by John Creasey
‘Listen, darling,’ Joan said, and a note of desperation sharpened her voice. ‘Supposing we don’t talk about what might have been, but just face up to the situation. Are you expecting the police to - to charge you soon?’
‘They might.’
‘Isn’t there any way you can start paying back and . . .’ She broke off, released his hands, and went back to the pouffe. When she sat down, he saw how bright her eyes were and realised that she too had been very close to tears; and for the fast time, he understood the great strength in her. ‘There must be some way that we can persuade Haileybury and the police that it wasn’t fraud. You haven’t admitted anything, have you?’
‘No, of course not. But . . .’
‘Couldn’t Jimmy have made a genuine mistake?’
‘I wish we could pretend that was a way out, but it isn’t. He faked surveyor’s reports. He stated that he had checked the reports in person, and that the vein of ore showed a one in ten iron content.’
‘Who has those reports now?’
‘The police.’
‘Oh,’ said Joan, as if that made her realise how desperate the situation was. But she didn’t look away, and after a while she went on stubbornly: ‘You’ve got to try, Charles, somehow. I think it’s a mistake for Jimmy to run away and hide. If the police realise that he’s hiding from them, they’ll only make it worse for you. Surely the house, my furs, the jewels, everything we have is worth more than ten thousand pounds.’
‘To buy, they’re worth twenty. To sell it’s a different matter.’
‘Darling, I think we’ll have to sleep on it, but I believe that we should bring Jimmy back, tell the police that it was a genuine mistake, and promise that the firm will pay back every penny,’ Joan declared. ‘After all, the important thing is to pay the money back and make sure that no one loses.’ When he didn’t reply, she went on flatly: I can’t believe that the police or anyone else would want to be vindictive. Why should they? If we sell everything, and offer that as part repayment - if we make an official statement that our surveys were based on erroneous reports and that all the money will be repaid within a certain period . . .’
‘Joan, even if the authorities could let us get away with it, we haven’t got the money. Don’t you understand that? I’ve spent every penny. The firm was in debt, I was in debt - why I couldn’t raise a thousand pounds except on your things. Listen, Joan. This is my fault, and I’ve asked for it. There’s no reason why you should have to lose everything. You’ve had the furs and the jewels for years, and’
‘Don’t be silly,’ Joan said, impatiently. I couldn’t go around in mink and diamonds if you were in prison - I would have to sell most of them to live, anyhow, I can’t imagine any job I could do that would earn much money. We’ve got to value everything we possess, to find ways and means of borrowing or raising the money, so that the people who bought the shares can sell them back to us at par. One obvious possibility is Uncle Reggie, he might have a few thousand to spare, and if he has he’ll lend it to us.’ There was a brighter light in her eyes. ‘Then there’s Maude. She and Arthur are stinking rich, there are no two ways about it. Can we tell them? Can we say that you were misled by the reports, and that your whole reputation is at stake? I know it would mean that we’d be in debt for life to them, but they’ve so much money that it wouldn’t really matter. I think I can help to handle Maude.’
She broke off.
Ericson’s eyes were shimmering with tears.
She got up and went to him, sat on the arm of his chair and slid her arm round his shoulders.
‘Don’t let it get you down, darling.’
‘Get me down,’ exclaimed Ericson in a choky voice.
In Islington, about the same time, a husband and wife were sitting together, in the small front room of their small front flat in a narrow street. There were two bedrooms, this room, the kitchen and scullery; they shared a landing bathroom with a neighbour. Here the wallpaper was of a garish red and yellow, a zig-zag pattern which their elder daughter - who had married and gone to live in Australia - had liked. On the table in the middle of the room was a green chenille tablecloth, and on this a tray with a milk drink, and some tea and milk. In the corner was a twelve-inch television set, silent and blank. The two shabby but comfortable arm-chairs were facing each other across the fireplace, with its bright green tiles and its black hearth. The only light came from a hanging lamp with a tasselled shade. Behind the chairs was the kitchen door, beyond the kitchen their dead child’s bedroom. Thanks to the kindliness of neighbours and the wisdom of the authorities, the child’s body had quickly been taken away from the flat.
