A Train of Powder (28 page)

These two told how last they had seen Mr. Setty. As his sister had walked in a street in the quarter where the automobile market is carried on, she had seen him drive by in his resplendent automobile, a yellow Citröen limousine with scarlet upholstery, some time between five and half-past on October 4. His cousin had seen him driving by, a little later, as he stood waiting for a bus. This seemed an improbable statement when he made it, for he should obviously have travelled either by elephant or by a limousine as spectacular as his cousin’s; but indeed he could be seen every afternoon going home from the Old Bailey on the bus, which he made, by the mere act of boarding it, the rickety and ill-proportioned contrivance of an immature civilization. These two family witnesses were followed by two young automobile dealers, who told how Mr. Setty had visited their office later that evening, and how they had introduced Hume to Mr. Setty some time before. These young men were in the same line of picturesqueness as the Shashoua kin. Their clothes also reversed the drabness of the West and sent the mind back to the valleys of the Euphrates and the Tigris. One of them was solid and sleek, and was dressed in such richly coloured and finely woven stuffs that it seemed hard to believe that he did not keep his automobiles in a cave guarded by a jinni; the slenderness of his partner was so treated by his tailor that it came back to the mind that slim young men were often likened to the crescent moon in the Arabian Nights. Yet for all this gorgeousness of apparel they were not Shashouas.

The Setty relatives looked as if their interior lives matched their exteriors to some degree in picturesqueness, as if they intensely experienced love and hate and joy and grief, and could find words to express how these fires burned. These younger people’s tongues were dead in their mouths. They gave their evidence in tired jargon. They could not say “no,” they had to say “definitely no”; they could not use the word “about,” they had to put in its place “approximately.” They painted no pictures for their listeners, and their faces were never lit up by their minds.

These young men had had legal troubles of a complex kind which the Shashouas would have rolled over their tongues with the ecstasy of connoisseurs, and were quite unworthy of them. Shortly after the war, when it became obvious that the bulk of British automobiles must go abroad and only a few could be kept for the home market, the British Motor Traders’ Association made a rule that none of its members should sell a new automobile without making the purchaser sign a covenant binding himself not to resell it for twelve months. This was a sensible enough provision, for it might well have happened that the auto trade passed out of the hands of the legitimate traders and became a matter of private sales at huge profiteering prices, which would encourage auto-stealing and the passing off of stolen autos as new ones.

Some dealers, however, had contended that the covenant was an illegal restraint of trade and refused to observe it; and these two young men were among their number. They therefore had been defendants in an action brought in the civil courts by the British Motor Traders’ Association, a case which lasted a month and was remarkable for the number and brilliance of the attorneys involved. It would have been as good as a vintage claret to the brothers Shashoua. These young men showed in the witness box that they had never understood what had happened in court and blundered over the simplest legal terms.

Their ingenuousness went deep. When Mr. Setty’s cousin and sister were in the box they looked at Hume with sombre courtesy. They and he were walking along the same road, and it had led them into the Valley of Skulls, which was no place for brawling. But when these two young men spoke of Hume it was as if the three of them were hobbledehoys quarrelling in a school playground. They knew him quite well, and it was through them that Hume had met Mr. Setty. Hume had put his name down on the waiting list of an automobile manufacturer, and when he got his new automobile sold it to these dealers, who afterwards introduced him to Mr. Setty as a possible scout for used automobiles. As a result of this contact these dealers had formed a poor opinion of Hume, and from the deals of his which were traced they seem to have been right: he once bought a new car and sold it shortly afterwards at a loss of thirty per cent, which was something of an achievement in those days. But they expressed their opinion with a curious infantilism. They were the big strong popular boys who were good at games, and Hume was the little odd-come-short who sometimes tried to suck up to the gods of the school but only got jeers and cuffs as a reminder that he must keep his place. When the sleeker of the two told how Hume had tried to borrow a couple of shillings from him so that he could make up a pound to buy a postal order to send off with his weekly football-pool coupon, he might have been saying that everything about the wretched little beast was paltry, he never even had enough pocket money. But if they showed no respect for Hume’s danger, they also showed none of the resentment towards him which might have been expected, considering that in his statement he had suggested that Mr. Setty had been murdered by associates of this pair. Thus he must have brought on them hours of questioning in a most disagreeable connection; but, like many people who come into the law courts, they had the virtues as well as the defects of childhood.

