A Gun for Sale

'It's not far now,' Raven said. 'There's a loose plank. I got it all fixed up for myself early this morning. Why, there's even sacks, lots of sacks. It's going to be like home,' he said. 'Like home?' He didn't answer, feeling along the tarred wall of the goods yard, remembering the kitchen in the basement and the first thing very nearly he could remember, his mother bleeding across the table. She hadn't even troubled to lock the door: that was all she cared about him. He'd done some ugly things in his time, he told himself, but he'd never been able to equal that ugliness. Some day he would. It would be like beginning life over again: to have something else to look back to when somebody spoke of death or blood or wounds or home.

'A bit bare for a home,' Anne said. 'You needn't be scared of me,' Raven said. 'I won't keep you. You can sit down a bit and tell me what he did to you, what Cholmondeley did, and then you can be getting along anywhere you want.'

'I couldn't go any farther if you paid me.' He had to put his hands under her shoulders and hold her up against the tarred wood, while he put more will into her from his own inexhaustible reserve. He said, 'Hold on. We're nearly there.' He shivered in the cold, holding her with all his strength, trying in the dusk to see her face. He said, 'You can rest in the shed. There are plenty of sacks there.' He was like somebody describing with pride some place he lived in, that he'd bought with his own money or built with his own labour stone by stone.

2

Mather stood back in the shadow of the doorway. It was worse in a way than anything he'd feared. He put his hand on his revolver. He had only to go forward and arrest Raven—or stop a bullet in the attempt. He was a policeman; he couldn't shoot first. At the end of the street Saunders was waiting for him to move. Behind, a uniformed constable waited on them both. But he made no move. He let them go off down the road in the belief that they were alone. Then he followed as far as the corner and picked up Saunders. Saunders said, 'The d-d-devil.'

'Oh no,' Mather said, 'it's only Raven—and Anne.' He struck a match and held it to the cigarette which he had been holding between his lips for the last twenty minutes. They could hardly see the man and woman going off down the dark road by the goods-yard, but beyond them another match was struck. 'We've got them covered,' Mather said. 'They won't be able to get out of our sight now.'

'W-will you take them b-b-both?'

'We can't have shooting with a woman there,' Mather said. 'Can't you see what they'd make of it in the papers if a woman got hurt? It's not as if he was wanted for murder.'

'We've got to be careful of your girl,' Saunders brought out in a breath.

'Get moving again,' Mather said. 'We don't want to lose touch. I'm not thinking about her any more. I promise you that's over. She's led me up the garden properly. I'm just thinking of what's best with Raven—and any accomplice he's got in Nottwich. If we've got to shoot, we'll shoot.'

Saunders said, 'They've stopped.' He had sharper eyes than Mather. Mather said, 'Could you pick him off from here, if I rushed him?'

'No,' Saunders said. He began to move forward quickly. 'He's loosened a plank. They are getting through.'

'Don't worry,' Mather said. I'll follow. Bring up three more men and post one of them at the gap where I can find him. We've got all the gates into the yard picketed already. Bring the rest inside. But keep it quiet.' He could hear the slight shuffle of cinders where the two were walking; it wasn't so easy to follow them because of the sound his own feet made. They disappeared round a stationary truck and the light failed more and more. He caught a glimpse of their moving shadows and then an engine hooted and belched a grey plume of steam round him; for a moment it was like walking in a mountain fog. A warm dirty spray settled on his face; when he was clear he had lost them. He began to realize the difficulty of finding anyone in the yard at night. There were trucks everywhere; they could slip into one and lie down. He barked his shin and swore softly; then quite distinctly he heard Anne whisper, 'I can't make it.' There were only a few trucks between them; then the movements began again, heavier movements as if someone were carrying a weight. Mather climbed on to the truck and stared across a dark desolate waste of cinders and points, a tangle of lines and sheds and piles of coal and coke. It was like a No Man's Land full of torn iron across which one soldier picked his way with a wounded companion in his arms. Mather watched them with an odd sense of shame, as if he were a spy. The thin limping shadow became a human being who knew the girl he loved. There was a kind of relationship between them. He thought: how many years will he get for that robbery? He no longer wanted to shoot. He thought: poor devil, he must be pretty driven by now, he's probably looking for a place to sit down in, and there the place was, a small wooden workman's shed between the lines. Mather struck a match again and presently Saunders was below him waiting for orders. 'They are in that shed,' Mather said. 'Get the men posted. If they try to get out, nab them quick. Otherwise wait for daylight. We don't want any accidents.'

'You aren't s-staying?'

'You'll be easier without me,' Mather said. 'I'll be at the station tonight.' He said gently: 'Don't think about me. Just go ahead. And look after yourself. Got your gun?'

'Of course.'

'I'll send the men along to you. It's going to be a cold watch, I'm afraid, but it's no good trying to rush that shed. He might shoot his way clear out.'

'It's t-t-t-tough on you,' Saunders said. The dark had quite come; it healed the desolation of the yard. Inside the shed there was no sign of life, no glimmer of light; soon Saunders couldn't have told that it existed, sitting there with his back to a truck out of the wind's way, hearing the breathing of the policeman nearest him and saying over to himself to pass the time (his mind's words free from any impediment) the line of a poem he had read at night-school about a dark tower: 'He must be wicked to deserve such pain.' It was a comforting line, he thought; those who followed his profession couldn't be taught a better; that's why he had remembered it.

3

'Who's coming to dinner, dear?' the Chief Constable asked, putting his head in at the bedroom door.

'Never you mind,' Mrs Calkin said, 'you'll change.'

The Chief Constable said: 'I was thinking, dear, as 'ow—'

'As how,' Mrs Calkin said firmly.

'The new maid. You might teach her that I'm Major Calkin.'

Mrs Calkin said, 'You'd better hurry.'

'It's not the Mayoress again, is it?' He trailed drearily out towards the bathroom, but on second thoughts nipped quietly downstairs to the dining-room. Must see about the drinks. But if it was the Mayoress there wouldn't be any. Piker never turned up; he didn't blame him. While there he might just as well take a nip; he took it neat for speed and cleaned the glass afterwards with a splash of soda and his handkerchief. He put the glass as an afterthought where the Mayoress would sit. Then he rang up the police station.

'Any news?' he asked hopelessly. He knew there was no real hope that they'd ask him down for a consultation.

The inspector's voice said, 'We know where he is. We've got him surrounded. We are just waiting till daylight.'

'Can I be of any use? Like me to come down, eh, and talk things over?'

'It's quite unnecessary, sir.'

He put the receiver down miserably, sniffed the Mayoress's glass (she'd never notice that) and went upstairs. Major Calkin, he thought wistfully, Major Calkin. The trouble is I'm a man's man. Looking out of the window of his dressing-room at the spread lights of Nottwich he remembered for some reason the war, the tribunal, the fun it had all been giving hell to the conchies. His uniform still hung there, next the tails he wore once a year at the Rotarian dinner when he was able to get among the boys. A faint smell of moth-balls came out at him. His spirits suddenly lifted. He thought: my God, in a week's time we may be at it again. Show the devils what we are made of. I wonder if the uniform will fit. He couldn't resist trying on the jacket over his evening trousers. It was a bit tight, he couldn't deny that, but the general effect in the glass was not too bad, a bit pinched; it would have to be let out. With his influence in the county he'd be back in uniform in a fortnight. With any luck he'd be busier than ever in this war. 'Joseph,' his wife said, 'whatever are you doing?' He saw her in the mirror placed statuesquely in the doorway in her new black and sequined evening dress like a shop-window model of an outsize matron. She said, 'Take it off at once. You'll smell of moth-balls now all dinner-time. The Mayoress is taking off her things and any moment Sir Marcus—'

'You might have told me,' the Chief Constable said. 'If I'd known Sir Marcus was coming... How did you snare the old boy?'

'He invited himself,' Mrs Calkin said proudly. 'So I rang up the Mayoress.'

'Isn't old Piker coming?'

'He hasn't been home all day.'

The Chief Constable slipped off his uniform jacket and put it away carefully. If the war had gone on another year they'd have made him a colonel: he had been getting on the very best terms with the regimental headquarters, supplying the mess with groceries at very little more than the cost price. In the next war he'd make the grade. The sound of Sir Marcus's car on the gravel brought him downstairs. The Lady Mayoress was looking under the sofa for her Pekinese, which had gone to ground defensively to escape strangers; she was on her knees with her head under the fringe saying, 'Chinky, Chinky,' ingratiatingly. Chinky growled out of sight. 'Well, well,' the Chief Constable said, trying to put a little warmth into his tones, 'and how's Alfred?'

'Alfred?' the Mayoress said, coming out from under the sofa, 'it's not Alfred, it's Chinky. Oh,' she said, talking very fast, for it was her habit to work towards another person's meaning while she talked, 'you mean how is he? Alfred? He's gone again.'

'Chinky?'

'No, Alfred.' One never got much further with the Mayoress.

Mrs Calkin came in. She said, 'Have you got him, dear?'

'No, he's gone again,' the Chief Constable said, 'if you mean Alfred.'

'He's under the sofa,' the Mayoress said. 'He won't come out.'

Mrs Calkin said, 'I ought to have warned you, dear. I thought of course you would know the story of how Sir Marcus hates the very sight of dogs. Of course, if he stays there quietly...'

'The poor dear,' Mrs Piker said, 'so sensitive, he could tell at once he wasn't wanted.'

The Chief Constable suddenly could bear it no longer. He said, 'Alfred Piker's my best friend. I won't have you say he wasn't wanted,' but no one took any notice of him. The maid had announced Sir Marcus.

Sir Marcus entered on the tips of his toes. He was a very old, sick man with a little wisp of white beard on his chin resembling chicken fluff. He gave the effect of having withered inside his clothes like a kernel in a nut. He spoke with the faintest foreign accent and it was difficult to determine whether he was Jewish or of an ancient English family. He gave the impression that very many cities had rubbed him smooth. If there was a touch of Jerusalem, there was also a touch of St James's, if of some Central European capital, there were also marks of the most exclusive clubs in Cannes.

'So good of you, Mrs Calkin,' he said, 'to give me this opportunity...' It was difficult to hear what he said; he spoke in a whisper. His old scaley eyes took them all in. 'I have always been hoping to make the acquaintance...'

'May I introduce the Lady Mayoress, Sir Marcus?' He bowed with the slightly servile grace of a man who might have been pawnbroker to the Pompadour. 'So famous a figure in the city of Nottwich.' There was no sarcasm or patronage in his manner. He was just old. Everyone was alike to him. He didn't trouble to differentiate.

'I thought you were on the Riviera, Sir Marcus,' the Chief Constable said breezily. 'Have a sherry. It's no good asking the ladies.'

'I don't drink, I'm afraid,' Sir Marcus whispered. The Chief Constable's face fell. 'I came back two days ago.'

'Rumours of war, eh? Dogs delight to bark...'

'Joseph,' Mrs Calkin said sharply, and glanced with meaning at the sofa.

The old eyes cleared a little. 'Yes. Yes,' Sir Marcus repeated. 'Rumours.'

'I see you've been taking on more men at Midland Steel, Sir Marcus.'

'So they tell me,' Sir Marcus whispered. The maid announced dinner; the sound startled Chinky, who growled under the sofa, and there was an agonizing moment while they all watched Sir Marcus. But he had heard nothing, or perhaps the noise had faintly stirred his subconscious mind, for as he took Mrs Calkin in to the dining-room he whispered venomously, 'The dogs drove me away.'

'Some lemonade for Mrs Piker, Joseph,' Mrs Calkin said. The Chief Constable watched her drink with some nervousness. She seemed a little puzzled by the taste, she sipped and tried again. 'Really,' she said, 'what delicious lemonade. It has quite an aroma.'

Sir Marcus passed the soup; he passed the fish. When the entree was served, he leant across the large silver-plated flower bowl inscribed 'To Joseph Calkin from the assistants in Calkin and Calkin's on the occasion...' (the inscription ran round the corner out of sight) and whispered, ' Might I have a dry biscuit and a little hot water?' He explained, 'My doctor won't allow me anything else at night.'

'Well, that's hard luck,' the Chief Constable said. 'Food and drink as a man gets older...' He glared at his empty glass: what a life, oh for a chance to get away for a bit among the boys, throw his weight about and know that he was a man.

The Lady Mayoress said suddenly, 'How Chinky would love these bones,' and choked.

'Who is Chinky?' Sir Marcus whispered.

Mrs Calkin said quickly, 'Mrs Piker has the most lovely cat.'

'I'm glad it isn't a dog,' Sir Marcus whispered. 'There is something about a dog,' the old hand gestured hopelessly with a piece of cheese biscuit, 'and of all dogs the Pekinese.' He said with extraordinary venom, 'Yap, yap, yap,' and sucked up some hot water. He was a man almost without pleasures; his most vivid emotion was venom, his main object defence: defence of his fortune, of the pale flicker of vitality he gained each year in the Cannes sun, of his life. He was quite content to eat cheese biscuits to the end of them if eating biscuits would extend his days.

The old boy couldn't have many left, the Chief Constable thought, watching Sir Marcus wash down the last dry crumb and then take a white tablet out of a little flat gold box in his waistcoat pocket. He had a heart; you could tell it in the way he spoke, from the special coaches he travelled in when he went by rail, the Bath chairs which propelled him softly down the long passages in Midland Steel. The Chief Constable had met him several times at civic receptions; after the General Strike Sir Marcus had given a fully equipped gymnasium to the police force in recognition of their services, but never before had Sir Marcus visited him at home.

Everyone knew a lot about Sir Marcus. The trouble was, all that they knew was contradictory. There were people who, because of his Christian name, believed that he was a Greek; others were quite as certain that he had been born in a ghetto. His business associates said that he was of an old English family; his nose was no evidence either way; you found plenty of noses like that in Cornwall and the west country. His name did not appear at all in Who's Who, and an enterprising journalist who once tried to write his life found extraordinary gaps in registers; it wasn't possible to follow any rumour to its source. There was even a gap in the legal records of Marseilles where one rumour said that Sir Marcus as a youth had been charged with theft from a visitor to a bawdy house. Now he sat there in the heavy Edwardian dining-room brushing biscuit crumbs from his waistcoat, one of the richest men in Europe.

No one even knew his age, unless perhaps his dentist; the Chief Constable had an idea that you could tell the age of a man by his teeth. But then they probably were not his teeth at his age: another gap in the records.

'Well, we shan't be leaving them to their drinks, shall we?' Mrs Calkin said in a sprightly way, rising from the table and fixing her husband with a warning glare, 'but I expect they have a lot to talk about together.'

When the door closed Sir Marcus said, 'I've seen that woman somewhere with a dog. I'm sure of it.'

'Would you mind if I gave myself a spot of port?' the Chief Constable said. 'I don't believe in lonely drinking, but if you really won't—Have a cigar?'

'No,' Sir Marcus whispered, 'I don't smoke.' He said, 'I wanted to see you—in confidence—about this fellow Raven. Davis is worried. The trouble is he caught a glimpse of the man. Quite by chance. At the time of the robbery at a friend's office in Victoria Street. This man called on some pretext. He has an idea that the wild fellow wants to put him out of the way. As a witness.'

'Tell him,' the Chief Constable said proudly, pouring himself out another glass of port, 'that he needn't worry. The man's as good as caught. We know where he is at this very moment. He's surrounded. We are only waiting till daylight, till he shows himself...'

'Why wait at all? Wouldn't it be better,' Sir Marcus whispered, 'if the silly desperate fellow were taken at once?'

'He's armed, you see. In the dark anything might happen. He might shoot his way clear. And there's another thing. He has a girl friend with him. It wouldn't do if he escaped and the girl got shot.'

Sir Marcus bowed his old head above the two hands that lay idly, with no dry biscuit or glass of warm water or white tablet to occupy them, on the table. He said gently, 'I want you to understand. In a way it is our responsibility. Because of Davis. If there were any trouble: if the girl was killed: all our money would be behind the police force. If there had to be an inquiry the best counsel... I have friends too, as you may suppose...'

'It would be better to wait till daylight, Sir Marcus. Trust me. I know how things stand. I've been a soldier, you know.'

'Yes, I understand that,' Sir Marcus said.

'Looks as if the old bulldog will have to bite again, eh? Thank God for a Government with guts.'

'Yes, yes,' Sir Marcus said. 'I should say it was almost certain now.' The scaley eyes shifted to the decanter. 'Don't let me stop you having your glass of port, Major.'

'Well, if you say so, Sir Marcus, I'll just have one more glass for a nightcap.'

Sir Marcus said, 'I'm very glad that you have such good news for me. It doesn't look well to have an armed ruffian loose in Nottwich. You mustn't risk any of your men's lives, Major. Better that this—waste product—should be dead than one of your fine fellows.' He suddenly leant back in his chair and gasped like a landed fish. He said, 'A tablet. Please. Quick.'

The Chief Constable picked the gold box from his pocket, but Sir Marcus had already recovered. He took the tablet himself. The Chief Constable said, 'Shall I order your car, Sir Marcus?'

'No, no,' Sir Marcus whispered, 'there's no danger. It's simply pain.' He stared with dazed old eyes down at the crumbs on his trousers. 'What were we saying? Fine fellows, yes, you mustn't risk their lives. The country will need them.'

'That's very true.'

Sir Marcus whispered with venom, 'To me this—ruffian—is a traitor. This is a time when every man is needed. I'd treat him like a traitor.'

'It's one way of looking at it.'

'Another glass of port, Major.'

'Yes, I think I will.'

'To think of the number of able-bodied men this fellow will take from their country's service even if he shoots no one. Warders. Police guards. Fed and lodged at his country's expense when other men...'

'Are dying. You're right, Sir Marcus.' The pathos of it all went deeply home. He remembered his uniform jacket in the cupboard: the buttons needed shining: the King's buttons. The smell of moth-balls lingered round him still. He said, 'Somewhere there's a corner of a foreign field that is for ever... Shakespeare knew. Old Gaunt when he said that—'

'It would be so much better, Major Calkin, if your men take no risks. If they shoot on sight. One must take up weeds—by the roots.'

'It would be better.'

'You're the father of your men.'

'That's what old Piker said to me once. God forgive him, he meant it differently. I wish you'd drink with me, Sir Marcus. You're an understanding man. You know how an officer feels. I was in the army once.'

