by Joan Fleming
“On the roof of Fiery Beacon?”
Sledge shook his head as Silas turned back towards them.
“Be seein’ you,” Sledge hissed, “outside Bob’s, as soon as you’re off.”
Frances said: “He knows where Joe Bogey is, or seems to.”
“You’re not falling for that one, surely?” Silas remarked with some distaste.
“It could be true; what I don’t understand is his parents taking it all so calmly; there must be a perfectly simple answer to it all, otherwise they’d be frantic. I’ve heard Mr. Bogey himself say that once there’s enough people in a secret it’s no longer a secret.”
“So you’d risk going off somewhere with Desperado Sledge, to some hypothetical meeting-place where you’ll see Joe again; all of you drawing rings round the police?”
Frances said: “You don’t trust me, do you?”
“Not entirely.”
“Well, perhaps you’ll at least admit that I have a woman’s instinct?”
“I certainly don’t, whatever that may be.”
“Well, I’ve got more common sense than you.”
“You think so?”
Frances waved her hands wide apart: “The whole thing … it’s out of hand; W. Sledge is ripe for anything now, he’s got away with murder, after all.”
“By no means, the police are well on his heels!”
“But they’re so slow,” she complained, “they let days slide by …”
“That’s part of giving their suspect enough rope to hang himself, or rather part of getting enough evidence to secure an arrest; it’s more important to arrest a man justly than to let a criminal go if there is any doubt as to his guilt.”
“Ho ho! I don’t think that at all, I’m like my square old Dad, a screaming fascist I suppose he’s called. During the time they’re collecting evidence against him, he could do an awful lot more damage and get himself out of the country. What is wanted is action now and I’ve got an idea.”
“What sort of idea?”
“A pretty lethal one. Don’t think I care a damn about W. Sledge one way or the other, but as long as he’s swanning around there’s going to be no peace and happiness for the Joe Bogey family and I adore them, they’re sweeties, I even like Joe Bogey, like I said …”
Silas had vaulted the bar and picking her up, was swinging her round and round, whilst she kicked out her feet and Mrs. James Trelawny, having despatched her washers-up and on her way out herself, took one outraged look through the curtains and departed by the side door.
“I think I love you,” Silas said, “God help me.”
“I haven’t time for that now,” Frances replied briskly as she struggled free, untying her apron and tearing off her chef’s hat.
“I’m taking you home …”
“You’re not, you’re not!”
“But don’t you understand? I want to marry you. I must be mad!”
“Well, that would be nice but honestly … I’ve a lot on my mind at the moment. Thank you very much, Silas, all the same. The Bogeys have been so sweet to me, I’ve got to help them. Let’s talk about it some other time …” and somehow or other she had slipped through his fingers and away.
“That’s my girl!” W. Sledge snatched at her, hurrying tube-stationwards through the eternal crowd in Leicester Square. “The car is parked down there, just behind the Odeon …”
“Now look,” she said, stopping suddenly. “I don’t want any funny stuff; you said Joe Bogey wanted to see me, well, where is he?”
“In my flat, or will be by the time we get there, waiting outside, I should say.”
“There’s a big difference between waiting outside and being actually inside, because I’m not going into your flat and that’s for sure.”
He made fun of her, asking her if this was the girl who ran away from her wicked Daddy; he didn’t believe a word of it. In the end she stepped quite meekly into the Rover, mistress of herself and of the situation, made over-confident perhaps by the very acceptable offer of marriage she had just received. She would really love to live with Silas, he was tall and thin and handsome and witty and not too young. She could really help him with his work and together they could open more and more pizza bars. Even her father could not complain that he was “not our class, dear,” and would have no excuse for “cutting her off with a penny” with which he continually threatened her. It was a marvellous let-out and happening within a little over a week of her escape “from a fate worse than death” it was only just short of miraculous.
Sitting beside the young murderer she had a feeling of glorious elation, she was more than seeing life, she was taking part in it, she felt wildly happy, secure, wise and fulfilled.
