‘Con could be cruel,’ said Tom, as if he knew she had got to that word. Doris shook her head and put the note on a table.
Both of them had heard the sound of the car.
Charmian, still a little caught up in the dream she had been having of fish swimming in warm tropical seas, walked in just ahead of the doctor and saw them grouped together in a macabre conversation piece, Tom sitting, Burgen and Doris standing, and on the staircase behind them a rope dangling. She followed the doctor into the bedroom where Con lay and, after silently looking at her, returned to the other room.
‘Stay where you are,’ she said in a bleak formal voice. ‘ Till the doctor is finished.’
‘I suppose it had to be you first, because of your coming here before,’ said Tom; he both looked and felt stupid. Doris had telephoned the police, not Tom. His statement that Con had drugged him was probably correct. ‘ You look tired. I’m tired. You know I can hardly use my arms, they’re so stiff. That’s the weight of carrying Con, I suppose. Burgen helped but his arms aren’t sore. I suppose for him it wasn’t such a heavy load.’
Burgen made a little noise rather like a bleat, and Tom looked at him.
‘I suppose I ought to stop talking, really?’
Charmian did not answer at once. She had seen people shocked into this hysterical talkativeness before, and knew its uses; she watched him alertly, wondering what more would come spilling out.
‘Tell me what happened,’ she said to prompt him.
Tom shook his head. ‘I was asleep. I was asleep. She said she’d pack her bag and go away and leave me, but that was only a trick. She didn’t mean it, or she didn’t mean it that way.’
‘What way did she mean it?’
‘Eh?’
‘If she didn’t mean she’d pack her bags and go, what did she mean?’
‘The streets,’ began Tom and then stopped himself. He began to cry silently as he realised that Con had left him, completely and for ever and without packing her bag. This time tears formed in his eyes and ran freely down his face. Then the tears ceased, his eyes closed and he rolled gently back against the chair.
‘He’s fainted,’ said Burgen, hurrying forward.
‘No, he hasn’t,’ said Doris without sympathy. ‘He’s asleep.’
‘What a funny thing to do,’ said Burgen, unbelieving.
‘About the best thing he could do,’ said Doris, turning away. ‘ I wish I could.’
‘We’d better wake him up,’ said Charmian.
‘You try.’
Charmian bent over him and shook him. He muttered something. Charmian shook him again and he repeated the words more loudly. ‘Con told me she had a confession to make, Con confessed …’ His voice trailed away.
With Burgen and Doris watching her, Charmian bent over Tom and shook him awake.
‘What did your wife confess?’ she said insistently. ‘Was it about the girl, Arlette Grey, whose clothes were found in your house? Did your wife have anything to do with it?’
Tom took a deep breath. ‘I didn’t let her confess,’ he said. ‘I didn’t let her tell me.’ He covered his face with his hands.
Doris and Charmian stared at each other.
‘Con was worth two of him and the girl too,’ said Doris. ‘I didn’t like her but it was true. You might remember that.’ She turned and walked out of the room.
‘So we know now at least that there was something between Tom Gilroy and a girl. That seems to be the only hard positive thing we do know, except Con Gilroy is dead,’ said Charmian bitterly. She drank some coffee.
‘Some mystery that girl,’ said Grizel, giving the coffee an experimental sip. As the sip was apparently successful, she drank some more.
‘She might just have a name.’ Once Doris had gone, Burgen had been communicative on the subject of Tom and the girl he knew.
‘Mary Lou Pallas. And do you think she’s the girl with the yellow car?’
‘The girl without the yellow car.’
‘The girl Arlette Grey wrote about?’
Charmian shrugged.
‘Yes, it’s all may be, may be,’ agreed Grizel; her coffee was filtering down nicely.
‘Yellow car, yellow hair. We need to prove something.’
Grizel thought they needed to prove a great deal, but this did not seem the moment to tell Charmian so.
‘Do you think the Gilroy woman killed herself because she had killed Arlette Grey … After all she had her clothes?’
