Ten and a Quarter New Tales of Read online

  They left me alone that day and the next, but they came in once and interviewed Laura on her own. I asked her what they had said, but she passed it off quite lightly. I supposed she didn’t think I was well enough to be told they had been enquiring about my movements and my attitude towards Brenda.

  ‘Just a lot of routine questions, darling,’ she said, but I was sure she was afraid for me, and a barrier of her fear for me and mine for myself came up between us. It seems incredible but that Sunday we hardly spoke to each other and when we did Brenda’s name wasn’t mentioned. In the evening we sat in silence, my arm round Laura, her head on my shoulder, waiting, waiting …

  The morning brought the police with a search warrant. They asked Laura to go into the living room and me to wait in the study. I knew then that it was only a matter of time. They would find the knife, and of course they would find Brenda’s blood on it. I had been feeling so ill when I cleaned it that now I could no longer remember whether I had scrubbed it or simply rinsed it under the tap.

  After a long while the chief inspector came in alone.

  ‘You told us you were a close friend of Miss Goring’s.’

  ‘I was friendly with her,’ I said, trying to keep my voice steady. ‘She was my wife’s friend.’

  He took no notice of this. ‘You didn’t tell us you were on intimate terms with her, that you were, in point of fact, having a sexual relationship with her.’

  Nothing he could have said would have astounded me more.

  ‘That’s absolute rubbish!’

  ‘Is it? We have it on sound authority.’

  ‘What authority?’ I said. ‘Or is that the sort of thing you’re not allowed to say?’

  ‘I see no harm in telling you,’ he said easily. ‘Miss Goring herself informed two women friends of hers in London of the fact. She told one of your neighbours she met at a party in your house. You were seen to spend evenings alone with Miss Goring while your wife was ill, and we have a witness who saw you kissing her good night.’

  Now I knew what it was that Isabel Goldsmith had told Laura which had so distressed her. The irony of it, the irony … Why hadn’t I, knowing Brenda’s reputation and knowing Brenda’s fantasies, suspected what construction would be put on my assumed friendship with her? Here was motive, the lack of which I had relied on as my last resort. Men do kill their mistresses, from jealousy, from frustration, from fear of discovery.

  But surely I could turn Brenda’s fantasies to my own use?

  ‘She had dozens of men friends, lovers, whatever you like to call them. Any of them could have killed her.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ said the chief inspector, ‘apart from her ex-husband who is in Australia, we have been able to discover no man in her life but yourself.’

  I cried out desperately, ‘I didn’t kill her! I swear I didn’t.’

  He looked surprised. ‘Oh, we know that.’ For the first time he called me sir. ‘We know that, sir. No one is accusing you of anything. We have Dr Lawson’s word for it that you were physically incapable of leaving your bed that night, and the raincoat and gloves we found in your incinerator are not your property.’

  Fumbling in the dark, swaying, the sleeves of the raincoat too short, the shoulders too tight … ‘Why are you wearing those clothes?’ she had asked before I stabbed her.

  ‘I want you to try and keep calm, sir,’ he said very gently. But I have never been calm since. I have confessed again and again, I have written statements, I have expostulated, raved, gone over with them every detail of what I did that night, I have wept.

  Then I said nothing. I could only stare at him. ‘I came in here to you, sir,’ he said, ‘simply to confirm a fact of which we were already certain, and to ask you if you would care to accompany your wife to the police station where she will be charged with the murder of Miss Brenda Goring.’

  Digby’s Wives

  Although our ways afterwards diverged, I was at school with Digby Ambeach and the fact of our having once been school fellows was enough for my mother to feel she had to keep me informed of his doings. ‘Digby Ambeach is getting married,’ she said when I came home from college at the end of my first term.

  ‘He can’t be more than nineteen.’

  ‘There’s no harm in settling down young when you know your own mind. Digby’s done very well for himself. She’s a bit older than he is; she’s twenty-one, a judge’s daughter, and I hear she came into quite a bit of money of her own on her birthday.’

