Part 8 (1/2)

Rosemary stared at this communication with a baffled irritation. Was she her mother's keeper? More to the point, was she one of her mother's heirs? It would be very handy if Frieda were to pop off and leave a tidy three-way fortune. Who knows what she might be worth?

This was an ign.o.ble thought, but Frieda, in Rosemary's opinion, had done little to induce a warmer regard in her children. Frieda had hated her own mother, and now was hated in turn. Frieda had alienated her children from their father, had brought them up unsuitably. Rosemary had little idea of who her father had been, what he had looked like. Had he been a red-faced, choleric, pressurized man? She thought not. He had been a mathematician and a drinker, a weakling and a runaway. Or this was the picture of him that Rosemary, on slim evidence, had formed.

The three Palmer children had never talked about their father, had never discussed why he had disappeared while they were still in their infancy. Daniel, the eldest, had set the tone of reticence. He could not bear to hear his father mentioned. The girls had not dared to speak of him. The subject was taboo. And Frieda too had kept her silence.

It would be trying to inherit high blood pressure from so absent a parent. Frieda herself had never suffered from it, as far as Rosemary knew: but why should she know? Of what had Frieda's sister Hilda died? Frieda's own father had died of a stroke. Perhaps it was the Haxby blood that had broken the little vessels in her eyeb.a.l.l.s and treacherously weakened the muscles of her heart.

Rosemary, at her desk, was in mild shock, which intensified into something near panic. She did not want to be ill. She had never been a hypochondriac, had never suspected herself of any ailment. This made the shock the worse. She was untrained in anxiety. Should she ring Gogo and ask her what high blood pressure in a forty-year-old might mean? Or did she prefer not to know the worst? The specialist had told her she must go back to the clinic the next week to be fitted with an ambulatory monitor. If news got out that she was not in perfect health, she would be sacked at once.

Cedric Summerson had been the blood pressure type: you could tell it from his complexion. Frieda had fancied beef-coloured men. Several of the uncles who had featured in their childhood had been red of face, including the most dominant of them, who had lasted a good eight years or more. He, like Cedric, had been stout, solid, fleshly. He had been rich and important and he had brought gifts. Uncle Bernard from Austria. He had been jowled and guttural, heavy and clever. He had been a philosopher and a philanderer. He had many children of his own and several wives, but he had nevertheless seemed anxious to spend his evenings in the Mausoleum in Romley with Frieda. He had helped Daniel, Gogo and Rosemary with their homework from time to time. He liked children, and they had liked him.

Rosemary had not thought of Bernard for years, and recognized that there was not much purpose in thinking about him now: whoever was responsible for her condition, it could not have been Bernard. He was genetically innocent. Innocent, and dead. He had died three years before, and had been buried with pomp. Frieda and two or three widows had attended the Memorial Service at St Martin-in-the-Fields. Rosemary had seen Frieda's photo in the papers, on the steps, arm in arm with one of the widows, unsuitably sharing a joke.

Frieda had been a scandal, in the days when scandal was less common than now. And she continued to be a scandal. Rosemary looked at Cate Crowe's fax and wondered what to do next. In the olden days one could have sent Frieda a telegram. Rosemary was just old enough to remember the days when telegrams were little yellow serious messages instead of large Occasional Greetings Cards that take just as long to arrive as normal mail, and a good deal longer than a fax. Was there money involved in Cate's cry? It smelt like it. Could she send a courier down to the West Country to summon Frieda? Could she alert the local police? Or perhaps she needed a lawyer, a detective? Could Frieda be cajoled into a signature? And if she couldn't, could Daniel take on power of attorney?

During her lunch break, eating carrot and nut salad with a plastic fork from a disposable plastic box, she investigated. Her PA (a well-trained young woman) had obtained telephone directories of Somerset and Devon, for it had occurred to Rosemary that there was no need to send a motorbike all the way from the metropolis. Even rural England (and it had, as she had driven through it earlier in the year, struck her as ridiculously, almost pretentiously rural) must have dispatch riders. And yes, here they were, two yellow pages of motorcycle and van couriers, promising urgent speedy fully insured distance-no-object twenty-four-hour same-day nationwide conveyance of doc.u.ments, parcels, packages, even livestock. One could dispatch a hamster or a goldfish, or, as a hospital had recently done, to in her view excessive public opprobrium, a dead baby.

