by Gary Newman
The small, compact person in leathers, who’d formed the front end of the pantomime horse – now handcuffed to an athletic young man in a baseball cap – was led up to us, and I dropped my head in grief and dismay as I recognized the firm contours of the body in which I’d so recently been losing myself so joyously. All my dark suspicions of the last couple of days were confirmed. I’d been steeling myself against the possibility, but nothing could’ve prepared me for the bitterness of the fallen blow.
‘I know this’ll be hard for you,’ Morris was saying, ‘but I’ve only met her once, and I’d like to get her identity confirmed.’
‘This is Dr Leah Rooney,’ I muttered, my voice almost breaking.
I looked up, and the almond eyes were as inscrutable as they were unwavering.
‘Well, that’s over with,’ Morris said as, with a jerk of his head, he dismissed my hope for a happy future and her escort. ‘I already know Mr Hague over there quite well – he needs no introduction.’
Frank, the rear end of the horse, his head now uncovered in the glaring light, looked over and gave his nervous little laugh as he was led away.
‘Women, Seb!’ he called over. ‘Bloody women . . .’
Morris turned to me as my shoulders shook.
‘We live and learn, Mr Rolvenden – we live and learn . . .’ Then, after I’d got my act together again: ‘I suppose your car’s somewhere near?’
I cleared my throat and sniffed.
‘It’s parked in a clump of bushes off a side road near Hawkinge.’
‘I’ll send someone up there to pick it up. I shouldn’t think you’ll be in a mood for driving: how about my driving you all up to Colchester?’
Just then I noticed Reet and Paul approaching over the lawn – so Reet had been in charge down here . . .
‘One of our men can follow up in your Land Rover, Mrs Rolvenden, and Conlon can take care of the, er . . . other parties.’
The stuffing had been knocked out of me – I’d lost Leah – and I just fell in automatically with the Detective Sergeant’s plan, and presently, with Paul up beside him and me in the back seat with Reet, Morris was driving us in pregnant silence along the M20. The Sergeant finally broke the silence with a question directed back at me.
‘When did you finally twig you were being set up, Mr Rolvenden?’
‘The white cliffs of Northumberland . . .’ I muttered.
‘Say again?’
‘I told Dr Rooney how I was given to occasional memory lapses when a sort of emotional trigger was set off.’
‘Yes, your son here told us about that – when you’d had some sort of upset, and then someone grabbed your arms. Where do the cliffs come in, then?’
‘I had a row a year or so ago with my wife and son in a cottage at Dunstanburgh, on the coast of Northumberland, and Paul grabbed my arms, so that I went off on one of my amnesiac walkabouts. Well, I told Leah – Dr Rooney – about this, and about the white cliffs where my fugue had ended, and she remarked that she knew that stretch of the coast well, as she’d spent holidays there as a child. Her remark struck me as odd later, because there aren’t any white cliffs in Northumberland.’
‘Not a patch I’m familiar with,’ the Detective Sergeant said. ‘Farthest up the east coast I’ve been’s Skegness.’
‘Well,’ I went on, ‘it occurred to me recently that Dr Rooney might have wanted to divert my attention from the white cliffs near Capel, where I now suspect was where I drove to after the row at Dunstanburgh.’
‘What made you think that?’
‘Well, I started to become generally suspicious of Leah’s motives when I noticed her reaction to some play Pat Hague had made with a copy of the Guardian in front of me and Dr Rooney at a filling station near my home – Leah was plainly rattled – and this tied in with what my wife told me about the incident the other day.’
‘Pat told me all about it,’ Reet said tersely.
‘And then,’ I went on, ‘I found out recently from Frank Hague that the day before Pat had waved the paper at Leah and me at the filling station, she’d returned from a seminar in Cambridge, and, according to Frank, she’d gone straight on to their boathouse, where he’d gone that afternoon to give her her mail delivered that morning at their flat above Frank’s shop. Now Frank had been out of town all that morning, and my guess was that Pat had returned early from Cambridge, let herself into the flat and found Leah’s Thursday Guardian lying around somewhere, with her name written on it by her newsagent.’
Morris chuckled.
