The Bath Mysteries (25 page)

“We'll pick him up all right, though, sooner or later, and more likely sooner than later,” declared Bobby's informant, and Bobby agreed, and, returning home, found the letter waiting for him which he had been expecting, giving full details of the assault upon a warder for which Lawrence had been punished while serving his sentence.

Bobby read it with interest, and sat down for a time to think. Then he got up, and, late as the hour was, went out and, finding a late taxi prowling homewards in the direction of the Edgware Road, bargained for a cheap ride thither.

“Bit late out, aren't you?” remarked the taximan, who knew Bobby by sight, taximen having a wide acquaintance with the police. “Looking out for someone?”

“That's it,” said Bobby, gave the man his promised shilling, and from the Edgware Road turned into the street where Lawrence lived.

There was no one watching, for it was not thought likely that if Lawrence knew of the search being made for him he would return home, while if he did not know he would be safely there in the morning. But when Bobby got to the house he saw there was still a light in one of the rooms, and, when he knocked softly, it was Lawrence himself who came at once to the door.

“It's you, is it?” he said, recognizing Bobby. “You've come about Mr. Norris's murder, I suppose?” The light from the hall lamp shone on his face, showing it clearly. He was smiling to himself, his worn and tortured features, as it were, entirely changed, so that they seemed to show an infinite content. “Come in a moment while I get my hat and I won't keep you,” he said.

Bobby said to him:

“How did you know Norris had been murdered?”

Bobby followed Lawrence into the sitting room where he had gone to get his hat. Did he live entirely in his memories, Bobby asked himself; and Lawrence, who had picked up his hat from the old horsehair sofa that stood limpingly on but three sound legs, said to him:

“I'm ready.”

Bobby turned his attention from the room to its tenant. He looked thinner even than when Bobby had seen him before, his eyes more deeply sunk, the black rings round them more clearly marked, his cheeks more hollow. The expression Miss Hewitt had used – “living corpse” – returned to Bobby's mind with a fresh impact of appropriateness, so remote from life Lawrence seemed, so far removed from all contact with the things around.

“I want to ask you some questions,” Bobby said.

“Questions?” repeated Lawrence vaguely, as if wondering what they were. “Why? I shan't answer,” he added, not with any air of defiance, but simply as stating a fact for which he himself had no responsibility.

“Not even if I ask you how you knew Dick Norris had been murdered?”

Lawrence's small, indifferent shake of the head was so slight as to be hardly visible.

“You seem to want to get yourself hanged,” Bobby snapped out angrily.

Lawrence let this drift by him as though he had not even heard it, as though it concerned him not at all.

“You see,” Bobby went on, “my trouble is this. I happen to be fairly sure you had nothing to do with Norris's murder.”

But to this statement, too, Lawrence paid no attention; it affected not in the very least that terrible aloofness from every human concern that seemed to be ingrained in all his being. He merely said:

“I'm ready if you want me to come with you.”

“You've no right to play the silly fool like this,” Bobby almost shouted, his temper quite gone, and this time Lawrence was moved to show a faint surprise, as if a little astonished at the other's vehemence.

“Well, why not?” he asked.

“I've been making a few inquiries about you,” Bobby said. “I've got to know quite a lot.”

“Your duty, I suppose,” Lawrence said.

Bobby, who had sat down on one of the slippery horsehair chairs, jumped to his feet. His face red with anger, he said furiously:

“For two pins I'd punch you one in the eye, and what would you do then?”

Lawrence appeared to be considering the question, which apparently had interested him enough to get below the armour of his indifference.

“I shouldn't do anything,” he decided at last. “Why should you mind a punch in the eye when you've had a dozen strokes with the cat-o'-nine-tails?”

Very greatly relieved, Bobby sat down again on his slippery chair.

“Now we're getting on,” he said with satisfaction. “I had a letter about you tonight. You were sentenced to five years' penal servitude for embezzling money. You were a bank clerk at the time, so you had every opportunity, and the judge said you had betrayed the confidence of your employers.”

‘‘He was quite right,” Lawrence said. “So I had.”

