by Ruth Rendell
For his part, Ulph saw a tall lean young man, intelligent-looking, not particularly handsome, whose eager eyes for a moment took ten years off his age. He poured out an impulsive story and Ulph listened to it, not showing the excitement which the name of North had at first evoked. What had he expected to hear? Not this. Disappointment succeeded his small elation and he stalled, summing his visitor up. Only one sharp pinpoint of his original excitement remained, and he left it glimmering to say briskly:
‘You’re telling me that Mr North and Mrs Heller have been meeting, to your certain knowledge, at a London public house called The Man in the Iron Mask? Meeting there at regular intervals before her husband and his wife died?’
David nodded emphatically. He had hoped for a sharper reaction than this. ‘Yes, I am. It may be far-fetched, but I think they met there to plot, conspire, if you like, to kill the others and make their deaths look like suicide.’
‘Indeed?’ Ulph’s eyebrows had gone up. No one looking at him now would have supposed him to be a man obsessed by thoughts of a gun and a subtly contrived exit. He looked as if David’s suspicions, the bare idea that North might be anything but totally innocent, were a revelation to him.
‘I’m sure he did it,’ David said impulsively, ‘and if he did it she must have been in it too. Only she could have told him when Heller would arrive at Braeside and only she could have given him the gun. I visited Heller’s flat the night before he died and I saw the gun. Later I saw her go into a cinema. I think North was inside that cinema, waiting for her to hand him the gun in the dark.’
The gun. This was the only way, Ulph thought, that North could have got it. Not by burglary, not by the unimaginable sleight of hand necessary to filching it from Heller himself, but through a conspiracy with Heller’s wife. Immediately he saw pitfalls and he said, ‘You say North and Mrs Heller first met at this pub in August?’
‘Yes, I think it was this way. Bernard Heller had met Mrs North, fallen in love with her, started this affair of theirs, and North found out about it. So he got in touch with Magdalene Heller.’ David paused and drew a deep breath. He was beginning to feel proud of himself again. His theory was forming as he spoke and it sounded good to him. ‘They arranged to meet and discuss—well, the wrong that is being done them. For a while they don’t do anything more. Bernard tried to commit suicide in September—I read that in the paper—and it must have shaken them. But when he took up with Louise again, they went on with their meetings and decided to kill the others.’
It was so full of holes, so remote from life as Ulph knew it, that he almost laughed. But then he remembered that, absurd as this theory was, a farrago of nonsense, he owed to it the one clue he had as to how North had come into possession of the gun, and he only sighed. The proper study of man is mankind, he thought, and he wondered how anyone as intelligent, as articulate and as alert as this man who confronted him, could have lived nearly thirty years on this earth yet be so blind to man’s cautiousness and the pull convention exerts over his conduct.
He said gently, ‘Listen to me, Mr Chadwick.’ For this, he thought, is going to be quite a long speech. ‘An ordinary middle-class quantity surveyor discovers that his wife is unfaithful to him. There are several things he can do. He can discuss it with her; he can discuss it with the man; he can divorce her.’ Under the desk he felt his hands begin to clench and he relaxed them. Hadn’t he done all these things himself? ‘He can do violence to one or both of them, kill her, kill them both. Also he might just contact the wife of his wife’s lover and reveal his discovery.
‘This last is a possibility. You or I,’ Ulph said, ‘you or I might not do it, but it has been done. The innocent pair confront the guilty pair. More violence or more discussion follows. What the innocent pair do not do is meet in a pub and plot a murder. Strangers to each other? Knowing nothing of each other’s emotions, propensities, characters? Can you hear it? Can you see it?’
Ulph began to speak in a tone quite unlike his natural voice, boyishly, impulsively. Was this North’s manner of speech? David had no idea. He had never heard it. ‘“We both hate them, Mrs Heller, and want to be rid of them. Suppose we make a foolproof plan to kill them? Suppose we plan it together?”’ But Magdalene’s voice he did know and he flinched a little, so uncanny was Ulph’s imitation of her long vowels and her sibilants. ‘ “What a lovely idea, Mr North! Shall I help you work it all out?”’
