A Cry from the Dark

by Robert Barnard

  The next day they split up. Sylvia and Oliver went their various ways around Edinburgh, and Bettina went to Glasgow. She had decided years ago, when she was in the city on a publicity trip, that the Burrell Collection was second-rate, so she went to the Kelvin-grove Art Gallery, had a long and delightful lunch on her own with the Times crossword still to do, then went back to the gallery and looked for a second time at the pictures which really interested her. When she got back to Edinburgh neither Ollie nor Sylvia was in their room. Theater or a concert, she decided. Sylvia had worked most of her life as a teacher, but her great love was arts administration—coordinating the work of hundreds of amateur bodies in Australia. Bettina didn’t want another big meal, so she awarded herself an early night. She was, after all, nearly eighty.

  She got down to breakfast late and decided to have the works—the full English, or British, breakfast, starting with porridge and continuing with a fry-up. It was a long time since she had eaten, and she made up for it. She was on to the toast and marmalade when Sylvia came into the breakfast room, looked around for her, then came over and bent over her table, her voice urgent.

  “Bettina, you’re wanted at the desk.”

  Bettina wiped her mouth.

  “At the desk? What on earth can that be for?”

  “I don’t know. I was just coming in from a morning walk when they hailed me because they know we’re together. It’s someone on the phone from London, and I think I heard the word ‘police.’ ”

  “Oh Lord, Mark can’t have been up to his tricks again, can he?”

  “Surely they’d want Ollie if he had, wouldn’t they?”

  Bettina was beginning to be worried. Leaning a little on Sylvia’s arm, she left the breakfast room and went out to reception.

  “I can put the call through to the box over there if you like,” said the receptionist. “It’s more private.”

  Bettina nodded and she and Sylvia went over.

  “Yes? Bettina Whitelaw speaking,” she said.

  “That is Mrs. Whitelaw of Thirteen Holland Park Crescent, is that right?” asked a young male voice.

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “I’m afraid there’s been a break-in at your flat, Mrs. Whitelaw.”

  “Oh Lord. What’s missing?”

  “That we don’t know. Nothing obvious. We’ll need your help on that. But I’m afraid the lady in the flat—”

  “Katie? What’s happened to Katie?—”

  “I’m sorry, but she’s in hospital. She has bad head injuries. She’s not expected to survive, I’m afraid.”

  Bettina whispered, “I’ll be there. I’ll come as soon as I can,” and put down the phone.

  Chapter 12

  Taken by Force

  Bettina sat in the plane, shaking her head at all the offers of food and drink, deep in thought and memories. She was glad to be on her own with them. Sylvia had volunteered to come with her, but that was not what Bettina wanted.

  “No, you stay for your last day, as we’d intended. I wouldn’t want Ollie left on his own. I haven’t got my old brain around what has happened yet. If I need support and comfort it will be after I’ve grasped the details, and decided whether I’m—”

  “You don’t think you’re responsible, do you?” said Sylvia, a schoolmistressy note in her voice. “That it was your fault? You said yourself that she volunteered—”

  “I know, I know. Let’s wait and see, shall we? Just come with me to the airport and find out if there are any spare places. The police are contacting the airline to ask them to give me priority. I do so want to be home quickly.”

  So here she was, almost without registering what was happening, on the ridiculously short flight from Edinburgh to Heathrow. The thought of Katie fighting for her life in hospital—if she hadn’t already lost that fight—tormented her. Why hadn’t she simply refused her offer? Katie would have been offended, but it wouldn’t have altered their friendship—their barbed friendship, in which Katie rejoiced in the office of the candid friend. She’d always made it clear that she preferred Peter, and perhaps she’d been right. He was one of her own, spoke her language, and perhaps was the nicer person.

  But Peter, so relaxed and kind on the surface, had always put his own needs and well-being first. And selfishness always increased as a person got older. Probably her own acceptance of Katie’s offer had been selfish—to save herself further trouble. Easy options got more attractive the older you got, the more effort every action involved. And the more it didn’t seem to matter whether they turned out well or not.