“You pleaded guilty at the trial and you didn't say anything in explanation or excuse. It's no excuse, of course, but you had taken the money because the girl you were engaged to had been flashing around and had got herself into the hands of moneylenders. She had been doing a bit of forging on her own account, hadn't she? And if you hadn't found that five hundred for her, she would have gone to prison and not you.”

Lawrence said harshly and angrily:

“What business is that of yours?”

“Other people's business is a detective's business pretty often,” retorted Bobby. “While you were doing time, the young lady concerned married someone else. A good match, too. It was the manager of the bank where you had worked. She got him by playing a broken heart at her discovery of your wicked dishonesty. He felt it was up to him to mend what one of his staff had broken, and she felt his salary of a thousand a year or so would do the trick all right, and anyhow was a jolly sight better than waiting five years for an ex-convict.”

Bobby paused then, and Lawrence said very slowly:

“I never expected her to wait. I knew it was finished – an ex-convict. She acted – sensibly.”

“While you were in prison,” Bobby went on, “your mother – died. She was found drowned. The coroner made some remarks about recent distressing experiences she had passed through. The verdict was a kindly one – ‘temporary insanity.' ”

Lawrence's face was livid now. All his indifference had gone. It had become human again, by a paradox, human through the awful animal ferocity it showed. He said, muttering the words through firmly clenched teeth:

“Take care – take care.”

“I'm a bigger man than you,” Bobby answered dispassionately, “and I'm in training, and your condition – well, rotten, isn't it? If I have to, I'll knock you down and sit on you while I finish what I have to say. I could get away with it, too. ‘Resisting the police in the execution of their duty,' I should put in my report. That's like charity. It covers a multitude of – incidents.”

Lawrence, standing opposite, stared bewilderedly at Bobby.

“You are police, I suppose, aren't you?” he asked. “I don't know what you're getting at.”

“What I'm getting at,” retorted Bobby, “is that you can't put the Embankment trick over on me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the fellow you scared on the Embankment by looking at him,” Bobby answered. “I've heard about that, too. But it won't go with me. Never mind that, though. Let's get on. I ought to be hauling you off to the Yard, but there's a lot I want to say first. While you were in prison, you assaulted a warder; nearly killed him. You got the cat for it.”

“Would you like to see the marks on my back?” Lawrence asked.

“No,” Bobby answered slowly, “for I do not think those are the marks that matter.”

Lawrence seemed about to make some angry remark and then changed his mind. He was sitting at the table now, and they were both silent. Bobby, watching closely, saw by the flickering and uncertain light that came through the broken mantle on the gas pendant how Lawrence's expression had altered. His utter, frozen indifference had been broken now; it was as if he had become aware of his environment; his eyes were no longer aloof but living, as if these stories of the past had drawn him from his perpetual contemplation of it and made him more conscious of the present. Bobby continued:

“The letter I got tonight said the reason you went for the warder, and got flogged for it, was because you had seen him put his foot on a mouse.”

“It wasn't that so much,” Lawrence explained in hesitating, doubtful tones, “it was the way he did it – deliberately, as if he thought it fun. I suppose, in a prison, a mouse means a lot; it comes and goes, and you can watch it; you can't come and go, but the mouse can, and so you watch. When he did it, I hit out at him without thinking – I mean without thinking who he was and what I was. I was in good condition then, whatever I am now, and I had him down in a moment. Some other warders came up and went for me, and I lost my head a bit, I suppose, and went for them, too. So after that they tied me up and flogged me. You don't know what it is, to be tied up and whipped. I think they whipped the soul and heart out of me.”

They were both silent again, both thinking deeply.

Lawrence muttered:

“It was being tied up and whipped. It was deliberate... like the mouse. Deliberate. It was afterwards I heard about mother. She had stood it about the five years, but when she knew I had been flogged with the cat – she couldn't.”

“No,” said Bobby, “no.”

“It wasn't that it hurt so awfully, it wasn't the pain – it hurt all right, but anyone can stand pain if they've got to. It was its being done so deliberately,” Lawrence said, and added: “Like the mouse under that warder's boot.”

