Nell Alone

by Jennie Melville

  ‘But who am I lending the money to, you or your husband?’ Nell had asked, when she wrote in reply.

  ‘That was a terrible thing to have asked, Nell,’ wrote back her sister in passion. It was the only thing on the typed postcard except for a brief comment that they were moving their address. Louise had not written again.

  ‘You see, if there was a quarrel – well, that alters the case, doesn’t it?’ said the sergeant. He looked sturdily unbelieving, as if he spent far too much of his life listening to silly women but wouldn’t lose weight on it.

  ‘And how long is it since you heard from your sister?’ he went on.

  ‘Three weeks,’ said Nell. ‘ Nearly four.’

  ‘Not long. No. I don’t think we can go much by that. Take my advice and don’t worry. She’ll show up.’

  ‘I want you to look,’ persisted Nell.

  ‘Are you telling me all the truth, Miss?’ he asked giving her a penetrating look.

  ‘Yes, of course I am.’

  But she wasn’t. There was a little item she was keeping to herself. She thought Louise had been anxious to leave the city because she believed Nell would find her husband attractive. This was something Nell was ashamed to tell to the sergeant.

  As it was, he knew at once she was lying; she could read disbelief in his eyes. He stood up. ‘Come in and see us when you’ve had time to think it over. Or

  you may find there’s no need.’

  He had decided, not altogether wrongly, that she was a liar. Or,

  at the least, a girl with a secret.

  They were still digging up the street outside as Nell left.

  Nell had no way of knowing what was in the young policeman’s

  mind. She was ignorant of the impression she had created.

  ‘I don’t know whether we’ll ever turn up the missing sister or

  even if she really is missing,’ he told himself, ‘but I do know this:

  if she turns up dead, I shall know where to look.’

  He thought about Nell. ‘ There’s violence in that girl.’ And then

  he added: ‘Attractive girl, too.’

  Nell was very busy that morning at the Institute, and worked on with determination until lunch time. She resisted the temptation to telephone her home to see what answer she got. No policeman interrupted her and, although Jordan Neville put his head round the door once, he withdrew it rapidly as he saw the forbidding expression on her face.

  By lunch-time she was tired and thirsty. She had a ten-year-old boy with her, called Jimmy, who was pretending to be deaf and dumb. At least the considered medical opinion was that he must be pretending as there was no organic reason for his impediment. Also, he had certainly been able to talk at least six months ago when, according to his school teacher, he had had a vocabulary which would not have disgraced a merchant seaman.

  She studied his case history.

  ‘James Glyn, born 1955. The first child of a family to which six more have subsequently been born. Subject’s father is an excessively alcoholic individual, a poor supporter of his family, whom he frequently deserts. He makes infrequent payments for their support. The mother works irregularly. She is described by her employers as a good worker. The police, on the other hand, who have had contact with her, consider her to be a nagging and quarrelsome woman unfit to care for her children.

  ‘James has good health. Because of chaotic conditions at home with no real training in discipline, he and his brother and sisters have displayed delinquent traits at an early age. He entered school at the age of five but has been a poor attender. He was examined (Dr Baker) at the age of six and considered to be of borderline defective intelligence.’

  Nell looked up and met James’s eyes. They seemed alert and bright to her. She lowered her gaze and read on.

  ‘James was examined again at the age of eight. IQ. 78.’

  Nell looked at him. So his I.Q. was obviously improving. She smiled slightly and to her surprise James gave a wintry smile back.

  On the whole Nell did not blame him for putting aside his faculties. He was probably happier without them. But it was her duty to break up his tranquil inward communion. Withdrawal might even be the best way out for him, but it was heresy to think so here. He must communicate.

  She saw from his medical report that his health had improved too over the last few months, so he was healthier as well as happier without speech and sound. Perhaps we all should be.

  ‘You know, you’d be a nice-looking boy if only you could hear and talk,’ she said in a soft voice.

  His expression did not alter. The deafness was real, not feigned. The mind could do anything, Nell told herself. No one knew this better than she.

