Long after Grizel had gone, Charmian stared out of the window. There was little to see, a dull evening in Deerham Hills. For everyone except the Greys. She glanced at her watch: ten o’clock. Still time to go out and see her boys. She groaned and crawled stiffly out from behind her desk. All her limbs seemed to ache, and for a moment she stood there considering, asking herself if she was going to be ill? But no, she felt radiantly well. There must be some other explanation.
The three men sitting in the shelter in the bus station watched Charmian approach. They could see her make her way right across from the police building. There was no pause in their conversation and no reference was made to Charmian but they were very conscious of her. Awareness was shown by the lack of movement, a stiffening of the neck and a slowing down of the movement of the hands. Fred Barnes wanted a cigarette, he did not light one; Cooper Jones felt the seat of the bench growing hard beneath him, he did not fidget; Albert Gordon wanted to scratch even more fervently than either of the other two wanted to smoke or move, but he did not scratch. Or not for a second, anyway. Finally the need was overwhelming, and he gave his elbow a long hard scratch.
‘You’ve been scratching ever since you went to the Zoo,’ said Cooper morosely. ‘Scratch, scratch, scratch.’
‘The Zoo was two weeks ago!’
‘Yes. That’s just what I mean. Ever since, scratch, scratch, scratch. You want to watch yourself.’
‘I think he was scratching before he went to the Zoo,’ observed Fred. Charmian was very close now.
‘You two want to start telling the truth,’ said Bert Gordon irritably. Charmian was at the door. He looked up at her.
‘What is the truth?’ she asked.
‘It’s usually what you don’t want to … hear,’ he said, still irritable. Perhaps it had been a mistake to ride on the camels.
‘Not always,’ protested Charmian. ‘I want to hear the truth. It’s my job.’
‘About other people. The truth’s always all right about other people. It’s when it’s about us we don’t like it.’ Big camels have big fleas, he reflected.
Charmian was silent. Bert Gordon was a simple unsophisticated old man who still believed you could know the truth about yourself. But Charmian knew now that this was something not you nor any outsider could really know; you could not know the truth about yourself, you could just occasionally observe its operation upon your life, like a miracle or a thunderbolt. A thunderbolt was more usual.
‘Perhaps we’re using big words,’ she said finally, thinking of life and death, and not of camels. ‘What I really want is the gossip.’
They brightened at once.
‘You mean that Mrs Nan King business,’ said Fred.
‘That’s part of it.’ Charmian was surprised to have them begin on this stuff and not on the girl who had disappeared.
‘She was a floater, all right,’ said Fred with satisfaction. ‘ Drowned in it.’
‘She drank then? I didn’t know that.’
‘So you come to us. Who did know she drank? Not many. But we knew.’
‘My daughter worked for her for ten years,’ put in Cooper.
‘Someone else put her on to it though,’ said Fred.
‘They did?’
‘Think so. Drink wasn’t her way out by nature.’
‘So who suggested it?’
Fred shrugged. ‘I don’t know everything.’
‘It’s Arlette Grey I’m really interested in,’ said Charmian.
‘That’s the sort of business that’s best left untouched,’ said Fred decidedly. ‘A nasty little girl.’
‘Was she?’ Charmian was taken aback. ‘ Who says so?’
‘Says so?’ repeated Fred. ‘ It’s the way the talk is.’
Charmian considered. She knew that ‘ nasty’ covered a variety of different attributes with Alfred. Arlette might have been malicious or quarrelsome or he might just not like the way she had walked. Or she might really have been a neurotic or a wicked person. ‘Nasty’ could subsume all that.
Charmian continued her walk, thoughtful and a little displeased. Her picture of Arlette Grey was growing and growing monstrously. It began to frighten her. She began to feel that there was a penumbra of crime about the girl, that anything might have happened.
