Island Madness (18 page)

“Good,” he said to his father. “Teil your daughter to keep it nice and warm. This is where we’re all going to fuck her tonight.”

His father had wanted to end it for them that afternoon, but there was no gun for him to do it quickly, to shoot them both and then turn it on himself, just the gutting knife and the rolling pin and Grandmama’s walking stick she used to whack his legs with, and he couldn’t bring himself to use any of those. So they sat, the three of them, praying and singing soft songs of their homeland, hoping that the soldiers might go away or forget. When the time had come and the officer had put his head round the corner, tapping at the watch he held in his hand, his father, weeping, had shaken his head, imploring him, pointing to her youth and the trust she had placed in his ability to protect her.

“Do not worry,” the officer had told him, “I understand,” and slipping the watch back into his pocket, had taken him out and shot him underneath their broken window. The soldiers had to step over his outstretched arms to come through the door. They had come through the door all night.

Six

W
edel parked the car at the top of the road. As the two men set off down the hill a group of nurses appeared on the brow of the other side, laughing and chatting. On seeing the Major approach they feil silent. One of them waved nervously. Lentsch nodded.

The house was bathed in a blank grey daylight, the blinds drawn, the pinned-back slatted shutters rattling in the spasmodic wind. Ned hesitated by the gateless entrance. Even when he had come here before, when there had been life and brazen purpose to his visit, it had seemed to him then that despite the thought that had gone into its construction and the young woman whose willing form would lead him up the stairs or out into the lush wilderness at the rear, this was a house in which footsteps and voices and words of love would always ring hollow, one where its occupants would always appear transitory. Perhaps it was true what his old man had claimed. “Some houses,” he used to tell him, “are built for crime, for misery, desertion. It doesn’t matter if you’re a saint or a sinner, the bricks and mortar will get you in the end.”

The garden was more overgrown than he remembered, a tumble of weeds and grass. Last night’s clouds had hidden the worst. Lentsch moved forward.

“I tried to persuade her to do some gardening,” he told Ned, brushing aside a drooping bramble. “I even sent Albert over for a couple of hours, but like her father, she showed no real interest.” He held the offshoot back for Ned to pass. “A garden should not be like this,” he called out after him. “It does not speak well of the home.”

Ned stood before the door and reached for the knocker. Think�ing better of it, he laid it gently back against the brass fitting.

“It’s just possible,” he said, “that there may be something he would not want to tell me in your presence. Perhaps it would help if halfway through you took yourself into the garden, or went off and read a magazine. Improved your English.”

“My English is not good?”

“It was a joke, Major.”

Before he could grasp the heavy ring again, the door swung open. Ned could not be sure but it seemed to him that when van Dielen saw who it was the slightest trace of a smile played across his small and careful face. Ned swallowed. He felt as if his voice were trapped inside, ashamed to show itself. Isobel’s father swung the door wide. He spoke in that clear, lilting voice which seemed to mock everyone but himself.

“Here you are at last, Mr Luscombe. Uninvited as always, but this time I will concur that I cannot deny you. And the Major too. A very particular delegation, if you’ll excuse the observation.”

“This is a bad business, Mr van Dielen.” Ned looked sideways at the Major, conscious of his echoing of Lentsch’s earlier remark.

“A bad business.” Now it was van Dielen’s turn to repeat it, and he elongated the phrase, accentuating its awkward banality. “Is this what you’ve come to tell me?”

He said nothing more but stepped back, flinging his arm out in an exaggerated gesture of hospitality. Ned and Lentsch walked in. There was no hall to speak of. The front door opened on to a set of tall French windows and beyond a large drawing room. Nothing had changed. It was still as bare a room as Ned had ever seen, with glass at the back and glass at the front, with rugs and strange furniture scattered across the wooden floor. “As friendly as a barred cage,” Isobel used to say. At the back, slowly rising to the balcony, rose the tubular staircase with its polished steel handrail. Ned could hear the fall of discarded shoes as she moved towards it, hear the soft swish of her dress against the balustrade, her bare feet squeaking on the polished wood as she climbed above. His eyes rose involuntary to the corridor and her closed bedroom door. Van Dielen gestured to the steps leading down to the bar.

“Come and join me, why don’t you? My first guests of the new year.”

He led them down to where a half-empty bottle of brandy stood. Van Dielen poured himself another glass.

