Skydancer

by Geoffrey Archer

  ‘Two years! For two years you’ve been deceiving me,’ she burst out.

  Why had it all happened? There had to be a reason for it.

  ‘It was about two years ago I started campaigning seriously,’ she continued more quietly. ‘That’s when I got involved at the craft co-operative and began campaigning against your work, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Well . . . it was about that time,’ he conceded uncomfortably.

  ‘So this . . . this was you getting your own back, was it?’

  ‘No! It really didn’t begin for any reason that I can explain. It was just – an opportunity that suddenly presented itself; a temptation if you like, and . . . I failed to resist it,’ he ended feebly.

  He knew his explanation would not satisfy his wife. His fingers fumbled with the peppermill on the table.

  ‘We didn’t meet very often, and I didn’t really take it very seriously at first, but . . . Mary became more involved than I did. And in the end . . . I mean she knew I was married – always knew that . . . But in the end she seemed to expect me to leave you and the children and set up home with her – and I wasn’t having it. So I told her I couldn’t see her anymore.’

  Belinda eyed him suspiciously. He must have encouraged the woman to fall in love with him.

  ‘And now she’s dead . . .’

  Peter flinched at the accusation in her tone.

  ‘Yes, she’s dead.’

  He still found it hard to believe.

  ‘There was a note. She left a note,’ he continued with an effort. ‘In it she said that she was very bitter . . . that she’d wanted to hit back at me in some way. She said she took a page from a secret file at the Defence Ministry, photocopied it and left it on Parliament Hill . . . expecting that it would be found by a passer-by and cause a scandal which would damage my work at Aldermaston.’

  ‘What?’ Belinda gasped with astonishment. ‘So she was at the bottom of this security scandal? You mean she was the one who’s had you running round in circles the past few days? Well, she’s certainly got her own back!’ She shook her head with a certain admiration at the panic the woman had been able to cause.

  For a few moments neither spoke, as Belinda took in the seriousness of what had happened. It was not just that Peter had been unfaithful to her; he was now at the very centre of a national crisis over Skydancer. It would be he who would take the blame for all that had happened. He faced disgrace in his professional life and his career would be in ruins.

  His handsome face looked crumpled and crushed. She began to feel a little sorry for him, despite her anger and resentment at what he had done.

  ‘She must have been really desperate,’ Belinda reflected.

  ‘I still can’t believe she did it,’ her husband murmured. ‘However much she may have got to hate me, I just can’t believe she’d have done this. She was too . . . too professional. This is so out of character – it really is. I mean, it seemed obvious the Soviets would try to steal the Skydancer plans. They’re bound to want to know what we’re up to. So when that paper was found on Parliament Hill, it looked exactly like a drop that had gone wrong. That explanation fitted perfectly. But now . . . Mary.’

  He frowned as he tried to recall the exact words in the note John Black had given him. There had been something about that note that did not seem quite right, he thought in retrospect. He puzzled about what that was.

  ‘Is there any doubt?’ Belinda asked, curious at the implications. ‘There is, isn’t there? I can see it in your eyes?’

  Peter was concentrating hard, trying to remember exactly what the letter had said. It was still in his jacket pocket, but he did not want Belinda to read it.

  The more he thought about it now, the stranger it all seemed. Mary had been such a stable person. Would she really have taken such drastic revenge on him, and then killed herself? He somehow could not believe it. Or was he just telling himself that to lessen the guilt pressing down on his shoulders?

  ‘John Black said there was little doubt that she killed herself It seemed to fit the circumstances,’ he murmured.

  ‘John Black?’ Belinda spat. ‘You believe that creature?’

  ‘He is conducting the investigation,’ Peter answered flatly.

  ‘Well, God help poor old Britain!’ she exclaimed. ‘He’s an evil man! And, anyway, I thought MI5 were discredited these days. Aren’t they all supposed to be Russian moles? How do you know Black didn’t murder your . . . friend, to cover up some spy operation being run by Moscow?’

  Peter looked at Belinda in astonishment.