No problem there, but what should she send to Frieda? A copy of Cate Crowe's fax, perhaps? That would let her out of having to make up any verbiage. She looked at the fax and decided that it wasn't quite suitable. There was something insufficiently deferential in Cate's wordingnothing overtly offensive, just a general lack of the obsequiousness that Frieda seemed to think her due. Rosemary would have to rephrase it slightly, make it sound lucrative, tempting, important.

Was there any hurry? Should she wait for Cate to get back to England with more details? Should she consult Daniel and Gogo?

She could feel her blood chugging, blooming, swelling. She tried to breathe deeply, calmly. She recited a bit of a mantra she had once picked up in a yoga cla.s.s, and stared at the Henry Moore sheep on the opposite wall. The sheep stared back with their silly saintly faces.

The young man on the motorbike buzzed happily along the high coast road, through the bracken and the gorse, past the nibbling sheep and a small herd of Exmoor ponies, sheltering from the prevailing wind in the lea of a high wall of beech hedge. It was a wild clear day, with high clouds over the channel: a dramatic day. The road was a switchback and he took the b.u.mps and curves at a reckless speed. It was good to be out of Exeter, and moving fast. This was an important mission. He was bearing a valuable doc.u.ment, marked CONFIDENTIAL: DELIVER IN PERSON TO ADDRESSEE. The route had been marked for him in shocking pink Glow Pen by Mr Ffloyd on an OS map. Terry wasn't all that brilliant at map-reading but he could tell that he was off to a remote spot, off the beaten track. He had been told to track down Miss Frieda Haxby, to force her to acknowledge his package, to compel her to sign for it, and if possible to extract from her some kind of answer. This struck Terry as quite a lark. His engine revved and roared as he overtook a G-reg Renault and a tractor.

The descent to Ashcombe slowed him down. His machine skittered over stones, b.u.mped over ruts, churned up mud. He was almost at the bottom, almost at the sea's edge, when he saw the roofs and bell-tower of the big house, just below him. There was no sign of any habitation, no smoke curling, no post-box stuffed with circulars nailed to a tree. It was desolate. Ferns sprouted at him from high banks. Boughs thrashed. It was getting darker, though it was only midday. Rain was on the way from Cornwall. He was dry and warm inside his windproof leathers, he was buckled and badged like a knight errant. A secret skull and crossbones was stamped upon his black s.h.i.+rt, and beneath his black s.h.i.+rt his snake tattoos rippled.

This was a wrecker's coast. Two summers ago he'd had a few drinks in The Wreckers' Arms,just ten miles back on the headland. The pub had been hung with trophies. Planks with inscriptions, bra.s.s lamps, old manacles, a pair of painted wooden hands from a wooden s.h.i.+p's figurehead. Terry and his mates had had a few pints, then smoked a few joints amidst the hot bracken. Bliss. The unmanned lighthouse had winked and turned.

Terry Zealley parked his bike in the weed-choked courtyard and stared up at the bleak facade. Then he marched boldly towards the nearest door, and knocked. He pressed an old white b.u.t.ton of a bell but could hear no answering sound within. He knocked again, then advanced, tried the sidedoor, shouted. He could sense there was n.o.body here. The old bird had flown. He skirted the side of the house, as Will Paine had done before him, making his way to the front lawn that faced the sea. Again he shouted and his voice sounded thin in the wind.

One of the long, low, mullioned windows had blown open, and was swinging and creaking. This was odd. Terry Zealley crossed the lumpy gra.s.s, and peered in. He could see a large table, laid with various objects, including a bottle and gla.s.ses, and several smaller tables, some also littered. It looked, as he was later to tell his mates, like the Marie Celeste. It was creepy. Again he shouted, into the damp interior. He could have climbed in, easily, over the low window-sill, but instead he went back to the sidedoor, and tried it. It was unlocked. He went in.

The house smelled of dereliction, but there were signs of recent occupation. Muddy boots in the hallway, a raincoat and a stick hanging from a peg, tins of dog food in a cardboard carton, a new-looking Calor Gas bombe, empty milk bottles, a plastic bag of wine bottles and fizzy-water bottles that looked as though they were awaiting a trip to a bottle bank. Terry backed out again, to explore the courtyard, the back regions. There might be somebody hanging about in the outhouses. In one of them stood an old grey Saab, with a broken wing mirror. It was unlocked. He opened the door, sniffed. It was stale, a smoker's car. A tin of boiled sweets sat on the dashboard, with a spectacle case and a box of tissues. Nothing remarkable there.

