Brought to Book

by Anthea Fraser

  By the time they returned to the cottage, tired and breathless from their walk, the wind had freshened, and the warm air that greeted them was more than welcome. Rona stood surveying their belongings, still where they’d been dumped on arrival.

  ‘Let’s tidy up and make the place more habitable, then I’ll make some tea and we can look at the diaries.’

  Storm clouds were banking to the east, and Max switched on the lights. ‘Hope it doesn’t rain,’ he remarked. ‘I shouldn’t fancy the walk back to the pub in a downpour.’

  Rona looked up from shaking out the sleeping bags. ‘You think it’s worth a return visit?’

  He shrugged. ‘Up to you, but we’ll need to eat somewhere. And as we said, there might be a different crowd in.’

  ‘OK. Never let it be said I missed an opportunity.’

  It was with a feeling of anticipation that, ten minutes later, they sat side by side on the sofa, the diary for 1994 open in front of them. For the first time, Rona studied the scrawl that would become so familiar. Under the first of January, Theo had begun breezily: Another year, another dollar – or several, one hopes. Wonder what 1994 holds in store.

  ‘More than he bargained for,’ she said grimly. ‘Let’s hope we discover what it was. The first thing is to find when he started writing in code; it must have been after August, when he was planning Game for Fools.’

  ‘Shouldn’t be too hard to crack,’ Max remarked, starting to riffle through the pages. ‘“E” is the most common letter in the alphabet, so a substitution soon becomes obvious. And if a letter stands alone, it must be either “A” or “I”. Once you get the vowels, it becomes much easier.’

  ‘Smart Alec!’ Rona retorted. ‘Whoa – here’s one passage, but it looks like the code he used in the book, so it’s unlikely to be significant. Go on a bit.’

  Max continued flicking through the pages, several of which had experimental sentences spelt out in the now familiar cipher. But halfway through October an entirely new configuration appeared.

  ‘Hell’s teeth!’ Rona gazed helplessly down at the string of letters, ugly in their dissociation, that spread across the page: Wqrsn of fttr gy q hkocqzt egrt, royytktfz ykgd ziqz of zit wgga. Ziol ligxr rg. Max, however, gave a whoop of triumph.

  ‘Almost too simple!’ he exclaimed jubilantly. ‘Not only has he given us a single-letter word, but it’s the clue to the whole thing.’

  Rona stared at him resentfully. ‘Don’t tell me you can make sense of this gibberish?’

  ‘Sure, if you give me a few minutes.’

  ‘Stop being so infuriating and tell me how.’

  ‘Can’t you see? The “Q” is the give-away; it’s the good old Qwerty keyboard, isn’t it? You substitute it row by row for the alphabet, so “Q” equals “A”, “W” equals “B”, and so on. As codes go, it’s pretty basic, but then he wasn’t dealing with professional code-breakers, was he? I suppose all he was concerned about was that a casual glance from his wife or stepson wouldn’t reveal anything incriminating. In which case, why bother writing it down at all?’

  ‘Because he was a writer,’ Rona answered. ‘I can understand that. Having kept a diary for so long, he’d feel impelled to record absolutely everything. He told Justin he held nothing back.’

  ‘I don’t call writing in code holding nothing back.’

  ‘It would only have been a temporary measure, till he was ready for his autobiography.’

  Max looked back at the diary. ‘Anyway, to business: did you bring your lap-top?’

  She rose to get it, while he felt in his pocket for a pen and scrap of paper. By the time she returned, he’d written the letters of the alphabet along the top.

  ‘Now, read out the keyboard, row by row, and I’ll write the letters under those that correspond.’

  Minutes later, they read out in unison: ‘Badly in need of a private code, different from that in the book. This should do.’

  ‘That’s all we have to do to decode the diaries?’ Rona couldn’t take it in.

  ‘I wouldn’t say “all”,’ Max objected. ‘OK, so we know what code he’s using, but it’ll be the hell of a job, going through it letter by letter. How much is encrypted?’

  Rona leafed through the rest of the year. The hieroglyphics appeared only spasmodically, but every now and then whole paragraphs were interspersed with his ordinary script.

  ‘You could send it to someone who specializes in such things,’ Max suggested.

