‘Couldn’t have said yes quickly enough.’
‘Have you recently been accosted by a stranger who’s probably in a car?’
‘It’s always happening,’ she answered and looked archly at him.
‘Strangers …’
‘I’m talking about men I’ve known all me natural.’
‘I’m talking about strangers.’
She shrugged her thin shoulders and her breasts heaved up and down. ‘I’ve known ’em to come up at night and ask. I gives ’em an answer that makes ’em run.’
‘Has this happened recently?’
‘I can’t ’elp being attractive.’
‘When was the last time?’
‘I don’t know, and I bet you don’t know the last time you did something.’
She turned to one side and patted her hair. Rusk left and his last impression was that in her mind she had become the Lorelei, luring victims by the score. As he closed the door behind him and stepped into the hall, the girl’s mother, middle-aged and looking old, came out of the kitchen. ‘I’ll let myself out,’ he said. She remained hostilely silent as he slipped back the catch of the front door and left.
He crossed to the Singer and drove away. He wondered how Carren was weathering. Ampforth, the detective-superintendent from HQ, had come down to take charge of the case. He wasn’t riding on Carren’s shoulders, but the latter seemed to think he was and so had become more pugnaciously efficient than ever. Efficient was about the right word. No matter how much you disliked the man, you had to admit that that was one quality he possessed. Cynically, Rusk wondered how much of his opinion of the other was coloured by the fact that he, Rusk, was the older man and that, despite all his qualifications it was fairly certain he would never gain further promotion. It was very easy to dislike success.
He thought about the murder. Most crimes never touched him emotionally. Many of them he could, perhaps, all too easily condone. But to rape and kill a girl was a crime that produced within him a jarring shock. He had the unhappy faculty, over which he had no real control, of transporting his mind into the bodies of other people and under certain conditions experiencing the mental processes of those other people. He could frighten himself by the intensity of feeling this faculty aroused. He thought about the girl. The moment when she had realised it was no joy-ride: the ghastly, humiliating, pain-ridden experience, and then the death. His mind suffered what he imagined she had suffered.
He turned right into the courtyard of the police station, parked the car, entered by the side door and made his way upstairs to Carren’s room.
‘Been wondering if you’d ever show up again,’ said Carren.
‘Some of the interviews became protracted through my need for an interpreter.’
Carren stood up and paced the space behind his desk. Every time he stepped on one of the uncarpeted floorboards, it squeaked. After a half minute he came to a halt and, with hands thrust down into his trousers pockets, faced Rusk. ‘How long have you been with us?’
‘Just over a year, sir.’
‘Seems longer, doesn’t it? … It was only the other day Mr Ampforth asked me how you were getting on. I told him I reckoned you thought too much.’ He took his hands out of his pockets. ‘Too damned cogentive by twice.’ He sat down. ‘So you’ve been making inquiries by the thousand, carrying the burden of the department on your shoulders?’
‘As yet, there’s no real pattern of a man in a car accosting women.’
‘It’s there — if only you knew how to look for it.’ Carren sprawled back in the chair and pushed his feet out before him to their full extent. He sucked his lower lip into his mouth, then released it with a splashing sound. ‘I’m not having a load of inefficiency muck the whole thing up so that people say we ought to have called in those bastards from the Yard … Ever heard of a man called Fleetly? Vernon Richard Fleetly?’
‘The psychiatrist?’
‘You would know all about him, wouldn’t you?’ Carren pushed to one side a pile of reports that concerned other work going on in the division. He searched under some books and eventually found a pipe which he began to clean with a stained pipe-cleaner. ‘It was the Old Man’s idea to bring him into it, though God knows why — the only thing a psychiatrist knows is how to pat the criminal on the back and tell ’em they couldn’t help it but their mothers all suffered shocks just before they were bom. He saw the girl and then the scene of the killing. He came up with a report that’s so much bull, but I’ve had strict instructions to circulate it.’ Carren put down the pipe and picked up two pieces of paper from the left-hand side of the desk.
