Come Home and Be Killed

by Jennie Melville

  ‘It’s early, early,’ said her husband fiercely.

  ‘I can see dawn,’ replied the optimistic Emily. ‘It’s morning light.’

  An angry wordless roar from above signified that her son was awake too.

  ‘I wish he’d learn to speak,’ worried Emily, her anxieties deflected to another score. ‘ Why doesn’t he learn to speak? Do you suppose he’s mental?’

  ‘He’s doing all right,’ said her husband dryly. ‘He doesn’t need speech. He manages very well without.’

  ‘I wouldn’t like him to be a case,’ said Emily.

  ‘More parents are cases than children.’

  There was a further roar from upstairs. Emily listened frowning, a particular note struck her ears, her face cleared and she rose. ‘He wants his fruit drink,’ she said.

  ‘See what I mean,’ said her husband triumphantly, going back to his coffee. Not to his surprise, Emily did not come back. Going upstairs he found her curled up beside her son, sweetly asleep. Lovingly he tucked them both in and went back to bed himself.

  The morning paper plopped through the door, Jim went to get it and glanced automatically at the stop press, there was nothing there.

  Impelled by some unconscious urging he put on the radio on which the early morning news should be about to start.

  Emily appeared carrying her son. Over Emily’s head their eyes met in a long wordless communication of affection, suspicion, trust and slight resentment, the sum total of which, as Jim realised with a small shock of surprise, was genuine human love.

  The radio was jigging out a gay little tune and the baby started to echo it.

  ‘Well, he can sing even if he can’t speak,’ said Emily, giving him his orange juice.

  She started to get breakfast, and the baby threw the orange juice over his father’s paper so what with one bustling, one swearing and one shouting, they did not notice that music had slid into speech and that the news had begun.

  ‘Murder’ was the first word that got across and then Emily jerked to attention.

  ‘Listen,’ she said.

  ‘Well give me a chance,’ said her husband still mopping himself up.

  ‘Two women were found late last night in a locked car in Deerham Woods. They are thought to have been asphyxiated with the exhaust fumes of the car. Whether it is suicide or murder is not yet known but the police have set up an emergency encampment on the site of the discovery and are using tracker dogs. The names of the two women have not yet been disclosed but they are believed to be aged about fifty and twenty. The car is a grey saloon.

  ‘Today’s weather …’

  Emily put out a hand and switched off the set.

  ‘So,’ she said, looking at her husband.

  ‘You were right then. Or nearly right. Only you got it backwards.’

  ‘We don’t know what happened yet,’ said Emily carefully.

  ‘They killed themselves. Or someone did it for them. Motive unknown.’

  ‘They’d never kill themselves, not that pair, let me tell you that. Never, never, never.’

  Emily set her lips in an obstinate line. ‘Two other women,’ she said. ‘Two other women.’

  Chapter Nine

  The two women, their plans so disarranged, their hopes and futures dislocated, had been found curled up side by side, almost embracing, in the grey car. The elder one, with the greying hair, had her arm round the younger one’s waist and the girl had her head leaning on the other one’s shoulder. But it was a false embrace as if in full life they hadn’t really known each other that well. They were resting on each other. Their faces were a bright and pretty pink. The red flush, their flaccid muscles, the sleep-coma, were typical.

  The discovery had been made by a woman out walking with her dog. Cars were not common at night in Deerham Woods. It was a highly respectable locality, and if courting had to be done then there was other provision made for it. The woman had peeped in the window and the dog had howled, that had been enough.

  The police found the tracks of the car leading up to the little dell in which it still rested, and then they found footsteps leading away in the soft mud. The marks looked like a woman’s tread. But some men have small feet and although wax casts were at once made they were not going to be easy to identify. Across one sole was a cut as if the walker had trodden on something deep and sharp. This might lead somewhere in the end.

