Salt is Leaving

by J. B. Priestley

  Maggie tried to think about this Noreen Wilks puzzle, but soon gave it up. Cars soon flashed and screamed at them. Lorries, looking gigantic in the dusk, lumbered past them or remained maddeningly in their way. Maggie had that feeling she often had when she was being driven, especially at this time of day, along a main road – as if everybody were fleeing in a panic, trying to escape from the threat of some appalling catastrophe, as if our whole civilization were really quite mad. And she had a great longing, which rather alarmed her, just to touch this man sitting beside her who, whatever anybody might say, was sane and real and so ready to be helpful, so quick to understand.

  At the police station, she waited in the car while Dr Salt went to find the sergeant. They were talking as they approached the car. ‘All I ask,’ Dr Salt was saying, ‘is that you let me do it my way. However I look and behave, whatever I say, just let it pass, without any interruptions – um? Oh – Miss Culworth – Sergeant Driver. You can direct me from the back seat, Sergeant. And don’t sit on that old bag of mine.’

  ‘Not going to take their temperatures or listen to their hearts, are you, Dr Salt?’ the sergeant inquired humorously as he got in.

  ‘I hope not. But I never go very far without my bag. I never know when it might be wanted.’

  ‘Quite right, Doctor. And once we’re there, I’ll let you play it your way. I think we’ll find ’em in, because they’ve just bought themselves a new telly.’

  ‘They have, have they? Well, well, well!’ Dr Salt started the car.

  ‘Go straight on till you come to the lights,’ said the sergeant, who was a heavy, middle-aged man with a lot of chin and hardly any nose, which perhaps explained why he seemed to have some difficulty in breathing. ‘Then make a left turn and carry on till I tell you to make another turn – straight into Gladstone Street.’

  Comdon Bridge was the kind of smallish industrial town – and there were lots of them in the Midlands – that Maggie could never imagine herself enduring. It was like the nastier part of a city from which there was no escape to any better part. The shopping street they were in now offered a panorama of illuminated rubbish. Gladstone Street looked exactly like Birkden’s Olton Street, where Mrs Pearson lived – and once, of course, Noreen Wilks.

  ‘This is it, Doctor – Number 86. End house.’ As they got out of the car, Sergeant Driver continued: ‘They’re in all right. You can hear the telly. Now I’ll go first, then explain who you are – and then leave it to you. Right?’

  They were not enthusiastically welcomed. ‘Oh – not again, Sarge, not again!’ a man shouted above the noise of the sheriff’s posse firing at the rustler. ‘We’re trying to enjoy ourselves – just for once, just for once.’

  The three of them had been looking at their new television set, which was on top of a chest of drawers, all seated at a small table on which were several bottles of beer and stout and the smelly remains of a chips-and-fish supper. All three of them looked hot and greasy, but while Mrs Duffy and her daughter Rose were not merely plump but fat, Mr Corrigan was thin and had an angry inflamed face. Sergeant Driver, once he had had the television switched off, said to them: ‘We shan’t keep you long. But this is Dr Salt – and his – er – secretary – Miss Culworth, and as Noreen Wilks was a patient of Dr Salt’s, he just wants to ask you a few questions.’ All three, sitting round the table again and leaving their visitors standing, nodded solemnly and looked important.

  Even before he spoke, Maggie realized that Dr Salt was going into his hopeful simpleton act again, offering them the same apologetic smile that she hadn’t seen since their visit to the Fabrics Club. ‘I’m very sorry to bother you – some of these Western serials are very good, aren’t they? – take you right out of yourself, don’t they? – but, strictly for medical reasons, I must ask you a question or two about Noreen Wilks. That’s not unreasonable, is it?’

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ said Mrs Duffy, who looked rather like an enormous parrot. ‘Quite all right, Doctor—’

  ‘Quite all right,’ said Mr Corrigan, who still looked angry but contrived to sound polite but important, as if he might be a doctor himself. ‘And not unreasonable – no, no, not at all.’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Duffy, Mr Corrigan. You see, Noreen had been a patient of mine for several years. She even insisted upon giving me a photograph of herself – and signing it too, like a film star, but not quite so grand, of course. You see – Yours Gratefully, Noreen. Unusual, but very nice of her, I thought.’ And, to Maggie’s surprise, he handed over a postcard-size photograph.

