Sleep No More: Six Murderous Tales

by P. D. James

  I used Collingford’s landing stage to clamber out the other side. Again I stood still and listened. There was no sound except for the constant moaning of the river and the solitary cry of a night bird. I made my way silently over the grass. Outside the door of his workroom, I paused again. I could hear the noise of some kind of machinery. I wondered whether the door would be locked, but it opened easily when I turned the handle. I moved into a blaze of light.

  I knew exactly what I had to do. I was perfectly calm. It was over in about four seconds. I don’t think he really had a chance. He was absorbed in what he had been doing, bending over a lathe, and the sight of an almost naked man, walking purposely towards him, left him literally impotent with surprise. But, after that first paralysing second, he knew me. Oh yes, he knew me! Then I drew my right hand from behind my back and struck. The knife went in as sweetly as if the flesh had been butter. He staggered and fell. I had expected that and I let myself go loose and fell on top of him. His eyes were glazed, his mouth opened and there was a gush of dark red blood. I twisted the knife viciously in the wound, relishing the sound of tearing sinews. Then I waited. I counted to five deliberately, then raised myself from his prone figure and crouched behind him before withdrawing the knife. When I withdrew it there was a fountain of sweet-smelling blood which curved from his throat like an arch. There is one thing I shall never forget. The blood must have been red, what other colour could it have been? But, at the time and forever afterwards, I saw it as a golden stream.

  I checked my body for bloodstains before I left the workshop and rinsed my arms under the cold tap at his sink. My bare feet made no marks on the wooden-block flooring. I closed the door quietly after me and, once again, stood listening. Still no sound. The house was dark and empty.

  The return journey was more exhausting than I had thought possible. The river seemed to have widened and I thought that I should never reach my home shore. I was glad I had chosen a shallow part of the stream and that the bank was firm. I doubt whether I could have drawn myself up through a welter of mud and slime. I was shivering violently as I zipped up my tracksuit, and it took me precious seconds to get on my running shoes. After I had run about a mile down the towpath I weighted the toilet bag containing the knife with stones from the path and hurled it into the middle of the river. I guessed that they would drag part of the Thames for the weapon but they could hardly search the whole stream. And, even if they did, the toilet bag was one sold at the local chain store which anyone might have bought, and I was confident that the knife could never be traced to me. Half an hour later I was back in my shack. I had left the television on and the news was just ending. I made myself a cup of hot cocoa and sat to watch it. I felt drained of thought and energy as if I had just made love. I was conscious of nothing but my tiredness, my body’s coldness gradually returning to life in the warmth of the electric fire, and a great peace.

  He must have had quite a lot of enemies. It was nearly a fortnight before the police got round to interviewing me. Two officers came, a Detective Inspector and a Sergeant, both in plain clothes. The Sergeant did most of the talking; the other just sat, looking round at the sitting room, glancing out at the river, looking at the two of us from time to time from cold grey eyes as if the whole investigation were a necessary bore. The Sergeant said the usual reassuring platitudes about just a few questions. I was nervous, but that didn’t worry me. They would expect me to be nervous. I told myself that, whatever I did, I mustn’t try to be clever. I mustn’t talk too much. I had decided to tell them that I spent the whole evening watching television, confident that no one would be able to refute this. I knew that no friends would have called on me. I doubted whether my colleagues at the library even knew where I lived. And I had no telephone so I need not fear that a caller’s ring had gone unanswered during that crucial hour and a half.

  On the whole it was easier than I had expected. Only once did I feel myself at risk. That was when the Inspector suddenly intervened. He said in a harsh voice:

  “He married your wife didn’t he? Took her away from you some people might say. Nice piece of goods, too, by the look of her. Didn’t you feel any grievance? Or was it all nice and friendly? You take her, old chap. No ill feelings. That kind of thing.”

  It was hard to accept the contempt in his voice but if he hoped to provoke me he didn’t succeed. I had been expecting this question. I was prepared. I looked down at my hands and waited a few seconds before I spoke. I knew exactly what I would say.

