stresses to which the jungle predators had subjected her, I cannot find it in my heart to say she should have stood firm.
Surprising as it may seem, it took me some minutes to appreciate how I was concerned. This is doubtless because a crime writer, though he may write of crimes, normally has had little personal involvement in such matters. In some ways he can be a proper little innocent.
When realisation dawned it came as a shock. This woman had laid a complaint against me, alleging that I had made improper suggestions to her in a train. Her photograph would indicate that such suggestions might have been very peculiar indeed, because she obviously had no pretensions at all to normal sex appeal. Her photograph would be recognised at the local police station, and her complaint on record.
She had been killed, it was hinted, by an unbalanced killer, not by a sex maniac, or by a berserk assassin lusting for blood, or by a robber, but by somebody who was peculiar in some unspecified way.
I was very anxious to get to the police station, before a police officer called on me. I kept telling myself that I was not nervous because I had nothing to be nervous about, but that it would look better if I came forward, as a volunteer with information, rather than if I sat back until I was approached.
I was waiting to cross Earls Court Road from Scarsdale Villas when a man’s voice said, “Excuse me, sir.” He only wanted to know the way to the Old Brompton Road. Yet the incident set my heart pounding, because I was so keen to report to the police station before the police called on me.
What exactly I was going to say about poor old Bunface, which I hadn’t said already the previous day to Sergeant Matthews, I did not know.
In the event, I just walked in and up to the Enquiries counter. I had to wait a few minutes while a poorly dressed middle-aged woman gave her name and address and details of a purse which she had lost from her handbag. It was two minutes to six by the big white clock on the wall.
By five minutes past six she had finished describing in some detail the circumstances leading up to her loss. The station sergeant was a bright-looking, fair-haired man in his thirties. Her tale would make no difference. Either the purse would be found and handed in, or it wouldn’t. But he listened patiently, sensing that in pouring out the details she was finding relief, even misguidedly believing that she was contributing something towards the recovery of her purse. He was doing a first-class public relations job. The police are very good at this sort of thing. It is an ancillary part of their work which is not sufficiently recognised, a psychotherapy for people in distress akin to that provided by the priest in the confessional.
As she turned away from the counter, he looked at me and said, “Yes, sir?” in the cheerful manner of a greengrocer dealing with the next customer in the queue. I watched the woman go out of the door, and heard the sergeant say, “Yes, sir?” again.
As he did so, another woman, younger, carrying a small dog, came through the door. I would rather have spoken to him on my own, but I could not delay any more. I said, as quietly as I could:
“There’s a case in the papers about a murdered woman being found in Paradise Lane. I would like to have a word with somebody about her.”
“I see, sir,” he said, with as much interest as if I had been reporting a stolen bicycle. He reached for a piece of paper.
“May I have your name, sir?”
“James Compton.”
“Address?”
“274 Stratford Road-round the corner from here.”
“I take it you have some information you wish to give, sir?”
“Yes, more or less.”
“Could you give me some rough idea of the nature of the information, sir? You’ll understand that in cases of this kind we get a lot of-”
I misunderstood what he was going to say:
“Yes, I know, cranks and crackpots.”
He smiled and said:
“Well, yes-but I was going to say a lot of duplicated information, not that we aren’t glad to have it, of course, but it’s just a question of who should see you, sir.”
“Well, I travelled from Brighton with her in a train the evening before yesterday,” I began. He interrupted me.
“Ah, now you’re cooking with gas, sir!”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I mean that’s interesting, sir. Just one minute-”
He made to move away from the counter. The woman with the dog had been pretending to read some police notices on the wall. She turned away from them and moved with studied casualness over to the counter. This was something she could not miss.
“Actually, Sergeant Matthews from this police station knows the story. I just thought if there were any other small details-you know? Well, I just thought I’d call in-in case, as it were.”
“Sergeant Matthews knows the story?”
“He called yesterday morning.”
“Yesterday morning, sir? The murder wasn’t committed till the late evening, sir.”
“He called about another aspect of the case-connected but different.”
“Connected but different?”
“That’s right.”
The woman with the dog was stroking its head, pretending to be preoccupied with it, looking down at it. She was on my right side. I could almost see her left ear growing bigger. I wasn’t going to say any more. Nothing about the pavement incident, or the lights in my flat, and the abortive search. She’d had enough free entertainment.
“Just a minute, sir,” said the sergeant again, and disappeared into the back of the station.
After a few minutes he came back.
“Would you go into the waiting-room, sir? I’ll show you where it is.”
“I know where it is, I was there yesterday evening.”
“I see, sir.”
He gave me a thoughtful look, but he didn’t ask why. He insisted on accompanying me to the waiting-room. I had a feeling he was afraid I might change my mind. As he shut the door behind me, I noticed that he could see the door from the Enquiries counter. I began to fill my pipe, and had hardly got the tobacco burning smoothly before a young plain-clothes detective came in.
He was tall and dark, with black curly hair and a fresh complexion. All bright and breezy and friendly, he was, and he slumped himself down on to a chair on the opposite side of the little table, and slapped a notebook and pencil down on to the table and said cheerily:
“Good evening, sir, you’re Mr. Compton, I believe? What is it you want to tell us, sir?”
“I don’t particularly wish to tell you anything. I just thought I’d call in and remind you that I met this murdered woman on a train from Brighton the evening before last. You know about it.”
“We know about it?”
“Yes, they know about it here. She called later that evening and alleged I had made improper suggestions to her. Poor old thing,” I added. “Poor old thing. I wouldn’t think anybody had ever made suggestions to her improper or otherwise. Anyway, the station sergeant took note of her complaint, and your Sergeant Matthews called on me yesterday morning to tell me about it. I gathered that the desk sergeant here had already formed an opinion that she was-well, you know, a bit of a crackpot, but they felt they had to inform me officially and get a formal denial from me, and all that sort of thing.”
“I see, sir.”
He wasn’t taking any notes at all.
“I mentioned one or two other things to Sergeant Matthews.”
“What sort of things, sir?”
But I wasn’t buying that one.
“Look,” I said, “it’s a long story. This woman gave me a message typed on my own typewriter and on my own typing paper. But it’s all very complicated, and linked up with other things, and so I told all to Sergeant Matthews. I
