by Gil North
Greensleeve stood there. He closed the door of his car and made slowly for his shop. He stopped in the doorway, realizing that Jean and Margaret were staring at him, Margaret grinning, Jean pale-faced and worried. He shook his head as if to clear it of confusion. He said, “We can’t allow this to go on,” his words measured. “The whole of Gunnarshaw knows the truth. There’s no question about who’s guilty. If he won’t arrest Carter we’ll have to find a policeman who will.”
He wondered what was the matter with her. He asked Jean, “Are you ill?” She had a hand to her mouth and he quailed under her fixed, wide-open eyes. He began to explain, reasonably, trying to make it clear to her, “There can’t be any doubt about it. The way he used to wait for her, her treatment of him. You must have heard. The town’s humming with it.”
Margaret’s grin widened. He could have struck Margaret. He asked himself, “What have I done to her?” He said, “Isn’t the important thing to punish Jane’s murderer? It’s the only thing.” He added, “It’s not what she was, what might have happened in her life apart from Carter.” He addressed himself exclusively to Jean, Margaret forgotten. “Don’t you agree?” he begged.
Jean spun on her feet. She ran blindly into the dispensary. He heard her running across the dispensary to the cloakroom behind. He called after her, “It must be Carter, Jean.”
He half-turned, helplessly, to Margaret and he couldn’t bear to stay in Margaret’s presence. She didn’t move until he had gone. Then she strolled to the door, into the shop entrance. Cluff and Barker, with Clive, stood together in a little group, this side of the church, opposite the Town Hall on the farther pavement. Greensleeve hurried, conspicuous in the rain, making an exhibition of himself that no one in Gunnarshaw, a couple of days ago, would have credited.
Jean pushed against Margaret, dressed for the street. Jean said desperately, “How can he talk like that?”
“It isn’t true,” Margaret goaded. “But if it was true Carter was driven to it. Where are you going?”
“Must I—?”
“You’ve got to tell. If Carter killed her, there’s an excuse. The Sergeant can’t help Carter unless he knows. No one’ll believe what Carter says on Carter’s word alone.” She watched Jean. “What must it be like for Carter? Carter’s word against Greensleeve’s—”
Chapter VIII
“Again?” Cluff said, fending Greensleeve off.
“You must have talked to Carter,” Greensleeve pleaded.
“You’ll catch cold. Where’s your coat?”
“She’d go with any man who asked her to.”
“You knew her better than I did.”
“No—”
“Yes.”
“He’s a liar if he said so.”
“Perhaps not.”
“What did he tell you?”
“They were together, Jane and Carter. You saw them—
twice.”
“You’re guessing.”
Cluff moved on to the setts, across the road. He began to climb the steps in front of the Town Hall.
Greensleeve held Barker’s arm: “Weren’t you there? Hadn’t Carter found out?”
“Found out?”
“What did he kill her for?”
He couldn’t hold Barker any more than he had been able to hold Cluff. He felt eyes watching him from windows. He started back for the shop and saw Jean coming towards him. She lifted her head and turned quickly, her feet pattering away. He ran a few paces and forced himself to a walk, despairing of catching her or, if he caught her, of what he could say in the street. Margaret stood in the entrance to his shop. She moved inside, scornful, back to her place at the counter. He stayed on the threshold, out of the rain.
Cluff came out of the Town Hall and spoke to Barker, who was waiting for him at the bottom of the steps. The two men and the dog recrossed the road. They rounded the corner by the church. Just before the buildings cut off their view down the High Street, Barker looked round.
“Can you see him?” Cluff asked.
“By the shop.”
They walked over a bridge.
Barker said, “Gunnarshaw’ll never believe it.”
“Do you?”
“It’s difficult—”
“You’re wrong,” Cluff said. “Gunnarshaw would be glad to believe it. What friends has he made in Gunnarshaw? The higher they climb the harder they fall.”
“Are you certain?”
