Hammond Innes - Solomons Seal

‘Two,’ I said, ‘so it may pay to auction them. I’ll be going up to London on Friday, and if I have time, I’ll look in on a dealer I know and get his advice.’

He nodded. ‘Well, I’m sure you’ll do the best you can for her.’ He was turning to go, and I reminded him about the house and that I’d need the key. ‘Ah, yes, I should have told you. She left it with a Mrs Clegg next door, a house called Wherry Haven.’ And he added, ‘Have a good lunch, and if you’re being asked to deal with anything local, you might remind Rowlinson we did the conveyance on his present residence.’

It was well past one when I got to the factory on the Maldon road. They were standing around in the boardroom, and a girl was serving drinks. All the directors were there, including Chips’s wife, Bessie, a nice homely woman, but with a very good head for business. Shortly after they were married, the two of them had begun smoking salmon in a shed attached to their cottage on the Blackwater, using the traditional oak chips, which was how he got his nickname. That was the start of it all, and now even the new factory was too small for them. The board meeting had been considering details of the latest expansion programme, and they asked me about the availability of the adjoining land and its probable cost.

It was when we were having coffee that Bessie Rowlinson drew me aside and said, ‘You realise what this means. That sheep station will have to go. Chips is needed here. He can’t go out and see to the sale himself.’

And later, when I was leaving, Chips took me by the arm and saw me to my car. ‘Bessie had a word with you, did she? When do you think you can leave?’

‘As soon as I’ve got my visa.’

‘Your firm agrees?’

‘Not exactly.’ And I told him the result of my interview with the senior partner.

‘I see.’ He looked at me, a sly little smile. ‘But you’re not worried.’

‘No, not really. It’s time I moved on.’

He nodded. ‘Good. I’ll dictate a letter of agreement for you this afternoon.’

Three hours later I had cleared my desk and was on the A12 driving north to Aldeburgh. It was a bright, still evening, and the house when I reached it looked less neglected with its brickwork glowing in the slanting rays of the sun. Wherry Haven was only a few yards down the road. I had phoned Mrs Clegg that afternoon, and as she handed me the keys, she said, ‘I’ll be glad when it’s sold. My husband didn’t think I should be saddled with the responsibility, not at my age, but I couldn’t very well refuse. First her father, then that poor brother of hers. She needed to get away.’

She was grey-haired, her hands showing signs of rheumatism, but her eyes were bright and intelligent, her movements still energetic. ‘How long have you known the Hollands?’ I asked.

‘Let me see now. We came here when my husband retired. He was very keen on sailing. That was just over four years ago, and they came soon after.’

‘You knew her father then?’

She nodded. ‘He used to walk down to the yacht club and chat with us while we were working on the boat. We had a small twenty-footer then. He had lived a lot of his life abroad. In Papua New Guinea.’

‘He came to England when his wife died, I believe.’

‘Yes. But he never talked about that. She was killed, you see. By the natives. It was a very primitive place, and they had some sort of cult. Something to do with ships and cargo.’ She hesitated as though trying to remember something, then went on: ‘The Hollands were a shipping family, that’s why he was interested in boats. He’d have a drink with us sometimes, and then he’d talk about the incredible blackness of the people, the incessant rain and the war, when his father had lived close under an active volcano and had fought the Japanese, things like that. It was all very interesting and colourful. But he never told us what happened. He was a strange man, very withdrawn, very nervy. And that poor boy. You’d never think they were father and son, would you?’

‘I never met either of them,’ I said, wondering what she meant.

‘Oh, well, if you’d seen them together. The father was quite a dull little man, very English in his manner. But that son of his with his red hair, those strangely flattened features, and the eyes … you’ve met Miss Holland, haven’t you?’ And when I nodded, she said, ‘Yes, I thought I saw you here about a fortnight ago, before she left. She has something of the same features. Very striking, don’t you think — unusual?’ She was suddenly silent, as though she had been trying to convey something to me and was at a loss for words. ‘Oh, well, I mustn’t keep you. You’ll bring back the keys.’ And she added, ‘I hope it’s sold soon. I never liked the house — inside, I mean. All those terrible carvings.’

The first thing I noticed when I went into the house was that the carvings had gone, and most of the pictures, too. I went through it quickly, noting down the rough measurements of the rooms and drafting out the sale notice. The reddening sun cast a lurid light, and the empty, abandoned feel of the place made even a professional visit seem like an unwarranted intrusion. It didn’t take me long to check the contents against the inventory I had made on the previous visit. All the furniture was still there, but she had cleared out every drawer. No papers, no photographs, nothing to show the sort of people who had occupied the place. She had made a clean sweep of everything. Even the loft was empty. The trunk she had mentioned was gone, presumably into store. The place was dusty, still hanging in cobwebs, and in a corner close under the rafters my torch picked out a small pile of books. They were most of them old Army manuals, a copy of Queen’s Regulations, some pictures of Sandhurst, one of a group of cadets, several dinner menus. And then, tucked into the pages of a book called Black Writing from New Guinea , I found the photograph of a man in khaki shirt and shorts, a black and white picture taken against a background of round thatched huts exuding smoke in the shadow of sombre mountains.

I took it down with me to the window of the room that had been her bedroom. The picture had been taken in the fading evening light when the cooking fires were burning in the thatched village, the whole scene very dark, no humans, only that single figure and a pig with its tail up scurrying away from him. But some trick of the light, a shaft of sunlight perhaps shining through a gap in the mountains, illumined the man’s face. He was a young man, clean-shaven, hair standing up like a brush on his bare head, and the face rather square, a jutting jaw and wide-set eyes above a flattened pugilistic nose. It was a face that was both pugnacious and gentle, the nose and jaw contrasting oddly with the appearance of almost childlike innocence, the overall impression one of clean-living boyishness.

I looked up from the picture and saw her as I had last seen her, sitting on the window ledge staring out to sea, the same brooding, dreamy look, the same nose and jaw, only the hair different. They must have been very alike, the way twins are; I knew why she had gone then, understood her purpose, and it scared me, so that without thinking I stuffed the picture into my pocket and hurried downstairs, out into the fresh air, closing the front door behind me.

The sun was setting now, the sky cloud-galleoned and flaring red. The stillness and the brilliance, the peace of an East Anglian summer evening — my mood changed. The sense of something appalling and beyond my comprehension that had clung to those empty walls was gone. Like a bad dream, I could not even recall what it was that had so disturbed me, just the memory of her face and how she had stared out towards the sea.