Young Man, I Think You're Dying

by Joan Fleming

  “Well, anyway,” she returned, looking up blandly at the ceiling, “anyway … it’s a lovely evening, let’s go there again … to Maidenhead, the river will be nice tonight …”

  Anyone with more imagination might have seen a red warning light, flickering on and off, somewhere around the top of her head. As it was, W. Sledge only very faintly seemed to smell burning. He swung his legs off the arm of the sofa and sat with his elbows on his knees, looking at her thoughtfully but not really thinking.

  “Why not?” she argued. “The worst of the rush-hour will be over, we can go down the M4, in your new car.” Pause. “How about it?”

  He wanted to change his clothes, vain always as to his appearance, and the final result would have been better without the topping of thick black hair, as all his clothes had been chosen to complement the red hair. He changed his snazzi-pants to tight black corduroys and put on his dark glasses.

  She gave him a quick glance over: “You’ll do,” she threw off casually, and drew in tightly the belt round the middle of her short striped fun-fur coat, so tightly that she was short of breath, but in any case, she could scarcely breathe for excitement and, yes, fear.

  As they drew away from the parking lot and stopped to allow a car to pass in front of them before emerging on to the road she gave a gasp: it was an open MG and in it was Silas d’Ambrose, wearing his deerstalker hat. They followed him towards the main road but before reaching it he turned off abruptly to the left, up an entirely irrelevant road.

  “See who that was?” W. Sledge asked.

  “No,” she said blankly, “no.”

  “It was your friend from the pizza bar, your boss.”

  “Rubbish! You can’t see properly in those ridiculous glasses!”

  CHAPTER XIII

  MRS. BOGEY’S FINGERS were trembling as she put them to her lips. “No, Mr. d’Ambrose, she hasn’t come back. I … we … we don’t know where she is, really we don’t, any more than we know where Joe is. This is a terrible state of affairs we’ve got ourselves into! I feel if only I hadn’t stayed away those last two days; all went well till those two days I stayed over; if only I’d come back when I intended to!”

  Silas said: “And I’m perfectly sure that when I say your boy’s best friend is a homicidal maniac it sounds nonsense to you. But as I see it, Mrs. Bogey, there has to come a moment in the career of any, let’s say, homicidal maniac (even if I’m wrong) when he has to start, something happens to tip it off. Nobody’s told me anything, I’ve had to guess most of what I know and the police aren’t giving away anything; I’ve been to see them and told them all I’ve guessed about Sledge but they’re waiting for us to give ourselves away and tell a whole lot more, about Joe, too!”

  “Everything happened at once!” Mrs. Bogey wept, “and it’s all because I stayed away. If I hadn’t been away that night, our Joe would never have brought the girl home … there wouldn’t have been room. He only wanted to make use of my bedroom for that one night …”

  “The girl being here may not have had much to do with anything, she was just an added complication, but the point was, she wouldn’t have come to Fiery Beacon at all if it hadn’t been that she met Sledge in the morning, the first day of her so-called adventure.”

  “The only thing I can suggest, Mr. d’Ambrose, is that you go and see the Sledge parents, they’re on the eighth floor front, they may know somethink. You may even find Sledgey there … oh, sorry, I can’t help calling him that, it’s what Joe always called him.”

  So the last desperate thing Silas could do was to ask Mrs. Bogey to tell Frances to be sure to ring him, when she came in, if she came in and, sadly, she closed the door after him.

  “We can’t go on like this,” she said to her husband after he left.

  “Now, don’t lose your nerve,” Mr. Bogey begged, “or we will be in the soup; it’s not like you, dearie; look, your hands are trembling. We’ve done our best and I can’t see as we can do any more. All we’ve got to do is to stay … let’s say … deadpan. Just stay deadpan and let it all roll over us!”

  “Stay deadpan,” Mrs. Bogey repeated firmly as she stared at her own white face in the looking-glass over the radiator.

  So down to the eighth floor.

