Lonelyheart 4122 f-3

by Colin Watson

  “I have given some further thought, Mr Purbright, to the matter we discussed the other morning, and I have decided that I might have been just the tiniest bit over confident in one respect. That is why I telephoned and asked to see you again.”

  “I’m very glad you did, Miss Teatime. What has been worrying you?”

  “Oh, not worrying, exactly, inspector. I am quite sure in my own mind that what I said then was true. But I cannot help feeling that the assurance I gave you about that handwriting was accepted by you more out of politeness than conviction.”

  “I took your word for it, naturally.”

  “Ah, yes; but I know that my word is not really evidence.”

  “Not scientific evidence, perhaps.”

  “No. And so for the sake of everyone concerned—my friend by no means least—I intended to try and give you an actual example of his writing.”

  “I see.”

  “It will be best, do you not think so?”

  “I’m sure it will.”

  Miss Teatime nodded and picked up her handbag and gloves. She regarded the inspector for a moment in silence, then smiled.

  “Do you know, I really think you are anxious about me, Mr Purbright.”

  “I am,” he said simply.

  “There is no need to be.”

  Purbright leaned forward. “Look, won’t you tell me now the name of this man?” His face was serious.

  She appeared to consider. Then she said: “I am sorry, but I must ask you to wait a little longer. Where can I reach you at eight o’clock this evening?”

  He looked surprised. “At home, I hope. Why?”

  “What is the address?”

  “Fifteen Tetford Drive.”

  Screwing up her eyes, she wrote it in her little notebook.

  “And now may I have that photograph? The handwriting, you know.”

  He took it from the folder at his elbow and handed it across the desk. She put it into her bag.

  Purbright watched her get up and wait for him to see her to the door. Then he, too, rose.

  “I hope you know what you are doing,” he said quietly.

  She gave him a bright smile of farewell.

  “Oh, yes. I know,” she said.

  Back in her room at the Roebuck, Miss Teatime lit a cheroot and took her first whisky sip of the day. As she stared thoughtfully at the gulls swooping down past the blind eyes of the old warehouse, her fingers tapped the sheet of writing paper spread ready on the table before her. She was devising a simple insurance policy.

  She picked up her pen.

  My dear Inspector Purbright: The enclosed letters unexpectedly came to hand today. They were written by my friend, who calls himself Commander John Trelawney. You will see that I was mistaken about the handwriting. I can plead only that loyalty clouded my judgment. His address is not known to me at the moment, but I have no doubt that Mrs Staunch will be able to give you the information you need. As you will notice, the reference number is 4122.

  Yours sincerely,

  Lucilla Teatime.

  She folded the note, pinned it to the three sheets of the commander’s correspondence and put them all into an envelope. This she sealed and addressed.

  Downstairs, she found the manager supervising the changing of flowers in the residents’ lounge. He bustled up to her in immediate response to a smile of inquiry.

  “I wish you to undertake a delicate but important commission, Mr Maddox.”

  At once he was fussily intrigued.

  She handed him the envelope.

  “I am going out today and probably shall not be in for lunch,” she explained softly. “I may even be away until early evening. If, however, I have not returned by eight o’clock, I want you to have this letter delivered straight away by hand.”

  Maddox looked at the address and nodded earnestly. “Eight o’clock,” he repeated.

  “I am sure I can rely upon you, Mr Maddox.”

  “You most certainly can.” He peered at her, suddenly anxious. “I hope there’s nothing, ah...”

  “Purely precautionary,” said Miss Teatime. “As I believe you know, I am being well looked after.”

  At the door she gave him a reassuring wave. Mr Maddox stared after her, his hand feeling for the edge of the envelope in his pocket.

  The journey to Benstone, this time without incidental vigils at railway stations, was much more quickly accomplished than she had expected. It was not yet twelve when she halted the Renault just short of the series of lane turnings where she had lost Trelawney’s car two nights before.

  She took out the map. Three buildings were marked at distances from the road that could reasonably be supposed to be within earshot. There was one along each lane.

  She started off again and took the left turn. About fifty yards from the road, a big, sombre farmhouse loomed behind an overgrown hedge. Miss Teatime did not need to get out of the car to see that no one had occupied it for many years. Through one of the glassless windows she caught a brief glimpse of sky as she drove by; part of the roof at the back had collapsed.

  After returning to the main road, she made her way up the second lane—that on the right. She saw first a chimney stack and then thatch appear in a cleft in the lane’s banking.

  Soon she drew level with a broad gateway. Beyond it was a gravelled enclosure in front of a long, low, white-walled cottage.

  A garage large enough for two cars had been built against the right hand gable and painted white. It was open and empty.

