‘Oh, er, Graham, hello. Terrible, this, about Bob, isn’t it?’
‘Frightful.’
‘Must be absolutely awful for you in particular.’
Graham looked up in surprise as George expanded his remark. ‘I mean, to have lost Merrily and then, so soon after, to lose such a close colleague … I mean, you and Bob were chums, weren’t you?’
Good God, if George thought that, he really was losing his marbles. Many remarks sprang to Graham’s lips, but he contented himself with, ‘It’s very sad.
‘Yes, lucky you weren’t sailing with him this weekend.’
‘Sure.’
‘Though apparently Terry’s all right.’
‘What? Terry? Terry who?’ The old boy’s mind has really gone.
‘Terry Sworder. Didn’t you know? Terry Sworder was staying with Bob this weekend. He went sailing with him.’ Graham gaped.
‘Apparently he was in the — what? Dinghy, fender. . whatever they call it, when the fire started. He was blown free by the blast. Bob wasn’t so lucky.’
Graham’s throat was dry. He seemed once again to taste salt in his mouth.
‘Wh. . where’s Terry now? Is he in today?’
‘No.’
‘What, in hospital?’
‘No, he wasn’t hurt much. Just shock, I think. No, I had a call from him.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘He’s with the police.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, he’s a witness, Graham. Obviously. He saw exactly what happened.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
He was back to being an amateur. Constantly fear took hold of Graham and shook him. Sweat oozed coldly from his body. He started at every knock on his office door, every ring from the phone, every stranger he met in the corridor. Each one could be the summons, the polite voice of officialdom asking for a few words in connection with the death of Robert Benham. And this time there would be no easy let-off, no grieving widower to be distracted by commiseration. This crime wasn’t on Laker’s patch, this one, he felt sure, was being investigated by a mind as cold-blooded and as logical as his own.
As he thought of this, he realised what a blazing trail he had left. He had been relying on the assumption of an accident; once the idea of crime had been planted in an investigator’s mind, there were any number of pointers that would lead straight back to Graham Marshall.
Suppose his shoes had been washed up. Or the brand-new waders. It wouldn’t be hard to trace those back to Farlow’s in Pall Mall and, even though he had paid cash, he was sure that his ignorance of technical details, where he was going to fish and so on, had made him memorable to the rather snooty assistant.
Then there were footprints or fingerprints. It was only canteen conjecture that most of Tara’s Dream had been immolated. Robert might have been killed just by the blast and the fire quickly extinguished. Graham thought uncomfortably of all those shining fibreglass surfaces and bitterly regretted his omission of rubber gloves.
Or the car might have been seen, its number memorised and traced back to the hire firm. Thence to George Brewer and, once he had been eliminated, suspicion could not be long in moving to his assistant.
Then there were the clothes in the skip in Haslemere. . Everything he thought of had the same effect. It was as if, suspended over his head, was a huge black arrow with the legend ‘HE DID IT’.
The rest of the Monday in the office was excruciating, but even then, through his fear, Graham could see once again how his emotions were misinterpreted. Everyone recognised his state of tension, but everyone put it down to shock at the news of Robert Benham’s death. Rather than revulsion, the murderer attracted sympathy.
Things were even worse when he returned home. He was back to the state he had been in after killing the old man. There was no confident glow, no feeling of immunity, of being set above the herd. Graham Marshall felt terrified, and abjectly ashamed of his own incompetence.
He couldn’t eat, but managed to drink a lot of whisky. He tried watching television, but nothing could engage his attention for more than a few minutes.
Sleep was as much out of the question as eating, and Graham spent the night in the sitting-room, where Sunday papers were still scattered over the floor. He drank steadily and the whisky aggravated the rancid taste of fear at the back of his mouth.
His thoughts spiralled ever downwards. At one point, for the first time in his life, he contemplated suicide. Death, he knew, had power, and bringing about his own might perhaps be the last expression of that power he could achieve.
But the idea did not stay with him long. He knew he lacked the kind of nerve the act required and, besides, even at this nadir of his hopes, some tiny glimmer remained. His luck had been incredible over the last few months; why shouldn’t his ration last just a little longer?
The deepest of his pain came from the knowledge that he was no longer in control of events. Nothing he could do now could either slow down or accelerate the investigation into Benham’s death. He could only sit and wait. And go through the motions of as normal a life as possible.
He bathed at about six and put on clean clothes, but the change didn’t refresh him. The whisky, of which he had consumed the best part of a bottle, had not made him drunk, but left him with a grinding headache.
He geared himself up to leaving at the normal time for work, and then remembered he had arranged to go in late. The Post Office engineer was coming that morning to make the connections for the Ansaphone in his study.
Now even having the device seemed pointless. He tried to recall in what mood of euphoria he had bought it and realised, with shame, that it had been simply in imitation of Robert Benham. So much of his recent motivation had been to reproduce the lifestyle of his latest victim. In Graham’s current state, it all seemed rather petty.
He also shared, for the first time, some of the belittling contempt for the Personnel Department which prevailed throughout the rest of Crasoco. Even the job for which he had strived so hard, he realised, was a failure’s job, chief elephant in the elephant’s graveyard. He had taken all the risks for nothing.
Cramming himself into normality like a smaller man’s clothes, he waited for the Post Office engineer, then watched the fitting of the new jack plug and made suitable jokes about the sort of outgoing messages he could leave. When the engineer departed, Graham congratulated himself that the man would have found nothing untoward in his client’s behaviour.
But that small triumph gave only brief respite from the fear. Next Graham had to go into the office.
Terry Sworder was sitting at his desk. The right side of his face was red. His eyebrows and the fringe of his hair were frazzled to wisps of woodshaving.
Graham was momentarily immobilised by shock, then felt a perverse kind of relief. At least now he could find out how much the police knew, and begin to put some time limit on his fate.
‘Terry, are you all right?’ he asked as he sat down.
‘Still pretty shaken.’ The young man withdrew a thin cigar from his mouth with trembling hand as if to emphasise the point. ‘Physically O.K. But it’s the shock, you know.’
‘Of course. What actually happened?’
In the previous forty-eight hours Terry Sworder had become accustomed to this question and polished his reply into a neat little dramatic routine. But none of his audiences had listened to it with as much attention as the current one.
‘It was terrible. So quick, for a start. And I was bloody lucky. What happened was. .’ He paused, warming to the performance. ‘I was in the rubber dinghy and Bob had stepped on to the boat. He told me to hang on a min. till he’d opened the cabin, because it’s fairly cramped in the well there, and fortunately I didn’t tie the dinghy up, just hung on to the back. They reckon that’s how I was saved from worse injury. Because what happened was, the minute Bob opens the hatch — woomph, the lot goes up like a bomb. .’