The Iron Gates

by Margaret Millar

  “Oh, what does it matter?”

  “It matters to me. If you like, when Lucille comes back home I’ll ask her.”

  “Good Lord, no!”

  “I insist on asking her,” Andrew said.

  Martin pounded his fist on the desk. Nearly all of his arguments with his father left him with this feeling of helpless rage against Andrew’s naiveté. After twenty-five years of being a doctor Andrew seemed never to have lost his faith in human nature. Martin, who had no faith in anyone but himself and no religious convictions beyond the basic one that he was God, alternately respected and despised his father.

  The two men watched each other across the width of the desk. The return of Lucille was now an issue between them, and their faces had a waiting look.

  At six-thirty Edith arrived. She had left Polly and Giles dining at the Oak Room and had rushed home in the conviction that everything would go wrong in the house if she didn’t.

  The fact that everything had already gone wrong was explained to her vividly by Annie as soon as she opened the door. After the first shock was over Edith plunged into the mystery and upset the whole house with her splashing and churning.

  It was Edith who discovered that Lucille’s black-suede purse and the housekeeping money for the rest of the month were missing. Della and Annie vigorously denied going near the drawer where Lucille kept her purses. Edith believed them.

  “So,” she told Andrew, “Lucille must have taken it herself.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps she wanted to go out and buy something, that’s the simplest explanation.”

  “She wasn’t wearing a coat.”

  “Nonsense,” Edith said. “I’m not pretending to know why she went out but I refuse to believe any sensible person would go out in this weather without a coat. She may have worn one of mine.”

  Edith’s coats, however, were all found in her closet.

  It was Della who backed up Edith’s belief in what a sensible woman would do. Della had gone up to her room on the third floor to change her uniform. Her discarded one, tear-stained because Edith had called her a moron, she tossed into the closet. She saw that someone had disarranged the clothes.

  A few minutes later she came down the stairs wailing.

  “My money,” she screamed at Edith. “My coat and money! She took it! She’s a thief, a common thief!”

  Twenty dollars and a reversible raincoat had been taken from Della’s closet. The coat, beige gabardine on one side and red-plaid wool on the other, was practically new and not even a fifty-dollar check mended Della’s broken heart.

  Though the manner of Lucille’s departure now seemed to be explained, for Edith the taking of Della’s coat merely deepened the mystery.

  “Why Della’s coat?” she said. “Why not one of her own? It’s as if—as if she was escaping and didn’t want anyone to recognize her.”

  “No,” Andrew said. “No, I don’t believe it.”

  “And the money . . . Yes, Andrew, she ran away.”

  “The girls swear they didn’t hear her go out. They went upstairs and looked for her.”

  “That was when she got out,” Edith said. ‘‘She ran up to hide in Della’s room while they were looking through hers. When they went downstairs again and were searching the living room she came down with the coat and the purse and the money. . . .”

  She put her hand over her eyes to blot out the picture. How vivid it seemed, how grotesquely easy it was for the mind to twist Lucille’s placid smile into a crafty grin, to add slyness to the quiet eyes, and furtiveness to the sure slow movements of her body.

  Perhaps I look like that to someone, Edith thought. We are all protected by a veil of trust. I must think of her as she was.

  But the veil was already torn and the crafty grin and the furtiveness became clearer. Suspicions grew in Edith’s mind like little extra eyes.

  “And then,” Edith said, “she simply went out the back door while the girls were in the living room.”

  “Simply,” Andrew said with a sharp mirthless laugh. “Simply!”

  Edith flushed. “I’m terribly sorry, Andrew.”

  “Sorry! Another magnificent understatement, my dear. I don’t want you to be sorry for having spoken your mind. If you believe that my wife is a thief and perhaps worse, you can’t help it. Any more than Martin can help it.”

  “I haven’t said anything,” Martin said. “Yet.”

  “Keep quiet, Martin,” Edith said. She went over to Andrew and placed her hand on his shoulder. “Andrew, I’m sorry, I don’t know what to think.”

  He smiled up at her, wryly. “Then why think? If Lucille went away she had a reason to go. She’ll be back.”

