The Morbid Kitchen

by Jennie Melville

  ‘Yes.’ In spite of herself, Charmian was impressed. Do I take this seriously? Perhaps I had better.

  ‘I knew she’d come, Birdie.’ Winifred was triumphant, hair still dripping, but pleased with herself. ‘Told you she would. Leave it to me, I said. I’ll get her.’

  ‘Thanks, Winifred,’ said Charmian, without turning her head towards Winifred. After a short session with Winifred in this mood, she felt the absence of free will. Damn you, Winnie. ‘And you did. Having got me here, let’s see what you two can do.’

  Birdie motioned the two of them to follow her into the sitting room where she took a seat at the table. She held the handkerchief and the letter in her hand, but she made no other preparations, the curtains were not drawn, nor did she shut her eyes. But she continued to look grave.

  ‘Take my other hand, Winifred, you have power and may give me some.’

  Winifred was inclined to fuss: ‘What about your hair? It’s all wet. Let me dry it.’

  Birdie ignored her.

  Charmian moved forward. ‘Do you want me? Can I help?’

  ‘No.’ Birdie was still very serious. ‘ You are too negative.’

  Winifred sat down at the table, taking Birdie’s hand. Charmian took a seat facing them. For a moment she had a swift vision of H. G. Horris’s face, full of horror. Then it faded, to be replaced with one of her husband’s more sceptical smiles. ‘Oh come,’ he seemed to be saying. ‘ This isn’t like you, you’re the sceptical one.’

  Would the room grow cold as Birdie concentrated?

  Would Birdie drift away into a trance? Charmian had not been present when Birdie had been seeking Benjy. Winifred was looking troubled, but Birdie’s face was very very grave.

  Silence.

  Charmian moved in her chair, then stopped herself holding her hands; she drew her feet firmly together, anchoring to one spot. She wanted to cough but bit it back. She could see a drop of water slowly fall off Birdie’s hair and drip down her neck. Not that anything disturbed Birdie.

  Charmian had wondered if Birdie would start to moan or groan or call out as a vision came to her, but nothing happened. Five minutes, ten minutes. She could hear the clock on the wall ticking.

  Then, still quietly, still seriously, Birdie began to speak. ‘This place is dark. I suppose it is a room but there is little light. I smell wood, but it is not a pleasant smell, the wood is old and damp. A great dustiness in the air … It is not far away … Not a house, but I cannot make out what it is. But I know there is wood and oil. Yes, and stone. Certainly stone beneath her feet. Or is it brick? Perhaps both … Dark, closed in, cold … Emily is there. She is certainly there.’

  ‘Is she dead?’

  Birdie did not answer for a moment. ‘ I think not. No, I can’t tell you that. These are ideas, sensations, I am dealing in, not certainties, But her presence is there.’

  ‘And it is not far away?’

  Birdie looked troubled. ‘I think it must be close. It feels close.’

  All this time, she had not been looking at Charmian; now she turned to her. ‘That’s it, I’m afraid. Not much. But you didn’t expect an address and telephone number.’

  ‘Did it feel like a prison? As if the girl was imprisoned there?’

  Birdie seemed to look inside herself to see if she could draw out an answer. Charmian waited. But then Birdie shook her head. ‘Can’t say. Beyond me, that one. But I will say it feels like a bloody unpleasant place.’ She drew in a sharp breath. ‘ Yes, it has known violence … I can smell it.’

  She began to be much less calm. ‘It’s a bad place, I can tell you that, Charmian.’ Her hands, so steady and calm, began to shake.

  ‘Now Birdie,’ said Winifred in alarm. ‘I’ll get you a drink of water.’

  Birdie let her go, then sipped the water. ‘Sorry about this, not my style at all, and it may all be nothing but my imagination. You can’t be sure.’ She took another, longer drink. ‘And anyway, not much help.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that.’ Charmian picked up her case and bag, ready to go. ‘I’m thinking it over, Birdie, things have a way of clicking together. You know that, it’s the way you move forward sometimes.’ It was true, somewhere, embedded in what Birdie had come out with, was the chance of something useful.

