The Secret House of Death (8 page)

Her reluctance to burst in on them had grown with every step and now she felt a strong revulsion. They might be naked. She put her hand to her forehead and felt a faint dew of sweat. It must be at least ten to one and Bob could be turning the corner of Orchard Drive at this moment.

She grasped the handle and opened the door gradually.

They were both on the bed, but the man appeared to be fully clothed. Only Louise's stockinged feet could be seen, for her lover lay spreadeagled across her, his arms and legs flung wide in the attitude of someone crucified on a St Andrew's Cross. His face was slightly turned as if he had fallen asleep with his lips pressed to Louise's cheek. They were both utterly still.

No one slept like that.

Susan came round the side of the bed between it and the dressing table and as she did so she stumbled over something hard and metallic that lay on the carpet. She looked down on it, breathing fast, and at first she thought it was a child's toy. But the Norths had no little boys to run up and down the stairs, shouting, Bang, bang, you're dead!

Momentarily she covered her face with her hands. Then she approached the bed and bent over the couple. One of Louise's shoulders was exposed. Susan touched it and the man's head lolled. Where his ear should have been was a neat round hole from which something sticky had run and dried. The movement revealed a mat of blood, liquid and caked, grumming their faces together and smothering the front of Louise's nightdress and housecoat.

Susan heard herself cry out. She put her hand up to her mouth and backed away, stumbling, while the floor eddied and rocked beneath her and the furniture swayed.

The police asked her to wait there until they came. Susan's voice had shaken so much on the telephone that she was astonished she had made herself understood. She was almost numb with shock and long after the kind voice had stopped talking and told her to do nothing and to touch nothing, she sat staring at the Madonna while the receiver hung from her hand.

A rushing splash of water at the front of the house announced the arrival of the car. Susan was surprised she could stand. She made her way to the front door, clinging to the furniture and groping like a blind person.

The Airedale hadn't barked, but in her present state this didn't warn her. Then, in a kind of horror, she watched the latch turn from the inserted key.

Bob had come home to lunch.

He had dived through the rain from the newly serviced car to the door and he had stepped inside, shaking the drops from his hair, before he realised who waited for him in the cold shadowy hall.

‘Susan?' She couldn't speak. Her lips parted, she drew a long breath. He looked at her, then past her at the dead ashes in the grate, the briefcase on the kitchen table. ‘Where's Louise?'

Her voice came in a cracked whisper. ‘Bob, I . . . She's upstairs. I . . . I phoned the police.'

‘Tell me what's happened?'

‘She's dead. They're both dead.'

‘You came to coffee,' he said stupidly and then he plunged for the stairs.

‘You mustn't go up there!' Susan cried. She caught his shoulders and they were stiff, without a tremor, under her hands. He gripped her wrists as if to free himself and then the dog Pollux began to bark, dully at first, then furiously as the police car splashed through the puddles in the street. Bob dropped limply on to the stairs and sat with his head in his hands.

There were three policemen, a little brown-faced inspector called Ulph, a sergeant and a constable. They spent a long time upstairs and questioning Bob in the kitchen before they came to her. The sergeant passed the open living-room door with a sheaf of papers that looked like letters in his hand. Susan heard Bob say:

‘I don't know who he is. I don't even know his name. Ask the neighbours. They'll tell you he was my wife's lover.' Susan shivered. She couldn't remember ever having felt so cold before. They were searching through the briefcase now. She could see them through the serving hatch and see Bob, sitting pale and stiff, by the table. ‘No, I didn't know he was married,' Bob said. ‘Why would I? Bernard Heller, did you say his name was? Of course I never ordered central heating.' His voice rose and cracked. ‘Don't you understand? That was just a blind.'

‘What about your own movements this morning, Mr North?'

‘My car was in for a service. I left for work on foot. About half past eight. My wife was all right then. She was in her dressing-gown, making the bed, when I left. I'm a quantity surveyor and I went to Barnet to look at a building site. Then I collected my car from Harrow where it was being serviced and drove back here. I thought . . . I thought my wife was expecting me home for lunch.'

