The Gigantic Shadow

by Julian Symons

‘Too late,’ Charlie echoed indignantly. ‘That’s nonsense, Bill. Too late for what? It’s never too late.’

  He wrapped himself in the big towel, the warm protective thing, but inside him there remained an area of cold. ‘It’s been too late for a long time, Charlie, too late for me. I told you before. When something like this happens you have to make a clean break. It’s the only way.’

  ‘You never do it,’ Charlie said. ‘You keep on coming back. That’s why you’re here. Don’t you want to know what I found out about that girl who calls herself a model?’

  ‘Tanya Broderick? Not particularly. Does it matter?’

  ‘She’s never been inside, but she’s no more of a genuine model than I am. She plays around with people on the edge of crime – not the real big boys but the hangers-on, understrappers you might call ’em.’ Charlie said slowly, ‘There are three or four men she’s mixed up with now – she never has just one boyfriend at a time. One of them is Brannigan, Paddy Brannigan. Didn’t you say you knew him?’

  The mirror had steamed over. He rubbed away reflectively and saw himself, a red-haired ogre in a bath towel.

  ‘Didn’t you?’

  ‘It was a long time ago, Charlie,’ he said. ‘Too long.’

  In the bedroom Anna had put out a good grey tweed suit, clean handkerchief, shirt, socks, shoes. It was all part of the warmth he understood, but could not feel, that a fly-button was missing from the trousers and that there was a hole in the toe of one sock. Before putting on the suit he looked in the second drawer of the chest of drawers, the one that almost always stuck. This time it opened smoothly. The gun lay beneath spare sheets, black, shiny, surprisingly small. He broke it to see that it was loaded, dressed, and put it into his hip pocket.

  Back in the living room Anna stared at him mournfully. ‘You’re going away again.’

  ‘Yes. What’s Westmark’s number?’

  ‘On the pad by the telephone.’

  Charlie got up, drained his beer. ‘I’m off. Ta very much for the beer, sweetie. Be seeing you. Goodbye, Bill.’ He kissed Anna lightly on the forehead. As he went out he did not look at Hunter.

  Now that they were alone, Anna compassionately stared at him. ‘Are you going to ring up that man?’

  ‘Later, perhaps. Not now.’

  ‘You’re in trouble.’

  ‘You might say so.’

  ‘Charlie says Westmark’s a currency fiddler, does it in a big way. Says he’s a bad man to get mixed up with.’

  ‘Charlie should know. He gave me Westmark’s name.’

  ‘Are you leaving the country?’

  ‘I was. Now it looks a bit doubtful.’

  She wandered over to the mantelpiece, took a sweet from the box there, bit it. ‘There’s someone else. You’re taking her with you.’

  ‘There’s nobody else, Anna. Not at present, anyway. I’m just going out to play a game. Find the lady, you might call it.’ He touched her shoulder. It was firm and warm. ‘You’ve always been good to me. Better than I deserve.’ Why is it always the stale, sentimental words one uses, he wondered?

  The usual easy tears were in her eyes. ‘You’re in some sort of trouble. I don’t know what it is, but I can tell it’s bad trouble. Don’t do anything silly.’

  ‘I’ve done such a lot of silly things in my life that one or two more don’t matter.’

  She put her hand on his arm, timidly. ‘You think too much about the past. Really it doesn’t matter all that much.’

  ‘It does to me. Sometimes I think that the past is the only thing that’s real.’ He broke away from her, muttering something – he could not have said exactly what – and left the flat.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  To place one’s head deliberately in the lion’s mouth – is that the best way of making sure that one is not eaten? Would Moorhouse recognise him as one of the people in the lift? People had swarmed into it from the eastbound train, and it was impossible for Moorhouse to remember them all. Moreover, Hunter had stayed behind him on the escalator and had stood behind him in the lift. But fear of recognition, in any case, was comparatively unimportant to him now. To find Anthea, or to find out why she had not come to the den – did anything else matter? Boldly he walked up the steps of the house in Cavendish Square, and rang the bell.

  The door was opened by a butler – could it, in these days, be a butler? Some sort of grave deferential flunkey, at least, with the jowly dignity that is so rarely found among genuine aristocrats.

