Fear to Tread

by Michael Gilbert

  As he spoke he moved across to the window, so that the light fell on a white line of scar which ran down, stretched and taut, from cheekbone to chin, so that for a moment, the jaw seemed to hang from it, like a puppet’s jaw on a thread. When the sergeant turned back into the room he spoke more mildly.

  “So far as doing anything about this goes,” he said, “I’m ‘L’ Division. Luigi’s place in Deptford Broadway, that’s ‘R’.”

  “Is it?” said Mr. Wetherall. The geography he had been taught had not included the frontiers of the London Police Authorities.

  “However, I’ll see if anything can be done. I might put a word in the right quarter. But my best advice to you, Mr. Wetherall, is to leave it alone. They’re not a nice crowd the people behind this. Not a nice crowd at all.”

  “Thank you,” said Mr. Wetherall. “I’m sure if anything can be done you’ll do it.”

  As soon as he got back to the school he sent for Peggy.

  “What’s it all about?” he said.

  “All what, Mr. Wetherall?”

  “Your brother – living at home. What’s happened to his wife? And what’s happened to him. He looks ten years older than when I saw him last – you must know what I mean. If you think,” he added with belated caution, “that it’s none of my business, say so. But I’ve known you all for a very long time, and if it’s just that he’s had a row with his wife, or something like that, and there’s anything I can do to help—”

  “It’s not a row, Mr. Wetherall. She’s dead.”

  “Good heavens,” said Wetherall stupidly. “I am sorry. I’d no idea. Of course, that explains it. What a pity. Such a nice girl.”

  He found that Peggy was looking at him, in the steady way that her brother had done. He felt a growing sense of embarrassment.

  “Silly of me,” he said, “jumping to conclusions. You must forgive me. What happened to her? It was very sudden, wasn’t it?”

  “She didn’t just die,” said Peggy slowly. “She was killed.”

  “Killed?” Mr. Wetherall was really startled.

  “I don’t think there’s any reason I shouldn’t tell you about it. It was in the papers. You know they had one of the houses in Lower Marsh. Some men broke in one night. I expect they knew Patsy was away on duty. Doris was alone in the house. They tied her up and gagged her with a towel. They bust the home up. They didn’t take much. Just some papers and a little money.”

  Peggy stopped, and Mr. Wetherall tried to say something, but failed. The truth was that the idea of violence frightened him. At second hand it made him feel rather sick.

  “They tied the towel over her mouth too tight. She was suffocated. She was dead when Patsy got home to her.”

  “How horrible. How absolutely horrible. Did they catch the people who did it?”

  “They haven’t caught them yet.”

  “Have they any idea—?”

  “Patsy says he knows who it was. But he can’t prove it. You know his job is something to do with stealing from the railways, and the long distance lorries—”

  “If he knows,” said Mr. Wetherall, very much distressed. “If he knows, surely—”

  “Knowing isn’t proving. There was one particular lot he was mixed up with. He didn’t say much about it. He’d been pretending to take bribes, and they thought he was bought and sold so they got talking a bit freely in front of him. What they did was meant as a sort of warning to him not to pass it on – they never meant to kill Doris.”

  “It was murder, whether they meant to kill her or not.”

  “I suppose it was,” said Peggy. She seemed unexcited about this aspect of it. For a moment Mr. Wetherall wondered if she might have been making the story up. He dismissed that thought. Nobody could have made up a thing like that.

  “Has he told anyone about his suspicions?? If the police only knew, surely they could do something. It would give them a line to go on.”

  “They had an inspector from Scotland Yard on it. He didn’t get very far.”

  “You’re not answering my question,” said Mr. Wetherall testily. “Did Patsy tell them what he suspected – what you’ve just told me?”

  “He couldn’t, Mr. Wetherall. Really, it was just suspicions.”

  “So he didn’t say.”

  “No.”

  “Somebody ought to.”

  Peggy looked up in alarm.

  “I don’t think Patsy would like that.”

