by Iris Murdoch
‘It’s just as well Colette isn’t here,’ said Gerda. In spite of the warmth of the room she had kept her tweed coat on.
‘Yes. She went to London this afternoon to see her Aunt Pat. You know, Ruth’s old friend, Dame Patricia Raven. She’ll stay the night there.’
‘I agree with you,’ said Gerda, ‘there just aren’t any other possible moves.’
‘Obviously we can’t let Colette go to those men, either alone or with an escort, we agree on that, don’t we? If Henry does he may be in danger. There was perhaps some point in Henry playing for time by giving them some money and promising more. I don’t blame him for doing that. After all, the situation wasn’t even clear till then. But I don’t think there’s any point in feeding them more money now. That won’t ultimately save Cato’s life. Now they’ve got some they’ll probably be prepared to wait and bargain a bit. This boy that came, Henry, the one you’d seen before with Cato, you said you thought he was just a sort of pawn?’
‘Cato said he was a petty criminal,’ said Henry, lifting his head. ‘He’s very young. I suppose he’s just got into the clutches of those people.’
‘Exactly. Now it’s absolutely no good our trying to play the detective about this on our own. We’ve agreed on that too. We’ve nothing to go on. This place where Cato is may be anywhere. The postmark is certain to be misleading and this letter gives us no clue.’
‘I can’t think how he can have written such awful letters,’ said Gerda. ‘It’s a terrible thing to do, to involve other people like that. Henry might have got hurt.’
‘I did.’
‘A pity you destroyed the other letter.’
‘There wasn’t any more clue in the other one,’ said Henry sulkily, his chin nearly down on the table.
‘No, this tells us nothing,’ said John Forbes, inspecting Cato’s letter. ‘The only positive thing that can be done is to lay hands on this boy. You said he had someone with him, Henry?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you see the other man?’
‘No, but he said there was someone outside and it stands to reason he wouldn’t come alone.’
‘These people must be ambushed. Henry must go once more and—’
‘I don’t see why Henry—’ said Gerda.
‘Neither do I,’ said Henry.
‘Anyway this is a question for the police,’ said John Forbes. ‘It’s a technical question, a question for experts. I think Henry should be prepared to—’
‘If we agree to tell the police then let’s do so at once,’ said Gerda. ‘I wanted to ring them immediately. Where should we telephone, here or London?’
‘There is a risk in telling the police. I wanted to satisfy myself—’
At that moment the telephone began to ring in the hall. John Forbes got up and went out, leaving the door open. Henry lifted his head and looked at his mother. There was a slight shudder of emotion but neither of them moved. They could hear John talking in the hall.
‘Hello … Oh hello, Pat … Yes … What? But I thought she was with you, she said you’d rung up … Oh my God. Yes, read it, read it… Oh my God … No, no, it’s not your fault… Oh Christ… Look, Pat, I can’t talk now, I must telephone the police … Yes, yes … yes, I’ll ring you back later on tonight.’
John Forbes came back into the kitchen and sat down heavily at the table. He was flushed again. He put his hands to his face.
‘What’s happened?’ said Gerda.
‘Colette’s gone. She’s gone. She’s gone—there—to those men—’
‘How—?’
‘She said Aunt Pat had rung up and that she was going to see her. I was out all afternoon and when I came back she told me and then she went off to the train. But Pat didn’t ring and she didn’t go to Pat’s. She just dropped a letter in there addressed to me with “Please forward” on it. I expect she thought that Pat had gone to bed and wouldn’t get it till the morning. But Pat came in late and picked it up just now and thought it was so odd she opened it—’
‘And what—?’
‘There was a letter from Cato inside addressed to Colette, telling her he’d been kidnapped and that she must come to the Mission house at one o’clock if she wanted to save his life. And there was a note at the bottom from Colette just saying “I’ve gone”.’
‘She must have got that this afternoon,’ said Henry. ‘It must have come by the same post as mine.’ ‘What’s the time?’ said Gerda. It was a quarter past one.
Awkwardly, dragging at her hair which had become entangled in the knot, the boy took the bandage off her eyes. Colette automatically helped him to undo it and he left it in her hand. She was trembling so much that she almost staggered. Walking blindfold had disturbed her balance, and now an ague of physical fear seemed to rattle her whole body. Her teeth clicked together. She blinked and turned her head away from a globe of bright light which was shining near to her face. She was in a small room which was lit only by a candle which was standing on a shelf level with her eyes. Beside the candle was a small square box with a latticed metal front, perhaps some sort of microphone or speaker. The dust on the shelf was scrawled with circling tracks. She stood there staring, her hands to her face, the bandage trailing, her handbag hanging from one arm.
‘Don’t make a noise or they’ll come. Sit down.’
She half turned and saw the edge of an iron bedstead and sat down on it. She dropped the bandage and put her handbag behind her. She wanted to speak but could not. A strangled wavering sound, the very utterance of terror, came into her mouth and died there like a little mouse. Her hands returned to her face and she could feel her mouth trembling. She pressed her fingers against it to stop it. Shocked and helpless, she experienced her terror with a kind of surprise.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘I’m frightened,’ said Colette. Saying it might help, and she could think of nothing else to say. She was able to articulate the words but her voice sounded cracked.