As he slammed the car door shut, hoping and fearing that the noise might attract attention, he heard a low whining, and saw, approaching, an old thin black and white dog. Terry, born and bred in a Devon village, knew that kind of dog: a scrounger, an outcast. He whistled at it, and it approached, its ears flat, eager, but keeping its distance. It would not come near his offered hand, but crouched, looking at him with its head tilted. Terry started back towards the house, but the dog did not want him to go. It looked at him and whined again, a mournful supplication, then stood up and set off towards the garden, stopping to see if Terry were following. Was it trying to take him towards his mistress's body, his mistress's grave? Was she lying in the woods out there with a broken leg?

Terry followed the dog, which led him down the shrubbery and through a gap in a hedge to a lower level of neglected kitchen garden and crumbling walls. The ground was thick and wet with autumn leafmould, and puffb.a.l.l.s and parasols sprouted from the decay. Brambles thick with berry clambered and caught at him. Flies buzzed, for this was a sheltered spot, and somebody had been burning garden rubbishhe could see and smell the remains of a large bonfire. He approached, kicked at the charred sticks. It had been a large fire, for the blackened circle it had left was some five feet across. Grey-black logs, partly consumed, and soft mounds of finer ash. Terry kicked again, and ash rose into the air. Looking more closely, he could see the remains of what looked like thick wads of papers, whole boxes of papers, which had been heaped on to the pyre. Was it a recent fire? Was it his imagination, or could he feel a faint warmth? He kicked again, and fancied that a single spark flew upwards. A fire like that could smoulder for days.

The dog seemed satisfied with his inspection of the embers, and now suggested that Terry return to the house. Terry was not sure what he was meant to have noted; had the dog been indicating the scene of a crime? And were those mussel sh.e.l.ls and splinters of bone that he could see in the ash part of the crime, or were they the remains of an innocent barbecue? He bent down, picked up a sh.e.l.l, rubbed it on his trousers, inspected it. It was neatly hinged, cross-rayed with brown and purple. Empty, sucked dry. It told him nothing. He followed the dog back towards the building.

He went in again through the sidedoor, and made his way down a long corridor to the large room he had seen through the open window. And there he found more clues. An abandoned meal, laid on the large table, with knife, fork, plate, a half-empty bottle of wine, a half-empty wine gla.s.s full of drowned flies. The end of a loaf, dusted with blue mould. A hard and s.h.i.+ning cheese rind, a brown and withered apple paring. A bowl of winkle sh.e.l.ls. An open book, propped against a kitchen-roll. Terry stared, sniffed, prowled. He discovered a clock patience, half played. A board laid out with coloured counters for a game which he did not know to be backgammon. A dried orange skewered with a knitting needle, and an adas, open at the Americas. Spooky, definitely spooky. A little bra.s.s pot full of burnt-down joss sticks. A three-cornered pub ashtray full of cigarette ends. And, if he wasn't mistaken, a half-open matchbox full of the weed. He picked it up, sniffed cautiously. Yes, of course. And a packet of Rizlas. Somebody here had been smoking substances. A rum old lady. And where the h.e.l.l had she got to?

Miss Frieda Haxby: Deliver in Person. Easier said than done. He smelled sorcery, he smelled witchcraft, as he was to tell his mates. He was tempted to open the package, to see if it contained a contract with the devil, but knew better than to risk his job by tampering. There weren't many nice jobs going in the South West, for an enterprising lad like Terry Zealley.

The skull gave him a turn. He hadn't spotted it at first, in the clutter of bric-a-brac, but eventually it managed to catch his eye. It stared at him from its deep eye-sockets, grinned at him with its four remaining teeth, warned him from its blaring absent nostrils. Yellow and pitted and slightly marked with grey and pink, it held its place for ever. What were those cracks in its cranium? Those st.i.tched seams joining the plates above where its ears had been? Those deep slanting eyeslits? Had it ever lived, and how had it died, and why was it here?

Terry went out into the courtyard and ate one of his tuna and mayonnaise sandwiches. He didn't want to eat in that house. He'd thought he was hungry, but somehow it didn't taste as good as he'd expected. The Crosskeys Garage usually sold a good sandwich, but this wasn't up to the mark at all.

What to do next? Should he ring Mr Ffloyd on his mobile? Should he ring the police? Should he poke around a bit more in the hope of finding a corpse or a haul of gra.s.s?

