by Julian Gloag
Willy’s face grew tighter. She said nothing.
“You don’t believe it, do you?” he said.
“You are a silly goose. Of course you couldn’t do a thing like that.” Her tea was untouched, her hands folded in her lap.
“That’s comforting.” He opened the cigarette box on the table.
“Oh, Jordan!”
“What?”
“Just look at your hand.”
His fingers were brown with nicotine stains. The scars of battle with the police, he thought.
“You don’t need another, Jordan. You know what Dr. Wilcox says about smoking.”
“Oh damn Wilcox.” He lit a cigarette.
“May I have one?”
“Sorry.” He gave her one and lit it. She smoked just like her mother, with an awkward nineteen-twentyish nonchalance. It was about the only thing she and her mother had in common.
“Tom says,” Willy began.
“Tom isn’t God almighty.”
There was a pause. “That’s not very fair,” she said.
“No, I suppose not. I’m sorry.” He was irritable, but—why couldn’t they leave him in peace? “Well, what did Tom say?”
She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Your mother will be upset.”
“It’ll do Mummy good to have something worthwhile to be upset about for a change.”
He couldn’t help laughing.
“Is that funny?”
He nodded, smiling. His irritation melted. “I’m going to have a drink. Want one?”
“No thanks.”
He didn’t expect her to drink, not now. He remembered his headmaster saying once, “Never take a drink before you make a speech.” Willy thought like that. Life’s hurdles had to be crossed stone-cold sober. If you really needed it, you shouldn’t have it. Aunt Mary had a rule that no fires were to be lit before November the first or after the end of March. To break the rule would … He stopped pouring. The ghost of Uncle John rose before he could prevent it—jolly and dotty and uncomplaining and broken dead at last against Aunt Mary’s iron rule. With an almost physical effort, he pushed the thought away.
He poured a larger whiskey than he’d intended and drank half of it at once. Insulation. He turned and looked at Willy. He smiled at her and she smiled back with the cold edges of her mouth.
“I wish you got on better with your mother,” he said, surprising himself.
“She’s impossible.”
“Yes.” But in a charming way. “At any rate,” he said, “It’s a good thing you get on well with Mary—and Trevor.”
“I admire Aunt Mary tremendously.”
“And she thinks the world of you. And expects the worst of me. This won’t come as much of a surprise to her.”
“What do you mean? You said there was nothing to worry about!”
“No, no. There isn’t. Absolutely nothing.” Why did he do it to her?
“Tom says it’s all circumstantial,” she said, earnestly. “There’s nothing concrete. Unless they’ve got something up their sleeves. And what could they have up their sleeves?”
A piece of me, he thought. Just a tiny nick from my flesh. She went on talking, but he didn’t listen. He thought of his arrest now as a foregone conclusion. But only, he told himself, because it was a habit of thought always to expect the worst, so that when it turned out that way—and on the whole it did—one wasn’t too surprised. It was only a common safety precaution, and of course it was quite useless against the worst disasters.
Willy stopped speaking.
“Well,” he said, “it’s no good getting worked up. All we can do is wait and see.” He poured himself another drink. “It’s a bit nerve-wracking, isn’t it?”
She was still for a moment, and then she nodded.
He felt he had won a small victory. And with the weekend to get through, every little bonus helped.
6
He held the daffodils awkwardly. Willy never appreciated the problems of carrying flowers on a crowded Monday-morning bus from Waterloo to the office. It was easy enough in the train—just put them in the rack and forget about them. And he often did forget about them, leaving them for some lucky porter.
He struggled out of the bus, holding the daffodils high, like a talisman. He felt slightly sick—he could hardly remember a morning lately when he hadn’t been a bit hung. He made himself walk fast; get the alcohol circulating. He was almost at the door of the office when he heard the familiar voice.
“Excuse me.”
He stopped. “Well, what is it now, Mr. George?” He was aware of a tingling excitement in his legs. Perhaps this was it.
“We’d like you to accompany us to the station, if you don’t mind.”
He didn’t mind. He was past caring. He saw Symington standing behind the superintendent. “Why?” he said.
“For further questioning.”
They even had a car waiting for him. He got in the back beside George. Symington sat in the front.
“Bad day for traffic,” said Jordan after a little while.
Neither policeman answered, or even appeared to have heard him. Jordan felt a flush of annoyance. Still, the police weren’t paid to be courteous. Nor were they paid to sit sulking while they might be using this travelling time for a good purpose.
“I suppose you want to ask me about the flowers,” he said. It had been on his mind all weekend long. “Not these.” He touched the daffodils resting ridiculously on his knees as though he were an undertaker’s assistant. “I mean the flowers I took—left with June, rather. You found them, didn’t you?”
Again they said no word; didn’t even look at him.