David smiled in spite of himself. ‘Not in those words, of course, but something like that.’
‘Wouldn’t she have run from him? Called the police? Are you saying that two people, brought together only because their marriage partners were lovers, found in each other a complementary homicidal urge? It says much for your virtue. You’ve evidently never tried to involve a stranger in a conspiracy.’
But he had. Only two days ago he had attempted just that with Susan Townsend. He had gone to a stranger in the absurd hope she would help him to hunt North down. Why hadn’t he learned? Recent experience should have taught him that people don’t behave like that.
‘Suppose I go back to the pub,’ he said diffidently. Was that amusement in Ulph’s eyes? ‘Suppose I get the names of those two men?’
‘As long as you don’t get yourself into trouble, Mr Chadwick.’
David walked slowly out of the police station. He felt humiliated, cut down to size by Ulph’s expertise. And yet Ulph had only shown him that his reasoning had been at fault. He had done nothing to alter David’s conviction of North’s guilt or diminish the growing certainty that North was pursuing Susan Townsend to find out how much she knew.
14
It was just his luck that Sid and Charles weren’t in The Man in the Iron Mask tonight. Perhaps they never came in on Thursdays. He couldn’t remember whether he had ever been there on a Thursday himself before. Certainly he couldn’t remember any occasion when he had been there and they hadn’t. He hung about until eight and then he went home.
On the following night all the regulars were there, the middle-aged couple, the old actor, the girl with the mauve fingernails and her boy-friend, this time wearing a Battle of Waterloo tricorne hat, everyone but Sid and Charles. David waited, watching the clock, the door, and at last he asked the barman.
‘Those two bearded characters, d’you mean?’
‘That’s right,’ David said. ‘You called them comedians. There’s something I wanted to see them about.’
‘I doubt if you’ll see them in here.’ The barman looked at him meaningfully, setting down the glass he had been polishing. ‘Keep it under your hat, but I had a bit of a ding-dong with them yesterday lunchtime. Always money, money, money with them it was. Like a disease. The very first time they came in here they started on me about giving wrong change, over-charging, that sort of guff.’ He lowered his voice. ‘You wouldn’t believe the insinuations. Well, yesterday I’d had about enough. Get the police if you’re not satisfied, I said. We’ve nothing to hide. I’m within my rights to refuse to serve you, I said, and if you come back tomorrow I will.’
‘The same sort of thing happened to them last August at The Rose,’ David said hopelessly.
‘I shouldn’t be at all surprised. I’m right in thinking they’re not friends of yours, aren’t I?’
‘I don’t even know their names.’
‘A pub crawl,’ said Pamela Pearce. ‘Well, I don’t know, darling. It could be dreary.’
‘There are two chaps I want to find. I’ve got to find them.’
‘I suppose they owe you money.’
‘No, they don’t,’ David said crossly. ‘It’s much more serious than that, but I’d rather not explain. Come on now, it might be fun having a drink in every pub in Soho.’
‘Intoxicating. Still, I don’t mind if it’s Soho. But, darling, it’s pouring with rain!’
‘So what? You can wear your new raincoat.’
‘That’s a thought,’ said Pamela, and when he came to pick her up she was glittering in silver crocodile skin.<
br />
At Tottenham Court Road tube station he said, ‘They’ve both got beards and their conversation is almost exclusively concerned with money.’
‘Is that all you’ve got to go on?’
He nodded and avoided meeting her eyes. It had occurred to him that Sid and Charles, when at last run to earth, would certainly make cracks about his concern to find a striking-looking dark girl, his ex-secretary. Pamela knew very well he had never had a secretary. Strange that this didn’t worry him at all.
They would go first to The Man in the Iron Mask. There was just a chance some of the other regulars might remember North and Magdalene. But David doubted this. He had been a regular too, but he had no recollection of ever having seen the couple—the conspirators? The lovers?—until the inquest day. Did Sid and Charles only remember because like the majority of men they had been susceptible to Magdalene’s beauty?
He must find them.
Pamela walked along beside him in silence while the rain fell softly and steadily through grey vapour.
