The Secret House of Death (17 page)

North's shadow moved across the road. It was much larger and more sinister than the man who cast it. David watched him go up to Mrs Townsend's front door and ring the bell.

They were on close terms those two, he thought as he drove away. The gin and the can of fizzy stuff were for him. No wonder the girl had reacted as she had! She was not merely a good discreet neighbour; she was emotionally involved with him. Why not use old-fashioned, more realistic terms? She was in love with him. On his looks alone, he was a man any woman might love. And he, David, had thought he could sound her about North's behaviour, North's attitude.

He must have been mad to suppose he could enter into a conspiracy with a strange woman, even if that woman had not been in love, enter with her into a plot to bring about North's downfall. This was not one of those serials for which he designed sets, but the real unromantic world. Had he really supposed that at a word from him she would break the barriers of convention and loyalty and confer with him an to her friend's actions and motives?

It seemed that he had. He had genuinely believed in the possibility of setting up with Mrs Townsend a kind of amateur detective bureau and, without prior contact, they were to have banded together in a scheme to overthrow two lives.

Bob put his arm gently around her shoulders and led her to a chair. ‘What's happened, Susan? You look as if you've had a shock.'

‘Someone was here,' she said, breathing quickly. ‘A man . . . He said—insinuated, if you like—that you'd met Mrs Heller secretly on the day of the inquest.'

‘So I did,' he said coolly. ‘I met her in a London pub, but there was nothing secret about it.'

‘You don't have to tell me.' Susan moved slightly to free herself from his encircling arm. ‘It isn't my business, only I thought you didn't know her. I had the impression you'd never met till the inquest.'

‘We hadn't. But afterwards I talked to her—she apologised to me, as a matter of fact, for the way she'd behaved in court. I was sorry for her. She's almost destitute, you know. That swine Heller hadn't left her a penny to live on. I felt I was bound to help and that's why we met. However, when we got there I found her with a man.'

‘This Chadwick who came here?'

‘Yes. Susan, the last thing I felt like was talking to strangers. I'm afraid I just bolted and then I came to see you. Of course, I've seen Mrs Heller since at her home. I've just come from there now.'

‘How cruel people are,' she said wonderingly.

‘Some are. And then you find someone who's sweet and good and lovely like you, Susan.'

She looked up at him incredulously.

‘I meant that,' he said softly. ‘Come here, Susan. You lived next door to me for years and years and I never saw you. And now, I suppose it's too late . . . I wonder . . . Would you kiss me, Susan?'

He would touch her forehead, brush her cheek, as he had done the other day at the door. She lifted her face passively and then, suddenly, it was not like the other day at all. She was in his arms, clinging to him, mouth to mouth and eyes closing at last on their loneliness and their shared rejection.

Detective Inspector Ulph knew that Robert North had killed his wife and his wife's lover. He knew it, not as he knew he was James Ulph, forty-eight years old, divorced, childless, but he knew it as a juror must, beyond a reasonable doubt.

There was nothing he could do about it. His superintendent laughed at him when he talked of North's motive and North's opportunity. Motive and opportunity cut no ice, unless it can be proved the man was there, the gun to which he had access, in his hand.

‘Ever heard of a small point,' said the superintendent scathingly, ‘of tracing the weapon from its source to the killer?'

Ulph had. It had perplexed him all along. Half-way through his interrogation of North he had met the man's eyes and read in them, under the simulated grief, a defiance which seemed to say, You know and I know it. It can never be proved. And as in a match there comes a point where one of the contestants knows the other will win – will win, at any rate, this hand or this game – Ulph knew that North held the good cards, that he had stacked them subtly long beforehand.

The gun was Heller's. Both Heller's widow and Heller's brother swore that it was in his possession the night before the killing. Except by unimaginable feats of burglary, by breaking into a flat of whose very existence North was certainly ignorant, he could not have gained possession of that gun. After the deaths Ulph had tested Heller's hand for powder burns and then, as if it were an embarrassing formality, North's hand also. Heller had fired shots, North none. Heller had been seen to enter Braeside at ten minutes past nine by a Mrs Gibbs and a Mrs Winter and during the rest of the morning no one had left the house. North, carless as he was once every four weeks, had been in Barnet.

