Stone's Fall by Iain Pears Page B

possible explanation. Although I saw less of him than usual.”
    “Why was that?”
    “He was working. He would be out late. Ordinarily, he would return in the early evening, and he rarely left the house again. He preferred to eat at home, then we would read together. Sometimes he would have work to attend to, but only in his office. Sometimes he would read his papers sitting by the fire, with me next to him. In the last few weeks he would go out again, sometimes coming back late at night. But he never told me why.”
    “Do you know a man called Cort? Henry Cort?”
    She gave no reaction, either of pleasure or anything else. “I have known Mr. Cort for more than twenty years,” she replied evenly. “John also knew him for a long time.”
    “Who is he?”
    “He is… I don’t know how to describe him, really. He was once a journalist, although I understand he gave that up long ago. He was a correspondent for The Times in Paris, which is where I came to know him.”
    “So he was not an employee of your husband?”
    “Oh, no. He has independent means. Why do you ask?”
    “A name that came up,” I replied. I still didn’t know what FO meant. Some religious order? “Was your husband a Catholic?”
    She smiled. “His mother was, but John was brought up as an Anglican. His father was a vicar. But he was not a great churchgoer.”
    “I see,” I replied.
    “Here we are,” she said, opening a door on the second floor. “This was his office. And where he fell.”
    It was a room about eighteen feet square, the same size as the sitting room we had been in a few moments previously. And, presumably, directly above it. A simple but masculine room where the other had all the touches of a woman’s hand. In this room brown dominated; the woodwork painted as mock oak, the curtains heavy velvet. A smell of tobacco hung in the air; heavy wooden filing cabinets filled one wall, and there were no paintings, only a few photographs in heavy silver frames. Family? Friends?
    “All his family,” she replied. “His parents, sisters and their children. He was fond of them all, but they rarely met after his mother died. She was a remarkable, if rather strange, woman. Foreign, like me. He got much of his drive from her, his kindness from his father. They all live in Shropshire, and rarely come to town.”
    “Would one have been close enough for him to have confessed an indiscretion?”
    “I wrote and asked, but they said they knew nothing. By all means ask again, if you wish,” she replied. “Now, this is his desk, and I had assumed that these documents would have been in this drawer.”
    I saw that the whole left-hand pillar keeping the desk up was in fact one drawer, which, when opened, revealed a metal top. It was clearly immensely heavy, but slid out on hidden rollers underneath, which bore much of the weight.
    “He had this built to his own requirements,” she explained. “It was the sort of thing he liked to do.”
    “He was a practical man?”
    She laughed, thinking fondly. “No, not a bit. He was the most impractical man I have ever known. I don’t think I ever saw him do anything at all with his hands, besides eat, write and light his cigar. I meant he liked solving problems to his own satisfaction. Then he would get other people to turn his ideas into reality.”
    I pulled at the lid on top of the strongbox; it came open easily. There were bundles of papers inside.
    “Examine them if you wish,” she said. “But you will find they are all deeds of our houses, and insurance policies and other domestic documents. I have looked carefully, but do so again if you want to.”
    “Later, perhaps. Was the drawer locked or unlocked when you first came to see what was in here?”
    “Locked. And the key was in John’s pocket. At the morgue.”
    “Is there another key?”
    “I don’t know.”
    I stood and looked at the drawer for a few minutes, hands in my pockets, thinking. That was a waste of time; no blinding flash