Sleep No More: Six Murderous Tales

by P. D. James

  “Yes,” she lied. “I heard all about it.” But she had done more than that. She knew. She had seen it. She had been there.

  And then the outline of the chair before her altered. An amorphous black shape swam before her eyes; then it took form and substance. Her grandmother was sitting there, squat as a toad, dressed in her Sunday black for morning service, gloved and hatted, prayer book in her lap. She saw again the glob of phlegm at the corner of the mouth, the thread of broken veins at the side of the sharp nose. The grandmother was waiting to inspect her grandchild before church, turning on her again that look of querulous discontent. The witch was sitting there. The witch who hated her and her daddy, who had told her that he was useless and feckless and no better than her mother’s murderer. The witch who was threatening to have Blackie put to sleep because he had torn her chair, because Daddy had given him to her. The witch who was planning to keep her from Daddy forever. And then she saw something else. The poker was there too, just as she remembered it, the long rod of polished brass with its heavy knob.

  She seized it now as she had seized it then, and with a scream of hatred and terror, brought it down on her grandmother’s head. Again and again she struck, hearing the brass thudding against the leather, blow on splitting blow. And still she screamed. The room rang with the terror of it. But it was only when the frenzy passed and the dreadful noise stopped that she knew from the pain of her throat that the screaming had been hers.

  She stood shaking, gasping for breath. Beads of sweat stood out on her forehead and she felt the stinging drops seeping into her eyes. Looking up, she was aware of the man’s eyes, wide with terror, staring into hers, of a muttered curse, of footsteps running to the door. And then the poker slid from her moist hands and she heard it thud softly on the rug.

  He had been right; there was no blood. Only the grotesque hat knocked forward over the dead face. But while she watched, a sluggish line of deep red rolled from under the brim, zigzagged down the forehead, trickled along the creases of the cheeks and began to drop steadily onto the gloved hands. And then she heard a soft mew. A ball of black fur crept from behind the chair and the ghost of Blackie, azure eyes frantic, leaped, as he had leaped ten years earlier, delicately into that unmoving lap. She looked at her hands. Where were the gloves, the white cotton gloves that the witch had always insisted must be worn to church? But these hands, no longer the hands of a nine-year-old child, were naked. And the chair was empty. There was nothing but the split leather, the burst of horsehair stuffing, a faint smell of violets fading on the quiet air.

  She walked out the front door without closing it behind her as she had left it then. She walked as she had walked then, gloved and unsullied, down the gravel path between the rhododendrons, through the ironwork gate and up the lane towards the church. The bell had only just started ringing: she would be in good time. In the distance she had glimpsed her father climbing a stile from the water meadow into the lane. So he must have set out early after breakfast and had walked to Creedon. And why so early? Had he needed that long walk to settle something in his mind? Had it been a pathetic attempt to propitiate the witch by coming with them to church? Or—blessed thought—had he come to take her away, to see that her few belongings were packed and ready by the time the service was over? Yes, that was what she had thought at the time. She remembered it now, that fountain of hope soaring and dancing into glorious certainty. When she got home, all would be ready. They would stand there together and defy the witch, would tell her that they were leaving together, the two of them and Blackie, that she would never see them again. At the end of the road she looked back and saw for the last time the beloved ghost, crossing the lane to the house towards that fatally open door.

  And after that? The vision was fading now. She could remember nothing of the service except a blaze of red and blue shifting like a kaleidoscope, then fusing into a stained-glass window, the Good Shepherd gathering a lamb to his bosom. And afterwards? Surely there had been strangers waiting on the porch, grave, concerned faces, whispers and sidelong glances, a woman in some kind of uniform, an official car. And after that, nothing. Memory was a blank. But now at last she knew where her father was buried. And she knew why she would never be able to visit him, never make that pious pilgrimage to the place where he lay because of her, the shameful place where she had put him. There could be no flowers, no obelisk, no loving message carved in marble for those who lay in quicklime behind a prison wall. And then, unbidden, came the final memory. She saw again the open church door, the congregation filing in, enquiring faces turning towards her as she arrived alone in the vestibule. She heard again that high, childish voice speaking the words that more than any others had slipped the rope of hemp over his shrouded head.

