31st Of February (25 page)

The two men walked up the gravel drive toward the large grey building. They walked in step, without speaking. Neither of them noticed the brightness of the blue sky, or the geometrically neat gardens on either side. At the door of the building the younger of the two, a fair-haired inconspicuous figure in a brown suit, paused and said: “What are you trying to prove?”

His companion was taller and bulkier, and looked even larger than he was because on this April day he wore a thick, dark overcoat. He lifted his bowler hat, wiped his forehead, replaced the hat and said, “What?”

“What are you trying to prove? Isn’t it enough for you to have driven an innocent man mad?”

“
Innocent,
” the other said with a bursting, incredulous impatience. “You think like the Commissioner. I’ve been asked to resign.” He sneered. “My handling of the case is not approved. Unorthodox methods.”

“That’s a polite name for burgling a suspect’s flat and frightening him out of his wits.”

The other turned on him savagely. “I suppose you think the responsibility worries me, do you? You were careful not to say anything at the time.”

“I carried out your orders. But I haven’t hated a job more than the one of harrying that poor wretch since I became a policeman ten years ago.” Greatorex added with deceptive mildness: “It’s the first time I’ve ever driven an innocent man mad, you see; You’re used to it.”

“What do you mean?”

“You like to watch them squirm, Cresse. You like to pull off their wings and see them crawl over the table under your omniscient eye. You’re a sadist.” The big man made a noise. “What about Mrs Lowson, that woman who strangled her baby because she thought it was growing up to be a mental defective? She committed suicide after some friendly chats with you. What about Makepeace, that forger who’d gone straight for years until you picked him up. You framed him, didn’t you?”

Cresse said violently: “He was a criminal. Habitual. Filth. Scum.”

“A sadist, Cresse, you’re a sadist. You like to play God.”

“A policeman,” Inspector Cresse said, “is God – or God’s earthly substitute.” The strong shape of his body was firmly outlined against the grey building. “Justice should be intelligent. If we are obstructed by the forms of legality in reaching the ends of justice, the forms of legality must be ignored.” His flat white face was eager, his voice persuasive. “And what did we do that would distress an innocent man? A few hints were dropped here and there. We telephoned Sir Malcolm Buntz and arranged that you should be installed in the firm as his nephew. Nobody else was told. You changed the date on his calendar. His flat was searched. What was there in that to upset an innocent man?”

“The letter,” Greatorex said. He seemed during this recital to have shrunk inside his suit, and in spite of the warmth of the day he was almost shivering.

“The letter,” said the Inspector blandly. “A tribute to your skill as an amateur forger, although of course it would never have deceived a handwriting expert. And, after all, what was the effect of the letter?”

Still shrinking inside his brown suit, Greatorex said: “It helped to send him off his head.”

“Not at all. At the most it tipped the scale for a man who was obviously guilty. But take it for a moment that you’re right. What was there in the letter to frighten an innocent man? Why didn’t he tell me he was being persecuted? Why didn’t he say his journal had been stolen? Because he was afraid of the truth. My God, man,” Cresse said with the first approach he had shown to loss of self-control, “even the Commissioner didn’t dare to suggest outright that he was innocent. He didn’t deny that my methods worked. He simply said that he couldn’t possibly approve of them, and that he’d warned me before, etcetera, etcetera.” The graven lines were deep on the Inspector’s face as he looked up at the sky. “They don’t want people who get results.”

Almost sulkily, Greatorex repeated: “He was innocent. I believe he was innocent.”

“
You’re
innocent,” the Inspector sneered. He ticked off points on his fingers. “Think of the case against him. One, the money. Five thousand pounds is not to be sneezed at when you’re slipping in your job. Two, he hated his wife. You remember that journal? ‘I can’t see why I didn’t push her down the stairs long ago.’ Do you want anything clearer than that?”

“That doesn’t prove anything. It’s the kind of thing any man might write who didn’t get on with his wife.”

