‘The gentleman who let us in, sir. Is he — he would look after things here, sir?’
‘Maidment and his wife are employed in the house.’
‘And did the Maidments look for the child, madam, when they heard your distress?’
‘Maidment did. I told him to. We knew then Georgina couldn’t possibly have crawled away, but he looked all the same. He even went down the drive.’
‘And before that you were aware, Mrs. Iveson, of no vehicle drawing away from the drive? Nothing like that?’
‘No.’
The policewoman returns. She doesn’t shake her head, or comment. The man who isn’t asking the questions glances at her but there is no exchange, not even of a look.
‘I came here,’ Mrs. Iveson says, ‘to look after Georgina. We were going to have a nanny, but we changed our minds.’
It isn’t relevant. She doesn’t know why she volunteered information not prompted by a question. She sees herself for a moment, dropping off in her deckchair, old and stupid, not up to a simple task. No matter what their shortcomings, the girls they interviewed would not have fallen asleep.
‘We have an alert out, of course,’ the man says. ‘That was relayed at once. May I ask, sir, if it is a usual practice for you to take the dog with you in the car at that time of day? Are you normally away, sir, of an afternoon?’
‘I’m almost always here.’
The man nods, with what seems like satisfaction. By the look of things, he concludes aloud, today was chosen specially.
‘Notice anyone about the place, sir? Hanging about, even a while back, madam?’
They both say no, are asked to think for a moment, and then say no again.
‘My wife was well off,’ Thaddeus adds.
‘And that is generally known, sir? Locally?’
‘I think it probably is.’
‘If we might question your couple now, sir?’
The room goes silent when Thaddeus leads them from it. She gazes across mallows and garish cosmos at the empty deckchair, her book on the grass beside it. Her reading glasses are there too, although she cannot see them.
‘A telephone call may come,’ Thaddeus says, returning. ‘We are not to answer it until there’s been time for one of them to get to an extension.’
‘They think Georgina’s been kidnapped?’ The word, so often encountered in the novels she reads, so often heard on the radio and the television, and come across in newspapers, feels alien on her lips. ‘A ransom demand?’ she says, and it sounds absurd.
‘Yes, that’s what they mean.’
‘We must pay, Thaddeus.’
‘They say we mustn’t.’
She moves across the room, to sit again on the sofa.
‘We have the money. What does it matter, parting with it?’
‘More likely, they say, tomorrow’s post will bring a note. More likely than a phone call. But they say you never know.’
Did the two who were so silent in the drawing-room contribute something to the conversation on the way to the kitchen, or is this just Thaddeus’s way of putting it? She wonders, caught up with an unimportant detail, unable for a moment to shake it off, and then it goes.
‘I should at least have heard a car.’
‘I doubt it would have driven up. The Maidments heard nothing either.’
‘Negligent is what they’ll say.’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
He says something else, she does not listen.
‘My God, how could I have?’ she whispers, and there is silence in the room again.
‘From a window,’ Maidment says. ‘I happened to be passing. I happened to look out.’
‘And when was this, sir?’
‘The day the knives came back.’ Maidment turns to his wife. ‘Thursday week, was it?’
‘It was Thursday week the knives came back.’ And Zenobia adds for the policeman’s benefit: ‘The kitchen knives resharpened.’
‘And what exactly did you see, sir?’
‘Nothing, to tell the truth. It was the dog drew my attention.’
‘And why was that, Mr. Maidment?’
‘The dog was interested, but I couldn’t ascertain why. Her tail was going.’
‘Your view was obscured, sir?’
‘It’s a long way off. You have to see through trees.’
‘And we’re to presume Mr. Davenant himself was elsewhere at the time? And the lady also?’
‘They were in the house.’
‘But although you didn’t actually see anyone you formed the impression that there was someone there because the dog was wagging her tail?’
‘He thought he noticed a movement,’ Zenobia answers for her husband. ‘He said it later. No more than some disturbance, he said.’
‘And this is where in the garden?’
‘There’s a door in the wall. An archway with wistaria, beyond the plum trees.’
Hearing this, the two uniformed officers leave the kitchen. ‘Nothing like that today?’ their superior pursues his questioning when they have gone. ‘Nothing out of the way?’
‘Nothing.’
Maidment responds at once, Zenobia after a moment’s thought. ‘Nothing,’ she says too.
‘Did you report the Thursday sighting in the garden, sir?’
‘How d’you mean, report?’
‘Did you mention it to Mr. Davenant?’
‘There wasn’t much to report. In a manner of speaking.’
‘He said he would mention it,’ Zenobia intervenes, ‘if he had a suspicion that anyone came in by that door another time.’
‘It’s unusual, is it, for people to come into the garden this way?’
Unusual for an outsider, Zenobia agrees, and Maidment adds:
‘Mr. Davenant slips in and out on the odd occasion, and Mrs. Davenant did in her time. Taking the dog down to the stream.’
‘This door leads to the stream?’
‘There’s a path by the edge of the fields, going by the spinney to the lane. Or you can go on straight down to the stream.’
‘And people use this path?’
‘Not much.’
It was a short-cut from the house in days gone by, Zenobia says. ‘It seems they went to church that way if they wanted to walk in summer.’
‘So it’s not your experience, sir, that a passer-by might open that door and come into the garden, maybe making a mistake?’
‘Never.’
Zenobia points out that a passer-by would have no right. Sometimes a cat comes into the garden. Or a dog, not on a leash, is called back from the drive. Now and again a car comes up the drive, and goes away when it is realized that this is the wrong house. That’s not often, probably less than once a year.
‘Mr. Davenant’s a widower, I understand?’
Surprised, Zenobia wonders why this is mentioned. The way he puts it, the man knows already. Everything like that would have been established in the drawing-room. Maidment says:
‘There was a road accident. Not long ago.’
The policeman nods. A flicker of interest passes through his expression, a frown gathers and then is gone. The news was broken by the police, Maidment says. The news about that accident.
Listening to her husband giving the details, Zenobia is aware of the same sense of connection that Mrs. Iveson has experienced in the drawing-room, and it feels like mockery to her that there should be this second cruelty, drifting out of the summer blue, as the first did. Maidment’s thoughts are similar, then are invaded by a famous episode in the past — the taking of the Lindbergh baby. It was before his time; what he recalls is hearsay, supplied to him by an elderly butler of the old school who enjoyed such titbits. If that’s what this is there’ll be a message in the morning, the words cut out of a newspaper and pasted up: used banknotes to be secreted in a rubbish bin or a telephone-box or the cistern of a public lavatory, a specified place, a specified time.
‘If contact is made after we’re gone,’ the policeman says, ’I’ve told Mr. Davenant and the lady we’ll need to know at once. While we’re still here don’t answer the phone until we’re in a position to monitor the call.’