Not knowing what to expect, Kate found that her parents’ circumstances had changed for the better. Her father and the man next door were working partners and he was bringing in good money for the first time in many years. They got on so well that the neighbour had helped Mr. Buchanan to redecorate the small villa, and it was no longer the dark hovel it had been.
The two men had formed a friendship beyond their business relationship. It was the first time Kate had ever seen her father with a real friend. True, they both liked a drink, but now it was not the hectic drinking of Edinburgh or the early days in Cape Town. They would sit on the stoep in the hot evenings and drink a couple of bottles of cheap white wine, but the tempo had changed. Her father’s drinking was slower, more measured, as though he realised that since the money was coming in regularly, he could afford to have a drink at any time, and did not have to fill himself fast when the opportunity arose.
Duggie, too, was in work again. Through a war veterans’ association, he had been taken onto the temporary staff of the City Council, adding up rate demands, folding them and placing them in brown window envelopes for posting. There was a chance that he might move on to other, similar jobs and eventually get onto the ‘permanent’ temporary staff, as Mrs. Buchanan described it.
She was the one in whom the greatest change had occurred. She had never been a neighbourly woman, and even in Edinburgh had not been friendly with other families on the same stair, but Kate had not been in the house for long before there was a knock at the door and a fat white woman in a tight dress and carpet slippers, shouted from the door, ‘Can I use the phone, Mrs. B.?’
‘The phone?’ Kate said.
‘We had one put in a month ago because of the removal business. It’s in the passage.’
It was the phone that had made the difference, Kate realised. Few families in the street had telephones and they used the Buchanans’ as they might a public call-box. There was a box for money and they came and went. They gave the Buchanans’ number as their own, and during that afternoon Mrs. Buchanan twice answered it for neighbours and stood at the door, calling their names.
The result was that there was a flow of people in and out. ‘Sometimes I canna get my work done for a’ the telephoning,’ she said. ‘Then they’ll want a cup of tea and a bit of a crack. It’s as much as I can do to get rid of them.’
But Kate could see that secretly her mother was delighted. A whole new world had opened to her.
The irony, she thought, was that it had been in her mind to offer to pay their fares back to Edinburgh. She had felt increasingly guilty about forcing them to come out, especially since Duggie’s leg operation. But now she had to face the fact that they had finally settled down better than she had. That it was she, not they, who wanted to break away and leave the country.
Duggie came back about five and after supper she took him to the lounge of the Railway Arms and bought him a whisky. It was a dreary place, filled with cheap furniture; all the tables had cigarette burns.
Duggie had used part of the first month’s wages to buy a suit and when he was sitting down he looked neat, handsome, full of the old Edinburgh charm. The last time she had seen him like this was the day of the picnic.
She told him how Charles had described his movements that night, and he could find nothing with which to disagree.
They went over the day and the evening as they each remembered it, searching for some pointer to what had happened later. Finally, she put the question point blank: ‘Do you think he did it, Duggie?’
‘God knows. It’s something I’ve asked myself over and over. Everyone thought yon maid from Saxenburg . . .’
‘Lena?’
‘Aye, Lena. Everyone said she was just a mad old woman. But you should have seen her in the box. She didn’t look mad to me. A wee bit simple, perhaps. But there was nothing mad about her.’
‘People said she had gone peculiar after her daughter died.’
‘But she’d seen Charles. There’s no disputing it. She placed him with Miriam. And he’d never come forward before. He’d let yon fellow Jonas be arrested and I don’t think he’d have come forward even if that lad had been tried.’
‘You don’t know that.’ Again, Kate thought of Charles waiting on the rocks with his rifle for Jonas to emerge from the cave. Even though she had been there with him, even though she had told herself that he could never have known that Jonas really was hiding there, there was something uncanny and inhuman about the way he had worked it out and waited for the hunted man to be forced into the open.
‘Will you be giving evidence?’ Duggie said. ‘They went ahead with the preparatory examination without you.’
‘Mine was only the finding of the body. Mr. Godlonton says that if I wasn’t at the magistrate’s hearing, I won’t be called at the Supreme Court. Duggie, there’s something I think you should know. Charles says that when he took Miriam out that night, she told him she’d been with you.’
‘Aye. I saw her home.’
She remembered the two of them walking up Helmsdale’s main street after they had come back from the picnic.
‘He says she told him that you’d . . . that . . . that you’d made love.’
Duggie glanced at her, then looked away. He seemed suddenly withdrawn. He toyed with his whisky, swilling it round and round in his glass, then said, ‘I don’t want to talk about it. Or Miriam, for that matter.’
‘But, Duggie, they’re going to ask you about it in court.’
He looked suddenly afraid. ‘Why? What’s that got to do with anyone?’
*
She spent the night at the apartment. It was hot and stuffy from being closed up for so long and she flung open the windows, letting in the cooler evening air and driving out the musty smell. She sat on the verandah and wrote to Tom, and later when it grew dark, she went to unpack her suitcase.
