by Lorna Gray
Chapter 9
Formidable. I believe the term had been meant as a compliment – a young woman who might be considered admirably capable, possessing an unexpected steadiness in her course. This morning, I bore the term in the manner of an intensely focussed wrath.
Half past seven came and went and I certainly didn’t go to meet the bus. The hard reality of our night-time invasion, and the necessity of telling my uncle about it, rather put paid to any little outings of mine.
Or perhaps that was just my excuse for staying safely within the small territory of my desk.
A little over an hour later and my uncle drifted in. I was intercepted in my pursuit of him into his office by the boy from the print room. Mr Lock’s young assistant Larry had been the lucky recipient of my uncle’s unwanted sweet from the advent calendar, and now the boy thought he might try his luck with a drawer today.
There were two days to choose from, today’s and yesterday’s and, happily for him, one yielded a treat. The other he shyly returned to me. It was a brittle seed-head from some dead and dried summer weed, and not the treasure I had secreted there.
By the time I made it to the threshold of my uncle’s office, I had lost him to the lure of the telephone. The Willerson archive was a problem that would never sleep, and today brought no respite for him. But at least he could privately console himself with the knowledge that he had the paper on which to print it now.
Robert didn’t come in at all.
I went down to the shop, but found it empty of both visitors and Amy. I was a little early for my usual tea round so I suspect that I only went downstairs because I wanted to prove to myself that it was growing easier to face that gloomy space.
There was a distant murmur of voices from the passage beneath the stairs to the print room, but I didn’t bother to join them. Then, as I turned to stamp my way back up to the sanctuary of my desk, a well-dressed customer broke my fragile bravery with a rattle of the door and an inrush of cold air.
I wasn’t remotely ready to be faced with the sound of an opening door. He was broad and dressed in a smart raincoat. And that was the moment when I acknowledged that this whole morning was being occupied with the fear that at any minute someone would step in, and I would match them to some small detail from last night, and I’d be forced to identify the culprit.
But nothing but ordinary memory stirred in my mind. The incomer was Doctor Bates and he was politely removing his hat.
‘Good morning Mrs P. How are you?’
I had turned on the second step. It took me a moment to speak my reply. Finally, I said, ‘This isn’t your usual hour for visiting us, Doctor? I thought you had your morning surgery around this time. So if you’ve come to share tea with Miss Briar, I have to tell you that I haven’t had the chance to make it yet.’
Then I shook my head because I was being rude. But it didn’t matter anyway because Doctor Bates was walking directly towards me and telling me clearly, ‘I have a string of calls to pay this morning to various old people with the ’flu, so I thought I’d stop in while I was passing. I’ve only got a few minutes to spare, and as it is …’
Notably, since he’d broken his commitment to his patients’ confidentiality by giving me the details of what was wrong with them, Doctor Bates didn’t breach the rest of the rule by adding their names.
Instead, I saw him remark severely as he reached the counter, ‘As it is, I can tell that I ought to have visited you first. What on earth have you done to your hand?’
He made me stiffen. He was staring at the space near my right hip. My other hand was gripping the banister rail where it had remained while I had turned to greet him so that it still passed across my body, both as a security and a disguise. But the bandage was shining there in the gloom beside me. I hadn’t concealed it as well as I had thought with the twist of my body. Now, quite unwillingly, I released the rail and was reminded very sharply of the injured limb.
The sudden ache was disorientating because this narrowing of my thoughts onto that bright bandage actually proved to be the most unpleasant part of these past hours, even beyond the bruise. It wasn’t natural to dwell in this hard land of distrust where my mind had clearly learned to anticipate fresh pain.
And then I realised that the doctor had stepped briskly around the edge of the counter – and I’ve never felt anything like it.
The doctor was reaching out a hand. ‘Will you let me see?’
The bruise twinged sharply. It still loathed the idea of contact. I said hastily, ‘It isn’t broken.’
‘That’s for me to say. May I see?’
His stern reprimand scolded me into obedience. Numbly, I let him take my arm at the elbow to draw me off that last step into the space beside him behind the counter.
I felt the lightness of his touch as he tethered me there while he carefully set down his bag upon the glass. Absurdly, it occurred to me to realise that I had never made contact with this man before. Not even during our bus ride yesterday, where I had the vague idea he’d finished by asking me if I might like to meet him alone at some point.
Then he turned back to me and unravelled the bandage.
The last time I had seen the bruise, there had been a pronounced groove tracing the course of that wooden door jamb. Now a bulge was consuming the entire back of my hand with a small band of dull colour at the heart of it.
Doctor Bates didn’t touch the bruise but he did probe all the bones in my fingers. His touch was steady but utterly light. I watched him as he discovered the score line across my palm. His eyelashes screened his thoughts from me. But his concentration as he did his work matched the fierce rhythm of my heartbeat.
He made my pulse jump when he declared crisply, ‘It isn’t broken.’
Then he let me retreat into the relief of binding it up again. And the release came like a flood – uncomfortably.
I had never meant to show anyone this small part of last night, not even my uncle. I knew that whatever I told my uncle would have to be told to Robert as well. And speaking about this meant admitting to him – to all of us – precisely what we had been brought to by that business with the paper.