  “I could have killed Collingford myself when she first told me about him. But I had to come to terms with it. She went for the money, you see. And if that’s the kind of wife you have, well she’s going to leave you sooner or later. Better sooner than when you have a family. You tell yourself ‘good riddance.’ I don’t mean I felt that at first, of course. But I did feel it in the end. Sooner than I expected, really.”

  That was all I said about Elsie then or ever. They came back three times. They asked if they could look round my shack. They looked round it. They took away two of my suits and the tracksuit for examination. Two weeks later they returned them without comment. I never knew what they suspected, or even if they did suspect. Each time they came I said less, not more. I never varied my story. I never allowed them to provoke me into discussing my marriage or speculating about the crime. I just sat there, telling them the same thing over and over again. I never felt in any real danger. I knew that they had dragged some lengths of the river but that they hadn’t found the weapon. In the end they gave up. I always had the feeling that I was pretty low on their list of suspects and that, by the end, their visits were merely a matter of form.

  It was three months before Elsie came to me. I was glad that it wasn’t earlier. It might have looked suspicious if she had arrived at the shack when the police were with me. After Collingford’s death I hadn’t seen her. There were pictures of her in the national and local newspapers, fragile in sombre furs and black hat at the inquest, bravely controlled at the crematorium, sitting in her drawing room in afternoon dress and pearls with her husband’s dog at her feet, the personification of loneliness and grief.

  “I can’t think who could have done it. He must have been a madman. Rodney hadn’t an enemy in the world.”

  That statement caused some ribald comment at the library. One of the assistants said, “He’s left her a fortune I hear. Lucky for her she had an alibi. She was at a London theatre all the evening, watching Macbeth. Otherwise, from what I’ve heard of our Rodney Collingford, people might have started to get ideas about his fetching little widow.”

  Then he gave me a sudden embarrassed glance, remembering who the widow was.

  And so one Friday evening, she came. She drove herself and was alone. The dark green Saab pulled up to my ramshackle gate. She came into the sitting room and looked around in a kind of puzzled contempt. After a moment, still not speaking, she sat in one of the fireside chairs and crossed her legs, moving one caressingly against the other. I hadn’t seen her sitting like that before. She looked up at me. I was standing stiffly in front of her chair, my lips dry. When I spoke I couldn’t recognise my own voice.

  “So you’ve come back?” I said.

  She stared at me, incredulous, and then she laughed:

  “To you? Back for keeps? Don’t be silly, darling! I’ve just come to pay a visit. Besides, I wouldn’t dare to come back, would I? I might be frightened that you’d stick a knife into my throat.”

  I couldn’t speak. I stared at her, feeling the blood drain from my face. Then I heard her high, rather childish voice. It sounded almost kind.

  “Don’t worry, I shan’t tell. You were right about him, darling, you really were. He wasn’t at all nice really. And mean! I didn’t care so much about your meanness. After all, you don’t earn so very much, do you? But he had half a million! Think of it, darling. I’ve been left half a million! And he was so mean that he expected me to go on working as his secretary even after we were married. I type
d all his letters! I really did! All that he sent from home, anyway. And I had to open his post every morning unless the envelopes had a secret little sign on them he’d told his friends about to show that they were private.”

  I said through bloodless lips:

  “So all my notes—”

  “He never saw them, darling. Well, I didn’t want to worry him, did I? And I knew they were from you. I knew when the first one arrived. You never could spell ‘communication,’ could you? I noticed that when you used to write to the house agents and the solicitor before we were married. It made me laugh considering that you’re an educated librarian and I was only a shop assistant.”

  “So you knew all the time. You knew that it was going to happen.”

  “Well, I thought that it might. But he really was horrible, darling. You can’t imagine. And now I’ve got half a million! Isn’t it lucky that I have an alibi? I thought you might come on that Thursday. And Rodney never did enjoy a serious play.”

