‘Mr Churchill, I do not understand your meaning,’ said Emma.
‘Emma! He is dead. George is dead! Now we may be together and none can say us no! I can take care of you as you deserve; despite my losses, I have wealth enough to keep you comfortable, dear, dear Emma!’
‘Comfortable!’ Emma laughed gently. ‘Oh, I see your meaning. You are concerned for my comforts now I am a widow. Rest assured, dear Mr Churchill. There is no cause for concern. Did you not know that with my husband’s death while my father still lives, all debts are cancelled, and Hartfield remains safe? But none the less I thank you for your solicitude.’
‘Emma, what are you saying?’ demanded Churchill. ‘I am offering my heart. I am asking your hand in marriage.’
‘Marriage? With my widowhood a matter of hours barely, of minutes only in my knowledge? Fie, Mr Churchill what are you thinking of?’ reproached Emma coldly. ‘Besides, did you not understand me? Hartfield is safe. Now that I have Hartfield, what should I want with another husband?’
There was the sound of another horse approaching.
Emma said, ‘That will, I think, be Mr Perry. Perhaps you could admit him on your way out, Mr Churchill, and ask him to wait. Forgive me if I am short with you. You understand, there is much for me to do. Goodbye.’
Leaving the haggard, stricken figure behind her, she returned to the drawing-room.
‘I’m sorry to have left you,’ she said to the couple waiting there. ‘It was not in fact, Mr Perry, but Mr Frank Churchill, come post-haste to offer his condolences. A truly gentlemanly act, I think. Perry has arrived now, I believe, but I have asked him to wait till we shall have finished our business.’
‘Sister!’ cried Isabella. ‘Why have you sent for Perry? Papa is not worse, I hope?’
‘No, indeed,’ said Emma. ‘Papa in fact is much better this morning. I shall keep the sad news of Knightley’s death from him a little while, I believe, till he grows strong enough to receive it.’
‘Then, what of Perry?’
‘Perry? Oh yes. I must admit I have summoned Perry here on my own account.’
‘Emma! You are not ill, my sweet?’
Isabella moved forward all concern, and John Knightley plucked a cushion from a chair, though what he hoped to do with it was not clear.
‘Not ill, exactly, Bella,’ said Emma, smiling coyly. ‘Is it not strange how Providence arranges things? On this very day that you bring me this tragic news about George, I have summoned Perry to confirm good news, which is also about George in a way. Oh, fate is strange!’
‘What do you mean, Emma?’ cried Isabella, now alarmed far beyond mere concern for her sister’s or her father’s health.
‘I mean that I believe; no, I mean I am sure that I am, if you will forgive the phrase, brother-in-law, enceinte. I am with child, dear Bella. Knightley is dead, the poor, dear man. But his name will live on, his full name, if, as I hope, pray, and begin to feel, it is a boy!’
And now John Knightley began to look as if at last he had decided what he would like to do with the cushion.
Emma Knightley, handsome, clever and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition; with a much loved elderly father and an adorable, strappingly healthy son; seems to unite some of the best blessings of existence, and appears preordained to pass her remaining years in the world with very little to distress and vex her.
crowded hour
At twelve noon there were three people in that house. By the time the clock struck one, two of them would be dead and the life of the third would have changed for ever.
When the front door bell rang, Daphne was sitting curled up on the sofa, reading The Postman Always Rings Twice. She tried to pretend she hadn’t heard it. Frank and Cora had just started to make love by the body of Cora’s murdered husband. It was a bad place for an interruption.
The bell rang again. With a sigh of irritation, she rose and went to answer it. As she passed down the hall, she heard the church clock beginning to scatter all the quarters.
There was a man standing on the step, rather too close to the door. He was in his mid-thirties, tall, narrow-faced, with a good tan which showed off strong white teeth as he smiled and said, ‘Mrs Davis?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is your husband in?’
He wasn’t. Daphne was opening her mouth to say so when the shadow of the Golden Showers growing up the pseudo-Græcian column of the mini-portico moved. There was no wind. Someone was standing there out of sight.