  Winnie put up her hand. ‘ Sit down, and I’ll make us all a nice cup of tea.’ She was looking anxiously at Birdie.

  ‘No, I must go, and you’ve got your Laundering.’ Strong whisky was more Winifred’s style than tea, something must have thrown her off her balance.

  ‘No hurry about that, we have tomorrow.’

  Doing what she was told, Charmian sat down while Birdie took several deep breaths. There was a bunch of roses and pinks in the room which she went over to smell as if she needed to get something, some stink, out of her nostrils.

  ‘Sorry, Birdie.’

  ‘Don’t be. Only too glad to help. I’d like to help find the girl. Clear things up.’

  Winifred returned with the tea-tray on which was also a bottle of whisky. ‘That’s a bad business, you’re into,’ she said, pouring out tea and adding generous tots of whisky too.

  ‘That’s what I think.’ Charmian accepted her cup of tea, after all, the whisky was welcome and home was just around the corner, she would be walking. ‘It’s hard to imagine how a woman like Margaret Drue ever got a job there.’

  ‘She had good references, I imagine,’ said Winifred. ‘Possibly forged, but I don’t suppose it was her reference that got her the job.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Oh come on.’

  ‘No, explain.’

  ‘She was quite a taking woman if you had the taste for that sort of thing, and Nancy did have.’

  ‘I see.’ Charmian put her cup on the table and sat back. ‘ They were lovers?’

  ‘I don’t know if it went that far.’

  ‘I am surprised.’ She was thinking. ‘No hint of it got into the police files.’

  ‘No? Oh well …’

  ‘Who told you?’

  ‘No one told me,’ said Winifred drily. ‘ I didn’t have to be told. I saw for myself. But they were very discreet… I always felt there was someone else in the frame egging them on.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I may be wrong, just a feeling. A sense of another voice, a suspicion. No names, no pack drill, that’s what they say, isn’t it? I could be wrong. Drink up, dear.’

  Charmian took another drink of loaded tea. ‘ This tea tastes good.’ She was not going to let Winifred fall silent on this, she would come back to her.

  ‘In certain circumstances, tea with a nip is the only drink.’

  ‘You’re right: these are certain circumstances … You know, what you’ve told me, I expect you will be shocked, but I was surprised.’

  Birdie had just begun to hand back the handkerchief and the scrap of paper, when her face changed. Puzzled, she turned towards Charmian. ‘I believe I got it wrong … this is the open air, there is a wind blowing and it has been raining.’

  ‘Well, so it has.’ said Winifred in a down to earth kind of way. ‘Earlier today. Calm down, Birdie, draw it mild.’ She gave her friend an anxious look. You got strokes and heart attacks that way, she had said so before.

  But Birdie was going on. ‘And there is blood, much blood.’ Then she was violently sick.

  Charmian walked round the corner to her own home. Muff was no longer on the tree watching, she had given up and retreated to a private sanctum of her own by the compost heap. There were mice living inside which were sometimes so unwise as to come out. Worth a cat watching. Unlike some people she had no fear of blood, the taste of which on her tongue and teeth she liked rather than otherwise. As for a severed head, she usually ate it.

  The house was empty when Charmian let herself in; she expected this so she had prepared herself to cook a meal for both of them. Humphrey had promised to be back later but not too late, whatever that meant.

  She changed into jeans and a shirt, p
ut out Muff’s food, and started to cook. She had got very cunning about choosing meals that were easy and quick. You lit the grill and mixed a salad, that was the way to do it.

  At one time, she thought, as she peeled an onion and wiped away tears, a professional woman would have had a cook. But then, in this imagined other time, there would not have been a professional woman such as she was. She was a creature of her own time and must put up with it. Preparing thick slices of steak was not really pleasant when you had blood on your mind as a result of listening to Birdie. Flesh was flesh when all was said and done.

  All was quiet outside, too dark now for the police helicopter to be surveying the ground for a hiding place. If that was what it had been doing; she had only her own speculation on that, it might just as easily have been looking for a terrorist or sorting out a traffic problem.

  Probably a waste of time this afternoon with the witches. All she had done was to make poor Birdie sick. Interesting that though, because Birdie was a tough lady.

