There Lies Your Love

by Jennie Melville

  It was hair. Red hair. At first glance it looked as though there was a lot of hair, but when it was gathered together what appeared was a thickish bunch of short hair, each hair about three inches long, just as if a long fringe had been cut off.

  Nor could there be much doubt whose hair it was. The colour exactly toned with hair on John Grey’s head.

  ‘It’s Arlette’s hair,’ screamed Jane Grey, throwing the box away from her in a convulsive movement.

  Her husband picked up the box and the piece of brown paper in which it had been wrapped. The address had been typed on a square of white paper which had then been pasted on the parcel. Part of this label had been torn off on its journey so that the parcel had been delayed. Posted on Wednesday in London, it had not been delivered until Saturday morning.

  ‘Someone wants to torture me,’ moaned his wife.

  With a hand that trembled, Arlette’s father picked up the telephone to tell the police. The box fell to the floor where the cat sniffed at it and then started to scratch at it. Angrily John Grey snatched it away.

  The news reached Charmian just as she set off to Laurel Rise.

  The news was also passed on to Chief Inspector Rupert Ascham in London, together with the information about the finding of the belongings which might belong to Arlette Grey. Ascham studied his finger-nails and brushed his hair. One way and another, he was pleased with life.

  ‘Hair,’ he said. ‘Nothing like a good erotic symbol to stir the imagination.’

  Chapter Three

  BY this time on the Saturday morning, there were two dead and unburied women in Deerham Hills. One, Nan King, was laid out formally in a coffin, embalmed and neat, looking not quite as she had done in life, but very near it. She would be buried when the due processes of law allowed. She was known about and admitted. The second woman, girl really, was rolled up in an old blanket and hidden under a wooden floor, unadmitted and, so far, undiscovered. She looked very unlike what she had looked in life.

  Con stood by the front window, smoking a cigarette, and keeping an eye open for the arrival of the police.

  ‘So I have a very strong feeling this story Mary Lou Pallas was telling me was a phoney,’ she was saying to Tom. He was sitting at the table eating cornflakes.

  ‘And of course she knew that if I thought she really was pregnant I’d have had her out of the College in double quick time. So why tell me?’

  ‘You are ruthless, Con.’

  ‘Yes, so I am.’ She turned from the window to face Tom. ‘ What you’ve always got to remember about Mary Lou Pallas is that she’s a double-barrelled little twister. Never mind what her background is and whether she’s got good reason for it all, she’s very thoroughly what it’s made her … Eat up your breakfast.’

  ‘I don’t want it,’ said Tom, pushing his plate away. ‘I don’t seem hungry.’

  ‘Go on, take it, that’s cream you’ve got there. Was that the telephone?’

  ‘I’ll get it,’ said Tom, rising rapidly to his feet.

  ‘No, it wasn’t the telephone,’ observed Con cruelly. ‘Not expecting a call from Mary Lou Pallas, are you?’

  ‘No,’ said Tom wretchedly.

  ‘May I believe you!’ exclaimed Con.

  Tom did not answer.

  ‘And what’s more I wouldn’t put it past you to know what Miss Pallas is doing. For a little boy that hates to be lost, you sometimes show signs of longing to be even loster.’

  ‘There’s nothing,’ said Tom.

  Con put out her cigarette and walked over and poured out coffee and took the cup to Tom. ‘Here, drink this. “You seem to need more.’

  ‘What?’ Tom looked white. Perhaps he hadn’t slept well. Perhaps Bottom had been dreaming, as well as Titania.

  ‘Drink up that coffee first.’

  ‘Oh, Con.’

  ‘I have to be kind to be cruel.’

  Tom sipped his coffee, looking at his wife’s face and thinking he was so tired he would like to shut his ears to everything, creep back to bed, put a pillow over his face, and go to sleep. But Con would come in, take off the pillow and shake him.

  ‘I’m keeping an open mind, you know. I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt. It may be Burgen she’s after. Or it may be Burgen too.’

