Arlette Grey might have taken something more with her than her own body, her short cropped hair and her look of duplicity.
Charmian got up. On her way out, she put her head round the door of the bird cage. ‘You can move into the other room now. I’m going out.’
She ran down the stairs, narrowly avoiding Chief Inspector Ascham, who was just emerging from Inspector Pratt’s room. She stumbled on the last step, making a meeting between them seem inevitable, then she corrected herself and hurried on.
‘I thought she was going to fall,’ said Pratt.
‘No.’
‘That girl’s not doing her work like she should,’ went on the Inspector.
‘I think she is. In ten years time you’ll turn round and say to yourself she was the best policewoman you ever knew,’ said Ascham suddenly and savagely.
Pratt, nice kind industrious Jack Pratt, who had courted his wife decently for two years and then married her, was surprised. He was a little embarrassed too, but he had at least been around the world long enough to cover that up. He coughed.
The police day was clicking on methodically. In most of what was happening Charmian had had a hand. One event fitted into another like a cog, everything that took place there had a relationship with everyone in the building. In Room A a girl was being interviewed: Charmian had prepared the questions. In Room B photographs of known criminals were being shown to the witness of an armed robbery: Charmian had first interviewed this frightened woman. In Room C a tired old man was making a statement: Charmian had reluctantly pointed at his lies and evasions. Nan King and the Peeping Tom were on the list too.
Charmian had created this but it had created her too. Every day she was changing a little more into a girl who was sceptical of goodness, whose natural desire to set things right was hardening into prejudice, whose imagination was settling down into a machine that could take notes. Slowly she was being threatened with a kind of glaciation. Grizel saw this, Rupert Ascham knew it, and Charmian herself dreaded it. She thought she was clever enough to avoid this hardening but perhaps she wasn’t, perhaps it was going to need something more than cleverness.
‘Perhaps I should have gone into politics,’ she thought, as she drove away into the town and then out towards Abbot’s End. ‘It might have given me what I want without turning me into a Sergeant. But which party?’ She started to laugh at the thought of herself standing on a platform and kissing all the babies.
Abbot’s End looked pretty cheerful in the sun. There were the neat rows of houses, the crescent of shops, and the bridge which sometimes was the focus for the emotions of Abbot’s End. Near riots, processions, the occasional suicide all took place on the bridge. Charmian hated and feared it. Perhaps Arlette Grey was in the river under the bridge? But the river was clear of anything except a few pieces of paper.
She expected to find John Grey at home. Her spies had told her that he had not left the house for the last few days. No doubt this was wise. Charmian didn’t think his wife loved him or their home; if she came back to it she might destroy it. Just before she left it she had given it a lustral bath, if she came back she might burn it down. Arson seemed the next obvious outburst for a woman like Mrs Grey.
‘She’s telephoned me twice,’ said John Grey as he opened the door. He didn’t sound excited. ‘I suppose that’s what you’ve come about?’
‘Your wife?’
‘Yes. You didn’t think I meant Arlette?’
Charmian shook her head. No, she hadn’t meant Arlette. While Arlette thought her mother was at home there would be no telephone call. If they could put large notices up all over Deerham Hills saying that Mrs Jane Grey no longer lived at home, then they might get a communication from Arlette.
‘But she never said where she was or what she was doing.’ John Grey sounded quiet, tired, as if that long sleep he had taken had not refreshed him. Charmian looked at him with sympathy, wondering which he would rather have back, his wife or his daughter. He couldn’t have both.
‘What did she say then?’ asked Charmian.
‘Just that she wanted to be alone. Without me. She’s looking for Arlette.’
‘She’d be better at home.’
‘So that’s the way it is,’ said John Grey, going back to the chair by the window where he had been sitting. He had made himself quite a comfortable little corner there with chair, small table, footstool and radio. Charmian noticed he had put a tea cosy over the telephone.
