The Night She Died

by Dorothy Simpson

  Thanet read all the statements through twice, quickly, and then more slowly a third time. His instinct, he decided, had let him down. Try as he would he could not see that the accident to Julie’s father had any bearing on her murder. Reading the report had been a waste of time. He closed the file and pushed it away with a gesture of disgust.

  He stood up and moved to the window. Outside, the streets were crowded with people going home from work and traffic had come to a standstill at the pelican crossing a hundred yards or so away up the road to the left. It had been a mistake to install one on such a busy road, Thanet thought. A constant stream of people pressing the crossing control-button could make it virtually impossible for traffic to keep moving. A conventional system of traffic lights would have been better, with an integrated pedestrian crossing control system. He really must remember to raise the matter with Traffic Control.

  He felt as sluggish as the traffic below him. He hated this stage in a case, when the initial impetus seems to have slipped away and the possibility of failure rears its ugly head. Thanet privately thought of this time as the policeman’s Slough of Despond. Not that such thoughts were put into words. On the contrary, there seemed to be a conspiracy of silence on the subject and Thanet sometimes wondered if many men superstitiously refused to acknowledge their doubts even to themselves, lest merely entertaining the possibility of failure should somehow blight their chances of success.

  He knew that by now he ought to have had enough experience to be able to tell himself that his depression was normal, something to be expected at this stage of a case, but the trouble was that each time it happened came the fear that this time would be different, this time there would be no breakthrough, that he would have, eventually, to admit defeat.

  The thought was enough to make him grit his teeth and turn back to his desk. There was only one way to deal with a mood like this and that was to immerse himself totally in work, to revert to patient, thorough, routine investigation. He must sit down, reread all the reports that had come in on the case so far, check, re-check and cross-check, discuss the matter exhaustively with Lineham and try and see what they had missed, what their next moves ought to be.

  He pressed the buzzer on his desk. ‘Find Lineham for me, will you?’

  8

  By the time Thanet arrived home at half past eight he felt as though his brain were stuffed with cotton wool. He and Lineham had gone over and over every scrap of information they had so far accumulated, had endlessly discussed the possible guilt of their three main suspects – Holmes, Parrish and Kendon, and had failed completely to reach any satisfactory conclusion or to see any way of breaking out of the impasse they seemed to have reached.

  Joan took one look at his face and unobtrusively took charge. Thanet was shepherded into the living-room where Joan told him to sit down and relax, thrust a large drink into his hand and disappeared into the kitchen. Thanet sat gazing into space, sipping his whisky and thinking about absolutely nothing until she reappeared with a tray. He had thought he wasn’t hungry but the sight and smell of one of his favourite dishes, steak and kidney pudding, revived his appetite and by the time he laid down his knife and fork he was beginning to feel human again.

  Joan, sitting opposite him, watched in companionable silence. ‘Better?’ she said, finally, when he had finished, whisking away the tray.

  Thanet stretched his legs out before him, loosened his belt one notch and patted his stomach ostentatiously. ‘Much,’ he said.

  ‘Good. I’ll fetch the coffee.’

  Thanet waited, gazing absentmindedly at the painting which hung on the wall before him, above the fireplace. It was an original oil which Joan had found unframed in a junk shop, shortly after they were married. She had managed to unearth an antique dealer who carried a stock of old picture frames, had persuaded him to cut one down to fit and had hung the finished product in pride of place. Thanet had always liked the painting, which was of a rural scene – cows grazing in the water meadows along the banks of a river. Such pictures, although not especially valuable had become increasingly difficult to find, Joan said. She’d always been interested in art and lately had been talking about taking a three-year course in the History of Painting at the College of Art when Ben was old enough to go to school.

  ‘I forgot to tell you,’ Thanet said when she returned with the coffee, ‘I saw an interesting picture yesterday.’

  ‘What was it? A portrait?’

  ‘Landscape, I suppose. It was of a cricket match, on a village green. Very vivid colours and lots of tiny figures.’

