Ben on the Job Page 9

  But some things happened of which he was completely unaware. He was unaware, for instance, of two occasions when a burly figure appeared from the corridor and stood in the compartment entrance, silently contemplating his relaxed form across the carriage’s length. The relaxed form was in a corner farthest from the corridor, head drooped loosely over chest. An ugly mark on the forehead, which had been previously noticed, was now not visible in the recumbent position. ‘That head may look like that again one day!’ reflected the watcher ironically; and on this, the second of the two occasions, he did not return to his original compartment, but slipped instead into the compartment immediately next, no longer occupied by two chattering women.

  The chattering sportsman had alighted an hour earlier at a previous station.

  At last sleep came, sleep without dreams—a blessed victory for weariness. The respite could merely be temporary, however, and suddenly the sleeper was awakened by a voice calling from the corridor.

  ‘Hey! This is Applewold! Are you changing here or going on?’

  Applewold! Yes, wasn’t that what the inspector had said at Euston? Change at Applewold?

  Mumbling thanks to his informant, he stuck his fingers into his eyes to dissipate their heaviness and lurched out on to a grey platform. Faint light was appearing in the east, but a station lamp still flickered rather grudgingly till sunrise relieved it. The informant, withdrawing a little distance, watched him while a porter moved towards the half-awake man.

  ‘Ticket?’ said the porter.

  ‘What? Yes. I think—’

  The porter looked at the ticket, then at the passenger. Was he comin’ down with ’flu or something?

  ‘Couple of hours to wait, sir,’ he announced. ‘There’s a seat in the waitin’-room.’

  Two hours to wait. To wait for what? For another train to take him to another station which, when he got there, would mean no more to him than this one? Well, having covered the major stage of his journey, he might as well complete it. It delayed the necessity of making any further decision, and that alone had its value. Besides, he discovered a few moments later, the seat in the train would be less hard than the seat in the waiting-room.

  Nevertheless, in spite of the hardness of the seat in the waiting-room of Applewold station, he went to sleep once more, watched by eyes that remained wide open beneath a pair of bushy brows.

  He had to be woken up again.

  ‘Train just coming in—if you’re for Penridge?’

  He rose from his seat automatically. Everything was becoming automatic now. His own initiative was defunct, burned by the fever which was smouldering inside him and making him hot at one moment and cold the next; and something else was taking charge—something or someone. A man, wasn’t it? Or was that an illusion, and would the man change into a nurse? Yes, perhaps he was in hospital, and nurses were looking after him, and presently one of them would say, ‘He’s coming to,’ and he would discover that he had had an accident—knocked down by a motor car—and had passed through delirium and nightmare. Very probably, very probably. Feeling as hot as he did, he must have a high temperature. A hundred and five or six, at least. So all he had to do was what the nurses would tell him, and not worry about decisions, and just wait for those words, ‘He’s coming to—’

  But he wished he would come to. It was the hell of a dream! For here he was in a train again, and it wasn’t half as comforting as the last. The seats weren’t so soft, and the corner didn’t take him as comfortably, though that might have been because his body was aching more, and there wasn’t the same smooth rhythmic motion. Yes, this train was noisier than the last one. That might mean he was nearer the point of waking up, but he wished he could be sure, because the noise made his head ache and shook all his bones. It was a pretty rotten hospital! They didn’t even feed a fellow! He would be sick if he didn’t get some food inside him—had he had anything for a week?—but he couldn’t think of any food he wanted. A desire to cry swept through him. A desire to say things through tears. Say things? Oh, no, he mustn’t do that! Why not? There was a reason, if only he could remember it. He mustn’t talk. Not if he was delirious. God, had he been talking? There was somebody else in his compartment, somebody in the far corner … Who? Oh, yes, that sporting man, it would be. Better pretend to be interested. What had he just said? Something about a jockey who had killed a trainer …

  ‘No, I don’t suppose one would,’ he said, opening his eyes wide.

  ‘Would what?’ asked the man in the other corner.