Susan turned her head away. The sergeant closed the door and the hatch. The coat Louise had worn the day before lay slung over the back of one of the chairs. There was something very casual about that coat as if it had been put down only for a moment and any minute now Louise would come in and envelop her childish body in its comforting warmth. The tears came into Susan's eyes and she gave a little sob.

Upstairs the police were tramping heavily about. Then she heard someone descending the stairs and the small brown-faced inspector came in. He closed the door behind him and said gently to Susan, ‘Try not to upset yourself, Mrs Townsend. I know this has been a great shock to you.'

‘I'm quite all right, really. Only it's so cold in here.' He might think her eyes were watering from the cold, but she didn't think he would. He had compassionate eyes. Not the sort of policeman, she thought, who would be briskly hearty in the face of death or make jokes about it with his companions.

‘Did you know Mrs North was on intimate terms with this man, Heller?' Inspector Ulph asked presently.

‘I . . . Well, it was common knowledge,' Susan began. ‘I know she was very unhappy about it. She was a Catholic and couldn't be divorced.' Her voice shook. ‘She was terribly distressed when she came to see me yesterday.'

‘Distressed to the point of taking her own life, or to agreeing to a suicide pact?'

‘I don't know.' This sudden taking of responsibility frightened Susan. Her hands were icy cold and trembling. ‘A Catholic wouldn't commit suicide, would she? But she was in a bad state. I remember thinking she was at the end of her tether.'

He asked her quietly about the events of the morning and Susan, trying to keep her voice steady, told him how she had seen Heller's car outside soon after nine; how she had waited and waited for Heller to leave; how Mrs O'Donnell had called and how, at last, she had come here to Braeside to alert Louise and Heller, believing them to be asleep.

‘No one else came to this house during the morning?' Susan shook her head. ‘Did you see anyone leave?'

‘Only Mrs O'Donnell.'

‘Well, that's all for now, Mrs Townsend. I'm afraid you'll have to be present at the inquest. Now, if I were you, I should telephone your husband and see if he can come home early. You shouldn't be alone.'

‘I'm not married,' Susan said awkwardly. ‘Well, that is, I'm divorced.'

Inspector Ulph made no reply to this, but he came with Susan to the door, lightly supporting her with one hand under her elbow.

As she came out into the garden, she blinked and started back. The crowd on the pavement affected her as bright sunlight shocks someone coming out of a dark room. Wrapped in coats, Doris and Betty and Eileen stood outside Doris's gate with the old woman who lived alone next to Betty, the bride from Shangri-La, the elderly couple from the corner house. Everyone who didn't go out to work was gathered there and everyone, their tongues stilled, was silent.

Even Pollux had been stunned into silence by those unprecedented comings and goings. He lay exhausted at his mistress's feet, his head between his paws.

The rain had ceased, leaving the roadway a glistening mirror of pools and wet tarmac. Raindrops dripped steadily from the cherry buds on to umbrellas and coat collars. Doris looked colder and more miserable than Susan had ever seen her, but for once she said nothing about the cold. She stepped forward, putting her arms around Susan's shoulders, and Inspector Ulph said:

‘Will one of you ladies kindly look after Mrs Townsend?'

Susan let Doris lead her past the green Zephyr, the police car and the black mortuary van and into her own house. All the time she expected to hear her neighbours' chatter break out behind her, but there was only silence, a silence broken only by the steady drip-drip of water from the trees.

‘I'll stay with you, Susan,' Doris said. ‘I'll stay all night. I won't leave you.' She didn't cite her nursing experience as qualification for this duty and she didn't clutch at the radiators. Her face was grey and huge-eyed. ‘Oh, Susan, Susan . . . ! That man, did he kill her and himself?'

‘I don't know. I think he must have.'

And the two women, friends only from propinquity and mutual practical need, clung together for a moment, their heads bowed on each other's shoulders.

It was curious, Susan thought, how tragedy seemed to bring out in everyone the best qualities, tact, kindness, sympathy. Afterwards the only really tactless action she could remember was the arrival of Roger Gibbs at Paul's party with the present of a toy revolver.

‘I reckon some women are downright daft,' said Mrs Dring. ‘Fancy, a gun! You'd think Mrs Gibbs'd have had more thought. And she's sent that boy of hers with a streaming cold. What'll I get them on playing? Musical Parcel? Squeak, Piggy, Squeak?'

