The Secret House of Death (15 page)

Gin and the ‘something fizzy' he always liked to drink with it, coffee cups on a tray, the last of the daffodils displayed in a vase. Susan had only made these preparations once before but already they were becoming a ritual. Bob would be late tonight—he couldn't be with her until ten, for he had a business call to make–but she had already given up going to bed early. There was something to stay up for.

‘It's always so wonderfully warm in here, Susan,' he said as he entered the living-room. ‘There's a lot to be said for central heating. I don't know why I didn't have it put in years ago.'

She turned her head away to hide the blush, but, although she was aware of his solecism, she felt a rush of elation. In saying such a thing, he had showed her that while Louise's death was fresh in his mind, the circumstances which had led up to it were fading. Would it be right to trouble him now with the question she had been intending to put to him all day? In all their talks they had scarcely yet discussed any subject but that of Heller and Louise, and just the same she hesitated, waiting for him to begin as he always did, obsessively, minutely on the details of their love and death.

A lightness and a sense of relief came to her when instead he asked her casually if she knew of anyone who would do the Braeside housework for him.

‘My Mrs Dring might. I'll ask her.'

‘You've done so much for me, Susan, and here I am still asking favours.'

‘A very small favour. She may not be able to.'

‘Somehow I feel she will if you ask her. You're one of those people who make things come right. D'you know, in the past week I've often thought that if we'd really bothered to get to know you, if you and Louise had been friends, none of this would ever have happened.'

They were back to it again. Subject normal.

‘If I'm really so powerful,' Susan said, an urgency entering her voice, ‘if I can really make things come right, I'd like to begin by telling you to stop all that, Bob. Try to forget it, put it behind you.'

He reached out and took her hands, both her hands in a strong warm grasp. For a comforter, a safe refuge, she suddenly felt strangely weak and enervated.

Pamela Pearce was a pretty little blonde with a taste for glitter. Metallic threads ran through the materials of most of her clothes; she liked sequins and beads and studs, anything that sparkled. Tonight she wore lamé, and against the cobbles and the grey brick walls of the South Kensington mews she glittered like a goldfish in murky waters.

‘Hadn't you better tell me who my host and hostess are?' David said as he locked his car. ‘I don't want to feel like a complete gatecrasher.'

‘Greg's one of those society photographers. You must have seen those lovely things he did of Princess Alexandra. His wife's called Dian and she's absolutely lovely. You'll fall madly in love with her. Believe me, just to see her is to adore her.'

The trouble was David was never quite sure whether he had seen her. He was hardly in a position to fall madly in love with her as nobody bothered to introduce him to anyone and, Pamela having been borne off up the narrow staircase, he found himself alone on an island of carpet, surrounded by indifferent backs. Presently he forced his way between barathea-jacketed backs and half-naked backs, moving his arms like a swimmer doing the breast stroke, and finally squeezing into a little lyre-backed chair. A screen behind him was perilously loaded with lighted candles which dripped wax on to an improvised bar.

For some minutes no one took any notice of him and Pamela didn't reappear. Then a voice behind him said incomprehensibly, ‘Do you think you could get outside some cup?'

David looked over his shoulder, first at the young man with butter-coloured hair who had addressed him, then at the bar wherein a bowlful of pale golden liquid, cherries and pieces of cucumber were floating. Before he could say he would avoid this at any price, a ladleful had been scooped up and dribbled into a glass.

It tasted like fruit juice which someone had poured into a cough mixture bottle. David put his glass down behind a plate of smoked eel canapes, observing that everyone else seemed also to have shunned the cup.

The room was too small to accommodate so large a party, but even so the guests had succeeded in huddling themselves into distinctly isolated groups. The largest of these had for its nucleus a tall man with an enormous forehead and he stood beneath the central lamp which effectively spotlighted him. David had no difficulty in recognising Julian Townsend.

The editor's prim mouth was opening and shutting nineteen to the dozen while he gesticulated sweepingly with a large hand in which he held a sausage roll. Five women stood around him in a circle, hanging on his words.

