Chapter 19

My aunt did not return with me to England by the car-ferry as I thought she intended. She told me at breakfast that she was taking a train to Paris. “There are things which I must settle,” she said, and I remembered her warning of the night before and wondered – quite wrongly as it turned out – if she had a premonition of death.

“Would you like me to go with you?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “From the way you spoke to me last night I think you have had enough of my company for a while.”

Obviously I had hurt her deeply by refusing to listen to the story of the man called Charles Pottifer.

I saw her off at the station and received the coldest of cold pecks upon the cheek.

“I didn’t mean to offend you, Aunt Augusta,” I said.

“You resemble your father more than your mother. He believed no story was of interest outside the pages of Walter Scott.”

“And my mother?” I asked quickly. Perhaps at last I was to be given a clue.

“She tried in vain to read Rob Roy. She loved your father very dearly and was anxious to please, but Rob Roy was going too far.”

“Why didn’t she marry him?”

“She hadn’t the right disposition for a life in Highgate. Will you buy me a Figaro before you go?”

When I came back from the bookstall she gave me the keys to her apartment. “If I am away a long time,” she said, “I may want you to send me something or just to look in to see that all is well. I will write to the landlord and tell him you have the keys.”

I returned to London on the car-ferry. Two days before, from the window of the train, I had watched a golden England spread beside the line – now the picture was very different: England lay damp and cold, as grey as the graveyard, while the train lagged slowly from Dover Town towards Charing Cross under the drenching rain. One window could not be closed properly and a little pool of water collected at the side of the compartment; the heating had not been turned on. In the opposite corner a woman sneezed continuously while I tried to read the Daily Telegraph. There was a threatened engineering strike, and the car industry was menaced by a stoppage of cleaners in some key factory which turned out windscreen-wipers. Cars in all the BMC factories waited without wipers on the production line. Export figures were down and so was the pound.

I came at last beyond the court news to the obituaries, but there was little of interest to read in that column. Somebody called Sir Oswald Newman had died at the age of seventy-two; he was the star death in a poor programme. He had been chief arbitrator in a building dispute in the 1950s after retiring as Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Works. He had married Rosa Urquhart in 1928, by whom he had three sons, and she survived him. His eldest was now Secretary of the International Federation of Thermofactors and an OBE. I thought of my father whispering, “Dolly, my darling,” before he died on the floor of the auberge in the Haute Ville, too soon to meet Sir Oswald Newman during the building dispute, which would probably not have concerned him anyway. He always kept on good terms with his men – so my mother had told me. Laziness and good nature often go together. There were always Christmas bonuses, and he was never in the mood to fight over the rise of a penny an hour. When I looked out of the window it was not Sir Oswald Newman’s England I saw but my father’s grave in the smoky rain and Miss Paterson standing before it in prayer, and I envied him his inexplicable quality of drawing women’s love. Had Rosa Newman so loved Sir Oswald and her son, the OBE?

I let myself into the house. I had been away two nights, but like a possessive woman it had the histrionic air of being abandoned. Dust collected quickly in autumn even with the windows closed. I knew the routine that I would certainly follow: a telephone call to Chicken, a visit to the dahlias if the rain stopped. Perhaps Major Charge might address a remark to me over the hedge. “Dolly, my darling,” my father whispered, dying in the small hotel, as I lay in the Highgate nursery with a nightlight beside the bed to drive away the fears which always gathered after my mother – or was it my stepmother? – had pecked me good night. I was afraid of burglars and Indian thugs and snakes and fires and Jack the Ripper, when I should have been afraid of thirty years in a bank and a take-over bid and a premature retirement and the Deuil du Roy Albert.