  Bettina put herself in the dock. She had known that there was some kind of threat to the flat, and thereby possibly to herself. Someone had been in before she left for Edinburgh. Why hadn’t she—rather than accepting Katie’s offer—employed a security firm, or a flat-sitter? Why hadn’t she asked someone like Mark to stay there for the four nights that she would be away? He had a mobile, and would not have been out of the reach of any of his potential employers.

  But then she grimaced. She disliked the thought of Mark having the freedom of her flat. She disliked the thought of Mark full stop. She knew Sylvia considered she was unfair to him, and admitted to herself that she might be. But the truth was that he was associated in her mind with Sam Battersby, with Sergeant Malley, and men of that type. Even if he got the Nobel Peace Prize, or for that matter the prize for astrophysics, those were the associations that would remain around him in her mind, the men she would class him with.

  “I blame myself,” said Bettina, after she had settled into the car in the police compound at Heathrow and had begun the drive through hideous suburb after hideous suburb toward central London. Being met at the airport by a young policewoman had given her a feeling somewhere between being a VIP and being a prime suspect.

  “Why is that?” the capable young woman asked, keeping her eyes on the road.

  “How stupid can you get—asking an old woman to flat-sit for you when you’re away?”

  “Mrs. Jackson is a friend of yours, isn’t she?”

  “So she’s still alive?”

  “Yes, but very poorly.”

  “She’s a fighter. Please God she pulls through…Yes, she is a friend of mine. And that makes it stupider, and nastier too: how could I get Katie involved in something like this, when I knew that someone—God knows who it can be—had been showing an interest in the flat?”

  “Yes—we’d had a hint of that from Mrs. Tuckett.”

  “Oh, was it Clare put you onto my being in Edinburgh?”

  “Yes. Mr. Seddon put us onto her, and Mrs. Tuckett told us where you were staying.”

  Bettina looked at her, her forehead creased.

  “Mr. Seddon? Peter? How did you get in touch with Peter? I thought he was in Bournemouth.”

  “No, not at all. It was he who went round to your flat, and thought there was something wrong when he couldn’t get an answer. He went back a second time a few hours after, and when the same thing happened, he called us.”

  “I see.”

  But she didn’t really see, and they remained largely silent until they pulled up in front of Bettina’s apartment building in Holland Park Crescent. It was a substantial nineteenth-century house with five apartments carved out of it, and at the top of the four-step flight up to the front door there stood a policeman. He was witness to the fact that the powers that be at Scotland Yard had recognized that Bettina was a pretty well-known novelist, and the media could well get interested in the news that an intruder of some kind had battered an old woman who had been sleeping in the distinguished writer’s bed.

  “Is Murchison here?” the policewoman asked the uniformed guard. He nodded.

  “Arrived back ten minutes ago. Waiting for you.”

  The policewoman led Bettina up her own stairs and into her own flat. Bettina had just time to register that there were savage cuts around the lock when she was introduced to a man pushing fifty, with a little graying mustache, rimless spectacles, wearing a
smart, dark blue suit.

  “Mrs. Whitelaw? I’m sorry to have to bring you back from—”

  “How’s Katie?”

  “Holding her own, but only just, I’m afraid. Her age is against her. You mustn’t hold out too many hopes—”

  “That’s just what I must do. Where was she attacked? In bed?”

  “No. She was found in the doorway there.” They were inside the flat now, and he pointed to the door between the sitting room and the study. “She was—hit around the head.” Bettina had a strong sense of his holding something back, but for the moment she let it pass.

  “I noticed that the main door from the landing had been forced.”

  “Yes,” said Murchison, and Bettina had that feeling of caution once again. “We’re having an expert in to examine that. If you were just to look around the flat, at the most obvious things, is there anything you notice that is different? Moved, for example, or maybe missing?”