The woman, Doris Manson, was sitting in one chair. Her husband, Mortimer, was sitting on the arm, a work-calloused hand resting on his wife’s shoulders, broad fingers looking stubby, nails broken and split. They were a middle-aged couple; Ivy had been a late child and their great joy.
‘Doris, it’s no use just sitting there, you’ve got to come to bed,’ urged Manson. ‘I know how terrible you feel, honestly I do, but it’s no use sitting there. It won’t - it won’t bring her back, Doris. Don’t you understand that? Try to, dear, try to, please.’
The bereaved mother did not speak or move.
‘Doris, you’ve got to come to bed! I’ll bring you some more to drink, and you must have two of those tablets the doctor left. They will help you to sleep.’
The mother did not speak or move.
‘Doris!’ The man’s voice broke, and his arm tightened on her shoulders. ‘Don’t you think it’s bad enough for me already?’ Tears began to flood into his eyes. ‘She was the apple of my eye, you know she was. I had wonderful hopes for our Ivy, she was such a lovely girl, there wasn’t a lovelier girl living. I can’t believe that she’s gone for ever, any more than you can. Every time I come into a room I think I hear her voice, I think I see her smiling at me, but - but we’ve got to face it, Doris!’ He shook his wife almost wildly. ‘Don’t you understand, we’ve got to pull ourselves together, it’s no use giving way.’
He could not go on, and he could not shake her any more; and she neither moved nor spoke.
After a while, he got up, pressed his hand tightly against his forehead, and went into the kitchen. The door leading to the little bedroom beyond was closed and locked, as the police had left it, but it seemed to open, and his beloved child seemed to appear in the doorway, wearing a dressing-gown high at the neck, her silky yellow hair beautifully brushed, her blue eyes so bright and her lips so sweet and pink.
‘Oh, God, I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it!’ he cried.
After a few minutes, he went back. His wife was sitting in exactly the same position, staring straight in front of her. Her face was drawn and her eyes were narrowed, her hands were folded in her lap. The awful thing was that she looked like Ivy.
He was startled by a tap at the front door, and after a moment, went and opened it. It was an elderly woman, the neighbour across the landing.
‘Hallo, Mr. Manson,’ she said, quietly. ‘I thought I saw a light under the door, and I couldn’t rest until I’d made sure you’re all right. How is Mrs. Manson?’
‘She - she - she just won’t say a word. She’s been like it for hours, ever since they took my darling away.’ Manson’s voice was almost at breaking point.
‘Let me see if I can do anything with her,’ offered the neighbour. ‘And why don’t you go across and lie down for an hour on our sofa, Mr. Manson? Bert’s expecting you, I told him I thought I could guess how things were. I might be able to help your wife, and it certainly won’t do any good if you knock yourself up.’
Her husband appeared in the other doorway. Manson went across, slowly, gratefully, fearfully.
Some distance from north Islington and farther from Esher, the widow of Police Constable Jarvis lay alone in the large double bed, not really finding it strange to be alone, because Tom had been on night duty so often. In a peculiar way she had to remind herself that this was different, th
at the night would never come when he would lie beside her again, snoring with familiar faintness much of the time. There would be no more moments when he would become the lover she had known in the early days of their marriage, and even before it. He had always seemed so quiet, pipe and slippers, television and dog, garden and the occasional pint of beer; sometimes weeks would go by when it was almost possible to forget that she had a husband, only just a snoring sleeping partner; and then for a few almost abandoned days, usually after he had come off a spell of night duty, there would be nothing she could do with him. That was why she had taken such definite precautions; if he had had his reckless way, they would have had a dozen children, not three.
She heard a sound in a bedroom across the hall, and turned her head towards the door which she had left ajar in case any of the children woke. She had not yet told them the truth, only that their father had been badly injured, and was in hospital. Now, her heart began to thump with the anticipated dread of the inevitable moment when they would have to know all the truth.
A door creaked.
