"House of Green Turf" - читать интересную книгу автора (Peters Ellis)

His name was Francis Killian, and he was forty-one years old. Strictly speaking, he was not what is usually thought of as a private detective at all, and he never called himself one. The small plate on his office door above the book-shop in Market Street, Comerbourne, said only: ‘Confidential Enquiries,’ and that was precisely what he dealt in. He didn’t touch divorce business or commercial spying; sometimes he wondered why, since he had no very inflated opinion of his own holiness, and there was more money in these lines than in the cold, retired researches he did undertake. An eventful life, which had begun its adulthood with national service in Korea, could hardly leave him many illusions; and even after that unspeakably horrible trap had opened and released him, scarred for life, he had half-chosen and half-drifted into situations and callings which were not for the squeamish. Trying, perhaps, to rediscover disgust as the clean feel it, a luxury out of reach of those already soiled.

So he couldn’t congratulate himself that it was any particular moral purity that had won him a recommendation from one of Comerbourne’s most respectable solicitors to one of Comerbourne’s most eminent surgeons, improbably in quest of a private enquiry agent ‘for a friend,’ of course! All that had kept Francis acceptable to such clients was a fastidious sense of cleanliness, a cold dislike of the feel of dirt. If he still had moral scruples it was from old habit, and they were by no means clearly defined.

He was unmarried and alone. He hadn’t always been alone. He remembered women he had known, too many of them and too intimately, but all past. He expected now to continue alone. You can stand only so much self-exposure and so much self-division; in his case very little, the god head in him was a jealous god. It had been clear to him now for five years that there must be no more women gnawing away at the edges of his integrity. Such as it was! Not the world’s treasure, that was certain; but all the treasure he had and he valued it.

So Francis Killian was a lonely man, in the large sense that precludes any feeling of grievance in being alone. And he worked hard, as men alone do, in dry, precise, painstaking ways that commended him chiefly to the legal profession. Most of his work was done for solicitors, tracing witnesses to accidents, combing ancient church registers, making abstracts of tedious documents; and for scholars and writers, running to earth elusive authorities, compiling précis of acts and regulations, searching records for lost details. Sometimes he traced lost persons, too, and even lost ancestries, some of them better lost for good. Occasionally he consented to undertake a shadowing job, where a witness was liable to abscond, or worried parents wished to keep a wary eye on a young son’s questionable associates.

Dealing with documents was clean, sterile, congenial business that neither moved nor disturbed him, and that was what counted. It brought him in a modest living, and in money for its own sake he had no great interest. Indeed he had reached a midway breathing-space in his life when he had only a detached interest in anything, and what mattered most to him was to have the ground about him cleared of all encumbering passions and all human entanglements, like a man who finds it necessary to throw away all his possessions in order to feel free.

There were still things in the world, however, that gave him positive, profound, irresistible pleasure, burdening him with a kind of obligation to look again at a human race which could occasionally produce perfection. The first and greatest of these unwilling relationships he had was with music. Against the grain he conceded that there must still be hope for a species which had produced Mozart.

So against his instincts he agreed to consider stepping out of character to oblige Maggie Tressider. He thought of her as a voice rather than a woman, but the voice needed a human vehicle, and according to the old man the vehicle, the superb mechanism that produced that inimitable sound, was seriously threatened. Her recovery, he said, was being impeded by an obsession.

Any other name, and Francis Killian would have astonished and affronted his visitor by saying no. Obsessions were not in his line.

The old man wasn’t enjoying his errand. He would much rather have handed her over to the head-shrinkers, of course, and kept it, as it were, in the family. He had entered the office stepping with the delicacy of a duchess slumming, and been curiously disarmed, even reassured, by the pale, austere, orderly room, as clinical in its way as his own consulting-room. He too could appreciate professionalism. But the man behind the desk had cancelled out the soothing effect of his own environment. There would always be something ambivalent about Francis, however gravely he comported himself, a faint aura of self-caricature, as if in despising mankind he could never completely conceal his despite against himself.

If Gilbert Rice could have retreated then, he would have done it; but Rattray, Rattray, Bell and Rattray—all four of them—had testified that this man was secret, reliable and conscientious, and to open the case to yet another operative was unthinkable. And Francis redeemed himself. At the mention of Maggie’s name he froze, abandoning whatever he had been about to say, and sat thinking for a long minute, honestly eye to eye with his visitor. Then he said: ‘Tell me about it. If I can help Miss Tressider, I will.’

