The Evil Seed (16 page)

Their cries of: ‘Make
room!’ and ‘Give him air!’ surrounded me.

I tried to smile, to
breathe normally, to tell my story, to stop the dreadful palsy in my arms and
legs. Slowly, the tilted world righted itself. One of the boys ran to the
police station, bringing back with him two constables and an ambulance. I
refused to get into the ambulance but accepted a drink of brandy. I began to
feel better. I told my story three times, once to the students who had helped
me, once to the policemen, once again to the hard-faced young inspector with a
surprisingly gentle voice who interviewed me at the station and gave me a cup
of tea. I did not mind telling the story; every time I did it seemed to remove
it a little further into the realm of fiction. Over the teacup, looking into
the grey eyes of Inspector Turner and comforted by the sympathy in his voice, I
felt almost a hero. I had been in the war, yes, but now it was over.

‘What made you think
there might have been a body there, Mr Holmes?’ asked Turner softly. ‘The two
men I sent out tell me there was nothing to be seen from the bridge, and
…
you tell me yourself that your eyesight is not good.’

‘I know,’ I replied. ‘I
can’t explain it.’ I told him some of the events of the previous spring, about
Rosemary and how I had pulled her out of the river, and he nodded, as if he
understood.

‘I see,’ he said. ‘And
did you recognize the deceased?’ I shuddered, but this time it was a controlled
reaction, and my tea did not spill.

‘I didn’t see her face,’
I said in a low voice. ‘When she
…
turned over …
I was sick.’

Turner smiled narrowly.

‘Don’t be ashamed of
that, Mr Holmes,’ he said briskly. ‘I’ve seen more corpses than you have, and
this one is enough to make any man wish he hadn’t had any breakfast.’ He paused
and closed his little book.

‘That’s it for now, you’ll
be glad to know,’ he said. ‘Are you going to be all right to go home now, Mr
Holmes?’

‘I think so, thank you,
Inspector.’ I smiled, hesitated, fumbled with the buttons on my coat for a
moment, then asked the question he had known I would ask all along.

‘Are you treating this
case as a
…
I mean … do you think it’s murder?’

The Inspector sighed and
appeared to contemplate my question.

‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘Do you?’ And for that moment, I felt as if he were asking me a serious
question, as an equal, as if he thought I really might be able to tell him
something.

‘Well … maybe a
marauding animal …’ I suggested, feeling foolish.

The Inspector cocked an
eyebrow.

‘Maybe,’ he said mildly.

‘What sort of
person
would
do that to someone?’ I asked, helplessly.

Turner shook his head
and sprang his last question. ‘Are you sure you’ve told me everything you saw?’
he asked, and his grey eyes were cold in the middle of his smile.

‘Of course … at least …
I think so,’ I stammered. ‘Why? I’m not a suspect, am I?’

‘No.’ The Inspector’s
denial was offhand, almost disinterested. ‘There can be no suspect until there
has been a murder, and that will be for the pathologist to decide.’

‘Oh.’ The syllable
sounded lame, and I immediately began to
feel
suspect, guilt spilling
unbidden into my mind. ‘I see.’

I looked at Turner’s
smile, and a secret chill crept up from my feet and raised the prickly hairs on
my thighs. I am not good at lies, and I think the Inspector knew that I had not
told him everything, but this thing was too much, too secret for me to hand it
to him just yet. Besides, I hardly believed it myself, and I had to know before
I acted, before I decided what to do.

Because, you see, the
man I had seen on the bridge, the man I had called out to, and who had run away
with the abrupt graceless movements of total panic, the man whose eyes had
touched mine in a second of horror and understanding … I had known him.

It was Robert.

One

WHAT I HAD SEEN OF MY FRIEND ROBERT PLAGUED
MY MIND for some time before I gained enough courage to do what I did. I
remembered his grey face and the way he had looked at me before he ran away — not
the look of a sane man — and I was afraid. When I eventually went in search of
him, it was as much for my own peace of mind as it was out of concern for
Robert, for I had brushed with horrible death, and I was certain that my old
friend had somehow the key to the secret, whatever it was.

The
Cambridge News
had
published an article on what they called the ‘Body in the Weir’ case,
describing how I had found the woman, ‘as yet unnamed’ but presumed to be ‘a
missing person’. Apparently the pathologist’s inquiry had been inconclusive
over the cause of death, but had uncovered the fact that the injuries I had
seen on the body, which the newspapers had euphemistically termed ‘a massive
internal insult’ 3had been inflicted after death. No one knew at the time of
printing whether it had been murder or not. Except, perhaps, Robert.

