‘Repelled and attracted at the same time,’ said Charmian. ‘ Well, we all know the feeling.’
There was a scribbled note in pencil at the end. Charmian had to turn the book sideways to read it. The pencilling was very faint, but she thought she could make out the words: Is she waiting for me to die?
‘You shouldn’t let kids meddle with things they don’t understand,’ said Charmian.
‘One more thing,’ said Pratt, ‘if you go through Forbes’ notes you will find that Mrs Grey at first denied the notes were written by her daughter. Outright denial.’
‘But they are?’
‘Yes. She had to admit it, knew the handwriting. But her first reaction was downright denial.’
‘I don’t know what I make of that, if anything,’ said Charmian irritably. ‘What sort of a woman is she?’
‘Forbes likes her. Says she’s a good-looking fair-haired woman. Clever, he thinks.’
Charmian looked at the time. ‘ Forbes is a long while.’
‘You saw the remark about the yellow motor-car?’
‘I did.’
‘This afternoon a boy reported a yellow car abandoned in Mill Pond Road outside Deerham Hills.’
‘And on the strength of that comment in this fairy notebook Forbes has gone to look?’
‘Yellow isn’t so common for a car.’
‘It isn’t so uncommon either.’ She picked up a photograph. ‘So this is the girl?’
‘Arlette Grey? Yes.’ Pratt looked at the picture. It was of a schoolgirl with round plump face and dark straight hair. ‘Fairly recent. Taken just before she left school. The hair comes dark there, but in fact she has red hair.’
They both looked at the picture and the face stared up at them, sweet mouthed, gentle and rather silly.
Charmian groaned. ‘You can just see that poor little sheep getting gobbled up. But all the same, do we have to take this particular danger as real? Was there anything criminal about this girl she was studying? Is it serious? Is it real?’
‘We can’t afford not to take it seriously,’ said Pratt. ‘Arlette Grey is gone. One way and another what she wrote is relevant.’
Pratt left soon afterwards; he wanted to get out of the room before it became necessary for him to lie once again about his conversation with Ascham. Charmian returned to her own small office which she shared with Grizel and occasionally with young policewomen who were still in training. Deerham Hills was one of the stations to which they were regularly sent. Charmian herself had trained in a small Scottish town not far from her home. Only when she had got her promotion as a detective had she moved south, deliberately choosing this small police force in the Thames Valley because it offered a chance of quick promotion. She had done well. She had become a sergeant, she had her own house and a small car. But inside was an uncertainty which seemed to grow as she reached for the success she wanted. Wasn’t she harder, tougher, nastier than she had been even two years ago? Was the price of her success in her chosen profession to be that she became a thoroughly unpleasant woman? Grizel’s recipe for this was simple – marriage; but Charmian was still in check from her emotional disaster last year. Of course I didn’t love him, I know that now, she told herself, but how terrible that I didn’t know it then. So troubled, uncertain, much less worldly-wise than she appeared, Charmian was at a cross-roads in her career.
‘As I see it I have a choice before me,’ she had said bitterly to Grizel. ‘I can be a career-mad woman or I can be a happy pair of hands about the home, but at this moment I’m not being either. I’m not getting on at the job and I’m not lovable either.’ Grizel hadn’t answered at once; there were times when she feared Charmian. But always she respected a wry integrity which no one else in Deerham Hills police station had. She didn’t have it, Pratt didn’t have it. Both of us, Grizel acknowledged to herself, are doing a job, earning a living and we mean to go on doing that quietly until we retire. But Charmian isn’t thinking in terms of pay and pension rights, it’s a matter of life and death with her, she has an end in view. I don’t know quite what it is, and neither does she at the moment, but it’s there, shaping her and making her what she is.
‘I don’t think I could bear you if you were lovable,’ was how she had finally answered Charmian. ‘That’s strictly for the birdies. I’m not lovable myself, at least not very often, and I nearly always regret it.’
