“You helped her professionally sometimes, didn’t you?”

  “Now and again. There was nothing wrong about it. She didn’t go in for faked seances and all that caper. But now and then I’d look up a few facts. Trace someone. Get information which would help her.”

  “She paid you well for this?”

  “Sometimes. If she was feeling generous.”

  “When did you last work for her?”

  “I finished a job for her about a week ago. Well, more or less finished it. Came to a dead end as a matter of fact.”

  “Can you tell me about this job?”

  “If it’s absolutely necessary, yes. But it does concern someone quite important in the area. I really feel I would have to mention it to them first. To be quite honest—for Blanche’s sake—I’d rather not have to do that. I can’t see that it would have anything to do with her committing suicide. Just the opposite, I’d say.”

  “Well, let’s leave that for the moment.” He went on, “Have you any idea at all why she might do a thing like this?”

  “Not a bloody one. In fact the opposite. She was as fit as a fiddle and full of life. She’d got plans and ambitions for the future. The whole thing’s a mystery to me.”

  “Was there ever any question of marriage between you?”

  “Not really. We had a good relationship. Apart from that, she wanted to be on her own and so did I. I’ve been married once, you know. It didn’t work out.”

  The sergeant leaned back in his chair, considered George for a moment or two, and then said quietly, “Did you know she was pregnant?”

  “What?”

  It was clear at once to the sergeant that George’s surprise was genuine.

  “The autopsy shows that she was carrying a two-months foetus.”

  “Good God—why the hell didn’t she tell me?”

  “She was a big woman, Mr. Lumley. She might not have known herself. But if she had, what do you think her reaction would have been?”

  “She would have wanted me to marry her and I would have done. And I wish to God she had known and it had been like that. She might have been an odd bird in some people’s eyes, but she wouldn’t have played around with any abortion stuff. Life was precious to her. All fife.”

  “If she’d had to marry would it have affected her professionally?”

  “Of course not. Plenty of mediums are married. In many ways it helps. But I can see why she might not have known. She was a big girl and she always was skipping a monthly now and then. I always did the proper thing by her, of course. But it used to scare us at first.”

  “Scare?”

  “Well, you know what I mean.”

  “Yes, I think I do. Tell me, did she ever discuss her financial affairs with you?”

  “In what way?”

  “Well, how much money she had. How she’d got it invested and that sort of thing?”

  “No, she didn’t. She was fairly well off, I knew that. She paid me seven hundred and fifty pounds for this last job, even though I didn’t pull it off. Quite frankly, she knew how I was fixed and she was generous.”

  “We saw her mother again this morning, Mr. Lumley. Miss Tyler made a will a year ago. One copy is with her solicitor, and another copy was in the house. Her mother knew about the will. I mean she knew what was in it and where it was kept. Mrs. Tyler is the principal beneficiary. I have her permission and also her solicitor’s to disclose one item of the will to you.” Suddenly George was aware of the change of mood in the man. He said, “Look, what are you getting at?”

  “I’m asking you a few questions, and you’re being very co-operative, Mr. Lumley. That’s all. We’re enquiring into a case of suicide, and want to know the reason. Any help you can give us will be welcome. Did you know that you are mentioned in Miss Tyler’s will?”

  “No. I didn’t.”

  “She left you five thousand pounds.”

  “Five thousand what?”

  The sergeant smiled. “Pounds.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “It’s quite true. I can tell you that she wasn’t a rich woman, but she was not in need for a penny or two.”

  “I don’t care what she left me. I’d rather she was here alive. And if you want my opinion, I don’t believe that she was the kind who would ever commit suicide. And I can see quite clearly what you may be thinking—and that’s damned wrong too. That I killed her because the baby would be a nuisance and I’d get a nice five-thousand-pound bonus.” George stood up, his face tight with anger. “Jesus Christ, what kind of man do you think I am?”

  The sergeant waved a placatory hand at him.