  ‘Certainly not! If anyone’s going to find out Theo’s secrets, it’s me!’

  ‘It’ll be painstakingly slow; I thought you were impatient to crack it.’

  ‘It’s no use being impatient when writing biographies; there are no quick fixes, and I won’t be ready for these particular diaries till almost the end of the book.’

  ‘Even if they explain his block?’ Max challenged her. ‘Suppose I have a go, then? I enjoy puzzles, and it’d be a change from The Times crossword.’ He looked at her quizzically. ‘Or am I not allowed to forestall you, either?’

  She laughed. ‘I’ll make an exception in your case.’

  Their evening visit to the Plough proved interesting.

  ‘Glad you’ve come back,’ Jim the landlord greeted them. ‘Your questions about Theo got folks talking, and there are a couple more blokes with something to add, though I can’t vouch for their reliability. I’ll send them over.’

  The first comer was Ted Stacey, a tall, thin man with a lined face, who immediately captured their attention by claiming to have seen Theo on the evening of his death, getting out of a car with an unknown man. He was adamant that it wasn’t Myers, whom he knew by sight from the latter’s visits to the pub.

  ‘This bloke was much taller, for a start. I told the police,’ he added resentfully, ‘but I’d been knocking it back and they wrote me off as an unreliable witness.’

  With sinking heart, Rona noted the trembling of his hands. Perhaps ‘knocking it back’ was a habitual exercise. ‘Can you describe him at all?’

  ‘Not really. Tall, like I said, but it was dark, and I didn’t get a good look at him.’

  ‘What time was this?’

  ‘I can’t be sure, which didn’t help. The whole evening was a blur – I’d had a row with the missus and set out to get plastered.’

  Feeling her urgency, he added, ‘At a guess, ten, ten-fifteen.’

  ‘And where were they?’

  ‘Like I said, getting out of a car at Theo’s cottage.’

  ‘You live up that way?’

  Stacey bit his lip and looked away. ‘No, and don’t ask what I was doing there, ’cos I haven’t a clue. Probably set off for a breath of air. It wasn’t till about a week later that I remembered seeing them, and realized it must have been the night he’d died.’ He grimaced. ‘OK, so you can’t blame the police for not believing me, but I swear it’s the truth.’

  Rona and Max, their hopes plummeting, avoided each other’s eyes. An admitted drunk, with no reason to be near Theo’s cottage, who’d forgotten the entire episode for a week. An unreliable witness indeed.

  ‘Thanks very much for telling us,’ Rona said.

  Stacey shook his head hopelessly, and, pushing back his chair, returned to the public bar. They hadn’t time to discuss his claim before another man slipped into his seat. He had thick black hair and a cigarette drooped from the corner of his mouth.

  ‘You’re the two asking about Harvey?’

  They acknowledged that they were.

  ‘Jack Norton.’ He held out a hand to each in turn. ‘A word of warning: take anything Ted told you with a handful of salt. He’s as reliable as a chocolate teapot.’

  ‘Were you here yourself the night Harvey died?’ Max enquired.

  Norton shook his head. ‘Nonetheless, I think what I have to say will be of interest. Anyone tell you he entertained a lady at his cottage?’

  Seeing their surprise, he gave a short laugh. ‘Thought not.’

  ‘It wasn’t in the news reports
,’ Rona said.

  ‘By that time it wasn’t news, so I kept it to myself.’

  ‘I know he played around,’ she went on slowly, ‘but I understood that when he was up here, he devoted himself to his work.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Norton confirmed. ‘And so he did. Sometimes, when he’d had a few, he joked about women he’d known. “I come up here to get away from ’em,” he’d say. “Never mix work and pleasure, lads, it doesn’t pay.”’

  ‘So . . .?’

  ‘So I was surprised when I caught him out.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I was driving over the top one afternoon, and just short of his cottage a lighted fag fell into my lap. I braked and fumbled for it, and I was about to start up again when some movement at a window caught my eye, and I distinctly saw a woman standing there. She must have noticed the car, because she immediately ducked back.’

  ‘Could it have been his wife?’ Max asked.

  ‘No way,’ Norton declared. ‘I’d seen a photo of her with Theo, and she was as tall as he was. This one’s much shorter.’

