it’s Frank (that’s the unlucky fellow), the bastard’s ringing to call it off. But if I don’t rush, we’ll lose our place in the queue and then it’ll be off whether I like it or not. Oh Trudi, I’m sorry. No guests you see, but if I’d known you were going to be so handy, you could’ve been matron-of-honour or something!’
Here was a reasonable explanation for any oddity of reaction. A year ago she had been abusing her friend on the phone for not attending her first husband’s funeral; now she was having to apologize for not inviting her to her second wedding!
‘Jan, that’s marvellous,’ said Trudi, straining for conviction. ‘Many congratulations.’
‘Thanks. Look, I really must go. Then straight after the ceremony we’re off to the Costa del somewhere for a week. Ring me then, promise? Oh shit. I won’t be here, we’re moving into Frank’s house in Oldham and I can’t recall the number. Here, give me your address and number. I’ll ring you.’
‘Hope House, Linden Lane,’ said Trudi, adding the telephone number.
‘That sounds posh.’
‘It might have been fifty years ago. Now it’s an ancient monument. Thank heaven it’s just on a short lease,’ said Trudi.
‘Oh, we have become choosy in our old age,’ said Janet. ‘Look, I really must go, girl. I’ll be in touch, I promise.’
After she had replaced the receiver, Trudi stood in a confusion of feeling. Trent had been right. It really had felt good to talk to Janet again. But counterbalancing this was a feeling of illogical resentment at her re-marriage. All that hysteria a year ago, and here she was getting married again! No, it wasn’t some awful moral self-righteousness which was bothering her, Trudi assured herself. It was more like simple jealousy. She could hardly expect to get her friend back when she was just starting to share her life with a new husband.
She made a resentful face in the old pier glass hanging behind the phone. Its chipped and peeling gilt frame was symptomatic of this dark suburban villa Trent had brought her to, but perhaps it was too well suited to the picture it now contained. Viennese cooking had turned her dumpy, forty-five years had turned her grey. Only her eyes, clear and brown, belonged to the girl who’d married Trent Adamson a quarter of a century ago. She almost wished they too had turned dull and old and could no longer see so clearly.
The doorbell rang, distracting her from the displeasing image.
The door opened into a glass-sided storm porch. Through the rippled glass she could see a man, flanked by the two ghastly stone gnomes which guarded the main door of Hope House. The man seemed to be in uniform. She opened the outer door and saw he was a young policeman, with his cap in his hand.
That should have warned her. When policemen remove their hats they don’t bring good news. But his accent was so broad and his face so unrearrangeably jolly that it took a little time to realize he wasn’t simply collecting for something.
Slowly she made sense of him.
There had been an accident.
She knew at once that Trent was dead.
She knew it as she sat in the police car on their way to the hospital.
She knew it as she listened to a staff nurse explaining that someone would be along shortly.
She knew it when a soft-spoken man in a blue suit showed her Trent’s tempered steel identification bracelet.
At last, as if worn down by her silent certainty, they too admitted it.
‘I’m sorry Mrs Adamson. I’m afraid that your husband is dead.’
A week in Sheffield had been long enough for Trudi to take a strong dislike to the place.
She found it cold, drab and ugly, and the people were not much better. The north of England was almost more foreign to her than anywhere else in Europe. She disliked in particular the way everyone addressed her as ‘love’ or rather ‘luv.’ It felt like an invasion of privacy.
It was only now that she began to realize just how little in truth her privacy was likely to be invaded.
She knew no one. No one knew her. She went home and sat and waited for tears to come. When they didn’t she tried to induce them by going back over her life with Trent, like a video run in reverse. But nothing happened till she went beyond their wedding day and found herself suddenly three months earlier at her father’s funeral.
Now the tears came close. How regressive a thing was grief, she thought. Then the moment was past and her cheeks were still dry.
She took a strong sleeping pill and went to bed.
She awoke to instant remembrance but when she cautiously explored her feelings she discovered a barrier, thin as cellophane round a packet of biscuits, but irremovable without the risk of damage.
So she turned away from feelings and concentrated her thoughts on the bureaucracy of death.
Another policeman came, a sergeant, older, more solemn.
‘Just a formality, luv,’ he said. ‘Just a few details.’
He noted Trent’s full name, his age, his business.
‘This firm he works for. Silver Rider …’
‘Schiller-Reise of Vienna.’ Trudi spelt it out. ‘It’s a travel company. Reise means “journey”. And Schiller is the name of the man who runs it.’
‘Oh aye? German, is it?’
‘Austrian.’
‘And they’ve got an office here.’
‘Well no, I don’t think so,’ said Trudi hesitantly. She felt the officer regarding her dubiously and she pressed on. ‘They’re in most big European cities, of course. But I’m not sure about the UK. Probably that’s what my husband was doing, setting something up. He travelled a lot in his work, looking at hotels, locations, amenities. He used to be an airline pilot himself.’
She produced this last statement as if somehow it justified the preceding vagueness about Trent’s work. The sergeant looked unimpressed.
‘Is that right?’ he said. ‘Well, I reckon Sheffield’d be as good a centre as anywhere.’
He did not say for what.
There would, he told her, be a post-mortem; routine after any sudden death.
The facts of the accident were tragically simple.
It had happened a few miles south of the city in the Derbyshire Peak District. The car had been parked at the side of a narrow undulating country road. A fertilizer truck moving at speed had come over a rise some fifty yards behind it. It had been raining earlier in the day. There was muck on the road surface which was long overdue for repair after the previous bitter winter. The driver had braked, the truck had skidded, caught the parked car from behind and driven it a hundred yards