‘You understand, it is she who insists on employing a private detective. I… it was a misunderstanding. I would have preferred to recommend a psychiatrist. But Miss Tressider is a strong-willed woman, and very clear about her own state of mind. Whether it is a psychiatrist or a detective she needs, the fact remains that she can only be helped with her own co-operation, and she absolutely refuses a psychiatrist.’

Francis readjusted his image of her at once; she might, indeed, be rejecting what she most needed, but a woman who knew her own mind so firmly might well be a reliable witness. His own instinct, had anyone proposed to meddle with his mind, would have been to defend his flawed privacy to the death. The unknown woman who was Orpheus, who was Eboli, who was disembodied beauty shut in a body by some cosmic paradox, moved a step nearer to him.

‘And you think,’ said Francis shrewdly,‘ that the first step in curing her is to act as if you’re taking her preoccupation seriously. In short, I shall be fulfilling my only useful function by going through the motions of trying to trace the thing that’s worrying her. In that case, the answer is no. If I enter her employ I shall do my best for her, and it’s from her I shall take my orders. If she wants me to look for a skeleton in her cupboard, I shall look for it. I may even find it. But I can’t be hired to jolly her along towards recovery by pretending to look for it. You don’t believe,’ he said curiously, ‘that there’s really anything to be found, do you?’

After a struggle with his distaste and distrust, Gilbert Rice surprised him. ‘Yes,’ he said flatly,‘ there is something. Almost certainly something. I’ll be quite open with you, Mr. Killian. In my judgment Miss Tressider is a person of quite exceptional generosity and integrity, who has fared rather badly in her personal relationships. She comes from a very ordinary lower-middle-class family—you understand, I am using current terms simply because they are useful in establishing a picture—whose other members have sponged on her from the beginning of her celebrity without shame and without gratitude, and privately resent her pre-eminence as much as they publicly rejoice in it. I believe she has behaved towards all her relatives and associates with great loyalty, which in her heart she knows very well is cast on stony ground. I think it is entirely possible that once, just once, she rebelled and recoiled, that just once she turned and tore somebody, in a protest which was overdue. I suppose it’s even possible that there was a disastrous result, for someone who surely deserves little sympathy. She is incapable of real malice or meanness. But her standards are high. I think from her point of view there may well be something to regret. I believe it would be better if she knew what it was, and could be forced to accept it. You need not be afraid of the result, if you do run the thing to earth. She has a sense of responsibility to the rest of us too. Whatever you find, you won’t destroy her, you can only liberate her. She knows of what a marvel she is the custodian.’

Fantastic, Francis thought, shaken clean out of his objectivity. This antique pillar of society, thirty years established, father and grandfather, suddenly wrenching his heart open over a neurotic young woman he never saw before, because some accident of nature gave her the voice of an archangel. And how if he’s right? How if she really needs to be rid of an incubus that might kill her? No more immortal Orpheus, only that lament on a gramophone record, slowly paling for want of new, living breath. Stiff little, grey little stuffed shirt as he might be, Maggie Tressider’s surgeon had the courage of his convictions.

‘I take it,’ said Francis carefully, drawing the classic profile of Orpheus on the half-filled page of notes before him, ‘that the best thing I can do is come and talk to Miss Tressider during ordinary visiting hours… This evening?’

He went home and played the Gluck records. She was better even than he remembered her. It was not a dark, weighty, velvet contralto, but agile, thrilling and true, a quality in it that sheared through the heart like pure pain, like love itself, excising everything of lesser urgency. It was the voice the old man was in love with, of course. No face could live up to it, much less the heart and the being that went with the face.

She had a crooked mouth in photographs, and a wide, defensive glance, like a child’s, and a more than usually asymmetrical face, larger on the right side.

Well, there was the voice to be saved.

She was sitting up in bed when he came, looking exactly like all those other women in the long ward next door, polished and brushed and neatly tucked in for visiting-time. She had even the same half-apprehensive, half-expectant look as they had, and her eyes like theirs enlarged in a face blanched and honed to transparency by the experience of suffering, turned towards the doorway of her room as soon as his hand touched the handle, and transfixed him as he entered with their blue intensity. She looked glad, and eager, and afraid; exactly as if he had really been a personal visitor, and one to whom she had long looked forward.