'Perhaps in a week you will be in it again.'

'You know how a man feels. I don't want anything to come between us, Sir Marcus. There's one thing I'd like to tell you. It's on my conscience. There was a dog under the sofa.'

'A dog?'

'A Pekinese called Chinky. I didn't know as 'ow...'

'She said it was a cat.'

'She didn't want you to know.'

Sir Marcus said, 'I don't like being deceived. I'll see to Piker at the elections.' He gave a small tired sigh as if there were too many things to be seen to, to be arranged, revenges to be taken, stretching into an endless vista of time, and so much time already covered—since the ghetto, the Marseilles brothel, if there had ever been a ghetto or a brothel. He whispered abruptly, 'So you'll telephone now to the station and tell them to shoot at sight? Say you'll take the responsibility. I'll look after you.'

'I don't see as 'ow, as how...'

The old hands moved impatiently: so much to be arranged. 'Listen to me. I never promise anything I can't answer for. There's a training depot ten miles from here. I can arrange for you to have nominal charge of it, with the rank of colonel, directly war's declared.'

'Colonel Banks?'

'He'll be shifted.'

'You mean if I telephone?'

'No. I mean if you are successful.'

'And the man's dead?'

'He's not important. A young scoundrel. There's no reason to hesitate. Take another glass of port.'

The Chief Constable stretched out his hand for the decanter. He thought, with less relish than he would have expected, 'Colonel Calkin', but he couldn't help remembering other things. He was a sentimental man. He remembered his appointment: it had been 'worked', of course, no less than his appointment to the training depot would be worked, but there came vividly back to him his sense of pride at being head of one of the best police forces in the Midlands. 'I'd better not have any more port,' he said lamely. 'It's bad for my sleep and the wife...'

Sir Marcus said, 'Well, Colonel,' blinking his old eyes, 'you'll be able to count on me for anything.'

'I'd like to do it,' the Chief Constable said imploringly. 'I'd like to please you, Sir Marcus. But I don't see as how... The police couldn't do that.'

'It would never be known.'

'I don't suppose they'd take my orders. Not on a thing like that.'

Sir Marcus whispered, 'Do you mean in your position—you haven't any hold?' He spoke with the astonishment of a man who had always been careful to secure his hold on the most junior of his subordinates.

'I'd like to please you.'

'There's the telephone,' Sir Marcus said. 'At any rate, you can use your influence. I never ask a man for more than he can do.'

The Chief Constable said: 'They are a good lot of boys. I've been down often to the station of an evening and had a drink or two. They're keen. You couldn't have keener men. They'll get him. You needn't be afraid, Sir Marcus.'

'You mean dead?'

'Alive or dead. They won't let him escape. They are good boys.'

'But he has got to be dead,' Sir Marcus said. He sneezed. The intake of breath seemed to have exhausted him. He lay back again, panting gently.

'I couldn't ask them, Sir Marcus, not like that. Why, it's like murder.'

'Nonsense.'

'Those evenings with the boys mean a lot to me. I wouldn't even be able to go down there again after doing that. I'd rather stay what I am. They'll give me a tribunal. As long as there's wars there'll be conchies.'

'There'd be no commission of any kind for you,' Sir Marcus said. 'I could see to that.' The smell of moth-balls came up from Calkin's evening shirt to mock him. 'I can arrange too that you shan't be Chief Constable much longer. You and Piker.' He gave a queer little whistle through the nose. He was too old to laugh, to use his lungs wastefully. 'Come. Have another glass.'

'No. I don't think I'd better. Listen, Sir Marcus, I'll put detectives at your office. I'll have Davis guarded.'

' I don't much mind about Davis,' Sir Marcus said.' Will you get my chauffeur?'

'I'd like to do what you want, Sir Marcus. Won't you come back and see the ladies?'

'No, no,' Sir Marcus whispered, 'not with that dog there. ' He had to be helped to his feet and handed his stick; a few dry crumbs lay in his beard. He said, 'If you change your mind tonight, you can ring me up. I shall be awake. ' A man at his age, the Chief Constable thought charitably, would obviously think differently of death; it threatened him every moment on the slippery pavement, in a piece of soap at the bottom of a bath. It must seem quite a natural thing he was asking; great age was an abnormal condition: you had to make allowances. But watching Sir Marcus helped down the drive and into his deep wide car, he couldn't help saying over to himself, 'Colonel Calkin. Colonel Calkin. ' After a moment he added, 'C. B.'.

The dog was yapping in the drawing-room. They must have lured it out. It was highly bred and nervous, and if a stranger spoke to it too suddenly or sharply, it would rush around in circles, foaming at the mouth, crying out in a horribly human way, its low fur sweeping the carpet like a vacuum cleaner. I might slip down, the Chief Constable thought, and have a drink with the boys. But the idea brought no lightening of his gloom and indecision. Was it possible that Sir Marcus could rob him of even that? But he had robbed him of it already. He couldn't face the superintendent or the inspector with this on his mind. He went into his study and sat down by the telephone. In five minutes Sir Marcus would be home. So much stolen from him already, surely there was little more he could lose by acquiescence. But he sat there doing nothing, a small plump bullying henpecked profiteer.

His wife put her head in at the door. 'Whatever are you doing, Joseph?' she said. 'Come at once and talk to Mrs Piker.'

4

Sir Marcus lived with his valet who was also a trained nurse at the top of the big building in the Tanneries. It was his only home. In London he stayed at Claridge's, in Cannes at the Carlton. His valet met him at the door of the building with his Bath chair and pushed him into the lift, then out along the passage to his study. The heat of the room had been turned up to the right degree, the tape-machine was gently ticking beside his desk. The curtains were not drawn and through the wide double-panes the night sky spread out over Nottwich striped by the searchlights from Hanlow aerodrome. 'You can go to bed, Mollison. I shan't be sleeping.' Sir Marcus slept very little these days. In the little time left him to live a few hours of sleep made a distinct impression. And he didn't really need the sleep. No physical exertion demanded it. Now with the telephone within his reach he began to read first the memorandum on his desk, then the strips of tape. He read the arrangements for the gas drill in the morning. All the clerks on the ground floor who might happen to be needed for outside work were already supplied with gas masks. The sirens were expected to go almost immediately the rush hour was over and work in the offices had begun. Members of the transport staff, lorry drivers and special messengers would wear their masks immediately they started work. It was the only way to ensure that they wouldn't leave them behind somewhere and be caught unprotected during the hours of the practice and so waste in hospital the valuable hours of Midland Steel.

More valuable than they had ever been since November, 1918. Sir Marcus read the tape prices. Armament shares continued to rise, and with them steel. It made no difference at all that the British Government had stopped all export licences; the country itself was now absorbing more armaments than it had ever done since the peak year of Haig's assaults on the Hindenburg Line. Sir Marcus had many friends, in many countries; he wintered with them regularly at Cannes or in Soppelsa's yacht off Rhodes; he was the intimate friend of Mrs Cranbeim. It was impossible now to export arms, but it was still possible to export nickel and most of the other metals which were necessary to the arming of nations. Even when war was declared, Mrs Cranbeim had been able to say quite definitely, that evening when the yacht pitched a little and Rosen was so distressingly sick over Mrs Ziffo's black satin, the British Government would not forbid the export of nickel to Switzerland or other neutral countries so long as the British requirements were first met. The future was very rosy indeed, for you could trust Mrs Cranbeim's word. She spoke directly from the horse's mouth, if you could so describe the elder statesman whose confidence she shared.

It seemed quite certain now; Sir Marcus read, in the tape messages, that the two governments chiefly concerned would not either amend or accept the terms of the ultimatum. Probably within five days, at least four countries would be at war and the consumption of munitions have risen to several million pounds a day.

And yet Sir Marcus was not quite happy. Davis had bungled things. When he had told Davis that a murderer ought not to be allowed to benefit from his crime, he had never expected all this silly business of the stolen notes. Now he must wait up all night for the telephone to ring. The old thin body made itself as comfortable as it could on the air-blown cushions: Sir Marcus was as painfully aware of his bones as a skeleton must be, wearing itself away against the leaden lining of its last suit. A clock struck midnight; he had lived one more whole day.

Chapter 5

1

RAVEN groped through the dark of the small shed till he had found the sacks. He piled them up, shaking them as one shakes a pillow. He whispered anxiously: 'You'll be able to rest there a bit?' Anne let his hand guide her to the corner. She said, 'It's freezing.'

'Lie down and I'll find more sacks.' He struck a match and the tiny flame went wandering through the close cold darkness. He brought the sacks and spread them over her, dropping the match.

'Can't we have a little light?' Anne asked. 'It's not safe. Anyway,' he said, 'it's a break for me. You can't see me in the dark. You can't see this.' He touched his lip secretly. He was listening at the door; he heard feet stumble on the tangle of metal and cinders and after a time a low voice spoke. He said, 'I've got to think. They know I'm here. Perhaps you'd better go. They've got nothing on you. If they come there's going to be shooting.'

'Do you think they know I'm here?'

'They must have followed us all the way.'

'Then I'll stay,' Anne said. 'There won't be any shooting while I'm here. They'll wait till morning, till you come out.'

'That's friendly of you,' he said with sour incredulity, all his suspicion of friendliness coming back. 'I've told you. I'm on your side.'

'I've got to think of a way,' he said. 'You may as well rest now. You've all the night to think in.'

'It is sort of—good in here,' Raven said, 'out of the way of the whole damned world of them. In the dark.' He wouldn't come near her, but sat down in the opposite corner with his automatic in his lap. He said suspiciously, 'What are you thinking about?' He was astonished and shocked by the sound of a laugh. 'Kind of homey,' Anne said.

'I don't take any stock in homes,' Raven said. 'I've been in one.'

'Tell me about it. What's your name?'

'You know my name. You've seen it in the papers.'

'I mean your Christian name.'

'Christian. That's a good joke, that one. Do you think anyone ever turns the other cheek these days?' He tapped the barrel of the automatic resentfully on the cinder floor. 'Not a chance.' He could hear her breathing there in the opposite corner, out of sight, out of reach, and he was afflicted by the odd sense that he had missed something. He said, 'I'm not saying you aren't fine. I dare say you're Christian all right.'

'Search me,' Anne said.

'I took you out to that house to kill you...'

'To kill me?'

'What did you think it was for? I'm not a lover, am I? Girl's dream? Handsome as the day?'

'Why didn't you?'

'Those men turned up. That's all. I didn't fall for you. I don't fall for girls. I'm saved that. You won't find me ever going soft on a skirt.' He went desperately on, 'Why didn't you tell the police about me? Why don't you shout to them now?'

'Well,' she said, 'you've got a gun, haven't you?'

'I wouldn't shoot.'

'Why not?'

'I'm not all that crazy,' he said. 'If people go straight with me, I'll go straight with them. Go on. Shout. I won't do a thing.'

'Well,' Anne said, 'I don't have to ask your leave to be grateful, do I? You saved me tonight.'

'That lot wouldn't have killed you. They haven't the nerve to kill. It takes a man to kill.'

'Well, your friend Cholmondeley came pretty near it. He nearly throttled me when he guessed I was in with you.'

'In with me?'

'To rind the man you're after.'

'The double-crossing bastard.' He brooded over his pistol, but his thoughts always disturbingly came back from hate to this dark safe corner; he wasn't used to that. He said,'You've got sense all right. I like you.'

'Thanks for the compliment.'

'It's no compliment. You don't have to tell me. I've got something I'd like to trust you with, but I can't.'

'What's the dark secret?'

'It's not a secret. It's a cat I left back in my lodgings in London when they chased me out. You'd have looked after it.'

'You disappoint me, Mr Raven. I thought it was going to be a few murders at least.' She exclaimed with sudden seriousness, 'I've got it. The place where Davis works.'

'Davis?'

'The man you call Cholmondeley. I'm sure of it. Midland Steel. In a street near the Metropole. A big palace of a place.'

I've got to get out of here,' Raven said, beating the automatic on the freezing ground.

'Can't you go to the police?'

'Me?' Raven said. 'Me go to the police?' He laughed. 'That'd be fine, wouldn't it? Hold out my hands for the cuffs...'

'I'll think of a way,' Anne said. When her voice ceased it was as if she had gone. He said sharply, 'Are you there?'

'Of course I'm here,' she said. 'What's worrying you?'

'It feels odd not to be alone.' The sour incredulity surged back. He struck a couple of matches and held them to his face, close to his disfigured mouth. 'Look,' he said, 'take a long look.' The small flames burnt steadily down. 'You aren't going to help me, are you? Me?'

'You are all right,' she said. The flames touched his skin, but he held the two matches rigidly up and they burnt out against his fingers; the pain was like joy. But he rejected it; it had come too late; he sat in the dark feeling tears like heavy weights behind his eyes, but he couldn't weep. He had never known the particular trick that opened the right ducts at the right time. He crept a little way out of his corner towards her, feeling his way along the floor with the automatic. He said, 'Are you cold?'

'I've been in warmer places,' Anne said.

There were only his own sacks left. He pushed them over to her. 'Wrap 'em round,' he said.

'Have you got enough?'

'Of course I have. I can look after myself,' he said sharply, as if he hated her. His hands were so cold that he would have found it hard to use the automatic. 'I've got to get out of here.'

'We'll think of a way. Better have a sleep.'

'I can't sleep,' he said, 'I've been dreaming bad dreams lately.'

'We might tell each other stories? It's about the children's hour.'

'I don't know any stories.'

'Well, I'll tell you one. What kind? A funny one?'

'They never seem funny to me.'

'The three bears might be suitable.'

'I don't want anything financial. I don't want to hear anything about money.'

She could just see him now that he had come closer, a dark hunched shape that couldn't understand a word she was saying. She mocked him gently, secure in the knowledge that he would never realize she was mocking him. She said:' I'll tell you about the fox and the cat. Well, this cat met a fox in a forest, and she'd always heard the fox cracked up for being wise. So she passed him the time of day politely and asked how he was getting along. But the fox was proud. He said, "How dare you ask me how I get along, you hungry mouse-hunter? What do you know about the world?"

"Well, I do know one thing," the cat said. "What's that?" said the fox. "How to get away from the dogs," the cat said. "When they chase me, I jump into a tree." Then the fox went all high and mighty and said, "You've only one trick and I've a hundred. I've got a sack full of tricks. Come along with me and I'll show you." Just then a hunter ran quietly up with four hounds. The cat sprang into the tree and cried, "Open your sack, Mr Fox, open your sack." But the dogs held him with their teeth. So the cat laughed at him saying, "Mr Know-all, if you'd had just this one trick in your sack, you'd be safe up the tree with me now.'" Anne stopped. She whispered to the dark shape beside her, 'Are you asleep?'

'No,' Raven said, 'I'm not asleep.'

'It's your turn now.'

'I don't know any stories,' Raven said, sullenly, miserably.

'No stories like that? You haven't been brought up properly.'

'I'm educated all right,' he protested, 'but I've got things on my mind. Plenty of them.'

'Cheer up. There's someone who's got more.'

'Who's that?'

'The fellow who began all this, who killed the old man, you know who I mean. Davis's friend.'

'What do you say?' he said furiously. 'Davis's friend?' He held his anger in. 'It's not the killing I mind; it's the double-crossing.'

'Well, of course,' Anne said cheerily, making conversation under the pile of sacks, 'I don't mind a little thing like killing myself.'

He looked up and tried to see her through the dark, hunting a hope. 'You don't mind that?'

'But there are killings and killings,' Anne said. 'If I had the man here who killed—what was the old man's name?'

'I don't remember.'

'Nor do I. We couldn't pronounce it anyway.'

'Go on. If he was here...'

'Why, I'd let you shoot him without raising a ringer. And I'd say "Well done" to you afterwards.' She warmed to the subject. 'You remember what I told you, that they can't invent gas masks for babies to wear? That's the kind of thing he'll have on his mind. The mothers alive in their masks watching the babies cough up their insides.'

He said stubbornly, 'The poor ones'll be lucky. And what do I care about the rich? This isn't a world I'd bring children into.' She could just see his tense crouching figure. 'It's just their selfishness,' he said. 'They have a good time and what do they mind if someone's born ugly? Three minutes in bed or against a wall, and then a lifetime for the one that's born. Mother love,' he began to laugh, seeing quite clearly the kitchen table, the carving knife on the linoleum, the blood all over his mother's dress. He explained, 'You see I'm educated. In one of His Majesty's own homes. They call them that—homes. What do you think a home means?' But he didn't allow her time to speak. 'You are wrong. You think it means a husband in work, a nice gas cooker and a double-bed, carpet slippers and cradles and the rest. That's not a home. A home's solitary confinement for a kid that's caught talking in the chapel and the birch for almost anything you do. Bread and water. A sergeant knocking you around if you try to lark a bit. That's a home.'

'Well, he was trying to alter all that, wasn't he? He was poor like we are.'

'Who are you talking about?'

'Old what's-his-name. Didn't you read about him in the papers? How he cut down all the army expenses to help clear the slums? There were photographs of him opening new flats, talking to the children. He wasn't one of the rich. He wouldn't have gone to war. That's why they shot him. You bet there are fellows making money now out of him being dead. And he'd done it all himself too, the obituaries said. His father was a thief and his mother committed—'

'Suicide?' Raven whispered. 'Did you read how she...'

'She drowned herself.'

'The things you read,' Raven said. 'It's enough to make a fellow think.'

'Well, I'd say the fellow who killed old what's-his-name had something to think about.'

'Maybe,' Raven said, 'he didn't know all the papers know. The men who paid him, they knew. Perhaps if we knew all there was to know, the kind of breaks the fellow had had, we'd, see his point of view.'

'It'd take a lot of talking to make me see that. Anyway we'd better sleep now.'

'I've got to think,' Raven said.

'You'll think better after you've had a nap.'

But it was far too cold for him to sleep; he had no sacks to cover himself with, and his black tight overcoat was worn almost as thin as cotton. Under the door came a draught which might have travelled down the frosty rails from Scotland, a north-east wind, bringing icy fogs from the sea. He thought to himself: I didn't mean the old man any harm, there was nothing personal... 'I'd let you shoot him, and afterwards I'd say, "Well done".' He had a momentary crazy impulse to get up and go through the door with his automatic in his hand and let them shoot. 'Mr Know-all,' she could say then, 'if you'd only had this one trick in your sack, the dogs wouldn't...' But then it seemed to him that this knowledge he had gained of the old man was only one more count against Chol-mon-deley. Chol-mon-deley had known all this. There'd be one more bullet in his belly for this, and one more for Cholmondeley's master. But how was he to find the other man? He had only the memory of a photograph to guide him, a photograph which the old Minister had somehow connected with the letter of introduction Raven had borne, a young scarred boy's face which was probably an old man's now.

