Lonelyheart 4122 f-3

by Colin Watson

  His third sortie was successful. As he hunched thankfully in the dry, leather-smelling gloom, he caught a glimpse of the river over which the cab was carrying him, and groaned. It made him think, for a moment mercifully brief, of what the sea was in all probability like.

  And now here he was, he supposed, in Twickenham. He watched the passing scene. It might have been Acton, or Streatham, or Balham, or Reading. Or anywhere. What did names mean here? Why did people still pretend that there were individual oats in this great bowl of porridge?

  But when he got out of the taxi and saw the deserted, gently curved street of Georgian houses, each with a little railed garden into which raindrops splashed from the boughs of old, imperturbable sycamores, he had to admit that homogeneity was not yet absolute even in Middlesex.

  He found number eight The Turnills half way down the right-handed terrace—the taxi had been unable to enter the street because of three bulbous iron posts set across the carriageway at its upper end.

  His knock was answered by a slim, fair-haired girl of eleven or so, whose glasses gave her small, fastidious-looking face an attractive air of solitude.

  “How do you do?” she inquired of him, seemingly anxious to gain a truthful reply.

  “Good afternoon,” said the commander, with a big is-your-mother-in smile. “Do some people called Cambridge live in this house?”

  “Yes, they do,” said the girl. (A neighbour’s child, perhaps? A runner of errands?)

  He peered down amiably. “I should rather like to speak to them. To Miss Cambridge, that is.”

  “I am Miss Cambridge.”

  The commander laughed. “No, no. Miss Evelyn Cambridge, I mean.”

  “But that’s me. I’m Evelyn. What is your name, please?”

  “Well, fancy that...No, I’m afraid I haven’t made myself very clear. My name is Commander Trelawney and I wish to speak to the other Miss Cambridge—the lady who is the daughter of old Mr Cambridge.”

  The girl considered this, her natural politeness prompting her to attempt some interpretation that would satisfy the visitor. The best she could muster was: “I don’t think Grandad had a daughter called Evelyn, but I’ll ask Daddy if you like.”

  “Daddy?”

  “Yes. He’s called Mr Cambridge, as well.”

  “Ah...well, perhaps if I were to have a word with him...”

  The girl turned, then looked back at Trelawney apologetically and pulled the door fully open. “I should have asked you to come in, shouldn’t I?”

  “That is most kind of you, my dear.” He stepped forward and stood within the doorway.

  After giving him a careful glance, as if to make sure that he fitted properly and would not fall over when left alone, she trotted off down the corridor and disappeared round a corner at the end.

  The commander stuck his hands in his pockets and stood frowning out at the rain. He told himself that the apparent surplus of Cambridges was nothing to worry about. The child, no relation at all but simply avid for security and affection, was doubtless identifying herself with Lucy Teatime’s friend. “Daddy” would prove to be another dream figure—an imaginary father whom she pretended to consult when difficulties cropped up. Poor child. At any moment now, the real Miss Cambridge would come out and...

  He turned, having heard a gentle scuffling noise. Also he was vaguely aware of being watched.

  He peered along the corridor. As his eyes grew accustomed to the dimness, he discerned a number of small figures. They were ranged, apparently in some order of seniority, in a shadowy doorway and were gazing at him with dark, serious eyes. They reminded him for an instant of an unpacked nest of Japanese dolls, the sort that fit one inside another. But before he could begin to count them, they flitted away out of sight.

  The commander’s frown deepened. There was something very odd about all this. Why had Lucy not mentioned that the house would be full of children? Were they old Mr Cambridge’s? A hobby, perhaps, that had finally landed him in his present financial predicament. Into hospital, too. Yet surely the brood didn’t belong to his daughter? The straight-laced Lucy was hardly likely to have fostered the friendship of an unmarried mother—least of all one whose irregular habits were of such patent regularity...

  His anxious musing was brought to an end by the appearance of a man of pleasant aspect and with much the same expression of bespectacled helpfulness as the girl.

  The man greeted him affably. His voice resembled that of a don, delighted to discover at his door a colleague bearing port.

  “My name is Cambridge,” said the man.

  To Trelawney, the announcement sounded like some elaborate pun. He felt by now thoroughly bewildered.

  “Come along in,” said Mr Cambridge, leading him through a door on the right into a large, warm room that seemed at first sight to be a musical instrument museum; He waved him to a chair.

  “My daughter says that you are Commander Trelawney.”

  The commander nodded. He said, a little falteringly: “I’m very glad to see you’re...out of hospital again.”

  “Hospital?”

  “Haven’t you been in hospital?*

  “Not for some years, no.”

  “Oh...I’m sorry—I must have misunderstood. Anyway, you’re looking very fit. I’m glad.”

  Mr Cambridge gave a little bow. His face remained calm. Wasn’t he bearing bankruptcy rather too well?