One of them must be his wife, David thought, the innocent neighbour of Heller's mistress, she who had found the dead couple. There was a statuesque brunette with a cigar, two nearly identical blondes, a teen-ager in brown and an elderly lady who evidently intended to spend the rest of the weekend in the country, for she wore a tweed suit, mesh stockings and tall boots. Pamela was nowhere to be seen, although he could hear her shrill giggle occasionally from upstairs, and he felt a stab of annoyance. Short of introducing himself as a reader and a fan, he couldn't see how he was going to talk to Townsend without her.

Then the teen-ager detached herself from the sycophantic circle and made for the bar. Her movements had the rapid and entirely selfish directness of the very young and, to avoid her, David backed into the bamboo screen.

‘Good gracious, you nearly set your hair on fire!' The butter-haired barman had seized his arm and David backed away from naked candle-flame.

‘Thanks,' he said, his face inches from the girl's.

‘You need someone to look after you, don't you?' said the barman. ‘It quite upsets me to see you standing there all lost. Take him under your wing, Elizabeth, do.'

Having refused the cup and helped herself to brandy, the girl said baldly, ‘I'm Elizabeth Townsend. What's your name?'

‘David Chadwick.' He was very surprised and perhaps he showed it. In her very short shapeless dress of the colour and texture of brown bread and with her long untidy brown hair she looked about seventeen. No doubt accustomed to being in the company of a man never at a loss for words, she fixed him with an incredulous glare. ‘I believe you live in Matchdown Park,' he heard himself say in exactly the tone of wistful awe someone might use when enquiring if an acquaintance had a grace and favour apartment at Hampton Court.

‘My God, no. Whatever gave you that idea?'

‘I read it in
Certainty
,' David said indignantly. ‘You
are
Mrs Julian Townsend?'

‘Of course I am.' She looked deeply affronted. Then her brow, furrowed with impatience and some imagined slight, cleared. ‘Oh, I see it all now. You've dropped a clang.' His discomfiture stirred a gurgle from the depths of the brown bread dress. ‘That's his ex you're thinking of, my—well, what would you call her?—wife-in-law might fit, don't you think?' She giggled happily at her own joke. ‘Wild horses wouldn't make me live in Matchdown Park.' She said this with violent defiance, but almost before the words were out something quick and sharp came into her expression to change it and make it assume a slight concupiscence. ‘Why d'you ask, anyway? Have you got some sort of yen to live in the place?'

‘I might,' David muttered, not knowing where all this was leading. Never in all his life had he met anyone so brutally direct and unselfconscious as this girl. He wondered on what her confidence was built, plain, dumpy and charmless as she was.

‘Only my wife-in-law . . .' She grinned with delight at her invented expression. ‘. . .  my wife-in-law wants to move, so Julian's got this house in Matchdown Park on his hands. It's a very good sort of house.' She seemed sublimely unconscious that two minutes before she had denounced its environs with a shudder. ‘Julian would be absolutely ecstatic if I'd found a buyer for him.'

Next door to Norths, inhabited by the woman who knew the Norths, who had found Heller's body. The candles flared behind David's head and their reflections, tall, smoky, yellow-white, danced in Elizabeth Townsend's glass. ‘How big is it?' he said cautiously.

‘Come and meet Julian. He'll tell you all about it.' She grabbed his arm, her fingers, urgent and almost affectionate, digging into his elbow. ‘Julian, do shut up a minute! Listen, I've found a bloke who actually wants to live in Matchdown Park!'

Susan hadn't warned Paul that Bob was coming in for the evening. She didn't want him to awaken and, troubled by fears and fantasies as he was, hear a man's voice downstairs. In his present world men who called on solitary women brought guns with them . . .

Murmuring an excuse to Bob, she went up to Paul's bedroom, tucked him in again, restored his watch to a more secure position on the bedside table and went out again, leaving the light burning. She was half-way down the stairs when the phone rang.