  ‘Nice – very nice,’ said Mr Corrigan, after looking at it and then passing it to Mrs Duffy. ‘And the spit image, I’d say – the spit image.’

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Duffy, who now shared it with Rose. ‘It’s a nice photo – but doesn’t do her justice. Does it, Rose?’

  ‘You need colour for Noreen,’ said Rose, shaking her head so that her fat cheeks wobbled. ‘I’d know it was her, of course, but she ought to be in colour. Don’t you think so, Uncle Mike?’

  Uncle Mike wasn’t sure. Colour or no colour, it remained a spit image.

  ‘I agree with you, Mr Corrigan,’ said Dr Salt, smiling and holding out his hand for the photograph. ‘By the way, Mrs Duffy, what made Noreen come here?’

  ‘I can explain that right off. She wanted to get out of Birkden. And she knew me because me and her mother worked side by side for years at United Fabrics. I lived in Birkden then, of course. And if there’s anything else you’d like to ask, Doctor, don’t hesitate. I know Noreen thought the world of you.’

  ‘There’s just this,’ said Dr Salt apologetically. ‘She was having some medicine from me that I told her she must take, without fail, night and morning. It wasn’t pleasant to take – and you might have noticed it because it was a very unusual dark green colour – horrible-looking stuff, I’m afraid. But I’d like to think she was taking it regularly.’

  ‘Like clockwork,’ said Mrs Duffy. ‘She kept it down here specially so we’d notice if she missed a dose. You remember that nasty green stuff, Rose, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course I do. The faces she pulled!’ cried Rose. ‘And when I asked her why she bothered with it, she said she’d promised her doctor—’

  ‘That’s right, quite right,’ said Mr Corrigan. ‘She said that even if she was running off, she was going to carry out Dr Salt’s instructions—’

  ‘Oh – it was Dr Salt this, Dr Salt that – till I felt like telling her to shut up sometimes.’ This was Mrs Duffy again, all nods and smiles. ‘But the time she was here, before she went to London, she must have got through a whole bottle of that nasty green medicine – poor girl. But I suppose it was doing her some good. She always said it was.’

  ‘If she said it to me once,’ Rose put in, ‘she said it a dozen times.’

  Dr Salt turned to Sergeant Driver, and Maggie knew at once that the simpleton act was over. ‘I see no point in going on with this, Sergeant. There never was any such medicine. And the photo­graph they recognized at once was of a niece of mine who lives in Melbourne. Noreen Wilks never came here. They’ve never set eyes on her—’

  ‘They’re all lying?’

  ‘Of course they are.’

  ‘How d’you mean we’re lying?’ cried Corrigan belligerently, jumping up.

  ‘You keep still and keep quiet,’ said Sergeant Driver. He turned to Dr Salt. ‘But if they are, what’s the idea?’

  ‘Money.’ And Dr Salt pointed to the television set. ‘A down payment on that came out of it.’

  ‘That’s a dirty lie,’ Mrs Duffy screamed. ‘Coming here and soft-soaping us—’

  ‘And I’m not keeping quiet,’ Mr Corrigan told the world, ‘when I’m called a liar—’

  ‘Corrigan, just listen to me,’ said Dr Salt in his sharpest tone. And he moved a little, and then Maggie felt his hand on her arm, as if to give her some kind of warning. But he didn’t look at her, only at Corrigan. ‘You’re in a hell of a pickle, Corrigan. I’m now looking after the man
you coshed on Monday night, outside the old Worsley place.’ Maggie felt the pressure on her arm again, and now she understood it. ‘He happens to have a thin skull and a bad heart. He might live – and he might die. It’s touch and go, Corrigan—’

  ‘I didn’t hit him so hard. How did I know he’d go out like that?’

  ‘You bloody daft idiot!’ Mrs Duffy screeched at him. ‘Now you’ve done it.’

  ‘What is all this?’ Sergeant Driver inquired severely.

  ‘Honest to God, Sarge—’ began Corrigan.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Dr Salt cut in sharply. ‘I can’t waste any more time listening to these people. I must get back to Birkden. I’ll drop you at the station – and explain everything on the way. Come on, man, let’s go.’

