The Sleeping Partner (27 page)

By moving to the telephone he had halved the distance between us. He said savagely: ‘It was a hell of a way to hide her, but when it comes to the point you find that the corny place is the only place. I knew the police would look there.'

‘Why did you come back the next night?'

‘I'd left a gramophone catalogue that wasn't due to be published until the following week. What made you come here, now, today? How the hell did you get in here? What's put you on to me again?'

‘Hasn't your marriage shut down on all the evidence you hoped it might?'

He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, which was swelling at the corner. ‘I'm not married, my dear Mike.'

We stared at each other. A clock somewhere was chiming the half-hour. He said: ‘ Was it some friend of yours who called in on Margot last night, told her Lynn had been murdered, shook her innocent faith in what I'd told her? Was it?'

‘Yes.'

‘She didn't believe him then but she rang me after. I pacified her, told her he was a madman. I think she believed me. But then the newspapers came today … That settled it. I've just left her after three hours. She must have a week's postponement.' He looked at the siphon I held. ‘She must have it. Well, she'd have been a dull woman to live with, dull after Lynn.'

He was leaning now with his hands on the back of a chair. I said: ‘ Then it's really you that's on the run.'

‘Not yet. The mills of God. But now that you've pushed in … I hope your neck is stronger than hers.'

I said: ‘ Lynn was my wife.'

His eyes twitched again. ‘She wasn't much good, you know, not at heart. But she was good in other ways. She'd no thought for
anyone
but me. Not a thought in her head or her body. Once before she scratched me with her nails, all down my back, not in anger but in love. In love and passion. She was like a warm fish, with claws. Have you smelt o' the bud o' the briar or the nard i' the fire, or have tasted the bag o' the bee? She was a soft white bitch and her neck broke like chalk in my hands. Christ, it broke like chalk, and she was dead – just in ten seconds. I thought she'd fainted till the colour changed, changed while I was still holding her. Her eyes kept opening while I carried her. What did she look like after three weeks, eh? What did she look like?'

He picked up the chair in front of him and swung with it as I lifted the siphon. They jarred in mid-air and, the siphon slid down the wood, hit his fingers. The chair dropped but the siphon was knocked out of my hands. Across the falling stuff I jumped at him, glad now of this, we fell to the floor, rolled over. I knocked his fingers from my throat, got his; he tried to drag himself away, I hung on, glad of it, glad of it.

Something hit me across the eyes like blindness and fell beside me, the siphon; he thrust himself clear and was on top; at the third try he got his fingers where he wanted; they were slippery, sticky, but they held and tightened.

I plucked at his face and he stretched out of reach. Pressure on my neck stopped the blood. I knew, so far as knowledge was still there, that this last protest was over and with it the expiation; Lynn was waiting; body and soul I was hers; the skin had pulled away from the fingers and no air was left. The hangman's noose slackened as I died; like finding the reprieve of eternity.

Ray French was standing over me and the room focused occasionally and he'd swung away, was moving away, three, four steps while some sort of air passed like whooping-cough through my throat. I moved my head an inch and that brought sounds and pain back. Someone was putting a key in the door.

It came open as Ray faced it. His hand was dripping blood. A man I knew came in, a middle-aged man dressed like a shop-walker, with a face like a prison gaoler. And there was another man, and behind them someone from the hotel.

Ray said: ‘Stay where you are.'

The man said sombrely: ‘Look, Mr French, I'd advise you to do nothing silly.' He glanced at me. ‘Hobbs …'

The man behind him began to move but Ray said again: ‘Stay where you are.'

No one stirred for a few seconds. Flash point had to come, but we suffered a temporary preservation from it, a photographic embalming of the moment before. Then Sergeant Baker took another step.

‘I'll have to ask you to be reasonable, Mr French. In the first place—'

Ray turned sharply and walked out of the french windows. Baker shouted and leapt after him but it was too late. There was a shadow on the balcony and then no shadow. He might have de-materialised, because there was no other sound, no cry, and we were too high even to hear the fall.

