Prelude to a Certain Midnight Read online

  Still another of Asta’s friends was an artist who painted large canvases, one Johnny Nation, who had been trained to be a doctor like his father before him. He drew nothing but dried-up livers, kidneys preserved in formaldehyde, tangles of tortured nerves and guts.

  Nation drew with remarkable skill and accuracy. Asta hoped to wean him from his bad habits. Meanwhile, to give the young man a chance to live, she bought his pictures. Now her house was full of them, panels of bowels and bladders and dropsies; tumours wearing spectacles, wombs in aspic, ulcers in floral hats and carneous moles like human faces. She hung them up between Indian water-colours, caricatures by Sem, and bits of framed embroidery of the time of Queen Anne. Her house, in fact, was like a madhouse. Asta kept a cook and cooked for herself, employed a butler and presented her own guests to herself. She had a secretary who could not efficiently read or write, Mrs Fowl, a reduced gentlewoman, who sometimes helped with the sewing. What with her household and her charitable works, Asta Thundersley found little time to eat or sleep. And still she got fat 1

  ∨ Prelude to a Certain Midnight ∧

  Twelve

  Her increasing weight used to worry her. What was the use of a Crusade against hunger and oppression, led by a woman who looked as if she had been stuffed with chickens, peaches and cream? She tried – not whole-heartedly – to get thin, but God had seen fit to enclose her hungry soul in a hundred and seventy pounds of meat: there was nothing Asta could do about it. So she became more vehement in her outcries, and by this very vehemence she discredited herself. Asta might be in the right seven times out of ten, but she had a way of hanging the cap-and-bells on Reason and lending the aspect of lunacy to a trivial error. Nobody who was present is ever likely to forget the Bishop of Suchester’s tea-party, to which Asta Thundersley brought another of her friends, Tom Beano, the leader of a group of militant Freethinkers.

  “So,” said Beano, feeling the Bishop’s stomach, “this is how you sell all you have and give to the poor, is it, you swollen prelate?” Then he made a speech denying God: there was a scene.

  Beano loved scenes: he was responsible for the Buttick Street Riot. On that occasion Beano tried to overthrow the Salvation Army in one desperate coup d’etat. After the band had played, a melancholy, blue-lipped man in uniform told the audience that he had once been a drunkard, a liar, a fornicator, a thief, a profane swearer, a coppers’ nark, a teller of filthy stories, and in general a dirty dog – but now, now (Hallelujah! ) he was saved, saved, saved – now, now, now he was washed in the Blood of the Lamb (Praise the Lard! Oh Praise, Praise, Praise the Lord! ).

  Beano had arranged that his supporters should be ready for a certain signal. Everything had been rehearsed. As the saved Salvationist made a dramatic pause, Beano roared:

  “Sister Hannah! YOU shall carry the banner!” In a squeaky falsetto chorus his supporters responded:

  “But I carried it last time!”

  “You’ll carry it this time and like it!”

  “But I’m in the family way!”

  “You’re in everybody’s bloody way! – January, FEBRUARY, MA-A-A-ACHQ… Left-right, left-right, left, left, left, left…”

  Then the fight started, and that is how Beano lost his front teeth and the job he used to have in a shipping office. Beano and Mr Pink used to have some interesting discussions concerning the existence of the Deity. Mr Pink always ended by saying, with maddening calm: “I have Faith, my friend.”

  “So have I, my friend,” said Tom Beano, unshakable. “Faith in what? Faith in God, Mr Beano?”

  “Faith in the non-existence of God, Mr Pink.”

  “Then you’re a blind fool, Mr Beano, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  “And you are a blithering idiot, Mr Pink.”

  “Thank you, Mr Beano,” said Pink, with irony.

  “Thank you, Mr Pink,” said Beano, through curled lips.

  Asta picks such people up as the whim moves her, and seldom drops them. She always feels personally responsible for the welfare of her wistful, watchful hangers-on, who sit hungrily about her big red presence like stray dogs about a butcher’s shop. Yet she has made several true friends who love and understand her. Curiously enough, most of her real friendships developed out of enmity. Asta’s best friends are people whom she originally attacked.

