The Secret House of Death by Ruth Rendell

hadn’t.’
    â€˜You can’t hear a thing when those drills are going.’
    â€˜I suppose that’s why I didn’t. The verdict was murder and suicide by Heller, by the way. Apparently he was always threatening suicide. His brother and his wife both said so.’
    Doris helped herself to more salad, picking out pieces of pineapple. ‘What was the wife like?’
    â€˜Rather beautiful, I thought. Only twenty-five.’ Susan recalled how Carl Heller and Magdalene Heller had both tried to speak to Bob while they all waited for the inquest to begin and how Bob had turned from them, brushing off their overtures as if stung. She thought she would never forget how that big, heavy man had approached Bob and attempted to talk to him in his strongly accented English, and Bob’s near-snarl, his bitter contempt for the woman whose dead husband had killed Louise. She wasn’t going to tell Doris any of that, nothing of Bob’s frenzied outburst in court when Magdalene Heller had accused him of driving his wife, through his own neglect, into another man’s arms; nothing of the girl’s stony, stunned horror that had broken at last into vituperative ravings at Bob.
    â€˜She knew about Louise,’ Susan said. ‘Heller had promised to give her up and try to patch up his marriage but he didn’t keep his promise. He was miserable and suicidal about it. He’d been like that for months.’
    â€˜Had they ever met before, she and Bob?’
    â€˜Bob didn’t even know Heller was married. No one knows how Louise and Heller met. Heller worked for a firm called Equatair and the managing director was in court. He said Heller was going as their representative to Zürich in May—apparently he’d always wanted to go back to Switzerland. He was born and brought up there—but he didn’t show any interest when he was offered the post. I suppose he thought it would take him away from Louise. The managing director said Equatair got their custom by sending out business reply cards to people, but they hadn’t sent one to Louise and everyone seemed to think Heller must have given her one just so that she could fill it in and arrange for him to call. That would make his visits look innocent, you see.’
    Doris digested all this with satisfaction. She poked the fire until it crackled and blazed. Then she said, ‘I wonder why they didn’t just go away together?’
    â€˜I gathered from the letters that Heller wanted to but Louise wouldn’t. It seemed as if Louise had never even told Bob about it, not in so many words.’
    â€˜Letters?’ Doris said excitedly, discarding the rest of this fresh information. ‘What letters?’
    The police had found them in a drawer of Louise’s dressing table, two love-letters from Heller to Louise which had been written in November and December of the previous year. Carl Heller had identified his brother’s handwriting which, in any case, had been confirmed by an examination of Heller’s work notes. When they were read in court Bob’s face had grown grey and Heller’s widow, covering her face with her hands, had buried her head in her brother-in-law’s massive shoulder.
    â€˜They were just love-letters,’ Susan said, sickened by this inquisition. ‘They only read out bits.’ Strange and horrible that they had picked out those bits which most cruelly maligned Bob. ‘I can’t remember what he’d written,’ she lied.
    Her expression must have shown her unwillingness to talk about it any more, for Doris, realising that she had gone as far as she dared, dropped the subject with a, ‘It’ll all be in the paper, I expect,’ and suddenly became solicitous for Susan’s welfare. ‘I’m a beast, aren’t I?’ she said. ‘Pestering you after all you’ve been through. You don’t look at all well, as if you’re sickening