‘I’m trying to trace an old friend. Neil Housman. We lost touch shortly after the war. I’ve been round to the shop his parents used to keep in Arundel Street, but there’s someone else there now, Mr Billington. He gave me your name.’
‘And how do you think I can help, Mr Maxwell?’
‘I thought, if there had been a will when the old people died and Neil inherited, well, you might have had an address, something to start a trail.’
‘A trail, eh? Sounds interesting. A trail. You’ll pardon my curiosity I’m sure, Mr Maxwelton …’
‘Maxwell.’
‘… of course; but why do you want to find Mr Housman? A matter of money, is it?’
‘Just friendship. We lost touch, I was up here, so I thought …
‘I see.’ The bright eyes flickered cynically upwards for a moment. ‘I see. You were imprisoned with him perhaps?’
Goldsmith sat up in his chair so violently that it scraped across the floor. He knew it was impossible, but suddenly it felt as if the old man knew everything about him.
‘Imprisoned?’ he repeated.
‘Yes. If it’s the right Housman I’m thinking of, their son was in a POW camp. Well, we’ll soon find out.’
He rang a small handbell on his desk and a young clerk appeared at the door.
‘In the cupboard in the cloakroom you may, if you are both energetic and lucky, find a file marked Housman. Bring it, please.’
The clerk left and Simpson arranged his creases into a social smile.
‘Now we must merely await the event, Mr Macbeth.’
‘Maxwell.’
‘I’m sorry. Still it’s all Scottish. There’s no art to find the name’s construction in the face, eh? Where do you hail from, Mr Maxwell?’
‘London. I work in London,’ said Goldsmith.
‘London. Where precisely may I ask? I used to know London well. I was articled there, you know. Happy days. Interesting stuff I used to be in touch with. Criminal. I fancied myself as a criminal specialist, but like most of us I ended up with half a century of conveyancing. Where did you say you worked?’
The phone rang, saving Goldsmith from the intellectual pains of further lying. Simpson had a conversation about the possibility of making up a bridge four that evening, and as he finished the clerk returned with the file.
‘Now we shall see,’ said Simpson, opening it. For a few moments he thumbed through the papers it contained, his face expressionless.
‘Yes,’ he said finally. ‘This is the one. There was a will, I see. Everything to their only son, Neil. There was some delay as he was still away. The young man evidently spent some time in hospital after his liberation.’
‘Do you know what was wrong?’ asked Goldsmith.
‘Undernourishment, the usual POW thing, I suppose. No. Wait a minute. There’s something here. He was wounded. In the neck.’
‘Was he? Look, Mr Simpson, I know it’s a long time, but do you recall anything about him, about his appearance I mean?’
It was a foolish question, no answer to it could be helpful, and Simpson was looking at him with open curiosity.
‘No, I don’t,’ he answered. ‘Which is not surprising as I never saw the young man. All the details were settled by letter as far as I can make out. It dragged on for some time.’
‘By letter? Then you’ll have an address.’
Some military hospital, he thought. Or at best an army camp.
‘Indeed I do. Several. But the last is what you’ll want of course.’
He shuffled the papers. ‘Here we are, though what use it will be, I do not know. It’s nearly twenty years old after all.’
‘Could I have it, anyway?’
‘Of course. Here we are. Neil Housman. 26, Culham Gardens.’
‘Sunderland?’
‘Oh no. Not Sunderland, Mr MacHeath. Leeds.’
CHAPTER X
IT WAS POSSIBLE, the heavy beat of the Land-Rover’s engine seemed to insist all the way down the AI.
The war grinding to an end. Hebbel back in Germany checking carefully through POW records to find a face that fitted, a background that presented no difficulties. Perhaps Housman was on a short list already. Then news of his parents’ death reached the camp and he went to the top of the list. A transfer is fixed. Easy enough for Hebbel. Housman leaves Camp A. Shortly afterwards Hebbel is delivered to Camp B with a nasty throat wound, and lies speechless in the camp hospital till liberation.
