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« on: November 21, 2023, 10:50:01 am » |
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MACDONALD HAD meant to spend the morning with Brian Salcombe, but when Sally Dillon’s message reached him, the chief inspector changed his plans. Thus Brian found himself in the company of Inspector Jenkins, a stout, cheerful man who had grown grey in the service of the C.I.D. Jenkins’s retiring age had overtaken him some time ago, but Jenkins didn’t want to retire, and Macdonald didn’t want to lose him: stout Jenkins undoubtedly was, and a slow mover these days, but his long experience and shrewd judgment made up for his decreasing mobility, and nobody at C.O. had as long a memory as Jenkins concerning the methods, characters, and peculiarities of the old lag class---the recidivists, whose motto was an inveterate: “Next time lucky.”
Jenkins first took Brian to St. Monica’s Hospital, Paddington. They left Scotland Yard in a police car, and Jenkins kept up a non-stop commentary on London past and present, interspersed with beguiling reminiscences of his own career in the detection of crime.
Brian had started out feeling worried and depressed, but he soon forgot his depression in lively interest and eventual amusement at this unusual---and unorthodox---commentator.
In the shining corridors of St. Monica’s, Brian felt depression shutting down on him again: he hated the smell of hospital, the glimpse of ranks of beds and white faces, the trolleys which passed them on the way to the theatre.
Jenkins gripped the lad’s arm firmly: “Appendicitis,” he murmured. “Wonderful, isn’t it. They do ’em in dozens, regiments of them, so to speak. Nobody had ever heard of it when I was a nipper. It was Edward VII started it, and it’s just gone on. I often wonder if it’s all my eye. To the right here---ah, good morning, Sister: does me good to see all you girls looking so fresh and bonny. How’s our patient?”
“From our point of view, he’s doing wonderfully,” replied Sister, and Jenkins said:
“That’s fine. This is a friend of his, come all the way up from Devon: can he just have a peep?”
“Yes, of course. You know he’s still unconscious, don’t you?---and very quietly, please. You see, we still don’t know much about unconsciousness, but we do believe that quietness is essential.”
Brian stood and looked down at the bandaged head: with a stubble of reddish beard on the pallid chin, the lips relaxed, the nose pinched and jutting, it was difficult to recognise Dick. Then Brian saw his hands, and knew them at once: he had often noticed the contrast between Dick’s long fingers and his own hamlike fists. He stood there wishing with all his heart he could convey his own thoughts to that silent, motionless form on the bed.
Then the sister touched his arm, and with downcast eyes Brian tiptoed back to the door, careful not to glance at the other beds. The door swung silently to behind them and Sister said:
“I know he looks terribly ill to you, hardly alive: but he’s very much alive. When I take his pulse I marvel at the steadiness of it, the way his heart is going on doing its job, and his lungs as well. He hasn’t had any of the troubles we often get with head injuries. His mind is asleep, but his body is busy with mending itself.”
Brian brushed his hand across his eyes. “Thank you for saying that. It’s so queer to see Dick like that: we’re farmers, both of us, and he looks a real tough on a tractor.”
“How nice to have a farmer here,” she said. “He must be the first farmer I’ve ever had here.”
Jenkins’s low voice rumbled beside him: “Fine healthy lot, farmers. If I had my time over again I’d farm myself. Thank you kindly, Sister. God bless you.”
They went down again to the busy entrance hall and Brian turned to Jenkins. “It’s Dick, all right. No mistake about that, but . . . oh Lord . . .”
“Don’t you go getting miserable,” said Jenkins as they went back to the car. “He’s alive---and you know the old adage. Now the next chap I’m asking you to have a look at isn’t alive. He’s on a mortuary slab. To the best of our belief he travelled in the same compartment as Greville did, from Reading to Paddington, and Greville spoke to him just as the train stopped. This chap was picked up on the line, having fallen out of a train. We want you to tell us if you’ve ever seen him before.”
It was only a short distance between the hospital and the mortuary and before they went in Jenkins put a firm hand on Brian’s shoulder.