She did not even wriggle away when Sledge put his arm across her shoulders as they walked from where he parked his car to the lift station at Fiery Beacon. “I love this block of flats,” she said, “it’s different, isn’t it? There’s something mysterious about it … all these people living so close to one another and yet not even knowing one another by sight. I wouldn’t mind living here at all, right up at the top where the Bogeys live; it’s out of this world, literally; you can hear the bells all over London and the fog horn, and the air is fresh …”
Arms folded, he was leaning against the side of the lift, gazing at her with a kind of fixed smile, not listening or hearing what she said, his mind on other things.
“But listen,” she went on, “I don’t know why I’m coming up in the lift this side because I’m not coming into your flat if Joe isn’t there, truly I’m not, I mean it.”
Even then she didn’t have a trace of fear; she was as elated as though she were drunk, unimaginatively courageous.
They stepped out of the lift and a few paces to the left, past the half-wall which protruded outwards, screening one entrance from the other. There was no one outside Sledge’s flat; but the fascination of looking over drew Frances to the balcony edge and she laid her arms along the rail and stared out at the view, steaming London with the muffled sound of traffic.
Relaxed, W. Sledge once again threw his arm across her shoulders, ignoring the violent start she now gave at his touch. “Do you know what I’m planning to do? Emigrate, only I’ve enough money to do it quick, not Government sponsored.”
“Oh, where to?”
“I was thinking about Australia, it’s marvellous there. I’ve been taking advice about it.”
“Who from?”
“Well, for one thing I’ve bin along to a travel bureau, like. I’ve heard about how it’s cold down in the south and warm in the north and you’ve got this marvellous sea and loverly sands, not crowded. And loverly freedom.”
“Freedom?”
“Well, you know what I mean. Free and easy, not with the police always poking around, everybody suspicious of you … like here. I could take this new car and … come with me, Frances, we’d make it together marvellous!”
“I can’t do that, all the same.”
“You’d like it with me. I’m a marvellous nice guy, reelly I am …”
“Sorry but I’m fixed up.”
“Not Joe Bogey!” he exclaimed, aghast.
“No,” she snapped, “a grown-up, a real grown-up man.”
“Well, well, that’s quick work,” he said nastily. After a very long pause, during which she stared dreamily out into space he said: “There’s a fortune teller I know says I’m going there for sure, and you’re in it too.”
“Well, she’s wrong.”
“She can’t be wrong, she sees what she sees. Why not come along to her with me, ter-morrer, maybe, and you’ll hear what she has to say.”
“Not on your life, boy!” a favourite phrase with her, evidently.
“Aw, cummon, Frances, don’t be like that. She’s only above the pizza bar, Madame Joan. Marvellous! Oh, Christ!” he started patting himself, his pockets, his hip pocket. “Aw hell!”
“What’s wrong now?”
“My tiger’s tooth! I’ve bloom
ing well left it there, I was so excited. Well, that’s a bit of bad luck! I reckon I’m slippin’; I’m leaving things all over the place, absent-minded, that’s what; I need a rest …”
“Well, never mind about that now, where is Joe Bogey?”
He glanced at his wristwatch: “Should be here any time now. Come in and get us a cuppa, eh?”
“I said no and I meant no!”
He turned away and, taking out his keys, unlocked the door at both locks and went into the flat. She heard him fill the kettle and bang it on to the stove, she heard the electric switch being turned. He came out again.
“Come in, Frances, come in, don’t, don’t be like that.”
“It’s not a question of ‘being like that,’ I’m just not coming in and that’s that.”
“Well, I’ll have to bring you out a cuppa.”
“No you won’t, I came to see Joe Bogey and as he’s not here, I’m off.”
“Give us a chance,” he begged. “Joe’s hiding, keeping out of the way of the police because he’s dead scared about that little adventure we had a week ago.”
“Hiding isn’t doing himself any good, it’s admitting guilt.”
“Of course, but that’s what I’m hoping you’ll tell him! I’ve got confidence; I know the police have to have enough evidence before they start arresting, and I know about how much evidence they have and it’s not a lot. Old Joe loses his nerve too easy, that’s what!”
