Питер Робинсон - Seven Years

“I suppose I shall have to pay her a visit,” I said, “assuming she did, as you suggested, keep on the house. I want to make sure she hasn’t come to any harm. It sounds as if she was worried about something, perhaps even frightened. The sudden drinking and all. It could have been caused by anxiety, stress or fear. And I don’t think she actually read the inscription in the Browning, though I’m convinced it was meant for her. There must have been other communications from this Barnes. Ones that did get through to her.”

Alice Langham looked at her watch. “Heavens, I really must get back to school or I’ll be sharing the same fate as Miss Scott, drink or no drink.”

I stood up, shook her hand and thanked her for her time and help.

“Will you... I mean, will you let me know if you find anything out?” she asked me before she left, a slight blush on her cheeks. She wrote something on a beer mat and passed it to me. “Perhaps it would be better if you phoned me at home rather than at the school. I’m in most evenings.”

“And if Mr. Langham answers?”

“There is no Mr. Langham. Not for some years.”

I didn’t enquire any further, partly because I didn’t want to know what fate had befallen Mr. Langham. I had long thought my battered old heart damaged beyond repair, but I must confess that the offending organ gave an unexpected flutter when Alice Langham lowered her eyes and handed me the beer mat. While I would never have dared to admit it, hardly even to myself, the prospect of talking to, and even perhaps seeing, the charming Ms. Langham again was not without its appeal. “I most certainly will,” I said. “As soon as I find anything out.”

As I drove back over the Humber Bridge, I glanced east towards where the estuary widened. Far below me, the Humber pilot’s boat guided a large cargo ship out to the North Sea. Once back on the Yorkshire side, I found a garage, filled up with petrol and asked directions to the address Alice Langham had given me.

I thought of Alice as I drove along the country lanes. It was a long time, more years than I cared to remember, since a woman, any woman, had had that sort of effect on me. I can’t describe it easily in words, but meeting her, talking with her, had been so natural that I felt as if I had been doing it all my life. Or that I wanted to do it all my life. I told myself there’s no fool like an old fool, remembered the days of depression and endless poetic outpourings after Charlotte had abandoned me for an engineering student all those years ago. Remembered how I had finally made the effort, pulled myself together and devoted myself to an academic career, subjugated my feelings and desires to the demands of dead languages and dead poets. Despite the connection I had felt with Alice, I knew I couldn’t progress any further. Doing so would involve a move on my part so heavily laden with the risk of rejection that I knew I could never make it.

It was a beautiful, clear day in late October, and the landscape was so flat that I could see for miles around me. I saw what I thought to be Marguerite Scott’s house long before I reached it, some distance down the road, standing very much alone in its several acres of grounds. When I got closer, I saw that the grounds were walled, and beyond the wall stood an area of woodland through which a drive wound its way to the front of the house. The house wasn’t as large as it had been in my imagination, but it was certainly a substantial dwelling. Victorian, I guessed, with a certain Gothic touch in turrets, gargoyles and gables. It certainly didn’t seem as if the place had ever been a farm; more likely it had once belonged to a member of the local gentry, and the family no doubt had to sell it after the war, when it became almost impossible for the old families to cling on to their estates without turning them into zoos or fairgrounds and opening them to the public. Though this place was grand enough, it wasn’t quite in that league. Nevertheless, it made me wonder again why somebody who lived in such a mansion would need, or want, to sell books to a second-hand bookshop.

I pulled up outside the front door and rang the bell. After I had been standing there a few moments enjoying the birdsong and the gentle breeze soughing through the leaves, the door opened and a woman I took to be Miss Scott stood before me. She didn’t match the version of my imagination in any way, save that her hair was blonde. It wasn’t piled up like a Hitchcock ice queen’s, however, but expensively layered. She was a slighter figure than I had imagined, too, wearing designer jeans, dangling earrings and black polo neck jumper. She was definitely attractive, but her face had a sort of pinched look about it. Or perhaps she was simply looking guarded because a stranger stood at her door. Suspicion loomed in her light brown eyes.

“Miss Scott?” I ventured. “Miss Marguerite Scott?”

“Who’s asking?”

“My name is Donald Aitcheson. You don’t know me, of course, but I assure you that I come only out of friendship and concern.” I was so glad to find her alive and well that I was quite forgetting how my arrival might have made her nervous or frightened. I wasn’t sure how to put her at her ease.

She frowned. “You what?”

“Perhaps if you’d let me come in I could explain.”

At that, she closed the door even more, as if to make a shield between us. “I think I’d rather you explained yourself first,” she said. “A woman can’t be too careful these days. You might look harmless enough, but...”

Her voice wasn’t low and husky, but somewhat nasal, and the Yorkshire vowels were definitely present. I gave her my best smile. “I can assure you, I am exactly as harmless as I look.”

“That remains to be seen. What do you want with me? Miss Scott is my school name. If you’re selling something I—”

“I’m not a salesman,” I said, reaching into my briefcase for the Browning, which I realized would probably be my passport into the house. I could tell that she recognized the book as soon as she saw the cover, but her expression gave no indication that she knew of the sinister and threatening inscription. She looked puzzled rather than apprehensive. I opened it to the flyleaf and held it up for her to see. She frowned as she read the words, put her hand to her mouth.

“Oh, my God,” she said. “I never saw that. I...”

“But it was yours?”

“Yes. It was sent to me. Where did you get it? What are you doing here?”

I looked pleadingly at her. “I’ll explain everything. May I?”

She stood aside. “Of course. I’m sorry. Please come in, Mr....?”

“Aitcheson,” I reminded her, following her through a cavernous hall into a cozy and comfortable sitting-room, decorated in light pastels, with a large, empty fireplace on the far wall, in front of which lay a sheepskin rug.

“Please sit down,” she said. “How did you find me?”

I sank into a deep armchair. “The school. Linford Hall. There was a book with the name stamped on it in the box you sold to Gorman, a biography of Mary Shelley, along with the Browning, of course, which I bought, also without seeing the inscription.”

“Gorman?”

“Yes, the second-hand book dealer.”

She looked completely blank, then recognition seemed to dawn. “A second-hand book dealer, you say? Well, well, the little devil.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I distinctly told Martha, the woman who comes in once a week to clean for me, to drop the box off at the Oxfam shop in town. She must have decided she could make a few extra pounds by selling the lot to this Gorman.”

“I see. Well, it couldn’t have been much. I wouldn’t be too hard on her.”

“Oh, I have no intention of being hard on her. Good cleaning ladies are hard to find these days. I’ll let it go by. And you? Are you the bookseller’s assistant or something? Are you here to tell me there was a valuable first edition among my books?”