And now the doctor was asking me calmly, ‘Will it worry you if I ask how this happened?’
His grey eyes were being lit by the slanting electric glow cast by the nearest wall lamp, and his backdrop was the unrelenting dark of the old stained wooden bookcases receding in ranks through the shop.
I wasn’t expecting to hear myself say in reply, ‘I don’t mind the question at all. Because Robert has a key.’
I meant that Robert would have had no need to go skulking about my room in the dead of night for the purpose of stealing mine.
And suddenly, I was free. I’d had no idea that the use of my key had formed the heart of one of the more obscure terrors that had haunted me since the early hours. Now I was able admit that my distress ran far beyond the idea that at some point someone would step in and I would recognise them as the person who had crouched behind that closing door. I was terribly afraid that I would be forced to learn that the person who had dragged that awful cry from me was someone who knew me – and still they had left me there.
But no one could tell me now that it had been Robert. And in the next moment Doctor Bates was dragging my attention back to his face. He was looking severe. Beneath his well-bred uniform of the town doctor, there was utter bewilderment.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said with the slightly giddy exhilaration of relief, ‘I suppose you have no idea what I’m talking about.’
Then he swept aside my clumsy apology by repeating the name, ‘Robert?’
Incredibly, there was a breath of a threat in his tone.
He remarked, ‘You’ve progressed very quickly since yesterday from formal titles into the familiarity of first names with your uncle’s newest editor.’
‘I—’ I began uselessly. I drew back. I hadn’t braced to find more reasons to worry, but the feeling was here all the same.
I’d have called his reaction jealousy, except that the last time the doctor had used that tone to speak Robert’s name – as we’d shared that morning bus ride – he’d been weaving in strong hints about his landlady’s offer from a rival publisher.
So it was with a very uncomfortable degree of courage that I stemmed my urge to feel flustered and innocent, and instead asked him, ‘What precisely do you know about Mr Underhill and Nuneham’s?’
Now I was remembering that the secret of the paper was dangerous.
Not to put too fine a point on it, there were elements of its purchase which might be classed as criminal.
Doctor Bates was looking like a man who was wishing he had merely tutted over my hand before hurrying away to resume his round of morning visits. He had noted my retreat from using Robert’s first name, though.
‘Mr Underhill,’ he said, ‘took a hired van from the garage by the Curfew Tower yesterday, and later it came back from Abingdon fully laden.’
He knew all about the paper.
Carefully, as if measuring every word, Doctor Bates told me, ‘I was at the garage a few days ago getting them to put fuel in my car ready for the week’s rounds when Robert Underhill stepped in to speak to the owner. He mentioned Abingdon and the need to take a van for a trip to a fellow book press. A few telephone calls later and I had the name Nuneham’s and the details of their fate.’
I saw him bite his lip. Then he added, ‘You should know that I meant to catch him in the act of leaving yesterday morning. I might even have planned to follow him in my car. I didn’t fully know what he was up to just then. But then I saw you step out of the shop and then you boarded the bus to Stow.’
My throat was dry. It took a moment for me to be able to say, ‘You followed me instead. Why?’
The doctor’s expression suddenly crumpled to a grimace. ‘Because I acted on an impulse. I thought you might be able to give me some information that would help. But it was a mistake and by the time I’d made my way back to town, Underhill had long gone. In fact, it’s Rob by name and rob by nature, wouldn’t you say?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I’ll say it plainly, Mrs P. I think you must have been Underhill’s decoy.’
Suddenly I was flushing. ‘His decoy? I most definitely was not.’
Doctor Bates’ chin lifted. Condescendingly. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs P, but you were. My blame is entirely reserved for Mr Underhill because I think he’s been manipulating you. I think it safe to say that once I got chatting to you on the bus yesterday, I realised quite quickly that there was absolutely no point in asking you about his business. Because at the time, the name Nuneham’s meant even less to you than it did to me, didn’t it?’
I couldn’t refute that, because it was true.
Then the doctor’s expression was shifting into something oddly like sympathy and he was asking, ‘When did you learn about his trip to Nuneham’s?’
‘Yesterday afternoon, but—’
‘So how did he manage to get you onto that bus?’
I was vigorous shaking my head. ‘I wasn’t manipulated into doing anything, Doctor Bates. I was paying a perfectly innocent visit to one of our authors.’
‘But who asked you to go?’
I didn’t reply. But my sudden loss of speech wasn’t solely due to the pressure of knowing full well how this man would react if he learned that the giraffe book had come to me from Robert.
Instead, I was turning over a different part of what Doctor Bates had said about the van’s return trip from Abingdon. I was trying to calculate precisely how it should have befallen that Robert had decided to wait in Bourton to intercept me on my way home.
Because the route back from Nuneham’s to Moreton didn’t pass through Bourton. And yet Robert had passed it off as a mild happenchance that Mr Lock had set him down there for the purpose of waiting for me in the rain.
The doctor didn’t leave me any room in which to unpick this thought. With such swiftness that it hurt my mind, he dragged my attention back to his own concerns.