“You won’t like what you’re going to see: they’ve done their best to make the face presentable and recognisable, but the fact remains that what you’re going to see is ugly---very ugly. If you feel upset about it, just remember what that hospital sister said about your mate---‘His mind’s asleep, but his body is busy mending itself.’ ”
Brian stood and looked down at the form on the slab, trying to control his own instinctive recoil---and fear. He knew he was afraid: this was the first time he had ever looked on a dead face, and this face had none of the peace and smiling dignity of death. But after the first moment of horror, Brian’s mind accepted the thing as a thing, having no more connection with life than the dead beasts he had sometimes to deal with. He looked steadily, and then turned away.
“I can’t tell you,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him before, but I can’t swear to it. Even if I had ever seen him alive, I couldn’t tell now.”
“That’s all right. I didn’t expect anything else, but there was just a chance,” said Jenkins.
They went out again into the cold air, and Brian drew in a deep breath, thankful to be rid of the smell of the mortuary, at once antiseptic and tainted.
“Is there a madman around?” he asked Jenkins. “Some lunatic who’s got a kink which makes him kill? That chap---and Dick---it’s crazy.”
“Depends on what you mean by crazy,” replied Jenkins. “To our way of thinking there’s method in the business---in both cases. Now I’m going to brief you for the next part of the job.”
>>2
Macdonald drove Sally Dillon to Wimpole Street and during the drive he got her to talk about the journey up from Devon, in particular trying to find out if she had noticed anybody in the corridor when she had stood there smoking before the train ran into Paddington. Again what Sally remembered corroborated Weldon’s impressions. There had been one heavy, middle-aged man who looked “dirty and shoddy.” He had passed up and down the corridor more than once, but each time she had flattened herself against the window, and had not turned her head to look at him, but there had also been another man of similar age and build who looked “respectable”: he also had passed her more than once.
“How were they dressed?” asked Macdonald. The “dirty one,” she thought, had worn a raincoat, soiled and nondescript, with a cap and muffler: the other a big topcoat, tweedy in quality and a felt hat---“a squashy hat,” said Sally, “but I didn’t really look at them,” she added. “I know they were both large and I wished they’d go back to their places because corridors are narrow. They probably wished the same of me. Have you found out who the writing lady was---the large lady in the corner?”
“No. Not yet. She was noticed at Exeter Station, but she wasn’t known there.”
“I expect she gets so immersed in her writing that she’s above reading newspapers or listening to the radio,” said Sally. “I met a novelist in Devon once and she made an absolute cult of disregarding newspapers and wireless: she said she concentrated on her own work to the exclusion of all else.”
“Did you ever read any of her books?” asked Macdonald.
“I tried---but they defeated me completely: they never got anywhere. I like a story to my novels---a beginning and a middle and an ending.”
For the last few minutes of the drive she chattered on cheerfully and Macdonald was glad that she showed no tendency to “concentrate” exclusively on the story into whose midst she had been drawn by the chance choice of a seat in the train. When they arrived at Dr. Garstang’s, Sally hurried off to deal with the neglected letters: Macdonald sat in the waiting room until Garstang had dismissed his patient, and then went to the consulting room, where he told Garstang the gist of the evidence obtained in Devon.
“It’s an intensely interesting story, and a very unusual one,” said Garstang. “I only hope I shall be able to see the boy if he recovers.”
“Are you quite sure you haven’t seen him?” asked Macdonald. “One of the more surprising facts that emerged eventually was that Greville had been given your name as a consulting psychiatrist and he intended to come to you.”
Garstang sat very still, studying Macdonald with a steady, penetrating gaze, and it was some moments before he replied: “That’s very remarkable,” he said quietly. “Can you tell me any more about the circumstances in which he learnt my name?”
>>3
“Well, that seems to clear things up to some extent,” said Garstang a few moments later. “Harvey, the M.O. of the X Group, R.A.C., is an old friend of mine. About six weeks ago he wrote to me saying that a lad he was interested in, a National Service man, might be coming to me for treatment. Here’s his letter---he writes an abominable fist. The name he gives might be Greville---once you know the name you can make the letters out: if you didn’t know the name his scrawl might convey anything.”
Macdonald sat and studied the M.O.’s letter.
“. . . He’s a fine lad and a good soldier,” wrote Harvey, “but there’s obviously some psychological trouble. I had him in the sick bay to treat a damaged knee but I couldn’t get him to talk. Another chap, who once lived in the same district, tells me that Greville lost his memory when he was a child---after results of the blitz----Anyway, his particular pal came to me last night and asked if I could tell him of a psychologist---no explanation given for the request---but he didn’t want a Service practitioner. So I think it’s probable Greville will make an appointment with you when he’s in England again after demob. I shall be interested to know what you make of him.”
