‘There’s the knife,’ said Charmian, who had been very quiet. ‘That means something.’
‘We’ll have to see about that. I’m not speculating until we get the forensics. Or the girl. Whichever happens first.’ He stood up. ‘I’ll have to stir my stumps.’
Night was coming on, the sky was clear now, the storm was over, but there was no moon. It was getting hard to see into the corners of the kitchen. The tap was dripping with soft, regular persistence. Charmian went across to turn it off, then she reached out to the light switch and turned on the centre lamp. A hard cold glare filled the room.
Ulrika Seeley put her hand on the purse and the sanitary towels where they rested on the table-top.
‘These two objects are interesting.’
Charmian nodded. ‘Yes, I agree. She left the purse behind. So she has no money.’
‘She probably had a note or two tucked in her pocket,’ said Ulrika, who thought she knew just a touch more about young girls than Charmian.
‘And the other?’ asked Wimpey, he found the sanitary towels an embarrassing subject, one he usually tried to avoid.
‘It means she is now half-way between a child and a woman, and she is probably frightened of the future she is embarking on.’
There was something about the way Ulrika said this that silenced them.
Hoplite, a peaceful and wily animal, was tethered to a post in the field adjacent to the station. He was happily cropping the grass, but he had his eye on an interesting looking bush in a neighbouring garden. Supposedly he was tied up, but he had once shared a field with an elderly white donkey, put there as a companion, and he had learnt a trick or two worth knowing. Life seemed full of promise.
Chapter Fourteen
In the morning a pony with a piece of wooden fencing pendant from his neck like a decorative frieze was discovered quietly grazing on the grassy slope hard by Fletcher’s Cottage. Hoplite had come home. As well as teaching him guerrilla tactics, his donkey mentor had taught him to always learn the way home on the way out. You might not want the information, but it was better to have it. Hoplite, who was a conservative animal, had no intention of being a lost one. He was found by Freda who told Johnny who told Lesley. After a bit of thought, Lesley told Tommy. Hoplite’s return was reported to the Alexandria Road police station where the call was received by Sergeant Wimpey, who passed it through all the correct channels, one of whom was Charmian Daniels.
Charmian received the news with her breakfast coffee. ‘Going to have to see the parents,’ she said to Wimpey. ‘ I wonder how Annabel Gaynor is? I wonder if Brian Gaynor knows about the pony?’
‘Knew before us, I expect,’ grunted Wimpey. ‘ He’s up there at Mr Bingham’s.’
Yes, Charmian would tell Ulrika. She would get her on the telephone this morning. They had not, as yet, located Joanna, alive or dead. Charmian and Ulrika thought she was still alive, Chief Inspector Merry suspected she was already dead. Either way, the search for her was becoming more anxious.
Charmian had got back late last night to Maid of Honour Row, having stayed talking to Wimpey and Ulrika in the former’s office in Alexandria Road. Ulrika had then driven her home where the kitchen had showed evidence that Kate had been entertaining in her absence. Two wine glasses, two coffee cups, two plates with crumbs.
Probably Johnny had been the guest, Charmian decided, and wondered what, if anything, would come of that relationship. To her mind, they looked a dangerous combination, but perhaps that was what Kate wanted. It was what she usually got. Violence was spotted all over her past. Someone might have to tell Johnny.
It was pleasant in her kitchen with the sun on her back, drinking coffee, eating toast and honey, and looking out over her own garden where she could see Muff strolling among the roses. She didn’t remember letting the cat out, so it seemed likely that Muff had achieved her ambition and long-term aim of a whole night out.
A footstep on the stair made Charmian stir. ‘Kate, are you up?’ It was early for Kate. Silence. She went to look.
Johnny was creeping quietly down the stairs. They stared at each other in silence. He didn’t move, but did not speak, either. He looked bright, too bright for the early morning hour, and careful, he was waiting to see what she would do. Not the first time he had crept down a flight of stairs.
‘I didn’t see you,’ said Charmian. ‘This meeting did not take place.’
‘Thanks.’ He descended the last few steps. ‘Do I smell coffee?’
Yes, he was dangerous all right. He had that sort of charm that could get away with murder. ‘You can have some if you like.’
Murder, she thought. With my life, I ought not to use the word so lightly. Over their coffee and toast, they talked about the events of the last night, but in a detached, unemotional way. Johnny was sympathetic about the Gaynors, about his employer, most of all about the horses (Poor old Hoplite, he likes a quiet life, that one), but he was not prepared to break his heart.
As she closed the door behind him, Charmian asked herself if Kate would tell her about him? She was not a girl for secrets, but probably not.
But whoever tells anyone everything? Telling all could be therapeutic but it could also complicate life.
Yet persuading people to talk was part of her job, perhaps the most important part, and telling was what she was going to have to encourage the Gaynor family to do; and Ulrika had convinced her that there was much to tell. ‘Get them to turn over a few stones,’ Ulrika had said with gusto. ‘And watch what crawls out.’
