The Valley of the Fox

Eight

‘My!’ she said when she saw me transformed half an hour later outside Arthur’s bedroom. ‘I wouldn’t recognise you.’

‘No.’

She looked at me in her carefully appraising manner again. ‘You’re a whole different person. It all fits, doesn’t it? Even the shoes.’

She looked down at the pair of hand-stitched moccasins I’d found in the bottom of the press.

‘A bit tight round the toes,’ I said.

‘Yes. But you’re not the same man at all.’ She considered me, a distant look in her eyes, like a casting director giving nothing away.

‘Maybe the beard was better,’ she said at last.

‘I can always grow it again.’

‘Maybe.’ She thought about this intently, so that I became impatient at her too careful consideration.

‘Or I could black up,’ I said. ‘With burnt cork and one of your husband’s cutaway morning suits and play a nigger minstrel.’

‘You could,’ she said shortly and decisively, as though she really believed this. ‘There’s an awful lot of clothes in this house one way or another,’ she went on. ‘Even old ones. We found a lot of Victorian clothes here, in one of the attics.’

‘Yes. I think I saw some of them on the scarecrow out in the kitchen garden. And that Camelot outfit you were wearing the other night in the conservatory,’ I added pointedly.

‘I like dressing up,’ she replied with equal point. ‘So did the Hortons. Why, they even had a theatre here. Oh, just a little stage they rigged up at the end of the real tennis court at the back of the house. But that’s where all those old clothes must have come from, including the Camelot outfits.’

‘What? — the Hortons had Medieval Pageants here, did they? The Death of Arthur? That sort of thing? They took the Gothic Revival that far?

‘Yes, they did indeed. That’s one reason why I bought the house. They had pageants and jousting tournaments and all sorts of Gothic things. Rose Blumberg was an actress, of sorts, before she married.’

‘Was she? I wondered about her. Jewish, marrying such a worthy-sounding Victorian, some provincial coal baron.’

‘He wasn’t so worthy, or provincial. They were lovers, to begin with. He was already married. There was quite a scandal before they came down here and built this place. I found out quite a bit about them.’

Alice walked away down the long corridor. ‘So they produced themselves, did they?’ I called after her. ‘“Life as theatre”; I thought the great new psychology was not playing games?’

‘What a bore!’ she called back over her shoulder. ‘I’m hoping to get the stage going again. I’ve had the curtains fixed and talked to some of the local people. They weren’t mad about the idea. But then maybe that’s just because we’re a little too far out from Stow,’ she added optimistically.

Alice had changed herself meanwhile, into just such a classic cotton summer dress as I’d imagined her advertising in the New Yorker. And her hair, parted in the middle now and quite dry, had been combed to either side in a long wavy flow so that it came out like a black fan covering her neck and most of her shoulders. She wore no jewellery. But then of course, with her almost over-dramatic beauty, she didn’t need any. The two of us walked downstairs together, both of us quite different people.

But Arthur’s unaccustomed clothes had already begun to itch by the time we got to a small drawing-room beyond the great fireplace in the hall. My skin, though enclosed only by the lightest cotton, prickled in the heat. My face itched, too, the beard gone. I wished I was naked and bearded again.

‘Please, help yourself.’ Alice said. ‘Can you get me a lime soda?’

There was a generous Georgian silver drinks tray incongruously placed on the turned-down leaf of a Gothic lacquered desk in one corner. A heavy Victorian tantalus with three cut-glass spirit decanters stood on top. I gave Alice her lime juice and had the same myself, but with a good measure of gin thrown into it instead of the soda. The ice, I noticed, was already there, in a silver-lidded chalice adapted as a vacuum bowl, with a beautifully coloured enamelled kingfisher as a handle on top.

‘You were expecting someone?’ I asked. ‘With the ice.’

‘No. Mrs Pringle or it may have been Mary — she comes in most mornings to help — one or other, they fill it up every morning. It was a thing of Arthur’s. He was always expecting people.’

‘You don’t have any cigarettes do you, by any chance?’

‘Yes, somewhere. I don’t, but there are some.’ She found a silver cigarette-box behind some social invitations on the mantelpiece and handed it to me. There was a message engraved on the lid, cut as in sloping longhand. It said: ‘Arthur — with love, Alice.’

When I opened it there was another message, engraved on the inside of the lid, a verse:

Alice saw me looking at it.

‘It’s nice.’ I handed her back the box and lit the cigarette. ‘He didn’t take it with him?’

‘Arthur’s very busy.’

‘Yes. I suppose so. Everyone’s very busy these days. It’s the curse of the age.’ It struck me then how strange it was that neither of us had anything to do, becalmed in this great warm empty house, detached, suspended, waiting. It made me uneasy. ‘I’m sorry — about Arthur.’

I repeated the sympathetic phrase, but with an emotion now in my voice that had not been there before. And then a much stronger flood of feeling came to me, that I couldn’t account for at first, until I realised I was thinking of Laura. I walked away from the fireplace, looking round the room, my back to Alice so that she wouldn’t see the pain of this memory. There was a picture, an exquisite ink and pastel drawing, on the far wall, of a woman, a little like Alice, just the head and shoulders, with long wavy black hair. But the eyes were much bigger, the neck thicker, the lips even more bowed than Alice’s.

