The Empty House (7 page)

The Colonel looked at him stonily. He seemed, Peter thought, to have a list divided into two columns: items which could be discussed and items which could not. Peter was aware that he had again approached the dividing line.

The Colonel said, “You misunderstand the position. I was responsible for Dr. Wolfe’s—um—comfort and wellbeing inside the camp. When he left it, he came under a different jurisdiction. Lewis and Bateson were neither of them my men.”

“Lewis was the man who was hit by a motorist?”

“Yes.”

“That was on the same day that Dr. Wolfe had his accident?”

“Yes.”

“Would he have known about Lewis’ death?”

The Colonel considered the matter. Evidently the answer was on the permitted side of the line. He said, “We had the news about Lewis in the course of the afternoon. It was widely discussed. I imagine Dr. Wolfe heard about it before he left.”

“And when was that?”

“Shortly before nine o’clock that evening.”

“Might he have been upset at the news?”

“He might have been. We should not necessarily have known that he was. Dr. Wolfe was not a man who exhibited his feelings in public.”

There was a short pause. It seemed to be the end of the conversation. Dr. Wolfe had left the camp at nine o’clock in the evening. His car had gone over the cliff at Rackthorn Point shortly afterward. Finish. Peter could think of nothing else to say; of no question he could ask to which any helpful answer could be given. He was on the point of rising to his feet when the Colonel spoke again.

He said, “There is something I must say to you before you go,” and paused.

During their brief conversation Peter’s opinion of the Colonel had been changing. He knew, of course, that he was not dealing with a fool. He now realised that the Colonel’s stiffness and taciturnity were not the result of official obstruction or hostility. Colonel Hollingum was worried. He was anxious to put something across, and was uncertain how to go abou”I wonder if you realise that your car was picked up on our early warning system when it turned off the main road. It was recognised as coming from Key’s Garage, and we were finding out about you from Bill Key before you had got out of the car. The few minutes we kept you waiting outside the gate were spent in telephoning the writer of that letter. Fortunately, we caught him at his desk in the Ministry. If we had failed in either instance, you wouldn’t have been allowed inside the gate.”

“I realise you have to be careful,” said Peter.

The Colonel went on as though he had not heard him. “There is an infantry platoon on permanent duty here. One section is on red alert. The other three sections are ten minutes’ notice. We have an open radio-telephone link with Western Command, and another with Whitehall. I mention these precautions to give you some idea of the priority accorded to the work which is going on here. Whether I approve of that work or not, it is my job to see that it goes on uninterrupted. You understand me?”

Peter nodded.

“You mentioned the fact that Dr. Wolfe reported on his own work, in writing, at the end of the second and fourth years. Those reports did not go to me. They went to the Joint Services Scientific Advisory Committee, which, in turn, reports directly to the Cabinet. I know roughly what was in them, but not the details. Nor, of course, do I know the policy decisions which were based on them. I expect it was thought better that I should be kept in the dark.”

The Colonel smiled briefly, and Peter caught sight of a human being behind the official mask.

“It can be very trying work. During the time I have been here, we have lost three scientists. The first disappeared five years ago, when he was on leave. When I say disappeared, I mean that, literally. He might be anywhere, above the earth or under it. He has not been seen or heard of since. The second one failed to turn up for breakfast one morning, and I went over to his quarters to look for him. He was in his bath. He had cut his own throat the night before. It was not a pleasant sight.”

Peter nodded again. The room seemed to have become stuffy and airless.

“I am telling you these things so that you will listen very carefully to the advice I have to give you. Go back to London. Write your report. Say that it is quite impossible to decide whether Dr. Wolfe took his own life or whether it was an accident. Whatever the truth of the matter, one fact is certain. He is dead.”

By the time Peter got back to the hotel, lunch was under way. Anna was alone. Detecting the faintest hint of an invitation which might or might not have been there, Peter walked across to her table.

Anna said, “Come and keep me company. Kevin has gone to Cryde to see if he can hire a Land-Rover. He’s tired of pushing us out of goyals. How have you been spending the morning?”

