The Man Who Killed Himself

by Julian Symons

  ‘You didn’t do wrong.’ He let the waves of her talk move over him. In bed he felt such a chill of apprehension that he had to go out to the lavatory. On his return he did not go to sleep for a long time, and when he slept at last it was with one hand coiled tightly round the thumb of the other, a habit which belonged to his childhood.

  At breakfast Joan talked about Flexner and the Department until he could bear it no longer, and shouted at her. She began to cry.

  ‘You don’t want me to have anything to do with your life. I’m just something to cook meals and go to bed with.’ This was so nearly true that he found it difficult to answer. ‘It’s not like being your wife at all. I thought I was really going to be part of your life, but you won’t let me. I hate the Department.’

  ‘You’re sure he didn’t say anything else? About getting in touch, I mean.’

  ‘No. Just when the time came. And he smiled. He’s got a nasty smile, hasn’t he?’

  He agreed absently. ‘Chin up, old girl. Sorry I can’t tell you anything. It’s the old struggle for power.’

  ‘With AX, you mean?’

  ‘AX is playing a part, but it’s our own lot I’m worried about. There are moves to take us over, merge us with another department. That may be why Flexner was here.’

  ‘You said he was out of the country.’

  He said snappishly, ‘Obviously I was wrong. Since he’s come back it must be about something important.’

  He left her eager for a further instalment of Department news. His room in Romany House held the usual bunch of letters and postal orders. He dealt with them efficiently, but that sense of impending doom lay heavy as a ball in his stomach. The morning was alleviated only by a telephone call from Pat. She asked if they could meet and when he invited her to lunch she said that she would be too late for that, but could meet him at three o’clock in the hotel. This bold declaration of the fact that her interest was purely sexual flattered him, and gave savour to the quick lunch he ate in a pub. It was an expectant Major Easonby Mellon who entered the hotel, to be told with a smirk that his wife was already there.

  He found her on the edge of the bed in bra and knickers, a cigarette in her mouth. She put out the cigarette at once but somehow her appearance on the bed, smoking and nearly naked, upset him. She looked, if he had to put the thing crudely, like a tart, and he wondered again why she had come to him. Sex, however, is a solvent for doubt, and by the time she had pulled him on to the bed and helped him to take off his clothes he was in no state to be concerned about her motives. He was astonished when she rolled off the bed and put on her knickers, which he had removed in the course of the scuffle. He was about to remonstrate when she jerked a thumb behind him. He turned.

  A man was in the room with them. He was tall, thin and dark, he wore a dark grey suit, and he was smiling disagreeably. There could be little doubt that he was the man Joan had described as Flexner. In his hand there was a tiny camera, which he put away in his pocket. He nodded to Pat, who put on her frock. Then he said amiably enough, ‘Hi. Time for you and me to have a talk. I’m Jack Parker, Pat’s husband.’

  Major Mellon felt at an enormous disadvantage without his clothes. He dressed quickly but in a fumbling manner, having difficulty with his trousers. His mind was empty of thought, he did not know what to say. Parker was quite at his ease.

  ‘Little club round the corner. I’m a member. No hurry. Talk round there when you’re ready.’

  Suppose I’m not prepared to come, suppose I say no to your little club, he thought. But he knew that he was not capable of this, that coming on top of everything else this misfortune had stunned him. He followed them obediently into a sordid basement club down a side street. The room was small and dirty, the barman was a Greek or Cypriot in need of a shave. Parker ordered three whiskies and they sat at a small table. He was completely self-possessed. He might have been talking about the weather.

  ‘I’ll put the position to you, Major, so that you know just where you are. First of all, the Major. You’re not entitled to call yourself that, there’s no Major Easonby Mellon in the Army List. Next your firm. You’ve got no licence to operate as you should have – I’ve checked and you haven’t got a secretary. You’re only in the office part time. It’s just a trick for making money. You’ve kidded your wife that you work for some mysterious Department or other, so I played along when I came last night.’

