by Ruth Rendell
‘North met Magdalene Heller on holiday in Devon last July,’ he began. ‘They fell in love. It might be better to call it a physical enslavement on North’s part.’ She wasn’t looking at him and her face was impassive. ‘When they came home,’ he said, ‘they began meeting, sometimes in a London pub and, no doubt, in other places as well. Magdalene wanted him because he’s handsome and well-off by her standards. I’ve told you why he wanted her. Perhaps he also wanted children, but I don’t know.’ He watched her make a very faint movement of one hand. ‘I think it was Magdalene who thought of the idea, who was perhaps, to put it dramatically, North’s evil genius. Magdalene had a gun, you see, and in September Magdalene’s husband had tried to gas himself because he knew she no longer loved him. A man who attempts suicide may attempt it again and may succeed.
‘I don’t know when they first began to plan it. Perhaps not until after Christmas. It would have been in January or February that Magdalene gave North one of Heller’s business reply cards to hand to Louise and propose that they have central heating installed. No, it wasn’t a coincidence that Heller happened to work in the Matchdown Park area. It was because he did that Magdalene formed their plan on these particular lines.’
‘What lines?’ she said in a low, scarcely audible voice.
‘As soon as Louise had filled in the card and signed it,’ he went on, ‘she began to tell her neighbours about the central heating project. Heller came along in his car to discuss it with her and every time he came that dog barked so that everyone was aware of his visits. Louise North had been looking very unhappy because she too knew that her husband was being unfaithful to her. She talked to no one of it, but she couldn’t help the misery that showed in her face. She had only one thing to distract her, the plan for improving the heating of her house, and of course she told her neighbours about it. But when North was asked by them for his opinion on the scheme, he simply denied all knowledge of it. For this was the one sure way of making certain that Heller’s visits would be taken as illicit.’
Now, at last, she did turn her eyes to his. ‘But that is quite absurd.’ Indignation had replaced all the deadening effect of shock. ‘Of course people asked Bob about his central heating and of course he denied it. He told a friend of mine quite decidedly that he couldn’t afford central heating. This idea of yours—I don’t know what you’re leading up to—this idea is ridiculous. If Bob had been lying, what do you suppose would have happened if people had asked him and Louise about it when they were together? Very probably they did ask.’
‘And if they did?’ David asked quietly. ‘Wouldn’t it have made them believe all the more firmly in Louise’s guilt to hear her insist while her husband turned away and looked embarrassed? Wouldn’t they have felt sorry for him as the deceived husband doing everything he could to conceal his wife’s treachery?’
‘Louise North was in love with Heller,’ she said stubbornly. ‘He came here three or four times and Bob knew very well why he was coming. Look, I know you’re obsessed with these ideas of yours, but you weren’t living here. You don’t know the people involved. The day before she died Louise came in here in tears to tell me all about it, to beg me to go in there the next day and hear the whole story.’
For a moment he was checked. Suppose his theory was all wrong, all hot imagination? Susan Townsend would never speak to him again. ‘She actually told you,’ he said urgently, ‘that she was in love with Heller?’
A flicker of doubt creased the skin between her eyebrows. ‘No, but I . . . Of course she came for that. Why else would she have come?’
‘Perhaps to tell you that her husband was being unfaithful to her and to ask your advice.’
She looked at him blankly and then she blushed, deeply and painfully. ‘You mean that I would have been a good adviser because my husband had been unfaithful to me?’
It was dreadful that he, of all people, should have to wound her in this way. His throat was dry and for a moment he couldn’t speak. Then he said, ‘Because of that, of what you said, she wouldn’t have expected you to show much sympathy to the guilty partner of a marriage, would she? And yet that is what you believed she was.’
‘I still believe it,’ she said with sudden passion. ‘I believe in Bob’s unhappiness.’
‘Yes, I expect he was unhappy. There can’t be much happiness in being driven to do frightful acts by a woman like Magdalene Heller. They flared at each other at the inquest, didn’t they? All acting, or perhaps the rage of Lady Macbeth?’
