The Secret House of Death (22 page)

She looked up at him. ‘It's too soon, Bob.' His face was grey and drawn, no longer even handsome, and it was tenderness rather than desire that made her want to kiss him. She moved away, for suddenly her delaying answer had made kissing wrong. ‘Come and sit down,' she said. ‘You don't mind about the roses, do you? I don't know why he sent them.'

‘Because he wants to know you better, of course. Susan, the world is full of men who'll want to know you better. That's why I have to—you have to . . . Susan, if I'd seen you as I see you now, when Louise was still alive, would you have . . . ?'

‘When Louise was alive?'

‘If I'd fallen in love with you then, would you have come away with me?'

She was afraid without knowing the reason for her fear, ‘Of course I wouldn't, Bob. Even if you'd wanted to marry me then, Louise couldn't have divorced you. She was a Catholic.'

‘My God,' he shouted, ‘I know that!'

‘Then, don't torment yourself.' She hesitated and said, ‘I suppose you could have divorced her.' And would it have been different, would there have been true companionship for them without the spectre of Louise's death and Heller's between them, their sole wearisome topic of conversation? ‘Yes, you could have done that,' she said tiredly.

‘But I couldn't have done that,' he said, and his eyes had darkened from blue to a frightening impenetrable black. ‘It's because I couldn't have done that . . . Oh, Susan, what's the use? It's past, gone for ever. Heller loved my wife and killed her and I ought to be free . . . Susan, I'll never be free!' He quietened, shivered, and gradually his face assumed the look it wore when he explored his obsession. ‘Everyone persecutes me,' he said. ‘The police have been here again. Didn't you hear that dog? The whole street must have seen.'

‘But why, Bob?'

‘I suppose your friend Chadwick put them on to me.' There was a sneer on the fine-drawn mouth as he glanced at the white roses. ‘They wanted to know if I'd known Magdalene Heller last August.' He turned to stare at her with those sombre eyes and she, meeting them, was for the first time afraid of him. ‘She persecutes me, too,' he said in a dull, dead voice.

Susan said helplessly, ‘I don't understand.'

‘God knows, I hope you never will. Then there's your Mrs Dring.' He drew in his breath sharply. ‘I gave her the sack this morning. It was bad enough having to listen to her going on about Louise, but I could have stuck that.'

‘What happened, Bob?'

‘I found her rooting through Louise's dressing table. I think she was looking for those letters. She must have read about them in the papers and thought she'd got the chance of a peepshow. There was a scene, I said things I shouldn't have and so did she. I'm sorry, Susan. Nothing goes right for me, does it?'

He put out his hand to her very slowly as if to pull her towards him, and she was on her feet, bewildered and uneasy, moving to clasp that outstretched hand, when the telephone rang urgently into their silence. He dropped his head into his hands with a gasp of despair.

Susan lifted the receiver and sat down heavily when she heard Julian's brittle chit-chat voice.

‘I've found a buyer for the house, my dear. Our old friend Greg.'

Knowing him of old, Susan sensed that the pause had been made for her to fill with praise and congratulation. Like someone hazarding a half-learned foreign language, she felt she must speak just to prove she could. Anything she might say would do. ‘Why does he want to live out here?'

‘You may well ask,' Julian said, ‘after that delicious little mews place of his. The fact is Dian has been playing up and he feels there are too many naughty temptations in London. So I'll send him along, shall I?'

‘I hope I'll still recognise him.'

She was aware that Julian had made some sharp sarcastic reply to this, but the words were just words, meaningless, without power. At the sound of a movement from the living-room, she looked up and saw Bob framed in the doorway. His face and body were in shadow, a dark silhouette, and, poised there, his figure suggested a man on the brink of an abyss. She covered the mouthpiece with her hand.

‘Bob . . .'

He made a queer little gesture with one of those shadowed hands as if staving something off. Then he moved out of her sight and she heard the door to the garden close.

‘Are you still there, Susan?'

‘Yes, I . . .' How different this conversation with Julian would have been if she could have used it as the opportunity to tell him she was going to be married! In that moment she knew quite certainly she could never marry Bob. ‘I'll see Greg any time he likes to come,' she said calmly, and then, with the politeness of a distant business acquaintance, ‘It was good of you to phone. Good-bye.'

