In the Frame

1

I stood on the outside of disaster, looking in.

There were three police cars outside my cousin’s house, and an ambulance with its blue turret light revolving ominously, and people bustling in seriously through his open front door. The chill wind of early autumn blew dead brown leaves sadly on to the driveway, and harsh scurrying clouds threatened worse to come. Six o’clock, Friday evening, Shropshire, England.

Intermittent bright white flashes from the windows spoke of photography in progress within. I slid my satchel from my shoulder and dumped both it and my suitcase on the grass verge, and with justifiable foreboding completed my journey to the house.

I had travelled by train to stay for the week-end. No cousin with car to meet me as promised, so I had started to walk the mile and a half of country road, sure he would come tearing along soon in his muddy Peugeot, full of jokes and apologies and plans.

No jokes.

He stood in the hall, dazed and grey. His body inside his neat business suit looked limp, and his arms hung straight down from the shoulders as if his brain had forgotten they were there. His head was turned slightly towards the sittingroom, the source of the flashes, and his eyes were stark with shock.

‘Don?’ I said. I walked towards him. ‘Donald!’

He didn’t hear me. A policeman, however, did. He came swiftly from the sittingroom in his dark blue uniform, took me by the arm and swung me strongly and unceremoniously back towards the door.

‘Out of here, sir,’ he said. ‘If you please.’

The strained eyes slid uncertainly our way.

‘Charles...’ His voice was hoarse.

The policeman’s grip loosened very slightly. ‘Do you know this man, sir?’ he asked Donald.

‘I’m his cousin,’ I said.

‘Oh.’ He took his hand off, told me to stay where I was and look after Mr Stuart, and returned to the sittingroom to consult.

‘What’s happened?’ I said.

Don was past answering. His head turned again towards the sittingroom door, drawn to a horror he could no longer see. I disobeyed the police instructions, took ten quiet steps, and looked in.

The familiar room was unfamiliarly bare. No pictures, no ornaments, no edge-to-edge floor covering of oriental rugs. Just bare grey walls, chintz-covered sofas, heavy furniture pushed awry, and a great expanse of dusty wood-block flooring.

And on the floor, my cousin’s young wife, bloody and dead.

The big room was scattered with busy police, measuring, photographing, dusting for fingerprints. I knew they were there; didn’t see them. All I saw was Regina lying on her back, her face the colour of cream.

Her eyes were half open, still faintly bright, and her lower jaw had fallen loose, outlining brutally the shape of the skull. A pool of urine lay wetly on the parquet around her sprawled legs, and one arm was flung out sideways with the dead white fingers curling upwards as if in supplication.

There had been no mercy.

I looked at the scarlet mess of her head and felt the blood draining from my own.

The policeman who had grabbed me before turned round from his consultation with another, saw me swaying in the doorway, and took quick annoyed strides back to my side.

‘I told you to wait outside, sir,’ he said with exasperation, stating clearly that my faintness was my own fault.

I nodded dumbly and went back into the hall. Donald was sitting on the stairs, looking at nothing. I sat abruptly on the floor near him and put my head between my knees.

‘I... f... found... her,’ he said.

I swallowed. What could one say? It was bad enough for me, but he had lived with her, and loved her. The faintness passed away slowly, leaving a sour feeling of sickness. I leaned back against the wall behind me and wished I knew how to help him.

‘She’s... never... home... on F... Fridays,’ he said.

‘I know.’

‘S... six. S... six o’clock... she comes b... back. Always.’

‘I’ll get you some brandy,’ I said.

‘She shouldn’t... have been... here...’

I pushed myself off the floor and went into the dining-room, and it was there that the significance of the bare sittingroom forced itself into consciousness. In the dining-room too there were bare walls, bare shelves, and empty drawers pulled out and dumped on the floor. No silver ornaments. No silver spoons or forks. No collection of antique china. Just a jumble of table mats and napkins and broken glass.

My cousin’s house had been burgled. And Regina... Regina, who was never home on Fridays... had walked in...

I went over to the plundered sideboard, flooding with anger and wanting to smash in the heads of all greedy, callous, vicious people who cynically devastated the lives of total strangers. Compassion was all right for saints. What I felt was plain hatred, fierce and basic.

I found two intact glasses, but all the drink had gone. Furiously I stalked through the swing door into the kitchen and filled the electric kettle.

