There Lies Your Love

by Jennie Melville

  Burgen stood by his desk tugging at the drawer and muttering about Mary Lou Pallas, and this time of course she knew what would fall from the drawer. His newspaper cuttings.

  ‘Oh, Burgen!’ she cried, ‘you’ve kept them.’

  ‘I never destroyed them. I only pretended I had, to satisfy you. Some of them are new, of course, I’ve kept up to date.’

  ‘Yes, I notice that. You have so many more …’

  ‘Mary Lou Pallas told me this story about this girl she knew and this story certainly sounds like her, grey skirt and sprigged blue blouse and all,’ repeated Burgen.

  Which was the true conversation? Which could she trust?

  You know your memory is unreliable, she told herself. Now it was a sprigged blouse, the flowers little sprays set upon a paler ground. Had she herself introduced the phrase about the blue sprigged blouse? She groaned. A nerve throbbed in her temple and her head began to ache.

  The clock on the kitchen wall struck the hour. Seven o’clock. One hour gone. One hour since her brother had called her into the living-room.

  Next door, where two members of the mathematics department, Laurence Marks and Ben Cox, shared a house, the usual evening chaos was well on the way. The peak of upheaval and mess was usually arrived at with the production of the evening meal. Even steak and salad could produce a smell of burning, cries and anger and pain, and the crash of broken china, and when Laurence went on one of his cooking jags food was usually eaten in exhausted silence round about ten-thirty with the whole house smelling of garlic. Haute cuisine to Laurence invariably meant garlic. And indigestion the next day for both Laurence and Ben Cox, followed by anger and her notice from their cleaning woman Mrs. Shanks when she saw the washing up. It was usually round about eating time that both men were apt to mutter about finding a wife and being looked after, but in practice both were happy as they were and would have resented a woman in the house.

  Tonight Laurence had left a tap running and flooded the kitchen, but no other crisis had come on and they were ready to eat by seven.

  ‘Too much salt in the potatoes.’

  ‘Take some butter.’

  ‘Pass the pepper.’

  Both men always ate with books propped up in front of them. Most of their days were passed with books to mark, books to collect, books to study, books of one sort or another, but it would be wrong to suppose that they missed anything that went on. Together they made up the biggest gossip machine in the college. It was over the supper table they exchanged their information and drew accurate conclusions from what they had observed. Tom Gilroy called them the Eagles of College Row. They kept the best discipline of anyone in the Deerham Hills College of Arts and Science. No one held hands or smoked a cigarette at the back of advanced mathematics, although it was rumoured that someone had once held a cocktail party while Burgen was placidly giving a biology lesson out front.

  Ben chewed two or three mouthfuls, turned over a page and then looked up from his meal. ‘Strange,’ he said, ‘ I thought we were eating meat tonight but I’ve got fish, there’s fish in it. It tastes fishy.’

  ‘Does it?’ Laurence leaned over and looked. ‘I think you’ve got the dog’s dinner there by mistake.’ He looked interested. ‘ What does it taste like?’

  Ben ate a mouthful more and considered. ‘Only so so,’ he said.

  ‘I shan’t buy him that stuff again then,’ said his friend as if that problem was settled. ‘ You’d better finish it though, he’ll have had your supper by now.’

  There was a moment’s pause while Ben decided whether to make an issue out of it or not. Occasions such as this sometimes provoked shattering and noisy rows between the two men, although it was not scenes like this that caused either of them to mutter that he would get married and get out. They both acknowledged in their hearts that such rows were highly enjoyable.

  Laurence looked at his friend expectantly. Ben sometimes wondered whether Laurence did these things half on purpose. It seemed inconceivable that any sane human being could confuse his dinner with the dog’s. Last week Laurence had sent Ben’s second-best suit to the jumble sale and not the cleaners. Once he had locked all the drawers in Ben’s own special desk and somehow mislaid the key.

  But tonight Ben was tired.

  ‘I’ll just have bread and cheese,’ he said, pushing away his plate.