He confided, ‘I’ve been studying that man’s steps for weeks. You know I have. I’d imagined I was establishing just precisely what sort of place he’d taken in this business, because I’m decent enough to recognise that the man’s education and opportunities in life ought to have set him above his quiet style of work here. Don’t you find it odd?’
I didn’t particularly care to answer that. I found that I had stepped backwards to reclaim the first step on the foot of the stairs. It wasn’t nervousness that drove me to retreat there this time. In a way, I ought to have thanked the doctor for curing me of my terror of this dark staircase. I really was ready to face Robert now. In fact, there were many things which would have to be said upstairs, only I wouldn’t get the chance – because Robert was not there.
The doctor clearly wasn’t going to let me go anyway. He swept on with increasing energy to say, ‘I thought at first that Underhill’s little trips away were a sign that he was trying to patch things up with his old college in the hope of finishing his studies. I thought I might need to warn you that your uncle was about to be left high and dry. However, a quick telephone call to my old lecturer was enough to shine quite a different light on that theory.’
I was supposed to be troubled by this. But instead I supplied with all the coolness of my new mood, ‘And during that telephone call, Doctor Bates, was your old tutor able to tell you that Robert passed up the chance of finishing his training, and left his college for the second time only a few months before he came to us?’
I saw the doctor frown. ‘You know that?’
‘I do,’ I confirmed.
‘But aren’t you curious about how he left? Because the details I gleaned put me onto the idea of truly worrying about the man’s fitness to be in a position of trust here. And then to crown it all, I was on hand when Underhill abruptly needed to hire that van.’
He was studying me beneath lowered brows. I think he must have noticed the hardening of my resolve, and the endless drift of my attention to the office upstairs. And then he observed, ‘Do you know that I saw you yesterday evening when you and Underhill arrived back at the door of this building together?’
Suddenly, I had focused solely upon his face. So much so that I think the abrupt turn of my attention startled him. I saw him blink and then I said quite sharply, ‘Is that a return to that slur of being a decoy?’
‘Of course it isn’t,’ he assured me hastily. ‘I don’t fully know what I meant. I suppose I was simply observing that you seemed to give the man a cool farewell.’
Doctor Bates was running a hand through thick hair. He gave me a nervous little flicker of a smile as he lingered there by the counter.
And all of a sudden, I had the strange experience of suspecting that the doctor was in fact reviving the nature of his own parting from the morning bus, where he’d hinted at a certain kind of interest.
My doubt gave me that unfamiliar feeling again; that sudden consciousness of every inch of my presence here. This time it was his own glance that made me very aware of the style of my clothes, my defiance and the unintended elegance of my reach towards the banister with my left hand. I thought he was seeing something vividly alive in me, and setting me against the sweep of that dim and colourless staircase.
In a way it was profoundly empowering. I suppose anyone who generally dwells in that bruising no-man’s land after a sad end to a relationship ought to have at least one brief moment of being reminded of her strength.
On the other hand, I was hardly standing like this for the sake of feeling attractive. And when he spoke, it turned out that he had only meant that he was aware of the repeated drift of my gaze to the stairs behind me, and it was allowing him to believe that we were both united in distrusting Robert.
‘What really irritates me about Underhill,’ he was saying, ‘is that this sort of thing runs precisely along the lines of what Amy – Miss Briar, I mean – was probing when she was worrying
about the man’s unnatural lack of interest in pursuing excitement now that he’s free after his incarceration.’ He added with intense distaste, ‘This is where Underhill’s been hiding it.’
The doctor was a very different stamp of man when his mind showed its energy like this.
‘Please, Doctor. I don’t know that he enjoyed his trip to Nuneham’s, or any of the publishers.’
The doctor didn’t hear my protest. He was already saying, ‘You do see, don’t you, that the contradiction between how the man speaks and how he acts is the clue?’
‘No, I don’t.’
He swept on, ‘Underhill gives the impression of being quiet and unassuming but he must possess some metal to have worked his way into the heart of your uncle’s business. And my old lecturer explained how he and that band of fellow student doctors went off to war. Underhill led the way, and they all trotted after. So let’s not pretend here and now that he doesn’t know perfectly well how to lead people into all sorts of peculiar places.’
I must have abandoned any thought of upstairs. I was conscious of my position on the step in a very different way and I felt every whisper of movement as I stepped cautiously down to the ground again. ‘What are you talking about?’
His eyes had dropped to my new level. He said, ‘I’m suggesting to you that someone is steering this business of tearing about the countryside after failing publishing firms, and to me it just doesn’t quite bear the hallmarks of your uncle’s usual indecisive style.’
I stared. The doctor meant this to be a stark warning, only I didn’t quite know where he thought the danger lay.
After a moment, I observed carefully, ‘You seem very angry about this, Doctor.’
I must have released the feeling in him. Doctor Bates was suddenly telling me quite tersely, ‘In my opinion, Mr Underhill is a man who has developed a very unreliable idea of how to undertake normal business. He learned through years of striking horrific bargains with the prison guards over a few prohibited medicines for the suffering inmates, and all without, I might add, having any of the necessary qualifications.’
