Hide My Eyes Page 12

  Richard grinned at the man. He was his own age. He wished they could have gone together.

  “I’m afraid I must get there,” he said. “Thank you very much. Do you happen to know what sort of place it is?”

  “Sorry, I can’t say. It’s in a built-up area, see, so it won’t be noxious materials. It’s too big to be private so I think you’ll find its parcels of scrap all owned by different dealers which are waiting there for re-sale. The stuff would come and go by barge, I should say, on the canal. No trouble at all, sir. Goodnight.”

  Richard walked on towards the ’bus stop hoping he was not making a fool of himself. He realised he was taking a very long chance but he decided to press on.

  Two and a half hours later, however, his mood had changed. By that time he was convinced that he was behaving like a lunatic. The journey had proved formidable. He had travelled by a series of ’buses far into the East End of the city and had finished up at last in bright moonlight in a strange flat no-man’s-land which appeared to consist of wide acres of condemned slum houses, relieved here and there by the huge towers of the blocks of new council dwellings, all very modern and impressive against a limpid sky.

  With considerable difficulty, and against the earnest advice of everybody who had directed him, he had discovered the Dump at last. It lay dark and uninviting on the other side of a fifteen-foot barrier made partly of board and partly of wire, which lined one side of the road on which he walked quite alone. For ten minutes now he had seen no living soul and nothing which looked faintly like a door into the enclosure.

  Fortunately it was one of those clear nights which seldom occur over London because of the haze but are dazzling when they do. The moon was as big as a tea-tray and its light was so strong that colours were discernible by it, while all the shadows were ink-black, their highlights silver. Yet even under this enchantment there was nothing even faintly attractive about Rolf’s Dump. As far as Richard could discover through occasional unobscured patches in the wire fence, it consisted of a sort of moon landscape composed of mountains and craters of unlikely objects such as truck bodies, street lamp standards, rotted baskets, derelict machinery, cases of out-of-date tins of food, wheels, water tanks, and a thousand other examples of waste material all arranged in orderly masses. And beyond these he caught the gleam of a narrow waterway. It was very quiet. The city’s roar was here reduced to a murmur and there were very few nearer sounds.

  From the middle distance he could hear the hollow crashing of a railway and once or twice he thought he detected voices and movement from the far end of the Dump itself. But he was not sure. He could see no lights in that direction.

  The road he walked on was extraordinary. There was not a house in it. The buildings on the side opposite to the fence were roofless and ruined, the filthy glass in the windows broken and ghostly in the moonlight. They had been stables at one time, Richard thought, and now looked like relics of an age as dead as the Pharaohs.

  He stumbled on, cursing himself for an idiot, the worn stones greasy under his feet, until unexpectedly he came upon a much broader road running at right angles to his own and leading apparently directly into the Dump itself. The way was barred by a pair of stout doors which were very tall and completely black against the sky.

  For a moment he thought he was defeated and was on the point of turning away when it occurred to him that he might as well try them. He was looking for the lock when he discovered a small postern built into the left-hand door.

  It opened to his touch and he was about to step forward when a terrier, who was tethered just inside, sprang up barking hysterically and a voice, also uncannily near, let out a stream of comment equally violent.

  “What d’yer want?” it demanded finally.

  “Mr. Hawker.” Richard was too startled to invent. The name had been in his mind and he uttered it.

  “Orl right.” The voice was lowered and had become conversational. “Shut up, Jack! Down boy. ’E ain’t ’ere, I don’t think,” it continued. “I didn’t ’ear ’im come in yet.”

  Chapter 12

  AT THE ROSE AND CROWN

  AT JUST ABOUT the same time as Richard was asking for Jeremy Hawker at Rolf’s Dump, the man who called himself by that name when it suited him was standing against the round bar in the Rose and Crown. This public house stands directly behind the old Royal Albert Music Hall, a famous vaudeville theatre before the war and later the home of lavish musical shows. On this particular evening Morris Moorhen was appearing there in ‘Bowl Me Over’. The performance had been on for forty minutes and the long interval was due in five.

