I flopped down beside Penny. ‘Is he always like that?’
‘Always,’ she assured me.
I groaned. ‘I’ll be exhausted just watching him.’
Penny’s sister, Gillian, was as different from Penny as could be. She was the domestic type and ran the house. I don’t mean she acted as lady of the house and merely gave the orders. She ran it. The Ashtons didn’t have much staff; there were a couple of gardeners and a stable girl, a house-man-cum-chauffeur called Benson, a full-time maid and a daily help who came in for a couple of hours each morning. Not much staff for a house of that size.
Gillian was a couple of years younger than Penny and there was a Martha and Mary relationship between them which struck me as a little odd. Penny didn’t do much about the house as far as I could see, apart from keeping her own room tidy, cleaning her own car and grooming her own horse. Gillian was the Martha who did all the drudgery, but she didn’t seem to mind and appeared to be quite content. Of course, it was a weekend and it might have been different during the week. All the same, I thought Ashton would get a shock should Gillian marry and leave to make a home of her own.
It was a good weekend although I felt a bit awkward at first, conscious of being on show; but I was soon put at ease in that relaxed household. Dinner that evening, cooked by Gillian, was simple and well served, and afterwards we played bridge. I partnered Penny and Ashton partnered Gillian, and soon I found that Gillian and I were the rabbits. Penny played a strong, exact and carefully calculated game, while Ashton played bridge as he played tennis, agressively and taking chances at times. I observed that the chances he took came off more often than not, but Penny and I came slightly ahead at the end, although it was nip and tuck.
We talked for a while until the girls decided to go to bed, then Ashton suggested a nightcap. The scotch he poured was not in the same class as Tom Packer’s but not far short, and we settled down for a talk. Not unexpectedly he wanted to know something about me and was willing to trade information, so I learned how he earned his pennies among other things. He ran a couple of manufacturing firms in Slough producing something abstruse in the chemical line and another which specialized in high-impact plastics. He employed about a thousand men and was the sole owner, which impressed me. There are not too many organizations like that around which are still in the hands of one man.
Then he enquired, very politely, what I did to earn my bread, and I said, ‘I’m an analyst.’
He smiled slightly. ‘Psycho?’
I grinned. ‘No—economic. I’m a junior partner with McCulloch and Ross; we’re economic consultants.’
‘Yes, I’ve heard of your crowd. What exactly is it that you do?’
‘Advisory work of all sorts-market surveys, spotting opportunities for new products, or new areas for existing products, and so on. Also general economic and financial advice. We do the general dogsbodying for firms which are not big enough to support their own research group. ICI wouldn’t need us but a chap like you might.’
He seemed interested in that. ‘I’ve been thinking of going public,’ he said. ‘I’m not all that old, but one never knows what may happen. I’d like to leave things tidy for the girls.’
‘It might be very profitable for you personally,’ I said. ‘And, as you say, it would tidy up the estate in the event of your death—make the death duties bit less messy.’ I thought about it for a minute. ‘But I don’t know if this is the time to float a new issue. You’d do better to wait for an upturn in the economy.’
‘I’ve not entirely decided yet,’ he said. ‘But if I do decide to go public then perhaps you can advise me.’
‘Of course. It’s exactly our line of work.’
He said no more about it and the conversation drifted to other topics. Soon thereafter we went to bed.
Next morning after breakfast—cooked by Gillian—I declined Penny’s invitation to go riding with her, the horse being an animal I despise and distrust. So instead we walked where she would have ridden and went over a forested hill along a broad ride, and descended the other side into a sheltered valley where we lunched in a pub on bread, cheese, pickles and beer, and where Penny demonstrated her skill at playing darts with the locals. Then back to the house where we lazed away the rest of the sunny day on the lawn.
I left the house that evening armed with an invitation to return the following weekend, not from Penny but from Ashton. ‘Do you play croquet?’ he asked.
‘No, I don’t.’
He smiled. ‘Come next weekend and I’ll show you how. I’ll have Benson set up the hoops during the week.’
So it was that I drove back to London well contented.
I have given the events of that first weekend in some detail in order to convey the atmosphere of the place and the family. Ashton, the minor industrialist, richer than others of his type because he ran his own show; Gillian, his younger daughter, content to be dutifully domestic and to act as hostess and surrogate wife without the sex bit; and Penny the bright elder daughter, carving out a career in science. And she was bright; it was only casually that weekend I learned she was an MD although she didn’t practise.
And there was the money. The Rolls, the Jensen and the Aston Martin in the garages, the sleek-bodied horses, the manicured lawns, the furnishings of that beautiful house—all these reeked of money and the good life. Not that I envied Ashton—I have a bit of money myself although not in the same class. I mention it only as a fact because it was there.
The only incongruity in the whole scene was Benson, the general factotum, who did not look like anyone’s idea of a servant in a rich household. Rather, he looked like a retired pugilist and an unsuccessful one at that. His nose had been broken more than once in my judgement, and his ears were swollen with battering. Also he had a scar on his right cheek. He would have made a good heavy in a Hammer film. His voice clashed unexpectedly with his appearance, being soft and with an educated accent better than Ashton’s own. I didn’t know what to make of him at all.