‘That’s a study of Jane Burden, by Rossetti. Dante Gabriel. For his Queen Guinevere.’

‘It’s beautiful.’

‘Yes. Though people say she wasn’t really so ethereal at all. Bernard Shaw thought she was quite a frump. Only talked about pastry-making when he met her.’

‘Yes?’ I turned back to where Alice was standing by the fireplace.

‘Yes,’ she said. And she was smiling; one of her radiant explosions, almost mischievous, so that the whole mood changed and the sadness in the air quite disappeared.

The drawing-room, built at the corner of the house, had long windows looking both south and west, over two sides of the open parkland, but with the thick line of beech and oak as usual all round the horizon blocking out any further view. The room was a little more cheerful than the great hall, with a daisy-patterned Morris wallpaper and some fairly easy chairs covered in a heavy matching chintz. Yet, like the hall, with its great Victorian bracket lamp fittings and slightly fusty smell, the little drawing-room felt barely lived in. The desk where the drinks were had no other clutter; nothing poked from any of the pigeonholes at the back. There was a large engagement diary and a fine leather address book next a telephone by the tantalus. That was all. Elsewhere a few copies of the Field and Country Life were stacked too neatly on a small drum table by the window.

I said, ‘You hardly live in this room either, do you?’

‘Oh, I’ve a room of my own up in the tower, where I keep my things. This was where the ladies came after dinner. While the others had their port.’

‘You led a … a pretty formal life, you two, together here?’

‘Sometimes. Americans often like that more than you British. We even had place names in the dining-room, on little bamboo easels.’

‘I thought you’d have liked all that: courtly manners, formality, etiquette. Isn’t that one of your things? That article I read …’

‘Yes. I do like it. But I didn’t like the little bamboo easels. That was Arthur’s idea.’

‘You had a lot of dinner parties here?’

‘Yes. To begin with …’

‘A busy social life? Out among the county folk?’

‘To begin with. But that rather faded, thank God. People have somehow … died for me, recently anyway.’

Alice sat down by the fireplace, not at all the social failure, the rich American drop-out but poised, confident, beautiful. And I thought suddenly that despite her isolation here, how many other friends she must have, this very rich, attractive woman. And the more friends, surely, at just this moment in her life, on the brink of divorce: girl-friends, old flames, relations, sympathetic confidantes, or just scandalmongering nosy parkers. Where were they all? Surely the phone would go at any moment, long-distance from New York: or a big car from London would sweep up the drive, hell-bent on some mercy mission.

I said, with as much hidden nervousness as curiosity, ‘With Arthur gone, where are all your friends? Surely … just being alone here?’

‘Yes,’ She drank deeply from her glass. ‘I’ve not been so good with my friends. It wasn’t just a question of Arthur.’

‘How?’

‘Oh, coming over here in the first place. They didn’t understand that.’

‘You mean the Edwardian bicycle out in the back hall? And all this, the Gothic restoration?’

‘Perhaps. Some of them said it was “cute”. They were being polite. But most said nothing. They thought I was out of my mind.’

I smiled then. I very nearly laughed. But I stopped just in time. ‘Are you?’ I said.

‘Do you think so?’

‘I wondered. But,’ I hurried on at once, ‘all this — it’s nothing so crazy as my lying up in the woods out there for ten days, running about naked with bows and arrows.’

‘No. That’s really strange,’ Alice said, looking at me, genuinely surprised once more. And indeed it was, I thought. By comparison her life in this Gothic folly was almost conventional. There was something of an agreement between us now, I felt: a wordless contract that we shared against the world. We had somehow touched each other without touching.

‘Besides, about friends,’ she went on. ‘I’ve always asked too much or been too honest or had too much money. The usual things.’ She rubbed her chin. ‘Friends were difficult. Loving — or hating. That was easier.’

‘Of course. But —’

‘The friend thing, you know,’ she interrupted with enthusiasm. ‘It’s like this: friends prepare themselves too much for you. Oh, that’s exactly what they’re not supposed to do. But it happens: it becomes prepared, a role you or they take on: “I’m your friend.” But I’ve never been completely sure about that.’

‘They might just have wanted something from you — in your case?’

‘Possibly. But much more it was the feeling of their coming a long way out of the past, into an equally long future. It all seemed endless,’ she added lugubriously.

‘But isn’t that the whole point about friendship: that it is the same, that it is always there?’

‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘It should be. But, I told you, I just haven’t been good at it. I had a great friend once — oh, I didn’t see her that often. But when I did, well, it was like living suddenly, when you realized you’d just been getting by before. I met her in Florence, at the design school I went to there. An English girl. She did silk-screen printing, beautiful scarves and things. She was very bright and funny: original — outré, you’d say. And talented. So I offered to back her myself, with my money, to go into partnership. But she wouldn’t. Said it was taking the easy way. In fact she thought I was patronising her, or trying to get in on her act. Either way I … I found in the end I simply couldn’t explain myself to her at all. And I wanted to. I wanted that very much because I knew it was the real thing.’

‘The real thing?’

