VISITORS TO THE CRESENT

by MARY HOCKING

  ‘Put that round you. Where is the kitchen?’

  Edward jerked his head spasmodically and then found that he could not stop the jerking. When Harper came back some minutes later, Edward could scarcely take the cup of tea which he handed to him, but gradually as he drank it, strong, hot and very sweet, the shaking began to subside a little, and with it went some of the panic. He realized that he had made a most ridiculous exhibition of himself; it would have been preferable to have been beaten. Tears of weakness and mortification came to his eyes. He sipped the tea and wished that he might die. For a moment, he had almost forgotten what it was that had given rise to this dreadful scene, but as soon as he remembered he began to tremble again.

  Harper pushed cigarettes and a lighter towards him.

  ‘We shall have to take a statement from you about the man, Blantyre, later,’ he said. ‘You were one of the last people to spend much time in his company.’

  ‘I’d rather get it over now.’

  ‘I can’t take a statement from you without another police officer present,’ Harper said. ‘I’ll make arrangements for you to go along to the local station tomorrow.’

  Then the whole thing will start again, Edward thought; only it will be worse, he will be on his own territory and there won’t be any cups of tea and cigarettes then. Harper, who had been watching him, said quietly:

  ‘Mr. Saneck, we do know that refugees sometimes find themselves in certain difficulties. This doesn’t apply in your case?’

  Edward shook his head.

  ‘If you are subject to any kind of pressure, it would be wiser to tell me. I can’t promise anything, but I should be sympathetic.’

  Edward said nothing; he was beginning to tremble violently again and Harper did not press the point. After a moment, Edward said:

  ‘What more do you want?’

  ‘Nothing at present,’ Harper answered. ‘But I’ll wait with you until Miss Holt or Miss Brett returns.’

  ‘I’m all right now,’ Edward said. ‘I don’t want to keep you.’

  But Harper, who had an uncomfortable vision of newspaper headlines reading ‘Pole commits suicide after visit of Police Superintendent’, stayed. Edward sat back in his chair; the world seemed grey, drained, and even Harper, sitting by the window, looked tired and much older. About twenty minutes later, Paddy came in. Harper went into the hall and said to her:

  ‘Would you mind staying with Mr. Saneck for a while? He’s not very well and I don’t want to leave him alone.’

  Paddy took a look at Edward, white and shivering in the blanket.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be a damn sight better if you did leave him alone?’ she asked. ‘What do you do in your spare time: tear the wings off flies?’

  Harper’s face went a dull red, but he merely said:

  ‘I should be glad if you would stay with him.’

  He went back to the Yard. Sergeant Norris saw him come in, took one look at his face, and resolved to keep out of his way.

  The outcome of his interview with Edward Saneck should, Harper supposed, have gratified him. Saneck had so obviously been rattled. The annoying thing was, however, that Robert Harper had been rattled, too; and that, most certainly, had not been the object of the exercise. What was it, he asked himself, that bothered him so much?

  True, Saneck’s behaviour was unexpected. For example, why had he been so afraid? The fear of brutality. Harper could understand well enough; he had been afraid himself at times in his life. But why should Blantyre’s suicide have had such an effect on Saneck? From Saneck’s point of view, Blantyre dead and silent was surely preferable to Blantyre alive and under arrest; yet the crack had come, not when he was shown the photograph, but when he heard that the man had killed himself. And he had met him only once; this, Harper was fairly sure, was true.

