A Presumption of Death (28 page)

‘Well, that shouldn’t be too hard,’ said Peter. ‘I’ll get someone on to it.’

‘So next we find out where the real Brinklow was based, and then—’

‘I’ve thought of something,’ Peter said. ‘Didn’t Jerry say there was a will form in a pay-book?’

‘But officers don’t have them, he said.’

‘But their wills must be kept somewhere,’ said Peter. ‘That should lead us to his family. I’ll find out.’

Harriet went downstairs to romp with the children and help with tea and bath-time.

Putting his head round the nursery door a half-hour later, Peter said to her triumphantly, ‘RAF records, Gloucester. I’ve got someone on to it,’ before dropping on all fours to be a man-eating tiger chasing his son and smallest nephew round the sofa.

‘Do you fancy a little trip?’ Peter asked. He was walking arm in arm with Harriet up the lane, in a gathering dusk. Bedtime was getting later and later, and seemed, now Peter was home, to be nearly uncontrollable. He was indulging himself in an orgy of childish company. But all was quiet on the home front now, and he was taking the air with his wife. ‘Could we leave the nest of monsters for, say, three days, without mutiny in the ranks?’ he asked.

‘I think we could,’ she said. ‘Departing with threats and bribes and binding everyone over to be on best behaviour. It sounds wonderful. Where are we going?’

‘A long way. Destination unknown, via Gloucester.’

‘You wouldn’t consider Bannockburn by way of Beachy Head?’

‘No. It has to be as I suggest.’

‘To do with Brinklow, of course?’

‘Of course. But that wouldn’t prevent it being fun; it would just give us a clear conscience about tooling around on the roads, using petrol.’

‘I’d love it. When?’

‘Day after tomorrow all right? I take it you’d need a day to square Mrs Trapp and Sadie, and Bunter . . .’

‘Peter, we couldn’t take Bunter, could we? It would be just like our notorious honeymoon. Just like old times.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of driving gently enough to cradle a case of port in the boot,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘So it wouldn’t be
just
like . . . But would you really like Bunter along?’

‘I think I told you once that I love Bunter, and I wish I could have married him. Weren’t you listening? But seriously, Peter, Bunter must have had a rough time abroad, too. I expect he would like a break as much as we would.’

‘What a scoop this would be for the newshounds that used to chase us of old!’ Peter said, laughing. ‘Famous sleuth’s wife loves another! Lady Peter in love triangle! Seriously, Harriet, I would love to take Bunter. Would the home base run along without him?’

‘It has been, for months,’ she said serenely. ‘I think Hope’s parents live in Evesham. Isn’t that somewhere near Gloucester?’

‘It’s in the right general direction.’

‘You could give Bunter some leave, and drop him off there on the way, or the way back.’

‘As I said before, I have married a practical genius.’

‘Didn’t you bargain for that?’

‘Not specially. Silly of me, really. I thought of you as slightly elsewhere, very wrapped up in your work. And I don’t seem to have had a moment to ask you what you’re doing at the moment. Has Robert Templeton got a current case?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m not writing a detective novel, although people keep asking me for one. Somehow with the mayhem going on in Europe a body behind the sofa seems like one too many.’

‘Quite apart from two too many here.’

‘Exactly. I’ve been writing articles. Reading for the Le Fanu book. And writing some poems. They seem easier, more in tune with the moment.’

Peter didn’t ask to see them. He had a delicate tact with her that spoke eloquently to her.

‘May I show you some, some time?’ she said.

‘Please,’ he said. ‘Look, here comes Miss Twitterton, as large as life!’

Miss Twitterton seemed, in fact, rather larger than life. She was rosy-cheeked and glowing with her evening walk, and wearing a pretty silk scarf that Harriet didn’t remember having seen before. She broke into a trot as soon as she saw them, and closed the distance between them, crying, ‘Oh, oh, oh, Lord Peter! Oh, Lord . . . Peter, oh! I am so glad to see you! Oh, I thought we might never . . .’

Peter raised one of her outstretched hands, kissed it theatrically, and said, ‘I am just as glad to see you, Miss Twitterton, as you are to see me.’

