The Secret House of Death (18 page)

‘I see. And they've been meeting regularly here ever since?'

‘Not for the past fortnight.' Charles glanced in the barman's direction and then leant towards David confidingly. ‘It's my belief they got fed up with this place. There's a lot of skulduggery goes on. Just before you came in that fellow tried to pull a fast one on me. Said I'd given him a pound when it was a fiver. Disgusting!' His brows drew together angrily and he rubbed his beard.

‘It looks as if I'll have to advertise for a secretary after all.'

Sid glared at him derisively and, getting up suddenly, spoke the longest sentence David had ever heard him utter. ‘Don't give me that, that secretary stuff, d'you mind? We're all men of the world, I hope, and personally I don't care to be talked down to like a school kid. You don't want another drink, do you, Charles?' He swung the door open. ‘Secretary!' he said.

‘Quite,' said Charles, reversing roles. They went.

David turned towards the bar and shrugged.

‘Couple of comedians they are,' said the barman energetically. ‘If you like your humour sick.'

Keyed up and tremendously elated by his discovery, David had felt he couldn't stand the pub a moment longer. He was filled with an urgent energy, and wasting it on chit-chat with the barman made him impatient. Nor did he want to drink any more, for drink might cloud his thought processes. He went out into the street and began to walk about aimlessly.

His excitement lasted about ten minutes. While it lasted he felt as he had done at other high spots in his life, when he had got his diploma, for instance, when he had landed his present job. There was no room for anything else in his mind but self-congratulation. Heller was temporarily forgotten in a pride and an elation that had nothing to do with morality or justice or indignation. He had found it out, done what he had set out to do and now he could only reflect with wonder on his achievement.

But he was not naturally vain and by the time he came, by a circuitous route, to Soho Square his swagger was less confident. It might have been someone he had passed that recalled her to his mind, a girl with straight fair hair like hers or one whose grey eyes met his for a moment. Her image entered his mind with startling clarity and suddenly he came down to earth with a bump. He sat down on one of the seats under the trees and as his hand touched the cold metal arm a shiver ran through him.

She ought to be told. She ought not to be left there alone with no one to protect her, a prey to North. It seemed absurd to equate her with the classic detective story victim who, knowing too much, must be silenced, but wasn't that in fact what she had become? Already she had alerted North, informing him of David's early suspicions. There was no knowing how much else she had seen, living next door to North as she did, what tiny discrepancies she had observed in his behaviour. David didn't for a moment believe North sought her company from honest motives of affection. She was in danger.

He knew he couldn't warn her off. He was the last man in the world she would listen to. For all that, he got up and made slowly for a phone box. There was someone inside and he waited impatiently, pacing up and down. At last he got in. He had found her number, begun to dial when his nerve failed him. There was something better he could do than this, something more responsible and adult. As soon as he thought of it, he wondered why he hadn't done it days ago. The green directory then this time. . . . He took a deep breath and, tapping his fingers nervously on the coin box, waited for Matchdown Park C.I.D. to answer.

Inspector Ulph was a small spare man with a prominent hooky nose and olive skin. David always tried to find counterparts in art for living human beings. He had likened Susan Townsend to Millais' portrait of Effie Ruskin, Magdalene Heller had about her something of a Lely or even a Goya, and this policeman reminded him of portraits he had seen of Mozart. Here was the same sensitive mouth, the look of suffering assuaged by an inner strength, the eyes that could invite and laugh at esoteric jokes. His hair was not as long as Mozart's but it was longer than is usual in a policeman, and when he was a boy it had no doubt been the silky pale brown of the lock David had seen preserved at Salzburg.

For his part, Ulph saw a tall lean young man, intelligent-looking, not particularly handsome, whose eager eyes for a moment took ten years off his age. He poured out an impulsive story and Ulph listened to it, not showing the excitement which the name of North had at first evoked. What had he expected to hear? Not this. Disappointment succeeded his small elation and he stalled, summing his visitor up. Only one sharp pinpoint of his original excitement remained, and he left it glimmering to say briskly:

‘You're telling me that Mr North and Mrs Heller have been meeting, to your certain knowledge, at a London public house called The Man in the Iron Mask? Meeting there at regular intervals before her husband and his wife died?'

