‘Well, I don’t know what the statistics are. They don’t all get into the police records.’
‘Didn’t she have any paper?’ Forbes traced a line of writing right up to the corner of the ceiling. ‘She must have stood on a chair to do this.’
Charmian was silent. Because, of course, in a way she hadn’t had any paper. Paper meant an audience, somewhere, somehow, and Arlette had not enough of an audience for all she wanted to project. ‘I want to live my life not write it,’ she had really been crying when she wrote on the walls.
‘Poor dangerous little girl,’ thought Charmian. ‘You had a future, a life, a youth. It was no time for you to be writing on walls.’
The chalk came away on her hands.
Charmian moved her neck stiffly. There was a great spreading bruise on one side. She had stared at it in her hand-mirror with interested pleasure.
Ascham did not see at once how all this changed his picture of Arlette’s death. He still thought she had hardly known the person who had killed her. All along he had recognised that she was surrounded by fantasies so that now he found it hard to pick out the one real fact among them. Obviously he had belittled Arlette; she was of more stature than he had judged. Although he had thought her guilty he had also thought her innocent. He had thought that she died because she fell in with the wrong sort of person, whereas on the contrary, it was the end of a plan, her plan. The wrong end possibly, but certainly an end Arlette had envisaged.
She had written it on the wall. In large letters she had written several times: August 8th. August 8. August 8.
She had written her birthday over and over again, more as if she had not expected to reach it.
‘I am alone in my maison,’ she had scrawled. This too more than once. And it was written on her body.
The medical report rushed through was spread before them. Charmian hadn’t read it all. She was very tired. But one tiling stood out with great clarity
The hurried post-mortem revealed bruises on Arlette’s neck, very like those on Con Gilroy’s. Strong hands had seized her by the neck and held her. And yet although it had been a strong and steady pressure it need not have been a killing pressure. Unlike Con she had not been strangled. Perhaps she had not even been murdered.
Arlette, her mother’s healthy child, had suffered from status lymphaticus. In her rounded plump body a greatly enlarged thymus had almost completely covered the heart like a shawl.
She might have died any time. She had died a simple unfulfilled girl. She had been a virgin. Charmian and Ascham accepted this without comment: they had no call to do otherwise.
John Grey had come down and identified his daughter and also some of the writing on the walls. Some of it, he said, he couldn’t be sure of. No doubt no one could be sure of it. How does a fly write? How does a strange spirit write? How does someone write whom you never really knew?
He denied that he knew about the car or the garage. He was her father and he knew nothing. He did not issue the denial with much energy perhaps because the question was not asked with much force. No one really believed he was the man. Of all the people involved he seemed the most innocent and the most harmed.
Almost absently, just as he was departing and as if what he said could be of no possible interest, he pointed out that the coat hanging behind the door was his wife’s and was in fact the one she had worn when she left his home.
‘She’s been here then,’ he said looking round the room almost benignly ‘This is where she came, I suppose. I always thought she knew more about Arlette than I knew.’
So Ascham was wrong all round, thought Charmian with detachment.
‘How?’ asked Ascham.
‘She has special eyes, my wife.’ He laughed. ‘Like a bird.’
Charmian had a sudden vivid picture of Jane Grey hovering over Deerham Hills, like a vulture or an eagle, looking for someone. Looking for whom?
Their conversation was interrupted by a message.
‘Telephone call received. Woman going to jump from high roof. Address given: 26 Laurel Rise.’
‘That’s the Gilroy house,’ said Charmian.
Ascham pointed out: ‘There’s a man on duty up there. Why isn’t he reporting this?’
‘You can’t jump from those roofs,’ said Charmian.
‘You can jump from any roof.’
‘What I mean is: the roofs in Laurel Rise are very difficult to get on to – only a sky-light, and it’s not high when you get there. You couldn’t count on killing yourself.
‘I don’t understand,’ she added uneasily. ‘ I don’t understand.’
