“Andy, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She was not convincing; she was trying to shield somebody; she did not know of the irrefutable evidence in his pocket. He tried to tell her of it, to speak calmly, logically, but the phrases tumbled out in the wrong order or in no order at all. He heard his own voice, pitched too high. Somebody in his office, it was saying, the letter on his desk, in Val’s writing, how could she explain the letter? But of course she couldn’t explain – nonsense to pretend, to shield people – who was it? The young couple put down the forks with which they had been picking at their food and looked at it distrustfully.
Elaine had been opening and shutting the clasp of her black bag. Now she stood up, small neat and determined. “I’ve got to go.”
But the letter, the letter, Anderson heard the voice say whiningly – how can you explain? Look, here it is, here, here.
“Now, Andy,” Elaine said loudly and clearly and slowly, “You’re not well, Andy. Listen to me. You should go home and straight to bed and have somebody see to your face.”
The fingers dragged out the blue paper, and held it up. She glanced and snorted angrily. “That’s a bill. Now look, Andy, go home and see a doctor.”
He stared at the piece of paper unbelievingly. It was a tailor’s bill. Then the letter – the fingers fumbled again, but she was still talking. “I knew Val better than anyone, and I tell you you’re all wrong.” Anderson stretched out his hands imploringly. The young couple at the next table looked at one another, pushed away their food and got up.
Now the voice was saying it could find the letter, and was crying out over and over again
Tell me the name, please tell me the name.
And the blow fell, the blow he had expected and feared. She turned on him, the bag snapped tightly, finally, as tight and final as the look on her face “You’re crazy, Andy. I didn’t want to say it, but you’ve made me.” She paused – the young couple and the waitress waited eagerly, expectantly – and spoke the irrevocable words: “Val was sold on you from the day she met you. She never had a lover. You’ve invented him.” She walked with hard, firm steps on her high heels, past the cash desk and out of the restaurant.
9
He stepped out of the small, safe box of the taxi, into a world full of enemies. It would be unwise, no doubt, to let the driver know where he lived. He got out at the Demon, tipping the man half a crown, watching carefully to see if he betrayed any extravagant reaction. But the driver merely tested the coin with his teeth, said “Thanks, guv,” and put in his clutch. Anderson leaned forward confidentially and made a gesture with his thumb at the Demon behind him. “I don’t live here.”
“You don’t, eh?” The driver laughed, showing projecting teeth. “I wish I did. ’Night, guv.” And he was away, leaving Anderson standing shivering in his raincoat, on the pavement. The rain, thin and slanting, damped his face and his uncovered head. His uncovered head; he remembered now that he had taken off his Homburg – his second-best Homburg – in the taxi cab and put it by his side. Would the man bring it back? How extraordinary it was that he should forget his hat after, last night, forgetting his hat and taking the wrong coat. The wrong coat, the lost hats – they had a meaning, he knew, but what was it? He recognized a meaning, also, in the words Elaine Fletchley had spoken; although its precise significance still eluded him, although for that matter he could not remember exactly what she had said, he knew that he had ground for being deeply upset. But that was all too tangled, too difficult: and besides, it distracted his attention from the immediate problem. Was his home being watched? He walked to the entrance of the Demon, paused as though about to go in, and then moved quickly into the shadow by the side of the pub. In his shadow, not impenetrable but deep, he tiptoed to the corner, and stared into the darkness of Joseph Street. The house
was
being watched. In the front portico a figure lounged, unidentifiable, just out of range of the street light. Anderson drew back. His whole body was trembling.
The clumsy fools had stationed somebody outside the front door. He could have laughed aloud. But this was not a matter, after all, for laughter. It meant that the instinct which had warned him not to return here – the distasteful and even terrifying images that had arisen in his mind at thought of the disordered rooms, the empty drawer of the desk, the broken picture, and, yes, the cellar, the uninvestigated cellar – that instinct had been right. It would he falling into the trap, the trap for which that motionless and weary figure was acting as bait, if he turned the corner and walked across the road.