‘Yes: what you have to do, the real thing, whatever it is, with the one person you can really do it with. The rest is just — inconsequential chatter. Friends are great for that,’ she added derisively. ‘The world is full of “friends”,’ a sudden extraordinary vehemence rising in her voice. ‘They’re almost as bad as the others, the enemies, the vulgar fourth-raters most people are today: thugs and gangsters when they’re not mean-minded little schemers. I hate them, hate them all.’

Vulgar fourth-raters, I thought: Alice had lapsed into her Edwardian archaisms again, an embattled Duchess, where the bourgeoisie were storming her gates.

‘You rather narrow your field though, don’t you?’ I said. ‘Seeing life that way. Making it all — or nothing.’

‘That’s exactly what Arthur told me. Like everyone else, he loves compromise. Arthur Roy. Funny name, like a king. But he wasn’t. He’s a New York attorney. He loves his friends, too, down in the Century Club. They mean a great deal to him. But then his whole life is a kind of Club. And I couldn’t join it in the end. And it’s too late anyway now. We’re not actually divorced yet. But as far as I’m concerned I’m Miss Troy again.’

I thought of telling her how all this struck me as pretty childish, how the problems in her life seemed largely of her own making; of telling her how she just lacked the necessary abilities to compromise, to understand, perhaps even to settle for less; of saying to her, in short, that she had simply failed to grow up.

But then I thought how, like Alice, I, too, had cut myself off from wider life and friendship in the past few years; with what perhaps childish derision I too now looked on the contemporary world: a dull place filled with duller people — the churlish, the crass, the ignorant, the cunning. And I thought how an innocent sot like Spinks stood out in such a world, as Alice’s girlfriend obviously had. Like her, Spinks in his way, with all his beer-laden enthusiasms, Spinks was the real thing, too. I knew how rare such people were. And how much one could miss them.

Besides, in criticising Alice for her immaturity, I would surely be doing no more than Arthur had apparently done. She would have heard it all before. Criticism wouldn’t cure her at this late stage. But finally I said nothing because I saw how, if Alice had been a woman of any ordinary sense and convention, I wouldn’t be here, in Arthur’s fine clothes, drinking ice-cold gimlets in her warm drawing-room. I’d have been in Stow police station by now, waiting on a murder charge.

‘I’ve tried to make my own life,’ Alice summed up, in a confident, a happy and not at all a disappointed tone.

‘But why all this very English life? Why so much of that? The pre-Raphaelite paintings, the Gothic decor, the old kitchen; British wild flowers.’

‘Oh, I’ve loved all that ever since I was a child: I had an English nanny, she was always reading to me. Scott’s novels and the stories of King Arthur, the search for the Holy Grail, and that sort of thing. The Knights of the Round Table … I had a book then. I used to read it myself oh, so many times, I lived with it. I must have been about ten or eleven: a big story book, In the Days of the King, it was called, with wonderful line drawings by Walter Crane: a Knight going through a thick, evil, brambly sort of wood on a white charger with a beautiful long-haired maiden, up sidesaddle in front of him: a dark wood. But there was an extraordinary brightness about their heads, I remember, like haloes, like a fire in the dark. They were going to win.’

‘Yes. I wonder if the Knight was Launcelot, taking Arthur’s wife away. He certainly won.’

‘Maybe. But I was never cynical.’

‘No. I can see that. It’s a fine quality: to believe the best.’

‘All right, maybe it was a little crazy, this Anglomania. But I told you: I had the money to do what I wanted. So why not?’

‘And your parents? What did they want?’ I must have looked doubtful.

She smiled, her eyes narrowing happily. ‘Oh you can’t blame them for anything. I get on pretty well with them. My father’s just retired. My two elder brothers, Teddy and Harold, they’re in charge now. Along with one of my uncles. It’s very much a family business.’

‘Don’t you miss the family?’

She hesitated here. ‘I do and I don’t,’ she said finally, equivocating over something for the first time.

‘You’re the only daughter?’

‘Yes. The youngest.’

She spoke with the slightest tone of regret here, so that I said, ‘Poor little rich girl, were you?’

‘I went to a lot of costly private schools that I hated, if that’s what you mean. Boarding schools. I hated being cooped up. I spent a lot of my time trying to run away. The riding; that was the only thing I liked about them. That and the running.’

‘Literally running?’

‘Yes. Athletics. Apart from escaping school. I loved running and swimming and climbing and tennis, all those outdoor things. I hated books and pens and pencils and indoors. That’s what I loved about the Hamptons: everything was outdoors and summer. My father bought one of those great, spooky, Charles Addams houses out on Long Island. That was the Atlantic. I remember thinking one day I could just swim on and on straight out into the ocean and get right across to England and never come home. We lived there every summer. Then there was Vevey in Switzerland, a smart place for rich brats. I hated that, too. Then there was the design school in Florence, and that was something good, at last. And then New York, when I first married. My husband,’ she smiled remembering. ‘Well, he was something of a man-about-town. In fact, that’s all he was. We spent most of our time in the Russian Tea Rooms or at some smart disco till four in the morning. I got tired of that fairly soon. So I started a company, making fine cloths. Weaving. And big patchwork quilts, you know, designed with Red Indian motifs. Reconstructed. I specialised in those. You see, you were right: I am part Indian. An eighth or so. My mother’s mother, she was from one of the Michigan lake tribes.’

