Hide My Eyes (28 page)

He came away at last and moved very softly into the small square lobby outside the kitchen door. A short flight of stairs directly in front of him led up to the front hall and as he stood at the foot of them his eyes were almost on a level with the floor, so that he could see a narrow ribbon of grey light from the street where the front door did not quite fit its worn step.

As he stood watching an unmistakable shadow passed across this line and back again, so that he knew that a man stood waiting in the porch.

He crept up into the hall and turned into the little office where he stood flattened against the wall beside the window, peering over his shoulder into the street. There was no one actually loitering outside the gate but a heavy figure hurrying up the pavement on the opposite side of the road had something about him which was unmistakable.

Gerry moved away. Stepping very quietly, he regained the hall and turned down the passage to the museum. The door to the corridor which linked the house to the studio was kept fastened at night, but, as he knew, the key was always left in the lock. He got the latch undone without noise and felt his way through the yard or so of wooden tunnel carpeted with matting and smelling of varnish, to push open the swing door to the collection.

As he stepped into the airless, aromatic atmosphere he saw the square skylight, a patch of yellowish grey in the dark roof. Below it there was a cluster of grotesque shapes just discernible against the deeper shadow.

For a second he hesitated, his hand tightening round his gun. He thought he had heard a movement somewhere amid the shadows. It had been a rustle or a sigh, as if someone had
caught
his breath. He listened but it did not come again, and after a time he went on, advancing slowly down the side aisle past the dais.

He was so stunned by the discovery of his self-betrayal that his behaviour was largely automatic. Just as a hunted animal will continue to run for some time after a bullet has killed it, so he pressed on with the plan he had made.

He was making for the old iron stove which heated the room in very cold weather and was now almost certainly empty. When he had carried Polly’s milk down to be reheated and had discovered that the boiler was out, he had decided that this stove in the museum was the one place where the cremation of the jacket could be accomplished successfully. He had been anxious to destroy the ragged garment because he realised that it had been the outstanding item of his costume when he had carried the wooden box into the house in Minton Terrace, and he knew that over ninety per cent of the people who had noticed him at all there would in fact only have noticed the coat.

It was very dark in the side aisle and although he knew the place so well he found that he was brushing against the crowded exhibits as he passed. To get away from them he swerved across the parquet towards the dais.

The shadows sitting there, crouching so still not three feet away from him, seemed to materialise while he stared at it. He stopped, gripping his gun, his hairs prickling on his scalp. The shape changed in contour and a blurred white face peered up at him.

“Oh,” said Annabelle, her voice shrill in the darkness, “Oh, you’ve got a revolver!”

In the instant paralysis while his slowed mind registered the astonishing fact that the girl he intended to silence was here, and not where he expected her to be, upstairs asleep in her room, a second shadow streaked out of the blackness and a blow under his wrist sent the weapon spinning out of his grasp. Immediately afterwards a fist crashed into his face, catching him under the cheekbone.

The scoop dropped out of his hand and rolled away into the dry darkness and he struck out savagely, to meet a
whirlwind.
Richard plunged into the fight as some small men do with a reckless belligerence which offsets almost any disadvantage. He was used to giving away enormous amounts of weight and his reach was inadequate, but he was hard-headed and very fit, and on this occasion he had the advantage of surprise.

All day he had been growing more and more angry. He did not understand the world which had threatened to absorb his newly found and beautiful Annabelle, but everything he had so far discovered about it had struck him as inexpressibly second class and tawdry. And now her statement, coming to him out of the tingling dark, touched off an explosion.

For the first time in his life he experienced outrage.

He hurled himself at Gerry without doubting it was he and after a minute or two of hard milling had the extreme satisfaction of feeling him go down with a crash before his right. He flung himself upon him without pause, fought for his throat, and twisting his tie round his wrist achieved a stranglehold.

“You pulled a gun on her,” he muttered, drumming his knees into the narrow ribs as if he was riding a recalcitrant horse. “A
gun
! You had the blasted impudence to draw a gun.”

