The Methods of Sergeant Cluff

by Gil North

  He pushed a glass-panelled door between shop windows made opaque to more than half their height with brown paint. The place was hardly a café, converted from some other trade, most of its business the sale of ready-cooked food to millworkers and wives who went on working after marriage. They left their plates and basins in the morning and collected their pies and stews at noon. The prices were cheap and the food appetizing.

  Occasional customers ate in the shop. It stayed open late at night, missing no chances of profit. A few round tables crowded together in front of the counter at the back of the room. A tea urn perched at one end of the counter, flanked by a plate of cakes, not many cakes and not fancy cakes because the people of Gunnarshaw preferred more substantial food and called no meal a meal unless it involved the use of a knife and fork. Feathers of steam escaped from the urn, which grumbled and squeaked, sotto voce, to itself. Placards on the wall listed the humble prices of humble dishes, pies and peas, sausages and mash, bacon and eggs, meat and potato pie.

  A girl leaned her head on her hands, her elbows on the counter. She wasn’t busy. Dumpy and plain, her face shone and her eyes twinkled. The bell on the door jangled as Cluff and Clive came in. She straightened and looked up, pleased to have company. Her smile faded a little when she saw Cluff. She couldn’t quite make up her mind whether she’d wanted Cluff or not.

  He sat down and unbuttoned his coat. She approached him warily, her eyes fixed on his face.

  “It’s me, Doris,” Cluff said. “I’m not a ghost.”

  She stopped before she reached the table. She continued to look at him.

  “I’m not in a hurry if you’re not,” Cluff said.

  Whatever her thoughts were they didn’t hide the laughter that lived in her eyes, the humour round the corners of her mouth. A man could forget she wasn’t pretty because she was jolly.

  “I might have known,” she said ruefully, mocking herself. “There’s no getting away from you.”

  Cluff stared at her for a while. She stared back at him, wrinkling her nose. “Bring something for the dog,” Cluff told her. “You can say what you have to say later.”

  “And you, Sergeant?”

  “You might as well, now I’m here.”

  “It’s the first time.”

  “You’re off my usual track.”

  “You don’t know what you’ve been missing.”

  “Anything. I don’t care what.”

  Clive’s lips smacked over a well-filled dish on the floor. Cluff looked a little dubiously at a steaming pie surrounded by a moat of pale-green peas. She sat with him at the table.

  “Go on,” the girl invited. “I know there’s a barber next door, but he’s not called Sweeney Todd.”

  He dug the end of his knife into the crust and levered the blade down. Gravy spurted to inundate the peas. She pushed a bottle of sauce across to him. “Wait a minute,” she said and left him to draw two cups of tea from the urn.

  She held the cup to her lips. “Well,” she said. “Get it over with. Don’t tell me. I know what I ought to have done.”

  “Get what over with?” Cluff asked, through a mouthful of peas.

  “The lecture.”

  “We’ll skip the lecture.”

  “The trouble is,” she said, “he’s such a harmless sort of a chap. A puff of wind would blow him away.”

  “That’s right.”

  “We must be getting popular,” Doris remarked, looking round the room.

  Cluff, reloading his fork, replied, “I’ll give you a recommendation anyway.”

  “The ‘Crown’s’ more in her line than a spot like this,” she added. “Mind you, she brightened the place up. I’d give my right arm to look like her.”

  “You’ll do as you are.”

  “Safer, I’ll say that.”

  Cluff applied himself to the task of balancing peas.

  “I’d have got around to coming,” Doris said. She corrected herself, “At least, I’d have kept a lookout for you.”

  “It’s funny,” Cluff murmured. “Usually I hear more than I want to know. This time people don’t seem to want to tell me anything.” He paused. “Not people like you.”

  “I’m no different from most others in Gunnarshaw.”

  “I know.”

  He cleaned his plate: “I don’t see what you’re worried about. She’s dead and you’re not.”

  “She’d something to look back on, I’ll bet.”