  ‘Really? It sounds like a Dacre. She specialised in village scenes, Village Wedding, Church Fête, Shrove Tuesday – that one was of a pancake race – and so on. As a matter of fact, I’m sure I remember the one you’re talking about.’ She rose, started rummaging through a pile of papers and leaflets on a low table in the angle of the chimney breast. ‘I’ve got a catalogue here, somewhere. The style sounds typically hers, as I said – lots of tiny figures, brilliant colours. Ah,’ she said triumphantly. ‘Here it is.’

  She sat down beside, Thanet, opened the catalogue and ran her finger down the list of exhibits. ‘Yes, I thought so. Here we are. The Cricket Match. By courtesy of …’ her voice slowed, wavered before going on, ‘Mrs Julie Holmes.’

  ‘Let me see!’ Thanet started at the entry, his mind racing. The painting, then, had obviously just been returned from the exhibition – he remembered seeing the package in Holmes’s hall on … which day had it been? The day before yesterday? Yes, that was right. Wednesday, then.

  ‘When did you go to the exhibition, darling?’

  ‘On Tuesday.’

  Surely it would have taken longer than that to dismantle the exhibits? Apparently not. Here was the evidence, in print, before him. A thought occurred to him. When had the exhibition started? He looked at the front page of the catalogue. It had been, apparently, a memorial exhibition to mark the twentieth anniversary of the death of Annabel Dacre, and had been open to the public from Tuesday, April 22 to May 6. The Private View had been held on the evening of Monday, April 21.

  Thanet sat up with a jerk. ‘Who would have attended the Private View?’

  Joan shrugged. ‘Local big-wigs, I suppose. Local artists, probably. And, of course, all the people who had loaned the paintings.’

  Julie had loaned a painting. And on Monday, April 21 she had had that nightmare for the first time.

  Thanet went to the telephone and rang Holmes. It sounded as though Holmes had pulled himself together for he was unusually forthcoming. He had forgotten about it but yes, now that Thanet mentioned it, he and Julie had both attended the Private View. They had received an invitation because Julie had loaned a painting. Holmes had found the occasion very boring. They knew nobody, and he wasn’t interested in art anyway. Julie had wanted to go because she liked the idea of the privilege of attending a private view and because she’d thought it might be a chance to meet a few more local people. No, nothing, unusual had happened during the evening. Julie had been rather quiet on the way home, but he’d thought that was because she’d been a little disappointed that they hadn’t enjoyed themselves as much as she had hoped. The painting had belonged to Julie’s mother. Julie had found it tucked away in a box in the attic when she was clearing out the house in Wimbledon after her mother’s death. Then, when she’d seen the advertisement in the Sturrenden Gazette, she was rather tickled at the idea of lending the picture and having ‘By courtesy of Mrs Julie Holmes’ in the catalogue. The advertisment had announced that a memorial exhibition of Annabel Dacre’s work was to be arranged and requested the loan of examples of her work.

  Thanet went back into the living-room, sat down and began to read the biography on the back of the catalogue. The first line brought him up short and he experienced that unique elation that comes when one suddenly understands something which has been puzzling one, that sudden fusing of apparently unrelated facts into a coherent whole so obvious that one wonders why
on earth one hasn’t seen it before.

  ‘Darling, what on earth’s the matter?’ Joan had just come in with fresh coffee.

  ‘Annabel Dacre was born and brought up in Little Sutton!’

  ‘Yes, I know. What of it?’

  Thanet jumped up, wincing as his back protested, and began to pace up and down. ‘Well, it’s just that there have been one or two things nagging away at the back of my mind, and I couldn’t work out why. I knew, when I found out that the Parrs – Julie Holmes’s parents – had lived in Little Sutton, that there was some reason why the name rang a bell – apart from the fact that I knew the place, that is. I’d seen that painting at Holmes’s house, you see, and knew that there was something familiar about it. It was the background of course, the village green at Little Sutton. You know those two huge oaks, slightly off centre … Why on earth didn’t I see it before?’

