4

They invaded the building, smashing windows, computers, fax machines, phones, and copiers. They pulled open the drawers of filing cabinets and either tore up the contents or slung them in the shredders. The police got there very quickly, but while arrests were being made, another group had occupied the headquarters of Kingsmarkham Borough Council. A third rampaged about, destroying High Street shops.

Some of those arrested were tree people, but the hooded ones, wearing black stockings over their heads with eye and mouth holes, were newcomers to the town. They had come in during the day and set up a new camp on the bypass route, this one making the seventh. Yet more eviction orders had been applied for.

The day after what became known as the Kingsmarkham Rampage, Mark Arcturus, a spokesman for the campaigns section of English Nature, appealed for the protest to remain law-abiding.

“Everything we can accomplish,” he said, “will be lost if the public associates the protest with violence and criminal damage and we shall lose the public support we have enjoyed, which has been so heartening to us. Until yesterday the action was peaceful and civilized. Let us keep it that way.”

Sir Fleance McTear said that KABAL was dedicated to peaceful protest. “We do not condone violence even for so good a cause.”

The Kingsmarkham Courier, but no other newspapers, carried a statement from a man called Conrad Tarling to the effect that desperate situations called for desperate measures and what choice had the public when Government ignored the voice of the people? Tarling described himself as the King of the Wood and the leader of the SPECIES representation on the bypass site. Wexford recognized him from the picture accompanying the story. He was the cloaked man who had marched in the procession.

A team of workers was brought in under guard to remove spikes and wires from tree trunks. The tree people in the camps watched them at work and bided their time until the guards, who for a while kept up a round-the-clock shift system, eventually went home.

Patrick Young, of English Nature, announced in New Scientist the discovery in the river Brede of a rare caddis, Psychoglypha citreola, its larva a tiny worm in a mosaic-like cast, the adult form a yellow-winged fly about an inch long. As a result the government’s conservation advisers considered whether parts of the river should be designated as an area of special scientific interest.

“Under the European Habitats and Species directive,” Young said, “super reserve status gives the highest level of protection. Psychoglypha could still save this unparalleled area of beauty and rare species. Its discovery highlights the Department of Transport’s failure to carry out an adequate environmental assessment of the Brede and String-field Marsh.”

One of the tree houses in the camp at Elder Ditches caught fire on a hot afternoon toward the end of the month. Its occupants, a man and a woman, were leading lights in SPECIES. The tree house and its tree were both destroyed, but after some initial alarm it was decided that the fire was an accident, caused by a spirit stove used for tea making falling over.

“These people,” said Burden to Wexford, “destroy more of the environment than they save.”

“One tree. You’re ridiculous.”

“Being right often seems ridiculous at first,” said Burden sententiously. “How’s Sheila?”

“She’s fine. The baby’s due in three weeks. I’d feel a lot better if she’d have it in hospital.” Wexford went on, principally to rile the inspector, “One of her friends has joined the protest. He’s called Jeffrey Godwin, he’s an actor, owns the Weir Theatre.”

“That converted mill at Stringfield? He ought to know better.”

“He’s got the Weir to stage a protest play, opening next week. It’s called Extinction.”

“Sounds a bundle of laughs,” said Burden. “I for one shan’t be buying any tickets.”

On the last Monday in the month Concreation shifted its earthmoving equipment from the meadow at Pomfret Monachorum and the first digger plunged its great spiked shovel into the green hillside.

Wexford had been mildly worried for six months, waking up in the night sometimes and imagining the icy emptiness, the great yawning abyss opening at his feet, if Sheila should die in childbirth. He had never known of childbirth death, since the only occurrence of this in his own life had happened to an aunt of his when he was only four, but he was still worried. The coming child he thought of too, not especially about it but about the effect on Sheila if it should be less than perfect, about her grief, which would in the natural course of things be his grief too.

But he knew during those months that the anxiety he suffered would be nothing to what he would suffer when Sheila’s due date arrived, in the days that followed that due date, for first babies, they say, are never on time, and—unbearable to contemplate—once he knew labor had begun. This worry, though, was yet to come, not to start until September 4. He told himself not to be a fool, to banish it from his mind, at least until that due date, for there is no point in worrying twice, once for real and once about the prospect of future worry.

“Most of the things you have worried about,” he said to Dora on the evening of September 1, “have never happened.”

“I know,” she said, “I taught you that axiom,” and as she spoke the phone rang.

