The Ministry of Fear (5 page)

‘And the drug was imagination again?'

‘It's the straightforward explanation.'

Mr Rennit's calm incredulity shook Rowe. He said with resentment, ‘In all your long career as a detective, have you never come across such a thing as murder – or a murderer?'

Mr Rennit's nose twitched over the cup. ‘Frankly,' he said, ‘no. I haven't. Life, you know, isn't like a detective story. Murderers are rare people to meet. They belong to a class of their own.'

‘That's interesting to me.'

‘They are very, very seldom,' Mr Rennit said, ‘what we call gentlemen. Outside of story-books. You might say that they belong to the lower orders.'

‘Perhaps,' Rowe said, ‘I ought to tell you that I am a murderer myself.'

2

‘Ha-ha,' said Mr Rennit miserably.

‘That's what makes me so furious,' Rowe said. ‘That they should pick on me, me. They are such amateurs.'

‘You are – a professional?' Mr Rennit asked with a watery and unhappy smile.

Rowe said, ‘Yes, I am, if thinking of the thing for two years before you do it, dreaming about it nearly every night until at last you take the drug out from the unlocked drawer, makes you one . . . and then sitting in the dock trying to make out what the judge is really thinking, watching each one of the jury, wondering what
he
thinks . . . there was a woman in pince-nez who wouldn't be separated from her umbrella, and then you go below and wait hour after hour till the jury come back and the warder tries to be encouraging, but you know if there's any justice left on earth there can be only one verdict . . .'

‘Would you excuse me one moment?' Mr Rennit said. ‘I think I heard my man come back . . .' He emerged from behind his desk and then whisked through the door behind Rowe's chair with surprising agility. Rowe sat with his hands held between his knees, trying to get a grip again on his brain and his tongue . . . ‘Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth and a door round about my lips . . .' He heard a bell tinkle in the other room and followed the sound. Mr Rennit was at the phone. He looked piteously at Rowe and then at the sausage-roll as if that were the only weapon within reach.

‘Are you ringing up the police?' Rowe asked, ‘or a doctor?'

‘A theatre,' Mr Rennit said despairingly, ‘I just remembered my wife . . .'

‘You are married, are you, in spite of all your experience?'

‘Yes.' An awful disinclination to talk convulsed Mr Rennit's features as a thin faint voice came up the wires. He said, ‘Two seats – in the front row,' and clapped the receiver down again.

‘The theatre?'

‘The theatre.'

‘And they didn't even want your name? Why not be reasonable?' Rowe said. ‘After all, I had to tell you. You have to have all the facts. It wouldn't be fair otherwise. It might have to be taken into consideration, mightn't it, if you work for me.'

‘Into consideration?'

‘I mean – it might have a bearing. That's something I discovered when they tried me – that everything may have a bearing. The fact that I had lunch on a certain day alone at the Holborn Restaurant. Why was I alone, they asked me. I said I liked being alone sometimes, and you should have seen the way they nodded at the jury. It had a bearing.' His hands began to shake again. ‘As if I really wanted to be alone for life . . .'

Mr Rennit cleared a dry throat.

‘Even the fact that my wife kept love-birds . . .'

‘You
are
married?'

‘It was my wife I murdered.' He found it hard to put things in the right order; people oughtn't to ask unnecessary questions: he really hadn't meant to startle Mr Rennit again. He said, ‘You needn't worry. The police know all about it.'

‘You were acquitted?'

‘I was detained during His Majesty's pleasure. It was quite a short pleasure: I wasn't mad, you see. They just had to find an excuse.' He said with loathing, ‘They pitied me, so that's why I'm alive. The papers all called it a mercy killing.' He moved his hand in front of his face as though he were troubled by a thread of cobweb. ‘Mercy to her or mercy to me. They didn't say. And I don't know myself.'

‘I really don't think,' Mr Rennit said, swallowing for breath in the middle of a sentence and keeping a chair between them, ‘I can undertake . . . It's out of my line.'

