‘The packing of my case is not essential to my going,’ said Con softly. She picked up the velvet slippers and put them on. ‘I could just walk out, like this. And then you will really have to choose.’
What was the choice she was offering him? Perhaps it was a choice between her and Mary Lou Pallas. But to Tom it appeared as if a more serious choice was being offered him, almost a choice between life and death. There was something formidable in Con’s manner.
‘You talk as if I had free will in the matter.’
‘Well, I think you have a little,’ said Con, considering. Then she said, ‘And you talk as if I were not really trying to help you.’
So Con knows, thought Tom at once, she knows about Mary Lou Pallas. He could not prevent his hand going to his pocket, as if he had those puzzling letters hidden on him. But they were burnt, gone. Con could not possibly know. He saw her lips move in a faint smile, no mirth in it though. Con knows about the letters too, was his reaction. She had probably watched the whole episode. He had always known that Con maintained a steady watchfulness and he would be the last to deny that perhaps in many ways she was right to do so.
‘Let’s leave it at that, Con,’ he said. ‘You’re trying to help me.’
‘And if you aren’t open with me, frank, then I have to find out the best way I can. You close your mind to me too much,’ said Con reproachfully.
‘Everyone does a little.’ Tom was still fighting back, but the image of the dark deserted streets was waiting at the edge of his retina. ‘Everyone has their reserves. You have too.’
Con nodded.
‘I do love you, Con.’ This at least was true. In their way they loved each other.
‘Remember the first time you got lost?’
‘It’s forbidden to do what you are doing,’ protested Tom.
‘According to what law and what prophets?’ mocked Con, and Tom was silent. There was a strain of Jewish blood in him about which he was sensitive.
‘The first time you were lost was when you were still too young to speak. It was after a fair, and your mother lost you. Deliberately lost you, perhaps.’
‘No.’
‘Well, a careful mother would not have lost you. Afterwards you were a careful son, so that good came out of it. You were there in the streets, lost, alone. You knew no one. But, remember, you could not talk.’
‘But perhaps it never really happened,’ cried Tom. ‘Perhaps it was a dream. I am sure it was all a dream.’
‘Dreams are the worst,’ said Con cruelly.
Tom was silent. Con knew how to silence him all right.
‘Because to that place you can always be sent again.’
Now the streets stretched on either side of him, dusty and obscure, yet full of faces he didn’t know. The room with Con in it still existed, but underneath; he could feel it, but it was invisible, tangible but unreal. Reality was the nightmare. He was wandering, lost and speechless. The years were slipping away from him and he was child-like. Panic swelled in his stomach like sickness. Earlier, so long ago, he had been sick. Soon he would be sick again. Con knew the signs.
‘Let me out, Con, let me out,’ he gasped. Without knowing it, he was crawling around on his knees, feeling blindly with his hands.
‘You didn’t destroy all the letters,’ said Con softly. ‘I have one, I was watching. Didn’t you know?’
Tom shook his head.
‘Will you tell me? Tell me all about what the letters meant?’
‘I don’t know,’ muttered Tom.
‘And all about that wicked girl?’ said Con, ignoring what he said.
‘Yes … yes.’
‘Then you can come alive again, my love,’ said Con, and she said it with gratitude. She really hated to hurt him. At the same time, she could not resist using this trick she had of bringing about a waking dream in Tom. ‘And tell me everything.’
She slapped down the lid of her case, drew back the curtains which she had closed – Con was a little bit of a fraud and believed in helping her illusion by producing her own darkness. Perhaps Tom was a little bit of a fraud too.
Con helped him to stand up again and got him a glass of water. Tom drank, and coughed, then drank again.
They were deep in their complicated relationship. But they were much further in trouble than they realised. Much, much further.
Tom knew something about Mary Lou Pallas that Con did not know.
Con knew plenty about Tom and much about her own actions. Each thought they had a handle on truth.
But there was a third layer of truth that neither had grasped.
