by James Barlow
Baker said in excitement, ‘The girl was right about March 17th, sir. The man’s a traveller who called when “Mrs H.” was out. Later she mentions the red car, the mad wife; they even had lunch at the Dragon.’
‘Oh, no, this is too easy,’ protested MacIndoe. ‘That was where we went. We must go again, obviously. Let me read my last letter, Tony, and then we’ll sort through the diary.’
The letter had been written in January, 1945, and seemed more formal than the others:
DEAR MISS OLWEN,
I am sorry I have not wrote before, but it has taken me weeks to get the address. And what I have to give you is bad news, which you may have had already.
It is with regret that I have to tell you that Joe has been lost. I nearly had it myself as you can see by the address. [MacIndoe looked – the letter came from a German prisoner-of-war camp.] We was on patrol ahead of the others when a Tiger come out of a yard. Joe was killed instant. I ran for it but some of ’em on motor-bikes caught me and two more blokes. We was lucky not to be killed.
It’s not bad here. I hope this letter reaches you safe, even censored, because it is only right that you should know. I always remember that night of the dance, you and Joe scared to death. He was very fond of you, you know, quite different from your friend and me. (Give her my regards, won’t you?) Chin up, Miss Olwen, because Joe never knew nothing. No pain and that. And I suppose it was you he did it for. He had no folks. He was a good kid, but the good die young as they say. The older ones have got more sense.
Believe me, I am,
Yours Very Faithfully,
HARRY COXHAM
The Tiger tank and the marked passages of Shelley. ‘She says to me – I’ll never forget it – “You’re the salt of the earth, Mrs Wilson,” and blushed because she hadn’t meant to say it.’ She bought the New Testament in 1944 when the boy died. It was one of war’s little jokes that one should be inveigled into believing that one had found something perfect and perhaps immortal, only to be shown that in the face of chemical and exploding steel it was not. ‘Did they say what sort of a girl she was?’ No, they had not explained that. They were unaware that she was exceptional beyond the statistically remarkable fact of the way she had died. They said they were sorry to do this, but your name was at the top of the rota. They had an idea that the case would be difficult and sordid; it might prove to be interesting; but it was not within their experience that it should be beautiful. ‘Don’t you know about yourself? Hasn’t anyone ever told you? Why aren’t you conceited?’ Yes, why weren’t you conceited? You would have lived if you had been. If you had been conceited you would have been aware that a beautiful girl is always a protagonist in a battle for her own destruction; and you would have fought with your brain while you made surrenders with your heart. ‘The good die young. The older ones have got more sense.’ Sense meaning cunning, of course. Cunning is not beautiful; it knows nothing of tenderness or passion or humility or even anger; but it makes sure of the contraceptives; it has solicitors; it wants to know particulars of addresses and salaries and wives who are in asylums … I must find this man, MacIndoe thought. It’s an affront to all those things I believe in that I should allow the possibility of his meeting another innocent girl without conceit and destroying her in a similar fashion.
The diary was a larger volume than MacIndoe had anticipated. Each page measured about a foot in length and was nine inches in width. It was too large to be carried in a hand-bag, which no doubt explained why it had neither passed into the possession of the murderer nor been found at the copse. It also explained why there were no diaries for the previous years: this one was the New Year’s gift (no doubt to Mrs Harper’s business) of a chemical company. It could have been a gift from the murderer – although he didn’t seem to like the written word – who might have been a traveller for that company, but MacIndoe knew that it was not, for the entries began, not on March 17th, but on the first day of the year. The early entries were short and trivial – letters from home, films she’d seen, meetings with Peggy and others with Hazel. From the day she had met the traveller the entries were lengthier; the ones for each Tuesday were so long that they tended to overflow into the spaces for Wednesdays. MacIndoe studied the entries with care. Everyone the girl knew would be questioned closely, and it did not follow that this Roy was the murderer, but MacIndoe certainly wished to interview him.
