The Twilight Hour (6 page)

‘Hugh might know,' I said doubtfully, ‘we don't have it, I know that much.'

‘No, don't ask Hugh,' he said hurriedly. ‘What about that pub your lot go to? Someone in there might know.'

I had such an easy time as Stan's secretary that I didn't like to refuse. Actually, I didn't
want
to refuse. It was a challenge. It was even an adventure.

I crossed Regent Street and walked on until I reached Rathbone Place and the Wheatsheaf. Inside the bar I glanced swiftly round, hoping I wouldn't see anyone I knew, but in this weather the place was almost empty. I walked straight up to the bar and asked for a sherry.

‘All on your own, then? Where's that husband of yours? Letting you out on your own like Little Red Riding Hood? You never know when you might meet a wolf. Specially now Britain's turned into Siberia.' Gully the barman roared with laughter at this feeble joke.

‘Get caught in a blizzard, more likely. Frozen to death in the snow.' I took a gulp of the sherry. ‘Look, Gully, I wonder – the thing is, I'm looking for Titus Mavor … actually I need his address.' I blushed as I spoke, and hoped Gully wouldn't get the wrong idea. He raised his eyebrows and I was sure some risqué remark was on the tip of his tongue, but he restrained himself.

‘This is his only fixed abode these days. He's moving around at the moment – trouble with the bailiffs.'

I must have looked disappointed, for he fetched a bit of paper from behind a row of bottles. ‘I'm not supposed to give this out, but he wouldn't mind for a good-looking girl.'

Mecklenburgh Square lay at the far side of Bloomsbury. I swallowed the rest of the Amontillado and set off eastwards. At least it wasn't snowing, but a wind had got up, and blew the ragged clouds aside to unveil a bleak full moon. It took me nearly half an hour to reach the square. Its imposing terraces seemed both menacing and tragic, part bombed, the railings long gone, only their sockets remaining, privets growing wild, curtains shrouding the once grand windows. How gaunt and black the surviving houses looked. There were no lights in any ground floor rooms along the terrace, a few gleams here and there from an upstairs room. I walked along, peering at the numbers until I found the right door. I mounted the shallow, cracked black and white checked steps.

The door was not quite shut. How strange. I pushed it. It was very stiff and scraped against the lintel. The wood must have swollen in the cold. It would be easy for someone to think they'd shut it when they hadn't. I hesitated, then stepped into the soft-as-cobwebs darkness. I felt along the wall for a light switch. The little metal fitting felt cold and hard. I pressed it down and a faint orange twilight gleamed from the unshaded twenty-watt bulb that swung eerily in the wind from a cord far up in the ceiling over the stairwell.

The stairs stretched upwards into shadows.

I called Mavor's name. My voice sounded hollow – and weak at the same time. I hesitated, then tried the first door on the right. It was locked.

I moved forwards towards the long flight of stairs and peered upwards. The slender banister curved round at the top, and more flights above that wound away into endless gloom.

A sudden sound – my heart thumped. Soot tumbling down inside the chimney stack; crumbling plaster; a cat jumping from a chair. Yet I was not seriously frightened. It was the sort of building that would attract squatters, yet I felt almost certain the place was empty, abandoned. I walked along the corridor to the back of the house, but those doors were also locked, so there was nothing for it: I began to climb upwards, stepping gingerly on each creaking tread, hoping the stairs wouldn't actually give way, and trying for some reason not to make any noise, as though I were a thief, an intruder.

I
was
an intruder.

As I adjusted to the semi-darkness I made out odd shapes in the gloom; on the landing a suitcase and a broken chair. Here were more doors, another set of rooms. I tried the door of the room at the front. It opened.

The first thing I noticed was the smell. Alcohol? I looked around. There were no curtains and the moonlight was quite lurid. Bottles clustered by the grate. Paintings were stacked against the walls. Others had been thrown over anyhow onto the floor as if someone had been turning them over. I walked round the end of the sofa near the door.

Someone lay on the sofa, with splayed legs and moon face, eyes closed, mouth open, gleaming in the livid light.

The silence thickened. I stared. He lay so still. It gradually dawned on me that he was dead.

