The Secret House of Death (23 page)

Susan was almost sorry she was nearing the end of
Foetid Flesh.
In a way it had taken her mind off the tragedy next door and off Bob. Now her problems, only subconsciously present while she typed, would rush to fill the hours the finishing of the typescript must leave empty.

Page four hundred and two. The whole thing was going to run into four hundred and ten pages. Jane Willingale's handwriting had begun to deteriorate in the last fifty sheets and even to Susan, who was used to it, some words were nearly indecipherable. She was trying to interpret something that looked like an obscure shorthand outline when Doris hammered on the back door and walked in with Richard.

‘You don't mind if I leave him with you for a bit, do you, my dear? Just while we go for drinks with the O'Donnells. Bob was asked but he won't go anywhere these days. If you ask me, he's got persecution mania. Still, you'll know more about what goes on in his mind than the rest of us, no doubt. The police were here for hours in the week. Did you see?'

‘Bob told me.'

‘And I heard him yelling at your Mrs Dring when I was passing yesterday. He's in a very nasty nervous state. Many a time I've seen them like that in the nerve wards. I expect you know best, but if I were you I shouldn't fancy being alone with him. White roses, I see. They'll soon wilt up in this temperature. Unlike me. I could stay here all day, but I can see you want to get on. Pity it's always so perishing at the O'Donnells'.'

The outline was “murder'. Susan typed it with a faint feeling of inexplicable distress. She heard Richard go upstairs and the sound of little cars trundled out on to the landing. Seven more pages to go. To decipher the last, almost hysterical rush, of Miss Willingale's novel was going to demand all Susan's concentration.

The children had moved their toys to the stairs now. She must be tolerant, she must control the admonition until they became really unbearable. Bump, bump, crash, whirr. . . . That was the latest tank plummeting to make a fresh dent in the hall parquet.

‘You're making an awful racket,' she called. ‘Can't you go outside for a bit?'

‘It's raining outside,' Paul's voice came indignantly.

‘You know you're not to play on the stairs, anyway.'

She waded through a long sentence and turned the page. The writing had suddenly improved.

My darling,

You are in my thoughts night and day. Indeed, I do not know where dreaming ends and . . .

It didn't make sense. But this wasn't even Jane Willingale's writing. It sloped more, the capitals were larger, the ink different.

Susan frowned and, taking a cigarette, inhaled deeply. Then, holding the sheets up to the light, she contemplated Bernard Heller's love-letters.

‘Can we take the motorway outside?' Paul asked, adding virtuously, ‘It's stopped raining, but the grass is wet and I thought I ought to ask you.'

Susan hardly heard him. ‘What, darling?'

‘Can we take the motorway outside?'

‘The electricity won't work outside and it's too cold to leave the door open.'

Paul stuck out his lower lip. ‘It's not fair. We can't play on the stairs and we can't come in here because you're working. You've got your papers in an awful mess again and you've got ash all over them. If I mess them up you just get mad.'

So she had never burnt the letters. Perhaps in her heart she had always known she hadn't, but she also knew that she had certainly not tucked them between the main body of Miss Willingale's manuscript and the penultimate page. What reason would Doris have for doing such a thing, Doris or Mrs Dring?

‘Paul, you haven't been playing with my papers again, have you?'

‘No, I haven't!'

‘Are you quite sure?'

‘I haven't touched them,' the little boy flared. ‘I
swear
I haven't. Cross my heart. I haven't been at your desk since the day before you were ill, the day you had to go to the trial about Mrs North.' Self-righteous indignation turned his face a bright tear-threatening red. ‘You said if I touched them again you wouldn't let me wear my watch and I didn't touch them.'

‘You needn't make a big thing out of it. I believe you.'

‘Except for once,' he said defiantly, ‘the day you were first ill. I wanted to
help.
Your papers were in an awful mess. You'd left some of them on the coffee table so I put them back with the others, all tidy. I thought you'd be pleased!'

David was jubilant. He had been right, he hadn't wasted his time. Beyond all doubt now, Robert North and Magdalene Heller had known each other since last summer.

