style="font-size:15px;"> ‘Well, I only wish they’d come out in the open with it.’
‘But that’s not the way it is with an obsession. It blocks the light of day for people, like a great wall. And it’s a wall that’s maybe been building up over a long time.’
Kemp looked across at her. She sat holding her coffee cup in both hands, frowning slightly at the effort of putting thoughts into exact words because when she was serious only the right words would do. It was one of the first things he had noticed about her during the short time she acted as his secretary, her way with words. Later, of course, he had realized that such adroit handling of the tools of speech could be put to many uses.
‘That’s why I’m wondering why they’re being sent now,’ Mary went on, ‘because something must have triggered them off, and the only thing I can think of is that you got married. Is there some woman in your life who might resent it?’
‘Whom I have cast aside like a worn-out glove?’ said Kemp, airily. ‘Oh, they must be thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks in Vallombrosa, the women I’ve abandoned … Come off it, Mary, the only woman who has been affected by my marriage is yourself, and if I may say so, you’ve taken it rather well.’
‘You mean I have bettered myself, being rescued from a life of crime and marrying the boss into the bargain? Sounds quite a romantic fiction …’ But he could see she was only laughing at him as he went over and sat on the hearthrug at her feet. She curled her fingers in the tufts of hair on his forehead. ‘You’re getting a bit thin on top,’ she said. ‘I don’t see you as a breaker of hearts, Lennox, but I was serious about the letter-writer maybe being a woman, it’s a way women have …’
‘Willing to wound and yet afraid to strike … I don’t think that was said of a woman.’
‘Oh, you and your quotations … I’m serious, Lennox. You’ve been involved with women in a lot of your cases, not only the matrimonial ones. There must be someone out there who is bitter.’
‘It wasn’t a woman in the van that skedaddled the other night, and I don’t see a woman pushing firelighters through a door at seven in the morning. Much too obvious.’
‘She would have help, of course. Women don’t often act alone.’
‘You did, Mary Madeleine …’ Kemp could not see the point of never alluding to her past life; it was there before them both and, as he had accepted her, so it had become part of his life also.
‘I had grown used to being alone. It was the only way to survive … then …’
‘And now?’
Her face glowed in the firelight as she looked down at him.
‘Ah, now I’ve found a better way …’
‘No more talk then …’
But when he kissed her eyelids he saw first the fear in her eyes and knew what she was thinking. As he had once been afraid for her life so she was now for his.
Perhaps he should take more seriously what she had been saying, perhaps he should look back over his past cases, ransack his memory to find cause enough for someone to send him such poison through the post. He knew many of the phrases by heart, so often had they been repeated.
‘You’ll get your comeuppance, never fear …’
‘You wrecked lives, Kemp, let’s see yours get wrecked …’
‘I’ll get even if it’s the last thing I do …’
‘Vengeance is mine. I’ve waited long enough …’
Such sentences recurred over and over again in the six letters he had received during the last months, interspersed with more specific threats, a knife in the back, a breaking of bones, death by a variety of methods, all violent, couched in language not easily identifiable. There were misspellings, of course, but they could have been deliberate. ‘Comeuppance’ – not a word in everyday use – had been spelt correctly, as if a dictionary had been used but if so, why make other mistakes? There was a certain literary quality about the style, even semicolons were scattered about, and the grammatical errors looked false. Despite such contrivances the words flowed as if the writer knew very well what he or she was about, and feeling came through almost too well – a spillage of hate bursting its banks.
The letters were typewritten on plain paper torn off the kind of pad available at any stationers. The typing had the pepper-and-salt look made by a two-fingered typist, but that too could be misleading – any expert can imitate an amateur. The machine was manual not electronic, black carbon ribbon, the alignment fairly even with no smudging of the e’s and o’s … Someone who kept the keys clean or did not use that particular typewriter very often?
Except for this kind of muck … Kemp sighed. He would hand the lot over to John Upshire tomorrow and let the police get on with whatever analysis they could make of such unpromising material. He had already made photocopies for himself. He shovelled the letters back into their envelopes, plain brown manilla, all addressed to himself, Mr Lennox Kemp, at his new home. He studied the postmarks, all different, all districts of London from the City to outlying suburbs, the malevolent missives had obviously been simply popped into pillar boxes wherever the writer fancied. None had been posted here in Newtown, but there was local knowledge; references to ‘your posh office’ … ‘I seen your glossy girls go in and out’ … (That had an almost poetic ring to it.) ‘Choke you to death in a gravel pit’ was an obvious pointer to the main industrial activity along this stretch of the River Lea …
Kemp tossed the bundle into his briefcase and put it in the hall ready for the morning.
Mary was down first. She felt the draught halfway up the stairs and saw that the front door was standing wide open. It was a strong old-fashioned door of solid oak but the lock too had been old-fashioned and all too easily shattered, expertly done – and quietly. Where the wood had burned in the previous day’s fire the bolts had not drawn across properly.
Kemp surveyed the damage, and shook his head.
‘We kept open house last night,’ he observed, gloomily.
His briefcase had gone. It was all that had been taken.
‘So you’ve lost the evidence?’ John Upshire sounded more scornful than sympathetic.
‘Evidence of what? That someone hates my guts? I know what was in those letters – that’s enough for me. But there’s plenty of evidence for your men to get started on – a broken lock, an arson attempt and a stolen briefcase.’
‘All my sergeant’s got is a sackful of ashes … As for the breaking and entering, why’d they only pinch your case? Anything in it apart from the letters?’
‘Luckily, no.’ The inspector was just the man to assuage anger, it was part of his job. But even that habitual stolidity could do little to take away Kemp’s sense of outrage at what he saw as the violation of his home. He had been burgled before, both at his flat and in his office, and had accepted such happenings as part of modern living, but then he had been a single man … What rankled now was that he and Mary had been upstairs in bed, wrapped in sleep or other blessedness.
