The Night She Died

by Dorothy Simpson

  ‘Just a minute,’ Lineham said quickly.

  Thanet sat down again.

  ‘I wanted … I wanted to apologise.’

  Now it was Thanet’s turn to look startled. ‘Whatever for?’

  ‘For wasting your time, sir.’ Lineham hesitated, then went on. ‘If I hadn’t slipped up over. Mrs Penge, if I’d managed to get the truth out of her the first time, then you wouldn’t have wasted your time following up the Dacre case.’

  Undeniably true, but Thanet somehow couldn’t bring himself to feel even slightly angry with Lineham. Despite his own bruised pride, he suddenly realised he didn’t regret any of it. Dammit, he had enjoyed it. That delving back into the past had rounded off his understanding of Julie, had satisfied his need to know.

  ‘We all make mistakes,’ he said, ‘thank God. If we didn’t we’d be insufferable. I think we’ve both learned something from this case. So let’s leave it there, shall we?’ He stood up again.

  ‘Yes, sir. And, sir … thank you.’

  Thanet raised his hand in a half-salute of farewell, and left.

  19

  On a fine summer evening some three months later Thanet and Joan were strolling hand in hand towards the main car park in the centre of Sturrenden. It was Joan’s birthday and Thanet had taken her out to dinner to mark the occasion. They were in a mellow mood, full of good food and wine, at peace with the world.

  ‘Darling, look!’ Joan was pointing across the road at a small art gallery which had recently opened. On an easel in the centre of the window, spot-lit from above, was a painting. ‘Surely that’s The Cricket Match?’

  They crossed the road to see.

  ‘I thought so. Mr Holmes must have sold it,’ Joan said. ‘I’d have recognised it anywhere.’

  They studied the painting in silence. It was the first time that Thanet had had the opportunity to examine one of Annabel Dacre’s paintings at leisure. And there was no doubt about it, he thought, she had been good. The painting drew the eye like a magnet, its jewel-like colours, distinctive style and crowded canvas a source of never-ending fascination.

  ‘Did I tell you she put people she knew in them?’ he murmured.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Mmm. Mrs Manson told me. Look. I bet that’s her, with her husband. He’s wearing his dog-collar.’

  They leaned forward, pressing their noses against the glass of the shop window. The Reverend and Mrs Manson were holding cups of tea, standing near the long table which had been set up beneath one of the two huge oaks on the Green at Little Sutton, its white cloth gleaming in the shade. Yes, he would swear that that was Mrs Manson, Thanet thought, a younger, more vital version of the sick woman she had become. Extraordinary how, in such tiny figures, Annabel had managed to capture some essence of the person’s individuality, so that they were immediately recognisable.

  And there, he saw with a sense of shock, was Julie – no, not Julie of course, but her mother, Jennifer Parr, Julie’s ‘spitting image’ as Holmes had put it. The man beside her was presumably David Parr, Julie’s father, whose tragic accident had triggered off the train of events which had culminated in Julie’s death. If Jennifer had not left Julie with Annabel while she was at the hospital Julie would not have witnessed the murder which had had such a profound and far-reaching effect upon her. At Mrs Parr’s feet, her yellow dress vivid against the green of the grass, caught in the act of picking a daisy, was a child of about eighteen months who could only be Julie herself.

  He pointed her out to Joan, who grimaced. ‘Poor kid,’ she murmured. And then, ‘You mean they’re all in this, all the people you’ve told me about?’

  ‘More than likely, according to Mrs Manson. I wouldn’t mind betting that that’s Alice Giddy, for example.’

  Alice was walking across the Green towards the other spectators, supporting a woman who was clearly leaning heavily upon her – Alice’s mother, Thanet supposed. Alice’s glossy black hair was caught back in a chignon, accentuating the cat-like slant of the eyes, the high, prominent cheek-bones. Her strongly individual dress sense was even then apparent. She was wearing a sky-blue tube which narrowed to the hem, a complete contrast to the rather nondescript summer dresses of the other women.

  Thanet looked for the Pococks, but found them less easy to identify. Was that Roger, at the wicket, and that Edna, bending over the pram of a neighbour’s baby? Peake and Plummer, of course, he had never met. He straightened up with a sigh.

