The Secret House of Death Read online

  ‘You said this was the most convenient time,’ said the drawling pedantic voice, ‘so, since I aim to please, I’ve dragged myself away in the middle of my prawn cocktail.’

  ‘Hallo, Julian.’

  His habit of plunging into the middle of things without greeting, preamble or announcing who he was, always irritated her. Of course an ex-wife might be expected to recognise her ex-husband’s voice; that was fair enough. But Susan knew he did it to everyone, to the remotest acquaintance. In his own estimation he was unique, and it was unthinkable to him that even the deaf or the phone-shy could mistake him for anyone else.

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘I am well.’ This strictly correct but unidiomatic reply was another Julianism. He was never ‘fine’ or even ‘very well’. ‘How are things in Matchdown Park?’

  ‘Much the same,’ said Susan, bracing herself for the sneer.

  ‘I was afraid of that. Now, listen, my dear, I’m afraid Sunday’s out as far as having Paul is concerned. Elizabeth’s mamma wants us for the weekend and naturally I can’t chicken out of that even if I want to, which I don’t.’

  ‘I suppose you could take him with you.’

  ‘Lady Maskell isn’t exactly mad about having tots around the place.’

  It had always seemed odd to Susan that Julian, the editor of a left-wing review, should in the first place have married a baronet’s daughter and secondly should set so much store by the landed gentry to which his in-laws belonged.

  ‘This is the second time since Christmas you’ve put him off,’ she said. ‘It seems rather pointless the judge making an order for you to have him every fourth Sunday if you’re always going to be too busy. He was looking forward to it.’

  ‘Oh, you can take him out somewhere. Take him to the zoo.’

  ‘It’s his birthday the day after tomorrow. I thought I’d better remind you.’

  ‘Flap not, my dear. Elizabeth’s got it down on her shopping list to make sure we keep it in mind.’

  ‘That’s fine then, isn’t it?’ Susan’s voice shook with annoyance. It had been an impossible day, thronged with impossible people. ‘You’d better get back to your steak,’ she said in the nagging tone he both provoked and hated, ‘or whatever’s next on the menu.’ Elizabeth had got it on her shopping list! Susan could imagine that list: canned prawns, peppers, cocktail sticks, birthday present for ‘tot’, fillet steak, chocs for Mummy. . . . How maddening Julian was! Strange that whereas remembered words and phrases of his could sadden her and awaken pain, these weekly telephone conversations never did.

  He was bound to send Paul something utterly ridiculous, an electric guitar or a skin-diving outfit, neither of which were outside the bounds of what Julian or Elizabeth would consider suitable for a middle-class suburban child on his sixth birthday. Susan went around the house bolting the doors for the night. Usually on this evening task she never bothered to glance up at the side of Braeside, but tonight she did and it disquieted her to see the place in darkness.

  Could Louise already have gone to bed? It was scarcely eight o’clock. A simple curiosity, an inquisitiveness as indefensible as Doris’s possessed her, drawing her into the front garden to stare frankly at the house next door. It was a blot of darkness amid its brightly lit neighbours. Perhaps Louise had gone out. Very likely she had gone out to meet her lover and was now sitting with him in some characterless North Circular Road pub or holding hands in a half-empty café. But Susan didn’t think she had and it depressed her to imagine Louise lying sleepless in that house with her eyes open on the dark.

  She listened, hardly knowing what she was listening for. She heard nothing and then, a little unnerved, she listened to the silence. Julian called Matchdown Park a dormitory and at night it was a dormitory indeed, its denizens enclosed like bees in their warm cells. And yet it was incredible that so many people should live and breathe around her, all in utter silence.

  But if this was silence, it was nothing to the deep mute soundlessness of the back garden. Susan checked her back door lock, noticing that the wind had died. There was no movement in the black trees and, apart from the running river of traffic in the distance, no light but from the three red spots of the lamps the workmen had left on their pyramid of clay.

  4

  David Chadwick hadn’t seen Bernard Heller for months and then, quite by chance, he bumped into him on a Tuesday evening in Berkeley Square. It was outside Stewart and Ardern’s and Heller had his arms full of cardboard boxes. Some heating equipment, David thought, that he must going to dump at the offices in Hay Hill where Equatair had its headquarters.

