Dangerous Thoughts (13 page)

With the morning came a letter for me, handwritten, with a Norfolk postmark. By extreme ill-luck, Edwin had been the one right there in the hall as the letter came through the box, and he was now standing over me, like a terrier at a rabbit-hole, watching for me to open it.

I don’t know what good I thought my delaying tactics would do, they were instinctive really. Slowly, I spread another blob of marmalade on my last scrap of toast. Languidly, and with extreme reluctance, I started on the junk mail, actually reading it for the first time ever. A £25,000 car was to be mine: ‘You have drawn one of the lucky numbers, Mrs Wakefield, which entitles you to take part in our Grand something-something …’ I could feel Edwin’s impatience gathering around the back of my neck and down my shoulder blades.

He wasn’t going to go away. No sense in prolonging the agony. Like a suicide nerving himself for the final leap, I drew a deep breath, reached for a knife, and slit open the fatal missive.

Well, not fatal exactly. Indeed, on the face of it, it was
good
news. Leonard Coburn had been pronounced well enough to be flown home within the next few days, and the next half-page of Jessica’s letter was filled with expressions of wifely relief and rapture.

BUT … and there followed a fairly extensive list of all the problems, difficulties and inconveniences attendant on this rapturous event at just this exact moment in Jessica’s life. How,
for instance, was she to meet him at the airport now she was on this anti-histamine drug which meant that she couldn’t drive? And then — wasn’t it just her luck?! — her daily woman had gone sick, and so how in the world was she going to cope with an invalid as well as all the housework.

“And it’s such a
big
house, you know, and really dreadfully inconvenient, but of course Leo loves it …”

And so on and so on. Did it all add up to a request for me to go and help out in some way …? Before I had reached the end of the six closely written pages, Edwin had burst out with his own answer:

“The poor woman! We must drive up and help her
at
once
! We can’t leave her in all this trouble … We must start
now
!”

I don’t know if he thought that this unprecedented burst of altruism was actually going to deceive me? Or did he know very well — and gamble on it making no difference — that I knew exactly what his real motive was? Clearly, he wanted to be there, on the spot, to prevent any disastrous reunion between Leonard and Richard; already he could envisage them backing up one another’s accounts of the expedition, and giving the lie to him, Edwin, so decisively that no amount of twisting and prevaricating on his part could possibly extricate him.

As before, my first instinct was to delay things.

“But Edwin — we can’t possibly — not just like that — right now. What about Jason …?”

I had brought it on myself, I admit it. The angry explosion about fifteen-year-olds being to all intents and purposes adults, who could surely be left to run their own lives for a day or two without all this ridiculous nannying?

There have been other occasions, of course, when the opposite theme has ricocheted off our walls, about how fifteen-year-olds are still irresponsible children who shouldn’t be allowed out in the evenings without saying exactly where they were going and being back by nine.

I kept my head down, as I usually did when this fraught subject
got its periodic airing, and waited for the steam to go out of it. Which it did, of course, after a few minutes, and Edwin, unable to think of anything more to say, slammed out of the kitchen.

Slowly, my mind a whirl of plans and counter-plans, I carried the breakfast crockery to the sink, put away the marmalade, the milk, the butter, and found myself calculating, as I contemplated the contents of the refrigerator, what I could leave for Jason’s meal tonight … whether there was enough milk … cheese … orange juice to tide him over?

So had I already decided we must go to Norfolk today? In spite of knowing Edwin’s real motive for wishing to do so? The decision — if it was a decision — shocked me, and I wondered where it had come from? Only a few days ago, sitting on that damp dead log in the damp autumnal wood, I had been wrestling — or thought I had been wrestling — with the original decision about whether to back Edwin up in his deception — as perhaps a loyal wife should? — or whether (in his long-term interest, perhaps?) — to expose him as the liar that he was — or at least to use whatever influence I had to force him to a public confession?

I had no sense of having succeeded in coming to any decision about this tangled moral dilemma; and yet now, after only three days, I found that the decision had in fact been irrevocably made: not by any clear act of will on my part, but by a series of small,
ad
hoc
evasions; moments of taking the line of least resistance; of not interrupting him when his discourse took off into flights of fancy; of taking a non-controversial stance on every issue as it cropped up. By all these escapist manoeuvres I found myself, now, committed inescapably to helping him save face; to protecting him from himself by heading him off from whatever wild and desperate schemes might be churning inside his panicky soul. First and foremost, to head him off from trying to murder Richard, which, it was clear by now, he had already attempted more than once — though with such monumental inefficiency that one could not help wondering how realistic the intention had actually been? Anyway, the risk was there, and I was the only
person in the world who was in a position to monitor Edwin’s movements, to make sure that the opportunity for murder never arose.

