Crackpot. Philip Loraine

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СКАЧАТЬ with any envelope which wasn’t addressed to her personally, picking these out and leaving all the rest, including the junk mail, to him. Or had she on this occasion noticed the unaddressed envelope and been curious? He glanced at her pretty, comfortable face and thought not; if she’d read the anonymous note she’d have said so, instantly, that was the kind of person she was. Well, wasn’t she? And besides, he had examined the envelope carefully for signs of it having been steamed open. There were none.

      Very well, so Sarah didn’t know about it but somebody did, and that somebody could cause the most disastrous havoc. For God’s sake, who could it be and how could he be silenced?

      Sarah was now coping efficiently with Mrs Lind’s bad temper. ‘I think Oliver’s right, it’s got to be someone’s idea of a joke—in very bad taste. Lisa, don’t you agree?’

      Lisa shrugged, turning from her examination of the marble. ‘Could be. Your British sense of humour has always defeated me.’

      ‘All I hope,’ said Madame Lind, ‘is that you get to the bottom of it damn quick.’ Her attitude was beginning to rile Sarah, who replied more sharply, ‘And how would you go about that?’

      ‘Ask your inmates,’ suggested Vicky, as to an idiot.

      Oliver might betray his wife at the drop of a hat, but he wasn’t going to have this tedious, and really rather common, little woman being rude to her; also he didn’t awfully like the word ‘inmates’. ‘What good would that do? Whoever it is would obviously lie.’

      Vicky snorted. ‘It’s a very unpleasant situation. I’ve always felt protected here, that was the major … lure in your prospectus.’

      At this, Sarah’s irritation came to the boil: ‘There were no “lures” in our prospectus, and we’ve never promised any kind of protection. Crestcote’s part of the world, and the world’s a pretty lousy place these days. If you don’t like it here you’re free to go—we’d waive the month’s notice.’

      Lisa thought this was a damn good answer, but Madame Lind, no fool, sidestepped it neatly: ‘If you ask me, it’s a matter for the police—there’s a sex-maniac around.’ Like many women with little interest in sex, she was adept at seeing satyrs behind every bush. She turned on Lisa: ‘You don’t seem very interested, I must say.’

      ‘Frankly I don’t give a damn, I’ve more important things to worry about.’

      ‘Well, don’t blame me if the whole thing blows up in your face. People who ignore obvious warnings get what’s coming to them. And this—’ waving the photo-copy—‘is typical of a deranged male mind.’

      Oliver had a nasty feeling that there was nothing deranged about it; in fact, he was now quite sure that all these other notes had been sent as a blind, concealing the truth: that he himself was the real target. Meanwhile his wife, ashamed of her moment’s anger, took Vicky’s arm and said, ‘We’ll bring it up at dinner tonight—it’ll be fun. You are coming?’

      ‘I intended to, but now …’

      ‘You must. And I bet it will all have explained itself away long before then.’

      The anonymous note was showing no sign of doing any such thing. On the contrary, it was causing reverberations all over Crestcote that afternoon.

      Johnny Ash and Rosamund faced each other in anger, both balanced on precarious pyramids of love and distrust. ‘Now,’ he was saying, ‘she admits she didn’t get home until two a.m.! So this bloody thing could apply to you. What were you doing all that time?

      ‘Minding,’ replied Rosamund, flushed, ‘my own bleeding business. What were you doing?’

      ‘I told you, boozing in Bristol.’

      ‘And that’s a lie. I didn’t drink a thing all night—if you’d been boozing I’d have smelt you a mile off.’

      He was completely taken aback and showed it. ‘Come on,’ continued Rosamund, ‘what were you doing?’

      She expected him to veer away from the question, and that’s exactly what he did, holding out the piece of paper. ‘It says “in London”. You were in London, I was in Bristol. Who saw you doing what?’

      She had to swing away from him to control her temper; if it broke loose now she knew exactly what it would make her say: ‘For Christ’s sake, Johnny, let’s cut the crap. I know you go up to London at least twice a month without telling me. Why won’t you tell me? Why don’t we let the skeleton out of the cupboard?’ Something like that—and thank God she didn’t say it: perhaps because she was more scared than angry: scared that someone had unearthed his secret which clearly seemed to him so dangerous, and was about to use it in order to hurt him. She had no doubt at all that the sheet of anonymous garbage referred to him.

      Gazing at her rigid back, Johnny Ash was visited for the first time by an awful suspicion that she knew; perhaps she’d known for years, ever since they first met.

      When she turned back she was so stricken by his lost expression that the last trace of anger disappeared in a flash, replaced by love and pity. She said, ‘I’ll tell you what I did, I went and saw Mad Hattie, we had a few joints together. If anyone saw us they’d hardly think it very wicked, would they?’

      She saw relief creep over his face and could have wept for the mistrust which, however much they loved one another, lay between them. He frowned, gazing at the photocopy: ‘So what’s it all about?’

      She didn’t answer for fear of saying, ‘Oh Johnny, you know damn well.’ But then again, the note might have nothing at all to do with him. She seized on the nearest, most comforting possibility: ‘Some of them are jealous of us, you must know that. I mean … loving each other the way we do, and … you being so successful.’

      He jumped at it. ‘Trying to come between us.’

      ‘And succeeding by the look of it!’

      He gave a small gasp, dropped the troublesome message on to the kitchen table and put his arms around her. ‘Take more than crap like that to come between us.’

      ‘I didn’t tell you what I’d been doing because I knew you’d worry. I’m not … slipping back into the old bad habits.’

      He looked deeply into her lovely eyes and saw only honesty there. If only, if only he could be as honest himself. He said, ‘I know you’re not. How was Mad Hattie?’

      ‘Same as ever. Sent you her love.’ She knew that he was about to kiss her and that the moment, like so many others, would end in love-making. But, like most women, she was a realist; she knew that a moment must come when there wouldn’t be that easy escape. Her mother was fond of saying, ‘Never forget—truth will out.’ Rosamund, responding to his kiss, believed it.

      At The Lodge, Tamara Kusnik was in the garden picking a large bunch of slightly frost-nipped chrysanthemums from the bedraggled border. Returning to the cottage, she posed in the doorway as if for a curtain-call, but then noticed that her ex-husband was holding in one hand a glass of vodka and in the other a sheet of paper. He was looking disconcerted.

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