A month passed, and no news came to me from my aunt. I rang several times, but there was never any reply. I tried to interest myself in a novel of Thackeray’s, but it lacked the immediacy of my aunt’s stories. As she had foreseen, I even regretted having prevented her telling me the story of Charles Pottifer. I found myself living now, when I lay awake or waited in the kitchen for the kettle to boil, or when I let The Newcomes fall shut on my lap, with memories of Curran, Monsieur Dambreuse and Mr. Visconti. They peopled my loneliness. When six weeks went by without news I became anxious, in case, like my father, she had died in a foreign land. I even telephoned to the Saint James and Albany – it was the first time since I left the bank that I had telephoned abroad. I was nervous of my poor French when I spoke into a receiver, as though the errors might be magnified by the microphone. The receptionist told me that my aunt was no longer there – she had left three weeks before for Cherbourg.

“Cherbourg?”

“The boat-train”, the receptionist said and the line was cut before I could ask him what boat.

I feared then that my aunt had left me for good. She had come into my life only to disturb it. I had lost the taste for dahlias. When weeds swarmed up I was tempted to let them grow. Once I even consented, as a possible relief to my tedium, to attend, on Major Charge’s invitation, a political meeting: it turned out to be a meeting of British Empire Loyalists, and I supposed then that it was Major Charge who had given the organization my address for their pamphlets. I saw several of my old clients there, including the admiral, and I was glad for the first time that I was in retirement. A bank manager is not expected to have strong political preferences, particularly eccentric ones, and how quickly the gossip of my presence would have gone around Southwood. Now, if my old clients looked at me at all, it was with a puzzled expression, as though they were uncertain when it was we had met and on what occasion. Like a waiter on his day off, I passed virtually unrecognized. It was an odd feeling for one who had been so much in the centre of South-wood life. As I went upstairs to bed I felt myself to be a ghost returning home, transparent as water. Curran was more alive than I was. I was almost surprised to see that my image was visible in the glass.

Perhaps it was to prove the reality of my existence that I began a letter to Miss Keene. I made several drafts before I was satisfied with what I wrote, and the letter I am copying now differs in many small details from the one I dispatched. “My dear Miss Keene,” I can read in the draft, but I cut out the “My” in the final version, for it seemed to presume an intimacy which she had never acknowledged and which I had never claimed. “Dear Miss Keene, I am truly distressed that you don’t feel properly settled yet in your new home at Kofiefontein, though of course I cannot help feeling a little glad” (I altered the “I” to a “we” in later drafts) “that your thoughts still rest sometimes on our quiet life here in Southwood. I have never known so good a friend as your father, and my thoughts often go back to those pleasant evenings when Sir Alfred sat under the Van de Velde dispensing hospitality, and you sat sewing while he and I finished the wine.” (That last phrase I cut from the next draft – there was too much emotion in it barely concealed.) “I have been leading a rather unusual life the last month, much of it in the company of my aunt of whom I wrote to you. We have even gone as far afield together as Istanbul, where I was a good deal disappointed with the famed Santa Sophia. I can say to you – as I couldn’t say to my aunt – that I much prefer our own St. John’s Church for a religious atmosphere, and I am glad that the vicar doesn’t feel it necessary to summon the faithful to prayer by a gramophone record in a minaret. At the beginning of October we paid a visit together to my father’s grave. I don’t think I ever told you (indeed I only learnt of it recently myself) that he died and was buried in Boulogne by a strange concatenation of circumstances too long to write here. How I wish you were in Southwood that I might tell you of them.” That sentence too I thought it prudent to eliminate. “I am reading The Newcomes at the moment, but I don’t enjoy it as I enjoyed Esmond. Perhaps that is the romantic in me. I open Palgrave too from time to time and read over my old favourites.” I went on with a sense of hypocrisy: “My books are a good antidote to foreign travel and reinforce the sense of the England I love, but sometimes I wonder whether that England exists still beyond my garden hedge or further than Church Road. Then I think how much harder it must be for you in Koffiefontein to keep the taste of the past. The future here seems to me to have no taste at all: it is like a meal on a menu, which serves only to kill the appetite. If you ever come back to England —” But that was a sentence I never finished, and I can’t remember now what I intended to write.

