The Protagonists

by James Barlow

  This was obvious and disturbing even to an experienced policeman. If policemen are participating in a battle, as far as violence is concerned the battle has to be one-sided. Policemen cannot fight back; they do not become calloused by themselves killing, as soldiers do. They can only collect evidence for someone else to punish by killing. And the evidence of the girl’s death frenzy was not nice to look upon. Someone had perhaps tripped her as she had struggled to get away and, having got her down, had kept her down in brutal callousness or panic. Perhaps someone she had been fond of had taken her there, pleaded for physical love, and, living on physical terms alone – that is, unable to wish the loved one well and leave her alone without them – had inflicted physical death when the love had been refused.

  MacIndoe wondered in a brief moment of detachment whether he would hold such a generous opinion of the victim at the end of the case and beyond. The trouble with human beings is that every one is the exception … He could be completely wrong. It would be difficult for him ever really to know. The girl would never speak to him. Everything about her would be learned from others. He would hear opinions the girl herself had never heard. They will all be prejudiced, he thought. Some will love you, others despise you, yet others remain apathetic; and the only means I shall have of evaluating their opinions will be to relate them to what kind of a person offers them. Which in turn means that my eventual opinion of you will be formed by my own prejudiced opinions of others. What a pity I couldn’t have met you. I think I’d have liked ye.

  ‘She was running,’ he said, ‘and she might have got away, but she tripped or was tripped – see the way the one shoe’s dropped off? – and he – och, what’s the use of pretending it’s not a man? – he jumped on top of her and killed her. I only hope he wasn’t a madman …’

  He sighed (he was travel weary too), and sighed with justification. If the girl had been killed by a man whose mental balance hovered between sanity and madness, a man of perverted instincts – then they were in for difficulties that might prove insoluble. Every parent of a daughter fears these people. They form only a very small percentage of the population, and fewer still commit murder. But it is their tendency to hover where children like to play: they expose themselves or commit assaults in parks or along lonely paths. Not all of these assaults are rape, but the wounds and types of assaults are sexual in character; they are terrifying and painful, being nearer to sadism than pleasure as it is usually regarded in sexual matters. Police officers know most of these people in their districts, but can do nothing until an offence has been committed, and not a great deal then. But exposure is merely the beginning of the tendency, and the tendency leads to rape, assault or murder; and, being unknown to the girl victim’s friends prior to the outrage, the persons are extremely hard to track down. It is the repetition of the outrage – the habit of it – which brings them to justice. Even so, an alarmingly high percentage of child- and women-killers are not brought to justice, and MacIndoe dreaded this type of murder. One could not even have the pleasure of anger, for how could one morally assess the insane? He sighed now and asked Maddocks, ‘Any recent assaults on girls or children in the district?’

  Maddocks said, ‘No; nothing recently.’

  ‘When was the last?’

  ‘A year ago. He went to prison.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘I don’t know. We’ll look it up.’

  ‘We’ll ask the City of Birlchester Police too,’ said MacIndoe, adding wearily, ‘They’ll know thousands …’

  ‘Shall we search the ground?’ Baker suggested.

  ‘We did have a brief look round before dark,’ said Maddocks, ‘but there seemed to be only the camera, the satchel and the handbag.’

  With great care, these were put into special boxes. ‘We’ll have them all tried for prints,’ MacIndoe said. ‘I don’t suppose he has a record, but if prints are there it would be a pleasant confirmation when we get him.’

  There was an obvious truth in his comment. Fingerprints are kept of all known criminals; but there is no such thing as a known habitual murderer, and habitual criminals for the most part do not intend to commit murder even if it would complete their escape or prevent their detention. Unless it be the obvious one of assassination or the killing of a night watchman prior to robbery, which in itself would explain a motive and even indicate the killer, murder is a crime in isolation and without precedent. All the fingerprints of a murderer would do is confirm the deductions of the detective after he had made an arrest via other evidence. The truth still is that, in a murder case, all the detectives can do is identify the victim and question her friends and acquaintances, especially people known to be in her company immediately prior to her death. It is a question of elimination in terms of time and place, although such circumstantial evidence needs the assisting proof and confirmation by science before a conviction is secured. Fingerprints can also be taken from the hands of the victim – for the purposes of elimination and identification. Victims cannot always be identified easily; if relatives and friends cannot do it, it may still be done satisfactorily through the examination of clothes and laundry-marks, teeth, objects in the pockets, blood-grouping …

  The policemen searched for about twenty minutes, but found only old cigarette cartons and a broken thermos flask in the bushes. They would have continued but for the arrival of some constables with a stretcher, a tall, gaunt man in plain clothes, and the Chief Constable. The gaunt man was the Home Office pathologist, Dr Baxter. Too tall, apparently, for his own strength, knobbly at all joints, having pale skin and pale green eyes in a hollowed, intellectual head, the pathologist looked like a caricature of his own scientific type. To a lesser extent, so did the Chief Constable, who was enormous and broad, very upright, red-faced and with militant blue eyes.