Anne said, 'Are you asleep?'

'No,' Raven said. 'What's troubling you?'

'I thought I heard someone moving.'

He listened. It was only the wind tapping a loose board outside. He said, 'You go to sleep. You needn't be scared. They won't come till it's light enough to see.' He thought: where would those two have met when they were so young? Surely not in the kind of home he'd known, the cold stone stairs, the cracked commanding bell, the tiny punishment cells. Quite suddenly he fell asleep and the old Minister was coming towards him saying, 'Shoot me. Shoot me in the eyes,' and Raven was a child with a catapult in his hands. He wept and wouldn't shoot and the old Minister said, 'Shoot, dear child. We'll go home together. Shoot.'

Raven woke again as suddenly. In his sleep his hand had gripped the automatic tight. It was pointed at the corner where Anne slept. He gazed with horror into the dark, hearing a whisper like the one he had heard through the door when the secretary tried to call out. He said, 'Are you asleep? What are you saying?'

Anne said: 'I'm awake.' She said defensively, 'I was just praying.'

'Do you believe in God?'

'I don't know,' Anne said. 'Sometimes maybe. It's a habit, praying. It doesn't do any harm. It's like crossing your ringers when you walk under a ladder. We all need any luck that's going.'

Raven said, 'We did a lot of praying in the home. Twice a day, and before meals too.'

'It doesn't prove anything.'

'No, it doesn't prove anything. Only you get sort of mad when everything reminds you of what's over and done with. Sometimes you want to begin fresh, and then someone praying, or a smell, or something you read in the paper, and it's all back again, the places and the people.' He came a little nearer in the cold shed for company; it made you feel more than usually alone to know that they were waiting for you outside, waiting for daylight so that they could take you without any risk of your escaping or of your firing first. He had a good mind to send her out directly it was day and stick where he was and shoot it out with them. But that meant leaving Chol-mon-deley and his employer free; it was just what would please them most. He said, 'I was reading once—I like reading—I'm educated, something about psicko—psicko—'

'Leave it at that,' Anne said. 'I know what you mean.'

'It seems your dreams mean things. I don't mean like tea-leaves or cards.'

'I knew someone once,' Anne said. 'She was so good with the cards it gave you the creeps. She used to have those cards with queer pictures on them. The Hanged Man...'

'It wasn't like that,' Raven said. 'It was—Oh, I don't know properly. I couldn't understand it all. But it seems if you told your dreams... It was like you carry a load around you; you are born with some of it because of what your father and mother were and their fathers... seems as if it goes right back, like it says in the Bible about the sins being visited. Then when you're a kid the load gets bigger; all the things you need to do and can't; and then all the things you do. They get you either way.' He leant his sad killer's face on his hands. 'It's like confessing to a priest. Only when you've confessed you go and do it all over again. I mean you tell these doctors everything, every dream you have, and afterwards you don't want to do it. But you have to tell them everything.'

'Even the flying pigs?' Anne said.

'Everything. And when you've told everything it's gone.'

'It sounds phoney to me,' Anne said.

'I don't suppose I've told it right. But it's what I read. I thought that maybe it might be worth a trial.'

'Life's full of funny things. Me and you being here. You thinking you wanted to kill me. Me thinking we can stop a war. Your psicko isn't any funnier than that.'

'You see it's getting rid of it all that counts,' Raven said. 'It's not what the doctor does. That's how it seemed to me. Like when I told you about the home, and the bread and water and the prayers, they didn't seem so important afterwards.' He swore softly and obscenely, under his breath. 'I'd always said I wouldn't go soft on a skirt. I always thought my lip'd save me. It's not safe to go soft. It makes you slow. I've seen it happen to other fellows. They've always landed in gaol or got a razor in their guts. Now I've gone soft, as soft as all the rest.'

'I like you,' Anne said. 'I'm your friend—'

'I'm not asking anything,' Raven said. 'I'm ugly and I know it. Only one thing. Be different. Don't go to the police. Most skirts do. I've seen it happen. But maybe you aren't a skirt. You're a girl.'

'I'm someone's girl.'

'That's all right with me,' he exclaimed with painful pride in the coldness and the dark. 'I'm not asking anything but that, that you don't grass on me.'

'I'm not going to the police,' Anne said. 'I promise you I won't I like you as well as any man—except my friend.'

'I thought as how perhaps I could tell you a thing or two—dreams—just as well as any doctor. You see I know doctors. You can't trust them. I went to one before I came down here. I wanted him to alter this lip. He tried to put me to sleep with gas. He was going to call the police. You can't trust them. But I could trust you.'

'You can trust me all right,' Anne said. 'I won't go to the police. But you'd better sleep first and tell me your dreams after if you want to. It's a long night.'

His teeth suddenly chattered uncontrollably with the cold and Anne heard him. She put out a hand and touched his coat. 'You're cold,' she said. 'You've given me all the sacks.'

'I don't need 'em. I've got a coat.'

'We're friends, aren't we?' Anne said. 'We are in this together. You take two of these sacks.'

He said, 'There'll be some more about. I'll look,' and he struck a match and felt his way round the wall. 'Here are two,' he said, sitting down farther away from her, empty-handed, out of reach. He said, 'I can't sleep. Not properly. I had a dream just now. About the old man.'

'What old man?'

'The old man that got murdered. I dreamed I was a kid with a catapult and he was saying, "Shoot me through the eyes," and I was crying and he said, "Shoot me through the eyes, dear child."'

'Search me for a meaning,' Anne said.

'I just wanted to tell it you.'

'What did he look like?'

'Like he did look.' Hastily he added, 'Like I've seen in the photographs.' He brooded over his memories with a low passionate urge towards confession. There had never in his life been anyone he could trust till now. He said, 'You don't mind hearing these things?' and listened with a curious deep happiness to her reply, 'We are friends.' He said, 'This is the best night I've ever had.' But there were things he still couldn't tell her. His happiness was incomplete till she knew everything, till he had shown his trust completely. He didn't want to shock or pain her; he led slowly towards the central revelation. He said, 'I've had other dreams of being a kid. I've dreamed I opened a door, a kitchen door, and there was my mother—she'd cut her throat—she looked ugly—her head nearly off—she sawn at it—with a bread knife—'

Anne said, 'That wasn't a dream.'

'No,' he said, 'you're right, that wasn't a dream.' He waited. He could feel her sympathy move silently towards him in the dark. He said, 'That was ugly, wasn't it? You'd think you couldn't beat that for ugliness, wouldn't you? She hadn't even thought enough of me to lock the door so as I shouldn't see. And after that, there was a Home. You know all about that. You'd say that was ugly too, but it wasn't as ugly as that was. And they educated me too properly so as I could understand the things I read in the papers. Like this psicko business. And write a good hand and speak the King's English. I got beaten a lot at the start, solitary confinement, bread and water, all the rest of the homey stuff. But that didn't go on when they'd educated me. I was too clever for them after that. They could never put a thing on me. They suspected all right, but they never had the proof. Once the chaplain tried to frame me. They were right when they told us the day we left about it was like life. Jim and me and a bunch of soft kids.' He said bitterly, 'This is the first time they've had anything on me and I'm innocent.'

'You'll get away,' Anne said. 'We'll think up something together.'

'It sounds good your saying "together" like that, but they've got me this time. I wouldn't mind if I could get that Chol-mon-deley and his boss first.' He said with a kind of nervous pride, 'Would you be surprised if I'd told you I'd killed a man?' It was like the first fence; if he cleared that, he would have confidence... 'Who?'

'Did you ever hear of Battling Kite?'

'No.'

He laughed with a sacred pleasure. 'I'm trusting you with my life now. If you'd told me twenty-four hours ago that I'd trust my life to... but of course I haven't given you any proof. I was doing the races then. Kite had a rival gang. There wasn't anything else to do. He'd tried to bump my boss off on the course. Half of us took a fast car back to town. He thought we were on the train with him. But we were on the platform, see, when the train came in. We got round him directly he got outside the carriage. I cut his throat and the others held him up till we were all through the barrier in a bunch. Then we dropped him by the bookstall and did a bolt.' He said, 'You see it was his lot or our lot. They'd had razors out on the course. It was war.'

After a while Anne said, 'Yes. I can see that. He had his chance.'

'It sounds ugly,' Raven said, 'Funny thing is, it wasn't ugly. It was natural.'

'Did you stick to that game?'

'No. It wasn't good enough. You couldn't trust the others. They either went soft or else they got reckless. They didn't use their brains.' He said, 'I wanted to tell you about Kite. I'm not sorry. I haven't got religion. Only you said about being friendly and I don't want you to get any wrong ideas. It was that mix-up with Kite brought me up against Chol-mon-deley. I can see now, he was only in the racing game so as he could meet people. I thought he was a mug.'

'We've got a long way from dreams.'

'I was coming back to them,' Raven said. 'I suppose killing Kite like that made me nervous.' His voice trembled very slightly from fear and hope, hope because she had accepted one killing so quietly and might, after all, take back what she had said: ('Well done', 'I wouldn't raise a finger'); fear because he didn't really believe that you could put such perfect trust in another and not be deceived. But it'd be fine, he thought, to be able to tell everything, to know that another person knew and didn't care; it would be like going to sleep for a long while. He said, 'That spell of sleep I had just now was the first for two—three—I don't know how many nights. It looks as if I'm not tough enough after all.'

'You seem tough enough to me,' Anne said. 'Don't let's hear any more about Kite.'

'No one will hear any more about Kite. But if I was to tell you—' he ran away from the revelation.' I've been dreaming a lot lately. It was an old woman I killed, not Kite. I heard her calling out through a door and I tried to open the door, but she held the handle. I shot at her through the wood, but she held the handle tight, I had to kill her to open the door. Then I dreamed she was still alive and I shot her through the eyes. But even that—it wasn't ugly.'

'You are tough enough in your dreams,' Anne said.

'I killed an old man too in that dream. Behind his desk. I had a silencer. He fell behind it. I didn't want to hurt him. He didn't mean anything to me. I pumped him full. Then I put a bit of paper in his hand. I didn't have to take anything.'

'What do you mean—you didn't have to take?' Raven said, 'They hadn't paid me to take anything. Chol-mon-deley and his boss.'

'It wasn't a dream.'

'No. It wasn't a dream.' The silence frightened him. He began to talk rapidly to fill it. 'I didn't know the old fellow was one of us. I wouldn't have touched him if I'd known he was like that. All this talk of war. It doesn't mean a thing to me. Why should I care if there's a war? There's always been a war for me. You talk a lot about the kids. Can't you have a bit of pity for the men? It was me or him. Two hundred pounds when I got back and fifty pounds down. It's a lot of money. It was only Kite over again. It was just as easy as it was with Kite.' He said, 'Are you going to leave me now?' and in silence Anne could hear his rasping anxious breath. She said at last, 'No. I'm not going to leave you.'

He said, 'That's good. Oh, that's good,' putting out his hand, feeling hers cold as ice on the sacking. He put it for a moment against his unshaven cheek; he wouldn't touch it with his malformed lip. He said, 'It feels good to trust someone with everything.'

2

Anne waited for a long time before she spoke again. She wanted her voice to sound right, not to show her repulsion. Then she tried it on him, but all she could think of to say was again, 'I'm not going to leave you.' She remembered very clearly in the dark all she had read of the crime: the old woman secretary shot through the eyes lying in the passage, the brutally smashed skull of the old Socialist. The papers had called it the worst political murder since the day when the King and Queen of Serbia were thrown through the windows of their palace to ensure the succession of the war-time hero king.

Raven said again, 'It's good to be able to trust someone like this,' and suddenly his mouth which had never before struck her as particularly ugly came to mind and she could have retched at the memory. Nevertheless, she thought, I must go on with this, I mustn't let him know, he must find Cholmondeley and Cholmondeley's boss and then... She shrank from him into the dark.

He said, 'They are out there waiting now. They've got cops down from London.'

'From London?'

'It was all in the papers,' he said with pride. 'Detective-Sergeant Mather from the Yard.'

She could hardly restrain a cry of desolation and horror. 'Here?'

'He may be outside now.'

'Why doesn't he come in?'

'They'd never get me in the dark. And they'll know by now that you are here. They wouldn't be able to shoot.'

'And you—you would?'

'There's no one I mind hurting,' Raven said. 'How are you going to get out when it's daylight?'

'I shan't wait till then. I only want just light enough to see my way. And see to shoot. They won't be able to fire first; they won't be able to shoot to kill. That's what gives me a break. I only want a few clear hours. If I get away, they'll never guess where to find me. Only you'll know I'm at Midland Steel.'

She felt a desperate hatred. 'You'll just shoot like that in cold blood?'

'You said you were on my side, didn't you?'

'Oh yes,' she said warily, 'yes,' trying to think. It was getting too much to have to save the world—and Jimmy. If it came to a show-down the world would have to take second place. And what, she wondered, is Jimmy thinking? She knew his heavy humourless rectitude; it would take more than Raven's head on a platter to make him understand why she had acted as she had with Raven and Cholmondeley. It sounded weak and fanciful even to herself to say that she wanted to stop a war.

'Let's sleep now,' she said. 'We've got a long, long day ahead.'

'I think I could sleep now,' Raven said. 'You don't know how good it seems...' It was Anne now who could not sleep. She had too much to think about. It occurred to her that she might steal his pistol before he woke and call the police in. That would save Jimmy from danger, but what was the use? They'd never believe her story; they had no proof that he had killed the old man. And even then he might escape. She needed time and there was no time. She could hear very faintly droning up from the south, where the military aerodrome was, a flight of planes. They passed very high on special patrol, guarding the Nottwich mines and the key industry of Midland Steel, tiny specks of light the size of fireflies travelling fast in formation, over the railway, over the goods yard, over the shed where Anne and Raven lay, over Saunders beating his arms for warmth behind a truck out of the wind's way, over Acky dreaming that he was in the pulpit of St Luke's, over Sir Marcus sleepless beside the tape machine.

Raven slept heavily for the first time for nearly a week, holding the automatic in his lap. He dreamed that he was building a great bonfire on Guy Fawkes day. He threw in everything he could find: a sawedged knife, a lot of racing cards, the leg of a table. It burnt warmly, deeply, beautifully. A lot of fireworks were going off all round him and again the old War Minister appeared on the other side of the fire. He said, 'It's a good fire,' stepping into it himself. Raven ran to the fire to pull him out, but the old man said, 'Let me be. It's warm here,' and then he sagged like a Guy Fawkes in the flames.

A clock struck. Anne counted the strokes, as she had counted them all through the night; it must be nearly day and she had no plan. She coughed; her throat was stinging; and suddenly she realized with joy that there was fog outside: not one of the black upper fogs, but a cold damp yellow fog from the river, through which it would be easy, if it was thick enough, for a man to escape. She put out her hand unwillingly, because he was now so repulsive to her, and touched Raven. He woke at once. She said, 'There's a fog coming up.'

'What a break!' he said, 'what a break!' laughing softly.

'It makes you believe in Providence, doesn't it?' They could just see each other in the pale earliest light. He was shivering now that he was awake. He said, 'I dreamed of a big fire'. She saw that he had no sacks to cover him, but she felt no pity at all. He was just a wild animal who had to be dealt with carefully and then destroyed. 'Let him freeze,' she thought. He was examining the automatic; she saw him put down the safety catch. He said, 'What about you? You've been straight with me. I don't want you to get into any trouble. I don't want them to think,' he hesitated and went on with questioning humility, 'to know that we are in this together.'

'I'll think up something,' Anne said.

'I ought to knock you out. They wouldn't know then. But I've gone soft. I wouldn't hurt you not if I was paid.'

She couldn't resist saying, 'Not for two hundred and fifty pounds?'

'He was a stranger,' Raven said. 'It's not the same. I thought he was one of the high and mighties. You're—' he hesitated again, glowering dumbly down at the automatic, 'a friend.'

'You needn't be afraid,' Anne said. I'll have a tale to tell.'

He said with admiration, 'You're clever.' He watched the fog coming in under the badly fitting door, filling the small shed with its freezing coils. ' It'll be nearly thick enough now to take a chance.' He held the automatic in his left hand and flexed the fingers of the right. He laughed to keep his courage up. 'They'll never get me now in this fog.'

'You'll shoot?'

'Of course I'll shoot.'

'I've got an idea,' Anne said. 'We don't want to take any risks. Give me your overcoat and hat. I'll put them on and slip out first and give them a run for their money. In this fog they'll never notice till they've caught me. Directly you hear the whistles blow count five slowly and make a bolt. I'll run to the right. You run to the left.'

'You've got nerve,' Raven said. He shook his head. 'No. They might shoot.'

'You said yourself they wouldn't shoot first.'

'That's right. But you'll get a couple of years for this.'

'Oh,' Anne said, I'll tell them a tale. I'll say you forced me.' She said with a trace of bitterness, 'This'll give me a lift out of the chorus. I'll have a speaking part.'

Raven said shyly, 'If you made out you were my girl, they wouldn't pin it on you. I'll say that for them. They'd give a man's girl a break.'

'Got a knife?'

'Yes.' He felt in all his pockets; it wasn't there; he must have left it on the floor of Acky's best guest-chamber.

Anne said, 'I wanted to cut up my skirt. I'd be able to run easier.'

'I'll try and tear it,' Raven said, kneeling in front of her, taking a grip, but it wouldn't tear. Looking down she was astonished at the smallness of his wrists; his hands had no more strength or substance than a delicate boy's. The whole of his strength lay in the mechanical instrument at his feet. She thought of Mather and felt contempt now as well as repulsion for the thin ugly body kneeling at her feet.

'Never mind,' she said. 'I'll do the best I can. Give me the coat.'

