The Primrose Switchback

by Jo Bannister

  Marsh didn’t think Shad Lucas was a killer. Leaving aside the bump on his head – which just might have been accidental: fleeing the scene he ran into a projection invisible in the dark – his behaviour wasn’t that of a man with something to hide. It was he who alerted the police to the possibility of an incident; if he hadn’t, possibly no connection would ever have been made between Skipley and a dead girl in a goods wagon in Holyhead. Superintendent Marsh would never have been involved, the scene of the crime would never have been identified and a proper investigation would have been all but impossible. If Lucas had killed Jackie Pickering, all he had to do to get away with it was keep his mouth shut.

  Instead of which he dragged his friends to Crewe, then told them and then Marsh himself about the possibility of a murder. No killer in his right mind behaved that way.

  That was the rub. Arguably, Lucas was not in his right mind; at least, his worked so differently from other people’s that it was hard to judge his actions by the usual yardsticks.

  There was also the chance that he had genuinely, because of his head injury, forgotten something that put a whole new slant on events. That if he’d known everything from the start, the last place he’d have gone was a police station. It was that possibility Marsh felt he had to explore.

  Marsh met them in the front office, politely but firmly showed Rosie and Prufrock where they could wait while he interviewed Shad. As he expected, Rosie put up a fight.

  “As his doctor I ought to be present to monitor his physical condition. As you know, Shad’s suffered a head injury. He wanted to come here and sort this out, but you’ll have to remember he’s not well. I’ll just sit in the corner and—”

  “Ms Holland,” exclaimed Marsh impatiently, “you’re not his doctor – you’re a newspaper columnist!”

  “I was a doctor,” said Rosie with a pained expression.

  “And I used to service my own car, but nobody calls me when there’s a vacancy at Silverstone. You’re not his solicitor, and he’s too old to need an appropriate adult present, so your services will not be required until he’s looking for a lift home. And if you don’t want to wait, I’ll see to that too.”

  Her bluff called, Rosie subsided grumpily on to a plastic chair. “I’ll wait.” She glared after him as Marsh ushered Shad down the corridor. “But as a doctor I can testify that that lump on his head’s the only mark on him right now!”

  Prufrock shut his eyes and wished to be almost anywhere but here.

  A few hours’ sleep had done Shad good. At six o’clock this morning he’d looked haggard, gaunt and frail, the gypsy-dark eyes sunken and underlined by smudges as black as bruising in the pallor of his face. His normally gruff voice had swung unsteadily between the urgent need to tell his story and a plaintive expectation of disbelief. He’d swayed on his feet, and Marsh had had serious doubts about his fitness to be interviewed.

  Six hours later he still looked a little battered but much more himself. Both the shock and the anxiety had diminished now that the injuries he’d suffered – the blow to his head and the other one to his emotions – had had some time to heal. Nothing Marsh had in mind would do him any harm now.

  He slumped into the chair he was offered with the deliberate carelessness characteristic of his age and sex. It said, You don’t scare me. It said, I can walk out of here any time I want. It said, I’ll answer your questions, it doesn’t bother me, I eat policemen for breakfast.

  What it said to Harry Marsh was, I’m out of my depth here, maybe if I act tough nobody’ll notice. Marsh had seen it before. He’d seen it in the guilty and the innocent, and in casual witnesses who’d only been asked to describe an exchange between two other people. It didn’t mean as much as an untrained observer might have thought.

  “Well, you were right,” began the Superintendent. “We found her in a siding in Holyhead. The wagon was collected from Skipley about midnight, so whatever happened to her – and to you – happened before that.” He waited.

  “She was dead?” Shad knew she was; he just needed confirmation.

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  Marsh cocked an eyebrow at him. “Can you tell me? Think about it.”

  “I have thought about it,” growled Shad. “I can’t remember.”

