The Chalon Heads (14 page)

At the summit she found a cairn of old sandstone rocks with a metal plate on which were inscribed radiating lines with the names of the distant places that might be seen from this vantage-point—landmarks in Hampshire towards the lowering sun to the west, in Surrey to east and south, and beyond, in the hazy southerly distance, the swell of the South Downs in West Sussex. Kathy stood there for a while, gazing out at a column of pale smoke rising in the still air beyond Haslemere, a solitary glider catching the last thermals above Petersfield. Eva would have come up here, she thought, on her own perhaps, and she wondered what an eighteen-year-old Portuguese girl had made of this, and of the sixty-year-old man she had so impulsively married.

Kathy turned back along the trail, then struck off over the ridge and across the reverse slope, treading silently on carpets of pine needles. A cuckoo called from the depths of the woods, the falling second note of its call sounding forlorn and lonely.

She had worked her way round in a wide circle, expecting to come upon Poacher’s Ease again, but instead found herself approaching a small cottage through the trees. She was coming on it from behind, she saw, noticing a neat little vegetable garden, a washing-line with a couple of tea-towels drying, roses climbing profusely up a trellis.

She stood for a moment, admiring this domestic nest in the forest, relishing the pungent smells of the deep woods at the end of a hot summer day, the faint buzzing of insects, cooing of birds, when something—a soft noise, perhaps, or a foreign smell—made her stiffen, the hair stand on the back of her neck. She turned, wondering what on earth it was, saw nothing, stepped forward a pace and found herself face to face with a man, not three yards away, standing motionless close against the trunk of a huge horse-chestnut tree.

‘Hello again,’ he said, voice casual but eyes wary.

‘Oh . . .’ Now she recognised him as the man who had directed her on the road to Starling’s house.

‘Not still lost, I hope?’

‘Just taking a walk.’

‘Staying here, are you? With the Starlings?’

‘That’s right. Where are your dogs?’

‘They’re inside with my wife.’ He indicated the cottage. ‘Why don’t you come in and meet her? Toby Fitzpatrick.’ He held out a hand.

The Labradors heard the click of the back gate and came hurtling out of the kitchen door, barking enthusiastically.

‘Down!’ Fitzpatrick called. ‘Henrietta, shut up!’

They circled Kathy, bodies oscillating with the thrashing of their tails, and she offered them a hand each to sniff. Satisfied, they formed an escort to the kitchen door.

‘Darling!’ Fitzpatrick called into the interior. ‘You about?’ He led Kathy through a busy little kitchen into a small living-room, at the same time as a woman came down an open timber staircase set against the opposite wall.

‘This is a friend of the Starlings, Helen. I just found her prowling in the woods.’ Fitzpatrick gave a half-hearted laugh, as if he knew, even as he said it, that his banter was off-key.

Helen Fitzpatrick was of an age with her husband, late forties, and looked fresh and pink from a bath taken after a day working in the garden. She was wearing slacks and a gingham shirt, her hair drawn back in a band, and she smiled at Kathy with her mouth, but not her eyes. Close-to, her features looked tired beneath the flush of the bath, as if she might recently have been ill.

‘Really? A friend of Eva’s?’ The mouth kept smiling, but the eyes narrowed cautiously.

‘That must be Poacher’s Ease,’ Kathy said, looking out of the window to the lane at the front of the cottage. ‘I thought I must be in the right area. I went for a walk.’

‘You’re only about fifty yards from the Crow’s Nest, though you wouldn’t know it,’ Toby Fitzpatrick said, making an effort now to sound sociable. ‘Let me get you a drink. Sherry all right? About all we’ve got at the moment. Bit low on supplies.’

For some reason this seemed to irritate his wife. Kathy noticed her mouth tighten, and she thought, Oho, I’ve arrived in the middle of a row—that’s probably why he was skulking outside in the woods. ‘No, I won’t, thanks. Thanks all the same.’

‘Is Eva back, then?’ Helen Fitzpatrick went on.

‘Not yet, no. Sammy’s expecting her any time. But you know what she’s like.’

‘Oh yes,’ Toby Fitzpatrick said. ‘Free as a bird, old Eva . . .’ This time his wife definitely flinched. He noticed it too, and added hurriedly, ‘I think I may have a sherry. You, darling?’

His wife gave an abrupt shake of her head.