‘Miss Tressider? My name is Killian.’

‘It’s very good of you,’ she said, ‘to come so promptly.’ Her speaking voice was low-pitched, warm and vibrant. ‘Please sit down. I believe Mr. Rice has explained to you what’s worrying me?… what I want you to find out for me?’

It seemed that everything was to be conducted with despatch, practically, as between business associates, without any suggestion of anguish. Unless, he thought a moment later, you looked too closely at the fine-drawn lines of her face, which had still something of the chill of shock about them, the faint, reflected image of death as it missed its hold on her, or deeply enough into the wide, wild stare of the eyes to discover the fixed, silvery gleam of panic behind their honest, well-mannered blueness. She shopped for the commodity she needed with the directness of a child, but there was nothing childish about her need.

It was illuminating, too, that the paperbacks he had brought with him came as a shock to her, and an embarrassment. When he laid them on the bed convenient to her hand she touched them blankly, and didn’t know what to do or say. The thanks came mechanically, and what was really on her mind couldn’t find words. How right he had been to pass up roses! Unless, of course, he wanted her to withdraw the offer of this job? He still wasn’t clear about that, but if he had wanted it, roses would have been as good a way as any of making sure. He wasn’t here to have any personal relationship with her, she mustn’t be touched. All that he must inevitably discover about her she would countenance and assist as case-notes necessary to the job, but never as the impalpable web of a man’s understanding. This would have to be strictly clinical. So much the better; that suited Francis.

‘It seemed advisable to be as convincing a visitor as possible,’ he said dryly, ‘and you’ll have observed that they never come empty-handed. The women in the ward might not notice. The staff certainly would. I take it I’m right in thinking that only Mr. Rice is in your confidence?’

‘Oh,’ she said, flushing, ‘I see! Yes of course, that was thoughtful of you. I thought… I was rather afraid that you might be too well known to pass unnoticed, in any case.’

‘I’m hardly the celebrity type of detective,’ he assured her, amused and disarmed. ‘Few of us are, if the truth be told. Nobody here is likely to know who I am or what I do, and your privacy needn’t be compromised.’

‘That’s what I should prefer, if it’s possible. But of course you must include the books and everything in your expenses.’

The tone was perhaps a little arrogant, but so, in all probability, had his been.

‘We can come to an agreement about all that later,’ he said. ‘Since our time’s limited, what I think you should be doing now is lying back and relaxing, while you tell me yourself about this experience that made you send for me. By this time I take it you’ve found a way of surrendering yourself into the hands of doctors when you have to? Consider me one more in the same category. Close your eyes and shut me out if it makes it any easier. Most of us do that with doctors, when the handling begins.’

‘And dentists,’ said Maggie unexpectedly, and smiled.

‘And dentists.’ It might, he conceded ruefully, be a better analogy. ‘I shall have to take notes. You won’t mind that? They’ll all be destroyed, afterwards.’

‘Yes, I understand.’ She let her head fall back on the pillow. ‘I want to do everything that may help you to find out… what it is that’s haunting me. You understand, I must know. There’ll be no peace for me, no possibility of living normally, unless I know. He wanted me to put it out of my mind, but I can’t do that. If I’ve done somebody a terrible wrong, and now for the first time I feel what I’ve done, how can I just push it away and pretend I know nothing about it? Then he wanted me to put myself in the hands of a psychiatrist. Why should I do that? I don’t want it rationalised out of existence, if it really does exist, I want it put right! I’m sorry,’ she said, suddenly fixing those disturbing eyes upon his attentive face, ‘if you find all this a little unbalanced. All that got through to me was the fact of my guilt. It’s because I can’t give a rational account of the thing that I need you. Do you think I’m out of my wits?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘I think you are very much in command of them. Tell me!’

She told him, slowly, carefully, picking her words with concentration and precision, like a party to a case in court who must make the right impression now or never. And after a few moments she closed her eyes and put him out of her recognition except as a disembodied confessor, the better to feel her way towards objectivity. It seemed that her passion for truth and justice was large enough to compel absolute candour, as if she felt herself to be addressing God. In his experience women could be devious even in their prayers, but he would have staked his reputation that this one was not.