Garstang spoke again as Macdonald glanced up: “Harvey’s a very good M.O. Conscientious and skilful, but his letters are always the same---garbled and muddled. I filed the letter in case the chap turned up, and then thought no more about it---but that’s the explanation of Greville having been given my name. Harvey gave it to the other fellow---Salcombe.”
Macdonald nodded. The explanation was simple enough, but the chief inspector was conscious of a sense of tension in Garstang’s attitude: meeting that deliberately intent gaze, Macdonald found himself wondering if the psychologist were trying to read his mind---or trying to influence his mind: whatever it was, the result was curiously uncomfortable.
Almost as though he were aware of Macdonald’s thoughts, Garstang went on: “I’d like to get this thing straight. I want to help you in this enquiry, and I can’t if you don’t trust me. May I tell you a bit about my own personal history? I think it will do something to explain why Harvey wanted that boy to consult me.”
“By all means,” agreed Macdonald.
“I was born in Germany in 1903,” began Garstang. “My father was a German, my mother an Englishwoman. My father was a doctor of medicine, but he was also a student of the psychological methods developed in Vienna under Freud and Adler and Jung. He was a humane man and he had a horror of war. When he realised in 1914 that war with England was inevitable, he persuaded my mother to go to America and to take me with her. He himself volunteered as an army doctor and was killed in 1915. My mother was unhappy in America and in 1919 contrived to get permission to come to England to live with her own people. The vessel we sailed on struck a mine in a storm and sank. My mother was drowned and I was saved. I arrived in England at the age of sixteen and lived with my mother’s family in the north, eventually becoming a naturalised British subject and taking my mother’s maiden name.”
Garstang stopped here and looked at Macdonald with a half smile. “You may wonder why I have inflicted you with that history, but I think you will agree that it makes me a suitable practitioner to treat young Greville. You have told me about his experience in Germany, about his recognition of the language, his memory of a certain house in Cologne. I was born a German: as a child I lived in Cologne.”
“Yes. I appreciate your point,” replied Macdonald, and Garstang went on quickly:
“I knew you would, because you are a reasonable and highly intelligent man: but because detection is your business you are bound to suspect all contacts in your cases, much as a doctor must suspect contacts with infectious disease. I have told you what was the probable reason underlying Harvey’s recommendation of myself as a psychiatrist, for I am pretty certain he had observed Greville much more closely than the latter realised. I have also told you that Greville has not consulted me. If you suggest I might have connected the boy whom Sarah Dillon described with the boy mentioned in Harvey’s letter, I can only say that such a thing didn’t occur to me. But apart from my own statements, isn’t there any way of ridding your mind of a suspicion which can only be a hindrance to you?”
“By all means let us try to eliminate you in the same way I would try to eliminate any other contact---to use your own word, sir,” said Macdonald. “Where were you on Monday evening?”
“I was in this house: I have a small flat on the top floor, and apart from going out to the post, I was upstairs all the while, until I came down here to my consulting room about half-past nine on Tuesday morning. I was alone, for I have no resident servant.”
“Are there any other residents in this house?’
“Mr. and Mrs. Cox, who do the cleaning of the stairs and entrance hall, live in the basement. Dr. Glynn and his wife live on the floor below mine. They were not in---they stayed the night with their married daughter in Putney on account of the fog. I’m afraid there’s nobody to help to establish my presence here.”
“Did anybody ring you up during the evening?”
“No. I have a telephone upstairs---a party line which I share with the Glynns---but the number is not in the telephone book. I rang someone myself, but that was at seven o’clock, so it’s of no relevance.”
“And if I were to ask you where you were early yesterday morning, I suppose the answer would be the same,” said Macdonald. “You were in your flat upstairs.”
“No. You’re wrong there,” said Garstang. “I work indoors all day, so if I’m to get any exercise it has to be before the day’s work begins or after it’s over. Yesterday morning the fog had cleared: it seemed a major miracle after these last few days of Stygian gloom. I was out before seven o’clock and I walked up to Regent’s Park and trotted three times round the Inner Circle, praising whatever gods there be for such symptoms of dawn as were vouchsafed to us. I daresay the milkman can corroborate my outgoing, the postman my return.”
