James Dacre stayed only long enough to make and drink a cup of coffee. He was kind and sympathetic, like a teacher with a child who has fallen in the playground, but there was a distance between them. He made no further direct reference to the events of the morning or of the previous night, but glanced at the kitchen clock, said he had an urgent business appointment and he’d be in touch later. And left.
It seemed to Trudi that the revelation about Trent had really been the last straw for him. It gave her another reason for regretting having made it.
The full enormity of the implications of the photograph had not sunk in till she was alone. At first she tried to control her response by fitting the pieces together like a private detective. She now recalled Janet’s disproportionate shock at Trudi’s Boxing Day revelation that Trent had been having an affair, and her relaxation (now seen as relief) when she discovered that it was Astrid that Trudi was talking about.
She recalled also that it was Trent who had urged her to make contact with Janet once more. It was when she tried to puzzle out his precise motive for this that she found she was drifting out of the saving limits of cerebral induction into the trackless wastes of trauma.
Trent and Janet! How long? The photograph had been taken in the last few years: those passion-contorted faces had been middle-aged: but when were the seeds of the relationship sown? She felt something in herself close to death as her mind ran back over the years to those very first days. When she first met Trent, he’d been Janet’s boyfriend, hadn’t he? Or at least, the object of her aspirations. How far had things gone between them? Janet had concealed her disappointment, though not her amazement, when Trent turned his attention to her dormouse friend. And then she had been assiduous in promoting the ‘romance’. Never had she given the slightest hint that she had slept with Trent, but she had flown regularly with him till he gave up his job in England, and Trudi had heard lurid office stories about the good times flight and cabin crews had on overnight stops abroad.
After their marriage and the move to the Continent, Trudi had rarely returned to the UK, but Trent was frequently away from home. Indeed, as he moved from flying to executive status, his trips seemed to become more rather than less frequent. Did they take him to England? Occasionally perhaps. Or perhaps often. Her own interest in their duration and destination had never been great. It wasn’t that his domination of her life didn’t remain complete. On the contrary, it was so complete it didn’t even require his physical presence, merely the certainty that, however far he went, good old Trent would always come back.
So; Trent and Janet; her husband and her best friend (oh, how banal!) lovers perhaps for the past twenty-five years! Had they talked about her, mocked her appearance, her sexual performance? Or worse, had they perhaps talked kindly of her, affectionately, even pityingly, as of a much-loved family pet?
Rage, revulsion, disbelief; flight, suicide, revenge; her mind went reeling between emotions and courses of action till she felt herself spinning back through the months to that day she got news of Trent’s death. Like a perfectly timed cue, the doorbell rang. She went to answer it, certain she would find a policeman standing on the step.
She was right. But not a young constable this time, nervously twisting his cap in his hand.
‘Come in, Inspector Workman,’ she said.
His arrival was like a switch, lighting up the present once more. Whether his departure would return her to the shadows she could not foresee. But for the moment she was calm, alert, self-contained.
‘Herr Jünger isn’t with you?’ she said.
‘He’ll be along shortly,’ said Workman. ‘But I thought I’d get here first and have a little chat. Are you all right this morning, Mrs Adamson? You gave us a fright last night.’
‘I thought it was the other way round.’
‘Yes. I’m sorry. Herr Jünger’s English is good, but he hasn’t quite got the fine control working, has he?’
He smiled tentatively, inviting her to join him in the old English pastime of being amused by daft foreigners. She found herself smiling back.
‘Will you have a cup of coffee?’ she asked.
‘That’d be lovely.’
As they drank their coffee seated in the lounge, Workman came to the point, or the alleged point, of his visit.
‘The thing is, we like to cooperate with our colleagues abroad, you can understand that. Crime’s international these days. But our first duty’s still to our own people. It’s not always easy to make this clear in circumstances like yesterday, with Herr Jünger being there and all. So I thought I’d get here early and put you fully in the picture.’
He sat back, smiling, and sipped his coffee.
‘Yes?’ said Trudi.
‘Pardon?’
‘You said you were going to put me fully in the picture.’
‘Yes, that’s what I’ve been trying to do, Mrs Adamson.’
‘No,’ said Trudi firmly. ‘You’ve told me that if, or maybe when, Herr Jünger starts being nasty to me, I’m not to worry because you will be nice. But what’s it all about, Inspector? What does Herr Jünger really want from me?’
He looked at her shrewdly.
‘I think,’ he said at last, ‘that what he’d really like is for you to go back to Vienna with him to help in their enquiries.’
Trudi considered this, and Workman’s reasons for saying it.
I’m never going to trust anybody again! said part of her mind, that part most closely in contact with the reeling universe Workman’s ringing of the doorbell had summoned her from.
‘When I read that in the papers,’ she said slowly, ‘helping with enquiries, I mean; when I read that, I usually assume it means someone’s been arrested.’
‘Come now, Mrs Adamson,’ he laughed. ‘What could anyone want to arrest you for?’
‘Over here, nothing,’ she said.
‘And in Austria?’
‘Nothing again.’
‘So what’s the problem?’
‘No problem,’ she said. ‘Except that while I’m here, Herr Jünger can’t even threaten me with arrest, can he?’
‘But why should he want to? I mean, as you say, you’ve done nothing …’
‘Don’t treat me as naïve! I’m tired of being treated like an idiot child!’
