VISITORS TO THE CRESENT

by MARY HOCKING

  Vickers waited until the bus moved off; then he closed the door, wiped the sweat from his face, and came across to Edward. He felt sick, but in control of himself again. He put his uninjured hand on Edward’s shoulder and said coaxingly:

  ‘What did you tell Harper? I don’t suppose it was anything very important, was it? If you tell me about it, I expect I can put it right and you won’t have to worry any more.’

  Edward looked up with a sudden flicker of interest. ‘You mean you can go to the police station and make a statement for me about Blantyre? Oh, I wish you would, I don’t want to . . .’ His voice trailed away.

  ‘Blantyre!’ It was almost an explosion: Edward began to tremble imperceptibly. ‘Good gracious, is that what’s behind all this? Well, you can set your mind at rest. I’m fairly sure, from information obtained from a reliable source, that Blantyre left no note, nothing to implicate us. It must have been some private trouble; he was a rather intense individual, you know, with one of those exquisitely sensitive minds that can be put completely out of gear by the slightest jolt.’

  They looked at one another and Vickers saw, not relief, but despair in Edward’s eyes before he ducked his head to peer at the jade Buddha. He had no idea what it all meant, but in that moment he knew that Edward would have to be dealt with some time soon. He felt a cold fury with Edward. If anyone was to endanger the whole enterprise, then it would be himself, George Vickers, and it would be by his own choice. That a miserable specimen like Edward Saneck should do it was unthinkable. For the moment, however, Edward must be soothed. Vickers said:

  ‘Now look, you’ve nothing to worry about. I’ll rehearse a nice little statement for you to hand out to the police, and then, as far as you are concerned, the whole incident will be closed.’

  He spent a trying hour preparing Edward for his ordeal. At half-past three he forced the reluctant man out of the shop and sent him on his way to the police station.

  ‘Remember,’ he said softly as Edward left, ‘there are worse things than falling foul of the police.’

  He was reasonably satisfied, by the expression on Edward’s face, that this shaft, if no other, had found its way home.

  Edward walked slowly down Park Road East. A flower seller waved a bunch of tulips at him and said: ‘Three-and-six the half¬dozen, and that’s a bargain.’ He caught a glimpse of Edward’s face and muttered under his breath: ‘Look nice and cheerful on a gravestone, they would.’ Edward reached the main Holland Park Avenue and went straight ahead. There was a trumpeting sound as though someone had trodden on the foot of an elephant as the constable on point duty bore down upon him. Edward saw cars all around with angry faces thrust out of the windows.

  ‘Didn’t you see my signal?’ the constable demanded.

  Edward astonished himself and the constable by replying with a flood of apology in Polish. The constable jerked his head in dismissal. ‘All right, all right! But don’t do it again.’ Edward stumbled on to the curb on the other side of the road. A man in overalls who was standing outside a garage grinned at him and said sympathetically:

  ‘Don’t let him rattle you, matey.’ He spat. ‘Jumped-up schoolboys in uniform, that’s all they are.’

  Edward walked slowly up the hill. The Church of Saint Barnabas stood at the end of Potter Street, and as he saw its squat bulk rising in front of him his footsteps dragged. Outside the church he paused, as he had paused many times before, not because he admired the architecture, but because he always found it difficult to pass a church. Sonya had taught him that religion was the consolation of those not strong enough to bear the burden of reality. He had, with her help, rejected this consolation, but he had never managed to rid himself of a superstitious feeling of guilt. Today, the Church of Saint Barnabas was particularly forbidding; gaunt and blackened with soot, it looked impregnable, a fortress from which Edward Saneck was now for ever excluded.

  In comparison, the police station half-way down Potter Street seemed almost comforting with its homely red-brick and blunt- featured architecture. Edward looked at the blue lamp outside with a feeling that was not entirely fear; it was as though his journey had brought him full-circle at last. Harper would be waiting for him and this time he would not be so restrained. As long as they dispensed with the formalities quickly, he felt that he might be able to bear the rest. But once inside the familiar symptoms began; he wondered whether his heart would give out before he ever reached his tormentors. He went through the door marked enquiries. No doubt they would keep him waiting. They did.