  “You’ve something to look forward to.”

  “I’m still hoping.”

  Cluff pushed his plate away. Clive sat back, licking his chops.

  “Have another,” Doris suggested.

  “I think I will. They’re good.”

  She put his plate down, refilled: “I’ll feel better when you’re fed.”

  “Where did you learn that?”

  “At our house it’s food first and talk afterwards.”

  “You couldn’t do better,” Cluff said, chewing.

  “Will they hang him?”

  Cluff went on eating.

  “They shouldn’t. I wouldn’t have thought he had it in him.”

  Cluff didn’t reply.

  “He looked just like a pup that’s lost its mother.” She considered. “How did he manage to get hold of her? It doesn’t work the other way round.”

  “Eh?”

  “My way. I can’t catch anything in trousers. It’s not for want of trying.”

  “I’m here.”

  “Yes,” Doris said, looking down her nose. “We all know how fond of women you are.”

  He put his knife and fork down and sat back.

  “Men haven’t much sense. If he would bring her in here what could he expect?”

  “His name isn’t Rockefeller.”

  “Say that again!”

  He glanced at a yellow-faced clock ticking loudly on the wall: “You didn’t happen to notice the time?”

  “About seven. You should have heard her.”

  “You did.”

  “All right, I was listening. One look at them and you would have done too.”

  “It’s my job.”

  “I could have slapped her myself.”

  “Well?”

  “They were wet. You know what sort of a night it was. He kept talking about the pictures but she wasn’t keen. She asked him, ‘In the one-and-threes?’”

  “It would have been.”

  “I wouldn’t have minded the chance. I could have hit him as well, for not standing up to her.”

  Cluff pulled the photograph he had brought with him from Rupert Street out of his pocket. He asked, “Are you sure? This girl?”

  Doris pursed her lips and whistled: “I’d be an eyeful in one of those. Of course I’m sure.”

  Cluff put the photograph away.

  “Gunnarshaw won’t look the same without her,” Doris said.

  “Nothing’s what it was.”

  “In the end,” Doris said, “she got up and left him. They’d been talking in whispers. I couldn’t hear much once they lowered their voices. But I could see their faces, his white and hers with a look on it as if he smelt. I managed to catch one or two words. He told her, ‘I’m getting a raise next month.’ She stared at him and laughed.”

  “But he stayed after she’d gone?” Cluff pressed her, hopefully.

  “Hold on! I didn’t say so. He threw half-a-crown on the table and ran out after her without waiting for his change.”

  Cluff sighed. Doris went behind the counter. She came back with a fraying scarf in her hand: “He was in so much of a hurry he forgot this.”

  “He hasn’t lost much.”

  “I suppose you’ll want it.”

  “I don’t see what option I have.”

  She looked at him closely
: “I haven’t told anyone.”

  “You’ve told me.”

  “Not anything you didn’t know?”

  He answered the plea in her voice by shaking his head. He said, “What I didn’t know I could guess. You couldn’t have kept it to yourself.”

  She stood by his chair, doubtful. She insisted, “It was me you came to see?”

  “I was passing.”

  Her sense of humour got the better of her anger: “I’ve done it, haven’t I?”

  He finished his cup of tea: “How much do I owe you?”

  She totted up his bill and told him.

  He walked more rapidly, back to the High Street and up the road to the police-station. It occurred to him that during the whole of his conversation with Doris neither he nor she had mentioned Jack Carter by name. He’d assumed she meant Carter and she’d assumed that he knew who she was talking about. It needn’t have been Carter. Was Carter the only man in Gunnarshaw? He knew quite well it was Carter. There was no other man in Gunnarshaw it could have been.

  An excited Barker confronted him in the outer office.

  Barker said, “I didn’t know where you’d got to. I’ve been ringing the cottage.”

  “Annie’s not still there?”

  “I couldn’t get any reply.”

  “Good. It’s safe to go home then.”

