But before he left the room, he made one more effort to cheer up his dull and defeated-looking inspector, who was sitting with his head bowed over his open notebook.
“I’ll say it one last time, Peter,” he said. “It wasn’t your fault. You reckoned she was dead, everyone reckoned she was dead, her brother, her husband, that Enfield lot. You had to go ahead as you did. You’d have needed second sight to know where she was hiding herself. I mean, inspired guesses are one thing, but to work out she was in the Orkneys on the basis of what you knew, you’d have needed a miracle. Right?”
“Right,” said Pascoe.
“Good,” said Dalziel. “Come twelve, you can buy me a pint for being right. Again.”
He went out.
Pascoe closed his eyes and saw again the white-clad woman floating up the path from the lych-gate.
Why had she come back? What had she hoped for?
He shook his head and opened his eyes.
He would never know and he had no intention of trying an inspired guess. Dalziel was right. A detective should have no truck with feelings and intuitions.
He looked at his notebook, which still lay open at the first page of his scribblings on the Swithenbank case, made as he talked to Dove on the telephone two days before.
On the left-handed page there were two words only. One was HAIRDRESSER?
The other lightly scored through was ORKNEY?
He took his pen now and scratched at the word till it was totally obliterated.
Then he closed the book.
The Trunk in the Attic
The first letter came before I found the trunk. I didn’t notice it was addressed to Mrs. M. Evans and my first thought as I drew out the single sheet of paper was, who do I know in Her Majesty’s Prison at Wakefield?
Then I read “Dear Marion” and realized my mistake. I suppose I should have stopped there, but the eye is quicker than the conscience and it was a very short letter.
Dear Marion,
Sorry you couldn’t make it up here last month and hope nothing’s wrong. I just wanted to say if you had plans to come on Tuesday next week, come on Wednesday instead, as on Tuesday I’m seeing the parole board, so keep fingers crossed.
All the best,
Ken
The hand was childish but very firm and bold. I replaced the letter, wrote opened in error, address unknown on the envelope, and dropped it in a pillar-box. A week or so later, another letter in the same hand arrived and I treated it in the same way, except that I didn’t open it.
Some people are very inconsiderate when they sell a house. I’d never met the Evanses, the previous owners, who had already moved out when the estate agent showed me round. But they should have made some arrangement with the Post Office for forwarding their mail. I had better things to do than worry about other people’s letters. And I had other cause to dislike my predecessor in the house.
It was clear that Frank Evans had been an enthusiastic do-it-yourselfer. And a good one, too. For instance, he’d removed all the fireplaces in the house, bricked them up, papered them over and installed central heating himself. Naturally I had the Gas Board check it over, but they assured me it was perfectly sound. And doors, cupboards, window-frames, etc., were all in excellent condition. Unfortunately, craftsman though he might have been, he was no artist. Indeed, he must have been colour blind. His taste in wallpaper and paint ranged from the merely bright to the positively explosive! Something had to be done about it and while my wife, Ann, remained in London with the children tying up the loose ends of our house sale there, I was camping out here in the north. Decorating isn’t bad therapy after a day in an accounts office and I have the kind of systematic mind which was able to devise a work schedule which would see the work finished by the time Ann joined me.
With three days to go, I had completed the ground floor and the children’s bedrooms and was just putting the finishing touches to my masterpiece, the main bedroom. I had subtly altered its dimensions with ceiling tiles and plaster cornicing. The paintwork was a soft white with just a hint of pink and now I was putting on the paper, a discreet but sensuous Scandinavian pattern.
The telephone rang just as I was starting the last wall. I had a length of pasted paper in my hands which I laid carefully on the table. It was certainly Ann, I thought. I had rung her from the office earlier to tell her that at last the telephone had been reconnected. Another of Frank Evans’s little tricks had been not to pay his bill and the Post Office had disconnected the phone before I arrived.
“I want to talk to Marion,” said a man’s voice, very brusque.
“Do you?” I said. “You must have got the wrong number.”
“Is that Frank?”
“No. This is three-seven-eight-four-six-two.”
“That’s right. I want Marion Evans. Who’re you?”
“I’m the owner of this house,” I said. “The Evanses moved out several weeks ago.”
There was a silence, full of disbelief.
“Moved out?” he said finally. “Where to?”
“I’ve no idea. I never met them and they left no forwarding address.”
Another silence, then without so much as a good night, the receiver was banged down.
I set off up the stairs, feeling irritated. The phone rang again.
“Hello!” I shouted.
“You don’t sound very happy,” said Ann.
“Oh hello, love. Sorry, but I’ve been working hard.”
“So you keep on telling me. What are you doing now?”
“I’m just finishing our bedroom,” I said.
“What’s it like?”
“Superb. Sensual and soporific at the same time. A symphony of interior decoration.”
We talked for a few minutes, then I returned to my work. The pasted length was ruined, of course, and I had to cut a new one. As I snipped at it, I thought nasty thoughts about Frank Evans, whose taste was so abominable, who didn’t pay his phone bills and who left no forwarding address.
