‘What else did he say, Commander Thurn?’
‘Not very much, he tried to assure me that their rogue marine is long gone and couldn’t have anything to do with it.’
‘Were you not convinced?’
‘It’s hard to say, they have things so very much under their control around here, the Americans. What about the housekeeper, anything useful?’
‘She gave me a bit of background on the family, she’s known them for years, some connection with the place they used to have in Ireland. She’s fond of the old lady in her way, though she says she’s a real dragon most of the time, but she’s definitely no fan of the young Mrs H-M. According to Esther, Felicity has no one but herself to blame for the marriage not turning out like she wanted it to; she says she set her cap at Nicholas when the old man was ill and took advantage of them being desperate for a new generation. Of course, this was seven or eight years ago and there’s still no heir,’
A red car passed them, a mother and father sat in the front, two children in the back. Two polystyrene surf boards and a rolled-up windbreak were strapped to the roof rack. In unison the family turned to stare at the policemen on the verge.
‘Presumably that accounts for that comment about the atmosphere being sterile,’ she said, ‘Not very kind,’
‘No, she’s always having a dig about it, apparently; that and the fact that she doesn’t think Nicholas is capable of running the estate properly, it’s been losing money for years. There’s a real atmosphere in the house, Esther says. The young couple avoid each other most of the time, there’s none of the entertaining that used to go on. Neither of them seems to have much of a social life, but she’s become good friends with Dr Murray, the GP in St Columb that we’re trying to get hold of. Esther doesn’t approve.’
‘Why not?’
‘Some Irish argy bargy. She says the doctor’s a typical Presbyterian. Though to be honest I don’t think Esther - or the old lady - would approve of anything that the young Mrs H-M did.’
‘And this is the same GP that’s been called away to Northern Ireland urgently?’
‘That’s right, Jones is still onto it.’
‘And what did Esther have to say about Nicholas?’
‘More sympathetic, she says he was always in the shadow of his older brother and then when Peter died it got worse. She says he’s tried, with the estate, but that his heart was never really in it. Felicity has taken on more and more of the running of it. Nowadays he tends to leave her to it, he spends a lot of time in his office, keeps away from the house when he can.’
The first man to reach the end of the designated search area stood up and stretched and stepped carefully over the string that lay like a horizontal plumb line on the grass. One by one his colleagues followed him over the line.
‘Anything?’ Monica asked.
‘Nothing at all, M’am.’
Early the next morning, instead of driving straight to the RAF station, Monica made a detour to the woods.
Amanda’s car had been taken away, some of the low hanging branches had been snapped by the passing of the winch on the back of the recovery vehicle. The site where the Renault had stood was marked off by tape. Some yards from the rectangular outline for the car, the small plastic marker flag remained stuck into the thick layer of browned conifer debris, marking the fall of Amanda’s torch. It had been a blue and white cased Eveready torch, ‘Mermaid Hotel’ was marked with a strip of Dymo lettering. Monica stood looking around. There was the trunk of a fallen tree, cautiously she sat down and lit a cigarette. The barren density of the trees’ canopy and the absence of sound made her uneasy. She listened intently and heard, in the distance, the rattle bag clatter of a pheasant. Somewhere in the trees perhaps Mrs Harvey’s radio was playing songs from a modern world. Monica stared at the place where the car had stopped and imagined Amanda arriving among the dark and lowering branches, a lively, restive, capricious presence, bringing her scent and her pretty clothes and her childish, demanding need to be loved. Someone, under the dark branches, had acted out a passion of one kind or another and shut down the bright chaos of the girl’s life. When Monica was a child there had been an oak bookcase, it went everywhere with them, even on the moonlight flits. On its bottom shelf lived a worn volume of Grimm’s Household Tales. Someone, her mother perhaps, had once coloured some of the book’s illustrations with watercolour paints. Monica had disliked the book and feared the horrors within the pages, horrors that capered or skulked or hovered and might wait, by sleight of eye, in the features of a natural landscape, most often a forest. She finished the cigarette and was careful to grind out the stub so that no spark could be left to catch light the dry brush. As she did so her eye was caught by a rapid, fleeting movement among the trees to her right. She felt her heart rate increase and she acknowledged her own foolishness in coming to back to the scene alone and unfamiliar and wearing her town pavement court shoes. She saw that the tallest of the bracken stems were swaying gently although there was no breeze. She stood up.
