The Crime Writer

by Jill Dawson

  The passion went on for months. And not just mine but the whole of New York, no, the whole country, when her slayer was found and began his own confession in the New York Times. Oh, we were in for a treat then. Oh, my. Details we’d never have conjured on our own, some too obscene to print, we were told. That did it. That sealed me, sealed my fate. It took Vonny two hours to die, and over and over I’d imagine her during that time and swoon and swoon again.

  That was probably when it began. I read so many of those magazines, they began to seep into my dreams and colour my sweat. I guess they shaped and formed me; alongside Dostoevsky and Edgar Allan Poe and Karl Menninger, sure, they can be said to be an influence. And when I met up with my father, Jay Bernard Plangman, that’s a whole story in itself. Maybe I’ll tell it, maybe not. Guess what he shows me? The latest semi-clad newspaper photograph of Vonny. That’s all he can think to talk to me about. ‘That’s what I call a girl’ – his exact phrase. His not-so-subtle way to let me know that he found me, his boyish daughter, far short of the ideal.

  It doesn’t take a genius to point out that every girl I’ve ever loved does end up in the same delicious state: cringing, shame-stricken and brutally murdered in the end. But only in my fiction, of course.

  In real life they simply leave.

  Later that day – late afternoon, 5 p.m. – Ronnie arrives to take me to the party. The Crime Writers’ Association of Great Britain Dagger Awards. He waits while I choose a clean white shirt and fresh white socks, while I insist on re-ironing my best black slacks, and polishing again my smartest black brogues. He waits while I fasten my snakeskin belt, comb and smooth down my hair, helps me fasten the silver catch to my locket at the back of my neck and then watches as, trembling, I strap to my wrist the watch I saved up for all those summers ago. He pours me a large Scotch when he sees that I’m shaking and can barely buckle the watch strap, knowing it’s the thought of the party and of having to walk up to the podium if I win that is making me tremble. He takes my arm and says gallantly: ‘You should be proud – it’s something to be pleased about you know, winning an award.’ And he waits patiently, too, when I run back upstairs with my big purse, to get the essential award-party guests: a large head of lettuce from the fridge and most of my snails.

  The party is the usual god-awful affair. Filthy wine in little plastic cups that nearly fold in your hands. Matrons in floaty numbers over slacks; peppy little blondes in dresses so short they look like négligées. That mournful feeling, whenever there is a break in the conversation, or someone moves away from me, of gazing round helplessly for Ronnie, like a child in an empty stand searching for its mother, and seeing that I’m alone, utterly alone. Once or twice I put my hand in my purse and close my fingers around a cool smooth shell, feeling the stickiness at once retreating shyly. Pull in your horns and hide: if only it were possible.

  Charles Latimer bounds up and I’m glad of him, at least. ‘Darling! Congratulations! And, you know, it’s a real dagger – made of silver and everything. Have you seen it yet?’ He seems a little high.

  I have to go up there and collect it, it seems. More torture. And here is the dreadful Frances woman (a peck, and she hops off) and a bunch of English writers, whose names I should know but don’t, and once again, I’m on my own. I draw on a cigarette. I try to make my face into an expression of worldly sophistication, as if standing alone like this in a cloud of competing perfumes, in the midst of chattering, madly socialising people screaming with laughter, is something I want to do. Holy crap. Where, oh, where is Ronnie? And why should I care if I happen to seem a little odd? For some cock-eyed reason, most people in the world are concerned simply to be exactly like everybody else.

  Virginia Smythson-Balby is in front of me, drink in hand, smiling rather hopefully.

  ‘I – hope we’re – on speaking terms? I wanted to say, you know, congratulations and all that.’

  ‘Of course we’re on speaking terms, why wouldn’t we be? I’m having a hard time finding a drink – where did you get yours?’

  I’m feeling swimmy already – but I don’t tell her that. Her cup is full and she happily grabs one from the tray of a passing waiter and hands it to me, neatly depositing my empty cup on the same tray. White wine, but it could be the vinegar that pickles are drowned in. I down it in two glugs and reach for another.

