I didn’t feel like playing her game. ‘I realised that, of course.’ It wasn’t necessary, with all that glass, to approach the windows in order to admire the view. Nevertheless I strolled over, fishing out my pipe. ‘Sheba was never your dog.’

  ‘Please tell me what you’ll drink. I can’t stand here for ever.’

  She equated masculinity with strong drink. I smiled at her, holding my eyes on hers, and gently shook my head. She made an impatient sound, and looked away. ‘Then you don’t mind if I do?’

  I shrugged, though she wouldn’t have seen it. ‘It’s your home.’

  ‘You’re a guest here.’

  ‘Not a guest. A visitor. I’ll just take Sheba…Where did you put the lead?’

  She turned fast on one heel and glared at me, took four paces to a three-seater settee, and threw herself on to it, but managed not to spill one drop from her glass.

  ‘For God’s sake!’ she said. ‘What have I got to do? Down on my knees? Stay a while. I’m going crazy here, all by myself. It comes to something when I’ve got to kidnap a blasted dog to get a man into the house.’

  There seemed no necessity for me to turn from the view. Her tone told me everything. Three months had been too long. She was, she was blatantly telling me, a healthy woman with healthy appetites, and the house was empty, even encouragingly isolated. That, anyway, was the hand she revealed. I was not yet sure what hand she meant to play.

  ‘You need only have picked up the phone,’ I said, lighting up, bouncing the smoke from the glass.

  ‘And you’d have come?’

  ‘No.’ Puff-puff. ‘I’m married.’

  ‘Oh dear. Poor you.’

  It was degenerating into an adolescent game of word-play. I turned from the window. Her last words had been sharp and dismissive. I went and sat beside her. She smiled. Perhaps her martini could have been more dry. I smiled back, and produced the newspaper clipping Donald had been carrying.

  ‘Did you get one of these?’

  ‘No, I did not.’ Even more dry.

  ‘Through the post,’ I amplified.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘You got ‘em backwards. You should have asked that first.’

  ‘Let me see.’

  ‘You’d better put that drink down.’

  She did so, on a small, glass-topped table, forcefully.

  ‘Let me see, damn you.’

  In case she might have wished to destroy it, I held it up in front of her eyes. She squinted at it. Vanity had prevented her from wearing her close-up spectacles.

  ‘I can’t read it,’ she said pettishly. ‘Read it for me.’

  She was playing for time, wondering where we were going from there. I did so, reading it slowly to oblige her, in that if not in the other. I looked past it to her eyes.

  She was not quick-witted. Even now she had not decided on her attitude, and a hand went angrily to her hair, whipping it back.

  ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘It relates to the death of a woman in a caravan in plot thirteen of a site in Wales.’

  ‘Am I supposed to be distressed?’

  ‘I wondered if you’d read it before. Perhaps you received one by post?’

  ‘I think you’d better take Sheba and go.’

  ‘You didn’t give me the lead.’

  I don’t think she caught the double meaning. The lead she’d given me was now forgotten.

  ‘Where did you get it?’ she demanded.

  ‘You haven’t answered my question.’

  ‘What question? What?’

  ‘I’ve already asked it twice. Did you receive one of these in the post?’

  ‘I told you I didn’t.’

  ‘But that was before you gave it any thought. You’d have done better to say that you had. I got it from Donald, by the way.’

  She rose to her feet with such vigorous anger that the table shook, but she grabbed up her drink before it toppled. ‘I think you must be mad.’ She saw that I was watching her with a smile, and gulped at her drink. ‘How from Donald? Why would he give you that?’

  ‘I didn’t say he had. I took it from the pocket of his jeans.’

  ‘Took it?’

  ‘He being in hospital.’

  ‘Donald’s in hospital?’

  ‘Haven’t you heard? Paul should have phoned you. Donald’s in hospital because he was beaten up over a debt. The people involved like to terrify their customers into paying. He was beaten up because of the inheritance that he didn’t get from your father.’

  ‘Which none of us got,’ she snapped.

  ‘And which he was counting on, even though your father had no doubt told him he’d been disinherited. Virtually.’