‘What are you really trying to say?’
‘That Bernard Heller and Louise North weren’t lovers at all. That they were never more to each other than salesman and housewife.’
20
She took a cigarette and lit it before he could. Her hands were very steady. The puffiness under her eyes had almost gone, leaving blue shadows. He noticed how thin her hands were, so thin that the wedding ring slid to the first joint when she moved her fingers.
He stammered a little. ‘You’ve taken it very calmly. I’m glad of that.’
‘Only because I know it isn’t true.’
He sighed, but not with exasperation. How could he expect her to understand inconstancy, disloyalty? ‘I know it’s hard to take at first,’ he said quietly.
‘Oh, no, it isn’t that.’ Her face was almost serene. ‘When you began I was afraid it was all going to be true, and now I know it isn’t I feel, well, easier. I don’t bear you any malice,’ she said seriously. ‘I know you meant to do the right thing. I like that.’ She gave him a stiff brisk smile. ‘You’re a kind considerate person, really. It’s true that . . .’ And now she lowered her eyes. ‘It’s true that I let myself get fond of Bob North. We needed comfort from each other very much because . . .’ Her voice had grown very matter-of-fact, ‘Because we’d reached a low ebb in our lives. I’m getting over the shock of it now. I’m used to shocks,’ she said. ‘He did a dreadful thing and we shall never see each other again. It wasn’t as if we really ever had much in common. I’m going to move away quite soon and I’ve always got my little boy to think of. I shall never forget Bob, how frightened he was and how haunted.’ She paused and cleared her throat. ‘But you want to know why I’m so sure your idea’s wrong.’
‘Yes,’ he said tiredly, ‘yes.’
‘Well, then. Heller and Louise were in love, I know they were. You see, Heller was writing love-letters to Louise as far back as last November. I’ve got them here—Bob left them with me—and you can see them if you like.’
‘Forged,’ David said, as he turned them over in his hands, although he knew they couldn’t be. He had remembered them now, letters which had been identified in court by Magdalene and by Equatair’s managing director and by Bernard’s own brother. ‘No, I know they can’t be.’ He read them while she, lighting a second cigarette from the first, watched him with gentle sadness.
‘You see, they’re both dated 1967, last year.’
He read them again, slowly and carefully, and he looked again at the dates, November 6th, ’67, and December 2nd, ’67. There was no doubt when they had been written, but there was something wrong with them just the same. ‘He is not an old man and may live for years. He has no rights, no hold over you that anyone would recognise these days.’
‘How old is North?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ she said and she stopped, distress puckering her face. ‘About thirty, in his early thirties.’
‘Odd,’ David said. ‘Strange that Heller should have described him like that.’
‘But it’s true, he isn’t an old man.’
‘No, he’s so young that it was absurd of anyone who knew his age to write of him like that. That’s the way you talk of someone in late middle-age, someone of, say, fifty-five. It’s as if Heller were arguing with someone very young, putting the maturer, more realistic viewpoint. And what about this? “We just have to hang on and wait till he dies.” Why should North have died? He’s strong and healthy, isn’t he, as well as
young? And that about his rights, about him having no rights that anyone would recognise these days. I should think ninety per cent of the population wouldn’t deny that husbands and wives have legal and moral rights over each other, and the hold is pretty strong.’
‘It takes a good deal of legal machinery to break it,’ she said dryly. ‘But you’re forgetting that Heller was in an unstable state, he was writing hysterically.’
‘And yet these letters aren’t hysterical. Parts of them are calm and tender. May I ask why North gave them to you?’
‘He wanted them burnt. He hadn’t the strength of will to do it himself.’
David almost laughed. The man had wanted them burnt all right because although on first glance, on cursory examination, they seemed genuine, a closer perusal might have shown some oddity that revealed Louise could not have been their recipient. Why had he shown them to Susan Townsend? Because he wanted to be sure of her sympathy, her pity, her recognition of himself as injured. He had succeeded, David thought bitterly.
