The Empty House (3 page)

After dinner Peter walked down to the British Legion Club, of which he was one of the many young honorary members. The rain, which had swept up from the West Country on the day before, had cleared off and it was a fresh and sparkling evening.

At the club he found that Fred Dawlish had put their names down for the billiard table. “Time for a pint before this pair finish,” said Fred. “They’re worse than we are.”

They finished their drinks, had an inexpert game of snooker, and took a second pint to a table in the corner of the bar.

“I’m afraid my mother’s got them again,” said Peter.

“Little men?”

“That’s right. This one’s got a rose in his buttonhole.”

“Makes a change. The last one had false teeth and a squint, if I remember rightly.”

“Do you think she ought to see a doctor?”

“I don’t believe there’s much a doctor can do about it. Would you like me to keep an eye on her? Unofficial like?”

Fred was a detective sergeant at the local station.

“It’s very good of you,” said Peter, “but if she found herself being followed about by
two
men, she really would blow her top. Better leave it alone. Thanks for the suggestion, all the same.”

Candlewick Cottage was the end one of six which had originally been built for farm labourers but had gone up in the world. Peter tugged the wrought-iron bellpull and was answered by a mixed chorus of barking – treble, tenor, and bass.

“Quiet, all of you,” said a woman’s deep voice. “Pipe down, Charlie. I mean it. Sambo, if you jump up again, I’ll crown you.”

The door was opened, and Peter found himself being inspected by a gray- haired woman with a pleasant face and strong nose, a deerhound, a bull terrier, and a Jack Russell terrier. The deerhound, which was stationed on the right, had its head tilted to the left. The bull terrier and the Jack Russell on the left had their heads tilted to the right. The woman, who was not a lot shorter than Peter, was looking straight at him. This gave the whole group an effect of classical symmetry.

“Miss Wolfe?”

“That’s right. I’m not going to warn you again, Sambo. You must be something to do with insurance. I’ve been expecting you. Mind your head. These cottages were built for a race of dwarfs.”

The door opened directly into a sitting room, an untidy place with a large open fireplace, three walls lined with low whitepainted bookcases, and a ceiling of carefully uncovered and varnished oak beams. The tops of the bookcases were a clutter of musical scores, loose sheet music, catalogues, greeting cards, and a metronome.

“Watch your head,” said Miss Wolfe. “My goodness, you
are
tall.”

“Six foot five.”

“You’d better sit down before you hurt yourself.”

Peter looked for somewhere to sit. The sofa was now occupied by the deer- hound. The other two armchairs had been claimed by the bull terrier and the Jack Russell.

“Idle brutes,” said Miss Wolfe. “I try to keep them off the chairs, but it’s a losing battle. The place for dogs is in the stable.” She repeated, “The stable” in a threatening voice. The three dogs looked at her tolerantly. “They know I haven’t got a stable.” She went behind the chair with the Jack Russell in it and tipped it up, sliding the dog off onto the floor.

“Grab it quick,” she said.

Peter sat down. The Jack Russel jumped onto his lap.

“It’s all right,” he said. “He doesn’t worry me. I’m used to dogs.”

“It’s good of you to say so, but I feel I’m being weak. What I ought to do is to buy a whip. A
large whip.”
The deerhound, assuming that he was being talked to, thumped his tail against the arm of the sofa.

“About that policy,” said Peter.

“I got a letter about it,” said Miss Wolfe. “From the insurance company – I forget their name – and I’ve lost the letter. Or Sambo may have eaten it. Checks, letters, and banknotes. If you leave them lying about, he gobbles them up at once.”

“It wasn’t a company. The policy was underwritten by a syndicate at Lloyds:”

“Goodness. That makes me feel like a ship. And are you a—what is the right word? An undertaker?”

“I’m from Phelps, King and Troyte.” He gave Miss Wolfe his card.

She looked at it carefully and handed it back. “What does ‘Adjusters’ mean?”

“Well,” said Peter cautiously, “it’s our job to investigate insurance claims.”

“And adjust them?”

“If necessary.”

“Downward, I’m sure.”

