But alas!—in grey December, Harold, in Louisa’s own phrase, took ill and was about to die.
She sat with Mrs. Bindell in ‘the lounge’ while Mr. Bindell went up to the sickroom. ‘Though it’s not much use him going, Mrs. Bindell. It’s days since poor Harold could speak a word, not to be understood; nor hold a pencil to write, or even make signs.’
‘It is usual to call and enquire,’ said Mrs. Bindell loftily, putting common little Mrs. Hartley in her place.
But Louisa, it seemed, had been right after all. Harold had been unable to say a word to Mr. Bindell. ‘But he does seem to be trying to ask me something, Mrs. Hartley. Something he wants me to find for him or something like that. Do you know what it could be?’
‘No, I don’t,’ said Louisa. ‘We know about his will and all that. Something to do with the office, perhaps?’
‘I’ll go along there,’ suggested Mr. Bindell, ‘and get them to let me look around.’
But according to the office underlings, nothing was found that could account for Mr. Hartley’s anxieties; and when she herself tried to question him, he rolled his head on the pillow and his look said as plainly as it had many times said during their life together, ‘Mind your own business, Louisa, and leave me alone.’ And the days passed away and so at last did Harold; and at the Sanstone Crematorium, ashes to ashes returned, and that was the end of him.
Mr. Bindell waited a decent interval—a fortnight, he evidently considered sufficient—and then called upon the widow, this time without his lady. Linda had gone to the cinema with the twins. ‘So may I take it, Mrs. Hartley, that we are alone in the house?’
‘Well, yes,’ said Louisa startled. Was Mr. Bindell going to leap upon her with improper proposals, now that Harold was out of the way? She had always thought he had a nasty look.
But Mr. Bindell did not leap. Instead, he reached into his briefcase and brought out a large envelope. ‘You remember that your husband was trying to tell me something before he died?—trying to ask me to find something for him.’
‘Yes, I remember,’ said Louisa. ‘Did you find it? What was it?’
Mr. Bindell selected from the envelope a single item—a photograph on glossy art paper. He allowed Louisa one brief sight of it and then returned it to its envelope. ‘A collection of pornography,’ he said; and added: ‘The most lurid I’ve ever seen.’
Louisa thought, from her one glimpse, that this could hardly but be so. ‘Harold had this filth?’
‘In the private drawer of his safe at the office. Of course when I saw what it was, I concealed it from his staff.’ He snapped an elastic band round the envelope. ‘No wonder he didn’t want it found.’
‘No wonder,’ agreed Louisa, and thought of the gossip, spreading out and out in widening circles of ever more unsavoury scandal: nasty, dirty, salacious scandal, touched with that odd malice that, in so many quarters, Harold had seemed to attract. ‘Well, thank goodness, Mr. Bindell, that it was you who found it. And thank you very much for bringing it to me.’ Privately she thought that he might just as well have thrown the whole lot on the fire and not disturbed her in her widowhood; but he wanted thanks and appreciation, no doubt.
Mr. Bindell however wanted more than that and made very little bones about it. ‘Money is tight these days, Mrs. Hartley. My wife likes to keep up a—a good establishment; and we have two children yet to educate. I know Hartley left you pretty well off, and you’ve only the one girl.’
She sat with her hands in her lap, very still. She had been right, then, about there being a blackmailer. Only—Mr. Bindell! Mr. Bindell, the upright, respectable solicitor; and Mrs. Bindell, giving herself such airs…! She said at last: ‘How can you prove positively that they’re his? They might be anyone’s: you might even have—have got them for this very purpose.’
No fool, after all, Mrs. Hartley! Mr. Bindell reflected that these simple people had often very direct and rational minds. But he had been ready for it, anyway. ‘You saw what a glossy print it was? He would—no doubt pore over the stuff: gloating over it, you know. The whole lot will be covered with his fingerprints.’
‘I see,’ said Louisa. ‘So—?’
‘One word from me in my position—one whisper going the rounds at a Rotary luncheon, one anecdote confided in a pub when we’ve all had a drop too much… Not nice for a young daughter, Mrs. Hartley, growing up in a small town like this.’
‘No,’ said Louisa, very white. She wasted no more words. ‘How much?’