No Escape Page 11

  Jane pulled open the door of the flat. As she did so the outer front door below clicked shut. She raced back to the sitting-room. A dark figure was outside the gate; a pale blob of a face looked up at her and turned immediately away, unrecognised, unrecognisable.

  With the note in her hand Jane went once more to the telephone. She dialled the exchange and numbers on the paper and waited. The bell rang at the other end but no one answered it.

  Chapter Eleven

  At Garrod’s suggestion Jane rang the number on the note again after an hour. This time a voice answered the call, the same urgent, rough voice she had heard in the passage of Tom’s flat after the party.

  “Who are you?” Jane demanded.

  “Never mind that. I must see you.”

  “Why didn’t you wait when you left the card. I was in. I think I saw you in the road.”

  “You don’t live alone, do you? I must see you alone.”

  “Why? What’s all this in aid of?”

  There was a pause. Jane thought she heard heavy breathing at the other end.

  “It’s about—Sheila.”

  “What about her? You said this before at the party, didn’t you? You are the same person, aren’t you? And at the hospital main door?”

  “Yes, I am. When can I see you and where?”

  “Look,” said Jane firmly. “I’m not going to have you coming to my flat unless Mary is there too. The only other place I’ll see you is the hospital. With so many people about all the time a conversation between a patient and a member of the staff is about the most private you can find and it can be held in public, too. No one listens; they’re all much too set on their own troubles.”

  Again there was a pause. Jane saw that Garrod was now standing just behind her, listening to her end of the call. She put her hand over the mouthpiece and said, softly, “It is that student or artist or whatever. The scruffy one at the party.”

  “Are you there?” the harsh voice began again.

  “Of course. Waiting for you.”

  “Sorry. I was thinking.”

  “Perhaps you’d make up your mind. This call is ticking up, rather.”

  “Sorry,” the voice said again and then, in a rush, “O.K. At the hospital.”

  “At midday tomorrow. Twelve, noon, at the Out Patient Staff canteen. No, you won’t want to ask for that. Come to the Radiography Department and sit on one of the benches for waiting patients. If a nurse or anyone asks you what you’re there for, just say Miss Wheelan told you to wait for her. Got that?”

  “Yes. Twelve tomorrow morning outside your department. To wait for Miss Wheelan. I’ll be there. ’ Bye.”

  “Wait!” Jane cried. “You still haven’t told me your name!”

  But he had rung off; her receiver was already buzzing gently. She put it down and turned to Superintendent Garrod.

  “He wants to see me urgently. I’ve arranged to meet him—”

  “At noon tomorrow outside the Radiography Department. Yes.”

  “It wasn’t Gerry—I mean, Mr Stone.”

  “I’m aware of that. Has Stone been on to you today at all?”

  “No.” Jane’s eyes lit up in anger again. “Too busy ruining my poor films, I expect,” she said. “Or rather his beastly friends, I suppose.”

  The superintendent nodded.

  “I’m afraid we’ve nothing to go on here,” he said. “If it was a set of bogus window cleaners who got in through your window and swiped the films, they were professionals and wore gloves. On the other hand there were some prints outside the windows. Difficult to say whether they are old or recent. We haven’t had much rain lately, have we?”

  “Mostly fog,” Jane said, dispiritedly.

  “I suppose,” Garrod began again, “none of that bunch could have got hold of your keys at any time? I don’t mean stolen them. Just had an opportunity to handle them.”

  Jane exclaimed angrily.

  “I must be getting senile!” she cried. “Gerry took my coat and bag at the party when we got there. He took them away—”

  Garrod was reproachful.

  “You told me you missed a film out of the bag. You didn’t say you’d given up the bag for the whole evening.”

  “We weren’t there the whole evening,” Jane said, crossly. “I generally leave my bag with my coat, unless it’s a proper evening bag. I don’t take a lot of money to parties. Sometimes almost none if someone is driving me there. Anyway I wouldn’t have imagined at the start of that particular party that anyone would want to take an impression of my door keys.”