  “Granny? She isn’t very well. She told me to come on my own. No, there’s nothing to worry about. She’s quite all right. Daddy’s with her.”

  A Very Desirable Residence

  During and after Harold Vinson’s trial, at which I was a relatively unimportant prosecution witness, there was the usual uninformed, pointless and repetitive speculation about whether those of us who knew him would ever have guessed that he was a man capable of scheming to murder his wife. I was supposed to have known him better than most of the school staff, and my colleagues found it irritatingly self-righteous of me to be so very reluctant to be drawn into the general gossip about what, after all, was the school’s major scandal in twenty years. “You knew them both. You used to visit the house. You saw them together. Didn’t you guess?” they insisted, obviously feeling that I had been in some way negligent, that I ought to have seen what was going on and prevented it. No, I never guessed; or, if I did, I guessed wrong. But they were perfectly right. I could have prevented it.

  I first met Harold Vinson when I took up a post as junior art master at the comprehensive school where he taught mathematics to the senior forms. It wasn’t too discouraging a place, as these teaching factories go. The school was centred on the old eighteenth-century grammar school, with some not-too-hideous modern additions, in a pleasant enough commuter town on the river about twenty miles south-east of London. It was a predominantly middle-class community, a little smug and culturally self-conscious, but hardly intellectually exciting. Still, it suited me well enough for a first post. I don’t object to the middle class or their habitats; I’m middle class myself. And I knew that I was lucky to get the job. Mine is the usual story of an artist with sufficient talent but without enough respect for the fashionable idiocies of the contemporary artistic establishment to make a decent living. More dedicated men choose to live in cheap bedsitting rooms and keep on painting. I’m fussy about where and how I live so, for me, it was a diploma in the teaching of art and West Fairing Comprehensive.

  It took only one evening in Vinson’s home for me to realise that he was a sadist. I don’t mean that he tormented his pupils. He wouldn’t have been allowed to get away with it had he tried. These days the balance of power in the classroom has shifted with a vengeance and any tormenting is done by the children. No, as a teacher, he was surprisingly patient and conscientious, a man with real enthusiasm for his subject (“discipline” was the word he preferred to use, being something of an intellectual snob and given to academic jargon) with a surprising talent for communicating that enthusiasm to the children. He was a fairly rigid disciplinarian, but I’ve never found that children dislike firmness provided a master doesn’t indulge in that mordant sarcasm which, by taking advantage of the children’s inability to compete, is resented as particularly unfair. He got them through their examinations too. Say what you like, that’s something middle-class kids and their parents appreciate. I’m sorry to have slipped into using the word “kids,” that modern shibboleth with its blend of condescension and sycophancy. Vinson never used it. It was his habit to talk about the alumni of the sixth. At first I thought it was an attempt at mildly pompous humour, but now I wonder. He wasn’t really a humorous man. The rigid muscles of his face seldom crac
ked into a smile and when they did it was as disconcerting as a painful grimace. With his lean, slightly stooping figure, the grave eyes behind the horn-rimmed spectacles, the lines etched deeply from the nose to the corners of his unyielding mouth, he looked deceptively what we all thought he was—a middle-aged, disagreeable and not very happy pedant.

  No, it wasn’t his precious alumni whom he bullied and tyrannised over. It was his wife. The first time I saw Emily Vinson was when I sat next to her at Founder’s Memorial Day, an archaic function inherited from the grammar school and regarded with such reverence that even those masters’ wives who seldom showed their faces at the school felt obliged to make an appearance. She was, I guessed, almost twenty years younger than her husband, a thin, anxious-looking woman with auburn hair which had faded early and the very pale, transparent skin which often goes with that colouring. She was expensively and smartly dressed—too incongruously smartly for such a nondescript woman so that the ill-chosen, too-fashionable suit merely emphasised her frail ordinariness. But her eyes were remarkable, an unusual grey-green, huge and slightly exophthalmic under the arched narrow eyebrows. She seldom turned them on me, but when, from time to time, she gave me a swift elliptical glance it was as astounding as turning over an amateurish Victorian oil and discovering a Corot.

