From London Far (11 page)

‘It was awkward enough.’ Jean nodded soberly. ‘I knew none of the things that I was supposed to know, and that those rather unscrupulous people were determined to learn. So the next few days had their actively displeasing side. And my return to Town was altogether lacking in amenity. Just what would have happened in the end I don’t at all know. But then you walked in – and extremely grateful I am. Moreover’ – and Jean smiled happily – ‘the balance to date is all on the credit side. It was taken for granted that I knew so much that in actual fact I learnt quite a lot. Properjohn and Neff and Moila: I began a little to see how these fragments fitted together. We are in quite a strong position to plan our next move.’

There was silence in Meredith’s book-lined room. Meredith took a long puff at his pipe. But unlike the pasteboard devotees of the weed among whom his adventures had begun, his expression was troubled. ‘My dear,’ he said, ‘can you offer me a single substantial reason why we should not at once take this story to the police?’

‘You know I can’t.’

‘We must consider what is at stake. Canvases by Titian and frescoes by Giotto, Hellenic marbles and Cnossos figurines, are by no means counters to be hazarded in a game of personal adventure. But it would be impertinent in me to lecture you on that.’

‘We will spend the next couple of hours putting everything relevant on paper, and lodge the document with appropriate instructions at your bank. At the moment we should be thought mad as hatters. More attention will be paid to the thing if we never come back.’

Meredith smiled. ‘You are trying to think of reasons, after all. But none will hold. There is nothing to take you an inch further in this thing on your own except some personal rule of conduct to which you happen to subscribe.’

‘As you do, too. The trapdoor and Vogelsang attest it.’

‘I confess that when I look into my heart I see that I would not willingly draw back. But I am an elderly man with nothing before me except editing Juvenal, probably by no means so well as I have already edited Martial. It is different with you.’ Meredith had stood up and was looking very serious. ‘Unless I am entirely mistaken you are not the sort of woman whom an aberrant psychic constitution prompts to live among the Turks or scale the Himalayas. You have your work, which is as good as any man’s in your field. But you also have–’

‘I also have you.’ Jean Halliwell’s eyes were suddenly alive – with mischief and with more than mischief. ‘I’ve got you! And of what other male can I say that? You are going to come. And Bradshaw is before us.’

He looked at her for a moment in very great surprise. ‘I’m afraid it may be a bit out of date,’ he said. ‘Better confirm the times by telephone.’

The morning had advanced. Meredith scanned the last of several sheets of foolscap, closely covered in his fine hand. ‘I think’, he said, ‘that all the material particulars are there. And now we had better find out about Moila… Yes, Mrs Martin?’

The landlady, who had provided breakfast from within a cloud of considerable reserve, was standing in the doorway with some shapeless object in her hand. She spoke with deliberation, her eye scanning the room meanwhile – much as if she expected further tattered but well-poised girls to have appeared in it. ‘Mr Meredith, sir, and beg pardon for hinterrumping, but I would be obliged to ’ave your wishes on the ’ounds.’

‘The hounds, Mrs Martin?’

‘The ’ounds, Mr Meredith, sir – and very friendly disposed they did appear to be. But now I must confess to apprehensials, sir. Sitting on each side of the kitchen range, they was, for all the world like a calendar from the grocer. But now one of them ’as gorn and been sick in the mews.’

‘Dear me! I am extremely sorry. But the mews would seem a not unsuitable choice–’

‘It’
wot
he sicked, Mr Meredith, that has gorn to give me the apprehensials, I confess.’ Dramatically, Mrs Martin held a ragged garment up in air. ‘If I were to say, now, Mr Meredith, sir, that this ’ere was your best jacket you would not denige of it?’

‘Assuredly not. It is certainly the remains of what might be so described. But I assure you–’

Mrs Martin held the garment higher still and pointed to a large hiatus. ‘What the brute sicked’, she said, ‘was
that
. And it give me a fair turn orl right.’

Meredith nodded placidly. ‘My dear Mrs Martin, it is certainly true that the creature attacked me. But both it and its companion appear subsequently to have undergone a change of heart.’

‘A change of ’eart?’ said Mrs Martin, and held the garment higher still. ‘I don’t know that I ever ’eard–’ She stopped as there was a clatter on the floor. ‘Now wot–’

It was Bubear’s revolver, dropped lucklessly from the pocket into which Meredith must at some stage of his adventures have dropped it. Jean stooped and picked it up. ‘No call for more apprehension on this, Mrs Martin,’ she said. ‘It’s been fired until it can be fired no more.’

