The Secret House of Death (6 page)

David lived alone in a bachelor flat. He wasn't going anywhere that night and he intended to eat out. ‘Look, I don't want to be a bore about this,' he said awkwardly, ‘but if you're going straight home, would you mind if I came along with you and collected my projector?'

‘Now, d'you mean?'

‘Well, yes. You're going in May and I dare say you've got a lot on your mind.'

‘All right,' Heller said ungraciously. They got into the car and David's spirits improved slightly when the other man said, with a ghost of his old grin, ‘Bear with me, old man. I'm not very good company these days. It was decent of you to lend us the projector. I didn't intend to hold on to it.'

‘I know that,' David said, feeling much better.

They went over one of the bridges and down past the Elephant and Castle. Heller drove by a twisty route through back streets and although he seemed to know his way, he was careless about traffic lights and once he went over a pedestrian crossing with people on it.

Silence had fallen between them and Heller broke it only to say, ‘Nearly there.' The street was full of buses going to places David knew only by name, Kennington, Brixton, Stock-well. On the left-hand side a great blank wall with small windows in it ran for about two hundred yards. It might have been a barracks or a prison. There wasn't a tree or a patch of grass in sight. At a big brightly lit Odeon Heller turned right and David saw that they were at a typical South London crossroads, dominated by a collonaded church in the Wren style, only Wren had been dead a hundred and fifty years when it was put up. Opposite it was a tube station. David didn't know which one. All he could see was London Transport's Saturn-shaped sign, glowing blue and red. People streamed out over the crossing, their faces a sickly green in the mercury vapour light.

Some of them took a short cut home through a treeless park with a cricket pavilion and public lavatories. Heller drove jumpily on the inside lane of the stream. The street was neither truly shopping centre nor residential. Most of the big old houses were in the process of being pulled down. Shops there were, but all of the same kind, thrust shabbily together in a seemingly endless rhythmic order: off-licence, café, pet foods, betting shop, off-licence, café . . . If he were Heller he wouldn't have been able to wait for May. The prospect of Zürich would be like heaven. What kind of a slum did the man live in, anyway?

Not a slum at all. A fairly decent, perhaps ten-year-old block of flats. They were arranged in four storeys around a grass and concrete court. Hengist House. David looked around for Horsa and saw it fifty yards ahead. Some builder with Anglo-Saxon attitudes, he thought; amused.

Heller put the car into a bay marked with white lines.

‘We're on the ground floor,' he said. ‘Number three.'

The entrance hall looked a bit knocked about. Someone had written, ‘Get back to Kingston' on a wall between two green doors. David didn't think they had meant Kingston, Surrey. Heller put his key into the lock of number three. They had arrived.

A narrow passage ran through the flat to an open bathroom door. Heller didn't call out and when his wife appeared he didn't kiss her.

Seeing her gave David a jolt. Heller was only in his early thirties but he was already touched by the heavy hand of middle-age. This girl looked very young. He hadn't been thinking about her so he had no preconceived idea as to how she would look. Nevertheless, he was startled by what he saw and as he met her eyes he knew she expected him to be startled and was pleased.

She wore blue jeans and one of those skinny sweaters that there is no point in wearing if you really are skinny. Her figure was the kind that is photographed large and temptingly in the non-quality Sundays. Long black hair that a brush touch would set sparking fell to her shoulders.

‘I don't think you've met,' Heller mumbled, and that was all the introduction David got. Mrs Heller peeled herself from the wall and now her glance was indifferent. ‘Make yourself at home. I won't be a minute finding the projector.' He looked at his wife. ‘That slide projector,' he said. ‘Where did you put it when Carl brought it back?'

‘In the bedroom cupboard, I suppose.'

