The Secret House of Death (24 page)

‘You delayed a long time before you came to me, Mrs Dring,' Ulph said quietly. ‘Could it be that you've only come now because you have a grudge against Mr North?'

‘If you don't believe me, you ask Mrs Townsend. She knows. It was her put the idea into my head.'

Probably she supposed that her departure would be the signal for him immediately to set the law in motion. Ulph sat quite still, reflecting. His own construction of the murder scene, almost totally visual, had shifted and changed. North had done it very simply, after all. Ulph saw that there had been scarcely any premeditation at all and North, who had acted on impulse, had merely covered his tracks afterwards.

He had stayed at home that morning not to contrive a false suicide but to have it all out with Heller. He would have told Louise and let her warn her lover if she liked. Ulph touched his forehead and felt the muscle that jumped above his eye when he was nervous. Hadn't he done just that thing, confronting his own wife and the man she loved? Hadn't he too tried to discuss matters with them rationally and calmly? His wife had shut herself in her bedroom, flinging herself on the bed in a storm of tears.

Very likely it had been that way with Louise North, and the two men had gone up to her together. But first Heller had slung his raincoat and his heavy briefcase on the kitchen table, keeping the gun in his jacket pocket. Ulph knew very well that if a man, even a peaceful, mild man, owns a gun he is liable to use it under stress. Louise had given Heller the idea, perhaps erroneous, perhaps true, that her husband was violent and tyrannical. Aware of the kind of scene which awaited him, Heller would have brought his gun. Just as a threat, of course, just as a tool of persuasion.

And North? Perhaps Heller had arrived later than expected and the husband, tired of waiting, was ready for work in coat and gloves. Thus they had entered the bedroom together. Had they struggled and the gun off? Ulph thought so. In the struggle Louise had been inadvertently shot by Heller and when, in his horror at what he had done, he had bent over her, fallen beside her on the bed, North had taken the gun and shot him as he lay. Taken it in a hand already, but perhaps not with murderous intent, protected by a strong driving glove. Then, later, the instinctive actions of self-preservation, Heller's hand to be closed for the second time round the gun—lest the glove had eradicated earlier prints—and, hideously, a third shot to be fired. It had been raining. A duffel coat with hood up, the moment's pause to knock at the back door as the workmen always knocked, and then the deliberately slow stroll, heart pounding, blood thundering, to the fence, the street, the wide unsuspecting world outside.

With a good counsel, Ulph thought, North might not get very long. He had been intolerably provoked. The woman had turned his home into a house of assignation and written foul things of him to her lover. And suddenly Ulph remembered how North had spoken of his neighbour's kindness to him, as if he thought of her as more than just a doer of good deeds. She was divorced, he recalled. Was there a chance that she would wait for North?

Ulph got up and cursed himself for a sentimental fool. There had been no woman waiting for him when at last he had found himself a free man. He glanced at his watch. North would be still at work, home in three hours or so. As he prepared the things he must say and do, he thought with a faint amusement of David Chadwick and the theories borne of a fruitful imagination. What else could you expect of a scene designer? Still, for a day or two Ulph also had believed in the possibility of collusion, of conspiracy. He felt a little ashamed of himself.

He looked again at the photograph of the Norths that had been taken on their holiday and this time the background to their smiling faces was familiar. The inn sign was too blurred for its name to be readable, but he recognised the half-timbering on the gables of the King's Arms and the white fence that surrounded Jillerton's village green.

David had stacked this paper with other souvenirs, depressing, a little macabre, of Bernard Heller. Here were the records of his brief and humble intrusions into the public eye, and here the announcement of his marriage to the girl who had wheeled her sick father along the Bathcombe shore. The print was faded but Bernard's handwriting not at all, the figures of his wedding date sharp and blue with the little distinctive and very continental tick across the ascender of the seven.

He looked at them all musingly for a moment and then he went to the telephone. Inspector Ulph was out and no one could tell him when he expected to return. David hesitated, pushed away inhibition and the fear of a rebuff, and dialled again. It was the child who answered.