“It wasn’t a long meeting. They make all their decisions in committee. They’d nothing to do except confirm the committees’ minutes.”
Cluff added, “In any case, he didn’t stay to the end.”
“It’s odd—”
“She wanted him to see her with Carter. Not merely once, when she left the shop. Again, at a place meaning more to him than the shop.”
“Carter wasn’t with her that time.”
“Behind her. Would Greensleeve know the difference?”
“But why?”
Cluff shrugged: “If she made Greensleeve believe that she wasn’t alone, if he thought Carter was in it with her—”
“In what?”
“She’d a hold over him.”
“The baby?”
“It could hardly have been the first money she’d got out of Greensleeve. He wouldn’t be likely to pay any more willingly than the next man.”
“She’d quarrelled with Carter.”
“She wouldn’t have shared with anybody. Only a fool would have thought she’d get support from Carter. She wasn’t a fool. Carter was to let Greensleeve know she’d go to any lengths.”
“It’s only conjecture.”
“Where else can we start?”
“We don’t know he fathered it.”
“It might have served its purpose just as well.”
“If she followed him, to the Town Hall—”
“Motive. She was hounding him now. He couldn’t know when she’d confront him in public. She meant him not to know. She let him see her behind him. He leaves his car at the back of the Town Hall when he’s attending meetings. She could go out of the side door, into the car. It’s dark there. He’d know that was what she’d done.”
“He’d caught himself a tartar.”
“He’s never lived in Rupert Street.”
“A man in his position—”
“Everyone’s got a blind spot.”
“He’s married.”
“Would he be less dictatorial at home than in public?”
“I’m sorry for his wife,” Barker said.
Cluff warned him, “Don’t turn into my kind of policeman. You won’t be a success.”
They climbed the hill, out of the town centre. Cluff added, after a few minutes, “Nothing’s ever gone wrong for him. He’s money, a reputation in local government, more than a voice—a say—in what goes on in Gunnarshaw. People dance when he calls the tune.”
“Not you, Sergeant.”
Cluff took this road every day, to and from his cottage two miles off. At one time the houses of the town had extended only halfway up the road, beyond that point fields. The fields had blossomed more lately, like a garden given over to weeds, into a rash of quickly-built semi-detached dwellings contrasting with the solider, more substantial detached houses nearer to the High Street. Space when these latter had been built wasn’t at a premium. Their original owners, as anachronistic as the houses had become, had liked quiet and privacy. There weren’t many of these mansions and they stood in grounds round which trees had grown into thick screens.
Cluff said, “Greensleeve knows what we think we know.”
“Is that why you wouldn’t let me bolt the gate of his yard last night?”
“Let him believe we know what we’ve still to find out. It might save us trouble in the long run.”
They hadn’t reached yet the modern erections of speculative builders. A short drive opened in a tall hedge growing high on a bank above a mortarless retaining wall. It curved between Scotch pines to the unseen door of a square house, rising at its corners into pseudo-turrets, a narrow branch diverging to a kitchen entrance at the back. Cluff said, “He must be proud to live here. His father and his grandfather had the rooms over the shop. He’s come a long way. Money, not breeding’s the yardstick of importance these days.”
“He’s done well for himself all right.”
“What’s left of the family that built this place hasn’t got twopence to rub together.”
A grass border edged the drive. Cluff stepped over it on to viscous soil under the trees. Windows at the side of the house overlooked the drive.
“I don’t like this,” Cluff said. “You go.” He called Clive under the trees with him. He told Barker, “He even keeps a servant of sorts. Only an old woman. Some kind of relative.” He added, “Try the back.” Barker’s feet crunched on the gravel. “Quietly,” Cluff warned. “Leave his wife out of it if you can. You know what to ask.”
“She can’t be kept in the dark for ever.”
“When I’m ready,” Cluff said.
