Наташа Купер - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 126, No. 1. Whole No. 767, July 2005

“Let’s hope so,” she said.

As he put down the phone, George Read had thought they had a hell of a cheek ringing up out of the blue like that. What’s more, it was worrying. It wasn’t as if he and Hilda had ever had what you might call a close relationship with the Walkers, or even a distant one. After all, an accounting worker bee like George, relatively low down in the food chain, didn’t fraternize with a main board director like Rod Walker. Their socializing, such as it was, had been limited to the occasional company do, even more occasional drinks with other distant acquaintances. So what on earth was there to have lunch about? There was something about this that caused a major tick of worry in George’s chest.

After the phone call, and after telling Hilda that they had people for lunch, which she responded to with her normal silent acceptance, he went out into what he liked to call the back acre, although it was rather more than that, nearly three-quarters of a hectare, watched the goat, and allowed himself some fairly heavy-duty worrying.

How had Walker found him? It wasn’t that George had deliberately hidden himself and Hilda away, but he had been very careful to be extremely vague about their plans in the months before his retirement eleven months earlier. Neither he nor Hilda had any relatives to speak of — Hilda had a remote cousin in New Zealand and that was about it. Only children of only children, both of them, which made them both statistically improbable, and which meant few blood relations. They hadn’t had many close friends to speak of, either. They weren’t the sort of people who made close friends. Acquaintances is what they had, mostly, and very few of them. Not the sort of acquaintances you wrote to or telephoned. He couldn’t think of one person who knew exactly where they were. If anyone had ever shown any interest in their plans, he’d always said, “Travelling.” Full stop.

So anyone who did know had to have gone out and looked for them.

Dropping off the edge of the map had turned out to be, in the end, pretty simple. They upped and went. They had rented a small house in Rouen for a few months while he looked around, and then, after an agreeable search, he had found and bought the house for a price which was less than half what it would have cost in England to buy the equivalent. It was a long, thatched house on a hillside which overlooked a pleasant, rolling, wooded valley not far, he was amused to learn, from one of Falstaff’s chateaux.

He had pointed this out to Hilda, but she hadn’t seemed too bowled over. She had made a speciality of this, not being bowled over, ever since they had left Guildford. She had gone into a sort of self-induced coma. He’d asked her quite a few times, but all she would say was that she was perfectly happy. But she wasn’t perfectly happy, that was obvious. Perhaps he’d underestimated the shock it would be to uproot and move to a different country. He had explained all the advantages very carefully: the price of property, the cost of living, how much more they could do with his pension and the money he had put away. Of course, she didn’t know about all the money he’d put away, but then she didn’t have to. He’d pointed out how crowded England had become, and that France was two and a half times the size of Great Britain with the same population.

He hadn’t asked her, of course, he never had. Hilda had always done what he said without question. But he went through the motions of persuasion, anyway.

It hadn’t seemed to take. There they were with a beautiful, picturesque house with a superb view that people in England would give their eyeteeth to have and she’d turned into this drifting, sighing creature.

He had wondered if she might be still yearning after the house in Guildford. So he had taken her to Paris, to Maple’s, for God’s sake, just like being in the Tottenham Court Road, and let her choose and order the furniture. He seemed to have been right, because what she chose, he had realised, were exact replicas of the furniture in Guildford. At nearly twice the price, bloody French. But that hadn’t cheered her up. He’d worked like a slave planting the garden with all the varieties of flowers that he’d had in Guildford so that she’d have something familiar to look at, and even that hadn’t made a difference. She drifted around, sighing a lot and staring endlessly across the front garden into Normandy.

Then, quite suddenly, five months before, she had changed, God knows why. It was really very weird. Overnight she’d turned into this eerie, cheery person he’d never known. She’d completely perked up. Which was more than his bloody flowers had. They were a disaster, except for the roses. Something in the soil, it must be. Bloody France.

She was in the kitchen at the moment, singing away happily to herself, peeling vegetables for this lunch they were going to give the bloody Walkers. He could see her large face through the leaded window, beaming as she shelled peas or some damn thing. She’d changed into one of her summer frocks, a loose flowing number with large red flowers on it that made her look like a seed packet.

He stared moodily at the goat, who was munching grass with that look of vacuous contentment animals of that sort always seemed to have. He was proud of the goat. He had bought it to keep that grass down, and with some fuzzy notion of making goat’s cheese, but it was the wrong sort. It ate the grass, though; it ate everything it came across. Like a lot of things, the goat didn’t seem to be working out as planned. Like the flowers.

How had bloody Walker got his phone number? Well, he supposed that if you had the means to find someone you also had the means to find out the telephone number. But why would you do that? No, the more he thought about it, the more worrying it was. He wished he’d had the nerve to say, No, you can’t come, sorry, we’re going away today for several months, sorry and all that. But he hadn’t said that, and now they were coming.

He had to calm down. It was all a coincidence. There were no loose ends. Everything had been tucked away neatly and cleverly. This was simply a blip.

The blip was due to arrive at one o’clock, so he went into the house to shower and shave and help Hilda.

The Walkers arrived on time, rolling in their BMW up the long, rutted track that ambled though the plane trees and the chestnuts up to the house. They paused at the gate to take it in. A sloping lawn stretched up to a long, double-storied thatched house with dormer windows set into the thatch and a terrace in front that ran the whole length.

“Very impressive,” said Fiona Walker.

“It’s called a chaumiere,” said Walker.

“How clever of you to know that,” she said. “ I didn’t know that. And what are those on the top of the house?”

She pointed to the long terra-cotta trough planted with flowers that ran along the ridge of the thatched roof.

“Irises,” said Walker. “It’s traditional in this neck of the woods.”

She looked at him admiringly. “You do know stuff, don’t you, Rod?” she said.

He shrugged. “Doesn’t hurt to know stuff.”

Walker was about to get out and open the gate when, on the terrace, George’s long bony figure uncurled itself from one of the chairs set beneath a large red beach umbrella. He waved and began walking towards them, down the gravel drive.

“You know,” said Fiona Walker, “I can’t even remember having met him. At all.”

“You probably did, at some do or other. But he’s not the most memorable person.”

“I’ll tell you what,” said Fiona Walker, “he’s not going to want to say goodbye to all this.”

“I know,” said Walker. George reached the gate and gave a little wave as he opened it. Walker gave a little wave of his own, put the car into gear, and they coasted up the drive, between the flower beds.