The Secret House of Death (16 page)

‘If you don't think so,' she said, ‘of course there can't be any doubt.' And she felt cold and sick because he was on his feet now. She had been his comforter and now he must think her just like all the others, stirring up trouble for him, making use of him as a topic for speculation. Wordlessly, he had moved out into the hall to stand on the spot where Louise's heel had pierced the parquet.

‘Bob,' she said, going to him.

‘Susan?'

‘I was delirious.'

He touched her shoulder, bent down and brushed her cheek with his lips. It seemed like ages since anyone but Paul had kissed her and as she felt the light touch of his mouth she fancied she could still hear quite clearly the laughter and the music from that party far away, as if the telephone was still open, still transmitting it. A loneliness that was abysmal and a desire to end that loneliness at all costs, made her put out her hand and take his, holding it tightly.

‘Forgive me?'

He nodded, still too shaken to smile. She heard him walk swiftly into Braeside but although, after a sick empty interval, she too went out into the garden, she saw that no lights had come on in the house next door where the windows were always closed.

The trees which grew from rectangles in the pavement were the kind David most disliked, sterile ornamental cherries and prunuses which bear no fruit. They were in full blossom now and he guessed that he had picked for his visit the one day in the year on which Orchard Drive justified its name. The buds had all opened, not a petal had yet fallen, and the flowers reminded him of crêpe paper. Behind the pink cloudy masses street lamps glowed with the acid drop quality of milky quartz.

He drove along slowly, following the route Heller had taken to see his love. The houses would only appear large to those with small horizons. They were not all the same—he counted four different types—but each was detached, each had an integral garage and a biggish lawned or landscaped front garden. He passed doors painted lilac and doors painted lime; he noted here the pretentious bay tree and there the pair of mass-produced carriage lamps. No raised voice, no subdued strain of music, no footfall disturbed the silence. He was beginning to see why wild horses wouldn't have dragged Elizabeth Townsend to live here.

Rather like a wild horse herself or perhaps a shaggy Shetland pony, she had tugged him towards the group where the editor of
Certainty
was holding forth. With a shout of ‘Do me a favour, Mintay', and ‘Mind your backs!' she had shoved him unceremoniously under her husband's nose.

Julian Townsend raised his eyebrows and one deprecating hand in his wife's direction. ‘. . .  And just that essential dash of cointreau,' he finished. ‘It makes all the difference between common
potage
and
haute cuisine.
Now, what was it you wanted to say, my darling?'

The female sycophants edged away. David looked awkwardly into the face that each week launched a thousand outraged letters. A faint dew glistened on Townsend's bulbous forehead and it creased and smoothed again as his little brown wife introduced David inaccurately.

‘A private transaction would be nice, of course,' the great man said at last. ‘Not that I'd consider less than ten thousand.'

‘Not exorbitant these days.'

This casual rejoinder threw Townsend slightly off balance. It was apparent that he was thinking quickly, perhaps dismayed that he had named so paltry a sum. But, the mobile supercilious face having worked for some seconds, he seemed to abandon that line to say almost meekly, ‘It's a delightful area,
rus in urbe
, you know. The house itself is in excellent condition. Do you know the district well?'

David, who had occasionally passed through it on the tube and heard it twice mentioned by Bernard Heller, said that he did. Townsend beamed at him.

‘I really do think this calls for a drink.' He made no move to fetch drinks himself, but a kind of telepathy seemed to pass between him and the woman called Minta. She trotted off and returned with a trayful of whiskies. Townsend raised his glass and shouted something which sounded like ‘
Terveydeksenne
!'

‘A Finnish toast,' said Minta reverently.

So Townsend had gone off to find Dian and get her permission to use her phone. ‘I do hope you buy it,' said his wife, tucking her arm into David's. ‘We could do with our half-share in the ten thou. Give my love to poor old Susan.'

Well, he would see poor old Susan in a minute. This was the place next door to Braeside, innocent, respectable-looking Braeside where Heller had found something the green-eyed Magdalene could not give him and into which he had taken death.

