The Secret House of Death Read online

  ‘But surely Bernard said . . .’

  ‘You don’t want to listen to everything he says.’

  David followed her into the kitchen because he couldn’t hang about there any longer with the glasses of water and the mandoline or whatever it was. The blue jeans were provocative as she bent to light her cigarette from the gas. He wondered how old she was. Not more than twenty-four or twenty-five. In the next room he could hear Heller banging about, apparently shifting things from a high shelf.

  A pan of water was heating on the cooker. Already cooked and lying dispiritedly on a plate were two small overdone chops. When the water in the pan boiled the girl took it from the gas and emptied into it the contents of a packet labelled, ‘Countryman’s Supper. Heavenly mashed potatoes in thirty seconds.’ David wasn’t sorry they weren’t going to ask him to share it.

  ‘Magdalene!’

  Heller’s voice sounded weary and fed-up. So that was her name, Magdalene. She looked up truculently as her husband lumbered in.

  ‘I can’t think where it’s got to,’ Heller said worriedly, glancing with embarrassment at his dusty hands.

  ‘Leave it,’ David said. ‘I’m keeping you from your meal.’

  ‘Maybe it’s up there.’ It was the girl who had spoken, indicating a closed cupboard on top of the dresser. David was a little surprised, for up till now, she had shown no interest in the recovery of his property and seemed indifferent as to whether he went or stayed.

  Heller dragged out a stool from under the table and stuck it against the dresser on which was a pile of unironed linen. His wife watched him open the cupboard and fumble about inside.

  ‘There was a phone call for you,’ she said abruptly, her full mouth pouting. ‘That North woman.’ Heller mumbled something. ‘I thought it was a bloody nerve, phoning here.’ This time her husband made no reply. ‘Damned cheek!’ she said, as if trying to provoke from him a spark of anger.

  ‘I hope you didn’t forget your manners on the phone.’

  David was rather shocked. Uncouth, graceless, Magdalene might be, jealous even. She had hardly deserved to be reproved with such paternal gruffness in front of a stranger. She was evidently drawing breath for an appropriate rejoinder, but David never found out what it would have been. Heller, whose aims and shoulders had been inside the cup-board, retreated and, as he emerged, something heavy and metallic fell out on to the linen.

  It was a gun.

  David knew next to nothing about firearms. A Biretta or a Mauser, they were all the same to him. He knew only that it was some sort of automatic. It lay there glistening, half on Heller’s underpants and half on a pink pillow slip.

  Neither of the Hellers said anything. To break the rather ghastly silence, David said facetiously, ‘Your secret arsenal?’

  Heller started gabbling very fast then. ‘I know I shouldn’t have it, it’s illegal. As a matter of fact, I smuggled it in from the States. Went on a business trip. The Customs don’t always look, you know. Magdalene had got scared, being here alone. You get some very funny people about out there, fights, brawls, that kind of thing. Only last week there was a bloke down in the alley shouting at some woman to give him his money. A ponce, I dare say. Hitting her and shouting he was. In Greek,’ he added, as if this made things worse.

  ‘It’s no business of mine,’ David said.

  ‘I just thought you might think it funny.’

  Suddenly Magdalene stamped her foot. ‘Hurry up, for God’s sake. We’re going to the pictures at seven-thirty and it’s ten past now. And there’s the washing-up to do first.’

  ‘I’ll do that.’

  ‘Aren’t you coming, then?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  She turned off the oven, lifted the plates and carried them into the living-room. David thought she would return, but she didn’t. The door closed and faintly from behind it he heard the sound of spy thriller music.

  ‘Here it is at last,’ Heller said. ‘It was right at the back behind the hair dryer.’

  ‘I’ve put you to a lot of trouble.’

  Heller passed the projector down to him. ‘That’s one thing I won’t have to worry about, anyway,’ he said. He didn’t close the cupboard doors and he left the gun where it lay.

  Perhaps it was the presence of the gun, grim, ugly, vaguely threatening, in this grim and ugly household that made David say on an impulse, ‘Look, Bernard, if there’s anything I can do . . .’

  Heller said stonily, ‘Nobody can do anything. Not a magician, are you? Not God? You can’t put the clock back.’

