MILLY STOOD FOR a number of minutes after she had arrived at Mrs Day’s, staring down at the telephone and wondering if she would feel safer if she took the receiver off or if she didn’t. The pale winter sun, higher and higher every day now, was flooding in through the wide window, showing up every finger-mark, every dingy streak, on the elegant white instrument. Milly noticed, wonderingly, that her fingers were fidgeting to get at it with a damp cloth, just as if nothing had happened. They seemed as if they were separate animals altogether, quite unconnected with herself, and with her seething brain, lashing itself into a fever of indecision as to whether to leave the thing alone to do its worst, or to silence it, as could so easily be done. It was like deciding whether to give tranquillisers to a savage guard-dog. To do so, you have to go uncomfortably close, and yet not to do so may result in being torn to pieces later on. There is no way of guessing in advance which will work best: no evidence one way or the other. No one knows, least of all the guard-dog.
Milly picked up the receiver and laid it gently on the polished table, and at once it began muttering at her in feeble protest. Straightaway, like an over-anxious mother with her crying baby, she snatched it up and restored it to its proper place: then wished she had left it off after all. The whimpering would have stopped in the end. Off with it, then—the spoilt thing! —let it whine itself to sleep, with her safely out of hearing! She would shut the door on it, she would run to the other end of the flat and switch the Hoover on till it was all over! Then, at last, her nerves would begin to relax, and she would be able to get on with her work safe in the knowledge that the telephone not only wouldn’t ring, it couldn’t!
Safe? What sort of head-in-the-sand logic was this? By disconnecting the telephone she was cutting herself off from the awareness of danger, not from danger itself. The danger was still there. Biting its nails, perhaps, in some nearby telephone box—maybe only a stone’s throw away—and getting more and more impatient with the monotonous line-engaged tone. Tactics would be changed … and the first she would know of anything amiss would be the sound of the lift moaning to a halt out there across the landing.
By then, it would be too late. Whereas if she left the telephone in working order, she would at least get some sort of advance warning—enough, surely, to enable her to go racing down those six flights of softly carpeted stairs (no lifts, thank you! —she felt trapped enough already!) and out into the wild, wide, windswept world, where surely she would have the same fifty-fifty chance of freedom as a deer, or a fox, or any other hunted thing?
Already she could feel flight mustering in her limbs, speeding-up her heartbeat. Her hand, as she re-connected the telephone yet again, was trembling with a build-up of muscular energy as yet un-needed. From her brain the alert had gone forth, and throughout her body general mobilisation had begun: Milly found it hard, with this turmoil of activity going on within, to slow herself down to the pace of dusting … of handling ornaments … of washing up wine-glasses, putting them away on the high shelf of the cupboard. A slender glass stem snapped, brittle as ice, and tinkled sadly to the floor … Milly felt herself moving among Mrs Day’s fragile possessions like a battering ram. Already the sensitivity had gone from her fingertips, the delicacy from her movements: all her finer sensibilities were already in cold-storage, packed away to leave room for the essentials—strength, speed and cunning.
When the telephone finally did ring, it was almost a relief. Milly knew, now, exactly what she was going to say to them: she was inspired, the lies almost told themselves. No, she would tell them, she wasn’t Mrs Barnes, Mrs Barnes was no longer working here. Oh, yes, there had been a Mrs Barnes, certainly there had, she had worked here until—when was it? Two?—three?—weeks ago. Would that be the Mrs Barnes they were looking for? And no, she was very sorry, she couldn’t tell them where Mrs Barnes was working now she had moved—gone after a job in Birmingham, someone had said. There’d been some sort of trouble about her references, or something, and she’s had to leave in a hurry….
That would fox them! A big place, Birmingham. They could hunt down Barnes-es there for weeks on end, and as fast as they eliminated one lot, another batch would appear … Barnes after Barnes, rolling in without pause over the smoky Midland horizon.
And meantime, the Seacliffe police would have stopped bothering. Once the search had moved out of their district, they would surely lose interest … they must have plenty else on their minds, with hooligans smashing up deckchairs, and everything. And as for the big men in London—Scotland Yard, or whoever it was—surely their enthusiasm, too, would flag once the trail had grown as cold as this? London … Seacliffe … Birmingham … and already the dockleaves and the nettles beginning to sprout on Gilbert’s grave, somewhere or other in the crowded, neglected cemetery you could just see from the top of the bus as you travelled towards Morden.
They didn’t solve all their murder cases: how could they? No doubt they did their best, but you can no more trace every murder to its bitter source than you can trace the course of a stream beyond the place where it merges into marshland, spreading out into a formless no-man’s-land of bog, and reeds, and treacherous patches where, if you are not careful, you can sink nearly to the waist.
Surely Gilbert’s murder stood as good a chance of going unsolved as any? There was nothing newsworthy about it, nothing obviously bizarre to challenge the ingenuity of police or detectives, or to stir the popular imagination. The victim was not a beautiful young girl: the suspect was not a member of high society. If Milly could only put them all off the scent for even a few days, she would be safe. Their other files would begin to pile up … their in-trays to overflow…. After all, the police are only human, and in any human transaction, if you can once get muddle and procrastination working on your side, you’re home.
“Barnes? Mrs Barnes? No, I’m afraid not….” Now that it came to the point, Milly found herself gabbling nervously. The lies, spoken out loud, sounded less convincing than they had in the imagination, and she was hurrying to get to the end of her rehearsed speech before her nerve cracked. “No, I’m afraid there’s no one of that name here at the moment. But there was a Mrs Barnes working here not long ago. I wonder if that’s the one you mean? She left—let me see—two or three weeks ago, I think it must be. Someone told me she was moving—to Birmingham, I think they said….”
“Barney! Have you gone nuts, or something? What the hell do you think you’re playing at?”
“Jacko!” The relief was so great that for a moment it was indistinguishable from the terror that had preceded it, and Milly just stared at the pink wallpaper in front of her, and waited for her blood to start flowing again, and for her brain to start comprehending the miraculous new turn of affairs. “Jacko! Why didn’t you—? Your voice sounded all—! Oh, Jacko, I’m so thankful! I thought you were—!”
“Yes. You sounded like that’s what you thought,” Jacko commented drily, his voice sounding very small and far away. “Look, Barney, what the hell’s going on? Have you got the sack, or something? We rang you about sixty thousand times this morning, and the hag kept saying you didn’t exist….”
“Jacko! At Mrs Graham’s, you mean? So it was you, then, all the time! Oh, but how marvellous …!” The relief, the sudden lifting of fear, was almost more than Milly could sustain. The pale sunlight seemed to dance in the room, the very air shimmered with freedom, such freedom as she had never thought to breathe again.
Was it three breaths of it she drew, or four? Then Jacko’s voice again:
“… and so we tried to put him off, just like we did the Town Hall wallah yesterday, but it was hopeless. He just wouldn’t believe us when we said we’d never heard of you; and you see, Barney, by that time the Mums was poking her nose out of the kitchen, wanting to know what it was all about, so we just couldn’t keep it up any longer. Well, I mean. But I wouldn’t worry too much, Barney, really I wouldn’t. He seems terribly harmless, this one, like he couldn’t hurt a fly if you paid him. He must be about a hundred for a start, you should just have seen his mop of snow-white hair. Said his name was Soames.”