Six Feet Under

by Dorothy Simpson

  Thanet said nothing.

  “Well, I mean to say, if I help you …”

  “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours, eh, Harry?” said Thanet. He folded his arms across his chest and gazed at Pack sternly. “Come on, now. You know I can’t make bargains like that. All the same …”

  “Yes?” said Pack, pathetically eager.

  “Well, it’s nothing to do with me, mind, but the authorities do tend to look more favourably upon those who’ve given us a helping hand …”

  “You’d put in a word for me?”

  “Let’s hear what you’ve got to say, first. And, mind you, I want the strict truth. No frills. My sergeant here’ll be taking it all down, word for word.”

  “Well it was like this,” said Pack.

  “Just a moment. I think we’d all better sit down,” said Thanet.

  Pack took the sagging armchair by the empty fireplace and Thanet and Lineham chose two upright wooden chairs which appeared to be reasonably clean.

  “Right,” said Thanet when they were settled. “Let’s hear it.”

  Thanet listened to Pack’s story without surprise. It had all happened exactly as he had envisaged it. Lineham, however, had difficulty in concealing his amazement and kept glancing at Thanet as if expecting him to challenge the truth of Pack’s tale.

  Thanet, however, was convinced. Pack had been there. Every detail of his story tallied with what they already knew. When he had finished Thanet took him back over it, querying, probing, questioning, but he could not shake the man. His evidence would convince any jury. Carrie’s murderer was in the bag and Thanet only wished that the thought gave him more satisfaction.

  But there was something else worrying him now and a growing sense of urgency was making him restless. For the last ten or fifteen minutes his mind had been working on two different levels simultaneously: the surface part had been applying itself to an examination of Harry’s evidence, but the subterranean part had been questing back yet again over his last encounter with the murderer. What was it that was causing this pricking unease, this itching impatience to be gone?

  Suddenly, he had it: it was not so much what had been said that was worrying him, but how it might have been interpreted—or rather, misinterpreted, in the light of what he now knew or could guess of the murderer’s character and motive. And if he was right.… He stood up abruptly, cutting Pack off in mid-sentence.

  Both Pack and Lineham glanced up at him, surprised.

  “Let’s go,” he said, terse in his anxiety.

  The other two came to their feet, still looking puzzled.

  “We’ll have to hurry,” he said. “Get your coat, Harry, quickly.” By the time Pack and Lineham joined him at the front door he was practically dancing with impatience.

  “What’s the hurry all of a sudden?” asked Lineham as they bundled Harry into the back seat.

  “Later,” said Thanet. “I’ll drive.”

  They took off in a cloud of dust, paused to scoop up Bentley who was coming out of one of the council houses as they went by, and turned the corner into the main street of Nettleton with a squeal of tyres. The sense of urgency was overwhelming now and Thanet cursed himself for not having been more percipient before. Perhaps it was already too late.

  They skidded to a halt in front of number five, Church Cottages. With a hurried word to Bentley to stay with Pack, Thanet and Lineham flung themselves out of the car and ran up the path to the peeling front door. The curtains were still drawn and the house had a forlorn, abandoned look. There was no response to their repeated knocking.

  “Gone?” said Lineham.

  Thanet shook his head tightly, compressed his lips. “We’ll break in,” he said. They had no warrant, but his degree of certainty was such that he brushed the thought aside.

  The Yale lock on the door presented no problem and in a matter of seconds they were inside. The darkened sitting room within was deserted. But not completely. Lineham cannoned into Thanet from behind as he came to a dead stop.

  “Look at this, Mike.”

  It was Tiger, stretched out stiff and cold in their path. The sight convinced Thanet, as nothing else could have done, that he had been right to be afraid. No doubt, now, of what they would find upstairs. Nevertheless it was just possible that they were not too late and they pounded up the narrow staircase one behind the other. The doors to all the bedrooms stood open and a quick glance inside showed that they were empty.

  “The attic,” said Thanet, remembering the window he had noticed in the gable end of this house, the last in the terrace.

