The first excitement of discovery overpast, the police machine was moving forward in its usual impersonal manner. Charmian and Ascham remained silent for the moment but both deeply absorbed.
‘I suppose Mrs Gilroy could have killed Arlette and then been killed herself,’ said Charmian.
Ascham did not answer.
‘All the time we thought she was still alive she was dead. She must have died a long while before Con Gilroy, almost as soon as she disappeared.’
‘I think we’d better get her identified first,’ was all Ascham said.
‘You said that in a strange way, in a limiting kind of way, as if this was only one aspect of her that you were selecting out of many. Her identity.’
‘It’s the most important, isn’t it?’ said Ascham absently. ‘I wonder where she kept that yellow motor-car. I think she bought it with money from her inheritance, you know.’
—He’s not listening to me and probably never does listen to me, thought Charmian. I’m just a policewoman, useful for looking after lost babies and bad children but not otherwise to be taken seriously. Inspector Pratt believed in her ambitions but he never seemed around these days or, if he was there, was preoccupied. In a way she had never really recovered her status with him after the episode in which she had suffered suspension from all her duties for knowing a murderer too well. Perhaps Pratt had never really quite believed in her after that. Or was it rather that she had never quite believed in Pratt again?
She fixed her big bright blue eyes on Ascham so fiercely that he flinched a little.
‘That’s all we can do here. I’ll take you home.’
‘I can get there,’ said Charmian.
‘It’s late. I’ll take you. We can talk.’ He opened the door of the car.
‘Not yet,’ said Charmian a little wearily. She could see Doris Burgen approaching and there was something in her walk that promised delay. Doris wasn’t at all the sort of woman to make a scene, take a liberty or even show bad manners. Now she came up to them, opened the door of the car and got in beside them without waiting for them to speak.
‘I want to talk to you.’ She glanced at Charmian. ‘I tried twice yesterday. I can’t keep it in any longer.’
‘There’s no reason why you should.’
‘That’s not true at all and you know it. There’s probably every reason why I should but I can’t.’
‘Is it about your brother?’ asked Charmian, remembering her queries about Burgen.
Doris sighed. ‘Poor Burgen.’ But even as she deplored him she could not prevent affection showing in her voice. And also, marginally, amusement.
‘It can’t be serious, then,’ thought Charmian swiftly, hearing the amusement.
‘He can’t keep away from girls. Quite young girls. At his age, too.’ She sighed again.
‘What does he do about the girls?’ Memories were stirring.
‘He thinks about them a lot. Collects pictures of pretty ones. Childish really, but of course that’s only on the periphery of the problem with Burgen.’
‘It is?’
‘Yes, how can I put it?’ Doris considered, she had had long experience in summing up Burgen but she always found it difficult to put into words. He was so harmless and yet so absurd, so well meaning and yet perhaps, underneath, not without bad intentions. ‘He tries to protect them. If he can see trouble for one he tries to help. Perhaps he has wicked thoughts to himself. I quite see you could put that interpretation on it. Of course, you and I might see it this way but he never would,’ she ended, firmly. ‘He’s innocent. He never would do anything. Except once …’
‘Once?’
‘Even then it was really hardly anything at all. But it got in the papers … He thought the poor girl was lost. She wasn’t, of course. She wasn’t lost at all, the little wretch. Nor was the boy deliberately following her, like my poor Burgen thought … at least, he was, but she liked it. She only screamed to attract the boy’s notice, she wasn’t frightened, not she. But there it was, Burgen had a fine time explaining to the police and they didn’t believe him. Well, perhaps they did. They brought a case, though, but the magistrates dismissed it.’
‘There must have been more to it than that.’
‘Oh well, you know all about it, of course. I can see you do, you’ve looked it up. He was only trying to convince her she was in some danger. He happened to have some of his best cuttings on him … he was only showing her his collection.’
‘Cuttings?’
‘Newspaper cuttings about cases where poor girls had got into trouble … He was really only showing her his toys, one might say. Like a child.’