  Mr. Wetherall could hardly fail to recognise it. He had heard it twice that morning. It was the red signal. It was the notice which said: “Keep Out. Trespassers will get hurt”. The dullest man, and Mr. Wetherall was far from dull, cannot live his life in south London without becoming aware of certain facts. He was not a romantic. He was well past the age when one considered crime to be an adventure, or a puzzle, or a joke. He recognised it for what it was; a pathological growth, bred of poverty, rooting and flourishing in the weak and diseased cells of the body. He had been to too many dingy police courts to speak a word for the adolescent victim in the dock, had attended too many tearful mornings after the brave nights before, to think of crime as anything but an affliction; something akin to cancer or insanity; something which, in a perfect world, would not exist, but in the present state of imperfection you had to deal with it as best you could.

  He also knew that you could live among crime without being affected by it. There were plenty of doctors and parsons and schoolmasters who did it without a second thought. He himself knew a garage where a lot of things were done which had nothing to do with the repair of motor cars. He knew cafés which would not serve an unknown customer. He knew at least two receivers of stolen goods. But it stopped at knowledge.

  Crime would not interfere with him, provided that he did not interfere with it. That was the limit of the sufferance.

  In the end he said rather weakly: “All right, Peggy. I expect you’re right. Are you coming to the boxing?”

  “You try and keep me away,” said Peggy.

  When he arrived home he was so unusually silent that his wife, after a number of unsuccessful efforts to obtain his attention, asked him what was the matter, and after some deliberation, he told her a certain amount.

  “It’s nothing to do with you,” said Mrs. Wetherall.

  “So two other people have informed me already this morning.”

  “Well, is it?”

  “Not really, I suppose,” said Mr. Wetherall. “Except, if you see a thing going wrong, you ought to try and put it right.”

  “Sergeant Donovan’s old enough to look after himself.”

  “He didn’t look after his wife very well.”

  “It was an accident,” said Mrs. Wetherall. “Just the same as getting run over by a bus.”

  “All right, I agree. But if you thought the bus driver had done it on purpose, surely you’d want him prosecuted.”

  “If he really knew who these people were,” said Mrs. Wetherall, “and if he had any real proof against them, he’d have them arrested. He’s a policeman.”

  “Yes. He’s also an Irishman.”

  “I don’t—”

  “When he was a boy, he always liked to handle things himself. Sammy’s the same. And Peggy, for that matter. It’s a Donovan habit.”

  “What do you want to do.”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t very happy about one thing. Peggy told me that her brother had got into the confidence of one of the gangs by pretending to take bribes. Well, that’s all right in theory, but in practice it must be a very fine line between pretending to take them, and actually taking them – if you see what I mean.”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Wetherall, doubtfully.

  “He pockets the money either way, you see. He may be saying, I’m only doing this to fool them, and sooner or later I’ll pay it over to the Police Orphanage, but—”

  “I see what you mean,” said Mrs. Wetherall. “You think that’s why he daren’t tell anyone who they are—”

  “It could be one
of the reasons, couldn’t it?”

  II

  The Co-operative Hall, on the Walworth side of the Elephant had been built as a swimming bath. During the winter months the bath was boarded over and the space thus created became available for dances, gym displays and other feats of endurance. Or (with a small stage at one end and chairs) for theatrical performances, lectures, moots and revivalist meetings and (with tiers of benches round a movable ring) for boxing and all-in wrestling. In none of these transmogrifications did it really look like anything but a converted swimming bath. It might, Mr. Wetherall considered, have served as a working model for democracy, for it meant different things at different times and all its seats were equally hard.

  Nevertheless it was convenient, and cheap.

  He made his way there through the October fog which had come up from the river at dusk. In fog and in darkness the South Bank seemed more tolerable. Its outlines were softened. The lights from the shops and the naptha flares from the booths made brave splashes of light. The lamps behind the red curtains gave an impression of snugness to the inconvenient little houses.

