The Paper Chase (11 page)

“Someone else was there with me.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“Why were Martin and Montague killed?”

She spoke carefully. “The verdict on Eddie Martin’s death was misadventure. I’m not admitting anything else. But perhaps he was too greedy, would that explain it?”

“I expect so.”

“It never pays to be greedy.” She stared at Jenks and the tall man wriggled uncomfortably.

“And what about Montague?”

Just as carefully she said: “I should guess that Montague found out something he wasn’t supposed to know.”

“About this – agent of yours?”

“Perhaps. And perhaps the agent was a little hasty. Don’t you think that’s reasonable, Henry?”

“Oh, quite. I blame myself really. Frankie was not the man who should have been trusted with such a delicate matter.”

“A small-time crook,” Applegate supplemented. “He hardly carried enough weight.”

Eileen Delaney looked at a wristwatch that was covered with jewels. “Three more questions.”

“This is the thing that most puzzles me. You own this tower, you know where Bogue’s money is. Why should you wait all these years before trying to lay hands on it?”

She waved one claw in the air. About the gesture there was something oddly theatrical and false. “We had to have Eddie. Put it this way. Johnny’s money is in a secret place. A disused coal mine – there are some in the Marsh, did you know that? Eddie was the only one who knew just exactly where the money was hidden. He had the secret, but not the organisation to deal with it.”

“Why do you need an organisation?”

“You just do.” She lit a fresh cigarette from a dying butt. “Eddie comes to me. I still have a small organisation, I can be useful. We come to terms. But I told you the trouble with Eddie, he was too greedy.”

There was silence. Both of them were looking at him. He did not doubt that in this story truth had been blended with lies. The truth would be what he already knew or could find out, the rest would be lies – perhaps not direct lies, but stories designed to lead him away from some point of vital importance. “One more question,” the woman said.

“All right. What are you waiting for?”

“Something to happen.”

“And when it does?”

“You’ll know all about it. Now, I’ve answered your questions. Does that satisfy you?”

Applegate took a deep breath. “No.”

Jenks wriggled triumphantly. “You see. I told you he’d be difficult.”

The little woman stubbed out her cigarette. Dark eyes were hard above beaky nose, mouth was turned down at the corners. Good humour had dropped away from her. She looked dangerous.

“Let’s get this straight. I wanted to talk to you because I thought if we put our cards on the table you’d stop poking your nose into things that don’t concern you.”

“I suspect you of having aces still hidden up your sleeve.”

She did not respond to this facetiousness. “Henry says you write thrillers and that you’re just curious. You told him that and he believes it. I don’t care whether it’s true or not. I simply want you and that girl you’re running around with out of my way. A game like this is strictly for professionals. Understand?”

“But Henry said he was in it just to get back the money Bogue had stolen from him. Forty thousand pounds, wasn’t it, Henry? Plus interest.”

Jenks looked down his long nose in an embarrassed way.

She cackled. “Stolen from
him.
That’s a good one. Anyone who could steal from Henry deserves a medal. Did Henry tell you how he pimped his wife to Johnny – so sure he was Johnny would make his fortune. And he thought Johnny wasn’t smart enough to see it. My God!” She rocked back and forward a little with laughter.

“Now, Eileen,” Jenks said. “We don’t want to go into all that.”

“I don’t know what he’s been telling you, but the fact is Henry threw his wife at Johnny’s head. Then he was upset when he found she liked a man better than a cash register.”

The thin man’s cheeks were flushed now, but he still spoke with his usual finicky mildness. “You know Johnny didn’t treat me properly.”

“You tried to be too smart for Johnny, and nobody was ever that.”

“Now, Eileen, you know that’s not true.”

“Shut up.” Jenks subsided, muttering. “If Henry’s the only person you’ve listened to, you may have got the wrong idea of Johnny. He wasn’t a crook, don’t think it. He did a lot of harm, Johnny, but he did more good. Did Henry tell you about his childhood, Johnny’s? I thought not. His mother died before he was two years old and his father parked him out with a couple who beat him almost every day. He was with them three years, then his father got married again – he was a clerk in Leeds Corporation – and took him back. But his stepmother didn’t like him, said he was dirty, and she beat him too. His father was mad about her and believed everything she said. When Johnny was six she got his father to have him put in a home for backward children. Backward, hell, there was nothing backward about Johnny. But I shouldn’t like to tell you the kind of things they did to the children there. You know Johnny sponsored a bill trying to get all children’s homes under much stricter supervision? You didn’t? Of course it never had a chance. Ramsay MacDonald and Snowden hated Johnny’s guts. But there you are, you see, that sort of thing never gets remembered, only the trouble. Selling drinks after hours, is that so very wicked?”

