The Twilight Hour (15 page)

Gwen and Titus: a child! I heard myself gasp as she said it. It must have knocked Stanley for six, but when I looked sideways at him his face was impassive. I couldn't let it go, though. ‘They had a
child
?'

The old woman looked at me. ‘Kept quiet about it, has she?'

‘Where is the child?' Stanley spoke very quietly.

‘Oh, living with Titus's people. In the country.'

Then I remembered. Hugh'd said something about a child, when he came back from the funeral. Titus's child – not that it was Gwendolen's.

‘Anyway,' said Joan Mainwaring, ‘that's all ancient history. In the meantime someone will have to sort out the mess he left behind.' Then, out of the blue, she added, more sharply: ‘Your friend Colin Harris is in a lot of trouble.'

‘He's innocent,' I said stoutly. ‘We're determined to get him freed.'

A smile twitched her lips. ‘That's the spirit,' she said. ‘I admire your guts. Good luck to you.' There was something mocking about the way she said it and I suddenly decided I didn't like her.

‘He
is
innocent,' I repeated.

‘Oh really? I daresay he is.' But now she seemed bored with us all of a sudden. ‘So – if that's all …' She made no attempt to get up from the sofa. ‘Can you find your own way out?'

I pulled the front door shut with a bang. Stanley and I walked away through the dusk. ‘What did you make of that then?' I asked him, for he was looking rather grim. He didn't speak.

‘The way she talked about Colin! She seemed to know so much about him.'

Then I remembered what he must be thinking about. ‘Did you know about Gwen and Titus? That they had a child?'

‘No,' he said, ‘I didn't know.' After which he never said another word as we walked towards Tottenham Court Road. At the underground station we parted, I for the Central Line to Notting Hill, he on the Northern Line – he lived far out in Edgware or Barnet, somewhere in the suburbs, anyway.

.........

Having considered it, Julius Abrahams thought I should contact Inspector Bannister with my changed account. He told me how to present my ‘confession', and sent me away still feeling apprehensive, but convinced I could handle the situation.

It was odd to telephone a detective from one of the rank-smelling call boxes at Notting Hill underground station, and I hadn't expected him to be so difficult to get hold of. When at last I did, his response was rather cagey, but he agreed to see me at the police station the following afternoon.

I waited in the foyer. Seated on an old bench, its American cloth upholstery frayed and splitting, I watched the humdrum traffic of petty crime: a drunk, a spotty youth on bail reporting in, a prostitute in a garish fake leopard coat. There was less an air of villainy than of ineffectual lethargy. WE WORK OR WANT said the poster on the opposite wall, but perhaps criminals were as reluctant to do a decent day's work as the rest of the population was said – by the right-wing press at least – to be.

‘Come this way, miss.'

Bannister was waiting for me in the interview room where I'd signed my statement on the previous occasion; the same dirty windows, table carved with initials and stained with ink, battered chairs, ancient paint. He stood up. Before, he'd shaken my hand, pulled out my chair, all politeness. This time he just stood there until I'd sat down.

‘Now, what's all this about, Mrs Wentworth?'

Julian Abrahams had suggested the words I now carefully recited: ‘I believe I made a mistake in my previous statement.' It sounded stilted and false.

He raised his narrow black eyebrows, which looked almost as pencilled-in as his toothbrush moustache. ‘In what aspect of your statement?'

‘I have come to realise I was mistaken in supposing that Titus Mavor was still alive when I visited the house. That is, I think he must have already been dead when I called on him on the Friday evening.'

He looked hard at me. This was clearly an unwelcome surprise. ‘What makes you think that now? You said before –' And he read out that part of my statement, which he had in front of him. ‘You said he was asleep.'

‘Yes, but–'

‘He must have been breathing, must he not, if you thought that.'

‘I didn't actually hear him breathing. I was uncertain, there wasn't much light, it was strange being there … awkward, I wanted to get away. I – I touched him. He was rather cold, so …'

‘Was there much noise? In the street outside? In the house next door?'

I shook my head. ‘It was deathly quiet.'
Deathly
quiet: an unfortunate word.

‘So, in a dimly lit room you find a man apparently asleep. You touch him. Was that to wake him?'

‘Yes – no. It was more to see if he was … all right.'

‘Surely, Mrs Wentworth, if you hadn't been certain in your own mind that he was, as you put it, all right, you would have made some effort to get help at the time.'

‘Well, it was only afterwards that I began to think that something was wrong.'