She turned up a little passageway and stopped before a dark door. It was locked as usual. In the five years she had known the door it had always been locked. There was the same routine of opening always. She knocked, feet shuffled along the passage towards the door and then stopped. She knocked again and a body was pressed up against the door and a voice said hoarsely, ‘Who’s that?’ Charmian identified herself, a bolt was drawn and she was in. There had never been a time when the man who had spoken had not sounded as if he had a bad cold, and yet she knew for a fact that he normally spoke in a high, almost falsetto voice. But in this hoarse voice he had often handed across valuable information. He was wicked, mean, perverted and a liar, but Charmian used him.
The door was opened from within.
‘Hello,’ said Charmian calmly. She no longer even felt ashamed of herself for making use of him. Those days were past. She always had a good wash when she went home, though. ‘Hello, Eric.’
‘I’ve just come in from my work.’ His shirt-sleeves were rolled up above the elbows.
Charmian was silent; she didn’t wish to hear about his work. Even in Deerham Hills there was work done she had to turn a blind eye to. Every civilised society has to have its sewers.
‘I mean that’s why I am so dirty,’ he explained.
Again Charmian was silent. He was always dirty.
‘Well, say what you want then, if you won’t talk about anything else,’ he said irritably.
‘I want anything you know about Arlette Grey and her family,’ said Charmian. ‘Anything.’
He looked at her ironically, quite clever enough to know that Charmian at the same time needed his information and needed to prove him a liar. He usually gave her both lies and truth equally mixed.
‘I’m worth ready gold to you,’ he said. Perhaps he meant ruddy gold. He had a curious jargon, all his own.
‘A little gold,’ agreed Charmian cautiously. ‘Very little.’
‘Go on with you,’ he said, leaning back. ‘Gold indeed. Policemen never see gold. A little bit of old silver’ll be all you’ll offer me. It’s not worth it.’ He leaned forward. ‘What would you say if I asked for a kiss?’
‘I’d say you’d changed your habits,’ said Charmian levelly.
‘I remember once,’ he began.
‘I’ve learnt judo since those days.’
So he knew about the time when she had been used as a decoy for a man who was hanging about the woods on top of Deerham Hills molesting lonely women. They had caught the man but Charmian had suffered a certain amount of physical indignity. It had happened years ago now, had been almost her first assignment in Deerham Hills and presumably most of the other people concerned had encapsulated the episode in their minds and forgotten it. Certainly it wasn’t the sort of memory anyone would treasure.
‘I was there, you know,’ he said maliciously.
‘Liar,’ said Charmian loudly.
As he had moved forward his chair had come down hard on her foot. At once she could feel it swelling, just as it had done, twisted and sore, on that earlier occasion. The memory of an embrace, pain, and anger, provoked images in her mind and she shook her head to dismiss them, moved away from his chair and rubbed her ankle.
It was one of those happenings, trivial in itself, which made a pattern out of her life.
‘I hate you. I hate women,’ he cried.
‘Yes, I know that. What about Arlette Grey?’
‘She’s dead to you,’ he said decisively. ‘If she wasn’t, I’d know.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘I’d know. If she was in Deerham Hills, I’d know.’
‘And if she wasn’t?’
He hesitated. ‘She didn’t go into the Sm
oke.’ For the first time he did not sound so sure of himself. London was a big city, he could not pretend to omniscience, and in his way he cared for accuracy.
‘I think she’s dead,’ he said finally. ‘And the word is that her mother knows it.’ Then he added, ‘She had some money. She bought things.’
‘What’s that?’ Charmian was sharp.
He shrugged and did not answer.
This was how he liked to close an interview: with an ambiguity. He held out his hand as Charmian rose to go and closed it firmly round the silver she offered him. About this there was no ambiguity at all.
‘Mrs King drank then, did she?’ said Charmian conversationally as she left.
‘That’s not what I’ve heard,’ he said sounding surprised. ‘No, you’re wrong there. She didn’t drink. So that’s what you think,’ and he began to laugh. Eric was a very thin man with prominent twisted bones and his whole body seemed to vibrate with his laugh. One scraggy, pitted arm grabbed at a chair.
‘I wonder you don’t infect yourself one day,’ said Charmian as she left. ‘ You’ll die of septicaemia yet.’
