by Ruth Rendell
‘I don’t know him that well.’
‘Better than me, surely?’ Did she know what she had said? He muttered a quick good-bye. Her voice after that fatal sentence had sounded stunned. This was no fear of being caught out in a clandestine adventure, no fear of scandal. David sensed that she was deathly afraid. He had guessed right and located the source of her fear, her sudden change of heart, her advances to himself, and briefly he was elated. She wouldn’t bother with him again.
Of course she had set herself up as very pure, the essence of wronged womanhood in the coroner’s court. It would look funny if it turned out she had a man friend of her own, and he remembered how he had thought she was going to meet a man when he had watched her visiting the cinema. It might be a thought to read that inquest report again and see just what she had said.
Presently he unearthed the old newspaper—he always kept newspapers for weeks and weeks, finally bundling them up and putting them on top of his tiny dustbin—but the report was brief and very little of what Magdalene had said was quoted. With a shrug, he folded the newspaper again and then his eye was caught by a front-page photograph on the previous Wednesday’s copy of the Evening News. The caption beneath it said, ‘Mr Robert North and his wife Louise, who was today found shot with Bernard Heller, a 33-year-old salesman. This picture was taken while the Norths were on holiday in Devon last year. Story on page 5.’
David’s eyes narrowed and he looked searchingly into the photographed face. Then he turned quickly to page five. ‘I had never even heard Heller’s name,’ North had told the coroner, ‘until someone in the street where I live told me that Equatair’s rep. had repeatedly called at my house. I never saw him till he was dead and I certainly didn’t know he was a married man.’
But six hours later he had walked into a Soho pub where he had arranged to meet that married man’s widow.
A regular weekly feature of Certainty was a kind of diary written entirely by Julian Townsend and called ‘Happenings’. In fact, as few things ever happened to Julian and he was incurably lazy, the diary consisted less of accounts of events attended by him than a mélange of his opinions. There was usually some local war going on for Julian to condemn and advise negotiation or arbitration; some bill being placed before Parliament which enraged him; some politician whose way of life annoyed him and offered him an occasion of mischief-making. When, as occasionally happened, a freak silly season occurred, Julian vented his vituperation on old-established customs and institutions, spitting venom at the Royal Family, the Church of England, horse racing, musical comedies and the licensing laws.
This week ‘Happenings’ was as usual headed by Julian’s name writ large on a streamer beneath which the writer’s face scowled from a single column block. The high bumpy forehead, glossy with the sweat of intellect, round metal-framed glasses and supercilious mouth were familiar to David as a constant reader of Certainty and now he scarcely noticed them. A girl-friend of his, a television actress called Pamela Pearce, claimed acquaintance with Certainty’s editor and occasionally threatened to introduce him to David. But up till now he had steered clear of the encounter, preferring to keep his illusions. Townsend could hardly be as pompous, as self-opinionated and as pedantic as his articles led the reader to believe. David felt he might lose his zest for ‘Happenings’ if its writer turned out to be unassuming.
There was always a discourse on food and today Julian had gone to town, devoting the whole of his first column to recipes for aphrodisiac meat dishes and puddings, with erudite references to Norman Douglas, and half his second to a violent condemnation of the lunch he had eaten in a country hotel while week-ending with his aristocratic in-laws.
Smiling, David passed on. Apparently the fellow was going to fill up the rest of his space with an attack on the suburbs of London. ‘Happenings’ was a misnomer for this spate of vitriol. Rural England castrated by the entrenching tool, the pneumatic drill,’ David read, amused. From the ravaged countryside, Julian sped towards the metropolis. ‘Matchdown Park, where never a month passes without the demolition of yet another Georgian jewel . . .’
Rather odd. Years went by without a mention of Matchdown Park and now it was constantly in the news. David was surprised to find Townsend actually lived there. But he evidently did. ‘The present writer’s knowledge,’ the paragraph ended, ‘is based on five years’ sojourn in the place.’
