by P. D. James
“Drink this, darling. Try to get warm. Stay here, I’ll call you when I’m ready.”
She was amazed at how clearly her mind was working. Before she went upstairs she put the front door on the latch. She went outside and unlocked the boot of the car. The road was deserted. The nearest street light, ten yards away, was a yellow haze in the freezing mist. All the curtains of number 39 were drawn; behind them the dark and empty rooms waited for their new owners. At number 43 only the front downstairs room was lit. Here too, the curtains were drawn but they couldn’t muffle the gusts of laughter from the television comedy show. The Hicksons, inveterate viewers, were settled for the evening.
She took the plastic bag from the hanger in the cupboard under the stairs. Her coat still smelled of cleaning fluid. She wondered whether this familiar pungent smell would always be associated for her with this night. Then she thought of gloves. There was a pair of thin washing-up gloves hung over the taps of the kitchen sink. She hated to work in thick gloves. She put them on. Then she went upstairs.
The bedside lamp was on beside the double bed, the curtains were drawn. It was as if she saw the child for the first time. She lay sprawled on the bed, her left arm flung out, the fingers curving. Her blue knickers were down to her knees. She looked very peaceful. Her spectacles had been shaken off and lay separately on the counterpane. They looked ridiculously small, a delicate contraption of glass and wire. The woman picked them up and felt in the pocket of the child’s coat for the case. It wasn’t there. She felt a moment of panic as if it were vitally important that the spectacles were kept safe. Then she noticed a small black shoulder bag on the floor. She picked it up. It was made of cheap plastic and looked very new. Perhaps it had been bought specially to go with her Guide’s uniform. Inside was a handkerchief, still folded, a Girl Guide diary, a pencil, a small purse containing a few coins, and a red spectacle case. The woman folded the spectacles into the case. Then she opened the diary; the hand was childish, printed letters linked with straight lines. Julie Mavis Scase, 104 Magenta Gardens. She wondered why the child had taken this long way home. Surely it would have been quicker to go across the recreation ground. And if she had gone across the recreation ground she wouldn’t be lying here dead. They were a full mile from Magenta Gardens. It might be a day or two after the body was found before the police started their door-to-door inquiries here, and every day would make them safer.
She took the child’s coat and the Girl Guide beret and placed them on the body. Gently she pulled up the knickers. Then she drew the long plastic bag carefully over the child, twisting it above her head. Seen through the transparent sheeting her face, unspectacled, the lids closed, was transformed, delicate, beautiful even, but unreal. The lips were slightly parted showing the moist gleam of her thin metal braces across the teeth. A blob of saliva hung on it like a pearl. She looked like a doll gift-wrapped for Christmas, a present for a good girl. When the woman lifted the body in her arms she could feel its warmth through the thin plastic. The child was heavier than she had expected. The weight dragged at her arms and stomach muscles. It would have been easier to have slung the burden over her shoulder. Wasn’t that how they taught you to carry an unconscious person from a burning house? But she found she couldn’t do it. She had to carry the child in her arms gently, as if this were a sick and sleeping baby who must not be awakened. Words came into her mind. She is not dead, but sleeping. She wanted to pray: “Oh God, help us, please help us. Please make it all right.” But that wasn’t possible. She had put herself beyond the power of prayer. No one, not even God, could make it all right for them ever again.
Their car was a red second-hand Mini. They had only had it for six months. They had been able to save up for it because she worked. Even so, their Sunday trips to the sea with Rosie had had to be rationed. She was an unpractised driver, unused to fog. She drove very slowly, knowing what it could mean if they were in an accident, were stopped by the police. He sat beside her, propped up like a corpse, eyes staring ahead through the windscreen. She had wound his thick scarf round his neck, half obscuring his face; but she couldn’t hide his eyes. Neither of them spoke. Sometimes she murmured foolish sibilant reassurances as one might to a fractious horse. From time to time she took her left hand from the wheel and laid it on his. But she had made him wear his gloves and she didn’t know whether those stiff wool-encased fingers were aware of her touch.
The lights of the library windows shone through the fog. Although this was a branch she often used, she hadn’t driven there before and was unsure where to leave the car. She turned carefully to a side road and saw two cars parked at the kerb. She stopped the Mini carefully behind them. Then she told him what to do. He nodded. She didn’t know if he had understood. She pushed open the library door and was met by the familiar warm effluence of books and floor polish underlaid by the sour smell emanating from the adjacent reading room where the old men, swathed in their decaying overcoats, sat all day slumped over the newspapers, taking refuge from loneliness and the cold. She could see through the glass partition that three of them were still there. She envied them because they were alive and Martin was dead. That was the only moment during the night in which she was for a second disorientated, the child forgotten, thinking that it was his body huddled there in the boot of the car. But he was walking dead at her side.
She went up to the counter with the three books she had brought with her to return. He remembered her instructions and went over to the nearest fiction shelf. She called out to him: “There’s no time to choose new books, darling, if we’re going to get there in time for the big film. I’ll just put in my card for the Updike.”
