At the end of an hour he returned to his car better informed on several counts. He knew, now, for example, that the large house was in the hands of someone who gardened with fervour—and with a talent for regimentation. Fences, shed doors and herbaceous borders were plumblined in inspection order, like a battalion drawn up in line. Creosoting was fresh and punctilious. Such machinery as could be seen—a petrol-driven tiller in a lean-to store—was as gleaming clean as if fresh bought. Apart from the two houses, there seemed to be no signs of human life within the confines of the landscape. But though he had seen no one, he knew it likely that he had been observed by this time. The smaller house, the converted cottages, was said to be occupied by a retired professor of political economy. What sort of man would a professor of political economy be? Either a crank, or someone who could comment reasonably on his fellow creatures. Howard changed his tactics, went under close cover to the entrance to the Drove, then proceeded in open view up to the cottage of the emeritus academic.
It was an architect’s conversion that had not completely obliterated the memory of what had existed before: three agricultural labourers’ cottages which in the nineteenth century had probably been no more than hovels, and that even with such modernization as the new century had brought would have remained poky, dark and damp. But now the picture windows, the removal of tight, narrow staircases and the throwing out of kitchen and bathroom annexes had completed the sell-out from the labouring to the leisured class. The woman who opened the door to Howard was in her advanced forties—a buxom figure who looked as if she might live life for the sake of the things she found to laugh at. He wondered if perhaps the professor had married one of his students. The professor himself, Walter Fynes-Pym, was working at a small portable typewriter in a book-stacked study of which the door was open; perhaps he was a man from whom work did not demand seclusion. He was bald and looked desiccated, a man past the mid-seventy mark. Fynes-Pym was not known to the non-specialist public—he had never dabbled in pop politics. Howard had done enough rapid checking to discover that he was regarded as an experts’ expert, who would not, for example, be called on for comment by the TV trivializers—but who might behind the scenes be asked for his advice about the recruitment of a think-tank. Yet Howard was not to find him without the common touch, and a man constantly finding new ways of relieving the tedium of the emeritus life. Clearly he did not want to miss a visitor, and got up from his desk to come and meet Howard, even before being told who he was.
Howard had toyed with various cover stories, leaving the final choice until he saw what his reception might be. The first exchanges seemed so sympathetic that he told Fynes-Pym who he was—not only CID, but also Anne’s husband.
‘So what trail has been blazed to Spurlsby Drove?’
‘I’d be undermining myself if I told you that. But I will: a recurring dream of my wife’s.’
The professor chuckled as John Betjeman might at the sight of a Victorian parados in a lower middle-class terrace.
‘So they’re wrong when they say there’s no romance left for the likes of us?’
‘I’m afraid this affair is very far removed from the realm of romance.’
‘I apologize. That was putting it badly. My mind’s wandering. I’m looking at it from a purely selfish angle—the angle of a man who lives here.’
Howard got up from his chair, went to the window and looked at the house at the end of the Drove. He got a full view of it from this angle—its thatch, its mansard windows, and the windows of the lower rooms above the level of a regimentally barbered hedge. And yet by standing back no more than a foot or so, one could observe without letting oneself be seen.
‘Who lives there?’
‘A man and his wife, quiet types. They’ve been there since before we came here—name of Stableford. I think they must have bought the place in the immediate post-war years, probably got it in a dilapidated state for a price that seems laughable today. We don’t see much of them. They’re not exactly hermits—not rude if you speak to them—but they don’t really care for company, and they let that quietly be seen. I have even wondered if company’s something they’re afraid of. I’d call them non-showy apostles of the good life. He grows, cures and smokes his own tobacco. He gave me a fill of it one day. I fought shy of telling him that I felt constrained to throw that pipe away afterwards.’
‘Do they often go away from here?’
‘Never for more than the long inside of a day. They couldn’t. They have too much livestock of one kind or another: a goat, geese, Muscovy ducks, and a cob in their paddock. They drive to town in a trap for their weekly shopping.’
‘Do they have many visitors?’
‘Rarely—but some. It’s the visitors that make us think that there might be something in the stories that the Agnews told us.’
He laughed drily but with some abandon. There was a certain excitement in him. It was not exactly puerile, but a sort of sophisticated childishness, a foil perhaps to unemployed mental brilliance.
‘The Agnews—they were the people from whom you—’
‘Took over this place. That’s right. They had stood out stubbornly against being rehoused. We thought we’d never be able to close the deal. A crafty pair, I couldn’t help thinking: hung on until they were finally resettled in a seaside bungalow. But you must not let me wander, Sergeant. You’re here on much more serious business than the Agnews.’
‘Have you seen any recent visitors at the house?’
