Element of Chance

CHAPTER 5

SHORTLY AFTER half past five Alison put on her coat. The sky had grown leaden, it promised to be a chilly evening. As she opened her office door she saw Hazel Ratcliff going briskly by with a handful of papers. Hazel paused and gave her a sharp look.

‘You won’t forget about the meeting, Mrs Rolt?’

‘Of course not,’ Alison said. ‘Half past seven, I’ll be there.’

Hazel’s features relaxed slightly. ‘I hope it doesn’t rain,’ she said in a more affable tone. ‘But it seems as if it’s going to.’

‘You’ll have your work cut out to get home and back again for half past seven,’ Alison said.

‘I shan’t even try,’ Hazel said with energy. ‘It would be impossible with the buses as they are now.’ She jerked her head in the direction of her own room. ‘I’ve brought extra sandwiches. I’ll stay on here and catch up with a bit of work till it’s time for the meeting.’

I do believe I detected a faint increase in warmth in her manner, Alison thought with satisfaction as she went off down the stairs. She paused for a moment. Perhaps she ought to ask Hazel to join her for a meal, it might be a good move.

But she wasn’t going to eat at home herself. There was hardly any food in the flat and she didn’t in the least feel like battling round the streets in a last-minute effort to shop. She was going to call in at the Mayflower café for a snack and a chance to sit back and draw her breath before the rigours of the evening.

No, she would eat alone. She set off again down the stairs. It really would be altogether too much to ask that she should take Hazel along to the Mayflower and sit opposite her while she chomped her way through a mountain of baked beans.

Large drops of rain were starting to fall as Colin Viner pushed his way out of the supermarket. Still undecided how to deal with the flatness of the evening opening out before him, he took a firmer grip of his shopping bag and began to mooch along the pavement.

A flurry of rain drove him into a doorway; he turned and glanced at the shop window and saw that it was in fact a café. His spirits rose fractionally. He could go inside and have a cup of tea, give himself time to consider how to kill the next few hours.

The place was almost full but there was a table for two over against the wall with one empty chair. The young woman occupying the other chair leaned forward to pick something up and Viner saw her more clearly. A good-looking girl, long dark hair gleaming under the light. She sat back in her chair again and looked idly out at the street. A slightly olive skin, large dark eyes.

He felt a stir in some quarter of his brain, a teasing half-recollection. Oddly combined with a strong flavour of distaste. He frowned. Had he seen her before? Here, in Barbourne? No, surely not, for that would mean he had come across her in the last week or two and he couldn’t have forgotten her so soon.

He pushed open the café door. Half-a-dozen people came towards him from the direction of the cash desk, anxious for buses and home. An elderly woman, hurrying a little too fast, caught the heel of her shoe against a chair leg and almost fell to the floor, saving herself at the last moment by clutching at the trim waist of a very tall upright old man in front of her.

‘God bless my soul!’ the old man said in loud clear tones, feeling himself encircled for the first time in twenty-five years in a powerful feminine embrace. Tins and packets cascaded from the woman’s holdall, rattling and bouncing between the agitated feet of customers pressing towards the exit.

‘I’m ever so sorry,’ the woman said in a deeply humiliated voice. Viner bent down to pick up the groceries. A small cardboard drum had rolled under one of the tables so that he had to kneel and fish it out, murmuring apologies to the occupants of the table, who continued to consult their menus without paying the slightest attention to either himself or what they clearly considered an ill-bred little uproar.

I suppose I’d better be going, Alison thought, roused from her reverie by some minor commotion at the other side of the tearoom. She looked about, gathered up her things. Rain no longer blew against the window, the sky was beginning to clear. She wouldn’t bother taking a bus, she had time to walk.

As she came away from the cash desk she became aware of a tall young man getting up from his knees a couple of yards away, giving her a rueful grin. He was helping some old duck with her gear. He shepherded her to the door and then turned back into the café, looking over at Alison, almost as if he knew her.

She was faintly puzzled. Was he someone she ought to recognize? Some client from the agency – or from her days at Tyler’s perhaps? Then all at once she knew him. Good heavens! Colin Viner! After how many years?

She swung round to face him, laughing. ‘Colin!’ she said. ‘It is Colin Viner, isn’t it?’ It must be twelve or thirteen years since she’d last seen him. He’d been a couple of forms above her at Chaddesley Grammar School; she’d had to leave, had been transferred to the Barbourne school when her father had taken a post as art lecturer at the Barbourne College of Art. It was just herself and her father by then; her mother had died during an influenza epidemic three years before.