Charmian went to her window and looked out at what she could see of Deerham Hills on this summer evening. The sky was still a sultry grey but a light breeze had got up and the air was cooler. Over the hill it was probably raining. The rainfall was low in Deerham Hills; it seemed as though the ridge of hills to the west drew off the rain before it reached them. Across the road from the new Police Station were the new Public Library and the new Bus Station. As Charmian watched, a bus swung round the corner and out of sight.
She wondered how Arlette Grey had left Deerham Hills the day she disappeared, and exactly at what point in her day she went missing. There must have been a point at which the normal and the abnormal crossed. Charmian traced two crossing paths on the windowpane. This hot summer everything, even the window glass, was dusty. If Forbes has got anything about him as a detective at all, he will know when that point was, she thought.
The woman was still standing in the doorway of the Library. She was hanging on to her newspaper but her hands were trembling. She had moved perhaps two or three paces forward in the porch and towards the steps which led to the road and across to the Police Station.
‘She’s still there,’ said the Librarian to her assistant.
‘I can see.’
‘I don’t like it. Do you think she means any harm?’
‘Not to us at all events,’ said her junior, who had better eyesight and sharper powers of observation. ‘She’s never taken her eyes off the Police Station.’ She watched. ‘It’s not us she’s interested in.’
As they watched, the woman walked down the steps and, moving fast, as if she had at last made up her mind, crossed the road and went into the Police Station.
The telephone rang in Charmian’s room.
‘I’ve got someone for you,’ said the man on duty at the desk below. ‘Mrs Grey. Wants to talk.’
Charmian went downstairs. ‘I’m Sergeant Daniels,’ she said.
‘Yes. I know that.’ Mrs Grey closed her eyes as if the sight of Charmian was repellent to her.
‘I am investigating your daughter’s case.’
‘I guessed you would be.’
Mrs Grey sat down; the trembling which had been so noticeable on the steps of the Public Library had passed off and was replaced by a strange rigidity.
A new smell was pervading the room, which gradually became oppressive to Charmian. A strong, sharp smell, the smell of hospitals and bare rooms cleaned of the infections of the living. Uncomfortably she recognised the smell of disinfectant. The woman must have bathed in it, the way the scent invaded the room.
‘I don’t think she’s dead. Her father and that policeman think she’s dead, but I don’t.’
‘She may not be. I hope you’re right.’ Charmian was bleak.
‘The young policeman came and took a book of Arlette’s away. A book with writing in it. Kind of a work book, only it wasn’t, I saw that much. I hadn’t read this book but the policeman discussed it with me. Said it seemed to be a kind of report really, college work, about a girl. It seems strange to me, but I know Arlette was interested in that sort of thing.’
‘I have it here, if you like,’ said Charmian, producing the book.
‘No, I don’t want it. I’ve seen it. But I wanted you to know that I don’t believe this girl is real.’
Charmian was silent.
‘And I’ll tell you why I think so: it’s because of the yellow hair. Arlette was always going on about fair golden hair. When she was a little girl all the stories had to be about little girls with golden hair and if they weren’t you had to make them that.’ She leaned forward, her own dy
ed canary-coloured hair falling under the lamp-light. ‘I think it’s because I’ve always had such lovely fair hair and Arlette admired it.’
‘There’s a sort of ring of truth about the notes your daughter made about this girl,’ said Charmian. ‘I’ve read them and I think so. My boss Inspector Pratt has read them and he thinks so, too. We’re not without experience in these things, Mrs Grey. The notes feel real …’ To herself she added the thought that golden hair seemed to obsess them both, mother and daughter. ‘Maybe she just found someone with fair hair that interested her.’
‘I’m not saying there isn’t a girl, but it won’t be quite like Arlette’s got it written down. I know my Arlette, she’s imaginative.’ Her hands were trembling again.
‘Arlette,’ said Charmian thoughtfully. ‘Why did you call her Arlette? French, isn’t it?’
‘I’ve always had a feeling about France. People often say I could be taken for French. I wanted my daughter to feel French.’
‘You can’t really make over a girl like that,’ muttered Charmian; she was appalled by Mrs Grey.