  “Who is it?” Mrs. Sledge called nervously through the closed door. He called his name but as she probably would not have the slightest idea who he was he added: “Of the Soho Pizza Bar where your son’s friend Joe Bogey works.”

  She opened the door cautiously and peered out, half a cigarette was protruding from her mouth as fixed-looking as a small piece of overflow pipe. Having looked him over she opened the door wide enough for him to be able to pass through without much difficulty, then snapped it shut. She was wearing rollers in her hair and had evidently been reading a woman’s magazine, as she was still holding it in her hand.

  She asked him into the living-room, explained that her husband was not home from work, then said she felt sure he had come about their son Winston. And without waiting for any reply she went on that they really did disown Winston, he was over twenty-one now and they no longer had any responsibility for him. Why did people bother to call? Didn’t they understand, Winston was a grown man now and they couldn’t influence him one way or another?

  Like a mindless goldfish, Silas opened and shut his mouth several times without succeeding in saying anything.

  “Sit down, Mr. Er,” she invited, sitting down herself and lighting another cigarette from the stub. “Winston has been more than a disappointment to me and my husband, he was a lovely kid, I must say that for him, the loveliest kid you ever saw! People used to stop me in the street and say: ‘Oh, what a lovely kid!’ And then, and then …” for the first time she faltered, “but you wouldn’t understand, not being a mother. It was as though … it was like he was going rotten before my eyes, my very eyes! It seemed even before I could turn round, he’d changed from this lovely kid to a long, lanky boy, always up to somethink I knew nothink about, off on his own, up to I’d no idear what! My husband told me to go along and see his headmaster and I did. ‘Adolescence, Mrs. Sledge, nothink to worry about,’ says he, ‘it’s just somethink you parents and us schoolteachers have to put up with,’ says he … and a whole lot of crap about our Winston ‘finding himself.’ It’s like he hates us now, whenever he comes home, and that’s not often, he’s so, so lar-di-dar … makes you sick …”

  “Mrs. Sledge,” Silas at last managed to, as it were, get his foot in the door, like someone trying to sell encyclopaedias, and when she paused for a fleeting second he could not collect his thoughts in time to start off instantly and very nearly missed his chance. “Joe Bogey!” he snapped, just in time.

  “What about him?”

  “Where is he?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Have the police been here?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about?”

  “Asking me, or trying to ask me, questions about Winston. They asked if I knew he had a flat in this block under another name. ‘Know,’ I said, ‘I know nothink at all!’ It gave me a turn, though, the nerve of it! And all along he’s been saying he lived in Colindale with two other chaps.”

  And then Mrs. Sledge stopped pulling at her cigarette and her head almost fell forward on her chest as she murmured, “They were on about an Indian girl our Winston’s supposed to have been keeping as a mistress, she threw herself down it seems … outside …” she jerked her head in wordless explanation.

  Silas paused out of consideration for her feelings but finally said it was Joe Bogey he was worried about. She told him that Joe Bogey had always been a friend of Winston, ever since they were kids, she didn’t know where he was or anything about him, except his parents lived on the top floor front; never had, he was just a friend.

  Then Silas asked for the number of the flat Winston had taken and she said she didn’t know but the name was Ledge. “That’s Winston all over,” she couldn’t help a slight smile, “cunning like
a fox, a near-lie is always better than a great big one, that’s what he said to me once. I must say he’s got somethink there, a big whopping lie … I mean to say … people don’t believe you, do they? But a near-lie … oh yes, he’s a foxy one, that!”

  Since he had managed to get some information out of her, from sheer courtesy Silas let her work it all out of herself and when she was becoming spent from solid talking, he left.

  And it so happened that he called at the seventeenth floor north side flat a short time before W. Sledge returned from his abortive visit to Madame Joan. Just at the moment Frances had turned on the bath water for a fine, full hot bath, and did not hear knock or bell. He rang and knocked and it was clear, he thought, that no live person was in the flat who wanted to answer the door, but there could well be a dead one or ones.