She stood up then, put her glass back on the desk and looked out over the hot parkland. ‘I suppose I was the golden girl,’ she said lightly, looking back on her life. But now there was another slight hint of disappointment in her voice. The memory, or the present fact, of some loss creeping into her tones. And I was sure I knew what it must be: Alice Troy had everything except what was really important: a husband, children, family. Those were the vital things she lacked, the permanency, support, the continuity created through love or blood. Something wilful or even disastrous in her character had withheld those gifts from her in the end. Some considerable flaw in her emotional make-up had prevented her ever maintaining such familial ties satisfactorily. And she wasn’t going to tell me now what this might be, even if she knew what it was herself.

‘Do you still weave?’ I asked.

‘Yes. I’ve several looms upstairs. For tweed. From Cotswold wool. I’m trying to revive that. We have our own special flock.’

‘I see,’ I said, fearing a sudden onset of Gothic Arts and Crafts talk, thinking that this might be Alice’s real problem: an obsession with woolly sheep.

‘Yes,’ she went on, going over to the window. ‘Out there. Can you see? Some of them are on the other side of the park, over there, by the chestnuts. Are you interested?’ She turned from the window, looking round at me sharply, suddenly intently quizzical again, as if the fate of the whole of the British tweed industry hung on my reply.

It seemed churlish to say ‘No.’ And besides, I did like good tweeds, even if I preferred the soft Irish Donegals to any of the tougher Scots varieties.

So I said ‘Yes. I am interested,’ and she smiled happily in return. Like a child rewarded.

We took a salad lunch on a trolley out to the conservatory where we sat in the shade of a great mimosa tree under the hanging flower-baskets, with the Florentine fountain splashing and warbling to one side of us. In this heat, the ventilating windows high above had all been opened, so that every now and then fronds rustled and the long green trailers from the baskets swung minutely in the little eddies and down-draughts of summer air.

Tomato and potato salad and Yorkshire ham cut straight from the bone, with watercress and mustard and cheese and bottles of chilled Guinness to go with it. Apart from the cress I ate everything, down to the bone, to the last rind of cheese, telling Alice my story from start to finish between mouthfuls. I left out nothing, not even my theft of the cricketers’ tea, or her Cotswold lamb that I’d killed and barbecued. And it was hard to tell her this, knowing how she valued the flock. At that point in my story I thought she might turn on me, divorce herself from my violent affairs: I thought she might see how far I’d gone into mad ways, stoning defenceless animals, gutting them, murdering them in the rain.

But instead my shamefaced account of this seemed to draw an increased interest and sympathy, a sort of happy wonder from her, as if I had returned to her something of great value which she had once prized and lost.

Sometimes she interrupted or interjected a query, sitting across the table from me, hoping to clarify something I’d said. She was not a passive listener. She listened like a military commander hearing vital news from the front, news upon which he would soon have to make even more vital decisions.

The thing that surprised her most was my handing Clare over to the policeman.

I said, ‘At the time I felt there was no alternative. Laura was dead. If they’d taken me I would have been dead for Clare as well, with ten years in gaol or worse. As it stands, well, at least I can do something now. I’m free.’

‘Yes. You mean we can get her back?’

‘We?’

‘You asked me to help.’

‘I didn’t mean personally. If I could just use a few things from the house: clothes, a car, money. I’d pay you back.’

She laughed. ‘And if you did manage to rescue her, all on your own, what then?’

I had, in fact, already roughly thought out what I’d do then: try and get Clare and me back to Portugal, to Laura’s parents in Cascais. It was the only thing to do, I thought, since I felt that Laura’s father, Captain Warren, would understand, would give me sanctuary. He hated the British authorities already, the War Office and the secret men generally in Whitehall who had dispossessed him of his land and home in Gloucestershire forty years before. And if I could get to Portugal, David Marcus and his hit-men in MI6, as well as the police, would have another problem altogether. And even if they eventually got me back to Britain, Clare would be able to stay out there, with her grandparents. She would be safe from any dreadful institution. I told Alice all this.

‘And how would you get yourselves to Portugal?’

‘A plane. A ship. The usual way.’

‘With false moustaches and so on? They’d be looking out for you, you know.’

‘I haven’t thought it all out. And anyway, it depends first on whether I can get Clare away from wherever she is.’

‘I could probably find that out for you,’ Alice said, leaning forward, a sudden sparkle of adventure in her eyes. ‘The regional Committee for Autistic Children held a wine and cheese party here last winter, to raise money. I know the secretary —’

‘I don’t want you to get involved personally. There’s no need.’

‘Why not, for heaven’s sake?’

‘I’m sorry, you shouldn’t.’ I stood up. It was getting too hot, even in the shade of the mimosa tree. ‘If you help me directly it can only make it worse for you.’

‘You mean, you’d just like me to pretend that you came up here, for example, and stole a car and some clothes and some money?’

‘Yes. That’s exactly what I thought.’ I stopped over by the Florentine fountain and splashed some cool water from the great Carrara marble bowl over my face. ‘There’s no point your getting involved. You mustn’t.’

