Beside John Guppy ran the brave thin line of Ted Lanxon's bicycle tyres. Ted was my grower, bequeathed to me by Uncle Bob with orders to keep him till he dropped, which he resolutely refused to do, preferring to perpetuate my uncle's many errors. And bouncing through the middle of everything came the Toiler sisters in their jungle-painted Subaru, as much off the ground as on it. The Toilers were our part-time helpers and Ted's bane, but also his delight. And straddling the Toilers ran the alien imprint of a heavy lorry. Something must have been delivered. But what? The fertiliser we ordered? Came on Friday. The new bottles? Came last month.
In the gravel sweep before the house I saw nothing untoward, until the nothing began to bother me. Why were there no tyre tracks in the gravel? Had the Toiler girls not roared through here on their way to the walled garden? Had not John Guppy parked here when he delivered my mail? And what about my mystery lorry, which had come all this way only to make a vertical takeoff?
Leaving my lights burning, I got out of the car and patrolled the sweep, scouring it for the marks of feet or car tyres. Somebody had raked the gravel. I switched off the lights and mounted the steps to the house. On the train journey, my back had acted up. But as I let myself into the porch, the pain left me. A dozen envelopes lay on the doormat, most of them brown. Nothing from Emma, nothing from Larry. I studied the postmarks. They were all a day late. I studied the gummed joins. They were too well sealed. When would the Office ever learn? Setting the envelopes on the marble-topped side table, I climbed the six steps to the Great Hall without putting on the light and stood still.
And listened. And sniffed. And caught a waft of warm body on the still air. Sweat? Deodorant? Men's hair oil? If I couldn't define it, I could recognise it. I eased my way down the passage towards my study. Halfway along, I caught it again: the same deodorant, the faintest whiff of stale cigarette smoke. Not smoked on the premises—that would be insanity Smoked in a pub or car perhaps—not necessarily by the person whose clothes had borne the stale fumes—but alien cigarette smoke all the same.
I had laid no clever traps before I set out for London this morning, no hairs in locks, no bits of cotton thread stretched across the hinges, had taken no Polaroid pictures. I hadn't needed to. I had my dust. Monday is Mrs. Benbow's day off. Her friend Mrs. Cooke will come only when Mrs. Benbow comes, which is her way of disapproving of Emma. Between Friday night and Tuesday morning, therefore, nobody dusts the house unless I do. And usually I do. I enjoy a little housework, and on Mondays I like to polish my collection of eighteenth-century barometers and one or two oddments that receive less than their fair share of Mrs. Benbow's rather strict ministrations: my Chinese Chippendale footstools and the campaign table in my dressing room.
This morning, though, I had risen early, and with the tradecraft that seemed to have been laid on me since childhood, I had let the dust lie where it was. With a log fire in the Great Hall and another in the drawing room, I get a fine crop by Monday morning but an even better one by Monday night. And I saw as soon as I entered my study that there was no dust on my walnut desk. On its entire surface not one speck of honest dust. The brass handles pristine. I could smell the polish.
So they came, I thought without emotion. It's a given: they came. Merriman summons me to London, and while I am safely under his eye he sends his ferrets in a furniture van, or an electricity van, or whatever vans they use these days, to break into my house and search it, knowing that Monday is a good day. Knowing that Lanxon and the Toiler girls work five hundred yards away from the main house, inside a brick-walled garden cut off from everything except the sky. And while he is about it, Merriman slaps a mail check on me for good measure and by now, no doubt, a telephone check as well.
I went upstairs. Smoke again. Mrs. Benbow does not smoke. Her husband doesn't. I don't, and I detest the habit and the smell. If I have returned from somewhere and have woke in my clothing, I require a complete change, a bath, and a hairwash. When Larry has been visiting, I have to fling open all the doors and windows that the weather permits. But the landing I again smelled stale cigarette smoke. In my dressing room and bedroom, more stale smoke. I crossed the gallery to Emma's side of the house: her side, my side, and the gallery a sword between us. Larry's sword.
Key in hand, I stood before her door, as I had done last mew again uncertain whether I should enter. It was oak and studded, a front door that had somehow made it up the stairs. I turned the key and stepped inside. Then quickly closed and locked the door behind me, against whom I didn't know. I hadn't trespassed here since the day I tidied up after her departure. I breathed in slowly, mouth and nose together. A whiff of scented talc mingled with the musk of disuse. So they sent in a woman, I thought. A powdered woman. Or two. Or six. But women certainly: some asinine piece of Office decorum insists on it. Married men cannot be allowed to rootle among young women's clothing. I stood in her bedroom. To my left, the bathroom. Ahead, her studio. On her bedside table, no dust. I lifted her pillow. Beneath it lay the exquisite silk nightdress from the White House in Bond Street that I had put into her Christmas stocking but never seen her wear. On the day she left me, I had found it still wrapped in its tissue paper, pushed to the back of a drawer. In my role of Operational Man I had unfolded it, shaken it out, and placed it under her pillow for cover. Miss Emma has gone up north to listen to her music being played, Mrs. Benbow. . . . Miss Emma will be back in a few days, Mrs. Benbow. . Miss Emma's mother is desperately ill, Mrs. Benbow. . Miss Emma is still in bloody limbo, Mrs. Benbow... .
I pulled open her wardrobe. All the clothes I had ever bought for her hung neatly from their gibbets, exactly as I had found them on the day of her disappearance: long silk jersey dresses, tailored suits, a sable cape she resolutely refused even to try on, shoes by someone grand, belts and handbags by someone grander. Staring at them, I wondered who I had been when I bought them, and what woman I had thought I was dressing.
It was a dream, I thought. Yet why should any man need to dream who has Emma for his reality? I heard her voice in the darkness: I'm not bad, Tim. I don't need changing and disguising all the time. I'm fine as I am. Honest. I heard Larry's voice jeering at me from the darkness of the Mendip night. You don't love people, Timbo. You invent them. That's God's job, not yours. I heard Emma again: It's not me who needs to change, Tim, it's you. Ever since Larry walked into our walled garden, you've been behaving like someone on the run. I heard Larry again: You stole my life. I stole your woman.
I closed the cupboard, stepped into her studio, switched on the lights, and managed a skimming glance of the kind that is ready to take evasive action the moment something unseeable presents itself. But my eyes detected nothing they needed to avoid. Everything was as I had left it when I had re-created the seeming after her departure. The Queen Anne kneehole desk I had given her for her birthday was, thanks to my labours, a model of organisation. Its drawers, all tidied, were stocked with fresh stationery. The grate, now sparkling bright, was laid with newspaper and kindling. Emma loved a fire. Like a cat, she would stretch herself before it, one hip raised, one crooked arm cradling her head.
My investigations allowed me a momentary easing of my burden. If the entire break-in team had crowded in here with cameras, rubber gloves, and headsets, what would they have seen apart from what they were supposed to see? Cranmer's woman is of no operational significance. She plays the piano, wears long silk dresses, and writes of country matters at a lady's kneehole desk.