At that moment the constable in the police car parked fifty yards away, where the track became too narrow to drive over, signalled to Parrish, and he plop-plopped over, puffing and wiping his forehead. Two minutes later he was back.
‘That was Barstowe. The husband’s been contacted. He’ll be there on the down train in three quarters of an hour. They contacted him at Audley End, and he changed trains, I guess. Nasty news to be given on a railway station. I’d better go and meet him I suppose.’
‘Odd,’ said Sergeant Feather. ‘Why hadn’t he reported the disappearance earlier? Doc said he thought she’d been dead nigh on twelve hours or more. You wouldn’t just blithely get on the train and go to London if your wife hadn’t shown up all night.’
‘Some wives don’t get their husband’s breakfast,’ said Inspector Parrish. ‘And as you’d know if you had the sense to become a married man – plenty don’t sleep in the same room as their husbands.’
‘Some advertisement for marriage,’ said Sergeant Feather. ‘Still, I’m impressed by your knowledge of this woman’s sleeping habits – sleeps alone, wears make-up in bed. First the consequence of the second, perhaps. Anything else you know you haven’t passed on yet?’
Stephen Feather sometimes became unusually sharp when the subject of marriage came up. He resented Parrish’s rather obvious attempts to push him into the arms of Sergeant Underwood.
‘I want the whole area round here searched,’ said Parrish, ignoring him. ‘With a toothcomb – or a bloody fine rake, anyway. I’ll get you reinforcements from Chetley and Highton and round about if I can. Meanwhile no one’s allowed anywhere near here – keep the blighters where they are now.’
And he waved his hand to the spot some way off along the path into Twytching proper, where a couple of constables were keeping under their beady eyes a scared but delighted little band of Twytchingites, who were watching the every movement of all the policemen on the scene, some using field-glasses and all with expressions on their faces that suggested they were congratulating themselves on performing their public duty. They would have worn the same expression if they had been watching a pageant of Twytching history, or if they had gone along to see Miss Potts perform a ritual burning of obscene books in the High Street.
‘Have fun,’ said Parrish, ‘whatever you do,’ and he lumbered off towards the police car.
This was not the last they saw of him that morning, though. A little over an hour later, when Sergeant Feather’s stomach clock was telling him it was his lunch-time or close on, he lumbered back.
‘Found anything?’ Parrish asked Feather, who had been bent over or actually on his hands and knees most of the time since he left, and hardly felt in the best of moods.
‘A tin of boot-polish, three Coca-Cola bottles, twenty-four empty cigarette packets, and last Thursday’s Daily Mirror,’ said Stephen Feather, ‘and various things I wouldn’t mention to your chaste ears.’
‘Splendid work,’ said Parrish. ‘Keep at it. I’m sure they all fit in somewhere – help to make the pattern clear. It’s all a matter of finding the right pattern, you know. Eliminate the improbable, and what you have left is the bloody impossible. Don’t miss an inch of ground. I’m off to have a cuppa at the station.’
‘What did you do with Mailer, then?’ asked Feather.
‘Left him at home,’ said Parrish comfortably. ‘Poor chappie’s just lost his wife. If he did it, we’ll get him, sure as eggs. If he didn’t, he’ll need time to recover from the shock, talk to that daughter of his, and so on. It’s not for an old bachelor like me to intrude on him. I’ll just drink a leisurely cuppa and then go round to him in an hour or so.’
‘Don’t keep mentioning tea,’ said Stephen, bending back to his task. ‘It’s all right for some.’
‘I’d have sent some out for you, but I doubt I can spare the men,’ said Parrish. ‘Still, you’ll be through in a couple of hours or so, won’t you? Taste even better by then.’