It took me some time to
locate him, for since we had lost touch with each other, he had moved from his
lodging and had left no forwarding address. I contacted his college, but his
tutors were as bewildered as I; they had not seen him or spoken to him
regularly for weeks. At last, after another three days of fruitless enquiry, I
was directed to an unwholesome cellar-bar at the end of Mill Road, where, my
informant told me, the drink was cheap, ‘If you’re not particular about the
company’; and there I found Robert, alone at a table with a bottle of wine. The
change which had been wrought in him even in those few days was horrific. His
hair was unkempt and had grown too long, and he had not shaved. He was wearing
no tie, and his suit looked crumpled, as if it had been slept in, maybe more
than once. His eyes were red-rimmed, like a drunkard’s, his face drawn, his
cheekbones too prominent in his sunken face. He gave me one brief, incurious
glance and poured himself another glass of wine, propped up on his elbows on
the greasy table like an old man.

I sat down beside him,
saying nothing, but my mind boiled over with questions. He drank again, the
smell of the cheap red wine overpowering in that small, close place, but even
then, not managing entirely to camouflage the under-smells of sweat and dirt of
the cellar.

After a while, he spoke.

‘What d’you want?’ His
voice was only slightly slurred by alcohol, but his tone was expressionless.

‘Oh, Robert …’ I think
my voice was unsteady; I felt close to tears at seeing him like this, in this
place. ‘What are you doing to yourself? Why didn’t you come to see me if you
had any trouble? Why hide away in this awful place like …’ My voice failed
me, and I laid a hand on his arm, more to steady myself than to comfort him.
Robert had always been my touchstone in times of trouble, he had always been
stable, carefree, happy. What could have changed him so much?

The answer leapt
unbidden to my mind … in fact, it had never been very far from my thoughts
anyway.

‘Rosemary
…
’ I
whispered. ‘Is it something to do with Rosemary?’

The reaction was
immediate.

‘No!’ he snapped. ‘Nothing.
Nothing! Leave her out of it. It’s me. My business. Leave me alone.’ His voice
was a bitter, self-pitying whine. The facetious and affected Robert I had known
had coarsened, his nerves stripped raw, and with the terrible underlying
current of weakness, of helplessness one can sometimes see in drug addicts or
mental patients, that sense of abyss. For a moment I was disorientated,
everything I had thought solid and permanent in my world dissolving around me.

‘But I’m your friend …’
I protested. ‘If you’re ill, need help, I can always—’

‘I don’t need help!’
His
retort was so loud that the coarse woman behind the bar glanced his way,
wondering, perhaps, whether he was going to cause trouble. Robert saw her
reaction and lowered his voice, but his eyes were still overbright and hostile,
and there was venom in his voice.

‘I don’t need help,’ he
repeated. ‘I’m very happy with Rosemary. In fact, I’ve asked her to marry me.
He paused. ‘And she said she would,’ he added, as if to dispel any doubt I
might have as to the authenticity of his story.

‘Oh,’ I said in a small
voice. ‘Marry you? Congratulations, I, really. When?’ His announcement had
taken the wind out of my sails to such an extent that I could hardly string two
words together without stammering.

Robert saw my confusion
and made an effort to speak normally again.

‘Rosemary thinks … in
August. That will give us plenty of time.’ He tried to smile; the result would
have been a good approximation if the eyes had not been so blank. ‘I don’t know
what bee you’ve got in your bonnet about me, old man, but there’s really no
need, as you can see. I would have called, of course, but I’ve been very busy,
you know, with Rosemary and the preparations for the wedding and so — family to
contact — not much time
…
’

‘You look ill,’ I said,
lamely.

‘A few too many late
nights. A little attack of
Weltschmerz.
You caught me on a bad day, what
else can I tell you? Rosemary was busy tonight; I went out a-roving on my own
and ended up on the edge of Lethe.’ His tone was deliberately flippant; the
fact that he was trying hard to deceive me frightened me even more than when he
had snapped at me. I looked at my friend and saw a total stranger, bright
psychopathic eyes behind the carnival-mask. A sudden pain in my heart as I
realized that I had never known him at all.

