Paws for Alarm (16 page)

‘Hazel, we're over by the window.' I enunciated carefully. ‘Come and join us.'

‘Fine.' Her eyes carefully watching my lips, she nodded. ‘I'd love to. I was beginning to think I'd walked into the wrong party. I don't seem to know anyone here.'

‘Neither do we. And when you add to that the fact that there's been a radical change in the decor —Well, if I hadn't seen Lania and Richard around,
I'd
have thought I was in the wrong house.'

‘
And
Piers,' Hazel added absently. We twitched eyebrows at each other.

‘Hazel, honey!' Arnold greeted her with an arm around her shoulder and a peck on the cheek. ‘Great to see you!'

There was a slight stir in a nearby group and I became aware that one of the men had so far broken formation as to have turned and actually looked at us. At Arnold and Hazel – and there was an unpleasant look in his eyes.

‘Er –' I nudged Hazel and inclined my head towards the watcher. ‘Who's your friend?'

‘Never saw him before in my life.' She glanced at him just as he turned away – a bit too quickly to be casual. She frowned. ‘Not that I recall,' she amended.

‘Maybe he's a friend of your husband's – keeping an eye on you for him.' That would explain the disapproval at Arnold's gesture of affection.

‘My husband has no friends.' She spoke without thinking; she had gone pale.

‘Then he's a smart man,' Richard approved. His gaze wandered over our heads and found Piers. He had drunk just a bit too much and his stiff upper lip was in danger of wobbling. ‘That way, he'll never get into trouble.'

‘Oh, dear!' Hazel laughed nervously. ‘I didn't mean that the way it sounded. I just meant he doesn't have time to make friends, the way he's always travelling for the firm. Now that we've bought our house here, of course, we're planning to settle down and things will change.'

Perhaps I ought to start travelling myself,' Richard murmured. ‘Your husband can settle down here – and I'll take off. The swings and the roundabouts. Win some, lose some.'

‘You don't want to do that,' I told him. ‘You've already lost one good man around here. Look at John Blake.'

Okay, so I dragged the subject in by its heels and maybe I might have been more tactful about it. But how was I to know it would cause Hazel to burst into tears and run from the room?

‘Oh-oh, you stepped on some toes there, honey,' Arnold said. ‘I guess she still feels awful about it.'

Fortunately, nobody else seemed to notice, not even the man who had been glaring at us. The party was in full swing and. people were interested only in their own little cliques. Those who weren't interested in Lania and Piers, that is.

There was quite a crowd around them now and it wasn't just because the bar was there. Piers was holding forth on some anecdote that was being hilariously received. Lania beamed beside him, interpolating small corrections to the story. They looked very intimate, very cosy, very much the host and hostess.

‘It's always the wrong person who dies,' Richard brooded. ‘Have you ever noticed?'

‘You mean John Blake?' Arnold was deliberately obtuse. It was perfectly plain that Richard would have liked to have seen Piers drive over a cliff.

‘Poor old John, poor devil. Everything to live for – and look what happened.'

‘It's a tough world, all right,' Arnold sympathized.

‘Terrible,' I agreed. ‘A nice man like that. A man with no enemies ...' I let the thought trail off, fishing.

‘Wife who loved him ... children who looked up to him ... everyone in town respected him. Man on his way up ... might even have stood for Parliament some day. And won. No telling where he could have gone and – pffit! – over! Just like that.'

‘A shame,' Arnold agreed. We dipped our heads in brief mourning while I tried to formulate the next leading question.

‘
Other
men wouldn't even be missed –' Richard's baleful gaze was fastened on Piers. ‘Small loss to the world.'

Arnold and I looked at each other and remained silent. To agree, would have been to admit that the situation was becoming uncomfortably clear.

‘Rosemary –' I began, by way of getting back to the main subject. ‘Rosemary must have been –'

‘Especially me –' Richard tossed down the last of his drink, still brooding over his wife and Piers. ‘They'd never miss me.'

For a terrible moment, I thought there was going to be a real rooting-tooting scene. Then Richard turned back to us and smiled affably.