The advantage of the diary was that it recorded the events, irrespective of their distortion. The girl was not used to deception; she’d got to put down the truth somewhere, and here it all was. Even if ninety per cent of what the man had said was untrue, the girl did not lie: she put it all down in love and good faith so that it disturbed one to read it, knowing what it led to. In addition, she put down the small, hard facts that policemen can work on. MacIndoe noted every tiny, available one. The man had lied from the very first moment – the story was too familiar to doubt that – but he couldn’t lie in a vacuum. He’d told his lies in the Dragon, at the Priory Tea Rooms, in a ‘small inn in Brownhill’; in a red sports car, in the ‘Queen’s in the city’; somewhere where they went dancing – and all these places could be visited. It only needed one single person who knew him to have seen him once with the red-haired girl as they travelled about, ate in restaurants, danced or walked. The man had cunning. He’d been aware of the necessity of being anonymous from the start. Mrs Wilson had never seen the man: ‘She was ashamed of him, or ashamed of us’ – whichever it was you could be sure the man had agreed readily to Olwen’s arrangements that she wasn’t taken home. In addition to physical places the man had mentioned, he had had to give some account of himself. No doubt in her love the girl had longed for details. He had a wife called Evelyn who was in an accident and insane. That had a ring of truth, or why should he have admitted to being married at all? He said he had been a pilot who had dropped mines in the Kiel Canal. He’d obtained an order for 150 gross (what of? soap?) from Birrell’s. That might give him away. ‘R. had to go to Bristol today.’ That tiny fact might eventually prove something. Olwen kept talking about the twelve months they were to wait. What twelve months? Has the wife only that long to live – until next March? After her last visit to Wales the girl had written, ‘I had to be on guard against those who, loving me possessively, wished to hear about my every activity.’ So her parents don’t know about Roy even now. What bitter news for them. And no information for me from the Welsh police. ‘R. is funny – he makes me use typed, addressed envelopes.’ Why? I wonder. As Olwen said, who would the landlady make trouble with if she did open a letter, since the wife is mad? I’ve got a feeling that there is no wife; she was there as an excuse ready for when he decided to abandon Olwen. Perhaps Olwen began to plead for marriage and he explained (very skilfully, no doubt: he’d had previous experience of explanations) that they couldn’t be married because the (nonexistent) mad wife showed signs of recovery or at least of survival. Then comes the day when Olwen, with the fluttering gift of new life inside her, says that a decision must be made. She explains why and repeats what she put down in the diary, that she did not wish to kill the baby. And so he kills both of them.
‘Like I told you – she was nice – better than me.’ Hazel appreciated that your love had a quality different to her own. Joe felt the same sort of awe: ‘I feel ugly and afraid beside you.’ And you were only sixteen then, Olwen. He must have looked at your serious, virtuous face and realized that it wasn’t the same as others he’d known or wanted to know. ‘I’m glad you stopped me loving you’ – but he hadn’t stopped loving you; on the contrary, his love had developed. When you were a child Leslie wrote: ‘Nothing will ever be the same.’ He was wrong, for you kept his brooch for more than twelve years. You had the quality of compassion and they were all in awe of it – except R. You must have been a good nurse with your pity, the sort who continued her kindnesses off duty. Like you did for Stephen. You didn’t really love him, did yo
u? You wanted to show mercy to him, the compassion that in a beautiful girl leads to disaster if someone abuses it. Saints and nurses shouldn’t be beautiful. Stephen couldn’t help noticing that. ‘You don’t use lipstick and your lips have little lines, like the grains in wood … No doubt your shoulders and legs have the same perfection.’ Aye. Even I couldn’t help seeing that you’d been a bonny girl.
