He rose from the bed and walked across to the chair where he had slung his jacket. He took the Skein of Geese matchbox from its pocket, lit one of the matches and held it to the envelope until the flame had caught. As his own name shrivelled in the heat, he dropped the envelope into the ashtray and watched it burn to a husk, then prodded it into tiny fragments with the extinguished match. With the evidence destroyed, there was some hope of pretending it had never existed. Not that it really mattered. Harry knew his own nature if he knew nothing else. He could not be deflected now.
25
‘I’D LIKE TO check out, please,’ said Harry.
‘Not having breakfast?’ the receptionist responded brightly.
‘No.’
‘Very well, sir.’ Harry could see the realization dawning on her that small talk would be wasted on this guest. ‘Have you made any telephone calls this morning?’
‘No.’
‘Or used the mini-bar?’
‘No.’ (Harry had decided that to pay for entertaining Nadine Cunningham would be to add insult to injury.) ‘That’ll be seventy-four pounds and seventy-five pence then, sir.’
Harry winced. ‘I thought the room was sixty-five a night.’
‘It is, sir. But there’s VAT to be added.’
He sighed, took out another ten pound note and slid the money across the counter, calculating as he did so that he could have eaten adequately and drunk excessively for a fortnight in Lindos for what a night at the Skein of Geese had cost him. Not that he would have felt nearly so hard done by had only his wallet suffered by it. He pocketed his change and turned to go.
‘Oh Mr Barnett—’
‘Yes?’
‘Mr Cunningham asked if you could spare him a few minutes before leaving the hotel. You’ll find him in his office.’
Harry’s first inclination was to ignore the request. All he really wanted to do was walk away from the Skein of Geese and never return. He had no taste for further encounters with either Cunningham or his wife. Then curiosity got the better of him. At the very least, he might leave them with a few choice phrases to remember him by.
‘Ah, Barnett! An early riser, I see.’ Cunningham was leafing through a copy of the Financial Times at his desk amidst a cloud of cigar-smoke, beaming like some genial movie mogul, altogether unaffected, it seemed, by the events of the previous night. Amongst the papers before him stood an empty breakfast cup and an egg-smeared plate, suggesting that his digestion was as robust as his nerve.
‘What do you want?’ said Harry.
‘Ah! The acid tone confirms my worst suspicions. ’Fraid I disgraced myself last night. Should know better. Inexcusable, really. Thought I’d make my peace with you before you left.’
Harry was taken aback. Surely Cunningham did not mean to pretend nothing had happened. ‘Is that all?’ he snapped.
‘More than enough, I’d have said. Can’t apologize too much. Just hope I didn’t say anything to offend you.’
Was it possible, Harry wondered, was it remotely conceivable that Cunningham was an even bigger dupe than he was himself? Surely not. Yet perhaps it was at least a contingency worth testing. ‘You said nothing to offend me, Mr Cunningham.’
‘You mean it? That’s a load off my mind, believe me.’
‘But you did puzzle me. Do you remember mentioning the defenestration of Ramsey Everett?’
‘Oh God.’ Cunningham put a hand to his forehead. ‘I treated you to that, did I?’
‘You really think he was murdered?’
‘Probably not, Barnett, probably not. It’s just a harebrained theory of mine. I’m given to them, you know. My wife thinks I’m paranoid. Perhaps she has a point. Somebody could have murdered Everett, of course – in the circumstances, nothing simpler – but I expect it was just an accident, don’t you?’
‘I don’t know. You were there.’
‘So were we all. Ockleton, Morpurgo, Cornelius, Dysart and half a dozen others too drunk to mention. But there was so much coming and going that anyone of us could have slipped out, pushed Everett through the window and slipped back again without being noticed. Damn it all, we didn’t even notice Everett was missing until a porter tripped over him in the quad, so anything’s theoretically possible. Motive, means, opportunity: the classic combination, isn’t it?’
‘The means and opportunity you’ve established. But what would have been the motive?’