He was jubilant, but there was much he didn't understand. All along he had assumed that their meeting, knowledge of each other, love perhaps for each other had grown from the love affair between their marriage partners. Now it seemed that these two, the widow and the widower, had met first. North had gone alone on a boat trip and when it seemed they would be stranded at sea all night had been drawn towards Magdalene who was very likely the only other solitary passenger on that holiday voyage. David could picture her, a little frightened perhaps, but still flaunting her body in her trousers and her thin tee shirt, and he could picture North comforting her, lending her his coat.

But Bernard had been in London and Louise ill in bed.

Was it credible that on returning home North or Magdalene had brought the four of them together? Hardly, David thought. North had ordered the piece of pottery for her, had surely met her every day for the rest of his holiday. Mrs Spiller had spoken to him of her having ‘palled up' with someone she met on the boat. By the end of their holiday, David was sure, they were already in love. North would never have introduced Magdalene to his wife nor she North to her husband.

How, then, had they contrived that the others should meet?

David spent Monday morning in Knightsbridge among the antique shops, hunting for Chippendale furniture to dress the set of
Mansfield Park.
His search was fruitful and at half past twelve he crossed the street to the tube entrance on the corner of Hans Crescent.

A girl whose face seemed familiar came out of Harrods at that moment and bore down on him relentlessly. Recognition came with a sickening twist. It was ironical that he should encounter the second Mrs Townsend when more than anything in the world he wanted to see the first. The absurd coincidence made him smile and she took the smile as an enthusiastic greeting.

With a violent snort, she dumped an enormous coloured paper carrier on the pavement between them. ‘So you didn't buy that place, then?' she said with the loud directness he found repellent. ‘Did you know Greg was after it? Only he won't cough up more than eight thou and God knows we're on our beam ends. There's wads of it going out every month to that woman in Matchdown Park and what's left all goes on nosh.' She drew breath noisily. ‘You wouldn't believe what I've just had to pay for a lobster.'

David eyed her warily. She looked younger than ever this morning and particularly uncouth. The one-piece garment she wore—a dress? a coat?—was made of thick oatmeal-coloured material, striped here and there with grey and fringed at hem and wrists. It made her look like a squaw, the juvenile delinquent of the tribe.

‘My husband is bonkers about food,' she said. ‘Here, you might as well carry that for me. It weighs a ton.'

In fact, it must have weighed close on half a hundredweight. As David lifted the bag, a protruding bundling of wrapping paper slipped and a large red claw sprang out. Elizabeth Townsend marched to the pavement edge.

‘Can I get you a taxi?'

‘You're joking. I'm going on the bus.' She glared at him. ‘D'you know what I'm going to have for my lunch? Yoghourt. That's what I've come down to. And I love food, I just love it.' She sighed and said crossly, ‘Oh, come on, before the lights change.'

He followed her, humping the bag.

‘I thought I might go to lunch with Dian,' she said petulantly. He almost asked who Dian was and then he remembered the mews house and the flaming bamboo screen.

‘Why don't you? It's only just down the road.'

‘Well, I don't quite like to. I'm not usually funny about these things. Julian says I rush in where angels and all that jazz. No, the point is Dian's got a man giving her a whirl. Not really like Dian, is it?'

David said heartily that indeed it was not.

‘I'd have said Dian was the complete prude. Frigid, I expect. But then Minta rang up this morning and when I said I'd drop in on Dian, she said, I wouldn't because her boy-friend's there again.' Thrusting back the red claw, David said he saw what she meant. ‘I don't want to burst in on them, you see. For Christ's sake, don't say a word to Dian. I know she's a mate of yours. Live and let live, after all. Dian hasn't said anything to Minta—she wouldn't, would she?'

‘I shouldn't think so.'

‘But with Minta living opposite she couldn't expect to get away with it. Minta told me this bloke's car's been there half a dozen times in the past fortnight and she's seen him sneaking in after Greg's gone to the studio. Of course, she dropped a hint to Greg and that's why he wants to take Dian out of harm's way.'

Every step was taking him further and further from the tube station. As Elizabeth Townsend trailed relentlessly on past bus stops, he had been searching for an excuse to dump the shopping and make his getaway. And now he did dump it, but not because he wanted to escape.