—Why, he doesn’t want either one of them back, she thought with surprise. In these circumstances it began to seem the most natural thing in the world that they had both left.
‘I suppose she didn’t want me to make a journey,’ he said. ‘Do you know I once went to meet her at Liverpool and travelled all the way back with her.’ —So, there had once been enough love between the people in this house.
‘Would you do that now?’ asked Charmian.
‘No. But then it’s eight years since she spent a night away from the house.’
—Perhaps, perhaps not, thought Charmian. Aloud she said, ‘She’s gone now. And for good.’
‘That’s what I think.’ He looked towards the telephone. ‘But the fact that she telephoned means something. We are in touch. She won’t come back here, but we are in touch.’
He sounded quite satisfied with the prospect of a married life conducted on the telephone line. It might suit many people.
‘But Arlette?’ asked Charmian. ‘She hasn’t been in touch?’
‘Unless you call the hair she sent her mother keeping in touch,’ he said tonelessly.
‘You think she sent that?’
‘Nobody but Arlette could know how her mother would feel about her hair,’ he said definitely. ‘I couldn’t know it myself. And then when it happened I thought that’s it, that’s it, that’s where it came from. She sent it.’
‘You thought Arlette was dead,’ Charmian reminded him, almost accusingly. Indeed her whole attitude throughout the scene had been that of an accuser. She was conscious of it, and surprised.
‘Earlier. Afterwards when I thought more about the hair, when I saw what it did to her mother, I knew she wasn’t. We both knew it.’
‘Did Arlette have a bank account?’
John Grey shook his head. ‘ No. I didn’t allow that. I gave her what she needed. All the money in this household passed through my hands. Naturally.’
‘Was there trouble about money, Mr Grey?’
‘No. Yes. No, not what you could call trouble. We never quarrelled.’
—No, they just quietly melted away instead, Charmian wanted to say to him. The house looked much more comfortable now that Mrs Grey had gone, but oddly enough the unloveable character remained with it.
‘Arlette must have had some money, Mr Grey,’ persisted Charmian.
Her hunch was sitting heavily on her shoulders now like an old man of the sea.
He stared at her without answering.
‘Fifty pounds or possibly eighty anyway,’ said Charmian.
He still stared. Finally he said, ‘She had a Post Office Savings Book.’
‘And she took that with her?’
‘I think she must have done.’ He did not look at Charmian. ‘I can’t find it.’
‘You’ve looked then?’
He nodded silently.
‘Why didn’t you tell us all this before? It makes a lot of difference to know she had money. How much money?’
‘I suppose she might have had almost two hundred pounds.’ He sounded indifferent.
‘As much as that?’ Charmian did not hide her surprise. She had expected it to match up more with the sum pencilled in Arlette’s book, which both she and Robert Ascham had noticed.
‘She inherited a little money from her grandmother.’
‘When?’
There was a silence, perceptibly prolonged. Finally he heaved a long sigh and said, ‘It came into her possession about six weeks ago.’
—And this was the money yo
u did not quarrel about, thought Charmian. Aloud she said, ‘And you did not want her to have it?’
‘Of course I wanted her to have it. It was her money. But I wanted to control it … Only until she was older, of course.’
‘And what did her mother want?’
‘I expect she wanted Arlette to buy the moon,’ said John Grey bitterly. ‘ Only there wouldn’t have been quite enough for that.’
‘Did Arlette and her mother quarrel over the money?’
‘Not over the money.’
‘But they did quarrel?’
He shrugged. ‘ I’ve told you: we didn’t quarrel. Jane had other ways of going about things, and Arlette took after her.’
‘Do you know the number of your daughter’s savings book?’ asked Charmian.
He hesitated for a moment and then went over to a desk that stood by the window. From a neat drawer he produced a notebook, one of many, and opened it. ‘I wrote it down. The book was issued in East Tweem and was number 34769.’
