Connie was being raided7…
It was at the Moonrakers,8 of course. You got to the place through a narrow front door that led straight out of Dover Street. It was a respectable looking sort of door, in between a military tailors and a bespoke shoe‐makers. And judged by the concentration of expensive personal trades in Dover St the door might merely have led to a firm of select and exclusive hatters. But you would have noticed the difference the moment you got inside. No reputable hatter would have had an entrance hall with daffodil‐coloured walls covered with drawings of Apaches and Hawaiian dancing girls and bull fighters in scarlet cloaks.
The entrance hall was confined. And, once the front door was closed, it was completely unventilated. A slightly suffocating odour of face powder and stale scent filled the place, as though actresses had been caged here. In the wall facing the entrance hall were the double mahogany doors of a small passenger lift. The doors had been smart and highly polished when new. And the upper portions, except for the finger marks, still were highly polished. It was only in the lower portions that the smartness had worn off a bit. The bottom panels were heavily scarred all over, and it was evident that patrons growing weary of waiting had used their feet in an effort to attract attention.
In a strange way, the same mixture of smartness and shabbiness was repeated in the upstairs rooms. There was the same daffodil coloured paint everywhere, and more of the same sort of drawings. But round about waist height the yellow paintwork was smeared and dejected‐looking as though generations of customers in rather greasy clothing had rubbed against it. Some of the drawings had been almost effaced, in fact.
It could not exactly be said that upstairs the atmosphere was the same as downstairs. Because here it was so much stronger. It was the original form of the smell, in fact. What you smelt as you came in was simply what had leaked down the lift shaft. And mingled with it up here in its primitive form were the characteristic odours of several dozen different forms of alcohol, cooking, the close foxy stuffiness of two cloakrooms that were often so full that some of the hats and coats had to be arranged along the occasional tables in the passage, and whatever fresh perfumes the ladies had happened to introduce into the room that night.
The plan of the club was very simple. It was merely the top floor of two identical houses. This meant that there were two large rooms on each side, as well as a couple of smaller ones. One of the large rooms was the restaurant. This was entirely Spanish, with massive metal grilles over the windows and little balconies built out from the wall and stuffed birds in wicker cages and a bogus well‐head with a piece of mirror at the bottom, right in the centre. The tables were of chromium and scarlet wood. Out of this led the salon de danse with its radiogram, painted scarlet like the tables, and kicked about the base like the lift doors.
On the other side of the hall were the card rooms. One of these was an innocent‐looking, conventional sort of place with wicker chairs and green baize tables. Only a large velvet spider suspended from the middle of the ceiling added the authentic night club note. The other room was a very different affair. It had a big gold chandelier and was hung with a lot of rather dubious tapestries. The rest of the room was taken up with a long polished table with large glass ash‐trays on it. Except for a roulette wheel in the centre and the flimsy little gilt chairs, it might have been the board table of a city company. It was in this room that the serious business of the Moonrakers went on. Eating and dancing and bridge, even poker, were only pastimes to keep the patrons cheerfully occupied until their turn came. In the name of Charity and the Voluntary Hospital movement as much as six thousand pounds had changed hands in the Tapestry room in the course of a single night.
And this evening everything was warming up nicely. The dining‐room was full of prosperous‐looking men, and sleek‐haired women all wearing that season’s fashionable haggard expression. The women were mostly rather younger than the men and the most of them looked as though a course of good nourishing food might still be able to put them on their feet again. The men on the other hand all looked as though if they went on as they were going they would soon be off theirs for ever.
Even though it was still quite early – not yet midnight in fact – the salon de danse was packed full with lumbering couples dutifully grasping each other. In the Tapestry room a nearly bankrupt Peer and a well‐to‐do stockbroker were leading about a dozen other players in a friendly game of Faro.
Outside in her little cubbyhole Connie was all right, thank you. She had come to terms with one of the waiters and he had brought her the better part of a round of chicken sandwiches and a cup of soup that was still quite hot. Connie was doing fine.
Then in the midst of all this simple amusement, one of the customers – a tall strapping fellow halfway between a moon‐calf and a Guardsman – extricated himself from the scarlet table‐legs and going over to the window opened it, and began blowing a police whistle into the darkness. His two companions got up in the same unhurried way and stood at the entrance to the lift.
‘Nobody to leave, please,’ they said mechanically, while they were getting out their notebooks.
