Before taking off his rubber gloves, Patchin picked up the empty paraffin cans and left them near the old garden gate, which was half hanging off its hinges, then strode off to the place where he had hidden his own van. The time was 3:30, and everything had gone exactly as he had hoped. There was always blind chance of course, for instance, the remote possibility that another pair of lovers might be trespassing in the woods and see him striding along so purposefully, but there was nothing he could do about it.
Driving to the Thames, Patchin mentally examined his plan again and formulated one or two more things to be done. As soon as he had parked the van near Hambleden Mill, he assembled his rod and line right down to putting on the bait, a thing he never did till he was actually on the riverbank, so that anyone seeing him might think he had already been fishing and was trying another spot. Then, carrying the assembled rod, he walked along a gravel path and over the complicated series of weirs which cross the Thames at Hambleden Mill. As he approached the lock, he watched to see whether the keeper there might be in sight and was relieved to be able to cross unseen.
Patchin threw his piece of iron pipe into the river before spending an hour angling. He fished like a young boy, close-in to the bank where there were more bites to be had but the fish were always small. He caught a tiny roach and three gudgeon but was quite satisfied with them, leaving the last gudgeon on the hook as he walked back to the lock. Good fortune was still with him, for the lockkeeper was now at work opening the gates for a motor cruiser. The keeper, who knew Patchin well, called out, “Any luck, Dan?”
“Not much. Just tiddlers,” Patchin called out, shaking his rod so that the suspended gudgeon twisted about at the end of the line. “Think I’ll use them to try for a pike in the pool by the mill. See you.”
"Yes, see you. Will you keep me a nice small chicken for the weekend?”
“Yes. Right.” Patchin walked off just fractionally quicker than he did normally. With excitement working in him at the prospect of revisiting Ames’s cottage, it was not easy to appear just as usual. For once he was grateful that he had a rather expressionless face.
His mind on other things, he mechanically dismantled the fishing rod and line as quickly as he could. “Yes, all going to plan,” he said aloud, though there was no one within a hundred yards of him.
Driving back to the lane once more he experienced a surprising feeling of letdown and anticlimax. It was true that it had all gone without a hitch as far as he could tell, but somehow it seemed a bit too easy. There would have been more satisfaction if he could have allowed the tall but puny Johnson a chance to fight, some ludicrous attempt at self-defence which he would have brushed away derisively, as easily as a tomcat deals with a rat.
Once in Calcot Wood again, Patchin’s nose twitched. There was a faint aroma like that of roast pork which had greeted him at lunchtime at Pound Cottage. It grew stronger at every step he took. Desultory grey fumes struggled up from the ancient chimney. The smell was very strong in the hall and unpleasantly so in the kitchen, which reeked of cooking odours and where a blackened, twisted carcase was still roasting and dripping fat into a dying fire.
Despite the smell, Patchin stayed there looking at the object, which bore no resemblance to the once garrulous postman. Patchin’s hatred of the man had quite disappeared now that there was no longer any need for it. He was not gloating over his victim but musing on the quintessential evanescence of man. How easily was man humbled, how soon was he changed into rotting meat! It had been just the same in Korea: one minute his friend Dusty Seddon had been telling a dirty joke, the next moment lying mute with most of his face blown off.
Pausing in the hall, Patchin set light to a pile of paraffin-soaked sawdust and then lit the trails of wood chips and retreated to the sagging front door, throwing the box of matches behind him.
The fire had taken a firm grip on the cottage before Patchin had even left the garden; he could hear it raging and roaring unseen until a sheet of flame sprang up at one of the diamond-leaded windows. For the second time that day, Patchin experienced a slight attack of nerves; momentarily his right hand shook, and for a few minutes he seemed to be walking on lifeless legs, having to make an extraordinary amount of effort just to propel himself along.
Seated in his van, Patchin took out a large handkerchief and wiped his forehead, which was sweating profusely, and allowed himself a few minutes’ rest before driving off in his customary careful manner. Was there something he had overlooked, perhaps a trifling slip which might lead the police to his door in a few days’ time? As he navigated a series of lanes and minor roads that would put him once again on the main road from Hambleden to Pasterne, his mind was exercised by the nagging suspicion that he might have made one vital mistake.
Calm gradually returned as he drove slowly along, and he began to think of the possible effect of the fire on the Benningworth estate. The large garden of rank grass and weeds should act as a barrier between the fire and Calcot Wood, but even if it did spread, Lord Benningworth owed him a favour for all the hard work he had put in there as amateur forester for twenty-five years. A sudden thought made Patchin smile. The Benningworth family motto, Esse quam videre, ‘To be rather than to seem to be,’ was well known in the locality; it was a pity that Ray Johnson had not known that Daniel Patchin also had a motto: “What I have I hold.”
When Patchin arrived in Pasterne he felt completely normal. His pleasant life had been momentarily threatened with an upheaval, but that was now all over. The village looked particularly lovely in the late afternoon sunlight. The white ducks were sedulously paddling to and fro as though they were paid to do so, and swifts were skimming over the clear pond’s mirrorlike surface, occasionally dipping down to it hunting midges. The postmistress’s black and white cat moved carefully over the neatly clipped grass as if it might be stalking a newt and sat down at the edge of the pond. “Pretty as a picture,” Patchin said.
Walking along to Pound Cottage, Daniel Patchin thought of what he should say when he saw Angela. It was essential to appear absolutely as normal so that when she heard of the perplexing tragedy in Calcot Wood nothing about his behaviour should prompt suspicion in her mind. Then he understood Angela’s difficulty in appearing quite normal or saying anything about that walk she had taken on the glorious May afternoon, because phrases that he went over in his mind seemed artificial and suspicious. “Nice afternoon, but I didn’t catch anything” — false. “I enjoyed it, but not good fishing weather” — unnatural.
But Patchin need not have worried, for as soon as he opened the side door he heard the squeak of protesting bedsprings and Angela calling out in a voice that sounded false and unnatural.
James Ellroy
High Darktown
James Ellroy is a 38-year-old high school dropout who has displayed remarkable proficiency as a novelist. His first book, Brown’s Requiem was nominated for a Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Award. His second, Clandestine, was nominated for a Mystery Writers of America Edgar and won a medal from the West Coast Review of Books. His subsequent novels, from the Mysterious Press — Blood on the Moon and Because the Night — begin a quintet about LA policeman Lloyd Hopkins. The third volume, Suicide Hill, is scheduled for spring 1986.
Lee Blanchard, the detective in “High Darktown,” is a main character in Mr. Ellroy’s novel-in-progress to be called The Black Dahlia. The novel is based on a true crime case — the 1947 Los Angeles murder of a hauntingly beautiful black-clad woman. Mr. Ellroy hints that Blanchard will prove himself to be less than heroic.