  ‘Yes, go on, bugger off,’ cried Mrs Duffy, the stout-hearted member of the trio. ‘Call yourself a doctor – coming and deceiving innocent people like that!’ She may have enlarged on this topic, but they didn’t stay to listen.

  ‘I dislike talking while I’m driving, Sergeant,’ said Dr Salt when they were in the car. ‘So I’ll be as brief as I can. I’m not interested in those people, only in Noreen Wilks. If you want to charge them, you won’t get any help from me. They were bribed to tell that story. It hadn’t to stand up as evidence in court. It was just a delaying tactic. Corrigan was the link with the Birkden end. I’ll admit that was a lucky shot of mine, though it wasn’t just a wild guess.’ He concentrated now on his driving; they were out of Gladstone Street and in the traffic again. Then he had to wait for a green light.

  ‘Corrigan had been employed as a caretaker-cum-watchman by United Fabrics. On Monday night he knocked a man out. He was probably afraid to stay, and, anyhow, was taken off the job. Somebody – and I think I know who it was – paid him to concoct that story about Noreen Wilks with his sister and niece. Noreen Wilks is dead, probably murdered.’

  ‘That’s nothing to do with us, Dr Salt,’ said Driver hastily. ‘You’ll have to take that up with Superintendent Hurst of the Birkden Police.’

  ‘I know that,’ Dr Salt told him, and then said no more until they were back at the police station. ‘All I ask you to do, Sergeant – and I think you owe it to me – is to phone Superintendent Hurst, tell him what happened, and remind him that he promised to come and listen to me if that story was proved to be false.’

  ‘Well, I can do that,’ said the sergeant rather dubiously. ‘But what kind of report I’m going to make out—’

  ‘Don’t make any report out. Forget it. Comdon Bridge is now out of the picture. It’s all bonny Birkden. Leave it to Hurst – and to me—’

  ‘Well, Doctor, I suppose you know what you’re doing—’

  ‘Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. But thank you very much, Sergeant Driver. Sorry to bustle you like this, but I’m in a hurry.’

  And he was in a hurry all the way back to his flat. Which meant that he never spoke a word and Maggie was left to her own thoughts, which she found very confusing indeed: almost as if she were going at a mile a minute round and round a maze.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  How Dr Salt Found Her

  1

  As soon as they were back in the flat, Dr Salt took Maggie to see her father. ‘I doubt if he’s even moved since we last saw him,’ Dr Salt told her as they left the room. ‘And he’ll wake up in the morning twice the man he was this afternoon, you’ll see. Now let’s eat and drink.’

  She had a gin and tonic and he had a small neat whisky, and they stayed in the kitchen. ‘I’m famished, I warn you,’ said Maggie. ‘What have you got we can cook quickly?’

  ‘I suggest spaghetti. And I’ve a little tin of stewing steak I can combine with it somehow. You do the spaghetti while I attend to the meat department.’

  ‘Please,’ she suggested.

  ‘No, not please, Maggie.’ He was good-humoured but firm. ‘You’ve just said you’re very hungry. It’s going to be your dinner as well as mine. We’re doing it together. So one of us doesn’t have to say Please to the other.’

  ‘Perhaps not. But does one of us have to sound so bossy – just giving curt orders?’ She wasn’t angry, but her tone was sharp. However, she wasn’t looking at him but at the spaghetti.

  ‘You’re quite right. It’s living alone so long – being a doctor too, giving curt orders because you’re so often pressed for time. Now where’s the tin opener?’

  ‘I noticed it somewhere. Oh – there – look! You don’t like living out of tins, do you?’

  ‘Of course I don’t. But there again – it’s living alone and being a doctor. I couldn’t go shopping because I was always busy with patients. And as soon as I had a little free time, the shops were all closed. It’s one reason – and there are plenty of others – I’ll be glad to get out of this country. Most of its arrangements are dead against people who do any real work. Everything, from the tax system downwards, is in favour of betting men and layabouts. It’s turning into a dreamy country – with a bad climate. Lazy long-haired young men – not lolling in the sunshine but snarling in the rain.’

  ‘I know.’ She waited until she had filled the pan with water. ‘But is it any better anywhere else?’

