Marazan (18 page)

I say that his death had shaken me. For one thing, Compton was a man that I could have hit it off with most awfully well. One can’t describe these things, but—I liked him. At that time I’d never had much to do with educated people, people of my father’s sort; I can’t say that I had felt the loss. Till I met Compton, I don’t think I had ever dealt with a man of his sort quite on terms of equality, unless perhaps in the Service. It takes all sorts to make a world, and my way wasn’t theirs. But Compton had been different. I walked up Regent Street and Oxford Street on my way to Maida Vale, and I was pretty miserable.

The sheer brutality of the murder came home to me then in a way that it hadn’t before; I suppose because I had had my own affairs to think about. It was a blazing afternoon. I went striding on down the hot pavements without looking where I was going; once or twice I cannoned into people, but mostly they looked at me and got out of my way. I’m too old to have ideals. I had all that knocked out of me before I was fourteen. I’m not the sort of man that goes and puts his shirt on Truth or Justice or Purity, or any of those things with capital letters. That was the difference between Compton and myself; he was a man who lived for his ideals, whereas I hadn’t any to live for.

The whole show formed itself into a series of pictures as I strode on down Oxford Street on that blazing afternoon. I saw Compton driving his car up over the Downs from Winchester to Petersfield, and returning to his home near Guildford to sit down and write to his
brother that he really couldn’t go doing that sort of thing in England. I saw him in the restaurant in Leeds, repeating the same vague threat. I saw him in the cockpit of the
Irene
, and then I saw him as I had seen him last, with that frightful wound in the chest that I could do so little for, that was hopeless from the start, smashed and broken. All these pictures shimmered and danced against a grey background of dope, grey, brutal, and depressing.

Presently I found myself in my flat. I was suddenly very tired, most utterly weary. I slung my hat into a corner and collapsed into a chair in the tiny sitting-room. I was out of it all now. I tried to get the whole business out of my mind; I didn’t want to think about it any more. It had been a nightmare show; I didn’t think that sort of thing ever happened in real life. I must get along back to my flying, I thought, and forget about it. It would be as well to avoid any trips to Italy for a month or two. I could do that all right; very likely there would be no occasion for me to go.

It had been a rotten business to get mixed up in.

It’s curious how little a thing can turn the course of one’s life. The old woman in the basement who came in every morning to make my bed had given me a calendar at the New Year, the sort of thing that tradesmen send round to their customers. It had some advertisement on it. I had kept it to avoid hurting her feelings, and because above the calendar there was rather a pleasant reproduction of a water-colour sketch. The picture was a wide landscape with fields and woods running down to a blue sea, all very bright and sunny. I had always thought of it as a bit of the North Devon coast. I suppose I must have seen it every day since it arrived. I looked at it again now, and for the first time I saw that there was a couplet below the picture, not very conspicuous. It was a bit of Kipling and it ran:

I remember I felt just as if somebody had hit me in the wind. I sat for a long time staring at that thing. Looking back upon it now after all these years, I don’t think there’s any argument that could have stung me up just like that calendar did. It got me just where I lived. I can’t explain myself; I only know that I saw then that Compton had been right; we couldn’t possibly have that sort of thing going on in England. I only know that when I got up out of my chair and moved over to have a better look at the thing, Richard was himself again.

The front-door bell rang. I turned slowly away and went to open the door; as I went the words of the couplet were ringing through my head. Absently I opened the door. I was hardly surprised when I saw it was Joan Stevenson.

‘Good afternoon, Miss Stevenson,’ I said quietly. ‘I want you to tell me what I ought to do about Mattani.’

She stood on the mat looking at me in that disconcerting, direct way of hers, as if she had been a man. I wasn’t accustomed to it and it worried me; the girls I knew didn’t look at one like that. This time I managed to meet her gaze. I don’t think I shall forget that. I don’t know how long we stood there; I only remember the shadows in her deep grey eyes, and the couplet that was running in my head:

‘Our England is a garden …’

‘Do?’ she said. ‘Haven’t you done enough for us? It’s in the hands of the police now.’

We moved into the sitting-room.

‘I came to make sure that you were all right,’ she said, ‘and to hear what happened that night.’

