It was a weapon fashioned by somebody with experience and understanding of a deadly primitive craft, and the red paint on the tip, traces of it still clinging to the slits, right back to where the fire had burned it off, could be nothing else but a simulation of the blood of the intended victim. The masked doll and the weapon, the two together … and the blood-red sky fading above me. I felt suddenly cold and appalled, the concentrated hatred, the deadly fear that had made him do this, lying there in his bed, working away at this murderous copy of a weapon that symbolised a death wish — somebody else’s death — and his face so innocently boyish, his body crippled! What primitive knowledge had driven him to it? A patrol officer in a Civil Administration, and yet somehow he had been infected, possessed almost, by the primitive beliefs of the people he had administered. His grandmother’s people. Was he a throwback to the island woman Colonel Holland had married? And who was the enemy for whom it had been intended, who was the intended victim, whose death would save him? Or was it all just the figment of a dying man’s superstitious imagination?
I slipped it into my clipboard with the intention of getting an expert opinion. Sorcery, she had said. I could hear her voice, the way she had said, You can’t enter that as the cause of death, not in England.
My God, I thought, and she’s gone back there, alone. She’s gone to do what her brother could not do. I was still thinking about that as I took the fork to the toolshed and completed my pacing out of the garden. Then I went down the road to return the key to Mrs Clegg.
She must have been watching for me, for the door opened before I had even rung the bell. ‘You’ve finished then?’
I nodded, my mind still groping for a rational explanation.
‘Is it true the house is up for sale, too?’
‘Yes.’
‘When will it be, do you know?’
‘We’ll be advertising the date in the local paper. I think sometime next month.’ And I handed her the key.
‘You want me to keep this?’
‘The lawyers will be in touch with you.’ And I added, ‘Some of the things have been put in store. Do you know where?’
But all she could tell me was that a small van had been there about ten days ago. ‘It was just a trunk and several suitcases. There was no furniture moved. You’ll be selling the furniture, too, I suppose?’
‘The contents will go into one of our weekly sales at Chelmsford.’
‘I wonder who will come to live here. It makes so much difference in a road like this. We all know each other.’
‘Yes, of course.’ I hesitated. ‘Did they have many visitors?’
‘No, they kept very much to themselves. I went in occasionally, but Miss Holland didn’t make friends easily, and then there were all those extraordinary carvings. It wasn’t that people here didn’t care, but the house had a strange, rather unpleasant atmosphere. I always felt uneasy when I visited.’
‘What about strangers? Has anybody been to see them just recently?’
‘No. Not just recently.’ She stared at me, a little hesitant. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t say this, but earlier, talking about Miss Holland’s appearance — it was the red hair, you see. It reminded me.’
‘Reminded you of what?’ I asked, for she had stopped there as though she had changed her mind about telling me.
‘This man. It was about two months ago. Dick — that’s my husband — he was out, so I answered the bell. He seemed to have mistaken the house. He was asking for the Hollands, and really he looked so like Miss Holland’s brother, the same coloured hair, you see, and his face tanned by the sun, almost leathery. A rather aggressive manner. Australian, I think. He had that sort of accent.’
‘Did he say who he was?’
‘No. He asked if this was the Hollands’ house, and when I said No and pointed it out to him, he just nodded and went straight there.’
‘A relative?’
‘Oh, yes, I would think he must have been, with hair like that and coming to Aldeburgh specially to see them. Do you think that’s why she left? He was there a long time, several hours. I asked her about him when I next saw her. Two days later it would have been, and she just stared me down, making it obvious she didn’t want to discuss it. He was quite handsome in a way, but there was a hardness; the eyes, I think.’
She couldn’t tell me anything else, and I left her, wondering whether there was any connection between this stranger and the things I had found in the ashes of that fire.
I stopped for sandwiches and beer at The Spaniard near Marks Tey, sitting at a table by myself and staring at that arrowhead. Now that I had a chance to examine it closely I knew it wasn’t an old weapon, certainly not one of her grandfather’s collection of spears and arrows. The red coating came away quite easily to the scratch of my thumbnail, and the wood underneath was pale. The coating itself wasn’t hard like paint; it was softer, more like dried blood.
Who had taught him, I wondered, to fashion such a weapon, and for such a deadly purpose? I had never met him, yet holding that wicked little sliver of wood in my hand, I seemed to feel his presence. I could see him, propped up in that bed with the pictures on the wall in front of him, pictures that represented his real world, and labouring to trim the point and cut the slits, and death in his heart as he struggled to control and direct the movements of his hands. And she had thrown it on the fire, hating it. The doll, too. And now, to save him from himself, she was working her passage back to the world he had come from, where she had been born.
Pay-back, Chips Rowlinson had called it. If I catch up with the man … I felt a chill run through me, though the darkened bar was heavy with the day’s heat trapped in the crush of people eating and drinking. An English pub, everything so ordinary, and the sliver of wood in my hand, the memory of her words. And those stamps. They were part of it, too. I was certain of it, so that sitting there, drinking the rest of my beer, I wondered how Timothy Holland had come by them. He couldn’t have inherited them, not from his father at any rate; otherwise the albums would have been at Aldeburgh all the time, not as his sister had said among personal belongings sent home with him from Papua New Guinea. No, he had either discovered them or been given them out there. But where? And had he known they were valuable, or was his interest in them in some way connected with the disappearance of the Holland Trader?
Unfortunately, I had other things to think about next day in London, and when I discovered the stamps were probably worth even more than Tubby had offered for them, I ceased to worry about their real significance. If you’re hungry, you don’t enquire where the manna comes from.
*
Canberra House, where I had to go for my visa, is near the Law Courts so that it was only a short walk to the Strand Stamp Arcade and on my way to the Qantas office to pick up my airline tickets. This philatelic hypermarket almost next door to the Savoy has the atmosphere of a bazaar, a sort of Aladdin’s cave of stamps. I preferred it to Stanley Gibbons on the other side of the Strand because you were not confined to any one dealer and could wander from counter to counter, looking at stamps, chatting to dealers, meeting other collectors, and no pressure on you to buy anything. However, since I had got to know Josh Keegan personally, most of my purchases had been through him. He was expensive, handling nothing but the best, but if you could catch him between Continental buying trips, he was fascinating to talk to, full of stories of deals he had pulled off, fakes he had exposed and, of course, his latest acquisitions, which were always superb and mostly beyond my modest means.