  Edith and Martin exchanged glances over his head. “And if she had a reason.”

  Andrew continued, “she had a right to go. People should be allowed a certain freedom of movement. They shouldn’t get the feeling that they are constantly required to be some place at some specific time. They should have certain periods when nothing whatever is expected from them.”

  “This is very like a lecture,” Edith said coldly, “directed against me.”

  “Perhaps deservedly, Edith. You’re a driver. You can’t help it, I know, any more than I can help allowing myself to be driven, for the sake of peace.”

  “What has all this to do with Lucille?”

  “Nothing,” Andrew said. “Nothing at all. I was just talking.”

  “You aren’t usually so talkative.”

  “I keep thinking,” he said with a vague gesture, “I keep thinking, suppose when she was up in her room she had a feeling that she was in a prison, that she must suddenly escape, that the very walls were a weight on her. When I feel like that I escape to my office, I run like a hare back to my pregnant women, my neurotic young girls, my ladies with cysts and sorrows and headaches and backaches and constipation. . . .”

  “Really, Andrew!” Edith said, frowning.

  “Women,” Andrew said. “I don’t know how many there are in the world, but I think I’ve seen half of them and they’re all constipated.”

  “Father had a couple of drinks before you came,” Martin said.

  “You know you can’t drink, Andrew,” Edith said, annoyed. “It goes to your head.”

  “Please go away, Edith. Please go away back and sit down some place.”

  But Edith refused. She was as incapable of sitting down as she was of keeping quiet. Pacing the room she went over all the facts again, returning in the end to the unanswerable question, why?

  “Why?” Martin echoed. “Perhaps Father’s right. She felt like that, and off she went.”

  Edith shook her head. “No, that’s quite incredible. You know what a thoroughly sensible person Lucille is. If she felt like that she would simply have gone for a nice t long walk or something.”

  “People aren’t always capable of making sense,” Andrew said in a strange voice. “There are forces—forces in the mind . . .” He leaned forward and fixed his eyes on her. “Look, Edith. See, it’s like a jungle, the mind, dark and thick, with a million little paths that the light never reaches. You never know the paths are there until something pops out of one of them. Then, Edith, you might try to trace it back looking for its spoor and tracks, and you go so far, just so far, but the path is too twisted, too lightless, soundless, timeless . . .”

  Edith was standing with her mouth open, and quite suddenly she began to cry. She cried not for Andrew’s, sake or Lucille’s, but from sheer exasperation, because two people in whom she had placed her trust had betrayed her by stepping out of character. She saw Andrew as a dear little boy who suddenly and incongruously grows a long gray beard.

  She brushed away her tears with the back of her hand, angrily conscious that Martin was looking at her with dismay, and Andrew with a kind of detached interest.

  She averted her face and said stiffly, “You’re implying that Lucille has gone crazy?”

  “No,” Andrew said
, his voice mild again, and a little tired. “No. I think she . . .”

  “It would be far more to the point to investigate the man who brought the parcel to her. However dark a jungle my mind is, Andrew, I am still capable of logic. Whatever prompted Lucille to go away, the man with the parcel is connected with it. That’s the only out-of-the-ordinary thing that’s happened to her.”

  “No,” Andrew said, “there’s one other, isn’t there? Giles Frome.”

  “What on earth would Giles have to do with it?”

  “Probably nothing. Like yourself I’m simply being logical.”

  “Good Lord,” Martin said. “I haven’t been able to get a word in. I agree with Edith about the man with the parcel. The trouble is finding him.”

  “What are the-police for?” Edith said.

  “The police,” Martin said dryly, “are for finding people.”

  4

  “My wife,” Andrew said, “has disappeared.”

  “Ah,” Inspector Bascombe said, and folded his big square hands on the desk in front of him. He was a heavy, sour-looking man with bitter little eyes that seemed to fling acid on everyone they saw.

  He was thinking, so your wife has disappeared. Yours and a couple of thousand others’. Including mine. With an electrician from Hull.

  “The details, please,” he said without inflection.