‘This man Fleetly must have been paid by the thousand words. Starts off by saying the murderer may be anyone … takes an educated genius to work that one out. I quote: “The murderer is, to judge from his crime which bears many features of a familiar pattern, both a sadist and a masochist at the time of the killing and immediately before and afterwards, but at other periods he will appear to lay eyes to be perfectly normal.
‘“It is impossible to suggest he is of any particular character although one is more likely to find he is either a flamboyant extrovert or a precise and rather fussy introvert. Despite this probability, it is not inconceivable that he can be placed in an entirely different category. I suggest that no one type of person be selected as the most probably one, but that attention be paid to any suspect who is markedly flamboyant in dress or character or both.
‘“The murderer will almost certainly have shown previous signs of his condition and may well have passed through the hands of the police on a minor sex charge. Because he is a sadist, he derived pleasure from inflicting pain on the girl, and because he is a masochist he will have gained a further pleasure, or gratification, from the extreme feeling of remorse he will have suffered after the acts of killing and raping. This latter fact explains why he knelt by the dead girl and prayed — for himself, of course, not the girl. The sense of gratification will slowly become less.
‘“The crime suggests that the murderer’s need for relief had been growing greater and greater and that the dead girl represented the end of a search. Investigations may well show he has been accosting women over a long period of time.
‘“It is probable that by now the murderer finds himself unable to enjoy normal sexual relations. He killed because he knew, or rather believed he knew, that at the final moment he would suffer rejection.
‘“This will not be the last crime of such nature he attempts to commit if he remains free. Initially, his desires have been satisfied, but the gratification will finally have the effect of increasing future demands.
‘“It cannot be over-stressed that the murderer cannot be immediately typed by the lay-man as mentally deranged. There is no such thing as a typical sex-criminal. The murderer will probably, outwardly, be of perfectly normal behaviour pattern” … You know, Rusk, there’s a bloke with a belly filled with wind.’
‘It surely tells us several things, sir?’
‘It may tell you the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but it doesn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. Why the hell do they have to treat us as though we’d never tackled a job like this before?’
Rusk shrugged his shoulders. ‘At least we know for certain we have to stand by for another murder.’
‘Like hell, we do. I’m going to nail him high and dry before the month’s much older.’
‘I hope so, sir.’
‘I can promise you one thing — the department’s going to have to work like Ulysses until we land him … I’ve had HQ draw up a list of all known sex criminals. Tomorrow, we’ll start checking up on them, and in particular, where they were last night between ten-thirty and one in the morning.’
‘Then death was before one o’clock?’
‘That’s the guess of the experts — and anyone who relies on them wants investigating.’
‘Where’s the list of names?’
‘Being typed out. Vemon’ll give it to you … One last thing. Th
ey’ve used the semen in the girl to type the murderer’s blood. He’s group B and as the semen could be typed he’s also a … what’s the word?’
‘A secretor, sir. His sweat and saliva can also be checked.’
‘They taught you just about everything at that public school of yours, didn’t they?’
‘I doubt I learned that there.’
‘Well, well, well. And I thought they were omniverous.’
CHAPTER 4
Rusk drove slowly along country lanes towards the parish of Rustle-by. If you deliberately banished familiarity and brought fresh eyes to the scene, you were forced to realise how much of the countryside had been slaughtered. There were frequent huddles of jerry-built bungalows, ugly deposits of deep-litter houses, rusting corrugated-iron cattle-sheds, cat’s cradles of electric and telephone wires and poles, and now the latest abomination — the superpylons that straddled the land like some monstrous millepede, placed in position by men who cared nothing for the beauty of nature. Yet, despite all man’s depredations, there was still timeless quiet and peace and natural beauty in the countryside. Not even the town and country planners had so far been able to destroy that.
