The Players And The Game Read online

  ‘But I telephoned half an hour ago.’

  ‘I’m sorry. She cannot see anybody.’

  Lowson whimpered slightly. ‘Please, nurse.’

  ‘Is it really urgent?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Very well. Just a moment.’ She went into another room, returned. ‘Dr Winstanley will see you.’ When Lowson got up she barred the entrance to the inner room. ‘On your knees.’ He dropped clumsily to his knees. ‘Kiss my shoe. Now the other one.’

  There was a delicious smell of dirt and shoe polish blended. ‘Pathetic, you’re pathetic,’ the nurse said. She bent down, lifted him by one ear, pushed him into the room so that he stumbled.

  Louise Winstanley nodded from behind her desk. Her features were regular and handsome. The comers of her thin mouth were turned down in an expression of permanent disapproval. ‘Sit down. What is your trouble?’

  ‘Incontinence, Doctor.’

  ‘Yes, of course. And what has your behaviour been like since I saw you last?’

  ‘Bad, I’m afraid. I just can’t help myself.’

  ‘Then we must try to help you. Stand up.’ She came round to stand beside him. Her head came up to Lowson’s shoulder. ‘Take your clothes off. I must examine them to see if they are soiled.’

  He took off his jacket, then gave another whimper. ‘I don’t like to, Doctor. Not in front of a woman.’

  ‘Hold out your hands.’ He did so. She took a pair of handcuffs out of a cupboard and fitted them on his wrists. ‘You are disobedient, stupid and filthy,’ she said, and smacked each side of his face hard. ‘I think Agnes had better come in to help me deal with you, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ he whispered. When the nurse appeared in the doorway he thought he would faint with pleasure.

  An hour and a half later and twenty pounds poorer he was back in his office, relaxed and mellow. He contemplated Paul Vane, and listened to what he was saying, with the amused languor of a well-fed cat. He liked Paul, and thought of grooming him for some position which would involve his joining the Board. It was to keep Paul under his eye, as much as for the convenience of having him living near to the works, that he had mentioned the possibility of moving to Rawley. Looking now at the subdued anxiety of Paul’s expression, he wondered whether promotion was after all a good idea.

  ‘This is really Brian’s pigeon, you know that. You’ve spoken to him?’

  ‘Yes. He just said my name wasn’t on the list. If Blaney and O’Rourke can use the luncheon-room I should be allowed to use it too.’

  Childish and petty, Lowson thought, and stupid to run to him for protection. It showed a lack of adroitness. There were other ways of handling this kind of thing. He said that he would have a word with Brian. He looked speculatively at Paul’s slender figure, thin but longish hair and fashionably colourful tie. Perhaps Val’s doubts were right, perhaps he was a bit too much of a good thing.

  ‘How’s life in Rawley? Settling down?’

  Paul said it was terrific, marvellous to be out of London, with that note of enthusiasm which managed to sound at the same time both sincere and unconvincing. Alice was finding shopping a bit different but, yes, she was enjoying it too.

  From the depth of sensual repletion Lowson considered him. There was something odd about Paul. What was he like? An actor playing several parts, not quite at home in any of them? ‘And your daughter, Jean?’

  ‘Stepdaughter actually. Jennifer. I shouldn’t be surprised if she spread her wings soon, flew the coop. Youth, you know. She wants London.’

  ‘If there’s anything Alice would like to know, tell her to ring Val, she’d love to help. Has Alice joined the Townswomen’s Guild yet? Val’s on the committee.’

  ‘I don’t think so. She’s joined the bridge club.’

  ‘Plenty of time. Settle down first.’

  ‘As soon as we’re straight you must come round and have dinner.’

  ‘Plenty of time. Didn’t you tell me you played tennis? You should join the club. Sally’s a member.’

  ‘I’m meaning to. Just for these next few days I’m going to be pretty busy.’

  ‘I know. Still, you want to join one or two things, keep in the swim.’

  Paul got up. ‘You won’t forget–’

  ‘What? Oh no, leave it to me.’

