‘I do,’ said Pratt, without placing undue emphasis on any word. ‘There is, and we’ll find it. She’s missing and some of her clothes have been found. You heard about the box of hair sent to the mother?’
‘The connection could be through the girl Arlette Grey wrote up,’ said Charmian. ‘The Gilroys seem to know a girl who fits her description.’
‘Another screaming canary then,’ said Pratt bitterly. ‘How I hate having to deal with hysterical women.’
‘We don’t know that’s how it is.’
‘We do know. We know here and now,’ said Pratt. ‘ It bears every sign of it.’ He ticked points off on his fingers. ‘ One: the girl in the notes Arlette Grey made is clearly a neurotic, may be a liar and is probably a criminal. Two, she may have nothing to do with Arlette’s disappearance and if so the Grey girl has got herself into some other trouble, and ten to one she’s a canary.’
‘But hysterics like this girl sounds don’t usually kill,’ said Charmian. ‘ They threaten, act up, make a nuisance of themselves, but they don’t kill.’
Pratt shrugged. ‘That’s not to say it couldn’t happen.’
But Charmian was still thinking aloud: ‘Mrs Grey came all the way down here last night to tell me her daughter was imaginative.’
‘Yes, I got the impression she was quite enjoying the whole business.’ Pratt stood up and walked to the window and looked out as if he was expecting someone. ‘But she pushed the girl out of the nest somehow.’
Charmian was silent.
‘Mothers do, you know,’ said Pratt, almost tauntingly. He was childless himself.
‘You all right?’ asked Charmian, who was surprised at him this morning. They were surprising each other.
‘Did you know Nan King had a child?’
‘No. No, I didn’t know that.’
‘She had. A daughter. We never saw her, of course. Neither did Nan.’
‘Was she …?’ began Charmian.
‘No. Quite legitimate, quite respectable, the child of an earlier marriage which Nan preferred to forget. She forgot it for twenty-two years. Then this year the girl turned up.’
‘You’re not suggesting any connection,’ began Charmian.
‘Oh no, no connection with this missing girl. But it throws a little light on Nan, doesn’t it? And on people?’
‘You’re too wild for me,’ said Charmian.
‘That’s my girl,’ said Pratt. ‘Now you get out.’ There was the sound of a car stopping in the street below. Perhaps this was why he hurried her out. If he had had anything he wished to tell her, then he seemed to have changed his mind.
Charmian carried the box containing the skirt and the bags and books into her own room. The first thing to be done, before even laboratory tests were taken, was to get the possessions firmly identified by the parents.
Grizel, Charmian’s junior and subordinate, was sitting at her untidy desk in the corner of the room. She looked up as Charmian came in, waved and went back to her work. She was humming softly under her breath and she looked plump and pretty. Grizel would never make an ideal policewoman but she was efficient in her way, easy to work with, and a great success with dogs and small children.
Charmian put the box down on her table and lifted the receiver to telephone Mrs Grey. She looked at her watch as she did so: nine thirty.
‘Just phoning Mrs Grey,’ she explained. ‘ We’ve got some things that look like her girl’s. I want them identified.’
She could hear the telephone ringing and ringing, but there was no reply.
‘Strange.’ She replaced the telephone. Somehow she had imagined the parents of the missing girl sitting at home and waiting to be called.
Grizel looked up. ‘ Do you think so? Nothing that woman does could be called strange.’
‘No?’
‘Ask Abbot’s End what they think.’
‘How do you know so much about Mrs Grey?’
‘While you were enjoying your long winter of sleep I was keeping my eyes open,’ said Grizel, glad she could make that sort of joke again. ‘ In the first six months she lived in Abbot’s End she had every washing machine salesman in the place up there to demonstrate machines to see which boiled best. She never bought anything. She had the Sanitary Inspector up there twice to look at the drains and she had the back rooms fumigated. The house was never empty.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. And she’s asked both her neighbours not to put their dustbins where she can see them.’