  —

  After that brief visit I never saw or spoke to her again. I stayed in the shack, but life became pointless after Collingford’s death. Planning his murder had been an interest, after all. Without Elsie and without my victim there seemed little point in living. And, about a year after his death, I began to dream. I still dream, always on a Monday and Friday. I live through it all again; the noiseless run along the towpath over the mush of damp leaves; the quiet swim across the river; the silent opening of his door; the upward thrust of the knife; the vicious turn in the wound; the animal sound of tearing tissues; the curving stream of golden blood. Only the homeward swim is different. In my dream the river is no longer a cleansing stream, luminous under the sickle moon, but a cloying, impenetrable, slow-moving bog of viscous blood through which I struggle in impotent panic towards a steadily receding shore.

  I know about the significance of the dream. I’ve read all about the psychology of guilt. Since I lost Elsie I’ve done all my living through books. But it doesn’t help. And I no longer know who I am. I know who I used to be, our local assistant librarian, gentle, scholarly, timid, Elsie’s husband. But then I killed Collingford. The man I was couldn’t have done that. He wasn’t that kind of person. So who am I? It isn’t really surprising, I suppose, that the library committee suggested so tactfully that I ought to look for a less exacting job. A less exacting job than the post of assistant librarian? But you can’t blame them. No one can be efficient and keep his mind on the job when he doesn’t know who he is.

  Sometimes, when I’m in a public house—and I seem to spend most of my time there nowadays since I’ve been out of work—I’ll look over someone’s shoulder at a newspaper photograph of Elsie and say:

  “That’s the beautiful Ilsa Mancelli. I was her first husband.”

  I’ve got used to the way people sidle away from me, the ubiquitous pub bore, their eyes averted, their voices suddenly hearty. But sometimes, perhaps because they’ve been lucky with the horses and feel a spasm of pity for a poor deluded sod, they push a few coins over the counter to the barman before making their way to the door, and buy me a drink.

  The Murder of Santa Claus

  If you’re an addict of detective fiction, you may have heard of me, Charles Mickledore. I say addict advisably; no occasional or highly discriminating reader of the genre is likely to ask for my latest offering at his public library. I’m no H. R. F. Keating, no Dick Francis, not even a P. D. James. But I do a workmanlike job on the old conventions, for those who like their murders cosy, and, although my amateur detective, the Hon. Martin Carstairs, has been described as a pallid copy of Peter Wimsey, at least I haven’t burdened him with a monocle, or with Harriet Vane for that matter. I make enough to augment a modest private income. Unmarried, solitary, unsociable; why should I expect my writing to be any more successful than my life?

  Sometimes I’m even asked to do a radio chat show when one of the more distinguished practitioners of death isn’t available. I’ve got used to the old question: have you ever, Mr. Mickledore, had personal experience of murder? Invariably I lie. For one thing, interviewers never expect the truth; there isn’t time. And for another, they wouldn’t believe me. The murder I was involved with was as complicated, as bizarre as any fictional mayhem I’ve managed to concoct, even in my more inspired moments. If I were writing about it I’d call it “The Murder of Santa Claus.” And that, essentially, was what it was.

  Appropriately enough, it took place in the heyday of the cosy “whodunnits,” the Christmas of 1939, the first Christmas of the war. I was sixteen, an awkward age at the best of times, and, as a sensitive and solitary only child, I was more awkward than most. My father was in the Colonial Service serving in Singapore, and I usually spent the winter holiday with my housemaster and his family. But this year my parents wrote that my father’s elder half-brother, Victor Mickledore, had invited me to his Cotswold manor house at Marston Turville. His instructions were precise. I was to arrive by the 4:15 train on Christmas Eve and would depart on the morning of Wednesday, December 27th. I would be met at Marston station by his housekeeper/secretary, Miss Makepiece. There would be four other guests: Major and Mrs. Turville, from whom he had bought the manor five years previously; his stepson, Henry Caldwell, the famous amateur flyer; and the actress Miss Gloria Belsize. I had, of course, heard of Caldwell and of Miss Belsize although I don’t suppose that even I, naive as I was, supposed it to be her real name.