  There was nothing more to do about it but to go to the police, even though he was not hopeful, and discuss with them his fears. As usual they were deadly noncommittal.

  After that it was time to return to the pizza bar to see that the evening staff were there present and correct, but he felt impelled to call, once again, at the Bogeys’ flat, to see if Frances had returned. He knew how irresponsible she could be but he optimistically believed she knew enough not to allow herself to be alone with Sledge.

  Mrs. Bogey was again kind and, this time, very understanding. “I know just how you’re feeling about Frances,” she murmured sympathetically, “we feel that way ourselves, we’ve grown very fond of that girl, Mr. d’Ambrose. Mind you, she likes to dramatise things, I know that full well, but she’ll settle down.”

  He was amazed. Joe missing and now, possibly, Frances, and Mrs. Bogey no more perturbed than if they were simply late home. He wondered if, perhaps, Mrs. Bogey’s misfortune with her husband had been so great that she put up a huge resistance to any further disasters. It was the only explanation he could think up.

  Moodily he descended in the lift and went across to his car, climbed in, started up and drove off the parking lot, turning right, towards the King’s Road.

  A white Rover 2000 was coming out of the parking lot at the back of Fiery Beacon and waited for him to pass. He would never have any idea why he looked at it again in his driving mirror, he certainly did not do it thinkingly.

  Sheer excitement caused an extraordinary shrinking feeling inside his clothes, he felt tiny, suddenly, and hardly able to hold on to the steering wheel, but as they neared the King’s Road he pulled himself together, remembered to switch on his indicator, turned briskly to the left, into a side street, instantly reversed faster than he would have thought possible, and out again to follow the Rover, left in the King’s Road and on … and on … and on.

  Go west, young man.

  Till you get to the Hammersmith flyover.

  And on.

  And on, keeping right as you mount the glorious sweep skyward, over the houses and factory roofs at seventy-five miles an hour …

  Seventy miles an hour being the limit at that time on the M4, the white Rover took wing and went much faster where the road narrows beyond Slough and the traffic thins out but he did not lose sight of it … just.

  END OF MOTORWAY 1 MILE.

  He could have caught up now but he didn’t. Keeping his distance he followed, round the roundabout, along the straight towards Henley … a sharp turn to the right, again to the left, across a common and then he really lost sight of it in the narrow country lane that all motorways seem to end in, with people trying to drive far too fast because they have caught the habit on the motorway but having to crawl behind a stream of other crawling cars. Thus he slid past the entrance to the hotel car-park by the river, seeing the white Rover only just as it stopped, choosing a parking place. He shot over the bridge still too fast, then, in the little country riverside town, stopped and thought. It would be foolish to return and park in the same hotel car-park but he thought of a better plan. He reversed the MG again and drove slowly back over the river; looking left he saw the Rover parked, saw both doors open and out of the nearside door he saw Frances’s lovely legs. He slid slowly past looking for somewhere to leave his car along the road beyond the hotel; it was not easy but a young woman was cutting a hedge in front of a bungalow in the evening sunshine and very charmingly Silas asked if he might leave his car.

  “How long?”

  “Could I possibly … until I’ve dined?”

  “Well, yes …” she hesitated, “but my husband will be home about ten.”

  Silas was almost effusive, he would take it away long before then. But he was not at all sure that he would, as he walked back towards the hotel. What if they were there for the night?

  “You’re very quiet, love,” W. Sledge remarked. “What’ll you have? You’re not much company tonight, I must say!”

  “All right, I’ll have a crême-de-menthe, on the rocks, a big one.”

  She took a seat by the bar window overlooking the river and presently he carried the drink across to her. “On an empty stomach,” he remarked, “this should do you good!”

  She took a big gulp of it, without raising her glass to him, avoiding his look. “I’m shaking inside.”

  “Good!”

  “Don’t get me wrong, it’s your sadism, you like scaring the life out of me, don’t you!”