‘Well, I daresay it’s just me flying a kite, but the fact is Everett was too bloody inquisitive for his own good. Planned to be a criminologist after Oxford, you know, and started applying the craft to friends and acquaintances at Breakspear. He’d think nothing of checking up on a fellow’s credentials. Did he do as well at school as he claimed? Was his father really a war hero? That kind of thing. Embarrassed several of us with his discoveries, I can tell you. It struck me he might have come up with something one day that wasn’t just embarrassing but downright scandalous. He was enough of a prig to revel in disgracing any poor sod he dug up some real dirt about. That could have made him a candidate for murder, couldn’t it?’
‘Yes, I suppose it could.’
‘And it raises all sorts of questions about the car crash, doesn’t it?’ Cunningham was warming to this theme now. There was a feverish blush to his cheeks, as if he had seldom found so receptive an audience for his speculations. ‘Perhaps that wasn’t an accident either. Three days before the inquest on Everett’s death makes it a suggestive coincidence, don’t you think?’
‘But it was an accident. You were all drunk. Morpurgo was driving too fast. You said so yourself.’
‘Oh, Morpurgo was speeding, not a doubt of it, and he was pie-eyed, I don’t deny. But he might still have been able to stop in time if he’d braked hard enough. Ockleton and I were both asleep, so neither of us can be sure he didn’t slam on the brakes – only to find they weren’t working. Morpurgo knows, of course, but he’s incapable of telling us. And the car was such a mess nobody would have been looking for a sawn brake cable.’
‘You’re suggesting the car was sabotaged?’
‘I’m suggesting it may have been, yes.’
‘But why?’
‘Suppression of evidence, Barnett. Suppression of evidence.’ He sat back in his wheelchair with the self-satisfied grin of a man proud of his own ingenuity. Then he laughed and took a puff at his cigar. ‘Or it could be just the over-ripe fruit of my suspicious mind. Thanks to this contraption’ – he slapped the arm rest – ‘I’ve had plenty of time to cook up an outlandish conspiracy theory. It could easily be nothing more than my way of coping with the consequences of a senseless accident. That’s what my wife thinks it is. You can take your bloody pick.’
It was no accident. Half an hour later, walking slowly along the road into Haslemere through the mild grey morning, Harry described in his mind another circuit of all the barely linked half-chances that persuaded him Cunningham was right and concluded, not for the first time, that logic and probability were irrelevant. He believed Everett had been murdered for the same reason Cunningham did. He needed to.
Think it through again, he told himself: sift every grain of what you know until you find the answer. Suppose Everett was murdered to prevent him blackening the name of a fellow Breakspearean. Suppose one or more of those who visited Burford three weeks later had witnessed the murder or knew what Everett had discovered. Suppose the car crash was a botched attempt to kill them. If that were so, the answer lay with one of the occupants of Morpurgo’s car. The likeliest was Morpurgo himself, because, though not killed, he had been silenced, whereas both Cunningham and Ockleton could have spoken out afterwards – unless they were too frightened to do so. That left Cornelius. Was his withdrawal from the return journey good luck or self-preservation? Harry’s own half-formed suspicions tended to focus on him because Clare Mallender had been seen mooning over his photograph at the Skein of Geese two weeks before her death. But an alternative explanation had also come to him which he knew he should not
ignore. What if Everett’s putative murderer had been the intended victim of sabotage rather than its practitioner? What if revenge had been the motive rather than the silencing of a witness? If that were so …
A sleek blue BMW purred past him and halted about ten yards ahead. As Harry approached, the nearside front window wound automatically down. He glanced in to find Nadine Cunningham smiling at him from the driver’s seat.
‘Want a lift, Harry?’
‘No thanks.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘The station.’
‘It’s a long walk.’
‘I know.’
‘Then jump in.’ She was wearing a dark tracksuit and was smiling warmly, as if she had simply stopped on her way to the solarium to pick up a neighbour. ‘There’s something I want to tell you.’
Pride, Harry reminded himself, was a luxury he could not afford. He climbed in and they started off. ‘Well?’ he said neutrally.