And yet Ulph knew that he had killed his wife. The picture, as in a peculiarly vivid and impressive film sequence, of how he had done it first came to him during the actual process of the inquest and since then it had returned often with the insistence of a recurring dream.

No one had seen North leave his house that morning, but this, this negative thing, this not seeing, not noticing, was pathetic, laughable, when it came to a question of proof and circumstantial evidence. ‘I didn't see him leave,' Mrs Gibbs had said, ‘but I often don't see him leave. Not seeing someone's no help really, is it? I saw Heller come.'

Because the dog had barked . . . North knew that, of course, that no one in Orchard Drive ever saw anything unless the dog barked. Ulph's dream picture unfolded at this point, or just before this point. North had shot his wife while she was making the bed and then, when the dog barked, he had gone downstairs to admit the lover.

Ulph had only seen the man dead, but again and again he saw how that heavy earnest face must have looked when the door was opened, not by his mistress but by her husband. North would have stood well behind the door so that his neighbours, watching, saw only the door itself sliding inwards. And who would have questioned this secretive and surreptitious method of admitting Heller, this action so typical of a woman conducting a clandestine adventure?

Then, after the first shock, the adrenalin rushing into Heller's bloodstream, came the quick gathering of his forces. The cover story, the subterfuge . . . But North would have forestalled him, saying mildly that he was becoming genuinely interested in this idea of a heating installation. He had stayed at home to discuss it. And Heller, concealing his dismay, had followed him upstairs, entering as best he could, into this unlooked-for, fantastic conversation about radiators.

Ulph saw the dead woman lying on the bed and heard North's cry of alarm. His wife must have fainted. What more natural than for Heller to join him at the bedside, bend over—with a very real concern—the body of Louise North.

North had shot him then, shot him through the head. Had he been wearing rubber gloves? Had he perhaps come to the door with those gloves on and a tea-cloth in his hands? Ulph pictured those gloved hands closing the dead man's bare hand around the gun, aiming it at the dead woman's heart, pressing the trigger for the third time.

The picture stopped there, as if the projector had suddenly broken down.

North must have left the house. It was inconceivable that he could have done so and no one see him. All eyes had been on Braeside, regardless of the dog, waiting for Heller to come out. But North hadn't come out. He had come
in
at one-fifteen in his newly serviced car.

And the gun? Sometimes Ulph played fantastically with the idea that North might have taken it from him, out of his briefcase, while it stood on the kitchen table. But Heller never took that gun out of his flat. He would only have brought it with him to commit suicide. . . .

That part of Ulph which was a policeman wanted North brought to justice; that part which was an ordinary man had for him a sneaking fellow-feeling. His own wife had left him for another man and he had divorced her, but there had been times when another fantasy had occupied his mind, a fantasy not unlike that in which he saw North playing the vital role. He knew what it was like to want to kill.

That North's actions showed a long and careful premeditation did not, in Ulph's estimation, make the killing any less of a crime of passion. North had been cool, he thought, with the coolness that is a thin veneer lying on humiliated burning rage, unbearable jealousy. And the grief he had at first believed simulated might in fact be real, the horror of an Othello, who unlike Othello, had real and undeniable grounds for his crime.

So Ulph felt no desire to act as the instrument of society's revenge on North. His interest was academic, detached. He simply wanted to know how the man had done it, to a lesser extent why, when in this case divorce was the easy and obvious solution, the man had done it.

But the whole matter was closed. The coroner and the superintendent between them had closed it.

Afterwards David wished he hadn't telephoned her to apologise. Her voice still stung in his ears.

‘Mr North has arranged to lend her some money. It's a pity some of her friends of longer standing didn't think of that.'