  “More than one key?”

  “The main door and the flat.”

  “I see.”

  There was a pause. The superintendent was looking thoughtful.

  “So one or more of that lot may have got in simply by opening the door,” he said, slowly. “Another little headache for us, Miss Wheelan.”

  “What about me?” she said, indignantly. “It’s not a very encouraging thought that they can come in here any time they feel like it.”

  “It is not. I said the other day we might have to suggest you take a bit of sick leave or part of your holiday. I’m not sure I oughtn’t to press it now.”

  “Don’t you dare!” said Jane. “You asked me to see Gerry Stone again and that’s what I’m going to do, when he condescends to reappear.”

  Garrod did not press his suggestion. But he determined to brief his subordinates more fully about their watch on the house in Arcadia Road. It seemed to him to be extremely likely that Gerry had arranged to take an impression of Jane’s keys while she was parted from her handbag. He had visited the flat. He knew its geography. With a key to let himself in he could go over her room and leave again without being noticed by anyone. Especially by anyone who did not know he was not one of the tenants.

  When the superintendent had gone, Jane rang up the hospital to give Tim the latest news. He was interested, excited, indignant as she told her story. At the end she said, “I’ve been thinking. If Gerry is so keen on finding this film and hasn’t, of course, found it here, he may decide Sheila had it on her, after all. In which case he may expect the police have it, don’t you think?”

  “Yes. But the police haven’t moved yet—in any direction—so he may wonder if Sheila had it so well hidden they didn’t find it. In which case—”

  “Her parents might have got it!”

  “That was what I was about to say—”

  “Sorry. D’you know, I think I ought to go and see them.”

  “At Reading?”

  “Yes. The address was in one of the papers, wasn’t it?”

  “I’ve got it.”

  “I’m free tomorrow afternoon. I think I’ll go down. It would be a help to them, perhaps, to hear about her stay in hospital and what we tried to do for her and why she left.”

  There was a little pause, then Tim said, “Don’t ring off. I’m looking at my diary. Yes. I’ve nothing on tomorrow afternoon, either. I’ll run you down.”

  “Mightn’t you be wanted?”

  “Oh, balls to that! I’m not a slave, even if the powers that be like to think I am. The others can cope. They could even get Beech-Thomas to do some unprepared work for once.”

  “If you say so. I’d love to be driven down.”

  “Right. Two o’ clock outside the old Path Lab. No need to advertise.”

  Jane laughed as she hung up. Tim was sweet. Very cautious, very practical. Did he really want to see the Burgess parents? Or did he want to have her as a companion for the afternoon? Or—and the thought sent a little shiver of fear through her—did he dislike the idea of her travelling to Reading alone by train? As Sheila had done.

  At twelve o’ clock exactly the next morning Jane left the department and moved towards the benches along the corridor. A few figures sat there, waiting. They straightened up hopefully when they saw her, but getting no response from her subsided, muttering to one another their various dissatisfactions.

  Jane moved
slowly to the end of the row, then walked over to the general out-patients’ waiting hall. There was no scruffy figure anywhere. Shabby ones in plenty, but their well-worn clothes had been brushed for this occasion, their faces were clean, however worn by anxiety and disease. She looked in vain for the tangled hair, the fuzzy beard, the filthy sweater. The young man had not kept his appointment.

  Though her impatience grew as the minutes passed, Jane waited a full hour. Then, remembering that Tim wanted to leave at two, she went away to have her lunch.

  She ate quickly, wondering all the time why the young man had not kept his appointment. Was it an artist’s inability to move by the clock? Or had he been prevented from coming by other people, importunate friends, perhaps? Or perhaps forcibly held back? In which case it would be a mistake to ring him up, as she was half inclined to do.

  In the end she took no action about him. He had asked to see her and had not appeared. That was the end of it. But her thoughts went back to her own activities and they had not left her when she joined Tim on the rough neglected path beside the disused former Path Lab, and he found her subdued, less than responsive to his warm greeting, and silent when she took her place beside him.