  Miss Teatime drove into the enclosure, made a half-circle turn, and got out of the car. She knocked on the front door of the cottage. After a minute, she knocked again, more insistently. There was no response. The door was locked.

  She explored, going from window to window.

  The interior had every sign of expensive conversion. There was central heating and a wealth of good, modern furniture. The kitchen was generously, almost lavishly, equipped.

  It was not until she looked into the glass-paned annexe at the back of the cottage, however, that she found a clue of the kind she was seeking.

  Thrown across a bench was the suede leather driving jacket with fur collar and curiously pink-tinged octagonal buttons that Trelawney had been wearing when he took her to the Riverside Rest.

  So far, so good.

  Sensibly interpreting the empty feeling induced by the sight of the jacket as an indication that she needed lunch, Miss Teatime got into the car once more and drove the rest of the way into Chalmsbury.

  She had a meal at an inn called—irresistibly, she thought—the Nelson and Emma, wandered for half an hour around the shops in St Luke’s Square, and sat long enough on a bench outside the General Post Office to savour fully the grotesquerie of the town’s war memorial opposite.

  Then she returned to Low Benstone.

  The cottage was still empty.

  She sat in the car and smoked a cheroot.

  A full hour went by.

  Miss Teatime jerked upright in her seat, realizing that she had been about to doze off. She started the engine. A drive around the byways would be as pleasant a means as any of killing time.

  But when she came back at nearly five o’clock, she saw that the big garage remained gaping, unoccupied.

  She sat watching a trio of blackbirds chasing one another in and out of the hedge bottom near the gateway. They were angry and coquettish in turns. Every now and then, one would hop away from the others, stick tail and chest up in the air and stare at her officiously. She thought of that policeman waiting at the back of the Roebuck Hotel. Then, possibly by some chain of subconscious association, of window cleaners going up and down ladders in threes. Her eyes closed and the blackbirds were white, dive-bombing a bucket of blood...They strolled towards her in naval uniform, saluting in the most supercilious manner imaginable...

  Miss Teatime fell more and more deeply asleep.

  Sergeant Love put down the phone and wearily struck out the last name left on his list of es
tate agents, valuers and auctioneers in Chalmsbury, Flaxborough and district. All he had gained from his labours was a sore throat and the suspicion that somewhere along the line he had made an unwise joke to a freemason friend of the chief constable.

  He went in to Purbright and reported that if Brookside Cottage were indeed for sale, no one in the property trade was aware of it.

  “No, well we had to check,” said Purbright. He made it sound easy, trivial almost.

  “Would you like me to walk out to Benstone and ask at the cottage?” Love inquired bitterly.

  Purbright glanced at the clock.

  “Oh, not now, Sid. Leave it till morning.”

  He went on with what he had been doing, but looked up again as Love noisily opened the door.

  “I tell you what you can do. Give the county boys a ring at Chalmsbury and see if old Larch is in a good enough mood to get you the name of the occupants. It’ll save you asking at the door when you go. You’d better say it’s for me.”

  Love knew that he better had. Chief Inspector Larch was a fearsome misanthrope and disciplinarian who, while conscientious within those rules he could not ignore, would have regarded a request from a mere sergeant as impertinence.

  Even the quoting of Purbright’s name produced nothing more helpful from Hector Larch than an impatient grunt and a half promise to see what he could do if ever he disposed of a mountain of much more important matters.

  In fact, Larch obtained the information in less than five minutes, simply by demanding it of the front office clerk whom he knew to live at Benstone. But he saved it for a couple of hours more on principle.

  Thus it was that Purbright was anxiously examining the contents of an envelope that had just been delivered to his home by a porter from the Roebuck Hotel when there came a ring on the extension line from the police station.

  By the time he replaced the receiver, he was looking more anxious still.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Miss Teatime swam up out of sleep with the sense of a cold current dragging at her legs. Then it seemed to be a wind. She shivered and opened her eyes. The car door was open.

  “Ahoy, there! Why don’t you come ashore?”

  The big fleshy face, converging roundly to its prow-like nose, hung just below the car roof. Trelawney’s eyes peered down with a glint of calculating amusement. His broad, stooped shoulders shadowed her.

  “Good evening,” said Miss Teatime steadily. She knew by the greyness of the light that she had slept for at least a couple of hours.

  He stepped back and remained holding open the door.

  Miss Teatime got out of the car.

  He nodded towards the cottage. “So you found my little surprise all by yourself,” he said, then added, more harshly: “As I did yours.”

  “I think we had better go inside, Mr Trelawney.”

  He lingered a moment, his smile thin and fixed, then he turned and walked to the front door of the cottage.

