Chapter One
The space module “Hermes” swung high above its revolving mother ship. The lights of other bodies streamed past the observation window. They came and went too quickly to be identified, but companion modules were there, sharing the same orbit.
The noise, which at launching had been an ear-splitting amalgam of machinery, sirens and amplified last-minute instructions, was now much diminished. It consisted in the main of piped rock and roll music. This doubtless was to be a substantial ingredient of the cosmonauts’ sustenance in space.
The craft held a crew of two. Their ponderous suits and great gourd-like helmets concealed all clues to age and sex. They sat in moulded chairs, one behind the other, facing the nose cone of the module.
One of the helmet visors was pushed up just sufficiently to allow speech. The other crewman, staring out of a port, did not at first respond. Gloved knuckles rapped against his head-globe. He turned and raised his vent.
The cosmonauts conversed. Their gestures were lively, but not well coordinated. A terrestial observer might have supposed them slightly drunk—an effect of weightlessness, perhaps.
One struck the release buckles of his seat harness and pushed the straps impatiently aside. The other stopped talking and watched with interest, as if waiting for his companion to float around the cabin. Nothing happened, so he, too, freed himself.
Both appeared to be a good deal elated by their emancipation. One unstoppered a space-flask and sucked at the stimulant within, then held the flask out, offering it. The other removed his helmet and placed it between his knees. He took the flask. Drinking from it greedily, he made heroic gestures with his free arm.
A string of bright orange moons moved across the blackness framed in the observation window. The crew member who held the flask stared at them in surprise. Suddenly he was on the floor of the module. The vehicle had lurched.
There was some scrambling, boisterous but apparently good-natured. Helmet and space-flask left the floor and began to roll up the bulkhead and across the roof. So did the cosmonaut from whose grip they had escaped.
The module had entered that part of its programme which required it to revolve about its own axis, in accordance with the principle whereby space travellers are provided with a simulation of homely gravity.
Unhappily for the cosmonaut who had abandoned his seat harness (the other had never altogether relinquished hold upon his safeguard and was now securely strapped once more) there became operative at that moment what space agencies would have termed an extra-programmatic circumstance.
The vehicle’s ingress-egress hatch—its door, one might almost say—opened and swung outward.
Towards the black rectangle thus revealed trundled the flask as the module continued to turn. It hung at the rim for a moment, obstructed by a shallow flange, then suddenly disappeared into space.
The unharnessed cosmonaut was too preoccupied with trying to regain control over his own movement to notice the flask’s departure. If he had, he might have had time to reason out the precursive significance of the event and see his danger.
By the time the module’s revolution had brought him to the brink of the open hatchway, the cosmonaut was in that state of relaxation which frequently succeeds, if only momentarily, a period of playful physical exuberance.
He tumbled out in a flopping somersault without a cry; not into orbit, but in shallow parabola towards the gravitational centre of the planet earth, the nearest to which he got was the pavement outside the shop of Mr James Arliss, gentlemen’s outfitter and bespoke tailor, in Market Place, Flaxborough.
Chapter Two
Inquests, declared Mr Harcourt Chubb, MBE, Chief Constable of Flaxborough, were not much in his line, so it was Detective Inspector Purbright who attended the inquiry into the “Hermes” accident.
He addressed the coroner, a red-faced, punctilious young solicitor named Cannon, who had taken the job over twelve months before on the almost indetectable transition of the previous office-holder, Sir Albert Amblesby, from a comatose to a clinically lifeless condition.
“This case arises from an accident in Flaxborough Fair on Saturday night, sir,” said the inspector. “The fair is held, as you will know, in an area of the Market Place between West Row and the Corn Exchange, and it includes a number of mechanical rides.”
Mr Cannon nodded sapiently. He had a big note pad in front of him, as well as a pile of ready-typed depositions by witnesses.
“One of the rides was called Space Shot,” said the inspector.
“Space Shot?” echoed the coroner, affecting dubiousness.
“Yes, sir. The owner of the ride will be able to give you details if you require them, but I gather that the idea is to provide its passengers with a feeling of flight through space. They occupy a series of cars—or modules, is that right?”—Purbright glanced aside inquiringly at a large, whiskered man in a green velveteen suit, who said yes, that indeed was correct—“each of which holds two people. The passengers are provided with seat belts and there are prominent notices urging their use.
“An attendant has instructions—or so we understand—to see that riders have fastened their belts before the machine starts. He also is supposed to check the bolts securing the car doors. These can be operated from either inside or outside the modules, and are pretty substantial, as one would expect.”
There was movement at the back of the room. “That bloody thing wasn’t safe!” A woman in a sky-blue hat, face taut with anger and grief, was being held back in her chair by shushing neighbours. “There’s a boy dead ’cos o’ that.”
Mr Cannon scowled and seemed about to issue an interdict. There looked up at his left shoulder the gentle moon-face of Sergeant William Malley, Coroner’s Officer, with whispered counsel.
“The boy’s auntie, sir. Very cut up.”
Mr Cannon turned his attention to the inspector once more.
“Shortly before midnight on Saturday,” Purbright resumed, “an ambulance was called to the Market Place, where a young man was lying injured—possibly already dead—having fallen from the fair ride I have been describing. He was identified as Robert Digby Tring, aged 23, a pet-food processing technician—is that right, sergeant?”
“That’s how the job’s described, sir.”
“Thank you. And he lived with other members of the family, including his grandmother, at 18 Abdication Avenue. He wasn’t married, I gather—or was he?”
“No, sir. Not married. You’re probably confusing him with Joseph.”
Purbright said “Ah”, looked in silence at his notes for a moment or two, then asked the coroner if he would like the first witness called.
Mr Cannon was not sure that he cared for the tradition of informality at Flaxborough inquests that allowed the sort of side conversation between Purbright and Malley into which they had just drifted. But nor was he confident of his ability to manage affairs on his own. These local people were unpredictable; they could be truculent. Moreover there was someone present in court on that particular occasion of whom the coroner stood in too much awe to risk throwing his weight about.
“Very well, inspector,” said Mr Cannon.
There came to the table over which the coroner presided a man of about 30 with black hair and deep sideburns, a mahogany complexion and a loping, careless walk.
Purbright invited him to the chair which Malley had drawn out for him.
“Your name is Patrick Harold Tring?” inquked the coroner, glancing up from the deposition he had taken from the top of the pile.
“Aye.”
“You are aged 32 years, a storekeeper, and you reside at 18 Abdication Avenue, Flaxborough?”
“Aye.”
“And you identify the body you were shown last Sunday morning in the mortuary of Flaxborough General Hospital as that of your brother, Robert Digby Tring?”
“Digger. Aye. It was.”
“How old was he, Mr Tring?”
Tring indicated Purbright with his head. “Like the policeman said. Twenty-three.”
“And he resided with you and the other members of the family?”
“Aye. We all sort of muck in together like. With Gran. I already told him.” This time it was Sergeant Malley at whom Tring nodded.
“Yes, well, I have to hear it from your own lips, Mr Tring,” the coroner explained. He paused. “By Gran, I presume you mean your grandmother, do you?”
The possibility that there might be anyone in Flaxborough unacquainted with the redoubtable Grandma Tring struck the witness as so bizarre that for several seconds he could only stare at Mr Cannon. Then he looked down the room at the knot of people whence the earlier interjection had come and grinned clannishly.
“Well, I don’t mean my soddin’ uncle, do I?”
This earned squawks of commendation from kin and the very acidly expressed news from Mr Cannon that Mr Tring was in a courtroom and not upon the stage of a music hall.
“Your brother was not married?”
“No.”
“So far as you know, he was in good health?”
There was nothing, averred Mr Tring, the matter with Digger.
“That is all I have to ask you,” said the coroner, “but these other gentlemen may wish to put questions to you.” He indicated Purbright and, further off, a sleek, silvery-grey man whose very presence looked as if it was going to cost somebody a lot of money even if he made no further contribution to the proceedings.
The inspector said there was nothing else the police wished to ask this witness. Mr Cannon turned to the silver-grey man and offered him a deferential smile.
Mr Raymond Plant-Huntleigh, Q.C., accepted the smile and sent a much more splendid one back. He rose with athletic grace.
“You appear, Mr Plant-Huntleigh, I understand, on behalf of the Fair and Pleasure Garden Proprietors’ Protection Association,” said the coroner.
“That is my privilege, sir.”
“Pray proceed.”
The barrister gazed upon Mr Tring with a sort of grieved affection. “May I express the deep sympathy of my clients and, indeed, of myself, with the family of this young man, so tragically deprived of life at a time when it must have been full of promise.”
Mr Tring rubbed his jaw. “Yes, well...” He shuffled. “That’s all right. I mean, it’s not your fault, is it?”
“I commend your generosity in a time of sorrow,” said Mr Plant-Huntleigh. He watched Mr Cannon’s pen making its slow addenda to the typed deposition.
Purbright said something to Sergeant Malley, who squeezed nearer the coroner and murmured in his ear. Mr Cannon seemed a little annoyed, but he nodded and addressed the witness.
“Is the family legally represented?” he asked.
“D’you mean have I got a solicitor? No—well, I mean it’s not as if I was up in court for something, is it?”
“You are entitled to be represented, nevertheless. However, I shall give you what guidance I can in the event of your being asked any question you might feel doubtful about.” Mr Cannon glanced at the inspector. “All right, Mr Purbright?” Purbright made a small bow.
The barrister appeared to be in the most cordial agreement with Mr Cannon’s undertaking. He beamed upon Tring and said: “Let us revert very briefly to the matter of your brother’s state of health. Nothing the matter with Digger, I believe you said. Hale and hearty young chap, was he?”
“You could say that, yeah.”
“And full of high spirits on occasion, eh?”
“Well, he was only young, wasn’t he?”
“Indeed he was, alas. Indeed he was.” Mr Plant-Huntleigh guessed—rightly—that cross-examination was no novelty to Mr Tring. He took a little longer to lead up to his next question.
“You have heard, I have no doubt, the time-honoured phrase ‘All the fun of the fair’ ”, he said. “Fairs are places for fun, for enjoyment—enjoyment, it may be, of a somewhat boisterous kind sometimes. Nothing wrong with that, of course. Now do you agree that your brother would not hesitate to join in such enjoyment? To enter into the spirit of the occasion?”
“Dunno. Depends, doesn’t it?”
“On what, Mr Tring?”
“Well, I mean if he was with the gang an’ that. The bike mob.”
“His friends, in short.”
“Well, I mean you go around, muck in, have a giggle, p’raps.”
“Exactly,” said Mr Plant-Huntleigh. He sounded pleased.
Delicately, the coroner intervened.
“Forgive me, but as the witness has no legal adviser with him here today, perhaps I might suggest he be asked forthwith if he was in the company of the deceased at the fair. He can scarcely be expected to help establish the circumstances if he was not.”
“I am obliged to you, sir,” said the barrister. “My instructions, however, are that no witness of the accident has come forward and that the police have been unable to solicit assistance in the matter even from such companions of this unfortunate young man as are known to have been present in the fair at the time.”
Purbright half rose. “That is so, sir.”
“In which case,” resumed Mr Plant-Huntleigh, “I think I may fairly say, with respect, that a lack of direct evidence must enhance the value of what we may learn about the deceased, his personality and habits, from an informed, articulate and intelligent witness such as Mr Tring here.”
Sergeant Malley gave a silent whistle in admiration of the London lawyer’s dazzling forensic mendacity. The witness, curling his lip, covertly sent a two-fingered signal to his friends and relations.
“Mr Tring,” said his champion, pleasantly, “we have heard the nice things you said about Digger—his readiness to be a good mixer, his high spirits, his love of ‘having a giggle’. Now, then, you must not be offended by this last question of mine. It has to be asked, you understand, and you should not regard it as an accusation. All I wish you to say is whether or not your brother was a drinking man.”
Mr Tring drew himself to full height and addressed the coroner, accompanied by a mutter of shocked rebuttal at the back of the court.
“Your Honour, as God’s my judge, that boy never went inside a pub in all his life and I can fetch parsons who’ll tell you that—parsons, not bloody policemen!”
“You sound, if I may say so, admirably confident in your brother’s sobriety, Mr Tring,” observed Mr Plant-Huntleigh.
“ ’Course I am.”
“So if, for the sake of argument, someone ever did persuade him to take alcohol...”
“What d’you mean, argument? Who’s been arguing?”
The balm of Mr Plant-Huntleigh’s smile flowed forth. His hand, like a guru’s, enjoined peace. “No, no, no, Mr Tring. I am putting to you an utterly imaginary situation. I am asking you—a sensitive and sensible person—what would be likely to happen if a teetotaller, a non-drinker, your late brother, for instance, were to be induced—against his will, perhaps—to imbibe alcoholic liquor.”
For a moment Tring pondered, frowning suspiciously. Then he shrugged.
“Well, he’d get pissed, wouldn’t he?”
Mr Plant-Huntleigh, suddenly transformed back into a remote eminence, no longer the kindly confidant of bereaved storekeepers, made curt intimation to the coroner that he had no further questions, and moved his seat to confer with the whiskered man in green velveteen.
Dr Heineman was called.
The pathologist from Flaxborough General Hospital was a brisk enthusiast who gave his evidence in the manner of a lecturer. He was lithe and bony, with remarkably mobile eyebrows. In his gracefully gesticulating right hand was an invisible scalpel with which he seemed all the time to be parting and excising layers of tissue. It seemed a pity, Purbright reflected, that so professional a performance could, in the end, produce nothing better than a report of a common or garden busted skull.
“And that was the cause of death, was it, doctor?” asked the coroner, also sensible of anti-climax.
“Thet,” responded Dr Heineman, “was the cows of dith. Igsectly.”
Mr Cannon looked inquiringly at Mr Plant-Huntleigh.
“If he would kindly reiterate one tiny point,” said the barrister, rising, “I should be most obliged. Purely a matter of confirmation of my notes, doctor.”
Dr Heineman smiled an Old Vienna smile.
“Analysis of a sample of the blood of the deceased disclosed—am I correct?—an alcohol content equivalent to that which would be produced by consuming five ounces of spirits.”
“One handred end forty grems. Five wunces. Shoor.”
“A quarter of a bottle of whisky, doctor.”
“Yis. Thet you could say.”
“Thank you, doctor.”
It took some time for the import of this quiet, businesslike exchange to register upon the Tring family. When it did, they voiced indignation so forcefully that the coroner sent Malley to give them the choice between silence and eviction.
Mr Cannon then announced his intention of adjourning the inquest for two weeks.
“I think there would be no point in an adjournment sine die,” he said, looking directly at Mr Plant-Huntleigh as if seeking his permission to use such a very legal phrase. “Police inquiries into the accident are proceeding, of course, but the view of the police is that if a witness does not come forward in the next week or so—while the fair is in the town, in fact—it must be considered unlikely that we shall ever know more than we do now about this unfortunate occurrence.”
“There is other testimony to be heard, though, is there not? Irrespective of what may or may not be offered by the hypothetical eye-witness.”
Mr Cannon hurriedly assured Counsel for the proprietor of Space Shot that there was indeed such testimony and that it would be put on record two weeks hence. Depositions had been taken from two fairground attendants and an engineer’s report on the equipment from which the man had fallen would also be entered as evidence.
“I have a copy of that report,” said Mr Plant-Huntleigh. “I think that in order to alleviate possible public anxiety I should be permitted to disclose that the ride known as Space Shot has been found to be absolutely safe.”
“Crafty sod,” murmured Malley to Purbright. “I’ll bet that’s the swiftest two hundred quid he ever earned.”
The coroner said he considered Mr Plant-Huntleigh’s application perfectly reasonable in the circumstances. Courteously, they bobbed at each other. Papers were gathered, chairs pushed back. Dr Heineman went bounding off towards his pickles and dissection slabs. Policemen loitered gravely, like museum attendants at closing time, until all the members of the public had departed; then they unbuttoned tunics and some lit cigarettes.