And now there was Leonard Coburn, too. Once back in England, he too would be at risk. All this frantic urgency to set off this very day to go and ‘help’ in the Coburns’ Norfolk home seemed to me sinister in the extreme. Clearly, Edwin was determined to be first on the spot when Leonard arrived home, and somehow to prevent him making contact with Richard.

Somehow? How? I found my hands trembling as I put away the glasses, each one clinking a tiny, horrid little message to me about the state of my nerves.

I must calm down … calm down. No good would come of my allowing myself to become just as hysterical as Edwin himself …

It was as this thought went through my mind that it occurred to me that Edwin had been extraordinarily quiet during these last few minutes. I would have expected him, in the course of packing for this headlong trip, to have been in and out of the kitchen half a dozen times, howling for clean socks, for ironed handkerchiefs, for the one and only shirt which happened, at just this moment, to be the one which hadn’t been washed. Racing up and down the stairs, too, searching here there and everywhere for reading glasses, distance glasses, clip-on sunglasses, road map, bankcard, the lot. All the things which any wife other than me would have been able to lay her hands on unerringly, and without a moment’s hesitation.

Well, the clip-on sunglasses I
could
help him with. And he would need them, too, driving in an easterly direction this early in the day. They were right here, inside the soup tureen which, long since missing a lid, had become the receptacle of choice for just this sort of thing — objects that are wanted desperately, and with extreme urgency, but only now and then.

“Edwin,” I called, opening the door into the hall, “your sunglasses …”

Silence. Out I went into the hall, to the foot of the stairs.

“Edwin!” I shouted.

Still no answer. Seized by sudden apprehension, I ran into the sitting-room and looked out of the window.

Yes, the car was gone. Without a word to me, he had sneaked off, making no pre-journey fuss about anything, in total silence, shutting the front door furtively behind him.

My first instinct was to follow him, immediately. To ring up a taxi, to head for Liverpool Street, and jump on to the first train to King’s Lynn whence there would be some sort of connection (surely there would) to Dereham Market.

But why? What was the rush? Leonard Coburn wouldn’t be home yet. ‘The end of the week’, Jessica had said in her letter, and today was only Tuesday. Until Leonard actually arrived, surely there was nothing in the way of mischief that Edwin could get up to?

I must reread Jessica’s letter, and see exactly what she
had
said: but — wouldn’t you know it? — the letter was gone. Edwin must have decided he wanted it with him, either to pore over at leisure and without interference by me, or else as a sort of passport to legitimise his sudden and unannounced descent on his possibly reluctant hostess. “But look, you
asked
us to come,” he could say, and he would point to the bit of the letter which perhaps could — just — be interpreted that way.

I sat down at the kitchen table and collected my thoughts. There
wasn’t
all that much hurry, there really wasn’t. I needn’t, after all, cancel my temping job yet again. It would be finished by six, I could be home in time to get Jason’s supper and explain to him — with suitable omissions — what we were doing, and still be able to get a train from Liverpool Street.

By rights, I should at this point have rung Jessica Coburn to find out what kind of help, if any, she was asking for: but then what was I going to do if it turned out to be something I could
perfectly well do for her here in London? I
had
to go, now that Edwin had gone, whether she wanted me or not; and so what would be the point of finding out that she didn’t?

King’s Lynn in time for the connection to Dereham Halt. Well, that’s how it was going to be in theory, that is, in the small print of the Eastern Region Winter Timetable. But I was reckoning without the idiosyncrasies of today’s transport systems. It was nearly midnight when the train, after many a pause for thought, arrived at King’s Lynn, and I disembarked on to a brightly lit but totally deserted platform. No one in the booking office, no one behind any of the doors marked ‘Private’, and nothing written up on the indicator board. In spite of the brilliant illumination elsewhere, the waiting-room was in darkness. Still, at least it was open, and I could feel grateful that whoever had forgotten to put a bulb in the light socket had also forgotten to lock the door when he went off duty. So there was somewhere to sit sheltered from the wind, though of course one couldn’t read one’s book in there. For that, one had to stand on the bright, freezing platform buffeted by the east wind. One was spoilt for choice.