‘Hm,’ said Charmian thoughtfully. Had there been anyone in the Greys’ house? Why did she have the impression there might have been? And if so, why didn’t they answer her call? ‘I must get in touch with Tony Foss again,’ she said. Tony Foss might be the best known juvenile delinquent in Deerham Hills, he might be known as the Al Capone of Abbot’s End, but to Charmian he represented an indispensable source of information. Besides, she quite liked him.
Grizel finished what she was typing and leaned back. She looked thoughtfully at the cigarettes on the desk in front of her and then decided not to light one.
‘They’ve had a Peeping Tom up at Abbot’s End,’ she said. ‘Up there they blame Tony Foss. But I don’t think it’s Tony Foss myself. Do you?’
‘I do not. What could there be left for Tony Foss to peep at? What could there be for him to see that he hasn’t seen already?’
They both laughed.
‘Still, Tony likes to know what’s going on,’ said Grizel.
‘I can’t help thinking it is odd the Greys aren’t at home,’ murmured Charmian, exploring the box of objects. She had placed all the things found in the Gilroys’ house in a small cardboard box for safe keeping. There was the skirt, the handbag and the leather satchel of books. Jammed together by Charmian in a box too small for them, they had somehow become a whole, one object and not several. And the whole was greater, and nastier, than the parts.
‘Oh, she’s probably out looking for another washing machine salesman to try out.’
‘What’s that?’
‘The neighbours say it wasn’t only cleanliness and godliness she had in mind,’ said Grizel.
‘That’s something I can’t believe,’ said Charmian.
Grizel shrugged. She had long since given up trying to make rational the things people did or believed in. ‘It’s the way their minds work in Abbot’s End,’ she admitted.
‘It’s what they always say when there’s something they can’t understand. I wonder they haven’t started on me and Tony Foss.’
‘Oh, they have! Often.’
‘Fancy supposing Tony Foss has that sort of interest in me.’
‘It’s precisely the sort of interest he has in you,’ said Grizel coolly.
Charmian had the box open in front of her, but the objects were still resting within it. The skirt, released, began to uncurl itself as if alive. During the confinement in the box the smell hanging about the objects had revived and become concentrated. At once Charmian was aware of it. Previously it had been too weak to identify; now she could make no mistake.
Disinfectant.
She remembered how Mrs Grey had smelt, and associated the two odours. For Charmian this was the first true link between the objects and the missing girl, Arlette.
At this moment the telephone rang.
Charmian ignored it for the moment, pushed the things back into their box and covered them. ‘Take these across to the laboratory for me, would you, Grizel?’ The small but efficient laboratory where three technicians worked was the newest addition to the resources of the police of Deerham Hills. ‘Tell them I’ll be down in a moment.’ Absently she put out her hand to pick up the receiver.
Downstairs in Pratt’s office she could hear voices. This new building, which was meant to be soundproofed, had the strange quality of somehow channelling sound. Noises from Inspector Pratt’s office very often reproduced themselves in a muffled form in Charmian’s little room. It didn’t always happen, possibly it depended on the
weather, but it was happening today.
‘He’s having a party,’ she said, still absently, before she spoke on the telephone.
The startled laboratory technician, used as he was to almost everything, drew from the pocket of the grey skirt, which Charmian, perhaps carelessly, had not examined, a lock of hair, reddish in colour, and a wad of paper. It was lined writing paper of poor quality, and looked as though it had been soaked in water. It was still damp.
‘Darling Master Baby,’ he read. It was not, however, a letter he was reading. ‘Darling Master, Baby is a good girl,’ he went on. He was reading a poem. ‘Take her as she wishes, and you have something more. Or less.’ He paused at this point to make out a blurred word. ‘As you divide … the score.’
‘Weirdie,’ he said. He recognised what he had got. He was interested in words, and read but didn’t write poetry himself. ‘I see what he or she was getting at.’ He looked down at the skirt. ‘She. A sort of false innocence. Jokey. She didn’t pull it off, though.’