  Mr. Vick, who was standing next to Gerry, bright spots of colour on his cheekbones and his elegant black hat well on the back of his head, was having a much better time that anyone who merely saw the scene could possibly have supposed. The Rose and Crown was never a place of gaiety. Its main trade was done at lunch time and in the evening it was apt to present an ill-lit and deserted appearance.

  At the moment the only other two people in the place were behind the bar. There was the tender, a solid youngster who looked as if he had troubles of his own, and the manager, who was a white-faced gloomy-eyed man, who sat aloof in an alcove built into the mahogany and looking-glass contraption, part sideboard part office, which stood in the centre of the bar like a hub in the centre of a wheel. He was taking no notice of anybody but was reading an evening paper which he had folded into a narrow strip like a harlequin’s wand.

  Mr. Vick was drinking large dark glasses of unidentified sherry with a recklessness either of ignorance or insanity, and by now he was garrulous, affectionate, and noisy as a macaw, which he was beginning to resemble. His drawing-room scream became more and more frequent and the arch hero-worship which he lavished on the man in the raincoat was mounting.

  Yet the principal change which had occurred during the evening had taken place in Gerry. In the three hours since his carefully prepared alibi had been destroyed at the very moment of its success by the chance meeting with the inquisitive little barber, he had altered in appearance. His flesh seemed to be clinging more tightly to his bones. There was a slight stiffness in his body and the muscles of his face, while the blank expression in his flat eyes, normally infrequent, had become almost habitual. Moreover, his normal casualness of manner had become exaggerated, so that the barman, who was not bothering to give serious consideration to the matter, would have sworn off-hand that he was the more drunk of the two.

  This was an assumption which could not have been more wrong. By pleading that he was driving, Gerry had avoided alcohol all the evening and had achieved an icy sobriety in which his mind was working with unusual clarity. He had arranged many alibis in his life. It was part of his nature to be careful. So far he had never needed one. But always they had been there, like safety nets, ready to save him if by chance the unexpected occurred.

  Yet this time, by sheer fortuitous bad luck ascribable to no mistake on his part, the alibi had broken down and he was surprised to find that it was important to his faith in himself that he should replace it somehow.

  Mr. Vick had not been as easy to dominate as he had hoped when, in the first moment of panic outside the hotel, he had decided to abandon Richard and concentrate on the barber. The little man had a quicksilver intelligence, bright and unstable. No thought appeared to be, as it were, safe in his head for a couple of minutes together.

  “In ten minutes you’ll be in old Moggie’s dressing-room, Major,” Mr. Vick was saying with a bobbysox shiver. “Oh, my word, I do wish I could see you two together! It would be worth putting down in a diary, that would. I believe you’re selling him a song. Don’t deny it, I can see it in your eyes, I’m psychic. You could, you know. There isn’t much you couldn’t do, is there, Major? Be a sport and tell me, go on, do.” He turned to the bartender. “He won’t tell me anything,” he went on, his voice breaking. “We’ve been together all the evening …”

  “Ever since opening time.” Gerry spoke with mock w
eariness.

  “Ever since after opening time,” corrected Mr. Vick with dignity.

  “Hell to that, I’ve been suffering from you ever since before opening time. When we met it was so early we had to go and get the car before we could have one. You’ve been drinking that liver paralyser steadily ever since, but I should have thought you could have remembered that.”

  “I do.” Mr. Vick seemed surprised by the fact. “You said we’d got to go and fetch the car because it wasn’t opening time.” He paused and added flatly, “six o’clock.”

  “Half past five, old boy.” The correction came a fraction too sharply and the bartender raised a harassed face from his meditations.

  “London area, half past five,” he echoed obligingly.

  The man in the trench coat met his eyes and laughed. “I’ve had him on my hands since a quarter past five and I’m still sane,” he said with just the right air of affable indulgence. “I shall have to leave him here for ten minutes while I nip into the theatre. Don’t give him any more of that stuff than you can help.”

  “It’s a nice sherry.” The bartender pushed over the bottle for inspection. “It’s good South African.”

  “Is it?” Gerry stood reading the gay label, a new superiority in the curl of his lips, and the manager, who had been watching him, suddenly slapped his paper wand across his plump knees.

