It was on the Monday of his third week that it all changed. Her name was Katie Malleson and he met her in the gallery in Conduit Street. It was her first one-man exhibition and they thought he was from one of the Sunday papers. He was introduced to her by one of the PR ladies and that was that. He took her to dinner that night but it took four more dates before he had the courage to tell her that not only was he not a journalist but that he had only gone into the gallery to get out of the rain. But she was amused and genuinely not offended.
He didn’t know what attracted him so compulsively. She was very pretty, but all his girl-friends had been pretty. He came to the conclusion that the main attraction was that he didn’t have to put on an act. It was as if they had known each other for years. She asked no questions about his job or his life before she met him. None of it seemed to matter. She told him very little about her life either but she did drive him down to see her parents in Sussex. It was an easy, relaxed visit. Nobody appeared to be looking him over and he asked her to marry him as they ate their dinner at a country pub on the way back to London.
For a moment she went on eating and then she looked up at his face, smiling, “You don’t have to marry me to get me into bed, James. We can do that tonight and no strings attached.” She laughed and put down her fork. “You’re blushing. The first time I’ve ever made a man blush.” But she reached over and put her hand on his and the brown eyes were serious. “I won’t ask you if you’ve thought about it. I know you’ll have thought a lot before you spoke. I’d thought about it too, days ago.”
“What did you decide?”
“I decided to say yes provided you accept that my painting means a lot to me. It’s not just a hobby. I earn my living by painting. I make a reasonable amount of money and I care about my exhibitions and all that jazz. I always thought that if I married anyone it would have to be another painter. Nobody else would understand the moods, the ups and downs. But I think I was wrong. You don’t know a damn thing about art but you do encourage me. You’ve only got two more weeks of leave but you sit there quietly in my studio while I paint, reading or just watching, and I feel nice and safe. Like I was on my own but with a nice warm fire burning away in the grate.” She laughed. “So, my fire in the grate, yes I’m flattered that you asked me, and I’d be very happy to marry you.”
Cartwright, Boyd’s section head, used SIS’s leverage to get the Special Licence and they were married at Chelsea Registrar’s Office with a cleaning lady and the taxi driver as witnesses.
They drove down to Chichester and stayed at The Ship for the last week of his leave, spending all their time in the pretty villages that dotted the creeks. And on the last day they bought the second-hand Seamaster from a broker in Bosham village.
She bought him a pair of silver-backed military hairbrushes as a going away present and for the first time in his adult life he realized that he had never before had a present. Birthdays and Christmases had gone by unnoticed and unrecorded. And for the first time he felt lonely as he waved to her and she blew him a kiss from the wrong side of the plate glass windows at Heathrow. He sighed as he turned away trying not to look back. But he did look back, and, smiling, she blew him another kiss. And that was nice, but too much, and he hurried off to the loading gate.
The apartment had that special emphasis that places have when people are never coming back. The silence that comes when their human occupiers have deserted their living space.
As the man in the denim shirt and slacks stood with the police detective looking at the shambles in the living room, he tried to visualize what had gone on in the last minutes of her conscious life.
It was only two days since he had sat in this room in the early evening and she had been so excited. Dorothy Kilgallan was a freelance journalist with a syndicated column, and because he was a rival as well as a friend she had refused to tell him what she had learned.
She had just come back from interviewing Jack Ruby in his cell, the only journalist who had been allowed to do so. She had paced up and down this room, a glass in her hand, trying to control her excitement. When he had pressed her to tell him more she had stood quite still, then had turned slowly to look at him as she said, “What Ruby told me this afternoon is going to blow the JFK case sky high.”
At the time he had thought that her gestures were over-dramatic for so experienced a journalist, but he realized that if those were her reactions, then whatever she had learned from Ruby must be really explosive. She had years of investigative reporting behind her and that bred a cynicism that was prone neither to exaggeration nor naivety. But now, with her apartment still a shambles, she was dead. Dead from a massive overdose of sleeping pills laced with alcohol. And the missing pages from her notebook added to the mystery. It was a standard reporter’s notebook with a spiral