She was hanging up a frock in the big wardrobe that she and Charles had shared when she came across a garment she had never seen before. It was a kimono in cheap silk. She took it out and looked at it in the light. It was badly creased and stained. She could not remember Charles ever wearing such a garment. Then she remembered the last time she had spent a night in the flat, the night she and Freda had gone to the party. That night she had found empty glasses and a comb filled with hair. She sniffed the garment and caught a whiff of cheap scent, then took it to the kitchen, dropped it into the rubbish bin and washed her hands. The scent did not indicate whether it had belonged to a man or a woman. Either could have used it.
Her distaste grew. She thought of him here with his boys or his girls and suddenly the place seemed more squalid than ever. There was no jealousy in her reaction, just disgust.
She ripped the sheets from the bed and changed the pillow-cases and the towels and then she filled a basin with soapy water and washed down all the surfaces she was likely to touch. She cleaned the telephone and the doornobs and just when she thought she had finished, she would find something else. She became obsessive about it, trying to wipe out all traces of Charles and his friends. Finally, she fell into bed around midnight, exhausted.
She could not sleep. The night was hot, there were mosquitoes and her mind was unreeling the day like a jerky bioscope. She kept seeing Charles in the bleak prison room, saw again the mute appeal in his eyes, the need to be believed. She tried to think logically. If he had not killed Miriam, and if Jonas hadn’t, then who had killed her?
It had to be someone who had been at the picnic. Yet all the hours during the day and evening were accounted for, except for the time after Charles said he had left her. Had she gone home, and had someone paid her another visit? Duggie, perhaps. She thought of the picnic when Miriam had been so attentive to him, feeding him titbits, whispering to him, apparently attracted to him. Kate had assumed this to be her way of making Charles jealous, but it might have been more complex than that, for she remembered Miriam cavorting with Jerry in the water. Had that scene been directed at Charles or, for som
e reason she did not understand, at Duggie, whose physical disability precluded such games? Why had Duggie suddenly become afraid when she had mentioned the possibility of being questioned about Miriam? Her mother had once referred to Duggie and Miriam. They could have been closer than she had realised.
Or Jerry?
Had he gone to Miriam’s house when Freda was asleep? She recalled his determination in the back seat of the car in Cape Town, forcing his hand between her legs while his wife sat in the front seat. Had he been sufficiently aroused by those games in the water to go to Miriam later? Had something gone wrong there? Had those powerful hands been just too powerful?
Someone had forcibly penetrated Miriam’s vagina, damaging the tissues, and then that someone had strangled her. The police said it was Jonas, and that had been wrong. Now they said it was Charles. That could be equally wrong.
Whoever it was, had taken her dead body down to the sea and thrown it – no! It did not have to be that way. Surely whoever it was would have tried to get rid of it, to have it carried out to sea, not brought back. Jonas’s body had been brought by the currents to the precise spot where Miriam had been found. Yet everyone said that if you were sucked out of the sea-cave, you would end up out at the India Reef to be eaten by barracuda and sharks. Everyone said that, but they were wrong.
The following day she went to see Jerry. The contracting firm he had inherited occupied a series of sheds near the docks. It was burning hot and the fishermen on the pier were casting their lines into a flat and oily sea. He kept her waiting nearly fifteen minutes before his secretary sent her in.
He was sitting behind a large desk covered in papers. He was wearing a collar and tie and there were sweat marks under his arms. He looked the image of a prosperous business man. He greeted her warily, asking about her trip, then she said, ‘I saw Charles yesterday.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘He says he wrote to you.’
‘Ja, I think he did.’
‘He’s not blaming you. He says he realises you had to tell exactly what you saw.’
‘Are you hot? I’ll switch on the fan.’
‘He misses you, Jerry. He says you’ve never visited him.’
‘It’s difficult.’
He played with the papers on his desk. She watched the square hands that were so much like the rest of him: squat, chunky, powerful. He was one of the most sexually aggressive men she had met.
Now he was unable to meet her eyes.
‘He would like to see you,’ she said.
He glanced at his watch. ‘We’re pretty pushed now.’
‘Jerry, he’s your friend.’
‘Look, in this business you’ve got to keep your nose clean. I’m not the only one looking for work.’
‘But he hasn’t been found guilty. You don’t believe he did it, do you?’
‘I can’t talk about the case.’
‘What?’
‘It’s sub judice.’
‘For God’s sake, is there anything I don’t know that might give me a hint whether Charles did or did not do it? Don’t you see, I’ve got to know.’
His mouth turned into a hard, straight line. ‘I’ve just told you, I can’t discuss it.’
*
In the weeks before the trial, she seemed to become several different people. She found herself physically split between Saxenburg and Cape Town. At Saxenburg she had to concentrate on the new plucking season and, with Smuts, see to the washing and starching of the feathers; she had to oversee the house; she had to attend to Mrs. Preller and give her the shots she needed three times a day. Smuts took over when she went into Cape Town to see Charles.
She seemed never to be able to settle. She used the train journeys to catch up on her sleep and to write to Tom. Sometimes, when she returned to Saxenburg, she would find a letter from him.
Emotionally, too, she was split. To Mrs. Preller, she was a daughter-in-law; to Charles, a wife; to Tom, in her mind, a lover.