‘Let me get you another drink.' He collected the glasses from our nerveless hands and headed for the tree stump bar.

‘That was close, Babe,' Arnold said judiciously. ‘That was very close, indeed.'

‘That's what I thought.' We watched uneasily, but Richard merely handed the glasses to Lania to refill and waited beside her as she did so, neatly cutting her off from Piers and establishing his place at her side. Piers had the good sense to move away and begin mingling with his guests. ‘But it's all blown over, I guess.'

‘For this time, anyway,' Arnold said.

Richard seemed in no hurry to return to us; everybody else seemed intent on ignoring us. I'd had more fun at an Irish wake.

‘I don't know about you, Arnold, but I feel a deep boredom setting in.'

‘Me, too.' Arnold surreptitiously checked his watch. ‘Do you think we can decently leave? We haven't been here very long.'

‘It seems like hours.' Just then I felt something brush my ankles and muffled a shriek. I hadn't thought it was that kind of party. I sidestepped and glanced down. A familiar marmalade figure made a fresh assault on my ankles, twining round them.

‘Esmond!' I swooped and caught him up. ‘What are you doing here? Who let you in?'

‘Never mind that,' Arnold said, chucking Esmond under the chin with approval. ‘Here's our ticket out of here. We'll have to take him home.'

‘Yes, we will, won't we?' I brightened. ‘He must have slipped in when Hazel left. Clever Esmond, to find us in all this crowd.'

A couple of people standing nearby began smiling in our direction. Esmond was obviously more socially acceptable than we were. But it was too late, I just wanted to leave.

‘You're not going?' Richard intercepted us at the door. ‘I've just got your drinks.'

‘Esmond sneaked in to join the party.' We accepted the drinks, since it seemed churlish not to, but continued edging towards the exit. ‘We've got to take him home.'

‘Ah, yes.' Richard patted Esmond's head absently.

‘Not much for you at this party, Esmond. We usually have cocktail sausages, bits of cheese, things like that,' he explained. ‘But this is a gathering of more serious drinkers. Lania decided just olives, nuts and Bombay mixture for them. Look on the bright side, Esmond – if they get drunk enough, someone may buy this jungle out from under us before we actually have to live in it.'

‘Good luck on that, fella,' Arnold said.

‘I live in hope.' Richard followed us to the front door. We drank hastily, trying to empty the glasses and escape before Esmond grew restive.

‘If you get tired of all the foliage, come next door,' Arnold invited, ‘and refresh your memory as to how the other half lives.'

‘I might do that,' Richard agreed. ‘By next week, I could have reached the breaking point.'

‘That's stamina,' Arnold admired. ‘I don't think I could hold out much past Saturday myself.'

‘Ah, but that's only because I'll be away for a long weekend,' Richard said. ‘I have a site inspection and conferences scheduled in Edinburgh. I may not get back until Monday or Tuesday; it depends how it goes.'

‘Well –' I drained my glass and set it down on the hall table – I think it was a hall table. ‘Sorry to leave, but we've got to get this cat home. Thank you so much. It's been –'

‘Please –' He held up his hand, cutting me off in mid-lie. ‘I quite understand. In fact, I quite agree.'

Although the party was a washout, Arnold was not deterred from his new project. The thought that someone was gunning for him had concentrated his mind wonderfully.

‘We'll have to go to direct sources,' he announced in the morning. Then amended, ‘
I'll
have to.'

‘Arnold –' I was immediately nervous. ‘You can't go up and down the street with a notebook asking searching questions. The neighbours think we're crazy enough already.'

‘Not
that
direct, honey. I mean records, reports, documents. All the stuff of history, only it's contemporary this time. Just a few months old –' He could hardly contain his enthusiasm.

‘Compared to my usual research, the printers' ink will still be wet on the documents. There are bound to be leads I can follow up – and the trail won't lead through dusty parchment and old books. It will lead to people with living memories, able to recount their stories in the flesh. It's a historian's dream –' He came down to earth abruptly. ‘Or, it would be, if it wasn't my neck on the chopping block.'

