But once the engine had died, the silence was so overpowering that I felt more rattled than ever. I told myself it was absurd to be demoralised merely because the environment was so different from the one I was used to, but I was dimly beginning to realise that the problem lay not just in the unfamiliarity of my surroundings but in the fact that my disorientation was enabling all the horrors of the past few hours to crawl closer to the surface of my mind. I knew then that the only way to fight off a complete flashback of the scene with Mrs. Mayfield was to move on.
Setting off again I angled the car slowly from side to side so that I could read the names on the gates of the houses. Fortunately Elm Drive was not long, so although “The Larches” was at the end it only took me a couple of minutes to locate it. Parking the car a few feet past the open gates I cut the engine again and crawled out reluctantly into the damp, chilly evening air.
The drive turned out to be much longer than I thought it would be; that was the bad news. The good news was that someone appeared to be at home. The curtains were already drawn but lights glowed on the ground floor.
I padded along, my trainers crunching on the gravel and my eyes focused on the house ahead. It was enormous, possibly even more enormous than the monsters I had passed earlier. There was a three-car garage but all the doors were shut. The walls of the house were covered with ivy—or was it Virginia creeper? Whatever it was, it was sinister, conjuring up memories of all the wrong fairy-tales again. The dusk was becoming more opaque, obscuring my view of the garden, but the lawn on my right was visible; in the subdued light emanating from the house I could see the shaven grass shining as if it were not grass at all but an expanse of water reflecting the light of the moon.
I finally reached the front door and rang the bell.
There was no response. I tried peeking in through the windows but the curtains were too closely drawn for me to see into the rooms beyond. I rang the bell again but when there was still no reply I decided I had nothing to lose by moseying around the back before the darkness drowned the last of the twilight. Padding past the corner of the three-car garage I entered a small paved yard containing dustbins and saw a door which I guessed led into the kitchen.
I tried the handle. To my amazement the door opened. I had heard of places in the country where doors could be left unlocked, but I had never imagined myself encountering such a phenomenon. I waited for a moment. Surely an alarm would go off? But nothing broke that vast silence and in the end, my curiosity overcoming my nervousness, I stepped into the house.
“Sophie?” I called sharply. “Are you there?”
But there was no reply.
The door at the far end of the kitchen was open and from the light in the passage beyond I was able to see the room clearly. There was a large amount of space, suggesting that some interior decorator in the not-too-distant past had done a radical make-over. I doubted that the house was more than sixty years old but the 1930s architect would still have designed sculleries and larders and all manner of poky little nooks where the servants could sweat away preparing the food. Now there was just this big room stuffed with oak fittings where every modern appliance was concealed and only the Aga was exposed to convey its ghastly image of non-urban life.
In the middle of the room was a long wooden table and sitting on top of it was a wide-brimmed straw hat. Next to the hat was an object which I thought at first was a tray bearing entrails, but this deduction only showed how ready I was by that time to jump to melodramatic conclusions. The object was an unusual wooden basket, so flat that it was almost without sides, and lying in this basket lay some dirty gardening gloves and a pair of secateurs. Perhaps the lady of the house had been busy snipping the triffids before vanishing into thin air.
I was now sure I was alone, but as I walked down the passage towards a distant cavern which I assumed to be the hall, I did call Sophie’s name again, just in case she was upstairs and had failed to hear my call from the kitchen. But again there was no reply. Obviously she was out and obviously I had no right to intrude on her territory, but people who leave their backdoors unlocked and their burglar alarms switched off are almost begging for a passing stranger to tour their stately homes.
It suddenly occurred to me that if Kim had been accustomed to this kind of grandiose environment it was odd that he should have been willing to settle even temporarily for the cramped quarters of my Barbican flat. Even though he knew how fond I was of my home, I thought he might well have been tempted to suggest that we rent a bigger property while we waited to start house-hunting, particularly as he was now earning so much money. Had the blackmail taken an even bigger toll on his capital than he had admitted? Was there perhaps some other drain on his income? With a sinking heart I realised I knew nothing for certain about his financial affairs, and in an effort to blot this uncomfortable fact from my mind I once more refocused on my surroundings.
I was now reaching the double-height hall, a magnificent waste of space, where a staircase rose in a curve to the first floor beneath a central chandelier. The latter hung in massive splendour from the ceiling far above, and its multiple lights streamed down upon the glowing colours of the circular carpet below. As my glance travelled beyond the far edge of the carpet I saw that the lights were also picking out the colour of a dark red suit which was lying casually at the foot of the stairs.
A split second later my mind registered the fact that someone was inside the suit. Sophie was lying coiled on the floor, her head at a hideous angle to her neck.
I knew at once she was dead.
NINE
We often fail to cope, at least by the standards of success set up by us or by our families or by others. The failure itself becomes a complex event in our lives. We may end up in psychiatric care . . .