‘Only afterwards? After what?' He stared at me very hard. ‘After your husband's friend was arrested and you wanted to get him off the hook?'

I hadn't expected this. ‘No! That's not what I mean.'

Inspector Bannister stared at me. My gaze faltered; I looked down. There was a long silence. Then: ‘Isn't that what this is all about?'

‘No!' I was scared.

‘I think it is, Mrs Wentworth. Now, your motives may be well meaning, or perhaps your husband has put you up to this, persuaded you to help a friend. But I can assure you it will only make matters far, far worse, as if they were not serious enough already. For the suspect and potentially for you.'

I wavered. But I couldn't change my story a third time; besides which I was now telling the truth. Mavor had been dead. The lie was in explaining why I might not have realised at the time. ‘It was eerie, and dark,' I said. ‘And it was very cold. I thought perhaps he was cold because of that, because it was so freezing cold in the room. I wasn't sure, and I didn't know what to do.'

‘I don't find this account credible. Do you honestly expect me to believe that you found what was clearly a dead body in a virtually derelict house and you did nothing about it until the following day?'

I tried not to panic. I swallowed, took a deep breath and looked him in the eye. ‘I know it was wrong of me, Inspector, completely wrong. I can only explain my behaviour by saying that I was – I was scared. I wanted to get away from the house. I didn't really think. I didn't
expect
him to be dead, so I sort of assumed he was alive … at the time … I'm not even sure what happened next – I mean, I just wanted to get away … and I … I did ring 999 on my way home, at Notting Hill Gate, but then I … panicked again and I rang off, I don't know. But perhaps they made a note of the call.'

Bannister looked at me. I couldn't meet his gaze. My story was true, or very nearly true. Unfortunately it was not believable. I didn't blame him for not believing it.

‘Wasting police time is a serious offence. Even more serious is seeking to pervert the course of justice, concealing evidence or acting as an accessory after the fact.'

‘I am truly sorry, but I am telling the truth.'

Another long silence. Then: ‘Very well. You can make a formal statement now. I'll call someone in.'

fifteen

‘HE DIDN'T BELIEVE YOU! BUT IT'S
TRUE
! As if you'd lie about a thing like that.' Alan plunged his head in his hands.

‘It might help if I could think of a better reason for having lied before.'

‘You can't have been convincing enough.'

‘What do you mean? What else could I say?' I cried. ‘It was true. I was telling him the truth.'

‘Look – all I said was you didn't convince him.'

‘Why do you always blame me? As if I was stupid or something.'

‘How like a woman to take everything so personally!'

‘You
beast
!' I was so angry. Then I looked at his handsome, frowning face and took pity on him. How stupid and insensitive I'd been. He was frightened too. Alan, always so sure of himself, always in charge, always in the right – he didn't know what to do, he was terrified for Colin and he felt impotent. That was why he went charging about like a bull in a china shop.

‘God – this is all so hellish.' Then, looking sideways at me he must have seen I was close to tears. ‘Sorry – I'm not blaming you. I'm so worried about Colin, that's all.' He stared ahead grimly. ‘Hell! Hell!
Hell
!'

In the silence I knew we were both thinking of the awful, dark dread, the mushroom cloud that hung on the horizon. Colin faced an ordeal at the end of which, if the worst came to the worst, was the condemned cell: the condemned cell where they never turned the lights off; the hangman to measure him; the last walk; the body dropping like a sack. After Neville Heath's the press had lingered on the ritual of the last meal, the final walk to death, the scientific skill of the hangman, the crowd outside the prison. There was a pornographic pleasure to it all. And now we were being drawn forward towards that obscene moment, powerless to halt the course of events. But we had to find a way out.

‘It's more important than ever to find this …
chap
Colin was with that evening,' said Alan. ‘I'm visiting the prison today, I'll talk to him, I'll try to get him to be a bit more specific.'

.........

Colin had told Abrahams about his companion, but then, maddeningly – with some kind of mistaken chivalry, if you could call it that – had refused to say who it was. When Alan came back from the prison, however, he said, almost triumphant: ‘I got him to tell me, I know where we can find this boy. Colin wants him kept out of it, but if the police persist in saying it happened in the evening he
has
to have an alibi. Turns out Colin got him a job in one of the cutting rooms in Wardour Street – seems he hangs out in some café after work. Colin said it'd be better to try to see him there than at work. You'll have to go and find him.'

‘Me? Shouldn't we both go? I'd feel more confident if–'

Alan looked at me as though I were mad. ‘I can't possibly go to some queer hangout. What on earth would people think!'