  ‘He didn’t…’ She stopped.

  ‘Didn’t tell Donald, you were going to say? But how would you know that? From the simple fact that your father didn’t tell you?’

  She had to have time to work that out. With her face white now, she stared at me for a moment, then whirled away to her drinks cabinet, clattering the glass, making a performance of it to demonstrate her anger at me. She turned back. I lifted my head.

  ‘Father didn’t tell me,’ she said with dignity.

  ‘And yet you knew about his intention to change his will?’

  ‘I’m not going to listen to this, in my own home…’

  I got to my feet. ‘Two minutes, and I’ll go.’ I raised my eyebrows. She said nothing, so I went on. ‘You knew of your father’s intention, of course. He would have broadcasted it. But somebody, who knew his intention, attempted to kill my wife by blowing up the caravan on plot thirteen. That same somebody circulated copies of this newspaper cutting to the interested parties, to indicate that there was no longer any necessity to worry about the new will. Because my wife was dead. But it would not be necessary to send a copy to one’s self, I’d suggest.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ She was frowning as though it was beyond understanding.

  ‘That it follows…the one who didn’t get a copy was the one who sent them.’ I looked round. ‘Never mind the lead. Sheba, coming home, girl?’

  Sheba awoke instantly and gambolled over to me. I heard a drawer bang open, and turned. She was waving a bit of paper.

  ‘I got one, damn you.’ The pallor had gone. Anger had flushed her cheeks.

  I took it from her, folded it with the other, and put them both away safely. ‘And now—can I leave?’

  ‘You put me at a disadvantage, and then you walk out!’ She tried to follow the disgust with a smile, but it was ghastly. ‘What does it mean? I don’t understand.’

  ‘There was general disbelief when the will was read. There was an equally general disbelief that my wife was still alive. It was thought she’d died before your father. As simple as that.’

  ‘I knew nothing about it.’

  ‘But you understood very well what the cutting meant?’

  ‘It was a complete mystery to me.’

  ‘Then why did you keep it?’

  There was no way out for her. I saw she realised that, and I wondered whether she’d fall back on tears. She did not. Her reaction startled me. She suddenly threw back her head and laughed.

  ‘Oh you poor, dear man. Here I am, leading you astray, and you being all naïve and moral! Of course I knew he’d made a new will. Of course I believed your wife was dead. What would you expect, that I’d weep for her? I don’t know her. She was no more to me than those other anonymous deaths we hear about on the news.’

  ‘To me she is.’

  ‘But of course. Silly man. Sit down, you great idiot. You fill the room, standing there.’

  I sat, because I didn’t understand this new angle she was trying out. Her abrupt candour had disarmed me.

  ‘But you’d be used to that,’ I observed. ‘Wasn’t your husband a big man?’

  ‘Big, yes, in size. And in energy. And in forcefulness, like you. But not in…what’s the word?…sort of domination.’

  Me? Dominating?

  ‘No,’ she decided, her eyes measuring me. ‘Personality, that’s it. Understanding and sympathy…’

  Where did she get all this twaddle? ‘We can’t all be the same.’ I tried to sound modest.

  ‘But of course not. What would be the point?’ She gave me the full benefit of a suggestive look, and threw back her head as though to say: that’s put it in a nutshell. Then she said: ‘I’ll go and make some tea, seeing you’re not a spirits man. Al could take it, and it never seemed to touch him.’

  And yet, this commendation was expressed with contempt. At the same time, Aleric had been degraded to Al. Somehow, I felt sorry for him. She, too, could take her liquor, but it certainly touched her, judging by the look she tossed me as she swept out.

  It was thinking time for both of us. I still couldn’t see what she was trying to get across. I waited. There were distant sounds. She eventually returned with a silver tray, a silver tea service gracing it, and egg-shell china for me to worry about, me with my bulk and my domination. She had found time to do a little adjustment to her hair. Drops in her eyes? Would she go that far? But certainly they sparkled. And I? Had I found time to run a comb through my hair? I can’t remember.