  Whether meant seriously or not, her words further stirred the growing doubts in his mind. For the past three days the Defence Ministry’s guard had been up, trying to counter the loss of the Skydancer plans. But now, conveniently, it seemed there had been no loss of secrets after all, so they could all relax again. It was very comforting – perhaps too comforting.

  Belinda was torn between both a need and a reluctance to know more about the secret life her husband had been leading for the past two years.

  ‘You loved her, didn’t you?’ she asked eventually.

  ‘What?’ Peter was jolted back to the present. ‘I . . . I don’t really know,’ he stammered. ‘I suppose I was . . . sort of infatuated . . . in love with her maybe, but that’s not the same thing is it? We got on together,’ he continued carelessly. ‘There was no conflict between us until . . .’

  ‘Conflict! So that’s it! Conflict. Something you didn’t have with her, but you did have with me. But what was that conflict, Peter. What was it about? How did it happen? Well, I’ll tell you, in case you’ve forgotten. That conflict only arose because, as I got older, I began to understand the meaning of morality, and you didn’t. It all makes sense in a way; it explains your mistress. One immorality begat another!’

  ‘Immorality? What the hell are you talking about?’ he rounded on her.

  ‘You know perfectly well what I mean,’ she persisted. ‘Your work – that’s the source of our conflict. It is utterly immoral for you to devote your life to designing means of genocide, building weapons of mass murder! And it is the moral duty of every rational human being to oppose your work and demand that it ends!’

  ‘Belinda, please! Let’s not go through that all over again!’ Peter pleaded.

  ‘Yes. I can see how nice it must have been for you to find a woman who didn’t object to what you did for a living. No wonder you fell in love with your Mary if she never said anything that would make your conscience trouble you! If it wasn’t for the bloody bomb, none of this . . .’

  She stopped halfway through her sentence, turning towards the door. Peter turned in his chair to follow her gaze.

  ‘I heard a noise and thought it was burglars.’ Suzanne stood in the doorway, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. ‘Is it morning or what?’

  Peter rose from the table and crossed the room. Putting his arm round her shoulders he led her back towards the stairs.

  ‘No, it’s still the middle of the night. I’ve just got back from America, and Mummy and I were – talking,’ he explained gently, taking her back up to her bedroom. ‘I’m sorry we woke you.’

  He tucked her back under her blankets and kissed her on the forehead.

  ‘You were having a row!’ said Suzanne, holding on to his arm.

  Peter wondered how much she had heard.

  ‘Well, just a small one, but it’s over now,’ he conceded with a smile. ‘Back to sleep with you now.’

  When he returned to the kitchen, Belinda was placing their mugs in the sink.

  ‘That girl has ears on stalks,’ she complained. ‘Do you think she heard much?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he answered, grateful for the unexpected interruption to Belinda’s tirade.

  She turned to face him with a reproachful look in her eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry for what I said, but you’ve hurt me deeply, you know – very deeply indeed.’

  Those words. The same words that stuck in the back o
f his mind, and yet they were not quite the same. ‘You hurt me very deeply, you know’. Wasn’t that what Mary had written? Not quite. He had to look at the letter again.

  Belinda came over to him, as if looking for a response.

  ‘I’m desperately sorry, too. I’ve buggered things up dreadfully,’ Peter admitted.

  He took her hands in his own. She snatched them away and turned back towards the dresser, folding her arms tightly across her chest.

  ‘It’s not as easy as that.’ She was choking back a new threat of tears. ‘You can’t just say sorry and expect everything to be all right.’

  ‘No, it’s not that simple. I know that.’

  She looked so vulnerable, struggling with her feelings, that he felt an urge to clasp her firmly in his arms, to reassure her that their own relationship could and should survive all that had happened.

  ‘You may not find this easy to believe but, whatever may have happened in the last two years, I’ve never stopped loving you,’ he insisted.

  Although sincerely meant, his words sounded hollow.

  ‘Do you think you might forgive me one day?’ he asked softly.