Chapter Three
Irreverence was not a charge that could fairly be laid against Detective Sergeant Sidney Love. So when on one occasion he described life in the highly priced houses on Oakland as “all single beds and dinner gongs”, he was expressing genuine admiration.
Purbright found rather touching his sergeant’s attitude to what he regarded as the symbols of social eminence. Love was quite without envy and it would never have occurred to him to concede, in the course of his job, any privilege to the wealthy. Rather was he, Purbright thought, a sort of amateur anthropologist, ready always to be happily surprised by discovery of such gewgaws of trivial chieftainship as a white telephone or a leopardskin lavatory seat cover.
“Dinner gongs?” the inspector had echoed, intrigued despite himself.
Love had flushed boyishly and added: “Just little ones. On sideboards. I don’t think they ring them any more.”
“Ah, vestigial gongs.”
David and Julia Harton, of Number Six Oakland, did not own a dinner gong, vestigial or otherwise, but they occupied single beds and had done for nearly two years.
It was the morning following the first stage of the inquest on Robert Digby Tring. Julia Harton had risen from her single bed and stood now, yawning, scratching her right knee, and looking out of the window, from which she had raised a flower-patterned yellow linen blind. David Harton lay in his single bed, with one arm behind his head. He regarded his wife’s back with a lazy smile. By shifting his gaze very slightly, he was able to check on the smile in a mirror that covered half the wall opposite. The smile was his wry one. He nodded amiably to his reflection and looked again towards his wife.
Julia’s head was bowed. She was frowning down at her hands. With one thumbnail she chiselled off little flakes of varnish from the nails of the other hand. The light from the window outlined the body within the thin nightdress, which was rumpled and caught up on one hip. It was a small body, sturdy at neck and wrist and ankle, but narrow chested and with fine arms and shoulders. The only evidence of fat was a puffiness at the very top of her thighs. Even her belly, distended by her attitude of sulky abstraction, had nothing pendulous about it.
“You’re a pretty gross bitch,” David Harton remarked. “Look, why don’t you get a decent girdle or something?”
She glanced about her at the floor. It was littered with pieces of clothing: his, not hers. She reached forth one foot and hooked a pair of orange and green striped briefs on her toe. With a frown of distaste she tossed the briefs into a corner.
David followed the performance with his eyes, his smile unchanged.
Julia avoided looking at him directly, but she noticed that he had unbuttoned the jacket of his pyjamas. The froth of his chest hair was a dark blur in the outfield of her vision.
Without haste, she went about assembling her own outfit in readiness for dressing. She put everything neatly upon a white satin stool, then crossed to the chest of drawers where towels were kept. As usual, she would need a fresh one: David’s final act at night invariably was to leave the bathroom and all its contents waterlogged.
She stooped to a drawer, easing it forth with alternating tugs and pushes. Its emergence was a reluctant waltz.
“Couldn’t you even manage to fix a simple thing like this?” The question was quiet, weary, self-addressed. David pretended to consider it challenging. “Christ, I told you, didn’t I? Give Sandersons a ring. They’ll see to it.”
“David, one does not call in a firm of building contractors to rub a bit of wax along a drawer runner.”
“Wax? Where does one get wax, for God’s sake? What is the use of specialisation if fat-arsed women are too bloody stupid to make use of services that people have spent a lot of money and effort to provide?”
She took a towel from the drawer and put it on the floor beside her, then began unhurriedly to coax the drawer shut, using not her hands but her knees. The action imparted a sway to her body that would have seemed sexually provoking in other circumstances.
“Did you know,” David asked, sounding suddenly friendly and interested, “that you can get a bra with a hole in each cup exactly seven-eighths of an inch in diameter and fringed with mongoose hair. It’s supposed to be so stimulating that the nipples stand out permanently like nutmegs.”
Julia picked up the towel and straightened. She walked to the dressing table and gazed listlessly into its glass. In one corner of it she caught the reflection from the wall mirror of her husband. He had taken off his pyjamas and lay regarding his body with interest and approval.
She turned up her eyes in mock piety.
David spoke again. The tone continued to be light, conversational.
“They’re starting these tactile expansion sessions at the Kissinger. Did you know?”
The Klub Kissinger, formerly the Floradora Club, on the outskirts of Flaxborough, offered health and psychiatric therapy service.
Julia said nothing.
“They might do you good. Why don’t you go along?”
She paused, frowning. “Tactile expansion?” Behind the scepticism and contempt was simple curiosity.
“You can be really dim, can’t you?” He stroked one brown hairy thigh appreciatively. “Expand—grow wider. Simple dictionary definition. Widen experience and knowledge. Tactile—by touch. Christ, didn’t you go to school?”
On the dressing table was a jumble of jars, bottles and aerosol cans. Idly she picked out one of the cans. APPLE LOFT. Brings a Tang of the Country to the Man About Town.
“You mean it’s a free-feel-for-all party?”
“You smug, middle-class cow.”
Julia smiled briefly at APPLE LOFT. “You’ll have to take your Bobby-May along, then, won’t you?”
“It’s you who need the therapy, love. It’s your sex hang-up, not ours.”
At that “ours” there was a slight stiffening of the woman’s shoulders.
David noticed. He went on: “You don’t seem to realise how tiresome people find this small-town moral posturing of yours.”
“People? What people?” She had unscrewed a bottle of nail lacquer and was ruminatively withdrawing the little brush attached to its stopper. Her back was still towards him.
“People who matter. Who happen to be important. You know perfectly bloody well.”
“Business mates.” She pronounced “mates” with a kind of sardonic jauntiness.
Her husband raised himself suddenly on one elbow. “Right,” he said emphatically. “Business mates. Fine. And they make money, lots of money. Isn’t that incredibly vulgar of them?”
Julia put a neat dab of nail lacquer on the nozzle of the APPLE LOFT can. Then she turned, collected her towel and clothing, and left without giving him another word or glance.
He remained still and listened to the slow, rustling drag of her slippers across the landing carpet. A door closed and was locked. The rest of the house was so silent that he could hear and identify the click of a dress button against wooden door panels, the brushing of chain across enamel, the creak of a tap.
David Harton’s smile was no longer wry, as he could see in the mirror that he had had fitted in the days of higher nuptial expectation. It now bespoke pain, philosophically borne.
The distant gush of water ceased after four or five minutes. It was succeeded not by silence but by a faint, sustained vibrancy. Odd, how someone’s presence in the bathroom always produced this subtle difference in the timbre of the house.
The woman was projected to him in a succession of tiny sounds. All had a muffled yet ringing quality, imparted by the tiled walls and the metallic drum belly of the bath. The echo of a discarded slipper striking the floor. A soft boom of weight travelling down through a naked heel. He heard the lick and swirl of water as she tested its warmth. The smile died quickly from his face.
Julia was bending low, half turned, and sweeping fanned fingers just below the surface. It was the same action as smoothing sand on a summer beach. The water lapped back into stillness. Fingers, glistening, converged upon the button at her throat, like wet bathers clustering at a tent. It was she now who smiled. Pensive, sensual amusement. She put first one hand, then the other into her nightdress’s open front, wrists crossed, then slowly lifted her breasts up and apart within the hands’ cupped caress. Her lower lip projected coquettishly. Slowly the hands turned, miming beneath the fabric the weight and fulness of their burden. Her body tensed and narrowed. The self-embracing arms tightened. The hands, suddenly stiff as surfboards, slid from breasts to shoulders and down, denuding them. She stepped into the bath as carefully as if before a critical audience, then gradually relaxed until she lay at full length, immersed just sufficiently for the tides born of her breathing to lap the white islands of her breasts and to suck her groin like currents in a seaweed grove.
There was a separate shower next to the bathroom. David used it energetically. The violent drubbing, arm-flailing and posturing beneath the needle-sharp onslaught of cold water he described as “toning up”. Julia told her friends that he looked on these occasions like a discus thrower desperate for a pee.
David returned to the bedroom, leaving two pieces of soap, his pyjama trousers and two wet towels in the shower basin. Naked, he did eighteen press-ups on the floor in front of the mirror. Another towelling and a little muscular massage with finger tips. He examined his hands, turning fanned fingers this way and that. They were short and inclined to pudginess.
“Thornton! Thorney, darling!” Julia’s voice from the landing. She had emerged from the bathroom to rouse their eight-year-old son, home on holiday from his boarding prep school.
The child, already up and dressed, answered from the kitchen where he was persuading Mrs Cutlock to feed him cake and cold tinned mushroom soup. Mrs Cutlock was the daily help. She had just arrived from her council house home in Simpson Road.
“Down soon, old chap!” cried Thornton’s father, cheerily.
The whine of a vacuum cleaner signalled that Mrs Cutlock was at large. David opened a couple of drawers and sorted their contents around until he found a pair of nylon briefs in silver and yellow checks, which he pulled on. Approvingly he adjusted the bulge produced by his genitals.
Julia entered, fully dressed. She glanced at the open drawers, the disturbed contents. Ignoring her husband completely, she sat for a moment before the dressing table and applied some makeup. She rose and walked towards the door.
“Julia...”
She stopped and waited, not looking at him.
“I’m seeing Weatherby today. I want to be able to tell him to go ahead with the divorce preparations.”
She said nothing.
“Did you hear what I said?”
Julia began to leave.
He grabbed her wrist and twisted it upward, into the small of her back. “I said, did you hear? Did you bloody hear?”
On the staircase, the hoovering Mrs Cutlock had found an angle of observation through the banisters—a sort of leper’s squint. She noted the raised voice and watched Mrs Harton suddenly double forward.
David was still smiling but there was a pale rigidity about his mouth. He pulled the woman close by holding her trapped wrist low, so that she had to crouch in an attitude of subservience.
“Now then, are you going to be reasonable?”
Mrs Cutlock saw Mrs Harton shake her head, then give a jerk. What, she asked the vacuum cleaner, could Mr and Mrs Harton be doing? Mrs Harton had jerked again. Surely Mr Harton wasn’t kicking her? Oh, but yes, yes he was. With his bare foot. Short jabs with that big toenail of his. Poor Mrs Harton. Ooo—another one...
The involuntary grimaces of sympathy made by Mrs Cutlock were suddenly replaced by one of shocked wonderment as she saw Mr Harton reel backward, bent low and holding himself between his legs. The poor gentleman was white as a sheet, but she supposed it served him right. Who would have thought it of Mrs Harton, though? A headmaster’s daughter. Grabbing her husband’s balls. Quick as a terrier.
Julia crossed the landing and spent a couple of minutes more in the bathroom. When she emerged, she was singing.
Her voice was high and firm and possessed an almost professional accuracy of pitch. “If you go down to the woods today...” The Teddy Bears’ Picnic was Thornton’s special favourite, or so it had been when he was four.
Mrs Cutlock stood aside on the stairs and grinned as Mrs Harton went by. Her employer did not interrupt her song, but in mid-note she made a bow of greeting, playfully arch, like a princess in musical comedy. Mrs Cutlock giggled and reflected that Mrs Harton was a cool one all right.
“...for every bear that ever there was...”
David listened and scowled. He tossed a few things about until he found his watch. He strapped it on, taking care not to catch any of his profuse, black forearm hair in the gold linkage. The watch told him the date, temperature, air pressure, and could be used as a currency conversion calculator. Its mechanism was accurate to within two seconds in five years. David kept the watch quarter of an hour fast.
He picked up the APPLE LOFT deodorant, aimed at his left armpit and pressed the button. Nothing happened. He shook the can and tried again. He twisted the button and took different aim. The country-fresh tingle remained imprisoned within its man-size pack. David angrily wrenched the nozzle from side to side. Suddenly it came away. David’s torso was hit by a stream of foaming APPLE LOFT like the contents of a fire extinguisher. It was searingly cold and of ghastly pungency.
His yell of shock and pain penetrated to the kitchen, where Julia was humming a reprise of The Teddy Bears’ Picnic for Thornton’s benefit while she broke eggs into a basin.
“Daddy’s calling, darling,” she said. “Go and see what he wants.”
Ten minutes later, David was dressed, composed, and seated with his son in the dining enclosure that was screened from cook top and sluice unit by rubber plants and shelves of spice jars.
“Mummy was in good voice this morning, wasn’t she?”
Thornton, a frail boy with ash-blond hair, looked at his father, then at his mother. His eyes were wary.
Julia took off to the tap the saucepan in which she had scrambled eggs.
David began buttering a piece of toast. He cleared his throat. “This singing business...” He waited for Julia to come back to the table and sit down. “This singing—does it betoken bliss?” David glanced at the child, as though inviting him to learn something.
“A sort of resolute cheerfulness?” David persisted. He reached for marmalade, then, seeming to notice for the first time the egg on the plate before him, he pushed the jar aside. He loaded his fork with egg.
“We have to be resolute, don’t we, darling?” Julia said to Thornton. The boy smiled at his plate.
“Humming I can understand,” David said. “That’s spontaneous. You hum sometimes, don’t you, Thornton?”
“Sometimes.”
“There’s a big difference, though, between humming and giving a recital at the top of one’s voice. Do you remember the woman you heard at that concert we took you to?”
“Rather!” said Thornton. “I saw all the way down into her mouth!” For a moment he grinned happily.
“Daddy was asleep most of the time,” Julia said. “The lady must have seen all the way down into his mouth, too. I hope his tongue didn’t have its whisky overcoat on, don’t you?” She sounded fond and confidential.
Thornton glanced at his father and giggled uncertainly.
“Singing,” David told him, “is a rather queer thing. You’ll see what I mean if you keep your eyes open, old chap. Singers—those who make a habit of it, I mean—are all ugly. All of them. The throat muscles become unnaturally developed, you see. Their necks get to look like—oh, I don’t know—like... like athletes’ thighs!”
Julia, composedly pouring herself a cup of coffee, caught Thornton stealing a guilty look at her throat and smiled at him.
“Your daddy,” she said, “is very fastidious about keeping thighs in their right place.”
“I rather suspect, you know,” said David to the forkful of scrambled egg that he was assembling, “that your mother has musical ambitions. I’ve never heard quite so much night starvation sublimated into the Teddy Bears’ Picnic before.”
Thornton decided he had been given a cue to be funny. “Were you really starving all night, Mummy?”
Julia smiled at him. “He is a funny old daddy, isn’t he? Actually, his the one who gets peckish in bed, but even daddies have to learn that there’s a time and place for everything.”
David ate his meal hastily, but with close attention to the texture of the scrambled egg, most of which seemed to fail whatever test he was applying because he shunted it into separate piles around the rim of his plate and left it. He took bites from three slices of toast but finished none.
Thornton watched, making no start on his own food. When his father rose and went noisily through the hallway to the lobby, the child slipped down from the table and opened the back door.
David reappeared wearing a short suede car coat and a flat peaked cap in pink plastic.
“Oh, Christ!” murmured Julia. “We’re off to Disneyland.”
He strode through, ignoring her.
Thornton was latching back the long wrought-iron gate at the end of the drive. He already had opened the garage doors.
His father climbed into the big green Hastings-Pumari, grinned at the boy and made a gallant aviator sort of sign with one thumb. “Okay, old chap—chocks away!” He transferred the thumb to the starter button. The car gave a forward lurch, as if in pained alarm.
David scowled, wrenched it out of gear, and again pushed the starter button. He held it in for nearly half a minute. The engine failed to fire. The pulsating, grinding laughter of the starter motor brought Julia to the kitchen window. She smirked blandly.
The boy came running to the car. David tried to ask him who the hell had been playing with the thing but Thornton did not listen. “Choke!” he was shouting. “Have you got the choke out?”
David glared at the dashboard. Choke. That one. No, he hadn’t. Confused, he switched off the ignition. The boy looked over his shoulder.
“You’ve not switched on!” It was a cry of surprise, of delight, of triumph.