  When he was alone Bob Lowson closed his eyes. The day had been exhausting, and he could easily have fallen asleep. Then the green light on his desk showed, and a bell tinkled gently. The call was from the managing director of one of Timbals’ European subsidiaries. It was about some confusion over export deliveries and should have been dealt with by O’Rourke, but the managing director had asked specifically for Lowson. He applied emollient remarks, said that he hoped to be making a European tour later in the year, and sent for O’Rourke. He did not ring Paul back until nearly five o’clock.

  ‘Paul, I think you’ve got the whole thing a bit out of perspective. Essentially the luncheon-room’s meant for the use of directors. When they’ve got guests.’ His laugh came warm, rich, easy. ‘Even directors aren’t really supposed to use it unless they have guests, though I dare say some of them will.’

  ‘Blaney and O’Rourke aren’t directors. That’s just my point.’

  ‘No. But Blaney’s on home marketing and O’Rourke handles exports. The way Brian put it to me is that they both often have guests from whom we’re getting business, people who demand a bit of special treatment. You know. That’s something you just can’t say about Personnel.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Just have a word with me any time you’ve got guests who seem to you to need the full treatment, I’ll make sure you use the luncheon-room.’

  ‘But my name doesn’t go on the list?’

  You shouldn’t have said that, Lowson thought, you should have left it alone. ‘Paul, I don’t mind bending the rules but I never break them. And they’re not my rules, you know, they’re Brian’s, though I thought he was being quite reasonable.’

  At that point Paul did leave it, and said thank you very much. If I made a list of the things he’s done wrong in dealing with that little matter, Bob Lowson thought, starting with talking to me about it at all, they would fill a page. But the satisfaction of his mood was too deep to be affected by petty annoyances.

  The lift was packed. Paul found himself thigh to thigh with a middle-aged woman from Accounts. Joy Lindley, on the other side of the lift, smiled at him. As they walked towards the Underground she was a step or two behind him, and he stopped to let her catch up.

  ‘It was very nice of you, Mr Vane. Not telling Mr Hartford about the memo.’

  ‘Think nothing of it.’ He asked questions and found out that she lived in Highgate with her family, that her mother had had an operation and was more or less an invalid, and that she would have liked to go to University but didn’t get good enough grades. ‘I’m pretty stupid.’

  ‘Nonsense. You wouldn’t have lasted a week in Brian Hartford’s office if you were stupid.’ The presence of this long-legged filly cantering by his side made him feel youthful and frisky. At the Underground entrance he said, ‘Come and have a drink with me. Just a quick one.’

  Suddenly, unexpectedly, she put out her tongue at him, said ‘Ask me tomorrow,’ waved, and walked across the street. He was delighted. Later the wheels of the train rattled out words he had heard before: Vane Vane, off again. Not really, he told himself, I won’t say another word to the little minx.

  The place was just off the M4 near Datchet, a rambling Victorian country house approached by a winding drive of copper beeches. The evening was chilly, and no patients were in the grounds. Hartford went up to the first floor, spoke to the Sister on duty.

  ‘Good evening, Mr Hartford. Not quite so well today, I’m afraid. But we have our ups and downs.’

  ‘Yes.’ His lips were pressed thinner than usual as he walked down the corridor. The card on the door said Mrs Ellen Hartford. It was yellow, not white. His wife had been here for eight years.r />
  She sat at a table by the window. From the door her profile looked like that of the girl he had married. It was not until you were close that the puffy cheeks and slack mouth became obvious. Her eyes were like dead cornflowers. They looked at Hartford without appearing to see him. He spoke her name, kissed her cheek. She brushed the cheek as though a fly had touched her, then made a gesture towards the gardens.

  ‘Nobody out there now.’

  ‘No. It’s fairly cold.’

  ‘But they’ve been there.’

  ‘You haven’t been out yourself today?’

  ‘They’ve been watching me. All the afternoon. Two of them, on patrol, up and down. Waiting to get in. Over that balcony.’ She made a gesture at the balcony outside her window. ‘But I have to watch, and I can’t watch all the time. I must get some sleep.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I want the balcony taken away. Knocked down. So that I’m safe.’

