Windsor Red

by Jennie Melville

  It was soon established that all four limbs had been cut off by the same instrument, no doubt by the same hand and probably within the same time period. It was like the brush work on a painting, you could recognise the style. The cut marks on each leg had the same neat, regular look as if one person had worked away without interruption.

  All four limbs had traces of some substance which was discovered to be flour. Straightforward household flour as used in home baking. Under the microscope it looked coarsely ground with its full share of particles of husk.

  The laboratory worker who did the analysis knew what he was looking at but did not know Wellington Yard.

  The policeman who read the report first knew Wellington Yard, but did not pick up the significance of what he read. He was tired and out of sorts that day, because of a quarrel with his wife.

  A miss then.

  The link would not, of course, be missed for ever, perhaps not for very long, but for the moment there had been no connection.

  But the grouping of the four legs together in a good light did flush up one fact that had not been noticed before: the legs were sun-tanned.

  On the Datchet Road stood the Prince Albert Hospital, built in 1886, hit by a bomb in 1941, and totally rebuilt in 1960, when there was still a bit of money around for building. The design had been award-winning, the first major project of a young architect later to win a Gold Medal. He had been proud of his construction, because it was good to look at, the roof did not leak and the windows were in the right place, giving sunlight but no discomfort to the inhabitants who did not feel they were living in a fishbowl. It was a popular, small hospital, constantly under threat of closure because of its size but with plenty of active local support that rallied to its defence when it needed it.

  Like the police the Prince Albert came under pressure at this time, since it was missing a consultant and one junior doctor as well as being short of nurses on several wards.

  The consultant was away at a conference in Virginia where he was reading a paper; he was passionately envied by his junior colleagues for this outing. They looked forward to the day when it would be their turn. The junior doctor, who worked in obstetrics, had not yet returned from holiday

  The well attended and hard-working paediatric department was particularly feeling the strain because of the chicken-pox epidemic. Such epidemics have their own pattern of appearance in the young population. They are not uncommon or usually serious, but this one was proving nastier than most. Here and there were some very sick children. South Windsor had a pocket of such cases, all of whom were being nursed in the Prince Albert. One of these was young Peter Robertson.

  He was in a small side ward and his mother was with him. Parents were encouraged to stay with sick children, anyway, but Bessie Robertson was a special case. She was the mother of both a very ill boy and a missing baby. Under such terrible double stress, Bessie needed attention herself, so since her own doctor was still away, the hospital had taken her under its wing.

  It so happened that all the babies that had been lifted had been delivered in this hospital. Whether this was of significance or not had yet to be established, but it was certainly interesting. Practically speaking, it had meant the obstetric and gynaecological department coming under scrutiny from the police, who were in and out all the time, asking questions. They found it hard to believe that the department could not, somehow, lead them to a suitably guilty nursing mother. Some of the doctors, nurses and hospital staff had found this easy to bear, others had not.

  So the police had reason to be around the Prince Albert Hospital.

  In addition, the boy himself was a witness (if you could believe him) in the severed limbs case. He had seen the first plastic sack at a time and place before it appeared in the Yard, he had seen a woman standing by it. The police wanted to ask him about these statements. They had questioned the boy out with him on that night, but the friend said he had noticed nothing. So it was all up to Peter Robertson, when he could talk. That wouldn’t be just yet, the doctors said.

  A young policewoman spent a lot of the day with Bessie and Peter, just in case. She was in plain clothes, being on probation for the detective branch. It was an important step for her, an ambitious girl, with a pretty face, good voice and an acute mind.

  She was well primed with the questions she would ask if she got the chance. At the moment, mid afternoon on the day after Charmian and Anny had looked for Kate and Harry in Ealing, the Girls had eaten a pizza supper after the theatre, and the two other legs had turned up, Bessie and Peter were asleep, and the policewoman felt drowsy herself. But she was a conscientious girl, so she forced herself awake.

