The Long Body

by Helen McCloy

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries; Thrillers

Synopsis

A prominent American diplomat falls over a cliff to his death. The death is accepted as an accident, but could it have been suicide - or even murder? His widow finds a locked drawer in his desk and in it a file with a woman's name on it - but the file is empty.

Circumstances lead her to an elderly man bearing the same name, but he has a stroke and can neither speak nor write. And then she sees the car headlights coming at her, fast, at night, through an impenetrable mist ...

Release date: October 14, 2013

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 256

Sample

ALICE TOOK OFF her jacket as she stood on the terrace and let the warmth of the June sun penetrate her thin blouse. The
dogwood petals were fiery rose against a burnished blue sky. A sea-breeze stroked her hair, gently, as John used to do. It was the first time she had felt alive since his death, ten days ago.

She looked at the glory of rose and blue and tried to think: Dear John, you’re part of all that now. . . . The thought wasn’t real. It would have been more real to hear his
step on the stair, his voice calling: Allie, are you outside?

The sun’s light became a stage effect without warmth or cheer. She turned and went into the empty house. You’ve put it off long enough. You must go through his desk now.

Light lanced through a great window and gilded the broad, oak stair. She went up slowly, one hand on the balustrade. John, who no longer existed, was more real than the touch of sun-warmed wood.
Reality was illusion now. The bright heaven and gaudy earth were a frail screen wearing thin, trembling on the edge of transparence. At any moment they might roll away like the Apocalyptic
angel’s scroll. True reality was inside her own mind where John would live forever.

In the shadows, at the head of the stair, sudden movement caught her eye. She gasped, but it was only her own reflection in the long glass that hung there. She hardly glanced at the stranger the
mirror presented. A slender woman in cloudy white—John disliked mourning. A face oval and aquiline, framed in smooth coils of brown hair veined with grey at the hollowed, fragile temples.
Thoughtful eyes set deeply under arching brows. A full mouth, sensitive and vulnerable. Is this I, this fine-drawn mask of tragedy? What has become of that high-hearted girl who used to greet
me in the mirror?

Through her mind slid a picture of that girl confronting an old man in an old-fashioned library. Father, I’ve waited a long time for love. I’m not going to miss it now, no matter
what you say. In infinity that girl was still a part of the widow and mother that she was now. She could still see her father’s haggard face, so like her own as it was now. She could
still hear the tired disillusion in her father’s voice. Love, Allie? Are you sure? You’ll inherit a fortune one day. This young man is nobody and never will be anybody.

Years later in London, John and herself driving home from an official dinner at St. James’s Palace and John saying: You know, Allie, I wish your father had lived to see me now. He
never really believed in me, did he? . . .

She crossed the upstairs hall to John’s study and sat down at his desk in the glaring, unreal sunshine. An old desk, carved oak, with three large drawers and a drop-leaf: John’s
personal desk, a wedding present to him from her own father. She knew there were no official papers here. The few he had brought to this house had been kept in the wall safe. The evening he died, a
young man from the State Department flew up from Washington and carried them off in a padlocked brief-case, chained to his wrist. She had told him there were only personal papers in the desk and he
had taken her word for it.

The large drawers first. Notepaper, typewriting paper, carbon. Bank statements, cancelled cheques, receipted bills. All in order, each debt paid, each record filed precisely, as John did
everything.

In the pigeon-holes above the drop-leaf were a few current bills and unanswered letters. She wrote cheques to pay the bills. She dropped the letters in the scrap-basket. They were all from
people who would have read about John’s death in the newspapers.

Among the pigeon-holes were two small drawers. She and John had both kept old letters in the one on the right for many years. The telegram from John’s mother when John’s only child,
Malcolm, was born nineteen years ago. Alice laid it tenderly aside to show to Malcolm, and lingered a moment over the letter that came next.

December 21, 1929.

My dear Alice,

You gave me a rose. Will you give me a great deal more? I love you. I want you to be my wife . . .

She reached for the little drawer on the left.

Her hand dropped as if it had been stung. John never locked drawers in his own home. There were no secrets in his family life. But this drawer was locked.

She took her handbag from the table. There were two key-rings in it now—John’s and her own. For the first time since his death, she looked at his closely. Two front door keys, this
house and the winter home in Washington. Three car keys—her car and his and the station wagon. One small key she had never noticed before. She tried it in the lock of the little drawer. It
turned.

