It was, I found, the most difficult night telephone call I had ever made.
No one would describe me as a nervous man. Years of police reporting give a necessary control of all emotion, not merely a command of the show of it. I have seen men hanged, and the raped and mutilated bodies of young women, and children’s bodies that fire has burned, and drowned people on whom fish have been feeding; and for such sights great calmness of spirit is essential. One does not even allow an inward weeping for pity, or for shame at being oneself a man. One looks, and makes notes, and forgets. Nervousness does not come into it.
Yet this telephone call . . . To all the world it was but a routine night call to the headquarters of the criminal investigation branch of the State Police, and all I had to do was to lift the receiver and say ‘C.I.B., please,’ and the girl would say ‘Yes, Mr. Fitzherbert,’ and put me through. Or—though it was less desirable—I could use my own direct line, which I prefer to keep clear for incoming calls, for it is the one the police themselves use, ringing me personally instead of the office switchboard. The digits of my home number are the same—1939—and thus, if I am not on duty, they have merely to use the other call-symbol; the number is, of course, unforgettable.
The general reporters’ room was fairly busy still, though the country edition must have been just going to bed, for it was eleven o’clock. The tide in the harbour would be flooding westwards towards the bridge under a lowering sky. I had waited for that hour, with, as I thought, no feelings whatever. The management had not yet given me a private room and an assistant for full-time duty, and my table was in the big room with eighteen others; I walked about, sometimes, between nine and eleven, talking to one man or another, and sometimes sat at my table thinking, hoping that perhaps my own telephone would ring first. But they never bothered me about suicides unless there were peculiar circumstances, or unless it were very late, when they would ring me at home and I would get into touch with the office from there if there were a chance of catching the final or the city edition. If it was not late, they knew I would ring them as usual, at eleven o’clock.
I am certainly not a nervous man. What I had done I had done without fear or fumbling, cleanly, knowing the way—though it was not easy—and the most probable picture it would all make to the police mind, which is as a rule impatient of suicide. Now, however, I found that my hands were sweating profusely, my throat was dry, and in the lower part of my abdomen there was a trembling, jumping sensation; and I felt again the terrible emotion of triumph mixed with and outweighed by black and utter despair, guiltless yet horrified. I forced myself to think of Alan, to remember that what I had done was done for his salvation, not my own, and that I had him to live for; that now he was safe, that dear and beautiful boy.
It was after eleven. If you knew the office sounds in that vast building, you could hear from deep underground, far below street level, the presses running off the country edition, well away by now. At the airfield, the Gazette aeroplanes, two of them now, would be warming up out on the runway in the silvery blaze of light. One suicide more or less must mean nothing at all to the men and women of the Australian countryside, who are familiar with death in many forms by the violence of fire and water and the blind malice of accident . . .
By water. The perspiration tickled the roots of my hair and beard. I took up the house telephone receiver, and said to the girl on the switchboard in my usual voice, ‘C.I.B., please, Molly.’
‘Yes, Mr. Fitzherbert.’
At this, I felt the excitement and sickness leave me. It was a strong physical sensation, like that of an urgent bodily function timely performed. I sat on the edge of my table swinging one foot and watching the reflection of the ceiling light overhead come and go on the polished toe of that shoe. Often enough I had waited like this for Hubble or one of his men to answer my routine night call, and had been content to wait, assured and at ease. Tonight, it seemed that a long time passed before the harsh click at the other end of the line was followed by the sound of a typewriter working at speed under heavy hands, then by a familiar voice.
‘C.I.B.’
‘Fitzherbert here, Sergeant. Anything doing?’
That question was the climax of the whole business, and—as happens with so many climaxes—I had not realized it was upon me until I spoke. The sweat ran a little way down my wrist even before the sergeant answered; on my shoe the light was still, and the voices and typewriters in the general room where I sat sounded suddenly loud and many.
‘Hullo, Fitz. Nothing much in your line. A gent drove his car over an embankment half an hour ago in Chatswood. Minor injuries. I’ll give you details in a minute. A bit of a do at Kings Cross—the patrol car’s there now, if you can wait half an hour. No details yet. No sign of the chap who got out of the Bay—yes, Manser. Still loose. I’ll let you have some reassuring words about that, too . . . And that’s about the lot. Dull life, isn’t it?’
Sergeant Hubble I liked. He had put more than one good thing in my way, and given me valuable leads without betraying the trust placed in him by his organization. Tonight, however, his cheery and casual voice was that of a stranger, that of a man I was trying without words to persuade to tell me something he did not know, though I knew it. A sudden compelling desire to prompt him had to be suppressed so strongly that I found my teeth were clenched painfully, my body rigid with a species of helpless anguish.
‘Just a minute, Harry,’ I said. ‘I’ll have that Chatswood smash. Is it worth a picture?’
‘Not unless you’re light on. A ten-foot drop, not much damage, no one of importance—not even a pinched car. Are you right?’
Moving into the chair, I changed the receiver to my left hand so that I could write. In his most official voice, deep and clear above the bang and rush and ring of the typewriter in the room with him, Sergeant Hubble gave me the story, and then some pointers about the escapee, Manser, who was also a nobody—not even a dangerous criminal. Because the public (which has a perverse and nervous sympathy for those who evade that justice the public itself has decreed) enjoys reading about such evasions, as well as for the reputation of the force, the police are extremely touchy in the matter of these escapes; and this was the fourth in the State in less than three months. My paper’s policy has always been to play up the police efforts in such cases—in all cases, in fact, from murder down—and in return we have had a most satisfactory co-operation from those strange, suspicious, arrogant and often frightened men whom I have known to be as brave as at times they have been brutal. I listened and made notes; or perhaps I should say Lloyd Fitzherbert listened and made notes, in a neat shorthand on a tidy block of paper, while I, the secret self of that efficient, experienced and even esteemed police roundsman of the Sydney Gazette, stood aside watching with renewed anguish of mind the swift performance of a routine night task. For I had not heard from Hubble what I must hear if I hoped to sleep that night (or, said the subdued, unreasoning voice of despair, to sleep ever again); and, thinking of the tide in the harbour, how it must now be approaching its fullness, I knew it was time; it was time . . .
‘And that’s that,’ Hubble said at last. ‘Make what you like of Manser. He’s been sighted, which means we ought to have him by tomorrow night at the latest. They’re coming in now from the Cross after putting two men and a woman in Darlinghurst for the night. I think it was only a bun-fight. Ring you back. So long.’
He hung up before I could speak again; but that did not matter, for I had nothing to say that could be said to a police sergeant, however friendly. The nauseated sensation came over me again, and the dark and as it were drunken despair of mind. I put the receiver back on its trestle and sat looking at it. This period was one I had only half-foreseen, knowing it must be lived through but not realizing that a nervous exhaustion such as I had known only once before in my life—when Alan was born and my wife of less than two years’ marriage died—would make the endurance of it so hard.
Behind me, the last man on late duty was packing up to go. In the big room, with its barren spread of now vacant tables under the insufficient ceiling lights of white glass, the air was as stale and vitiated as that of an empty theatre after a show. It felt warm, in spite of the bleak May night outside in the streets; I knew that once again the air-conditioning system was out of order on our floor, and the general room, windowless, set in the middle of the building and surrounded by corridors, became at such times almost uninhabitable, and smelt of lavatories. My mind in a sort of frenzy underlined the physical discomfort; I felt I must go out and breathe the cold air of the emptying streets which by comparison would seem sweet. Only when I had typed out my notes taken from Hubble, and was about to carry the copy to the sub-editors and go on down the imposing lower staircase to the street door, did I realize that I was still waiting—I could not yet leave that telephone lying silent as if in exhausted sleep on its rest, not for more than a minute or two. When I did leave—probably at about midnight, perhaps later, if the call I must hear had not yet come—Hubble could briefly be let know I was to be found at home within half an hour; within fifteen minutes . . . A taxi would do it.