  ‘How did he work that?’ I said. ‘A solicitor’s clerk?’

  ‘Digby’s a very nice-looking young man and a very nice young man. I hope you’ll see something of him now you’re home.’

  I said I’d think about it, but I was too busy with a nice-looking young woman to spare any time for Digby Ambeach.

  My mother went on giving me snippets of news of him. She wrote to me devotedly every week. One of those letters, about five years later, told me about what she called Digby’s tragedy. His wife had been drowned while they were boating on the Norfolk Broads.

  I wrote him a letter of condolence. The following Christmas I went home for the holiday and my mother told me Digby had invested all the money his wife had left him as well as the sum for which her life had been insured in house property.

  ‘He’s got four houses now, all let off into flats, and he’s got a furniture shop in Chelsea.’ My mother levelled a disappointed look at me. ‘Oh, yes, Digby’s done very well. He hasn’t wasted his time.’

  An old girlfriend of mine lived in Fulham. I was on my way to see her, driving down the King’s Road, when I noticed a shop called Ambeach Antiques. It was well down below the World’s End and the stuff for sale looked as undistinguished as the neighbourhood.

  I went in and Digby came out from a room at the back. We hadn’t seen each other for seven years but he treated me like his best friend.

  ‘Welcome to the emporium, sonny boy.’ I was later to learn that Digby called all men ‘sonny boy’ – and all women ‘doll’. ‘Not exactly Sotheby’s, is it? Still, it keeps the wolf from the door.’

  ‘According to my mother,’ I said, ‘you’re a business genius.’

  ‘And, according to my mother, you’re the Master of Balliol.’ With that touch of nature to make us kin, we laughed together. ‘I’m glad you dropped in,’ he said, ‘because I’ve got a bit of news that hasn’t gone out on the maternal network. I’m getting married again next week.’

  Thus it was that Olivia came into my life.

  Digby must have gathered through what he called the maternal network that I had left my job in the north of England and taken a teaching post in a college of technology a little way outside London, for about six months after our meeting in the antique shop I got an invitation to dine with him and his new wife.

  They were living in a flat in one of Digby’s rickety old houses in a run-down corner of Maida Vale. It smelled of the canal and it was in urgent need of redecoration, but in the presence of Olivia Ambeach you took no more notice of the walls and ceilings than you would of the jam jar that holds an orchid.

  ‘What do you think of her, sonny boy?’ said Digby while his wife was out in the kitchen.

  ‘Gorgeous. Why did no one tell me she was ravishingly beautiful?’

  Digby gave me a funny look. ‘Yes, she’s a pretty girl,’ he said, ‘and I’m glad to say she hasn’t come to me empty-handed. She was a widow, you know. Her late husband’s life assurance will come in quite handy, I can tell you.’

  He disgusted me. Why had she married him? Why had she thrown herself away on a money-grubbing clod? I asked her those questions myself when we were in bed in a nasty little hotel in Paddington.

  ‘He was so keen to marry me,’ she said, ‘I just gave in. He thought I’d got more money than I really have.’ She laughed. ‘And I thought he’d got more than he has.’

  ‘You were the more deceived.’

  ‘He’s a cheerful soul,’ said Olivia, ‘and very even-tempered,’ w
hich gave an insight into what her first husband had been like.

  ‘Leave him and come away with me,’ I said. All this was some year or so after her marriage and my change of job and I was awaiting confirmation of an academic post in Australia. ‘You can’t throw your whole life away on Digby Ambeach.’

  She gave me one of her enigmatic smiles. ‘I don’t suppose I shall,’ she said, but she wouldn’t come with me. Six weeks later we said goodbye and she saw me off at Heathrow.

  We had agreed not to correspond. It was my mother who wrote to tell me Olivia had left Digby. ‘Disappeared into thin air. No one knows where she has gone, but my belief is she has run off with one of those men who were always hanging round her.’ I winced at that. I had got over Olivia but still it hurt to know I hadn’t been the only one.