What Pratt had not told Charmian, but had perhaps been trying to tell her, was that Rupert Ascham was already in charge of the investigations about Arlette Grey. He had now had one whole day in Deerham Hills.
‘Remember the girl in Largo Road, Putney, who walked out of her home one morning and never came back,’ he was saying. ‘ ’54 that was.’ He was referring to a celebrated case on which he had worked.
‘I thought she did come back,’ said Pratt a little sourly. ‘ Only not in as good a condition as when she left.’
‘You couldn’t expect it after lying in the open for three weeks,’ said Ascham. ‘We got the man who did it. That was one of the better cases.’
‘Not for the girl.’
‘No,’ said Ascham, sounding surprised. ‘Not for the girl. For me it was. I went up to the top of the class that time.’
Pratt continued to act sour. ‘Well, this girl won’t come back. We have to find her.’
‘We will start with the family. Always start there.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Pratt, watching Charmian, knowing he had not told her of the speed with which Ascham was moving in on the case. So, I’ve left it too late, he thought. Now she knows. The girl was being too quiet and bright-eyed to be normal, but in a surprising sort of way she looked pleased. Pleased with what? Pratt asked himself. Pleased with herself, was what he had to answer.
‘The family nearly always know more about what’s been going on, even if they don’t want to believe it.’
‘I’m not clear what Mrs Grey knows or what she believes,’ said Charmian, ‘but I know what she wants me to believe. She called to explain: her daughter got into bad company but it’s all a storm in a tea-cup.’
‘That was before the hair was received by her. She may think differently now.’
No one said that there was something strange about the cut-off hair, although perhaps each of them thought it.
While they were talking, the constable (it was Forbes again) sent to bring one or both of the Greys to identify the clothes that had been found, walked away from their house in Abbot’s End, having completely failed to get any answer. He turned at the gate and looked back. Without understanding why, he was anxious. There was something not quite normal about the house. He stared again. It looked a dead, desolate house. Still not knowing what impelled him, he began to move hurriedly back to the house.
Constable Forbes was young, distracted and a little out of his depth. He spent some time bending over the figure lying there, and some time staring at the mess. Then he was slow in getting back to the station. So it was some forty-five minutes before Rupert Ascham and Charmian arrived together in Abbot’s End.
By this time it was late afternoon. Con and Tom had relapsed into silence, Burgen and his sister were gardening side by side in apparent contentment, and Lawrence Marks and Ben Cox were out on their motor-cycles. Bobbie was in his kennel; he was angrily chewing at something.
‘Christ, did she do all this?’ asked Ascham, looking around him.
‘She must have, mustn’t she? There are no other candidates.’
‘What was she doing? Just a little laundry?’ Ascham was picking his way carefully around the room.
‘She has an obsession about washing,’ said Charmian. She moved into the middle of the room and stared about her.
They were standing in what was obviously the family sitting-room with a larg
e window facing the street. The curtains were the only normal things left in the room and they had obviously been left up to convince the passers-by that all was right inside. Every other object within the room was out of position and sopping wet.
‘She’s washed everything,’ said Charmian, stepping over a roiled up carpet. ‘Everything scrubbed, disinfected. She’s mad.’
Books, newspapers, letters, old shoes, a couple of old pipes, all had received their dousing and lay about as if dropped where they had been washed. There was no bowl of water in the room but a great puddle over in the comer suggested that this had been the lustral area.
And in the midst of this confusion, cocooned in shawls like a shroud so that his arms were pressed to his side, John Grey slept like a baby.
‘Only sound asleep,’ said Ascham, feeling the sleeper’s pulse. ‘Must have had a drug of some sort, though.’
‘She’s done it to him before,’ conjectured Charmian, looking down at the sleeping man’s pulse. ‘Every time she wanted to be off on her own, I suppose, without him knowing.’
‘At night maybe,’ said Ascham grimly. ‘I doubt if she’s done it in the daytime before. And what has she done with herself?’ He walked around the room picking up an object here and an object there. ‘Know what I think? She’s gone off in search of her daughter. Or else in search of the person who has her daughter. I think she knows who that person is. Or can guess.’