  When he arrived at the enquiries desk, one of those incomprehensible English scenes was being played out with stolid seriousness. A small black dog with a long, tattered tail and evil yellow eyes was standing on the desk being studied thoughtfully by a man in a leather jacket on the one side of the desk and a sergeant on the other. A constable was standing in a corner with his hands behind his back and an unhappy expression on his face. No one took any notice of Edward. The sergeant wrote in a large book, muttering: ‘long, bushy black tail . . .’ The dog sneezed and the sergeant blotted the page and regarded the dog without enthusiasm.

  ‘I think we’ve had him here before.’

  The man in the leather jacket then gave the sergeant his name and address; after which the sergeant rapped out:

  ‘Take him away.’

  For a moment, Edward thought that the man was about to be arrested; but the constable advanced tentatively towards the dog who bared his teeth in an unpleasant smile. The constable attempted bribery with a biscuit and the dog bit his hand. The sergeant, unmoved, looked at Edward and said:

  ‘What can I do for you, sir?’

  ‘I am Mr. Saneck and . . .’

  The sergeant turned away and Edward heard him giving instructions to an unseen man to show the gentleman up to Chief Inspector Grey at once. Edward waited. The constable was making propitiatory noises at the dog and the sergeant was bullying the constable. The door opened and another constable appeared and beckoned to Edward. Edward, envying the dog his day, followed the second constable.

  The man led him down a dark, narrow corridor and up a flight of equally dark, narrow stairs. There were several doors leading off the small landing, none of which were marked. The constable knocked on one of the doors and went in. A voice which Edward did not recognize said cheerfully:

  ‘Show him in.’

  The owner of the voice was a large, fat man with a big moustache. He advanced on Edward with every show of friendliness and said that he was Chief Inspector Grey and that it was good of Edward to help the police in their investigations.

  ‘This is Inspector MacLeish.’

  MacLeish and Edward looked at one another, and MacLeish managed a small, tight smile. The other man pushed a chair forward and then went and sat on the other side of a table, next to MacLeish.

  ‘I’ll leave this to you,’ he said to MacLeish.

  Edward glanced round uneasily. Surely Harper would come in soon; he felt impatient, as though he must have the man there under observation.

  MacLeish was looking down at the table; his face had a morose, almost sulky expression.

  ‘We should like any information you can give us about this man, Blantyre, sir,’ he said.

  He made a few general statements about the kind of information which would be particularly helpful and Edward responded by giving the information which Vickers had rehearsed with him and which, they had calculated, would be of no help whatsoever to the police. The interview progressed quietly. To Edward, it was the eerie quiet of an impending storm. MacLeish was polite and reasonable, but in a strained way, as though his behaviour had been dictated from above. His stifled resentment created an uneasy tension; watching him, Edward was reminded of a young hound unnaturally held in check. Whose, he wondered, were the hands on the leash? Harper’s? A little sweat of fear broke out on Edward’s forehead. There were one or two points in the statement which required clarification, but, although MacLeish interrupted Edward, he was patient a
nd he did not exert any pressure. Edward waited for the man’s control to snap; but it held, although at the end of the interview he noticed that there was sweat on MacLeish’s forehead, too.

  ‘We should like you to sign your statement, sir,’ MacLeish said. And he added: ‘It may be necessary for us to see you again if anything else should crop up, you understand.’

  For a moment his eyes met Edward’s, and Edward understood him perfectly.

  When the statement had been signed, the same constable appeared and led him down the narrow stairs. The door to the enquiries room was half-open. Edward heard a low moan and the voice of the sergeant saying in a lecturing tone:

  ‘If you can get yourself bloodied-up like this just taking a dog into custody, you won’t have a long life in the Force.’