  “They’re rather peculiar.”

  Why, sure they are. Bascombe thought. The details are always peculiar. What isn’t peculiar is how the wives turn up again when they’re left flat and broke. Except mine.

  He said, “Sit down, Dr. Morrow, and make yourself comfortable. There’s rather a long form to be filled out, her description and so forth.”

  Bascombe watched him as he sat down. He felt very glad that Morrow’s wife had disappeared because Morrow was the kind of man he hated most, next to electricians. Goddam whiskey ad, he thought. Men of achievement, men of tomorrow. Even the top drawer have women troubles, what a goddam shame.

  Thinking of whiskey ads reminded him of the bottle of Scotch he had hidden in the files. He tried to forget it again by being extra crisp and businesslike.

  “Name?”

  “Lucille Alexandra Morrow.”

  He wrote rapidly. Lucille Alexandra Morrow. Female. White. Age forty-five. Red-gold hair, long; blue eyes, fair skin, no distinguishing marks.

  The red-gold hair reminded him of the Scotch again. His hand jerked across the paper leaving a spray of ink.

  He looked up to see if Morrow had noticed, but Morrow wasn’t watching him. He had his eyes fixed on the lettering on the glass door—Department of Missing Persons.

  “Kind of fascinates you, doesn’t it,” Bascombe laughed. “I read it a million times a day.”

  Make it two million, and every time, I get a cold wet feeling in the gut. The Missing Persons. Some of them will never be found, some will come back by themselves, drunk or sick or broke or just tired. And some of them will come up from the mud at the bottom of the river in April or May, the ladies on their backs, and the gentlemen face down.

  He got up abruptly, and the pen rolled across the desk. Muttering something under his breath he went into the next room and closed the door behind him.

  Sergeant D’arcy, a small rosy-cheeked young man who looked a little too elegant in his uniform, glanced up from his desk.

  “Yes, sir?” he said.

  “Get the hell in there,” Bascombe said thickly. “Some guy’s lost his wife. Take it all down. I feel rotten.”

  “Yes, sir,” D’arcy said, riffling some papers efficiently. “Is there anything I can do, sir?”

  “What I’ve already told you to do.”

  “I meant aside from . . .”

  “Scram, lovely.”

  When D’arcy had gone Bascombe removed the bottle of Scotch from the back of the Closed Cases M to N file. D’arcy, who was listening, heard the gurgle of liquid, and thought, poor Bascombe, he had a truly great brain but he was drinking on duty again and would have to be reported.

  To Andrew, D’arcy presented his fine teeth, brushed for five minutes in the morning and five at night.

  “Inspector Bascombe had a slight touch of indigestion. He asked me to continue for him.”

  He picked up the form, noticing at once the spray of ink. Poor Bascombe.

  “Now, of course,” he said, “we require a few more details. Has Mrs. Morrow ever gone away like this before?”

  “Never.”

  “There is no evidence of coercion?”

  “None,” Andrew hesitated, “that I know of.”

  “Did she have any reason for leaving, to your knowledge, any domestic upsets and the like?”

  “None.”

  “No other man involved, of course?”

  Andrew looked at him with cold dislike. “There has never been any other man involved in her life except her first husband, George Lanvers. He’s been dead for nearly twenty years.”

  “We have to ask certain questions,” D’arcy said, flushing. “We really do.”

  “I understand that.”

  “We . . .” D’arcy paused and looked hopefully toward the door.

  He wished Bascombe would come back. He didn’t like asking people questions, he didn’t even like the Department. Or Bascombe.

  He cocked his head, listening for sounds in the outer office. As soon as he heard one he excused himself and went out.

  Bascombe had gone, but three people were waiting on the benches along the wall. One of them, an elderly well-dressed woman, D’arcy was able to dismiss immediately. She had come every day for nearly six months looking for her son.

  “Sorry, Mrs. Granger,” D’arcy said.

  She seemed quite cheerful. “No news from Barney yet? He’ll turn up. One of these days he’ll be turning up and surprising me.”

