The Secret House of Death (9 page)

‘She knew about Louise,' Susan said. ‘Heller had promised to give her up and try to patch up his marriage but he didn't keep his promise. He was miserable and suicidal about it. He'd been like that for months.'

‘Had they ever met before, she and Bob?'

‘Bob didn't even know Heller was married. No one knows how Louise and Heller met. Heller worked for a firm called
Equatair
and the managing director was in court. He said Heller was going as their representative to Zürich in May—apparently he'd always wanted to go back to Switzerland. He was born and brought up there—but he didn't show any interest when he was offered the post. I suppose he thought it would take him away from Louise. The managing director said
Equatair
got their custom by sending out business reply cards to people, but they hadn't sent one to Louise and everyone seemed to think Heller must have given her one just so that she could fill it in and arrange for him to call. That would make his visits look innocent, you see.'

Doris digested all this with satisfaction. She poked the fire until it crackled and blazed. Then she said, ‘I wonder why they didn't just go away together?'

‘I gathered from the letters that Heller wanted to but Louise wouldn't. It seemed as if Louise had never even told Bob about it, not in so many words.'

‘Letters?' Doris said excitedly, discarding the rest of this fresh information. ‘What letters?'

The police had found them in a drawer of Louise's dressing table, two love-letters from Heller to Louise which had been written in November and December of the previous year. Carl Heller had identified his brother's handwriting which, in any case, had been confirmed by an examination of Heller's work notes. When they were read in court Bob's face had grown grey and Heller's widow, covering her face with her hands, had buried her head in her brother-in-law's massive shoulder.

‘They were just love-letters,' Susan said, sickened by this inquisition. ‘They only read out bits.' Strange and horrible that they had picked out those bits which most cruelly maligned Bob. ‘I can't remember what he'd written,' she lied.

Her expression must have shown her unwillingness to talk about it any more, for Doris, realising that she had gone as far as she dared, dropped the subject with a, ‘It'll all be in the paper, I expect,' and suddenly became solicitous for Susan's welfare. ‘I'm a beast, aren't I?' she said. ‘Pestering you after all you've been through. You don't look at all well, as if you're sickening for something.'

‘I'm all right.' In fact, Susan had begun to feel dizzy and rather sick. Probably it was only nerves and the hothouse temperature in this room. She would be better at home.

‘Now I hope your place is really warm,' Doris twittered in the icy hall. ‘I know it usually is. The great thing with shock and all this upheaval is to keep in an even temperature.' She hunched her shoulders and wrapped her arms around her chest. ‘An even temperature, that's one thing my sister tut or always impressed on me.'

For Susan's neighbours the inquest had been a kind of demarcation. It was over and with it most of the excitement, the terror and the scandal. Those involved and those looking on had reached a point at which they must again take up the strings of their lives. Susan had found two dead bodies, but Susan couldn't expect to be the centre of attraction, of sympathy and of comfort for ever.

But for all that, it gave her a slight shock to realise that Doris wasn't going to accompany her home. Mrs Dring had stayed with her last night, but she had said nothing about coming back. Quietly and as cheerfully as she could, Susan said good-bye to Doris and thanked her for lunch. Then she crossed the road, keeping her eyes averted from Braeside.

Work is generally recommended as the remedy for most ills and Susan went straight to her typewriter and Miss Willingale's manuscript. Her hands trembled and, although she flexed them and held them against the radiator, she found herself unable to type at all. Would she ever again be able to work in this house? It was so dreadfully like Braeside. With all her heart she wished she had minded her own business on Wednesday, even though that meant the discovery would have been Bob's and not hers.

Her first impression of it, her first sight of its interior, had left on her mind an image of a house of death and now her own, its facsimile, seemed contaminated. For the first time she wondered why she had ever stayed on here after her divorce. Like Braeside, it was a house where happy people had lived together and where that happiness had died away into misery. Now nothing remained of that happiness and there was nothing to replace it while these walls reflected back the sorrow they had seen.

Susan heard Bob's car come in but she couldn't look up. Now that it was all over, she might have been able to comfort him. He had needed a counsellor for loneliness and here she was, alone. She knew she had neither the physical strength nor the will-power to go out and knock on his door. It was a cold ugly place, this corner of suburbia, where a young man and a young woman could live next door to each other in identical houses, two walls only between them, yet be so bound by reticence and by convention that they could not reach out to each other in common humanity.

Many times she had cursed the daily arrival of Doris at teatime, but when Paul came in alone she missed her bitterly. A craving for company, stronger than she had felt for months, made her want to lie down and weep. A child of six, no matter how much beloved, is no company for a woman who feels as troubled and insecure as a child and Susan wondered if in her eyes he saw the same bewilderment, masked by a determined effort to make a brave show, as she saw in his.

‘Roger Gibbs says Mrs North got shot by a man.' Paul said it quite casually, stretching his white face into a broad manly smile. ‘And she was all over blood,' he said, ‘and they had a trial like on the TV.'

Susan smiled back at him and her smile was as matter-of-fact, as bravely reassuring as his. In a light even voice she embarked on a bowdlerised explanation.

‘He says this man wanted to marry her and he couldn't, so he shot her. Why did he? He couldn't marry her when she was dead. Daddy didn't shoot Elizabeth and he wanted to marry her.'

‘It wasn't quite the same. You'll understand when you're older.'

‘That's what you always say.' The smile had gone, and with a quick glance at her, Paul went over to his toy box. The gun Roger Gibbs had given him lay on top of the little cars in their coloured boxes. He picked it up, looked at it for a moment and then dropped it listlessly. ‘Can I wear my watch?' he said.

‘Yes, darling, I suppose so.'

‘Can I wear it right up until I go to bed?'