It took Connie next to no time to realise what was happening, even though she was stuck away in a corner and couldn’t see anything. This wasn’t her first raid. And she knew just what to do. It was quite like old days diving for the main switch and flooding the whole place in darkness.
And after that the fun really started. Even the two detectives at the lift head started blowing their police whistles as well, and their mates down below kicked at the already damaged double mahogany doors in the entrance hall just to let the raiding party upstairs know that support was at hand.
The customers for the most part took the raid rather as people at a picnic take a sudden thunderstorm. One or two of the men complained that it was a bore, and the various women who were out with other people’s husbands wore a vexed expression. Only one girl broke down. She was a slim pretty thing, and slightly drunk. She was the daughter of Mr Veesey Blaize, K.C. and therefore of news‐value in the popular press. She didn’t want any more paragraphs about herself at the moment while her fiancé was away. So putting her golden head down on the table amid the litter of coffee cups and cigarette‐ends, she wept. She was still weeping when the police located the switch and put the lights on again.
Meanwhile Mr Vercetti, the manager, had been active and resourceful. Avoiding the beams of the policemen’s torches which were making darting criss‐cross patterns across the room like the novelty illuminations on a carnival night, he was gently ushering his most important customers to the fire escape at the back. There was one chance in a hundred that way, he explained. But, as it happened, it didn’t quite come off. The police knew at least as much about raids as Connie and Mr Vercetti and they always reckoned to pick up a handful round at the back. Down there in the back yard among the dustbins they gathered together an outside broker, a Peer’s nephew, a South African business man, a member of a South American military mission, a lady of title, an actress and two young women who spent quite a lot of time accounting to the police. It was a good haul and rather fun for the police just waiting there for the flitters to come down one by one into their arms out of the darkness. Mr Vercetti himself was past caring: he had merely tried to do his best by his customers.
But he was hurt, bitterly hurt. It seemed to him that he might as well give up trying to amuse a race so illogical as the English. In their despondent Anglo‐Saxon fashion they flocked to a night club to enjoy themselves. Then a lot of policemen, as despondent as the revellers, came in and raided them. And neither side really seemed to mind. In Mr Vercetti’s country the police would either, for a consideration, have been ready to leave him alone altogether or, if political personages had been involved, there would have been shootings, gunfire in the street outside, knives, vitriol‐throwing and prison sentences for ten, fifteen, twenty years. As well as one or two suicides.
Then, quite suddenly, Mr Vercetti’s temper gave way. He went up to the original whistle blower and addressed him.
‘This issa da outrage,’ he shouted. ‘I will ruina you. I demanda my lawyer. I demanda you to stop.’
The tall policeman put down a glass he was sniffing, and turned towards one of his men by the lift.
‘Take him downstairs,’ he said. ‘First car.’
The rest went very quietly after that, with the exception of the pretty girl who was still weeping with her head on her hands. Her two companions had got up with the rather sheepish expressions of people who are told to stand in line like children, and left her. She remained a lonely pathetic figure by the bogus well‐head. One of her shoulder straps had slipped leaving the pale young flesh, with the red weal where the strap had been. There was something appealing and virginal about her. The sub‐inspector, or whatever he was, came over to her.
‘Have to come along now, Miss,’ he said.
The girl did not stir, and the policeman tapped her on the arm.
The indignity of it, the miserable sordid indignity of being tapped on the arm by a policeman for the second time in fourteen days – it was only a fortnight ago when she had been among those rounded up at the Dishwashers – overcame her. She remembered her father’s good name; the money that she had lost, the inevitable paragraphs in the popular press, her fiancé. When the policeman’s hand descended on her, the second time, she turned sharply round and bit it.
That was why Cynthia Veesey Blaize – the one customer who had lowered the tone of the place by violence – went down in the small box‐like lift with two policemen all to herself.
Connie was one of the last to leave. By then, she’d seen the leader of the gang go round putting a seal on the drink cabinet in the bar and, after he’d removed the roulette wheel and the faro board, even putting a seal on the Tapestry room itself. By the time he’d finished sealing up everything, the Moonrakers looked as though a mad solicitor had been let loose in the place.
The journey to Vine Street was quick and well conducted. The driver of the Black Maria knew the way and they were all quiet in Connie’s car, including Connie. Only two of the passengers, indeed, showed any agitation over the whole affair. One was Mr Vercetti; he was still crying out that it wasa da outrage and that he would smasha da sergeant and ruina him. And the other was the fair girl. The cold night air had gone to her head and she was imploring her gaolers to let her out. She said that she had had enough of it, that she felt sick and that she wanted to go home. Then she was sick.