David fetched the blue S to Z telephone directory and there it was: Julian M. Townsend, 16 Orchard Drive, Matchdown Park. He hesitated, pondering. But when he began to dial, it wasn’t the number on the page in front of him.
‘Julian Townsend?’ said Pamela Pearce. ‘You’re in luck, as it happens, darling. I’m going to a party tomorrow night and he’s bound to be there. Why not come along?’
‘Will his wife be there?’
‘His wife? I expect so. He never goes anywhere without her.’
A Mrs Susan Townsend had found Heller’s body, and she lived next door to the Norths in Orchard Drive. It was all in the paper and it must be the same woman. What he would say when he met her David hardly knew, but it should be easy to bring the conversation round to the North tragedy. It would still be a hot topic with her. She had been a friend of Mrs North. Didn’t the paper say she had been paying an ordinary morning call? She would know if North and Magdalene Heller had known each other before the inquest and, since she had been in court, could tell him if North’s statements—‘I didn’t even know he was a married man’ and so on—had been misreported or if, when heard in their full and proper context, were capable of a different, innocent interpretation. If she were co-operative, she could set his mind at rest.
For it was active and troubled enough now. North had come to meet Magdalene in The Man in the Iron Mask six hours after the inquest. That was just explicable. He could have done so and still not have lied to the coroner. But if something else which David suspected were true, he had lied blackly and irredeemably.
They had arranged to meet there. That he knew for certain. Had they ever met there before?
11
‘It’s a crying shame the mess them floors get in,’ said Mrs Dring on all-fours. ‘There’s holes in this parquet you could put your finger in.’ Louise’s heels, Susan thought with a pang. Probably they would never be eradicated, but at least the new occupant need never know how they had been caused. Of this prospective buyer she now had high hopes, for, once well again, her first task had been to call at the estate agent’s. She watched Mrs Dring obliterating small clayey footmarks, her interest caught when she said, ‘Let’s hope we’ve seen the last of all this mud. Did you know they’ve finished the road at last? The three of them filled up that hole of theirs last night and good riddance.’
She had seen the last act of their play, then. Settling at her typewriter, Susan wondered why they had ever dug that series of trenches and whether life in Matchdown Park would have been brought to a standstill without, the monotonous rhythm of those drills and the renewing of those glimpsed cables. Her ability to concentrate and reason normally, rediscovered in the past two days, brought her intense pleasure. It seemed to her that her illness had marked the end of a black period in her life and during that illness she had found fresh resources, decided to break away from Matchdown Park and made a friend in Bob North.
But as she worked, congratulating herself on her recovery, a tiny thread of doubt crept across her mind. For some unexplored reason she was troubled by her recollections of the roadmen and although she should have shared Mrs Dring’s relief at their departure, she began instead to feel a curious dismay.
There had never been more than three men, Mrs Dring insisted, and yet while Louise was lying dead with Heller she had seen a fourth man in Louise’s garden. That man had knocked at Louise’s back door—Mrs Dring had heard him do so—and then walked away, not to join the others, but off by himself down the road. Recapturing the scene, lifting her eyes from the type which had blurred, Susan remembered quite clearly that the three ot
hers, the old man, Blue Jersey and the boy, had been in their trench while he stood for a moment, hooded, anonymous, to warm his hands at their fire.
‘Mrs Dring.’ She got up, feeling a faint sickness, the aftermath of her flu. ‘I’ve just remembered something, something rather worrying. I suppose I was getting this flu while I was at the inquest. Only—only they asked me if I’d seen anyone call next door during the morning and I said I hadn’t. I said . . .’ She stopped, appalled at the curiosity which almost amounted to hunger on Mrs Dring’s uplifted face.
‘Well, you didn’t see no one, did you?’
‘I’d forgotten. It can’t matter now. We all knew what the verdict was going to be, but still . . .’ And Susan bit her lip, not because of what she had said, but because she had said it to this woman, this bearer of malice, this arch troublemaker who had no kind word for anyone but her husband. Then she managed a strained smile and, convincing herself she was changing the subject, said, ‘You’ll have a chance to get the floors nice now Paul won’t be bringing in any more clay on his shoes.’