The subs had their heads down above the broad table which ran like a great brown polished horseshoe from one door to the other in the inner wall of their room. Unlike the general reporting staff, they could seldom leave their seats at that table during the eight long hours of duty. It was safe to put them into a room with windows overlooking the street—safe and healthy, I suppose. Now for the most part they were absorbed, for it was a busy time, with the cables still coming in from daytime Europe. In the corner annexe which also overlooked the street, the overseas teletype machine kept up a continuous solid rattle and ring, working away on its own as though moved by a human conscience inside its heavy metal case. I left the door open into the passage so that I could hear my telephone if it rang, and took my copy to the basket in front of Blake, the chief sub-editor, who was reading a page-proof. I did not wish now to talk to anyone, but Blake did; he had got the main body of the so-called final edition away, and as usual at this time of night he was bored, and boredom made his thin, sharp, white face with the ginger-red Chaplin moustache and penetrating green eyes look to be consumed with anger. However, as I knew by now, he merely wished for a cup of coffee upstairs in the staff dining-room, and a break away from that table where he must spend more than half the night, five nights out of seven.
Until I put my copy into it, the wire basket was empty. The chief cable-sub was getting paper direct from the teletype machine at the hands of a gum-chewing boy whose face in the harsh light was almost as white, though by no means as thin, as Blake’s. Blake snatched the few sheets out of the basket, glanced at them, called out ‘Bill!’ in a sharp tenor voice that perfectly matched his own red-and-white colour, and sank back in his wooden armchair to look at me at last.
‘Nothing big, Lloyd?’ he said. ‘We’re short of crime. No, seriously. How about going out and committing a nice juicy murder? A man with your experience, you ought to be able to get away with it.’
Such is the untrustworthy state of a mind battling with strong emotion that for the flashing part of a second I was impelled to answer by saying, ‘I have done that once since sunset, and once is enough for a lifetime.’ Instead, I laughed, though I had not meant to, nor to laugh so loudly. The room seemed to echo with it, but no head was raised, no face turned. Only Blake looked slightly surprised, and his thin mouth relaxed into a smile of sudden, complete charm.
‘Oh come,’ he said, ‘it’s not as funny as that. In fact, it’s not funny at all, I know. I did once see a film—or maybe it was in a book I read—where the ace crime reporter goes out and commits the perfect crime, just to make news. Hollywood and the Johnson office being what they are—to say nothing of the deep-seated moral rectitude of the film-going public, or so they say—the poor blighter wasn’t allowed to get away with it. I forget what happened, but I know he was duly and fittingly punished.’
All this was spoken at nervous high speed, and ended with a snap-to of his thin lips, unsmiling again. Blake was said to have been one of the really crack officers of the Australian army during the recent war. Looking at him sitting there bored and impatient in the urgent stillness of that room, I could easily believe this to have been so: with his profound and unconscious personal charm which only his friends were allowed to see went all the secret signs of an impersonal ruthlessness, perhaps cruelty, so perceptible to me that sometimes when I was with him I felt that for him the state of war never had been and never would be ended. He had about him always the air of immediate command, even—as now—in his times of greatest boredom.
My eyes saw him, part of my mind was yet again summing him up, but all the time I listened for the bell of my telephone; and I found I was feeling cold in every part of my body. That laugh had done me no good; it was as though it had come near to shaking loose my grasp on something on which I must retain my strongest hold, or perish. I had turned to go, to cross the room to the door, cross the passage to the big room opposite, with its faintly foul atmosphere, and once more sit at my own table, waiting, when Blake with a muttered exclamation in a tone of impatience and disgust rose from his chair and like a boy vaulted the shining curve at the very centre of the subs’ table, and stood beside me, as still as though he had been there all the time.
‘Come up for some coffee,’ he said. ‘You don’t look your usual self tonight, Fitz. Too much petty crime, no doubt. Come and have a cup of coffee—my shout.’
‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘I’m waiting for the C.I.B. to call me about some trouble at the Cross.’
‘How much?’ he asked instantly, seeming to forget about his cup of coffee. ‘We’re full.’ However much he might pretend, and jump about like a schoolboy, he was never off duty in that office; he had translated his war into an alert battle against space and time—literally—and this he pursued with a vigour of mind equal to that of his lean, trim body. It was thanks to him more than to any other individual that, in spite of the whims and vagaries and occasional rather petulant modifications of policy higher up, the old Gazette had become more concise, cleaner in outline, more readable and so more influential than it had ever been.
‘Three or four inches, I imagine—no more,’ I told him. ‘Keep it for the city if you like.’
‘We’ll whittle a bit more off that Chief Secretary on the sanctity of the kangaroo, if necessary,’ he said. ‘With a little less publicity he might show a little more sense. I don’t know why Scotty insists on using him—except, of course, that he’s always good for sending the correspondence columns mad. Can’t your ’phone call wait ten minutes?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘They’ve all gone home in there. I must stay about for a while.’
He marched away briskly, but with one hand trailing limply along the curved rail enclosing the well of the main staircase, so that it was as though two men, one soldierly, one idle and bored, walked with a single step round and out of sight. I went back to the general room, and just as I reached my table the telephone bell rang. The sound of it gave me a very strange feeling, mixed I think of relief and fear—a fear not for myself but lest even now I should not hear from the police what I could have told them myself hours earlier: for the waiting was becoming almost more than I could bear, I found. Nevertheless, I let the bell ring three times.
The receiver seemed to leap from the trestle to my ear and my mouth. It surprised me to hear my own voice saying with what might have been the weary calm proper to the hour and place, ‘Police rounds. Fitzherbert speaking.’
‘Yes, Fitz—about that Kings Cross rumpus.’ It was Hubble again sounding amused. ‘Have you a boy named Alan, A-L-A-N? If so, he’s in the cells at Darlinghurst. Have you?’
‘Good gracious,’ I said; and I did not know what to think, or indeed how to think at all. The message I had been challenging fate to let me hear was gone from my mind in an instant.
‘Keep calm—if you’re ever anything else,’ Hubble said, laughing. ‘It’s all rather funny. No real damage to anyone except a dog. Here’s how.’
He then told me that a dog-fight had started in one of the better-lighted back streets of Kings Cross, that square mile of passions and violence and bright colours which never quite sleeps. Alan, on his way home from a show I had persuaded him to go to, as a break from hard study (I said), came on the scene just as the man who owned one dog started kicking in the ribs of its opponent; whereat the woman who owned the second dog set upon the man, who took to her with his fists. Alan, it appeared, tackled the tough in his turn, only to find himself up against not merely the man, but the infuriated woman as well. The two dogs apparently pursued their own fight uninterrupted in the half-darkness between lamps, and as for Alan, only the fortunate arrival of the district police night patrol on a routine cruise saved him from probable serious injury; for the man, they found, was wearing a knife.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Thank you, Harry. I don’t think we need to do much about that, do you? How is the boy? Can I get him out?’
‘You can,’ he said. ‘We’ll let him off with a caution to keep the peace. Listen—I thought you Fitzherberts were gentlemen?’
‘We are,’ I said; and like a tide the immediate past flowed and fled over me again, and again I was in imagination prompting him to tell me what no one but myself seemed yet to know. It was with real physical discomfort that I withheld myself from shouting at him, There is a dead woman in the harbour tonight, waiting for you to find her. A dead woman, do you hear? A dead woman, a dead woman . . . It would not really have amused him to think I had gone mad, since we were good friends.
He was speaking again. His voice steadied me, the uproar in my mind quietened, and I remembered Alan with a sudden tender yearning to have him beside me.
‘If you’re free, I’ll pick you up in a minute,’ Hubble said. ‘I’m off at zero—five minutes from now. We can collect the younger Fitzherbert too, and I’ll run you both home. How’s that?’
‘Who takes over?’
‘Smithy.’
