by P. D. James
She discovered that her mother liked and had an instinctive appreciation of pictures; it was a discovery, too, for her mother. It pleased her to believe that her own pleasure in painting was inherited, enhanced by, but not the result of Maurice’s careful tutelage. They became almost obsessive tourists during their first week together, setting out early with a packed lunch to be eaten on park seats, on river steamers, on the top deck of a bus, in the secret squares and gardens of the city.
She thought that she knew the exact moment when her mother had voluntarily taken upon herself the burden of happiness. It was the evening of their third day together when they threw the things she had brought with her from Melcombe Grange into the Grand Union Canal. In the morning they had taken a bus to Knightsbridge and had fought their way into one of the sales. Watching her mother’s face as the horde of bodies pressed upon them, Philippa surprised in herself an emotion too close to sadism to be comfortable. They could have shopped perfectly well in Marks and Spencer in Edgware Road, getting there at nine-thirty before the crowd of tourists arrived. Had it been entirely because of a wish to see her mother in expensive clothes that she had led them to this melee? Hadn’t it been in part deliberate, a test of her mother’s courage, perhaps even the half-shameful pleasure of observing with detached interest the physical manifestations of pain and endurance? At the worst moment, the crush at the foot of the escalator, looking at her mother’s face, she had been suddenly afraid that she was going to faint. She had taken her mother by the elbow and urged her forward; but she hadn’t held her hand. Not once, not even in that bleak sitting room at Melcombe Grange had there been a touching of each other’s fingers, a meeting of flesh.
But she had been pleased with their bargains: a pair of fawn linen slacks, a jacket to match in fine wool, two cotton shirts. Trying them on again once they were home, her mother had turned to her with a curious look, half rueful, half resigned, which seemed to ask: “Is this what you want? Is this how you see me? I’m attractive, intelligent, still young. I have to live the rest of my life without a husband, without a lover. So what are these clothes for? What am I for?”
Afterwards she had sat on the bed and watched while her mother packed her case. Everything that she had brought with her from prison went in: the suit in which she had travelled to London, her gloves, her underclothes, her shoulder bag, even her toilet articles and pyjamas. It was an extravagance thus to relinquish even the small necessities of living, all of which would have to be replaced; but Philippa didn’t check her. It was an extravagance necessary to both of them.
They set out for the canal half an hour before the towpath was due to be closed to the public, and walked in silence, her mother carrying the case, until they reached an unfrequented stretch of the path overshadowed by trees. It was a warm, heavy evening of low cloud. The canal, rich and sluggish as treacle, slipped undisturbed under the low bridges and seeped into the moist fringes of the bank. A crowd of midges danced above the water, and single leaves, dark green, still glossy with the patina of high summer, floated slowly past on the sluggish stream. The air was rich with a rank river smell overlaid with loamy earth and spiced with the drifting scent of lawn cuttings and roses from the high gardens above the canal. The birds were silent now, except for the occasional distant cry, plaintive and alien, from the zoo aviary.
Still without speaking, Philippa took the case from her mother and hurled it into the middle of the stream. She had first glanced each way to make sure that the towpath was empty, but even so the splash as the case hit the water sounded so like a falling body that they simultaneously glanced at each other, frightened that someone from the road must have heard. But there were no calling voices, no running footsteps. The case rose slowly, slid along the greasy surface of the water then reared itself like a sinking ship, toppled and was gone. The circle of ripples died.
She heard her mother give a little sigh. Her face, stained by the green shadows, was extraordinarily peaceful. She looked like a woman in a moment of mystical exultation, even of religious ecstasy. Philippa felt an almost physical relief, as if she had flung away something of herself, of her past, not the past which she knew and recognized, but the formless weight of unremembered years, of childhood miseries which were not less acute because they lurked beyond the frontier of memory. They were gone now, gone forever, sinking slowly into the mud. She needn’t bother anymore to try to recall them, nor fear that they might leap out of her subconscious to confuse and terrorize her. She wondered what her mother was thinking, she whose past, seared on so many memories, documented between the buff covers of official files, could not so easily be flung away. They stood in silence at the water’s edge. Then the spell broke. Her mother turned to her. Her face relaxed into a smile like a woman released from pain into peace. It was almost a grin of pleasure. But all she said was: “That’s done. Let’s go home.”
7
That night she decided that she had waited long enough; it was time to read her mother’s account of the murder. But now that the moment had come she found herself reluctant to take the manuscript from her drawer. Almost she wished that her mother hadn’t handed it to her, that she could have been spared this new moment of decision. She wished it read; yet dreaded to read it. There was nothing to prevent her from destroying it, but that was unthinkable. It was here; she had to know what it said. She asked herself what was holding her back. Her mother had told her the bare facts on that first visit to Melcombe Grange. Nothing in that waiting foolscap envelope could alter those facts, nothing could extenuate or excuse them.
