“I can’t help you—”
“I’ve got to know where I stand, damn it. Why don’t we sit down and talk it over?”
“What’s the point? You’ll have to leave—”
“You went away,” I interrupted. I tried to smile. “You were going to sort things out, you said, and depending on what happened you were going to give me an answer. Can you give me that answer now?”
I was half hoping she would take up the challenge, if only to clarify my own thinking. My feelings regarding her were in a turmoil. Nothing had changed, and yet it was all different. Dot was a different woman from Phil. What had been a tentative affection had become brittle and chipped away. I could see it in her set face. She was brisk and forceful, her way clear to her when mine was not.
“It isn’t settled,” she said, lifting her chin. “I’m not sure. Not with…” Her shoulder moved in Felton’s direction.
“Not with him here? I’ll get rid of him.”
Her voice crackled. “Don’t start anything in here. Either of you.”
I found myself staring into Felton’s bleak and threatening eyes. I grinned at him. “You hear, Felton? Relax. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”
She said with exasperation, “For God’s sake—you two—stop it!” We faced each other like two black clouds, waiting for the lightning to spark across. Then I shrugged.
“I suppose he knows about you, anyway,” I said.
“How could he not know? You’re a fool, Paul Manson.”
I sighed. “Very well. You are Dorothy June Mann, ex-detective sergeant. Ejected for striking a senior officer. No reasons available to date, but I’m not surprised to hear it.”
She grimaced. “You’ve met him?” Her voice was softer. I’d aligned myself with her.
But I was uncertain about him, too. “Filey? Yes.”
“I hated him. Thought I hated him, anyway. But he’s a complex man. All he ever wanted was perfection. He saw himself as a white knight on a charger, fighting all the wrongdoers and destroying them.” She paused, smiling to herself. “He was even infecting me with it at one stage. Perhaps I encouraged him…I don’t know. Hell—it was all a mess.”
I glanced away from her, not sure I liked being equated with Filey, even though she couldn’t know in what way. “And all this led to you becoming Philomena Wise? That’s what I can’t understand.”
She walked across the room and began to fiddle with her record albums. Then she came back and stood in front of me with resolution. I could now see how she’d managed to dislodge Filey’s tooth. At that moment I feared for mine, considering her firm and poised stance.
“Listen,” she told me, “and don’t interrupt. It began with that warehouse raid and the death of P. C. Adamson. You know about that?”
“I didn’t know his name, but I’ve heard that one of your people was shot.”
She nodded. She now had a base from which she could work. “Ted Adamson, a great lumbering fool of a man, with guts enough for twenty. He went in, and he was shot. We collected all of ’em, and dear sweet Philomena. Stupid girl, she thought it was all a game of cops and robbers, like on the telly. But when there’re no cameras people really get hurt. We didn’t want her, so we gave her back to poppa. He was appalled. He hadn’t known she hung around with people like that. We let her go, but we knew what she must’ve seen, and that she’d know who’d shot Ted Adamson, so we wanted her as a crown witness. Filey gave me the job of persuading her. He’d got enough intelligence to realise he frightened her, and she wouldn’t trust him. She was terrified by that time, anyway. She hadn’t imagined what violence could be like, face to face. I spent hours with her, days, trying to persuade her. But she was scared. As I’d have been. Or you, Paul. You’ve got to admit it.”
“Knowing what these people are like, yes, I’d have been scared.”
I felt she was rushing her explanation, anxious to get it out and done with, and see the back of me. But this was her apology to me, and she was ashamed to have to make it. So I didn’t waste her time, but let her get on with it.
She nodded. “Right. In the end I got through to her. I promised her police protection—anything she wanted—to persuade her she’d be safe, but I must’ve given her the wrong impression. We could protect her until the trial, but you can’t protect anybody for ever. All right…” She looked past me, and her shoulders gave a small shuddering movement. “You can say I let her believe she’d always be safe. But I wanted her at the trial, and I wanted her evidence. Ted Adamson, well, he was something of a personal friend. Something special. I…oh hell…I got her to agree. Just to go and answer questions in court. I knew nothing about what she would say. I can see her there, her face absolutely stark white, there in the box, and when the prosecuting counsel asked her if she could indicate the person she’d seen fire the gun, she pointed at Carl Packer, and she used his name.”