  “Nobody is suggesting anything. We’re just having a chat and I’m giving you some information and you’re giving me some, in the hope that we can clear this matter up. If you want my personal opinion, I am quite sure that you would have married her if you’d known about the baby. And equally certain that you wouldn’t kill anyone for the sake of five thousand pounds. You’re not the type, Mr. Lumley.”

  “But what you are suggesting is that it might not have been suicide. That it was faked? That someone might have killed her? ”

  “You’re talking to a policeman, Mr. Lumley. Our job is to get at the facts. Miss Tyler might have committed suicide for reasons, good ones in her view, which we shall never know. On the other hand, she might not. What I would like you to do is to go away and think about it. I don’t want you to discuss it with anyone else. But think about it. If anything occurs to you, then let us know.”

  George went back to the Red Lion and had a bar lunch and two large whiskies and soda.

  At police headquarters after George had gone, the sergeant was joined by the C.I.D. man who had checked George’s cottage in the past and sent a report on him through Scotland Yard to Bush’s department.

  He said, “Well?”

  The sergeant shook his head. “I’d stake my life on it. He doesn’t know a thing. He didn’t know she was pregnant and he didn’t know he was due for anything under the will. And he can’t think of a damned reason why she should go off for the day with a nice picnic and then commit suicide.”

  The C.I.D. man picked up the autopsy report from the desk and glanced at it.

  “Slight superficial bruising top of left arm?”

  “You could do that just getting in and out of a car. Knocking yourself accidentally. There’s no question that she died from GO poisoning. You don’t need much more than a few minutes in a car like that before the atmosphere is lethal. I think she committed suicide and we’ll probably never know why.”

  “What does the Chief think?”

  “Well, you know him and suicide. Especially when it’s a car lark. Respite what the old girl, Mrs. Tyler, said, he’s asked for a further test. Blood, internal organs for any trace of drugs or toxics. She wouldn’t be the first one to be slipped something and then set up to look like suicide, would she?”

  “Nor the last. You know we reported this chap Lumley under that Trader enquiry?”

  “Yes. He’s first a kidnapper and then a murderer, I don’t think. We sent in about a hundred names under that business.”

  “I think we should let them know about this. You never know what line they’re working.”

  “All right. But I should wait until you get the doctor’s second report. Should be here tomorrow. Anyway, the Trader thing is a dead duck. He’s away comfortably with his loot by now. Just a memory that’s always going to be a thorn in the side of the big boys. If you think Lumley has any connection with that then you could believe that Jack the Ripper is alive and well and living in Blackpool.”

  * * * *

  Edward Shoebridge saw the code announcement in the Daily Telegraph that day. There was no elation in him. That would come much later. At the moment the signal was no more than he had expected. He sat down at his cellar console with a small child’s printing set and filled in a blank date space which he had left when the Grandison letter had been typed at the same time as the one to Sir Charles Medham. He gave it to his wife to be posted. She was going to drive to Southampton to do this.

  As he stood by the car before she left, he said, “While you’re in Southampton get a copy of the evening paper. It’s the Evening Echo, I think.”

  “Miss Tyler?”

  “Yes. There may be a report.”

  “You’re not worried about it?”

  “No. Even if they find out that she was here it can make no difference. We don’t know she has committed suicide. We don’t know the real reason for her visit. She came enquiring about caravan sites. That’s the truth. She would never have told us about Miss Rainbird if she hadn’t been frightened. She just wanted to have a look at us before she made up her mind. If anyone knows she came here, then we may soon get a visit from the police. We just tell the truth up to a point. If they know about Miss Rainbird and the connection with me, I tell the truth. I’m not interested in Miss Rainbird. When you get the paper just check if there is a report and then throw it away.”

  “It’s a pity it happened.”