The night was warm and she lay rigidly under a single blanket staring at the pale haze of the open window. Her mother’s window must be open too. She could hear the faint rumble of traffic along Lisson Grove and the occasional shouts and laughter of revellers outside the Blind Beggar. Through her own window there wafted a warm summer smell of flowers and earth as if there lay outside all the richness of a country garden.
There was no sound from her mother’s room but she waited to put on her bedside light until the last shouts from the pubs had died away and the street was finally quiet. It seemed to her important that she shouldn’t begin reading until she could be sure that her mother was asleep. Then she switched on the lamp and slowly drew the envelope from the drawer. The manuscript was written in her mother’s firm, upright but rather difficult hand on heavy, closely lined paper with a red-lined margin. Her mother had written only on alternate lines. The careful handwriting, the official-looking, very clean paper and the red margin gave the manuscript the look of an affidavit or of an examination script. It was written in the third person:
After she had been in Holloway for five years a new prisoner, a woman who had run a prostitution and extortion racket, standing beside her at the library shelf and looking at her with slant-eyed malice, had whispered: “You’re one of the Ductons, aren’t you? I read about you in a book I got from the public library: Fifty Years of Murder 1920–1970. It was a kind of encyclopaedia of murder, the most notorious cases. You were under D in the Child Killer section. The Ductons.”
It was then that she realized that she wasn’t a person anymore. She was a Ducton, categorized by crime, partner in an unholy alliance, indissolubly linked by infamy. But she was surprised that the compiler had thought them worth including. They hadn’t seemed notorious at the time, only a commonplace pair of bunglers, putting up a particularly poor fight in a trial which hadn’t attracted much publicity, hadn’t been able to compete with the suicide of a pop star or the sexual indiscretions of a minister of the Crown. The author must have had to scrape the barrel to pad out his chapter on child killers. She could guess what he had written under their entry. She herself had browsed through just such an encyclopaedia of death.
“Martin and Mary Ducton, who were convicted in May 1969 of the murder of twelve-year-old Julie Mavis Scase, both came from respectable, upper-working-class parents. Ducton was a clerk at the time of the murder, and his wife worked as a hospital medica
l records clerk. She was studying in her spare time for an external university degree and had some pretensions to culture. She is generally considered to have played the leading part in the child’s death.”
She had other pretensions too, to happiness, to achievement, to a different life for them both. And it was true that she took the lead. She always took the lead, even in their joint destruction.
After that meeting she decided to write the truth about the crime, except that the truth was as shifting as her feelings, as unreliable as memory. It was like a butterfly. You could catch it and kill it and pin it down on a board with every delicate detail, every nuance of colour displayed. But then it wasn’t a butterfly anymore. She thought that imagery was pretentious; but then she had pretensions.
At the trial she had sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. She had nearly added “So help me God” but that wasn’t written on the card. Only in fiction, apparently, did witnesses speak those words. There had been a little pile of holy books on the ledge of the box. The clerk, who was gowned like a verger, had handed her the Bible. She wondered what would happen if he gave her the wrong one, the Koran perhaps. Would she have to give her evidence all over again? The Bible was black and she took it with distaste because it was contaminated with the sweat of murderers’ hands and she knew that they hadn’t bothered to disinfect it. That was almost all she remembered of the trial. These facts are the truth.
She remembered coming home a little later that evening because the gynaecological clinic at the hospital where she worked had been busier than usual and she wasn’t free until after six. It was very cold even for January. A thin fog writhed round the street lamps and crept into the front gardens truncating the trees so that they seemed to move uprooted in majestic inconsequence, surpliced in white mist. As soon as she opened the front door she heard the child crying. It was a high desolate wailing, not loud but continuous and piercing. At first she thought that it was a cat. But that was ridiculous. She was the last woman to mistake the cry of a child.
And then she saw her husband. He was standing halfway up the stairs looking down at her. She could remember everything about that moment, the thin wailing of the child, the warm familiar smell of the hall, the patterned wallpaper and the break at the join where she hadn’t managed to match it accurately, her husband’s eyes. She remembered most his look of shame. There had been terror there, too, and a desperate appeal. But what she remembered was the shame. She could never afterwards remember what they said. Perhaps they didn’t speak. It wasn’t, after all, necessary. She knew.
There is no rehearsal for a murder trial. You have to get it right the first time. There are no explanations, only deceptively innocent questions to which the most dangerous response can be the truth. She could only recall one question to her in the witness box from the prosecuting counsel and her reply to that had been fatal.
“And what had you in mind when you went upstairs to the child?”
She supposed that she could have said: “I wanted to see that she was all right. I wanted to tell her that I was there and that I’d take her home. I wanted to comfort her.” None of the jury would have believed her, but some of them might have wished to believe her. Instead she told them the truth.