He was still laughing as she closed the door.
Charmian had one other informant she could turn to for gossip about the Grey family, and this was an elderly woman who had been a nurse. She still went out nursing among her neighbours as the occasion demanded, not expecting to be paid much money (she had her pension) but enjoying the intimacy, the brush with other people’s lives which she was lonely for since her husband died. In their relief from pain and anxiety, their happiness at recovering health, people could be very informative, and if they weren’t, she had her own ways of arriving at facts. She knew the insides of most cupboards at Abbot’s End and had helped tidy a few of them.
The lights were out in her house when Charmian rang the bell but Mrs Gow appeared without hesitation. She was wearing her coat and hat and carrying a small case.
‘Oh,’ she said, drawing back. ‘I thought you were Mr Parsons, his wife’s bad.’
‘I won’t stop you then,’ answered Charmian.
‘He’ll be here in a moment. He’s driving right round.’
‘That’s the Parsons who works in Lubbock’s store, isn’t it?’ asked Charmian. She knew Parsons and his ailing wife.
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Gow shortly. She was closing the door behind her and locking it. ‘I’ll wait out here.’
‘I was wondering if you knew anything about the Grey family?’
She shook her head. ‘Hardly anything. I’d nothing to do with them. I don’t know where she trained or I might have made some inquiries.’
‘She was a nurse then, was she?’ Charmian thought that this did explain some quality about Mrs Grey, but not everything.
‘Oh yes, I recognised the signs at once, but I don’t know where. I dare say I could find out.’
‘It’s the daughter I’m really interested in.’
Mrs Gow did not answer. A small black car was drawing up at the kerb. She hurried forward, shouting at Charmian over her shoulder.
Charmian couldn’t hear what she said except for one phrase: Peeping Tom.
Back home Charmian washed her hands throughly. As she did so, she reflected that Mrs Gow had not been pleased to see her and that her manner had been stiff and unfriendly. Sadly she wondered what rise in unpopularity, what suspicion, what gossip, this reflected. The last time she had been out in the cold had been when she had a love affair with a murderer. What did they think she had been up to this time? Perhaps it was Tony Foss.
‘I ought to have asked her whether Nan Grey drank or what the trouble was,’ she thought, as she dried her hands and went to make coffee. ‘But of course I’m my own worst problem as usual.’ She was out of sorts, hot and cross.
Where was Arlette Grey? Charmian had a strong feeling that to find out the answer she had to probe into the character of Arlette. It was the old story of the horse that was lost and the man who went to look for him. ‘I just thought where I would go if I was a horse and then I went there and he was there.’ If Charmian could get an insight into Arlette’s mind she might find out where she had gone.
Charmian walked over to the window and looked out on to the dark garden. She had a square of grass, two rose trees, and a hedge.
Arlette Grey was dead. She must be. You couldn’t get away from it: she had been missing from home too long.
Charmian stared out of the window. She believed Arlette was dead. Why then did she have the sense of a continuing plot still working itself out to its conclusion?
‘It’s not all over,’ she found herself thinking, and then saying, ‘But it must be,’ torn between what was happening and what appeared to be happening.
At the same time she was busying herself with all the other problems which faced her: the Peeping Tom, the baby found abandoned in the railway station, the pilferer at the Infants School. Arlette Grey was only one among six or so other problems.
Slowly and carefully Charmian drew the curtains. She was more worried by the Peeping Tom than she cared to admit.
The night wind stirred in her garden. Her house was known, marked, vulnerable to the Peeping Tom. Deerham Hills was too little a town.
Chapter Seven
CON was smiling as she lay on her back on her bed. A still set smile. Her lips held their position, taut like a bow, without effort. Surely no one could smile like that for ever, Tom thought. For ever and ever and ever. But apparently Con could.
Tom was crying. There were no tears in his eyes but they were gathered thickly in his nose and throat, choking him. Dry tears are the most painful to weep.
‘I was asleep, Con,’ he muttered. ‘How could I have gone to sleep? And you were hanging there.’ He shuddered.
