I had to think what day it was. Saturday. It seemed totally unreal.
‘Going to the races,’ I said. ‘We always go to the races when I come to stay.’
‘Fond of racing, were they?’ The past tense sounded wrong. Yet so much was now past. I found it a great deal more difficult than he did, to change gear.
‘Yes… but I think they only go… went… because of me.’
He tried the coffee again and managed a cautious sip. ‘In what way do you mean?’ he asked.
‘What I paint,’ I said, ‘is mostly horses.’
Donald came in through the back door, looking red-eyed and exhausted.
‘The Press are making a hole in the hedge,’ he said leadenly.
Inspector Frost clicked his teeth, got to his feet, opened the door to the hall and the interior of the house, and called out loudly.
‘Constable? Go and stop those reporters from breaking into the garden.’
A distant voice replied ‘Sir’, and Frost apologised to Donald. ‘Can’t get rid of them entirely, you know, sir. They have their editors breathing down their necks. They pester the life out of us at times like these.’
All day long the road outside Donald’s house had been lined with cars, which disgorged crowds of reporters, photographers and plain sensation-seekers every time anyone went out of the front door. Like a hungry wolf pack they lay in wait, and I supposed that they would eventually pounce on Donald himself. Regard for his feelings was nowhere in sight.
‘Newspapers listen to the radio on the police frequencies,’ Frost said gloomily. ‘Sometimes the Press arrive at the scene of a crime before we can get there ourselves.’
At any other time I would have laughed, but it wouldn’t have been much fun for Donald if it had happened in his case. The police, of course, had thought at first that it more or less had, because I had heard that the constable who had tried to eject me forcibly had taken me for a spearheading scribbler.
Donald sat down heavily on a stool and rested his elbows wearily on the table.
‘Charles,’ he said, ‘If you wouldn’t mind heating it, I’d like some of that soup now.’
‘Sure,’ I said, surprised. He had rejected it earlier as if the thought of food revolted him.
Frost’s head went up as if at a signal, and his whole body straightened purposefully, and I realised he had merely been coasting along until then, waiting for some such moment. He waited some more while I opened a can of Campbell’s condensed, sloshed it and some water and cooking brandy into a saucepan, and stirred until the lumps dissolved. He drank his coffee and waited while Donald disposed of two platefuls and a chunk of brown bread. Then, politely, he asked me to take myself off, and when I’d gone he began what Donald afterwards referred to as ‘serious digging’.
It was three hours later, and growing dark, when the Inspector left. I watched his departure from the upstairs landing window. He and his attendant plain-clothes constable were intercepted immediately outside the front door by a young man with wild hair and a microphone, and before they could dodge round him to reach their car the pack on the road were streaming in full cry into the garden and across the grass.
I went methodically round the house drawing curtains, checking windows, and locking and bolting all the outside doors.
‘What are you doing?’ Donald asked, looking pale and tired in the kitchen.
‘Pulling up the drawbridge.’
‘Oh.’
In spite of his long session with the Inspector he seemed a lot calmer and more in command of himself, and when I had finished Fort-Knoxing the kitchen-to-garden door he said, ‘The police want a list of what’s gone. Will you help me make it?’
‘Of course.’
‘It’ll give us something to do…’
‘Sure.’
‘We did have an inventory, but it was in that desk in the hall. The one they took.’
‘Damn silly place to keep it,’ I said.
‘That’s more or less what he said. Inspector Frost.’
‘What about your insurance company? Haven’t they got a list?’
‘Only of the more valuable things, like some of the paintings, and her jewellery.’ He sighed. ‘Everything else was lumped together as “contents”.’
We started on the diningroom and made reasonable progress, with him putting the empty drawers back in the sideboard while trying to remember what each had once contained, and me writing down to his dictation. There had been a good deal of solid silver tableware, acquired by Donald’s family in its affluent past and handed down routinely. Donald, with his warmth for antiques, had enjoyed using it, but his pleasure in owning it seemed to have vanished with the goods. Instead of being indignant over its loss, he sounded impersonal, and by the time we had finished the sideboard, decidedly bored.
Faced by the ranks of empty shelves where once had stood a fine collection of early nineteenth century porcelain, he baulked entirely.
‘What does it matter?’ he said drearily, turning away. ‘I simply can’t be bothered…’
‘How about the paintings, then?’
He looked vaguely round the bare walls. The site of each missing frame showed unmistakably in lighter oblong patches of palest olive. In this room they had mostly been works of modern British painters: a Hockney, a Bratby, two Lowrys, and a Spear for openers, all painted on what one might call the artists’ less exuberant days. Donald didn’t like paintings which he said ‘jumped off the wall and made a fuss’.
‘You probably remember them better than I do,’ he said. ‘You do it.’
‘I’d miss some.’
‘Is there anything to drink?’
‘Only the cooking brandy,’ I said.
‘We could have some of the wine.’
‘What wine?’
‘In the cellar.’ His eyes suddenly opened wide. ‘Good God, I’d forgotten about the cellar.’
‘I didn’t even know you had one.’