‘Leave a message for him to ring me at my home about anything at all, other than drunk and disorderly, and I’ll accept your offer very gratefully. I was going soon, in any case.’
While I listened, he wrote the message for the man next on duty, reading each word aloud as some people do: ‘Ring Fitz Gazette at home for anything above d. and d. . . . Right?’
‘I shall be at the front door in five minutes,’ I said.
When we had hung up, I suddenly saw the night stretching ahead of me, vast, sleepless and terrible. To rid my mind of that vision, I deliberately thought of Alan, whose affair pleased rather than fretted me. It was pleasing to think of what he had done for a mongrel dog (I supposed) in a back street. He would be let out of the cells, and come home with me unaware of what had happened since he left in the morning; I would keep him close, so that even if it were for the last time he might sleep soundly in the room next to mine, the laughter of the whole escapade still lingering about his sleeping mouth, as I had seen it many a time since childhood. He was good, and he was handsome and strong in his body, upon which neither I nor anyone else now had any claim. I felt again that inward melting sensation rather like the heart itself weeping, when I thought of him. His strength was youth, and youth had been his only weakness; and not long ago I had taken care of that, at the same time losing him altogether . . . This thought brought my mind back to the vision of night stretching ahead, as certain and as mysterious as a wet and unknown road stretching beyond the delimiting headlights of a car driven by a stranger. It led somewhere, that was sure. There would be dawn, turning the harbour slowly from light-pricked nothingness to an unfolding mystery of black and silver; aslant the twin bluffs of the Heads, which I could see almost entire from my high bedroom windows, day would break in melancholy tones of yellow and grey and the scraping cries of seagulls above the leaden water would herald the winter sunrise—grey and cold, no doubt, but day indeed, with its feeling of renewed security and purpose; and at some hour between now and I knew not when the telephone would ring, the final message would come.
Only an infinite patience was needed, a patience of the soul itself to withstand yet a little longer the terrible onslaughts of memory and imagination; and I had always been a patient man, never a nervous subject, never . . . until tonight, when something seemed to have been weakened in me, as though by the final spasm of a supreme effort.
In the street it was raining, very softly, little more than a breath of bliss on the night air. Already the city was quiet. Between the clanking rumble of late trams, near at hand and far away in distant streets, I could just perceive—it was both more and less than hearing—the pulse of the presses, deep underground in their brilliantly-lighted chambers of ferro-concrete, a pulse so slight that only one who sought for it would have detected it. Nevertheless it was the pulse of a most violent life, roaring in a muffled scream down there in the earth, where one of the greatest morning papers south of the Line was being printed by hundreds of thousands between now and dawn. Night after night, for more than twenty years, I had been aware of that sound, that terrific activity, and from the first I had never been sure of the rightness and sanity of its purpose, nor ever felt myself to be truly related to it.
The Gazette had long had what seemed to me an influence out of all proportion to its own, or any other’s, value as a daily newspaper. Its history proved beyond argument that the very real power of the Press is based chiefly upon the ignorance of its readers; yet the Gazette had brought about changes in State and Federal Parliaments; it had forced the setting-up of Royal Commissions and caused the downfall of Ministers; the divorce laws, the gaming and betting acts, the licensing act, the administration of public transport and the care of public health and education—with all these it had ever busied itself, as well as sponsoring many charitable causes, to the tune of millions of words and allegedly in the interests of the people and the nation; with an air of having said the last word that could be said, it considered music, letters and the kindred arts, talking pictures, wireless programmes, sport, and the whole political and economic scene; periodically it announced an increase or a decrease in the incidence of crime and other popular diseases; and its comments on international affairs were occasionally quoted round the globe.
And I—I had never felt myself to belong to it wholly, as most other men did, with a sort of contemptuous pride. It is likely that I was never of the stuff of which true newspaper men are made. I was not, above all, sufficiently a nervous man. By upbringing and by tradition I had never learned to yell loudly or to get drunk, to relieve any nervous tension induced by the often freakish exigencies of the life; and so, as the years passed, the need for such relief had diminished and gone, and I had achieved a certain stillness of the spirit which had long stood me in good stead, in the sort of work I was required by the Gazette to do. As Sergeant Hubble had implied not long since, the Fitzherberts were considered to be gentlemen, among the motley throng who had somehow come to be known—to all but themselves—as gentlemen of the Press.
Even as I thought of Hubble, he drew his car up softly alongside me where I was standing near the glistening edge of the sidewalk, looking at but not seeing my own shadow thrown by the light of the main entrance behind me into the more weakly lighted street.
‘Hop in, Fitz,’ he said. ‘Sorry we’re late. Last-minute job that won’t take a moment. Doc Maybee’s in the back there, going to examine a body. You may as well come along.’
I crossed the glare of his headlights to get in beside him on the front seat. For a moment the light blacked-out everything. At the same time my mind seemed to stand still abruptly in its forward movement. I felt it all again—the sweat, the nausea, the overpowering sensation of pervading coldness. So this was it! I had no doubt, no doubt at all; and I found I could not speak, not even to ask a casually curious question that would have needed no thought. Hubble turned from Martin Place into George Street, going north towards the bridge, and towards the city morgue behind the coroner’s court. After a silence he spoke to me again.
‘Fish bait. The vulgar boatmen’ (his term for the water police) ‘netted this one in the harbour off Woolloomooloo. Coming in with the tide, I suppose. They tell me it’s a real beauty—a woman, and not a mark on her. Luck, eh? Only the colour’s wrong for a drowning, it seems, though there was enough water in the lungs. The doc’s going to have a look-see, then we can go. You can do me a service by asking in your rag for help in identification. It appears she’s wearing only night attire—not even a handbag. Inconsiderate, these suicides. By the description I had over the ’phone, she’ll be missed by more than one male tomorrow, if not before. I wonder why they do it?’
Missed, I thought. Missed by Linda Werther, by Kalmikoff, by Alec the caretaker, by the girls at Chez Madame, by a whole crowd of exclamatory foreigners, people who, like her, had come to the country as to a refuge, and had turned much of it into a moral and aesthetic and material bargain-basement. Missed by Alan, by me . . .
Yes, she would be missed soon enough, but—if I knew them—not for long by many among us.
‘Old or young?’ I said at last, to show I had been listening. In the back seat the police surgeon yawned. The car slowed down, turned in the empty street, and came to a halt facing the way we had come, in front of a lighted open doorway. Through the mist of rain under the sickly green pallor of the overhead street lights, this front entry to the house of the dead looked almost warm, almost comforting against the crowding shape of midnight.
‘Young and beautiful, from what I hear,’ Hubble said, easing his big body away from the steering-wheel and backwards through the open driver’s door. ‘We’ll see in a minute. Let’s go.’
‘You don’t want me,’ I said. ‘I’ll wait, if you are not to be long.’
‘Come on, come on,’ Hubble said, with a sort of cheerful impatience. Maybee now stood beside him. ‘It may be murder, for all you know, my boy. Then how would you feel tomorrow, if some of the other lads got it and not you?’
He was amusing himself. He would never have allowed me to be scooped if he could have helped it, and we both knew this. Hubble never let me miss anything. But at that moment, outside the lighted doorway beyond which lay the unwanted dead of the city, dead by accident or by design, I felt my body weighted as though its flesh were lead, as though I must be lifted from the car if I were ever to leave it. The feeling of nervelessness affected even my hands and feet. Hubble and the doctor stood together on the sidewalk.
‘I am rather tired,’ I said, ‘and one cadaver is much like another, after all.’
Hubble, with the light, quick movements of many fat men who have lived active lives, was round the front of the car, at the door on my side, opening it, pulling me out with great firmness.
‘Listen to him,’ he said to the empty street, with laughter in his strong voice. ‘This is a corpse, boy. Cadaver, indeed! This is something to put in your paper.’
