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‘I was very busy at the time. I had a big deal impending.’
‘She wanted your help. You wouldn’t give it to her, so she came to me. You promised to write from America. Did you?’
‘I was busy,’ said Hellier weakly. ‘I had a heavy schedule – a lot of flights … conferences …’
‘So you didn’t write. When did you get back?’
‘A fortnight ago.’
‘Nearly six months away. Did you know where your daughter was? Did you try to find out? She was still alive then, you know.’
‘Good Christ, I had to straighten out things over here. Things had gone to hell in my absence.’
‘They had, indeed!’ said Warren icily. ‘You say that you found June a job and set her up in a flat. It sounds very nice when put that way, but I’d say that you threw her out. In the preceding years did you try to find out why her behaviour had changed? Why she needed more and more money? In fact I’d like to know how often you saw your daughter. Did you supervise her activities? Check on the company she was keeping? Did you act like a father?’
Hellier was ashen. ‘Oh, my God!’
Warren sat down and said quietly, ‘Now I’m really going to hurt you, Hellier. Your daughter hated your guts. She told me so herself, although I didn’t know who you were. She kept that damned patronizing secretary’s letter to fuel her hatred, and she ended up in a sleazy doss-house in Notting Hill with cash resources of three shillings and four-pence. If, six months ago, you’d have granted your daughter fifteen minutes of your precious time she’d have been alive now.’
He leaned over the desk and said in a rasping voice, ‘Now tell me, Hellier; who was responsible for your daughter’s death?’
Hellier’s face crumpled and Warren drew back and regarded him with something like pity. He felt ashamed of himself; ashamed of letting his emotions take control in such an unprofessional way. He watched Hellier grope for a handkerchief, and then got up and went to a cupboard where he tipped a couple of pills from a bottle.
He returned to the desk and said, ‘Here, take these – they’ll help.’ Unresistingly, Hellier allowed him to administer the pills and. gulped them down with the aid of a glass of water. He became calmer and presently began to speak in a low, jerky voice.
‘Helen – that’s my wife – June’s mother – my ex-wife – we had a divorce, you know. I divorced her – June was fifteen then. Helen was no good – no good at all. There were other men – I was sick of it. Made me look a fool. June stayed with me, she said she wanted to. God knows Helen didn’t want her around.’
He took a shaky breath. ‘June was still at school then, of course. I had my work – my business – it was getting bigger and more involved all the time. You have no idea how big and complicated it can get. International stuff, you know. I travelled a lot.’ He looked blindly into the past. ‘I didn’t realize.…’
Warren said gently, ‘I know.’
Hellier looked up. ‘I doubt it, Doctor.’ His eyes flickered under Warren’s steady gaze and he dropped his head again. ‘Maybe you do. I suppose I’m not the only damned fool you’ve come across.’
In an even voice, trying to attune himself to Hellier’s mood, Warren said, ‘It’s hard enough to keep up with the younger generation even when they’re underfoot. They seem to have a different way of thought – different ideals.’
Hellier sighed. ‘But I could have tried.’ He squeezed his hands together tightly. ‘People of my class tend to think that parental neglect and juvenile delinquency are prerogatives of the lower orders. Good Christ!’
Warren said briskly. ‘I’ll give you something to help you sleep tonight.’
Hellier made a negating gesture. ‘No, thanks, Doctor, I’ll take my medicine the hard way.’ He looked up. ‘Do you know how it started? How did she …? How could she …?’
Warren shrugged. ‘She didn’t say much. It was hard enough coping with present difficulties. But I think her case was very much the standard form; cannabis to begin with – taken as a lark or a dare – then on to the more potent drugs, and finally heroin and the more powerful amphetamines. It all usually starts with running with the wrong crowd.’
Hellier nodded. ‘Lack of parental control,’ he said bitterly. ‘Where do they get the filthy stuff?’
‘That’s the crux. There’s a fair amount of warehouse looting by criminals who have a ready market, and there’s smuggling, of course. Here in England, where clinics prescribe heroin under controlled conditions to Home Office registered addicts, it’s not so bad compared with the States. Over there, because it’s totally illegal, there’s a vast illicit market with consequent high profits and an organized attempt to push the stuff. There’s an estimated forty thousand heroin addicts in New York alone, compared with about two thousand in the whole of the United Kingdom. But it’s bad enough here – the number is doubling every sixteen months.’
‘Can’t the police do anything about illegal drugs?’
Warren said ironically, ‘I suppose Inspector Stephens told you all about me.’
‘He gave me a totally wrong impression,’ mumbled Hellier. He stirred restlessly.
