“I’ve been warned that you’ll dump me,” she said casually.
“Not in a hurry.”
I still held the envelope of Doctor Force details, and I opened it then with hope, but it told me very few useful facts. His name was Adam Force, age fifty-six, and his qualifications came by the dozen.
I said blankly, “Is that all?”
She nodded. “That’s all, folks, when it comes to facts. As to hearsay — well — according to a bunch of rumors he’s a brilliant researcher who has published star-spangled work since his teens. No one could tell my colleague about a white beard. He didn’t speak to anyone who’d actually met the subject.”
I asked, “Does Doctor Force have an address?”
“Not in these notes,” she answered. “In the Who’s Who we used, it gives only the information provided by the people themselves. Those reference books leave people out if they don’t want to be in.”
“Utterly civilized.”
“No, very annoying.”
She didn’t sound very annoyed, however, as she knew all about the Internet The next morning, she decided, we could catch him on the Web.
We ate the takeout food, or a little of it, owing to a change of appetite, and I switched up the heating a little in my bedroom without any need for explanation.
She’d shed somewhere in her life whatever she had ever suffered in the way of overpowering shyness. The Catherine who came into my bed came with confidence along with modesty, an intoxicating combination as far as I was concerned. We both knew enough, anyway, to give to each other as much pleasure as we received, or at least enough to feel slumberous and fulfilled in consequence.
The speed of development of strong feelings for one another didn’t seem to me to be shocking but natural, and if I thought about the future it unequivocally included Catherine Dodd. “If you wanted to cover the pale plain walls with brightly patterned paper, go ahead,” I said.
She laughed. “I like the peace of pale walls. Why should I want to change them?”
I said merely, “I’m glad you don’t,” and offered her thirst quenchers. Like Martin, it seemed she preferred fizzy water to alcohol, though in her case the cause wasn’t weight but the combination of a police badge and a motorbike. She went soberly home before dawn, steady on two wheels. I watched her red rear light fade into what was left of the night and quite fiercely wanted her to stay with me instead.
I walked restlessly downhill through the slow January dawn, reaching the workshop well before the others. The Internet, though, when I’d accessed it, proved less obliging about Adam Force than the address of Waltman Verity in Taunton. There had been a whole clutch of Veritys. Adam Force wasn’t anywhere in sight.
Hickory arrived at that point, early and eager to take his precious sailboat out of the Lehr annealing oven. He unbolted the oven door and lifted out his still-warm treasure. Although he would get the transparent colors clearer with practice, it wasn’t a bad effort, and I told him so. He wasn’t pleased, however. He wanted unqualified praise. I caught on his face a fleeting expression of contempt for my lack of proper appreciation of his ability. There would be trouble ahead if he tackled really difficult stuff, I thought; but as I’d done once in the past with someone of equal talent, I would give him good references when he looked for a different teacher, as, quite soon now, he would.
I would miss him most in the selling department for results and in the humor department for good company.
Irish, more humble about his skills, and Pamela Jane, twittery and positively self-deprecating, came sweeping in together in the cold morning and gave the sailboat the extravagant admiration Hickory thought it deserved. Harmony united the three of them as usual, but I hadn’t much faith in its lasting much longer.
Watched and helped by all three of them I spent the day replacing the minaret-shaped scent bottles we’d sold at Christmas, working fast at eight pieces an hour, using blue, turquoise, pink, green, white and purple in turn and packing the finished articles in rows in the ovens to cool. Speed was a commercial asset as essential as a three-dimensional eye, and winter in the Cotswold Hills was the time to stock up for the summer tourists. I consequently worked flat out from morning to six in the evening, progressing from sailboats via scent bottles to fishes, horses, bowls and vases.
At six in the evening when my semi-exhausted crew announced all six ovens to be packed, I sent them off home, tidied the workshop and put everything ready for the morrow. In the evening Catherine Dodd, straight off duty, rode her bike to Broadway, collected a pillion passenger and took him to his home. Every night possible that week Detective Constable Dodd slept in my arms in my bed but left before the general world awoke, and, during that time, no one managed to stick an address on Adam Force.
Glassblowing aside, by Friday afternoon, three days after Worthington and Marigold had joyfully left for Paris, the weekend held no enticements, as Catherine had departed on Friday morning as promised to a school-friends’ reunion.
On the same Friday, aching, I dare say, from the absence of their daily quarrel, Bon-Bon filled her need of Martin by driving his BMW, bursting at the seams with noisy children, to pick me up at close of day in Broadway.
“Actually,” Bon-Bon confessed as we detoured to my hill house for mundane clean shirts and socks, “Worthington didn’t like you being out here alone.”
“Worthington didn’t?”
“No... He phoned from somewhere south of Paris and specially told me a whole gang of people jumped on you in Broadway last Sunday evening when there were dog-walkers about, and this place of yours out here is asking for trouble, he said. He also said Martin would have taken you home.”
“Worthington exaggerated,” I protested, but after we’d all unloaded at Bon-Bon’s house, I used the evening there to invent a game for the children to compete in, a game called “Hunt the orange cylinder and the shoelaces.”
Bon-Bon protested. “But they told everything they know to the police! They won’t find anything useful.”
“And after that game,” I said, gently ignoring her, “we’ll play ‘Hunt the letters sent to Daddy by somebody called Force’ and there are prizes for every treasure found, of course.”
They played until bedtime with enthusiasm on account of the regular handouts of gold coin treasure (money), and when they’d noisily departed upstairs I laid out their final offerings all over Martin’s desk in the den.
I had watched the children search uninhibitedly in places I might have left untouched so that their haul was in some ways spectacular. Perhaps most perplexing was the original of the letter Victor had sent a copy of to Martin.
Dear Martin, it said, and continued word for word as far as the signature, which didn’t say Victor Waltman Verity in computer-print, but was scrawled in real live handwriting, Adam Force.
“The kids found that letter in a secret drawer in Martin’s desk,” Bon-Bon said. “I didn’t even know there was a secret drawer, but the children did.”
“Um,” I pondered. “Did any of these other things come out of the drawer?”
She said she would go and ask, and presently returned with Daniel, her eleven-year-old eldest, who opened a semi-hidden drawer in the desk for us with an easy twiddle, and asked if it were worth another handout. He hadn’t emptied the drawer, he explained, as he’d found the letter straightaway, the letter that was the point of the whole game, the letter sent to Daddy by someone called Force.
Of course, no one had found any trace of an orange cylinder or of recognizable laces for sneakers.
I gladly handed over another installment of treasure, as the hidden drawer proved to stretch across the whole width of the desk under the top surface, and to be about four inches deep. Daniel patiently showed me how it opened and closed. Observant and quick-witted, he offered other discoveries with glee, especially when I gave him a coin for every good hiding place with nothing in it. He found four. He jingled the coins.