  Once you persuaded her that she had done you an injustice, Asta would take off her skin to make a waistcoat for you: she was yours for life. Now, for example, Chief Inspector Turpin might be her brother: he is one of the few men she really admires. Yet at the time of the murder of Sonia Sabbatani, when Turpin was only a detective-inspector, she was ready to tear him to pieces.

  Turpin was a big man with a tucked-in chin and a spirally-wrinkled neck that resembled a gigantic screw by means of which his small head was fixed to his thick shoulders. His fists were freckled and his face was pale. When Turpin talked he barked, kept his white-grey eyes on you as if he was waiting for a sudden, belligerent move.

  Now his hair is white: his scalp resembles one of those wire brushes with which suede shoes are cleaned. When the Sabbatani case was in the newspapers, Turpin’s hair was almost red; he is thinner now, so that his face hangs in folds. The watery sepia ghosts of freckles still speckle the backs of his hands, but he is not the lean, tense man he used to be, although his eyes are more arrogant and his voice more brusque.

  ∨ Prelude to a Certain Midnight ∧

  Thirteen

  Asta met him first in the Bar Bacchus: he was pointed out to her by Gonger. “Detective-Inspector Turpin of the Yard,” he said, in a graveyard whisper.

  “Ho!” cried Asta Thundersley, loosening her shoulders with a series of angry shrugs, like a boxer before a fight. “Ho!… Hi, you!”

  “Mom?” said Turpin.

  “Where’s the beast that murdered Sonia Sabbatani?”

  “Couldn’t say, Mom, I’m afraid.”

  “He couldn’t say!” said Asta. “He couldn’t say! Why can’t you say? A friend, a customer of her own father, did it. Rotten-est, dirtiest case in the world, and he can’t say! What do I pay taxes for?”

  “Ha!” said Turpin, finishing his lager beer.

  “You’re a detective-inspector, aren’t you?”

  “Yes’m.”

  “Aren’t you a public servant, then?”

  “Yes’m.”

  “Find the beast that murdered Sonia Sabbatani, and I’ll give you a hundred pounds. There 1”

  “Much obliged to you,” said Detective-Inspector Turpin, dryly. “See what I can do.”

  “Sec what you can do? Bah! Catch the beast, lock him up and hang him – d’you hear?”

  “Yes’m,” said Turpin, rising and brushing ashes off his blue trousers and moving towards the door.

  “No you don’t,” said Asta. She interposed her powerful body between the detective-inspector and the way out of the Bar Bacchus, and continued:

  “Look here, you, whatever you call yourself. Find who killed Sonia Sabbatani, and I’ll give you a hundred pounds for yourself. In notes. Do you hear?”

  “Couldn’t accept it, ‘m. Find the man if we can, in any case.”

  “Look here!” Asta bellowed, holding the detective-inspector back as he tried to go out. “A little girl is murdered. Have you got any daughters?”

  “Two.”

  “If one of your daughters was Sonia Sabbatani, what’d you do?”

  “What I’m doing now,” said Turpin. “That’s what I’m here for.”

  “Here,” said Asta, “here a child is murdered – ”

  “Listen, Madam,” said Detective-Inspector Turpin, “do listen. This murder was, as they call it, a Sex Murder. That is to say, a sort of a murder without obvious motive – ”

  “The motive is obvious!” said Asta Thundersley, getting hold of the detective-inspector’s lapels. “Sex is the motive, rape is the motive, beastliness is the motive!”

  “Quite so. You know how these things are, don’t you? Some of the nicest pe
ople go in for that kind of thing – there’s no way of identifying them. Is there, now?”

  “Bah!”

