The Secret House of Death (14 page)

She said she had been there to meet someone and he had never for a moment believed that someone was a woman. Then he remembered the man who had come in, who had stared at her, hesitating, before retreating in haste. From that precise moment her manner towards David had changed.

Suddenly David knew quite certainly that her appointment had been with this man. She had arranged to meet a man at the pub, but the meeting must be a secret one. Why else had she failed to make the necessary introductions, denied recognising that face which now, as David remembered it, had worn in that first instant a look of satisfaction, of pleasurable anticipation? She knew him. She guessed that David's curiosity had been aroused, so she had staged the scene in the car to blind him, to seduce him and, ultimately, to make him forget what he had seen.

It must be terribly important to her, he thought, and he recalled her nervous gabbling and the urgency of her caressing hand. She had detained him in the pub after the man had gone. Because, having speculated as to the man's identity, he might have looked for him in the street, and seeing his face in daylight, have made absolute recognition certain?

But he and the Hellers had, as far as he knew, no acquaintances in common. How could he have recognised a friend of Magdalene's? And, supposing he had, why did it matter so much to her?

Suddenly it had grown too warm for a fire, even outside. The roadmen had brought a spirit stove with them and the boy boiled their kettle on it inside the hut. For the first time, as if lured out by the fine weather, the man in the blue jersey was working above ground, and for the first time too, Susan saw him standing erect.

She was surprised to see that he was rather short, or, rather, short in the leg. Perhaps it was the length of his torso which had deceived her. She had a strong impression that she associated this man with height, but she didn't know why.

Then it came to her that on one previous occasion she had seen him walking along on level ground. She had seen him in Louise's garden on the day of Louise's death, and now, as she thought about it, the impression of a much taller man strengthened and grew vivid. Surely that man had been quite six feet tall and more slightly built than Blue Jersey who, swinging a pick, showed a thick waistline and a heavily muscled back.

The answer must be that at that time there had been more than three men working on the road. When he brought the daffodils, Bob had spoken of four or five men and no doubt he was better-informed on this matter than she who had scarcely spared the labourers a second glance until illness brought them into compelling perspective.

That illness was now receding and by the middle of the week Susan had lost interest in the workmen. Their doings had lost their freshness or her own standard of entertainment, lowered by fever, had risen. She read her Proust, hardly distracted even by the spasmodic scream of the drill.

‘Mr North popped in with some books.' Mrs Dring piled a stack of new magazines on the bed. ‘I reckon it's been the best thing that could have happened for him, you being ill. It's taken him out of himself, stopped him brooding. He coming in here again tonight, is he? You want to mind your neighbours don't get talking. That Mrs Gibbs has got a tongue as long as your arm.'

‘Oh, rubbish,' Susan said crossly. ‘You said yourself he only comes for something to occupy his mind.'

‘And he's the type that occupies his mind with women. You needn't look like that. I dare say there's no harm in it. Men are men when all's said and done. My husband's different, but then he's one in a million as I've always said. And talking of men, if you're going to start sitting up you want to watch that lot in the road don't see you all in your nothings.'

Mrs Dring's manner was more that of a nanny than a charwoman. Susan let her draw the curtains half across the window and accepted, with a meek shrug, the bedjacket that was tossed on to the pillow.

‘How many men are there working on the road, Mrs Dring?'

‘Just the three.'

‘I thought there were four or five last week.'

‘There was never more than three,' said Mrs Dring. ‘That was your temperature making you see double. There's always been just the three.'

Magdalene Heller phoned David again on Wednesday evening. She was very lonely, she said, she hardly knew a soul but Carl.

‘What about your friend you were meeting in the pub?'

‘I don't know him that well.'

‘Better than me, surely?' Did she know what she had said? He muttered a quick good-bye. Her voice after that fatal sentence had sounded stunned. This was no fear of being caught out in a clandestine adventure, no fear of scandal. David sensed that she was deathly afraid. He had guessed right and located the source of her fear, her sudden change of heart, her advances to himself, and briefly he was elated. She wouldn't bother with him again.

Of course she had set herself up as very pure, the essence of wronged womanhood in the coroner's court. It would look funny if it turned out she had a man friend of her own, and he remembered how he had thought she was going to meet a man when he had watched her visiting the cinema. It might be a thought to read that inquest report again and see just what she had said.

Presently he unearthed the old newspaper—he always kept newspapers for weeks and weeks, finally bundling them up and putting them on top of his tiny dustbin—but the report was brief and very little of what Magdalene had said was quoted. With a shrug, he folded the newspaper again and then his eye was caught by a front-page photograph on the previous Wednesday's copy of the
Evening News.
The caption beneath it said, ‘Mr Robert North and his wife Louise, who was today found shot with Bernard Heller, a 33-year-old salesman. This picture was taken while the Norths were on holiday in Devon last year. Story on page 5.'

David's eyes narrowed and he looked searchingly into the photographed face. Then he turned quickly to page five. ‘I had never even heard Heller's name,' North had told the coroner, ‘until someone in the street where I live told me that
Equatair
's rep. had repeatedly called at my house. I never saw him till he was dead and I certainly didn't know he was a married man.'

But six hours later he had walked into a Soho pub where he had arranged to meet that married man's widow.

A regular weekly feature of
Certainty
was a kind of diary written entirely by Julian Townsend and called ‘Happenings'. In fact, as few things ever happened to Julian and he was incurably lazy, the diary consisted less of accounts of events attended by him than a
mélange
of his opinions. There was usually some local war going on for Julian to condemn and advise negotiation or arbitration; some bill being placed before Parliament which enraged him; some politician whose way of life annoyed him and offered him an occasion of mischief-making. When, as occasionally happened, a freak silly season occurred, Julian vented his vituperation on old-established customs and institutions, spitting venom at the Royal Family, the Church of England, horse racing, musical comedies and the licensing laws.