  ‘Would you like a lift back to Bridge Cottage later?’ the persistent girl says. Her shiny chestnut hair bounces on her shoulders, and she’s wearing an emerald green dress in some gaudy fabric with swirls on it; a dress so flighty it’s barely skimming her thighs.

  ‘I drove here. I brought Ronnie.’

  ‘Oh, but I just spoke to him. He told me he had met a friend here and intends to stay in London.’

  Sure, Ronnie told me that earlier, too. But she has a fine nerve.

  ‘That’s fine. I’m happy to drive alone.’

  She looks a little shifty then, embarrassed. Nods towards the cup of wine in my hand.

  ‘Well you can relax then, can’t you? Have another drink and not worry.’

  ‘It’s only seventeen shillings on the train to Ipswich,’ I say sharply. ‘I could get a cab from there.’

  ‘Oh, but do let me! We could leave your car here and I’m awfully horribly sober, and we can have a nice chat on the way home.’

  Sure. A chat. A powerful urge then to ask her about the letter from Stanley, or is it ‘BD’ or Brother Death? Did she know anything about it? Did she ever write letters, strange, meaningless letters, the kind of letters a fan might write, letters that simply say: ‘I know where you’re living’, or ‘Hello, I’m still here’, letters that say nothing very much but are written for the purpose of making me shudder? She looks like the letter-writing sort. Intense. A bit cracked, perhaps. Did she send letters to me, now or in the past, or even drop one in my house, perhaps sneak one into the airing cupboard on pretence of going to the bathroom one time?

  The latest letter from Stanley is still unopened, so I’ve no idea what it says. Maybe this one is worse than the rest. Maybe the writer confesses at last. Maybe he – she – knows something about Gerald.

  Another tiny cup of wine is downed, then the room is called to attention and the voices lapse to a hum and some crazy with a microphone is making a speech about the Crime Writers’ Association of Great Britain . . . and I’m picturing not writers but criminals, wishing, longing, dreaming up their deeds in smoke-filled studies across Britain; and then not criminals but strutting pheasants – seen so many of those in Suffolk lately: how stupid they are, and how many of them I see at this time of year, scooping up their tails like women lifting their skirts, scurrying across the road, with their white collars and their swanky colours, and how they dart out just as the car approaches, and then it’s my turn, my turn to step up there and say something, some thanks or jokes (well, yes, people are laughing and smiling, I guess I’m making some jokes), then accepting the narrow cardboard box and flipping it open to see the dagger lying there, silver, thin, pretty deadly, weighty – I really do think it could probably stab someone in the throat (perhaps the head of the Crime Writers’ Association?) – and then I make another joke about the dagger and there’s polite applause, and now I have to make a speech, it seems; I bite back my usual argument about how I’m writing ‘suspense fiction’ and mumble something instead about how happy I am that there is such affection for crime fiction in this country, wondering if the charming pleasure English readers take in vicarious acts of violence, in reading about wicked things that others do, makes a healthy outlet for society (some argue that pornography serves the same function, easing pressure that might otherwise turn fine men into rapists).

  Then in the middle of speaking I’m trout-sober and thinking again of the pheasants now crossing the road, thinking that they look like a stream of little vicars, lifting up their robes, the white collar at their throat, trotting, that funny mix of pomposity and timidity, as if they really do have some kind of ludicrous death wish – didn’
t one bat itself bloodily against the car the other day, a startling thud that made me jump, as if someone just threw a hard snowball? Vicars, vicars: how they tell Ronnie that the world is full of taboos and people used to live like animals. Children were welcomed, each one was ‘the little dear’ – oh, sure, everything as natural and healthy in the country as little yellow chicks, unless it was born out of wedlock and then it was shunned and hated. What of a child whose mother had tried to get rid of it with turpentine? How would they feel towards her? I want to ask. Could they turn the healthy yellow into a dank and skewered green? But Ronnie has no answer for that.

