Murderes' Houses

by Jennie Melville

  This episode pre-dated by three years anything else on Marley they had on the books; only intelligent guesswork related it to him, but the method of operating seemed to bear his trade mark. The only unlikely thing about it was the complete failure of Preddle, or Marley, when faced with a strong-minded (and strong-armed, Charmian reminded herself) woman. But possibly this was in itself the most highly significant thing about it. No doubt Marley learned a lot from this failure. He probably chose his victims with much greater care. He wouldn’t have got to like women from Rose Anne, but all the signs were he didn’t like them anyway. Like or hate, he couldn’t keep away from them. No one had to teach him how to disappear, though, thought Charmian; he seemed to know that from the beginning.

  She put the report down on her table, and wondered if she had extracted from it everything it had to offer her. She had a sneaking feeling there was one thing she hadn’t quite mastered.

  ‘Here,’ she said, tossing the papers over to Grizel. ‘Read that and tell me what you think.’

  Grizel looked up from her reading, amused. ‘He picked a tartar there all right. Pity there aren’t more like her.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘That’s all,’ said Grizel, tossing it back. ‘ Except that it must have been one of his earlier efforts. Perhaps his very first. A try-out.’

  ‘Yes, he’s improved since then.’ Charmian turned over the pages of the report again. ‘Got nastier too.’

  ‘Phillips? Wonder if that’s the woman who came down and lectured us on judo? She’ll know what he looked like anyway. You’ll get a description.’

  ‘She’s given it,’ Charmian looked up. ‘ But it’s not all that much help. It was ten years ago … And she’s not too proud of knowing him, you must understand.’ She frowned. ‘She’d know him if she saw him again, of course, but she has emigrated to Australia.’

  Even as she filed her notes, she was uneasily aware that there was something in the case of Rose Anne Phillips she had missed. Or was missing. The verb should be in the present.

  Grizel went back to the offices of the Deerham Hills Courier, where she was methodically going through the back issues to see if the Inspector in Manchester was right and Marley had, in some way, used the newspaper to get in touch with his contact here. But she was sceptical. ‘Why not use the post? He’s a nut-case all right, but still, why not use the post?’ But she knew what Charmian’s answer to this one was that someone like Marley wanted no chance of any letters surviving to be read by the wrong people. He wanted no chains between him and the women he used that he himself could not cut as and when he wished. So she went on doing what Charmian had asked. She didn’t in any case find it easy to run counter to Charmian (her husband was quite right in thinking Charmian a profound influence on her) and this was especially true now Charmian was wearing this air of intense abstraction, with now and then a whiplash of her blue eyes which suggested this attention could be switched if necessary. No, Charmian was rather terrifying these days.

  Charmian was alone in her office when the telephone rang. At first she thought the husky woman’s voice might be Velia. Velia had never telephoned her at work but might do so in need. She gripped the telephone very tightly. Then almost immediately she realised that it could not be Velia. The switchboard would never put a call from her straight through, so this call could only be from someone who was known to have access to Charmian. Or someone who could crack the whip, too. Even before the woman spoke again, she had her identified. A familiar feeling of hostility surged through her.

  ‘Rachel Lawson speaking.’

  Between Charmian and the head of the Girls’ School there had never been any liking, and since the Flete child’s trouble even respect had vanished.

  ‘Hello, Miss Lawson,’ she said coldly. ‘Anything I can do?’

  ‘Well, I’d like to see you.’ She sounded sad. She also sounded reluctant, as if she knew Charmian didn’t like her, saw the point, and felt the same way. Charmian underestimated the force of her personality: people were very rarely in any doubt about what she thought of them and why.

  ‘I’m available, Miss Lawson.’ Charmian was still bleak. At the beginning, when the Flete trouble was a new one on their hands, she had tried very hard to establish a good relationship with Rachel Lawson, but she and Grizel had some trouble in even getting to see her.

  ‘Yes. Look, I know you and I saw the trouble about the Flete girl differently—’

  ‘We weren’t even seeing the same trouble, Miss Lawson.’

