Fog of Doubt (11 page)

‘And it does seem as if poor Raoul took a long time to die.… (Emma, come
on
, darling! My God, I shall brain this child one day.).'

Thomas fished about blindly for the elastic hook. ‘Perhaps you might settle for some other form of outlet? I feel that one braining may be enough for the moment.' He lifted his head from his absorption with the celluloid doll and smiled at her across the room. ‘Don't let it get you down, darling. I know he was a friend of yours, but …'

She yanked the baby out of its chair and, sitting it on her her knee, began to wipe its grubby face. ‘Oh, Thomas, for goodness sake don't start being kind and make me burst into tears. Raoul wasn't a friend of mine, at least not really—he used to be, but I'd quite got over him. Of course I'm sorry he's dead, I'm sorry for anyone if they're dead, but all I can actually feel is that I wish he hadn't got himself killed in our house. Which does seem ungrateful, I know, because after all he was our guest.… Well, you know what I mean!' She broke off, half laughing, half in tears.

‘Yes, I know what you mean,' said Thomas.

‘(Emma have milko now, lovely, heavenly milko!) But, Thomas, about him dying—it's definitely established that he didn't actually die for about ten minutes?'

‘It may have been even longer. Tedward was about twenty minutes getting here after the 'phone call, and
he
says he thought when he saw him that he'd only been dead a very few minutes. The police surgeon confirmed that when he saw the body.'

‘If only I'd gone down, between doing Granny and baby!'

‘You couldn't have done anything, Tilda. He was going to die anyway, and after the telephone call he was almost certainly unconscious. You could see how he'd sort of clung on to the bureau with the receiver in his hand, and got weaker and weaker and fuzzier and fuzzier, I suppose, poor chap, and just passed into unconsciousness and slid down the front of the bureau and lain there with the thing still in his hand. What does it matter whether he was actually alive or dead?
He
didn't know anything about it; don't you worry.' He smiled at her again, briefly, and bent over the doll.

What goes on inside you? thought Matilda. What's in your head now?—being able to give your attention to that damn doll, and yet thinking so clearly and carefully. What do you know? What had you guessed?—about me, and about Raoul; and about Rosie. And if you suspected that I'd been unfaithful to you with that creature, would you—would you go out and bat him on the head, would you even mind enough to do that? As for Rosie … She remembered how sharply Thomas had questioned her about this sudden descent of Raoul Vernet upon them, how he had pounced upon the fact that she wanted to be alone with Raoul, how he had followed Rosie out into the hall. ‘Aren't you staying to see this wonderful Frenchman?', and ‘You did know this man in Geneva, didn't you?' ‘If you want to know, I knew him a great deal too well,' Rosie had said, bursting out with it, irritably. He had come back into the kitchen, staring down into his glass with troubled eyes; though when, after the murder, she had broken to him the news about Rosie—knowing that in the subsequent investigations it must almost certainly come out—he had protested that he had had no suspicion, none. And yet … Could anybody stand there, could even Thomas, the quiet, the unfathomable, the unpredictable, could even Thomas stand there so non-chalantly, his mind apparently altogether intent upon linking up the arms and legs of a celluloid doll, while all the time murder was hot in his heart and head? She took the empty mug away from the baby, and holding it on her lap again, its red head leaning against her shoulder, wiped its sticky, rose-leaf hands. ‘But
Thomas,
' she said, after a minute, ‘you've put the legs and arms on back to front. It looks most
odd!
'

Damien Jones enjoyed little sympathy at home over his political views. ‘What on earth were you doing at your meeting last night, Damien, with those nasty foreigners of yours? You've been as white as a sheet all day and I'm sure you're up to no good. You're not planning some sort of Attack, Damien, are you?' Mrs. Jones lived in terror of violence to members of His Majesty's Government at the hands of Damien's Branch—which, however, was so much more nearly a twig that the Home Secretary might be considered justified in sleeping soundly o' nights as far as that particular threat was concerned. ‘
And
you came home from the office to-day, limping, Damien.'

‘Well you don't think I've been out kicking the Prime Minister, Mother, do you?'

‘If there's anything wrong with your foot …?'