‘I owe you an apology.’
‘True, but I don’t expect one.’
‘I can see why you reacted the way you did last night. It must have been a shock. The letter, I mean, addressed to you in Greek.’
‘It was. As you intended.’
‘No, I didn’t. That’s what I wanted you to understand. It was no doing of mine. I even questioned the maid. She’s a reliable girl. She’s sure she locked the door after her. Somebody must have picked it. If they’d had a key, they wouldn’t have been so careless as to leave it open, would they?’
‘You’re wasting your breath.’
‘But don’t you see, Harry? It was nothing to do with me, or anybody else on the staff. It must have been an outsider.’
‘You really don’t have to make all this up on my account.’
They turned off sharply to the left and headed up a straight, sloping road between sombre stands of oak and beech. This was not the route Harry recalled from his taxi ride, but, for the moment, he did not protest.
‘I spoke to your husband this morning. He pretended to know nothing about what happened between us.’
‘He wasn’t pretending, Harry. That was genuine. I wanted to thank you – for not enlightening him.’
‘You expect me to believe that?’
‘Yes. But I don’t expect you to believe I was simply looking for a good time. There was an ulterior motive.’
‘Which you’re about to volunteer?’
‘Yes. It’s the least I owe you in the circumstances. You see, I’ve been offered a great deal of money for information which might discredit Alan Dysart: anything scandalous from his past or present. I knew from Rex that his work in Swindon had mystified his contemporaries, so, when you turned up, the one man who might know all about it, it seemed an opportunity too good to miss.’
She cast a brief and dazzling smile towards him, declaring without a hint of shame her duplicity as well as her frankness. Why he did not feel angrier than he did he could not understand. Perhaps it was the sheer blatancy of her confesssion. Perhaps it was the nagging awareness that he too had hoped to gain more than mere gratification from their acquaintance.
‘Don’t look so worried, Harry. I’m not going to try again. If things are so serious that people start picking locks and planting letters, I don’t want to know anymore. That’s strictly out of my league. The money would have—’
‘How much money were you offered?’
‘The figure was negotiable, depending on what I discovered.’
‘And who made the offer?’
‘Are you sure you want to know?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘He’s a reporter from one of the Sunday scandal-sheets.’
Harry might have guessed. ‘Jonathan Minter?’
‘Yes. How did you know?’
So that was Minter’s true objective: character assassination of a popular politician – the modern joumalist’s stock-in-trade. It explained his interest in Heather’s disappearance as well as his offer of money to Harry if he could give him a story. Perhaps it even explained his relationship with Virginia Dysart.
‘He first contacted us last year, shortly after Clare Mallender’s death. Apparently he knew the girl. He said he was researching a piece on Alan Dysart and wanted to ask Rex some questions about their Oxford days. Rex refused to cooperate when he realized that what Minter was really looking for was a scandal – any scandal. Rex worships this government, you see, more than he worships money, which is saying something. So Minter went away with a flea in his ear. He came back a couple of weeks ago and this time approached me rather than Rex. I told him about the defenestration of Ramsey Everett and he gave me five hundred pounds. He called it a down-payment and said there could be a hundred times that sum on offer for the right kind of information about Alan Dysart. The trouble was I didn’t have any – until you arrived.’
They topped a rise and began a slow descent towards the town. The woodland was thinner hereabouts, with the roofs of secluded residences dotted amongst the trees in a landscape of tamed nature and Home Counties opulence. It came as a surprise to Harry that even here cheque-book journalism could make its inroads.
‘I expect you’re thinking: is she really that desperate for fifty thousand pounds? The answer is yes. I have no money of my own, Harry. Everything belongs to Rex. So, if I’m to leave him, I need capital. You might think it’s a sordid way to raise it, but at least it’s quick.’
‘That’s what you want to do, is it – leave him?’
‘On my own terms, yes.’
‘Why?’
‘The usual reasons. I’ve never loved him, but now I’ve started to hate him – for making me the mercenary bitch I am. It’s no excuse, but you may as well know anyway: in Rex’s case, paralysis below the waist really does mean what it says.’
