by MARY HOCKING
The baker whose premises were below Moray’s office was now giving a guided tour to two constables. He had said he didn’t think the walls were very thick, but when the constables returned they reported that the wall between the bakery and the downstairs passage of Moray’s office seemed ‘pretty solid’.
Braithwaite said, ‘I see,’ and looked grim, as though he had had to relinquish a much-favoured scheme.
At this moment, the chief constable arrived. ‘Now, what do we know about this fellow?’ he demanded. ‘How does he tick, eh?’
‘Unmarried,’ Braithwaite told him, ‘and I don’t think he’s the kind who would listen to an appeal from his old mother-even if we knew she was alive, which we don’t. But I’ve got someone on the way here who may know something useful about him. Major Brophy. He was concerned with Cope and Moray in the election campaign. And, of course. Cope was in the army.’ He spoke as though the very fact of Cope having been in the army would mean that Major Brophy would read him like an open book.
The chief constable was not impressed by Major Brophy, but agreed that no harm would be done by hearing what he had to say. ‘As long as we don’t waste much time.’ He had publicly criticised the inactivity of the police in other cases of this kind and felt he was committed to action.
‘Lomax wants to see you, sir,’ a constable, who had been waiting the moment to intervene, said to Braithwaite. ‘He says Cope tried to kill him last night.’
They stared at him incredulously. He said, ‘There may be something in it, sir. We had a message from Eastbourne and it’s true he was in hospital there.’
‘Better get him,’ the chief constable said.
They were talking in the saloon bar of The North Star, the public house opposite to Moray’s office, which had been taken over as emergency headquarters. The constable went into the street where other officers were holding back sightseers and newsmen; he beckoned over the heads of the crowd to the officers who were with Lomax.
‘Is that ’im there, that one up at the window?’ a small boy asked.
Above, from the window over his jewellery shop, Sebastian Shoemack was entertaining a few favoured customers, one of whom was regarding the scene through a pair of binoculars; the small boys, despairing of information from the police, turned their attention to him. ‘What can you see, mister? ‘As ’e got them tied up?’
The policemen pushed the boys back as they escorted Lomax through the crowd. He looked white and shaken when he entered the saloon bar of The North Star and the chief constable grudgingly offered him a brandy. Lomax, who wanted above all else to keep his head clear, insisted on water. It was not an auspicious beginning and the arrival of Major Brophy did nothing to improve matters.
Outside, an ice-cream van had stopped on the periphery of the crowd, but had attracted no custom; there was a feeling that anything might happen at any moment, even in the few seconds it would take to buy a choc. ice.
‘An alternative world,’ Cope said. ‘Right here in Sussex on the Downs. It was like being born again. There is something in your myth, Hannah. One does need to be born again. But it has dangers. Do they tell you about them? After a few days, my mental processes were affected; ideas had been jettisoned some way back, but now even thoughts didn’t string themselves together, in fact, they seemed to be unravelling rather than knitting up. All impressions were visual, undifferentiated and without meaning. I was an unrelated being in an atmosphere in which there was no reason, no pattern, no sequence of events, no cause and effect.
‘You know, dogs are much more conditioned to civilisation than man. I begged from farmhouses from time to time; the farm folk thought I was a gypsy boy and no one reported me to the police. But the dogs didn’t like me. I didn’t fit into their idea of the respectable. Nor yours either, I suppose, Neil. Do you think we might have some coffee, Hannah? See if it will liven him up. I really must try to stimulate a little more audience participation.’
Neil was still sitting on the packing case. His position was unchanged but he had undergone a physical transformation. His body seemed to have shrunk so that his clothes hung on him, while his features had become slack as though the mechanism which controlled them had worked loose. He appeared to be aware of this and from time to time he fumbled with a fold of cloth, examining it with some perturbation; then, this having provided no clue to his condition, he would raise a trembling hand to trace the line of mouth or cheekbone. He looked furtively ashamed. It was plain that Cope’s words made no sense to him.