‘There isn't anything wrong, Mother, do stop fussing.'

‘Then it must be your shoes,' said Mrs. Jones, fretfully. ‘Your new shoes, Damien, and we paid such a lot for them. I don't know why they should suddenly start pinching you, they've been perfectly comfortable on you up to now, and Mr. Harvey's worn that kind for years and he's never had a minute's trouble with them, that's why we got them.…' Mr. Harvey was Mrs. Jones' pet lodger, a subdued little man who collected subscriptions for an insurance firm, and who now had weathered three years of the storms of what Mrs. Jones was pleased to call Liberty Hall.

Damien thumped on the table with a shaking hand. ‘Mother, I tell you, there's nothing wrong with my feet. And there's nothing wrong with my shoes and I—
am
—
not
—
limping
. So please don't go on and and on about it, please
don't, please
DON'T!' Oh, God! he thought, if she goes and babbles all this out when the police come …
If
the police come …

‘Well, all right, dear, don't shout. Oh, and some girl has been ringing you up all day.'

‘A girl?' faltered Damien.

‘Well, anyway, she's rung up twice in the last half hour.'

‘I expect it was Rosie?' said Damien, all offhand.

‘No, it wasn't—do you think I don't know Rosie Evans's voice? It was from a call-box. One of your Reds, I suppose, she sounded all whispering and mysterious like they always do.'

‘What did she say?'

‘Oh, lord, what did she say now? The usual thing, I've no doubt. “I'll meet him at the usual place only a bit further up, same day but not the time he arranged but an hour later,” and not to tell a soul. Honestly, Damien dear, I have no patience.…'

If his mother knew, if she but knew the sick terror in his inside, the swirly-whirly terror heaving up and down in his stomach, the hot mist of fear that seemed to beat against his aching eyes, turning everything to grey despair … ‘Mother, please don't go on and on, please give me the message and be done with it.'

‘Damien, you're not well, child,' said his mother, looking at his white face with renewed anxiety.

‘Yes, I am, mother, I'm fine; please, please don't go saying around that I'm not well, please don't go—don't go telling people that I wasn't well to-day, don't say I was limping, don't say anything
about
me.…'

‘People? What people?'

‘Oh, any people, anybody that—that just asks.' But now when they did ask she would remember this, she would know that something had happened last night. ‘It's—something to do with the Party,' he blurted out wretchedly. ‘You'll only get me into trouble if you go talking.' But that wasn't wise either; for when it came she would know that it was nothing to do with the Party at all. ‘Anyway, Mother—this telephone call: what did she really say?'

‘She just said she'd ring again at seven,' said Mrs. Jones, subdued.

And she rang at seven. ‘Damien? It's me. Look, I must see you.…'

‘No, no, Melissa, I think it's much better to—just to keep apart.'

‘Has anything happened—to you, I mean? The police or anything?'

‘Look here, do be careful, this thing may be tapped or something.'

‘I know, that's why I think we ought to
meet
and talk. I'll be at the corner of Elgin Avenue, at eight.'

‘Won't you be followed?' said Damien. Mr. Hervey passed him and stumped up the narrow staircase rather wearily after his heavy round of insurance collecting. ‘Look, I'm standing in the hall with half the world listening-in. All right, I'll be there, if you think it's safe.' It sounded like a boy scout game, it sounded like a gangster film, and yet it was all true enough, real enough, horrible enough—he, Damien, who yesterday had been just an ordinary person, afraid now to go out and meet a girl ‘on the corner' lest they be dogged by the police.

‘I've been out to this call-box three times and nobody's followed me. Nobody suspects me or anything, it'll be all right. I'll say I'm taking Gabriel for his walk.'

