XIV

 

 

 

 

I decided on the George, a pub I usually avoided, for what looked like being a solitary Monday night. On the way there I saw Emlyn and Ceri moving with the queue into the Regal, and I never tasted the first pint, found myself chain-smoking, hating everybody. Especially the barmaid, in her apron, looking like she was made of starched white linen, dispensing the drinks, her thin nose registering disapproval at the speed at which I had emptied my glass. In the George you took your beer in sips, and watched the door furtively, and kept the windows shut in case the fresh air ruined the smell of disinfectant. There were warnings everywhere about spitting, gambling and singing being forbidden. But it was either the George or the Anchorage, and I felt safer from Amos here where beer was sinful, conversation mumbling about death.

But I was wrong, of course. At half past eight he prodded the door open with his stick and came stumbling in. ‘Philip,’ he bellowed. ‘My God!’

‘No swearing if you please,’ the barmaid screeched in protest.

‘What the hell are you doing here, Philip?’ He went on, each word like a stabbing lance. ‘This place! Good God Almighty!’

‘Any more swearing and I send for the police!’ The barmaid warned him, and I was glad she’d said it because he now gave her his undivided attention.

He propped his stick against the counter and planted his elbows on the bar and brought his hands together in a sharp crack that made her jump. ‘I am the police,’ he announced. ‘Have you ever been prosecuted for the supplying of despair, madam?’

‘I keep an orderly house. We don’t have no trouble here!’

‘You don’t keep anything here,’ Amos told her. ‘One neat gin and a beer for my colleague – poor, deluded boy who thought he could hide from me – and you have my permission to risk a fragrant smile.’

But she was a tough old bird. ‘You’ve had enough. No drinks for you here. I’ve got the right, see. I know the law.’ She brought her thin, lethal nose within inches of his. ‘You clear off!’ she said, spit glistening on her lower lip.

‘I will not clear off!’ Amos replied. ‘Send for the forces, the magistrates and town clerks. I will not be ordered out while my money is on the table.’

Not bad for a Monday night slanging match, I thought. Some of the customers who had been dying over their drinks were now sitting up and seemed almost lively. The old man had obviously toured the pubs in his search for me, and he was more than three sheets to the wind. I stood back and watched and listened, not without admiration, even though it was all childish and pointless. But now I had him for the rest of the night, and Amos Ellyott sober had to be suffered; Amos Ellyott drunk was not to be tolerated. I was about to go looking for the back door when a heavy voice from the corner threatened to put him out. ‘It’ll have to be the two of us,’ I told the room, and was appalled to realise that what I wanted this Monday night was a fight.

Fortunately the only response to my remark came from Amos. ‘My dear boy,’ he said, turning his back on the barmaid, ‘thank you for that show of loyalty.’ And he held out a cold hand for me to grip. His rheumy eyes glistened. ‘Had Adolf Hitler succeeded in invading this country, rest assured that this dismal excuse for a public house would be the seat of the Gestapo.’

‘I think we should go to a pub, Mr Ellyott,’ I suggested.

‘Admirable, admirable,’ he replied in a choked voice. We headed for the door.

‘Good riddance to both of you!’ The barmaid was for having the last word. And as the old man appeared to be too overcome with emotion, or gin, I spoke for him. ‘You want to have your drains seen to. You’ve gassed those two in the corner.’

We went out on a flood of words from the barmaid, the old man chuckling. At the door the fog met us like a wall.

 

The fog was a Maelgwyn wonder, something that recurred in conversation and stories over the years. Some of them had punctuated my childhood and I had forgotten until that night how they filled the streets of the town, how dense they were. They occurred always in high summer. They lasted a few days – although I remembered my father saying that one of them, in 1896, had stayed down for a fortnight. Ten miles outside the town, a few thousand feet up in the air, the sun would be shining. They were phenomena peculiar to Maelgwyn and they were a visitation from on high of course. And a bad omen.

‘Can’t see a bloody thing,’ Amos said.

‘So stop walking up my leg,’ I said. ‘And look – just for one night I don’t want to talk about murders and I don’t want any more theories – all right?’

