Come Home and Be Killed

by Jennie Melville

  ‘So they did mean to go away,’ murmured Kathy; she went whiter than ever and sat down quickly. ‘Get me a drink of water, Rob.’

  ‘A minute ago you thought I’d poisoned you.’

  ‘I still think maybe you did,’ said Kathy weakly, ‘but get me some water now.’

  Robert got her the water and felt her pulse, almost as professionally as Emily herself might have done. Possibly they taught you that sort of thing in Insurance.

  ‘You’re not too bad,’ he said. ‘You’ve had a shock, and it’s getting late. If you lie down, I’ll sit here beside the ’phone and wait for news.’

  ‘You could go and sit beside your own ’ phone,’ said Kathy obstinate, hostile, as she rose to go upstairs, her shoes on the floor behind her, her stockinged feet making her much smaller than Robert.

  ‘They’re going to ring here. You still don’t trust me?’

  ‘I half do and I half don’t,’ said Kathy.

  ‘Go up to bed, Kathy,’ said Robert patiently, ‘and get some rest … And we’ll see in the morning.’ … What we shall see, he added, to himself.

  ‘Kathy,’ he called after her as she trailed upstairs, ‘were you really sick?’

  ‘Yes, I really was.’

  Robert nodded and let her go. He went about his preparations for the night methodically and sensibly. In the kitchen he made a pot of coffee, very strong and black and sweet, then he made himself a neat little pile of sandwiches. Then he arranged his chair between the telephone and the window, with a reading lamp by his side. He put a little heap of papers on the table by the light as if he meant to work on them. But in fact he did not settle himself in the chair at once. Instead, he went to the door and listened quietly. He heard the bathroom water running and deduced that Kathy was having a bath. In a few minutes the water began to drain down the pipe, he heard the bathroom door go and then Kathy’s door shut. He went silently up the stairs and listened. There was nothing to hear. He tried the handle. The door was locked.

  Then Robert went downstairs and going to his overcoat pocket took out and put on a pair of soft cotton gloves.

  Across Deerham Hills the town clock struck eleven.

  Seven hours since Kathy had first got back home. Eight hours and more since she had first anxiously asked the bus driver about Janet, and an unknown number of hours since Mumsy had disappeared.

  Deerham Hills was a quiet respectable town so that if it had crimes (and certainly it did have crimes, what town did not?) they were quiet respectable crimes: a shop broken open, a car or two stolen.

  A little violence, every crime must have violence, but not too much.

  Now it was to have a crime in which murder was planned.

  But whose murder?

  The driver of the bus was a man named Nicklin and he was a man well liked in his neighbourhood. He didn’t live in Deerham Hills proper, but in a less expensive little outpost of it called Gorseover. Perhaps there had been a Gorse there once. After all there was a hill. Now it was a section of little bungalows and houses and two-roomed maisonettes, laid out on the countryside, with open windows, and garages, and open-plan living, on the cheap certainly, but you had the look of the thing. There was a pub and coffee bar and even a church, so you had everything.

  Some of the roads were not made up, but they’d get down to it in time.

  Alfy had a house he had built himself together with a group of twelve other men. They had a carpenter and a bricklayer and the electrician and so on. And their wives.

  ‘Freda Macneice has our electric saw again,’ said his wife gloomily, ‘and the week before she had my mixer. That isn’t back yet and when it does come back she’ll have got the workings jammed up.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have told her we’d got them.’

  ‘She knows we’ve got them,’ his wife pointed out. ‘She’s always known. Her husband put in the plug and did the wiring that we run them by.’

  Alfy grunted. He knew they were committed but he would have liked to put up a fight. ‘ Pity you got to know her so well.’

  ‘You’ve got to know Freda well,’ said his wife. ‘There’s no other way. Either you don’t know her at all or you know her far too well. Eat your tea, the fish is getting cold.’

  Alfy went back to his tea, his eyes roaming restlessly round his home.