Maggie talked and Francis listened, made notes, and watched her face, a pure oval, its irregularities hardly discoverable here in the flesh. Photographs always exaggerate any disproportion in the features; but her photographs were almost caricatures, so far were they from doing her justice. It was largely a matter of colouring. Those dark, dark eyes of hers you would have expected to be softly purple-black like a pansy, but instead they were the startling, piercing blue of high-altitude gentians, as vivid as noon in their midnight darkness. And now he came to think of it, that was exactly the colouring of her dark, dark voice, too. And her hair, refined English mouse-brown in pictures, who could have guessed it would be this unbelievable tint between dark gold and orange-russet, even subtly greenish in the shadows, the colour of the budding foliage of an oak tree in spring? She was much thinner than in any photograph he had ever seen of her; but then, she was probably much thinner now than she’d been a few weeks ago, after extensive surgery, and with this obsession eating her alive.

He made the same discovery as the anaesthetist had made, paying his midnight visit to her in the ward to make sure she had really decided to take up the business of breathing again. She was beautiful. Very beautiful. It seems some people can have everything. Except, of course, peace of mind and a quiet conscience.

It was at about this point that he observed the first interesting peculiarity about her narrative. He didn’t make a note of it, it wasn’t necessary.

‘Thank you,’ he said when she fell silent. ‘That was very comprehensive, and I doubt if I have many questions to ask. If you’d had any clue to time and place you would have included it. But I gather we can’t limit the possibilities at all, apart from ruling out the last few years. Forgetting is mortally easy, easier than remembering, but it does take a little time. Assuming this haunting has a foundation in fact, if it had been recent it would have surfaced more completely, with more detail.’

‘But is it genuinely possible,’ she asked opening her eyes wide, ‘to forget something so important? Even after years?’

‘It’s possible, all right. What we retain over a lifetime is only an infinitesimally small proportion of the whole. Think how many impressions are run through in an hour, and how many brief acquaintances in a year. The most phenomenal memory can’t contain a tenth of the total.’

‘But something like that… a matter of life and death… that would surely be retained, whatever was thrown out.’

‘We don’t know that it was a matter of life and death, or that it seemed so important then. Maybe this is hindsight. I don’t suggest your condition conjured up a totally illusory bogy, but I do think it possible that it magnified and distorted a comparatively innocuous incident. Wait,’ he said reasonably, ‘until you know.’

‘You forget,’ said Maggie mildly, ‘that I’d just slipped through death’s fingers. When you find yourself staring at close range into judgment day, you get your values right.’

‘Not necessarily. Not unless you believe fear to be the best introduction to truth. Even the just aren’t going to feel too sure of themselves on judgment day.’

‘Oh, no,’ said Maggie oddly, ‘I wasn’t afraid. You go clean through that, you know. It doesn’t apply any more. Even now it isn’t like being afraid, it’s just that it’s impossible to live without knowing. Like Oedipus. There isn’t any possibility of turning back and letting well alone. There wouldn’t be any solid ground to stand on. And you can’t sing without truth!’

No, she couldn’t, he quite saw that. It took a bit of believing, in such a bogus world, but this woman had never severed her infant relationship with reality, and while she felt truth to be impaired everything would be devalued for her, even her art. He knew then that he was committed, not simply to accepting her commission, but to bringing it to a successful conclusion.

‘We still have half an hour. If you’re not too tired, I should like you to begin talking to me about yourself. Right from the beginning, your family, your childhood, things you remember. Names you remember. Don’t worry about looking for the seeds of this present trouble. Forget about it now. It may come to light of itself, it won’t if you try to trace it. Tell me who played with you, who were your friends, your fellow-students…’ Though the name that mattered she might not even recognise; she was almost sure by now that she had excised it from her memory for good reason, and eternally, unless some act of God or of Francis Killian raised it again to confront her. Between the conflicting needs and wants of the divided halves of her, what was a man in her employ supposed to do?

But she couldn’t sing without truth; she had said it, not he. And she couldn’t live without singing.

‘Just talk to yourself,’ he said, ‘and I’ll be quiet.’