  ‘Eh? What you’ve just said … a mild little fellow like that.’

  ‘Quite so,’ agreed the man in the other corner. ‘Quite so.’

  Something was wrong. It hadn’t gone the way it should. Something was wrong. Wake up, wake up, wake up!

  The train stopped.

  ‘I’ll help you out,’ said the man in the other corner. ‘This is Penridge.’

  11

  Start of a Bad Day

  Ben could sleep anywhere. The acquirement had been developed through a lifetime of necessity, and he boasted that he had slept in every possible location between, and including, the pavement and the roof. Once on a very dark night he had slept quite comfortably on a dead cow. True, he did not know at the time that it was a cow, or dead, the alarming discovery being made on waking, but in the darkness the mound had made a comfortable pillow for the head, and what you don’t know doesn’t trouble you.

  But tonight, in the small bed lately occupied by Bushy Brows in Jewel Street, sleep took a long time in coming. He had been accepted as a necessary guest, but not a welcome one, and the information he had come here to get had still to be won. After the conversation in the parlour which had culminated in Maudie’s decision that he should stay, she had shut up like a clam, and her mother had retired early, and during the hour before Maudie followed her up, the parrot, becoming nocturnally loquacious, had done most of the talking. What it had said had not helped, its remarks being somewhat embarrassingly amorous.

  Why, in these circumstances, they both stayed up at all seemed pointless on the face of it. Maudie sewed, and Ben looked through a copy of the Picturegoer eighteen times till he knew every film smile backwards. But the truth was that each had a secret hope of learning something from the other, and each was disappointed. The reason for this double failure may have been that they were both too tired to start the ball rolling again.

  Just before they parted for the night, Ben observed, ‘It’s bin a ’appy little hevenin’, ain’t it?’

  ‘If you weren’t going to talk, I didn’t see why I should,’ she retorted.

  ‘P’r’aps we’ll git on better termorrer,’ he answered. ‘I never believe in givin’ up ’ope!’

  ‘Well, if you’re hoping for early morning tea, you won’t get it!’

  ‘That’s orl right, miss—I always begins my day with sherry.’

  ‘Give her a bloody kiss,’ said the parrot.

  That had effectively ended the conversation.

  Lying in bed, and hearing snores through the wall—whether the mother’s or the daughter’s he did not know—he tried to work out what his next step should be on the morrow when he got up again. He was here, he recalled, not as Bushy Brows’ accomplice as he had to appear, but as Mrs Wilby’s private detective, and as such he had to find out things in order to return to Drewet Road to report them. All right. That much was clear amid much else that was not. Had he found out enough for a first instalment?

  An intensive survey of all that had happened since his arrival at the Kentons gave small results. The only definite event had been the visit of the police and their unsuccessful attempt to discover the whereabouts of Oscar Blake. Apart from this, all he had to add to the bag were the Kentons’ reactions to what he himself had let out. And what did these amount to? He went over them in his mind:

  ‘Nummer One. They was proper upset when I lets on there’s bin a murder. Well, ’oo wouldn’t be? When they wants ter know ’oo done it I didn’t t
ell ’em, ’arf ter find aht if they knoo already, and ’arf becorse I didn’t know meself.

  ‘Nummer Two. They dunno ’oo’s bin murdered, but Maudie thort at fust it was a woman. Wot I gotter find aht is wot woman she thort, and why?

  ‘Nummer Three. She knows now it’s a man, and I’m bettin’ a penny to a pahnd of acid drops she’s got some’un in ’er mind fer the corpse. Wot I gotter find aht is ’as she got the right man, and if not, ’oo?

  ‘Nummer Four. When I menshuns Drewet Road it ’its ’er bang in the middle of ’er stummick. Wot I gotter find aht is why?

  ‘Nummer Five. She’s worked with Blake. They’ve ’ad some gime on tergether. Wot I gotter find aht is wot?’