Susan heard Bob's car reverse out into the road. This time she went to the window and watched him. For a long time she stood there, staring at the empty street and remembering how she had told him of her loneliness on the night Julian had gone.

The inquest report was given a four-column spread on an inside page of the
Evening Standard.
David Chadwick bought a copy from a West End newsvendor and, reading it as he went, strolled along through the evening rush to where he had parked his car some ten minutes' walk away. Wednesday's evening paper had carried photographs of Magdalene Heller, of Robert North and of the young woman, a neighbour, who had found the bodies, but tonight there was only a shot of Mrs Heller leaving the court arm-in-arm with a man. The caption said he was Bernard's twin brother and from what David could see of him—his face and the girl's were shielded by a magazine he was holding up—the resemblance between the brothers was striking.

It must be he for whom the slide projector had been borrowed. David had unwrapped it on Tuesday night, a little amused by the care Heller had taken of it, swaddling it in newspapers under its outer covering of bown paper. And then he hadn't been quite so amused, but moved and saddened. For one of the newspapers, some South London weekly, yellowed now and crumpled, contained a tiny paragraph reporting Heller's wedding to a Miss Magdalene Chant. David only noticed it because the paragraph was ringed in ink and because Heller had written, just outside the ring, the date 7.6.62.

He had kept that paper as a souvenir, David thought, as simple people will. He had kept it until his marriage went wrong, until he had met Mrs North and wedding souvenirs were only a reminder of an encumbrance. So he had taken it, perhaps from a pile of other significant newspapers, and used it for wrapping someone else's property.

In the light of this notion and when he read of Heller's death, David had looked again at the sheets covering his projector and found, as he had suspected, newsprint commemorating Heller's success in some suburban swimming event and his inclusion among the guests at a darts club annual dinner. To Heller, evidently, these tiny claims to distinction, these printed chronicles, had once afforded the same pride as the record of his Order of Merit in
The Times
might give to a greater man. They had meant much and then suddenly, because his life had somersaulted and lost its meaning, they had meant nothing at all.

David thought of all this as he walked along Oxford Street and he thought also how strange it was that he, an acquaintance merely, should have been with Heller on the eve of his death, should indeed have spent more time with him on that occasion than at any time during the two or three years since their first meeting. He wondered if he should have attended the inquest, but he could have told them nothing that was not already known. Now he asked himself, as men do under such circumstances, whether he had failed Heller in his last hours, if he could have shown more sympathy and, worst of all, if there was any word he could have spoken of hope or encouragement that might have deflected the man from his purpose.

Who could tell? Who could have suspected what Heller had in mind? Nevertheless, David felt guilty and a sense of failure and inadequacy overcame him. He often thought of himself as a hesitant and indecisive person. Some men, hearty and brash perhaps but still the salt of the earth, would have sensed the depths of Heller's misery and, undeterred by his initial refusal to unburden his soul, have stayed and pumped his grief out of him. Others, the more sensitive of the do-gooders would have taken warning from that gun and linked its presence with Heller's confessed
weltschmerz.
He had done nothing, worse than nothing, for he had made his escape from that flat with obvious relief.

And on the next day Heller had shot himself. David felt bleakly depressed. He was driving, but he needed a drink, and all the breathalysers in the world could go to hell for all he cared. Folding the newspaper and cramming it into his pocket, he made for Soho and The Man in the Iron Mask.

It was early and the pub was nearly empty. David had never been there on a Friday before. He usually went home early on a Friday. Often he had a date and, anyway, to him the weekend started at five on Friday afternoon.

He didn't want to be alone yet and he looked around him to see if there was anyone here he knew well enough to sit with and talk to. But although all the faces were familiar, none was that of a friend. A man and a woman in their fifties were walking about, looking in silence at some new cartoons the licensee had pinned to the panelling; an elderly man who looked like an out-of-work character actor sipped pernod at the bar; the men with beards sat at a table near the pub door. As he passed, David heard one of them say, ‘“But that's share-pushing,” I said in my naive way. “Call it what you like,” he said, but he had a very uneasy look on his face.'

‘Quite,' said the other.

‘“Some people will do anything for money,” I said. “Money's not everything.”'

‘That's a matter of opinion, Charles . . .'

The couple who had been looking at the cartoons sat down and David saw that behind them, in the most dimly lit corner, was a girl alone. Her back was turned to him and she had only a blank wall to stare at. He ordered a light ale.

‘Buying on a margin like that,' said the man called Charles. ‘Apart from the ethics of the thing, I personally like to sleep quiet in my bed. Shall we go?'

‘I'm ready when you are.'

They went and while David was waiting for his change, he looked curiously at the solitary girl. He could only see her back, made shapeless by the vinyl jacket she wore, a head of glossy black hair, long legs in velvet trousers twined round the legs of her chair. She sat quite still, gazing at the brown panelling with the raptness of someone watching an exciting television programme.

He was surprised to see a girl in there alone. It used to be the practice, a kind of unwritten law among West End licensees, not to serve women on their own. Probably still was. However, this girl didn't seem to have a drink.

There was something familiar about the set of her shoulders and he was wondering whether he ought to know her when the door opened to admit four or five young men. The sudden cool draught caused her to turn her head swiftly and nervously. Instantly, but almost incredulously, David recognised her.

‘Good evening, Mrs Heller.'

The expression on her face was hard to analyse. Fear? Caution? Dismay? Her curious green eyes, speckled with gold and iridescent like a fly's wing cases, flickered, then steadied. David wondered what on earth she could be up to, by herself in a West End pub on the very day of her dead husband's inquest.

‘Is this your local or something?' she asked in a discouraging voice.

‘I come here sometimes. Can I get you a drink?'

‘No.' The negative exploded from her so loudly that several people turned to look. ‘I mean, no, thanks. Don't bother. I'm just going.'