Slowly she pulled out the drawer. Rubber bands, paper clips and a large envelope made of thin, foreign-looking paper, in a sickly shade of pale green. It was tied up like a package with rather
dingy, red string. It was light in her hand. At first she didn’t see any inscription. Then it tilted in her shaking hand and graphite on its surface caught the sun obliquely with a faint,
greasy grey sheen. There were five words, lightly pencilled in John’s small, neat hand:

Alice gazed at the envelope as if it were a coiled snake. The ugly green of the alien paper, the dirty, red string, the enigmatic inscription and the locked drawer—all fused in a flash of
dismay. This is something John would have burned, if he had known he was going to die. Something he had to keep that he did not want anyone to see, even his own wife. Something scandalous. Or
dangerous. . . .

Destroy it unopened?

Suppose she were wrong. Suppose it was something that John himself would have wanted her to know, now he was no longer alive. Something she should know for her own protection and
Malcolm’s.

When had she last seen the drawer open and empty?

The last week in May, when she came up from Washington to supervise the spring cleaning of this Connecticut house. John himself hadn’t come up from Washington until June 1st. He must have
brought the green envelope with him then. And only three days later he had died.

Miss Lash. She couldn’t recall the name among their wide acquaintance, here and in Europe. But did she really know everyone John had known over there?

Before her mind’s eye flashed a picture of the haggard face and grey temples she had seen in the glass a moment ago. Miss would be young and Lash would be English. A
cloud of pale hair, skin dazzling as apple-blossom, mouth like a rose. . . . Or perhaps some refugee name shortened for convenience. Lashenskaya. Hair black as night, skin like moonlight, eyes
darkly luminous. . . .

They had been so many and so exquisite, those European women who had drifted through the embassy drawing-rooms with such effortless elegance in the old Paris days. Never once had John given her
occasion for jealousy but that proved nothing. He would be careful to make sure that she was not hurt no matter what was going on. . . . Again her father’s voice echoed down the corridor of
years: Love, Allie? Are you sure? You’ll inherit a fortune one day. . . .

Did every human soul have one dark place that could not be shared with anyone else, however dear? There was a story of a Frenchwoman who wore a locket she never opened. When she died, husband
and lover were together as the locket was opened, each fearing secretly that the other’s face would be inside, but there was the face of an utter stranger that neither man had ever seen
before. . . .

Miss Lash. Not papers pertaining to Sybil or Irina. The formality of discretion? John’s attempt to spare his wife’s feelings if she chanced on the envelope? No, initials
would have been more logical for that purpose. This was a woman he thought of, automatically, as Miss, when he was jotting down her name on an envelope. It had a cold ring. The coldness of
a disillusioned lover, confronted with unlovely, hysterical demands, or even blackmail?

Why keep a written record of a purely romantic dalliance? John was no fool. He had the habit of discretion. He would want to spare his wife’s feelings. “Papers” suggested a
dossier and that, in turn, suggested either blackmail or politics. But if John’s relations with Miss Lash were political her file would have been in the wall safe with other official
documents. So it must have been a personal relation after all, unless . . .

A frightening suspicion took form in her mind: unless it were both.

Sexuality used to bait a political trap for John. A trap he himself had suspected before he died. That would explain so much. Suppose some political adventurer or fanatic were also an attractive
woman. Suppose John believed her interest in him was purely personal. What bitterness for him, if he finally suspected the truth. He would not betray someone he loved to authority unless he had
overwhelming proof. Some men might, but not John. Yet he would feel he must keep some record or evidence of his suspicions, in case he discovered later that they were true. He wouldn’t dare
keep such evidence with his official papers. Other officials had access to those. And he wouldn’t want his wife to know anything about the situation either. What could he do then, but lock
the evidence in a drawer of his own desk and keep the key on his key-ring?

These possibilities would not have occurred to most women, she knew. But John’s first European appointment had taken her into a strange world where people were rarely quite what they
seemed, and ever since that world had been a part of his life and hers. The waiter who thanked you so deferentially for your tip might be a former general now high in the ranks of the secret police
who had gone through your bags when you first entered the hotel. The attaché who danced so gracefully might spend his working hours breaking the cipher your husband used for confidential
messages. Even your fellow-American, the newspaper correspondent who had such a fund of witty stories, would think nothing of copying any private notes of your husband’s he could lay his
hands on, if they would provide thrills for his readers at home.