In that room too, the destruction had continued, with stores swept wholesale off the shelves. What valuables, I wondered, did thieves expect to find in kitchens? I jerkily made two mugs of tea and rummaged in Regina’s spice cupboard for the cooking brandy, and felt unreasonably triumphant when it proved to be still there. The sods had missed that, at least.

Donald still sat unmoving on the stairs. I pressed the cup of strong sweet liquid into his hands and told him to drink, and he did, mechanically.

‘She’s never home... on Fridays,’ he said.

‘No,’ I agreed, and wondered just how many people knew there was no one home on Fridays.

We both slowly finished the tea. I took his mug and put it with mine on the floor, and sat near him as before. Most of the hall furniture had gone. The small Sheraton desk... the studded leather chair... the nineteenth century carriage clock...

‘Christ, Charles,’ he said.

I glanced at his face. There were tears, and dreadful pain. I could do nothing, nothing, to help him.

The impossible evening lengthened to midnight, and beyond. The police, I suppose, were efficient, polite, and not unsympathetic, but they left a distinct impression that they felt their job was to catch criminals, not to succour the victims. It seemed to me that there was also, in many of their questions, a faint hovering doubt, as if it were not unknown for householders to arrange their own well-insured burglaries, and for smooth-seeming swindles to go horrifically wrong.

Donald didn’t seem to notice. He answered wearily, automatically, with long pauses sometimes between question and answer.

Yes, the missing goods were well-insured.

Yes, they had been insured for years.

Yes, he had been to his office all day as usual.

Yes, he had been out to lunch. A sandwich in a pub.

He was a wine shipper.

His office was in Shrewsbury.

He was thirty-seven years old.

Yes, his wife was much younger. Twenty-two.

He couldn’t speak of Regina without stuttering, as if his tongue and lips were beyond his control. She always s... spends F... Fridays... working... in a f... friend’s... f... flower... shop.

‘Why?’

Donald looked vaguely at the Detective Inspector, sitting opposite him across the diningroom table. The matched antique dining chairs had gone. Donald sat in a garden armchair brought from the sunroom. The Inspector, a constable and I sat on kitchen stools.

‘What?’

‘Why did she work in a flower shop on Fridays?’

‘She... she... l... likes...’

I interrupted brusquely. ‘She was a florist before she married Donald. She liked to keep her hand in. She used to spend Fridays making those table arrangement things for dances and weddings and things like that...’ And wreaths, too, I thought, and couldn’t say it.

‘Thank you, sir, but I’m sure Mr Stuart can answer for himself.’

‘And I’m sure he can’t.’

The Detective Inspector diverted his attention my way.

‘He’s too shocked,’ I said.

‘Are you a doctor, sir?’ His voice held polite disbelief, which it was entitled to, no doubt. I shook my head impatiently. He glanced at Donald, pursed his lips, and turned back to me. His gaze wandered briefly over my jeans, faded denim jacket, fawn polo-neck, and desert boots, and returned to my face, unimpressed.

‘Very well, sir. Name?’

‘Charles Todd.’

‘Age?’

‘Twenty-nine.’

‘Occupation?’

‘Painter.’

The constable unemotionally wrote down these scintillating details in his pocket-sized notebook.

‘Houses or pictures?’ asked the Inspector.

‘Pictures.’

‘And your movements today, sir?’

‘Caught the two-thirty from Paddington and walked from the local station.’

‘Purpose of visit?’

‘Nothing special. I come here once or twice a year.’

‘Good friends, then?’

‘Yes.’

He nodded non-committally. Turned his attention again to Donald and asked more questions, but patiently and without pressure.

‘And what time do you normally reach home on Fridays, sir?’

Don said tonelessly, ‘Five. About.’

‘And today?’

‘Same.’ A spasm twitched the muscles of his face. ‘I saw... the house had been broken into... I telephoned..’

‘Yes, sir. We received your call at six minutes past five. And after you had telephoned, you went into the sitting-room, to see what had been stolen?’

Donald didn’t answer.

‘Our sergeant found you there, sir, if you remember.’

‘Why?’ Don said in anguish. ‘Why did she come home?’

‘I expect we’ll find out, sir.’

The careful exploratory questions went on and on, and as far as I could see achieved nothing except to bring Donald ever closer to all-out breakdown.