DAVID F. FORD
The Shape of Living
I
One of her shoes had come off and was lying nearby. As my feet carried me closer to the corpse my mind registered the fact that the high heel was missing, and a second later I saw it lying some feet away. At once I visualised Sophie stumbling on the stairs, snapping the heel and fatally losing her balance, but even while this devastating sequence of events was flashing through my mind I found myself hoping she was still alive. Kneeling by her body I reached for her wrist, but there was no pulse and her skin was unnaturally cool.
I wondered how long it took dead bodies to chill. Maybe Sophie had even been dead when I had phoned from London, although the evidence of the straw hat and that odd horticultural accessory, the wooden basket, suggested she might have been in the garden at the time.
The shock finally hit me. I was suddenly so frightened that I could hardly breathe. I tried to move but found myself paralysed while the words of the classic question— “Did she fall or was she pushed?”—ricocheted around and around in my brain. Who would have thought that a cliché could trigger such a gush of raw, undiluted terror? My stomach wanted to heave but fortunately the muscles there had gone on strike. I began to pant. I had never panted with fear before. For one long moment I stood listening to this harsh, alien sound, but then I rushed from the house and hared down the dark drive to my car beyond the gates.
II
Once I had ensured I was safe from any murderer who might be lingering on the premises I rapidly got a grip on my panic. My loss of nerve was certainly humiliating, but I told myself that in the circumstances this was forgivable behaviour.
Scrambling out of the car I moved back to the open gateway. The house looked exactly the same. No additional lights had been turned on and no Hitchcock psychopath (Bruno in Strangers on a Train?) was sauntering down the drive to kill me. Therefore it seemed reasonable to assume I was in no danger, but unfortunately by this time my mind was again so clouded by panic that I was no longer in the mood to be convinced by rational assumptions.
I had realised that I was going to have to return to that house.
III
I had to wipe the message I had left on the answe
rphone. There was going to be an inquest. The police would ask questions. The coroner would ask more. Even if Sophie had died as the result of an accident and no other person had been involved, I hardly fancied being hauled up in court to explain a voice-message which not only put me at the scene but raised all kinds of questions about why I had been so keen to see my husband’s ex-wife. Once the investigators began to trawl through the murky waters of Kim’s private life God only knew what they might uncover, and although I longed to see Mrs. Mayfield in trouble with the police I did not want the trouble to engulf either me or Kim.
On the other hand, if Kim had killed her I had a duty to co-operate with the police. Indeed if Kim had killed her I would want to co-operate with the police. But as matters stood I had no proof either that Sophie had been murdered or that Kim had done the killing.
I had to break off to do some more shuddering but once I had recovered I was able to think more incisively. Kim was a cool, tough customer. I could see him racing down to Oakshott ahead of me in order to negotiate with Sophie, but I had difficulty visualising him making such a mess of the negotiations that she wound up dead, especially when he had such a first-class motive for silencing her.
I decided I was going to act on the assumption that Sophie had died accidentally when Kim was miles from Oakshott, but I did wish the idea of him preceding me to the house was less plausible. If he had left the office as soon as we had spoken on the phone he could have had a head start on me of at least half an hour if not longer, as I tried to get in touch with Sophie, drank black coffee and changed into casual clothes. And if he had arrived on the scene, could his presence and Sophie’s fall have formed nothing but a big coincidence?
I decided that I should not attempt to answer this question in case I started to pant again, but the next moment I had a brainwave which made me feel much better. Mrs. Mayfield could have killed Sophie after instructing Kim to set himself up with an alibi. I had no trouble whatsoever imagining Mrs. Mayfield pushing Sophie downstairs.
I suddenly became aware that I was still standing by the gates, still looking at the house, still listening to the alien silence—although the silence was in reality not empty at all but filled with the scufflings in the undergrowth of nocturnal creatures busy snaking around among last autumn’s leaves. An owl hooted somewhere. Without doubt the country-side was the stuff of nightmares. I pined futilely for my urban tower.
Driven on by the need to act before I fluffed out again I forced myself to return to the back door. There was still no sign of a smiling psychopath. Feeling more confident I padded once more into the kitchen and when I saw the gardening gloves, lying in the wooden basket, it occurred to me to think of fingerprints. The gardening gloves were too thick to be anything but a hindrance indoors, but there were some rubber gloves by the sink and I thought Sophie had probably been a good enough housewife to keep a spare pair in stock. I did not want to use the gloves by the sink in case the police started wondering who had taken them—and I would have to remove any gloves I used because they would contain my fingerprints.
I found a spare pair in a cupboard below the counter and stuffed the plastic wrapper in my bag. Once I was gloved I used a tea-towel to wipe the knob on the cupboard, the handle of the back door and the panel of the light-switch. I tried to remember if I had touched anything else. I had grasped Sophie’s wrist in my search for a pulse but I did not think fingerprints could be lifted from skin—or maybe nowadays they could. That meant I would have to—but I chopped off that thought. First things first. I had to wipe that tape.