He picked up the receiver.

“Hi, Pop,” said Sheila. “I just had the baby.”

He had to sit down. Fortunately, the chair was there.

“Can you hear me, Pop? I had the baby and she’s fabulous. She’s called Amulet. She’s got black hair and blue eyes. And do you know, it wasn’t half as bad as I expected.”

“Oh, Sheila …” he said, and to Dora, “Sheila had the baby.”

“Well, aren’t you going to congratulate me?”

“Congratulations, darling.”

“She weighs three-point-four-four kilos. I don’t know what that is in pounds, you’ll have to find conversion tables. I could have phoned you when labor started, but I knew it would only worry you and then things happened so fast …”

“Here’s your mother,” he said. “Tell your mother all about it.”

Dora talked for fifteen minutes. When she finally put the phone down she said to Wexford that she’d be going to London in two days’ time.

“She asked me to come tomorrow.”

“Why not go tomorrow?”

“Too many things to see to here. I can’t just up sticks and go off like that. Besides, I think I should give her a day or two. Let her get used to the baby. It’s not as if there’ll be anything for me to do there except be with them. She’s got a private nurse.”

“Amulet,” said Wexford. “I expect I shall get used to it.”

“Don’t worry. She’ll be called Amy.”

SPECIES and the tree people swarmed over the earthmoving equipment during the night, removing metal parts, cutting cables, immobilizing engines, and mixing iron filings with diesel fuel. A number of arrests were made, a guard was put on the diggers, and James Freeborn, the Deputy Chief Constable of Mid-Sussex, appealed for a government grant of £2.5 million for policing the bypass.

Wexford asked for a meeting with him to discuss the outbreak of shop-breaking and petty thieving in Sewingbury and Myfleet. Four hundred security guards, hired by the Highways Agency, were housed in decaying huts on the former army base at Sewingbury. Local residents put the blame on them, complained that they were responsible for pub brawls and that the buses which transported them to the bypass site caused traffic congestion, noise, and pollution.

“An irony, isn’t it?” Wexford said to Dora. “Who shall have custody of the custodian? But thanks to this meeting I won’t be able to drive you to the station.”

“I’ll get a taxi. If I wasn’t carrying all this stuff, all these presents you insist on, I’d walk it.”

“Phone me this evening. I want to hear all about this child. I want to hear her voice.”

“The only voice they have at that age,” said Dora, “is crying, and we’ll have as little of that as possible, I hope.”

He left the house at nine for his meeting. Before he went he meant to tell her not to phone Contemporary Cars. It wasn’t particularly important, but he didn’t care for the idea of Stanley Trotter driving his wife. Of course it might not be Stanley Trotter, it might be Peter Samuel or Leslie Cousins, and even if it was Trotter the chances were he wouldn’t mention Wexford or his arrest or Burden’s unfounded suspicions. That really depended on whether Trotter was paranoid or aggrieved or just relieved to have been released when he was. Anyway, he hadn’t warned her, but at the time he hadn’t said a word to her about Trotter so if worse came to worst she could justly plead ignorance.

His meeting ended without any firm policy being agreed on, but his presence there seemed to put ideas into Freeborn’s head. If he hadn’t anything better to do that afternoon, perhaps he would like to accompany the Deputy Chief Constable on a tour of the conservation sites. It was being undertaken prior to the environmental assessment of the Brede and Stringfield Marsh, and the bodies represented would include English Nature, Friends of the Earth, the Sussex Wildlife Trust, KABAL, and the British Society of Entomologists.

Wexford could think of a lot of better things to do. He couldn’t imagine why Freeborn’s presence was required, still less his own, and he remembered rather sadly his resolve not to go near Framhurst Great Wood again, a decision that had already once been broken.

Of course he said he would come, he hadn’t much choice. It was no good being an ostrich about these things. He must confront the prospect like everyone else. Perhaps he could even tell the Entomologists of his sighting of the Map butterfly. He was thinking about this and about how animals and insects and even some plants dislike the moving of their habitats, even when this is no more than a mile or two, when the call came in to Kingsmarkham Police Station from Contemporary Cars.

Not Trotter but Peter Samuel. It was a little after noon. He had come back to the offices in Station Road to find his receptionist bound and gagged and tied to a chair, the place turned over, and the petty cash stolen.

Barry Vine went down there with Detective Constable Lynn Fancourt. The door to the mobile home was open and Samuel was standing on the steps.