It was Hume’s story, unsupported by any other evidence, that he had come into possession of Mr. Setty’s body through his meeting with three men, who, he said, were well known to these two young dealers: a tall fair man in his thirties named Mac or Max, who wore a single-stone ring which he was always polishing, a younger man wearing steel-rimmed spectacles who was called The Boy, and a Greek or Cypriot in a green suit who was called Green or Greenie or G. They had asked him to take up in a plane some hot presses, with which they had been printing forged petrol coupons, and drop them in the sea. Hume declared it was natural that they should make such an inquiry of him, since he was known for making illicit air trips to the Continent, some in connection with the purchase of planes and munitions for the Middle East. He consented to do the job for about four hundred dollars, and the three called at his flat with two parcels on the afternoon of October 5, the day after Mr. Setty disappeared. These parcels were supposed to have contained the head and legs of Mr. Setty, but, according to Hume, he never doubted that they were presses, and he went to his flying club and got rid of them in the sea just beyond the Thames estuary. He then went home, and found the three men waiting in the street below his apartment with a third parcel, which he took up the next day and dropped in the same area. He admitted that he had suspected that this third parcel contained part of a corpse, but he pleaded that he had been too frightened to go to the police, either then or when it was announced in the newspapers that the parcel had been found and what it was.

Certainly something extraordinary had happened in Hume’s flat on those days, though it was not a place which most criminals would have chosen for a dangerous operation. It was a duplex flat in a line of houses, with shops underneath, that hugs one angle of a busy crossroads. The spot is well known to all connoisseurs of Victorian thrillers; for it was here that, in the first chapter of Wilkie Collins’
The Woman in White,
the drawing master, Walter Hartwright, met the escaped lunatic walking through the night in her dressing gown. Then hedges divided it from fields. Now it is the heart of a suburban shopping centre. The intersection is dominated by Golders Green Station, and Golders Green Theatre stands beside it. At the end of the fine of houses where Hume lived there is a cinema. A line of streetcars links this spot with the farther suburbs, many bus routes run through it; it sees more than suburban traffic in the way of automobiles, for this is a short cut between West London and the Great North Road. There was a bus stop right opposite Hume’s front door, and an electric standard that pours brightness on it when daylight has gone. The shops round about serve a wide district, in which German is heard as often as English, for many refugees from Hitler’s Germany have settled there, and perhaps for this reason it keeps later hours than most London suburbs. At all times a policeman on point duty stands fifty yards or so away. The back entrance to the premises can be reached only by a narrow road behind the line of houses which runs past a garage and is overlooked by a number of flats. The neighbours would take note if any automobile used it late at night.

Even inside his home Hume had less privacy than many. He lived in the upper of two duplex apartments over a greengrocer’s shop, and the structure was as insubstantial as cheap suburban architecture usually was fifty years ago. A dark, steep, and narrow wooden staircase with a murderous turn to it led past the front door of the lower duplex flat, which was inhabited by a schoolmaster and his wife, up to Hume’s own front door, which opened on a slit of lobby. To the left was a living room, looking over the street; to the right was a smaller dining room, long and narrow, with a pantry beyond it, and beyond that again, an attic kitchenette, with the slant of the roof coming fairly low. None of these rooms was large. The living room was perhaps fifteen feet by eleven, and the dining room fifteen feet by eight.