  They entered a long, low-beamed room, thickly carpeted in blue, with yellow cushioned light wood furniture, an enormous television set and, in the three deep window recesses, earthenware bowls of cactus and succulents. The walls were of pale grey rough cast plaster. On that facing the windows hung a Gauguin reproduction, its flowers and flesh glowing like a stove.

  Miss Teatime sat primly on a chair near the centre of the room, her handbag on her knee.

  Trelawney walked slowly to one of the windows, where he remained with his back towards her.

  “As a preliminary to our discussion...” she began.

  He spun round. “Oh, it’s to be a dicussion, is it? How nice. Will you begin, or shall I?”

  “Please do not be childish. I was saying that as a preliminary I should like to ask you not to use any more of those jolly jack tar expressions. I have suffered a number of courtships in my life, but never before one which made me seasick.”

  “You’ll have something worse than seasickness to worry about before I’ve finished with you, woman.” He had flushed, and yet he spoke quite calmly and deliberately.

  “Threats will serve the interest of neither of us,” Miss Teatime replied. “They are ill mannered and unbusinesslike.”

  “I suppose that as a professional swindler you are all for the smooth approach?”

  Miss Teatime sighed. “There you go again, Mr Trelawney. Abuse will get us nowhere.”

  “So you don’t deny being a swindler, then?”

  “That is not what is worrying you. It was the word ‘professional’ on which you laid stress, I noticed. If the acquisition of smoothness will allay your jealousy and bad temper, do for goodness’ sake stop imagining that amateurism is a virtue.”

  He leaned back against the wall and folded his hands. High in one cheek a nerve throbbed spasmodically.

  “What did you come here for?”

  “For compensation, Mr Trelawney. I do not consider that I have been fairly treated.”

  “You don’t cons...”

  She raised a hand. “No, please let me finish. Your intention was to acquire a valuable motor boat by handing to a distressed family what you knew to be a worthless cheque. It was a very shabby design, which was thwarted thanks only to my having invented both the boat and the family’s distress.

  “Thus your gain was an easy conscience, and it was I who accomplished it.

  “But what did I receive in return?

  “No one can compute the worth of an easy conscience; it is a priceless commodity. And so when I decided to draw a fee that would little more than cover my expenses, it hurt rather than embarrassed me to find that you had lied about putting five hundred pounds at my disposal.

  “For that hurt, I believe I am fully entitled to recompense, and if you will now be good enough to write me a cheque—a genuine cheque this time—for five hundred pounds, I shall be much obliged, Mr Trelawney.”

  Miss Teatime drew herself a little more erect in her chair, smoothed her skirt and stared solemnly out of the window.

  Trelawney said nothing for several seconds. He was grinning as he explored one nostril with the tip of his middle finger. When he had finished, he looked at the finger and wiped it on the wall behind his back.

  He walked across and sat in a chair facing her, three feet away. He leaned forward and nodded.

  “All right. Joke over. Now just what is it you think you’re up to?”

  She turned to him and raised her eyebrows. “This is not a joke, Mr Trelawney. I have told you quite simply what I require.”

  “Do you mean to say,” he said slowly and with no trace now of amusement, “that you have the bloody neck to come out here and try and drag money out of me after what’s happened?”

  “I do,” said Miss Teatime.

  “You know what you are, don’t you? You’re a prissy-mouthed, four-eyed, chiselling bitch, and you can go to hell!”

  She looked at him appraisingly.

  “If you really feel that we have arrived at the exchange of compliments stage, I can only assure you that the choice between an hour of your company, Mr Trelawney, and being sewn for a week in a sack of discarded boil dressings would be by no means easy to make.”

  “Cow!”

  She shrugged and looked at her watch.

  “I advise you not to waste further time on thinking up expletives. You lack the talent. If you will write me out that cheque at once, a great deal of trouble will be avoided—for you in particular.”

  Watching her all the time, he moved his chair a little closer. There was menace now in his quietness, in the slow, deliberate manner of his watching and listening. With the tip of his tongue he felt his upper lip.

  “Go on,” he said. “This trouble...Tell me.”

  “The situation,” said Miss Teatime, “is not without a certain piquancy. I shall come to that aspect in a moment. First, though, let us acknowledge a few facts of which you imagine I am unaware.

  “I have known for some little time that your intentions towards me are strictly disho
nourable. You are doubtless vain enough to have supposed that I would not guess, but it really was not very difficult.

  “I also happen to know—although I claim no personal credit for this—that you have already successfully imposed on the credulity of at least two other women. I know their names. One was called Reckitt, the other Bannister. And I know that the police are looking for the man who enginered their disappearance. For you, in fact.”