Her lips seemed dry. She moistened them. Felton was eyeing her with his head on one side. This was new to him, as it was to me. But perhaps he made something different out of it. I said not a word, afraid I might shatter a very frail and delicate truth.
“Of course, we got his outburst and his threats.” She moved a hand in front of her face. “He said he’d get her, and she fainted. But afterwards, Filey was delighted, you can bet. He’d wanted to put Packer away for years. I met him in the corridor outside, bouncing with smug satisfaction. But…even I knew…Packer with a gun? Never. Then I understood, or thought so. Filey had got at Philomena. Some time or other. He’d persuaded her to say it was Packer. Five of ’em, and she could’ve pointed at any one of them. But she picked out Packer. Of course, I realised later, he’d promised Philomena to do what he could for Art, if she’d say what he wanted. The tricky bastard—and he couldn’t do anything, not for Art, nor for Philomena afterwards.”
She stopped abruptly, leaving me with my mind racing, searching for implications. It didn’t look as though she was intending to pursue it, so I prompted her.
“But you hit him! I don’t understand…nothing you’ve said—”
She turned a shoulder to me and spoke over it. “Can’t you work anything out for yourself! Packer had made his threats—and I knew he’d keep ’em. But…did Filey care a toss for that? Not him. And it’d been me who’d persuaded her, so the responsibility was mine. And the bastard laughed! So I hit him. Isn’t that enough for you, for God’s sake? It got me thrown out of the force.”
Then she left me in order to wander round the room, apparently searching for cigarettes. It was finished. I was dismissed. I was supposed to creep away, the naughty boy glad to get out of the headmaster’s study.
I wasn’t going to be dismissed so easily. She had changed. Was she so caught up in that past case that she couldn’t, even now, release her involvement? Or did she mistrust me now, my motives and my intentions?
I walked after her and seized her arm. “But you’ve told me nothing!” I shouted, anger suddenly bubbling to the surface.
Eleven
She turned on me furiously, bending over a table and glaring back with her hair falling forward like a screen. What I could see of her eyes implored me to let it drop, but I didn’t know when there’d be another chance.
“It’s all you’re going to get, Paul. Now will you please leave.” She sounded exhausted.
Felton assumed he’d been given the go-ahead. He advanced on me, grinning. It was lopsided. I backed off a yard. No trouble, if I could help it.
“The police,” he decided, “we’ll have the police. What d’you people dial…”
I reached back and lifted the handset and offered it to him. “It’s nine, nine, nine.”
Dorothy moved quickly to come between us. She snatched the phone from my hand and slammed it back in its cradle. “All right, Grant.” She seemed short of breath. “I’ll settle this. What d’you want to know?” she asked me, her cheeks flushed and her eyes moist.
“What the hell d’you think I want to know?” My voice was still t
oo loud, my control hanging on a very slender thread. “The meaning of your stupid impersonation, to start with.”
She lifted one hand and let it fall to her side. Felton threw himself into her Queen Anne chair, disgusted and sulking.
“I knew I’d have to change my name if I wanted to go on working in the town I knew,” she said, picking her words carefully. “I thought that Filey would throw trouble at me if I tried anything under my real name. All I could think to do, because it’s the only thing I know, was to try to make it as a private investigator. But it’s a slow game getting it established, and I hadn’t got any savings. I needed a steady income to tide me over. So I changed my name.”
I didn’t understand her. “But why to—”
She cut me short with a flip of her hand. “I arranged it with her father. I knew Carl Packer’s threats weren’t empty, and that he’d pay somebody if necessary. Aubrey Wise was intending to leave the district, and he didn’t want people chasing him from one place to another. So I agreed to use the name of Philomena Wise. I got a monthly retainer. All right—so I haven’t got far as a private eye. Just try concentrating on a job when you’ve got to keep one eye open to cover your back!”