  She smiled at him again and once again he smiled back. Something about that smile told Nell she was in for a long job, and with a sigh she took up the burden.

  ‘Come along, boy,’ she said to him. ‘We’ve got to work at this.’

  All the same, Jimmy defeated her on this trip, and she thought he would again, and possibly again. She was standing and considering her failure when the knock on the door came.

  For the moment she ignored it. She was quite accustomed to ignoring knocks on the door when it suited her.

  ‘Miss Hilton? Dr Hilton?’

  ‘Either will do,’ said Nell, looking up. ‘Close the door, will you?

  There’s a draught.’ She caught at the papers blowing about her desk.

  ‘It’s quite a draughty building,’ answered the policeman amiably. ‘You could do with a new one.’

  ‘We could do with almost everything,’ said Nell. ‘Including money.’

  ‘Practically every person I’ve spoken to here has made that speech.’ The detective looked interested.

  ‘It’s on our minds. You know we might be closed up.’

  ‘I hope not. You do good work. We know all about what you do in this district,’ he said politely. His eyes were making a journey round her room as he spoke. It was a tidy anonymous room from which you could tell that Nell worked hard and nothing else.

  ‘Come on, what’s this all about, why the big build-up?’ asked Nell abruptly. ‘What is it you want to ask me?’

  The policeman looked surprised as if he hadn’t expected Nell to start talking in such a way. But Jordan Neville could have told him that there was in Nell a brash, awkward streak that made her strike out like this occasionally. ‘She does it on purpose, the little devil,’ Jordan would have pointed out. And it was true that it did, as now, often give her a slight advantage.

  It’s a boring world and someone like Nell in it provides a diversion. The policeman looked amused as well as surprised. But policemen are trained to come back fighting and he did so now. He produced the routine phrase.

  ‘I’m making a few enquiries. Perhaps you can help.’

  ‘About the body that was found?’ Nell shook her head. ‘ I don’t suppose I can help.’

  ‘You may be able to. You can’t tell. Let me be the judge of that. I’m asking the questions.’

  Nell sat down at her desk and faced him, waiting.

  ‘We are trying to establish the identity of the body we have found. We don’t have anything yet.’

  ‘Nothing at all?’ said Nell, her eyes bright. She was interested in people disappearing, totally disappearing. Louise was gone, wasn’t she? And she had asked the police for help and they had given her none. Now they wanted help, she enjoyed the irony.

  ‘I wouldn’t say nothing. There is always something – a scrap of paper, a piece of cloth to give some sort of indication to us.’

  The dead person stirred a little now again, a little life coming back as the names game was played. This was a game the dead one wished to play.

  ‘You don’t talk like a policeman,’ said Nell suspiciously.

  ‘In this city we are anxious for policemen to make a good impression,’ he said severely. ‘I should have introduced myself. I am Detective Abel.’

  ‘I don’t know why you t
hink we can help you here in the Institute. We’re only around from nine until five, then the building is empty weekends too. Most of my colleagues don’t belong in the district. Even our patients come from all over the country.’

  ‘You employ cleaners, work people from here.’

  ‘Yes, that’s true.’ Nell’s mind shot to her own cleaner, a sad-looking woman six feet tall and with a brown moustache. She was still around anyway. Only this morning she had polished Nell’s floor until it shone and, as usual, completely neglected to dust her desk. She devoted all her energies to the floor, which was like glass, and pretended to be afraid of disturbing Nell’s papers on the desk. Possibly she was afraid, but Nell was reasonably certain that she read the papers when it suited her. Sometimes Nell left things out on purpose.

  ‘But that doesn’t mean anything, I agree. I just make the point.’ He leaned forward. ‘A letter was found with the body which indicated some contact here.’

  He leaned back and was silent, allowing Nell to absorb the sinister undertones of this conversation.

  ‘What did it say? If there is a letter it must have a signature, an address on it.’