‘May I speak to your mother?'

He sounded a nice sensible boy, older than the impression David had from a fair head once seen on a pillow. ‘Who shall I say?'

‘David Chadwick.'

‘We've got your flowers in a vase.' He could never know how much pleasure he had caused with that simple statement. ‘Wait a minute and I'll fetch her.'

David would have waited all night.

‘Thank you for the flowers,' she said. ‘I was going to write to you, only things—well, haven't been very easy.'

He had meant to be gentle, tactful, cunning in his approach. The sound of her voice stunned him into abruptness. ‘I must see you this evening. Can I come now?'

‘But, why?'

‘I have to see you. Oh, I know you can't stand me and, I tell you frankly, it's North I want to talk about. Don't put the receiver down. I should still come.'

‘You're an extraordinary man, aren't you?' There was no laughter in her voice. ‘I wouldn't be frightened this time,' she said, and then, ‘Perhaps it would clear the air.'

Paul fell asleep quickly that night and Susan wondered if it was because the house was almost certainly sold now. It was still daylight, the evening soft and spring-like, and she had no need of a coat to go next door.

The Braeside windows were all tightly closed. A secret shuttered house, she thought. Hadn't someone once likened death to a secret house? And she forced her eyes not to look upwards as she made her way to the back door.

Bob had taken upon himself the right to enter her house without knocking and, although until now she had never availed herself of it, she felt that with him she must have a similar privilege. This was the first time she had entered Braeside since that Wednesday morning. The door yielded to a push and the kitchen yawned emptily at her. Did it seem bare because Heller's coat and briefcase were missing from the table?

‘Bob?'

She had called his dead wife's name like that and, getting no answer, had gene upstairs. Suppose history had repeated itself? The niche where the Madonna had stood was empty now, an open mouth in the wall.

‘Bob?'

The living-room was stuffy, but clean and as tidy as if no one had lived in it for a long time. For a second she didn't see him, he was sitting so still in the chair where she too had sat and talked to the police inspector. A bar of sunlight made a wavering gold band down the length of his body, passing across his eyes, but he stared through it, undazzled, like a blind man.

She went over to him, knelt at his feet and took his hands. The touch of his skin was no more exciting to her now than Paul's, and she felt for him only as she sometimes felt for Paul, pity, tenderness and above all an inability to understand. But she loved Paul. Had she ever been close enough to Bob to love him?

‘Susan, I've come to the end,' he said. ‘The police came to me today at work, but never mind that. Never mind that now. I went mad, I was corrupted, I suppose. I don't want to blame anyone else. If I was led into things—well, I was a grown man and I don't want to blame anyone else.' He held her hands more tightly. ‘I'm glad,' he said, ‘that they can't get anyone else for all this. They can't find out. You don't know what I mean, do you?'

She shook her head.

‘Just as well. I don't want you to know. Tell me, did you ever think I might, well, do you an injury?'

Speechless, she looked at him.

‘The suggestion was made,' he said hoarsely, ‘and I—for a while I . . . It was only for a day or two, Susan. I didn't know what you knew and what you'd seen. I really love you. I love you, Susan.'

‘I know,' she said. ‘I know.'

‘And Louise loved Heller, didn't she? You know that. Everyone knows that.' He gasped and, leaning forward so that the beam of light shivered and cut across his shoulder, said fiercely, ‘What I did, it was from jealousy. I couldn't stand . . . I had provocation, didn't I, Susan? And maybe I won't have to go away for very long, I'll come back to you.' He took her face in his hands. ‘Do you know what I'm trying to tell you?'

‘I think so,' she faltered and she stayed where she was, kneeling, because she thought that if she got up she might fall. She had come here to tell him that she still had his wife's letters, that they had never been burnt. His hands palpatated her skin. She had thought of him as a blind man but now he was like someone who is deaf and who can only discern speech by feeling the subtle and tiny movements of the speaker's bones.

Perhaps he had really become deaf, for he gave no sign that he had heard the dog begin to bark, hollowly at first and then with fury as the car door slammed.