I
T WAS
dark as I came out into Whitehall, and the rain had cleared at last. I didn't know the time because my watch had stopped at twenty-five to six; the glass was starred, a finger broken. It had become a stop-watch pointing the time of Ray's suicide.

It was dark and the rain had cleared, and my head still thumped between the eyes and I walked with a limp. Baker had offered me a car as far as Letherton but I'd said no, I'd stay in London tonight. ‘I think it will be all right, Mr Granville,' he'd said; ‘but don't go far away until after the inquest,
please.
Perhaps I can call on you tomorrow?' A formidable person, Baker. The sandwiches I'd eaten in his office might have been lead-lined, and I couldn't feel yet that it was all right; everything had happened too quickly; and anyway, the all right that Baker spoke of covered the narrowest field and left all the most complicated issues outside.

I turned up towards Trafalgar Square. They'd booked me a room by telephone at the usual hotel and had offered to run me there, but I said I'd walk. So I walked.

Baker had said: ‘ Your phone call to Mrs Curtis just did the trick; we had the line tapped by then; I'd just got back to the Yard when the message came. Lucky for you … It's a bad thing to conceal things from the police, Mr Granville.'

Conceal things from the police. I'd just signed a statement in which nothing was concealed except all the things that counted – such as my hurt from Lynn and my love for Stella and my overriding obligation to … ‘You've a good friend in Dr Curtis. If it hadn't been for him. An inspired guess of his about French and Miss du Caine. Of course it was more than a guess. When I saw him this afternoon he gave me his reasons. No proof as we need it, but it has helped us to find the proof.'

I passed the RUS Museum and crossed Horse Guards Avenue. Someone stared at the plaster on my forehead, and I stopped at the corner to look for a taxi because I found walking wasn't in my line after all. But none came so I went on.

While I was having first-aid treatment Baker had been to see Margot du Caine.

‘I had the greatest difficulty in persuading her to talk,' he said. ‘Human nature's a strange thing. She was very distraught, appears now to be blaming herself and blaming her mother that she didn't marry him after all.' He paused for a while, brooding. ‘You see, she loved him.'

I said: ‘ So did Lynn …'

‘Of course Miss du Caine had nothing to do with the murder, but she was in French's flat when he came back from visiting your wife late that Thursday afternoon. He'd had an appointment with her at five and hadn't turned up, so she'd gone round to his flat. He came back about six carrying the suitcase with your wife's initials on it, with scratches down his face, and coal dust on his shirt and sleeves. It's not surprising, I suppose, that he didn't linger a second longer than he could help at your house after doing what he had done, or that he should want to wait until dusk before planting your wife's suitcase in her London flat. But Miss du Caine's unexpected presence put him on the spot. He told her he'd had a car accident with a coal lorry, he being with your wife in her car. The du Caine girl quarrelled with him because he'd promised not to see Mrs Granville again, but she swallowed his story. No doubt French saw the possibilities and the danger right away. For him it became a race against time, whether he could marry Miss du Caine before the body was discovered. To that end he went to every length to keep your wife “alive”.'

I crossed Whitehall and skirted Trafalgar Square. Three buses in line came round the corner, sweeping and speeding like fire-engines. A clock was striking; Big Ben; I stopped and counted. Eleven. Later than I thought.

I said to myself, I'm free, there's no longer any real danger at all. But it wasn't Baker or Margot du Caine I had to thank; it was John. It was his moves …

I said to myself, I'm free; the shadow's gone; I'm free; I have to say it over and over again to try to believe it; because in my heart I know it's not true.

Or only superficially true. Because all the time this threat of arrest for Lynn's murder had been a sort of façade, behind which the real tensions had been mounting and maturing.

I thought, Lynn is gone but I still owe for Lynn. And if John is not yet gone he has made the unrepayable gesture …

I limped up the Haymarket. The cinemas had all emptied and the streets were thinning. Just ahead were the electric fireworks of Piccadilly Circus tirelessly exploding their banal advice.