She sat by the phone for a long time, thinking how she and Bob were separated now only by two thin walls and ten feet of air. But those barriers were as impenetrable to her as the enclosures of his mind. She shivered a little because when they kissed or sat in silence she was almost happy with a happiness quenched at once by glimpses into that hooded mind.

Using his story of the lost book, David spent Saturday afternoon calling at every hotel on the South Devon coast between Plymouth and Salcombe and at each he drew a blank. Plymouth itself defeated him. He counted twelve hotels and guesthouses in the A.A. guide alone and, having tried four of them, he gave up. The Norths must have rented a house or stayed inland.

Must have? The chances were that they had been to North Devon, that they had been there in May or June. And Magdalene might have been telling the truth. It was not on a beach or a seafront restaurant that Bernard had met Louise but in fact in a suburban kitchen, drinking tea.

‘Had a good day?' asked Mrs Spiller, slapping a plateful of pork pie and lettuce in front of him. ‘Pity it's too early in the year for you to do the boat trip to Plymouth. But they don't run till May. Mag always went on them boats. Still, I dare say you wouldn't fancy it, you being the nervy type.'

He had never thought of himself as a neurotic. Perhaps the urgency and at the same time the fruitlessness of his quest was telling on him. ‘Is it a particularly perilous voyage?' he asked sarcastically.

‘Safe as houses normally, only there was the
Ocean Maid
, after all, wasn't there?'

The name rang a faint bell and then he vaguely recalled distasteful headlines and remembered reading in the papers of a catastrophe, similar to the
Darlwyne
tragedy, but with a happier ending. A glance at Mrs Spiller told him she was avid for conversation and he had no one else to talk to, nothing to do. ‘She was a pleasure boat,' he said. ‘Didn't she go aground off the coast here?'

Mrs Spiller took a cup from a side table and filled it from David's teapot. ‘She was taking folks on trips from Torquay and Plymouth, calling in here and at Newton. Due back at six she was. The next thing we knew it was on the wireless she was missing.' A few drops of tea fell on to her embossed lilac bosom. She took a paper napkin from a tumbler and scrubbed at the stain. ‘Drat that tea! What was I saying? Oh, yes, well, Mag had been a bit bored and lonely, not knowing what to do with herself, so I said, Why not go on the boat trip? and she did. I got her a real nice packed lunch and I saw her off on the boat myself, never thinking they'd go and run out of fuel and get themselves stranded overnight.

‘Just a pair of slacks and one of them thin tee shirts she had on. You've got a lovely figure, so why not show it off? I said. Mighty cold she must have got on that boat, though. Well, it got to six and it got to seven and still she hadn't come and then we heard about it on the news. I was in a proper state, on the point of sending a wire to Bernard. You don't know what to do in a case like that, do you? You don't know whether you're worrying them needlessly like. Especially as I'd egged Mag on to go, got her ticket and all. I blamed myself really.'

‘Didn't he go on the trip, then?' David put his knife and fork down and looked up, suddenly chilled.

‘Go on the trip? How could he? He was up in London.'

‘But I thought you said . . .'

‘You're miles away tonight, Mr Chadwick, you really are. This was
last
year, last July. Mag came down on her own. You're mixing it up in your mind with the other years when Bernard came with her. Anyway, as I said, I never wired him and it was all right and poor little Mag none the worse for what she'd been through. She didn't let it keep her in for the rest of the time she was here. Palled up with some folks she'd met on the boat, she told me, and she was off with them every day. I was glad I hadn't got Bernard down here all for nothing, I can tell you. You've gone quite white, Mr Chadwick. Not feeling queer, I hope?'

Magdalene hadn't lied. Bernard had met Louise just as she had told him. Perhaps it was true also that she had never set eyes on North until the inquest, had never plotted with him to do a murder, never handed him a gun nor sat with him in The Man in the Iron Mask. Wasn't it possible too that Sid and Charles had never seen them there together, but had concocted an amusing story to while away half an hour while they drank the drinks he had paid for?

On Sunday morning he packed his case and left the Swiss Chalet. Five miles inland he stopped for petrol in a village called Jillerton.

