Murderes' Houses

by Jennie Melville

  ‘And what did you bring her?’ asked Velia.

  Morgan ignored that one. ‘And then there was the one this time, this last time, you would have liked her, Velia, she was quite your sort. Youngish, not bad looking and ready for anything.’

  ‘So now I know the sort I am,’ thought Velia.

  ‘She had her lunch always next to this bank cashier and introduced us. I bet she’s wondering where I am these days. If she remembers me.’ He laughed.

  ‘And where Mrs Chandler is,’ said Velia, before she could stop herself.

  ‘Ah, she’s dead,’ said Morgan, getting up and standing between Velia and the door. ‘Just between you and me.’

  ‘I don’t want to know.’ She turned hastily to the door. From the very minute of hearing about the dead woman she had been frightened. At first her fears had circled aimlessly round, then they had fixed upon Dusty, and only finally had she known who had been killed and why and by whom.

  ‘Still you do know. It’s a reason for you not going, Velia.’ He put his hand firmly, yet gently, on her arm. ‘And anyway, you couldn’t think I’d let you go.’

  By the time darkness came the street was quiet and all the children were in bed. Lights were on in most of the houses, throwing little pools of golden light onto the front gardens. By contrast Velia’s house was still dark. Eventually, one light came on in the room which was Velia’s bedroom. The sharp-eyed neighbour had abandoned her observation post for the day, had turned her back on the street and was watching her television set. As she watched and knitted and chewed chocolate toffees she was not however forgetful of the scene she had witnessed between Charmian and Velia. Just what horrible things had Charmian been suggesting to Velia? she wondered, her own thoughts taking on a fine sharp edge of speculation. She could at once think of several interesting possibilities. Methodically, she tried for more precision. What emotions had she caught in Velia’s voice? She attempted to analyse them. It seemed to her that there had been alarm, repulsion (certainly an element of throwing off, of pushing away, her memory confirmed it) and shock. What would shock her? she wondered, and then reluctantly admitted that she would make no headway on these lines because what would shock her would very probably not shock Velia. She gave thanks that she was easily shocked; life would be much duller for her if she wasn’t. So she tried again with the word repulsion: as if Velia was pushing Charmian away. It had been a physical reaction, as if Velia couldn’t bear that Charmian should touch her? She shook her head. She might be mistaken about that, but the fear remained. Velia had certainly been frightened. Fear, revulsion, shock, it all added up to something, didn’t it? Her eyes staring at the screen, jaws munching, she brooded on.

  Velia had not noticed that the street had fallen quiet. She was quiet herself. She was sitting in an armchair in her own room, feet propped up on a stool, pillow at her back, head relaxed, and eyes closed. Morgan had said to relax. She found herself unconsciously repeating the words over and over again.

  ‘Open your eyes,’ said Morgan.

  Velia opened them. She felt sleepy. A not unnatural result from sitting with eyes closed in a dark room.

  Morgan switched on the light. Velia blinked. She could hardly see Morgan’s face, then it came into focus. It was closer to her than she had expected and she drew back.

  ‘Velia?’

  She had always been proud of her name. Velia. Her mother had called her it after the heroine of The Merry Widow. To Velia her name had always sounded romantic and wistful. Full of magic. She had once heard someone say that Morgan was another name for Merlin the Enchanter and now she thought: ‘If I’m Velia the Witch of the Wood, he’s Morgan the Magician.’ And in spite of all her woes there was a curiously deep satisfaction in the thought.

  Morgan certainly didn’t think of himself as Merlin Le Fay, or even especially as Morgan, but then he knew, and, as it happens, Velia did not, that his real name was not Morgan. He visualised himself as the nameless, faceless, lonely one. Perhaps this sense of his own isolation explained his interest in islands. Lately however he had seen that what had interested him in islands was the quality of separation – the separating of one man from another. And you could have this quality intensified, even elaborated, in mazes. Mazes were a confusing, baffling network of winding paths, cutting off communications. That was it. A puzzle, a confusion, a bewilderment.

  ‘Sit up, Velia.’

