A Little Local Murder

by Robert Barnard

  Timothy Jimson’s harangue reminded Parrish of Sergeant Feather in his more self-righteous moods, and he thought idly how gratified Stephen would be to hear the police force described as a profession. But he felt the need to put in a word to defend the integrity of his subordinates, which was in fact one thing about them he was fairly confident of.

  ‘I can assure you, sir,’ he said, thrusting his hand into the seat of his chair to remove another piece of Meccano, and finding it suddenly encountering a half-sucked sweet, ‘that nothing of the kind would have happened. My people understand their job.’

  ‘Well, of course, I accept your reassurances, Inspector,’ said Timothy, ‘but I think you ought to remember how everyone loves to find out anything discreditable about schoolteachers. Any little scandal of that sort goes straight into the News of the World, with the word “schoolmaster” blazoned in the headline. People hate us, you know. Jealousy, of course, but it’s a fact of life we all have to live with in my profession.’

  ‘Well, now, sir,’ said Parrish, assuming the majesty-of-the-law pose that he thought might work with Jimson, who seemed to be both aware of his duties as a citizen and a coward to boot (majesty-of-the-law poses only worked with the respectable or the would-be respectable), ‘I hope you’ll make up for this dereliction of duty, which I’m willing to overlook just this once, by handing over the letter without any more fuss. If you’d done it earlier you would have saved us a great deal of trouble, perhaps even prevented worse than that.’

  There was a long silence. Timothy Jimson was wrestling with his conscience. Or possibly weighing the pros and cons. Jean watched him, intensely interested. She had never seen him in this sort of situation before. She knew her place better than to say a word.

  ‘Very well, Inspector,’ said Timothy, and with a reluctance that was palpable to everyone else in the room he went over to the sideboard and opened the door. A large mass of building bricks, jigsaw puzzles, story-books and games cascaded to the floor, and spoilt the attempted nobility of his gesture.

  ‘I’ve been meaning to tidy that out,’ said Jean.

  Timothy did not honour this with a reply, but opened one of the drawers, rummaged to the bottom, and finally produced a sheet of paper, which he did not look at. He stalked over to Parrish and handed it over to him.

  ‘You’ll see for yourself,’ he said, ‘that it’s obviously someone’s dirty-minded fantasies.’

  Parrish smoothed it open, and read:

  ‘KEEP under cover or the whole town will know that you molest little girls after school and commit fornication, adultery and all uncleanliness with girls under the AGE OF CONSENT. People like you should not be ALLOWED near the children of DECENT folk. Watch your STEP.’

  Parrish studied it carefully. It looked very like the similar message addressed to Tom Billington. Though short, it took up the entire page, because some of the words were in large capitals – in some cases obviously newspaper headlines, in others (such as the words ‘age of consent’) apparently of stiffer materials, possibly from a paperback book. Other words were typewritten, but close inspection revealed that these were photocopies rather than originals. That was no doubt what Mrs Leaze was trying to get at. Parrish puzzled his head over these. He didn’t see that the fact that these were photocopies would absolutely prevent the lab people identifying the typewriter they came from, should it turn up. Did the writer think it would? Most of the rest of the words were simply cut from newspapers, several different ones apparently, though there was one rather unattractive type that seemed to predominate.

  ‘You don’t have the envelope?’ said Parrish, turning to Timothy Jimson and observing that his face was deeply flushed.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ snapped Timothy. ‘I threw it away without thinking. Human factor, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I see,’ said Parrish. ‘Well, of course we take it for granted this is someone’s sick fantasy. But I’m most grateful to you for showing it to me finally. It will help us considerably.’

  ‘Can we throw it in the fire now?’ said Timothy, without much hope in his voice.

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Parrish, taking it up carefully and preparing to bear it off. ‘But if we ever need to use it, you can be quite sure we shall not reveal the exact contents.’

  As Parrish left the room, wrapped in his comfortable rural dignity, Jean Jimson watched her husband. His eyes were watching Parrish’s movements with an odd mingling of fear, dislike and contempt. Suddenly he became aware that he was being watched, and he visibly pulled himself together.

  ‘Nasty little episode,’ he said. ‘Much too like a third-rate play for my liking. Clear up this mess, can’t you, Jean?’