  The list was richer in what he hadn’t found out than in what he had, and it was certainly impossible to find out anything with that insistent snoring in one’s ears. Recalling that he could pass through the cupboard between his room and that of the snorer—or were they both at it?—it was loud enough for a duet—Ben contemplated the audacious and indelicate idea of paying them a visit and demanding, if not silence, some modification of the nocturnal music. If one had to snore, couldn’t one do it under a pillow? But in the end he lay still and suffered stoically, until at last Nature took pity on him and bore him away into dreams.

  Next morning when he opened his eyes he awoke to silence. He heard no sounds either inside or outside the house, and after he had rolled out of bed and picked himself off the floor, he shuffled to the window and discovered the reason. The muffling fog was thicker and yellower than ever.

  Perhaps it was as well. If you do not choose a foggy day to go out, neither do others choose it to come in, and Ben wanted undisturbed hours. What time was it? He had no watch, and the fog gave no indication. Suddenly wondering whether he were late, and breakfast would be over, and Maudie would have departed for Woolworth’s where he understood she worked, he performed his one-minute toilet and hurried downstairs.

  How gloomy the staircase looked, and how uninviting the little passage at which it ended, with its twist back to the kitchen behind the stairs, and the parlour door needing a fresh coat of paint on the right, and the front door with its cracked fanlight ahead. Ben never liked the dark, but he could accept it when it was supposed to be and when it was its natural black colour. Heavy yellow darkness was darkness out of season.

  The silence persisted below as it had above. No sounds came from the kitchen. None from the parlour. None from anywhere. Was he early, after all, instead of late, and was this a new kind of midnight, with the two women still sleeping in their bedroom? They certainly had stopped snoring, but even snores had their limit, like everything else, and ceased when they had reached their allotted span. This thick yellow light might be due to one of them ickilipses. Ickilipses could turn things topsy-turvy, couldn’t they? Like sun spots.

  He advanced to the parlour door and pushed it open. A nasty moment followed. Maudie and Mrs Kenton were there. They were seated at the breakfast table. They were not merely silent; they were completely motionless. They might have been two wax figures at Madame Tussaud’s, in the Chamber of ’Orrers. ‘Mrs Kenton and her daughter, just before their arrest.’

  But they were flesh and blood, not wax, and after Ben had stood staring at them for a couple of seconds Mrs Kenton turned her head. Ben had the sensation that somebody had put a penny in her somewhere and made her move. Maudie did not move, but remained with her eyes fixed on the table before her. A newspaper was lying by her plate.

  ‘Wot’s up?’ said Ben.

  Life now came into Mrs Kenton’s glazed eyes.

  ‘Do you have to ask?’ she hissed.

  Ben had often read of people hissing. Not in a theatre, but conversationally. He shouted. She muttered. He rasped. She hissed. But he had never actually heard the hissing done. Mrs Kenton did it.

  He decided to keep clear of it himself.

  ‘Oh! Yer readin’ abart it?’ he asked innocently.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ demanded Mrs Kenton shrilly.

  ‘Wot would yer ’ave done if I ’ad?’ replied Ben. ‘I sed there was a murder. Is it anythink ter do with you?’

  Now Maudie raised her eyes. She looked pale and ill, and Ben thought she was trying to pretend she was not frightened. To his annoyance, he began to feel a little sorry for her. See, when it’s a woman …

  ‘Don’t make things worse, Ma,’ she said.

  ‘How could I do that?’ cried Mrs Kenton. ‘Didn’t I tell you from the start? Didn’t I warn you? But young people don’t listen these days, dear me, no, they know better! You might as well talk to a statue as to—’

  ‘Be quiet!’ exclaimed Maudie angrily. ‘You soon stopped your warnings, as you call them, when you found the money there was in it!’

  ‘That’s a lie!’ screamed Mrs Kenton.

  ‘That’s right—yell the house down and bring the police!’

  Mrs Kenton, pulled up by this reminder, spluttered incoherently, then rose from her chair and, pushing by Ben, ran out of the room and into the kitchen.

  ‘She drinks,’ said Maudie bluntly.