  The only trouble with building your own house was that you knew too much about it. Every time he looked at those uneven bricks on the chimney breast he remembered how Roddy Murphy had slapped them on in a temper because he had a row with his wife, and what hid said and what Rod had said, and what both their wives had said, and the net result had been a new baby in the Murphy family and his bricks were still irregular.

  All through the meal Alfy was thoughtful, he was quiet the whole evening, and his favourite T.V. comic didn’t raise a laugh. His wife, after giving him a long considered stare, went out to the kitchen and started to mix up a dose of senna pods: a little purge was always her favourite resource.

  ‘Rose,’ said her husband following her into the kitchen and fiddling with the kettle of hot water, ‘If someone tells you that something’s there when you know it isn’t, what would you think?’

  ‘That they’re out of their mind,’ said his wife promptly.

  ‘Ah, but supposing on that same day someone tells you about someone who ought to be there and isn’t?’

  ‘Then I’d think maybe I was out of my mind,’ said his wife.

  ‘Yes, that’s what’s worrying me,’ said Alfy. ‘Know Miss Birley and her stepsister Janet Lower that lives at Deerham Hills?’

  ‘I do. Nice person.’

  ‘She is, isn’t she?’ agreed Alfy. ‘ She told me she lost her sister on the bus coming over. They got parted. I said that Miss Birley must have got on the first bus and got away without noticing her sister hadn’t got on with her.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I don’t think Miss Birley believed me … and then later old Mrs Uprichard told me she saw Miss Janet get on, walk down the bus and get straight off the bus by the other door.’

  ‘She could have.’

  ‘There wasn’t another door,’ said her husband simply. ‘Not today. We were using one of the old buses. Just one door to get on and get off.’

  ‘She was mistaken then,’ said his wife, but she put away the senna pods and used the boiling water to make a pot of tea … if he had a genuine worry, well, that was all right. ‘Heaven knows she’s been mistaken plenty of other times too. Probably didn’t even see the girl.’

  ‘Yes,’ said her husband, standing there helplessly, ‘but she knew what the girl was wearing. How could she know that if she hadn’t really seen her. Explain that away.’

  Kathy lay on the bed and listened to the noises from downstairs. She could hear Robert gently walking about. She heard him close the door of the sitting-room, they were all soft normal noises. It was the other things that were unusual, the intangibles. But it was silly even to say this: the normal noises in this house would have been Mumsy singing in her bath, Janet playing records and talking on the telephone, and Kathy typing a business letter at her desk.

  The room was lit by moonlight and Kathy had her reading lamp on as well, she even had a book resting on the bed, face down. It was her regular bedside book, she’d been reading it for months now, for at no time was Kathy much of a reader and life had been pretty full lately. She put on her spectacles and solemnly resumed War and Peace. Emily and her husband were still up and about in the house over the garden fence. She could see the lighted window from her bed. It gave her a false sense of comfort and cheer.

  She plodded slowly through War and Peace, she had only got to page thirty, all the big scenes of the book lay ahead of her, but she knew already that she and Tolstoi weren’t going to see eye to eye. She thought pretty poorly of Prince Andrew. She had begun the book because of a Book Group she had belonged to last winter. Tolstoi had been given the big treatment and there had been one talk and one discussion on him and one b
rave soul actually read a paper on Anna Karenina (although it was not clear if he had indeed read the book). It had not been a success, possibly because the class as a whole had approached Tolstoi like gun-shy donkeys. They had been given a reading list and Kathy was conscientiously working her way down it: she had done Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre (BOOKS BY WOMEN AUTHORS) and got to BOOKS OF SOCIAL IMPORTANCE. Tolstoi came in between Dickens and D. H. Lawrence.

  Now she thought once again what a poor soul Prince Andrew was. She liked men to be more go-getting. Like Robert, she thought, unless the fact that you might be planning a murder automatically removed you from the list of eligible, attractive, desirable men.