“If ever I catch you touching this bloody car again...”
Open-mouthed, winded by injustice, Thornton stepped back and pressed himself against the garage wall. The big car drew out and sped erratically towards the gateway.
Ten minutes later, the postman had brought the morning mail and Thornton was soothing his wounded pride with sachets of the Instant Old English Ginger Beer for which he had persuaded his mother to rush a coupon seven weeks previously.
For Julia there came in the same little pile of packets and envelopes an offer of comfort of a very different kind.
She read the letter through once, twice, three times. She examined it carefully. Then she read it again.
Finally, after making sure that Thornton was happily preoccupied and that Mrs Cutlock had descended into the area of table clearing and washing up, Julia went to her bedroom. She locked the door and sat down by the extension telephone. After long deliberation she picked up the receiver and dialled a Flaxborough number.
Response was almost immediate.
“My name,” she said, “is Mrs Harton. Mrs Julia Harton, of Oakland.”
“Ah, yes. Mrs Harton. Splendid.” The voice was cultured, friendly—avuncular, almost.
“You wrote to me.”
“I did, indeed. And you have responded. I do hope you are free for lunch.”
“Who are you?” She tried to sound cold and incurious.
“I did sign the letter, Mrs Harton. Don’t tell me that the old professional affectation hasn’t been quite subdued yet. A sign of immaturity, alas.”
“Affectation?”
“Illegibility. Prescriptions no one can read. You know?”
Prescriptions. Was he a doctor then? She didn’t ask, for fear of sounding näive.
“I take it,” she said instead, “that this letter of yours is supposed to be some kind of a joke.”
He chuckled softly, and with no hint of resentment. “Why should you think that?”
“Oh, come now, Mr...”
“Rothermere. Mortimer Rothermere.”
“...Mr Rothermere. It is your letter-heading which I assumed was meant to be funny. What are you—a pop group or something?”
Again the unoffended chuckle. “Nothing so bizarre, I assure you. Unfortunately, honest trade descriptions are sufficiently rare nowadays as to sound melodramatic.”
Julia was beginning to find the urbanity of Mr Rothermere challenging. Very seldom among her husband’s friends and visitors was she able to converse in a way that she considered did justice to her own education and natural intelligence. David associated almost exclusively with people from outside Flaxborough—bankers, property men and some rather odd characters he called efficiency consultants: all conversational cripples unless money or golf were the topic.
“Yes, but really! The name of this set-up of yours—I ask you!” And she gave the sort of creamy laugh that she remembered as characteristic of a Girton tutor who had made her feel much ashamed of an essay of hers on Dickens the Great Reformer. “What’s the ‘Inc.’ for, anyway? I know Americans stick it after everything but I’ve no idea what it stands for.”
A little purr of good humour, then: “Strictly speaking, Incorporated. But we rather like to think”—another purr—“Incarnate.”
After a pause, Julia asked: “How did you come to know those things about us—about me and my husband?”
“Lunch, Mrs Harton... it will be so much more satisfactory. Have you any preferences?”
She pouted thoughtfully, then turned to look at the little china clock on the table beside her bed. When she spoke again, her “Very well, Mr Rothermere,” was terse and cool. She asked: “Do you know a restaurant in Spoongate called Fold’s?”
“I do, indeed.”
“Oh, please don’t sound enthusiastic on my account. The food is mediocre and the prices preposterous. My husband happens to have an account there, that’s all.”
“I must say I rather like your sense of fitness, Mrs Harton. Of occasion. We shall get along famously, never fear.”
“Twelve forty-five,” she said. “The head waiter will be able to point me out. Unless, of course, I don’t bother to pursue this nonsense any further.”
And she rang off.
Chapter Four
First fruit of the publicity accorded the Tring inquest by the East Midlands Evening Gazette fell into Inspector Purbright’s office in the shape of Miss Patricia Booker.
“I thought you ought to hear what she has to say,” said Sergeant Malley, to whom, as Coroner’s Officer, the girl had been referred from the inquiries counter downstairs.
In the fatherly shade of Bill Malley, Purbright saw a plump-faced girl of about sixteen, who nodded to him familiarly and then made a quick and manifestly unimpressed survey of the room. She sat in the chair brought forward for her by Malley.
“This accident at the fair,” she said, then was silent.
Purbright waited. Just as it began to seem that Patricia intended the verbless fragment to stand as a complete exposition, she added:
“Me and a friend was in Venus.”
“One of the cars,” Malley explained to the inspector. “On that roundabout thing. They’re all named after stars or planets or something.”
Patricia’s large, healthy eyes shone. “Twenty-eight times me and my friend’s been up. Fabulous. Venus is best. You know. Clean.”
“Clean?”
“Yeah, well, I mean some of them’s been thrown up in. You know.”
The inspector intimated that he did know, yessir.
Suddenly the girl was solemn.
“This fellow. The dead one. We saw him fall out.” She stared up over her shoulder at Malley, then at Purbright.
“Hurms is just in front of Venus,” she said. Purbright hoped the sergeant would not fuss over the mispronunciation, but all Malley said to him was: “That’s the one Tring was in. Hurms.”
“They’d been larking about,” said Patricia. “Inside the module. I mean you’re supposed to be strapped in, aren’t you? And it turns over, doesn’t it?” She fanned all ten fingers over her stomach, looked up at the ceiling and gasped dramatically.
“Tell the inspector what you mean by larking about.”
“Well, showing off, actually. You know. I think they must have spotted me and my friend.”
“There were two men in the car, were there?” Purbright felt it was time to get the narrative into some sort of shape.
“Yeah. Like I said.”
“Ah, yes.”
“One of them kept leaning right over like he was on a horse or something. Or his bike. Could have been. I mean they was in leathers. And he was drinking out of a bottle, wasn’t he? They both was taking drinks out of it but him specially. The other fellow never leaned about or nothing. He didn’t really let go of his seat, did he? Not that I could see, he didn’t. He wasn’t such a show-off as the first fellow, the one that fell out.”
There was a long pause. Malley prompted. “The door, Patricia. What was it you told me about the door?”
“Oh, yeah; the door. Well, that was funny. Just before all the modules started turning over and over, it came open. I could see it sort of flapping, couldn’t I? And I said to Di, hey Di, those blokes have got their door open. But she wouldn’t look because I think she was scared. And straight after that we started to turn over and I shut my eyes.”
“Were you scared, then?” Purbright asked.
“Me? No, shutting your eyes helps to make everything go dur-reamy,” and Patricia illustrated the condition there and then. She looked, the inspector thought, passably ecstatic.
“You didn’t see how—in what manner—the door of the module in front came to be open?”
“No. It just was. And then it wasn’t any more. I mean, that’s what was funny about it really.”
Malley saw Purbright’s understandable confusion. “What you’re telling us, Patricia, is that when you looked again, when you’d stopped turning over, the door of the car in front was fastened properly, like all the others. Is that right?”
She nodded. “Yeah, and there was just this one bloke sitting inside. Straight up, like nothing had happened.”
“Wait a minute, Patricia.” Purbright was frowning. “You said earlier that you saw Mr Tring—one of the two men in front of you—fall out.”
“Well, he must have, mustn’t he? I mean, there was two, then there was just one. He must have.”
“But you didn’t actually see it happen?”
A momentary sulkiness clouded her face. “I had my eyes shut, didn’t I?”
“Ah, yes, of course. I’d forgotten.”
Miss Booker understood and forgave. After all, the tall and easy-going and nicely mannered policeman was quite good looking for his age—almost dishy in a sort of way. She would be able to tell Di and Linda and Trish that she was glad to have accepted their dare because now she was an important witness and would get her name in the Flaxborough Citizen and perhaps even the Gazette. And that would be dur-reamy.
The inspector put a few more questions in a style more conversational than investigatory. Then Malley shepherded the girl away to the tiny office in the basement where, with frowns and wheezes and slow, one-fingered diligence, he would translate her story into a typed deposition.
Purbright and Malley met later. With the inspector was Detective Sergeant Love. Purbright indicated him and said to Malley: “Sid here has been much abused by Grandma Tring.”
“Who hasn’t.”
“Quite. But in this case her complaint is specific and a bit odd.”
Love spoke. “She says that somebody’s pinched a photograph of Digger.”
Malley looked up from the short, black pipe he had been probing with a piece of wire. “I’d have thought the only photograph of anybody in that family had been taken by us. Profile and full face.”
“I don’t think she was telling the tale,” Love said. “She said a reporter had called a couple of days ago—at least, he said he was a reporter—and she answered a lot of questions about her grandson. Then he asked for a picture of him so that the picture could be printed with the story. She gave him a framed photograph of Digger with his bike.”
“So?” Malley was busy again with his pipe.
“It’s the frame the old lady’s bothered about,” said Love. “She says it’s silver.”
Malley smiled knowingly, but said nothing.
Love looked at Purbright, as if for support against the unconscionable scepticism of the Coroner’s Officer.
“The point is,” said the inspector, “that nobody from the Citizen office has been anywhere near the Tring household. When the old woman called and demanded to have her photo back, they didn’t know what she was talking about and pushed her on to us.”
“Me, actually,” complained Love.
“What’s the crime—larceny of a picture frame?”
Malley blew down the newly excavated pipe stem. There was a noise like a death rattle and a sudden, overpowering reek of tar.
Purbright looked thoughtfully at Patricia Booker’s deposition. The signature, in painstaking back-sloped script, had a childish flourish at the end.
“Tring’s companion on that ride seems to have been a remarkably self-possessed character,” said the inspector. “I like the way this kid remembers seeing him after the roll—‘sitting straight up like nothing had happened’.”
Malley snorted amiably. “Aye, well, they’re all pretty hard buggers, that lot.”
“Even so, when your mate’s just gone out into a fifty-foot dive on to concrete, I should scarcely suppose your first instinct would be to shut the door after him and sit tight.”
“They aren’t very easy to close, those doors,” Love informed them. “I tried all of them. The latches are very strong.”
“You’ve seen the engineer’s report, have you?” Purbright asked.
Love and Malley said they had. It was mainly a lot of technical bumf but there was no doubt the equipment was in good order. “Better than some public transport,” averred Love, in daring disregard of The Establishment, as represented by the Flaxborough and District Passenger Committee and its eight buses.
“So you’d rule out the possibility of that particular door coming open on its own—or rather being swung open by the motion of the car.”
Love confirmed that he would. He showed in mime the way the latch was secured, then freed.
Having watched, the inspector said: “I’m afraid I had assumed up to now that the door could have been opened quite easily by accident—by a drunk knocking against it, for instance.”
“Oh, no; he’d have to get hold of the latch handle properly and give it those three separate pulls and pushes.” Again Love demonstrated in mid-air.
Malley said: “It doesn’t follow that just because Tring had had a few drinks he couldn’t get a door open.”
“Deliberately, yes,” said Purbright, “but I was talking about his doing it by accident.”
“All those Trings are mad sods,” observed Malley. “Them and the Cutlocks and the O’Shaunessys. Why shouldn’t he have opened it deliberately?”
“Bravado?”
“Showing off. Certainly, why not? There were a couple of totties just behind.”
Purbright glanced quickly down the girl’s deposition in search of a remembered phrase, found it, frowned.
“She says she recognised Digger Tring but not the other one because ‘he kept his lid shut’.” He looked up. “His motor cycling helmet, I presume?”
“That’s right.”
“ ‘Shut’ though—what does that mean?”
Love explained. “She’s talking about the visor. It’s a shield of dark coloured plastic that comes right down over the face.”
“Hinged,” added Malley. “Digger would have to push his up out of the way because he was drinking, remember.”
“Ah, yes. Neat whisky. And a rather superior brand.”
Across Malley’s big moon face flitted good-natured suspicion. He raised his eyebrows.
“It’s all right, Bill; there’s probably no connection. But the conscientious Johnson did find a smashed bottle near the West Row corner when they were collecting Tring. A Glenmurren straight malt, no less.”
“Digger,” said Love, “couldn’t have told the difference between whisky and fly spray.”
The inspector acknowledged his own impression that the Tring family appetites were not noticeably selective.
“He could always have pinched it, of course,” conceded Malley, and with this reasonable hypothesis the matter of the whisky was abandoned.
Which is not to say that Inspector Purbright had gained from his exchange with Malley and Love any substantial degree of assurance that he would be able to conceal, during an impending and unavoidable interview with the Chief Constable, that instinctive unease which Mr Chubb found so irksome a quality in his detective inspector.
Chapter Five
Mortimer Rothermere backed the big lemon coloured Fiat into a space in the centre of a line of cars in a private yard behind the Education Committee offices. He parked it with a single confident sweep, looking back and giving the wheel the precise final three-quarters turn that would just leave him room to open the door without risk to the adjacent Daimler.
A porter limped from a doorway. He leaned a little to one side so that the sleeve of his uniform hung low, concealing his hand. From the end of the sleeve a blue thread of smoke escaped.
Rothermere fished a brief case, a furled umbrella and The Times from the back of the car and swung the door shut. He patted his curly-brimmed, silver-grey homburg and prepared to cross the yard.
“Can’t park there, sir,” announced the porter. “That’s the Director’s place.”
“My good man, you don’t have to tell me, I am the Director.”
The porter faltered. He had put one hand behind his back. “Yes, but Mr Parry...”
“Dismissed.” Rothermere, though brusque, sounded regretful. “They should have told you.”
He strode past the porter, entered the door, turned right along a corridor, crossed the hall, into which it led, and left the building by its main entrance in Southgate. On his way to Fold’s, some twenty yards distant, Rothermere noted with approval that street parking was prohibited throughout the area.
Julia Harton had arrived early at the restaurant in order to study, away from Mrs Cutlock’s heavily suggestive solicitude and the demands of a Thornton already bored with holidays and impatient to return to school on the morrow, the curious communication from Happy Endings Inc.
She sniffed musingly the medicinal tingle of the bubbles bursting from her double Campari and soda, and read:
You have been selected, on the recommendation of persons of financial probity and social eminence, who work as a voluntary body to advise this organisation, as a suitable candidate for assistance and support by Happy Endings Inc.
Our Confidential Research Division experts have already examined data relevant to your case, and I am delighted to be able to tell you they have decided that your high Community Rating merits the offer of a very special service—that of our Cliveden Bureau.
The Cliveden Bureau operates as a general rule for the exclusive benefit of titled selectees. Some of the country’s oldest families have been enabled by the Bureau to make matrimonial readjustments without fuss or scandal, and it has long enjoyed their confidence and gratitude. Now you, Mrs Harton, because of the delicacy of your social connections, and the necessity of avoiding scandal that might weaken your husband’s commercial standing (and hence his capacity to compensate you adequately for the dissolution of your marriage), may share with the greatest in the land the privilege of Benefit without Bother.
Terms, of course, are an immaterial consideration in the context of the work of Happy Endings Inc., but we would assure you at the outset that a minimal percentage—a mere out-of-pocket reimbursement—is the total of our expectation.
All you need do in order to take advantage of this offer is to telephone the undersigned at Flaxborough 2229. He has the pleasure of being the representative appointed to be especially responsible for your interests.
For the next quarter of an hour, Julia sipped her drink and idly amused herself by comparing each new arrival with her mental picture of Mortimer Rothermere. Most of the diners could be disqualified at once; they were local business or professional men known to her, at least by sight. As Julia had expected, none was accompanied by a wife at this time of day. Her assignation might be noticed, but it would not be diligently monitored.
At last the door was pushed open in the confident, but not quite brash, manner exactly suitable to the entry of a man with broad shoulders, a greying but impeccably trimmed beard that emphasised his rosiness of cheek, an eye bright and watchful yet calm, and a big expanse of brow beneath the sort of hat that kings used to wear to race meetings.
He had an air, Julia decided. He had tone. Moreover, even if there was a hint of corsetry about him, he was not at all bad looking. She hoped very much that he was Mr Rothermere.