Gin and the ‘something fizzy’ he always liked to drink with it, coffee cups on a tray, the last of the daffodils displayed in a vase. Susan had only made these preparations once before but already they were becoming a ritual. Bob would be late tonight—he couldn’t be with her until ten, for he had a business call to make–but she had already given up going to bed early. There was something to stay up for.
‘It’s always so wonderfully warm in here, Susan,’ he said as he entered the living-room. ‘There’s a lot to be said for central heating. I don’t know why I didn’t have it put in years ago.’
She turned her head away to hide the blush, but, although she was aware of his solecism, she felt a rush of elation. In saying such a thing, he had showed her that while Louise’s death was fresh in his mind, the circumstances which had led up to it were fading. Would it be right to trouble him now with the question she had been intending to put to him all day? In all their talks they had scarcely yet discussed any subject but that of Heller and Louise, and just the same she hesitated, waiting for him to begin as he always did, obsessively, minutely on the details of their love and death.
A lightness and a sense of relief came to her when instead he asked her casually if she knew of anyone who would do the Braeside housework for him.
‘My Mrs Dring might. I’ll ask her.’
‘You’ve done so much for me, Susan, and here I am still asking favours.’
‘A very small favour. She may not be able to.’
‘Somehow I feel she will if you ask her. You’re one of those people who make things come right. D’you know, in the past week I’ve often thought that if we’d really bothered to get to know you, if you and Louise had been friends, none of this would ever have happened.’
They were back to it again. Subject normal.
‘If I’m really so powerful,’ Susan said, an urgency entering her voice, ‘if I can really make things come right, I’d like to begin by telling you to stop all that, Bob. Try to forget it, put it behind you.’
He reached out and took her hands, both her hands in a strong warm grasp. For a comforter, a safe refuge, she suddenly felt strangely weak and enervated.
Pamela Pearce was a pretty little blonde with a taste for glitter. Metallic threads ran through the materials of most of her clothes; she liked sequins and beads and studs, anything that sparkled. Tonight she wore lamé, and against the cobbles and the grey brick walls of the South Kensington mews she glittered like a goldfish in murky waters.
‘Hadn’t you better tell me who my host and hostess are?’ David said as he locked his car. ‘I don’t want to feel like a complete gatecrasher.’
‘Greg’s one of those society photographers. You must have seen those lovely things he did of Princess Alexandra. His wife’s called Dian and she’s absolutely lovely. You’ll fall madly in love with her. Believe me, just to see her is to adore her.’
The trouble was David was never quite sure whether he had seen her. He was hardly in a position to fall madly in love with her as nobody bothered to introduce him to anyone and, Pamela having been borne off up the narrow staircase, he found himself alone on an island of carpet, surrounded by indifferent backs. Presently he forced his way between barathea-jacketed backs and half-naked backs, moving his arms like a swimmer doing the breast stroke, and finally squeezing into a little lyre-backed chair. A screen behind him was perilously loaded with lighted candles which dripped wax on to an improvised bar.
For some minutes no one took any notice of him and Pamela didn’t reappear. Then a voice behind him said incomprehensibly, ‘Do you think you could get outside some cup?’
David looked over his shoulder, first at the young man with butter-coloured hair who had addressed him, then at the bar wherein a bowlful of pale golden liquid, cherries and pieces of cucumber were floating. Before he could say he would avoid this at any price, a ladleful had been scooped up and dribbled into a glass.
It tasted like fruit juice which someone had poured into a cough mixture bottle. David put his glass down behind a plate of smoked eel canapes, observing that everyone else seemed also to have shunned the cup.
The room was too small to accommodate so large a party, but even so the guests had succeeded in huddling themselves into distinctly isolated groups. The largest of these had for its nucleus a tall man with an enormous forehead and he stood beneath the central lamp which effectively spotlighted him. David had no difficulty in recognising Julian Townsend.
The editor’s prim mouth was opening and shutting nineteen to the dozen while he gesticulated sweepingly with a large hand in which he held a sausage roll. Five women stood around him in a circle, hanging on his words.