‘That’s all right; I’m used to that kind of thing. The police attitude largely coincides with the public attitude – but it’s no use chivvying an addict once he’s hooked. That only leads to bigger profits for the gangsters because the addict on the run must get his dope where he can. And it adds to crime because he’s not too particular where he gets the money to pay for the dope.’ Warren studied Hellier, who was becoming noticeably calmer. He decided that this was as much due to the academic discussion as to the sedation, so he carried on.
‘The addicts are sick people and the police should leave them alone,’ he said. ‘We’ll take care of them. The police should crack down on the source of illegal drugs.’
‘Aren’t they doing that?’
‘That’s not so easy. It’s an international problem. Besides, there’s the difficulty of getting information – this is an illegal operation and people don’t talk.’ He smiled. ‘Addicts don’t like the police and so the police get little out of them. On the other hand, I don’t like addicts – they’re difficult patients most doctors won’t touch – but I understand them, and they tell me things. I probably know more about what’s going on than the official police sources.’
‘Then why don’t you tell the police?’ demanded Hellier.
Warren’s voice went suddenly hard. ‘If any of my patients knew that I was abusing their confidence by blabbing to the police, I’d lose the lot. Trust between patient and doctor must be absolute – especially with a drug addict. You can’t help them if they don’t trust you enough to come to you for treatment. So I’d lose them to an illicit form of supply; either an impure heroin from the docks at an inflated price, or an aseptic heroin with no treatment from one of my more unethical colleagues. There are one or two bad apples in the medical barrel, as Inspector Stephens will be quick enough to tell you.’
Hellier hunched his big shoulders and looked broodingly down at the desk. ‘So what’s the answer? Can’t you do anything yourself?’
‘Me!’ said Warren in surprise. ‘What could I do? The problem of supply begins right outside England in the Middle East. I’m no story-book adventurer, Hellier; I’m a medical doctor with patients, who just makes ends meet. I can’t just shoot off to Iran on a crazy adventure.’
Hellier growled deep in his throat, ‘You might have fewer patients if you were as crazy as that.’ He stood up. ‘I’m sorry about my attitude when I first came in here, Dr Warren. You have cleared up a lot of things I didn’t understand. You have told me my faults. You have told me of your ethics in this matter. You have also pointed out a possible solution which you refuse to countenance. What about your faults, Dr Warren, and where are your ethics now?’
He strode heavily to the door. ‘Don’t bother to see me out, Doctor; I’ll find my own way.’
Warren, taken wrong-footed, was startled as the door closed behind Hellier. Slowly he returned to the chair behind his desk and sat down. He lit a cigarette and remained in deep thought for some minutes, then shook his head irritably as though to escape a buzzing fly.
Ridiculous! he thought. Absolutely ridiculous!
But the maggot of doubt stirred and he could not escape its irritation in his mind no matter how hard he tried.
That evening he walked through Piccadilly and into Soho, past the restaurants and strip joints and night clubs, the chosen haunt of most of his patients. He saw one or two of them and they waved to him. He waved back in an automatic action and went on, almost unaware of his surroundings, until he found himself in Wardour Street outside the offices of the Regent Picture Company.
He looked up at the building. ‘Ridiculous!’ he said aloud.
III
Sir Robert Hellier also had a bad night.
He went back to his flat in St James’s and was almost totally unaware of how he got there. His chauffeur noted the tight lips and lowering expression and took the precaution of ringing the flat from the garage before he put away the car. ‘The old bastard’s in a mood, Harry,’ he said to Hellier’s man, Hutchins. ‘Better keep clear of him and walk on eggs.’
So it was that when Hellier walked into his penthouse flat Hutchins put out the whisky and made himself scarce. Hellier ignored both the presence of the whisky and the absence of Hutchins and sank his bulk into a luxurious armchair, where he brooded deep in thought.
Inside he writhed with guilt. It had been many more years than he could remember since anyone had had the guts to hold up a mirror wherein he could see himself, and the experience was harrowing. He hated himself and, perhaps, he hated Warren even more for rubbing his nose into his shortcomings. Yet he was basically honest and he recognized that his final remarks and abrupt exit from Warren’s rooms had been the sudden crystallization of his desire to crack Warren’s armour of ethics – to find the feet of clay and to pull Warren down to his own miserable level.
And what about June? Where did she come into all this? He thought of his daughter as he had once known her – gay, light-hearted, carefree. There was nothing he had not been prepared to give her, from the best schools to good clothes by fashionable designers, parties, continental holidays and all the rest of the good life.
Everything, except myself, he thought remorsefully.
And then, unnoticed in the interstices of his busy life, a change had come. June developed an insatiable appetite for money; not, apparently, for the things money can buy, but for money itself. Hellier was a self-made man, brought up in a hard school, and he believed that the young should earn their independence. What started out to be calm discussions with June turned into a series of flaming rows and, in the end, he lost his temper and then came the break. It was true what Warren had said; he had thrown out his daughter without making an attempt to find the root cause of the change in her.