  “I knew you were still in Gunnarshaw. Your car—”

  “My car?”

  “Don’t you remember? I drove it in this morning.”

  “So you did.”

  Barker trailed him into his office. “Listen,” he said, “I’ve—”

  Inspector Mole poked his head round the door, interrupting Barker. Mole commented to Cluff, “You’re back.” He asked, without any confidence, “How’s it going?”

  Cluff sat down in his chair. Barker hopped on the other side of the table, bursting with news. Mole, refusing to accept that he wasn’t wanted, made no move to leave them alone.

  Barker couldn’t contain himself any longer. Mole or no Mole he had to say, “I’ve got the surgeon’s report. She was going to have a baby.”

  “Well, well, well!” Mole said, emphasizing each word.

  Cluff dragged a scarf from somewhere about his person. He placed it on the table.

  “It didn’t show,” Mole commented.

  “Two to three months,” Barker elucidated.

  Cluff said, “I don’t believe it.” Barker stared at him, thunderstruck.

  “I shouldn’t argue with our surgeon,” Mole advised. “He doesn’t take quietly to contradiction even when he’s only expressing an opinion. He’ll have something more than an opinion to go on.”

  “It’s true,” Barker asserted, thinking that Cluff was accusing him of having made a mistake.

  Mole interrupted, in his official voice, “That just about buttons it up. That and the letter.”

  “So you’d read the letter?” Cluff said.

  “Naturally. You must have heard by now who ‘Jack’ is.”

  “I’ve known all along who he is.”

  “Then it’s simple.”

  “Everybody knows,” Cluff said. “Jack Carter.”

  “Everybody—?”

  “In Gunnarshaw.”

  “I didn’t know.” Mole glared first at Cluff and then at Barker, as if they had been keeping information from him.

  “The money—” Cluff said.

  “The money?” The money was no problem to Mole. “Blackmail. The letter reeks of panic—”

  “Or despair.”

  “—Fear in every line of it. No wonder. The baby explains everything.”

  “Don’t you know Carter?”

  “We aren’t all Gunnarshaw men.”

  “He hasn’t any money.”

  “He’d that much anyway.”

  “She had it.”

  “It’s clear enough where she got it from. Where’s he work? You’ve only got to dig around a bit. I didn’t say he’d come by it honestly.”

  Cluff wasn’t paying any attention. He stared at Barker and Mole without seeing either of them. Instead of Barker and Mole he saw her father. He heard her father repeating, “She was a good girl,” the father’s futile self-deception: “I trusted her.” No one could keep this from her father. When a girl died as she’d died death was public property.

  Cluff slumped in his chair. “I can’t believe it,” he said a second time and saying it made him more certain that he was right.

  He could believe it of Jack Carter, of Jack Carter in love, of any youth in love, his love returned. He couldn’t believe it of Jane Trundle, not with Jack Carter, not as careless as that even if her rejection of him had only been a sham. Carter penniless, a life with Carter the duplicate in time of the life she lived in Rupert Street, she and Carter the inevitable repetition in the future of her mother and father, the same poverty, the same dinginess and decay and eternal cheeseparing. It didn’t fit. Her pregnancy made it all the more unlikely.

  He emptied his pocket, Carter’s crumpled letter begging her to meet him, the wallet with the money, her photograph. He placed the photograph on the table, meticulously, setting it exactly to rights until its position satisfied him. Mole moved round the table and leaned over it, much taken by the photograph.

  “Not with Carter,” Cluff told himself, again and again. “Not with Carter.” She knew too much. She’d seen too much. There was more in those eyes than provocation, or promiscuous invitation. He had it now. Calculation. Beautiful, but beautiful in the manner of a work of art, cold like a statue, with no emotions, no warmth of feeling, no possibility of surrendering herself, all else forgotten, to the passion of the moment.