  After they had eaten they listened to the news. They heard every item with the same detached interest, even the one which announced:

  ‘Deerham Hills police are investigating the disappearance of eighteen-year-old Arlette Grey of Abbot’s End, Deerham Hills. The girl is a student of London University. She left her home on the morning of Tuesday, June 9, and has not been seen since … She was wearing a grey pleated skirt, a blue cotton blouse, and blue cardigan … leather bag containing books … handbag …’

  ‘They must think she’s dead,’ said Laurence.

  ‘Going out tonight?’

  ‘Just my usual three miles,’ said Tom Gilroy. He took his health seriously and always walked three miles a day. If he hadn’t managed to do this before bedtime he would borrow the Carters’ dog and pace his three miles through the night. Last time he had borrowed the dog the animal had bitten him and refused to walk another step. On another occasion he had been reported to the police and had been quietly watched until they decided he was harmless. Tom Gilroy knew nothing about this nor that his face and some of his habits were thus known to Charmian Daniels.

  ‘Don’t be too late,’ said Con wearily. ‘For someone who hates the idea of getting lost you certainly take long dark walks.’

  ‘It’s not dark yet,’ said Tom.

  At the end of the road where the hill melted into Deerham Hills Woods he met Mary Lou Pallas.

  ‘Did you tell her?’ he asked at once.

  ‘Yes, I told her.’

  ‘She hasn’t said a thing.’

  ‘I told her. I said to her I’m afraid I’m pregnant,’ said Mary Lou Pallas. ‘She heard all right. I’m surprised she hasn’t told you.’

  ‘That’s so like Con,’ said Tom.

  Mary Lou Pallas continued: ‘I said of course I’m not really a nanny in any nice family, I’m living on my savings. She said “ I guessed that.” I said I am living with three students, all brothers and all scientists. It’s unconventional but that’s how I like it. And now I’m pregnant. And she said, “ So what do you want me to do?” ’

  Chapter Two

  THERE was a woman standing in the doorway of the Public Library in Deerham Hills. From where she stood she could see straight across to the Police Station. She was pretending to study a newspaper but under its cover she had watched Pratt and Charmian enter.

  ‘The statistics show that she was most likely to return home to her family under her own steam,’ said Pratt, rather glumly. ‘Next most likely to turn up in London with her boy friend, and rather unlikely to be found dead.’

  It was later on the evening of Friday the 12th of June. Pratt and Charmian Daniels were preparing to work into the night on the disappearance of Arlette Grey.

  ‘But you think she is dead?’ asked Charmian.

  ‘Yes, and I’ll tell you why. Both the men who’ve been working on the case, good experienced men, say they don’t like the feel of it.’

  ‘I’ve got their reports here.’

  ‘Johnson and Forbes. Johnson first and then Forbes when Johnson went down with mumps … at his age.

  ‘Not that I ever set much store by statistics,’ went on Pratt, ‘ but they give you something to lean on, and we leaned, until Forbes said it wouldn’t do. Forbes and your girl Grizel.’

  ‘Oh yes, she was in on it,’ said Charmian dryly. Grizel was one of her assistants. Two years ago Grizel had married a local schoolmaster. ‘Well, Grizel wouldn’t approve of leaning on statistics.’ She rather liked statistics herself. She thought that the development of criminology probably did lie in the direction of computers and filing cabinets and men working in laboratories. She
meant to continue her career in Chicago or New York if she could, when she had had enough with Deerham Hills. She was an ambitious girl and set her sights high; she didn’t intend to remain a policewoman on the Deerham Hills Force for ever. Grizel was different; she had married and made her home here. Unconsciously Charmian’s lips set in a determined line and Pratt, looking at her, didn’t know whether to sigh or be amused. He was a little uneasy these days when certain topics came up with Charmian. Marriage, for instance, or ambition, or even just poor Grizel.

  ‘I don’t know why the case didn’t come to me in the first place,’ said Charmian with slight irritation. ‘I knew of it, of course. I knew what Grizel was working on. She reported.’