Frances continued to lean against the rail, her feet crossed one over the other, her back to the front door of the flat and to W. Sledge. She could not, therefore, see his face.
The lid of the kettle started to blup-blup up and down, the water inside now boiling, but W. Sledge stood in his doorway and looked at Frances with her back turned to him, with what he was about to do written all over his face. What a kid she was!
“There goes the kettle!” he exclaimed, his voice slightly strangled from excitement. He moved the doormat with his foot, without looking down at what he was doing, he was wedging the door open. He said: “Well, I’ll have to go and make the tea, if you won’t …” and as he uttered the words he stepped forward and with a single movement put his hand, holding a tea towel over Frances’ mouth, pressing her head back as he had pressed the head of the widow in Kensington, putting a vice-like grip round her tiny waist with the other arm and pulling her back into the flat, across the hall, where her wildly flailing legs kicked over the telephone table and displaced the few mats strewn over the fitted carpet, and through the open door of the tiny bathroom. He thrust her inside so violently that she fell face downwards on the fitted carpet; he slammed the door, bolting the two newly fixed bolts, top and bottom.
Then he went into the kitchen and made himself a pot of tea. “Serve her right for being so bloody stupid, if she wasn’t frightened of me she bloody well ought to have been, silly, sloppy, stupid kid!”
CHAPTER XII
“IT’S LIKE THIS, Mr. Bogey,” the kind policeman was saying, “so long as we don’t know where your son is, he’s by way of being a suspect in the affair of the Bellhanger lady. I personally don’t for one moment believe your son is a killer; from what we have heard about him from his late headmaster, that’s not your Joe’s line. But he was always very easily influenced, and I confirmed this with another teacher, who possibly knew him better.”
“I’m afraid you’re right there, Officer,” Mr. Bogey agreed sadly. “There was a time when I was his hero, so I should know; there was nothing I couldn’t do with that little lad, if I’d wanted. He was ready for any game I suggested, not necessarily adventure but anything with a bit of glamour to it; these old-fashioned adventure stories, like King Solomon’s Mines and all that; you could set him alight with a bit of reading to him; it wasn’t half fun, playing with him, like.”
“Well, you do see my difficulty, Mr. Bogey. It’s hard to have to say it, but so long as he’s not around, he’s suspect.”
“That’s all very well, Officer,” Mr. Bogey argued with deep respect, “but if he was ‘around’ as you call it, he’d be suspect too, since you’ve got what might be his pullover in your possession, found on ‘the site,’ as it were …”
“Mr. Bogey … are you sure you can give me no clue as to the present whereabouts of your son, Joe?” The policeman’s attitude had stiffened, there was no doubt about that.
“I swear to you, Officer, that at this moment I do not know exactly where my son Joe is.”
“ ‘Exactly,’ ” the policeman repeated, chewing over the word. “ ‘Exactly.’ ” He stood staring down at the cripple, who returned his look with a wide open, frank stare.
“Why pick on me?” Mr. Bogey asked pathetically. “What possible use could I be to an …” he hesitated over the word but brought it out triumphantly, “an absconding son? Have you a son yourself, may I ask, Officer?”
Alas, the policeman had two.
“Well then? Just how much do you think you know about their activities?”
It was unanswerable. Check and mate, as Mr. Owland from downstairs would say.
“Let us know if you have any news at all, won’t you?” Mrs. Bogey begged as she let the officer and his silent assistant out of her flat.
“Isn’t it funny,” the Inspector remarked as they went down in the lift, “how you’ll take anything from a physical wreck like him? He exudes a kind of goodness that you can’t doubt.”
“Can’t you?” the silent one put in finally, “I can.”
“You think he was lying?”
“Indeed I don’t. He was being quite, quite candid, as befitting a pathetic and clearly good-through-and-through cripple.”
“What the dickens do you mean?”
“It’s the word exactly; he meant what he said and it was the sober truth, he doesn’t know exactly where his son is. Do you ever, at any moment, know exactly where your sons are?”