I turned to Alice. She was sitting, rather hunched, over the table, her head down, hair falling over her cheeks, fiddling with a napkin, dejected: like a child just denied a treat.

It made me angry that I seemed to have upset her so. ‘Good God, Alice, you’ve got better things to do. You could find yourself in gaol as well!’

She looked up. ‘Why? Why should either of us find ourselves in gaol? You’re telling the truth, aren’t you? Well, they’re bound to find out you didn’t kill your wife in the end. And find that other man … And what’s wrong with regaining control of your daughter? You’re still her legal father, after all.’

‘Nothing wrong, if you do it legally. But this is taking the law into my own hands, to put it mildly. I’ve gone too far to do otherwise. Besides, as I told you, it’s really British Intelligence who are after me. I know too much, about various people. They want me stopped, put away, killed. Not the police. So even if I were proved innocent about Laura, that wouldn’t stop the others still coming after me. Look at what happened this morning: that man with the shotgun. That was Ross, the head of our dirty tricks section. Well, he’s somewhow got onto my track. They’re working hard. They’re out to kill me. It’s obvious. So I can’t do anything “legally” in this country. I have to get out if I can, with Clare. But you mustn’t get tied up in all this. If they killed Laura by mistake, why, they might do the same for you.’

Alice stood up and started to clear away the lunch. ‘That’s all theory. You could be wrong. In any case, one thing is fact: you won’t get Clare out of any institution, or either of you away to Portugal, without help. Without me,’ she added decisively.

‘Why not? I had some training when I was in the service. With a car, some money —’

‘And passports? You’d need them. And one with Clare’s name on it.’

‘She’s on Laura’s passport. It’s back in the cottage. Or I could buy one. There are places in London … I’d pay you back.’

‘Yes, of course. I need the money.’

‘Besides, if I need help, I’ve friends in London. One of them could help. They’re my friends after all. You don’t have to be involved.’

She saw at once that I was lying here. It was a stupid thing to say. We were already closer than I realised.

She said sharply. ‘I don’t believe you have such friends in London. If you had, you’d have gone to them in the first place, instead of lying up in the woods here for ten days. I think you’re probably as bad as I am about friends,’ she added with some defiance. ‘Any way,’ she went on, ‘I’m here to help …’

But she didn’t finish the sentence. We both of us heard wheels crunching over the gravel surround in front of the house just then. And we both saw the police car a moment later, a big white Rover streaked in orange and black, pulling up by the porch. Alice didn’t hesitate for a second.

‘Quick! Over there,’ she said. ‘Don’t go through the hall. There’s no time. Get in under that big shelf at the back, where the pots are. The other plants in front will hide you completely. I’ll get these dishes out of the way.’

I ran over to the back of the big conservatory where a profusion of brilliantly coloured potted plants and shrubs lay along a broad shelf against the wall. On the stone floor in front were other taller shrubs in pots and urns. Pushing my way in behind these from one end, I found myself beneath the shelf in a kind of greeny cage, hedged in by the exotic plants, with just the odd spyhole through the leaves and crimson petals out into the conservatory.

I heard the great hall doors opening in the distance. Alice would surely take the police into the drawing-room at the far end of the great hall, I thought. So I was surprised — no, I was angry — when a minute later I heard the footsteps coming through the library and on into the conservatory. What the hell was she doing bringing the police in here, unless to have done with me, to betray me? She’d probably fixed it all on the phone, when I’d been changing in Arthur’s rooms.

A bluff, nice, west-country voice rang out not far in front of me. ‘… I shouldn’t, Miss Troy. But I couldn’t resist asking you — just another look at your conservatory? I only glanced at it last time I was here. I’m not really a hothouse man myself, and I don’t get up to Chelsea now. But this! This is really wonderful. You don’t mind if I take another look, do you?’

‘Of course not, Superintendent. Go right ahead.’

‘These camellias, Miss Troy. They’re quite extraordinary.’ I heard the heavy policeman’s footsteps coming straight towards me. ‘Never seen anything like them. Even in Chelsea. This one …’ The Superintendent had stopped right in front of me now. I could see his black trousers blotting out all the light. The camellias were obviously all along the shelf immediately above me.

‘Yes, I’m proud of that. Marvellous, isn’t it? So dramatic. Those crimson petals on the little narrow bush. “Anticipation”, it’s called. Yet it’s ideal for small gardens. But my favourites are these, over here, these single-flowered ones: “Henry Turnbull”. They’re so delicate, the petals, like some fantasy Ascot hat. Just a breath of air and you’d think they’d disintegrate. In fact they’re quite robust.’

‘Beautiful. Just beautiful. Of course they don’t really do at all up here on this soil. Outside, I mean.’

‘No. Not enough acid. You have to pot them. And then pot on, and re-pot as they get bigger. It’s a bit tiresome, and you have to have the right kind of mulch every year and a good loam compost: acid loam if you can get it. Or add some sulphur. But once you get your compost right there are really no problems, they’re quite trouble-free. You have to watch the watering, though. Not too much, that’s the great thing. I use rainwater. The softer the better.’

‘Yes. I’d heard that.’