The constable Forbes reappeared. ‘Just had a word with her neighbours. They say the house has been dead quiet all day, but that about an hour ago she went out, all dressed up in her best, but hurrying.’
‘That’s it,’ said Ascham. ‘What did I say? Obvious.’
‘She’s a clever woman,’ said Charmian uneasily. ‘ Nothing she does is obvious.’
Across the road she recognised, and without surprise, the face of Tony Foss. This was Abbot’s End and his territory. He was dressed, soberly for him, in a white shirt with pale blue stripes and grey trousers. At this distance he looked a fresh and youthful figure because you could not see the restless eager eyes. Eagerness should be a good quality and yet in Tony it was not. He was so eager for the wrong reasons; he was alert because he wanted to take, observant because he was frightened, full of energy because he was greedy. The good things about Tony were all the passive ones, his tenacity in clinging to his ambitions for himself, his persistence in the face of his frequent set-backs, the endurance he could bring to any task he set himself. Tony knew all there was to know about survival.
Charmian slowly crossed to him, aware that Ascham was watching her.
‘What are you after?’ she asked. There was no point in beating about the bush with Tony, because the bush usually held several well-kept birds you wanted to get your hands on. ‘Why are you watching?’
Tony shrugged.
‘How long have you been here?’
‘Hour or so. It’s my resting place today.’
Charmian ignored this sally. ‘ See anyone go out?’
‘Mrs Grey, you mean? Off to East Tweem, I suppose.’ He was watching Charmian closely.
‘What do you know about East Tweem?’ asked Charmian irritably.
‘It’s in the air over here. I just plucked the name out of the air.’
‘No, you didn’t, Tony,’ said Charmian sharply. ‘You pluck information out of people just like everyone else.’
‘All the same, it is all the talk: East Tweem. The Greys and East Tweem.’
‘But why?’ asked Charmian, beginning to feel angry. ‘Why do they say they are connected. What reason?’
‘Ah, they don’t know that,’ said Tony, drawing down his eyelids as he did when he wanted to look sophisticated and succeeding in looking like a tired little old man. ‘It’s just in the air, like I said. The talk. The On Dit.’ He was watching her with a slight smile as he brought out the French.
‘You’re getting educated, Tony,’ said Charmian. ‘Don’t spoil yourself.’ She was wondering exactly why the Greys should have become associated in the gossip with East Tweem. She herself knew of a possible connection through Mary Lou Pallas. Mrs Gilroy had told her Mary Lou Pallas lived there.
‘And does the On Dit have anything to say about who the Peeping Tom of Abbot’s End is?’ she asked absently.
‘If they do they’re not saying it in French,’ said Tony sourly. ‘I haven’t been worried by him personally myself.’
Charmian laughed, her anger suddenly dissipated. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Ascham approaching.
‘Don’t worry, Tony. The police don’t suspect you.’
‘Thanks for nothing. I left that sort of thing behind before I was six. I’m grown up.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Charmian soberly. ‘I’m afraid you are, Tony, for better or worse.’ She walked back to meet Ascham. ‘ My informer says to try East Tweem.’
‘You’re a good girl, Charmian,’ said Ascham and he put his arm round her shoulders. It was no more than a gesture, over in a second. Once again she received that unexpected rich surge of energy. She felt triumphant, as if she had been given a great good, or a great victory.
How strange she shouldn’t recognise it for happiness.
Tom Gilroy stirred at last and moved stiffly. He and Con were seated side by side on the sofa, leaning shoulder to shoulder, whether supporting or restraining each other it was not easy to say. Tom was the first to move. Oddly enough, he looked less exhausted now than Con.
‘Con?’ he murmured.
‘Yes.’
‘You came into my bed last night.’
‘I didn’t think you noticed. You were asleep.’
‘I noticed. Come tonight.’
Con began to cry. Titania was awake again. As she cried, Tom stroked her head, moving his hand gently over her fine soft hair.