He seemed not to have heard. He stood there stiffly facing the shelves like a dummy in a shop window. There was only one person in front of her, a determinedly bright middle-aged woman apparently returning library books for her invalid mother. The girl librarian listened impassively as she sorted out the tickets while the woman gabbled on about the books she was returning, her mother’s health, the books she hoped to take out. She must have been a frequent visitor. Perhaps returning library books was the only chance she got of a little freedom. The librarian said, “Thank you, Miss Yelland” as she handed over the three tickets.
And now it was the woman’s turn. She asked to be placed on the waiting list for the Updike and filled up the card with her name and address in bold capitals. She was surprised that her hand could be so steady. She took a lot of trouble over forming the letters, bold and black against the white card. If the police did check up, surely no one could believe that these firm letters had been penned by anyone under stress. Then she went over to her husband. He seemed rooted to the ground and she had almost to lead him to the door and out to the car.
And here, again, the film ceased to roll, the pictures were lost. The worst part of the drive must have been circling the roundabout where five roads met at Manse Hill. But she must have managed that without incident because the next thing she remembered was parking the car in front of the cinema. The car park was more crowded than she had expected, but that was a good thing. It meant that the cinema would be fairly full, that their departure would be less likely to be noticed. She was able to find a parking space close to one of the side exits. When she switched off the engine the silence was almost frightening. They sat together in the fog-shrouded car and she told him again what to do. She said: “Darling, do you understand?” He nodded, but he didn’t speak. They got out of the car and she closed his door for him. The fog was thicker now. It rose and fell like a malignant gas, spilling in glutinous dollops from the high street lamps. They waded through it, knee-deep, to the foyer.
The last programme must have begun. There were only two people in front of them at the box office. When her turn came she asked for eight-and-sixpennies and handed over the five-pound note. She took her change and propelled him a little ahead of her letting one of the four one-pound notes drop from her hand. Then she turned and went back to the box office. She said:
“I think I’m a pound short. There are only three here.”
The woman said solidly: “I gave you four, madam. You saw me count them out.”
“There are only three here.”
The woman repeated: “You saw me count them out, madam,” and turned to the next customer.
She moved away from the box office, then said loudly: “I’m sorry, I must have dropped it. It’s here on the floor.”
The whole episode struck her even at the time as unreal, artificial. The woman in the box office shrugged her shoulders. They moved together across the foyer to the entrance to the stalls. She tried to hand him his ticket, but he wouldn’t take it, pretending not to notice her nudging hands. But she knew that he couldn’t face sitting apart from her. They would have to stay together.
They stepped into what seemed an immensity of warm-scented blackness. Only the screen was alight, blazing with colour and noise. It was a James Bond film and it must just have begun. She followed the pinpoint of light from the usherette’s torch down the centre gangway, one hand behind her clutching at his coat. They were shown into two seats at the end of a row. This wouldn’t do. She wanted to slip out from the side entrance, not to walk again up the centre aisle. After they had sat for about ten minutes she whispered to him and took his hand. Together they slipped out of their seats and she led him forward towards the screen until her eyes, more accustomed now to the darkness, could discern a sparsely occupied row. There were only three couples, all seated near the central gangway. They pushed their way past them muttering apologies and took their seats at the far end of the row, almost immediately opposite the red exit sign.
She made herself wait nearly half an hour before she gave him the sign. It was an exciting point of the film; the background music was rising to a crescendo, the screen was full of hurling cars and screaming mouths. In the rows in front of her every face was turned to the screen. She gave a pull on his hand and half rose to her feet. He followed her and they were out through the door. There was a short flight of concrete steps, then she was pushing at the bar of the final door, the cold fog swirled in their faces, and they were in the car park. She felt in her coat pocket for the keys. They weren’t there. And instantly she knew. She had left them in the car. Clutching his hand she dragged him with her as she raced through the fog to where she had parked the Mini; but she knew what she would find. The two painted white lines enclosed emptiness. The Mini had gone.
And after that the film of memory broke again. They must have walked for three hours, hand in hand, trudging onwards through the fog towards the forest. Her next memory was of a narrow road stretching straight and unlit between the trees.
The night was icy cold and very still. On each side of the road the forest stretched ahead of them, shrouded in mist. She thought she could hear from it a gentle persistent dripping, slow and portentous as drops of blood. In her imagination it stretched forever, exuding its black miasma, dropping terror from the tangled bushes, the high leafless boughs, oozing a slow contagion from the slimy trunks. She could see their breath, small puffs of white smoke, leading them onwards. There was no other sound, only the endless ring of their feet on the tarmac. Occasionally they would hear the purr of an approaching car. Instinctively they would step into the darkness of the trees until it passed in a sweep of light, carrying ordinary people, perhaps on their way to a party or driving home late after a long day, happy people with nothing to worry about except mortgages and sickness, their children, their marriages, their jobs.
