by Ruth Rendell
Two Sewingbury buses came and one marked Kingsmarkham Station. He was still reading, contrasting the agent’s euphemisms with the description in his transcript, when the silver car pulled into the kerb.
‘Mr Archery!’
He turned. The sun blazed back from the arched wings and the glittering screen. Imogen Ide’s hair made an even brighter silver-gold flash against the dazzling metal.
‘I’m on my way to Stowerton. Would you like a lift?’
He was suddenly ridiculously happy. Everything went, his pity for Charles, his grief for Alice Flower, his sense of helplessness against the juggernaut machinery of the law. An absurd dangerous joy possessed him and without stopping to analyse it, he went up to the car. Its bodywork was as hot as fire, a shivering silver blaze against his hand.
‘My son took my car,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to Stowerton, just to a place this side of it, a house called Victor’s Piece.’
She raised her eyebrows very slightly at this and he supposed she knew the story just as everyone else did, for she was looking at him strangely. He got in beside her, his heart beating. The continual rhythmic thudding in his left side was so intense as to be physically painful and he wished it would stop before it made him wince or press his hand to his breast.
‘You haven’t got Dog with you today,’ he said.
She moved back into the traffic. ‘Too hot for him,’ she said. ‘Surely you’re not thinking of buying Victor’s Piece?’
His heart had quietened. ‘Why, do you know it?’
‘It used to belong to a relative of my husband’s.’
Ide, he thought, Ide. He couldn’t remember hearing what had become of the house after Mrs Primero’s death. Perhaps it had been owned by some Ides before it became an old people’s home.
‘I have a key and an order to view, but I’m certainly not going to buy. It’s just – well …’
‘Curiosity?’ She could not look at him while she was driving but he felt her thoughts directed on him more powerfully than any eyes. ‘Are you an amateur of crime?’ It would have been natural to have used his name, to end the question with it. But she didn’t. It seemed to him that she had omitted it because ‘Mr Archery’ had suddenly become too formal, his Christian name still too intimate. ‘You know, I think I’ll come over it with you,’ she said. ‘I don’t have to be in Stowerton until half-past twelve. Let me be your guide, may I?’
Imogen Ide will be my guide … It was a stupid jingle and it tinkled in his ears on a minor key like an old, half-forgotten madrigal. He said nothing but she must have taken his silence for assent, for instead of dropping him at the entry she slowed and turned into the lane where dark gables showed between the trees.
Even on this bright morning the house looked dark and forbidding. Its yellow-brown bricks were crossed with fretted half-timbering and two of its windows were broken. The resemblance between it and the agent’s photograph was as slight as that of a holiday postcard to the actual resort. The photographer had cunningly avoided or else subsequently removed the weeds, the brambles, the damp stains, the swinging rotted casements and the general air of decay. He had also succeeded in somehow minimizing its rambling size. The gates were broken down and she drove straight through the gap, up the drive and stopped directly before the front door.
This moment should have been important to him, his first sight of the house where Tess’s father had committed – or had not committed – his crime. His senses should have been alert to absorb atmosphere, to note details of place and distance that the police in their jaded knowledge had overlooked. Instead he was conscious of himself not as an observer, a note-taker, but only as a man living in the present, dwelling in the moment and discarding the past. He felt more alive than he had done for years and because of this he became almost unaware of his surroundings. Things could not affect him, not recorded fact. His emotions were all. He saw and experienced the house only as a deserted place into which he and this woman would soon go and would be alone.
As soon as he had thought this in so many words he knew that he should not go in. He could easily say that he only wanted to look at the grounds. She was getting out of the car now, looking up at the windows and wrinkling her eyelids against the light.
‘Shall we go in?’ she said.
He put the key in the lock and she was standing close beside him. He had expected a musty smell from the hall but he was hardly aware of it. Shafts of light crossed the place from various dusty windows and motes danced in the beams. There was an old runner on the tiled floor and catching her heel in it, she stumbled. Instinctively he put out his hand to steady her and as he did so he felt her right breast brush his arm.