  Bettina’s eyes were such that she had to walk around the sitting room, looking at chairs, tables, cupboards, and walls. Then she did the same in the study and the two bedrooms.

  “There is some disturbance on the desk in the study,” she announced when she had concluded. “And one picture missing.”

  “Yes—we’d noticed a gap, and the brighter wall-paper,” Murchison said quietly. They went over to the place near the door out to the landing. “What was there?”

  “An Australian aboriginal painting by John Mawurndjurl. I’ll write the name down for you. A bark painting—very intricate and geometrical—but not an abstract: more and more shapes emerge the more you look at it.”

  “But not especially valuable, surely?”

  Bettina raised her eyebrows at the assumption.

  “Not the most valuable I have, certainly. But I bought it some time in the mid-eighties—because I liked it, but also on Hughie’s advice. Hughie is my friend who’s an art critic. He says it must be worth now many times what I paid for it. You should talk to Hughie—that’s Eugene Naismyth. You can contact him through the Sunday Telegraph, or I could give you his home address.”

  Murchison nodded, taking everything in and filing it.

  “Right, I will. First things first, though. Do you know of anyone who would want to kill you, or injure you, or steal from you?”

  “No to the first two. But steal—”

  “Mrs. Whitelaw mentioned to me someone showing an interest in her flat,” said the policewoman. Bettina looked at her approvingly.

  “That’s what it was. Shortly before I went to Edinburgh I was sure someone had been in here. Nothing was missing, but things had been moved in the study.”

  “Sure?”

  “Absolutely sure.” Murchison nodded. He trusted her, she thought. She was pleased at gaining the trust of a calm if limited mind that could weigh evidence.

  “Now what about keys to the flat?” Murchison went on.

  “But surely he—” Bettina stopped short. She mustn’t imagine she could teach him his job. “Well, Katie had one for a start.”

  “Anyway? Not just given her while she was flat-sitting for you this week?”

  “Anyway. She still did work for me now and then. And Clare has one—Clare Tuckett, my agent.”

  “Yes, she’s told us that. I’m a bit hazy about agents. Why would your agent need a key to the flat?”

  “She’s a friend as well as my agent. I probably gave her one when I was away but wanted her to do something here, or collect something.”

  Murchison practically tut-tutted.

  “Anyone else?”

  “Mark, my nephew. He stayed here for a bit when he arrived from Australia, and I had one cut for him then.”

  “And in all these cases you never asked for the key back?”

  There was despair in his voice that decades of trying to educate the overtrusting public had had such meager effect.

  “No, I—” began Bettina weakly.

  “And all these people had a key to the front door as well as to the flat?”

  “Well, one of them would be no use without the other.”

  “And all these keys could have spawned other sets of keys, if anyone close to the holder thought it was worthwhile to get one made?”

  “Yes, I suppose so. You think I’ve been silly…Oh, Peter may still have one. Peter Seddon. He was my partner many years ago. Partner as in lover.”

  “He didn’t use it when he came round. He called us.”

  “Well, maybe he’d lost it, or given it back to me sometime. I’m afraid I don’t remember.”

  She saw, plain as the back of her hand, a thought going across Murchison’s face: maybe Peter thought it unwise to show the police he had his own key. It had become obvious that the police thought the marks on the front door were a blind—a red herring. But perhaps they could explain why anyone close to her would want to steal one of her aboriginal paintings—worth something, certainly, but far from the most valuable paintings in her collection.

  There were footsteps on the stairs and a knock on the door. A police rider was there, helmet under his arm, a parcel of books in one hand. It made an odd picture, but Murchison merely nodded his thanks and closed the door.

  Bettina’s eyes went to the pile of books. Immediately she recognized The Heart of the Land. Murchison saw her recognition and looked a little shamefaced.

  “When we found out who lived here—yesterday afternoon it was, when I talked to Mr. Seddon—I asked the library to put together anything they could get hold of about you. That’s one of yours, is it?”

