Dusk at Dawn Read online

  Paul supposed his own expression must have betrayed ignorance because Burkett promptly embarked upon one his voyages into the arcane.

  ‘If I remind the captain that the name “Liberator” most probably derives from the building’s association with the late Mr Jabez Balfour, the former Member for Burnley, would the captain be any further enlightened?’

  Paul closed his eyes. ‘No, Burkett, he would not.’

  ‘The gentleman who had that little difficulty over the failure of the Liberator Building Society? But perhaps the affair occurred before the captain took an interest in such matters.’

  ‘Before I was born, you mean.’

  ‘An unpleasant business all round,’ Burkett resumed, suddenly adding with the reverberant boom of an Old Testament prophet that made Paul jump, ‘Ruin!’ He paused portentously then leaned confidentially towards Paul once more. ‘A matter of financial irregularity, I’m sorry to relate.’

  Paul blushed. Having just read the phrase ‘present difficulties’ in livid green ink, the implication was obvious. It brought back the still-raw distress of Valentine’s betrayal. He cursed Valentine under his breath again although, having cursed the man so often over the past few days his invective had lost most of its force; what was left of the execration sounded little more than oath by rote.

  Meanwhile Burkett, running before some wind of his own, was elaborating on the Member for Burnley and Argentina, something about extra-judicial kidnapping... He had reached the sheltered port of an apparently consequent trial before Paul was able to intervene.

  Pre-empting Burkett of the opportunity of launching into a verbatim account of the court proceedings, Paul asked:

  ‘The Liberal Club?’

  ‘The turreted building.’

  ‘Near the War Office?’

  Burkett nodded and Paul glanced at the note again. 46, east turret. He looked at his watch. It wasn’t far and he had plenty of time to get there but wondered why he should. After all, he wasn’t at the beck and call of any stranger who might leave him notes. And any ‘difficulties’ he might be having at the moment were his business, not the concern of others. Besides, it was almost time for lunch and his whole reason for being at the club was so that he could sign for the meal without actual recourse to cash.

  Burkett gave a warning cough and began gesturing theatrically towards the stairs. Paul saw the Club Secretary descending and edged further behind the column.

  ‘And the man actually used the words “something to my advantage”, you say?’

  Burkett stepped discretely between Paul and the Secretary who had now reached the lobby.

  ‘Those very words, sir.’

  ‘Thank you, Burkett,’ Paul said in an undertone, waving the letter. ‘Perhaps you’ll let the Secretary know I’m attending to that little misunderstanding over my bill?’ Then, with an glance towards the Secretary’s turned back, he made a bolt for the door and down the steps, pushing the letter into his pocket as he went.

  It was at this moment that he saw a thickset man wearing a flat cap standing on the other side of the street, and became aware that he had vaguely noticed the fellow a few minutes earlier before going into the club.

  The man was standing more or less in the same place as before. Paul stopped on the bottom step and peered at him. The man’s face was half-hidden by the wide cap and the rest of his features were further obscured by a heavy black moustache.

  Paul had the impression that a moment before the man had been looking in his direction, although now he appeared to be assiduously examining a pair of ornate Corinthian capitals adorning the entrance of the building opposite. On reflection, Paul doubted if he would have noticed the man at all had he been wearing a uniform and not dressed in civilian clothes that were obviously too heavy for the season. Or carrying an umbrella, come to that, as the sky was of clear unclouded blue.

  Even so, there were still plenty of men not in uniform to be seen. Even men within the age of conscription as Paul would have guessed this man to be. Hardly a reason to have attracted his attention at all. No, there was something more. Something about the man looked oddly familiar, although Paul was sure he didn’t know him. He worried at it for a second or two while the man continued to examine the stonework until a passing cab hid him momentarily from view. Then, without the distraction, Paul became acutely aware of the hollowness in his stomach, reminding him that he had not eaten that morning. With a last glance over his shoulder to make sure the Club Secretary was not following him, he strode off down the road, the problem of lunch pressing in upon him once more.

  Having to pass up a meal at the club was a nuisance. As his rent was overdue he had missed breakfast, being obliged to slip out of his lodgings early to avoid his landlady. He had been counting on getting at least a meal or two at the club before the matter of his unpaid bill came to a head. Having to leave unfed, though, was preferable to enduring an unpleasant scene. In other circumstances he might have been inclined to have made a stand and faced the Club Secretary down, relying on the assumption that a man in uniform wounded in the service of his country and fresh out of hospital might expect to be allowed a little leeway in the matter of unpaid bills. Ordinarily he might have been able to make a decent case out of that sort of thing. As it was, however, at the moment the streets of London were thronged with men in uniform wounded in the service of their country. He suspected that whether in or out of hospital he — along with the rest of them — were becoming the norm. In fact, if things didn’t improve, he imagined that in a year or two he might very well find the same men standing on the same street-corners selling bootlaces. And all be thought of as nothing but a damned nuisance on top of it.