“What makes you think that?”

“If you adjusted them upward, no one would bother to employ you.”

Peter had to acknowledge that there was some truth in this.

“However,” said Miss Wolfe, “there can’t be much scope for adjusting this one. It’s for a definite amount of money, payable in defined circumstances.”

“It’s the circumstances that I was asked to look into. One of the clauses in the policy was most unusual. I don’t think, in all my experience, I’ve ever seen one like it.”

“Twenty years? Thirty years?”

“What—?”

“You said, in all your experience. The way you said it, it sounded a very long time.”

“That was pompous,” said Peter. “I’m sorry.” When embarrassed, he blushed very easily. “I didn’t mean it to be. I’ve been exactly two years in this job. All the same, it
is
an unusual clause.”

“It was drafted for my brother by his solicitor, Roland Highsmith. He’d every confidence in him, I do know that. They were at Oxford together and have been friends ever since.”

Peter looked at his file. “That would be Messrs. Highsmith and Westall, Solicitors, of Forebury Street, Exeter.”

“Right. But I believe that Westall’s an invalid. He’s always away sick, or something. Roland does all the work.”

“I shall have to have a word with him.”

“Why? Is there something wrong with the clause?”

Miss Wolfe put a pair of horn-rimmed glasses onto her strong nose and studied the policy. Peter had realised for some time that her speech and manner were a cloak for a shrewd mind; the sort of mind to be expected of a woman who had made her way to the top in one of the most competitive musical outfits in the world.

“It’s the way it’s worded,” said Peter. “’If there is an assumption that the cause of death, or one of the causes, was drowning.’” It seems to have been carefully designed for what actually happened. Does it worry you if we talk about this?”

“I was very fond of Alex,” said Miss Wolfe, “and he of me, I think. But we weren’t close. We wrote to each other on birthdays and at Christmas, but I hadn’t seen him for – let me think – more than three years. Nearly four. You were saying—?”

“If the policy had said, simply, drowning, there would have been an argument that the impact of the car onto the water must have killed him
before
he went under.”

“Then you might have wriggled out of it.”

“I don’t say we would have. It’s the sort of argument our lawyers might have put up.”

“Clever old Roland. He thought of that one.”

“Don’t you see, that’s what makes it all so odd. It almost looks as if he had this particular sort of accident in mind when he drafted the policy.”

“Not true. The sort of accident they both had in mind was a plane going down over the sea and being lost without trace. The same arguments would apply.”

“Did he do a lot of flying?”

“He used to. A great deal. In the last few years he’s usually taken his car across to the Continent and driven about in it. It was easier to shake free of the little men who trailed round after him.”

Peter stared at her. He thought of his mother. Surely not a second case of persecution mania?

Miss Wolfe was looking at him over the top of her glasses, which were still perched on her nose. She said, “You don’t know a great deal about my brother, I can see.”

“Practically nothing. I’d be very grateful for anything you can tell me.”

“I don’t know the details of the work he was doing. Except that it must have been connected with biological warfare, or he wouldn’t have been at that Hell’s Kitchen in Devonshire. I’m sure he hated it as much as I did.”

“Then why did he work there?”

“He was blackmailed into doing it.”

“Blackmailed? Who by?”

“By the government. And if you keep looking at me in that unbelieving way, I shan’t say a single word more.”

“I do apologise. I do, really. It’s just that I was startled. Somehow one doesn’t associate governments with blackmail.”

“All governments use blackmail. Some openly. Some more discreetly. This was a particularly unpleasant form of blackmail because it was disguised as charity. What my brother specialised in was genetic research, but jobs in that line were few and far between. When he left Oxford, he filled in time for a year or so teaching science at a public school, but always with his chin on his shoulder. Finally he got what he wanted. It was a junior post at the Molecular Biology Research Unit at Cambridge. While he was there they arranged for him to do a spell at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and he went, on attachment, to Bart’s Hospital. They’ve got a Medical Oncology Unit. He was beginning to be interested in the connection – everyone knows it must exist – between the normal processes of growing older, and the abnormal ones.”

“Cancer?”