“Well, you see—” he wasn’t going to be put off like this—“Willy—that’s my wife—always gives me flowers from the garden, you know. Every Monday. To brighten up the office. Tell you the truth, I don’t much care for flowers—but there you are. Well last week it was tulips. Yellow tulips, weren’t they? Yes, yellow I think. June always seemed rather keen on flowers, you know. In fact, I very often used to let her take them home with her. I mean, there was hardly any point in chucking them away. Not that I would have, of course, but … Well, anyway, there I was—home, or, rather, at June’s home, so I thought I’d just leave them with her. She was very grateful. I suppose you want to know all about that. Well, they were wrapped in green—”
“Save your remarks for the station, Maddox,” said George tonelessly.
“I was only trying to help.” Bloody rude they were. If they wanted to ignore him, he’d ignore them. Then why the blazes were they taking him to Sarah Street, if they were just going to ignore him? Further questioning. But he had every right to supply the answers before they asked the questions, if he wanted to. And he did want to. After all—and he saw this quite clearly now—it was important for them to understand exactly what happened last Monday morning. He wasn’t making any bones about that any more. He cleared his throat.
“You’re probably wondering how I came to forget about the tulips. You must think I have a rather exceptionally faulty memory.” He laughed and, as he did so, Chief Superintendent George turned and stared at him. “I have for some things—not for others of course. Flowers—well, as I said, I’m not awfully keen on flowers. I said that, yes. That makes them rather easy to forget. Eminently forgettable, in fact. What I’m getting at … is that …” He turned his head away quickly and looked out of the window. One couldn’t go on talking to wax dummies. It was bloody humiliating. If they didn’t want to hear what he had to say, why didn’t they say so? They had said so. In that case …
He tried to concentrate on the people hurrying to work along the pavements. But all he was aware of was the rising nausea in his stomach. He clenched his teeth. But there was no effective way of fighting off car sickness except to stop and get out, and, although to vomit over the black leather seats would be the ultimate degradation, he could not ask that. He just had to hang on, battling every yard of their pro
gress in the creeping traffic; not thinking beyond, of their time of arrival, of their destination. He tried to mark each street, craning to read the names. He concentrated on the advertisements on the buses and hoardings—every one seemed to be for whiskey or gin or beer or, in bright characters that leapt out at him, for milk.
They passed the bottom of Panton Place, but he could hardly connect it with anything in his mind except the ingestion of chocolate Swiss roll. He swallowed desperately and gripped the daffodils on his knees, crushing their bright yellow trumpets.
Even when the car finally stopped and they got out and went up the steps of the police station and along the familiar green corridor, Jordan hardly dared relax his inner concentration to ask for the lavatory. He asked, and as he did so he knew it was only a matter of seconds.
With the impatient paternal tolerance of a father left in charge of a child at the seaside, Symington escorted him to the place and waited as Jordan staggered into one of the open cubicles and knelt tremblingly on the damp stone floor. The stained bowl, a cigarette end shredding gently in the yellowish water, was a vision of surcease. But he only managed to bring up a trickle of brown watery matter—remnant of uneaten meals. The agony of his empty retching gradually dwindled and at length he was able to stand up, the bitter taste filling his mouth and his eyelashes wet with tears.
The water in the tap was cold and there was no towel. He dried his hands and face on his handkerchief. As he followed Symington, he felt as though he were being led to an operation where the surgeons would slice open his stomach and read his guts for portents. He would accept it gladly, in return for a dose of anaesthesia and long drugged weeks straight in a hospital bed.
It was a different room this time. Larger, with two desks at right angles. George was sitting at one, and Symington took his place at the other. Jordan sat down uncertainly, not knowing who was going to ask the questions or whom he should face.
In front of each officer was a cup of tea. Jordan longed for one; but he determined to maintain his silence—to say nothing until he was asked.
But he wasn’t asked. George sipped his tea and said carefully, “I must warn you, Maddox, that anything you say will be taken down in writing and may be given in evidence.” Then he went on drinking.
The telephone rang and George picked it up. He listened for a minute, then hung up without having said a word.
Jordan looked at Symington, who seemed to be absorbed in something he was writing.
“Shall I—?” He cut himself off. And then, closing his eyes for a second, he accepted as inevitable that any promise he made to himself now would almost immediately be broken. “Shall I tell you about the flowers?”
“You would be well advised to tell us everything, Maddox,” said George.
“Well, I will.” He paused because he sensed the policeman knew something he did not know; there was something that George was grimly withholding from him. Perhaps if he could find it out and—tell them. Perhaps it would be alright. “It’s only the flowers that I forgot to tell you about,” he said.
But the superintendent didn’t respond.
“I’ll tell you about the flowers then.” He tried to order his thoughts, but it was hard to do in the face of George’s impassive hostility. “I told you, really, in the car, but …” He began again the vapid tale of how he had brought tulips to June.
As he talked, he found he didn’t care what he said. If it sounded as though he had carried an offering of love to his mistress, very well. Not to worry—it was almost a physical relief.
“Again,” George said dryly.
“What?” Jordan was dragged from his pleasing mist of incoherence.
“Let’s go over that again.”
He started to protest; but protestation would use up more energy than compliance. But this time it was not so easy. George kept harshly interrupting him.
“How many flowers, Maddox?”
“I don’t know. Quite a few. I didn’t look at them.”
“Six, eight, ten?”
“Eight. I don’t know. I really don’t—”
“Seven?”