And so he was. But for some moments he remained where he stood, just inside the restaurant’s entrance, peering vaguely into the pink dusk of the long, narrow room.
Five years before, Fold’s had been a homely, slightly shabby eating house; its glass-topped tables a-clatter with cruets and thick tumblers and much worn cutlery with ornate, cast metal handles, each with a tiny drainage hole out of which vestiges of washing-up water would trickle upon the wrists of the unwary. In those days (“I think I’ll have the beef, Miss, and the apple crumble to follow...”) the ordinariness of the food had been honestly proclaimed in the light from high, naked windows. Now, though, the windows were darkened; some were masked in heavy velvet, others turned into alcoves, shallowly shelved to display culinary whimsicalities—a pepper mill, an old enamelled herb jar, a copper ladle. What light there was came from thickly shaded sconces. It was just enough to convey the prices on the menu as impressions rather than statements. It was a blush of well-being; a subtle reminder to the beneficiaries of Cultox Nutritionals (Catering Division) that spending money, unlike making it, carried the obligation of grace.
A shadow became flesh.
“Sah...” suspired the head waiter. He stood at Mr Rothermere’s side, looking prepared not so much to serve him as to truss him up.
Mr Rothermere continued to stare down the room. One did not look at head waiters: direct regard would be abdication.
“Sah?” The man’s face jerked upward; taut, helpful, insolent.
“Mrs Harton, I believe, is lunching here.” Mr Rothermere took a gold watch from his waistcoat and frowned at it, as if to invite the commemoration of this particular minute snatched from an unimaginably busy day.
The head waiter reached into the air and snapped a little of it between finger and thumb.
One of the floor waiters materialised from the gloom.
“Table six,” said the head waiter. He glanced distastefully at Mr Rothermere’s brief case and umbrella. The subordinate put out his hand. “Might I, sir?”
Ignoring him, Mr Rothermere turned and began walking past tables. The waiter had almost to run to overtake him and to become, with bobs and napkin flutterings, the dancing partner of the pulled-out chair.
Mrs Harton watched over the top of her glass. She inclined her head very slightly. Mr Rothermere gave her a full bow before taking his seat. Then, for four or five seconds, he gazed upon her with every appearance of fond approval.
“You look,” said Mrs Harton, “just like Edward the Seventh.”
Mr Rothermere chuckled delightedly. With plump, white fingertips he patted and caressed his moustache. Julia noticed how small and pink was the mouth framed by all the carefully groomed whisker-work.
The mutual examination was interrupted by the descent before each of a menu the size of a card table.
Julia returned hers at once without looking at it. She ordered a cheese omelette, a little salad and French bread. From behind the other menu came cautiously the voice of Mr Rothermere. He asked for translations of some of the more ecstatic prose passages. The waiter—also, it seemed, a stranger to menu language—met each inquiry with the earnest assurance that the comestible indicated was “very nice, sir.”
Resignedly, Mr Rothermere gave the signal for the menu to be hauled up. “It had better be the sweetbreads.” He held up a hand in a delicate measuring gesture. “Very few mushrooms. And no potatoes.”
Julia now saw that her companion had assumed a pair of gold-rimmed half spectacles. They gave him an even more benign appearance. “Whenever I see a bill of fare like that,” he said to her, “I can hear the dull thud of the freezer lid and the whine of the infra-red resuscitator. We live in wicked times, Mrs Harton.”
Julia regarded him for a moment. “You sound like a moralist, Mr Rothermere.”
Quickly he shook his head. “Moralising is like refrigeration. It doesn’t make life any better; just destroys the flavour.”
“My husband,” she said, “might almost be said to be an immoralist. He is for ever talking like a rake, but the only real talent he has is one for making money.”
“You resent that?”
“His talk or his talent?”
“His money-making.”
“Not in the least. One must love somebody to resent his preoccupations. The talk, though, I do find a bore. It’s meant to be provocative, of course.”
The wine list had arrived. While looking through it rapidly for what he wanted, Mr Rothermere held his free hand in a gesture of postponement of all other matters. The hand, Julia noticed, was white and very clean. The fingers were short and thick. On the backs of the fingers grew symmetrical patches of ginger hair. He wore three rings, one jewelled.
“The fifty-nine Macon.” He handed back the list. To Julia he said: “He probably is fearful of impotence. That troubles rich men quite a lot, actually.”
“All David fears is that I’ll...”
She stopped, looking suddenly surprised, as if the absurdity of the situation had only just occurred to her. From her handbag she drew the letter she had received.
“Look here, just what is all this about?” She smoothed out the sheet of paper and peered first at it, then at him, shaking her head. “I must be out of my bloody mind.”
Mr Rothermere mournfully chewed a fragment of roll while he watched delivery of steaks and fried potatoes to three silent, wary men at a nearby table. They eyed the meat on their plates like secret policemen counting in a new batch of suspects.
“Nonsense, my dear,” Mr Rothermere assured her in an abstracted manner. “You are here because you think I can help you... God, just look at all that cholesterol... which of course I can.” He wrenched his regard away from the steaks and smiled at her with fully restored attention.
“Now then, tell me if I am wrong. You are married to a man of substance but no sensibility. He is boring, offensive and—worst of all—mean. You would be glad to let him have the divorce he so ardently desires for certain squalid purposes of his own. However, you would require adequate compensation for the loss of material comfort and social status which the marriage confers—or ought to confer. And you fear that your husband’s meanness, in alliance with his own financial cunning and the expertise of his advisers, might result in your being cheated once you agree to start divorce proceedings. Am I correct?”
“Absolutely.” Julia’s eyes had widened a fraction. “You actually sound like a lawyer.”
Mr Rothermere’s little pink lips pouted with pleasure. A ringed finger passed in and about his beard. “I hate to think,” he said, “that so expensively acquired a qualification should be obtrusive enough to be instantly detected.” He shrugged self-deprecatingly.
Food arrived.
Julia viewed her salad. Not a doctor, then. A lawyer. Not that he’d actually said...
“You could have him done away with,” remarked Mr Rothermere, in a matter-of-fact tone. “He sounds as though he deserves it.” He speared a morsel of food on his fork. Julia was finding his beard not the least intriguing of the day’s novelties; she watched the piece of sweetbread conveyed through the hirsute hazard with quite remarkable deftness.
Airily, Mr Rothermere waved his fork. “I was joking, of course.”
“Naturally.”
They tried some of the wine. Julia liked it very much, and said so. He topped up her glass immediately.
They ate. After a while Julia asked: “This set-up of yours—is it something to do with Reader’s Digest?”
“Good heavens, whatever makes you ask that?” His surprise was so complete that several seconds went by before he saw, and acknowledged with a grin, that the question had been sardonic.
“American Express?” she persisted. “Encyclopedia Britannica?” She tapped the letter with her knife. “It’s this privilege lark—the old you-have-been-selected approach. Oh dear.”
“You think it is fraudulent?” He broke off a piece of roll and began to butter it. “I’m very glad you do. A client of intelligence is always much easier to work with.” He raised his eyes. “Intelligence, and a modicum of ruthlessness.”
“Oh, I can be ruthless, all right.”
“Good. Now I shall tell you something surprising. The claims you so rightly view with scepticism happen to be true. You have been recommended—and selected. No come-on, Mrs Harton. It is all, as I believe the expression runs nowadays, happening for you.”
Julia watched the rosy cheeks broaden, the eyes crease into shining slits and the mouth tighten and tremble with amusement as Mr Rothermere suddenly gave himself up to a transport of good humour: a condition which he emphasised by seizing the bottle and filling their glasses with a flourish that even Dr Heineman could scarce have improved upon.
“I still don’t understand,” she said. “Why me? And who has been doing the recommending?”
A sudden cloud of regret dimmed his smile. “My dear Mrs Harton, confidentiality is the essence of our organisation. You must see that.”
“It wasn’t Daddy, was it?” she persisted. “He’s a Mason.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What, that he’s a Mason?”
“That I cannot satisfy your perfectly natural curiosity.”
“It must be Daddy. He gets fits of indulgence. And he’s always looked on David as a sort of Steerforth who ought to be expelled.” She giggled. “By Christ, he’s right, too.”
The waiter closed in. He partitioned them with menus. Julia said she wanted only black coffee. Mr Rothermere did some reading.
“Kindly tell me,” he said at last, “what is meant by ‘couched in double Devon farmhouse cream, with mist of Kümmel and Toasted Kent hazels, dredged with rough-crushed Barbados crystals’.”
“Sir?” The waiter leaned and peered at the description indicated by Mr Rothermere’s finger. “Oh, the strawberries, sir. Yes, they’re very nice.”
Mr Rothermere said that coffee would suffice. Oh, and perhaps another bottle of wine.
“And now we shall never know,” he said to Julia. For the first time since their meeting, she gave him a full and friendly smile.
“No,” she said. “So let us talk instead of my loathsome husband and how to make his life a misery. Not that we shall be able to. He is one of those asbestos bastards who are so convinced of their own marvellousness that you can be gouging their eyes out and they’ll think it’s because you want to go to bed with them.”
Mr Rothermere raised one finger. “But money. That is different. That is their zone of sensitivity.”
“David’s?”
“Oh, I think so.”
She shrugged. “Maybe. I’ve never had a chance to kick him really hard in that area.”
Mr Rothermere regarded her narrowly. “Twenty thousand pounds...do you suppose he would feel that?”
“God almighty!” Her sudden harsh laughter brought glances from the stolid steak-eaters. She paid no attention to them.
“Our inquiries indicate that twenty thousand would be just about the maximum he’d pay.”
“For a divorce?”
“He wishes to marry—or so I understand—a young woman called Lintz...”
Julia’s amusement again got out of hand. “Bobby-May!” she managed to gasp.
“That name I was told but did not believe. Now I suppose I shall have to.”
“Perfectly true, it really is. The whole family has a sort of tennis fixation. It comes out in the queerest ways.”
“Your husband,” he reminded her. “There will have to be pressure, of course.”
“If you’re serious about that twenty thousand, you’re going to need boiling oil, never mind pressure.”
Mr Rothermere smiled blandly. “Oh, I don’t think so, Mrs Harton. Conventional, non-violent pressure will suffice, if there is enough of it.”
“Blackmail, do you mean?”
“I most certainly do not. Blackmail might be defined as seeking profit from a threat to disclose. The plan the Bureau has in mind in Mr Harton’s case will operate on the opposite principle.”
Julia peered uncertainly into her glass. “That sounds terribly complicated. You must”—with one finger she made little circles in the air—“unravel it for me.”
“But of course. What we intend is simply to qualify for your husband’s gratitude by rescuing him from an extremely unpleasant situation.”
“Rescuing him?”
“Yes. If he wishes us to. And guarantees that little settlement of twenty thousand pounds on the dissolution of your marriage.”
“And the situation you have in mind?” The finger now was picking out notes upon an imaginary keyboard. “How unpleasant?”
“One of considerable pressure. But not exerted by us, so you need have no qualms, Mrs Harton.”
“By whom, then?”
“By experts, naturally. By the police.”
Julia looked blank. For a few moments, Mr Rothermere regarded her with a kind of twinkling speculation. Then suddenly he beamed and leaned forward.
“On which night this week would it be convenient for you to disappear, Mrs Harton?”
Julia’s face remained impassive. She reached out her glass and held it while Mr Rothermere poured into it more wine. She sipped very slowly, waiting for him to expand the joke, but he said nothing. He was looking now at her shoulders and the rise of her breasts.
The silence, not the scrutiny, irritated her. She lowered her hand. “Go on, then; let’s hear the big strategy.”
For a few seconds more, his gaze was fixed upon the opening of Julia’s dress with a steadiness that somehow turned the examination into a compliment. Then he sighed, leaned back in his chair and signalled the waiter. He ordered Benedictine.
“With such a throat,” he said to Julia, “you deserve jewels. What does your husband spend his money on? Golf clubs, I suppose.”
She smiled, pleased. “I think it’s time you came to the point, Mr Rothermere.”
“Enough formality. Mortimer is my name.”
Julia made a little bow. “Go on, then, Mortimer.”
“The plan?”
“But of course. The plan. The grand strategy.”
“Not here, I think. Perhaps my chambers. Would you be agreeable?”
Her laughter spilled tipsily. “Chambers! Marvellous! And I’ll bet you have etchings.”
“Alas, no longer. My second wife purloined the collection while I was in Helsinki.”
“I suppose you want me to ask what you were doing in Helsinki?”
He shrugged lightly. “Embassy. One cannot take everything.”
“How true.”
“Curiously enough...” The liqueurs had just been placed on the table, and Mr Rothermere was regarding their golden gleam dreamily. “Curiously enough, it was Helga—my third wife—who tried to make me a Benedictine addict. She regarded it as a sort of private love potion and made me drink a glass every night after dinner. ‘For your rheumatism, darling.’ Sweet. I mean, when have I ever had rheumatism? She was a Finn, of course. They think everyone else in the world is impotent. It was terribly funny one night—well, morning, actually—I remember it was light enough to see her hand when she raised it, with her fingers spread out—like that. ‘Oh, darling,’ she said, ‘I’ve been counting, and that was five times! You must never, never let yourself catch rheumatism!’ So sweet...I always pretended it was the Benedictine; you know—just to please her.”
“Mortimer, you are a very gallant fellow.”
Mr Rothermere wrinkled his nose and screwed up his eyes in a fat-cat smile of satisfaction.
“I am, dear Julia, nothing of the kind. I am what your intelligence has divined already—an unprincipled scoundrel much given to venery and the taking of purses. You will see me yet in the Honours List. But”—he raised and wagged a plump finger—“this I tell you quite seriously: if you really want this precious husband of yours beaten to his knees, you are going to have to match his unscrupulousness with something like mine.”
“You are not really so wicked as you pretend.”
“Ah, you are preparing yourself for disappointment. There is no need.”
“It is you who may be disappointed.”
He made a small gesture of deprecation; gold and a jewel glinted in the flurry of white fingers.
“In my chambers,” he said, impishly confiding, “I believe there remains a nearly full bottle of Madeira wine. Let us go and lay our scheme.”
Sleepily and happily acquiescent, she shrugged and looked about her for the handbag she supposed she had brought with her some—how many?—hours before. Was it only that morning the ridiculous letter had arrived? From Mortimer. Dapper Mortimer with the curly brimmed hat and the boulevardier’s air. Happy Endings, for god’s sake. Ah, well, she’d had a bath—that was for sure—and changed into fresh pants. Roll on ye spheres of destiny...
She jerked herself properly awake. The waiter was by her side, offering her a scrap of paper on a tray. He kept his distance, as if the paper was infectious. It was only the bill. Without examining it, she scribbled her signature on one corner. The waiter withdrew.
“David’s bunch own this place,” she said. “Wouldn’t you just know it?”
“There is, I agree, a sort of logic in the connection between a restaurant and a dog food factory. One cannot help being put in mind of Sweeney Todd and the pie shop.”
Julia laughed but shook her head. “Pure coincidence, I’m afraid. Cultox have got their greedy hands on so many things that nobody knows who’s running what or where.” She waved a hand. “All this...I mean, what genius of an accountant thought that hard-headed, civilised country people who love their bellies would fall for this sort of rubbish?”
Mr Rothermere made no reply. He sat on, looking patiently benevolent and flicking the occasional crumb from his own, presumably well loved, belly.
Julia, too, lapsed into silence. She bowed her head. Mr Rothermere watched her fingering absently a button on the front of her dress. When she spoke at last, it was quietly and with only a hint of difficulty that the last glass or two of wine had induced.
“David is a real twenty-four carat Cultox-brand pig. All I want is to hear him squeal while he has his bank account cut. I’d say throat, but he’s got no nerves in that.”
Mr Rothermere nodded. He rose from the table and stepped to the back of Julia’s chair, ready to draw it out for her.