And he lumbered off again, shaking with benevolent laughter. Sergeant Feather sometimes thought he was making his life on duty so uncomfortable in order to make the thought of marriage and a home more attractive. Why doesn’t he mind his own damned business? said Feather to himself, digging up a dead match embedded in the soil. He suspected Parrish already had plans for him and Sergeant Underwood to walk out of the local church through an archway of raised truncheons. Very romantic, no doubt, and a suitably ludicrous ending to a marriage conducted by the present vicar of Twytching. But Stephen Feather did not intend to be married off by anyone, least of all by his bachelor boss. Stephen Feather did not, for the moment, intend to be married at all. And meanwhile there were another two hours or more of Coca-Cola bottles, empty match-boxes and contraceptives. And Inspector Parrish, meanwhile, was no doubt sitting in the station, feet up, drinking his tea. Roll on promotion.
• • •
Arnold Mailer was a tall man, and he and Inspector Parrish seemed comfortably to fill the tiny study – the smallest bedroom upstairs, in fact – which was where they talked later in the day. Mailer had asked him to sit down in the lounge, and had seemed to assume that Cressida, wide-eyed yet still sadly calm, would be allowed to sit in on the interview. Inspector Parrish found this oddly innocent – as if, because he knew he had nothing unpleasant to reveal, the Inspector would have nothing unpleasant to ask. But he had insisted on finding somewhere else to talk.
Mailer had got a better grip on himself in the hour he had been given with his daughter, though his eyes sometimes contracted from the immediate scene, as if in a sort of disbelief at what had happened, or a wondering grief. When he put a cigarette in his mouth (a cheap brand, Parrish noted, a type often smoked by men with wives like Alison Mailer) his hand shook as he tried to manipulate the lighter. But the first inhalation seemed to calm him again, and he sat back in his desk chair – Parrish had a very old armchair, obviously inherited or bought at a junk sale for the room in the house that didn’t matter because it wasn’t seen – and waited for the first question.
‘When did you last see your wife, Mr Mailer?’
Parrish felt vaguely Cromwellian in putting the question. A spasm passed over Mailer’s face – rather a good-looking face, Parrish decided, for a man of fifty or so, and probably positively handsome twenty years ago.
‘Yesterday. Yesterday at dinner-time.’
‘What time would that be?’
‘Well – I got in from work about six, and we had sherry. I suppose we must have eaten about a quarter to seven.’
‘All three of you?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Do you know what your wife had been doing during the day?’
‘Doing? No, we didn’t talk about that.’
‘What did you talk about?’
‘Oh, the usual things. Let’s see. Prices in the shops, the radio team being here, redecorating the lounge . . . That’s all I remember.’
‘And then you had dinner. I suppose your wife must have spent some part of the day cooking.’
‘I imagine so – she and Cressy.’
‘And after the meal, what did you do?’
‘Well, I had one or two papers to put in order – up here, you know. Then I went to the meeting at the village school.’
‘Oh yes, the Amenities Protection Group – Mr Jimson’s affair, isn’t it? Was your wife with you?’
‘No, I went on my own.’
‘You’re . . . er . . . interested in environmental matters and that sort of thing, are you, sir?’ asked Parrish rather tentatively.
‘Well yes, within reason. But that wasn’t why I went. Alison – that’s my wife – was on the committee, but she wasn’t going, and I thought I ought to show the flag.’
‘I see, sir.’
‘I wished I hadn’t later on, in a way. I got the impression it was a sort of put-up job, for the benefit of the Radio Broadwich production team. I’m a bit out of village life, and I hadn’t realized.’
‘Did your wif
e give any reason for not going – any other appointment, for example?’
‘No, she didn’t say. I think she just said she was bored with it. She got bored very easily, I’m afraid. Perhaps I shouldn’t have brought her to a little town like this. She liked it at first, but really it wasn’t her sort of life.’
And Arnold Mailer jerkily grabbed a handkerchief from his pocket and shamefacedly wiped his eyes.
‘So your wife stayed at home. And you have no reason to think she might have been intending to meet anyone later? I’d better be specific: that she might have had an appointment with a man, for example?’
Nothing could be more genuine than Arnold Mailer’s wide-eyed surprise as he met Inspector Parrish’s gaze.
‘That’s just not on, Inspector, no question of it at all. My God, I suppose that’s what these village tabbies are likely to be saying, isn’t it?’