  A smile wreathed the face of Edward’s constable, and as he saw Edward on to the steps he confided happily:

  ‘Proper free for all we’ve had in there.’

  ‘Did the dog get away?’ Edward asked.

  The constable looked shocked. ‘Oh no, sir.’

  Left alone, Edward remained for a moment on the steps of the police station looking down at the desultory movement of people in the street. He was sorry that they had turned him out of the police station. He was sorry that Harper had not ordered that he should be beaten senseless so that for a few blessed hours at least he would be relieved of all his nagging doubts and fears. He went down the steps. He had been right about Harper’s subtlety. Because, of course, he was not really free. He had been given a small extension of time in which to torture himself.

  The torture began as soon as he returned to his flat. Jessica was waiting for him with a cup of coffee and some sandwiches. She looked at him anxiously as he came in and said:

  ‘Well, it wasn’t so bad, was it?’

  It was a relief to have someone on whom he could vent his pent-up feelings.

  ‘Do you enjoy watching people tormented?’ he asked bitterly. ‘Is that why you have to be here, waiting on the doorstep? To get a good look at the victim.’

  ‘You are tormenting yourself, Edward,’ she replied with exasperating gentleness.

  ‘So it is all my imagination, is it?’ he shouted. ‘I just imagine all the terrible things that have happened in the last few days . . .’

  ‘What terrible things?’

  He made a rather theatrical gesture with his arm, and said vaguely:

  ‘These questions, these continual visits, this invasion of my privacy . . .’

  ‘All that has happened is that you have had a burglary at the shop,’ she pointed out.

  He did not answer, but slumped down in a chair and began to eat a sandwich. She came across and sat on a stool at his feet; although her voice was calm he could see that the muscles in her neck were taut.

  ‘You had a burglary,’ she said, ‘and the police came here for details. And ever since then things have been building up as though some kind of a crime had been committed. And the person who gives that impression most of all is you, Edward.’

  Edward pushed the plate of sandwiches away and took up the cup of coffee.

  ‘It’s just that the police frighten me.’

  ‘Oh yes, yes, I know all that,’ she said wearily. ‘But surely you can see that there is a difference between the man who came here and the men you dealt with behind the Iron Curtain?’

  ‘You mean that Superintendent Harper is an Englishman?’ he asked coldly.

  Her voice grated on the edge of exasperation. ‘You have told me a little of what happened in Poland, of the things that the secret police did to you. Harper is not like that. He probably has a streak of ruthlessness, I daresay most successful policemen have; but he isn’t a sadistic bully.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  She looked at him in surprise. ‘I just know.’

  He laughed and pretended to choke over his coffee.

  ‘Edward, he is one of my own people,’ she protested. ‘I can judge him better than you can.’

  He stared at her warily. She was angry because he had laughed at her; her face was flushed and her grey eyes had darkened. She looked dangerously unsettled, as though she might hit out at him or burst into tears. This unpredictability alarmed him. He had never before asked himself whether she was a person that he could trust; but now that it became necessary to ask the question he was surprised to find how little he felt that he could rely on her. She was so strange and foreign, she might be capable of anything.

  ‘You understand this man Harper, don’t you?’ he said. ‘There is an unspoken complicity.’

  She flinched, and said with defensive sharpness:

  ‘That most certainly is not true, I have no idea what the man is talking about half the time.’

  ‘But at some deeper level you understand perfectly. Just as, at that deeper level, you have no idea what I am talking about.’

  The ragged flush was dying out of her face, her lips trembled and he saw, to his horror, that she was very near to tears.

  ‘Then make me understand, Edward.’ She reached out and took his hand; there was an urgent appeal in her voice. ‘Make me understand. Now, before it is too late.’

  He drew back.

  ‘You won’t, you see!’ she cried. ‘You won’t because you don’t want to be understood.’

  ‘No!’ he shouted, now really afraid of her. ‘No, I don’t. I just want to be left alone. All this probing and questioning and demanding is more than I can stand. You and Vickers and Harper . . .’