No, it’s absurd; he told himself in a sudden change of mood. He would need accomplices and could such a wound as had caused that dreadful scar on Housman’s neck be self-inflicted?
He turned off the AI and drove towards Ripon. It was not the quickest way home, but he was in no hurry and felt in the mood for narrow winding ‘B’ roads and unclassified tracks which were more like creases in the ancient skin of the moorlands than intrusions upon it. The image made him think of Simpson, the old solicitor. Was he as astute and perceptive as he seemed? Or was this merely a sophisticated form of that typical Northern ‘knowingness’ which stems from inbred suspicion of the motives of strangers? He wasn’t free of it himself. Readiness to suspect the worst had got him into this business to start with.
He treated himself to afternoon tea at a small hotel near Pateley Bridge where the waiter was either a dwarf or should have been at school. Afterwards he walked a couple of miles over the fields till a flurry of rain made him turn back to the road.
It was dusk when he arrived home. He felt weary, and as he unlocked the door he was looking forward to sinking into the huge soft leather armchair which was one of his few furnishing extravagances. But his mood changed as soon as he stepped into the hall.
Someone had been here. There was no noise, movement, smell, nothing to advertise the intrusion so immediately. But he felt it.
And there was something tangible, he realized as he moved cautiously along the hallway. A current of air that shouldn’t have been.
The kitchen door was ajar. He pushed it fully open and saw at once the source of the draught. Someone had smashed in a pane of glass from the window. With that out of the way, it would be an easy task to reach in and open the window. There were traces of mud on the window-sill where the intruder had scraped his foot. Goldsmith felt at the same time very angry and very frightened. Angry at the fact of intrusion, frightened at its possible motives.
Behind him someone coughed.
He turned so quickly he caught his knee on the kitchen table and staggered against it for support as his leg buckled.
Standing in the dark rectangle of the doorway wearing a short white raincoat which his height made look like a jacket was a man.
There was a drawer in the table. In it Goldsmith kept his cutlery, including a fearsome broad-bladed carving knife. It was this that came into his mind now as he slowly reached for the drawer.
‘Hello, Mr Goldsmith. Sorry if I startled you, but the front door was open.’
The man stepped forward into the kitchen, Goldsmith had the drawer open but his fingers halted short of the knife. The last glimmers of light falling though the broken window showed him the man’s face. It was Inspector Vickers.
‘Good evening, Inspector,’ said Goldsmith, casually drawing the curtains of the broken window. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘Nothing. It’s daft really,’ Vickers said with a convincing laugh. ‘I suppose I’m just making sure you are you.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Well, I’ll come clean with you, shall I? It’s my rest day and there is nothing I like more than a stroll in the Dales. On my way home, I suddenly thought of you. You know, when a man dies and it gets in the paper, especially a well-to-do man like Mr Housman, you often get some very strange characters turning up and bothering the widow.’
‘And you thought…’
‘Not really. But while I was up here, it seemed worth while just checking you were who you said.’
‘And this proves I’m not a strange character?
’ asked Goldsmith, wondering what degree of indignation was proper for such a scene. He frequently found himself carefully measuring certain public emotions – sorrow, amusement, enthusiasm – and felt that in this at least he was a true politician.
‘Probably,’ replied Vickers. ‘Such people don’t usually identify themselves so readily. Unless they’re very strange characters indeed.’
‘Would you like a cup of tea, Inspector?’ asked Goldsmith. ‘Or perhaps a drink as you’re not on duty?’
“That would be kind, though I mustn’t keep you long. It must be pretty time-consuming being in politics as well as doing a full-time job.’
‘It sometimes is,’ said Goldsmith, producing a bottle of scotch from the cupboard under the sink. He made no effort to take his unwanted guest into the living-room where for all he knew unmistakable evidence of the break-in might abound, but placed his glass on the kitchen table and invited him to pull out a stool.
‘Anything more on poor Housman’s death?’ asked Goldsmith.
