The Ministry of Fear (6 page)

‘Very small and dark with twisted shoulders – practically a cripple.'

‘There is no one like that here.'

‘I thought perhaps that if I found Mrs Bellairs . . .' The name seemed to convey nothing. ‘One of the helpers at the fête.'

‘They were all volunteers,' the girl explained. ‘I dare say we could find the address for you through the organizers, but is it so – important?'

A screen divided the room in two; he had imagined they were alone, but as the girl spoke a young man came round the screen. He had the same fine features as the girl; she introduced him, ‘This is my brother, Mr . . .'

‘Rowe.'

‘Somebody called on Mr Rowe to ask about a cake. I don't quite understand. It seems he won it at our fête.'

‘Now let me see, who could that possibly be?' The young man spoke excellent English; only a certain caution and precision marked him as a foreigner. It was as if he had come from an old-fashioned family among whom it was important to speak clearly and use the correct words; his care had an effect of charm, not of pedantry. He stood with his hand laid lightly and affectionately on his sister's shoulder as though they formed together a Victorian family group. ‘Was he one of your countrymen, Mr Rowe? In this office we are most of us foreigners, you know.' Smiling he took Rowe into his confidence. ‘If health or nationality prevent us fighting for you, we have to do something. My sister and I are – technically – Austrian.'

‘This man was English.'

‘He must have been one of the voluntary helpers. We have so many – I don't know half of them by name. You want to return a prize, is that it? A cake?'

Rowe said cautiously, ‘I wanted to inquire about it.'

‘Well, Mr Rowe, if I were you, I should be unscrupulous. I should just “hang on” to the cake.' When he used a colloquialism you could hear the inverted commas drop gently and apologetically around it.

‘The trouble is,' Rowe said, ‘the cake's no longer there. My house was bombed last night.'

‘I'm sorry. About your house, I mean. The cake can't seem very important now, surely?'

They were charming, they were obviously honest, but they had caught him neatly and effectively in an inconsistency.

‘I shouldn't bother,' the girl said, ‘if I were you.'

Rowe watched them hesitatingly. But it is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself. For more than a year now Rowe had been so imprisoned – there had been no change of cell, no exercise-yard, no unfamiliar warder to break the monotony of solitary confinement. A moment comes to a man when a prison-break must be made whatever the risk. Now cautiously he tried for freedom. These two had lived through terror themselves, but they had emerged without any ugly psychological scar. He said, ‘As a matter of fact it wasn't simply the cake which was worrying me.'

They watched him with a frank and friendly interest; you felt that in spite of the last years there was still the bloom of youth on them – they still expected life to offer them other things than pain and boredom and distrust and hate. The young man said, ‘Won't you sit down and tell us . . . ?' They reminded him of children who liked stories. They couldn't have accumulated more than fifty years' experience between them. He felt immeasurably older.

Rowe said, ‘I got the impression that whoever wanted that cake was ready to be – well, violent.' He told them of the visit and the stranger's vehemence and the odd taste in his tea. The young man's very pale blue eyes sparkled with his interest and excitement. He said, ‘It's a fascinating story. Have you any idea who's behind it – or what? How does Mrs Bellairs come into it?'

He wished now that he hadn't been to Mr Rennit – these were the allies he needed, not the dingy Jones and his sceptical employer.

‘Mrs Bellairs told my fortune at the fête, and told me the weight of the cake – which wasn't the right weight.'

‘It's extraordinary,' the young man said enthusiastically.

The girl said, ‘It doesn't make sense.' She added almost in Mr Rennit's words, ‘It was probably all a misunderstanding.'

‘Misunderstanding,' her brother said and then dropped his inverted commas round the antiquated slang, ‘ “my eye”.' He turned to Rowe with an expression of glee. ‘Count this Society, Mr Rowe, as far as the secretary's concerned at your service. This is really interesting.' He held out his hand. ‘My name –
our
name is Hilfe. Where do we begin?'

The girl sat silent. Rowe said, ‘Your sister doesn't agree.'