‘Robin,’ she called, ‘Robin, Mr Harvey, is that you?’
For several seconds the sense of the arrested flight of someone or something was palpable and then a low noise reverberated through the still air. Someone was humming, not in a tune but on one continuous note.
‘Robin,’ she called again, ‘perhaps we could talk …’
The pitch and the volume of the humming sound increased and then there was a rustling rush of undergrowth and twigs. She stayed by the fallen tree for several minutes, waiting for her breathing to slow and steady. Despite her instinct to return to the car, it would necessitate turning her back on the place where whoever it was had been hidden. Her mind moved over past situations where she had been afraid. There had been arrests and confrontations when the melodrama of violent death or injury had hung in the air. The scarlet of spilled blood or of ambulance blanket exclaimed on the humdrum, commonplace, mackintosh world but always she had been in the company of others. In recent years there had come another kind of fear. This newer fear was solitary and mostly it visited her at night, she would imagine the telephone ringing and it being the nursing home. But just supposing, suggested her crowded mind as she stood beside the fallen tree, just supposing it is not after all Garth who dies first but me. Me here, in a wood in a place that I do not much know or like.
‘On that cheerful note …’ upbraiding herself she felt braver and she looked down at her shoes and said ‘Bloody silly’ and began the walk back to her car. She placed her unsuitably shod feet firmly and followed a zig zag course away from the tall bracken. It was because she took this irregular route that she was able to glimpse, way off among the trees, what seemed to be a line of masonry. She stood still, craning and squinting through the trunks. There, perhaps five hundred yards distant, was the side wall of a building.
Several times as she walked towards the building it seemed to vanish, when at last she reached it she found a single storey Georgian lodge. It was dilapidated, the window spaces were boarded over with thick planks and a sheet of corrugated iron was nailed across the doorway. The roof line had sunk in the middle, a tarpaulin hayrick cover was draped unevenly across it. Moss and green stains had spread across the cover, acting as camouflage. Brambles craning for the light reached and arched at a wall corner. She walked around to the back of the building. The undergrowth here had been recently cut back, allowing a pathway just wide enough to walk without snagging on the thorns. Someone had placed sawn boughs against the wall, the dark bark and the slowly dying and browning foliage leaned like a wigwam of many besom brooms. Pausing, she smelled the resin smell and saw that there was a careful gap in the pine props. Once again, her heart beat grew loud in her ears as she peered into the gap and found the other door to the lodge. This door was fastened by a bolt and the bolt was clasped by a padlock. The padlock was shiny and looked new. It bore a sticky price label. The label showed that the padlock had been purchased from Glanville’s, the ironmonger’s in St Columb Majo
r.
When Monica returned to the lodge she was accompanied by Sergeant Bee and DS Toy and a patrol constable. The constable had taken from the boot of his car a pair of bolt cutters and, as an afterthought, a crow bar which he handed to DS Toy to carry. First in line, the constable’s uniform shirt gleamed white among the trees. As they reached the lodge he and Toy paused at the front door.
‘Not there,’ said Monica and the men trooped silently after her around the side of the building to the bough wigwam.
The three small rooms of the canal surveyor’s lodge were ruinous, in one they found the broken carcase of a standing desk. The ceiling plaster had fallen in and lay whitish among the white grey of bird mess and bones and feathers and the criss-cross of nest twigs and lath strips.