  She set down the tray. ‘That’s him over there.’ She nodded towards the shelf above the fire, to which Sheba, confused as I was, had returned. The head and shoulders photograph of Aleric Tolchard had caught a certain arrogance, a confident angle to his head, the strength of the chin and the determination in his eyes.

  ‘Sugar?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ll help myself.’

  I returned to my seat. She chose to sit opposite to me now, though you can’t do anything interesting with slacks. The tea was Earl Grey.

  ‘Your wife,’ she asked, ‘is she getting better?’

  This was more than she’d asked about Donald. ‘There was some worry about infection in her arm, but the antibiotics are winning.’

  ‘Poor woman. Such a pity.’

  I wondered which was the pity, the pain or the recovery. Her teeth, her smile round them, challenged me to guess.

  ‘She’s quite a fighter,’ I assured her. Warned her.

  ‘I can’t wait to meet her. She’ll be arriving soon, I hope. To take over. To the house…’ Here, she faltered. The house had always been her main objective.

  I said it might be a few weeks yet.

  ‘Anything could happen,’ she observed, ‘in a few weeks.’

  ‘I wouldn’t think so.’

  ‘It would be such a pity if it did. To inherit all of it, and not even see it!’

  ‘We mustn’t be morbid,’ I told her, my voice beautifully in control.

  ‘But you’ve seen it.’ The smile again. It was switching on and off like fairy lights, presumably to hypnotise me. ‘You wouldn’t want to lose it now.’

  ‘But I wouldn’t, would I.’

  ‘Of course not. Silly me. You’d get it all.’

  I raised my eyebrows. She cocked her head in question at my question. We played it like two dummies, remotely controlled. ‘If she died,’ she explained.

  ‘Ah yes.’ I allowed myself to sound relieved, at last comprehending. ‘As your husband died. That, too, was very sudden.’

  ‘Too? But she’s alive.’

  ‘Nancy Rafton isn’t. The woman mentioned in the cutting,’ I explained. ‘Though her name’s not given.’

  For a moment she glanced aside, but not quite quickly enough. Then she busied herself with the cups again.

  ‘He had an exercise room, you know,’ she said, apparently changing the subject. ‘I could show it to you. Do you exercise, Mr Patton? Must I continue to call you mister?’

  ‘Richard, and I don’t.’ Apart from the occasional punch-up.

  ‘It’s all in there, Al’s stuff, his weights and his rowing machine and his skipping rope. God, what a way to spend your time! Out every morning before breakfast in his joggers. Four miles. Coming in hardly out of breath, straight into the shower, a quarter of an hour under his sun-ray lamp. A fanatic, that’s what he was.’

  ‘It must be very wearing.’

  ‘Wearing! I was fed right up to here with it.’ She gestured to her throat, which, just at that moment, she was displaying at its very purest curve. ‘Two evenings a week, it was off to his squash club in Birmingham. Bang, smack, slash, take that you little bastard! Oh, he could hammer all hell out of a tiny ball. My husband was a man, Richard. A real, genuine hunk of powerful machinery.’

  Which puts me in my place, I thought. ‘But fit. Very fit.’

  ‘One hundred bleeding per cent fit,’ she declared, spacing each word. ‘He was macho. Mucho macho. Make no mistake about that.’

  What the hell was she getting at?

  She moderated her tone to a hushed tenderness. ‘But do you hear the pitter-patter of tiny feet, Richard? Any childish laughter?’ She couldn’t hold it, though. ‘Not on your damned life, you don’t. Aleric Hubert Tolchard was impotent, Richard. He was no more use than a jelly baby.’

  What did I say to that? She hadn’t brought me there to tell me she’d been deprived for three months, she was telling me it had lasted ten years. Ten years of waiting for the right man to come along? One with prospects, if only he hadn’t already got a wife! What was the crazy woman saying? That she’d welcome me if I got rid of Amelia?

  But she was full of surprises. Abruptly she transferred her anger, and was on her feet, her eyes furious, her mouth distorted with anger.

