Martin Coxon’s inquiries, it seemed, had not been useless after all.
Chapter Six
Count Louis Joachim lived in a very simple way, and was courteous and kind to the brother of his old friend. The room we ate in was full of the things of their common interest: a Hittite clay tablet a framed papyrus from the tomb of Weserhet, a twelfth-dynasty gold mask, decorated pottery from Phylakopi.
He spoke of his long friendship with Grevil stretching back almost twenty years and of their last meeting before he left for Java. They had talked all that evening about his purpose in making the excavations, and Grevil had told him then that he felt he was groping his way towards a new conception of man’s origins. If his findings the next two or three years confirmed his present impressions, he thought he could see his way to a complete regrouping of anthropological dates.
‘‘Young men of promise—there are plenty of such,’’ said Louis Joachim. ‘‘Your brother was that much more important thing, a mature man of promise. There was no staling in him—along with maturity there was this constant renewal, so to say. Nothing of his youthful approach had been lost. He was ripe for big things. That is why it is so tragic.’’
‘‘And inexplicable.’’
‘‘And inexplicable.’’ He was silent for a time.
I said: ‘‘Do you attempt to explain it, even to yourself?’’
‘‘Only by the recollection that Grevil Turner was a good man and a very unusual one.’’
‘‘I don’t see what follows.’’
‘‘No. Nothing follows. It is just the feeling that one has to strive to see through this veil that his death has cast. One turns this way and that …’’ Louis Joachim frowned at me thoughtfully. ‘‘Always your brother was a man to set himself the almost impossible task. How would he, I have been wondering, tolerate failure, from whatever source it came?’’
‘‘How does anyone?’’
‘‘Yes, that is so. But the ordinary man surely does not risk as much to begin, or feel as much to finish. His standards, let us admit it, are flexible; they adapt themselves more quickly to the need of the hour. Whereas the man of high ideals, with the great capacity for goodness, such as your brother, sometimes has not the spiritual ambiguity to compromise. He cannot or he will not. They must conquer or die who have no retreat.’’
It struck me again that in all these speculations about the mystery of Grevil’s death, every person, Arnold, Colonel Powell, Martin Coxon, and now Count Louis joachim, really, only imagined what they might or could have done themselves, so that instead of a projection you got a reflection. Each one put himself in Grevil’s place and interpreted or speculated according to his own temperament. None of them really knew or understood what Grevil had thought. Perhaps that was impossible. Perhaps that pretty problem was mine alone to solve. And I could do it not by any mental acrobatics but by deep affection and understanding—or not at all.
Towards the end of the evening I noticed Louis Joachim twice emphasised his country’s debt to Grevil because of all the kindness and help he had given to the Royal Family between 1940 and 1942. He was sincere enough in saying this, but he said it as if it needed to be mentioned. I wondered if he was more in the confidence of his police than I was.
I left about ten and was back in the city by ten-thirty. A feeling had been growing in me all day. Before I left, before I was finished with this visit to Amsterdam, there was still one thing. I wanted to see Hermina Maas again.
De Walletjes wasn’t easy to find even at this second visit. I took two wrong turnings and eventually came on it from the other end, which at least saved the walk beside the lighted windows.
A light rain was falling; the cobbled bridge glistened as I crossed it. In the distance a man was shouting a drunken song; instead of sounding jolly it sounded lonely and lost. These little lighted rooms might be sarcophagi, the bodies inside marking the final corruption of the flesh. However you dressed it up, vice fundamentally was shabby and depressing. The sexual act can be all that the poets sing of; or it can be just what’s written on lavatory walls.
As I came to the end of the bridge I thought I heard a footstep clink on the cobbles behind me. I swung round. Nothing stirred. Then a man came out of the house opposite and came towards me. He was a buck negro of the type you don’t often see outside the cosmopolitan ports of the world, a fine tall fellow of six feet three or four with an ebony face, in a light-coloured jacket with the sleeves much too short and a grey felt hat with the brim upturned at the front. The set of his head and the sway of his shoulders told you a lot. I stopped and waited for turn to catch me up. He looked at me with a glint of white in his eyes, and opened his mouth to say something, but then went on past and up the street and disappeared round a corner.
The first-floor window of Zolenstraat 12 was in darkness and the blind of the lower window was drawn. I wondered if Mr. Jodenbree was waiting behind it. I went in and up the stairs.
The upper landing was in darkness, and I had to grope my way to the door of her room. My fingers touched the handle and then I knocked. There was no reply. My foot was on a loose floorboard, and I shifted it to stop a further creak. It seemed suddenly important that I should: make no more noise. Upstairs someone had a wireless on, and in the street beyond a dog was yelping as if it had been trodden on. I tried the handle of the door. It turned and the door opened.
I didn’t at once go into the room but felt up and down the wall inside for the light switch. After a bit I found it, but it was already pressed down. I flicked it a couple of times but nothing happened. Half in the room, I tried to remember last night. The room had been lit by a table-lamp. Probably there was a second switch there. The blind wasn’t drawn, and as my eyes got used to the dark I could see the sharp corner of the cheval glass and what looked like the rounded silhouette of the lampshade.