Chapter Thirteen
‘THERE they go again,’ said Tom. He was watching a spatter of letters drop through on to the rug behind the door. They were all in white envelopes this time, all suggesting, in their strange way, that Mary Lou Pallas, who was Arlette Grey, was still alive and letters could be addressed to her.
He could see them clearly from where he sat at a table in the living-room, but he made no move to pick them up. There was no surprise about them.
‘Nasty,’ he murmured. When he was a boy there had been an advertisement for syrup. A dead lion and bees rising up in a swarm. Out of his strength, sweetness. Surely he couldn’t be remembering it accurately? Perhaps he was. Out of strength, sweetness was being drawn, drop by poisonous drop.
He ignored the letters, each a little puncture into his spirit.
Tom put his mind into the drawer and drew out something wrapped in newspaper. Without unwrapping it he placed it on the table in front of him. The paper was torn and one yellow strand appeared.
He studied his grisly trophy. ‘I pick, I choose,’ he murmured. ‘ I pick, I choose.’ It might have been a bundle of knitting wool, it might have been a human head. It was a yellow wig.
He knew it wasn’t true that he picked or chose. He had not picked nor had he chosen. Especially the yellow wig. He might have been chosen.
From the moment Tom had found the yellow wig he knew the sort of trouble he was in. He knew the type, not the exact specification, but the general form. He was in trouble.
You can’t deceive a poet. They nearly always have definite forebodings of their own doom.
Deerham Hills was a small town. True, it was growing every year and now had three separate housing developments, but it remained an ambitious little town with its eyes on London. One of the ways it showed this was in the way information and gossip sped round. No one ever had to wait for news, someone was always ready to tell him and add on something extra as well. Gossip spread out from the centre of the town where it was fed into two big centres of dissemination, Lubbock’s food store and the Bus Station, from which it circled the town in every bus and delivery van that went out. This time the story was about Arlette Grey and her dead body and the room. Deerham Hills knew all about the room. The whispers spread, carrying always an undertone of tension and doubt. Deerham Hills didn’t like the burden it was carrying. One version of the story said that two girls lived in the room and that one had killed the other. Another way of telling the tale was that only one girl lived there and she was quite, quite mad. Other people said however that no one lived in the room, it was all a fake and the police were fools to be taken in. A gloss on this variation was that the police knew all about the room and were not taken in.
In spite of his comparative isolation, the stories soon reached Tom. In no time at all he was in possession of the story of the room and what the police thought of it or were supposed to think of it.
‘But my own position’s not much clearer,’ he said to himself sadly. ‘I hardly know what to think.’ But inside him a little censor was busy making quite clear-headed articulate remarks. ‘You are frightened, not ill-informed,’ it told him. ‘You are right to be frightened. Your position is dangerous. But you are not, we repeat not, in any serious mental confusion.’ Brushing aside one of its utterances which asserted that he was a rabbit and a hunted one at that, but certainly not unmoved by it, Tom said
aloud, ‘I must somehow find out more about the room.’
He paced up and down his sitting-room and then looked out of the window, as if this would clarify his thoughts.
‘The woman Daniels would tell me all I want to know if I found out the right way to ask her.’ But inside him the counter-Tom, who spoke in a higher, shriller voice, told him that he would never find the right way to speak to Charmian. Yes, he was right to think she found him interesting, but no, there would never be a true conversation, a real question-and-answer game between them.
If he asked Charmian the question: Please tell me was it really only one girl who lived in the room in East Tweem? he could guess her answer.
‘We think so,’ she would reply gravely. ‘ So it seems.’
‘And who was she?’
‘Arlette Grey.’
‘But I knew her as Mary Lou Pallas.’
There was no need for Charmian to answer, even in his imagination. Tom knew the answer: yes and yes and yes.
Tom looked quite calm, even relaxed, sitting there, but in fact he was well away, floating high above his body. Every so often he had a terrible feeling that he was going to crash-land back in reality, and yet he always managed to rise again. His head was up there in the corner but his feet felt very heavy, like lead. He had drunk a good deal of brandy.