  ‘No … I admit I didn’t want you coming round, asking questions, and stirring up the rest of the school. I thought it was better left covered up, that we could get at things quietly … I had to think of the other girls.’

  ‘And you always blamed Flete in any case,’ thought Charmian. ‘You always thought it was her own fault, that she asked for it and got it.’

  ‘I know you always thought it was simply a question of finding out who was guilty,’ she said.

  ‘No, not as simple as that.’ Rachel Lawson was hesitant. Now there was no mistaking the sadness and shocking fatigue in her voice.

  ‘We never had a chance even to do that,’ said Charmian, ‘when she wouldn’t say a word and you backed her up.’

  ‘I’m telephoning you to say the girl is missing.’

  ‘I thought you were supposed to be keeping an eye on her?’

  ‘We were, but that’s what we were doing, keeping an eye on her. We didn’t chain her up.’

  ‘Have you any idea where she can have gone?’

  ‘No. She went out this morning. Her mother supposed it was for a walk. No one was with her, we thought it best to keep things as normal …’

  ‘Except that she wasn’t normal.’

  Rachel Lawson did not answer, but she took a deep breath that sighed across the wires.

  ‘Any ideas? Surely her mother must have?’

  ‘No ideas exactly …’ The words came very reluctantly. ‘But there’s been a lot of talk about the river lately at the school … Since the woman was found there, you understand … I suppose you were right and I was wrong. You can’t keep girls from talking.’

  Charmian put down the receiver and rested her head on her hands for a fraction of a second. She didn’t cry easily, she wasn’t crying now, but tears gathered behind her eyes.

  Merely by existing, merely by following out his own plan, Marley was claiming one more victim.

  One more little spoil, an extra, hardly to be counted perhaps by this man who preyed on women. She was filled with a hot emotion made up of fear, fascination and anger, the ambiguous nature of which she did not herself recognise.

  Suddenly she raised her head. Velia had told her that she would never touch Morgan’s hands. She had explained this away by saying that his forearms and wrists were tattooed with lizards which he tried, to hide.

  But that can’t be the answer, Charmian thought. Why should something on his arms stop one touching his hands? Was he, she wondered, recalling Fred’s words, a comedian?

  The comedian, the character actor, was enjoying his stay in Deerham Hills. He did not intend it to be unduly prolonged, and in his own way was already making plans for his departure. The move from Manchester had been decisive. He recognised that he had come to a climacteric in his life. He would never settle in one town again. Henceforth he was footloose. He was also, as he had never been before, a murderer. The violence was right out in front now. But this aspect of his development was, naturally, not the one he put stress on. He did not, in fact, see it that way.

  The librarian smiled at him as he stood by the shelves choosing a book. She liked the look of her new reader; he had been in a good deal during the last month. She made up her mind to look at the name on his ticket when he came with his book. ‘An interesting face,’ she thought. ‘So full of imagination.’

  Morgan was quite aware she was looking at him. In a little while he would look up and catch her eye and smile, that shy, dry, little smile that he h
ad, which always went down so well.

  He read on for a few minutes. Chambers’ Encyclopaedia was quite good on mazes. Presently he raised his head and smiled.

  ‘Perhaps he isn’t so imaginative as I supposed,’ thought the librarian, catching the smile. ‘Or perhaps they’re not nice dreams.’ And indeed Morgan’s smile was more revealing these days, was less dry and far and away less shy than he supposed. It was not without a certain hungry attraction though.

  She smiled back a little nervously. ‘Well, he’s a great reader, anyway,’ she thought. ‘That must mean something.’ Then, ‘I wonder what he reads about?’ She edged over towards him.

  Morgan saw her coming. He was never surprised by his success with women. He attributed it to his virility. His virility, in turn, was nourished and sustained by his diet. No Buddhist maintained more strongly than he that what you eat is what you are.