  Heller didn’t look particularly pleased to see him, although he forced his features into an unsuccessful grin. David, on the other hand, was glad they had met. Last summer, on a generous impulse, he had lent Heller his slide projector and now he thought it was time he got it back.

  ‘How are things?’

  ‘Oh, so-so.’ The boxes were stacked up under Heller’s chin and perhaps it was this which gave to his face a set look.

  ‘How about a drink if you’re knocking off?’

  ‘I’ve got some more stuff to unload.’

  ‘I’ll give you a hand,’ David said firmly. He didn’t want to lose him now.

  ‘In the car, then.’

  He still had the same green Zephyr Six, David noted as he lifted out the three remaining boxes from the boot which Heller had opened. The cardboard was torn on the top one and inside part of a gas burner could be seen.

  ‘Thanks,’ Heller said, and then, with an effort to be gracious, ‘Thanks very much, David.’

  Equatair’s swing doors were still open. A couple of typists in white boots and fun furs passed them on the steps. Heller put his boxes on the floor of a small vestibule and David followed suit. Photographs of radiators and boilers and one of a lush living-room interior were pinned to the walls. It reminded David of his own designs for television film sets. That was how he had first met Heller, through work. Equatair made fireplaces too and David had borrowed one for the set of a series called, Make Mine Crime.

  ‘How about that drink?’

  ‘All right. I’m in no hurry to get home.’ Heller didn’t look at David when he said this and he mumbled something else with his head averted. It might have been, ‘God knows, I’m not,’ but David couldn’t be sure of that.

  He was a big heavy man, this heating engineer, with a round bullet head and hair that stuck up in short curly bristles. Usually he was almost irritatingly cheerful, inclined to slap people on the back while he told tedious jokes which, for all that, had about them an innocent slapstick quality. Tonight he had a hangdog look and David thought he had lost weight. His plump jowls sagged and they were greyish, perhaps not just because Heller, normally careful of his appearance, was in need of a shave.

  ‘There’s a nice little place in Berwick Street I sometimes go to,’ David said. He hadn’t got his car with him so they went in Heller’s. For an engineer-cum-salesman, he was a lousy driver, David thought. Twice he was afraid they were going to go into the back of a taxi. It was his first experience of being driven by Heller as their encounters had usually been for a pre-lunch drink or a sandwich. Heller had been kindness itself over the fireplace and almost embarrassingly generous. It had been a job to stop him paying for all their drinks. Then, back in July, he had happened to say his twin brother had been staying with relatives in Switzerland—they were Swiss or half-Swiss or something—but couldn’t show the slides he had taken because he hadn’t a projector. For a long time David had wanted to show his gratitude, but it was difficult while Heller insisted on paying for everything. The loan of the projector had settled that question.

  Paying off debts was one thing. He hadn’t expected the man to hang on to it for eight months without a word.

  ‘I wonder if I might have my projector back sometime?’ he said as they crossed Regent Street. ‘The summer’s coming and holidays . . .’

  ‘Oh, sure,’ Heller said without enth
usiasm. ‘I’ll drop it off at the studios, shall I?’

  ‘Please.’ It wouldn’t have hurt him to say thank you. Still, he evidently had something on his mind. ‘That’s the place, The Man in the Iron Mask. If you’re quick you can nip in between that van and the Mercedes.’

  Heller wasn’t very quick. Twice he bungled the reversing manœuvre. The pub was tucked between an Indonesian restaurant and a strip club. Heller gave the pictures of nudes on leopard skin a sick look.

  Over the entrance to The Man in the Iron Mask was a sign depicting this apocryphal character, his head encased in a cage. David went in first. Inside the place was cosy and overheated and with its black and white tiled floor and walls panelled in dark wood, suggested a Dutch interior. But the hunting prints could only be English and nowhere but in England would you see the facetious slogans and the pinned-up cartoons.

