The Morbid Kitchen

by Jennie Melville

  No sign of Birdie and Winifred, not to be expected, even if they were back from the Laundering trip; they shopped in various specialist stores concentrating on healthy organic food loaded with vitamins. Even Benjy ate like that when he stayed with them and only Muff the cat stayed loyal to fish and meat.

  She waved to Dolly, who waved back before returning with an abstracted air to the biscuit selection.

  There was Dr Yeldon and his wife; Dr Yeldon was pushing the trolley and his wife appeared to be pushing him. She fancied it was usually that way round.

  They seemed to be meeting friends on every side because she could see smiles and greetings as they went round the aisles.

  She finished her shopping as quickly as she could, then surveyed the checkout desks for the one with the shortest line-up of shoppers. She found herself joined by the Yeldons, whose trolley was, she observed with interest, well loaded with bottles of wine and whisky. Who’d have thought it?

  Were they embarrassed to meet her and let her see their purchases? Dr Yeldon looked a bit shifty but his wife smiled, her large, yellow teeth clear and bold.

  ‘Nice to see a friend,’ said Mrs Yeldon. Dr Yeldon smiled and muttered something about the necessity for friends to keep in touch, which did not make sense to Charmian who had not guessed she was a friend, or not that sort. Not drunk already, she thought, no surely not.

  His wife was certainly not drunk or under the weather of any sort, her smile, although broad and unwavering, was arctic cold. Not sure if I want to be a friend to that smile, Charmian thought, but perhaps you could not choose your friends but had to take what the gods offered. Did a lifetime of friendship with Mrs Yeldon stretch ahead of her?

  She caught up with Dolly Barstow in the car park where she was glad to see that Dolly had bought things other than biscuits. Plenty of them though, chocolate and plain, also Swiss rolls, fruit cake and currant buns.

  ‘Having a tea-party for baby and assorted nannies,’ she explained, noticing Charmian’s observing gaze. ‘The kid is my godchild … Anny is coming and so is Rewley. Do you want to come? Saturday, the only day that suits them all.’

  ‘I might look in.’ Charmian was cautious, it might be better to leave them alone to see what happened. Several cars away, she could see Mrs Yeldon preparing to drive off with Dr Yeldon in the car beside her like another bundle. ‘Not thinking of asking the Yeldons?’

  Dolly raised an eyebrow. ‘ You must be joking. She’s poison that woman, my spies tell me that she’s sent him in practically daily asking about progress in the investigation. I don’t know how he bears it.’

  ‘With the help of the bottle, I think,’ said Charmian. ‘But takes a keen interest himself, I seem to remember.’

  ‘I don’t like civilians to be so keen.’ Dolly was sharp. ‘ They ought to stay out of it. I always suspect their motives.’

  ‘I suppose those two were fond of the Bailey family.’

  ‘Oh well, maybe.’

  ‘And right to be worried about Emily …’

  ‘No news of her?’

  Charmian shook her head. Why mention a grave due to be dug in the morning?

  In the morning, she was ready for the car when it came. Not ready for the grave, which she found stomach-turning in a way she had never expected.

  The dig had begun long before she arrived; she knew as soon as she approached the site that there was something wrong with this grave. For one thing, it was old, too old. Not immemorially old, not the burial place of a Roman, or a Saxon, both of whom might have lived and died and been buried in Egham, but too old to be the grave of Emily

  Yet there was a body in it; as diggers got further down, they moved the soil with great delicacy. All around on the ground above the dig, the piled up earth was being sieved by other men. It might contain clues. But so far nothing had shown up except the bones of a small animal.

  As a foot appeared, sticking up at an angle, the diggers stopped and looked up at HG.

  ‘Yes, go on, but use your hands.’

  He turned to Charmian. ‘It’s coming, whatever is there, it’s coming up. About time too, I feel as though I’ve been here all day already.’ He had shaved early so that a thin dark line was already showing on his upper lip; he had had a moustache in early youth before joining the force, and the ghost of it hung around.