‘How do I know?’ Charmian stood up irritably and looked down at Grizel, still comfortable and relaxed in her chair. The office they shared caught the morning sun but it was too small for both of them and the furniture had really been designed for midgets. Charmian was tall and so at intervals she had to get up and move around the room to stretch her legs. It had become a nervous trick in a girl anyway by nature restless and fidgety. ‘I wish Mrs Gilroy had stayed around longer and told us more. Her husband’s certainly involved with the Pallas girl so perhaps he was mixed up with the Grey girl as well.’
‘You’re just muddling yourself,’ said Grizel calmly. She too stood up. ‘ Take it straight: the Gilroy woman killed herself, reason unknown – so far. Her husband knew a girl called Mary Lou Pallas. The clothes of Arlette Grey, who is missing, were found in the Gilroy house. Four people there, connect them up which way you can. There’s several combinations.’ She watched Charmian stride around the room. ‘There’s plenty you can do to check. Fingerprints, lab tests, you know.’
‘And Ascham’s doing them. I’ve no doubt that he’s got the whole bag of tricks out at the Gilroy house this minute. He’ll send me out with my little list of errands pretty soon.’
‘You don’t do that man justice. He likes you. I’ve seen it.’ She added uneasily: ‘You know he’s married?’
‘No. Yes, I suppose I did … People of his age usually are married,’ said Charmian irritably.
‘His wife’s never around, though. No one ever sees her.’
‘That’s why he likes me, I suppose,’ said Charmian angrily. ‘ You’re just the same as every one else. Give you another year, another case with Ascham and you’ll have me …’ She did not finish.
‘You’re just self-conscious,’ said Grizel.
Charmian stared at her angrily. She was too clever not to see the implications of this comment, and too honest not to ask herself it it could be true.
‘Anyway, I shan’t be here next year,’ said Grizel slowly, as if she had at last made up her mind to say what she wanted to say. ‘There’s going to be a child.’
Charmian took her time answering, but a pink flush started at her neck and moved up to her face. In spite of herself she was deeply moved, but the emotions that were bubbling up inside her were not easy to identify. ‘Well, it had to happen. I could see it coming. You’ve been married two years. I am glad for you, Grizel.’ But she sounded sad.
‘Yes, it’s nice isn’t it,’ said Grizel, her voice wavering. She really was a little afraid of Charmian.
Charmian walked to the window and stared out. She could see two buses leaving the station, both almost empty, she could see a party of schoolchildren being conducted into the Town Library opposite, she could see young Detective Constable Forbes hurrying across the road. None of it meant very much probably, but all of it might turn out to be important as a part of some picture somewhere. This piecing together of observed detail had been the fascination of detective work for her until now.
She turned and said suddenly, ‘And you, do you think I haven’t guessed, known all these weeks? The way you’ve been going about.’
‘I suppose I knew,’ admitted Grizel. She was acutely aware that the proud euphoria of the pregnant woman had galled the childless woman. There was a pause, then she laughed: ‘Don’t cast yourself as Elizabeth Tudor, Charmian. You’re not barren stock. Give it a try.’
To her pleasure and interest, Charmian flushed deeply.
‘Words,’ said Charmian.
‘S
ome words are magic, Charmian, didn’t you know?’ answered Grizel. ‘Like love and marriage. Say them often and you will find out.’
‘Oh, I’m impervious to incantations,’ said Charmian.
‘No one is. You least of all. You say them all the time. Only your incantations use words like ambition, success.’
‘It’s not easy, my way,’ said Charmian, somewhat bitterly. ‘But hard.’
‘And is this easy for me?’ said Grizel, almost in tears.
Startled, Charmian put her arm round her, in a moment of genuine tenderness and affection.
In that moment Grizel knew that Charmian was capable of great love.
‘You and I will never understand each other,’ said Charmian almost desperately.
(‘She’s not hard or unloving, like you said,’ explained Grizel that evening to her young husband.
‘I never said those things.’ But he knew better than to argue with Grizel. ‘I think she’s a woman with great powers of feeling. That’s the trouble.’
Grizel began to giggle).