  But as he drove off towards the west she settled back in her seat, relaxed with a sigh and said, happily, “You’re doing a very good deed driving me down, I was really quite a bit scared of going by train.”

  He glanced round at her quickly.

  “I wasn’t thinking of thugs when I suggested it,” he said. “I was thinking of coppers.”

  “Oh. Yes, of course. They’re supposed to be keeping an eye on me. But only if I meet Gerry, and he hasn’t uttered since the day before yesterday.”

  “I didn’t mean that, quite, either. I was thinking of what Garrod said about not interfering.”

  “Interfering? Oh, I see what you mean. But surely going down to see the Burgesses to say how sorry we are and all that isn’t interfering with police action?”

  “It could be. It all depends on what they tell us. And what we tell them, doesn’t it?”

  His honesty was infectious. Jane agreed. They decided that they didn’t care what the police thought of their action and that they would find out as much as possible about Sheila’s life during the last few years.

  But in this they were disappointed. The Burgess parents were surprised, gratified and touched by the visit. Mrs Burgess, after a few formal exchanges, mastered her growing emotion sufficiently to ask Jane to go upstairs with her.

  “Father would like to hear the medical side from Dr Long,” she said. “I don’t think I could stand it again. Not after the inquest.”

  ‘That must have been terrible for you,” said Jane, following her out of the room.

  Mrs Burgess led the way upstairs. The house was one of the extensive Edwardian suburban development on the Wokingham side of the town. It was small but not quite as box-like as its successors of the twenties and thirties, nor so well planned as the really modern homes of the late forties and fifties. Mr Burgess was a clerk in an insurance office. One of the many conscientious white collar workers whose salary had not risen over the years at the pace dictated by the big unions for their members’ wages. Great care, Jane thought, was needed in this house to keep up the standard below which Mrs Burgess refused to fall. It was evident in the carefully darned curtains at the staircase window and the neatly patched cover of the bed in Sheila’s room.

  Mrs Burgess moved to the mantelpiece and there turned to face her.

  “Sheila wasn’t happy at home,” she said. “We were too quiet for her. She was an only child, you understand. My little boy died before she was born.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jane said. She shrank from hearing any more. At the hospital she had come across so many tragedies of precisely this kind. The small, far too small, family of the highly respectable, obsessively careful office worker; parents reasonably healthy, but not over-robust; perhaps the grandchildren of the industrial revolution, suffering still from a legacy of that over-crowded and under-fed generation. These Burgesses looked elderly, perhaps they had married late. And so, of their two children, the boy had died in childhood and the girl had—

  “Sheila would go to London,” Mrs Burgess was continuing. “That was where you first knew her, wasn’t it, Miss Wheelan?”

  “Yes. At our preliminary training course.”

  “She could have worked in the hospital here,” Mrs Burgess went on. “They’re always short of staff. I know the money isn’t much, but living at home would have made it up to what she got at that Bream’s, having to pay for her room and her food and everything.”

  “I’m sure it would,” Jane agreed. “Living in London is terribly expensive.”

  “It’s no wonder she got in with the wrong lot,” Mrs Burgess said. “We only saw him once—before—before the accident, that is. But once was enough. Father agreed with me.”

  “Who was that?” Jane asked.

  “Why, Mr Stone, of course,” Sheila’s mother said, looking very straight at Jane. “Only I mustn’t say anything, must I, seeing he’s a friend of yours?”

  “Did he tell you that?”

  “How else would I know? He was here the day after it happened, asking a lot of questions. Very upset he seemed, I must say. But I don’t trust that sort. Too friendly by half.”

  “He is not a friend of mine,” Jane said, “and I entirely agree with you.”

  She told Mrs Burgess about her first meeting with Gerry and about his subsequent behaviour. She did not describe the party in Tom’s studio.

