Faithful unto Death

by Caroline Graham

  She had wanted so little, poor girl. Dinner at a pub on the river bank at Marlow, “with white swans so very graceful bobbing at their reflections in the water. Daintily they ate some petty fours straight from my hand.” A concert at High Wycombe with a slow drive home in the moonlight “which Alan begged and pleaded might never end.” Yet another Chinese, this time at the Kyung Ying.

  The room was filling up. Some people had gathered in front of the notice-board on which were pinned blow-ups of Brenda’s studio photograph along with the SOCO pictures of Alan on the hearth rug, the happy nuptial portrait and the Polaroids of Simone. Others were making themselves familiar with the latest developments to date. Barnaby closed the diary and returned to his official place.

  “All right, everyone.” The jabber lessened only slightly. He gave the surface of the desk a smart blow with his fist. And tossed a cold “Thank you” into the ensuing silence.

  “Now, this is what we’ve got and so far it isn’t much. Brenda Brockley was last seen by her parents at seven thirty last Monday evening. She left the house in the clothes she was wearing when she died. She said nothing as to where she was going. Just jumped into the car and drove off ‘like a mad thing,” to quote her father. She didn’t even take a handbag and scraped the gatepost as she went by.

  “At nine o’clock she called to say she had met a friend and was going for a meal and they weren’t to wait up. Her father, who took the message, got the impression, from the background noise, that she was ringing from a railway station. We now know that it was almost certainly Heathrow. All of this information is already on a Four Two Eight which is being photocopied and should be up here shortly, so make yourselves familiar.

  “The body was found on the top level of the Short Stay Car Park that serves Terminal One, as was her car. The injuries are commensurate with being struck by a vehicle moving at some considerable speed. The PM’s being done this morning so we should know more by tomorrow at the latest. Her photograph, together with that of Hollingsworth and his wife, are being circulated at the airport. She could have had the meal she was referring to on the concourse itself, in which case she may well have been noticed. She was an . . . unusual looking girl.”

  Someone said something at the back of the room and someone else laughed.

  “What was that?” Barnaby’s voice cracked like a whip.

  “Sorry, chief.” A throat was cleared. “Got a bit of a cough.”

  “We can’t all look like Ava Gardner, Constable.”

  “No, sir.”

  “The Heathrow police are being very cooperative and, as more stuff comes in, we shall know better how to proceed. Now, as to the Hollingsworth inquiry, any more catching up for me to do? Yes, Beryl?”

  Detective Sergeant Beryl, whose surname was the bane of his life, said, “I talked to someone in St. Chad’s Lane yesterday, sir. A Mr. Harris. He was working in his front garden and actually saw Alan Hollingsworth drive away at the time Dawlish said he heard him.”

  “Excellent. Get in touch with him again, would you? Find out if he saw the Brockley girl leaving as well. It sounds to me as if they set off within minutes of each other. And bear in mind, everyone, that this was the evening of the day that Hollingsworth received the money. I don’t think it’s stretching matters to assume that he was on his way to hand it over. And if she was following him . . .”

  There was an interested and lively murmur of speculation then a plainclothes inspector, leaning against the water cooler, said, “Has there been any feedback from her parents at all? I mean, any suggestion as to why she might have been pursuing Hollingsworth?”

  “She fancied herself in love with him.” Barnaby glared around the room as if daring it to respond risibly. Everyone was quiet. “As far as we know, she never even went inside the house, though once we’ve got her prints, we may find otherwise.

  “I’m holding back on any large-scale inquiry at this stage mainly because it’s possible we might simply be looking at an accident. But I would like her photograph, together with Hollingsworth’s, shown at all the cafés and restaurants in Causton. See if anyone remembers seeing them together.” Though Barnaby firmly believed the diary to be a complete work of fiction, he couldn’t risk not checking the matter out.

  “I shall be visiting her place of work in half an hour and hope to fill in the background somewhat. The next briefing’s at six o’clock. So, go to it. Gavin?”

