THE HOUSE AT SEA’S END

present’. She’d refused, almost angrily. She may only be an ignorant girl from the Philippines but she knew that you should never take money from a man, especially a policeman. She’d made her mistake once, with George’s father, just a few months after she’d arrived in England, but she’s not going to be caught again.
    Archie had been different. Of course, he’d been an old man, old enough to be her grandfather, as he’d often said. But sometimes he didn’t seem like an old man at all. His voice, for one thing, was still strong and echoing, not thin and apologetic like the old people at home. Archie still sounded like a soldier. Some of the other carers didn’t like it; they thought he was too bossy, too full of himself. But Maria liked a man to be a man. She didn’t mind Archie telling her what to do; he was her elder, after all. They had nice conversations, sitting in his little room in the evenings; they talked about George, about Maria’s plans for him. He would grow up to be an important man, just like his father,and do great things in the world. Archie was an important man, Maria was sure of that. That was why it was wrong that he had been taken, suddenly in the night like that. Dorothy said they weren’t to talk about it but Maria knew what she thought. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t what God intended.
    Even the garage isn’t the same tonight. Usually it is a great comfort to her because it is open for twenty-four hours, its little kiosk a beacon of hope through the night. But, tonight, there don’t seem to be any cars, just one figure, in a long, black coat, standing beside the tyre gauge. Maria doesn’t like the figure. She knows that people without cars shouldn’t hang around garages but this person has been there for twenty minutes at least, just standing, not going into the shop or anything, just waiting, out of view of everyone except her. Maria goes away to check on George. When she comes back, the figure is still there. Is it a man or a woman? She can’t tell. The person has a long coat and a woolly hat, its hair is hidden and she can’t see its shape. Maria watches for another five minutes before she realises the awful truth. She isn’t watching the figure. The figure is watching her.
    Tired as he is, Nelson can’t sleep. Michelle has gone to bed and Rebecca is watching some music programme in the sitting room. Nelson sits in the study, going through Hugh Anselm’s papers. He doesn’t know why he is doing this or what he expects to find. He just knows that he needs a breakthrough. Could Irene, over ninety at his guess, really have killed three people to protect her husband’s name? It’sunlikely, to say the least. Perhaps she could have stopped Hugh’s stairlift, maybe even smothered Archie, but kill Dieter Eckhart, a fit young man in the prime of life? Surely not. Could someone have done it for her? Jack, for instance, or even Clara?
    He should watch the film again but he just can’t face it tonight. He can’t face seeing Hugh Anselm, so earnest, so tormented, so
young
. Nelson isn’t given to flights of fancy, but when he was watching the film he had the curious sensation that Hugh was speaking directly to him. Tell people about this, he was saying. Don’t let this happen again. Find the person who killed me.
    Hugh Anselm’s papers date from about 1960. There is nothing about the murders and, as far as he can see, very little about the Home Guard. From 1960 onwards Hugh Anselm had kept a diary, which takes up about twenty exercise books. He didn’t write every day and what he did write was mostly about politics. Hugh had high hopes of J.F. Kennedy and of Harold Wilson and, in both cases, disillusionment set in fairly quickly. He lost faith in Kennedy over the Bay of Pigs and, to Hugh Anselm, Kennedy’s assassination was ‘a tragedy but perhaps better to remember him this way? Otherwise his presidency would surely have dissolved in a haze of scandal and broken promises.’ He admired Wilson for standing up to America over Vietnam and, especially, for setting up the Open University (Anselm was a great fan of further education, always going on courses) but he felt that, ultimately, Wilson had ‘betrayed the workers’. Anselm’s greatest loathing, though, is reserved for Margaret Thatcher. Page after page is devoted to heriniquities, her jingoism, her lack of compassion, even her hair (‘dreadful helmet-like arrangement’) and her voice (‘reeking of