Six Feet Under

by Dorothy Simpson

  “A little tired, that’s all,” he said as he turned back to face Thanet. “Naturally, today has been rather a strain for her. She knew Miss Birch—Carrie, as we called her—quite well, of course.”

  “She had been working for you long?”

  “Ever since we came here, about five years ago.” And now, at last, Selby relaxed sufficiently to sit down.

  “And they got on well together?”

  The Major stared. “I presume so.” The woman, his gaze said, had not been here to “get on” with his wife, but to work.

  “What did you think of her?”

  Selby considered. “Never had much to do with her really. She was usually here only when I was out, of course, during the day.”

  “But you must, over the years, have seen something of Miss Birch, have formed some opinion of her.”

  The Major waved his hand. “She was a little mouse of a thing. Did what she was paid to do well enough, I suppose, but she never had much to say for herself.”

  “You arrived home just after ten last night, I believe,” said Thanet, giving up.

  “As I’m sure my wife will have told you. Yes.”

  “And did you by any chance …”

  “See or hear anything suspicious? No. Come, Inspector, I was tired after a long trip, thankful to get home. I merely drove into the garage, parked the car and came indoors. The road is invisible from the house, as you will no doubt have noticed and in any case I used the kitchen door, which is closer to the garage.”

  It was pointless to go on, Thanet thought. He thanked the Major and left.

  Half way back to Sturrenden he suddenly remembered the money under Carrie’s mattress. He really ought not to leave it there all night. He’d look an absolute idiot if by any chance it were stolen. Cursing, he did a three-point turn on the deserted road and headed back once more to Nettleton.

  It was now a quarter to ten and lights were still on downstairs in numbers one, three and five. Thanet fumbled the unfamiliar key into the lock of number four and stepped into the small living room, closing the front door behind him and groping along the wall for a light switch. He found none. Perhaps it was on the far side of the room, near the kitchen door. The room smelt musty, as if its occupants were already long departed and it had been shut up for some time. There was, too, the unmistakable odour of sickness and old age, overlaid with a faintly medicinal smell reminiscent of hospital corridors.

  The room’s dreariness struck him anew as he found the switch and clicked the light on. The overhead bulb encased in its dreary shade was of too low a wattage and drained out of the room the little colour it possessed. Thanet did not feel inclined to linger and he pushed open the door into the old woman’s bedroom, using the light filtering through from the front room to locate the switch for the staircase.

  Upstairs in Carrie’s room he heaved the mattress aside once more and quickly counted up the packets of pound notes. There were twenty. He began to stow them away in his raincoat pockets, his movements slowing as he became aware of a feeling that there was something he had left undone. When he had finished he lingered, looking around the room, trying to pin down the source of his unease, but it was no good, his mind remained obstinately blank.

  And God, he was tired. It had been a long day, not as long as many he had known but long enough, nevertheless. At the beginning of a case there was always so much to absorb and there was work yet to be done before he would be free to go home. He still had to get this money counted and checked into the office safe and write up his reports on tonight’s interviews. He had found from past experience that if he procrastinated on these they would pile up into unmanageable proportions with unbelievable speed. Besides, irritating though it was to have to spend so much time on paperwork, it frequently helped to have to get it down in black and white, the act of writing it down forcing him to reassess what he had learned, to clarify his impressions and try to be objective about them.

  He looked about him once more at the cheerless little room and shook his head. Perhaps, if he stopped thinking about it, the elusive reason for that nagging doubt would surface of its own accord.

  Stubbornly, however, it refused to do so. It was one o’clock by the time he got to bed and he was still no nearer understanding it.

  Consciously, he tried to relax, to empty his mind of the crowded impressions of the day. But for a long time this proved impossible and endlessly, obssessively, he retraced his steps, relived jumbled snatches of conversation.

  Just before he slept the first two lines of Blake’s poem floated irrelevantly through his mind.