‘Oh, no,’ she said, falling in step with them down the lane. ‘You really cannot mean that, Lord Peter. I have been safely here with dear Lady Peter and the quiet village society, and you have been in such terrible danger. Such terrible things, such atrocities happening in those poor countries. I just can’t bear to think what they do when they capture somebody. We have all been simply
terrified
for you. Every time we have sung
Eternal Father Strong to Save
, you have been the
primary
person I have been thinking of.’

‘It’s very kind of you, Miss Twitterton,’ said Peter. There was not the slightest tremor of amusement in his voice. ‘I haven’t been in peril on the sea, or at least only for the last six hours of the mission. But it was a touch hazardous. Never mind, here I am you see, as large as life and as odd-looking as ever.’

If Miss Twitterton flushed, as she always used to do when Peter gave her more than a moment’s attention, the dusk was now too deep for Harriet to see it. Instead of flustering around the conversation as she would have done only weeks ago, Miss Twitterton said, ‘Lord Peter, you are
very nearly
the nicest-looking man I have ever met.’

Peter gave Harriet a gaze of consternation and amazement. ‘It’s getting rather dark,’ he observed. ‘And you have a little way to go, Miss Twitterton. May I walk you to your gate?’

‘That is most remarkably kind of you, Lord Peter,’ Miss Twitterton said. ‘But I am quite used to walking round the lanes by myself. There is no need. I was just wondering, Lord Peter, if you have a favourite hymn? Because I thought, to give thanks for your safe return at the morning service next Sunday . . . and if it’s a very unusual hymn we would need to learn it at choir-practice tomorrow night.’

‘Thank you, Miss Twitterton,’ Peter said. ‘I have always rather liked the old one hundredth.’

They had reached the bottom of the lane, and their ways home diverged.

‘Oh, that’s easy!’ she cried. ‘You shall have it, Lord Peter, you shall indeed. Goodnight to you both.’ And she skipped away towards Pagford with a very light step.

‘Peter,’ said Harriet, in amazement, ‘whoever is the
absolutely
nicest-looking man Miss Twitterton has ever met?’

‘Whoever he is,’ said Peter, ‘I owe him a debt of gratitude. He has relieved me of a most onerous and unwelcome role!’

Harriet felt such joy the next morning, waking in Peter’s arms, and lying quite still so as not to wake him, that it brought with it also a flicker of guilt. What had
she
done to deserve this, and wasn’t it tempting fate; fate that was already rolling towards them, armed and malignant? Yet surely it wasn’t a duty to be glum? Wasn’t it better to seize the day?

‘Why should we rise because ’tis light?’ said her husband.

She laughed. ‘Did we lie down because ’twas night?’ she asked him. ‘But, my lord, if we are to pack, and get ourselves on the road for a journey . . .’

‘Mmm,’ he said, holding her tight enough to prevent her getting up. ‘I expect you will find Bunter has seen to the packing. You can have another five minutes abed.’

‘Peter,’ she said, a little later, ‘do you ever feel that you can’t possibly deserve happiness – I mean great happiness, like having you home again – when other people can be in such wretchedness?’

He propped himself up on one arm and contemplated her. ‘Logically, whether we deserve this morning or not should not be connected to what kind of a morning anyone else is having,’ he said.

‘I don’t think logic has much to do with it,’ she said. ‘Although I do think Aristotle might cast some light.’

‘You keep quoting that pestilential philosopher at me. This time you are speaking of catharsis.’

‘Yes, pity and fear. Do you remember what he says: that pity is occasioned by undeserved misfortunes, and fear by that of one like ourselves?’

‘And now the world is full of undeserved misfortunes, descending on those just like ourselves?’

‘You always understand me so quickly!’

‘The Aristotelian emotions were supposed to purify,’ he said. ‘Can’t we feel pure joy?’

‘Bought at the expense of other people’s suffering?’

‘No, bought in the shadow of knowing how we might suffer ourselves. Awareness sharpens joy, don’t you think?’

‘Sharp joy – that’s what I’m feeling!’

‘The kind that makes one want to dance at funerals?’

‘Now that really is heartless, Peter!’