Murder was the favourite party game among the undertens in Orchard Drive. When no one suggested playing it, Susan knew they must have been forewarned by their mothers. Had those mothers told their sons what she had told Paul, that Mrs North had had an accident and been taken away? What do you tell someone who is old enough to wonder and be frightened but too young, far too young by years and years, to understand?

‘I hope to God,' said Mrs Dring, ‘young Paul won't have an accident with that watch his dad sent him.' She was unusually subdued this afternoon, softer-voiced and gentler, for all the dazzling aggressiveness of her red hair and the lilac suit she declared her husband had knitted. ‘Has Mr Townsend been in touch yet?'

The watch had arrived by the first post and with it a card bearing a reproduction of Van Gogh's
Mills at Dordrecht
, a gloomy landscape that Julian had evidently preferred to the more suitable teddy-bear mouthing, ‘Hallo, six-year-old'. He approved of culture being rammed home during the formative years. But there was no note inside for Susan and he hadn't phoned.

‘He must have read about it,' said Doris indignantly, passing with a tray of sausage rolls.

Mrs Dring frowned at her. ‘Perhaps he'll put something about it in his own paper.'

‘It isn't that sort of paper,' said Susan.

It was only because she had wanted to keep Paul's interest from the tragedy next door that she had decided to go ahead with the party as planned. But now, as the little boys shouted and romped to the loud music from the record player, she wondered how much of this noise was reaching Bob. Since Louise and Heller had been found, he had only left Braeside for two visits to the police station. All the curtains, not just those upstairs, remained drawn. Gossip had reached the workmen on the cemetery road and today none of them had come up to the back door for their tea. Susan didn't care to think of Bob alone in there, living, moving, sleeping in the house where his wife had been shot. If he heard the children, would he take their merriment as the outward sign of her own indifference to his sorrow?

She hoped he wouldn't. She hoped he would understand and understand, too, that she hadn't yet called on him because she felt as yet he was better alone. That was why she hadn't been among the stream of tip-toeing housewives who knocked almost hourly at the Braeside door, some of them with flowers, some with covered baskets, as if he was ill instead of sick at heart.

Doris met Susan after the inquest was over and took her back for lunch in the over-heated room the Winters called their ‘through-lounge'. An immense fire was burning. Susan saw that Doris's gentle, sympathetic mood had passed now. Her curiosity, her avidity for gossip, had returned, and, wondering if she was being just, Susan recognised in the huge fire, the carefully laid tray and the gloss of the room, a bait to keep her there for the afternoon, a festive preparation in return for which she must supply the hostess with every juicy tit-bit the inquest had afforded.

‘Tell me about the gun,' Doris said, helping Susan plentifully to fruit salad.

‘Apparently this man Heller smuggled it in from America. His twin brother was in court and he identified the gun and said Heller had tried to commit suicide in September. Not with the gun. The brother found him trying to gas himself.' Doris made eager encouraging noises. ‘He shot poor Louise twice, both times through the heart, and then he shot himself. The pathologist thought it rather strange that he'd dropped the gun, but he'd known that happen before in cases like this. They asked me if I'd heard the shots, but I hadn't.'

‘You can't hear a thing when those drills are going.'

‘I suppose that's why I didn't. The verdict was murder and suicide by Heller, by the way. Apparently he was always threatening suicide. His brother and his wife both said so.'

Doris helped herself to more salad, picking out pieces of pineapple. ‘What was the wife like?'

‘Rather beautiful, I thought. Only twenty-five.' Susan recalled how Carl Heller and Magdalene Heller had both tried to speak to Bob while they all waited for the inquest to begin and how Bob had turned from them, brushing off their overtures as if stung. She thought she would never forget how that big, heavy man had approached Bob and attempted to talk to him in his strongly accented English, and Bob's near-snarl, his bitter contempt for the woman whose dead husband had killed Louise. She wasn't going to tell Doris any of that, nothing of Bob's frenzied outburst in court when Magdalene Heller had accused him of driving his wife, through his own neglect, into another man's arms; nothing of the girl's stony, stunned horror that had broken at last into vituperative ravings at Bob.