This week ‘Happenings' was as usual headed by Julian's name writ large on a streamer beneath which the writer's face scowled from a single column block. The high bumpy forehead, glossy with the sweat of intellect, round metal-framed glasses and supercilious mouth were familiar to David as a constant reader of
Certainty
and now he scarcely noticed them. A girl-friend of his, a television actress called Pamela Pearce, claimed acquaintance with
Certainty
's editor and occasionally threatened to introduce him to David. But up till now he had steered clear of the encounter, preferring to keep his illusions. Townsend could hardly be as pompous, as self-opinionated and as pedantic as his articles led the reader to believe. David felt he might lose his zest for ‘Happenings' if its writer turned out to be unassuming.

There was always a discourse on food and today Julian had gone to town, devoting the whole of his first column to recipes for aphrodisiac meat dishes and puddings, with erudite references to Norman Douglas, and half his second to a violent condemnation of the lunch he had eaten in a country hotel while week-ending with his aristocratic in-laws.

Smiling, David passed on. Apparently the fellow was going to fill up the rest of his space with an attack on the suburbs of London. ‘Happenings' was a misnomer for this spate of vitriol. Rural England castrated by the entrenching tool, the pneumatic drill,' David read, amused. From the ravaged countryside, Julian sped towards the metropolis. ‘Matchdown Park, where never a month passes without the demolition of yet another Georgian jewel . . .'

Rather odd. Years went by without a mention of Matchdown Park and now it was constantly in the news. David was surprised to find Townsend actually lived there. But he evidently did. ‘The present writer's knowledge,' the paragraph ended, ‘is based on five years' sojourn in the place.'

David fetched the blue S to Z telephone directory and there it was: Julian M. Townsend, 16 Orchard Drive, Matchdown Park. He hesitated, pondering. But when he began to dial, it wasn't the number on the page in front of him.

‘Julian Townsend?' said Pamela Pearce. ‘You're in luck, as it happens, darling. I'm going to a party tomorrow night and he's bound to be there. Why not come along?'

‘Will his wife be there?'

‘His wife? I expect so. He never goes anywhere without her.'

A Mrs Susan Townsend had found Heller's body, and she lived next door to the Norths in Orchard Drive. It was all in the paper and it must be the same woman. What he would say when he met her David hardly knew, but it should be easy to bring the conversation round to the North tragedy. It would still be a hot topic with her. She had been a friend of Mrs North. Didn't the paper say she had been paying an ordinary morning call? She would know if North and Magdalene Heller had known each other before the inquest and, since she had been in court, could tell him if North's statements—‘I didn't even know he was a married man' and so on—had been misreported or if, when heard in their full and proper context, were capable of a different, innocent interpretation. If she were co-operative, she could set his mind at rest.

For it was active and troubled enough now. North had come to meet Magdalene in The Man in the Iron Mask six hours after the inquest. That was just explicable. He could have done so and still not have lied to the coroner. But if something else which David suspected were true, he had lied blackly and irredeemably.

They had arranged to meet there. That he knew for certain. Had they ever met there before?

‘It's a crying shame the mess them floors get in,' said Mrs Dring on all-fours. ‘There's holes in this parquet you could put your finger in.' Louise's heels, Susan thought with a pang. Probably they would never be eradicated, but at least the new occupant need never know how they had been caused. Of this prospective buyer she now had high hopes, for, once well again, her first task had been to call at the estate agent's. She watched Mrs Dring obliterating small clayey footmarks, her interest caught when she said, ‘Let's hope we've seen the last of all this mud. Did you know they've finished the road at last? The three of them filled up that hole of theirs last night and good riddance.'

She had seen the last act of their play, then. Settling at her typewriter, Susan wondered why they had ever dug that series of trenches and whether life in Matchdown Park would have been brought to a standstill without, the monotonous rhythm of those drills and the renewing of those glimpsed cables. Her ability to concentrate and reason normally, rediscovered in the past two days, brought her intense pleasure. It seemed to her that her illness had marked the end of a black period in her life and during that illness she had found fresh resources, decided to break away from Matchdown Park and made a friend in Bob North.

But as she worked, congratulating herself on her recovery, a tiny thread of doubt crept across her mind. For some unexplored reason she was troubled by her recollections of the roadmen and although she should have shared Mrs Dring's relief at their departure, she began instead to feel a curious dismay.

There had never been more than three men, Mrs Dring insisted, and yet while Louise was lying dead with Heller she had seen a fourth man in Louise's garden. That man had knocked at Louise's back door—Mrs Dring had heard him do so—and then walked away, not to join the others, but off by himself down the road. Recapturing the scene, lifting her eyes from the type which had blurred, Susan remembered quite clearly that the three others, the old man, Blue Jersey and the boy, had been in their trench while he stood for a moment, hooded, anonymous, to warm his hands at their fire.

‘Mrs Dring.' She got up, feeling a faint sickness, the aftermath of her flu. ‘I've just remembered something, something rather worrying. I suppose I was getting this flu while I was at the inquest. Only—only they asked me if I'd seen anyone call next door during the morning and I said I hadn't. I said . . .' She stopped, appalled at the curiosity which almost amounted to hunger on Mrs Dring's uplifted face.

‘Well, you didn't see no one, did you?'

‘I'd forgotten. It can't matter now. We all knew what the verdict was going to be, but still . . .' And Susan bit her lip, not because of what she had said, but because she had said it to this woman, this bearer of malice, this arch troublemaker who had no kind word for anyone but her husband. Then she managed a strained smile and, convincing herself she was changing the subject, said, ‘You'll have a chance to get the floors nice now Paul won't be bringing in any more clay on his shoes.'