For a long time – how long? A minute? An hour? A hundred years? I didn't move. At last I bent slowly over him and my hand, with a life of its own, stretched out to touch his face. He was
cold
. Yet I jumped back as if I'd been burnt.

The room was cold too. I came to, as if from a dream. I was perfectly calm. I'd seen a dead body before – once; at the end of the war, after a V2 attack. It had looked a lot worse than this one: blood, wounds, half a face, one eye staring upwards. Mavor's eyes were closed. He looked peaceful.

There was no other living person in the house; I was certain of that. I was alone with a dead man. But I was not afraid. I was eerily alert, abnormally aware of my own reactions, noting as I pulled my coat more tightly around me that there was an exhilaration, an illicit excitement in my grim discovery, almost as if his lifelessness made me that much more alive.

I looked carefully round the room, noting the mess he'd lived in, and wondered how long he'd been here. He must have been far gone – perhaps despairing. Even his paintings were in a state, almost as if he'd attacked his own work.

I walked back round the sofa, out of the room, down the lofty stairs and out of the house. The door scraped on the stone lintel, and I couldn't get it shut. A lone pedestrian was approaching me, and glanced at me as we passed. I looked back, and it seemed to me that she was turning into the house I'd just left. I walked more quickly, hurried down Lamb's Conduit Street, suddenly needing the brighter lights of Holborn and Southampton Row, hurrying towards the underground, the Central Line to Notting Hill and the flat where Alan could hear the tale of my adventure.

Then I remembered my errand, Stan's letter still crushed into my bag. I slowed down. In fact, I sobered up. Why had Stan written to him? I walked along until I found a phone box.

I clanged my pennies into the slit and waited. But it was long after six now, and I doubted Stan would still be at the office. I didn't have his home number.

He answered. Thank God! I pressed button A and the pennies clattered down.

‘Hullo! Hullo!' I shouted. ‘It's me, Dinah. Something's happened. I found him, but – he's dead.'

Silence; then: ‘
Dead
? Can you meet me somewhere? Meet me at the milk bar round the corner from the office.'

‘I'd better dial 999,' I said. ‘Report it to the police; or get an ambulance.'

There was another silence, then he said slowly: ‘No, don't do that. Not yet. We'll sort that out later. You've still got the letter, haven't you? You didn't leave that behind?'

My money ran out. I hung up. I stood there, and the letter was burning a hole in my bag. I honestly didn't mean to do it, but I drew it out and examined it. Why wasn't it sealed? Had Stanley just forgotten to lick it down? Carefully I pulled out the flap and drew out what was inside. There was no letter, simply a cheque for £150.

I left the sour-cold fug of the kiosk for the frozen street. I walked along, thinking. I didn't see a taxi, so I walked. It wasn't that far, even in this weather, and I needed time to think. £150. That was a staggeringly huge sum of money. Maybe it was for a painting. Stanley had said something about investing in art, although I doubted Mavor's style would have appealed to him.

Perhaps he'd simply been doing Mavor a good turn. Perhaps saving Mavor from destitution was his good deed for the week. Mavor was a notorious cadger, never paid for his drinks, someone always treated him, he was Fitzrovia's mascot …

All the while the memory of his congealed body in the cold empty house sank deeper and deeper into me. Cold in death. Death in this dark, endless winter. The inert, indigestible
fact
of it grew larger in my mind, heavy, morbid, menacing.

He'd died of drink. Must have. He was an alcoholic: sad but hardly sinister.

His eyes had been closed. Had someone closed them? Or had he simply slipped into a coma, floated peacefully away on an ebb tide of whisky?

.........

Stanley was waiting for me in the milk bar. It was pretty empty – it was a place for a lunchtime clientele, not really an evening place, tucked in as it was behind a big, impersonal department store, but maybe it stayed open for the cinema crowd later on. I'd have preferred to meet in a pub. I needed a drink. But Stanley never drank.

‘Are you all right?' He looked at me. ‘I'm so sorry – what can I say – I'd no idea …' He shook his head. ‘Bloody hell – excuse the language – it's not the Blitz any more, you don't expect to find –' and in the nick of time he lowered his voice, ‘dead bodies.' He bought me a coffee – pretty weak – and I handed him his envelope. He took it with an odd, crooked smile. ‘Sure you're all right? Okay to tell me what happened?'