Or had death come to him?

That, David thought, was presumably why he was here. To try to find out. To disturb this all-enveloping, blanket-like silence. The pale, dry papery flowers brushed his face as he got out of the car. He slammed the door and from behind him out of the dark stillness came an appalling frenzied roar. He jumped, wheeled round. But it was only a dog, a great ginger and black curly coated thing with a monstrous horror-film shadow that cavorted wildly in an opposite garden. David noted that a sturdy iron gate separated it from him. That was that. The noise put paid to all thoughts, very tempting natural thoughts, of giving up and returning the way he had come. Poor old Susan would have been alerted by now, was probably eyeing him from between those drawn curtains.

He marched up the drive, suddenly dreading the encounter. Would she be a facsimile of Elizabeth, strident and indiscreet, or a taboo-ridden housewife from whose genteellisms Townsend had thankfully escaped? The dog's fury pursued him embarrassingly. He rang the bell. The fact that it rang instead of evoking a carillon of Westminster chimes slightly cheered him. The hall light came on, the door opened and he stood face to face with the woman who had found Heller dead.

She was not what he had expected. Taking in the fair hair, the broad brow and the slender tilted nose, he knew at once where he had seen that face before. In the National Gallery, but not on a living woman. Effie Ruskin, he thought, Millais,
The Order of Release
. She smiled at him in a businesslike way.

‘I'm sorry about the dog,' she said. ‘Deafening, isn't it? He always barks like that at strangers.'

‘Only at strangers?'

‘Oh, yes. You needn't worry that he'll bark at you if you come to live here. Won't you come in? I'm afraid it's rather late for you to see the garden.'

A sudden dismay seized him. Pulling a fast one over Julian Townsend and his current wife was all very well. Shallow, unscrupulous, insincere, they had seemed to ask for it. This woman, who received him in good faith, impressed him at first sight as utterly honest. He sensed an old-fashioned integrity about her and it made him feel like a spy. For the past few days he had been living in a spy story world where the unconventional and the ‘not done' thing was suspended. She brought him up against the hard brick wall of reality with a jolt.

Following her inside and watching her meet her own reflection, tall, shapely stylish, in the long wall glass, he thought of her supplanter and his opinion of Julian Townsend sank still further. Very probably he would give up taking
Certainty
.

‘This is the living-room,' she said, ‘with a dining area, you see, and that door leads to the room my—Julian, that is—used to have for his study. I'll show you in a moment.'

There was something that looked like a manuscript—perhaps she wrote—on a desk, a full ashtray beside it—she smoked too much—and on the sofa arm a copy of
Within a Budding Grove.
She had a mind too. For a prospective buyer, he was looking at all the wrong things. It was not she that was for sale.

‘I'm sure you won't mind if I ask you to keep fairly quiet when we go upstairs. My little boy is asleep.'

‘I didn't know you had a child.'

‘Why should you?' Her cool voice chilled. She began to instruct him in the controls of the central heating plant and he thought of Heller. On the sideboard he could see a tray with a gin bottle on it, a can of some fizzy mineral water, two glasses. She was expecting someone, a man probably. Two women alone together would drink coffee or tea or perhaps sherry.

Presently she led the way upstairs. The child slept in a lighted room and he liked the way she approached the bed, tenderly and gently, to rearrange the tumbled bedclothes, but he was less happy about her troubled frown and for the first time he noticed a gauntness in her face.

Nobody slept in the main bedroom now. Bachelor though he was, he could tell an unused bed and detect that nothing lay between mattress and counterpane. She must have moved out when Townsend left her. Damn Townsend! It gave him a very real pleasure to envisage the man's disappointment when the expected ‘five thou' wasn't forthcoming. For two pins he'd keep him hanging on while he, David, ostensibly made up his mind. He could take weeks about it, months. Only there was this girl. As she talked and pointed out the amenities of the place, he began to feel sick. He was practising on her a monstrous deceit, all the more reprehensible because she probably needed the sale.

