Unfaithfully Yours (3 page)

It is interesting that you mentioned the possibility of a local dramatic society. He is, as it happens, a member of the Putney Thespians, a group who meet regularly at a church hall in the Lower Richmond Road. He is currently playing Hamlet in a production of the Shakespeare play which bears that name. That might be a possible place to start. Whenever he returns from rehearsals he has a furtive look about him.

I hope this is satisfactory. Send a written report of progress to the above address when you think you have used up five full snooping days!

Yours,

Elizabeth Price

From:

Roland O. Gibbons

Gibbons Detective Agency

12 The Alley

Putney, SW15

4 July

To:

Elizabeth Price

PO Box 132

Putney

Dear Mrs Price,

When I came in this morning, your hand-delivered letter was waiting for me.

I am starting to understand why you prefer letters to emails. I can’t imagine daydreaming about the person behind, say,
[email protected]
, but the hand that typed a paragraph on a screen, sent that paragraph to the printer, wrapped it in an envelope herself and then posted it through my humble letterbox – along with £750 in crisp red fifty-pound notes! – that conjures up a woman, who is, well, interesting. It is the unknown in other people that attracts us. You’ll turn me into a writer yet, Mrs Price, and, so far, in this letter anyway, I haven’t used a single inverted comma.

The photograph of Gerald is very disturbing indeed. He is – and I hope you will not mind my saying this – a sinister-looking man. His face is typical of the kind of adulterer with whom I have had dealings over the years. His lips, I note, are thick and sensual and, although the hat he is wearing makes it difficult to be certain about this, he seems to bear a strong resemblance to a gorilla.

The eyes struck me very forcefully. They are set very closely into his – large – nose. They suggest to me that he may very well have something even worse on his mind than sexual relations with people to whom he is not married. Is he violent, Mrs Price? I would guess so from his expression. Do you have pets? Has he been cruel to them? He looks like the sort of a man who might well kick a dog. You mentioned that he might, at one point, have planned to kill you. From the look of him I would have said he was well up for strangling.

His hands are large and he has wide shoulders, as well as a thick neck.

There is something fairly suspicious about the way he is looking at the two small boys next to him, although this may have something to do with the fact that they seem to be hitting each other with what look like broadswords. I assume they are plastic. Perhaps they are your children. Or grandchildren! If they are, the way he is looking at them is not natural. What I can see in his face may be dislike rather than sexual desire – in my experience, the two are often very close – but if they are your children, Mrs Price, and your letter made mention of a daughter, I would ask you to try to make sure that he is not alone with them too often.

I will start work tomorrow and report at your earliest convenience.

Yours,

Roland O. Gibbons

PS While I fully understand your reluctance to use telephone or email as a form of communication, I am assuming your husband has no such scruples. It may, therefore, at some point in the future be worth considering my monitoring his mobile and landline phones and, of course, his computer.

PPS Sorry about the inverted commas! You can take the boy ‘out of the housing estate’ but you can’t ‘take the housing estate out of the boy’.

PPPS I do not think of myself as a ‘snooper’ but as someone who is valiant for the truth!

From:

Roland O. Gibbons

Gibbons Detective Agency

12 The Alley

Putney, SW15

12 July

To:

Elizabeth Price

PO Box 132

Putney

Dear Mrs Price,

No! I have not melted in the heat. I have been hard at work on Mr Gerald O’Shaughnessy Price.

On Monday, at 0850, I put on a pair of baggy shorts and a T-shirt and got out my old ‘Holdsworth’ drop-head racer from the shed at the back of my block of flats. I am using inverted commas because it is a brand name. I have not ridden it for some years and am a little shaky.

I was headed up Putney Hill towards the Green Man when I saw a figure that was, unmistakably, your husband. He has aged considerably since the photograph you sent me (do you have a more recent one, perhaps?) but it was definitely the same man. He was coming down the bus lane at a speed of at least forty miles an hour. The wind whipped through his surprisingly luxuriant hair as he pulled out to overtake a bus, raising the third finger of his right hand and pointing it at the driver, shouting, as he passed him, ‘Out of the way, you cunt!’