  ‘Darling, do stop pacing about like that. You’re making me dizzy. Sit down, and explain why you’re so excited about it.’

  Thanet subsided on to the settee. ‘Look. As a child Julie – Julie Parr, as she then was – lived in Little Sutton. We found that out today. And it was in Little Sutton, presumably, that one of her parents bought the picture of the cricket match. Now when Julie is three her father is killed in a car crash and at once Mrs Parr, anxious to get away from painful memories, leaves the village and moves to London. She can’t bring herself to destroy the picture – perhaps it had been a gift from her husband, but neither can she bear to look at it. So she tucks it away in the attic and for twenty years no one but she knows of its existence.

  ‘Julie grows up, gets married, her mother dies and Julie finds the picture when clearing out the house. Then her husband’s firm transfers him to Sturrenden. She moves with him, having no idea that she once lived in Kent, her mother for some reason having given her to understand they’d always lived in London. She is intrigued to read in the local paper that Sturrenden College of Art is appealing for the loan of paintings by Annabel Dacre for a special memorial exhibition. She offers to lend hers, is invited to the Private View, attends it with her husband – and that night she has the first in a series of nightmares which frighten her to such a degree that she asks her counsellor for a private interview and is sick after telling her about them. Even the people at work notice that she is looking ill – jumpy, nervous, was how one girl described it.’

  ‘So you think something happened at that Private View to … to what?’

  ‘To, how shall I put it, reactivate something which had had a profound effect on Julie as a child.’

  ‘But even if that is true, how can it possibly be relevant to her murder?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Thanet struck one clenched fist into the palm of the other. ‘I just don’t know. I just have this feeling …’ Thanet picked up the catalogue again and quickly read the rest of the biographical details on the back. ‘What does it mean, “tragic early death”?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. As it says, Annabel Dacre was twenty-five when she died. And it was tragic. I think the world lost a fine painter.’

  ‘And that was twenty years ago. 1960. The same year Mrs Parr moved to London.’

  ‘But that was because her husband was killed.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s a coincidence, and although coincidences do happen, I like to make sure that’s what they really are.’ Thanet tossed the catalogue on the table, turned to Joan, put his arm around her. ‘I think a little visit to the College of Art is indicated, in the morning.’

  Joan grinned. ‘It’s Saturday tomorrow.’

  ‘Damn. So it is. Never mind, I expect we’ll be able to dig someone up.’

  He didn’t doubt it. His mood of despondency had melted away and he felt buoyant, confident, on course again. He certainly wasn’t going to be defeated by red tape.

  He almost was, however. It took over an hour of telephone calls to get around the fact that the entire educational system of Kent closed down on Saturdays. In the end it was Lineham who, through a friend of a friend who was a student at the College of Art, managed to get hold of the man who was Head of Fine Arts at the College, and that only after working systematically through all the Johnsons in the local directory.

  ‘At last,’ Lineham said, triumphant but weary, handing the telephone over to Thanet.

  Mr Johnson was not very pleased at having his weekend plans interrupted, but agreed, relucantly, to see Inspector Thanet.

  ‘I’ll be there in twenty minutes,’ said Thanet. ‘Thank you, sir.’

  The Johnsons lived on a small, pleasant estate of individually designed modern houses which had been built in the grounds of a large country house in a village two miles out of Sturrenden. Each stood in a beautifully landscaped plot of about half an acre, generously endowed with mature trees which were obviously a legacy from the original gardens of the stately home. Thanet wondered how on earth the builders had managed to get planning permission. ‘Infilling’? he wondered.

  From the outside the Johnsons’ house was pleasant but unremarkable: large windows, random stonework, pleasantly mellow red brick. Inside, however, it was a very different kettle of fish. Only half the house had a first floor, the other half being one huge room open right up to the exposed roof rafters. It was divided into several clearly defined areas: a studio area with tall windows on the north side, an eating area and, fascinatingly, a sitting area which consisted of a kind of pit sunk into the floor, its edges defined by thickly padded bench seats, the whole close-carpeted in velvety peacock blue. Joan would have loved to see this, Thanet thought.