‘Oh,' the young man said, ‘she'll come round. She always does in the end. She thinks I'm a romantic. She's had to get me out of too many scrapes.' He became momentarily serious. ‘She got me out of Austria.' But nothing could damp his enthusiasm for long. ‘That's another story. Do we begin with Mrs Bellairs? Have you any idea what it's all about? I'll get our grim volunteer in the next room on the hunt,' and opening the door he called through. ‘Dear Mrs Dermody, do you think you could find the address of one of our voluntary helpers called Mrs Bellairs?' He explained to Rowe, ‘The difficulty is she's probably just the friend of a friend – not a regular helper. Try Canon Topling,' he suggested to Mrs Dermody.

The greater the young man's enthusiasm, the more fantastic the whole incident became. Rowe began to see it through Mr Rennit's eyes – Mrs Dermody, Canon Topling . . .

He said, ‘Perhaps after all your sister's right.'

But young Hilfe swept on. ‘She may be, of course she may be. But how dull if she is. I'd much rather think, until we
know
, that there's some enormous conspiracy . . .'

Mrs Dermody put her head in at the door and said, ‘Canon Topling gave me the address. It's 5 Park Crescent.'

‘If she's a friend of Canon Topling,' Rowe began and caught Miss Hilfe's eye. She gave him a secret nod as much as to say – now you're on the right track.

‘Oh, but let's “hang on” to the stranger,' Hilfe said.

‘There may be a thousand reasons,' Miss Hilfe said.

‘Surely not a thousand, Anna,' her brother mocked. He asked Rowe, ‘Isn't there anything else you can remember which will convince her?' His keenness was more damping than her scepticism. The whole affair became a game one couldn't take seriously.

‘Nothing,' Rowe said.

Hilfe was at the window looking out. He said, ‘Come here a moment, Mr Rowe. Do you see that little man down there – in the shabby brown hat? He arrived just after you, and he seems to be staying . . . There he goes now, up and down. Pretends to light a cigarette. He does that too often. And that's the second evening paper he's bought. He never comes quite opposite, you see. It almost looks as if you are being trailed.'

‘I know him,' Rowe said. ‘He's a private detective. He's being paid to keep an eye on me.'

‘By Jove,' young Hilfe said – even his exclamations were a little Victorian – ‘you do take this seriously. We're allies now you know – you aren't “holding out” on us, are you?'

‘There is something I haven't mentioned.' Rowe hesitated.

‘Yes?' Hilfe came quickly back and with his hand again on his sister's shoulder waited with an appearance of anxiety. ‘Something which will wipe out Canon Topling?'

‘I think there was something in the cake.'

‘What?'

‘I don't know. But he crumbled every slice he took.'

‘It may have been habit,' Miss Hilfe said.

‘Habit!' her brother teased her.

She said with sudden anger, ‘One of these old English characteristics you study so carefully.'

Rowe tried to explain to Miss Hilfe, ‘It's nothing to do with me. I don't want their cake, but they tried, I'm sure they tried, to kill me. I know it sounds unlikely, now, in daylight, but if you had seen that wretched little cripple pouring in the milk, and then waiting, watching, crumbling the cake . . .'

‘And you really believe,' Miss Hilfe said, ‘that Canon Topling's friend . . .'

‘Don't listen to her,' Hilfe said. ‘Why not Canon Topling's friend? There's no longer a thing called a criminal class.
We
can tell you that. There were lots of people in Austria you'd have said couldn't . . . well, do the things we saw them do. Cultured people, pleasant people, people you had sat next to at dinner.'

‘Mr Rennit,' Rowe said, ‘the head of the Orthotex Detective Agency, told me today that he'd never met a murderer. He said they were rare and not the best people.'

‘Why, they are dirt cheap,' Hilfe said, ‘nowadays. I know myself at least six murderers. One was a cabinet minister, another was a heart specialist, the third a bank manager, an insurance agent . . .'

‘Stop,' Miss Hilfe said, ‘please stop.'