‘Mrs Hague would’ve guessed that Dr Rooney had left the paper at the flat after she’d spent the night there with Mr Hague while she’d been at this do in Cambridge. When the cat’s away, the mice’ll play, eh?’
‘Pat thought it enormously funny,’ Reet remarked. ‘She told me she’d just left everything as it was in the flat – left the mail on the doormat – and gone straight on to the boathouse, not letting on when Frank turned up there after lunch with her letters. She said what a delicious tease she was going to have with you.’
‘But nothing to the “tease” Frank and Leah were planning for her.’
‘Frank had the guile,’ Reet said.
‘And Leah the guts,’ I capped her.
‘And had you other reasons for suspecting Dr Rooney was up to something?’ Morris asked me.
‘The matter of the crosses on my grandfather’s old map, Sergeant: you were the one who reminded me that anyone could’ve put them there, and at any time.’
‘Right – I remember now. Well, why should it have been Dr Rooney in particular who put them there?’
‘Because unless the pencilled crosses had been on the map before they’d arrived through the post at the lighthouse, she was the only one who could’ve put them there before I’d examined the map myself. Leah was there with me when the Jiffy bag containing the map arrived in the post. I opened the bag, and we both looked at some of the other things in it, but before I could examine the map, the window cleaner arrived for his money, as he usually does of a Saturday morning. I went to the door to deal with him, leaving Leah with the map and the other contents of the Jiffy bag.’
‘But,’ Morris objected, ‘that wouldn’t have left her much time to pencil the crosses on the map, especially if they had to be marked in specific spots. It would only have taken you a minute or so to pay the window cleaner and come back . . .’
‘The window cleaner also doubles as a jobbing builder, Sergeant, and for ages now he’s been trying a hard-sell technique on me to persuade me to let him repoint the walls of the lighthouse – it was a standing joke between me and Leah. In fact, I stood at the door argy-bargying with him for a full five minutes or more before he gave up and went away.’
‘Mmm . . .’ Morris murmured. ‘Ample time for Dr Rooney to do her thing with the old map – and she’d no idea the map was on its way to you from Jersey?’
‘It came to me as a bolt from the blue, Sergeant – there’s no way she could’ve had a plan already prepared for when it came.’
‘A clever, cool lady, then, who knows how to make the very best of an opportunity. She marks two or three crosses at strategic points on the map – places she knows Mrs Hague frequents – and leaves you to go and sniff around them, so it’ll look later as if you’d been stalking the lady in London.’
‘Then,’ I took up from the Sergeant, ‘after Frank and Leah dope Pat and bundle her away from the boathouse, I’m sent the email – ostensibly from Pat – summoning me there to “eat Pidgeon pie”, when Pat couldn’t have known anything about the Frenchman called Pidgeon I’m after. Leah knew all about him, though . . .’
‘And you obliged,’ Morris went on, ‘even to the extent of losing your rag at the boathouse when you realized you’d been invited on a wild goose chase, and rattled the door handle and banged on the closed shutters. Just like some barmy, disappointed stalker. A stalker, moreover, who was the last person to have any apparent contact with Mrs Hague before her disappear
ance. On top of that was the row you had with Mrs Hague at the auction sale in Suffolk – talk about grist to their mill! – not to mention the fact that you’re still a bit fragile in the wake of your breakdown. All in all, as neat a little stitch-up as I’ve ever come across. But how did you know Mrs Hague would’ve been taken to the Capel bungalow, and that tonight had to be the night for their finally disposing of her?’
‘When I told Leah that I’d been down to take a look at the area round Capel, in search of clues to the disappearance there of my French blood relation, Philippe Barre, in 1955, she made a point of asking me whether I’d actually been in the bungalow. And here’s where we came in regarding Leah’s incongruous remark about white cliffs in Northumberland: I immediately suspected it had been a flimflam at the time to divert my interest from the real white cliffs near the Capel bungalow.’
‘Right,’ Morris said, ‘their plan wouldn’t have been ready then.’