  ‘That is a woman’s shoe,’ said Charmian. A court shoe with a high heel, probably light brown in colour once, but now stained with earth and blotched with what might be blood.

  ‘Make a guess who it is?’

  ‘Won’t try,’ Charmian answered, her eyes on the legs which were now appearing; one leg was bent against the body and it was on this leg that they could see the shoe. The other leg lay straight but was shoeless. Not much trouble seemed to have been taken in burying this body: a hole had been made and the body dropped in it. The earth had covered it and grass and weeds had grown over the top. Except for the miracle of the modern camera with its trick of seeing into the earth, it might never have been discovered.

  Not true, Charmian thought while she watched; this discovery is at the end of a chain which began when Nancy Bailey died and the heirs in Australia decided the house in Windsor must be sold. Thus Emily had been obliged to uncover the basement room and reveal what was inside. Then she had disappeared, and Albert had been killed. She was probably dead herself but she was not here, in this grave.

  A length of muddied pleated skirt appeared, still attached to the body and covering the rib cage, pelvis and upper legs. What colour it had been was doubtful, it had melted into the earth and been tinged with earth colours. The colour could be revived in the laboratory, but something about the stripes reminded her of the summer when the soft striped skirt was all the rage. She had worn one herself. Her skirt had been blue and white; popular colours had been a strong yellow and a mild orange, this one might have been yellow.

  The skull shone white the flesh fallen away although a little seemed to hang on the cheekbones and on the jaw. A fall of dark hair still on it, straggling like underground vegetation.

  She looked at HG. ‘I guess now.’

  It was like one of those games where you are given three guesses. Or a fairy story where the traveller or the princess is allowed three guesses.

  I guess this is a woman. Because of the shoes. I guess this is not a young woman, but a woman of a certain age, because of those shoes which are old in style, dark court shoes, not the shoes of a young woman. I guess she has been dead for about ten years, because skirts of the sort she seems to have been wearing … it is badly torn, I observe … were fashionable about that length of time ago.

  Apparently she had said all this aloud. There was a silence while HG considered her words. ‘That’s three guesses.’

  ‘Did I say that aloud? Well, I’m not ashamed.’

  ‘Have another go,’ said HG, turning his back on the grave and walking away. ‘We all will.’

  I guess what we have found is the body of Margaret Drue.

  Chapter Ten

  ‘So there we are,’ said HG.

  ‘It is Margaret Drue,’ said Charmian with conviction and a sense of shock.

  ‘I think so too.’ The Superintendent looked as solid as ever, his body swelled out by the exertions of his morning, but his face was troubled, and sad. Not really an emotion she associated with HG.

  Sad? Charmian observed his face again. Surely not sad about a woman whom he had not known and whose history he had disliked? No, not sad for her, but sad because his prime suspect for several murders was now seen to have been dead herself for years. Yes, she couldn’t blame him for a pang over that, bad luck, HG, she thought. Case down the drain.

  But perhaps Drue had been the first killer, the murderer of the child, and possibly also of Madelaine Mason? Then killed herself by a revengeful unknown figure? That was the scenario with which they had started after all. Could they go back to it?

  But no, even as she thought about it, Charmian found the idea carried less an
d less conviction this time round. She couldn’t accept it. It had never been a very good idea, just an optimistic one, that this would turn out to be a case already solved. But some mysteries were never solved, it might be that this was going to be one of them.

  She joined HG in a fit of sadness. A passing mood of sadness which she suppressed with a quick hand, first because she did not wish to join HG in any mood, and also because it was such a second-class emotion in the circumstances. She was going to flush out this killer, she was determined on it. And now the false theory of Margaret Drue was out of the way, it might be easier.

  Ideas were already beginning to form in her mind.

  In HG’s, it seemed they were not. He looked empty of ideas. He rarely had ideas, he was a routine man, who worked away doggedly until the truth came up and hit him like a brick wall.

  ‘What we’ve got to do now,’ Charmian said, ‘is to find Emily.’

  ‘Have been trying,’ he said heavily. ‘Not much to go on, the blood didn’t help. According to Dr Yeldon, who was her doctor, it was her blood type, but common enough.’