“We shall have to see,” he said, “just what we can devise along those lines.” He patted, then squeezed, her shoulder. “I have high hopes, I really have.”
Chapter Six
Mr Rothermere’s “chambers” proved to be a chalet in the Oxby Moor Motel, a mile west of Flaxborough. It held a large double divan, a combined chest of drawers and bureau, and a table with a telephone. Closet doors of simulated mahogany were set in one pale blue wall. On the wall facing the divan was a television set; it looked an integral part of the permanent structure. Through an open door Julia glimpsed lemon tiling, the edge of a wash basin, and some chromium plating. She sat on the divan, leaning back on one elbow, and watched Rothermere fussily make disposition of hat, umbrella and briefcase. The Times he seemed to have left behind in the car. He closed the bathroom door after bringing out a basketwork chair. This he carried to the bureau and sat down.
From one of the drawers he took a notebook, a newspaper cutting and a camera. Julia wondered about Madeira, but it seemed that more urgent matters were to be disposed of first.
Mr Rothermere ran a thumb along his moustache, stroked his cheeks twice, made a sort of will-reading rumble in his throat, and began:
“We were never in doubt that we should use the classic ploy of the vanished wife in this case. Circumstances are unusually favourable. Your husband’s factory has precisely the sort of machinery and disposal plant that would make your disappearance convincing. Add to the annoyance of being placed in peril of a murder charge the catastrophe of public suspicion of adulteration of pet food and you can imagine how ready your husband will be to come to terms.”
Julia had sat upright and clasped one knee. She now leaned further forward. She stared, frowning.
“You really mean all this, don’t you. You’re serious about it.”
Surprise, pain, reproach flitted in turn across his face. “My dear Julia!” The centre of the little pink mouth suddenly tightened in a mischievous smirk. “I am nothing if not an honourable man. I am contracted to help you. Had you doubted it?”
She had turned her gaze elsewhere, thinking, not listening. A finger was raised. She touched her lip, smiled. “You asked, didn’t you, on which night it would be convenient to be done away with...”
“Fatuously put. I’m sorry.”
“No, no. Please don’t be. This really could be a lovely idea.”
“Actually, before you...”
“Hey, do you think they’ll keep him in a cell all night?” Julia was hugging her knees, eyes sparkling. “God, he’d hate that. And if they get a search warrant they’ll find his precious collection of girlie magazines. Hey, I’d love to see a couple of Flaxborough bobbies trying to puzzle out that dreadful rubber thing he sent away to Liverpool for.”
Mr Rothermere raised his hand. “My dear, you will have leisure shortly in which to picture Mr Harton’s discomfiture. We have in mind for you an exceedingly pleasant little retreat on the Norfolk coast. What are your feelings about that?”
She shrugged, her head a little on one side, but made no reply.
“This I promise you: the food there is...” He joined middle finger and thumb to signify indescribable excellence, and kissed the air.
How continental, thought Julia. She said: “All right, suppose I disappear. What next?”
“Nothing for a while. Two, perhaps three days. Your husband will be uneasy, but I think he will not do anything. This lapse will look bad later, if and when the police begin making inquiries. At the end of three days, we shall make a preliminary approach. He will be told that if he does not agree to a reasonable divorce settlement at the figure my organisation suggests—twenty thousand pounds—your anxious friends and relatives will report your sudden and unexplained absence to the authorities.”
“To which, knowing David, I suspect he will say: go ahead and sod your eyes and much good may it do you. He does tend to be truculent when asked for money.”
“Ah, but our inquiries show that he is also shrewd in assessing odds. If I may say so, Julia, you have lived with him at too close quarters to have seen anything but rapaciousness and arrogance. He knows the score, this fellow; we don’t have to worry about that.”
“So?”
“So he will see certain possibilities and he will not like them. He will agree to pay.”
She remained a while in thought. Then she said: “One thing I’d rather like to know. Why is he supposed to have murdered me? You must grant even David the intelligence to see that the police won’t take a motiveless killing very seriously.”
Mr Rothermere smiled. “You do yourself less than justice, Julia. Jealousy—what else? The discovery that so beautiful a woman has a secret lover would drive any husband to homicide, I assure you.”
“There’s one small snag, darling. A secret lover is just what I don’t happen to have. Or are you volunteering?”
“You really are sweet.” He glanced at his watch. “And it’s true that I don’t have another engagement until five-thirty. Let us, however, first have regard to the—how shall I say?—the practicalities of the problem.”
Seeing him get up from his chair, Julia pulled straight her skirt but remained on the divan. She eyed him with something of provocative speculation.
Mr Rothermere did not look at her. He went into the bathroom and returned with a tubular metal stand, about six feet high when he extended it fully. To this he clamped the camera. He placed the stand between the window and the divan and spent a few moments adjusting the camera mounting. He peered through the viewfinder, squinted round it at Julia and altered a couple of lens settings. Every movement he made had a balletic nicety that contrasted oddly with the shortness and plumpness of his legs, which Julia’s position enabled her to notice for the first time.
“What the hell are you doing?” she asked, not unamiably.
He gazed at her through the frame of his fingers. “You know, you have quite a bit of”—he turned and did something infinitely precise to the shutter control—“Ingrid about you. Strictly professional”—the finger frame again—“but once off the set, very companionable, very civilised.”
“Ingrid?”
In sudden dismay, Mr Rothermere struck his brow. “God, your Madeira! My manners are really quite appalling.” From the bureau he produced a squat, very dark bottle and two plain tumblers. “And they would seem to be matched by the establishment’s drinking ware. I’m sorry.”
He more than half-filled each glass. She accepted hers and sipped. This was a much sweeter and, she thought, more flavoursome wine than the one in the restaurant.
“Nice,” she said.
He looked pleased to hear it.
“My husband has nothing but whisky at home. He doesn’t like it much, but he knows I can’t stand it, so he lashes it down quite bravely. It seems to help him raise his unpleasantness level.”
Mr Rothermere regarded her thoughtfully for a while. “You could have done better for yourself, I suppose.”
“By Christ! The understatement of this and every other year!” She emptied her glass at one swig. Her skirt had ridden up again. Disregarding it, she hunched forward, cheek on knee, and stared blankly at the window.
“Not that I am confident,” said Mr Rothermere, “that the lover we have selected for you would have been a notable improvement.”
She raised her head. “I’m not with you, darling.”
“Of course not. But I am about to explain.” He affected not to have noticed her empty glass. “We agreed—and it is perfectly obvious—that your husband must be credited with a powerful and, if possible, demonstrable reason for ending your sweet life. Correct? So. So a lover has to be provided. Policemen, remember, are middle-class moralists to a man; in their book, cuckoldry and burglary are equally heinous. But whom do we appoint? It must be someone who will cooperate, someone sexually vigorous and preferably free of responsibilities, someone, if possible, who cannot be too closely investigated. You can imagine our difficulty.”
Julia, who had been attending with mournful intensity, slowly shook her head.
“But then,” announced Mr Rothermere, “quite suddenly and out of the blue—the perfect candidate.” With the air of a conjuror, he picked up the cutting Julia had seen him take from the drawer. He handed it to her.
A little Wearily, Julia read. She looked up. “I don’t get it.”
“Your secret paramour. Mr Robert Digby Tring!”
Mr Rothermere was looking his most benign. She heard a curious sound. The man from Happy Endings Inc. was emitting a nasal hum of satisfaction; at that moment he looked like a big bearded bee.
“But he’s dead, according to this.”
The bee stopped humming. “Exactly. Wasn’t it your uncontrollable grief at his demise that gave the game away and brought on your head a husband’s jealous fury?”
Gradually the bewilderment left Julia’s face. She looked first thoughtful, then mildly amused. Delight dawned. “Hey, this is bloody marvellous!”
“I thought it might appeal to you.” Mr Rothermere had opened a closet door and was pulling out a big suitcase.
“Poor David will never survive the social slur. His missus having it off with a Hell’s Angel. And one of the Trings, at that.” Julia stretched precariously and possessed herself of the Madeira. “Know the Terrible Trings, do you? Ooo, Mortimer...” She attempted to whistle, gave up, and concentrated on getting the cork out of the bottle. “Actually...” She paused, then repeated with great deliberation “Ac-tu-ally...”
“Yes?”
“Actu-ally I wouldn’t have minded. David’s a great lad for showing off his hose but he couldn’t put a real fire out to save his life.”
Mr Rothermere looked sympathetic and murmured something about sexual behavourism and a conversation he once had had with a man called Jung. Julia thought he sounded very reassuring. She lay flat on the divan, closed her eyes, executed a brief hula movement with her pelvis and made a “rrrhummm” noise in imitation of a motor-cycle engine. She looked happy but hungry.
He took the bottle from her hand, carefully poured her a small drink, and passed it to her. “I suggest, my love, that before we grow too convivial we get the photography done. Have I your cooperation?”
Julia looked up at the camera on its stand and gave it a wink. She bared one shoulder and struck an attitude in a parody of seductive guile.
“Yes, but I think we shall need something a little more intense, a fraction more...” He shrugged, his hands open as if offering gifts.
“Obscene?”
A hand rose at once. “No, oh dear, no. Nothing actually indecent. I fancy the right phrase would be artistically provocative. All right? Picasso, I remember, used to ask me occasionally to arrange a model for him because he said sex was music and it needed a musician to read the score, not a painter. He was an astonishingly modest man, that fellow.”
Mr Rothermere opened the suitcase. Julia turned on her stomach in order to peep over the side of the divan. She saw that the case contained a full set of motor-cycle leathers and a bright orange crash helmet.
Mr Rothermere held the helmet aloft. It bore a black stencilled representation of a winged skull.
“May I suggest,” he said, “this”—he laid the helmet beside her—“and these”—a pair of black leather gauntlets with silver studs across the knuckles came from the case—“and these, so long as they fit, which I devoutly trust.”
Julia examined his third offering: knee boots in soft black leather-imitating plastic. She compared one of their soles with her own shoe. “Should do.” Without looking at him, she reached up as if in expectation of further articles.
Mr Rothermere snapped the case shut. She turned and stared at it stupidly, swaying a little.
He took off his jacket, hung it meticulously on a chair back, and began unknotting his tie. He spoke to her over his shoulder.
“I would have suggested your changing in the bathroom, but I know you are too honest, too live, a person to suffer from bourgeois susceptibilities.”
She surveyed in silence for a few seconds the boots, gloves and helmet, then suddenly giggled.
“My soon-to-be-late-I-hope husband is a waffle addict.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You talk about bour...bourgeois whatsits. Guess what David and his Bobby-May get up to. Oh, yes, one of his more amiable habits is to describe to me how Miss Lintz turns him on, as he puts it.”
“Yes, but waffles...”
“Oh, that—well, it seems to involve her sitting on a couple of tennis racquets for ten minutes. Butter comes into it somewhere as well, for God’s sake.”
“Cultox,” observed Mr Rothermere, “manufacture eighty-two per cent of the world’s margarine. Think of that.”
Kicking off one shoe, she drew on a boot and lay on her back, the leg on erect display. It was, Mr Rothermere noted, a singularly shapely leg. She stroked from knee to thigh. “God, wouldn’t David just love this! He’s kinky as all get out, poor bastard.”
He glanced at the poised camera, then at Julia once more. “Don’t forget you still have tights on.” It was the quiet, unemotional observation of a photographer rather than a seducer.
Mr Rothermere came and stood over her. “Passion without practicality can be self-defeating. Here—let me...”
She closed her eyes, at the same time raising her hips slightly. Gently he peeled towards himself the nylon second skin, bent over, kissed very lightly the gold-downed flesh. Julia’s blind smile was annihilated instantly by her sharp intake of breath.
“I think,” said Mr Rothermere, in a tone of murmurous admiration that was almost entirely genuine, “that I have not seen so attractive a woman for a very long time.”
Julia half-opened one eye. “How long?”
He gave her chin a brief, playful caress. “Since 1956.” The hand passed down the line of her throat, gentle but confident, and curved about her breast. “No, I tell a lie. 1949. In Istanbul.”
She felt cool air invade shoulders, then breasts, and caught herself breathing so rapidly that her mouth was drying, so she closed her lips tight, but almost at once the word “yes” broke through and she went on helplessly repeating it in a series of gasps until the movement of hands over and beneath her had ceased and the cool air was on her whole body, but only for a tiny while until warmth, intense, heavy, possessive, enveloped her. She gave a great sigh and opened her eyes. She was looking straight into the lens of the camera above. There echoed ridiculously in her head the command given at some school photograph ritual. “Say Cheese.” But only for an instant.
Not that it mattered. Mr Rothermere, quite unprofessionally moved by the occasion, had not had the heart to set the delayed shutter release.
He retrieved the situation half an hour later, with all the props in place and with a degree of eager cooperation on Julia’s part that persuaded him to the happy conclusion that the day’s work had made him a friend.
Chapter Seven
Grandma Tring stood square on her stocky old legs in Flaxborough Market Place and stared up at the gyrating modules of Space Shot. Her face was brown and wondrously wrinkled, with a shrewd, sucked-in mouth, a nose much punished by a lifetime of reckless inquiry and assertion, and a chin like a sea captain’s. Lending shade to her eyes, quick and black as rain beetles, was the last surviving example of what had been standard headgear among the older women of the harbour district when Grandma Tring was born there eighty-two years ago—a man’s flat cloth cap.
For a while, she watched the coloured cars climb, dip and revolve, and listened to the whoops and squeals of their more excited passengers. Then she turned, spat, and trundled off through the fair towards East Street.
Grandma Tring paid scant attention to the rest of the huge mechanical contrivances that now dominated Flaxborough Fair. They seemed to her to offer ordeals rather than enjoyment. What had happened to the Golden Horses, the great shining prancers, with red nostrils flaring like Charlie Dugbine’s used to do when she let him take her round the back of the hut beside the Field Street level crossing, and all the little flags flying on the top, and the painted pictures of cowboys and Neptune and Roman chariots, and the twisty brass rails going up and down with the horses, and the boom and blare and ting-a-ling of the steam organ as you went round past it and saw the ginger-bread stall again and then the Try-your-Strength with its gong in the sky, and then the girls from the seed warehouse, waving, and up came the steam organ once again and a fleeting chance to see all the bits of mirror on it and the wonderfully painted model musicians working like mad to thump drums and ring bells? Where were the stately Twin Yachts, hanging magically in mid-air for a moment before swinging past each other and up again with a gentlemanly little double cough of steam? And how, for heaven’s sake, did young men nowadays put their girls in an itching and asking when there were no swingboats to stand up in and bunch their muscles while they heaved on ropes like blue and scarlet catkins until the girls screamed for them to stop but not really wanting them to because it was so exciting to see Saint Laurence’s tower keep turning upside down and to know that the lads on the coconut shies were looking up their flying skirts?
As soon as she could push her way through the crowd at the north end of the Market Place, Grandma Tring escaped through a side street into the relative quiet of Priory Lane and thence stumped along to Fen Street.
Despite the Tring family’s long history of conflict with authority, its matriarchal head had no qualms about entering a police station. On the contrary, she seemed to feel that as regular customers, so to speak, of the law, she and hers were entitled to some privilege in the matter of invoking it.
She ignored the inquiries hatch and went up to the counter behind which Police Constable Braine was doing some pencil-chewing.
She rapped on the counter. Braine took the pencil out of his mouth and scowled. He looked like a bespectacled toad.
“I want to see the head lad,” announced Grandma Tring.
“You want to what?”
“Come on, duck. Git off yer arse. I want the bean pole with the yeller hair. The inspector. And nobody else. Not that wet bloody errand boy of his, neither.”
Constable Braine’s fury at being called “duck” by this unseemly old besom was ameliorated somewhat by the salty disrespect offered Sergeant Love, whose equable disposition was in Braine’s opinion a most unpolicemanly failing.
