‘Of course, I didn’t know then she was a pathological liar, a fantasy expert, with a different personality and a different name and a different wig for every place like a drunken sailor. No truth in her. No truth. She wasn’t even one of our students. She ought to have been working away like a good girl in London. Do you know how we met? On one of my long walks. I couldn’t see the colour of her hair that night. I suppose she bought the wig when she decided to take me up.’
On the table between them was the wig and the pile of letters. Mrs Grey was gripping her handbag tight.
‘Why did she play with me?’ said Tom in a voice like a sad, cross child.
‘Well, it wasn’t exactly a game,’ said her mother dryly.
‘You are very like her.’ He peered into her face.
‘You might call it her display technique. Oh, she must have been attracted to you.’
‘Oh, that’s the way to get yourself noticed all right,’ said Tom, some of his scenes with Mary Lou Pallas embroidered in scarlet on his mind. ‘But it can lead to a permanent display cabinet with a head-stone and a view of the church.’
‘She was unlucky,’ said her mother sharply.
‘I was unlucky,’ corrected Tom. ‘She never meant to help. Just torment me. Or perhaps she didn’t know what she really did want. I can sympathise with that.’ For the first time his attitude towards the dead girl seemed to relent a little.
‘I know what it is to love, too,’ said Mrs Grey. ‘You’re not the only one. I know what it is to love someone who has really only half an eye on you. Day after day. Year in, year out. One eye on you and the other on an accounting machine.’
Did she really say this aloud or did Tom just read it on her face?
‘You went on sending the letters addressed to Mary Lou Pallas here, although you knew she was dead and not real anyway. Why did you do that?’
‘I thought it might scare you. And, of course, I knew all about what Arlette planned. She had written it all down, in detail. I wanted to alarm you.’
‘You were right. You try getting letters from the grave,’ said Tom, beginning to talk wildly. ‘ They scared me. Lettres de mon sépulcre. French letters.’ His voice was rising.
‘Don’t be obscene,’ said Mrs Grey coldly.
‘Of course, I knew you weren’t really dead,’ cried Tom.
‘Don’t be too sure of that, I’m not.’ She studied his face. ‘It’s strange, I’ve been much more interested in you since I met you. I almost feel what Arlette saw in you.’
‘She would have seen it in any man,’ cried Tom. ‘It was herself. Her own face she wanted to see.’
‘Probably.’
‘I pressed my hands on her throat to stop her shouting at me. She died. All entirely by accident. I’m not a murderer, you know. Murderers have the intent to kill. I never had that.’
‘Not even your wife?’ Mrs Grey looked sceptical. If she was nervous, as perhaps she should have been, she did not show it. Occasionally her eyes rested on her handbag. Tom’s eyes were often turned towards the door.
‘I never intended to kill,’ repeated Tom.
‘Very few murderers do, I dare say, until there it is happening to them.’
‘No. Haigh did. Christie did, Crippen did, probably.’
‘They’re not common.’
‘Your daughter was common,’ shouted Tom. ‘What have you come here for?’
A single step in semantics had led him to ask the real question.
Mrs Grey took a large, bright knife from her bag and placed it on the table before her.
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know. Something horrible, I haven’t quite decided yet.’ She was eyeing him, speculatively.
Tom leapt up. ‘No. No. I’ve telephoned the police.’
‘You wouldn’t dare.’
‘I didn’t mention me,’ said Tom, looking cunning. ‘I said you were in danger. You were on a high spot going to jump.’
He gripped her wrist really hard. A tough, aggressive look had replaced his expression of doubt and surprise. They were on the roof with the wind already blowing in his ears and he was getting ready to push her. He tightened his grip.
His heart began to beat fast.
To his surprise she toppled over in the chair quite easily. When he looked at her again he saw that she was unconscious with great suffusions and swellings on her face as if she had been strangled.
He drew back, terrified and bewildered.
Someone had certainly strangled her, or had a good shot at it, and there was only himself in the room. They were not on the roof or anything like it; they had never left this room.
He picked up the wig and placed it on her head.
On the threshold Charmian paused. She saw Mrs Grey, half on the floor, half on the chair, she saw Tom bending over her.
‘Oh, Con, Con,’ said Tom, raising his head and looking at Charmian. ‘Come in like an avenging angel as usual.’
Charmian walked over to Mrs Grey; she had not heard Tom’s words.
‘Not dead,’ he muttered. ‘Not dead. None of you are dead.’
Charmian lowered Mrs Grey’s head and shoulders gently to the floor.
‘No. She’s not dead.’ She thought that was what he meant.
The woman’s eyes opened. ‘He attacked me. But he confessed he killed Arlette himself.’
‘I know,’ said Charmian.
‘I shall deny it,’ said Tom. His heart was banging inside his chest so loudly that he could hear it. ‘And they’ll have to take me seriously because I’m a poet. You have to take a poet seriously. You have to take a poet’s poetry seriously, you have to take a poet’s novel seriously …’
‘We’re not trying you for a novel,’ said Charmian.
‘He’s mad,’ croaked Mrs Grey; she was standing up. ‘No. He’s not mad. But I do think he’s unlucky.’ Tom stared at them, side by side. His heart was beating fast.
Faster. Faster. Faster. He fell forward across the table.
He was right in the end. Con – Charmian had killed him. He
lived for several days longer, but was never again conscious of
Tammuz-Tom.
‘A terrible business,’ said Pratt. ‘So young too. Poor girl.’ He paused.
‘I am wondering what my wife and I can do to help.’