He leaned on his stick. Clive, catching his sense of melancholy, the melancholy of the dripping, overgrown garden, its dull shrubs, its dark trees, looked up at him, helpless to cheer him when he was in this mood. Neither the dog nor the man noticed a curtain flutter at one of the upstairs windows. Barker didn’t come back.
The rain wept on him from the eyes of the trees. The winter afternoon waned to its close. He withdrew into himself, stifling thought, powerless to guide or control, too far on his way at this stage to go back, carried on by the tide of events. The sound of footsteps on the gravel penetrated his understanding but he didn’t look up, waiting to hear Barker’s voice. The footsteps stopped. He forgot them, sinking back into oblivion.
She said, “You don’t have to hide from me.”
He stepped over the verge again, on to the drive. He looked at Greensleeve’s wife, trying to reconcile the tone of her voice with her appearance. Her words sounded cheerful, even triumphant, as if she welcomed his coming rather than feared it. She looked weary and worn out, small like Greensleeve, both of them much of a height, thin, her figure more masculine than feminine.
“Caleb Cluff,” she said.
He remembered her, as he remembered all of his generation still alive, in the dales round Gunnarshaw or in Gunnarshaw where he had boarded on weekdays at the Grammar School. What he saw both pleased him and depressed him. He could not recognize in what Greensleeve had turned her into the girl Greensleeve had married. At the same time she justified both his pursuit of Greensleeve and his growing certainty of Greensleeve’s guilt. The pieces of the puzzle that was no puzzle clicked farther into place, the reasons for Greensleeve’s defection more obvious. Observing her from under lowered eyelids he could understand the impulse that had compelled Greensleeve to place in jeopardy everything most dear to him. Her fault or Greensleeve’s wasn’t important. The only fact that mattered was the woman Cluff saw now.
It came to him more forcibly than ever that he could hardly recall the time when he had last seen her in the town, years ago. She had disappeared from general view at so distant a date in the past that Gunnarshaw might well be forgiven for believing her already dead. She seemed to him hardly alive as it was, ghastly, doll-like. His heart lurched for the girl she had once been, a rung in the ladder of Greensleeve’s climb to urban glory, broken now, her purpose served. She faced him, slovenly, careless, her hair awry, her stockings wrinkled, not too clean. If anything of her youth had outlasted her life with Greensleeve it was her eyes. Her eyes gazed at Cluff, bright and sparkling. Her eyes were wrong, at odds with the rest of her. He felt naked under them. They held more in them than a girl’s eyes held, something he could not interpret, beyond his grasp.
He stood quietly. They faced each other in the gloom of the sad garden. Her lips curled and she said, “Your man’s in the kitchen.” He could follow or not as he wished. He followed, his dog beside him.
Barker perched on the edge of a wooden chair, diffident, uneasy, embarrassed. The large room was intended not only for a kitchen but as living quarters for domestic staff. An old woman, older than Alice Greensleeve, not much neater but stouter, less defeated once and once surer of herself, watched Barker like a hawk. Cluff felt that the mistress had been the maid and the maid the mistress, but it didn’t apply any more, the mistress in charge again and the maid confused and unbelieving.
“It’s not a social call,” Greensleeve’s wife said. He knew that she mocked him, but he did not know why. It occurred to him that she would thank him if he freed her from her husband. She stared at him as if she was considering how he could be useful to her. He had more than a passing conviction that she regarded him as a tool. The positions they ought to have had were reversed, she the originator, himself the instrument.
They spoke their minds in the dales, without fear or favour. They said what they meant in the least possible number of words, without prevarication, refusing to evade the issue. He was a dalesman, with a reputation amongst dalesmen for directness, famous for his independence with men who called no man master. He sought for words and he couldn’t find words. He began to get angry with himself and in the cold kitchen his cheeks warmed and went redder.
Her words were a statement of fact. “The murder,” she said, the smile that was no smile playing on her lips, her eyes taunting. The brightness in her eyes was the brightness of fever not of youth. He recognized it now if he had been deceived before. He looked down at his feet. What sort of game was this?