  After a minute, Rona said, ‘When was this?’

  ‘Oh, a year or two back. Some time before he died, which was why I kept schtum. No point in causing more grief at that late stage.’

  ‘Can you pinpoint the time more closely?’ she pursued.

  Norton looked at her, his eyes narrowed against the smoke curling from his cigarette. ‘Important, is it?’

  ‘It could be.’

  ‘Well, let’s see now. It was in springtime, I remember that, and I know I still had the old Peugeot, because when I knocked the ciggie off my lap, it burned a hole in the carpet. I traded it in – when would it have been? – around Christmas ’95.’

  ‘So you saw her in the spring of that year?’

  ‘That’d be about right.’

  ‘Just the once?’

  ‘As clearly as that, yes; they were more careful afterwards. I tried to pull his leg about it the next time I saw him, but he wasn’t amused. Told me curtly I must have imagined it, and the look in his eye advised me to mind my own, so I let it drop.’

  ‘But you did catch other glimpses?’

  He lit another cigarette. ‘They drove past me once in Buckford; both wearing dark glasses, but I recognized them all right. Those were the only definite sightings, but around that time I was driving past his cottage regularly; I sell farm machinery, and had a customer up that way. I kept my eyes open out of curiosity, and saw the same car several times, pulled off the road and hidden behind some bushes. I wouldn’t have noticed it if I’d not been looking.’

  They were silent for a minute. Then Max said curiously, ‘Why did you think it worth telling us this?’

  ‘Because the lady here is writing a book, isn’t she, and I thought she might like to dig deeper. See, it was no ordinary fling; if it had been, he’d have boasted about it like he did the others. This was altogether more serious, which was why he warned me off.’

  And it had happened in spring 1995 – six short months before Theo’s descent into depression and the resulting writer’s block. Had this mystery woman been responsible?

  ‘The car could have been anybody’s,’ Max began, ‘and if you only—’

  Norton dismissed this with a wave of the hand. ‘It was the same one I’d seen them in, I’d swear to it. After a while, even if I didn’t spot it, I could tell when she’d been. He was – different, somehow – quieter, more subdued, but – God, I can’t describe it. Happy.’

  They were silent, thinking over what he’d said. Then Max asked, ‘And when did she stop coming?’

  Norton took a long draught of beer. ‘Well, Theo left here at the end of May as per usual and came back in August, also as usual, but I’m pretty sure she never came again.’

  ‘And shortly after that,’ Rona said slowly, ‘the depression set in.’

  Norton gave a low whistle. ‘Buggered if I made the connection, but you’re right.’

  According to both Al and Keith Bromsgrove, Theo was fine when he first returned that autumn. Then, suddenly, he wasn’t, and the resulting block lasted a full two years. Rona was filled with frustration. Here, she felt sure, was an important factor, but it seemed the merest hint of it was all she’d be granted.

  ‘Would anyone else have known about this woman? Anyone Theo was close to?’

  Norton shook his head positively. ‘I told you, he was dead secretive about her.’

  ‘But weren’t you curious to find out more?’

  He shrugged. ‘It intrigued me for a while, but when it was clear he wouldn’t open up, I lost interest.’

  ‘Can you describe her, at all?’

  He gave an exasperated laugh. ‘Give us a break, lady! I caught two fleeting glimpses, each time at a distance and through a window. She was quite short, but I’m not sticking my neck out further than that.’

  ‘Dark or fair hair?’

  ‘Reddish brown, I’d say, but I can’t be sure.’

  It was clear he’d told them all he knew, and when their supper was brought to the table, he took his leave.

  ‘Quite a productive trip,’ Max observed on the way home. ‘We’ve been given a new slant on this Gary character; heard of a possible unknown suspect, and learned that Theo entertained a mysterious woman. Not bad, for two visits to the pub!’

  ‘But when you get down to it, Gary’s our only possible lead. Let’s drop in to the White Horse on the way home and try to sneak a look at that register.’

  However, when they drove into Spindlebury soon after ten the next morning, the door of the White Horse was still shuttered and Dick’s register, with Gary’s address in it, remained tantalizingly out of reach.

