A Fatal Inversion by Ruth Rendell Page A

less, but on the other hand, his holiday would have been spoiled. He would have liked very much to be alone. Of course he knew there was no possibility of this, now or when he returned home, for when you were married, you never could be alone. Presumably that was the point. What was he going to tell Anne? How much was he going to tell her? He didn’t know. None of it, if he could help it.
    They sat at the table in the dining area to eat an absurdly early high tea. Lewis asked him if he could remember the day when he heard he had inherited Wyvis Hall and had walked in here and astounded them with his news.
    “He had a beard then, Anne.” Lewis’s subdued air had changed to one of high good humor. “You wouldn’t have recognized him, he looked like John the Baptist.”
    Adam could remember very well but he wasn’t going to say so.
    “What a funny thing,” said Lewis. “We had ham salad that day too. What a coincidence! Oh, yes, I’ve been meaning to ask you, who was it looked after Wyvis Hall while you were in Greece?”
    Adam could eat nothing. That other time, he remembered, it was his father who hadn’t been able to eat. He didn’t know what Lewis meant about someone looking after the house, but no doubt he, Adam, at the time had concocted some tale to keep his father quiet, to keep him away even.
    “Someone from the village, you said,” Lewis persisted.
    “How can I remember that far back?”
    “The police will want to know. It may be of vital importance.”
    “Aren’t you going to eat your meat, dear?” said Beryl.
    Abigail, who had been put upstairs in one of the bedrooms to sleep, set up a wailing sound. Adam was on his feet at once.
    “I think we should go.”
    They had to wait until his father was ready. Adam would have preferred to phone for a hire car but Lewis wouldn’t hear of it. Anne sat in the front in the passenger seat while Adam was in the back with Abigail. If his father could have found out what flight they were coming on, the police certainly could. It was possible they might be waiting for him. They would wish to interview every former owner or occupant of Wyvis Hall. He looked again at the newspaper account of the adjourned inquest that his father had saved for him. It would be owners and occupants of Wyvis Hall between nine and twelve years before that they would wish to interview, and those were Great-Uncle Hilbert, who was dead, himself, and Ivan Langan, to whom he had sold the house. As for other occupants, how would they know who else had lived there?
    It was ironical that ten days before he had seen Shiva at Heathrow. The encounter he now saw as an omen, a shadow cast by a coming event. What would that event be? Adam did not want at this point to speculate; it made him feel sick. He turned the newspaper over so that he could not see that headline and those paragraphs. In high spirits, his father was talking about the immense advances made in forensic science in recent years.
    As soon as they got home Anne started getting Abigail to bed. Their bags humped upstairs and put into the bedroom, Adam looked Rufus Fletcher up in the phone book. He was in there twice, at a Wimpole Street number and again at an address in Mill Hill: Rufus H. Fletcher, M.B., MRCP. All these years then, or for some of them, Rufus had been living three or four miles from him. He couldn’t look Shiva up because he could not remember his surname. Women marry and change their names, he thought, there was no point in pursuing that one. Of course he could look up Robin Tatian but where, really, would that get him? He was reaching for the blue directory when Anne came back with Abigail in her arms, so Adam took her and carried her back to bed himself and tucked her in and kissed her. She was almost asleep. He wondered if Rufus had children, and if so, did he worry about them coming to terrible harm the way he himself worried. Was his whole life affected by what had happened at Ecalpemos? Adam might have escaped