‘Nobody'll know! And anyway, what'll they think if I start slumming around all on my own.'

‘Well, for one thing they won't think you're a homo, will they. Look – why don't you get Fiona to go along with you.'

I was far from sure that Fiona would welcome someone – me – who was trying to get the man accused of murdering her lover off the hook, but I did as I was told. For one thing, I quite liked the idea of seeing her again. I seemed to have lost touch with all my girlfriends since my marriage, and Gwendolen hardly made up for them.

I arrived at tea time, but Fiona was still in bed, frowsty and pale. Her room smelled intimately of stale face powder and stale tea with an overlay of gas.

She didn't seem to mind me watching as she slid out from between the grimy sheets in her
slip
. I was shocked! She slept in her underwear! But I wasn't as shocked as I would have been a year ago. I was learning fast that the behaviour I'd been brought up to think of as not merely normal but absolutely
de rigueur
was certainly not universal; and – amazingly! – the heavens didn't actually fall in if you sometimes forgot to clean your teeth or went to bed without taking off your make-up, or didn't use embossed writing paper.

Fiona padded over to the washbasin in the corner of the room. ‘I've hardly any soap,' she wailed. ‘Look!' She held up a tiny morsel.

‘Ah!' I said, ‘but I've got a present for you.' And I held out a round deliciously smelling cake of very expensive Roger et Gallet soap, wrapped in tissue paper, one of the three in the beautiful box Radu had brought back from New York and Gwendolen had given me. Fiona was thrilled.

She moved about the room very slowly. I couldn't believe how long it took her to get dressed, and I was wriggling impatiently about on her slidey counterpane long before she'd finished. She pulled on a pair of tweed slacks and the jumper with the wooden buttons she'd been wearing the first time I met her. ‘Perhaps they'll think we're lesbians,' she said with a giggle. My face went hot.

‘Oh! I hope not!' I cried.

She gave me a funny look in the glass at which she was applying her make-up. ‘I thought that Gwendolen Grey was a bit sweet on you.'

‘Fiona! What nonsense. That's ridiculous.'

We bundled up as usual to brave the cold. Now that we were ready to go I felt nervous. We stumbled down the rickety stairs past the restaurant and out into the street.

‘I simply have no idea how we're going to find this boy.'

‘We probably won't. He won't want to get involved, will he,' said Fiona shrewdly. ‘If word goes out we're looking for him, he'll simply disappear. What's his name, you said?'

‘Johnny.'

‘There's a lot of Johnnys between here and the Thames.' And she sniggered.

But we were in luck. The first place we went was the Swiss Café off Charing Cross Road.

‘We'd better have a cup of tea – wait for a bit,' said Fiona.

I thought the people there were rather awful, not only shabbily dressed and not very clean, but even a little mad-looking. One young man at least was muttering to himself and making strange gestures.

‘They all think they're geniuses,' whispered Fiona. ‘They think they're going to be actors or painters or poets. But actually they're just unemployed.'

At a corner table, two thin young men with extravagant gestures and shrill laughter were, I was sure, wearing rouge. ‘Come on,' said Fiona, ‘we'll have to go and ask them if they know your friend's friend.'

Just then the door swung open and they looked up. So did we.

This boy was different. For a start he wasn't a boy; he was in his early twenties I guessed, a bit older than me. He was short, but the opposite of willowy; stocky and muscular, with a very short haircut and a military look about him: quite unlike the rest of the café clientele, and obviously not a pansy. Yet he went and sat with the other two.

I plucked up my courage and walked over to their table. The two who'd been there all along stared and tittered in an intimidating way. ‘Hel
lo
!' They looked me up and down. The recent arrival pushed his chair violently backwards as he stood up. He looked as if he wanted to get away. He had gone rather red. He swallowed. He wanted to speak, but couldn't get the words out. Finally he said, his cockney voice hoarse: ‘It's about Colin.'

I gaped.
This
manly young man couldn't surely be … I pulled myself together. ‘I'm looking for Colin's friend, Johnny, but how did you know?'

‘I'm Johnny. I saw Colin with you once – in a pub somewhere, Wardour Street probably, the Intrepid Fox?'

I'd never seen
him
before and my puzzlement must have showed, for he added: ‘Colin wouldn't have introduced us. And I scarpered when I saw you together – he'd have been so embarrassed.' Whether it was irony, amusement or bitterness in his voice I wasn't sure.

‘I need to talk to you.'