  By the time they reached home, it was raining fairly steadily. Max cooked an omelette for lunch, and they sat at the kitchen table staring out into the drenched garden.

  ‘Gus needs a walk,’ Rona said without enthusiasm.

  ‘And you’re itching to get to the computer.’

  She smiled in acknowledgment.

  ‘So what you actually mean is, would I mind taking him to the park?’

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘I suppose not. I could do with stretching my legs after the drive.’

  ‘Thanks, you’re an angel.’

  After he left, Rona went up to the study. She had not used the recorder during their visit; for one thing, it had been too noisy in the pub, and for another, she doubted if any of her informants would have felt comfortable with it. This had necessitated scribbling down the salient points afterwards, and she now needed to sort them out in her mind before slotting them into place on the database. She opened her notebook and, leaning back in her chair, started to read them through.

  It was over an hour later that the phone interrupted her, and she lifted it to hear a voice she couldn’t immediately place.

  ‘Mrs Allerdyce?’

  No, Ms Parish. ‘Yes?’

  ‘This is Archie Duncan. Sorry to disturb you on a Sunday, but could I have a word with your husband?’

  A matching face formed in her mind. It belonged to the rosy-cheeked, blue-eyed police sergeant who was one of Max’s students.

  ‘I’m sorry, he’s out at the moment. He should be back soon; shall I ask him to phone you?’

  Duncan hesitated. ‘I’m about to go out myself; would you mind giving him a message? He asked me to check on the Harvey case and the police thinking on it. You’re writing a book about him, I believe?’

  ‘Yes,’ Rona confirmed after a moment, bewildered that Max hadn’t mentioned this approach.

  ‘Well, I did a bit of rooting around, and the story that emerged is that the lads weren’t happy about the guy Myers, who was with Harvey that night. Unsavoury type – a user – and although he could account for his movements over the crucial period, they felt there was something dodgy about him. Not the kind of company you’d expect someone like Harvey to keep.’

  Which had been the general opinion, Rona noted. ‘Was h
e blackmailing him?’

  ‘That was their first thought, certainly, and could have provided a motive for suicide, but nothing came to light to support it. There were no large sums missing from Harvey’s bank account, and Myers hadn’t any form.’

  Rona said carefully, ‘Have you got an address for him?’

  ‘It’s probably here somewhere. Hold on a tick.’ There was a rustling of papers. ‘Yes, here we are. Twelve, Shelley Road, Stokely.’

  She breathed a prayer of thankfulness. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘That’s not privileged information, by the way,’ he added. ‘It appeared in the press, but all the same, treat it with caution. I shouldn’t, for instance, advise bearding him in his den.’

  He paused, but when she made no comment, he continued. ‘Max also wanted to know if murder or suicide was suspected, and the answer is that both were, but again no evidence either way. Harvey’s injuries were consistent with knocking his head when he fell into the stream, and he was certainly very drunk at the time. Myers was definitely not in the vicinity when he died, and no one else was in the frame. All in all, an open verdict was the best we could hope for.’

  ‘Well, thank you so much for looking into it. Max will be very grateful.’

  ‘You’re – OK are you?’ Duncan asked hesitantly. ‘No more doorbells in the night?’

  So that was what had spooked Max.

  ‘I’m fine, thanks.’

  ‘Well, if you do have any more trouble, be sure to get in touch.’

  ‘I will,’ Rona assured him with a dry mouth. ‘And thanks again.’

  She put down the phone and stared at it thoughtfully. Max had obviously been more worried than she’d realized, to go to the police behind her back. It occurred to her with a sudden lurch of the stomach that Myers could have been the sender of the note and ringer of doorbells.

  Well, she thought, a decision forming, she’d pass on Duncan’s message but omit the fact that he’d given her Myers’s address. Max’s warning would be considerably more forceful than Duncan’s, and she didn’t want a confrontation. It was possible Myers was the linchpin behind the whole business, and she’d no intention of being prevented from meeting him.

  The rain was still rattling against the windows, and she glanced at her watch, surprised that Max was prolonging the walk in this weather. They’d been gone a good hour and a half. Aware of a sudden niggling of unease, she picked up the phone again and pressed the button for his mobile.