The Empty House

by Michael Gilbert

His instincts had been correct. The newcomer turned in through the front gate and approached the house. Here he paused, and Peter, who was not more than five yards away, could see that he was fumbling in his pocket for – yes, no question. It was keys.

  The opening of the front door let out a thin fan of light and confirmed Peter’s suspicions. The visitor to Number 8, the Chine was the Exeter solicitor Roland Highsmith.

  As soon as the door had closed, Peter was on the move again. He wanted to get away from the house as quickly and as quietly as possible. Five minutes later he was back on the sea front.

  The thin rind of the new moon was showing over the horizon. He walked slowly, listening to the sea lapping the shingle. He was trying to sort out the events of the last few days and put them into some sort of perspective.

  He had no doubt at all that he had found Dr. Wolfe. He did not give himself overmuch credit for it. The long chain of coincidence which had led him to Cryde Bay was too thin and too fragile for self-congratulation.

  What he was in no position to appreciate at that point was the full extent to which blind chance had helped him. He had no idea that there were three different organisations anxious to keep track of his movements; and that he had side-stepped all of them. For the moment, he was off their screens. They scanned for him in vain.

  He was in limbo.

  13

  “Ilfracombe?” said Captain Andy. “It’ll take you all of two hours. Along the coast road most of the way. Porlock, Lynton, Combe Martin. A very nice run. As long as the weather holds up.”

  “It looks all right at the moment.”

  “It looks very nice at the moment,” agreed the Captain, casting a speculative eye out of the window. “Almost too good. We had a week of rain and storm. Now we get a few bright days. Like the eye of the hurricane. Worse to come.”

  “The wireless said, ‘set fair.’”

  “They’ll say anything. The government pays them to keep people happy.” A telephone call to the garage at Dunster had assured him that his car was ready. When he got there, it seemed to him that the gnomelike mechanic was worried about something. “She is all right, isn’t she?”

  “The car? Surely, she’s right as rain. It’s your friends I was wondering about. Perhaps I did wrong.”

  “My friends?”

  “Turned up an hour after you’d left. Two young men. Foreign, I thought. When they saw the Savoia, they started asking about you.”

  “Did they give any names?”

  “No. Just said they were friends. Motoring down the coast on a holiday. They said they recognised the car. It’s not a common make. They wondered if it belonged to their friend Manciple.”

  “But—” said Peter.

  “But,” agreed the mechanic. “I knew, because you told me, you’d hired it from Key’s Garage at Bridgetown, so I thought ‘funny.’”

  “Very funny,” said Peter, with a cold feeling in the pit of his stomach. “What did you tell them?”

  “I said they were quite right, it did belong to Mr. Manciple. I said as how you’d left it here for a proper overhaul. Might take several days. You’d told me you were taking the train back to Taunton so you could switch onto the main line for Barnstaple, where you were planning to stop until the car was ready. After they’d gone, I did wonder if I’d done right. Maybe they were friends of yours.”

  “You did absolutely right,” said Peter, “and I can’t tell you how grateful I am.”

  “Well, they were foreigners, see, and telling lies. I didn’t like the look of them. I should keep clear of them, if I were you.”

  Excellent advice, thought Peter, as he drove the car, now purring happily, through the wooded hills of the North Devon Coast toward Lynton. Excellent advice, but how did one follow it? How could one keep clear of enemies who followed your car with unseen eyes, never more than an hour behind it? When he reached a point near the top of Kipscombe Hill where the road ran out from under the trees, he turned into a rutted lane, drove on for fifty yards, stopped, and walked back to the main road.

  Three cars had passed him in the last half-hour. None had overtaken him. He sat down, hidden among the heather at the roadside, and waited. A baker’s van passed him without stopping. Ten minutes later two girls on bicycles, with large rucksacks on the carriers, came toiling up the hill in the other direction. After that, nothing except the singing of the birds and the humming of bees.