“A dreadful extravagance, I’ll admit, but under the circumstances.” He waved it at the two uncomfortable men. “Will you not join me, gentlemen? It is of the highest quality.”

Ned looked to the floor. The Major was unfailingly polite.

“Some other time, perhaps,” he said.

Van Dielen was in the mood for repeating awkward phrases.

“Some other time. Now there’s a thing to conjure with. From which would you have me choose? The future or the past?”

Ned tried to break in. “Mr van Dielen…”

“I favour the past, though whether the present past or the far-away half-remembered past, I am in something of a quandary. Perhaps that infamous bicycle ride of yours, Mr Luscombe. I should have not treated you so harshly. I can see that now.”

“Mr van Dielen, there’s no call to—”

“Had I known then what I know now, I would have invited you in and given you the run of the house. Brandy, cognac, rum, they’re all stocked here. You could have helped yourself to anything you liked. Asked me for a cocktail. I make very good cocktails. They all said that in the East.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“And as for that bicycle. I have nothing against the bicycle so long as it is maintained in good working order. I would have bought her one in due course. It was only a matter of time. Do you still have your bicycle, Mr Luscombe?”

“I sold it.”

“We saw a tandem in the desert once. A tourer. The woman was riding in front, straining hard, pulling all manner of panniers and rucksacks strapped to the sides and back, while her man was seated behind, feet up on his handlebars, reading a newspaper. How we laughed! ‘What a very naughty fellow,’ I said, ‘for not doing his fair share.’”

“‘No, no, Daddy. That’s not the point,’ she said. ‘It should be the other way around.’ She was only nine then and already conversant with the uses of men. Pigtails on such an old head. Do you like pigtails on a girl, Mr Luscombe?”

“Pigtails?”

“On a girl they are correct, but not on a woman, I think. On the Continent, in Germany and Austria, my own country too, they are fond of pigtails on both girls and women. Why is that, I wonder?”

“I have never given it much thought.”

“No. Well, you wouldn’t, would you. But is that not true, Major?”

“Indeed.”

“The young girls that took your fancy, they had pigtails, did they not?”

“Some of them, yes, I am sure. And my sister too.”

“Your sister?”

“Yes.” The Major tapped his top pocket. “I showed you a photograph of her once, when I came here.”

“And she wore pigtails in both childhood and…?” He let the word fall.

“For a time.”

“There you are, then. And Isobel, did you ever wish that she might gather her locks and wear them in plaits, like your lady-friends back home?”

Now it was Lentsch’s turn to falter.

“I never imagined such a thing,” he stammered.

“You see! It’s true! You would have preferred pigtails! She was too knowing for you, was that it? Was that what brought her down? That she was too knowing. And here we are the three of us, who brought her such a treacherous gift.”

He took another gulp, choking as he swallowed hard.

“Forgive me. I am not a great conversationalist. I know how to talk, indeed in English and in German and my own native tongue I am somewhat gifted in mastering the technical differences of vocabulary and regulations, you understand. Where I fall down is in the thing that counts, the art of conversation. The words I produce, the manner in which they are delivered, their overall intent and appearance seem to demand the immediate cessation of that of which they seek to be a part, although I find myself unable to understand why.”

“No.”

“I am doing it now, in this very modern and open design, blocking off all avenues of conversation even as I speak.”

“This is not a time for conversation, Mr van Dielen.”

“No. You are right, Mr Luscombe. Ned. May I call you Ned? It is what she called you, after all. I am her father, am I not? Have I not that right too, even though I have been unpardonably rude to you in the past?”

“Thinknothingofit.”

“You said that last night, did you not? When I met you by our front gate?”

“What?” Lentsch looked surprised.

“Did you not know, Major?” Van Dielen delighted in Ned’s discomfiture. “Last night I returned from my dinner with Major Ernst to find the Inspector here scuttling about outside our house like a crab looking for a shell.” He tapped Ned on the knee. “You must be truthful with the Major, Ned, or he will lose his little German temper.”

“This is true?” Lentsch sounded shocked.

“I was walking home late. I thought I saw a light.”

Van Dielen leapt upon the uneasy explanation.

“The light? Yes, I remember.” He stared Ned in the face. He should have been a policeman. “There was no light or I would have seen it too, while taking my farewell of Major Ernst. The only light shining that night was the one burning in your jealous heart.”

He caught Lentsch’s bewildered expression.

“Does not the Major know of that either?”

Ned felt the sand shifting from under his feet. He was being led out of his depth. Now he knew what Isobel had felt like that on that first swim. He tried to scrabble back.