In his mind he could hear Mary Lou Pallas speaking. ‘ We are conspiring, you and I, Tom,’ she was saying. ‘Conspiring against Con. And you must never tell her what we have planned. Or I will kill you.’ As Mary Lou spoke her little hands had flexed and curled in menace.
But now he had told Con; she knew everything, or very nearly everything, and too late Tom now saw that he had done exactly what Mary Lou Pallas wanted. She had always planned that Con should know.
‘Still, I am not a marionette,’ muttered Tom, as if in answer to Mary Lou Pallas’s voice and moving hands. ‘ Not just a puppet.’
Nor for that matter, unluckily, was Con.
‘Tom,’ she whispered. ‘Tom, I have a confession to make.’
‘Ah no,’ he said, still stroking her. ‘ No confession. Don’t confess, Con.’
They were deaf to all noise, all movement save the noises in their own heads.
Jane Grey did not turn up again that day, but no search was made for her. She was not missing, on the contrary, as Ascham was beginning to suspect, she knew where she was going. Meanwhile the search for her daughter continued without success, and Charmian continued to probe into the character of Arlette Grey.
Chapter Six
THERE were passages in Arlette Grey’s notebook which repaid study. There was the passage about the age of the mysterious girl she was writing about, and on a back page were a few words and figures which Charmian had not noticed before. They were palely scribbled in pencil. Ascham had seen them, however; there was a tick and his initial by them. Charmian placed her fingers on it for a second, deliberately, if unconsciously, obscuring his mark.
The pencilled scribble said:
£83 10s. od.
-£50
Leaves £33 10s. od.
So it was a piece of simple arithmetic. She saw then that Ascham had not only placed a tick by it but also a small question mark which seemed an unnecessary ambiguity. She frowned.
‘Better give up and go home,’ advised Grizel, who was just clearing her desk and making ready to depart. ‘You look quite white.’ She herself looked plump and pink-cheeked. At the sight of her reflection in the mirror she caught herself giving Ch
armian an apprehensive look, and wondered if this was the moment to speak to her. But no, probably better wait a little longer. Then she saw that Charmian was staring at her, but Charmian did not utter, only stared at Grizel gravely and then returned to her work. ‘You are white. You must be tired or something.’
‘It’s not fatigue. Only my new make-up,’ murmured Charmian absently. ‘A paler shade. You ought to try it. You look almost too healthy, Grizel.’
‘I am healthy,’ said Grizel, remembering that health was not a crime even if Charmian did seem to think it was. ‘ It’s the way I am. Of course, you can cheer yourself up by remarking that I’m really a dull, dull girl and health is all I’ve got.’ She was stowing things rapidly away in a big paper bag as she spoke and mentally checking them over: steak, salad, butter, coffee, fruit. Yes, she had a dinner in there all right. She just stopped herself counting the calories and gave a faint giggle.
‘Your secret life gets fuller and fuller,’ remarked Charmian, with sudden irritation, hearing the giggle.
‘Hey!’
‘Listen to this,’ said Charmian, ignoring her and reading aloud: ‘The best way to be of one mind is to become two people.
‘What would you say to that, written by a nineteen-year-old?’
‘I’d say she was crazy and ought to be locked up,’ said Grizel emphatically.
‘I say they’re all crazy in that family,’ said Charmian, throwing down her pencil and walking round the room. ‘And all ought to be locked up. Mother, father, daughter.’
‘Arlette Grey?’
‘Know what the father said when he finally woke up? “I was having a dream that I was happy and alive, and now I’m awake and dead again”.’
‘I don’t think that sounds so crazy,’ said Grizel slowly. ‘ It sounds like someone who’s had more than he can take.’
‘He sounds like someone who is hiding,’ said Charmian. ‘ He’s counting words. Know what else he said? “ My wife used to follow Arlette. Maybe that’s what she’s done now”.’
Grizel did not answer, but continued quietly with her preparations to go home. She was not a clever girl, and sometimes Charmian, who was, perplexed her.
There Lies Your Love Page 8