A Gun for Sale (7 page)

‘We don’t think so. Got an idea, Mather?’

Colour was coming into the sky above the city. Cusack switched off his table-lamp and left the room grey. ‘I think I’ll go to bed.’

‘I suppose,’ Mather said, ‘that all the booking offices have the numbers of those notes?’

‘Every one.’

‘It looks to me,’ Mather said, ‘that if you had nothing but phoney notes and wanted to catch an express –’

‘How do we know it was an express?’

‘Yes, I don’t know why I said that, sir. Or perhaps – if it was a slow train with plenty of stops near London, surely someone would have reported by this time –’

‘You may be right.’

‘Well, if I wanted to catch an express, I’d wait till the last minute and pay on the train. I don’t suppose the ticket collectors carry the numbers.’

‘I think you’re right. Are you tired, Mather?’

‘No.’

‘Well, I am. Would you stay here and ring up Euston and King’s Cross and St Pancras, all of them? Make a list of all the outgoing expresses after seven. Ask them to telephone up the line to all stations to check up on any man travelling without a ticket who paid on the train. We’ll soon find out where he stepped off. Good night, Mather.’

‘Good morning, sir.’ He liked to be accurate.

3

There was no dawn that day in Nottwich. Fog lay over the city like a night sky with no stars. The air in the streets was clear. You have only to imagine that it was night. The first tram crawled out of its shed and took the steel track down towards the market. An old piece of newspaper blew up against the door of the Royal Theatre and flattened out. In the streets on the outskirts of Nottwich nearest the pits an old man plodded by with a pole tapping at the windows. The stationer’s window in the High Street was full of Prayer Books and Bibles: a printed card remained among them, a relic of Armistice Day, like the old drab wreath of Haig poppies by the War Memorial: ‘Look up, and swear by the slain of the war that you’ll never forget.’ Along the line a signal lamp winked green in the dark day and the lit carriages drew slowly in past the cemetery, the glue factory, over the wide tidy cement-lined river. A bell began to ring from the Roman Catholic cathedral. A whistle blew.

The packed train moved slowly into another morning: smuts were thick on all the faces, everyone had slept in his clothes. Mr Cholmondeley had eaten too many sweets; his teeth needed cleaning; his breath was sweet and stuffy. He put his head into the corridor and Raven at once turned his back and stared out at the sidings, the trucks heaped with local coal ; a smell of bad fish came in from the glue factory. Mr Cholmondeley dived back across the carriage to the other side trying to make out at which platform the train was drawing in. He said: ‘Excuse me,’ trampling on the feet; Anne smiled softly to herself and hacked his ankle. Mr Cholmondeley glared at her. She said: ‘I’m sorry,’ and began to mend her face with her tissues and her powder, to bring it up to standard, so that she could bear the thought of the Royal Theatre, the little dressing-rooms and the oil-heating, the rivalry and the scandals.

‘If you’ll let me by,’ Mr Cholmondeley said fiercely, ‘I’m getting down here.’

Raven saw his ghost in the window-pane getting down. But
he
didn’t dare follow him closely. It was almost as if a voice blown over many foggy miles, over the long swelling fields of the hunting counties, the villa’d suburbs creeping up to town, had spoken to him: ‘any man travelling without a ticket,’ he thought, with the slip of white paper the collector had given him in his hand. He opened the door and watched the passengers flow by him to the barrier. He needed time, and the paper in his hand would so quickly identify him. He needed time, and he realized now that he wouldn’t have even so much as a twelve-hour start. They would visit every boarding house, every lodging in Nottwich; there was nowhere for him to stay.

Then it was that the idea struck him, by the slot machine on No. 2 arrival platform, which thrust him finally into other people’s lives, broke the world in which he walked alone.

Most of the passengers had gone now, but one girl waited for a returning porter by the buffet door. He went up to her and said, ‘Can I help and carry your bags?’

‘Oh, if you would,’ she said. He stood with his head a little bent, so that she mightn’t see his lip.

‘What about a sandwich?’ he said. ‘It’s been a hard journey.’

‘Is it open,’ she said, ‘this early?’

He tried the door. ‘Yes, it’s open.’

‘Is it an invitation?’ she said. ‘You’re standing treat?’

He gazed at her with faint astonishment: her smile, the small neat face with the eyes rather too wide apart; he was more used to the absent-minded routine endearments of prostitutes than to this natural friendliness, this sense of rather lost and desperate amusement. He said, ‘Oh yes. It’s on me.’ He carried the bags inside and hammered on the counter. ‘What’ll you have?’ he said. In the pale light of the electric globe he kept his back to her; he didn’t want to scare her yet.