‘Very probably, sir. But it’s a question I had to ask as well.’
‘It’s not on the cards at all, Inspector. Alison wasn’t that sort of person at all.’
‘So your wife, as far as you know, was intending to stay at home. But you didn’t see her when you got back from the meeting?’
‘No. I assumed she’d gone to bed.’
‘And had she? Had the bed been slept in?’
‘I haven’t . . . been in there. Cressy says not.’
Inspector Parrish shifted his cosy weight in bachelor embarrassment in his armchair.
‘You don’t . . . use the same room at night, sir?’
‘That’s right. I have to get up early, especially on the days I go to London. My wife is a late riser as a rule. She didn’t like to be disturbed, you see.’
‘And she was usually early to bed, was she, sir? You say you assumed she had gone to bed when you came back from the meeting.’
‘That depended, Inspector. Sometimes she was up till all hours. She went out fairly often, had a lot of friends and so on. But sometimes she went to bed not long after dinner. As I say, she bored easily.’
‘So when you got back from the meeting – about ten that would be, wouldn’t it? – you didn’t look in on her?’
‘No. I had a scotch, read a little, and went to bed.’
‘What were you reading, if you don’t mind my asking?’
‘Solzhenitsyn. My wife had told – had asked me to read it and tell her what it was about.’
‘And this morning, then, you didn’t look into her room before you left for work?’
‘No, she wouldn’t have thanked me for that. Except of course that she wasn’t there . . .’ He paused, and slumped a little forward in his chair, thinking. ‘Wasn’t there . . .’
Inspector Parrish cut in quickly. ‘Then today was one of the days you went to London, was it, sir?’
‘That’s right. Tuesdays and Fridays.’
‘And you made your own breakfast in the morning?’
‘Yes. Or Cressy sometimes helps me, and has hers as well. She likes getting up early.’
She likes having breakfast alone with you, Inspector Parrish thought. There was no disguising the affection between father and daughter.
‘What is your business, sir?’ he asked.
‘Construction firm, with a bit of property dealing thrown in,’ said Arnold Mailer. ‘We operate mainly in East Anglia, but we have London interests, and there’s usually enough Stock Exchange business to keep me busy on those two days. I’m in charge of the financial side of things.’
‘Is business thriving?’ asked Parrish banally, not necessarily expecting an honest answer.
‘Is any business these days?’ answered Arnold. ‘But we’ve done well in the past, and that should carry us over the lean times. Of course anyone who has to do with property has a bad reputation these days – people say we’re all sharks. But our firm has made a good name for itself – in pretty murky waters, I admit – and that means a lot when money’s short, as now. People are only willing these days to deal with the sort of firm they know they can trust.’
‘Well, I think that’s about all, for the moment anyway, sir,’ said Parrish. ‘I’ll probably have to be troubling you again about details before very long. I suppose you’d rather I didn’t talk to your daughter today, wouldn’t you? I can hold it over for twenty-four hours easily enough.’
‘I’d be grateful if you would,’ said Arnold. ‘She’s very upset, though she doesn’t show things as much as other kids – terribly self-contained, and always has been. If you could hold off for a bit I’d take it very kindly, though I’m sure she won’t have anything she can add.’
‘Children sometimes see a lot,’ said Parrish, adding to himself that they habitually saw more than the besotted kind of husband. ‘I’ll be back tomorrow, sir,’ he said aloud, ‘and I’ll probably have more questions for you too, I’m afraid, sir. After that I suppose you’d prefer to send the young lass away for a bit – to relatives or something.’
Arnold Mailer looked at him naively, as if the thought simply hadn’t occurred to him before.
‘Do you think so, Inspector? I hadn’t thought of it. Surely she’d be better with me than with strangers?’
‘I just thought the house . . . and having the police here, and people talking, and so on. And the funeral eventually.’
‘She’s a child with a lot of imagination,’ said Arnold Mailer. ‘I think she’d worry a lot more about those things if she wasn’t around to see them. And frankly, I don’t think she’d go.’