Con’s lips, set in their stiff archaic smile, did not move. This smile was changeless, hers for ever: the risus sardonicus of death. Her face was swollen and flushed.
‘Surely not everyone who dies smiles like you, Con?’ said Tom. ‘And what had you to smile at?’ Shock was making him babble. ‘I mean why did you die, Con? Why did you really die? What is the right of it?’
Doris and Burgen in the next room heard him and looked at each other. ‘ We ought to stop him,’ said Burgen.
‘The police’ll be here soon.’
‘He doesn’t know what he’s saying.’
Doris was silent. ‘I think he feels guilty,’ she said at last. ‘And if he does then it’s best to let him face it.’
‘But she killed herself.’
Doris shrugged; it was a nervous irritable movement. ‘And he thinks it’s his fault. Well, I agree with him. It might be his fault.’
‘Oh you always take the woman’s side,’ said Burgen; he was distraught himself.
‘Oh no, I don’t,’ said Doris grimly. ‘Not by any means.’
Once again there was silence between them, broken only by the murmuring from the next room.
‘Did you notice,’ whispered Burgen, ‘as we carried her in, the rest of her body was quite limp but her face was all stiff and fixed? I saw it as we put her on the bed.’
‘I didn’t look,’ said Doris.
‘We shouldn’t have touched her. The police will want to know why we did.’
‘They’ll know why we did,’ said Doris. ‘They’ll know why anyone would. Any human being. Besides, I didn’t think she was dead.’
‘I did,’ said Burgen with a shiver. He started to think how women should be protected, and how little anyone had protected Con.
‘I wonder why he came to us?’
‘We’re his closest neighbours.’
‘But we’ve never been close really. Con didn’t even like us.’
But the truth was that Tom had stumbled blindly out for help, hardly knowing which way he was going but instinctively following his need to find a woman to help. Doris was not that kind of woman and did not care for Tom but she was the only one near.
They were both listening for the sound of the doctor and the police but
outside all was quiet.
‘I think he’s praying,’ whispered Burgen.
‘I hope he isn’t,’ said Doris woodenly.
Burgen got to his feet. ‘We ought to go to him. It’s wrong to leave him on his own.’ But even as he spoke he remembered that Tom was not on his own, he had his wife with him even if she was dead. At what stage in the process of dying did you cease to become a person and become a thing? ‘ I’ll go and get him.’
‘It’s too late. He’s coming in.’ She sounded unfeeling, but all the same she got to her feet and moved forward to help as Tom came in, and it was she who seated him in a chair. Perhaps Tom had not been so far wrong in his unconscious appraisal of what he could get from her. ‘Do your dressing-gown up,’ she said to him.
He obeyed her with stiff trembling hands. They were all in their dressing-gowns, but Doris and Burgen looked neat while Tom did not. Even when he had buttoned himself up he had got the buttons crooked. Doris watched him and saw this but did not offer to help, and to do Tom justice he did not look at her as if he wanted any.
‘I was deep in sleep,’ he said. He looked dazed and muddled. ‘Deep asleep … I think she must have given me something. Yes, I’m sure she did.’
‘Why she do it?’ cried Burgen, bursting out with the only question that mattered to him. ‘Why did she do it?’
Tom put his hand unsteadily up to his head. ‘She said she’d leave me. She said she was going to pack her bag and leave me. I remember that … If I was seriously interested in Mary Lou Pallas she would leave me.’
‘And were you seriously interested?’ Burgen couldn’t stop. He knew he should but he couldn’t.
Tom looked sick. ‘Mary Lou had her letters sent here. She wanted to impose herself. I think she hated Con. Me too, perhaps,’ he added belatedly. ‘Con could be clever, though. She got to know things, more than you’d expect. She had something against Mary Lou.’
‘This note sounds as if she was ashamed of herself,’ said Doris wonderingly. She fingered the note which Con had typed. Misery, it said, I have behaved in a way I cannot allow myself to behave any longer, it said, wicked, it said, cruel, cruel, cruel.
There Lies Your Love Page 9