Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

There were bound to be half-a-dozen of his subordinates busy on a case like this. The police weren’t stingy about manpower. It would be detective-inspectors who had done the investigations, not their boss. He might not know much, but he would certainly know something. That was no reason, though, why he should talk to me. I was not a special friend of his. Further, I should have to declare that I had some sort of interest. He was far too shrewd, and also too inquisitive, a man not to discover it. If I had been there out of random or even out of sadistic curiosity, I should have stood a better chance.

I had asked him to meet me at a pub in the market place. There, in the saloon bar, immediately after opening time, I waited. But I didn’t have to wait long. The door swung open, and Maxwell entered with a swirl and a rush of air. He was a man both fat and muscular, very quick on small, strong, high-arched feet. He turned so fast, eyes flashing right and left until he saw me, that the air seemed to spin round him. “Good evening, sir,” he said. “How are you getting on?”

I said, come and have a drink.

We sat in an alcove, tankards on the table in front of us. When he lifted his tankard, wishing me good health, Maxwell’s eyes were sighting me. He had a strange resemblance to my old colleague Gilbert Cooke. Maxwell, too, was smooth-faced and plethoric, so much so that a doctor might have worried, though he was particularly active for a man in his mid-fifties. His great beak nose protruded violently from the smooth large face. His eyes were of the colour that people called cornflower blue, and so wide open that they might have been propped. The resemblance to Gilbert was so strong that it had previously, and had again that night, a curious effect on me: it made me feel that I knew him better than I did. Because I had an affection for Gilbert, I felt a kind of warmth, for which in reality I had no genuine cause, for this man. In upbringing, though, they weren’t at all the same. Gilbert was the son of a general, while Maxwell’s mother had been a charwoman in Battersea. He had himself started as a policeman on the beat, and one could still hear relics, by now subdued, of a south-of-the-river accent.

“Are you getting on all right?” he began — and then didn’t know what to call me. When we had some dealings together in the war, he had come to use my Christian name. Now my style had changed; he was uneasy, and cross with me because he was uneasy. That was the last thing I wanted, to begin the evening. Not for the first time, I cursed these English complications. I told him, as roughly as I could, to drop all that. Underneath his inquisitive good manners, he could be rough himself, as well as proud. He gave a high-pitched laugh, drained his tankard, called me plain Lewis, and whisked off to fetch two more pints, although I was only half-through mine.

He went on with his enquiries about my fortunes. I retaliated by asking about his; all was well, he had just had a grandson. But with Maxwell the questions tended to flow one way.

“What are you here for, anyhow?” his eyes were unblinking and wide.

“That’s almost what I’ve come to ask you.”

“What’s that, then?”

“Your people have been dealing with this murder, haven’t they? I mean, the boy who disappeared.”

He stared at me.

“What’s the point?” he asked.

I thought it better not to hedge. “I happen to know a relative of one of those young women—”

“Do you, by God?”

Across the table his big face was looking at me, open, not expressionless, but with an expression I couldn’t read. His reactions, like his movements, were very quick. He was wondering whether to tell me that he couldn’t speak. Yes or no. I had no idea of the motives either way.

As though there hadn’t been a hesitation, he said: “You’d better come to the office. Too many people here.”

He looked round the bar with his acquisitive glance, the same glance, I guessed, that he had used as a detective in London pubs, picking up gossip, talking to his informers, just as much immersed in the profession of crime as if he were a criminal himself. Nowadays he was too conspicuous a figure to do that magpie collecting job. Yet the habit was ingrained. Leave him here, and he would find someone who would gossip, and information, irrespective of value (perhaps about the domestic habits of commercial travellers), would be docketed away.

“When you’ve finished your beer—” Now that he had made up his mind, he was eager to be off.

Through the familiar market place he walked with short quick steps, faster than I should have chosen. Then up the street where the recognition symbols were disappearing: the pavements were crowded, every third or fourth face seemed to be coloured; I mentioned to Maxwell that when I was a boy it was an oddity to see a dark skin in the town.

“Mostly Pakistanis,” said Maxwell. “Don’t give much trouble.”

Keeping up his skimming steps, he was telling me, as it were simultaneously, that the police headquarters weren’t far off and that the town had less than the nation’s average of crime. On one side of the street were a few shops whose names hadn’t changed: on the other, a building vast by the side of its neighbours, bare and functional. Maxwell jerked his thumb.

“Here we are,” he said, taking my arm and steering me across, as though the traffic didn’t exist.

In the great entrance hall, policemen said Good evening, Superintendent. The lift was painted white, so was the fourth floor corridor. Maxwell opened a door, whisked through a stark office where sat men in plain clothes, opened another door into his own room. After all the austerity, it was like going into a boudoir. The furniture, I imagined, was official issue, though at that, he had a couple of armchairs. There were flowers on his desk and on a long committee table. Flanking the vase on his desk stood two photographs, one of a middle-aged woman and one of a baby.

“That’s the grandson,” said Maxwell. “Have you got any yet?”

“No,” I said.

“They’ll give you more pleasure than your children,” said Maxwell. “I promise you they will.”

We had sat down in the armchairs. He pointed to a cigarette box on the desk, then said, without changing his tone of voice: “I want you to keep out of this.”

I replied (despite his quiet words, the air was charged): “What could I do anyway, Clarence?”

He looked at me with an intent expression, the meaning of which again I couldn’t read.

Suddenly he said: “Who is this relative?”

He was speaking as though we were back in the pub, the past twenty minutes wiped away.

“Cora Ross’ uncle. A man called Passant.”

“We know all about him.”

I was taken aback. “What do you know?”

“It’s been going on a long time. Corrupting the young, I should call it.”

I misunderstood. “Is that why you want me out of the way?”

“Nothing to do with it. We can’t touch Passant and his lot. Nothing for us to get hold of.”

“Then what are you warning me about?”

For once his response wasn’t quick. He seemed to be deliberating, as in the pub. At last he said, “Those two women are as bad as anything I’ve seen.”

“What have they done?”

“You’ll find out what they’ve done. I tell you they are bad. I’ve seen plenty, but I’ve never seen anything worse.”

I had heard him speak pungently before, but not like this. His feeling came out so heavy that I wanted to divert it, to return to the matter-of-fact.

“You can prove it, can you?” I said.

“We’ve brought them in, haven’t we?” At once he was a professional, cautious, repressed, telling me that I ought to know the police didn’t arrest for murder unless they were sure.