He was beside her now, smiling down at her, striving to recall her name. Just when he thought he’d have to confess he couldn’t remember it, his brain flung up the long-ago syllables.

‘Alison!’ he said in triumph. ‘Alison Lloyd!’ It came to him in the same moment that he hadn’t known her all that well, she was a couple of years younger than he was. And it came to him also that he hadn’t much liked her. But the reason for his dislike – that eluded him.

‘I’m not Alison Lloyd any more,’ she said. ‘I’m Alison Rolt. I got married a few years ago.’ She pulled a face. ‘Not a very good idea, it came unstuck.’

People began to push past them. ‘We’d better move,’ he said. He walked beside her to the door, came out and stood on the windy pavement.

‘What are you doing in Barbourne?’ she asked. ‘Do you live here now?’

‘I was transferred here a few weeks ago. I’m in the police. A detective sergeant, to be precise.’

She made a little grimace of affected awe. ‘Fancy!’ She scrutinized his face with a candour left over from the shared days of childhood. ‘You haven’t really changed all that much.’

‘Come and have a drink this evening,’ he suggested. Infinitely better than sitting alone in his lodgings. ‘Or dinner,’ he said. ‘We could have a good old gossip.’

She shook her head. ‘This evening’s no good. I have a committee meeting.’ She laughed. ‘It’s not really my style. I’ve been roped in to help with the Charities Fair. But I could make it another evening. Tomorrow – or Wednesday.’

‘Wednesday then,’ he said. ‘The Montrose Hotel? Seven-thirty?’

William Yoxall was the first member of the Charities Fair Committee to arrive at the Fords’ house. Robin Ford answered his ring at the door and ushered him into the dining room, where his parents were engaged in some last-minute rearrangement of the furniture.

‘It’s no good,’ Beryl Ford was saying sharply as Yoxall came in. ‘That trolley will have to go out, otherwise someone is going to have to sit on top of the sideboard.’ She gave Yoxall a distracted glance. ‘You here already? It’s not gone seven, surely?’

‘No,’ he said soothingly. ‘You’ve plenty of time. I’m on the early side.’

‘You can give me a hand with this then,’ Arthur Ford said. He jerked his head at the side table, laden now with china, cutlery, silverware. Plates of fancy biscuits, little cakes elaborately iced.

‘Certainly.’ Yoxall took one end of the table and heaved it back under Arthur’s directions into a more convenient position.

‘Always the same,’ Arthur said with philosophic joviality. ‘Beryl can never settle down to enjoy a social evening unless she’s made one hell of a domestic upset first.’

‘Another couple of chairs from the sitting room,’ Beryl said to Robin. ‘Those two straight chairs by the window.’ She darted an anxious glance into the mirror above the hearth, raised both hands and stabbed at her carefully constructed hairdo. She was wearing a tight-fitting dress of electric blue crepe festooned with pleated whorls and frills that did nothing for her bony figure.

‘That’s it then,’ Arthur said forcefully a few minutes later. ‘If you’re not satisfied now you never will be. Come on, Robin, we’ll make ourselves scarce before your mother has time to think up a fresh move.’

‘Come into the kitchen,’ Beryl said to Yoxall. ‘You can talk to me while I get on with one or two jobs. Oh – I was nearly forgetting,’ she added on a higher note. ‘You’ll never guess who Hazel Ratcliff has got to take over the Art stall.’ She flung William a look full of challenge. ‘Go on! See if you can tell me!’

‘I’ve no idea,’ William said mildly.

‘Mrs Rolt! There,’ she added as she saw his eyes blink open. ‘I knew you’d be surprised. She’s coming along this evening.’ She led the way into the kitchen. ‘We must have everything just so for her ladyship.’ She reached into a cupboard and took out a coffee percolator with important movements. ‘I’m not having her go away and say she found anything to criticize.’

‘No, indeed.’

‘I expect you think her very good-looking,’ Beryl said, almost accusatory.

‘She certainly has a striking appearance.’ His tone lacked enthusiasm. ‘I can’t say I greatly admire that type.’

‘My own opinion exactly,’ Beryl said with energy. ‘Altogether too exotic for my taste.’ She pulled down the corners of her mouth. ‘Her mother was a foreigner, I understand. A Greek, I believe.’

William nodded with a reflective air. Then he looked about him. ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’

She sent a harassed glance round the room. ‘No, not really.’ She banged things down on to a tray. ‘That wretched creature Yardley phoned again to ask if he could serve on the committee,’ she said suddenly. ‘He’s got a nerve! After the way I choked him off last time, I really couldn’t credit that he’d ask again. He sounded as if he’d had more than enough to drink and that was at five o’clock in the afternoon.’