  “Then guess.” It wasn’t as absurd a suggestion as it must have sounded. He was dealing with a man’s subconscious: Lucas probably knew how the woman died, even if he didn’t know he knew. If they could find a chink and insert a lever the wall would come down and he’d remember what happened.

  It sounded ridiculous to Shad; but you could rule out lions, somebody tampering with her parachute, drowning and an explosion loud enough to be heard in Railwayview Street. “A knife?”

  “That’s right.” Marsh invested the words with no particular significance. “She was stabbed. The knife was found beside her. You probably saw it. What was it like? Long, short, broad, thin? A stiletto, a flick knife, a Bowie knife, a kris?”

  But Shad couldn’t get an image of it. Maybe Marsh was wrong and he never did see it; maybe he’d been hit before he had the chance. “I don’t know.”

  “All right. Then, do you remember handling it?”

  “What?” The word exploded from Shad in outrage. His eyes were appalled.

  Marsh shrugged. “It’s not unlikely. If it was lying on the floor; if it was still in her, even. Fingerprints were taken from it: it would be useful to have yours for elimination. Then any others we find will probably belong to the murderer.”

  It was a reasonable request. Shad knew of no reason not to grant it. “OK.”

  Marsh nodded. “We’ll do that before you leave. You might let me have the shirt you were wearing as well. The blood on it – it may not be yours. Anyway, we know now who she was.”

  Shad sniffed. “Unless she had a garden I don’t expect I knew her.”

  “No, possibly not. She lived in Skipley, though. She worked for a television programme, as a researcher.” He was watching the younger man’s face but no flicker of recognition crossed it. “Her name was Jackie Pickering.” Still nothing.

  He thought for a moment. “Mr Lucas, what’s the last thing you do clearly remember? Before being in Crewe, I mean.”

  Some of Wednesday had crept back into Shad’s mind. “I went to Foxford House as usual yesterday morning. Mrs Thurley asked me to clear some of the deadwood out of the shrubbery.”

  Marsh had spoken to the Thurleys. That was about midday. The housekeeper had given Shad a bit of lunch in the kitchen; after that he’d scythed the paths through the wildflower meadow, and at five o’clock he’d gone home. All that was business as usual. He hadn’t seemed in any rush to leave and hadn’t mentioned going anywhere else.

  “Good. Well, that’s something you didn’t remember this morning.”

  But Shad was in no mood for sops of comfort. “But it’s not much help, is it?” His eyes smouldered.

  Marsh clung to his patience. “It will be if it helps you remember something else. Like, why you left home in the evening. Were you going somewhere? Did you need something from the shop?”

  “I wasn’t dressed for going out,” Shad said in his teeth. “I might have gone to the corner shop like that: if I’d been going anywhere else, or meeting someone, I’d have changed.”

  “Unless something came up at short notice.”

  Shad had no answer to that.

  Superintendent Marsh thought for a moment. “Your friend Ms Holland. Did you see her on television last week?”

  The abrupt change of subject didn’t stop Shad remembering the episode with pleasure. “You mean, when she floored the creep?” He grinned. “Worth the licence fee for that alone.”

  Harry Marsh had felt much the same way, but that wasn’t why he’d mentioned it. “That was the programme Jackie Pickering worked for.” He left it hanging in the air, watching for Shad’s reaction.

  Trying to make sense of it, his face toyed with all manner of emotions – concern, dou
bt, bewilderment, and others that Marsh couldn’t put a name to. When his expression settled, what was on top was alarm. “I never met her.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Unless you count seeing her after she was dead, which I may have done though I don’t remember.”

  By now Marsh had a photograph of the dead girl. He put it on the table between them. “You may have known her by another name. If she was … using … you, she may have wanted to keep her real identity secret.”

  Shad stared at the photograph. “Using me?”

  “You’re an interesting man, Mr Lucas, you can do things most people can’t. You made headline news doing it just this summer. Television feeds on interesting people. The possibility of doing a programme on you was bound to occur to someone. If it occurred to Miss Pickering, she may have approached you on some other pretext – to weigh you up before showing her hand.”