  A loud and insistent humming, growing in strength. A helicopter swung into view from the south – no bee this, but a surly cockchafer. It passed almost directly over where Peter was sitting and continued out over the sea. It had the look of an Army machine.

  Peter walked back to the car and continued on his way. He was giving only half his mind to his driving. The other half was trying to recollect whether a helicopter had come over him when he had parked his car outside Exeter four days before. He had stopped there for a considerable time and had been so deeply engrossed with private speculations that he would probably not have noticed if a wing of heavy bombers had flown over him. The characteristic square-cut top of the Savoia would have been easy to pick up from a helicopter at three or four hundred feet . . .

  A horn blared, and he realised that he had strayed absentmindedly onto the righthand side of the road.

  At Ilfracombe a policeman directed him to the address he had been given. It was in the southern part of the town, well away from the boardinghouses and the hotels. It was where the residents lived, retired folk for the most part, happy to spend the evening of their lives in the small, detached houses, each with its small, neat garden.

  As soon as Peter lifted the latch of the gate, a curtain twitched in the front window and a face appeared. By the time he reached the door, it was open and Mr. Garland was standing there glaring at him. Peter was not worried. The glare, as he knew, was a preliminary defensive gambit, developed by Mr. Garland in his dealings with generations of schoolboys.

  He said, “I don’t suppose you remember me, sir. I’m—”

  “Wait,” said Mr. Garland. Peter could see his lips moving as though in prayer. “Mathematics Manciple. Correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “I have to employ these little mnemonics. It would be difficult, otherwise, to recall the names of more than a thousand boys. Sometimes they are obvious. Pimples Piries. It’s the first two letters which are significant. There was a boy with a bad stutter. By happy coincidence, his name was Stutchbury. Before your time, I think. Come in, come in. I am always glad to see old boys. Quite a few of them come to visit me.”

  He led the way into the front room. There was a large table in the middle at which a curious game of bridge without players appeared to be in progress. The cards, larger than life size, were mounted on wooden stands, so that they could be moved onto different parts of the table, which was squared like a chessboard, except that there were thirteen squares on each side. Two of the walls of the room were covered by bookcases. Most of the books seemed to be dictionaries or encyclopaedias.

  “Ingenious, are they not?” said Mr. Garland. “You purchase the shelves in sections and screw them together. Soon I shall have sufficient to cover the third wall also. I collect books for my old age as a squirrel collects nuts for the winter.”

  He looked like an old grey squirrel. A cheerful old grey squirrel with a large hoard of nuts and a safe hole to keep them in.

  “And what are you doing in this part of the world, Manciple?”

  Peter had been wondering as he came along exactly how he was going to broach the proposition which he had in mind. He said, “I expect you read in the papers about Dr. Wolfe.”

  “Alex Wolfe.” Mr. Garland turned away toward the sideboard. “Yes. I wonder if you would care for a glass of light sherry.”

  “Well—”

  “I usually have one myself at about this time. You’ll join me? Good.”

  By the time Mr. Garland had turned around again, his face was as expressionless as usual. But Peter had not misse
d the sudden change, the flash of almost savage interest.

  “Alex Wolfe,” he said. “Yes indeed, I read about it. He was a brilliant man. The country can ill spare people of that calibre.”

  “You knew him well, sir?”

  “I might say so, yes. We shared lodgings together in Riverton for the whole of the three years he was at the school. One gets to know a man when one lives and works with him. In much the same way that I got to know your father.”

  “My father?”

  “Certainly. I hope this sherry is to your liking. Some people find it rather light.’

  “It’s very nice. Would you mind telling me—”

  “When I worked with your father? Did he never tell you himself? No, I suppose he would hardly have done so. He was bound, like myself, by the fetters of the Official Secrets Act. But since it is now more than thirty years in the past, I hardly imagine—” Mr. Garland snuffled happily—”that I shall be imprisoned in the Tower of London if I tell you. It was during the war. We worked together for – let me see – it must have been nearly four years at the Decoding Centre at Bletchley Park. His training as an actuary was of great assistance to him. While I have always been interested in puzzles and conundrums. Or ought one to say conundra? The point had never occurred to me before.”