‘I hope you weren’t too hard on him,’ William said. At forty-two Yoxall was too young to have served in the war, but he had some kind of notion of what things had been like for Brian Yardley.

Now turned fifty, gaunt and greying, Yardley had been a local hero in 1940 when William was a child at primary school. A Battle of Britain pilot, shot down in the final days of that epic struggle, appallingly burned, put together again afterwards over a long period punctuated with bouts of despair and bitterness, Yardley had eventually forced himself to surface once more into the life of Barbourne, take his grotesque face – that had been so pleasing to look at when he had climbed into his plane that August day – and his disfigured body about the streets and thoroughfares. A course, William had often thought, requiring very nearly as much courage as anything Yardley had done in the war.

‘I’ve no patience with him,’ Beryl said. No, you haven’t, Yoxall thought. She would never trouble to look below the surface disorder of the personality that now served Yardley in some sort of fashion as his last remaining shield against the terrors of existence; she couldn’t be bothered to show mercy to the disturbed, distressed soul underneath.

‘He’s still trading on his war service,’ she said, ‘even if he doesn’t mention it. We’re all supposed to overlook the fact that he’s half drunk half the time.’

Yardley had tried his hand at a number of jobs in the painful time of his attempts at readjustment. He had succeeded at none of them. For the last few years he had run a small antique business; he seemed to be making a living out of it. At all events he hadn’t yet gone bankrupt.

‘It wouldn’t have done any harm to let him help with the Fair,’ Yoxall said.

Beryl made a sound of distaste. ‘He simply wants to be noticed. Anything to get attention. He’s prepared to force himself on people—’ She was interrupted by a ring at the front door. ‘I’ll go and answer that.’ She glanced at Yoxall. ‘You’d better go on into the dining room.’

‘Why, Mrs Rolt!’ he heard her exclaim a few moments later in a voice like syrup dripping from the blade of a knife. ‘How very nice to see you! Do come in. I was delighted when Hazel rang to tell me …’

I’d forgotten the atmosphere of this house, Alison thought as she suffered the attentions of Mrs Ford. She remembered all at once how it had seemed to her when she was a junior at CeeJay, sent to the house with some query when Arthur Ford was absent from the office because of a passing indisposition. Cramped and crowded as if some manic interior decorator had attempted to fill every inch of space.

And covers on everything that could conceivably be covered: the telephone, radio magazines, the backs of chairs, tops of furniture, even the seat in the lavatory. And what wasn’t hidden away was caged or confined, barricaded behind the doors of built-in fitments, thrust into decorated containers and canisters, enclosed in glass, fenced in behind metal grilles.

It hadn’t changed much since she had last stepped over the threshold. New carpets, a more violent shade of paint, wallpaper of a different but equally restless pattern; the essentials remained the same.

The doorbell rang again. Cars drew up outside. Beryl’s face took on a glow of pleasurable concentration as she darted about, admitting, ushering, chattering.

‘Seven o’clock!’ she cried as the clock on the mantelshelf chimed, just when she was closing the door of the dining room behind the last arrival. ‘All ready to start on time!’

An hour and a half later when the arguing, feuding and jostling for position had reached a temporary lull, Arthur put his head round the door. ‘I hope I’m not disturbing the cogitations,’ he said jovially. He nodded greetings round the table. ‘I’m just off,’ he said to his wife. He jerked his head in the direction of the outside world. ‘I shan’t be very late.’ He smiled expansively at the circle of faces. ‘Enjoy yourselves.’ His face vanished from the aperture.

‘We might as well take a break now,’ Beryl said as the front door closed behind him. Concentration had been effectively broken, refreshments would allow the combatants to restore themselves for the second half of the fray. She sprang to her feet and went out into the passage.

‘Robin!’ She sent a piercing shout into the upper regions. ‘Come down and give me a hand! ‘

He came down almost at once, made himself useful, handed cups and plates, talked politely to the committee members.

Alison accepted a canapé from the dish he held out. She gave him an unthinking, automatic smile. A faint flush rose in his cheeks. He lingered beside her, still holding out the dish.

‘Wake up there!’ Beryl called out sharply to him a few moments later. Alison caught her eye, briefly registered the quality of its gaze – controlling, possessive, more than a little tinged with suspicion and hostility. She looked up at Robin, flashed him another smile but this time fully switched on, brilliant.

‘I’ll have another of those,’ she said. ‘They’re delicious.’ She began to chat to him with animation, asked him about his interests, if he ever went to the theatre.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.