  “Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

  In the forests of the night …”

  9

  When Thanet arrived at the office next morning Lineham was already at work.

  “Finish your decorating?” said Thanet, giving his raincoat a shake before hanging it up. Overnight the sky had clouded over and it was a grey, cheerless morning with intermittent showers borne on a blustery March wind.

  “Yes, thanks. Most of it, anyway.”

  “Interesting?” Thanet nodded at the report Lineham was studying.

  “The path report,” said Lineham, handing it over. “Doc Mallard was right, as usual. She was hit on the head and then suffocated.”

  Thanet scanned the report quickly and then read it again, brooding over certain passages. “Yes, he’s quite definite about it isn’t he? ‘Cause of death: asphyxia.’ So the blow on the head—there was only one, I see—would just have knocked her out.”

  “That’s right,” said Mallard, who had entered the room as Thanet was speaking. “It certainly wouldn’t have killed her.”

  “And our old friend the blunt instrument was used.”

  “Yes. Poker, stick, length of piping …”

  “Arnold—the builder—would be using copper piping for the plumbing work on number two,” Lineham said.

  “I shouldn’t think he’d leave it lying around,” Thanet said. “It’s valuable stuff these days. But check, anyway. So,” he went on thoughtfully, “she was knocked out by a not-very-hard blow on the head, and then suffocated.”

  “By something handy, I should guess,” Mallard said. “Pillow, cushion …”

  “Indoors, then?” Lineham said eagerly.

  “… coat, blanket, travelling rug,” intoned Mallard.

  Thanet and Lineham grimaced.

  “Could have been anywhere,” Thanet said.

  “Well, mustn’t sit about here doing nothing.” Mallard stood up. “Should have started a clinic half an hour ago.” At the door he paused, peered over his half-moon spectacles at Lineham. “You look as though you could do with a good night’s sleep. Build up your strength for Saturday.” And with a wicked grin he was gone, leaving Lineham pink about the ears.

  Thanet glanced sharply at Lineham. Mallard was right. The sergeant was looking distinctly drawn. The skin beneath his eyes was shadowed and the rounded lines of cheek and jaw seemed to have sharpened, adding years to his appearance.

  Thanet opened his mouth to speak but Lineham said hurriedly, “Did you find out anything interesting last night?”

  If Lineham didn’t want to talk about his private life, that was his affair, Thanet thought.

  “There were one or two intriguing suggestions. That Marion Pitman is having an affair with Derek Ingram, for instance.”

  “Any truth in it, you think?”

  Thanet shrugged. “The vicar doesn’t seem to think so.”

  “He would know, surely, living smack across the road like that.”

  “Quite. All the same, I don’t think we ought to dismiss the idea out of hand.”

  “Who suggested it?”

  “Mrs Ingram herself. Oh, not to me directly. When I went to see them last night I happened to overhear a conversation between her and her husband. There was a window open.… Odd, how often the jealous ones are absolute knockouts. Have you seen her?”

  “Mrs Ingram?” Lineham shook his head.

&nb
sp; “She really is something. Nobody’d ever think, looking at her, that she could possibly be jealous of anyone. But she is … which is very interesting from our point of view.”

  “I don’t see what you mean, sir.”

  “Well, what happens when his wife accuses an innocent man of having an affair with another woman?”

  “He denies it, I suppose.”

  “Yes, but does she believe him?”

  “If she’s the jealous type, presumably not.”

  “Then what? Put yourself in his position. Year after year you are falsely accused. At first you love your wife, protest your innocence, but you get tired of all the suspicion, the arguments, the tears, the rows, the fact that you can’t even look at a woman let alone speak to one without your wife thinking you’re ready to hop into bed with the poor girl.…”

  “I don’t know,” Lineham said. “I suppose if it went on long enough and I got fed up enough, I might think, well, I’ll give her something to complain about.…”

  “Exactly,” Thanet said. “And we have one unfaithful husband who, if he’d been left in peace might never have strayed at all. She drives him to it, don’t you see, and in the end she herself brings about the very situation she has been afraid of all along. Now, suppose that at just this stage a third person intervenes …”

  Sudden understanding dawned in Lineham’s eyes. “You mean …”

  “Carrie. Yes.”