It was probably all perfectly innocent but she had been sensitized by her reading and she heard herself saying, ‘Yes. I’ll just go and fetch him. Please wait.’
She began to close the door. He continued to smile but his foot was already over the threshold. She tried to slam the door and had the brief satisfaction of hearing him gasp as his expensive soft leather slip-on was crushed against the jamb. Then the hidden man appeared and flung his weight against the door. It burst open. She turned to flee. They caught her in two strides. She hit the floor heavily. The second man knelt astride her, his knees gripping her as tight as a lover’s. From inside his loose-fitting blouson he dragged a shotgun, barrels and stock sawn off to reduce it to little more than eighteen inches. He pushed it hard under her chin and hissed, ‘Keep quiet!’
She heard footsteps moving swiftly, doors opening and shutting. She glimpsed the first man passing on his way to the staircase. He carried an automatic pistol and he was no longer smiling.
Time passed; terror stretched it to an eternity. Then she saw him again, a tapering giant from her angle of view. He was pushing his gun back into an underarm holster.
‘All right. Let her up,’ he commanded.
The man astride her squeezed once more with his legs and rose reluctantly. The tall man offered his hand. She ignored it and rolled away from them both.
And as she pushed herself upright she heard the church clock complete its long recitation of the hour.
In the lounge they prodded her into a chair. The man with the shotgun glowered down at her while the other went to the drinks cabinet, poured a tumblerful of Scotch and brought it to her.
‘Get that inside you,’ he said.
‘I could do with one of them,’ said the other. He was much younger, stockier of build, coarser of feature.
‘No way,’ said the tall man. ‘Come on, Mrs Davis, drink it up, then we’ll have a little chat.’
Slowly, Daphne drank. She hated whisky. Worse than medicine, she used to say. For some reason this seemed to exasperate Ted, so she stopped saying it. But now it was medicine and she needed it. Her whole body felt slack and weak. She was seeing this familiar room through a soft filter. Only the intruders came out sharp and focused.
‘He keeps nothing here,’ she said. ‘It’s all in the shop. You’re wasting your time.’
She hadn’t meant to speak but her voice was only as lightly in her control as her muscles. Words were jostling to get out. It wasn’t contact she wanted but a barrier. There seemed to be some measure of safety in words.
The tall man said, ‘Thank you, Mrs Davis, but we realize that. Just you concentrate on answering a couple of questions and everything will be all right. Where’s he gone?’
It was Ted they wanted. Ted and the shop keys. Her mind was racing like a squirrel in a wheel, the words were crowding her lips once more.
‘He’s gone out. He’s lunching out. Business. He often has Sunday business lunches. He won’t be back till this evening. He’s bringing some people back for dinner. Business friends. All men. Half a dozen of them. They’ll all be arriving together …’
The words felt as if they would come forever. She was amazed at her quickness of wit. Ted would be amazed too, Ted who was always putting her down for being slow …
Suddenly her hair was seized from behind and she shrieked as her head was jerked viciously to one side. She’d been concentrating all her attention on the tall man and hadn’t noticed the stocky man’s movements.
�
�Shall I knock the stupid cow about a bit?’ he asked.
‘Not yet,’ said the other. ‘She’s only trying to be clever. That’s a good sign. Shows she’s got her wits about her. I can’t bear hysterical women, Mrs Davis. So Ted’s gone to lunch? Thing is, we’ve been watching the house for half an hour, ever since he finished washing the car. We’d have come in then, only your neighbour was deadheading his roses and it’s silly to take unnecessary chances, isn’t it? But we know the car’s still in the garage and your husband hasn’t come out of the front of the house. So where is he?’
Daphne didn’t speak. Her head was forced further sideways till she was almost looking at the tall man upside down. He sat down on the sofa facing her. He noticed the open book lying there, picked it up, looked at the cover, read a little, smiled.
‘OK, Tommy,’ he said. ‘Give her one. But take it easy. Just break her nose.’
Somehow that take it easy was even more terrifying than the shotgun swinging up over her face.