It was Sunday and Julian Townsend was taking his son out for the day. Hand in hand they walked down the path towards the parked car. Susan watched them go, amused because the Airedale who only barked at unknown interlopers, had suddenly begun to roar at Julian. He had become a stranger.
She shrugged and went indoors. In the hall glass her reflection walked to meet her and she stopped to admire herself, the fair hair that had a new gloss on it, the grey eyes alight with happy anticipation, the new suit she had plundered her bank balance to buy. The fee from Miss Willingale could be used to make that good, for she had only four more chapters to complete.
Bob’s footsteps sounded in the sideway. No more formal front door calling for him. Susan looked at the mirrored girl and saw in her face pleasure at the new intimacy, the beginning of taking things for granted.
She went to meet him a little shyly. He came in and took her in his arms without a word. His kiss was long, slow, expert, almost shocking in its effect on her. But they were only friends, she told herself, friends in need, each other’s comforters. She broke away from him, shaken, unwilling to meet his eyes.
‘Bob, I . . . Wait for me a moment. I have to get my gloves, my bag.’
Upstairs the gloves and the bag were ready where she had left them on the dressing table. She sat down heavily on the bed and stared at the sky, hard blue this morning, at the elms that swayed lazily, seeing nothing. Her hands were shaking and she flexed them, trying to control the muscles. Until now she had thought that the year passed without a man, a lover, had been nearly insupportable on account of the lack of companionship and the pain of rejection. Now she knew that as much as this she had missed sexual passion.
He was waiting for her at the foot of the stairs. She remembered how the girl in Harrow had turned to look at him, how Doris had spoken of his looks and his charm, and these opinions, the spoken and unspoken views of other women, seemed suddenly to enhance him even more in her eyes. All but his own wife were overpowered by that physical presence, that quintessence of all that a man should be and should look like. She thought of his wife fleetingly now as she came down towards him. Why had this one woman been impervious, indifferent?
He smiled at her, holding out his hands. There was something shameful in wanting a man because of his looks and because—ugly, shameful thought—you wanted a man. She came closer and this time it was she who put out her arms to him and held her face up to be kissed.
‘We’ll have lunch,’ he said, ‘in a little country pub I know. I’ve always liked little pubs.’
She held his hand, smiling up at him. ‘Have you, Bob?’
He said nervously, ‘Why did you say it like that? Why do you look like that?’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t mean to.’ She didn’t know, nor did she know why Heller and Heller’s widow had suddenly come into her mind. ‘Let’s make a pact,’ she said quickly, ‘not to talk about Heller or Louise while we’re out today.’
‘God,’ he said, and she felt him sigh as briefly he held her against him, ‘I don’t want to talk about them.’ He touched her hair and she trembled a little when she felt his fingers move lightly against her skin. Her relief should have matched his own, but she felt only a vague dismay. Had they anything else to talk about, anything at all in common? There was something painfully humiliating in the thought which had crept into her mind. That instead of going out with him she would have preferred to stay here like this, holding him, touching her cheek to his, in an eternal moment of warmth and of desire. Outside this room they would have, it seemed to her, no existence as a pair, as friends.
The sharp bright air shocked her as if out of a dream. She walked ahead of him to his car and she was appalled at herself, like someone who had committed an indiscretion at a party and now, in the light of day, is afraid to face both his neighbours and his partner in that fall from grace.
Doris looked out of her window and waved. Betty looked up from her gardening to smile at them. It was as if she and Bob were going off on their honeymoon, Susan thought, and the pink cherry petals fell on to her hair and her shoulders like confetti on a bride. She got into the car beside him and then she remembered how harsh he had been with her the day he had driven her to Harrow, violent almost as he drove deliberately fast to frighten her. It was the same man. He smiled at her, lifted her hand and kissed the fingers. But she didn’t know him at all, she knew nothing about him.
Whatever she said it would come back to Heller. It always did. But she had promised not to mention him or Louise and now she realised that although Bob himself would do so and derive a strange comfort from the tragedy, he became uneasy if she took the initiative herself. It was as if the double suicide was his private possession that no one, not even she, might uncover and look at without his permission.