Inside, it was a squeeze for the four of them. Tanya Paine, whose job it was to answer the phones, the one for the cars and the one for potential fares, sat on the pulldown bed rubbing her wrists. The cord that tied her had been tightly bound around her wrists and ankles. A pair of tights had been used as a gag and another to blindfold her. She wasn’t hurt but was frightened and shaken, a young woman in her early twenties, white-faced under the heavy makeup, her elaborately done long hair coming down from its chignon where the gag and blindfold had been tied.

“I’d been driving a client to Gatwick,” Samuel said. “I was on my way back. Couldn’t make out why I hadn’t had a call from Tanya here. I mean, it was unheard-of, an hour going by without a call. I thought maybe the phone was down. So I come back here. I mean, I never come back here, not till my dinnertime, but being as I hadn’t had a call not in all of an hour and a half …”

“All right, sir, thank you very much,” said Vine. “Let’s hear from Miss Paine. Just one man, was it, Miss Paine? Did you get a look at him?”

“There were two,” said Tanya Paine. “They had black masks on with holes for their eyes and mouth. Well, not masks, hoods. It was like the pictures in the paper of that lot that broke into the bypass builders’ place. And one of them had a gun.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Of course I’m sure. I was scared. I was dead terrified, actually. They opened that door and came up the steps and shut the door and the one with the gun pointed it at me and said to get in here. So I did—well, I wasn’t going to argue, was I? They made me sit in that chair and one of them tied me up. At gunpoint. I hadn’t got no choice, it was at gunpoint.”

“What time would that have been?”

“Ten-fifteen, ten-twenty, something like that.”

“And you were gagged and blindfolded?” said Lynn Fancourt.

“I don’t know why. I couldn’t see their faces, anyway, not with them masks. They blindfolded me and I couldn’t see a thing. I heard them moving about. Then they shut the door on me, that door, and I couldn’t hear either. Oh, well, I heard the phone ring a few times, I could hear that. They was here a good while after they tied me up, a long time, I don’t know how long it was before I heard the door bang.”

The room where they were had originally been the bedroom of the mobile home. To the built-in furniture, pull-down bed, hanging cupboard, and two foldaway tables had been added a fireside chair and two Windsor Wheelback chairs, to one of which Tanya Paine had been tied. Beyond the door was the kitchen, equipped with microwave, fridge, and cupboards with counters, and beyond that the living area, currently used as the office. With both interior doors shut not much of what was going on in the office could have been heard by a gagged and blindfolded woman shut in the bedroom.

Vine and Lynn Fancourt looked it over. “Contemporary” as a title for this company was something of a misnomer. The two telephones were the only evidence of modern technology. There was no computer and no safe.

“We don’t need no safe,” said Samuel. “Twice a day I bank the takings, once at dinnertime and once at three.”

“So what was in the petty cash box?” asked Vine, holding up an empty tin that long ago had contained cream crackers. He held it in a clean handkerchief between thumb and forefinger, though whatever fingerprints that might have been there had by then been irrevocably smudged by Samuel’s and Tanya Paine’s handling of it.

“Maybe five quid,” said Samuel, “and that’d be pushing it. I’d got my takings on me and the same would go for Stan and Les. They’d bring them in round about midday and I’d bank the lot.”

Vine shook his head. It was a long while since he had heard of anything so slapdash. Tanya Paine came out, her hairdo reassembled, her lipstick renewed.

“I thought you’d want to see me the way they left me,” she explained, “before I repaired the damage. There was three pounds forty-two in that cash box, Pete. I checked it out on account of thinking I’d pop out for a cappuccino and a Mars bar when Stan came back and I’d not got no change myself. Three pounds forty-two exactly.”

They had taken it. But had they been looking for something else? A drawer had been pulled out from under the counter where the phones were. A book of receipt stubs was on the floor. The VAT book had been opened and left face downward. But policemen get to know when a place has been ransacked or, conversely, made to look as if it has been ransacked. This effort to deceive had not even been wholehearted. The two masked men had come for something Contemporary Cars had, but, as Vine said to Lynn on the way back to the police station, it wasn’t three pounds forty-two and it wasn’t some vital document among the VAT inputs.

“What were they doing then for what she calls a long time after they’d left her tied up in there?”

“I don’t know,” said Vine. “The chances are, though, that it wasn’t the long time she says. She was scared, understandably so, and it seemed like a long time. It was probably a couple of minutes.”