‘Clean your windscreen, sir?'

‘Thanks, and would you check the tyre pressures while you're about it?'

‘Can you hang on five minutes while I see to this gentleman?'

David nodded and strolled across the village street. One day, he thought, he might look back to this weekend and laugh at himself. It had taken him a two-hundred-mile drive and surely two hundred questions besides two wasted days to find out that Bernard Heller had never been here at all.

There was only one shop in the street and, although it was Sunday, the door was open. David went inside aimlessly, eyeing the coloured car stickers, the pixie statuettes and the carved wooden stags, replicas of which he had seen for sale in Vienna, in Lacock, in Edinburgh and on the pavement by Oxford Circus underground. On a shelf behind this array of mass-produced bric-à-brac stood mugs and jugs in Devon pottery, hand-painted in cream and brown and not unattractive. He could think of no one but Susan Townsend to whom he wanted to give a present and if he bought her a souvenir she would probably send it back. The white roses might be wilting on his doorstep at this moment.

Some of the pottery was lettered with obscure proverbs and this he disregarded, but the mugs, plain and prettily shaped had a christian name written on each of them, Peter, Jeremy, Anne, Susan . . . There would have to be one for Susan, of course. What was wrong with him, what sentimental madness had seized him, that everywhere he looked he had to see her name or her face?

There was a plain one at the end of the shelf that he could buy his mother for her nightly hot chocolate. He lifted it, turned it round and saw that it wasn't plain after all. In common with the rest it had a name written in elegant brown calligraphy.

Magdalene.

Could Bernard have ordered it for Magdalene on one of those previous visits of theirs, ordered it and neglected to collect it? He was setting it down again thoughtfully when a voice behind him said, ‘A very uncommon name, isn't it, sir?' David turned in the direction from which the deep Devon burr had come and saw an assistant who was perhaps his own age. ‘I've often said to my wife, we'll never sell that one, not with a name like Magdalene.' And, raising his voice, he called to someone in the room behind the shop, ‘I'm saying to this gentleman, we'll never sell that mug Mr North ordered.'

‘
Mr North?
'

‘I remember because the circumstances were a bit—well, funny,' said the assistant. ‘Last August it was, right in the height of the holiday season. Still, you won't want to be troubled with that, sir. The gentleman won't come back for it now, so if you're interested . . . But no, not with a name like Magdalene.'

‘I'll have it,' David said in a bemused voice.

‘I call that handsome of you, sir. Ten and sixpence, if you please.'

‘You said there were funny circumstances.'

Wrapping paper in hand, the young man paused. ‘If you're going to have it, I reckon you're entitled to know. The gentleman was staying at the King's Arms. That's the inn on far side of the green and my uncle keeps it. Mr North ordered the mug for his wife, he said, but when he didn't come for it and he didn't come I had a word with uncle. 'Tis a Mrs
Louise
North, he says, not Magdalene. Queer that, we thought. Looks as if 'twere for a lady friend and the gentleman not quite above board.'

‘So you didn't want to embarrass him by taking the mug over to the hotel?'

‘Proper embarrassing it would have been too, sir, seeing as the lady, his true wife that is, fell sick with one of these here old viruses the day after they came. 'Twould have set her back a bit to hear her husband was carrying on.'

‘Is the King's Arms that smart-looking pub on the green, did you say?'

‘That's it, sir.'

North had a fondness for smart little pubs. . . .

‘Rather unfortunate for them, Mrs North being ill like that,' David said casually and, as he spoke, he remembered Magdalene Heller's words. When Bernard met her she had been ill. . . . So it was after this holiday, then, they had met? ‘It must have spoilt their time here.'

‘Mr North didn't let it get him down, sir.' The assistant shrugged, perhaps at the villainy of mankind in general or London people in particular. ‘Went on that boat trip, he did, without his wife. The
Ocean Maid
, you'll have read of in the London papers. He told me the tale when he came in to order that little mug, how they'd been drifting for hours, never knowing how close they were to the rocks. ‘Twould put you or me off our holiday properly, wouldn't it, sir? But that Mr North he didn't turn a hair. I said to my wife at the time, you can see it'd take a mighty big upheaval to get him down.'