Annabel Gaynor had recovered consciousness, her blood pressure had gone up to something nearer to normal, she was out of danger and so she was removed from the Intensive Care Unit into a private room. She would rather have been in an ordinary ward because she felt the need of company, but she was an object of interest to everyone in the hospital and to a good many people outside it.
Also, the police wanted to question her. She was better on her own. So she lay propped up on pillows on her high hospital bed and stared out of the window at the trees and roofs beyond.
Annabel recognised where she was, both her babies had been born in the Prince Albert Hospital, also in private rooms. The private surgical wing was on the top floor so tree-tops were all she could see. Even in this way the sight of others was denied her. But the room itself was pleasant with blue and white spotted curtains and a picture of birds flying over the sea on the wall. She had a bunch of flowers and a bottle of mineral water, Evian, her favourite sort on the table; she wondered who had chosen the golden roses and who was paying the bill for this room. Perhaps her mother from her faraway hide-out in Corfu where she lived in the summer. Her mother wintered in Sloane Street where she maintained a small house. She disliked the rest of London, where she rarely left the neighbourhood of Knightsbridge because she said it was so changed. But she was good about sending flowers. They were her substitute for loving.
Brian sat by her side, but they were not talking. He was working on a brief with law books stacked in a pile on the floor. Annabel had noticed that he was only pretending to work, that his eyes did not shift from one spot on the page, but she was too far removed from reality to care. They told her she was better. She did not feel better, but she felt different.
Without turning her head, she said, ‘ Why don’t you ask me what happened?’
‘Oh, you’re awake.’
‘You know I’m awake.’
‘I didn’t want to disturb you.’
She was gravely disturbed already, probably permanently disturbed and she guessed he knew that too.
‘So that’s why you didn’t ask me any questions?’ No one had asked her any questions yet, but they were all there, hanging in the air above her waiting to fall, not like bombs, but more like ripe fruits that would squash on impact and stain her for ever. The doctors, the nurses, even the policewoman who had sat by her bed, had all been exceedingly gentle and kind, but she had felt the waves of their passionate interest washing all over her.
Her husband was silent.
‘It’s your job to ask questions, isn’t it?’
‘Oh Annabel.’
‘You’re frightened to ask. Is Joanna home?’
He considered lying, but it wouldn’t do. ‘No.’
‘So she got away? I thought she would do.’
‘She might have killed you.’
‘Oh no,’ said Annabel with conviction. ‘I might have killed her but she would never have killed me.’ Then she said, ‘But we might both have killed you.’
Brian swallowed. ‘Aren’t you worried about where Joanna is?’
Annabel looked out of the window. The trees were waving as if a wind had got up. ‘I think I would be more worried if she got back.’
‘You hit hard.’
With a change of voice, Annabel said, ‘Of course I’m worried. I tried to stop her going. That’s how this happened.’ She held out a tentative hand and he took it. It was the first real contact between them for weeks. ‘ Who sent the flowers?’
‘I did, of course.’
‘But you never send flowers.’ Even when she had the babies he had come in to the hospital carrying two books from the best-seller list, but not a flower, not even one rose.
‘I did this time.’
Before she left the house, Charmian had taken a call from Chief Inspector Merry. He sounded gruff. Never at his best early in the morning, he had had a bad night with indigestion. This had led to an irritable quarrel with his wife who blamed too much coffee, drunk too late, and not her excellently cooked dinner. This, in turn, had given him a bad headache. What with one thing and another he did not find it easy to be gracious to Chief Superintendent Charmian Daniels who he felt was an over-educated, over-promoted, over-active lady with powerful friends.
‘I understand you and Dr Seeley are off to speak to Mrs Gaynor? I would have preferred to have had one of my lads do it, but I’ve had my arm twisted and I’m told you are likely to get more out of her.’
Charmian was tactful. ‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that, but we might just know more the sort of questions to ask.’
‘All right, I go along with that. You two are the experts.’ He paused. ‘But I want you to know that from my point of view this attack on Mrs Gaynor is a side-issue in a major investigation of three murders.’
‘I’m not sure if that is so.’
‘It’s just how I see it. What’s happened to her and the disappearance of the girl may have no relevance to what we are investigating. I’ve got three dead women, brutally slaughtered, and I don’t see a twelve-year-old doing it.’
He was a man of orthodox views who loved his wife and children in a straightforward way, and who, in spite of a wide experience of life gained in his police duties which had been tough and varied found it hard to believe, really believe (although he knew they existed) in paedophiles, incestuous relationships and parents who molested their children. Likewise he could not take on board the idea of a child as a multiple killer. But he was an honest man, who faced facts.
‘There’s no news of her?’
‘No. But a railway worker whom we didn’t see last night, says he thinks he saw a girl who fitted her description travelling on the six-fourteen train to Waterloo. The time would be about right. She could have caught that train. No one seems to have noticed the horse, but there’s a broken fence in the field next to the station. Matches what the animal had round its neck. Seems to have eaten its way through half the apple crop on an overhanging tree. Wouldn’t have thought a horse could do what that one did, but it did.’ There was a note of reluctant respect for the intelligence of the pony.
