Read The Secret House of Death for Free Online Page A

was afraid of that. Now, listen, my dear, I’m afraid Sunday’s out as far as having Paul is concerned. Elizabeth’s mamma wants us for the weekend and naturally I can’t chicken out of that even if I want to, which I don’t.’
    â€˜I suppose you could take him with you.’
    â€˜Lady Maskell isn’t exactly mad about having tots around the place.’
    It had always seemed odd to Susan that Julian, the editor of a left-wing review, should in the first place have married a baronet’s daughter and secondly should set so much store by the landed gentry to which his in-laws belonged.
    â€˜This is the second time since Christmas you’ve put him off,’ she said. ‘It seems rather pointless the judge making an order for you to have him every fourth Sunday if you’re always going to be too busy. He was looking forward to it.’
    â€˜Oh, you can take him out somewhere. Take him to the zoo.’
    â€˜It’s his birthday the day after tomorrow. I thought I’d better remind you.’
    â€˜Flap not, my dear. Elizabeth’s got it down on her shopping list to make sure we keep it in mind.’
    â€˜That’s fine then, isn’t it?’ Susan’s voice shook with annoyance. It had been an impossible day, thronged with impossible people. ‘You’d better get back to your steak,’ she said in the nagging tone he both provoked and hated, ‘or whatever’s next on the menu.’ Elizabeth had got it on her shopping list! Susan could imagine that list: canned prawns, peppers, cocktail sticks, birthday present for ‘tot’, fillet steak, chocs for Mummy. . . . How maddening Julian was! Strange that whereas remembered words and phrases of his could sadden her and awaken pain, these weekly telephone conversations never did.
    He was bound to send Paul something utterly ridiculous, an electric guitar or a skin-diving outfit, neither of which were outside the bounds of what Julian or Elizabeth would consider suitable for a middle-class suburban child on his sixth birthday. Susan went around the house bolting the doors for the night. Usually on this evening task she never bothered to glance up at the side of Braeside, but tonight she did and it disquieted her to see the place in darkness.
    Could Louise already have gone to bed? It was scarcely eight o’clock. A simple curiosity, an inquisitiveness as indefensible as Doris’s possessed her, drawing her into the front garden to stare frankly at the house next door. It was a blot of darkness amid its brightly lit neighbours. Perhaps Louise had gone out. Very likely she had gone out to meet her lover and was now sitting with him in some characterless North Circular Road pub or holding hands in a half-empty café. But Susan didn’t think she had and it depressed her to imagine Louise lying sleepless in that house with her eyes open on the dark.
    She listened, hardly knowing what she was listening for. She heard nothing and then, a little unnerved, she listened to the silence. Julian called Matchdown Park a dormitory and at night it was a dormitory indeed, its denizens enclosed like bees in their warm cells. And yet it was incredible that so many people should live and breathe around her, all in utter silence.
    But if this was silence, it was nothing to the deep mute soundlessness of the back garden. Susan checked her back door lock, noticing that the wind had died. There was no movement in the black trees and, apart from the running river of traffic in the distance, no light but from the three red spots of the lamps the workmen had left on their pyramid of clay.

4
    David Chadwick hadn’t seen Bernard Heller for months and then, quite by chance, he bumped into him on a Tuesday evening in Berkeley Square. It was outside Stewart and Ardern’s and Heller had his arms full of cardboard boxes. Some heating equipment, David thought, that he must going to dump at the