I, with a certain amount of shame, grew ordinarily hungry, having not bothered to eat earlier in the day. I thought with regret of the dinner I had been looking forward to, with Regina tossing in unmeasured ingredients and herbs and wine and casually producing a gourmet feast. Regina with her cap of dark hair and ready smile, chatty and frivolous and anti-bloodsports. A harmless girl, come to harm.

At some point during the evening her body was loaded into the ambulance and driven away. I heard it happen, but Donald gave no sign of interpreting the sounds. I thought that probably his mind was raising barriers against the unendurable, and one couldn’t blame him.

The Inspector rose finally and stretched the kinks caused by the kitchen stool out of legs and spine. He said he would be leaving a constable on duty at the house all night, and that he would return himself in the morning. Donald nodded vaguely, having obviously not listened properly to a word, and when the police had gone still sat like an automaton in the chair, with no energy to move.

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s go to bed.’

I took his arm, persuaded him to his feet, and steered him up the stairs. He came in a daze, unprotesting.

His and Regina’s bedroom was a shambles, but the twin-bedded room prepared for me was untouched. He flopped full-length in his clothes and put his arm up over his eyes, and in appalling distress asked the unanswerable question of all the world’s sufferers.

‘Why? Why did it have to happen to us?’

I stayed with Donald for a week, during which time some questions, but not that one, were answered.

One of the easiest was the reason for Regina’s premature return home. She and the flower-shop friend, who had been repressing annoyance with each other for weeks, had erupted into a quarrel of enough bitterness to make Regina leave at once. She had driven away at about two-thirty, and had probably gone straight home, as it was considered she had been dead for at least two hours by five o’clock.

This information, expressed in semi-formal sentences, was given to Donald by the Detective Inspector on Saturday afternoon. Donald walked out into the autumnal garden and wept.

The Inspector, Frost by name and cool by nature, came quietly into the kitchen and stood beside me watching Donald with his bowed head among the apple trees.

‘I would like you to tell me what you can about the relationship between Mr and Mrs Stuart.’

‘You’d like what?’

‘How did they get on?’

‘Can’t you tell for yourself?’

He answered neutrally after a pause. ‘The intensity of grief shown is not always an accurate indication of the intensity of love felt.’

‘Do you always talk like that?’

A faint smile flickered and died. ‘I was quoting from a book on psychology.’

‘ “Not always” means it usually is,’ I said.

He blinked.

‘Your book is bunk,’ I said.

‘Guilt and remorse can manifest themselves in an excess of mourning.’

‘Dangerous bunk,’ I added. ‘And as far as I could see, the honeymoon was by no means over.’

‘After three years?’

‘Why not?’

He shrugged and didn’t answer. I turned away from the sight of Donald and said, ‘What are the chances of getting back any of the stuff from this house?’

‘Small, I should think. Where antiques are involved, the goods are likely to be halfway across the Atlantic before the owner returns from his holidays.’

‘Not this time, though,’ I objected.

He sighed. ‘Next best thing. There have been hundreds of similar break-ins during recent years and very little has been recovered. Antiques are big business these days.’

‘Connoisseur thieves?’ I said sceptically.

‘The prison library service reports that all their most requested books are on antiques. All the little chummies boning up to jump on the bandwagon as soon as they get out.’

He sounded suddenly quite human. ‘Like some coffee?’ I said.

He looked at his watch, raised his eyebrows, and accepted. He sat on a kitchen stool while I fixed the mugs, a fortyish man with thin sandy hair and a well-worn grey suit.

‘Are you married?’ he asked.

‘Nope.’

‘In love with Mrs Stuart?’

‘You do try it on, don’t you?’

‘If you don’t ask, you don’t find out.’

I put the milk bottle and a sugar basin on the table and told him to help himself. He stirred his coffee reflectively.

‘When did you visit this house last?’ he said.

‘Last March. Before they went off to Australia.’

‘Australia?’

‘They went to see the vintage there. Donald had some idea of shipping Australian wine over in bulk. They were away for at least three months. Why didn’t their house get robbed then, when they were safely out of the way?’

He listened to the bitterness in my voice. ‘Life is full of nasty ironies.’ He pursed his lips gingerly to the hot coffee, drew back, and blew gently across the top of the mug. ‘What would you all have been doing today? In the normal course of events?’

I had to think what day it was. Saturday. It seemed totally unreal.

‘Going to the races,’ I said. ‘We always go to the races when I come to stay.’