Is that what I believe, then? Anderson asked himself. Must I turn round and go back? Let me be logical. And now a whole set of completely different arguments came into his mind. Was it really likely that they would be as clumsy as that? Was there not an obvious motive for stationing a man just where he would be seen? Wouldn’t Anderson, in fact, be playing into their hands by running away like a scared child, failing to remark that a double trap had been laid for him? Anderson began to laugh. He said aloud: “Come on now, give them credit for a bit of subtlety. They’re not fools – we all know that.” But beneath these uttered words, or above or behind them or anyhow existing in some relation to them, were the things Elaine had said, the things he had forgotten and could not now try to remember. He spoke again, without knowing the meaning of the words “The letter,” he said, and turned the corner. With rain blowing directly into his face he stepped firmly into the roadway. The figure in the door straightened up, moved slowly to the gate, tucked a newspaper under one arm and then ran to meet him. They met in the middle of the road. It was Molly O’Rourke. “Andy,” she cried, “Andy, are you all right?” He said nothing, but stood looking at her consideringly. “What’s happened to you, Andy? Why are you looking at me like that?”
In a voice so consciously soft and low that he could not recognize it as his own, Anderson said: “Who sent you?”
“What do you mean? I heard about it this afternoon.”
Distracted for a moment, he said: “About what?”
“That dirty devil Reverton – he’s been wanting to get you out for a long time. When you’re not well, too.”
What was she talking about? But the last phrase caught in his mind and was linked with other things that had been said recently. “What do you mean not well? Who told you I was not well?”
“Andy, we can’t stand here in the rain. Let’s go and talk.” Quite passively he allowed himself to be led to the curb, and then broke free of the hand she had placed on his arm. He said, again with that conscious gentleness: “Who told you I was not well?”
“Anybody can see for themselves. You’re shivering. And – what’s the matter with your face?”
“You don’t care to give me the name of your informant?” he said politely
“Oh, don’t be silly.” Now they were at the front door. “Give me the key.” He handed the key to her obediently, but as she turned it in the lock he moved swiftly. He was inside the front door, and had snatched the key from the lock. He held the door open a little, facing her and laughing. “My dear girl, you must be very simple to think I should fall for
that.”
“For what, Andy? I don’t know what you mean.”
He laughed again. How easy it had been to outwit her. “I’m afraid you’ll have to go back to them and report failure. Suggest that they should try something subtler next time.”
“Let me in.” She took a step forward.
“Ah ha,” he said, and laughed again. “No nearer.” But now she darted forward, with a suddenness that took him by surprise, and they were struggling together in the doorway. He had been overconfident, he had relaxed his guard, and the result was a fight to expel this creature who was all hair and claws, who sobbed even as she tried to push past him. She had come out now, however, thank goodness, in her true colours; there was no subtlety about it; she was simply trying to come in where she was not wanted, and as they swayed together he felt the exhilaration of one whose dubiety’s had been lost in the satisfaction of righteous action. He heard a voice crying out something of this, but he was unable to listen closely, because his energy was given to the struggle with the enemy. Her approach might have been clumsy, but she fought cleverly, eel-like, eluding his grip, trying to get past him. But he was filled with the strength of ten; he caught her by the throat and when she tore his hands away brought up his knee as Shifty had done to Benny Baily. She cried out, and sprawled on the ground with her skirt up, showing a patch of thigh. Somehow the evening paper that had been in her hand was inside the door, as though it had been delivered by a newsboy. He picked it up, slammed the door shut, and burst out laughing.
But that, after all, was not the end of her. She got up, kept her finger on the doorbell, which chimed most musically, and cried to be let in. What stupidity! And what effrontery! Did she take him for a fool? He was suddenly very angry and, standing on the other side of the door, shouted at her a mixture of insults and obscenities – rather shameful words, perhaps, and he waited for Fletchley to come down. But Fletchley did not come down; Fletchley was out somewhere.
Go away,
Anderson heard a voice screaming.
Go away.
