Straight (12 page)

Diamonds in the ice cubes? I didn’t think he would have put them anywhere so chancy: besides, he was security conscious, not paranoid.

I hauled myself upstairs to the hall again and then went on up to the next floor, where there was a bedroom and bathroom suite in self-conscious black and white. Greville had slept there: the built-in closets and drawers held his clothes, the bathroom cabinet his privacy. He had been sparing in his possessions, leaving a single row of shoes, several white shirts on hangers, six assorted suits and a rack of silk ties. The drawers were tidy with sweaters, sport shirts, underclothes, socks. Our mother, I thought with a smile, would have been proud of him. She’d tried hard and unsuccessfully to instill tidiness into both of us as children, and it looked as if we’d both got better with age.

There was little else to see. The drawer in the bedside table revealed indigestion tablets, a flashlight and a paperback, John D. MacDonald. No gadgets and no treasure maps.

With a sigh I went into the only other room on that floor and found it unfurnished and papered with garish metallic silvery roses which had been half ripped off at one point. So much for the decorator.

There was another flight of stairs going upward, but I didn’t climb them. There would only be, by the looks of things, unused rooms to find there, and I thought I would go and look later when stairs weren’t such a sweat. Anything deeply interesting in that house seemed likely to be found in the small back sitting room, so it was to there that I returned.

I sat for a while in the chair that was clearly Greville’s favorite, from where he could see the television and the view over the garden. Places that people had left forever should be seen through their eyes, I thought. His presence was strong in that room, and in me.

Beside his chair there was a small antique table with, on its polished top, a telephone and an answering machine. A red light for messages received was shining on the machine, so after a while I pressed a button marked “rewind,” followed by another marked “play.”

A woman’s voice spoke without preamble.

“Darling, where are you? Do call me.”

There was a series of between-message clicks, then the same voice again, this time packed with anxiety.

“Darling, please please call. I’m very worried. Where are you, darling?
Please
call. I love you.”

Again the clicks, but no more messages.

Poor lady, I thought. Grief and tears waiting in the wings.

I got up and explored the room more fully, pausing by two drawers in a table beside the window. They contained two small black unidentified gadgets which baffled me and which I stowed in my pockets, and also a slotted tray containing a rather nice collection of small bears, polished and carved from shaded pink, brown and charcoal stone. I laid the tray on top of the table beside some chrysanthemums and came next to a box made of greenish stone, also polished, which, true to Greville’s habit, was firmly locked. Thinking perhaps that one of the keys fitted it, I brought out the bunch again and began to try the smallest.

I was facing the window with my back to the room, balancing on one foot and leaning a thigh against the table, my arms out of the crutches, intent on what I was doing and disastrously unheeding. The first I knew of anyone else in the house was a muffled exclamation behind me, and I turned to see a dark-haired woman coming through the doorway, her wild glance rigidly fixing on the green stone box. Without pause she came fast toward me, pulling out of a pocket a black object like a long fat cigar.

I opened my mouth to speak but she brought her hand round in a strong swinging arc, and in that travel the short black cylinder more than doubled its length into a thick silvery flexible stick which crashed with shattering force against my left upper arm, enough to stop a heavyweight in round one.

M
ay fingers went numb and dropped the box. I swayed and spun from the force of the impact and overbalanced, toppling, thinking sharply that I mustn’t this time put my foot on the ground. I dropped the bunch of keys and grabbed at the back of an upright black leather chair with my right hand to save myself, but it turned over under my weight and came down on top of me onto the carpet in a tangle of chair legs, table legs and crutches, the green box underneath and digging into my back.

In a spitting fury I tried to orient myself and finally got enough breath for one single choice, charming and heartfelt word.

“Bitch.
”

She gave me a baleful glare and picked up the telephone, pressing three fast buttons.

“Police,” she said, and in as short a time as it took the emergency service to connect her, “Police, I want to report a burglary. I’ve caught a burglar.”