‘Hester! Is that you?’ She stretched out a firm arm, and put on the beside lamp, which dimmed the pale light coming from the street lamp at the window. This was a small, two storied house, built between the wars in a pleasant little suburb; Eltham.
There were footsteps, the door opened, and Hester the eldest child stood framed in it. She was a big girl for ten years old, and already beginning to mature physically. She wore pyjamas of faded pink stockinette, a little too tight for her, with a T-shirt neck. Her hair was drawn straight back from her forehead, which helped to give her an older look. Her brown eyes, always large and very like her father’s, seemed huge and luminous.
The clock downstairs struck twelve.
‘Can’t you get to sleep?’ asked Mrs. Jarvis, and hitched herself up in bed. ‘Come in with me for a few minutes, pet, you’ll soon drop off.’
The girl came eagerly, scrambling on to the bed, but the moment she was lying down and looking at her mother, she was more subdued.
‘Worried about Daddy?’ asked Mrs. Jarvis, and somehow managed to keep her voice calm.
‘Yes, I am,’ Hester answered. ‘Mummy . . .’ She broke off, but did not look away, although there was something in her manner which told Mrs. Jarvis that she really had some trouble on her mind.
‘Yes, pet?’
‘You - you know I went to the corner shop to get some extra tea and sugar.’
‘Of course I do.’
‘Mummy,’ said Hester, in a very small voice, ‘as I went in the shop they stopped talking, all of a sudden. Mrs. Wagner was there, and Auntie Flo. But they hadn’t seen me at first, and I heard them say that Daddy was dead.’ There was another long, tense pause, before she went on: ‘Is he?’
Mrs. Jarvis tried not to close her eyes, tried not to show any signs of breaking down. In the moment which elapsed between question and answer, she wondered how this disaster would affect Hester, the one child who worried her. The others, aged seven and four, would not suffer so much, but Hester - it had always been difficult to understand the child, who showed no preference between her mother and father, but was always a little remote, a little too self-sufficient.
‘I’m afraid it is true, darling,’ Mrs. Jarvis managed to say steadily.
Hester’s brown eyes seemed to grow enormous.
‘I knew it,’ she said, softly. ‘I had a feeling that he was, it was the way you looked when you told us about the accident. I knew it must be serious, or Aunt Mabel wouldn’t have come to look after us while you were at the hospital, and when you came home and said you weren’t going to the hospital any more today, I thought: That means Daddy is dead. Why didn’t you tell me right away?’
Her mother said: ‘It is a terribly hard thing to believe even for me, darling, and I wanted - I wanted to feel strong enough to talk to you about it.’
‘I see,’ said Hester, and after another long pause, she went on: ‘You and Daddy don’t believe in life after death, do you?’
That almost made the mother break down, but she managed to answer:
‘It isn’t that we don’t believe, it’s rather that we’re not convinced. We keep an open mind on it.’
‘Well, Daddy knows now,’ said Hester, thoughtfully. ‘Would you mind telling me one more thing?’
‘If I can, I will.’
‘Did he suffer much?’
‘For a few minutes I’m afraid he did,’ answered Mrs. Jarvis and she would never know how she kept herself from bursting into tears. Her nerves were almost beyond screaming point. ‘But there was a doctor on the scene very quickly, and modern drugs are wonderful pain-killers. It didn’t last long.’
‘And was he a hero?’
‘Yes, he was a very brave man, Hester.’
‘I always thought he was,’ declared Hester. She blinked, and her eyes misted over as if the stimulant of question and answer were beginning to lose their effect. She lay still for several minutes, breathing evenly, and her mother was glad to lie on her back, eyes closed, burning tears forcing their way through. Then sleepily, Hester asked: ‘Mummy, you know that there’s to be the special school outing next Friday.’
‘Yes, pet.’
‘Will this make any difference? Can I still go?’
Oh, God.
‘Of course you can still go.’
‘Thank you,’ said Hester; and ten minutes later she was fast asleep, so soundly that she did not hear her mother’s convulsive sobbing. She would never know that she had broken her mother’s tension, either, and that out of the paroxysm there was born some ease of mind.