“I expect,” Bobby mused, “only the very best and the very worst can go through a flogging and remain unchanged.”

“I was changed, I think,” Lawrence said. “Afterwards I felt somehow I wasn't like a man any more.”

“Afterwards,” Bobby said, “they found out things about that warder and he got the sack, didn't he? But they couldn't unflog you.”

“No,” agreed Lawrence, “and they couldn't make me feel a man again – nothing can. I'm just a thing that's been tied up and whipped. Not even God can alter that.”

“I suppose God can do what He can do,” Bobby said.

Lawrence seemed to be sinking back into his former abstraction.

“It's all past now,” he said.

“You're making it the present,” Bobby told him, and went on in a tone he tried to make hard and sneering: “Oh, yes, you talk about cruelty – cruelty to a mouse, cruelty to a girl when you saw a man putting a lighted cigarette-end on her wrist. All that upsets you a whole lot, doesn't it?”

“Cruelty always did, somehow, I don't know why; seeing helpless things ill-used always upset me. I dare say it wouldn't now. Who told you about the Embankment?”

“Well, we'll be getting on,” Bobby said, “but I wouldn't talk about cruelty to helpless things upsetting you if I were you – not while you're trying your best to poke a helpless girl's eyes out. Worse, if you ask me, than squashing a mouse; worse than putting a lighted cigarette to her wrist. Not that you care, you and your talk about cruelty.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Lawrence said, staring at Bobby in bewilderment, his tones more human than any he had used before.

“I'm talking about a girl who is going blind,” Bobby answered, “going blind because she's working her eyes out to get money to help you and all you do is keep your hands in your pockets and look on.”

“I don't know –”

“Of course you don't,” Bobby interrupted sharply. “Why should you? The fellow who flogged you didn't know either. Why should he? That made no difference. You were flogged and her sight's going.”

“You mean Alice – Miss Yates?”

“It doesn't matter,” Bobby answered, shrugging his shoulders. “It isn't you, anyhow, so that's all right. We'll be getting along – gross breach of duty wasting all this time talking. After all, there's been murder done, and they're wanting to see you at the Yard. I don't happen to think you had anything to do with it, but that doesn't matter.”

“No,” agreed Lawrence; “besides, you see, I had.”

When he had said this, Lawrence relapsed again into silence, but a silence different entirely from that which had before possessed him. For that had been a denial and a withdrawal, a refusal of that common manhood by which we are all members one of another, a silence, in fact, of an inhuman indifference. But now this new silence of his was an outcome of doubt and of bewilderment, of terror, of a whole tumult of long-repressed emotions stung all suddenly into violent being once again. Whereas before his immobility had been that of unknowing stock or stone, now he seemed a man again, for he was suffering.

Not that Bobby at the time understood all this in such plain terms. But he did realize well enough that he had achieved his main purpose of awakening Lawrence from the lost dream of the past in which he had been living, and bringing his mind back to that strange aspect of reality we call the present; and he realized, too, that this ferment of the other's re-awakened mind had best be left for the time to work out its own conclusions.

The thought came oddly into his mind, as he and Lawrence left the house together and went down the street towards the main road, that it was almost as if it was by the side of one risen from the dead that he walked. He found himself wondering if those who had walked with Lazarus, or with the son of that widow who had but the one child, had felt a little as he felt now toward Lawrence.

By good luck, before they had gone far, they met a cruising police car. In it they were conveyed to Scotland Yard, and there Bobby was much puzzled by the reception given to Lawrence. It is true that between the professional criminal and the professional detective there often exists an odd kind of fellowship, as of those who know and understand each other and take each other as part of the necessary framework of the world. There is no malice on either side, provided that the decencies are observed, and the arrested criminal may always be sure that any reasonable request he makes will be granted. While if he does manage to wangle a “not guilty” verdict out of the jury, he will probably get from his defeated opponent of the police a hearty slap on the back, a word of congratulation on such undeserved good luck, and a warning to change his ways while there was time, since good luck does not last forever.