The Mask of Memory Read online

  Her solicitor, Andrew Browning, after the formalities of condolence, and the practised paternalism towards a wealthy client, not friend, but long known, respected, privately assessed and judged as worthy, and the marital conditions no surprise to him because they paralleled a hundred others and more that came across the table to him, was entirely reassuring, which, he knew, was all that she wanted at the moment.

  He said, ‘ The police will have to know about the argument between you and your husband, of course. And about your friendship with this Mr Dougall.’ He had seen him once or twice when he was playing golf at North Lobb. Sometime, years ago, he seemed to remember that the fellow had occasionally been among the caddies at the club-house. Not her type. But so far as that was concerned, he was beyond surprise. Legally, if she stayed with his firm, he would do all he could to protect her. But give a starved woman a new lease of life and her generosity could smash all the floodgates of prudence. ‘I think, perhaps, later on, I should have a talk with him. However for now, don’t worry about the police. It is entirely right and proper that you should have held your counsel until you could see me.’ He knew the Chief Inspector, played golf and bridge with him, and sat with him often at Rotary lunches. ‘ I’ll have a word with them. Of course – since there must be an inquest – you’ll have to make a complete statement.’

  ‘An inquest?’

  ‘Naturally, Mrs Tucker. It wasn’t a natural death. The Coroner must handle it. But there’s nothing to upset you in that. Leave it to me.’ He smiled thinly. ‘ You’re all right, of course, financially, as I know. You may or may not know that your husband’s will is lodged with us. Probate, of course, takes some time, but it’s not a complicated will and, of course, everything goes to you.’

  ‘Yes, he told me that long ago.’

  ‘And that he was a man of considerable substance…?’ It was less question than a floating bubble on the surface of the conversation.

  ‘Yes … I always assumed so.’

  ‘He had a flat in London, I think?’

  ‘Yes, a furnished one. There will be some things up there.’

  ‘Would you like us to handle that? With your authority we could send someone up. No doubt the keys will be … available, among your husband’s effects down here.’

  She said, ‘Maybe … I’m not sure. Could I let you know about that later?’

  ‘Of course. Do you know the name of the firm he worked for? They must be told. There will be various matters to clear with them, and they with us.’

  Bluntly, the memory of the long-standing offence firming her words, she said, ‘ I’ve no idea. He was always evasive – secretive – about it. I could never think why. Once he did say he worked on a private, sort of freelance, basis for various firms. I never pressed him. Bernard wasn’t that kind of man.’

  ‘I see.’ He was surprised but would have thought poorly of his professional poise to show it, had become with the years almost incapable of showing it. His own emotions were best kept out of his clients’ affairs. ‘Well, it won’t be a difficult matter. There will be something in his flat or at home among his papers which will give us that. The main thing at the moment, Mrs Tucker, is to look after yourself. Leave everything to us. If anything bothers you or you need help just give me a ring either here or at my home.’

  He went to the door with her, holding it, mouthing the smooth farewells and stood for a moment watching her cross the hallway. She was a good-looking woman, well-built and well looked after, full of years in which she would be attractive to men. Pity she had picked on a man like this Dougall. Not that he knew anything against him, but it was enough that he wasn’t her type or class. Odd fish, her husband. He’d only met him briefly a few times. Something tightly contained there, words well chosen, controlled. Secretive, she’d said. Maybe, but it was more than that. Some kind of professional remoteness … banker, property speculator, negotiator … oil or chemical industries? Marked all over him. Well, sooner or later, when they went through his papers they would know. Thirty-foot drop – he knew the place … public walk – to the only few rocks in the whole top end of the combe. Luck was against him. Nine times out of ten it would only have meant a broken arm or leg or a few cracked ribs at the worst.

  It was no good pretending that the house was empty without him or that she missed him. The house was as it always was. She went into his study, where he had worked all the Sunday. The desk was neat and tidy, no loose papers around. The remains of the coal fire were dead in the grate. She pulled open the drawers of the desk. They were either empty or held stationery and impersonal stuff … nurserymen’s catalogues, a local house directory, and a Whitaker’s Almanack – two years old. It was remarkable how he could have inhabited a room, though sporadically, over so long a time and leave nothing of himself in it; no pipe, no, favourite worn-covered book, no broken cigarette lighter nor the odd feather picked up on a walk and stuck in a vase … nothing of Bernard, either of his coming or going.

  She went up to his bedroom. The safe was locked – as was the one in the study. The papers he had worked on over the weekend would be in one or the other. She had a momentary curiosity about them because they were tokens of the man she had never known. Well, when she got his keys from the police, she would see them. The cover on his bed was partly turned down, waiting for him. He had done it himself because he didn’t like her to come into the room to do anything for him when he was at home. Everything had the neatness of an exnaval man, used to small spaces and the wisdom of neatness; a place for everything and everything in its place so that the hand in the darkness could find what it wanted without delay. The dressing-table held its toilet things in exactly the same places as she had always known them to be. The drawers of his chest were full of meticulously marshalled shirts, pants, socks, handkerchiefs. His suits, coats and ties hung in his wardrobe, each precisely aligned, all ordered, not one sign of haste, carelessness or indifference in their ranging.