  At least he could console himself with the thought that he was better off than most. He still had all his limbs; he continued to possess his full complement of faculties. He remained unscarred by his experiences, if one didn’t count the puckered skin at his temple where the fragment of shell had hit him, that was. Yet he was aware that taking a philosophical view of his situation didn’t put grub in his stomach. Despite what others might regard as good fortune, he still couldn’t help feeling just a little hard done by. Granted, he was prepared to acknowledge that at least to some degree part of the position he now found himself in was of his own making. He had been too naive. But this didn’t absolve Valentine of any of his richly deserved opprobrium. That still remained, even if it did smart to realise that Paul’s downfall had mostly been occasioned by his own, too trusting, nature.

  Wandering fruitlessly in this barren wasteland of self-examination was not, however, filling his empty stomach. Forced to reconsider his options, since his pay wasn’t due for another week, he was reluctantly beginning to wonder whether he had any other recourse but the final one of having to visit his mother. The only alternative to that last ditch measure was to go without eating, sustaining himself, he supposed, with the Micawberish hope that something might turn up.

  It was only then he realised that of course something had.

  He paused in a doorway and took the letter out of his pocket again. Having been hand-delivered, the unmarked envelope gave no indication of the sender. The note itself held no more information (beyond the fact that the writer had an odd taste in ink) than the address, a reference to Paul’s ‘present difficulties’ and an admonition to be prompt.

  An unwonted flush of embarrassment stole over him at the thought of a third party being privy to his financial circumstances. In particular at the manner that had occasioned them. Then it occurred to him that it might actually have been Valentine who had sent the note. Before embarrassment could turn to anger, though, he reasoned that since the man had already helped himself to Paul’s money, there couldn’t be much left to interest him. Still, there was always the possibility that Valentine had passed Paul’s name onto some other confidence-trickster who might be looking to pick over the remains.

  He gave another ineffectual curse and screwed up the note and was on the point of hurling i
t into the gutter when he noticed that the man in the cap was standing on the pavement some hundred yards or so behind him. This time his attention appeared to have been caught by a notice board advertising a piano recital to be given that afternoon. It had caught Paul’s eye as he had passed as he had wondered if the free recital might include refreshment. Failing to see any immediate connection between Corinthian capitals and piano recitals, Paul loitered behind a lamppost and tried to get a better look at the man.

  Being oddly familiar, the thought had occurred that the fellow might be some old sweat from his regiment who had spotted him on the street and was trying to pluck up the courage to ask for a handout. But despite this vague familiarity he couldn’t quite put his finger on, the man didn’t look like any old sweat he had ever seen. He studied the man in the cap for a moment or two before coming to the conclusion that the man wasn’t trying to pluck up courage to approach him, but rather doing much the same as Paul was himself, watching him in as unobtrusive a manner as he could. Alarmed that the man might be looking to dun him for some debt that he had forgotten or, worse still, be a bailiff waiting for a less public opportunity to serve him with a summons, Paul hurried on still clutching the balled letter.

  He couldn’t actually remember having any outstanding debts beyond those to his landlady and his club, although he couldn’t discount the possibility. His memory had not been all it had used to be since he had been wounded.

  This possibility added a new dimension to his situation. The more he thought about it the more Burkett’s message — assuming it had nothing to do with Valentine — began to take on the appearance of the proverbial straw within the reach of the proverbial drowning man. He was certainly having trouble keeping his head above water. He straightened out the note once more. Whitehall wasn’t far, yet he wondered if he should take a cab to shake off the man in the cap. As he folded the note into his pocket for the second time, though, his fingers brushed against the few remaining coins that stood between him and total insolvency. He glanced at his watch. There was at least an hour until the appointment and so he decided to walk, to take a roundabout route and his chances with the man in the cap.

  3

  The morning was clear. Beyond his own clouded horizon, it was a perfect summer day. Reaching the river, he stopped. He had walked almost to The Strand, cutting this way and that through side streets to the Victoria Embankment. Confident he had lost the man in the cap, he leaned against the wall and smoked a cigarette. A barge was plying its way up-river beneath the Charing Cross Bridge, the sun as it played on the bow wave turning the water into a sequinned swell. The cough of its engine on the morning air repeated like the hacking of a consumptive and Paul allowed himself the momentary fancy of imagining he might be hearing the sound of a dying empire. The old orders were passing; the Russian monarchy had fallen and the Austrian empire was in tatters. Whoever was the loser now — Germany or Britain — surely would not survive. Yet on such a morning the thought brought nothing worse than a sense of the feyness of life, a vestige of fin de siècle nostalgia amid the horror.

  In this frame of mind it was almost tempting to regard his own situation as little other than a passing inconvenience. Even his hunger pangs could be seen as simply one of life’s temporary vicissitudes. A matter of luck which, when examined dispassionately, could be viewed as a sort of tide given to washing in upon one and out again with a certain — if unpredictable — regularity. He just happened to be unfortunate in that, at the moment, its tendency was to be washing out. He had found that out the previous evening when he had tried his hand at the gaming tables in an attempt to parley his last pound or two into a sum sufficient to tide him over until payday. But luck — as luck would have it — hadn’t favoured him. The cards were not running his way. In fact, instead of easing his situation he’d ended up watching what little money Valentine had left him dribble away across the baize.