‘I must be rather oddly wired up. But when those great words roll over us – man that is born of a woman hath but a short time; all flesh is as grass; the places where he was known shall see him no more – I always want to rush off and drink champagne, or dance all night, or hear an opera.’

‘Or find a lovely woman?’

‘That was long ago. Before I became a contented husband.’

‘Peter, we surely should be getting up now, even if Bunter is packing for us. We won’t have time for breakfast.’

‘Good God, woman, why didn’t you say?’ he said, abruptly sitting up. ‘Breakfast is one of the very joys we should wallow in while luck is on our side! Will there be bacon and eggs?’

‘If so, don’t tell anyone,’ she said.

It was only once they were moving, with Peter driving, with Harriet settled back on the deep sensuous leather seat of Mrs Merdle, and Bunter seated in the back holding the road map, that Harriet realised how glad she was of a change of scene. Somehow the idea of moving round England had been expunged almost as thoroughly as the idea of big game hunting in France. ‘For the duration’ one no longer expected it. The local paper had carried a picture of ‘holidays at home’ showing a girl in a swimsuit sunbathing on a deckchair in the back garden of a suburban house, and of course a lot of children were happily running wild in woods and fields who would without the war have been in grim urban schools. But grown-up holidays – she had to pinch herself to believe she was awake, and remind herself each hour that a trip with a serious purpose was not made frivolous merely because one enjoyed it.

And although Harriet often travelled with her eyes shut when Peter was driving, it was certainly a lovely treat to reach Oxford in time for a late lunch at the Mitre, and from there to roll gently through the modest but touching beauties of the Cotswolds to reach Gloucester by tea-time. Bunter turned out to have a friend in Gloucester, so he took himself off for an evening visit. Peter and Harriet sat by the fire in the hotel lounge, playing the quotation game.

‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments,’ Harriet offered.

‘I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,’ Peter replied.

‘If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.’

‘No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief . . .’

‘Go, lovely Rose! Tell her, that wastes her time and me . . .’

‘Music hath charms to sooth a savage breast . . .’

‘Busy old fool, unruly sunne . . .’

‘So sweet, so smooth, so silvery is thy voice . . .’

‘V is difficult,’ Peter said. Hang on:
Vivre est une chute horizontale
.’

‘Is French allowed?’

‘Why not? Aren’t they our gallant allies, and the pinnacle of civilisation, to boot?’

‘Falling over sideways might be all too apt,’ said Harriet, suddenly sombre.

Peter regarded her with mute attention. ‘Nothing for H?’ he said. ‘I win then, and you must pay the forfeit.’

‘Which is?’

‘Being sent to bed early, my dear. Come along, things always look better in the morning.’

Misquoted from the Book of Proverbs

While Peter went off to the RAF records office Harriet spent until noon in the cathedral. One could do the whole history of church architecture here, from the Normans to the Reformation. Harriet lingered most of the time in the cloisters, under the earliest fan vaulting in England, where Peter found her, entranced.

‘We’ve got our lead,’ he said. ‘Brinklow did make a will and it was a very new one. Changed at the last minute. Everything, which had been to go to Dr Barnardo’s, left to a girl called Joan Quarley of Culpits in Northumberland. So off we go.’

‘What do we know about Joan Quarley?’ Harriet asked Peter as they drove once more through the Cotswolds, this time making north-east.

‘Absolutely nothing. Only that he changed his will in her favour.’

‘Cutting out his parents?’

‘I think the earlier will in favour of Barnardo’s might indicate that he was an orphan.’

‘Hmm. A young man I knew at college was a Barnardo’s boy. He wasn’t grateful.’

‘I have a feeling, don’t you know, that Joan Quarley when we find her will be able to explain it.’

‘Peter, how much are you going to be able to explain to her?’

‘Depends what sort of a young woman she is,’ he said. ‘She might be level-headed and reliable. But I expect she’s very young.’

‘Why do you think so?’

‘Because he was.’

‘It’s interesting, isn’t it,’ Harriet said a little later, when they were driving again, ‘how the word “young” changes as we get older. I would have thought myself completely and fully adult at twenty, and been very offended at being treated as anything less.’

‘And now twenty seems green and callow and untried?’

‘Well, it does, rather.’

‘And yet these children are old enough to die in combat,’ he said.