Summer's Lease

by John Mortimer

  She was as clear in her mind, as detached as though she had taken some drug which made the heat, the tiredness, the pain of her period recede or seem to belong to someone else with whom she wasn’t particularly concerned. She was as excited as she had always been when the great detective summons the suspects to the library and starts, slowly and logically, to reveal the truth until the moment when the guilty party, the least probable suspect, starts from a leather armchair shouting, ‘Damn you, you’ll never prove it!’ She waited almost motionless and for a long time.

  Then she heard footsteps in the corridor and voices. There was a conversation in Italian about a key; two men were talking. The door was unlocked and Buck Kettering stood looking at her. ‘Bene, grazie,’ he said to some unseen motel attendant. Then he shut the door behind him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  ‘Mr Kettering. You are Mr Kettering, aren’t you?’

  She had stood up when he came into the room, an act of recognition for the man she had thought about so often and pursued so relentlessly. And now he was there, between her and the door, standing solidly and barring her escape. Whatever she had in mind, she now had no alternative but to go through with it.

  ‘I’ve got a photograph of you outside the café in Siena. Giovanna said it was you.’ She called her evidence quickly, before he could deny his name. ‘I’m Molly Pargeter. You know, I’ve taken your house.’

  He stood silently, watching her. He was unshaven with the heavy-lidded eyes she had seen in so many paintings and his reddish-brown hair was brushed back without a parting. He was wearing his red shirt, linen trousers and a pair of leather sandals. He stood with his feet apart, as though waiting for an attack. The room seemed colder and she felt what she had not bargained for, real danger, and not the secondhand fear of detective stories. It was as though she had climbed to the top of a mountain and the only way down was dark and precipitous.

  ‘Did she send you?’

  ‘She?’

  ‘My wife. Did she send you?’ His voice was low and husky, still with traces of an East London accent mixed with the sounds of the Italian he had become used to speaking.

  ‘Of course not.’ She did her best to smile and got no response. ‘I don’t even know your wife. The only person I met at ‘La Felicità’ was Bill Fosdyke.’

  He looked at her, still without moving, as though the name meant nothing to him. ‘Why did you come here?’

  To tell him that she knew. That was the reason and some time, very soon, she would have to do it. But not yet. Not when he was standing so imperturbably between her and the door to the outside world, her life with Hugh and the children, and the Tapscotts who seemed ordinary now.

  ‘I came,’ she tried to say casually, as though they had just met at a party, ‘to see the pictures. You suggested that, didn’t you? In one of the letters. I wanted to see the Pieros. Particularly that picture.’ She looked towards the postcard of ‘The Flagellation’. His eyes also flickered towards it for a moment and then returned to the business of watching her.

  ‘No pictures in this dump,’ he told her. ‘It’s not exactly an art gallery.’

  ‘I came here to see you. I thought I should tell you what I’ve discovered.’

  ‘What’ve you discovered, Mrs Pargeter?’

  ‘About Bill Fosdyke.’ After so long she couldn’t help herself and had to say it. ‘About how he died.’ It was as though she had been forced to blurt out something obscene.

  ‘They say he got drunk and fell into an empty swimmingpool. That’s what I heard.’

  ‘Yes,’ she told him. ‘I heard that too.’ Then there was a silence. She couldn’t, for the moment, go on with the shockingly intimate business of accusing him.

  Then he said, ‘And how did you know where to find me?’

  ‘Rosie Fortinbras.’ She was compelled to be honest.

  ‘Rosie told you?’ He frowned.

  ‘No, she didn’t tell me. But I guessed she came here to see you.’

  ‘She’s an old friend.’

  ‘An old friend of mine too.’ That seemed to reassure him. He began to smile at her and she knew it was the smile that had launched a thousand dangerous deals when he ran the dark side of Arnold Leadbetter’s business.

  ‘I’m not too keen on my wife finding out where I am. Not just at present.’

  ‘I guessed that.’

  ‘There’s plenty of reasons for a man not being too keen on his wife finding out where he is.’

  ‘I’m sure there are.’

