Cracking Open a Coffin. Gwendoline Butler

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СКАЧАТЬ CHAPTER 3

       Day Three to Day Seven

      Time passed, a slow, and painful passage for those closely concerned with the two missing students. Sir Thomas kept his appointments and tried to avoid the sympathetic comments of his colleagues as the story got out. He preferred not to discuss it. His wife, a distinguished physician, flew home from Berlin where she had been giving a series of lectures. He would have preferred not to discuss it with her too, but that was not to be.

      She refused to be met at the airport and drove herself home in her own car.

      ‘I hope you had it in the long stay car park,’ said Tom Blackhall.

      ‘I won’t even answer that one.’ Victoria Blackhall travelled light, just one bag suspended from her shoulder.

      ‘Cost a fortune otherwise.’ This was about the level of their communication at the moment. If they got in too deep there were things that might be said that were better left unsaid.

      ‘You need therapy, Tom,’ she said, going into the hall. It was long and spacious, with an impressive stretch of carpeting and a few good pieces of furniture, all of which belonged to the university, but the pictures on the walls, a Freud and a Sturrage, belonged to Victoria and were probably worth more than all the furnishings put together. She disliked the furniture, calling it fake Georgian, which was unfair as one or two of the pieces had scraps of authentic old woodwork melded into their carcasses. ‘Speech therapy.’ She dumped the big soft piece of Louis Vuitton on the floor. ‘And if it had cost a fortune, it would have been my fortune.’ She knew it irked him that her income, all earned, was considerably larger than his. In the Blackhall household, money spoke. It defined status and pecking rights.

      ‘Can we have a truce?’

      ‘Done.’ She held out her hand. She was always the less aggressive of the two, though quick to defend her rights.

      ‘How was the conference?’

      ‘What I want to know about,’ said Victoria carefully, ‘is Martin. But since you’re asking, the meeting was great and I was great.’

      ‘Martin …’ Her husband hesitated. ‘No news.’

      ‘Is that good or bad?’

      He hesitated again. ‘I don’t think it’s good.’

      ‘I don’t either … What do the police say?’

      ‘They don’t say.’

      ‘I must get unpacked. I need some clean clothes … I bought you some German brandy … it’s probably horrible but you used to like it.’

      A long time ago that had been, before the honours and horrors of his position had fallen upon him. Fallen? No, not fallen like the gentle dew from heaven, but bitterly and fiercely struggled for. Part of the trouble, really.

      The autumn sun poured into their bedroom. ‘Damn those thin curtains, they don’t hide a thing.’ Victoria yanked down a blind which had been installed at her own expense. Curtains in this house were a sore point with her. A later generation would discover that the handsome pair of red silk damask curtains in the large reception room downstairs were a fake, just for show, they could not be pulled together, money having run out when the decorators got to the curtaining. The light revealed the shadows under her eyes and the lines and hollows a sleepless night had brought her. Victoria was older by a little than her husband and the years had treated her less well.

      As she unpacked, Victoria said: ‘He could be suicidal … I have wondered about it.’

      ‘Martin is quite normal,’ said Tom fiercely. ‘You’re not a psychiatrist.’

      ‘You learn to observe in my job.’

      ‘I know much more about students than you do, my dear. You think you do, but you don’t.’

      ‘I don’t want to believe he’s dead, but I just do. I think Martin is dead.’ She put her hands to her face. ‘Oh God, I can’t bear this. I do love him.’

      ‘I know you do. So do I.’ He put his arm round her shoulders and drew her head on to his shoulder. The truce was holding.

      Suddenly she raised her head and looked. ‘You’re keeping something back, I can tell. What is it?’

      ‘Suicide might be the best of it,’ he said.

      ‘What do you mean?’

      ‘Martin is suspected of doing away with the girl.’

      ‘She may not be dead … Who suspects him?’

      ‘James Dean for one … Probably the police too, but they aren’t saying.’

      Or if they didn’t think it now, then they would as soon as they remembered about Virginia Scott. They must have remembered now, the police were good at remembering that sort of thing, their computers told them—would tell them—that Martin had been her friend too.

      But for the police, it was a matter of reason. Evidence and reason, these were their tools … James Dean now, that was different. Emotion there.

      ‘I’ve half a mind to phone Dean, see what he knows. More than I do, I suspect.’ He had that feeling about Dean, that knowledge of some sort was tucked away inside him.

      He reached out for the phone by the bed and dialled.

      ‘No, don’t,’ said Victoria, her voice sharp. ‘Leave it, just leave it.’

      Jim Dean also went about his business. He had no wife, so he turned his anxiety upon himself. He could quarrel with himself, hate himself, easily enough, no trouble there.

      He could also hate Martin Blackhall, that too presented no difficulty. His suicide, if it had taken place, he would have regarded as a positively good step. He considered the possibility of killing him.

      But to do that, it would be necessary to find him. The police would be of no use there, a private detective must be found. No trouble there either, he knew one, if not two. Use of them came his way in business at times. But he also had an underground link to a CID officer in the Second City Force.

      But he hesitated.

      He toyed with a gold propelling pencil, decorated with his initials by Asprey’s, which had been one of his first purchases for himself when he started to make money. He wanted to handle gold, just as he wanted to wear soft leather.

      He could pick up the telephone and say, ‘Hello, Harry, how are things?’ and get a response. But it would mean going behind John Coffin’s back and he had a healthy respect for that man’s acumen.

      The telephone rested on an alabaster stand set with gold. It matched a pen which matched the pencil.

      He liked everything about him to be of the highest quality and massive, made of quantities of the best possible materials, whether gold, silver, silk or wood, but actual design he left to the professionals so that his office, as with his home in Chelsea Bank, looked beautiful and expensive but unlived in. СКАЧАТЬ