  There were introductions, and then MacIndoe, who already knew the pathologist, asked him, ‘What happened to you? I heard you’d started before us.’

  ‘A puncture,’ the pathologist said. ‘Miles from anywhere and the rain doing its damnedest. I was nearly struck by lightning. I wish you gentlemen would find your bodies at reasonable hours.’

  The Chief Constable smiled grimly and said, ‘It’s not done to a timetable, Doctor.’

  ‘Doctors and policemen,’ Dr Baxter went on, ‘lead a dog’s life – or, rather, a cat’s. Did you ever bear of a woman having a baby during the daytime? I never did. Well, let me have a look at this poor devil.’

  The same sergeant removed the material once more, and the pathologist, taking a clinical thermometer in one hand, bent down to examine the young woman with red hair. ‘What do you know about her?’ he asked.

  Maddocks said, ‘She was found yesterday evening at eight-fifteen by a courting couple. They think they passed the same spot on the previous evening. There’s a camera here that suggests a daytime visit. All of which indicates that she died some time yesterday.’

  ‘She did,’ said the pathologist. ‘Conditions indicate between three and four yesterday afternoon. Sorry I can’t be more exact than that. The poor girl was strangled. Big hands, I think, MacIndoe. She’s not a virgin, your girl isn’t. By which I don’t mean she was raped. Nothing took place yesterday, although it’s obvious something was attempted.’

  ‘Then it’s someone she knew,’ said MacIndoe. ‘We shall find him.’ He felt an unreasonable disappointment in the girl because she had not been a virgin … I’m a sentimental fool, he thought. There was bound to be something. And what’s it got to do with me? I’m not her judge or her avenger. But he still felt disappointed. The first impression of the sprawled girl had suggested innocence, which was a quality he admired …

  Some way off lightning flashed, and it was followed soon after by a long roll of thunder. ‘I’m going to get wet again,’ complained the pathologist. He turned the body and it rolled heavily on to its back. The girl lay now comp
letely relaxed in death; the doctor had destroyed the previous posture of violence. The girl had a beautiful face. Despite his conclusions concerning her, MacIndoe was quite startled. It was the face of a sad, wise child; it contained more than mere innocence; it had integrity, which implied a successful struggle. And yet her blouse was undone at the front – not torn – and this confirmed the pathologist’s statement that she had not been attacked. To some extent she must have surrendered. The simplest and most obvious explanation occurred to him: she was not a virgin because she was married. It was curious, but even in these atheistic times a woman could surrender her body in marriage and retain her expression of innocence, yet when it was yielded out of marriage the expression changed subtly, imperceptibly, to guilt or at least awareness. He looked at the girl’s left fingers and saw no wedding ring. It must be something complicated; there is a story here, he thought. Perhaps someone has tricked her. Knowing that faces do not indicate more than the main characteristics, MacIndoe still could not help believing what the girl’s face conveyed to him. It was too gentle a face to be resisted.

  Something like this must have been passing through the doctor’s mind also, for he commented, ‘She had a good body and a pretty, honest sort of face. She doesn’t look like a whore to me, but like a healthy young thing who should have been bearing babies.’

  ‘Perhaps she was,’ the Chief Constable said. ‘We know nothing about her. She may be married – anything.’

  The rain came suddenly and tropically. ‘Doctors and policemen,’ the pathologist commented again, ‘need to be in good condition so that they can do the work which would exhaust and kill anyone else … Come on. Let’s get out of here. I’ll do the rest in a laboratory … There isn’t anything else, is there?’

  The Chief Constable glanced at MacIndoe, who said, ‘No. Not at present.’ The Chief Constable signalled to the waiting constables, who arranged the body on the stretcher, covered it and followed the small procession back to the cars and ambulance. In the pouring rain the party tended to hurry. The dead girl was to be taken eventually, without her own permission, to a laboratory in the city of Birlchester. The policemen were driven to a breakfast of sausages and bacon.

  Chapter Three

  The contents of the handbag had been examined and the probable identity of the victim established. In the handbag had been found a compact and lipstick tube (although there was no makeup on the dead face); a comb retaining a few strands of auburn hair; a packet of cigarettes with five of the original ten remaining; some hair-grips; a box of matches; a pair of green woollen gloves; two handkerchiefs (no laundry-mark on either); a photograph of a middle-aged man and woman inscribed by a feminine hand ‘Mama and Dada, 1953’; a postcard with a view of Weston-super-Mare on its glossy side; and, finally, a letter.

  The letter and the postcard were both addressed to the same person: a Miss O. Hughes, care of a Mrs Wilson at an address in south-west Birlchester. On the postcard was simply the message or plea, My love, I’m sorry. Peggy. It had been posted in Weston on July 18th, more than a week earlier. There was no address on the letter, only the day, ‘Sunday’. It began ‘Olwen dearest’, which told MacIndoe what Miss O. Hughes’s Christian name was. The letter was from Mama and was affectionate but anxious. Apparently Olwen had not written for ten days and her mother wondered if she was ill. Someone named Tom (the Olwen’s brother, perhaps) had met a girl, but if Olwen came home for the Bank Holiday she was requested to say nothing about it. The letter was posted on July 25th, two days earlier, and the county was distinguishable as Merionethshire. If Miss Olwen Hughes was the victim – and it was at least strongly probable that she was – it seemed clear that she had been alive on Tuesday morning to receive a letter.

