Murderes' Houses

by Jennie Melville

‘It always worried me,’ admitted Pratt. ‘And it still does. We have to find it.’

  He paused for a moment before adding. ‘ I won’t be in tomorrow. If anything crops up, you’ll be on your own.’

  ‘But why—’ began Charmian

  ‘No but why,’ said Pratt, turning away. ‘I just won’t be in tomorrow. You carry on.’

  Charmian went into her own room and stared down silently at her desk. She retained an image of Pratt silhouetted against the brilliant sunlight pouring through his open window. He had looked thin and hunched and tense. Deerham Hills was a comparatively small station and they all knew a good deal about each other. Charmian knew that Pratt had had a good year and a pat on the back with the hint of promotion from the Chief Constable, she knew that he was booked with his wife to go on an expensive Mediterranean cruise in September, that his eldest boy wanted to be a vet, and that his wife dyed her hair but was said to be good-tempered. Maybe he and his wife were going to choose things for the ship. But Pratt hadn’t looked like a successful policeman taking a day off to go shopping. He had looked sick.

  Grizel was trying to talk to her.

  ‘This is the report on the little Flete girl I’m making up.’ She spoke over the typewriter. ‘The provisional report anyway. I finally got to see the headmistress, did I tell you? How I do dislike that woman. Still, at least I wasn’t rude to her. She said you were, the last time you …’

  ‘Was I?’ said Charmian absently. ‘Yes, I probably was.’

  ‘Still, I think I’m getting this business cleared up … I’m afraid little Flete knows more than she cares to admit. Ah well, with a mother like that who can …’

  ‘Velia said something like that.’ Charmian was interested.

  ‘Oh yes.’ Grizel’s voice was cool. ‘ She would be on to something snoopy like that.’

  ‘You don’t like Velia.’ It wasn’t a question; Charmian knew.

  ‘There’s something unwholesome about her, Charmian.’ Grizel looked thoroughly wholesome herself with her pink cheeks and curly hair and slight, very slight curve of fat beneath the chin. ‘And she has a bad effect on you,’ she said, carefully not looking Charmian in the face. ‘She could mean real trouble; to my eye it’s written all over her.’

  ‘Trouble’s my job.’

  ‘Other people’s trouble: not your own.’

  ‘Are you warning me against Velia?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Grizel, after a moment’s thought. ‘I think that’s exactly what I am doing.’ And it was true that she urgently felt the need to warn Charmian against something, she wasn’t clear exactly what, so Velia was elected.

  ‘No,’ said Charmian, getting flushed. ‘ You’re warning me against myself. You’re at it again, Grizel.’ She was really getting angry. ‘Why should you be so right? Marriage doesn’t give you some sort of third eye or something.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Grizel, after a while. ‘I apologize … It’s this Flete thing, I believe. When you work on a case like that … I’ve got so I see abnormalities in everything.’

  ‘All right,’ said Charmian.

  ‘I was only going to say do you think even me and Ted are normal?’ said Grizel looking hurt.

  ‘Oh Grizel, Grizel,’ and Charmian began to laugh.

  After a pause Grizel laughed too.

  But although they laughed, there was a cold hard feeling inside Charmian, and she knew Grizel had raised a question.

  ‘Charmian,’ Grizel started again. ‘Pratt put you up to date about the woman in the river.’

  ‘He told me about the handbag.’

  ‘We’re looking for that now,’ said Grizel thoughtfully, as if that wasn’t all she was thinking about. ‘But there’s something else. It’s sort of silly really. I didn’t like to tell Pratt about it, especially the way he is at the moment.’

  Their eyes met.

  ‘Well, tell me,’ said Charmian.

  ‘It was only what Stan told me, you know, but he didn’t invent it … He asked around the town about this woman he’d met. Remember he was puzzled.’

  ‘Stan’s always puzzled.’

  ‘You know there are a lot of shops in Riverview Drive where she got off the bus. Grocer’s shops, a baker’s, a tea-shop. Also two or three butchers. She went into each of the butcher’s shops, Charmian, and asked them if they’d got any customer who ate a lot of liver.’

