Eye of the Needle(65)
“Yes, taller than you.”
“Have you got a telephone?…”
WILLIAM DUNCAN was twenty-five years old, five-feet-ten, weighed a trim 150 pounds and was in first-class health. His open-air life and total lack of interest in tobacco, drink, late nights and loose living kept him that way. Yet he was not in the armed services.
He had seemed to be a normal child, if a little backward, until the age of eight, when his mind had lost the ability to develop any further. There had been no trauma that anyone knew about, no physical damage to account for sudden breakdown. Indeed it was some years before anyone noticed that there was anything wrong, for at the age of ten he was no more than a little backward, and at twelve he was just dim-witted; but by fifteen he was obviously simple, and by eighteen he was known as Daft Willie.
His parents were both members of an obscure fundamentalist religious group whose members were not allowed to marry outside the church (which may or may not have had anything to do with Willie’s daftness). They prayed for him, of course; but they also took him to a specialist in Stirling. The doctor, an elderly man, did several tests and then told them, over the tops of his gold-rimmed half-glasses, that the boy had a mental age of eight and his mind would grow no older, ever. They continued to pray for him, but they suspected that the Lord had sent this to try them, so they made sure Willie was Saved and looked forward to the day when they would meet him in the Glory and he would be healed. Meanwhile, he needed a job.
An eight-year-old can herd cows, but herding cows is nevertheless a job, so Daft Willie became a cowherd. And it was while herding cows that he saw the car for the first time.
He assumed there were lovers in it.
Willie knew about lovers. That is to say, he knew that lovers existed, and that they did unmentionable things to one another in dark places like copses and cinemas and cars; and that one did not speak of them. So he hurried the cows quickly past the bush beside which was parked the 1924 Morris Cowley Bullnose two-seater (he knew about cars, too, like any eight-year-old) and tried very hard not to look inside it in case he should behold sin.
He took his little herd into the cowshed for milking, went by a roundabout route to his home, ate supper, read a chapter from Leviticus to his father—aloud, painstakingly—then went to bed to dream about lovers.
The car was still there on the evening of the next day.
For all his innocence Willie knew that lovers did not do whatever it was that they did to one another for twenty-four hours at a stretch, so this time he went right up to the car and looked inside. It was empty. The ground beneath the engine was black and sticky with oil. Willie devised a new explanation: the car had broken down and had been abandoned by its driver. It did not occur to him to wonder why it had been semiconcealed in a bush.
When he arrived at the cowshed he told the farmer what he had seen. “There’s a broken-down car on the path up by the main road.”
The farmer was a big man with heavy sand-colored eyebrows, which drew together when he was thinking. “Was there nobody about?”
“No—and it was there yesterday.”
“Why did you not tell me yesterday, then?”
Willie blushed. “I thought it was maybe…you know…lovers.”
The farmer realized that Willie was not being coy, but was genuinely embarrassed. He patted the boy’s shoulder. “Well, away home and leave it to me to deal with.”
After the milking the farmer went to look for himself. It did occur to him to wonder why the car was semiconcealed. He had heard about the London stiletto murderer, and while he did not jump to the conclusion that the car had been abandoned by the killer, all the same he thought there might be a connection between the car and some crime or other; so after supper he sent his eldest son into the village on horseback to telephone the police in Stirling.
The police arrived before his son got back from the phone. There were at least a dozen of them, every one apparently a non-stop tea drinker. The farmer and his wife were up half the night looking after them.
Daft Willie was summoned to tell his story again, repeating that he had first seen the car the previous evening, blushing again when he explained that he had assumed it contained lovers.
All in all, it was their most exciting night of the war.
THAT EVENING, Percival Godliman, facing his fourth consecutive night in the office, went home to bathe, change and pack a suitcase.
He had a service flat in a block in Chelsea. It was small, though big enough for a single man, and it was clean and tidy except for the study, which the cleaning lady was not allowed to enter and as a consequence was littered with books and papers. The furniture was all prewar, of course, but it was rather well chosen, and the flat had a comfortable air. There were leather club chairs and a gramophone in the living room, and the kitchen was full of hardly used labor-saving devices.
While his bath was filling he smoked a cigarette—he had taken to them lately, a pipe was too much fuss—and looked at his most valuable possession, a grimly fantastic medieval scene that was probably by Hieronymous Bosch. It was a family heirloom and Godliman had never sold it, even when he needed the money.
In the bath he thought about Barbara Dickens and her son Peter. He had not told anyone about her, not even Bloggs, although he had been about to mention her during their conversation about remarrying, but Colonel Terry had interrupted. She was a widow; her husband had been killed in action at the very beginning of the war. Godliman did not know how old she was, but she looked about forty, which was young for the mother of a twenty-two-year-old boy. She worked on decoding intercepted enemy signals, and she was bright, amusing and very attractive. She was also rich. Godliman had taken her to dinner three times before the present crisis blew up. He thought she was in love with him.