“Did you tell the police all this?” Dave asked.
“I told them everything I could think of, my whole life story, not that I suppose it means anything now. I told them where I was Tuesday night, too, but how do you prove you were in a cinema? Not even a local, but in the city. From a quarter to five, when I left the office, I could have been anywhere. I didn’t come home. What for, I knew he wouldn’t be here!” Her pallid, unmarked morning face had quickened into painful and positive life. Whatever was left of it now, once she had been in love with her husband, and for all her disillusionment she still had not broken the habit of reckoning with him—or, as now, with the blank where he had been.
“But you did tell them about this business with the magazine?” Dave insisted. “Because he must have had a reason for hunting up an issue six years old.”
Surprise came as a relief to her. She looked up at him with fresh animation. “You really think it could mean something? I did tell them, yes, but I didn’t make all that much of it. I never thought… Here, wait a minute! You could do something for me, at that.”
She got up quickly, and clacked out of the kitchen with more spring to her step than he had yet heard in it; and in a moment she was back with a limp and dog-eared magazine in her hand, Country Life-size, once glossy.
“I didn’t give them this yesterday because I didn’t know where it was. I thought he’d taken it away with him, but he hadn’t, he’d only hidden it. I was turning out his papers and letters last night, after they’d gone. I found this shoved at the back of his transparency files. You’re going back there anyhow—give it to that inspector for me.”
She put it into his hands. He had occasionally seen copies of it before, but half of it was social gossip, provincial at that, and lacking for him both general and local interest, and he had never bought a copy himself in his life. The Midland Scene—glossy monthly published right here in Birmingham, but belonging rather to the outer shires than to the city. July 1964, and consequently full of regattas, tennis, gardens open to the public, stately homes on show, and country race meetings. In the winter it would be hunt balls, meets, the exploits of midland skiers abroad, winter sports and annual dinners. The paper was good, the layout elaborate, the colour-printing first-class. He turned the pages, full of social events and comments that seemed to him as remote as Mars; and he came to a feature article with pictures, the centre-piece of the colour pages:
Country Houses of the Midlands.
Number Five: Mottisham Abbey,
Midshire.
There was no mistaking that long, lofty roof, that thick block of chimneys. The photographs were good and well printed, and had caught house and garden at their summer best. There were two shots of the exterior, one focused across all that remained of a wall of the refectory, barely breaking the soil, one from the best corner of the garden, over a jungle of roses. The lichen-yellows and sage-greens in the roof tiles made an exotic print; and that tall, erect, distinguished-looking fellow in the authentic country tweeds and leather elbows, with wild grey hair still curly and crisp as heather, was Robert Macsen-Martel, senior, a year or so before his death. Sixty years old, but looking at least ten years younger, with a smile that could fetch the birds out of the bushes—literally, according to Saul Trimble.
Dave turned the page, and found a central-double-page spread with three more pictures: the dove-cote in the garden, the panelled hall, the drawing-room.
Not the wine-cellar door! Was that the point? Was that what Bracewell had been hoping to find?
He turned back to the previous page. “Text by Alix Trent. Pictures by Gerry Bracewell.”
“It’s the house up there, where it happened, isn’t it?” said Bobbie Bracewell, watching him narrowly.
“Yes, this is the house. The one the door came from.”
“That’s what I thought. So the police ought to have this. I don’t know whether it means anything—but it meant something to him, all right. Or something that isn’t there meant something to him. Take it back with you.”
“All right, if that’s what you want.” He hesitated, aware suddenly of her peculiar desolation, which had not been created, but only revealed, by the loss of a husband. “If it’s any consolation, I don’t think he was looking for this Alix Trent—or not for her own sake. If he went to the trouble to get this back-number from somewhere, after all this time, it was for these pictures. When he was on a job like that, I suppose he’d take a fair number of pictures, and the author or the editor would choose the ones they wanted to use? There’d be more than just these few?”
“Sometimes he’d take as many as thirty to get three, provided the magazine was paying for everything.”
“And after he’d looked at these, and failed to find what he wanted, he started turning out all his own files again?”
She shook her head sadly. “That wouldn’t do him any good, either. He never kept any but his few best negatives more than about three years, not where the work was commissioned. What space would he have for filing thousands of pictures in a place like this? He was always going to have a proper filing system and a proper library some day. When our ship came in—only we spent too much time pushing the boat out!” She laughed, and was again grave. “I’ll have to go and put my face on, it’s time I went. But I suppose I could have a look through them, just in case…”
“Yes, do that,” said Dave, and got up from the kitchen table. “Thanks a lot for the coffee. Now just tell me where I can put the car for you, and I’ll be getting back.”
He walked away from Number 10 Clement Gardens, towards the nearest bus-stop, and he had never been so glad that he wasn’t married. The last thing she had said to him, as he left, was: “Call in again some time, if you’re this way. You’re welcome any time.” And the kindling spark he had seen in her eye might have been merely the stimulus of preparing for the day’s work, but might equally well have been the first signal of a reviving interest in men—all those men who were still alive and not on a slab in the mortuary. Whatever its source, it made up his mind for him that he was never going to call in at Number 10 again. He didn’t dislike her, he was sincerely sorry for her, she even inspired a sort of respect by her rigorous honesty; but he was never going to see her again if he could help it. He’d take her magazine to Sergeant Moon or to Chief Inspector Felse, and he hoped she’d go through all those negatives and transparencies her husband had kept—at least it would give her an interest for an evening or two, and help her over the worst, even if she found nothing—but from this on, let the police take care of anything she produced.
But the magazine under his arm bothered him. Here was confirmation, if nothing more, that Gerry Bracewell had seen something that puzzled, intrigued and excited him about that church door at St. Eata’s, and had wanted desperately to hunt up the pictures he had once made of the house in which the door had then hung. To compare? To confirm some nagging suspicion in his own mind that there was something changed about it? Could he have forgotten, in six years, exactly what pictures he had taken? Was it only a shot in the dark that there might have been a photograph of that door in its old position? Or did he know he’d photographed it? As many as thirty pictures to get three, his wife had said. He couldn’t remember which of his batch the magazine had chosen, he had to get hold of a copy of the article first. When that failed, what next? The negatives, presumably, would belong to The Midland Scene. So the next step would be—supposing the whole thing was urgent enough, and promising enough—to consult their records. Another disappointment? After he’d thrown the magazine across the room in fury and frustration he’d disappeared until the Friday, and only after that had he settled down grimly to turn out all his dead, past pictures, just in case he’d missed it. So before Friday he’d thought of something and someone else he might try. And drawn another blank.