Free A Fragment of Fear by John Bingham Page B

again, a supple, yielding body, and a skin like a magnolia leaf, then I would believe you, whether her face was beautiful, or, like Juliet’s, oval and classically undistinguished.
    Let’s face it. Lust caused me to gamble on Juliet.
    Good fortune alone decreed that she had those other ingredients which men hope for and sometimes get and sometimes don’t. So I was lucky. But I would have proposed to her anyway.
    The frame of her horn-rimmed glasses was black, and perhaps too heavy for the delicacy of her face. Not that it matters at all.
    It was her father’s ’phone call which set me off thinking about her, in fact, all three of them, as I dressed and boiled an egg and made some toast, and prepared to call at the police station.

    I never made that visit because the door bell rang just after eight-thirty. I went to the door thinking it might be a parcels delivery or even a cable from Juliet in New York saying her time of arrival had been changed. But it was a police sergeant who had apparently cycled round from Kensington Police Station. He still wore his trouser clips.
    I was surprised and pleased to see him, thinking that something suspicious might have been reported by a neighbour in my absence.
    He was a middle-aged man, rather short as London policemen go, and when he took his helmet off I saw that he was bald on top, with grizzled hair above the ears.
    He asked me if I was Mr. James Martin Compton, and I said I was, and asked him if he would like a cup of tea. He said, no, he had just had a cup. I asked him to sit down, but he said, no, he wouldn’t be very long, and he’d just as soon stand. I said:
    “I am glad you called.”
    To which he replied:
    “Then I take it you were not altogether surprised, sir?”
    “Well, yes and no,” I said. “The fact is I’ve been away for a few days, and I think—indeed, I’m sure—that somebody has been into this flat in my absence. I was going to call round at the Station and mention it. I thought they might as well know about it. Not that they can do anything about it.”
    He had taken a sheet of paper from his pocket while I was speaking, and when I had finished he looked up from it, and around the living-room, moving his head slowly, his big, brown, good-natured eyes seemingly searching for some intruder who might still be there.
    He looked at me for a couple of seconds, and then down again at the piece of paper in his hand, and cleared his throat. He said:
    “Well, we can come to that later, sir. Whatever has happened here, or has not happened here, is not the reason for my visit, sir.”
    I had the impression he was ill at ease.
    “Meaning what?” I asked.
    “Did you travel on the eight-twenty-five train last night from Burlington via Brighton to Victoria Station, sir?”
    I had brought the breakfast tray into the living-room, with some tea, and toast, and the egg and the butter and marmalade. I was pouring out a cup of tea when he asked his question. I went on pouring, having no idea what was coming.
    “Yes, I did.”
    “Did you have in your compartment a female, possibly between the age of forty-five and fifty, dressed in a white mackintosh, and wearing a head-covering, attached beneath the chin?”
    I added the milk to the tea, and nodded, and carefully replaced the little milk jug on the tray. I didn’t feel sick, but I felt a surge of dull pain in the stomach.
    “Yes, I remember her,” I said, and remembered the tears welling out of the naïve eyes, and although I also thought of the note she had given me, it was the thought of the grief I had witnessed which was uppermost in my mind.
    The note, and its message, was a minor thing at that moment, a trivial, stupid little mystery compared to the major issues of the black night of the soul, of death by suicide, of my slap-happy remark about putting one’s head in a gas oven, and my tongue-tied inadequacy in the face of her distraught pleas for reassurance.
    I saw the significance of her longing for an