The theft of the silver from his home had only confirmed his impression that she had gone bad, and his main worry had been to keep the matter quiet and out of the press. He suddenly realized, to his shame, that the bad press he was likely to get because of the inquest had been uppermost in his mind ever since he had seen Inspector Stephens.
How had all this happened? How had he come to lose first a wife and then a daughter?
He had worked – by God, how he had worked! The clapperclawing to the top in an industry where knives are wielded with the greatest efficiency; the wheeling and dealing with millions at stake. The American trip, for instance – he had got on top of those damned sharp Yanks – but at what cost? An ulcer, a higher blood pressure than his doctor liked and a nervous three packets of cigarettes a day as inheritance of those six months.
And a dead daughter.
He looked around the flat, at the light-as-air Renoir on the facing wall, at the blue period Picasso at the end of the room. The symbols of success. He suddenly hated them and moved to another chair where they were at his back and where he could look out over London towards the Tudor crenellations of St James’s Palace.
Why had he worked so hard? At first it had been for Helen and young June and for the other children that were to come. But Helen had not wanted children and so June was the only one. Was it about then that the work became a habit, or perhaps an anodyne? He had thrown himself whole-heartedly into the curious world of the film studios where it is a toss-up which is the more important, money or artistry; and not a scrap of his heart had he left for his wife.
Perhaps it was his neglect that had forced Helen to look elsewhere – at first surreptitiously and later blatantly – until he had got tired of the innuendoes and had forced the divorce.
But where, in God’s name, had June come into all this? The work was there by then, and had to be done; decisions had to be taken – by him and by no one else – and each damned decision led to another and then another, filling his time and his life until there was no room for anything but the work.
He held out his hands and looked at them. Nothing but a machine, he thought despondently. A mind for making the right decisions and hands for signing the right cheques.
And somewhere in all this, June, his daughter, had been lost. He was suddenly filled with a terrible shame at the thought of the letter Warren had told him about. He remembered the occasion now. It had been a bad week; he was preparing to carry a fight to America, and everything had gone wrong so he was rushed off his feet. He remembered being waylaid by Miss Walden, his secretary, in a corridor between offices.
‘I’ve a letter for you from Miss Hellier, Sir Robert. She would like to see you on Friday.’
He had stopped, somewhat surprised, and rubbed his chin in desperation, wanting to get on but still wanting to see June. ‘Oh, damn; I have that meeting with Matchet on Friday morning – and that means lunch as well. What do I have after lunch, Miss Walden?’
She did not consult an appointment book because she was not that kind of secretary, which was why he employed her. ‘Your plane leaves at three-thirty – you might have to leave your lunch early.’
‘Oh! Well, do me a favour, Miss Walden. Write to my daughter explaining the situation. Tell her I’ll write from the States as soon as I can.’
And he had gone on into an office and from there to another office and yet another until the day was done – the 18-hour working day. And in two more days it was Friday with the conference with Matchet and the expensive lunch that was necessary to keep Matchet sweet. Then the quick drive to Heathrow – and New York in no time at all – to be confronted by Hewling and Morrin with their offers and propositions, all booby-trapped.
The sudden necessity to fly to Los Angeles and to beat the Hollywood moguls on their own ground. Then back to New York to be inveigled by Morrin to go on that trip to Miami and the Bahamas, an unsubtle attempt at corruption by hospitality. But he had beaten them all and had returned to England with the fruits of victory and at the high point of his career, only to be confronted by the devil of a mess because no one had been strong enough to control Matchet.
In all that time he had never once thought of his daughter.
The dimming light concealed the greyness of his face as he contemplated that odious fact. He sought to find excuses and found none. And he knew that this was not the worst – he knew that he had never given June the opportunity of communicating with him on the simple level of one human being to another. She had been something in the background of his life, and the knowledge hurt him that she had been something and not someone.
Hellier got up and paced the room restlessly, thinking of all the things Warren had said. Warren had seemed to take drug addiction as a matter of course, a normal fact of life to be coped with somehow. Although he had not said so outright, he had implied it was his task to clear up the mess left by the negligence of people like himself.
But surely someone else was to blame. What about the profit-makers? The pushers of drugs?
Hellier paused as he felt a spark of anger flash into being, an anger which, for the first time, was not directed against himself. His was a sin of omission, although not to be minimized on that account. But the sin of commission, the deliberate act of giving drugs to the young for profit, was monstrous. He had been thoughtless, but the drug pedlars were evil.
The anger within him grew until he thought he would burst with the sheer agony of it, but he deliberately checked himself in order to think constructively. Just as he had not allowed his emotions to impede his negotiations with Matchet, Hewling and Morrin,, so he brought his not inconsiderable intellect to bear unclouded on this new problem. Hellier, as an efficient machine, began to swing smoothly into action.