‘I kept to the hills most of the time. Occasionally I saw a town in a valley, white and black, or grey and black; I only felt secure when I put a fold of the Downs between myself and the town. The weather broke with the hunter’s moon. At night the temperature went down below freezing point. I got rather sick. And about the time I got sick, I discovered a city in the Downs; but this one wasn’t white and black, or grey and black, it smouldered blood-red as though the sun went down in it, the buildings were very close together and seemed all gables and spires, nothing flat anywhere. When I got a little better I tried to find the city, but I never came to the right one, they were all white and black, or grey and black, whereas my city had been on fire, the streets and walls flaming around you as you walked. I never found it. They found me first.’
‘Did they expel you?’ Hannah asked.
‘Far from it! I was a hero. I had lived up there for several weeks. It was a remarkable feat of survival for a ten-year-old. A great test of character and physique. They approved of that.’
‘How are you going to manage about coffee?’ she asked.
‘You are rather a Martha, aren’t you, Hannah? Well, I think you are going to take that packing case over there and put it just below the window sill, and you are then going to put the cup of coffee on it. From time to time I shall relax sufficiently to sip the coffee. I don’t think Neil is going to rush me, are you, Neil? FOR GOD’S SAKE, MAN! Are you?’
Hannah pulled up the packing case and put the cup of coffee on it, then she poured out black coffee and took it to Neil. ‘This is black, good and strong,’ she said. She wanted him to be strong, because she needed to let go and she could not do it while he was like this. All the time she continued to hang on, she was being carried inexorably further and further from reality and she was afraid a time might come when she could not get back. Instead of taking the cup, Neil took her free hand. He gripped it very tight, while his body shook and his face contorted grotesquely; he cried, silently, the gash of a mouth gaping.
‘Neil,’ she whispered. ‘Come to the window. You may feel better then.’ But he shrank back against the wall and hunched his shoulder in front of his face, trying to hide himself.
‘So, you see, I can’t ask Braithwaite for a walk on the Downs,’ Cope said. ‘I’ve, as you might say, “done the Downs”.’
The carnation walls of The North Star were bathed in brilliant sunlight, and the glare was now fiercely reflected in the half-window of Moray’s office. Cope could have asked for no more effective cover. Two policemen, reputedly crack shots, were installed, one in the upper room of the Chinese restaurant, the other in a bedroom at The North Star. Neither man was confident that he could be sure of killing Cope with his first shot.
The chief constable, who was a believer in swift, decisive action, was angry with the two policemen, with the sunlight, and most of all, with Lomax and Brophy.
‘A clear picture doesn’t seem to be emerging, does it?’ he said grimly. Ts he a cool customer who’s got everything well organised, working to sortie plan, or is he just a maniac with a rifle?’
‘He’s a very good organiser,’ Brophy said cautiously. ‘He did wonders during the campaign.’
‘But he didn’t commit himself to it in advance, did he?’ Lomax said. ‘In fact, he came into it as a result of a spur-of-the-moment decision at a party.’
This had been going on for some time. First Brophy said one thing, then Lomax contradicted it. To the surprise of the chief constabl
e, Lomax was emerging as by far the more dominant personality of the two. He watched with distaste as Brophy once again retracted. ‘Always thought that was odd. Must agree with you there. An odd fellow. Unpredictable.’ He finally threw in the sponge. ‘Think you probably know him better than I do.’
‘It doesn’t seem as though either of you can be much help,’ the chief constable scud.
‘It isn’t easy to find a solution once he has been allowed to get into the office carrying a rifle.’ Lomax was deliberately offensive because this was something the chief constable understood and equated with strength. ‘And particularly as no effort was made to stop Miss Mason going in a quarter of an hour later.’
‘That kind of thing is of no help now.’ The chief constable was angry, but he was reluctant to dismiss Lomax; Cope’s attempt on the man’s life gave him status of a kind. He said, ‘Have you anything to suggest?’