So he crept out after supper, limping along in the just-too-tight shoes and there she was, waiting for him on the corner, with the little black poodle dancing about her, her eyes huge, her face pale, the hair with its threads of pure gold in the lamplight, falling forward over her cheek. They walked up the little rise into Hamilton Terrace and sat on the wooden bench outside the church. They talked in half whispers. It was very dark and still. ‘Haven't the police been to your house at all, Damien?' ‘No, why should they—unless you went and said …' ‘I haven't mentioned your name, Damien, I haven't breathed to a soul that you were there at all, last night.' ‘What did they say to you, Melissa, about yourself?' ‘They just asked me where I'd spent the evening and I said I was with a—a friend of mine.' ‘Won't they try to find the friend?' ‘No, I—I told them I didn't know his name, I said he was kind of a pick-up and I had no idea where he lived and all that, and not even his surname. I said I came in—some time, I couldn't remember when, I got muddled up, but finally I just said “some time”; and that after a bit I heard a noise in the hall—and that was the first I knew about it.' She pushed her lock of hair back and, in the pale lamplight, looked him in the eyes. ‘You do know that I—well, that I went up before that, Damien?'

‘Yes, yes,' he said, hurriedly. ‘Better not say anything about it, don't even put it into words; not now, not ever.'

Silence fell. Their white young faces stared through the lamplit darkness, they sat, tense and immobile, except for the nervous restlessness of their hands. All her silliness and affectation had fallen away from her, she was afraid, and in the reality of her stark fear, the reality of herself shone through. ‘What shall I do now, Damien? Anything?'

‘No, don't do anything, just keep quiet, just say nothing. Why do anything if they don't suspect?'

‘But if they ask me any more questions?'

‘Stick to what you've said. Be as vague as you can, so that they can't pin you down, like saying that you came in “some time”, that was fine. But anything you do say, stick to it, that's all.'

‘It seems simple when you're here,' said Melissa, wistfully. ‘But things crop up out of the blue. And it does sound fishy to say I was walking about with—with my friend—all that time in the fog.'

‘Millions of people were walking about in the fog; once you'd started you got lost and just sort of crept around trying to find the way. Couldn't you have said that you went to a cinema?'

‘I nearly did, but then I thought they'd ask me what film I saw and I might get caught out. As you say, it's better to just be vague. Nobody can prove that we weren't just walking about in a fog.'

‘Unless this friend turns up,' said Damien, uneasily.

‘He won't,' said Melissa, more or less assured.

People drifted past, exercising dogs, to the great chagrin of Gabriel, pulling excitedly on his lead. ‘I'd better go now, Damien; I could have walked round the block by now.' She stood up and shook back her lock of hair. ‘You'd better not even come back down the hill with me, in case.' She said, abruptly: ‘Good-bye.'

‘Good-bye,' said Damien, standing with his hands in his overcoat pockets. He turned and started off at once, limping along Hamilton Terrace, shoulders hunched. After a minute she came running after him, the poodle towing her along gaily, on its scarlet lead. ‘Damien! Half a minute!' She caught up with him. ‘I just wanted to say—thank you, Damien.' She touched him humbly on the sleeve and turned and was towed away off down the hill; her hair gleamed gold for a moment as she passed under the corner lamp.

Ye Gods! ‘Thank you,' thought Damien, bitterly. Talk about understatements!

Sergeant Bedd picked up the receiver in Thomas's office. ‘Yes?'

‘Could I speak to Miss Rosie Evans, please?'

‘'Oo is it speaking?' said Bedd, in a butlerish voice.

‘Oh, er—just say John Brown, will you?'

‘A Mr. John Brown is a-mouldering on the telephone for you, Miss,' said Bedd, ushering Rosie into the office and returning quietly to lift the receiver of the extension in the hall.

Rosie rushed all excited to the telephone. ‘Hallo? Oh, gosh, Stanislas—I thought it might be you.'

‘Can you meet me again, Rosie—round by the telephone box, eh?'

‘My dear, I don't think I can. Haven't you seen the papers?'

‘The papers?' said the disembodied voice, blankly.

‘Good lord, it's in all the evening papers, the place has been absolutely swarming with reporters and things. Well, while we were—you know, round by the telephone box last night, a chap got killed here, in our house, somebody came in and hit him with a mastoid mallet.…'

‘With a
what?
What on earth are you talking about?'

‘It's in the
Evening Standard
, you can look for yourself. It was while I was at Tedward's, well, that's where I was going when I ran into you in the fog; well, while I was there a man rang up and said somebody had killed him and, my dear, when we came rushing round, sure enough there he was, lying dead on the floor in our hall.'