sleep in my own bed. I was tired. Ian absolutely wouldn’t have it, and drove us to London.’
Yale looked at me steadily. ‘Did you have a premonition?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’ I hadn’t felt a shiver, as I had in my flat. Perhaps the premonition in the flat had been for the house. ‘I was just… frightened,’ I said.
Malcolm glanced at me with interest.
Yale said, ‘What of?’
‘Not of bombs,’ I said. ‘I never considered that. Frightened there was someone in the house. I couldn’t have slept there, that’s all.’ I paused. ‘I saw the way the car drove at my father at Newmarket — it hit my leg, after all - and I believed him, of course, about being attacked and gassed in the garage. I knew he wouldn’t have murdered Moira, or have had her murdered by anyone else. I believe absolutely in his extreme danger. We’ve been moving around, letting no one know where to find us, until this week.’
‘My fault,’ Malcolm said gloomily. ‘I insisted on coming back here. Ian didn’t want to.’
‘When the doors were moved,’ I said, ‘it was time to go.’
Yale thought it over without comment for a while and then said, ‘When you were in the house looking round, did you see anything unusual except for the doors?’
‘No, nothing.’
‘Nothing where it shouldn’t be? Or absent from where it should have been?’
I thought back to that breathless heart-thumping search. Whoever had moved the doors must at least have looked into the office and the sitting-room. I hadn’t bothered with the position of any of the otherdoors except closing the one from the kitchen to the hall. Someone could have looked into all the rooms in the house, for all I knew.
‘No,’ I said in the end. ‘Nothing else seemed out of place.’
Yale sighed again. He sighed a lot, it seemed to me. ‘If you think of anything later, let me know.’
‘Yes, all right.’
‘The time-frame we’re looking at,’ he said, ‘is between about three-forty p.m., when the gardener went home taking the dogs, and ten-thirty p.m., when you returned from Cheltenham.’ He pursed his lips. ‘If you hadn’t stayed out to dinner, what time would you have been home?’
‘We meant to stay out to dinner,’ Malcolm said. ‘That’s why Arthur had the dogs.’
‘Yes, but if…’
‘About six-thirty,’ I said. ‘If we’d gone straight home after the last race.’
‘We had a drink at the racecourse after the last race,’ Malcolm said. ‘I had scotch, Ian had some sort of fizzy gut-rot.’ He tapped ash into the ashtray. He was enjoying having Yale believe him at last, and seemed to be feeling expansive.
‘Ian thinks,’ he said, ‘that I was probably knocked out just outside the kitchen door that day, and that I was carried from there straight into the garage, not dragged, and that it was someone the dogs knew, as they didn’t bark. They were jumping up and down by the kitchen door, I can remember that, as they do if someone they know has come. But they do that anyway when it’s time for their walk, and I didn’t give it a thought.’ He inhaled a lot of smoke and let it out into the superintendent’s erstwhile clean air. ‘Oh yes, and about the fingerprints …’ He repeated what I’d said about firemen’s lifts.
Yale looked at me neutrally and polished his moustache. He was difficult to read, I thought, chiefly because he didn’t want to be read. All policemen, I supposed, raised barriers and, like doctors and lawyers, tended not to trust what they were told, which could be bitterly infuriating to the truthful.
He must have been forty or forty-five, I supposed, and had to be competent to have reached that rank. He looked as if he habitually had too little exercise and too many sandwiches, and gave no impression of wallowing in his own power. Perhaps now he’d dropped his over-smart suspicions of Malcolm, he could actually solve his case, though I’d heard the vast majority of criminals were injail because of having been informed on, not detected. I did very much want him to succeed. I wished he could spontaneously bring himself to share what he was thinking, but I supposed he’d been trained not to. He kept his counsel anyway on that occasion, and I kept mine, and perhaps it was a pity.
A policewoman came in and said, looking harassed, that she didn’t know where to put the Pembroke family.
Yale thought briefly and told her to show them all to his office. Malcolm