  In the car they had found a blue raincoat, the coat which Charmian had investigated, and on this coat were traces of blood. The younger of the two women had bled from a scalp wound, a tear in the flesh. Her head appeared to have rested, or been placed, against the coat.

  To Inspector Pratt the discovery of the women was the middle of the case rather than the beginning.

  The beginning for him was set even further back than it was for Charmian because he was older and had lived here longer. He had been a friend of old Mr Birley. Pratt was not a native of Deerham Hills (for that matter hardly anyone was but the man who ran the funeral parlour and the post office) and he knew no one really well but he knew old Mr Birley as well as anyone. Pratt was not given to abstract thought, to weighing ends and means, remaining even in the innermost recesses of his own mind the eternal detective, gathering the evidence but not passing the judgment, the pursuer not the High Court judge, but even he might have concluded that life had given old Birley a raw deal. His first wife had been a crazy lunatic and his second had been Mumsy, a woman who both attracted and repelled Pratt.

  The first Mrs Birley’s fetish, to the exclusion and detriment of her husband, had been her house; some people maintained that she had passed on this attitude to her daughter, but Kathy was more realistic. And when she died, mercifully quite suddenly, you might have expected old Birley to let it go at that, but what must he do but plunge into marriage with Mumsy. The thing about Mumsy that you couldn’t help noticing was that she got as much as she could out of life.

  If there was a competition Mumsy went in for it, if there was a prize for collecting green flags, Mumsy collected green flags. She was always on the look-out for prizes. Just exactly what prize and in what competition poor Daddy Birley represented no one would ever know now. And he had been such a dapper lively young man. You might have thought therefore that now he was dead and buried his troubles would be over, but they weren’t. Murder was determined to twine itself in and out of his family.

  Kathy’s announcement that her mother and sister were missing, and the report of the discovery of the bodies had got to the Inspector at roughly the same hour. He was at home with his wife at the time. In Deerham Hills there was no need to hang around the station expecting trouble. Pratt and his wife Bessy had a bridge party. Bessy was social and to be social in Deerham Hills you had to play something, the Pratts were past tennis and golf, so that made it bridge. Pratt actually enjoyed bridge, he liked sitting there, with his cards in his hand, doing a little detective work on the other players’ hands. What was maddening to him was that although he knew more about bridge and usually more about his partner’s cards, Bessy won more often than he did. In his way he had the same trouble that Jim Carter had with Emily. ‘Telephone,’ he had said gratefully, sliding out of his seat.

  In the woods it was dark and quiet and there was a smell of leaf mould. The noise and lights of the police tramping about startled a few little animals that clung to a precarious wild life in Deerham Hills. The car was not very far in, visible even from the road if you stared, no one had taken much trouble to hide it. The sequence of events after the woman had peeped in and discovered the two women lying there followed the usual pattern.

  First the arrival of a sceptical constable who never trusted the tales people came in with; then when he was reluctantly convinced, a telephone to Pratt which brought about the entrance of Pratt himself with his sergeant. Pratt imposed his own pattern on the scene on to which more and more people flooded disturbing the quiet night with noise and lights. Then the process reversed itself, one by one the investigators d
eparted. The two women themselves were taken away. Then Pratt himself went off with the ambulance to the hospital, followed by a brief conference in his office. Afterwards, driving himself, he returned quickly to the woods where one man still remained on duty. Soon the car would be moved.

  He was an observant man and trained by his work to an even greater acuteness. He stood looking at the car in the grass.

  It looked shabby and stained as if it had been rained on. A few leaves were plastered on to the roof with a splash of mud. A piece of newspaper had blown against the wheel. It was difficult to see. He picked up the newspaper: it was the Deerham Hills Evening Gazette of the day before. Within the car itself there was all the appearances of suicide. But the younger woman had some puzzling lacerations and bruises.

  He went to the car and examined the petrol tank. It was empty. No petrol left at all.

  He knew that there was one report he must have and quickly. He must find out from the doctors the exact time of this happening. It would be the hardest of all to get: doctors, in his experience, hated committing themselves to dates, and times.