‘You be careful, Arnold. If you think somebody's been trying to kill you just on general principles, what do you think they're going to do if they catch you snooping around like that?'

‘Damned if I do – and damned if I don't.' Arnold's face tightened with a new determination. ‘If I have to go down, I'm going down fighting!'

‘Who are you fighting, Dad?' Donald came into the kitchen, Donna just behind him. ‘Are you gonna get those guys who beat you up?'

‘Never you mind,' Arnold said. ‘Sit down and eat your breakfast.'

‘You're late, Daddy,' Donna worried. ‘You're going to miss your train.'

‘He's already missed it,' Donald said. ‘What's the next train? Shall I get the timetable?'

‘Never mind,' Arnold said again. ‘I'm not going up to London today. I'm going to, er, work locally for a few days.'

‘Will you be home to lunch every day, then?' My practical Donna produced a question that had not yet crossed my mind. I waited with interest for the answer.

‘I might be –' Arnold caught my eye and grinned suddenly. ‘On the other hand, I might come home every day and take us all out to lunch. How about that? There are a lot of nice-looking places around here that we haven't tried.'

‘That's one of your better ideas,' I told him. ‘Starting today, I hope?'

‘Why not? I'll begin at the library this morning and see how much they've got on file. When I've exhausted their resources, I'll move on to the local newspaper. They might even have some back copies to sell me so that I can study them at home.'

That routine worked very well, right through to Saturday. To tell the truth, I was relieved to be able to keep a closer eye on Arnold – and not just for the lovely luncheons at country inns. Nothing else dire happened and I was gradually losing my conviction that he was the designated victim of some mad murderer – who would have to be mad to want to kill poor, innocent Arnold. But I was happier not having him disappear up to London every day, never knowing what condition he might be in when he returned.

If he returned. No, a discreet check on his condition over a lunch somebody else had cooked and served suited me very well.

It kept the twins happy, too. The only snag was that we couldn't carry on much of a conversation with them around. We solved that by sending them upstairs early every evening to watch television while we retreated to the study to discuss Arnold's discoveries of the day, if any.

All in all, Arnold and I hadn't spent so much time alone together since the early days of our marriage. I began to remember why I had fallen in love with him. He could be very good company – when you got him out of his libraries and away from his dusty old records.

He was looking better these days, too, despite his injuries. The enforced rest had relaxed him, he had lost a certain amount of flabbiness since he had been so active catching trains and buses; most of all, a new sense of purpose had hardened his jaw and tightened his muscles.

‘Penny for your thoughts, Babe.'

Also, he was paying more attention to me. A few weeks ago, back in New Hampshire, he would never have noticed whether or not I was thinking anything.

‘I was just thinking you're quite a guy.' Then, so as not to spoil him, I added. ‘In your own way, that is.'

‘You wouldn't swap me, then? Not even for Piers?'

‘Especially not for Piers. Richard, now ...' I dodged a mock blow, laughing.

‘Lania's crazy.' Arnold sobered suddenly. ‘Messing around a nice guy like Richard. I wouldn't blame him if he didn't put up with it any longer.'

‘Do you really think she's seriously involved?'

‘Would you let some guy use your living-room as an out-of-town showroom, if you
weren't
seriously involved?'

‘Well, no, but this is England. Things may be different here.'

‘Not
that
different.' Arnold rubbed his wounded arm reflectively. ‘I'd call it more than serious. I'd call it blatant. And I wouldn't blame Richard if he did a bit of murdering on his own account.'

‘Lania's so silly. She's got everything: a lovely home, a good husband, two nice children, and –' I looked at the piles of photocopies and back-issue newspapers on the desk. ‘And she's got Rosemary's example. She's seen how easily it can all be swept away. Even at the best of times, life is so precarious. Why should she risk everything she's got?'

‘Some women never believe it can happen to them.' He looked at me sombrely. ‘Even you don't, do you, Babe? Not down deep?'

‘I don't want to.'

‘Yet it happened to the Blakes.' He rifled one of the piles of photocopies. ‘There's the collected evidence. We'll begin sifting through it tomorrow. Maybe we'll find a clue somewhere in there.'