Body Line dibs-13

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  Slider felt such a surge of relief that they’d come to it at last, he almost fell off the chair. But such was his self control he was even able to say, ‘Yes please,’ when she asked if he’d like another cup. Atherton refused, and though he sat quite still, Slider knew him well enough to know that mentally he was chewing his fingernails.

  When the second cups had been poured, she said, ‘Where had I got to?’

  ‘David asked you to marry him.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ She looked away again, into the past. ‘I got off at two one day, and he took me for tea in the Assembly House. Then we went for a walk along the river. It was March, a cold day, with a nasty wind, but I never noticed it. We walked arm in arm and huddled up together, and to me it was as good as being on the beach in Spain in June. We found a bench in a sheltered spot and sat down. And he said he wanted to marry me.’ She sighed unconsciously. ‘I’d have said yes there and then, but he said that before I answered, he had to tell me some things. He said his job was very demanding and took him away a lot, and that even when we were married I wouldn’t see much of him, maybe no more than I saw of him now. So I said what was his job, because it didn’t seem to me that being in PR for a drugs firm was that demanding. And he said he hadn’t been in the PR job for a long time. Just about the time we first met he’d started something else. He said it was secret and very important work, and he couldn’t tell me more than that, because it might be dangerous, and he didn’t want me involved. I said couldn’t he trust me, if he wanted to marry me? And he said I had to trust him, because he’d never do anything to put me in danger.’

  ‘Secret, important and dangerous,’ Slider said, with an inward groan. ‘What did you think it was?’

  ‘Well, I couldn’t imagine, and we argued back and forth a bit, but he was adamant he wouldn’t tell me about it, and in the end I had to trust him, because I knew he’d never do anything wrong, and if I was going to marry him – well, I had to, didn’t I? I had the feeling that he was in the secret service, because he hinted there were foreign connections – and after all, what else is that secret? But he never would tell me, not from that day to this.’ Tears filled her eyes suddenly as she stubbed her mental toe on the fact that he was dead, something that had subsided in her mind while she talked to them. But she blinked the tears back hard, and got out a handkerchief and blew her nose with a determined honk. Slider was impressed by her self-control. There was more to this ordinary woman than met the eye.

  ‘So you got married?’ Slider prompted.

  ‘In May, at the register office. He’d bought this house already and had it done up, and in September when my notice at the Norwich and Norfolk was up, we moved into it. And that first day he gave me the deeds, and said he’d had it made over to me, as my wedding present, so that whatever happened I’d have somewhere to live.’

  ‘Whatever happened?’ Slider queried. ‘He was worried, then?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Actually, I don’t think he was worried then. He said the job could be dangerous, but I don’t think he really thought about that side of it. He seemed to be enjoying it. He was happy whenever I saw him. High-spirited, even. Sometimes he was tired, but he never seemed to be bothered by his job. He always said it was wonderful to be home, and he complained he wished he could see more of me, but that was the only thing he complained about. Until about a year ago.’

  ‘And what changed then?’ Slider asked.

  ‘Well,’ she said, considering. ‘I suppose looking back it might have been coming on for a while before that, but it was about a year ago I really started to notice it. He was quieter, thoughtful, as if he had something on his mind that was worrying him. Sometimes he’d arrive and he’d hardly have a thing to say. He’d sit staring at nothing for ages, or he’d go for a long walk on his own. If I tackled him about it he’d say nothing was wrong and try to snap out of it, but I knew. And then he started talking about what would happen if he died. He said he was having his will made up, to make sure I got everything. He brought a copy of it down one day and told me to keep it safe. That would be about last July. But it was only for about the last month or six weeks that he’s been really worried.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Really jumpy. Anxious the whole time. Hardly speaking to me. Jumping out of his skin if the phone rang. He said that his job was coming to an end and there could be danger in it. That the people he’d been working with might decide it would be safer if he couldn’t talk. He told me he was afraid for me, too, and that I mustn’t talk to anyone about him. Well, I didn’t anyway, I never had, but he was extra insistent. He said if anything happened to him I’d be taken care of, but I’d have to lie low for a while and not let on to anyone about our relationship. He even gave me extra money to tide me over in case he suddenly disappeared. It had me worried, I can tell you. You’d need to have seen him to know how tense he was. But still I never thought anything would happen. You don’t, do you? Not until it does. And when I read that paragraph in the paper, I thought that the people who were after him were playing a trick, maybe to flush out his contacts or his colleagues or whatever. But then when he didn’t come down this week, and I didn’t hear from him, I started to think maybe something had happened. And then – and then you arrived.’

  It took her some determined swallowing and nose work this time to regain her composure. Slider said, ‘I’m so sorry for your loss. But I have to ask you, have you any idea at all who these people were that he was afraid of? Or what sort of work he was involved in?’

  She shook her head, emerging from the handkerchief with a red nose and a look of exhaustion. ‘None at all. He always kept that side of things from me, and I never asked because I knew that was the way he wanted it. He was too gentle and kind to be a secret agent, that’s what I always thought, but he must have been tough underneath it all to have done a job like that. And of course I was important to him, because it was only with me he could show the other side of himself, the gentle side. But in the end it got to him – the double life. That’s what I think. I’m afraid in the end he was so worn down with it that he made a mistake, and they got him. I can’t account for it otherwise.’