Christmas approached with no news of my aunt, not even by the medium of a Christmas card. A card, of course, arrived from Koffiefontein, a rather unlikely card with an old church seen across an acre of snow, and a comic one from Major Charge which showed goldfish in a bowl being fed by Father Christmas; it was delivered by hand to save the stamp. The local store sent me a tear-off calendar with a different treasure of British art for each month, the colours bright and shiny as though they had been washed in Omo, and on December 23 the postman brought a large envelope which when I opened it at breakfast shed a lot of silvery tinsel into my plate, so that I couldn’t finish my marmalade. The tinsel came from an Eiffel Tower which Father Christmas was climbing with his sack over his shoulder. Under the printed Meilleurs Vœux was only one name, written in block capitals: WORDSWORTH. He must have seen my aunt in Paris, for how else could he have obtained my address? At the bank I had always used the official Christmas cards to send to my best clients, with the bank’s coat of arms stamped on the cover and inside a picture of the main office in Cheapside or a photograph of the board of directors. Now that I had retired there were few people to whom I posted cards: Miss Keene, of course, Major Charge perforce. I sent one also to my doctor, my dentist, to the vicar of St. John’s and my former chief cashier who had become manager of a branch in Nottingham.

A year before my mother had come to me for Christmas dinner, and without the aid of Chicken I had cooked a turkey quite successfully under her directions, then we had sat almost silent, like strangers in a restaurant-car, both of us feeling that we had eaten too much, until she left at ten. Afterwards I had, as was my habit, attended the midnight service with carols at St. John’s. This year, since I had no wish to cook a meal for myself alone, I booked a table for dinner at the Abbey Restaurant off Latimer Road. It proved a mistake. I had not realized they were mounting a special menu with turkey and plum pudding to attract the lonely and the nostalgic from all over Southwood. Before I left home I had rung my aunt’s number in the vain hope that she might have returned just in time for Christmas, but the bell tolled and tolled in the empty liat, and I could imagine the noise setting all the Venetian glasses atinkle.

The first person I saw when I came into the restaurant, which was a very small one with heavy beams and stained-glass windows and a piece of mistletoe in an undangerous position over the toilet, was the admiral sitting all alone. He had obviously dined early and he wore a scarlet paper crown – a torn cracker lay on his plate with the remains of plum pudding. I bowed to him and he said angrily, “Who are you?” At a table beyond him I could see Major Charge, who was frowning over what looked like a political pamphlet.

“I am Pulling,” I said.

“Pulling?”

“Late of the bank.”

There was an angry flush below the red paper hat, and an empty Chianti bottle stood on the table. I added, “Happy Christmas, Admiral.”

“Good God, man,” he said, “haven’t you read the news?”

I managed to get by, though the channel between the tables was very narrow, and found to my distress that my table had been reserved next to Major Charge’s.

“Good evening, Major,” I said. I began to wonder whether I was the only civilian in the place.

“I have a favour to ask of you,” Major Charge said.

“Of course… any help… I am afraid I no longer keep up with the stock market…”

“Who’s talking about the stock market? You don’t suppose I’d have anything to do with the City? They’ve sold this country down the river. I’m talking about my fish.”

Miss Truman interrupted us to take my order. Perhaps to encourage her customers, she was wearing a paper cap, vaguely military in shape but yellow in colour. She was a large boisterous woman who liked to be called Peter; the little restaurant had always seemed too small to contain her and her partner as well – a woman named Nancy who was timid and retiring and perhaps for that reason showed herself only occasionally framed at the service hatch.

Unable to look elsewhere, I made some complimentary reference to her cap.

“Like the old days,” she said, looking pleased, and I remembered that she had been an officer in the women’s Navy.