He then rode through the red traffic lights at the junction of the hill and the Lower Richmond Road. He kept the middle finger of his right hand pointed up at the sky during this manoeuvre and, as he wove out into the middle of the road to make an illegal right turn into Disraeli Road, which is, as I am sure you know, a one-way street, I think I heard him shout, ‘Die, motherfuckers!’

He did not, I have to say, look like a man with adultery on his mind. Suicide seemed a bit more like it.

I am, as you were pleased to remind me, Mrs Price, more than a little overweight, but I do take pride in my physical fitness and I did not find it difficult to keep him in my sights. I followed him, illegally, up Disraeli Road, through to Putney Bridge Road and down towards the Wandsworth one-way system. As we reached the park that lies between the main road and the river he slowed and I thought, for a moment, that he might be easing the pace in order to enjoy the beautiful morning. The sun was sparkling on the river and the trees on the far side of the park were crowned with summer light.

In fact, just ahead of us, a young female cyclist was hoisting her buttocks high off her saddle and your husband was thrusting himself forward in a manner that, if left unrestrained, would undoubtedly have led to his sniffing or, possibly, penetrating her behind with his nose. As we drew up to a set of lights he slowed to pull up next to her and, as I watched, from a safe distance, he struck up a conversation. At first I thought he might know her and, indeed, that she might be the woman with whom he was having a relationship; but it very quickly became clear that the easiness of his manner was just that.

He has charm, Mrs Price, I will admit. Within a few seconds she was laughing at something he had said and, when they pulled away, they rode together for a few hundred yards until the young woman turned right, down towards Tooting, just before Wandsworth Bridge. He waved a cheery goodbye to her. For a moment I was beginning to think the better of him and then, as I came behind him at the next set of lights, I heard him say to another fellow cyclist, a young man in his twenties, ‘Lovely arse on that!’

Not the sort of thing one would usually say to a stranger but, again, it was done with a certain charm. It did not seem as offensive as it ought to have done. His teeth, I noted, were brilliantly white and his eyes – very pale blue – sparkled with the kind of intense life that is very difficult to resist. Oh, Gerald! I thought, as I pedalled on, thirty or forty yards to his athletic rear. ‘You devil! You’re up to something! I wonder what it is!’

The rest of his journey to work was, I am afraid (or pleased) to report, without incident. I followed him all the way to his chambers and paid particular attention to his demeanour as he entered the building. I will obviously look into his office life further. As I think I said, work is an erogenous zone. But men of Gerald’s age and type, when conducting an affair, do not usually risk being seen by their ‘fancy bits’, wearing bicycle helmets, Lycra and a hairstyle so blown about by the wind it resembles a haystack in a hurricane. He did not look like a man with filth on his mind. I cycled home – a journey for which I have not charged you, Mrs Price – convinced that he is ‘playing away’ ‘close to home’.

On Thursday night I went along to the church hall in the Upper Richmond Road where the Putney Thespians meet.

It is not an inspiring location. There is a draughty, gloomy entrance hall and, beyond, an even more draughty and gloomy high-ceilinged room in which there are some chairs, a large table and a poster saying, ‘ARE YOU A CUSTARD CHRISTIAN? DO YOU GET UPSET OVER TRIFLES?’ There were only about five or six people in the room and they were sitting, all well apart from each other, with the air of those who have been waiting for a train that they are starting to suspect will never arrive.

A woman in her late fifties was the only one to rise. She had what I think is called strawberry blonde hair, which looked – I am afraid – as if it were not her natural colour. She had, also, a strawberry blonde complexion and, as she was wearing a pink cardigan, pink slacks and what looked like a pair of pink slippers, my first impression was that she was, for some psychological reason perhaps, too heavily involved with the colour pink.

She had, however, two of the largest breasts I have ever seen on an Englishwoman. In fact, on first sight of her upper half I was convinced there might well be more than two of them. Her lower half, too, spread outward from her waist in a manner that reminded me of the upholstery of an old but very comfortable sofa. As she came towards me, smiling brightly, she wobbled all over in a way that was not, although at first it threatened to be so, unpleasant.