  She slapped the steak hard with a rolling pin to encourage tenderness, then left it to marinade. There was some wine left over from yesterday so she poured herself a glass. Muff came in, studied her dish of food, then walked away.

  ‘All right, be like that,’ said Charmian, sipping her wine. Something ought to happen, she could feel it was time. As if to answer her, the telephone rang. She reached out a hand; if it was Humphrey saying he was going to be later after all, very late, then she was going to be angry, very angry.

  But no. ‘HG here. Thought you would be interested to know that the helicopter flushed up two possible sites that are worth thinking about.’

  ‘Are you talking about where someone could be held prisoner?’

  He hesitated. ‘No, not exactly … more suggested burial places … where a body could be. Disturbed earth and vegetation.’

  ‘Recent?’

  Again he hesitated. ‘One of them. The other not so recent.’

  She thought of what Birdie had said about the location of her dark, dread place. ‘Near the town?’

  ‘One of them, just on a patch of green not far from the Great Park … The other is between Eton and Slough, nearer Slough. Too late to do anything tonight, but we will have a go tomorrow.’

  ‘Try the nearer place first.’ She owed that much to Birdie, although really neither site fitted in with what she had said. But should it? Real life and Birdie’s images might not match.

  ‘Yes.’ He did not commit himself. ‘Have to see what we can do. And of course, neither site might turn up anything. And the girl might walk in any minute.’

  ‘Do you think that likely?’

  ‘I don’t know. Less and less.’

  It was what Charmian thought as well. This apart, nothing matched with her own reflections or what Birdie had summoned up. Birdie herself had produced a contradiction, of course, nothing was clear cut. But when was it ever in police work?

  ‘It’s not very easy work,’ he went on gloomily. ‘A real brute of a case. I felt it the minute that basement was opened up and we found what was there. And even if we locate the girl is it going to help that investigation, which is where we started?’

  ‘I think it might do, it’s all of a piece. It’s like a maze … find the string that marks the right path through, and everything will fall into place.’

  HG gave a grunt. ‘You’re an optimist, ma’am.’

  They agreed to talk again in the morning, and Charmian went back to consider her cooking. There was no need for progress at the moment since there was no sign of Humphrey. Muff, however, had decided to eat; her head was in the bowl from which she was eating in a slow, thoughtful fashion.

  ‘You’re getting an old lady,’ said Charmian, bending down to stroke her. ‘I suppose we will have the dog back with us tomorrow if the witches are off.’

  The thought struck her like a poisoned arrow: Birdie could not have expected Emily to turn up alive, or the two of them would have stayed at home. Missed the Laundering. Wouldn’t they? Dismiss the thought, woman, she told herself. Birdie and Winifred, delightful as they are, do not have a direct line to the future. Remember that you told yourself it was a kind of wickedness, substitute silliness, to consult Birdie at all.

  Muff raised her head from the dish, alerting Charmian to the sound of a car and the arrival of her husband.

  ‘Not before time,’ she said, giving him a kiss. ‘Another minute and the dinner would have spoiled.’

  ‘You haven’t started to cook it.’

  ‘Exactly what I mean: it would have been in the bin. Or Muff’s dish.’

  ‘Or the dog’s. He’s on his way home, I saw Winifred with him.’

  ‘Ah, I thought he might be.’ She went to the door in time to see Winifred and Benjy coming up the path.

  ‘Off early tomorrow, so here is your boy …’ Winifred handed the dog over. ‘Sorry we weren’t more help.’

  ‘Maybe you will have been. How’s Birdie?’

  ‘Quite herself again. Back the day after tomorrow.’ Winifred plodded back down the path to the street, then home. She looked tired.

  ‘What did they help with?’ asked Humphrey, who had been watching.

  ‘Tell you some time. How was your day?’

  ‘I managed to stop two representatives of NATO hitting each other, everyone hates everyone else at the moment and that’s before we have the old Warsaw block countries in. I don’t know what will happen there, feelings run even stronger with them. How the old Austrian-Hungarian Empire held together as long as it did, I shall never know.’