  Sergeant Troy picked up his jacket and followed his boss from the room. As the door closed behind him, the man who had laughed said, “Who the hell’s Ava Gardner?”

  Approaching the Rover where his chief was already installed, Sergeant Troy, carrying two cans of iced pop from the iced pop machine, was laughing silently to himself. His expression was bemused and his head moved back and forth in disbelief as he climbed into the driving seat.

  “Thanks,” said Barnaby, holding out his hand. “I could do with one of those.”

  “Oh. Right.” Troy, who had bought both cans for himself, handed over the least pleasant. “This one’s supposed to be pretty good.”

  “I wouldn’t deprive you, Gavin,” said Barnaby, seizing the alternative. “What were you chortling at?”

  Troy explained. “There was this old tramp downstairs trying to make a complaint. Apparently he’d been sitting on the pavement, everything he owned in the world packed into a fraying carrier, when some smart Charlie walks up. ‘I represent Sainsbury’s,’ he says. ‘Penny for your bag?’ Chucks the coin down and walks off with all the old geezer’s stuff. They were still wetting themselves in reception.”

  “Made your day, did it?”

  “Pretty near,” said Sergeant Troy, opening his Cherryade and taking a long swig.

  “Well, you’re not here to enjoy yourself so knock that back double quick and get a move on.”

  “Right, guv.” He drained the can, wedged it behind the gear box and turned on the ignition.

  They had been asked to go to the back entrance of the Coalport and National but, on arriving, found it locked. Barnaby peered over half-mast lace curtains into what proved to be a kitchen/rest area. A girl who was washing up dried her hands on a tea towel and let them in.

  “Sorry. I was supposed to watch out for you.” Easing past them, she opened the inner door revealing a large, high-ceilinged room with several desks and a counter at the far end at which one person was standing. “I’ll just let the manager know you’re here.”

  After the customer had left, Mr. Marchbanks, a Lowry stick-figure with a mass of pale lemon curls, eyes like boiled gooseberries and a handshake like a damp flounder, admitted the two policemen to the main office.

  “I was sure you would wish to discuss matters undisturbed,” he said, indicating the notice on the glass door. The side facing them said Open. “But I do hope . . .”

  “I’ll try not to take up too much of your time,” replied Barnaby. “May I?”

  As he sat down at an empty desk, a great sepulchre of a woman, very tall and wide with more bristles on her top lip than an Oral B, came out of an office marked Personnel. The Chief Inspector presumed this to be Trish Travers.

  Everyone looked subdued but not overly distressed. Not even Mr. Marchbanks, who had thought the world of Brenda.

  “This is devastating news,” he said, with the air of a man about to pare his nails. “The whole office is in a terrible state of shock.”

  “I understand,” said Barnaby. “And I do appreciate your cooperation.”

  Troy selected a high stool at the counter, laid his notebook down next to the Day At A Time calendar and took stock of the talent. Four in number (you couldn’t count Adolf) and of variable delectability.

  There was the very short one who had let them in: a proper little butter ball, completely round with long eyelashes and a ginger fringe. Fringes, Sergeant Troy thought, always made a girl look saucy. An only half-decent looker with floppy wings of silky fawn hair, a complexion like the wrong half of the Flash floor ad and a long pointed
nose. Fine if you liked Afghans. An irritable, harassed looking one with worn hands, too much jewellery and a habit of screwing up her face and blinking. And Troy’s fancy; tall, red-headed like himself, wearing enormous tortoiseshell glasses perched on the tip of her pretty nose. Long fragile legs folded away beneath her chair. A juicily deluscious eye-boggier. Viewing alone fair brought a lump to your trousers.

  He waited till the smoky lenses glinted in his direction and gave her a brilliant, uncomplicated smile.

  She parted her own lips, wet and glistening like newly washed cherries, in acknowledgement.

  “It would be helpful,” the Chief Inspector was explaining, “if we could discover a little about Miss Brockley’s background and private life. I know that girls often—”

  “Women, I believe you mean,” put in the tired hands.