  But Saneck’s reactions were probably to be explained by one of those odd quirks of human behaviour which it was no concern of Harper’s to investigate. It was something more personal that made him feel so uncomfortably at odds with himself. He was well aware that even if he could have foretold what Saneck’s reactions would have been, he would not himself have behaved any differently during their interview. His thoughts, however, might have been different. Over the last few years he had been dealing with people who were very queer cattle indeed; no doubt at some time in their lives they had been recognizably human, and no doubt a psychiatrist would have been able to justify their odd, twisted mentalities. But Harper was not a psychiatrist, and while he was not consciously in the habit of passing judgement, he realized now that he had viewed them with contempt. For Saneck, looking back over his recent interview, he felt no contempt and he was ashamed, not of his actions, but of his lack of respect. Years ago in a Japanese prison camp, he had seen just what the denial of human dignity could do to men and he had no wish ever to be a party to this kind of infamy. The thought brought back an old, sick ache that he had imagined had been stifled, if not healed, a long time ago. The little throb of pain startled him. He looked up and saw that it was growing dark. He switched on the light and reached for the telephone. It was at moments like this, he thought, that your guard suddenly slipped and you found yourself tangled in your own net. He was damned if that was going to happen to him. When Sergeant Norris picked up the receiver. Harper’s voice was particularly belligerent:

  ‘Why haven’t those photographs been sent up to me yet?’

  The sergeant was prepared to defend himself, and that suited Harper. He let fly at the sergeant, about whose human dignity he had no doubt whatsoever.

  Chapter Five

  I

  While Harper was puzzling over Edward’s reactions, much the same questions, though with a rather different emphasis, were occupying Vickers’s mind. Jessica had telephoned him late that evening and now he was in Edward’s sitting-room with Paddy and Jessica. Edward was in bed; a fact which infuriated Vickers who would have liked to have carried on where Harper had left off.

  ‘He was in a dreadful state,’ Paddy said. ‘He had been sick and he was shaking as though he had ’flu.’

  ‘Why?’ Vickers asked. He watched them both closely, wondering how much they suspected. ‘Seems a rather astonishing reaction to a chat about a burglary, doesn’t it?’

  Paddy was too absorbed by her anger with Harper to be very bothered about the whys and wherefores of Edward’s conduct. But Jessica, Vickers could see, was thinking things out: he waited, wondering how near to the truth she would get. The woman was more interesting than he had once thought her.

  ‘The superintendent asked me about Edward’s acquaintances when he came here before,’ she said eventually. ‘Do you think that perhaps he began to delve into the past and Edward got alarmed?’

  ‘Why should he be alarmed?’ Vickers pressed her. ‘His past is blameless enough; at least, in the eyes of people on this side of the Iron Curtain.’

  ‘But he would still be afraid of anything approaching a cross¬examination,’ Jessica answered. ‘He had a bad time with the secret police in Poland, and lately his mind seems to have been going back . . .’

  ‘And the superintendent aided his memory, you mean?’ Vickers pounced suddenly. ‘A little gentle arm-twisting?’

  ‘No.’ She gave him an unexpectedly sharp, antagonistic look. ‘I didn’t mean that.’

  ‘But it’s an explanation, isn’t it? In fact, the only sensible explanation.’ Vickers’s eyes gleamed. ‘How very unwise of Mr. Harper to come here alone and then behave like that, without any witnesses.’

  ‘He didn’t touch Edward,’ Jessica said flatly.

  ‘How do you know? You weren’t here.’

  ‘Edward said so himself. He was very reticent about exactly what happened, but the one thing he did say was that he had made a fool of himself because the man never raised a hand to him. I think Edward was almost sorry he didn’t get beaten up; it was something he would have understood.’

  Vickers’s face went white. ‘The idiot!’

  If Edward
was going to land himself in any kind of trouble, this incident with Harper might have been used to advantage; the sickness was most opportune, and although there were no bruises, that could have been arranged. But there was Jessica Holt to consider, a purist if ever there was one. She would need to be under very great pressure before she would be a party to anything like that. He looked at the woman, noting the firm mouth, the grave, wide-set eyes of that grey which seems always to go with an uncomfortable degree of honesty. She was the kind of witness a jury would believe. He shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Then we have to assume that the superintendent behaved himself within reason, but that he managed to convey something to Edward that frightened him very much.’

  In return for which, he thought, Edward probably coughed up rather more than his dinner.

  ‘Did Harper look particularly elated when he left?’ he asked Paddy.

  ‘No,’ she answered emphatically. ‘In fact, just for once I think I drew blood when I had a crack at him.’

  So that, after all, the situation might not be too serious. Vickers turned to Jessica.