  “If she’d found out,” Lineham said excitedly, “threatened to tell Mrs Ingram …”

  “We’d have a neat explanation for all those nice little piles of pound notes.”

  “Yes …!” breathed Lineham.

  The two men sat in silence for a while, contemplating this theory which did at least have the merit of fitting all the known facts. Ingram had left the house at a quarter to ten on the night of the murder. Suppose that Carrie had been blackmailing him, and had arranged to meet him that evening, that the quarrel with his wife had been manipulated by Ingram in order to give him an excuse for stamping out of the house at the appropriate time.… Suppose that Carrie had then stepped up the pressure, had demanded more money.… There would just have been time for Ingram to kill her and dump her in that convenient little outhouse before hurrying down to the Plough and Harrow. The landlord had said that Ingram had arrived around ten.

  “It could fit, sir,” Lineham said.

  “I agree. But ‘could’ is the operative word, I think. We’ll keep an open mind at present. One thing I would like you to do is to try to find out if Ingram had a girlfriend in Sturrenden.”

  “You don’t think he is having an affair with Miss Pitman, then?”

  “I don’t think he’s her type. Nor she his, for that matter. I could be wrong, but I’d guess that he would go a little further away from home for consolation. Carrie could still have found out about it.”

  “But how, if the girlfriend lives in Sturrenden? So far as we can gather, Carrie never seems to have left the village, not even to go shopping. Though I suppose she must have, occasionally.”

  “I think there was more to Carrie than meets the eye. I forgot to tell you that there was another interesting little fact I gleaned last night.” And Thanet told Lineham what the vicar had said about Carrie and the church cleaning. “So you see, there was one evening a week when nobody, not even her mother, knew what she was up to. She may have spent it somewhere in the village, of course, and if so, no doubt the fact will emerge eventually, but she might well have gone into Sturrenden. Make enquiries about Thursday evening buses, see if you can get hold of the drivers.”

  “Well, well, well,” Lineham said, grinning. “Good for her. I’m glad she managed to put one over on that horrible old woman.” Then, abruptly his smile vanished and his eyes grew bleak.

  Thanet hesitated and then said gently, “What’s the matter, Mike?” He could guess, of course. Mention of Carrie’s mother had made Lineham think of his own. “Look,” he went on, as Lineham pursed his lips and shook his head, “I know I’ve no business to interfere, but … it’s your mother, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Lineham admitted miserably. “She’s not well again this morning and …”

  “You’re afraid the wedding’ll have to be called off again. Right?”

  Lineham nodded.

  Thanet stood up abruptly and walked to the window, looked down into the street. It was pouring with rain and there were few people about. It wouldn’t be very pleasant out at Nettleton this morning.

  “Look,” he said, turning, “perhaps I’ve no right to say this, but you’re going to have to make up your mind what to do, if she is taken ill again.”

  “I won’t have any choice, really, will I?” said Lineham grimly. He had been fiddling with a ball-point pen and now he stabbed viciously at the blotting paper in front of him before throwing the pen down in disgust.

  “Won’t you?” Thanet said softly.

  Lirieham’s head came up with a jerk. “What do you mean?”

  “Well,” Thanet said carefully, “there is a choice, isn’t there?” He would have to be very tactful.

  “You mean, I should go ahead with the wedding regardless?”

  Thanet returned to his desk, sat down again. “Look, Mike, I don’t like to interfere, as I said, but you can’t go on like this. If you have to put up with much more of it you’ll be a nervous wreck. What does Louise feel about it?”

  Lineham grimaced. “She’s fed up, naturally. But she says I have to make up my own mind.”

