‘Yes, Lou’s all right, not a bad sort. I don’t know how she came to have a sister like Joan. But no one’s perfect.’
‘You know them,’ she persevered. ‘ Do you think Lou knew what was going on back then?’
‘Well, of course,’ said Baby. ‘Course she did.’
She could be wrong, she often was, but she was a shrewd guesser, born, she claimed, out of being a hairdresser, which taught you a lot about human nature.
‘Thanks for that, I’ll bear it in mind,’ Charmian said, finishing the conversation.
I wish Dolly was here with her own brand of common sense, she can be candid and earthy but she gets it right, Charmian thought to herself.
Rewley banged on the door and walked in.
‘I hear Dolly has fled the country with a handsome CID chap from London.’
‘Rubbish,’ Charmian was abrupt. ‘She’s gone to London to see what she can get on Rhos Campbell.’
‘That’s not what the tale is down below.’
‘Well, shut them up.’
‘Oh, I did. I said Dolly would never elope without telling me.’ He rubbed his chin. ‘I don’t think they believe me.’
He produced a dark parcel from under his arm. ‘ Edith asked me to give you this. I don’t think she cared to handle it too much. Can’t say I blame her. It smells. Also, I think she wants to keep out of your way.’
Charmian grabbed the file and confirmed that it was the one she wanted. It looked as though it had spent the last decade in a dustbin. ‘I was a bit short with her. Still I’ve got what I want.’
She turned to Rewley. ‘So what did you come to see me about?’
‘You’ve heard about the woman killed in Staines?’
‘Yes.’ A short answer and a bleak one.
Rewley knew what she meant. Personally, he wanted to move in on this case because the woman had been brutally treated and he was against this. But he could only move if Charmian did.
‘It seems as though the boyfriend did her in.’
‘Not in our area,’ she said. ‘Nothing to do with us.’
‘Cheasey is though, he comes from Cheasey. And he’s gone missing. May be in the Windsor area. In the Great Park.’
‘I shall ignore him. Let him stay missing.’
‘He’s called Charlie Rattle … you remember that name. You put his father away. For killing his mother.’
Charmian looked down at her hands in her lap and plaited her fingers. She remembered the murder of Edna Rattle, and she remembered her killer, he had been called Charlie Rattle too.
‘Runs in the family,’ she said.
A nasty killing it had been too, brutal and messy. Not that Edna had been a delight as a woman: into drink, drugs and on the game.
‘But not my business unless asked. And I haven’t been asked. And don’t you go looking to be asked.’
‘Well, you did want to be kept informed. Always. You said advance information was invaluable.’
‘Oh, go and emigrate,’ she said, and then, as he went to the door, added, ‘And before you go, get the details of the latest family game of the Rattles.’
Then she turned to the file of papers which Rewley had brought: it smelt of dust and something that might be mice, because it was wrapped in stained brown paper and tied up with string, both of which looked chewed.
‘Needs surgical gloves to handle this safely,’ she muttered. ‘ No wonder Edith didn’t care to touch it.’
She cut the string, then folded back the paper. Inside was a dark cardboard folder. It was a thin affair, not packed with papers.
‘That probably represents the part Rhos played, or anyway how the police saw her: the supporting player.’
The folder opened stiffly as if no hand had touched it for decades. A dried, flattened fly was on the top page.
She found herself feeling sorry for Rhos: doubly dead and buried with a fly.
She shuffled through the papers, using her fingertips. Before her were the broken shards of the investigation into Rhos’s part in the murders.
Four girls had been killed, in groups of two, so only two episodes. The girls had been friends, and in each case they had been out together when they had disappeared.
One pair, Rosy Ridge and Pat Bacon, both aged fourteen, had been swimming and were cycling home together. Their cycles had been found, neatly parked and neatly padlocked outside a small park on the outskirts of Merrywick, on the Cheasey side. The two girls had been killed in the same way, stabbed several times, in the park itself.
The other pair: Susan Meridan and Margaret King, twelve and thirteen respectively, had been walking home together from school in Windsor. They lived near each other but were not otherwise close friends. They were killed in the same way as the first pair – stabbed many times. Susan and Margaret lived in Merrywick but in the only area that could be called poor. They were found side by side, in a half torn-apart old bus in a used-car lot near their homes.
Charmian tried to visualize the scenes, but she had to remember that in the decades since these deaths, there had been a great deal of building which had changed both Merrywick and Cheasey. She knew, for instance, that the area in which Susan and Margaret had lived and died, then not prosperous, had now been completely rebuilt with a large luxury apartment house and a hotel. The used-car lot had long since gone.
A symbol, something between a star and a cross, had been incised with a sharp knife on each girl. The first two girls, Rosy and Pat, had been marked, but less clearly, as if the killer was just learning how to do it. There was a photograph of these carved symbols: on the upper arm in Rosy’s case, and on the buttocks in Pat’s. Charmian saw that it bore a remarkable resemblance to the marks on the bodies of the two present-day victims.
Peculiar. Was it coincidence? She could not believe it.