‘When is this baby coming?’ Charmian asked her friend.
‘Oh, in about eight months and two weeks,’ Grizel replied airily.
‘Grizel!’ And Charmian, who knew all about violence and crime and the perverse ways of the world, was genuinely shocked that Grizel should prattle on about a child who must be so minuscule, so very close to beginning at all.
‘You’ll never get over your education,’ cried Grizel, amused.
Charmian came and sat by her and started to laugh. The door swinging open burst into their mood. They both looked up and stared hostilely at Rupert Ascham.
‘They’re a closed shop,’ he thought, amused and irritated. ‘ They don’t want to see me and they don’t want me in their room.’ ‘ I did knock,’ he said aloud, and in what was for him a mild manner. ‘I mean I’m looking for you.’
Grizel, moving evasively away with the coffee cups, thought he looked tigerish. No, he was too large for that. She’d got the wrong animal. Say a muscular elephant with sharp eyes. An elephant is a kindly symbol, but with him, as no doubt also with elephants, if you could get close enough, you saw that the eyes were not kindly but hard and clear.
Sergeant William Carter, the present acting head of the police technical laboratory at Deerham Hills, was as close to the missing girl Arlette Grey as anyone could be at that time.
‘I am of the opinion,’ he typed carefully, ‘that the skirt I have examined is probably the one worn by Arlette Grey. It fits the description of the skirt she was said to be wearing; the measurements of the person wearing the skirt match up with what we know of Arlette. Waistband of skirt is 26 inches, some indications of strain, suggesting wearer had somewhat bigger measurement.’
‘—Or put on weight,’ he said aloud to himself, studying his typescript. He had already sent in his report on the skirt and hair, what he was typing now was entirely for his own benefit, to keep his records up to date. One of the things he had learnt from Charmian (there had been other vivid but more personal lessons) had been the downright necessity in police work of keeping your private notes as an aide-mémoire.
‘The stain,’ he typed, ‘is due to household disinfectant.’
‘—An absolute basinful just chucked at the skirt,’ he added to himself. ‘Wonder what Daniels made of that?’
Charmian was on his mind. He had been able to forget her for over two years, but now he had come back to Deerham Hills she had moved powerfully back into his life. He didn’t know whether to raise a cheer or be resentful.
‘Now for the car,’ he said, putting a new piece of paper in the typewriter. ‘And for that, nothing. Nothing,’ he typed, hammering the keys vindictively. ‘ I couldn’t pin anything on that car … Except the colour. Yellow, and that was put on recently and by someone who wasn’t used to painting but certainly liked yellow. Perhaps it was a symbol or something. Or that’s what Daniels will say.’ He didn’t go in for symbols himself. He liked a good sound practical reason for things. Or, putting it his way, the only good sound reason for doing anything was a practical one.
‘I’ll write to Daniels tonight,’ he decided, ‘or telephone.’ And for this there seemed no good sound practical reason at all. To make up for this he made a good sound practical gesture and scribbled ‘ring Charmian’ on the pad by his right hand. Then he thought: perhaps it was a mistake to come back to Deerham Hills. There had been a practical reason for this, though, because to become even deputy head of a new laboratory on a small police force was one step up; he was an ambitious young man who might be likeable one day. Sergeant William Carter always denied he was any relation of Emily Carter who also lived in Deerham Hills. Some people believed that he was a cousin of her husband’s but that he found Emily too terrifying to claim as kin, even by marriage. Everything about Emily was larger than life. She had more interests, more children, more animals, more vitality than anyone else in the town and everything in her ambience proliferated and grew as in science fiction. William Carter was probably right to be frightened of her until he grew up a little more.
He remembered the poem he had found in the pocket of the skirt. This had been sent to Charmian Daniels for inspection. Judging by the speed with which it had come back to him for further investigation, he guessed that neither Charmian nor Ascham had known what to make of it.
He knew what he made of it.
‘The girl was mad. Plain mad. And not very nicely mad either.’ Sanity for him was one and indivisible.
At the bottom of his mind he was still concerned with another problem.