She realized she had raised her voice to a level not much below shrieking. She took a deep breath and regained control. At least now she knew how close to snapping she was.
She said quietly, ‘I’ve done nothing, but here in my own house in my own country, Jünger can only question me with my consent and your cooperation. Even if I confessed to mass murder in Vienna, he couldn’t arrest me, could he? He’d have to get you to hold me while he applied for extradition. But in Vienna, it wouldn’t matter if I was arrested or not. I’m sure you’ve all got your local methods of keeping people “helping with enquiries” as long as you like. I don’t know what Herr Jünger wants, but I don’t fancy wasting a week in custody finding out!’
Workman produced a packet of cigarettes, offered them, said, ‘Do you mind if I do?’
‘If you must,’ she said.
‘Must?’ he said musingly, examining the cigarette he had already removed from the packet. He replaced the cigarette and put the packet on the table.
‘There,’ he said. ‘Just to show who’s in control. Look, Mrs Adamson, don’t you think you’re being just a little paranoiac? I’m not saying you should go running off to Austria this very minute. But listen to Herr Jünger at least. Trust him. OK, SO it’s obviously not just about this Fischer woman dying of an overdose of heroin. You’re not stupid, and I’m sorry if anything I’ve said suggested I was treating you as such. All I’m saying is, if you can have a nice all-expenses-paid trip to what must practically feel like your home town and help the Austrian police sort out what sounds like a very nasty business, where’s the problem? I mean, why be so suspicious? If the Austrians really wanted to get you in a dungeon under a spotlight as you seem to suspect, wouldn’t they have boxed clever and just waited till next time you visited Vienna and then pounced?’
‘What makes you think there’d be a next time, Inspector?’ asked Trudi.
‘I don’t know. Your husband’s affairs. Selling your furniture. Or simply attending Astrid Fischer’s funeral. It seems to me there could be plenty of reasons for a next time.’
Trudi finished her cooling coffee.
As far as she could recall she had not mentioned, the previous evening, the reason for her last visit to Vienna. She did not believe Workman was psychic.
The doorbell rang.
‘Excuse me,’ she said.
It was Jünger, nicely on cue. Perhaps the house was bugged!
When she returned to the lounge, the inspector was smoking. He caught her glance and, peering at the cigarette in his fingers, he said with apparently genuine amazement, ‘Christ! How did that get there?’
Jünger produced a big Austrian cigar and said, ‘You permit?’
Trudi said, ‘Why not?’ and Workman, about to stub his cigarette out, paused, took a long last draw, then extinguished it.
As Jünger made himself comfortable, Trudi watched for some signal to be passed between the two men, but was unable to detect anything. On the contrary they seemed to be ignoring each other.
His cigar lit, Jünger leaned forward. To her surprise he began to speak in German.
‘I believe your German is very good,’ he said. ‘Our friend here doesn’t speak a word. First, I want to say I am sorry for having caused you such a shock last night. It was ill-mannered to say the least. Second, very quickly, before we are interrupted, I want to say I was a good friend to your husband. Say nothing of this here. But please agree to come back to Vienna with me.’
‘Excuse me,’ said Workman. ‘I’m sorry, Herr Jünger, but our agreement was, English only.’
‘Forgive me, Inspector,’ said the Austrian. ‘It was a slip of the tongue.’
‘Some slip,’ said Workman. ‘What did you say?’
‘Only that I was sorry Frau Adamson became ill last night and hoped she was recovered. Frau Adamson, let me now explain things more clearly. Astrid Fischer died of an overdose of heroin. She had been an addict, we know that, but she had taken a voluntary course of treatment some years earlier and the puncture scars on her body were all old except the one that killed her. Why should she have chosen that moment to restart the habit? No, we do not believe this injection was self-administered. We believe you must have been the last person, other than the killer, of course, to see her and speak to her. We would like from you several things. One, a detailed account of your conversation that night. Two, an examination of Fischer’s apartment to see if there are any changes there from when you last saw it. Three, a study of photographs of possible suspects to see if you recall seeing any of them in the vicinity of the apartment that night. There are other ways you can help also, but these are the most important. Some of these things you could do here in England; all of them can be done more efficiently in Vienna. We would be grateful if you could return there for perhaps two days only to assist us. Your expenses will, of course, be taken care of and any loss of income recompensed.’
‘Income?’
‘Yes. You have a job, the inspector tells me.’
Another snippet of information from the well-informed inspector!
Trudi said in rapid German, ‘And what about my husband, what’s this got to do with him?’
‘Please, Frau Adamson, leave it till later!’ urged Jünger.
And, turning apologetically to Workman, he said, ‘The lady wants assurances that we will not keep her beyond two days. I have promised. Perhaps you will witness my promise, Inspector.’
‘Gladly,’ said Workman solemnly with a small gesture of his right hand which might have been a parody of a judicial oath-taking.
Do they really expect me to fall for that? wondered Trudi.
But she had made up her mind, with or without reassurances. Jünger’s reference to Trent had had its probably intended effect.
Also, she had a feeling amounting to certainty that very soon Janet would try to contact her in Sheffield. That was an encounter she wanted to delay as long as possible.
‘All right, Herr Jünger,’ she said in German. ‘I agree. I will return with you to Vienna.’
And saw from the flicker of triumph in Workman’s eyes that, as she’d suspected, it had all been a game and he understood German perfectly well.
But it didn’t change her mind.