over the darkening park. There was so much he had still to remember; the thought came to him like a threat in Hilfe's dubious tones.

The door opened, and when he let the curtain fall he realized how dark it had become. Anna walked stiffly towards him and said, ‘There you are. You've got what you wanted.' Her face looked ugly in the attempt to avoid tears; it was an ugliness which bound him to her more than any beauty could have done; it isn't being happy together, he thought as though it were a fresh discovery, that makes one love – it's being unhappy together. ‘Don't you want them,' she asked, ‘now I've got them for you?'

He took the little roll in his hand: he had no sense of triumph at all. He asked, ‘Where is he?'

She said, ‘You don't want him now. He's finished.'

‘Why did you let him go?' he asked. ‘You promised.'

‘Yes,' she said, ‘I promised.' She made a small movement with her fingers, crossing two of them – he thought for a moment that she was going to claim that child's excuse for broken treaties.

‘Why?' he asked again.

‘Oh,' she said vaguely, ‘I had to bargain.'

He began to unwrap the roll carefully; he didn't want to expose more than a scrap of it. ‘But he had nothing to bargain with,' he said. He held the roll out to her on the palm of his hand. ‘I don't know what he promised to give you, but this isn't it.'

‘He swore that's what you wanted. How do you know?'

‘I don't know how many prints they made. This may be the only one or there may be a dozen. But I do know there's only one negative.'

She asked sadly, ‘And that's not it?'

‘No.'

3

Rowe said, ‘I don't know what he had to bargain with, but he didn't keep his part.'

‘I'll give up,' she said. ‘Whatever I touch goes wrong, doesn't it? Do what you want to do.'

‘You'll have to tell me where he is.'

‘I always thought,' she said, ‘I could have both of you. I didn't care what happened to the world. It couldn't be worse than it's always been, and yet the globe, the beastly globe, survives. But people, you, him . . .' She sat down on the nearest chair – a stiff polished ugly upright chair: her feet didn't reach the floor. She said, ‘Paddington: the 7.20. He said he'd never come back. I thought you'd be safe then.'

‘Oh,' he said, ‘I can look after myself,' but meeting her eyes he had the impression that he hadn't really understood. He said, ‘Where will he have it? They'll search him at the port anyway.'

‘I don't know. He took nothing.'

‘A stick?'

‘No,' she said, ‘nothing. He just put on his jacket – he didn't even take a hat. I suppose it's in his pocket.'

He said, ‘I'll have to go to the station.'

‘Why can't you leave it to the police now?'

‘By the time I get the right man and explain to him, the train will have gone. If I miss him at the station, then I'll ring the police.' A doubt occurred. ‘If he told you that, of course he won't be there.'

‘He didn't tell me. I didn't believe what he told me. That was the original plan. It's his only hope of getting out of here.'

When he hesitated she said, ‘Why not just let them meet the train at the other end? Why do it all yourself?'

‘He might get out on the way.'

‘You mustn't go like this. He's armed. I let him have his gun.'

He suddenly laughed. ‘By God,' he said, ‘you have made a mess of things, haven't you?'

‘I wanted him to have a chance.'

‘You can't do much with a gun in the middle of England except kill a few poor devils.' She looked so small and beaten that he couldn't preserve any anger. She said, ‘There's only one bullet in it. He wouldn't waste that.'

‘Just stay here,' Rowe said.

She nodded. ‘Good-bye.'

‘I'll be back quite soon.' She didn't answer, and he tried another phrase. ‘Life will begin all over again then.' She smiled unconvincingly, as though it were he who needed comfort and reassurance, not she.

‘He won't kill me.'

‘I'm not afraid of that.'

‘What are you afraid of then?'

She looked up at him with a kind of middle-aged tenderness, as though they'd grown through love into its later stage. She said, ‘I'm afraid he'll talk.'

He mocked at her from the door. ‘Oh, he won't talk
me
round,' but all the way downstairs he was thinking again,
I
didn't understand her.

The searchlights were poking up over the park; patches of light floated like clouds along the surface of the sky. It made the sky seem very small; you could probe its limit with light. There was a smell of cooking all along the pavement from houses where people were having an early supper to be in time for the raid. A warden was lighting a hurricane-lamp outside a shelter. He said to Rowe, ‘Yellow's up.' The match kept going out – he wasn't used to lighting lamps; he looked a bit on edge: too many lonely vigils on deserted pavements; he wanted to talk. But Rowe was in a hurry: he couldn't wait.

On the other side of the bridge there was a taxi-rank with one cab left. ‘Where do you want to go?' the driver asked and considered, looking up at the sky, the pillows of light between the few stars, one pale just visible balloon. ‘Oh, well,' he said, ‘I'll take a chance. It won't be worse there than here.'

‘Perhaps there won't be a raid.'