‘He was lucky not to go to prison,’ said Charmian thoughtfully.
‘Yes, he was lucky,’ agreed Doris. ‘But innocent.’
Charmian smiled. It was a smile full of more knowledge and understanding than Doris could claim to. They had both known men like Burgen, only Doris had seen one side and Charmian the other.
Ascham had been sitting silent: if possible he always preferred to let a woman question a woman.
‘And what is it that’s worrying you particularly now?’ he asked.
Doris stirred uncomfortably. ‘Yes, that’s just it,’ she said, in her mind the anxiety that Burgen might have gone too far at last. Always innocently of course. ‘But it’s possible it is just in my own mind.’ Her head had been lowered, but now she raised it. ‘For a long time I have been thinking of that blouse the girl Arlette Grey wore as one with pretty little sprigs of blue flowers. I saw it like that in my mind. As if I had seen it.’ She looked them straight in the face. ‘And when I saw what the dog had found, I knew I had seen it before.’
‘No mistake?’ said Ascham.
Doris shook her head. ‘ No, I could not be mistaken. I know.’ She added: ‘ What I wasn’t prepared for was the strong smell of carbolic. I didn’t remember that.’
Disinfectant: an agent designed to cleanse from infection, to destroy germs. The brain-child of a nineteenth-century Englishman faced with corruption and disease. And yet the scent of disinfectant spread like a miasma over this case, hinting at dirt and hate.
Charmian had noticed it first at the original discovery of the clothes in the Gilroy house. You had to go back to what Con discovered in her house to understand what had been going on. Charmian was beginning to grasp this.
The clothes, smelling as they were of disinfectant, had been hidden perhaps because they smelt. It was reasonable to believe that no one would want to wear clothes smelling like that.
The yellow car, still unclaimed, still unidentified, was resting in a police garage. The yellow car too had smelt of disinfectant. Charmian had smelt it.
Sergeant William Carter had smelt disinfectant on the poem he had found in the skirt.
The poem, the car, the disinfectant made up a strange trio.
Charmian frowned, trying to make a whole picture from all the details floating around in her mind. It was like trying to assemble the parts of a Dali picture into the framework of a Cézanne still life – each was a bit distorted, but the distortions did not fit.
She noticed that Doris was blinking her eyelids rapidly and nervously. —Watch out for Doris when she looks nervous and blinks, Burgen would have told her.
‘You know you saw this blue flowered blouse before,’ she said slowly. ‘Perhaps you forgot or weren’t sure, but now you know.’
Ascham made an assenting noise under his breath.
‘Tell us what you really know,’ said Charmian.
‘I saw her,’ said Doris.
‘You saw her?’
‘Yes. Yes. I saw her. She was hiding something in Con Gilroy’s basement. I didn’t know they were clothes then, of course, I just saw a bundle.’
‘Where were you?’
‘I was watching from my garden.’
‘From your garden? Forty feet away?’
‘From my garden. I had glasses: binoculars, I suppose you could call them,’ said Doris defiantly.
‘I’ll need those glasses,’ said Ascham.
‘Zeiss. Burgen bought them.’
‘For watching too, no doubt?’ said Ascham grimly.
Doris was silent. Then she said, ‘I saw her hide the clothes. She tried two or three places. I saw her step back as if she was studying where she’d put the bundle. And I thought: why, my girl, you’re putting that where it’s bound to be seen, and then I thought: perhaps you want it to be found.’ Her voice died away.
‘Why are you so nervous? Why did you suppress what you knew?’
‘I didn’t want to admit I’d been watching.’
‘But everyone knows you do. No, it was more than that,’ said Ascham. ‘ Was it your brother? Were you anxious about him?’
Doris looked dumb.
‘Oh, come on. If you don’t tell me I can easily find out. A question here, a question there. You’re watched, do you know?’
But Doris really wanted to tell him. She had got into the car anxious to get rid of her knowledge and not even loyalty to Burgen could keep her back now.
