A Little Local Murder

by Robert Barnard

  It was not quite as easy a job as he had hoped. The letters, whatever their qualities as literature, had certainly managed to scare their recipients to death. A hunted look came into their torpid rustic eyes at the most oblique reference to such a thing as an anonymous letter. Some even feigned ignorance of the term. The whole operation therefore involved a great deal of patient toing and froing, of letting assurances sink in gradually, of convincing people that others were in the same boat, and that much the safest course would be to hand the letters over at once in return for police protection. Oddly enough, the recipient he visited first was the hardest nut to crack. He had always thought of Mrs Leaze as an amiable old crook, as incapable of secrecy as your average Labour cabinet minister. But for once in her life she seemed to have been shocked into silence. Like most of the rest she denied vigorously for the whole of Parrish’s first visit that she had received any such letter:

  ‘If you believe that old scrounger Amos Chipweather, a dirty old rogue as reads people’s postcards and pinches kiddies’ postal orders at Christmas, then you want your ’ead reading,’ she said. ‘It’s a wonder to me why we should pay our rates to support a police force that can’t mind its own business better than that.’

  On his second visit, fear had conquered shyness, and she admitted to having received such a letter a week or ten days before. No power on earth would make her show it to the Inspector, however. In fact, like every single one of the other recipients, she insisted that she had burnt it.

  ‘You know me, Inspector,’ she said. ‘I’m never one to gossip and pry into other people’s lives, and if all I ’ear is true some of ’em wouldn’t stand up to much prying, that’s sure as sure, and when you get some nasty-minded soul as ’as got so little to do that ’e can sit down and put together a letter like that, well, I feel like I feel when someone comes into my shop and wants to spread filthy tales about other people in this village. What I do is I shut ’em up, and what I did with this was I burnt it.’

  ‘Very natural, I’m sure, Mrs Leaze,’ said Parrish, not believing a word. ‘You said the letter was “put together” – wasn’t it written in the normal way?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t. Them things never are, are they? It was some words clipped from newspapers and such likes, sometimes just the one word, sometimes two or three together. Then some of the words were typewritten like – ’

  ‘Typewritten?’

  ‘Well, sort of typewritten. Typewritten and yet not typewritten, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘Not exactly,’ said Parrish. ‘What precisely did they look like?’

  But Mrs Leaze’s descriptive powers were exhausted, and he could get no more revealing description of it than that. When he turned to the contents of the letters, her initial caginess returned in full.

  ‘I wouldn’t dignify it by repeating it,’ said Mrs Leaze, drawing herself up to her full bulk. ‘I threw it straight in the fire, so I ’ardly saw what was in it. In any case there was nothing whatsoever that could interest you.’

  Deciding that these statements contained the seeds of mutual contradiction Parrish pressed her further, but when he did finally succeed in getting something out of her, it was decidedly vague, and must be, Parrish decided, very much less colourful than the original.

  ‘It said I was a filthy-minded old – well, I won’t soil my lips,’ said Mrs Leaze, ‘and you know me, Inspector, and you can vouch that gossip never sullies this shop no matter what folks ’ave done, and do it they will, as you well know. Then there was something silly about buying up old stock and stuff about to go off and selling it at full price.’

  ‘No!’ said Inspector Parrish.

  ‘Yes!’ said Mrs Leaze. ‘Well, you can see yourself ’ow daft that is. ’Snot as though Twytching was London, where folks don’t know the difference between a fresh lettuce and a month-old one, is it? Little country place like this people know exactly what they’re buying in the way of vegetables and eggs and that, stands to reason. I wouldn’t last a week if I tried that sort of trick, I can tell you.’

  Mrs Leaze’s confident protestations rather ignored the fact that she had little or no competition in Twytching. And Parrish did not think of Twytchingites as being particularly close to the soil (close to the telly would be nearer the truth), or as anything other than slovenly shoppers who could be deceived by the most patently bogus special offer, the most obviously inflated packaging device. However, Parrish felt there were enough people around these days acting as the shopper’s friend without the police getting involved, so he concentrated on prising the letter out of Mrs Leaze. It proved to be more than his powers of persuasion could achieve. Neither sweet understanding nor his standard majesty-of-the-law pose could come near to breaking down her flabby immovability.

