Early next morning Hutchman drove east almost as far as Maidstone and dispatched another sheaf of envelopes. The weather was sunny and relatively warm. He got back to the house to find Vicky and David having a late breakfast. The boy was eating cereal and trying to do arithmetic problems at the same time.
“Dad,” he shouted accusingly. “Why do sums have to have hundreds, tens, and units? Why couldn’t it all be units? That way there’d be no carrying to do.”
“It wouldn’t work very well, son. But why are you doing homework on a Sunday morning?”
David shrugged. “The teacher hates me.”
“That’s not true, David,” Vicky put in.
“Then why does she give me more sums than the other boys?”
“To
“Thanks, Dad.” David looked at him in wonderment, then darted out of the kitchen whooping with glee.
“Why did you do that?” Vicky lifted the coffeepot, poured an extra cup, and pushed it across the table to Hutchman. “You’ve always said that sort of thing didn’t help him.”
“We seemed to be immortal in those days.”
“Meaning?’
“Perhaps there isn’t enough time to do everything slowly and properly.”
Vicky pressed her hand to her throat. “I’ve been watching you, Lucas. You don’t act like a man who’s been…” She sighed. “What would you say if I told you I hadn’t been unfaithful in the clinical sense of the word?”
“I’d say what you’ve said to me several hundred times in the past — that doing it in the mind is just as bad.”
“But what if it was nauseating to my mind, and I only — “
“What are you trying to do to me?” he demanded harshly, pressing the knuckles of one hand to his lips in case they should tremble.
“Lucas, have you been unfaithful to me?” Her face was that of a priestess.
“No.”
“Then what has all this been about?”
Hutchman, standing with the coffee cup in his hands, felt his knees begin to orbit in minute circles which threatened to become larger and bring him down. A fearsome shift took place in his mind.
He became aware that the telephone was ringing. Vicky halfrose from the table, but he waved her back, hurried impatiently into the hall, and lifted the instrument, cutting it short in the middle of a peal.
“Hutchman speaking.”
“Good morning, Lucas.” The woman’s voice seemed to speak to him from another existence, something completely alien and irrelevant to Hutchman as he was on that bright Sunday morning. It took a genuine mental effort for him to identify the speaker as Andrea Knight.
“Hello,” he said uneasily. “I thought you’d have been at Gat wick by this time.”
“That was the original plan, but I’ve been transferred to a later flight.”
“Oh!” Hutchman tried to understand why she had rung him. To gloat? To try to make him feel worse by pretending to try to make him feel better?
“Lucas, I’d like to see you today. Can you come round to my flat?”
“Sorry,” he said coldly. “I don’t see any point…”
“It’s about the envelope you gave me to post for you.”
“Well?” He suddenly found difficulty in breathing.
“I opened it.”
“You
“It occurred to me that I should know what I was carrying into Moscow. After all, I’m a practicing socialist, and if the article was intended for publication anyway…”
“You’re a socialist?” he asked faintly.
“Yes. 1 told you that last night.”
“So you did.” He recalled Andrea saying as much, but then it had seemed unimportant. He took a deep breath. “Well, what did you think of my little hoax? Childish, isn’t it?”
There was a long pause. “Not very childish, Lucas, no.”
“But I assure you…”
“I showed the papers to a friend and he didn’t laugh much, either.”
“You’d no right to do that.” He made a feeble attempt at blustering.
“And you’d no right to involve me in something like this. Would you like to come round here and discuss the matter?”
“Just try stopping me.” He threw the phone down and strode into the kitchen. “Something has come up on the Jack-and-Jill program. I have to go out for an hour.”
Vicky looked concerned. “On Sunday? Is it serious?”
“Not serious — just urgent. I’ll be back in an hour.”
“All right. Lucas.” She smiled tremulously, in a way that hurt him to see. “We have to sit down together and talk.”
“I know.” He ran out to his car, broadsided it out onto the road in a turn which sent gravel hissing through the shrubbery like grapeshot, and accelerated fiercely in the direction of Camburn. The traffic was light — with a scattering of people on their way for a pre-lunch drink — and he made good time, the concentration on fast motoring relieving him of the necessity to plan his immediate actions. When he reached the apartment block where Andrea lived it looked unfamiliar in the lemoncoloured sunlight. He stopped the car and glanced up at the top floor. There was nobody at the windows of her flat. He walked quickly to the elevator and rode up in it, staring distastefully at the aluminium walls which in their distorted reflections seemed to store visual records of the previous night’s madness. He thumbed Andrea’s doorbell, still without taking time to think of what he might say or do. She opened the door within seconds. Her dusky face, with its pouting lower lip, was immobile as she stood aside to let him enter.
