went to the public library in Reading, he did that most days; also sat around wherever there were seats, doing nothing. He read the job-offer pages in newspapers, but apparently did little to find work. No heart. (My opinion.) Mr T. on brink of nervous breakdown (my opinion).
I interviewed him in coffee shop. His hands trembled half the time, rattling cup against teeth, and he's not yet forty. Alcohol? Don't think so. Nerves shot to hell.
Mr T. drives old grey Austin 1100. Has slight dent in front wing. Mr T. says it's been there weeks. Car dirty, could do with wash. Mr T. says he has no energy for things like that.
Mr T.'s opinion of Mr Ian is very muddled (like the rest of him). Mr Ian is 'best of bunch, really', but also Mr T. says Mr Ian is Mr Pembroke's favourite and it isn't fair. End of enquiry.
With a sigh, I put Thomas to the back and read about Berenice; no happy tale.
Mrs Berenice Pembroke (44 according to Mrs Joyce), wife of Mr Thomas, lives at 6 Arden Haciendas. No job. Looks after daughters, spends her days doing housework and reading trashy romances (according to Mrs Joyce again!).
Mrs B. very hard to interview. First visit, nothing. Second visit, a little, not much. She couldn't produce alibi for either day.
I asked about children and school journeys. Mrs B. doesn't drive them, they go by bus. They walk alone along pavement in residential side-road to and from bus stop, which is about one-third of mile away, on the main thoroughfare. Mrs B's mother lives actually on the bus route. The girls get off the bus there most afternoons and go to their grandmother's for tea.
Interviewed Mrs B.'s mother. Not helpful. Agreed girls go there most days. Sometimes (if cold, wet or dark) she drives them home at about 7 pm. Other days, they finish journey by bus. I asked why they go there for tea so often and stay so late. Told to mind my own business. Younger girl said Granny makes better teas, Mummy gets cross. Told to shut up by older girl. Mrs B.'s mother showed me out.
Mrs B. drives old white Morris Maxi, clean, no marks on it.
Mrs B. gave no opinion of Mr Ian when asked, but looked as if she could spit. Says Mr Pembroke is wicked. Mrs B. slammed her front door (she hadn't asked me in!). End of enquiry.
I put Berenice, too, back in the packet, and cheered myself up just a fraction with a slice of pork pie and a game of darts.
From the outside, Arden Haciendas were dreadful: tiny houses of dark brown-red brick set at odd angles to each other, with dark- framed windows at odd heights and dark front doors leading from walled front gardens one could cross in one stride. Nevertheless, Arden Haciendas, as Joyce had informed me a year earlier when Thomas had moved there, were socially the in thing, as they had won a prize for the architect.
God help architecture, I thought, ringing the bell of No 6. I hadn't been to this house before: had associated Thomas and Berenice always with the rather ordinary bungalow they'd bought at the time of their wedding.
Berenice opened the door and tried to close it again when she saw me, but I pushed from my side and put my shoe over the threshold, and finally, with ill grace, she stepped back.
'We don't want to see you,' she said. 'Dear Thomas isn't well. You've no right to shove your way in here. I hate you.'
'Well, hate or not, I want to talk to Thomas.'
She couldn't say he wasn't there, because I could see him. Inside, the Haciendas were open-plan with rooms at odd angles to each other, which explained the odd-angled exteriors. The front door led into an angled off-shoot of the main room, which had no ceiling where one would expect it, but soared to the rafters. Windows one couldn't see out of let daylight in at random points in the walls. Horrible, I thought, but that was only, as Mr West would say, my opinion.
Thomas rose to his feet from one of the heavily-stuffed armchairs brought from the bungalow, old comfortable chairs looking incongruous in all the aggressive modernity. There was no carpet on the woodblock floor; Thomas's shoes squeaked on it when he moved.
'Come in, old chap,' he said.
'We don't want him,' Berenice objected.
Thomas was looking haggard and I was shocked. I hadn't seen him, I realised, for quite a long time. All youth had left him, and I thought of him as he had been at eighteen or nineteen, laughing and good-humoured, coming for weekends and making Serena giggle. Twenty years on, he looked middle-aged, the head balder than when I'd last taken his photograph, the ginger moustache less well tended, the desperation all-pervading. Norman West's assessment of early breakdown seemed conservative. It looked to me as if it had already happened. Thomas was a lot further down the line to disintegration than Gervase.
Ferdinand, he confirmed in answer to my question, had told him about Malcolm's will and about Malcolm's wish that I should try to find out who wanted to kill him. Thomas couldn't help, he said. I reminded him of the day old Fred blew up the tree stump. Ferdinand had mentioned that too, he said. Thomas had been there. He remembered it clearly. He had carried Serena on his shoulders, and Fred had been blown flat.
'And do you remember the time-switches we used to make, with wire on the clocks' hands?'
He stared, his eyes gaunt. After a long pause, he said, 'Yes.'
'Thomas, after Gervase and Ferdinand left Quantum, did you or they make any more of them?'
Berenice interrupted, 'Dear Thomas couldn't make a time-switch to save his life, could you, darling?' Her voice was pitying, sneering, unkind. Thomas sent her a haunted look but no protest.
'Someone gave Robin and Peter a Mickey Mouse clock with white plastic-covered wires stuck on it,' I said. 'Very bright and attractive.'
Thomas shook his head helplessly.
'In the rubble at Quantum, they've found a clock hand stuck onto some white plastic-covered wire.'
'Oh, my God,' Thomas said miserably.
'So what?' Berenice demanded. 'Dear Thomas does over-act so.'
'So,' I said, 'someone who knew how to make these time-switches blew up Quantum.'
'What of it?' she said. 'I can't see Thomas doing it. Not enough nerve, have you, darling?'
Thomas said to me, 'Have a drink?'
Berenice looked disconcerted. Asking me to have a drink had been for Thomas an act of rebellion against her wishes. There hadn't been many of them, I guessed. I accepted with thanks, although it was barely five-thirty and to my mind too early. I'd chosen the hour on purpose, hoping both that Thomas would have returned from his day's wanderings and that the daughters would stop at their grandmother's house on their way home from school.
Thomas squeaked across the floor to the kitchen, which was divided from the main room only by a waist-high counter and began opening cupboards. He produced three tumblers which he put clumsily on the counter and then sought in the fridge interminably for mixers. Berenice watched him with her face screwed into an expression of long-suffering impatience and made no move to help.
'We have some gin somewhere,' he said vaguely, having at last found the tonic. 'I don't know where Berenice puts things. She moves them about.'
'Dear Thomas couldn't find a book in a library.'
Thomas gave her a look of black enmity which she either didn't see or chose to ignore. He opened another cupboard, and another and in his wife's continued unhelpful silence finally found a nearly full bottle of Gordon's gin. He came round into the main room and poured from the bottle into three glasses, topping up inadequately from a single bottle of tonic.
He handed me a glass. I didn't much care for gin, but it was no time to say so. He held out the second glass to Berenice.
'I don't want any,' she said.
Thomas's hand was trembling. He made an awkward motion as if to raise the glass to his own lips, then put it down with a bang on the counter and in an uncoordinated movement accidentally knocked the gin bottle over so that it fell to the floor, smashing into green shiny pieces, the liquid spreading in a pool.
Thomas bent down to pick up the bits. Berenice didn't help. She said, 'Thomas can't get anything right, can you, darling?'
The words were no worse than others, but the acid sarcasm in her voice had gone beyond scathing to unbearable.
