Death Scene

by Jane A. Adams

  The constable looked blank, then shook his head. ‘Ten minutes? No more than that. I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Ten minutes too long,’ Henry said flatly.

  The constable’s gaze travelled guiltily around the room and then back to Henry. He looked utterly shamefaced but also defiant. ‘What else could I do, sir? I’ve lived around the water all my life, I know the currents, I know the deep pools, I thought I could be of help. If I had not gone and there had been a little kiddie in the water, and I might have helped, well, I don’t think I could have lived with myself.’

  Henry glared at him and then allowed his expression to soften. He knew he would have done the same himself so how could he blame the constable for reacting with natural compassion?

  ‘So what do I do now, sir?’ the constable asked nervously.

  ‘Did you know the boy?’

  ‘No, sir. But he won’t be that hard to find. And when I do …’

  ‘And when you do you’ll lock him in the cells for an hour or two, just as a warning, and you’ll find out who sent him on his errand. In the meantime you’d better take up your post outside and record everything you can remember in your notebook. Then you can make a proper statement when you get back to the station. Understood? And then you’re going next door to talk to Dr Clark and take a proper statement from that gentleman. Understood?’

  The constable nodded. ‘Yes, sir. Thank you, Inspector, sir. If I could just trouble you for a drink of water, sir?’ he asked, pointing towards the kitchen.

  Henry closed his eyes in exasperation. ‘This,’ he said heavily, ‘is an active crime scene. One that has been left unprotected. One that I now have to assess anew. Constable, I suggest if you need refreshment you should go next door and speak with your Dr Clark, take his statement and see if you are fortunate enough to be offered a cup of tea.’

  The constable disappeared with great alacrity and Henry sighed.

  ‘What would you like me to do, sir?’ Constable Prentice asked. He had maintained a diplomatic silence throughout.

  Henry studied the scene carefully, not quite sure what should be done.

  ‘Assist me with the photographs; we need some sense of what has been moved and disturbed and what might have been taken. Touch nothing. I imagine our perpetrator wore gloves but we’ll need to fingerprint anything he might have been in contact with. But for now, the day grows late, as does my patience.’ And, though it was still bright outside, the sun had shifted round and the interior of the bungalow was now in shadow. He was reluctant to find and light the paraffin lamps because the smell of paraffin in the room was very strong. He suspected they had been knocked over and the spirit perhaps soaked into the floor or the furniture. He had no wish to start a fire. He had a torch and guessed that Constable Prentice would have one too and others could be borrowed, but even so, the thought of embarking on any attempts to untangle things just by torchlight did not appeal. They would be lucky if they got the photographs finished before the light became too weak.

  Henry examined the bag again and discovered that there was a small stock of flashbulbs so they could make use of those if necessary. He preferred not to; the flash could distort.

  ‘We photograph what we can; we draw any conclusions that we might as to what the perpetrator might have touched. We note this down. Then you, Constable Prentice, will stand guard while I return to the police station and arrange not only for your relief but also for a locksmith to be found, something that should already have been done. Something that I was assured would already have been seen to. And someone to board up the windows temporarily. We can have no repetition of this.’

  ‘You think he’ll come back?’

  ‘I think we can’t be sure he found what he was looking for. If the officer is to be believed, then he was away for no more than ten minutes. Let’s say fifteen; he is certain to have sought to limit the damage by underestimating the time that he was absent. In ten or fifteen minutes this was done, which suggests to me that the perpetrator either did not know what to look for or did not know where to find it. That being so, we cannot be sure that he achieved his aim.’

  Prentice nodded and looked a little unsure of himself. Henry realized the boy was thinking about being left alone outside the bungalow. He hastened to reassure him. ‘I think two officers might be better than one. One to stand and one to patrol and good locks on the door will slow anyone down.’

  ‘I’m sure it will, sir. Did you think to check the water tank?’