‘Nothing. I imagine there’ll be an open verdict. You have any theories, Mr Goldsmith?’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Goldsmith, startled.
‘Well, for instance, this is off the record, of course, and just between the two of us, but I’d certainly understand if there was something you wanted to keep hushed up.’
Goldsmith sipped his scotch and wondered with growing unease what the hell Vickers was talking about. An invitation to confess? With some half-hinted promise of a deal? No, he was turning bushes into bears again.
‘What kind of thing would I keep hushed up, Inspector?’ he asked coldly.
‘You knew Mr Housman; I didn’t. Was there anything in his affairs, or his character, which might have suggested the possibility of suicide to you?’
‘Suicide? I don’t think so,’ said Goldsmith momentarily relieved as he saw the drift of Vickers’s questioning.
‘Give it a good going-over in your mind, Mr Goldsmith,’ said the detective. ‘No one wants to say anything which would further upset Mrs Housman, or possibly interfere with the payment of insurances, that kind of thing. But it’s always good to know the truth.’
He finished his drink and stood up.
“Don’t say anything now. Just think about it. Your acquaintance with Mr Housman was based on business, I take it?’
The question was casual. Perhaps too casual. All this man had was my name and my car number, thought Goldsmith. Yet he’s bothered to unearth my address and to drive forty-odd miles to see me. And he knows I’m involved in local politics, so he’s been asking around about me. A pound to a penny he knows where I work too.
‘No,’ he answered. ‘Not business really. Just a chance acquaintance, that’s all.’
‘Really? It was good of you to seek Mrs Housman out on such a slight basis. Now I must be off. But think things over, Mr Goldsmith. You never know what may come up. I’ll keep in touch. Thanks for the drink.’
He turned and left, with Goldsmith following as far as the front door. The sight of the detective’s car made him even more determined to be circumspect in his dealings with the man. For a start it was pointing the wrong way for a vehicle just returning from a day in the Dales; and in addition it was a white Beetle like the one he had observed the previous day from his vantage point on the ridge. So much for ‘dropping in in passing’.
For all he knew, Vickers had called earlier that day and actually broken into the cottage. Would a police officer of rank act like that? Goldsmith asked himself and answered, ‘Why not?’ Almost everyone was capable of almost everything, was the sad philosophy his own experience had brought him. The function of civilized society was to limit the opportunities.
He went into the living-room, not knowing what to expect there. But instead of the feared shambles, he found evidence that in one respect at least he had been maligning Vickers.
On the mantelpiece in front of the clock was a note from Liz.
Sorry about the window, but they told me at your work you were ill and when I came round with the nourishing broth and couldn’t get an answer, I thought you might be lying in a coma or your bath, unable to move, so I broke in. Wherefore the malingering anyway? Give me a ring when you get back just to forgive, explain and reassure.
He could feel beneath the surface flippancy the real concern. It must have taken an act of will in more ways than one to break that window and clamber into the empty cottage, particularly as the only way to reach the back was to go round the field. He wanted to sit quietly for a while and think about Vickers, but first he went to the phone and dialled Liz’s number.
Her mother answered.
‘How’s my favourite politician?’ she greeted him cheerfully. ‘Liz? Sorry, Bill, but she’s out. Spreading the good word about your many virtues, no doubt. If you’d like to exercise a few of them, come round and keep me company till she returns.’
‘No, thanks. I’m rather busy tonight. Tell Liz I called, will you?’
He replaced the phone quickly. At least it seemed that Liz had been discreet about his absence. If she hadn’t told her mother (and Mrs Sewell would have been unable to resist a gibe) it was unlikely that she’d told anyone. Which meant he just needed a story which would satisfy her.
He made himself a cup of coffee and heated up a can of Irish stew. As he ate it, he thumbed through the large desk diary he kept by the telephone. Anything smaller he would have lost by now.
