Death in Summer

by William Trevor

  ‘I don’t think I said at lunch-time that I have come to understand why Letitia loved you.’

  ‘I was the last of her lame ducks. There was a bargain of some kind in our marriage, in the giving and the taking. But gradually it got lost, as if all it had ever been was a means to an end. I would have given half my life then to have loved Letitia. Today it will begin, I used to think. In some random moment of the morning, or after tea, or when we’ve gone to bed. But it never did.’

  ‘All that does not belong now.’

  ‘It is something to say.’

  ‘Why do you not blame me?’

  ‘Blame does no good.’

  Vaguely, she nods again, the same tired gesture ofacknowledgement, not up to conversation. Thaddeus turns off the lamp on the table, and the conservatory is more softly lit by the haze of early morning. He does not want this day, so gently coming. He does not want its minutes and its hours, its afternoon and its evening, its relentless happening.

  ‘A miracle it has seemed like,’ Mrs. Iveson hears him say, and is confused until he adds: ‘Loving Georgina.’

  She dreamed of Scarrow Hill, Zenobia says, and Maidment remembers from his own sleep a raw-faced bookie in a jaunty hat, and polka dots and hoops and jockeys’ chat, Quick One at nines, K. McNamara up. There was, before or after that, her wedding-dress hanging on the wardrobe door, his carnation in a tumbler by the wash-basin. There was his own voice singing ‘Drink To Me Only’.

  ‘It was to say a woman died,’ Zenobia passes on. ‘That phone call that came earlier.’

  ‘What woman?’

  She gives the name. Bleary, he feels he’s dreaming still. Not quite in the kitchen yet, but hovering in the doorway as he sometimes likes to, he averts his head to belch away a little air. Slowly he advances to the table and sits down.

  ‘What’s this then?’

  ‘I looked in at the conservatory to see if anything was needed.’

  ‘They’re there?’

  ‘And have been a long while.’

  ‘So Mrs. Ferry’s passed on her way?’

  ‘Dead was what I heard.’

  ‘Mrs. Ferry was the woman quarrelled over the afternoon of the accident.’

  ‘You said.’

  Each time she passed through the hall, returning the brass and silver pieces to their places, Zenobia says she heard the voices continuing in the conservatory. It not being her place to listen, she didn’t do so. What she heard about the woman there’d been the quarrel over was said when she looked in to see if anything was needed.

  ‘I dropped off a second and had that dream about the Scarrow Man.’

  ‘I doubt my eyes closed,’ Maidment touchily retorts, annoyed because it seems he might have passed the hours more profitably. He woke up and saw the other bed empty. Someone took the baby, he remembered then.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ he loudly and with suddenness exclaims. ‘Jesus bloody hell!’

  In astonishment, Zenobia looks across the table at him. He is not given to this. Coarseness and blasphemy have never been his way.

  ‘We should have drawn special attention to that girl and her ring,’ his explanation comes, his tone still cross. ‘Out of the way, that episode was.’

  ‘Oh, surely not.’

  ‘Out of the way from start to finish.’

  ‘Well, mention it when they come back. No call for rowdiness.’

  ‘I said at the time. High and low she took him, after a ring that never saw the light of day in this house. I said it to you where you’re sitting now.’

  ‘No call for violent language neither.’

  ‘A time like this, it’s normal to speak straight out.’

  His continuing vexation infects Zenobia. She responds as, years ago, she occasionally did in their circumspect marriage.

  ‘Was it speaking straight out to mention your bones to that man? Ridiculous, that sounded.’

  ‘What bones? What’re you talking about?’

  ‘It’s meaningless when you say you’ll lay down your bones. If you should have spoken about the girl and her ring, why didn’t you instead of going on about your bones?’

  Astonished in turn, Maidment goes quiet. He stares at the scrubbed surface of the table, the furrows in the grain. Nothing more is said.