  And then I mention (oh, sure I’m still making a speech) – lightly, very lightly – an alternative view, that rather than the ever-growing love for crime fiction releasing society from some of its evils, letting off a little steam, as it were, perhaps such fiction is stoking a fire, making violent behaviour, violent acts ever more desirable and appealing, exhilarating, keeping us ever entertained, ever aroused to their potential excitements, always happening to and being done by other people; protecting us from the hurtful, sordid glimpse of how such things really are . . . I trail off here and there’s some uncertain applause and then I’m allowed to step down, melt back into the crowd, the faces ballooning up – Ronnie, smiling, the sun behind him as always, Ronnie telling me something important that actually matters, like a scythe cost seven shillings and sixpence in Wickham Market and we did the reaping by hand; how I long for something clean and true like that, instead of this god-awful stupidity and clapping and the spotlight and the podium and the sickness, the dirty wicked sickness, sweeping through my body.

  Smythson-Balby drives me home. Of course she does. She had an idea of that all evening. I can’t remember where I’ve left my car but she says Ronnie knows and we can go back for it ‘on the weekend’; she’ll drive me. So, not just one occasion to drive me but two. She’s taking advantage. It was she who planted more and more tiny cups of wine in my hand, and now she has her reward. I’m slumped in the passenger seat beside her and she’s singing, I swear she’s actually singing along to the radio, Brook Benton . . . Hotel Happiness (tra la la la).

  She’s chattering, too. All sorts of things. Did I see Muriel Spark at the party? Had I read the latest Edna O’Brien? Could she take another peek at the little silver dagger lying in its box, and when I pass it over, ‘Oh, how pretty! One could use it for a letter opener!’

  I’m struggling to sober up. I’m slumped against the cold of the car window and I’ve taken off my shoes and am curling as close to the foetal position as I can manage, in the cramped seat of her Triumph. I must stay alert. She might mention Gerald, Sam, Aldeburgh, and something might slip. Her lurid green dress with its swirly pattern is rucked up, and I can see the top of her pantyhose, and I have to deduce: she’s got a fine nerve. She doesn’t care if I see it or not.

  Now her chatter is about her family: Daddy who is – good Christ – a high-court judge; one younger brother, a sort of mongoloid it seems, in an institution somewhere, I can’t remember the word she uses; an older sister, nicknamed Bonnie, very fat, ‘poor darling’; an older brother who runs the family home, the estate, with his own giant brood. They’re practically in the car with us. Another sister, who does something with horses, or is that the same fat one? On and on it goes until I sit up a little straighter, and ask: has she ever written weirdo letters to anyone? Fan letters?’

  A light laugh. She doesn’t blink or give anything away. Impossible to tell what she’s really thinking of my question but the answer comes easily and pleasantly, pink-painted nails on the steering-wheel, a little tug at the hem of her dress: ‘No, I don’t think so. Is this about . . . is it because I said I loved your work? Do people write to you? And you find that – unsettling?’

  I shake my head. The Suffolk roads are dark, flanked either side by trees that always make me think of a film set, a false front. I know what’s behind them: hills and further darkness, a waiting blankness. At Cretingham (I think of the brother she mentioned – perhaps ‘cretin’ was the word she used), a ghostly owl sweeps in front of us and the headlights suddenly pick out an old-timer in a flat cap, sitting in the back garden of his lone cottage with a pipe – at past midnight – like a gnome.

  She laughs. ‘What’s the story there, do you think? Old chap had a row with the missus and come outside to smoke?’

  ‘Probably just buried her. Surveying his handiwork.’

  ‘Never off duty, are you? It must be exhausting dreaming up all the horrible things people are always thinking and doing.’

  When I say nothing to this, she starts up again: ‘And yet they’re not, are they? I mean, most people are law-abiding. It’s just a little fantasy. You said it yourself, when we first met. How many murders was it in England last year?

  ‘Three hundred,’ I say.

  ‘Yet if you read – sorry, I don’t mean to cause offence – but if you read novels like yours, you’d think they were happening willy-nilly, to everyone!’

  ‘Most of my novels aren’t set in England. In fact, this one is the first.’

  The feeling then: this is the point of her conversation, to find out more accurately what I’m writing and report back to dear Cousin Frances. I bite my lip.

