A Cry from the Dark

by Robert Barnard

  “Oh, The Chattering Crowd,” said Bettina with practiced friendliness. “My first book set in London.”

  “I’m sure I shall enjoy it,” said the woman, slipping tactfully away.

  “I suppose that’s a book about the arty mob, isn’t it?” said Mark.

  “Something like that,” said Bettina, though that was in fact precisely what the book was about.

  “You’d know about them. But how did she recognize you, Auntie Bet?”

  There was no mistaking his expression now. There was on his face the most naked, naive, childish jealousy.

  “Oh, I used to appear on arts discussion programs on television,” said Bettina. “Before the BBC dumbed itself down.”

  But something in Mark’s reaction—not the jealousy but the naïvety—made her remember her father’s reaction, shortly before his death, when she gave him one of her books. She dictated it into her tape that night, knowing she would have to fit her father’s death into the novel somewhere.

  Bettina flew back to Australia in three laborious stages in 1961 to see her father, who was dying of kidney failure. He had been living for the last three years in Ollie and Judy’s home in Bendigo, northern Victoria. She brought with her one of the first copies of her book The Chattering Crowd, which she had great hopes for. It was an exciting time to be part of the British literary scene. Angry young men vied with sparky young women for critical attention, and once again, as in the Brontës’ time and Arnold Bennett’s, writers from the provinces, soon to be renamed “the regions,” had pushed their way to the forefront of public attention.

  Bettina could not compete with writers from Stoke-on-Trent or Nottingham. She had quarried her first twenty years of life in four novels set in Australia and it was time to move on, as she had moved on in actual fact fifteen years before, to London. The Australian novels had done respectably, but they had certainly not managed to go with the tide of popular interest aroused by Shute’s bestseller A Town Like Alice. Bettina had not been surprised. She had not aimed at or expected bestsellerdom. But it was time to move on, time to make use of that sharp, satirical intelligence that she had only intermittently brought into play in the first novels: it was the age of the Discontented Migrant, and there were too many people sounding off about the awfulness of Australia for her to want to join them. It would have been the emotional equivalent of rejecting mother’s milk.

  Jack Whitelaw lay in the bed, gaunt, seeming to lack totally the grit and vigor that had been his when Bettina really knew him, twenty-odd years before. They kissed and cuddled, and Bettina lay beside him in the bed.

  “How are you really?” she asked at last.

  “I’m a bit worried,” said Jack slowly. “I’m trying to juggle the date of my death so it doesn’t interfere with one of Judy’s Tupperware parties.”

  “Oh, Dad!” Then she looked at him and they both giggled.

  “She doesn’t actually have Tupperware parties,” admitted Jack, “but she does love having the young married set around so they can discuss the price of frozen peas and tinned baby food.”

  “I don’t see why Judy should worry about the price of baby food,” protested Bettina. Ollie and Judy’s first child, Marileen, had not been born until two years later, and Mark’s birth was all of twelve years away.

  “She has her family planned. Judy’s good at long-term strategic planning. Now aren’t I an ungrateful mongrel, going on like that? They’ve both been very good to me, and I expect I’ve been a dead weight on them since this happened.”

  “Why didn’t you stay at Wilgandra, Dad?”

  “Bill’s getting old and sick himself, and he’s grooming one of his nephews to take over. I’d’ve only been in the way…That was my happiest time, you know, Betty.”

  “Was it, Dad?. At Wilgandra? I thought giving up Fort George—”

  “No! I knew that place couldn’t be long-term. It was never going to come good. Oh, I hated that blasted drought, and the look of the cattle and sheep, and I hated being defeated by it all. But I knew I couldn’t win. You needed plenty of capital to come through a time like that terrible drought. But only half of me—less than that—hated giving up my independence. I enjoyed managing a big place, having cash reserves to spare so I could really make plans—big plans sometimes. And Bill always supported me. That was his nature. He hated not being able to support that bludger Paul Naismyth.”

