The Morbid Kitchen

by Jennie Melville

  Dolly was waiting for her at the Fisherman’s Bar with a glass of dry white wine. She seemed more cheerful. ‘I like it here. My idea of what a pub should be. Everything genuine but the name, surely it started out as something else?’

  Charmian looked around her at the quiet, dark, warm room. ‘Yes, it’s resisted the temptation to call itself the Dog and His Dinner and go chintzy and brassy with gas logs.’ The fire, such as it was, smouldering away within a mask of smoke, was genuine. ‘I believe it was originally called the Duke of Wellington.’ And since there had probably been a pub or ale house here since William the Conqueror, no doubt it had been the Duke of Marlborough before that and the Great Harry before that, back to a nameless village ale house well known to the compilers of the Domesday Book.

  Neither of them mentioned Kate, but she was there in the background of their conversation all the time. Kate had never, as far as either of them knew, come to this pub, which was why they came here now: there was no ghost of a tall and lovely girl to confound them with grief.

  ‘How was Em?’

  Charmian considered. ‘Fraught.’

  ‘Can’t blame her. I’d be the same.’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t.’ Charmian looked at her young friend. ‘You’ve got what’s called bottle. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have taken up the career you have. She’s anorexic too, I think.’

  ‘Is she? What did Jim Towers think?’

  Charmian shrugged. ‘Not sure. Sorry for her, I think.’

  Dolly drank some wine and eyed Charmian. ‘ You don’t like Jim, do you?’

  ‘Did I say that?’

  ‘You don’t have to.’ Dolly finished her wine, putting down her glass with a defiant flourish.

  ‘I do like him.’ Suddenly she found herself saying exactly what she felt: ‘But I’d prefer him not to be so keen on heads.’ Before Dolly could answer, to stop any reaction hitting her, she went on: ‘How did you get to know Emily? I met her at a party you gave and she kind of clove to me. I liked her but there’s the generation thing. How did you know her?’

  The answer surprised her. ‘Through Kate.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have expected them to be friends.’

  ‘I don’t know that they were. I liked Em more than Kate did, they weren’t soul mates, but Anny knew Em’s sister, she may even have known their mother, I believe she did, so the relationship goes a long way back. Not close though, there was an age difference.’

  ‘I’ve already noticed that Emily seems to have no friends of her own age.’

  ‘Oh, I expect she has,’ said Dolly easily. ‘She just keeps quiet about them, circles not mixing and that.’

  Charmian looked out of the window, where you could just see the Thames gleaming in the wintry sunlight. Anny Cooper had been her friend almost all her adult life. ‘Odd that Anny never mentioned knowing the Baileys.’

  ‘Never?’

  ‘Never. I would have remembered.’ Anny was a great talker as a rule, added to which she was very often engaged in a furious argument about something with someone, which she was willing to share with those of her friends who would listen. No, Anny was not a silent lady.

  ‘Did you mention that you knew Emily? Or that you were interested in the murder of ten years ago?’

  ‘No, probably not. Anny didn’t like hearing about my work, not since that murder which came so close home to her.’ A friend and neighbour of Anny had been a particularly savage killer. That was in the past, but Anny had not forgotten, nor Charmian’s part in it all. Also, Anny was in a confusion of grief at the death of her daughter and elation at the possession of a grandchild. Come to think of it, Anny had been at the party where she had met Emily Bailey. They had driven there together.

  ‘I wonder if Anny knew Margaret Drue. Did you?’

  Dolly shook her head. ‘If I ever met her, then I don’t remember. I used to visit Windsor, but I wasn’t based here. Really, all I know is hearsay.’

  ‘A lot of detection is hearsay,’ said Charmian. ‘I’ll listen to anything you have.’

  Dolly watched as a car arrived and a party of new lunchers arrived. Two men, two women, they were laughing. One woman was blonde and fat, but beautifully dressed. The other was small and dark, not so well dressed, but she was doing most of the laughing. Dolly recognized her as someone she had seen on television, a well-known actress. She watched for a moment, interested to see how different the actress looked off screen without the make-up and clothes. The same yet different.