David nodded emphatically. He had hoped for a sharper reaction than this. ‘Yes, I am. It may be far-fetched, but I think they met there to plot, conspire, if you like, to kill the others and make their deaths look like suicide.'

‘Indeed?' Ulph's eyebrows had gone up. No one looking at him now would have supposed him to be a man obsessed by thoughts of a gun and a subtly contrived exit. He looked as if David's suspicions, the bare idea that North might be anything but totally innocent, were a revelation to him.

‘I'm sure he did it,' David said impulsively, ‘and if he did it she must have been in it too. Only she could have told him when Heller would arrive at Braeside and only she could have given him the gun. I visited Heller's flat the night before he died and I saw the gun. Later I saw her go into a cinema. I think North was inside that cinema, waiting for her to hand him the gun in the dark.'

The gun. This was the only way, Ulph thought, that North could have got it. Not by burglary, not by the unimaginable sleight of hand necessary to filching it from Heller himself, but through a conspiracy with Heller's wife. Immediately he saw pitfalls and he said, ‘You say North and Mrs Heller first met at this pub in August?'

‘Yes, I think it was this way. Bernard Heller had met Mrs North, fallen in love with her, started this affair of theirs, and North found out about it. So he got in touch with Magdalene Heller.' David paused and drew a deep breath. He was beginning to feel proud of himself again. His theory was forming as he spoke and it sounded good to him. ‘They arranged to meet and discuss—well, the wrong that is being done them. For a while they don't do anything more. Bernard tried to commit suicide in September—I read that in the paper—and it must have shaken them. But when he took up with Louise again, they went on with their meetings and decided to kill the others.'

It was so full of holes, so remote from life as Ulph knew it, that he almost laughed. But then he remembered that, absurd as this theory was, a farrago of nonsense, he owed to it the one clue he had as to how North had come into possession of the gun, and he only sighed. The proper study of man is mankind, he thought, and he wondered how anyone as intelligent, as articulate and as alert as this man who confronted him, could have lived nearly thirty years on this earth yet be so blind to man's cautiousness and the pull convention exerts over his conduct.

He said gently, ‘Listen to me, Mr Chadwick.' For this, he thought, is going to be quite a long speech. ‘An ordinary middle-class quantity surveyor discovers that his wife is unfaithful to him. There are several things he can do. He can discuss it with her; he can discuss it with the man; he can divorce her.' Under the desk he felt his hands begin to clench and he relaxed them. Hadn't he done all these things himself? ‘He can do violence to one or both of them, kill her, kill them both. Also he might just contact the wife of his wife's lover and reveal his discovery.

‘This last is a possibility. You or I,' Ulph said, ‘you or I might not do it, but it has been done. The innocent pair confront the guilty pair. More violence or more discussion follows. What the innocent pair do not do is meet in a pub and plot a murder. Strangers to each other? Knowing nothing of each other's emotions, propensities, characters? Can you hear it? Can you see it?'

Ulph began to speak in a tone quite unlike his natural voice, boyishly, impulsively. Was this North's manner of speech? David had no idea. He had never heard it. ‘“We both hate them, Mrs Heller, and want to be rid of them. Suppose we make a foolproof plan to kill them? Suppose we plan it together?”' But Magdalene's voice he did know and he flinched a little, so uncanny was Ulph's imitation of her long vowels and her sibilants. ‘ “What a lovely idea, Mr North! Shall I help you work it all out?”'

David smiled in spite of himself. ‘Not in those words, of course, but something like that.'

‘Wouldn't she have run from him? Called the police? Are you saying that two people, brought together only because their marriage partners were lovers, found in each other a complementary homicidal urge? It says much for your virtue. You've evidently never tried to involve a stranger in a conspiracy.'

But he had. Only two days ago he had attempted just that with Susan Townsend. He had gone to a stranger in the absurd hope she would help him to hunt North down. Why hadn't he learned? Recent experience should have taught him that people don't behave like that.