  On the mantel shelf over the disused fire were the only real signs of the man himself and his life and affections. There was a silver-framed photograph of her taken on their honeymoon. He kept it there for her sake, she knew. Next to it in a battered leather frame was a picture of himself and another naval officer on the bridge of a destroyer, duffle-coated, binoculars about their necks, his companion’s peaked cap set a little rakishly, and Bernard wearing a balaclava knitted helmet with his naval cap stuck on top of it, grinning at some joke that had passed between them, gone now, dead for ever. Two other photographs – group ones – of different ships’ companies. Bernard somewhere in them all. And in pride of place, taking up the centre of the mantelpiece, was the symbol of a love which had been stronger and more lasting in him than any other – his first command, a frigate, long before she had known him, modelled in teak and metal, resting on a wooden cradle from which it could be lifted. This creation of metal and wood on its painted wooden sea was the altar at which he had worshipped the love outstripping all others, cherished beyond all others … Seeing then, not the mature man in uniform who had come up the loch shore to greet her, but the young man, the young officer who had been piped aboard his first command, the Bernard she had never seen in life, and already committed to his first and only love, she began to weep. She sat back on the edge of his cabin-neat bed and let the tears come freely for him.

  On Tuesday afternoon at six o’clock Warboys’ buzzer went for Quint. He put down the Evening Standard he had been reading – the last, he knew, that he was likely to see for some time since the printers were going on strike in all the major cities, obeying the call of their union, the National Society of Operative Printers, Graphical and Media Personnel. A nice mouthful, he felt. And anyway, no papers would be a relief from reading about bad news, trade recessions, balance of trade deficits and all the rest. Though the television would do its best, no doubt, to fill the gap.

  Warboys was leaning forward over his desk, his arms cradled on it, hands clasped as though he confined some small creature in
his span and watched it, unamused at its attempts to escape. At his nod Quint sat down.

  Briefly cocking an eye at him, Warboys went back to the contemplation of the phantom captive on his desk.

  He said, ‘You gave Tucker my letter before he went?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Did you go to the station with him?’

  ‘No, sir. We dropped him at his club in St James’s. He was having lunch there. Although he was going to follow the train schedule I worked out for him, he’d decided to take a later train but use the same routings.’

  Warboys raised a hand to his chin, breaking the barriers about his captive, and stared into space above Quint’s head.

  ‘How was he?’

  The question confirmed to Quint that something was wrong. It was a strictly professional question, hard with interest but carrying no human concern with the simple state of a man’s health.

  ‘Just the same as ever, sir.’

  ‘How big was the case he carried?’

  ‘Weekend. One I’ve seen him use often.’ There was no hunger in Quint to know why the questions were being asked. To have put a question himself until the invitation was handed to him would have been a breach of all his training.

  ‘There’s been no communication from him while I’ve been out?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘You can get into his flat?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Go over now and have a look round.’ Warboys sat back slowly in his chair and shrugged the collar of his black jacket up round his neck. ‘I shall be here until late. Come back and report.’ He clipped his nose between thumb and forefinger as though to suppress a sneeze and added, ‘ He had an appointment with me today. He hasn’t shown up. There may be something, small if there is, in his flat. That’s all.’

  Quint took a taxi a hundred yards away from the building, and he dismissed it some streets away from the apartment block where Tucker lived. During the ride he kept his speculations well within bounds. He did this out of cold know ledge. For all he knew – and they had played some twisted tricks for exercises on him before – it could all be part of the now sophisticated training schedule which they still had for him. It could be that he would walk in and find Tucker there, grinning at him and no explanation ever given, and himself going back, containing his private confusion, to report to Warboys and be dismissed still without satisfaction. Could be – but he was wiser now in their ways and fancied he could scent, like some maturing hound dog, the true trail from the artificial.

  He walked the stairs to Tucker’s first-floor flat and opened the door with the duplicate key which every staff member had to provide of his or her dwelling place. Ultimately there were no ivory towers, no private lives in the service.

  He went through the flat methodically and expertly and without hope. If Tucker had had anything which could only be hidden in the flat he doubted whether he would find it without tearing the place apart. At the back of his mind, however, he half-knew, half-guessed that Warboys was reaching not for something, some sign, deliberately and fastidiously secreted, but for some trivial mark or object left exposed because at the time of leaving not even Tucker could have known that future events would load it with some slim significance. He found one only, and this only of minimal interest.

