'You looking at young Vickers?' said Mrs Lyle who had the hypersensitivity of the blind. 'I wish my grandson was here to blow him a raspberry. All the kids round here do that, and good luck to them.'
'Better look for those letters now, Mrs Lyle.'
They went upstairs, the old woman leading the way. She took him into her bedroom which had the jumble sale look of rooms occupied by old people and in which they have grown old. Apart from the usual furniture there were work- boxes, wooden and wicker, stacked one on top of the other, trunks under the bed and trunks covered with dust sheets which were themselves piled with old magazines and old albums. Two of those miniature chests of drawers, dear to the hearts of the Victorians, stood on the massive tallboy, and above them on the wall was a what-not, crammed full of letters and papers and little boxes and old pens and jars of hairpins.
'It might be in here,' said Mrs Lyle, 'or it might be in the other rooms.'
Wexford looked into the other rooms. None of them was exactly untidy. Nor were they rooms for people to live in. They were the repositories for the results of sixty years of hoarding, and it was apparent to his practiced eye that some crazy filing system had been employed in the days when Mrs Lyle sell had her sight.
She seemed to sense that he was taken aback. A note came into her voice that was not quite malice but faintly revengeful. She said, 'You've got a long job.' She meant, 'You can see and I can't, so you get on with it.'
He got on with it, beginning in her bedroom. Perhaps it was the smell of these souvenirs, merely musty to him but evocative to her of the occasions they commemorated, which made her face go strange and dreamy, though not unhappy, her hand shake a little as she touched the cards and photographs he lifted from the drawers. He fetched the old brass bedlamp and put it on the tallboy to give him light, and in its yellow radiance, mated with dust, he explored the archives of Mrs Lyle's long life.
She had been a great correspondent and she had kept every letter, every birthday and Christmas card she had ever received. Some male relative had been a philatelist so she had kept the envelopes too, but the collector had never come for his stamps which had accumulated in their thousands on envelopes and scraps torn from envelopes. The late policeman's love letters were there, bound in ribbon from a wedding cake, pieces of ancient and petrified icing still adhering to it. Every year he had sent her a Valentine. He found five in the tallboy, and then he began on the workboxes, seven more in there.
'I never throw anything away,' said Mrs Lyle happily.
He didn't say the cruel thing aloud, but he asked it of himself. Why didn't she? Why did she keep these cards, these cake boxes, these locks of babies' hair, these greetings tele- grams and these reams of newspaper cuttings? She was blind; she would never be able to see any of them again. But he knew she kept them for another reason. What matter if she never again read the policeman's writing or looked at his picture and those of her posterity? They were the bricks of her identity, the fabric of the walls which kept it safe and the windows through which, though sightless, it could still look out upon its world. His own identity had been too precariously shaken in recent weeks for him to reproach someone who hoarded and harvested and stored to preserve her own.
And he could see. His eye didn't hurt him at all. Even in this dull and dusty light he could read the spidery writing and distinguish the faces in the cloudy sepia photographs. By now he felt that he could have written Mrs Lyle's biography. It was all here, every day of her life, keeping her alive and a unique personality, waiting to be burned by a grandson when she needed it no longer.
They moved on into the next room. Wexford didn't know what time it was; he was afraid to look at his watch. There must be easier ways of finding Rebecca Foster. If only he could remember where it was that he had seen her for the first time . . .
He wished he had begun in the smallest bedroom, for it was there that he found it. He unstrapped a suitcase, unlocked it, opened it, The case contained only letters, some still in their envelopes, some loose, their sheets scattered and mixed with others. And here it was at last. '36, Biretta St., S.W.10. June 26th, 1954. Dear May, Sorry to hear you are having trouble with your eyes . . .'
'Well, that didn't take too long, did it?' said Mrs Lyle. 'I hope you've put all my things back right, not mixed up. I like to know where they are. If you've done, I'll see you off the premises and then I think I'll get to bed.'
21
He maple the proverb true, which saith: He that shooteth oft, at last shall hit the mark.
HIS last day. He didn't think of it as the last day of his holiday but as his last opportunity to solve this case. And it was the first time he had really known what it is to be set a deadline. In the past, of course, at Kingsmarkham, the chief constable had pressed him and there had sometimes been threats of calling in the Yard, but no one had ever said, You have twenty-four hours. After that time has elapsed, the case will be taken out of your hands. No one was saying it now except himself.
Howard had ceased to regard him as being involved in it. Come to that, he had never said, This is your case. Solve it for me. How could he, in his position? All he had asked for were his uncle's ideas and his uncle's advice, and with Wexford's failure he had given up asking even that. Not that he gave any sign of being disappointed, but he pinned his faith now to Baker and it was of Baker that he had talked the night before.
Wexford had been too tired to take much of it in, gathering only that Gregson had been remanded in custody on a charge of assaulting a police officer. Baker still thought of him as his prime suspect, but just the same he was pursuing other lines. The scarf was interesting him at the moment and he was much concerned about an interview he had had with one of the tenants of Garmisch Terrace. Wexford couldn't summon up energy to ask questions, and Howard too was tired, his foot paining him, and he let his uncle go off to bed, wishing him good night with the optimistic assurance that the case might well be solved before the Wexfords left on the Saturday.
It might well, Wexford reflected on the morning of his last day, but not by Baker.
The women had long given up waiting at the foot of the stairs for him and with regard to breakfast he took pot luck. He felt perfectly well. Yesterday's exercise had taken off more weight while the meals had added none, and even doubtful solicitous Dora had to admit that his holiday had done its good work. It was hard for him to realise that this Friday was just the last day of their holiday for her, a time for packing and going out to buy last-minute gifts. Her only concern was whether or not she had remembered the order for milk to be left on Saturday, and would their little comer shop keep a loaf of bread for her?
'What did you say?' said her husband.
'The bread, Reg. I said I hoped Dixons would keep me a loaf of bread.'
'You said the corner shop . . .' That was where he had seen her! Not, of course, at Dixons down the road from him in Kingsmarkham, but at a little place that might have been its twin opposite a rose-pink house in Fulham. All those hours wasted, rummaging through the storeplace of a life! 'Pity you didn't mention it before,' he said abruptly.