  “Indeed,” said Barnaby. “I beg your pardon. Women will sometimes tell their colleagues in the workplace things they might not discuss with immediate members of their family. I wonder if Brenda perhaps . . .”

  There was an uncomfortable silence. Barnaby took the room’s temperature and was not encouraged. He had already suspected that the sterile pattern of Brenda’s life as described by her parents indicated the type of withdrawn personality that did not communicate easily with others.

  “Was she . . . well-liked here?”

  “I wouldn’t say well-liked,” said Mr. Marchbanks.

  “But not disliked,” the roly-poly girl, Hazel Grantley from Accounts, interrupted quickly.

  There was an immediate chorus of over-emphatic agreement which died down into another awkward pause.

  Barnaby recognised their collective dilemma, for it was not uncommon. Many people who thought nothing of speaking ill about the still woundable living could not bring themselves to breathe a syllable against the indifferent dead.

  “So no one here was what you would call close to Brenda?”

  There was a negative mumble. Not a single person looked directly at him.

  “What about outside the office? Did she ever mention anyone she regularly went about with?”

  “Not to us.”

  “A boy friend, perhaps?”

  Everyone looked surprised and then ashamed of looking surprised and then cross at looking ashamed.

  “I don’t think she had a boy friend,” said Mr. March-banks.

  “Brenda didn’t go in for that sort of thing.”

  “She was a born singleton,” said the girl with the Bambi legs.

  Barnaby winced as much at the casual unkindness as at the excruciating terminology. “What about personal telephone calls? Did she receive or make many?”

  “They’re not allowed.”

  “Officially,” said the girl with the long nose and everybody started to giggle until they remembered how solemn the occasion was.

  “She got one,” corrected the woman clanking with jewellery. “The first morning she didn’t come in. A man rang and asked to speak to her. About nine thirty, it was.”

  That would have been her father. Barnaby asked then how long Miss Brockley had been working at the Coalport and National.

  “Since she left school,” said Mr. Marchbanks. “That would be thirteen years.”

  Unlucky for some, thought Sergeant Troy. Appreciating the fan standing next to the calendar, he eased it more directly towards him, loosened the collar of his check sports shirt and flicked over the first page of his notes.

  “What about when she was up at the counter?” persisted the Chief Inspector. “Did she have any long conversations with anyone in particular? Perhaps the same person on more than one occasion?”

  “Well,” Mr. Marchbanks cleared his throat, “she didn’t do a lot of, erm . . .”

  “One-to-one customer relations.” The Afghan helped him out.

  “That’s right. She seemed to prefer to work more quietly.”

  “By herself, like,” said the woman from Personnel.

  Barnaby had a quick apprehension of the abyss of loneliness on the edge of which Brenda must have existed at the Coalport and National. Arriving in the morning to conversations about boy friends, problems at school, family rows, how would she have responded? By nodding and smiling while listening to described situations completely outside her own experience? Perhaps, appreciating that any attempt properly to participate must necessarily be known to be false, or even condescending, she had pretended not to hear—and may well have been thought stand-offish for her pains. Perhaps she simply sat quietly at her desk, hoping not to be noticed—no doubt the empty one in the far corner of the office on which now lay a solitary bunch of roses, swathed in shiny, white-spotted paper. He wondered if they had ever bought flowers for her when she had been alive.

  Barnaby asked about the midday break. Had anyone ever called to take Brenda out to lunch? No. Never. Did she perhaps spend time during this period with any of her workmates?

  “Not really. We all had things to do, you see.”

  “She’d stay here, make herself a coffee and eat her sandwiches.”

  “Sometimes she went to the library.”

  “We’d come back absolutely fagged. Racing round the shops buying food and stuff. She’d be sitting there, feet up, reading one of her romances.”

  “I think her mother did everything.”

  “Yeah, she had it dead cushy.”

  “Wouldn’t do for me. Nearly thirty and still living at home.” The needling words were delicately shaded with spite. Troy directed a glance of warm admiration at this lovely girl, so after his own heart. She recrossed her slender, breakable legs and smiled to herself. He noticed that her identity brooch read “Jacqui Willing” and hoped it wasn’t having him on.