  ‘To be perfectly honest with you…’ And that, she thought, was how the crookedest dealing started, with a smile and a protest of honesty. ‘I’m not staying here under my own name. That’s sad, isn’t it? Sad when I tell you what I think of my house and my children. And my wife. What I still think of my wife. But that’s how bad things have got between me and Sandra. And it’s no use trying to hide it.’

  ‘I know you’re calling yourself Arnold. After your old boss.’

  ‘Did Rosie tell you that too?’

  ‘Yes.’ She lied, not wanting to alarm him by her powers of deduction, hoping that he would move away from the door, and wondering, if he did so, if she could leave him, her task unfinished and the truth untold. And then, to her considerable surprise, he offered her a drink. ‘Take a glass of brandy, Mrs Pargeter?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He disappeared behind the shower curtain and she heard his voice. ‘You like the Pieros, then?’ Her way of escape was open but she had to answer him.

  ‘I’m not sure “like” is the right word.’

  ‘And that one…’ He came out from behind the curtain carrying two tumblers. He nodded at the postcard as he half filled them with Stock brandy. ‘Undoubtedly the world’s greatest small picture?’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand it.’

  ‘Oh, what don’t you understand?’

  It seemed extraordinary to her that they should be standing together, in that bedroom, discussing a work of art. ‘I don’t know exactly what’s going on.’

  ‘You surprise me, Mrs Pargeter.’ He had become more cheerful since he had, it seemed, decided to use his charm to disarm her. ‘I thought you understood everything. Do sit down. You’re quite safe. It’s not gran confort but we don’t have bugs in the furniture.’

  He handed her a glass tumbler and she sat bolt upright on a fragile chair with a black plastic seat. He sat on the end of the bed and appeared to be laughing at her. He lifted his glass and said, ‘Here’s to marriage. Yours’s going all right, I sincerely hope?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, impatient at his way of deflecting her purpose. ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘You didn’t come here with your husband?’

  ‘I came alone. I came to see you.’

  ‘Drink up, Mrs Pargeter. Then perhaps we can find out why.’ Molly did as she was told. Then he thought of something which seemed to come as a relief to him. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve had some trouble with the water at “La Felicità”?’ She was no more than a complaining tenant, such as he’d been accustomed to deal with all his life.

  ‘Well, of course we have.’ Molly was impatient; the brandy gave her courage and the words poured out of her. ‘That must have been a bit of mistaken enthusiasm considering how deeply your family are all involved in the water business. I’m sure it wasn’t meant to happen, any more than the pool was meant to be drained at the house Bill Fosdyke was looking after. That Claudio doesn’t seem to be very efficient. He even gets letters delivered to the wrong people. The water business is all over. I didn’t come all this way to complain about that.’

  ‘Then why…?’

  ‘My father wrote an article about Italian women.’

  ‘Is that what you came to tell me?’

  ‘He says,’ she went on doggedly, ‘that they like their husbands to be ridiculously jealous. Mrs Kettering, that is, Sandra, she’s Italian, isn’t she? I wonder how she felt when you found out about her and Bill Fosdyke.’ The names, so
familiar to her, had gone round and round in her head, changing places, during the past three weeks. ‘He was quite a handsome sort of man, I suppose. If you didn’t mind the squint. And tremendously anxious to oblige. No wonder you wanted him lost and gone forever.’

  He was looking at her, unsmiling now; the coldness had returned. ‘What did I want?’ he asked, hardly above a whisper.

  ‘Just what you wrote in your list left behind in the Kenneth Clark book on Piero. At least it was there until you came back and removed it.’

  ‘Go on,’ he said, no louder than before. So she began, methodically, to inflict his own story upon him.

  ‘I’m sure you called on Fosdyke at that house to warn him off Sandra. I suppose you got into a fight. Two men fighting over a woman. When he fell in that way it may have been an accident. Really, I know no more about it except that you killed him.’ She had said it now, the great obscenity. She caught her breath as he stood up and took a step towards her; a man, she had now realized, who was capable of killing.

  ‘You know nothing of the sort!’