  He couldn’t envisage her in love at all. She’d had too much experience, with the example of her parents in front of her, of love. She wasn’t capable of love, even if love could be accompanied by wealth and position. For her to have loved Carter, for a single instant, was impossible. How could Carter have paid for her body? She’d no other asset, nothing else to trade with. She knew where she was going, away from Rupert Street, and nothing Carter could have done or said would have been instrumental in turning her from the object she had set herself.

  “A baby,” Cluff thought, sure that with her a baby, too, would be part of her plan, another weapon she’d armed herself with, deliberately, something the father, whoever he was, couldn’t repudiate. The Sergeant’s arm moved and it sent the scarf sliding. Mole grabbed at the scarf and missed. The scarf slid to the floor and Cluff put his foot on it.

  He wasn’t worried about the scarf, about the quarrel Carter had had with her in the eating-house. The letter Carter had written to her could be ignored. What was it to Cluff that she had walked away from the chemist’s arm-in-arm with Carter, Greensleeve watching them, and Margaret and Jean, that she had met Carter again later that evening after a brief visit to Rupert Street and dismissed him with a finality he wouldn’t accept?

  Barker coughed. Mole, with the photograph still in view, had forgotten the scarf already. Cluff’s heart grew heavier. His eyes almost closed. After all, it didn’t follow. There was a fallacy in his argument. If he rejected the quarrel and the letter and Carter’s pursuit of her, couldn’t he reject equally the money in her wallet, her pregnancy, the certainty he had of her character? Was this set of facts more valid than the other? Which coincidence, running parallel to the truth but apart from it, which of the two the one to be set aside? He knew her. He knew Carter as well. Carter insulted beyond endurance, withered by her scorn, as unstable and emotional as she was stable and frigid. A would-be lover, with no hope left, unprepossessing, too much aware, even without her confirmation, of his deficiencies, hated not loved, not hated despised, himself, his environment, his family, everything that surrounded him, everything he stood for, which he couldn’t change, because it wasn’t in him to change a
nything.

  Carter, and all the Sergeant had to do was what Mole expected him to do, and Gunnarshaw, ranging the evidence against Carter until Carter couldn’t deny it, until Carter had no loophole left, opportunity and motive unanswerable. What was Carter to Cluff? What were people to the Sergeant?

  Someone was speaking. An envelope waved under his nose. Cluff looked automatically at the table, for the envelope containing Carter’s letter, and the envelope was still there. The envelope in Barker’s hand was a different envelope, newer, whiter, unaddressed, its flap untorn, not sealed down.

  The words he could hear were Barker’s words and Barker hadn’t finished yet. The news Barker had brought so proudly wasn’t enough for Barker. He had to drive it home, to emphasize it, to drum it into Cluff until it became the salient fact, the one thing that couldn’t be pushed into the recesses of Cluff’s mind.

  “There’s something else—” Barker was saying.

  The envelope, the other envelope, tipped. A few shreds of black, brittle matter, minute, speckled the space on Cluff’s blotter Barker had cleared. Mole was asking, without interrupting his study of Jane Trundle’s picture, “What is it?”

  “Her clothes,” Barker said. “I’d nothing else to do. I thought—. They’d taken them off at the mortuary. It was easier when she wasn’t wearing them—”

  Cluff rolled the dry threads between his fingers, feeling them rasp and give against his skin.

  “In her shoes,” Barker stammered, feeling that he was making a fool of himself. Mole managed at last to free himself from the spell of the snapshot. He glared at Barker angrily, his eyes accusing Barker of further complication, irrelevant, a red herring.

  “Caught in the crack between the half-sole and the upper, under the arch,” Barker succeeded in elaborating.

  Mole asked incredulously, “Don’t you believe what’s staring you in the face either?”

  Cluff leapt to his feet. He snatched at the hat he had thrown carelessly amongst his papers. He was halfway to the door already, Clive in front of him scratching at the threshold. Barker caught him up in the outer office. Mole shouted, “Have you gone mad?” He rushed in his turn through Cluff’s door. He yelled, “It could have been there for weeks, whatever it is.”