  The area behind the bar was suffused with red light, making it look like the entrance to a furnace, and this same light stained the faces of the man and the girl who sat there. Her fingernails showed mauve when she moved her hands out of the red glow to caress her boy-friend’s shoulders. The discerning would have recognised his grey tunic as the upper half of a Confederate uniform.

  ‘What are you going to have?’ David asked, anticipating the usual. ‘No, let me.’

  ‘Lime and lager,’ Heller said only.

  ‘Big stuff. What are we celebrating?’

  ‘It’s just that I have to drive.’

  David went up to the bar. He was trying to remember where Heller lived. South London somewhere. If he was going to have to make conversation with this semi-conscious man, he would need something strong.

  ‘Double scotch and a lime and lager, please,’ he said to the barman.

  ‘You mean lager and lime.’

  ‘I don’t suppose it would matter at that.’

  Heller rubbed his big forehead as if it ached. ‘D’you often come in here?’

  ‘Off and on. It’s quiet. You see some interesting characters.’ And as he spoke, the Confederate kissed his girl on her oyster-coloured mouth. The door opened with an abrupt jerk and two bearded men came in.

  They advanced to the bar and, because it was for an instant unattended, knocked sharply on the counter. The taller of the two, having given their order with a scowl, resumed an anecdote. The red glow turned his beard to ginger.

  ‘So I said to this bank manager chappie, “It’s all very well you moaning about my overdraft,” I said. “Where would your lot be without overdrafts?” I said, “That’s what I’d like to know. That’s what keeps you banks going. You’d be out of a job, laddie,” I said.’

  ‘Quite,’ said the other man.

  Heller didn’t even smile. His florid skin was puckered about his eyes and the corners of his mouth turned down.

  ‘How’s work?’ David asked desperately.

  ‘Just the same.’

  ‘Still operating in the Wembley—Matchdown Park area?’

  Heller nodded and mumbled into his glass, ‘Not for long.’

  David raised an eyebrow.

  ‘I’m going abroad. Switzerland.’

  ‘Then we are celebrating. I seem to remember your once saying that’s what you wanted. Haven’t Equatair got a footing out there?’

  ‘Zürich.’

  ‘When do you go?’

  ‘May.’

  The man’s manner was only just short of rude. If he went on like that it was a wonder he ever sold anyone a thermostat replacement, let alone a whole central heating system. It struck David suddenly that May was only two months off. If he ever wanted to see his projector again he had better look sharp about it.

  ‘You’re fluent in German, aren’t you? Bi-lingual?’

  ‘I went to school in Switzerland.’

  ‘You must be excited.’ It was a stupid thing to say, like asking a shivering man if he was hot.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Heller said. ‘Might have been once.’ He finished his drink and a spark of something fierce flashed momentarily in his dark eyes. ‘People change, you get older.’ He got up. ‘There doesn’t seem much point in anything, does there?’ Without offering to buy David a drink, he said. ‘Can I drop you anywhere? Northern Line for you, isn’t it?’

  David lived alone in a bachelor flat. He wasn’t going anywhere that night and he intended to eat out. ‘Look, I don’t want to be a bore about this,’ he said awkwardly, ‘but if you’re going straight home, would you mind if I came along with you and collected my projector?’

  ‘Now, d’you mean?’

  ‘Well, yes. You’re going in May and I dare say you’ve got a lot on your mind.’

  ‘All right,’ Heller said ungraciously. They got into the car and David’s spirits improved slightly when the other man said, with a ghost of his old grin, ‘Bear with me, old man. I’m not very good company these days. It was decent of you to lend us the projector. I didn’t intend to hold on to it.’

  ‘I know that,’ David said, feeling much better.

  They went over one of the bridges and down past the Elephant and Castle. Heller drove by a twisty route through back streets and although he seemed to know his way, he was careless about traffic lights and once he went over a pedestrian crossing with people on it.

  Silence had fallen between them and Heller broke it only to say, ‘Nearly there.’ The street was full of buses going to places David knew only by name, Kennington, Brixton, Stock-well. On the left-hand side a great blank wall with small windows in it ran for about two hundred yards. It might have been a barracks or a prison. There wasn’t a tree or a patch of grass in sight. At a big brightly lit Odeon Heller turned right and David saw that they were at a typical South London crossroads, dominated by a collonaded church in the Wren style, only Wren had been dead a hundred and fifty years when it was put up. Opposite it was a tube station. David didn’t know which one. All he could see was London Transport’s Saturn-shaped sign, glowing blue and red. People streamed out over the crossing, their faces a sickly green in the mercury vapour light.

