William Trevor - Death in Summer

‘When you dozed, madam -’

‘I slept for longer than I thought. When I woke up I thought maybe a minute or two. But it was half an hour, perhaps three-quarters even. I didn’t know that until Zenobia brought me in from the garden, until I asked what time it was.’

‘And there was nothing unusual when you looked about the garden, madam? Nothing that struck you?’

‘Only that Georgina wasn’t there any more.’

‘Is it a regular thing for you to sit out in that particular place in the afternoon? With the baby?’

‘Yes, it has been.’

‘Every day?’

‘Yes.’

‘You show me, madam? If you would.’

They stand at the french windows. She points at the deckchair and the rug beneath the catalpa tree. WPC Denise Flynn steps out on to the paving outside, then hurries on the upper lawn. Bounding about around her, Rosie drops her ball, then picks it up and drops it again.

‘That dog all right, sir?’ the man in uniform asks sharply, the first time he has spoken, and Thaddeus says Rosie’s all right.

‘He wasn’t here, did you say, sir?’ the other man inquires. ‘The dog was out with you?’

‘Yes, she was.’

‘And you were gone, how long, sir?’

‘A couple of hours.’

‘Out for a walk, sir?’

‘No. We were in the car.’

Something stirs in Mrs. Iveson’s consciousness, a sense of experiencing, not long ago, questioning like this. Having pointed at the deckchair in which she fell asleep, she hasn’t sat down again. She stands between the two french windows, the fingertips of her left hand lightly touching the surface of the table with Letitia’s photograph on it. She doesn’t feel groggy any more, but that support is there if she needs it. Inspector Ogle, it suddenly comes to her: Inspector Henry Ogle asked questions like the ones the present man is asking, and there was something he wasn’t satisfied about with Miss Amble’s replies. That was happening when she dropped off.

‘The gentleman who let us in, sir. Is he — he would look after things here, sir?’

‘Maidment and his wife are employed in the house.’

‘And did the Maidments look for the child, madam, when they heard your distress?’

‘Maidment did. I told him to. We knew then Georgina couldn’t possibly have crawled away, but he looked all the same. He even went down the drive.’

‘And before that you were aware, Mrs. Iveson, of no vehicle drawing away from the drive? Nothing like that?’

‘No.’

The policewoman returns. She doesn’t shake her head, or comment. The man who isn’t asking the questions glances at her but there is no exchange, not even of a look.

‘I came here,’ Mrs. Iveson says, ‘to look after Georgina. We were going to have a nanny, but we changed our minds.’

It isn’t relevant. She doesn’t know why she volunteered information not prompted by a question. She sees herself for a moment, dropping off in her deckchair, old and stupid, not up to a simple task. No matter what their shortcomings, the girls they interviewed would not have fallen asleep.

‘We have an alert out, of course,’ the man says. ‘That was relayed at once. May I ask, sir, if it is a usual practice for you to take the dog with you in the car at that time of day? Are you normally away, sir, of an afternoon?’

‘I’m almost always here.’

The man nods, with what seems like satisfaction. By the look of things, he concludes aloud, today was chosen specially.

‘Notice anyone about the place, sir? Hanging about, even a while back, madam?’

They both say no, are asked to think for a moment, and then say no again.

‘My wife was well off,’ Thaddeus adds.

‘And that is generally known, sir? Locally?’

‘I think it probably is.’

‘If we might question your couple now, sir?’

The room goes silent when Thaddeus leads them from it. She gazes across mallows and garish cosmos at the empty deckchair, her book on the grass beside it. Her reading glasses are there too, although she cannot see them.

‘A telephone call may come,’ Thaddeus says, returning. ‘We are not to answer it until there’s been time for one of them to get to an extension.’

‘They think Georgina’s been kidnapped?’ The word, so often encountered in the novels she reads, so often heard on the radio and the television, and come across in newspapers, feels alien on her lips. ‘A ransom demand?’ she says, and it sounds absurd.

‘Yes, that’s what they mean.’

‘We must pay, Thaddeus.’

‘They say we mustn’t.’

She moves across the room, to sit again on the sofa.

‘We have the money. What does it matter, parting with it?’

‘More likely, they say, tomorrow’s post will bring a note. More likely than a phone call. But they say you never know.’

Did the two who were so silent in the drawing-room contribute something to the conversation on the way to the kitchen, or is this just Thaddeus’s way of putting it? She wonders, caught up with an unimportant detail, unable for a moment to shake it off, and then it goes.

‘I should at least have heard a car.’

‘I doubt it would have driven up. The Maidments heard nothing either.’

‘Negligent is what they’ll say.’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

He says something else, she does not listen.

‘My God, how could I have?’ she whispers, and there is silence in the room again.

‘From a window,’ Maidment says. ‘I happened to be passing. I happened to look out.’

‘And when was this, sir?’

‘The day the knives came back.’ Maidment turns to his wife. ‘Thursday week, was it?’

‘It was Thursday week the knives came back.’ And Zenobia adds for the policeman’s benefit: ‘The kitchen knives resharpened.’

‘And what exactly did you see, sir?’

‘Nothing, to tell the truth. It was the dog drew my attention.’

‘And why was that, Mr. Maidment?’

‘The dog was interested, but I couldn’t ascertain why. Her tail was going.’

‘Your view was obscured, sir?’

‘It’s a long way off. You have to see through trees.’

‘And we’re to presume Mr. Davenant himself was elsewhere at the time? And the lady also?’

‘They were in the house.’

‘But although you didn’t actually see anyone you formed the impression that there was someone there because the dog was wagging her tail?’

‘He thought he noticed a movement,’ Zenobia answers for her husband. ‘He said it later. No more than some disturbance, he said.’

‘And this is where in the garden?’

‘There’s a door in the wall. An archway with wistaria, beyond the plum trees.’

Hearing this, the two uniformed officers leave the kitchen. ‘Nothing like that today?’ their superior pursues his questioning when they have gone. ‘Nothing out of the way?’

‘Nothing.’

Maidment responds at once, Zenobia after a moment’s thought. ‘Nothing,’ she says too.

‘Did you report the Thursday sighting in the garden, sir?’

‘How d’you mean, report?’

‘Did you mention it to Mr. Davenant?’

‘There wasn’t much to report. In a manner of speaking.’

‘He said he would mention it,’ Zenobia intervenes, ‘if he had a suspicion that anyone came in by that door another time.’

‘It’s unusual, is it, for people to come into the garden this way?’

Unusual for an outsider, Zenobia agrees, and Maidment adds:

‘Mr. Davenant slips in and out on the odd occasion, and Mrs. Davenant did in her time. Taking the dog down to the stream.’

‘This door leads to the stream?’

‘There’s a path by the edge of the fields, going by the spinney to the lane. Or you can go on straight down to the stream.’