So it had turned out to be more than she could handle. “You certainly put yourself in a spot,” I agreed cautiously.
“I know how to handle myself. I just had to be prepared.”
“So?” I prompted carefully, realising that if her nerve had gone, an offer to go to America could have appeared a godsend. It wasn’t a warming thought. I waited for her answer. “And?” I asked, when I seemed about to get nothing.
“I laid it on. The Wisemann Agency was a lure. Anyone looking for Philomena Wise would find it, and from it trace me…her. I was waiting for somebody. An approach. Anything.”
Fleetingly I wondered whether the choice of name for her agency might have been prompted by a personal fear, that Packer might wish to punish her, too. She’d concentrated both targets in one persona.
She wasn’t going on with it. Felton muttered something. It sounded like, “Bloody stupid idea.”
“And?” I said again, my voice a little tighter. I hadn’t begun to scrape the surface of it.
She didn’t want to continue. We were coming to something approaching truth, and it pained her to express it. When she spoke again there was bitterness in her voice.
“And you turned up, Paul, damn you, with that blasted smile of yours…” She bit her lip, shaking her head again. “I didn’t know what Packer’s man would look like, but I’d been expecting an approach—been expecting it for two blasted years. And it was you. I had a…a check made on you. I’ve still got friends at the station. And you’d come from Gartree. What did you imagine I was going to think! I didn’t know…” Looking me in the eyes, she whispered, “Even now…”
“Tell him, tell him,” Felton cut in.
I stared at him. Tell me what? That I was a bloody jailbird, and that meant I must have killed Philomena? Was that what was haunting him? I nearly walked over to shut his mouth.
“And they told you I was a strangler?” I asked her. “All you had to do was watch my hands.”
She flinched. “It wasn’t like that.”
“No? Did you get some sort of perverted kick from leading on a strangler, to see how far I’d go?”
“No!” she shouted, her head jerking forward.
Felton was on his feet. “Let him try it on me. So help me—”
“Sit!” I snapped, not even glancing at him, seeing only his movement on the edge of my vision.
Dorothy was drawing in deep breaths with her lower lip between her teeth, her eyes blinded by tears. “What in God’s name could you expect from me, Paul? Once I knew—thought I knew—who had come from Packer…what could I do? Wait to be attacked? And you…there was no sign of intention. I was completely confused. And then you spoke about taking me abroad. How could that fit in with Packer’s schemes? You wouldn’t need to take me all the way to Nevada in order to kill me.” Her voice was breaking, but she managed to get out, “I was all mixed up…”
Her distress made me uneasy. I’d put her in an impossible position. Both of us. There was nothing left to say.
“I’ll go.”
“Wait!” She fought for her composure. “Why d’you think I went to Sumbury? I wanted time to think, and I wanted to discuss the situation with Aubrey. Oh, heavens, Paul, can’t you understand?”
I nodded, anxious to get away now. “I can see you’d want a consultation. The trouble is…oh, Phil—Dot—can’t you see what you’re telling me?”
There had been only one way in which she could’ve made certain of her future. “What could you find there, what action could you take?”
“For me to withdraw from my arrangement with Aubrey Wise,” she said, dismissing it with a curt gesture. “The trouble was,” she said, “that whoever Packer sent wasn’t fooled. They knew I wasn’t Philomena. So I was followed to Sumbury, and I led him there.”
“I see what you mean. ‘They knew’ and ‘led him.’ But you mean me. That you led me to her, is that it, Dot? Dot! It’s like talking to a stranger.”
That was the block I couldn’t get past. I was talking to a stranger, who no longer possessed the response and warmth I’d found in my Phil. Because this had been false? She was now demonstrating a hardness and determination that belonged to somebody called Dorothy Mann. Underneath, she was still a police officer. Right and wrong, that was all there was for her, with no shades of compassion in between.
