The Mask of Memory

by Victor Canning

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered

  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

  At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.

  We publish in ebook and Print on Demand formats to bring these wonderful books to new audiences.

  www.bellobooks.co.uk

  Contents

  Victor Canning

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Victor Canning

  The Mask of Memory

  Victor Canning was primarily a writer of thrillers, and wrote his many books under the pseudonyms Julian Forest and Alan Gould. Among his immediate contemporaries were Eric Ambler, Alistair Maclean and Hammond Innes.

  Canning was a prolific writer throughout his career, which began young: he had sold several short stories by the age of nineteen and his first novel, Mr Finchley Discovers His England (1934) was published when he was twenty-three. Canning also wrote for children: his The Runaways trilogy was adapted for US children’s television.

  Canning’s later thrillers were darker and more complex than his earlier work and received great critical acclaim. The Rainbird Pattern was awarded the CWA Silver Dagger in 1973 and nominated for an Edgar award in 1974.

  In 1976 The Rainbird Pattern was transformed by Alfred Hitchcock into the comic film Family Plot, which was to be Hitchcock’s last film. Several of Canning’s other novels including The Golden Salamander (1949) were also made into films during Canning’s lifetime.

  Chapter One

  Without any awareness of what she was doing Margaret Tucker picked up a packet of brightly coloured, cellophane-wrapped boiled sweets and dropped them into the pocket of her light overcoat. Against her forehead was a warm pressure as though a large, familiar hand had been placed there, a hand she welcomed for the slow spasm of comfort it gave her. The store was a long, brilliantly lit cave of delights, the people moving about it suddenly silent, remote figures in an innocent dream. Nowhere was there any threat, any ache, any loneliness.

  She added a slab of chocolate to the sweets in her pocket. On the wrapper a brown and white cow stood in deep meadow grass. She moved slowly down the filled racks and took three more packets of sweets, waiting once patiently for another buyer to move on so that she could take a particular brand which had caught her eye. Armoured against thought and reality by the soothing, obliterating hand on her forehead, she drifted between the stalls, stopping once to finger the material of a blouse hanging from a floor stand. Then, unhurried, untouched by guilt or shame, she went out of the place without paying.

  She walked down the main street, turned off through the walk that cut through the yard of St Peter’s Church and so to the car park. She unlocked the door of her small car. With a little awkwardness, for she was a tall woman, she slid into the driving seat and fidgeted for a second or two, disposing her loose coat comfortably around her. As she did so her right hand palmed the bulk of her pocket and she heard the sharp protest of cellophane.

  In that moment the comforting pressure against her forehead was withdrawn, awareness returned and with it the birth of a swift, familiar agony. She sat in the driving seat, staring straight ahead of her as the rare but recognizable panic symptoms hit her. Her body trembled with a sudden violence. She shut her eyes against it and felt the warmth of tears escape and touch the length of her cheeks as she said to herself, ‘Oh, dear God … dear God.’

  A man walked across the front of the car and glanced her way. She quickly dropped her head to hide her tears, pretending to be occupied with fitting the car key into the ignition lock. Her hand shook, trembling with a violent life of its own.

  The man passed on, moving up the row of parked cars towards his own. He sucked at a short pipe, the stem of which had been cracked and mended with a twist of black insulating tape. He had seen Mrs Bernard Tucker in the store and had followed her, without haste or fear of losing her, to the car park. It was not the first time he had witnessed one of her occasional shoplifting activities. He knew, too, that she had no financial need to steal. So far some benign guardian angel had protected her from discovery. As he was cynical about guardian angels he knew that some time or other hers would let her down. He got into his own car and pulled a notebook from the dash pocket. He flipped it open to a section which was headed in capitals, MARGARET TUCKER, turned over two or three pages filled with notes and then began to add more notes. As he wrote he saw Margaret Tucker’s car drive out of the park. For a few moments he wondered if he would follow her. He decided against it. He knew exactly where she was going. Her routine on the afternoons of Monday, Wednesday and Friday was always the same. Billy Ankers did not believe in wasting time confirming regular routines. In his opinion Mr Bernard Tucker was wasting his money.

  By the time she was through the town and out on the estuary road Margaret Tucker had recovered. Brief though her shame was on these occasions when she became aware of what she had done, aware that for a few minutes she had acted, without realizing it, like a common thief, the swift passage to composure left her drained and lazily exhausted in mind and body. There was something almost drowsily voluptuous in the aftermath … as if, though she always tried to push the comparison from her mind, she had just been loved, deeply and physically and satisfyingly by a man. She pushed the thought from her now, a puritan spurt of self-censure shivering through her body.

  She drove the six miles of road along the estuary through an urban sprawl of housing estates, motels and caravan parks. The October sun burned high in a clear sky and two jet fighters from the RAF station drew wind-shredded trails across it in fast fraying ribbons. The tide was half in, sweeping rapidly over the last sandbanks in mid-stream. Where the two rivers met and the tide fronted their outflowing waters a cloud of gulls wheeled noisily in the air. Beyond the golf course which occupied the first footings of the long westward stretch of dunes and marshes, she turned down to the beach and left her car in the park. The holiday season was over now and there was only a handful of vehicles in the place.