He nodded. ‘Reason I bought the house. Perfect humidity and temperature for long-term storage. There’s a small fortune down there in claret and port.’
There wasn’t, of course. There were three floor-to-ceiling rows of empty racks, and a single cardboard box on a plain wooden table.
Donald merely shrugged. ‘Oh well… that’s that.’
I opened the top of the cardboard box and saw the elegant corked shapes of the tops of wine bottles.
‘They’ve left these, anyway,’ I said. ‘In their rush.’
‘Probably on purpose,’ Don smiled twistedly. ‘That’s Australian wine. We brought it back with us.’
‘Better than nothing,’ I said disparagingly, pulling out a bottle and reading the label.
‘Better than most, you know. A lot of Australian wine is superb.’
I carried the whole case up to the kitchen and dumped it on the table. The stairs from the cellar led up into the utility room among the washing machines and other domesticities, and I had always had an unclear impression that its door was just another cupboard. I looked at it thoughtfully, an unremarkable white painted panel merging inconspicuously into the general scenery.
‘Do you think the burglars knew the wine was there?’ I asked.
‘God knows.’
‘I would never have found it.’
‘You’re not a burglar, though.’
He searched for a corkscrew, opened one of the bottles, and poured the deep red liquid into two kitchen tumblers. I tasted it and it was indeed a marvellous wine, even to my untrained palate. Wynn’s Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon. You could wrap the name round the tongue as lovingly as the product. Donald drank his share absentmindedly as if it were water, the glass clattering once or twice against his teeth. There was still an uncertainty about many of his movements, as if he could not quite remember how to do things, and I knew it was because with half his mind he thought all the time of Regina, and the thoughts were literally paralysing.
The old Donald had been a man of confidence, ca
pably running a middle-sized inherited business and adding his share to the passed-on goodies. He had a blunt uncompromising face lightened by amber eyes which smiled easily, and he had considered his money well-spent on shapely hair-cuts.
The new Donald was a tentative man shattered with shock, a man trying to behave decently but unsure where his feet were when he walked upstairs.
We spent the evening in the kitchen, talking desultorily, eating a scratch meal, and tidying all the stores back on to the shelves. Donald made a good show of being busy but put half the tins back upside down.
The front door bell rang three times during the evening but never in the code pre-arranged with the police. The telephone, with its receiver lying loose beside it, rang not at all. Donald had turned down several offers of refuge with local friends and visibly shook at the prospect of talking to anyone but Frost and me.
‘Why don’t they go away?’ he said despairingly, after the third attempt on the front door.
‘They will, once they’ve seen you,’ I said. And sucked you dry, and spat out the husk, I thought.
He shook his head tiredly. ‘I simply can’t.’
It felt like living through a siege.
We went eventually again upstairs to bed, although it seemed likely that Donald would sleep no more than the night before, which had been hardly at all. The police surgeon had left knock-out pills, which Donald wouldn’t take. I pressed him again on that second evening, with equal non-results.
‘No, Charles. I’d feel I’d deserted her. D… ducked out. Thought only of myself, and not of… of how awful it was for her… dying like that… with n… no one near who I… loved her.’
He was trying to offer her in some way the comfort of his own pain. I shook my head at him, but tried no more with the pills.
‘Do you mind,’ he said diffidently, ‘if I sleep alone tonight?’
‘Of course not.’
‘We could make up a bed for you in one of the other rooms.’
‘Sure.’
He pulled open the linen-cupboard door on the upstairs landing and gestured indecisively at the contents. ‘Could you manage?’
‘Of course,’ I said.
He turned away and seemed struck by one particular adjacent patch of empty wall.
‘They took the Munnings,’ he said.
‘What Munnings?’
‘We bought it in Australia. I hung it just there… only a week ago. I wanted you to see it. It was one of the reasons I asked you to come.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. Inadequate words.
‘Everything,’ he said helplessly. ‘Everything’s gone.’
2
Frost arrived tirelessly again on Sunday morning with his quiet watchful eyes and non-committal manner. I opened the front door to his signal, and he followed me through to the kitchen, where Donald and I seemed to have taken up permanent residence. I gestured him to a stool, and he sat on it, straightening his spine to avoid future stiffness.
‘Two pieces of information you might care to have, sir,’ he said to Donald, his voice at its most formal. ‘Despite our intensive investigation of this house during yesterday and the previous evening, we have found no fingerprints for which we cannot account.’
‘Would you expect to?’ I asked.
He flicked me a glance. ‘No, sir. Professional housebreakers always wear gloves.’
Donald waited with a grey patient face, as if he would find whatever Frost said unimportant. Nothing, I judged, was of much importance to Donald any more.
‘Second,’ said Frost, ‘our investigations in the district reveal that a removal van was parked outside your front door early on Friday afternoon.’
Donald looked at him blankly.
‘Dark coloured, and dusty, sir.’
‘Oh,’ Donald said, meaninglessly.
Frost sighed. ‘What do you know of a bronze statuette of a horse, sir? A horse rearing up on its hind legs?’
‘It’s in the hall,’ Donald said automatically; and then, frowning slightly, ‘I mean, it used to be. It’s gone.’