  She sat up, quite willingly. The chair was comfortable enough; it was no hardship to sit up.

  ‘Say: you are my master,’ commanded Morgan. ‘Go on; say it: you are my master.’

  ‘You are my master,’ repeated Velia obediently.

  Chapter Six

  THERE followed a period of two weeks during which Charmian, working hard, did not telephone Velia, and did not come to the house again: and when Velia was learning her lesson.

  The inquisitive neighbour of Velia was a little disappointed that no more interesting scenes between Velia and Charmian took place, but she had already put her own gloss on what the scene meant and she added to it generously in her imagination. She had been interested for some time in her girlish but not really young neighbour and the policewoman who sometimes looked so pretty and sometimes so lumpish.

  It was not that Charmian had ceased to worry about Morgan, or take him seriously as a possible murderer, but there were other practical considerations. To begin with, short of stationing a man on duty outside Velia’s house, there was no way she could be sure of catching sight of Morgan if Morgan didn’t want to be seen. In fact if you were going to do the job properly it would have to be two men, and Pratt would never stand for that sort of extravagance. He was inclined, even when in the best of health, to be acid about what he called ‘Charmian’s intuitions’, and the way he was at the moment, Charmian judged it better not even to mention Morgan to him.

  This was one reason for leaving Velia and Morgan alone for the moment, another was that Charmian’s attention was being dragged elsewhere. The business of the Flete girl was dragging on. She had stopped attending school, her headmistress Rachel Lawson had accepted the excuse that she was unfit, and had sent her work to be done at home. She could still take and pass her O Levels, she had said. Charmian and Grizel together raised their eyebrows. ‘Just like Rachel Lawson to think the remedy for everything is to read a book,’ muttered Charmian. ‘ If a kid’s been raped, let her read a book while she waits to see if she’s pregnant.’

  ‘They don’t think she is,’ said Grizel quickly. ‘I mean, the doctors don’t think so.’

  ‘Does she think she is?’ Charmian asked. ‘And is she going to name who was responsible? Can she?’

  Three acute questions, and no one to answer them. Trudy Flete had stopped attending school, and had stopped even pretending to do the work that was sent her. She took long solitary walks by the river. She did not jump in, but by the end of the week another girl had tried it.

  Pratt grimly and silently debated whether to put a night and day patrol on the river, but he was short of men; he began to nag Charmian. The nagging was a bad sign. He looked more finely drawn and worried than ever. He was beset with other problems than the murdered woman and the Flete girl. He had learnt from the chief constable that a commission on the police, recently announced in the Press, would be coming to Deerham Hills to make enquiries. Pratt had his secrets and muddles as well as the next man and he did not relish having them dragged out into the light of day. Moreover, the Superintendent, who usually delegated a good deal to Pratt, had heard of the commission too, and was perpetually popping in and asking questions, not all of which Pratt could answer, or wished to answer.

  The Marley case, then, rested quietly for the moment in Deerham Hills. Instead the line of inquiry shot off towards Manchester. Charmian went there herself for one day. Her purpose was to see if she could, somehow, make sense of what had happened up there. She hoped she might find some clue to Marley’s character and whereabouts up there. Even just a good description would do. Any d
escription. There must surely be someone in Manchester who had seen him. She interviewed Mrs Chandler’s landlady again, saw the manager of the bank where the dead woman had worked, and spoke there to her only woman friend, a Miss Lipton. All she got from it was a repetition of the landlady’s judgment that ‘ he looked just like a man’.

  Charmian had accepted this in silence.

  ‘Quite a manly man, though,’ the woman added unexpectedly. And even more unexpectedly gave a smile, as if she approved of this quality.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ asked Charmian, but she didn’t really need an answer; she already knew that Marley must be attractive to women, that he must have some physical quality that made him so.

  It stood out a mile. Whatever his gifts of guile, and cunning, and elusiveness, he also had this purely inborn animal quality. It was a quality which George Joseph Smith had obviously had too, and possibly Landru and perhaps Christie.

  It was very, very little to add to what she knew of Marley, but it was undeniably important.