‘Polo ponies are quite bright.’
‘Pity it couldn’t talk.’
If it could, it would probably be complaining of acute indigestion and comparing notes on the subject with him.
‘Anything else?’ You had to probe with Merry, he hated to disgorge information.
‘As a matter of fact, yes.’
As a matter of fact, yes, echoed Charmian in her head. God! Merry could be a bore sometimes. She felt she needed tweezers to pluck the facts out. Why couldn’t he just say?
In the garden she could see Muff stalking something. She rapped on the window.
‘What’s that noise?’
‘Just me. So what is it?’
‘The blood on the shirt in the case does not belong to either Mrs Gaynor or the girl Joanna. They were both O, this is A.’
‘Well, that’s interesting. And the victims, any match there?’ Yes, she did need tweezers, sharp ones.
‘Could be, just could be, Victim C.’
The gay lady, the friend of Baby, Beryl Andrea Barker, the friend she called Maggie.
‘But more tests are needed. You know how things are.’ Once they had got results in a matter of days, hours sometimes now, in the interests of precision, it could take weeks, it could be Margery Fairlie.’
So really Bert Merry had had something positive to impart, but how reluctant he had been to pass it on. Because it was on her side of the fence, this piece of evidence, and not his. It pointed to Joanna Gaynor as the killer.
Through the window she could see Muff emerging from a bush with a bird in her mouth, her eyes were bright, her tail bushy. This is the life, she was saying, never mind if it is someone else’s death.
One more task before Charmian left for the hospital on the Datchet Road: she asked her secretary in London to call a garage and get her car repaired. Ulrika was about to drive her to the interview with the Gaynors, but it might be as well very gently to distance herself from Ulrika. She too had noticed a look in Ulrika’s eyes, one or two gentle pressures on her arm and speculated; she was not as unaware as Kate had believed.
As she drove to the hospital, Ulrika said, ‘Am I just to sit in on this interview or am I allowed to talk, to ask questions?’
‘Oh, you are allowed to talk, of course. Would anything stop you?’
‘You mean I always interfere?’
‘Something like that.’
‘But to a good end. You must admit it?’
Charmian said, ‘We’re here. Don’t overshoot the entrance. You can park under this tree.’
‘And I do come up with the answers.’ While talking, Ulrika was backing her car neatly into position.
‘You seem sure of that.’
‘Mind, there are sometimes several answers.’ There was more than a hint of mockery in her voice. ‘I offer a choice.’ She locked the car. ‘ Where do we go?’
The Prince Albert Hospital had undergone many changes since it had been built in the reign of Queen Victoria, after whose consort it was named. The original nineteenth-century building, a strong statement in Italianate red brick, had been deemed inadequate to modern medicine in the 1960s and doomed to destruction. There had then arisen a Victorian Preservation Society which had declared the building a gem of its kind. Local patriotism had taken hold, royal patronage invoked and the building was saved. It was now imbedded in a concrete and glass structure whose leaking roof and heat loss in winter, together with the intensity of the heat glare in summer, was a constant worry to the hospital administrator. The Victorian building, being the most comfortable, had been given over to the private patients, of which this prosperous district had a large number, and renamed the Armitage Wing after the original architect. An imposing staircase led to the main entrance.
‘Up those stairs. She’s in the Armitage Wing, that’s where the private rooms are.’
A nurse was at that moment coming down the steps. Since Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing, had been influential in the setting up of the original hospital, the nurses at the ‘ Bertie’, as it was locally called, still wore the pretty pleated caps and stiff aprons that she had devised, resisting the nylon dresses and paper hats of some other establishments. It was now recognised that this uniform, which was very fetching, pulled in the best student nurses and the richest patrons. The nurses looked so pretty in their lavender and whi
te uniform that the marriage rate was high too. Many distinguished consultant doctors and surgeons, several bishops and a clutch of cabinet ministers had found their spouses while either working or being cured in the Prince Albert Hospital. Only by the young female doctors was this uniform resented as unfair competition.
The young nurse stopped them on the way up. ‘Can I help you?’ They had all been instructed to watch out for journalists and sightseers. Mrs Gaynor was to be protected.
‘Police,’ said Charmian, identifying herself. ‘We are here to see Mrs Gaynor. Which room is she in?’
‘Twenty-seven. I’m specialling her. I’ll show you.’
‘How is she?’
‘Coming along,’ said the nurse discreetly. ‘But you won’t be staying long, will you? Not too long?’
Charmian smiled but did not answer.
Annabel Gaynor, in a pretty blue bedjacket, and with her hair brushed behind her ears, offered her visitors a nervous smile. Then she gave a quick look at her husband. Charmian did not fail to notice the look.
‘Can I bring you some coffee?’ asked the nurse from her position by the door.
Better take it. Relax the atmosphere. ‘Yes, please.’ Charmian smiled at Annabel. ‘Let’s all have some.’
‘None for me.’ Brian Gaynor stood up, scattering his papers. ‘Damn.’
A Cure for Dying Page 17