Something big was apparently happening in Penny’s line of work that week, and she rang to say she would be in the laboratory all Friday night, and would I pick her up on Saturday morning to take her home. When she got into the car outside University College she looked very tired, with dark smudges under her eyes. ‘I’m sorry, Malcolm,’ she said. ‘This won’t be much of a weekend for you. I’m going to bed as soon as I get home.’
I was sorry, too, because this was the weekend I intended to ask her to marry me. However, this wasn’t the time, so I grinned and said, ‘I’m not coming to see you—I’m coming for the croquet.’ Not that I knew much about it—just the bit from Alice and an association with vicars and maiden ladies.
Penny smiled, and said, ‘I don’t suppose I should tell you this, but Daddy says he can measure a man by the way he plays croquet.’
I said, ‘What were you doing all night?’
‘Working hard.’
‘Doing what? Is it a state secret?’
‘No secret. We transferred genetic material from a virus to a bacterium.’
‘Sounds finicky,’ I remarked. ‘With success, I hope.’
‘We won’t know until we test the resulting strain. We should know something in a couple of weeks; this stuff breeds fast. We hope it will breed true.’
What I knew about genetics could be measured with an eye-dropper. I said curiously, ‘What good does all this do?’
‘Cancer research,’ she said shortly, and laid her head back, closing her eyes. I left her alone after that.
When we got to the house she went to bed immediately. Other than that the weekend was much the same as before. Until the end, that is—then it changed for the worse. I played tennis with Ashton, then swam in the pool, and we had lunch on the lawn in the shade of a chestnut tree, just the three of us, Ashton, Gillian and me. Penny was still asleep.
After lunch I was introduced to the intricacies of matchplay croquet and, by God, there was a vicar! Croquet, I found,
is not a game for the faint-hearted, and the way the Reverend Hawthorne played made Machiavelli look like a Boy Scout. Fortunately he was on my side, but all his tortuous plotting was of no avail against Gillian and Ashton. Gillian played a surprisingly vicious game. Towards the end, when I discovered it’s not a game for gentlemen, I quite enjoyed it.
Penny came down for afternoon tea, refreshed and more animated than she had been, and from then on the weekend took its normal course. Put down baldly on paper, as I have done here, such a life may be considered pointless and boring, but it wasn’t really; it was a relief from the stresses of the working week.
Apparently Ashton did not get even that relief because after tea he retired to his study, pleading that he had to attend to paperwork. I commented that Penny had complained of the same problem, and he agreed that putting unnecessary words on paper was the besetting sin of the twentieth century. As he walked away I reflected that Ashton could not have got where he was by idling his time away playing tennis and croquet.
And so the weekend drifted by until it was nearly time for me to leave. It was a pleasant summer Sunday evening. Gillian had gone to church but was expected back at any moment; she was the religious member of the family—neither Ashton nor Penny showed any interest in received religion. Ashton, Penny and I were sitting in lawn chairs arguing a particularly knotty point in scientific ethics which had arisen out of an article in the morning newspaper. Rather, it was Penny and her father doing the arguing; I was contemplating how to get her alone so I could propose to her. Somehow we had never been alone that weekend.
Penny was becoming a little heated when we heard a piercing scream and then another. The three of us froze, Penny in mid-sentence, and Ashton said sharply, ‘What the devil was that?’
A third scream came. It was nearer this time and seemed to be coming from the other side of the house. By this time we were on our feet and moving, but then Gillian came into sight, stumbling around the corner of the house, her hands to her face. She screamed again, a bubbling, wordless screech, and collapsed on the lawn.
Ashton got to her first. He bent over her and tried to pull her hands from her face, but Gillian resisted him with all her strength. ‘What’s the matter?’ he yelled, but all he got was a shuddering moan.
Penny said quickly, ‘Let me,’ and gently pulled him away. She bent over Gillian who was now lying on her side curled in a foetal position, her hands still at her face with the fingers extended like claws. The screams had stopped and were replaced by an extended moaning, and once she said, ‘My eyes! Oh, my eyes!’
Penny forced her hand to Gillian’s face and touched it with her forefinger, rubbing gently. She frowned and put the tip of her finger to her nose, then hastily wiped it on the grass. She turned to her father. ‘Take her into the house quickly—into the kitchen.’
She stood up and whirled towards me in one smooth motion. ‘Ring for an ambulance. Tell them it’s an acid burn.’
Ashton had already scooped up Gillian in his arms as I ran to the house, brushing past Benson as I entered the hall. I picked up the telephone and rang 999 and then watched Ashton carry his daughter through a doorway I had never entered, with Penny close behind him.
A voice said in my ear, ‘Emergency services.’
‘Ambulance.’
There was a click and another voice said immediately, ‘Ambulance service.’ I gave him the address and the telephone number. ‘And your name, sir?’
‘Malcolm Jaggard. It’s a bad facial acid burn.’
‘Right, sir; we’ll be as quick, as we can.’