“I’m Greville’s brother,” I said thickly, from the floor.

For a moment it didn’t seem to reach her. I said again, more loudly, “I’m Greville’s brother.”

“What?” she said vaguely.

“For Christ’s sake, are you deaf? I’m not a burglar, I’m Greville Franklin’s brother.” I gingerly sat up into an L shape and found no strength anywhere.

She put the phone down. “Why didn’t you say so?” she demanded.

“What chance did you give me? And who the hell are you, walking into my brother’s house and belting people?”

She held at the ready the fearsome thing she’d hit me with, looking as if she thought I’d attack her in my turn, which I certainly felt like. In the last six days I’d been crunched by a horse, a mugger and a woman. All I needed was a toddler to amble up with a coup de grace. I pressed the fingers of my right hand on my forehead and the palm against my mouth and considered the blackness of life in general.

“What’s the matter with you?” she said after a pause.

I slid the hand away and drawled, “Absolutely bloody nothing.”

“I only tapped you,” she said with criticism.

“Shall I give you a hefty clip with that thing so you can feel what it’s like?”

“You’re angry.” She sounded surprised.

“Dead right.”

I struggled up off the floor, straightened the fallen chair and sat on it. “Who are you?” I repeated. But I knew who she was: the woman on the answering machine. The same voice. The cut-crystal accent.
Darling, where are you. I love you.

“Did you ring his office?” I said. “Are you Mrs. Williams?”

She seemed to tremble and crumple inwardly and she walked past me to the window to stare out into the garden.

“Is he really dead?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She was forty, I thought, perhaps more. Nearly my height. In no way tiny or delicate. A woman of decision and power, sorely troubled.

She wore a leather-belted raincoat, though it hadn’t rained for weeks, and plain black businesslike shoes. Her hair, thick and dark, was combed smoothly back from her forehead to curl under on her collar, a cool groomed look achieved only by expert cutting. There was no visible jewelry, little remaining lipstick, no trace of scent.

“How?” she said eventually.

I had a strong impulse to deny her the information, to punish her for her precipitous attack, to hurt her and get even. But there was no point in it, and I knew I would end up with more shame than satisfaction, so after a struggle I explained briefly about the scaffolding.

“Friday afternoon,” I said. “He was unconscious at once. He died early on Sunday.”

She turned her head slowly to look at me directly. “Are you Derek?” she said.

“Yes.”

“I’m Clarissa Williams.”

Neither of us made any attempt to shake hands. It would have been incongruous, I thought.

“I came to fetch some things of mine,” she said. “I didn’t expect anyone to be here.”

It was an apology of sorts, I supposed; and if I had indeed been a burglar she would have saved the bric-a-brac.

“What things?” I asked.

She hesitated, but in the end said, “A few letters, that’s all.” Her gaze strayed to the answering machine and there was a definite tightening of muscles round her eyes.

“I played the messages,” I said.

“Oh God.”

“Why should it worry you?”

She had her reasons, it seemed, but she wasn’t going to tell me what they were; or not then, at any rate.

“I want to wipe them off,” she said. “It was one of the purposes of coming.”

She glanced at me, but I couldn’t think of any urgent reason why she shouldn’t, so I didn’t say anything. Tentatively, as if asking my forbearance every step of the way, she walked jerkily to the machine, rewound the tape and pressed the record button, recording silence over what had gone before. After a little while she rewound the tape again and played it, and there were no desperate appeals anymore.

“Did anyone else hear ... ?”

“I don’t think so. Not unless the cleaner was in the habit of listening. She came today, I think.”

“Oh God.”

“You left no name.” Why the hell was I reassuring her, I wondered. I still had no strength in my fingers. I could still feel that awful blow like a shudder.

“Do you want a drink?” she said abruptly. “I’ve had a dreadful day.” She went over to the tray of bottles and poured vodka into a heavy tumbler. “What do you want?”

“Water,” I said. “Make it a double.”