  ‘So she is wounded? Might be dead by now. Dead or alive, in one piece or bits, we want her.’

  HG looked at her with heavy sadness; what a horrible way of putting things she had, this woman, whose intellect he respected, whose career he had to admire, but who got up his nose. He hated coppers in skirts.

  ‘Only guessing.’ Another thing he hated was having to guess. Gloomily he added: ‘Have to call in another pathologist. The queue of bodies is getting too long.’ He was aware of almost having made a joke. ‘Our chap is too busy.’

  ‘Try Hedda Robinson from Reading,’ said Charmian. ‘She’s brilliant. Young too.’

  Lovely, thought HG, just what I wanted. But he was aware he would follow Charmian’s advice and that he would be wise to do so: she gave good advice.

  ‘I’d better get back,’ said Charmian. ‘Thank you for letting me come. I’m glad I did. I wanted to see for myself.’

  HG led her towards the car that had brought her out to the site where the police crews were already at work. The body would be photographed, studied in detail on the spot, then taken away in a plain van. The media had not arrived yet, but the word would get round.

  ‘I’ll have to stay.’ He saw Charmian to the car, holding the door politely. ‘See things set up here, then I’ll be off back myself. Not much I can do here.’

  And frankly, not much I can do back in my office, except read reports on Albert, on Madelaine Mason and on the child’s head. They don’t tell me much. Plenty of questions asked by a number of diligent officers, but there seem to be no witnesses and no one with much to say.

  On the road overlooking the digging area, several pressmen had already arrived. H. G. Horris dealt with them briskly and briefly. ‘No, nothing to say yet, I will be holding a press conference later. Yes, you will be told when and where.’ But they were both photographed.

  Driving back into Windsor towards her office, Charmian let her thoughts roam. Ideas were flitting in and out, she did not dwell on one particular notion yet, but it felt good. She was beginning to see a pattern of events.

  But where to go? She needed Emily, dead or alive. She still thought that the girl was alive and shut up somewhere. No good going to the witches again; all that had come from that mad experiment had been talk of darkness and death, and although it had happened to have a certain relevance to events as they turned out later, Birdie’s visions had not produced Emily. Come close, she was beginning to think, but not done the job.

  Back in her office, she had the day’s bundle of work and messages to deal with, and while her mind operated on these with its usual smoothness, underneath thoughts about Emily were rumbling away. She had asked H. G. Horris whom he had questioned about the girl, which friends and neighbours had been asked for details, for anything that could give a clue to what could have happened to her.

  ‘Had the lot questioned,’ he had answered. ‘Not that it amounted to much in the end: girls she worked with, people in the same group in that course she was doing …’ he was cavalier in the way he described Emily’s studies, of which he obviously thought little. ‘They had nothing much of use, she was friendly but not communicative, or not to them. If she had closer friends to whom she did talk, I haven’t found them. She was a loner.’ He was one himself in a way, so this at least was something he understood. ‘So I went back to the people from the school see what they remembered: Dr Yeldon and his missus, the old gardener … I even had a word with Jim Towers.’

  ‘What did he have to say?’ she had asked.

  ‘Nothing much, says she was never there as a child, and that he knows nothing of her as a girl now, except what we all know, what you know, ma’am.’

  But you don’t believe him, she had thought, and what that means, I don’t know.

  ‘It’s all there in the reports which you get,’ HG had said.

  And it was. She put her hand on the reports where they sat on her desk. What she had there was all the information that had been brought in by all the officers, put on file, and written up. It didn’t make for exciting reading.

  She listened to Dr Yeldon’s tape again, she had already done so once. Talk, a laugh.

  She sat thinking; she drank more of the coffee in the pot on the hot-plate, left ready for her. It had been there all day so it tasted stewed and thick, but it seemed to work. She could feel ideas, or one idea, emerging. Sensational, horrible, but something to hang on to.

  It had all started when the wall went down. Before that, years and years of silence. Several dead bodies stowed away, but silence. Quiet. Then things started to happen.