Macdonald listened to the easy voice with no consciousness of ease on his own part. Wimpole Street was five minutes from Baker Street Station, Baker Street five minutes from Paddington, and Westbourne Park a few minutes beyond Paddington.
Still in the same easy, non-committal voice Macdonald asked: “Can you tell me where you were in the spring of 1941?”
Garstang stared back at him and made no haste to reply: the faintest smile curved his mobile lips. At last he said: “Are you depending on a time reaction? We don’t find it very reliable unless the free-association business is developed very skilfully first. I admit your question surprised me, but I can see the connection. In March 1941 I was in Dijon---of all places in the world in that year of grace.”
A half smile lightened his sombre eyes. “I am not expecting you to take my word for it---though there’s no proof obtainable---but you might get them to disinter some of the records in M.I.5, if they still exist. I told you I was born in Germany: in the summer of 1939 I went to Vienna, to a professional congress, and thence on to Munich and Berlin. I contrived to stay in Germany, by means which I need not elaborate, until the autumn of 1940. I got some messages through to London---whose value was less great than I believed at the time. From September 1940 until July 1941 I was occupied in a very slow, very tedious journey, through Belgium and France and Spain. I eventually reached Bristol on July fourteenth . . . Quatorze Juillet, 1941. I then reported to London, to the gentleman who had originally suggested that I might be very helpful if I would co-operate with some of his agents inside Germany.” Again Garstang smiled. “It may have occurred to you that I look older than my years warrant: I take it that I’m younger than you are, but I don’t look it. That was a very ageing journey and I’m afraid it was quite futile so far as the authorities here were concerned---but we all took ourselves very seriously at the time. If you ask me to prove precisely where I was in the spring of 1941, I can only tell you that it’s beyond my powers. Most of those who befriended me---and many other better men than me---are dead.” Again he fell silent for a moment and then added, quite cheerfully, “I’m afraid from your point of view it’s all rather a mess. I don’t know exactly what’s in your mind, but from the trend of your questions I can guess to some extent.”
Macdonald laughed. “Then we’re both in the same boat,” he replied. “You said a short while ago that your job and mine have something in common: we both go trawling for our livings. We both ask questions and assess the answers in the light of our training and experience. You say you want to help in this enquiry and it’s plain that you’re well qualified to help. I suggest that you talk to Brian Salcombe, getting such information from him as you judge should help you to understand what state of mind Greville was in---and that I listen to both questions and answers.”
Garstang chuckled. “I like that,” he said. “It’s very astute, and it’s a sort of inversion of my usual practice. I usually assess the answers: you, in your turn, are going to assess the questions I ask. I have a feeling that if I were the criminal I should be in for a tricky spell.”
“But you agree to the suggestion?”
“Certainly I do: and if I succeed in evoking any information you haven’t already acquired, I hope you’ll give me due credit.”
>>4
When Jenkins and Brian Salcombe left the mortuary, they drove out of the borough of Paddington into the borough of St. Marylebone.
“I always say the air feels different the minute you’re across Edgware Road,” chuckled Jenkins, “but then I’m a Marylebone man myself: born in the High Street—my dad had a grocer’s shop. Marylebone’s my village, and we never had much opinion of Paddington. We’ll drive round Regent’s Park, round the Outer Circle---you’ll soon see what I mean.”
As they drove in that pleasant roadway between the newly painted Regency mansions and the lake where ducks were being fed by youthful Londoners, Jenkins “briefed” Brian for his next job---that of talking to Dr. Garstang. As though with a policeman’s sense of appropriate timing, Jenkins had Brian on the doorstep of 500, Wimpole Street at the very moment that Macdonald wanted him. It was all as neat as a conjuring trick, and Garstang seemed to realise it.
“Dramatic fitness---or routine?” he enquired somewhat sardonically.
“You might call it guesswork,” rejoined Macdonald. “Since you have been good enough to put off some of your patients and give us your valuable time, I’m glad the guess was a good one, for no time will be wasted.”