  Usually she could rely on Tolstoi to send her to sleep within ten minutes of starting but tonight he tightened her up instead, put a nervous edge on her. She kept remembering the young lecturer’s earnest face and the way he seemed to think all these books mattered. So they did of course in a way, Kathy admitted the importance of CULTURE AND LITERATURE AND ART, why else was she at the course (except to get friends, get out, get away)? But it wasn’t like living.

  It was a calm, quiet night outside, spring just beginning to bloom with the early flowers, always the nicest, and the house looking calm and sweet in the new scheme of decoration Kathy had thought up and got done this spring. It was strange how she loved her house so much, but she loved it best done up in Wedgwood blue and white as she had firmly made clear to Mumsy, not the yellow and green of Mumsy’s choice.

  In some ways Mumsy was surprisingly orthodox, witness her colour schemes; she would keep putting black with white and green with yellow, and still thought red heads shouldn’t wear pink, whereas Kathy was educated and knew that sulphur yellow went wonderfully with deep turquoise, and that every room should have a touch of deep Burgundy, or wine anyway, never mind the district.

  Kathy put Tolstoi quietly aside, he would not do for her now, he would not help her build up her world. She wanted a world of comfort and solidity, of babies in high chairs, of dogs in the garden. But so far none of this had been for her and she was beginning to wonder if it ever could be. Sometimes it seemed so close, but then something, herself probably, stepped in between. Like the boy those years ago at school and Bert who had married, and the traveller in high-class wools she had met in London, and Robert.

  In the distance a car turned a corner, was heard for a moment, and then dwindled into silence.

  Kathy listened, a chill thought coming up from the depths of her mind, surfacing, displaying itself, resting there to puzzle and alarm her.

  She had remembered what had worried her about Robert’s return.

  When he came over first, he had come on foot. Nothing unusual about this, he lived well within walking distance and often did walk over.

  But when he came back, after his supposed trip to the police station, she now remembered she had heard an engine. This time Robert had brought his car. If she looked out of the window she would see it there.

  She did look out of the window. The moonlight shone on the garden, on the road and the open garden gates. There was no motor car to be seen.

  But so far from relieving her this alarmed her more than ever.

  Robert had finished his careful inspection, search almost, of the sitting-room. He had not found what he wanted, but then he had not expected to. He removed his white gloves and unlocked the door. The room didn’t look as though he had searched it. Neither did the kitchen or the hall or the bathroom, but in fact he had subjected each to a thorough search. He stood at the bottom of the stairs and studied each tread carefully.

  ‘Clean whistle,’ he said.

  He was not surprised to hear movement and to see Kathy’s door open: he had never really expected her to sleep after all. How could you?

  He looked at her without saying anything: his mood had changed since she had gone to bed. He looked tougher, harder, more resolute, although what he had to be resolute about Kathy didn’t know.

  ‘I didn’t sleep,’ she said. ‘Anyway what are you doing? Has anything happened? Have the police rung up yet?’

  ‘You know they haven’t Kathy,’ said Robert. ‘You’d have heard. You’ve been listening, haven’t you?’

  Kathy came down the stairs a few more steps. ‘ What have you been doing?’ she said suspiciously, and then, without waiting for an answer: ‘It’s terrible lying up there waiting and wondering.’

  Robert did not answer, but he noticed that she had not undressed, that her dressing-gown was slung over the clothes she had been wearing all day …’

  ‘What can have happened to them?’ went on Kathy pressing her hands together. ‘I feel if I don’t get some news soon I’ll scream.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ said Robert. ‘ I’ll join you.’

  An hysterical woman on his hands was what he did not want. Not yet.

  ‘I don’t understand you, Robert,’ said Kathy. ‘ I thought you loved Janet and now you seem, well, different.’

  ‘I’m concerned.’

  ‘Concerned, yes, but what are you concerned about? Do you know something I don’t know? Do you?’ She was almost peering into his face. When you did that you could see that beneath the plumpness and good humour of Rob’s face was quite a tough person. Was that what Janet saw?