Twenty to one. Presumably there would be
some
sort of a train, some time? A freight train, perhaps? Nuclear waste, or something? Every now and then I would start up from my uneasy doze in the dark waiting-room, fancying I heard a singing of the rails, heralding the approach of a train, but always it was nothing, just the gusts of wind, rising and falling. And then I would stay outside for a little, trying to read, until the wicked cold drove me in again, to sit on the hard bench, shivering and half-dozing in the darkness.

And so, sitting, standing, cowering, shivering, I edged and pushed myself through the recalcitrant stretches of the night until at last, icy cold and almost believing that time itself had come to a stop, I saw, with incredulous joy, that another living being, hunched in a greatcoat had come on to the platform; and then another, and another. It was five-fifteen. The workmen’s train was due at last.

By six o’clock I had reached my destination — or, rather, the windswept local station about three miles, so far as I could judge from my map, from the Coburn’s home. It was still dark, and I felt it to be far too early to be bothering a prospective hostess — especially one who has been more or less press ganged into the role — and so I decided not to set off along the road straight away, but to walk down to the sea. I could tell the direction by the fierce, salty wind that hit me as I stepped out into the station forecourt.

The darkness was lifting now, just a little, and I was able to make my way down a rutted track which led, after about a quarter of a mile, to a wild, windswept landscape of sand dunes and marram grass, the stiff, wintry blades rattling and rustling under the gusts of the dawn wind.

Stumbling and slithering, clutching my suitcase, I clambered to the top of the first dune, and there — Oh, the sudden sense of being on a planet, hurtling through space, overwhelmed me. Dwarfed and battered by the gigantic and random forces of Earth’s atmosphere, I struggled to get my breath; then turned to face the huge curve of the sea, beyond which the first silvery streaks of dawn were breaking, flicking into sharp relief the long white rims of the waves that moaned across the sand towards me.

There must have been a storm during the night, and for a moment I felt a slight sense of shock as I saw, a mile or so further along the coast, the outlines of a sunken ship. Was I the sole witness of a maritime disaster? Should I do something? Fetch somebody? But before I had come to any sort of decision, the light had already brightened, and I could see now that this was
indeed a wreck, but a very long-ago one. With its broken rails and rotting uptilted bows, it had probably been lying there half-submerged for years.

The sky low in the east was becoming yellow now, a pale lemon yellow and then pink; flashes of pink radiance danced across the tumbled waters and touched the stretches of wet sand with streaks of light. One could imagine slithering down the sand dune, down and down to that expanse of shining sand, on and on to the curved edge of the water and beyond, to share totally in the burgeoning of the new day as the planet tipped one eastward towards the sun …

A numbness was stealing over me, I was stiff with cold; the wind chiselled past my ears, and what about my suitcase?

Welcome or not, too early or not, I must be on my way.

Once off the sand dunes and on the coast road, I began to feel less numb, more in charge of what I should do next. I didn’t
have
to go straight to the Coburns’. There was the village, wasn’t there, Dereham Market, where there might quite easily be some sort of café open serving breakfasts for building-site workers and farm labourers and so forth? I could sit there spinning out some sort of a meal and a cup of coffee for as long as I judged expedient.

By now, it was nearly full daylight, and I paused to study my map. It seemed that, from here, the village was on the
other
side of the Coburns’ farm house; in fact I would have to go right past their gate to reach it, unless I made a deliberate detour. Oh, well, never mind. It would all help to fill in time.

The coast road, at this hour in the morning, was completely deserted. On one side the sand dunes cut off sight of the sea, but on the other barley fields—well I think it was barley, but of course at this time of year there was only stubble to be seen—stretched flat and bare to the other horizon, almost like a second sea.

I met no one, heard no sounds except for the endless whistling of the wind and the muffled thudding of the incoming tide beyond the dunes. There seemed to be no sign of human life anywhere, so I was quite startled when just round a bend in the road I came upon a parked car. It was parked half on the road, half on the sandy verge,
its front wheels partially sunk in the loose, powdery sand. I was even more startled when I took in that it was
our
car.

I read the number twice before I could believe it, and even then had to walk right up to it and peer in through the window in order to be convinced by the familiar clutter on the back seat. A torn rain-hat. Road maps too out of date to be any use, only we didn’t want them indoors either. A thermos flask with its cap missing so that nothing stays hot in it. And, in the back, Edwin’s tennis racket dating from the days before he quarrelled with the secretary of our local tennis club — I forget what about, and actually I think it was more that Edwin was putting on weight and losing his knack; but anyway, there the tennis racket has remained. Well, we didn’t want that indoors either. I didn’t, anyway: it would only end up as one more thing in the kitchen, leaning against something.