  ‘Three hundred guineas,’ Joan said thoughtfully. ‘Worth every penny, and a good investment, I should think.’

  ‘No!’ Thanet said vehemently. ‘I couldn’t bear it. Even if we had the money to spare, which we haven’t, I really could not bear to have that hanging on our living room wall. D’you realise it was this painting which was really responsible for sending me off on that wild goose chase?’

  ‘Poor darling. You still feel sore about it, don’t you?’

  ‘Less now than I did.’ He grinned. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps it would be a good idea to buy it after all – hang it up where I could see it every day as an Awful Warning.’

  ‘Not on your life! Home is not the place for Awful Warnings.’ Joan tugged at his arm and with one last reluctant look at the painting, he yielded.

  ‘There’s no doubt that it is Holmes’s painting, I suppose?’ he said as they walked on.

  Joan shook her head. ‘None. I remember reading somewhere that it was Annabel Dacre’s policy never to do more than one painting of the same subject.’

  ‘Poor devil. I wonder if he’s still in Gladstone Road. If he has any sense he’ll have moved by now. Anyway, I’m glad to know he sold that picture.’

  ‘Why?’

  Thanet shrugged. ‘Because it’s rather macabre, I suppose, to think of him having it hanging in his house unaware of its significance.’

  ‘You mean, he didn’t know that all those people were in it? Julie, her parents, Annabel’s murderer …?’

  ‘He didn’t strike me as being the type to be interested in painting. The figures are so tiny, I doubt that he ever studied The Cricket Match sufficiently closely to have spotted Julie in her mother’s likeness. And he knew nothing of Annabel’s murder. I did wonder whether to tell him, but I thought it would probably make him even more unhappy, give him a whole new set of circumstances to brood over, just when he was beginning to take up normal life again. I don’t know. Perhaps I should have told him. Perhaps he had a right to know. What do you think?’

  A heavy lorry swung around the corner just as they were about to cross the road and Thanet seized Joan’s elbow. They watched it go by and then he piloted her across to the car park entrance.

  ‘Mmm?’ he said, making it clear that he was still awaiting an answer.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I honestly don’t think I know enough about it to be able to judge. But, why worry about it now? It’s all past, done with. You did what you thought right at the time, surely that’s what matters? What are you grinning at?’

  Thanet’s smile broadened. ‘Something Doc Mallard said to me once. “Don’t try taking over the Almighty’s job,” he said. “He’s much better at it than you could ever be.”

  Joan’s eyes sparkled with pleasure. ‘Typical,’ she said. ‘But he’s right, you know.’

  ‘He usually is,’ Thanet said. ‘Whereas I …’

  ‘And so are you,’ she cut in. She gave him a wicked little grin. ‘Well, most of the time, anyway.’

  They were still smiling when they reached the car.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Inspector Thanet Mysteries

  1

  Detective Inspector Luke Thanet was a happy man. He had an interesting job, no pressing financial worries, two healthy lively children and, perhaps best of all, a wife who was all that any man could wish for. And so it was that on this blustery March evening, blissfully unaware of the nasty little shock that Fate was preparing for him, he stretched out his toes to the fire, settled back into his armchai
r and reflected that he wouldn’t change places with any man in the world.

  Reaching for his pipe he tapped it out, scraped it, inspected it, blew through it, then filled it with loving care.

  “It’s nine o’clock,” Joan said. “D’you want the news?”

  “I don’t think so. Do you?”

  “Not particularly.”

  She went back to her book. Thanet lit his pipe and picked up the newspaper. He hadn’t been reading for more than a few minutes, however, when he realised that Joan was unusually restless. Normally, when she was reading, she plunged at once into total absorption. One one occasion Thanet had counted up to a hundred from the time he asked her a question to the moment when she looked up, eyes unfocused, and said, “What did you say?”

  Now she fidgeted, crossed and re-crossed her legs, fiddled with her hair, chewed the tip of her thumb.

  Eventually, “Book no good?” Thanet enquired.

  She looked up at once. “Mmm? Oh, it’s all right. Very interesting, in fact.”