  “Now you look exactly like your Grandad, Gerald,” he remarked. He had a fat man’s voice, friendly and broad, with a South London accent. His sad eyes had brightened in his white face. “I wasn’t sure at first,” he went on. “You’re more like the old man than yourself, as I remember you. I’m completely unrecognisable, I suppose? What is it? Thirty years? Twenty-two or three, must be.”

  He thrust a hand over the bar. “I’m Dan Tilley. Our garden backed on to your grandfather’s in Urquhart Road, remember?”

  There was a moment of utter silence. The man in the trench coat blinked, as if a bullet had struck him, and for a second his face wore the expression of innocent surprise which goes with it. Then he pulled himself together. He was controlled, but still unnaturally grand. He took the proffered hand with exaggerated deference.

  “Why yes,” he began, conveying that he was utterly at sea but determined to be polite. “Yes, of course. Dan—er—Tilley. My dear fellow, twenty-odd years, what a very long time. Too long.”

  The manager flushed. He was embarrassed and had no skill to hide it. He took refuge in a sort of truculent pleasantry.

  “‘Lord Almighty’, that’s what we called your old man,” he said. “It was your name for him, not mine. You seem to have forgotten it was me helped you to get away. You did get to Australia, did you? I never heard of you again, you know, not from that day to this.”

  Gerry remained wooden, the faint half smile still on his lips, but at this point Mr. Vick decided to intervene. He had climbed on to a stool and now sat there, his hat hanging half off his head, his gaze fixed upon the manager whom he appeared to see for the first time.

  “I’ve known the Major for ten years,” he announced with startling distinctness. “We are two dear old friends out on the loose. I don’t know who you are and I don’t care.”

  “Hush.” Gerry spoke reprovingly. This definite line so crudely taken had made up his mind for him. No doubt it had occurred to him that a drunken witness is of little use without a sober one to vouch for him. “This is the original Danny Boy, the first chum I ever had,” he went on with an abrupt return of friendliness. “I didn’t know you, Dan,” he said, turning to the manager. “You made me grow cold for a moment. You brought back my childhood. Good God, you old sinner, now I look at you you haven’t altered in the least. Put on a fair-isle sweater and navy knickerbockers and I’d know you anywhere. You say the same damned things, too. I resent the suggestion that I resemble the old man.”

  “You do though, Gerald, in feature.” The manager was mollified. He was revealed as a slow-thinking person, loth to leave any subject until it is utterly exhausted. “I’m not saying you’re like him in any other way, of course. He was a one, and his second wife. They thought themselves somebody.” He sucked his teeth by way of emphasis. “A clean paper collar every day and a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica to read up at night. He went through the world on those two, old Lord Almighty did.” He laughed reminiscently. “Oh dear, he used to make my father so wild. They used to go up in the train together to their pore little offices and be rude to each other on a big-’eaded level all the way. Just a bit more educated and more refined than anyone else in the street, that’s how your Gran’dad saw ’imself. It shook ’im when you ran off, you know. Did you go to sea as you planned?”

  “Briefly.” Gerry’s wry smile suggested youthful false steps safely retraced. “I never saw the house or the old people again, though. My God, what an atmosphere to drag up an orphan child in. I can see that place now,” he added with a flash of pure sincerity which completely transformed him. “Suppressed dirt, suppressed starvation, and a soul-chilling atmosphere of superiority to the rest of the ignorant herd.”

  “Huh,” said the manager. “Everybody knew that they could sell ’im at one end of the street and buy ’im at the other. Silly old clod,” he added with a flicker of resentment still alive after twenty years. “He had a lower intelligence than most.”

  “Oh no, he was a very brilliant man. I think you really must grant him that.” The man in the trench coat made the statement with a conviction not only out of character but clearly misplaced. The effect was conventionally shocking, as if he had put a straw in his hair suddenly. “Quite, quite brilliant,” he repeated with a fleeting smile of contented superiority which made everybody in the room, including the drunken barber, vaguely uncomfortable. The revelation was no more than a glimpse. Immediately afterwards he was his usual sophisticated and charming self. “It was no home for a kid, anyway,” he said.