Another steep and narrow and perilous stairway led up to a bedroom, a nursery, and a bathroom. The rooms were sparsely furnished, which meant nothing, for furniture was the last painful shortage in Britain, and only a very well-to-do young couple could then set up a brand-new comfortable home. But the place had been furnished according to the memory of a pattern established by the educated and fairly prosperous middle class. Somebody living here had been brought up in the kind of home where they took in
Punch.
The convention of interior decoration on that level of culture is simple and airy, so there were no nailed-down carpets and linoleum, no heavy curtains. The cheap wood floors, which were insufficiently caulked between the widely spaced boards, might as well have been gratings. If anybody shouted or screamed in any room in this apartment, or if anything heavy fell on the floor, it would have been audible in all the other rooms, and almost certainly in the apartment below, and probably in the houses to the right or the left

There were three people living in this apartment: this nearly handsome, faintly raffish young ex-pilot, as his intimates considered him, Brian Donald Hume; his wife Cynthia; and their baby daughter, who was just over two months old. Cynthia Hume had an unusual and very strong personality. She was twenty-nine and looked six or seven years younger. She had soft dark hair, gentle eyes, a finely cut and very childish mouth, and an exceptionally beautiful creamy complexion. Her fault was that she appeared colourless. If she had been more definite in appearance she might have had the chiselled dignity of a Du Maurier drawing, of Mimsie in
Peter Ibbetson,
but she was too shadowy for that. In compensation she had a low-pitched and very lovely voice, and a charm that, had she been a mermaid, would have drawn all navies down into the deep water, man by man. Nobody could talk with her for more than ten minutes without feeling that she was infinitely kind and tender and simple and helpless, and that to succour her would be bliss. The only unfavourable suspicion she ever aroused was a doubt as to whether her look of childishness might not spring from a lack of adult intelligence. The doubt was unfounded. She was not intellectual but she was shrewd. Perhaps she was too languid to use her shrewdness to avert catastrophe; but she could survive catastrophe.

Her father was the chief examiner in a Midland Savings Bank which had four hundred branches, her mother was a woman of strong character and abounding affections. After she had been at a provincial university for a term or two she went into the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, at the age of nineteen; and life in the women’s services did its curious trick of making a girl into a woman before her time and at the same time keeping her for ever a little schoolgirlish. She made an unsuccessful marriage, which took her into the night clubs and restaurants of the West End of London. She got a divorce, which neither she nor her family took lightly. She was secretary in a fashionable restaurant when, late in 1948, she married Brian Donald Hume. Ten months afterwards she had a baby, suffering a difficult and dangerous confinement. Now she was breast-feeding the baby, as well as looking after it herself, and doing all its laundry. She also did all the housework with no help except a weekly visit from a domestic worker. If she had a pretty air of sleepy remoteness it was not because she had assumed it in order to seem voluptuous and exciting. It was because she was tired, and by nature turned all things to favour and prettiness, even fatigue.

Nothing is known of what happened in this apartment on the night of October 4. Hume said he was at home, though at first he put up a false alibi; and Mrs. Hume said that that night was to her like any other evening. She could bring back to her mind nothing about it, until she looked at an old copy of the
Radio Times
and recognized one of the programmes as one she had listened to when she sat in the living room after supper, waiting to go upstairs to give her baby its ten o’clock feed. It was, in obedience to the sinister pattern of this murder case, an account of the trial of Landru. For the rest it was, as she kept on repeating, just like any other evening. She and Hume slept in a double bed, and he had come to bed as usual. At no time did she wake up and find him gone. And when she rose at six in the morning to give the baby its first feed, he was still there.

But if we know nothing about the night of October 4, we know a great deal about October 5. That day was built up all over again, as solid as when it was first lived, when it had seemed buried for months deep in the past. A procession of people passed through the witness box and showed what it is that the virtuous apprentice receives as his reward. They toiled and they spun and they were in no way like the lilies of the field; a bank manager, the manageress of a dyeing and cleaning establishment, a charwoman, a house painter, a taxi driver, and so on. Not for them tailoring that recalled the dyes of Tyre, the weavers of Arabia. Drab they dressed and drab they lived, but somehow their tongues were alive in their mouths. They said “no” and “about” instead of “definitely no” and “approximately.” Because of their simple and economical use of language they achieved magic. It was as if all sorts of objects came floating over the housetops from Golders Green to the Old Bailey to build up that day anew; a trail of five-pound notes, a carpet, a prescription, a carving knife, a cup of tea, a piece of rope. But the magic was mischievous. Reconstructed, the day suited no one’s convenience.