‘The girl had long yellow hair. I only saw her back but I could see her hair shining,’ whispered Doris, ‘ so naturally I thought it was Mary Lou Pallas.’
Back to yellow. Back to yellow hair. Back to Mary Lou Pallas resurrected, thought Charmian.
‘It will be easy enough to prove her identity,’ said Ascham. It was Charmian’s car but he was driving it. ‘We can get her fingerprints and match them. Dentistry. Oh, many ways.’
‘Even a straight face-to-face identification,’ suggested Charmian, hanging on to her side of the car as they swung round a corner. She had not seen the body unwrapped.
Ascham cleared bis throat. ‘This girl was dead well before Mrs Gilroy. Several days before. Dead probably from the time the clothes were hidden. Or shortly afterwards. She was lying on her face, pressed down under the floorboards. She’s unrecognisable.’
‘What about the hair?’
‘It was dark in that hut. Later I had a better look. I can tell you one thing: what hair she had was darkish and cropped short. No long yellow hair there.’
Charmian got out of the car and walked towards her house, feeling for her key in her pocket. Perhaps Doris was wrong, or lying, about the hair.
She hadn’t asked Ascham to follow her, but he was there.
‘What is it we were going to talk about?’ she asked over her shoulder. Possibly it was Inspector Pratt and his retirement. Was he going to retire? Her mind busied itself with Pratt, more than willing to accept him as a substitute for another subject she might find less easy to handle. Ascham, for instance.
The door opened easily.
‘You didn’t lock it,’ said Ascham.
‘I suppose not. I suppose I forgot.’ She felt ashamed of this little slip of the memory.
The house was dark. Ascham stared at it.
‘Don’t you ever shut your windows here?’ he said.
‘What! Yes, of course.’ Not really listening to him, preoccupied and tired, she entered the house.
She stopped for a moment on the threshold, halted by an involuntary sensation that this was not her house and then brushed this strangeness aside, for here were her curtains, her furniture, and hurried on, muttering about coffee.
A sudden blow from Ascham threw her sideways with tremendous force. At the same time he put on the lights so that her eyes were dazzled.
Then, more gently, he led her to a chair in the hallway and pushed her into it.
‘Sit down and get your breath.’
‘I think you’ve broken my neck,’ she said unsteadily.
‘Nice friends you’ve got here.’
‘I was a fool not to lock up properly.’
‘Who’s after you?’ He was examining what he had found stretched across the inner door.
‘I don’t know.’
‘It’s your job to know.’ And then more gently, he said, ‘ I’m sorry if I hurt you.’
Charmian was staring at the cord stretched across the doorway and pointing from it the long shining metalled object stuck in cork.
‘What is it?’
‘It’s a pretty little device called a jicky moke,’ said Ascham. ‘I believe it was invented in Hong Kong.’ He ran his finger down the edge. ‘ Sharp as a razor. My God, it could pierce an elephant’s hide let alone a donkey’s. It might have killed you if you’d walked slap up against it.’ He stared at her for a moment, white-faced and bright-eyed.
He was really a plain, heavily made man but he had built himself by careful attention to clothes and voice into a vivid, attractive person. His face was the same face as the gawky boy’s who had joined the force and been called Big Nose, but the aware amused lively expression was what you saw now.
And when he was silent, the deep lines around the eyes, and the sag of the lips which were slightly drawn to one side, showed up strongly. Life had made his face into something arresting.
‘I wouldn’t have walked into it in the light,’ Charmian stammered, a little incoherently.
‘No. Probably it was only meant to scare you. Someone hates you, Charmian.’ He stood looking down at her. ‘We’ve got to talk. About you.’
‘I thought we were going to talk about the case. Arlette.’
‘Arlette.’ He dismissed the subject. ‘We know the answer there, don’t we?