“That wasn’t what I meant,” she protested. “But I certainly led somebody.”
“Not me. I didn’t kill her.”
“I don’t know who killed her.” Her voice was cold, the distant bitter cold of a wind that’s come a long way.
“But you were there when she died,” I said, trying to keep my voice even and persuasive. “She was dead, so your job for Aubrey Wise was finished. Let’s say that you’d failed.”
“I tried, damn you, I tried!”
I gave a sigh. “I’m sure you did. But you went there, you’ve said, to sort things out. And you’d have found Philomena was going away with Australia’s great white hope. That’s even further than Nevada. So you would soon be free of it, and you knew I was waiting back here. Remember what you said: you’d let me know, yes or no. But you didn’t. In fact, you’ve been keeping out of my way.”
“I’m getting out of here,” Felton said with disgust, but he didn’t do anything about it until he realised that neither of us intended to dissuade him. With a grumbling sound in his throat, he weaved his way round us. The door opened behind me, then it slammed. I didn’t look round. Her eyes were on mine, and she didn’t spare him a glance.
“And what the hell’s he doing here?” I demanded.
“That’s no business of yours.”
“No? Isn’t it?”
For a moment her eyes left me. There had been a flicker of self-disgust in the line of her lips. “It was yes or no. As you say.”
“And it’s no?”
She shook her head violently, rejecting something I couldn’t understand. Then she turned away with a gesture of despair. “Take it for no, then, if you want to.”
“Your business with Wise is finished,” I reminded her, gently persuasive, giving it every chance.
She turned back to me, pouting, trying for a smile. “Do you really believe that?”
“No,” I agreed, “it’s not finished. We’re both dead in the middle. Perhaps we could hurry it up.” I was offering her an alliance, but her eyes rejected it. I took a deep breath. “Can you tell me…something I don’t know about…”
Her shoulders sagged and she sighed. “If it’s something you think you ought to know.”
“It was just…last Friday evening. I understand there was to have been a party.”
She seemed to lose interest. She shrugged. “It was her birthday.”
“I know. She went out before seven. She had to be back in order
to change into her finery. But—didn’t anybody object or go after her, something like that? It’d seem strange—her party coming up—and it was getting dark. The sun would’ve gone down, anyway.”
“I went after her—yes.”
“You did? Why was that?”
“She’d had her hair done, and set.”
That stopped me. “I don’t understand.”
“The mist was coming off the sea—you could see it in the tops of the trees. It would’ve ruined her hair. But she…she wasn’t thinking about that.”
“About Art. Yes, I know. What time did she leave?”
“Oh, around ten to seven, give or take. Paul, please, this isn’t really your concern.”
“Accept that it is. You knew she was going to meet Art?”
“He’d phoned. Yes, I knew.”
“So you ran after her to make her change her mind.”
She twisted her lips in a cynical smile. Then it softened. “Nothing would have done that. She had to see him. At the party she was going to become formally engaged to Grant Felton. Of course she had to see Art. No—I ran after her with a headsquare.”
“Not a fawn one…”
She laughed. “As though that hasn’t been asked, Paul! You don’t think much of the police—I’ve told Greaves all this. I ran after her down the drive. It would’ve looked fine, wouldn’t it, dressing up for her party with her hair all dangling round her ears…” She stopped. There had been a catch in her voice.
I realised, then, that Greaves had known more than he’d admitted. No wonder he’d given me a loose rein.
“So, you took off after her with your scarf.”
“Not mine. Grant’s.” Then she laughed openly at the expression on my face. “Not his, you idiot. His present. A nylon headsquare.”
“Are you telling me he bought her a measly nylon headsquare—”
“No! Will you listen. He’s got one of these peculiar senses of humour. He piles things on. Expect a dozen roses, and he sends one bunch every hour. You know the idea—the diamond ring hidden in a box of cheap chocolates. He was going to give her the headsquare, then watch her expression, and after a few seconds tell her it was for holding her hair in place when she drove the brand-new BMW convertible he’d got hidden in one of the garages.”
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