  • • •

  After her initial hesitations, those hesitations which all the recipients seemed to feel were demanded by etiquette, Val Rice (whose married surname seemed so dispensable that she remained to everyone in Twytching Mrs Buller’s Val) became as obliging in this matter as she customarily was in most others. At the beginning of the interview, which took place in her council house living-room, overlooked by china poodles and brass animals of indeterminate species, she had cleverly seated Sergeant Feather on the sofa, though he had aimed himself at an upright chair. So when she fetched the letter, still in its envelope, she was able to sit beside him, and as she got close to read the letter over with him she pressed her bulging belly against him in a manner which Sergeant Feather, trying desperately to be verbal rather than instinctive, mentally described as ‘suggestive’.

  ‘’Course, it’s only some silly old sex-maniac,’ she said, digging him in the ribs, ‘and I’ve known enough of that type in my time, so it’s not as though I’m bothered.’

  In spite of his efforts, Sergeant Feather felt himself becoming hot and red, and he wished he hadn’t seated himself in the corner of the sofa, whence retreat was impracticable. He looked down, trying rather too hard to be sublimely unaware of such things as bulging bellies and shapely legs. She did have shapely legs. Very shapely legs. Val crossed them as she fished in the envelope.

  ‘My Sam’s doing a job for someone,’ she said irrelevantly. Sergeant Feather concentrated on the envelope. The envelope. Concentrate on the envelope. Beautiful even capitals, drawn with a . . . Concentrate on the envelope. Drawn with a lettering set.

  ‘This is it,’ said Val, smoothing it out lovingly over Sergeant Feather’s worsted-clad thighs. ‘In all its glory! What a mind, eh? What a mind!’

  The letter read:

  ‘Your type is a disgrace to the TOWN. You walk round inviting men to SCREW YOU! Anyone with an ounce of shame would have left years ago, and taken that ginger-haired little bastard with you. Nymphomaniacs like you who have sexual relationships with MEN all over the town ought to WATCH IT. Other PEOPLE get hurt and might HURT back. You and your men are like pigs barbecued in your own shit.’

  ‘Dear me,’ said Sergeant Feather.

  ‘Actually,’ said Mrs Buller’s Val, leaning seductively across Sergeant Feather, and gazing invitingly into his eyes, ‘there’s ginger hair in Sam’s family. Several generations back.’

  • • •

  Assembled together they were a pretty impressive bunch, though as with most things of that kind, with prolonged reading a feeling of monotony was liable to set in. The style was rather jerky, due no doubt to the difficulty of finding the desired word in newspapers and other convenient sources. At times, in fact, one got the impression that the author had given up striving for le mot juste and had taken whatever unpleasant mot had come most readily to hand. Certainly he hadn’t found anything very interesting to say to Mrs Buller, for one, so that the message to her concentrated largely on the delinquencies of her nearest and dearest, which she was accused of aiding and abetting. That to Jack Edgar accused him of being a ‘personal screwing machine’ and a ‘masculine whore’. (‘Good gracious,’ said Sergeant Underwood.) It was clear, thought Inspector Parrish, that Mr Edgar was regarded by the writer as another of Harold Thring’s conquests, unles
s there were other potential clients for masculine whores in Twytching. What havoc Harold’s eyelashes seemed to wreak! That to the vicar was more specific. Sergeant Underwood blushed as she handed it over. She had been a regular attendant at Sunday School in the little village she came from, and there the vicar had been regarded with a truly Victorian awe. The writer of the note was far from sharing such feelings. Having told him succinctly that he was a geriatric case and a disgrace to his cloth, it went on to say he was useless for anything ‘except producing ginger-HAIRED little buggers and COPULATING in the vestry with girls from the CHOIR’.

  ‘I always wondered why people used to shake their heads over that boy,’ said Sergeant Feather.

  ‘Anyone who was a real policeman would have found out years ago,’ said Parrish grumpily. ‘Well, tell us, lad, was she worth the vicar’s immortal soul?’

  Stephen Feather blushed deeply. Parrish looked back at the array of filth spread out on the table.

  ‘Odd letters,’ he said after a pause.