  ‘I said I burnt it, and burnt it I did, and there’s an end of it. If you don’t believe me then I’m sorry for you, and ’ope you’ll learn in time the difference between an honest soul as works for ’er living and chapel twice on Sunday if it’s fine and them liars and criminals you ’ave to deal with every day of the week. You ’ave to dirty your ’ands with them and I pity you for it, but I int going to be treated as one such myself, I assure you.’

  ‘Did the letter contain a threat?’ Parrish asked unabashed.

  ‘A threat?’

  ‘Or a demand for money?’

  ‘Money? There’s little enough money to be got out of me. ’Aven’t you ’eard ’ow difficult things are for the small shopkeeper?’ Mrs Leaze’s eyes strayed involuntarily round the room, but unfortunately they caught sight of the enormous and expensive fur coat, hanging ostentatiously in the hall. She quickly changed the subject. ‘As to threats – well, there was something silly about mending my ways. What was it: “Stop flaunting yourself around Twytching” – me, at my age, flaunting, I ask you – “as if you own the place. Mend your ways and cease cheating and swindling or exposure and public ignominy will ensure.” ’

  ‘ “Ensue”, I suppose,’ murmured Parrish.

  ‘No, there was nothing said about suing,’ said Mrs Leaze.

  But Parrish noted she could remember the letter well enough when it suited her.

  • • •

  Parrish finally got to see Tom Billington an hour or so before opening time, and found Ted Livermore scuttling upstairs to his room after a hard afternoon of bogus local historians and cakes of unique Twytching recipe. Ted was beginning to think that for sheer nullity and tedium the Twytching documentary would be nigh unsurpassable.

  ‘You don’t want me, Inspector, do you?’ he asked Parrish, pausing on the stairs.

  ‘Not really, sir,’ said Parrish. ‘It’s Mr Billington I’m after. But there was just one thing my sergeant forgot to ask your . . . assistant producer would you call him?’

  ‘I’m surprised there was anything my assistant forgot to tell him,’ said Ted. ‘Harold in confidential mood is pretty voluminous as a rule.’

  ‘Well, I believe he did go fairly fully into his role in the matter,’ said Parrish, grinning briefly. ‘And we tried to reassure him about that. But he didn’t tell us why she was on the programme.’

  ‘Who? Mrs Mailer?’

  ‘That’s right, sir. She didn’t seem quite the type you normally use. She wasn’t greatly involved with things locally.’

  ‘Wasn’t she?’ said Ted, this not having been quite the impression Alison had given him. Then the penny dropped. ‘Oh, I see – I suppose you must think that I slept with her, do you?’

  Inspector Parrish was unperturbed. ‘The thought had crossed my mind, sir.’

  ‘Wrong, I’m afraid, Inspector. Wrong, for once. No – she did come along to see me in my office some weeks ago, and Harold was down here on a reconnaissance trip, but I’m afraid we both kept our clothes on the whole time, which would probably surprise some of the old tabbies around here.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Parrish, ‘though I must say Mrs Mailer hadn’t the reputation locally for sleeping around.’

  ‘No,
she didn’t strike me as a compulsive spring-tester,’ said Ted. ‘The fact is, she’s a friend of the BWC.’

  ‘BWC, sir?’

  ‘Big White Chief. Otherwise Sir Charles Watson, our principal shareholder – the man who holds the purse-strings. When she heard we were going to Twytching she just tripped along and introduced herself to me – without any ulterior motive in the world, of course.’

  ‘Did the . . . er . . . BWC bring her along himself, or did he send a letter of introduction?’

  ‘No, he just sort of sent her along, I imagine.’

  ‘You didn’t check later?’

  ‘Did Moses ask for a replay of the Ten Commandments?’ said Ted. ‘No, I just accepted what she said. We chewed the cud for a bit about Twytching, what a boring little place it was, and so on, and finally I did the expected and offered her a spot on the programme. And after a bit of hesitation, she accepted.’