On top of the attack, which was utterly unexpected, Gerry recognised the voice and the last flimsy shreds of illusion dropped from his eyes.

“You … followed me from the Tenniel?” The words were breathy in the airless dark.

“I followed you from here to the barber’s this morning.” Richard could not resist telling him. “I brought Annabelle here, and as she’s only a kid I wanted to know what sort of life she was going to find. Now I know. I’ve been to Rolf’s Dump and so have the police. They’re round this house now waiting for you to come out. I don’t care if they catch you or if they don’t, but I won’t have Annabelle mixed up in any mucky little scandal. Do you understand that or don’t you?”

Gerry did not move. The discovery that Richard regarded him as some sort of small-time crook flourishing a gun to frighten a woman had an extraordinary effect upon him. It
arrived
like a brief mercy, a little screen to hide for a moment his naked horror, which had become terrifying even to himself.

He let his body go limp. “All right.” He sounded merely sulky.

Richard released his hold and got up. As he stepped back his heel knocked something heavy and he stooped and picked it up. It was the gun and he stood holding it.

“Buck up, Gerry, and clear out of this building,” he said.

“I don’t care if you go back into the house or not, but I don’t want you found in here with us.”

The young voice was strong and authoritative, and a little way down the room Annabelle, responding to it, opened the door into the garden, to let in a great swirling gust of midnight air.

Immediately from somewhere just behind them, there came the sound of a strange sucking breath, followed at once by a small blunt noise like a toy balloon bursting, and a sheet of orange flame shot up from the edge of the dais and began to spread.

As Gerry reeled to his feet the whole of the far end of the museum appeared to catch fire at once. It happened in a moment and without warning, like the descent of a fire bomb.

The explanation was simple. At the beginning of the fight, when Gerry had dropped the coke scoop, it had rolled over and over and the jacket had fallen half out of it with the firelighters amid its folds. The heat had melted the wax and the sudden draught from the garden door had fanned the cloth into flame. The museum was ripe for burning, like a bonfire saved for a celebration. Even the stuffed beasts, impregnated for many years with a naptha spray against moth, were dry and tinder-like with age and dust.

The ostrich lamp with its silken shade blazed like a sacrificial torch, flinging sparks up into the roof, and as they fell they started other fires, so that the whole building was as good as lost in the first three minutes.

“Aunt Polly. We must get Aunt Polly!” Annabelle’s choking cry from the doorway reached Richard through the sighing rustle of the flames and he swung towards her.

“Get out before you’re suffocated!” he gasped and pushed her into the garden. “Mrs. Tassie is all right. She’s not in the same building. She can get out through the house, can’t she?”

He threw the final question at the man who had reeled out behind them.

“Get the door shut. The air’s making it worse in there.”

Out in the rain the darkness was newly alive. On the other side of the wall at the end of the garden someone was shouting and from the path to the back road the sound of running feet came thudding towards them. Already the glare from the museum was lighting the dark branches of the trees, so that the watchers in the street in front had been alarmed.

Richard’s arm was round Annabelle’s shoulders.

“It’s no use us assing about any longer. We’ll have to see the police,” he said to her. “Come on, pretty. We’ll go and meet them.”

He glanced back at the shadow beside him. “You’d better go in through the kitchen, Gerry, and warn the old lady, hadn’t you? Or are you going to make a dash for it while the going’s good?”

His dislike and contempt, which were both so essentially youthful, had not lessened, and the face of the silent figure beside him made no impression upon him. He did not even see it. The notion that something a little less than a man might be trembling there, struggling feebly to wrap itself in the shreds of a false and shameful identity which had been casually created for it by Richard himself, was something quite outside his imagination. It was an aspect of hell, which, mercifully, was not in his comprehension.

“Anyway,” he said fiercely, “don’t stay here. We don’t want to see anything of you again, and I don’t want to have to explain this either, so take it with you, please.”