“So they tied her up, shut the two doors on her, took the petty cash, and dropped a few things on the floor to make it look like a search? And they had a gun?”

“That’ll have been a toy or a replica. No one was hurt, it’s a small sum that’s missing, there was no damage—and we’re never going to find those two, you know that.”

“That’s a bit of a defeatist attitude, Sergeant Vine,” said Lynn, who was twenty-four, new from her training, and ardent.

“You watch it, young Lynn. I don’t mean we’re not going to check the place over and see if the prints are those of any villain known to us. We shall observe the usual routine, but there’s been rather a lot of this sort of thing lately, though I’ll admit the masks and the gun are novelties.”

When Burden heard of it he immediately seized on the fact that one of Contemporary Cars’ drivers was Stanley Trotter. One of the two intruders could even have been Stanley Trotter.

“Tanya Paine would have recognized him,” said Vine. “Anyway, why would he need that? He was on the spot or could be. He could look for whatever it was without tying the girl up.”

“Where is he now?”

“Down there, I reckon. They all come in at midday with their takings. They’re all there. Well, not Barrett, he’s away on his holidays.”

Burden went down to Station Road, accompanied by an enthusiastic Lynn Fancourt. Tanya Paine was back on her phones, apparently none the worse for wear. She sent them through to the kitchen area, where Trotter was sitting in front of the black and white television set, eating a hamburger and with a plate of chips on his knees.

“Maybe you’d like to tell me where you were between ten and midday,” Burden said.

Trotter took a bite out of his hamburger. “The station trade,” he said with his mouth full. “And when that come to an end after the ten-nineteen’d come and gone, I got a call from here to fetch a fare from Pomfret. Masters Street, Pomfret, number fifteen, to be precise, which I took to the station, picked up a fare as was waiting, and drove them to Stowerton, and by then it’d have been half-eleven, so I had my tea break. I was back in the cab by ten of twelve and I hung about down by the station, but when I never got no more calls from here, I thought, Funny, that’s very funny, that’s never happened before.”

“What then?”

“I come back here, didn’t I?”

“I’d like the name of the fare you picked up in Pomfret.”

“I don’t know his name. Why would I? Tanya said to go to fifteen Masters Street, Pomfret, and that’s what I done.”

Burden asked Tanya Paine for the fare’s name. Presumably she kept a record. She looked at him blankly.

“I’d have to write them down.” She spoke as if writing by hand was comparable to mastering some difficult language, Russian, for instance. “Pete’s thinking of getting a computer,” she said, “if he can pick one up secondhand.”

“So you’ve no idea how many calls come in or who from?”

“I never said that. I know how many. I sort of jot it down.”

She showed him a sheet of paper on which perhaps thirty or forty dashes had been made in pencil.

“What about the fare you picked up at the station after that?” Burden asked.

“I took him to Oval Road, Stowerton. Number five or it might have been seven. He’ll remember me and so will the Pomfret chap.”

Trotter fixed Burden with a stony glare. He didn’t look guilty, though. He looked as if he had nothing to hide. Burden was unable to imagine how the incidents of the morning at Contemporary Cars could have any connection with the murder of Ulrike Ranke, but that was what police work was about, discovering connections where none seemed to exist. He went back to the office where Tanya Paine had retreated. Squinting into a small hand mirror, she was applying violet-colored mascara, her lips pursed and her nostrils narrowed.

“Is it possible,” he said, “that one of the two men who tied you up could have been one of the drivers here?”

“Pardon?” She turned around and passed her tongue wetly across her lips.

“The two men,” he rephrased it, “could one or both of them have been known to you? Did you have any sort of feeling of familiarity?”

She shook her head, stunned by this new turn the inquiry was taking.

“Did they speak?”

“One of them did. He said to keep quiet and I would be okay. That’s all.”

“So you didn’t hear the other one’s voice?”

Again that amazed shake of the head.

“The other one, then, he was masked and you didn’t hear his voice. You can’t really say he couldn’t have been known to you, can you? If you couldn’t see his face and didn’t hear his voice, it could have been someone you knew very well.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Tanya Paine. “I’m confused now. They tied me up and gagged me and it was horrible and I want counseling, I’m a victim.”

“We can arrange that, Ms. Paine,” said Lynn sympathetically.

Burden took Lynn Fancourt down to Stowerton with him where they established that no one from number five Oval Road had been brought by taxi from the station that morning. Nobody was at home at number seven, so they had either gone out again or Trotter was lying, an alternative Burden preferred to believe. A woman at number nine told them her neighbor was called Wingate, but she had no idea whether he had been fetched from Kingsmarkham Station that morning or where he was now.