‘There’s a rich choice,’ she said. ‘Bath buns, penny buns, last year’s biscuits, ham sandwiches. I’d like a ham sandwich and a cup of coffee. Or will that leave you broke? If so, leave out the coffee.’

He waited till the girl behind the counter had gone again, till the other’s mouth was full of sandwich so that she couldn’t
have
screamed if she’d tried. Then he turned his face on her. He was disconcerted when she showed no repulsion, but smiled as well as she could with her mouth full. He said,‘I want your ticket. The police are after me. I’ll do anything to get your ticket.’

She swallowed the bread in her mouth and began to cough. She said, ‘For God’s sake, hit me on the back.’ He nearly obeyed her ; she’d got him rattled ; he wasn’t used to normal life and it upset his nerve. He said, ‘I’ve got a gun,’ and added lamely, ‘I’ll give you this in return.’ He laid the paper on the counter and she read it with interest between the coughs. ‘First class. All the way to – Why, I’ll be able to get a refund on this. I call that a fine exchange, but why the gun?’

He said: ‘The ticket.’

‘Here.’

‘Now,’ he said, ‘you are going out of the station with me. I’m not taking any chances.’

‘Why not eat your ham sandwich first?’

‘Be quiet,’ he said. ‘I haven’t the time to listen to your jokes.’

She said, ‘I like he-men. My name’s Anne. What’s yours?’ The train outside whistled, the carriages began to move, a long line of light going back into the fog, the steam blew along the platform. Raven’s eyes left her for a moment; she raised her cup and dashed the hot coffee at his face. The pain drove him backwards with his hands to his eyes; he moaned like an animal; this was pain. This was what the old War Minister had felt, the woman secretary, his father when the trap sprang and the neck took the weight. His right hand felt for the automatic, his back was against the door; people were driving him to do things, to lose his head. He checked himself; with an effort he conquered the agony of the burns, the agony which drove him to kill. He said, ‘I’ve got you covered. Pick up those cases. Go out in front of me with that paper.’

She obeyed him, staggering under the weight. The ticket collector said: ‘Changed your mind? This would have taken you to Edinburgh. Do you want to break the journey?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘yes. That’s it.’ He took out a pencil and
began
to write on the paper. An idea came to Anne: she wanted him to remember her and the ticket. There might be inquiries. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’ll give it up. I don’t think I’ll be going on. I’ll stay here,’ and she went out through the barrier, thinking: he won’t forget that in a hurry.

The long street ran down between the small dusty houses. A milk float clattered round a corner out of sight. She said, ‘Well, can I go now?’

‘You think me a fool,’ he said bitterly. ‘Keep on walking.’

‘You might take one of these bags.’ She dropped one in the road and went on; he had to pick it up. It was heavy, he carried it in his left hand, he needed his right for the automatic.

She said, ‘This isn’t taking us into Nottwich. We ought to have turned right at the corner.’

‘I know where I’m going.’

‘I wish I did.’

The little houses went endlessly on under the fog. It was very early. A woman came to the door and took in the milk. Through a window Anne saw a man shaving. She wanted to scream to him, but he might have been in another world; she could imagine his stupid stare, the slow working of the brain before he realized anything was wrong. On they went, Raven a step behind. She wondered if he were bluffing her; he must be wanted for something very serious if he was really ready to shoot.

She spoke her thoughts aloud, ‘Is it murder?’ and the lapse of her flippancy, the whispered fear, came to Raven like something familiar, friendly: he was used to fear. It had lived inside him for twenty years. It was normality he couldn’t cope with. He answered her without strain, ‘No, I’m not wanted for that.’

She challenged him, ‘Then you wouldn’t dare to shoot,’ but he had the answer pat, the answer which never failed to convince because it was the truth. ‘I’m not going to prison. I’d rather hang. My father hanged.’

She asked again, ‘Where are we going?’ watching all the time for her chance. He didn’t answer.

‘Do you know this place?’ but he had said his say. And suddenly the chance was there: outside a little stationer’s where the morning posters leaned, looking in the window filled with cheap notepaper, pens and ink bottles – a policeman. She felt Raven come up behind her, it was all too quick, she hadn’t time to make up her mind, they were past the policeman and on down the mean road. It was too late to scream now; he was twenty yards away; there’d be no rescue. She said in a low voice, ‘It
must
be murder.’