‘Sssh, they’ll hear. Sit quiet for a while. Don’t tremble so. You’ll make me feel frightened too.’
The boy was sitting on a chair looking at her. Colette had recognized him as soon as he appeared out of the darkness of the alleyway behind the Mission, just as she was opening the door of the yard. He shone a torch into her face and by the light of the torch she had glimpsed the odd shape of his glasses and the neat cut of his straight fair hair. He had stood for a moment shining the torch on her. Then he had lowered the torch and had shown her his other hand, which was holding a knife. Neither of them spoke. Colette walked by his side, her mouth slightly open, her eyes staring, her body tethered. He did not take her arm, but she walked beside him through a kind of telepathy, twisting and turning with him through small ill-lit empty streets. Then when they came to an open space where there was nothing but blackness ahead he stopped and blindfolded her. Colette could not understand for a moment what he was doing, but stood there paralysed, then let him lead her on over uneven ground. He still did not take her arm but pulled her lightly by the sleeve of her coat, and still tethered she followed him by telepathy. They climbed over some obstructions and sidled past other ones and descended a ramp and then some steps and entered a place that echoed. Then her hand knocked hard against a wall and they halted and he undid the blindfold and she saw the candle burning.
Colette was for the moment almost entirely concerned with a sort of physical struggle with herself, as someone might be who was determined not to drown or fall. After she had, home at Pennwood, received Cato’s summons she had felt weak and flimsy with terror. Then, coming to her like a long cool breath, came courage, the sudden extraordinary ability to lie to her father, to leave the house, to catch the train, to endure, sitting in a café at the railway station, later in a pub, the awful interval. What chiefly upheld her during this time was the absence of any alternative. Cato had asked her to come, somehow to help him, somehow to save him, and she had to come, just as she would have run into a burning house if she had heard hi
m calling. Still stiffened by courage, and even with relief, though her heart beat so terribly, she had come to the Mission house. She had, putting herself deliberately into a kind of daze, endured the weird telepathic walk through the strange streets, feeling herself, a girl walking with a boy, to be invisible, her crazed mask invisible. But now suddenly there was no more courage, no more purpose, only this shuddering and a mute scream lodged in her throat. Shaken by her collapse into fear, she fought with herself.
Deliberately she looked about the room, not at the boy. She was in a small grey cubical box with pitted concrete walls. The bright candle flame wavered slightly. There was a slight draught and a watery muddy smell. Conscious of the boy’s eyes, or rather of his glasses, which she could see without looking at them, she inspected the rest of the scene. There was the bed, the chair, and a lowish table which suddenly looked to her like an altar. Upon the altar, touched with a moving glitter from the candle flame, lay the unsheathed knife. Underneath the table was a suitcase, with packages of papers piled on top of it and round about it. She pressed her hand against her mouth and took her lower lip between her teeth, then flinched as the boy suddenly moved. He leaned down and picked up one of the packets, pulled and snapped the elastic band that held it, and threw it onto Colette’s lap. She gave a little smothered cry, and then stared down at the coloured faces of five and ten and twenty pound notes which were falling about on her skirt and raining to the floor. The boy laughed, and kicked at the notes as they fell.
‘Can you remember my name?’
At the shock of his movement tears had leapt into her eyes. She rubbed them away with her hand and with the same movement lifted her loose hair back behind her shoulders. Somehow the quick tears steadied her, softly breaking some tension which had seemed as if it could only break with a scream. ‘Beautiful Joe.’
‘Don’t cry. I won’t hurt you.’
‘My brother—’ said Colette.
‘He’s all right. So far. Don’t cry.’
‘Is he here—?’
‘No. Don’t talk loud. There’s no one here now but the big negro who keeps the gate, but I don’t want him to come. If you screamed or anything he’d come. He was reading his comics when we came in. The people I work for are very cruel people. But if you’re quiet and sensible I’ll look after you.’
‘But my brother—what is this money—?’ Colette shook the rest of it off her skirt on to the floor.
‘Ransom.’
‘For him—who paid it?’
‘Someone.’
‘But what’s going to happen, what will they do to him?’
‘He’ll be all right if you do exactly what you’re told. I’m telling you the truth. If you don’t something bad will happen. Look, I want to show you something. Never mind the money, get up, stand on it, stand on it.’
Colette rose and stepped onto the scattering of bank notes.
‘That’s good, that’s nice. You’ve got such—pretty shoes.’ The candle moved and shadows rushed about in the room. She now looked at the boy’s face, but without seeing it clearly, though the lifted light was making it golden. The golden bristles about his lips and chin were glittering and shifting like the scales of a fish. His curling lips lengthened and she could hear his fast breathing. There was a faint vibration in the pitted wall. Colette covered her mouth.
‘Look at this. I bought it for you myself. Today. Yesterday.’