‘Do you know them then?’ asked Charmian, surprised. Somehow the Grey family did not seem likely friends for Pratt and his wife.
‘I’ve known Nan King for years,’ said Pratt.
‘I was thinking of Arlette Grey’s family,’ said Charmian. ‘Anyway, they’re together again. John Grey came round and collected his wife. He seems to have forgiven her for bundling him up like an outsize baby and giving him sleeping tablets. It’s a strange way of life, but perhaps they both like it. By the way, do you know? – Mrs Grey’s not called Jane after all but Alma. She called herself Jane.’
‘Ascham’s gone,’ said Pratt, with satisfaction.
‘He has?’ Charmian stopped on her way to the door.
‘Yes. Shot back to London. Couldn’t wait to double off.’ He added cheerfully: ‘That’s these London men all over. Still, the whole case seems nice and tidy. No loose ends.’
‘Lovely,’ said Charmian bitterly.
‘By the way, I’m not leaving,’ Pratt called after her. ‘Just in case you’re interested.’
‘I never thought you were,’ muttered Charmian.
Charmian drove home fast, tears were pouring from her eyes.
‘Horrible, terrible, loathsome man.’ She made her little car go even faster. ‘I hate him.’
She felt as though she had been running a race and had suddenly discovered she was the only competitor.
She banged the car-door, stamped up the path and kicked open her front door. She was roaringly, royally angry.
Ascham stood by a window smoking a cigarette.
‘I told you: you ought to keep your doors locked.’
‘It wa
s locked,’ Charmian stammered.
‘Not against a policeman.’
He put down his cigarette and came towards her.
So that was the race I was running in, she thought. Atalanta’s race. She started to laugh.
‘What’s that?’
‘Just a race I was once running in.’
‘And did you win?’ He was kissing her. ‘It turned out to be the sort of race you couldn’t win. Or lose.’
‘Funny sort of race.’ This time he kissed her hair.
‘Oh well, it’s a race everyone runs in sooner or later.’
‘Eh?’ He raised his head and stared at her suspiciously for a moment. Then he too began to laugh. ‘ I suppose we have some future, you and I?’
The cigarette had burned away to ash when the telephone rang. It was Grizel.
‘We’ve picked up the Peeping Tom who nearly did for you,’ she announced.
‘Good. You’ve been quick.’
‘Tony Foss put us on to him.’ There was a hint of amusement in her voice. ‘He knew who it was of course. It was young Raymond York.’
‘I thought I put him away for six months,’ exclaimed Charmian.
‘You did. But they let him out early because he was a good boy.’ No doubt about the amusement in Grizel’s voice now. ‘He was after you.’
‘Nasty little boy.’
‘There’s a hint he may have been put up to it by one of your contacts. A man called Peter Hatt. You must have trodden on his toes somehow.’
‘I might have done,’ said Charmian, thinking that Peter Hatt perhaps knew more about the drugs Nan King got than he’d felt safe to reveal. ‘Yes, I might have done.’ How strangely one case interacted upon another. Mrs King had died because she was not a real person. Arlette Grey had no life, her relationship with her family had destroyed her, so she had to invent a life, or lives, for herself.
‘You want to watch the company you keep,’ observed Grizel, putting the receiver down.
Charmian drove to work cheerfully next morning. She glanced at her watch, ten minutes late. She felt a wild desire to be even later, to somehow fly a flag.
Laurel Rise lay to her right and for the first time for weeks she did not look at it. She was sad about Tom Gilroy, but it was all over.
No trouble there now, she thought. She had forgotten how close she had come to liking Tom.
She was not quite right. In the Carter house there was some trouble.
Jim was shouting to his wife.
‘Emily! I thought I asked you to check on their reading. Read it yourself first to see if it was suitable.’
‘I did read it first.’
‘Emily,’ cried her husband in outrage.
‘It’s about someone their own age, just a child,’ explained Emily.
‘That’s the whole point,’ cried her husband.
‘It’s quite interesting.’
‘Emily, have you read all this book?’
‘Oh well, not every page maybe. I was pretty busy just then. It was when we had the fire. But enough to see what it’s about. It’s about this girl and she’s running away from her mother …’
‘That’s the grossest understatement of the plot of Lolita I’ve ever heard.’
‘She dies in the end, poor thing,’ said Emily.
Her husband went upstairs, lay down on his bed and beat his pillow with his clenched fist.
‘I was thirty-two and a father before I read Lolita,’ he shouted.
On the stairs leading to her office, Charmian met Grizel.
‘Glad we caught that Peeping Tom,’ said Grizel. ‘I still worry about you alone in that house. You ought not to be.’
‘I won’t be in the house alone much longer,’ said Charmian with a smile.
‘No? Oh Charmian, how lovely,’ began Grizel.
‘Yes, it will be nice. Someone to come home to and all that.’
‘Come home to? But won’t you be at home, Charmian?’
‘Someone has to keep us both,’ said Charmian.
Grizel’s eyes widened. ‘More husbands,’ she began.
‘Husbands?’ Charmian looked grave. ‘ What can you be thinking of? I’m going to keep a dog. A dog called Bobbie.’
From down below they heard a sudden hubbub. A woman was talking in a loud distressed voice.
‘Down at the Infants’ School. No, I don’t know who it is. Oh, do send someone quickly, please.’
Charmian and Grizel looked at each other and then hurried down the stairs to the work that was waiting for them.
Copyright
First published 1965 by Michael Joseph
This edition published 2015 by Bello
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There Lies Your Love Page 16