Something that he’d once said came back to me. “The right kind of a husband understands everything, forgives everything. He takes care of things for her. And above all, he doesn’t speak of it.”
Francis Iles (Anthony Berkeley)
Dark Journey
One of the most widely acclaimed psychological mystery novels of our time was before the fact (1932) by Francis Iles. Howard Haycraft called it the author’s masterpiece (although John Dickson Carr, no small expert himself preferred TRIAL AND ERROR, 1937, as by Anthony Berkeley) and described it as “an internally terrifying portrait of a murderer.” Alfred Hitchcock directed the now-famous movie version, titled “Suspense,” starring Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine.
The Frances Iles story we now give you is also “an internally terrifying portrait of a murderer” — a superb psychological study of crime and punishment...
Cayley was going to commit murder.
He had worked it all out very carefully. For weeks now his plan had been maturing. He had pondered over it, examined it, tested it in the light of every possibility; and he was satisfied that it was impregnable. Now he was going to put it into practice.
Cayley did not really want to kill Rose Fenton.
Indeed, the idea made him shudder, even when he had been drinking. But what else could he do? He was desperate. Rose would not leave him alone. She thought, too, now that she had a claim on him; and she was plainly determined to exercise it. And Cayley very much did not want to marry Rose Fenton.
He never had thought of marrying her. A solicitor’s clerk, with a position to make in the world — a solicitor’s clerk with every chance of an ultimate partnership in his firm — cannot afford to marry a girl like Rose Fenton. Respectability is the bread of a solicitor’s life. Besides, now there was Miriam. Miriam Seale, the only daughter of old Seale himself, the senior partner in Cayley’s own firm...
Cayley knew now that he had been risking his whole future by taking up with Rose at all. It had not seemed like that at first. Other men have adventures, why not he? But adventures in any case are not safe for solicitors, and now Rose had decided not to be an adventure at all, but a job. As Cayley knew only too well, Rose was a determined girl. Rose knew nothing of Miriam.
It seemed curious to Cayley now to remember that once he had been quite fond of Rose. Now, of course, he detested her. He would sit for hours in his cottage over a bottle of whisky, thinking how much he hated Rose. Before Rose became impossible, Cayley had never drunk whisky alone. Now he was depending on it more and more, and one cannot go on like that. One must make an end somehow.
Rose had brought it on herself. She would not leave him alone. She would not see when an affair was — finished. Cayley did not at all want to kill Rose, but he gloated over the idea of Rose dead. And he would never be his own man again till Rose was dead. He knew that. No; Cayley did not at all want to kill Rose, but what else could he do?
And now he was waiting for Rose to come; waiting on the side of the road, in the dark, with his stomach full of whisky and a revolver in his pocket.
As he waited, Cayley felt as if he were made of lead. The night was warm, but he felt neither warm nor cold, afraid nor brave, despairing nor exultant. He felt nothing at all. Both body and mind seemed to have gone inert, so that he just waited and hardly noticed whether the time went fast or slowly.
The noise of the bus roused him from his torpor. He followed its progress along the main road: loud when the line between it and himself was clear, with curious mufflings and dim silences when hedges or a fold in the ground intervened. Rose was in the bus, but Cayley did not feel any excitement at the thought. Everything had become in some strange way inevitable.
Cayley was waiting a couple of hundred yards down a side turning. It was a convenient little lane which Cayley had marked weeks and weeks ago, when he first thought of killing Rose. He and Rose had picnicked there one Sunday, on Rose’s afternoon off. They had sat on the wide grassy margin which bordered one side, and Cayley had thought then how he would be able to wheel his motor-bicycle on to it and put out the lights while he waited for Rose. In such a deserted spot, in the dark, with his headlights out, it would be impossible that their meeting could be seen.
Rose had not been able to understand at first why Cayley should want to meet her in such an out-of-the-way place and so far from both the cottage and from Merchester; but Cayley had been able to make her see reason.
Both the plan in his heart and the plan on his lips depended on his meeting with Rose remaining secret, and that had been very convenient for the former. That explained why Rose was coming to meet him in the last bus from Stanford to Merchester and not in that from Merchester to Stanford, although it was in Merchester that Rose was in service and Cayley worked.
Stanford and Merchester, both towns of some size, were eighteen miles apart, and while it was unlikely that Rose, not indigenous to the district, should be recognized leaving Merchester, it was almost impossible that she could be recognized leaving Stanford. Cayley had been taking no chances at all.
The bus had grumbled to a halt just beyond the turning and roared on again. Cayley heard footsteps coming towards him, scraping in the dark on the gritty surface of the lane. He waited where he stood until they were almost abreast of him, disregarding the calls of his name, rather louder than he liked, which Rose sent out before her in waves of sound through the still night like a swimmer urging the water in front of her.
“Rose,” he said quietly.
Rose uttered a little scream. “Coo! You didn’t half make me jump. Why didn’t you answer when I called?”
“Have you put your trunk and things in the cloakroom?” It was essential to Cayley’s plan that Rose should have left her luggage that afternoon at Liverpool Street Station, in London.
“Course I have... Well,” added Rose archly, “aren’t you going to give us a kiss?”
“What else do you think I’ve been waiting for?” Cayley’s heart was beating a little faster as he kissed Rose for the last time. He thought of Judas. It made him feel uncomfortable, and he cut the kiss as short as he decently could.
Rose sniffed at him. “Been drinking, haven’t you?”
“Nothing, really,” Cayley returned easily, feeling for his bicycle in the darkness. “Just a drop.”
“It’s been too many drops with you lately, my lad. I’m going to put a stop to it. Not going to have a drunkard for a husband, I’m not.”
Cayley writhed. Rose’s voice was full of possession; full of complacent assurance that in future he would have no life but what she chose to allow him. Had any qualms remained in him, that tone of Rose’s would have dispelled them.
“Come on,” he said sharply. “Let’s get off.”
“All right, all right. In a great hurry, aren’t you? Where’s the bike? Coo, I never saw it. It’s that dark.”
Cayley had wheeled the bicycle into the lane and switched on the headlight. He helped Rose into the side-car, and jumped into his saddle.
“All serene. So off we go, on our honeymoon,” giggled Rose. “Fancy you and me on our honeymoon, Norm.”
“Yes,” said Cayley. It was odd that, though this was the last time they would ever be together, Rose’s hideous shortening of his Christian name grated on him as much as ever.
He drove slowly down the lane. “See anyone you know in Stanford?” he asked as casually as possible.
“So likely, isn’t it? A fat lot of people I know.”
“But did you?”
“No, Mr. Inquisitive, I did not. Any more questions?”