“I saw no reason to tell him right away. It was all in the past. I would have got to it eventually.”

“All in the past?” Van Dielen turned to the Major. “Two summers ago, Major, Isobel was his dream come true and she foolish enough to embrace his advances. A summer of secret love fol-lowed, a summer of illicit swimming in treacherous bays, of bicycle rides and furtive little love notes tucked in hidey-holes.” He turned as he heard Ned’s intake of breath. “Oh yes, I know all about those infamous billet-doux.” He swivelled round to the Major again. “But she discarded him. And he did not like that. He felt cheated and wronged and for a whole winter bored the natives with his maudlin tales of his woe.” He leant back on his stool and looked at the two men triumphantly. “At least that is what his uncle told.”

Ned tried to set the record straight.

“It was a summer romance, that was all.”

“For her maybe. But not you,” van Dielen said, rejecting his summary with scorn. “You always entertained the possibility that she might return. Perhaps that is why you were here last night.” He seized on the idea, fascinated with the possibility of embroidery. “Perhaps you had come earlier, to try and plead with her.”

Ned looked down at the floor. His leg was trembling. He pressed his hands on his knees and felt the sweat trickle out under his arms. Van Dielen wriggled in his seat. The prospect of giving no quarter invigorated him.

“Perhaps she tried to send you packing,” he said. “Perhaps you lost your temper. Have you ever thought, Mr Luscombe, Ned, that you yourself could be a suspect?”

“Mr van Dielen!”

“Ah, leave me alone, why don’t you? You’re no use here.”

“As soon as I am able. But there are questions I need to ask.” Lentsch rose on the signal and moving to the drawing room, started flicking through the pages of some old magazines.

“A little clumsily orchestrated,” van Dielen observed. “And quite unnecessary. Well? What is it that we must keep from him?”

“I need to know where she went that Saturday, that’s all,” Ned reassured him. “Can you tell me her movements?”

“I would have thought you knew enough about my daughter’s movements to fill your notebook three times over.”

“Mr van Dielen! You must stop this. It does no good.” Ned spoke to him quietly, though his patience with the man was evaporating fast. Van Dielen closed his eyes, nodding fiercely.

“You are right,” he admitted. “I must stop. It does no good.” He took a deep breath. “Early in the morning she went down to the town to collect her dress from the rehearsal room. She wanted it for the party that night. Later she went for coffee with her aunt. Marjorie telephoned her. ‘Summoned’ was the word Isobel used.”

“When was this?”

“Midmorning? Isobel was put out. She needed to alter her costume. But duty called. She went out. She drank coffee. She came back.” He looked back to the living room where the Major gazed out over the blustery green of the back garden.

“What was she like when she came back?” Ned asked.

“I hardly saw her. As soon as she got back she charged up to her room. I wouldn’t read too much in that,” he added, noting Ned’s interest. “It’s what girls of a certain age do. “Do you want to bring the walls down around our ears?” I called up. Not a word. I presumed she had returned to the strictures of her hemline.”

“And you?”

“I forswore needlework that Saturday. Most of the morning I spent in my study. The dinner with Major Ernst was not only social, you understand. There were important matters concerning the island’s construction programme which needed attention. Isobel and I had a quick lunch of cold meats and beetroot—how I am beginning to loathe that vegetable—and in the afternoon we went down to the old quarter to do some shopping. Then it was on to the yard. I wanted to see the damage the break-in had caused, talk to my foreman.”

“George Poidevin, I take it.”

“Certainly George Poidevin.”

“Did you find much damage?” he asked.

“Judging by George’s rather hysterical ranting over the phone I had assumed half the yard had been laid to waste. As it was there was hardly anything at all, except for George’s precious supply of tea and sugar. You’d have thought they’d stolen the Crown jewels the way he was carrying on. “Don’t worry, George,” I said, “I’ll get you another packet of tea for your little wooden hut,” but the man seemed impervious to my intended generosity.”

“Any cement taken?”

“Not that I know of.” He caught Ned’s look. “Yes, I know what you’re thinking. But even if there was, there’d be no way of identifying it. There’s more bags of cement on this island than there are toffee wrappers.”

Ned returned to the subject of van Dielen’s yard. It puzzled him that Isobel had gone there too.

“A bit odd that, wasn’t it, she going with you? She’d never shown much interest in the yard before, had she?”

“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.”