‘The difference,' Hilfe said, ‘is that in these days it really pays to murder, and when a thing pays it becomes respectable. The rich abortionist becomes a gynaecologist and the rich thief a bank director. Your friend is out of date.' He went on explaining gently, his very pale blue eyes unshocked and unshockable. ‘Your old-fashioned murderer killed from fear, from hate – or even from love, Mr Rowe, very seldom for substantial profit. None of these reasons is quite – respectable. But to murder for position – that's different, because when you've gained the position nobody ‘has a right to criticize the means. Nobody will refuse to meet you if the position's high enough. Think of how many of your statesmen have shaken hands with Hitler. But, of course, to murder for fear or from love, Canon Topling wouldn't do that. If he killed his wife he'd lose his preferment,' and he smiled at Rowe with a blithe innocence of what he was saying.

When he came out of what wasn't called a prison, when His Majesty's pleasure had formally and quickly run its course, it had seemed to Rowe that he had emerged into quite a different world – a secret world of assumed names, of knowing nobody, of avoiding faces, of men who leave a bar unobtrusively when other people enter. One lived where least questions were asked, in furnished rooms. It was the kind of world that people who attended garden fêtes, who went to Matins, who spent week-ends in the country and played bridge for low stakes and had an account at a good grocer's, knew nothing about. It wasn't exactly a criminal world, though eddying along its dim and muted corridors you might possibly rub shoulders with genteel forgers who had never actually been charged or the corrupter of a child. One attended cinemas at ten in the morning with other men in macintoshes who had somehow to pass the time away. One sat at home and read
The Old Curiosity Shop
all the evening. When he had first believed that someone intended to murder him, he had felt a sort of shocked indignation; the act of murder belonged to him like a personal characteristic, and not the inhabitants of the old peaceful places from which he was an exile, and of which Mrs Bellairs, the lady in the floppy hat and the clergyman called Sinclair were so obviously inhabitants. The one thing a murderer should be able to count himself safe from was murder – by one of these.

But he was more shocked now at being told by a young man of great experience that there was no division between the worlds. The insect underneath the stone has a right to feel safe from the trampling superior boot.

Miss Hilfe told him, ‘You mustn't listen.' She was watching him with what looked like sympathy. But that was impossible.

‘Of course,' Hilfe said easily, ‘I exaggerate. But all the same you have to be prepared in these days for criminals – everywhere. They call it having ideals. They'll even talk about murder being the most merciful thing.'

Rowe looked quickly up, but there was no personal meaning in the pale blue theoretical eyes. ‘You mean the Prussians?' Rowe asked.

‘Yes, if you like, the Prussians. Or the Nazis. The Fascists. The Reds, the Whites . . .'

A telephone rang on Miss Hilfe's desk. She said, ‘It's Lady Dunwoody.'

Hilfe, leaning quickly sideways, said, ‘We are so grateful for your offer, Lady Dunwoody. We can never have too many woollies. Yes, if you wouldn't mind sending them to this office, or shall we collect? You'll send your chauffeur. Thank you. Good-bye.' He said to Rowe, with a rather wry smile, ‘It's an odd way for someone of my age to fight a war, isn't it? collecting woollies from charitable old dowagers. But it's useful, I'm allowed to do it, and it's something not to be interned. Only – you do understand, don't you – a story like yours excites me. It seems to give one an opportunity, well, to take a more violent line.' He smiled at his sister and said with affection, ‘Of course she calls me a romantic.'

But the odd thing was she called him nothing at all. It was almost as if she not only disapproved of him, but had disowned him, wouldn't co-operate in anything – outside the woollies. She seemed to Rowe to lack her brother's charm and ease; the experience which had given him an amusing nihilistic abandon had left her brooding on some deeper, more unhappy level. He felt no longer sure that they were both without scars. Her brother had the ideas, but she felt them. When Rowe looked at her it was as if his own unhappiness recognized a friend and signalled, signalled, but got no reply.

‘And now,' Hilfe said, ‘what next?'

‘Leave it alone.' Miss Hilfe addressed herself directly to Rowe – the reply when it did at last come was simply to say that communication was at an end.

‘No, no,' Hilfe said, ‘we can't do that. This is war.'