As for Connie she was in the first cubicle on the left as you go in. And provided the policeman in the gangway didn’t stand bang in front of the door she kept getting little glimpses of London life through the grille at the back. She found them rather exciting – the flashing signs, the statue of Eros with the lights shining down on him, the crowds. Because, though Connie spent every single one of her nights here in the centre of things, she was too busy to see any of them. And it was a funny thing, now that she recalled it, that she had once made almost this identical journey already. It had been at the end of a stag party in Half Moon Street when some Army chaps had invited a few girls in afterwards, and a brunette had been hit with a champagne bottle. The only difference was that the Black Maria had been horse‐drawn then.
All the same, the fun seemed somehow to have leaked out of the thing by the time they got to Vine Street. It had been raining – still was raining in fact – and the pavements were cold and messy. They couldn’t all go into the little yard because there were too many of them and some of the cars had simply to draw up outside, like limousines arriving for the Opera. The policemen on duty were brusque and businesslike and, though Connie tried to keep up her spirits by blowing a kiss at the solitary spectator, there was a kind of soullessness hanging over the whole proceeding.
Once inside, there was the distempered unhomeliness which is peculiar to police stations. Against the setting of the dark green paint, the white waistcoats of the men and the evening frocks of the ladies showed up startingly.
Immediately in front of Connie in the queue was a tall young man with vague purplish pouches under his eyes and a straggle of honey‐coloured moustache across his upper lip – he was the Peer’s nephew – and his companion, a dark melancholy looking girl with green finger nails.
‘Frightful bore this,’ the young man said whenever he caught her eye.
‘Can we smoke?’ the girl asked.
‘Not a hope,’ the young man answered. ‘Frightful bore, I’m afraid.’
‘How long shall we be here?’
It was her first raid, and she felt tired.
‘Oh, hours probably,’ the young man answered. ‘They’ve got to write down all our names and addresses. They’re always fearfully slow. Can’t really write, you know. Frightful bore, waiting.’
‘Can we go home then?’
‘Oh yes, rather. We’ll be released, on bail.’
‘Can you arrange it, or do we have to get Daddy’s solicitor?’
‘Oh I’ll fix it. Bit of a bore, but it’s nothing really. Providing we’re both here in the morning, doesn’t really cost anything.’
‘But I’m meeting Mummy in the morning. She’s coming up specially.’
‘Have to put her off, I’m afraid,’ the young man comforted her. ‘Frightful bore. Don’t know why we had to go there. Too sickening they should have chosen that one. Frightful bore all this, I’m afraid.’
Connie despised the dark melancholy looking girl because in the ways of the world she seemed no better than half‐witted. But she liked the perfume that she was using, and she kept coming up close to have sniffs at it. When the girl found out what was happening, and looked round to find Connie’s little withered face pressed up against her collar and the old nostrils distended like a horse’s, she gave a little grimace and took half a step forward. But they were packed too close for easy movement and a little shudder, half jolt, half ripple, passed right along the line of arrested revellers, as though a shunting engine had butted into the back of a goods train.
After this rebuff Connie spent her time discreetly going over the contents of her moire handbag just to be sure that there was nothing in it that she would have preferred the police not to question her about. But it was quite all right: everything in the bag was hers.
The queue got smaller and smaller, and Connie was finally brought face to face with the Sergeant. He was still scratching away in his book like the Recording Angel. One after another the gentlemen in evening dress had put a price on their own head and on the head of the lady who was with them, and one or two of the ladies who were without companions had opened up their sequin pouchettes and produced a visiting card. Of course there were some who had earlier in the evening made Mr Vercetti a present of most of the ready money they started with, and there had to be a bit of telephoning. Taxi‐cabs kept arriving with surprised friends arranging to go bail. Then Connie’s turn came.
‘Name?’ said the Sergeant.
It was the forty‐seventh name that he had written down, and he had given up saying ‘Please.’
‘Victoria Regina Coke,’ Connie told him.
It was her real name that she was giving: Connie was only a pet name that she had given herself because Victoria Regina had seemed a bit too formal among friends. Also it went so well with Coke.
‘Address?’
‘10 Dulcimer Street, S.E. 11.’
‘Occupation?’
Connie disliked everything about the Sergeant. He was large, disinterested and foxy‐featured. And she wondered if he would have behaved in that off‐hand manner if she had been the one with the pen in her hand and he had been standing against the rail almost up to his chin.