  “We’ve always known that there could be a random element at any time. Either it would be disastrous or we could deal with it. It happened and we’ve dealt with it.” He gave a rare smile. “We know the stakes and we know the risks. We’ve always known that there’s no such thing as infallibility. The gods gave us a little bad luck, that’s all. Just to be sure that we could deal with it.” He leaned forward and kissed her through the car door.

  She said thoughtfully, “She looked the wrong type to commit suicide.”

  He smiled again. He knew it was no weakness in her. There was no weakness or fear in her. He said, “So many of them do. People are always saying, ‘I can’t believe it. She just wasn’t that kind.’ ”

  When his wife had gone he went to the mews and took out his son’s goshawk. While the boy was at school he exercised her. He went up through the elms at the back of the house. The unhooded hawk, seeing and hearing the birds in the rookery above, began to bob, to spread her tail, and her head twisted as she followed the flight of the birds above.

  He took her through the stand of elms and walked half a mile along the down. Lower down the slopes were the first fields, green now with young corn shoots. There was always a passage of rooks from the fields to the elms. Sometimes they moved in company, but now and again there would be a solitary one flying back to the trees. After a while a single rook came winging up the slope. He slipped the goshawk and she went upwind after the rook. It saw her coming and with no trees or cover below began to climb in clumsy circles dropping downwind as it did so. The goshawk ringed up after the rook. The rook was a strong bird and it was some time before the hawk was high above her.

  Shoebridge stood watching, remembering the first time his son had flown the goshawk at a rook like this. With the really good things, he thought, one always remembered the first time, and every time after that was still good but there was the smallest edge of magic gone from it. One’s first pheasant taken coming downwind like a rocket, the first salmon running out line to burn inexperienced fingers. . . . Life was full of good things. But these days so many of the good things were going. There was a natural balance between life and death. But there was no balance in nature that could control man’s fast spread of filth and pollution. He was turning the seas and rivers into sewers and the land itself into poisonous rubbish heaps. Nothing could stop it. The only thing to do was to find some uncontaminated place and ring it round with a defence against the world’s slow stain.

  The goshawk fetched the rook, hanging a hundred feet above the bird, and then made two quick feints, false stooping to drive the rook lower. The rook went sideways down the wind, dropping fast for the shelter of the hedges that lined the fields far below.

  The goshawk turned over and went down after the bird in a close-winged dive and Shoebridge could hear the hiss of the air as she cut through it. She hit the rook a hundred feet above ground without binding to it and there was an explosion of black feathers as the goshawk threw up and the rook tumbled clumsily towards the ground. It was death, thought Shoebridge, and it was beautiful.

  Walking back to the house he thought of the boy. School-term was coming to an end. He would be home soon. They would take the car and go off, the three of them, a close trinity, to Scotland and Ireland. . . . If they couldn’t find what they wanted there, then they would find some place abroad. Norway, Sweden or Canada. None of them had any conservative feeling about this country. They all knew what they wanted and would recognise it when they saw it. All he felt the boy knew and understood. Their desire was not poetic or philosophical, they wanted neither Thoreau nor Robinson Crusoe as guides. Their desire was physical. They wanted a place with bastions against the world where in twenty, a hundred or five hundred years they or their spawn would have lived as close to their true nature as they could and where they would fight the last fight against the final overwhelming of the world by man’s pollution. It was a project at which many would have laughed and then called him mad for having such a dream, and madder still to want to make it real..So let them— but the desire in him was iron-hard.

  When his wife came back she said that there had been a small paragraph in the Evening Echo reporting the discovery of the body of Blanche Tyler. She cooked the Archbishop’s dinner, giving him smoked trout and a tournedos Rossini with broccoli spears. When she came back she brought with her the copy of the Daily Telegraph from the cellar. Across the top of the front page the Archbishop had written—I would prefer the Times to this.

  Shoebridge took the paper and burnt it. The paper would not be changed. Although he treated the Archbishop with all the consideration that was possible, the man did not exist as a personality for him. He was an object of value which very shortly would be sold.

