The Chalon Heads (35 page)

‘I couldn’t get her to explain why she was so wet. I said I’d fetch a doctor, or the police, but she wouldn’t have it— she got really hysterical then, shrieking at me.’ He looked around in dismay. ‘Most of all she seemed terrified that Sammy would come to the cottage and find her, and she made us promise we wouldn’t tell him she was there, and that we’d protect her.’

‘I took her upstairs to the bathroom then,’ Helen Fitzpatrick broke in dully. ‘I tried to make out where she was hurt, but apart from some cuts to her feet, she didn’t seem injured. She was thin as a rake, though, and shaking terribly, and she smelt of chlorine, as if she’d been in the swimming-pool. She was holding something between her hands, which I saw was a shiny metal tube, dark blue, and I thought . . . well, I had no idea what it was. I thought it might be something precious, jewellery or something, she was hanging on to it so tightly.

‘I got her a dressing-gown and slippers to change into, and she calmed down a bit. She said that she would like a cup of tea, and I left her and came down to the kitchen to make it. When I returned with it, a few minutes later, the bathroom door was closed. There isn’t a lock on it, and I knocked and went in. She was on her knees beside the bath, and I thought at first she must be being sick. But then she looked up at me with this funny smile, completely calm now. Beside her on the floor was the metal tube, in two pieces, and there were several little plastic bags, empty, lying around on the floor. I think I realised then what it was. The most weird thing, the thing that made me cross, was that I’d just received a letter from my sister, and I’d left it on the bathroom window-sill, and Eva had torn the page in two, and had rolled one half up into a sort of tube. And I thought, You bitch, I haven’t finished reading that letter yet.

‘We managed to get her downstairs again. She was calm, but not really with us, and she stumbled getting down the stairs. By this stage I was wondering whether we shouldn’t ring Sammy and tell him to come and get her, but she seemed so genuinely frightened of him that I wasn’t sure. When I mentioned Marianna, that seemed just as bad as Sammy. What she said she wanted was to go up to London. She said she had a friend there who would look after her.’

‘Did she give a name?’ Kathy said. ‘Any indication at all of who it might be?’

‘No, she was very secretive about it. Her manner was quite weird, playful one minute and paranoid the next. It was difficult to make sense of what she was saying half the time. She seemed to want us to take her to London straight away, but the thought of taking off in the middle of the night with her in such a state . . . Then . . .’

Helen paused and took a deep breath, as if coming to the difficult bit. ‘Then she said she had a secret she would share with us, if we would take her to London. She said it was a very valuable secret, which Toby especially would be very interested in.’ She turned her head away from her husband, who lowered his, his shoulders sagging visibly.

‘She said that Sammy had been very mean to her—well, I had to laugh at that. It was incredible the clothes and things that Sammy showered on her. She was the most pampered wife I’d ever seen, and I told her so. But she got angry with me then. I think that was when I first realised that she didn’t like me, probably never had. Anyway, I think that made it easier in a way for her to tell us her secret, because it was a punishment, not only for Sammy but also for us.

‘She said that she’d found a way to get money from Sammy to buy things to make her happy—she meant her drugs, of course. She had a friend, she said, who sold expensive stamps to Sammy and gave her a commission on the sale. The reason she got the commission was that she had introduced Sammy to him, and also so that she would keep quiet about the fact that the stamps he was selling Sammy were worthless fakes. When she told us this, Toby made some strange sound, and I couldn’t understand why he’d suddenly gone white. Then I guessed . . . Why don’t you tell her, Toby?’ she said, mouth tight.

He husband was crouched forward in his seat. He cleared his throat and muttered, ‘Oh, God . . .’

‘Go on!’ she ordered him, and he straightened upright with an expressionless face and took up the story.

‘Months ago, Sammy had shown me these stamps, Chalon Heads, which he’d been getting from a new source. They were of a much better quality, and a much better price, than he’d been able to obtain through the usual dealers and auction sales. They included some absolute corkers . . .

