The bus drove slowly through the emptying town and stopped to pick up its last passengers at St Lawrence’s Church and Burton Place. Then it entered Burton Lane and began a rambling tour of two council estates. Ten minutes later, its load reduced and, in the opinion of Mrs Palgrove, refined, it turned towards the complex of avenues south of Heston Lane malevolently described by envious occupants of less substantial and secluded residences as ‘Debtor’s Retreat’.
Mrs Palgrove alighted at the stop nearest the upper end of Brompton Gardens and made her way home. Except for her, the road was empty. It usually was. The people who had settled here had done so expressly in order to avoid sight of one another. They were as apprehensive of being ‘overlooked’ as their mediaeval ancestors had been of coming within scope of the evil eye. Only from an occasional flash of red tile or brick through high foliage could one have guessed that Brompton Gardens was populated at all.
Dunroamin was the last house but one on the left before the road narrowed abruptly to become a gravelled track through open fields. This track eventually doubled back towards town and joined the main road into Flaxborough from Chalmsbury. The house was screened not only by the thick beech hedge, more than ten feet high, that bordered its surrounding gardens, but by a pair of enormous old chestnut trees in the middle of the front lawn. A drive of new-looking concrete skirted the lawn and ran past the side of the house to open out into a broad, paved area, a sort of courtyard, brightened by geraniums and begonias growing in cast concrete urns. From the courtyard’s opposite side, a path wide enough to give passage to a car led between rosebeds and more lawns to a two-car garage. This was built of concrete blocks roughened to simulate stone and was half hidden by creeper. Just beside it, a gate in the beech hedge opened to a back lane.
As Mrs Palgrove approached the house, she heard the murmur of a car engine. Suddenly the sound expanded to a roar. It died, rose again, died.
Frowning, she looked across to the end of the garden. More bursts of noise, like the protests of a teased and tethered beast. And with each, a little cloud of azure smoke came rolling out of the open garage.
Leonard Palgrove, aged forty-four, company director, chamber of commerce member, amorist manqué, sports car enthusiast, was making love to his Aston-Martin.
Mrs Palgrove smiled, but not fondly, and walked on. In the court of the concrete urns, she paused to set something down. It was a dog, but one so diminutive that it had been invisible in its carrying place between the crook of Mrs Palgrove’s arm and the overhang of her bosom. Released, it pranced like a high-stepping rat to the nearest urn and lifted against it a leg no bigger than a pigeon’s drumstick. She spoke to the dog, calling it Rodney. She crooned it a number of questions. Rodney made no reply.
Leaving the door open, Mrs Palgrove walked through the cool, grey-carpeted hallway and entered the kitchen. This was an impeccable, gleaming laboratory in saffron and white. Mrs Palgrove set down upon the central table the square cardboard box that had hung by its looped ribbon from her finger all the way from Penny’s Pantry. She untied the ribbon and carefully lifted the lid of the box. There rose the sugared, buttery smell, faintly tinged with violet and almond essences, of freshly made cakes. Mrs Palgrove reached across to the window and pulled the cord of the air extraction fan. Then she lifted the cakes one by one from the box and arranged them on a plate fashioned to resemble a huge glossy vineleaf. After regarding the collection for a few moments, she transferred a Chocolate Créme Log to a saucer which she put down on the floor. “Rodney!” she cried.
At third calling, the dog appeared. It licked some of the icing off the cake, then wandered away, bored. Mrs Palgrove stooped and cut the cake into small, neat cubes. The dog returned to sniff at them. “Cakey,” declared Mrs Palgrove. “Nice!” Despite her repeating both these observations several times, and quite vehemently, Rodney did not respond. Mrs Palgrove called him a naughty boy in the end and went off into the lounge on her own, carrying the rest of the cakes.
Her husband joined her ten minutes later, just in time for a solitary Coconut Kiss. He ate it quickly, standing up. Mrs Palgrove watched with distaste the absent-minded way he rubbed his stickled fingertips on one of the chintz chair covers. She picked up the empty plate and took it to the kitchen, where she washed and put it away.
“Got to go to Leicester tonight,” Leonard announced as soon as she was in the room again. He was still standing: he believed that standing was a sound way to keep weight down.
Leicester. Seventy or eighty miles. So that’s why he had been tinkering with that car of his...
“Why should you want to go to Leicester?”
“I don’t want to go. I said I have to. Business.”
“You’ll be late back, then?”
He turned, shrugging. “Lord, I’m not dragging back here the same night. I’ll stay over. Perhaps Tony can put me up.”
“Tony?” The tone implied that this was the first she had ever heard of a Tony, in Leicester or anywhere else.
“He’s with Hardy-Livingstone. You know him. Drives an Alvis.”
“You can’t just drop in on people like that. They aren’t hotel keepers.”
“Tony won’t mind. His wife won’t either.”
She looked at him bleakly. “What is it you’re going to do in Leicester?”
“Something to do with...with machinery. It wouldn’t mean anything to you.”
“It means something to me that without any warning you clear off to stay the night with some people or other I’ve never heard of.”
“But you have heard of him. Tony Wilcox. Bloody hell, you met him at the firm’s dinner a year ago. Two years, maybe.”
“Two years ago?”
“Yes.”
“You went on your own two years ago. I was having that sinus operation.”
“Well, three, then. What the hell does it matter?”
“Quite a lot, judging from the way you’re taking refuge in obscenities. It’s always the same when you’ve something to hide.”
Palgrove’s gaze went to the ceiling. “Oh, for Christ’s sake...”
It was, on the face of it, a fairly standard quarrel. The neighbours would not have given it much of a rating even if they had heard it, which they hadn’t. One fortuitous eavesdropper there was, however, whom the wrangle impressed. He was the boy from Dawson’s, delivering the evening newspaper. This boy had been reared in the very proper belief that rows were the prerogative of ordinary folk and had no place in the well-ordered lives of the sort of people who lived in Brompton Gardens. So when he heard coming through the slightly open window of Mrs Palgrove’s posh lounge some of the familiar expletives of home, he loitered in wonderment.
Which, for Mr Palgrove, was to prove unfortunate.
Chapter Five
By the time Mr Hive judged that to descend from his room would no longer entail the risk of being waylaid by his landlady, aggressively hospitable and redolent of fishcakes, he had consumed three-quarters of a bottle of gin. He was now quite confident that even if Mrs O’Brien had not yet cleared away such remnants of her daunting evening meal as she had been unable to coax and bully down the gullets of her other ‘gentlemen’, he at least was proof against persuasion.