  Mr. Marchbanks began tousling his limp curls with a worried hand at this point, Trish Travers looked at her watch and the heavily ringed fingers on the tired hands crept towards the nearest keyboard. Someone knocked on the glass front door.

  Realising there was probably little else to be gained at the Coalport and National, Barnaby thanked the manager, handed over a card should any of the staff remember anything that they might consider helpful, and prepared to leave.

  Bambi was detailed to show them out. As she opened the back door, with Troy’s zealous and quite unnecessary assistance, she said, “Poor Brenda, she was really oversensitive about her looks. Many’s the time I’ve tried to cheer her up. ‘Bren,’ I used to say, ‘beauty’s only skin deep.’ But you just can’t help some people, can you?”

  Barnaby could have hit her.

  By the time the Chief Inspector had concluded his building society interview, the Evening Standard had already published its midday edition under the headline “Mysterious Death Of Kidnap Woman’s Neighbour.”

  This time the village, genuinely and deeply shocked, kept its distance when invaded. Journalists, asking in the Goat and Whistle for the Brockleys’ precise whereabouts, got nowhere. The fact that the couple were not well liked did not enter into the matter. As is the way of the fourth estate, they quickly sussed the address anyway and were soon giving The Larches’ push button bell some really serious stick.

  Shona jumped up at the window, barked and had her picture taken. Next day it appeared under the caption “Dead Girl’s Pet Pines Away.” Several people rang the Mirror wanting to adopt the dog.

  Few people could cope easily with such an onslaught. Brenda’s grief-stricken parents were prodigiously ill-equipped. They cowered behind their starched net frills. Iris wept, Reg wrung his hands and rained blows on the walls and furniture. The poodle, desperate to go out, scratched and whined for half an hour then did a puddle in the hall. When a bearded face pressed up against the kitchen window, Iris started to scream.

  It was at that moment that Constable Perrot, accompanied by the vicar, arrived. Perrot, alternately cajoling and threatening arrest for trespass, eased the press out of the Brockleys’ garden and back into the lane. Then supposing, rightly, that the door chimes must have by now worn out their welcome, he ignore
d the bell and reprised his earlier star turn at Nightingales. Bending down he spoke, very clearly, through the letter box.

  “Mr. Brockley? This is Constable Perrot. I’m your local community police officer.” He felt this explanation necessary as he had never actually spoken to Brenda’s parents before. “The vicar is with me. We’re anxious to help in any way we can. Please open the door.”

  Reg and Iris looked fearfully at each other. Having heard the noise from the army of pressmen diminish slightly, Reg had peeped through a narrow gap in the curtains and seen Perrot firmly shepherding them away. Gratitude alone thus inclined him to admit the visitors. Common sense reinforced the idea. After all, sooner or later he and Iris would be forced to let someone in. Or, horror of horrors, go out themselves. And at least these people’s interest would, hopefully, be impersonal.

  It was nothing new for the vicar to enter a house of mourning. Years of experience had equipped him with suitable responses and to spare. To give him his due, he tried to empathise afresh in every case and not sound platitudinous or mechanical. But as soon as he stepped into the Brockleys’ private hell, he knew that the situation was beyond him. Childless himself, he understood that anything he might have to say could only be cruelly impertinent. He hovered in the hall, one foot spongily sinking into the dog’s puddle. Shona herself crouched on the stairs, isolated and lonely, her nose between her paws.

  Perrot, quietly and with concerned sympathy, took charge. In the lounge Iris lay full length on the sofa, her stout legs stretched out, her arms by her side. She looked as if she was on a bier. Reg stood in the centre of the room. He seemed lost, as if waiting for someone to tell him what to do.

  Perrot made some tea and cut some bread and butter. As he did this, he asked one or two questions in a soft, uninsistent way. Had the doctor been? Was there a prescription to be filled? Could he make any telephone calls on the Brockleys’ behalf?

  Reg said, “We’ve stopped answering the phone.”