  ‘Genuine hesitation?’

  ‘Of course not. But better done than usual.’

  ‘Well, thank you, sir. I won’t keep you.’

  ‘Will you be with Mr Billington for long?’

  ‘Some time, I’m afraid. It’s a rather ticklish matter I’ve got to discuss with him.’

  ‘I’ll warn his wife,’ said Ted helpfully. ‘So long, Inspector.’

  Tom Billington certainly did make heavy weather of the whole thing. He sat on the old sofa in the public bar, simmering and glowering, as if the strength of his feelings could find no sufficient utterance in mere words. Quite apart from anything else, the receipt of the letter had distressed him because he had thought he was accepted in Twytching. He was unaware of the fifty-year probation period imposed on newcomers to the village, and he had thought that because the locals came to drink his beer they had taken him to their bosoms as one of themselves. But they drank his beer because it was good, and they kept rigidly to the thousand and one nice gradations of language, attitude and behaviour by which a proper distinction could be drawn between a ‘Twytcher’ and one less favoured by nature. It was a dim realization of this fact that lay behind Tom Billington’s heavy obstructiveness.

  ‘Was a right nasty piece of work, it was,’ he said, when he had finally, after half an hour of persuasion, admitted to having received an anonymous letter. ‘That sort of bloke ought to be locked away. They’re psycho, that’s what they are.’

  ‘I think you’re probably right,’ said Parrish. ‘On the other hand, there could be some quite different mind or motive behind it – something really cunning. Possibly something connected with this murder. That’s why I want to see one – ’

  ‘I burnt it,’ Tom blurted out quickly.

  ‘ – to check on the typewriter and that sort of thing. We haven’t a hope of getting whoever did it and putting a stop to it unless we see some of the actual letters.’

  ‘I burnt it,’ said Tom, rather more slowly. He shifted his enormous wrestler’s weight around the sofa, uneasy.

  ‘And the reason I’m relying on you, is that you’re a stranger. You know as well as I do that here in Twytching everybody’s business is public business. You’ve only got to pick your nose, and it’s commented on. That’s why none of the natives will show me the letters they got. Too many old skeletons in the woodshed, so to speak. Now you, coming from outside, you’re above all this. You’re outside this long saga of gossip and tongue-wagging. And of course in your job you want to stay on the right side of the police . . .’

  ‘I burnt it,’ said Tom, but rather as if Umbaba the Wild Man from Borneo had his arms and legs in grips of steel, and was bashing his face against the canvas. ‘That’s what I did.’

  ‘Have you thought,’ asked Parrish, ‘how grateful folk around here will be if it’s you who shows the letter? That’s the sort of thing that helps a newcomer in a closed-in little place like this. Quite apart from the fact that it will show us you’ve got nothing to hide.’

  ‘I ’ave got nothing to hide,’ said Tom. ‘It was just a load of filf, that’s all it was.’

  ‘And of course the contents will be as secret as the grave as far as we’re concerned,’ said Parrish. ‘You can just tell people you handed it over to us, and leave it at that.’

  Tom Billington raised his weight from the sofa, and lumbered over to a shelf behind the bar. Taking up a bottle of a seldom drunk liqueur, he extracted a piece of paper from under it, and came slowly back, still obviously pondering.

  ‘Since you put it like that,’ he said finally, ‘I suppose people will be pleased if it’s me who stumps up. Take the pressure off them, like. And you can see what a load of old cods it is.’

  He methodically unfolded the sheet of paper, and read it over to himself, glowering dully. Then he spread it out slowly over the table between them, and Parrish was able to read:

  ‘Filthy foreigners like you ought TO BE SHOT,’ said the note. ‘Bringing your loose LONDON morals and parading your shameless COW of a wife for every vile lecher in the VILLAGE who wants to fuck her, and turning your pub into a male brothel. Don’t try and push yourself forward or you will both be EXPOSED as a whore and a cuckold. Be warned and keep quiet.’

  ‘Well,’ said Parrish. ‘What a good vocabulary. Shows what a liberal education can do for you.’