She tightened her mouth and put down the vodka bottle with a clink. “Soda or tonic?” she asked starchily.

“Soda.”

She poured soda into a glass for me and tonic into her own, diluting the spirit by not very much. Ice was downstairs in the kitchen. No one mentioned it.

I noticed she’d left her lethal weapon lying harmlessly beside the answering machine. Presumably I no longer represented any threat. As if avoiding personal contact, she set my soda water formally on the table beside me between the little stone bears and the chrysanthemums and drank deeply from her own glass. Better than tranquilizers, I thought. Alcohol loosened the stress, calmed the mental pain. The world’s first anesthetic. I could have done with some myself.

“Where are your letters?” I asked.

She switched on a table light. The on-creeping dusk in the garden deepened abruptly toward night and I wished she would hurry because I wanted to go home.

She looked at a bookcase which covered a good deal of one wall.

“In there, I think. In a book.”

“Do start looking, then. It could take all night.”

“You don’t need to wait.”

“I think I will,” I said.

“Don’t you trust me?” she demanded.

“ No.”

She stared at me hard. “Why not?”

I didn’t say that because of the diamonds I didn’t trust anyone. I didn’t know who I could safely ask to look out for them, or who would search to steal them, if they knew they might be found.

“I don’t know you,” I said neutrally.

“But I...” She stopped and shrugged. “I suppose I don’t know you either.” She went over to the bookshelves. “Some of these books are hollow,” she said.

Oh Greville, I thought. How would I ever find anything he had hidden? I liked straight paths. He’d had a mind like a labyrinth.

She began pulling out books from the lower shelves and opening the front covers. Not methodically book by book along any row but always, it seemed to me, those with predominantly blue spines. After a while, on her knees, she found a hollow one which she laid open on the floor with careful sarcasm, so that I could see she wasn’t concealing anything.

The interior of the book was in effect a blue velvet box with a close-fitting lid that could be pulled out by a tab. When she pulled the lid out, the shallow blue-velvet-lined space beneath was revealed as being entirely empty.

Shrugging, she replaced the lid and closed the book, which immediately looked like any other book, and returned it to the shelves, and a few seconds later found another hollow one, this time with red velvet interiors. Inside this one lay an envelope.

She looked at it without touching it, and then at me.

“It’s not my letters,” she said. “Not my writing paper.”

I said, “Greville made a will leaving everything he possessed to me.”

She didn’t seem to find it extraordinary, although I did: he had done it that way for simplicity when he was in a hurry, and he would certainly have changed it, given time.

“You’d better see what’s in there, then,” she said calmly, and she picked the envelope out and stretched across to hand it to me.

The envelope, which hadn’t been stuck down, contained a single ornate key, about four inches long, the top flattened and pierced like metal lace, the business end narrow with small but intricate teeth. I laid it on my palm and showed it to her, asking her if she knew what it unlocked.

She shook her head. “I haven’t seen it before.” She paused. “He was a man of secrets,” she said.

I listened to the wistfulness in her voice. She might be strongly controlled at that moment, but she hadn’t been before Annette told her Greville was dead. There had been raw panicky emotion on the tape. Annette had simply confirmed her frightful fears and put what I imagined was a false calmness in place of escalating despair. A man of secrets ... Greville had apparently not opened his mind to her much more than he had to me.

I put the key back into its envelope and handed it across.

“It had better stay in the book for now,” I said, “until I find a keyhole it fits.”

She put the key into the book and returned it to the shelves, and shortly afterward found her letters. They were fastened not with romantic ribbons but held together by a prosaic rubber band; not a great many of them by the look of things but carefully kept.

She stared at me from her knees. “I don’t want you to read them,” she said. “Whatever Greville left you, they’re mine, not yours.”

I wondered why she needed so urgently to remove all traces of herself from the house. Out of curiosity I’d have read the letters with interest if I’d found them myself, but I could hardly demand now to see her love letters ... if they were love letters.