  His wife stared hard at the floor for a few moments, before looking him coolly in the eye.

  ‘I shall never forget,’ she answered finally.

  ‘No. I don’t suppose either of us will,’ he answered sombrely. ‘Well, we can’t stay down here all night. You go back to bed, and I’ll follow in a minute.’

  As soon as she had left the room and he heard the stairs creak under her tread, Peter pulled from his inside pocket the envelope containing the letter Mary had written. He held the page under the light over the kitchen table.

  He stared fixedly at those crucial words: ‘But you hurt me very deep,you know.’

  ‘Hurt very deep’? Mary would never have said that. ‘Deeply’, yes, but not ‘deep’. It was ungrammatical, and even under such stress she would have still written correct English, Peter was certain.

  Suddenly he looked at the page with suspicion; so much of it now seemed wrong. The whole letter had been typed, including the ‘love M’ at the bottom. Surely she would have signed it? All the letters she had sent him in the past had been hand-written. He knew she had a typewriter in her flat, but used it only for business letters.

  He was stirred by a sudden sense of unease. What had first appeared the tragic last words of a distraught woman now began to look totally different – something altogether more alarming and sinister.

  With only two hours’ sleep that night, Peter felt worse in the morning than if he had not gone to bed at all. At breakfast he was conscious of his younger daughter’s silent stare as she searched for clues to the conflict between her parents that had disturbed her night’s sleep.

  By 8.30 he was at his desk at Aldermaston, struggling to make sense of his aroused suspicions. A note left by his secretary the previous evening reminded him that John Black wanted to see him at eleven in London, and announced that the Chief of the Defence Staff had invited him for lunch at his club.

  Peter felt at a loss about what to do next; Mary Maclean now dominated his thoughts completely. He felt certain now that her death was by no means the end of the Skydancer secrets affair, but more likely just its beginning.

  Suddenly he knew what he had to do. Absentmindedly he had been fingering the keys in his pocket, and realised that one belonged to the door of Mary’s flat. He had omitted to give it back to her.

  The motorway traffic into London was heavy at that time of day, and it was nearly ten o’clock by the time he drew up outside the large Victorian house in Chiswick where Mary have lived in the garden flat.

  Looking at the house, he felt overwhelmed by sadness, remembering the pleasure and anticipation he used to feel when visiting her here, though a pleasure tinged with guilt. Mary had adored him, and to come here to see her had been a rejuvenation for him. But now she was dead. For a few minutes he just sat in his car, staring at the house, weighed down with his grief.

  Eventually he walked up the drive, with dread in his heart. He had had to come – to discover more about how she had died.

  The big house was divided into six apartments and the door to Mary’s garden flat was round at the side. He tried the key in the lock. It did not fit. The lock had been changed.

  There was a wooden gate leading into the garden, and he tried to open it, thinking he might see something through the French windows, but the gate was bolted from the other side.

  ‘You won’t find her, you know. She’s gone,’ an elderly female voice croaked behind him.

  Startled, he spun round to see the old woman who occupied the flat at the front of the house. She had been living there longer than anyone else and saw herself as something of a caretaker. Mary had considered her a busybody.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she continued, puffing at the cigarette clamped firmly in the corner of her mouth. She recognised him as the man she had often spotted stealing away from Mary’s flat in the early mornings.

  ‘Yes,’ Peter answered abruptly, annoyed at the way she had crept up on him. ‘Yes, I was trying to get into her flat, but the key she gave me doesn’t seem to fit anymore.’

  ‘No, it wouldn’t.’ She stared accusingly into his eyes. ‘They changed the lock after they broke the door down. You know what happened to her, I suppose?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Yes, well you would,’ she sniffed self-righteously.

  She was in her late sixties, with curly grey hair, and a pair of glasses sat crookedly on her nose.

  ‘So you’re a scientist, are you?’

  ‘How did you know that?’ Peter asked in surprise.

  ‘Policeman told me. His name was Black. Asked me all sorts of questions about Miss Maclean and her visitors. Seemed to know all about you. Even had a photo of you in his briefcase.’