  “He was a disaster.”

  “Bill never hired anyone sight unseen after that. Not even a kitchen hand. He was good-natured, you know that, but he hated being imposed on. Did you know Paul and his snooty wife split up, and he was arrested for conning elderly ladies out of their life savings soon after the war?”

  “I knew the first, not the second.”

  “Worked the English seaside hotels. Was banged away for two years. You could use him in one of your books.”

  “I don’t use real people,” said Bettina, an automatic response. Then she pulled herself up. “Well, I do, but I always have to say I don’t.” They laughed again. She dived into the traveling bag beside the bed and brought out a copy of The Chattering Crowd. “It’s not quite published. Out next week.”

  Jack Whitelaw took it. His eyes widened. He seemed to be struggling to find something to say. It was almost, like Mark, as if he never saw books, as if they were not part of his life, which was not true. Bettina knew from her letters that he had read her early books. She took pity on his sudden attack of inarticulation and kissed him on the forehead. He grasped her around the neck and gabbled something about how proud he was.

  The cover of The Chattering Crowd, not chosen by Bettina but atmospherically drawn by Ardizzone, showed a collection of fashionably dressed people in little groups clearly engaged in gossip and spite under a sparkling chandelier. Later, in the bath, trying to wash away traces of the last leg of her plane trip, Bettina decided that her father had been moved by the well-heeled people on the cover, the splendid setting, and they had been an image for him of how far his daughter had traveled from her origins in Bundaroo.

  She herself was not inclined to think that the in-group of London literati, which she had satirized in the book, was so very different, or so much more elevated, than the society in which she had grown up.

  “So what do you think actually happened here that night?” Bettina asked Murchison as he sat opposite her drinking coffee. “Not who was in here, but what did he or she actually do?”

  Murchison took his time before replying.

  “He or she took the aboriginal painting. But Mrs. Jackson was found battered at the door between this sitting room and the study. We feel he had in fact been in the study—it’s nothing more scientific than a matter of disturbed dust on the desk.”

  “But speaking of scientific evidence, what about DNA?”

  “Nothing much of interest yet. It takes a hell of a time. And criminals are getting wise.”

  “So you haven’t ruled out a professional?”

  “I’ve told you, nothing is ruled out. If you look at the evidence the idea of a professional has a lot going for it. An article appears in Hi! magazine. There is a photograph of Kerry Probyn beside the John Mawurndjurl. Not only that: Have you read the article itself?”

  “I couldn’t bear to. Silly little bitch.”

  “The article says that the Mawurndjurl is part of ‘a choice and varied collection of Australian art.’ A thief would only have to check a telephone directory to find your number in Holland Park Crescent—obligingly named in the article: Don’t they have any sense?—and come at night into a not particularly well-protected building and case the joint to see what’s worth stealing.”

  “Would he be likely to know that?”

  “He could be, if art is his speciality. If not he has only to go to a book on Australian art and note down the big names: Nolan, Drysdale, Boyd, and so on. He could have been looking for the big names on your pictures when he was disturbed.”

  “Yes, he could…On the other hand?—”r />
  “On the other hand, it’s difficult to account for his presence in the study, if there was one. There’s only two or three pictures in the study, and the presence seems to have been at the desk. Of course the person disturbing the dust could have been Mrs. Jackson herself.”

  “If Katie decided to do some housework, reverting to old routines, she’d have dusted, not just disturbed some dust. She had no interest in my writing, and no reason for snooping around on my desk.”

  “Right. So if we take it that the intruder was at the desk this gives us an alternative scenario. The painting then becomes something he grabs as he leaves the flat to give credence to the idea of a burglary. It was just by the door, remember. Probably he’d always intended covering his tracks by taking some paintings, but having to attack Mrs. Jackson panicked him and he made it less convincing than he intended by just taking the one. In this scenario it was the desk that was the object of the break-in—or the entry we might call it, if he had his own key.”