I haven’t thought of myself as a nervy type, but it took an effort to go into the room. A voice was nagging at me to skip it. After all, I had the other girl’s address; that was enough; what did I need here?
Only one thing, but that the most important.
I got as far as the lamp without falling over anything and my fingers traveled energetically down the stem to the button at the bottoms. The light came on.
After the darkness of the last ten minutes it looked too bright, too obvious, too public. I reached quickly to the window, pulled down the blind.
I don’t know what I expected to find in the room. My eyes have never travelled quicker round anywhere. The ruptured settee, the soiled pink hangings to the bed, the brown flowers on the brown walls, the calendar, a pair of laddered stockings, a dress with green dots and a stain down the front, a lipstick, hair-pins, cigarette ends.
She was not here.
Still feeling a need for getting on, I opened one or two drawers, lifted the coverlet of the bed, picked up a scrawled envelope but couldn’t read it. The door was still open and I thought it time to leave. I went to it and flipped the switch, but the light didn’t go out. I had to return to the table-lamp, plug it out there and then grope my way back to the door.
Once I was out on the landing I remembered the blind was still down, but I didn’t feel like going back. I shut the door and groped by way down the stairs. I thought of knocking on the lower door and asking for information, but when I got down I knew I shouldn’t be able to do that because two men were standing waiting for me on the threshold of the outer door.
There wasn’t any other way out, and they’d heard me come down the stairs. I wished Martin Coxon was with me then. But tonight there was no convenient friend on the bridge.
And these men weren’t Jodenbree. These were his professional thugs, warned probably by the buck negro, ready with cosh and
razor. At least I couldn’t see myself ending up in the canal unmarked.
‘‘Mister Turner,’’ one said.
‘‘Well?’’
‘‘It is necessary that you come with us.’’
So perhap
s this was, to be the subtler method after all. Perhaps
I would learn by personal experience how Grevil had died.
I took a step. Break through? But help wouldn’t be easy to find
outside.
The man said: ‘‘Inspector Tholen has instructed us. You must
leave this district with us and return to your hotel.’’
My knuckles were hurting. I slowly relaxed them. I tried not to
make much noise with the breath I let out.
‘‘Inspector Tholen sent you?’’
‘‘Yes, of course.’’
‘‘Have you been following me for long?’’
‘‘Since yesterday.’’
I felt thin round the knees. ‘‘ I came to find Hermina Maas.’’
‘‘She is in protective custody. Now come at once.’’
He spoke sharply, and it occurred to me that they weren’t feeling
too secure themselves.
I went with them. ‘‘Why have you taken her into protective
custody?’’
‘‘Should you not suppose it best for her after your visit and your
friend’s visit on Tuesday?’’
I said: ‘‘And Mr. Jodenbree?’’
There was no reply. On the bridge three men were talking. The
rain had come on harder, but they didn’t seem interested in that.
As we passed I saw that one of them was the big negro. There
was another negro as well, and a white man in a heavy sailor’s
jersey. They stopped talking and watched us past.
The man with me said: ‘‘It is as well that we followed you, Mr.
Turner.’’
Arnold said: ‘‘What will you get out of a visit to Rome?
“I don’t understand.’’
‘‘Nor I yet.’’
‘‘You don’t want to tell me what you’ve discovered?’’
‘‘Practically nothing— so far.’’
‘‘Your firm will have had something to say about this, won’t they?’’
‘‘They’ll have something to say when they know. As yet they don’t know.’’
I could see Arnold’s brain moving round it. The fact that I’d travelled up to the Midlands to tell him so little had been a surprise perhaps. Then the thing suddenly worked itself out.
‘‘They may cut up rough.’’
‘‘I should in their place. Things in California are in a very crucial stage. Having me drop out just isn’t a business proposition for them.’’
‘‘And you?’’
‘‘I shall ask them to send someone in my place. How they’ll react I don’t know. They may be nice. Or they may take it as a sign of the family insanity.’’
Arnold blew his nose. He was thinking out his words carefully. ‘‘I know you’re not a person who needs security, Philip—not perhaps as an ordinary person does. You’ve proved that by refusing to draw more than a pittance from us all those years you were trying to paint. But you must know that if anything goes awry between yourself and B. T. J.’s—especially over this—there’s still a position for you here, either temporary or permanent.’’
‘‘I suppose I ought to know. But I don’t take it for granted.’’
Arnold got up and flattened out the dog-ears in the telephone book. ‘‘I’ve been thinking a good deal about this, Philip. Much more since Grevil’s death. That sort of thing makes one … I’m anxious to link you to this firm, and it’s occurred to me that hitherto my approach perhaps hasn’t been right. I’m sure if we sat down to plan the thing we could block out something more congenial for you than sitting behind an office desk. There are opportunities for—for initiative, for travel.’’
‘‘Yes, that could be.’’
‘‘What I’d like to see is someone of the same name. We’ve not been a prolific family in this generation. Myself without children, Grevil one daughter, you, after the break with Pamela, showing no serious signs of settling down. There’s no one coming on. Of course I know’’—he stopped—‘‘I know you and Grevil have always felt I attached too much importance to the firm.’’