  “Ask yourself, Miss Thundersley,” said Turpin, “if it’s as easy for us as you seem to think. As you say, sex is the motive – beastliness as you said just now, and quite right too. Well now, you see, almost anybody might commit a crime like that. Respectable fathers of families have been known to, er, commit certain offences against children. People you’d never suspect are always strangling ladies of easy virtue with silk stockings, for instance. This sort of murderer is the hardest sort of murderer to lay your hands on, because he’s not a habitual criminal. He is not known to the police. A burglar, or a forger, or a confidence trickster – he leaves, as you might say, his autograph on his work. A certain kind of thief might be specially expert at opening, say, Yale locks with a bit of celluloid. Or another might, as a skilled craftsman, have his own particular way of cracking a safe. They can no more change their style than you or I can change our handwriting or our fingerprints. They give us something to work on, and sooner or later we make an arrest. And besides, in the criminal world there is always somebody or other who will give information to the police; or at least somebody we can get information from in one way or another. But the sort of men that do jobs like this Sabbatani job, they’re lone wolves. Ordinary, clean-cut crooks hate and despise them. They’re always the last sort of people you could possibly suspect. For all we know the man who killed that poor kid is having a quiet drink in this bar at this very moment. Or perhaps he’s too respectable to hang about in bars: perhaps he believes it’s wicked to drink. Or perhaps he’s hard at work earning money to keep his mother, wife, and children. Or he might be a doctor, at a lying-in. Or a tramp on the roads. There is no earthly way of saying, is there? That’s where our headache comes in, don’t you see? But don’t you worry, we’ll get him in the end.”

  “Oh, yes! Of course you will get him in the end! Bah! Don’t talk to me! I know you. I know the police. They couldn’t even catch a cold. I know them. Oh, they’re remarkably efficient when it comes to picking up some old hag, paralytic-drunk on Red Biddy; or running in somebody without visible means of support, or lying in wait for tarts in Gerrard Street. But when it comes to a murder – ”

  With some amusement Turpin asked: “As a matter of curiosity, ‘m, I wonder what you’d do in a case like this if you were the superintendent. God forbid. Here are your facts: little girl goes to school. In the afternoon thick fog comes down, real London pea-souper – can’t see a hand in front of you. Four o’clock comes, the little girl doesn’t get home. Mother, worried, goes to the school to meet her, with a torch. School is in Ingersoll Road, half a mile away through half a dozen dark dirty streets. Mother gets to the school at five. Asks for Sonia and is told that the child has been kept in for being a bit too high-spirited but has been released with a caution at ten past four because of the fog. Mother walks streets – ”

  “ – She felt something terrible had happened,” said Asta, with tears in her bloodshot bull-eyes, “she felt it in her heart.”

  “Quite so, quite so. Everybody always does, or at least they say they do after the fact. Mother walks streets shouting Sonia, Sonia, Sonia, and gets home three-quarters of an hour later. Still no Sonia. Waits till six. Very properly rings local police station. No news. At half-past seven she rings again. Enquiries have been made at local hospitals. Still no news of Sonia. At last body of little girl is found in the coal cellar of empty house (condemned property) in John Cornelius Street. An Offence had been committed and the child strangled. Medical evidence says death occurred some time during that foggy afternoon. Nobody saw anybody or anything. No witnesses could possibly be reliable, in any case, because the whole town was stone blind… Well?”

  Asta Thundersley gritted her big teeth and, after a long pause during which she pinched her cheeks, twisted her ears and stood on one leg like a dropsical stork, while Detective-Inspector Turpin watched her out of the corners of his eyes with a little expectant smile, she said: “Arrest every known pervert in London.”

  “You’d have your work cut out,” said Turpin.

  “What the hell are you paid for? To hang around grinning like a Cheshire cat and wasting the public money in saloon bars?”

  “All right, Miss Thundersley, I beg your pardon. You’re the boss now. You’re going to arrest every known pervert. What do you mean by Pervert?”

  “People who go in for that sort of thing, of course,” said Asta, angry because she felt that she was not on solid ground.

  “You mean,” said Turpin, with an irritating smile, “arrest everyone whom you know to be a child-murderer, is that it?”

  “I mean everyone who might be a child-murderer,” said Asta Thundersley, breathing hard.

  “On what charge would you arrest them, Miss?”

  “For questioning.”

  “Ah, Miss Thundersley, I see you’re one of these Hitlerites.”

  “Do you want me to knock your silly head off?” asked Asta Thundersley, in such a tone that the detective-inspector realized that she might at any moment try to do so.

  He said hastily: “You can’t just arrest people because they might have done this or that. You ask them to call and see you, or ask permission to call on them and have a few words with them… But all right. Have it your way. You’re the boss now, remember.”