  Slider could not make head nor tail of this. David Rogers, a secret service agent? Was it possible? If he was, he was the Niven James Bond rather than the Connery or Craig. But he came up against the problem that if he had been, the investigation would have been taken away from them straight away. Six had its own way of dealing with these things. No, no, whatever was going on, it wasn’t that. Secret and dangerous Rogers’s job might have been, but the man who romanced Cat Aude and Angela Fraser wasn’t doing important work for the country. He had been doing something that paid him handsomely in cash, and that was not the MI6 way. But on one thing he agreed with Helen Aldous – he had eventually made a mistake of some kind, and they had got him.

  He asked, hoping for a new direction, ‘Do you know anything about Windhover?’

  ‘The Windhover?’ she said. ‘David’s boat, do you mean? It’s moored down at the Yacht Club.’

  Slider blinked. ‘His boat is called the Windhover?’

  She nodded. ‘Isn’t that what you meant? He loved that boat. He really, really loved it. That’s why he chose Southwold for us to live, because that’s where he was keeping it. That was his one recreation – fishing. Lots of consultants play golf but he hated the game, and he never cared about skiing or shooting or any of those things. But the one thing he never missed when he came down was his night fishing on the Windhover.’

  ‘He went night fishing?’ Slider said, puzzled.

  ‘He said it was the only real sport – sea fishing at night. Any other fishing was kids’ stuff to him. He was passionate about it. I didn’t begrudge him. I mean, we had little enough time together, but a man needs his hobby, and he worked so hard the rest of the time. He’d come down whenever he could get away, sometimes of a Tuesday, sometimes weekends, but whatever else happened he was always here on a Wednesday and he’d g
o out every Wednesday night in the Windhover. Then Thursday morning he was off straight from the harbour, so I never got to see his catch, but he said he was always lucky, always got something. He gave it away to whoever was in the harbour at the time. Well, he’d no use for raw fish in his sort of life – who’d have cooked it for him?’

  Who indeed, Slider thought. Not one of his other women, that was for sure.

  ‘Did you never want to go with him?’ Atherton asked.

  ‘I’m not keen on boats,’ she said. ‘I could get seasick crossing a bridge. I did go with him once, though. We’d not long been married, and he begged me to come with him because we had so little time together, he didn’t want to waste it.’

  Didn’t occur to him not to go, thought Atherton. Atta boy!

  ‘That was the time he got tangled up with that Dutch boat,’ she went on.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Well, we’d been going for a while, and it was fun at first, rushing through the dark, standing at the wheel with David’s arm round me, drinking champagne, with the wind whipping past. But eventually I started to get seasick – when it goes really fast it kind of skips and bumps on the waves, and my stomach was getting jolted. I told him I wasn’t feeling too hot, and after a bit he says he’ll stop. And he makes me a hot cup of tea and puts brandy in it and tucks me up in the bunk below with a hot water bottle. He was so gentle when he was taking care of me,’ she said with a tremble of the lips. ‘I think I dropped off for a bit, with the brandy, and being warm and relaxed. Anyway, I started to feel better, and I didn’t want to spoil his night, so I thought about getting up and going on deck again. And then I heard another boat coming up fast. I sat up and looked out of the window, just as it sort of whirled round and came to a stop beside us. And a man started shouting something. I couldn’t hear what it was. David shouted back, and it sounded as though they were having an argument. Anyway, after a bit the other boat starts up again and roars away. Then David comes down to see how I am.

  ‘I asked him about the other boat, and he said it was some Dutchman making out this was his fishing spot and complaining David was in the wrong place. But David sorted him out. Then he said he was going to take me home, because I wasn’t well. I said I was feeling a bit better and I didn’t want to spoil his fishing, but he said he’d sooner see I was all right, so we went back. That was the only time I went out with him. It was really a man thing, his fishing, and he was better off doing it alone.’

  Slider’s mind was working so hard he wondered there wasn’t smoke coming out of his ears. ‘You don’t happen to remember the name of the Dutch boat, do you?’ he asked.

  She raised her eyebrows. ‘Why on earth do you want to know that? It was just some old—’ She stopped as something obviously dawned on her. ‘You don’t mean,’ she went on in a lowered voice, ‘that he was meeting his contact? He wasn’t fishing at all?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Slider said. ‘The thought occurred to me.’

  She thought. ‘No,’ she concluded. ‘If I hadn’t been seasick, what then?’

  Atherton answered. ‘There are lots of ways to make sure you were down in the cabin at the right moment.’

  Still she shook her head. ‘No, I don’t believe it. He loved that boat, and he loved fishing.’

  ‘Do you remember the Dutch boat’s name, by any chance?’ Slider urged gently.

  ‘Well, as a matter of fact, I do. It was right under my nose, so to speak, when I looked out – it was about all I could see, with it being so close. It was called Havik – or however you pronounce it.’ She spelled it for him. ‘And there was another word underneath, a funny Dutch word beginning with I. Can’t remember what that was. That would be the harbour, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Probably,’ Slider said.