  ‘Outrageous.’ Major Mellon had found his voice, although it came through as a croak.

  ‘I thought you’d be pleased.’

  ‘How did you know where I lived?’

  ‘Followed you. Been keeping an eye on you ever since the day Pat came along. Careless of you not to notice. Another point, I just mention it in passing. You don’t go home to Clapham every night. I’m only making a guess, but do you know what it smells like to me? It smells as though you’ve got a little love nest tucked away somewhere else.’

  ‘He couldn’t have,’ the girl said. ‘He hasn’t got the guts.’

  ‘Shut up. Am I right?’

  Alarm struggled with relief, alarm that the man had got so near to the truth, relief that he had not discovered it. ‘Of course not.’

  Parker shrugged. ‘I could easily find out, but to me it doesn’t matter. This is a business deal.’

  ‘The badger game.’ He knew the phrase from books.

  ‘Not really.’ Parker smiled again. He looked like a large well-dressed rat. ‘I sent Pat along thinking you might put her in touch with a rich mark. She’s a clever girl. She spotted right away that you were a mark yourself.’

  He sipped the whisky. It tasted disagreeably of oil. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Suppose it got through to the Greater London Council – they issue your licence, I’ve done my homework – that you’re operating under a false title and without a licence. Suppose Pat makes a complaint about you and I back it up with these pictures you’d be for the high jump, agreed?’

  ‘You’d never dare to do it.’

  ‘We’re clean. We’ve never been inside. The point is, you wouldn’t want us to do it. I’d lay odds Mellon’s not your real name. I dare say the bogeys would be pleased to know where you are.’

  With a sense of shock he realised that they thought he was a crook like themselves, operating a racket. The fact that this was in a sense true did not make him less indignant.

  Parker went to the bar and brought back three more whiskies. The girl was becoming impatient. ‘Get to it, Jack. You’re too fond of the sound of your own voice.’

  ‘We’ll do it my way if you don’t mind.’ She flinched slightly. ‘I want the Major here to know just where he stands. Then we can fix the deal.’

  ‘The deal?’

  ‘It’s a business deal. I said so from the start, no hard feelings.’

  He sipped the second whisky. The inside of his mouth seemed to be numb. ‘What sort of deal?’

  ‘Twenty a week.’

  ‘Pounds?’ He could not take it in. ‘You want me to pay you twenty pounds each week?’

  ‘Every Friday. One of us will drop in to collect. Probably me. You might forget yourself with Pat.’ He smiled again.

  ‘Impossible.’

  ‘Don’t say that. Let’s keep it friendly.’ Parker’s mouth when he did not smile was like two lines of steel. ‘I tell you what. There are two ways of doing this. Twenty a week straight, and that’s what I’d like. Or a fiver a week and you give Pat some introductions to marks.’

  ‘No, I can’t do that. I don’t work in that way, I couldn’t possibly–’ He left the sentence unfinished.

  ‘It would have advantages.’ Parker was watching him. ‘You’d get a cut. Twenty per cent. And you don’t have to know anything about it, there’d be no trouble. Pat’s clever. She can tell which ones to take. And you can trust me, I know how hard to squeeze.’

  The walls of the room were lime green, and one was discoloured where damp had seeped through. They made him feel sick. ‘That sort of thing, I
can’t involve myself in it.’

  Parker took out a long thin cheroot from a case and lighted it. The cheroot stuck out sharply from a face composed of a series of angles. ‘I’m being patient, Dad, but you haven’t grasped it. You’re over a barrel. You don’t have a choice. It’s twenty a week, or five and a little co-operation, a partnership. I’ll be frank, we don’t want trouble, but that’s nothing to the way you don’t want it.’

  ‘I must have time to think.’

  ‘No. Here and now.’

  He seemed to be incapable of thought. Major Mellon had shrivelled to Arthur Brownjohn, and it was Arthur who said miserably, ‘Five. And the – the co-operation.’