  “That’s right. One of my Australian ones. About to be filmed. I had to stop writing about my own country because I was getting too remote from it…And this is a book of interviews by a man who specializes in interviewing women. It was the only time I’ve ever enjoyed being interviewed, as a matter of fact…And here’s a history of Australian literature. I think they gave me all of a page, which is probably more than I deserve…” Bettina paused, surprised. “What on earth is this?”

  She was looking at a copy of Hi! magazine, a cheap weekly that specialized in celebrities and paid good money for home interviews with them, lavishly illustrated. Film and television stars, footballers and other athletes in photogenic sports, aristocrats, rich businessmen, and game show hosts—these were the usual grist for their mill. It was a magazine that did not aim high.

  “What can a common little mag like this have to do with me?” asked Bettina, looking disgustedly at a cover picture of Joan Collins, happy at last with a new man. Superintendent Murchison took the magazine up.

  “Joan Collins, of course,” he said, flicking through the pages. “Andy Cole, the Duchess of Westminster, that Australian barmaid from the Queen Vic, Princess Michael of Kent—”

  “The Queen Vic? Is that EastEnders?”

  “Yes. She’s out of the series now. What’s her name?”

  “Is it Kerry Probyn?”

  “Yes.” He’d found the place and opened up the magazine. “About to start filming The Heart of the Land.”

  On the first page there was an Armstrong-Jonesy portrait of Kerry herself. On the second page there was a picture of Kerry and Bettina around the coffee table, as close as Bettina ever allowed herself to get in the course of the interview. “About to star in a major film,” said the rubric at the top of the page. Murchison flicked over. There was another picture, of Kerry standing at the very door they were now standing by, and to her left was the bark picture by John Mawurndjurl where now there was a mere gap.

  “Pushy little bitch,” said Bettina disgustedly.

  When she had talked to Murchison for some time it occurred to Bettina that she could not—and certainly didn’t want to—spend the night in her own flat. The thought of sleeping, or tossing sleepless, in the bed from which Katie had been awakened and gone to the brutal attack which maybe would still prove her death made her gag. Unwilling to interfere with the SOCO investigations she went downstairs to her best friend in the flats—Nick Sza
bo, a refugee from the 1956 Hungarian uprising, who had proved to have a Midas touch on the stock exchange. He had been in the flats almost as long as Bettina and remembered the scandal when she had taken up with a bus driver.

  “Hello, Bettina—still bringing trouble on us,” he said genially when he found her at his door.

  “No, Nick. Someone is bringing trouble on me,” she said firmly. “Or on poor Katie. Can I use your phone? I need somewhere to rest my head.”

  “I suppose you do. Are you going to the Prince Leopold?”

  “If they have got a room for me.”

  “They’ll find one.”

  The Prince Leopold, one of the few family hotels left in that or any other part of London, had figured in one of Bettina’s later novels—one that had contained sharp portraits of all sorts of literary figures including Kingsley Amis, Muriel Spark, and Ted Hughes. Bettina had been a favored client ever since, had stayed there whenever she had had the decorators in, and had parked there any visitor she did not care to have in her own flat. They had heard the news of the break-in, were very concerned, and had already penciled her in for one of their best rooms.

  “Come as soon as you like,” Harry on the desk said. “Get away from all the nastiness.”

  “I may just do that,” said Bettina. “I’m only in the way here.”

  An hour later, having packed a small suitcase under the watchful eye of the policewoman who had driven her from Heathrow, she was installed in a small suite in the Leopold with an unasked-for pot of tea, a plateful of her favorite crab sandwiches, and a cake stand with the sorts of goodies they did particularly well at the Prince Leopold.

  “Got to pamper you a bit,” said Harry, the son of the house, who brought the tray up himself. “Now, are you in hiding or in retreat here, or are you receiving visitors and phone calls?”

  “Being in retreat sounds marvelous,” said Bettina, “but I can’t hide from what has happened. The police know I’m here, so I suppose I’m available to them or anyone else who calls.”