  ‘Then why are you hiding?’ She could not stop herself arguing with him. ‘It’s not just to get away from your wife.’

  He looked at her for a long time, apparently considering the weapons he might use against her. Then he said, ‘What do you expect, Mrs Pargeter? Do you expect money?’

  She felt the flush rising to her neck and she looked at the dusty point of her sensible white shoe. ‘Of course not!’

  ‘I’m only staying here while certain things are being arranged. I’ll be getting money in a day or two now.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ She had become brave enough to rebuke him. And he looked at her, apparently unable to understand her refusal of cash so easily earned.

  ‘Then what have you come for?’ She could scarcely believe that she saw his eyes flicker towards the awful, hard, pillowless, three-quarter-sized motel bed.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I want nothing. Truthfully.’

  All his manoeuvring was over. He stood quite still, the tumbler of brandy in his hand, his strong feet in sandals planted on the ground, and seemed to look out at nothing. He was the boy from Whitechapel, prepared to do anything to bring off a deal, but he was also Buck Kettering who had been struck speechless by the paintings he saw in Italy, who had made his house beautiful, who had lived in it like the king of a small country until his throne had been usurped and he was left an exile in an appalling motel. And there she had come, to flog him with her knowledge.

  ‘I believe I can understand what you felt, if that’s any sort of comfort to you.’

  She knew that, having failed to make any sort of a deal with her, he had no idea what to do next.

  ‘We’ll be back in England in a couple of days,’ she told him. ‘You’ve got nothing to worry about as far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘Nothing.’ She couldn’t tell if it were a statement or a question.

  ‘I haven’t told anyone about this visit. And I shan’t. The friends I’m with know nothing about it.’

  ‘Friends?’ He looked at her with mistrust.

  ‘Only some people’ – she did her best to sound reassuring – ‘who drove me over to see the paintings.’ She finished her drink, feeling a shot of sweet fluid at the back of her throat and a dizziness when she stood up.

  ‘You’re leaving?’ He seemed, then, to fear being alone.

  ‘Yes. You won’t see me again. Whatever secrets you have are perfectly safe with me.’

  ‘Whatever secrets…’ he repeated. ‘How can I let you go?’

  ‘Easily. I haven’t come to make trouble.’

  ‘I still don’t understand. What have you come to make?’

  ‘Sure. Goodbye, Mr Kettering.’

  She walked past him then and went to open the door. She felt his eyes burning, heavy-lidded behind her but when she turned back to look at him he was again sitting on the end of the bed and seemed unable to move. She thought, he’ll sit there for a long time, too tired to take the next step, quite uncertain of what the next step should be.

  ‘I can find my own way out.’

  He smiled at her faintly and let her go.

  As she left the Motel Vallombrosa and walked beside the road which led out of the town, she was surprised to see, coming towards her under the trees, the pale figures of her guides, the Tapscotts.

  ‘Great Scot,’ Nicholas greeted her, ‘there you are!’

  ‘We looked everywhere for you. In some of the restaurants.’

  ‘Why?’ Molly was worried about news of the children. ‘Nothing’s happened?’

  ‘Oh, absolutely nothing. Then we decided to do a tour outside the walls.’

  ‘Not madly picturesque out here, is it? You might as well be in Basingstoke.’

  ‘There’s really no point in Italy,’ Connie said, ‘when it’s not being picturesque.’

  ‘Did you find somewhere decent for dinner?’

  ‘I just walked and looked at things. I didn’t really bother about dinner.’

  ‘So it’s back to the hotel then. Shall we wander?’

  Molly allowed the Tapscotts to lead her back through the town. Connie said, ‘Nicholas thinks there’s no need to rush madly in the morning. We’ve done all we came for. Do you want to see anything else?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Molly told her. ‘Nothing else at all.’

  They parted in the hotel. As she undressed, Molly heard, through the thin wall between their adjoining rooms, Nicholas telephoning, although she could make out no words.