  ‘And what about you, Kathy?’ said Robert. ‘While we’re on the subject of people being different and knowing something on the quiet, what about you? Are you being straight? Do you know something I don’t know?’

  And Kathy, who certainly did, kept quiet.

  ‘And for that matter, haven’t you changed? I’ve felt you liked me, Kathy, really liked me, maybe, perhaps I shouldn’t say this,’ he hesitated, ‘even more than liked.’

  Kathy flushed.

  ‘And now look at you … You don’t even trust me any more, do you?’

  ‘I can’t answer that.’

  ‘It’s a question I want an answer to,’ said Robert firmly, ‘before we go any further.’

  ‘I don’t think I trust anybody,’ said Kathy, coming out with rock bottom truth.

  They stood staring at each other.

  ‘I’d like to know where I am with you, Kathy,’ said Robert, as he studied her face, ‘I would just like to know.’

  The night had turned much warmer. It was true, after all, that spring was nearly here. The house seemed stuffy and airless as if its windows had been closed too long. Kathy felt the heat, and loosened her layers of clothes. It looked as though Robert was sweating.

  ‘How do you heat this house?’ he said.

  ‘There’s a furnace,’ said Kathy. ‘ I’ll go and look at it. The thermostat may not be working.’ It was an old coke furnace and often went wrong. Kathy planned to replace it sometime.

  ‘This heat is killing me,’ said Robert. As he pulled out his handkerchief to wipe his forehead something fell from his pocket, a thin gold bracelet.

  ‘That’s Janet’s,’ said Kathy in surprise.

  ‘So it is.’ He picked it up and it rested for a moment in his hands.

  ‘Jan hates taking it off,’ she said, her eyes glued to it. ‘Hates it.’ Kathy stared. ‘ It doesn’t really come off easily.’

  ‘It fell off one day when we were out.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Kathy. Inside she was trying to remember whether Janet had worn it on that last memorable occasion.

  ‘Well, it’s off,’ said Robert slipping it into his pocket.

  There was something terrible in this episode to Kathy: she would not even allow herself to work out what the implications could be. But deep down inside her a mill was turning over and over and over.

  ‘I wish the telephone would ring,’ she said.

  ‘It may not ring until morning.’

  ‘No.’ Kathy faced that thought. Could she hold out until morning? Would she do?

  ‘Go and see to the furnace.’

  There was a change in their relationship. They were no longer equals, preoccupied with a common worry, in some obscure way Robert had go
t himself in charge. It was her house but he was doing the ordering. Anger stirred in Kathy. But she went out to the furnace because she didn’t know what else to do.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she said suddenly, turning her head sharply.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Robert. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You were doing something,’ she said obstinately, ‘ something you didn’t want me to see. I know you were.’

  She paused there at the top of the stairs leading to the furnace … Is she a mind reader? thought Robert. He hadn’t been doing anything. But he’d meant to.

  When Kathy had disappeared Robert went over to make the telephone call that her appearance from the bedroom had interrupted in the first place.

  He got the number quickly.

  ‘Hello Charlie,’ he said. ‘I’ve got the plans going. Well? … I couldn’t say well, but it’s going. Give me time.’

  Chapter Six

  Although it was late night, past eleven and nearly twelve, there was intense activity in the town centre of Deerham Hills. The police station was lighted and showed a certain quiet bustle. There was a group of dark cars waiting by the kerb.

  The hospital too was alerted and not sleeping. A small knot of people waited in the hall.

  At the bus station where Kathy had left or lost Janet, although the last bus had drawn out, the manager and the night staff were there talking to the police.

  And in the woods, where the river curved in a swanlike bend beneath the trees, there were police, and cars, and lights, and voices.

  A middle-aged policeman called Pratt was in charge. He was an Inspector. He was assisted by a junior detective and a policewoman, Charmian Daniels.