“I had to stop her crying.”
Childhood is the one prison from which there’s no escape, the one sentence from which there’s no appeal. We all serve our time. She was eleven when she realized the truth, that her father didn’t beat her and her brother because he was drunk; he got drunk because he enjoyed beating them and that was how he found the courage to do it. When he came back at night her brother would begin crying even before they heard his heavy feet on the stairs and she would slide into bed with him trying to stifle the noise in her arms, hearing the lurching feet, her mother’s expostulatory whine. She learned at the age of eleven that there was no hope, only endurance. She endured. But for the rest of her life she couldn’t bear to hear a child crying.
Murderers often excuse themselves by claiming that they can’t remember exactly what happened. Perhaps it’s true. Perhaps the mind mercifully erases what it can’t bear to recall. But she could remember so much horror. Why then should this particular moment be a blank? She must have lost her temper with this wailing stupid girl who hadn’t, after all, been seriously hurt, who surely had been warned that she shouldn’t go with strange men, who hadn’t even the sense to stop crying and get out of the house and keep quiet. At the trial the pathologist described the post-mortem findings. Death had been by throttling; the neck was bruised with the marks of human hands. They must have been her hands. Who else’s could they have been? But she couldn’t remember touching the child, nor could she remember the moment when what she was shaking was no longer a child.
After that, memory was like a film rolling on with only a few moments when the picture was lost or no longer in focus. Her husband was in the kitchen. She saw that there were two cups and the teapot and milk jug on the kitchen table. For one moment she had a ridiculous thought, that he was restoring them with tea. She said: “I’ve killed her. We must get rid of the body.”
He accepted the brutal statement as if he already knew, as if she was telling him the most commonplace of facts. Perhaps he was so petrified by horror that no new horror could touch him.
He whispered: “But her parents. We mustn’t hide her. We can’t let them go on hoping, wondering, praying that she’s all right.”
“They won’t be left hoping for long. We won’t take her very far, just to the edge of Epping Forest. The body will be found soon enough. But it mustn’t be found here.”
“What are you going to do?”
Fear sharpened her wits. It was like fabricating a plot. All the details had to be right. She considered, discarded, contrived. They would use the car. The body would be put in the boot. But it would have to be wrapped. If they were suspected, the car would be searched by forensic scientists. They would find traces of the child, hair, dust from her shoes, a thread of cloth. A sheet would do to cover her, a clean, ordinary, white terylene and cotton sheet from her airing cupboard. She always washed them at the launderette. There would be no laundry mark to betray them. But it would be difficult to dispose of a sheet; they would have to bring it back in the car for washing. Plastic would be better, that long plastic bag in which her winter coat had come back from the cleaners. No one would be able to trace it to her, and after they had disposed of the body it could be screwed up and left in any public litter basket. But they would need an alibi for the time of death and that meant speed. They must start now, at once. She said: “We’ll take back our library books. I’ll ask for the new Updike; it’s still on the reserve list. That means that the girl will remember us if the police check up. Then we’ll go to the cinema at Manse Hill. We’ll have to do something there to make the box-office girl notice us. I’ll find I haven’t enough money and ask you for some. We’ll argue about it. No, better still, I’ll accuse her of cheating me over the change. That means paying with a five-pound note. Have you got one?”
He nodded.
“I think so.”
He tried to take out his wallet. His hands were shaking as if he were palsied. She put her own hand into his jacket pocket and found it. In the note compartment there was a new five-pound note and a couple of crumpled pound notes. She said: “We only stay in the cinema for about half an hour. Once we’re through the foyer we’ll take our own tickets and separate. If the police do suspect us they’ll be asking people if they saw a couple leaving. They won’t expect us to be apart. And we’d better sit at the end of different rows, not next to anyone. It shouldn’t be difficult. There won’t be many people there on a night like this. But you must keep your eyes on me. As soon as I get up to leave slip out after me. We’ll go out by the side entrance, the one that leads straight on to the car park. Then we’ll drive to the forest.”
He said: “I don’t want to sit away from you. I don’t want us to be parted. Don’t
leave me.”
He was still shaking. She couldn’t be sure that he had understood. She wished that she could do it all alone, that she could help him to bed, tuck him in with a hot-water bottle, cosset him like a grieving child. But that wasn’t possible. He, more than she, must have an alibi. She couldn’t leave him alone in the house. They had to be seen together. Then she remembered the brandy, the miniature bottle she had won at the hospital Christmas party. She had been saving it for some unspecified emergency. She hurried to the pantry and poured the brandy into a glass. When she smelled it she knew how much she needed it. But there were only a couple of mouthfuls in the bottle, not enough to do good to two of them. She took it to him. She switched on the third bar of the electric fire.
