The Empty House (2 page)

There was nothing else to be seen.

The Colonel came back slowly. He found the man sitting in the car. He was looking white.

“Sorry,” he said. “Not used to this sort of thing. Makes you feel sick, doesn’t it?”

“It’s upsetting,” said the Colonel. “But there
is
something you can do.”

“As long as it doesn’t mean going near the edge of that bloody cliff.”

“Nothing like that. I shall have to stay up here for a bit. Could you take your car down and stop people coming up here? Just tell them there’s been an accident and the police want the place kept clear.”

“O.K.,” said the man. The prospect of something to do seemed to have cheered him up.

“It won’t be for long,” said the Colonel. “Some Army people should be here soon. Let them through. Or the police, of course. No one else.”

“What shall I say if they want to come?”

“Tell them it’s a matter of national security,” said the Colonel.

The man looked startled, reversed his car, and drove off.

When he had gone, the Colonel stood for a few moments staring after the car. He had a round and cheerful face, slightly protuberant eyes, and a thick waterfall moustache of the type which had been made fashionable by General Plumer fifty years before.

“Damn this weather,” he said.

He was looking at the sun going down behind a bar of blue-black cloud. There was more rain coming. Wind, too. It was dusk already, and would be dark in half an hour. He wanted other people to see the car tracks before a night of storm had smoothed off their edges. He wished he had brought a camera with him.

He squatted down beside the tracks and tried to read whatever message they might hold.

The track up which they had driven was chalk and flint, sunk a few inches into the turf. The point where it swung away from the cliff edge was also the point where it started to go downhill. It was here that the car had broken through the shallow lip of the track and driven straight on to the cliff edge, hitting the post and rail fence hard enough to break through it.

The distance from track to cliff edge was about ten yards. The tyre tracks were clearly marked in the spongy turf. Were they too clear? If, as he had first assumed, the driver had been braking, stamping down frantically on the pedal in a last-moment attempt to halt the downhill progress of the car – and surely that was what he would have been doing – ought not the tracks to show the scrape of locked wheels?

He got to his feet as he heard a car coming. It was a Land-Rover, driven by the young man from the farm.

“Don’t come too close, Rupert,” said the Colonel. “Park off the track, on the other side. Have you got a torch? Bring it here. I want to show you something. There. What do you think?”

“Looks odd, certainly,” said Rupert. “Not a sign of skidding. You’d certainly have seen the marks if the brakes had been on hard.”

“That’s what I thought,” said the Colonel.

“It makes the whole thing look pretty deliberate, doesn’t it?”

‘It makes it look very odd indeed. Did you get through to Command?”

“I got through, all right. There was a bit of a flap on.”

“A flap about what?”

“One of the guards at the Research Station had been reported as missing.”

“Which one?”

“Lewis.”

“A reliable man. He wouldn’t do anything stupid, I’m sure.”

“He’s not going to do anything stupid now,” said Rupert. “He’s dead. They found him in a ditch, halfway between the Station and Bridgetown. It looked like a hit-and-run job.”

The two men stood looking at each other. The Colonel’s eyes looked more vacant than ever. Before he could say anything, they heard the helicopter overhead.

“Here comes the Army,” said Rupert.

“And the rain,” said the Colonel.

“It’s an odd business,” said Mr. Troyte. “A damned odd business. I think it stinks.”

“Odd, certainly,” said his senior partner, Mr. Phelps. “But then, odd things do happen.
We
know that.”

“Our people don’t like it.”

By our people he meant, as Mr. Phelps understood, the syndicate at Lloyds for which Messrs. Phelps, King and Troyte, Insurance Adjusters of St. Mary Axe, did most of their work.

“If they don’t like it,” said Mr. Phelps, “we’d better do something about it, hadn’t we? Who did you think of giving it to?”

“I thought of Peter Manciple.”

Mr. Phelps pursed his lips. “Bit inexperienced.”

“He hasn’t had a lot of experience,” agreed Mr. Troyte. “He’s done two or three good jobs, though. The Palgrave Marina case—”

“Yes. He did a good job there. Didn’t he have some family trouble, about a year ago? I seem to remember there was something that upset him badly.”

