Hot Money Part 21

Yale looked blank. 'Who is West?'

'A detective,' Berenice said. 'I sent him away with a flea in his ear, I can tell you.'

'He was awfully persistent,' Helen said, not liking the memory. 'Itold him I couldn't possibly remember exactly, but he went on prying.'

'Dreadful little man,' Serena said.

'He said I was illegitimate,' Gervase complained sourly. 'It's thanks to Joyce that he knew.'

Yale's mouth opened and closed again and he took a deep breath. 'Who is West?' he asked intensely.

'Fellow I hired,' Malcolm said. 'Private detective. Hired him to find out who was trying to kill me, as I reckoned the police weren't getting anywhere.'

Yale's composure remained more or less intact. 'All the same,' he said, 'please answer the questions again. And those of you without husband and wife here, please answer for them as best you can.' He looked around at all the faces, and I would have sworn he was puzzled. I looked to see what he had seen, and I saw the faces of ordinary people, not murderers. Ordinary people with problems and hang-ups, with quirks and grievances. People anxious and disturbed by the blasting of the house that most had lived in and all had visited. Not one of them could possibly be a murderer, I thought. It had after all to be someone from outside.

I felt a lot of relief at this conclusion until I realised I was raising any excuse not to have to find a murderer among ourselves; yet we did have to find one, if Malcolm were to live. The dilemma was permanent.

'That's all for now,' Yale said, rising to his feet. 'My staff will take your statements in the interview rooms. And Mr Pembroke senior, will you stay here a moment? And Mr Ian Pembroke also? There are the arrangements to be made about the house.'

The family left me behind with bad grace. 'It's my job, not Ian's, to see to things. I am the eldest.' That was Donald. 'You need someone with know-how.' That was Gervase, heavily. 'It's not Ian's house.' Petulance from Edwin.

Yale managed however to shovel them all out, and immediately the door had closed, I said, 'While they're all in the interview rooms, I'm taking my father out of here.'

'The house ...' Malcolm began.

'I'll see to the house later. We're leaving here now, this minute. If Superintendent Yale will lend us a police car, fine; otherwise we'll catch buses or taxis.'

'You can have a police car within reason,' Yale said.

'Great. Then... urn... just take my father to the railway station. I'll stay here.'

'All right.'

To Malcolm, I said, 'Go to London. Go to where we were last night. Use the same name. Don't telephone anyone. Don't for G.o.d's sake let anyone know where you are.'

'You're b.l.o.o.d.y arrogant.'

'Yes. This time, listen to me.'

Malcolm gave me a blue glare, stubbed out his cigar, stood up and let the red blanket drop from his shoulders to the floor.

'Where will you be?' Yale asked him.

'Don't answer,' I said brusquely.

Malcolm looked at me, then at the superintendent. 'Ian will know where I am. If he doesn't want to tell you, he won't. Gervase tried to burn some information out of him once, and didn't succeed. He still has the scars ...' he turned to me '... don't you?'

'Malcolm!' I protested.

Malcolm said to Yale, 'I gave Gervase a beating he'll never forget.'

'And he's never forgiven me,' I said.

'Forgiven you? For what? You didn't snitch to me. Serena did. She was so young she didn't really understand what she'd been seeing. Gervase could be a proper bully.'

'Come on,' I said, 'we're wasting time.'

Superintendent Yale followed us out of his office and detailed a driver to take Malcolm.

'I'll come in the car, once I can move it,' I said to him. 'Don't go shopping, I'll buy us some things later. Do be sensible, I beg you.'

'I promise,' he said; but promises with Malcolm weren't necessarily binding. He went out with the driver and I stood on the police station steps watching his departure and making sure none of the family had seen him or could follow.

Yale made no comment but waved me back to his office. Here he gave me a short list of reputable building contractors and the use of his telephone. I chose one of the firms at random and explained what was needed, and Yale took the receiver himself and insisted that they were to do minimum weather-proofing only, and were to move none of the rubble until the police gave clearance.

'When the driver returns from taking your father,' he said to me, disconnecting, 'we can spare him to ferry you back to your car.'

'Thank you.'

'I'm trusting you, you know, to maintain communications between me and your father.'

'I'll telephone here every morning, if you like.'

'I'd much rather know where he is.'

I shook my head. 'The fewer people know, the safer.'

He couldn't exactly accuse me of taking unreasonable precautions, so he left it, and asked instead, 'What did your half-brother burn you with?'

'A cigarette. Nothing fancy.'

'And what information did he want?'

'Where I'd hidden my new cricket bat,' I answered: but it hadn't been about cricket bats, it had been about illegitimacy, which I hadn't known at the time but had come to understand since.