As I put down the phone I was aware that Benson was staring at me with a startled expression. Abruptly he turned on his heel and walked out of the house. I opened the door to the kitchen and saw Gillian stretched on a table with Penny applying something to her face. Her legs were kicking convulsively and she was still moaning. Ashton was standing by and I have never seen on any man’s face such an expression of helpless rage. There wasn’t much I could do there and I’d only be in the way so I closed the door gently.
Looking through the big window at the far end of the hall, I saw Benson walking along the drive. He stopped and bent down, looking at something not on the drive but on the wide grass verge. I went out to join him and saw what had attracted his attention; a car had turned there, driving on the grass, and it had done so at speed because the immaculate lawn had been chewed up and the wheels had gouged right down to the soil.
Benson said in his unexpectedly gentle voice, ‘As I see it, sir, the car came into the grounds and was parked about there, facing the house. When Miss Gillian walked up someone threw acid in her face here.’ He pointed to where a few blades of grass were already turning brown. ‘Then the car turned on the grass and drove away.’
‘But you didn’t see it.’
‘No, sir.’
I bent and looked at the wheel marks. ‘I think this should be protected until the police get here.’
Benson thought for a moment. ‘The gardener made some hurdles for the new paddock. I’ll get those.’
‘That should do it,’ I agreed.
I helped him bring them and we covered the marks. I straightened as I heard the faint hee-haw of an ambulance, becoming louder as it approached. That was quick—under six minutes. I walked back to the house and rang 999 again.
‘Emergency services.’
‘The police, please.’
Click. ‘Police here.’
‘I want to report a criminal assault.’
THREE
They got Gillian into the ambulance very quickly. Penny used her authority as a doctor and went into the ambulance with her, while Ashton followed in a car. I judged he was in no condition to drive and was pleased to see Benson behind the wheel when he left.
Before he went I took him on one side. ‘I think you ought to know I’ve sent for the police.’
He turned a ravaged face towards me and blinked stupidly. ‘What’s that?’ He seemed to have aged ten years in a quarter of an hour.
I repeated what I’d said, and added, ‘They’ll probably come while you’re still at the hospital. I can tell them what they need to know. Don’t worry about it. I’ll stay here until you get back.’
‘Thanks, Malcolm.’
I watched them drive away and then I was alone in the house. The maid lived in, but Sunday was her day off, and now Benson had gone there was no one in the house but me. I went into the living-room, poured myself a drink and lit a cigarette, and sat down to think of just what the hell had happened.
Nothing made sense. Gillian Ashton was a plain, ordinary woman who lived a placid and unadventurous life. She was a homebody who one day might marry an equally unadventurous man who liked his home comforts. Acidthrowing wasn’t in that picture; it was something that might happen in Soho or the murkier recesses of the East End of London—it was incongruous in the Buckinghamshire countryside.
I thought about it for a long time and got nowhere. Presently I heard a car drive up and a few minutes later I was talking to a couple of uniformed policemen. I couldn’t tell them much; I knew little about Gillian and not much more about Ashton and, although the policemen were polite, I sensed an increasing dissatisfaction. I showed them the tracks and one of them stayed to guard them while the other used his car radio. When I looked from the window a few minutes later I saw he had moved the police car so he could survey the back of the house.
Twenty minutes later a bigger police gun arrived in the person of a plain clothes man. He talked for a while with the constable in the car, then walked towards the house and I opened the door at his knock. ‘Detective-Inspector Honnister,’ he said briskly. ‘Are you Mr Jaggard?’
‘That’s right. Won’t you come in?’
He walked into the hall and stood looking around. As I closed the door he swung on me. ‘Are you alone in the house?’
The constable had been punctilious about his ‘sirs’ but not Honnister. I said, ‘Inspector, I’m going to show you somethi
ng which I shouldn’t but which, in all fairness to yourself, I think you ought to see. I’m quite aware my answers didn’t satisfy your constable. I’m alone in Ashton’s house, admit to knowing hardly anything about the Ashtons, and he thinks I might run away with the spoons.’
Honnister’s eyes crinkled. ‘From the look of it there’s a lot more to run away with here than spoons. What have you to show me?’
‘This.’ I dug the card out of the pocket which my tailor builds into all my jackets and gave it to him.
Honnister’s eyebrows rose as he looked at it. ‘We don’t get many of these,’ he commented. ‘This is only the third I’ve seen.’ He flicked at the plastic with his thumbnail as he compared me with the photograph. ‘You realize I’ll have to test the authenticity of this.’
‘Of course. I’m only showing it to you so you don’t waste time on me. You can use this telephone or the one in Ashton’s study.’
‘Will I get an answer this time on Sunday?’
I smiled. ‘We’re like the police, Inspector; we never close.’
I showed him into the study and it didn’t take long. He came out within five minutes and gave me back the card. ‘Well, Mr Jaggard; got any notions on this?’
I shook my head. ‘It beats me. I’m not here in a professional capacity, if that’s what you mean.’ From his shrewd glance I could see he didn’t believe me, so I told of my relationship with the Ashtons and all I knew of the attack on Gillian which wasn’t much.
He said wryly, ‘This is one we’ll have to do the hard way, then—starting with those tracks. Thank you for your co-operation, Mr Jaggard. I’d better be getting on with it.’
The Tightrope Men / The Enemy Page 30