He shivered, taking it off, and seemed to lose some of his sour assurance without the tight black tube which had hidden a very old, very flamboyant check suit in holes at both the elbows. It hung on him uneasily. He looked under-nourished. He wouldn't have impressed anyone as dangerous now. He pressed his arms to his sides to hide the holes. 'And your hat,' Anne said. He picked it up from the sacks and gave it her. He looked humiliated, and he had never accepted humiliation before without rage. 'Now,' Anne said, 'remember. Wait for the whistles and then count.'

'I don't like it,' Raven said. He tried hopelessly to express the deep pain it gave him to see her go; it felt too much like the end of everything. He said, I'll see you again—some time,' and when she mechanically reassured him, 'Yes,' he laughed with his aching despair, 'Not likely, after I've killed—' but he didn't even know the man's name.

Chapter 6

1

SAUNDERS had half fallen asleep; a voice at his side woke him. 'The fog's getting thick, sir.'

It was already dense, with the first light touching it with dusty yellow, and he would have sworn at the policeman for not waking him earlier if his stammer had not made him chary of wasting words. He said, 'Pass the word round to move in.'

'Are we going to rush the place, sir?'

'No. There's a girl there. We can't have any sh-sh-shooting. Wait till he comes out.'

But the policeman hadn't left his side when he noticed, 'The door's opening.' Saunders put his whistle in his mouth and lowered his safety catch. The light was bad and the fog deceptive; but he recognized the dark coat as it slipped to the right into the shelter of the coal trucks. He blew his whistle and was after it. The black coat had half a minute's start and was moving quickly into the fog. It was impossible to see at all more than twenty feet ahead. But Saunders kept doggedly just in sight blowing his whistle continuously. As he hoped, a whistle blew in front; it confused the fugitive; he hesitated for a moment and Saunders gained on him. They had him cornered, and this Saunders knew was the dangerous moment. He blew his whistle urgently three times into the fog to bring the police round in a complete circle and the whistle was taken up in the yellow obscurity, passing in a wide invisible circle.

But he had lost pace, the fugitive spurted forward and was lost. Saunders blew two blasts: 'Advance slowly and keep in touch.' To the right and in front a single long whistle announced that the man had been seen, and the police converged on the sound. Each kept in touch with a policeman on either hand. It was impossible as long as the circle was kept closed for the man to escape. But the circle drew in and there was no sign of him; the short single exploratory blasts sounded petulant and lost. At last Saunders gazing ahead saw the faint form of a policeman come out of the fog a dozen yards away. He halted them all with a whistled signal: the fugitive must be somewhere just ahead in the tangle of trucks in the centre. Revolver in hand Saunders advanced and a policeman took his place and closed the circle.

Suddenly Saunders spied his man. He had taken up a strategic position where a pile of coal and an empty truck at his back made a wedge which guarded him from surprise. He was invisible to the police behind him, and he had turned sideways like a duellist and presented only a shoulder to Saunders, while a pile of old sleepers hid him to the knees. It seemed to Saunders that it meant only one thing, that he was going to shoot it out; the man must be mad and desperate. The hat was pulled down over the face; the coat hung in an odd loose way; the hands were in the pockets. Saunders called at him through the yellow coils of fog, 'You'd better come quietly.' He raised his pistol and advanced, his finger ready on the trigger. But the immobility of the figure scared him. It was in shadow half hidden in the swirl of fog. It was he who was exposed, with the east, and the pale penetration of early light, behind him. It was like waiting for execution, for he could not fire first. But all the same, knowing what Mather felt, knowing that this man was mixed up with Mather's girl, he did not want much excuse to fire. Mather would stand by him. A movement would be enough. He said sharply without a stammer, 'Put up your hands!' The figure didn't move. He told himself again with a kindling hatred for the man who had injured Mather: I'll plug him if he doesn't obey: they'll all stand by me: one more chance. 'Put up your hands!' and when the figure stayed as it was with its hands hidden, a hardly discernible menace, he fired.

But as he pressed the trigger a whistle blew, a long urgent blast which panted and gave out like a rubber animal, from the direction of the wall and the road. There could be no doubt whatever what that meant, and suddenly he saw it all—he had shot at Mather's girl; she'd drawn them off. He screamed at the men behind him, 'Back to the gate!' and ran forward. He had seen her waver at his shot. He said, 'Are you hurt?' and knocked the hat off her head to see her better.

'You're the third person who's tried to kill me,' Anne said weakly, leaning hard against the truck. 'Come to sunny Nottwich. Well, I've got six lives left.'

Saunders's stammer came back: 'W-w-w-w.'

'This is where you hit,' Anne said, 'if that's what you want to know,' showing the long yellow sliver on the edge of the truck. 'It's only an outer. You don't even get a box of chocolates.'

Saunders said, 'You'll have to c-c-come along with me.'

'It'll be a pleasure. Do you mind if I take off this coat? I feel kind of silly.'

At the gate four policeman stood round something on the ground. One of them said, 'We've sent for an ambulance.'

'Is he dead?'

'Not yet. He's shot in the stomach. He must have gone on whistling—'

Saunders had a moment of vicious rage. 'Stand aside, boys,' he said, 'and let the lady see.' They drew back in an embarrassed unwilling way as if they'd been hiding a dirty chalk picture on the wall and showed the white drained face which looked as if it had never been alive, never known the warm circulation of blood. You couldn't call the expression peaceful; it was just nothing at all. The blood was all over the trousers the men had loosened, was caked on the charcoal of the path. Saunders said, 'Two of you take this lady to the station. I'll stay here till the ambulance comes.'

2

Mather said, 'If you want to make a statement I must warn you. Anything you say may be used in evidence.'

'I haven't got a statement to make,' Anne said. 'I want to talk to you, Jimmy.'

Mather said, 'If the superintendent had been here, I should have asked him to take the case. I want you to understand that I'm not letting personal—that my not having charged you doesn't mean—'

'You might give a girl a cup of coffee,' Anne said. 'It's nearly breakfast time.'

Mather struck the table furiously. 'Where was he going?'

'Give me time,' Anne said, 'I've got plenty to tell. But you won't believe it.'

'You saw the man he shot,' Mather said. 'He's got a wife and two children. They've rung up from the hospital. He's bleeding internally.'

'What's the time?' Anne said.

'Eight o'clock. It won't make any difference your keeping quiet. He can't escape us now. In an hour the air raid signals go. There won't be a soul on the streets without a mask. He'll be spotted at once. What's he wearing?'

'If you'd give me something to eat. I haven't had a thing for twenty-four hours. I could think then.'

Mather said, 'There's only one chance you won't be charged with complicity. If you make a statement.'

'Is this the third degree?' Anne said.

'Why do you want to shelter him? Why keep your word to him when you don't—?'

'Go on,' Anne said. 'Be personal. No one can blame you. I don't. But I don't want you to think I'd keep my word to him. He killed the old man. He told me so.'

'What old man?'

'The War Minister.'

'You've got to think up something better than that,' Mather said.

'But it's true. He never stole those notes. They double-crossed him. It was what they'd paid him to do the job.'

'He spun you a fancy yarn,' Mather said. 'But I know where those notes came from.'

'So do I. I can guess. From somewhere in this town.'

'He told you wrong. They came from United Rail Makers in Victoria Street.'

Anne shook her head. 'They didn't start from there. They came from Midland Steel.'

'So that's where he's going, to Midland Steel—in the Tanneries?'

'Yes,' Anne said. There was a sound of finality about the word which daunted her. She hated Raven now, the policeman she had seen bleeding on the ground called at her heart for Raven's death, but she couldn't help remembering the hut, the cold, the pile of sacks, his complete and hopeless trust. She sat with bowed head while Mather lifted the receiver and gave his orders. 'We'll wait for him there,' he said. 'Who is it he wants to see?'

'He doesn't know.'

'There might be something in it,' Mather said. 'Some connection between the two. He's probably been double-crossed by some clerk.'

'It wasn't a clerk who paid him all that money, who tried to kill me just because I knew—'

Mather said, 'Your fairy tale can wait.' He rang a bell and told the constable who came, 'Hold this girl for further inquiries. You can give her a sandwich and a cup of coffee now.'

'Where are you going?'

'To bring in your boy friend,' Mather said.

'He'll shoot. He's quicker than you are. Why can't you let the others—?' She implored him, 'I'll make a full statement. How he killed a man called Kite too.'

'Take it,' Mather said to the constable. He put on his coat. 'The fog's clearing.'

She said, 'Don't you see that if it's true—only give him time to find his man and there won't be—war.'

'He was telling you a fairy story.'

'He was telling me the truth—but, of course, you weren't there—you didn't hear him. It sounds differently to you. I thought I was saving—everyone.'

'All you did,' Mather said brutally, 'was get a man killed.'

'The whole thing sounds so differently in here. Kind of fantastic. But he believed. Maybe,' she said hopelessly, 'he was mad.'

Mather opened the door. She suddenly cried to him, 'Jimmy, he wasn't mad. They tried to kill me.'

He said, I'll read your statement when I get back,' and closed the door.

Chapter 7

1

THEY were all having the hell of a time at the hospital. It was the biggest rag they'd had since the day of the street collection when they kidnapped old Piker and ran him to the edge of the Weevil and threatened to duck him if he didn't pay a ransom. Good old Fergusson, good old Buddy, was organizing it all. They had three ambulances out in the courtyard and one had a death's-head banner on it for the dead ones. Somebody shrieked that Mike was taking out the petrol with a nasal syringe, so they began to pelt him with flour and soot; they had it ready in great buckets. It was the unofficial part of the programme: all the casualties were going to be rubbed with it, except the dead ones the death's-head ambulance picked up. They were going to be put in the cellar where the refrigerating plant kept the corpses for dissection fresh.

One of the senior surgeons passed rapidly and nervously across a corner of the courtyard. He was on the way to a Caesarian operation, but he had no confidence whatever that the students wouldn't pelt him or duck him; only five years ago there had been a scandal and an inquiry because a woman had died on the day of a rag. The surgeon attending her had been kidnapped and carried all over town dressed as Guy Fawkes. Luckily she wasn't a paying patient, and, though her husband had been hysterical at the inquest, the coroner had decided that one must make allowance for youth. The coroner had been a student himself once and remembered with pleasure the day when they had pelted the Vice-Chancellor of the University with soot.

The senior surgeon had been present that day too. Once safely inside the glass corridor he could smile at the memory. The Vice-Chancellor had been unpopular; he had been a classic which wasn't very suitable for a provincial university. He had translated Lucan's Pharsalia into some complicated metre of his own invention. The senior surgeon remembered something vaguely about stresses. He could still see the little wizened frightened Liberal face trying to smile when his pince-nez broke, trying to be a good sportsman. But anyone could tell that he wasn't really a good sportsman. That was why they pelted him so hard.

The senior surgeon, quite safe now, smiled tenderly down at the rabble in the courtyard. Their white coats were already black with soot. Somebody had got hold of a stomach pump. Very soon they'd be raiding the shop in the High Street and seizing their mascot, the stuffed and rather moth-eaten tiger. Youth, youth, he thought, laughing gently when he saw Colson, the treasurer, scuttle from door to door with a scared expression: perhaps they'll catch him: no, they've let him by: what a joke it all was, 'trailing clouds of glory', 'turn as swimmers into cleanness leaping'.

Buddy was having the hell of a time. Everyone was scampering to obey his orders. He was the leader. They'd duck or pelt anyone he told them to. He had an enormous sense of power; it more than atoned for unsatisfactory examination results, for surgeons' sarcasms. Even a surgeon wasn't safe today if he gave an order. The soot and water and flour were his idea; the whole gas practice would have been a dull sober official piece of routine if he hadn't thought of making it a 'rag'. The very word 'rag' was powerful; it conferred complete freedom from control. He'd called a meeting of the brighter students and explained. 'If anyone's on the streets without a gas-mask he's aconchie. There are people who want to crab the practice. So when we get 'em back to the hospital we'll give 'em hell.'

They boiled round him. 'Good old Buddy.'

'Look out with that pump.'

'Who's the bastard who's pinches my stethoscope?'

'What about Tiger Tim?' They surged round Buddy Fergusson, waiting for orders, and he stood superbly above them on the step of an ambulance, his white coat apart, his ringers in the pockets of his double-breasted waistcoat, his square squat figure swelling with pride, while they shouted, 'Tiger Tim! Tiger Tim! Tiger Tim!'

'Friends, Romans and Countrymen,' he said and they roared with laughter: Good old Buddy. Buddy always had the right word. He could make any party go. You never knew what Buddy would say next. 'Lend me your—' They shrieked with laughter. He was a dirty dog, old Buddy. Good old Buddy.

Like a great beast which is in need of exercise, which has fed on too much hay, Buddy Fergusson was aware of his body. He felt his biceps; he strained for action. Too many exams, too many lectures, Buddy Fergusson wanted action. While they surged round him he imagined himself a leader of men. No Red Cross work for him when war broke: Buddy Fergusson, company commander, Buddy Fergusson, the daredevil of the trenches. The only exam he had ever successfully passed was Certificate A in the school O. T. C.

'Some of our friends seem to be missing,' Buddy Fergusson said. 'Simmons, Aitkin, Mallowes, Watt. They are bloody conchies, every one, grubbing up anatomy while we are serving our country. We'll pick 'em up in town. The flying squad will go to their lodgings.'

'What about the women, Buddy?' someone screamed, and everyone laughed and began to hit at each other, wrestle and mill. For Buddy had a reputation with the women. He spoke airily to his friends of even the super-barmaid at the Metropole, calling her Juicy Juliet and suggesting to the minds of his hearers amazing scenes of abandonment over high tea at his digs.

Buddy Fergusson straddled across the ambulance step. 'Deliver 'em to me. In war-time we need more mothers.' He felt strong, coarse, vital, a town bull; he hardly remembered himself that he was a virgin, guilty only of a shame-faced unsuccessful attempt on the old Nottwich tart; he was sustained by his reputation, it bore him magically in imagination into every bed. He knew women, he was a realist.

'Treat 'em rough,' they shrieked at him, and 'You're telling me,' he said magnificently, keeping well at bay any thought of the future: the small provincial G. P.'s job, the panel patients in dingy consulting rooms, innumerable midwife cases, a lifetime of hard underpaid fidelity to one dull wife. 'Got your gas-masks ready?' he called to them, the undisputed leader, daredevil Buddy. What the hell did examinations matter when you were a leader of men? He could see several of the younger nurses watching him through the panes. He could see the little brunette called Milly. She was coming to tea with him on Saturday. He felt his muscles taut with pride. What scenes, he told himself, this time there would be of disreputable revelry, forgetting the inevitable truth known only to himself and each girl in turn: the long silence over the muffins, the tentative references to League results, the peck at empty air on the doorstep.

The siren at the glue factory started its long mounting whistle rather like a lap dog with hysteria and everyone stood still for a moment with a vague reminiscence of Armistice Day silences. Then they broke into three milling mobs, climbing on to the ambulance roofs, fixing their gas-masks, and drove out into the cold empty Nottwich streets. The ambulances shed a lot of them at each corner, and small groups formed and wandered down the streets with a predatory disappointed air. The streets were almost empty. Only a few errand boys passed on bicycles, looking in their gas-masks like bears doing a trick cycle act in a circus. They all shrieked at each other because they didn't know how their voices sounded outside. It was as if each of them were enclosed in a separate sound-proof telephone cabinet. They stared hungrily through their big mica eye-pieces into the doorways of shops, wanting a victim. A little group collected round Buddy Fergusson and proposed that they should seize a policeman who, being on point duty, was without a mask. But Buddy vetoed the proposal. He said this wasn't an ordinary rag. What they wanted were people who thought so little about their country that they wouldn't even take the trouble to put on a gas-mask. 'They are the people,' he said, 'who avoid boat-drill. We had great fun with a fellow once in the Mediterranean who didn't turn up to boat-drill.'

That reminded them of all the fellows who weren't helping, who were probably getting ahead with their anatomy at that moment. 'Watt lives near here,' Buddy Fergusson said, 'let's get Watt and debag him.' A feeling of physical well-being came over him just as if he had drunk a couple of pints of bitter. 'Down the Tanneries,' Buddy said. 'First left. First right. Second left, Number twelve. First floor.' He knew the way, he said, because he'd been to tea several times with Watt their first term before he'd learned what a hound Watt was. The knowledge of his early mistake made him unusually anxious to do something to Watt physically, to mark the severance of their relationship more completely than with sneers.

They ran down the empty Tanneries, half a dozen masked monstrosities in white coats smutted with soot; it was impossible to tell one from another. Through the great glass door of Midland Steel they saw three men standing by the lift talking to the porter. There were a lot of uniformed police about, and in the square ahead they saw a rival group of fellow-students, who had been luckier than they, carrying a little man (he kicked and squealed) towards an ambulance. The police watched and laughed, and a troop of planes zoomed overhead, diving low over the centre of the town to lend the practice verisimilitude. First left. First right. The centre of Nottwich to a stranger was full of sudden contrasts. Only on the edge of the town to the north, out by the park, were you certain of encountering street after street of well-to-do middle-class houses. Near the market you changed at a corner from modern chromium offices to little cats'-meat shops, from the luxury of the Metropole to seedy lodgings and the smell of cooking greens. There was no excuse in Nottwich for one half of the world being ignorant of how the other half lived.

Second left. The houses on one side gave way to bare rock and the street dived steeply down below the Castle. It wasn't really a castle any longer; it was a yellow brick municipal museum full of flint arrowheads and pieces of broken brown pottery and a few stags' heads in the zoological section suffering from moths and one mummy brought back from Egypt by the Earl of Nottwich in 1843. The moths left that alone, but the custodian thought he had heard mice inside. Mike, with a nasal douche in his breast pocket, wanted to climb up the rock. He shouted to Buddy Fergusson that the custodian was outside, without a mask, signalling to enemy aircraft. But Buddy and the others ran down the hill to number twelve.

The landlady opened the door to them. She smiled winningly and said Mr Watt was in; she thought he was working; she buttonholed Buddy Fergusson and said she was sure it would be good for Mr Watt to be taken away from his books for half an hour. Buddy said, 'We'll take him away.'

'Why, that's Mr Fergusson,' the landlady said. 'I'd know your voice anywhere, but I'd never 'ave known you without you spoke to me, not in them respiratorories. I was just going out when Mr Watt minded me as 'ow it was the gas practice.'

'Oh, he remembers, does he?' Buddy said. He was blushing inside the mask at having been recognized by the landlady. It made him want to assert himself more than ever.

