“Are there any children?”
“No.”
“So that isn’t the reason she sticks to him. You’re sure it’s because of women that he vanishes, are you?”
“It seems likely, doesn’t it, unless now and then he finds he’s simply got to have a rest off Naomi. She’s a very intense blonde who can’t get over the fact that she gave up a wonderful career on the stage to marry him. The career tends to get more wonderful as time goes on.”
“What does he do?”
“I’m not sure. He’s something in the City. I’ve an idea he’s in a firm of stockbrokers, but I’m not sure about it. Naomi drives him into Maddingleigh in the morning and he takes the train to London, and she picks him up again in the evening. Then about three weeks ago he simply didn’t come back and he hasn’t been seen since.”
“And his wife has no trace of him?”
“Not so far as we know.”
“Do you know if she’s reported it to the police?”
“Oh, she wouldn’t do that!” Mollie exclaimed. “If he’s simply gone off for a short time with another woman, she wouldn’t want to bring them in on it, would she? I mean, think of the humiliation. I don’t believe she’s told anyone about it but Connie and me and perhaps one or two other friends.”
In fact, a gossip, Andrew thought.
“What do his employers think about it?” he asked. “Hasn’t she been in touch with them?”
The sisters exchanged looks again, then shook their heads.
“We don’t know,” Constance said. “After all, there are certain things one doesn’t ask a person even when they’re pouring their heart out to you. Or seem to be pouring out their heart. As a matter of fact, there’s a complication in the present situation which has made us rather careful of what we say to her. We’ve a suspicion that Naomi’s got an affair of her own going at the moment, and that that might even be the reason why Mike’s stayed away. We may be quite wrong about it, but in a place like this that sort of thing gets around, and it’s a fact that Nicholas Ryan is spending an unusual amount of time in the old house and a good deal of that time with Naomi.”
“Ryan,” Andrew said thoughtfully. “Why does that name sound familiar?”
“You’ve probably heard it from us,” Constance answered. “It was old Mrs. Ryan whom Mollie worked for for all those years and who left her so much money. Well earned, one may say, but still, it was generous of her. Nicholas is her grand-nephew and all she left him is that Victorian monstrosity down the lane. It’ll bring in a very handsome sum if he ever succeeds in selling it, but I don’t think he’s finding it easy to get rid of. Unless someone wants to turn it into an old people’s home, or something like that, it may be very hard to sell. It’s too big and inconvenient and ugly. Still, he doesn’t seem to hold it against Mollie that his old aunt left most of her money to her. He’s an easygoing, friendly young man with a casual sort of attitude towards money and possessions generally. I’m not sure what he does for a living. Sometimes I wonder if he’s on the dole and just camps in the old house now and then when it suits him. But of course he may have inherited plenty of money from some other relative. Anyway, every time he talks to us about what he’s doing, it’s something different. I know he’s been a courier for a travel firm, and he’s worked in a company that was making some kind of very modern furniture, and in some kind of project—I think it was voluntary—which was sending food to starving Africans. And that may mean he has money of his own. I always find it very refreshing to talk to him, because you never know what may be coming next. And besides that, he’s very good-looking.”
“And definitely isn’t one of the people who’s disappeared,” Andrew said.
“No, as I told you,” Constance said, “he’s around the place rather more than usual.”
“Then are Mr. Eckersall and Mr. Wakeham the only ones who’ve really vanished?”
“Well, as a matter of fact, no,” she said.
“Go on then, who are the others?”
There was a slight pause, then Mollie asked, “Do you think a woman counts?”
He was puzzled. “The murder of a woman is generally thought to be as important as that of a man. I don’t think there’s ever been any inequality in the matter.”
“No, but what I mean is—” She hesitated, weaving her fingers together and looking as if she did not know how to set about explaining something. “In that letter that came to me, you see, it says, ‘Don’t forget I saw you bury him…’ That means the dead person, if there really is one, is a man, doesn’t it? So the fact that our doctor’s wife left him two or three weeks ago isn’t—What’s the word I want?” She looked helplessly at Constance.