“Name?” He reached grudgingly for the telephone.
A disdainful silence.
“Mrs Tring, is it?”
The old woman’s back stiffened. She wagged a bony finger. “Don’t you play silly buggers with me, son.”
Braine pressed a key on the switchboard. “Miss Tring is here, sir. She’d like to see you if it’s convenient.”
To Braine’s deep disgust, Inspector Purbright not only agreed to see Grandma Tring at once, but asked that she be made comfortable in an adjoining room in order to be saved a climb upstairs. Most galling of all was the instruction to get her a cup of tea if she wanted one.
The old woman followed her reluctant guide and tested all the chairs in the room before settling into the largest and least dilapidated. Braine watched gloomily from the doorway. At a moment when her inquisitive gaze was directed at a spot safely remote from himself, he mouth-mimed the question “Tea?” (Of course I asked her, sir—she ignored me.)
“Yiss,” snapped Grandma Tring, to Braine’s surprise and alarm. He stared at the back of her head and fancied for an instant that he saw supplementary eyes, but they were only the glass heads of her hat pins.
“And plenty of sugar, mind,” she added.
Inspector Purbright found the old woman contentedly nosing the steam from a canteen mug. He told her it was a shame about young Digger, and he was sorry.
She accepted his sympathy without remark, but seemed to pass it as genuine. Rocking gently over her tea, she asked when that dratted trial was going to be got over because it wasn’t doing any good to anybody.
“It’s an inquest, Miss Tring, not a trial. The coroner asks questions and tries to find out what caused the accident.”
“That was nivver no bloody accident, son. You can have twenty inquests and they wain’t make it any different. Inquests isn’t nobbut wind and piss.”
Purbright appeared to consider this axiom carefully. Then he asked:
“Miss Tring, have you any reason for supposing that your grandson’s death was other than accidental?”
She gave a businesslike grunt and leaned forward.
“Reasons? Listen, I could give you reasons enough to boil three and bust six, but you ain’t got all day no more than I have, so shut up and pay heed. It weren’t accidental because it were on purpose. That’s the first thing you niwer got told, ain’t it. And here’s another. There was them after ’im as he knew something about and likely wanted a quid or two for, as is natural in a lad.”
“Ah, now that I did not know.” The inspector nodded sapiently.
Grandma Tring paused to suck up some tea. Her face saddened. “We reckoned at home,” she said, “that young Digger had got into bad company.”
The possibility of their existing within a hundred miles of Flaxborough any company susceptible of unfavourable comparison with the Trings had never occurred to Purbright.
The old woman, supposing his startled expression to indicate concern, elaborated.
“What kind o’ company? Fancy company. That’s what kind. And fancy’s bad as often as not. We reckoned Digger was sarvin’ wimmin out of ’is class.”
“Sarving?”
She peered at him, dubiously. “Aye, sarvin’—like ’orses an’ ’ogs. Ain’t you nivver sarved yer missus?”
He led her back to the point at issue. With what lady, or ladies, had her grandson formed a misalliance?
Ah, she couldn’t help him there—not as to names. Digger and his friends didn’t use names. The girls they picked up were too busy getting pleasured by one lad or another in the old bike shed to be called anything special. Well, when you were young, you didn’t bother. But there was one tottie she’d seen him with in town, not just once neither, though at a distance, and that one she could tell right away was the scent and pink frock kind. And she’d got a motor of her own.
“A married woman, would you say, Miss Tring?” Purbright asked.
“Shouldn’t wonder. Them’s the ones as touch up easiest. Specially after church.” Grandma Tring’s sudden cackle made the inspector jump. He recalled, and did not disbelieve, Sergeant Bill Malley’s assertion that she was frequently the guest occupant, with her knitting, of the big old basket chair in the building behind Edward Crescent that served the Flaxborough Hellcats as motor-cycle store, clubhouse and bordello.
“If you’ll forgive my saying so, what you’ve told me up to now doesn’t add up to very much,” Purbright said. “It can hardly be said to prove that someone wished your grandson harm.”
Grandma Tring scowled. “All right, then. What about the photo, eh? That fellow who came round. Said he was from the paper, but he bloody wasn’t, ’cause I’ve asked. And what”—she thrust her face closer—“about Digger’s medal?”
“Medal?”
“Ah, they niwer told you about that, did they?”
“No. I can’t say they did. What did he win it for?”
“I an’t sayin’ ’e won it. Not like in a war or jumpin’ in rivers an’ that. But ’e’d got it and once ’e showed it me, and ’e said, Gran, ’e said, that little old sod’s worth a thousand pounds any day I like to pick up a tellyphone. That’s what ’e said. And ’e meant it. A thousand pounds. So where’s it gone, eh?”
“How do you know it’s gone anywhere?”
“It’s not in Digger’s things. We’ve all had a look.”
“Can you describe this medal?” Purbright squatted down by the old woman’s side and handed her a pencil and a folded envelope. “Show me what it looked like.”
She smoothed the paper flat on a thigh skirted in what seemed to be black roofing felt, and made a wavery circle with the pencil.
“Ain’t no good at drorin’ ”, she said. A few squiggles and dots appeared within the circle, which was about an inch and a quarter across. “Them’s printing,” explained Grandma Tring. “Words.”
“Can you remember what they were?”
She shook her head. “Digger kep’ it in ’is ’and. Aye, but I reckon”—an eye half closed in effort of recall—“as it was somethin’ to do with Mister Churchill.”
“Sir Winston Churchill?”
“Yiss. ’Im.”
There was silence while the old woman stared at her sketch and ruminatively twisted the little bunch of hairs that decorated a mole on her jaw. Then the pencil went to work again. Some short jabs and dashes appeared on the rim of the circle.
“It was cut about a bit,” she announced. “Sort of jaggy.”
Purbright took back pencil and envelope and rose to his feet.
“I’ll certainly let you know if it turns up, Miss Tring. But there is something else missing, isn’t there? A framed picture of your gra...”
“Silver.” The word snipped off the tail of his sentence like a sprung mousetrap.
“My sergeant tells me that the man to whom you handed that photograph—and frame—told you he was from the Flaxborough Citizen office. You now know that wasn’t true.”
She pursed her lips, as if the only appropriate comment was too venomous to be let out.
“I understand from Mr Love that he was a bearded man, smartly dressed, well spoken. A biggish man—is that right?”
Yes, that was it, biggish. And with the looks of a fancy eater. A prissy talker, too, as if he had a bit of foreigner in him. She would not be all that surprised if he put scent on his whiskers.
“What sort of questions did he ask you, Miss Tring?”
“Well, about Digger, didn’t ’e. Where ’e went to school and if ’e’d played football and such and where ’e went to work. All that. It would’ve been a lovely piece in the paper after what I told him.”
“And what did you tell him?”
Grandma Tring looked away. “Oh, this ’n that.” There was a pause. “About Digger’s dad gettin’ the Victoria Cross, and the time Digger saved the dog meat factory from burnin’ down, and about doctors that measured up ’is brain when ’e was four and sayin’ ’e’d got enough for a vicar an’ a librarian both at one go. Fam’ly things. Jus’ fam’ly.”
“Pity he wasn’t really from the newspaper,” said Purbright, meaning it.
She snorted. “The fleechin’ bugger! If my lads lay daws on ’im, they’ll use ’is eyeballs for bottle stoppers.”
“A short while ago,” said the inspector, when he judged her ire to have subsided, “you said something to the effect that your grandson possessed information that he thought was worth money. People were ‘after him’ I think you said.”
“I might ’ve,” she said, warily.
“Have you any idea who they were, these people?”
No, she hadn’t. God rest his soul, Digger had been a close young sod.
“In that case,” said Purbright, “I suppose you’ll not be able to tell me what the information was that he considered valuable.”
He supposed right. Unless...
“Yes?”
Unless, the old woman said after deliberation, it had something to do with tombstones. She looked up. “R.I.P.—that’s what they put on tombstones, ain’t it?”
Purbright nodded, and she went on:
“Aye, well, I asked ’im what ’e thought ’e was up to with ’is medals and ’is tellyphones and ’is tales about knowin’ this an’ that and the other, and what does ’e do but wink his poor little good eye at his Gran and thump the side of his nose with his finger like that and say ‘R.I.P.’ I says, What? And again ’e says ‘R.I.P.’ And looks pleased as if ’e’s farted in church. But that’s all I could get out of ’im, and now ’e’s gone, poor lad.”
The inspector suggested that Digger had merely intended to reprove her inquisitiveness with a tactfully oblique reference. Had he wanted the matter to be allowed to ‘rest in peace’ in fact?
Grandma Tring scowled dubiously. No, it was that missing medal as she reckoned was at the bottom of it all. A thousand pound was a rare old lot of money to be got by telephone, even in these wicked times. And Digger wasn’t a lad as would lie to his Gran.
Purbright later took up the point with Sergeant Love.
Love confirmed that none of the younger Trings would dare employ at home those imaginative gifts for which they were noted elsewhere.
“In that case, unless the old woman fed me the story for some obscure purpose of her own, we can assume that this medal, or whatever it is, does exist,”
Love thought about that. “There’s no medal on the missing property list.”
“No? Well, in any case I can’t see one fetching any extravagant sum of money, not even for sentimental reasons.”
“Could be blackmail,” suggested the sergeant, incurably optimistic in the matter of High Crime.
“I’ve yet to hear of anybody ready to pay lest the neighbours get to know he’s a hero. Incidentally, since when has Digger’s father been a V.C.?”
“Since when has Digger had a father?”
Purbright knew better than to suspect a witticism. Love was by no means a solemn young man, but he was an essentially serious one. The truth about the Trings was that they had genetic peculiarities similar to those of the hive, in as much as all the fertilising was done by casual, drone-like suitors who were soon driven away again by matriarchal tyranny.
“Perhaps,” said the inspector, “the old woman’s obvious preoccupation with medals has led us up the garden a bit. She didn’t examine the thing closely. It could have been something of high intrinsic value that just looked like a medal.”
“Such as?”
“A slug of platinum, say. Cast in a form that can be called artistic to get round the metal-hoarding regulations.”
Love frowned. “Who’d want to hoard platinum?”
“There are those, Sid, whose gains are so considerable and so ill-gotten that they can’t wait to transmute them into some thing respectable. I believe the Americans call it ‘laundering’. Do you suppose there is such a thing as a Churchill Medallion?”
“Probably. There are Churchill tanks and Churchill cigars and no end of Churchill Avenues.”
Purbright shook his head vaguely. “Just something else Grandma said.”
“Was she on about that photograph again?”
“She was.”
“Fancy Digger having his picture taken.” Love looked almost wistful. “One without a number on it, I mean. They reckon he had a tottie though, so it might have been for her.”
“The old woman spoke of a girl friend—one complete with scent and her own motor car, according to Grandma. Would that not have been out of character?”
Love considered, then suddenly brightened. “Perhaps,” he said, “Digger was a rich woman’s plaything.”
“Perhaps,” murmured the inspector. He looked pained.
A moment later he remembered something else that Grandma Tring had said. About her grandson’s “good eye”.
“Digger wasn’t blind in one eye, was he, Sid?”
“No, not blind. He came off his bike about two years ago, though, and messed one side of his face up a bit. It left a biggish scar under one eye.” Love pointed to his own unblemished cheek in illustration.
“Ah, yes,” said Purbright. “I noticed that when they collected him.”
Chapter Eight
The following morning was Thursday. Mrs Cutlock did not come to work for the Hartons on Thursdays. Thornton had been taken off to his boarding school in Yorkshire the previous day by Julia’s father. David Harton, who was required by the Cultox “My Pal My Boss” code to remain in his office late enough on one evening a week to be available to discuss night shift problems, was now, at half past ten, on his way to the Doggigrub plant. Julia waited a further quarter of an hour, then began to pack a large suitcase.
The task was unexpectedly difficult. There were many clothes from which to choose. Yet again and again a dress or coat or pair of slacks went into the case only to be reconsidered, sighed over, and thrust back. One had to look decent, even in retreat; but any suggestion of deliberate emigration would be dangerous.
One thing was sure. David would not have the slightest idea of what she had taken. He never noticed what she wore and took no interest in her shopping—beyond deploring the fact that it cost money. He certainly would be without a clue when it came to giving the police an inventory.
When? She frowned, suddenly anxious. If it came to that, she had meant. But no, surely to God he wouldn’t prove that bloody stubborn and stupid. Not when his own neck was threatened, he wouldn’t.
She retrieved from the case a dress in brilliant orange jersey, hung it back in the wardrobe and selected instead an outfit in autumnal beige. No point in looking conspicuous, even though the game wasn’t going to be allowed to get to a really absurd stage, like a police hunt or something.
Shoes. A pair for looks, a pair for walking. September walks in Norfolk. Very pleasant. She must remember to impress on Mortimer the need to let her know if things threatened to go too far. There was Thornton to be considered. Though her father was sure to have had him in mind when he called in Mortimer Rothermere’s organisation in the first place.
Julia smiled when she remembered the inscrutability maintained by her father while he marshalled the child into his car yesterday and prepared to drive off to Yorkshire. No wonder the boys at his school called him Clam. He’d let all her hints go by, not even rising to the bait when she’d wished the trip “happy ending”.
At a quarter to twelve, she carried the packed case through the door that led from the kitchen into the back of the garage.
She put the case into the boot of her own small car. The garage could not be seen from the road, nor was it overlooked by the window of any other house. She watched the drive carefully just the same until the case had been stowed and the boot lid pressed shut. A sense of elation was beginning to take hold of her. It heightened her consciousness, both of self and of relevant externals. This, she supposed, was what people addicted to dangerous games meant when they claimed to be having “fun”. Well, so it was.
Julia drove into town the long way round, up Partney Drive into Hunting’s Lane, then down past the park and through Fen Street. The late Victorian washhouse-gothic home of Flaxborough’s police force in Fen Street, she seemed to be seeing for the first time. It looked huge and fortress-like. Two men in uniform were emerging ponderously from a side door. Julia looked quickly away and kept her face averted until she reached the East Street junction where she turned right and joined the trail of traffic waiting to squeeze past the booths and rides in the crowded Market Place ahead.
The town bridge, too, was congested, but after the left turn into Burton Place the west-bound traffic became sparse. In another five minutes the little blue car had travelled the length of Burton Lane and was entering the grounds of the motel just beyond the Oxby Moor crossroads.
Julia drove to the back of the reception building where there was a crudely paved parking area. It contained only three cars. One of them, a big yellow saloon, was standing at the far side of the space, half concealed by bushes that had straggled through gaps in the tall boundary fence.
There was no attendant. A notice board warned of the management’s accepting no responsibility for something or other. Julia gave it no more than a glance. She drove across the area and made a reverse turn into position alongside the yellow car.
She got out. The car was Rothermere’s. His Times of two days before still lay on the back seat. It and the missing winder handle on the passenger side gave her a sense of familiarity.
The boot of the Fiat opened easily. Inside was a parcel, a bulky parcel securely but inexpertly tied with thick string. It was heavy and awkward enough to need a two-armed effort to lift.
Less than a minute later, Julia was driving back along Burton Lane. Her slight breathlessness was not the result of switching case and parcel in accordance with Rothermere’s instructions. It arose from sheer excitement, from a mounting persuasion that these curious things she was steeling herself to perform—things she always had supposed peculiar to the fantasy world of the thriller—were not only well within her capacity but were actually going to prove effective.
On her return trip through Fen Street, she stared boldly at the police station. A tall man with corn-coloured hair, hatless, was standing outside in leisurely conversation. An inspector, she thought, remembering having seen him with her father on some school occasion. The tall man, endowed perhaps with a policeman-like sensitivity to stares, glanced at her as she passed. He smiled shyly.
