The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

MRS. BARTLETT WAS something of a surprise. She was three or four inches taller than her husband, and she ordered him around as if he were a naughty but lovable little schoolboy. There was another surprise, too. No one had mentioned to Morse that the Bartletts had a son, and the rather slovenly-dressed, sullen-looking, bearded young man who was introduced as Richard seemed not particularly anxious to make an immediately favourable impression. But whilst the four of them sat rather awkwardly drinking their sherry, it became apparent that under his skin young Richard had a pleasant and attractive personality. As the ice thawed, he spoke with an easy humour and a total lack of self consciousness; and as he and Morse discussed the respective merits of the Solti and Furtwängler recordings of The Ring, Mrs. Bartlett slipped away to push a cautious fork into the Brussels sprouts, and summoned her husband to open the wine. The table was immaculately set for the four of them, the silver cutlery winking and sparkling on the white tablecloth in the dimly lit room. The vegetables were almost ready.

Bartlett himself refilled Morse's glass. 'Nice little sherry, isn't it?'

'Indeed,' said Morse. He noticed that the label was different from that on the sherry bottle found in Quinn's rooms.

'Any more for you, Richard?'

'No.' It sounded oddly abrupt, as though there lurked some dark and hidden enmity within the Bartlett clan.

The soup was ready now, and Morse tossed back the last of his sherry, got to his feet, and walked across the wide room rubbing his hands together.

'Come on then, Richard.' His mother said it pleasantly, but Morse could hear the underlying note of tension.

'Don't worry about me. I'm not hungry.'

'But you must, Richard. I've—'

The young man stood up, and a strange light momentarily blazed in his eyes. 'I've just told you, mother, I'm not hungry.'

'But I've got it all ready for you. Just have a—'

'I don't want any bloody food. How many times do you want telling, you stupid woman?' The words were cruel and harsh, the tone one of scarcely repressed fury. He stalked out of the room, and almost immediately the front door slammed with a thudded finality.

'I'm awfully sorry, Inspector.'

'Don't worry about me, Mrs. Bartlett. Some of the youngsters these days, you know—'

'It's not that, Inspector. You see. you see, Richard suffers from schizophrenia. He can be absolutely charming, and then — well, he gets like you saw him just now.' She was very near to tears and Morse tried hard to say the right things; but inevitably the incident had cast its shadow deep across the evening, and for a while they ate in awkward silence.

'Can it be treated?'

Mrs. Bartlett smiled sadly. 'Good question, Inspector. We've spent literally thousands, haven't we, Tom? He's a voluntary patient at Littlemore at the moment. Sometimes he comes home at the weekends, and just occasionally, like tonight, he'll drop in and sit around or have something to eat.' Her voice was wavering and her husband patted her affectionately on the shoulder.

'Don't worry about it, my dear. We didn't ask the Inspector along to talk about our problems. He's got enough of his own, I should think.'

Only when Mrs. Bartlett was washing the pots were the two men able to talk, and Morse's earlier impression that the Secretary knew exactly what was going on in his own office was cumulatively confirmed: if anyone had any ideas about who had been prepared to prostitute the integrity of the Syndicate, Morse felt it would be Bartlett. But he didn't, it seemed. With every subtlety he knew, Morse tried to draw out any suspicion of secret doubts; but the Secretary was deeply loyal to his staff, and Morse knew that he was tiptoeing too delicately. He decided the time had come.

'What did Mr. Quinn want when he rang you up?'

Bartlett blinked behind the window frames; and then looked down at his coffee, and was silent for a while. Morse knew perfectly well that if Bartlett denied that Quinn had spoken to him, that would be the end of it, for there was no hard evidence on the point. Yet the longer Bartlett hesitated (surely Bartlett must realize it?), the more obvious it became.

'You know that he did ring me, then?'

'Yes, sir.' He might as well push his luck a little.

'Do you mind telling me how you know?'

It was Morse's turn to hesitate, but he decided to come reasonably clean. 'Quinn's telephone is on a shared line. Someone overheard you.'

Did Morse catch a sudden flash of alarm behind the friendly lenses? If he did, it was gone as quickly as it had appeared.

'You want me to tell you what the conversation was about?'

'I think you should have told me before, sir. It would have saved a great deal of trouble.'

'Would it?' Bartlett looked the Inspector in the eye, and Morse suspected that he was still a long, long way from reaching to the bedrock of the mystery.

'The truth's going to come out sometime, sir. I honestly think you'd be sensible to tell me all about it.'

'Haven't you got that information, though? You say someone was listening in? Despicable attitude of mind, isn't it? Eavesdropping on other people—'

'Perhaps it is, sir; but, you see, the, er, person wasn't really listening in at all — just trying to get a very important call through, that's all. There was no question of deliberately—'

'So you don't know what we were talking about?'

Morse breathed deeply. 'No, sir.'

'Well, I'm, er, I'm not going to tell you. It was a very personal matter, between Quinn and myself—'

'Perhaps it was a personal matter that led to him being murdered, sir.'

'Yes, I realize that,'

'But you're not going to tell me?'

'No.'

Morse slowly drained his coffee. 'I don't think you realize exactly how important this is, sir. You see, unless we can find out where Quinn was and what he was doing that Friday evening—'

Bartlett looked at him sharply. 'You said nothing about Friday before.'

'You mean—?'

'I mean that Quinn rang me up one evening last week, yes. But it wasn't Friday.'

Clever little bugger! Morse had let the cat out of the bag — about not really knowing what the conversation had been about — and now the cat had jumped away over the fence. Bartlett was right, of course. He hadn't actually mentioned Friday, but—

Mrs. Bartlett came through with the coffee pot and refilled the cups. She appeared quite unaware of breaking the conversation at a vital point, sat down, and innocently asked Morse how he was getting on with his inquiries into the terrible terrible business of poor poor Mr. Quinn.

And Morse was game for anything now. 'We were just talking about telephone calls, Mrs. Bartlett. The curse of the times, isn't it? I should think you must get almost as many as I do.'

'How right you are, Inspector. I was only saying last week — when was it, Tom? Do you remember? Oh yes. It was the day you went to Banbury. The phone kept ringing all the afternoon, and I said to Tom when he came in that we ought to get an ex-directory number and — do you know what? — just as I said it, the wretched thing rang again! And you had to go out again, do you remember, Tom?

The little Secretary nodded and smiled ruefully. Sometimes life could be very unfair. Very unfair indeed.

Just after 8.15 p.m. that same evening a man was taking the lid off the highly-polished bronze coal scuttle when he heard the knock, and he got slowly to his feet and opened the door.

'Well, well! Come on in. I shan't be a minute. Take a seat.' He knelt down again by the fire and extracted a lump of shiny black coal with the tongs.

In his own head it sounded as if he had taken an enormous bite from a large, crisp apple. His jaws seemed to clamp together, and for a weird and terrifying second he sought frantically to rediscover some remembrance of himself along the empty, echoing corridors of his brain. His right hand still held the tongs, and his whole body willed itself to pull the coal towards the bright fire. For some inexplicable reason he found himself thinking of the lava from Mount Vesuvius pouring in an all-engulfing flood towards the streets of old Pompeii; and even as his left hand began slowly and instinctively to raise itself towards the shattered skull, he knew that life was ended. The light snapped suddenly out, as if someone had switched on the darkness. He was dead.