Seeing Red

by Roger Ormerod

  Not wishing to remain inactive, I called into a tobacconist’s and bought some tobacco, then went along to see whether Sergeant Timmis was on duty.

  He was. He smiled sourly when he saw me and leaned in exaggerated weariness over the counter. ‘Still here, then?’

  ‘Barely started,’ I admitted. ‘I’d rather like to get a look at the car, if it’s still available.’

  ‘Gledwyn’s Escort? That’ll tell you nothing.’

  ‘All the same...’

  He turned, and called out: ‘David, where did they take the burnt-out Escort?’

  ‘Old Cadwell’s yard, I think.’ The voice came from the office at the rear.

  Timmis returned his attention to me. ‘It’s convenient. At the top of this street, where it fades out. He’s dug himself into the old quarry. But don’t count on too much.’

  ‘I won’t.’ I stared at a poster about Colorado beetle. ‘There’s mention of a local you’ll know. Evan Rees. A brain from the University at Aberystwyth. Can you tell me anything? He’s visiting this afternoon, and I’d like to start with an advantage.’

  This seemed to delight him. He put his hands together as though praying, and blew into his palms. ‘Well now! Young Evan coming to visit Angie, is he?’

  ‘Coming to visit me.’

  ‘Guess whose eyes he’ll stare into.’

  ‘If it was like that,’ I said severely, ‘she’s had plenty of time to send for him.’

  He grinned hideously. ‘But she’s been alone. How could he visit her, with his family in the farm next door? They’re very funny round here, you know. Things can get sexy, but they’ve got to be discreet.’

  ‘For a good laugh, I’ll know where to come in future.’

  ‘And as soon as she’s got a chaperone, Evan’s on his way. What a coincidence!’

  ‘I’m sorry I troubled you, Sergeant.’

  ‘No, no. Don’t go.’ He drew himself up to his full height. In uniform he looked huge. ‘If you’re going to be a chaperone, it’s only fair you should know what you’re up against.’

  ‘Much obliged.’

  ‘Evan’d be about the same age as Angie. That’d make him — what? — oh, twenty-six or so. The apple of his father’s eye, Evan was. The farm was coming to him. But you’d never see ’em apart when they were kids, Angie and Evan, and that brought Evan close to Gledwyn, and that was the end of farming for Evan. Those days, any trouble either of them got in, you just looked round for the other. Angie was the leader, and Evan caught the trouble. A big, shy fool he was. She got him into scrapes, and she’d laugh, and he’d smile quietly, and they’d run off together after a good ticking-off...but as I say, Evan got too close to Gledwyn, and there were great plans for Angie, so how could Evan do anything different? Where Angie went, Evan had to go, trailing along, looking dull and stupid. But Gledwyn said he’d got a fine brain. Well, you probably know what happened by now. Angie dropped out of the University, but Evan went on. It’d got hold of him. In here...’ He thumped his chest. ‘…Evan was a farmer. In here...’ He tapped his forehead. ‘…he was a scientist.’

  ‘On research now, I hear.’

  ‘And doing well. Morgan Rees says he’s disowned the lad, but he’s as proud as hell of him.’

  So...Evan Rees had lost out, or won out, whichever way you looked at it. While he was qualifying at Aberystwyth, going on for his doctorate, taking on research, Angie was meeting Phil Rollason, and who’d have predicted a motor mechanic for her?

  ‘A bit of a shock for Gledwyn Griffiths, wasn’t it?’ I asked. ‘A crummy garage attendant for his darling girl!’

  I put in a load of disparagement there, but I couldn’t shake him. Everything bounced off that great chest and the low, broad forehead.

  ‘True, true,’ he agreed.

  I thanked him for his assistance, went and dug out the Rover, and drove up to Cadwell’s Quarry.

  The hill soon disintegrated to a section of the town they’d probably have preferred to forget. A row of tatty shops was too far from the town centre to attract attention, and an old petrol station had ceased to trade years before. The last significant building was a chapel, and I couldn’t tell whether or not it was still in business. From that point I climbed between high banks each side until the one on the left fell away to rolling hillside, and on the right the rise was cut into as a quarry. Somebody had noticed a seam of gravel or sand and dug their way in until it disappeared. They had left Cadwell with an ideal place for his junk.

