TWENTY-ONE
At 5:20, my week's pay in my handbag, I stood outside the building where Miss Sarah Chessman lived. Seven minutes later, I saw a woman matching her description alight from a crowded omnibus and clack purposefully down the street towards me, a small woman with glossy shingled hair, wearing clothes that had been carefully tailored for a woman who weighed a few pounds more than she did just now. The deliberate set to her jaw and shoulders made me wonder how long she could stretch her reserves, and as she drew near, I could see the pallor of her skin and the tautness next to her eyes and the slightly haunted look I had often, in the past, seen in my own mirror. She took out her key, and as she moved past me to the door, I held out a meaningless but official-looking card which Lestrade had prepared for me.
'Miss Chessman?' I asked politely.
She jumped as if I had screamed at her, and when she looked up from the card, she had on her face a look of pure loathing.
'Oh, bloody hell, not again!'
She jammed her key into the lock, slammed the door violently open, and stalked into the building.
'Miss Chessman?' I called after her.
'Come in, for Christ's sake. Let's get it over with. But it's the last time, do you hear? Absolutely the last time.'
I followed her up to her tiny flat and closed the door behind me. The room was painfully neat, and the way in which she went automatically to the wardrobe to brush her coat and hang it up and to place her hat on the shelf told me that it was not a temporary tidiness, but a permanent state. Like its occupant, the room was glossy, smooth, and designed to allow no one entrance without permission. Both room and woman were very different from the teary, newly affianced flosshead I had expected to find. This was going to prove even more difficult than I had anticipated.
She was, however, nervous and could not quite hide the fact. She went to a cupboard and poured herself a drink, straight gin, without offering me anything. She took a large swallow, went to a table near one of the two windows, took a cigarette from a japanned tin box, and made a great show of inserting it into a holder and lighting it. She stood and puffed and drank and looked down at the passing cars, and I waited motionless, hands in pockets, for her to gain control of herself. Finally, she stubbed the cigarette out in a spotless ashtray and went back to the drinks cupboard. She spoke over her shoulder.
'I've already told you people everything I can remember. Three nights last week and once on the weekend, one bloody set of police after another. You'd think I'd run her down, the way the questions come.'
'I'm not from the police, Miss Chessman.' The mildness of my reply turned her around, and she ran her eyes over me as I stood there patiently. 'The card was given me so you would know I was here with their permission.'
'Then who are you? The newspapers?'
'No.' I had to smile at the thought.
'Who, then?'
'A friend.'
'No friend of mine. Oh, you mean a friend of hers, that woman?'
'Of that woman, yes.'
I thought for a minute she would tell me to go, but abruptly she threw up one hand in a lost little gesture, and seemed even smaller.
'Oh, all right. Sit down. Can I give you something?'
'A small glass of the gin would be nice.' I did not intend to drink it, but it established the community of the table. She brought it and her own refilled glass and sat opposite me. I thanked her.
'Really,' she said, subdued, 'I cannot help you. I've told everyone everything I can remember. You're wasting your time.'
'She was my friend,' I said simply. 'You were the last person, aside from her murderers, to see her alive. Do you mind awfully, going through it again? I know it must be very painful for you, and I'll understand if you can't bring yourself to do it.'
Her face softened, and I caught a glimpse of the person her friends saw, when her formidable defenses were down. She would have few friends, I thought, but they would be lifelong.
'Do you know, you're the first person who has said that to me? Every other one acted like I had all the feelings of a phonograph record.'
'Yes, I know. I should hate having to be a policeman, having to grow all hard and impersonal to keep from being eaten up by it all. I'm sorry they were so awful to you.'
'Oh, well, it wasn't that bad, I guess. The worst of it was the way they wanted every last detail, where was I standing, and where was the beggar sitting, and did the screeching sound come after she fell or as she was falling, and all the time all I could think of was the sound of—' She stood up and went for another cigarette, then pulled the harshness back up around her voice. 'It's stupid, really, but I keep thinking of the time when I was nine and I saw my dog get crushed under a cart. Try telling a Scotland Yard chief inspector that.' She laughed, and I knew that she would not help me, not in the way I needed her to help me, unless I could shatter that smooth surface. It would cost me a great deal to buy her cooperation, and there was no guarantee that the results would be worth the expense. I studied her glossy, smooth hair and well-cut clothes, and felt too tall and unkempt and poorly clothed, and I knew again that I had no choice. I exhaled slowly.
'May I tell you something?' My soft question brought her attention around to my face, and what she saw there brought her, wary, back to the chairs. I told her then the story I had given to only two other people in my life. It was a simple story, a terrible story, of an automobile that strayed from its side of the road and what happened when it met another automobile at the top of a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and what happened to the only survivor, the child who had been the cause of it: me.
It was a cruel thing to do, telling her that tale with the hideous, ever-fresh guilt lying naked in my face and voice. My coin was pain, my own pain, and with it I bought her. By the time I finished, she was, unwillingly, in my debt, and I knew that the drained starkness in her face was a reflection of my own.
'Why are you telling me this?' It was almost a whisper. 'What do you want from me?'
I answered her indirectly but honestly.
'You have to remember that I was only fourteen. For several weeks, I ranged from states of near catatonia to violent fits of self-destruction. And amnesia. I could not remember the accident at all, not while I was awake, until a very good and amazingly sensitive psychiatrist took me on. Yes, you begin to see the point of it now. With her help, I learnt to get it under control, at least to the point that I could take it out and look at it. The nightmares took longer, but then I ... didn't have her help for more than a couple of months.'
'Do you still have nightmares?' This was more than idle curiosity asking.
'Not of the accident, not anymore.'
'How did you get rid of them?'
'Time. And, I told someone who cared. That took a long time.'
'To tell?'
'To work up to the telling.'
I waited while she fussed with another cigarette. Her short hair fell perfectly from the razor-sharp line down the centre of her scalp.
'What did she do to make you remember? The psychiatrist?'
'A number of different things, many of which would be inappropriate here. Are you by any chance expecting your fiance this evening?'
My question confused her, but she answered willingly.
'Yes. He said he'd be here at six-thirty.' It was five past.
'After he gets here, with your permission and his, I'd like to think about something, a little experiment. Have you ever been hypnotised?'
Her eyes grew slightly wary.
'Hypnotised? Like with a swinging watch, 'you are getting sleepy,' and that? I was at a party once where someone was doing it, making people walk through the fountain and such, but they were all pretty tipsy to begin
