The Secret House of Death (20 page)

Carl's sad face lit with pleasure. He looked a man whose counsel is seldom sought. David gave him a pen and an old envelope on which he wrote in a long sloping hand his address and a landlady's phone number.

‘Any time, Mr Chadwick.' He opened the door, peered out. ‘I thought we might have the pleasure of seeing Mr North tonight,' he said. ‘Once or twice I've been here when he has called to see Magdalene. But he is a busy man and his neighbours take up so much of his time. . . .'

His neighbours. One neighbour, David thought. He crossed the street and as he slipped the envelope into his pocket his hand touched the card he had bought in the National Gallery. Under a street lamp he stopped to look at it. Was North with her now? Was North making love to her, just as Magdalene Heller had tried to make love to him, David, and for the same reason?

She was very lovely, this girl that Millais had painted, had wrested from Ruskin and had finally married. Susan Townsend was exactly like her, as like as Carl was to Bernard. It might have been her photograph which, bent and a little soiled now, David carried with him in his pocket. He wondered how he would feel if, instead of buying it, he had received it from her as a gift.

At East Mulvihill station he bought his ticket and then, swiftly, before he had time to dwell too much on what he was about to do, he went into a phone box.

‘Mrs Townsend, this is David Chadwick. Please don't ring off.' Did his voice sound as intense to her as it seemed to him? ‘I wanted to talk to you. I couldn't just leave things.'

‘Well?' It could be a warm word, a word denoting health or things excellently done, but she made it the coldest in the world. On her lips it was onomatopoeic, a well indeed, a place of deep, dark and icy waters.

‘I haven't phoned to talk of—what I mentioned to you last week. I don't intend to discuss Mr North.'

‘That's good, because I wouldn't discuss him.' She was neither scathing nor hectoring. It was hard to say what she was. Iron-firm, implacable, remote.

‘It was appalling what I did last week and I apologise profoundly. Can you understand when I say I want to see you and explain that I'm not a lout or a practical joker? Mrs Townsend, would you have dinner with me?'

Unable to see her, he couldn't define the atmosphere of her silence. Then she said, but not scornfully, ‘
Of course not
,' and she laughed. In her laughter he detected neither mockery nor outrage. She wasn't even amused. She was incredulous.

‘Lunch, then,' he persisted. ‘In some big crowded restaurant where I couldn't—couldn't frighten you.'

‘I was frightened.'

In that moment he fell in love with her. Until then it had been a silly dream. Why had he been such a fool as to telephone and create for himself in five minutes a load of sorrow?

‘I was frightened,' she said again, ‘because I was alone and it was dark.' Again the silence fell and the pips sounded, remote, careless of what they terminated. He had his coin ready, his breathless question.

‘Are you still there?'

Her voice was brisk now. ‘This is rather a ridiculous conversation, don't you think? I expect you acted in good faith and it doesn't matter now, anyway. But we don't really know each other at all and the only thing we could talk about—well, I wouldn't talk about it.'

‘It isn't the only thing,' he said fiercely. ‘I can think of a hundred things just offhand like that.'

‘Good-bye, Mr Chadwick.'

He went down the escalator and when he was alone in the passage that led to the platform he dropped the picture card to be trampled underfoot in the morning rush.

She was almost sure Bob hadn't overheard that conversation, but when she returned to the living-room he lifted his eyes and they had a haunted look. Should she lie to him, tell him it was someone the agent had put on to her, a prospective buyer of the house?

‘I heard,' he said. ‘It was that fellow Chadwick.'

‘Only to ask me out to dinner,' she said soothingly. ‘I shan't go. Of course, I shan't.'

‘What does he want, Susan? What's he getting at?'

‘Nothing. Don't, Bob, you're hurting me.' His hands which were so soft when they stroked her cheek, seemed to crush the bones in her wrists. ‘Sit down. You were saying, before he phoned . . . ?'