“Didn’t get on with his wife,” Cresse echoed mockingly.

“And he’d been playing around with Elaine Fletchley.”

“She denied it.”

“What would you expect her to do – give it to us on a plate? He blew a fuse on that cellar staircase deliberately. Or how was it that Fletchley a few minutes earlier found the light still working? Then he hit his wife on the head and fractured her skull, she fell down the stairs and broke her neck.”

“You don’t know that Fletchley told the truth.”

“Why should he lie? And what about the matches? What can you say about the matches?” The man in the brown suit said nothing about the matches. “Where did those matches come from that lay by her body? She left the kitchen to go to the cellar – Anderson said she had no matches in her hand. She had no pockets in her dress. She walked along a passage where there was no ledge on which matches could have rested. She switched on the cellar light and found it didn’t work. She started down the stairs – where could she have got hold of the matches? There’s only one explanation for them being by her body. Anderson put them there after he’d killed her. What other explanation can you offer, can anyone offer?”

“I don’t know,” the other said. “Perhaps she was holding a box of matches in her hand and he didn’t notice them. Perhaps someone had left a box at the head of the cellar stairs.” He said weakly: “Funny things happen.”

“But not as funny as that.” The Inspector chuckled softly.

The sound was not pleasant. “We scared him, didn’t we, with our letters and the little tricks we played, the calendar and the messages. It was fun.”

“And events helped us – if you can call it helping,” the younger man said. “All the trouble at the office – the mess he got into over Kiddy Modes, Reverton trying to get rid of him, the Hey Presto business.” He shuddered. “I shall never forget his face that night all puffed and red with that poisonous stuff, and bloody where he’d cut himself fighting with a ghost.”

“And by the way,” the Inspector said, still moved by his internal amusement, “I understand they’re not putting that stuff on the market. It’s back in the experimental stage. One person in ten had a skin allergic to it.” There was a silence. “No use hanging about any longer.” He turned to go in. Greatorex caught his arm.

“I can’t go in there.”

The Inspector turned to look at him. “Don’t be a fool.”

“What do you expect to prove?” Greatorex repeated insistently. “What do you expect him to tell you?”

“If he’s able to recognize me,” the Inspector said slowly, “if this madness of his isn’t all a stunt – if I can get a written confession to put before the Commissioner –
then
we’ll see what he has to say about orthodox methods and resignation.”

“I don’t want to see it,” Greatorex said. He shuddered. “I don’t want to see you with him.”

The Inspector stared at him. Then he began to laugh. The laughter grew until it filled his whole hard body, until he took off his hard hat and revealed the great shining bald head. Between gusts of laughter he said: “You know, Greatorex, I’m not sure you shouldn’t be in this place.” He was still laughing when he entered the grey building.

Inside the asylum he was received deferentially, but perhaps a little ambiguously. “You must be prepared for a change in him,” the doctor said, “He has grown a beard. He has a horror of shaving.”

“I’ve seen worse things than a man with a beard,” the Inspector said. “Can he talk sensibly?”

“That depends,” said the doctor. He had a fresh face and a shock of white hair. “What do you want to talk about?”

“I want to ask a few questions about the murder of his wife. Can it do any harm to discuss it?”

“I don’t think,” the doctor said, “that anything can do him harm.”

“You mean he’s incurably mad.”

“That’s hardly a clinical way of putting it,” the doctor murmured. “But he will certainly never stand trial, if you have that in mind. Shall we go?” The Inspector nodded and the doctor pressed the bell. To the burly white-coated man who came in he said: “How is Anderson?”

“Quiet. He’s writing.”

“Writing,” the Inspector said. “That may be important,”

“We shall see,” the doctor said.

Inspector Cresse was not an impressionable man, but he felt a little strange when the door of the room was opened and he saw what appeared to be a complete stranger bent at a table, writing. “Is this—”

“This is Anderson,” the doctor said. “Here is a visitor for you, Anderson.”