The Pomfret fare, if he existed, might still be in London or Eastbourne or wherever the train had taken him, but more than three hours had elapsed, so it was equally likely he was back again. Lynn rang the bell at fifteen Masters Road, a between-the-wars bungalow with a view over the bypass site.

The woman who answered the door had been doing some interior decorating. She had magnolia gloss paint on her hands, her jeans and shirt, and streaks of it in her hair. She looked cross and hot. No, she hadn’t got a husband. If Burden meant her partner, he was called John Clifton, and yes, he had gone to London that morning on the 10:51. A taxi had taken him to Kingsmarkham Station, but she hadn’t heard him phone for it, she hadn’t seen it come, and she had no idea which firm it was or who was driving the car. John had called out good-bye and said he was off and—

“What’s happened to him?” she said, suddenly alarmed.

“Nothing, Miss …”

“Kennedy. Martha Kennedy. You’re sure nothing’s happened to him?”

“It’s the taxi driver we’re interested in,” said Lynn.

“In that case, perhaps you’ll excuse me. I want to finish these bloody doors before John gets back.”

Burden said they would call again later. The door was shut rather sharply in his face. On the way back to Kingsmarkham they passed Wexford, who was driving himself to Pomfret Tye for his meeting and tour with the Deputy Chief Constable and the conservationists.

The day, which had started dull and misty, was such a day as all lovers of the countryside should be given for their viewing of natural wonders. Or perhaps should not be given, should be denied, lest the soft air, the sunshine, the blue sky, and the rich green of vegetation give too painful and nostalgic an edge to a pastoral loveliness that must soon pass away. Better for all, Wexford was thinking, if the day were dull and cold and the sky the color of the concrete soon to spread itself across these hills, these deeps and marshes, and bridge on stark gray pillars the rippling waters of the Brede.

Today the butterflies would be out, the tortoiseshells and fritillaries as well as Araschnia, and wild bees on the eyebright and the heather. There were goldcrests in the fir trees of Framhurst Great Wood. He had seen a pair of them once when on a picnic with Dora and the girls, and he and Sheila had looked, though looked in vain, for the nest that is like a little hanging basket. Dora—he had meant to phone her at lunchtime, in spite of what he’d said about her phoning him in the evening. But he hadn’t, he’d decided to wait. By now she would have seen the new child, his granddaughter Amulet. Alone in the car, he laughed out loud over that name.

Freeborn hadn’t yet got there, much to his relief. If the Deputy Chief Constable had arrived first he would have had something snide to say about it, even if Wexford himself had been on time, even if he had been early. Somewhat to his dismay, Anouk Khoori, chairperson of the Council’s Highways Committee, a woman with whom he had crossed swords in the recent past, was representing the local authority. She was fetchingly dressed in a yellow T-shirt with green jodhpurs and green boots, her bright blond hair tied up in a black and yellow bandanna, and she was exercising her wiles on Mark Arcturus of English Nature, smiling into his eyes, one scarlet-tipped hand resting on his sleeve. All smiles ceased when she became aware of Wexford’s presence and she gave him a very brief frosty glance.

Wexford said in his best stolid policeman voice, “Good afternoon, Mrs. Khoori. A fine day.”

The Entomologists introduced themselves and Wexford told them about Araschnia. Anecdotes on the theme of rare butterflies spotted in unlikely places were interrupted by the arrival of Freeborn accompanied by Peter Tregear. The Deputy Chief Constable took it upon himself, like a primary school headteacher, to count heads.

“If we’re all here we may as well begin.”

“We’re surely not going to walk, are we?” said Anouk Khoori.

Wexford couldn’t resist: “They haven’t built the road yet.”

“And let us hope they never will,” said Arcturus, as if the earthmoving equipment wasn’t busy a couple of miles on the other side of Savesbury Hill even while they spoke. “Let us be positive. Let us remember hope is one of the cardinal virtues.”

It wasn’t a very long walk that the party undertook. They took the footpath across the meadows from Pomfret Tye and at Watersmeet, where the Kingsbrook flowed into the Brede, Arcturus was able to point out, under the clear golden water, clinging to a round gleaming pebble, the mosaic cylinder of the yellow caddis. Mrs. Khoori was disappointed. It wasn’t big enough for her taste.