‘Hostess,’ she said firmly.
The Sergeant wrote it down without raising an eyebrow.
‘Anyone to go surety for you?’
Connie drew herself up and flashed her little yellow teeth at him.
‘I can go surety for myself, thank you,’ she said and handed her bag across to him.
The Sergeant opened it, took one glance at the broken comb, the match box with cigarette ends in it, the chipped mirror, the bus tickets, and began counting out the odd coins.
‘Only three‐and‐eight here,’ he said.
‘There was a five pound note there when you had it,’ she said.
‘Want to make a charge?’ the Sergeant demanded, leaning forward across the desk.
Connie shook her head.
‘No use,’ she said. ‘I may have spent it at my milliners.’
‘Anyone you can phone up?’ he asked.
Connie thought for a moment.
‘Only the Lord Mayor,’ she answered. ‘And he’s probably in bed.’ ‘Then we’ll have to keep you here, Mum,’ he told her.
‘Who are you calling Mum?’ Connie demanded.
But he ignored her. He raised his hand and beckoned to one of the waiting policemen.
‘Down below,’ he said. ‘Look slippy.’
Connie avoided the constable’s arm and went off in a kind of mincing tripping walk that was meant to convey light‐heartedness. But on the way one of the green‐painted doors down the bleak corridor opened, and Mr Vercetti appeared. He had been taken into one of the private rooms for questioning. Connie greeted him eagerly.
‘Oh sir,’ she said. ‘I’ve come out without any small change and they won’t let me go. I don’t want to spend the night in a cell with my rheumatism.’
But Mr Vercetti was too much agitated to take any notice of her.
‘Getta out of my way,’ he said to Connie and turning to the Inspector he resumed the conversation where it had been left off. ‘I admitta nothing,’ he declared loudly. ‘You is notta so clever as you think you is. Ina morning you will find out. I will grilla you. You will be ruina…’
And with that Mr Vercetti, his own surety in £50, went out into the night, and Connie went down into the cells. She spent her time demanding rugs, a hot‐water‐bottle, a light over her bed, privacy, an aspirin, something to drink, and a Bible. She said that she wanted the Bible to kill the miscellaneous vermin with which, so she threatened to tell the magistrate in the morning, the cell was swarming.
But her real anxiety was for Duke. It was because of him that she cried.
In the half light of the basement – a more extravagant woman would have lit the gas by now – Mrs Vizzard was seated at the mahogany dining‐room table, going over her budget. There was everything set out there in the smallest and minutest detail. ‘Fish, fourpence; stamp, penny‐halfpenny; milk, threepence; tea, sevenpence; soap powder, twopence‐halfpenny; pair of quarter‐rubbers, ninepence; beetroot, threepence.’ Her eyes fixed themselves in a frightened stare as she gazed at the figures. It was terrifying, positively terrifying, the way things mounted up. Money seemed to be slipping, slipping from her all the time.
With a sick feeling of alarm, she remembered the lease. Eighteen years. It wasn’t long, was it? And after that…? She shuddered at the thought of it, and returned to the column of household expenses in front of her. The beetroot, for instance. That had been simply a piece of idle indulgence. She could perfectly well have done without beetroot.
The bell of the spring bracket outside the door suddenly began pealing, and Mrs Vizzard started. For some reason it alarmed her. She caught her breath and sat there for a moment without moving. By the time she had recovered herself and got up the stairs, the rusted wires were already scraping once more on their pulleys and the bell was beginning to ring again. Mrs Vizzard quickened her pace.
But she was taking no chances. Before she laid a finger on the door knob she made sure that the safety‐latch was in place and she put down the lid of the letter box as an additional precaution so that nothing could be thrust at her from outside. Then, having flattened out the corner of the door‐mat that always jammed when the door was opened, she turned the handle.
It was not yet quite dark. And in any case the street lamp was only just opposite. It threw a pool of milky light over the doorstep. Standing there in the cold was a man. And rather an unusual looking man. He wore a broad black hat like a priest’s or an actor’s, and a heavy overcoat that was too large for him. It hung straight down almost to his ankles. On the step on either side of him were two battered, dumpy suitcases. Mrs Vizzard sized him up at a glance and judged him to be trying to sell something. She made ready to close the door again.
But the man on the doorstep was speaking.
‘You have a room to let?’ he asked vaguely, in a faint hollow sounding kind of voice. ‘A furnished room, I believe.’