  ‘She sounds mad.’

  ‘Yes. Perhaps she was mad,’ agreed Grizel. ‘Or perhaps she was just looking for someone who ate a lot of liver … Either way it gives you a funny feeling, doesn’t it?’ she added uneasily.

  Some thirty-six hours later the handbag was found in the shallows of the river by a young policeman. It was his first triumph as a detective. He was hot and tired, but he was also pleased and proud because the bag had not been an easy find.

  The searchers soon found the railway ticket inside, and although it was soaked and colourless, laboratory technicians soon identified the word Manchester on it.

  Pratt absorbed the information without a word. He was back on the job again, utterly silent about his day off. He wasn’t talking much anyway these days.

  But there was promise of more to come.

  The post-mortem report on the dead woman had said that as well as the death injuries there was evidence of earlier extensive injuries such as might have been caused by a motor car accident or a brutal beating-up. She was scarred and her left leg had been injured so that she might have walked painfully. Stan Beadle had said that she walked as if it was difficult.

  A routine call to Manchester followed and within a few hours she was identified, tentatively, as Mrs Florence Chandler, widow, aged fifty. By the next morning, Sunday, she had been definitely identified by her landlady, the only person with whom she seemed to have had much contact.

  She was Mrs Chandler, the last victim of the missing man, Marley.

  Pratt picked up the telephone to call Charmian. The ball was now definitely in her court.

  Chapter Four

  CHARMIAN heard the news on Sunday morning, and although she was in bed with menstrual cramps, feeling sick and ill, she got up at once. She had the strange disquieting feeling that time, for her, was very short.

  Analysing this suspicion, she decided she was frightened that Pratt might whisk the whole case out of her hands. In his present state of illness and fatigue, he might decide that the case was too much for the Deerham Hills force and that they ought to call in outside help. He had done this once before, although not in her time. The decision, strictly speaking, was not his to make. Above and beyond him was a hierarchy ending in the Chief Constable, but so far what Pratt wanted had always been what happened. This power might no longer rest with him.

  In any case, Manchester was now involved. Someone would have to go to Manchester and find out what had been going on there, and how it related to what was happening, or about to happen in Deerham Hills. Pratt might delegate this job to her; it would be a quiet way of easing her out of the case. This again Pratt had done before to others, although so far never to her. She had never had to have her face saved before: she didn’t relish it now.

  Thus rationalising the feeling that the pressure was on her, Charmian swallowed some aspirin, and dressed. It was possible that the whole cause of her disquiet was physical. Charmian was always reluctant to admit to any illness, especially anything that seemed to underline that she was a woman. She had never admitted, not even to Grizel, that she had times of intense pain. In a way, it explained why she was so moved by Inspector Pratt’s illness now. She wanted him to be invulnerable because she was not.

  But neither of these causes for her sense of haste seemed quite enough, and later she was to feel that her unconscious mind had been a sharp observer.

  Her hands trembled as she put on her cothes, and she paused long enough to drink some luke-warm coffee. Her plaster fish rested on the table, and she picked it up and stroked it. But whereas yesterday it had seemed beautiful, now it seemed clumsy a
nd heavy. Last night her neighbour Coniston had praised it: she had taken it to show him, and he had admired it. ‘Why a fish?’ he had asked. Why indeed? Suddenly she laughed and felt better.

  When she arrived in Pratt’s office she was as composed and cheerful as usual.

  ‘I telephoned you last night,’ said Pratt. ‘I couldn’t get you.’

  ‘I was out.’ For a moment Charmian relived the physical buoyancy and elation of last night, when she had felt alive with purpose, happy simply to be there breathing and moving. Coniston had picked her fish up, balanced it in his hand, and remarked how its weight balanced its size. It was remarkably heavy. Almost like a weapon. Coniston made his remark sound like a compliment. Charmian realised by now that Coniston really knew very little about the technique of sculpture. He knew less than she did about its history or its skills. When he had said he was only beginning, it had been the truth. Or perhaps he only pretended to an interest in sculpture because she had talked about it. Was it vanity to think this? She thought of Alec Livesey, and smiled: of course, no friend of his would know about sculpture. Coniston was at work on something big in his shack in the garden, but this Charmian had never seen because she had never been inside. He said it was more than an abstract and less than an edifice; more of a construct. Charmian didn’t know what he meant.

