By chance, however, she had walked back into his life – or rather, he had walked back into hers, as into a lamp-post – and, less than twenty-four hours later, here he was thinking of her and Cora Rutherford and Alastair Farjeon and Patsy Sloots and young Tom Calvert and all. Like her or loathe her, impossible as she often could be, things did tend to happen around Evadne Mount.
And that was the crux of the matter. Nothing much tended any longer to happen around him. After years of serving the Law, years of being universally respected as one of the Yard’s top men, here he was, what, a codger? Yes, a codger. An old geezer.
He owned a pleasant, comfortable, semi-detached house in Golders Green in which he lived a pleasant, comfortable, semi-detached life. He had a thriving little vegetable garden in which he would grow his own leeks and radishes and carrots. He had an ever-diminishing circle of friends from the old days whom he would meet for a congenial pint in his local hostelry. And he had an occasional, these days extremely occasional, lunch in Town with a few pals from the Yard.
When it was with former colleagues of his own generation that he lunched, it was a real treat. He enjoyed reminiscing with his peers about the curiously, paradoxically, innocent criminals whom they had all dealt with at one time or another over the years, criminals for whom, by virtue of an unvarying, even comforting, routine of arrest, charge, trial, sentence, release and re-arrest, they had all acquired a certain fondness.
But every so often, or every so seldom, he would be invited out to lunch by one of the younger crowd, somebody whose mentor he’d once been or flattered himself he’d been – and that tended to prove something of an ordeal.
It wasn’t just the mortifying impression they left, however kindly disposed they seemed to be towards him, that, compared to their methods, his generation’s had been almost comically outmoded; that, far from having advanced the science of criminology, as he secretly prided himself he had done, he and his contemporaries had actually set it back a couple of decades. It was also the fact that they all appeared to be engaged on fascinating cases which, just to hear about, caused his mouth literally to water.
He felt old and irrelevant, a back-number. If he offered a suggestion as to how they might proceed on some ongoing case, they would listen politely enough until he had finished speaking, then simply pick up where they had left off as though he himself had never opened his mouth. Contrariwise, if he pointed out some striking resemblance between that ongoing case and one with which he himself had been involved several years back, they would shake their heads with ill-concealed amusement, as though to answer him would merely be to humour him, and they would end by remarking, unfailingly, ‘You know, Mr Trubshawe, things have changed since your day …’
Ah yes, things had changed since his day … But if it wouldn’t be true to say that he had got definitively used to his becalmed way of life, at least he had, if one can phrase it so, got used to not getting used to it. Until, that is, he had idly wandered into the tearoom of the Ritz Hotel and heard the unforgettable – and, he realised, never quite forgotten – voice of Evadne Mount, his old sparring partner.
How that same voice, ten years before, had set his false teeth on edge! And how, yesterday, he couldn’t deny it, how it had positively rejuvenated him! As had everything that followed. After tea at the Ritz, a visit to a grand West End theatre, a marvellously funny hoax of which he was just as willing a victim as anybody else in the audience, dinner at the Ivy with Evadne and Cora Rutherford, and finally the shock, but equally (admit it, Trubshawe) the secret thrill, of hearing, before the news hit the headlines, of the death of a famous film director whose name had meant nothing to him just the day before. All that, a good deal more than had happened to him in the past ten years, squeezed into just sixteen hours!
He sat there, at his oblong kitchen table, sucking on his unlit pipe. He had never really looked forward to retirement but had had to resign himself to what was, after all, the ruthless way of a ruthless world. You worked hard for forty years – work, in his case, which he loved unreservedly – and then you retired. Or, as again in his case, you were retired.
His own luck, however, had run out almost at once. His wife, with whom he’d looked forward to sharing his retirement, had passed away only a few months after he quit the Yard. His loyal old Labrador, Tobermory, had been shot dead on the moors near ffolkes Manor. Just one exciting thing had happened to him in all the years that followed – meeting Evadne Mount again. Would there be, he wondered wistfully, any more to come?
Naturally, he would never have contemplated ringing her up, even had he known her telephone number. But then a sudden remembrance came to him. What was it she had said? That she could be found at the Ritz every day at teatime. So what if he, Trubshawe, ‘just happened’ to stroll into the hotel one day at around five o’clock and what if he ‘just happened’ to run into her? Oh, not today, not tomorrow, not even the day after tomorrow. Towards the end of the week, perhaps? Or at the beginning of next?
He shook his head sadly. That wouldn’t do at all.
What troubled him wasn’t that Evadne Mount would get ‘the wrong idea’ – considering their respective ages, appearances and dispositions, nothing could be more improbable – but that she would get the right idea. That she would realise at once he’d become a lonely old man whose need for company was such he actually hoped she would accept the terminally lame excuse that he had chanced to drop, yet again, into the poshest hotel in London.
No, forget it. The novelist had re-exited his life as swiftly and casually as he had re-entered hers.
Ho hum. Might as well spend an hour or two in the garden …
Chapter Five
It was five uneventful weeks later, one Sunday in May, as Trubshawe was preparing to wash his car, a chore he performed every dry Sabbath, that the doorbell rang and he discovered, standing on his doorstep, Evadne Mount.
He had spent those five weeks much as he had spent the preceding five years. He had read his Daily Sentinel, pottered in his garden, drank his daily pint at his local before returning home to his solitary supper. And, every evening, on his way to and from that local, rain and shine alike, he had walked his imaginary dog.
It should be understood, though, that if the dog was imaginary it wasn’t because the former detective had reverted to a state of infantile senility in which he’d started consorting all over again, as in childhood, with a companion who lived exclusively inside his head. It was simply because, when Tobermory had died on Dartmoor, he couldn’t bring himself to replace him.
Tobermory had been his excuse – his alibi, as he affected to call it – for the constitutional he took virtually every evening and his death hadn’t struck him as a good enough reason for giving it up. The passing of his wife, with whom he’d shared his entire adult existence, had already familiarised him with the mildly throbbing, toothachy pain of solitude, never quite intolerable but never, ever fading away altogether. Fond of Tobermory as he had been, he was not prepared to be made twice the grieving widower. He had taken his walks before ever acquiring Tober and he refused to discontinue them now. His sole concession to a dog-lover’s sentimentality was that, as before the Labrador’s killing, he would absent-mindedly pick up its lead from off the hallway table and swing it along with him on his walk, like a soft, rubbery cane. Yet even that habit really couldn’t be put down to sentimentality. He had swung Tobermory’s lead in such a fashion for so many years now, he just wouldn’t have felt right, dog or no dog, without it.