“Cancer and leukemia are the vicious ones. There are plenty of others. All the knobs and spots and blotches that accumulate as your system gets tired. Like trees.”

“It sounds fascinating.”

“It certainly fascinated him,” said Miss Wolfe. “Do you know anything at all about molecular biology?”

“Not a scrap.”

“Well, I don’t know much. But some years ago, Alex and I had a holiday together on a farm in Wales. Considered as a holiday, it was a dead loss. It rained almost every day. Alex did a lot of talking and 1 remembered some of it. It seems that everyone has got a personal genetic code. It’s carried by his own private arrangement of biochemicals in cells called nuclei, and the important thing is to find out how the chromosomes are packed into them and then to try and read the pattern of information carried by them. Stop me if I’m boring you. This is nothing to do with insurance policies.”

“You’re not boring me,” said Peter. He noticed that, now that Miss Wolfe was talking about something that interested her, she had dropped all affectations.

“I gather that it was like the code-breaking we did during the war. Only, the code they were trying to read was more complicated than anything the Germans ever thought up. It was there that Alex finally lost me. All I can remember is that it was something to do with a submicroscopic thread called DNA. It is chemically the most complex of the five substances which make up a chromosome, and seems to be their intelligence unit. To date, it’s been cleverer than any of the people trying to unravel it. There was a woman – I can’t remember her name – who Alex said got closest to it. Then she died, and the whole research was put back by years.”

“Didn’t she leave notes of where she’d got to?”

“You say that as though she was travelling on the Underground and could tell them what station she’d arrived at. When you get to that point in pure research, you’re on your own. You’re pushing out into the dark. No maps. Not even a star to guide you. It must be the most terrifying and the most exciting thing imaginable.”

The terrier on Peter’s knees pricked up his ears and gave a single sharp bark. Charlie, the deerhound, unfolded himself from the sofa, padded across to the window, and looked out. From where he sat, Peter could see the road. A car had drawn up, ten yards past the gate. It did not seem to be doing anything in particular.

“That’s when the trouble started. Alex wrote an article.”

“About his work?”

“Nothing to do with his work. He wrote it after one of his trips to the Middle East. If he hadn’t been becoming wellknown in his own field, no one would have dreamed of publishing it. I wish to heaven they hadn’t. It was the sort of mad, infantile, totally apolitical argument that scientists might indulge in while talking over their port after dinner but should certainly never commit to paper. What he said was that a surgeon would remove even a sound organ from the body if the presence of that organ was, on balance, potentially dangerous to the rest of the anatomy. On this analogy, the course of wisdom was clearly to excise the state of Israel. It might be, probably it was, a well-run and peace-loving state. What was wrong with it was that it was
in the wrong place.
Set down somewhere else, it would be harmless. Established exactly where it was, it was a source of infection in the body politic. Can you imagine the reactions?”

“Easily.”

“The national press got it, of course. ‘Israel a Plague Spot. Move It to the Sahara’ was one of the mildest.”

“Why did anyone take it seriously? Couldn’t they see it was meant as a joke?”

“It’s one of the things you mustn’t joke about. Like immigration and South Africa. Poor Alex found that out, quickly enough.”

“I imagine a lot of people got very angry,” said Peter, “but there wasn’t much anyone could actually do about it, was there?”

“Was there not? It didn’t take long for someone to point out that Alex was doing the sort of job which might, quite easily, lead to important developments in the military field. The public thinks in cliches. Alex was working in a biological research unit. They’d heard of something called biological warfare. One and one make two. Here was a scientist calling for the destruction of Israel,
and he
was one of the few men who might be in a position to do it.
You know how television has conditioned people to think of scientists as evil little men with bald heads and steelrimmed glasses who are plotting to destroy the world. Here was one of them in the flesh. It was nonsense, of course, but the press and the Jewish lobby between them worked up such a head of steam that the government withdrew Alex’s security clearance. And that meant, in practice, that no laboratory would accept him. He was so far ahead in his own field that his reputation was already international. And the only job open to him was teaching small boys O Level and A Level science. Now do you see?”