Europe between wars was a masked ball where tyrants posed as popular leaders and popular leaders became tyrants, where pacifists sought war and warriors prayed for peace. A world of agents and
informers who were careful not to let their right hands know what their left hands were doing. In the foreign service, you shook the right hand and pretended not to feel the left hand probing your
pocket for loose change or classified documents. . . .

With sudden decision, Alice realized that she did not have the strength to destroy this envelope unopened. She was in her forties. She might live another forty years. She could not live all
those years with this torturing uncertainty.

Perhaps there was nothing of real importance in the envelope after all. Perhaps she would find peace and trust again after one glance inside.

Her trembling fingers fumbled clumsily with the knot in the red string. It was several moments before she could get it untied. The string slid away in a writhing coil with the horrid agility of
a worm: her nails clawed at the flap of the envelope. It was unsealed. As it opened, she was aware of a faint, unfamiliar scent, heady and tantalizing. She lifted the open envelope and looked
inside.

It was empty.

TEARS STUNG HER eyes, but she sat still, forcing herself to think. Was she just too late? Had someone else managed to open
this drawer in the ten days since John’s death? But who would want papers pertaining to Miss Lash among the few who had had the opportunity to take them?

Could John himself have destroyed the papers before he died? Not likely he would leave the empty envelope with its tell-tale inscription and its string re-tied. Could it have been Malcolm, after
John’s death, trying to spare his mother an ugly discovery? Malcolm wouldn’t have any reason to re-tie the string either and he certainly wouldn’t have left the envelope there to
torment her. That must have been done before John’s death by someone who wanted John to think the papers were still there if he opened the drawer looking for a rubber band or a paper clip,
without opening the envelope itself.

Who then? The staff of the Washington house was on vacation. Here in the Connecticut farmhouse there was only a middle-aged cook, recruited from a village that was ten thousand light-years
removed from John’s world. It simply couldn’t be Adelaide Hite. She had granite standards of probity and she wasn’t stupid enough to be used as a tool by someone else.

Neighbours? There were none, but the Cushings, Byrd and Betsy and their daughter, Jean. Byrd was John’s oldest friend. As boys of fifteen in Arizona they had enlisted in the cavalry
together, lying about their age. After the Army experience they had drifted apart, but when John and Alice flew to Europe on their honeymoon, John had discovered Byrd piloting the plane, with the
same cool, skilful daring he had once used to break wild horses. John became Byrd’s lawyer then and, later, when John first went to Washington as a young assistant secretary, Byrd was his
right-hand man. But Byrd soon got out of the Washington rat race by marrying Alice’s cousin, Betsy Talcott, and using her money to back an aeroplane designer. It was fortunate because Byrd
might have been a rather embarrassing asset to an ambassador as cautious as John became later on in Europe. No one could have been less fitted for conventional diplomacy and political intrigue than
Byrd. Alice thought of him as the last of the Rough Riders, absolutely direct and irresistibly impetuous, crashing through protocol and red tape at a gallop with a glint of wicked humour in his
handsome, black eyes.

That straight, impulsive nature was better suited to the business world, where Byrd had doubled Betsy’s money by the time he retired and the Cushings settled in Connecticut to be near
John’s summer home. Byrd had been out of politics for twenty years, out of business for nearly ten and spent his leisure breeding horses. He wasn’t involved in John’s Washington
life at all now.

Neither was Betsy, Alice’s favourite cousin, placid Betsy, who would have been beautiful instead of merely pretty if only she had had a spark of Byrd’s fire in her nature.

Jean, their only child, was Malcolm’s age, just begun at college, as wholesome as Betsy and as direct as Byrd. The answers to Alice’s questions couldn’t be found among these
three. It was simply impossible to imagine any one of them stealing papers from John’s desk.

But who else could it be? There were no other friends or neighbours here, no other house in any direction for several miles, except one little cottage that was for sale and, so far as Alice
knew, it wasn’t sold or even rented to anyone at present.

So the answer wasn’t local. Some stranger, probably someone Alice had never seen or heard of, must have come here. . .