  ‘But you’re quite wrong, you know,’ she went on. ‘Fishing was his passion. Fishing, and me – we were his real life. He kept his job separate, otherwise he wouldn’t have had a life at all.’

  ‘She probably wasn’t wrong about one thing,’ Slider said. ‘She was his real life. Poor sap didn’t have much else.’

  ‘I’m trying to figure out what he saw in her,’ Atherton said. ‘I suppose she was a bit of a rest cure after Amanda Sturgess. And with slightly more brain than the jiggling jugheads.’

  ‘She loved him,’ Slider said. ‘That was her attraction. She didn’t see him as an investment or a means to social advancement or a meal ticket. She just loved him – enough to remain secret and be grateful for seeing him once or twice a week.’

  ‘Hmph,’ said Atherton. ‘So did Aude and Fraser.’

  ‘That wasn’t love, that was delusion.’

  ‘My point exactly.’

  ‘No, I think there was more to this one. She said they came from the same background. Maybe he was reverting to the safety of his childhood.’

  ‘You mean she reminded him of his mum? That I can believe.’

  Slider wouldn’t be baited. ‘And she was a nurse and he was a doctor. They’d have had plenty to talk about.’

  ‘Hmph again,’ said Atherton. ‘And what about this boat being called the Windhover? Was it a joke on Rogers’s part, to name the boat after his paymasters? What is a windhover anyway? Sounds like a helicopter.’

  ‘Country name for a kestrel.’

  ‘Trust you to know that.’

  ‘What are you so crabby about?’

  ‘I hate this woman being taken for a mug. Secret agent indeed! What kind of a chat-up line is that?’

  ‘You’re just annoyed you didn’t think of it first.’

  Atherton’s face split in a reluctant grin. ‘At least with me it would be a credible story. So, harbour next?’

  ‘Harbour next. And keep your eyes peeled.’

  There was no sign of anyone watching the house, or them. Slider was fairly confident that whoever ‘they’ were, they had not yet caught up with the secret wife. Or, if they knew about her, they didn’t think her dangerous, otherwise they’d have done her at the same time as Rogers. But he’d cautioned her to extra vigilance and warned her to speak to no one about David, and to ring him immediately if anyone tried to contact her.

  ‘And what happens next?’ she had asked him, looking utterly flattened, lost and doleful again, now that the stimulation of telling her story was over.

  ‘We continue to investigate, until we find who did this and why. And take them into custody. At that point I will let you know, and then we’ll be able to release the body to you for burial and you’ll be able to file for probate of his will. Until then, you must just be patient and keep your head down.’

  ‘I’ve been doing that for years,’ she said. ‘A few days longer won’t make any difference.’

  ‘A few days’ was a nice piece of optimism, or trust in their prowess. Slider hadn’t liked to mention at that point that if Rogers’s money was ill-gotten, she wouldn’t be getten it. At least she had the house – and how wise he had been to put that in her name straight away.

  Southwold’s harbour was a modest affair, lying to the south of the town on the River Blyth, stretching from the river’s mouth nearly a mile upstream, but catering only for fishing boats, yachts and small pleasure craft. Those yearning for the delights and conveniences of a marina had to go further up the coast to Lowestoft, where there was every facility, including the Royal Norfolk and Suffolk Yacht Club in its grand white Edwardian clubhouse, looking like a cross between the Hotel Del Coronado and a vicarage conservatory.

  The only facilities for yachtsmen in Southwold were the Harbour Inn, and upstream of it the clubhouse of the Southwold Yacht Club, which by contrast looked like a village cricket pavilion. The tie-ups were to rings in the harbour wall or rickety wooden jetties, and it was a brisk walk of a mile or so into the town for shops. The road along the harbour front wasn’t even paved, but a spring-busting melange of ruts, potholes and jutting lumps of concrete.

  ‘Now why would he choose this place, rather than a proper marina?’ Atherton wondered as
they picked their way past the puddles. It was too early in the season for the place to be seething with tourists, but there were a fair few Sunday visitors, idling along sucking ice-creams, and buying fish from the tar-paper huts that lined the road.

  ‘Anonymity,’ Slider said. ‘He’d have thought he could slip in and out of here with much less scrutiny.’

  ‘Could he?’

  ‘Yes and no. Not much official scrutiny, that’s for sure. But a lot of prying unofficial eyes. In a place like this everyone tends to know everyone else’s business. On the other hand, they don’t tend to interfere in it.’

  They strolled along like tourists, keeping an eye out for the Windhover. Helen Aldous had told them she was white, with dark-blue dodgers with her name on them. ‘They’re new, he only got them a couple of weeks ago, only they misspelled the name. David was furious. Now they say it’ll be six weeks before they can replace them. Not –’ she suddenly remembered – ‘that it matters now, I suppose.’

  ‘It’s surprising how often that happens,’ Slider said now to Atherton. ‘Our old super, Dickson, had a yachting friend whose boat was called Oenone, and when his dodgers arrived they said Oneone. He always called it the One One after that.’

  ‘Not a bad name, actually,’ Atherton said.

  ‘There she is,’ Slider said, spotting her at that moment.