Her letters to him were, she knew, unsatisfactory, for she could foresee no clear future. If Charles was found guilty and hanged, could she simply leave Saxenburg and return to Vienna? The answer had to be no. What if he was imprisoned for life? Could she ask for a divorce and leave him to rot? Or if he was found not guilty and released? Would she not feel obliged to help him rebuild his life, a life for which she had become responsible when she had married him? And always in the background was her obligation to the old woman in the dim room upstairs, who depended so much on her now: could she simply walk away from that? She felt that circumstances were closing around her, trapping her, cutting off the one escape route to her personal happiness: the route to Vienna and Tom.
On one of her visits to Cape Town she met Charles’s counsel, Joshua Prescott, K.C. He was a gross man, a great, rotund figure overflowing the chair in which he sat in his chambers. He wore a black and white bow-tie and a light grey alpaca office jacket, the elbows of which were in tatters. His face was large and moon-like and a toupée was perched above it. The hair at his temples was grey, the toupée dark brown with a parting in the middle. His office was a shambles: books stood in piles around the walls, briefs lay in an untidy mass on his desk. He sweated a great deal and the smell in the room was ripe: a mixture of his body and the Sen-Sen he sucked constantly.
He appeared at first meeting to resemble a large, simpleminded and rather sleepy bear, but Kate had not been with him for more than a few minutes when she felt herself in contact with a muscular brain.
He began slowly. ‘Charles tells me you’ve been in Vienna. I was there some years ago. You know Demel’s of course?’
‘I never went there.’
‘The finest cakes and pastries in the world. Coffee so thick with cream you could stand the spoon up.’ His eyes were half-closed as he remembered. Then they opened and he said, ‘Did he do it?’
Caught off-guard, she was about to reply when he cut across her. ‘No, he did not. That is your answer, Mrs. Preller, to me, or anyone else who might ask you. That is my answer to you and to them as well. He did not.’
‘That’s what I say to myself,’ she said. ‘But if he didn’t, then who did?’
‘Discovering that is not the function of this trial, that is the function of the police. Our – I should say, my – duty, my function in this matter is proving the innocence of Charles Preller to the satisfaction of the court. We do not even have to search for the truth, except insofar as it affects Charles. Do you understand me, my dear?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good.’ He began to swivel from side to side then read some notes on the pages of a yellow legal pad.
‘You were at both inquests, so we need not worry about them now,’ he said. ‘None of that evidence implicates Charles. No, our problem is this coloured woman, Lena Lourens. She’s the nigger in the woodpile, if I might use the phrase. She lied before, she could be lying again, though Godlonton said she made a fierce impression at the preparatory. Fierce.’
‘Charles says his case was badly handled there. So do other people.’
‘Mrs. Preller, you would not expect me to criticise a legal brother, would you?’
‘I suppose not. But . . .’
‘Let there be no buts. Dismiss it from your mind. What is past, is past.’ He made a gesture and wiped out the preparatory examination. ‘There are two ways, two paths, one follows in a case like this. The first is the better, the easier. We show positively that your husband could not have committed the crime with which he has been charged: alibis, witnesses, hard circumstantial evidence. Impossibility. Irrefutable. Accused could not have done it because he was in Timbuctoo at the time. Here are witnesses who saw him there. Next case, please. But this isn’t our path. Our path must be more circuitous, the low road, the negative one, i.e. to attack the credibility of the witness who says he did it, or that he was there at the time, therefore he could have done it. Do you see?’
‘Attack Lena?’
‘Precisely. I want to know everythin
g about her. Every tiny thing, even though you might not feel it to be important. Let me be the judge.’
She told him everything she knew about Lena, and everything she had heard. While she spoke, he made notes. Then he said, ‘Tell me about Betty. And again everything, please: looks, age, way of speaking, every little detail.’
Kate felt drained when she had finished for she had been talking for nearly an hour. It was not possible to talk about Lena without discussing the entire Preller family and its recent history. Some of this Prescott seemed to know, but there was much that caused him to raise his eyebrows.
He sat in silence for some minutes, paging back through his notes, underlining phrases, dotting i’s and crossing t’s.
‘You say on the night of the fire when Hugo died and Mrs. Preller senior was so badly burnt, that Charles ran for Lena rather than his mother. Do you not consider this to be odd behaviour? I mean, why would he run for the cook and not his own mother, especially if the cook was living in a shanty some distance from the house?’
‘Lena wasn’t the cook then, she was the children’s nanny. She slept in the house.’
‘I see. But she wasn’t in the house that night. Where was she, at church?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘That’s one thing we must look into.’ He paged on, then stopped again. ‘These voices that told her to tell the truth. When did they start?’
‘Mr. Smuts says it was after Betty died. I never heard her talk about them before I went abroad, though she was always very religious. She used to pray a lot, and sometimes she would sing hymns.’
He offered her the Sen-Sens, but she refused. He popped two into his mouth. ‘Unfortunately religious fervour doesn’t prove mendacity. On the contrary. And there are one or two judges – great hymn singers themselves – who might see it as a positive virtue.’ He smiled, and she was reminded of the smile of a baby in an advertisement for infants’ milk.
The Sea Cave Page 30
