I reset the rod into the latch on the inside, as it wouldn’t shut unless one did, and stepped outside. My teenage design limitations meant that one had to go down on one’s knees to close the door the last few inches, hooking one’s ringers into a hollow under the bottom row of bricks and pulling hard. The door and walls fitted together again like pieces of jigsaw, and the latch inside clicked into place. I replaced the sill under the door, kicking it home, and tried to encourage the crushed nettles to stand up again.
‘They’ll be flourishing again by morning,’ Malcolm said. ‘Rotten things.’
‘Those cardboard boxes are too big to come out through the door,’ I observed, rubbing stings on my hands and wrists.
‘Oh, sure. I took them in empty and flat, then set them up, and filled them bit by bit.’
‘You could take those things out again now.’
There was a pause, then he said, Til wait. As things are at present, they might as well stay there.’
I nodded. He whistled to the dogs and we went on with the walk. We had given up referring explicitly to fear of the family, but it still hung around us like grief. On our return from the field, Malcolm waited outside without comment until I checked through the house, and prosaically began feeding the dogs on my report of all clear.
Neither of us discussed how long all the precautions were going to have to go on. Norman West’s latest report had been as inconclusive as his first, and by Wednesday evening the pitiful summary I’d been making of his results read as follows:
DONALD: busy about the golf club. Cannot pinpoint any times.
HELEN: working at home making Henley souvenirs.
LUCY: reading, walking, writing, meditating.
EDWIN: housework, shopping for groceries, going to public library.
THOMAS: looking for new job, suffering headaches.
BERENICE: housekeeping, looking after children, uncooperative.
GERVASE: commuting to London, in and out of his office, home late.
URSULA: looking after daughters, unhappy.
FERDINAND: on statistics course, no attendance records.
DEBS: photo-session vouched for on Newmarket Sales day.
SERENA: teaching aerobics mornings and most evenings, shopping for clothes afternoons.
VIVIEN: pottering about, can’t remember.
ALICIA: probably the same, unhelpful.
JOYCE: playing bridge.
All one could say, I thought, was that no one had made any effort to produce alibis for either relevant time. Only Debs had a firm one, which had been arranged and vouched for by others. All the rest of the family had been moving about without timing their exits and entrances: normal behaviour for innocent people.
Only Joyce and I lived beyond half an hour’s drive from Quantum. All of the others, from Donald at Henley to Gervase at Maidenhead, from Thomas near Reading to Lucy near Marlow, from Ferdinand in Wokingham to Serena in Bracknell, and even Vivien in Twyford and Alicia near Windsor, all of them seemed to have put down roots in a ring round the parent house like thistledown blown on the wind and reseeding.
The police had remarked on it when investigating Moira’s murder, and had checked school runs and train timetables until they’d been giddy. They had apparently caught no one lying, but that seemed to me inconclusive in a family which had had a lot of practice in misrepresentation. The fact had been, and still was, that anybody could have got to Quantum and home again without being missed.
I spent a short part of that Wednesday wandering around Moira’s greenhouse, thinking about her death.
The greenhouse was invisible from the house, as Arthur Bellbrook had said, set on a side lawn which was bordered with shrubs. I wondered whether Moira had been alarmed to see her killer approach. Probably not. Quite likely, she had herself arranged the meeting, stating time and place. Malcolm had once mentioned that she didn’t like casual callers, preferring them to telephone first. Perhaps it had been an unforeseen killing, an opportunity seized. Perhaps there had been a quarrel. Perhaps a request denied. Perhaps one of Moira’s specials in acid-sweet triumphs, like picking Arthur Bellbrook’s vegetables.
Moira in possession of Quantum, about to take half of everything Malcolm owned. Moira smugly satisfied, oblivious to her danger. I doubted if she had believed in her nightmare death even while it was happening.
Malcolm spent the day reading the Financial Times and making phone calls: yen, it appeared from snatches I overheard, were behaving gruesomely from Malcolm’s point of view.
Although making calls outward, neither of us was keen to answer inward calls since that morning, when Malcolm had been drenched by a shower of recriminations from Vivien, all