‘You talk as if they’ve been buried or burned,’ Handley said. ‘But I’ll find them if I have to take the house and grounds apart, stick by bloody stone. I’ll not touch another bit of paint till they’re found. So get plenty of grub down you, because after coffee we’re going to form into search parties. We’ll leave nothing unturned.’
‘I know it’s too late,’ Maricarmen wept, tears on the soft skin of her cheeks.
Enid stood behind and took her hand. ‘They’ll be found. Albert would have been a policeman if he hadn’t become a painter!’
Ralph felt as if an enormous stone had been lifted from his heart. After suffering a slow-burning attack of asthma and indigestion in the last few days he now, suddenly and miraculously, found the oppression gone. They could spend ten years looking for the notebooks, but all the perverted revolutionary data written in them had gone up in holy smoke to England’s blue air.
The rice and veal came, and the news had certainly blighted no appetites. ‘We’ll find who took them,’ Handley said, ‘and whoever was bloody responsible will be publicly booted out never to return. By God, I’ll know who it is. But as we’re on the subject of thievery some light-handed lunatic has nicked the revolver and ammunition from John’s room.’
Enid turned pale, and shouted in a frightened voice: ‘How long have you known?’
‘A while.’
‘You should have called the police,’ she said. ‘Why have you been so tight-lipped about it? Do you want to get us killed?’
‘I thought somebody had taken it for a few sporting potshots with bottles in the woods. Or that it had been mislaid and would turn up. But now that the notebooks have been snatched I think things are getting a bit more serious — shall I say? I’m putting one and two together.’
Cuthbert looked on at the ants-nest he had kicked over, worried that Handley would suspect his uncontrollable silence. Giving in to a purely nervous twitch he smiled, then turned his head away too quickly. Dawley, hating the reason behind Cuthbert’s smile, saw him as a man without honesty or generosity, a carcass of plot and counter-plot, out to do what damage he could to all and sundry because it was his only form of amusement or feeling.
Then he despised himself for such thoughts, and was angry at Cuthbert for making him have them, aware that he might be no better than Cuthbert if he were thus a prey to his diabolical twists. He had tried to be friendly but it was impossible. His amicable remarks were seen as weakness, for a smile to Cuthbert was an insult that had to be avenged.
Cuthbert surprised Mandy by offering her a cigarette. His look had produced the desired result of hatred and confusion in Dawley — not very difficult since those who were dull and honest, and therefore strong, were easily broken down. But Dawley was the lynchpin of the whole rotten fabric of both family and community, so he had a grander fate in store for him than a disdainful turning away of the head. Dawley was the idol of the family now that Uncle John was no longer alive, a guerrilla-fighting idiot who had come to his throne like any upstart king — over the dead body of Myra’s husband, of Shelley, and of Uncle John himself. Cuthbert often saw events in such medieval shifts of power.
He had worked out the trio of deaths with Maricarmen, always returning to the fact of how Dawley had ‘forced’ Shelley into Algeria, so that Shelley had died of gangrene. Once when Dawley was out for a walk he had strolled into the caravan and read the manuscript in which Dawley admitted guilt at Shelley’s death. He had not claimed a similar credit with Uncle John — and in truth he couldn’t be blamed for it — but Cuthbert had only been interested in Shelley’s unnecessary demise, which he whispered to Maricarmen in her room at night, burying his poison into her undying Iberian righteousness.
‘If I’d got that gun I’d sell it,’ Mandy joked, to whom the disappearance of both gun and papers was of absolutely no importance.
‘When I get my hands on it,’ Handley said, ‘I’ll take the bloody thing to the middle of Gould’s Lake and drop it where it can’t cause any bother.’
‘Like King Arthur’s sword,’ Adam laughed. ‘Maybe a hand’ll come up and grab it.’
‘And fire a few shots,’ Richard giggled, ‘before pulling it under for good.’ They laughed at the joke, as if the deeper the trouble the more light-hearted they became. Maricarmen again doubted the probity of this community she’d been trapped into joining. They gave you refuge, showed what good hearts they had, spouted of ideals to lull you into safety, and even into feeling affection for them — when, without warning, you saw them laugh together as if they were wolves who had drawn you into their den by posing as human beings.
Enid was the only person whom she trusted, and felt something close to love for, yet given the jungle-logic of this house she was the one who should be suspected of stealing the notebooks. It was enough to drive you mad — unless you did quickly what you had come for and then got far away from the place. She would keep silent till they recovered the notebooks. Then she would kill Dawley, and go back to Spain, where life was perhaps better than the chaos around her.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
It seemed strange to Handley that Cuthbert should volunteer to wash the kitchen floor when he could selfishly leave it for the next day’s shift, but he was out of the door and half-way across the yard to look for a bucket in the garage before he could call him back.
The rain had spent itself — after laying pools of water which Cuthbert jumped across so as not to get his slippers soaked. Myra’s dead husband George, a man of high standards and much dexterity, had spent a few Saturdays excavating a repair pit in the garage floor, giving the rectangular hole a lid of two neat doors which closed it off completely.
Cuthbert blessed him for it, got into the Morris Traveller parked above, and let down the handbrake. He’d planned on doing it in a leisurely fashion, but also with desperate hurry if necessary. The floor was on a faint slope, and he sweated as the car rolled clear of the trap doors. Half-way out of the garage, he noisily yanked up the handbrake ratchet. They were still too busy in the dining-room, deciding who would search where, to hear him. Minor decisions were swamped in such time-wasting debate that three hundred years would be needed to live a full life under such conditions. Only a guiding brain to give firm orders — even if occasionally the wrong ones — would get any good out of such an organisation.
He pulled up the doors and leapt into the pit, where Shelley’s notebooks in a plastic sack had lain since he switched them for a false lot which his brother-in-law had incinerated in the paddock. Poor Ralph, he thought, had lived with the triumph and guilt of having burned them, while still leaving him the means by which to destroy Dawley and the community for good.
The bag seemed heavier than when he’d first dragged it from the garage and let it drop there. He pulled and sweated before it eased up the side. Time was not with him. The discussions in the house might end, and a search party wonder what he was up to. Not that he didn’t have a good reason for tidying the garage and ‘accessory spaces’ — a good phrase, appealing to any community heart — on his duty-day.
His luck held, and the bag was by his feet. He got back into the car, and let it roll right out of the garage. For a full minute it had been unobserved in its suspicious position, and now he pulled on the brake and went back to use more strength on the bag. He didn’t fancy himself as a toter of bales and humper of sacks, but had enough muscle in his arms to perform all that was called for.
Using the Morris to cover him from the house, he went across to the caravan, where Dawley had his quarters, and began stuffing the notebooks under the bed. It was difficult to stop them slipping out, there were so many, but soon they stayed hidden — yet not hard to find.