  * * * *

  George sat in the kitchen with Blanche’s mother drinking whisky. He had brought in a bottle with him. The old lady accepted it, although she preferred tea. But a death in the family made things different for a while. They drank it from cheap tumblers. The house was hers now and there was good glass in the dining-room, but for the time being habit held her, restrained her almost as surely as if Blanche were alive and still mistress at Maidan Road.

  George was adjusting now to the tragedy, moving slowly back into a pattern of normal behaviour and thought, doing what thousands do every day somewhere, absorbing shock and accepting that life must go on. “You think she ever had any idea she was pregnant?” he asked.

  “No. Head in the clouds too much for that. She thought she was safe. You never are. No matter what you do, lad. Life finds ways of creepin’ in.”

  “I’d have married her. Like a shot. Poor old darling.”

  “You wouldn’t. She weren’t the marryin’ kind. Not our Blanche. I don’t mean she’d have got rid of it. She’d have had it, done right by it, found a home or kept it here. I weren’t never married to her father. In our life sometimes you did and sometimes you didn’t. Church didn’t mean much. A man took a woman to live with him, got her kids and stuck by her or didn’t.”

  George poured more whisky for them. It had been a bad day, but with its ending he was beginning to feel better. Not the same. Better. It was the way life went and you had to go with it.

  He said, “When you phoned this morning the bottom dropped right out of things. It was the last thing I would ever have thought of. Blanche sitting up there in the car with the rain belting down . . . doing that. I still can’t believe that part of it. She’s gone, yes, I can face that. But not the way she did it.”

  “It weren’t no surprise to me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, in the way it was to you. Oh, yes, it was a shock. Just as it would have been if she’d been knocked down. But not the other.”

  “I don’t get you.”

  “Why should you? Like I told them at the police station. It’s in the family. I never told her, mind. Though she might have guessed. You can’t keep things from kids. But Old Tyler was the same.”

  “Her father committed suicide?”

  “He did that. Walked out one night. Strong man. Not a care in the world, you’d say. And they found him in the river next morning. Old Tyler that could swim like an eel. One of his brothers was worse. Only forty. Sat on a railway bank and waited for the train to come. Put his neck on the line when it was fifty yards away. Weren’t a thing wrong with him. He’d just bought a new horse and had the caravan repainted all outside. Both of ’em cheerful, normal men, you’d say.”

  “Good God. They just did it? For no reason?”

  “That’s right. ’Cepting there’s got to be a reason inside somewhere. Old Tyler, you’d say, didn’t have a care in the world. Four hundred pounds we had in the Post Office bank. Gave me a kiss and a cuddle afore he went out and they brung him up to the fairground the next morning on a hurdle. Smiling, he was, like it was all some joke. It’s in the blood. No, it weren’t no surprise to me what Blanche done. Shock, yes, and a mother’s grief. But no surprise. She must have got it from his side of the family. What you going to do now, without her?”

  George didn’t answer. He sipped his whisky and shook his head. Blanche had been more part of his life than he had realised. What was he going to do without her? Do what everyone else did, he supposed, when they lost people . . . let time and chance fill up the gaps, wait for memory to lose its sharp outlines, die away.

  He said, “I don’t know. Just get stuck into something I suppose. Like this little business of mine. Make a go of it. She’d want me to do that.”

  “Well, the money she left you will help. She wouldn’t have left that unless she’d been real fond of you. Always careful about money was Blanche.”

  So far as he was concerned, thought George bitterly, the money could all go down the drain if it would bring Blanche back. Luirfley’s Sunshine Gardens Ltd. How could you put your heart into something like that now? He’d wanted to do it for her. To show her that he could really make a go of something, and then to know her pleasure and the pride she would have had at his success. Christ Almighty, the things life did to you, and right out of the blue. You got up smiling, the sun shining, and—wham—life gave you a damned great smack in the face.