‘Mind how you go,’ he said, not looking at her. Her shoe had sent up a little cloud of dust and she gave a nervous laugh. Perhaps it was just a normal laugh. He was beyond that kind of analysis, for he could still feel the soft weight against his arm as if she had not stepped quickly away.
‘Terribly stuffy in here,’ she said. ‘It makes me cough. That’s the room where the murder was committed – in there.’ She pushed open a door and he saw a deal board floor, marble fireplace, great bleached patches on the walls where pictures had hung. ‘The stairs are behind here and on the other side is the kitchen where poor old Alice was cooking the Sunday dinner.’
‘I don’t want to go upstairs,’ he said quickly. ‘It’s too hot and dusty. You’ll get your dress dirty.’ He drew a deep breath and, moving far from her, stood against the mantelpiece. Here, just on this spot, Mrs Primero had felt the first blow of the axe; there the scuttle had stood, here, there, everywhere, the old blood had flowed. ‘The scene of the crime,’ he said fatuously.
Her eyes narrowed and she crossed to the window. The silence was terrible and he wanted to fill it with chatter. There was so much to say, so many remarks even mere acquaintances could make to each other on such a spot. The noonday sun cast her shadow in perfect proportion, neither too tall nor grossly dwarfed. It was like a cut-out in black tissue and he wanted to fall to his knees and touch it, knowing it was all he would get.
It was she who spoke first. He hardly knew what he had expected her to say, but not this – certainly not this.
‘You are very like your son – or he’s like you.’
The tension slackened. He felt cheated and peeved.
‘I didn’t know you’d met,’ he said.
To this she made no reply. In her eyes was a tiny gleam of fun. ‘You didn’t tell me he worked for a newspaper.’
Archery’s stomach turned. She must have been there, at the Primeros’. Was he expected to sustain Charles’s lie?
‘He’s so very like you,’ she said. ‘It didn’t really click, though, until after he’d gone. Then, taking his appearance and his name together – I suppose Bowman’s his pseudonym on the Planet, is it? – I guessed. Roger hasn’t realized.’
‘I don’t quite understand,’ Archery began. He would have to explain. ‘Mrs Ide …’
She started to laugh, stopped when she saw the dismay in his face. ‘I think we’ve both been leading each other up the garden,’ she said gently. ‘Ide was my maiden name, the name I used for modelling.’
He turned away, pressing the hot palm of his hand against the marble. She took a step towards him and he smelt her scent. ‘Mrs Primero was the relative who owned this house, the relative who’s buried at Forby?’ There was no need to wait for her answer. He sensed her nod. ‘I don’t understand how I can have been such a fool,’ he said. Worse than a fool. What would she think tomorrow when the Planet came out? He offered up a stupid ashamed prayer that Charles had found out nothing from the woman who was her sister-in-law. ‘Will you forgive me?’
‘There’s nothing to forgive, is there?’ She sounded truly puzzled, as well she might. He had been asking pardon for future outrages. ‘I’m just as much to blame as you. I don’t know why I didn’t tell you I was Imogen Primero.’ She paused. ‘There was no deceit in it,’ she said. ‘Just one o
f those things. We were dancing – something else came up … I don’t know.’
He raised his head, gave himself a little shake. Then he walked away from her into the hall. ‘You have to go to Stowerton, I think you said. It was kind of you to bring me.’
She was behind him now, her hand on his arm. ‘Don’t look like that. What are you supposed to have done? Nothing, nothing. It was just a – a social mistake.’
It was a little fragile hand but insistent. Not knowing why, perhaps because she too seemed in need of comfort, he covered it with his own. Instead of withdrawing it, she left her hand under his and as she sighed it trembled faintly. He turned to look at her, feeling shame that was as paralysing as a disease. Her face was a foot from his, then only inches, then no distance, no face but only a soft mouth.
