Prelude To A Certain Midnight

‘What will you do?’ asked Asta, shedding tears for the first time in twenty years — not counting the times she had wept alone.

‘My method is to give them a strong sleeping tablet in a spoonful of milk and when they’re asleep, put them into the lethal chamber. She won’t feel a thing. She won’t know. You can stay with her and stroke her if you like, until she’s quiet. Upon my word of honour, it’s the only kind thing to do.’

Asta looked into the vet’s eyes for several seconds, and then, standing like a condemned man when the safety catches of the firing-squad click open, said: ‘_Do it_.’

And Jinny was only a dog.

Now this was Asta’s third descent into hell.

She could not drive from her mind the appallingly vivid recollection of the grief, the hopeless grief, of the Sabbatanis. She could see them, as the firelight flickered, rocking to and fro as on a see-saw of which the point of balance was the limit of endurance — in and out, in and out, in and out of the frontier of utter despair.

She remembered the coal dust on her shoes, the squalor, the melancholy and the rottenness of that vile empty house; that abandoned evil place with its deep wet cellar. She could see it all. She could see the red-brick school in the yellow fog.

The child comes out. Somewhere, not far from the gate under the sign that says GIRLS, someone is waiting. Who? As yet nobody knows. There is the fog, and a Figure with blurred outlines. No doubt his coat-collar is turned up. He is quiet, persuasive, soft-spoken. The odds are that the child knows him. He says: Do let me see you safely home in all this nasty fog: your Father sent me to see you safely home…. And then leads her, chatting very pleasantly, perhaps telling her an amusing story, down the dark, dirty street to that condemned house; and there he tells her that he has got something there for her. A live teddy bear, it may be, or — most likely — nothing at all, just a mystery. I bet you a penny I can show you something you’ve never seen before.

He makes a mystery, a secret; and they go down, down that dreadful passage, down those rotten stairs, past that dark washhouse, into that grave — that stinking grave — that vault, that coal-cellar —

— And then, when the little girl says: ‘Well?’

(Asta Thundersley could not bear to think of what happened then.)

Again she trembled with desire to do something about it, and cursed herself for her incapacity to do anything at all. Almost deliriously she wished that Evil were in fact a great serpent and that she was a horned antelope: she would cast herself into the jaws of the serpent and perish — and in swallowing her the serpent would swallow that which must destroy him. Suffocating in his coiled maw, hers would be the last laugh, because with her last breath she could gasp: My horns will pierce you — I have let in the daylight — writhe and die!

Having draped her ungainly body in a linen nightdress and put herself to bed, Asta forced herself to be calm.

Out of the emotional chaos of the past twenty minutes there came an idea — one of the ideas for which she could give no reason and for which, nevertheless, she was prepared to fight to the death.

It was somebody who knew the Sabbatanis that raped and murdered the little girl.

After that, sleep was impossible. She was thinking, in her disorganized way, of the people she proposed to invite to her party.

Could it have been Dr Schiff? No, because whatever Schiff might have in mind, above everything he had in mind the safety of his person. Schiff (thought Asta) could even run away to save himself. As she saw things with her peculiarly-focused eyes, this was unthinkable. It was permissible to beg, borrow or steal for another; but not for oneself. One might sacrifice one’s selfrespect by running away for the sake of some other living creature. But no proper person ever ran away to save his own skin. She discounted Schiff. Yet anything was possible.

But what of Sir Storrington Thirst? He was a man of good family. Yet there must be, surely, something extraordinary in Sir Storrington. How could a man who called himself a man — not that she liked men — be so shameless? If he wanted a drink he would steal the price of it out of a blind beggar’s tin cup, or sponge on a woman. He would dash his title into your face, slap his pockets, put on an expression of astonishment that would not deceive a little girl of nine years old … and forget his wallet three days running. For the sake of a free drink Sir Storrington would invent slanders against his own mother. He kept his address secret — came and went, here to- day and gone to-morrow. Yet, as she knew — he had made a funny story about it — he had been one of Sam Sabbatani’s customers. He had borrowed a dinner-suit from a younger brother, sewn into it a label off one of his old suits, and sold it (with Sir Storrington Thirst, Savile Row clearly marked upon it) for two or three pounds more than it was worth. He had a habit of laying his hands upon you.

Surely, such a man might be capable of anything?

It was so hard to decide. What of Tobit Osbert? Asta knew nothing to his detriment, yet the man was, so to speak, a little too mealy-mouthed to be a proper man. You could see, simply by looking at him, that Osbert was keeping secrets. But then again, what if he were? Thea Olivia was keeping secrets — secrets with which she had been entrusted — so that you never knew which way to take her. What to make of Osbert, and how to define what lay at the back of his soul?

As for the girl, Cigarette, she couldn’t possibly have done anything in this connexion. But she associated with the sort of set that might easily give birth to the murderer of Sonia Sabbatani. Certainly not that poor burglar, Chicken Eyes Emerald — he was nothing but an honest burglar — a reclaimable man, Asta decided. Shocket the Bloodsucker? No. It was impossible to doubt that he was bloodsucker by name and bloodsucker by nature, because of the formidable percentages he extracted from the unhappy boxers for whom he arranged matches. He was a bloodsucker, but not a sucker of blood.

Titch Whitbread? No. Whitbread was, as the posters persistently insisted, a killer. But he was a killer only in the way of sport. She had talked to Titch Whitbread and remembered the conversation:

‘I saw you fight and congratulate you. It was a good clean fight and you deserved to win. But that poor boy — what’s his name? Kid Carpet — how is he?’

‘I saw him while we was dressing, lady, and he didn’t look too bad. I mean to say he didn’t look much cut about.’

‘I’m glad to hear it. Did he have anything to say?’