‘Suppose I go back to the pub,' he said diffidently. Was that amusement in Ulph's eyes? ‘Suppose I get the names of those two men?'

‘As long as you don't get yourself into trouble, Mr Chadwick.'

David walked slowly out of the police station. He felt humiliated, cut down to size by Ulph's expertise. And yet Ulph had only shown him that his reasoning had been at fault. He had done nothing to alter David's conviction of North's guilt or diminish the growing certainty that North was pursuing Susan Townsend to find out how much she knew.

It was just his luck that Sid and Charles weren't in The Man in the Iron Mask tonight. Perhaps they never came in on Thursdays. He couldn't remember whether he had ever been there on a Thursday himself before. Certainly he couldn't remember any occasion when he had been there and they hadn't. He hung about until eight and then he went home.

On the following night all the regulars were there, the middle-aged couple, the old actor, the girl with the mauve fingernails and her boy-friend, this time wearing a Battle of Waterloo tricorne hat, everyone but Sid and Charles. David waited, watching the clock, the door, and at last he asked the barman.

‘Those two bearded characters, d'you mean?'

‘That's right,' David said. ‘You called them comedians. There's something I wanted to see them about.'

‘I doubt if you'll see them in here.' The barman looked at him meaningfully, setting down the glass he had been polishing. ‘Keep it under your hat, but I had a bit of a ding-dong with them yesterday lunchtime. Always money, money, money with them it was. Like a disease. The very first time they came in here they started on me about giving wrong change, over-charging, that sort of guff.' He lowered his voice. ‘You wouldn't believe the insinuations. Well, yesterday I'd had about enough. Get the police if you're not satisfied, I said. We've nothing to hide. I'm within my rights to refuse to serve you, I said, and if you come back tomorrow I will.'

‘The same sort of thing happened to them last August at The Rose,' David said hopelessly.

‘I shouldn't be at all surprised. I'm right in thinking they're not friends of yours, aren't I?'

‘I don't even know their names.'

‘A pub crawl,' said Pamela Pearce. ‘Well, I don't know, darling. It could be dreary.'

‘There are two chaps I want to find. I've got to find them.'

‘I suppose they owe you money.'

‘No, they don't,' David said crossly. ‘It's much more serious than that, but I'd rather not explain. Come on now, it might be fun having a drink in every pub in Soho.'

‘Intoxicating. Still, I don't mind if it's Soho. But, darling, it's pouring with rain!'

‘So what? You can wear your new raincoat.'

‘That's a thought,' said Pamela, and when he came to pick her up she was glittering in silver crocodile skin.

At Tottenham Court Road tube station he said, ‘They've both got beards and their conversation is almost exclusively concerned with money.'

‘Is that all you've got to go on?'

He nodded and avoided meeting her eyes. It had occurred to him that Sid and Charles, when at last run to earth, would certainly make cracks about his concern to find a striking-looking dark girl, his ex-secretary. Pamela knew very well he had never had a secretary. Strange that this didn't worry him at all.

They would go first to The Man in the Iron Mask. There was just a chance some of the other regulars might remember North and Magdalene. But David doubted this. He had been a regular too, but he had no recollection of ever having seen the couple—the conspirators? The lovers?—until the inquest day. Did Sid and Charles only remember because like the majority of men they had been susceptible to Magdalene's beauty?

He must find them.

Pamela walked along beside him in silence while the rain fell softly and steadily through grey vapour.

It was Sunday and Julian Townsend was taking his son out for the day. Hand in hand they walked down the path towards the parked car. Susan watched them go, amused because the Airedale who only barked at unknown interlopers, had suddenly begun to roar at Julian. He had become a stranger.

She shrugged and went indoors. In the hall glass her reflection walked to meet her and she stopped to admire herself, the fair hair that had a new gloss on it, the grey eyes alight with happy anticipation, the new suit she had plundered her bank balance to buy. The fee from Miss Willingale could be used to make that good, for she had only four more chapters to complete.