One of them must be his wife, David thought, the innocent neighbour of Heller’s mistress, she who had found the dead couple. There was a statuesque brunette with a cigar, two nearly identical blondes, a teen-ager in brown and an elderly lady who evidently intended to spend the rest of the weekend in the country, for she wore a tweed suit, mesh stockings and tall boots. Pamela was nowhere to be seen, although he could hear her shrill giggle occasionally from upstairs, and he felt a stab of annoyance. Short of introducing himself as a reader and a fan, he couldn’t see how he was going to talk to Townsend without her.
Then the teen-ager detached herself from the sycophantic circle and made for the bar. Her movements had the rapid and entirely selfish directness of the very young and, to avoid her, David backed into the bamboo screen.
‘Good gracious, you nearly set your hair on fire!’ The butter-haired barman had seized his arm and David backed away from naked candle-flame.
‘Thanks,’ he said, his face inches from the girl’s.
‘You need someone to look after you, don’t you?’ said the barman. ‘It quite upsets me to see you standing there all lost. Take him under your wing, Elizabeth, do.’
Having refused the cup and helped herself to brandy, the girl said baldly, ‘I’m Elizabeth Townsend. What’s your name?’
‘David Chadwick.’ He was very surprised and perhaps he showed it. In her very short shapeless dress of the colour and texture of brown bread and with her long untidy brown hair she looked about seventeen. No doubt accustomed to being in the company of a man never at a loss for words, she fixed him with an incredulous glare. ‘I believe you live in Matchdown Park,’ he heard himself say in exactly the tone of wistful awe someone might use when enquiring if an acquaintance had a grace and favour apartment at Hampton Court.
‘My God, no. Whatever gave you that idea?’
‘I read it in Certainty,’ David said indignantly. ‘You are Mrs Julian Townsend?’
‘Of course I am.’ She looked deeply affronted. Then her brow, furrowed with impatience and some imagined slight, cleared. ‘Oh, I see it all now. You’ve dropped a clang.’ His discomfiture stirred a gurgle from the depths of the brown bread dress. ‘That’s his ex you’re thinking of, my—well, what would you call he
r?—wife-in-law might fit, don’t you think?’ She giggled happily at her own joke. ‘Wild horses wouldn’t make me live in Matchdown Park.’ She said this with violent defiance, but almost before the words were out something quick and sharp came into her expression to change it and make it assume a slight concupiscence. ‘Why d’you ask, anyway? Have you got some sort of yen to live in the place?’
‘I might,’ David muttered, not knowing where all this was leading. Never in all his life had he met anyone so brutally direct and unselfconscious as this girl. He wondered on what her confidence was built, plain, dumpy and charmless as she was.
‘Only my wife-in-law . . .’ She grinned with delight at her invented expression. ‘. . . my wife-in-law wants to move, so Julian’s got this house in Matchdown Park on his hands. It’s a very good sort of house.’ She seemed sublimely unconscious that two minutes before she had denounced its environs with a shudder. ‘Julian would be absolutely ecstatic if I’d found a buyer for him.’
Next door to Norths, inhabited by the woman who knew the Norths, who had found Heller’s body. The candles flared behind David’s head and their reflections, tall, smoky, yellow-white, danced in Elizabeth Townsend’s glass. ‘How big is it?’ he said cautiously.
‘Come and meet Julian. He’ll tell you all about it.’ She grabbed his arm, her fingers, urgent and almost affectionate, digging into his elbow. ‘Julian, do shut up a minute! Listen, I’ve found a bloke who actually wants to live in Matchdown Park!’
Susan hadn’t warned Paul that Bob was coming in for the evening. She didn’t want him to awaken and, troubled by fears and fantasies as he was, hear a man’s voice downstairs. In his present world men who called on solitary women brought guns with them . . .
Murmuring an excuse to Bob, she went up to Paul’s bedroom, tucked him in again, restored his watch to a more secure position on the bedside table and went out again, leaving the light burning. She was half-way down the stairs when the phone rang.