When she reached home again, Julia was surprised to see the time was only 12.20. It was going to be a damned long afternoon. She cleared the breakfast table and washed up. Slowly and methodically, she put away the china and cutlery. She considered lunch. Not yet. A sherry might be a better idea. Appetite did not respond. She had a second sherry, drinking it more slowly. At one o’clock, she switched on the portable radio in the kitchen and listened with half consciousness to the news while she viewed the small reserve of convenience foods from which she occasionally drew a meal when she was on her own.
A four-ounce portion of a compound labelled, incredibly, “Ham’n’Egg-Burger” was the only alternative to the extreme gastronomic polarity of baked beans and truffled oysters. She offered it, albeit with misgivings, to the can opener.
The telephone rang.
“Julia?” It was David, of course. Why the hell did he always sound like this on the phone, as though he expected some other woman to be in charge of the house?
“Naturally.”
“Nothing natural about it. You could be one of a thousand people. Surely a simple announcement of identity wouldn’t cripple you.” (God!—argue, argue, argue...)
“What is it you want?”
“I’d like you to fetch me tonight. The bloody car’s broken down.”
Oh, god, now what. Today of all days. “Broken down?” She tried to think quickly of ways in which her strategy might be threatened.
“Look, I don’t have time to give you a run-down on all failure factors relevant to the internal combustion engine. Just accept that the car won’t go, right? Daddy’s motor broken. Wheels not go round. Mummy come at half-past seven, yes? Half seven.”
He rang off. Slowly Julia replaced the receiver. She returned to the kitchen and did some more thinking while she unlidded the “Ham’n’Egg-Burger” and sliced it into a frying pan. By the time it was emitting its promised sizzle of true country goodness, she realised that, far from upsetting the day’s plan, the car incident might almost be an improvement. Her presence in the factory at the day’s end would not now need to seem fortuitous; it was David who would be seen to have engineered it.
After lunch, Julia brought in from the garage the parcel for which she had exchanged her case of clothing. She cut the string and opened out the single sheet of brown wrapping paper.
She stared dreamily for some seconds at the black zip-fronted tunic, the breeches in the same soft, leather-textured plastic, and the boots, supple and with heightened heels. Then she drew on a pair of pink rubber housework gloves and, carrying one of the boots, crossed the hall into the sitting-room.
A shoe was lying in the fireplace, another on the seat of a chair. She measured it, sole to sole, against the boot. They matched, as she had known they would. David had unnaturally small feet for a man. They and his tiny, yet clumsy, hands seemed as if they had ceased growing when he was about ten.
His head appeared small, too, but she could not be sure about that. He never wore a hat, and because he was sensitive about a tendency to premature greying he kept his hair cut very short. So there was no helmet in the parcel, Mortimer having agreed that a bad guess might spoil the whole thing.
Back in the kitchen, Julia spread boots, tunic and breeches on a clear section of bench and with a slightly waxed cloth systematically rubbed the entire plasticised area and every button and piece of metal that might have retained finger-prints. She did not find the task in the least onerous: it was more like the first intriguing and satisfying trial in practice of some process learned on an arts and crafts course.
Still wearing gloves, she bundled the gear together with deliberate awkwardness and re-wrapped them in newspaper. She viewed the resulting package, and nodded, satisfied. An authentic Harton creation. She stuffed it into a floor level recess beneath the sink and pushed it as far back as it would go.
There remained the original paper and string. She could not remember if Mortimer had said anything about them. Never mind, she was capable of thinking for herself and of being thorough. She carried the wrappings to a corner of the garden where there was a wire basket which David, in a brief flirtation with horticulture, once had bought for the burning of fallen leaves. She made in it a bonfire of the paper and a couple of armfuls of the early sheddings of a big chestnut tree.
It was not yet half-past two. She tried to relax and listen to an orchestral concert on radio but gave up after a quarter of an hour.
Setting off to fetch a book from upstairs, she found herself wandering from room to room as if making an inventory of their contents and committing to memory the exact arrangement of furniture.
It was ridiculous, this restlessness. She was behaving like a nervous middle-aged woman embarking on her first shop-lifting expedition. There was nothing criminal in what she was doing. Nobody was going to cross-examine her. She had every justification for what she intended—to frighten a self-centred, brutish husband and to force him into making amends for his treatment of her.
Perhaps, Julia reasoned, a bath would help. At least it would pass some time.
She ran water to a slightly greater depth than usual, but made it a little cooler; it needed to be calming but not soporific.
Tossed among a mixture of toothbrushes, paste tubes, and razor and blades at the back of the wash basin bench was an unstoppered bottle, the latest addition, Julia supposed, to David’s assiduous gleanings from the field of male cosmetics. She picked it up. “Forestry Balm, a Skin-Toning Compound of Twenty-nine Costly Herbs from Finland.” She sent a couple of glugs into the bath water. They fizzed briefly, then spread in green whorls. There arose a steamy, obtrusive perfume. It reminded Julia of the smell of breath-sweeteners, whose use had been one of her husband’s earliest essays in the achievement of sexual irresistibility.
She undressed in the bedroom. The bruises on both legs that testified to the kicks David had delivered two days before were now starkly defined, their colour yellowish like tobacco stains. Julia stared at them for a long while in the mirror, her face showing no emotion save perhaps thoughtfulness, satisfaction even.
She turned away at last and moved about the room, lazily casual. At the window, she paused to look out upon the rowan trees, scarlet clustered, and the closely set beeches that formed now a flame-coloured wall of leaf guarding the privacy of the house and garden. Gently, she pressed her body against the glass. The chill tingled into her breasts and belly. She closed her eyes. Was this how it felt to be a nude painting? David would probably have preferred her to be a big erotic picture. He was great on peeping; had a special face to wear for it—his tolerant, I’ll-go-along-with-it intellectual face, that he kept for strip shows at the Masonic.
Julia opened her eyes again to look at the trees and sky. Slowly, almost reluctantly, she drew away from the window, as from an embrace. She left the room and went slowly downstairs. For five minutes or more, she wandered in and out of rooms. She had never before been naked in any of them. It was marvellous, this solitude, this freedom. And it was only a symbolic foretaste, after all. Soon she would be able to go where she liked, to do what she fancied, when she fancied. To the tune of twenty thousand pounds.
She ascended the stairs like a nude priestess and slid, tongue-tip in ecstatic communion with upper lip, into the green-tinged, gently steaming water.
The weather, which had been bright and warm during most of the day, grew more dull as the afternoon passed. At six o’clock some of the street lamps came on. Julia, making herself a pot of tea, saw the light from one of them through the trees, faint and red like a paper lantern. She frowned; fog would be an unwanted complication.
She drank her tea quickly and without enjoyment. Resisting a chronic inclination to check every room again to ensure that everything indicated a natural and unplanned departure, she left the house at ten minutes past six.
The Doggigrub plant lay on the northern outskirts of Flaxborough. It was set back from the Chalmsbury road, fenced within its own grounds. Broad concrete carriageways circled the factory buildings, some of which were linked by conveyors, big pipes slung overhead like aerial arteries. By the time Julia drove past the gate office and made her way towards the administrative block, most of the daytime production had ceased. A couple of trucks were being loaded with cases in the floodlit transport bay. Plumes of steam marked where a continuous sterilisation plant had been left on automatic setting until morning.
She listened to noises which, though ordinary enough in daylight, were strangely difficult to identify in the gathering dusk; the rolling of an empty can; a chain passing over a pulley; the clash of elevator gates.
Julia had been seen, recognised and respectfully greeted by the gatekeeper. No doubt he had conscientiously set down in his record of traffic the arrival at 18.29 hours of the wife of Doggigrub’s chairman and managing director. Still, it would do no harm to have a few more witnesses.
She left the car opposite the main entrance to Administration and walked back to the long, single-storeyed building that housed the dog food processing department.
A pair of men in Doggigrub green overalls were pushing a big scraper back and forth across an area of floor that had acquired a pinkish grey crust. They were the sole occupants of the building.
“Hi,” said Julia, from the doorway.
The men stopped pushing and looked towards her.
“Evening, Mrs Harton,” said the older. His companion nodded nervously. They waited.
“My husband promised me a bit of sight-seeing. He’s not about, though, is he?” She tried to grin cheerfully but it wasn’t easy. A familiar but loathed smell was beginning to insinuate itself through the masking deodoriser that was constantly being injected into the air supply. It was the unconquerable stink of carrion.
Promptly and eagerly, the men peered about, across, up and down. No, they admitted, Mr Harton was not about.
“Not to worry.” She gave them a nice smile and withdrew.
The younger man said to the older: “I’d rather be up her than up in Newcastle.” The older man jerked his head in indication of the shadowy shapes of machinery. “Sight-seeing? Bloody hell!”
Julia returned to where she had left her car. All the lights in the office block were on, although most of the staff had gone home an hour ago. Through one window she saw a pair of women in pinafores and dust caps. They were vigorously up-ending waste paper bins and lashing desk tops with dusters.
A row of three windows belonged to the boardroom. It, too, was lighted, but the curtains of blue and gold striped satin had been drawn. That was where David would be now, with McGregor probably, and Donaldson, and perhaps chinless Higgins, punishing the pink gin and replaying games of golf.
Julia passed into the reception lobby. A girl was seated behind a desk that consisted substantially of a sheet of black glass. She had a phone beside her, but nothing else. Julia thought how sad she looked, as though she had been kept behind after school for something she hadn’t done.
“Oh dear, I’m afraid he’s in conference,” the girl said, suddenly attentive but looking more pained than ever. She extended a timorous hand towards the phone. “Would you like me to tell him you’re here?”
“No, that’s all right, Eileen. I’m a bit early, actually. He is expecting me. I’ll come back.”
Along the southern boundary of the site occupied by Doggigrub was a path that once had been a bridleway between Northgate and farms on Heston Down. It now was little used and some stretches had become overgrown, but it did not require much diligence, even on a dark evening, to follow this path as far as the opening in the perimeter fence that had been made some years before by dwellers in adjoining Twilight Close and since renewed by them so perseveringly after each repair that the factory management had finally conceded victory. What the management had not done was to solve the mystery of why the inmates of a local authority’s home for the aged should want to have access to the grounds of a pet food manufactory. Many suggestions, some sinister, had been offered. All were wide of the truth, which was simply that the pleasantly landscaped and planted area provided for a few at a time of the old men and women a secluded refuge from the strictures and (much worse) solicitous jollities of their captors.
Julia reached the gap in the fence without having seen anybody or encountered worse obstacles than a patch of thistles and a number of elder bushes whose berries, hanging in shadow at face height, had brushed unexpectedly across her cheeks like bunches of little clammy finger ends.
She climbed through into the driveway of Twilight Close and walked swiftly and as quietly as she could to the rear exit, which was used only by tradesmen making deliveries to the kitchens during the day.
The big yellow Fiat was waiting on the opposite side of Leicester Avenue, twenty yards down.
Julia hurried to the car and got in.
Mr Rothermere, swaddled in warm air, cigar smoke and a Mozart quintet, gave her a sideways beam of welcome.
“No one saw you leave?”
“Not a soul.”
He nodded and squeezed her thigh.
The journey through Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire into Norfolk took two and a half hours. For some of the time Julia slept, leaning lightly against Mr Rothermere’s shoulder. She did not snore, a fact he found curiously endearing; indeed, twice during this interlude he looked down at the sleep-smoothed face with sadness and something that could have been self-reproach.
They stopped in Norwich for a leisurely dinner amidst oak and stone and pewter and American Express cards. Mr Rothermere played a solo on the wine list with characteristic panache, a performance he followed up by recounting how the Gironde Maquis had sabotaged a consignment of wine for Germany by putting into it corn plasters that fastidious Nazis would suppose to have floated off the feet of the grape treaders.
“One actually did get into a bottle that was delivered to Goering.” He raised a finger, as if admonishing her laughter. “No, it really did.” Somewhere in those jauntily curled whiskers was a grin, surely? She began, warily; “Were you...I mean, I haven’t really gathered...” But always the barrier of modesty. “God, it was so long ago. And so dreadfully unimportant.” She did not press him. Some of his memories must be pretty terrible.
As soon as Julia climbed wearily out of the car and stood on the empty forecourt of the little Cromer hotel, she was aware of the long breathing of the sea. She was slapped fully awake by the pungency of salt and wet sand and mats of weed. She stared at the dark that hung, like a heavy curtain, beyond the cliff’s edge. Such intensity of blackness compelled a straining to discern the slightest pinpoint of light that would make it credible. After a while, Julia saw a tiny gleam, then another, fainter. Ships, she supposed, far out. Then high up, a diamond speck, two, six, a dozen. A glittering frost of stars. Feeling foolishly relieved, she turned and followed her escort into the hotel.
The woman who appeared in response to Mr Rothermere’s shaking a little silver handbell at the reception counter was a florid-complexioned, dumpy woman with a round face and beaklike nose that gave her the profile of a parrot. He entered in the register the names of Mr and Mrs M. H. Rothermere, Greenfield Lodge, Well Road, Hampstead, London, N.W.3.
“I,” said the parroty lady to Julia, “am Mrs Cartwright,” and she stared at her with great interest.
“How do you do,” said Julia.
“My wife will be staying on for a few days,” said Mr Rothermere. “I, alas, must return to town first thing tomorrow. I did mention that in my letter, didn’t I?”
Mrs Cartwright inclined her head. “Mr Cartwright’s Army,” she said to Julia. After a pause, the awkwardness of which made Julia wonder if some sort of password was expected of her, she added emphatically: “Major.” Again there was silence.
Mr Rothermere took charge. Putting an arm round his supposed spouse’s shoulder, he leered fondly down at her and said: “Up the wooden hill you go, little woman. I shouldn’t think you’ll need much rocking tonight.”
Upon hearing which unpromising sentiment, and not aware from where she stood that it was belied by a hand cupped about Julia’s left buttock, Mrs Cartwright turned and sought out the key to their room. At the same time, she hooted two or three times, summoning thereby a stringy, sandy-haired man in khaki shirt and trousers, who took the cases upstairs.
Mr Rothermere followed, with his little woman, a quartern bottle of brandy, two glasses, and the gratitude of Mrs Cartwright for his understanding the problems posed by shortage of staff.
“She does know why I’m here, doesn’t she?” Julia demanded anxiously as soon as they were alone.
“But of course.”
“She seemed to be making heavy weather of the Mr and Mrs thing.”
He smiled. “Your own guilty feelings. Oh, and very nice, too. My analyst maintains that sex without guilt is like Bierwurst without gherkin.”
“When will you be seeing my husband?” Now that the excitement of planning, decision and action was subsiding, Julia felt an emptiness, a bewilderment, that a first brandy was disappointingly slow to dispel.
Mr Rothermere sat beside her on the bed. “You are going to have to be patient, my dear. He will need to be marinaded a little. At least until after the weekend. The Bureau works to very carefully researched guidelines in these matters. Listen, do you know who is retained as its permanent consultant?”
Julia shook her head. She was conscious of being gently and systematically undressed, but felt for the moment neither resentment nor pleasure.
“Farquharson,” said Mr Rothermere. “It was to have him handy that they laid the Whitehall-Harley Street hot line in Churchill’s day. Amazing man. And yet when I knew him in Vienna—we shared a flat, actually, with a dried yeast salesman, of all things—he was dreadfully shy and stuttered.”
Without interrupting the narrative Mr Rothermere took Julia’s glass, drew over the arm thus freed the loop of her brassiere, and replaced the glass in her hand.
“This is not generally known, but three prime ministers have gone mad since 1950. Farquharson had them all back on the rails before any serious damage could be done. Except on one occasion, when he was with me, tunny-fishing off Scarborough.” He bent to take off her shoes. “So you see I too have a guilt complex. I feel personally responsible for Suez.”
Chapter Nine
David Harton emerged from the boardroom of Northern Nutritionals at five minutes to seven, with Donaldson, his sales director, and two men who had arrived on the London train earlier in the day.