Mrs Vizzard kept the door half open. She was undecided. Horribly undecided. What she had been looking forward to was a young single business gentleman: it was, in fact, what she had specified in her advertisement. The man on the doorstep might have been single. But he certainly didn’t look businesslike. There was an indefinable suggestion of moth balls and the rag‐bag about him. But, at least, his voice sounded educated and refined. It was even possible that he might be a gentleman.
‘You saw my advertisement?’ she asked non‐committally.
The broad black hat stirred in silhouette.
‘The advertisement? Yes… yes, of course. The advertisement.’
The voice under the hat was hesitant and unassured. It was almost as if, having actually come to the house in search of lodgings, he had at that moment been thinking of something else.
Mrs Vizzard pursed up her lips. She had to admit that she didn’t like the look of the man. But she couldn’t keep him waiting on the doorstep indefinitely. And that back basement room, unlet and unearning, was a constant reproach to her.
‘Would you like to see the room?’ she asked.
The black hat nodded.
‘Thank you,’ the man said. ‘Thank you very much.’
When the safety chain was undone, he followed her into the hall and put his bags down against the small bamboo table that supported the fern. The bags collapsed inwards upon themselves as soon as he let go of them as though there were practically nothing in them.
‘It’s downstairs,’ said Mrs Vizzard grimly. ‘If you wait here I’ll go and put a light on.’
It was not only thoughtfulness that made her do this. She wanted to keep a safe distance between herself and the stranger until she knew a bit more about him. It wouldn’t have been the first time that defenceless elderly ladies had been slugged on their own back‐stairs.
When she had lit the gas she called out to him to come down. She had half hoped that he might be disinterested when he found that the room was downstairs. But the man gave no hint of minding. He followed her as though he had been going down basement stairs all his life.
The room even with the gas lit was scarcely cheerful. The bamboo table in the hall upstairs was only a small side shoot of the original bamboo forest that sprouted in the basement. Everything down here was of mottled, banana‐coloured bamboo. There was another occasional table, with a red‐fringed cloth spread cornerwise, obscuring most of the little criss‐cross pieces, but under the cloth the tell‐tale ridges of the wood showed unmistakably. There was a bamboo wardrobe, ingeniously strengthened with angle brackets, also of bamboo. There was a bamboo washstand. There was a wicker‐and‐bamboo easy chair that sagged suggestively as though very fat men had been sitting in it for years. And there was a bamboo‐and‐shell overmantel.
The bed was the one entirely bamboo‐less object in the room. It was of iron and brass, set high with its casters in separate glass bowls, either to save the oil cloth or because with so much bamboo about, Mrs Vizzard had unconsciously grown to fear the depredations of white ants.
But the stranger scarcely seemed to notice the furnishings.
‘Thank you,’ he said, in the same hollow voice that she had noticed on the doorstep. ‘Thank you very much.’
Down here between four walls it sounded more hollow than ever. It was like reverberation in a vault.
‘You mean you like the room?’ Mrs Vizzard asked.
She was frankly incredulous. In all her years of experience in letting she had never known anyone like the room before.
‘Thank you,’ the stranger said again.
But this was too easy. It revived all her suspicions.
‘You know the rent?’ she asked.
‘The rent. Ah yes, the rent.’
Again it was as though the man was mysteriously thinking of something else, as though he wasn’t paying proper attention to what was going on. He passed a limp hand that carried a long frayed cuff with it across his forehead and seemed to recover himself a little. ‘Ten shillings a week, I think the advertisement said,’ he added.
‘Without service.’
‘Without service?’
‘And in advance,’ Mrs Vizzard reminded him.
There had been nothing in the advertisement about payment in advance. But the stranger didn’t seem to mind.
‘In advance,’ he replied. ‘Yes, yes, of course. In advance.’
‘With references,’ Mrs Vizzard added meaningly.
The stranger was silent for a moment. The limp hand and the frayed cuff straggled across the forehead again.
‘Would rather an old one do?’ he asked apologetically. ‘You see I’ve been moving about rather a lot lately.’
‘When do you intend to come?’ Mrs Vizzard asked.
‘Intend to come?’ The stranger gave a little laugh that sounded more hollow than his voice. ‘Oh, I’ve come,’ he said. ‘I shan’t be going away again.’
He unbuttoned his coat and drew out an envelope containing two one‐pound notes. He handed one of them to her.
‘For a fortnight,’ he said again. ‘A fortnight in advance.’