  ‘Sensible.’ Parker gripped his hand. ‘Let’s get along.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Where do you think? The office.’

  The next hour was one of the most miserable in his life. They took a taxi to Romany House and went to the office of Matrimonial Assistance. He gave Parker five pound notes and then the Parkers went through his files, looking for possible marks and making rude comments. They picked out a dozen possibles, mostly elderly men who said that they had a private income, or middle-aged businessmen. He agreed to send them Pat’s name, with a special recommendation.

  ‘After that you have nothing to do with it. Leave it to Pat. She can size ’em up in ten minutes. The ones we want are married, out for a bit of fun on the side. They have their fun, but they pay for it. What’s fairer than that?’ Parker was in high good humour.

  When they had gone he sat in the little office with his head on the table. The humiliation of watching them go through his files and read the letters on his desk was somehow the worst thing of all. The business he had built was dishonest, yet he took a pride in it and felt it to be something he had created. That he should have been forced to allow these crooks to use what he had done as a basis for their filthy game was hard to bear. He realised that this was what Parker had intended from the start, and that if he had agreed to pay twenty pounds a week something more would have been demanded of him. It was his list of gulls they were after, to make some quick killings. The future was foreseeable. The Parkers might bring off half a dozen coups, but at some time they would choose the wrong person and one of their marks would go to the police. They might be arrested or they might get away, but either way he would be dragged into it, and his complicity would be obvious. And of course his double life would be revealed by any serious police investigation. What sentence was likely for bigamy? In the general wreck of his fortunes that did not seem particularly important. Whichever way he looked, disaster lay ahead.

  Chapter Eight

  The Solution

  The solution was simple enough in its essential elements, and it occurred to him almost immediately. It was that he must say goodbye to Major Easonby Mellon. What was he, after all, but a wig, a beard, some loud suits and an accompanying loud manner? If he were to disappear tomorrow who would be the wiser? The clients of Matrimonial Assistance would write letters, come to the office, and eventually no doubt report his absence to the company that ran Romany House. The company would write to him and get in touch with his bank, but he would have drawn out all except a nominal fragment of the money he had in credit. Joan might be approached, but what could she say except some tales about UGLI 3 and – a nice confirmatory touch – about the man who had come to see him? And who would suffer? Honesty compelled him to admit that Joan would be left high and dry. He felt sorry for her, but was able to console himself with the thought that she was the kind of woman who would always, somehow and somewhere, find a man. To live with men and be deceived by them was her destiny. No, the real sufferer would be – himself. If he was to go on living with Clare the emotional release afforded by Easonby Mellon was a necessity. And the suffering would not only be emotional. If Matrimonial Assistance closed down, what would Clare say when he told her that he could no longer pay the expenses of the household? He shivered at the thought of her endless wrath. The solution so simple in its essential elements was thus no solution at all.

  On Thursday morning he sat brooding in the Lektreks office over a volume dealing with the James Camb case. Camb, a steward with the Union Castle had been accused of strangling a girl in her cabin and then pushing her body out of the porthole. He had no doubt relied upon the absence of a body, but he was found guilty just the same. If only, Arthur reflected, he could make Clare magically disappear so that her money came to him! But of course it was not possible. He closed the book with a sigh at the very moment that a knock sounded on the door. He opened it expecting to see the caretaker and was disconcerted to be confronted by the fine white teeth of – it took him a moment even to remember the man’s name – Elsom, the engineering executive.