I said: ‘‘The money we’ve had from it has kept us all—Grevil when he dropped his physics, I when I monkeyed about after the war. We’d be pretty ungrateful to despise what gave us that or to feel patronising towards the only one of us who has kept his head down and made the thing go. Grevil was a man apart and had to be treated as such. I’m not. I know I’ve always been restive under the bridle, but it may work off with age.’’
Arnold went to his desk. He wasn’t a man to hang his feelings out for anyone to see, but I thought he was satisfied with this as far as it went. And in a queer way, although I’d been fighting against this happening all my grown-up life, I was not unwilling now to leave the offer open. With that at my back I was better set to do whatever I wanted to do. And perhaps Grevil’s death—or the gap left by his death—had brought us closer together than we’d ever been before.
All the same, that was in the future, the very much unspecified future. Until Grevil was off my mind—if he ever could be—there didn’t seem to be any settled future at all.
‘‘By the way, Philip, there’s one other thing I should mention. I expect you know, don’t you, that the stuff Grevil was bringing back, the results of his excavations—or such of them as were portable—were mainly for the Rijksmuseum of Amsterdam. But a few things, at his own discretion, were to come with him to England. All these were flown back in the plane with him to Amsterdam; four small packing-crates for the museum and one for himself. Well, when he died, the Dutch police impounded his belongings—temporarily you understand—in order, they said, to help them in their inquiries. These have now been released to us. His ordinary things came to our house—where luckily I was able to head them off before Grace saw them—but the case went to Professor Little at the British Museum. Well, I’ve had a letter from little today, and he says the case was two-thirds empty.’’
‘‘You mean the Dutch had lifted the rest of the stuff?’’
‘‘Apparently. Why, we don’t know, unless the Dutch archaeologists felt that Grevil’s death put an end to the arrangement and so they were entitled to help themselves to everything of interest. It was queer keeping all his personal belongings until now.’’
‘‘What does Little think of the stuff that’s eventually arrived?’’
‘‘In the crate? Not much. But he’s forwarded on to me Grevil’s notes, which are in that shorthand of ours. I shall find it tedious work because it’s years since I did any. I wondered if, in view of what you intend to do——’’
‘‘Yes, of course,’’ I said. ‘‘Where are they?’’
Father, among his other diverse activities, had invented a shorthand of his own, which he had failed to get taken up in a big way but which he had passed on to his sons, the elder two direct and me at one remove. Grevil had always written to me at school in it and kept his own notes that way. He’d often said it was useful to have a langauge no one else could read without preliminary effort.
Arnold had fished a couple of loose-leaf note-books out of his drawer. ‘‘ Little would like a full transcription if you can manage it. And it’s just possible, the notes may shed some light on the situation before Grevil’s death. At least it will give us an indication of what the Dutch have chosen to keep for themselves.’’
‘‘Yes.’’ I said. ‘‘I’ll take it with me to Rome.’’
I didn’t see Martin Coxon before I left. I should have, because it was entirely his doing that I had what information I had; but I badly wanted to take the next step on my own.
Withycombe was very stuffy about my wanting further leave, and I didn’t at all blame him, but there was not much he could do except emphasise the difficulty they’d be in to find another man to fly to California at once. At least I didn’t get the sack, and I didn’t feel compelled to resign; but I came away knowing I hadn’t improved my prospects in the firm. I
t was a pity because I liked the job, and I flew to Rome feeling rather down-in-the-mouth about the whole thing.
In one way Withycombe was helpful, and that was in agreeing to have my last month’s salary cabled to me in dollars abroad.
It was impossible at this stage to make an estimate of how long I should be away or what money I should need.
I took the night plane, slept a little on the way, and had breakfast in the noise and the hot early sunshine of the Piazza Colonna. By eleven I was walking up the steps of the Hôtel Agostini. Somehow I hadn’t expected the search to end here, and it did not. Mrs. Winter had stayed two nights only at the Agostini and had then left for Naples. My troubles were only just beginning. However, I walked up to the station and found a train just leaving, caught it without a ticket and was within sight of the Bay by a little after two o’clock.
Naples is a big city to search, and there were only two ways of going about it. I either spent a week going the rounds of the hotels or I went to the police.
I went to the police.
I told them Mrs. Helen Winter was a very old and dear friend of mine, and I’d heard she was in the town but not where she was staying. I was most anxious to trace her for personal reasons, etc. The man I interviewed was sympathetic. He agreed to do what he could. Information regarding the registration of aliens was naturally for police records only, but—he would do what he could, and in the circumstances … I caught his eye and smiled apologetically. I made it clear that this was almost a family matter, and if it was not already that I wanted it to become one. He nodded again, fully understanding, and said it would take a little time. In the meanwhile if I would give him an hotel where he could get in touch with me …
Next morning, having heard nothing, I went round again, but my friend of yesterday was not there. Instead a tougher looking man greeted me and asked me to wait. I waited for an hour. Then the first man came in with a slip of paper. I was glad to see him.
‘‘This is the information you want signore. Mrs. Helen Winter spent the night of the fourth April at the Hôtel Vesuvio.’’
The Little Walls Page 7