  My mother’s next letter was a bombshell. Digby had moved into the maternal home and there were suggestions going about – ugly rumours, my mother called them – as to the reason for Olivia’s disappearance. What could she mean? I wrote back, asking for an explanation; for I imagined the police interrogating Digby and digging up the Maida Vale garden.

  An answer came but not the one I wanted. My mother had quarrelled with Mrs Ambeach, who had accused her of spreading slanders about her son, and they were no longer on speaking terms. Reading between the lines, I gathered that my mother had been frightened into never uttering Digby’s name, still less setting anything down about him on paper.

  For a while, because Olivia and I had been lovers and she was beautiful and I had been in love with her, I thought I ought to do something. I ought to take some kind of action. You see, I remembered that first wife of Digby’s, drowned in a boating accident. She had left him money. Had he persuaded Olivia to put her bit of money into one of his abortive business ventures and then made away with her? I wondered. It was very disquieting.

  But twelve thousand miles is a long distance. It makes the heart less fond and home anxieties remote. Gradually I began to tell myself that Olivia would have turned up by now, that she was alive and happy somewhere and all was well.

  For ten years I remained in Australia, going home only once in all that time when my mother fell ill. The doctors gave her three months to live but she died in three weeks. Mrs Ambeach, her enmity forgotten, came to the funeral.

  ‘How’s Digby?’ I asked her after the ceremony.

  ‘He’s fine. Did you know he’d got married again?’

  No, I hadn’t known. There had been a rather aggressive or defiant note in her voice. After a little hesitation, I asked about Olivia.

  ‘Remarried.’ She looked daggers at me. ‘I don’t know any details, you’ll have to ask Digby.’ I could have done, of course, but I didn’t much want to. He might possibly know I had been one of the men who were ‘always hanging round’ Olivia. She had promised never to tell him. But I know what that sort of promise amounts to when a woman is quarrelling with her husband before leaving him.

  I was relieved to know that my fears had been groundless, that there had evidently been a divorce and both parties embarked on fresh matrimonial ventures. There seemed no reason why Digby Ambeach and I should ever meet again.

  But we did.

  A friend of mine wrote to me from London, offering me a partnership in his now flourishing business. It promised to be more lucrative than my present job and, besides, I was growing tired of the academic life. I flew home to England in the July and set about flat-hunting.

  The way rents had risen appalled me. What I had been paying for a whole flat before I went away would now just about get a furnished room. It looked as if I should have to buy a place, but that takes time and I was still a grateful but embarrassed guest in my friend’s house when I ran into Digby.

  To save my hostess extra burdens I was eating my evening meal in a pub in St. John’s Wood when someone came up behind me and gave me a hearty slap on the shoulder. ‘Long time no see, sonny boy. When did you get back from Down Under?’

  I told him.

  ‘You haven’t changed a bit.’

  Digby had. His thick brown hair had turned prematurely grey. It gave him a military look. I am no judge of good looks in men but if I were a woman I think I should find Digby handsome. He had lost weight and the grey didn’t age him.

  He bought us both a drink. ‘Where are you living now, sonny boy?’

  I told him and told him, too, about my housing problem. He looked interested but he made no particular comment and then, suddenly, to my astonishment, he started talking about Olivia. It was a fact, wasn’t it, that I had made inquiries about her through my mother and then through his? Had I heard the police had suspected (his phrase) foul play? I felt very awkward.

  ‘It wasn’t an easy time for me,’ said Digby. ‘But she’s married to a very nice chap now and we all get on like a house on fire.’ He put his head on one side and gave me a slow grinding wink. ‘I don’t think I’ll give you her address, though. You might take it into your head to break up another of her marriages.’ My face grew hot. ‘Digby …’

  ‘Don’t say a word, sonny boy. Bless you, I don’t mind any more. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then.’ He gave me another slap on the back. ‘I tell you what, I’ve been thinking: there’s a flat at the top of my house going vacant – bedsit, kitchen and bathroom. Only twenty quid a week, seeing you’re an old pal.’

  That was about half what I should have had to pay elsewhere for similar accommodation. I began thanking him.