  Then she turned back to Charmian. ‘I do remember something, although it may not mean anything, just the sort of thing people say when there’s this kind of tragedy. There was a low-key story that there was something odd, unpleasant going on at the school.’

  ‘What sort of thing?’ Charmian thought she could guess.

  ‘Sex came into it somewhere.’ Dolly pursed her lips. ‘Nothing specific but there was the hint of child abuse.’

  ‘Who told you?’

  ‘I’m trying to remember … I think I got it from the woman who sold newspapers outside the office I worked in … She knew all the gossip. I didn’t rate it very much; I never really believed all she said. Just took it in and shrugged. I don’t think I believed it.’

  ‘Is she still around, this newspaper-seller?’

  Dolly looked sad. ‘ No, she died. Cancer. Such a nice old woman too.’ She started to get herself together to depart. ‘Must get back to work. Thanks for the drink and sandwich … About the tale, the police team must have picked it up. Nothing got in the papers that I know of but I expect they heard.’

  ‘Be surprising if they hadn’t.’

  They parted in the car park. ‘ That was Amanda Royal, did you notice? The actress, I saw her arrive, and she came into the bar. I heard her order a beef sandwich.’

  ‘She is human; she eats.’

  ‘But she does that TV advert about the green world and animals and eating vegetarian meals.’ Dolly sounded shocked.

  ‘That’s work, this is her pleasure.’ What a puritan Dolly could be.

  As Dolly started the car, she leaned out of the window to wave goodbye. Her hair looked beautifully cut, shining and free.

  ‘Who cuts your hair, Dolly?’ called Charmian.

  ‘Your friend Beryl Barker … you sent me to her, she cuts well, you said, but watch her.’ She waved again and was away.

  Beryl Barker, Baby, an old friend, a good hairdresser but she could be dangerous company with a criminal past. But Dolly was streetwise and clever, she had certainly checked up on Baby. Charmian put a hand up to her own hair, which felt rough and dry. She might pop into Baby’s herself.

  On the edge of her mind, as if she was seeing it out of the corner of her eye, came a picture of wispy, floating hair going grey and a striped skirt in orange rather than yellow: Emily had said that everyone was wearing striped cotton skirts that summer. It was a shadow, a picture of a moment, then gone. Was that what Margaret Drue had looked like?

  She smoothed her own hair: she would go to see Baby. There was one thing about Beryl Andrea Barker, lawless she might be but she had great common sense. But one other thing first, even before her hair.

  Charmian went straight back to her office, where she ignored the freshly arrived files on new cases (all of which she had asked for and truly needed to see), and the pile of letters demanding attention, in favour of telephoning Jim Towers.

  He was at his desk, which surprised her somewhat since she had taken him for an out on the street, hands on investigation man, but he answered her politely, which did not surprise her. He would always be polite.

  He also sounded hopeful, a hope she had to disabuse.

  ‘No, I haven’t got anything for you on Margaret Drue, I want to ask you something. Was there any suggestion of child abuse in the school?’

  There was a perceptible pause. ‘It was thought of, of course. I’ve checked the files, the case was kept open, but there was no evidence of it. It’s clear that tactful enquiries were made and got n
owhere, so that the idea was written off … All the same …’ She could hear him clearing his throat. ‘I’ve talked to those men who worked on the case and are still around and each one said that they were troubled, and that they felt there was something, couldn’t put their finger on it, they just smelt it.’

  ‘What did it smell like?’

  ‘Sex.’ He was blunt. ‘Somewhere, somehow.’

  ‘I feel that too. It has to be somehow. But was anything ever discovered for sure?’

  ‘They tried, believe me. That was what Drue was suspected of. Especially when she went missing. Now we know she was killed herself. I don’t know if that clears her. To my mind it doesn’t.’

  ‘What state was the child’s body in? Remind me.’

  ‘She hadn’t been physically abused, if that’s what you mean. No sign of that at all.’

  Charmian said: ‘ But there are ways of abusing children that are not always physical.’

  ‘Some of the worst are, but it usually goes with a bit of knocking about too.’ There was a question in his voice.