I imagined I heard again the tenor voice of Blake: ‘We’re short of crime . . . The ace crime reporter goes out and commits the perfect crime . . . How about going out and committing a nice juicy murder? A man with your experience . . .’
We walked along the lighted passage. Under the brim of his hat Hubble’s face was benevolent and without other expression; in his heavy overcoat he looked enormous. No doubt from habit, he held me by the arm. Quite suddenly his touch made me feel uneasy, and I disengaged myself from his light, friendly grasp. He looked sideways at me, smiling with lips and eyes round his plump red cheek, as we stepped among the echoes of the dark and empty courtroom, from lighted doorway to lighted doorway; and we were there.
I had been thinking very rapidly over what would now ensue. If I had made any plans, done any but the most elementary things in advance, to cover myself, they would not have included arrangements for a visit to the morgue. If I had foreseen this moment, no degree of imagination could possibly have warned me of the feelings which, I found, must accompany it. Clearly, I would have to identify the body; a thing which, did they but know it, I could have done in utter darkness with the fingertips of one hand, or—to be melodramatic—with my very lips. Identity having been established, I must tell all that was necessary to be known of my relationship to the dead woman; and we should need to go to the flat next to my own, where Hubble would find an almost-empty coffee cup and a note—a genuine suicide note, too—addressed to me. The time had come, with the sudden shock of a thunderclap, to act my part; and I perceived very clearly the difference between passive and active participation in such a scene.
Certainly, I had foreseen much of this, but not, as I say, the emotions that went with it, which must be not only hidden but inwardly suppressed, lest they confuse my mind in its present task of making some show of emotions I did not quite feel. As the grey-haired attendant opened a door in the refrigeration unit and began to slide out the tray, I silently made a great call upon that stillness of spirit which is beyond all physical and nervous and mental strength.
I must have closed my eyes for a moment, for suddenly, as Hubble said ‘Ah!’ with deep appreciation in his resonant voice, I looked—and she was there, there before me again.
Her head was turned away, with closed eyes and parted lips as though in sleep. I knew the pose; it wanted only the light of dawn gleaming like pearl upon her shoulder and cheek and arm, and I should have forgotten where I was. However, there was now only the hard overhead glare of an unshaded electric bulb, merciless and brilliant upon her eternal serenity. The dark hair clinging to the skull and swept by some not-unkind hand in a loose coil beneath her right cheek and that shoulder and arm would have lost its subtle human smell mixed with the perfume of geranium—the hair she had cared for with such absorption each night, each morning; now it must smell of salt water and the undying bitterness of the ocean in which she had drifted back to us. Shining but lustreless, clinging close with moisture, it gave her averted head a sexless, formalized appearance belied by all else about her; for the cover had been folded down to her waist, and her hands, closed listlessly as in sleep, were exposed in all their final helplessness, and the ‘night attire’ mentioned by Hubble over the telephone was a loose suit of white nylon pyjamas in which, even when it was not made completely transparent by sea water, she (as I had told her with an irritation I could not control) might just as well have gone entirely unclothed. This very evening I had told her that . . . poor soul, poor doomed and destructive creature with whose fate I had tampered too much.
Her bosom through the fantastic material was actually emphasized, and there, too, was the faint, childish thumb-print that was her navel, the sign of mortality more pathetic and pitiful than any other in the whole estate of the flesh. But what was to me most suddenly disconcerting was the utter absence of movement, of the subtle stirring of breath.
I had not realized how she would look. I suppose I had expected horror, the terrible nibbling depredations of leather-jackets and other small harbour fish, such as I had seen too often before, with the bleached bone and bloodless tissue exposed. Instead, here was beauty, more than she had ever seemed to have in life, even in her most harmless moments when she slept. Now that face, quite free of all expression, robbed me for a moment of breath and caution. I went away and sat on a wooden chair. Hubble and the doctor looked at me: even while I rested my face in my hands I could feel their regard of surprise and wonder.
‘Can’t you take it?’ Hubble said, watching me closely.
‘I know her,’ I said.
There was a short pause. Then ‘Hell!’ Hubble said softly, with great emphasis. He came to where I sat hiding my face in both hands, and rested his own plump hand, gentle now and giving no inkling of its tremendous strength of a former professional wrestler’s hand, on my shoulder.
‘Take it easy then, Fitz,’ he murmured. ‘Take it easy.’
‘It is the surprise,’ I said. ‘I was not ready. I feel rather tired, that is all.’
‘Take it easy,’ he said again. Maybee had turned away and was looking down with an expression of deep thoughtfulness at that averted face. Through my spread fingers I saw him extend his hand and delicately raise one peaceful eyelid; then he went round to the other side of the tray, took from his pocket a pencil torch, raised the eyelid again, and shone the minute beam of light full and steady on the dead, unseeing eye. I felt a passing relief that her face was turned away from where I sat. My view was of her cheek and ear and wet dark hair, and the police surgeon’s swarthy and morose face peering, peering with a look of angry concentration into the terrible emptiness of the exposed eyeball. With what seemed an enormous effort, I restrained myself from jumping up and rushing at him to dash the little torch from his hand, to cover again that bared torso with its look of indescribable virgin innocence, and to hide beneath the sheet that lovely sleeping face of clay.
Hubble removed his hand, and I let mine fall on my knees, and looked up at him.
‘My identification will be all you will need,’ I said; and the time had come to speak with an exquisite care I feared might be beyond me. ‘She is known as Irma Francis or Irma Martin. She has lived in the flat next to ours for three years. Martin is an Anglicized form of Maartens—Dutch. Francis was a professional name—she modelled women’s clothes at a shop in town here. Actually I believe she was Lithuanian, part-Jewish, with a name no one but her Lithuanian friends—if she had any—could have pronounced, even had they known it, which I understand they did not. She claimed to be Dutch, anyhow. Irma Martin. Or Francis. A mannequin.’
The room was very cold, but again I felt the perspiration prick my hair and beard, and the palms of my hands were damp again. Yet this was not because of any fear. I must suppose it was caused by the not inconsiderable effort of telling Hubble all he needed to know, yet telling nothing he would not have found out for himself.
‘Her legal name,’ I said slowly, looking up steadily at him as I spoke, ‘is Irma Fitzherbert. As you said, the Fitzherberts call themselves gentlemen. We were married three years ago, with two old men, strangers picked up outside the registrar’s office, for witnesses. Besides them and the registrar, you are the only person who knows of this. My son does not know. Her friends did not know. We each had reasons for not appearing to be more than old and close friends. I can tell you about that some other time.’
‘So long as it has nothing to do with—this.’ He gestured with his elbow, keeping his hands in his pockets.
‘Nothing more I could possibly tell you has anything at all to do with it.’
It was my first lie, but for the moment I did not realize that. In spite of that inward stillness beyond life and death, beyond fear and desire, I felt my voice tremble on the brink of uncontrol; and at once I saw there was no danger to myself in allowing it to become uncertain. Hubble was staring into my face with a mild look of mixed incredulity and compassion. It was one of the few times when I had known him to look anything but cheerful or officially expressionless.
‘As for this, itself,’ I said, satisfied that my voice was still noticeably shaken, ‘I cannot tell you anything about it. I do know she had been subject to fits of inconsolable depression and would talk rather wildly about killing herself’ (this I had heard from Miss Werther, long ago) ‘probably because she had been through such hell before she escaped from Europe.’
‘A Communist,’ Hubble said quietly, as though to himself; but I was not sure of the ground there; I felt I should answer his comment.
‘She had been a Party member, in Europe, and had left the Party. She told me only a little of it, but quite enough to explain her occasional states of mind that were like a sort of insanity. Yet when I saw her last, late yesterday afternoon, she was perfectly happy and cheerful.’
It was true. As I handed her the cup of black coffee, which she took very strong with much sugar and a tablespoon of brandy in it, she had been laughing . . .