  ‘I must have a word with Edward.’

  ‘Not now,’ she answered. ‘He has only just gone to sleep.’

  ‘Then I shall have to wake him.’

  ‘No.’ She was standing near the door to Edward’s bedroom; she sounded like a hospital matron and she looked every bit as determined. ‘You can see him tomorrow, he will be stronger then.’

  Which was just what Vickers feared. Nevertheless, he decided that it would be unwise to create a scene with this woman who, he was beginning to realize, was a potential enemy. So he said goodnight to her, and consoled himself with the thought that if Harper could frighten Edward so easily, he himself should have very little trouble.

  In fact, he had more trouble than he had anticipated when he tackled Edward the following day. It was not that Edward was deliberately obstructive; it was not in Edward’s nature to be obstructive. It was rather that Edward seemed dazed and unable to bring his mind to bear on the things which Vickers thought were important. This put Vickers in a dilemma. If, in fact, Edward had simply reacted to excitement by being sick, he was not at all anxious to put into his mind all kinds of unpleasant possibilities. Edward, in the past, had been invaluable because of his unquestioning acceptance of everything that happened to him and around him. He had seemed a shadow of a man, still living, although something vital within him had ceased to function; there had been an unusual, and convenient, absence of conflict. It had sometimes seemed to Vickers that if he were to have said to Edward: ‘Throw yourself over that bridge!’ Edward would have done it rather than involve himself in argument.

  But now? There was undoubtedly a change in the man. Vickers noticed this when he found him in the shop, arranging antique figures on a large, flat-topped table with a nervous concentration that seemed quite out of character. Lines had appeared on the pleasant, diffident face, at the sides of the mouth, beneath the eyes; and the film which had once seemed to mask the eyes had cleared revealing something sharper, more harrowed than Vickers had ever seen there before. Perhaps a bad night could explain all this. But if the explanation were more complex, if there were still something within that could be hurt again, it was just possible that Edward had become a very bad risk indeed. There were ways of dealing with bad risks. Unfortunately, Vickers had, in a moment of abandonment, already dealt with one doubtful risk in a way that had been too drastic. He could not afford, he judged, to arouse any more interest in his activities at the present time. If possible, Edward must be kept alive and reasonably well for a little while until a less ostentatious way of dealing with him could be devised. And so Vickers found himself handling Edward with more care than he had intended when he first heard of the interview with Harper and its strange outcome.

  It was early-closing day. The door of the shop was locked and the two men were alone; but outside in the street people drifted by and one or two children paused at the shop, flattening their noses against the window and making grotesque faces. Edward looked at the children and fear flashed across his face. Vickers, who thought that the fear was occasioned by the sight of the constable on the beat pounding his slow way by, said:

  ‘You mustn’t let the police rattle you.’ He smiled, his bright, feverish smile and bent down over Edward’s shoulder. ‘They are really not very formidable. That impassive expression on their great big faces is handed out to them at the police college with the rest of their uniform. It doesn’t necessarily mean that an intelligence is at work below the surface.’

  Edward picked up a jade Buddha and appeared to lose himself in an agony of doubt before replacing it in exactly the same position.

  ‘Why did you bring in the police?’ he asked petulantly. ‘We didn’t lose anything of value.’

  The constable was moving the children away from the window; he peered in and nodded at Vickers and Edward, a protective nod which was meant to assure them that all would be well so long as P.C. Moxton was in the vicinity. Vickers saluted the officer, and said to Edward:

  ‘I brought them in because it would have looked very odd if I had failed to report a burglary. That poor man out there would have been heartbroken.’ He lit a cigarette and sat down near Edward. ‘Besides, as you know, Mrs. Crawford discovered that broken window when she came in the morning and found all the stuff in here disarranged.’

  ‘Mrs. Crawford?’ Edward repeated.

  ‘Yes, Mrs. Crawford. The woman who helps us in the shop.’

  Edward frowned. ‘But I’m not worried about Mrs. Crawford. Why should we let the police into our lives just to satisfy Mrs. Crawford?’