  This girl was an admirer of Charmian Daniels, had taken her as her career model, and meant to be equally successful. Although Charmian was keeping herself in the background and saying nothing, she was the object of much quiet observation from the local Force. They might not know what she was up to, but they knew she was there. She was a name, a figure to be watched. She had done things in the past that made her a legend.

  For someone like WPC Dolly Barstow she had helped establish the position of women in the CID. Of course, she had not been happy in herself as a person, or so one heard, but Dolly meant to do better. To begin with, she would not marry, or if she did, then her husband would not be a fellow policeman.

  A nurse came into the room, took the boy’s pulse, then smiled at Dolly.

  ‘How is he?’ Dolly had got the present task because she had had chicken-pox, a nasty go, and she knew what it felt like.

  ‘Coming on nicely.’

  ‘He hasn’t said much.’ Nothing really, just the odd mutter. He seemed to sleep all the time.

  ‘Oh, there’s no brain damage.’

  ‘Could there be?’

  ‘Well, you never know.’ She smiled again and departed.

  Bessie had not stirred. Just as well, Dolly considered, since there was still no news of the baby, if she could sleep the time away—she might wake up one hour and learn he was back. With luck. Quietly, she took herself off in search of a cup of coffee. She had learnt to avoid the coffee of the Prince Albert.

  She had not wasted her time at the hospital where she was already on friendly terms with several of the nurses and a few of the doctors. She had eyed one of the senior housemen, who had an air of patrician dreaminess which took her fancy, such a change from her colleagues. Moreover, he liked her. Without a word being passed between them, they had managed to meet several times at the coffee-machine.

  The special coffee-machine, of course, in the doctors’ common-room, which made real coffee, not the sad coffee in paper mugs which was provided for patients and visitors in the lobby.

  She poured her coffee, avoiding sugar and cream. Her training allowed her to take in the room at a glance, without appearing to do so, a very useful trick to a hopeful girl. He was not there.

  A hand touched her elbow. She gave a jump. ‘ Oh, you.’ She dabbed at her skirt.

  ‘I walked in behind you. Sorry if I made you spill your coffee on your skirt.’

  ‘It’s had worse on it.’

  He wasn’t quite with her today. Mind on his work, probably. Yes, he was taking a quick look at his watch.

  He never talked about his cases. She respected his professionalism, it was how she liked to behave herself. He talked about his colleagues sometimes, but with discreet amusement, as if he was talking about strange animals of a race subtly different from his own. This was the quality that Dolly so liked about him.

  A voice from the door hailed him. ‘Len?’

  Yes, this was his name, the only unstylish thing about him. Dolly never used it, secretly she hoped it was short for something finer. Perhaps it was Lancelot. One wouldn’t use Lancelot, she could see that, but it would be there in the background.

  The speaker was a tall young woman, another doctor, of whom Dolly was a little jealous. She had noticed that Len did not make jokes about Fiona.

  ‘Can I have a word
?’ she gave Dolly a brief smile, as if Dolly was not important but could not be ignored.

  Len poured himself some coffee, but did not move from his spot near Dolly. ‘Speak on.’

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Well, thank you.’

  ‘Good. Because one by one people are going down with infections. Gervase has chicken-pox.’

  ‘I’ve had it,’ said Len promptly.

  ‘So have I. Of course, I’ve got migraine and I might have flu, but I can’t go sick because everyone else has got in first.’

  ‘Is that what you came to say?’

  ‘No, that was just a cry of pain.’ And she relapsed into a technical conversation about the advisability of inducing labour in a difficult case, who was making a fuss about natural childbirth.

  ‘I always say: Tell me what you don’t want,’ said Len, in a practical way. He made one or two suggestions which Fiona accepted.

  Dolly thought she looked very tired. In a burst of sympathy she poured some coffee and handed her a cup.

  ‘Oh thanks,’ and this time Dolly got a real smile. ‘I must dash. I’m covering Amanda Rivers’ slab on the rota, and if she doesn’t get back soon I shall scream.’