  Inspector Pratt grunted, as if she shouldn’t have been out.

  ‘I was just getting some advice. About a hobby of mine.’

  ‘Policemen shouldn’t have hobbies.’

  ‘You play cards.’ Charmian was exasperated that Pratt should be able, even by implication, to criticise Coniston.

  ‘Oh, cards! They’re not a hobby, they’re just to pass the time,’ said Pratt bitterly. ‘I should have known that time passes for all of us in the end. And for some quicker than others. But we haven’t come here to discuss each other’s hobbies. Now we’ve got a positive identification of the woman we’ve got to find out all we can about her, and through her about the man Marley.’

  The woman, Mrs Florence Chandler, had worked in a bank for twenty years. She had joined the bank at the outbreak of war as Florence Milroy. Three years later she had been married. The bank had no marriage bar, and she went on working. No one in the bank ever saw her husband. He existed, though, he was no figment of her imagination, because when he died she received an insurance policy of five thousand pounds which she promptly invested according to the advice of the manager of her bank, who had by that time quite a respect for Florence’s own financial abilities. ‘The thing about Florence,’ a woman colleague in Manchester had said, ‘was that she always knew exactly where you came in, she knew what was going on in your life better than you did yourself. She could always see the score on your card better than on her own. It got to be monotonous. I don’t think she was too happily married. No, she never said so, but she didn’t look it. I always wondered why she didn’t have any children.’

  Pratt, of course, knew why she didn’t have any children, could speculate why she hadn’t been happily married.

  ‘She was a naïve, simple woman, I reckon,’ said Pratt stiffly, as if naïvety and simplicity were really virtues and he was reluctant to admit they could be vices as well.

  ‘Caught twice.’

  ‘Yes,’ Charmian was surprised, ‘I suppose you could say she was caught twice.’

  ‘Chandler and Marley,’ said Pratt.

  ‘Shrewd and silly, poor woman, they often go together,’ said Pratt, as if he was dismissing her, Charmian thought. But he wasn’t; he went on: ‘I suppose she was trying to escape from it all. But don’t we all try to escape?’

  ‘I don’t,’ protested Charmian. She didn’t know how to handle this new, reflective Pratt.

  ‘Oh, you,’ he looked at her wryly, affectionately, but did not go any further into the subject of Charmian. ‘Now we have her landlady. She travelled down to Deerham Hills at our request overnight. She seemed to be the only person we’ve got who’s ever seen Marley.’

  ‘That could be dangerous for her.’

  ‘Not really. They didn’t get what you might call close. You’ll see.’

  The landlady of Florence Chandler was thin and tired and cross; she took an instant dislike to Charmian. But she was supported by the strength of her feelings against Marley, and, by this time, against Florence Chandler.

  ‘She’s dead and I’ve identified her, but …’

  There’s always a ‘but’, thought Charmian, sitting glumly with her chin on her hand, and listening.

  ‘I have to say it: Florence was headed for trouble the last few years. She changed. I never liked the sound of the man she took up with, and I knew the minute she started giving him money, but she never would listen. She was the one that knew best. Ah well, she knows better now. We all travel down the same road in the end, don’t we?’

  ‘There’s more than one way of making the journey, though,’ Charmian reminded her.

  ‘You’ve got quite a look of her,’ said the woman, with what certainly seemed like amusement.

  Charmian thought of that poor swollen discoloured body and was not able to see the joke.

  ‘Go on telling me what you know about the man Marley and Mrs Chandler’s association with him,’ she said abruptly.