  There was a corrugated iron shed just round the corner as I drew up inside. From it tottered a greasy old man, who took one look at the Rover and decided he couldn’t see a customer. I got out and surveyed the chances.

  He, or somebody — I couldn’t imagine him managing any physical toil — had got things organised. Old vehicles from which something might be salvaged on the left, junk wrecks on the right. Presumably you stripped out what you needed. Bring your own tools, wave your own wallet.

  He tittered, rubbed his half-gloved hands together, and said: ‘Help you, squire?’

  ‘I was looking for the car that was burnt-out at the roadworks.’

  ‘’Nescort, was it?’

  ‘S’right,’ I matched him.

  ‘It’s over there. Help yourself.’ He cocked his head. ‘You buyin’?’

  ‘Just looking.’

  ‘Engine could be okay. Transmission, too.’

  ‘I wasn’t really in the market for either.’

  He cocked his head again. ‘Cost yer a quid for lookin’.’

  I’d met a shrewd old fraud. I glanced round. He had hefty and high metal barred gates and a huge padlock hanging free. Nobody was going to be doing any free looking out of hours. I searched out a pound note.

  ‘I’ll give you its mate, if I decide to buy you out.’

  I used up a pound’s worth of looking to no good purpose at all. It was on its side, leaning against a couple of other wrecks, and it took me a few moments to decide it had been an Escort at all. When I climbed over shifting metal, I saw that the interior was an unpleasant mess where the upholstery had shrivelled itself into black lumps. The tyres had gone completely, and one of the wheels seemed to have been wrenched off with the impact. At the rear — and I had a good view of its underside — the tank had clearly exploded, leaving a large, jagged hole in the metalwork. There was barely a sign of paint anywhere, and red rust was replacing the blackened surface of the shell.

  I uttered a silent prayer that Angie had not seen this, and turned away.

  From that angle I could see behind the shed, where Cadwell had his own transport. It was a nearly-new Audi 100. A lot of people had had a pound’s worth of looking.

  I drove back and found Angie looking very intense over a cup of tea in the café, and I found out later she’d been wondering what brilliant detecting I’d been doing. I hefted her shopping bags and we went for the car. Isn’t it wonderful what weights these slim women can carry about? They nearly killed me.

  She directed me out of town past a small park with ducks and two swans on its pool, and told me we’d get to Whitchurch if we kept going long enough. A mile out of town we took a left, and began a wriggly climb into the hills.

  ‘It’s longer, but the view’s better,’ said Angie. ‘We used to do miles round here on our pedal cycles. You can see the house from just along here...the break in the trees...there it is. Oh, do stop a minute, please.’

  I pulled in because she sounded so childishly delighted. There was a low dry-stone wall, beyond it the ground falling away to reveal our own road winding down through the valley, and way over to the left I got a much better idea of what the new roadway would look like when it was finished. Far down, a tiny moving toy, I could see a grey hatchback weaving its way in the direction we were going. If the light hadn’t deceived me the night before, it could well have been Lynne Fairfax’s Fiesta.

  If so, there didn’t seem to be any sign of it when we reached Viewlands — and where else could she have bee
n heading? But when I drove into the yard there was evidence that she was there. One of the big doors next to the garage was open.

  ‘Lynne’s here,’ said Angie, without any enthusiasm.

  Come to see me, I guessed. There had been an incompleteness about our previous encounter, when I had perhaps caught her at a disadvantage.

  But there was no sign of welcome when I wandered into what was obviously Gledwyn’s lab and shouted: ‘Anybody here?’ There was Lynne, at the far end of the building, fiddling around with something, and all she did when I approached was give me a glance and say: ‘Oh...it’s you!’

  Then Angie called out, friendly enough, ‘You here for lunch, Lynne?’ and Lynne called back, ‘I brought sandwiches.’

  ‘You’ve come to show me around,’ I declared, giving her the benefit of the doubt. Lynne shrugged.