‘That’s just what I used to say of my old man.’ Mrs Martin was suddenly as emphatic as she was inconsequent. ‘Lorst more jobs, ’e did, than the queen has bangles.’ She stopped and stared. ‘It wouldn’t be a
gun
, now?’ Her eyes widened. ‘Mr Meredith wouldn’t be going packing a gun?’

‘Packing a gun? Dear me, no. I have no intention of taking a firearm with me.’ Meredith smiled, suddenly understanding. ‘Ah,
packing
a gun. I perceive, Mrs Martin, that you do not go to the cinemas for nothing. And – well – last night I was very decidedly packing a gun.’

‘Which would be why, Mr Meredith, sir, there would be brains on your boots?’

‘Brains on my boots!’
Meredith recalled the Aubusson carpet and stared at his landlady in horror.

Mrs Martin nodded with paralysing placidity. ‘They do say as how they splatter,’ she said. ‘They do say they splatter somethink chronic.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Mr Meredith, sir, and beg pardon for being inquisitial, but ’ow did you buy orf the police dorgs? Would it ’ave been wiv a chop?’

‘Really, Mrs Martin, the matter was not quite as you would appear to apprehend. It is hardly possible to explain–’

‘Wot I would ’ave you tell me, Mr Meredith, sir, is this: ’ow am I to explain the ’ounds when you and the young lady is gorn? For going I can see you are – and very natural too in the circumstantials. But the ’ounds will be inquired after, I don’t doubt.’ Her glance strayed to the desk at which Meredith had been writing, and to the substantial document which lay there. ‘Lord a mercy!’ she exclaimed. ‘If you haven’t been and wrote out a confession. Now just you be going and packing up unobtrusious like, and give that to me to put straight into the kitchen range.’

It was plain that Mrs Martin supposed her learned lodger to have committed some homicidal act – probably of the species
crime passionnel
. It was equally plain that she had no thought of being other than an accessory after the fact. Meredith looked at her in some perplexity. ‘Perhaps,’ he said – and knew that his words were to be without inspiration – ‘perhaps the hounds will just go away.’

Mrs Martin shook her head despondingly. ‘Would that I were Mandrake!’ she said – and paused as if to admire this literary turn of phrase. ‘Would that I were Mandrake Mr Meredith, sir.’

‘Mandrake, Mrs Martin?’ This was a reference altogether outside the circle of Meredith’s cultivation. ‘Do I understand you to refer to a plant of the genus
Mandragora
?’

‘A magician, Mr Meredith – one as wot changes ’umans into ’ounds reg’lar. And I could say I had done that to you and Miss Halliwell ’ere.’

‘Bless my soul!’ Meredith looked mildly surprised at this Circean proposal. ‘It would certainly be what might be termed a false scent. But I must assure you that you are altogether under a misapprehension. As far as I know, the police are not, in fact, looking for Miss Halliwell and myself; and I believe that none of the King’s judges would hold that I had committed a crime.’

Mrs Martin shook her head sadly. ‘Ah, Mr Meredith, sir,’ she said, ‘they all believes that until the black and fatal moment comes. Would you be liking a taxi, or would it be more curcumspecial to go out by the back?’

Meredith sighed. ‘The back, Mrs Martin – by all means, the back. And I hope to return to you in a few days’ time.’

‘Um,’ said Mrs Martin.

‘If I do not, you will find that suitable arrangements have been made. And I would like to say that, despite an abstraction and reserve of which no one is more painfully conscious than myself I have always greatly appreciated your kindly and competent ministrations.’

‘There, now – if you aren’t a regular gentleman!’ Dropping Meredith’s mutilated jacket and lifting up a crumpled apron, Mrs Martin wept. ‘I know as ’ow there will be money in it,’ she whimpered. ‘My hexclusive story in the Sunday papers and a photograph as well – ’olding the ’ounds, as likely as not. But oh, Mr Meredith, sir, would that I were Mandrake!’ And Mrs Martin ran blubbering from the room.

‘Really,’ said Meredith, ‘it is hard to know how to take this good woman. Not only is she assisting us, as she believes, to cheat the gallows, but she is taking that course without thinking twice about it. And although in this instance it is all to our benefit, I cannot help feeling that the morals of the Metropolitan populace have been somewhat impaired by the times we live in.’