  Henry nodded. Most of the water used by the residents in the bungalows was rainwater, caught in large butts and tanks outside. He understood that fresh water could be bought from the bungalow stores but that they relied on this natural source for washing and cooking.

  ‘Sergeant Hitchens examined it,’ he said. ‘But it would not hurt to have a closer look. I will leave that task to you, Constable Prentice, when we have finished with the photographs.’

  It was almost an hour and a half later that Henry set off back. He had already sent word back to the police station, making use of one of Dr Clark’s boys to carry the message and giving him a shilling for his reward.

  The locksmith, he was told, was now on his way. A second constable had been sent to keep Prentice company and another would relieve him as soon as possible.

  Henry had to be satisfied with that. He made a telephone call to Mickey Hitchens in London and relayed the day’s events to his sergeant.

  ‘Nothing so far on the fingerprints,’ Mickey told him. ‘The post-mortems have both been scheduled for tomorrow afternoon, starting somewhere after two. Shall I remain here and wait for you?’

  Henry told him that would be the best idea and he would catch the train from Worthing the following morning. He planned to process the new photographs at his sister’s house that night, he told Mickey.

  ‘You’ll be running a bit fly on the chemicals,’ Mickey told him.

  ‘I’ll do what I can; the rest may have to wait until I return to London, but I would prefer to examine them tonight.’

  Cynthia had sent a car, but not the Bentley this time. Her own little Ford sedan was waiting outside and the driver told him that his sister had ‘gone up to town, to the theatre, sir. She said to tell you that the master would be in later, and if there was anything you needed or wanted you should just ask.’

  Henry thanked him and spent the journey back to his sister’s house in quiet reverie. It had been an eventful day but not one on which the events were in any way satisfying.

  EIGHT

  ‘Hello, old chap. You still up?’ Albert came into his study and headed straight for the drinks cabinet, poured himself rather more than two fingers of Scotch, added a splash of soda from the tall glass siphon and waved a glass in Henry’s direction. ‘Can I get you a top-up?’

  Henry thanked him and said he would indeed like another drink. He made to gather the photographs that were spread all across Albert’s desk and on the floor, but Albert gestured that he should leave them. Henry’s brother-in-law peered curiously at the pictures. ‘What sort of a day have you had, then, old man?’

  ‘Frustrating. A damnably frustrating one,’ Henry told him. ‘And yourself?’

  ‘More boring than frustrating, if I’m honest. I had a lot of business to clear out of the way, today. Although it is only Thursday, I have taken tomorrow off, and next week I have promised Cynthia absolutely nothing will disturb us. So if I am to have an undisturbed week I must have a very disturbed Thursday.’

  Albert threw himself down on the small sofa and gestured at the photographs once more.

  ‘Local press is buzzing with it. I picked up some of the papers on my way home. Glamorous Actress Done to Death in Her Own Home, you know the sort of thing. It’s a damnable shame, though. What a ghastly thing to happen to a beautiful young woman.’

  Henry thought it was a pretty ghastly thing to happen to anyone but he didn’t bother saying so. He knew that Albert meant no harm by the comment. ‘And so,’ he said, ‘how is
the world of business?’

  ‘More complicated than I’d like, if I’m honest.’

  ‘How so?’ Henry asked, sensing that his brother-in-law would like to talk about it. Henry wasn’t at all sure that he wanted to talk about his own day so he was glad of the distraction.

  How was business, Henry had asked him, and Albert said that it was sound, and expanding. ‘But we don’t want to expand too far or too fast,’ he said. ‘To be frank, Henry, I don’t trust the times. I keep looking to Europe and more especially to Germany and what do I see? Hyperinflation and demoralization and a disturbing rise in the more extreme politics. There’ll be trouble from that quarter again, you mark my words.’

  ‘I thought the idea was that a weakened Germany would insure against that,’ Henry commented.