  But the crême-de-menthe, followed by another, didn’t really lighten the atmosphere, which was heavy and depressing. She was dreamy, very unlike her too-communicative self. They chose what they were going to eat from the menu and when it was ready they went into the dining-room. The drink made her even more morose.

  “You’re like a broody hen,” he complained. “What’s up?”

  “I’m thinking.”

  “About us, I hope. Oh, it’s going to be marvellous, kid! Marvellous! A breath of fresh air and getting away from it all!”

  She hardly touched her food, pushing aside most of the expensive meal, at which he complained bitterly, but enjoyed his own meal.

  With the coffee he begged her to “perk up.” “Are you feeling all right?” he added, peering closely at her. Her face was extremely pale and her eyes appeared to have enlarged; her hands were trembling. She said she was feeling sick and that was something with which he could sympathise.

  “It’s your nerves,” he said reassuringly, “me too, I get that badly sometimes.”

  His kindness was unendurable; she turned away, ashy.

  She got up and ran from the table, she left her handbag on the floor, under her chair. Intentionally.

  Silas, having followed them thus far, could not bear to lose sight of them. Nor could he bear to leave his pizza bar for long without his own supervision. He felt he had to have a telephone call to Mrs. James Trelawny telling her he was unavoidably held up but would be back “at any moment,” which threat would keep them, as he called it, “on their toes.” There was nothing Mrs. James Trelawny liked better than to be left in charge of the pizza bar, but Silas thought it was bad for the bar’s image; her presence giving it more than a taint of an English seaside tea-room.

  Observing now that his couple were dining together by candlelight and that the evening was fading into twilight, he slipped out and over the bridge into the main street, where he hurried the length and back on the other side, without seeing a public telephone.

  He went to the bar and fortified himself with two glasses of stout and rum and a packet of potato crisps.

  He sat brooding as he smoked the last but one of his Balkan Sobranie: he very much loved his Frances Smith, and for the first time in his life thought he had met a girl whom he wanted to marry, and by that he meant a virgin and a girl who would remain faithful to him.

  He had judged Frances to be both these things but tonight he was shaken; he didn’t mind her unpredictability but he had to satisfy himself that it was not sexual.

  So he waited in some disgust because he felt like some paid private sleuth, to see if they had booked a room in the hotel or whether they would drive back to town and retire
together into the Ledge flat in Fiery Beacon. If they did either of those things the affair between Frances and himself was at an end; an unfaithful wife was one of the things up with which, he told himself, he would not put. And with the second stout and rum he was filled with a stubborn Victorian righteousness.

  Lurking outside the dining-room he saw the waiter taking coffee to their table, then he went out to the car-park and concealed himself behind a still brown beech hedge with its pointed buds on the verge of explosion, running between the car-park and the narrow strip of lawn.

  Just below the hotel, half of the river was diverted into a long, shallow weir; it was part of the hotel’s charm that the sound of this weir was constantly present, soft or loud according to the pressure of water. At the moment it was very loud indeed and he realised that he would not hear a word they spoke when they came out, if they did come out.

  Silas did not have to wait so very long, out they both came, evidently having dined without enjoyment. It was almost dark now, the only light being from the windows of the hotel, all except the candlelit dining-room windows which looked over the river in the front and not over the car-park.

  W. Sledge found the key in his pocket and opened the door of his car, climbed in and leaned forward to release the lock on the passenger’s side. She opened the door and shouted so that he could hear above the sound of the weir: “Oh Sledgey, I’ve left my bag … under the seat I sat in at dinner!”

  Sulkily but always the gent, he got out and as he walked back to the hotel entrance she nipped round to the driver’s seat. By now Silas was too fascinated to care whether or not she saw his white face peering through the newly sprouting beech hedge or not. He had to see what she was doing.

  And it was this: she was fumbling with something beneath the steering wheel, which, from his position, he could not see but which he knew to be the padded flap of the glove locker; he saw her right arm tugging something; it was the wire handle of the bonnet catch, in a Rover cunningly concealed in the glove compartment which could be locked with the engine key, against anyone interfering with the engine.