He read it again:
‘Darling Master, Baby is a good girl.
Take her as she wishes, and you have something more
Or less, as you divide or multiply the score.
‘She suffered from a fatal rush of words to the mouth, this girl,’ he said, diagnosing what was certainly one of the troubles of Arlette Grey. ‘Wonder what Daniels will make of this. Not the sort of thing she’s likely to get much help from. There’s the hair, though.’ Carefully, he proceeded with his work. ‘ “ Did your daughter Arlette write poetry, Mrs Grey?”, Daniels will ask, and that will be the end of it.’
He admired Charmian himself and had once taken her to a dance. As a social occasion it had been a dismal failure; he had trodden on her toes and she had been uneasily conscious that in her high heels she could stare over his head.
‘I made her feel a monster,’ he murmured sadly. ‘A real he-woman, poor Daniels, and she already has the idea she’s that anyway. No wonder she – we – oh well, never mind … We might have another try though.’ Charmian still pretended she couldn’t really see him, even when she had to speak to him. He found it both galling and stimulating. He was an optimist. ‘This paper stinks of disinfectant. Ain’t people weird?’
He gathered up the strands of hair and took them over to a side table on which rested the box and the hair which had arrived at the Grey home that morning. He measured the length of hair against the hair which he had already decided to be naturally reddish hair, cut from the head of a female, Caucasian. The two sets of hair exactly matched.
As a result of her vain telephone call Charmian went hurrying out, driving herself in her own car. Grizel stayed behind trying to do some work on the Peeping Tom of Abbot’s End. She did not believe they would ever discover who the Peeper was. One day the complaints about him would just cease; he would have stopped operating and that would be that. She yawned, feeling the heat. Her own life was absorbing all her interest lately.
Charmian drove out of Deerham Hills, through Abbot’s End and up the London Road. Here she was in a district of scrubby heathland, dry and dusty on this hot day, and with little shade. On the south side and far from the main road, the heathland dipped. A side road led down to this hollow and Charmian swung her car along this road.
The yellow car stood at the roadside. There were no leaves on its roof and no layer of dust had been deposited on it yet. Wherever it had come from and whoever had abandoned it here, it had not stood there very long.
‘Boy living in that house phoned us yesterday and told us it had been here since early morning,’ said Forbes, pointing to a house bordering the heath. ‘Quick of him, wasn’t it? Some people are.’
‘You could leave it here and walk back into Deerham Hills,’ said Charmian, measuring the distance in her mind.
‘If you wanted to,’ said Forbes.
‘Someone did want to.’
‘There would have to be a pressing reason for that,’ observed Forbes.
‘I think there was.’ Charmian was carefully looking over the car. Superficially the inside was neat and tidy and bare. Someone had been careful to tidy out of it any personal possessions. And before that someone had kept the leather and paintwork polished. It was an old car and had probably cost only a few pounds but someone had taken care of it lately. —Distantly, Charmian heard a voice saying: It was more than a car to her, it was a home. Arlette had written those words, and someone else (who had it been?) had repeated them.
Charmian went over the car, touching very little, but on the alert for what she could see. At the end of her examination she had to admit she had found nothing.
‘I’ll have to get this down to the Laboratory. You stay here and I’ll go back and get them to send someone to collect it. They’ll take their time, no doubt.’
‘They’ve got Sergeant Carter down there now, haven’t they?’
‘Yes,’ said Charmian shortly.
‘He’s just come back from doing that scientific course?’
‘I believe so.’
‘He’ll be wanting to show us what he can do. Moved around a lot that boy, hasn’t he? I mean, here, then London, then the course, now back again.’
Charmian was silent.
‘Think we’ll keep him this time?’
‘We’ll keep him if he thinks it worth his while.’ Charmian could see a clear picture. ‘Pratt will go one day, sooner than we think perhaps. I’m never sure how good his health really is. And then you’ll find that William Carter has somehow worked himself into the position where he’s the obvious promotion. You see.’