‘He’s taken Lady for a walk!’ she screamed. ‘Our dog. Lady. He’s taken her for a walk.’
The shotgun stopped at the peak of its swing.
‘Dog? No one said nothing to me about a dog,’ said the man called Tommy.
‘Tommy, I try to keep demands on your mentals to a minimum. No sweat. It’s not a Dobermann, just a nice old friendly Labrador. Right, Mrs Davis?’
The tall man’s detailed knowledge was disturbing, but the bit of her mind still in touch with thought observed that he himself had been disturbed. This was an upset to his plans and he didn’t look like a man who liked upsets.
He rose from the sofa and went to the window overlooking the rear garden: patio and barbecue area, long lawn, small orchard, bounded by a briar hedge with open fields beyond.
‘He went this way?’
‘Yes. There’s a gate in the hedge.’
‘Then?’
‘There’s a path. Lots of paths. You can get down to the river. Or across to the golf course. Or through the woods to Little Morton. Please, can you make him let me go?’
He made a gesture and Tommy gave her hair a last vicious twist before releasing her.
‘What now, Mac?’ he said surlily. ‘This ain’t so bleeding clever, is it?’
He spoke with an indeterminate London accent. The tall man’s voice had seemed flat and featureless till the name of Mac drew attention to a faint under-burr.
‘No sweat,’ said Mac. ‘He’ll be back for his lunch. We just sit in comfort and wait.’
He returned to the sofa. He looked very relaxed in his dark blue lightweight jacket, open-necked grey silk shirt and knife-edged light blue slacks. The outfit looked continental in style and very expensive. Tommy, by contrast, was straight off a chain store counter. Beneath the loose cotton blouson, he wore a hooped T-shirt which strained over his barrel chest. Daphne tried to register every detail. She didn’t want to seem stupid when the police or Ted were asking her questions. Also it was important to make herself believe in a time after this.
Tommy wandered across to the drinks cabinet.
‘Come on, Mac,’ he said. ‘What about a drink? Little one won’t do no harm.’
‘Are you deaf or just stupid? I told you, no alcohol. You can get pissed out of your mind on your duty-free’s later on. But I wouldn’t say no to a coffee. Why don’t you make us a cup of coffee, Mrs Davis?’
She wanted to say no but she wasn’t brave enough. In any case, simple acts of defiance led nowhere. She had to think and it was terror that made you clever, not courage.
‘All right,’ she said, rising.
The door from the kitchen into the garden was open. Ted had gone that way and she hadn’t locked it after him. There were bound to be people outside on a sunny Sunday. And even though the houses were some distance apart and well screened, her screams could not go unheard.
She didn’t want to appear to be hurrying but in fact her legs proved to be so unsteady that she didn’t have to pretend. She went out of the lounge, down the hall, into the kitchen; there was no sound of anyone coming after her; she was holding her breath as she moved to the sink and gazed out on freedom. Now she darted a look behind her. No one. She might not have to scream. A thirty-yard dash and she could be into the garden next door where there seemed to be a large and noisy party every sunny Sunday. She’d asked Ted to complain. He hadn’t, of course. But now she would greet the revellers like dear friends and never be able to hear them again without thanksgiving.
She went to the door and pressed the handle and pulled. Nothing happened. She pulled harder. Still nothing. And knowing now it was all pointless, she pulled again and again, sobbing with effort and frustration. ‘I just wanted to say, instant will do,’ said the man called Mac. He was standing in the doorway from the hall. In his upraised hand was the back door key.
‘First rule: plug all boltholes,’ he said. ‘Two spoons of sugar for Tommy. You’ve probably noticed, his metabolism’s on fast burn.’
She thought she’d trained herself not to cry any more, but now the tears streamed uncheckably as she filled the electric kettle. By the time it had boiled, the tears had stopped. She stared out of the window again. There was still no sign of Ted and Lady coming over the fields.
She didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry.
As she carried the tray of coffee cups into the lounge, she heard the church clock strike the first quarter.
They drank the coffee in silence. Tommy was still sulking at being forbidden a real drink, but silent inactivity was clearly not something that came easy.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘What if he hasn’t got his keys with him? They could just be lying around the house somewhere, couldn’t they?’