‘Fond of racing, were they?’ The past tense sounded wrong. Yet so much was now past. I found it a great deal more difficult than he did, to change gear.

‘Yes... but I think they only go... went... because of me.’

He tried the coffee again and managed a cautious sip. ‘In what way do you mean?’ he asked.

‘What I paint,’ I said, ‘is mostly horses.’

Donald came in through the back door, looking red-eyed and exhausted.

‘The Press are making a hole in the hedge,’ he said leadenly.

Inspector Frost clicked his teeth, got to his feet, opened the door to the hall and the interior of the house, and called out loudly.

‘Constable? Go and stop those reporters from breaking into the garden.’

A distant voice replied ‘Sir’, and Frost apologised to Donald. ‘Can’t get rid of them entirely, you know, sir. They have their editors breathing down their necks. They pester the life out of us at times like these.’

All day long the road outside Donald’s house had been lined with cars, which disgorged crowds of reporters, photographers and plain sensation-seekers every time anyone went out of the front door. Like a hungry wolf pack they lay in wait, and I supposed that they would eventually pounce on Donald himself. Regard for his feelings was nowhere in sight.

‘Newspapers listen to the radio on the police frequencies,’ Frost said gloomily. ‘Sometimes the Press arrive at the scene of a crime before we can get there ourselves.’

At any other time I would have laughed, but it wouldn’t have been much fun for Donald if it had happened in his case. The police, of course, had thought at first that it more or less had, because I had heard that the constable who had tried to eject me forcibly had taken me for a spearheading scribbler.

Donald sat down heavily on a stool and rested his elbows wearily on the table.

‘Charles,’ he said, ‘If you wouldn’t mind heating it, I’d like some of that soup now.’

‘Sure,’ I said, surprised. He had rejected it earlier as if the thought of food revolted him.

Frost’s head went up as if at a signal, and his whole body straightened purposefully, and I realised he had merely been coasting along until then, waiting for some such moment. He waited some more while I opened a can of Campbell’s condensed, sloshed it and some water and cooking brandy into a saucepan, and stirred until the lumps dissolved. He drank his coffee and waited while Donald disposed of two platefuls and a chunk of brown bread. Then, politely, he asked me to take myself off, and when I’d gone he began what Donald afterwards referred to as ‘serious digging’.

It was three hours later, and growing dark, when the Inspector left. I watched his departure from the upstairs landing window. He and his attendant plain-clothes constable were intercepted immediately outside the front door by a young man with wild hair and a microphone, and before they could dodge round him to reach their car the pack on the road were streaming in full cry into the garden and across the grass.

I went methodically round the house drawing curtains, checking windows, and locking and bolting all the outside doors.

‘What are you doing?’ Donald asked, looking pale and tired in the kitchen.

‘Pulling up the drawbridge.’

‘Oh.’

In spite of his long session with the Inspector he seemed a lot calmer and more in command of himself, and when I had finished Fort-Knoxing the kitchen-to-garden door he said, ‘The police want a list of what’s gone. Will you help me make it?’

‘Of course.’

‘It’ll give us something to do...’

‘Sure.’

‘We did have an inventory, but it was in that desk in the hall. The one they took.’

‘Damn silly place to keep it,’ I said.

‘That’s more or less what he said. Inspector Frost.’

‘What about your insurance company? Haven’t they got a list?’

‘Only of the more valuable things, like some of the paintings, and her jewellery.’ He sighed. ‘Everything else was lumped together as “contents”.’

We started on the diningroom and made reasonable progress, with him putting the empty drawers back in the sideboard while trying to remember what each had once contained, and me writing down to his dictation. There had been a good deal of solid silver tableware, acquired by Donald’s family in its affluent past and handed down routinely. Donald, with his warmth for antiques, had enjoyed using it, but his pleasure in owning it seemed to have vanished with the goods. Instead of being indignant over its loss, he sounded impersonal, and by the time we had finished the sideboard, decidedly bored.

Faced by the ranks of empty shelves where once had stood a fine collection of early nineteenth century porcelain, he baulked entirely.

‘What does it matter?’ he said drearily, turning away. ‘I simply can’t be bothered...’

‘How about the paintings, then?’

He looked vaguely round the bare walls. The site of each missing frame showed unmistakably in lighter oblong patches of palest olive. In this room they had mostly been works of modern British painters: a Hockney, a Bratby, two Lowrys, and a Spear for openers, all painted on what one might call the artists’ less exuberant days. Donald didn’t like paintings which he said ‘jumped off the wall and made a fuss’.