“Relevant,” Constance said.
Mollie nodded vigorously. “That’s it. Relevant. The letter can’t have had anything to do with that, can it?”
“It doesn’t sound like it,” Andrew agreed. “All the same, tell me about it.”
“We don’t know much about it,” Mollie said, “but David Pegler’s been my doctor for years. And he looked after Mrs. Ryan too. He lives in that nice Georgian house at the crossroads. His practice is mainly in Maddingleigh, but he and a partner hold a surgery twice a week in Clareham, and we used to see quite a lot of his wife, Carolyn. She’s a good deal younger than he is. I suppose he’s about fifty and she’s only thirty-five, but I always thought it was a happy marriage. And then one day apparently she just left him. He isn’t the kind of man who tells you much about himself and all he said to me in a sad sort of way was that she’d gone and he didn’t suppose she’d be coming back, and I remember I gave him a cup of coffee and we went on and talked about cricket. He’s secretary of the village cricket club and tremendously keen on it. He really keeps the club going. And I suppose Carolyn went off with some other man she’d fallen desperately in love with, or something like that, but I really don’t know anything about it.”
“And that’s the lot?” Andrew asked.
“No,” Constance said again.
“I was just thinking it wasn’t a very promising bunch,” Andrew said, “but you’ve been keeping something up your sleeve, haven’t you?”
“We did say there was one disappearance that didn’t seem altogether natural, didn’t we?” She reached for the coffeepot and refilled their cups. “Actually I find it very hard to talk about it, even if it’s got nothing to do with the letter, or with murder, because it’s still a real tragedy. There’s a young couple who live across the road in the cottage next to the Eckersalls’. Their name’s Gleeson. Jim is Leslie’s second husband. He’s a quantity surveyor, working in Maddingleigh. And they’ve a son—they had—that’s to say, Leslie had or has—oh dear, I’m afraid I’m getting confused. What I’m trying to say is that Colin, who’s about eleven, if he’s still alive, is Leslie’s son by her first husband, who I believe was killed in a car crash, so Jim is Colin’s stepfather, and the relationship between the two of them has never been good. Jim’s a difficult sort of man, very touchy and suspicious, and Colin’s a very self-assertive sort of child. But I don’t know what he did to make Jim lose his head one day, because usually you could see he tried very hard to hold himself in when Colin was getting on his nerves. But something happened and Jim gave Colin a real beating up and after it Colin ran away and hasn’t been heard of since. And Leslie’s been absolutely devastated by it. Of course she hasn’t forgiven Jim and I don’t think he’s forgiven himself, yet it seems to comfort them in some way to cling to one another, rather as if they feel they’re both guilty for what happened. But if that letter has anything to do with Colin…”
“Yes?” Andrew said as she paused.
She drank some coffee and did not reply. A cloud had settled on her face.
There was a little silence, then Andrew said, “Presumably the police were brought in on this.”
“Oh yes, immediately!” Mollie broke in with a kind of eagerness, which seemed to have been brought on by her sister’s reluctance to say any mo
re. “They’ve been here, asking endless questions, and every few days they come to the Gleesons and say they think they’ve found Colin, and then it turns out to have been a mistake and it makes poor Leslie feel worse than ever. I think she and Jim are really sure Colin’s dead. But of course it’s the not knowing that’s so terrible for them. I believe every time their telephone rings they expect news of some sort, and then it’s nothing.”
“How long ago did this happen?” Andrew asked.
“About a month ago,” Mollie answered.
“Well, you know what the story makes me feel,” Andrew said. “It seems to me there’s no question that Constance should take that letter to the police. If the child’s dead, whether he was killed by Gleeson or some chance passerby who picked him up when he was trying to run away, they ought to know that there’s someone hereabouts who saw it happen, or at least saw the body being disposed of. Constance, you know you’ve no choice about it, whatever secret of your own you may be afraid may come to light. You’ve got to go to the police.”
