The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene [106]
Yusef said, ‘You know what boys are. They get scared by the siren and they take shelter. We must sit here and talk to each other, Major Scobie. It is a great opportunity for me. I do not want the morning ever to come.’
‘The morning? I am not going to wait till morning for AIL’
‘Perhaps he will be frightened. He will know you have found him out and he will run away. Sometimes boys go back to bush ...’
‘You are talking nonsense, Yusef.’
‘Another whisky, Major Scobie?’
‘All right. All right.’ He thought: am I taking to drink too? It seemed to him that he had no shape left, nothing you could touch and say: this is Scobie.
‘Major Scobie, there are rumours that after all justice is to be done and that you are to be Commissioner.’
He said with care,’ I don’t think it will ever come to that’
‘I just wanted to say, Major Scobie, that you need not worry about me. I want your good, nothing so much as that. I will slip out of your life, Major Scobie. I will not be a millstone. It is enough for me to have had tonight - this long talk in the dark on all sorts of subjects. I will remember tonight always. You will not have to worry. I will see to that’ Through the window behind Yusef’s head, from somewhere among the jumble of huts and warehouses, a cry came: pain and fear: it swam up like a drowning animal for air, and fell again into the darkness of the room, into the whisky, under the desk, into the basket of wastepaper, a discarded finished cry.
Yusef said too quickly, ‘A drunk man.’ He yelped apprehensively, ‘Where are you going, Major Scobie? It’s not safe - alone.’ That was the last Scobie ever saw of Yusef, a silhouette stuck stiffly and crookedly on the wall, with the moonlight shining on the syphon and the two drained glasses. At the bottom of the stairs the clerk stood, staring down the wharf. The moonlight caught his eyes: like road studs they showed the way to turn.
There was no movement in the empty warehouses on either side or among the sacks and crates as he moved his torch: if the wharf rats had been out, that cry had driven them back to their holes. His footsteps echoed between the sheds, and somewhere a pye-dog wailed. It would have been quite possible to have searched in vain in this wilderness of litter until morning: what was it that brought him so quickly and unhesitatingly to the body, as though he had himself chosen the scene of the crime? Turning this way and that down the avenues of tarpaulin and wood, he was aware of a nerve in his forehead that beat out the whereabouts of Ali.
The body lay coiled and unimportant like a broken watch-spring under a pile of empty petrol drums: it looked as though it had been shovelled there to wait for morning and the scavenger birds. Scobie had a moment of hope before he turned the shoulder over, for after all two boys had been together on the road. The seal grey neck had been slashed and slashed again. Yes, he thought, I can trust him now. The yellow eyeballs stared up at him like a stranger’s, flecked with red. It was as if this body had cast him off, disowned him - ‘I know you not’. He swore aloud, hysterically. ‘By God, I’ll get the man who did this,’ but under that anonymous stare insincerity withered. He thought: I am the man. Didn’t I know all the time in Yusef s room that something was planned? Couldn’t I have pressed for an answer? A voice said, ‘Sah?’
‘Who’s that?’
‘Corporal Laminah, sah..’
‘Can you see a broken rosary anywhere around? Look care’ fully.’
‘I can see nothing, sah..’
Scobie thought: if only I could weep, if only I could feel pain; have I really become so evil? Unwillingly he looked down at the body. The fumes of petrol lay all around in the heavy night and for a moment he saw the body