  ‘What horrible thoughts you have,’ said Tom, giving a genuine shudder. ‘And so early in the morning.’ He had just caught sight of the clock – nine o’clock. No wonder he felt so tired. ‘ I think I’ll just go back to bed.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But why not? I always sleep late on Saturday. I mean it’s quite normal for me not to get up.’

  ‘Tom, you listen. In our basement, done up in a bundle, put among our newspapers, I found a girl’s handbag and books and skirt and some other things.’

  Tom looked at her wildly as if he didn’t grasp what she was saying.

  ‘Do you understand what I’m telling you? These things had the initials A.G. on them.’

  ‘No, you didn’t mention that,’ said Tom. He gulped.

  ‘I think they belong to Arlette Grey the girl who is missing. Tom, Tom,’ she said urgently, ‘take it in, will you? We have in our basement clothes belonging to the girl who is missing.’

  ‘How did they get there?’

  ‘I don’t know. But who’s the outsider around here? Mary Lou Pallas. I’ve told the police.’

  Tom was bending over the table, head hanging, white and faint.

  Con stopped talking and looked at him. – So he does love her, was what she thought. I’ll kill that little yellow-haired girl if she’s got him into bad trouble. Kill her and scalp her and skin her.

  In spite of her seriousness she could not help reflecting, with amusement, that scalping was a highly technical operation even for a Red Indian and might present serious difficulties to Con. She tapped her teeth as she did when thoughtful.

  She lit another cigarette and looked towards the window.

  ‘Brace up, Tom,’ she said, putting her hand on his shoulder. ‘The police are here.’

  She watched Charmian’s little car draw up outside the house and the girl herself get out. ‘Thinner than she used to be,’ thought Con, who knew Charmian by sight. ‘ But with those bones she’ll never be really slight.’

  Laurel Rise had looked calm and pleasant in the early sun as Charmian had driven up to it. She knew the road, as she knew most roads in Deerham Hills, by its reputation and its place on the map that hung in her room, but this was the first time she had visited it. As she drove, she appraised it. A pretty, neat, and well-cared-for road. The people who lived here were not rich but they knew how to get the best out of their money. They didn’t buy luxuries, but good solid things that would last. No one had smart garden furniture, but everyone had well made lawn-mowers. Hardly any of the wives had help with their housework (it wasn’t too easy to hire in Deerham Hills anyway), but their kitchens were bursting with automation in glossy white boxes which cooked, washed dishes and laundered clothes. Only the house inhabited by Laurence Marks and Ben Cox was without these treasures since the day Laurence had flooded the kitchen and short-circuited all the electricity in four houses by overloading his clothes washing-machine. Charmian could assess all this accurately and even work out that the Cox-Marks household was different, by the fourteen pairs of socks dripping on the line in the garden and the two motor bikes resting against the kerb. She drove her car slowly up the road, passing the house where she had to call. She could see that this too had a cosy well-kept look, but had been painted dark green as if the owners cared more for serviceability than beauty. Con would have admitted this judgement as a very fair comment on her. Charmian noticed that the house next door was nicely done up in charming blue and white which not only was pretty in itself but harmonised with its green neighbour and toned down the effect of the house on the other side, which looked as though a tornado had hit it. This small house was lived in, as Charmian started to remember, by a large family called Carter. Emily Carter was one of the
women on the fringes of Charmian’s life, hardly a friend, never becoming prominent, but a noticeable figure all the same. As Charmian turned to drive back she saw a large black cat streak across the Carters’ garden carrying what looked like a chicken and followed by what looked like Emily. She passed the blue and white house where Burgen was standing at a window, staring out, and stopped outside the Gilroys’.

  Before leaving the car she consulted her notes. Constance and Tom Gilroy. Strange she had so little information about them. They must be a quiet couple. Didn’t people say that Tom Gilroy was writing a book and would be famous when it was finished? That should make him sufficiently remarkable in Deerham Hills, reflected Charmian, where few people read books, let alone wrote them. Perhaps it was the best way round, though, terrible to live in a society where everyone wrote books and there was no one left to read them.