‘I am no longer at the theory stage,’ he snapped back. Then he discovered that he was not wearing his glasses. We had not reached the porch of the King’s Arms. ‘I’ve got to have them. I’m blind without them. Were they on my nose in that dreadful pub?’ I told him I couldn’t remember if they were or not, but one thing’s for sure, if we went back there it would be a lynching party. I called for drinks at the bar of the King’s Arms, but he went on moaning about his glasses.

‘Go back home and have a look,’ I told him, ‘I’ll wait for you here.’

He rapped his stick against the bar. ‘Would you have me expire in that filthy fog out there? Would you?’ All the saloon bar sitting up, silent, and watchful. Drink your poison, I said and let’s go. ‘No need for you to sound so petulant,’ he replied. Outside the fog had thickened. We stumbled along in the general direction of the promenade. The braying sirens from the ships in the estuary were muffled but somehow more urgent. People came up to us out of the fog, then vanished. And Amos talked. ‘George Garston, the one party in this case who remains a complete puzzle. It is my belief that it was he who fired those shots when we were investigating the Tower.’

A man came out of the fog. Seeing us, he changed course, but I glimpsed the outline of his face. Idwal Morton? It was. Bareheaded, great dome of a forehead. There was no mistaking him. Sick man in the fog.

 

I followed Amos up the creaking staircase to his rooms. He reached for his key above the door and pushed it into the lock, and it wouldn’t turn. He gave the knob a twist, the door opened and I felt the hairs rise on the back of my hands. He switched on the light. Chairs overturned. Cushions on the floor, papers from the bureau scattered everywhere, his books swept off the shelves. The door to the bedroom was wide open, mattress and blankets in an untidy heap on the floor. I looked at him, and he was smiling.

‘She worked it out that it was I who sent her the photograph,’ he said. Then he knelt and pushed a strip of carpet back into place. If I had one photograph, then I must have more...’

‘You knew this was going to happen,’ I said. ‘That’s why you made me come back with you.’ He took his glasses from an inside pocket and waved them at me.

‘You’re a deceitful old sod! What have you proved, anyway? Only that she wants the pictures.’

He glared at me. ‘Now I have her on the run, don’t you see? Depths to Mrs Edmunds – depths so clearly absent in her husband. She is about to break. Don’t be sentimental, Philip. She is quite prepared to let her spouse take the blame.’ He stopped short there, as if something else had occurred to him. He was staring into the bedroom. Slowly he heaved himself to his feet. Stick pointing, he shuffled across the room to the bedroom door. A singing sound from the electric lightbulb above my head. He groped along the wall for the switch. The light came on. Fog at the window open wide. I stood behind him in the doorway. ‘It’s the way the mattress is lying,’ he whispered, fear now in his voice. He took two strides forward and pushed at the blankets with the end of his stick. And she was there.

Her hands up as if she was holding the knitting needles. Her glasses dangling from one ear across her chin. Blood on the lenses, her skin dark as blood. There had been something tight around her long neck, something that had bitten deep into the flesh. A sound from her, a pocket of air escaping.

‘Downstairs. The basement flat. Telephone.’ Amos’s voice across a great, echoing and empty wasteland. The broken stillness of her. I saw him search for a pulse beat in the throat. ‘Phone the Inspector,’ he said, ‘never mind the ambulance.’

 

This one a different death. Not simply because she was the first victim I had seen close up, but in every way. She had been dead no more than an hour; she had been left where she had been killed; a clumsier job, someone said, more signs of a struggle; her handbag was missing; and above all she was someone the others had never been – a native of the town. When I reached home at one in the morning Laura was still up, in tears. Sylvia Edmunds. Mrs MT. Miss Lloyd that was. A somebody.

The hours between had been all coming and going, uniformed and plain clothes men moving about purposefully, a photographer’s blinding flash bulb, powder for prints, specimens stored in envelopes for analysis, and I, left standing in one corner, Amos in another. Men went running through the fog to MT’s house and came back with the news that Mash was in a drugged sleep, in bed all evening. It was MT they took to the police station. No, not one of the other tenants had heard anything or seen anyone, and they had all been in because of the fog... Inspector Marks was closeted with Amos for a long time, and Amos emerged, truculent and pinch-mouthed to watch a carpet raised in his living room, a floor board prised up and a large, manilla envelope handed over. ‘I require statements as to how you came into possession of these photographs,’ the Inspector declared. ‘Now – have you any more hidden away?’

