Peterson defended him at once with all that charity of his which is far more lethal than straight attack, and I stood quite still, looking at the big calendar over the bar.
Of course. I could not think why I had not realized it before. For Chippy time was growing pretty short.
I was so anxious that Peterson, whom I love like a brother and who knows me nearly as well, should not cotton to my idea that I wasted several valuable minutes in what I hope was misleading casualness before I drifted off, ostensibly to phone my wife. From that moment I hunted Chippy as he had never hunted me and it was not too easy an undertaking, since, as I have said, the place was stiff with pressmen and I was more than anxious not to raise any general hue and cry. Anything Chippy had I was willing to share, but until my wire was safely sent, not with the world.
I hunted him carefully and systematically like a peasant woman going through a shawl for a flea, and for the best part of the day I was fighting a conviction that he had vanished into air. But just before six, when I was growing desperate, I suddenly saw him, still festooned with cameras, stepping ashore from a so-called pleasure steamer which had been chugging a party round the bay for the best part of three hours. The other people looked to me like the same crowd who had tramped up to the wood behind the Kursaal the day after the body was found. The adolescent girl with the baby brother was certainly there, and so was Chippy’s buddy of the moment, the man with the smile.
From that moment I do not think I lost sight of him, or them either. Shadowing them was comparatively simple. The whole party moved, it seemed by instinct, to the nearest hostelry and from there in due course they moved to the next. So it went on throughout the whole evening, when the lights first came out yellow in the autumn haze and later when they shone white against the quickening dark.
I do not know when he first became aware that I was behind him. I think it was on the second trip up the Marine Boulevard, where the bars are so thick that no serious drinking time is lost in transit. I met his eyes once and he hesitated but did not nod. He had a dreadful group round him. The man with the smile was still there and so was a little seedy man with a cap and a watch-chain, and two plump blondes in slacks. I recognized them all and none of them, if I make myself clear. After that I could feel him trying to shake me off, but he was hampered and I was, I think, a fraction more sober than he. There must have been a bar on the boat.
After a while I realized that he was going somewhere in particular, heading somewhere definitely if obliquely, like a wasp to its nest. His red eyes wandered to the clock more and more often, I noticed, and his moves from pub to pub seemed more frequent.
Then I lost him. The party must have split. At any rate, I found myself following one of the blondes and a sailor who I felt was new to me, unless of course it was not the same blonde but another just like her. I was in the older and dirtier part of the town, and closing time, I felt with dismay, could not possibly be far off. For some time I searched in a positive panic, diving into every lighted doorway and pushing every swinging door. As far as I remember, I neglected even to drink and it may be it was that which saved me.
At any rate I came finally to a big ugly old-fashioned drinking house on a corner. It was as large and drab and inviting as a barn and in the four-ale bar, into which I first put my head, there was no one at all but a little blue-eyed seedy man wearing a flat cap and a watch-chain weighted with medals. He was sitting on a bench close to the counter, drinking a pint with the quiet absorption of one who has been doing just that for the last two hours. I glanced at him sharply but there was no way of telling if he was the same man who had been with Chippy’s party. It was not that I am unobservant, but such men exist not in hundreds but in thousands in every town on or off the coast.
I turned away and would have passed on down the street, when I noticed that there was a second frontage to the building. I put my head in the first door I came to and saw Chippy’s back. He was leaning on the bar, which was small and temporarily unattended, the landlord having moved farther along it to the adjoining room. At first I thought he was alone, but on coming into the room I saw his smiling friend reclining on a narrow bench which ran along the inner wall. He was still beaming, but the vacancy of his broad face was intensified, if one can say such a thing, and I knew he must have ceased long ago to hear anything Chippy was telling him. Chippy was talking. He always talks when he’s drunk, not wanderingly nor thickly but with a low intensity some people find unnerving. He was in full flight now. Soft incisive words illustrated by the sharp gestures of one hand — the other, after all, was supporting him — flowed from him in a steady forceful stream.
“Trapped,” he whispered to his friend’s oblivion. “Trapped for life by a woman with a sniff and a soul so mean — so mean — so MEAN...” He turned and looked at me. “Hullo,” he said.
I remember I had some idea that in that condition of his I could fool him that I’d either been there all the time or was not there at all — I forget which.
The barman bustled back, drew me a beer and waddled off again, after nodding to Chippy in a secret important way I entirely misunderstood.
“She was mean, was she?” I ventured, mumbling into my beer.
“As the devil,” Chippy agreed and his red eyes wandered up to look over my shoulder. “Come in, son,” he said softly.
A pallid youth was hesitating in the doorway and he came forward at once, a long cardboard roll held out before him like a weapon.
“Dad said you was to have these and he’d see you tomorrow.”
As soon as the kid had gone, Chippy tore the paper off the roll and I could see it consisted of four or five huge blown-up prints, but he did not open them out.
The smiling man on the bench moved but did not rise. His eyes were tightly shut but he continued to grin. Chippy looked at him for some time before he suddenly turned to me.
“He’s canned,” he said. “Canned as a toot. I’ve been carting him round the whole week to have someone safe to talk to, and now look at him. Never mind. Listen to me. Got imagination?”
“Yes,” I assured him flatly.
“You’ll need it,” he said. “Listen. He was young, a simple ordinary friendly kid like you or I were, and he came to the seaside on his holiday. Only one week’s holiday in the year.” He paused for the horror to sink in. “One week, and she caught him.”
“His wife caught him, you say?”
“No.” He lowered his voice to the intense stage-whisper again. “Her mother. The landlady. She worked it. Twisted him.” He made a peculiar bending movement with his two hands. “You know, said things. Made suggestions. Forced it. He had to marry the girl. Then he had hell. Couldn’t afford it. Got nagged night and day, day and night.”
He leaned towards me and I was aware of every one of his squat uneven teeth.
“He grew old,” he said. “He lost his job. Got another, buying old gold. Used to go round buying old gold for a little firm in the Ditch. It went on for years and years. Years and years. And more years. A long time. Then it happened. He began to see her.”
“Who?” I demanded. “His wife?”
“No, no.” Chippy was irritated. “She’d left him, taken all he had, sold the furniture, and scampered with another poor mug. That was years ago. No, he began to see the mother.”