  “I have come about the boat,” announced the commander.

  There was a short silence,

  “But I don’t think we want a boat,” Mr Cambridge said. He looked at the door and added: “I’ll ask my wife, if you like.”

  Trelawney tried not to believe that a horde of impostors had taken advantage of the removal of the real Mr Cambridge to hospital and seized his house.

  “I am not selling boats,” he said. “I am here to buy yours.” He reached in his pocket for the letter. “On behalf of its original owner.”

  “A boat,” Mr Cambridge repeated thoughtfully. He looked up. “You’re sure you don’t mean a cello?”

  Trelawney stared wildly.

  Mr Cambridge stepped to a corner of the room where there was, indeed, a great fat stringed instrument. He stroked it fondly. “Edwin can’t really manage it, you know, and Estella’s got her hands full with a harp at the moment. I don’t like to see it go, but...”

  Trelawney cut him short by leaping tip and thrusting the letter into his hand.

  Mr Cambridge looked at it. “But this is addressed to Evelyn. She’s the one who let you in, you know.”

  “Read it.”

  Mr Cambridge slit open the envelope.

  “How very odd,” he said, three minutes later.

  Trelawney took back the letter and put it in his pocket. He continued to regard Mr Cambridge in grim silence.

  “There obviously has been some misunderstanding, Mr Trelawney. To me, that letter is quite incomprehensible. I’m awfully sorry.”

  “Then you don’t know this...this woman?”

  “I have never even heard of her.”

  Trelawney nodded. He looked very angry indeed.

  When he had gone, Mr Cambridge sorted among the children until he found Evelyn, whom he led by the hand into the room with all the musical instruments.

  “Tell me, Evelyn,” he said, “do you know a lady called Miss Lucilla Teatime?”

  “Yes,” said Evelyn.

  “And who is she?”

  “I don’t know who she is, but I can tell you where she used to live.”

  “All right.”

  “Three doors up, on the other side. She was very nice.”

  “But is she there now?”

  “Not now. She went away. She said she was going to get married to Mr Jackman. He keeps that jeweller’s next to the paper shop at the top.”

  “I see.”

  “But I don’t think she ever did.”

  Once the commander had been borne away on Flaxborough’s best train of the day to London, Miss Teatim
e quitted the platform and went at once to the Field Street branch of the Provinces and Maritime Bank.

  As she entered, she received a nod of recognition from the clerk with whom she and Trelawney had arranged the opening of their joint account two days before. She smiled back at him and drew a chair to a small table set against the wall.

  The clean, sharp-edged cheque book positively creaked with newness when she folded back its cover. Only one cheque had been used; it was now on its way to Twickenham. Little girls were lucky these days, Miss Teatime told herself. No one had travelled across half England with an order for her to be paid five hundred pounds when she was a child. The only bouncy thing she had ever been brought was a ball.

  She dated the next cheque in the book and wrote “cash” in small, maidenly copperplate. Amount...now what should she put? To lift the full sum of dear Jack’s transfer of the previous day was feasible but crude. There were no grounds, of course, on which it could be challenged. The account was hers no less than his. And yet...No, taking the whole lump would be as bad as wiping up gravy with a piece of bread. There was too much wolfish behaviour in the world today.

  She appended her neat signature, filled in the counterfoil and carefully tugged free the cheque.

  “Good morning, Miss Teatime.”

  (Her name remembered on only the second occasion? What a conscientious young man. What a nice bank.)

  “Good morning, Mr Allen.” The name was engraved on a bronze plate set above the grille. (Bronze, not plastic: the employees of this bank were clearly no fly-by-night journeymen.)

  Mr Alien picked up the cheque, glanced at it in the most cheerfully matter-of-fact way, and nodded. “Four ninety-seven, eighteen and six. Yes...I shan’t keep you a moment, Miss Teatime.”

  He wheeled off his stool and disappeared through a door in the partition behind him.

  Two minutes later, he was back, brisk and obliging as ever. But he was no longer holding the cheque.

  He leaned forward, smiling. “If you will just go down to that end of the counter, Miss Teatime”—his head gave a slight tilt to his left—“Mr Beach will look after you.”

  She looked in the direction indicated and saw a plump, friendly-seeming man standing twenty feet away. He beckoned her benignly, and showed her into an office. The office, with its orange carpet, glass and aluminium table, and long, bottle green velvet curtains, looked more like an advertising agent’s gin parlour.

  Miss Teatime accepted the proffered chair. Mr Beach took his seat behind a desk of maple, inlaid with what appeared to be white porcelain lozenges, each initialled “P & M“.

  He made of his fingers a prayer-pyramid and looked under it at Miss Teatime’s cheque, lying on a blotting pad.