“No!” She stood up abruptly. “Now let’s go for a walk. Let’s forget I ever told you anything about the letter.”
Chapter Two
Andrew was acquainted with that flat “No!” of Constance’s. He had encountered it a number of times in days gone by, and he had learnt that the best way to deal with it was simply to retreat. Argument achieved nothing. It only led to her digging her heels in more and more firmly. In any case, he was not an argumentative man. Conflict upset him, and he had learnt that if he quietly left the room, leaving Constance for the time being in possession of the field, it was probable that she would presently follow him, having apparently forgotten that they had ever argued about anything and being ready to concede whatever he wished. So he said now that he would very much like to go for a walk and said nothing more about the letter.
Mollie did not accompany them. She wanted, she said, to get the spare room ready for Andrew. Starting out, Constance and Andrew turned to the right in the lane, passing first a small house very like Mollie’s, and then Lindleham House, the mansion in which she had looked after Mrs. Ryan for fifteen years.
It was a massive, graceless house, built of the liver-coloured brick that never weathers and with facings the colour of dried mustard. It had a couple of small turrets sprouting out of the slate roof, a pretentious porch and rows of tall, blank-looking windows. If heavy curtains had not been visible at them, the house would have looked uninhabited.
The garden obviously had once been a fine one, but it appeared to have been neglected for some time. There was a soft blue haze of speedwells in the grass, which had not been mown for a long time, a charming sight really, and if only speedwells had been difficult to grow, lawns such as these might have been treasured. But unfortunately they sprouted all too easily, like the splendid dandelions, the delicate cow parsley and the white-flowered nettles that choked the borders. If Nicholas Ryan wanted to sell the house, Andrew thought, it would be to his advantage to lose no time in employing a gardener.
He and Constance walked slowly, with Andrew reducing the length of his stride to match hers. Her back was still straight and her air was brisk, yet there was the stiffness of age in her movements. For a little while they hardly talked, but presently they began to chat about the mechanism of the absorption of sucrose into the cell, a subject in which they had both been interested in the past, and a sense that this was a normal thing to be doing when he and Constance were together and that anything else that they had talked about that day was a kind of fantasy, came to Andrew and made him feel that it was very pleasant to be here among the soft hawthorn scents of the countryside on such a kindly May day. Instead of believing that they ought to be discussing the anonymous letter and that there was something craven about having abandoned his insistence that it be shown to the police, he began to hope that the matter need not be raised again.
Not that he thought for a moment that it would not be. Give Constance a little time and she would return to it herself. She had come to him that morning for advice and sooner or later she would probably ask for it.
However, for the rest of the day the subject was avoided. When they returned from their walk Andrew found that a room had been made ready for him and, retiring to it, he unpacked the small suitcase that he had brought. As he did so he found words beginning to pound in his brain.
Then up spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate…
Catching sight of his own face in the mirror as this happened, he scowled at it. He could not have been less interested than he was in what brave Horatius had had to say, so why could the man not leave him alone? And if this reciting of verse to himself whenever his mind happened to be empty, or was resisting the intrusion into it of thoughts that he wanted to avoid, was so firmly built into his makeup that he could not escape from it, why did the verse always have to be the sort of thing that he had admired when he was ten years old? Why could it not be perhaps a little Shakespeare, or some Donne or Milton, poets whom he had discovered when he was a little more mature? Just occasionally it was, but today Macaulay went relentlessly on.
Then up spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate,
“To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late…”
An indisputable fact. Trite, in fact. But unfortunately it raised in Andrew’s mind once more the dark question of whether or not death had come sooner than it ought to one of the people about whom he had been hearing earlier in the day. The old man who had gone to visit a son in Australia. The man who had an odd habit of leaving his wife without warning or explanation. The doctor’s wife, who, however, was probably safe and well because she happened to be female. The little boy who hated his stepfather.