Since yesterday when the body of the girl had been found and Bobbie had been led off barking like some disgraced yet holy symbol, Tom had been drinking. In the houses around him signs of distress were apparent. Doris and Burgen were working in their garden, silently, but side by side. Laurence and Ben were quarrelling, for real this time. Ben had already written away about a new teaching job in Canada. Emily Carter and her husband had tied up the dog and made each of the children promise to be good. It seemed an ineffectual way of trying to live a better life but it was all Emily felt up to. ‘ We’ve all got to be better people,’ she said solemnly to her husband. ‘I feel so terribly guilty. As if it was all my fault that this poor girl is dead and Con too. It’s a family thing. When you think about it – it must be.’ Emily always identified. There wasn’t a guilt in the world that Emily hadn’t at one time or the other tried on for size. She had been guilty about Hiroshima (although she was only ten at the time), guilty of Sharpeville, and guilty of Dallas, Texas (although she had been having a baby that November). Her husband shook his head silently. ‘ I love you, Emily,’ he said finally.
Away down town even Inspector Pratt had for the moment turned his mind away from his worries about his health, his wife’s health, and his wife’s friend Mrs Nan King, who had plainly killed herself because she hated her life and her friends. She had been taking drugs for years. Pratt stopped thinking about this and thought about the dead girl. He was thinking about Charmian and Ascham, too, and his own retirement.
Tom had knocked over a jug of water, deriving from the beginning of his session when he was still adding water to his brandy, and it was dripping steadily on to his knee and down his leg.
‘My sap, my sweetness, dripping out,’ he thought.
The damp was warm and sticky. It felt like blood.
‘Torn apart by the women like Orpheus,’ said Tom, abandoning the concept of his sweetness. ‘ Wasn’t Tammus another name for Orpheus? An eastern name for him? Tammuz-Tom. The Eastern Tom,’ he mused. Perhaps he could make a poem.
As he sat there staring at the letters he remembered that the time for the regular delivery of letters was over. He walked over and picked up one letter. It was unstamped.
‘No postman delivered this.’ It was already surprising that the Post Office had continued to deliver letters to a strange girl at this address without comment. Perhaps they didn’t have a very good liaison with the police.
Tom knew now that the hour of attack was at hand. Soon there would be someone at the door.
‘The postman is my friend,’ he said to himself. And then loudly, ‘I’m not going to be killed. I’m not going to be the one that gets killed. No, I’m not.’
He put out his hand and reached for the telephone. ‘Get me the police,’ he said, in a loud whisper which yet almost choked him. ‘She’s going to jump. From a high place. You’d better come quick.’ He gave his address.
The bell rang at the front door.
‘How imbecile,’ he said, ‘ to ring the bell. Obscene really,’ he amended.
He went to the door and opened it. On the back of the front door there had for a long time been a large peeling area of paint where something corrosive had once got spilled and Con had never got around to repainting it. Now, quite distinctly the patch had taken on a look of a girl’s face. Put the yellow wig on it and it would have been complete. Complete but not pleasant.
‘You strange and hateful woman,’ he said aloud to it.
He was already dazed and off balance when he saw the person standing on the threshold. He pushed his face forward towards her because he had not got his spectacles on and could not see very well. His eyes had certainly got worse lately. His heart began to beat faster.
‘Oh God, you’re not dead.’ He leaned back against the wall.
‘Dead? Of course I’m not dead.’ She pushed past him into the hall and closed the door behind her. ‘Don’t want to be seen.’
‘I’m surprised you haven’t been. I hope you have.’
‘The police don’t see everything. You ought to know that.’
Tom was silent. He put his hand on to his wrist and felt his pulse.
‘You won’t die naturally,’ said his visitor scornfully, observing him.
‘Better than live unnaturally,’ said Tom with a shudder. ‘You ought to be dead.’
‘What are you talking about?’ said his visitor, pulling up a chair and sitting down at the table. She too could see the wig but she made no comment, although she looked at it hard. Her thin rather beautiful face was without expression.
