Revengeful Death

by Jennie Melville

  ‘Nothing on his body to identify him. A bit of money, a handkerchief.’

  ‘Someone she picked up? Or an old friend? … What do you make of all this face-painting?’

  ‘I don’t know what I make of anything in this setup. I’ve spoken to the tenants on the floor above and they say she was a drinker and they’re sorry for the boy.’ The sergeant looked around at the room. ‘Clearly a fight took place here, but it must have been a quietish one because the people upstairs claim not to have heard anything. Clearly the little lad was here and was terrified and hid himself … He could tell us something.’

  ‘When he can speak. He’ll want careful handling, and not by us.’

  ‘No, CCS will have to come in.’

  The Children’s Care Service maintained its own doctor, psychologists and social workers who cooperated with the police and could be called upon.

  ‘I like Jess Barley there the best,’ said Jack Headfort absently. He had once had a fairly close relationship with Jess Barley, and appreciated her good qualities. ‘But I suppose we’ll take who we get sent.’

  ‘What else have we got? The weapon?’

  ‘No knife,’ said the sergeant promptly. ‘Nothing sharp enough here.’

  The body was taken out, the photographer departed and only the SOCO remained, still quietly moving around the apartment.

  Jack looked at the confusion. ‘ What did happen here? And where’s Alice Hardy? Last seen running down the road, according to March.’

  ‘You think she’s lying?’

  Headfort shrugged.

  ‘Hardy’s gone anyway, that’s clear. And why not running? She’s probably got the knife on her.’

  Headfort frowned. ‘Maybe. Why?’

  ‘Taking it away to hide. Drop it in the river. I would.’

  ‘Did the surgeon say what had been removed? If not the heart?’

  ‘No. He did come up with a view after some thought. The thymus gland.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Jack was silent for a moment. ‘No, don’t tell me. It has various functions in the body.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘In animals it’s called the sweetbread and you eat it.’

  ‘God.’

  ‘Yes, then the sooner we find the killer – Alice Hardy, if it is her – the better.’ He turned away. ‘I’m off. You stay.’

  He pushed his way past the few local reporters who had got wind of something. ‘A statement will be forthcoming as soon as we can do it. No, nothing to say now.’

  He passed Mary’s window with a quick look. There was a man in a dark overcoat ringing the front doorbell. He frowned. He had seen the man before. Hanging about?

  Inside her apartment, Mary was reading the note that had been stuffed through her letter box. She had found it as the boy Ned was taken away by a social worker and the policewoman left with him. The letter could have been there some time, for she had not looked in the box since early morning and it was now evening. The message was typed in capital letters.

  It said:

  ACROSS THE ROAD WAS A TASTER.

  YOUR TURN WILL COME.

  Mary had read it several times already.

  Her sitting-room was sunny and prettily decorated in pale pastels, with large bowls of flowers which scented the room. Mary had an allowance from a successful brother (Danegeld, she called it to herself, knowing what she knew) and there was some money from the sale of a chain of family businesses which neither Mary nor her brother had wanted to keep running. Blood money, she called that. Mary herself was well dressed in soft colours. Books filled a long set of shelves under the window. A big sofa was in front of the fire. A big old doll, considerably aged and battered, had a chair to herself in one corner of the room. In a cupboard in her bedroom was another doll, more like a bundle of old rags, torn and cut.

  The doorbell rang. Through the peephole she saw a man in a dark overcoat; he wore dark glasses.

  Mary did not open the door. I am not letting you in, she said to herself. Not you and not anyone else.

  ‘I don’t buy from the door,’ she called out. ‘And if you’re from the press, then you can hop it.’

  Damn it, the caller muttered to himself. You might regret this.

  Jack Headfort travelled back to base; he was thinking over the scene he had left behind.

  This was more than a local scene. The dead man is not one of ours, he thought, he’s an outsider. This will have to go to SRADIC.