‘You've been crying,' David said.

‘Yes, I didn't know it showed.'

The traces of tears were not disfiguring, only the evidence of an unbearable vulnerability. The puffiness they gave to her eyes, like some beautician's exclusive treatment, served to make her look very young. ‘I was boorish on the phone,' he said. ‘I'm always boorish with you.'

‘It doesn't matter,' she said indifferently. ‘At the moment I can't feel that anything much matters. You came to talk to me about—about someone we both know. I think you're too late. I—I don't think he'll come back here.'

‘Do you mean he's been arrested?'

‘That's what you wanted, isn't it?' she said harshly. He couldn't tell if it was personal hatred in her eyes or despair at the world she lived in. She turned away her head and sat down as if she must, as if her legs would no longer support her. ‘Oh, I don't condone it,' she said. ‘It's too soon yet, I can't fully realise it.' She swept back the fair hair which had tumbled across her forehead. ‘But, d'you know what jealousy is? Have you ever known it? Have you?'

David didn't answer that. ‘Is that what he told you?' he asked. ‘That he did it from jealousy?'

‘Of course.' Her voice was hard and brittle. ‘He went over the edge. It was an impulse, he wasn't sane.'

‘You're so wrong, Susan.' She had let the christian name pass. From indifference, he thought bitterly. ‘I want to tell you something. It might comfort you. I don't say it would make you feel differently towards North, although . . .' He sighed quickly. ‘But it might make you think better of me. May I tell you?'

‘If you like. I haven't anything else to do. It will pass the time.'

He had wanted very much to tell this story of his, and he would have told it to Ulph had the inspector not been otherwise occupied. It was a dreadful story and, as the truth of it had come to him by degrees during the day, he had shocked himself into a kind of horror. In a way it was as if he had invented it, as a writer of the macabre invents, and then is troubled by the sick fecundity of his own mind. But David knew that his story was true and therefore inescapable. Because it was true and it changed the whole aspect of North's conduct and North's motives, it had to be told. But this girl was the wrong audience, although to him she was right in every other respect. He already felt for her the tenderness that wants to save its object from cruel disillusionment, but it had come to him too that she might contemplate waiting for North and, during that long wait, arrive at what she now denied, condonation of an act that to her was the outcome of uncontrollable jealousy.

‘North met Magdalene Heller on holiday in Devon last July,' he began. ‘They fell in love. It might be better to call it a physical enslavement on North's part.' She wasn't looking at him and her face was impassive. ‘When they came home,' he said, ‘they began meeting, sometimes in a London pub and, no doubt, in other places as well. Magdalene wanted him because he's handsome and well-off by her standards. I've told you why he wanted her. Perhaps he also wanted children, but I don't know.' He watched her make a very faint movement of one hand. ‘I think it was Magdalene who thought of the idea, who was perhaps, to put it dramatically, North's evil genius. Magdalene had a gun, you see, and in September Magdalene's husband had tried to gas himself because he knew she no longer loved him. A man who attempts suicide may attempt it again and may succeed.

‘I don't know when they first began to plan it. Perhaps not until after Christmas. It would have been in January or February that Magdalene gave North one of Heller's business reply cards to hand to Louise and propose that they have central heating installed. No, it wasn't a coincidence that Heller happened to work in the Matchdown Park area. It was because he did that Magdalene formed their plan on these particular lines.'

‘What lines?' she said in a low, scarcely audible voice.

‘As soon as Louise had filled in the card and signed it,' he went on, ‘she began to tell her neighbours about the central heating project. Heller came along in his car to discuss it with her and every time he came that dog barked so that everyone was aware of his visits. Louise North had been looking very unhappy because she too knew that her husband was being unfaithful to her. She talked to no one of it, but she couldn't help the misery that showed in her face. She had only one thing to distract her, the plan for improving the heating of her house, and of course she told her neighbours about it. But when North was asked by them for his opinion on the scheme, he simply denied all knowledge of it. For this was the one sure way of making certain that Heller's visits would be taken as illicit.'