“It might have been seven.”
“There were seven tulips, weren’t there, Maddox?”
“Alright. There were seven. Seven tulips and some leaves.”
“Leaves? That’s new. Tell me about the leaves.”
He couldn’t really remember about the leaves. He’d just thrown them in for good measure. There must, of course, have been leaves. There always were. He didn’t know what kind—but eventually they settled on rhododendron leaves.
“And what did Singer do with them when you gave them to her?”
“I told you. I didn’t give them to her. I just left them there for her. I probably said she’d have more use for them than I would or something like that.”
“In other words, you gave them to her.”
“If you want it that way. Alright—I gave her the flowers.”
“What did she do with them?”
“I don’t know what she did with them.”
“Did she put them in water?”
“I don’t remember. I don’t think she did anything with them.”
“Think, Maddox.”
He tried. All he wanted to do was shut his eyes and go whirling off to a place of private peace. But he had to concentrate. He found himself concentrating only on the possible right answer. “I suppose she put them in water. It would have been the logical thing to do.” He tried to detect from George’s countenance whether or not he had given the correct reply. If only he could get a hint of what it was the superintendent was hiding, what he was holding up his sleeve.
And then he had it—up his sleeve. He’d had it all the time. He even managed to smile at his own obtuseness. Up his sleeve—the short deep scratch the cat next door had given him. There was no cat next door. They’d probably checked that already. They had certainly got the results of the skin test. So they knew that too.
And suddenly Jordan didn’t mind any more. He knew what they wanted, and he would tell them, tell them the truth, and then it would be all over and they would be happy and he would be happy. But wouldn’t tell them at once. He’d save it up a little—as they had saved up their knowledge—and there was something oddly exciting about that thought.
As George pushed and pried, Jordan answered gently. The superintendent’s hard anger didn’t worry him—he’d make the old man smile again soon. The only discomfort he felt now was the dryness of his mouth—and hunger. He was actually hungry. They brought him a sandwich at one point. He was surprised to see that it was lunchtime. A cheese sandwich—stale, butterless bread. But he ate it. He didn’t mention his great thirst. The slaking of it he held out to himself as a kind of reward.
The superintendent leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette; there was something particularly ridiculous about the tiny Woodbine in that huge hand.
“You’re in very serious trouble, Maddox. You’re a well-educated man—do you really think it’s amusing to be flippant in your situation? Or wise, Maddox? Is that what they teach you at Oxford?”
“Cambridge.”
“I don’t care a bugger where it was!” said George loudly. There was a momentary tremor in Jordan’s good humour—but he clung to the comfort of the simple explanation he would give, when the cobwebs would be swept away. “I think,” he said, “you’re making a fuss about nothing.”
George grunted. “It might interest you to hear we’ve got the results of the skin test.” His voice was quiet now. “It’s no use beating about the bush.”
“Oh, I know that.” In fact, it was rather funny. Quite a joke.
“What exactly do you know?”
“I know the results are positive. That’s obvious.” He smiled at the alert expression on George’s face—poor chap, he was on pins and needles. “It’s quite simple.”
“Then it won’t be any trouble to tell, will it?”
“Quite.” He savoured the moment. “T
hat memory of mine again, I’m afraid.” He gave a little laugh. He lifted up his wrist and pulled his sleeve back to show the thin thread of scab. “June scratched me, you see. It was an accident, of course. I remember when we went up the stairs to her room, she warned me about the carpet at the top—the runner had come away and it was loose. Well, when I left, she didn’t come all the way to the door with me. She came to the top of the stairs. And as I turned to say goodbye, my foot—right foot, if you want to know—skidded. I was holding the typewriter in my left hand, with the manuscript under the same arm, so that I couldn’t steady myself on the banister. I must have instinctively put out my right hand, and June tried to grab it. But all she managed to do was give me a rather nasty scratch on the back of my wrist. I stumbled down a couple of steps but didn’t hurt myself. She was very upset about it. Wanted to put iodine on it, et cetera. And, well—” he smiled—“that’s about it. She went back to her room, and I went off to the office.”
He waited, but the policeman just stared at him. Perhaps it wasn’t a huge joke, but at least, Jordan thought irritably, it was worth some reaction.
Then George turned to Symington. “Did you note that down, Bill?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, tear it up. We won’t be needing that page.”
Jordan was puzzled. Was it a jest? “Surely …” he began.
“When did you think that one up?” asked George mildly.
“Think … I didn’t … Don’t be absurd. It’s absolutely true. That’s what happened.” He felt a frightful lurching in his stomach.
“Wouldn’t convince a child of two.”
“But, good lord …” His voice trembled. He tried to get control of it. “Can I have a drink of water?”
“Help yourself.” George indicated a jug and a glass on top of the filing cabinet.
Jordan got up. He clutched the jug tightly, but even so spilled water as he filled the glass. He drank one glass, two, three. It was warm and heavily chlorinated, and went from his lips to his throat without moistening his leather-dry mouth.
As he sat down, he felt the water flushing last night’s whiskey into his bloodstream. He was beginning to feel sick again.