“Listen, Andrea,” he said. “Let’s get all the nonsense over with quickly. Give me back my papers and we’ll forget the whole thing.”
“I want you to meet Aubrey Welland,” she replied tonelessly.
“Good morning, Mr. Hutchman.” A stocky, bespectacled young man, with a square-jawed face and the look of a rugby-playing schoolteacher, emerged from the kitchen. He was wearing a red tie and in the lapel of his tweed jacket was a small, brass hammer-and-sickle badge. He nodded when he saw the direction of Hutchman’s gaze. “Yes, I’m a member of the Party. Have you never seen one before?”
“I didn’t come here to play games.” Hutchman was depressingly aware that he sounded like a retired major. “You have some papers belonging to me, and I want them back.”
Welland appeared to consider the request for a moment. “Comrade Knight tells me you are a professional mathematician with a special knowledge of nuclear physics.”
Hutchman glanced at Andrea, who eyed him bleakly, and he realized he was getting nowhere by standing on his dignity. “That’s correct. Look, I tried to play a very childish practical joke and now I realize just how stupid it was. Can’t we — “
“I’m a mathematician myself,” Welland interrupted. “Not in your league, of course, but I think I have some appreciation of genuine creative maths.”
“If you had, you’d recognize an outright spoof when you saw one.” An idea formed in the back of Hutchman’s mind. “Didn’t you notice the anomaly in the way I handled the Legendre functions?” He smiled condescendingly, and waited.
“No.” Welland lost a little of his composure. He reached into his inside pocket, then changed his mind, and withdrew his hand — but not before Hutchman had glimpsed and identified the corner of a white envelope. “I’m going to take some convincing about that.”
Hutchman shrugged. “Let me convince you, then. Where are the papers?”
“I’ll keep the papers,” Welland snapped.
“All right.” Hutchman smiled again. “If you want to make a fool of yourself with your Party bosses, go ahead. To me it’s all part of the joke.” He half-turned away, then sprang at Welland, throwing the other man’s jacket open with his left hand and grasping the envelope with his right. Welland gasped and clamped his hands over Hutchman’s wrists. Hutchman exerted all the power of his bowtoughened muscles, Welland’s grip weakened, and the envelope fluttered to the floor. Welland snarled and tried to drag him away from it and they went on a grotesque waltz across the room. The edge of a long coffee table hit the back of Hutchman’s legs and to prevent himself going down he stepped up onto it, bringing Welland with him. Welland raised his knee and Hutchman, trying to protect his groin, flung the other man sideways. Too late, he realized, they were close to the window. There was an explosive bursting of glass, and suddenly the cool November air was streaming into the room. The lacy material clogged around Hutchman’s fingers and mouth as he looked downwards through angular petals of glass. People were running into the forecourt, and a woman was screaming. Hutchman saw why.
Welland had landed on a cast-iron railing and, even from a height of four storeys, it was obvious that he was dead.
CHAPTER 8
Detective Inspector Crombie-Carson was a lean, acidulous man who made no concessions to his own or anybody else’s humanity. His face was small but crowded with large features, as though all the intervening areas had shrunk and caused the dominant objects to draw together. Horn-rimmed spectacles, a sandy moustache, and one protuberant mole also found room, somehow, on his countenance.
“It’s damned unsatisfactory,” he said in clipped military tones, staring with open belligerence at Hutchman. “You left your home on a Sunday morning and drove from Crymchurch to here to have a drink with Miss Knight?”
“That’s it.” Hutchman had been feeling ill since he saw the television-camera team among the crowd below. “Andrea and I have known each other since our university days.”
“And your wife has no objections to these little excursions?”
“Ah… my wife didn’t know where I was.” Hutchman drew his lips into the semblance of a smile and tried not to think about Vicky. “I told her I was going to work for an hour.”
“I see.” Crombie-Carson gazed at Hutchman in disgust. From the start of the interview he had shown no trace of the behind-this-badge-I’m-just-another-human-being attitude with which many police officers eased their relationship with the public. He was doing a job for which he expected to be hated and was more than ready to hate in return. “How did you feel when you arrived and found