The repetition stung him into speech. ‘That’s justice for you. Always thinking the worst. They’ve pinned a robbery on to me, and I don’t even know where the notes were stolen.’ A man came out of a public-house and began to wipe the steps with a wet cloth; they could smell frying bacon; the suitcases weighed on their arms. Raven couldn’t change his hands for fear of leaving hold of the automatic. He said, ‘If a man’s born ugly, he doesn’t stand a chance. It begins at school. It begins before that.’

‘What’s wrong with your face?’ she asked with bitter amusement. There seemed hope while he talked. It must be harder to murder anyone with whom you’d had any kind of relationship.

‘My lip, of course.’

‘What’s up with your lip?’

He said with astonishment, ‘Do you mean you haven’t noticed –?’

‘Oh,’ Anne said, ‘I suppose you mean your hare-lip. I’ve seen worse things than that.’ They had left the little dirty houses behind them. She read the name of the new street: Shakespeare Avenue. Bright-red bricks and tudor gables and half timbering, doors with stained glass, names like Rest-holme. These houses represented something worse than the meanness of poverty, the meanness of the spirit. They were on the very edge of Nottwich now, where the speculative builders were running up their hire-purchase houses. It occurred to Anne that he had brought her here to kill her in the scarred fields behind the housing estate, where the grass had been trampled into the clay and the stumps of trees showed where
an
old wood had been. Plodding on they passed a house with an open door which at any hour of the day visitors could enter and inspect, from the small square parlour to the small square bedroom and the bathroom and water closet off the landing. A big placard said: ‘Come in and Inspect A Cozyholme. Ten Pounds Down and a House Is Yours.’

‘Are you going to buy a house?’ she said with desperate humour.

He said, ‘I’ve got a hundred and ninety pounds in my pocket and I couldn’t buy a box of matches with them. I tell you, I was double-crossed. I never stole these notes. A bastard gave them me.’

‘That was generous.’

He hesitated outside ‘Sleepy Nuik’. It was so new that the builder’s paint had not been removed from the panes. He said, ‘It was for a piece of work I did. I did the work well. He ought to have paid me properly. I followed him here. A bastard called Chol-mon-deley.’

He pushed her through the gate of ‘Sleepy Nuik’, up the unmade path and round to the back door. They were at the edge of the fog here: it was as if they were at the boundary between night and day; it faded out in long streamers into the grey winter sky. He put his shoulder against the back door and the little doll’s house lock snapped at once out of the cheap rotten wood. They stood in the kitchen, a place of wires waiting for bulbs, of tubes waiting for the gas cooker. ‘Get over to the wall,’ he said, ‘where I can watch you.’

He sat down on the floor with the pistol in his hand. He said, ‘I’m tired. All night standing in that train. I can’t think properly. I don’t know what to do with you.’

Anne said, ‘I’ve got a job here. I haven’t a penny if I lose it. I’ll give you my word I’ll say nothing if you’ll let me go.’ She added hopelessly, ‘But you wouldn’t believe me.’

‘People don’t trouble to keep their word to me,’ Raven said. He brooded darkly in his dusty corner by the sink. He said, ‘I’m safe here for a while as long as you are here too.’ He put his hand to his face and winced at the soreness of the
burns
. Anne made a movement. He said, ‘Don’t move. I’ll shoot if you move.’

‘Can’t I sit down?’ she said. ‘I’m tired too. I’ve got to be on my feet all the afternoon.’ But while she spoke she saw herself, bundled into a cupboard with the blood still wet. She added, ‘Dressed up as a Chink. Singing.’ But he wasn’t listening to her; he was making his own plans in his own darkness. She tried to keep her courage up with the first song that came into her head, humming it because it reminded her of Mather; the long ride home, the ‘see you tomorrow’.

‘It’s only Kew

To you,

But to me

It’s Paradise.’

He said, ‘I’ve heard that tune.’ He couldn’t remember where: he remembered a dark night and a cold wind and hunger and the scratch of a needle. It was as if something sharp and cold were breaking in his heart with great pain. He sat there under the sink with the automatic in his hand and began to cry. He made no sound, the tears seemed to run like flies of their own will from the corners of his eyes. Anne didn’t notice for a while, humming the song. ‘
They say that’s a snowflower a man brought from Greenland
.’ Then she saw. She said, ‘What’s the matter?’