‘We have. And that’s the point I’ve been working up to. Do you mind if I return to the Agnews for a moment? We met them when we first looked over the place, and again when we came informally with an architect friend. They were quite extraordinarily hospitable—and a couple who never stopped talking. They had been weaving legends about that house over there for years. Everything they saw happening there, they turned into some sort of sinister story. They watched everything, imagined that all the comings and goings were spy stories, drug traffic, a cache from the takings from large-scale burglaries. They even seemed to be able to pull the dates to fit in with the stories they’d got from the newspapers. If you mentioned a sensational crime they reckoned they could tie it up with something they’d seen over at that house. I don’t know what reading matter they indulged in—there’s a mobile library comes round every week or two—but they certainly had strong tastes for the lurid.’
‘And since you’ve been here, sir—have you seen the same sort of thing going on?’
‘Oh, we make a point of looking for it, Jane and I. We were so amused, you see, by the Agnews, that ever since we came here we’ve done our best to carry on the tradition. It’s a sort of competition between the pair of us. We’ve seen anarchist couriers, scab labourers brought here by trades union thugs to be tortured, escaped convicts, political refugees, illegal immigrants—all in the imagination, of course. And all faithfully in the wake of the Agnews. You can have no idea, Sergeant, of how remote this place is—how much one is thrown back on one’s mental resources. But I’m sorry—I’m wasting your time.’
‘Far from it. I’d like to hear more of your stories—and especially of the Agnews’. I’d like to hear more about the real people who’ve put some of your fancies into your mind.’
‘Oh dear, Sergeant what a pity! This is going to spoil our game, you know. Our whole joy has been in not taking life seriously. It will be unpalatable even to joke about these things from now on. Some of the Agnews’ stories really were hilarious—only perhaps not quite as far-fetched as some that Jane and I have invented. And what a job it would be to sort out originating fact from subsequent fiction! Yet there were things that didn’t seem quite normal: a man arriving on a bicycle in the middle of the night; an old felt hat, blown about the Drove by the wind, the morning after that visit. But if that place over there has been a safe house all these years—I suppose that’s the term you use for it—then it could not have been more adroitly handled. I mean, there have been incidents, and I’ll try
to remember some for you. They have happened over the years. Sometimes there have been long intervals between them. Only last night, we thought we might have heard a woman scream.’
‘Over there, in the house?’
‘It seemed so. But you know how it is with something as evanescent as a single scream, heard behind closed doors, while you are watching the shoot-out of a classic western on the box.’
‘What time was this?’
‘Well—when does the shoot-out of a classic western generally take place? Giving time for the final credits, a very few minutes before the nine o’clock news.’
‘So there are visitors at the house at the moment?’
‘We have seen none. We thought we heard a car on the Drove at an ungodly hour the other morning, but neither of us got up to look—precisely because of the ungodliness of the hour. And a car would not necessarily be sinister. Despite his pony and trap, Stableford does run an old banger. And he does make an occasional marketing trip, usually dragging a trailer with crates of hens in it, greenstuff in season, that sort of thing.’
And it was at this stage that the professor’s wife inserted herself into the conversation.
‘You know, Walter, it’s very wrong indeed to be playing fox and geese with the Sergeant like this. He is not here to listen to small-talk, and it is his wife who is missing. Why don’t you stop talking and let him ask questions?’
But impatient as he was to get down to concrete facts, Howard knew that he was into a good seam here, and that it might be most productive if he simply let the stories flow. Sometimes when you tried to direct people’s minds, you inadvertently steered them away from the very revelations you were hoping for.
‘Of course you must realize, Sergeant, that we are being most unfair. You must think us a mad couple. But you see, we think we are living in a mad world. If you had spent a lifetime trying to see reason in political economy, you might possibly arrive at the same stage yourself. So we do tend to while away our solitude by abnegating reality. We take innocent happenings and develop the possibilities that they are not as innocent as they look. It hardly seems the sort of evidence that a high-powered modern policeman would set much store by. But you are welcome to anything we can tell you, if you think your sanity can stand up to it.’
‘Just think, Walter,’ his wife said. ‘Some of the stories we’ve been concocting have got into somebody else’s recurring dream. Now that might be something to work on.’
This encounter might have its potential, but it was one that could easily get out of hand. Howard felt he had to bring things down to a mundane level.
‘Actually,’ he said, ‘we’re working to the belief that it’s not so much a recurring dream as an isolated memory: something from my wife’s girlhood experience that she cannot connect with anything else.’
‘Ah.’
Set deep in his ancient face, the professor’s eyes were alive with activity.
‘As if she had been here before—say when she was two to three years old.’
‘Ah.’
‘Could she perhaps have been incarcerated over there?’
He glanced over at the timber-framed house, whose facade somehow gave the impression of being completely deserted.
‘Ah.’
This time there was a joyousness in the syllable, as if something vital had connected in the professor’s mind.
‘Well, not exactly incarcerated,’ he said. ‘And not over there. Here, perhaps—in this house—’
Well, that was even nearer to possibility. It was, after all, from this address that Jean Cossey had written to the estate agent in Broadstairs.
‘So this must be one of the Agnews’ stories in which there clearly must have been some element of truth. Well—there was an element of truth in all their stories. I think you had better tell the Sergeant this one, my dear. You have had some experience in telling it to people.’