  “I see. And what in particular about the desk? My memory novel?”

  “Yes. Someone could be afraid of how you might present them, what you might allege about them, in the book.”

  “I don’t see why.”

  “I’m sure you do. You have a reputation for putting pretty cruel pictures of real people in your books.”

  Bettina became frosty.

  “Oh? Had you anyone in particular in mind?”

  “I’ve been reading up about you. There was a book about the London literary scene. A lot of people recognized themselves, and a lot of critics claimed to recognize real writers. It made the book’s fortunes.”

  “The Chattering Crowd…” Bettina was forced to go through a thaw. “There was Kingsley, of course. I thought him a loathsome man…and Philip. And poor Iris. Awful to think of the Alzheimer’s, then that horrible book, and the film. No one pays even lip service to dignity and privacy these days…And Olivia Manning had a bit part—she hadn’t made her name then, but she had made herself felt…And Ted and Sylvia, the happy young pair—all glamour and poetry. Yes, I’d have to plead guilty that there were sketches of people in that book. But they’re all dead.”

  “So I believe,” said Murchison. “But if you can do that to mere literary acquaintances, someone today who’s a close friend, or someone who’s been a close friend of yours at some time, might be afraid about what you are intending to do to them in this new book.”

  “Who in particular?”

  “Many people—some whom I know, some whom I don’t know yet. Peter Seddon; your agent, Clare Tuckett; Eugene Naismyth, whom I haven’t had time to talk to. Then there’s your brother Oliver and your daughter Sylvia—”

  “In Edinburgh.”

  “Late plane down, early morning flight back. Perfectly possible. I’m just throwing the full range of suspects at you.”

  “Yes. You haven’t mentioned Mark.”

  “No.” He looked at her closely. “I thought you might tell me about yesterday.”

  Bettina nodded.

  “Ah, yesterday. I’m not sure there’s all that much to tell. I learned that filming a commercial is a thing of mind-bending monotony.”

  “All filming is, I suspect,” said Murchison. “I once had a case at the old Elstree Studios.”

  “But there the end product might have some weight, or some style, or some intellectual content. But a commercial about sweets, filmed by grown men playing around like boys? Sometimes I really yearn back to the time when we only had one television channel, no color supplements, when advertisers didn’t rule the roost, and when the billboards were not packed with smutty innuendoes and glossy status symbols.”

  “Well before my time,” said Murchison.

  “Of course. This is just an old woman’s ramblings. I had the impression that Mark was getting the hang of doing commercials. But he also has the traditional Australian attitude to people in authority—thumbing their nose at them, not taking any bullshit from them, as he would probably call it. That may well harm his prospects over here, but I must say I found it rather refreshing.” She thought for a moment. “Though when it was aimed at me, as a matriarchal figure in his family’s life, I didn’t like it at all.”

  They both laughed together.

  “He and the other chap, a footballer, came up and talked to us in the break, both very conscious of the young women among the spectators; then they filmed the dramatically demanding sequence of Mark stealing the bag of Munchets from Mel Whatever-his-name-is, and after that they all knocked off for lunch and Mark came along with us to find a suitable pub to have lunch.”

  “Yes…You’re leaving something out, aren’t you?”

  “Well, not really. It’s just a matter of impression.”

  “Your impressions are what I want.”

  “All right, here they are, however childish: A young woman came up to me on the promenade with one of my books. She’d recognized me earlier and slipped into town to buy it. Mark looked at the book quite bemused, as if—I don’t know—he didn’t realize people still read books, couldn’t understand why a young woman would read one of mine, and then finally…”

  “Go on.”

  “I don’t think I imagined it: a look of jealousy, almost childish, that I was getting attention. Public attention, the sort of thing he would like.”

  Murchison left a long silence.