  “What’s the matter, then?”

  She hesitated, gave him a speculative look.

  He laid down his newspaper. “Come on, love. Out with it.”

  To his surprise she still did not respond. “Joan?” He was beginning to feel the first faint stirrings of alarm.

  She shook her head then, a fierce little shake. “Oh, it’s all right. There’s nothing wrong, not really. It’s just that I’ve a nasty feeling you aren’t going to like what I’m trying to pluck up the courage to say.”

  “Oh?” he said, warily.

  She looked at him with something approaching desperation. “It’s just that … oh, dear.… Look, you know we’ve said all along that when Ben starts school I’ll go back to work? Well, that’s only six months away now. So I really ought to start thinking about what I want to do.”

  “I see,” Thanet said slowly.

  “There you are. I knew you wouldn’t like it.”

  “Darling, don’t be silly. It’s just that, well, the idea will take a bit of getting used to after all this time, that’s all.”

  “Don’t pretend,” she said. “You’re dead against it really, aren’t you? I can tell.”

  And she was right, of course, he was. They had been married for eight years now and for all that time Joan had been the good little wife who stayed at home, ran the house efficiently and without fuss, coped with two children and made sure that everything was geared to Thanet’s convenience. Unlike the wives of so many of his colleagues, Joan had never complained or nagged over the demands of his job, the irregular hours. Now, in a flash, he saw everything changed. Uncomfortable adjustments would have to be made, there would be inconvenience, irritation, arguments. Theory and practice, he now realised, were very different matters. All very well, in the past, to contemplate with equanimity the prospect of Joan returning to work one day, but to accept that that day was almost here … No, she was right. He didn’t like it at all.

  “Nonsense,” he said. “We’ve always said you would, when the children were old enough.”

  “Oh, I know you’ve always said you wouldn’t mind. But that’s very different from not minding when it actually happens.”

  “I thought you’d more or less made up your mind to do an art course.”

  “No. Oh, I did think so, at one time. I’m very interested, as you know. But … I don’t know, I’d like to feel I was doing something, well, less self-indulgent, more useful. Oh, dear, does that sound horribly priggish?”

  He grinned. “To be honest, yes. But I know what you mean.”

  “Do you?” she said eagerly. “You don’t think I’m being stupid?”

  “Not in the least. What sort of thing did you have in mind?”

  “Well, that’s the trouble. I’m just not qualified for anything. That’s why I feel I ought to start thinking about it now, so that if I have to do a course, or any special training, I can get myself organised for September.”

  “Yes. I can see that. You haven’t gone into it yet, then?”

  “I wanted to speak to you about it first. Oh, darling,” and she came to kneel before him, took his hands, “you’re sure you don’t mind?”

  “No,” he lied valiantly. “I knew, of course, that the time would come, sooner or later …”

  Very much later, he told himself, as he drove to work next morning. And preferably not at all. He had awoken still feeling thoroughly disgruntled and the weather matched his mood: grey, lowering skies and a chilly wind.

  In his office he scowled at the pile of reports awaiting his attention, riffled through them impatiently. It wasn’t even as though there was anything particularly interesting on at the moment … With a sigh he opened the top folder, began reading.

  A moment later he was on the phone.

  “Where’s Lineham?”

  “Gone out to Nettleton, sir.”

  “What for?”

  “Some woman making a fuss, sir. Name of … Pitman, sir. Marion Pitman. Apparently there’s this old girl who’s an invalid, a neighbour of Miss Pitman, and her daughter’s disappeared.”

  “What d’you mean, disappeared?”

  “Didn’t come home last night, sir. The old woman …”, the sound of papers being rustled came clearly over the phone, “Mrs Birch, didn’t find out until this morning.”

  “Probably out on the tiles,” Thanet said. “What the devil did Lineham have to go out there himself for?”

  “Miss Pitman was most insistent, sir. Apparently the daughter, Miss Birch, just isn’t the type to … er … stay out all night. A middle-aged spinster, sir.”

  “Well, as soon as Lineham gets back, tell him I want to see him.”

  But Lineham did not return and half an hour later Carson rang through.