The shame went in a wave of desire made the more terrible and the more exquisite because he had felt nothing like it for twenty years, perhaps not ever. Since coming down from Oxford he had never kissed any woman but Mary, scarcely been alone with any but the old, the sick or the dying. He did not know how to end the kiss, nor did he know whether this in itself was inexperience or the yearning to prolong something that was so much more, but not enough more, than touching a shadow.
She took herself out of his arms quite suddenly, but without pushing or struggling. There was nothing to struggle against. ‘Oh, dear,’ she said, but she didn’t smile. Her face was very white.
There were words to explain that kind of thing away. ‘I don’t know what made me do that’ or ‘I was carried away, the impulse of the moment …’ He was sick of even the suggestion of lying. Truth itself seemed even more compelling and urgent than his desire and he thought he would speak it even though tomorrow and in the days to come it too would appear to her as a lie.
‘I love you. I think I must have loved you from the first moment I saw you. I think that’s how it was.’ He put his hands up to his forehead and his fingertips, though icy cold, seemed to burn just as snow can burn the skin. ‘I’m married,’ he said. ‘You know that – I mean my wife is living – and I’m a clergyman. I’ve no right to love you and I promise I’ll never be alone with you again.’
She was very surprised and her eyes widened, but which of his confessions had surprised her he had no idea. It even occurred to him that she might be amazed at hearing from him lucid speech, for up to now he had been almost incoherent. ‘I mustn’t suppose,’ he said, for his last sentence seemed like vanity, ‘that there’s been any temptation for you.’ She started to speak, but he went on in a hurry, ‘Will you not say anything but just drive away?’
She nodded. In spite of his prohibition, he longed for her to approach him again, just touch him. It was an impossible hunger that made him breathless. She made a little helpless gesture as if she too were in the grip of an overpowering emotion. Then she turned, her face held awkwardly away from him, ran down the hall and let herself out of the front door.
After she had gone it occurred to him that she had asked no questions as to his reasons for coming to the house. She had said little and he everything that mattered. He thought that he must be going mad, for he could not understand that twenty years of discipline could fall away like a lesson imparted to a bored child.
The house was as it had been described in the transcript of the trial. He noticed its layout without emotion or empathy, the long passage that ran from the front door to the door at the back where Painter’s coat had hung, the kitchen, the narrow, wall-confined stairs. A kind of cerebral paralysis descended on him and he moved towards that back door, withdrawing the bolts numbly.
The garden was very still, overgrown, basking under a brazen sky. The light and the heat made him dizzy. At first he could not see the coach house at all. Then he realized he had been looking at it ever since he stepped into the garden, but what he had taken for a great quivering bush was in fact solid bricks and mortar hidden under a blanket of virginia creeper. He walked towards it, not interested, not in the least curious. He walked because it was something to do and because this house of a million faintly trembling leaves was at least a kind of goal.
The doors were fastened with a padlock. Archery was relieved. It deprived him of the need for any action. He leant against the wall and the leaves were cold and damp against his face. Presently he went down the drive and through the gateless entrance. Of course, the silver car would not be there. It wasn’t. A bus came almost immediately. He had quite forgotten that he had omitted to lock the back door of Victor’s Piece.
Archery returned the keys to the estate agent and lingered for a while looking at the photograph of the house he had just come from. It was like looking at the portrait of a girl you had known only as an old woman, and he wondered if it had perhaps been taken thirty years before when Mrs Primero had bought the house. Then he turned and walked slowly back to the hotel.
Half-past four was usually a dead time at The Olive and Dove. But this was a Saturday and a glorious Saturday at that. The dining room was full of trippers, the lounge decorously crowded with old residents and new arrivals, taking their tea from silver trays. Archery’s heart began to beat fast as he saw his son in conversation with a man and a woman. Their backs were towards him and he saw only that the woman had long fair hair and that the man’s head was dark.
