by Barbara Vine
This last paragraph I’m adding on in the morning. Although I nearly fell asleep over the typewriter, I couldn’t sleep when I got to bed. Or else I did sleep and dreamt without knowing it, for I kept thinking I could hear someone trying, though trying in vain, to get into the house.
I was up at seven. The rain was past, the sun was shining and the sea was deep blue. I stood at the window, thinking that perhaps it was often blue, perhaps it was my grief and my misery that had turned it brown, and now I could hope and be happy it was transformed to the blue of a jewel. Sentimental slush? Maybe. Anyway, it didn’t last, though the sea stayed blue, because at seven-thirty the phone started ringing. Of course I thought it was Ivo, phoning to tell me he’d found Sergius in the jacket pocket.
It wasn’t. It was the nursing home to say my mother had died in the night. I shall go there now…
24
Tim was first questioned when he came back from the nursing home in the afternoon. They found an envelope addressed to him in Steadman’s pocket. It was handwritten and the postmark was Seattle. The writer isn’t important as far as this issue is concerned, but it led the police to Tim.
I don’t think I’ve mentioned how Steadman was killed. It isn’t very pleasant. He was stabbed a total of eight times in the chest and neck with a kitchen knife. Shown the knife, Tim admitted quite transparently that it was one of his. He hadn’t seen it since the night before when it lay, as it always did, on a wooden board in his kitchen. He couldn’t say how it came to be used to kill Ivo Steadman.
They arrested him two days later. He thought of me and asked for me. I’ve found my name several times in the manuscript I’ve been reading. He alludes to me flatteringly and unflatteringly, once in a way that touched me very much. While I was reading it, sitting in a corner of the hotel lounge, a striking-looking dark woman came in and sat in a chair on the other side of the room. After a while she came over, introduced herself as Isabel Winwood and asked me if I was Tim’s lawyer. Not solicitor, but lawyer. She’s not American, of course she isn’t, she is the late unfortunate Steadman’s sister, but she uses a few American expressions from having lived over there so long.
‘Can I see Tim?’ she said.
Probably not, I said, not at the moment, but I had reason to believe he wouldn’t be held any longer, not now that I had new evidence for the police. I told her that with luck I’d be back by lunchtime and bring Tim with me.
From Tim’s own account I was well aware of how he felt about Isabel Winwood. That made me curious to know more of her. For instance, I’d have liked to sit down with her for half an hour and tried to make some assessment of this woman Tim loved so deeply and enduringly. Of course I had no idea how she felt about him. It was possible she wanted to see him only to express her hatred of her brother’s murderer. I couldn’t tell, though I did know by this time, loyalty to my client and a natural bias apart, that Tim wasn’t guilty of that act.
The police had to release him. They had been unable to get an extension. I indicated the way for them, gave them photocopies of the relevant pages of the manuscript, and pointed out a significant fact, that the knife had been missing from Tim’s kitchen since the night before. One man, I said, looks very like another when covered up in a hooded waterproof, especially in the dark. The pocket yielded the only safe Tim had, whatever he might once have boasted to the contrary, one of those books with a hidden compartment. It’s needless to say, probably, that the space inside was empty. The set of keys Steadman had on him was not capable of opening the front door of Tim’s house.
Have you followed all this? Steadman’s killer mistook him for Tim, perhaps never knew whom he had killed. He helped himself to the money inside the book and with the useless keys attempted to get inside Tim’s house during the night in quest of that elusive ‘safe’. I suggested to the police that they search the streets of Ipswich and before I left I heard they had arrested the vagrant called Thierry Massin and charged him with Ivo Steadman’s murder.
In the drama of it I forgot my promise to Isabel Winwood. I had said I would try to arrange a meeting between her and Tim, though I was somewhat nervous about bringing them together, but I am afraid I forgot her existence. It was to Tim that I had to devote my energies. He was relieved to be released, though not as euphoric as I would have expected. Then I remembered his mother had died a few days before.
I went back to his house with him. It’s quite a remarkable house, right on the seafront, with virtually nothing but the North Sea between it and the Dutch coast. The interior is a horror, untouched since the 1950s, and the furniture the sort of stuff you see out on the pavement in North End Road. But the house itself must be worth a lot of money, even in these hard times. Still, as he said to me, if he sells it where could he go?
There was nothing more I could do for him. I was getting up to go when suddenly the front doorbell rang. It made poor Tim jump.
‘I’ll have to get used to it,’ he said. ‘I mean, to knowing it isn’t going to be Ivo.’ And he shut his eyes for a moment, he winced as if in real pain. ‘And when the post comes I won’t be looking for any more Robinson Crusoe stories.’
I have no idea what he meant and he didn’t explain. He went downstairs to answer the door and I waited and waited for him to come back. I’d ordered a taxi to take me to Ipswich, the trains from Saxmundham being few and far between, and, standing in the bay window, I saw it draw up outside.
There was nothing for it but to go down and find where he had got to. I saw them when I was halfway downstairs, Tim and Isabel Winwood. They were in a close embrace and they were kissing as if the past two years had been nothing but a search for each other. They had both loved him and each suffered deeply from his loss, but whether they thought of it like that or not, Steadman’s death was the means that brought them together.
I came past them as self-effacingly as I could but I need not have bothered. They were lost to extraneous things, they didn’t see me. Can it possibly work for them? Can it last? I don’t know and I don’t suppose they do. Stranger things happen all the time. I closed the door behind me, got into the taxi and caught the 14.33 for London.
I wrote this last bit in the train, coming home to you.
He just wanted a decent book to read …
Not too much to ask, is it? It was in 1935 when Allen Lane, Managing Director of Bodley Head Publishers, stood on a platform at Exeter railway station looking for something good to read on his journey back to London. His choice was limited to popular magazines and poor-quality paperbacks – the same choice faced every day by the vast majority of readers, few of whom could afford hardbacks. Lane’s disappointment and subsequent anger at the range of books generally available led him to found a company – and change the world.
We believed in the existence in this country of a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price, and staked everything on it’
Sir Allen Lane, 1902–1970, founder of Penguin Books
The quality paperback had arrived – and not just in bookshops. Lane was adamant that his Penguins should appear in chain stores and tobacconists, and should cost no more than a packet of cigarettes.
Reading habits (and cigarette prices) have changed since 1935, but Penguin still believes in publishing the best books for everybody to enjoy.We still believe that good design costs no more than bad design, and we still believe that quality books published passionately and responsibly make the world a better place.
So wherever you see the little bird – whether it’s on a piece of prize-winning literary fiction or a celebrity autobiography, political tour de force or historical masterpiece, a serial-killer thriller, reference book, world classic or a piece of pure escapism – you can bet that it represents the very best that the genre has to offer.
Whatever you like to read – trust Penguin.
www.penguin.co.uk
Join the conversation:
Twitter Facebook
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the
Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England
Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, 182–190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
First published by Viking 1994
Published in Penguin Books 1995
Copyright © Kingsmarkham Enterprises Ltd, 1994
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-241-96493-4