"Do you ever receive post for other people?" I asked him.
"How do you mean?" he said.
"Do letters arrive here for other people with your house address on them?"
"Sometimes," he said.
"What do you do with them?" I asked.
"Stella takes them," he said.
"And did Stella take them today?" I asked, knowing that the lady he called Stella hadn't taken anything away from here except the dirty plate.
"No," he said.
"Have you got any post for other people at the moment?" I asked.
"Lots of it," he said.
"Shall I take it away for you?" I asked him.
He closed the door and I thought I had missed my chance, but he was only undoing the security chain. The door opened wide.
"It's in there," he said, pointing to a rectangular cardboard box standing next to his feet.
I looked down. There must have been at least thirty items of various shapes and sizes lying in a heap in the box.
"I've been wondering about it," he said. "Most of it's been there for months. Stella doesn't seem to take it anymore."
Without asking again, I reached down, picked up the box and walked off with it towards my car.
"Hey," old Mr. Horner shouted after me. "You can't do that. I need that box to put the next lot into."
I poured the contents out onto the front seat of the Jaguar and took the empty box back to him.
"That's better," he said, dropping the box back onto the floor and kicking it into position next to the door.
"Don't forget your lunch," I said, turning back towards my car. "Don't let it get cold."
"Oh," he said. "Right. 'Bye." He closed the door, and I was back in my car and speeding off before he had time to rethink the last few minutes.
I spent the afternoon in my bedroom, first impersonating a government official and then knowingly opening other people's mail. I was pretty sure that both actions were dishonest, and, even if they weren't against the letter of the law, they would certainly be in breach of Values and Standards of the British Army.
First, using the local Yellow Pages directory, I started calling nursing homes, claiming to be an official from the Pensions Office inquiring after the well-being of a Mr. George Sutton. I told them that I was checking that Mr. Sutton was still alive and entitled to his state pension.
I had never before realized there were so many nursing homes. After about fifty fruitless calls, I was at the point of giving up when someone at the Silver Pines Nursing Home in Newbury Road, Andover, informed me in no uncertain terms that Mr. George Sutton was indeed very much alive and kicking, and that his pension was an essential part of the payment for his care and I'd better leave it alone, or else.
I had to assure them profusely that I would take no action to stop it.
Next, I turned to the mail sent to 26 Banbury Drive, Oxford.
In all, there had been forty-two different items in Mr. Horner's cardboard box, but most of them were junk circulars and free papers with no name or address. Six of them, however, were of particular interest to me. Three were addressed to Mr. R. Ward, a fourth to Mrs. Jane Philips, my mother, and the two others to a Mrs. Stella Beecher, all three persons supposedly resident at 26 Banbury Drive, Oxford.
Two of the letters to Roderick Ward had not been that informative, simply being tax circulars giving general notes of new tax bands. The third, however, was from Mr. Anthony Cigar of Rock Bank (Gibraltar) Ltd, formally confirming the immediate closure of the bank's investment fund and the imminent proceedings in the Gibraltar bankruptcy court. The letter was, in fact, a copy of one addressed to my mother and stepfather at Kauri House. It was dated July 7, 2009, and almost certainly did not arrive in Banbury Drive until after Roderick's fatal car accident of the night of July 12.
On the other hand, the letter to Mrs. Jane Philips, my mother, was much more recent. It was a computer-generated notice of an automatic penalty of one hundred pounds for the late filing of her tax return which had been due just ten days ago.
But it was the two letters to Mrs. Stella Beecher that were the real find.
One was from the Oxford Coroner's Office, informing her that the adjourned inquest into the death of her brother, Roderick Ward, was due to be reconvened on February 15-next Monday.
And the other was a handwritten note on lined paper that simply read, in capital letters: I DON'T KNOW WHETHER THIS WILL GET THERE IN TIME, BUT TELL HIM I HAVE THE STUFF HE WANTS.
I picked up the envelope in which it had arrived. It was a standard white envelope available from any high-street store. The address had also been handwritten in the same manner as the note. The postmark was slightly blurred, and it was difficult to tell where it had actually been posted. However, the date was clear to see. The letter had been mailed on Monday, July 13, the day after Roderick Ward supposedly died, the very day his body had been discovered.
I sat on my bed for quite a while, looking at the note and wondering if "in time" meant before the "accident" occurred and if "the stuff " had anything to do with my mother's tax papers.
I looked carefully at it once again. Now, I was no handwriting expert, but this message to Stella Beecher looked, to my eyes, to have been written in the same style, and to be on the same type of paper, as the blackmail note that I had found on my mother's desk.
On Thursday evening, at seven forty-five, I carried a bottle of fairly reasonable red wine around from Kauri House to the Hall in Lambourn for a kitchen supper with Isabella and her guests. I was looking forwards to a change in both venue and company.
As I had expected, the supper was not quite as casual as Isabella had made out. Far from being in jeans, she herself was wearing a tight black dress that showed off her alluring curves to their best advantage. I was pleased with myself that I had decided to put on a jacket and tie, but there again, I'd worn a jacket and tie for dinner in officers' messes for years, especially on a weekday. Dressing for dinner, even for a kitchen supper, was like a comfort blanket. For all its preoccupation with killing the enemy, the British Army was still very formal in its manners.
"Tom," she squealed, opening the front door wide and taking my offered bottle. "How lovely. Come and meet the others."
I followed her from the hallway towards the kitchen, and the noise. The room was already pretty full of guests. Isabella grabbed my arm and pulled me into the throng, where everyone seemed to be talking at once.
"Ewen," she shouted to a fair-haired man about forty years old. "Ewen," she shouted again, grabbing hold of his sleeve. "I want you to meet Tom. Tom, this is Ewen Yorke. Ewen, Tom."
We shook hands.
"Tom Forsyth," I said.
"Ah," he said in a dramatic manner, throwing an arm wide and nearly knocking over someone's glass behind him. "Jackson, we have a spy in our midst."
"A spy?" Isabella said.
"Yes," Ewen said. "A damn spy from Kauri Stables. Come to steal our secrets about Saturday."
"Ah," I said. "You must mean about Newark Hall in the Game Spirit." His mouth opened. "You've got no chance with Scientific running."
"There you are," he boomed. "What did I tell you? He's a bloody spy. Fetch the firing squad." He laughed heartily at his own joke, and we all joined in. Little did he know.
"Where is this spy?" said a tall man, pushing his way past people towards me.
"Tom," said Isabella. "This is my husband, Jackson Warren."
"Good to meet you," I said, shaking his offered hand and hoping he couldn't see the envy in my eyes, envy that he had managed to snare my beautiful Isabella.
Jackson Warren certainly didn't give the impression of someone suffering from prostate cancer. I knew that he was sixty-one years old because I'd looked him up on the Internet, but his lack of any gray hair seemed to belie the fact. Rather unkindly, I wondered if he dyed it, or perhaps just being married to a much younger woman had helped keep him youthful.