But they did not leave Fiery Beacon; they walked round to the north side and took the lift up to the seventeenth floor, stepping out on to the balcony just as W. Sledge was stooping down to pull the doormat out of the way, so that he could close the door. He started so violently that his start could have been seen several yards away. It was the two policemen who had been before, eyes frozen over as they said, “Winston Sledge, isn’t it? Or Sam, er, Ledge?”
“Coo, Officer, you gave me a fright; just doing a spot of housework!” He gave a nervous laugh but was now apparently more than relaxed. “Come in, do!” So this was it, she would scream and it would be all over; why didn’t she scream and “let’s have done with it all,” he thought, wondering how long it would be before he retched and was sick like a dog on the doormat in front of him.
But now they wanted to ask about Joe Bogey and also to see how he reacted to their use of both his Sledge-like names; it seemed ridiculous that two such large men should wish to squeeze into such a small flat and sit down for the short time they stayed. It was as though they wished to familiarise themselves with their surroundings. They, in fact, stared round.
Scream, damn you, scream! Thump on the door! Scream the place down and then it will be all over! No more worries; just a lifer, and time for “me nerves” to settle down. The formality, the extreme courtesy, the glazed eyes: Christ, it was getting him down! He was going to be sick, he knew he was. “Just a minute!” he rushed from the room and leaned over the kitchen sink, heaving. No vomit came, he turned on the tap and dabbed his forehead with cold water, drying it with a tea towel.
He was back in less than a minute in the living-room. There they sat, as though there for life, paying a courtesy call. They turned their blank faces to him, but observing his sweaty white face, his black, black hair …
“So you have no idea where your friend Joe Bogey is, none at all?”
Beyond words, W. Sledge, sick, shook his head. They were actually going. They went. Without a word to one another they descended in the lift, they walked across the parking lot to the waiting car. They got in.
; “He’s dead; he’d have to be; he is the only person who can give evidence over the Kensington-Bellhanger thing; so he’d have to be killed. It’s only a question of when the body will turn up.”
The other wriggled uncomfortably. “No, I can’t agree there, I’m not sure. That smooth-faced cripple and his attractive little wife, they were altogether too, too relaxed!”
“Like to take a bet on it?”
“Not more than ten bob.”
“Taken.”
He couldn’t stand it any longer, he banged on the door.
Silence.
He kicked the door, he got angry and kicked wildly, as though he were trying to break it down. “Damn you! Damn you! Damn you!” he screamed; he beat his fists against it, he kicked again and again.
He sat down on the telephone chair, head in his hands, and cried. He couldn’t be sick so he cried. What was the matter with the damn’ girl, keeping dead quiet like that? Had he killed her?
That was it, he’d killed her. Killing was altogether too, too easy. He’d done it once, he meant twice … it was nothing, no force, nothing. They were there and alive and suddenly they were not there, they were dead. And it wasn’t as though he’d wanted to kill either of them, any of them. It was not what he had intended, this last thing, not at all what he had had in mind.
It was more … something like that marvellous film he had seen, a chap gets this girl as a prisoner in the cellar of his house, keeps her there for weeks, months, gets to know her. It wasn’t sex he wanted so much as … well, what was it? Having this hold over her, knowing that her life was in his hands, he could kill her or rape her or do anything else with her, she was his, quite, quite his. That was the sort of thing he’d had in mind, keeping her, looking after her and torturing her if necessary until she agreed to do what he wanted, which was to go off to Australia with him and the Rover.
He’d had this locking-up lark in mind over Amrita, after he had seen that film; he’d actually said to her that he’d a damn’ good mind to shut her up, like that, in the bathroom and she’d laughed and asked why. And he couldn’t say why. Only he did point out how excellent a place the bathroom would be, since, from top to bottom of the flats, the bathrooms, built one over the other, were part of the lift shaft, central to the building, the pipes and electric cables and air shafts all going up the centre shaft. There was ventilation but no windows in the bathrooms, and you could hammer your way right through the walls to find yourself in the vast dark nowhere; you could scream yourself silly, locked inside one of these continental-type bathrooms, no one could possibly hear you.