  ‘Say no more. It’s just the place for you. Drink up your drink and we’ll go and have a look at it. You can meet Lily at the same time.’ In the taxi I began wondering about his Lily and speculated as to whether he had married another young beauty.

  As we got out in front of Digby’s house, he touched my arm and said: ‘Not a word about Olivia in front of Lily, sonny boy. She’s inclined to be possessive.’

  They had the ground floor. Digby took me into a living room at the back. There was an old woman sitting at a table with the Financial Times spread out in front of her, and for a moment I thought it was Digby’s mother. But when she turned, I saw it wasn’t.

  ‘My wife, Lily,’ said Digby very breezily, ‘and this is Michael Dashwood, doll, an old pal of mine.’

  I can’t begin to tell how grotesque it was to hear Digby call her ‘doll’. She was twenty-five years older than he and she hadn’t made any effort to look younger than she was. Her hair was white, her face lined and she wore a mannish navy-blue suit with cigarette ash spilled down the front.

  ‘How do you do?’ said Lily without enthusiasm. Digby went away to fetch us all a drink and Lily immediately began talking about money. She talked as if she had known me for years but at the same time as if she took no personal interest in me. The Stock Market was her passion. I gathered that she was well-off and kept a tight rein on her own money.

  By the time Digby came back with a bottle of whiskey and three glasses, she had told me the King’s Road shop had failed, as had a couple of Digby’s other ventures.

  ‘He can’t expect any financial backing from me,’ she said.

  Digby gave her a strained smile. ‘Whiskey, doll.’

  ‘No, thanks,’ said Lily. ‘If you didn’t drink so much, you’d have a better head for business.’

  Five minutes later she had folded up her newspaper, stuck it under her arm and gone off to bed. It was ten to nine. Digby and I went upstairs to look at the vacant flat. We passed the first floor and the flat on the second floor where he had lived with Olivia, and the third floor that was let off in single rooms and came to a very steep and narrow staircase – a real death trap, I thought. I should have to be very careful of it if I took the place.

  The top floor had originally consisted of two very large rooms, the doors to which opened on to a landing. One of them led into a bed-sitting room with kitchen and bathroom off it. It was shabby but quite well-appointed, light and airy and a cinch at twenty pounds.

  ‘Like it?’ said Digby.<
br />
  ‘Very much.’

  ‘I’ll do you proud. I’ll have the place painted before you move in. And I’ll get you a fridge.’

  It wasn’t till I got back to my friend’s house that an odd discrepancy struck me. They all got on like a house on fire, Digby had said, referring presumably to the amicable relations that prevailed between the Ambeaches and Olivia and her husband. On the other hand, Olivia’s name wasn’t to be mentioned to Lily because she was jealous. Something was wrong somewhere.

  Suppose there was another reason for this prohibition of Olivia’s name. Because Lily would have said that she had never in her life set eyes on Olivia? I thought about that a lot and I thought about Digby’s first wife, too, the one who had drowned. It made me distinctly uneasy but it didn’t stop me moving into the flat at the appointed time.

  True to his word, Digby had had the flat redecorated and had got me a fridge.

  ‘I don’t like the idea of having it in that alcove,’ I said.

  ‘You can’t have it in the kitchen,’ said Digby. ‘The electric point’s faulty.’

  ‘Then we’ll have it mended. After all, this is my living room and my bedroom. I don’t want to sit here looking at a refrigerator.’ I went into the kitchen and saw a space between the oven and the sink. ‘That’s where it can go,’ I said, ‘and we’ll get an electrician in.’

  The last thing I expected was for Digby to fly into a rage, but that is exactly what he did. Even-tempered, Olivia had once called him, and I would have described him that way myself. His face went red and his eyes bulged.

  ‘Now look here,’ he shouted, ‘I don’t want you coming here and criticizing my arrangements. I let you have this flat for a measly twenty quid a week and the minute you get in you start nit-picking. I want that fridge where I’ve put it and I don’t want you messing about with the wiring. Be a fine thing, wouldn’t it, if you set the place on fire.’