‘As for the timing of Pat’s planned disappearance,’ I went on, ‘I recalled that Leah had been thoroughly rattled by the Guardian incident at the filling station a fortnight ago – how much did Pat suspect about what Frank and Leah were up to? – so if they were going to move against her, it’d have to be soon. Then, when I drove down to Capel and found that the bungalow had actually been sold very recently, and was to be occupied by the new owners tomorrow, I knew Frank and Leah would have to act immediately. From their point of view, Lord knew when the new owners might turn up – they might even drive over this evening to have a preliminary look at their new home, bring friends to see it – anything might happen . . . In fact, when I did drive down here, I was more than half expecting to find I’d cut it too fine, and that they’d already done Pat in.’
‘When I told Mum about your phone call from the cliffs in Kent,’ Paul said from the front of the car, ‘and that you’d told me that Mrs Hague had disappeared, she smelt a rat straight away . . .’
‘Yes,’ Reet said to me. ‘In view of what Pat had told me about Frank and Leah’s affair, and the fact that your dad had once had a weekend place on the Kent coast, I put two and two together, and rang to warn you to lay off Capel at all costs. I wanted whatever was going on just to be between Frank and Leah and the police.’
‘Though I could’ve wrung Pat’s neck,’ I explained to my ex-wife, ‘in the end I wasn’t really prepared just to sit by and let someone else do it in cold blood, so I thought it was time to come down here, just in case my suspicions turned out to be right. In the event, I’m glad you called in the Law, though, Reet.’
‘And right through Leah’s involvement with Frank Hague,’ Reet went on, ‘you suspected nothing, Seb. Pat told me that Frank had gone out of his way to introduce Leah to you at a party in their flat, yet you saw nothing, but just went on thinking you were God’s gift, and she’d been bowled over by you . . .’
The passionate scorn in my ex-wife’s voice belied the forensic indifference of her actual words up to now, and I understood how Pat, with her sadist’s eye for vulnerability, must have played on this while reporting to Reet – or inventing – the details of my now-punctured romance with Leah. However cheap and foolish I felt, though, I couldn’t resist an even cheaper and more foolish snap at Reet.
‘And it never occurred to you to put me out of my misery?’
I then noticed that my former wife’s eyes were full of angry tears, and I think that, if someone had slipped me a loaded revolver at that moment, I would without hesitation have clapped it against my head and pulled the trigger.
‘That’s rich, Dad!’ Paul exploded from up front. ‘For a kick-off, it was you who made your own bloody misery in the first place, and for seconds you’ve a nerve to expect Mum to act as a, a . . . gooseberry to you and this Leah! Mum’s got her self-respect.’
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry . . .’ was all I could reply to my son’s strictures.
‘God’s gift . . .’ Reet murmured, shaking her head.
Detective Sergeant Morris coughed diplomatically, clearing the air.
‘The other factor that must’ve prompted Hague and Dr Rooney to act a.s.a.p.,’ he added, ‘would’ve been the tape of your voice they made – or rather Dr Rooney must’ve made when she’d been, er . . . with you at night. When they found out it had gone missing, they’d have thought immediately of Mrs Hague, and sure enough we found it in her office at the university.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘once she’d got hold of the tape, she could’ve sprung the plot at any moment. Frank and Leah must’ve been on absolute tenterhooks, with the prospect in front of them of their plan unravelling before their eyes.’
‘But,’ Reet said, ‘Pat with her sick vanity would never have credited Frank with the nerve to do anything drastic against her.’
‘Dr Rooney had nerve enough for both of them,’ Paul put in. ‘D’you know what I think kept Frank with his wife all this time?’
‘What?’ the Detective Sergeant asked.
‘Blackmail. I reckon he was as bent as a clockwork orange, with his boathouse and villa on the Riviera, and just a potty little shop in Wivenhoe to account for it all. Mrs Hague treated him like dirt, and milked him for all he was worth, but he daren’t give her the boot. Because she knew too much, and that’s why he had to do her in; he and Dr Rooney, who wanted his money, too. Why, the Sergeant here greeted him like an old friend when he nicked him tonight.’
‘How does that grab you, Sergeant?’ I asked.
‘No comment,’ Morris said from behind the driving wheel, but his knowing chuckle was all the confirmation we needed for my son’s theory that Pat had held on to Frank by sheer blackmail.