  Johnson led the way down the three steps which descended into the pit and waved Thanet on to one of the benches. He was tall, stooping, half bald, with a tiny, wispy beard, sunken eyes and surprisingly luxuriant eyebrows. Thanet had clearly interrupted his work. He was wearing a paint-stained smock and scuffed moccasins.

  ‘I must apologise for my reluctance on the telephone, Inspector,’ he said with a rueful smile, ‘but I’m afraid my free time is very limited and I always try to devote Saturdays to painting. I should have realised, however, that crime doesn’t take the weekend off, so I hope you will forgive me.’

  A girl of about seventeen, long-haired and barefoot, had silently approached with a tray. Thanet smiled his thanks as he accepted the coffee. The mug was of a striking design, pot-bellied and out-curving at the rim and thrown in satisfyingly heavy rough-surfaced stoneware.

  ‘The work of one of our most promising young potters, a boy called Denzil Runyon,’ Johnson said, noting Thanet’s interest.

  ‘Very attractive indeed,’ Thanet said. ‘No, I’m the one who should be apologising, Mr Johnson, for disturbing you at your work. But as you say, crime isn’t a Monday-to-Friday business.’

  ‘So how can I help?’

  ‘I’d be grateful if you would tell me about the Dacre Exhibition – who suggested it, how it was set up and so on. I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to explain my interest, and indeed the information might prove to be irrelevant to the enquiry upon which I’m working. But we must follow up every lead, you understand.’

  ‘So my curiosity will remain unsatisfied. What a pity. Well, never mind. I must grin and bear it, must I? Yes, well now, let me see. The Exhibition was suggested by Annabel Dacre’s mother.’

  Thanet was startled. He hadn’t thought that Mrs Dacre would still be alive, but now, of course, he realised that it was quite feasible that she should be. If Annabel Dacre had been only twenty-five when she died, twenty years ago, and her mother had been, say between forty-five and fifty-five at the time …

  ‘She’s in her early seventies now, and very frail. I’ve known her for many years and have long been aware of her hopes for a Silver Jubilee Exhibition of her daughter’s work. Over the last year, however, Mrs Dacre’s health has deteriorated to such a degree that I believe she came to think that she would not live to see it. So, when she came to me last autumn with the suggestion that the Exhibition should be held this year, I was quite rea
dy to agree. Mrs Dacre has been most generous to our College. She has endowed five annual scholarships for further studies, which has meant that some of our most promising students have been able to go abroad after leaving us, when they would not normally have been able to afford to do so.’

  ‘So what was the next step, after you had agreed?’

  ‘Various bits of red tape – obtaining permission from the Education Authority, for example. It all took time. And then, in January, we started to run the advertisements in the local paper.’

  ‘Requesting the loan of paintings?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why not in the national press?’

  Johnson sighed, sat back and folded his arms. ‘Unfortunately Annabel Dacre was not well known, though in the last year or two the value of her paintings has soared. But when she was alive most of her pictures were sold to local people – friends, neighbours. Many of them scattered, of course, moved away, and we did in fact insert two advertisements in the national dailies, but the bulk of her work is still hanging in houses locally. So we ran the advertisement in the Gazette fortnightly from the beginning of January to the end of March. By then the catalogues had to go to the printers, of course.’

  ‘And you got a good response?’

  ‘Very good. Twenty-four paintings, which was, I confess, more than I had hoped for. Some of them from quite interesting sources.’

  ‘Do you remember a Mrs Holmes?’

  ‘Ah yes, now that was a case in point – the painting had been bought by the girl’s mother, stored away in an attic for …’ He stopped, abruptly. ‘My God,’ he said. ‘I’ve only just made the connection … Mrs Holmes … that girl who was murdered …’

  ‘Yes,’ Thanet said heavily. ‘That’s why I’m here. Though I would be grateful if you could keep this visit to yourself, at least until the case is solved.’ One can sound confident even if one doesn’t feel it, he thought wryly as Johnson hastened to assure him of his discretion.