‘You find Ridetski, dead or alive,’ Amos replied. ‘You get your men working on that Tower.’ He winked at me as he followed the Inspector out, but when I helped to settle him in at a boarding house a few doors away he was in a raging temper. ‘They want to know it all.’ He kept on saying, ‘and don’t dare ask me to enter into discussion with you about it.’

These details a flickering film, out of sequence in my head, all the way home and in the kitchen over countless cups of tea with Laura, and in bed as I fought back sleep. Mr Stubbs, the office boy dashing in to say, ‘Both Garstons, sir – and the Mortons – accounting for their movements now. Squad ready to move to the Tower.’ A loop of film in a projector that showed no sign of stopping. Then sleep, and a boy at the door to our backyard, the snakes writhing in his hands.

 

White fog, dense as smoke, in the morning streets. A warm, very damp fog such as occurs in the tropics. Visibility no more than a few feet, so that you came upon buildings and people unexpectedly and found your way from memory. I made for Emlyn’s house. The front door was closed and locked. No one came in response to my knocking. I tried the back door and that too was locked. No lights anywhere, no sounds, an empty house. Both of them in the police station still? Or had Emlyn gone to the Grange to see Mash? I hurried, full of unease, to the Haven Hotel where Amos Ellyott had been found a night’s lodging.

‘Out,’ Miss Williams said. She was one of Laura’s friends, a nervous woman. She kept the door half open, most of her body behind it. ‘Philip – I remember when you were little. It’s worse than the old war, isn’t it?’

‘Did he say where he was going?’

She shook her narrow head. ‘He’s a very strange old man,’ she said. ‘Do you know – he was out nearly all of the night. Never said where, though. You came, didn’t you? And the police. But no sooner had you gone than he was out of the house. “If anybody wants to see me,” he said, “tell them I’m in bed!” Then out he went. It was early hours when he came back.’

‘Did he leave a message for me?’ Once again a decisive shake of the head. I felt left out, abandoned. ‘Didn’t he mention anything?’

Miss Williams’ eyes flickered nervously. ‘What’s happened in town is too much,’ she said, a break in her voice. ‘I don’t get nice people staying here any more. All he said to me was, ‘Madam – I do not wish to speak to you,’ and all I asked was about his breakfast – was it all right?’ She dabbed a finger first under one eye, then the other. ‘Too much, too much.’ I told her I’d call back later. ‘Everybody’s strange,’ she called after me, ‘Everybody gone strange.’

There were only a few customers in the Market Hall, and they had come to talk not to buy. Even Isaac Moss Cobblers had downed tools and stood there with the traders, a hammer in his hand. Grim faces, all of them. No jokes about this one, the different death.

I kept out of their way. Let Laura tell them what I had seen. I crept into the shop and waited for her, startled her when she came, her hands fluttering at her breasts. ‘Philip – you should have stopped in bed. You’ve had a shock. I heard you shouting in your sleep.’

‘Why do you call her Miss Lloyd Penmorfa Villa?’ She stared at me dumbfounded, shaking her head slowly. ‘It’s all right – just a thought I woke up with.’

‘Poor Mrs Edmunds? Well – before she married MT she was Miss Lloyd, bless her – and her father had Penmorfa Villa.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘no – it was Glanmorfa House. Miss Lloyd Glanmorfa House – where Mash lives now. MT changed the name.’

She laughed and touched my arm. ‘Oh, Philip – you are in a pickle! It was Idwal Morton’s wife Ellen who used to live in Glanmorfa House! Her family had it, remember? Belongs to rich people from Liverpool. They changed the name to Blundellsands or something.

Idwal Morton turning the pages of the Tales from Shakespeare. ‘I left my memory in India,’ I said. Idwal Morton’s face in the fog.

‘You go home,’ she advised me. ‘There’s aspirins in the cupboard above the sink. You’ve had a shock.’

But I walked around the town in the fog. I sat over a cup of coffee in Bodawens, hoping that Ceri might come in. What the hell was I bothering my head about that poem for? ‘Summer has a fine warm face’. Oh, Jesus. Edward Mortimer, Sir and Honourable, Gent and Poet. A little girl with a fountain pen in her hand. Ellen Morton, dead a long time now – I couldn’t remember her maiden name – and not Miss Lloyd Penmorfa Villa. And so what? No significance there, surely? You got the houses mixed up, Philip Roberts. Drink your coffee. Come on Ceri, show up. Have another fag. Let your mind alone.