'How old were you both?'

'I was eleven. Gervase must have been thirteen.'

'Why didn't you give him the bat?' Yale asked.

'It wasn't the bat I wouldn't give him. It was the satisfaction. Is this part of your enquiries?'

'Everything is,' he said laconically.

The hired car was movable when I got back to it and as it was pointing in that direction I drove it along to Quantum. There were still amazing numbers of people there, and I couldn't get past the now more substantial barrier across the drive until the policeman guarding it had checked with Superintendent Yale by radio 'Sorry, sir,' one of them said, finally letting me in. 'The superintendent's orders.'

I nodded and drove on, parking in front of thf .bease beside two police cars which had presumably returned from taking the many family members to their various cars.

I had already grown accustomed to the sight of the house; it still looked as horrific but held no more shocks. Another policeman walked purposefully towards me as I got out of the car and asked what I wanted. To look through the downstairs windows, I said.

He checked by radio. The superintendent replied that I could look through the windows as long as the constable remained at my side, and as long as 1 would point out to him anything I thought looked wrong. I readily agreed to that. With the constable beside me, I walked towards the place where the hall could still be discerned,skirting the heavy front door, which had been blown outwards, frame and all, when the brickwork on either side of it had given way.

QUANTUM IN ME FUIT lay face downwards on the gravel. I did the best I could. Someone's best, I thought, grateful to be alive, hadn't quite been good enough.

'Don't go in, sir,' the young constable said warningly. 'There's more could come down.'

I didn't try to go in. The hall was full of ceilings and floors and walls from upstairs, though one could see daylight over the top of the heap, the daylight from the back garden. Somewhere in the heap were all of Malcolm's clothes except the ones he'd worn to Cheltenham, all his vicuna coats and handmade shoes, all of the gold-and-silver brushes he'd packed on his flight to Cambridge, and somewhere, too, the portrait of Moira.

Jagged arrows of furniture stuck up from the devastation like the arms of the drowning, and pieces of dusty unrecognisable fabric flapped forlornly when a gust of wind took them. Tangled there, too, was everything I'd brought with me from my flat, save only my racing kit - saddle, helmet and holdall-which was still in the boot of the car along with Malcolm's briefcase. Everything was replaceable, I supposed; and I felt incredibly glad I hadn't thought of bringing the silver-framed picture of Coochie and the boys.

There was gla.s.s everywhere along the front of the house, fallen from the shattered windows. With the constable in tow, I crunched along towards the office, pa.s.sing the ruins of the downstairs cloakroom on the way, where a half-demolished wall had put paid to the plumbing.

The office walls themselves, like those of the kitchen, were intact, but the office door that I'd set at such a careful angle was wide open with another brick and plaster glacier spilling through it. The shockwave that must have pa.s.sed through the room to smash its way out through the windows had lifted every unweighted sheet of paper and redistributed it on the floor. Most of the pictures and countless small objects were down there also, including, I noticed, the pen pot holding the piece of wire. Apart from the ancient bevelled gla.s.s of a splendid breakfront bookcase which stood along one wall, everything major looked restorable, though getting rid of the dust would be a problem in itself.

I spent a good deal of time gazing through the open s.p.a.ces of the office windows, but in the end had to admit defeat. The positions oftoo much had been altered for me to see anything inexplicably wrong. I'd seen nothing significant in there the previous evening when I'd fetched Malcolm's briefcase, when I'd been wide awake with alarm to such things.

Shaking my head I moved on round the house, pa.s.sing the still shut and solidly bolted garden door which marked the end of the indoor pa.s.sage. The blast hadn't shifted it, had dissipated on nearer targets. Past it lay the long creeper-covered north wall of the old playroom, and I walked along there and round into the rear garden.

The police had driven stakes into the lawn and tied ropes to them, making a line for no one to cross. Behind the rope the crowd persisted, open-eyed, chattering, pointing, coming to look and moving away to trail back over the fields. Among them Arthur Bellbrook, the dogs at his side, was holding a mini-court in a semicircle of respectful listeners. The reporters and Press photographers seemed to have vanished but other cameras still clicked in a barrage. There was a certain restrained orderliness about everything which struck me hard as incongruous.

Turning my back to the gawpers, I looked through the playroom window, seeing it, like the office, from the opposite angle to the previous night. Apart from the boxroom and my bedroom, it was the only room unmetamorphosed by Moira, and it still looked what it had been for forty years, the private domain of children.

The old battered armchairs were still there, and the big table that with a little imagination had been fort, boat, s.p.a.ceship and dungeon in its time. The long shelves down the north wall still bore generations of train sets, building sets, board games and stuffed toys. Robin and Peter's shiny new bicycles were still propped there, that had been the joy of their lives in the week before the crash. There were posters of pop groups pinned to the walls and a bookcase bulging with reprehensible tastes.