  My uncle—or should it be step-uncle?—apologised for the fact that there would be no other young guests to keep me company. That didn’t worry me. But the thought of the visit did. I had met my uncle only once, when I was ten. I had the idea, gleaned as children do from half-spoken sentences and overheard remarks, that my parents and he were on bad terms. I think he had once wanted to marry my mother. Perhaps this was an attempt at reconciliation now that war, with its uncertainties, had started. My father had made it plain in his letter that I was expected to accept the invitation and that he was relying on me to make a good impression. I put out of my mind the treacherous thought that my uncle was very rich and that he had no children.

  Miss Makepiece was waiting for me at Marston station. She greeted me with no particular warmth, and as she led the way to the waiting Daimler, I was reminded of the school matron on one of her more repressive days. We drove through the village in silence. It lay sombre and deserted in its pre-Christmas calm. I can remember the church half-hidden behind the great yews and the silent school with the children’s Christmas chains of coloured paper gleaming dully against the windows.

  Marston Turville is a small seventeenth-century manor house, its three wings built round a courtyard. I saw it first as a mass of grey stone, blacked out as was the whole village, under low broken clouds. My uncle greeted me before a log fire in the great hall. I came in, blinking, from the December dusk into a blaze of colour; candles sparkling on the huge Christmas tree, its tub piled with imitation snowballs of frosted cotton wool; the leaping fire; the gleam of firelight on silver. My fellow guests were taking tea and I see them as a tableau, cups halfway to their lips, predestined victims waiting for the tragedy to begin.

  Memory, perverse and selective, has even clothed them appropriately. When I picture that Christmas Eve, I see Henry Caldwell, that doomed hero, in his RAF uniform with his medal ribbons on his breast. But he couldn’t have been wearing it. He was only then waiting to report for his RAF training. And I invariably picture Gloria Belsize in the slinky golden evening dress which she changed into for dinner, her nipples pointing the satin; I found it difficult to keep my eyes from them. I see the plain, intimidatingly efficient Miss Makepiece in her grey woollen dress severe as a uniform, the Turvilles in their shabby country tweeds, my uncle always in his immaculate dinner jacket.

  He bent over me with his dark sardonic face.

  “So you’re Alison’s boy. I wondered how you’d turn out.”

  I thought I knew what he was thinking: that the right father would have made all the
difference. I was aware of my lack of height beside his six-foot two—only Henry could match him—and of my adolescent crop of pimples. He introduced me to my fellow guests. The Turvilles were a gentle-faced white-haired couple, older than I had expected and both rather deaf. I found Henry’s austere good looks rather formidable; shyness and hero-worship made me dumb. Miss Belsize’s face was known to me from the papers. Now I saw what tactful touching-up had concealed: the deepening lines under the eyes, the sagging jawline, the hectic flush under the remarkable eyes. Then I wondered why she should be so excited by Christmas. Now I realise that she was half-drunk for most of the day and that my uncle saw it, was amused by it, and made no attempt to curb her. We were an ill-assorted party. None of us was at ease, myself least of all. After that first greeting my uncle hardly spoke to me. But whenever we were together I was aware of his intense scrutiny, of being in some way under approval.

  The first intimation of horror, the Christmas cracker with its message of menace, was delivered at seven o’clock. It was a long tradition at Marston Turville that carol singers from the village sang to their squire on Christmas Eve. They arrived promptly, sidling in under the blackout curtain one by one, as the lights in the great hall were lowered. There were ten of them, seven men and three women, cloaked against the cold of that frosty night, and each carrying a lantern which was lit as soon as the heavy door was closed. I stood, uneasy in my newly acquired dinner jacket, between Mrs. Turville and Henry to the right of the fire and listened to the old, innocently nostalgic carols resolutely sung in their hearty country voices. Afterwards the butler, Poole, and one of the maids brought in mince pies and hot punch. But there was an air of constraint. They should have been singing for the Turvilles. The manor was in alien hands. They ate and drank with almost unseemly haste. The lights were put out, the door opened, and my uncle with Miss Makepiece at his side thanked them and said goodnight. Miss Belsize fluttered round them as they left, almost as if she were chatelaine of the manor. The Turvilles had stood distanced at the far end of the room and, when the singing began, I saw her hand steal out to his.