And then there was a hand on my shoulder. ‘Are you Philip Roberts?’ A tall, plump man, red hair in a crew cut. He looked like police to me. Heavy freckles on his face, wearing a grubby raincoat with damp patches on it, mud on his boots.

‘Philip Roberts,’ I agreed. There was a suggestion of freckles in his eyes. Here we go, back to the police station, I thought. Well, that was something positive, at least – and I might catch up with Emlyn and his old man there.

‘Davies, CID,’ he said. ‘Look – you know David Garston, don’t you? We’re looking for him.’

‘What’s up – is he lost?’

‘Don’t be funny, mister. He’s done a bunk. This bloody fog. You seen anything of him?’

‘I thought you had him in.’ The man sat down next to me and looked as if he was ready for a rest. ‘Has he made a run for it?’

‘I never said that...’

‘Well – have you tried his home?’ Christ, I thought, Davy Garston. And felt relieved.

‘How d’you think I got all this shit on me?’ He said, looking down at his boots.

‘Davy Garston – you want him?’

‘I don’t want him. I want to get off bloody duty, mate, and get my head down.’ He sighed heavily. ‘You’ve not seen him then?’

‘Not a sign,’ I said. ‘If I do – shall I tell him you’re looking for him?’

‘Very funny,’ he said. ‘You got funny mates as well. That old man, that Emlyn Morton – they was out there, digging in all that cowshit.’

The news floored me. ‘At Garston’s farm?’ He nodded. By God, I thought, and felt the blood pound in my head. Abandoned. Left out. Well of all the miserable bloody tricks to play. He’d picked Emlyn. ‘What were they digging for?’ I said.

He got to his feet and stretched and yawned. ‘Search me. For worms? Maybe they’re going fishing.’

‘What about Mr Morton? Is he in the police station still?’

‘Look, matey, I can’t talk about who’s in the station and who isn’t. You’ve not seen this young Garston right? If you do – say nothin’. Just come and tell us, OK?’ My turn to nod. He went out and I felt more alone than ever.

I left the cafe and started to wander. Lights on in the houses, only a few people out and about, blinds down on many windows. Maelgwyn a secret place, like a town occupied by the enemy. Lights in every window on St John’s Street, except one house. Ceri’s. The bell under my finger rang hollow and echoing. From an upstairs window in the next house a woman I couldn’t see called out, ‘Not at home. They had to go in the middle of the night. Mrs Price’s sister Olwen took seriously ill in the port.’ I thanked her and walked back up the street, cursing the fog, sulking again, a child left out of the game. I wasn’t going to see what they were playing at out there on Garston’s farm. To hell with it. And once more that bloody poem in my head.

 

‘Goodness,’ Miss Phelps said. ‘Philip Roberts. One has to be careful who one opens one’s doors to.’ Another inch of door space, another part-face. ‘Philip Roberts? Are you the one who received a decoration for gallantry?’

 

‘That’s Emlyn Morton.’ And the door was opened wide. I nearly laughed aloud, having forgotten what a little round dumpling of a woman she was. Miss Dorothy Phelps, English Lit.

‘You were in the fifth when I retired. You joined the Navy?’

‘The army.’ She led me into her sitting room which had a second fog from cigarette smoke.

‘And it was North Africa?’

‘Burma.’ She had five wireless sets, a notebook by each one.

‘Father a butcher?’

‘Bookseller.’

She did a little dance and clapped her hands. ‘Ah. Yes. Got it! Emlyn Morton’s crowd.’ Her voice which had boomed Shakespeare, Tennyson and Keats was ragged. ‘I have been trying to forget you all. A poem you say?’ She accepted a cigarette eagerly. ‘Your interest in poetry then was minimal, surely? Sit. Cup of tea?’ By Laura’s standards the room was dirty. Miss Phelps moved a vacuum cleaner and went through into the kitchen to put the kettle on the stove. ‘Forty years I spoke,’ she went on, ‘now I listen to my wireless. Philip Roberts, Philip Roberts – so many Robertses and Joneses and Williamses. Radio Paris in ten minutes! And you want the school magazines? Astonishing.’

