She put the phone down. “Why didn’t you say so?” she demanded.
“What chance did you give me? And who the hell are you, walking into my brother’s house and belting people?”
She held at the ready the fearsome thing she’d hit me with, looking as if she thought I’d attack her in my turn, which I certainly felt like. In the last six days I’d been crunched by a horse, a mugger and a woman. All I needed was a toddler to amble up with a coup de grace. I pressed the fingers of my right hand on my forehead and the palm against my mouth and considered the blackness of life in general.
“What’s the matter with you?” she said after a pause.
I slid the hand away and drawled, “Absolutely bloody nothing.”
“I only tapped you,” she said with criticism.
“Shall I give you a hefty clip with that thing so you can feel what it’s like?”
“You’re angry.” She sounded surprised.
“Dead right.”
I struggled up off the floor, straightened the fallen chair and sat on it. “Who are you?” I repeated. But I knew who she was: the woman on the answering machine. The same voice. The cut-crystal accent. Darling, where are you. I love you.
“Did you ring his office?” I said. “Are you Mrs. Williams?”
She seemed to tremble and crumple inwardly and she walked past me to the window to stare out into the garden.
“Is he really dead?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She was forty, I thought, perhaps more. Nearly my height. In no way tiny or delicate. A woman of decision and power, sorely troubled.
She wore a leather-belted raincoat, though it hadn’t rained for weeks, and plain black businesslike shoes. Her hair, thick and dark, was combed smoothly back from her forehead to curl under on her collar, a cool groomed look achieved only by expert cutting. There was no visible jewelry, little remaining lipstick, no trace of scent.
“How?” she said eventually.
I had a strong impulse to deny her the information, to punish her for her precipitous attack, to hurt her and get even. But there was no point in it, and I knew I would end up with more shame than satisfaction, so after a struggle I explained briefly about the scaffolding.
“Friday afternoon,” I said. “He was unconscious at once. He died early on Sunday.”
She turned her head slowly to look at me directly. “Are you Derek?” she said.
“Yes.”
“I’m Clarissa Williams.”
Neither of us made any attempt to shake hands. It would have been incongruous, I thought.
“I came to fetch some things of mine,” she said. “I didn’t expect anyone to be here.”
It was an apology of sorts, I supposed; and if I had indeed been a burglar she would have saved the bric-a-brac.
“What things?” I asked.
She hesitated, but in the end said, “A few letters, that’s all.” Her gaze strayed to the answering machine and there was a definite tightening of muscles round her eyes.
“I played the messages,” I said.
“Oh God.”
“Why should it worry you?”
She had her reasons, it seemed, but she wasn’t going to tell me what they were; or not then, at any rate.
“I want to wipe them off,” she said. “It was one of the purposes of coming.”
She glanced at me, but I couldn’t think of any urgent reason why she shouldn’t, so I didn’t say anything. Tentatively, as if asking my forbearance every step of the way, she walked jerkily to the machine, rewound the tape and pressed the record button, recording silence over what had gone before. After a little while she rewound the tape again and played it, and there were no desperate appeals anymore.
“Did anyone else hear...?”
“I don’t think so. Not unless the cleaner was in the habit of listening. She came today, I think.”
“Oh God.”
“You left no name.” Why the hell was I reassuring her, I wondered. I still had no strength in my fingers. I could still feel that awful blow like a shudder.
“Do you want a drink?” she said abruptly. “I’ve had a dreadful day.” She went over to the tray of bottles and poured vodka into a heavy tumbler. “What do you want?”
“Water,” I said. “Make it a double.”
She tightened her mouth and put down the vodka bottle with a clink. “Soda or tonic?” she asked starchily.
“Soda.”
She poured soda into a glass for me and tonic into her own, diluting the spirit by not very much.
Ice was downstairs in the kitchen. No one mentioned it.
I noticed she’d left her lethal weapon lying harmlessly beside the answering machine. Presumably I no longer represented any threat. As if avoiding personal contact, she set my soda water formally on the table beside me between the little stone bears and the chrysanthemums and drank deeply from her own glass. Better than tranquilizers, I thought. Alcohol loosened the stress, calmed the mental pain. The world’s first anesthetic. I could have done with some myself.
“Where are your letters?” I asked.
She switched on a table light. The on-creeping dusk in the garden deepened abruptly toward night and I wished she would hurry because I wanted to go home.
She looked at a bookcase which covered a good deal of one wall.
“In there, I think. In a book.”
“Do start looking, then. It could take all night.”
“You don’t need to wait.”
“I think I will,” I said.
“Don’t you trust me?” she demanded.
“ No.”
She stared at me hard. “Why not?”
I didn’t say that because of the diamonds I didn’t trust anyone. I didn’t know who I could safely ask to look out for them, or who would search to steal them, if they knew they might be found.
“I don’t know you,” I said neutrally.
“But I...” She stopped and shrugged. “I suppose I don’t know you either.” She went over to the bookshelves. “Some of these books are hollow,” she said.
Oh Greville, I thought. How would I ever find anything he had hidden? I liked straight paths. He’d had a mind like a labyrinth.
She began pulling out books from the lower shelves and opening the front covers. Not methodically book by book along any row but always, it seemed to me, those with predominantly blue spines. After a while, on her knees, she found a hollow one which she laid open on the floor with careful sarcasm, so that I could see she wasn’t concealing anything.
The interior of the book was in effect a blue velvet box with a close-fitting lid that could be pulled out by a tab. When she pulled the lid out, the shallow blue-velvet-lined space beneath was revealed as being entirely empty.
Shrugging, she replaced the lid and closed the book, which immediately looked like any other book, and returned it to the shelves, and a few seconds later found another hollow one, this time with red velvet interiors. Inside this one lay an envelope.
She looked at it without touching it, and then at me.
“It’s not my letters,” she said. “Not my writing paper.”
I said, “Greville made a will leaving everything he possessed to me.”
She didn’t seem to find it extraordinary, although I did: he had done it that way for simplicity when he was in a hurry, and he would certainly have changed it, given time.
“You’d better see what’s in there, then,” she said calmly, and she picked the envelope out and stretched across to hand it to me.
The envelope, which hadn’t been stuck down, contained a single ornate key, about four inches long, the top flattened and pierced like metal lace, the business end narrow with small but intricate teeth. I laid it on my palm and showed it to her, asking her if she knew what it unlocked.
She shook her head. “I haven’t seen it before.” She paused. “He was a man of secrets,” she said.