‘You sure, er, Kathy?’

‘No, I’d better get back. Sammy will be wondering where I’ve got to. They’re lovely.’ She pointed to a pair of vases holding an assortment of flowers from the garden, white cosmos and pink daphne spilling around spikes of lemon yellow digitalis.

‘Helen’s a marvel in the garden,’ Toby said appeasingly, in his wife’s direction.

Kathy paused at the front door, with its view of the lane, and said, ‘You didn’t see Eva by any chance, did you, when she left for London?’

‘No, we didn’t,’ Mrs Fitzpatrick said. ‘I went with a couple of friends to play tennis there last Sunday, and Sammy said she’d already gone. I thought she’d be back by now. Why do you ask?’

‘Doesn’t matter.’ Kathy smiled. ‘Thanks for showing me your home. It’s idyllic.’

Helen Fitzpatrick smiled back without warmth. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It is.’

When she returned to the house Kathy saw the dark-blue Mercedes parked at the front door. Starling answered her ring, checking over her shoulder as he let her in. He looked limp and pale.

‘No word?’ she asked.

He shook his head. ‘Just been trying to get one of the vultures off the phone,’ he said. ‘My financial adviser. Thinks I’m selling up and moving to the Caribbean.’

He led her into a generous hall, a staircase curving up to a first-floor gallery.

‘This place was built for a movie producer,’ he said automatically, as he had said a hundred times before.

‘That must appeal to Eva,’ Kathy said.

‘What?’ He didn’t seem to follow.

‘With her interest in movies.’

‘Oh, I see . . . No. English movies weren’t of any interest to her.’

Weren’t? Kathy thought.

As they passed a panelled door Starling stopped and opened it on to the kitchen. A small dark woman was working at a central table, tears streaming down her lined brown face. It took Kathy a moment to realise that she was peeling onions.

‘Marianna,’ Starling called to her. ‘This is Ms Kolla, a visitor. She stays the night.’ He spoke slowly and distinctly. ‘In the guest room. OK?’

Marianna stared at them stonily through her watery eyes. ‘OK.’

As they turned away, Starling said, ‘Speaks almost no English. Won’t be much point in trying to ask her anything.’

He showed her upstairs to a large bedroom, comfortably furnished, like the rest of the house, in a traditional cottage style completely unlike the stark modern furnishings of the London flat. Much of the long side of the room opposite the doorway was filled by a range of casement windows, framed in bunched, flowery curtains. Kathy went over to them and looked across a broad lawn towards the spectacular panorama she had seen from the cairn, extending out over forested hills rolling away to a distant hazy horizon. The layout of the house and its approaches had been contrived to hide this spectacle, the whole point of the siting on top of the Hog’s Back, until the visitor reached the public rooms on this, the south-facing side of the house. Kathy opened a window and leaned out on the sill, savouring the view and the evening woodland smells, and wondering how anyone would rather spend their days locked up in the darkness with Buñuel.

‘Make yourself at home,’ Starling said behind her. He turned away abruptly and would have left if she hadn’t called out.

‘Mr Starling, I’d like to see Eva’s room.’

He seemed about to object, but then turned and she followed him to the opposite end of the house, and into another bright room with the same spectacular view to the south. There was a large four-poster double bed at one end, two armchairs by the windows, and a connecting door into a dressing-room and bathroom area at the other end. Starling led Kathy briskly through a further connecting door to a small sitting-room beyond. There was a sofa and a TV, a pile of videos alongside it.

‘I’d like to have a look around here and in the bedroom, if that’s all right, Mr Starling.’

Starling hesitated, then said, ‘No.’

‘Pardon?’

‘No, it’s not all right. I’m sorry, but if the time comes . . . Until then I don’t want any of her things disturbed. There’s no need. You won’t find anything useful.’

‘Mr Starling, I think—’

‘No. End of story.’ He put an arm out to the door and closed it firmly on her.

‘Dinner should be about eight,’ he said, leading her to the corridor. ‘There’s booze in the lounge, and the TV. Help yourself.’

‘Where will you be?’

‘I’ll wait by the phone in my study, downstairs.’

She nodded. ‘I’ll just have a wash, then I’ll come down. You will let me know if the phone goes, won’t you, Mr Starling? Before you answer it?’

‘Of course.’ He turned and walked away stiffly.