How ambiguous my feelings were. I realized in those moments how deep was the disturbance my aunt had caused. This was my familiar world – the little local world of ageing people to which Miss Keene longed to return, where one read of danger only in the newspapers and the deepest change to be expected was a change of government and the biggest scandal – I could remember one defecting clerk who had lost too much money at the Earls Court greyhound track. It was more my country than England could be, for I had never seen the Satanic mills or visited the northern wastes, and in my way I had been happy here; yet I was looking at Peter (Miss Truman) with an ironic eye, as though I had borrowed my aunt’s vision and saw with her eyes. Beyond Latimer Road there stretched another world – the world of Wordsworth and Curran and Monsieur Dambreuse and Colonel Hakim and the mysterious Mr. Visconti who had dressed up as a monsignor to escape the Allied troops, yes, and of my father too, saying “Dolly darling” to Miss Paterson with his last breath on the auberge floor and gaining a lifelong devotion by dying in her arms. To whom now could I apply for a visa to that land with my aunt gone?

“Will you take the set meal, Mr. Pulling?”

“I don’t think I can manage the plum pudding.”

“Nancy has made some smashing mince pies.” “Perhaps one,” I said, “because it’s Christmas.”

Miss Truman rolled away with a Tom Bowling stride and I turned to Major Charge. “You were saying?”

“I’m going away for the New Year. To a study group at Chesham. I’ve got to board my fish. Can’t trust them with the daily. I thought of Peter – but she’s a woman too, in a way. You can see how she feeds us. Any excuse to pile it on. She would probably do the same with the little buggers.”

“You want me to look after your fish?”

“I looked after your dahlias.”

And starved them of water, I thought, but I had to say, “Yes, of course, I will.”

“I’ll bring you the food. Just one teaspoonful once a day. Don’t pay any attention if they come guzzling at the glass. They don’t know what’s good for them.”

“I’ll harden my heart,” I said. I waved away the turtle soup – it was overfamiliar. Too often I had opened a bottle of it when I had no appetite even for eggs. I asked, “What kind of a study group?”

“The problems of empire,” he replied, staring at me with eyes enlarged and angry as though I had already made some foolish or unsympathetic reply.

“I thought we had got rid of all those.”

“A temporary failure of nerve,” he snapped and bayoneted his turkey.

I would certainly have preferred him as a client to Curran. He would never have bothered me about overdrafts: he lived carefully within the limits of his pension: he was an honest man, even if I found his ideas repulsive, and then I thought of Mr. Visconti dancing with my aunt in the reception room of the brothel behind the Messaggero after swindling the Vatican and the King of Saudi Arabia and leaving a wide trail of damage behind him in the banks of Italy. Was the secret of lasting youth known only to the criminal mind?

“A man’s been looking for you,” Major Charge said after a long silence. The admiral got up from his table and made unsteadily for the door. He was still wearing his paper crown, but when his fingers were already on the handle, he remembered it and scrunched it into a ball.

“What man?”

“You’d gone to the post office – or so I imagine. At any rate you turned right not left at the bottom of Southwood Road.”

“What did he want?”

“He didn’t tell me. He rang and knocked and rang and knocked, making the hell of a din. Even the fish were scared, poor little buggers. There were two of them. I thought I ought to speak to them before they disturbed the whole street.”

I don’t know why, but I thought at that moment of Wordsworth, a possible message from my aunt…

“Was he black?” I asked.

“Black? What an extraordinary question. Of course he wasn’t.”

“He didn’t give a name?”

“Neither of them did. He asked where he could find you, but I had no idea you were planning to come here. You weren’t here last year or the year before. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you here before. All I could tell him was that I knew you went to the carol service at Saint John’s.”

“I wonder who it could be,” I said.

I had a deep conviction that I was about to find myself again in Aunt Augusta’s world, and my pulse beat with an irrational sense of pleasure. When Miss Truman brought me two mince pies I accepted them both as though I needed them to sustain me for a long voyage. I even helped myself liberally to brandy butter.

“I used real Rémy Martin,” Miss Truman said. “You haven’t pulled your cracker.”