‘You take a long term view,’ said Forbes, slightly surprised. He lived like a mole himself, only aware of the next patch of ground in front of his nose. At the moment this foreground was filled with hopes of the flat in the new block of police married quarters that he hoped to get for himself and his young wife.
‘Did you notice anything about that car?’ said Charmian as she turned to go. ‘In the inside?’
Forbes shook his head. ‘Nothing special. Nothing you didn’t see.’
‘I just thought there was a smell of disinfectant,’ said Charmian uneasily.
She went running up the stairs to her room and was stopped before she could reach it by the sight of Pratt and a tall, heavily-built man standing at the top of the stairs. She went running on and came up face to face with them before she could check. She didn’t want to stop herself though; somehow that last rush of movement upwards was a vital expression of how she felt.
She had recognised Rupert Ascham instantaneously. Chief Inspector Rupert Ascham, who had played so important a part in her life a year ago, and whom she had disliked and feared, but who had in the end offered her something between his apology and his admiration. She had decisively rejected both.
The two men came towards her, Ascham smiling. Charmian understood why he was here: he had come to take over the case of Arlette Grey.
Once again there was this feeling of some powerful emotion flowering within her. It was so strong that she could not identify it; she could not tell if it was anger or pleasure but it made her breathless.
Have you found her then?’ she panted, as soon as she got her breath back.
Two . . . Lost Love
Chapter Five
‘PEOPLE are never what they seem,’ said Con dreamily.
‘I know you never would really pack your things and leave me,’ replied Tom.
‘Little worms creep out and little worms creep in.’
‘I don’t think they move much,’ said Tom faintly. Con could be sickening. ‘They wriggle, of course, but they must be relatively immobile animals. You wouldn’t really go, Con.’
‘So you hope. You cling to that. With their dark secret love your life they destroy.’
‘I do wish you wouldn’t quote poetry if you can’t get it right,’ said Tom irritably, roused to a show of vigour.
‘I didn’t know it was poetry,’ said Con.
‘Blake wrote it
.’
She had thrown him a life-line by quoting Blake. Poetry brought him, even if momentarily, in contact with the world again. She proceeded to cut the life-line.
‘It’s your dark secret dreams, really, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, they’re not secret, not secret,’ cried Tom wildly. ‘ I should think everyone knows about them by now. It’s why I didn’t get the job as head of the department.’
‘No!’ said Con; she set herself up as the arbiter of his career.
‘Oh, I don’t say they knew I had bad dreams, that I fear to get lost, but they knew something was wrong. There goes Old Tom, they’d say, and there’s something wrong with him.’
‘I believe you think I enjoy our scenes. You think I create it all to hurt you. But I don’t. Sometimes it’s the only way to get through to you.’ Con was in tears. She rushed from the room.
Con usually did cry, remarked the ice-cold observer who always remained alive in Tom, but it didn’t put her off.
Con’s bag stood open on the floor as if ready to be packed, but there was nothing in it yet except Con’s bedroom slippers. The slippers were a symbol of her departure. Tom had seen them so often that he was conditioned by them, like Pavlov’s dogs, and began to get his symptoms at the sight of them. They were a special black velvet pair which never appeared at any other time, although at the back of his mind was an impression that they had come on his honeymoon which was probably significant.
‘I suppose I should have expected both love and cruelty from Con the minute I saw those velvet slippers,’ thought Tom, with an ironic smile.
Con at that moment re-appeared and sat down, her face composed. ‘I won’t go just yet,’ she said, settling down comfortably. ‘I’ll stay a little longer.’
‘You couldn’t go yet anyway,’ said Tom, taking his eyes from those hypnotic shoes. ‘You haven’t finished your packing.’
‘Oh, the packing,’ Con dismissed it. ‘I could finish that.’
‘But you never do,’ Tom burst out. ‘In all this time I’ve never known you finish it. And for that matter you never go anywhere, either.’
There Lies Your Love Page 7