He made his way between the armchairs, growing hot with trepidation and weaving among beringed fingers holding teapots, little asthmatic dogs, pots of cress and pyramids of sandwiches. When the woman turned he should have felt relief. Instead bitter disappointment ran through him like a long thin knife. He put out his hand and clasped the warm fingers of Tess Kershaw.
Now he saw how stupid his first wild assumption had been. Kershaw was shaking hands with him now and the man’s lively face, seamed all over with the wrinkles of animation, bore no resemblance at all to Roger Primero’s waxen pallor. His hair was not really dark but thin and sprinkled with grey.
‘Charles called in on us on his way back from town,’ Tess said. She was perhaps the worst dressed woman in the room in her white cotton blouse and navy serge skirt. As if explaining this, she said quickly, ‘When we heard his news we dropped everything and came back with him.’ She got up, threaded her way to the window and looked out into the bright hot afternoon. When she came back she said, ‘It feels so strange. I must have walked past here lots of times when I was little, but I can’t remember it at all.’
Hand in hand with Painter perhaps. And while they walked, the murderer and his child, had Painter watched the traffic go by and thought of the way he could become part of that traffic? Archery tried not to see in the fine pointed face opposite his own, the coarse crude features of the man Alice Flower had called Beast. But then they were here to prove it had not been that way at all.
‘News?’ he said to Charles and he heard the note of distaste creep into his voice.
Charles told him. ‘And then we all went to Victor’s Piece,’ he said. ‘We didn’t think we’d be able to get in, but someone had left the back door unlocked. We went all over the house and we saw that Primero could easily have hidden himself.’
Archery turned away slightly. The name was now invested with many associations, mostly agonizing.
‘He said good-bye to Alice, opened and closed the front door without actually going out of it, then he slipped into the dining-room – nobody used the dining-room and it was dark. Alice went out and …’ Charles hesitated, searching for a form of words to spare Tess. ‘And, after the coal was brought in, he came out, put on the raincoat that was left hanging on the back door and – well, did the deed.’
‘It’s only a theory, Charlie,’ said Kershaw, ‘but it fits the facts.’
‘I don’t know …’ Archery began.
‘Look, Father, don’t you want Tess’s father cleared?’
Not, thought Archery, if it means incriminating her husband. Not that. I may already have done her an injury, but I can’t do her that injury.
‘This motive you mentioned,
’ he said dully.
Tess broke in excitedly, ‘It’s a marvellous motive, a real motive.’ He knew exactly what she meant. Ten thousand pounds was real, solid, a true temptation, while two hundred pounds … Her eyes shone, then saddened. Was she thinking that to hang a man wrongfully was as bad as killing an old woman for a bag of notes? And would that too remain with her all her life? No matter which way things fell out, could she ever escape?
‘Primero was working in a solicitor’s office,’ Charles was saying excitedly. ‘He would have known the law, he had all the facilities for checking. Mrs Primero might not have known about it, not if she didn’t read the papers. Who knows about all the various Acts of Parliament that are going to be passed anyway? Primero’s boss probably had a query about it from a client, sent him to look it up, and there you are. Primero would have known that if his grandmother died intestate before October 1950 all the money would come to him. But if she died after the Act his sisters would get two-thirds of it. I’ve been looking it all up. This is known as the Great Adoption Act, the law that gave adopted children almost equal rights with natural ones. Of course Primero knew.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I’ve been on to the police but Wexford can’t see me before two on Monday. He’s away for the weekend. I’ll bet the police never checked Primero’s movements. Knowing them, I’d say it’s likely that as soon as they got hold of Painter they didn’t trouble with anyone else.’ He looked at Tess and took her hand. ‘You can say what you like about this being a free country,’ he said hotly, ‘but you know as well as I do that everyone has a subconscious feeling that “working class” and “criminal class” are more or less synonymous. Why bother with the respectable, well-connected solicitor’s clerk when you’ve already got your hands on the chauffeur?’
Archery shrugged. From long experience he knew it was useless to argue with Charles when he was airing his quasi-communist ideals.