  ‘And murder is happening sometimes, even here, isn’t it?’ I say. ‘Look at Christie. Not Agatha! I meant John Christie. Eight women, wasn’t it, most of them hidden in his back yard?’

  She nods. This has been in the news again lately, a new investigation ten years later, because one of the victims was blamed on Timothy Evans. Radio, television, newspapers: it would be hard not to know the details. Strangling them with their own stockings; raping them once they were unconscious.

  ‘And that thing they say, crummy guys who didn’t know him at all. He “kept himself to himself” – how often do you hear that when newspaper men interview the neighbours? Meaning: I didn’t know him but I want my five minutes of fame so I’m going to say something about him. Everyone loves it, the frisson, the glamour of being associated with a murderer.’

  ‘Well, Daddy says they took a vote this week in the House of Commons. And the death penalty really is going to be abolished . . . dragging up the cases again and poor Timothy Evans, well, it has achieved something. Ghastly though it all was. If you believe that the death penalty is barbaric. But perhaps you don’t. I suppose a lot of Americans, Texans, wouldn’t agree with me.’

  ‘I do happen to agree with you,’ I mumble. I’m not your average Texan.

  I file this information away: no death penalty, then. I somehow knew that would happen, a reprieve of sorts, punishment withdrawn for a crime no one has yet uncovered, and doesn’t it take some of the sting away, making it less of the ultimate risk? But Smythson-Balby is pleased, and rattles on about civilised behaviour or something. Now she just seems young. Young, idealistic and sweet. I put my cheek against the cold car window, suddenly feeling icily sober.

  ‘And another thing,’ I say. ‘You’re getting yourself confused. Between fiction and fact, I mean. An author makes things up. Their skill is to lie, to deflect and head-off, not to give you a shining pathway to their innermost self.’

  I read the sign saying ‘Saxtead 2, Debenham 5’, which always makes me think of Ronnie, and she changes down a gear as we reach the road that runs alongside Bridge Cottage. There are no lights on in Mrs Ingham’s house – Bridge House – but I have the strong feeling that Minna’s standing there anyway, watching. There’s a hesitation after Smythson-Balby has wrenched on the handbrake and is wondering whether to cut the engine, and then she does, and the interior light flashes on. An unexpected feeling wells up in me. Her cheek is rather pink; her bottom lip pouting a little. Her big eyes blazing. Another dangerous thought as the light and silence fill the car, then fade away: I’m lonely. I miss Sam. And, God, that girl has good strong legs.

  I reach for my purse, which has travelled carefully on the back seat, with the clasped frame slightly open for oxygen. My
hand is shaking a little on the inside handle of the car. ‘You fancy a nightcap?’ I ask.

  She says she does.

  This must be the most dangerous situation I’ve ever found myself in. This girl wants to know about me, and I want to tell her things. My love affairs often begin this way: the tease and charge of sharing, revealing, confessing, then making full about-turns, snatching it all back. I’m swimmy with whisky too. Dangerous. I’m rarely interested in getting to know the other person. I’m excited by what they want to know about me and how many secrets I can hold tight.

  I take her from room to room upstairs, handing her one of the spare toothbrushes I keep in packets in the medicine cabinet; unsurprised, she takes one dutifully and brushes her teeth, spitting noisily into the basin.

  Then I show her the snails, returning the ones who have been journeying with me back to their rightful bowls (there are many more of them now: I’ve bought proper tanks for several of them). Although she wrinkles her nose at the smell and seems surprised at first, she stands for a while watching as they make love. Abelard reaches down to kiss Héloise.

  ‘How can you tell he’s the male?’ she says.

  ‘You can’t. There’s no difference between them.’

  Héloise had reared on the end of her tail, swaying a little under Abelard’s caress. We watch for a while, and I’m thinking of absolutely nothing. Then the swellings begin to appear on each side of the snails’ heads. The sticky lumps grow larger and touch. ‘How they adore each other,’ I murmur, and drag myself away with reluctance, feeling her interest slacken.