  ‘Lord Moorhouse,’ Hunter said. ‘It’s in connection with his stepdaughter’s disappearance.’

  The jowly dignity was undisturbed. Hunter was asked into a hall like the scene from a film set. A subdued light from a chandelier illuminated, more or less, pieces of heavy mahogany furniture and huge armchairs, stretching away into the middle distance. Brownish paintings stared down from the walls. He walked across to one of them and read the gold plaque beneath. ‘Edward John Moorhouse, 1818-1884. Master Mariner.’ The name signed to the painting was that of a living Academician. Why, it’s a fake, Hunter thought. The old devil’s got some hack to paint his ancestors from old photographs. He was moving on to the next painting when a cough came from behind him.

  ‘Lord Moorhouse will see you now, sir. If you will come this way.’

  He followed a broad back through one great room and another, and then along a corridor littered with vases and bits of statuary. This is the treatment, he told himself, the old English home treatment they put on for the benefit of ex-IRA barbarians who come to pay a visit. Like the family portraits, it’s a fake. He was not altogether satisfied with this reassurance. Even if this was just the treatment for barbarians, he had to admit that it was impressive. He tried to imagine Anthea in these surroundings, and failed. Surely she must have rebelled against them? And so she had, he reminded himself. What was the kidnap plot but an act of rebellion?

  The room into which he was ushered at last was comparatively small, almost cosy. Standard sets of standard authors lined two walls, there was a recording machine and two desks, a large one at which Lord Moorhouse now sat, and a smaller one with a typewriter on it. This was the study, then? A man stood with his back to Moorhouse, looking out of the window. He did not turn round.

  ‘I understand you have some information about my stepdaughter, Mr –’

  ‘Hunter.’ Moorhouse looked clean still and birdlike, but the weariness Hunter had noticed in the lift was now more marked. The bird’s eye was not so bright and quick, an edge of sharpness had gone, he was more obviously an old man. He gave no sign of recognising Hunter. ‘I’m a friend of hers,’ he went on. ‘I saw her on Saturday night. I thought it might be useful to you to know that – I don’t know when she disappeared –’

  ‘On Monday morning.’ Moorhouse sounded tired, not very interested. ‘She was at home on Sunday. It’s kind of you, Mr Hunter, but I don’t think Saturday night will help very much. What we’re really looking for is somebody who saw her on Monday. She rang up a friend early on Monday morning, and made an arrangement to go shopping.’

  ‘I see.’ Anthea had kept to the arrangement so far, then. Discouragement was visible in every line of Moorhouse’s face, every word he spoke. The idea that he could have had anything to do with Anthea’s disappearance was obviously wrong. Hunter was about to say that he supposed he could not be of any help, when the man at the window turned round and revealed the bright smile and the eager doggish salesman’s look of Inspector Crambo.

  ‘Mr Hunter? We meet again. It’s a small world, as they say.’

  ‘Inspector Crambo is handling the – the investigation,’ Moorhouse said wearily. ‘You know Mr Hunter, Inspector?’

  ‘I’ve had the pleasure of meeting him before, yes.’

  ‘I didn’t see in the papers that you were in charge,’ Hunter said, before he could stop himself.

  ‘Or you wouldn’t have come along here, eh?’ Crambo’s meaningless laugh somehow made his words more offensive. ‘Keep out of the way
of the police, as my old mum always used to say, only mix with nice people. Right she was, too. But this is a funny sort of coincidence, now, wouldn’t you agree to that? Except, no doubt, that you could improve my phrasing.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  Crambo did not speak for a moment. He was looking at Hunter, not at his face but somewhere about halfway down his body. Could there be some mark on his clothes, Hunter wondered, and did not dare look down. Now Crambo spoke, but almost absent-mindedly, as though he were talking to fill in time while he worked out some difficult problem in mental arithmetic.

  ‘First of all you turn up in this affair of Melville Bond. You seem to have quite a bit of knowledge about Bond being mixed up with Mr Nicholas Mekles.’

  ‘I’ve already told you, I simply used the information I was given by my research assistant.’

  ‘I know you explained, but it was a bit of a coincidence you must agree. I mean, you just happened to ask Mr Mekles about this chap Bond, and it just happened that he’d committed suicide a few hours earlier. That’s right, isn’t it?’