The servant, the dependent relative, whatever she was, frowned, transferring her attention from Barker to Greensleeve’s wife, a jailer whose prisoner had been suddenly pardoned, lost at the abrogation of authority. Alice Greensleeve’s eyes wandered to the old woman for a moment, challenging discipline, daring interference.
“We’re involved in it,” she told Cluff. “Of course we’re involved in it. He’d be a fool who thought differently.”
He couldn’t bring himself to speak the usual empty excuses about a routine visit, for elimination rather than for information, that he might have uttered. She wouldn’t have believed him. She looked into him and read his mind. If she was mildly surprised at his call it was only because he had delayed it for so long. He had an impression that she had been waiting for him.
He asked, “What time did your husband come in?” without apologies for bringing Greensleeve into it, not needing to elaborate the exact occasion he referred to. She showed no resentment at his question. It did not offend her in any way. She did not counter with a demand about why he asked it, how her husband was concerned. Indifference Cluff might have accepted, in view of her years with Greensleeve, the eagerness that bubbled in her stuck in his craw.
The old woman jerked like a marionette. Barker dropped his hat on the floor and stooped to retrieve it. Clive’s hackles lifted.
“He was often late,” Greensleeve’s wife said. “He didn’t spend much time at home.”
She volunteered the information offhandedly and Cluff was certain that she knew what she was saying. The walls around him contracted, oppressive, and the atmosphere of the room hung about him like a material fog, heavy with long-standing hostility. He longed for the open air. The house was a house of adults, disillusioned, beyond dreams, lacking the presence of children, and the memory of children, with nothing to sweeten the disillusion of growing old, worse than the house in Rupert Street.
She asked, “What would Gunnarshaw do without him?” her voice level, her tone neutral, carefully avoiding the sarcasm and bitterness Cluff sensed nevertheless.
He thought back, trying to see her in those days more exactly, the daughter of a manufacturer, of little account in the world outside but big enough i
n Gunnarshaw, a self-made man fashioning a new Gunnarshaw, coloured by his own image. Whatever Greensleeve’s views on the eligibility of a mistress the chemist had chosen a wife with an eye to the main chance, an only child with the inevitability of inheritance. She’d never attracted Cluff. He recalled her snobbish and spoilt, her nose in the air, holding her skirts against contact with more ordinary boys and girls.
She added, with the same air of impartiality, “And he’s busy at the shop.” She looked at Cluff archly. “Busy,” she repeated, “with more than he can do by himself.”
How did she know? Had she only suspected? Had Greensleeve, in a moment of lost self-control, mocked her with it, painting to her the picture of herself and comparing it with a picture of Jane Trundle? For some reason Cluff remembered Margaret in the shop, the bitterness and the contempt she directed at Greensleeve behind his back, the frustration of longing without gratification, the fear of surrender for which she never had opportunity. Margaret could have told Greensleeve’s wife, Margaret active to snatch from others a prize she had no hope of gaining herself. It wasn’t important. How Alice Greensleeve knew was beside the point. She knew and she wouldn’t admit she knew. Jane Trundle’s death was no tragedy to her.
The old woman interrupted suddenly, “Not much after nine,” and Barker jumped again. He looked anywhere but at Cluff. He cleared his throat nervously and prayed for Cluff to dismiss him.
It wasn’t over yet. Alice Greensleeve remarked, imperturbably, “The clocks in this house are never right.”
The old woman’s tone grew shrill: “I heard him.”
“She’s old,” Greensleeve’s wife told Cluff, excusing the woman not blaming her.
Cluff had his watch in his hand, comparing it with a clock on the mantel. He said, “It’s right now.”
“I’ve my wits about me,” the old woman screamed.
Alice Greensleeve continued, as though the servant hadn’t spoken, “He hasn’t been at home as early as that for years.”