And she talked, and he was very quiet. Her lips moved slowly and thoughtfully, unrolling before him a cartoon of that ordinary family of hers, odd little vignettes of her schooldays, without sentimentality, without nostalgia, almost without interest. She had had to leave her kin to find her kind, like many another. Not a matter of class at all, but of quality, which is a different and a mysterious thing. She mentioned names faithfully. Most he did not bother to note down, but some were still quick in her memory. He was sensitive to the intonations now. And then her first singing days, the little local successes, the audition that took her into Doctor Paul Fredericks’ classes, the serious study beginning. No doubt of the urgency now, his pen was busy writing down names that mattered to her almost as gravely as her own.

She was still twelve years back in time when the bell rang for the end of visiting-hour. She opened dazed eyes. Her forehead was moist, but the lines of her face were relaxed and tranquil.

‘I’ll come the day after to-morrow,’ he said, putting away his notebook, ‘in the evening, if you can manage to deflect all your other visitors. I’ve tired you out too much…I’m sorry!’

‘Oh, no!’ she said quickly. ‘I’m glad! Just to be doing something about it is worth anything. I feel happier now. I trust you.’

Now that, he thought bitterly, winding his way across the car park to his third-hand Riley, is about the most unfair and terrifying thing one human being can say to another. She trusts me! To come up with miracles, to get her out of her little private hell. What sort of spot does that put me in? But of course, she’ll be paying my daily rate and all expenses… even the paperbacks! That puts it on quite a different footing for her, all she’s asking is fair work for fair pay. But what does it do for me? It may take more than a little patient research, more than leg work, more than you can buy for any daily retainer, to turn up X for her and get the thorn out of her flesh.

Still, he reflected, driving home to his flat in Market Street, bare as a hermitage, he had got one positive thing out of this first session. All the female names he had written down were recorded only as possible sources of information; apart from that he might as well cross them off at once. Maggie Tressider was quite certainly honest in claiming that she could not recapture a single limiting fact about the identity of X. But every time she spoke of her victim and persecutor she said ‘he.’

He went to the trouble to check on her family, though he felt and found that they were of no interest. Her parents were dead, the father long ago, while Maggie was still at school, the mother four years ago of heart disease. There remained a sister and a brother, Alec, both older than Maggie. The brother played the horn in a Midland orchestra, well enough to hold his place but not well enough ever to get any farther. A little probing produced a picture not at all unexpected; he had been trading on his sister’s reputation and his relationship to her ever since she emerged into celebrity. He had made one flying visit to see her in the hospital, since it wasn’t far out of his way. Rice was of the opinion that he had come for money, and hadn’t gone away empty-handed, but he did at least make himself pleasant, affectionate and cheerful while he was there.

The married sister, eldest of the three, lived in Hertfordshire with an insurance-agent husband and two children. She hadn’t visited. There was a record of telephone enquiries from her, beginning with an agitated lament on the first evening, before Maggie was up from the theatre, expressing endless devotion and the fixed intention of leaving everything and rushing to her bedside; but the tone had cooled off after it became clear that the bed was not going to be a death-bed. Mrs. Chalmers still called in with loving messages but she didn’t suggest coming. These details Francis also gleaned from Rice, who had them from the ward sister, through whom all those earlier phone calls had been channelled.

It began to seem as if all those who professed affection for her also harboured in secret a corrosive resentment. Yet everything went to show that she had remained loyal and generous to her family and early associates. Maybe that was her really unforgivable virtue. If she had shaken them off and gone her own way unimpeded, they could at least have felt that she was down on their human level, and taken pleasure in her flaws for their own comfort. People who have everything stir in ordinary mortals a venomous ambition to take everything from them, or if that’s impossible, at least to spoil what is spoilable. No, Maggie had never caused any of her tribe to lament at her shoulder in the night. They were much more likely, given the chance, to ruin and despoil her.

Then there were the others, colleagues, fellow-singers, accompanists, conductors, admirers. Would-be lovers, most of them, whether they knew it or not, though a few had the integrity and detachment to be disinterested friends to her into the bargain. God knew she had need of those, they seemed to have been few and far between in her life. The music teacher at her local school, perhaps, who had first realised what a glorious instrument she possessed, and done his best to help her develop its possibilities. And afterwards, Paul Fredericks, that eccentric and wealthy old genius who had spent the last years of his life squandering the profits of his own musical career on the musicians of the future. But how many more?