I like ye verra much, Olwen. I’m glad I met ye in the first person, and didn’t collect all my opinions from others. Tony says he thinks he would have liked ye too. I wish ye could have met him. He’s a fine boy. He’s a big, blond, honest-looking lad, about your age, and he didn’t eat very much breakfast after he’d seen your lithe, dead body. He’s still young enough to believe beautiful people can never be killed. Like you, Olwen, although ye had pity for the ugly also. When Tony reads your diary he’s going to be angry. It’s not a good thing for a policeman to be angry; he loses his impartiality; but I shan’t blame him. Ye musta been a fine girl, Olwen, but ye were foolish. Ye shouldn’t have read Gone With the Wind. It makes romance out of something that more probably wouldn’t have been romantic. Ye should have read your own diary before ye went out of the house that day. Don’t ye see, it conveys the story of your own destruction? Notice how light-heartedly and with what tenderness ye started out, and with what despair ye ended. Notice that when it’s written down one sees all too clearly that it’s a trick; the man’s intentions become obvious quite quickly. ‘I go about sighing and smiling to myself; I have to lower my gaze in buses and pretend to take an interest in hair styles for fat ladies. And all the time I think of him.’ I know what ye thought – all tenderness and gentility. I have a wife who’s still like that. She’s forty-six years old and still shy. She would have liked ye. ‘I had to slap R.’s face!’ Ye thought in your charity that he was just being foolish and excited. ‘He said something about how the war and Evelyn’s illness had destroyed all his religion.’ Ye should have known then. A man’s religion is not destroyed by adversity; on the contrary, he clings to it all the more tightly. Didn’t he ever go to church to pray for this wife of his? On the train a few weeks later ye lose your control over him. He insists and ye can’t stop him. ‘It’s a marvel I wasn’t scared, but then, despite his eagerness, I trust him.’ Oh, Lassie, didn’t ye know what the sherry and the first-class compartment were for? But I suppose all lovers, innocent as well as guilty, want privacy. ‘He longs to possess me and is even showing slight impatience at my arguments.’ What arguments? Were ye still going to church at the time? ‘I had the feeling I would have had to quarrel to stop him.’ He was very impatient, wasn’t he? But only for your body, Olwen, not for your love. He already had that. And so ye went on to surrender and the diary begins to record your unhappiness. ‘I sometimes cry, but heaven knows what about.’ He wasn’t unhappy, though, was he? He always had his own way after that. I’m afraid your friend Peggy was right. If it was a thing ye couldn’t tell your mother about ye must have known it was wrong. Did ye know, I wonder? – did ye begin to see that if one half is ugly the whole cannot be made beautiful?
Ye will have to excuse me reading your letters and diary. Ye needn’t be embarrassed. Ye won’t see me – policemen don’t go to Heaven – they’re not needed there. Ye have been a great help to me. Ye see, this description ye have given me of the man ye loved tells me what sort of a man he was. I play the record in reverse and the music is no longer sweet: it comes out bitter and discordant. Ye know now he was exactly the reverse of what he persuaded ye to believe. Ye see that? Ye see the trick? His enormous advantage was that he looked the lie. Your friend Hazel confirms that. He looked distinguished. They don’t usually. Ugliness comes into their faces when they’re granted the surrender they seek. Ye were very unlucky. But why didn’t ye put down the name of his company, Olwen, or his surname, or the number of his car? Anything. Ye can’t love an initial. Ye see, he may even get away with it. Hazel’s given a good physical description; he has to move about, and so does his red car; and we’ll be looking for him. But it’s possible he may evade us. I am a pretty good detective, but partly because the average man does not want to commit murder. He does it in rage and grief and without premeditation, and even if his nerves don’t make him surrender, he leaves evidence behind for us … But this man from the very first moment he met ye was deceiving ye, and through ye, me. I don’t like it, Olwen. It suggests callousness, premeditation. But I may be wrong. Ye will know now. Ye know the very best and worst of him. Perhaps he is suffering acutely now. Perhaps he has already surrendered, thrown himself on our mercy. In any case, my estimation of ye is that ye will have forgiven him. But I can’t do that, Olwen. I am not supposed to have any opinion; I only have to find him; and that I still intend to do.
Chapter Six
At Mrs Harper’s. Women hanging about, mouths open, one of them weeping. Resentful stares – as though the police were responsible for the crime. Both assistants looking absolutely exhausted. Mrs Harper chain-smoking: the over-sweet atmosphere as thick as that in a pursued submarine. ‘Oh, God,’ she protested. ‘You again.’ No signs of compassion at all. All that pushed out of the way. The resentment genuine now. (Oh, God, in whom I unfortunately have not the emotional capacity to believe, why did You let this girl be killed and cause all this inconvenience to me?)