  “Very sensible of her. If she put pressure on you, you’d only resent it later, if anything went wrong.”

  “That’s what she says.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. What do you think I ought to do?”

  Thanet considered. He was treading on dangerous ground and he knew it. If he told Lineham to go ahead and Mrs Lineham had a fatal attack, he, Thanet, would feel responsible for her death. On the other hand, in Thanet’s experience, people only took advice if it was what they really wanted to do anyway. Perhaps Lineham simply needed some moral support in order to go through with what amounted to outright rebellion against his mother.

  “If you really want to know, I think you should plan to go ahead.”

  “Regardless?”

  “Regardless. But as Louise so rightly says, you are the only one who can really decide. And it’s a miserable position to be in, really miserable, I know that. But try to look at it objectively. Twice, already, you’ve had to postpone the wedding. Now this can’t go on indefinitely. From what I know of her, Louise isn’t the sort of girl, however much she loves you, to be prepared to play second fiddle to your mother for ever. I know it’s hard, but it seems to me that sooner or later you’ll have to choose between them. And the longer you put off that decision, the more likelihood there is that you’re going to lose Louise in the process. How much does she matter to you? That’s what you have to ask yourself.”

  Lineham was obviously thinking hard and Thanet waited for a minute or more before going on.

  “And if that happened,” he said eventually, “how would you feel about your mother? My guess is that you’d be bitterly resentful and you’d end up by being on bad terms with her too. So what I would suggest is this—and remember, it is only a suggestion—that you go to her, tell her that although you are naturally worried about her health, you feel that you have no right to keep Louise dangling like this. Say that you therefore feel that whatever happens you have to go ahead with the wedding arrangements this time. And see how she reacts. You never know, if she sees that you really have decided, she might just accept it.…”

  “You think so?” said Lineham bitterly.

  Thanet shrugged. “I wish I could say yes, Mike, but I can’t. I just don’t know.”

  Lineham looked away, out of the window. “We’ve even thought of slipping off quietly to the registry office, without saying anything to anyone, even to mother. That way, we thought she might not have time
to get worked up about it and if she knew it was done, over, she might get used to the idea in time.”

  “But?”

  “We just didn’t like the idea of being so underhand about it. And Louise especially wants a church wedding—oh, not for the fuss and bridesmaids and so on but because she goes to church regularly and won’t feel properly married, she says, if it’s just a civil ceremony. So it just wouldn’t do.” He looked thoughtfully at Thanet. “I might just try what you suggest, sir.”

  “Well, as I said, it’s your choice. But if you do tell her you’re going to go ahead regardless, make sure you do just that. Otherwise …”

  “Yes,” Lineham said. “There’d be no end to it, would there? Well, thank you sir,” he added stiffly. “I’m sorry to bring my problems to work with me.”

  “We all do,” Thanet said, “from time to time.”

  Twenty minutes later, after briefing the others, he and Lineham made a dash across the car park to their respective cars, heads lowered against the driving rain. Thanet had handed over to Lineham the list of PCC members which the vicar had given him, with instructions to cross-check their stories and also find out if any of them had seen anything of interest when leaving the vicarage on Monday evening.

  The sudden flurry of movement, the sting of rain on his face, exhilarated him and as he swung out of the car park and headed for Nettleton he found himself looking forward eagerly to the challenge of the day ahead. Whom should he see first?

  He wanted to check up on his hunch about Susan Selby and Chris Gamble and he also wanted to dig a little further into that rumour about Marion Pitman and Ingram just in case his instinct was wrong; but most of all he wanted to try to deepen his understanding of Carrie herself. In a case like this it was essential to get to know the victim and it was extraordinary, really, how little he felt he knew about her. He had now talked to all the people in her claustrophobic little world and she herself still remained shadowy, elusive, a pathetic ghost hovering in the wings. Perhaps she would stay that way. Perhaps she really had been such a nonentity, had had so negative a personality, that there was nothing of real interest to be discovered.