‘I'll pay more,' Rowe said. ‘It always comes down to that, doesn't it?' and as soon as he felt cupidity stirring in the little dusty room, over the half-eaten sausage-roll and the saucer and the tattered telephone-directory, he knew he had gained his point. Mr Rennit after all could not afford to be nice. Rowe said, ‘A murderer is rather like a peer: he pays more because of his tide. One tries to travel incognito, but it usually comes out . . .'

Chapter 3

FRONTAL ASSAULT

1

R
OWE
went straight from Orthotex to the Free Mothers. He had signed a contract with Mr Rennit to pay him fifty pounds a week for a period of four weeks to carry out investigations; Mr Rennit had explained that the expenses would be heavy – Orthotex employed only the most experienced agents – and the one agent he had been permitted to see before he left the office was certainly experienced. (Mr Rennit introduced him as A.2, but before long he was absent-mindedly addressing him as Jones.) Jones was small and at first sight insignificant, with his thin pointed nose, his soft brown hat with a stained ribbon, his grey suit which might have been quite a different colour years ago, and the pencil and pen on fasteners in the breast pocket. But when you looked a second time you saw experience; you saw it in the small cunning rather frightened eyes, the weak defensive mouth, the wrinkles of anxiety on the forehead – experience of innumerable hotel corridors, of bribed chamber-maids and angry managers, experience of the insult which could not be resented, the threat which had to be ignored, the promise which was never kept. Murder had a kind of dignity compared with this muted second-hand experience of scared secretive passions.

An argument developed almost at once in which Jones played no part, standing close to the wall holding his old brown hat, looking and listening as though he were outside a hotel door. Mr Rennit, who obviously considered the whole investigation the fantastic fad of an unbalanced man, argued that Rowe himself should not take part. ‘Just leave it to me and A.2,' he said. ‘If it's a confidence trick . . .'

He would not believe that Rowe's life had been threatened. ‘Of course,' he said, ‘we'll look into the chemists' books – not that there'll be anything to find.'

‘It made me angry,' Rowe repeated. ‘He said he'd checked up – and yet he had the nerve.' An idea came to him and he went excitedly on, ‘It was the same drug. People would have said it was suicide, that I'd managed to keep some of it hidden . . .'

‘If there's anything in your idea,' Mr Rennit said, ‘the cake was given to the wrong man. We've only got to find the right one. It's a simple matter of tracing. Jones and I know all about tracing. We start from Mrs Bellairs. She told you the weight, but why did she tell you the weight? Because she mistook you in the dark for the other man. There must be some resemblance . . .' Mr Rennit exchanged a look with Jones. ‘It all boils down to finding Mrs Bellairs. That's not very difficult. Jones will do that.'

‘It would be easiest of all for me to ask for her – at the Free Mothers.'

‘I'd advise you to let Jones see to it.'

‘They'd think he was a tout.'

‘It wouldn't do at all for a client to make his own investigations, not at all.'

‘If there's nothing in my story,' Rowe said, ‘they'll give me Mrs Bellairs' address. If I'm right they'll try to kill me, because, though the cake's gone, I know there was a cake, and that there are people who want the cake.
There's
the work for Jones, to keep his eye on me.'

Jones shifted his hat uneasily and tried to catch his employer's eye. He cleared his throat and Mr Rennit asked, ‘What is it, A.2?'

‘Won't do, sir,' Jones said.

‘No?'

‘Unprofessional, sir.'

‘I agree with Jones,' Mr Rennit said.

All the same, in spite of Jones, Rowe had his way. He came out into the shattered street and made his sombre way between the ruins of Holborn. In his lonely state to have confessed his identity to someone was almost like making a friend. Always before it had been discovered, even at the warden's post; it came out sooner or later, like cowardice. They were extraordinary the tricks and turns of fate, the way conversations came round, the long memories some people had for names. Now in the strange torn landscape where London shops were reduced to a stone ground-plan like those of Pompeii he moved with familiarity; he was part of this destruction as he was no longer part of the past – the long weekends in the country, the laughter up lanes in the evening, the swallows gathering on telegraph wires, peace.