‘I don't suppose you've sold the house yet?' Julian's voice sounded unnaturally enthusiastic against a background of music and hilarity.

‘Hardly,' Susan said dryly.

‘That's what I thought. However, not to worry. Now tell me, are you doing anything on Monday night?'

She no longer loved him but it was horrible to be asked such a question by the man who had once been her husband.

‘Why?'

‘I've told some fellow he can come and look over the house. Chadwell, Challis—something like that. He's here with me now as a matter of fact—well, not exactly with me but we're all at Dian's and Elizabeth picked him up.'

‘I thought you must be. I can hardly hear you for the racket. How is Dian?'

‘Absolutely lovely as usual.'

Susan cleared her throat. ‘What time does this man want to come?'

‘Eightish. By the by . . .' He lowered his voice to a barely audible mumble. ‘I shouldn't mention that peculiar affair next door. It might put him off.'

‘Julian, you must be more naive than I think you if you imagine anyone could go through all the fuss of buying this house without finding out about Louise's suicide.' She stopped, aghast. All the doors were open and Bob must have heard. Too late now. ‘Oh, Julian!' she said, exasperated.

‘He might not find out,' Julian said craftily, ‘until he'd signed the contract. Don't tell me you're indifferent to the prospect of five thousand pounds. Now I must return to this do. I suppose you're all alone?'

‘In point of fact,' Susan said, ‘I'm not. A friend is with me, so if you'll excuse me, Julian, I'd better get back to him.'

Bob sat where she had left him, on his face the blank look of someone who has been unable to help overhearing a private conversation but who must pretend, from politeness, to a temporary total deafness.

‘Sorry about that,' Susan said crisply. ‘You must have heard.'

‘I couldn't help it. I gather you're thinking of moving, Susan?'

‘The atmosphere here isn't right for Paul, and besides that . . . I suppose I wasn't well, I was almost hysterical at the end of last week. I wanted to get away as soon as possible, but that was before . . .'

Before what? What had she been about to say? Confused, she turned her head away. She had waited for him to finish the sentence for her and instead his glance was cool, analytical, assessing.

‘When d'you think you'll go?'

‘As soon as I can,' she said evenly, and then she made herself smile, crushing down the absurd disappointment. Had she really supposed this widower, this lost soul almost, came to see her because he was growing fond of her? He wanted a shoulder to cry on merely, and hers was waiting.

‘I can understand you want to shake the dust of this place off your feet,' he said, ‘put all the misery behind you. You'll soon forget about Louise and me, won't you?' Then, obsessively, forgetting perhaps that he had said it all before a dozen times, he began step by step to go over every word, action and suspicion that had led him to suspect Louise's love affair, to search again into the circumstances of her death.

‘Bob,' Susan said sharply, ‘you'll have to stop this. You'll turn yourself into a neurotic. What do you hope to gain by it? They're both dead, it's all over.' He looked at her, shocked and silenced. For the first time she was asking herself why, when another man would put up an outward show of courage, he should be so obsessed by his wife's death. A little thrill of nervousness, not quite fear, at the enormity of what she was about to say, ran through her. ‘It isn't because . . .' she began slowly, ‘it isn't because you doubt that it
was
suicide, is it?'

He made no answer. His smoky blue eyes had a glazed look and his face went dead so that the lamplight seemed to fall on a copper mask.

Susan's own words had startled her and now that they were out she was sure they would have been better unsaid. She had no grounds at all for saying them, only a vague unease that during the day and the previous day had held her standing sometimes in a dream or sent her upstairs to stare meaninglessly out of the window.

‘It's just that, while I was ill . . .' She blushed hotly. Was this how Doris felt when she made one of her gaffes? ‘There were one or two things,' she said, ‘one or two odd things that made me wonder.'

‘You were delirious.'

‘Come now, I wasn't that ill.'

‘I shouldn't want,' he said, ‘I couldn't bear . . . Susan, it was his gun, they found the powder marks on his hand. How could there be . . . ?'