‘Anyway, the story was that this dealer in London had a widow for a client, whose husband’s family had been collecting stamps for generations. His father and grandfather had been colonial administrators in various places around the globe, and had built up a fabulous collection of Empire stamps, especially Chalon Heads. The old widow knew they had value, though not how much, but she didn’t want to dispose of the lot because she hoped to leave most of them to her grandchildren one day. But in the meantime she had very little income, and there were living expenses and charities to support, so she was selling off her husband’s legacy, a page at a time.

‘According to Sammy, he had come to an agreement with the dealer to take all the old widow’s stock, the minute it came through the door. Sammy was very excited about it, as if he’d found a hidden seam of gold, and I can remember how jealous I felt. Luck like that only came to people like Sammy, who didn’t need it, I thought.

‘From time to time he would show me his latest acquisitions from the widow’s collection, as he called it. Part of him wanted to keep it a secret, but another part wanted to trumpet it from the rooftops, and I suppose I was the way he resolved it. I was the tame audience, appreciative and dependable, listening to him babbling on about the latest Head when he couldn’t contain himself any more, and promising not to tell anyone else. He didn’t realise that I was burning up inside with envy—they really were wonderful stamps.’

‘He didn’t tell you anything about the dealer?’

‘Oh, no! Absolutely nothing. He was terrified others would get in and bump the prices up. It was only by accident that I discovered that the man was in London, when Sammy let drop one time that he’d been up to town again to buy more stamps. Come to think of it, he may have said that on purpose, as a false trail. Anyway, as it happened, he didn’t need to tell me, because one time when I was coming away from a session with him, Eva met me in the garden. She teased me a bit, about playing with Sammy’s stamps, like we were little boys. Then she asked me if I thought his latest purchases, from the widow, were any good, and I said, oh, gosh, yes, they were absolutely wonderful, and Sammy was so lucky to have found his source. Then she said that she knew where he got them from, “such a funny little man”, she said. I asked if she’d met the dealer then, and she said she had. She knew where his shop was, and she said the man adored her, and would do anything for her. And I said something like, “Well, I wish you’d persuade him to sell some to me.” It was a spontaneous remark, because I knew I didn’t have any money to buy that sort of thing with. She just laughed.

‘About a month later she phoned me, here, at home. I said that Helen was out at work, and she said she knew that, she wanted to talk to me. She said she’d been to see the dealer, and she had something I might be interested in. Well, it all sounded quite intriguing, and I agreed to walk the dogs past the end of her garden, and meet her. I wasn’t really prepared for what she had to tell me.’

His wife gave a derisive snort.

‘What it was,’ Toby battled on, ‘was that she had mentioned my interest to the dealer, and his response was that he wasn’t prepared to put at risk his relationship with a dependable client like Sammy for the sake of one or two little sales on the side to me. Well, I felt a bit flattened, because I’d thought she’d got something positive to tell me, but I could understand his point of view.

‘However, she said, the widow had just dropped in something big, a whole album. There was some story about her wanting to set up a trust fund for her grandchildren’s education, or something. Sammy knew nothing of it yet, and the dealer might be prepared to sell it to me as a one-off, if I kept quiet about it to Sammy. He wouldn’t split it up, I had to take the lot or nothing. I said, “What do you mean, big?” And she said, “Sixty thousand.”

‘I laughed, and told her that was way beyond my resources, and she seemed surprised, as if she couldn’t imagine anyone not having sixty thousand quid to spend. Anyway, she had photocopies of the pages of the album, and I said I’d love to see them, and she gave them to me on the understanding that she had to give them back the following day to the dealer, who would then sell the album to Sammy.

‘I took them home and had a close look at them, pages from a very old album, with this fabulous collection of mint Bahamas Chalon Heads, all beautifully written up in an old-fashioned script. It was mouthwatering, it really was. So then I began checking the stamps against their market values in the Stanley Gibbons catalogue, and I soon realised that sixty thousand was an incredibly cheap price for them. There were individual items that alone were worth five thousand and more, and I calculated that, even discounting quite heavily, the album would fetch at least twice its price at auction.’

Fitzpatrick poured himself another brandy, his hand shaking as he held the bottle against the rim of the small glass. He took a sip, grimaced and coughed.

‘So anyway,’ he continued, ‘I fell for it. I—I think you’d better tell them about the money, Helen. I feel rather sick.’