  The hall was packed. The South Borough Secondary School had two other boys beside Donovan in the Area Finals and Mr. Wetherall had meant to go round to the changing room and give them a last-minute word of encouragement. Then, because he had an understanding mind, he sat down in his seat. They would all, he realised, be going through agonies of nervousness, one’s first public boxing match was an ordeal beside which any future ordeal, from the dentist’s to the electric chair, must pale into insignificance. Anyway, their trainer, a competent and taciturn man, would be with them.

  The master of ceremonies entered the ring. “Three rounds of two minutes – no applause during the rounds please – highest traditions of sportsmanship – no clinching, holding or gouging – best man win,” and two tiny boys entered the ring from opposite sides, one with a red sash round his waist, the other with a blue. For the allotted two minutes, and in the most spirited and creditable way, they did their best to destroy each other, and then the bell rang and they sank back into their corners. Mr. Wetherall was close enough to the ring to hear the nearest of the seconds, a grey-haired, earnest man in a sweater saying “Ride off his leads on your arms, and cross to the right side of his face,” and Blue Sash saying: “O.K. Mr. Braithwaite,” when the bell sounded again.

  At the close of the bout Blue Sash was proclaimed winner, (though whether as a result of the advice he had received Mr. Wetherall was too inexpert to decide), and his supporters in the hall were threatening the stability of an entire section of the seating, when Mr. Wetherall became aware of his neighbour.

  He smelt him first.

  Parma Violet and after-shave lotion. Then his eyes took him in. Black hair, a white face, and a striking suit of clothes – bold pattern, thick cloth, rolled lapels, stuffed shoulders. A metal green tie. Pointed brown shoes. All the success signals. Looking again it occurred to Mr. Wetherall that he knew him. Pollock, Postgate, Partridge. It began with a P. He conducted a mental roll-call. Parry, Parsons, Price. That was more like it. Not Price, though. Prince!

  He was so pleased at getting it that he spoke the name aloud. The man turned slowly, and seeing his full face, on which the flesh was beginning to hang, he realised that the man was older than he had first imagined – and also that he was blind in one eye.

  All the same, he was sure he was right.

  “I’m so sorry,” said Mr. Wetherall. “I thought—”

  What he thought was lost in a fresh outburst of cheering.

  “Can’t hear.”

  “I said,” he shouted, “that I thought—”

  “Why, it’s Mr. Wetherall.”

  Prince shot out a fat white hand, at the end of a thick wrist. Gold cuff links winked against silk shirt cuff. “How’s tricks? Been finding any dead kittens lately?”

  This was a reference to a long-forgotten, and not very happy episode in Mr. Wetherall’s early teaching career at Battersea, and he laughed half-heartedly.

  “That’s right,” said Prince. “Keep the little sods in order. Spare the rod and spoil the child. And between you and me—” Prince leaned forward and a bow wave of Parma Violet came ahead of him, “a little more stick in the schools and we shouldn’t have so much joovenile delinquency.”

  “Oh, quite,” said Mr. Wetherall. “And what have you been doing since I saw you last?”

  “In and out of the ring. You seen my eye? Lost that fighting. Mug’s game. Near as a nicker lost the other one too. Then I stopped. S’all right for boys and amachoors. Does ‘em good. Not professional, though. They know too much, these professional boys.”

  “Seven stone and under,” announced the master of ceremonies. “In the red sash, Peter Dawkin, Walworth School. In the blue sash, Sam Donovan, South Borough School—”

  From the back of the hall Mr. Wetherall heard the Donovan family giving tongue.

  Sam sat in the corner, pretending to listen to what his second was saying, his red hair in striking contrast to his white singlet. Then the bell sounded and the fight was on.

  It was the sort of fight which often results where one of the parties has a balance on science and the other a balance on courage. At the end of the first round the front of Sammy’s vest was almost as red as his hair. At the end of the second, he had a fast closing right eye, and even the Donovan family were beginning to sound anxious. In the middle of the third round Sam seemed to collect himself, and hit his opponent once, very very hard, in the face. After that the opposition crumbled, and he came out a handsome winner.