  He knew that it was foolish to argue, although for a long time he had tried to do so. Now he was silent. Her hands twined and retwined, a sure sign that she was more than usually disturbed.

  ‘Have you got anything?’

  He drew from his pocket a half-pound block of chocolate. She broke off a piece, ate it greedily. ‘They’re trying to starve me here. Nothing to eat today since breakfast, you’re not to say I’m lying, it’s true.’ She put a hand up to her eyes as though afraid of being hit. ‘I don’t like it here, I want to go back to Bayley.’

  Bayley was the village where they had lived before the accident. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said I’ll see. We’ll talk about it again.’ He knew that in half an hour she would have forgotten the conversation.

  ‘They may try to stop me, but I’ve made plans. Not silly ones. Shall I tell you about them? You’re not listening.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘I shan’t tell you. Only that I’ve got a helper here. Somebody who is truly helpful. Or it seems she is. Only one thing that’s wrong, it worries me. At some time or other she has offended God. She bears the mark. Do you know what God did to show his displeasure?’ She leaned across, her spittle touched his face. ‘He made her black.’

  Hartford looked at his watch. A little more than eight years ago she had been taking their ten-year-old daughter Eve to a party, had driven out of a side road without looking and run head-on into a bus. Ellen had been badly concussed, and it had been some time before she could be told that Eve had been killed. She had found it impossible to cope with the simplest household tasks when she came out of hospital, but it was six months before the extent of the damage to her brain was realised. For those six months he had kept her at home with a housekeeper to do the work, but when she set fire to the house he had accepted that she must go into a home. He was a logical man and liked to feel that he must ‘accept’ facts, although of course it was she who had had to accept life in the home. Sometimes she would seem perfectly rational, but evenings like this one made him accept also that she would probably never come out. Perhaps, after all this time, he did not even want her to come out. She said something through a mouthful of chocolate.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You’ve been lying to me. You sold our house at Bayley. You live in a flat. You sold it because you wanted to keep me in here, didn’t you?’

  There would be another half-hour of this. He always stayed for an hour, and he came three times a week. He now felt no emotion at all in relation to Ellen, but he sometimes wondered what Eve would have been like now, at eighteen, if she had lived.

  During this month of June Anne Marie’s elder sister Nathalie came over to England, and took her clothes and few other belongings back to France. She talked to Plender, who was impressed by her certainty that the girl would not have gone off without at least telling her family. They were Catholics, Anne Marie adored her father and got on well with her sister, and although Nathalie admitted that she was rather flighty and occasionally did things they disapproved of, it was inconceivable that she would have gone off and not been in touch with them.

  Plender told Hurley, who was not much impressed. What, he wondered, were they expected to do about it that wasn’t being done already? Details about her had been circulated, her name and description were on the Missing Persons list.

  The sergeant ran a hand through his black curly hair. He was a conscientious young man, and he had been worrying about the case. ‘Maybe something has happened to her.’

  ‘Perhaps it has. I dare say she deserved it. What then?’

  ‘It’s those two disappearances, sir. I can’t get over the idea that they’re connected. We haven’t heard anything of the other girl either.’

  But a couple of days later they did hear something of the other girl, in the form of a telephone call from Joan Brown’s landlady, Mrs Ransom. She had turned up again, asking if her old room was still vacant. Mrs Ransom had told her of the police inquiries, and Joan Brown herself came into the station.

  Plender saw her. She was a dumpy girl in her middle or late twenties, with no obvious attractions. Not the most likely candidate, Plender had to admit, for a sex crime. He told her that she had given them a lot of trouble.

  ‘I don’t understand. What have I done wrong?’

  ‘I didn’t say you’d done anything wrong, only that you’d caused a lot of trouble. Not only to us. Mr Darling, your employer, came in to see us. He said you just left without giving notice or saying a word. Is that right?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘That wasn’t very considerate. Why did you do it?’

  ‘He was an old pinchfist. It was rotten pay. And there wasn’t much to do anyway, business was slack. I got fed up.’