And at last she went away, walking slowly and dejectedly, dabbing at her face with a handkerchief. He opened the door of his own flat, tiptoed into the sitting room and looked out through a window (the curtain edge lifted the merest fraction) until she had turned the corner. He had won the first round. Now to sit back and take stock of the situation.
But the kind of stocktaking he had promised himself – the rational working out of his own position, the plans for his own defence – proved impossible, after all. For when, hesitantly, he had pressed the switch and the fluorescent light, cold, even and blue, shone out into the room, it illuminated also the fact that only yesterday the enemy had been here, poking and snuffling, opening doors and sniffing out secrets. How ridiculous to have made that prodigious struggle to keep the woman out tonight when yesterday she or her friends had invaded his privacy and discovered the mysterious things they wanted to know. Looking round at the room, catching sight of the dirty whisky glasses, he felt utter hopelessness. And beneath the hopelessness, fear.
He sat in the chromium-armed chair and put his hand in his pocket. And now the first thing he pulled out was the letter from Val, creased and crumpled but unmistakably in her hand. Another dip – and here was the anonymous letter that had strayed mysteriously into Greatorex’s overcoat. Why had he been unable to find these things when he talked to Elaine? He stared at them, spread out upon his knees. But the words were blurred in front of his eyes, and he quickly lost interest in the letters and let them drop to the floor.
Groping on the carpet for these dropped letters, he found the evening paper that had been dropped so neatly and, it now appeared, cunningly inside the door. They had had a purpose in leaving the paper, for they had a purpose in every-thing. Was it to try to scare him with a paper dated February the Fourth? He looked at the type, but it danced away from him. It danced away – and yet after a moment the date was clear, although everything else wavered up and down. The date upon the newspaper sneered at him in letters and numerals that grew larger until they exploded in his brain. The date was the thirty-first of February. And at that moment, when clear warning was given him – but warning of what? – he noticed the smell.
Head raised, nostrils sniffing apart, he was able to separate from the faint odour of dust another smell equally familiar: the smell of a particular scent. Lovely Evening, that Val used. And the smell, pungent now in his nostrils (how could he have failed to notice it before?), came from the bedroom. Now he knew that the struggle and victory outside had been an illusion. On the thirty-first of February the last fight must be fought and won before he could rest.
How many seconds, how many minutes, how many hours, were used up while he switched off the light at the door, moved silently to the door of the bedroom, and then with one decisive gesture flung it back. The darkness within was almost complete, but still his eyes recognized, deceptively motionless upon the bed, the faithless woman he had married. This, then, was the struggle for which the events of these last days had prepared him; and shouting like a battle cry,
The Thirty-first of February,
he flung himself upon the bed.
But this woman was a hundred times more cunning and skilful than the one in the street. She slipped into his clutches and out again; is was impossible to get a grip on her; she fought silently and at times invisibly. His throat was constricted and, gasping, he pulled at the invisible hands, breaking their grip, tearing at collar and tie as he rolled to the floor.
The Thirty-first of February,
he cried again and, struggling wildly with her, felt his face cut by pieces of glass, the blood running down it warmly. He kicked out, but she brought down something heavy which struck him in the stomach. He moved his head, and something else was shattered just where his head had been. He brushed a hand across his eyes and pursued her again, unable to see clearly where she was, blundering round the room, catching and losing her.
The light came on, and he stood still. If she had brought in reinforcements there was little hope. Panting, he turned slowly to face the door. There, solid as a bowler-hatted bulldog, with legs apart and face graven into sad lines, stood her chief ally, and behind him faces that he had known in a past life, the woman at the door, a young fresh face that was unrecognizable, men in blue. Would they be too much for him? It was with the consciousness of defeat that he cried for the third time
The Thirty-first of February,
and was among them, fighting with the strength of virtue, knocking off the bulldog’s – 2017 – The Thirty-first of February – Fifty-three – BJ–198 hat and getting the snarling beast down to the floor, squeezing the corded throat. Then he felt a dull pain in his head, spreading all over it, his hands became strengthless, he slipped down, down, down into defeat, into permanent and shameful defeat.