  It was not without a dash of pleasure that he thought about landing it on Charmian Daniels. There had been a time when he had cursed the invention by a Home Office committee of the concept of Outsiders. Facile, ill thought out, mad, divisive, he had said. But now he could see an advantage.

  He could shift it over to a woman he both admired and somewhat feared, a case which looked like being pain and grief. A neat and terrible killing with a hideous pay-off.

  It was not particularly neat, Charmian Daniels said, when the investigation came her way, except in the efficient execution of the victim.

  ‘No identity yet for the victim? No,’ she answered her own question. ‘And the woman, Alice Hardy?’

  ‘We haven’t found her yet,’ said Jack.

  Charmian looked down at her hands. ‘I must see Mary March. And then the boy. Ned, is he called?’

  ‘Ned, yes. He couldn’t be questioned at first … He wouldn’t talk, and the word is he mustn’t be forced.’

  ‘Where is he? In care?’

  ‘No,’ Jack sounded a bit surprised. ‘With his father, Edward Hardy. He and the mother have been divorced about three years, but he seems devoted to the boy. Takes his duties seriously. He came forward at once and took the boy over. Best thing, we’re told.’ Now he sounded the least bit doubtful.

  Charmian caught this. ‘ Didn’t you like the father?’

  ‘No, a nice man, but I just thought the child might be better with someone neutral, outside it all. I haven’t spoken to the boy – advised to leave it for a day or two. I’ll check for you, see when you can do it.’

  Charmian nodded. ‘ I’ll see Mary March, but the father and son first. The child was there, knows a lot, if he can tell us. Did Hardy know who the dead man was?’

  ‘Showed him the body; he said he’d never seen the man in his life. Mind you, what with the face paint and death, it wouldn’t be easy unless you knew the chap well.’

  ‘Not a friend of his wife?’

  ‘I asked that but he couldn’t say; doesn’t keep in touch with her much.’

  ‘Did he have anything to say about her?’

  Jack gave one of his characteristic shrugs. ‘She drinks … whether because the marriage broke up or whether the marriage ended because she drank, I don’t know. But he clearly thinks she neglected the child.’

  ‘And what about Miss March?’

  ‘An enigma inside an iceberg.’

  ‘Surely not,’ said Charmian, who knew something about being both an enigma and an iceberg.

  ‘And she is frightened.’

  Charmian looked at him.

  ‘No, not of me.’

  ‘I’ll see her, of course, but the child first.’

  Yes, you made that clear, Jack thought. When they parted, he promised to let her know when she could see the boy. He rang within the hour to say well, as it happened, today was the day. She could speak to the child, ask questions, if she was careful. He would not ask to be present himself; the less people the better was the received opinion. Oh, and you are to see him at home, with his father.

  There were enough people in the small room anyway. Edward Hardy seemed to be prosperous in a modest way. He lived in a pleasant part of a Windsor suburb called Merrywick with a view of the river. The house was clean, well furnished, not immaculately tidy, though. An air of disorder hung over it.

  Present were Edward, the boy Ned and a social worker, Carol Evans (Headfort’s preferred Miss Barley not being free). Charmian recognized Carol as being trained in the care of children in trouble. They
were all crowded into a small room but sitting carefully apart, not touching, not even the father and son.

  Charmian said in a soft voice, ‘Hello, Ned. I’m Charmian Daniels. I have to ask you some questions.’

  Ned said nothing, but looked at her with big dark eyes.

  ‘I know you were frightened at what happened in your home the other day. You went to hide.’

  Ned was sitting next to his father on a long sofa, while Carol sat opposite. They had all turned to look at her as Charmian came in. She had come alone, considering bringing one of her assistants but finally deciding against it. She had a small recorder which she would get everything on.

  Ned said nothing. Speech was hard for him at the moment. Words were painful.

  ‘You were clever about where you hid. It wasn’t comfortable for you. Were you there long?’

  Ned gave a tiny nod, a minimum of movement.