“Pull it with me, Peter,” I said with daring. She had a strong wrist, but I got the winning end, and a small plastic object rolled on to the floor. I was glad to see that it was not a hat. Major Charge leapt at it and gave a snort of laughter as merciless as a nose-blowing. He put it to his mouth and breathed hard, making a sound like a raspberry. Then I saw that it was shaped like a tiny po with a whistle in the handle.

“Lower-deck humour”, Miss Truman said in a kindly way.

“It’s the festive season,” Major Charge said. He blew another raspberry. “‘Hark! the herald-angels sing,’” he said in a tone of savagery, as though he were taking some kind of revenge on Christmas Eve and all its impedimenta of holy families and mangers and wise men, a revenge on love, a revenge for some deep disappointment.

I arrived at St. John’s Church by a quarter past eleven. The service always began at half past eleven so as to distinguish it from the Roman Catholic Midnight Mass. I had begun to attend when I first became the bank manager, for it gave me a stable family air if I were seen at the service, and though, unlike Aunt Augusta, I have no religious convictions, I could be there without hypocrisy since I have always enjoyed the more poetic aspects of Christianity. Christmas, it seems to me, is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.

For years now I have always sat in the same pew below a stained-glass window which was dedicated in 1887 to the memory of Councillor Trumbull. It shows Christ surrounded by children as he sits in the shade of a very green tree – the text, of course, is “Suffer little children.” Councillor Trumbull was responsible for building the square red-brick block with barred windows in Cranmer Road, which, once an orphanage, is now a detention centre for juvenile delinquents.

The carol service began with a gentler version than Major Charge’s of “Hark! the Herald-Angels Sing,” and then we proceeded to the old favourite, “Good King Wenceslas.”

“Deep and crisp and even,” the high female voices sang from the gallery – it has always seemed to me a very beautiful line, conveying the landscape of a small country England with no crowds, no traffic, to soil the snow, when even the royal palace stood among the silent and untrodden fields.

“No white Christmas, sir, this year”, a voice whispered in my ear from the pew behind, and turning, I saw Detective-Sergeant Sparrow.

“What on earth are you doing here?”

“If you can spare me a moment after the service, sir,” he replied, and raising his prayer-book, he sang in a very fine baritone voice:

 

“Though the frost was cru-el,

When a poor man hove in sight”

 

(perhaps Detective-Sergeant Sparrow, like Miss Truman, had once been in the Navy)

 

“Gathering winter fu-u-el.”

 

I looked back at his companion. He was smartly dressed with a lean legal face. He wore a dark grey overcoat and carried an umbrella crooked for safety over his arm – I wondered what he would do with it or with the sharp crease to his trousers when the time came for him to kneel. He didn’t seem as much at home in the church as Detective-Sergeant Sparrow. He was not singing and I doubt whether he was praying.

 

“Mark my footsteps, good my page,”

 

the sergeant sang lustily,

 

“Tread thou in them boldly,”

 

and the voices in the gallery rose ardently to the unexpected competition from below.

At last the proper service began, and I was glad when the Athanasian Creed, which they invariably inflict on us at Christmas, was safely over. “As also there are not three incomprehensibles, nor three uncreated: but one uncreated, and one incomprehensible.” (Sergeant Sparrow coughed several times in the course of it.)

I intended – it is always my custom at Christmas – to go to Communion. The Anglican Church is not exclusive: Communion is a commemoration service, and I had as much right to commemorate a beautiful legend as any true believer has. The vicar was saying clearly, while the congregation buzzed ambiguously to disguise the fact that they had forgotten the words: “We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we, from time to time, most grievously have committed…” I noticed that the detective-sergeant, perhaps from professional prudence, did not join in this plea of guilty. “We do earnestly repent, and are heartily sorry for these our misdoings…” I had never before noticed how the prayer sounded like the words of an old lag addressing the Bench with a plea for mercy. The presence of Detective-Sergeant Sparrow seemed to alter the whole tone of the service. When I stepped into the nave to go up to the altar I heard an outburst of argumentative whispers in the pew behind me and the words, “You, Sparrow,” spoken very forcibly, so that I was not surprised when I saw that it was Detective-Sergeant Sparrow who knelt as my neighbour at the Communion rail. Perhaps they had been uncertain whether I might not take advantage of the Communion to escape through a side-door.