'He said I'd be taken to the 'ospital.'

'Come on, men,' Buddy said and led them up the stairs. But their number was an embarrassment. They couldn't all charge through Watt's door and seize him in a moment from the chair in which he was sitting. They had to go through one at a time after Buddy and then bunch themselves in a shy silence beside the table. This was the moment when an experienced man could have dealt with them, but Watt was aware of his unpopularity. He was afraid of losing dignity. He was a man who worked hard because he liked the work; he hadn't the excuse of poverty. He played no games because he didn't like games, without the excuse of physical weakness. He had a mental arrogance which would ensure his success. If he suffered agony from his unpopularity now as a student it was the price he paid for the baronetcy, the Harley Stiset consulting room, the fashionable practice of the future. There was no reason to pity him; it was the others who were pitiable, living in their vivid vulgar way for five years before the long provincial interment of a lifetime.

Watt said, 'Close the door, please. There's a draught,' and his scared sarcasm gave them the chance they needed, to resent him.

Buddy said, 'We've come to ask why you weren't at the hospital this morning?'

'That's Fergusson, isn't it?' Watt said. 'I don't know why you want to know.'

'Are you a conchie?'

'How old-world your slang is,' Watt said. 'No. I'm not a conchie. Now I'm just looking through some old medical books, and as I don't suppose they'd interest you, I'll ask you to show yourselves out.'

'Working? That's how fellows like you get ahead, working while others are doing a proper job.'

'It's just a different idea of fun, that's all,' Watt said. 'It's my pleasure to look at these folios, it's yours to go screaming about the streets in that odd costume.'

That let them loose on him. He was as good as insulting the King's uniform. 'We're going to debag you,' Buddy said.

'That's fine. It'll save time,' Watt said, 'if I take them off myself,' and he began to undress. He said, 'This action has an interesting psychological significance. A form of castration. My own theory is that sexual jealousy in some form is at the bottom of it.'

'You dirty tyke,' Buddy said. He took the inkpot and splashed it on the wallpaper. He didn't like the word 'sex'. He believed in barmaids and nurses and tarts, and he believed in love, something rather maternal with deep breasts. The word sex suggested that there was something in common between the two: it outraged him. 'Wreck the room!' he bawled and they were all immediately happy and at ease, exerting themselves physically like young bulls. Because they were happy again they didn't do any real damage, just pulled the books out of the shelves and threw them on the floor; they broke the glass of a picture frame in puritanical zeal because it contained the reproduction of a nude girl. Watt watched them; he was scared, and the more scared he was the more sarcastic he became. Buddy suddenly saw him as he was, standing there in his pants marked from birth for distinction, for success, and hated him. He felt impotent; he hadn't 'class' like Watt, he hadn't the brains, in a very few years nothing he could do or say would affect the fortunes or the happiness of the Harley Street specialist, the woman's physician, the baronet. What was the good of talking about free will? Only war and death could save Buddy from the confinements, the provincial practice, the one dull wife and the bridge parties. It seemed to him that he could be happy if he had the strength to impress himself on Watt's memory. He took the inkpot and poured it over the open title-page of the old folio on the table.

'Come on, men,' he said. 'This room stinks,' and led his party out and down the stairs. He felt an immense exhilaration; it was as if he had proved his manhood.

Almost immediately they picked up an old woman. She didn't in the least know what it was all about. She thought it was a street collection and offered them a penny. They told her she had to come along to the hospital; they were very courteous and one offered to carry her basket; they reacted from violence to a more than usual gentility. She laughed at them. She said, 'Well I never, what you boys will think up next!' and when one took her arm and began to lead her gently up the street, she said, 'Which of you's Father Christmas?' Buddy didn't like that: it hurt his dignity: he had suddenly been feeling rather noble: 'women and children first': 'although bombs were falling all round he brought the woman safely...' He stood still and let the others go on up the street with the old woman; she was having the time of her life; she cackled and dug them in the ribs: her voice carried a long distance in the cold air. She kept on telling them to ' take off them things and play fair', and just before they turned a corner out of sight she was calling them Mormons. She meant Mohammedans, because she had an idea that Mohammedans went about with their faces covered up and had a lot of wives. An aeroplane zoomed overhead and Buddy was alone in the street with the dead and dying until Mike appeared. Mike said he had a good idea. Why not pinch the mummy in the Castle and take it to the hospital for not wearing a gas-mask? The fellows with the death's-head ambulance had already got Tiger Tim and were driving round the town crying out for old Piker.

'No,' Buddy said, 'this isn't an ordinary rag. This is serious,' and suddenly at the entrance to a side street he saw a man without a mask double back at the sight of him.' Quick. Hunt him down,' Buddy cried, 'Tallyho,' and they pelted up the street in pursuit. Mike was the faster runner: Buddy was already a little inclined to fatness, and Mike was soon leading by ten yards. The man had a start, he was round one corner and out of sight. 'Go on,' Buddy shouted, 'hold him till I come.' Mike was out of sight too when a voice from a doorway spoke as he passed. 'Hi,' it said, 'you. What's the hurry?'

Buddy stopped. The man stood there with his back pressed to a house door. He had simply stepped back and Mike in his hurry had gone by. There was something serious and planned and venomous about his behaviour. The street of little Gothic villas was quite empty.

'You were looking for me, weren't you?' the man said.

Buddy demanded sharply, 'Where's your gas-mask?'

'Is this a game?' the man asked angrily.

'Of course it's not a game,' Buddy said. 'You're a casualty. You'll have to come along to the hospital with me.'

'I will, will I?' the man said, pressed back against the door, thin and undersized and out-at-elbows.

'You'd better,' Buddy said. He inflated his chest and made his biceps swell. Discipline, he thought, discipline. The little brute didn't recognize an officer when he saw one. He felt the satisfaction of superior physical strength. He'd punch his nose for him if he didn't come quietly.

'All right,' the man said, 'I'll come.' He emerged from the dark doorway, mean vicious face, hare-lip, a crude check suit, ominous and aggressive in his submission. 'Not that way,' Buddy said, 'to the left.'

'Keep moving,' the small man said, covering Buddy through his pocket, pressing the pistol against his side. 'Me a casualty,' he said, 'that's a good one,' laughing without mirth. 'Get in through that gate or you'll be the casualty—' (they were opposite a small garage; it was empty; the owner had driven to his office, and the little bare box stood open at the end of a few feet of drive).

Buddy blustered,' What the hell!' but he had recognized the face of which the description had appeared in both the local papers, and there was a control in the man's action which horribly convinced Buddy that he wouldn't hesitate to shoot. It was a moment in his life that he never forgot; he was not allowed to forget it by friends who saw nothing wrong in what he did. All through his life the tale cropped up in print in the most unlikely places: serious histories, symposiums of famous crimes: it followed him from obscure practice to obscure practice. Nobody saw anything important in what he did: nobody doubted that he would have done the same: walked into the garage, closed the gates at Raven's orders. But friends didn't realize the crushing nature of the blow: they hadn't just been standing in the street under a hail of bombs, they had not looked forward with pleasure and excitement to war, they hadn't been Buddy, the daredevil of the trenches one minute, before genuine war in the shape of an automatic in a thin desperate hand pressed on him.

'Strip!' Raven said, and obediently Buddy stripped. But he was stripped of more than his gas-mask, his white coat, his green tweed suit. When it was over he hadn't a hope left. It was no good hoping for a war to prove him a leader of men. He was just a stout flushed frightened young man shivering in his pants in the cold garage. There was a hole in the seat of his pants and his knees were pink and clean-shaven. You could tell that he was strong, but you could tell too in the curve of his stomach, the thickness of his neck, that he was beginning to run to seed. Like a mastiff he needed more exercise than the city could afford him, even though several times a week undeterred by the frost he would put on shorts and a singlet and run slowly and obstinately round the park, a little red in the face but undeterred by the grins of nursemaids and the shrill veracious comments of unbearable children in prams. He was keeping fit, but it was a dreadful thought that he had been keeping fit for this: to stand shivering and silent in a pair of holed pants, while the mean thin undernourished city rat, whose arm he could have snapped with a single twist, put on his clothes, his white coat and last of all his gas-mask.

'Turn round,' Raven said, and Buddy Fergusson obeyed. He was so miserable now that he would have missed a chance even if Raven had given him one, miserable and scared as well. He hadn't much imagination; he had never really visualized danger as it gleamed at him under the garage globe in a long grey wicked-looking piece of metal charged with pain and death. 'Put your hands behind you.' Raven tied together the pink strong ham-like wrists with Buddy's tie: the striped chocolate-and-yellow old boys' tie of one of the obscurer public schools. 'Lie down,' and meekly Buddy Fergusson obeyed and Raven tied his feet together with a handkerchief and gagged him with another. It wasn't very secure, but it would have to do. He'd got to work quickly. He left the garage and pulled the doors softly to behind him. He could hope for several hours' start now, but he couldn't count on as many minutes.

He came quietly and cautiously up under the Castle rock, keeping his eye open for students. But the gangs had moved on; some were picketing the station for train arrivals, and the others were sweeping the streets which led out northwards towards the mines. The chief danger now was that at any moment the sirens might blow the 'All Clear'. There were a lot of police about: he knew why, but he moved unhesitatingly past them and on towards the Tanneries. His plan carried him no further than the big glass doors of Midland Steel. He had a kind of blind faith in destiny, in a poetic justice; somehow when he was inside the building he would find the way to the man who had double-crossed him. He came safely round into the Tanneries and moved across the narrow roadway, where there was only room for a single stream of traffic, towards the great functional building of black glass and steel. He hugged the automatic to his hip with a sense of achievement and exhilaration. There was a kind of lightheartedness now about his malice and hatred he had never known before; he had lost his sourness and bitterness; he was less personal in his revenge. It was almost as if he were acting for someone else.

Behind the door of Midland Steel a man peered out at the parked cars and the deserted street. He looked like a clerk.

Raven crossed the pavement. He peered back through the panes of the mask at the man behind the door. Something made him hesitate: the memory of a face he had seen for a moment outside the Soho café where he lodged. He suddenly started away again from the door, walking in a rapid scared way down the Tanneries. The police were there before him.

It meant nothing, Raven told himself, coming out into a silent High Street empty except for a telegraph boy in a gasmask getting on to a bicycle by the Post Office. It merely meant that the police too had noted a connection between the office in Victoria Street and Midland Steel. It didn't mean that the girl was just another skirt who had betrayed him.' Only the faintest shadow of the old sourness and isolation touched his spirits. She's straight, he swore with almost perfect conviction, she wouldn't grass, we are together in this, and he remembered with a sense of doubtful safety how she had said,' We are friends.'

2

The producer had called a rehearsal early. He wasn't going to add to the expenses by buying everyone gas-masks. They would be in the theatre by the time the practice started and they wouldn't leave until the 'All Clear' had sounded. Mr Davis had said he wanted to see the new number, and so the producer had sent him notice of the rehearsal. He had it stuck under the edge of his shaving mirror next a card with the telephone numbers of all his girls.

It was bitterly cold in the modern central-heated bachelor's flat. Something, as usual, had gone wrong with the oil engines, and the constant hot water was barely warm. Mr Davis cut himself shaving several times and stuck little tufts of cottonwool all over his chin. His eye caught Mayfair 632 and Museum 798. Those were Coral and Lucy. Dark and fair, nubile and thin. His fair and dark angel. A little early fog still yellowed the panes, and the sound of a car back-firing made him think of Raven safely isolated in the railway yard surrounded by armed police. He knew that Sir Marcus was arranging everything and he wondered how it felt to be waking to your last day. 'We know not the hour,' Mr Davis thought happily, plying his styptic pencil, sticking the cotton-wool on the larger wounds, but if one knew, as Raven must know, would one still feel irritation at the failure of central heating, at a blunt blade? Mr Davis's mind was full of great dignified abstractions, and it seemed to him a rather grotesque idea that a man condemned to death should be aware of something so trivial as a shaving cut. But then, of course, Raven would not be shaving in his shed.

Mr Davis made a hasty breakfast—two pieces of toast, two cups of coffee, four kidneys and a piece of bacon sent up by lift from the restaurant, some sweet 'Silver Shred' marmalade. It gave him a good deal of pleasure to think that Raven would not be eating such a breakfast—a condemned man in prison, possibly, but not Raven. Mr Davis did not believe in wasting anything; he had paid for the breakfast, so on the second piece of toast he piled up all the remains of the butter and the marmalade. A little of the marmalade fell off on to his tie.

There was really only one worry left, apart from Sir Marcus's displeasure, and that was the girl. He had lost his head badly: first in trying to kill her and then in not killing her. It had all been Sir Marcus's fault. He had been afraid of what Sir Marcus would do to him if he learnt of the girl's existence. But now everything would be all right. The girl had come out into the open as an accomplice; no court would take a criminal's story against Sir Marcus's. He forgot about the gas practice, as he hurried down to the theatre for a little relaxation now that everything really seemed to have been tidied up. On the way he got a sixpenny packet of toffee out of a slot machine.

He found Mr Collier worried. They'd already had one rehearsal of the new number and Miss Maydew, who was sitting at the front of the stalls in a fur coat, had said it was vulgar. She said she didn't mind sex, but this wasn't in the right class. It was music-hall; it wasn't revue. Mr Collier didn't care a damn what Miss Maydew thought, but it might mean that Mr Cohen … He said, 'If you'd tell me what's vulgar... I just don't see...'

Mr Davis said, 'I'll tell you if it's vulgar. Have it again,' and he sat back in the stalls just behind Miss Maydew with the warm smell of her fur and her rather expensive scent in his nostrils, sucking a toffee. It seemed to him that life could offer nothing better than this. And the show was his. At any rate forty per cent of it was his. He picked out his forty per cent as the girls came on again in blue shorts with a red stripe and bras and postmen's caps, carrying cornucopias: the dark girl with the oriental eyebrows on the right, the fair girl with the rather plump legs and the big mouth (a big mouth was a good sign in a girl). They danced between two pillar-boxes, wriggling their little neat hips, and Mr Davis sucked his toffee.

'It's called "Christmas for Two",' Mr Collier said.

'Why?'

'Well, you see, those cornucops are meant to be Christmas presents made sort of classical. And "For Two" just gives it a little sex. Any number with "For Two" in it goes.'

'We've already got "An Apartment for Two",' Miss May-dew said, 'and "Two Make a Dream".'

'You can't have too much of "For Two",' Mr Collier said. He appealed pitiably, 'Can't you tell me what's vulgar?'

'Those cornucopias, for one thing.'

'But they are classical,' Mr Collier said. 'Greek.'

'And the pillar-boxes, for another.'

'The pillar-boxes,' Mr Collier exclaimed hysterically. 'What's wrong with the pillar-boxes?'

'My dear man,' Miss Maydew said, 'if you don't know what's wrong with the pillar-boxes, I'm not going to tell you. If you like to get a committee of matrons I wouldn't mind telling them. But if you must have them, paint them blue and let them be air mail.'

Mr Collier said, 'Is this a game or what is it?' He asked bitterly, 'What a time you must have when you write a letter.' The girls went patiently on behind his back to the jingle of the piano, offering the cornucopias, offering their collar-stud bottoms. He turned on them fiercely. 'Stop that, can't you? and let me think.'

Mr Davis said, 'It's fine. We'll have it in the show.' It made him feel good to contradict Miss Maydew, whose perfume he was now luxuriously taking in. It gave him in a modified form the pleasure of beating her or sleeping with her: the pleasure of mastery over a woman of superior birth. It was the kind of dream he had indulged in adolescence, while he carved his name on the desk and seat in a grim Midland board school.

'You really think that, Mr Davenant?'

'My name's Davis.'

'I'm sorry, Mr Davis.' Horror on horror, Mr Collier thought; he was alienating the new backer now.

'I think it's lousy,' Miss Maydew said. Mr Davis took another piece of toffee. 'Go ahead, old man,' he said. 'Go ahead.' They went ahead: the songs and dances floated agreeably through Mr Davis's consciousness, sometimes wistful, sometimes sweet and sad, sometimes catchy. Mr Davis liked the sweet ones best. When they sang, 'You have my mother's way', he really did think of his mother: he was the ideal audience. Somebody came out of the wings and bellowed at Mr Collier. Mr Collier screamed, 'What do you say?' and a young man in a pale blue jumper went on mechanically singing: 'Your photograph Is just the sweetest half...'

'Did you say Christmas tree?' Mr Collier yelled.

'In your December I shall remember...'

Mr Collier screamed, 'Take it away.' The song came abruptly to an end with the words 'Another mother'. The young man said, 'You took it too fast,' and began to argue with the pianist.

'I can't take it away,' the man in the wings said. 'It was ordered.' He wore an apron and a cloth cap. He said, 'It took a van and two horses. You'd better come and have a look.' Mr Collier disappeared and returned immediately.' My God!' he said,' it's fifteen feet high. Who can have played this fool trick?' Mr Davis was in a happy dream: his slippers had been warmed by a log fire in a big baronial hall, a little exclusive perfume like Miss Maydew's was hovering in the air, and he was just going to go to bed with a good but aristocratic girl to whom he had been properly married that morning by a bishop. She reminded him a little of his mother. 'In your December...'

He was suddenly aware that Mr Collier was paying, 'And there's a crate of glass balls and candles.'

'Why,' Mr Davis said, 'has my little gift arrived?'

'Your—little—?'

'I thought we'd have a Christmas party on the stage,' Mr Davis said. 'I like to get to know all you artistes in a friendly homey way. A little dancing, a song or two,' there seemed to be a visible lack of enthusiasm, 'plenty of pop.' A pale smile lit Mr Collier's face. 'Well,' he said, 'it's very kind of you, Mr Davis. We shall certainly appreciate it.'

'Is the tree all right?'

'Yes, Mr Daven—Davis, it's a magnificent tree.' The young man in the blue jumper looked as if he was going to laugh and Mr Collier scowled at him.' We all thank you very much, Mr Davis, don't we, girls?' Everybody said in refined and perfect chorus as if the words had been rehearsed, 'Rather, Mr Collier,' except Miss Maydew, and a dark girl with a roving eye who was two seconds late and said, 'You bet.'