Human hair, although having the same general structure as the hair of animals, can be readily distinguished from it. The base of the hair can be examined to see if the root is present; if the root and ruptured sheath are present then the hair has been violently pulled out, but if the hair has fallen out naturally then the withered root can be observed and there is no root sheath. But the reddish hair had been cut off, so there were no roots and no sheaths. The tips of the hairs had then been examined to see if the hair had been trimmed lately. Newly trimmed hair has a square appearance, as the days pass it rounds over and after a month has a gently bevelled appearance. In the case of this hair it looked as though it had been trimmed two or three weeks ago. This would provide a check: they could find out if Arlette Grey had had her hair cut recently.
But with the reddish hair were two or three strands of yellow hair: fine, straight, naturally blonde hair, completely different in texture from the red hair.
And this yellow hair presented yet another picture. There were no roots, so the hair had been cut from the head. But it had been a break rather than a clean cut, the ends were frayed. The tips had been cleanly cut and there were no signs of rounding over.
Therefore either the yellow hair came from a newly cut head of hair: very newly cut, which was a point in itself. Or it came from the head of someone whose hair had stopped growing.
Carter considered. Only one cause for that, so far as he knew.
Death.
‘I don’t think it would be a good idea, do you, so early in the morning, to eat cake?’ said Laurence to Ben.
‘Eh?’
‘But that’s all there is for breakfast,’ continued Laurence regretfully. ‘I don’t know how it is, I always seem to forget breakfast is a meal to be catered for. But there is cake if you could stomach it.’
‘What cake is it?’
‘The chocolate one.’
‘The dog had that,’ said Ben firmly.
‘No, not really, only the top. I took it back.’
‘He licked it.’
‘I don’t mind. He’s a clean dog. He licks me sometimes.’
‘If he licks me I’ll bite him,’ said Ben fiercely. ‘Yes, Ben, I know you would. I wouldn’t do that myself.’
‘You let that dog dominate you.’
‘I am sorry about breakfast, Ben.’ – Was he really sorry or was it part of his tease? ‘ But there is the
cake.’
‘I’m not Marie-Antoinette,’ cried Ben with rage. ‘And it isn’t so early either. If it wasn’t for Con Gilroy being dead we’d be up and out.’
‘I am up, Ben,’ said Laurence.
‘Well, I’m not,’ said Ben, and he turned over and buried his face in the pillow.
Laurence padded out into the kitchen. Whistling softly so as not to disturb Ben, he made himself coffee. (There was coffee, but he had omitted to tell Ben so; perhaps he had forgotten). There was also just enough bread to make one piece of toast. No butter, however, but Laurence didn’t care for butter and spread apricot jam quite happily. He sat down at the table and ate his toast and drank his coffee while studying the newspaper. All the time he was thinking about Con.
In his opinion Con had stuck her neck out.
‘I always knew that other one was a nasty little girl,’ he said to himself as he spread more jam. ‘And she was just the sort you couldn’t show it to either. Con showed it.’ He shook his head. ‘She stayed here and she let Tom stay, and really she should have started to run the minute that one showed her face in College.’
He got up and went to the gas stove where he put the coffee on to heat it up again. He had taken pity on Ben.
Ben was right when he worked out that the balance of probability was that if Arlette Grey’s clothes were in the Gilroy house, then someone very close to that house put them there. But it wasn’t Con that put them there. And why? He turned the gas up higher. ‘Because she was genuinely surprised when she found them there. So was Tom. He was terrified. So who does that leave?’
It left Ben and himself, Doris and Burgen, and Mary Lou Pallas.
The coffee boiled over. Ben hated coffee that had boiled, but Laurence poured him out a cup and carried it into the bedroom.
‘It’s difficult, Ben isn’t it?’ he said, as he handed him the bitter brew. ‘Who is guilty and of what and why? Why should poor old Con be the one to slip the rope round her throat and go?’
‘Did you notice her smile?’ said Ascham at once to Charmian. ‘Did you notice the smile on the dead woman’s face? It meant something.’
There Lies Your Love Page 10
