“You did the right thing,” I said, and my voice sounded like an echo of futility itself.
“That’s what I thought. It helps when you know you’ve done the right thing.”
“Oh, yes it does.”
The train was slowing down in Victoria Station. I could hardly wait for it to stop. She was heaving herself into her silly white mackintosh, adjusting her ludicrous head covering. I heard her murmur something about catching a No. 52 bus, and saw her open a big shabby handbag, and take out a buff-coloured envelope. Suddenly, impulsively, I blurted out:
“Don’t do anything foolish. Suicide is no solution.”
The train had almost stopped. She said:
“You may be right. But it’s hard to go on.”
“Try.”
She nodded. Then she swallowed, and sought the same old assurance.
“I shall see her again?”
“Of course, of course you will,” I said, and reached thankfully for the door handle as the train stopped.
We walked a little way along the station platform together.
“She left me a barometer, too. I do hope I get it. But the family are making a fuss.”
I indicated a side entrance, and said I’d have to take a taxi as I was late. I wasn’t. I had nothing to be late for, but I wanted to get back to normality and away from sadness. I felt I couldn’t stand it any longer. I could have given her a lift part of the way, but I couldn’t stand it, not any longer.
Yet at the last moment she detained me with a red, square, hand laid on my arm, and said:
“It’s been such a help talking to you. It’s not often you find somebody who understands. These days everyone is so hard. They don’t seem to understand the nice things in life.”
I felt ashamed by her simplicity, and appalled by the memory of my inability to offer real comfort. I shook my head and began to mutter something, but she interrupted me and said:
“Because you’ve been a help to me, here is something which may help
She thrust into my hands the buff-coloured envelope she had taken from her handbag, and left me, and her squat figure hurried on in the direction of the main station entrance.
I have described the incident at some length because I believe that despite the hold which certain people had on her, her sorrow and grief were sincere.
I believe she thought the small role she played to be innocuous, as indeed it was. Whether she had performed less innocuous acts in the past must be a matter for speculation. On this occasion I am certain she was not play-acting, because it would have been pointless to go to such lengths.
Actually, I thought the buff envelope probably contained some extract from the Bible or something, and I put it in my pocket, had a couple of drinks at the Devonshire Arms near my flat and forgot all about it till I was undressing.
When I opened it, it contained an ordinary quarto sheet of white paper, on which was typed the following:
There was no signature.
Feelings merge, and blend, and overlap, and it is hard to sort them afterwards, but I think I can truthfully say that the thing which first impressed me, as much as the cumbersome threat, was the appalling heaviness of the phraseology, the awful resemblance to the style used by lawyers and civil servants.
Then I read it through again, and noted how the capital letter “I” was defective, and reproduced itself with the lower part missing, and how the “e” and the “o” were blurred and clogged, and I glanced at my own typewriter on the desk by the window, and remembered that for some time it had required overhaul, and cleaning, and repairs to the letter “I”; and when I held the paper up to the light and saw the watermark, “64 MILL BOND EXTRA STRONG,” I hardly needed to look at the watermark on my own paper on the desk, or at the buff envelopes I keep in the letter rack.
It is all very fine to see these things on the films or television, but when they happen to you personally you experience the feeling you get when you completely mislay something you have seen only a few minutes ago. You wonder if you are going mad, or are in a dream, or even dead.
I stood still with a singing sound in my head, and this was mingled with the thumping noise of my heart, and with vague distant sounds of people laughing and talking loudly, and the sound of cars starting, which showed that the tavern down the road had shut.
After about two minutes, I heard the faint creak of a floor board from the spare bedroom which Juliet and I were turning into a dining-room. The door was closed.
I went into the hall and fetched a knobkerrie given me by an uncle. For those who do not know, in these post-Imperial times, a knobkerrie is a wooden stick with a large heavy knob, formerly much used by African natives. It could be flung through the air, or used as a club in battle, or for polishing off wounded warriors after battle. Its modern uses are limited.
It gives a psychological reassurance when faced with a closed door, but that is about all. I opened the door a couple of inches, groped, switched on the light, flung the door wide, and felt a fool.
There was nobody in the flat. Nothing had been disturbed. More particularly, when I examined the front door, there were no scratches round the Yale-type lock or round the paintwork on the door or windows.
I went to bed, tense, worried, and listening.
The attempts in Italy and England to dissuade me from probing into the case had till now seemed isolated incidents, reasonably civilised, and explainable on one pretext or another.
Tonight’s affair was different.
Although I had not the slightest intention of abandoning my plans, I was, I admit, getting jumpy. If somebody had been in my flat once, they could come into it again.
I record that I lay in bed in a very uneasy mood, thinking of Bardoni, Miss Brett, Mrs. Gray, that thick-set, muffin-faced old Tartar, and the sad, sad woman in the train and the message she had given me.
I had spoken to Mrs. Gray of senseless obstruction. There was obstruction all right, no longer negative but positive, and it could not be senseless. But what was behind it was as unclear as ever, and why they had gone to the trouble of entering my flat illegally and using my typewriter and paper baffled me.
At first I thought it was an attempt to gain their ends by melodrama, but I abandoned that line. It now seemed part of a detailed operation planned to overcome any stubbornness on my part. I noted that now, for the first time, I was thinking in terms of They and Them.
For the first time, too, the peasant realised he had caught a clear sight of green eyes, heard the sound of feline bodies, and the cracking of twigs, and become properly conscious of jungle peril.
It was unpleasant but it was not yet terrifying.
At one-thirty in the morning I was still awake. I got up, warmed some milk, poured an enormous slug of whisky into it, took two aspirins, and went back to bed. In fifteen minutes I was sound asleep, which is not surprising. Anyway, peasants usually sleep well.
I decided I would call in at the police station first thing in the morning, and fell asleep trying to think what I would say.
I need not have worried. I had a call myself, first thing in the morning.
CHAPTER 4
At about six-thirty in the morning I was awakened by the sound of a car changing gear noisily and