They sat down in Garstang’s consulting room, the four of them: Jenkins, an unobtrusive amanuensis, sitting out of sight by the door: Macdonald near the window, Brian facing Garstang across the table. Listening for undercurrents, Macdonald was aware that the young farmer was distrustful of Garstang and prepared to dislike him, but so skilful was the psychologist’s manner of approach, so even and kindly and understanding, that Brian’s abruptness and slight aggressiveness faded out, to be replaced by a genuine effort to answer the questions put to him and to answer them fairly and fully. The two voices went on: Garstang’s deep, quiet, and gentle: Brian’s so much younger, so much less under control, anxious, and insistent.
Macdonald did not learn anything new from the first stages of the enquiry: indeed, the story as elicited by Garstang’s questions lacked the intense vividness of Mrs. Greville’s narrative, and Macdonald’s mind carried two parallel versions, so that some of the old lady’s phrases returned to him in a visual awareness. “. . . He put him over his shoulder as he would have a sick lamb and brought him to me, and I fed him like a baby. . . .” It was later in the interview that Macdonald had no time for his own thoughts: Garstang was asking about the house Richard Greville had remembered in Cologne.
“You were on a road running south from the city, in the direction of Bonn? . . . You passed the remains of a modern church close to a civic building like a town hall, for instance, with pointed windows and a lot of elaborate carving, and reached a crossroads? . . . The lane was on the right, just beyond the crossroads, and the house had three gables, rather tall and narrow, and they were roofed with rather elaborate tiles?”
“That’s right,” said Brian.
“And was there a wistaria growing up the house?”
“Wistaria . . . oh, a creeper, you mean . . . a thing with mauve flowers . . . Yes. There was. Why, do you know the house?”
“I knew it once. The pastor’s name was Baumgarten: he had lived there for years. He kept a small school for about half a dozen little boys, and his wife boarded some of them.”
“A school,” exclaimed Brian. “Then Dick must have been at school there---but why didn’t he remember? If he remembered the house, he must have remembered being there.”
“Not if he didn’t want to,” said Garstang quietly.
“But I tell you he did want to,” cried Brian.
“You’ve got to realise that we have ‘wants’ on different levels,” replied the other. “A whole lot of our behaviour is conditioned by wants, needs, desires---and fears as well---that never emerge into our conscious minds at all. The simplest way of understanding it is by admitting that we don’t forget to do the things we like doing, but we do genuinely forget things that bore and irritate and worry us, whether it’s paying bills, taking medicine, or writing duty letters. But let us leave the explanations until later, and get back to those last few weeks when you were in Germany. Did you and Greville invariably spend your free time together?”
“No, of course not. We didn’t always have the same duties, so we weren’t always free together, and anyway towards the end of the time Dick went broody. He didn’t want to go out: it was as though he were afraid to go out. That’s when I began to realise something had got to be done about it. Things were getting him down.” Brian suddenly thumped the table with his fists. “I wish I’d never done it, never interfered. If Dick had come on to the farm with me right away and cut out all the college business he’d have been all right. He suggested that, but I said no. I told him to come and see you and then go on to Reading. If it hadn’t been for what I said this would never have happened.”
“Something would have happened, and that something might have been worse,” said Garstang. “The strain on his mind might have led to more hideous disaster than you realise. You’ve nothing to blame yourself for---far from it. Now you were demobbed together and you went back to Devon together?”
“Yes. Dick went home to Moorcock and I got busy at Long Barrow.”
“Did Greville stay at his home the whole six weeks between demob and his journey to London last Monday?”
“All but a few days. He went to see his uncle in Wales: he borrowed my motor bike and had the heck of a time with it. Everything went wrong that could.”
Garstang sat in silence for a moment, then he asked, “Are you quite sure he went to Wales?”
“Yes. He told me so.” Brian’s chin went up and his eyes met Garstang’s angrily. “Dick’s never told me any lies---or anyone else, either,” he added.
“All right,” said Garstang. “Don’t get in a bate about it. But remember this: You could see for yourself that he wasn’t normal; I know much better than you do that he was living under an intolerable strain, and it’s quite possible that his whole character might have been affected by that strain.”
Brian looked at him angrily. “You’re trying to twist things to suit your own theories,” he protested. “It may be all very clever and very scientific---but I know Dick.”
“Nobody knows anybody,” said Garstang quietly. “All you know is what they want you to know . . . want with their conscious minds, that is.”
He got up, adding, “Thank you very much. You’ve been very patient and very helpful.”
“Thank you for nothing,” retorted Brian unreasonably.
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