  She sat back for a moment and looked at the house. It didn’t look the sort of house where the possessions of a missing girl would turn up. But you could never predict anything. What sequence of events had led to the placing of the articles in this house and their finding by Mrs Gilroy? Had they been taken by force from the girl who owned them? Had she shed them freely? Or in fear? And who had carried them to Laurel Rise? And for that matter, why? These were questions she had to ask herself. Was it possible that all these actions had been performed by the girl Arlette Grey herself? Surely in many ways she was the most likely person? Meditating on the implications of this thought, Charmian slowly got out of the car and went towards the house.

  ‘Here she comes,’ said Con. ‘Now get up and open the door and act as if you made the decisions around here.’

  ‘She’s got a nice face,’ said Tom nervously. ‘Calm.’

  ‘She’s as nervous as a cat.’

  But she was wrong. Charmian, standing on the doorstep, was not nervous, but suddenly swept with a strong excitement. Only once before had this feeling come to her at the beginning of a case and then it had been one which had developed into her first big success. She felt this same sensation again, this mixture of alertness and absorption and energy, almost arriving at gaiety. Yet she could not say she was happy in this state; happiness hardly came into it, she was just in another dimension.

  It had been Tom who had had the happy idea of placing an enormously blown-up photograph of his closest colleagues at college on the wall facing the door, and this was the first thing Charmian saw as she stepped into the house.

  ‘Oh, that’s been there since our Christmas party. It’s just a joke,’ said Tom nervously. ‘It’s just stayed there, I don’t know why.’

  ‘It’s stuck to the wall, that’s why,’ said Con, appearing behind him. ‘You can’t move it.’

  ‘I’d better see these things you’ve found. It was you that telephoned?’ Charmian faced Con.

  Con nodded. ‘I’ll get them for you.’

  Charmian stopped her. ‘No, let me see them where they were found … You haven’t moved them?’

  ‘I did move them. And put them back afterwards as they were.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have touched them.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have found them. But as I did, I moved them.’

  From across the hall, from the house on the other side, the one painted blue and white, came a tremendous burst of music.

  ‘Oh dear, Burgen’s at it. So early in the day too,’ said Con.

  ‘He must have seen you come in,’ said Tom uneasily.

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ Charmian looked surprised.

  ‘He’d be mad with curiosity,’ said Tom. ‘ We think this is his way of expressing frustration.’

  ‘Well, bang on the wall or something. Get him to shut up.’

  Con and Tom exchanged glances, well aware that it was easier said than done to shut up Burgen. Shut him up one way and he burst out another, as Doris well knew.

  ‘He’ll stop quite suddenly, you’ll find,’ said Con. Even as she spoke the music died away. It was true that it was at once replaced by the sound of a recorder but this could be ignored.

  ‘I’ll go downstairs and see these things,’ said Charmian. She followed Con down the small carpeted stairs. There were only a few steps. It hardly counted as a basement. ‘ You keep it clean down here.’

  ‘Oh, you have to,’ Con led the way across the room. ‘ You can’t live on a heap of dirt.’

  ‘A lot of people do,’ said Charmian. Con gave her a startled glance but did not answer.

  ‘Here you are.’ She moved the top newspapers and revealed the odd little bundle. It seemed to have dwindled in significance somehow since she had looked at it first. Now it just looked pathetic.

  Charmian examined the various objects carefully. There was a small leather handbag, a satchel heavy with books and a grey skirt, well worn and crumpled with a torn waist-band. She opened the case and took out the books. First a thick volume on sociology, then a sturdily bound book of essays on anthropology, and then a slighter book on the history of social legislation in England in the nineteenth century.

  ‘Heavy to carry around,’ said Charmian, dusting her hands. Although everything in the room was tidy, the books themselves were dusty. She was talking to herself and did not expect a reply.

  ‘That’s why they were dumped here,’ said Con. ‘ Heavy to carry about and difficult to destroy.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Charmian was non-committal.

  Tom came over slowly and examined the books, but without laying a finger on them. ‘Some people can’t destroy books,’ he said.

  ‘Can’t they?’ said Charmian: she only seemed to meet the sort that could destroy anything. ‘They look like things that could belong to Arlette Grey. I’ll have to take them with me.’

