observation. Me and the flat. Day and night.”
“Oh, that lot,” said the sergeant.
The superintendent said gently:
“The ones who are persecuting you? The people whose voices you hear on the telephone, who type messages to you on your own typewriter, and try to attack you in the street?”
I nodded. I found myself unable to say more, and walked out without being obstructed in any way.
I think they were glad to be rid of me. At any rate for the moment.
Outside the light was failing now. I stood on the steps of the police station, breathing deeply, watching the traffic move slowly past, thinking about the man calling himself Sergeant Matthews, trying to discern somewhere some clue, and finding no answer.
I walked to the edge of the pavement, waiting for a gap in the traffic. Suddenly I saw what I thought might be an opportunity to nip across the road. A blue car was following a bus, with some distance in between. I believed I could make it, and took a step into the roadway, but the car was travelling faster than I had at first realised, and I stepped back and waited, and between the narrowing distance as the car closed up to the bus, I happened to glance at the corner of a side road some way up Earls Court Road.
It seemed to me that the men standing at the corner were looking in my direction. One was tall and wore drain-pipe trousers, and a short, dark, knee-length mackintosh-type coat. The other was of medium height and stockily built.
Then the traffic closed in. When it thinned again the corner was deserted except for a woman passing with a child.
I looked back at the police station, but I knew it was out of the question, I couldn’t go back in there and say I thought I had just seen the two men who had menaced me on my way back from Juliet’s home. I hesitated, but for no more than a few seconds.
I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t face them again.
I consoled myself with the thought that I was probably mistaken, and that it was two other men, but I knew it was lack of moral courage.
I could imagine the sergeant now saying, “Proper old persecution complex that one has, sir. Proper ripe one, that one is. Well, we get ’em all, don’t we, sir? We get ’em all, the short and the tall, and a few nuts thrown in for good measure.”
There was no question of going back.
All right, so the tired and over-worked superintendent and sergeant took a rugged, conventional view of me. Maybe they weren’t as tactful as they might have been.
But now I knew, in effect, what it was like to have no police force to which one could appeal.
Now I knew what it was like to have the jungle about you, as you walked along the dangerous paths, and you were on your own, and there were eyes upon you, and there was no police force to which you could run for protection.
I appreciate these things now, but at the time I nurtured harsh feelings.
I went back to the flat and washed, and the evening paper with poor Bunface’s picture on the front page was where I had left it, and I picked it up, and when I left the flat to call for Juliet I double mortice-locked the door.
In addition to the Yale-type lock I had a double mortice affair, though I had never used it. You turn the key twice in the mortice lock, and by and large it is burglar proof, short of cutting out the lock or battering down the door.
We went to Soho, to an Italian restaurant for dinner. One of the things which had surprised me was the calm way Juliet had accepted the news of the complaint laid against me by poor Bunface. I did not understand one of the simplest facts of life. If a woman loves you, then you are in the right if it is a question of simple, straightforward matters, and anybody who complains about you is a liar. There is no argument about it.
Juliet made no reference to anything of significance as we drove to Soho. This surprised and pleased me.
When we were seated in the restaurant I said: “Have you seen the evening papers? There was a murder quite near you.”
She nodded equably.
That’s one of the things about modern life. Murder means nothing, unless it affects you personally. In Anglo- Saxon times, when peasants were thin on the ground, murder was a serious matter. It was the loss of a pair of hands to the community. The hue and cry was raised, and everybody by law had to drop what they were doing and bring the criminal to book. Things are different now, because there are so many of us. We can afford losses.
“Seen her picture?” I asked.
She was looking at the menu, preoccupied. She nodded. I said:
“That was the woman on the train from Burlington and Brighton.”
She put the menu down and took off her dark framed spectacles, and stared across the table at me, her face magnolia-pale in the lamp light.
“Are you sure?”
“Certainly I am.”
“You must go to the police, darling.”
“I’ve been.”
“What did they say?”
“Various things. They said she had never made a complaint against me, for one thing.”
“But what about the-?”
“What are you having as a first course?”
A waiter was standing by her shoulder. We chose our food and the waiter moved away.
“They said the man who called on me wasn’t a police officer,” I went on. “They hardly believed a word I said, except that I had been in the train with her.”
She stared down at the table cloth, picking at a roll of bread with her left hand.
“Didn’t you ask them for help or advice, or something?”
“More or less, yes.”
“Well, I mean, what did they
I shrugged and ordered a carafe of red wine from the wine waiter.
“They kind of skated around things.”
“They can’t skate round them, darling.”
“Well, they did.”
“Didn’t you press them for heaven’s sake?”
“What for, sweetheart?”
“Well-investigations. And protection.”
“Investigations of what? Protection against what? A message typed on my own typewriter which I can’t produce? A ’phone call from an unknown man? Thugs who didn’t attack me? People who come into my flat and aren’t seen? Old ladies who won’t co-operate? Men who hire policemen’s uniforms-if he did hire it?”
She didn’t answer, and did not have to, because the spaghetti bolognese arrived. She bent over it, but after a few seconds she gave me one of her quick, silent, secretive looks.
“Don’t go and get all withdrawn,” I protested. “You don’t understand.”
“No, I don’t understand. Something ought to be done. You ought to have demanded it.”
“Look, to the police a crime has two motives-a money motive in one form or another, or a sex motive of some sort. They asked, in effect, if I could supply a motive for them to work on. And I can’t. If money or sex comes into it, it’s so well hidden that I can’t begin to see it.”
She bent down and picked up the evening paper which I had placed on the floor by the table, and looked at the picture.
“There might be a sex angle, from what you told me,” she murmured. “I suppose it’s possible.”
I hesitated, thinking over what she had said.
“There might be,” I conceded reluctantly. “I suppose there just might be, in a twisted sort of way. But I doubt it.”