  ‘No demands for money,’ pointed out Sergeant Underwood. ‘So it doesn’t seem to have been blackmail.’

  ‘No – but that often comes later. Send one or two of these little marvels, then start making demands when they’re thoroughly frightened.’

  ‘He can hardly have hoped to get anything out of Val Rice,’ pointed out Sergeant Underwood. ‘It’s not as though she had any reputation to keep up. The whole town knows about that boy.’

  ‘Except Stephen,’ said Parrish. ‘And then there’s the two schoolmasters. Everyone knows teachers earn less in a month than an illegal immigrant in his first fortnight. As far as extracting money is concerned schoolmasters are very poor bets.’

  ‘Jimson has some private money, I believe,’ said Sergeant Feather, pleased to have got away from the subject of Val Rice.

  ‘Really?’ said Parrish. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I was in his class at Barstowe Grammar. That’s what they said when he bought that house. It’s a bit out of his class.’

  ‘Better go into that. By the bye, if you were in his class, you’d better be silent as the grave about that letter. He says it was that sort of possibility that stopped him coming to us with it in the first place.’

  ‘I’m not in the habit of spreading official matters through the town,’ said Stephen priggishly.

  ‘We’d better hand these little darlings over to the experts once you’ve typed the transcripts,’ said Parrish. ‘I suppose this is about the lot, except for the Mailer one.’

  ‘You didn’t get on to him, then?’

  ‘No. I thought I’d give him another day to get over things. Anyway, the boys who are going over his house won’t have finished till tomorrow. If anything comes out of that I’ll kill two birds. Of course we have no guarantees it was to him, and if it was to his wife, I’d bet she wouldn’t have told him of it.’

  Parrish paused. He had been looking carelessly down at the letters spread out on the table, and now he took off his glasses and bent close to them, peering.

  ‘Odd that,’ he said finally.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Those words that have been typed and photocopied. Can you see? They’ve been cut out differently from the others.’

  The two sergeants bent to look closely, bumped their heads together and went off into interminable apologies before diving carefully towards the letters again. Finally they stood up.

  ‘Don’t see it,’ said Sergeant Feather. ‘They’re all cut out with scissors, aren’t they? They all look the same to me.’

  ‘Look again, man,’ said Parrish testily. ‘Look at the corners. Now do you see?’

  ‘Well,’ said Feather, after prolonged observation and an effort to think that seemed to tick through the silent room, ‘they sort of go in.’

  ‘Exactly. Where?’

  ‘At the top, at both ends.’

  ‘Precisely. The others are cut more or less square, right angles at each corner, and so on. But the typed ones are all cut at a slant inwards, from bottom to top. Why?’

  The other two thought hard.

  ‘Can’t imagine,’ said Stephen. ‘But it can’t be important.’

  ‘Thank you, Dr Watson,’ said Parrish. ‘You may return to your practice.’

  CHAPTER X

  IN QUEST OF A PERSONALITY

  The information from the various police experts came through to Parrish in dribs and drabs. The medical evidence on Alison was suggestive, but wide open to a variety of interpretations. The time of death was probably some time between about eight and eleven on Monday evening – and the doctors wanted to leave those outer limits as vague as could be. Like all professionals they left as many openings as possible to avoid being proved wrong. Alison had been hit twice on the back of the head, low down where the skull was most vulnerable. Once she had been hit with a flat, heavy instrument of some kind, once with what might have been something thinner and sharper but which was probably the edge of the same flat instrument as caused the other blow. Whether she was merely stunned by the first, or killed, was not clear, nor could it be stated for certain whether she had been killed where she was found or elsewhere. There was dirt in the wound, but this proved little. Some degree of strength had been necessary to administer the blows, but little above the ordinary. Alison’s skull, like so much else about her, was brittle.

  The experts’ report on the letters came through very quickly. There were no fingerprints on any of them, other than the recipients’. The provenance of the words had caused no great problems. Most of them had been cut from newspapers, the majority from the pages of the Daily Telegraph, but many from the News of the World, the Sun, and others. There were some words from the covers of paperback books (for example, Age of Consent) and a few which seemed to come from the inside of an unidentified paperback. The typewriter used for the typed words had probably been an Olivetti Lettera 36, and the words had been copied on a Rank Xerox machine, one of the less expensive varieties. The only envelope, that shown to Feather by Mrs Buller’s Val, was of the same cheap Woolworth’s brand as the paper, and was postmarked ‘Twytching, April 16th’. This seemed to have been one of the earliest letters, possibly the earliest, since the others remembered theirs as coming later in the month or in the course of May. Jack Edgar’s had been the last, coming second post on Tuesday, May 21st, the day after the amenities meeting and the murder of Alison Mailer. It had probably been posted late on the Monday night, another suggestive fact.

  ‘By the way,’ said Inspector Parrish to Jack Edgar, meeting him in the street on Friday morning when he was on his way to Arnold Mailer’s, ‘I suppose you must have met Harold Thring, the little birdie from Radio Broadwich.’

  Jack Edgar was a tall, well-built chap, with an incipient paunch, the result of a typically Twytching indolence. He had rather sleazy good looks, and thought himself irresistible. At parties his unending stream of sexy innuendoes and dirty snickers was variously received, as were his incessantly roving hands. Some of his adolescent girl pupils fell in love with him, but none of the brighter ones did. He showed no signs of being embarrassed by Parrish’s question, and seemed a model of airy frankness.

  ‘Harold? But of course! Who in Twytching hasn’t met our own little Harold by now?’

  ‘Where did you meet him, sir?’

  ‘At the meeting of the Jimson fan club – what do they call themselves? The Amenities Group, that’s right. He sat next to me. I was favoured, you might say.’ He gave a fruity chuckle. ‘Our Harold gave every sign of being smitten by my charms, but so far there haven’t been any results – not in the form of an invitation to stardom on his dreary little documentary, anyway. I am downcast, needless to say.’

  He spread out his hand in an Italianate gesture of grief. Inspector Parrish thought he probably was downcast.

  ‘You say he gave every sign, sir. May I ask . . .’

  ‘Shall we just say my roving hands have met their match at last, Inspector?’ said Jack Edgar with a greasy smir
k.

  ‘Was there anyone sitting near you who could have seen Mr Thring’s . . . approaches, shall we call them?’ asked Inspector Parrish.

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Jack. ‘If they could manage to wrench their attention away from my fellow pedagogue’s dazzling discourse. Unlikely, but just in the realms of the possible. Let’s see.’ He considered. ‘There was no one behind us, and only Mrs Brewer directly in front – I remember the whiff. She was concentrating on the meeting with exemplary attention – somewhat studied, perhaps, but exemplary. I doubt if she saw anything. Wait a tick – there was little Miss Potts from the County Library at the other end of the row, with nobody in between us. Then – that’s right – I think Jimson may have seen us from the stage. I thought Harold’s little attentions put him off his stride during his opening address. May be my imagination, but I had a good chuckle over it at the time.’

  ‘Well, thank you, sir,’ said Parrish, rather glad he had no children to blossom under the influence of Mr Edgar. ‘You’ve been very helpful.’

  Parrish pursued his way past the Lamb and Child, where the Broadwich Broadcasting recording van was drawn up. There was a great deal of fussing going on, with Ted in the middle of it, and standing in the doorway of the Lamb, talking to Tom Billington, was the newly-arrived interviewer from the Wisconsin station. Hank Nelson was a very large middle-aged man, with a dreadful freshness about him. He was wearing an immaculate light-weight suit, and a great expanse of white shirt. He had a tan too perfect for nature, and this seemed somehow to cast doubt on the authenticity of the chest. He had a splendid smile imprinted on his face, and he seemed intent on living up to the stereotype American of everyone’s imagination. ‘It’s all so fantastically English!’ he was saying to Tom. Harold, gazing wistfully, said to no one in particular: ‘He must have been dishy, twenty years ago!’ Soon, Parrish imagined, when the lethargic curiosity of the assembled Twytchingites was appeased, Hank would retreat with Tom and Joy into the snug bar, and they would all record an interview in which the cockney proprietors would say what a charming little place Twytching was, how friendly all the locals were, how beautiful the countryside around, and in general how close an approximation to the life of our First Fathers in Paradise was lived by the inhabitants there. Parrish shook his head dubiously, and went on his way.