  But actual contacts of the man were impossible to find. None of the women from whom he was known to have got money had ever discovered his address.

  ‘There is one address extant for him,’ said the local man, Inspector Creevey, ‘where he was known to have lived, about the time we succeeded in making the only contact we ever had with him.’ He paused for a moment. Betts and Jenkins, the two policemen who had been killed after interviewing Marley, had been his friends. ‘But it won’t do you much good, I’m afraid.’ He handed over the address. ‘And, of course, you can see the report Sergeant Betts turned in. He didn’t describe him though. Why should he? I mean, we didn’t know then that he was the Invisible Man.’

  ‘Well, I’ll just go round and see for myself,’ said Charmian, taking the address and putting the report aside.

  ‘Aye, you do that,’ said Inspector Creevey.

  Creevey watched her go out with melancholy satisfaction. ‘You can’t teach ’em anything,’ he said to his clerk when she had gone. ‘I tipped her the wink as near as I could, but no, she must push off and check on her own.’

  Charmian found the address she had been given without difficulty. Marley had rented two rooms above a tobacconist’s shop. The owner of the shop, a Mr Cornish, lived behind the premises in one crowded room. He was quite willing to talk. Pie was an elderly man wearing an overall over a dark suit. He had large pale blue eyes, a colour which Charmian was ever afterwards to view with alarm and suspicion, and a completely bald shiny head.

  ‘Oh yes, I remember clearly,’ he said to her. ‘I never forget anything. Sometimes I wish I could. But there it is. That’s the way it is. I could tell you what I had for my tea this day 1926.’

  ‘I’m not asking anything so difficult as that,’ began Charmian.

  ‘Ah, it’s not difficult, that’s my point. No, there is everything jostling round in my memory, fighting to get out.’

  ‘Now about this man, your lodger—’

  ‘I remember him as well as I remember my own mother, and she’s been dead fifty years,’ interrupted the man.

  ‘Will you describe what he looked like?’

  ‘He was a young man,’ said her witness promptly. ‘Tallish. Lot of hair. No spectacles. His own teeth.’

  ‘That isn’t quite enough,’ said Charmian gently; she was still gentle at this stage. ‘ Was there anything striking about him?’

  ‘He didn’t talk much. I hardly ever saw him, you know, even though he lodged here for six months. Very quiet on his feet he was. Remarkable big feet he had, for his size.’

  ‘You said he was tall.’

  ‘No, I’d say he was on the short side. It’s all what you compare him with.’

  ‘But, anyway, he was young,’ said Charmian.

  ‘Yes, I dare say he was. Not old, anyway. Younger than me. He could have been any age.’

  ‘I’m beginning to wonder if he had any hair,’ said Charmian bitterly. ‘ Or any teeth.’

  ‘Oh yes, he had now.’ The shop-keeper sounded hurt. ‘You ask the butcher. A terrible amount of butcher meat he ate.’

  ‘All right. A youngish tallish short man with good teeth and hair,’ said Charmian. ‘What colour hair and eyes?’

  ‘Brown eyes, but he had them tinted so that sometimes they looked green,’ said Mr Cornish.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Charmian. She now felt considerably less gentle. ‘And I suppose he dyed his hair?’

  ‘I’m afraid he must have done,’ said Mr Cornish regretfully. ‘Or worn a wig. I believe I saw it most colours.’

  ‘I told you,’ said Inspector Creevey, when she returned. ‘It isn’t that he’s a liar, although he is, it’s that he’s constitutionally unable to tell the same story twice. Somewhere in there you may have the truth, but you can take your pick which facts represent it.’

  ‘You’re just being charitable,’ said Charmian crossly. She had to telephone Pratt within the hour and report progress: or, in this case, the lack of it. ‘Now there’s one other thing: you told us this man always worked with a woman, a different woman. How can you know that?’