  At half past five, faint beads of dew on the morning cobwebs, Thaddeus crosses one lawn and then the other, Rosie trailing behind him. He gathers tools from the shed in the yard: pliers and a hammer with a claw, wire-cutters and spade. The day he made the pen for Letitia’s pullets — out of sight, behind the summer-house — it took all morning. Dismantling promises to be quicker.

  It was Letitia who planted the geranium banks he passes now — clumps of Lohfelden and Ridsko and Mrs. Kendall Clark, Lily Lovell and Lissadell. She wanted to have a part of the garden hers and cleared spring weeds and cut down nettles and dug up docks. She made her own wild corner, and her calm presence seems fleetingly there again among the echium and poppies, a Bach cantata soft on her transistor. Surely it is enough that she has died. Thinking that, for a moment it all seems one to Thaddeus, too: the death and what so soon has followed it.

  The thought still there, he patiently extracts the staples that attach the chicken-wire to the posts he drove into the grass, dropping the staples into one half of a plastic container that once held spring water. He rolls up each length of wire as it becomes free and levers the posts back and forth until they’re loose enough to pull up. Only one does not come easily and he has to use the spade.

  There are four coils of chicken-wire when he has finished, and eight posts which can be used for something else. The door he made of chicken-wire on a frame may be useful also. He fills the holes left in the grass with soil, ramming it home with his heel.

  White sweet-pea thrives not far from where he works. Herbs are separated by narrow brick-paved paths: tarragon and apple-mint and basil, sage and parsley and rosemary and thyme, chives in profusion. A twisted trunk of wistaria is as thick as a man’s thigh, its tendrils stretching for yards on either side of the archway in which, yesterday, the door was found open. It is another cloudless day.

  The branches of the cherry tree that marks this corner stretch over the patch that was suitable for hens. Tidying up there, after two hours’ work, Thaddeus hears the distant crunch of car tyres and pauses in his search for the short lengths of binding wire he has used, lost somewhere in the grass. Voices carry to him. A police car has returned.

  13

  The detective inspector of yesterday, whose name has registered neither in the kitchen nor the drawing-room although it was repeated in both, is less dishevelled this morning. He is wearing a different tie and a clean shirt, the trousers of his brown suit pressed overnight. His name is Baker, christened Brian Keith, but known as Dusty among his friends and colleagues.

  The hall door is open when he reaches it, leaving Denise Flynn on the car phone. The hall itself is empty, but the beaky-faced houseman appears, his unobtrusive tread suggesting to a detective’s trained observation a man who enjoys moving silently. Yesterday he had him down as slippery. There was a Maidment he arrested once, an unsuccessful embezzler.

  ‘You’ve been informed we have a description, Mr. Maidment?’ Since the opportunity is there, he feels he may as well start with this man as with anyone. He repeats the description that has come in, from a railway employee and kids playing on the towpath: a girl with a bundle, in a hurry on the towpath, nervous on the railway platform, a girl of slight build, with glasses, in a T-shirt with a musical motif on it, short blue denim skirt.

  ‘Ring a bell at all, Mr. Maidment?’

  Hoping to hear in response, after the usual moment of blankness, that this could possibly fit a girl of the locality, the detective hears instead that this is a girl who recently came twice to the house, the first time after a nursemaid’s job that was advertised, the second in search of a ring she’d dropped.

  ‘When was this, Mr. Maidment?’

  ‘The ring was less than
a week ago.’

  This is confirmed when the question is put later to the father and the grandmother, who also agree that the description fits.

  ‘You’ll have the details, sir? Name, address? She would have passed all that on?’.

  ‘Ernily something, I think.’

  Mrs. Iveson shakes her head. Emily was the one with frizzy black hair.

  Other first names are mentioned, Kylie and Dawne, but it’s agreed that the girl in question was neither. No addresses or telephone numbers were retained, nor even known, none of the girls being suitable for the position.

  ‘The girl we’re talking about, would she have brought references? Would there be a name that comes back from being on a reference, sir?’