‘Do you know what I think?’ She didn’t, she didn’t seem to want to. She was listening to him out of politeness. He went on just the same. ‘I believe the man referred to wasn’t a husband at all. The woman who received these letters was tied to someone, certainly, but tied only by duty.’ He looked up and saw that she was very tired. ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘May I take these letters away with me?’
‘I don’t see why you shouldn’t. No one else wants them.’
She gave him her hand, passed before him into the hall. It was as if he had called to see her on some practical business, as if he and not the society photographer had bought her house.
‘You shouldn’t be alone,’ he said impulsively. ‘I wouldn’t leave you, only you must loathe the sight of me.’
‘Of course I don’t, but I’m quite used to being alone. I was in a bad state after the inquest, but I was ill then.’ She opened the front door and as soon as he appeared, framed in light, the dog began to howl. No wonder North had stroked its head, patted it, that last night David had been here, for it had been his innocent henchman. ‘I wish we could have met under different circumstances,’ she said.
‘But we have met.’ He didn’t wait for her answer, for it might have quenched hope.
Until she was married Magdalene Heller had lived with her father, a victim of multiple sclerosis, aged about fifty-five. She had been a devoted nurse to him until she went to London and met Bernard. But she couldn’t get married and leave her father; she had to wait for him to die. Mr Chant must have needed a great deal of care and attention that could only be provided by the daughter who understood. The chronic invalid was harsh and ungrateful, resenting the health of the girl who nursed him and sometimes violent to her. But it was her duty to stay with him and see her fiancé only occasionally, when he could come and stay near her in Exeter or she manage a day in London.
David assembled these facts in his mind and when he came to East Mulvihill he had formed a theory, subsidiary to his first, like the tiny offshoot on the body of a hydra. Carl Heller opened the door of the flat to him. Did Magdalene retain him there like a porter to do her bidding? His dull lethargic face was abject tonight, the heavy jowls as pendulous as a bloodhound’s.
‘You have seen the morning papers?’ he asked, pausing between each guttural word. ‘They have arrested Mr North for killing my brother.’ Never before had David seen anyone actually wring his hands. ‘Oh, my brother and his wrongdoing . . .’ He seized David’s arm with a quick clumsy movement. ‘I can’t believe it. Magdalene is sick, lying down. Yesterday when he did not come and he did not phone I thought she would go mad.’ He shook his head, threw up his hands. ‘She is better now, calmer. And all this misery has come upon us through my brother’s wrongdoing.’
‘I don’t believe he did anything wrong, Mr Heller. He wrote some letters once to Mrs North, didn’t he?’
‘Wicked letters. I shall never forget how in the court I had to say those letters were written by my brother to that woman.’
‘But he did write them to her?’ David followed him into the sitting-room. The table was bare and the place tidy, but every piece of furniture was filmed with two days’ dust.
Carl sat down, but jumped up again immediately and began to lumber about the room like a carthorse in a stall made for a pony. ‘I don’t mean he did not write them,’ he said, but that I was ashamed to say he had. My brother to write of poor Mr North that he was useless and better dead!’
‘Mr Heller . . .’ David knew that it would be pointless to try to explain anything to this man whose slow stupidity was intensified because he was distraught. ‘Will you tell me something? It may be meaningless to you, not to the point at all, but tell me, how did Bernard make his sevens?’
Astonishment, anger even, at the apparent inconsequence of the question wrinkled Carl’s brow while his face—did he think David was mocking righteous chagrin?—flushed a dull brick red. But he stopped pacing and, taking the pencil David handed to him, licking the tip of it, drew a seven with a tick across the ascender.
‘I thought so. He was educated in Europe, in Switzerland. Now make a one the way Bernard did.’