Plenty of would-be lovers, though, from the modest admirers of her girlhood, through the teeming procession of her fellow-students, to the celebrities who surrounded her now. And wasn’t there, somewhere in the sweet chorus of their devotion, a slightly sour note, too? The courting male knows his worth, and expects to make an impression, but Maggie Tressider had always stayed unattainable. They still praise and they still pursue, when the object of the pursuit is such a valuable cult image and status symbol; but after a while a slight acidity sets in, the heart goes out of the charade, and something alien comes to birth in its place. Spite?

He didn’t realise, until he tapped at the door of her room for the second time, and saw her propped on her pillows with delicately made-up face and burnished hair to receive him, exactly what it was about her that disturbed him most. He entered with his memory marking off like spent beads the names of her adorers, who were legion; and there in the white bed in the white room, tense and still, sat this one slender, solitary creature, the cobalt mirrors of her eyes waiting for a human image to reflect, so that she could be peopled. He had never known anyone round whom such numbers of worshippers revolved; and he had never known anyone so intensely and disastrously alone.

She was a good client, patient and humble. She was ready to pick up her autobiography where she had left it two days before, and even paid him the compliment of following his recipe for relaxation while she recollected, as if he had indeed been one more doctor with authority over her, if only a temporary authority. Slack in her pillows, with closed eyes, she recorded her testimony; and in the pauses, which were frequent but brief, long enough for thought but not for concealment, he watched her marble stillness, even her breath held, and thought, what would happen if one kissed this Sleeping Beauty? Would she wake up? On the contrary, she would withdraw into the hundred-year-long death-sleep at the first touch. You’d be lucky if you didn’t impale yourself on the thorns before you ever reached her mouth.

‘Dr. Fredericks used to pick out a small group of his pupils every spring and autumn, and take them on a tour of the Continent. He had good connections everywhere there, and it was his way of giving us proper concert experience before we tackled the big things. Freddy’s Circus, we all called it. We used to attend some of the smaller festivals, and fill in with concerts all through Switzerland and Austria, and part of Germany too. There’d be two or three solo singers, and maybe a couple of instrumentalists, usually a pianist—one of the accompanists was always good for a concerto or two—and maybe a violinist, and a small orchestra. It cost him the earth to keep it all up, but now and again he even made a profit. I went three times. Once in 1954, in the autumn. I was eighteen. And then both the tours in 1955. After that I had my first big break, I was asked to sing Cherubini. He let me take it, so I knew I was ready. I never went abroad with him again, there were concerts, engagements, recordings… things began to go very fast. Two years later, Freddy died. In Bregenz, at the festival. There weren’t any more Circuses.’

‘And who was with you on those tours? Can you remember?’

She mentioned several names. Two of them had followed her aloft, though less rapidly. One had died in a plane crash. Some were still, and presumably for ever, lost in obscurity.

‘I don’t remember any others. Oh, yes, the last time there was a change, because Freddy’s sister, who always used to tour with us and act as chaperone for the girls, had to go into hospital just before we left, and one of his old pupils came along with us instead. Bernarda Elliot was her concert name. I think it was her maiden name. She was a contralto… a good one, but she’d been married for quite a time then, to somebody named Felse. She was living somewhere in the West Midlands, I remember. She came along with us just to oblige Freddy, and only that once. It was the only tour Miss Fredericks missed. She died, too, only a few months after Freddy. Voluntarily, I think. You know what I mean? They’d always worked together, without him the world wasn’t worth hanging on to.’

‘I know,’ said Francis. ‘This Cherubini… that was at Covent Garden, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes, I was lucky. We recorded with the same cast, afterwards. It wasn’t the best “Figaro” ever, but it got a lot of notice.’

From then on it had been simply a climb from one eminence to another, steadily extending her range, always waiting for a few additional years to bring new works and maturer parts within her grasp. She told him about it just as she had experienced it, without either arrogance or modesty, and it dawned on him suddenly that she was not quite the gifted child he had begun to believe her, that this headlong simplicity and directness of hers was not a property of innocence, but the deliberate choice of an adult mind, the weapon of a woman with a great deal to do and only one lifetime in which to do it. Maggie Tressider had no time to waste on circumlocutions. There was it seemed, at least one quality in her which might well destroy either her or anyone who got in her way. Generous, scrupulous, loyal, all these she might be, but ambitious she certainly was. Not for herself so much as for the voice of which she was the high priestess. If ever there was a clash of interests, she would sacrifice everything and everybody to that deity, including Maggie Tressider.