‘I saw you on the
bridge, Robert. You ran away, but I recognized you.’

‘What bridge?’

I told my story,
beginning with my finding of the body, then how I had seen him and called for
help. His reaction was frankly incredulous, touched with the old half-good-natured
contempt of the old days.

‘It wasn’t me, Dan,’ he
said. ‘You’re really off on the wrong track here.’

‘I’m certain it was! You
were wearing the same coat …
you looked at me, for heaven’s sake!’

For the first time that
evening, my friend looked me straight in the eye, and put his hand on my arm.

‘Look, old man,’ he
said, not unreasonably. ‘If it had been me, and you had called me for help, do
you really think I would have run away?’ I shook my head helplessly. ‘What’s
more,’ he went on, ‘you say yourself that you’d had a shock. And I know what
bad eyes you’ve got. You were feeling rocky, you saw a man in a coat like mine,
shouted to him … your imagination did the rest. No wonder the poor devil ran
away.’ He tried the smile again; this time, I was almost convinced.

‘And as for being ill,’
he said, ‘you don’t look so good yourself. Too much worry, old chap. Now take
yourself home and get some rest, and stop fretting. I’ll call round one of
these days, and we’ll go out and have a drink. Just like the old days. Right?’

I nodded.

‘Just like the old days.
See you later, Dan. Now push off, that’s a good chap, and come to see me when I’m
more sociable.’ And at that he turned to pour himself another drink, leaving me
feeling isolated and rejected. Helplessly, I went up the cellar stairs and out
into the fresh air, thinking furiously to myself. There was something wrong, I
knew
there was something wrong, and none of his arguments could change that, but
why did I think he had lied to me? Why would he have
needed
to lie to
me?

Rosemary. Everything
came back to Rosemary. She was the root of it; she was the one who had changed
him and taken him from me. Maybe she could give me an answer; maybe she could
explain. I halted at the top of Mill Road, the germ of an idea forming in my
mind.

Then I went back to the
cellar.

A few words with the
female behind the bar were enough to obtain what I needed to know; she remembered
Rosemary, though not by name, of course. She had seen her with Robert often
enough, yes, and she knew where she lived, described a row of shabby apartments
outside the town and overlooking the river. I looked at my watch; it was just
past ten o’clock. Maybe, if I was lucky, I would catch her before she went to
bed.

I quickened my pace,
trying to tell myself that it was only the unaccustomed exercise which made my
heart beat faster, and it was only twenty past ten when I came to the row of
apartments, a long terrace which had once been lodgings for one of the
colleges, and was now privately owned. The building was mostly dark, but here
and there a light shone, tinted red or blue or purple with the colour of the
curtains, and at the base of each staircase there was a lighted porch for the
letter-boxes bearing the name of each resident.

I tried six staircases before
I found the plaque which said ASHLEY 2; then I made my way up the stairs to
apartment 2. I knocked, but no one answered. I knocked again, straining my
ears, but no one came, and there was no light under the door. Rosemary was out.
I looked at my watch and frowned; it was twenty-five to eleven already; rather
late for a young woman to be out on her own. But maybe she was not on her own.
I thought about that for a while. Had she found another waitressing job, or a
job behind a bar?

Had she found another
man?

I wondered if I had not
hit the nail on the head. The fact that Rosemary was in love with someone else
might possibly account for Robert’s despondent, almost aggressive mood. It
would explain why Robert had been less than eager to see me: maybe he thought I
still harboured some resentment against him for having taken Rosemary from me.
I resolutely pushed the episode at the bridge from my mind; that had been
explained already. I went down the stairs again, intrigued, but with a certain
satisfaction that I had solved the mystery. Poor Robert. No wonder he had
snapped my head off when I asked him about Rosemary. The first time he had ever
taken a real interest in a woman, had even gone as far as to propose marriage
to her. Not that I hadn’t suspected something of the kind before this, in view
of her disloyalty towards myself. I was pondering this as I happened to halt at
the window of the first landing, and a movement from outside caught my eye.
There was no reason for me to believe that it was Rosemary; and yet, with an
obscure certainty, I knew. Maybe there was something about the way she moved,
the way she held her head, though how I could have been sure, how I could still
have been so poignantly aware, even after all this time, of her every gesture,
even half-glimpsed through a first-floor window, I cannot say. Maybe it was
simply that Rosemary, once seen, however briefly, was not so easily forgotten.