And then, suddenly, he stopped. He said, his voice dull, utterly defeated: “I’m tired. Come with me into the forest and we’ll find somewhere to sleep. I’ll cuddle you. You won’t feel the cold. We’ll be together. We need never wake up ever again.”
But she failed him. She wouldn’t go with him. In the end he pleaded, almost cried, but still she refused. She made him turn with her, defeated, and begin the slow trudge home. Ever since earliest childhood she had been terrified of the forest. It wasn’t the forest of primary-school fairy tales, the wail of a hunting horn calling through dappled glades, paths regal with stags. This was a mush of corruption, the place where her father had threatened to lose her if she screamed, the dumping ground for murdered bodies. In her childish imagination the sluggish streams ran with blood.
And it wasn’t only the terror of the forest. She didn’t share—she never had shared—his pessimism. Life for him was fundamentally tragic, a series of days to be somehow got through, not a privilege to be rejoiced in but a burden to be endured. He was always surprised by joy. The thought of death held no anguish for him; it was life which called for courage. But she was different. Nothing but intolerable pain or utter despair could make her kill herself. The heart of her personality was buoyant with optimism, all her life she had been nourished by hope. She hadn’t survived the miseries of her childhood to die so easily now. She told herself that all might yet be well. The car thieves might never open the boot; why should they? The car wasn’t worth stealing for its own sake. That meant that they wanted it just for the ride and would abandon it when they had finished with it. In time the police would find it and examine it. But tracing the car to them didn’t make her a murderess. The rapist—anyone—could have stolen it from outside their door. All they had to do now was to make their way home, wait for the morning, and report it missing.
But in her heart she knew that the hope was false. Once the car was found they would be the chief suspects. They would be asked about their movements that evening; the call at the library, the argument over the cinema tickets. They would be asked how they had travelled to the cinema without the car. There was no direct or easy bus route. And they couldn’t reply that their car had been stolen from outside the cinema. Why hadn’t they reported the theft before they left the house? She knew that Martin wouldn’t be able to stand up to this early and probing questioning. She had banked on having several days before the police got around to him and, even then, with nothing to connect them with the crime, it would only have been a routine door-to-door visit. Nothing was known against him. Now everything was changed. The plastic bag would be traced to the local dry-cleaner. Her recent visit there would be discovered.
And so they trudged home together to the waiting police cars standing already outside the house, to the watching eyes from the houses across the road, to the knowledge that, never again, would they be alone together.
The terrors of the forest were imaginary. All the terrors to come would be real. If she had cared enough she could surely have taken his hand and let him lead her into the darkness under the trees. She could have conquered panic in his arms. Always she had been the stronger. It was to her he had looked for support, for comfort, for reassurance. Wasn’t that, after all, why she had married him, because he was a man who had none of the qualities which her father had taught her belonged to manliness? Now, and for the first time, he had asked her to trust to him. He had wanted it that way, wanted to lie in the darkness with her, comforting her into death. But because of her childhood terrors she failed him. She withheld from him the right to die with dignity in his own way and in his own time. She condemned him to the trial, the dock, the torture of those eighteen months in prison before death released him. She had heard what prisoners did to child molesters. She had lived through those eighteen months separated from him, unable to comfort him, unable to tell him that she was sorry. The child’s death hadn’t been willed; she told herself that she couldn’t have prevented that act of violence. The child had been murdered by the child she had once been. But this desertion of him at the end had been voluntary.
I should have died with him that night. He was right, there was nothing else for us to do. That was the real sin, the failure of love. “Perfect love casteth out fear.” It didn’t need a perfect love not to fail him then. It only needed a little kindness, a little courage.
And there the manuscript broke off. When she had finished reading Philippa turned off the light and lay very still, her heart pound
ing. She felt sick and at the same time faint. She got up and sat on the edge of her bed for a moment then made her way over to the window and leant out, breathing great gulps of the sweet-smelling air. She didn’t ask herself how much of the story she believed. She didn’t judge it as writing or as description. She couldn’t distance herself from it any more than she could distance herself from the woman who had written it. She knew that she wouldn’t tell her mother that she had read it and that her mother wouldn’t ask. This was all that she would ever be told about the murder, all she would ever know or need to know. After ten minutes of silently gazing at the night sky she put the manuscript back in her drawer and went back to bed. Only then did she wonder where she had been that night.
8
He returned that same evening and took possession of his command post. Next morning he breakfasted as soon as the dining room was open at half past seven, and by eight o’clock he had begun his watch. He sat at the window on the one chair, the binoculars resting on the ledge, the door bolted. At his side he placed the open rucksack ready to slip the binoculars inside and to hurry downstairs once Mrs. Palfrey was sighted. It would take too long to go down by lift; he would have to move fast if he were to keep her in sight.
At nine-fifteen precisely a tall, dark-haired man carrying a briefcase left number 68. This, presumably, was Mr. Palfrey. He had the businesslike air of a man with his morning planned, and Scase didn’t believe that it included calling on the murderess or her daughter. His first conviction had never wavered; it was the woman whose frightened voice he had heard over the telephone who would eventually lead him to them.