  He was about to leave when the doorbell rang; three short rings, a pause, and then a long ring. Quint made no move to the hall door. Bernard Tucker would never ring his own doorbell. Quint had no intention of opening it. He went quietly into the bedroom and stood behind the half-drawn curtains and watched the broad flight of steps at the front of the apartments, lit brightly by the overhead door light and three small floodlights in the narrow garden. It was almost seven o’clock. After a moment or two a man and woman, arm in arm, turned in from the street and entered the building. Had they been going out he would have marked every detail of their dress and appearance and never forgotten it. He would have assessed their age, type, and class with a smooth expertise that had taken him years to achieve and which others above him could still easily overmatch.

  Quint waited, puzzled a little that any caller should only ring the once. Then, through bedroom and lounge doors which he had not shut, he heard the firm slam of the hall door. He went quickly back into the lounge, standing shielded by its half-open door.

  A woman came into the room and closed its door with a little nudge of her left shoulder which swung her round so that she was facing Quint.

  He gave her marks for only the briefest upswing of an eyebrow, the shadow of the parting of lips in a quickly killed expression of surprise. She was bare-headed, glossy black hair, a touch of the evening’s sporadic drizzle laying highpoints on it under the light. She had a pretty, petite, heart-shaped, slightly too thin face and skin with a dying tan. A fur coat made her body shapeless though he knew from her legs that it would be shapely enough, and he knew who she would be; Bernard’s woman, the Slav talker, the bachelor’s solace. A special bell ring, and then wait four or five minutes before letting herself in with her own key … Warboys must know about it and tolerate it as a privilege of rank. His, Quint’s, own amours were scattered, brief and scarred no emotions.

  He knew he would have no trouble with her. She would not be standing where she was, with a red nylon string bag of groceries hanging from her right hand, unless Bemard had trained her to contentment with a limited alliance. Her long acceptance of those conditions fashioned the cool – accenttouched – words that came from her.

  ‘Good evening. Were you waiting for Bernard?’

  ‘Yes, I was. He said he would be here at half-past six, but that he might be a little late. That’s why he gave me this.’ He opened his right palm and showed the frontdoor Yale key.

  She smiled. ‘ He can be erratic about time.’ She moved, put her string bag down on a chair and slipped off her fur coat. The dress underneath was simple, but was no copy pirated from a famous house. It belonged to her and was her almost as naturally as her dark hair and, revealed now, the small-boned grace of her slim, wide-hipped body. She moved towards the sideboard and without looking at him said, ‘Would you care for a drink while you’re waiting?’

  ‘No, thank you. I’m afraid I must be going. I’ve another appointment. Perhaps you’ll tell Bernard?’

  She turned, dark eyes on him, and smiled, nodding.

  ‘Of course.’

  He moved towards the door, saying, ‘I’m sorry if I gave you a surprise.’

  ‘Not at all.’ She paused, the smile given more and deliberate liberty and added, ‘I’m used to it.’

  For a moment he wondered if she was fooling him and he was supposed to know it. That this was why he had been sent another hundred-metre post on the long training track. An ordinary person would have asked, his name, given a name, too. She could be one with him and Tucker and Warboys. A deep flick of anger stung him, and then pricked him again as he realized that when he reported to Warboys he still might not be enlightened. Then the resentment was gone. They, trained you hard, and went on being hard. It was too late to cry out for some easing up. You had to stay fit, always strung to competition point, neither below nor over, always finely on the precise pitch of absolute performance.

  When he was gone she walked into the bedroom and watched him go down the entrance steps and as he reached the pavement turn and look up at the window. He couldn’t see her, she knew. But he would know she was watching him. He and Bernard – they played games whose names and most of the rules she had guessed long ago. It was this esoteric, shadow play which had kept her moderately faithful to Bernard for so long and gave her, no matter the wide spaces of ignorance and mystery he retreated into at times, a deep and compassionate pity for all his kind which was a form of loving. All men were boys and never recovered from their juvenile blood-and-thunder reading which fed some primitive hunger in them and even in later years forced them to join some society, secret or overt, where they could go on acting out mankind’s torrid ancient dreams.
r />   She took her shopping bag into the kitchen, slipped on an apron and began to make preparations for cooking a dinner in which Bernard had said he had every hope of joining her. Hope was a commodity of spurious worth with him. She had cooked many a dinner for which he had never appeared. Whoever the man was, she had not liked the look of him; young, in his late twenties, tallish with a long, prominently boned face, the skin like hard-honed leather, firm, unwrinkled, and brown, rarely blinking eyes with little humour in them.

  Warboys was sitting as he had left him, arms half-mooned together on the desk, head lowered, only a glimpse of his eyes coming up now and then as he talked. It would have been easy to imagine that he had remained in a state of trance, unmoving, since he had left him were it not for the position of his desk telephone. It stood now four inches closer to his hand. He wondered what conversations had gone on white he had been away.

  He said, ‘ I went through the flat. Everything was in order. But there were two things which … well, might have some relevance.’ He regretted the lame phrase as soon as he had used it.