  Some of them took a short cut home through a treeless park with a cricket pavilion and public lavatories. Heller drove jumpily on the inside lane of the stream. The street was neither truly shopping centre nor residential. Most of the big old houses were in the process of being pulled down. Shops there were, but all of the same kind, thrust shabbily together in a seemingly endless rhythmic order: off-licence, café, pet foods, betting shop, off-licence, café . . . If he were Heller he wouldn’t have been able to wait for May. The prospect of Zürich would be like heaven. What kind of a slum did the man live in, anyway?

  Not a slum at all. A fairly decent, perhaps ten-year-old block of flats. They were arranged in four storeys around a grass and concrete court. Hengist House. David looked around for Horsa and saw it fifty yards ahead. Some builder with Anglo-Saxon attitudes, he thought; amused.

  Heller put the car into a bay marked with white lines.

  ‘We’re on the ground floor,’ he said. ‘Number three.’

  The entrance hall looked a bit knocked about. Someone had written, ‘Get back to Kingston’ on a wall between two green doors. David didn’t think they had meant Kingston, Surrey. Heller put his key into the lock of number three. They had arrived.

  A narrow passage ran through the flat to an open bathroom door. Heller didn’t call out and when his wife appeared he didn’t kiss her.

  Seeing her gave David a jolt. Heller was only in his early thirties but he was already touched by the heavy hand of middle-age. This girl looked very young. He hadn’t been thinking about her so he had no preconceived idea as to how she would look. Nevertheless, he was startled by what he saw and as he met her eyes he knew she expected him to be startled and was pleased.

  She wore blue jeans and one of those skinny sweaters that there is no point in wearing if you really are skinny. Her figure was the kind that is photographed large and temptingly in the non-quality Sundays. Long black hair that a brush touch would set sp
arking fell to her shoulders.

  ‘I don’t think you’ve met,’ Heller mumbled, and that was all the introduction David got. Mrs Heller peeled herself from the wall and now her glance was indifferent. ‘Make yourself at home. I won’t be a minute finding the projector.’ He looked at his wife. ‘That slide projector,’ he said. ‘Where did you put it when Carl brought it back?’

  ‘In the bedroom cupboard, I suppose.’

  Heller showed him into the living-room, if pushing open a door and muttering could be called showing anyone anywhere. Then he went away. The room had three white walls and one red one with a stringed instrument hanging above an Equatair radiator. A little bit of haircord clung to the centre of the floor space. Mrs Heller came in and rather ostentatiously placed cutlery for two persons on the table. It amused David to reflect on the domestic surroundings of real salesmen-executives. In the films and plays he did sets for they had open-plan apartments, forty feet long, split-level with wall-to-wall carpeting, room dividers festooned with ivy, leather furniture. He sat down in an armchair that was a woven plastic cone in a metal frame. Outside the buses moved in a white and yellow glare.

  ‘Sorry to come bursting in on you like this,’ he said. She put two glasses of water on the table. In his films they had bottles of Romani Conti served in straw baskets. ‘I happened to run into Bernard and I remembered my projector.’

  She swivelled, tilting her chin. ‘Ran into him, did you?’ Her voice had the remnants of a burr he couldn’t place. ‘D’you mind telling me where?’

  ‘In Berkeley Square,’ he said, surprised.

  ‘Sure it wasn’t Matchdown Park?’

  ‘Quite sure.’ What was all this? The man was legitimately employed in Matchdown Park, wasn’t he? He watched her as she finished laying the table. An orchidaceous face, he thought. Horrible word, but it just described that lush velvety skin, the little nose and the full pink pearl lips. Her eyes were green with gold sparks. ‘I hear you’re going to Switzerland. Looking forward to it?’

  She shrugged. ‘Nothing’s settled yet.’