The explosion on the other side of the thick load-bearing wall had done less damage to the playroom than to anywhere else I'd seen; only the broken windows and the ubiquitous dust, which had flooded in from the pa.s.sage, showed that anything had happened. A couple of teddy bears had tumbled off the shelves, but the bicycles were still standing.

Anything there that shouldn't be there, anything not there that should be, Yale had said. I hadn't seen anything the night before in those categories, and I still couldn't.

With a frustrated shrug, I skirted the poured-out guts of the house and on the far side looked through the dining-room windows. Like the playroom, the dining-room was relatively undamaged, though here the blast had blown in directly from the hall, leaving the now familiar tongue of rubble and covering everything with a thick grey film. For ever after, I would equate explosions with dust.

The long table, primly surrounded by high-backed chairs, stood unmoved. Some display plates held in wires on the wall had broken and fallen off. The sideboard was bare, but then it had been before. Malcolm had said the room had hardly been used since he and Moira had taken to shouting.

I continued round to the kitchen and went in through the door, to the agitation of the constable. I told him I'd been in there earlier to fetch the pine chair, which someone had since brought back, and he relaxed a very little.

'That door,' I said, pointing to one in a corner, 'leads to the cellars. Do you know if anyone's been down there?'

He didn't think so. He was pretty sure not. He hadn't heard anyone mention cellars.

The two underground rooms lay below the kitchen and dining-room, and without electric lights I wasn't keen to go down there. Still... what excuse did I have not to?

Malcolm kept some claret in racks there, enough to grieve him if the bottles were broken. Coochie had used the cellars romantically for candlelit parties with red-checked tablecloths and gypsy music, and the folding tables and chairs were still stacked there, along with the motley junk of ages that was no longer used but too valuable to throw away.

'Do you have a torch, constable?' I asked.

No, he hadn't. I went to fetch the one I'd installed by habit in the hired car and, in spite of his disapproval, investigated downstairs. He followed me, to do him justice.

To start with, the cellars were dry, which was a relief as I'd been afraid the water from the storage tank and the broken pipes would have drained down and flooded them.

None of Malcolm's bottles was broken. The chimney wall, continuing downwards as st.u.r.dy foundations, had sheltered everything on its outer side as stalwartly below as it had above.

The dire old clutter of pensioned-off standard lamps, rocking-chair, pictures, tin trunk, tiger skin, bed headboard, tea-trolley, alltook brief life in the torchlight and faded back to shadow. Same old junk, undisturbed.

All that one could say again was that nothing seemed to be there in the cellar that shouldn't be, and nothing not there that should. Shrugging resignedly, I led the way upstairs and closed the door.

Outside again, I looked into the garage, which seemed completely untouched, and walked round behind it to the kitchen garden. The gla.s.s in the old greenhouse was broken, and I supposed Moira's little folly, away on the far side of the garden, would have suffered the same fate.

I dearly wanted to go down to the far end of the kitchen garden to make sure the gold store was safe, but was deterred by the number of interested eyes already swivelled my way, and particularly by Arthur Bellbrook's.

The wall itself looked solid enough. The crowds were nowhere near it, as it was away to the left, while they were coming in from the fields on the right.

The constable stood by my side, ready to accompany me everywhere.

Shrugging, I retreated. Have faith, I thought, and drove away to London.

Twelve.

Malcolm had achieved a double suite at the Ritz with views of Green Park. He had lunched on Strasbourg pate and Dover sole, according to the remains on the white-clothed room-service table, and had reached the lower half of a bottle of Krug.

'How are the shakes?' I said, putting his briefcase down beside him.

'Were you followed here?' he asked.

'I was not.'

He was doing his best to pretend he had regained total command of himself, yet I guessed the train journey had been an anxious and lonely ordeal. It was difficult for me to imagine the escalating trauma within him. How could anyone be the target of deadly unrelenting virulence and not in the end break down? I'd got to invent something better for him, I thought, than cooping him up in millionaire cells. Make him safe, give him back his lightheartedness, set him free.

'Um,' I said, i hope your pa.s.sport's still in your briefcase.'

'Yes, it is.' He had taken it in his briefcase to Paris.

'Good.'

An unfortunate thought struck him. 'Where's yours?' Malcolm asked.

'In the rubble. Don't worry, I'll get a replacement. Do you have a visa for America?'

'Yes. I also had one for Australia once, but they only last a year. If we go, we'll have to get new visas from Australia House.'

'How about if you go to America tomorrow?' I said.

'Tomorrow? How can I?'