“I’ve been changing cars, too. I’ve got one more suited to my length of leg. Then I went over to the Research Station.”

“Did they let you in?”

“After checking everything down to the date of my birth and my size in shoes and gloves.”

“It’s a terrible place. In Old Testament times it would have been visited by fire from heaven. I don’t suppose they let you look at any of whatever it is they’re doing, did they?”

“Certainly not. I had a chat with the boss, and was told a few things about Dr. Wolfe, most of which I knew already. I got the impression that he was a very private sort of person.”

Anna considered the point, sitting up in her chair and straightening her back as she did so. The movement brought her breasts very slightly forward inside the thin shirt she was wearing that morning. Peter lowered his eyes and became engrossed in filleting the grilled trout on his plate.

“He wasn’t private in the sense of being stuffy,” said Anna. “He was easy to talk to, and interesting. He knew about a lot of different things. Music – I suppose from his sister. He talked a lot about her. And rock climbing and sailing, and the connection between music and chess and mathematics. He was fun to talk to. But when it was all over, you did realise that you hadn’t got one inch past his outer defences.”

“Do you mean that he was hiding something?”

“Not exactly. I mean one got the impression that he was leading two quite different lives, or maybe even three. And he could switch from one to the other whenever he wanted. No, Dave, I simply couldn’t.
Treacle pudding,
in this weather? I’ll just have some cheese.”

“Cheese for me, too,” said Peter.

“What are you going to do with yourself this afternoon?”

“I thought of exploring the country behind Rackthorn Point.”

“Work or pleasure?”

“A bit of both.”

“Can I join in the pleasure part?”

“By all means,” said Peter. “We’ll take my car to the caravan site and do the rest on foot.”

“Is this where it happened?” said Anna.”I think it must be. And that’s the place where the fence was broken. For God’s sake, watch it.”

Anna had walked to the extreme edge of the cliffs and was bending forward, looking down. “It’s quite a drop,” she said. “Do you think anyone could have gone over it with his eyes open?”

“No,” said Peter, with a shudder. “I don’t. Please come away from the edge. You’re making me feel wobbly inside.”

Anna came back and sat down beside him. She said, “Different things frighten different people. I’ve never minded about heights, even when I was quite small. What I can’t stand is squishy places. Bubbling marshes and bogs and quicksands. I used to have a regular nightmare about being sucked down, very slowly, into a marsh. First my mouth went under, then my nose. I can remember saying, ‘If you try hard enough, you can breathe through your ears.’”

“What happened then?”

“It seemed such a funny idea it made me giggle, and I woke up. Where do we go from here?”

“Straight down towards the wood. There must be some way through it. You can see the path going up on the other side.”

There was no difficulty about it. The wood was unfenced, and was not particularly thick. They pushed their way through and climbed the knoll beyond. Standing on it, they could see across the valley, from the line of the Cryde-Huntercombe road to the levels of Exmoor running away, fold behind green and purple fold, into the distance.

“That’s where you think he went, isn’t it?” said Anna.

“It’s possible,” said Peter, considerably startled.

“First having pushed his car over the cliff. Could he have done that?”

“I think so. He’d drive it off the path, leaving it pointing downhill. It’s a fairly steep slope. The turf was wet, but it wasn’t soggy. In fact, it was probably rather slippery. One good push and I think the car would have gone over, all right. Particularly if he’d broken the fence first. After that, he’d just have to walk down the way we came. It was already getting dark. There was the whole night ahead of him.”

“How are you going to prove it? Always supposing you’re right.”

“The only way of proving it would be by finding Dr. Wolfe.”

“There’d be no argument then,” agreed Anna.

“Don’t, please, say anything about this to anyone else.”

“Certainly not.”

“Not even to Kevin.”

“All right. Not even to Kevin. Though I share most secrets with him.”

They walked down the hill toward the road. In a curious way Peter felt that the last few minutes had broken down all restraints between them. It seemed perfectly natural that they should find a sheltered dip in the hillside and sit down in it. He had no wish – or no immediate wish – to do anything but talk.