When his turn with the chalice came Detective-Sergeant Sparrow took a very long swig, and I noticed afterwards that more wine had to be fetched before the Communion was finished. When I returned to my seat, the detective-sergeant trod on my heels, and in the pew behind me the whispers broke out again. “My throat’s like a grater,” I heard the sergeant say. I suppose he was apologizing for his performance with the chalice.

At the end of the service they stood and waited for me at the church door, and Sergeant Sparrow introduced his companion. “Detective-Inspector Woodrow,” he said, “Mr. Pulling.” He added with awe in a lower voice, “Inspector Woodrow belongs to the Special Branch.”

I shook hands after a little hesitation on both sides.

“We were wondering, sir, if you would mind assisting us again,” Sergeant Sparrow said. “I told Inspector Woodrow how helpful you had been once before over that jar of pot.”

“I suppose you are referring to my mother’s urn,” I replied with as much coldness as I could muster on Christmas morning.

The congregation poured out on either side. I saw the admiral go by. In his breast-pocket he had a patch of scarlet, which I suppose was the paper cap serving as a handkerchief.

“They told us at the Crown and Anchor,” Inspector Woodrow said to me in a stiff unfriendly tone, “that you have your aunt’s keys.”

“We like to do things nicely,” Sergeant Sparrow explained, “with the free consent of all parties concerned. It goes down so much better in court.”

“What exactly do you want?” I asked.

“A happy Christmas, Mr. Pulling.” The vicar put his hand on my shoulder. “Have I the pleasure of meeting two new parishioners?”

“Mr. Sparrow, Mr. Woodrow, the vicar,” I said.

“I hope you all enjoyed our carol service.”

“Indeed I did,” Sergeant Sparrow said heartily. “If there’s one thing I like it’s a good tune with words I can understand.”

“Just a moment while I find copies of our parish magazine. Quite a bumper Christmas number.” The vicar dived back into the dark church looking like a ghost in his surplice.

“You understand, sir,” Sergeant Sparrow said, “we could have easily got a search-warrant and made a forcible entry, but besides ruining a good lock – it’s a Chubb, very prudent of Miss Bertram – it looks bad in evidence, you understand what I mean, for the good lady. If it comes to evidence. Which we hope will not be the case.”

“But what on earth are you looking for? Not pot again surely?”

Inspector Woodrow said in a grave hangman’s tone, “We are pursuing an inquiry at the request of Interpol.”

The vicar came hurrying back to us, waving copies of the parish magazine. He said, “If you would both just turn to the last page you will find a tear-out subscription form for the coming year. Mr. Pulling already subscribes.”

“Thank you, thank you, I am sure,” Detective-Sergeant Sparrow said. “I haven’t a pen with me at the moment, but just leave it with me. A very tasteful and original design – all that holly and the birds and gravestones.”

Inspector Woodrow took his copy with evident reluctance. He held it in front of him as a witness holds a Bible in court, not quite certain what to do with it.

“It’s a very swinging number,” the vicar said. “Oh, forgive me. Poor lady. I’ll be back in one sec.” He pursued an elderly lady down the path to Latimer Road, calling, “Mrs. Brewster, Mrs. Brewster.”

“I think before he returns,” Inspector Woodrow said, “we had better go somewhere and discuss things.”

Sergeant Sparrow had already opened the parish magazine and was reading it with absorption.

“You can come home with me,” I said.

“I would prefer to go to Miss Bertram’s with no further delay. We can explain matters in the car.”

“Why do you want to go to my aunt’s flat?”