  ‘Did he indeed?’ Peter answered as casually as possible trying to control his growing annoyance. ‘Tell me, do you by any chance have a spare key for the new lock? I seem to remember Miss Maclean saying you used to keep one for her in case she locked herself out.’

  ‘Want to go in there, do you?’ She looked at him oddly, her lower lip quivering. ‘No one’s cleaned up in there, you know. It was a horrible mess the policeman said. Told me I should keep well out of it. He said some relative of hers would come down at the weekend and sort things out.’

  ‘Do you have a key?’ Peter repeated abruptly.

  ‘Well, yes. As a matter of fact Mr Black gave me one so as I could let her relatives in when they come.’

  ‘Then may I borrow it, please? Obviously you know I was a close friend of hers,’ he insisted.

  She hesitated, looking anxious.

  ‘I suppose it’s all right,’ she muttered, turning back towards her own flat. ‘The police did say they’d finished.’

  As Peter waited for her, he was dreading what he might find inside.

  After a few minutes she returned and handed him a key. As he went in, she hovered by the door, not daring to enter. He closed the door firmly behind him.

  In the small entrance hall he stood still for a few moments, conscious of the silence. Mary had always treasured the way she could cut herself off from the world outside simply by closing that front door. None of the noise of passing traffic or aircraft seemed to penetrate in here. Today, though, that silence seemed unreal, as if any moment it might be broken by the sound of her voice calling out to him.

  He looked around; splintered wood on the door frame bore witness to the force used by the police to enter the flat. A rough job of carpentry had been done when the new lock was fitted, and wood shavings still littered the floor.

  Peter paused by the door to the living-room. Inside it looked much as always, though the cushions were squeezed into the corners of the chairs, where heavy policemen had clearly been sitting on them.

  At the end of the hall, two doors stood ajar. One led into the bedroom, but through the other he could see the edge of the bath and
the washbasin beyond. He dreaded entering that room, but knew he had to. As he drew nearer he could see streaky red-brown stains on the bathroom carpet.

  Fighting to control his nausea, he forced himself to look into the room. Blood streaks were also daubed round the edge of the bath and a concentrated stain round the plughole had been left where the water that had formed Mary’s shroud had drained her blood away.

  Peter choked at the sight and backed away. Turning into the neighbouring room he sat on the bed, clutching his head in his hands. He could not believe that she had done such a thing to herself. The sight of that blood made him realise just how violent her death had been. But that was the key to it. She was just not capable of such an act of violence. If Mary had ever contemplated suicide, it would have been by some other means. Gas or drugs maybe, but not to slash her own veins with a knife.

  ‘Somebody murdered you!’ he said out loud, astonished at the certainty of his conviction.

  And, yet, was he deceiving himself? Was there any real evidence of murder – or was it simply what he preferred to believe?

  He stood up. There might be something else, some other clue in this flat that would point to the truth of what had happened, something the police had overlooked. Against one wall of the bedroom stood a small writing table, and on it the portable typewriter on which her final letter was apparently written. Its keys were dusty with fingerprint powder. The police had been thorough, at least.

  He looked round the bedroom again, but nothing struck him as out of the ordinary. Then he walked down the hall to the living-room. Standing by the sofa, he rested a hand on it to support himself. A trace of Mary’s perfume seemed to linger in the air. He cast his eye round the room, looking for anything out of place – something that had not been there before, or something familiar missing from its usual position. He began with the bookcase, running his finger along the volumes which had meant so much to her. Then he moved into the kitchen; an unwashed wine glass stood on the draining-board, its lip and stem coated with the white powder used by the forensic men. Next to the cooker a rack for kitchen knives was fixed to the wall. He stared at it for a moment, conscious that one knife was missing. There should have been five. He had always noticed the perfect symmetry with which they were arranged there, with the largest knife in the middle and blades of decreasing size on each side. It was the smallest one that was missing, the one she had kept particularly sharp for slicing vegetables.