‘And yet I don’t know. I had a certain success. Arlette speaks French beautifully. She could pass for French.’
‘Why did you really come, late at night, to tell me this?’ asked Charmian gently. ‘If I believed you we’ll be taking a step back, not forward, won’t we?’
‘The truth can’t ever be backward,’ cried Mrs Grey.
There was silence.
‘I don’t want you to go worrying about a girl who may be innocent,’ she went on.
‘You want your daughter found?’
‘Yes, of course I want my daughter found. I believe she will be found.’ She was starting to tremble quite violently now. ‘I don’t want her secrets pried into. She has a right to her own life.’
Charmian was experienced enough not to expect consistency or even sense from someone connected with a case but there was something extra about Mrs Grey. Originality, crazy if you like, but there. A true-sounding note, springing not perhaps from honesty, but intelligence. She took a deep breath.
‘Of course you’re right there. I don’t know what we’re arguing about, Mrs Grey.’
‘I mean I don’t want any scandal.’
‘Why should there be any scandal? What are you suggesting?’ Charmian was interested, but on the whole not puzzled. She had conducted too many of these interviews by now to be puzzled. Sooner or later in any case which concerned adolescents, and especially girls, the parents turned up with a hysterical denial that there had ever been a boy of any sort in their daughter’s life, and from then on, even if there had been any doubt in your mind before, you knew that there had been, and that if you waited a little longer the parents would tell you his name. The parents always pretended to be surprised, but very very rarely really were. Charmian sometimes thought there was a vast Nelsonian conspiracy on the part of parents to pretend that what you didn’t see didn’t exist. The parents who truly didn’t know anything were usually well below average intelligence, and were usually in trouble themselves. What made Mrs Grey different was that she was alone, without her husband. In Charmian’s experience a couple usually came together for these scenes; they may not have been on speaking terms for years but for this occasion they were united, more than they might have been perhaps if their child was being married.
Mrs Grey was different also in that what she was offering was not evasion but a genuine piece of observed truth: that you couldn’t trust her daughter’s imagination. Her motives in offering this piece of mediatised truth did not fit into any pattern, but never mind that. Charmian had got beyond expecting to understand or even comprehend the motives of people under pressure. Perhaps when you came down to it what moved Mrs Grey was simply a desire to come down to the Police Station and talk about her daughter.
‘She might be real, this girl, and she might mean real danger for your daughter,’ said Charmian uneasily. ‘ She just might.’ She was thinking of the abandoned yellow car.
‘You’re looking in the wrong direction,’ cried Mrs Grey. ‘ I tell you you are, you hard-faced bitch.’
—So that was what you really came down here for, thought Charmian, because you are angry, and in pain, and hate the world and women in particular, and want to make some demonstration about it. You and me both, she added to herself.
All the same her cheek burned as if Mrs Grey had struck her. She stood up.
‘I’ll get a car to take you home,’ she said.
‘I can go by bus. It’s not really late,’ said Mrs Grey sullenly, turning her head towards the window and staring vaguely at the bus station. She was trembling in little starts.
‘You don’t look fit to.’
‘I was fit to come and I’m fit to go. Besides, there’s my husband. He went to bed early. He doesn’t know I’m here.’ She gave a smile.
She’s done this before, thought Charmian. Gone trotting off on her secret life. What sort of household is it?
The smell of disinfectant remained in the room after her. Forbes sniffed at it as he came in.
‘Strange smell. Carbolic. You sick or something?’
Charmian shook her head. ‘No. It was Mrs Grey. You just missed her.’
‘What’s she disinfected against?’
Charmian shrugged. ‘Me. Or the world. Or her own troubles. Who can tell?’
‘Mad.’
‘No, it’s in character deep down there somewhere.’
‘What did she want?’
‘To nag me, I think. She had something to say though: not to look for the girl with fair hair. What about the car?’
Forbes looked put out. ‘It wasn’t there. Gone. Someone had moved it.’
‘Perhaps it never had been there.’