  ‘Not on the ward, I hope. Sister would not stand for it.’

  ‘No, to the Hospital Administrator,’ said Fiona grimly, sounding as if she meant it. She drank the coffee, then made for the door.

  ‘I must go too,’ said Dolly to Len. She had been away too long as it was.

  They eyed each other. A decisive moment was approaching and they both knew it. Either forward or back it must now be. Dolly took the plunge for them both.

  ‘I’m off duty tonight.’ She had already recognised that she was probably the keener of the two.

  ‘I’m on call. I could bring my bleeper, though.’

  The step had been taken. After all, bringing your bleeper home to a girl is a decided advance towards intimacy.

  ‘Right. I can’t say I won’t get a phone call myself. You never know in my job.’ It was something they had in common.

  Together they walked towards the main lobby from which all ground floor corridors radiated. At this time in the afternoon it was quiet and uncrowded. It might at any moment explode into life with an emergency, but for the moment the two young women at the reception desk had time to talk to each other.

  ‘I know why you are here, of course,’ said Len. ‘ Stories have gone around. How is the boy?’

  ‘Not talking.’

  ‘It’s a funny business.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Mm.’ Len acknowledged her point. ‘The mysteries in a small town.’ Not that you could really call Windsor a small town. Or not the average small town. In size perhaps, but as an idea it was very big. ‘You must know what is going on in the investigation on the kidnapped babies.’

  And it was not much. ‘Yes.’ A lovely, pedantic way of putting things he had. As she did not say.

  ‘But you couldn’t discuss it.’ It was hardly even a query; he took professional silence for granted.

  ‘No.’ Although that did not mean she might not, given the right circumstances. ‘Why?’

  ‘Just something I’ve been thinking about.’ He looked towards the lifts. On the third floor a patient was waiting for him.

  ‘Want to say?’

  ‘A thought I had. Might be nothing in it. I’ll go on thinking about it. Tell you tonight.’

  It could do me a lot of good to come up with a really bright lead. As once again she did not say aloud. She knew without being told that although ambitious himself he would not promote hers. Charmian, her model, had taken her first big step forward when a murderer fell in love with her. Or so the story went. This case was quite different, of course. But you did need a bit of luck. Dolly decided to hang on to her luck.

  ‘Tonight it is.’ She gave him directions how to find her flat:

  Middle of the town, you can walk it. Run back to the hospital if you have to. And I’ll run with you if I haven’t got what I want out of you by then.

  One of the women at the reception desk was taking a telephone call, her gaze wandering from the doors to the lifts as she did so.

  Charmian pushed open the big swing doors. You’re not supposed to get emotionally involved, she told herself.

  Behind her was a day in which she had had a session with her supervisor, had spoken to Humphrey Kent about Mr Delaney on the telephone, and had made arrangements to see Yvonne and then Elsie at home tonight.

  She was smarting slightly: her supervisor, a middle-aged don, approved of what she had done so far but seemed to view her efforts with the same faint scepticism as her police colleagues. ‘You know something I don’t know,’ his expression had seemed to say, ‘but I do not desire to know it. I am a scholar, between us is a gulf fixed.’ It was disheartening.

  Then he examined her. ‘What questions are you asking? Are you asking if women criminals are different from men criminals? Is their criminality of a different type? Do women only fall into crime when they lack a strong family nexus? Should we, indeed, use the word fall? Does it imply a sexist basis in the way we talk about women criminals? Are these the questions you are asking? And what sort of answers do you look for? You know, by the way, the true scholar does not look for the answers, they fall on him from the heavens, he is surprised.’ This bit was not disheartening, but it was gruelling.

  Now she had taken a few minutes for her own private enquiry.

  She looked around, caught the abstracted gaze of the woman on the telephone, and turned towards Dolly and Len. As one actress will recognise another, so she knew Dolly at once for what she was.