  ‘You’ll be better when you get to Zürich.’

  ‘If I get there.’

  The whole thing had shaken David considerably. Once out of the courtyard, he found himself a pub, bigger and brassier and colder than the Man in the Iron Mask. He had another whisky and then he walked up to the tube station, discovering when he was a few yards from it that it was called East Mulvihill. As he walked under the stone canopy of the station entrance he caught sight of Magdalene Heller on the other side of the street, walking briskly, almost running, towards the big cinema he and Heller had passed. She looked jerkily to right and left before she went in. He watched her unzip her heavy shoulder bag, buy a ticket and go alone up the stairs to the balcony.

  The cause of Heller’s misery was no longer in doubt. His marriage had gone wrong. One of these ill-assorted, very obviously incompatible people, had transgressed, and from what Magdalene had hinted of a telephone call, David gathered the transgressor was Heller. It looked as if he had found himself another woman. Had he dwindled to this taciturn shadow of the cheerful buffoon he once had been because it was not she but Magdalene he must take with him to Switzerland?

  5

  On the way to school they passed the postman and Paul said, ‘I don’t have to go to school tomorrow until after he’s been, do I?’

  ‘We’ll see,’ Susan said.

  ‘Well, I shan’t,’ he said mutinously for Richard’s benefit. Richard ran ahead, jumping into the air at intervals to grab at the cherry branches. ‘He’ll be early anyway,’ Paul said in a more conciliatory tone, taking his mother’s hand. ‘Daddy’s going to send me a watch. He promised.’

  ‘A watch! Oh, Paul . . .’ Of all the vulnerable and ultimately—when Paul fell over in the playground as he did two or three times a week—tear-provoking presents for a six-year-old! ‘You’ll have to keep it for best.’

  They reached the school gates and the two little boys were absorbed by the throng. Susan looked at the children with different eyes this morning, seeing them as potential adults, makers of misery. A cold melancholy stole over her. Determinedly she braced herself, waved to Paul and turned back towards Orchard Drive.

  It was ten to nine, the time she usually saw Bob North. His car regularly passed the school gates about now. Susan didn’t want to see him. She remembered their last encounter with distaste. He wouldn’t offer her a lift today as he would be able to see she intended to go straight home, but she was certain he would stop. Probably he had found out about Louise’s visit to her and their appointment for this morning and he would be anxious to put his own story across before Louise could blacken his character. People in Louise’s situation always blamed their marriage partners. Julian had spent a long time pointing out her deficiencies as a wife, her nagging, her dislike of his more avant-garde friends, her old-fashioned morality, before embarking on the tale of his own infidelity.

  She felt very exposed as she walked back under the cherry trees, nervously aware that any time now Bob’s car would nose or back out of the Braeside drive. She thought wildly of bending down to retie her shoelace or, if this ploy failed, diving into the house of someone she slightly knew. The trouble was she hardly knew anyone well enough for that.

  It was a still day, not quite foggy, but uniformly grey. Rain threatened in the clammy air. Susan quickened her pace as she approached Braeside and then she remembered. Bob’s car was in for a service. He would go to work by train today, s
o therefore he had probably left much earlier, had certainly left by now. Her spirits lifted absurdly. Really, it was stupid to work herself up to such a nervous pitch because in a couple of hours time one of her neighbours was going to confide something rather unorthodox to her. That was all it amounted to.

  Braeside had a dull dead look. The upstairs curtains were all drawn as if the Norths were away. Perhaps Louise was lying late in bed. Unhappiness made you want to do that. Jane Willingale would have attributed it to a desire to get back to the womb but Susan thought it was only because you felt there was nothing to get up for.

  As usual there was not a single open window, not even a fanlight lifted an inch or two. It must be cold and stuffy in there, the air stale with angrily exhaled breath and tears and quarrels.

  Mrs Dring would arrive at any moment. Susan let herself into her own warm house and began to grease tins and beat mixture for Paul’s party cakes. Her hall clock chimed nine and as the last stroke died away, the pneumatic drills began.