By the time the bell rang to send him away, she had arrived at the present. Iris-circled, with half-transparent lids veined like snowdrops, her eyes remained closed for a moment after she was silent. The long lashes that lay on her cheeks were coloured like her hair, green-bronze-gold. When they rolled back from the wide stare that fastened unerringly on his face, the unveiled blue of her eyes was blinding.

It was then that it happened to him, sharp and clean as a knife-thrust, so that for an hour afterwards he never felt the pain.

‘I’ll contact you,’ he said, ‘as soon as I have anything to report. It may be a few days, but I’ll ring you.’

‘Yes…’ She wanted to ask what was in his mind, whether he had got anything at all out of her self-examinings; but she refrained. She had said that she trusted him, and now it was in his hands. ‘I feel better,’ she said, offering him the one encouragement and commendation she had to give. ‘Since you came I haven’t lost any more weight. And I sleep now. I’m going to get well.’

‘Of course!’ he said.

‘And to put this right…’ She smiled at him, a grave, grateful, impersonal smile. The burden of her confidence sagged heavily on his heart, and deep within him, secretly and slowly, the mortal wound began to bleed.

It was half-way through the evening before the numbness thawed away, and the injustice and indignity and rage and pain, the reasoned hopelessness and irrational hope, all hit him together.

He was sitting over his notebook with a full ashtray at his elbow, methodically compiling lists of names and considering the significance of the periods into which her life fell. There was always more to be gained by sitting and thinking, and evaluating what was given, than by rushing about questioning people, and he had his starting point.

‘I’ve done something awful to him… killed him …’ ‘He’s here with me all the time, he never leaves me…’ ‘It wouldn’t be so bad if I could ever see him clearly…’ Where there’s no precise identification the masculine pronoun can embrace the feminine, too, of course. Maybe! But that was by no means the effect of the repeated ‘he’ in her mouth. She didn’t know even the sex of her enemy; no, but some spark of her subconscious knew, all right. All Lombard Street to a china orange, X was a man.

What sort of man? Not a member of her family; those she bore with, visited occasionally, subsidised as a matter of course. Rice had suggested that there might have been some such hanger-on who chose the wrong moment, or the wrong approach, and started in her a spurt of distaste that caused her for once to lash out in rebellion against her role. But did any of them matter to her enough to make that probable? Francis thought not. And whoever provoked her into cruelty would have to matter to her pretty fundamentally.

The more he thought about it, the more clearly did X put on the likeness of the one person who was so conspicuously absent from Maggie’s life. A face so rigidly excised from memory might well belong to the one man who wasn’t there.

Plenty of men had loved Maggie, but not one of them, by her own account and the world’s, had Maggie ever loved. Never once had she mentioned the word ‘love.’ And that in itself was remarkable enough to arrest attention. Here was a gifted, beautiful woman, still defensively alone at approaching thirty-two. On the face of it that was the most mysterious thing about her. Why did she never marry? Because she was married to her art? Even so, why did she never, apparently, even consider taking husband or lover, never let any of the candidates get within arm’s-length of her? Take a step too near her, and she would take three away from you, and then keep retreating until she was out of sight. He had seen it for himself, and so, if he wasn’t mistaken, had Gilbert Rice. So what was wrong with her? What was the block that shut men out? The same that blotted out the face of X?

And if the hunt for X was the hunt for the invisible, the non-existent lover, the only one who got past her guard, where was he most likely to be found? Somewhere fairly far back, or she could not have expunged him so completely and for so long. In the world’s eye not, perhaps, a very great figure in her life, or, again, she could not have forgotten him so successfully; yet great enough in retrospect to turn her whole life barren afterwards. What was it she had done to him?

No need to look back as far as childhood or early adolescence, either, because this was a thing that had fixed its claws into her adult being, and pierced deep. Somewhere at the emergence of the woman, say at eighteen or nineteen, when her career suddenly opened before her and she knew she was going to be great, when she was intoxicated and dazzled by music, and men, perhaps, faded into the background just when they should have been growing clear and important. Twelve or thirteen years ago. In twelve years she had had time to suppress a lot of regrets, to forget genuinely a lot of once-important people.