The man at the table hurriedly closed the book in which he had been writing and pushed it into a drawer of the table. Then he looked at his visitors. The lower part of his face was hidden by a straggling beard of a dull brown colour, but the features themselves had changed curiously in shape and texture. The whole face was fatter and somehow blunted, and had lost its look of intelligence. The eyes, which had in the Inspector’s memory looked watchful and hunted, were now like dull buttons.

“Well, Mr Anderson,” the Inspector said, “so we meet again. You remember me, don’t you?” He held out his hand, but Anderson did not take it.

“Certainly I remember you. Your name is Rex.”

“Cresse.”

“Rex Imperator, son of the Almighty.” Anderson stood up and made a mocking bow. “Where is your companion?”

“My companion?”

“The greater Rex, your drinking friend, advertising manager to God. An amiable youngster, but deceitful. He told me God fathered him on Sir Malcolm Buntz.”

The Inspector said to the doctor: “Are you sure this isn’t all put on? I believe he knows quite well who I am.”

“We shall see,” the doctor said. “What have you been writing, Anderson?”

The blunt features twisted into an unpleasant expression of cunning. Anderson shook his head.

“About
her?”

Anderson nodded.

“May we see it?”

With a look of alarm Anderson shook his head again.

“Let us see it, Anderson,” the doctor said pleasantly. “I will keep her away.” He said to the Inspector: “He thinks his wife comes to torment him, and that writing in the book is the only thing that stops her.”

“You can’t keep her away,” Anderson said. He took the book out of the drawer, and held it close to him.

“I shall put a spell on her.”

“She knows all your spells,” Anderson said. “She came last night, tearing and scratching. She knew the date.”

“What date?” The doctor glanced at the Inspector.

“The thirty-first of February,” Anderson said. He began to cry out in a high voice, over and over again: “The thirty-first of February, the thirty-first of February.” He stood up in the middle of the room and flapped his arms like wings. “Here she is,” he screamed. The book dropped to the ground. The doctor picked it up.

The room was square, with no furniture in it except the table and a bed, both bolted to the ground. Anderson ran from side to side of the room, holding his hands to his head, uttering shrill unintelligible noises, like an animal in pain. He blundered into the three men standing there as if they were statues. Then, still with those inhuman cries coming from his mouth, he began to knock his head against the wall. The man in the white coat locked Anderson’s arms behind his back and threw him on the bed. There he lay quietly, with his face turned away from them.

The doctor opened the book. Each page was covered with thousands of fine lines of incoherent scribbling written across, up, and down the page. A few disconnected words could be made out in various pages:
London, God, wife, scheme.
The doctor looked at the Inspector. The Inspector shrugged his shoulders.

Outside in the April sunlight Greatorex was waiting. The Inspector said nothing, but clapped his bowler hat on his head.

“What happened?”

“Nothing happened. He’s mad.”

“He made no confession.”

“No.”

“Then we shall never know,” Greatorex said. “We shall never know whether he was guilty.”

“He was guilty,” the Inspector said. “But he is mad. There will be no confession.”

“Your resignation stands?”

“My resignation stands,” the Inspector said. He took out a pipe, looked at it, filled it, and felt in his pockets. “I thought I had a box of matches, but I must have left it—”

Greatorex said in an odd voice: “There’s a box by your feet.”

For a moment the Inspector looked almost disturbed. Then his face cleared. “There is a hole in my pocket. They must have dropped through it.”

“A hole in your pocket.”

Very slowly the Inspector bent and picked up the matches, struck one and lighted his pipe. “A hole in my pocket,” he said. “And what of it?”

Smoke rose from the Inspector’s pipe. The two men stood looking at each other.

(in order of first publication)

These titles can be read as a series, or randomly as standalone novels

(in order of first publication)

These titles can be read as a series, or randomly as standalone novels

(in order of first publication)

These titles can be read as a series, or randomly as standalone novels

(in order of first publication)