  ‘Hallo there.’ Almost imperceptibly Elsom was in the room, which he stared at quite frankly, his gaze passing like a rake over the dusty box files, the single desk with its typewriter, the gas ring for making tea, the blueprints of the Everlasting Torch and its successor the Hammerless Screw Inserter, the notices on the walls certifying that Lektreks was incorporated as a company and that Arthur was a member of the Society of Inventors. Elsom, carefully regarded, was an objectionable-looking man. He had close-cut sandy hair and a sandy moustache, vertical nostrils which seemed distended by curiosity, almost lashless eyes and extremely large square competent-looking hands. He was the sort of man who in that quick glance round would have photographed and permanently recorded anything possibly useful to him. ‘So this is where you tuck yourself away,’ Elsom said. ‘I was passing by and thought I’d look in to see if you were free for a spot of lunch.’

  Arthur intended to say that he was not, but reconsidered. He felt certain that something lay behind Elsom’s casual dropping-in. If he was put off he might drop in again or become a pest on the telephone. There had been occasions, although they could be counted on the fingers of both hands, when people from Fraycut had visited the office, and Arthur had always firmly stressed that it was no more than a receiving place for correspondence, and had got them out of it as quickly as possible. Clare herself had been to the office only twice, conveying both her contempt for it and her astonishment that he was able to make a living from such a place. She had conceded that it was a good address, but the whole ambience was obviously a wretched one when put beside the Slattery connection. Arthur felt that it would be a good idea to get this grinning bristly Elsom out of the office and also to damp any curiosity he might be feeling. He said that a spot of lunch would be very nice.

  They ate in a pub not far away. Elsom was known in the Grill Room. He took charge of the meal, giving particular instructions about the way in which their steaks should be done, and going into details about the wine. It struck Arthur that he was being treated with some attention. When the steaks came Elsom attacked his savagely, and kept up a flow of conversation about people in Fraycut until he had eaten the last scrap. Then he asked how things were going.

  ‘Going? Oh, business you mean. I mustn’t grumble.’ He added untruthfully, ‘Very glad you found me.’

  ‘You don’t put up much of a front.’

  ‘What would be the point?’ Arthur had countered this remark before. ‘My business isn’t done in London, it’s personal.’

  Most people left it at that but Elsom, at the same time that he gestured to a waiter to bring a tray with the puddings on it, said out of the side of his mouth, ‘No girl to take messages.’

  ‘It’s difficult to get efficient staff. I use an answering service.’

  Elsom nodded and transferred his interest to the trolley, ordering what proved to be a huge portion of trifle. He disposed of it in a few gulps and Arthur, toying uneasily with crême caramel, had the feeling that his companion needed something crunchy on which to sharpen his teeth. No wonder that a trifle was quickly disposed of. Elsom’s next remark took him by surprise.

  ‘Can’t help feeling a bit sorry for old Clare.’

  ‘You mean her illness? She was much better whe
n I left yesterday.’

  ‘Don’t mean that. Being the grass widow was what I had in mind. I mean, you’re away three, four nights a week.’

  ‘Oh, not always. It varies.’

  ‘If I were you I’d be feeling worried.’ The words were alarming. What did the man mean? ‘She’s damned attractive, your good lady.’

  ‘Clare?’

  ‘I wouldn’t go off and leave her half the week, I know that.’ Elsom took a mouthful of scalding coffee and roared with laughter. ‘Just pulling your leg, old man. Perhaps it’s the other way round, eh? A few home comforts up in the Midlands?’ He laughed again.

  Those were the vital words, although their possible implications were not borne in upon him at the time. It had never crossed his mind that anybody could think Clare particularly attractive. ‘You don’t really mean that you think Clare is –’

  ‘Not a bit of it. Shouldn’t have said anything of the sort, schoolboy sense of humour, it’s got me into trouble before. Still, I expect you’d like to get home a bit more often.’ He leaned over the table. ‘GBD might make it possible.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ll lay it on the line. We’re interested in acquiring firms that are going concerns but aren’t, how shall I put it, flourishing quite as they were. That doesn’t matter, positive advantage in fact. Don’t ask me why, it’s one of these financial fiddles about stock distribution, I don’t understand it except that after every little takeover the directors get richer on paper. Well, Lektreks sounds like a candidate to me.’

  ‘For takeover?’