One of these men, although in his early forties, had absolutely white hair, brushed straight back from a broad, baby-pink forehead. The other was sallow of face, a little taller than his companion, and he had a sort of watchful humility that would automatically steer him to the back of any group. Both gave the impression of having extremely small feet and pale, almost bleached, hands. They might have been taken to be investigative emissaries from the Vatican. In fact, they were Cultox men. Central Office of the parent company. Security Division. During the evening, they had accepted one dry sherry apiece,
“Goodnight, gentlemen.” Donaldson peeled off towards his own office to get his coat. He looked unhappy and exhausted.
“Goodnight, Brian.” Harton gave him a condescending, army officer kind of smile.
From reception came Eileen, the late duty girl. “Oh, Mr Harton...”
“Yes, Eileen.” He halted at once, courteous and friendly. Why did the wretched girl always stand and even walk about with her arms folded tightly across her breasts? Petit-bourgeois mock modesty.
“Mrs Harton is here. She said you were expecting her, and not to bother you until you came out.”
“Sure. Sure.” He gave her shoulder a jolly, get-along-home squeeze.
Distantly, a bell rang, signalling the seven o’clock shift. Eileen snatched up scarf and handbag, briefly surveyed her glass desk, and began walking to the door.
Harton frowned suddenly, turned. “Eileen...”
She looked back from the door.
“You say Mrs Harton thinks I’m expecting her?”
“That’s right.”
“I’m not, actually. Never mind, though. Where is she now?”
“I don’t know. She said she’d be back.”
“Fine.” He waved cheerily. “Off you go, then.”
The men from Cultox had been looking on, impassively. Now the one with white hair spoke. “Look. David, you obviously must stay on. If you’ll get someone to ring for a taxi, we can easily look after ourselves from now.”
“Nonsense, Charles. We’ll do as we arranged. Dinner first, then I’ll run you to the station.”
“But your wife...”
“Julia does tend to be unpredictable. I’ll leave a note on my desk. She may even have gone home.”
They accompanied him to his office. He wrote on his desk pad. Dining at Roebuck with Charles and Simon—come along if you like.
The white-haired man was at Harton’s shoulder, reading the note. The other, Simon, stood deferentially on the opposite side of the desk. He could read upside down.
“Would our names mean anything to Mrs Harton? Neither of us has ever met her.”
“My dear Charles, does it matter? One tries not to break what good habits one has, such as courtesy and general friendliness—you know?—but the truth is that Julia is, to put it mildly, pretty unrewarding. No, of course your names will mean nothing to her. She’d cut the Archbishops of Canterbury and York if I brought them home. I can but hope that the situation will soon be resolved.”
“That, and a certain other situation,” said Simon, piously but with a distinct hint of acerbity. Harton wondered if he had given a sufficiently gratifying emulation of his visitor’s way of pronouncing resolved as rezoalved.
“With any luck, one will evoalve from the other,” he said.
Charles puffed his pink, healthy cheeks in good-natured reproof. “Luck, David? Marketwise, there’s no such commodity.” He grinned and patted Harton’s arm. “As you know perfectly well, David. Anyway”—he took a step towards the door, rubbing his hands—“let us sample the roast beef of old Flaxborough at this marvellous old inn we’ve heard so much about.”
Harton, who had made no claims concerning either the age or the cuisine of the Roebuck Hotel, both of which were matters of complete indifference to him, was astute enough nevertheless to recognise that a small pit was being dug for his self-esteem.
He determined to take note of the Londoner’s technique so that he might use it himself some time.
They left the building by the main door. Julia’s car was standing a few yards away. Harton indicated it. “The wife’s. She has a genius for leaving things where they’ll be a nuisance. Bless her little heart.”
Simon’s smile was understanding.
Just round the corner stood the Hastings-Pumari, in its private port. Charles made himself comfortable in the front passenger seat. Simon entered the back. He stroked the plump suede cushioning. “Nice,” he said.
The engine fired at once and hummed with perfect manners. Less than ten minutes later, the car drew into the lighted courtyard of the Roebuck.
Charles gazed about him. “Oh, dear,” he said, pleasantly.
Harton, pausing on his way to the door that led to the dining room, gave him a look of inquiry. Charles pretended to be forcing a brave smile. “Imagine,” he said, “the sort of response you’d get if you asked in London for mulled ale!”
They went inside.
Charles examined pointedly the plywood Jacobean panelling that lined the corridor. “As for genuine roast beef...” The enormity of demanding from a London restaurateur this commonplace comestible of Flaxborough he left Harton to picture.
The dining-room was nearly empty. They were shown to a table by the manager, Mr Maddox, who left them with a menu apiece while he went to switch on another couple of lights in honour of the occasion.
“I had rather expected to see a spit,” said Charles, then: “No, no, old man, I’m only joking. You’re right, it’s quite a place. Marvellous, David.” He put the menu aside. “I think I’ll have the old English sausage and chips, if I may.”
Harton felt that even his wriest smile would not quite meet this one, “Thursday’s a bad night,” he offered, “Staffwise, I mean,”
Charles stared aloft at a ceiling criss-crossed circa 1935 with oak-stained beamwork. He nodded sympathetically.
“Just the same in town, David. But we don’t have the compensation of being able to look around and get this marvellous sense of history,”
Mr Maddox served them himself. He was asked by Charles if the sausages were a speciality of the house—made from boar’s head, were they?—local herbs?—that sort of thing? To the company, Mr Maddox made grave reply that the recipe was the secret of the hotel’s supplier, one of whose ancestors had been tortured to no avail by Cromwellian officers, similarly intrigued. To Mrs Maddox, in the privacy of the kitchen, he announced that some clever dicks from the dog meat factory had been trying to take the piss out of him on account of the Co-op bangers, so instead of making them fresh coffee she could jolly well boil up that lot that had been left over from breakfast.
While sipping which punitive beverage, the Cultox security men broached the matter that had brought them to Flaxborough.
“We had a long talk on the phone yesterday,” said Simon, “with Rothermere. He is not altogether happy.”
“Oh? That wasn’t my impression.”
“When did you last see him, David?” asked Charles.
“Yesterday. There’s a little pub up the road at Pennick. I met him there yesterday morning. It’s an arrangement we have.”
“He filled you in on progress?”
“Right.”
“Did he express no anxiety at all?” Simon asked.
Harton shook his head. “No, I gather he’s got everything pretty well tied up. We can only be sure, of course, when we see what the next couple of days produce.”
“Your wife, David, is an intelligent woman,” said Charles reflectively. He seemed not to relish the thought.
“Intelligent? Julia? Oh, come, Charles. A certain element of cunning, maybe—but instinctive, not intelligent. And too spite-orientated to be effective in the long term.”
“You are taking a subjective attitude, David. We have to view this thing companywise. And I must stress again that the company has been placed in an awkward position.”
“One could almost say an extremely invidious position,” added Simon.
“Yes, but not by me.”
“By whom, then, David?” The question came gently and with no trace of rhetorical overtone.
“Well, this wretched man Tring, primarily. I mean, we all know that.”
“You were his immediate employer,” Simon said.
“Now look: if we’re going to talk about basic responsibility, I think we might start with R.I.P... Who invented that bloody concept?”
“David...” The reproof was quiet but firm. “Matters have gone past the stage when there might have been any point in assessing blame. What is all-important now is to build a wall—an impenetrable wall—round the reputation of the company. You mentioned something just now, David. I didn’t quite catch it, actually. Simon didn’t either. But from now on we all are going to have to be very careful indeed about what we say—in public and in private.”
“I couldn’t agree more, Charles.” Harton signalled to the loitering Mr Maddox and ordered brandies.
Simon spoke. “Reverting to what Rothermere said about Mrs Harton, there are two or three questions I should like to put. The first is this. Has she any knowledge of what Tring was up to before he met with his unfortunate accident?”
“None,” said Harton, bluntly.
“Very well. Two. Is there any way you can think of, any way at all, whereby your wife might grow suspicious about that accident?”
“Put it this way,” said Harton. “I wouldn’t rate her chances as a detective very high. She’s got a one-track mind. Once the idea’s in her head that I’m going to get 20,000 quid squeezed out of me, she’ll be too busy gloating to doubt what she’s been told.”
There was silence. Then the man with white hair looked pensively at Harton and said: “You would appear to have something less than an ideal marriage, David.” His companion looked away and proggled an earhole with his middle finger.
Harton grinned, as if to acknowledge a compliment. “She’s a right bitch.”
“But you do have a replacement in mind?”
“You know I do. That’s what this is all about.” Harton saw the admonitory finger, the mouth opening to object; he added at once: “Apart, I mean, from the main purpose, the company thing. Naturally.”
“Naturally,” echoed Charles, softly.
For a while they sipped their brandy in silence. Harton’s offer of cigars was refused by the others. He lit one himself, after cutting the end with elaborate care and going through a rolling and warming ceremony, then laid it aside on an ashtray, where it went out almost immediately.
It was the generally uncommunicative Simon who resumed the discussion. “Tell me,” he said to Harton, “your opinion of the local police. You do have police here, I suppose?”
“Oh, surely. A full set.”
“Yes, I thought the place would run to something more than a village constable. We’ve seen the inquest report in your local paper. You actually boast a detective inspector, I gather.”
“Chap called Purbright. Yes.”
“Bumpkin?” This from Charles.
“I wouldn’t say that. I’ve not had much to do with him, actually. He’s not in Rotary and he isn’t a Mason, but that’s not to prove he’s a deadhead. My old man loathed him, I remember.”
“Your father?”
“Surgeon. He emigrated to the States last year, having developed a taste for highpriced cock in his old age.”
Simon smiled thinly, without approval. “Why did your father dislike this inspector?”
“Because the man was inquisitive. He was persistent. I believe he turned up things that my father found professionally embarrassing. The old man was bloody annoyed, and I don’t blame him.”
“Let us hope,” said Simon, “that this village Sherlock of yours hasn’t developed a taste for causing embarrassment. We have enough of that to cope with already.”
“No problem,” said Harton. He looked sleek and relaxed, like a four-coloured advertisement for the brandy he cradled in cupped hands and sniffed appreciatively at what he deemed artistic intervals.
“It would be extremely helpful,” said Charles, who had just consulted his watch, “if one could have absolutely up-to-the-minute knowledge of what the police have found out. We don’t want to have to wait until the inquest is resumed.”
“Yes, but what can they have found out?”
“Oh David, don’t be so näive! For one thing, they can find what you and your resourceful girl friend and the cunning Rothermere all failed to find. Look, the train goes in quarter of an hour. If you can’t get any back door information out of the Flaxborough police, say so.”
“Very doubtful.”
“Fair enough, David. Let’s hope Rothermere delivers, that’s all.”
Harton drove them the short distance to the station. The London train was due. He did not wait to see them off.
A chill wind was blowing across the darkening and almost empty Station Square. Harton drove into East Street and headed the car for the Field Street crossing and Queen’s Road, where dwelt George and Gladys Lintz, their twenty-five-year-old unmarried daughter, and some fish in an illuminated tank.
Mrs Lintz answered Harton’s ring. She was a tubby, tightly permed woman with the habit of constantly checking by fingertip exploration that neck and hair were still within her franchise.
Harton received a smile of welcome. Then, turning her head aside, Mrs Lintz called loudly: “Bobby-May!” She waited, mouth slightly open, as if to catch an echo. The only sound that reached them was of some televised programme of raised voices, music and applause.
“We were just watching Guessalong,” Mrs Lintz explained. It sounded, in her mouth, an occupation as wholesome and universal as breathing. Again she called her daughter, more stridently than before. There came an answering squawk. A door opened and Bobby-May emerged into the lighted hall.
At that distance the girl looked much younger than 25. She was neither noticeably short nor tall, but her movements had an undisciplined, a capricious quality characteristic of a child. Her dress, of a striking emerald green and made of some silkily fluid material, was gathered by a sash and hung at a level just too low to be fashionable. It was the kind of dress that gets called a frock.
“It’s Mr Harton, dear.”
“I thought you might like half an hour along at the tennis club, Bobo.” Harton craned forward across the threshold.
“Oh, lovely!” Bobby-May clasped hands and made restless little shuffles. “Do you mind, Mummy?”
The wide eyes had whites like fresh milk. The irises were richly brown; they scintillated like seal fur.
“Mind? Why should I mind, baby? There’s plenty to occupy me. Anyway, Daddy will be back from his Lodge shortly.” Mrs Lintz made to depart, then paused and turned towards Harton. She looked very pleased with life. “We were just watching Guessalong,” she told him in a loud whisper, wrinkling her nose in intimation of the magnitude of the treat he was missing out there in the cold. Then she hurried away.
Bobby-May ran to Harton, pulled him inside by the arm and closed the door. She nuzzled against his chest. He bent and brushed his lips among her shiny, liquorice-black curls.
Suddenly she threw her head back. Harton had to jerk away his face to avoid a blow on the nose. When he looked at her again, her eyes were closed, her lips pursed imperiously. He kissed her, but she broke away almost at once. “Shan’t be a jiffy.”
Harton watched her race upstairs, green sash flying, three-inch heels tottering dangerously. Legs not as good as Julia’s. A harder, livelier bottom, though.
In less than a minute, she was back. She carried a pair of racquets and a small sports bag.
“What do you want those for?”
She stared. “The club, you said.”
“Yes, I said. For your dear mum’s consumption.”
“Half an hour’s prac, David. Go on. Please.” She ran a finger, plump and creamy white, along the line of the pattern of his shirt.
“All right. If the indoor court’s free.”
Her eyes flicked shut; the rosebud mouth was offered. He glanced down the hall to the door whence Guessalong noises issued, then chanced a man-of-the-world response with lips and tongue-tip. Bobby-May reacted with immediate rigidity and a vacuum lock that reeled his tongue into her mouth like a hose at fire practice.
The embrace lasted nearly two minutes, during which Bobby-May made little growling noises in the back of her throat. When Harton slid his hand over a breast, she grasped it at once and pulled it away, at the same time giving a prohibitory head-shake. The effect of this was to aggravate the ache he had begun to feel at the root of his tongue.
She disengaged without warning and ran to throw open the door through which her mother had passed. A racquet whirled in farewell. “ ’Bye, Mums. Off for an hour’s prac.”
In the car, the girl stretched, sighed happily and drew her legs beneath her in a sideways squatting posture.
“You don’t really want tennis practice tonight, do you?” he asked.
She was looking across at him speculatively. “Where’s Awful Julia?”
“Awful Julia’s out.”
“How do you know Awful Julia’s out? I thought you always worked late on Thursday nights.”
He started the engine. “I’ve not been home, if that’s what you mean. But I do happen to know that Awful Julia is not there, my sweet.”
For a little while, they drove in silence. Over the crossing. Right at the East Street junction and left into Corporation Street. Many of the shop windows were lighted still, but there was no one to look into them except an occasional group of teenagers, sauntering along, tugging at one another, breaking and re-forming, laughing, jeering, leaning against the wind, aimless.
“David...”
“Sweetheart?”
“What time will Awful Julia be back?”
“Why do you ask, lover?”
“I was just thinking. We could make do with twenty minutes’ prac. Well, I did have a knockabout this afternoon, actually, so.”
“So?”
“So we could go along to your place afterwards for a little while. If Awful Julia’s not there, I mean.”
“She won’t be.”
Bobby-May gazed dreamily through the windscreen into the middle distance. “When you’ve got your divorce, you know,” she said, “I shall let you possess me utterly.” The last word was delivered with an emphatic stiffening of her throat and chin. Then she relaxed, as if to mark a complete change of subject, and said: “If you like—and if Awful Julia doesn’t turn up—I may let you play our bagpipes-in-the-forest game.”
Harton gave her a fond glance and took his hand from the wheel to squeeze her thigh.
“But remember...” She pretended to look stern.
“Yes, sweet?”
“No biteys this time.”
“Scout’s honour.”