The hard fingers relaxed. ‘About Louise,' he said. ‘I was telling you how she and Heller met and how he drove her home. Magdalene Heller's told me the whole story. After that they used to meet when I had to work late.' His voice was feverish, desperate. ‘In cafés, in pubs. He got in such a state he tried to kill himself. I wish to God he'd succeeded then. He started writing those horrible letters to her . . . Susan, you
did
burn those letters, didn't you?'

She was past caring now whether she told the truth to him or lied. What, anyway, was the truth? ‘I burnt them, Bob.'

‘Why can't I forget it all, put it behind me? You think I'm going mad. Yes, you do, Susan, I can see it in your face.'

She put her head in her hands, running her fingers through her hair. ‘Keep away from Mrs Heller, if she upsets you,' she said presently. ‘You've done enough for her.'

‘What d'you mean?'

‘You've given her money, haven't you?'

He sighed and he sounded infinitely weary. ‘I'd like to get away, go far away. Oh, Susan, if only I didn't have to go back to that house tonight! Or ever again to see Magdalene Heller.' He paused and said as if he were stating something profound, yet at the same time novel and appalling, ‘I don't ever want to see Magdalene Heller again.'

‘Nor me, Bob?' Susan asked gently.

‘You? It would have been better
if
I'd never met you, never seen you . . .' He got up and his face was as white and strained as if he were ill or really demented. ‘I love you, Susan.' His arms went round her and, his lips almost touching hers, he said, ‘One day, when I'm—when I'm better and all this is past, will you marry me?'

‘I don't know,' she said blankly, but she kissed him on a long sigh and it seemed to her that no kiss had ever been so pleasurable and so sweet. ‘It isn't the time yet, is it?' she said as their mouths parted and she looked up into that strained haunted face.

‘There's the boy, I know,' he said urgently, reading her thoughts. ‘He's frightened of me. That'll pass. We could all go away, couldn't we? Away from Mrs Dring and this Chadwick and—and Mrs Heller.'

The play for which David had designed the sets ended and the credit titles came up. He thought he might as well watch the news. The first item was the result of some West Country by-election which interested him not at all and he had got up to turn it off when he stopped, intrigued by the voice of a speaker who had suddenly replaced the announcer. That lilting intonation, those stressed r's were familiar. He had heard them before that evening on the lips of Magdalene Heller. Her accent, far less strong than that of the commentator, had always puzzled him and now he located it at last. She came from Devon.

Immediately he remembered the newspaper picture of Robert and Louise North. That had been taken in Devon while they were holidaying there last year. Did it mean anything or nothing?

Very carefully he repeated in his mind the conversation he had had with Magdalene two hours before and it seemed strange to him that she had taken such pains to tell him how her husband and Louise North had met. Because the circumstances of that meeting caused her real distress, or because in fact they had not met that way at all? Of course it was possible that Bernard had driven her home because she was unwell, had promised perhaps to enquire after her subsequently, and that from this beginning their love affair had grown. But wasn't it far more likely that they had all met on holiday?

Once more David felt excitement stir. Suppose they had met, the two couples, in an hotel or on a beach? Then, when Louise and Bernard returned respectively to Matchdown Park and East Mulvihill, intending to follow up the attraction which had already begun, the last thing they would have done was talk to friends or neighbours of this apparently brief holiday acquaintance. But North and Magdalene would have a knowledge of each other, a shared memory which, however casual, would make their later meetings natural.

In this case North might well have contacted Magdalene to disclose his wife's conduct, or Magdalene him to reveal Bernard's. Even Ulph, David thought, wouldn't find anything fantastic in such a supposition.

He hesitated for a moment and then he dialled Carl Heller's number. The landlady answered. Mr Heller had just come home from his sister-in-law's, he was taking off his coat at this moment. The telephone slightly distorted his voice, making it more guttural.

‘There is nothing wrong, I hope, Mr Chadwick?'

‘No, no,' David said. ‘It was just that I thought of going to Switzerland for a few days at Easter and it occurred to me you might be able to recommend somewhere to stay.'