‘You probably remember them better than I do,’ he said. ‘You do it.’

‘I’d miss some.’

‘Is there anything to drink?’

‘Only the cooking brandy,’ I said.

‘We could have some of the wine.’

‘What wine?’

‘In the cellar.’ His eyes suddenly opened wide. ‘Good God, I’d forgotten about the cellar.’

‘I didn’t even know you had one.’

He nodded. ‘Reason I bought the house. Perfect humidity and temperature for long-term storage. There’s a small fortune down there in claret and port.’

There wasn’t, of course. There were three floor-to-ceiling rows of empty racks, and a single cardboard box on a plain wooden table.

Donald merely shrugged. ‘Oh well... that’s that.’

I opened the top of the cardboard box and saw the elegant corked shapes of the tops of wine bottles.

‘They’ve left these, anyway,’ I said. ‘In their rush.’

‘Probably on purpose,’ Don smiled twistedly. ‘That’s Australian wine. We brought it back with us.’

‘Better than nothing,’ I said disparagingly, pulling out a bottle and reading the label.

‘Better than most, you know. A lot of Australian wine is superb.’

I carried the whole case up to the kitchen and dumped it on the table. The stairs from the cellar led up into the utility room among the washing machines and other domesticities, and I had always had an unclear impression that its door was just another cupboard. I looked at it thoughtfully, an unremarkable white painted panel merging inconspicuously into the general scenery.

‘Do you think the burglars knew the wine was there?’ I asked.

‘God knows.’

‘I would never have found it.’

‘You’re not a burglar, though.’

He searched for a corkscrew, opened one of the bottles, and poured the deep red liquid into two kitchen tumblers. I tasted it and it was indeed a marvellous wine, even to my untrained palate. Wynn’s Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon. You could wrap the name round the tongue as lovingly as the product. Donald drank his share absentmindedly as if it were water, the glass clattering once or twice against his teeth. There was still an uncertainty about many of his movements, as if he could not quite remember how to do things, and I knew it was because with half his mind he thought all the time of Regina, and the thoughts were literally paralysing.

The old Donald had been a man of confidence, capably running a middle-sized inherited business and adding his share to the passed-on goodies. He had a blunt uncompromising face lightened by amber eyes which smiled easily, and he had considered his money well-spent on shapely hair-cuts.

The new Donald was a tentative man shattered with shock, a man trying to behave decently but unsure where his feet were when he walked upstairs.

We spent the evening in the kitchen, talking desultorily, eating a scratch meal, and tidying all the stores back on to the shelves. Donald made a good show of being busy but put half the tins back upside down.

The front door bell rang three times during the evening but never in the code pre-arranged with the police. The telephone, with its receiver lying loose beside it, rang not at all. Donald had turned down several offers of refuge with local friends and visibly shook at the prospect of talking to anyone but Frost and me.

‘Why don’t they go away?’ he said despairingly, after the third attempt on the front door.

‘They will, once they’ve seen you,’ I said. And sucked you dry, and spat out the husk, I thought.

He shook his head tiredly. ‘I simply can’t.’

It felt like living through a siege.

We went eventually again upstairs to bed, although it seemed likely that Donald would sleep no more than the night before, which had been hardly at all. The police surgeon had left knock-out pills, which Donald wouldn’t take. I pressed him again on that second evening, with equal non-results.

‘No, Charles. I’d feel I’d deserted her. D... ducked out. Thought only of myself, and not of... of how awful it was for her... dying like that... with n... no one near who I... loved her.’

He was trying to offer her in some way the comfort of his own pain. I shook my head at him, but tried no more with the pills.

‘Do you mind,’ he said diffidently, ‘if I sleep alone tonight?’

‘Of course not.’

‘We could make up a bed for you in one of the other rooms.’

‘Sure.’

He pulled open the linen-cupboard door on the upstairs landing and gestured indecisively at the contents. ‘Could you manage?’

‘Of course,’ I said.

He turned away and seemed struck by one particular adjacent patch of empty wall.

‘They took the Munnings,’ he said.

‘What Munnings?’

‘We bought it in Australia. I hung it just there... only a week ago. I wanted you to see it. It was one of the reasons I asked you to come.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. Inadequate words.

‘Everything,’ he said helplessly. ‘Everything’s gone.’