As Charmian was leaving, he said, ‘Have you ever come home day after day to a house scrubbed clean and disinfected? That was one of my wife’s ways of showing her feelings. Boiling my bed linen was another.’ He held out his hands. ‘I mean, where could I go on from there?’
As Charmian left she could hear the telephone begin to ring under its muffling cover. She listened for a little while but very soon it became clear that no one was going to answer it. Presently it stopped.
Bobbie had returned that morning to his post by the gate, blood-stained and growling, having fought Emily Carter’s old cat for the remains of the breakfast kippers. Bobbie was bigger but the cat was older and crueller, also a faster eater, so that all Bobbie got was a scratch across the nose and the smell of catty fishy breath in his face. He sat at the gate now, grumbling under his breath and breathing heavily. He was not a clever dog, although a persistent one, and his memory was faulty. He often buried bones and forgot where he had buried them, digging a series of holes in Emily’s garden (or even Laurence and Ben’s or the Burgens’ garden) in a desperate attempt to find his treasure.
The butcher’s boy cycled past, a car turned the corner, a young girl walked briskly up the road, bag, skirt and hair swinging. Bobbie watched them all.
A recollection of something interesting, and possibly desirable stirred in his faulty memory. Presently he got up and trotted away.
‘Somebody will kill that dog one day,’ said Emily Carter, watching him lope off with his collar hanging in loose chewed fragments round his neck. ‘And it might easily be me.’
Charmian turned back along the way she had come. She meant to go back to her own home, get out all the notes, all the material she had collected about Arlette Grey, and study it. She had done this before, she would do it again.
In addition she would once again re-read Arlette Grey’s own notebooks. They were still in Rupert Ascham’s possession, but it wouldn’t be difficult to get them back. She knew what he was doing today. His investigation into the disappearance of Arlette Grey and the death of Con Gilroy had got to the stage where he was giving what he called ‘the publicity’. This meant that he was seeing the press, being televised for the television news, making a public appeal for anyone who knew anything relevant to come forward. And the way Rupert Ascham worked this meant that he had already made up his mind what had happened and who he was going for. For some time now he had had every available policeman working on the case, Charmian included. He had been twice to the College and once made a silent solitary inspection of Con’s desk and locker there. But only he knew what it all added up to as a picture of a crime. Charmian herself felt elbowed aside, she thought that she knew less now of the story than she had known at the beginning. Ascham had, in a way, diminished her.
‘He’s never trusted me since that business last year.’ Then, out of that strange welter of emotions that swept over her whenever she touched on him, she thought wretchedly: ‘Perhaps he is right not to trust me.’
Rupert Ascham had all the information she had, he had certainly noticed the significance of the money Arlette had. In fact it had been his scribbled pencil tick that had first pointed it out to Charmian.
But he hadn’t yet found Arlette.
He was having his press campaign, therefore he had made up his mind. But he hadn’t yet found Arlette.
He had made up his mind but he hadn’t found Arlette.
Charmian was getting her sentence more and more precise with each formulation.
She hurried into Ascham’s office, and demanded and received the photostat of Arlette’s notebook.
‘Got the original over in the laboratory,’ said the clerk working in what was now Ascham’s temporary office. It looked at once tidy and crowded with his possessions. Charmian supposed he also kept an office in London. And somewhere, perhaps, a home.
As she drove rapidly away she admitted, and with a sense of shame, that she was not only looking for Arlette Grey: she was engaged in a competition of some sort, perhaps a race, with Rupert Ascham.
Her little house looked clean and polished and also every clean and well polished article in it was just slightly out of the position where Charmian usually placed it. She sighed. Cathy’s day for cleaning. There was an unspoken war between her and her cleaner who came in once a week when Charmian was out. They rarely met except when Charmian was on holiday or ill, and business between them was carried on by a series of little notes. ‘Please polish book-case’ written by Charmian before she set out for work got the answer ‘We are out of vinegar’ when she got home. Cathy expressed her own loneliness and sense of possession of the house by moving furniture, china and curtains infinitesimally from the usual resting places; Charmian expressed her sense of ownership by moving them smartly back. Nothing was ever said. Cathy never touched books and papers however, which she regarded as sacred, holy, and slightly dangerous to the lay person.