There was an extension in the kitchen but this was just an ordinary phone. Tiptoeing into the hall I found the door which led into the living-room and switched on the lights. I saw what I wanted at once. An answering machine was hooked up to a phone on a table by the sofa, and I was just heaving a sigh of relief when I realised something was wrong. There was no beep signalling that a message had been left, and no flashing red light either.
I checked the tape.
It had been wiped.
IV
I stood staring at it. I was thinking that although Kim would have wanted to wipe the tape to protect me, Mrs. Mayfield would have felt under no such obligation.
That meant it had been Kim, not Mrs. Mayfield, who had visited Oakshott—but no, not necessarily; there was yet another possibility. Sophie herself could have wiped the tape. She could have returned to the house from the garden, played back all the messages and reset the machine before Mrs. Mayfield arrived.
Returning to the hall I saw the corpse and fetched the tea-towel from the kitchen so that I could wipe the wrist I had held. Afterwards I finally suffered a physical reaction to all the shock but I managed to find the downstairs lavatory before I threw up. This well-ordered evacuation of my stomach contents came as a relief to me, not just because I felt better afterwards but because the mess could be flushed away without trace. Having drunk some water by using my hands as a cup I dragged myself back into the kitchen to replace the tea-towel.
Here an important thought occurred to me. This was my one and only chance to search Sophie’s territory for an explanation of the mysteries which had driven me to Oakshott. Returning to the living-room I found that the antique desk was almost empty, a fact that suggested it was kept merely for its ornamental value, but the desk in the study on the other side of the hall looked more promising. This desk was modern and functional. It contained not only stationery but also files, some hanging from a rail in the deep bottom drawer and some stacked flat in the drawers above. There was no typewriter or word processor, but I noticed a small Xerox machine on the table by the window and guessed that Sophie was efficient enough to keep copies of all her handwritten business letters.
The files presented a striking array of colours: terracotta brown, pillar-box red, sea-green, sky-blue—and there was even a nauseating shade of yellow which reminded me of my recent session in the lavatory. It did not take me long to work out that the reds related to the house and car, the browns to the garden (much correspondence with a landscape architect), the blues to her work connected with the local church and other charities, and the pukish yellows to correspondence with lawyers. I reflected that it was probably not without significance that she had allotted the lawyers in her life such a disgusting shade.
I removed the yellow files. There was one relating to the death of her mother and matters arising from probate. Another contained correspondence relating to a trust of which she was a trustee, and there was a similar file relating to a trust under which she was a beneficiary. I also found correspondence relating to employment legislation. Apparently her gardener had been in trouble with the Inland Revenue because . . . I stopped reading.
There was no file relating to the divorce.
Replacing the yellow files I checked the contents of the drawers above, but they were entirely devoted to beige files containing correspondence with her stockbroker and accountant. I flipped through but it was just the usual guff spawned by accountants and stockbrokers hired to feather-nest a wealthy client.
Searching the rest of the desk I discovered that the bottom drawer on the other side of the knee-hole was locked. This made me sit up. I deduced that although Sophie had trusted her cleaner not to snoop in boring files, there was at least one file which had to be kept under lock and key.
I returned to the living-room, where I had previously noted Sophie’s handbag lying on a chair. In a zipped compartment I found her key-ring and saw that one of the keys was a small modern item which looked as if it might fit a drawer of a large modern desk.
It did.
I opened the drawer but found it empty.
Someone had been there before me.
V
Again I reminded myself that I still had not proved Kim had been in the house. Sophie herself could have removed the contents of the drawer and absent-mindedly relocked it, even though there were no contents left to safeguard; perhaps she had decided to keep the contents somewhere which was
still more secure. I wondered if she had a safe, but there was no sign of one on the ground floor and I found I was unable to face going upstairs. My courage was on the ebb. It was time to go.
As soon as I had reached this decision I could hardly wait to hurl myself from the house. It took a huge effort to backtrack through the rooms I had visited to make sure I had left no trace of myself behind, but once this safety-check had been completed I hurried outside.
Closing the back door I stripped off my gloves, shoved them deep into my bag alongside their Cellophane wrapper, and fled down the drive to my car.
VI
I thought it best not to stop on the A3 but as soon as I reached London I found a quiet sidestreet and used the carphone. At my flat the new machine picked up the call but I did not leave a message; it was enough to know Kim was still out. It occurred to me that if he had gone down to Surrey the Mercedes would be missing from its slot in the garage, but if he had merely gone to the Savoy he would probably have taken a cab, particularly as he and Warren were going to be drinking.
I tried to remember whether the Mercedes had been in its slot when I had set off earlier from the garage in my Porsche, but our slots were some way apart and I found I was unable to picture whether or not Kim’s had been empty.
I called the Savoy again but was told Mr. Warren Schaeffer was still not answering the phone in his room. Glancing at my watch I realised he could be lingering over dinner but I decided not to have him paged. Eventually he would return to his room and eventually I would get to speak to him. Driving east along the south side of the river I finally crossed Blackfriars Bridge into the City just before ten and five minutes later I was back in the garage of Harvey Tower.
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