‘They told me at the Yard that you’d been there,’ I said. ‘Thanks for that.’ I didn’t say that they had told me that she went there to try and get me out of the mess, but I knew she understood.

‘It seemed so rotten for you to have been dragged into all this,’ she explained. ‘And it was quite easy, because I was at school with Doris Carter, and she took me along to her father yesterday morning. He was so nice about it, and he said you’d be all right. Captain Stenning, I haven’t really heard anything about this—this frightful thing. How did it all happen? Who killed him?’

‘Mattani killed him,’ I said shortly. ‘Mattani, or his men.’

‘It’s horrible!’ she muttered.

She sat down, and I told her the whole story so far as I knew it. I found that she couldn’t tell me much that I didn’t know already; we compared notes, but I learned very little more. She told me that they had had an inquest in the Scillies and had adjourned for a month; the funeral was to be held at Guildford on the following day. I don’t know how much they had told his parents. Joan said that she thought his mother was getting so feeble that she would hardly realise the details. It was an extraordinarily painful business.

Presently we had told each other everything we knew. I got up and opened a window, and stood looking out into the street. They had diverted a bus route down our road while the main road was being repaired, I remember; I stood and watched the scarlet buses as they passed below in the sunlight, their decks crowded.

As I stood there, it seemed to me that the man I ought to get in touch with was Giovanni da Leglia. He had
been in my flight of Sopwith Camels during the war. Heaven knows what had brought him into the British Flying Corps; he was one of those freaks that turn up from time to time even in the best regulated squadrons. We used to call him Lillian, being the closest approximation to his name that we could manage. He was in my flight for six months, a long partnership in the Flying Corps. He was shot off back to Italy, as an instructor, then; I remember that we swore blue we’d meet in Paris when the war was over. I hadn’t seen him since.

I had an idea he came from Florence. I tried hard to remember something of his characteristics. He had been a hare-brained young man in those days, cool, keen as mustard on flying, and utterly irresponsible. We had a Bessoneau hangar on one ’drome that was open at each end, and served as a garage for cars. I remember the rowing I gave him for diving down at the end of a patrol and flying his Camel clean through this thing and out the other side, regardless as to whether there was anyone or anything inside. His speed was probably a hundred and fifty miles an hour or so, the clearance about two feet above and below the machine. It turned out later that there were two men in the hangar, who hurled themselves into corners as he came through. I made him give them credit for a quid each in the wet canteen when I’d done with him. I think he thought me very pernickety.

That was one side of him. The other point that I remembered was his fantastic pride of race. He was an aristocrat of the aristocrats. He used to try and tell us all about the da Leglias. We used to throw things at him. Once, indeed, one guest night, we were too far gone to hit him, and he rambled on till he came to the bit about his descent from one of the Kings of Aragon on the wrong side of the bed. We began to sit up and
take notice then; before we went rolling to our huts we had revised and improved upon his pedigree. It needed bowdlerising by the time we’d done with it, but it proved a great attraction at subsequent guest nights.

That, however, is all by the way. The thing that really mattered, and the thing that had impressed me at the time, was his pride in his family. I began to wonder how that fitted in with Fascismo. For all I knew, he might be one of the most ardent of the lot. On the other hand, he might be sitting quietly at home in a dignified opposition. He had pots of money. But Fascist or not, I knew that I could depend on Leglia for advice. He was a stout lad; there would be no shaking hands with murder where he was concerned.

Joan got up from the chair where I had left her and came across to me at the window.

‘Is there anything more for us to do?’ she said. I think she must have guessed what I was thinking about.

I looked down at her reflectively. There was nothing more that she could do, and if there was I didn’t want her to do it. Whatever turn this affair was to take, it was pretty sure to end in a vulgar brawl.

I temporised. ‘The police are taking it up,’ I said.

She nodded. ‘They’ll arrest Roddy?’

I laughed. ‘If they get a chance,’ I said. ‘They’ll have their work cut out to do it. He can’t be extradited.’

She hadn’t heard that, and I had to explain it. Something in what I said must have made her smell a rat, though, for her next question put me in a corner.