  ‘Are you certain it was suicide?’

  ‘That was the verdict at the inquest. There was a witness, remember.’

  Hunter was stung into useless speech. ‘Did you know that the witness was a woman who had occupied the flat she was in for only three weeks, an associate of criminals?’ Crambo was no longer looking at Hunter, and seemed to have worked out his problem. At least he had regained his normal brisk salesman’s manner. It was almost with amusement that he said, ‘Yes. We knew that, Mr Hunter.’

  ‘Did you notice the two long scratches under the window that might have been made by a man’s heels as he was forced back out of it?’

  ‘Or his toes as he scrambled out awkwardly. Bond had a leg injury in the war, did you know that? It would have been quite a job for him to climb out on to that sill.’

  Hunter was disconcerted. ‘But you never questioned the girl’s story.’

  ‘Didn’t we? How do you know?’

  ‘Why…’

  ‘Miss Broderick was under questioning for several hours. She’s a cool customer – as cool as a cucumber if you’ll forgive the clitch.’

  Moorhouse had been listening impatiently. Now he interrupted. ‘Inspector, what is all this? Has it really any connection with my daughter’s disappearance?’

  Crambo scratched his head in mock perplexity. ‘I just don’t know, sir. They say at the Yard that Crambo walks all round the garden looking at the flowers, but in the end he gets to the compost heap.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means that, unless I’m much mistaken, something here stinks. This man Hunter is a convicted criminal. He had a job on television which he gave up after an altercation with the financier Nicholas Mekles –’

  ‘Mekles. Oh, yes. I’ve heard of him.’ Whatever Lord Moorhouse had heard about Nicholas Mekles was plainly nothing good.

  ‘I expect you have. An altercation about a man named Bond, who had just committed suicide. As you’ve heard, he seems to doubt that it was suicide. Now he comes in here, saying he’s a friend of your daughter. He said he had some information to give, but he seemed to be looking for it, not giving it. Do you see what I mean when I talk about the compost heap?’ Turning to Hunter, Crambo asked, ‘How long have you known Miss Moorhouse?’

  ‘For some weeks.’

  ‘After you left your television job?’

  ‘I met her a few days afterwards, yes.’

  ‘And you saw her on Saturday night?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re living in London?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You saw her in London, then?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Ah, you’re one of those “of course” chaps. Always been too slow myself, too coarse to be of course, if you see what I mean.’ He covered his mouth with his hand, like a man trying to conceal a belch. ‘What did you talk about at this meeting on Saturday night now? Did she say anything important, interesting, anything that indicated why she might have disappeared? Sinister men following her, you know, anything like that?’

  With the feeling that he was falling into some obvious trap, Hunter said slowly, ‘She mentioned something about a man following her. A tall man with a slight limp.’

  ‘Aha. Any further details?’

  ‘She thought he’d been watching the house – this house, I mean.’

  Crambo wagged an admonitory finger at Lord Moorhouse, sunk in gloom at his desk. There was something almost indecent about his levity. ‘That confirms what Mr Sennett told us. The mysterious stranger. The man with the limp. Very nice touch, that limp. Anything more about him, now? Bowler hat, sports car round the corner, turned his foot inwards with a special sort of twist, anything like that?’

  There was something ominous, surely, about this levity. ‘I think she said he was bareheaded. There was nothing else. You must remember that it was a casual remark, nothing more than that.’

  ‘Of course.’ Crambo looked pleased. ‘There you are. Managed one myself. You didn’t see this man, I suppose, Mr Hunter?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And she didn’t point him out to you at this place you met, wherever it was. Where was it, by the way? In London, yes, I know that. Of course. But where would it have been?’

  ‘It was in a hotel.’

  ‘In your hotel, would it have been? In the Cosmos in Pimlico? That’s where you usually met, I believe.’

  The moment had an impact as appalling as that in which one breaks a glass. Hunter looked round for a chair, saw a leathery club armchair across the room, made his way to it on rubbery legs, sat down. This removed him from the vicinity of Crambo, and the inspector also moved, strolling across from the window to the typist’s desk a foot or two from the armchair. He perched on this desk, hitching up his trousers to reveal finely-polished, rather pointed black shoes, and elegant striped socks. Only Moorhouse stayed unmoving at the big desk, with head hunched into his shoulders.