The clatter of the wooden gate less than forty feet away from them lent emphasis to the words. Gerry felt a cold weight thrust into his hand. He turned back blindly into the fire, his fingers closing round the gun.

The museum of oddities, the collection of nonsense, the jokes in bad taste, and all the other naïve banalities, were about to burn to the ground, but so far most of the actual
blaze
was confined to the dais and the further end of the building, so that the creeping figure holding the weapon was able to cross the few feet of parquet to the swing door in the passage. He burst through the second door and closed it behind him, and came safely into the cool hall of the little house where all was dark and quiet, as he had left it.

He went down the short flight of steps towards the kitchen and turned back to see the grey streak showing under the front door. For a minute he watched it fixedly and dropped slowly down until he was lying on the stairs, his eyes level with the top step. But the grey line remained unbroken. The watcher had been distracted by the fire. The shadow had gone.

The house was silent as the end of the world. The noises from the outside, the shouts and the hollow alarums of the firebells, the police whistles and the stamp of feet were far away from him, as if already they belonged to a place in which he had no claim, and as he lay there in the little dark hole, with the gun in his hand, he heard them without interest.

He was nothing, and there was nothing for him.

After a time he put the muzzle of the weapon into his mouth, but although his finger curled round the trigger he did not press it.

The long seconds crept by. The corner was very cool, very dark.

In the end he stirred painfully. The gun slid out of his hand, dropping into the carpeted well below him, and then very slowly and as if he had no strength in his body, he began to climb hand over hand up the steps, across the hallway, and finally, as if it was a mountain he was essaying, up the main staircase.

It was an hour after dawn when Sergeant Picot placed a cup of nice black tea on the desk where Luke sat writing in the office which had once been his own in the Barrow Road station.

“It’s like the good old days, Chief,” he remarked, demoting his hero in a fit of pure nostalgia. “Well, that’s that, and
very
satisfactory.” He jerked his square head in appreciation of good work done. “He’s a cool one. I hope he gets what’s coming to him. That was only done for show you know, him bringing the woman out. Do you know what he said to me?”

Luke had heard, for it was all over the Station, but he was a kind man even in the early morning. He made an interested noise and took up the tea for which he was very grateful.

Picot leaned across the desk, his solid face shocked as a child’s.

“I said to ’im as I put on the bracelets, I said ‘What made you go back for the old girl?’ ’Pon my Sam he looked me square in the face and spoke as straight as if he was saying his prayers. ‘Because I need her,’ he said. It was as crude as that. Serve ’im right if she turns on him when she comes out of hospital and see what’s happened to her property and hears what he’s been up to.”

“She won’t.” The Superintendent spoke with utter certainty.

“Then she’s a fool,” said Picot, “because that chap really is the cold-blooded monster that the papers are going to call him. D’you honestly think she’ll stick by him when it all comes out?”

Luke sighed and went back to his report. His vivid face was furrowed with weariness.

“I know it,” he said. “She’ll forgive him without question, whatever he’s done to her and however high we hang him.
And he knows it
. It’s no use you blaming her. She can’t help herself. She’s only a vehicle. That’s Disinterested Love, Chum, a force, like nuclear energy. It’s absolute.”

Picot shrugged his shoulders. He was disgusted.

“Well, he left the wallet on the caff table and his gun on the stairs so he made pretty certain of hanging,” he observed with some satisfaction. “He couldn’t stand himself any longer, that’s what it amounts to.”

“I doubt it.” Luke put another sheet in the typewriter. “In my experience that kind of blackout always indicates an explosion. Either some unexpected idea or demand set off an emotional spark which he didn’t know he had in him, or some force from outside suddenly succeeded in penetrating
his
hide and startled him out of his senses for a minute. We shall never know quite what it was. It’s not the sort of evidence which comes out at a trial.”

Picot said nothing but sat down at the other desk and put on his spectacles. There was a great deal of work to be done.