  Mr. Wetherall attended only partly to the fight. He had seen Sammy perform too often to have any serious doubts as to the result. The more active part of his mind was concerned with the man sitting next to him. Everything about him said money. But not, he felt, very good money. Surely a half-blind boxer, one who had never reached the first flight and had now slipped out of the game altogether, could not be earning a great deal. He might have other jobs, of course.

  At that moment, the mass hysteria making all normal speech impossible – Prince leaned across and shouted: “Good boy, that.”

  “Very,” said Mr. Wetherall.

  “One of yours, ent he?”

  “Yes.”

  “Plenty of guts.”

  “It’s a thing that runs in the family.”

  “Patsy’s Sammy Donovan’s brother, ent he?”

  “Yes. Do you know Sergeant Donovan?”

  “I’ve heard of him,” said Prince with a grin. “Patsy’s a bright boy, too.” He consulted an expensive watch. “I gotter scarper now. Quite like old times seeing you again. Ever you’re up west you must come and have a drink at my club.”

  “Er-certainly,” said Mr. Wetherall, slightly surprised. “I’m afraid I don’t know—”

  “The Atheeneum,” said Prince. “Just ask for the Bishop of London. Ta ta.”

  “Eight stone and under,” said the announcer.

  Mr. Wetherall sat looking thoughtfully after the back of the retreating Prince.

  III

  Mr. Wetherall did not go directly home after the match. By making a slight detour he could visit the school, and there were some exam papers he wanted to pick up. He would have to correct them at home – (a form of overtime from which schoolmasters suffer a good deal, without the corresponding advantage of getting paid at overtime rates). He collected the papers and found a letter, which had evidently arrived by the evening post. It was from the Managing Director of Lithography & Artists Services Ltd., who said that he would be only too pleased to take on Crowdy as a paid junior assistant at a starting salary of three pounds a week and how was Mrs. Wetherall keeping?

  It capped the end of a rather successful day. All of his boys had won their bouts and now it looked as if he had done what he could to place Crowdy’s foot on the bottom rung of the ladder – that narrow, unstable, overcrowded ladder which leads up to eminence in the arts.

  Warmed by this glow of altruis
m he decided that he would break the good news to the Crowdy family at once. By making a further small detour, he could go past their house, and then catch his bus one stop further along.

  Outside, the fog had thickened. He made his way into the Old Kent Road, crossed it, and after a moment’s hesitation, chose one of the side streets running along the northern side of the Bricklayers Arms railway goods yard. As he went by, he stopped for a moment to look through an open doorway at the complicated hell within. A huge, concrete-floored building with concrete loading-ramps round three of the sides. Single unshaded electric lights fighting a losing battle with the fog.

  Vans loading and unloading. Hurrying figures, the familiars of the place, in leather peaked caps, and overalls, which might originally have been of any colour, now blackened to a drab uniformity by grease and dirt. Above the throng, in detached hutches round the perimeter, the dispatchers and parcels clerks, slapping on labels and making entries in books. And, all round, an ocean of parcels, packages, bales, boxes, coops, crates and cartons; things tied lengthways in bundles, things wrapped in sacks, things wrapped in straw. Where, amongst all this, might one tiny food parcel be lying?

  He became aware that a railway policeman was standing just inside the entrance, watching him.

  “They’re very busy tonight,” he said.

  “You ought to see them at Christmas,” said the policeman.

  “Well, good night.”

  The policeman said nothing to this.

  The Crowdy house was discovered without much difficulty. It was a thin and dirty house, in a terrace of thin and dirty houses. The front door, at the top of a flight of steps which spanned the area across a flying buttress of concrete, was ajar. Mr. Wetherall pulled the bell but this proved to be a waste of time, since it was quite obviously not attached to anything. He knocked, without result, pushed the door open and went in.

  Usually he was most scrupulous about such things but he felt that as a bearer of good tidings, it would probably be forgiven him; also he was late for his supper.