  ‘Perhaps hardly a letter,’ he admitted. ‘The top of a letter.’

  ‘I’m not quite clear. Was it the top of a letter to someone here? Or a letter addressed from here?’

  ‘It began: “Dear Dr Hilton”,’ he said smoothly, watching her.

  Chapter Four

  Nell came back at this statement of Detective Abel’s as she had been trained to do. In her world you never accepted anything as fact until you had examined it suspiciously from all angles.

  ‘Show me this paper,’ she said promptly.

  ‘I don’t exactly carry evidence around with me in a pocket. It’s not allowed, to begin with. But I have a photograph.’ He handed one across and Nell studied it.

  ‘It’s not a writing I know,’ she said at once. ‘Not to remember. I may have seen it, of course. I get very few written letters as a matter of fact. Most of my correspondents seem to type.’

  ‘You may never have got the letter,’ he observed, pocketing the photograph.

  ‘I obviously didn’t,’ said Nell sharply. ‘ Or it would have been in my possession, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Nell saw the implications as he had obviously meant she should. If she had received the letter it might have somehow passed out of her possession into that of the dead person, either before or after death. It was the after that worried her.

  ‘Is this a case of murder you are investigating?’ In spite of her control her voice was a little high.

  ‘We can’t say yet.’

  ‘But you are treating it as such?’

  ‘Naturally.’ It was striking how much younger and less confident he looked when he was being asked to reveal something. He wasn’t perhaps such a very experienced questioner, Detective Abel. What had his training been? Mostly in the wholly guilty or the really innocent? Not in people like Nell who are still making up their mind which to be. ‘I wouldn’t say that. You mustn’t put words into my mouth, Dr Hilton. It’s like I said, we want to establish identity.’

  He stood up to go. ‘We don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Sooner or later the gap this man left in the world he lived in is going to show up and we shall be told about it. Missing men always get a name in the end.’

  Nell nodded as if in agreement. But inside herself she was making a different answer. ‘ Not always,’ she said to herself. ‘ Perhaps sometimes their friends and relations are quite glad to have the hole there and don’t want it filled.’ She thought that she after all had more personal experience of missing people.

  ‘Much of my work is really concerned with helping people to find an identity,’ she said absently. ‘Only children of course. Perhaps you might say I even create one for them. Or I could do, if I wasn’t very very scrupulous.’

  ‘I am sure you would never do anything unethical, Dr Hilton.’

  ‘No.’ She looked up at him and gave him a beautiful and suddenly confident smile.

  Detective Abel thought it one of the strangest smiles he had seen.

  On the examination table the police pathologist soon discovered that the strange shrivelled blackness of the dead person had been due to burning.

  ‘Wrapped in newspaper and then burned,’ he announced, delicately picking out a charred piece of newspaper with a tweezer. ‘Strange.’

  ‘Only an attempt at burning really,’ observed Detective Abel, who had turned up there to watch. ‘Only the head and shoulders. Oh well, that makes it murder, I suppose.’

  ‘I can think of some pretty rum suicides.’

  ‘True. When will you know for sure?’

  ‘Give me time.’

  ‘We always do. Are you trying to read that newspaper?’

  ‘Be patient and I may get the date off it for you.’

  ‘Try and find a name and address while you’re at it, will you?’ said Abel, preparing to leave again.

  ‘I might help you come close to it, ‘said the scientist, in whose mind a new thought was beginning to arise. ‘ Here, hang on a moment.’

  Abel crossed the room and sat down on a chair to wait. He knew how to be patient. He watched the minute hand on his watch move round.

  Finally the pathologist raised his head from his work.

  ‘You will have to wait for me to confirm this but I believe this is murder. Strangulation.’

  So now the dead person had made one clear statement: I died violently and before my time.

  There was undeniably a subdued excitement about the Institute today. Nell noticed it at lunch where, although she herself never mentioned the police visits, she was probably the only one who didn’t: except for Jordan who lunched with her, loyal and silent.