  Shad looked again at the photograph. She didn’t look at all familiar. “I’ve never seen her before.”

  “Shad, you have,” said Harry Marsh, quietly insistent. “In the wagon, almost certainly. If she doesn’t look familiar to you, maybe you’re shutting something out. Maybe you were with her last night. Maybe that’s why you went out.”

  “You’re saying … I killed her?” The gruff voice cracked in astonishment.

  “No, I’m not,” Marsh said levelly. “I’m speculating that you went out yesterday evening in order to meet her. That that’s what you were doing behind the sidings. I don’t know who stabbed her. Maybe it had already happened when you found her, or maybe somebody jumped the pair of you – floored you and stabbed her. I don’t know. But you do, if you can get at it.

  There’s somebody I want you to talk to. A doctor. He specialises in amnesia; he might be able to help.”

  Shad knew what Marsh was saying. The bottom fell out of his stomach. “A psychiatrist?”

  “Yes. You won’t have to go to the hospital: he’ll see you at his house if you’d rather.”

  “You’ve already talked to him?”

  The superintendent nodded. “I need you to remember what happened. You need that, too.”

  Shad sucked in an unsteady breath. “What if I refuse?”

  Marsh watched him. “You have that right. But people might wonder why you’d want to exercise it.”

  “I don’t want anybody messing round in my head!”

  “I understand that. But there’s a killer out there, and the only one who can help us find him is you. If he kills again you’ll never forgive yourself.” Which was true, if a bit below the belt. “Why don’t you talk to Doctor Cunningham, see if you can find a way of doing this that doesn’t worry you?”

  He wrote on a piece of paper. “This is his home number: give him a call. He knows what it’s all about. If he doesn’t think he can help he’ll say so. If you don’t want to work with him, we’ll try to find another way. But it’s important we make progress quickly. I have a dead girl in the morgue, if I’m going to make an arrest I have to find out what happened. I need your cooperation, Shad. Whether or not you knew her, you’re the only one who can help Jackie Pickering now.”

  Chapter Seven

  Alex was trying to concentrate on the job in hand, which was composing a reply to Fran Barclay on the subject of her relationship with Jamie. Instead she kept finding her thoughts drifting to her own relationship with Matt Gosling.

  Would he accept her wishes in this? Or would the office become a battlefield as she fought first his advances, then his resentment?

  On the other hand, if he really had felt like this for nine months and done nothing until now, maybe in his heart he knew it wasn’t a good idea. But what if he wouldn’t take no for an answer? In a world of chancers and bullies Matt Gosling was the closest thing she knew to an officer and a gentleman; but still, where basic feelings are involved no one’s responses are entirely predictable. She couldn’t work in an atmosphere that persisted longer than a week or two while he got the disappointment out of his system.

  She turned her attention once more to the letter Matt had selected from the post.

  First, believe me when I say that my lover’s happiness is all that matters to me. For that I would sacrifice my own. If I was sure that his long-term fulfilment depended on my departure, I might sob all the way to the bus station but I’d go. He’s that important to me.

  The problem is, I’m important to him too. But so is his job, and I’m the biggest obstacle to success in it. I really don’t know why. I’m perfectly presentable, and even if I wasn’t I never show my face at his office. But Skipley is a small town in many ways: everybody knows everyone else, and unfortunately the people on whom Jamie’s advancement depends are stuck back in the 1950s. It would be different if we were able to marry; it would be all right if he lived alone; but while we live together I’m an albatross around his neck. It isn’t fair, it isn’t right, you’d think there’d be a law against it, but the plain fact is that I’m stopping him from doing as well in his career as his talents, application and sheer hard work warrant. No one will ever say this is why, but it is.

  So what do I do? He says Sod them, and I think that right now he means it. But what of the future? At thirty-four he’s too young to be stuck in a dead-end job, too old to start afresh somewhere else. I’m terrified the time will come when he’ll regret what our relationship has cost him. That he’ll resent me. I’d rather go now, while we still mean something to one another, than wait for that to happen.