The candle dipped and she saw, under the foot of the bed, an orange plastic bucket, quite new, with triangular paper labels still upon it.
‘That’s the toilet. It’s all yours.’
Colette looked at the bucket. Then for a moment it seemed that something hot, some strengthening cordial, anger perhaps, had been injected into her blood. The sight of the brand new orange bucket somehow filled her with intense annoyance. ‘Look here,’ she said, ‘what is all this, I want to see my brother, I want an explanation.’
‘Your brother isn’t here.’
‘Is he all right? Why do they want me?’
‘You’ll see.’
‘Why—?’
‘Shut up. Be glad you’re still alive. Life is cheap around here. I’ve got to go now. You can’t get out, so don’t try. You’d better lie down and sleep, I mean it’s still night time so you may as well. Don’t make a noise or the negro will come. He’s subnormal, he likes hitting people. I don’t want to come back and find you with your face all smashed. I can look after you if you’re good. If you’re not they’ll take you from me. See?’
The candle moved towards her face and Colette backed away, stepping back over the carpet of bank notes, seeing the low table and the unsheathed knife. The bed touched her legs and she sat abruptly. She saw Joe’s hand descend to pick up the knife. The candle moved to the door and disappeared through it. The door closed and a lock turned. A further door opened and closed, there was a rattle and a click and then silence.
The darkness was thick and total, the absolute dark against which ordinary darkness would show as grey or blue. Colette sat quiet on the bed, both her hands holding her throat. She sat absolutely still for a very long time, her body tense. Then muscle by muscle, limb by limb, she began to relax. She felt behind her for her handbag and found it. It was company, like a dog. It did not occur to her to grope about and explore her prison, she knew that she could not get out of it. Nor was she tempted to shout or scream. If she did that the violent men would come and silence her. She concentrated on breathing deeply and steadily and she tried to think. Cato had said in his letter and underlined it, ‘tell nobody’. Colette had intended to tell nobody, but out of the misery of it and a desire to share her anguish she had dropped the letter in on Aunt Pat who would find it in the morning and send it on to her father. But if her father had paid that ransom money, which even now was strewn all over the floor around her bed, he must know already? But that was impossible. He could not have acted to her, could not have concealed his distress. Somebody however must know, somebody else, who had paid the ransom? Where was Cato now and was he even still alive? Her loving will, so bent upon her brother ever since she had received his letter, now felt checked and desperate. Tears came out in the darkness and wandered on her face. She felt her cheeks and they were blazing hot.
With an effort she decided to take off her shoes. She lifted her feet carefully out and put the shoes neatly together under the bed. She did not take off her coat, but lay back and pulled the blanket up over her. She became aware how cold the room was. Stiffened and aching now with cold she lay controlling her breath and listening. She told herself, I can do nothing now but wait, I have done what Cato asked, I have done right. Now I must simply wait. And as she lay there it seemed that something odd was happening to time, and it was as if her whole life up to now were a sort of present moment which had just gone by, and the present moment in which she now lay, as in a great cup, was of equal length. And she looked at her life and seemed to understand it and to grieve over it as if it were already over, although she did not clearly formulate the idea that she was about to be killed.
I thought I was coming to Cato, she said to herself, I thought I was coming to help him, but this makes no sense now, nothing makes sense now. I don’t know what I’ve done, and perhaps I shall just disappear and no one will ever find out what happened to me. And I don’t even know whether I’ve been brave or whether I’ve just been stupid. And an awful pain of remorse began to grow inside her. Her father had so often scolded her for doing stupid things in a hurry. Here was another of them and perhaps the last. Why had she come running because Cato had written a letter asking her to do something which perhaps he did not want her to do at all?
She lay stiff and in anguish, and then, quite suddenly, with a part of her mind which was not yet in bondage, she began to think of Henry Marshalson. She had loved Henry so much when she was a small child, only no one would ever believe this or even hear about it now. That love all belonged to the elapsed moment. She recalled the strange lurid evening in her
little room in college when she had sat holding her father’s letter telling her of Sandy’s death; and she had felt such a violent jolt of love and certainty, and had understood in a second so many implications and had seen so many visions. And as now she had rushed towards Cato because of his letter, just so compulsively and so blindly had she fled from the college, back to Laxlinden simply and solely to see Henry again, to be with him and to worship him with her love. She turned on the bed, bringing her knees up and bowing her head and screwing up her eyes in the dark. She thought, I ran to Henry, I had to. And she saw his quizzical laughing face framed in the dark curling hair, and his dark glowing eyes looking at her, and she wished for physical desire to distract her from her misery and terror, but it would not come. And she felt with a sadness that she had lost him, not because he did not want her, but because she did not any more want him. In this darkness Henry gave no light, he was just a young girl’s silly empty dream.
‘I’ve got to sleep,’ said Henry. ‘I’ve got to, I have to go to London tomorrow to see the police there, they want me to go to that place tomorrow night.’
‘You’ll be killed.’
‘No, I won’t, the police will be watching.’