Mrs Vizzard hesitated. While the stranger had been standing there, Mrs Vizzard had been inspecting him. It wasn’t merely that his coat was long. It was the ghost of a coat that had once been magnificent. A complicated brocaded arrangement of frogs ran down the front of it, and the collar was of astrakhan. The buttons had once been covered in the same material as the coat itself. But these had worn threadbare by now, leaving only a pattern of small wooden discs.
But now that his hat was off, it was his face that fascinated her. It was a swarthy, dusky face, almost like an Indian’s. Under the eyes were two half‐moons that were faintly bluish. But the eyes themselves were dark and brilliant.
‘Like a mesmerist’s eyes,’ Mrs Vizzard told herself. ‘The sort of eyes that could hypnotise you and make you do things you didn’t want to.’
Across the stranger’s forehead a lock of lank black hair fell forward. Mrs Vizzard shivered slightly. She was aware that the man was smiling at her.
Slowly she stretched out her hand for the note and her fingers closed on it. It crackled authentically and she felt temporarily reassured.
‘Are… are you connected with the stage?’ she asked.
‘The stage?’ The stranger shook his head. ‘No, I am quite unconnected with the stage,’ he assured her.
‘And will you be out all day?’
‘No,’ he answered, the dark eyes still smiling at her. ‘I shall be in. In all day.’
Mrs Vizzard began backing towards the door. She wanted to shut it. Shut it between him and her, and decide what to do. Call the police seemed the sensible thing. Get rid of him before he could make trouble. But on what evidence? The police wouldn’t arrest a man for answering an advertisement. Or offering to pay his rent in advance. So she tried to keep her head, and be businesslike. With her hand on the door‐knob – somehow the very feel of the thing gave her confidence – she raised her eyes to him again.
‘The name,’ she said. ‘I didn’t catch it.’
‘I didn’t give it to you,’ he answered. ‘It’s Squales. S‐Q‐U‐A‐L‐E‐S. Henry Squales. And now if you’ll permit me I’ll get my bags and unpack.’
Back in her own living‐room, under the portrait of the departed Mr Vizzard, Mrs Vizzard shut the door and locked it. She felt safer that way. But not much safer. The newcomer was too near to her in the back room for her to feel altogether safe. ‘Suppose he tries to hypnotise me through the brickwork?’ she asked herself. ‘Or taps on the wall at night when everyone else is asleep. Or bores holes in the skirting and spies on me…’
Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of the front door opening. It was followed by footsteps, quick athletic ones mounting the stairs two steps at a time. She recognised them at once. They were Percy’s. He was bolting upstairs to his old mum in just the way a good son should. Then she heard another door, an upstairs one, bang and she knew that he was home. She’d always liked the lad and now she was positively glad of him. It was comforting to have anyone so strong and vigorous about the place.
She glanced towards the wall that separated her from the back room. Behind the wall she could hear the man moving about shifting things. The old feeling of timidity returned to her, and she shuddered.
‘I hope I’ve done the right thing,’ she told herself. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me to find we’d got a murderer here. A murderer here in Number 10.’
And what about Connie? How’s she been getting on?
Lumme, she didn’t half have a time of it at Vine Street. It wasn’t no bed of roses being shut up in that cell worrying about Duke all night. And she didn’t exactly look at her best when she came before the beak in the morning. By the time she got the mug of Police Station tea at breakfast she wasn’t much more than yesterday’s buttonhole.
But she wasn’t going to have a lot of flatties putting anything over her. Not likely. That was why she kept on insisting on her rights just to show them that she was a human being and not some kind of a horse. First of all she told ’em she wanted a chair. And, when they asked her why, she said mysteriously that it was because of her condition. Then she wanted to report the night wardress for sticking her nose up against the grille of the cell door and making faces at her every time she’d just been dropping off to sleep.
Nothing came of that complaint. But it was funny while it lasted. And it established her. She spoke in a carrying sort of voice, and everyone who was waiting to go up into the Court room could hear her. She was the life and soul of the party downstairs.
‘Just you ask the Sergeant to step along this way,’ she began again after a pause. ‘Tell him I was at College with his sister. And if he’s out having a quick one, send the Inspector. The good‐looking one. Tell him it’s a matter of life and death. But don’t say who for. And if he doesn’t come, say I’ll report him to the magistrate. If you think that was tea you gave me just now someone’s been robbing you. There’s a lot going on around here that needs showing up. I’ll give you five minutes by my gold wrist‐watch and if nobody’s been to see me by then…’
But the constable outside didn’t even let her finish. He just opened the cell door and waited there.