Was one of them dead and buried probably somewhere near, and was it Andrew’s duty to find out the truth about it?
It was next morning that he heard more of the story of one of the people who had disappeared, though not from either Constance or Mollie. They had spent a quiet evening watching a Chekhov play that happened to be on television, then they had all gone to bed early. It had surprised him a little to find that although Mollie was the more generally domesticated of the sisters, it was Constance who did most of the cooking. But it was not really surprising that, as in everything else at which she worked, she should turn out to be extremely competent. Dinner had been a simple meal consisting of a soup that had certainly not come out of a tin, lamb cutlets, courgettes and new potatoes, and then a fresh fruit salad, but everything had been perfect. Breakfast, however, Constance left to Mollie, and though Andrew was faced with a fried egg, a sausage and bacon, to which he was not accustomed, Constance herself drank only black coffee.
After it, Andrew walked out into the garden. The spell of fine weather was lasting and sunshine lay warm and glittering on the lawn at the back of the house, on the beds where the rose bushes were putting out their new shoots and where wallflowers and forget-me-nots bloomed together in the borders. A wooden fence against which a clematis had been trained divided the garden from that of the house next door. There was a bench under an old walnut tree at the bottom of the lawn, and after walking up and down for a little while, he sat down on it and tried to think lucidly about the situation into which he had got himself.
He had a feeling that Constance would not be sorry if he were to say that he had to return to London that day. She had gone to him in a panic, wanting his help, but by now, he thought, she was more afraid of his questions than she was of handling the situation by herself. Perhaps his questions had helped her to clarify her view of the problem, but he realized that it had become even clearer to her than it had been at first that she did not want him probing into what she feared had been in the letter to Mollie that might have gone astray.
What Mollie was thinking at the moment he was not so sure. She was the kind of woman who would always feel happiest if she had a man to advise her, even if in the end she would
not dream of taking his advice. Of the two sisters he could easily imagine her being the more stubborn, because she was the less rational. But what did she want? Did she really hope that he could solve some mystery for her?
He did not know how long he had been sitting there when a voice startled him.
“Good morning. You must be Professor Basnett.”
Looking round, he saw a woman regarding him over the fence that divided the sisters’ garden from that of the Wakehams. All he could see of the woman was her head. It looked as if it was balanced without any neck on a clump of clematis. She had very fair hair, which fell softly around a narrow, pointed face with large dark eyes and a small but full-lipped mouth. Supposing that this was Naomi Wakeham, Andrew remembered that Constance had described her as an intense blonde, and even with only her head showing above the fence, he thought that he could recognize a questioning intensity in the way that those surprisingly dark eyes regarded him.
He stood up and went towards her.
“Good morning,” he said. “Are you Mrs. Wakeham?”
“Yes,” she said. “Mollie told me that you were probably coming down to stay. Are you busy at the moment?”
“I’m doing nothing at all.”
“Then would you care to come round for a cup of coffee?”
Andrew was not sure which he felt more, curiosity or alarm. Curiosity because this woman’s husband was one of the missing people, alarm because this might be the beginning of finding himself drawn helplessly into the vortex of other people’s problems.
“Thank you,” he said, “it’s very nice of you, but—”
“Oh, do come,” she interrupted. “I’ve just been making some coffee for myself. And as a matter of fact, there’s something I rather specially want to ask you.”
That set the alarm bells ringing, yet curiosity won.
“Well, if I may just tell Constance and Mollie where I’ve gone—”
“Oh, don’t bother about that,” she said. “I saw Constance drive off to the shops a few minutes ago and Mollie’s always busy about the house at this time of day, so just come round, and as it’s such a lovely morning, I’ll bring the coffee out into the garden. Come straightaway. I’m so glad to have a chance to talk to you.”
The Other Devil's Name Page 3