  “Sir, DS Lineham’s just been on the radio. That woman he was looking for, they’ve found her. Dead, sir, in an outside toilet …”

  “Lavatory,” growled Thanet, who didn’t like euphemisms. Poor old girl, what a way to go …

  “Murder, sir, he thinks,” Carson finished eagerly.

  In a matter of minutes Thanet was on his way. As he passed the desk he paused to say, “Manage to get hold of Doc Mallard yet?”

  “Yes, sir. We’re having to send a car for him. His has broken down.”

  “Don’t bother. I’ll pick him up. I have to pass his house anyway.”

  Mallard came hurrying down the path as Thanet drew up in front of the trim little bungalow into which Mallard had moved after his wife’s death some years ago. Thanet had known him since childhood and was fond of the older man, patient with his moods, aware that Mallard’s testiness was the result of his inability to come to terms with the loss of his wife. “It’s as if half of me has been amputated,” Mallard had once said to Thanet in a rare moment of intimacy. “And the half that’s left never stops aching.”

  Thanet greeted him warmly, told him the little he knew of the reported murder.

  “Lineham’s already out there, you said?”

  “Yes.”

  “Think he’ll make it to the altar this time?”

  Lineham was supposed to be getting married on Saturday.

  Thanet grimaced. “Don’t know. I hope so, for his sake. He’ll go berserk if it has to be put off again.”

  Detective Sergeant Michael Lineham was an only child. His father had died when Mike was six and Mrs Lineham had never remarried, had lavished all her love, care and attention on her son. Lineham had fought the first great battle of his life over his decision to enter the police force; the second was still in progress. Twice already the wedding had had to be postponed. On both occasions Mrs Lineham had had a mild heart attack the day before.

  “Those attacks,” Thanet said now. “They are genuine, I suppose?”

  “Oh yes. No doubt of that. Brought on, I would guess, partly by distress over losing her son and partly by the subconscious desire to delay the wedding.”

  “So there might well be another one, this time?”


  “Quite likely, I should think.”

  Thanet sighed. “I do hope not, for Mike’s sake. And for Louise’s, of course. She’s a nice girl, but I can’t see her putting up with these delays indefinitely. And who would blame her? Ah, this is where we turn off.”

  Nettleton was a small Kentish village of around a thousand inhabitants, a couple of miles from the centre of the ever-expanding town of Sturrenden, where Thanet was based. At one time it had been a completely separate community but over the last ten years the advancing tide of houses had crept inexorably over field and orchard until Nettleton had become little more than a suburb on the very edge of Sturrenden.

  “At this rate the English village will be a thing of the past by the end of the century,” muttered Mallard.

  Nettleton, however, had still managed to retain something of its individuality, perhaps because the main Sturrenden to Maidstone road did not run through the centre of it. Mallard and Thanet looked around approvingly at the picturesque scatter of cottages on either side of the road, the black-and-white timbered building which housed the general shop and post office.

  “Village school’s gone, I see,” said Mallard, gesturing out of the window.

  It had shared the fate of so many of its kind and had been converted into a private house.

  “One of the biggest mistakes they ever made,” the doctor went on. “And now, of course, they’re howling over the cost of transporting the kids so far to school. Typical.”

  “Here we are,” Thanet said. “Lineham said to park in front of the church.”

  There were already several police cars in the small parking area. Thanet got out of the car, locked it and then stood frowning at a small crowd of sightseers clustered on the opposite side of the road around the entrance to a footpath which ran along the back of a row of terraced cottages.

  “Ghouls,” he muttered—aware, however, that the sudden tension in him, the flutter of unease in the pit of his stomach, had nothing to do with the onlookers. The moment he always dreaded was approaching. He had never admitted it to anyone, even to Joan, but he hated his first sight of a corpse, could never dissociate the dead flesh that he would have to handle from the living person it had so recently clothed. Other men, he knew, evolved their own method of dealing with the situation, erecting barriers of callousness, indifference or even, as in the case of Mallard, macabre levity, but he had never been able to do so. Somehow, for him, that moment of suffering was necessary, a vital spur to his efforts to find the killer. Without it his investigation would lack that extra impetus which usually brought him success.