  He pottered across to the bookshelf and took down a volume of the Greater Oxford Dictionary. It seemed to be a well-used book.

  “No,” he said. “Conundra would be incorrect. But here I am, deviating onto quite a different topic to the one you introduced—”

  And cleverly done, too, thought Peter.

  “You mentioned Alex Wolfe. Do I gather that your visit to the West Country is in some way connected with his unhappy demise?”

  “I have been looking into it.”

  “An official investigation?”

  “Perhaps I should explain.”

  If he was going to get the old gentleman’s help, it had to be the whole story. Or almost the whole story. There were certain things which could be left out. As he spoke, Peter was conscious of a change in Mr. Garland. He had dropped his normal mask of donnish affability. The signs were small, but could be observed by a careful watcher. A slight tightening of the mouth, a fractional closing of the eyes. During the whole of the recital, he hardly moved in his chair. Even his hands, folded in his lap, were still.

  At the end of it, he said, “That is a very remarkable story, Manciple. I imagine that you are telling it to me for some reason.”

  “I am telling you because I want your help. I want you to come back with me and pay a call on Dr. Wolfe.”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Because, in spite of the beard he has grown to hide the scar on his face, and any other small changes he may have made in his appearance, I am certain you could identify him. And because, if he would be prepared to tell anyone what he was up to, I imagine he would tell you.”

  “Your first surmise is correct. I should know him at once. Your second surmise might be correct. We were very old friends. Nevertheless, I fear I must decline to help you. Alex never did anything without good reason. He must have very cogent reasons for what he is doing now.”

  “There will be other people who could identify him, but they would be official people and bound to take an official line. I thought that if you – well, it would leave our options open.”

  “Possibly,” said Mr. Garland. But he did not say it in the tone of voice of someone who is changing his mind. “Although I should have thought that you, personally, had no option in the matter. Whatever your personal feelings, you surely have a paramount obligation to your employers to tell them, if no one else, what you have discovered.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “You sound unhappy about it. You are torn in two directions? It is certainly a problem. But not, I fear, a problem which my books will help to solve.”

  As Mr. Garland said this, he snuffled again. It was a signal that he had reverted to the innocent old schoolmaster. Peter recognised the finality of the change. He accepted a second thimbleful of sherry, discussed a number of mutual acquaintances, and wandered out into the sunlight of Ilfracombe. He was puzzled, and worried; but mainly puzzled.

  His puzzlement continued as he drove out of Ilfracombe. It came to a head as he reached the exact place at which he had halted on the way out. He said, “Helicopters be blowed. You’d need a fleet of helicopters to keep track of a car in these lanes.”

  He drive the Savoia into the same rutted lane, got out, and sat down beside it.

  “There’s something about, you, old lady,” he said, “which allows people to follow you at a distance. It can hardly be a sense of smell. You’ve had some gadget attached to you.” A second line of thought presented him with a cross-reference. “And I know when it was put on.”

  It explained something which had been worrying him before. If Professor Petros was a fake, and up to some mischief, why had he allowed Peter to visit the dig? Peter, it was true, had assured him that he knew nothing about archaeology, but why take the risk at all?

  “That’s when it was fixed,” said Peter to himself. “When Stephen took me for that tour of the trenches. I caught him looking at his watch. He had been told to keep me out of the way for a specific time. It must be quite a simple gadget to fix. And quite easy to find.”

  It was a black metal box, about six inches square, spot-welded onto the frame inside the back panel of the trunk. No tools that Peter had would remove it, but the front panel of the box was only held by a thumbscrew. Peter opened it and examined the complicated contents with interest.