  She climbed the dune, above the beach and dropped down to the summer-filthy stretch of sand that awaited the winter gales to cleanse it. The beach stretched westwards three miles to the estuary mouth, the far waters lost in a low, russet haze. A few people, some with dogs, studded the wet, hard sand at the tide’s edge in pygmy perspective. They would mostly be residents like herself, glad to have the long vistas and lonely sweeps of dune, marsh and burrows restored to them. She pulled off her woollen tam-o’-shanter and stuffed it into her pocket, the left one, still well aware of the sweets in the right-hand one.

  The steady on-shore wind lifted her fair hair and blew loose sand into the corners of her pale blue eyes and made them water. She walked with long, easy strides over the hard fringe of sand. A straggling crocodile of a dozen small children came down the sands towards her. A nun in a billowing black habit headed them and another brought up the rear.

  Margaret Tucker altered her course and moved up the sands to meet the leading nun. She stopped in front of her. The crocodile came to a halt. The children, wrapped up in an assortment of short coats, large-eyed, faces bright and wind-polished, fanned out raggedly between the two nuns.<
br />
  Margaret Tucker took the sweet packets from her pocket. The nun watched her. This was not the first time it had happened. She blinked her eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses. A small boy who was now sitting down and beginning to dig in the sand with his bare hands looked up at Margaret and grinned cheekily, wrinkling his nose at her.

  Margaret Tucker said, ‘ For the children, Sister.’ She handed over the sweets. The nun took them and they disappeared swiftly somewhere within the voluminous folds of her robe.

  ‘Thank you, madam.’

  Margaret Tucker moved on. The nuns called to the children, the crocodile came to untidy formation and straggled on. Margaret Tucker held a picture in her mind of the children. Over a dozen of them. All orphans. She could afford easily to adopt one … Even Bernard wouldn’t object … But that was not what she wanted. Suddenly, and it was the first time the thought had ever come to her, she said, ‘Maybe I steal for the child I want.’

  The moment of self-pity faded, leaving her amused at her own mawkishness. She walked on with the wind pulsing at her side, sweeping her light coat-skirts clear of her legs, like untidy, powerless wings.

  A mile up the beach she turned away from the shore. She followed a familiar path through the dunes, twisting and turning between patches of yellow-berried buckthorn, dwarf bramble and thorn, growths. After a while she came to a shallow hollow, backed by two high dunes whose sides had been worked into sandy, dropping-marked moraines by rabbits. She took off her coat, spread it on the short turf and lay back on it, looking up into the pale blue sky.

  From a quarter of a mile away, where he lay on the fringe of the dunes above the beach, Maxie Dougall saw Margaret Tucker as she stopped briefly to talk to the nun. He sharpened the focus of her image in his field-glasses, saw the coloured flash of the sweet packets as she handed them over, the pale hand movements of a small girl who stood behind the leading nun, scratching at her ribs through her overcoat, and the bright movement of Margaret’s fair hair, caught by the wind, sharp and golden against the slate-grey sweep of wet sands. He swung the glasses from the group and picked up the tide-fringed strip of sand a hundred yards away.

  A flock of sanderlings, little white-and-grey ghosts of birds, worked the water’s edge, running and feeding ceaselessly as the returning sea brought life to the beach fringe, stirring shrimp and sandhoppers to activity. Now and again the birds took to the air, wheeling and curving low over the water in a remarkable precision of black and white-barred wing beats. They were here for the winter now, to join the moorland curlews and the oyster catchers working the tide flows. Other migrants were beginning to pass through. There had been dozens of golden plover on the marsh pasture this morning with the lapwings and he had seen knots, dunlin and whimbrels each day for two weeks.

  He pushed the glasses into the pocket of his worn pilot jacket and turned to watch Margaret Tucker. He liked the way she walked, a firm, easy stride as though she knew exactly where she was going. He had watched her now for over two years, noting her at first with less interest than he gave to the birds and animals of the dunes and beach, with less interest than he had for a lot of people who came into his view. It was only when the summer crowds went that she fell into her weekly routine. In the summer she might appear at any time. But as the sands and the dunes lost their visitors she came back to a familiar routine. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Only the worst weather broke that ritual. He knew who she was, and where she lived, he knew her car and its number. To know such things was second nature. He had lived in these parts far longer than she had done.

  As she swung to her left from the beach and entered the dunes he knew what her movements would be, just as he knew that when the tide was almost full the sanderlings would rise and stream in a thin, precise echelon across the water to roost on the rocks at the cliff foot on the eastern arm of the bay, and that at midnight a fox vixen would lope a mile across the marshes to work the litter bins in the beach car park, her pickings thinning as the holiday season wore away. Knowing was a passion with him.