She went on hunting in sideboards and cupboards, treated me to a bottoms up view of a pair of blue bloomers and brown stockings, and refused all offers of help, muttering my name as she did so. She came back with a large, cardboard box, paused to light yet another cigarette before she opened it. ‘Did you say 1937?’ Yellowing, typewritten sheets in her hands, but there was no poem by Edward Mortimer in that issue.

‘Will you try 1938?’

She held up a stubby finger for silence, the cigarette smoke bringing tears. ‘Edward Mortimer. Philip, we never had an Edward Mortimer. I would have remembered that one. But we – ah, yes – we had a little joke. She smoothed down a page. ‘Yes, yes. We had a joke.’ She cleared her throat and croaked it out:

 

Who’s left to love?

Only he who rages –

Gone to ashes all the ages.

Summer has a fine warm face,

Winter such a cold embrace.’

 

And we were silent. The time for Radio Paris was long since past. She gave me a long, questioning look. ‘By Edward Mortimer. Did you know that not one member of staff, none of the children, not one parent ever asked me who Edward Mortimer was! And what does that prove? Why – that nobody ever reads school magazines.’

‘Emlyn?’ I said.

She nodded. ‘He and Marshall Edmunds came to see me – here, in this house. Mrs Edmunds, I was told – is it true?’

‘Yes.’

Another cigarette appeared in her mouth.

‘Incredible. It is many years since I saw her. I don’t get out much, you see. Never a mixer.’ She traced the words with a nicotine stained finger. ‘Children come up with a promising idea, you know – in poetry I mean. They look as if they are going to take you somewhere – then they quit. This is what has happened here. The first three lines promise something, however obscure, and then we go onto something else entirely. It has little meaning out of context. Such a private poem, wouldn’t you say? I said to him “you never wrote this, Morton” but he was a beautiful boy, you know, a charmer. Claimed Edward Mortimer was his nom de plume. I never knew if he had penned it or not. But in it went. A bit of a joke.’ Ash from her cigarette fell on the paper and she blew it away. ‘A private poem. It can mean anything you want it to. Like a prayer.’

She shivered visibly. She stared, a plump and solemn owl, questions gathering behind the cigarette smoke. ‘Why do you want to know? As a young man you did not exhibit either a great concern or feeling for poetry – although I may of course have misjudged you – now home from the war...’

‘I don’t know. It was just something that was going through my head. Look – thank you very much, Miss Phelps. I’ll be going. Sorry to put you to any trouble.’

I got to my feet and she followed me down the hallway to the door, but at a distance. I opened the door, and then she spoke, ‘His mother had died that winter. I saw it as an obscure elegy for her. Gossip said his father was having an affair at the time. Such a private poem.’

How tiny she was in the gloom of the hall, running a hand through her short grey hair. I apologised again and stepped out into the fog. She came in a rush to push the door to. ‘It’s very important, isn’t it?’ She called after me, a kind of relief in her voice.

‘No, not really,’ I replied, but it was important. I felt as if I was nearly there. I walked home slowly, and each face in the fog was Idwal Morton’s.

 

Laura was in the kitchen, pouring herself a glass of stout. ‘What have we here,’ I said. ‘I thought you’d signed the pledge.’

She kept her face hidden. ‘No jokes required,’ she said and gulped down half a glassful. ‘The wedding will not now take place! He’s changed his mind.’

‘Well – good God – what came over him? I’ll go and sort him out for you.’

She became suddenly vicious. ‘Don’t you think you’ve done enough? All of you? All these terrible things that have happened?’ Laura in tears. ‘Like he said – as a man in business in the town he can’t afford to have his name mixed up...’

‘Can’t afford what? Does he think I’ve been murdering people?’

‘You’ve been involved – and people talk...’

‘The miserable old sod!’ How many wrong things can you say? ‘If you ask me – you’re well rid of the bloody old skinflint!’

Then she looked up, her face stiff as a mask, her voice filmed with ice. ‘Did it never strike you that I liked him?’ I had to look away, and the silence grew around us. I wanted to say I was sorry, but it was too late for that. J. Palmer Roberts’ son – your father always laughed at me.

I was still wearing my raincoat. ‘I have to go out, Laura,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’ But she made no reply.