“His father was killed. Might have been an accident. Might have been suicide.”

“There was an inquest?”

“Yes. There had to be an inquest. The verdict was accident.”

“And you think the jury were being charitable?”

“I don’t know,” said Mr. Troyte. “I didn’t ask a lot of questions about it. It didn’t seem to be our business. It upset Peter, of course. But he seems to have got over it all right.”

“Very well, let’s give it to him. There’ll be a lot of leg work involved, get him out of the office. It should keep his mind off his own troubles. Will you brief him?”

Mt. Troyte agreed that he would brief Peter Manciple. He had intended to use him anyway; but he always went through the motions of consulting his senior partner. It was one of the things which made them a good firm.

That conversation took place on Friday morning, two days after the blue Vauxhall car had gone over the cliff at Rackthorn Point. A search by the police, helped by the Rescue Service from Cryde, had found nothing; not so much as a splinter of metal or glass. Nor had they expected to. Don Bisset, the bearded coxswain of the Life Boat, spelled it out to Chief Superintendent Home of the Devon Constabulary.

“It’s deep water,” he said, “and there’s a backwash under the cliff. You won’t get a diver to go down there. He knows he’d be carried in. There’s an inlet under the cliff foot. No one knows how far it goes. If ever we did get down there, we’d find a thing or two, I reckon.”

“Treasure?”

“Treasure, no doubt. And bones, too. The old wreckers knew all about Rackthorn Point. Anyone who might tell an awkward story would be likely to be pitched over there with a few feet of cable wrapped around his legs. There’s a saying in these parts: ‘What Rackthorn takes, Rackthorn keeps.’ “

The Superintendent put all this into his report, one copy of which went to Western Command Headquarters at Exeter. It appeared that the only known car in the neighbourhood corresponding to the one which had gone over belonged to a man called Alexander Wolfe, a scientist working at the Biological Warfare Research Station near Bridgetown. “These boffins,” he said to Sergeant Rix. “They live in a world of their own. Ten to one, he was thinking about some missing equation and drove straight over.”

“He’s a missing equation himself now,” said Sergeant Rix. “And it isn’t only the Army who are worried. There’s something about an insurance policy. I heard a buzz that he’d insured himself only a few months ago. A hundred thousand pounds, they said.”

“Who gets it?”

“There’s a sister somewhere. Plays the cello – in one of those London orchestras.”

The Superintendent considered this angle of the matter. It didn’t make a lot of sense. It was not inconceivable that man would insure his life and then commit suicide, disguising it as an accident; it had happened in one case he knew about. But that had been for the benefit of a hard-pressed wife and family. Wolfe was a bachelor without known dependents – unless a sister who played the cello could be described as a dependent.

Very odd.

Mr. Troyte sent for Peter Manciple, and while he was waiting for him, he got out the policy and studied it again. It was certainly a curious document. Odd in itself; odder still in the light of what had happened. But then, as he had said to Mr. Troyte, odd happenings were part of their trade. Only last year, one of the Syndicate’s clients who owned a garage which was known to be losing money had insured it against fire in a very large sum indeed. It had been burned to the ground two days later. The fire had demonstrably been started by a flash of lightning. “And unless he had a private line to the Almighty—” said Mr. Troyte. “Come in. Oh, it’s you, Peter. I wanted you to have a look at this file.”

While Peter Manciple studied the documents, crouched forward in his chair with a lock of fair hair falling over one eye, Mr. Troyte studied Peter.

They had taken him into the business on the recommendation of one of their important clients. When Mr. Troyte had first interviewed Peter, he had been so struck with his apparent frailty that he had insisted on a medical check. The doctor, one of the toughest diagnosticians in the insurance world, had found no fault. “He’s unusually tall,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean that he’s a bad life. Quite the contrary. These long, thin streaks are very durable. He was probably a late developer. Most of his early growth went into his height. When he thickens out a little, he’ll be all right. Nothing wrong with his heart or lungs.”