  The constable and the children had moved away and had been replaced by a middle-aged couple who appeared to be having a heated argument about a rather ugly china dish.

  ‘The police didn’t have a search warrant,’ Vickers said. ‘So what are you worrying about? I was here the whole time during their investigations and I can assure you that they found nothing more than that agitated couple outside would find if we were to unlock the door at this moment and let them in. Which, by the way, I rather think they want us to do.’

  Edward’s hand hovered over the jade Buddha again.

  ‘But it has given them a chance to ask so many questions,’ he protested. ‘And how do we know they weren’t responsible for the burglary in the first place?’

  Vickers moved to the window; the man mouthed at him, pointing to the dish: ‘Is that Belleek?’ and Vickers mouthed back: ‘No. Swansea.’ The man turned to the woman in triumph and Vickers turned back to Edward. He ignored Edward’s second point, and said:

  ‘What questions have the police asked that trouble you so much?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  Vickers felt his muscles beginning to tighten and he knew that soon pain would drive him to excess.

  ‘Something must have given you a shock last night,’ he said, and already there was an edge to his persuasiveness. ‘I would have thought you would have remembered the interview quite clearly.’

  ‘I don’t like questions of any kind. I don’t like having to delve into my mind for the answers which are never quite what I expect them to be.’

  ‘You can’t tell me you were sick because you have an abstract dislike of questions.’

  ‘I have a particular dislike of policemen.’

  The hand above the Buddha was beginning to shake, Vickers noticed.

  ‘Did the superintendent threaten you?’ he asked.

  Edward abandoned the Buddha and said wearily:

  ‘All policemen are a threat.’

  ‘I’ve already told you not to overestimate them.’

  ‘Harper isn’t a fool.’

  ‘Not a fool, no; but not a master mind either. Not even an original mind. Just a typical policeman, hemmed in by rules and regulations which he would never have the guts to break because he is much too anxious about his promotion chances and his pension. Very much a man of the herd.’ All
the time he had been speaking his voice had been rising; now it had an off-pitch quality that jarred the glass ornaments on the table. ‘You don’t for a moment imagine that a man like that could bring me down?’

  Edward did not reply and Vickers began to speak yet more savagely:

  ‘I have reserves to call on that Harper would not dare to summon. I’m not afraid to unleash the power that is within me. But Harper will let his actions be governed by the traditions of society; he won’t leave the shelter of his civilized world and come out to fight beyond its restraining legal bounds.’

  He stopped abruptly, aware that Edward was watching him with a perplexed expression on his face. He thought he understood that expression; he had seen the same look on Desmond Ames’s face recently; he turned away and went across to the door.

  ‘Let’s have a little air in here, shall we, now that that couple have gone?’

  ‘Civilized world?’ Edward repeated, still perplexed. ‘You think that Harper belongs to a civilized world?’

  ‘The law is one of the cornerstones of the structure.’

  Vickers stood in the doorway breathing deeply; he was beginning to show a side of himself that he knew should be kept very private. He felt the need for care, but was physically incapable of exercising it at the moment.

  ‘The law?’ Edward repeated with the same maddening perplexity, as though he had been confronted by an interesting new conception.

  The fresh air had failed to calm Vickers; he felt an intolerable urge to thrash the information out of Edward. His head was heavy with blood. In desperation, he turned upon himself, pressing the lighted cigarette into the palm of his hand. The fishmonger had come out of his shop. He walked slowly across to Vickers and it was not until the man reached him that Vickers threw the cigarette away.

  ‘Have the police caught your burglar yet?’ he asked. Vickers leant against the door and shook his head. The fishmonger wagged a finger at him and said gloatingly: ‘They won’t, you know. Not while we have Mr. Butler at the Home Office. I was up in Whitehall the other day, and you should have seen the carry-on – literally a carry-on, ha, ha! – with all those nuclear disarmament people. The police force is too busy giving free lifts to teen-age girls to get down to any serious crime detection.’ He went on to tell Vickers how that kind of obstruction would be dealt with in Red Square, but was interrupted by the arrival of his bus before he reached his climax.