She looked at him coldly. ‘We went through a bad patch, a few years back. Toby was made redundant, at the worst possible time in terms of our commitments. We’d got ourselves caught in the housing market, and ended up with a huge mortgage and negative equity. When we finally extracted ourselves, we’d lost most of our capital, and we couldn’t get another mortgage to start again, what with Toby being out of work. I had this inspiration to come up here, as I told you before, to the Hog’s Back, where I used to come as a little girl to stay with my aunt. It was running away, I suppose, and it seemed an impossible dream, until we came upon this place. It was exactly what I’d imagined, a little refuge in the woods. We couldn’t afford to buy, of course, and we started renting, but we got to know the landlord, a retired judge, and he was really sweet, and after a while offered us an option to buy within five years, if we could raise enough, at a pretty reasonable price, which he would hold for us.

‘Well, it seemed like a miracle, although we didn’t have nearly enough. We had the remains of Toby’s payout, and I started doing any kind of work I could get, and gradually we built it up. We had sixty thousand, amazingly enough.’ Her eyes narrowed at her husband.

‘I told you, darling,’ he whispered, ‘it was a pure coincidence she came up with that figure. I never told her or anyone else about our plan.’ He turned to Kathy and said, with a pathetic sigh, ‘I thought the stamps would double our money, you see. We’d be able to buy the cottage, and everything would be all right.’

‘But he didn’t tell me,’ Helen said.

‘No. I didn’t think Helen would agree to risk our money like that. Not on stamps. She’s always thought they were a bit of a joke.’

‘Didn’t you get them checked by an expert?’ Kathy said.

‘Oh, I thought of that. They came with certificates of authentication, you see. Quite impeccable. And I had to act quickly, because the dealer was in two minds about selling to me rather than Sammy . . .’

He ran out of words. For a while nobody said anything, then his wife said, ‘Yes, well, I knew none of this. So you can imagine how I felt when Eva, the poor orphan on our doorstep, revealed that the stamps were worthless, and that she’d ripped us off of our complete future. It wasn’t helped by the fact that she seemed to think it was all a hilarious joke. She kept giggling, until I slapped her.’

Kathy nodded. ‘What happened then?’

‘She sobered up after that. When I’d finally understood the whole dreadful story, I said she would have to take us to the dealer, and he would have to give us our money back, but she refused. She said the money had all gone, and he would never pay. She said the only way we could get our money back would be to sell the stamps again, without letting on they were forgeries. After a while . . . I suppose I came to realise that that was the only way we would be able to hang on to the cottage. I knew it would be dishonest, a fraud, but the alternative was too much to bear, and it wasn’t as if anyone would be really hurt by it, not if they never discovered that the stamps were fakes. I suppose the thing that decided it was when Eva suggested that the dealer could sell them to Sammy, and get our money back that way. She thought that was very funny. I thought . . .’ she lifted her chin defiantly ‘. . . I thought that Sammy didn’t really deserve his money and that house and everything else anyway. I mean, he made it in some sort of dodgy way, didn’t he? He was nearly imprisoned for fraud some time ago, wasn’t he? So I thought that it would be only fair if anyone had to lose by it he should. He could easily afford it, anyway . . .’ Her defiance ran out of steam, and she went silent.

‘So what did you decide to do?’ Kathy asked.

‘We decided that Toby would take Eva up to London, with the stamps, and she would arrange the sale through the dealer again. I would stay here in case Sammy came looking for Eva, and try to put him off the scent. I gave her some of my clothes, and they left, what, about eleven thirty, I suppose.’

Her husband nodded. ‘She wanted to go to her flat, to get her own clothes and phone her dealer friend, she said. The plan was that we’d go to the dealer together that night, and I’d make sure there were no misunderstandings about us getting our money back. Anyway, by the time we got to Canonbury, she was asleep, and when I woke her up, she insisted she couldn’t go on that night. She was in a pretty exhausted state. I had to practically carry her into the flat. I told her I’d call back in the morning, and we’d go to the dealer then.’

‘You still had no idea where this man’s shop was?’

‘No, she wouldn’t tell me anything. So I came home. Early next morning I went back up to town, and she was gone—at least, there was no reply at the flat. We’ve never heard from her again.’