‘Yellow's up,' the driver said, and the old engine creaked into life.

They went up across Sloane Square and Knightsbridge and into the Park and on along the Bayswater Road. A few people were hurrying home; buses slid quickly past the Request stops; Yellow was up; the saloon bars were crowded. People called to the taxi from the pavement, and when a red light held it up an elderly gentleman in a bowler hat opened the door quickly and began to get in. ‘Oh,' he said, ‘I beg your pardon. Thought it was empty. Are you going towards Paddington?'

‘Get in,' Rowe said.

‘Catching the 7.20,' the stranger said breathlessly. ‘Bit of luck for me this. We'll just do it.'

‘I'm catching it too,' Rowe said.

‘Yellow's up.'

‘So I've heard.'

They creaked forward through the thickening darkness. ‘Any land-mines your way last night?' the old gentleman asked.

‘No, no. I don't think so.'

‘Three near us. About time for the Red I should think.'

‘I suppose so.'

‘Yellow's been up for a quarter of an hour,' the elderly gentleman said, looking at his watch as though he were timing an express train between stations. ‘Ah, that sounded like a gun. Over the estuary, I should say.'

‘I didn't hear it.'

‘I should give them another ten minutes at most,' the old gentleman said, holding his watch in his hand, as the taxi turned into Praed Street. They swung down the covered way and came to rest. Through the blacked-out station the season-ticket holders were making a quick get-away from the nightly death; they dived in earnest silence towards the suburban trains, carrying little attaché-cases, and the porters stood and watched them go with an air of sceptical superiority. They felt the pride of being a legitimate objective: the pride of people who stayed.

The long train stood darkly along number one platform: the bookstalls closed, the blinds drawn in most of the compartments. It was a novel sight to Rowe and yet an old sight. He had only to see it once like the sight of a bombed street, for it to take up its place imperceptibly among his memories. This was already life as he'd known it.

It was impossible to see who was in the train from the platform; every compartment held its secrets close. Even if the blinds had not been lowered, the blued globes cast too little light to show who sat below them. He felt sure that Hilfe would travel first class; as a refugee he lived on borrowed money, and as the friend and confidant of Lady Dunwoody he was certain to travel in style.

He made his way down the first-class compartments along the corridor. They were not very full; only the more daring season-ticket holders remained in London as late as this. He put his head in at every door and met at once the disquieting return stare of the blue ghosts.

It was a long train, and the porters were already shutting doors higher up before he reached the last first-class coach. He was so accustomed to failure that it took him by surprise, sliding back the door to come on Hilfe.

He wasn't alone. An old lady sat opposite him, and she had made Hilfe's hand into a cat's cradle for winding wool. He was handcuffed in the heavy oiled raw material for seamen's boots. His right hand stuck stiffly out, the wrist bandaged and roughly splinted, and round and round ever so gently the old lady industriously wound her wool. It was ludicrous and it was sad; Rowe could see the weighted pocket where the revolver lay, and the look that Hilfe turned on him was not reckless nor amused nor dangerous: it was humiliated. He had always had a way with old ladies.

Rowe said, ‘You wouldn't want to talk here.'

‘She's deaf,' Hilfe said, ‘stone deaf.'

‘Good evening,' the old lady said, ‘I hear there's a Yellow up.'

‘Yes,' Rowe said.

‘She's deaf,' Hilfe said, ‘stone deaf.'

‘Shocking,' the old lady said and wound her wool.

‘I want the negative,' Rowe said.

‘Anna should have kept you longer. I told her to give me enough start. After all,' he added with gloomy disappointment, ‘it would have been better for both . . .'

‘You cheated her too often,' Rowe said. He sat down by his side and watched the winding up and over and round.

‘What are you going to do?'

‘Wait till the train starts and then pull the cord.'

Suddenly from very close the guns cracked – once, twice, three times. The old lady looked vaguely up as though she had heard something very faint intruding on her silence. Rowe put his hand into Hilfe's pocket and slipped the gun into his own. ‘If you'd like to smoke,' the old lady said, ‘don't mind me.'

Hilfe said, ‘I think we ought to talk things over.'

‘There's nothing to talk about.'

‘It wouldn't do, you know, to get me and not to get the photographs.'

Rowe began, ‘The photographs don't matter by themselves. It's you . . .' But then he thought: they do matter. How do I know he hasn't passed them on already? if they are hidden, the place may be agreed on with another agent . . . even if they are found by a stranger, they are not safe. He said, ‘We'll talk,' and the siren sent up its tremendous howl over Paddington. Very far away this time there was a pad, pad, pad, like the noise a fivesball makes against the glove, and the old lady wound and wound. He remembered Anna saying, ‘I'm afraid he'll talk,' and he saw Hilfe suddenly smile at the wool as if life had still the power to tickle him into savage internal mirth.