  ‘So now you know what I think of big, clumsy oafs who think they can bully me, Mr Richard Patton.’ She drew a hand from behind her back and threw something at me. ‘There’s your blasted lead, and there’s your dog. Take her with you.’

  I untangled it from round my neck and was on my feet, had taken one step towards her, and with a snarl Sheba was flying at me. Her weight, her teeth in my anorak sleeve, fortunately padded, took me back on to the settee. The worst thing you can do in these circumstances is fight. I let her work at the padding, speaking to her in a calm voice—as well as I could manage that—over and over. And gradually she stopped, released me, and stood staring at me in confusion.

  Behind it all, Clare was laughing, too close to hysteria for comfort.

  With a fair show of dignity, Sheba and I walked out of that house. As I drove away—Sheba beside me and panting her frantic love in my left ear-hole—I wondered whether that was what Clare had wanted to show me. That Sheba would support her. That Sheba could be so confused as not to recognise the aggressor. But surely Clare would not have wanted to demonstrate that she could have thrust her father from that window, Sheba or no Sheba.

  I was parking in the side car park of the factory before I got it. Clare had been telling me that ten years was too long, and that she’d had a secret lover for a large part of them. Then, if I found out elsewhere, I would not assume it had anything to do with Tolchard’s death. As though I would! Clare was too cold and brittle to allow a little affair to lead to murder.

  There was also another small matter she’d made quite clear. If I had any ideas about getting rid of my existing wife, I needn’t go to Clare for solace. Hadn’t she told me plainly that she didn’t like my type? She’d go for the very opposite.

  Mind you—with enough money behind me—you never could guess what might happen, could you!

  18

  I had driven past the main entrance, the forecourt seeming to be full, and pulled into the larger parking area provided for the worker bees. The surface was poor, but firm enough at that time. There was a convenient short-cut, trampled through the diamond mesh fence and opposite to the side entrance. This was one of those custom-and-practice facilities, implicitly approved by the management, in proof of which I discovered the time clocks just beyond the side door. Clocking-off time seemed to be 4.30. It was now half-past three. Paul would be getting anxious.

  I walked round the corner of the main block, and on to the forecourt. It saved stopping for a chat with Frank, who couldn’t see me from his hut. Though it probably wouldn’t be him, at that time.

  The reception lobby was open-plan, no more than a large expanse of carpeted floor, with a lone receptionist isolated at her desk in a corner. Remote from her, three vinyl-covered easy chairs squatted round a low table. The walls were lined with display cases, the table loaded with photographic magazines.

  I gave my name. Her pertly pretty face came alive. She said Mr Paul was expecting me, and whispered into her phone. I waited, prowling round the display cases. You’d be surprised at the number of different accessories photographers seem to need.

  He came down for me himself, a welcoming hand thrust ahead. This was a changed Paul. He’d come to terms with the situation, and decided to swim with the tide rather than get swamped.

  In the lift he told me what he’d hoped to show me, though there was now little left of the day. He said this with rueful admonition. He took me first to his office (‘I’m not much in here—have to be where the action is’), then showed me Walter’s (‘We mustn’t leave it empty too long’), and we put our heads into the boardroom (‘My, but there’ve been some battles in here’). I expressed interest, but he did not exude the enthusiasm of Chad, not even the near-exhausted attitude of Leyton, but more that of a man defeated by boredom and a constant attack from forces he didn’t understand.

  We went through all three shop floors. Here, I could have developed an interest, in machines operating and processes being carried out, and intricate assembly being done by nimble fingers. I love watching people work. From time to time he would stop at the elbow of one of the operatives, who were for the most part women, and say: ‘No, dear, try a gentle pressure on that lever. Let it feed itself.’ Or to another: ‘Not more than two seconds of contact, there’s a good girl. You’ll burn it out.’ I noticed that he loved that part of it, and I was aware that the foremen and forewomen seemed to find something to do in the distance when he was near.

  Sit him at a machine and he’d have been happy all day. As a works manager, I guessed, he was uncomfortable, and therefore not a success.

  We returned to his office, just in time for a pot of tea before the building emptied. Everywhere I went I was confronted by tea.

 

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