“Wasn’t there some question of drugs?”

“That was Eddie Martin. It was never proved about Johnny’s connection.”

“He was too smart.” Jenks sniggered.

She snapped at him. “It was never proved. And what about the Jews? Did you know Johnny used his contacts to get dozens of Jews out of Germany? My God, I’ve seen some of them weeping as they thanked him. That’s the kind of scoundrel Johnny was, he risked his life to get Jews out of Germany.”

“I see,” Applegate said, although in fact he was far from seeing anything clearly. “What do you want from me?”

“The police. What are they doing about Montague?”

“A boy named Winterbottom has disappeared. They seem to think he did it.”

She nodded. “The people who run that crazy school, the Ponts. What’s happening to them?”

“They’re going to close the school. I think most of the parents will want to take their children away.”

“I should bloody well think so,” she said indignantly. “A place like that – why, they never punish the kids for anything. How can you expect them to grow up anything but daft? This Pont and his wife must be a bit cracked.”

Applegate was surprised to find himself speaking with warmth. “Not at all. They may have some queer ideas, but they’ve done a lot of valuable pioneering work. After what you’ve been saying about Bogue’s childhood –”

“You talk like a book,” she said, it seemed with approval. “I like you, kid. I wouldn’t want to see you get hurt.” He forbore to say that he had been hurt already, although only slightly. She asked abruptly: “How much longer do you reckon to stay? I mean to say, if everyone’s going there won’t be any classes, isn’t that right?”

“I’m going in a few days.” Deliberately he said: “I talked to a man today who’s quite sure that Johnny Bogue didn’t leave a fortune. This man lent Bogue a couple of hundred pounds a few days before he died. He says Bogue was on the rocks then. How does that square with what you’ve been telling me?”

She answered him, and although her voice could never be soft, it was less grating than he had heard it.

“Listen to me, kid. Keep your eyes closed and your nose clean. That way you won’t get hurt. Henry here and me, we’ve got a little business to settle, and I’ve told you what it is without the word of a lie. On my honour as a Catholic,” She suddenly fished out a small golden cross from the recesses of the mauve dress, and kissed it. “On my honour it’s to do with money, and Johnny’s money. I can’t tell you more than that. But believe me, it’s nobody’s business but ours. Remember that, kiddo, and there’ll be no trouble. Forget it and we’ll have to play rough. Clear?”

“Quite clear.” He stood up.

“And you can pass it on to your girlfriend.” Jenks beamed at him benevolently. They were both smiling. The audience – which was how he now thought of it – might have ended upon this happy note, but for a last remark to which he was prompted by a sudden recollection. “About your little organisation…”

Two smiling faces looked expectant.

“–Does it contain a man with the lobe missing off his left ear?”

The smiles vanished from the two faces like lamps going out in a house. Jenks’ hand pulled at his mouth. Eileen Delaney stood up behind the trolley and the voice in which she told him to get out had the anger of an animal’s scream.

It is said that a persistent stare directed at the back of the neck can force the person stared at to turn round. When Applegate was a few yards away from the water tower some emotional pressure of this kind was exerted on him. There was no malign gaze, such as he had expected to see, directed upon him from a ground floor window. But at an upper window, on the third or fourth storey, he glimpsed a face. Almost in the moment he glimpsed it the face had gone, jerked away as though by a string, the pale face, it seemed, of a prisoner, nose pressed against glass.

He was walking back along the front when he was halted by a sign which said: “Barnacle Bill and his Limpets. Concert Party. Special Attraction, twice daily, 3 and 7 pm.” An arrow pointed round the corner and he followed it, speculating on the eccentricity that had led a concert party to Romney Marsh in April. A suicidal impulse it must have been, surely, that had brought them to this abomination of desolation rather than Bognor or Brighton, Falmouth or Folkestone, Littlehampton or Llandudno, Southport or Skegness. But Barnacle Bill and his Limpets had no doubt been unable to obtain engagements in any of those places. They had been forced down and down, through provincial engagements in dirty, empty, little halls. And now they had reached rock bottom.

