John Bingham - A Fragment of Fear

In the event, I just walked in and up to the Enquiries counter. I had to wait a few minutes while a poorly dressed middle-aged woman gave her name and address and details of a purse which she had lost from her handbag. It was two minutes to six by the big white clock on the wall.

By five minutes past six she had finished describing in some detail the circumstances leading up to her loss. The station sergeant was a bright-looking, fair-haired man in his thirties. Her tale would make no difference. Either the purse would be found and handed in, or it wouldn’t. But he listened patiently, sensing that in pouring out the details she was finding relief, even misguidedly believing that she was contributing something towards the recovery of her purse. He was doing a first-class public relations job. The police are very good at this sort of thing. It is an ancillary part of their work which is not sufficiently recognised, a psychotherapy for people in distress akin to that provided by the priest in the confessional.

As she turned away from the counter, he looked at me and said, “Yes, sir?” in the cheerful manner of a greengrocer dealing with the next customer in the queue. I watched the woman go out of the door, and heard the sergeant say, “Yes, sir?” again.

As he did so, another woman, younger, carrying a small dog, came through the door. I would rather have spoken to him on my own, but I could not delay any more. I said, as quietly as I could:

“There’s a case in the papers about a murdered woman being found in Paradise Lane. I would like to have a word with somebody about her.”

“I see, sir,” he said, with as much interest as if I had been reporting a stolen bicycle. He reached for a piece of paper.

“May I have your name, sir?”

“James Compton.”

“Address?”

“274 Stratford Road-round the corner from here.”

“I take it you have some information you wish to give, sir?”

“Yes, more or less.”

“Could you give me some rough idea of the nature of the information, sir? You’ll understand that in cases of this kind we get a lot of-”

I misunderstood what he was going to say:

“Yes, I know, cranks and crackpots.”

He smiled and said:

“Well, yes-but I was going to say a lot of duplicated information, not that we aren’t glad to have it, of course, but it’s just a question of who should see you, sir.”

“Well, I travelled from Brighton with her in a train the evening before yesterday,” I began. He interrupted me.

“Ah, now you’re cooking with gas, sir!”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I mean that’s interesting, sir. Just one minute-”

He made to move away from the counter. The woman with the dog had been pretending to read some police notices on the wall. She turned away from them and moved with studied casualness over to the counter. This was something she could not miss.

“Actually, Sergeant Matthews from this police station knows the story. I just thought if there were any other small details-you know? Well, I just thought I’d call in-in case, as it were.”

“Sergeant Matthews knows the story?”

“He called yesterday morning.”

“Yesterday morning, sir? The murder wasn’t committed till the late evening, sir.”

“He called about another aspect of the case-connected but different.”

“Connected but different?”

“That’s right.”

The woman with the dog was stroking its head, pretending to be preoccupied with it, looking down at it. She was on my right side. I could almost see her left ear growing bigger. I wasn’t going to say any more. Nothing about the pavement incident, or the lights in my flat, and the abortive search. She’d had enough free entertainment.

“Just a minute, sir,” said the sergeant again, and disappeared into the back of the station.

After a few minutes he came back.

“Would you go into the waiting-room, sir? I’ll show you where it is.”

“I know where it is, I was there yesterday evening.”

“I see, sir.”

He gave me a thoughtful look, but he didn’t ask why. He insisted on accompanying me to the waiting-room. I had a feeling he was afraid I might change my mind. As he shut the door behind me, I noticed that he could see the door from the Enquiries counter. I began to fill my pipe, and had hardly got the tobacco burning smoothly before a young plain-clothes detective came in.

He was tall and dark, with black curly hair and a fresh complexion. All bright and breezy and friendly, he was, and he slumped himself down on to a chair on the opposite side of the little table, and slapped a notebook and pencil down on to the table and said cheerily:

“Good evening, sir, you’re Mr. Compton, I believe? What is it you want to tell us, sir?”

“I don’t particularly wish to tell you anything. I just thought I’d call in and remind you that I met this murdered woman on a train from Brighton the evening before last. You know about it.”

“We know about it?”

“Yes, they know about it here. She called later that evening and alleged I had made improper suggestions to her. Poor old thing,” I added. “Poor old thing. I wouldn’t think anybody had ever made suggestions to her improper or otherwise. Anyway, the station sergeant took note of her complaint, and your Sergeant Matthews called on me yesterday morning to tell me about it. I gathered that the desk sergeant here had already formed an opinion that she was-well, you know, a bit of a crackpot, but they felt they had to inform me officially and get a formal denial from me, and all that sort of thing.”

“I see, sir.”

He wasn’t taking any notes at all.

“I mentioned one or two other things to Sergeant Matthews.”

“What sort of things, sir?”

But I wasn’t buying that one.

“Look,” I said, “it’s a long story. This woman gave me a message typed on my own typewriter and on my own typing paper. But it’s all very complicated, and linked up with other things, and so I told all to Sergeant Matthews. I just called in here in case there was some other details you people wanted to know.”

I watched him doodling with his cheap government pencil on a blank page of his notebook. After a while he said:

“Well, we appreciate that, sir, we appreciate that very much. Just for the record, perhaps you would give me a detailed description of the woman you travelled with from Brighton.”

I described her without hesitation and without difficulty. When I had finished he said:

“Well, sir, the best thing I can do is to attach a note to the sergeant’s report, saying you called, and if there’s anything further we want, we’ll get in touch with you. Right?”

“Fine,” I said, and got to my feet. But he hesitated.

“Perhaps I’d better just look for the old sergeant’s report, sir, as I haven’t seen it. It’s a big station here, we don’t see everybody else’s reports. I mean, that wouldn’t be on the cards, would it? I mean, we can’t see everybody’s reports, can we? Otherwise we’d spend all our day reading. See what I mean? I mean, there might be some point or other we could clarify at once. So if you wouldn’t mind just hanging on a minute, sir?”

I liked his eager, babbling incoherent manner. It was nice and friendly.

“It might save us troubling you further,” he added, as an afterthought.

“Certainly, if you wish,” I said, and sat down again. He went out of the room. He was a pleasant, ingenuous character, probably a young uniformed officer on probation to be a detective.

I waited for ten minutes. When the door opened again two other plain-clothes men came in. They were different.

One of them announced himself briefly as the superintendent in charge of what he called “the Paradise case.” Later, he referred to the other man as “sergeant.”