I finished the room about eleven. Though I say it myself, it really did look superb. This left only one small room to do, a box-room really, which I planned to use as an office. It would take a desk and a filing cabinet, though little else. At the moment it contained my camp bed as I did not care for the paint fumes in the newly decorated rooms.
It also contained the trap-door which led to the attic. I had made a mental note to have a look up there before I started painting the woodwork, and now as I prepared for bed I found my gaze returning again and again to the trap. I felt restless as one often does after bringing a specific task to a successful completion and on an impulse I fetched the step-ladder, ascended to the trap-door and pushed. It opened easily. Handyman Evans kept his hinges oiled.
I stood on the steps, my feet in a world of light and air and my head in a world of musty shadows. To my left loomed the house’s central chimneystack and alongside it the water tank. In the dim light filtering from the room below I could see that the floor was boarded between the opening and the tank but elsewhere the bare joists ran out to the shadowy eaves.
I noticed a light switch fitted into the floor next to the trap, but when I clicked it down, nothing happened and I could see no light fitment anywhere among the beams. Perhaps Evans had had to leave before the job was finished, though the switch looked ancient enough.
There was nothing to be seen and the atmosphere was, as it generally is in attics, a trifle uncanny, so why I should have pulled myself wholly on to the patch of boarded floor I do not know. Perhaps because I was aware of an irrational uneasiness and annoyed by it. I told myself I would take a look at the water tank and check that all was well. Every good householder should check his water tank once or twice before he dies!
There were in fact two tanks, both very new. One was the normal cold water tank and the other was for hot water, raised up here to feed the shower unit Evans had installed en suite with the main bedroom. Again, I guessed he’d done it all himself. The boar
ds around the tanks and the chimneystack were strewn with old cement sacks. Perhaps he had been such a perfectionist that he’d even been doing some pointing work on the bricks of the chimney, though why he should have felt it necessary, having just installed central heating, I didn’t know!
I slid the cover off the cold tank and peered in. All I saw was water and a ball-cock which seemed to be performing its function perfectly adequately. Self-esteem satisfied, I replaced the cover and was about to return to the comfort of my well-lit bedroom when I noticed the trunk.
It was lying across the joists behind the chimneystack and the tank and was thus quite invisible from the trap. I wished it had remained invisible, but having spotted it I had to look more closely. So I stepped off the boarded area and edged my way along the narrow joists, moving with exaggerated care as I had no desire to put a foot through the ceiling of one of my newly decorated bedrooms. I had thought it was dark before, but now the gloom was almost tangible and the square of light from the trap-door seemed very distant and dim.
It was a large trunk, perhaps five feet long and three deep. I touched it and drew back my hand sharply at its coldness. I had expected wood, not metal. It had been painted a deep green, almost khaki. I wondered if it had some military significance. Perhaps Evans had been an army man and served in far corners of the world with his most precious belongings shut away in this trunk. Perhaps it still contained them. Perhaps …
But that was fantasy and a lifetime dealing with figures had given me a practical turn of mind which does not tolerate fantasy for long. The trunk had other implications more important to my present activities. Clearly it belonged to Evans. Had it been left there deliberately or in error? And if in error, suppose he turned up one day and wanted it back?
Simply give it to him, you may answer. There were handles fixed to either end and I bent down and took hold of one of them. Exerting all my strength, I managed to shift the thing a fraction. It would take at least two men to lift it and even then it would require a lot of effort. And how even two strong men would be able to manoeuvre this solid object across the attic and through the trap-door without going through the plaster or damaging the wood and paintwork below, I could not see.
Perhaps emptied, it would provide an easier task.
With a casualness absurd in the absence of witnesses, I tried to raise the lid.
It wouldn’t budge.
I stooped and examined it more closely and saw what I had missed at first in the gloom—a hasp with a large and solid-looking padlock.
I felt quite relieved as I made my way back to the comforting square of light. I wouldn’t have shied away from opening it if I had been able to, but it was good to have the opportunity denied to me.
As I stood on the step-ladder and pulled the trap-door shut above me, I wondered how on earth Evans had got it up there in the first place.
I was very tired now, but I lay a long time in my narrow and uncomfortable little bed staring up at the ceiling before I finally fell asleep.
The next evening I was a little later than usual and it was dark when I got to the house. The garden was my next job, I thought as I negotiated the rambler rose which lay in ambush between the garage and the front door. Evans had obviously been a keen gardener, too (though the same taste for the garish was apparent in his choice of shrubs and bedding plants), but no one had touched it since he left. The rambler shot out a low branch and caught my ankle and I jerked away angrily and almost stumbled into the arms of a figure who stepped out of the entrance porch.
“Who the hell are you?” I asked in nervous anger.
“I talked to you on the phone last night,” he said brusquely. “About Evans.”
“Did you? So that’s who you are. Well, I told you. He’s gone. I don’t know where. Excuse me.”
I unlocked the front door and stepped inside. I didn’t feel inclined to enter into further discussion with this man, and besides I was ill-equipped for hospitality.
“Hold on. I’m not done yet,” he said determinedly.