  It had rained yesterday, but not today.

  The copy of the Gazette belonged to yesterday.

  The women had inhaled carbon monoxide slowly, through a rubber tube from the exhaust. The setting up of the apparatus by which the tubing ran from the exhaust through the car window had been neatly done, all holes plugged, but the petrol tank had been forgotten. Pratt did not expect any case whether suicide, murder, or accident to be absolutely true to type with no ragged ends, but this case had puzzled him. There was one discrepancy in particular. It was a matter of timing. And the more he thought about it, the more it seemed to him not a discrepancy but a great, glaring hole in the middle.

  He made a little clicking noise equally compounded of irritation and satisfaction.

  ‘At one cubic foot per minute per 20 h.p. they’d go under in about five minutes in a small garage,’ said the pathologist. ‘It’d take longer out in the open with that tube coming into the car, but not overlong … However at that it almost took too long,’ he said, thinking of the two women. ‘The petrol tank was about empty.’

  Pratt nodded. ‘And exactly when did the carbon monoxide start pouring into their lungs?’

  ‘Dates and times,’ said his colleague irritably, as he had expected. ‘Dates and times.’

  ‘You mean you don’t know?’

  ‘As it happens, I do. Roughly twenty-four to thirty-six hours ago – but there are circumstances which make assessment difficult. As you well know.’

  Pratt nodded.

  ‘There is this other factor, they were drugged. Their appearance – characteristic of a heavy, and I mean heavy, concentration of barbiturate in the blood. Face congested, muscles flaccid, pupils semi-dilated.’

  ‘How was this done?’

  ‘One heavy dose, whether self administered or not, could produce these symptoms. You could die in twelve hours. More characteristic however is a coma lasting for twenty-four to forty-eight hours, after which you peg out if someone hasn’t helped you. Sleep leading to coma, leading to death, that’s the sequence.’

  ‘And how would the carbon monoxide affect this?’

  ‘It would tend to reinforce all these symptoms.’ He added thoughtfully. ‘You know as well as I do that many suicide pacts, and for that matter many murders, are a double death method. It seems to make for certainty.’

  Pratt grunted; he was thoughtful.

  ‘And Pratt’ … the other man hesitated … ‘remember you mustn’t expect too much. Memory is a funny thing.’

  Pratt glared at him.

  ‘By God, I’ll jerk someone’s memory,’ he said.

  ‘Circularise about the car,’ he said abruptly to the Sergeant. ‘Find out who saw it, when and where. Get on to all the local garages. I want you to get someone who saw that car.’

  Chapter Ten

  As the night wore on towards morning, Charmian turned her little car towards the city centre.

  At the heart of Deerham Hills (if it had a heart which many people doubted, though it certainly had eyes, ears and tongue) were the hospital, the magistrates’ court and the police station. They were all handsome buildings except the block of the police station which was the original old building and no money had been wasted here. It was dark and oppressive and on the small side, but because one of the strongest human instincts, and perhaps the most valuable, is to find a hole and make it comfortable, it was cosy enough in its arrangements. Charmian shared a room with another woman police officer who was junior to her. They were both strong characters and each in her own way had left her mark on the room. Charmian smiled as she saw a coat hanging over a chair, shoes tucked away in a corner and something white sticking out from a drawer, and remembered that Grizel had changed here to go to a dance. She doubted if Grizel would ever make a policewoman: she lacked the dedicated intensity needed to succeed, but all the same, she was good at her job and was splendid with the babies and children and distressed adolescents.

  Charmian set her notebook down on her desk and went to consult her own particular filing cabinet. She wanted to track down old Mrs Uprichard.