‘Hello!’ she said, with some eagerness. ‘I’m Ophelia! Are you Rosencrantz or Guildenstern?’

‘I’m afraid,’ I said, ‘I’m even more unimportant than those two characters. I’m not even a member of the club. I just saw the sign outside and wondered whether you might need a hand backstage.’

‘Oh, gosh, how marvellous!’ said the pink woman. ‘How absolutely marvellous! We need all the help we can get backstage! Perhaps you could play Rosencrantz or Guildenstern as well! Or both of them! We could . . . sort of . . . merge their two characters, couldn’t we? They are pretty much the same, don’t you think? And we just haven’t got enough bods, have we, Rachel?’

A small, grey woman with a squint looked at her with real dislike.

‘There are some who maintain,’ she said, ‘that we haven’t got a Hamlet!’

The pink woman became even pinker. ‘That’s a horrible thing to say, Janet,’ she said. ‘I think Gerald is going to be one of the great Hamlets of all time!’

The grey-looking woman took out a packet of cigarettes and, without making a move towards the door, got one out and lit it. I thought, these days, that that was a pretty brave thing to do, but she must have been sure of her ground, as none of the other members of the cast made any move to stop her.

‘If we can talk him out of the German accent,’ she went on, inhaling deeply, ‘he might be adequate. With a few more years of rehearsal!’

As she was saying this, your husband came through the doors of the hall. He looked, I have to admit, very like Hamlet. He was dressed entirely in black – black jeans, a black polo-neck sweater and a black jacket. He also had the look – common, I have found, in people who play this part – of a man who was about to contradict the next thing that was said to him. He is, I suppose, Mrs Price, a handsome man. His jaw is too large but built on very secure lines. His nose – as I think I said – is a possibly over-ambitious structure but those pale blue eyes have a kind of life that is clearly hard to resist.

Janet, the grey woman, became suddenly faintly girlish. Whatever she might say about him behind his back, she looked glad to have him in the room. And my pink friend was trembling like a blancmange that has been set down too violently upon a table.

‘“Soft you now!”’ he said, holding out his right hand in what looked a little like a Hitler salute. ‘“The fair Ophelia!”’

I began to suspect he was already ‘in character’ since – as the grey woman had suggested earlier – there was definitely a Germanic edge to his accent. Perhaps there is a ‘Nazi theme’ to the production. The effect on the pink woman was striking. She went towards him and, taking his hand, led him towards the centre of the room. I could not quite hear everything she said but I caught the words ‘“How does your honour for this many a day?”’ To which he replied, ‘Fucking brilliant, darling!’

It was not, however, what they said, but what they didn’t say. Suddenly that shabby church hall was reeking of sex. I had the impression that, at any moment, Mr Price was going to throw her on to the floor, pull down her pink trousers and have her right there in front of the core members of the Putney Thespians.

I am writing this in my living room, Mrs Price, and the man next door seems to be trying to run over his dog with his lawnmower. I will try to give you a more detailed report tomorrow. Suffice it to say that, from what I have seen of these two over a period of only two days, I am convinced that something is ‘in the wind’ between them. I will need further proof, quite obviously, and this will involve detailed surveillance of ‘Mary Dimmock’, which may involve extra expense. Do, please, let me know your thoughts. If you could bear to telephone or email me that would certainly speed things up!

Yours truly,

Roland O. Gibbons

From:

Elizabeth Price

PO Box 132

Putney

14 July

To:

Roland O. Gibbons

Gibbons Detective Agency

Dear Mr Gibbons,

Just received your letter. No, I will not phone or email you. This woman Dimmock was known to me although I have – thank Christ – managed to avoid her for the last fifteen years. There was a nasty moment in 2003 when I sighted her while crossing Hotham Road and had to duck down behind a parked car until I was sure she had passed. Keep your distance and on no account let either her or my husband suspect that you are what you are.

I want to know everything that happens between them. If you have to use a telephoto lens – use it. Tape record whatever seems necessary. You have my permission to hide under whatever bed they may be using to do what they do – if you think that is advisable.