  They remember a reference, passed from one to the other, then back to the girl. It hadn’t impressed them.

  ‘And the name on it, sir? Madam? Nothing at all comes back? Nothing jotted down, sir?’

  ‘It wasn’t necessary.’

  ‘The girl returned, I understand. A ring she lost while she was here?’

  ‘Yes.’ There is a pause. ‘We mentioned the girl yesterday.’

  The man in the hall said the same, regretting he had not made more of this girl’s return to the house.

  ‘She just turned up, did she?’

  ‘She telephoned beforehand to ask if we’d found her ring.’

  ‘I understand, sir. And would she have given her name then?’

  ‘She may have. But I think I’d remember if she had.’

  It has been a shock that the abductor is known; that shows in both their faces, his drawn and exhausted, hers nervily agitated. He remains still, motionless by the bookcases; she moves about, quite different from yesterday. He apparently was puzzled at first, when the girl was on the phone, not knowing who she was, then realizing she was one of the girls they’d interviewed.

  ‘You realized which girl particularly, sir?’

  ‘The last one who came, she said, and I remembered.’

  ‘I understand there have been phone calls to the house during the past few weeks. Nuisance calls.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you answered the phone yourself, sir, when the girl rang about her ring?’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘You don’t recall exactly what was said, I suppose?’

  ‘She asked if the ring had been found.’

  ‘And of course it hadn’t?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She then suggested coming out here again?’

  ‘While she was still on the phone I looked where she’d been sitting. There was nothing there.’

  ‘Did you expect to find something, sir?’

  ‘There seemed no reason why the ring shouldn’t be there. I asked her if she could let me have a telephone number. So that we could contact her in case anything came to light.’

  ‘But you didn’t think anything would.’

  ‘I’d no idea.’

  ‘And what number did she give you, sir?’

  She didn’t give a number. If she had he would remember writing it down, and Mrs. Iveson interrupts to say that none of this makes sense. Why should a girl who’s hardly known to them tell lies about a ring? Why should she steal a baby?

  ‘It’s what we’re endeavouring to find out, madam. We can only find out by asking questions. There is no other way.’

  ‘We’ve told you what we can. We’re both of us beside ourselves with worry.’

  ‘I do appreciate that, Mrs. Iveson.’

  ‘My God, I wish you did. Thaddeus — ’

  ‘They’re doing their best.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. So the girl preferred to return in person when she might have left a number? That didn’t strike you as odd, sir?’

  ‘I assumed she wasn’t on the phone. She mentioned looking for her ring on the drive, and on the lane she’d walked along. She was uncertain about where she’d dropped it. She said she was sorry for being a nuisance. The ring wasn’t valuable, she said, but there was some sentimental attachment.’

  ‘And it didn’t strike you as unusual, sir, that she should want to search your drive for an object as small as a ring? A period of time had passed, after all. Cars presumably had come and gone.’

  ‘A needle in a haystack, I thought. I think I said it.’

  ‘Which you must have said again when she arrived out here. The same day was that?’

  ‘No, some days later.’

  ‘And what precisely occurred then, Mr. Davenant?’

  ‘We looked together, down the sides of the sofa. We went upstairs to the nursery.’

  ‘Why was that, sir?’

  ‘Because my mother-in-law had brought the girl to the nursery when she was here before.’

  ‘And the ring was nowhere in the nursery?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t.’

  ‘So the girl went away then?’

  ‘She looked again in this room. She asked if she might, just to be sure.’

  ‘And there was nothing?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And then she examined the drive and the lane she had walked along? Or had she done that already?’

  ‘I honestly don’t know.’

  ‘I don’t think she was looking for anything very much after she left the house.’ Mrs. Iveson intervenes again, calmer now.

  ‘You observed the girl, Mrs. Iveson?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you were…?’

  ‘I was where I was yesterday when Georgina was taken. In the shade of the catalpa tree.’

  ‘Anything about the girl, Mrs. Iveson, when you took her up to the nursery the day she came to be interviewed?’