She closed the bedroom door and said quietly, ‘There's something I think you ought to know before we go any further. I don't know if you like the house, but I couldn't let you make an offer without telling you there was a double suicide next door. Only three weeks ago. It was in all the papers but perhaps you haven't connected it.'

Her honesty, in contrast to his deceit, brought the colour into his face. ‘I did . . .'

‘It wouldn't be fair not to tell you. Some people might feel superstitious about it. Mrs North and the man—a man called Heller—shot themselves in her bedroom.
This
bedroom. The houses are just the same inside.' She shrugged. ‘Well, now you know,' she said.

He walked away from her and rested his hands on the banister rail. ‘I did know,' he said, and in a rush, ‘I knew Bernard Heller. I knew him quite well.'

The silence behind him was thick and almost frightening. Then he heard her say, ‘I don't quite understand. You knew and yet you wanted . . .'

He began to go downstairs, all his natural diffidence depriving him of words. She came slowly after him. Without looking back, he felt a quite disproportionate sorrow that the tentative friendly harmony established between them had been destroyed.

At the foot of the stairs she stood a little distance from him. ‘You want to buy a house next door to the one your friend died in? I really don't understand.'

‘I know Mrs Heller too and I'll try to explain . . .'

She looked towards the front door, back at him. ‘It's hardly my business, but it is my business to know if you want to buy this house or not. If you're a journalist or a private detective, you ought to be next door, not here.'

‘Mrs Townsend . . .'

Her eyes opened wide—grey eyes, unbearably clear—and the Effie Ruskin mouth curled as it curled in the painting. ‘What exactly
did
you think? That I'd gossip, give you revelations? I don't know anything about Mrs Heller, I only saw her once, but hasn't Mr North had enough?'

She glanced up upstairs, then trying to move casually, edged past him. She was frightened. It had never occurred to him that she might be frightened, for he had never before put himself into the shoes of a lonely woman who finds herself closeted with a strange man, an impostor. He felt his face go white with shame as he watched her eye the telephone, that lifeline, that communication with protection, and he moved away, his heart pounding.

In her eyes he was the salesman who wedges his foot in the door, the soft-spoken mechanic turned rapist, the insurance collector with warped desires, latent sadism. Her hand creeping towards the receiver, she said bravely, ‘Mr North is a friend of
mine.
I don't understand what you're doing, only that he isn't going to be hurt any more. Tell Mrs Heller that.'

He opened the front door. The pink crêpe paper blossom covered the street light like a lampshade. He stepped out into the porch and once again the dog began to roar. She must know now that she was safe. ‘Perhaps Mrs Heller has already told him,' he said loudly above the din.

‘She has never spoken to him.' Abandoning the telephone, she lifted her head high. ‘Now will you please go?'

‘O God,' he said, stammering a little, cursing the dog, ‘I won't hurt you. I'm going and you can phone the police if you like. I expect I've done something against the law, false pretences probably.' He couldn't meet her eyes, but he had to say it. ‘Mrs Townsend, they do know each other. On the very day of the inquest they planned a meeting in a London pub. I saw them.'

The door slammed in his face, so near to his face that he had to jerk backwards quickly. The dog was so incensed by now that its antics made the gate rattle and clang. He got into his car, his hands actually shaking.

As he moved off another car passed him and swung smoothly into the Braeside drive. Only someone who did that manœuvre every day could perform it with such practised ease. David slowed. The man got out and David saw his head in his driving mirror, a dark head, neat, perfect, a gleaming, almost metallic coin relief in the pinkish-white lamp glow. Robert North. He had only seen that face in the flesh once before.

David braked and sat still. Without turning his head, he continued to observe North in the mirror. The other man was raising his garage door now, approaching his car, changing his mind. David wondered why the silence seemed wrong somehow and then he realised that the dog had ceased to bark. No one had taken it into the house. Its long monstrous shadow, magnified into a Hound of the Baskervilles, wriggled fawningly between the shadowed bars of the gate as North approached it and patted its head. The big black silhouettes quivered. North turned away and still the dog was silent. Susan Townsend had said it only barked at strangers. . . .