I crossed the big park and went into the belt of trees at the back of Norham Gardens, where I soon found George’s house. I knew it was his since the detached Victorian rectory style of the building, with its fretted gable ends, tall chimneys and haphazardly placed windows made it easily recognisable out of the line of other slightly less eccentric redbrick mansions on the road. And I recognised the ugly new sliding aluminium-framed windows giving out onto the garden, which George had added, upsetting the whole mood of the place. Crouched in the bushes at the end of his garden, I watched their ground-floor flat.
The big window was partly open. But there was no human sign or sound from anywhere in the house. I moved very. carefully over the fence and then across the lawn. There was another flat in the basement, I knew, and one of the top floor. But there was no sound from these either.
I waited a few more minutes just outside the sliding aluminium window, then pushed it open and walked into the Bensons’ drawing-room. It was empty. The room faced south-west, so that the summer light flooded into it from over the trees, lighting up a shiny modern chesterfield against one wall and an appalling abstract painting above it. A big pot-pourri bowl lay on a table to one side of the sofa with a video machine on the other. There was a sickly, over-sweet scent in the warm air. I went out into the hall and then into all the other rooms. But the whole place was deserted.
Then I saw a half-open door leading down to the basement flat from the hall. I went over to it and listened, looking through the gap for a minute. There was no sound from beneath. I walked slowly down the stairs. The flat was empty, but in considerable disarray. It might have been a student’s pad, except there were no books or papers lying about. There was a half-finished tin of baked beans and a glass of milky tea on the dirty, sugar-encrusted kitchen table. In the bedroom clothes were scattered about everywhere, expensive clothes, lightweight summer suits, fine shirts. But there were old clothes as welclass="underline" grubby garden wear, a donkey-jacket, a torn pullover, a dirty pork-pie hat, an old Army camouflage jacket lying on the unmade bed.
And then it came to me. The pork-pie hat and the camouflage jacket. The African in the valley had worn just such a jacket, and so had the man who’d killed Laura. And months before, in the early spring out on the land beyond our cottage, we’d seen someone running away, his face hidden, with just the same kind of jacket, and the same pork-pie hat. It all added up: the man who’d killed Laura, who’d pursued us through the valley, was the same man I’d just seen outside George Benson’s office at the museum. The only mystery now was why this African had obviously been living here all the time: in George Benson’s basement flat.
I went back upstairs. There was a small room just off the hall, a study where George Benson worked, obviously, for it was filled with the books of his trade, with a typewriter and papers covering most of a large table set against a window looking out on the street.
I knew I mightn’t have much time since, if George had phoned the police, he or they or both might turn up here at any moment. All the same, looking for some explanation of the African’s presence downstairs, I thought I might find a clue here. I sifted quickly through the papers on the table, and I was lucky. Halfway down, hidden beneath a copy of the National Geographic magazine with an article by George in it, I found a letter, with the Bensons’ own address die-stamped in red on top of it. It had been hurriedly scrawled, on a single side of the paper, with just the letter ‘A’ at the end. A letter without love or any other good wishes. It was from Annabelle, George’s wife. I skipped through it quickly.
… and I certainly can’t stay in the house any longer. The situation you have contrived here is quite impossible — and has been between us, in any case, for quite some time. Since you refuse to take any advice from me, or contact the police, you’ll have to sort matters out yourself. I don’t intend ‘betraying’ you now — though I should have done that long ago. It’s your life — and the decisions you made in it over the years, and with Willy in the past, are your decisions, and you must live with them and resolve them in your own way. But until you settle things up I can’t live with you.
The Kasters have gone on holiday. They’ve offered me their house and I’ll be out there for the time being. But please — until you have made some effective decisions — leave me alone.
A.
The Kasters? There was an Oxford directory by a telephone on the table. I looked them up. There was only one Kaster in the book — a Mr and Mrs David Kaster. They lived just outside Oxford: Sandpit Farm House, near Farmoor. Annabelle had left George because of the African, obviously, among other reasons: because of ‘decisions’ George had made over the years, decisions made with ‘Willy in the past’ … Africa loomed up for me again. Something had happened out there, with all of them. I was sure of that now. Something unpleasant, to say the least of it. But what was it? The answer, I thought, might lie somewhere out along the Eynsham road, in Sandpit Farm House.
Fifteen
There was a sign on the roadside, several miles outside Oxford, at the head of a rough track just beyond the village of Farmoor, giving direction to Sandpit Farm House. The house itself was some distance away, isolated among fields, with the Thames just visible behind a line of poplars beyond. If she was in, and there were no other guests with her, Annabelle couldn’t have chosen a better bolt-hole from my point of view.
I parked the car at the head of the drive and walked down towards the house in the hot evening light, a small, converted farmhouse, I saw, when I came nearer to it, with a pretty garden in front and a big Cotswold stone wall to one side, running away to the back, with an arched doorway in the middle. Avoiding the front of the house and reaching this entrance, I looked through into a deserted patio, with an empty swimming-pool in the middle. But there was someone or something in the pool, invisible to me below the level of the sides, for I could hear the sound of water, under pressure from a hose, being sluiced against the concrete.
I tiptoed through the archway and came to the edge of the deep end. Annabelle was standing right beneath me, in a bikini, her back towards me, with a hose in her hand, cleaning the sides of the pool. Tall, angular, straw-haired Annabelle, the plain, flat-chested woman. I had seen her before as a distant and perhaps troubled person, yet someone essentially hard-headed, I thought, and never vulnerable as she was now. She turned with the hose, moving to another part of the pool, and when she saw me she literally jumped in the air with fright.
‘God!’ she exclaimed, gasping.
‘It’s all right. It’s only me.’
‘Only you?’
She paused, shaking, regaining her breath. She tried to look over the edge of the pool, as if for help, but even she wasn’t tall enough. There was a ladder to one side of the deep end. But there was no other exit from the walled patio itself other than by the doorway I’d come through. She saw she was trapped, and I helped her in this feeling by standing coldly above her, an ogre in the evening sunlight. I had no time to waste and I knew, if she hadn’t been prepared to ‘betray’ her husband, that I might well have to threaten her in any way I could for the information I wanted. And I saw a means then, readily to hand: there was a barbecue barrow parked by the diving board, with its various cooking implements laid out on the tray. I picked up a long metal kebab skewer casually and toyed with it.