‘Or you can sub-irrigate, with a sand base and a water drip, if you’re really doing it grandly. But I prefer the old watering-can: the personal touch.’

‘Of course. That’s what plants are all about anyway, aren’t they? The personal touch.’

‘Would you like a cutting? Here — this japonica hybrid: “Tinkerbell”. There’s no problem.’

‘I wouldn’t think of it, Miss Troy —’

‘Not at all, Superintendent. Here, I’ll get my secateurs. Put it in some damp moss peat, you know, cover and seal it with a thin polythene, a little warm water now and then and you should have something in six or eight weeks …’

Their voices drifted away as they went out to the far side of the conservatory. But they were back again in a minute, right in front of me again while Alice took a cutting.

Then she said, ‘Coffee, Superintendent?’

‘No thank you, Miss Troy. As I mentioned in the hall, I really came up about this man who’s escaped.’

‘You think he’s still somewhere here, do you?’

‘Well, I don’t. But some people from London do, from the CID there, that man you told me about down by your lake this morning. They think he may be still hiding out somewhere on your estate. So we’re going to have to go through the whole place all over again, if you don’t mind. In fact, Miss Troy, I have to admit it, the man from London, well, he went back through the little valley down there, after you’d moved him off your land. He came to us then. You see, he found some things.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes. You see, he’d brought a dog with him: an Alsatian tracker. He lost it earlier in the morning. But he found it when he went back. It had fallen down a well behind that old pumping-station you have on the far side of the little lake.

‘Yes?’

‘It seems the dog was speared by something, a piece of metal, through the throat, before he drowned. Well, that’s not so important — probably ran into something, an old bit of wire fencing. But then inside the pumping-station we found the remains of some cooking: warm bricks, a few bits of meat, ashes.’

‘Oh, that was me. Yesterday. I’m often down by the lake, bathing. And we sometimes make a barbecue in that old shed. Gets you out of the wind. That was me, Superintendent! Not the man you’re looking for.’

‘Well, that explains that. But then, Miss Troy, another thing: our dogs picked up a scent, just by the shed, of someone, possibly this man, and it led right up to your house here, to the kitchen door in fact. I have some of my men out in the yard now.’

‘So? I was down by the lake myself this morning. That trail must have been mine: I was right at the pumping-shed, then walked straight back here, to the back door in fact, about two hours ago. So that was my trail.’

‘Of course. I’m sure it is. But just possibly not. You see, with our own tracker dogs, we’d given them a scent start with one of this man’s socks. And this seemed to set them off. Took off at once, straight up here. Of course, it’s probably nothing. But we ought to make sure.’

‘You mean?’

‘Well, how long were you out of the house this morning?’

‘An hour. Not more.’

‘And your domestic staff? They were in the back of the house all the time. In the kitchen?’

‘No. Not this morning, now I come to think of it. My housekeeper went to Stow. And her husband’s away. And Mary, the daily help, she leaves before midday.’

‘And your gardeners? They were in the yard?’

‘No. They were thinning wood on the other side of the park.’

‘So there was no one in the house, or the yard, for more than an hour this morning?’

‘No. I suppose not.’

‘Well, I think we ought to make sure then, Miss Troy.’

‘You mean he could have come in here?’

‘You didn’t have your alarm on, did you?’

‘No. I don’t bother. Not during the day.’

‘It’s just a chance, then. You don’t mind us looking round the house? It’s a big place. He could have come up to steal something, and then hidden somewhere. It’s better to be sure. He’s dangerous, Miss Troy. Especially if you’re here on your own.’

‘Yes, I’ve heard. And what happened to his poor child, by the way?’

‘Oh, the little girl is quite safe. Being looked after, in the Banbury hospital for the moment.’

‘Well, of course, if you think it necessary, take a look round. But are you sure?’

‘I’m sure we should take every precaution, Miss Troy, every nook and cranny …’

The Superintendent’s voice faded as they walked out of the conservatory, back into the library, and by then I was out from my hiding-place and moving over towards the big glass doors that opened from the conservatory onto the garden terraces and the parkland to the east beyond. It was time to get back to the woods if I could, I thought. But in any case I had to get out of the house.

Luckily I never opened the door. As I touched the handle I saw two policemen in gumboots coming towards the Manor along the beech hedge which divided the terraced gardens from the yard area behind. I drew back quickly. I couldn’t leave the house by way of the library and the great hall, I could hear people moving out there already, and I didn’t dare stay cornered, with my back to a wall hidden behind the camellias.

I looked up at the Juliet balcony with its slim Gothic balustrades high above me. And then I saw, just to the side of this, a dozen cast-iron rungs that had been set into the wall of the house leading up to it — part of some old fire escape, I imagined. That was the only answer.

I climbed up fast, pulled myself over onto the balcony and opened a glass door that led onto the Minstrels’ Gallery that ran all round one side of the library and the hall, but which gave off immediately to my right into a long corridor I’d not seen before. And then I was running soundlessly, in the soft moccasins, down the carpeted landing of this unknown house, wondering where to hide in such a vast place — yet a place whose every nook and cranny was about to be exposed.