‘Not here.'

Fiona followed us into the Charing Cross Road. There wasn't another café in sight. We could have gone back into Soho and found one, but Johnny strode off in the direction of Leicester Square. It was too early for the pubs to be open, and we ended up in the Westminster reference library just north of St Martin-in-the-Fields. It seemed a funny place to go, but there was an echoing marble and wood-panelled hallway with a bench on which we sat down.

‘Colin's in trouble – you know that? You know what's happened?' Silly question – of course he knew!

Johnny nodded. He was looking down at his feet.

‘He needs your help.'

‘There's nothing I can do,' he said huskily.

‘There is – really, there is. Colin didn't want you involved. He wanted to protect you, but …' I hesitated. ‘Have you been to see him at the prison?'

Johnny jumped in his seat. ‘Oh, God no!' He looked appalled. ‘More'n my life's worth.' He paused. ‘I mean, I'd like to, but it's just too difficult.'

‘He seemed to think you knew him quite well,' I said in a hard voice. I wasn't even sure that was true, but I didn't care. I was determined to push him, to get a reaction. ‘If you're really his friend, you'll help him, now he's in such terrible trouble.'

He risked a sideways glance in my direction. His eyes were very blue, with long lashes, his cheekbones knobbly, his skin rough and badly shaved.

‘There's nothing I can do.'

I was being too hard on him. My head girl demeanour just frightened him. He wasn't going to talk. It was all leading nowhere – as I'd always known it would, deep down.

Unexpectedly Fiona stretched a hand out and patted his knee. ‘You mustn't be frightened. Dinah's only trying to help Colin.'

‘I'm not frightened. Well, I am, but it isn't that. It's just … I could get into trouble and it wouldn't do him any good.'

‘He needs an alibi,' I said, still stern. ‘Colin says you were with him on the evening it happened.'

The very word ‘alibi' upset him. ‘It wouldn't do any good. It'd make things worse.' He stood up. ‘Look,' he said, ‘you don't understand …'

‘Please – can't you at least visit him?'

The boy shook his head, with a smile of utter contempt for my lack of understanding. ‘That's the last thing I should do.'

He stood up. I took hold of his arm. ‘Look – the case against him is really weak. The lawyer says so. It'll probably be dropped. This is just in case the worst comes to the worst, don't you see.' He shook off my restraining hand. ‘At least leave me a number, an address,
somewhere
–'

Reluctantly: ‘You can leave messages with the barman at the Fitzroy Tavern.'

And he was gone.

.........

Alan and I felt so desperate that we finally decided to see if my father could help. It wasn't that we didn't trust Abrahams, but Colin needed all the help he could get.

At Waterloo, all the trains were disrupted. We waited for nearly three hours. A grimy fog blurred the vaulted vistas of the terminus, and the atmosphere was thick with the resentful pessimism of would-be passengers. There was an air of endlessly, terminally putting up with things. Occasionally an engine in a siding trumpeted, mooed or bellowed like an elephant marooned in some distant holding pen.

Finally a train slithered, exhausted, alongside the platform. The interminable wait had drained our anger, reducing it to apathy, but now we felt a sudden surge of optimism, almost gratitude at our luck in there being a train at all. It was unheated, but it was surprisingly empty; we had a carriage to ourselves. In fits and starts we travelled past miles of suburban wasteland, bomb-sites and shabby buildings, a formless disorder that stretched on forever. Each time the train stopped at some deserted station I wondered if it would ever start again, but finally it got up speed as we came into open country.

Then unaccountably it stopped again, this time not even at a platform, but in the middle of a field. Silence fell. I went into the corridor, rubbed the window clear, and looked out. Snowfields stretched away in all directions, latticed with black lines of hedgerows, a white polar waste beneath a sulphur sky, a world slowly expiring in eerie silence. I wondered if we were now the only people on the train until I heard a high-pitched, bird-like twitter of human speech from the next carriage, in a language I neither understood, nor recognised, perhaps Chinese. I giggled rather hysterically, wondering if we actually were on the trans-Siberian express en route for Manchuria – marooned at the end of the world.

At length the train dragged itself forward again, and when we finally arrived at Alton we were not just relieved, but astonished. My father had heroically come to meet us. Somehow he'd got some petrol and he drove us at a snail's pace over the frozen roads.

My mother had prepared a feast of duck given to them by a friend; for pudding there was treacle tart. It was the best meal we'd had in ages. It was so nice of her to have taken such trouble, and I gave her a big hug.