  ‘You’ve been talking to Bert,’ Hunter said.

  ‘Bert?’ The inspector raised an eyebrow. ‘Oh, yes. Robert Manton, waiter. Came forward very promptly to give information, public spirited citizen and all that. Didn’t seem to like you much, said you threatened him.’

  ‘He didn’t tell you that he had tried to blackmail me.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Crambo was odiously polite. ‘Now, what would he be able to blackmail you about?’

  ‘Miss Moorhouse…’ He stopped, out of pity for the old man at the desk. But why should he feel pity? He remembered the look on Anthea’s face as she bit her fingernail and told him that her stepfather had made a pass at her. It occurred to him for the first time that the story might not be true.

  ‘You were very friendly with her? She visited you at the hotel. She was your mistress?’

  Hunter was saved from the need for an immediate reply, by the old man’s gesture of protest. Moving a little in his chair he spoke. ‘Anthea was always a wild girl, Inspector, but nothing more, I assure you of that. Her mother died when she was a child, you know. She never settled down, somehow, I don’t know how it was, she has never settled down to any interest. There’s the PFC, of course, I was glad she interested herself in that. If she was friendly with this young man, I am sure it was an innocent relationship.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Crambo did not look in the least sorry. ‘Your daughter visited this man’s room, day after day, and stayed there for hours at a time, according to the hotel waiter.’

  ‘But must you – these details are objectionable. Are they important?’

  ‘They are. Miss Moorhouse has disappeared. You think it may be a practical joke of hers. I doubt it. Now here is a man with a record of violence, and not much money. He knew her well. It’s important to know how well. What do you say, Mr Hunter? Was she your mistress?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The waiter recognised her and tried to blackmail you?’
r />   ‘Yes. He saw an old Tatler with her photograph in it.’

  ‘That was why you moved out of the Cosmos so suddenly.’

  ‘Yes.’ At least, he realised, the attempt at blackmail gave a reasonable explanation for his departure from the hotel.

  ‘You say that Saturday was the last time you saw Miss Moorhouse. You left the Cosmos on Tuesday. Weren’t you surprised that she hadn’t got in touch with you?’

  ‘A little. But it wasn’t all that unusual.’

  ‘Have you tried to get in touch with her?’

  ‘No. She doesn’t much like me doing that. Telephoning her at home here, I mean.’ It was a good thing probably to stick to the truth as nearly as he could. ‘I thought she might be away. Then I saw the paper.’

  Crambo got off the table, walked six steps up and down the room, wheeled round and said sharply, ‘What did you come here for?’

  ‘I’ve told you. To help –’

  ‘You saw her on Saturday, she disappeared on Monday. What help did you think that could be?’ Crambo spoke almost contemptuously. ‘We know something about Miss Moorhouse’s movements on Monday. I don’t know whether it will be news to you or not. She rang up this friend, Mary Winter, and arranged to go shopping. She never arrived at Miss Winter’s flat. She did, however, go to the offices of the Patriotic Fellowship Circle. She arrived there at about ten-thirty, discussed with the colonial secretary, Mr Pine, arrangements about some canvassing they were to do that evening, and left about a quarter of an hour later. That’s the last information we have about her.’

  For a moment Moorhouse was roused from his abstraction. ‘That was the one thing,’ he said, ‘the one thing that interested her. I blame myself – perhaps I didn’t encourage her sufficiently.’ His voice died away.

  It was a piece of typical over-elaboration on Anthea’s part to deviate from their original plan by calling on the PFC and making arrangements for future canvassing. But why had Crambo said nothing about the money. ‘I love Anthea,’ he said. ‘I want to find out what has happened to her. That’s why I came here.’

  There was a long moment in which Crambo’s curious, light-coloured eyes stared into Hunter’s. Then the detective laughed, an easy, vulgar laugh that destroyed the tension between them. ‘Do you know, I’m beginning to put on the pressure like a real American detective. The AC said to me the other day, “Crambo,” he said, “You’ve been reading too many of these American thrillers. You’re beginning to talk out of the corner of your mouth. Watch it, Crambo,” he said, “or you’ll never get promotion.” Quite right, too, but you know what it is. Sometimes your feelings run away with you.’