‘How do you know about it?’ I asked Frost curiously, and guessed the answer before I’d finished the question. ‘Oh no…’ I stopped, and swallowed. ‘I mean, perhaps you found it… fallen off the van…?’
‘No, sir.’ His face was calm. ‘We found it in the sitting-room, near Mrs Stuart.’
Donald understood as clearly as I had done. He stood up abruptly and went to the window, and stared out for a while at the empty garden.
‘It is heavy,’ he said at last. ‘The base of it.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘It must have been… quick.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Frost said again, sounding more objective than comforting.
‘P… poor Regina.’ The words were quiet, the desolation immense. When he came back to the table, his hands were trembling. He sat down heavily and stared into space.
Frost started another careful speech about the sitting-room being kept locked by the police for a few days yet and please would neither of us try to go in there.
Neither of us would.
Apart from that, they had finished their enquiries at the house, and Mr Stuart was at liberty to have the other rooms cleaned, if he wished, where the fingerprint dust lay greyish-white on every polished surface.
Mr Stuart gave no sign of having heard.
Had Mr Stuart completed the list of things stolen?
I passed it over. It still consisted only of the diningroom silver and what I could remember of the paintings. Frost raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips.
‘We’ll need more than this, sir.’
‘We’ll try again today,’ I promised. ‘There’s a lot of wine missing, as well.’
‘Wine?’
I showed him the empty cellar and he came up looking thoughtful.
‘It must have taken hours to move that lot,’ I said.
‘Very likely, sir,’ he said primly.
Whatever he was thinking, he wasn’t telling. He suggested instead that Donald should prepare a short statement to read to the hungry reporters still waiting outside, so that they could go away and print it.
‘No,’ Don said.
‘Just a short statement,’ Frost said reasonably. ‘We can prepare it here and now, if you like.’
He wrote it himself, more or less, and I guessed it was as much for his own sake as Donald’s that he wanted the Press to depart, as it was he who had to push through them every time. He repeated the statement aloud when he had finished. It sounded like a police account, full of jargon, but because of that so distant from Donald’s own raw grief that my cousin agreed in the end to read it out.
‘But no photographs,’ he said anxiously, and Frost said he would see to it.
They crowded into the hall, a collection of dry-eyed fact-finders, all near the top of their digging profession and inured from sensitivity by a hundred similar intrusions into tragedy. Sure, they were sorry for the guy whose wife had been bashed, but news was news and bad news sold papers, and if they didn’t produce the goods they’d lose their jobs to others more tenacious. The Press Council had stopped the brutal bullying of the past, but the leeway still allowed could be a great deal too much for the afflicted.
Donald stood on the stairs, with Frost and myself at the foot, and read without expression, as if the words applied to someone else.
‘… I returned to the house at approximately five p.m. and observed that during my absence a considerable number of valuable objects had been removed… I telephoned immediately for assistance… My wife, who was normally absent from the house on Fridays, returned unexpectedly… and, it is presumed, disturbed the intruders.’
He stopped. The reporters dutifully wrote down the stilted words and looked disillusioned. One of them, clearly elected by pre-arrangement, started asking questions for them all, in a gentle, coaxing, sympathetic tone of voice.
‘Could you tell us which of these closed doors is the one to the room
where your wife…’
Donald’s eyes slid briefly despite himself towards the sittingroom. All the heads turned, the eyes studied the uninformative white painted panels, the pencils wrote.
‘And could you tell us what exactly was stolen?’
‘Silver. Paintings.’
‘Who were the paintings by?’
Donald shook his head and began to look even paler.
‘Could you tell us how much they were worth?’
After a pause Don said ‘I don’t know.’
‘Were they insured?’
‘Yes.’
‘How many bedrooms are there in your house?’
‘What?’
‘How many bedrooms?’
Donald looked bewildered. ‘I suppose… five.’
‘Do you think you could tell us anything about your wife? About her character, and about her job? And could you let us have a photograph?’
Donald couldn’t. He shook his head and said ‘I’m sorry,’ and turned and walked steadily away upstairs.
‘That’s all,’ Frost said with finality.
‘It’s not much,’ they grumbled.
‘What do you want? Blood?’ Frost said, opening the front door and encouraging them out. ‘Put yourselves in his position.’
‘Yeah,’ they said cynically; but they went.
‘Did you see their eyes?’ I said. ‘Sucking it all in?’
Frost smiled faintly. ‘They’ll all write long stories from that little lot.’
The interview, however, produced to a great extent the desired results. Most of the cars departed, and the rest, I supposed, would follow as soon as fresher news broke.
‘Why did they ask about the bedrooms?’ I said.
‘To estimate the value of the house.’
‘Good grief.’
‘They’ll all get it different.’ Frost was near to amusement. ‘They always do.’ He looked up the stairs in the direction Donald had taken, and, almost casually, said ‘Is your cousin in financial difficulties?’
I knew his catch-them-off-guard technique by now.
‘I wouldn’t think so,’ I said unhurriedly. ‘You’d better ask him.’