  It was at the end of Founder’s Memorial Day that I received my first invitation to visit them at their home. I found that they lived in some style. She had inherited from her father a small but perfectly proportioned Georgian house which stood alone in some two acres of ground with lawns slanting green down to the river. Apparently her father was a builder who had bought the house cheaply from its impoverished owner with the idea of demolishing it and building a block of flats. The planning authority had slapped on a preservation order just in time and he had died in weeks, no doubt from chagrin, leaving the house and its contents to his daughter. Neither Harold Vinson nor his wife seemed to appreciate their possession. He grumbled about the expense; she grumbled about the housework. The perfectly proportioned façade, so beautiful that it took the breath, seemed to leave them as unmoved as if they lived in a square brick box. Even the furniture, which had been bought with the house, was regarded by them with as little respect as if it were cheap reproduction. When at the end of my first visit I complimented Vinson on the spaciousness and proportions of the dining room he replied:

  “A house is only the space between four walls. What does it matter if they are far apart or close together, or what they are made of? You’re still in a cage.” His wife was carrying the plates into the kitchen at the time and didn’t hear him. He spoke so low that I scarcely heard him myself. I am not even sure now that I was meant to hear.

  Marriage is both the most public and the most secret of institutions, its miseries as irritatingly insistent as a hacking cough, its private malaise less easily diagnosed. And nothing is so destructive as unhappiness to social life. No one wants to sit in embarrassed silence while his host and hostess demonstrate their mutual incompatibility and dislike. She could, it seemed, hardly open her mouth without annoying him. No opinion she expressed was worth listening to. Her small domestic chat—which was, after all, all she had—invariably provoked him by its banality so that he would put down his knife and fork with a look of patient resigned boredom as soon as, with a nervous preparatory glance at him, she would steel herself to speak. If she had been an animal, cringing away with that histrionic, essentially false look of piteous entreaty, I can see that the temptation to kick would be irresistible. And, verbally, Vinson kicked.

  Not surprisingly they had few friends. Looking back it would probably be more true to say that they had no real friends. The only colleague of his who visited from the school, apart from myself, was Vera Pelling, the junior science teacher, and she, poor girl, was such an unattractive bore that there weren’t many alternatives open to her. Vera Pelling is the living refutation of that theory so beloved, I understand, of beauty and fashion journalists in women’s magazines that any woman if she takes the trouble can make something of her appearance. Nothing could be done about Vera’s pig-like eyes and non-existent chin, and, reasonably enough, she didn’t try. I am sorry if I sound harsh. She wasn’t a bad sort. And if she thought that making a fourth with me at an occasional free supper with the Vinsons was better than eating alone in her furnished flat I suppose she had her reasons, as I had mine. I never remember having visited the Vinsons without Vera although Emily came to my flat on three occasions, with Harold’s approval, to sit for her portrait. It wasn’t a success. The result looked like a pastiche of an early Stanley Spencer. Whatever it was I was trying to capture, that sense of a secret life conveyed in the rare grey-green flash of those remarkable eyes, I didn’t succeed. When Vinson saw the portrait he said:

  “You were prudent, my boy, to opt for teaching as a livelihood. Although, looking at this effort, I would say that the choice was hardly voluntary.” For once I was tempted to agree with him.

  Vera Pelling and I became oddly obsessed with the Vinsons. Walking home after one of their supper parties we would mull over the traumas of the evening like an old married couple perennially discussing the inadequacies of a couple of relatives whom we actively disliked but couldn’t bear not to see. Vera was a tolerable mimic and would imitate Vinson’s desiccated tones.

  “My dear, I think that you recounted that not very interesting domestic drama last time we had supper together.”

