The Secret House of Death (26 page)

‘I wanted to know,' David said when she answered the phone, ‘if you were all right.'

‘But you phoned last night to know that,' she protested, ‘and again this morning.' At least, he thought, she didn't say, ‘Back again?' ‘I'm quite all right. Really I am. Only the police are here all the time . . .'

‘I want to see them myself, but afterwards, may I come and see you?'

‘If you like.' she said. ‘If you like, David.' She had called him by his name and his heart turned a little. ‘But no stories, no theories. I couldn't stand any more.'

‘I promise,' he said. She would have to attend the trial and by then she would know him well enough to let him go with her. She would hear it all there and she would need him beside her when she heard the evidence against the two people in the dock.

So David put the phone down and went to tell Ulph what Magdalene Heller and Robert North had done. How they had invented a love affair between two mild and gentle people who had never harmed them except by existing; how they had spread upon their characters so much filth that her friends and neighbours and his twin brother had vilified them; how they had done it simply because Louise North could not divorce her husband and Heller was going to take his wife away to Switzerland.

But before he went into the station entrance, he paused for a moment and leaned against the railings of the treeless park. They had driven past this place, he and Bernard Heller, and yet it was not as he had been then that David suddenly saw him, nor as he had been when he lay dead in the arms of the dead woman he had never really known. He remembered instead the fat jovial clown and the tedious jokes and the unfailing generous kindness.

Perhaps he would tell Ulph of his last discovery first. He was not a vindictive man, but he wanted to see Ulph's face when he learned that Magdalene Heller had kept her own love-letters, the letters Bernard had sent her in 1961, and used them as the documentary evidence of an adultery that had never been. He wanted to see Ulph's expression and, ultimately that of a judge and a jury.