Peace had come to an end quite suddenly on an August the thirty-first – the world waited another year. He moved like a bit of stone among the other stones – he was protectively coloured, and he felt at times, breaking the surface of his remorse, a kind of evil pride like that a leopard might feel moving in harmony with all the other spots on the world's surface, only with greater power. He had not been a criminal when he murdered; it was afterwards that he began to grow into criminality like a habit of thought. That these men should have tried to kill him who had succeeded at one blow in destroying beauty, goodness, peace – it was a form of impertinence. There were times when he felt the whole world's criminality was his; and then suddenly at some trivial sight – a woman's bag, a face on an elevator going up as he went down, a picture in a paper – all the pride seeped out of him. He was aware only of the stupidity of his act; he wanted to creep out of sight and weep; he wanted to forget that he had ever been happy. A voice would whisper, ‘You say you killed for pity; why don't you have pity on yourself?' Why not indeed? except that it is easier to kill someone you love than to kill yourself.

2

The Free Mothers had taken over an empty office in a huge white modern block off the Strand. It was like going into a mechanised mortuary with a separate lift for every slab. Rowe moved steadily upwards in silence for five floors: a long passage, frosted glass, somebody in pince-nez stepped into the lift carrying a file marked ‘Most Immediate' and they moved on smoothly upwards. A door on the seventh floor was marked ‘Comforts for Mothers of the Free Nations. Inquiries.'

He began to believe that after all Mr Rennit was right. The stark efficient middle-class woman who sat at a typewriter was so obviously incorruptible and unpaid. She wore a little button to show she was honorary. ‘Yes?' she asked sharply and all his anger and pride drained away. He tried to remember what the stranger had said – about the cake not being intended for him. There was really nothing sinister in the phrase so far as he could now remember it, and as for the taste, hadn't he often woken at night with that upon his tongue?

‘Yes?' the woman repeated briskly.

‘I came,' Rowe said, ‘to try and find out the address of a Mrs Bellairs.'

‘No lady of that name works here.'

‘It was in connection with the fête.'

‘Oh, they were all voluntary helpers. We can't possibly disclose addresses of voluntary helpers.'

‘Apparently,' Rowe said, ‘a mistake was made. I was given a cake which didn't belong to me . . .'

‘I'll inquire,' the stark lady said and went into an inner room. He had just long enough to wonder whether after all he had been wise. He should have brought A.2 up with him. But then the normality of everything came back; he was the only abnormal thing there. The honorary helper stood in the doorway and said, ‘Will you come through, please?' He took a quick glance at her typewriter as he went by; he could read ‘The Dowager Lady Cradbrooke thanks Mrs J. A. Smythe-Philipps for her kind gift of tea and flour . . .' Then he went in.

He had never become accustomed to chance stabs: only when the loved person is out of reach does love become complete. The colour of the hair and the size of the body – something very small and neat and incapable, you would say, of inflicting pain – this was enough to make him hesitate just inside the room. There were no other resemblances, but when the girl spoke – in the slightest of foreign accents – he felt the kind of astonishment one feels at a party hearing the woman one loves talking in a stranger's tone to a stranger. It was not an uncommon occurrence; he would follow people into shops, he would wait at street corners because of a small resemblance, just as though the woman he loved was only lost and might be discovered any day in a crowd.

She said, ‘You came about a cake?'

He watched her closely: they had so little in common compared with the great difference, that one was alive and the other dead. He said, ‘A man came to see me last night – I suppose from this office.'

He fumbled for words because it was just as absurd to think that this girl might be mixed up in a crime as to think of Alice – except as a victim. ‘I had won a cake in a raffle at your fête – but there seemed to be some mistake.'

‘I don't understand.'

‘A bomb fell before I could make out what it was he wanted to tell me.'

‘But no one could have come from here,' she said. ‘What did he look like?'