  Breaking across this shrill sound, the Airedale’s bark sounded hollow. He was used to Mrs Dring by now and wouldn’t bark at her arrival. Not for the first time Susan wondered why this canine summons was impossible to resist. Hardly anyone really interesting ever came to Orchard Drive and yet Pollux never barked in vain. She was as vulnerable to the alert as any of the women, although, unlike them, a change of delivery man or a new meter reader left her indifferent. She didn’t want to speculate as to why Fortnum’s van had called at Gibbs’s or a couple of nuns at O’Donnells’. Sometimes she thought she rushed to the window when Pollux barked because, against all experience to the contrary, she always hoped the roar announced a newcomer into her own life, someone who would change it, who would bring hope and joy.

  How pathetic and childish, she thought as, in spite of herself, she ran into the living-room and drew aside the curtain. Winters’ gate clanged between its concrete posts and Pollux, who had half-mounted it in his rage, dropped back on to the path with a thump.

  Susan stared. On the grass patch in the pavement, its tyres buried in the ruts they had made on Monday, stood the green Ford Zephyr.

  Once again Louise North was entertaining her lover.

  ‘Good morning, dear. Did you think I wasn’t coming?’

  Mrs Dring always bellowed this question on a triumphant note if she was more than a minute late. A large raw-boned redhead of forty-five, she put immense value on herself and the work she did, confident that her employers, in the event of her non-appearance, must be reduced to a helpless and desperate panic like abandoned infants.

  ‘I’ll do downstairs, shall I?’ she said, putting her head round the door. ‘Make it nice for the boy’s party.’ Cleaning a room before a children’s party seemed pointless to Susan, but it was useless arguing with Mrs Dring. ‘Want me to come and give you a hand tomorrow? There’s nothing anyone can tell me about running kids’ parties. Famous for them I am.’

  Mrs Dring didn’t explain how she came to know so much about the organisation of children’s parties. She had no children of her own. But she was always making statements of this kind in a dark tone, as if implying that all her acquaintances were aware of her omnipotent versatility and took repeated advantage of it. She had a good word for no one except her husband, a man whose competence in the most unlikely fields rivalled her own and who possessed in equal measure to his manual and administrative skills a superhuman intelligence quotient.

  ‘There’s nothing that man doesn’t know,’ she would say.

  Now she advanced into the room and went straight up to the window where she stood tying up her hair, almost scarlet this morning, in a scarf.

  ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you,’ she said, her eye on the green car, ‘what’s going on next door?’

  ‘Going on?’

  ‘You know what I mean. I got it from my friend who helps Mrs Gibbs. Mind you, my friend’s a proper little liar and I reckon anyone who’d believe a word Mrs Gibbs says must want her head tested.’ Drawing breath, Mrs Dring proceeded at once to place herself in this lunatic category. ‘She says Mrs North is carrying on with the central heating fellow.’

  ‘Do you know him?’ Susan couldn’t stop herself asking.

  ‘I’ve seen him about. My husband could tell you his name. You know what a wonderful memory he’s got. We was thinking about central heating ourselves and I said, You want to talk to that fellow—Heffer or Heller or something—who’s always about in a green car. But my husband put the pipes in himself in the end. There’s nothing he can’t do it he puts his mind to it.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t he be calling on Mrs North just for business?’

  ‘Yes, funny business. Well, it stands to reason he’s in the right job for that kind of thing if he fancies it. It’s her I’m disgusted with.’ Seeing Susan wasn’t to be drawn, Mrs Dring dropped the curtain and pulled two kiss-curls, as fluorescent red as Day-glo paint, out on to her forehead. ‘What d’you think of my hair? It’s called flamingo, this shade. My husband did it last night. I always tell him he ought to have gone into the trade. He’d have been in the West End by now.’

  Susan began typing desultorily. Mrs Dring was never silent for long and these mornings she was on edge, constantly distracted from work by futile remarks. Her cleaner, engaged in the first place ‘to do the rough’ had soon made it clear that she preferred polishing and cleaning silver to heavy work and her favourite tasks were those which kept her at a vantage point near one of the windows.