‘There’s just one thing,’ Morris addressed the company a moment or two later. ‘What if Mr Rolvenden hadn’t obliged by arriving in Capel tonight? And what if Mrs Rolvenden hadn’t rumbled Hague and Rooney, and we hadn’t been called out? There wouldn’t have been any incentive for Hague and Rooney to keep Mrs Hague alive, since Mr Rolvenden – the intended patsy – wasn’t going to turn up and be incriminated next to Mrs Hague’s still-warm corpse. What would have been the point of dumping the body in the Capel bungalow if they hadn’t been absolutely sure Mr Rolvenden would turn up?’
‘Simple,’ I said. ‘The police would’ve received an anonymous tip-off about my visit to my father’s late friend Bill Wallace’s old bungalow up the road in Lympne, and the old guy who now lives there would’ve testified he’d seen me in the vicinity on the eve of the discovery of Pat’s dead body.’
‘Neat,’ Morris said. ‘That would’ve done nicely. I can just picture what the investigating officer would’ve asked the old guy as far as identifying marks went: “And can you tell me if this man had anything particular to identify him?”’
‘“One of his eyes was green and the other brown, officer,”’ Paul put in in a senile croak.
‘If it had come to trial,’ the Detective Sergeant said, ‘see if any defending barrister could’ve picked any holes in that one . . .’
‘So,’ I said, ‘if I’d told Leah I’d been inside the Capel bungalow when she’d asked me yesterday, Pat Hague would probably have been dead by now.’
‘Talk about bloody Lady Macbeth . . .’ Paul said.
‘For all her psychological expertise,’ Reet observed, ‘Leah Rooney had the typical academic’s bitterness: to be cleverer than practically anyone else in pretty well any company, but to be skint. Money’s the one gift the gods almost always keep from academics, and the same went for Pat, only she’d hooked Frank, and she was damned sure she was going to hang on to him. That’s my opinion, anyway.’
‘Pat and Leah were fighting over who should own the goose that laid the golden eggs,’ I mused aloud. ‘It was a campus struggle, really . . .’
‘There’s another little point that hasn’t been cleared up yet,’ Morris said. ‘The memo we found among Mrs Hague’s things in her office at the university: “Visit Cwmdonkin Drive.” You may remember I asked you about that, Mr Rolvenden.’
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�It ties in with one of the crosses Leah Rooney put on my grandfather’s map, Sergeant: at the bottom of what’s now Royal College Street in Camden Town.’
‘Mmm . . . go on.’
‘The French poets Rimbaud and Verlaine once stayed there in the 1870s – I saw a plaque to that effect up on the wall of the house.’
‘Where does Mrs Hague come in, then?’
‘She’s writing a book about the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas.’
‘The Under Milk Wood man?’
‘The same, Sergeant: Dylan once called himself the Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive, his boyhood address in Swansea.’
‘Right, I’m with you . . . Mrs Hague would’ve been meaning to visit there for background for her book, and her husband would’ve known that, as well as that she’d have been to Royal College Street, too, to look up the Rimbaud connection.’
‘And,’ I went on, ‘Frank tells Leah about it, so when my grandfather’s map falls into her lap, she decides to mark the spot – with the other Pat Hague sites – with a cross.’
‘And you follow it up, as you followed up the other crosses – in the footsteps of Mrs Hague.’
‘The legend of the Camden Town Stalker is born . . .’ Paul said.
‘They meant to do for you, Mr Rolvenden,’ Morris summed up.
‘Frank’s always resented you, you know,’ Reet said, implacable as Nemesis. ‘Starting at school, where he has to run to you for protection, then, later on, he envies you for what he sees as your easy successes – so neat, then, to combine your comeuppance with the convenience of your going down for Pat’s murder.’
‘Frank’ll fix it . . .’ my son quoted me.
‘You know,’ I couldn’t help saying, ‘it looks as if I’ve been getting up a lot of people’s backs without my knowing it!’
At that, Reet and Paul gave spontaneous hoots of laughter, and, to my astonishment, I felt Reet’s hand briefly squeeze the back of mine. Outside the car window, dawn was beginning to grey up the skies, and a silence fell for a few minutes, each of us alone with his or her thoughts. Presently Detective Sergeant Morris yawned, then spoke, as if to himself.