Half a mile along the river, perhaps not so much, Wexford could see the old mill building that Jeffrey Godwin had converted into the Weir Theatre. Dora wanted to see that play Extinction and no doubt Sheila would come down for it … He switched his mind from that train of thought. Janet Braiswick, of the British Entomologists, was walking with him and he told her about the goldcrests. He told her about seeing scarlet tiger moths when he was a boy. She told him how as a child in Norfolk she had once, but only once, seen a swallowtail in the fens.

They came to the nettle plantation at Framhurst Deeps, treading softly now, even Anouk Khoori, silent and anxious. The sun was hot, it was butterfly weather, and they waited and watched almost reverently but no Map butterfly appeared. No butterfly at all rose from the long grass and the oxeye daisies that whitened the meadows like summer snow.

The dismantled badger setts were studied, for here at this point the bypass would run, through Araschnia’s nettles, through the outskirts of the wood, and into Stringfield Marsh. In the distance Wexford could see the latest camp, the cluster of houses put up by tree dwellers. Eviction notices had been applied for but not yet issued. Meanwhile the tree dwellers had spiked every oak, ash, and lime in a half-mile stretch. Perhaps Sir Fleance McTear wanted to avoid the controversy these spikes might evoke or the indignation of Mrs. Khoori, who was known to disapprove of all protest that was not a matter solely of the written or spoken word, for he suggested they turn back and make a small detour to take in the area designated for the new badger setts.

They were too far away to hear, still less see, the diggers working at the start of the site. Much too far to see the guards brought in by bus to protect the construction workers, the watching tree people, the witnesses. This was no more than a nature walk, Wexford thought, reminiscent of distant schooldays when Kingsmarkham infants were brought to these meadows to see the dragonflies and the water beetles. He asked Janet Braiswick when she had last seen tadpoles in an English pond, but she couldn’t remember, only that it was at least thirty years, when she had been a small child.

At five they were all back in Pomfret. Sir Fleance suggested tea in a local tea shop, at least a cup of tea if no one wanted to eat, but this proposal met with no enthusiasm. They were all depressed by what they had seen, they were saddened. Even Freeborn, Wexford noticed, was subdued. He and Anouk Khoori were country dwellers who never went out into the country, who had been obliged to do so today, and had in some strange way been frightened by what they saw, by its existence and its ephemerality.

They would rather not have seen it and then they could have pretended it wasn’t there, just as he had thought he wouldn’t go back so that he also could pretend. Avoid that place, don’t pass that way, avert the eye, until there were no more ways to pass or places to be in …

And now he might as well go home. He remembered then that he would be alone at home. Well, he had plenty to read. He could start on those George Steiner essays everyone said were wonderful. And at some point there was always television, accompanied by a small single malt. Dora would probably phone about seven. She wouldn’t expect him to be home much before seven, but she would phone then because whoever cooked for Sheila, and there was certain to be someone, would put dinner on the table at half-past.

The house was hot and stuffy. Today it had felt more like July than early September. He opened the French windows, drew a chair up to the garden table, went back into the house for beer from the fridge and the book of essays: No Passion Spent. Was it necessary to begin at the beginning or could he dip? He thought it would be fine to dip.

The French windows blew shut. He wouldn’t hear the phone but Dora wouldn’t phone before—well, ten to seven. At a quarter to seven he considered eating. What should he eat? When Jenny Burden went away she left her husband homemade frozen dinners in the freezer, one for every day of her absence. Wexford wouldn’t submit his wife to such slavery, but he didn’t like cooking; the fact was he couldn’t cook. Bread and cheese and pickles for him, and maybe a banana and ice cream. Soup first, Heinz tomato. Burden said that this was every man’s favorite soup …

When it got to ten past seven and Dora hadn’t phoned he began to wonder. Not to worry; to wonder. She was a punctual meticulous woman. Perhaps they had people round for drinks and she couldn’t just slip away. He would postpone eating until he’d spoken to her, and he turned off the gas under the soup.

The phone rang at seven-fifteen.

“Dora?” he said.

“It’s not Dora, it’s Sheila. Where have you been? I’ve been phoning and phoning. I phoned your office and you weren’t there, I phoned home over and over.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t expect a call till seven. How are you? How’s the baby?”

“I am fantastic, Pop, and the baby is perfectly fine, but where is Mother?”

“What do you mean?”

“Mother. We expected her by one at the latest. Where is she?”