  But since he had always believed one made one’s own luck — bitter pill though it was to swallow — he had to admit that a good part of his present adverse fortune could be put down to sheer bad judgement. The fact was that a good friend of his — who, as it turned out, had deserved neither the adjective nor the noun — had skipped town two days earlier having added what cash Paul kept in his rooms to the totality of his savings; money which Valentine had already prised from what had been far too loose a grip.

  To Paul’s cost, Valentine had persuaded him to invest in what he had described as a new and exciting (‘Oh, a very exciting’) chemical process for extracting radium from pitchblende. While Paul hadn’t fully understood the method as Valentine had explained it, it had sounded very plausible. Up-to-the-minute, particularly as conveyed by Valentine’s boyish enthusiasm. Paul’s real problem was that science had never been his best subject at school. He had never really got a handle on it, then or since. The closest he had got to being adept at anything remotely scientific was, after entering the trenches, acquiring the mental facility of tracking the trajectory of any artillery shell likely to land anywhere near him. But then most soldiers learned that trick (or, fatally, didn’t) and he supposed that it was more a case of an instinct for personal survival than any innate ability to comprehend trigonometry and vectors and all the other paraphernalia of applied mathematics. And even that trick, although indescribably useful, could not always be relied upon — as witness his five months in hospital.

  He finished his cigarette and flicked the butt over the embankment into the river. If he was going to be honest, he had to admit that all the self-recrimination about science was in reality no more than an excuse; what really lay at the root of his problem was that he had been taken in by Valentine. The man had been a confidence trickster. Facing the truth of the matter at least made him feel better. Not as good a decent lunch might have done but at least that showed one couldn’t live off self-deception.

  He looked back along the street. There was no sign of the man in the cap and the fact made him wonder if the man’s apparent interest had been no more than his own imagination, another variant of self-deception. He turned and headed towards Whitehall.

  Whitehall Court turned out to be a gothic pile standing between the Embankment and Whitehall, a building he must have passed a hundred times without paying it any attention. The War Office was around the corner — a fact he knew from having been summoned there shortly before being wounded and where he had undergone a curious interview, the purpose of which had never been explained. He had eventually put it down to his promotion which had come through shortly afterwards. He had never been quite able to reconcile this, though, with some of the uncomfortable questions about his background and friends he had been asked. Or, come to that, the nagging suspicion that his promotion had really been meant for someone else, the other Paul Ross perhaps.

  Whitehall Court, he now saw, dominated the skyline. Several storeys high it boasted three asymmetrically placed turrets that loomed like the topping on one of mad Ludwig’s Rhinish castles. He craned his neck at them as he walked the building’s considerable length until he stood beneath the east turret. He was about to go inside when he caught sight of the man in the cap again, loitering across the road. Paul stopped and stared defiantly at him but the man appeared unconcerned. He simply turned on his heel and walked away.

  Paul watched him, experiencing an illogical sense of dissatisfaction. Then, dismissing the man from his thoughts, Paul passed through the entrance. Finding number forty-six listed on the top floor, he took the lift.

  His knock upon the door was answered by a rather severe-looking girl with a long equine face and brown hair wound into a bun on her neck. She regarded Paul suspiciously from a pair of horsy eyes. They matched the colour of her hair, a few strands of which had escaped the bun and hung beside her left ear in a rather dishevelled way.

  ‘Yes?’ she asked, blinking the horsy eyes at him.

  Paul removed his cap and despite the number being inches from his shoulder asked if this was number forty-six. Over her sh
oulder he could see the room was empty except for a desk, a chair and a typewriter. From beyond the room, though, came the noise of voices and machines.

  ‘Do you have business here?’

  ‘I think so,’ he said.

  ‘You think so.’

  ‘Yes. Well, actually I’m not sure.’

  ‘You’re not sure.’

  Frustrated at having everything he said repeated, Paul explained how he had been given the note with the address on it. ‘If this is number forty six,’ he finished.

  ‘Show me this note.’

  A little unsettled by her peremptory manner he pulled the crumpled note from his pocket. The girl took it, giving him a brief interrogative glance that might have been a comment upon its condition.

  ‘Where did you find this?’

  ‘I didn’t find it,’ he said. ‘I was given it. It was addressed to me. Well, it wasn’t actually addressed, if you see what I mean, but it was meant for me.’

  She gave him another penetrating stare then, with what seemed reluctance, stood aside and allowed him to enter.

  Despite catching a faint trace of eau de cologne as he edged past her, he was aware of a formidability about the girl he wasn’t used to in women. Most members of the opposite sex he met generally displayed an attitude of admiration, if not deference, towards him; an esteem, he accepted, given more to the uniform rather than to him as an individual, even if by now he regarded these to be virtually interchangeable. He couldn’t help but be aware that this submissiveness was absent in this girl. With her errant strands of hair and disconcerting manner, he suspected she might be just the kind one might find chained to the railings outside Parliament demanding votes for women.

  She sat down at the desk and picked up a sheet of paper, clipping his note to it. Behind her a curtain obscured a door and, to his right through another, he could see an adjoining room where several girls sat at desks while a man carrying sheets of paper passed between them. The man glanced up at that moment and seeing Paul stepped to the door and abruptly shut it.