‘Come along,’ he said. ‘We’re ready for you.’
‘About time, too,’ Connie answered, and joined the little queue that was going upstairs.
They went through the narrow oak door that led into the court and it was then that Connie had her first big disappointment. She’d rather been looking forward to being a member of a big happy family, all peers and stockbrokers and pretty ladies, with Mr Vercetti himself, the dirty Eyetie, as centre of the picture. She hadn’t half been wanting to see him get it in the neck from someone without being able to answer back. But apparently that part of the circus was already over, leaving Rex v. Victoria Regina Coke to come on separately. It was flattering, but not so friendly.
Just to keep her spirits up she had a good look round the Court while they were getting things ready. It would have been nice to see even one friendly face in all that crowd. But she couldn’t find one. She’d never seen a more awful‐looking lot of dials in all her life. The policemen all looked hot and beefy, as policemen always do without their helmets on, and the other people in the body of the court might have been borrowed from a mortuary.
Her second big disappointment was the magistrate. He wasn’t the regular one and that made things more chilly and impersonal. There had been a time – during Connie’s gay period – when the magistrate had been like an old friend to her. Rather a spiteful and vindictive one at times, but still friend. Whereas this cheesy little man on the bench might have been an elderly dentist. He didn’t look as if he could be a friend even to himself.
‘I wonder if anyone at No. 10 has noticed that poor old Connie didn’t get back last night?’ she was thinking again. ‘I wonder if Duke’s had his water changed…’
Then the usher called her name and she went into the box.
The magistrate and his clerk had a whispered conversation and then the clerk, very rapidly, began intoning.
‘…charged with obstructing the police in the performance of their duties in that she did switch off the…’
‘Oh I never,’ Connie exclaimed.
The magistrate took one glance in Connie’s direction and told her to keep quiet. Her turn would come in a minute, he said. From his voice he seemed a quiet, unemotional sort of man.
‘…when the police entered, with the intention of impeding them in their lawful duties.’
The magistrate looked at his finger nails for a moment and then turned to her again.
‘Do you plead guilty or not guilty?’
‘Not guilty, m’lud,’ Connie answered. ‘It’s a lie.’
‘Call the Inspector.’
The big young man like a moon‐calf was called. He took the oath with an expertness that left Connie aghast.
‘Give your evidence,’ the magistrate ordered him.
‘At 11.30 in accordance with my instructions,’ he said almost as though he had spent the earlier part of the morning in learning the part, ‘I visited the Moonrakers’ Club and secured entry. Alcoholic liquors were being served and in an inner room card games were in progress…’
‘Yes, yes, we’ve heard all that,’ the magistrate interrupted him. ‘We’ve heard all that.’
But the moon‐calf did not seem in the least put out by the interruption. Still in the same over‐rehearsed monotone he continued.
‘At 12.5 as ordered I rose from my table and opened the window so that my police whistle could be heard outside. The prisoner then appeared from a side passage marked “Cloaks” and operated the electric light switch connected with the mains. In the darkness a number of those present attempted to escape.’
‘You’re quite sure that this is the woman?’ the magistrate asked.
The policeman took one look at Connie.
‘Quite sure, sir,’ he said.
It was her turn now. The usher handed her a Bible and she took it with the easy nonchalance of someone who is used to Bibles.
‘…the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help me God,’ she said, speaking almost as fast as the Inspector.
The magistrate looked even harder at Connie than the policeman had done. He was, in fact, staring at her so hard that Connie felt uncomfortable. Because he was staring, she began shifting from one foot to the other.
‘Is the prisoner sitting down or standing?’ the magistrate asked at last.
The policeman who had handed Connie the Bible answered for her.
‘She’s standing, sir,’ he said.
The magistrate, however, appeared unconvinced.
‘She seems very short,’ he remarked resentfully. ‘I can scarcely see her.’
For a moment he regarded his finger nails again. Then he turned to Connie again.
‘You have heard the evidence,’ he said. ‘Have you anything to say?’
‘Only that it’s all a lie, sir.’
‘You mean that you didn’t turn off the electric light switch?’
‘Not deliberately.’
‘Then how did you turn it off?’
‘I slipped.’
There was a titter from the public gallery when Connie said this. The magistrate removed his horn‐rimmed glasses and placed them on the desk in front of him.