There were fresh towels in the
en suite
bathroom, with little touches—a cluster of exotic sea-shells around the soap dish, a bunch of dried flowers in an elegant wicker basket, an unopened bottle of unusual bath oil—that someone had gone to a lot of trouble to find and to lay out. Not Sammy Starling, but who? Marianna, perhaps? Eva? They had an air of having been there for a long time, like dried offerings discovered in an Egyptian tomb. Perhaps they were the work of Sammy’s first wife, Brenda, remaining undisturbed in the guest room. Certainly the majority of furnishings in the house must have been her choice. The carpets and curtains dated from the five years she had had here before her death, and there were few signs that anyone had tried to supplant her style of plump, comfortable, traditional domesticity. The interiors of this house and of the flat in London were two opposite poles, each complete and uncontaminated by the other.

Kathy went out on to the landing and back down the curving staircase, her footsteps silent in the thick pile carpets. From behind the closed kitchen door she heard the sound of chopping, but otherwise the house was silent. The door to the lounge was half open, and she went into a long room with french windows opening out to the southerly lawns. Opposite was a large fireplace with logs piled beside it, ready for the autumn. A mixture of sofas and armchairs were arranged companionably around it, and old oil paintings of rural scenes decorated the walls. Among them, looking slightly incongruous, was a studio portrait photograph of the head and shoulders of an elderly man. Taken in black and white, Kathy assumed at first that it was old, for the man looked like a nineteenth-century patriarch, with thick white hair and moustache, peering imperiously at the camera through
pince-nez.
But at the foot she saw the stamp of a Lisbon photographic studio and the date, 1987.

Kathy noted the drinks cabinet of which Starling had spoken, and at the other end of the room a TV and a writing desk. There were a couple of videos in the cabinet with the TV, Kathy discovered, old Disney films for young kids. Relics of a Christmas party, perhaps. Surely not Eva’s choice. She could find nothing at all in the room that might have been Eva’s choice, apart from the photograph, presumably of her father.

She opened the french windows and went out on to a terrace of warm York stone. Beyond the lawn to the right she could see the corner of a crystal blue swimming-pool sheltered by a yew hedge, and beyond it a tennis court. All looked well maintained, hedges clipped, weeds suppressed. Below the tennis court lay an ornamental pool and next to it a rose garden, enclosed by a bank of shrubs.

A clock chimed seven as she went back into the lounge. Although it wasn’t yet nearly dusk, the circling trees were casting lengthening shadows across the lawn, and the house interior was becoming dark and sombre. She went through to the hall and saw a passageway beyond the stairs. The door at the far end was half open, light reflected along the wallpaper of the passage. She walked silently towards it and saw Starling seated at a green-baize-topped table, concentrating on some sheets of paper spread across the surface, his nose only inches away from the pages, which were lit by a bright spot of light from the illuminated magnifying instrument he held in his hand. She stepped into the room and looked around at his den, a desk and one high-backed leather chair beside the fireplace, a small bookcase and a wine rack against one wall.

He was wearing a white shirt, and for a moment she thought of a surgeon, or a dentist, intent on some delicate surgical procedure. But she knew that the focus of his attention was a postage stamp, one of a number on the white page in front of him. There was a multitude of colours, she saw, dull, faded colours, oranges, greens, sepias and blues, but all of the same unvarying design.

He looked up at her.

‘Chalon Heads,’ she said, then noticed with a shock that he was crying, tears glistening on his cheeks.

He stared at her, his round face absurdly expressionless, given the tears.

‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you. I saw the light . . .’

She turned to go but he called after her, ‘No . . . It’s all right. Come back, if you want.’

His voice was hoarse and also rather plaintive, as if he had a need to say something.

‘You think this is mad,’ he said, and she wasn’t sure at first what he was referring to.

‘This,’ he said, pointing to the sheets of stamps.

‘Oh. Actually I’m trying to get the hang of it. Mr Melville lent me some books. I’m still on primitives— postmaster provisionals, Sydney views, cottonreels and woodblocks. There’s a lot more to it than I realised.’

He dipped his head in a little bow. ‘Very conscientious of you, Sergeant, trying to understand the mind of the deranged philatelist.’

‘Are you deranged?’

‘Just at the moment it feels very much like that.’

‘He said that you’d written a book on the Chalon Heads.’

Starling nodded.