Tim Binding - Island Madness

“She went to keep me company, Mr Luscombe. Daughters do that sometimes, keep their fathers company, for no other reason. It is sufficient unto itself.”

Ned made no comment. “And then?”

“Then we walked back along the front. Once home I went back to my study and she went upstairs for a nap. Later I went to change for dinner, she was running a bath. She helped me with my bow tie. I have never been very good at that. Before I left I knocked on her door. But she wouldn’t let me in.”

“Why not?”

“She said she wasn’t decent. I was always very sensitive to those sorts of things, propriety, decorum, the feelings of a young woman. I understood more than she thought, more than I let on. It is not in my nature to let on.” He took another drink, satisfied. “So I talked to her through the door. She told me not to wait up. That she’d be home late.”

Ned balanced two beer mats together, then catching van Dielen’s disapproving eye quickly laid them back on the surface. “So you weren’t worried when she didn’t come home.”

“No. She had stayed over once or twice before.”

“You didn’t mind?” Ned asked, aware of the hypocrisy of the question.

“In war, Inspector, behaviour that would not be acceptable in peacetime seems quite ordinary, quite understandable. Necessary, even.”

“Did she ever stay with her aunt?”

“Her aunt! She’d rather sleep next to her blessed horse.”

“They didn’t get on?”

“They couldn’t stand each other, didn’t you know?”

“I knew they were never close, but not…yet Mrs Hallivand invited her round for coffee?”

Van Dielen laughed.

“Isobel was funny about that. ‘I’ve half a mind not to go,’ she said. ‘Then don’t,’ I told her.”

He brushed the seat of his trousers. Criticism of others was a task demanding precision and calm. “I’ve no time for the woman myself. An ageing social flirt, if you ask my opinion. ‘No need to bow down to the old crow on my account,’ I told her. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I think I will. Just to see her squirm’.”

“Squirm? I don’t understand.”

“Apparently Marjorie was desperate to be invited to the Major’s homecoming.” He swivelled on his stool, spilling brandy on his trousers. “The woman’s quite besotted with him, you know. She even has embroidered a picture of him looking out over the sea like some latter-day Bonny Prince Charlie, though she keeps it well hidden. Isobel chanced upon it that morning all tucked away at the bottom of some needlework basket. We had a good laugh about that. Though she never said as much, Marjorie did not entirely approve of Isobel’s association with the Major.”

“And what did you think of it, Mr van Dielen?”

“I didn’t force the Major on her. Isobel would have liked him, whatever his nationality.”

“But for you, it must have been helpful.”

“Helpful?”

“For your business.”

“That was not the reason I allowed it. There would have been others who, had she shown interest, would have made it more helpful.”

“Like?”

Van Dielen gestured across the road.

“He was always inviting himself over. Isobel found him repulsive.”

“And you do not. If I remember our conversation correctly, you were quite vocal in your admiration.”

“We work well together.”

“Forgive me for saying so, but don’t you ever worry what will happen when they…”

“Lose?” Van Dielen’s voice was deliberately shrill. “No. When this is over my skills will be needed more than ever. If not here then some other, more ravaged quarter. There will be opportunity aplenty for the van Dielens to ply our trade.”

“You speak as if there were more than just you.”

“I always hoped that Isobel might find a husband who could come into the business, bear a son who would add further lustre to our endeavours.”

“And what did she think of such an idea?”

“I never told her. What would be the point? But it was always on the cards that she might meet someone who might have appreciated the firm’s potential. There used to be money here, Mr Luscombe, investors’ money, bankers’ money, waves of it washing in with the tide. In time I dare say there will be again.”

“An empire, then, is what you’re after?”

Van Dielen considered the idea for a moment. “The English Empire is exhausted, the German Empire stillborn and America has not sufficient moral backbone to engage in such an enterprise. Commerce, business, finance, these will be the new conquistadores, not nation states, but manufacturers, engineers. A construction company straddling Europe, Africa, building roads and bridges, towns and cities, employing thousands, its arms stretching to the furthest corners of the globe? Why not?”

“And you hoped Isobel would be part of your plan?”

“No. But she was good for the business, young, attractive, the daughter of a moderately wealthy and successful man. Clients liked coming to dinner when she was here.”

“Which is why you did not discourage her with the Major.”

“Perhaps.”

He starled to drink heavily again and the dark liquid sat on his lips and swam in his eyes.

“Ask me no more questions now. I have a daughter dead, Mr Luscombe, and I need to drink to that, to take it abroad this grey windswept isle and tell her mother that Isobel will soon be joining her. I have to tell her that and then listen to her curses rising from the ground. She never wanted to be here. Every day she would go down to the sea and swim out as far as she could. I asked her one day why. “I am trying to escape,” she said. I thought she was joking. She came here and she died here and now my daughter has followed in her footsteps. Leave me to my troubled peace, I implore you.”

“As soon as I am able, Mr van Dielen. It is just…”

“What?”

“I ought to search her room.”

Van Dielen waved him away. “Well, what’s keeping you. You know where it is, I believe.”

Ned was unable to move.

“Ach. You look so discomforted! Daughters write diaries, Mr Luscombe, diaries left in the imagined privacy of their bottom drawers. And suspicious fathers read them. You may well blush, for they were fulsome epistles. I was all for ending it there and then, if not on moral grounds then at least economie ones, but Marjorie told me to rest my peace, that by next season it would be all over. So I took her advice, the only time I believe that I have ever done so. Perhaps I should not have listened to her, after all. Go on with you, up to her room. I have matters to discuss with the Major as regards her burial.”

Her room had not changed: the long walnut fitted wardrobe that ran the length of one wall, the brightly coloured striped rug which had come from the Sudan, and in the middle of the narrow bed a pair of striped pyjamas folded neatly on the pillow. Next to the bedside table, overlooking the front road, stood the writing desk, replete with inkstand, gold-nibbed Conway Stewart fountain pen and matching light-blue stationery, with the initials vD embossed at the head. It was typical of the man that he should fly in the face of ridicule and be the proud Standard bearer of such socially unacceptable initials. Ned fingered the mark. Above the fresh sheet lay a slight tear of paper still attached to the gum. Must see you. Sunday morning, 11 o’clock. Usual place. Must see you . He took the note she had sent out of its envelope and smoothed it out over the notepad. It fitted perfectly; the last note she had written, then. But written when? When she had come back from Mrs Hallivand? With her father had knocking on her door?

Putting the letter back in his pocket he pulled open the drawer. More notepaper, more envelopes; a bottle of permanent black ink, a bottle of washable blue, a box of rubber bands, a tub of glue, a pencil, a green India rubber. No diary.