A pleasing fancy, Applegate thought, but no doubt inaccurate. What did happen to concert parties in the wintertime? He paid a shilling at the door of the Rivoli Concert Hall and went in. To his surprise the glass-domed hall was half-full. Old women knitted or slept in the front rows, old men sat with their hands clasped round walking sticks, staring indignantly at the stage. Half a dozen bath chairs stood in various corners, their occupants swathed in rugs and shawls. It was evident to Applegate that he had underestimated the octogenarian population of Murdstone. How was it that the nipping winds failed to kill them off? Conspicuous among the dodderers were Barney, who stared at the stage intently with his arms folded, and Arthur, who appeared to be playing a solitary version of cat’s cradle. Heads turned to look at Applegate as he walked up the aisle. He glanced at his watch and realised that he was arriving ridiculously late, when the show was three-quarters over.

The concert party was like many other concert parties. A decayed-looking man played a slightly out of tune piano and the four performers, two of each sex, appeared in a variety of guises which gave them an excuse to sing comic or sentimental songs. A fat girl of forty, her legs pimpled with gooseflesh from the cold, sang “Knocked ’Em in the Old Kent Road.” Barnacle Bill, a burly figure with his own dyed hair and a false handlebar moustache, engaged in a dialogue with his stooge, a melancholy-looking stunted figure with beautifully white false teeth. “Who was that wife I saw you with the other night?” asked the melancholy man and Barnacle Bill replied: “That was no wife. She’s a lady.” The knitting ladies in the front row looked up disapprovingly. One of the bath chair figures writhed with noiseless laughter – or was he perhaps coughing? Applegate could not be sure.

“I want you to lend me five pounds,” shouted Barnacle Bill.

“Five pounds, what do you want five pounds for?” stooge shouted back.

“If you give me five pounds I’ll turn it into fifty,” Barnacle Bill roared, winking at the audience.

“Turn five pounds into fifty, how will you turn five pounds into fifty?”

Applegate sighed. The repartee between Barnacle Bill and stunted Limpet ended, and stunted Limpet reappeared as a kind of juvenile lead, accompanied by a stringy blonde with a look of invincible hostility to life. They sang “If You Were the Only Girl in the World” together. Then the decayed-looking man placed a rickety door in the centre of the stage and a pair of steps beside it. The stringy blonde, wearing a rather dirty nightdress, climbed the steps and mewed: “‘Who’s that narkin at my dahr,’ cried the fair young maiden?” Barnacle Bill staggered on from the other side of the stage waving a bottle and wearing a bulbous red nose. He knocked thunderously on the door, and croaked:

“‘It’s only me from over the sea,’

Cried Barnacle Bill the sailor.

‘I’m all lit up like a Christmas tree,’

Cried Barnacle Bill the sailor.

‘I’ll laugh and swear and drink and smoke,

But I can’t swim a blooming stroke,’

Cried Barnacle Bill the sailor.”

The stringy blonde minced down the ladder, daintily lifting her nightdress. “‘I’ll carm dahn and let you in, I’ll carm dahn and let you in,’” she sang. “‘I’ll carm dahn and let you in,’ cried the fair young maiden.”

Barnacle Bill stumped up and down, took a swig from the bottle, and croaked:

“‘Then hurry before I bust in the door,’

Cried Barnacle Bill the sailor.”

Applegate closed his eyes. Words came through to him from a distance. “I’ll drink your rum and eat your pies, I’ll kiss the girls and black their eyes…” He opened his eyes again, it seemed no more than a moment later, to a thin spatter of applause. Barnacle Bill and the Limpets stood bowing and smiling, then Barnacle Bill stepped forward, his dyed patches very noticeable. “Thank you for a splendid reception, ladies and gentlemen. Don’t let the fact that you’ve seen our show once stop you from seeing it again. We ’ave a considerable repertory of ever-fresh songs and jokes, and although we sometimes repeat a popular item, you never see the same show twice. Thanking you, ladies and gentlemen, says Barnacle Bill the sailor and his Limpets.”

Barney and Arthur had gone. Evidently it was time for Applegate to go too. He came out, feeling gloomy, into a thick, misty rain.