  Albert knew something and was killed. Emily knew something. She disappeared, and we can’t get a hold on where she is or why. No one seems to know much. That silence is still operating.

  She drank some black coffee and let the thoughts assemble themselves. The pattern they began to make was not agreeable, but she needed something solid to hang it upon. Like a picture on a wall, it needed a peg. She remembered a laugh, and wondered.

  A thought scrambled up from the depths. What about going to Dr Yeldon? He was very anxious about the whole business, held his ‘street party’, went to check on where Emily lived when he heard there might be trouble. Trouble, she thought, that’s an understatement for this nightmare. But he might know more than we’ve got out of him so far.

  He had not laughed, but the evidence of the tape suggested that someone had done. She picked up the telephone to speak to the Superintendent. ‘Would it be true to say that you are pulling out everything to find Emily?’

  He was silent for a moment while she willed him to say what she wanted. Then, his voice husky, he said: ‘I’ll turn Windsor over stone by stone, if I have to.’

  Charmian laughed. ‘ That’s what I wanted to hear. Can I quote you?’

  The Yeldons’ house was older and greyer than she had expected, heavy, substantial grey stone and well over a hundred years old. The front garden had a lawn and shrubbery but not many flowers. Dr Yeldon was in the garden when she called, pruning a bush (was it really the season of the year for pruning roses?) and looking as if the greyness and the heaviness of his house weighed him down. He was a large man who had gone hollow inside with age. His face suggested he might be sick. And if so, with what illness? Even doctors could fail to diagnose their own ills. Or might not want to, if the prognosis was bad. Be gentle with this man, she told herself, he may need you to be.

  Mrs Yeldon appeared through the side garden gate, her expression watchful. Whatever he’s got, she knows, Charmian decided. She’s guarding him, protecting him. You did protect your own property, didn’t you, and he was valuable to her. He represented a big expenditure of her time and energy – her life in short, and you couldn’t get more valuable than that. Goodness knows why he needed protection, perhaps Mrs Yeldon thought all men did.

  Dr Yeldon stood up when he saw Charmian. He looked surprised. ‘You’ve got
news? About Emily?’ Without waiting for an answer, he advanced towards her. ‘We’ve heard about Albert, of course. Poor fellow, poor boy. Not one of the brightest and easily led, but with a good heart.’

  ‘One of your patients’?’

  ‘His parents were, they are long dead, but I didn’t see much of Albert. Never ill, splendid specimen physically but not too much up above?’ He was still carrying a small garden fork. ‘The firm he worked for have been putting up a new garden shed for us.’ He looked over his shoulder. ‘In the back garden. All done now, so we haven’t seen the lad nor expected to, it was a considerable shock, though.’ Then he added gravely, ‘Anything about Emily?’

  ‘No, sorry.’

  Dr Yeldon shook his head. ‘A bad business, however way you look it. The investigation going slowly, eh? Perhaps I shouldn’t ask, one knows these things have to be confidential.’

  ‘The death of Albert opens things up, don’t you think?’

  Dr Yeldon put on his spectacles as if this would help him see things more clearly.

  ‘He and Emily knew each other.’ went on Charmian. ‘There has to be a connection.’

  Mrs Yeldon came up to where Charmian still stood, holding the gate open. ‘Do come in, dear. Is there anything we can do?’

  They had not heard about the finding of Margaret Drue’s body she did not intend to tell them, H. G. Horris would be making his own announcement there.

  ‘I know you two were concerned about Emily, that the whole business worried you, and you probably know more about the background to the death of the child Alana and Madelaine Mason …’

  Dr Yeldon pursed his lips. ‘We told the police all we knew, at the time, didn’t we, my dear?’ He looked at his wife, who nodded. ‘And really it wasn’t so much, it seemed a happy little school and Nancy was a nice woman. My wife knew her better than I did.’

  ‘No one really knew Nancy well,’ said Mrs Yeldon.

  ‘So I gathered.’

  ‘I don’t think we can add to those earlier statements.’

  ‘Wish we could,’ put in her husband.