The fourth, large room had remained sound and dry against the elements and was to some extent furnished. On the swept floor lay a camping mattress and two neatly folded tartan rugs. On the plain slate mantelpiece stood a champagne bottle with a candle fixed in the neck by rivulets of melted wax. Beside the bottle was a circular mirror on a stand, a florist’s bouquet in a tall glass jar which had once held orange juice from Israel, and the box, black and white houndstooth checked, for a bottle of Christian Dior scent. There was a fur rug and in the grate logs had been recently burned, to one side of the hearth, a neat stack stood ready. On the wall above the mantelpiece hung an oil painting in a heavy gilt frame. The painting was a depiction mainly grey and silver, of a haycart going laden home through a moonlit landscape. On the ceiling above the bed a silhouette hung from a drawing pin. It was a white card cut-out of an elaborate bird cage with two love birds inside it. As the policemen moved around the room the silhouette cage turned slowly in the draught.
‘Rubbish here M’am,’ the constable called and moving into one of the smaller rooms Monica found him gingerly peering into a black plastic sack while Sergeant Bee looked on.
‘Go on then boy, tip it out,’ said the sergeant.
Reluctantly the younger man lifted the bag and shook out its contents, stepping back from a reek of fish. Martin Bee grinned, ‘Now all you got to do is make an inventory.’
The constable fetched a twig to poke at the pile. Ten minutes later he took his list to Martin Bee and Monica, waiting outside. With the list were several of the imprinted bottom copies from credit card transactions. It was the smoked salmon wrapping, explained the constable, that accounted for the stink.
‘They did themselves all right then her, and whoever,’ said the sergeant.
‘They did,’ Monica agreed, ‘and now,’ she held up the slips of thin paper receipts ‘we know who the whoever is’.
‘Hello again Miss Lyons,’ said Monica. The secretary was wearing the same white cardigan over a dress with a trellis pattern. Today her three-row necklace of pearls had an apricot hue.
‘Is Mr Haig-Mercer here?’
‘He is, yes, I’ll just …’ she stood up but Nicholas Haig-Mercer was already descending the staircase.
‘It’s all right, Lydia,’ he said.
With one hand she clasped the fingers of her other hand. She did not reply but nodded several times, as if in approval or relief or encouragement. Nicholas Haig-Mercer was wearing a pale blue vee necked jersey and a checked Viyella shirt and twill trousers.
‘Shall we sit down,’
Monica pulled forward two of the grey office chairs. Sergeant Bee stood to one side of the desks. Lydia said ‘I’ll just pop upstairs’ and Monica nodded. When the secretary was half way up the staircase she paused and said with reedy-voiced firmness
‘You know where I am if you need me, Nicholas,’
Monica pulled the secretary’s chair closer to him, it was a revolving chair and the seat made a quarter turn as it moved.
‘When did you first meet Amanda Shute, Mr Haig-Mercer?’ she asked.
He smiled, he was gazing away from them, into memory,
‘I saw her first in Truro, at the offices of my solicitor, she had just come out of the waiting room, but that day she didn’t notice me. Afterwards I kept thinking about her, I couldn’t get her out of my mind … I even wondered if I could telephone Rosewarne on some pretext, get him to tell me who she was. Then, a few weeks later, she just miraculously appeared, here, in the garden…’
‘Was this at the fête, for Feast Week?’
‘Yes, that’s right, yes,’ for a moment he looked pleased and grateful, as though she had identified a piece of music that he had heard but could not name.
‘Did your affair begin straightaway?’
‘Pretty much, it did yes. I mean, I was already hooked and Amanda, incredibly, marvellously, felt the same way about me. The first time, I asked her out to dinner. We went down to the Tregenna Castle at St Ives. When they closed the restaurant, we were the last to leave, we began to drive back but then we stopped at Trevose and we sat in the car all night long, just talking. Amanda and I could talk to each other about anything … things we could never have told other people …’
‘Did anyone know about your affair?’
‘No, no one knew. We were very careful – we had to be - things have been difficult, with Felicity, and with my mother, we couldn’t risk anyone knowing about us, not until we could be sure of our plans for the future. It’s hard to keep anything secret in a place like Cornwall. We needed to have somewhere we could meet, to be together, we tried hotels, but it was either risky – because Amanda’s family are so well known in the trade, or it was just … sordid somehow, snatching a couple of hours together as though it were something to be ashamed of…’
‘So, you decided on the surveyor’s lodge?’