  ‘A weakened Germany, yes. Now, politically I’m all in favour of that. But you start to push the ordinary people too far and one day they will start to push back. And I, for one, don’t like what I’m seeing.’

  ‘You’ve been there recently, I believe.’

  ‘I have. They are desperate for stable currency. If you have dollars or sterling you can buy yourself anything. But there’s a desperation, Henry, a sense of injustice that you can’t escape. It worries me. I’d had the thought to open a factory there, a spot just outside Münster that I could have bought for a song. Labour is cheap and people are desperate for jobs but …’

  ‘But you decided against.’

  ‘I did, but I can give you no sound business reason. Sometimes, Henry, you just have to trust your gut and mine is telling me to leave well alone.’

  Henry nodded. It seemed strange to him that a scant decade after the end of the war, Albert should have been considering such a venture anyway.

  ‘So, I came back from Münster and I discussed matters with my board and also with your sister. We have made the decision to consolidate rather than expand, and are keen to try and insure our business against shocks. Cynthia has proposed, and I agree, that we should begin to move money out of stocks and shares and into more concrete products. Our business was always focused around commodities and this has stood us in good stead in the past. We have been considering our options and are thinking to put the capital that we managed to liberate from the sale of our stocks and bonds into property. Good quality property. That rarely loses value in the long term and we need to secure the future for the children, whatever happens in the business world.’

  ‘That would seem a sensible course of action,’ Henry approved.

  ‘To my mind, yes. Many of my fellow men of business disagree, of course, and the board took convincing, I can tell you. But fortunately, I have always retained a casting vote. They see this as a safe, slow option in a world that is no longer safe and slow. They think we should be taking more risks, expanding more swiftly and, of course, there are still those who believe I listen to my wife more assiduously than is good for me, but I worry about the volatility of the markets. I worry about some of the trends that I’m seeing and I would rather be slow and safe and have a steady investment in the years to come than strive to make pots of money now only to lose it all when the markets turn. It’s happened before and it will happen again, Henry. Mark my words.’

  Henry Johnstone nodded. It occurred to him that he could almost hear his sister’s voice in what Albert was saying. He was glad that she had such influence and also glad that Albert gave her some credit for it. ‘I would take my sister’s opinion over that of most men I know,’ he said. ‘She has always been a source of great good sense.’

  The conversation turned to cinema and the prospect of talking films becoming a widespread phenomenon.

  ‘Cynthia is very enthused about that new film The Jazz Singer; apparently it will be reaching London in late September. I imagine there will be queues around the block at every cinema. You think it will catch on, old man?’

  ‘From what I have heard in the last couple of days, those involved with the industry certainly think it will,’ Henry told him. ‘I imagine it will be good news for the voice coaches and the elocutionists. I’m told there will be many actors and actresses who will not make the grade because their voices are inadequate to the task.’

  ‘Well, there were many whose acting was not up to the task, but that never seemed to stop them.’ Albert laughed at his own joke. ‘It strikes me that all the young women ever had to do was stand there and look glamorous. However, I do find it an exciting prospect. Sound on films! I was reading the other day about that experiment with television. I’ll find the article for you if you like; I know you’re interested in such things.’

  ‘You mean the transmission in colour?’ Henry asked him. ‘Yes, Sergeant Hitchens was telling me something about it. His reading matter is surprisingly broad, you know.’

  ‘So I’d noticed. He is a good chap, all told.’ Albert nodded as though to affirm his opinion and got up to get himself another drink. Henry declined.

  The clock in the hall struck midnight and Albert announced he was going to bed. He’d been up since five trying to get business out of the way.

  ‘I expect I’ll see you at breakfast. And I hope your day goes better tomorrow. With fewer frustrations and a little more progress.’

  Henry thanked him and his brother-in-law took himself off to bed, a glass of whiskey in one hand and the latest P.G. Wodehouse, Money for Nothing, in the other.