  MacIndoe and Baker were now travelling through the pouring rain, guided by a map loaned by Maddocks, to see Mrs Wilson. Maddocks himself had gone to the local Almond Vale magistrates’ court. The rain lashed at the windscreen faster than an instrument could clear it, and after a silence of some time MacIndoe said, ‘I’m glad we have an excuse to avoid that copse for a while, Tony. Let the reporters get wet. They deserve to more than we. They represent morbid curiosity, while we – what do we represent, eh, Tony?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Baker. ‘Justice perhaps.’ He recognized that MacIndoe was in a good mood; no doubt the result of finding the letter; it was always irritating to a detective if he had to devote time to finding who a victim was before carrying on to inquire why. ‘Justice or revenge.’ He sensed that MacIndoe wanted to talk; this was rather unusual.

  ‘We’re not seeking revenge,’ MacIndoe said. ‘I certainly am not. And I’m not sure justice belongs to prejudiced people like us. Justice is indivisible, m’lad, and belongs to God. No, Tony, I think we are the representatives of civil law – and civil law, not liking murder, says that anyone who commits it must hang as a warning and example to others.’ A pause. ‘What’s your impression of the victim?’

  Baker was slightly startled. ‘The victim. Well, I think I would have liked her very much.’

  ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’

  Baker laughed. ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Neither do I particularly,’ said MacIndoe. ‘Yet I thought the same as you without much reason to do so. Look for a cinema on your side, Tony. We should be about there.’

  A few minutes later Baker said, ‘Here’s the cinema: the Rialto.’

  ‘Now we turn right, third left and then right again,’ said MacIndoe. ‘We find No. 37 and have all our impressions wiped away.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Baker, voicing his thoughts, ‘the murderer will answer the door.’

  MacIndoe shook with amusement. ‘It’s not happened to me yet.’

  The thunder had stopped an hour earlier, but the rain was just as heavy as it had been in the copse. The two men huddled in the porch of No 37, an Edwardian house – one of a long line – and waited for someone to answer the door. A puddle had formed in the small front garden; the hedges glistened in cleanliness in the rain; a tradesman’s van passed by; an old man walking slowly stared from across the road. Hell, MacIndoe thought impatiently, what’s she gone out in the rain for? Is it early-closing day in Birlchester? I forgot to ask Maddocks. There was an alteration in the pattern of light beyond the frosted glass of the front door. Someone was coming slowly down a long hall. A woman. She said, ‘Half a minute.’

  The woman who answered the door was elderly, stout, tidily dressed except that her sleeves had been rolled up and there was soapy foam on her plump arms. MacIndoe’s thoughts formed an opinion telegraphically: lower middle class; widow; too pale to be in good health; kindly and even cheerful; doesn’t know we’re police officers; we shall get the truth if she knows it; opinion of the Olwen girl will be favourable, possibly prejudicially so. The woman said, ‘Hello. Lovely day for the match.’

  ‘The match?’

  ‘The cricket match.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Perfect. We would like to speak to Mrs Wilson.’

  ‘I am Mrs Wilson. Will you come in? You’ll get drowned out there.’ The policemen stepped into the hall. ‘Let’s go in here,’ said the woman.

  They entered the front room, which had the appearance and smell of a parlour: overcrowded with photographs, ugly china dogs, the furniture and the fabrics too dark, it left an impression of being available rather than used. ‘We are police officers,’ said MacIndoe.

  She was visibly shocked. ‘I thought you’d come for rooms. Perhaps you have.’

  ‘I’m afraid not, Mrs Wilson,’ MacIndoe said. ‘We came to inquire if you know an auburn-haired girl, probably with the name Olwen Hughes.’

  Mrs Wilson sat down quickly on one of her own chairs. ‘Yes, I know Olwen.’

  ‘Are you a friend of hers?’

  ‘She’d never do anything wrong –’

  ‘She hasn’t done anything,’ MacIndoe said gently. �
�I’m afraid I have bad news of her, Mrs Wilson.’

  ‘She’s been hurt?’

  ‘I’m sorry to say that she has been killed.’

  The pale, fat face lost its apathy; suffering seemed to colour it from inside. The murderer had claimed another victim. This woman – who did not yet even know that it was murder – would never be quite the same again. She was trembling now so that she could scarcely breathe. She was old; she would never recover; there would always be a nervous tic, a fear of answering the front door … Mrs Wilson said in a sort of protest, ‘But she was always so careful.’

  ‘Careful?’

  ‘On the roads.’

  ‘Did Miss Hughes have fine, dark red hair?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then there’s no doubt.’