‘Is that all Minta has to go on?' he asked, trying to keep the breathlessness from his voice. ‘Just seeing a man's car outside Dian's?'

‘She saw him go in,' said Elizabeth Townsend sharply.

‘But, Mrs Townsend . . .'

‘Oh, call me Elizabeth. You make me feel about ninety-six.'

‘But, Elizabeth . . .' It was a relief. The other name conjured up a very different face and voice. ‘He could be a salesman, a surveyor, an interior decorator, anything.'

‘Yeah? I tell you he's a sexy fellow of thirty and Dian's a real dish. You know damn' well Dian and Greg haven't been having it for two years now and Dian's always off on her own. You can take it from me, she's all mixed-up over this bloke. You're green, David, that's your problem. But Minta's not and I'm not and when we hear a fellow's been sneaking round to a girl when her old man's nicely out of the way, we know what to think.'

‘Faithful Dian? Frigid Dian?'

‘You are rooting for her, aren't you? So she's not faithful, she's not frigid. This proves it.'

At this point the bottom fell out of the bag. He looked at the aubergines, the lemons and the tins of
fois gras
which rolled into the gutter and said happily, ‘Elizabeth, I'm awfully glad I met you. Tell me, if you could choose, what's the nicest place you can think of for lunch? The place you'd most like to go to?'

‘The
Écu de France
,' she said promptly, stuffing two lemons into the pocket of her Red Indian garment and eyeing him optimistically.

‘I can't bear to think of you eating yoghourt,' he said. ‘I never liked it.' He hailed a taxi and, opening the door, bowled vegetables and fruit and cans on to the seat. ‘Jermyn Street,' he said to the driver. ‘The
Ecu de France
.'

He heard a chair shift and scrape from inside the office as he approached the door and when he came in the woman who was waiting for him sat a yard or two from his desk, her expression grimly virtuous. Ulph was sure she had been examining the papers which lay face-upwards on his blotter. They were a draft of the programme for the police sports gala and Ulph smiled to himself.

‘Good morning,' he said. ‘You wanted to see me?'

‘I don't care who I see,' the woman said, ‘as long as it's someone high up, someone as knows the ropes.' She patted her fuzzy red hair with a hand in a Fair Isle glove and she looked at him in truculent disappointment as if she had expected to see someone big, aggressive, authoritative. ‘You'll do,' she said. ‘I reckon you'd be interested in a fellow called North.'

‘May I have your name, madam?'

‘As long as it doesn't go no further. Mrs Dring. Mrs Leonard Dring. My first name's Iris.' She took off her gloves and laid them on the desk beside her handbag. ‘I work for this North, cleaning like, or I did till he give me the push Saturday. What I wanted to tell you was, I work next door too and I was working there the morning Mrs North was done in.'

Ulph nodded, his face reserved. This was not the first time he had encountered the spite of the discarded servant. ‘Go on, please.'

‘There was three fellows digging up the road at the bottom of them gardens. Mrs North used to give them their tea, regular like. Well, about nine-thirty it was, I was in Mrs Townsend's kitchenette and I heard this banging on the back door next door. Well, I didn't think no more about it and I was doing my windows, in the lounge that is, when I see this chap go down the garden path, tall chap in a duffel coat. Mrs Townsend and me, we thought it was one of them workmen. He lets himself out of the gate and goes off up the road.'

‘Perhaps to get his tea at a café instead?'

‘So we thought at the time. I reckon that's what he wanted us to think. The point is there wasn't never more than
three
men working on the road. I'll tell you how I know. I said to my husband, How many chaps was there working on the cemetery road? And he says, Three.' Never more than three. And he's never wrong, my husband, there's nothing that man doesn't know. I said, You're pally with that old fellow, the foreman that was, you ask him? And that's what he did. Three fellows there was, all the time, the old chap, the man and the young lad. And what's more, when I heard the banging at the door that dog never barked. It was out the front, laying in wait, and it could see the side door all right. Like my husband always says, them animals have got more sense than we have. They don't take no account of duffel coats and folks setting themselves up as workmen.'