“I’ve told you. There has been an inquiry from Interpol. We don’t want to disturb a magistrate on Christmas night. You are next of kin. Your aunt by giving you her keys has left the flat in your care…”

“Has something happened to my aunt?”

“It is not impossible.” He was never satisfied unless he made four words serve for one. He said sharply, “The vicar is coming back… For God’s sake, Sparrow, pay attention.”

“Now I hope you won’t either of you forget your subscription,” the vicar said. “It will go to a good cause. We are furnishing a Children’s Corner in time for Easter. I would have preferred to call it a chapel, but we have some old Protestant battle-axes in Southwood. I’ll let you into a very deep secret. I haven’t even told my committee. The other day I obtained in Portobello Road an original drawing of Mabel Lucy Atwell’s. We shall unveil it at Easter, and I am wondering if we couldn’t persuade Prince Andrew…”

“I’m afraid, Vicar, we shall have to go,” Inspector Woodrow said, “but I hope your Corner will be a great success.” It was beginning to rain. He looked at his umbrella, but he didn’t open it. Perhaps he was not confident that the neat folds could ever be properly reproduced.

“I will be calling on you both one day very soon,” the vicar said, “when I have your addresses on the subscription form.”

“Sparrow!” Inspector Woodrow spoke quite sharply.

Sparrow closed the parish magazine with reluctance and followed us at the run because of the rain. As he sat down beside Woodrow in the driver’s seat, he explained apologetically, “There’s a story called ‘Who’s Guilty?’ I thought it might be a murder story – I like a good murder story – but it was only about an old lady who was unkind to a pop singer. You can’t tell anything from titles nowadays.”

“Now, Mr. Pulling,” Inspector Woodrow said, “when did you last see your aunt?” The phrase sounded vaguely familiar.

“Some weeks – months – ago. In Boulogne. Why?”

“You travel about a great deal with her, don’t you?”

“Well…”

“When did you last hear from her?”

“I’ve told you – Boulogne. Do I have to answer these questions?”

“You have your constitutional rights,” Detective-Sergeant Sparrow began, “like any citizen. Duties too, of course. A voluntary statement always has a better sound in court. The court takes into account…”

“For God’s sake, hold your tongue, Sparrow,” Inspector Woodrow said. “Aren’t you surprised, Mr. Pulling, that you’ve heard nothing from your aunt since Boulogne?”

“There is nothing about my aunt which surprises me.”

“You aren’t anxious – in case something might have happened to her?”

“Should I be?”

“She has kept some very queer company. Have you ever heard of a Mr. Visconti?”

“The name,” I said, “is somehow familiar.”

“A war criminal,” Detective-Sergeant Sparrow added unwisely.

“Please keep your eye on the road, Sparrow,” the inspector said. “General Abdul – you’ve heard of General Abdul, I presume?”

“…Perhaps, yes, I seem to know the name.”

“You were with your aunt in Istanbul some time ago. You arrived by train and you were expelled after a few hours. You saw a Colonel Hakim.”

“I saw some police officer or other certainly. An absurd mistake.”

“General Abdul made a statement before he died.”

“Died? Poor fellow. I didn’t know. I can’t see how his statement can concern me.”

“Or your aunt?”

“I’m not my aunt’s keeper.”

“The statement concerned Mr. Visconti. Interpol has circulated the details. Until now we had always assumed that Mr. Visconti was dead. We had written him off.”

“By the way,” I said, “before we go any further, I must tell you that I haven’t got my aunt’s keys with me.”

“I had hardly expected that. I wanted only your permission to enter. I assure you that we’ll do no damage.”

“I’m afraid I can’t allow it. The flat is in my charge.”

“It would look so much better if it ever came to a jury, Mr. Pulling,” Sparrow began, but the inspector interrupted him. “Sparrow. Take the next turning on the left. We will take Mr. Pulling home.”

“You can call on me after Christmas,” I said, “that is, if you have a search warrant.”