MacIndoe said, ‘We have reason to believe Miss Hughes knew a man who was a traveller.’ He waved a hand to stop Mrs Harper’s impending protest. ‘He must have called here, because it happened on March 17th, which was a Thursday. In other words, he called on what I take it – correct me if I’m mistaken – was for Miss Hughes a working day. In addition, we understand he’s about thirty, probably more, has a red sports car, is tall and rather dark, gives an impression of being perhaps upper middle-class, has the Christian name Roy …’
Mrs Harper took two aspirins. ‘I’ve got a headache. I can’t think about anything. You do it. I’m tired. Who told you all that?’
‘We can’t go into that. The point is, do you know him?’
‘No,’ said Mrs Harper. ‘I’ve been thinking – when they’ve let me – about travellers. They’re all middle-aged. None of them use sports cars.’
‘You are referring to regular callers, I presume,’ MacIndoe pointed out. ‘What about men who have called and had their stuff rejected? This man certainly seems to have only made the one call.’
‘It’s possible,’ said Mrs Harper. ‘But the only young man I can remember in months was a blond boy, about twenty-five, cheeky, came in a black Ford. I soon threw him out.’
‘Who else would attend to travellers? Olwen?’
‘Whoever it was would have referred them to me,’ Mrs Harper explained. ‘None of my staff can turn away a traveller – they all see me.’
Bowler back on head, back through the small crowd. ‘All right. We’ll leave you to brood on it.’
‘I shan’t be able to do much else, shall I? It’ll be wonderful for business – everybody’ll be in. My God, she wasn’t worth this much fuss.’
At Birrell’s. The smell of bacon and cheese. A machine slicing the bacon. A child eating a biscuit. Four or five women waiting about, shoulders sagging. One of them pretty and very upright. Pregnant. She’ll be sagging soon. A man saying, like a ritual, ‘How about sauces? We’ve Worcester, tomato, brown, sweet pickle –’
A man wearing glasses, white face heavily creased, exhausted after the years of selling things for the stomach. The manager.
‘Good afternoon.’
‘Good afternoon. We’re police officers investigating a murder.’
The inevitable, unbearable silence. Heads turning. Only the child, too young to know the word, continuing to eat. ‘Oh,’ said the manager, while behind him every one of his staff looked and listened without pretence. The customers could wait and did so willingly. The pregnant girl’s eyes widened in horror. Like Olwen’s, MacIndoe thought. ‘We are anxious
to interview a man who is a traveller. He is known to have called here on Tuesday, March 22nd, and obtained an order for a hundred and fifty gross – I do not know what of.’
‘I see,’ said the manager slowly. Raising his voice, ‘Fetch the books for March, and stop gaping.’
The man who had been slicing bacon left the machine and presently approached with two heavy books. ‘Soon tell you,’ the manager said. ‘We keep a record of everything. Damned income tax and auditors and ministries – you have to know where you are. March 22nd, did you say?’
‘Yes, March 22nd.’
‘I’m sorry. We didn’t give any orders on March 22nd.’
‘Nothing at all?’
‘No. Are you sure about the day?’
‘Absolutely sure.’ (I can trust Olwen.) ‘It was a Tuesday.’
The manager thumbed a calendar. ‘Yes, Tuesday it was.’
‘Have you other branches?’
‘No.’
It didn’t make sense. Olwen had written it down, and not an hour ago Hazel had told them, before they left Mrs Wilson’s house, that it was the place where she had obtained her groceries. She wasn’t likely to forget that. MacIndoe bit a thumbnail. The customers and staff waited to hear what he would say.
‘Just possibly,’ he said, ‘the traveller didn’t obtain an order, or the witness was misinformed. This man we wish to interview has a red sports car. He is tall, darkish, well-dressed, about thirty-five, probably good-looking.’
‘I don’t know him. I’ve never heard of a man using a sports car for work.’
A girl approached. About twenty, tall, a heavy, rounded body, long, slow-moving limbs, full breasts. Her face very pale, but not without sensuality. ‘Excuse me, Mr Belcher.’