‘She talked so easily of suicide, now and then, that I firmly believed she could never do it. I was sure she was incapable.’
Above all, I must not let him know she had once tried to take her own life.
‘It is a hard thing for me to consider,’ I said. ‘As you know, my Church considers it one of the basest sins—something inconceivable to the ordinary mind.’
‘How long have you known her?’ Hubble said suddenly.
‘A long time, I suppose. I saw her first on the ship when she arrived with other refugees in nineteen thirty-eight. Quite a while afterwards, I met her again by chance, at a friend’s flat. Little by little we became friends, at first because I was sorry for her, and later for other reasons. I was able to be helpful to her once or twice. Three years ago she agreed to marry me. That is all.’
‘That’ll do for now, Fitz. I’m dam’ sorry you had to find it out like this. If I hadn’t insisted on dragging you along . . .’
He touched my arm and turned away.
‘Anything unusual, Doc?’
‘One of the opiates, and a hell of a lot of it,’ Maybee said. I could clearly hear their murmured talk, subdued for my sake in that place where lowered voices mattered no more. With a quick, casual movement the surgeon unfolded the cover and flicked it upwards, so that she was gone from sight completely, and there remained only the hinted outlines of a lifeless anonymity stretched out under the harsh glare of the light overhead. I knew I should never see her again.
‘They got water out of her lungs, Doc.’
‘They might have. One breath, perhaps. This stuff had about done its work when she went in, I’d say at a guess. Better fix it for tomorrow, Hubble.’
Hubble murmured something hurriedly, and then raised his voice a little to speak to me.
‘Would you like us to go on ahead and wait, Fitz?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I had better come with you. We ought to go up to the flat straight away, if you don’t mind. There may be something.’
‘Right,’ he said. ‘The doc will want a p.m., you know. Mind?’
‘Nothing,’ I said, ‘can hurt her now. Why should I mind? It is all part of the job.’
I saw the look of slightly puzzled embarrassment about his steady eyes and full, firm lips.
‘Queer devil,’ he said, as if to himself. ‘Perhaps you’re right, Fitz. Part of the job. Perhaps you’re right. But look—what about that boy of yours?’
‘Later,’ I said. Now Alan would have to know—tonight; by far the worst was yet to come, I thought. ‘He’s in good hands where he is. Let us go to the flat first. He need not know about this yet. They were tremendously fond of one another, in spite of the age difference. It will be a shock to him.’
More than anything else in this affair, I had plagued myself with thoughts of how Alan would take it. At the moment, it seemed to me best that he should stay where he was, safely locked up where I could find him when it was time. A growing anxiety to return to the flat next to mine, in the company of this friendly and intelligent police sergeant, this professional detective, now quite obsessed me. As we went out the attendant came back wiping his lips; when he gave us good night as he passed, I could smell he had been drinking tea, and that made me hungry, for I had had no proper meal that night. In the passage, I heard behind us the tray slide home into the cold blackness, and the soft and final closing of the airtight door. They were sounds I heard with something of relief, something of reawakened old despair. Then we stepped out into the greenish-black air of night in the empty street. The small rain was still falling.
In the car, driving back along George Street towards the centre of the city, Hubble and Maybee were silent, until the sergeant, as though reaching the end of a train of thought, said suddenly, ‘Now then—your story, Fitz. “The body of a young woman clad only in pyjamas was found by Sydney Water Police late last night floating in the harbour off Woolloomooloo Bay. The dead woman was later identified as Miss Martin or Maartens, also known as Irma Francis, age so-and-so, a Dutch migrant who had worked in Australia as a professional mannequin. Medical examination indicated that the dead woman had taken a large quantity of a—a sleeping-draught, and police believe she may have entered the water while not fully aware of what she was doing. This theory is borne out by the fact that death was caused by drowning. Detective-Sergeant Hubble of the C.I.B. is in charge of investigations.”’
After a pause, he said with a coldness I guessed was affected, ‘Is that in the best Gazettese? I think it tells the truth without bringing in personalities.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘That will do very well. To tell you the truth, I was wondering how to put it.’
‘And some day,’ he went on, as if he had not heard me, ‘you can tell me the whole story.’
His voice now was as cold and heavy as a stone. I took a deeper breath, but he was too quick for me.
‘Don’t interrupt, Fitz, until I’ve said what I’m going to say. Whether you like it or not. Firstly, I don’t mind telling you it looks a dam’ funny way for any woman, especially a young and beautiful one, to put her own light out. Apparently she had enough of whatever drug it was to do her business, so why the water? Did she think of the water first, and take the dope to make it easier and to make certain? That’s possible, I know. We’ve had these double-header jobs before and they’re always puzzling. But usually they use a rope for their second string, so to speak. You know that yourself. Was she worried about what she’d look like afterwards? Suicides nine times out of ten are what you writers call consumed with vanity. They are. If she had that in mind, she forgot the fishes and sharks et cetera in our lovely harbour. It’s only luck that they got her so soon, that she’s not unrecognizable at first glance. How long would you say she’d been in, Doc?’ he said in a louder voice, without looking away from the upward incline of William Street, now almost empty of traffic, which we were ascending at some speed towards the sleepless brilliance of Kings Cross.
Maybee said glumly, ‘Hard to tell. Anything from two to six hours, at a guess. My guess is no better than yours. All I can tell you is that she must have been alive when she went in, if they got water from the lungs. Whether she was conscious or not is another matter. The p.m. may give us some idea. You can make that for eleven o’clock if that suits Weatherall.’
‘Right . . . How would she get in if she wasn’t conscious? The answer is either A or B. A says she might fall in. B says she might have been pushed or dropped in.’
I felt compelled to interrupt at last.
‘B would be murder.’
‘Right.’
‘Impossible.’
He laughed through his nose briefly.
‘Fitz, Fitz, nothing’s impossible when you’re dealing with human frailty. You of all people should know that. Had she any enemies—people, foreigners, who might want her out of the picture? You know what these refugees are. Had she?’
‘Ten years ago I would have said “perhaps” to that,’ I told him. ‘Anyone who leaves the Party always has enemies, depending on how important the apostate may have been as a member. She was . . . just a member, I imagine, and on the other side of the world. No, I know of no enemies in the last few years, none at all.’
Except herself, I might have added, and it might or might not have sounded right to Hubble in his present state of mind. I said no more.
‘Well,’ he said, with a sort of reluctance, ‘I suppose you’d be the one to know. All the same, I agree with what you said. When they talk a lot about suicide they seldom do it . . . Look here, Fitz, don’t misunderstand me. I’m sincerely and deeply sorry about it for your sake. But for me it’s a job—just another job. I have to get these things out clean with no tangles or implications or loose ends. The fact that you and I’ve been friends for donkeys’ years mustn’t be allowed to make any difference. When I say I hope for your sake it was suicide, don’t get me wrong. If it had happened to be murder, your own part in the story would have had to come out, and I quite realize you don’t want that. Jesus—how the Sunday papers would go to town about you. What was it they called you that time—“the neatly-bearded and aloof Mister Lloyd (‘Sherlock Holmes’) Fitzherbert, bright boy of the Gazette’s secret sleuthing department”, wasn’t it?’
‘It’s more for the boy’s sake,’ I said, ‘than for my own. He knows nothing of the marriage, and I think it would upset him a good deal if he found out about it now, in that particular way. Some day I shall have to tell him, of course . . . Not that you could call it much of a marriage, in any case, I suppose.’
In the back seat the morose police surgeon laughed suddenly and harshly.
‘You people will never face the facts about women,’ he said, ‘all you bloody gentlemen and policemen. No man on night duty and on call at all hours should ever think of marriage. Who’s ever known a happy doctor’s wife? Unless she had a second string to her bow, as most of ’em have. It’s so obvious. It’s only at night that women have any use for a man. Bloody nuisances in daylight. Ask any house-frau.’