Distantly, she could hear a voice saying, ‘Who would have seen the original cut and remembered it?’
The answer was any of the police team who had seen the bodies, the pathologist who had examined the victims, and the killer. Oh, and anyone who had seen the photographs if they appeared in any newspaper. She must check on that possibility. Nor could the families of the four girls be ignored.
She picked up the telephone. ‘Rewley? Oh good, I want you to check on the newspapers of the time when the four girls were killed and see if the symbols they were marked with were reproduced in any of them.’
‘Right,’ he accepted his mission without enthusiasm.
‘Shouldn’t take long, and don’t forget local newspapers as well as the nationals. When you’ve done that, try and locate the families and see if anyone there saw the symbol.’
‘That might take some time.’
‘Yes, depends how many you manage to locate. Don’t spend too long on it.’
Rewley promised with feeling that he would not.
‘We will leave the police team and the forensic people and the doctor who would have seen the cuts till later. I am not convinced they could have anything to do with these two new killings.’
‘I’m glad about that.’
‘But possibilities have to be ruled out.’
As Rewley passed through the outer office, he muttered quietly but so he could be heard, ‘I think our respected boss is trying to drive me mad.’
Edith looked up. ‘Oh, Miss Daniels wouldn’t do anything like that … but she has been a bit twitchy lately.’
‘Perhaps it’s herself she’s driving mad.’
Edith looked shocked.
‘Just joking.’
‘Of course, I knew you were, Inspector.’ She nodded. ‘ I never take any of you seriously.’
Charmian had opened her door and heard this. ‘Don’t you now? Well, take this seriously: get all the papers in here photocopied for me, I can’t bear the smell or touch of them. Then bring them back soonest.’
She shut her door and made herself a cup of coffee. But it wasn’t the smell or the dry crumbly touch of the paper that repulsed her, it was that e
verything she had read created a vivid picture of those four girls as they died.
It was a horrible scene, truly shocking.
And through it all she could see Joan’s face, smiling in her cloud of bright yellow hair, and behind her, not smiling but staring through the hair, was Rhos.
She drank the coffee and by the time the cup was empty, she had admitted to herself that neither Rewley nor Edith had been entirely wrong. Twitchy wasn’t a bad word.
‘I cannot enter into the mind of the killer,’ she said aloud. ‘But I must stop him entering into mine.’
By the time Edith was back with the original documents and the copies, Charmian was able to smile.
Edith looked relieved. ‘Couldn’t help reading a bit here and there as I worked,’ she said. ‘Strange young woman. I mean weird, very weird.’
‘You’re ahead of me.’ Charmian remained amiable. Edith was new in the job, and naive, to reveal that she read what she photocopied. Of course she did, Charmian knew this, but better not to say so.
She picked up the folder of papers. The first document was the first interview with Rhos, which had obviously been conducted formally. Just the usual, regular line of questioning. Clearly the police had nothing on Rhos and were just fishing around. Yes, she knew Joan Dingham. They were old friends. No, she did not know any of the girls who had died, nor could she understand how her name came into it.
Very little was established at the first interview. In the next, she agreed that she had been seen walking in the park where the girls, Rosy Ridge and Pat Bacon, were later found dead. But she often walked there. So did many people. Yes, she knew where the used-car lot was, not far from where she lived and she had probably walked the dog there more than once. No, Susan Meridan and Margaret King were not known to her. Did Joan Dingham go on these walks with her? They were friends, no answer beyond that. Yes, she had bought a sharp knife in the local hardware shop: Kitchen Devil it was called. The purchase had been made several weeks before the murders.
That would be the knife that later turned up in Joan’s garage, Charmian told herself. In her car, and stained with blood. The blood of both girls. One of the key features of the case against Joan.
No, Rhos said, she had no idea what had become of the knife. Knives came and went, didn’t they? One of the policemen conducting the questioning, Sergeant Mack, had said that not in his kitchen they didn’t.
He probably should not have said this because after that Rhos ceased to answer questions. Mutism set in. It had probably already set in for Joan, who had been questioned earlier.
Charmian read on, she could see the case that the police had gradually assembled against the two women.
Both Joan and Rhos had been seen near the sites where both sets of bodies had been found. Joan’s car had been parked not far away on the night of the first killing, and had been noticed by another car owner, who had resented it being in the road where he lived, and who had taken the registration number down. The same car could have been in the neighbourhood at the time of the second killing but this time there had been no sharp-eyed cross observer, just a woman out with her dog who thought she might have seen it. Only might, nothing concrete there.
There had been several other questioning sessions, all conducted according to the rules, with Rhos and her solicitor and no answers forthcoming.
It was obvious to Charmian that several other likely suspects would have been undergoing questioning at this time, but that Rhos’s silence would have sharpened the feeling against her.
A search of Joan’s house had turned up the knife and, hidden in the attic, they had found bloodstained clothes. A jersey was identified by a neighbour as belonging to Rhos.
Charmian raised her head from the papers. She could see the police reasoning: two nicely dressed women could accost the girls in public without raising any fears. Probably they had spoken to the girls earlier, creating a friendly relationship.