  “He even had the nerve to ask for some small trinket of hers as a memento,” Mrs Burgess said, indignantly. “I had to tell him the police had all her things, suitcases and all. They only sent them back to me today.”

  She pointed at the bed where Jane had already noticed a pile of clothes and then, opening a drawer, took out a box that Jane recognised and from it drew a string of white beads.

  “These were round her neck when they found her,” she said. “Now I’ve seen you and heard your opinion of Mr Stone and know what you tried to do for Sheila I’d like to give you these. I couldn’t bear to keep them. We’ve decided to offer the clothes to the Red Cross. After all she did and taking her own life, too, we don’t feel we want to be reminded—”

  “All she did?” Jane said, astonished at the bitterness and even hatred in the woman’s voice. Then she understood.

  “You mean those art photographs, don’t you?”

  Mrs Burgess made a noise expressing both contempt and disgust.

  “Art doesn’t have to be filth,” she said. “To my mind you can have art without the—er—the altogether—”

  “So you can,” said Jane, stung into argument. “But the nude can be an object of art, too. All the greatest painters in the world, and sculptors, have used naked figures in their works.”

  She checked herself, knowing she could never alter the Burgesses’ views on this matter. No wonder Sheila had refused to live at home. This house and these people explained nearly everything.

  “That may be so,” Mrs Burgess answered. “I don’t care much for pictures myself, nor figures in stone, either.”

  She drew the chain of white beads through her fingers, then held it out to Jane.

  “I’d like you to have them, Miss Wheelan,” she repeated. “I only wish she’d met up with you again sooner than she did. She needed a nice friend and she never found one, poor child.”

  So she was a nice friend, was she, Jane wondered, following Mrs Burgess soberly down the stairs again. In spite of their difference of opinion. Perhaps almost because of it. The intricacies, the more delicate shades of snobbery were beyond her.

  Mr Burgess and Tim were discussing rugby football over a glass of beer. They had clearly found Sheila a topic of limited interest.

  Mrs Burgess, slightly flustered, found Jane and herself a cup of tea and as soon as the various beverages were drunk Jane said they had a long way to go and had better
start back at once.

  “You were a hell of a time upstairs,” Tim said, after a silence that lasted until they were clear of the town. “Was Ma Burgess upset or something?”

  “No. I think they’ve got over the shock.”

  “He has, certainly.”

  “I think they’ve disapproved of Sheila for too long to feel great sorrow for her now. She obviously hated her home.”

  “Can you blame her?”

  “Not really. All loving care and no real affection or understanding. Mrs Burgess gave me these.”

  She pulled the beads out of her bag. Tim glanced down at them.

  “What are they?”

  “Sheila’s. She was wearing them in the train. They hadn’t fallen off because she had them inside her jumper, Mrs Burgess said.”

  “How odd. Or do girls often wear decorative necklaces out of sight.”

  “Rather odd. If they were pearls, real ones, I might wear them like that for safety in travelling. Not ordinary white poppets.”

  “White what?”

  She broke the string of beads to show him how each head fitted into its neighbour.

  “Useful, because you can have them any length you want,” she explained. “Have you really never seen poppets before?”

  “Not consciously.”

  Tim said no more about them until, much later in the day, after dining with Jane, he dropped her at the door of the flats. Then he said, quite suddenly, “About those beads. I remember now Sheila had white beads on in bed. When I was taking that plaster off—”

  “They got in the way, you mean?”

  “By no means. They were up round her neck. Quite a short strip of them. Not a ruddy great chain like you have there.”

  “I told you. That’s the whole point of poppets,” Jane said.

  She pulled the chain out of her bag, demonstrated their mechanism once more and poured them back again. Then thanking Tim for a lovely afternoon and evening she turned away towards the front door.

  He did not follow her. But after he had got back into the car he waited for a few minutes before driving away. He wanted to see the lights go on in the flat and know that she was safely home. Also he had remembered something more about Sheila’s beads. It puzzled him, but he would have to wait until the morning, he knew, before he could set his mind at rest.