‘Well, that’s up to you, sir,’ said Parrish. ‘But I’m afraid I’ll have to have my men give this house a thorough going-over – in fact they’d better start as soon as it’s convenient to you.’
‘As soon as you like, of course, Inspector. Though I can’t think what you can expect to find.’
‘I don’t, sir – so far I have no ideas, no theories, nothing. That’s why we have to start from scratch and look up all sorts of avenues. Well, thank you anyway, sir. My men will be round in a half-hour or so, and I’ll make sure they give you as little trouble as possible.’
And Inspector Parrish let himself out of the study and went down the stairs, looking into the lounge, where Cressida was still sitting at the table over an exercise book, and didn’t look up as he passed. The contrast between the trendy but rather boring hall and the man he had just been talking to struck him. He wondered why he had liked Arnold Mailer as a man, and thought it must be partly his unlikeness to his own house. He was a living contrast to all around him, but he lacked the elementary self-consciousness that would have told him so. It might be that to have lived happily with a woman such as Alison Mailer argued a fairly high degree of stupidity as far as some areas of life were concerned, but these were, after all, areas in which a great many men were fortunate enough to be dense. For the thousandth time Inspector Parrish regretted his bachelor status, and thought he would have liked to have a chance to cultivate a similar denseness. For the thousandth time he wondered how sincere he was in regretting his bachelorhood. It was an exercise in self-analysis unusual in a common-sensical sort of man, and one that gave him endless food for thought.
Swapping a few words and admonitions with Constable Lockett on the door, Parrish went out into the open air.
• • •
The biggest room in the Twytching Police Station, apart from that in which the general public was received, was officially Inspector Parrish’s, though Sergeant Feather also had a desk in the corner, where he typed in an enthusiastic and imprecise manner when the occasion demanded. His precision was not helped by continual fencing matches with his superior over why he didn’t get married to Sergeant Underwood, and a further range of topics – personal, social and political. Sergeant Feather diverted Inspector Parrish’s bachelor enthusiasm for marrying off his younger acquaintances into a number of channels, and this little back room was one of the few places where the Great Debate on the Common Market had actually got going. It was a scruffy, slightly dirty room, but Inspector Parrish had tried to make
it reasonably homely by bringing in a few sticks of furniture he had inherited from a dead sister, and sticking up on the wall colour photographs cut from calendars. He encouraged pictures of the Sussex Downs and the Lake District, and felt that Norway and the Swiss Alps were slightly on the sensational side.
Later on the same Tuesday Inspector Parrish tried to explain to Sergeant Feather the effect Arnold Mailer had made on him – not making too good a job of it either, for though he was far more loquacious with his sergeant than with any other living soul, he basically mistrusted words.
‘Put it this way,’ he said. ‘If I was buying a property, or doing a deal, I’d trust him. Nothing showy, nothing put on. Just a straightforward kind of chap – very quiet, very controlled.’
‘Still waters run deep,’ said Sergeant Feather, leafing through his report on the finding of the body.
‘Still waters run deep, my fat aunt,’ said Parrish, irritated as usual by his sergeant’s preference for cliché over hard thinking. ‘I’ve known still waters about as deep as a bath in war-time. Still, in this case there’s a lot of strong feeling – you’re right that far. Quite broke down when he heard the news, so I heard from the Barstowe people. Pulled himself together well later on, though – perfectly clear when I spoke to him. Did you ever come across him at all?’
‘Just once, in the High Street, about a couple of months ago, I guess. Had his car parked a bit close to the corner. Very nice and apologetic about it. Pretty calm, easy-going sort of chap, I agree.’
‘I spoke to him in the Lamb a week or so ago,’ went on Parrish, ‘or rather we were both there and I heard him talking to Tom behind the bar, and to Fred Brewer and that Mr Jimson. Now, I’ve had the idea that a lot of people in this town have been a bit jumpy over the past weeks. Just an impression of mine – a sharp word here and there, the odd look – you know what I mean. It’s no more than an impression. But I didn’t notice anything of the sort about Arnold Mailer.’
A Little Local Murder Page 8