Lomax was desperately anxious and uncertain. He knew, however, that certainty was the only thing the chief constable would settle for.
‘I am absolutely certain,’ he said with what resolution he could command, ‘that the only chance of getting Moray and Miss Mason out of there alive is to give Cope time to play this out in his own way.’
‘But he may kill them.’
‘Yes, he may. But you won’t stop him doing that by rushing him.’
‘And what do you mean by “playing things out in his own way”?’ It went against the chief constable’s principles to indulge a criminal in this fashion.
‘I think it is possible that in time Miss Mason and Moray may lose their importance for him.’
‘They are hostages, damn it!’
‘Yes, but he’s not consistent; he loses sight of things, or they
cease to be relevant to him. It could be he won’t want to take
anyone else over the edge with him.’
‘If you imagine that that type would spare anyone else. . . .’
‘I’m not talking of sparing people. I am suggesting there are experiences he will reserve for himself.’
‘I’ve never heard such nonsense! And if he has a brainstorm?’
It was this possibility which chilled Lomax; indeed, it seemed to him to be rather more than a possibility. He said carefully, ‘If he had a brainstorm, you wouldn’t want to have done anything to precipitate it, would you?’
He could see that he had made his point. If things went badly wrong now, the blame would be his.
There was a ripple of laughter from the street. A plainclothes man by the window explained, ‘Says he’d like Ted to lend him Morning Cloud. Seems to be enjoying himself up to now.’
‘You won’t be needing me any more,’ Lomax said. He left the saloon bar and telephoned Allinson at the Gazette office. Then he went into the street. He looked up at the room where they were. Cope had drawn the sliding window so that there was only a slit of darkness from which the rifle pointed. The reflected light was very bright now and it was impossible to see any of the occupants of the room.
How disaster simplifies one’s feelings for a person! Only this week, as he watched Hannah coming down the road to meet him, he had realised it was already too late to question their relationship and he had been filled with misgivings. Now, he loved her without reservation, a state of loving he had never achieved before and would probably not sustain were she to be restored to him. The fear that she might not be restored to him was so terrifying that he felt he could not see this through, that he must go back to the office, get a few of his impressions down while they were still fresh in his mind. Those women who wait at pit-heads, hour after hour, how do they do it? It was something he had never asked before, they were so much an accepted part of the pattern of disaster. He remembered that when he was a reporter on a northern newspaper he had seen a girl trying to drag her mother away; the older woman had said, ‘I can’t leave him.’ It hadn’t made sense. But now, without it making any more sense, he could not leave Hannah.
‘There’s nothing you can do here, sir,’ a constable advised. ‘Better go in.’
‘I’ll stay if you don’t mind,’ he said.
People were coming up from the beach, the usual holiday entertainments abandoned in favour of the surprise attraction of a man holding two people to ransom. The police were having difficulty in keeping the street clear.
‘If no one gets hurt they’ll ask for their money back,’ the constable said to Lomax.
Three acrobats from the pavilion show were staging a free demonstration in an attempt to get a better view. The knife thrower had already offered his services to the police.
By half-past four, nothing had happened and the ice-cream vendor was doing brisk business.
Cope said, ‘I think I shall have to ask for an aeroplane soon.’ It was such a small room: stalemate and a small room! ‘But if I had an aeroplane there would be nowhere really interesting to go. There never has been, of course.’ He had created a situation for other people to deal with, just like starting a fire. He began to walk up and down the room. Hannah watched him. ‘And even if there was somewhere – still to go, I would have to take myself along. There are two people inside me, Hannah. One of them wants to be free of the other. You don’t seem surprised. Is this true of all of us? Am I the last to be told about it?’ The skin was drawn tight so that the skull showed, the eyes were very bright and becoming more protuberant; it was as though someone was indeed trying to escape, Hannah could almost feel the pressure behind the eyes.