‘If you really think it’s relevant—’
‘How will he know whether it’s relevant or not, until he’s heard it? He can easily tell you to shut up—can’t you, Sergeant?’
‘It sounds relevant,’ Howard said.
‘Well—this was some years ago.’
‘It is some years since my wife was three years old.’
‘I can’t tell you to the year when this happened. As raconteurs, the Agnews did not worry overmuch about precision. But they did know how to set a scene. They were only a rustic couple, you understand—but they had something of the talents of a Hitchcock—and one night there was a Hitchcockish arrival at their back door: black rain falling, the shutters clapping loose, the shadows Stygian—all the trappings. A young woman was tapping furtively on the door—very furtively.’
If this had not been leading so cliff-hangingly to Jean Cossey and Anne, it would have been a good story to listen to. As a story-teller, Mrs Fynes-Pym was not without finesse, and she was thoroughly enjoying herself.
‘Very furtively. A young woman who certainly looked too young to own the child she was carrying in her arms. She had come, it seemed, from somewhere near Spalding—that must have been all of eight miles on the filthiest of nights. The woman was married to an American airman—they still had a base or two in Lincolnshire in those days. But it had been one of those marriages where the veneer of glamour was worn very thin. The man had turned out to be the coarsest of country hicks. He got drunk at stag parties, he knocked the pair of them about, so she was at last on the run from him, terrified about what he might do if he caught them. She begged the Agnews for shelter, just for a few days, while she got in touch through the post with friends who would help her. She had money about her and made an offer for board and lodging that was very generous indeed. Mrs Agnew would not accept more than half of it.
‘The Agnews were most impressed by the child. She was quiet, intelligent—in fact to hear the old woman tell the story, you’d have thought she was a candidate for canonization. And the young woman did more than her share of the housework, but her nervousness was extreme. She was bitterly afraid that some outsider might catch sight of her. The little girl was never allowed outside, and even in the cottage she had to remember to stay well back from the window: it must have been a dreadful time for her. And the pair stayed a lot longer than the woman had first suggested they might. Then at last a letter arrived for her, and Mrs Agnew could not tell us exactly what was in it: but it was an occasion for great joy.
‘They made their escape with melodramatic secrecy, very early one morning, hidden away in the back of a tradesman’s van—a mobile grocery, to be exact. You can imagine, can’t you, the euphoria of the Agnews, actually to be participating in an escapade like that? Mrs Agnew, of course, had put herself in charge of all the cloak and dagger trimmings.’
‘Was there any later correspondence between Mrs Agnew and this woman?’
‘None at all. Never a word. Mrs Agnew was very hurt by that.’
But Howard could understand it. Jean Cossey was a shrewd woman. Rural postmen were not always the best guardians of what they deduced from postmarks. Jean Cossey would not want any inkling of her whereabouts to become known in Spurlsby Drove. She would not even want Spurlsby Drove to be reminded unnecessarily of her existence.
‘And she had never given the Agnews a hint as to where she was going?’
‘Not the shadow of a hint.’
‘I mustn’t jump too readily to conclusions,’ Howard said, ‘just because they fit in too readily with what I’d like to think. But what if it was not from Spalding that this young woman was expecting trouble? What if it was only from the other side of the Drove? Suppose it was from the safe house she’d escaped? Would that bring in any inconsistencies?’
‘It would make sense to me,’ the professor said. ‘Isn’t it a classical truth, Sergeant, a cliche, that the best place to hide anything is almost in full view? There might have been very good reasons why the young woman did not want to travel farther than this. The weather was filthy, for one thing. For another,
it’s flat open country—not the sort of landscape you’d be keen to cross with a toddler if there were spiteful people after you. You’d make a sharp dash for the nearest haven—and stay there. Oh yes—I can see that.’
He actually rubbed his hands together with delight.
‘Well, I thank you,’ Howard said. ‘And if anyone asks, I came here to consult your opinions on electoral reform. I think I’ll just pop over and see if the Stablefords have any useful views on the subject.’
Chapter Twenty-Two
His first approach to the Tudor house had been along the best training-school lines of Indian scout. Now he came openly, unworried by the crunch of his feet on the white gravel of the drive. A postal packet, too thick to go easily through the letter-box, had been jammed half into it. The ground-floor windows looked blankly at him, as if announcing unequivocally that the house was unoccupied. A cat came wandering from the back of the house, mewing piteously because it had not been fed that morning.
He went up and looked closely through a window, saw a cosy interior, a worn and clearly loved cottage living-room, such as one could easily associate with the sort of good-life people that Fynes-Pym had depicted. But here was the same sense of regimentation that he had noticed about the grounds. The neighbouring ground-floor room, on the other hand, was quite different. The furniture was modern—Swedish chairs and table in varnished pine, a music centre of Japanese manufacture, with a stack of control panels in shining metal. There was no regimentation here—rather a sense of laissez-faire: magazines—Playboy and soft porn—cast aside and left lying where they landed. There were paperbacks on the window-sill: John D. MacDonald, Ed McBain, Wilbur Smith.
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