Events had shown that there was nothing wrong with his brains, either. He had a remarkable gift for filing away and recalling facts. It was something more than mere memory. As a computer will store facts, producing them to order when the appropriate button is pressed, so could Peter absorb, without seeming effort, the contents of endless reports, documents, statements, and accounts, selecting, without any reference back, the facts that mattered and presenting them in a logical sequence. His report on the notorious Palgrave Marina swindle had already become a classic in insurance circles.

“I suppose it’s the last clause in the policy that’s worrying you,” said Peter.

“Right.”

“Why did we ever accept it?”

“Look at the premium.”

“It’s loaded,” agreed Peter. He studied the clauses again, scratching the tip of his nose with the index finger of his left hand. “What it means is that if there is an
assumption
that the cause of death – or
one
of the causes – was drowning, the insurers are to pay up without actual proof of death.”

“Right.”

“Did he explain why he wanted such an odd clause put in?”

“Yes. He said that he often had to travel by air, and it might happen that his plane went down over the sea and was never recovered. Or it might only be salvaged years later. Or he might be in a ship that was lost at sea without any evidence of what had really happened to it. It doesn’t happen so often now, with wireless and radar, but it’s still possible. If the body isn’t found, I understand that, strictly, you have to wait seven years before the court will presume death. He didn’t want his sister to be kept out of her money.”

“Then we shall have to pay up.”

“There
is
the usual exclusion clause. If the insured commits suicide within two years of taking out the policy.”

Peter stared at him. “Do people really think that?”

“The Army put in a report. A Colonel Hay, a retired officer who was staying in a farmhouse nearby. He was out for an evening stroll. He didn’t actually see the car go over, but he heard it, and he was on the spot within minutes. There’s a copy of his report among the papers. He says that there was no sign of braking. He and an Army friend who was with him were the only people who saw the tracks while they were fresh. The tracks were more or less washed out by a freak storm that night. But both men are quite positive.”

Peter read through Colonel Hay’s report before speaking again. Then he said, “What do you want me to do about it?”

“I want you to look into it. The whole thing seems altogether too much of a coincidence to be trusted. Here’s this clause. It was drafted by his own solicitors. Their name’s in the file somewhere. Six months after the policy’s written, Wolfe puts his car over one of the very few places on the English coast where it’s probably never going to be seen again.”

“Can’t they salvage it?”

“Have a look at Coxswain Bisset’s report.”

When Peter had read it, he said, “If it was suicide, Wolfe was either a saint or a madman. Either way, it isn’t going to be easy to prove it now.”

“It isn’t going to be easy,” agreed Mr. Troyte. “It may not even be possible. But there’s a lot of money involved, and we’ve got to make an effort. It’s Friday today. Tomorrow you’d better go and see the sister. Lavinia Wolfe, Candlewick Cottage, Sudbury. She plays in some orchestra.”

“If she’s
the
Lavinia Wolfe,” said Peter, “that’s a fairly inadequate description. She’s leading cellist in the London Symphony Orchestra. I heard a recital she gave at the Festival Hall last year.”

“I expect you’re right,” said Mr. Troyte, tolerantly. “I’m tone deaf, myself. When you’ve got what you can from her, you’ll have to go down to Devonshire. Take your time about it. Ferret round. See what you can find. If you dig up anything, let me know at once. If not, let me have some sort of report by Monday week. Right?”

“Right,” said Peter. And to his mother, that evening, “It’s the maddest thing. I’m not sure whether it’s a serious investigation, a cosmetic exercise to please our Syndicate, or a buckshee summer holiday.”

“Perhaps it is all three,
cheri,”
said his mother. Being a Frenchwoman, she added, “Doubtless you will be able to make a profit from the expenses which you will be allowed. That will be some compensation.” She added, without any change of tone, and almost as though it was part of the same train of thought, “I was followed again today.”

“Oh, dear. Are you sure?”

“Quite sure. It was a small man with a rose in his buttonhole.”

“Did you do anything about it?”

“I considered reporting the matter to the police. But on the previous occasion they were
si peu sympathique
that I decided not to do so.”

“It must be very provoking. Is supper ready? I’m starving.”

“Then you must starve for ten more minutes. Time to drink one glass of that abominably sweet sherry which your uncle gave us.”