  The library was filling up. This time of day was always busy. A woman with a crowd of children (or it seemed like a crowd to Morgan, though perhaps there were only five or six) surged up and took over the Encyclopaedia Britannica which lived next to Chambers’ and Home Hints From All Nations. The woman smiled briefly at Morgan, but not in a way which encouraged him to try his special smile back.

  Emily Carter was well known in Deerham Hills where she had lived since just before the birth of her first child. It was difficult not to know Emily. She was a powerful and dominating figure. Her friends sometimes had a confused feeling that there were at least four Emilys, all of them knowing what was best for you. Emily suffered from empathy. A sudden surge of sympathy for other human beings, of identification almost, was always passing through her and forcing her into action. ‘ Emily and the sufferings of the world are one and indivisible,’ commented her husband in a resigned way. ‘It’s a disease.’ This capacity to take on the troubles of others had made her a sympathetic and rather inefficient nurse before marriage, and it made a devoted and domineering parent after it.

  She could change her position too. One day she was all worked up about the lot of Married Women and the next it was Unmarried Mothers. Emily knew all about the Bomb and the Pill and could advocate one remedy for the declining Middle Classes and another for the Population Explosion. ‘Emily’s going to get muddled one day,’ said her husband, ‘and get us all blown up by mistake.’

  At this very moment what she was looking up in the encyclopaedias was Paranormal Cognition. A friend of hers had a bad case of it, and Emily wanted to read it up. The friend suffered from pre-cognition and telepathy. Anyway, this was Emily’s diagnosis. This girl always knew what her husband was thinking and usually before he thought it. There was also a strong suspicion of poltergeists about. Certainly a great deal of crockery was broken in that house.

  ‘We’ve had those symptoms in this house for years,’ Emily’s husband pointed out, ‘and you’ve never gone psychic.’

  Emily shook her head.

  ‘Those friends of yours just get on badly,’ he said patiently. ‘And we don’t … But Emily, I feel I must warn you this state of things may not continue. I don’t object to you reading my mind, but must you read my letters too? All right, so now you know what I’m giving you for your birthday.’

  Emily read her pages on parapsychology while her children waited, more or less quietly, around her.

  ‘There may be a Group Mind. Human minds may not be completely separate and individual, and deeper down may become fused into one common subconscious. Telepathy could be explained this way,’ she read.

  ‘I never even thought of that,’ reflected Emily, turning the pages rapidly as she read.

  The librarian watched her at one desk and Morgan at the other. Two earnest readers. With less pleasure she noticed that the children seemed to be building a little cave of books on the floor. She started to move in that direction again. They were getting noisy too. Strange their mother didn’t notice. Then she remembered it was Emily and it wasn’t strange at all.

  Just then, however, Emily did look round at her children with a fond smile as if she was pleased to see them again. It was Emily’s deep conviction that she never had a thought outside her family and existed only for them.

  ‘I’m going to have a wretched middle age,’ she thought placidly. ‘Everyone says it’s terrible to live through your children, and that women who do suffer for it in middle age.’

  She stopped to interfere in a fight between the twins, who naturally fought as one, and the eldest girl. At the same time she took a toy out of the baby’s mouth.

  ‘I’ve got a good ten years’ more work ahead of me, anyway,’ she thought cheerfully. Then she calculated rapidly. ‘Why, I won’t have a middle age to be wretched in. I’ll head straight into a beat old age. I reckon I’ll be the first beatnik granny. My beatnik gran,’ she rehearsed. ‘Hope they like having me. One thing: if I’ve got them, equally, they’ve got me.’

  Her elder son was tugging at her skirt. He was whispering something.

  ‘Mummy. Mummy. That man’s hands!’

  Emily looked up. She saw Morgan; her eyes dropped to his hands, then she withdrew them rapidly.

  ‘Hush,’ she said. ‘Shut up.’

  Emily, in one of her metamorphoses, before her marriage, had been a nurse. She looked at his hands with serious interest. Hadn’t she read something like this, some time in her training days? She fumbled with her memory.

  Morgan sprang up and departed hurriedly. On the way out he brushed against the librarian.