  Henry sat for a little longer, still sipping his whiskey. Both his sister and brother-in-law drank quite heavily, as did most of their set, but Henry himself was more restrained. He did not like the way that alcohol dulled his thoughts – though, he supposed, for a lot of people that was the whole point of it.

  His mind wandered through the events of the day but he was no nearer to pulling the threads together and eventually he too wandered up to bed.

  That night Henry slept but he also dreamt and the dreams were uncomfortably vivid. In his dream Cissie Rowe stood by the seashore, but this was not England on the south coast, this was somewhere else. And behind her stood a procession of men and women and children and horses and guns, stretching out into a place that he recognized as the River Adur, though it seemed wider and deeper than when Henry had walked beside it.

  Henry woke, his pyjamas soaked in sweat, but he was relieved to find that the sun was streaming through the window and it was dawn and that, despite his dreaming, his sleep had refreshed him.

  What does it matter, Henry? Just one more death, what is one more little death? Henry wasn’t sure what had called that question to mind; something in his dream had triggered a memory, together with the fury Henry had felt towards the speaker.

  ‘It all bloody matters,’ Henry said, hauling himself out of bed and striding into the little bathroom that was en suite to his bedroom. He stripped off his sodden pyjamas and dumped them into the laundry hamper, then washed thoroughly, as though using the face cloth and soap to raze the last of the dream, to scrape it from his skin.

  He dressed and then sat at the small desk that Cynthia had installed beside the window and took out his journal.

  The man who spoke those words to me found himself face down in the mud. I’d hit him hard, I remember that I’d hit him hard enough for my knuckles to be scraped raw. It took him a while to get up again, or so I’m told. I’d had my fill of him, frankly. I didn’t hang around long enough to see him regain his feet.

  It sickened me then and it sickens me now, this notion that some deaths are of so little consequence. We threw men at cannon, at machine guns, sent them forward and forward until the bodies piled up and the guns fell silent because they had spent their ammunition, more often than not for the gain of a few feet of land. Often not even that.

  He paused, breathed deep and released the breath slowly. It had been ten years and yet the anger still burned just as hot and bright as it ever had. Mickey reckoned that he was afraid to release it. Lose that anger and Henry was afraid that he would lose his edge.

  Cynthia knew that it went deeper th
an that. If Henry ceased to feel angry then he feared he might cease to feel anything at all.

  The gong in the hall, announcing that breakfast was served, interrupted his reverie. Henry shrugged into his jacket, slipping the journal back into the pocket, and went downstairs, hoping that Albert would be true to form and not expect small talk at such an early hour.

  In fact, Henry and Albert didn’t speak very much over breakfast, neither being the type who enjoyed early morning conversation. Instead they read their papers and Henry caught up with what the local press was saying about the inquiry. He was struck by one of the headlines: ‘The Final Death of Cissie Rowe.’

  He read the article with some irritation. The author talked about the young woman’s film career and how she had begun by playing tiny parts, younger sister or second maid, and slowly progressed through the industry. More recently she had played the discarded lovers, young women disappointed in love and heroines that had met sticky ends.

  He noted a smaller photograph further down the page, of Cissie Rowe caught in a candid moment, chatting to a fellow actress. The photograph was credited to Miss S. Mars, reminding Henry of his meeting with the young woman who had accosted him at the studio and taken his picture. He was discomforted to note that this image had also made its way into the newspaper, with the caption ‘Chief Inspector Johnstone Investigates’.

  Irritated, Henry nevertheless read on.

  In a career that sadly imitated real life, Miss Rowe was frequently depicted as the victim of violent acts. I have counted roughly and approximately and I believe Miss Rowe to have died on screen perhaps five or six times and, through the magic of film, five or six times she has walked away, gone back to her home and returned to delight us in yet another film. Sadly she will not get up and walk away this time. We are told that the police are investigating and that they have certain leads. Let us hope that the violence meted out to this quiet community and this graceful woman will be met by equal violence and determination on the part of our police force.