  ‘What made you hide? You were frightened at what you saw, was that it? What did you see, Ned?’

  There was silence. ‘It was not good, what went on there in that room,’ said Charmian carefully. ‘I can tell you know that. What was it? What did you see?’

  Ned said nothing, but he looked at his father under his heavy-lidded eyes. Then he shook his head.

  ‘You saw nothing? But there was a fight … it frightened you. What can you tell me?’

  Ned shook his head, slowly, from side to side.

  Carol stirred uneasily in her chair.

  Ned looked at his father. ‘Dad, Dad,’ he muttered.

  Carol got up. ‘ Leave it there, please. Sorry, ma’am. I don’t think he remembers … wiped it out. It may come back.’

  Charmian opened her briefcase – she had laid in a few useful tools to memory. Now she produced them.

  ‘Here, Ned, here is a large writing book, plain pages. One you can draw pictures in … When you feel like doing it, if you feel like it, draw me a picture of your mother’s living room. Would you do that for me?’

  Ned looked at it silently, then he stretched out a hand and took what she was offering. He did not look at his father, nor at Carol, but he slid from the sofa and stood up. The interview was over.

  Charmian measured him with a glance. We will meet again, Ned, she said inside herself. I can tell.

  It was the second day after the discovery. Charmian looked at her watch; two-fifteen in the afternoon, a fog coming up and a committee meeting to attend, and not one she could skip.

  Mary March would have to wait until tomorrow. But she drove herself past the house where the murder had taken place.

  She knew the street – there had been another killing here, not long ago – not one of the most respectable streets in Windsor. She slowed down as she looked across the road to where Mary March lived. She was the woman who had found the body but it was clear she did not know him.

  The curtains were drawn in Mary’s apartment but dusk was coming early today, the fog was thickening: soon lamps would be lit.

  There was a man sitting in a car at the kerb a few yards down the road. Charmian observed him because she was trained to do so, but thought nothing of it.

  Mary March had been standing behind the curtains when Charmian drove past; when the car slowed, she recognized the driver, for reasons of her own. She had attended a talk by Charmian on public order (a subject on which she had some private views). ‘Nice car, clever lady, I admire her, but she’s an I-person: I tell you what to do and you do it.’ She watched the toss of reddish-brown hair as Charmian drove off. ‘Strong, a strong woman. But I am strong too.’ Strong in sadness and anger.

  Mary did not notice the man in the parked car at all.

  There were certain signs that the murder had been the work of an outsider – not a local of this relatively peaceful, law-abiding town in the south of England. There was no identification on the body but in the pocket of the jeans a bus ticket to Cheasey. It had been issued on the day of his death.

  In recent years there had been a steady seeping of the disaffected and disenchanted – seedy changelings, they seemed – from London into Cheasey, an outlying district of Windsor, while some families had settled in the town itself. With the Queen in the Castle, Windsor took security seriously. Keeping an eye on these incomers had lately been added to Charmian’s duties as head of SRADIC (Southern Register, Documentation and Index of Crime), an autonomous position of power which she had occupied for some years now, to the fury of a few of her colleagues in the local police. She knew too much, they said angrily, about them – about everyone. Perhaps she had made herself too powerful, been seen as a challenge that ought to be removed. A disquieting hint had reached her ears. She pushed it away as she turned to the duties of the day.

  The reason the murder was attributed to an outsider was, in the first place, because the victim was an unknown, and also because the face was painted with a Union Jack – red, white and blue. No local would do that, said the police in Cheasey. Not even Cheasey forgot the flag and the Queen. The men of Cheasey made excellent soldiers, in fact, brave and resourceful. Army life gave them every opportunity to be violent and full of guile. No one did better out of the army than a Cheasey man. Many a little business had been started with illicit profits on this and that in a far-flung theatre of war. Korea, the Falklands and the Gulf War, all had made their contribution to the economy of Cheasey. There was no national service, of course, these days, but many a Cheasey lad joined up as an investment, took the Queen’s shilling and emerged after five years or so with many a shilling. If necessary they would fight and die, but they knew various ways of not doing either.