  She wrapped them carefully in one of the old newspapers.

  ‘In some ways it’s probably harder to destroy a book than a person,’ said Tom, still absorbed in working out his own thoughts.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever tried to destroy a person,’ observed Charmian drily.

  Tom was silent.

  ‘Have you any idea how these things could have got here, Mrs Gilroy?’ asked Charmian. She saw that the room had a door which led out to the downward slope of the garden, and tried it. The door opened easily. ‘Anyone could have got in. This ever locked?’

  ‘Sometimes. If I remember. I keep the door from here into the house locked,’ explained Con carefully. ‘As a rule.’

  ‘You any ideas, Mr Gilroy?’

  ‘I don’t believe they belong to Arlette Grey.’

  ‘I did think of just rolling them up and doing nothing about it,’ admitted Con. ‘I don’t know why I didn’t. I seriously thought of it.’

  ‘When did you find, them exactly, Mrs Gilroy? You telephoned us this morning.’

  ‘Late last night.’ Con took a quick look at Tom. ‘While you were out.’

  ‘Any idea how long they could have been in your basement?’

  Con shook her head without speaking. ‘I don’t look round here often. But, of course I was bound to find them in the end.’

  Charmian considered; they both appeared to be extremely frank and co-operative. Nevertheless, both were in a good position to have placed the bundle where it was. She looked at them speculatively: both appeared perplexed and anxious, both seemed truthful and talkative.

  ‘Plenty of people around here all the time, I suppose?’ she said.

  ‘Oh, all the time.’

  ‘What about the neighbours?’

  ‘They could get in, I imagine,’ said Con. ‘Yes, I don’t see why not. Of course, they aren’t the sort that come poking around. They know everything, though.’

  Charmian at once registered that she did not really like her neighbours.

  ‘I’ll see them,’ promised Charmian. ‘What about the one next door with the music and the frustrations?’

  ‘Oh that was just a joke,’ said Tom.

  Con gave him a bleak look.

  ‘Burgen?’ repeated Charmian
thoughtfully. ‘ I seem to know that name.’

  ‘Burgen is a little self-conscious,’ said Tom. ‘I mean he does act as if he’s worried someone may have heard of him or may be noticing him.’

  ‘Sergeant Daniels is thinking of something less poetic,’ said Con sourly.

  Tom looked surprised. But he made an excuse to linger as they turned to go back upstairs.

  ‘Can I talk to you alone?’ he whispered. ‘Without my wife?’

  ‘Now will do,’ said Charmian. ‘To make a start.’ She stared at him.

  ‘My wife is a strong-minded, clever woman,’ said Tom speaking quickly, his eyes on the stairs in case Con reappeared. ‘She makes up her mind about things. I mean, she gets a picture of things and how they are and she doesn’t like it altered. Now she’s made up her mind about these bags and books. She says someone left them here. Hid them on us. That’s how she sees it. But I think it’s quite likely she put them here herself and forgot. She’s always up to something. She was collecting old things for the Students’ Charity Drive. Well, it’s her job. That’s how they got here, I’m sure.’

  ‘She’s not self-conscious, I take it,’ said Charmian.

  ‘Eh?’ said Tom, his eyes on the stairs.

  ‘Are you coming?’ called Con from above.

  ‘Don’t believe what she says,’ said Tom in a low, urgent whisper to Charmian as he hurried up the stairs ahead of her. Then he turned and said, ‘ I know what you mean by that crack about self-conscious. Con’s as sensitive as anyone else.’

  Within a few minutes Con, having sent Tom away (she didn’t bother to whisper or make a secret thing of it, Charmian observed), was saying: ‘There is a girl I want to tell you about. She’s called Mary Lou Pallas. I think she may have left the bundle here. I’m not saying there’s anything criminal about it, although it’s weird if she did it, but she’s a weird girl.’ Con swallowed. ‘How can I explain it? When she’s with you then you hardly notice, you’re carried along, but when she’s gone you think “ There was something wrong about that, something not quite right. What was it?”’ Con stared at Charmian. ‘Have I made you understand? Do you know the sort of person?’