  “I recognize that sort of childishness. You often get it in criminals. In others, too: actors, opera singers, stars of all sorts. In aristocrats as well, particularly ones who have nothing much apart from their birth to recommend them. It’s a craving for attention, a need for it, an inability to understand why anyone else should be receiving it when only they deserve it. Politicians have it in spades.”

  “I can’t think why Mark thinks he’s worthy of it, has done anything to deserve it.”

  “I don’t think that enters into it. I had the impression when I interviewed him that it was the old notion of being God’s gift—to women, of course, but to everyone else as well.”

  That chimed in with Bettina’s own observations.

  “Yes, and yet with it there is something else. Uncertainty. He—and others like him—acts like he’s God’s gift but somehow behind the facade you sense that he doesn’t believe it.”

  “But that’s part of the childishness, isn’t it? Always needing reassurance. Being the center of the world’s interest in his own eyes, but always finding evidence that the world has other, more important things to think about.”

  “Yes. That seems to make sense. But I must say I can’t see Mark having the nous, the perseverance, the nerve, to carry out a burglary and an attack such as the one in this flat. And what could be the motive in his case?”

  “Your memoirs? As we said before, they could have gone up to the present day, they could take in living people you know.”

  “They could. But why should Mark imagine he would figure prominently?”

  “He didn’t need to figure prominently. Vanity hates pinpricks. Just a casual aside, a dismissive sneer, a cruel joke, would be enough. He could easily have feared that sort of treatment. He knows you don’t like him, I’m sure.”

  “He certainly knows he doesn’t impress me. I’m so old I don’t think he’s thought about liking one way or the other. When he stayed here, when he first arrived, he tried to treat me as an irrelevancy, but I wasn’t going to put up with that.”

  “This all ties up with vanity, doesn’t it? The child or adolescent thinking he’s the center of the universe.”

  “Maybe. But I still don’t think Mark is capable of this…I tell you one thing: if he did do it, you’ll find evidence against him. He’s not bright enough to have thought of everything.”

  “Then we don’t have to worry: There’s no danger of his not getting caught, is there?”

  Chapter 17

  Declaring Allegiances

  “Bettina?”

  “Hello, Hughie. Who else could it be?”

 
“Sylvia’s voice is quite like yours. But of course a bit more Australian.”

  “Of course. But Sylvia moved back to Mark’s flat several days ago.”

  “You’re not nervous on your own? You really are all right?”

  “I really am all right,” said Bettina, concealing her exasperation. “What are you ringing about, Hughie?”

  “I have a very faint trace, a possible trace, of the John Mawurndjurl picture. Don’t get your hopes up—”

  “You’ve already raised my hopes. I love that picture. Hughie, why don’t you come—both of you, of course—to a little farewell drinks gathering I’m giving for Ollie and Sylvia? It’s at the Prince Leopold—early evening, about five. They’re off to the National later on.”

  “At the Prince Leopold? I don’t know why you bothered to move out.”

  “It’s at the Prince Leopold because the alternative, here, wouldn’t be exactly conducive to jollity.”

  Hughie cleared his throat, chastened. Bettina knew very well how to chasten him.

  “Of course not. I’ll be there.”

  Jollity reigned only fitfully at the gathering. Ollie and Sylvia still had two more days in London, and Bettina was taking them to Windsor—one of her favorite places—the next day. This was the only time the Prince Leopold had one of its smaller private rooms available. Clare didn’t add much to the jollity, and Hughie’s manner suggested that attending such a gathering involved bending—even stooping—to a level he did not normally function on. Bettina was just glad that Marie had been on one of her monstrous shopping binges and sent her regrets. Peter, as so often, was the jolliest, and swapped stories with Ollie about British roads and with Mark about the sporting scene and television advertisements.

  “These days they’re the best things on television,” Pete said.

  “Too right. Little miniature dramas,” said Mark. “That’s what our director calls them.”

  Seeing Pete looking at his watch, Bettina said, “And how are your miniature dramas, Peter? Someone lined up for later?”