  A cupboard-like door in the corner of the landing revealed the even steeper flight of stairs leading to the roof space. There was no door at the top and the room itself was in pitch darkness. Thanet fumbled for a light switch on the wall nearby and as Lineham came up behind him, found it. The room sprang to life in the sickly yellow glow of artificial light in daytime.

  Both men froze.

  It was as if they were seeing double: twin beds, twin bodies, each with cropped grey hair, faces overlaid with the unnatural pallor of death, both dressed in identical garb of corduroy trousers, men’s shirts.

  It was only on closer inspection that the mirror-image impression splintered and resolved itself into male and female.

  “Her brother Joseph,” said Thanet heavily, gazing down upon the weak, unshaven face of the slighter of the two bodies. “The only person she ever cared about in her whole life.”

  “But how did you know?” Lineham’s face was a study in amazement.

  “Something old Mr Pitman told me. He said.…”

  “Sir?” The voice reverberated through the empty house, reaching them only faintly. Its note of urgency, however, was even at this distance clearly audible.

  Both men made for the head of the stairs. “Up here,” Thanet called. “In the attic.”

  Bentley appeared at the bottom of the staircase, puffing slightly. “Sir, message on the car radio …”

  “Well? Get on with it, man,” Thanet snapped.

  “It’s Mike’s … DS Lineham’s mother, sir. She … she’s had a heart attack, been taken to Sturrenden General.” Bentley peered miserably up the stairs at Lineham’s frozen face.

  “Sorry, Mike,” he said.

  19

  “Now then,” said Joan, settling herself into the passenger seat with a sigh of relief, “tell me all.”

  It was half past one the following afternoon. Ben and Bridget were safely parked with friends and Joan and Thanet were setting off for the little country church where Louise and Lineham were to be married. It was wedding weather—bright sunshine, cloudless blue sky and a little breeze which set the daffodils nodding in the gardens as Joan and Thanet went by.

  This was their first opportunity to talk. When the news of Mrs Lineham’s heart attack had come through, Thanet had insisted that Lineham leave at once for the hospital. Fortunately the attack had once again proved to be mild and although the hospital insisted on keeping her in bed and under observation for a few days Lineham had been able, after some qualms of conscience, to stick to his ultimatum and go ahead with plans for the wedding. On Louise’s suggestion, the newly married couple would visit Mrs Lineham in hospital in their wedding finery and present her with the bridal bouquet before changing to leave on their honeymoon.

  Meanwhile, of course, Thanet had found his workload doubled. In the aftermath of the deaths of Matty and Joseph Cox there had been much to do. Joan had been in bed and asleep by the time Thanet had finally crawled home last night, and this morning he had had to return to the office to try to clear away the accumulation of paperwork which was the inevitable accompaniment to the end of a case. Until now there had been no time to give Joan anything but the bare details.

  “It’s difficult to know where to begin,” he said.

  “Start with how you guessed. However did you? What made you suspect Miss Cox in the first place?”

  Thanet frowned, thinking back. “It’s difficul
t to tell, really. It wasn’t so much that at one particular point I said, ah, there’s something fishy about that. It was more an accumulation of things which in themselves didn’t seem to have any special significance but when added together pointed to only one conclusion.”

  “What sort of things?”

  “Well, in a case like this you have to try to get inside the skins of those involved. The sort of people who lived in Carrie Birch’s world don’t go around killing each other for nothing. The trouble was that, as so often happens, once we began investigating all sorts of unpleasant secrets began to surface.”

  “Like poor Mrs Selby’s drinking, you mean?”

  “Yes. That’s a typical example. And there’s no doubt about it, they do confuse the issue for us. Mrs Selby had no idea we knew about her drink problem and her main concern was to prevent us finding out. Looking back, I think that the real reason why she lied to us about Carrie having been there that evening was because she was so drunk that she didn’t remember anything about the visit and thought it would be simpler to lie than to risk being questioned about it.”