  ‘I’m going to see. There are disadvantages and drawbacks every­where, and it’s a question of adding and then subtracting them from the advantages.’

  ‘I don’t think my mind works like that.’

  ‘Neither does mine, in the last resort. I’ve an onion somewhere. We need one for this stewing steak – no flavour. That’s another thing now about life here. Not enough flavour. No onion. I’m talking about people like us, not about people who still live in delightful old country houses with a few devoted old retainers.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know how to behave to devoted old retainers, even if I had any.’

  ‘Neither would I, Maggie. What about that man you were in love with in London?’

  ‘Who told you about him?’ She turned to stare at him.

  ‘Nobody. I was just guessing. But we don’t have to talk about him.’

  ‘We’re not going to. Have you any cooking salt? Oh – yes, I see. I’ll tell you about him one day.’ Then she checked herself abruptly, and they hardly spoke again until they were ready to sit down.

  ‘There’s a touch of cheese and some fruit,’ he said cheerfully. ‘So it’ll be something like a meal. I ought to have some wine for you, but I’ve been too busy to buy any. More gin?’

  ‘No, just water, thank you. I think you’ve been rather clever with that boring meat. And I’m going to have a great fattening helping of this pasta.’

  A few minutes later, he began: ‘Now – about Noreen Wilks—’

  ‘Oh – dear! You never stop, do you – Salt? We were being so cosy. I wanted to forget about her – just for a little while – even if she is – or was – my stepsister—’

  ‘That’s the point, Maggie. I doubt if she was.’

  Her fork never reached her mouth as she stared at him. ‘You mean – it was some other man – not my father—?’

  ‘Yes. I can’t prove it. But I’ve remembered something Mrs Wilks once said. And now that I’ve seen your father, I doubt if Noreen was his child. She wasn’t like her mother – quite a different type physically – and so I assumed that her father’s strain was strong in her, as often happens with daughters. You are obviously your father’s daughter, for example. But Noreen didn’t resemble your father – or you – at all. She suggested quite a different strain, entirely different from you Culworths. And from what I knew of Mrs Wilks I can easily believe she had a night or two with some dashing young pilot. It was never easy for her to say No, and it must have been particularly hard then, when so many of them flew away and never came back. No, Maggie, I don’t think Noreen was your half-sister.’

  ‘Are you going to tell my father?’

  ‘I don’t know. What do you think?’

  ‘Dr Salt, don’t tell me you’re actually asking for my advice?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I
? I’ve never pretended to know everything, have I?’

  ‘Not everything, perhaps – but almost.’

  ‘Nonsense! I’m not that kind of man at all—’

  ‘Aren’t you?’ She laughed at him.

  ‘Certainly not. It just happened that you walked into the middle of something that I knew a little about and you knew nothing. It might easily have been all the other way round—’

  ‘I can’t imagine it – unless it was something like making clothes. And even then you’d probably turn up with some strong opinions and a few sharp orders. No – listen – I’ll be serious now. I think my father ought to be told, but perhaps not just yet. What worries me is what we’re going to tell my mother – tomorrow morning, too.’

  ‘Leave that to me. You must bring her here yourself, then you can listen carefully to what I’ll tell her.’

  ‘Which won’t be the truth—’

  ‘Do you want it to be the truth?’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ she said. ‘But I thought you might.’

  ‘A doctor learns to be very careful with the truth. Not everybody is ready for it.’

  ‘But do you enjoy lying?’

  He gave her a grin. ‘Not much, though I’m pretty good at it.’

  ‘On the whole you’re rather pleased with yourself, aren’t you?’ It was not an attack; she said it lightly.

  Nevertheless, he gave it a moment’s serious consideration. ‘Not specially, I think. But I’m tired of that gentlemanly English modesty which often covers conceit a mile thick. I prefer men who seem to be more pleased with themselves than they really are.’

  ‘What about women?’

  ‘Women, too. I like women, but I don’t like English ladies – not that I’ve seen very much of ’em. Do you feel like helping me to clear and then wash up, Maggie?’

  They had just finished when Alan and Jill arrived. ‘I thought you wouldn’t mind Jill coming along,’ said Alan. ‘I wanted to know about my father—’