  He turned over on his back and narrowed his eyes against the sun. He began to think of the three holiday girls he had made love to on these dunes during the summer. He remembered their names, their faces and their bodies, and he knew they were trash and there was no warmth in his memory of them. Suddenly there was a picture in his mind of a recent morning when, lit by the rising of a red sun, he had seen a salmon jump as it came from the sea, running the estuary, hitting the first of the brown-tinged spate water of the East River, and leaping high; a silver mark suspended against the morning like an exclamation from God. No woman could shock and stir his senses with the same bowel-slashing pulse of delight.

  After a while he rolled over and got to his feet. He walked the length of the beach to the car park. In passing Margaret’s small car he paused for a moment or two and looked inside. It was neat and clean, no signs of the family rubbish and disorder that marked so many of the cars. There was a paperback on the dashboard shelf. It was a historical romance. The cover showed a Highland clansman standing on a windswept rock, the wind tearing at his kilt and mantle, in his right hand a sword raised in defiance to a blue and grey bruised sky, his left arm holding to him a slim girl, fair-haired, bare-footed, and wearing a ragged shift that revealed most of her breasts. Blazing across the cover ran the title – BOLD BE MY LOVE.

  Smiling to himself he turned away, back along his path. He wondered if that was how Margaret Tucker saw herself? A fair-haired waif from the glens, royal blood unacknowledged in her veins … a mess of soothing fantasies, an escape from a too familiar, unexciting morning, noon and night? Probably. He didn’t know anyone who wasn’t looking for an escape from something, living on the hope or the dream of a richer tomorrow. He did it himself, but it never troubled his sleep. In his dreams he travelled no wild glens in search of plunder, a lost heritage and a bedding with the dispossessed daughter of a chieftain in whose veins ran the blood of kings. He had come from a well organized limbo. Dumped in an orphanage at the age of two, unnamed, unmarked, charity his nurse, but when he had reached the age of twenty-one, the possessor of a monthly remittance whose source was a London solicitor tied to professional secrecy. From pride and contempt – although he accepted the money which lifted him just out of reach of poverty and far from easy comfort – he never once tried to trace the donor. An Irish nun, long dead, who had led him in crocodile line up and down this beach, had named him Maximilian Dougall. Maybe she had felt that the grandness of his name would offset the pettiness of his birth. She was a little mad anyway in her own affectionate fashion, and he had given her all his childish love.

  Walking back up the beach, the whistle of sandpipers on the tide edge to his left, he decided – knowing that the decision must have been coiling and uncoiling in his mind for a long time – that he had waited long enough for opportunity to rattle the door-latch for entry. He had to make his own opportunity. From all he knew, Margaret Tucker was as good a person to fit his future as any others he had considered. Yet he knew, too, that if he hadn’t seen her today he could as easily have picked someone else, some other woman who walked this beach, the dunes, the cliff paths, the moor slopes to the east. Any woman with a reasonably acceptable body and the right background would have suited him.

  He turned off the beach and into the dunes where three or four hundred yards away he knew that Margaret Tucker would be sitting or sleeping in her sun-filled, windless hollow.

  Billy Ankers had an office over a baker’s shop in Allpart Street. The entrance was through a narrow door at the side of the shop. At the back of the office was a long, narrow bedroom with a small kitchen recess which held a gas stove and a yellowstone sink which served him for all his cooking and washing purposes. At the bottom of the stairs leading up to the office was a small toilet belonging to the bakery, the use of which was granted to Billy in his rent agreement.

  Billy was a clean, scrupulously neat and tidy man. In his rooms everything had its place and was kept clea
n and polished. Billy loved all the things he possessed. When they were broken or damaged he repaired them and went on using them – he did this less from economy, though he was always tight for money, than from an almost physical ache he experienced when something old and well-tried finally outlived its function and he had to throw it away. A smashed cup dropped into the dustbin was some small part of his life gone for ever and he knew it would take him weeks to break in a new one and come to love it. Love for his meagre possessions was a gentle passion with Billy. He was a pleasant man, affable, companionable and quite unscrupulous where money was concerned. Apart from his one-man enquiry agency which was unmarked by any name-plate on his entry door, though advertised in the local and county papers as ‘William Ankers. Confidential Enquiries. Tel: 083-65397’ he did an intermittent business as a middle dealer, no questions asked on either side. Watches, radio sets, poached salmon and venison, silk underclothes, motor parts and tyres – Billy could find a discreet market for them and his commission was reasonable.

  He tapped away at an old Royal portable typewriter, composing his monthly report to Mr Bernard Tucker, a man whom he had met only once in his life. He typed meticulously but with no great speed. He did not over-concern himself with the effort of correct spelling because on the whole he was unaware of his mistakes. A little fleur-de-lys of wrinkled concentration marked his brow, a brow that ran sharply back to thinning, sandy-coloured hair laid close to his head without parting. His face was thin, wedge-shaped, the skin a pale olive colour and, for all his thirty-five years, smooth and unmarked as though it were fashioned from polished plastic. His eyes under the faintest smear of sandy brows were large, dark, and bright like sloes which had lost their bloom-haze. His long legs thrust under the table were almost touching a small electric fire on the far side of the table. He loved to keep his feet warm no matter what the season. The feeling now of the fire’s heat beating against the leather of his shoe’s soles gave him a mild, sensuous pleasure.