They had reached the centre of Haslemere now and their progress had slowed amidst a tangle of straying pedestrians and lumbering delivery vans. The electronic strains of a synthesized choir could be heard above the rumbling exhausts and Harry, gazing out at the tinsel-hung shopfronts, wondered if it was this jangling ubiquity of Christmas spirit which made his fellow men and women seem so dismally ignoble.
‘It’s not a pretty story, is it, Harry? I’m sorry about it, really I am. Don’t think too badly of me. A girl’s got to look to the future, you know.’
‘As a matter of fact, Nadine, you were wasting your time all along. Minter wouldn’t have paid you a penny for what you might have got out of me. You see, Alan Dysart doesn’t have a secret to hide.’
‘I thought everybody had at least one.’
‘Well, he’s the exception that proves the rule.’
For a second, it crossed Harry’s mind that he could be wrong. Just because he knew and liked Dysart, the man was not necessarily above suspicion. On the other hand, Minter had evidently found no skeleton in his cupboard, for all his efforts to do so. With Virginia Dysart as either his ally or his dupe, only sheer desperation could have made him offer bribes to the likes of Nadine Cunningham.
‘Tell me,’ Harry said as they neared the station, ‘if I hadn’t found that letter last night and thrown you out, would you have told me all this?’
‘No, I wouldn’t.’
‘Then why now?’
‘Because I’m hoping you’ll agree to pass on a message for me to Minter. You will be seeing him, won’t you?’
‘Yes, but—’
‘I thought you would. I want you to tell him I can’t assist him any further and there’s no point him contacting me again. Will you do that for me?’
‘All right. But why so adamant?’
‘Because that letter was a warning, Harry, one I don’t intend to ignore – even if you do.’
They pulled up in the station car park. Nadine kept the engine idling but Harry made no move to climb out. ‘You’re frightened?’ he said incredulously.
‘Yes, I am. Aren’t you?’
‘No. Why should I be?’
‘Isn’t it obvious?
Heather Mallender started asking the same sort of questions you’re asking – and look what happened to her. I didn’t take the idea seriously until last night, but, believe me, I don’t need fifty thousand pounds that badly. To put it bluntly, Harry, I don’t want to disappear. Do you?’
Watching the BMW ease out into the traffic a few minutes later and accelerate away along the road, Harry turned Nadine’s words over in his mind. The point she had made was an obvious one, but, till now, he had succeeded in overlooking it. In searching for Heather, he was faithfully reproducing her movements – and quite possibly her mistakes as well. In following the same clues as her, he might well be heading for the same destination.
26
HARRY THOUGHT WELL on trains. He found their steady, rhythmic progress an aid to concentration and the oddly oblique views of the world they offered – weed-choked farmland at the feet of embankments, gnome-dotted gardens on the edges of towns – ran somehow parallel with his own. He supposed it was due to the railways’ air of resentful obsolescence, combined with their persistent insights into what was so often ignored: abandoned pastures, neglected buildings, all that was overgrown and outmoded, all that was best forgotten.
Like Harry himself. That, of course, was the source of the affinity. He was, in his way, as redundant as the steam engines whose numbers he had avidly collected as a boy in Swindon. All those roaring blurs of hissing steam and belching smoke were gone now to the breaker’s yard. The very sheds where their boilers were forged had been levelled to the ground. Compared with them, however, Harry possessed one crucial advantage: the right to decide that he would not go quietly. He should have felt as tired and inadequate as his age and circumstances dictated, but he did not. He should have been cowed and compromised by fear and debt, but he was not. Instead, halfway between Guildford and Woking, he experienced a curious surge of elation. He was gaining ground on all of them, he had the beating of them yet. From Waterloo station, he phoned the offices of The Courier and somewhat to his surprise, found himself put straight through to Jonathan Minter. Still suffused with a sense of equality to the challenge that confronted him, he slipped deftly into the image he believed the other man would have of him.
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