Charmian tramped into the kitchen, jerked the red check curtains the disputed half inch back towards the wall and picked up the note which Cathy had left on the table. It didn’t look as neat as Cathy’s usual efforts; she must have been flustered when she wrote it.
‘Keep the window curtains closed,’ she had scribbled.
‘Well!’ Charmian was annoyed. Cathy had gone too far. It was her business how she kept her curtains. ‘Besides,’ she added aloud, ‘if the curtains were closed I’d never be able to see out.’
Imagination about herself and her own position was never strong in Charmian: this lack had led her into trouble before. Now she screwed up the note and threw it aside, dismissing it as one of Cathy’s foibles. It was true, as Grizel had often said, that Charmian never thought anything could touch her until it hit her in the face.
Charmian went into her sitting-room where she spread out on the table what she was beginning to call the Arlette dossier. The laboratory report on the clothes, hair and motor-car were on one side with a paperweight, in the shape of a fish, on top. (The fish had been modelled by Charmian herself and in those days had represented ‘art’ to her. Now she saw it simply as a paper-weight like everyone else and a repaired one at that). The photostats of Arlette’s diary she opened in front of her.
For the first time she found herself wishing she had the original in her hands instead of photostats. She wanted to see the notebook as a thing in itself. To touch it, regard it, weigh it so that she was in direct touch with the girl herself. Arlette, who had produced this student notebook, Arlette the hard little worker.
‘But I know better than that, don’t I?’ murmured Charmian. ‘Already I know more than that. Let’s give your image a twist.’
Her voice was excited. Yesterday she had left Deerham Hills and travelled to London where she had called on some of the people who had known Arlette Grey as a student. She had prepared herself a short list of questions.
‘What was she like with you? How did you feel about her? Did you like her?’ The people she had asked had not seemed surprised that Arle
tte had disappeared. It had not struck them as out of character to do this. She was an outsider. This was the thing Charmian noticed at once. She began to wonder how people thought about her. Would they be surprised if she went off suddenly? Would Grizel? But no, that wouldn’t be what they expected of her. From her they expected the sudden shock, the abrupt descent into scandal.
But people didn’t have strong feelings about Arlette. In a way they drew back from her with a shrug. Not a flat refusal but a reluctance to wrestle with the problem of what was Arlette. Perhaps this very refusal meant something.
‘She worked hard the first year she was with us,’ said the man who had taught her. ‘And then afterwards,’ he shrugged, ‘she didn’t do anything much, just ticked over. Her attention was elsewhere, I’d say, but where or how or why I don’t know. You couldn’t tell anything from her face.’
‘It happens, I suppose,’ said Charmian thoughtfully.
‘Of course it does. Sometimes it’s a young man, sometimes they’re just plain bored.’
‘Somehow I don’t think it was that with her,’ said Charmian, still thoughtful. ‘Who were her friends?’
‘No friends.’ He made it sound final and absolutely definite.
‘You seem to know?’
‘The other policeman asked the same thing.’
‘Yes, he would do,’ said Charmian, thinking that, of course, Ascham had been here before her. But she knew with triumph that he hadn’t asked her questions and wasn’t going to get what she was going to get. ‘And tell me, when did you first realise she was a liar?’
It was such a simple question, but such a lot could flow from it.
They stared at each other in silence for a few seconds. Professor Bewdley was taller than Charmian and looked down at her.
‘Did I realise that?’
‘You more or less said so when you made the comment that you couldn’t tell anything from her face.’
‘Clever of you to see that.’ He started to move about the room. ‘Yes, I suppose that is what I was really saying. I had no idea it came out so clearly. She was a little bit of a liar right from the start, of course. Does it matter?’
There Lies Your Love Page 12