This first-floor bedroom corridor ran northwards, towards the back of the house, before turning left and giving onto a small half-landing, part of the back stairs which led up from the kitchen area. From a window here I saw the two policemen again, out in the yard. But this time they had a tracker Alsatian with them. If they brought the dog in I was done for. But in any case I would have to go upwards — to the second floor, the attics? Perhaps I could hide behind an old water-tank beneath the eaves — or better, get out onto one of the many haphazard roofs that, given the generally bizarre design of the house, could well hide me completely from the ground below. I heard the tramp of feet on the lower floor; doors opening, furniture being moved. There must have been half a dozen men combing the place beneath me. I ran on.

This servants’ staircase led up from the half-landing to the second floor into a narrow twisting badly-lit corridor. And here the elaborate restoration of the house had come to a full stop. The landing was in considerable disorder and there was a slightly musty smell in the air. The heavy varnish had been stripped from the panelling, and whole panels removed, leaving damp patches, old water-marks on the rough plaster behind. Repairs had been started here and then abandoned. And now the corridor had been turned into a long storeroom, it seemed. It was littered with expensive Victorian bric-à-brac of all kinds, like a room in Sothebys before some important sale of nineteenth-century effects. There were pictures stacked against the walls: lesser pre-Raphaelites, nude slave girls and piping Grecian dancers. There were great, elaborate cast-iron fireguards and fenders, magnificent brass telescopes on huge tripods; early, but essentially decorative, scientific equipment, wind gauges and strangle mechanical devices beneath great glass domes. And there were Victorian display-cases everywhere, of butterflies, moths and wild flowers; and larger boxes filled with stuffed fish and animals: a huge pike, two wildcats fighting, a golden eagle. It was more a museum than a corridor, where the objects had all been assembled but not yet put together.

I had to move carefully now, in this crowded gloom, clambering over half-opened packing cases, coming towards a sinister shape: it was a magic lantern, I found when I squeezed past it, set on a tall stand that looked at first like a man with one great Gorgon’s eye, wearing a stovepipe hat. And then straight in front of me — I couldn’t avoid stepping on it — was a crocodile, ten feet long, lying out along the floor, its snout raised, teeth bared below two beady eyes. My heart thumped like a drum as I veered sideways trying to avoid it. But I couldn’t, and as my foot touched it I waited for the searing pain as its teeth sank into me … Of course it didn’t move. It was dead, perfectly preserved, some Victorian memento from the Nile.

The landing got darker as I went further along it, pushing myself slowly and much more gingerly now through this strange debris. Without more light I couldn’t safely or soundlessly go much further. I opened a door to my left. It was a nursery. Or at least it was filled with a lot of old nursery toys: a wooden steam-engine big enough for a child to sit on, with two canary-coloured carriages linked behind; a rocking-horse, prancing wildly, front feet splayed out dramatically on the long runners. A collection of Victorian china dolls in lacy dresses and red ribbons stared at me with big blackberry eyes, sitting neatly, mutely, all tight together in a line along a miniature sofa, and there was a vast dolls’ house, sufficient almost for a child to live in, over by the window.

But it was the window that I really noticed. It gave out onto a lead guttering with an interior slated roof rising up to the left a few yards away. I opened the small sash. But just as I did so my heart bolted again: there was a sudden, terrifying, unearthly shriek from immediately outside. A great bird rose up right in front of my face, its wings brushing my hair: a huge, mythical thing, it seemed, a multi-coloured nightmare in shimmering blues and greens with a long tail. Peacock-blue. It was a peacock, I saw, as it flew off the ledge down towards the flat top of a great cedar tree in the garden below.

But at least from here, I saw now, I could get out and look around for some completely hidden part of the roof. Or perhaps I could even get down to the ground from the big tower which I could see now, too — Alice’s tower where she had her rooms — which rose above another taller roof near the centre of the house.

I closed the window behind me after I’d stepped out onto the narrow ledge, and after that I managed without difficulty to pull myself up the side of the roof in front of me. The tower lay immediately ahead. And sure enough, there was a fire escape, or at least some wooden steps, leading up to a door at the top of it. The only problem was reaching the tower, since, from my perch on top of this small gable end, I found myself looking down into a large glassy-covered well in the centre of the house, the sloping top lights set above the big dining-room, on the ground floor, I imagined. And there was no way across this wide gulf, other than by three narrow stone bridge-buttresses that linked and supported both the interior walls of the house, at this point a good twenty feet above the glass.

I could stay where I was, of course. But on looking back I saw that, on top of this roof, I was no longer hidden from the ground. And if I returned to the ledge outside the nursery window, the police — perhaps having heard the peacock’s commotion and coming into the room to investigate — had only to open the window to find me. I could at least test the stone buttresses beneath me …

I slid gently down the edge of the roof to the first of them, nearest to the front of the house and thus almost completely hidden from the overlooking windows. The stonework was at least a foot wide to begin with, and firm as a rock as I straddled it. But the buttress narrowed gracefully as it rose to a bridge in the middle, and I wasn’t certain that it would support my weight at that point. On the other hand, since it was built in the form of a bridge, with a keystone in the middle, I thought it should quite naturally take the increased strain.