But what had been crucial in fixing the murders on to Joan and through her on to Rhos were two facts that had been carefully kept from the press. One girl had had her nails painted a vibrant silvery green, while the other wore a soft pretty pink. The other pair had been scented with an expensive new scent called Diorama and one of them had the nail on the little finger of her left hand painted purple.
In Joan’s house they had found a small beauty pouch with several bottles of nail varnish, coloured from green through pink to purple. There had also been a small selection of scents, of which Diorama was one. These were the sophisticated sweetmeats which had lured four teenagers of the seventies to their deaths.
Next, Charmian found a photograph of Rhosamond among the papers. A plump ordinary-looking young woman wearing big spectacles – this style had just begun to be fashionable about that time, Charmian remembered – her hair, long and curly.
Not a face you would notice or think about after you had left her.
Charmian turned the photo over. On the back Rhos had written: ‘To us from Rhos’. No message, no date, and possibly the photograph had never been given to its intended recipient, since here it was in the archive.
Who was ‘us’? she asked herself. Probably Joan and Rhos.
Beneath the photograph was a small, blue book. Inside was a diary.
It was a diary of very short handwritten comments, scrawled comments. No dates except for the names of the days. It seemed to be from the last week or so of Rhos’s life. The book had been immersed in water and passages were obscured, turned into blue patches where the ink had run.
Sunday Not a holy day nor holiday except for some. The police for instance. No questioning today. I would keep my silence, of course. As told to. Sometimes, I begin to question my docility. But I have been … so long now, and got pleasure and given pleasure, accepted advice if not orders, that I do not know if I can change now. What I … cannot …
Monday Start of a new week, Feels like the old one. Not good. I can’t get through to Joan … Fear … But I have been told what to do. As always, I do it. Where is the joy, where is the pleasure? It is all gone … Revolting … There has to be a way out.
Tuesday
Police day. I say nothing.
Then a splodge of text where the water had made the ink run. Charmian could make out the word: pain. Pain was part of a
sentence the rest of which was lost. ‘Whose pain?’ she asked herself. She could make out nothing more of this entry. The paper was
very fragile and there were several holes.
Wednesday. This had been a densely written page but the ink
had run creating a pale blue wavy pattern. But here and there was
the shadow of a sentence.
Charmian thought she could read – I have been used … Joan … She … The name Joan was clear enough, but she, or was it he?
There was not much more to be got out of Wednesday but Thursday was clearer.
By Thursday, Rhos was letting her feelings run wild. Once again that phrase: I am used …
Charmian frowned. Not easy to read. Might be, just possibly might be: I am abused, Rhos’s writing was unclear.
In the middle of the page of indecipherable scribbles one sentence stood out.
I have been used, instructed, taught, I can do no more …
they must be on their own.
I cannot go on.
Another set of words stood out: the Great Park … and then the lake was mentioned a few words on. The words in between could not be deciphered. At the bottom of the page were the words: I shall have to say.
What she was going to say was unknown.
That was the lot. After this a whole block of pages had been torn out. By whose hand, she could only guess. But she was beginning to make guesses.
The next piece of paper that interested her was the account of Rhos’s death. She had been missing for several days before her body had been found, caught in weeds in the lake in the Great Park. One of the park rangers had found her, half hidden by all the greenery.
The police surgeon’s report settled for suicide. The inquest on her had produced a verdict of death by drowning. There was a contusion at the back of her head, probably caused as she jumped in. The lake was not that deep, but you can drown anywhere if you put your mind to it.
She had left no letter. No signs that she was preparing to depart this life were to be found in the small neat flat she lived in. She had travelled by train from Richmond to Windsor, then walked to the park. She had travelled first class, the ticket was in her pocket. Her handbag, with the diary in it, was later dredged from the bottom of the lake.
By this time, Joan was already under arrest. She did not comment on the suicide of her friend. She smiled sometimes, kissed her sister when she visited, but hardly spoke to her, and to the police not at all.
Mutism was operating.
Oddly enough there was a photograph of Joan in the file. A much younger Joan, hair not so puffed up and yellow, just falling about her face in a natural way. She had a half smile. Across the bottom she had written: Love From Joan.
Charmian closed the folder and walked to the window to look out. She looked in the direction of the Great Park. She imagined that she could just see the tops of the trees. The Great Park, the old hunting ground of the Norman kings, stretched all around Windsor, Merrywick and Cheasey. They had hunted for pleasure but also to eat, since the enormous royal household needed the venison that they killed.
‘Nice old world, full of killers.’ Charmian said aloud. She turned away from the window. ‘And they are my job, my career has been built around them and on them, so what does that make me?’
A kind of partner.
Then her good sense reasserted itself: she was doing a job that had to be done, and which she did well. It was the theatrical element to these murders that was getting to her.
She picked up the file and a small piece of paper fluttered out. On it was drawn, in thin pencil lines, the symbol between a cross and a star which had been cut into the girls’ skin, and which she thought she had seen again in the latest victims.
Underneath was written: Our Sign.
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