  “Well,” said Asta, a little out of countenance, “interview (if you like that word better) people who have tendencies that way.”

  “You wouldn’t find enough policemen in the world to do it, would you?” asked Turpin.

  “What do you mean by that, Turpentine, or whatever you call yourself?”

  “Well, Miss Thundersley, I come back to what I said before. Anyone, absolutely anyone, could be the culprit. Take these queer people whose idea of fun is to give their girl friends a good hiding. Where are they?”

  Asta Thundersley said: “All over the place, I believe.”

  “Well, I put it to you, since you’re the boss now; anyone who has fun that way might be the man we’re looking for. But how are you to find out? I’m going to be crude: sometimes this sort of nonsense with dog-whips, or whatever it might be, is something between husband and wife, as it might be. Your Queer fellow has his fun, if you can call it fun, with the connivance and the assistance of what a normal person would call the ‘victim’. The willing victim.”

  “Well, Turpentine?”

  “Turpin. The name is Turpin. You can put it this way. Say, for the sake of example, I am a timid sort of man. I am as quiet as a mouse. This has nothing to do with present company, but – just for the sake of example – I am as quiet as a mouse and you (you realize, of course, that I am only talking for the sake of talking), you are one of those soft little women, one of those little fluffy-ducks who wants to do nothing but please someone.

  “I am timid. Why am I timid? I am timid because I shrink away from people. I’m timid, in short, because I am afraid. What I really want to do is, show myself to the world as a great big savage hairy creature with a pair of fists on me like hammers and the courage of the devil; I want to use those fists that I haven’t got. I’d be a real thug, a tough guy, if I could. But I can’t. I’m always, if the truth must be told, one of those shrinkers-back full of all sorts of hate. You see, I’m dead yellow. And what happens is, I cover it all up by pretending to be sweet and soft and gentle. But underneath I’m waiting for just one chance to get at someone. If, say, you give me a good smack in the face, I won’t do anything about it except store it up in my mind. And then, at last, one of these days, the thing I’ve been storing up breaks out. But I don’t get my revenge on you, you see. I get my own back on something weak. See?

  “How does it break out? You can mark my words, hardly ever of its own accord. Somebody’s got to help it. Who? I’ll tell you who.

  “The person that helps a softie to get his revenge is always the willing victim I think I mentioned a little while ago. You know wha
t I mean; somebody who gets a thrill out of suffering: it might be a woman, it might be a man. Up comes the willing victim; which is all that this shy torturer, as you might call him, this murderer who’s afraid to commit his murder – this willing victim is all that he needs to make him feel powerful. He never felt powerful before.

  “But you (I am not speaking personally), you are much stronger, better-looking, and socially more important, perhaps, than he is – and you somehow enjoy submitting to him. I’m being direct and brutal, “m, since you asked for it. You make this man feel stronger; you give him a feeling of self-confidence – which is half his battle – because you lie down and let yourself be ill-treated by him.

  “And so there comes a certain night – or it might be a foggy afternoon – when somebody falls into his hands. More often than not it’s a child. The weakest man is stronger than the average child, isn’t he? So what happens? All of a sudden he feels that he’s something like a man of power; and he rapes that child. After he has raped that child he knows that if she lives she’ll recognize him; and her identification together with the medical evidence will make things hard for him. See? And generally he’s a respectable man. So what does he do? Tries to wash out the evidence. How? With a child it’s easy. Get hold of her throat and hold on tight.

  “Then he goes back to whatever job he does for a respectable living. I can tell you, anyone might have murdered Sonia Sabbatani… But you’re the boss, Miss; and you’re telling me what you would do if you were superintendent,” said Turpin.

  Asta Thundersley said: “I am to take it, I believe, that everyone who enjoys being hurt adds to the cruelty of the world. Is that it?”

  “I suppose you could put it that way, ‘m.”

  “You could put it this way: that anyone who enjoys being hurt is bound to find someone who enjoys hurting him, or more probably her.”

  “Yes’m.”

  “What you indicate is this: that any woman who gets a thrill out of suffering and submission will, as it were, stimulate some man, in play, to feel he’s compelling her to suffer and submit. Am I right?”