  • • •

  ‘The foul fiend,’ proclaimed the vicar to Sergeant Underwood, spluttering his fricatives like a burning chip-pan, ‘the foul fiend must have a hand in it. Whence can such rank disease of the mind spring, but from him, whence but from him such aberrations of the intellect, such sores and abscesses of the spirit?’

  Sergeant Underwood admired the air of perpetual lunatic sermonizing which characterized the vicar’s speech, but she recollected that the police had to be interested in a source for the letters more immediate than the foul fiend.

  ‘With your knowledge of the parish,’ she said, ‘you surely must have some idea who has that sort of imagination.’

  ‘Who can tell?’ neighed the vicar, characteristically throwing his glances at the far ceiling. ‘Nobody. Everybody. Where can Satan not implant himself, force entry, penetrate? Yet there are here some who are mine enemies – ’

  ‘Thine enemies – I mean your?’ stumbled Sergeant Underwood.

  ‘But I will stay my hand. Vengeance is not mine, but the Lord’s. There shall be silence in heaven about the space of half an hour. Or longer.’

  ‘Don’t you think in view of the – ’

  ‘Meanwhile,’ went on the vicar, ‘in the interim, I have made contact with the woman Mailer.’

  ‘Made contact?’ repeated Sergeant Underwood, puzzled.

  ‘Last night,’ said the vicar nonchalantly, ‘after a prolonged wrestling of the spirit.’

  Sergeant Underwood dimly remembered having heard that the vicar was reputed by the more credulous of his parishioners to be possessed of supernatural powers, and that he himself claimed abilities akin to those of the lady who communicates with Beethoven and Bernard Shaw and brings back from her encounters symphonies and witticisms so inferior to those written while they were alive as to suggest that death is not all it’s cracked up to be.

  ‘What did you ask Mrs Mailer?’ asked Sergeant Underwood.

  ‘I asked her,’ said the vicar, ‘if it were she who had committed to paper this slanderous ordure.’

  ‘And what did she reply?’

  ‘She said the carpets in her heavenly mansion were incredibly bourgeois. Disappointing in the circumstances. But I shall work at it.’

  • • •

  ‘Of course normally,’ said Timothy Jimson, ‘I would have taken something like this straight to the police.’

  Jean Jimson watched her husband closely, with the absolute knowledge born out of the terrible propinquity of marriage. He was expanding his little body pompously, as if to meet an attack, but she read plainly underneath the outward bellicosity, signs of fear, panic – perhaps something else too, even nastier than she had ever expected.

  ‘Quite right, sir,’ said Parri
sh, settling himself comfortably down into an armchair, but finding his posterior getting poked by a piece of Meccano. ‘Exactly what everybody ought to do. Why didn’t you in this case?’

  ‘Living in Twytching, Inspector,’ said Jimson, as if this was to be the beginning of a lengthy exposition, ‘is not like living in a city. None of that blessed anonymity here! You have to remember that a schoolmaster is in a peculiarly delicate, peculiarly perilous position. The least breath of scandal and he is in jeopardy – his career, his way of life, his standing in the school, in the community. School-teaching is not like other jobs, and we are very much in the position of doctors, clergymen, people of that kind.’ A memory of the vicar of Twytching came through Timothy’s mind, and he decided to hurry on with his argument. ‘All this is understandable, of course, absolutely understandable. Don’t get me wrong – I wouldn’t have it any other way. Parents are quite right to insist on the highest possible standards – nothing disgusts me more than this fashionable slovenliness – dress, haircut, speech, accent! Some of the accents one hears nowadays among the younger staff members – ’

  ‘Yes, but you were saying, sir,’ interposed Parrish.

  ‘Quite, yes, well, I felt that though I have of course the highest respect for you, and your discretion, none more so, I don’t know your subordinates. You yourself must agree that the police force is in the same boat as the rest of the professions these days: the difficulty is recruiting men of the right calibre. Now for all I know one of your constables could have broadcast the whole damned thing around town – in fact, for all I know one of them could be an old pupil of mine. You see my problem.’