  “I should say.” The manager wagged his head again. “No one blamed you for going. The old girl told a lot of lies, I believe,” he added slyly.

  “What about? What sort of lies?” The questions came very sharply and the manager coloured.

  “Just what you’d expect,” he muttered. “I wouldn’t have blamed you, mind you, if you had helped yourself to something to go on with. They’d made your home impossible, I mean to say.”

  “Lies, of course.” Gerry’s dignity was pitying. He seemed to be a different person altogether when on the subject of his childhood. “Poor woman, I think her life may have been difficult. She wasn’t clever, you know.”

  “Look at the time, Major, look at the time!” Mr. Vick went off like an alarm clock himself. He was pointing at the bold-faced clock over the door and was in imminent danger of falling off his stool.

  Gerry burst out laughing and exchanged amused glances with his newly-found oldest friend.

  “Take care of him until I come back,” he said. “I just want a word with someone in the theatre. I shan’t be ten minutes.”

  “I’d like to see old Moggie and old Moggie’d like to see me,” said Mr. Vick, emerging into the open after the bait which had been dangled before him all the evening.

  “I doubt it.” Again the childhood friends exchanged glances and as Gerry went out of the back door nearest to the theatre the manager’s soothing voice reached him as it addressed Mr. Vick.

  “If you’ve been on sherry since opening time, sir, I wonder if you’d like a change? What about a nice Fernet Branca cocktail?”

  The man in the trench coat walked swiftly down the pavement, avoiding the stage door in the blank wall of the theatre. There was a contented smile on his lips. “Since opening time.” The words were so satisfactory that he repeated them aloud. It was the point he had been trying to establish all the evening and now that it had been done, and he had a new alibi in place of the other which had gone astray, he felt infinitely happier even though he was quite confident he would not need to use it.

  Perhaps if his attitude to the preca
ution had been less superstitious and more practical it might have occurred to him that two alibis for the same vital quarter of an hour, one in Richard’s mind and one in Mr. Vick’s, might be more dangerous than none at all. That realisation came some minutes later.

  Crossing the main street he turned into one of those small eating houses which seem always to be built on the same rectangular plan. They possess two short counters set one on either side of a narrow entrance, and a passage between leading into a square steam-filled room where plastic-topped tables are surrounded by quantities of spiky bent-wood chairs. This was a poor place with shabby painted walls and dusty light bulbs, and the single waitress, a pallid flat-chested youngster, was only too obviously the daughter of the grim old lady at the urns. A group of seedy looking youths who might have been planning anything from a burglary to a skiffle group sat round the largest table in the far corner talking together, and did not look up as he came in. The rest of the room was empty.

  He chose a small table under the ledge of the right-hand counter. It placed him in a corner diagonally opposite the whispering group, and as he edged round to get the angle behind him the bunched skirts of his trench coat scattered the lightweight chairs. Beneath the coat the pockets of his ragged jacket were heavy and he frowned as he sat down. The chance meeting with Mr. Vick had upset the whole exercise. He was carrying far too much incriminating stuff for complete safety and the wooden box was still in the car.

  Yet he was by no means panic-stricken. His attitude was far more dangerous than that. He felt impersonal, almost as if his whole interest in the matter was academic.

  There was a wireless set turned low on the counter and as he sat down he heard the chimes of Big Ben heralding the news. He ordered coffee and sat there sipping it while the prim voice of the B.B.C. announcer went through the happenings of the day.

  There was no police message, no mention of a West End Crime.

  Presently he pushed his cup away and drew out the black wallet which he had taken from Matt Phillipson’s body. It lay plump and neat in his hands, where it looked unremarkable. By far its greatest bulk consisted of a cheque book, he noticed with mild regret, of no use to anybody now. But in the opposite pocket there was a reasonable wad of pound notes and a couple of fivers tucked among all the usual miscellany. It was when he was looking to see if there were any more that he discovered the two letters, clipped together and kept there for safety away from secretaries as Mr. Phillipson had promised Polly. Gerry recognised her familiar sprawling handwriting and a flood of tingling blood rose up from his stomach to suffuse his face.