Литагент HarperCollins - Postscript to Murder

When the railway had first come to Newtown it had not impinged on the original village but discreetly held to the banks of the Lea where the river-barge traffic had once flourished. But the Victorians too were entrepreneurs in terms of their future and soon houses were needed to accommodate those whose business interests might lie in the City of London but whose horizons encompassed a wider land of England beyond the green woods and sleepy hamlets of the home counties. Railways brought trade and prosperity till even the squat little widow of Windsor was moved to approve, and with that blessing of crown and country, villas rose fast along the new steel lines which conveyed not only freight to the Midlands but also ladies eager to sample the delights of shopping in Oxford Street.

George Meredith’s heroine, Diana of the Crossways, complained to one enthusiast: ‘How I hate your railways … Cutting up the land and scarring its countenance for ever, its beauty will never be the same again

If these, not unmodern, sentiments had echoed over the century they had never struck any chord in Newtown, which had gone on grasping at commercial straws, both long and short, right down to the present recession. However, No. 2, Albert Crescent had not been one of the victims of this particular turn of fortune. There had never been money enough to convert it, unlike its neighbours, during the upsurge of the eighties, into a gold brick of plush offices for financial consultants and insurance brokers. Under the heel of circumstance these now had a tarnished look, gilt peeling from gingerbread, while No. 2 still stood in all its decayed splendour, an honourable relic.

‘I like it,’ Mary had said as soon as she saw it. ‘Far better-looking and half the price of those awful boxes on the estate where your friends the Lorimers live, and just look at the length of the back garden … Why, it goes right down to a river …’

‘Once you’ve fought your way through the undergrowth, yes, that’s the Lea, all right. A puddle of slime enriched with beer cans …’

‘You’ve never seen the Liffey,’ said Mary, complacently, ‘nor the East River for that matter. I guess we can clean up a little brook like the Lea. If we buy this house, Lennox, I’ll go half on the purchase price …’

‘You bloody won’t …’ But of course he’d been overruled, despite the fact that when she had stood up at the altar Mary Madeleine Blane had promised to obey.

He should not have been surprised, for this woman he had married – perhaps against his better judgement – was still an unknown quantity. When he asked her to marry him he knew it went against all his reason to do so; had he stopped to think he never would have made such a proposal …

But he had not stopped to think because he was caught up in the age-old folly which had nothing to commend or excuse it, except the fact that he was in love.

She came out from the drawing room when she heard him in the hall. Her kiss of greeting was by no means perfunctory.

‘You told John Upshire?’ she asked. ‘What did he have to say?’

‘Not a lot. You know what policemen are like.’

‘Oh, I do, I do …’ When she smiled, as she did now at the thought behind his words, her plain features lit up like a glint of sun on a cloudy day. ‘They’ve the face on them puts us all in the wrong. Let’s have some coffee, it’s just made.’

‘Does he think it’s me that’s to blame?’ she said later, as they sat by the fireside.

Kemp held nothing back from this new wife of his. ‘He did wonder about the possibility but I soon scotched that one. You and I have seen those letters, it’s me they’re aimed at.’

‘But why now, Lennox? Whoever’s writing them, they’re obsessed with some grievance against you.’

‘Well, I only wish they’d come out in the open with it.’

‘But that’s not the way it is with an obsession. It blocks the light of day for people, like a great wall. And it’s a wall that’s maybe been building up over a long time.’

Kemp looked across at her. She sat holding her coffee cup in both hands, frowning slightly at the effort of putting thoughts into exact words because when she was serious only the right words would do. It was one of the first things he had noticed about her during the short time she acted as his secretary, her way with words. Later, of course, he had realized that such adroit handling of the tools of speech could be put to many uses.

‘That’s why I’m wondering why they’re being sent now,’ Mary went on, ‘because something must have triggered them off, and the only thing I can think of is that you got married. Is there some woman in your life who might resent it?’

‘Whom I have cast aside like a worn-out glove?’ said Kemp, airily. ‘Oh, they must be thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks in Vallombrosa, the women I’ve abandoned … Come off it, Mary, the only woman who has been affected by my marriage is yourself, and if I may say so, you’ve taken it rather well.’

‘You mean I have bettered myself, being rescued from a life of crime and marrying the boss into the bargain? Sounds quite a romantic fiction …’ But he could see she was only laughing at him as he went over and sat on the hearthrug at her feet. She curled her fingers in the tufts of hair on his forehead. ‘You’re getting a bit thin on top,’ she said. ‘I don’t see you as a breaker of hearts, Lennox, but I was serious about the letter-writer maybe being a woman, it’s a way women have …’

‘Willing to wound and yet afraid to strike … I don’t think that was said of a woman.’

‘Oh, you and your quotations … I’m serious, Lennox. You’ve been involved with women in a lot of your cases, not only the matrimonial ones. There must be someone out there who is bitter.’

‘It wasn’t a woman in the van that skedaddled the other night, and I don’t see a woman pushing firelighters through a door at seven in the morning. Much too obvious.’

‘She would have help, of course. Women don’t often act alone.’

‘You did, Mary Madeleine …’ Kemp could not see the point of never alluding to her past life; it was there before them both and, as he had accepted her, so it had become part of his life also.

‘I had grown used to being alone. It was the only way to survive … then …’

‘And now?’

Her face glowed in the firelight as she looked down at him.

‘Ah, now I’ve found a better way …’

‘No more talk then …’

But when he kissed her eyelids he saw first the fear in her eyes and knew what she was thinking. As he had once been afraid for her life so she was now for his.

Perhaps he should take more seriously what she had been saying, perhaps he should look back over his past cases, ransack his memory to find cause enough for someone to send him such poison through the post. He knew many of the phrases by heart, so often had they been repeated.

‘You’ll get your comeuppance, never fear …’

‘You wrecked lives, Kemp, let’s see yours get wrecked …’

‘I’ll get even if it’s the last thing I do …’

‘Vengeance is mine. I’ve waited long enough …’

Such sentences recurred over and over again in the six letters he had received during the last months, interspersed with more specific threats, a knife in the back, a breaking of bones, death by a variety of methods, all violent, couched in language not easily identifiable. There were misspellings, of course, but they could have been deliberate. ‘Comeuppance’ – not a word in everyday use – had been spelt correctly, as if a dictionary had been used but if so, why make other mistakes? There was a certain literary quality about the style, even semicolons were scattered about, and the grammatical errors looked false. Despite such contrivances the words flowed as if the writer knew very well what he or she was about, and feeling came through almost too well – a spillage of hate bursting its banks.