‘Arlette, who should never have been let out alone, but that’s just my opinion, met some nasty people and got into trouble. Perhaps just one nasty person. She wasn’t a very nice girl, she didn’t meet up with very nice people. She probably got what she was looking for. You’re thinking to yourself: now that’s an unpleasant way to be talking. The girl’s gone. But Mrs Gilroy’s dead, too, you might remember, and she probably was rather a good person. We don’t agree there, I see. Mrs Gilroy didn’t kill Arlette, you can forget that. Arlette was killed, assuming it is her body we’ve got, by someone with whom she had blundered into some quite arbitrary accidental relationship. I don’t think she knew the person who killed her very well.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘What do you expect a policeman to say? We haven’t found anyone close to her.’
‘She was a liar.’
‘She dramatised herself, like we all do.’
‘I suppose so. Yes.’ Charmian was still off balance.
‘We’ve known for a long time. It’s been clear. Muddy but clear.’ He laughed. ‘Why else has that wily old bird Pratt been keeping so quiet? He could see it was a dirty case. He likes to keep his feet clean.’
‘I think he’s been worried about other things – the King inquest, and perhaps he’s not well.’ Charmian was defensive.
‘Pratt and his worries and his wife and his wife’s friend. That’s his level,’ said Ascham, with some contempt. ‘It’s not yours.’
‘I still think you’ve broken my neck,’ said Charmian irritably. She got up. She walked over and ripped at the cord still taut from side to side of the door. It came away easily. ‘See, just a pretty toy.’
Shock and pain made her blunt. ‘What about your wife?’ Then it seemed a nasty mean vulgar thing to say, and she was embarrassed. ‘Don’t take any notice of that. Let’s forget I said it.’
‘No, don’t let’s forget it.’ He seemed pleased. ‘ It’s an interesting question. It shows me what’s in your mind.’ He came and stood beside her. ‘That’s how it has to be between you and me, hasn’t it? Marriage or nothing. I’m glad we’ve broken that piece of ice.’
Charmian was absolutely silent.
‘She died. Not suddenly and dramatically in a crash or in an operation, but slowly and terribly. Each day she died a little more, so that one day I looked at her and knew that the person I saw there was somebody she would have scorned to recognise as herself only a year before, sans sight, sans movement, sans love. And all this while she was still able to speak to me and question me.’
Charmian felt sad. She didn’t want to come to happiness over the grav
e of a dead woman.
That night the police discovered the room where a girl had lived alone. And it altered everything. Everything.
Chapter Twelve
THE East Tweem police came upon the room by chance, looking for something else. There was a complaint about a wild dog on the loose. The dog was discovered cowering in an empty garage and above the garage was the room where the girl had lived. It was hardly a room at all, a tiny extension of the garage, both rented from the big house at the corner.
‘Well, it was rented by this girl,’ said the owner of the house. ‘It was supposed to be for her car. She wasn’t supposed to live there.’
The room above the garage was squalid and yet exciting. Damp came in at one corner of the room and made a patch like a man’s face on which someone had painted a hat with feathers. The floor was dirty and the blankets on the camp bed were stained, but both had been stuck over with paper flowers. It was a lively imaginative decadent room.
And everywhere there was writing. Tiny esoteric little scribbles on the walls, great large staggering crayon marks on the books. Pages and pages of sentences.
What did they all mean? At first the police could not make much of them but gradually they learnt to read the handwriting and then they saw it was all about the writer. Or variants of the writer. Sometimes she called herself Arlette Grey, sometimes Mary Lou Pallas, sometimes Cleopatra, once even I. Eye.
All this information was scribbled on the wall. The police only had to read it.
‘She was writing about all these people,’ said young Forbes. He was surprised.
‘She was writing about herself,’ said Charmian with certainty. ‘She was making up stories with herself as heroine.’
‘She was sick?’ He was incredulous; his imagination was limited.
‘No. I don’t think so. She merely carried to an extreme something many people do. Most of us have different faces to show to different people. She went a step further and made herself a different person – different name, different hair, different way of life. Plenty of adolescents have fantasy lives, hers was for real.’
‘I bet there aren’t many like her,’ said Forbes with conviction.
There Lies Your Love Page 14