Heller showed him into the living-room, if pushing open a door and muttering could be called showing anyone anywhere. Then he went away. The room had three white walls and one red one with a stringed instrument hanging above an
Equatair
radiator. A little bit of haircord clung to the centre of the floor space. Mrs Heller came in and rather ostentatiously placed cutlery for two persons on the table. It amused David to reflect on the domestic surroundings of real salesmen-executives. In the films and plays he did sets for they had open-plan apartments, forty feet long, split-level with wall-to-wall carpeting, room dividers festooned with ivy, leather furniture. He sat down in an armchair that was a woven plastic cone in a metal frame. Outside the buses moved in a white and yellow glare.

‘Sorry to come bursting in on you like this,' he said. She put two glasses of water on the table. In his films they had bottles of Romani Conti served in straw baskets. ‘I happened to run into Bernard and I remembered my projector.'

She swivelled, tilting her chin. ‘Ran into him, did you?' Her voice had the remnants of a burr he couldn't place. ‘D'you mind telling me where?'

‘In Berkeley Square,' he said, surprised.

‘Sure it wasn't Matchdown Park?'

‘Quite sure.' What was all this? The man was legitimately employed in Matchdown Park, wasn't he? He watched her as she finished laying the table. An orchidaceous face, he thought. Horrible word, but it just described that lush velvety skin, the little nose and the full pink pearl lips. Her eyes were green with gold sparks. ‘I hear you're going to Switzerland. Looking forward to it?'

She shrugged. ‘Nothing's settled yet.'

‘But surely Bernard said . . .'

‘You don't want to listen to everything he says.'

David followed her into the kitchen because he couldn't hang about there any longer with the glasses of water and the mandoline or whatever it was. The blue jeans were provocative as she bent to light her cigarette from the gas. He wondered how old she was. Not more than twenty-four or twenty-five. In the next room he could hear Heller banging about, apparently shifting things from a high shelf.

A pan of water was heating on the cooker. Already cooked and lying dispiritedly on a plate were two small overdone chops. When the water in the pan boiled the girl took it from the gas and emptied into it the contents of a packet labelled, ‘Countryman's Supper. Heavenly mashed potatoes in thirty seconds.' David wasn't sorry they weren't going to ask him to share it.

‘Magdalene!'

Heller's voice sounded weary and fed-up. So that was her name, Magdalene. She looked up truculently as her husband lumbered in.

‘I can't think where it's got to,' Heller said worriedly, glancing with embarrassment at his dusty hands.

‘Leave it,' David said. ‘I'm keeping you from your meal.'

‘Maybe it's up there.' It was the girl who had spoken, indicating a closed cupboard on top of the dresser. David was a little surprised, for up till now, she had shown no interest in the recovery of his property and seemed indifferent as to whether he went or stayed.

Heller dragged out a stool from under the table and stuck it against the dresser on which was a pile of unironed linen. His wife watched him open the cupboard and fumble about inside.

‘There was a phone call for you,' she said abruptly, her full mouth pouting. ‘That North woman.' Heller mumbled something. ‘I thought it was a bloody nerve, phoning here.' This time her husband made no reply. ‘Damned cheek!' she said, as if trying to provoke from him a spark of anger.

‘I hope you didn't forget your manners on the phone.'

David was rather shocked. Uncouth, graceless, Magdalene might be, jealous even. She had hardly deserved to be reproved with such paternal gruffness in front of a stranger. She was evidently drawing breath for an appropriate rejoinder, but David never found out what it would have been. Heller, whose aims and shoulders had been inside the cup-board, retreated and, as he emerged, something heavy and metallic fell out on to the linen.

It was a gun.

David knew next to nothing about firearms. A Biretta or a Mauser, they were all the same to him. He knew only that it was some sort of automatic. It lay there glistening, half on Heller's underpants and half on a pink pillow slip.

Neither of the Hellers said anything. To break the rather ghastly silence, David said facetiously, ‘Your secret arsenal?'

Heller started gabbling very fast then. ‘I know I shouldn't have it, it's illegal. As a matter of fact, I smuggled it in from the States. Went on a business trip. The Customs don't always look, you know. Magdalene had got scared, being here alone. You get some very funny people about out there, fights, brawls, that kind of thing. Only last week there was a bloke down in the alley shouting at some woman to give him his money. A ponce, I dare say. Hitting her and shouting he was. In Greek,' he added, as if this made things worse.