I switched on the hall light and looked at him. He was about my age, mid-thirties; perhaps older. It was hard to say. Experience ages, and his face looked as if it had experienced a lot. It was a good face for winning arguments with and it matched his broad shoulders and aggressive stance.
“I’m sorry. I really can’t tell you anything,” I repeated in a more conciliatory tone. “I can give you the estate agent’s address and that’s it.”
“I’ve tried the agent,” he said. “I called earlier. You weren’t in. One of the neighbours remembered who’d sold the house, though.”
I was rather piqued that the fellow had gone to other houses in the street asking questions. There was no way this could reflect on me, but nevertheless I didn’t like it.
“And the agent couldn’t help? Well, I’m sorry. That’s hard luck. You’ll just have to advertise for Evans.”
“It’s not Evans I want. It’s his wife.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“Marion’s my sister.”
“Ah!” I said, light dawning. “You must be Ken.”
“How the hell do you know that?” he said aggressively and stepped into the hall. Quickly I explained about the letters. He frowned when I described my mistake in opening and reading the first and I felt that perhaps he deserved a little recompense so I took him into the kitchen and offered him some scotch in a tea-cup.
Now he in his turn became conciliatory.
“Yes, I’m Ken Pargeter,” he told me. His voice was harsh, his accent northern. “Marion’s my kid sister. She were always my favourite. There were six of us in our family, but we were always closest.”
“Yes,” I said sympathetically. “And she used to visit you, didn’t she … ?”
My voice tailed off as his eyes fixed me coldly. Hastily I slopped another couple of inches of whisky into his cup.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “The letter …”
“Oh aye. Well, I’m out now. Parole. It’s took a long time but it’s come at last. A bloody long time.”
He sipped his drink reflectively.
“How long?” I wondered. “I mean, if you don’t mind …”
“Six years,” he said.
“Six, eh?” I said, trying to think how long that meant with remission and parole, and what a man had to do to get himself put away for such a sentence.
“She always came. Regular each month, especially since I’ve been at Wakefield. It’s been handy for her. She’d never miss, no matter what he said.”
“He? Oh, your brother-in-law. You don’t care for him?”
He laughed humourlessly and held out his cup for replenishment.
“There’s better men inside,” he said. “Frank’s decent enough on the surface, but I always reckoned there’s a nasty streak in him. Our Marion’s like me. She’d fly off the handle easy enough, but she’d not bear a grudge. Frank’s sneaky. I don’t think she’d have wed him if I hadn’t been sent down again. She likes to play the field, our Marion. Never short of a man, a good-looking girl like that. So why get stuck with a shit like Evans?”
He was becoming loquacious on my liquor. I’d have placed him as a hard-drinking man, but after six years’ lay-off he’d need to get back into training. I had another shot myself.
“Didn’t she tell you they were moving?” I asked.
“Not a word,” he said. “Not a hint.”
“Not to worry,” I said confidently. “It’s a busy time for a woman. She’ll surely get in touch as soon as she’s settled.”
“It’s him,” he said. “He’s trying to stop her. The bastard.”
“You said she’s a determined girl,” I said. “I mean, she visited you when her husband didn’t want her to. So she won’t let him stop her from writing to you, will she?”
“Mebbe not,” he said, pouring himself another snort. “But you’d think someone’d have her new address.”
“Must do,” I agreed. I was beginning to take a
liking to Pargeter. Through a whisky haze, he was quite a romantic figure. Just out of jail, harsh sentence, debt paid, looking for the sister he loved. I felt I’d like to help him.
“Someone knows,” I said. “What about his work?”
“He had a shop. Do-it-yourself,” said Pargeter scornfully. “I’ve been there. He’d sold up. No forwarding address.”
“Odd,” I said. “No assistants?”
“Marion helped. And there was a young fellow, George something. Foxton, aye, that’s it. No one knows where he’s working now either.”
I thought again. He drank. His role was the man of action and I was sure he’d be damned efficient in it. Mine was the thinker. I felt he was relying on me.
“Solicitor!” I said. “He must have used a solicitor. Now, the estate agent will know who it was. Or if not, certainly my solicitor must know! I’ll give you his telephone number. Problem solved!”
Triumphantly I poured out what remained in the bottle and we parted on such good terms that we arranged to meet for a pub lunch the following day so that he could tell me what progress he had made.
As he swayed very gently on the doorstep, I was emboldened by the drink and our bond of friendship to ask what he’d been sent down for.
He stopped swaying.
“I was climbing out of a window,” he said very clearly. “A policeman stopped me. I broke his jaw. It were an accident.”
“Oh, I’m sure, I’m sure,” I said.
“Aye. I meant to break his bloody neck. Goo’ night!”
Ann rang a couple of hours later.
“How’s it going?” she said.
“Fine, fine,” I answered. “Have you confirmed everything with the removal men?”
“Yes. Now you’re sure you’ll be finished?”
“Absolutely,” I said.
I felt a little guilty as I lay in bed that night. Not a thing had been done since Pargeter left. I know myself better than to start wielding a paint brush with half a bottle of whisky swilling around inside me. But as I fell asleep I consoled myself with the thought that it was only this one small room that remained to do. One good night would just about finish it.
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