I tried the doors, but of course they were locked, and so, I just stood there, trying, weakly, to make sense of the situation. That Edwin had driven up yesterday of course I knew — but why leave the car
here
?
Why not have driven right to the house, and parked in the Coburns’ front yard, or wherever?

Had he, for some devious reason of his own, not wanted Jessica to know that he had come by car? Why not? Did he want to avoid having to drive her to the airport to meet her husband when the time came? This, actually, was the one and only obvious bit of help he could have given her. To have come all this way more or less uninvited, and then refuse to give her this bit of help, would be intolerably ungracious even by Edwin’s standards. And anyway, why? Surely, the whole motive for this trip was to make contact with Leonard as soon as he possibly could, before Richard had a chance to do so? This must be his motive, surely? Nothing else made sense. What, exactly, he had in mind to do, having made this contact, I hadn’t yet begun to speculate. I think I was avoiding doing so. I didn’t want to know what he was planning, I only knew that I must be on hand to frustrate it. How, I didn’t know. Simply by being there presumably, and keeping an eye on everything all of the time.

I tried the doors again, and also the boot. All locked. It then occurred to me — a most simple and obvious explanation — that Edwin might genuinely have run into trouble with the vehicle? Just because someone is planning a murder, it doesn’t follow that they are no longer subject to the ordinary hazards of life — flat batteries, leaking oil and so forth. Murderers can catch flu, suffer nosebleeds and lose their reading glasses just as easily as anyone else; it just
seems
incongruous somehow.

So, if I waited around, Edwin might turn up, complete with plausible explanation.

Did I want him to turn up?

Did I want to hear the explanation?

I did not. I continued on my way.

It wasn’t until I was sitting at a plastic-topped table in a small, fairly grimy café in Dereham Market, with a cup of coffee and a rock bun in front of me, that an idea came into my head which was more disturbing than anything I had yet thought of. Supposing Edwin, defeated at last by the evermore complex web of deceit he had been weaving around himself, had decided to end it all? There at hand was the grey, sounding sea, not a soul in sight from horizon to horizon, no witnesses, no would-be rescuers — would he be tempted, even momentarily, to take the easy way out?

If it
had
been easy, then maybe, yes. But of course it wouldn’t be. Edwin was a strong swimmer — or had been; maybe a bit out of training now, but still pretty good — and surely no one even half-competent in the water is going to choose death by drowning? For a swimmer, it cannot be an easy death; on the contrary, he will face hours and hours of mounting exhaustion, and yet still be debarred from succumbing to it, for all the time you
can
swim just one more stroke, however agonising, your body will force you to do so …

No. Not Edwin. Not anybody really. I tried to picture Edwin facing even the earliest stage of this ordeal … the first steps into the icy water … the freezing ache mounting to his knees …
his thighs … the wind slicing past his bare torso, and unable, this time, to say to himself “I’ll just dip in for a moment, and then dash out”. For there would be no dashing out, ever again. Once in, he would have to stay there. For ever.

No. Not Edwin.

All the same, I hastily finished the rock bun, swallowed half the coffee, and hurried out into the narrow street.

By now, it was bright morning, the blue, windswept sky dazzling above the bare, brown fields, and the sun hot on my shoulders as I walked, or rather half-ran, along the field path which the café proprietor had pointed out to me as the quickest way to Coburn’s Farm. I could see the grey building, foursquare to the winds, ahead of me, with its barns and outbuildings: and the nearer I came, the more I was aware of my heart thudding behind my ribs.

Of course, I’d been running. Or more or less running.

I pulled the massive dangling chunk of iron that looked as if it operated a bell, and sure enough it did. I heard the hollow peal clanging round and round the unseen stone spaces within, and it sounded to my jangled nerves like the Trump of Doom. What was I going to find? With what news would I be greeted?

The door was opened, warily — or was it merely very heavy? — by a very young girl who looked about fourteen, with a round freckled face and a mouth slightly open. Without a word she led me across the stone-flagged hall, pushed open another heavy door, and stood, clutching it, while I made my entrance.

Surprise, quite as much as relief, stopped me in my tracks. There, sitting round a bright log fire, drinking coffee, sat three people: Edwin, his hostess and a stout lady I did not know. Animated conversation had been going on, and when they turned at my entrance, with varying degrees of welcome, the tail end of a smile was fading from each face. They’d been having fun, and I’d interrupted it.