  He smiled. Almost as if he had switched it on. The manly smile didn’t match his eyes. He made a little courtly gesture. But his hand slipped. He was awkward with his hand, and suddenly the gesture looked ludicrous.

  The librarian was in a strung-up state, timid, nerves taut. She gave a little titter which she tried to change to a hiccup. She and Fred down at the shelter in the park would have agreed on one thing if they could have discussed it together: there was a terrible grotesque humour about this man. Against his will he was a comic character.

  But Emily, staring gravely at his back, did not think him comic at all.

  Morgan walked out of the library straight under the window where Charmian was working. At that moment, though, Charmian had her back to the window, staring into a mirror, so she did not see him.

  He walked stiffly, head bent, angry at the laughter. Then after a while he lifted his head again and walked on with dignity; he knew that very soon he would show the world that he was not to be laughed at. He obliterated the picture of the boy and that bright-eyed woman staring at the palms of his hands, as he always managed to do, even though the thought of it was what boiled inside him all the time. In a way he would have liked to have gone up to the woman and say: let me touch you. That would have taught her something. Unluckily it would have taught him too. But there was one woman he had this pleasure lined up for.

  He was interested in mazes, but at this moment it came to him that what you really wanted at the heart of the maze was a cage. A cage to keep the woman in.

  Charmian turned away from her mirror just in time to see Emily and her brood leaving the library. The sight of Emily always aroused mixed feelings in Charmian. In a way, Emily personified everything Charmian distrusted about her sex, the unprofessionalism, the completely personal approach to everything, but you had to hand it to someone who did as much as Emily did as well as bring up, not to mention actually producing, all those children. True not one of them, including Emily herself, looked even half way to tidy, but probably they were basically clean underneath. She watched them storm across the road; they could stop the traffic any day. They surged round the corner and out of sight. The children always gave the impression of bearing Emily triumphantly along with them.

  Charmian turned back to her mirror and realised that she looked as unkempt as Emily herself.

  ‘Do I really look as wild and dishevelled as that?’ she asked herself, studying her face and feeling her hair; her hair which felt dry and rough. On an impulse, she pic
ked up the telephone and rang her friend Baba the hairdresser.

  ‘Oh, she’s busy just now,’ said Baba’s assistant cheerfully. ‘She’s talking to a customer.’

  Charmian could faintly hear Baba’s voice.

  ‘Well, yes madam, you could dye it bronze … I’m afraid on top of mauve it might turn your hair green. Why don’t you stick to that nice gun metal … No, I never have seen a gun that shade.’

  She heard the voices die away and then Baba was on the line. ‘That woman.’ She sounded as if she was laughing. ‘ Her hair’s lilac colour now and I had to persuade her not to try for chestnut bronze.’

  ‘And it wouldn’t suit her?’ asked Charmian, thinking chestnut bronze sounded nicer than lilac.

  ‘I wouldn’t know anything about it suiting her,’ Baba sounded sympathetic now. ‘But at least it looks like hair. Get anything else on it and I’m afraid it might look like seaweed.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind a bit of chestnut bronze myself,’ said Charmian, touching her hair.

  ‘Yours is reddish already. Tell you what, I’ll give it a silvery wash.’ Baba sounded enthusiastic. ‘And then you give over wearing that bright orange lipstick and you’ll look fine.’

  ‘Is it terrible?’ said Charmian surprised. She had paid a lot for that lipstick. Lipsticks which cost as much as that ought to make you look lovely, said the primitive reasoning underneath. She really did regard make-up as a sort of magic, although she’d never admit it, least of all to herself. She had bought a bottle of expensive scent since knowing Coniston, and although she hadn’t used it yet, she looked at the bottle often.

  ‘Throw it away,’ demanded Baba. ‘I’ll give you something better.’

  ‘Give?’ Baba never gave anything away, which was why at the age of thirty she owned her business and half a motor car. She still had nowhere to live and camped out, with her second husband, over the shop, but she had the best clothes and the best prospects, except perhaps matrimonially, of anyone of her age in Deerham Hills. She and Charmian were natural friends.