  “And what, my dear, have you been doing with yourself today? What fascinating conversation did you have with the estimable Mrs. Wilcox while you cleaned the drawing room together?”

  Really, confided Vera, tucking her arm through mine, it had become so embarrassing that it was almost enough to put her off visiting them. But not quite enough apparently. Which was why she, too, was at the Vinsons’ on the night when it happened.

  On the evening of the crime—the phrase has a stereotyped but dramatic ring which isn’t inappropriate to what, look at it as you will, was no ordinary villainy—Vera and I were due at the school at 7 p.m. to help with the dress rehearsal of the school play. I was responsible for the painted backcloth and some of the props, and Vera for the make-up. It was an awkward time, too early for a proper meal beforehand and too late to make it sensible to stay on at school without some thought of supper, and when Emily Vinson issued through her husband an invitation to both Vera and me to have coffee and sandwiches at six o’clock it seemed sensible to accept. Admittedly, Vinson made it plain that the idea was his wife’s. He seemed mildly surprised that she should wish to entertain us so briefly—insist on entertaining us was the expression he used. Vinson himself wasn’t involved with the play. He never grudged spending his private time to give extra tuition in his own subject but made it a matter of rigid policy never to become involved in what he described as extramural divertissements appealing only to the regressed adolescent. He was, however, a keen chess player and on Wednesday evenings spent the three hours from nine until midnight at the local chess club, of which he was secretary. He was a man of meticulous habit and any school activity on a Wednesday evening would, in any case, have had to manage without him.

  Every detail, every word spoken at that brief and unremarkable meal—dry ham sandwiches cut too thick and synthetic coffee—was recounted by Vera and me at the Crown Court so that it has always intrigued me that I can no longer visualise the scene. I know exactly what happened, of course. I can recall every word. It’s just that I can no longer shut my eyes and see the supper table, the four of us seated there, imprinted in colours on the mind’s eye. Vera and I said at the trial that both Vinsons seemed more than usually ill at ease, that Harold, in particular, gave us the impression that he wished we weren’t there. But that could have been hindsight.

  The vital incident, if you can call it that, happened towards the end of the meal. It was so very ordinary at the time, so crucial in retrospect. Emily Vinson, as if uneasily aware of her duties as hostess and of the unaccountable silenc
e which had fallen on the table, made a palpable effort. Looking up with a nervous glance at her husband she said:

  “Two such very nice and polite workmen came this morning—” Vinson touched his lips with his paper serviette then crumpled it convulsively. His voice was unusually sharp as he broke in:

  “Emily my dear, do you think you could spare us the details of your domestic routine this evening? I’ve had a particularly tiring day. And I am trying to concentrate my mind on this evening’s game.” And that was all.

  The dress rehearsal was over by about nine o’clock, as planned, and I told Vera that I had left a library book at the Vinsons’ and was anxious to pick it up on the way home. She made no objection. She gave the impression, poor girl, that she was never particularly anxious to get home. It was only a quarter of an hour’s brisk walk to the house and, when we arrived, we saw at once that something was wrong. There were two cars, one with a blue light on the roof, and an ambulance parked unobtrusively but unmistakably at the side of the house. Vera and I glanced briefly at each other then ran to the front door. It was shut. Without ringing we dashed round to the side. The back door, leading to the kitchen quarters, was open. I had an immediate impression that the house was peopled with large men; two of them were in uniform. There was, I remember, a policewoman bending over the prone figure of Emily Vinson. And their cleaning woman, Mrs. Wilcox, was there too. I heard Vera explaining to a plain-clothes policeman, obviously the senior man present, that we were friends of the Vinsons, that we had been there to supper only that evening. “What’s happened?” she kept asking. “What’s happened?” Before the police could answer, Mrs. Wilcox was spitting it all out, eyes bright with self-important outrage and excitement. I sensed that the police wanted to get rid of her, but she wasn’t so easily dislodged. And, after all, she had been first on the scene. She knew it all. I heard it in a series of disjointed sentences: