The Woman Who Was Not There

by Jennie Melville

  Charmian walked through the crowd and into Waxy House. Inside was Superintendent Drimwade, a Detective Inspector March, whom she knew, by sight (keen eager beaver, Rewley had called him, but this was when March had been going out with Dolly Barstow), and Sergeant Jacaponi. Their faces and air of consultation mirrored the trio outside.

  ‘One more turned up,’ said Drimwade to her. ‘Thought we’d done. In the floor.’

  Dr Cairns had appeared again, and was just closing his medical bag. ‘Young female, dead, very dead,’ he shrugged. ‘Up to you now. They can all be moved as soon as you want.’ He looked pinched and worried. He saw Charmian then and gave her a nod. ‘I must talk to you.’ His voice was urgent. ‘ Personal.’

  Charmian nodded. ‘In a minute,’ and to Drimwade she said: ‘So you’ve found five now? Any identification?’

  ‘No.’ Drimwade shook his head. ‘Not Ellendale. Got both her feet, this one, so no help there. We reckon this was the first done. Lowest down. Where he started off.’

  ‘You’re sure the killer is a man?’

  ‘Got to be,’ said Drimwade, with deep conviction.

  Gender coming in again, thought Charmian. A really evil serial killer has to be a man. Women have sexual fantasies too. Think of Nurse Brownrigg, whipping her apprentice to death. Something more there than sheer brutality.

  ‘I’ll talk to Dr Cairns, then I’ll go downstairs and have a look round …’

  ‘We haven’t found any bodies upstairs,’ said Drimwade with gloom, ‘but there is always time. Checking for fingerprints all over, of course, and all forensic fragments.’ He did not sound hopeful.

  Cairns was waiting for Charmian outside. ‘ It’s the boy. He’s missing.’

  ‘Angela telephoned me this morning to say she was taking him to see her grandfather.’

  ‘Yes, Frank Felyx.’

  ‘She said she had permission, but she wanted to tell me.’

  ‘She did have my permission,’ Cairns said. ‘She got it from me. She said the boy had something important to say and she wanted advice. I told her she could but also to go to you.’

  ‘So she did.’

  ‘I don’t know what it is he could have to say that he couldn’t say to me.’

  ‘He may have tried. Angela said the boy thought he might recognize the killer.’

  Cairns threw his hands up. ‘I can’t believe she could be so stupid as to take the boy there.’

  Charmian pushed down the thought that Angela wanted to confront Angus with her grandfather. ‘ I don’t know exactly what was in her mind; I expect nothing except her grandfather knew a lot about crime and could give good advice.’

  ‘And now they’re both missing. She said she’d have him at school in good time. But he isn’t there. He never turned up. I’ve rung Felyx and he’s not answering.’

  ‘I don’t think Angus will come to any harm.’ Inside she was cursing Frank, Angela and even Angus. ‘ Frank Felyx is not the killer. You go home now and you might find them both there. Or the boy might be at school.’

  She walked with Dr Cairns to the car, still making noises of reassurance. Mr Bacon was outside, talking to Chris Fenwick and Harry Aden.

  ‘Is Angela in your office?’

  ‘Gave her the day off, we’re closed today. I rang everyone when I heard what was going on here. I hope you lot know what you’re doing; it’s bad for business, especially my business. Is it true you keep turning up bodies?’

  ‘Is that what people are saying? There have been discoveries, yes, but I’m sure you understand I can’t talk about it.’

  She noticed that Cairns had not driven off but was sitting in his car, apparently deep in thought.

  ‘Has your wife turned up, Mr Fenwick?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘I do need to speak to her.’

  ‘I don’t see why. She didn’t know Alicia Ellendale.’

  Charmian found a nerve throbbing in her temple, bringing with it the hint that although she did not have a headache now, there might be one coming.

  ‘We haven’t found Alicia yet.’ She turned to look at Harry Aden. ‘Now you three are all here together, I want to tell you that I will be ordering a search of your back gardens.’

  ‘We hardly have gardens,’ said Fenwick. ‘Just little patches. No walls or fences to speak of, long since fallen down.’

  ‘Big enough. And later I may possibly institute a search of your houses.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Harry Aden.

  ‘Well, as neighbours to this house, you three might have the best access to it.’ As Fenwick had boldly said: there were no real boundaries at the back.

  ‘By that token, I’m the nearest,’ said Harry Aden.

  ‘I’m open-minded,’ said Charmian.

  ‘Glad to hear it.’ He spoke seriously.

  ‘Will you three gentlemen please wait here for me? I’ll be back.’

  At last she had seen what she expected and needed to see. She walked over to the car. ‘Dr Cairns, you can stop worrying. Here comes your son with Frank Felyx.’

  Frank, side by side in a companionable way with Angus, was pushing through the crowd and being admitted by the police constable in charge, who had his orders.

  ‘Frank, Angus, why are you so late?’

  ‘I was giving this young chap a good breakfast.’ Frank sounded more cheerful than for some time past. ‘The food my grand-daughter hands out wouldn’t feed a bird.’

  ‘Bacon and eggs,’ said Angus. ‘Yum.’ He too looked in better spirits.

  ‘Dad won’t be pleased, not when I tell him what a great time I’m having,’ and Angus led the way to the car.

  Charmian went back into Waxy House. She walked down the stairs to the terrible basement where the four bodies were being zipped into decent black bags and loaded on to gurneys. The fifth was still being photographed while awaiting the first survey of the pathologist.

  A young, twisted little face and a curled-up body, foetus-like. Something about the soil in this place seemed to slow decay. The flesh was recognizable still. She was completely clothed in dark jeans and what had been a white shirt.

  ‘Coloured girl,’ said Drimwade, who had followed her down. ‘Only a kid, strangled like the rest. At least she was dead when she was buried. Remains of a cigarette in the earth there too, someone left it. She’s the missing student, we think.’

  Charmian stood back. No doubt about it; the throbbing in her head was worse. Had she eaten any breakfast? She couldn’t remember. So many ideas had been rushing through her mind since she woke up that she had thought more of telephoning this one and that.

  ‘I want one man to come with me to go over the next-door house and then the next one, Aden’s and then Fenwick’s.’

  ‘Not the accountant chap, Bacon?’

  ‘I’m not so interested in him.’ ‘I’ll come myself,’ said Drimwade.

  They stood in the ground-floor room where Harry Aden stored his equipment. Charmian had extracted him from the trio, told the others to wait their turn, and entered the house with him. It was a smaller place than Waxy House, but immaculately clean.

  ‘You have to keep this stuff spotless,’ Aden explained. ‘Dust and dirt don’t agree with it.’

  The house was warm and dry too. ‘ I prefer it that way,’ he explained with a touch of humour. ‘But it suits the software too.’

  A family may once have lived in this house, but there was no sense of that left; it was a workplace. The floors were bare wood, unpolished but once again very clean. All the woodwork of the house was white. At the windows hung blinds which could be pulled down against the sun. The room on the middle floor was where Harry Aden had banks of screens besides all the other instruments that he needed. Several telephones seemed to be necessary with fax machines attached. The house was totally impersonal.

  ‘I do look out of the window sometimes,’ he said, reading her mind. ‘Just to see the world is there.’

  ‘But you didn’t see anything that worried you abou
t next door?’

  ‘I don’t worry when I work.’

  ‘That’s no answer.’

  ‘The best I can do.’

  Followed by Drimwade, she marched briskly through each room. The top floor was empty. ‘Don’t use it,’ said Aden who had come with them.

  ‘You don’t smoke?’ asked Charmian as they walked down the stairs.

  ‘Never have. I’m asthmatic, wouldn’t suit me. I eat sweets, though, and that’s what gives me this round and cuddly look.’

  ‘I don’t think I’d call you a cuddly man, Mr Aden. I think you’re sharp as well as highly intelligent—’

  ‘That’s the computers, I suppose,’ he broke in.

  ‘Not entirely, just how I read you. Intelligent, observant, although you claim not, and exceedingly unhappy.’

  He was silent. ‘Caroline Fenwick didn’t come to me. I don’t know where she is. I think she may be in trouble. She knew I loved her, I had begun to think we might do something about it. But she went off, didn’t even say goodbye.’

  ‘Was she normal about sex?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said in an unhappy voice. ‘What is normal? Am I normal, I feel normal to me, but who am I to judge? But we never had sex together. It didn’t happen. Perhaps that wasn’t normal.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ said Charmian. ‘Did she smoke?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  Drimwade had been silent all this time, but he looked sharply at Charmian when he heard this question.

  As they walked down the stairs, he said: ‘I see what you’re getting at but I don’t see how.’

  ‘Not sure I see myself.’

  He followed her out of the door. ‘ How’s your headache?’

  With surprise, Charmian said: ‘Coming on. How did you know I had one?’

  ‘Because I’ve got one myself,’ said Drimwade with dignity.

  When they got out into the street again, Charmian went over to the car. ‘Frank, Angus, why don’t you go for a walk in the gardens; they run into each other and it makes a pleasant little walk. There’s a couple of men searching the gardens but you can ignore that.’

  Angus got out of the car with Frank holding his elbow and shepherding him past Chris Fenwick. ‘Walkies,’ Frank said, ‘Think your dad would buy you a dog?’

  Angus turned to wave to his father, who waved back, calling out that he would wait. They left him hunched over the wheel, muttering a dog, there had to be a dog.

  Charmian led Chris Fenwick round his house, which was plain but neat, an architect’s workplace. On one wall was a reproduction of a great dark Poussin: Christ and the Introduction of the Eucharist. She looked at it with interest. Then, she took him into the garden where two uniformed men were slowly quartering the ground, head down. ‘What are they doing?’ he demanded.

  ‘Just looking. People leave traces when they pass, you know. They can be useful. It’s called the Locard principle. Tell me, did your wife wear high-heeled shoes?’

  Fenwick went still. ‘ Sometimes.’

  ‘Useful to know. Did she take her shoes with her when she left?’

  He was breathing more easily now. ‘I daresay. I haven’t looked. Does it matter?’

  ‘Might do.’

  Down the garden Angus and Frank were pacing the grass too, staring down at the garden. There was a large shed at the bottom.

  ‘That your shed?’

  ‘The last tenant put it there, so I suppose it is mine.’

  ‘Do you use it at all?’

  ‘My wife did. She grew a lot of vegetables; we have a small allotment. My wife’s, really, I’m not great with fruit and veg.’

  ‘You must know where she is. Why won’t you tell me?’

  ‘When she gets in touch with me, then of course I’ll tell her you want to see her.’

  With determination, Charmian said: ‘It’s important to me to find her. We will find her, trust me.’ She stopped and turned to face him. ‘Come on, tell me. It’ll be better all round if she’s found without any fuss.’

  Harry Aden walked across to them, angry. ‘There’s these men tramping all over my garden. What do they think I keep there?’

  ‘I don’t know, Mr Aden. Not yet.’

  ‘Perhaps they don’t know themselves.’

  ‘I’ve explained to Mr Fenwick here that scraps and traces can be very important forensic evidence.’

  ‘For God’s sake, stop calling me Mr Fenwick. Chris will do. Or nothing – yes, nothing would be best.’

  ‘Mr Nothing,’ said Aden.

  Charmian said: ‘Chris, I’d like to look in that shed your wife uses.’

  ‘I don’t know why you’re so interested.’

  She took her time before answering. Words were important. Nervous tension and fear were her weapons.

  ‘There’s a theory going around that your wife, dressed in black, dropped Alicia Ellendale’s shoe with the foot in it near the river. There is an addition to this: that still dressed in black but this time limping like Alicia, she killed the coach driver … Remember him? There was an idea that it was Alicia, somehow surviving, but I don’t believe that. But I have to find Alicia, because that was what I was asked to do. And that leads me to your wife.’

  ‘What possible motive could my wife have for behaving like that?’ His hands, cigarette stained and sinewy, were clenched.

  Charmian shook her head at him. ‘It’s what I would like to ask her. But the scenario that has been suggested to me …’ She let her eyes take in Frank and Angus, who were watching them at a distance. Frank had his hand on the boy’s shoulder, restraining or supporting him. ‘It has been suggested that your wife is bisexual. She may have hated women like Alicia who traded their sex for money.’

  ‘I’ll fight that idea to the death,’ said Harry Aden, almost in tears. ‘ She’s a lovely woman, she couldn’t kill.’

  ‘I need to see her for myself,’ said Charmian. She looked at Chris Fenwick. ‘You could be hiding her. Let’s have that shed open.’

  ‘She has the key.’

  Charmian nodded to one of the searchers. ‘He has broad shoulders; he can break down that door.’

  Harry Aden said: ‘I have a key … She gave it to me. We met there once or twice.’ He avoided looking at Fenwick.

  ‘If you have it on you, then open the door.’

  Silently, Harry produced the key from an upper pocket.

  ‘Carry it next to your heart, do you?’ snarled Fenwick. ‘I could kill you for this.’

  The door swung open. It was a large shed with carefully arranged vegetable racks. It smelt earthy and of potatoes with a hint of onions.

  A canvas armchair and a camp bed with rolled-up blankets lined one wall. There was a desk beside it and opposite a very large white freezer.

  ‘Lived here, did she?’ asked Charmian.

  White and angry, Chris Fenwick; said: ‘Of course not, but it was a business with her – a small one, but she enjoyed it. She grew it all in an allotment, stored it here, then she sold the produce in the market off a stall.’

  Charmian opened the freezer. Packets of frozen peas, neatly labelled, filled a plastic tray.

  She lifted the tray. Underneath was the small figure of a woman, legs drawn up. From the ankle there were no feet. It was Alicia.

  ‘I see why the feet went,’ she said. ‘Alicia wouldn’t have fitted in the freezer if she’d still had her feet. I ought to have guessed there was a practical reason.’

  Harry Aden staggered away to the door. ‘I’m going to be sick.’

  Charmian put a restraining hand on him. ‘Before, you do that, I want you and Chris here to lift up Alicia.’

  ‘No, no, I couldn’t.’

  ‘You may be right. I ought to get the professionals in here first, to do it right. Let me just move her hair aside.’

  She drew a pair of white gloves out of her pocket and gently moved the dead woman’s hair. Underneath were more vegetables, but they were lightly packed and she could see beneath to another body. She
pushed one of the bags aside and saw a woman’s face. The eyes stared back at her, clouded and pale. Younger than Alicia and longer dead.

  ‘Chris … I must ask you to identify your wife.’

  At the door Harry Aden was retching and gasping. ‘Please,’ he was muttering, ‘please, please.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Charmian. ‘Other people can be bisexual, can dress up in black and learn to limp like a woman with a foot cut off at the ankle.’

  ‘Are you going to arrest him?’ asked Chris, flexing his hands, ‘or do you want me to kill him for you?’

  ‘No, let’s go outside. I have someone out there who might know a face. Come on, Harry, brace yourself.’ She pushed Aden out into the garden and beckoned towards Frank and Angus.

  ‘I have some more thoughts to share. Cigarette smoke, a name in the list of members of a club which collected coins or pretended to do so while having other interests … One of the men went by the nickname Santa Claus … Sounded a bit like you, Harry, but you don’t smoke and I smelt smoke when someone came up the back staircase to frighten Fanny that night.’ She turned towards Chris Fenwick. ‘It was not your wife, because she was dead too, but you smoke; I saw the stain on your fingers just now. I could smell it on your clothes. And the nickname Candleman could be you, Mr Nothing, Mr Fenwick. Because a wick is part of a candle, the bit that burns.’

  Angus, supported by Frank, came up to them. He stared from Harry Aden to Chris Fenwick, then he nodded.

  ‘He thinks it’s you, Chris,’ said Charmian. ‘He thinks he saw you by the river.’

  Chris Fenwick sprang at her, hands outstretched; he had them round her throat. ‘ I am not Mr Nothing, nor Candleman. I am not building a church, I am a church. Christus natus hodie, my name is Christ. Sinners must die and go to hell. I must kill you just like the rest of all the other women.’

  She felt the fingers tighten round her throat and the colour fade out of the world. This way death came quickly.

  ‘I had to make him lose his head … At that time there was no real evidence against him,’ she said. But she would rake it in now, forensic evidence would do the job, but everyone, here and in London, whose path had crossed the Fenwicks’, would be questioned until all significant details were milked. Charmian was in her office with Rewley and Dolly Barstow. ‘Just speculation and a boy’s observation. It wasn’t a case …’