‘Yes,’ he looked at Monica, searching her expression, ‘Have you been there?’
‘We have, yes. It must have made a very private place for you.’
‘It did. I hadn’t been there since I was a boy, my father used to take Peter and me out there to camp. I had told Amanda about it and she asked if we could go and see it. At first it took me some time to find it again, my father had that part of the woods closed off after there was an accident and everything had grown up around it. When I did find it and I showed Amanda, she loved it, I knew that she would. Even on the coldest days, we could make a fire and it was perfect…’
‘Didn’t the Harveys know you were going there?’
‘Only Robin, he came across us one day, he’d seen the smoke from the chimney and he was curious. I made him promise not to tell anyone, not even his mother. I offered him money to keep quiet but he refused, he said he didn’t want it, he just liked keeping secrets … so I promised him that I would try and arrange for him and his mother to be rehoused, somewhere easier for her… It’s funny, you know, Robin and I are the same age …’
‘You were very successful at keeping your affair secret. Amanda’s family thought that there was someone but they had no idea who it was.’
Again he smiled, ‘Do you know how we used to keep in touch with each other? Vagabond language. It was something my father taught us when we used to camp out in the woods. Amanda picked it up straight away, we chose a place beside the road, somewhere we both passed every day, we could leave our messages there and no one else understood … no one else even noticed, that’s the thing, you see, about vagabond language, people don’t see it …’
‘And Mrs Haig-Mercer, your wife – and your mother – they had no idea about the affair?’
‘None whatsoever. I’m afraid I made a mistake, a pretty big mistake, when I married Felicity. I knew it wasn’t right, even at the very beginning, but I thought, if we could have children, make a go of it, you know … but of course the children didn’t happen and that made it worse for us both, with my mother. I don’t believe that she has ever forgiven me for not being the son who died. Peter, my brother, he would never have made a hames of things like I had done … anyway, Felicity and I had stayed together, but we were living separate lives… sometimes days went by without us even speaking to each other. But with Amanda, it was
all so … so right – she was interested in all the things that interest me, she wanted to share everything … she even began taking Russian lessons … it was my thing, you see, Russian literature, before I had to come back to run the estate…’
‘And so, your affair has been going on since last autumn?’
‘Yes, it’s funny, men aren’t supposed to remember dates and things, are they – but I can tell you that it was nine months and twenty-seven days … I didn’t know it was possible to be that happy.’
He suppressed a sound in his chest. Sergeant Bee, looking at the violet blue shadows under the other man’s eyes, thought that the sound might have turned into a sigh or a sob or even perhaps a yawn, as he was over taken by the exhausted relief of speaking out.
Monica, quietly and firmly, said
‘Mr Haig-Mercer, we have to ask you, where were you on Tuesday night?’
He sat up abruptly, shaking from himself the drowsing lull of relief or remembering.
‘Surely to God …’ he looked first at Monica and then at the sergeant and he paused because he saw that both were both watching him intently, in their different ways, ‘surely you can’t think that I killed her … you can’t …’
‘We have to ask you, Mr Haig-Mercer, you must realise that.’
He subsided, exhaustion seemed to overtake him again.
‘I suppose … On Tuesday I was in London, I had to meet a friend to …’ this time he looked first at the sergeant. ‘I wish that I had never gone,’ he said.
‘What did you have to do?’ asked Monica.
‘I had to make the final arrangements. Amanda and I were going away, you see.’
‘Where were you going?’
‘Initially, we were going to the Midlands, Lichfield, later on we were going to be travelling about a lot …’
‘Where?’
‘All over the place, Eastern Europe, the Soviet Bloc,’
‘You need to tell us more,’ said Monica.
‘Barney, Barnabas Toms, he’s an old friend of mine, I’ve known him since my publishing days. Barney’s set up a new venture, Amanda and I … we were going to work for him.’
The Trebelzue Gate Page 18