Jean Halliwell, who was endeavouring to take a comprehensive survey of her dilapidated person in two inches of pocket mirror, laughed aloud. ‘Juvenal speaks!’ she said.
‘Resolved
at length
– How does it go?’

‘Ah! you have remembered Johnson:

Resolved at length, from vice and
London
far,

To breathe in distant fields a purer air…’

Meredith paused. ‘Well, I suppose that is just what we are going to do. The road to Moila lies right over peat and heather – to say nothing of some little part at least of the stormy waters of the North Minch. And, talking of Dr Johnson, he was there himself, you know, in 1773, or thereabouts. Boswell’s is a very amusing account of the whole adventure. There may be considerable charm in following some of his footsteps.’ And Meredith, momentarily seeing the hazardous escapade before him in the mild character of a literary pilgrimage, turned to search for an atlas. ‘When he met Lord Monboddo and debated whether our ancestors had tails–’

‘We shan’t meet Lord Monboddo.’ Jean had put her mirror away. ‘But we do hope to meet the arch-conspirator, Properjohn. A prim and harmless sort of name, don’t you think? But we may find ourselves rather wishing that we were Mandrake, nevertheless. That the distant fields will yield a purer air is altogether problematical.’

Meredith, now studying a map, chuckled comfortably. ‘It will be an excellent plan to begin by making each other’s flesh creep. And here is one way to do it: let us remember last night and the very sufficient alarms we experienced on the mere periphery of the business. And by that measure let us compute the kind of reception we are likely to receive at its centre.’

‘Our arrival will at least be totally unexpected. For the gang must undoubtedly believe that we are dead.’

‘I am inclined to agree with you in that.’ And Meredith nodded – now gravely enough. ‘In addition to destroying we don’t know what compromising matter, the explosion was certainly designed to eliminate ourselves. But just what all these people made of the situation, it would be hard to say.’

‘I think I’d risk saying that they had once more lost the requisition book. Of course, it’s a terrifying organization and all that – but I have a kind of feeling that a pleasing vein of muddle runs right through it. Think of the absurdity of swallowing you as Vogelsang! Incidentally, and whether Bubear is alive still or dead, I’m banking a lot on that.’

Meredith frowned. He was now packing a suitcase – which with him meant beginning with a substantial layer of books. ‘You mean that he will want to keep mum about the whole thing?’

‘Just that. He was careless, and as a result the real Vogelsang was killed and the whole depot or whatever it is to be called was abandoned and destroyed in a panic. He doesn’t know what you were after; he doesn’t perhaps
really
know whether you were the real Vogelsang or not; he just knows that
both
claimants to the name were killed – as was Marsden’s girl before she gave any information on the Mykonos Marbles. Now, Bubear has been cheating his bosses, as we know, and ten to one it will be his instinct to obscure the discreditable truth of last night’s junketings behind whatever fibs come first into his head. And there’s one other point – a fact I gathered when I was picking up what I could. This Vogelsang, as far as personal acquaintance goes, was to be quite a new contact. Properjohn had never met him. There may be a strong card in that yet.’

Meredith, having half-filled his suitcase with Latin authors, had gone to seek pyjamas and socks. ‘Your mind’, he called from his bedroom, ‘moves naturally to the tune of romance – or indeed of that strip-fiction in which you and Mrs Martin are both so well read. Or I ought to say
so well seen
– a capital use for an old idiom. For the effort of reading is unnecessary with such things, and hence their charm.’

‘I’m making the effort to read Bradshaw. And it will be effort, I expect, all the way. To get on trains and to stay there. Likely enough, it will be corridors all the time.’

‘All that.’ Meredith reappeared with a safety razor and a tooth-brush. ‘Moreover, our movements may be complicated by coming upon areas still under some species of military jurisdiction. I should imagine that those islands–’ He broke off, his eye meditatively upon Jean. ‘By the way…it rather occurs to me that your attire… I mean that if it is really cold–’ And Meredith stopped, much confused.

‘You mean I look as if I had come out of a rag-bag – and you would prefer to travel with something from a band-box? But that is going to be fixed right away. Mrs Martin is taking upon herself to lend me an outfit of her daughter Minnie’s things. Are you nearly ready? I think I’ll go and get into them now.’