  Now, having observed all there was to see in Orchard Drive, she had stationed herself at the french windows with the plate powder and a trayful of Susan’s silver ornaments. It was half past nine. Although it had begun to rain, the drills had scarcely ceased in the past half-hour. Susan could hardly believe there was anything of interest to see from that window, but Mrs Dring kept craning her neck and pressing her face against the streaming glass until at last she said, ‘They won’t get no tea this morning.’

  ‘Mmm?’ Susan looked up from her typewriter.

  ‘Them men. Look, he’s going down the path now.’ The summons couldn’t be refused without rudeness. Susan joined her at the window. A tall workman in a duffel coat, its hood pulled up over his head, was making his way down Norths’ garden from the back door towards the gate at the far end. ‘I heard him banging on the back door. Wants his tea, I said to myself. Canteen’s closed this morning, mate. Madam’s got other things on her mind. Funny that dog of Winters didn’t bark, though. Have they got it shut up for once?’

  ‘No, it’s out.’

  It was raining steadily. The workman opened the gate. His companions were deep in their trench where one of them was still plying his drill. The solitary man warmed his hands at the bucket fire for a moment. Then he turned, his shoulders hunched, and strolled off along the road that skirted the cemetery.

  Nodding her head grimly, Mrs Dring watched him disappear. ‘Gone to fetch himself a cup from the cafe,’ she said and added because Susan had retreated, ‘Is the car still there?’

  ‘Yes, it’s still there.’ The rain streamed down its closed windows and over the pale green bodywork. Someone else was looking at it, too, Eileen O’Donnell, who was putting up her umbrella after scuttling out of Louise’s garden.

  ‘Mrs O’Donnell’s coming round to the back door, Mrs Dring,’ Susan said. ‘Just see what she wants, will you?’

  She was sure she would be called to the conference that was about to ensue, but after a short conversation at the back door, Mrs Dring came back alone.

  ‘Mrs North asked her to bring some fish fingers in for lunch in case her husband comes home. She says she’s banged and banged at the front door but she can’t make no one hear. She says the upstairs curtains are all drawn but that’s on account of Mrs North not wanting the sun to fade the carpets. I reckon some folks go about with their eyes shut, don’t know they’re born. Sun, I said, what sun? A kid of five could tell you why she’s drawn them curtains.’

  Susan took
the package, noting with amusement that it was wrapped in last week’s edition of Certainty. How pained Julian would be! Its use as insulating material for frozen food was only one step up the scale from wrapping it round fish and chips.

  ‘What am I supposed to do with them?’

  ‘Mrs O’Donnell said you was going in there for coffee. And could you take them in with you just in case that poor wretch she’s doing dirt to comes home for his lunch?’

  But Susan had begun to doubt whether she was expected to keep that appointment. By the time Mrs Dring had finished the living-room and moved into what used to be Julian’s study it was half past ten and the car was still outside. It looked as if Louise had forgotten. Love was generally supposed to conquer all and, although this was perhaps not what the adage meant, it certainly in Susan’s experience, banished from the lover’s mind firm promises and prior engagements. Curious, though. Louise had been so insistent.

  But between ten-thirty and eleven the time went slowly. There was no need to watch the window. The Airedale, now sheltering in Winters’ porch, would warn her of the man’s departure. Eleven struck and on the last stroke Susan’s oppression lifted. The rain was filling Monday’s ruts with yellow clayey water, making pools round the wheels of the green car. Its driver was still inside Braeside and Susan sighed with relief. She wouldn’t have to go now. There was no need for tact or kindness or firm advice because, by her own actions, Louise had cancelled the consultation.

  Mrs Dring wrapped herself in a cocoon of blue polythene and trotted off into the rain, pausing to glower at the car and the curtained windows. Susan tried to remember how many times and for how long each time the car had been there before. Surely not more than three times and the man had never stayed as long as this. Didn’t he have a job to go to? How could he afford to spend so much time—an entire morning—with Louise?

  She opened the refrigerator door to make sandwiches for her lunch. The fish finger packet lay slightly askew on the metal slats. Did Bob ever come home to lunch? Eileen O’Donnell had seemed to think he might and now, as Susan considered, she remembered how Bob himself had told her he might come home one lunchtime.