We reached the Cross. Light seemed to swallow us; the coloured glare of the neon signs made the face of humanity into a livid mask. By contrast with the empty city streets we had just left, the place was still restless with life, sleepless and hectic, a gleaming nightmare of faces and eyes seen as it were through greenish-red water, drowning. We had turned cautiously left into Darlinghurst Road, the street of greatest activity at any hour. At this time of night people were walking in the roadway without care, and the clearest sound, rising above the throb of engines and the scraps of music like torn flags in a wind, was the intermittent blare of taxi-cab horns. When we were forced to halt for some seconds at the Springfield Avenue corner, the voices reached us; and I thought again, as always, how there must be less English spoken in this quarter than in any other equivalent area in the whole country. As the world’s most thickly-populated district of comparable size, it had long ago become a refuge within a refuge. Every foreigner who landed from Sydney harbour or stepped to earth at Mascot aerodrome knew of the Cross already, and went there as though drawn by an irresistible passion, there to fade—if he chose—into a consoling anonymity until, like the beetle or the butterfly from its chrysalis, he was ready to emerge, full of plans for conquest.
Irma had come here from her ship, she told me; and I knew she had never lived anywhere else in Sydney, never sought or thought of another refuge until she was driven to it; for here she felt at first she had reached her Ultima Thule, the end and the beginning of the world. Like thousands of others in the years just before the second world-war and during it, she felt the safety of the place, its air of plenty, the security of many tongues, most of which she herself knew, and the more animal security of the herd actuated by one itching idea, which was, as I had learned with dismay and a sort of shame, to outwit the Australian hosts in every way, at every turn in every affair, however small. It was when I myself had become a dupe, a voluntary victim of this almost unconscious intention striking at my most real life, my integrity and my very self—it was then that I had been driven, by a force beyond analysis and so beyond proper control, to act.
‘Thank God for the Cross,’ Hubble was murmuring; and he seemed to have forgotten the matter to which he had been giving such cold, intense thought two minutes earlier. ‘Where would we poor policemen be without it? Crime—I dote on it. Don’t you?’
‘Like you,’ I said, ‘I live by it. If it interests me, it is for reasons you would not understand.’
‘Ho-ho-ho.’
At the end of Darlinghurst Road we turned right, and the car’s headlights swept through sudden comparative gloom and silence. Through the cleared half-moon of glass before me, on which the windscreen-wiper was working with awkward urgency, I could see the wet street above which the night brooded, heavy with rain. We were going downhill now, to the maze of dead-end streets at water-level on the city side of Rushcutters Bay; we were nearly home. Again the despair, the fruitless sense of completion, the loneliness, came upon me, as for days past they had done hereabouts when in the small hours I made my way back, usually on foot from the Cross, to my own flat night after night, knowing that only a wall divided from each other the only two people I had ever fully loved, disinterestedly with my mind as well as with my heart and, indeed, all my flesh, all my spirit, my whole self. Now the two flats would be empty.
‘Right at the end still, isn’t it?’ Hubble said doubtfully.
‘Right at the end, on the right.’
‘On the very edge of the water.’
‘Almost in the water. The harbour-side foundation is carried straight ahead to make a tidal breakwater for the swimming pool belonging to the building.’
We ran gently down the last incline, almost as steep as a ramp, and stopped before the dimly-lighted front entrance. When he cut off the engine, a profound silence enveloped us, emphasized by the faint contracting clicks of hot metal cooling under the bonnet. This was one of the quietest parts of the whole city, for the streets were all culs-de-sac, and there was no passage for through traffic within half a mile. Cars could not even approach at speed without risk, and the noise of accelerated departures up the steep street was always a diminishing noise; nor did we whose flats faced north-east, looking out across the vast beauty and peace of the outer harbour, hear any sounds of street traffic at all—nothing but the hush and splash of the ocean, landlocked and serene, against the breakwater and the boat-house piles, the grating screams of the grey gulls shearing for ever across the sky’s huge disclosure, and the mild and distant sounds of the ceaseless traffic of the sea as the ships came and went, by night and by day . . . Yes, it was a place of peace, where the spirit could, if it would, be still.
This time I led the way, and Maybee stayed in the darkness of the rear seat, smoking in silence. The caretaker’s small flat was on the floor below street level, and while Hubble waited I went down the single unlit flight of stairs, and rang the bell. It was a bad hour in which to wake a man out of his first sleep. For some time there was no answer. I tossed up my keys to Hubble and told him to go up to the third landing and let himself into the flat next to mine. A deep silence filled the building, for it was almost one o’clock, and though we who were tenants lived near the Cross we had, for the most part, suburban habits. Irma was the only one, besides myself, who had kept late hours; and now, of course, time would never again mean any more to her than she meant to time, or to me. She was gone, and sometimes during this long night my own desire to live had wavered, as though willing to be gone with her; and only the thought of Alan, so young and proud and bright with happiness and intelligence, had steadied and fed the flame of that desire when it seemed to weaken within me.
I realized now, as I listened to Hubble’s ascending steps soften into silence on the carpeted stair, that never again would I return home in the hours after midnight to find her lying on the blue rug, open-eyed and quite motionless before her low-tuned wireless receiver, listening to foreign broadcasts; never again would she pull me down on to the floor beside her, roughly and without a word, and invariably begin to rub my hair with almost ruthless fingers until, although refreshed by this and by her bodily nearness, I could bear neither without moving for a moment longer.
Standing down there in the dark, I felt very tired. No sound of movement could be heard from Alec’s little flat, and I pressed the bell-button a second time, holding it down a little longer. The abrupt opening of the door inwards, away from my face, startled me, but in spite of the sensation of profound weariness, I had command of myself; and in any case, I am not a nervous man. Alec’s daughter, prepared I think to be indignant, stood against the light of the small entrance hall, wearing like a cloak a woollen dressing-gown that partly concealed her winter pyjamas. She was still half-asleep.
‘It’s Lloyd Fitzherbert, Emmy,’ I said quietly. ‘I’d like to see your father for a minute.’
‘’S asleep, Mr. Fitz,’ she struggled to say. ‘Won’t I do?’
Alec had no wife alive, but had got his job of caretaker on the understanding that his daughter shared the work and the living quarters with him. He once told me she was better than any wife, as she would not bother to quarrel with him and took his mild orders obediently; and it is certain that this was one of the best-cared-for buildings in the whole rabbit-warren of a residential district in which it unobtrusively stood. It is no less certain that I never knew a young woman, as generally presentable as Emmy, who gave such an immediate impression of having no private life of her own whatever.
‘I think you had better get him up for me,’ I said; and though we spoke only in casual murmurs, our voices seemed to echo up the stair-well with a ghastly hollowness, like the voices of conspirators in a cellar.
She went away from the door, and I heard her call her father in a hushed and regretful tone, and heard his sudden answer in the brisk voice of a man who wishes to be thought wide awake and expectant. A minute later he came himself, owl-eyed in the light, hitching his dressing-gown about his shoulders.
‘What’s trouble, Mr. Fitz?’ he said in a surprised voice.
I told him, and explained that I wanted his master-key. I did not tell him Hubble had used my own duplicate and was already in the flat next to mine.
‘Don’t go to bed for a few minutes,’ I said. ‘There is a police detective with me who may want to ask you a few purely formal questions, as you are in charge here. It is for him I want the key.’
Speechless, he took a ring of keys from somewhere behind the door, looked at them and pushed them about until he could isolate a particular one. I saw he was well awake by now; when he spoke at last, it was with his own peculiar intonation and emphasis which always put me in mind of some radio comedian I had once heard on a B.B.C. programme.
‘That one is her key,’ he said in his queer falsetto voice. ‘There is no master key, Mr. Fitz, but that one is hers. Or . . . should I say—er—was? Dear me. This is indeed a dreadful thing, and you and your boy and her such friends. Dear me, what a dreadful thing. I do hope, Mr. Fitz, it doesn’t get in the papers, I mean to say, the flats, you know—it’s the letting what I’m thinking of, Mr. Fitz. People don’t like it, goodness knows why, but they don’t.’
