Free Split Code by Dorothy Dunnett Page B

easily. It began to turn red as I answered her. It became redder and redder, and then returned to being quite pale. Rosamund Booker-Readman said, ‘You are talking absolute rubbish. Of course that isn’t the ikon my husband lost. Anyone can see it’s some cheap reproduction. Give it me. You’ll give us all typhoid.’
    And lifting the whole sopping bundle, she stalked down the basement and as I watched her, thrust the lot into the boiler.
    It burned like firewood. When the last chip was consumed she banged the door shut and came upstairs for some handwashing. ‘Well?’ she said. ‘Hadn’t you better get on with the feed? Or has Benedict lost his fascination now you’ve met the Eisenkopps?’
    I said good-night and I hoped she’d have a pleasant evening. By hook or by crook, I could see, Benedict was going to have to smile at his mother.
    I fed him and he cried all the time I was trying to do my ironing. At eight-thirty I gave in and supplied him with a clean nappy and an extra five ounces, upon which he fell asleep instantly. I switched on the baby alarm and went downstairs again to my ironing.
    I like being alone. Outside were the spaced lights of the street, and the lines of parked cars, and the dark space where the Carl Schurz Park was, and the blazing edifice next door in which was the Eisenkopp duplex. Distantly one heard, from time to time, the whoop of sirens, or bantering voices, or the music of a transistor. The house itself was very quiet; reproaching the central heating on occasion with a creak from the stairs or the floorboards, or the sounds of the rush-bottomed chair I had used when feeding Benedict.
    I had the empty bottle and teat still to wash. I remembered also that the contents of my pocket were still lying on the hall table, where I had pulled out the bundle for Rosamund. I finished the neat pile of white Viyella nightgowns, the pressed matinée jackets, the feeders. I was thinking chiefly of bed as I stuck the ironing board away and went to rinse out the bottle.
    Benedict’s voice, crying, blared out of the baby alarm.
    I stood, extremely surprised. Warm, fed, dry and exhausted, the child had no reason to wake. Nor was there pain or fright in the wailing: I knew Benedict’s voice in all its limited register. Whatever had roused him, that was the grumble of boredom. It needed no urgent attention and was going to get none from me. He would be asleep before I climbed to the bedroom.
    I let him get on with it, and finished cleaning the bottle and teat and shoving them into the sterilizer. Benedict continued to cry. I tidied up, with the sound following me like a persistent seagull from room to room. It didn’t stop.
    After ten minutes, the longest I would ever leave a bored baby, I went upstairs to the bedroom I shared with him and eased the door open.
    I like babies to get used to the dark, so there wasn’t a light in the room. The crying, unamplified but unabated, followed me to my own bed, where I switched on my bedlamp and turned, chanting nonsense, to Benedict’s corner.
    It was empty. In its place was a tape recorder, crying forlornly into the baby alarm.
    Then the door closed with a bang, and the main lamp came on like a searchlight.
    ‘You took your time coming,’ said Johnson.
    He was leaning on the wall, in shapeless corduroys, with his hands stuffed into the pockets. His voice was aggrieved.
    I said, ‘Where’s Benedict?’ I didn’t know it was going to come out in my nursery school bark until I saw Johnson’s eyes bat behind the bifocal glasses. He looked pained.
    ‘Asleep in his basket next door. I have put him,’ said Johnson virtuously, ‘in a draught-proof corner with the door ajar in case he wakens.’ He bent and did something to the tape recorder, and the crying ceased. He straightened. ‘And I got in by copying Rosamund’s key when she came for her portrait sitting. Really, you should never trust locks.’
    ‘Or portrait painters,’ I said. I was reviewing, very