That attracted Mr Davis's notice. Independent, he thought approvingly, stands out from the crowd. He said,' I think I'll step behind and look at the tree. Don't let me be in the way, old man. Just you carry on,' and made his way into the wings where the tree stood blocking the way to the changing rooms. An electrician had hung some of the baubles on for fun and among the litter of properties under the bare globes it sparkled with icy dignity. Mr Davis rubbed his hands, a buried childish delight came alive. He said, 'It looks lovely.' A kind of Christmas peace lay over his spirit: the occasional memory of Raven was only like the darkness pressing round the little lighted crib.

'That's a tree all right,' a voice said. It was the dark girl. She had followed him into the wings; she wasn't wanted on the stage for the number they were rehearsing. She was short and plump and not very pretty; she sat on a case and watched Mr Davis with gloomy friendliness.

'Gives a Christmas feeling,' Mr Davis said.

'So will a bottle of pop,' the girl said.

'What's your name?'

'Ruby.'

'What about meeting me for a spot of lunch after the rehearsal's over?'

'Your girls sort of disappear, don't they?' Ruby said. 'I could do with a steak and onions, but I don't want any conjuring. I'm not a detective's girl.'

'What's that?' Mr Davis said sharply.

' She's the Yard man's girl. He was round here yesterday.'

'That's all right,' Mr Davis said crossly, thinking hard, 'you're safe with me.'

'You see, I'm unlucky.'

Mr Davis, in spite of his new anxiety, felt alive, vital: this wasn't his last day. The kidneys and bacon he had had for breakfast returned a little in his breath. The music came softly through to them: 'Your photograph is just the sweetest half...' He licked a little grain of toffee on a back tooth and said, 'You're in luck now. You couldn't have a better mascot than me.'

'You'll have to do,' the girl said with her habitual gloomy stare.

'The Metropole? At one sharp?'

'I'll be there. Unless I'm run over. I'm the kind of girl who would get run over before a free feed.'

'It'll be fun.'

'It depends what you call fun,' the girl said and made room for him on the packing case. They sat side by side staring at the tree. 'In your December, I shall remember.' Mr Davis put his hand on her bare knee. He was a little awed by the tune, the Christmas atmosphere. His hand fell flatly, reverently, like a bishop's hand on a choirboy's head.

'Sinbad,' the girl said.

'Sinbad?'

'I mean Bluebeard. These pantos get one all mixed up.'

'You aren't frightened of me?' Mr Davis protested, leaning his head against the postman's cap.

'If any girl's going to disappear, it'll be me for sure.'

'She shouldn't have left me,' Mr Davis said softly, 'so soon after dinner. Made me go home alone. She'd have been safe with me.' He put his arm tentatively round Ruby's waist and squeezed her, then loosed her hastily as an electrician came along. 'You're a clever girl,' Mr Davis said, 'you ought to have a part. I bet you've got a good voice.'

'Me a voice? I've got as much voice as a peahen.'

'Give me a little kiss?'

'Of course I will.' They kissed rather wetly. 'What do I call you?' Ruby asked. 'It sounds silly to me to call a man who's standing me a free feed Mister.'

Mr Davis said, 'You could call me—Willie?'

'Well,' Ruby said, sighing gloomily, 'I hope I'll be seeing you, Willie. At the Metropole. At one. I'll be there. I only hope you'll be there or bang'll go a good steak and onions.' She drifted back towards the stage. She was needed. What did Aladdin say... She said to the girl next her. 'He fed out of my hand.' When he came to Pekin? 'The trouble is,' Ruby said, 'I can't keep them. There's too much of this love-and-ride-away business. But it looks as if I'll get a good lunch, anyway.' She said, 'There I go again. Saying that and forgetting to cross my fingers.'

Mr Davis had seen enough; he had got what he'd come for; all that had to be done now was to shed a little light and comradeship among the electricians and other employees. He made his way slowly out by way of the dressing-rooms exchanging a word here and there, offering his gold cigarette-case. One never knew. He was fresh to this backstage theatre and it occurred to him that even among the dressers he might find—well, youth and talent, something to be encouraged, and fed too, of course, at the Metropole. He soon learnt better; all the dressers were old; they couldn't understand what he was after and one followed him round everywhere to make sure that he didn't hide in any of the girls' rooms. Mr Davis was offended, but he was always polite. He departed through the stage door into the cold tainted street waving his hand. It was about time anyway that he looked in at Midland Steel and saw Sir Marcus.

The High Street was curiously empty except that there were more police about than was usual; he had quite forgotten the gas practice. No one attempted to interfere with Mr Davis, his face was well known to all the force, though none of them could have said what Mr Davis's occupation was. They would have said, without a smile at the thin hair, the heavy paunch, the plump and wrinkled hands, that he was one of Sir Marcus's young men. With an employer so old you could hardly avoid being one of the young men by comparison. Mr Davis waved gaily to a sergeant on the other pavement and took a toffee. It was not the job of the police to take casualties to hospital and no one would willingly have obstructed Mr Davis. There was something about his fat good nature which easily turned to malevolence. They watched him with covert amusement and hope sail down the pavement towards the Tanneries, rather as one watches a man of some dignity approach an icy slide. Up the street from the Tanneries a medical student in a gas-mask was approaching.

It was some while before Mr Davis noticed the student and the sight of the gas-mask for a moment quite shocked him. He thought: these pacifists are going too far: sensational nonsense, and when the man halted Mr Davis and said something which he could not catch through the heavy mask, Mr Davis drew himself up and said haughtily, 'Nonsense. We're well prepared.' Then he remembered and became quite friendly again; it wasn't pacifism after all, it was patriotism. 'Well, well,' he said, 'I quite forgot. Of course, the practice.' The anonymous stare through the thickened eyepieces, the muffled voice made him uneasy. He said jocularly, 'You won't be taking me to the hospital now, will you? I'm a busy man.' The student seemed lost in thought with his hand on Mr Davis's arm. Mr Davis saw a policeman go grinning down the opposite pavement and he found it hard to restrain his irritation. There was a little fog still left in the upper air and a flight of planes drove through it, filling the street with their deep murmur, out towards the south and the aerodrome. 'You see,' Mr Davis said, keeping his temper, 'the practice is over. The sirens will be going any moment now. It would be too absurd to waste a morning at the hospital. You know me. Davis is the name. Everyone in Nottwich knows me. Ask the police there. No one can accuse me of being a bad patriot.'

'You think it's nearly over?' the man said.

'I'm glad to see you boys enthusiastic,' Mr Davis said. 'I expect we've met some time at the hospital. I'm up there for all the big functions and I never forget a voice. Why,' Mr Davis said,' it was me who gave the biggest contribution to the new operating theatre.' Mr Davis would have liked to walk on, but the man blocked his way and it seemed a bit undignified to step into the road and go round him. The man might think he was trying to escape: there might be a tussle, and the police were looking on from the corner. A sudden venom spurted up into Mr Davis's mind like the ink a cuttlefish shoots, staining his thoughts with its dark poison. That grinning ape in uniform... I'll have him dismissed... I'll see Calkin about it. He talked on cheerily to the man in the gasmask, a thin figure, little more than a boy's figure on which the white medical coat hung loosely. 'You boys,' Mr Davis said, 'are doing a splendid work. There's no one appreciates that more than I do. If war comes—'

'You call yourself Davis,' the muffled voice said.

Mr Davis said with sudden irritation, 'You're wasting my time. I'm a busy man. Of course I'm Davis.' He checked his rising temper with an effort. 'Look here. I'm a reasonable man. I'll pay anything you like to the hospital. Say, ten pounds ransom.'

'Yes,' the man said, 'where is it?'

'You can trust me,' Mr Davis said, 'I don't carry that much on me,' and was amazed to hear what sounded like a laugh.

This was going too far. 'All right,' Mr Davis said, 'you can come with me to my office and I'll pay you the money. But I shall expect a proper receipt from your treasurer.'

'You'll get your receipt,' the man said in his odd toneless mask-muffled voice and stood on one side to let Mr Davis lead the way. Mr Davis's good humour was quite restored. He prattled on. 'No good offering you a toffee in that thing,' he said. A messenger boy passed in a gas-mask with his cap cocked absurdly on the top of it; he whistled derisively at Mr Davis. Mr Davis went a little pink. His fingers itched to tear the hair, to pull the ear, to twist the wrist. 'The boys enjoy themselves,' he said. He became confiding; a doctor's presence always made him feel safe and oddly important: one could tell the most grotesque things to a doctor about one's digestion and it was as much material for them as an amusing anecdote was for a professional humourist. He said, 'I've been getting hiccups badly lately. After every meal. It's not as if I eat fast... but, of course, you're only a student still. Though you know more about these things than I do. Then too I get spots before my eyes. Perhaps I ought to cut down my diet a bit. But it's difficult. A man in my position has a lot of entertaining to do. For instance—' he grasped his companion's unresponsive arm and squeezed it knowingly—'it would be no good my promising you that I'd go without my lunch today. You medicos are men of the world and I don't mind telling you I've got a little girl meeting me. At the Metropole. At one.' Some association of ideas made him feel in his pocket to make sure his packet of toffee was safe.

They passed another policeman and Mr Davis waved his hand. His companion was very silent. The boy's shy, Mr Davis thought, he's not used to walking about town with a man like me: it excused a certain roughness in his behaviour; even the suspicion Mr Davis had resented was probably only a form of gawkiness. Mr Davis, because the day was proving fine after all, a little sun sparkling through the cold obscured air, because the kidneys and bacon had really been done to a turn, because he had asserted himself in the presence of Miss Maydew, who was the daughter of a peer, because he had a date at the Metropole with a little girl of talent, because too by this time Raven's body would be safely laid out on its icy slab in the mortuary, for all these reasons Mr Davis felt kindness and Christmas in his spirit; he exerted himself to put the boy at his ease. He said, 'I feel sure we've met somewhere. Perhaps the house surgeon introduced us.' But his companion remained glumly unforthcoming. 'A fine sing-song you all put on at the opening of the new ward.' He glanced again at the delicate wrists. 'You weren't by any chance the boy who dressed up as a girl and sang that naughty song?' Mr Davis laughed thickly at the memory, turning into the Tanneries, laughed as he had laughed more times than he could count over the port, at the club, among the good fellows, at the smutty masculine jokes, 'I was tickled to death.' He put his hand on his companion's arm and pushed through the glass door of Midland Steel.

A stranger stepped out from round a corner and the clerk behind the inquiries counter told him in a strained voice, 'That's all right. That's Mr Davis.'

'What's all this?' Mr Davis asked in a harsh no-nonsense voice, now that he was back where he belonged.

The detective said, 'We are just keeping an eye open.'

'Raven?' Mr Davis asked in a rather shrill voice. The man nodded. Mr Davis said, 'You let him escape? What fools...'

The detective said, 'You needn't be scared. He'll be spotted at once if he comes out of hiding. He can't escape this time.'

'But why,' Mr Davis said, 'are you here? Why do you expect...'

'We've got our orders,' the man said.

'Have you told Sir Marcus?'

'He knows.'

Mr Davis looked tired and old. He said sharply to his companion, 'Come with me and I'll give you the money. I haven't any time to waste.' He walked with lagging hesitating feet down a passage paved with some black shining composition to the glass lift-shaft. The man in the gas-mask followed him down the passage and into the lift; they moved slowly and steadily upwards together, as intimate as two birds caged. Floor by floor the great building sank below them, a clerk in a black coat hurrying on some mysterious errand which required a lot of blotting paper, a girl standing outside a closed door with a file of papers whispering to herself, rehearsing some excuse, an errand boy walking erratically along a passage balancing a bundle of new pencils on his head. They stopped at an empty floor.

There was something on Mr Davis's mind. He walked slowly, turned the handle of his door softly, almost as if he feared that someone might be waiting for him inside. But the room was quite empty. An inner door opened, and a young woman with fluffy gold hair and exaggerated horn spectacles said, 'Willie', and then saw his companion. She said, 'Sir Marcus wants to see you, Mr Davis.'

'That's all right, Miss Connett,' Mr Davis said. 'You might go and find me an ABC.'

'Are you going away—at once?'

Mr Davis hesitated. 'Look me up what trains there are for town—after lunch.'

'Yes, Mr Davis.' She withdrew and the two of them were alone. Mr Davis shivered slightly and turned on his electric fire. The man hi the gas-mask spoke and again the muffled coarse voice pricked at Mr Davis's memory. 'Are you scared of something?'

'There's a madman loose in this town,' Mr Davis said. His nerves were alert at every sound in the corridor outside, a footstep, the ring of a bell. It had needed more courage than he had been conscious of possessing to say 'after lunch', he wanted to be away at once, clear away from Nottwich. He started at the scrape of a little cleaner's platform which was being lowered down the wall of the inner courtyard. He padded to the door and locked it; it gave him a better feeling of security to be locked into his familiar room, with his desk, his swivel chair, the cupboard where he kept two glasses and a bottle of sweet port, the bookcase, which contained a few technical works on steel, a Whitaker's, a Who's Who and a copy of His Chinese Concubine, than to remember the detective in the hall. He took everything in like something seen for the first time, and it was true enough that he had never so realized the peace and comfort of his small room. Again he started at the creak of the ropes from which the cleaner's platform hung. He shut down his double window. He said in a tone of nervous irritation,' Sir Marcus can wait.'

'Who's Sir Marcus?'

'My boss.' Something about the open door of his secretary's room disturbed him with the idea that anyone could enter that way. He was no longer in a hurry, he wasn't busy any more, he wanted companionship. He said, 'You aren't in any hurry. Take that thing off, it must be stuffy, and have a glass of port.' On his way to the cupboard he shut the inner door and turned the key. He sighed with relief, fetching out the port and the glasses, 'Now we are really alone, I want to tell you about these hiccups.' He poured two brimming glasses, but his hand shook and the port ran down the sides. He said, 'Always just after a meal...'

The muffled voice said, 'The money...'

'Really,' Mr Davis said, 'you are rather impudent. You can trust me. I'm Davis.' He went to his desk and unlocked a drawer, took out two five-pound notes and held them out. 'Mind,' he said, 'I shall expect a proper receipt from your treasurer.'

The man put them away. His hand stayed in his pocket. He said, 'Are these phoney notes, too?' A whole scene came back to Mr Davis's mind: a Lyons' Corner House, the taste of an Alpine Glow, the murderer sitting opposite him trying to tell him of the old woman he had killed. Mr Davis screamed: not a word, not a plea for help, just a meaningless cry like a man gives under an anaesthetic when the knife cuts the flesh. He ran, bolted, across the room to the inner door and tugged at the handle. He struggled uselessly as if he were caught on barbed wire between trenches.

'Come away from there,' Raven said. 'You've locked the door.'

Mr Davis came back to his desk. His legs gave way and he sat on the ground beside the waste-paper basket. He said, 'I'm sick. You wouldn't kill a sick man.' The idea really gave him hope. He retched convincingly.

'I'm not going to kill you yet,' Raven said.' Maybe I won't kill you if you keep quiet and do what I say. This Sir Marcus, he's your boss?'

'An old man,' Mr Davis protested, weeping beside the waste-paper basket.

'He wants to see you,' Raven said. 'We'll go along.' He said, 'I've been waiting days for this—to find the two of you. It almost seems too good to be true. Get up. Get up,' he repeated furiously to the weak flabby figure on the floor.

Mr Davis led the way. Miss Connett came down the passage carrying a slip of paper. She said, 'I've got the trains, Mr Davis. The best is the three-five. The two-seven is really so slow that you wouldn't be up more than ten minutes earlier. Then there's only the five-ten before the night train.'

'Put them on my desk,' Mr Davis said. He hung about there in front of her in the shining modern plutocratic passage as if he wanted to say good-bye to a thousand things if only he had dared, to this wealth, this comfort, this authority; lingering there ('Yes, put them on my desk, May') he might even have been wanting to express at the last some tenderness that had never before entered his mind in connection with 'little girls'. Raven stood just behind him with his hand in his pocket. Her employer looked so sick that Miss Connett said, 'Are you feeling well, Mr Davis?'

'Quite well,' Mr Davis said. Like an explorer going into strange country he felt the need of leaving some record behind at the edge of civilization, to say to the next chance comer, 'I shall be found towards the north' or 'the west'. He said, 'We are going to Sir Marcus, May.'

'He's in a hurry for you,' Miss Connett said. A telephone bell rang. 'I shouldn't be surprised if that's him now.' She pattered down the corridor to her room on very high heels and Mr Davis felt again the remorseless pressure on his elbow to advance, to enter the lift. They rose another floor and when Mr Davis pulled the gates apart he retched again. He wanted to fling himself to the floor and take the bullets in his back.

The long gleaming passage to Sir Marcus's study was like a mile-long stadium track to a winded runner.

Sir Marcus was sitting in his Bath chair with a kind of bed-table on his knees. He had his valet with him and his back to the door, but the valet could see with astonishment Mr Davis's exhausted entrance in the company of a medical student in a gas-mask. 'Is that Davis?' Sir Marcus whispered. He broke a dry biscuit and sipped a little hot milk. He was fortifying himself for a day's work.

'Yes, sir.' The valet watched with astonishment Mr Davis's sick progress across the hygienic rubber floor; he looked as if he needed support, as if he was about to collapse at the knees.

'Get out then,' Sir Marcus whispered.

'Yes, sir.' But the man in the gas-mask had turned the key of the door; a faint expression of joy, a rather hopeless expectation, crept into the valet's face as if he were wondering whether something at last was going to happen, something different from pushing Bath chairs along rubber floors, dressing and undressing an old man, not strong enough to keep himself clean, bringing him the hot milk or the hot water or the dry biscuits.

'What are you waiting for?' Sir Marcus whispered.

'Get back against the wall,' Raven suddenly commanded the valet.

Mr Davis cried despairingly, 'He's got a gun. Do what he says.' But there was no need to tell the valet that. The gun was out now and had them all three covered, the valet against the wall, Mr Davis dithering in the middle of the room, Sir Marcus who had twisted the Bath chair round to face them.

'What do you want?'Sir Marcus said.

'Are you the boss?'

Sir Marcus said, 'The police are downstairs. You can't get away from here unless I—' The telephone began to ring. It rang on and on and on, and then ceased.

Raven said, 'You've got a scar under that beard, haven't you? I don't want to make a mistake. He had your photograph. You were in the home together,' and he glared angrily round the large rich office room comparing it in mind with his own memories of cracked bells and stone stairs and wooden benches, and of the small flat too with the egg boiling on the ring. This man had moved further than the old Minister.