‘I shall have to kill you all over again.’ Tom’s voice was growing fainter. He put his hands to his face. ‘ Oh God … and I don’t want to. I’m so tired of the way I feel.’
Mrs Grey struck him hard on the shoulder, a stiff rousing blow. ‘I’m not Arlette. You know they’ve found Arlette.’
‘It was Mary Lou Pallas I killed,’ said Tom dully. ‘ Till her wig fell off. That gave her a new lease of life, I suppose.’ He got a grip on himself. ‘But that of course is rubbish. People, once dead and buried, do stay dead. You’re her mother, I suppose, You look alike. That’s what deceived me.’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Grey. ‘You see the resemblance.’
‘I do now.’
‘It’s strange you should think us alike,’ said Mrs Grey, almost with satisfaction. ‘Hardly anyone notices. Yet you saw it at once.’
‘She’s on my mind.’
There was silence.
‘And you’ve kept on sending these letters? She sent the first lot herself but she’s dead.’ The letters had shocked Tom. They had been the first hint that the scheme had got out of control. He had never consented to letters addressed to Mary Lou Pallas at his address to anger Con.
Mrs Grey nodded.
‘How did you know what to do?’
‘Arlette had it all written down in a notebook. The scheme, everything.’
‘Ah yes, the scheme,’ said Tom. ‘I expect there were things written down there she never told me,’ he added bitterly. ‘There was plenty she never told me. Like my real place in the scheme.’ He looked down at his hands, which trembled. ‘What I was really supposed to mean in it. I was a victim all right. Well, you know all about it if you’ve read it up so I needn’t elaborate. We were going to get me out of prison.’ He said it casually, factually, as if it was the most normal thing in the world.
‘Arlette was in it herself,’ said her mother sharply. She was certainly a clever woman.
‘Ah yes, but I didn’t know that then. At all events she wasn’t in my prison.’
Mrs Grey looked at him sombrely. Perhaps she was thinking that there was on
ly room for one inside his prison.
‘Con had me in her thrall. She was the belle dame sans merci. Very sans merci when it suited her. And I wanted to escape.’
‘And yet you loved her?’
‘Arlette had that written down, too, had she? Of course, nothing would have mattered if I hadn’t loved Con.’
‘You needed help?’
‘Your daughter needed help, too,’ Tom pointed out. ‘She was on the run as well.’
‘And from you, too,’ he added vindictively. ‘Don’t make out you were an ideal parent. You threw a bottle of disinfectant over her, and ruined her skirt, and told her she was a dirty girl.’
‘She cut off her hair and sent it to me in a box,’ said her mother dully. ‘I suppose she needed it short for the wig.’
‘Like mother, like daughter. She hid her things where Con could find them. On purpose. That’s what she did to me, when she knew the police had her down as missing and were looking for her. I didn’t know. I thought she was a girl called Mary Lou Pallas, a perfectly straightforward little wanton, but she knew who she was.’
‘Don’t feel too sure about that,’ said her mother.
‘I ought to have felt sorrow, guilt that she was dead. I do feel guilt, plenty of it, but not for her. I just felt angry at what she’d got me into.’
‘What you got yourself into.’ She was angry. ‘Let’s put the blame, fair and square, where it belongs.’
‘We were going to shame Con into a divorce. And I was attracted to Mary Lou Pallas.’ He looked confused. ‘That’s what I called her.’
Mrs Grey nodded.
‘Ah, but I found her attractive with her strange tales – rape – incest. It was exciting.’
Her mother laughed, but without amusement. ‘Never left home until she was seventeen.’
‘She told me she was pregnant. That made it sound so much more serious. I started to get frightened.’
‘Never was pregnant, never could have been pregnant,’ said Mrs Grey in a hard voice.
‘I knew it was not me,’ said Tom, half to himself. ‘ We didn’t know that sort of relationship. Couldn’t really. But I thought of all the others – the medical students she lived with …’ he stopped, looking confused again. There hadn’t been any medical students. It was all lies.
There Lies Your Love Page 15