  I don’t know what I’m expecting from you: this is our dilemma, only we can resolve it. But I’m so worried, I felt the need to tell someone, if only to crystalise how I feel myself. If it was something I could talk to my mum about I wouldn’t have bothered you. And I know what Jamie wants: I’m just not sure it’s what he needs. I know what I want, but I’m not sure it’s what Jamie needs. If I fell under a bus tomorrow – and I’m talking hypothetically, I really don’t see suicide as an option – he’d be devastated, but I think maybe his life would go forward then in a way that it can’t while we’re together.

  Heaven knows why, but I feel better just for putting pen to paper. If you’ve any useful suggestions I’d be glad to hear them; otherwise feel free to consign this to the round file. At some point I’ll decide what I have to do and then I’ll do it. Wish me well. Keep writing The Primrose Path, it keeps me sane!

  Her initial assessment had been right, thought Alex: TLC. When Rosie read this she’d lose her temper, demand to know where Jamie worked and march round to confront his bosses who thought that (a) their employee’s domestic arrangements were any of their business; and (b) even if they were, a partner as loving as Fran could be anything but an asset to him. Of course she’d probably make things worse, but she’d think she was sticking up for the star-crossed lovers.

  Alex agreed with Fran: there probably wasn’t much to be done except decide how to live with the situation. There was employment legislation protecting people from prejudice, but Jamie’s employers could always find some other reason for not promoting him. Racial and sexual discrimination were amenable for prosecution because it was usually possible to make a direct comparison. But a man in middle management who might have gone further but then again might not? Even if the whole building knew it, how could you prove that his superiors’disapproval of his partner was the reason?

  Alex turned to her keyboard and slowly began to write. There was no easy answer to this: she had to be sure that any contribution of hers would make Fran feel better even if the problem remained. The words began scrolling up on the screen:

  You’re right: it isn’t fair, there should be a law against it, and if Jamie decided to leave he could try to claim constructive dismissal. He might succeed, or his employers might offer compensation to avoid going to court; but either way it could be a Pyrrhic victory. Jamie could end up with a few thousand pounds in his pocket but no job and a reputation for being difficult to employ. If that’s the course he decides on he would be wise t
o seek alternative employment first. It would reduce the compensation payable, but a few thousand pounds is no substitute for a regular wage.

  As to what you should do, I think what you must do is talk to Jamie about this. I suspect he’ll be appalled that you’re considering ending your relationship. I suspect he’d rather sweep the streets and come home to you than be Managing Director and go home to an empty house. But even if I’m wrong, it’s his decision. When he’s got over the shock he’ll be deeply touched that you care so much about his happiness. But if someone has to choose which of two prizes will make him most happy for longest, it has to be him.

  Personally, I have no doubt which he’ll go for. But if I’m wrong I’ll pass on the names of all the men I know will write in offering to give up their jobs, their Porsches and all they have for a girl like you.

  Alex printed her reply and put it in an envelope. If a return address was enclosed they always sent a personal reply in advance of publication. It was not only courteous, it was a chance to catch NGIs – non-genuine inquiries. If the recipient of a letter phoned up to say, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ and it turned out to be a hoax perpetrated by an acquaintance with a third-form sense of humour, there was still time to change the page before the Chronicle was printed.

  Alex went back to the in-tray to see what else awaited her attention. There was plenty; but as she toyed with the keyboard it wasn’t a reply to a query that started to appear.

  Dear Primrose,

  I have the privilege of working for one of the nicest men in the world. He’s kind, courteous and funny: the sort of man any woman would give her eye-teeth for. Except me.

  Even that isn’t entirely true. I’ve enjoyed his friendship for nine months. But it seems friendship isn’t enough for him any longer. We’re both free; you couldn’t find two people who get on better; the only obstacle is what everybody I know considers a stupid prejudice of mine.