'You're mad,' Sir Marcus whispered. He was too old to be frightened; the revolver represented no greater danger to him than a false step in getting into his chair, a slip in his bath. He seemed to feel only a faint irritation, a faint craving for his interrupted meal. He bent his old lip forward over the bed-table and sucked loudly at the rim of hot milk.

The valet suddenly spoke from the wall. 'He's got a scar,' he said. But Sir Marcus took no notice of any of them, sucking up his milk untidily over his thin beard.

Raven twisted his gun on Mr Davis. 'It was him,' he said. 'If you don't want a bullet in your guts tell me it was him.'

'Yes, yes,' Mr Davis said in horrified subservient haste, 'he thought of it. It was his idea. We were on our last legs here. We'd got to make money. It was worth more than half a million to him.'

'Half a million!' Raven said. 'And he paid me two hundred phoney pounds.'

'I said to him we ought to be generous. He said: "Stop your mouth."'

'I wouldn't have done it,' Raven said, 'if I'd known the old man was like he was. I smashed his skull for him. And the old woman, a bullet in both eyes.' He shouted at Sir Marcus, 'That was your doing. How do you like that?' but the old man sat there apparently unmoved: old age had killed the imagination.'The deaths he had ordered were no more real to him than the deaths he read about in the newspapers. A little greed (for his milk), a little vice (occasionally to put his old hand inside a girl's blouse and feel the warmth of life), a little avarice and calculation (half a million against a death), a very small persistent, almost mechanical, sense of self-preservation: these were his only passions. The last made him edge his chair imperceptibly towards the bell at the edge of his desk. He whispered gently, 'I deny it all. You are mad.'

Raven said, 'I've got you now where I want you. Even if the police kill me,' he tapped the gun, 'here's my evidence. This is the gun I used. They can pin the murder to this gun. You told me to leave it behind, but here it is. It would put you away a long, long time even if I didn't shoot you.'

Sir Marcus whispered gently, imperceptibly twisting his silent rubbered wheels, 'A Colt No .7. The factories turn out thousands.'

Raven said angrily, 'There's nothing the police can't do now with a gun. There are experts—' He wanted to frighten Sir Marcus before he shot him; it seemed unfair to him that Sir Marcus should suffer less than the old woman he hadn't wanted to kill. He said, 'Don't you want to pray? You're a Jew, aren't you? Better people than you,' he said, 'believe in a God,' remembering how the girl had prayed in the dark cold shed. The wheel of Sir Marcus's chair touched the desk, touched the bell, and the dull ringing came up the well of the lift, going on and on. It conveyed nothing to Raven until the valet spoke.' The old bastard,' he said, with the hatred of years, 'he's ringing the bell.' Before Raven could decide what to do, someone was at the door, shaking the handle.

Raven said to Sir Marcus, 'Tell them to keep back or I'll shoot.'

'You fool,' Sir Marcus whispered, 'they'll only get you for theft. If you kill me, you'll hang.' But Mr Davis was ready to clutch at any straw. He screamed to the man outside, 'Keep away. For God's sake keep away.'

Sir Marcus said venomously, 'You're a fool, Davis. If he's going to kill us anyway—' While Raven stood pistol in hand before the two men, an absurd quarrel broke out between them. 'He's got no cause to kill me,' Mr Davis screamed. 'It's you who've got us into this. I only acted for you.'

The valet began to laugh. 'Two to one on the field,' he said.

'Be quiet,' Sir Marcus whispered venomously back at Mr Davis. 'I can put you out of the way at any time.'

'I defy you,' Mr Davis screamed in a high peacock voice. Somebody flung himself against the door.

'I have the West Rand Goldfields filed,' Sir Marcus said, 'the East African Petroleum Company.'

A wave of impatience struck Raven. They seemed to be disturbing some memory of peace and goodness which had been on the point of returning to him when he had told Sir Marcus to pray. He raised his pistol and shot Sir Marcus in the chest. It was the only way to silence them. Sir Marcus fell forward across the bed-table, upsetting the glass of warm milk over the papers on his desk. Blood came out of his mouth.

Mr Davis began to talk very rapidly. He said, 'It was all him, the old devil. You heard him. What could I do? He had me. You've got nothing against me.' He shrieked, 'Go away from that door. He'll kill me if you don't go,' and immediately began to talk again, while the milk dripped from the bed-table to the desk drop by drop. 'I wouldn't have done a thing if it hadn't been for him. Do you know what he did? He went and told the Chief Constable to order the police to shoot you on sight.' He tried not to look at the pistol which remained pointed at his chest. The valet was white and silent by the wall; he watched Sir Marcus's life bleeding away with curious fascination. So this was what it would have been like, he seemed to be thinking, if he himself had had courage … any time... during all these years.

A voice outside said, 'You had better open this door at once or we'll shoot through it.'

'For God's sake,' Mr Davis screamed, 'leave me alone. He'll shoot me,' and the eyes watched him intently through the panes of the gas-mask, with satisfaction. 'There's not a thing I've done to you,' he began to protest. Over Raven's head he could see the clock: it hadn't moved more than three hours since his breakfast, the hot stale taste of the kidneys and bacon was still on his palate: he couldn't believe that this was really the end: at one o'clock he had a date with a girl: you didn't die before a date. 'Nothing,' he murmured, 'nothing at all.'

'It was you,' Raven said, 'who tried to kill...'

'Nobody. Nothing,' Mr Davis moaned.

Raven hesitated. The word was still unfamiliar on his tongue. 'My friend.'

'I don't know. I don't understand.'

'Keep back,' Raven cried through the door, 'I'll shoot him if you fire,' He said, 'The girl.'

Mr Davis shook all over. He was like a man with St Vitus's dance. He said, ' She wasn't a friend of yours. Why are the police here if she didn't... who else could have known...?'

Raven said, 'I'll shoot you for that and nothing else. She's straight.'

'Why,' Mr Davis screamed at him, 'she's a policeman's girl. She's the Yard man's girl. She's Mather's girl.'

Raven shot him. With despair and deliberation he shot his last chance of escape, plugged two bullets in where one would do, as if he were shooting the whole world in the person of stout moaning bleeding Mr Davis. And so he was. For a man's world is his life and he was shooting that: his mother's suicide, the long years in the home, the race-course gangs, Kite's death and the old man's and the woman's. There was no other way; he had tried the way of confession, and it had failed him for the usual reason. There was no one outside your own brain whom you could trust: not a doctor, not a priest, not a woman. A siren blew up over the town its message that the sham raid was over, and immediately the church bells broke into a noisy Christmas carol: the foxes have their holes, but the son of man... A bullet smashed the lock of the door. Raven, with his gun pointed stomach-high, said, 'Is there a bastard called Mather out there? He'd better keep away.'

While he waited for the door to open he couldn't help remembering many things. He did not remember them in detail; they fogged together and formed the climate of his mind as he waited there for the chance of a last revenge: a voice singing above a dark street as the sleet fell: They say that's a snowflower a man brought from Greenland, the cultivated unlived voice of the elderly critic reading Maud: Oh, that 'twere possible after long grief, while he stood in the garage and felt the ice melt at his heart with a sense of pain and strangeness. It was as if he were passing the customs of a land he had never entered before and would never be able to leave: the girl in the café saying, 'He's bad and ugly...', the little plaster child lying in its mother's arms waiting the double-cross, the whips, the nails. She had said to him, 'I'm your friend. You can trust me.' Another bullet burst in the lock.

The valet, white-faced by the wall, said, 'For God's sake, give it up. They'll get you anyway. He was right. It was the girl. I heard them on the 'phone.'

I've got to be quick, Raven thought, when the door gives, I must shoot first. But too many ideas besieged his brain at once. He couldn't see clearly enough through the mask and he undid it clumsily with one hand and dropped it on the floor.

The valet could see now the raw inflamed lip, the dark and miserable eyes. He said, 'There's the window. Get on to the roof.' He was talking to a man whose understanding was dulled, who didn't know whether he wished to make an effort or not, who moved his face so slowly to see the window that it was the valet who noticed first the painter's platform swinging down the wide tall pane. Mather was on the platform, but the detective had not allowed for his own inexperience. The little platform swung this way and that; he held a rope with one hand and reached for the window with the other; he had no hand free for his revolver as Raven turned. He dangled outside the window six floors above the narrow Tanneries, a defenceless mark for Raven's pistol.

Raven watched him with bemused eyes, trying to take aim. It wasn't a difficult shot, but it was almost as if he had lost interest in killing. He was only aware of a pain and despair which was more like a complete weariness than anything else. He couldn't work up any sourness, any bitterness, at his betrayal. The dark Weevil under the storm of frozen rain flowed between him and any human enemy. Ah, Christ! that it were possible, but he had been marked from his birth for this end, to be betrayed in turn by everyone until every avenue into life was safely closed: by his mother bleeding in the basement, by the chaplain at the home, by the shady doctor off Charlotte Street. How could he have expected to have escaped the commonest betrayal of all: to go soft on a skirt? Even Kite would have been alive now if it hadn't been for a skirt. They all went soft at some time or another: Penrith and Carter, Jossy and Ballard, Barker and the Great Dane. He took aim slowly, absent-mindedly, with a curious humility, with almost a sense of companionship in his loneliness: the Trooper and Mayhew. They had all thought at one time or another that their skirt was better than other men's skirts, that there was something exalted in their relation. The only problem when you were once born was to get out of life more neatly and expeditiously than you had entered it. For the first time the idea of his mother's suicide came to him without bitterness, as he reluctantly fixed his aim and Saunders shot him in the back through the opening door. Death came to him in the form of unbearable pain. It was as if he had to deliver this pain as a woman delivers a child, and he sobbed and moaned in the effort. At last it came out of him and he followed his only child into a vast desolation.

Chapter 8

1

THE smell of food came through into the lounge whenever somebody passed in or out of the restaurant. The local Rotarians were having a lunch in one of the private rooms upstairs and when the door opened Ruby could hear a cork pop and the scrap of a limerick. It was five-past one. Ruby went out and chatted to the porter. She said, 'The worst of it is I'm one of the girls who turn up on the stroke. One o'clock he said and here I am panting for a good meal. I know a girl ought to keep a man waiting, but what do you do if you're hungry? He might go in and start.' She said, 'The trouble is I'm unlucky. I'm the kind of girl who daren't have a bit of fun because she'd be dead sure to get a baby. Well, I don't mean I've had a baby, but I did catch mumps once. Would you believe a grown man could give a girl mumps? But I'm that kind of girl.' She said, 'You look fine in all that gold braid with those medals. You might say something.'

The market was more than usually full, for everyone had come out late to do their last Christmas shopping now that the gas practice was over. Only Mrs Alfred Piker, as Lady Mayoress, had set an example by shopping in a mask. Now she was walking home, and Chinky trotted beside her, trailing his low fur and the feathers on his legs in the cold slush, carrying her mask between his teeth. He stopped by a lamp-post and dropped it in a puddle. 'O, Chinky, you bad little thing,' Mrs Piker said. The porter in his uniform glared out over the market. He wore the Mons medal and the Military Medal. He had been three times wounded. He swung the glass door as the business men came in for their lunch, the head traveller of Crosthwaite and Crosthwaite, the managing director of the big grocery business in the High Street. Once he darted out into the road and disentangled a fat man from a taxi. Then he came back and stood beside Ruby and listened to her with expressionless good humour.

'Ten minutes late,' Ruby said, 'I thought he was a man a girl could trust. I ought to have touched wood or crossed my fingers. It serves me right. I'd rather have lost my honour than that steak. Do you know him? He flings his weight about a lot. Called Davis.'

'He's always in here with girls,' the porter said.

A little man in pince-nez bustled by. 'A Merry Christmas, Hallows.'

'A Merry Christmas to you, sir.' The porter said, 'You wouldn't have got far with him.'

'I haven't got as far as the soup,' Ruby said.

A newsboy went by calling out a special midday edition of the News, the evening edition of the Journal, and a few minutes later another newsboy went past with a special edition of the Post, the evening edition of the more aristocratic Guardian. It was impossible to hear what they were shouting and the north-east wind flapped their posters, so that on one it was only possible to read the syllable '—gedy' and on the other the syllable '—der'.

'There are limits,' Ruby said, 'a girl can't afford to make herself cheap. Ten minutes' wait is the outside limit.'

'You've waited more than that now,' the porter said.

Ruby said, 'I'm like that. You'd say I fling myself at men, wouldn't you? That's what I think, but I never seem to hit them.' She added with deep gloom, 'The trouble is I'm the kind that's born to make a man happy. It's written all over me. It keeps them away. I don't blame them. I shouldn't like it myself.'

'There goes the Chief Constable,' the porter said. 'Off to get a drink at the police station. His wife won't let him have them at home. The best of the season to you, sir.'

'He seems in a hurry.' A newspaper poster flapped 'Trag—' at them. 'Is he the kind that would buy a girl a good rump steak with onions and fried potatoes?'

'I tell you what,' the porter said. 'You wait around another five minutes and then I shall be going off for lunch.'

'That's a date,' Ruby said. She crossed her fingers and touched wood. Then she went and sat inside and carried on a long conversation with an imaginary theatrical producer whom she imagined rather like Mr Davis, but a Mr Davis who kept his engagements. The producer called her a little woman with talent, asked her to dinner, took her back to a luxurious flat and gave her several cocktails. He asked her what she would think of a West-End engagement at fifteen pounds a week and said he wanted to show her his flat. Ruby's dark plump gloomy face lightened; she swung one leg excitedly and attracted the angry attention of a business man who was making notes of the midday prices. He found another chair and muttered to himself. Ruby, too, muttered to herself. She was saying, 'This is the dining-room. And through there is the bathroom. And this—elegant, isn't it?—is the bedroom.' Ruby said promptly that she'd like the fifteen pounds a week, but need she have the West-End engagement? Then she looked at the clock and went outside. The porter was waiting for her.

'What?' Ruby said. 'Have I got to go out with that uniform?'

'I only get twenty minutes,' the porter said.

'No rump steak then,' Ruby said. 'Well, I suppose sausages would do.'

They sat at a lunch counter on the other side of the market and had sausages and coffee. 'That uniform,' Ruby said, 'makes me embarrassed. Everyone'll think you're a guardsman going with a girl for a change.'

'Did you hear the shooting?' the man behind the counter said.

'What shooting?'

'Just round the corner from you at Midland Steel. Three dead. That old devil Sir Marcus, and two others.' He laid the midday paper open on the counter, and the old wicked face of Sir Marcus, the plump anxious features of Mr Davis, stared up at them beyond the sausages, the coffee cups, the pepper-pot, beside the hot-water urn.' So that's why he didn't come,' Ruby said. She was silent for a while reading.

'I wonder what this Raven was after,' the porter said. 'Look here,' and he pointed to a small paragraph at the foot of the column which announced that the head of the special political department of Scotland Yard had arrived by air and gone straight to the offices of Midland Steel. 'It doesn't mean a thing to me,' Ruby said.

The porter turned the pages looking for something. He said, 'Funny thing, isn't it? Here we are just going to war again, and they fill up the front page with a murder. It's driven the war on to a back page.'

'Perhaps there won't be a war.'

They were silent over their sausages. It seemed odd to Ruby that Mr Davis, who had sat on the box with her and looked at the Christmas tree, should be dead, so violently and painfully dead. Perhaps he had meant to keep the date. He wasn't a bad sort. She said, 'I feel sort of sorry for him.'

'Who? Raven?'

'Oh no, not him. Mr Davis, I mean.'

'I know how you feel. I almost feel sorry too—for the old man. I was in Midland Steel myself once. He had his moments. He used to send round turkeys at Christmas. He wasn't too bad. It's more than they do at the hotel.'

'Well,' Ruby said, draining her coffee, 'life goes on.'

'Have another cup.'

'I don't want to sting you.'

'That's all right.' Ruby leant against him on the high stool; their heads touched; they were a little quietened because each had known a man who was suddenly dead, but the knowledge they shared gave them a sense of companionship which was oddly sweet and reassuring. It was like feeling safe, like feeling in love without the passion, the uncertainty, the pain.

2

Saunders asked a clerk in Midland Steel the way to a lavatory. He washed his hands and thought, 'That job's over.' It hadn't been a satisfactory job; what had begun as a plain robbery had ended with two murders and the death of the murderer. There was a mystery about the whole affair; everything hadn't come out. Mather was up there on the top floor now with the head of the political department; they were going through Sir Marcus's private papers. It really seemed as if the girl's story might be true.

The girl worried Saunders more than anything. He couldn't help admiring her courage and impertinence at the same time as he hated her for making Mather suffer. He was ready to hate anyone who hurt Mather. 'She'll have to be taken to the Yard,' Mather said. 'There may be a charge against her. Put her in a locked carriage on the three-five. I don't want to see her until this thing's cleared up.' The only cheerful thing about the whole business was that the constable whom Raven had shot in the coal-yard was pulling through.

Saunders came out of Midland Steel into the Tanneries with an odd sensation of having nothing to do. He went into a public-house at the corner of the market and had half a pint of bitter and two cold sausages. It was as if life had sunk again to the normal level, was flowing quietly by once more between its banks. A card hanging behind the bar next a few cinema posters caught his eye. 'A New Cure for Stammerers. ' Mr Montague Phelps, M. A., was holding a public meeting in the Masonic Hall to explain his new treatment. Entrance was free, but there would be a silver collection. Two o'clock sharp. At one cinema Eddie Cantor. At another George Arliss. Saunders didn't want to go back to the police station until it was time to take the girl to the train. He had tried a good many cures for stammering; he might as well try one more.

It was a large hall. On the walls hung large photographs of masonic dignitaries. They all wore ribbons and badges of strange significance. There was an air of oppressive well-being, of successful groceries, about the photographs. They hung, the well-fed, the successful, the assured, over the small gathering of misfits, in old mackintoshes, in rather faded mauve felt hats, in school ties. Saunders entered behind a fat furtive woman and a steward stammered at him, 'T-t-t—?'

'One,' Saunders said. He sat down near the front and heard a stammered conversation going on behind him, like the twitters of two Chinamen. Little bursts of impetuous talk and then the fatal impediment. There were about fifty people in the hall. They eyed each other rather as an ugly man eyes himself in shop windows: from this angle, he thinks, I am really not too bad. They gained a sense of companionship; their mutual lack of communication was in itself like a communication. They waited together for a miracle.

