CHAPTER SIX
I had a house call to make before I took the train to Perth. After I got out of hospital I headed straight for my digs. Mrs White intercepted me at the door. I liked the tone of concern in her voice and I told her that I was in the clear. Any warmth dissipated when she saw me wince as I removed my hat.
‘Who have you been fighting this time?’ Her eyes were hard. This could be the crunch.
‘Listen, Mrs White. Someone assaulted me from behind in the smog last night. Hit me on the head. While I was in the hospital they wanted to check out whether I had TB or not. And that’s the truth. This is in no way connected to the police coming here.’
‘It seems to me that you attract trouble.’ She took my elbow and turned me brusquely around and examined the back of my head. ‘Elspeth
…’ she called through to her twelve-year-old daughter. ‘I want you to go down to Mr Wilson the fishmonger and ask for a bag of ice.’
Mrs White conducted me into the living room and sat me down on the leather Chesterfield while she busied herself in the kitchen making tea. I had only ever seen the living room from the door before and took the opportunity to survey it. The late Mr White had been a junior naval officer in the war and his family had been reasonably well-to-do. The room was well-decorated and furnished expensively. There was a large walnut radiogram against the wall but the new medium of television which had begun to appear in the more well-heeled homes had not yet made its presence felt here. I suspected a recent-past-tense affluence. A glass-fronted cabinet held some glasses and bone-china, as well as a bottle, half-full, of Williams and Humbert Walnut Brown Sherry. A marble and brass clock was the centrepiece on the mantle and was flanked by photographs in deco-style silver frames: a formally posed wedding photograph, each of the girls as babies, an austere-looking older couple with a pretty young girl whom I recognized instantly as Fiona White, standing awkwardly beside them.
She came back in with a large pot of tea and poured me a generous cup. Just then Elspeth, her daughter, returned with an oilskin bag. Fiona White scooped out some of the ice and wrapped it in a cloth, pressing it gently against the base of my neck and instructing me to hold it there. Two beatings’ worth of pain started to ease. She stirred two headache powders into a glass of water and laid it next to my teacup, then sat down as far away from me as she could, in a large yielding leather club chair.
‘Thank you.’ My eyes fell on the photographs again. ‘It must be difficult,’ I said, and regretted it immediately.
‘What?’ Flint glinted in her green eyes.
‘Bringing up the girls alone, I mean.’ I was digging myself a deeper hole and fast.
‘I manage perfectly well, Mr Lennox.’
‘I know you do. I didn’t mean anything… I mean, I think you do a marvellous job. It’s just that I imagine it can’t be easy. Doing everything alone.’
The flint remained in her eyes. The death of Fiona White’s husband had been lost in an ocean of statistics. The loss of one junior naval officer counted only in combination with the thousands of other seamen killed. The snuffing out of his life had, by itself, meant nothing to the war effort. But for Fiona White and her two daughters it had been as if the sun had been extinguished. The entire focus of their universe had been annihilated. And with his death, the person Fiona White had been had also died. Much in the same way as the kid who had played on the shores of the Kennebecasis River had died somewhere as the 1 ^st Canadian Army had killed and bled its way through Italian towns and villages with tourist-guide names. We were both victims of war.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t have-’
‘No, you shouldn’t have,’ she cut across me curtly. ‘How I bring up my children is entirely my affair.’ There was an embarrassed silence, then she said: ‘What is it that you do, Mr Lennox? It seems to bring you all kinds of trouble. I don’t for one moment believe that getting that bump on your head is pure coincidence.’
‘I told you when I applied for the flat. I’m an Enquiry Agent,’ I said. ‘It means that people pay me to find things out for them. Unfortunately other people object to things being found out.’
‘So why did the police treat you the way they did that night?’
‘Some of the people I work for come to me because they won’t or sometimes can’t go to the police. The police don’t like that. I’m a victim of professional envy.’ I smirked, but she either didn’t get the joke or chose not to. I decided to get off the subject. ‘I will be away overnight tonight, Mrs White. I’m going up to Perthshire. Business. Just the one night. Maybe two.’
I took the powders and drained my teacup. Mrs White took my empty cup but made no effort to refill it. ‘Very good, Mr Lennox.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
The journey to Perth was one back in time. The ancient city was not the most cosmopolitan of places and it felt as if it had been untouched by the war or the changes that had happened to the social structure of Britain afterwards. The forties and the fifties had got lost in the mail.
There was only one taxi outside Perth’s railway station. It was one of the boxy types from the early thirties. The driver too was surprisingly elderly. I asked him to take me to the nearest half-decent hotel. There was no point in me going up to the sanatorium now. The evening visiting time would soon be over and it was some distance outside town, up in the hills above Perth. Although I had concerns about the vintage of both driver and conveyance, I asked the elderly taxi man if he could pick me up at ten the following morning.
The hotel he took me to was by the Tay, and I had a room overlooking the river. The bed was comfortable enough and the street outside quiet enough but I had trouble sleeping. Every time I closed my eyelids disparate thoughts and images bounced against them. Again I saw Lillian Andrews semi-naked, sensuously wreathed in fog; I saw the desperately off-hand and totally unconvincing demeanour of her ill-matched spouse; the professional manner in which she had used sex as the lure for her ambush in the smog, not knowing the reason for me tailing her, but knowing that I was.
Why was everything so complicated? Why did I make everything so complicated? I knew that I wasn’t going to let the Andrews thing go. There was no money in it. No one but me wanted me to push it further. But I would push at it. Until something gave and opened up a picture that made sense to me. Or maybe my inability to let it go was just a case of hurt pride at being bushwhacked from behind. I tried to put it from my mind. For the moment. I had a bigger fish to fry, and one that would pay off. But my head hurt from the blow and the thoughts still crowded in. It took me an age to get to sleep.
My elderly taxi driver turned up exactly on time. When I gave him the address of the sanatorium, far out in the hills above the city, he eyed me suspiciously.
‘That’s a long way by taxi.’
‘I guess so.’
‘It’ll cost a lot.’ It was obvious that he was worried about collecting his fare. I handed him three half-crowns.
‘I’ll square up with you for the rest afterwards. I’ll need you to wait for me until I finish my business at the sanatorium.’
As we drove up into the hills the sun came out as if to showcase the beauty of the countryside for a visitor. The sanatorium itself sat in vast grounds that rose steeply to the plateau on which the vast Victorian edifice sat. The shields of manicured grass exploded into vast beds of rhododendron bushes. It seemed that every window in the building had been thrown open and there were banks of deckchairs ranged around the walls and on the flat part of the grounds. I could understand why. After Glasgow I could feel the difference in the air myself. Breathing is an unconscious act and you never think about the air you pull into your lungs, but up here each breath was like a sip of cold, clear mountain water.