  “Now, Miss Teatime, I take it that you wish to withdraw a sum of four hundred and ninety seven pounds from the account which you have jointly with Mr Trelawney.”

  “I do, yes.”

  “You are aware, I expect, that a customer with a bank account—any kind of account—may not take out more money than there is credited to that account?”

  There was a pause.

  “Mr Beach, I really do not see any need for irony. It is pure coincidence that matters in connection with our business—Mr Trelawney’s and mine—have arisen which necessitate this withdrawal so soon after the money was deposited. But, after all, it is our money, Mr Beach, and...”

  She stopped. Of course she knew what had happened. It was only some kind of professional reflex action that had made her pretend ignorance and indignation.

  Mr Beach raised his eyes.

  “How much did you suppose this account contained?” he asked.

  Miss Teatime appeared to think for a moment.

  “Five hundred and five pounds. Oh—less ten shillings for the cheque books, I suppose.”

  “I regret to say that you are under some misapprehension, Miss Teatime. Deducting the cheque book charges—ten shillings, as you say—there remains of the original deposit exactly four pounds ten shillings.”

  She stared.

  “But...but Mr Trelawney called yesterday in order to transfer five hundred pounds from his personal account into this one.”

  “If that was his intention, I’m afraid something must have prevented his coming in,” said Mr Beach. He sounded very sympathetic.

  “Dear me...”

  “Oh, you mustn’t worry about it, Miss Teatime. We are quite used to these small misunderstandings. They happen, you know, they happen. Even in the best regulated circles, I assure you...” (Oh, for crying out loud, thought Miss Teatime.) “The bank is not embarrassed. We are aware of how busy people are nowadays and how easily things slip their memories. In all probability—in all probability, I say—Mr Trelawney will be calling in some time today and then we can...”

  She rose, ignoring the cheque that Mr Beach had begun to wave diffidently in her direction.

  “All I can say about Mr Trelawney,” she interrupted firmly, before walking to the door, “is that he has a pretty piss-boiling way of going about things.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  It was the following morning that a letter with a Derby postmark and addressed to Inspector Purbright arrived at Flaxborough police station. He opened it eagerly.

  About that little talk we had, [Miss Huddlestone had written], and the thing you asked me to try and remember—well I have puzzled it over and all of a sudden today it came to me what Martha (Miss Reckitt) meant by Catching a Crab.

  When we were children and both living in Chalmsbury we went for walks a lot and often brought back fruit and things for our mothers to make jam. Well there was a cottage not far from my home, out towards Benstone Ferry, and it had a big, garden with fruit trees. An old lady lived in it then and we noticed that she didn’t pick the fruit much, so one day we knocked and asked if we could take some apples. She said Oh they are just crabs, you know, so we said we wouldn’t bother. Actually we thought she wasn’t quite right in the head and when we got home I told my mother that a funny old woman had made out that she had crabs in the garden, just as if it was the seaside. And mother said don’t be so silly, she just meant crab-apples and they were very good for jelly. Anyway we went back and got some, and the next year as well, but we often had a good laugh over getting that idea about crabs. Of course Martha would remember it straight away when this man took her to see it. It was called Brookside Cottage and the last time I saw it it had been done up a good deal and had a garage and that sort of thing. It stands on its own at the end of a lane—Mill Lane I think we used to call it—about two miles out of Chalmsbury on the Benstone Road. I do hope this is some use to you and that you soon find what has happened to poor Martha.

  Purbright opened a drawer in his desk and took out a copy of the same ordnance survey section as Miss Teatime had bought on the station bookstall. The ring he pencilled on his, though, was smaller and more precise than Miss Teatime’s reference.

  He went to the door and called in Sergeant Love.

  “This”—he pointed to the ringed cottage—“is the place that Martha Reckitt’s intended said he was going to buy for her. He probably told the same story to Mrs Bannister. The address is Mill Lane, Low Benstone, and the cottage used to be called Brookside, although there’s no guarantee that it still is.

  “There are two possibilities. Either the chap just picked the place at random as part of his scheme to string those women along, in which case he’s probably never even made an inquiry about it. Or it is genuinely for sale and he had some reason for knowing it. There’s just a chance of some connection. We’ll have to work on it.”

  “You mean I will,” Love observed, without malice.

  “For a start, yes. I’ve got this Teatime woman coming in this morning. You’d better try the estate agents first. Find out if the place is for sale, which agent is handling it, who the owners are and whether they are still living there.”

  “Just the Chalmsbury agents?”

  “They’re the most likely, but if
you draw a blank there you’ll have to ask around in Flax as well.”

  The sergeant left to provide himself with a classified telephone directory and a mug of tea.

  Just before ten o’clock, Miss Teatime was shown in to Purbright’s office. The inspector fancied that her manner had a slightly more purposeful edge to it than when he had last seen her. And, indeed, she came straight to the point.