He turned into a lane that was only wide enough to take one car and over the top of which the trees on either side met to form a tunnel. When he’d been a kid, he’d always asked to be driven down these tunnels because he’d been certain that in the middle of the next one he’d come face to face with a boatload of pirates.
Childhood reminded him. He was going to see Kremayne who, fifteen years ago, had been found guilty of indecent assault on a girl of twelve and had been placed on probation. He’d been lucky. Most benches in those days would have given him a dose of imprisonment to cool him down … But the really interesting fact was that he, Rusk, had been at school with a Jonathan Edgar Royce Kremayne. With a name like that, it had been inevitable that Kremayne was called the Jerk. He’d been expelled in his last year, but what for. Rusk could no longer remember. It was too much to suppose two people could have the same sequence of Christian and surnames, which meant he was about to meet a slice of the past. Odd to think the Jerk had taken up little girls.
The lane twisted and turned, insensible to the advent of the motor car. That was how it should be. Rusk would have forbidden the car in the countryside, along with television, portable wireless sets, and trippers. Hopelessly illogical and reactionary, but he was perfectly willing to admit just that.
He came to a small, private signpost that pointed to Frithton Look on the right. He turned and went up the drive. Behind the poplar trees that lined the drive were tightly clipped yew hedges that could easily have been there when the Armada was at sea. The grass verge was carefully cut. At the end of the hundred-yard-long drive was a circular turning point, surrounded by flower-beds thick with sweet williams, lupins, geums, paeonies, and anchusas, and beyond that, the house. It was large. Kremayne hadn’t spent his life starving.
Rusk brought the car to a halt in the middle of the turning point and climbed out. The house was a collector’s item of all that was tasteless in architecture while the view was perhaps the finest he had ever come across in Kent.
The house came from the period when no proud house owner would be without his false castellated tower, or his impressive rows of chimney tops and pots that clearly showed the cost of coal was of no account. Frithton Look’s tower was immediately over the front door and it reminded Rusk of a generous phallic symbol. The view went through three hundred and sixty degrees. To the south was the Romney Marsh laid out in neat squares and bounded by the sea; to the north, far distant, were the Wye Hills with the crown picked out in white. To the east and west was rolling countryside that, as distance foreshortened it and because the rises were tree-covered, seemed to be nothing but woods — as though the forest of Andredsweald had returned.
He rang the front-door bell. A man could search for years and never find a place situated as this one was. It was worth suffering the house.
The door opened and a short, chunky woman, with a square face made extra ugly by several hairy moles, said: ‘Good morning?’
‘Is Mr Kremayne in?’
‘I’m not sure, sir, but Mrs Kremayne is. Would you like to speak to her?’
‘Yes, please.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Rusk.’
‘Per’aps you’d like to wait inside.’
She held the door open and he went in. Considering the size of the house, the hall was small and this fact was underlined because on the left it narrowed into no more than a passage. Lack of windows left it gloomy, and what little light there might have been was cut down by the oak panelling.
He followed the woman across the hall and into the room immediately opposite. This was large and well furnished, but gave the impression of being, from the point of view of use, more of an extended hall than a living-room. Through the large French windows could be seen the well-kept, though informal garden, and the sweeping view across the Marsh and English Channel.
‘I’ll just find Mrs Kremayne.’ She left by way of a second door on the east side.
Rusk look round. He was no expert on furnishings but had a natural flair for mostly knowing what was good, and therefore expensive. The set of William and Mary walnut chairs, the mahogany break-front bookcase and serpentine-fronted sideboard, the twin day-beds, and the two Persian carpets would, he felt certain, leave no change from a couple of his years’ salary.
The door on the east side opened and a woman entered. She was of medium height, not exactly slim, but certainly not fat. She was dressed in expensive tweeds worn rather carelessly as though she could not be bothered too much with how she looked. Her face was round, evenly marked, and not beautiful, but it possessed a suggestion of strong character. She wore no discernible make-up.