  ‘You were tied up with the Drayer Street thing,’ pointed out Pratt, ‘and anyway, let’s face it, you’re not at your best with young girls at the moment.’ He was aware of having blundered. ‘ I mean there’s certain things you’re a bit out of sympathy with at the present.’

  Charmian was silent.

  ‘Anyway, it’s yours now by the look of it.’ He started to tidy up the litter on his desk.

  ‘You mean it’s mine now she’s probably dead and not with her lover in bed somewhere,’ said Charmian harshly.

  ‘Yes, and that note in your voice is exactly what I mean,’ said Pratt. ‘You wouldn’t have reacted like that a year ago. You’ve shut yourself up against a whole part of life.’ He was too much in earnest not to notice whether he was being tactful or not. ‘You used to be such an open welcoming person, Charmian.’

  ‘And now I’m closed up, unwelcoming and suspicious,’ said Charmian. ‘Do you blame me?’

  ‘I don’t blame you, but I thought you were cleverer than that.’

  ‘Clever!’

  ‘Worth more then, put it like that. I thought you were too strong a girl to let a bad experience get you down. I feel as though only a second-rate person lets himself become embittered. You fell in with a man who was a killer; it happens.’

  ‘I fell in love with him, that’s the worst of it,’ said Charmian in genuine distress. ‘It eats into me. I made a fool of myself.’

  Pratt looked at her without speaking: the corollary to her statement was ‘And everyone saw me doing it’, but neither of them needed to put this into speech.

  ‘You go on nibbling away at yourself this way, Charmian, and you’ll wake up one morning and find you’re not there.’

  ‘Just like Nan King,’ said Charmian.

  ‘Yes, there’s a puzzle there, all right,’ said Pratt, and he sighed.

  The inquest on Nan King had been adjourned until next week. The lawyer representing Jim King had intimated that there was more medical evidence to be heard and new testimony to be introduced by Alice Evans, who had looked as if she would prefer not to give it. She had gone white and looked sick.

  ‘He’s trying to fight off the suggestion that the King-Lubbock businesses are in trouble, and I think he’ll do that because Johnson thinks they are,’ said Pratt.

  Silently Charmian considered the information Pratt had casually handed to her: there were rumours circulating about Lubbock’s Stores. Pratt knew of them and also knew enough additional information to guess they were untrue, and she, Charmian, did not know and had heard nothing. A year ago this could never have happened. Because it had happened gradually she had not noticed how her sources of information were drying up and how each month she knew less and less of what was the secret life of Deerham Hills. Previously it had been Charmian who knew exactly why the headmistress of the big girls’ school on the hill left abruptly, and why the man who operated the local bus service suddenly sold the whole affair, his station, buses and service vans, at a loss and moved from the town. She had made use of a carefully worked up circle of informants, some paid, some unpaid. One of her best paid sources had been the group of old men who met to talk and gossip every day, in the park in summer, and in the library in winter. She had made a friend of Tony Foss, the boy who was the best known trouble-maker in Abbot’s End but who now, although still sometimes making trouble, also passed on to Charmian information about what was brewing. If he didn’t pass on everything and if he liked to be paid, well that was business. Charmian and Tony understood each other. Every detective worth his salt has paid informers, Charmian said.

  Suddenly she realised she hadn’t heard from Tony for three months. There was a girl missing in Abbot’s End and there was trouble at Lubbock’s and she had known nothing about it.

  ‘That’s not the way your bread is buttered,’ she muttered to herself. Aloud she said, ‘They’ve had labour troubles at Lubbock’s, haven’t they?’

  ‘They’ve had every sort of trouble. Remember someone nearly died from eating potted shrimps? And the fire last spring? But that didn’t kill Nan King!’

  ‘I must get hold of Tony Foss,’ said Charmian, half to herself. ‘Funny thing … I got to know Tony just about the time of the Marley-Morgan case and I suppose I was sympathetic to him because I was miserable myself. There was the business of the Flete girl going on then, remember? Strange how cases seem to go in pairs.’

  ‘By that, do you mean they possess a real relationship?’ said Pratt.