Mac clapped twice.
‘Great thinking, Tommy,’ he said. ‘Except that he won’t take those keys off, no matter what he’s doing, am I right, Mrs Davis? But it’s not important anyway. It’s him I need as much as his keys. A stranger can’t just walk into a jeweller’s shop on a Sunday, even if he knew where all the alarms were, which I don’t. Too many eyes, too many mouths. They see Mr Davis taking a special customer in, that’s OK, that’s normal. Anyone else and it’s 999, hello hello hello, in five minutes flat.’
‘Yeah, all right,’ conceded Tommy reluctantly.
‘I’m glad I meet with your approval, Tommy.’
‘But what if he don’t come back?’ persisted the other. ‘We’ve not got all bleeding day.’
‘For God’s sake, he’s just taking the bloody dog for a walk,’ snapped Mac. ‘Give your mind a rest, Tommy. It’s not up to overtime.’
Daphne noted his reaction with interest. What had Tommy meant by not having all day? What was their hurry? It couldn’t make any difference to getting into the shop if Ted didn’t show up for another hour or more. So it must have something to do with afterwards …
A getaway, perhaps?
But it was hardly the crime of the century, was it? They wouldn’t be jetting off to some South American hide-out on what they were likely to be getting from Ted’s strongroom. A couple of months on the Costa del something, perhaps …
And then it came to her: what if the Costa del something was already where they lived? Her eyes took in Mac’s tan and his fancy clothes. It all fitted. What if they’d come across to do this job and were keen to get back to their sunny safety before anyone spotted them and started hunting out old warrants? They could have a nice safe flight booked back that afternoon. A package probably, less risky than a scheduled flight, and from Luton, only thirty minutes away for a quick driver.
It was a nice theory, marred only by the absence of real motivation. No one like Mac was going to risk his liberty for the contents of Ted’s down-market little jeweller’s shop.
All the same, she found herself unable to resist testing it out.
She said, ‘It must be hot living in Spain this time of year.’
She had the satisfaction of seeing a giveaway frown of surprise crease his face. The
n he smiled and said, ‘Having second thoughts, are we, Mrs Davis?’
It was an odd answer but she ignored it in the glow of self-congratulation. Ted would scornfully put her feat of inductive reasoning down to a diet of paperback thrillers and TV crime series. He had a way of diminishing everything she did. She didn’t doubt but that he’d find some way of criticizing her reaction to this crisis. At least she was coping as well as he would. He had no skill for dealing with unforeseen complication. He’d always rather walk away from trouble than face up to it.
Well, he’d literally walked away from it today.
She realized that she was beginning to feel uncomfortable and stood up.
‘I need to go to the bathroom,’ she said in response to Mac’s querying gaze.
‘You’re sure? I mean, if you’ve got any more daft ideas, forget it. You’ll leave the door open and Tommy here will be standing outside. Still want to go?’
She looked at Tommy who pursed his lips and made an obscene kissing sound.
‘I’ve got to,’ she said. ‘Only I’d rather you came with me than that animal.’
‘You think I’m more of a gent, do you?’ Mac laughed. ‘That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said about me in years. All right. Let’s go.’
He motioned her ahead of him. She went out of the lounge, turned towards the stairs. He said, ‘No.’
‘What?’
‘I saw a cloakroom down here. It’s got no windows to shatter or jump through. It’ll do nicely. In you go.’
She went in. At first she was inhibited by the idea of his presence beyond the door but her need proved greater than her inhibition. When she came out she saw that she needn’t have worried. He was sitting some distance away at the foot of the stairs. He looked tired. She readjusted her estimate of his age. The tan and expensively casual dress had deceived her. He was probably older than she was. Perhaps a bit of sun and styling would take her back from forty to thirty. Ted had tried to push her in that direction a few years ago but it had all seemed a waste of time and money. They would be celebrating their twentieth anniversary soon. Why try to look as if you got married at the age of ten?
There are No Ghosts in the Soviet Union Page 23