‘It's no business of mine,' David said.

‘I just thought you might think it funny.'

Suddenly Magdalene stamped her foot. ‘Hurry up, for God's sake. We're going to the pictures at seven-thirty and it's ten past now. And there's the washing-up to do first.'

‘I'll do that.'

‘Aren't you coming, then?'

‘No, thanks.'

She turned off the oven, lifted the plates and carried them into the living-room. David thought she would return, but she didn't. The door closed and faintly from behind it he heard the sound of spy thriller music.

‘Here it is at last,' Heller said. ‘It was right at the back behind the hair dryer.'

‘I've put you to a lot of trouble.'

Heller passed the projector down to him. ‘That's one thing I won't have to worry about, anyway,' he said. He didn't close the cupboard doors and he left the gun where it lay.

Perhaps it was the presence of the gun, grim, ugly, vaguely threatening, in this grim and ugly household that made David say on an impulse, ‘Look, Bernard, if there's anything I can do . . .'

Heller said stonily, ‘Nobody can do anything. Not a magician, are you? Not God? You can't put the clock back.'

‘You'll be better when you get to Zürich.'

‘If I get there.'

The whole thing had shaken David considerably. Once out of the courtyard, he found himself a pub, bigger and brassier and colder than the Man in the Iron Mask. He had another whisky and then he walked up to the tube station, discovering when he was a few yards from it that it was called East Mulvihill. As he walked under the stone canopy of the station entrance he caught sight of Magdalene Heller on the other side of the street, walking briskly, almost running, towards the big cinema he and Heller had passed. She looked jerkily to right and left before she went in. He watched her unzip her heavy shoulder bag, buy a ticket and go alone up the stairs to the balcony.

The cause of Heller's misery was no longer in doubt. His marriage had gone wrong. One of these ill-assorted, very obviously incompatible people, had transgressed, and from what Magdalene had hinted of a telephone call, David gathered the transgressor was Heller. It looked as if he had found himself another woman. Had he dwindled to this taciturn shadow of the cheerful buffoon he once had been because it was not she but Magdalene he must take with him to Switzerland?

On the way to school they passed the postman and Paul said, ‘I don't have to go to school tomorrow until after he's been, do I?'

‘We'll see,' Susan said.

‘Well, I shan't,' he said mutinously for Richard's benefit. Richard ran ahead, jumping into the air at intervals to grab at the cherry branches. ‘He'll be early anyway,' Paul said in a more conciliatory tone, taking his mother's hand. ‘Daddy's going to send me a watch. He promised.'

‘A watch! Oh, Paul . . .' Of all the vulnerable and ultimately—when Paul fell over in the playground as he did two or three times a week—tear-provoking presents for a six-year-old! ‘You'll have to keep it for best.'

They reached the school gates and the two little boys were absorbed by the throng. Susan looked at the children with different eyes this morning, seeing them as potential adults, makers of misery. A cold melancholy stole over her. Determinedly she braced herself, waved to Paul and turned back towards Orchard Drive.

It was ten to nine, the time she usually saw Bob North. His car regularly passed the school gates about now. Susan didn't want to see him. She remembered their last encounter with distaste. He wouldn't offer her a lift today as he would be able to see she intended to go straight home, but she was certain he would stop. Probably he had found out about Louise's visit to her and their appointment for this morning and he would be anxious to put his own story across before Louise could blacken his character. People in Louise's situation always blamed their marriage partners. Julian had spent a long time pointing out her deficiencies as a wife, her nagging, her dislike of his more
avant-garde
friends, her old-fashioned morality, before embarking on the tale of his own infidelity.

She felt very exposed as she walked back under the cherry trees, nervously aware that any time now Bob's car would nose or back out of the Braeside drive. She thought wildly of bending down to retie her shoelace or, if this ploy failed, diving into the house of someone she slightly knew. The trouble was she hardly knew anyone well enough for that.