right; perhaps if we had been unhappy rather than merely bored we might have separated and looked for happiness elsewhere. But when you’re neither one thing nor the other, time slips away before you realise that there might be something more.’
Guessing that Aubrey’s widow would despise any form of pre-varication, Penrose decided to make his questions as direct as possible. ‘Were you always faithful to each other?’
‘Yes, absolutely.’
‘You seem very sure. Can you speak so certainly for your husband?’
‘I can afford to be sure, if only for the simple reason that I wouldn’t have minded if he had strayed. There would have been no need for him to lie about it. I might even have been relieved, although of course you never know when jealousy will strike. No, 165
we were both too lazy to have an affair.’ She took a cigarette from the silver box on the table beside her and paused to light it.
‘Do you have any children?’
‘A son, Joseph. He lives in Gloucestershire. He and Bernard were never very close – they were far too much alike to get on well, and Bernard always resented the fact that Joe didn’t want anything to do with his precious theatres. And thank God he didn’t, bearing in mind what’s happened to his father.’
‘Did he have enemies, then?’
‘Clearly he did, Inspector. I would have thought that much was obvious.’
‘But specifically within the theatre? You seem to blame his work for his death.’
‘Bernard was a powerful man. He made careers and he destroyed them. His decisions were invariably right but often ruthless, and he made them with no thought for sentiment or even loyalty. And he was found poisoned in the private area of his theatre.
You’re the detective, of course, but the evidence does seem to point in that direction.’
Penrose resisted the temptation to return the charge of seeing things too simply. ‘I believe your husband’s death is connected to another murder which took place on Friday. Does the name Elspeth Simmons mean anything to you?’
She thought for a moment. ‘The girl who was killed at King’s Cross? I read about it in the paper tonight but I’d never heard of her before that. What makes you think Bernard’s death had anything to do with hers?’
‘She was involved with one of his employees – a young man named Hedley White. I gather your husband thought a lot of him and was very upset at the news of Miss Simmons’s death.’
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I’m sorry – I can’t really help you there. He did talk fondly about Hedley – I remember because it’s an unusual name – and he was certainly a great believer in giving young people a chance, but I can’t be more specific than that.’
‘Had you noticed any change in his behaviour recently?’ Penrose asked, although he was rapidly coming to believe that Grace 166
Aubrey knew too little about her husband’s life to be able to throw much light on his death. ‘At the risk of being too straightforward, had he been unhappy?’
She smiled at him with a growing respect. ‘At the risk of being pedantic, I’d say angry rather than unhappy. He always had a short temper, but it was usually soon over. Lately, he often seemed worried or frustrated.’
‘Do you have any idea why?’
‘When Bernard was angry, it was usually because he couldn’t get his own way over something, but don’t ask me what.’
‘I know it’s unlikely, bearing in mind the manner of his death, but can you imagine anything that might have led Bernard to take his own life?’
‘No. Absolutely nothing. He had no great faith to prevent him from doing it, but after all he went through in the war and all the lives he saw snatched away before they were ever really begun, he scorned suicide as the coward’s way out. That was something he never was – a coward – and he despised it in other people. He had a bleak view of the world and he could be very hard on himself at times, usually because of things he hadn’t done that he thought he should have, but he always claimed that the greatest punishment for any sin was to go on living.’
Penrose wondered if the sin for which Bernard Aubrey had felt the need to repent went back as far as the war. He asked as much, and was rewarded once again with a look of approval.
‘What makes you think that, I wonder? You’re right, though.
Bernard had a terrible time, and he came back a very different man. Not broken, you understand, but with a combination of resentment and guilt which ran deeper than the grief we all felt to some extent.’ She lit another cigarette but lodged it almost immediately in the ashtray, where it burned steadily down, forgotten.
‘He’d been in the war in South Africa and distinguished himself there, so, although he was really too old to fight in France, they begged him to go over and lead the war underground. Lots of older men did the same – they needed the youngsters to do all the digging, but they only had a week’s basic training or something 167
ridiculous before they were sent out to that God-forsaken landscape and then expected to do battle with earth and water and charges going off all over the place. People like Bernard, who were experienced and could lead by example, were worth their weight in gold. I know that there was no such thing as an easy war for anyone – you look the right age to vouch for that – but it always seemed to me that tunnelling was a different level of hell. There’s something peculiarly unnatural about never seeing daylight. But he was marvellous with those boys, at least at first; he looked after them, taught them how to keep their nerve and anticipate the enemy’s next move, and believe me – there was nobody better than my husband at doing that. And they learned quickly – they had to; the slightest noise down there could cost lives and if you gave way to panic, that was it – you lost the confidence of your colleagues and your usefulness was over.’
‘And is that what happened to Bernard?’
‘No, not at all, although I don’t know how he kept it together.
He had to spend hours alone in cramped positions, straining every sinew to hear enemy noise. Apparently, sound travels further through solid ground and water than it does through air and it was his job to interpret what he heard, to plot the direction of the tunnels and judge the distances for the charges. There must have been enormous pressure on him, psychologically I mean, knowing how much depended on his decisions and how close he was to