  ‘Only that she wouldn’t do. The day she came to look for her ring she stood on the tarmac staring at me.’

  ‘Staring at you, Mrs. Iveson?’

  ‘Yes, I do remember that.’

  ‘I see. And did she leave a description of this ring, sir? Just in case?’

  ‘Soapstone, she said. Grey soapstone.’

  ‘And this time she would have left you some means of contacting her before she went on her way, sir?’

  ‘No, she didn’t.’

  ‘So if at some point the ring actually did surface, you still wouldn’t have known what to do about it?’

  ‘By then I really didn’t believe it had been lost in the house. If it turned up anywhere else, no, we wouldn’t have known what to do about it.’

  ‘Didn’t cross your mind, sir, that for some reason this girl was making the whole thing up?’

  ‘No, it didn’t.’

  Detective Inspector Baker — known for his doggedness in the force, recently promoted after eleven successful years in the vice squad — considers it extraordinary that a would-be employee came to this house, was interviewed for a position, answered questions as to suitability and background, and walked away again without a note being kept of her name. That she later telephoned with a story a child wouldn’t have fallen for, and ended up being assisted to search for a non-existent item of jewellery beggars all reasonable belief. In a brief wave of nostalgia, the inspector recalls the quick-witted pornographers and street pimps whose prevarications and deceptions were so often and so precisely presented to him. There is a measured helpfulness about the man he has been questioning, a clear determination not to become emotional. The old lady’s in shock and can’t, of course, be blamed.

  ‘Well, there seems no doubt that it was this girl.’ He nods at both of them, but when he is asked if the establishing of this identification is going to make the search for the baby easier, he adopts the stony-faced reticence of detectives in films, hoping to conceal the fact that he doesn’t know. The girl was confident. She walked into a garden and took a sleeping baby, in full view of anyone who might have been at a window. Without a shadow of a doubt, she had previously established the lie of the land and the routine of the household, had clearly waited until the dog was out of the way; and having successfully collected the baby, took the path through the fie
lds and then by the canal in order to avoid being seen on the lanes or waiting for a bus. She’d timed the whole thing so that she could slip on to the four twenty-three, which yesterday had run only two and a half minutes late. The confident ones are often the most dangerous.

  ‘She was normal, would you say, sir? From your observation when she returned that day?’

  ‘Normal?’

  ‘Manner and that. Her behaviour odd or peculiar in any way?’

  ‘She talked rather a lot, I remember.’

  ‘You can’t remember what about, I suppose?’

  ‘To tell the truth, I didn’t really listen.’

  ‘Spoke about the baby, did she?’

  ‘I don’t think so. More about herself. There was something to do with a mother in Australia.’

  ‘Ah. And nothing else comes back, I suppose?’

  ‘She said that she’d put flowers on my wife’s grave.’

  ‘My God!’ Mrs. Iveson’s invocation is an anguished mutter, which seems to the detective aptly to sum up this whole extraordinary affair.

  ‘And do you think she did, sir?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Yau didn’t think the girl was on anything, sir?’

  ‘Drugs, you mean?’

  ‘They sometimes are.’

  ‘She could have been. That didn’t occur to me.’

  ‘No reason why it should have, of course. With someone who was a stranger to you.’

  There is a silent moment, incidentally there when the questioning ceases. The girl has taken her chance, the detective muses, attracted by the baby she saw when first she was shown the nursery. It could be something misheard, that she placed flowers on the grave of a woman she never knew. Most likely it is that, he speculates, but does not say so.

  The local search that Maidment predicted is not carried out: the immediate locality is of less interest now. Again, for hours, the telephone does not ring. All morning there is silence. No breakfast is taken, no lunch. It is the afternoon of the day Thaddeus has dreaded when the news comes, preceding WPC Denise Flynn, who later carries the stolen baby from the police car to the house.

  ‘A shut-up building,’ Maidment says, ‘that used to be a home for unwanted children. A lad poking round found her.’