“Is Kevin your twin?”

“He was born five minutes after me. In a lovely, decrepit old mansion house in the north of Donegal, under the Derryveagh Mountains. It’s a peaceful corner of northern Ireland even now, so I’m told, though we haven’t been back in the last five years. Don’t you think it’s a mistake to go back to somewhere where you’ve been very happy?”

“Yes,” said Peter. “Yes, I do.”

“My mother died when we were born. Perhaps the local midwife wasn’t very clever. I don’t know. It must have upset Father badly, but he never let it worry us. We had a succession of women who were called housekeepers. I think Father slept with most of them. It didn’t worry us at the time and it doesn’t worry me now. It wasn’t an eighteenth-century sort of household. Father taught us the important things, like how to ride properly and handle a gun or a fly rod. We went to school later and hated it. I ran away three times.”

Peter willed her to go on talking. She was lying back, propping herself on her elbows. The shirt she was wearing was made of some thin material which looked like cheesecloth. It was biscuit coloured, with a thin blue stripe.

“Father never seemed to worry about anything. Certainly he never worried about money. There was enough, that was all that mattered. I gather it came from a family brewery which his father and his uncle had set up. Money was made for spending, not keeping. What would have happened in the end, I don’t know. He was killed out hunting, and lawyers took over and looked grim and talked about insolvency and the workhouse, but it didn’t happen, because that very year they found enormous deposits of bauxite on our property. That’s really all there is to tell. Kevin and I are a hopeless pair. We’ve not been trained to do anything useful, so we wander round enjoying ourselves. Now tell me about you.”

“It won’t be nearly as interesting as yours.”

“I hope it was happy, because I don’t really enjoy gloomy stories.”

“Then I’ll tell you about the happy part. It was when I was ten and my older brother was twelve. We had a bungalow on the Thames at Laleham. That’s a little place about fifteen miles outside London. We were both at boarding school, but we spent all our holidays there, winter and summer. In some ways the winter was best, when the river was high and there weren’t too many people about. We became real water rats. We had a punt and a dinghy and a canoe, and we took them out in all weathers. There wasn’t any trick of watermanship we didn’t know and improve on. Once, for a bet, I took a canoe across the river standing up in it and using a punt pole, and if you think that’s easy, you ought to try it. Of course, it wouldn’t have mattered if I had fallen in, I was only wearing bathing trunks.”

Anna laughed and said, “I can just see you, Peter, looking like a long, skinny spider.”

“I
was
rather skinny. Another thing we used to do was take the punt upstream, dive out of it, and let it drift down empty, with us swimming behind it and almost underneath it. People would see it was adrift and get very worried and come out to catch it, and we used to pop out of the water like seals and grin at them, which made them furious. And sometimes we’d come home blue with cold, and Mother would make us have a hot bath and cook great plates of porridge for us. It was a lovely time. Later we went back to live in London, and things weren’t such fun any more. Jonathan, my brother, was sent by his firm to New Zealand and got married and decided to stay out there.”

He wasn’t going to tell her about the other things.

Anna said, “Something happened which made you very unhappy.”

“Yes. “

“Then don’t talk about it. Only think about nice things. Jumping in and out of the water like a little frog, and eating porridge.”

She was half lying, propped up on her elbows. Her left hand was quite close to Peter’s right hand. As he moved it cautiously forward, Anna shivered suddenly, jumped to her feet, and said, “Let’s go back to the car. All that talk about porridge. It’s made me feel hungry again.”

When they got back to the hotel, they found Kevin, very pleased with himself. He had managed to hire an old Army-surplus Jeep with a winching attachment which he was demonstrating to Dave Brewer.

“You just hammer one of these pickets into the ground, fasten yourself to it, and wind yourself out backward.”

“You get yourself bogged down to rights,” said Mr. Brewer, “and you won’t get out with no winches. Only one thing’ll pull you clear. That’s a team of cart horses.”

“We’ll see,” said Kevin. “We’ll see.”

It was at ten o’clock that night that the telephone call came.