  ‘I knew very little about that directly. I thought at the time it was funny I never saw him, but I see now it was deliberate. He didn’t mean he should be seen. Except by Florence. I don’t know what she really thought of him. At first he was wonderful, he was going to make her fortune for her, and then afterwards she started to be frightened of him. The giving him money and the being frightened started almost at the same time. But she never said good-bye …’

  ‘You saw him once?’

  ‘In the distance. Talking to Florry. He was tall and he was a man, and that’s about all I can say.’

  ‘I’d like to know more about the way he operated,’ said Charmian thoughtfully. ‘He must have been a smooth fast worker.’

  ‘She wasn’t simple-minded either, was Florry Chandler … And yet in a way she was. She was quite sharp-eyed about other people, but she didn’t understand herself at all. I think the answer is: he was a man, and she was pleased he was interested in her.’

  ‘That would do for a beginning,’ admitted Charmian.

  ‘And then, afterwards, I think she was physically afraid of him; she was quite a coward, was Florence.’

  ‘I don’t think I blame her,’ said Charmian. ‘He seems to be something of a sadist.’ She was thinking, if he was a sadist, perhaps poor Florence Chandler was an unconscious masochist, perhaps all his victims were. She had a picture in her mind of a lonely, clever, possibly bitter woman, meeting a man who made himself attractive to her and relaxing her defences only to find she had let in an invader who was determined to destroy her.

  ‘I was away from home when the bad trouble came. I went away for a fortnight, my usual holiday, and when I came back Florry was in hospital. I never got to know the full details of what happened, but I reckon he attacked her and nearly strangled her from all I can make out. They must have had some sort of a quarrel. She hurt her leg too. She was still limping when she came out of hospital.’

  ‘He’s psychopathic, all right.’

  ‘If you mean mad, I know he is, and so was Florence by the time he’d finished with her. She was half cracked to come down here after him. You know why she came, don’t you?’

  Charmian shook her head.

  ‘I don’t know how she knew where to come.’

  ‘You’re not the only one. I should think the police in Manchester might be worrying. She didn’t tell them the truth about that.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘They knew about her being attacked and were on to her, but she wouldn’t say much to them. Pretended she didn’t know where he was.’

  ‘And that wasn’t true?’

  ‘She knew all right … I think she found a little notebook he had and read something in there. An address, maybe.’


  ‘You mean you know she found it.’

  The woman was silent. ‘Well, yes, I saw the book myself in Florry’s purse … It was just figures and notes, a sort of daily account book really, so much for this, so much for that, I couldn’t make much of it. But that was what she had and she took it off with her.’

  No book had been found in the dead woman’s handbag.

  ‘And why did she come down here to see him?’ asked Charmian.

  ‘Not to get her money back, nor to get the police down here on him, although she might have done just that. She never came back to me after the hospital you know, when they discharged her she must have set straight off down here. I suppose that would make it about a month ago now and three weeks before that he attacked her. Seven weeks from beginning to end …’

  Charmian waited patiently for her to get the chronology clear.

  ‘No, the funny thing is I believe she was looking for him for his own sake. She told me she’d try to find him. He needs me, she said, he might do something bad without me … Well, she did find him, and he did do something bad; he killed her.’

  ‘Are you telling me she knew he might be violent and was frightened of him, and yet she came?’

  ‘She was mad, I told you.’

  ‘No, she wasn’t mad,’ said Charmian slowly, thinking it was far more complicated. Here were all the signs of the classic killer: his power over his victims, their willingness to go on consorting with their murderer even although they sensed their danger, the apparent immunity of the murderer, even after a succession of crimes, from the due processes of law coupled with the certainty that he considered himself exempt. She thought of George Joseph Smith, of Palmer the poisoner of Rugeley, and of Manuel of Glasgow. Yes, Mr Marley was one for the text-books.

  ‘She didn’t seem to know exactly where to find him,’ said Charmian, thinking aloud, and recalling Stan Beadle’s story of the woman wandering desolately around the shops. ‘If she had his address, she didn’t have it precisely.’

  ‘Well, maybe she didn’t have the exact house – but she knew more or less,’ said the woman impatiently.