  ‘So you left him, just packed your things and cleared off. Why?’

  ‘I don’t see it’s your business.’

  ‘Boy-friend trouble?’

  ‘I wanted a rest.’

  ‘Where did you go to?’

  A pause. ‘Home. At Kiley. Just outside Mansfield. In Nottinghamshire.’ Flatly she repeated, ‘For a rest. Things were getting me down.’

  ‘Just suddenly like that, you needed a rest.’ Plender got along well with most women, but he was finding Joan Brown hard work. ‘And what have you come back for now?’

  ‘Might as well be in Rawley as anywhere, I suppose.’

  ‘Are you going to ask for your old job back?’

  ‘Shouldn’t think so. I told you it was boring and he didn’t pay much. I’ll look around.’

  ‘Do you know a girl named Anne Marie Dupont? This girl.’ He showed her a photograph. He had the impression that her mind was occupied by some different subject, and decided that it was almost certainly connected with a young man, and that this was the reason for her leaving Rawley.

  His eye automatically noted: no rings, nice hands but doesn’t take care of them, worn handbag but it looks like leather and not plastic. There was a vague wild look in her eye that he associated with religion, on the slender basis that he had once had a girl-friend with a similar look, and that she had become a Jehovah’s Witness. He said on impulse, ‘Are you very religious, Miss Brown?’

  At last he had said something that interested her. ‘I was brought up a Methodist. But I don’t go to chapel now.’

  ‘Is your father a preacher?’

  ‘No, a schoolmaster. But they’re both Methodists, very strict. What made you think I was?’

  Plender said truthfully that she reminded him of a girl he knew who had joined the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and her interest waned. She gave him her parents’ address and promised to let him know if she moved again in the next few weeks. Then she wandered out of the station as vaguely as she had come in.

  He decided against ringing the parents. After all, what would he be ringing them for? As Joan Brown said, she had done nothing wrong. If she chose to pack in a job and leave Rawley because she wanted a rest or for some other reason, that was her affair. When he repor
ted her visit to Hurley, the inspector made it clear that he was gallantly refraining from saying I told you so.

  So, with the Joan Brown disappearance cleared up, interest in Anne Marie Dupont dropped almost to vanishing point. Only Plender felt uneasily that perhaps something more should be done about it.

  Chapter Eight

  The Tennis Club

  The centres of middle-class social life in Rawley were the Rotary Club and the golf club for men, the social club and the Townswomen’s Guild for women, and the tennis club. The Rotary Club was for business men, the golf club for those on a rather higher social level, including some Timbals executives, the social club (which included the bridge club that Alice Vane had joined) for their wives. Rawley was too big to be a company town, but there were five thousand workers at the Timbals factory, and the firm helped to support most of these organisations.

  The tennis club was upon the whole the place where the sexes chiefly met, not just occasionally but all the time. The social grading there was not less accurate for being invisible and unmentioned. In theory anybody could join, but in practice the ordinary Timbals workers would no more have thought of trying to do so than would a grocer’s shop assistant. They belonged to the firm’s sports club, which had better courts than Rawley Tennis Club and more of them, available at a much lower cost. To join the club was, as Bob Lowson had said to Paul Vane, to keep in the swim – or rather, to swim in the right bath. Paul had taken his advice and joined. Jennifer had refused, on the ground that she’d finished with all that stuff at school, and Alice didn’t play. At the tennis club on a June evening he was the centre of a trivial incident which was later to assume some importance.

  Paul played tennis as he played other games, flashily rather than well. He had a hard first service which went in only occasionally, and an erratic whipped forehand drive. He was playing a mixed doubles with Louise Allbright against Ray Gordon and Sally Lowson. Ray and Sally should have been much too good for the other pair, but Sally was expressing her boredom with the Rawley scene by playing almost every stroke a few seconds late, as though she were in Copenhagen and operating her racket by remote control. Paul, on the other hand, was playing altogether above himself. At four-five down he won two points by decisive smashes to pull up from love-thirty on Louise’s service to thirty-all. Then a third smash raised a puff of white on the back line. Ray called ‘Out’.