  The hospital lights were burning brightly. Charmian knew the night pattern of the lights in the hospital. There were certain concentrations of lights, certain areas of dimness, where wards were darkened, but tonight the pattern seemed different. There were more lights and differently placed. Charmian stared at them, wondering what interpretation to put on them. She knew that the two women had been taken there. As she looked one set of lights went on and another off. But still there was nothing to be learned from that. Any cause might keep Deerham Hospital wakeful. It was a good hospital with a high reputation locally. Deerham Hills liked to boast that it was as well looked after in matters of medicine as was London. A new annexe was building now which would house the new surgery unit, built according to the very latest principles, and then Deerham Hills believed it would be better than London. Only the very rich, of which there were few in Deerham Hills, took their ailments to London. The disparity between this and education never failed to amuse Charmian. It would have been an admission of defeat on the part of the ambitious in Deerham Hills (and this covered nearly everybody) to get their children educated locally. One and all they departed from the age of eight onwards to various unknown (except to other parents from Deerham Hills) schools all over the country. But health, Deerham Hills seemed to say, was something you could cut down on, better not to be ill at all, of course, but if you were obliged to be then you could be ill economically.

  The lights dimmed as Charmian watched, and silently she turned back to her files. Here was her own private knowledge, available to anyone, but collected, collated, cross-indexed and summarised by Charmian herself. Here she had facts and information about many people who would have been surprised, and affronted, that she had collected them. For this reason Charmian made her notes in a code of her own. Because of what she had noted here she knew why the medical superintendent of the hospital left in a hurry and what relation it had with the party held after the Charity Ball. She knew why the Mayor did not stand for re-election and why the Chairman of the Education Committee did.

  Charmian’s expression when she studied her cards was a mixture of distaste and resignation.

  It was at a time such as this that Grizel once exclaimed ‘You don’t really like the human race: you just want to tidy it up.’

  But Grizel was wrong.

  Inspector Pratt knew her methods and let her follow them. He let her follow them because he loved her. It would have surprised Charmian to know there was room for love in a man so dour, so happily married, and yet he did love her. He loved her for being young and zestful, for reminding him of his wife, and for being a bit like himself (Love works that way). Charmian’s weakness was not to know that human emotions sometimes run oddly and not always in set channels.

  Her office was quiet and warm. She heard a car drive up to the do
or of the station; a door banged; the car drove away again. Intent on her work she forgot it for a few minutes and was surprised to hear Grizel’s laugh.

  Grizel came into the room and banged the door behind her. She showed no surprise at seeing Charmian sitting working there in the small hours. She often said she was more surprised when Charmian wasn’t there.

  ‘Had a good dance?’ said Charmian, not looking up.

  ‘So so.’ Grizel was gathering up her day clothes, and packing them neatly into a little case. ‘ I don’t think I’d better leave these here all night, do you, the Station Sergeant wouldn’t approve of it?’ She sat down and lit a cigarette. ‘Oh why pretend? I was three inches taller than my escort and all the time we were dancing he kept thinking I could throw him over my left shoulder if I wanted.’ She looked down at her five feet ten inches regretfully. ‘And I could have, too.’

  Charmian gathered her notes into a neat little pile, shuffled them once more and put down her pencil. She had found what she wanted in the list of the old people who had attended the Old Age Pensioners’ Christmas Party. Mrs Uprichard, c/o Mrs Manton (that would be one of the oppressed daughters), Sunnysides, Loach Avenue (Loach had been the jobbing builder; he went bankrupt later, Charmian had him in the files too).

  ‘Had a good dance?’ she said once again. Then she looked up. Her eyes met Grizel’s. They both laughed.

  ‘I hear you’ve had trouble with the Birleys, mother and daughter, Deerham Hills blue, blue blood. Well I can’t say I’m surprised. It’s blood that’s been due to be spilt for quite a while.’

  ‘How do you know about them?’ Charmian frowned.

  ‘You forget I’m local,’ said Grizel, preparing to depart. ‘ I’ve known all about them always. Everyone’s known there’d be trouble there sooner or later. Kathy’s the soul of charity but even she couldn’t take everything. Just made use of her really.’