  ‘Oh,’ blinked Ben.

  ‘She was at it last night when I went up to bed, and she started again this morning. And then, when I read her out—this—’ She thrust a hand on the newspaper, and gave it a little shove. ‘Well, that finished her.’

  ‘I didn’t ’ear nothink as I come dahn—’

  ‘No. You slept late. And you came in here during the calm before the storm!’

  She looked at him with grim desperation. It was a different Maudie from the Maudie of the night before.

  ‘Yer know, I ain’t got orl this, miss,’ said Ben, after a pause. ‘As I sed just now, I told yer there’d bin a murder larst night—’

  ‘You didn’t say who it was!’

  ‘No, I kep’ that fer a bit. But—when yer fahnd aht it wasn’t a woman, I thort yer might be on ter it?’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Wasn’t yer?’

  ‘I hadn’t seen it in print.’

  Ben nodded. Then he moved nearer the newspaper, and lowering his nose over the teapot, read the paragraph which had destroyed the final peace of No. 46, Jewel Street.

  It did not give many details. It was headed ‘Gruesome Find in Cellar’, and it gave the name and address of the body that had been found there—George Wilby, of 18, Drewet Road, SW3, identified by his wife—and it mentioned the ’phone call that had taken the police to the spot. Then the usual little build-up. The police were following up important clues. There was a man they wished to interview … arrest expected shortly …

  ‘How did you know!’

  Ben looked up.

  ‘I didn’t do it,’ he replied solemnly.

  ‘Was it you who phoned up the police?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Was it?’

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘You wouldn’t—if you’d done it!’

  ‘Tha’s right.’

  ‘And I’m believing you.’

  ‘Well, there yer are—’

  ‘So you could have phoned the police! And suppose I go off and tell them.’

  She was looking at him hard. He wondered whether she meant it, or whether she were bluffing—and, if so, what was the game behind it.

  ‘Wotcher mean, I s’pose,’ answered Ben slowly, ‘is that, if I could git you inter trouble, you think you could git me inter trouble—’

  ‘Don’t act the fool!’ she interrupted. ‘Though I’m beginning to wonder which is the biggest! Of course we can get each other into trouble, but what we’ve got to decide—isn’t it?—’a moment of wavering—‘is whether we’re going to? You’re not getting any mad idea into your head, are you, that because—because we’re upset, I’ve had anything to do with this business? I mean—you know—that!’

  She pointed to the paper, and Ben shook his head.

  ‘Corse I knows yer ain’t done it,’ he said. ‘You ain’t goin’ ter swing no more’n me. But
yer done somethink, ain’t yer?’

  ‘Pumping me, Eric?’

  ‘Oh! Yer ain’t fergot me nime?’

  ‘I haven’t forgotten the name Oscar—Mr Blake—gave you in his note. Tell me, if you’re such a friend of his, doesn’t he take you into his confidence?’

  ‘Meanin’ that if ’e did, I wouldn’t ’ave ter arsk yer nothink?’

  ‘You’ve said it exactly.’

  ‘P’r’aps,’ said Ben darkly, ‘I knows a lot, but not quite orl?’

  ‘How much do you know?’

  ‘Enuff ter mike me think it’d be best ter tell me the lot!’

  ‘Best for who? You or me?’

  ‘I’ll leave you ter work aht that one!’

  She frowned. ‘Yes, and I’ve got to work it out before we go any farther.’ Suddenly she jumped up and ran to a small desk in a corner. Opening a drawer, she took something out, then returned and handed it to him. It was a page torn from a picture paper. ‘Bottom picture. Have a look at it! See anything that interests you?’

  Ben examined the photograph. Above it were the words, ‘London Greets Film Star’, and the film star was waving from an open car.

  ‘Yer wouldn’t git me standin’ in the street fer that,’ he commented.

  ‘No? See if you can find yourself in the crowd,’ suggested Maudie.

  Ben’s eyes left the film star and began searching among the star’s admirers. All at once he lowered his nose to look closer. Maudie was watching him intently.