  ‘Not sure exactly what I mean myself. Talking to the child, showing her pictures, letting her see scenes …’ It wasn’t nice what she was describing, but it could happen. ‘And the child might talk about it.’

  ‘Drue was the suspect, and may have been abusing the child in some way or the other. She may indeed have been the murderer of that child. And she may have been killed by another person in that household as an act of justice.’

  ‘Do you think that?’

  He was silent. ‘No. It’s so very brutal, the way the head and Drue’s body were stuck together in that cupboard. Not justice, an act darker than that.’

  ‘The head, you mean?’

  ‘Not just the head. The whole feel of that cupboard and what was in it.’

  ‘And that was why she was killed? Of course, it was always on the cards that the child was killed because of something she knew, but it was only speculative. Is still,’ he said. ‘ No evidence, one way or the other. In the end I think the general feeling was it was just brutality: someone wanted to kill.’

  ‘There was brutality, all right, but something more as well.’ Charmian was still puzzled, but so many years had now passed since that killing, perhaps they would never get to the bottom of it all.

  Not her affair, really. Or was it?

  For somehow or other, Margaret Drue had dragged her into it.

  At Anny’s smart duplex apartment in a courtyard off Peascod Street, there was no sign of a baby in the airy cool establishment, unlike in some houses. This was because the whole upper floor, reached by its own lift, had been made over to the child, so that where Anny lived there was no smell of soap, talcum powder or nappies, no pram to see. Money could talk.

  Anny’s husband Jack was moping around the hall when Charmian arrived. He complained, ‘ I love the child, I’d be delighted to see the little scrap, push the pram.’

  With two nurses? But Charmian did not say this aloud.

  Anyway, Jack answered it. ‘ It’s like getting to see the Queen. Worse, really. I have to wash my hands in disinfectant and take off my shoes.’

  Charmian was not sure if she believed this. Jack in drink, as he was now, did tell tales. You couldn’t help liking him, though. Drunk or sober, he was a good sort. The heart was there.

  ‘Where’s Anny?’

  ‘She’s not with the child.’ He looked around as if he might see her, then shrugged. ‘Considering she worships the kid, she sees very little of it.’

  ‘Really?’ It was hard with Jack when in this mood to know whether he spoke the truth or not.

  ‘Ask her yourself, here she is.’ He nodded towards the door.

  Anny was there, casually dressed in a trouser suit, but one that you knew came from a good couture house, possibly a French one – she had just come back from France; her arms were full of parcels which she let slip to the floor as she threw open her arms. ‘Charmian, darling.’

  So I am in favour? And Charmian responded herself. ‘Anny love, I’ve come to see the baby.’

  ‘Yes, go and see the little tyke,’ said Jack from behind them.

  Anny sighed. ‘Sometimes, I think he doesn’t know her sex. She’s a girl, dear, a girl, sitting up and looking pretty.’

  ‘Nearly sitting up,’ said Jack. ‘Fell over backwards last time I looked.’

  ‘Can I go and see? Take a look?’ You did not invade the nursery without permission. It had taken Charmian some time to recognize the rules of visiting but she was getting to know them now. And the first one was that you asked Anny. Who quite often said NO.

  But she was in a good mood. ‘Come on up.’ She turned to Jack. ‘Coming too, Grandpa?’

  Jack looked visibly taken aback, even shocked, but although it would eat into valuable drinking time, which usually counted with him, he nodded. Speech seemed beyond him.

  They all crowded into the lift, which rose swiftly to the top floor. Anny had decorated the walls with murals of her own. Not specially nursery stuff, but gay and lively. Also gentler than some of her latest production. She was abandoning the abstract, Charmian noticed, as were so many of her contemporaries, but there was a kind of idealized style to the landscapes she had painted over all the surface. The sun shone on fields and meadows while the full moon lit up a city street.

  Peascod Street and Wellington Place, Charmian recognized with surprised pleasure. ‘It’s lovely, Anny.’

  ‘Yes, some of my best work,’ she said in a detached voice. ‘ I’ve backed it, you see, so I can remove it when I want.’