She had crushed him with cool pointed sentences, calculated to wound. But as he listened to her meekly, he could only think of the first impression she had made on him, an impression of utter sincerity. He bore her no ill-will. Unable to forget her face, he went into the Tate Gallery after work, found
The Order of Release
and then bought a postcard copy. He had made no mistake in likening her to Effie Ruskin, but now as he made his way out on to the Embankment and hailed a taxi, he found that the card which he still held in his hand brought him no pleasure, nor any satisfaction at the accuracy of his visual memory. He had the feeling that to pin it on his wall with the others might curiously depress him.

When he got to The Man in the Iron Mask the two bearded men were the only customers and they sat at their usual table, drinking shorts.

‘Covenanting's all very well, Sid,' David heard Charles say, ‘for the other fellow, the one who benefits, but it's a mug's game for number one.'

‘Quite,' said Sid.

‘What's in it for you, I mean? Sweet Fanny Adams, unless you get a kick out of doing the Inland Revenue in the eye.'

The barman eyed David curiously as, with an anxious frown, he pretended to scan the empty room.

‘You look as if you've lost something.'

‘Someone,' David corrected him. ‘A young lady.' The genteelism grated rather. ‘I hoped to find her here.'

‘Stood you up, has she?'

‘Not exactly.' Sid and Charles weren't going to bite. Why should they? It wasn't going to be as easy as all that. He edged diffidently towards their table. ‘Excuse me.' Charles gave him an indignant glare. David thought it a bad-tempered face. ‘Excuse me, but have you been in here since they opened?'

‘We have.' Charles seemed about to add So what? or did David want to make something of it?

‘I wondered if you'd happen to see a girl come in, striking-looking dark girl. You saw me in here with her a couple of weeks back.'

‘Rings a bell.' Charles's surly expression softened and he began to look less like Rasputin. ‘Wait a minute. Dishy-looking piece in tight pants, would it be?'

‘Come now, Charles,' said Sid.

‘No offence meant, old man. Intended as a compliment actually.'

‘That's all right.' David managed a quite easy, natural laugh. ‘She used to be my secretary and now my present girl's leaving me, I thought . . . The fact is I believe she's often in here and as I don't know where she's living, I came in on the off-chance of catching her.' He marvelled at his own ability to lie glibly. ‘You know how it is,' he said.

‘She's not been in tonight,' said Charles. ‘Sorry we can't help you. I wish I'd had the nous,' he said to Sid, ‘to buy a hundred Amalgamated Asphalts last week. They touched thirty-eight-and-six this morning.'

‘Quite.'

‘Can I get you a drink?' David asked desperately.

‘You could have knocked me down with a feather. Six months they've been stuck at twenty-five bob and . . . Did I hear someone say the magic word drink? That's very nice of you, old man.'

‘Brandy,' said Sid, apparently for both of them.

David bought two brandies and a beer for himself. The barman tightened his lips. His expression was meaningful but David couldn't interpret that meaning.

‘Her boy-friend would do,' he said as he put the glasses down. ‘All I want is her address.'

‘
Salud y pesetas
,' said Charles. ‘Not that I'd say much for the peseta at this moment. You still worrying about that girl, old man?'

Casting aside caution, David said, ‘Have you ever seen her in here with a man?'

Charles gave Sid a lugubrious wink. ‘Time and time again. Tall, good-looking dark bloke. Always drank gin with something fizzy in it, didn't he, Sid?'

‘Quite,' said Sid.

Excitement caught at David's throat, making him stammer. That Sid and Charles obviously thought him Magdalene Heller's cast-off lover, didn't bother him at all. ‘Always?' he said. ‘You mean they've been in here often?'

‘About once a week for the past six months. No, I'm wrong there. More like eight months. You can put me right on that, Sid. When did we give up The Rose and start coming here?'

‘August.'

‘August it was. I remember it was August because the first day I got back from Majorca Sid and I went as usual to The Rose and, damn it, if they didn't short-change me. I've had about as much of this as I can stand, I said to Sid, and so we came here instead. Your girl and the dark bloke were here then.'