A busy week lay ahead. The annual party conference had started that day in Scarborough. He had been a delegate for the past three years but this year he had backed out and was contenting himself with a visit on the Friday. Jeff had been annoyed, but Goldsmith had persuaded him that he would be better employed staying at home, looking after the shop. National decisions were made at Scarborough, local decisions usually emanated from the billiards room of the local Labour Club. So he had got himself a weekful of committees. He didn’t mind these. They were games of a kind. Sometimes you played for yourself, sometimes for the team. But they did require work in preparation. And of course at the end of the following week, he would go before the Selection Board. He ought to be working at that as well. His supporters like Liz and Jeff Malleson would be grafting away on his behalf. But the others had their backers too who would not be idle. He frowned as he finished his coffee. Perhaps he was in for a shock, but somehow he felt sure of selection. The problem which concerned him was not how to get it, but what to do when it was offered.
Do I want to be an MP? he wondered for the hundredth time. This Housman business had to be sorted out one way or another before he could answer that. But carefully. Parliamentary candidate arrested was not a headline which would launch him on a rapid voyage to the Cabinet. Vickers’s evident interest did at least free him from the worry of arousing it. Another visit to Sheffield was necessary. But first, that Leeds address that Simpson had given him.
He took out his street map of the city and tracked down Culham Gardens. He glanced at his watch. Quarter to eight. It was worth a drive just to check. Anything was better than sitting around doing nothing. He went out to the Land-Rover.
Culham Gardens turned out to be a street of Victorian terraced houses, once good solid middle-class dwellings though now generally declined into flats and boarding-houses. Goldsmith was reminded of Wath Grove, though the pendulum here was still swinging away from fashionability. The roadway was lined with lorries, obviously the main source of clientele for the lodgings. Supply seemed to exceed demand, however, as there were plenty of vacancy signs, including one propped against the net curtain of No. 26.
The fat middle-aged woman who came to the door regarded him with the natural suspicion of the landlady towards a prospective lodger till without much hope he put his question. The change was dramatic. A smile ran up her face like a tidal bore and Goldsmith found himself drawn irresistibly into the house.
‘Neil Housman! George! George! Here’s a friend of Neil’s!’
George, a lugubrio
us fifty-year-old, seemed less enthusiastic or at least less demonstrative than his wife, who made Goldsmith sit down in the parlour and launched into a series of affectionate reminiscences of Housman. Her method was anecdotal, esoteric and digressive, but the facts which emerged were that Housman had lodged there in 1945, that he had remained there till 1949, that he had visited there from time to time in the first few years thereafter, partly because of his friendship with the Waterfields (Agnes and George) and partly because he used the house as a poste restante depot. But in the early’fifties they had lost contact. Christmas and birthday cards with no return address arrived for a while, then they too failed.
Goldsmith, posing once more as the army friend trying to get in touch, tried to turn the conversation to Housman’s antecedents, but without success. He had been in the army, that was all they knew. Got one in the throat, said George. Spoke funny. Not funny, protested Agnes. Deep. Mysterious. She implied, sexy.
His civilian job in Leeds seemed equally mysterious, though Agnes remembered that he had inherited some money early on in his stay there.
All told, it did not seem like being a very profitable visit. Again and again Goldsmith was finding himself forced back on the thought that the best he could hope to find was nothing. Once again he had succeeded, but it was a frustrating business for all that.
The fat woman chattered nostalgically all the way to the door. At least Housman had been liked here, that much was evident.
‘Sorry I can’t help more,’ she said finally. ‘I’d like to know myself where he got to.’
She eyed Goldsmith assessingly, decided he could be trusted and whispered, ‘There was some bother, I think.’
‘Bother?’
‘Yes. Not long after he left a policeman came round, asking about him. Of course, I said nothing and I told Neil next time I saw him. He didn’t say what it was all about, but he didn’t come round so much after that. Then he didn’t come at all. Still, that’s life, isn’t it? Ships that pass, ships that pass.’
The front door opened and a well-built blonde girl of sixteen or seventeen came in and squeezed past them without comment. She reminded Goldsmith of someone.
A Very Good Hater Page 8