  ‘It’s in the report,’ said the Inspector. ‘When you’ve had time to read it. Briefly, it was an intelligent deduction from a lot of small facts. We found that he was always well informed about the life of his chosen victim, knowing details about her life that would generally be easier for another woman to pick up (he knew what size one woman took in shoes), and he usually picked up his victim when she was in the society of other women, at the cinema, at tea in a restaurant, once at the hairdresser’s. Twice it was a woman who struck up the acquaintance, and then introduced him.’

  Charmian read the report.

  Sergeant Betts had had everything that Manchester had gathered about the man neatly arranged and easy to read. It was all there, even to the newspapers he read. But there was nothing that could help Charmian find him. Betts had finished up with a scribbled note in longhand about what he called ‘ the contact woman’. – ‘The north of England must be littered with these women who helped him line up his victims. My own opinion is that he dropped them smartly. But he must have done it pretty cleverly too, because none ever turned up to help us, and you’d think they would. He may have threatened them too. Or maybe they’re dead.’

  Charmian lifted her head from the report and stared across towards Creevey without even seeing him.

  ‘I think I should have liked Sergeant Betts,’ she thought.

  ‘Betts was a good man,’ said Creevey, as if he had read her mind. ‘I miss him all the time.’

  ‘He was operating with you from 1954 or possibly earlier, as far as I can see,’ said Charmian. ‘I wonder where he came from and why he cleared out?’

  Where had he come from, this man who preyed on women, what made him so skilful at escaping notice when he wished to do so, and so unobtrusively powerful when he wished to use his power? How had he learnt his power and what had started him off on his career?

  ‘That’s right,’ said Creevey, putting on a pair of thick-rimmed spectacles and studying her. ‘I wouldn’t like you to think we’re not looking for him up here,’ he added with a grin. ‘Just in case he comes back.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Charmian got up to go. ‘It’d be a help if we all knew who we were looking for.’

  ‘But I can tell you why he cleared out,’ said Creevey.

  ‘Go on,’ said Charmian.

  ‘Partly it was because the thing had blown up here and the woman was out to make trouble, but that wasn’t all … he had a call.’ Creevey raised his eyes and looked at Charmian. He had pale grey eyes. ‘A call. I’m a Congregational man myself, not Church of England, it’s strong up here, and that’s how we arrange our ministers. They can’t choose to go where they like. They have to wait for the ‘‘ Call’’. God chooses them, you see. Well, that’s one way of looking at it. The other way, is that it’s all fixed beforehand, and there’s plenty of information about all parties passing back and forth before any c
all comes out. You only get called if you’ve already been chosen. But you really need the two parts: the feeling that you’ve made the right choice, and the solid information to back it up. Well, it would be like this with the man you’re after. In his way, I reckon he’s a religious type. He had a call to go somewhere he wanted to go. He had a job there he wanted to do. A man like that can’t work entirely by reason. He’s got to have some strong emotional pull that really makes up his mind for him. He’d got his inside information, but he was going down south to do a job he wanted to do. I repeat that. This customer was in it for kicks as well as money.’

  Charmian frowned at him. ‘You mean he already knew someone in Deerham Hills?’

  ‘Probably a woman,’ said Creevey, ‘that being the way he works. And this woman provided him with just the sort of opportunity his twisted mind longed for.’

  Charmian felt cold, but her brain was still working.

  ‘How would he get this contact in Deerham Hills?’

  ‘Yes, that’s the question, isn’t it?’ said Creevey, studying his blotting pad. He took up a coloured pencil. ‘ Probably advertised …’

  ‘What, in the newspapers?’ said Charmian incredulously.

  ‘Why not? Didn’t you notice what Betts said in his report about newspapers? But don’t let me do all your work for you.’ Creevey dropped his pencil and started to pare his nails. ‘And if he’s the sort of chap, as he seems to be, that doesn’t like giving his address, what better method?’

  So Charmian came back to Deerham Hills to put Grizel on to studying the Deerham Hills Courier and worry about the Flete girl again. And to listen to Pratt coughing.

  He came into her room to see her late one afternoon.

  ‘Something I want to say,’ he cleared his throat. ‘You may have to carry on alone. I may have to go off to hospital for a bit. —No, nothing important,’ he said irritably. ‘I’m just warning you.’