Their counsel to me would be simple and direct. Kruschen's for a top-heavy sense of obligation; Craven A for frayed nerves; Gordon's for loneliness. There was something to be said for over-simplification. Anyway, I knew the real cure for loneliness but I couldn't take it.

I got to the hotel and signed in and took the key. I went upstairs and lay on the bed and lit a cigarette and watched the smoke. I knew the cure for loneliness, and perhaps you found the answer to the other two complaints within the first. So it all depended really on what happened between me and Stella.

Over-simplification had a lot to recommend it here. I only had to wait. That was what it would boil down to in the end; I couldn't pretend anything else. Nothing finally could keep me away from her, not fire or storm or war, and if John now stood between us, and if his memory always would, yet I would take all that and any strings attached, to get the person I loved.

But I knew in my bones it wasn't going to be as easy as all that. The gap between her and me was greater than it had been a week ago and it would grow wider yet.

I lay back for a bit and my mind went over all the work I'd put into the last twelve months, seeing the new factory grow out of the grass, planning it, organising it, getting through the removal without complete chaos yet running into trouble almost at once; fending off Frank Dawson's bitter rivalry with Read; Piper and Burgin and all the complications and headaches of being half a scientist and half a business man and not quite either; the threatened strike. I thought of the survey equipment and the success of last night and what I'd lost in trying to win it. I thought of success generally, how much we sweated for it up every side-alley of life, how hard we tried for it and how little it eventually added up to. I thought of it all in a way I hadn't thought of it since that conversation with Simon, driving home from the night-club with Lynn at my side before all this broke.

And, I thought, perhaps I've learned something since that night. Because I know now that life isn't a question of trying to get a quart
out
of a pint pot; it's more like finding the first drops to put into a pot of unknown size. Maybe that was an advance, thinking that. At least it seemed to lead somewhere, because I suddenly knew now what I'd got to do.

If I wanted to keep any of the things I cared about, I'd first got to learn to give them up. A primary law, that; and it operated in different ways at all stages of the game.

I'd got to grow up. I'd got to learn to break with the habit of grabbing at toys. Perhaps few enough people learned it, but for some reason I had to be one of them. Then perhaps later … But later had to take care of itself. Take therefore no thought for the morrow … Was that what it meant?

I picked up the phone and gave a Didcot number.

After about five minutes a voice said ‘Thurston.'

I said: ‘This is Granville. Sorry to phone you so late and at your private number but there was something I wanted to get settled. D'you think you could get hold of Bennett tonight?'

‘What? Well … It's a bit late, isn't it? I'll be seeing him first thing in the morning.'

‘… Yes, all right. I want you to give him a message. Tell him I'll go to Africa with the survey stuff. Tell him I'm ready to start when he says.'

‘You've decided to go?' Thurston sounded surprised.

‘Yes.'

‘What about your factory? Will it be able to carry on?'

‘I think so.'

There was a pause. He said: ‘By the way, did your manager get in touch with you?'

‘Who? Read? No.'

‘He phoned me this morning. Apparently he'd been trying to get in touch with you since yesterday morning and didn't know you were in Wales. Have you been threatened with some sort of a works stoppage?'

‘A strike. Yes.'

‘Well, he told me to tell you if I saw you. It's off.'

‘Off …'

‘There was some sort of a vote, he said, and it went the right way.'

‘Oh …'

Another pause. We were both thinking. He said: ‘Does that affect in any way your decision to go with the survey stuff?'

‘No.'

‘Look, Mike, let me make this quite plain. You've no need to do this to put yourself right with Harwell. You've done that. Bennett should have made that clear. Your going to the Sudan can't make you any better thought of than you are right now.'

‘He did make it clear. That's not the reason I'm going. I want to. I want to see this thing through.'

‘Yes, I know how you feel. I might feel the same in your shoes. But all the same I think you're making a mistake. Bennett should never have asked you.'

‘Why not?'