  That was like Anny: she did not waste her work. The murals would go into an exhibition here or in America sooner or later, with a price on them, and if it was met, she would sell. Art was not about sentiment. This was something that Jack, a highly emotional man, had never understood, and it probably lay behind their worst quarrels.

  One nurse was ironing something soft and white by the window; she nodded in welcome but worked on. This was Nurse Number Two. Number One Nurse was out, probably shopping for all the equipment the child seemed to need.

  The baby was sitting in her play-pen, propped against a giant teddy bear whose eyes she was attacking with probing fingers; she was wearing a smocked blue silk dress and her hair was well brushed. She looked jocund, blithe and debonair.

  So far unchristened, she was not unnamed: she was another Kate. Charmian found that very sad.

  ‘She gets more like her mother every day,’ said Anny.

  ‘And her father.’ Someone had to remember Rewley, who so often seemed to forget himself these days. And in fact the child already had a way of looking at you that was like Rewley’s. But she did have Kate’s lovely hair and big blue eyes.

  ‘I let him in occasionally, you know.’ Anny looked without expression at Charmian, who supposed it was a joke, but grasped that it almost was but not quite. ‘As much as he seems able to cope with. And Dolly Barstow. Why don’t you find him some work to do to occupy his mind?’

  Charmian stroked the baby’s soft cheek. The thought was hard to handle but here it came: I could not call her Kate, not yet, perhaps not ever. ‘It’s work I came to you about.’

  ‘Somehow I thought as much.’

  Jack had sat himself down on the floor where he sat staring quietly, but she thought, happily at his grandchild. She stared back, giving the teddy bear a rest. It looked touch and go whether she smiled at Jack or burst into tears. She decided to smile. And the smile, when it came, was all her own, in it she resembled neither Kate nor Rewley.

  But my God, Charmian thought, it’s Jack. He smiled too and smile for smile seemed to match. But the baby who was not yet to be called Kate had added her own something to it, something feminine and delicate.

  ‘I am occupied.’ Yes, that was the word. ‘I am occupied with the bodies in the old school house in Flanders Street. You’ve heard about them?’

  ‘Who hasn’t?’

  ‘You knew Nancy?’

 
; ‘Sure. You know I did, she was well known in Windsor. Everyone knew her. Before and after death.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means the Nancy after the body of the child was found and the school closed was not the one who later worked in the Castle. That one was a kind of zombie.’

  Jack muttered: ‘Don’t talk about this sort of thing in the nursery in front of the baby.’

  ‘She can’t understand.’

  ‘You can’t be sure. You don’t know how much babies take in.’

  Anny shrugged. ‘If ancestry has anything to do with it, then she must be used to it, crime talk bred in the bone.’

  This was Anny being at her worst, Charmian wished she had not come.

  ‘Did you know Margaret Drue?’

  ‘Yes, to that too.’ Anny turned her head. ‘You did too, Jack, didn’t you?’

  ‘Don’t remember.’

  ‘One of Jack’s drinking companions of those years.’

  ‘She was not.’

  Anny said: ‘ So she’s turned up in the house, dead?’

  ‘Looks like it,’ Charmian said cautiously.

  ‘Nancy was a friend, I knew Margaret Drue through her, she brought Margaret to one of my exhibitions and she made some sensible observations. Not a nice woman but she didn’t deserve to be murdered. Still, I suppose it’s marginally better than being thought to be a murderer.’

  ‘Did you ever mention my name?’

  ‘To Margaret Drue?’ Anny was surprised now. ‘ I hardly spoke to her. She wasn’t one of my favourite people. We were polite to each other when we met, you know how one does in Windsor, but I never mentioned you as far as I know. Why?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Clearly it does.’ Anny was trying to help now. ‘Ask Jack, he may have done. No, I don’t mean that nastily, Jack. The woman was your friend, even if I didn’t like her. You may have talked of Charmian.’

  ‘Don’t remember.’ said Jack. He stood up, moving away from the baby.

  ‘All right.’ Anny patted him on the arm. ‘She was a nicer woman than I admit, a good friend to you, and I am a jealous cow. Or was. I hope there is no need for that now, Jack?’