For a moment it seemed as if Carl wouldn’t comply. The frown deepening, he stared at David, and then, shrugging, drew on the paper an outline very like an English seven. David slid the paper from under the big hand and looked at it thoughtfully. Magdalene had married Bernard in 1962, had met him in 1961. It all fitted and yet . . . Why hadn’t the police seen who had access to Bernard’s current notebooks, why hadn’t the managing director of Equatair who knew Bernard’s writing and style of making figures, why hadn’t Carl?
‘You said to me once that for the sake of getting on in his job, Bernard wanted to appear as English as possible. Did he ever alter his way of making these continental ones and sevens?’
‘I think he may have.’ Carl nodded, not understanding, not wanting to understand. ‘Five years ago he said to me he would make himself so English no one would know.’
David said softly, ‘Five years ago, then, he began to write his sevens without the tick and his ones as an upright stroke . . .’ He said it softly because he had heard a door open behind him and footsteps in the narrow passage.
She was in a dressing-gown. A negligée would have been wrong for her and the thing she wore was a long stiff bell of quilted stuff, black shot through with blood red. It caught the light like armour. Her face was white and stiff and quite old-looking. She was a queen on a court card, the queen of spades.
‘Back again?’ she said. She was trying to be defiant but she was too frightened to manage the strong voice necessary for defiance. ‘I want a drink of water,’ she said to Carl. He fetched it, nodding humbly. Her nails rattled against the glass and she spilled some of the water. It trickled down her chin and on to the black quilting. Now she had a voice again, a poor travesty of a voice, as if she had really aged. ‘Bob North killed them, after all. Just as well we didn’t have any more to do with him. He must have been a fool, letting himself get caught like that.’
‘Murderers ought to be caught,’ said Carl stupidly.
‘They ought to be tough,’ she said, ‘and see they don’t.’
‘I wonder if you would be tough enough,’ David said, and he added conversationally as he got up, ‘It would be interesting to see.’ It will be interesting, he thought, tonight, or tomorrow. The green eyes, iridescent, shallow, rested on him for a long moment, and then she went back into the bedroom, the glass in her hand, her long stiff skirts rustling on the floor. He listened as he passed the door but behind it there was only a silence so deep as to be stronger and more frightening than any sound.
‘I wanted to know,’ David said when she answered the phone, ‘if you were all right.’
‘But you phoned last night to know that,’ she protested, ‘and again this morning.’ At least, he thought, she didn’t say, ‘Back again?’ ‘I’m quite all right. Really I am. Only the police are here
all the time . . .’
‘I want to see them myself, but afterwards, may I come and see you?’
‘If you like.’ she said. ‘If you like, David.’ She had called him by his name and his heart turned a little. ‘But no stories, no theories. I couldn’t stand any more.’
‘I promise,’ he said. She would have to attend the trial and by then she would know him well enough to let him go with her. She would hear it all there and she would need him beside her when she heard the evidence against the two people in the dock.
So David put the phone down and went to tell Ulph what Magdalene Heller and Robert North had done. How they had invented a love affair between two mild and gentle people who had never harmed them except by existing; how they had spread upon their characters so much filth that her friends and neighbours and his twin brother had vilified them; how they had done it simply because Louise North could not divorce her husband and Heller was going to take his wife away to Switzerland.
But before he went into the station entrance, he paused for a moment and leaned against the railings of the treeless park. They had driven past this place, he and Bernard Heller, and yet it was not as he had been then that David suddenly saw him, nor as he had been when he lay dead in the arms of the dead woman he had never really known. He remembered instead the fat jovial clown and the tedious jokes and the unfailing generous kindness.
Perhaps he would tell Ulph of his last discovery first. He was not a vindictive man, but he wanted to see Ulph’s face when he learned that Magdalene Heller had kept her own love-letters, the letters Bernard had sent her in 1961, and used them as the documentary evidence of an adultery that had never been. He wanted to see Ulph’s expression and, ultimately that of a judge and a jury.