‘Then there’s nothing more that we can do, is there?’ she said.

I shall always remember that, because the tone of relief that she used startled me. It wasn’t natural. I glanced down at her sharply, and I think perhaps I saw
rather more than I was meant to. One remembers these things.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I had some idea of going to look up a pal of mine, a bloke called da Leglia. He lives in Florence.’

She caught her breath. ‘Oh …’ she said. ‘You can’t go there. Sir David said that you would have to be careful.’

‘I shall be,’ I said. ‘Damn careful.’

She turned away, and stood for a bit looking out at the strings of scarlet omnibuses that passed below, shaking the house. At last she said, without taking her eyes from the window:

‘Don’t you think it would be best to leave it to the police now?’

‘They’ll never get him, of course,’ I remarked.

‘Why not?’

‘Look at it,’ I said. ‘They can’t extradite him—for the present, anyhow. He simply refuses to be extradited, and that’s that. As for getting at him any other way, they’re so handicapped. They’ve got to play fair. They stand for England. If they could get to know that he was in England some day, I dare say they might be able to do something about it. They can’t very well set about enticing him to come to England. At the same time, we know that he does come here from time to time. I’ve not had time to think about it much, but I fancy we might be able to work something on those lines if we went about it in the right way.’

She glanced sharply at me. ‘You mean that you’d decoy him here and set a trap for him?’ she said.

‘That’s about it.’

‘They’d hang him, wouldn’t they?’

‘With any luck,’ I said.

She turned back to the window. ‘It would kill his mother,’ she said quietly.

I had forgotten all about the old couple at Guildford. I’ve never had much to do with family matters, so that this remark of hers put me all at sea. I tried to assimilate the idea for a bit. I tried to see it from her point of view, but I couldn’t make it go. I really couldn’t see in that any reason for letting Mattani go free. I was still worrying over this when she turned to me again.

‘Leave him alone,’ she said. ‘It would be frightful for them if anything happened to Roddy—on top of this.’ She stood fingering one of the button-holes of my coat, and looking up at me.

And then, at long last, I knew what the trouble was.

‘Look here, Joan,’ I said gently. ‘D’you think that’s quite straight? Because I don’t.’

I saw her flush up scarlet, but I went on before she had time to answer, and that gave her time to collect herself.

‘It’s not Compton that I’m thinking about altogether,’ I said. ‘I’d do my best to get Mattani hung for that, certainly, but if it was only that I’d leave it to the police. What worries me is the dope. We’ve got to stop that coming into England, you know, and the only real way to stop it is to get hold of Mattani. I don’t know how many loads he’s run in up to date—either two or three. I don’t know how much he runs of it at a time or what the profits are; but I’m damn sure of this, the profits are something perfectly enormous. He’ll go on doing it, you know. He may wait six months till the fuss has died down, but he’ll begin again. We’ve simply got to stop the stuff getting into the country like that. So far as I can see, the only satisfactory way of stopping it is to hang Mattani.’

She flashed out at me. ‘Don’t talk about it like that.’

I was hardly listening to her. ‘Sorry,’ I said absently. I was thinking of the days just after the war, when I had been living at a fair rate, when it was all rose-coloured for us because we had not been killed. I was thinking of the girl that I had met then, and the fine times we had had, that first summer after the war. I was thinking of how it all came to an end.

‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen anyone that you cared for really well on in dope, have you?’ I said. ‘I did … once.’

She looked at me in a troubled sort of way. ‘It’s their own fault if they take it,’ she said uncertainly.

‘I don’t think so,’ I said quietly. ‘They take it—they take it because there’s nobody to tell them any better. The sort of people who want looking after, only there’s nobody to do it. The Wimps and Flossies, trailing about Shaftesbury Avenue in the evening, looking for a bit of fun. The ones that come from Golders Green and think they’re seeing life when they dance all night in some damned cellar. They’re mostly women. They take it because they think it makes them bright. Because they think it makes them pretty. They fairly lap it up. It’s only because they haven’t got anyone to look after them. They haven’t a chance. It’s not playing the game to put the damn stuff in their way. It’s a Chink’s game, Chinks and Dagoes.’