‘This is a court of justice, not a pantomime,’ he observed in the same cold lifeless voice. ‘If I hear more laughter I shall order the Court to be cleared. I am frequently amazed that there should be so many idle persons who apparently have nothing better to do than to sit in court deriving merriment from the misfortunes of others.’
The magistrate – who was quite famous for that kind of thing – waited long enough for the reporters to get down his saying‐of‐the‐week correctly, and then resumed.
‘I am expected to believe that suggestion about slipping?’ he asked. ‘It’s God’s truth, sir,’ Connie answered.
The fact did not seem to impress him unduly.
‘I trust that it’s all God’s truth that I’ve been hearing,’ he said. ‘You have been on oath ever since you entered the box, remember.’
‘I’ll remember, sir,’ Connie answered contritely.
The magistrate replaced his glasses and contemplated her solemnly.
‘And what did you do with your arms when you were falling?’
Connie thought for a moment.
‘I held them in front of me to break my fall,’ she said.
‘Do you remember what it was you fell over?’
Connie thought again. She felt that there was a catch in it somewhere.
‘My feet, sir,’ she replied at last.
At the reply a titter started up again in the body of the court. But the usher was up on his toes all ready, and the laughter died away before it had really come to anything.
As for Connie, the magistrate appeared to be satisfied with her for the moment. He asked her to stand down and invited the moon‐calf into the box again.
‘How high on the wall is the switch?’ he asked.
‘Seven foot, eight inches, your worship,’ he answered.
That was all from him. For the magistrate called Connie once more. It was to be the last time he would worry her.
‘How tall are you?’ he asked.
‘Five foot one, sir,’ she told him.
‘Yet you invite me to believe that in falling you became entangled with an electric light switch nearly a yard above your head.’ He paused: ‘Even if you had extended your arms to their full length it would still have been a remarkable coincidence if you had worked the switch. It must in fact have been either a very extraordinary switch or a very extraordinary slip. But your arms were not extended above your head, you say. On the contrary, on your own oath, they were held in front of you to break your fall. In the circumstances I can only conclude that you did turn out the light. Possibly it was before your fall. Indeed, your fall may have been the result of putting out the light…’
‘Silly old buzzard going on about my fall,’ Connie was thinking. ‘They go on about anything you tell them.’
But the magistrate was still speaking.
‘There is nothing in the evidence to show why you extinguished the light,’ he continued. ‘I will conclude that you did so under instructions. Fourteen days…’
The magistrate had removed his glasses and was now sitting back once more. The bench in fact was feeling a bit peckish and was just about to go over to the Club for its lunch.
But Connie had not moved.
‘Fourteen days,’ she repeated incredulously.
‘Fourteen days,’ the usher repeated and tapped on her shoulder.
‘But… but I’ve got a dependent,’ she said. ‘I can’t leave him.’
The magistrate regarded her for a moment without his glasses and then regarded her again with them on.
‘You wish to say something?’ he asked.
Connie nodded.
‘I’ve got a dependent,’ she said again. ‘There’s no one to look after him.’
‘Is it your husband?’ the magistrate asked. ‘Is he an invalid?’
‘No, sir, he’s quite all right. That is to say I haven’t got a husband.’
Again the titter. And again the usher up on his toes.
‘Then who is this dependent?’
‘He’s a canary.’
This time it was more than a titter in the body of the court. It began somewhere with a loud guffaw and broadened into a general murmur of laughter.
The magistrate rapped on the desk.
‘My orders have been disregarded,’ he said. ‘Usher, clear the Court.’
Next morning, Mrs Josser received a cheap‐looking Government envel ope containing a letter in a ragged, unreliable hand like a child’s. It was on the notepaper of Holloway Prison.
‘Dear Mrs Josser,’ it ran. ‘Owing to a slight misunderstanding, I shall be here for fourteen days. Please ask Mrs Vizzard to on no account let the room which I shall be requiring. Tell her the rent will be attended to prompt on my return. Also please look after Duke. His water will need changing. The birdseed packet is in the top drawer with my hair‐brush. Give him enough to cover a penny. Please tell Mrs Vizzard it’s only for a fortnight or sooner if I can get solicitors. If it gets very cold please have Duke down with you. Again thanking you and apologising for bothering you, and hoping that you and Mr Josser are both well.
Yours truly
Connie.’
PS. ‘Please don’t on no account let Duke out of the cage even if he asks, he’s very uncertain. Tell him we’ll stretch our wings together when I get home.’