‘We’ll keep the address out of it, Alec,’ I said. ‘Just wait for a minute or two, and I’ll call down to you if Sergeant Hubble wants you.’
‘As you say, Mr. Fitz,’ he said rather doubtfully; and I left him there in the doorway with his pinched, precise face turned up as he watched me go with some anxiety, and began the climb up that so-familiar stairway to the third landing and—as I hoped—the beginning of the last act in this drama of my own devising, which would be almost at an end when I brought Alan home. It was a heavy and an interminable ascent, for while my will led me up and on with desperate determination, my whole body was in open rebellion now, and I had actually to resist a strong urge to sit down on the top step of the first flight and lean my forehead against the coldness of the pale-green wall. Only the knowledge that Hubble was in her flat, alone, drove me on without a pause. When I reached the landing I saw the lighted doorway, and saw his bulky shadow move slowly across the slab of light on the corridor carpet outside it. Without hesitation I went in to join him. One look about, as I entered the big room from the entrance lobby, assured me that all was as it should be. Hubble, very solid and serious in his heavy overcoat, stood still now in the middle of the deep-blue carpet. His regard met mine without suspicion, with—I thought—an expression of simple compassion at last.
‘There’s a note for you on the radio,’ he said. ‘I want you to tell me, for the sake of formality, if it’s her handwriting. If you have any letters of hers you’ve saved, you’d better show me one. Just formality, you know. The note about settles it, I think.’
I took up the note with both hands. In these matters you cannot be too careful, particularly under the very eye of the police; and that folded sheet of paper, did he but know it, already had my finger-prints on it, as well as Irma’s. I did not enjoy this active deceiving of a man who had long been my good friend, but I had determined that it should be he, and no one else from his branch if possible, who would be with me at this moment, for now much depended upon his casual goodwill towards me. It must be understood that I was thinking throughout not of myself and my own safety, but of Alan. Once determined upon, once begun, the business must not be botched through any over-confidence of mine, for the boy’s whole well-being depended upon me now.
Our friends, as well as those who love us much, are of course our easiest dupes. I had recently tasted this duplicity myself, and was as yet no judge upon it; but it was then that, by the action of that terrible and subtle poison, part of my inner self had withered and died, in a space of minutes, like green leaves in a quick fire. Not for the world would I have had Hubble experience, through my own action, anything like this.
I read the note. Though I knew it by heart, I read it again with an irresistible fascination now, for now, after so many months, it had true and fatal meaning. That meaning I myself had infused into the half-hysterical words so clearly and neatly written:
‘Lloyd darling, I have no world of my own and can’t can’t live in yours any more. I look at the water of the beautiful harbour and it calls me all night and day even when I sleep. So I am going. This time it is true. I thank you for loving me so kindly and I kiss you
Goodbye Fitzi darling—IRMA’
After handling the paper a little more, turning it over as though seeking some added word, some more definite explanation of that least natural of all human actions, suicide, I held it out to Hubble.
‘You’ll want this, I suppose,’ I said. ‘It’s certainly her handwriting.’
Without speaking he took it, folded it, and put it neatly into his large wallet. Then he walked to the window, and from the light folding table that always stood there, at which we had taken so many good and happy meals, he lifted up the empty glass tube by sliding a pencil into it. Turning back to the room, he waved it briefly at me.
‘Morphine hydrochloride,’ he said conversationally. ‘Quarter grains. I wonder how much there was in this? Did you know she had the stuff?’
‘I knew she used to have it. She used it with a needle, she told me, years ago when she had some painful trouble—I think she brought it into the country with her. A great many of them—the refugees—did that. They carted the stuff about with them wherever they went in Europe, after nineteen thirty-three, I believe—only it was usually one of the cyanides. In small glass capsules that could be hidden, or even swallowed unbroken and recovered. You will know all about it, I expect. She had one of those too, but I threw it into the harbour. About the morphine, she told me she had lost that years ago. She must have come across it again since. I could not disbelieve her, anyhow. Possibly she got more. They used to get those things easily enough from Jewish chemists in Europe. You know what the casual traffic in it was like here after nineteen thirty-nine. They were the people responsible, the refugees. And it all began because they were frightened even of Australia. They made sure they had a way out. Apparently she did too. If I had known she had that . . .’
I left it to him to finish the sentence, for although not a nervous man, I am a bad hand at telling lies.
‘If you’d known, she might be still alive, you mean?’ Hubble said softly. ‘Well, Fitz—maybe. But in view of that note I doubt it. She meant business, Fitz. But why in God’s name do they do it?’
I sighed. He was not, in his manly kindness of heart, to know that it was a sigh of relief, as well as of utter weariness and that sick despair which I could neither understand nor fight down. All was now ended—all but the task of getting Alan home and telling him, somehow without lying, of Irma’s fate; and such was my unforeseen relief at Hubble’s last remarks that this task did not now seem so hard in prospect. Often before tonight I had consoled the boy’s grief and hidden my own caused by the sight of his; I could do it again, I could do it as long as I lived, for this love knows no exhaustion, asks no return; it is like the spring of water near Hill Farm, in the mountains: no man has ever known it to falter or dry and cease from flowing.
‘I’ve looked round,’ Hubble said. ‘There’s that coffee cup on the radio—can you find me a bottle of some sort, I’ll take the dregs for Maybee. It’s likely she took the stuff in that.’
In the kitchen, off the small passage that opened upon the service-staircase outside, I looked about for a small container. The complete tidiness of the place, scrubbed and immaculate as though never used, gave me again that subtle feeling of pleasure I had always had when looking at the indications of her manner of living; for she was tidy and clean to a truly exquisite degree, yet in so casual a manner that one never seemed to catch her at it. This was especially true of her person, though her natural physical perfection was nothing at all like the aseptic and repellent American magazine-advertisement sort, but arose and emanated rather from an abundance of good health and her use of leisure for being idle than from the pursuit either of health or of leisure so miserably characteristic of the age. I never knew a woman with her capacity for immobility and ease. Like her strange, animal ability to sleep at will, from which I think it sprang, it was at first disconcerting, though in time I learned its virtue and lost my earlier desire to make her move and speak; to ask—like any love-sick boy—‘What are you thinking about?’ Her reply, which in another woman might have sounded foolishly affected, was the simple truth: ‘I think of nothing at all. My mind is a blank, so do not talk to me, darling.’
I could hear that voice with its light, strong, un-English inflections and accent as I opened the doors of the cupboard under the shining sink. It was so clear in my hearing, memory was so faithful and vivid, that an inadvertent thrill of intense, unreasonable happiness passed through my nerves and seemed to lodge like an obstruction in my throat, bringing a sting of tears, while I bent down to search for one of the small brandy flasks she kept for replenishments, to lace her morning and evening coffee with the spirits. I had forgotten she was dead.
‘Fine,’ Hubble said, when I took the little flat bottle in to him. ‘Did she drink much of this, by the way?’
‘Two tablespoons a day,’ I said. ‘One in the morning, one in the evening, always in coffee. She considered it a sort of tonic medicine. Otherwise, she drank wine sometimes with meals. Not always. She was as abstemious as—as I am myself.’
Hubble laughed softly as he drained the porcelain coffee cup with delicate precision into the flask.
‘What a nice sober couple you must have been, then,’ he said. ‘Personally, I could do with a drink right now.’
‘When you are ready,’ I said, ‘we can go next door and you can have some whisky, if that will do. I have the caretaker waiting, if you want to see him.’
‘Fine,’ he said again without much interest. ‘Better see him, I suppose. He may be able to give us some idea of the time.’