  ‘Angela doesn’t know much about it.’ There was a certain amount of prim pride, and a frigidity in the way she used the name.

  ‘You’re the expert,’ I said cheerfully, and it got me a conducted tour.

  What I had taken, the night before, for a row of windows, turned out to belong to the four large doors that had replaced the half-doors of the original four stables in the middle. These had been knocked together, which had given Gledwyn a wide but not very deep laboratory. The remaining stable at one end matched the garage at the other. Along the back wall he’d run his main bench, a solid pine surface on which was his heavy equipment. The centre of the floor space was taken up by two smaller benches, displaying the more delicate-looking instruments. The back far corner was walled off to form a small square space which Lynne quite proudly called her office. A door in the side wall, next to her office, opened into the garage at the end. I put my head in there briefly. There was no car, just a patch of oil where the Escort had stood and an up-and-over door to the yard.

  ‘Strictly speaking,’ said Lynne, ‘I’m not a technical person. I never had any laboratory training and science was my worst subject at school. I came here when Gledwyn advertised for a secretary, but really, you know, there was hardly any work in that line. So I got to following him round with a notebook, and he told me what it was all about and what he was doing, and I picked it up on the way. Towards the end, most of what I did was lab work. We worked together. He told me everything. We were friends — more than that. You know how it is, when you can work with someone without having to say a word. He trusted me, you see, in so many ways. Took me for granted, if you like. I was supposed to be there always, at his beck and call, to drive for him, type for him...cook for him sometimes, otherwise he’d have starved, I think.’

  This was somewhat different from her previous attitude towards him, but I had to make allowances for the fact that her resentment, then, had arisen from the fact that his demands had impinged on the death of her friend. Any other time and she’d have accepted them. There is a sort of person who takes pride in being taken for granted. They equate it with being trusted; something certainly to be proud about. But it can go too far. It sounded to me as though he’d walked all over her. But she did not see it like that, and her voice was soft with affection as she spoke about him.

  ‘He was a very great man, I hope you realise that. If he’d kept on with his research at Aberystwyth, he’d have done wonderful things, I’m sure. He told me all about his plans and dreams, when he was there, and how it all fell apart when his wife became ill. Of course, it was impossible for him to stay away from her for long. Multiple sclerosis, it was, poor woman. Oh, don’t get me wrong, he didn’t feel that he’d been robbed. Gledwyn wasn’t like that. Sometimes he was just a little sad when he spoke about it. That’s all. What he could do here was so...restricted, really.’ There was a sudden, oblique sharpness in her voice. ‘But make no mistake, he martyred himself to his wife.’ And abruptly she sounded ridiculously mature and bitter.

  ‘Shall we make some coffee?’ she asked.

  She took me into her little office, which I’d been waiting to see. The ancient Royal rested on an old kneehole desk, and she had a plain, upright chair. There was a wooden filing cabinet and a small table on which she had her gas ring. ‘I get water from the lab,’ she said, and, noticing my attention to the cabinet, ‘His life’s work is in there. Years of research.’

  She adopted a fond possessiveness when speaking about the research. It had been hers, really, in her mind. Gledwyn Griffiths had done it, but she’d supervised, encouraged, probably bullied. It belonged to her.

  While she was getting the kettle filled, I peeped out of her tiny window, and one mystery was solved. The rhododendrons that flanked the drive continued along past the lab building, but were set back a matter of eight feet. Here, tucked away, she had parked the Fiesta. There was a pathetic independence in the gesture, distancing herself from the house. This was her province, hers and Gledwyn’s. She’d really have preferred it to be isolated on a mountain top.

  When she returned with a full kettle, I said: ‘I can see how you came to meet Neville. Did he visit his uncle often?’

  ‘He was the only one Gledwyn could depend on.’ She nodded. That set Neville high in her estimation. It was strange how she fluctuated between youth and age, perhaps not so strange when you considered the years of association with her older employer.