He first thought of Warren who, with his special knowledge, was undoubtedly the key. Hellier was accustomed to studying closely the men with whom he dealt because their points of strength and weakness showed in subtle ways. He went over in his mind everything Warren had said and the way in which he had said it, and seized upon two points. He was certain Warren knew something important.
But he had to make sure that his chosen key would not break in his hand. Decisively he picked up the telephone and dialled a number. A moment later he said, ‘Yes, I know it’s late. Do we have that firm of investigators still on our books? They helped us on the Lowrey case … Good! I want them to investigate Dr Nicholas Warren MD. Repeat that. It must be done discreetly. Everything there is to know about him, damn it! As fast as possible … a report in three days … oh, damn the expense! … charge it to my private account.’
Absently he picked up the decanter of whisky. ‘And another thing. Get the Research Department to find out all they can about drug smuggling – the drug racket in general. Again, a report in three days … Yes, I’m serious … it might make a good film.’ He paused. ‘Just one thing more; the Research Department mustn’t go near Dr Warren … Yes, they’re quite likely to, but they must steer clear of him – is that understood? Good!’
He put down the telephone and looked at the decanter in some surprise. He laid it down gently and went into his bedroom. For the first time in many years he ignored his normal meticulous procedure of hanging up his clothes and left them strewn about the floor.
Once in bed the tensions left him and his body relaxed. It was only then that the physical expression of his grief came to him and he broke down. Waves of shudders racked his body and this man of fifty-five wet the pillow with his tears.
TWO (#ulink_c225979a-a526-5b3f-844a-bc3a9ebd502a)
Warren was – and was not – surprised to hear from Hellier again. In the forefront of his mind he wondered what Hellier was after and was almost inclined to refuse to see him. In his experience prolonged post-mortems with the survivors did no one any good in the long run; they merely served to turn guilt into acceptance and, as a moral man, he believed that the guilty should be punished and that self-punishment was the most severe form.
But in the remote recesses of his mind still lurked the nagging doubt which had been injected by Hellier’s final words and so, somewhat to his surprise, he found himself accepting Hellier’s invitation to meet him in the St James’s flat. This time, oddly enough, he was not averse to meeting Hellier on his own ground – that battle had already been won.
Hellier greeted him with a conventional, ‘It’s very good of you to come, Doctor,’ and led him into a large and softly luxurious room where he was waved courteously to a chair. ‘Drink?’ asked Hellier. ‘Or don’t you?’
Warren smiled. ‘I have all the normal vices. I’d like a Scotch.’
He found himself sipping a whisky so good that it was almost criminal to dilute it with water, and holding one of Hellier’s monogrammed cigarettes. ‘We’re a picturesque lot, we film people,’ said Hellier wryly. ‘Self-advertisement is one of our worst faults.’
Warren looked at the intertwined R H stamped in gold on the handmade cigarette, and suspected that it was not Hellier’s normal style and that he went about it coldbloodedly in what was a conformist industry. He said nothing and waited for Hellier to toss a more reasonable conversational ball.
‘First, I must apologize for the scene I made in your rooms,’ said Hellier.
‘You have already done so,’ said Warren gravely. ‘And in any case, no apology is necessary.’
Hellier settled in a chair facing Warren and put his glass on a low table. ‘I find you are very well thought of in your profession.’
Warren twitched an eyebrow. ‘Indeed!’
‘I’ve been finding out things about the drug racket – I think I have it pretty well taped.’
‘In three days?’ said Warren ironically.
‘In the film industry, by its very nature, there must be an enormous fund of general knowledge. My Research Department is very nearly as good as, say, a newspaper office. If you put enough staff on to a problem you can do a lot in three days.’
Warren let that go and merely nodded.
‘My research staff found that in nearly one-third of their enquiries they were advised to consult you as a leading member of the profession.’
‘They didn’t,’ said Warren succinctly.
Hellier smiled. ‘No, I told them not to. As you said the other day, you’re a very busy man. I didn’t want to disturb you.’
‘I suppose I should thank you,’ said Warren with a straight face.
Hellier squared his shoulders. ‘Dr Warren, let us not fence with each other. I’m putting all my cards on the table. I also had you independently investigated.’
Warren sipped whisky and kept steady eyes on Hellier over the glass. ‘That’s a damned liberty,’ he observed mildly. ‘I suppose I should ask you what you found.’
Hellier held up his hand. ‘Nothing but good, Doctor. You have an enviable reputation both as a man and as a physician, besides being outstanding in the field of drug addiction.’
Warren said satirically, ‘I should like to read that dossier some time – it would be like reading one’s obituary, a chance which comes to few of us.’ He put down his glass. ‘And to what end is all this … this effort on your part?’