While he took the empty cup and its saucer to the kitchen to rinse them—for, like some fat men and not all police officers, he was a neat and tidy fellow in all things—I looked in at the bedroom. It was, of course, just as I had seen it last, like the rest of the flat, not many hours before. On the white dressing-table lay her hairbrush which I had picked up from where it fell out of her hands; and I thought I could see still on the bedcover the faint imprint of her half-conscious form, though I had smoothed the ruffled material after I got her off the bed and into a chair in the big room. Neither of us would ever wake again in that firm and comfortable bed, as until recently we had so often done when the light of dawn warned me that it was time to go softly back to my own flat. I supposed that to the rest of the world it would have seemed a fantastic marriage, had the facts of it been known; but as it was it suited us both very well, for there was something innocently clandestine about it besides the freedom of movement made possible by those two separate and adjacent establishments, each of which one of us commanded without question.
Standing there just inside the doorway, breathing her most intimate atmosphere for the last time, while she lay cold and lifeless in an airtight refrigeration chamber, a body among other unwanted bodies each in its narrow deathly little cell, I decided that Alec should arrange with the owners, if possible, to purchase the entire furnishings of the flat for what they cared to pay, so that like certain others in the building it could be rented furnished. I would probably never enter or see into it again, and I was not inclined to have anything more to do with what had belonged to her, even though many of the material things I myself had given her cried out softly to be remembered and taken away. Miss Werther could look after it—that would be better still, better than Alec. For the rest, all was ended tonight, all, and there must be no loose threads. On this I was absolutely determined, just as I was determined that Alan too should never come in here again. There must be no loose threads for him either, for youth can become entangled in such things more easily even than maturity, to its own confusion.
I became aware that Hubble had returned to the room behind me and was waiting, so I switched off the bedside lamp at the door switch and closed the door. As I turned to him I saw again that look of simple compassion in his blue friendly eyes.
‘Shall we go?’ he said. ‘There’s nothing more, I think.’
The place suddenly felt dead and empty, as though no one had ever lived there. I looked at none of it as we let ourselves out; I would have welcomed the suggestion of a haunting ghost, but there was no ghost, nothing but a still emptiness containing nothing, expecting no one.
There was still much to be done, and I clung to that thought. When Hubble was settled in my flat, I went down and called Alec from the first landing, apologizing for having kept him out of bed for so long. He followed me up in silence. No doubt the thought of meeting a policeman professionally in some way outraged his law-abiding soul. But Hubble was all kindliness and brevity now, when he questioned him.
‘I heard her wireless,’ Alec said in a more confident tone. ‘That would be at seven p.m., sir, because I had just gone up to look at one of the off-peak hot-water tanks, and it was coming down I heard it, quite a while after Mr. Fitz, I should say Mr. Fitzherbert, had gone off to the office, which is why I remember, for as you know Mr. Fitz and Alan was very friendly with Miss Martin, poor thing, and they was always in and out of one another’s flats when at home. Oh—I hope I do not divulge unwanted information, Mr. Fitz?’
‘Go ahead, Alec,’ I said. ‘Did you hear the wireless stop?’
‘No, sir, but one of her friends came, and when he knocked he could not get an answer, so he came downstairs to me and says was Miss Martin out? and I says not that I am aware of, because mostly I hear the tenants come and go, and he says “Well,” he says, “she does not answer her door so I presume,” he says, “she has gone out, though she was expecting me.” So I said to him, “Well . . .”’
‘What time was this?’ Hubble asked gently. Alec, interrupted, looked confused for a moment; his fixed stare over Hubble’s head wavered and came back to the present.
‘About eight o’clock I think it was,’ he said.
‘And what was the visitor like?’ Hubble asked.
‘Like, sir? He was one of these foreigners, very foreign in his way of speaking, with a big dark mo and glasses.’
‘Kalmikoff,’ I said. ‘He’s a musician, an irritating fellow she seemed to have known for years. One of those fugitives from Communist Russia who become rabidly communist the moment they reach a country of refuge. Like most of them, he is quite futile and harmless—irritating to talk with, but an excellent musician. You may have heard of him, even if you have not heard him play. He is a violinist.’
‘I may have heard of him,’ Hubble said. ‘As for music, I know nothing about it. Did he stay or go?’ he asked Alec.
‘Him? Oh—he went away, sir, and rather angry I should say he was, muttering to himself in some foreign lingo. I went upstairs again, but Miss Martin had turned her wireless off, and if she has gone out, I thought, why, she has been pretty quiet about it. Most likely she didn’t want to see this chap, I thought, but too kind to say so. She was always very kind in that way, sir. And that is all I know.’
His information could not have satisfied me more if I had dictated it to him myself. Fortunate fellow, he would return to sleep not knowing that when he had heard her wireless tuned to Radio Luxembourg—the only foreign station I knew how to find—Irma was already dead in the early darkness of the placid harbour beyond the breakwater; while I, not she, had heard his quick steps softly pass that door and continue the descent towards dinner and a peaceful evening with the papers and the commercial broadcasting programmes. Before Kalmikoff banged at the door, before Alec returned to listen, I had gone by the way I came after my earlier and more ostentatious departure.
‘Thank you,’ Hubble said. ‘This is quite helpful. And now you had better be off to bed—catch up on your beauty-sleep, lucky man.’
Alec made a sudden clucking noise, his queer way of laughing, and went towards the door, saying, ‘Beauty-sleep. That’s a good one. Wait till Emmy hears that one. Good night, sir, good night Mr. Fitzherbert . . . Beauty-sleep!’
He let himself out and clucked softly downstairs. Hubble smiled at the closed door while I set out whisky and a soda-water siphon on the book-table beside my reading chair where he sat, and poured us a stiff peg each. As he took the tumbler, he motioned with his head at the telephone on my work-table in the corner near the windows.
‘Hadn’t you better ring your office?’ he said. ‘Then we’ll go and get that boy of yours out of the clutches of the law. He must have cooled off enough by now.’
‘What about Maybee?’ I said. ‘Would he join us?’
‘Don’t bother him. He’s most probably asleep, if I know the doc. A hard-working, hard-tongued chap, but one of the best. Now.’
I went to the table and unlocked the only drawer in the whole place that had a key to it. It contained my small revolver, which I had bought and had licensed in my early, youthful days on police rounds, and had never used; and weighted down by this were some half-dozen letters from Irma which for reasons of somewhat weakly sentiment I had kept, meaning always to destroy them yet somehow never being quite willing to part with them or anything else that had been hers. I had never looked at them again. The most recent one, more than three years old, I took out and carried to Hubble where he sat holding his glass near his mouth, enjoying the whisky and at the same time smoking his pipe for all the world as though he were seated by his own fireside. I was pleased to observe the finality of his relaxation; it made my own mind easier, and I filled and lighted a pipe for myself. Then I went back to the table and sat down, and took up the telephone receiver to speak to Blake. As I did so, it occurred to me that I had never had and now never would have that telephone call on which my whole future had seemed to hang; and this I took as a warning not to count on the preconceived mechanics of a carefully devised situation when such a situation depends however lightly upon tides and men and other factors not mechanical.
‘Thanks,’ Hubble said, coming over when I had given Blake the brief story. (‘Can’t you do better than a bloody suicide, Fitz? Give us blood, man,’ Blake said when I had finished.) ‘That puts it beyond doubt.’
He was holding out the letter, looking down at me, his fat, strong face serenely quizzical and apologetic. We met each other’s gaze for some seconds; then he smiled.
‘Don’t forget what I said earlier. One day you can tell me the whole story. You can answer all the questions you know I haven’t asked you . . . And now let’s go and get that precious boy of yours.’
It was then that I decided to write this down, as time allowed, partly to ease my soul of a burden I had not even then foreseen, partly to help memory shrug off the weight of what is now past and irrevocable. Until I die, it can remain in that locked drawer with the useless revolver and the now meaningless letters from the woman I loved, for whose death may God forgive me in the end.