  ‘I’m searching for Dr Amanda Rivers. Can you tell me where she is?’ The receptionist left her telephone and came across to Dolly. ‘ I was looking for you. There’s a call. That telephone over there.’

  Dolly went across to take the call. She listened, did not say much in reply, then came back with a sober face. ‘It’s the missing baby. I have to tell Mrs Robertson.’

  So Dolly Barstow, apprentice police detective, went off to see Mrs Robertson; Dr Len Lennard, first name Aylwin, departed to help his patient to deliver her child; and Charmian Daniels, denied a meeting with Amanda Rivers, but having obtained her home address, had set off for Wellington Yard.

  Laraine, Nix, Betty, Rebecca, Yvonne and Elsie had each finished their day’s business and gone to their own places without communicating with each other that day. Nix, whose antennae were sensitive, had picked out from the air the sense of hostile observation. It was a general feeling she had, one she did not pin on Charmian specifically, but it was hanging over her head and might at any moment settle on her.

  Len was thinking about his patient, but also about the babies and the way they were fed; he had an idea.

  Dolly was thinking about the Robertson baby but also about Charmian, whom she had identified accurately.

  Charmian was thinking about Kate and the women whom she thought of variously as the Girls, the Group or the Gang.

  They were thinking only of themselves, and what they had in store for life. Well, perhaps not the whole of life, this little bit of it as represented in Windsor. Perhaps the happiest of them all was Yvonne, who was dreaming of entertaining Charmian Daniels in her own little room. She thought she had a friend there, and from now on, things might look up. She would make her a cup of tea (not alcohol, drink meant little to Yvonne, but tea she did feel strongly about), and they would talk. In her way, Yvonne was a romantic.

  Laraine saw it in terms of money. She usually did. In no abstract way, she was not a miser, but for what it could buy. Clothes, a bit of jewellery, a lover. She knew what she wanted, what was for sale and its price. She was for sale herself. Always had been, and her real grudge against life was that she hadn’t fetched a higher price.

  Nix heard trumpets blowing and saw flags flying. As she saw herself, she was a fighter against society. It was her against them. A battle by a woman for wome
n. Show them.

  Betty, as was her wont, weighed up the risks and profits of breaking the law, and came down in favour of breaking it. As she nearly always had done. It was the way of life of her family. Since she was out of touch with her brothers at the moment, she had substituted the other women, led by Laraine and Nix. She would not necessarily remain loyal to them. Her loyalty was fragile, but for the moment they had it. She took Elsie Hogan with her as a kind of satellite: Elsie was not allowed, and did not want, her own opinions.

  Rebecca knew she had got into it all because she had nowhere else to go. Anyway, she was a friend of Elsie Hogan who was a friend of Betty and she trusted them. As far as she trusted anyone. Why worry? She was a drifter, always had been, knew it and did not care. She was the despair of her probation officer.

  Yvonne had not made a conscious choice. Once again, things were happening to her in a totally unexpected and mysterious way, and she just went along with them. She was the last one to know why.

  Charmian Daniels found herself longing passionately for her little house in Deerham Hills, to which, she supposed, she would now never go back to live permanently. She would return only to sell and pack up. But it was no good, she would never get used to being a Southerner. North and South it was, just as in the days of Mrs Gaskell (one of her favourite novelists), and she was a Northerner. She felt unsophisticated and provincial and was annoyed with herself for feeling so. It was the girl Dolly who had made her feel like that, without meaning to but she had, with her glossy ways and her pretty voice. Also the young doctor with his superior manner.

  Windsor society itself was probably too much for her and she had not bargained for the intensity of the Windsor season. She should never have come to live here, she should have left it to Anny who seemed better adjusted to it all (but Anny had always had money), and found herself some other hole to live in. Slough, say, or Staines.

  Then she remembered Kate again and felt ashamed of herself. It was a terrible thing to be worried about your child. To suspect her of something you hardly dare think about. She had to respect this in Anny.