The idea was very disagreeable to her. He was thinking about it now. She could see it in his face. For the first time she put into silent words what she had known since that other drive in this car with him. He thought about it all the time, day and night without rest.
She must talk to him about something. ‘How are you getting on with Mrs Dring?’ she asked desperately.
‘All right. It was good of you to persuade her, Susan, sweet of you.’
‘She can only come on Saturdays?’
‘Yes, when I’m there.’ He took one hand from the wheel, touched her arm. Not from desire, she thought, not out of affection. Perhaps simply to assure himself that she was really there. Then he said, his voice very low, as if they were not alone in a car but walking in a crowded street were anyone could hear unless he whispered, ‘She talks to me about it. I try to keep away from her, but every chance she can, she talks to me about it.’
‘She’s rather thoughtless,’ Susan said gently.
He set his mouth, but not defiantly. He was controlling the trembling of his lips. ‘She opens the windows,’ he said.
And thereby let fresh air and sound into the secret thing he kept there? Susan suddenly felt cold in the stuffy car whose heater blew out a hot breeze. In a monotone, low yet rapid, he began to tell her about the questions Mrs Dring had asked him, of her maudlin tactless sympathy.
‘I’ll have a word with her.’
But he hardly seemed to hear her. Once more he had returned to that morning, to his arrival at Baeside, to the couple on the bed. And, pitying him, not wanting him to know she was also a little afraid, Susan put her hand on his arm and rested it there.
‘I couldn’t find them,’ David said. Ulph’s expression was that of an indulgent father listening to a child’s tall stories. Perhaps he had never really believed in the existence of Sid and Charles. He made David feel like a crank, one of those people who go to the police with wild accusations because they want to make mischief or attract attention to themselves. And it was on account of this that he said no more of his quest with Pamela Pearce, of their visits to eighteen different pubs, of the perpetually repeated enquiries, all in vain. Nor, natural
ly, did he say anything of their subsequent quarrel when their tempers were frayed by frustration and the incessant rain.
‘I should think they work in the City,’ he said, feeling foolish. ‘We could try the Stock Exchange or Lloyds, or something.’
‘Certainly you could try, Mr Chadwick.’
‘You mean you won’t? You wouldn’t put a man on it?’
‘To what end? Do any of the other regulars at this pub remember seeing Mr North and Mrs Heller there?’ David shook his head. ‘From what you have told me of their conduct, your two bearded acquaintances aren’t remarkable for their probity. Mr Chadwick, can you be sure they weren’t—well, having you on?’
This time David nodded stubbornly. Ulph shrugged, tapping his fingers lightly on the desk. He too had much in his mind his professional discretion prevented him from revealing. There was no reason to tell this obstinate man how, since his last visit, North and Mrs Heller had again been separately questioned and had emphatically denied any knowledge of the other prior to the suicides. Ulph believed them. Mrs Heller’s brother-in-law and Mrs Heller’s neighbours all knew Robert North by now. They knew him as the kind benefactor who had first shown his face in East Mulvihill five days after the tragedy.
And, because of this, Ulph had lost his faith in David’s theory as to the gun. He still believed in North’s guilt, still had before his eyes that moving picture of North’s actions on that Wednesday morning. But he had acquired the gun some other way. Ulph didn’t know how, nor did he know how North had got out of the house. Answers to these questions would help him to get the case reopened, not unfounded theories as to a conspiracy.
‘You see, Mr Chadwick,’ he said patiently, ‘not only do you have no real evidence of conspiracy existing, you have no theory to convince me such a conspiracy would be necessary. Mrs Heller offered her husband a divorce when she first discovered his infidelity and only failed to petition because for a time he wanted them to try to keep their marriage going. He couldn’t have prevented her divorcing him as the guilty party. It wasn’t even as if he tried to conceal the truth from her. He loved Mrs North, was committing adultery with her, and he told his wife so. As to North, he might have committed a crime of passion from jealousy or hurt pride. That’s a very different matter from conspiring for months with a comparative stranger. His anger would cool in that time. Why take the enormous risk premeditated murder entails when with all the evidence he had, he too had only to seek a divorce?’