Saunders waited with them: waited as he had waited on the windless side of the coal truck, with the same patience. He wasn't unhappy. He knew that he probably exaggerated the value of what he lacked; even if he could speak freely, without care to avoid the dentals which betrayed him, he would probably find it no easier to express his admiration and his affection. The power to speak didn't give you words.

Mr Montague Phelps, M. A., came on to the platform. He wore a frock-coat and his hair was dark and oiled. His blue chin was lightly powdered and he carried himself with a rather aggressive sangfroid, as much as to say to the depressed inhibited gathering, 'See what you too might become with a little more self-confidence, after a few lessons from me.' He was a man of about forty-two who had lived well, who obviously had a private life. One thought in his presence of comfortable beds and heavy meals and Brighton hotels. For a moment he reminded Saunders of Mr Davis who had bustled so importantly into the offices of Midland Steel that morning and had died very painfully and suddenly half an hour later.

It almost seemed as if Raven's act had had no consequences: as if to kill was just as much an illusion as to dream. Here was Mr Davis all over again; they were turned out of a mould, and you couldn't break the mould, and suddenly over Mr Montague Phelps's shoulder Saunders saw the photograph of the Grand Master of the Lodge, above the platform: an old face and a crooked nose and a tuft of beard, Sir Marcus.

Major Calkin was very white when he left Midland Steel. He had seen for the first time the effect of violent death. That was war. He made his way as quickly as he could to the police station and was glad to find the superintendent in. He asked quite humbly for a spot of whisky. He said, 'It shakes you up. Only last night he had dinner at my house. Mrs Piker was there with her dog. What a time we had stopping him knowing the dog was there.'

'That dog,' the superintendent said, 'gives us more trouble than any man in Nottwich. Did I ever tell you the time it got in the women's lavatory in Higham Street? That dog isn't much to look at, but every once in a while it goes crazy. If it wasn't Mrs Piker's we'd have had it destroyed many a time.'

3

Major Calkin said, 'He wanted me to give orders to your men to shoot this fellow on sight. I told him I couldn't. Now I can't help thinking we might have saved two lives.'

'Don't you worry, sir,' the superintendent said, 'we couldn't have taken orders like that. Not from the Home Secretary himself.'

'He was an odd fellow,' Major Calkin said. 'He seemed to think I'd be certain to have a hold over some of you. He promised me all kinds of things. I suppose he was what you'd call a genius. We shan't see his like again. What a waste.' He poured himself out some more whisky. 'Just at a time, too, when we need men like him. War—' Major Calkin paused with his hand on his glass. He stared into the whisky, seeing things, the remount depot, his uniform in the cupboard. He would never be a colonel now, but on the other hand Sir Marcus could not prevent... but curiously he felt no elation at the thought of once more presiding over the tribunal. He said, 'The gas practice seems to have gone off well. But I don't know that it was wise to leave so much to the medical students. They don't know where to stop.'

'There was a pack of them,' the superintendent said, 'went howling past here looking for the Mayor. I don't know how it is Mr Piker seems to be like catmint to those students.'

'Good old Piker,' Major Calkin said mechanically.

'They go too far,' the superintendent said. 'I had a ring from Higginbotham, the cashier at the Westminster. He said his daughter went into the garage and found one of the students there without his trousers.'

Life began to come back to Major Calkin. He said, 'That'll be Rose Higginbotham, I suppose. Trust Rose. What did she do?'

'He said she gave him a dressing down.'

'Dressing down's good,' Major Calkin said. He twisted his glass and drained his whisky. 'I must tell that to old Piker. What did you say?'

'I told him his daughter was lucky not to find a murdered man in the garage. You see that's where Raven must have got his clothes and his mask.'

'What was the boy doing at the Higginbothams' anyway?' Major Calkin said. 'I think I'll go and cash a cheque and ask old Higginbotham that.' He began to laugh; the air was clear again; life was going on quite in the old way: a little scandal, a drink with the super., a story to tell old Piker. On his way to the Westminster he nearly ran into Mrs Piker. He had to dive hastily into a shop to avoid her, and for a horrible moment he thought Chinky, who was some way ahead of her, was going to follow him inside. He made motions of throwing a ball down the street, but Chinky was not a sporting dog and anyway he was trailing a gas-mask in his teeth. Major Calkin had to turn his back abruptly and lean over a counter. He found it was a small haberdasher's. He had never been in the shop before. 'What can I get you, sir?'

'Suspenders,' Major Calkin said desperately. 'A pair of suspenders.'

'What colour, sir?' Out of the corner of his eye Major Calkin saw Chinky trot on past the shop door followed by Mrs Piker. 'Mauve,' he said with relief.

4

The old woman shut the front door softly and trod on tiptoe down the little dark hall. A stranger could not have seen his way, but she knew exactly the position of the hat rack, of the what-not table, and the staircase. She was carrying an evening paper, and when she opened the kitchen door with the very minimum of noise so as not to disturb Acky, her face was alight with exhilaration and excitement. But she held it in, carrying her basket over to the draining board and unloading there her burden of potatoes, a tin of pineapple chunks, two eggs and a slab of cod.

Acky was writing a long letter on the kitchen table. He had pushed his wife's mauve ink to one side and was using the best blue-black and a fountain pen which had long ceased to hold ink. He wrote slowly and painfully, sometimes making a rough copy of a sentence on another slip of paper. The old woman stood beside the sink watching him, waiting for him to speak, holding her breath in, so that sometimes it escaped in little whistles. At last Acky laid down his pen. 'Well, my dear?' he said.

'Oh, Acky,' the old woman said with glee, 'what do you think? Mr Cholmondeley's dead. Killed.' She added, 'It's in the paper. And that Raven too.'

Acky looked at the paper. 'Quite horrible,' he said with satisfaction. 'Another death as well. A holocaust.' He read the account slowly.

'Fancy a thing like that 'appening 'ere in Nottwich.'

'He was a bad man,' Acky said, 'though I wouldn't speak ill of him now that he's dead. He involved us in something of which I was ashamed. I think perhaps now it will be safe for us to stay in Nottwich.' A look of great weariness passed over his face as he looked down at the three pages of small neat classical handwriting.

'Oh, Acky, you've been tiring yourself.'

'I think,' Acky said, 'this will make everything clear.'

'Read it to me, love,' the old woman said. Her little old vicious face was heavily creased with tenderness as she leant back against the sink in an attitude of infinite patience. Acky began to read. He spoke at first in a low hesitating way, but he gained confidence from the sound of his own voice, his hand went up to the lapel of his coat. '"My lord bishop"...' He said, 'I thought it best to begin formally, not to trespass at all on my former acquaintanceship.'

'That's right, Acky, you are worth the whole bunch.'

'"I am writing to you for the fourth time... after an interval of some eighteen months.'"

'Is it so long, love? It was after we took the trip to Clacton.'

'"Sixteen months... I am quite aware what your previous answers have been, that my case has been tried already in the proper Church Court, but I cannot believe, my lord bishop, that your sense of justice, if once I convince you of what a deeply injured man I am, will not lead you to do all that is in your power to have my case reheard. I have been condemned to suffer all my life for what in the case of other men is regarded as a peccadillo, a peccadillo of which I am not even guilty.'"

'It's written lovely, love.'

'At this point, my dear, I come down to particulars. "How, my lord bishop, could the hotel domestic swear to the identity of a man seen once, a year before the trial, in a darkened chamber, for in her evidence she agreed that he had not allowed her to draw up the blind? As for the evidence of the porter, my lord bishop, I asked in court whether it was not true that money had passed from Colonel and Mrs Mark Egerton into his hands, and my question was disallowed. Is this justice, founded on scandal, misapprehension, and perjury?'"

The old woman smiled with tenderness and pride. 'This is the best letter you've written, Acky, so far.'

'"My lord bishop, it was well known in the parish that Colonel Mark Egerton was my bitterest enemy on the church council, and it was at his instigation that the inquiry was held. As for Mrs Mark Egerton she was a bitch.'"

'Is that wise, Acky?'

'Sometimes, dear, one reaches an impasse, when there is nothing to be done but to speak out. At this point I take the evidence in detail as I have done before, but I think I have sharpened my arguments more than a little. And at the end, my dear, I address the worldly man in the only way he can understand.' He knew this passage off by heart; he reeled it fierily off at her, raising his crazy sunken flawed saint's eyes. '"But even assuming, my lord bishop, that this perjured and bribed evidence were accurate, what then? Have I committed the unforgivable sin that I must suffer all my life long, be deprived of my livelihood, depend on ignoble methods to raise enough money to keep myself and my wife alive? Man, my lord bishop, and no one knows it better than yourself—I have seen you among the flesh-pots at the palace—is made up of body as well as soul. A little carnality may be forgiven even to a man of my cloth. Even you, my lord bishop, have in your time no doubt sported among the haycocks."' He stopped, he was a little out of breath; they stared back at each other with awe and affection.

Acky said, 'I want to write a little piece, dear, now about you.' He took in with what could only have been the deepest and purest love the black sagging skirt, the soiled blouse, the yellow wrinkled face. 'My dear,' he said, 'what I should have done without—' He began to make a rough draft of yet another paragraph, speaking the phrases aloud as he wrote them. '"What I should have done during this long trial—no, martyrdom—I do not know—I cannot conceive—if I had not been supported by the trust and the unswerving fidelity—no, fidelity and unswerving trust of my dear wife, a wife whom Mrs Mark Egerton considered herself in a position to despise. As if Our Lord had chosen the rich and well-born to serve him. At least this trial—has taught me to distinguish between my friends and enemies. And yet at my trial her word, the word of the woman who loved and believed in me, counted—for nought beside the word—of that—that—trumpery and deceitful scandalmonger."'

The old woman leant forward with tears of pride and importance in her eyes. She said, 'That's lovely. Do you think the bishop's wife will read it? Oh, dear, I know I ought to go and tidy the room upstairs (we might be getting some young people in), but some'ow, Acky dear, I'd just like to stay right 'ere with you awhile. What you write makes me feel kind of 'oly.' She slumped down on the kitchen chair beside the sink and watched his hand move on, as if she were watching some unbelievably lovely vision passing through the room, something which she had never hoped to see and now was hers. 'And finally, my dear,' Acky said, 'I propose to write: "In a world of perjury and all manner of uncharitableness one woman remains my sheet anchor, one woman I can trust until death and beyond."'

'They ought to be ashamed of themselves. Oh, Acky, my dear,' she wept, 'to think they've treated you that way. But you've said true. I won't ever leave you. I won't leave you, not even when I'm dead. Never, never, never,' and the two old vicious faces regarded each other with the complete belief, the awe and mutual suffering of a great love, while they affirmed their eternal union.

5

Anne cautiously felt the door of the compartment in which she had been left alone. It was locked, as she had thought it would be in spite of Saunders's tact and his attempt to hide what he was doing. She stared out at the dingy Midland station with dismay. It seemed to her that everything which made her life worth the effort of living was lost; she hadn't even got a job, and she watched, past an advertisement of Horlick's for night starvation and a bright blue-and-yellow picture of the Yorkshire coast, the weary pilgrimage which lay before her from agent to agent. The train began to move by the waiting-rooms, the lavatories, the sloping concrete into a waste of rails.

What a fool, she thought, I have been, thinking I could save us from a war. Three men are dead, that's all. Now that she was herself responsible for so many deaths, she could no longer feel the same repulsion towards Raven. In this waste through which she travelled, between the stacks of coal, the tumbledown sheds, abandoned trucks in sidings where a little grass had poked up and died between the cinders, she thought of him again with pity and distress. They had been on the same side, he had trusted her, she had given her word to him, and then she had broken it without even the grace of hesitation. He must have known of her treachery before he died: in that dead mind she was preserved for ever with the chaplain who had tried to frame him, with the doctor who had telephoned to the police.

Well, she had lost the only man she cared a damn about: it was always regarded as some kind of atonement, she thought, to suffer too: lost him for no reason at all. For she couldn't stop a war. Men were fighting beasts, they needed war; in the paper that Saunders had left for her on the opposite seat she could read how the mobilization in four countries was complete, how the ultimatum expired at midnight; it was no longer on the front page, but that was only because to Nottwich readers there was a war nearer at hand, fought out to a finish in the Tanneries. How they love it, she thought bitterly, as the dusk came up from the dark wounded ground and the glow of furnaces became visible beyond the long black ridge of slag-heaps. This was war too: this chaos through which the train moved slowly, grinding over point after point like a dying creature dragging itself painfully away through No-Man's Land from the scene of battle.

She pressed her face against the window to keep her tears away: the cold pressure of the frosting pane stiffened her resistance. The train gathered speed by a small neo-Gothic church, a row of villas, and then the country, the fields, a few cows making for an open gate, a hard broken lane and a cyclist lighting his lamp. She began to hum to keep her spirits up, but the only tunes she could remember were 'Aladdin' and 'It's only Kew'. She thought of the long bus-ride home, the voice on the telephone, and how she couldn't get to the window to wave to him and he had stood there with his back to her while the train went by. It was Mr Davis even then who had ruined everything.

And it occurred to her, staring out at the bleak frozen countryside, that perhaps even if she had been able to save the country from a war, it wouldn't have been worth the saving. She thought of Mr Davis and Acky and his old wife, of the producer and Miss Maydew and the landlady at her lodging with the bead of liquid on her nose. What had made her play so absurd a part? If she had not offered to go out to dinner with Mr Davis, Raven probably would be in gaol and the others alive. She tried to remember the watching anxious faces studying the sky-signs in Nottwich High Street, but she couldn't remember them with any vividness.

The door into the corridor was unlocked and staring through the window into the grey fading winter light she thought: more questions. Will they never stop worrying me? She said aloud, 'I've made my statement, haven't I?'

Mather's voice said, 'There are still a few things to discuss.'

She turned hopelessly towards him. 'Need you have come?'

'I'm in charge of this case,' Mather said, sitting down opposite to her with his back to the engine, watching the country which she could see approach flow backwards over her shoulder and disappear. He said, 'We've been checking what you told us. It's a strange story.'

'It's true,' she repeated wearily.

He said: 'We've had half the Embassies in London on the 'phone. Not to speak of Geneva. And the Commissioner.'

She said with a flicker of malice, 'I'm sorry you've been troubled.' But she couldn't keep it up; her formal indifference was ruined by his presence, the large clumsy, once friendly hand, the bulk of the man. 'Oh, I'm sorry,' she said. 'I've said it before, haven't I? I'd say it if I'd spilt your coffee, and I've got to say it after all these people are killed. There are no other words, are there, which mean more? It all worked out wrong; I thought everything was clear. I've failed. I didn't mean to hurt you ever. I suppose the Commissioner...' She began to cry without tears; it was as if those ducts were frozen.

He said, 'I'm to have promotion. I don't know why. It seems to me as if I'd bungled it.' He added gently and pleadingly, leaning forward across the compartment, 'We could get married—at once—though I dare say you don't want to now, you'll do all right. They'll give you a grant.'

It was like going into the manager's office expecting dismissal and getting a rise instead—or a speaking part, but it never happened that way. She stared silently back at him.

'Of course,' he said gloomily, 'you'll be the rage now. You'll have stopped a war. I know I didn't believe you. I've failed. I thought I'd always trust—We've found enough already to prove what you told me and I thought was lies. They'll have to withdraw their ultimatum now. They won't have any choice.' He added with a deep hatred of publicity, 'It'll be the sensation of a century,' sitting back with his face heavy and sad.

'You mean,' she said with incredulity, 'that when we get in—we can go off straight away and be married?'

'Will you?'

She said, 'The taxi won't be fast enough.'

'It won't be as quick as all that. It takes three weeks. We can't afford a special licence.'

She said, 'Didn't you tell me about a grant? I'll blow it on the licence,' and suddenly as they both laughed it was as if the past three days left the carriage, were whirled backward down the metals to Nottwich. It had all happened there, and they need never go back to the scene of it. Only a shade of disquiet remained, a fading spectre of Raven. If his immortality was to be on the lips of living men, he was fighting now his last losing fight against extinction.

'All the same,' Anne said, as Raven covered her with his sack: Raven touched her icy hand, 'I failed.'

'Failed?' Mather said. 'You've been the biggest success,' and it seemed to Anne for a few moments that this sense of failure would never die from her brain, that it would cloud a little every happiness; it was something she could never explain: her lover would never understand it. But already as his face lost its gloom, she was failing again—failing to atone. The cloud was blown away by his voice; it evaporated under his large and clumsy and tender hand.

'Such a success.' He was as inarticulate as Saunders, now that he was realizing what it meant. It was worth a little publicity. This darkening land, flowing backwards down the line, was safe for a few more years. He was a countryman, and he didn't ask for more than a few years' safety at a time for something he so dearly loved. The precariousness of its safety made it only the more precious. Somebody was burning winter weeds under a hedge, and down a dark lane a farmer rode home alone from the hunt in a queer old-fashioned bowler hat on a horse that would never take a ditch. A small lit village came up beside his window and sailed away like a pleasure steamer hung with lanterns; he had just time to notice the grey English church squatted among the yews and graves, the thick deaths of centuries, like an old dog who will not leave his corner. On the wooden platform as they whirled by a porter was reading the label on a Christmas tree. 'You haven't failed,' he said.

London had its roots in her heart: she saw nothing in the dark countryside, she looked away from it to Mather's happy face. 'You don't understand,' she said, sheltering the ghost for a very short while longer, 'I did fail.' But she forgot it herself completely when the train drew in to London over a great viaduct under which the small bright shabby streets ran off like the rays of a star with their sweet shops, their Methodist chapels, their messages chalked on the paving stones. Then it was she who thought: this is safe, and wiping the glass free from steam, she pressed her face against the pane and happily and avidly and tenderly watched, like a child whose mother has died watches the family she must rear without being aware at all that the responsibility is too great. A mob of children went screaming down a street, she could tell they screamed because she was one of them, she couldn't hear their voices or see their mouths; a man was selling hot chestnuts at a corner, and it was on her face that his little fire glowed, the sweet shops were full of white gauze stockings crammed with cheap gifts. 'Oh,' she said with a sigh of unshadowed happiness, 'we're home.'

The End

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