  Detective Abel had probably not told anyone about the scrap of paper with ‘Dear Dr Hilton’ written on it, and Nell certainly had not, but the grape-vine had put the news about with zest. Everyone knew. And, of course, even before the police pathologist had passed the word to Abel, they were calling it murder.

  ‘They’re looking at you and they’re absolutely delighted that you knew some poor devil who’s got himself slugged,’ said Jordan gloomily.

  ‘But I don’t think I did,’ replied Nell, eating steak hungrily. ‘The steak is good today, isn’t it? I have quite an appetite.’

  ‘Why won’t you watch out for yourself better, Nell?’

  ‘Oh, I do.’

  ‘One day you’re going to find a great big hole and you’ll be at the bottom of it.’

  ‘I suppose that’s a new way of saying that I’m riding for a fall?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You may be right,’ answered Nell. ‘But it’s too late now.’

  ‘Nell! Nell, what do you mean?’

  ‘Just a joke. Because it never is too late really, is it? There never is a time when you can’t change your mind and say I’ll go back,’ said Nell, in whom a sense of nightmare was deepening.

  ‘Don’t deceive yourself on that score,’ said Jordan, now thoroughly alarmed by Nell. ‘Or you will be in trouble.’ He put his hand gently on hers. ‘I love you, Nell.’

  For a moment Nell considered enlisting him in the work she had on hand. (‘ Just a little project, Jordan, you could be a real help’). But he was too good, too sane, and for what she was doing she knew well that you had to be just a little mad.

  She withdrew her hand.

  When she got home that evening, Nell went straight into her sitting-room. Her visitor, or her prisoner, look at it as you will, was lying asleep. In his sleep he looked younger and weaker.

  His hands lay, palms up, in his lap. Nell could see their redness and a tiny row of blisters almost as if he had been using his hands to move something heavy. Himself, for instance. He could have been using arms and hands to drag himself about. Nell thought he might have been doing just that.

  She touched his hair softly and moved it from his face.

>   ‘What are you preparing yourself for?’ she asked, half aloud. He did not stir.

  But she might also have added: ‘And what am I preparing you for?’

  Chapter Five

  The two girls Amabel and Charlotte were not long left untouched by the finding of a dead body not far from their home. Charlotte’s mother, an extremely nervous woman, ordered them to stay home or play in the garden.

  ‘Play!’ said Charlotte scornfully. ‘ What does she think we are? For three days now I’ve been a poet and she says play.’

  ‘You were a dancer last week,’ said Amabel sceptically.

  ‘Yes, and next week I’ll be a painter,’ answered Charlotte robustly. ‘But now I’m a poet.’

  ‘I wish I could be anything,’ cried Amabel. ‘I don’t seem to see myself as anything. That’s my trouble.’

  ‘You have to work at it,’ said Charlotte. ‘I’ve had weeks and weeks when I was absolutely negative.’

  They looked at each other with sympathy. Both agreed on the importance of a positive line on life.

  ‘But then I would call you a sceptical person,’ went on Charlotte. ‘You ask so many questions. I’d call you more a destructive person than a creative.’ She looked grave.

  ‘Thanks.’ Amabel aimed a punitive kick at her friend’s shins. ‘Who asked you to sum up?’

  ‘It’s the poet’s task,’ said Charlotte, ‘to pass judgment, you know.’

  ‘Let’s meet again later,’ said Amabel, getting up and lounging off. ‘When you’ve stopped digging the poet’s task.’

  ‘No, wait,’ called Charlotte, ‘I have something real to tell you.’

  Amabel paused. ‘No more poet’s task?’

  ‘No. Something I saw.’ Charlotte bustled over.

  Amabel waited.

  ‘The old woman—’ began Charlotte.

  ‘She’s a terrible old woman,’ said Amabel, with complete and utter conviction. ‘Miss Hilton can’t see that.’

  ‘I can’t myself always,’ said Charlotte slowly. ‘She gave me chocolate once.’

  ‘Chocolate!’ said Amabel with scorn.