  “You’re a talkative little bastard,” he said. “But you shall talk no more.” Using a pair of long-nosed pliers, he extracted the miniature valves and broke the tiny connecting wires. Then he screwed back the front of the box, got back into the car, and drove off happily.

  14

  Next morning Peter was wakened by bells and realised that it was Sunday. He found a note: “Gone to Mass at St. Barnabas’ Church. Eggs on the dresser, bacon in the fridge.” He had cooked and eaten his breakfast by the time the Captain got back.

  Peter said, “Would it be all right by you if I wanted to stop on here for the rest of the week?”

  “No problem,” said the captain, “If you’re hard up for something to do, you can help paint the other bedrooms. We want to be shipshape by next Monday.”

  “What I must do first is drive out and collect my stuff, and make my peace with Dave Brewer. I’ve paid for the week in advance, so he won’t be the loser.”

  However, it was not Mr. Brewer who opened the door of the Doone Valley Hotel to him. It was Detective Inspector Home, who said, in his placid West Country voice, “We’d been hoping you’d put in an appearance, Mr. Manciple. You’ve been what I might call off the map lately, haven’t you?”

  “I’ve been—” said Peter, and was stopped, at the last moment, by an absurd recollection of his mother saying, “When will you understand? The police are on the other side.” He changed it at the last moment. “I’ve been touring round a bit. Have there been some developments here?”

  “You might call it a development, yes.” The Inspector led the way through the hall and out into the yard at the back. “Perhaps you’d care to have a look at something we’ve got here.”

  He opened the door of what had once been the dairy, and Peter followed him in. With no presentiment of what he was going to see, the shock was uncushioned.

  Where the milk churns and butter crocks had once stood lay little Dr. Bishwas. His body was covered by a blanket, but his face was exposed. His mouth was half open, and his lips had drawn away from his teeth in some convulsion of agony in the seconds before death had released him.

  As Peter put out his hand to the blanket, the Inspector said, “No, sir. I wouldn’t look, if I were you. The body’s not in a very pleasant state.”

  “I was going to cover his face,” said Peter with a shudder. “Where did they find him?”

  “
He was found half in, half out of the Culme, way out on the moor. It’s a place where the water comes down fast, among the rocks.”

  “You mean he was drowned?”

  “We haven’t had the autopsy yet. But no, sir, I don’t think he died by drowning. Nor I don’t think he fell into the river by accident. Both his legs were broken, you see. Snapped across the shin. Hold up, sir. You’ll feel better outside.”

  He steered Peter out into the yard. Peter fought down his nausea, and said, “Have you any idea how – or who—”

  “That’s two questions. Three, really. How, who, and why? That’s why I was glad to see you, being perhaps the last person who spoke to the poor gentleman before this happened to him.”

  “Yes, I suppose I was.”

  “You told me about it when we spoke at the hotel in Riverton. In outline, as you might say. I wondered if you could fill in some of the details. The best way would be if we ran over the ground. We could go in my car. Perhaps that would be more comfortable.”

  The Inspector’s voice was fatherly, but Peter was beginning to tune in to the undertones. He realised that he had been subjected to a carefully prepared shock in order to loosen him up, and the realisation went some way in restoring his balance.

  As they drove past the Research Station, he answered the Inspector’s questions slowly. Yes, he had had a telephone call that evening. He had picked up Dr. Bishwas at the corner of the boundary fence. Yes, just about here. Bishwas had been waiting for him, had got into the car, and they had driven along the track.

  He could see the barn ahead of him, and a section of the track which had been marked with white tapes.

  “We’ll keep over to the left here,” said the Inspector. “We’ve hopes we may be able to pick up some tyre marks. The ground was still pretty soft.”

  “You’ll certainly find my tyre marks.”

  “We were thinking of the other car, sir. The indications are that the Doctor was brought back here after you’d gone. It’d be a handy sort of place if they wanted to question him. If you’d step out now, we’ll have a look inside and you can go on with your story.”