Carl began to reel off a list of names and places. He sounded almost animated, over-helpful, as Bernard had been when asked favours. And David recalled how this man's dead brother, when asked tentatively for the loan of a fireplace, had pressed on him not one but a dozen of the latest models. Thus Carl, instead of naming a couple of
pensions
, selected from his memory hotels and tourist centres in every Swiss canton, pausing only for David to make, or pretend to make, copious notes.

‘That'll do fine,' David said when Carl drew breath. ‘I suppose your brother and his wife often stayed at this one?' And he named a modest hotel at Meiringen.

‘My brother never went back to Switzerland after he was married. He was trying, he told me, to become like an Englishman and he dropped all his continental ways. He and Magdalene had their holidays in England, in Devon where Magdalene comes from.'

‘Really?'

‘That is why I was so pleased for them, for the Zürich appointment. Wait till you see real mountains, I said to Magdalene. But then my brother does this wicked thing and . . .' Carl's heavy sigh vibrated through the earpiece. ‘It is a funny thing, Mr Chadwick, it will amuse you, although in a way it is sad. Always in Devon they are staying in the same place at Bathcombe Ferrers, and the place they stay at it is a small
pension
called—what do you think?—the Swiss Chalet. Often my brother and I have laughed about this. But you are a great traveller, I know, and would not be content with such a place. No, you must go to Brunnen or maybe Lucerne. Mount Pilatus now—you have it on your list like I have told you? You have the name. . . .'

In his hand David had only the soiled envelope on which Carl had written his address and now, feeling a little ashamed of the deceit he had practised, he wrote beside it just five words.

A rustic sign with its name burnt on in pokerwork informed him that he had arrived. Nothing else gave a clue as to why this place had been named ‘The Swiss Chalet'. It was an Edwardian house, three storeys high with scarcely any visible roof. A superabundance of drain-pipes, tangled like creeper, climbed all over its façade.

The entrance was through a conservatory full of pots of Busy Lizzie. David opened the inner glass door and found himself in a hall that in colour and decoration might have been the subject of a nineteenth-century sepia photograph. He approached a cubby-hole in the wall which reminded him of a ticket office window at an almost totally disused station. On its shelf stood a bell, a brass bell painted with edelweiss and the name Lucerne. Honour was satisfied. In the Swiss Chalet there was at least one genuinely Swiss object.

Its shrill-throated ring brought a little round woman from a door marked Private. David stuck his head through the aperture, wondering if this was how it had felt to be put in the stocks. The woman advanced aggressively upon him as if she might at any moment throw a rotten egg or a tomato.

‘Chadwick,' he said hastily. ‘From London. I booked a room.'

The threatening look faded but she didn't smile. He put her age at just over sixty. Her hair was dyed to the shade of coconut matting, which it also resembled in texture, and she wore a mauve knitted twinset, a miracle of cable stitch and bobbles and loops.

‘Pleased to meet you,' she said. ‘It's Mrs Spiller you talked to on the phone.' She wasn't a native. Retired here perhaps in the hope of making a fortune. He glanced at the pitch-pine woodwork in need of revarnishing, the lamp in its bakelite shade, the visitors' book she pushed towards him whose emptiness told of failure. ‘Room number eight.' He put out his hand for the key. Outrage settled in a crease on her purplish forehead. ‘We don't have no keys,' she said. ‘You can bolt your door if you're particular. Breakfast's at eight sharp, dinner at one and I do a high tea at six.' David picked up his suitcase. ‘Up two flights.' She bobbed out from under a hinged flap. ‘The first door on your left. The lav's in the bathroom, so don't hang about washing too long. There's such a thing as consideration.'

Consideration for whom? he wondered. The season had scarcely begun and the place seemed dead. It was ten past eleven, but Mrs Spiller seemed to have forgotten her last exhortation, for as he mounted the stairs, she bellowed after him:

‘You never said who recommended me.'

‘A friend,' David said. ‘A Mrs Heller.'

‘Not little Mag?'

‘Mrs Magdalene Heller. That's right.'

‘Well, why didn't you say so before?'

Because he had thought he must come round to it subtly, with cunning and by degrees.