Hester woke again a little after seven o’clock in the morning. Neil, her four-year-old brother, was running about his bedroom. Hester pushed back the bedclothes and was at the door when her mother woke.
‘I’ll see to him,’ she promised.
Mrs. Jarvis sat up slowly, looked at herself in the mirror, saw the dried traces of tears on her cheeks, remembered that last question from Hester, the one which revealed how little the child had yet been seared by the tragedy.
Then she heard Neil giggling.
‘The best thing to do is get them off to school,’ Mrs. Jarvis said aloud, and got out of bed. Behave as if everything was normal. ‘Hester!’ she called. ‘When you’ve washed, start washing Neil, will you?’
‘All right, Mum,’ Hester called back.
Pamela Harrison lay wide awake in her lonely bed at Brighton. Tony hadn’t come home, and she doubted whether he would, tonight. He would tell her some plausible story tomorrow, and she would have to pretend to believe it.
In Chloe’s bed, lying drowsily, Harrison was going over possible methods of murdering his wife without being caught. One way kept recurring; she could commit suicide because the children had left home, because he was away so often. Suicide was the answer, but - how?
7 VISITS FROM GIDEON
Gideon woke early that morning, possibly because the ringing of the fire alarm had been in his mind most of the night; twice he had lain awake for several minutes, listening to Kate’s even breathing, but each time he had dropped off quickly. Rain was scudding against the window, and now and again a gust of wind shook a loose window on the landing. Must put that right, Gideon thought. Never seem to get a minute, these days. It was a little after seven. He got up, slid his arms into a dressing-gown, and five minutes later went to examine the landing window. None of the children was up. Their six were down to four, now, with Tom long since married and Prudence married to her Peter towards the end of last year. There were no signs that Priscilla, now nearly twenty-one, was thinking of settling down, but Matthew, the second oldest boy, would be going to Cambridge in a few weeks. He had worked himself to his limit to win a scholarship. Penelope at sixteen was still devoted to her piano, and had some promise, and young Malcolm, at thirteen, was no problem at all.
The window, of the sashcord type, rattled noisily when Gideon pushed it; a sliver of wood was needed on the sides to stop
that; that meant having the window out, and might mean a sashcord renewal. ‘I’ll do that on Saturday somehow,’ he said. ‘Must remember to get some thin slats.’ He went downstairs to the kitchen, and was surprised to find Matthew, tousle-haired but with his face freshly scrubbed, making the morning tea.
‘Hallo, Dad.’
‘My, my,’ said Gideon. ‘It’s not often you get up in the middle of the night. What’s on your conscience?’
‘Nothing, really,’ said Matthew. He was a smaller edition of Gideon in features, but would never have his father’s breadth of shoulder or thickness of chest. He was broadening out, though, and nearly as much man as boy; as a child, he had been the family ugly duckling. ‘I haven’t been sleeping too well, lately, that’s all,’ he added.
Gideon looked at him thoughtfully, and saw him glance out of the kitchen window, into the small back garden with its postage-stamp lawn, the neat flower beds all round it, one a herbaceous border, another filled with wallflowers, tulips and forget-me-nots, with only the little blue flower out.
‘You want to slacken off a bit,’ Gideon advised. ‘I’ll take the tea up, old chap. Thanks.’ He took the tray, and then glanced round. ‘Get me about ten feet of deal slats today, will you - ask the shop to plane them down to an eighth of an inch.’
‘Yes, Dad,’ Matthew said, still subdued. He had probably been working too hard, Gideon decided, but there might be something else. Kate would know.
Gideon took the tea upstairs, and saw Priscilla disappearing into the bathroom, fair hair still in a net. When he went into his bedroom, Kate was beginning to sit up, and pushing her hair with her right hand; her hair net was on the bedside table. Kate first thing in the morning was something to see; she always looked as if sleep had not only thoroughly refreshed her, but had taken years off her age. Yet her hair was much greyer than he had noticed before, you couldn’t fight your years. She was forty-nine, he was fifty-three. He put the tray on the foot of the bed, went across and closed the door, and then poured out.