  He put his head in his hands. There was a rather long pause, and then she said:

  ‘What do you want from me, Edward?’

  He still kept his hands to his face as he said hesitantly:

  ‘Can’t we go on just as we always have done?’

  He heard her get to her feet. After a moment, the door closed behind her and he was alone.

  II

  MacLeish walked a good part of the way back to Scotland Yard, a tall, glowering figure pushing rather boorishly past anyone who happened to get in his way. He would have preferred to be out walking in his native land where there was room for a man to move without rubbing shoulders with his fellow men. But London being the overcrowded monstrosity it was, he had no alternative. He must get some of this out of his system before he saw Harper, otherwise his tongue would run away with him; and while he feared no man he had a grudging respect for his chief’s temper which was particularly uncertain lately. At the moment, he had little other respect for Harper.

  ‘Give him time,’ Harper had said.

  Time! With a man they could crack if they brought him in now and really worked on him. As he made his way through the dingy backstreets around Notting Hill his mind hovered resentfully over his last interview with Harper.

  ‘We’ve no proof, nothing to arm ourselves with. If we went to court now we’d be had up for indecent exposure.’ That had been Harper’s contention. ‘The evidence M.I.5 have collected about Blantyre is negligible and there is only the most tenuous of threads to link him with Vickers and Saneck. I don’t want that thread snapped.’

  ‘The thread wouldn’t snap. It would tighten into a noose,’ MacLeish muttered to himself. There was a crowd of coloured children playing ball outside a tenement house; they scattered as he strode by, watching him with big, mistrustful eyes. He kicked their ball viciously across the road, not because he had any strong feelings about them – he liked children of whatever colour – but because he needed so badly to kick at something. ‘All we have to do is to work Saneck over and we can get him to confess to anything,’ he had told Harper. ‘He’d be a shivering wreck after a few hours. We could write it all down for him and he would sign on the dotted line.’

  He saw nothing wrong in this suggestion because he was convinced that the confession which he would dictate would be a true one. Integrity might have become a dirty word to some people, but not to him; he had been brought up in a rigidly religious home and he had a burning belief in his own integrit
y. It entitled him to adopt unorthodox methods in order to further the course of justice.

  Harper, who had not had the blessings of a religious upbringing, had no such convictions. Of course, MacLeish remembered, the man had been in the Force for over twenty years, he had an ingrained respect for rules and regulations; he might twist them a little to suit his purpose, but he would not jeopardize his own position. He lacked daring and imagination; he would not gamble everything on one throw of the dice. And the powers-that-be would support him in that. They were all afraid of the courts, that was the real trouble. MacLeish himself had no great respect for the courts. So far as he was concerned, when he arrested a man he was guilty and what followed after was a mere formality. This attitude had led to more than one reprimand and it had recently been suggested that his spectacularly rapid promotion had been a mistake. But he had accepted censure with the martyr’s conviction that one must pay for one’s inflexible sense of duty. And his duty was to put people like Edward Saneck out of the way of decent human beings.

  He felt very strongly about this. But as he walked, weariness began to drive the image of Saneck from his mind. His thoughts turned homewards to a romp with his three young children, followed by food and the deep comfort of an armchair. It was one of MacLeish’s weaknesses that he gave all he had to everything he did, however trivial, with the result that he wore himself out early in the race. He was a very tired man when he walked into Harper’s room at Scotland Yard.

  Harper had also had a trying day, but Harper had more stamina than MacLeish and he had learnt to discipline his strength, to hold something in reserve. His brain was still alert and he was looking forward to several more hours’ work. MacLeish, who would have died rather than admit that his chief could better him in anything, fought back weariness and flogged his tired brain to further effort. The two men settled down together, their lack of sympathy imposing an initial strain on both of them which MacLeish proceeded to aggravate by describing his interview with Saneck and again expressing the opinion that a little pressure would produce the right answers.