through riot-proofed doors to his office and detailed a policewoman to take Joyce off for some tea. Joyce went protestingly, and Yale with another sigh sat us down in his bare-looking Scandinavian-type place of business.
He looked at us broodingly from behind a large desk. He looked at his nails. He cleared his throat. Finally he said to Malcolm, 'All right. You don't have to say it. I do not believe you would blow up your house just to make me believe that someone is trying to kill you.' There was a long pause.
'That being so,' he said, as we both sat without speaking, 'we must take the attack in the garage more seriously.'
He was having a hard time, I thought. He ran a finger and thumb down his large black moustache and waited for comments from us that still didn't come.
He cleared his throat again. 'We will redouble our efforts to find Mrs Moira Pembroke's killer.'
Malcolm finally stirred, brought out his cigar case, put a cigar in his mouth and patted his pockets to find matches. There was a plastic notice on Yale's desk saying NO SMOKING. Malcolm, his glance resting on it momentarily, lit the match and sucked the flame into the tobacco. Yale decided on no protest and produced a glass ashtray from a lower drawer in his desk.
'I would be dead twice over,' Malcolm said, 'if it weren't for Ian.'
He told Yale about the car roaring straight at us at Newmarket.
'Why didn't you report this, sir?' Yale said, frowning.
'Why do you think?'
Yale groomed his moustache and didn't answer.
Malcolm nodded. 'I was tired of being disbelieved.'
'And… er… last night?' Yale asked.
Malcolm told him about our day at Cheltenham, and about Quantum's inner doors. 'I wanted to 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 shiv eras 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 other doors 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 in jail 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 said, 'Oh God,' and dragged on his cigar, and presently the whole troop arrived.
I got to my feet and Alicia immediately sat on my chair. Vivien and Joyce both glared at Malcolm, still seated, willing him to rise, which he didn't. Which of them could he possibly give his chair to, I thought, stifling laughter, without causing ex-marital bloodshed?
With a straight face, Yale asked the policewoman to fetch two more chairs, and I couldn't even tell if he were amused or simply practical. When Vivien and Joyce were suitably enthroned, he looked around and counted us all: thirteen.
'Who's missing?' he asked.
He got various answers: 'My wife, Debs', 'Thomas, my husband', 'Ursula, of course.'
'Very well. Now, if any of you know anything or guess anything about the explosion at Quantum House, I want to hear about it.'
'Terrorists,' Vivien said vaguely.
Everyone ignored her and no one else made any suggestion.
'While you are here,' Yale said, 'I'll ask you all to answer certain questions. I'll have my personnel write down your answers, and of course after that you can leave. The questions are, what were you doing yesterday between three in the afternoon and midnight, what were you doing a week last Tuesday between the same hours, and what were you doing two weeks ago today, Friday, also between three p.m. and midnight.'
Edwin said crossly, 'We've already answered most of those questions for that wretched man, West it's too much to go over it all again.'
Several of the others nodded.
Yale looked blank. 'Who is West?'
'A detective,' Berenice said. 'I sent him away with a flea in his ear, I can tell you.'
'He was awfully persistent,' Helen said, not liking the memory. 'I told him I couldn't possibly remember exactly, but he went on prying.'
'Dreadful little man,' Serena said.
'He said I was illegitimate,' Gervase complained sourly. 'It's thanks to Joyce that he knew.'
Yale's mouth opened and closed again and he took a deep breath. 'Who is West?' he asked intensely.