He performed, almost idly, the small exercise of looking back twelve years in his own life. Where had he been then? More to the point, with whom? He found a narrow boat on a Midland canal, a summer frittered away on an antique business that had folded under him because he didn’t work at it, and a woman who had been the reason for his lack of application; but when it came to recalling the woman, she was only a small, blank, woman-shaped space without face or name. Nothing but an empty shape and a bitter taste, and no guilt except the guilt he felt for the squandering of whatever promise he’d ever had, and that held no mystery.

And then, abruptly, like a flower bud opening marvellously under the camera, the pale non-recollection put on colour and form and life, the head flushed into the incredible colour of oak foliage in spring, the burning blue eyes pierced him as they had pierced him an hour ago, and the searing realisation of his position broke out like blood at last, and he knew he was lost. Who had he thought he was, writing off women so confidently? Who did she think she was, writing off men?

For the first time in his life he hadn’t seen it coming, hadn’t side-stepped and dictated the ground on which it should approach him, and the terms on which he would entertain it. Now it was too late to do anything but stop the bleeding by force of will, and somehow claw his way back to the job in hand. Because he had just established to his full satisfaction that no man alive had a dog’s chance of getting within Maggie Tressider’s guard. Want her as he might, want would have to be his master, as it had been many another’s.

Or would it? If he played his cards intelligently, hadn’t he certain advantages?

She trusted him! She’d said so, and meant it. Who else had her ear as he had? Who else had access to her as he had? The hunt for X could be prolonged until his position was secured, and the uncovering of X could be so handled—assuming he was found, and in whatever circumstances—as to serve the interests of Francis Killian no less than those of Maggie Tressider. Yes, he had unique advantages…

And unique disadvantages, his own saner self warned him tartly. You’re taking her money to do a job for her, the only trust she has in you is the trust intelligent people place in competent professionals bound to them by contract. Take one step out of line, to-morrow, next week, ever, and she’ll be gone. And you’ll be a bigger heel even than you’ve ever been before. At least until now you’ve kept your business clean.

I shall still be doing that, he persisted strenuously, fighting off his better judgment. I’m not proposing to cheat her. The job I’ve taken on for her I’ll finish, if it can be done at all. But while it lasts I’ve got her ear, I’ve got a measure of her confidence, and I’ll earn more. I’m wronging nobody if I conduct my own campaign alongside hers.

And you think you’ve got so much as a dog’s chance? asked his doppelgänger venomously. You know what that woman is, a world figure, a beauty, a towering artist. Do I need to tell you? And you know what you are, don’t you? Or maybe you’ve forgotten. It’s a long time since you looked in a glass!

There wasn’t a mirror in the room, or in the flat apart from the one in the bathroom. But he didn’t need a glass, he knew what he looked like, and what he was. A man of forty-one, average height, light weight, not bad to look at as average men go, if he hadn’t spent all his adult life being knocked about by circumstances, and knocking himself about when circumstances let up. All that kept him from looking and being seedy was the odd vein of austerity that persisted from his Nonconformist upbringing, still unsubdued after a life-long battle with chaos and self-indulgence, and that basic dislike of dirt that would have been glad to believe itself a virtue, but sadly realised it was no more than a foible.

‘Yes, agreed his demon, reading his thoughts, you’ve had things cleaned up for the past five years, from artistic squalor into monastic order, and it cost you plenty to do it, and you know damned well the value you put on it. There was going to be no more of that! How much of your soul will you still own, if you let love break in here now? Don’t you recognise a disaster when you see one? Take a look round this cell of yours. It’s more than it looks, it represents the only safety you’ve got, because it’s the only order, it’s what’s left of your morality, it’s your identity. Open the door and let love into that, and it’ll kick the whole structure apart before you can say: Maggie!

And he knew it was true. Only a fool could welcome in the invader of his painfully-won privacy, and run to meet the power that humiliated and outraged what he had made of himself at so much cost. And for such an impossible hope! He knew, none better, that he would never reach her. If he regrouped his defences now, while there was time…

But there was no time left. It was already too late.

All right, he said defiantly to his double, sit back and watch. A little patience, a little craft, a nice mixture of blackmail and gratitude, and you’ll be surprised what I can do, when I want something enough. What will you bet me I don’t get her in the end?

And if you do, said the demon, with the finality of ultimate, unquestionable truth, what you get won’t be what you want. It will be only to possess and enjoy, you know that, don’t you? And spoil! Never to unite with her.

All right, damn you! said Francis, setting his teeth, then I’ll settle for that!