‘Good morning,’ she said. ‘You wanted to speak to my husband?’
‘If that’s possible.’
‘He’s somewhere out on the farm right now … Is it business … ?’
‘I’m from the police, Mrs Kremayne. I’m making certain routine inquiries and I’m hoping your husband will be able to help me.’
She studied him carefully. ‘Please sit down. I’ll telephone through and see if I can get hold of Jonathan — we have a private telephone system which connects up various points on the farm, but whenever I really want my husband I always find he’s at one of the points without a telephone.’ So the Jerk was a farmer, and obviously a big one at that.
‘May I offer you a drink, or coffee?’
He smiled. ‘I can never refuse coffee.’
‘Of course! How stupid of me, policemen don’t drink on duty.’
‘They do, but this one starts fairly late in the day.’
She smiled and he appreciated the warmth in that expression, and the amusing crinkles that formed round her eyes. He watched her leave the room. She moved with determined strides that weren’t sufficiently so, however, to be masculine. Clearly, she led an active life.
He lit a cigarette and dropped the spent match into an ash-tray on the small walnut card-table to his right. Happiness and contentment were supposed to be for the philosophers, but man could come pretty close to such ideals in this house.
He heard quick footsteps. Through the far door came Mrs Kremayne and, immediately behind her, a large heavily-built man.
‘I hear you want to see me,’ said Kremayne, as he closed the door. ‘Luckily I was just on my way back to the house. Police, eh? Nothing serious, I hope?’
It was the Jerk brought up to date. A full mouth which had, to his bitter indignation when young, the delicate slope of a cupid’s bow: a broad and puffy face: ears that threatened to flap: hair receding at a fast clip: a voice that boomed: a trifle too much fat on the body: loud check, country-cut suit that was one shade too loud: finally, the old school tie — evidently his being expelled hadn’t made him deny his Alma Mater.
‘The matter itself is rather serious,’ replied Rus
k, answering the other’s question.
‘Everything’s too damned serious these days, thanks to the Government and the Common Market. God knows what’s going to happen to farming in this country. It’s shored up with subsidies, and if you begin to move any of them around … Enough wailing. How about a drink?’
‘I’ve asked Mrs Peters to make coffee,’ said his wife.
‘Coffee? For a man of action! … Come on, now, something with more of a kick to it?’
‘Not for me, thanks,’ replied Rusk.
‘That’s what I call really unsporting — means I’ll have to stick to coffee as well. Now, what’s all this about serious trouble? Parked my car in a yellow-band area, I suppose?’
‘Perhaps I could have a quick word with you somewhere?’
Kremayne crossed to the grand piano and opened the silver cigarette box on it. ‘I’m here, you’re here. Isn’t that enough to start the party going?’ He laughed shortly, picked out a cigarette and lit it with a gas lighter he took from his pocket.
‘But quite obviously I’m here,’ said his wife. ‘I’ll go and see how the coffee’s getting on. Left to herself, Mrs Peters is quite likely to pour the coffee beans into a tea pot and add boiling water. Let me know if there’s anything you want.’
Kremayne seemed about to expostulate at her going but he finally remained silent until she left the room. Then he turned and leaned against the piano. ‘What’s the trouble that you have to be so extraordinarily secretive?’
‘I thought you’d rather I didn’t mention certain facts in front of your wife.’
Kremayne was silent for a few seconds, then he said abruptly. ‘You know something, it’s odd but you remind me of someone and I can’t think who. Have you met me before?’
‘Many times.’
‘Damned if I can place when.’ He jerked himself away from the piano and crossed to one of the tapestry-covered arm-chairs and sat down in it. ‘When and where?’
‘The sixth form.’
‘Sixth what?’ For a moment, the reference failed to make sense, then when it did, Kremayne made the identification. ‘My God! You’re Rusk!’
Exhibit No. Thirteen Page 3