  She went out briskly. The two men rose and came over to D’arcy. They were in the fur business and they had sold a mink coat to a man, named Wilson for cash. The cash had turned out to be counterfeit and Wilson and the coat were missing.

  D’arcy referred them, with a superior smile, to another department. But he wasn’t feeling superior. He had the sinking sensation that he always got when he was required to do any thinking for himself.

  The door opened and Bascombe came back in.

  “The doctor still here?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir. It seems to be a very interesting case.”

  “Aren’t they all.”

  “I wish—I think you should talk to him personally.”

  Bascombe’s face was flushed and his eyes were a little glassy.

  “Thanks for the advice, D’arcy.”

  “Well, but I really mean it, sir. Dr. Morrow looks as if he might have considerable influence.”

  “The only kind of influence I care about comes in quart bottles,” Bascombe said, but he laughed, almost good-naturedly, and went back into his own office.

  It was nearly noon when he came out again with Dr. Morrow. Morrow left immediately, looking, D’arcy noticed, pretty grim.

  Bascombe was smiling all over his face. “A very nice case. The lady disappeared with all the money she could get her hands on, wearing one of her maid’s coats. A reversible coat. Get it?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Plaid on one side, beige on another. She can switch them around and make it harder for us to find her. Inference, she’s not coming back and she doesn’t want to be found. So just for the hell of it we’ll find her. Get your notebook.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “All right. The usual checkups first, hospital and morgue and her bank—Bloor and Ossington Branch of the Bank of Toronto. I think you’ll draw blanks there. Morrow’s going to send over a couple of studio portraits by messenger. Meanwhile, start calling beauty parlors.”

  “All of the beauty parlors?” D’arcy said faintly.

  “Use your noddle and you won’t have to. If the woman is really in earnest about disappearing, she’ll probably try to d
isguise her most distinctive feature, her hair, and then grab a train or bus for out-of-town.”

  “And the bus terminals and stations being mostly in the south and west I’m to try those sections first?”

  “Amazing,” Bascombe said. “Beauty and brains you have, D’arcy. I’m going out to lunch. Be back later.” When he had gone D’arcy did a little checking-up on his own and discovered that the bottle of Scotch was missing from the file.

  “Poor Bascombe,” he said sadly. “I’ll have to report him. It’s my duty.”

  He didn’t want to report Bascombe, who was a fine figure of a man, really.

  He sat down at his desk and picked up the telephone directory. D’arcy was at his best on a telephone, he could forget how small he was and how the other policemen didn’t like him and kept shunting him back and forth from one department to another.

  While he was working Kirby came in. He was a big loose-jointed young man who spent half his time around the morgue and the hospitals.

  “It’s about time someone appeared,” D’arcy said. “I haven’t had my lunch. I’m hungry.”

  “Too bad.” Kirby took off his hat and stretched and yawned. “Where’s Bascombe?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know. He doesn’t confide in me.”

  “He owes me five bucks on the Macgregor girl. I found her this morning. She’s in a ward at Western with a nice case. Says she got it in a washroom.”

  “People,” D’arcy said primly, “should behave themselves.”

  Pointedly, he returned to the telephone. He worked nearly all afternoon with one eye on the door, waiting for Bascombe to come back.

  At four-thirty he became quite excited by a telephone conversation he had with Miss Flack, who owned and operated the Sally Ann hairdressing parlor in Sunnyside. He tried to get Bascombe’s apartment on the wire. Nobody answered.

  “I’ll report him,” D’arcy whispered. “I really will. It’s high time.”

  He went up to Sands’ office.

  The Allen Hotel is on a little street off College. A redbrick building, caked with soot, it has passed through many phases in its long life. It has been, in turn, a private hospital, a barracks, an apartment house, and a four-bit flophouse. The Liquor Act was passed just in time to save it from the wreckers. A few licks of paint, extra chairs and tables, a new neon sign and a license to sell beer and wine transformed the old building into the Allen Hotel, a fairly prosperous tavern with a dubious clientele. The clientele was kept under control by a large tough bartender and a number of printed prohibitions which were strictly enforced: No checks cashed. No credit. No spitting.