  But no Cheasey man or woman (for they also knew a trick or two) had done this killing, Charmian decided, as she studied a photograph of the dead man’s head. Perhaps it had been Alice Hardy, who seemed to have disappeared into the blue, leaving her son behind her.

  A silent son. A son who must have seen and heard a great deal of what had gone on, if not the actual killing, but would not, or could not, speak of it.

  She was in her sitting room in Maid of Honour Row, the house in which she and her husband had settled. She was Lady Kent now, but she did not use that name at work, hardly even thought of herself that way. Her husband had just retired from a nameless diplomatic job which had kept him on the move; diplomats retired too early, she thought, but he said he was glad to retire and would devote himself to visiting all the museums and art galleries he fancied; he might write a book. Charmian doubted all this and thought he would be bored, although she had to admit that he showed no signs of it as yet.

  She studied the photograph of the dead head. Young, not yet bruised by life, hair pale gold; he must have been good-looking when alive. So far unidentified.

  It might be that he came from the groups of disaffected who continually took up good causes and bad, and in whom she had a professional interest because of the Queen and Windsor.

  They moved around, these people, on whom the Metropolitan Police (backed up by MIS, Security and the Drug Squad) kept an eye but they had settled in groups, rather like a bacterial infection, in Wallingford Road and Oxford Road, Cheasey. In Windsor, they had edged into Fable Street, a small colony and shrinking rather than growing, so the watcher from the Met said. Windsor was hostile to outsiders of a certain sort.

  There must be something about Cheasey that attracted them, Charmian thought, raising her head from the photograph. Possibly there was the well-known Cheasey skill in keeping the police out, and possibly the closeness to the great motorway network. Heathrow and exits out were not too far away also. Not to mention being just a short train-ride from the Channel Tunnel.

  Yes, Cheasey was well placed.

  ‘Are you, were you, one of them?’ She addressed the photograph. ‘I don’t know who you are, and until I know who you are, I don’t think we can find your killer.’

  The face stared back at her. The mouth sagged a bit in death, the eyes were closed.

  ‘They’re not all the same, these people,’ her contac
t in the Met had said, a tall young policewoman whom Charmian had helped train. ‘Artists, readers, as well as conmen and liars, you might like one or two as a friend. Drunks, on drugs, peddling drugs, sometimes one of them even has a real job. But never trust them.’

  Charmian had a list of names, beginning with Bergin and Brown and ending with Young and Ziegler. Not all real names, of course, some were assumed, and there were a few who remained obstinately nameless. The Chrises, the Georges and the Alis. These names could cover either sex, which was why they were used.

  In her files, and on disk, Charmian’s office also had descriptions and records. So she knew how many had been to prison and for what. Surprisingly few, she thought sourly.

  They had the body of a nameless man whom no one claimed to know.

  She allowed herself one working day to assess the facts as she knew them.

  There had been a fight in the the Hardy living room. Alice Hardy might have been there, although there was no proof of that. She might have been seen running away, although Mary might have been wrong. (Might have been lying, Jack Headfort had hinted, which was interesting in itself.) And in this fight, the unknown painted man had been stabbed to death.

  Death had come quickly according to the forensic report, and the thymus gland had been extracted.

  Extraordinary, Charmian thought. The forensic report also added that certain physical signs, like wasted muscles, suggested that the thymus in this man was diseased, in which case it would be swollen – thymoma it was called. In a young man the gland was not easy to see, and hence hard to cut out.

  She knew that in animals the gland was called the sweetbread by butchers and that it was a delicacy, cooked and eaten.

  Had the killer cut it out in order to eat it? A strangely unpleasing idea. And if he had, then would his thymus become diseased too?

  He or she, because one must always remember that Alice Hardy was missing and might have been the killer. After all, it was her flat, and a woman could kill.