Peter remained silent, not because he couldn’t think of anything to say, but because in the twenty-two years he had known Manfred Wallace he had never once seen him cry.
Five
As Hollis turned off Woods Lane, a dog darted into the road. He braked suddenly, stalling the car, and the small basket of chocolates spilled off the passenger seat on to the floor. He let them lie where they fell—already softened by the heat, the dirt clinging to them—then he restarted the engine and carried on along Highway Behind the Lots.
Abel lived in a modest cottage near the junction with Wireless Road. It was the house he had grown up in, the only house he had ever known. His father, an engineer with a New York firm, had moved with his wife and newborn son to East Hampton soon after the Great War to oversee the construction of a wireless telegraphy station on a plot just south of Cove Hollow Road.
By 1921 Henry Cole’s work was done, but East Hampton had weaved its spell on him. A keen amateur photographer, he secured a loan for a down payment on a narrow store on Main Street, and for the remainder of his life devoted himself to photographic portraiture. Abel was nineteen years old at the time of his father’s death, and it was natural that he take over the business. However, with money tight he was in no position to move out of the family home, and he had to content himself with entertaining a string of local girls on the plum-velvet Victorian couch in the shop, the one reserved for family portraits. With his dark, broken looks, his languid manner and quick wit, there was never any shortage of young women willing to test the springs with him.
His mother died quite unexpectedly of a stroke the day after the German army entered Paris. The two events were not necessarily unconnected. Sylvie Cole had spent the first eighteen years of her life in a small apartment off the Square des Batignolles in the 17th arrondissement of that city, before boarding a ship in Le Havre bound for New York.
The only son of an only son, destined never to meet his mother’s family from whom she was estranged, Abel found himself alone in the world at the age of twenty-three with an ailing business and a small shingled cottage on Highway Behind the Lots.
Set some distance back from the road, the front lawn of the house was an untended meadow of tall grasses and wild flowers, Queen Anne’s lace and black-eyed susans. A narrow swathe of clipped lawn provided the only access to the house, obliging visitors to run a gauntlet of butterflies and bees in order to reach the front porch, which was fringed with self-seeded hollyhocks, well over six feet tall at this time of year.
If Hollis knew the names of the flowers it was only because Abel’s girlfriend, Lucy, had talked him through them on many occasions. Although they didn’t live together, Lucy had staked her claim to the front and back gardens— wild, unruly kingdoms which belied the thought, expertise and hard work behind them.
Lucy made a comfortable living maintaining the gardens of city people. Out of season she pruned their shrubs, cut back their perennials, planting bulbs and annuals so that their borders, pots and window boxes were ablaze with color come the summer when they took up residence once more. The summer months were her quietest time of the year. She had a team of local boys, headed by her feckless nephew, to weed and water, and mow the lawns.
Lucy must have seen Hollis park up because she appeared on the porch as he made his way towards the house. Slight, slender and effortlessly beautiful, her long dark hair tied back with a ribbon, she was wearing an apron and clutching a wooden spoon. Hollis kissed her on the cheek.
‘You look very…’ He searched for the word.
‘Yes?’
‘Norman friggin’ Rockwell!’ shouted Abel from inside the house.
Hollis laughed. It was true, she was the very picture of benign domesticity, the smiling wife in the gingham apron, pure
Abel appeared from the house and Lucy struck him with the wooden spoon, a playful but firm blow on the arm.
‘Jesus, Lucy!’
‘Any more of that and you won’t be eating tonight.’
‘Chance would be a fine thing,’ mumbled Abel, wisely backing out of range. Lucy headed inside.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Abel. ‘She insisted.’ He was referring to the fact that Lucy was wearing an apron. She was a woman of many talents; sadly, cooking wasn’t one of them. It was an inescapable truth that Lucy sought unsuccessfully to refute with recipes of ever-increasing ambition and complexity.
In her defense, the dish she’d prepared for them that evening was far better than it sounded. Tomato aspic with cloves and beef tongue was certainly a first for Hollis, and it wasn’t half bad, though there was no question it would have been far more appetizing had Lucy chosen to slice the tongue first. As it was, the pale, muscular appendage, spiked with cloves, lay suspended in its bed of rosy gelatin like some scientific curiosity preserved for posterity.
Abel was uncharacteristically restrained in his comments, even when Lucy cleared the plates and entered the house. They were eating at the table on the back terrace, the garden awash with warm evening light. Abel filled Hollis’ glass with wine.
‘You make any headway on the dead girl?’ he asked.
‘Name’s Lillian Wallace.’ From Abel’s expression, it rang no bells with him. ‘Her father’s some Wall Street whiz. I spoke to him earlier, broke the news. The family’s driving up tonight. There’s a formal identification of the body set for noon tomorrow.’
He didn’t tell Abel that he planned to be at the morgue a good hour earlier to scrutinize the results of Dr Hobbs’ autopsy before the body was released to the custody of the family.
‘Speaking of corpses,’ said Abel, reaching for his pack of cigarettes. ‘Any news from Lydia?’
‘She called a couple of nights back.’
‘Collect?’
Abel had never liked Hollis’ wife, a fact he had half-heartedly attempted to disguise while she’d been around.