They stared at each other. Charmian was aware of feeling unexpected disappointment. So she had believed in the girl and the car.
Charmian went home that night and fell into an exhausted sleep in which she dreamt of a blue notebook endlessly opening and shutting in front of her face, tantalising and irritating her. She buried her face in the pillows to hide from the smell of disinfectant which came with it.
‘Frightened, frightened,’ she muttered to herself. And then, as she came more fully awake, ‘What am I frightened of?’
‘There’s no fear like an old fear,’ replied the joker who lived deep inside her.
It was a significant phrase and at once relieved her. She sat up in bed and faced her fear: she was frightened of herself as a woman.
‘But at least I don’t need to use disinfectant,’ she thought with amusement. ‘My life doesn’t smell that badly to me.’
She lay back on her pillows and closed her eyes again.
Mrs Grey and Nan King were on a see-saw; as one went up the other went down.
Cases often went in pairs. She had said so herself. In her sleep her mind linked the two affairs without trying to analyse their relationship.
Charmian moved and fidgeted restlessly throughout the night, her mind still obsessed with this case in which she must succeed. The feeling of being frightened returned to her again and identified itself this time with the fear of failure.
While Charmian slept and dreamed, Con lay wakeful. Her bed was narrow and austere and not shared with Tom. He lay the other side of the room, deep in sleep. Every so often his legs gave a little jerk. After some time of this Con got up and locked his blankets firmly round him. As always, this quietened him.
Con’s action was entirely automatic, habitual. She knew all about quietening Tom. The person she could not quieten was herself.
She moved to a chair by her dressing-table and lit a cigarette. Her face looked haggard and staring in the dim light. She could just see her reflection in the mirror and did not fancy what she saw.
‘Not young; not beautiful; not plump and fair,’ she said to her own face. Her image grimaced and winced. She had never felt less certain of her own identity. Perhaps as she sat there everything was seeping away that had
made her Con.
‘Old, cunning, plain Con.’ She turned her back on the looking glass. ‘ Nothing left now but a face in a mirror.’
‘I may not be a clever woman, Tom, but I observe. And I feel. Oh yes, I feel.’ What she felt very strongly was that Mary Lou Pallas was up to something. She recalled that figure, standing by her desk, large blue eyes fixed on hers, and telling her story. But all the time she had the feeling that she, Con, was the person at whom all this story-telling was aimed. She had a part in a play but no one had told her the plot.
She connected this incident with the bundle she had found in the basement. And at the memory of that pathetic little bundle she made her decision.
In his bed Tom at last got his feet free and started to jerk.
‘Oh damn you, Tom, keep quiet,’ said Con, still smoking. Then she turned to face him wryly.
‘I have a problem, Tom, and you’re it. And Mary Lou Pallas (pregnant or not). And, I suppose, Arlette Grey is my problem now.’
But she had made her decision about what to do in the morning and she felt better and could sleep.
This time she did not go back to her own bed but crawled in beside Tom, whose head looked shaggy and dark in the shadows, and placed her arm protectively, but also possessively, over him. Titania with her Ass’s Head.
‘Baby,’ said Tom, still asleep. ‘Baby,’ in a sad little voice as if suddenly aware of what it was all about.
Next morning, early, while she was sitting over a cup of strong black coffee and trying to throw off the effects of her dreamy restless sleep, Charmian heard her telephone ring. She stretched out for it, keeping her seat at the table. The call was from Deerham Hills Police Station.
‘Daniels? Something for you. Some woman up at Laurel Rise. Says she’s found a bag and some books in her basement. She’s heard the news bulletins and thinks they could belong to Arlette Grey. I’ll give you the number and the name …’
—Some silly hysterical woman, thought Charmian. But she was wrong. Con was never silly.
Early on that Saturday, June 13, a small box was delivered through the post to Mrs Grey, to whom it was addressed. It was before her breakfast; she was just up, but she opened it at once. When the lid was off some soft rusty stuff slithered gently out and fluttered down on to her knees.
There Lies Your Love Page 4