I moved very slowly out over the glass, legs soon dangling in space to either side, edging forward along the buttress inch by inch, never looking down. The sun was suddenly very hot on my neck and shoulders and I started to sweat, unable to move a hand to mop it up. The salty moisture soon came down in beads in front of my eyes, over my nose, into my mouth.

Towards the apex of the buttress, when I was riding up it, my head and shoulders hunched down over the bridge like a man on a galloping horse, I thought I heard a stone shift, the minute sound of something giving, beginning to crack. I froze for a minute, sensing the sharp glass beneath, a great pit opening in my stomach. But nothing moved; there was no other sound and I inched my way down the far side without mishap.

And now it was an easy journey up the corner guttering of the roof opposite and down the far side to where the big square tower with its pagoda roof rose up into the dazzling summer sky like an irresistible Victorian command, pushing its way imperiously through the other fantastic Gothic excrescences, the eccentric roofs and turrets, the miniature spires and stone pineapples which covered the top of the manor like barnacles.

The railed steps down from the tower, though, I saw now, didn’t lead to the ground. They were part of some interior fire escape, if anything, and led straight to a small doorway in one of the gable ends, which of course would only lead me straight back into the house again. Perhaps I might be safe in the tower?

I climbed up the steps, unseen from the ground below since they faced inwards, and the door at the top opened at once. There was quite a large, perfectly square room inside, with four expected Gothic arched windows — but with a quite unexpected domed ceiling covered in blue-and-white tiles, an eastern mosaic of turbanned gentlemen smoking hookahs with camels in the background, and Arab lettering picked out in long scrolls that ran right round the circumference. The view was stupendous from this height, right across the rim of beech and oak which normally hid the estate, giving out over half the North Cotswolds.

A big wooden loom stood in the middle of the room, skeins of variously coloured wools to one side of it and lengths of lovely finished tweed on a day-bed in one corner. There was a telephone on a small but this time well-cluttered desk. I saw an open diary — another large engagement diary, but again with no engagements in it. Glancing at the top of the page I read: ‘… awful thing — that he won’t let me touch his hands even …’ There was some crockery, cutlery and a small fridge filled with tubs of yoghurt, pots of honey and a half-bottle of champagne. I could have done with a cold beer. Even though one of the windows was open it was very hot, with a hot, baked smell of wool and dried pine from the floor and wooden loom. It was a marvellous retreat, a hermit’s eyrie, high on the land, quite cut off from the world. And indeed, that was the problem. There was no access to, or escape from this tower as far as I could see other than the steps I had come up. It seemed a wilfully inconvenient place to have a workshop.

But then I saw what must have made it much more habitable. In one corner was a heavy, ecclesiastically carved panel with a wooden handle beneath carved in the shape of a big cigar. I lifted it up. There was a dumb-waiter behind, the serving shelves presently in position. And then I realised: of course, the cigar-shaped handle, the desert Arabs smoking hookahs on the tiled dome of the ceiling. This turret retreat had obviously been built as a smoking-room originally, where the Victorian grandees, the more agile of them, the youngsters perhaps, could get well away from the ladies and freely indulge their fumes, their vintage port, their risqué jokes. And if this was so then the dumb-waiter would certainly lead down to the dining-room, or to the pantry, and perhaps below that to the cellars where the butler could the more readily load cargoes of Fine Old Tawny on board for the bloods on high.

I could get right down to the bottom of the house in this way, I thought: it was worth the try. The opening into the lift was quite big enough. The ropes inside were new. If I lowered the serving box down a few feet I could get inside the shaft, stand on top of the box and then, working the return rope, let myself down to the ground floor or basement.

The police were searching upwards through the house, I knew. But if I doubled back on them in this way, and got into the cellars which they’d have checked out by now, I might finally be secure.

As I thought about it I heard a sound on the roof beneath and, looking out the window for a second, I saw the door in the gable end which led out to the tower steps beginning to open. The police had reached the top of the house, but still weren’t finished. I needed no further prompting.

I pulled the lift down to below the level of the floor and, gripping fast onto the return rope, I levered myself quickly into the dark hole, closing the serving-hatch behind me. The shaft was hardly more than two feet square. But everything had been perfectly built and carpentered here and I slipped down gently, soundlessly, through the guts of the house, down this dark gullet, without any problems.

I passed a chink of light in the wall, where the dumb waiter gave out onto the kitchen or dining-room or pantry. But there was still a further drop in the shaft; it went deeper. Eventually the lift came to a halt in complete darkness. I must have been at the bottom of the house, in one of the cellars. I felt in front of me with my fingers. There was nothing but open space. The sleeve of wooden panelling which all the way above had enclosed the lift shaft must have been absent in the cellar at least in front of me, for I found then that I was still hemmed in to either side. But in front I was free: sitting on the serving box: free, but in complete darkness. Lowering myself very carefully, my feet eventually touched the floor. And then I saw a very faint crack of light ahead. It came from beneath a door and I groped around the sides of this looking for a switch. Finding one at last, I turned the light on.

I was in a cellar, certainly, a big cellar with arched stone alcoves all about me, filled with pyramids of dusty claret, fine brandies, vintage port. But the cellar door, naturally enough, was firmly locked on all these riches. And there was nothing I could see inside that would help me open it.