All the while he fingered the envelope, turned it over, laid it down, then picked it up again. He had a habit of chewing his nails when he was on edge – closing a deal, say, or ruminating on Gwendolen – and he was biting them now.

The woman behind the counter wiped its Perspex top. She eyed us sullenly.

‘He was just –
there
. The place reeked of drink.' I paused. ‘No. The smell was … different.' What was that smell? It reminded me of … ‘I suppose he must have died of drink,' I said doubtfully.

Died of drink: it was a fate my father mentioned from time to time in connection with some school or college friend, gone to the dogs in the colonies or the army. It sounded plausible. I said it with confidence. And yet …

‘There was no sign of violence,' I added, ‘but … there was something … I mean, the room wasn't just untidy. It was more than just alcoholic squalor. It had been turned upside down.'

The more I thought about it, the more suspicious it became. That could be how he'd lived, yet … would he have hurled his own paintings around like that?

‘Perhaps he was in such bad financial trouble that he killed himself,' I said. Mavor hadn't seemed the suicidal type, but – another of my father's insights drawn from the experience of years at the Bar – ‘you never could tell.' My father's firm belief was that the least likely individuals were the most liable to end it all.

‘What made you say that?' said Stanley.

‘Say what?'

‘No sign of violence. Why should there have been?'

Why had I said that? There was no reason to think … but Stanley was disturbed by the suggestion. ‘What made you say that?' he persisted.

‘I don't know. Nothing. It was the shock, I suppose,' I added, as though in need of some excuse.

He leaned towards me, contrite. ‘Yes – I'm sorry. Must have knocked you sideways.' He looked at me, consideringly. ‘You've got pluck. You're bearing up well.'

‘I'm okay. Really.'

‘
Are
you?'

I nodded. And I was. But the unassimilable fact – Mavor dead – was congealing inside me like cold porridge, indigestible, inedible, impossible.

After a while Stanley muttered: ‘He was a nasty bit of work, you know. Look how he insulted your commie friend that night at the restaurant.'

‘Yes.'

Another silence. Stanley was biting his nails. He glanced sideways at me. ‘There were rumours, you know … he knew too much about people and …' he was almost whispering now, but seemed to have second thoughts and didn't finish his sentence.

As we sat there, our coffee growing cold, a suspicion trickled through my mind, like icy water. Could Mavor have been a blackmailer? Was that the explanation of the £150? Had he been blackmailing Stanley? Demanding money with menaces? I was anxious about being late home. Alan would worry and that would make him cross. Yet I sat on, held by a strange sense of camaraderie with Stanley. There's nothing like sharing a secret to bring you closer to another human being.

A secret: but was it a secret? Why was it a secret? Why did I think of it in that way? But of course: I'd found Mavor's body while delivering a letter for my boss. That would be just unusual enough to arouse curiosity if not suspicion in the minds of the police. Or did I just think that because I knew what the letter contained?

The police would have to be informed. We discussed this for some time. Everything about my upbringing had trained me into truthfulness; and truthfulness was not simply not telling a lie, it was telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth: above all the
whole
truth – but if I reported Mavor's death, I'd have to explain what I was doing in Mecklenburgh Square, why I'd been looking for Mavor.

‘The thing is, Di,' said Stanley, man to man, ‘I don't want my name brought into this. You understand that, don't you? You know me, you know what I do, you know it's all perfectly above board. But in my line of business everything depends on trust, trust and reputation. I can't afford to have my name dragged into some sordid little … scandal, mystery, whatever it is. Not that it probably is anything – just another arty-farty has-been who thought he was a genius and drank himself to death.'

‘Alan said he confused self-indulgence with inspiration.'

Stanley liked that. ‘Sums it up pretty accurately.'

But there was still the problem of what to do about it. I continued to urge informing the police as the only moral course of action. Stanley listened, not unsympathetically.

‘Look,' he said finally, ‘I agree. You are right. But let's just wait until tomorrow. With any luck someone else will find him. He is well known, after all, he won't just lie there to rot indefinitely. It's not as if he hasn't got any friends. Let's wait until tomorrow,' he repeated almost pleadingly, ‘see if it makes the news.'