  “You think Carrie did go to the Selbys’ that night, then?”

  “I think she must have, because of the timing of what happened later, in Miss Cox’s house.”

  “And Major Selby lied because his wife had asked him to?”

  “Yes. All of which, of course, made us highly suspicious.”

  “I suppose that if you look hard enough, most people would have something in their lives that they’re ashamed of, either in the past or in the present.”

  “That certainly applied to the people in this case,” Thanet said. “Which gave us plenty of grounds for suspicion when we discovered that Carrie was a snooper.”

  Joan wrinkled her nose. “Nasty.”

  “Yes. But, be fair, in her case it was understandable. If you’d met that mother of hers.… Poor Carrie. Her secret indulgences just weren’t enough to satisfy her. I would guess they were too inward-turning, too … sterile. She wanted something real, involving other people. But she was incapable of making good relationships with them so she settled for finding out about them instead.”

  “And you think that was enough for her?”

  “I do, yes. I don’t think it ever entered her head to use that knowledge in blackmail. Certainly there’s no shred of evidence that she did. Prying is a nasty, shabby business and perhaps she deserved some kind of punishment. But to pay with her life … it does seem altogether out of proportion to her crime, if crime it can be called.”

  “But if she didn’t get the money from blackmail, where did she get it from?”

  Thanet grinned sheepishly. “Would you believe it? From bingo.”

  “Bingo? Oh darling, no! I just don’t believe it!” Joan began to laugh. “What a let-down, after all those dramatic explanations you thought up—blackmail, theft, gambling.…”

  “Well bingo is a form of gambling, of course … But it just shows that it doesn’t pay to let your imagination run away with you. It’s a sad and rather dreary fact of life that the obvious explanation is often the true one. And in this case, well, it really should have been obvious to me that she was a bingo sort of person. I must admit I felt a bit of a fool when we found out.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “As so often happens, when we were following quite another line of enquiry. The men were on house-to-house, trying to track down the sneak thief, and Bentley came across this woman who was also a bingo addict and regularly used to see Carrie on bingo night at the Embassy. Carrie had quite a reputation for being lucky, I gather.… Where was I?”

  “Talking about Carrie’s snooping.”

  “Ah yes. Well anyway, when I began to understand just how nosey Carrie was, I started to think about Miss Cox. Just imagine how frustrating it must have been for a woman like Carrie to live next door to someone who is a complete enigma. For years she must have longed to get her foot inside Miss Cox’s front door. I expect that when Miss Cox broke her leg and accepted Carrie’s offer of help with the shopping, Carrie thought that she was going to make it inside number five at last—but no, she never got over the threshold. And I could imagine her planning all sorts of stratagems to worm her way in. It might well have become an obsession with her. Burning curiosity and the determination to satisfy it … in certain circumstances they can be a pretty fatal combination, as Carrie found out.”

  “I see!” said Joan. “So you think that’s what happened. She managed somehow to get inside Miss Cox’s house and either saw brother Joseph or something which betrayed his presence …”

  “And Miss Cox came back and found her. Yes, that’s how it was, I’m certain of it. I’d guess Miss Cox lashed out in anger at first, with the walking stick she was using—forensic have confirmed that that was the weapon used to knock Carrie out—and then, realising that if Carrie were allowed to live the secret would be out, decided that there was only one safe place for her from now on and that was in a wooden box, six feet under.”

  “Poor Carrie. I suppose that the second she put her foot over the threshold of number five she had, in effect, signed her own death warrant. But I still don’t really understand why. Why was it so important to keep Joseph’s presence a secret?”

  “He was a deserter,” Thanet said. “After being shot down in the Berlin raids he must somehow have made his way back to England and headed for home instead of reporting to the authorities. He was a quiet, timid lad and I should think he would have found his war experience more shattering than most. And then, well, once she had him safely home again I bet his sister persuaded him to stay. Even at that stage I expect they would both have been afraid that if the truth came out he would be arrested.”

  “What was the penalty for desertion?”