  ‘Empires always fall apart with tears.’

  ‘The Roman Empire didn’t do too badly.’

  ‘They got chewed up by the Goths in the end.’

  ‘I sometimes think we are all Goths now.’ But he was laughing; he was an optimist really, or he wouldn’t do the work he did. The world would roll on.

  They had a quiet meal, hardly talking but feeling at peace with each other. It was a good mood to be in. While she made some coffee, Charmian told him about her day, even including her session with Birdie. ‘That’s not for repeating, by the way.’

  He could see why, but did not say so. He knew that Charmian occasionally reached out for a wilder edge on things, she had done it before.

  ‘So now you have an identification of the dead woman in Flanders Street, and you know the child’s head had been both boiled and refrigerated … nasty that, you think the woman had been imprisoned before being killed?’

  ‘Yes, and if so, then Emily may be in the same place.’

  ‘But HG thinks he may have found a body?’

  ‘I wanted him to look for a prison, but I think he thought he ought to look for a body and he seems to have found a burial. May not be Emily. There could be another body to be found. If Rewley’s strange informer was speaking the truth, then there are other human remains out there. But Rewley has not been in touch, so I can take it that the man has not surfaced either. Probably all rubbish.’

  ‘Not like Rewley from what I have seen of him to go for rubbish.’

  ‘Not as a rule, no.’ But how steady was Rewley at the moment?

  ‘So now you are looking for Emily, and also for Margaret Drue? And Drue, you believe, is alive and lethal.’

  ‘That’s about it.’ Of course, she could always be wrong. ‘The informer that spoke to Rewley said he had seen her “ come out”. Or words like that. So he was speaking of a woman … He could have been talking about Margaret Drue, around all the time, but in disguise.’

  ‘And he had recognized her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Humphrey considered. ‘Coming out has come to have a special, sexual meaning.’

  ‘She might have been bisexual.’ She told him what Winifred had said.

  ‘So she might have been going around as a man?’

  Charmian nodded. ‘It could be. I’ve been thinking that way. It would explain why she was never flushed out.’

  ‘No wonder you are so res
tless.’

  ‘Am I?’ She looked down at her feet, they did look fidgety; she put them close together as if otherwise they might get away from each other. She clasped her hands firmly, fingers interlaced. No fidget there.

  ‘Let’s go for a walk. Take the dog.’

  ‘Let’s go to bed.’

  ‘Yes, let’s. Walk first, then bed.’

  Charmian thought about it; she had drunk a fair amount of wine. Bed appealed, but Humphrey usually knew best. ‘All right. If you say so.’ She was getting to be a really dutiful wife, damn it.

  Benjy was glad to take a walk, he was glad to be back with Charmian, whom he regarded both as his patron and a responsibility: you had to watch her, but she fed you well whereas the witches were trying to make a him a veggie.

  Charmian wound a scarf round her head. ‘Let’s go to the Prince Consort Park, I like it there and Benjy can go off the lead, it’s allowed there.’

  They strolled off, all three in a happy mood. The night, it was right to call it night now, had turned fine with a noble moon shining on the Castle where the Royal Standard fluttered.

  To reach Prince Consort Park, you left Maid of Honour Row behind you, passed the Castle Mound, and turned towards the river. You did not cross the river but turned a sharp left before the bridge. Benjy, released from his leash, trotted ahead. He knew the way, one of his best walks.

  Humphrey touched Charmian’s arm. ‘ Who’s that coming towards us? It looks like Rewley.’

  ‘He’s running,’ said Charmian.

  Then she stopped. ‘What is he doing with his hands? For God’s sake, what is he doing with his hands?’

  Chapter Nine

  Rewley had stopped running and was coming towards them with a loping walk. He was rubbing his hands over and over with what looked like paper. Somehow that looked more alarming to the two people watching him.

  ‘He’s wiping his hands.’

  Rolling them over and over like a hefty (he was a big man) and unshaven Lady Macbeth. The dog, who had been running forward, stopped, gave a rumbling growl at the back of his throat and stood in front of Charmian.

  Her husband put a hand on her arm to hold her back: ‘ Hang on a minute.’