She went to the window. He did not seem to mind, or even to notice. Her strength was nearly spent, the effort of keeping her head above panic-level would soon be too much. She must take in something of that sane world outside and try to store it away, releasing a little at a time to keep her going until the next opportunity. But the view was not reassuring. The people seemed pathetically unmotivated, policemen standing aimlessly, looking up but not seeming to focus on her, a man with a ladder and nowhere to put it, a fire engine without a fire; farther away, sightseers jostled one another, a man hoisted a child on his shoulders, a girl stood on the roof of a car and a boy scaled a lamp-post, Chinese faces smiled from the Chinese restaurant kitchen, television cameras were in position on the flat roof of the building behind the Lantern Shop. Yet nothing was happening. They were all playing make- believe. She remembered how, as a juror she had seen the policeman and the prisoner standing shoulder to shoulder, the one face impassive, the other sullen boxed in together, the truth locked between them, condemned to watch a charade which bore no resemblance to what (had really happened: and now, she and Neil and Rodney were boxed into this room while the people outside indulged in an absurd fantasy of their own devising.
‘Telly,’ Cope said, coming up beside her and pointing the rifle at the cameras. ‘In every sitting-room in the land they will be living through this great experience with us. Can’t you imagine them, the little voyeurs. . . .’ He spat out the last phrase with something more than contempt. He was becoming desperate. Whatever else is handed out to us, there is only one death apiece, so it is worth taking trouble over it. He should have thought of this before; it was hideously wrong to go into death blazing away with a rifle like any mad Jock. There must be something else, some other way. He said, ‘ “A flower on a tall stem and three dark flames. . . .” ’
Hannah no longer listened or attempted to understand. At first she had thought that if she kept with him, it might be all right, that even if it involved a glimpse of his alternative world, it might be the only way to survive; but now she began to realise that it was a world that could only be entered by those who are prepared to risk their sanity. This did not mean that she doubted its reality. Indeed, at the moment, it seemed more real than anything else. It swirled around them. Neil was witness to this. For some time, he had been feeling the edge of the packing case as though it was a one-man ark in which he was now marooned. He appeared not to realise that it was not his body, but his mind that was at stake, and he constantly readjusted his limb
s. Now he was taking off one shoe, muttering, ‘Must keep circulation going. . . .’
Cope said, ‘Is fire the answer, as long as one doesn’t run away from it?’
Hannah looked out of the window and saw that Will had come into the street. He had his arm in a sling and he, too, was looking up, but like the others he seemed unable to see her. Yet he remained there, gazing upwards. Through the invisible screen which separated them, she gazed back at him. After a moment or two, it no longer bothered her that he was unable to see her, they would only have wasted precious time, like one did on long-distance telephone calls. It was better to have him like this, quite still, so could draw from him what she needed which certainly wasn’t a smile, a wave of the hand, a frantic attempt to convey instant reassurance. What it was she needed, she could hardly have said. At times. Will had seemed to her to be an elusive and not entirely safe person whose mind darted ahead of hers, questioning more, accepting less. And now, he was, by his stillness, detached from all the busy little people down there; essentially solitary, not obviously a comforting person. But more than comfort was needed now. She concentrated on Will, trying to shut everything else out of her mind, Rodney prowling round the room, Neil huddled on his packing case; and all the time she was conscious of a note, which although soundless, she could hear rising and rising so that if she opened her mouth it would even out into one incredibly high, sustained scream which would tear everything apart and put an end to all resistance. It seemed the pressure must burst her ear drums; she clenched her teeth and concentrated on Will until gradually everything around him blurred and dimmed and there was only one point of light which trembled on his face.
Cope said, ‘We can rip up the packing cases. There may even be some paraffin in the store cupboard.’
The sun went down behind the tall chimneys in Scotney Square, throwing out gaudy streamers of orange, turquoise and crimson; in Pont Street, there was already a blueness as though arc lights had been switched on. From the open window of a car a young man was saying, ‘This is Martin Penney speaking from the radio car in Pont Street; behind me is the network of alleys called The Warren, but this evening the prey is not in The Warren, he is still . . .’