  “Well, that’s the point. I expect they thought he would be shot. Deserters were, during the first world war, and during the second the myth persisted that they still would be. In fact, it would probably simply have meant a term of imprisonment.”

  “I suppose one could understand them feeling like that while the war was still on, then, but afterwards … Surely there was an amnesty for war-time deserters?”

  “That’s the tragedy of it, there was. I checked. In February 1953. After that he could safely have come out of hiding at any time. If only they’d known. But they were very simple people, living such circumscribed lives. If they hadn’t actually come across the information by chance, either on the radio or in the newspapers, I’m sure they’d never have thought of enquiring. For that matter, I’m not sure they would have known what an amnesty was if they had heard about one.”

  “So how d’you think Carrie did manage to get in, in the end?”

  “On the night of the murder, Tiger—Miss Cox’s cat—went missing. She was very attached to it and when it didn’t come to her call she went out to look for it. It had got shut in the shed at the bottom of the garden, she said, and she blamed the wind for banging the door closed. It may have done, of course, but I’ve wondered since if Carrie might not have shut the cat in the shed on purpose, knowing that Miss Cox would go out to look for it. Miss Cox, like Carrie herself, was very much a creature of habit and Carrie would have been able to anticipate her movements exactly. Miss Cox still had a leg in plaster and Carrie would know that it would take her some time to get down the garden path, locate the cat and get back again, long enough for Carrie to slip into the house and have a quick snoop around.”

  “But if Miss Cox had a leg in plaster how on earth would she have been able to move the body from her house to where it was found? It was some distance away, wasn’t it?”

  “A hundred yards or so, I’d guess. Yes, that leg was one of the things which threw us off the scent and made us tend to discount her. But it is extraordinary what one can achieve with sufficient incentive and determination. I think she must have rolled the body—and Carrie was a small woman, remember—on to one of the big plastic sheets which she used for wrapping up those loose
covers she made for a living. Then, when all the lights were out in Church Cottages and everything was quiet, she dragged the body down the garden path, along the footpath and into the back garden of number two—where, unluckily for her, Harry Pack had gone to pinch another sack of cement for his wife’s concrete path. He told us he’d left home at midnight, so it must have been about twenty past when he had the fright of his life and almost bumped into her as he was coming back out on to the footpath. Although he couldn’t see exactly what she was doing, he didn’t wait to find out. He was terrified of being caught red-handed, knowing that it would mean prison this time, so he dodged back into the garden and hid behind the privy.”

  “Where she hid the body!”

  “Exactly. When she’d gone, curiosity made him peep inside. You can imagine how he felt when he saw what was there.”

  “And he’s quite sure it was Miss Cox?”

  “Certain. He knows her well by sight. There was a fitful moon that night and enough light for him to identify her beyond any shadow of doubt. There was that leg in plaster, too. He must have had a very nasty half an hour or so while she laboured to cram Carrie’s body into the privy only feet away from him.”

  “But surely, the fact that Miss Cox hid the body doesn’t necessarily mean that she was the murderer?”

  “You mean, Joseph might have done it?”

  “Why not? It would have been natural for her to cover up for him, wouldn’t it? And everything you’ve said about the murder could equally apply to him. Carrie could have come upon him, startled him, and he could have killed her in the shock of discovery.”

  But Thanet was shaking his head. “No, I can’t agree. It’s all wrong. Just think about that relationship, Joan. When Matty Cox lost her mother she invested all her loving in that baby. It wasn’t so much that he needed her—I’m sure that if she hadn’t looked after him, somebody else would have—but that she needed him, emotionally speaking. He was her life-line and the intensity of her love for him increased rather than diminished with the years. He became, if you like, her raison d’être. Think how she must have felt when he was called up, how she would have grabbed with both hands at the chance of keeping him at home, when he eventually turned up after making his way back from Germany. I’d guess she would have done anything, anything at all, to prevent his being snatched away from her again—well, she did, didn’t she? She killed for just that reason.”