Terry nosed around. The sandwich had restored perspective. He'd always wanted to find a dead body. Well, who hasn't?

He made friends with the skull, picking it up to speak to it: he was alarmed when its jaw dropped off, but he managed, guiltily, to rea.s.semble it so it looked just the same as before. He inspected the little bird and animal skulls that surrounded it. One was a sheep's skull, he thought, one a badger's. There were some curled horns, and a few feathers. Had there been voodoo, had there been slaughtered chickens and dancing goats, had there been hanky-panky? He rather hoped so. He went upstairs, boldly, and followed the sound of humming (a refrigerator? a corpse in a freezer? a dehumidifier?) to discover Frieda's workroom. There was her word-processor, switched ori, and speaking quietly and patiently to itself. The screen was blank, but there was a line of pale green flickering writing at the top of the screen which said EYEBOX PC 2000 8.3.1990 LAST USED 00.00.00 CURRENT INTERRUPTED. TO RECOMMENCE PRESS ENTER. TO DISCONTINUE PRESS ESCAPE.

Terry found the keys marked ENTER and ESCAPE, but thought better of pressing either of them. He did not understand computers. This whole thing was getting out of hand. How long had that machine been patiently waiting for its mistress's return? Did it know where she had gone? Did it contain her farewell message, her suicide note?

He looked around him, found the globe and the binoculars, switched on the light in the globe so that all the nations of the earth and all its oceans glowed with blue and green and brown and desert gold. Importantly, from the look-out post, he raked the horizon through the powerful binoculars.

A small fis.h.i.+ng boat chugged along westwards, over a grey and choppy sea. Was it a drug-carrying vessel, part of an international plot? Was the package for Miss Haxby a summons from her G.o.dfather? Two tons of cannabis had been seized off Ilfracombe the month before, from a thousand-ton merchant s.h.i.+p called Proteus, on its way from Morocco. It had been a big story in the local and national press. Had Miss Haxby been the mastermind behind the fleet of bogus fish vans lined up to distribute this sinister loading? Was it from this very window that Miss Haxby had flashed her secret signals? For here, by the globe and the binoculars, stood a large, heavy waterproof torch, and an old-fas.h.i.+oned paraffin storm-lantern. He was surely on to something here.

The house was far too big to search, but on the way down he easily found what must have been Frieda Haxby's bedroom. A double bed, with a duvet heaped upon it, and piles of books and papers on the bedside table. A sea view. Another torch, a packet of cigarettes, a lighter, heaps of clothes upon a chair, several pairs of shoes lined up not untidily. No corpse in the bed: he lifted the duvet to look.

Frieda Haxby would never sign the doc.u.ment that he carried in his plastic satchel. She had vanished, to avoid it. She had gone for good. She was dead. So who should he ring, the police or Mr Ffloyd?

Of the two, the police seemed the more attractive option, the one which would yield him the most entertainment. He'd never had occasion to dial 999 on his mobile. Could you dial 999 on a mobile? Maybe mobiles didn't recognize real emergencies, maybe they only recognized privatized emergencies, financial emergencies. Well, now was the time to find out. Terry Zealley settled himself in the courtyard, in a sheltered corner where he thought reception would be good. He'd got his map reference ready. He was looking forward to his stint in the witness box. He punched in the magic numbers, and waited for a reply.

'Disappeared,' echoed Gogo.

'Yes,' said Rosemary, distraught, on the verge of unseemly laughter. 'Disappeared. Vanished. A missing person. Or a Misspers, as they seem to be called in the West Country. They've got the coastguards out, searching the seaward side of the cliff. And the local constabulary are going through the house.'

'Jesus,' said Gogo. 'How f.u.c.king inconvenient. Have you told Daniel?'

'I've left a message for him at chambers. He's in court.'

'He won't be best pleased when he hears.'

'You're right there. Can you imagine?'

'Do the police know who it is they're looking for?'

'I don't think so. She didn't have much of a social life up there, I don't suppose.'

'Better keep this out of the press.'

'Don't worry, I'm not going to put them on to it.'

'What had I better do? Ring Daniel this evening? When does he usually get out?'

'G.o.d knows. He's probably aiming to get back to the Farm, but this may stop him.'

'One of us is going to have to get down there.'

'It's five hours. I'm telling you. I suppose it's lucky it's the weekend.' 'Lucky?' snorted Gogo, and laughed.

'Gogo?'

'Yes?'

'I've just discovered I've got roaring high blood pressure. What does that mean?'