  ‘After Paul left,’ she said, her voice disturbed by possessive anger, ‘Paul, that’s his son...after the final row, and Paul gone, and Angela taking off like she did...you’d have expected something better, wouldn’t you, the way he doted on her! But no, along came that Rollason — have you ever met him? A bit smarmy, I thought, the way he got round Gledwyn. Along he came, and nothing else existed anymore for Angela. It hurt him, you know. I had to work with him, and I felt it. Suddenly he was an old, old man.’ She seemed to flop loosely as she said it, following him into old age. She was wearing what I’d thought to be a smart outfit — certainly not what she’d have worn for working there — but for a moment it fell about her raggedly, and all her joints were stiff, her posture undisciplined.

  ‘But I take it he recovered?’ I suggested.

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Last night, you gave me the impression of a vigorous person whose behaviour upset you, not a broken old man.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, he was full of energy. I don’t understand what you’re saying.’

  I wanted to bring her more up-to-date. I wasn’t yet certain in my mind on the sequence: Carla’s death and Gledwyn’s death.

  ‘You told me that on the Saturday evening, late, Gledwyn returned here from visiting his son Paul.’

  ‘That’s quite correct.’

  ‘I don’t really know about this son, Paul. Visiting him where?’

  ‘Aberystwyth, of course.’

  I might have guessed. But I was now having to extract the information sentence by sentence.

  ‘Is he another researcher there, or a professor...’

  ‘I’m sure he’d like to be.’

  ‘He’s staying there, then?’

  ‘At some hotel or other. He’s recently come back from America. You’d think he’d have come here — but oh no. That fine Yankee wife of his, I suppose. Not good enough for her.’

  Now I had to restrain her. Once she got going...‘Paul Griffiths was staying at Aberystwyth with his American wife. Gledwyn went to visit, presumably because his son was reluctant to bring his wife here. And it was from this visit he returned in a terrible temper and threw his keys at the wall?’

  ‘Over there,’ she said, pointing. ‘They landed down beside the cabinet.’ Serious, nodding, marginally distressed at the memory.

  ‘But you said Neville had driven him there.’

  ‘Neville’s been so good to him. You wouldn’t believe...’

  ‘I gather that. This was in Neville’s new Metro, the one I drove last night?’

  ‘Oh no. It was in the Escort.’

  We’d have been sixty or more miles from Aberystwyth. ‘I thought this Escort was an old wreck.’

&nb
sp; ‘Oh it was. It was Neville’s in the first place, and Gledwyn wanted a car he could experiment with. The Escort suited, and Neville was looking round for another car. So Gledwyn bought the Escort from him. Or rather, he helped him buy the Metro.’

  ‘All right. But...this Saturday...Gledwyn had come back, and you were waiting for him. In here?’

  ‘Yes. Waiting here in my office. He’d re-written this speech...oh, a dozen times. I had it ready, but there was always the chance it’d be changed again. So I waited.’

  ‘And still it didn’t satisfy him?’

  ‘He hardly glanced at it.’

  ‘Just threw his keys at the wall, and tore his speech to pieces?’

  ‘He was so upset! What they must have said to him…’

  ‘Then, I suppose, he marched back into the house. And where was Neville, while this was going on?’

  ‘Picked up his Metro and gone home, I suppose.’

  ‘He didn’t come in and have a word with you?’

  ‘He wouldn’t know I was here. It was late.’

  ‘Late, yes. And you — waiting here for Gledwyn and knowing that your friend Carla was driving over to your place on a visit — all the same you sat right down and typed it out again?’

  ‘He’d need it the next day. He was going to Blackpool, to his Convention. I was driving him.’

  ‘In your Fiesta?’

  She was becoming a little impatient. ‘Yes.’

  ‘So eventually you took the re-typed speech in to him...’

  ‘He came in here. He was flustered. He apologised.’

  ‘It took you...how long to do it again?’

  ‘A good hour.’

  ‘He timed it right, then, appearing just before you could take it across to the house.’

  She frowned, shaking her head. I was being abrupt with her, trying to shake her simplistic faith in him. ‘How can you know that?’

  ‘You’d be anxious to get away, knowing Carla would be waiting.’ But Carla wouldn’t have been waiting; most likely, at that time, she’d have been dead. It did not occur to Lynne.