  The ringing had echoed again in the marble-halled Roman flat. When she picked up the telephone Sandra Kettering learnt that her husband had gone to ground in a grotty motel called Vallombrosa and might still be there the next day if she wished to see him. Mrs Kettering, who had no intention of ever seeing her husband again, was grateful for the information and thanked the Tapscotts warmly. They had acted, she said, like true friends. Later she made further telephone calls and other arrangements for someone to visit Buck Kettering.

  Molly fell into a deep and dreamless sleep as soon as her head touched the pillow. She was exhausted as though by an act of love.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The storm which had been threatening, summoning up its forces, bumping and trundling about the sky all the previous day, burst over Tuscany in the afternoon, washing dusty terraces, replenishing wells and making families abandon wet swimming-towels and saturated lilos by the side of pools to take refuge indoors, play Scrabble and think of England. Headaches were cured, wet lizards slid under stones and unexpected holes were found in the roof of ‘La Felicità’.

  Rain didn’t fall in Urbino. There Molly woke late, feeling unusually well and rested. She bathed and dressed slowly and, when Mrs Tapscott knocked at her door, asked if they could do some shopping before they started home. Walking through the streets their roles were reversed. It was Molly who, apparently released from all anxiety, chattered endlessly. The Tapscotts were frequently silent and Nicholas no longer looked at his watch, nor did he make sure that they kept up to schedule. As they walked round the walls a police car went wailing past them, followed by an ambulance driven at speed. At last they got started and Nicholas thought that they might as well have another lunch in Sansepolcro. ‘With any luck, we’ll get back too late to paint. Won’t have to discover our complete lack of hidden talent until tomorrow.’

  Late that afternoon Nancy’s chauffeur arrived to take Haverford to the Villa Baderini for dinner and to stay the night. He splashed out to the car, wearing his panama hat at a rakish angle and carrying a small suitcase. ‘My respects to Molly Coddle when she gets back to the family circle,’ he shouted at Hugh, ‘and I hope to relieve her of all responsibility for my continued existence.’

  When he arrived at the Villa the door was opened unbidden by the sallow manservant, who had clearly heard the car crunching the gravel, and Haverford was swallowed in the shadows. The curtains flapped at the tall windows; outside the c
ypresses bent in the wind and the swimming-pool was lashed into a miniature storm at sea. Climbing the staircase under the domed and painted ceiling, with a man in white gloves carrying his suitcase in front of him, Haverford felt that he was entering into his inheritance at last. There was no sign of Nancy in the silent house and when he was shown into his room he asked in his phrase-book Italian, ‘Dov’è la camera della Signora Leadbetter?’

  ‘La Signora sta dormendo.’

  ‘Sl. Capito. Ma dov’è sua camera da letto? Dov’è?’ he repeated, when the man seemed reluctant to come out with the information.

  ‘A destra,’ the man said finally, waving a hand in its general direction. ‘In fondo al corridoio.’ He then left Haverford with a token bow and an expression of deep contempt.

  Not in the least put off by his reception Haverford arrived in the drawing-room in the very best of spirits. He had bathed in the marble, gold-tapped tub adjoining his room and anointed himself with a liberal selection of the colognes and after-shave lotions there displayed. He had enjoyed a siesta under the silken canopy of a four-poster bed topped with the Baderini escutcheon and awoken to switch on the lights, one fixed on the end of a huge candle in the hands of the Baroque statue of a Cardinal, another gently illuminating the cream and rose coloured flesh of a pair of Marie Laurencin girls over the fireplace. He wondered why anyone possessed of the wealth contained in the house should bother herself with a small business concerning the water supply, but told himself that the rich keep rich by concerning themselves in small businesses and, in any event, he had always preferred to treat the process by which money is made as being too tedious for his attention. He dressed himself with considerable care in his off-white suit and a mauve shirt with a pink bow-tie. He sprinkled a drop or two more of the eau-de-Cologne on the pink summit of his head, combed what was left of his hair and considered, as he glanced in a gilded and cherub-festooned mirror, that he hardly looked a day over sixty.

  After all these preparations he was not best pleased to find Prince Tosti Castelnuovo occupying a minute corner of the sofa and reading Country Life. However, he said buona sera in as pleasant a manner as possible and requested a gin e Schweppes from the manservant.