  ‘No. No causal connection. Put it this way: you often find one case you are working on illuminates another. I suppose your mind just opens up to possibilities you’ve never been aware of before, you become sensitised.’ She continued her thoughts aloud: ‘No, it’s more than that. Sometimes there is a curious parallelism between two cases, you couldn’t call it connection, but a strange undercover relationship.’

  Pratt started to cough. He looked up at Charmian standing by the door of his office ready to leave, and tried to digest what she said; for him it wasn’t easy. He liked a simple straightforward view of life in which cause and effect were easily traced. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘I mean, you’re reading a lot into things.’ No, Charmian doesn’t think she’s God, he recalled Grizel saying once, but she certainly thinks she has a hot line straight through to Him.

  But he had his own contribution to make from his experience as a policeman.

  ‘This is your case now, Charmian, yours and mine, but more yours just now because I have to be in court for the next week giving evidence in the Dillingham bank robbery.’

  ‘I hadn’t forgotten.’

  ‘Let me finish. It’s your case now and you can have Forbes, but not Grizel because she’s got to come with me and testify that the woman who helped break open the bank had a gun tucked in her handbag. It’s your case, but if we don’t find the girl within a few days then it won’t be your case, we shall have to get help.’

  He did not tell her that he had already made unofficial soundings and discussed the case with Chief Inspector Rupert Ascham of Scotland Yard. If it had to be Ascham then it had to be Ascham but he could have wished for the help of someone else. Ascham had visited Deerham Hills once before when he had been investigating the murderer Morgan. He had also, in a way, been investigating Charmian, who had for a time been suspended from her duties.

  If there was a man in the world Charmian disliked it was Rupert Ascham. Now it looked as if she would have to work with him. Pratt sighed and coughed. He was seeing himself ground between the upper and the lower millstones, between fierce ambitious Ascham and this new tetchy man-hating Charmian.

  And to make matters worse, Rupert Ascham was said to have an eye for women.

  ‘I’m uneasy about this girl,’ he said half to Charmian, half to himself. ‘I have a bad conscience. I didn’t take it seriously enough at first … Until Forbes said it wouldn’t do. Thank God Forbes did …’ He fumbled among his papers. ‘Here, you’d better see what really got Forbes going.’

  ‘She kept a diary and left it behind,’ said Charmian dryly.

  Pratt silently produced a paper-covered notebook.

  ‘That also has happened in similar cases,’ went on Charmian, as if he had asked a question and she was answering it.

  ‘Not a diary, no,’ said Pratt.
‘ Just notes for I suppose what you would call a case history … She was a student in sociology, you see, Forbes checked up and her professor said yes, it could be work in connection with an essay or thesis she had to present at the end of her first year.’

  He threw the book across to her.

  ‘Forbes didn’t like the sound of what he read.’

  Silently Charmian took it.

  ‘And Grizel?’

  Charmian picked up the book which slipped open easily as if it was often opened. Her eye fell on pages of closely written notes.

  She read rapidly, skipping, picking out sentences that seemed significant.

  Age? Not really known but she seems older than me. Much more experienced, anyway. Say about twenty. Says she can’t recall her birthdays if asked (she could be this sort of person. It’s unbelievable with her life. But I don’t have to worry about her being unbelievable, she is). Knows her birthday which is in August, the same as mine. (As if that mattered). This girl hates Mummy …’ This word was crossed out and money substituted. The notes continued: But she loved to spend it. Saving is immoral (N. B. I have had a Post Office Savings book since I was eight. Over eleven years of saving). Then the writing went on: Long fair hair. Very fair. Beautiful hair which she wears loose and long as if she wanted it to be unrestrained.

  Incest.

  Rape.

  ‘She seems to have picked a real canary,’ muttered Charmian, flicking over a page.

  … personal. All that fair hair.

  The yellow motor car is more than just a car to her. It is her home: the place where she really lives.

  ‘The fair hair certainly made an impression on her,’ observed Charmian. ‘She was attracted all right.’

  This girl gives the impression of coming from a strange and possibly criminal background. She seems fated, said the book in measured, didactic but also fascinated tones.