A Little Local Murder

by Robert Barnard

  Stephen was looking modestly pleased with himself, though not in any way bursting with illumination.

  ‘There’s something here,’ he said, ‘though I’m damned if I see exactly what it is.’

  ‘Spill the beans,’ said Parrish. ‘Little Mr Price was friendly, was he?’

  ‘Oh, very,’ said Stephen. ‘Quite hail-fellow-well-met and what can I do for you? Made no trouble at all about formalities. Well then, first of all the Mailers have separate accounts.’

  ‘That’s what I’d imagine,’ said Parrish. ‘There’d never be anything in a joint account if she had her own chequebook.’

  ‘There was never a great deal in Arnold Mailer’s account as it was,’ said Stephen. ‘She was obviously an expensive wife. He’s got a good salary coming in, and no need to worry, but still they lived more or less up to their income. Hers was an interesting account, though. Never anything much in it for years, just an allowance put in monthly. Then last summer there starts coming in a series of fairly large cash sums – in hundreds and two hundreds at a time, and three hundred on one occasion. Irregular this, with no rhyme or reason about it. She spent much of it – there are largish cheques to clothes shops, furniture shops, record shops, places like that.’

  ‘Interesting,’ said Parrish.

  ‘Very,’ said Stephen. ‘Seems to me as if blackmail is in the air.’

  ‘And Jimson?’ asked Parrish. ‘What about him?’

  Stephen looked disappointed and less sure of himself.

  ‘Well now, there’s an odd account, too. It’s always in the black, though never spectacularly so. There seems to be no private fortune, no shares or anything that the bank manager knew about. But good little sums keep going in regularly: fifty, a hundred, two hundred. The manager had never questioned this: he thought it must have come from his writing.’

  ‘Didn’t know there was so much in verse drama,’ said Parrish. ‘You should try your hand at writing it, Stephen.’

  ‘And these sums came in cash, too,’ said Feather, ignoring him. ‘Doesn’t sound like any publisher’s payment to me.’

  ‘Hardly,’ said Parrish. ‘Much too open-handed. And it wouldn’t be for his column in the local paper either. I don’t imagine he makes much more than seventy-five pee a pop for them. It’s not the big time. What about the outgoing?’

  ‘Nothing very interesting there,’ said Stephen. ‘Usual bills paid, and the rates, and that sort of thing. But he took seventy-five out in cash earlier this month, and there was an unexplained fifty in April – these could be worth looking into. But there’s no evidence of his being milked over a long period, or anything like that. It’s a big house, and they’ve three children. Even with these extra sums he doesn’t have a lot to spare.’

  ‘I imagine not,’ said Parrish vaguely. He always imagined family men to be presented with incessant bills for new school-blazers and water-boots. ‘Well, so the picture as I see it is that they both have some sort of unidentified income. Nothing spectacular in either case, but bringing in the sort of tidy sum that makes all the difference between struggling along and managing quite nicely thank-you. What’s it all about, do you imagine? Neighbours in crime?’

  ‘There was no correspondence in the dates they put the money in – I checked that,’ said Stephen.

  ‘Marvellously co-operative your Mr Price.’

  ‘Oh, he was,’ said Stephen. ‘Nice as pie. Until . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘As I got up to go, he reminded me I was twenty-five quid overdrawn.’

  ‘Never trust the friendliness of bank managers,’ said Parrish.

  He sat down in his big desk chair, pondering. Stephen Feather never liked him much in that mood. It always meant that he was even more moves ahead of him than usual. Stephen had all the buoyant self-confidence of the young, but he hated to be humiliated in front of Sergeant Underwood.

  ‘You’d agree about blackmail, wouldn’t you, sir?’ he asked.

  Inspector Parrish waved his arms impatiently. ‘Oh yes, perhaps – blackmail or something crooked or dubious at least. There’s been something going on, certainly. The trouble with this case, though, is that it seems to point in two different directions.’

  ‘Really?’ said Stephen. ‘At least I should have thought it was clear this Mailer woman was writing letters, terrorizing people, and then making demands on them.’

  ‘It’s a possibility,’ said Parrish.

  ‘They’ve stopped since she died.’

  ‘Of course they’ve stopped,’ said Parrish impatiently. Then he seemed to forget Feather, and his slowness. As if talking to himself, but actually addressing himself to Betty Underwood, he said: ‘Two different directions. The problem is, are they connected? Or is one a snare and a delusion? In the long run we’ve got to concentrate on the Mailer woman.’

  ‘Obviously,’ said Stephen sourly, ‘since she’s our corpse.’

  ‘Exactly. And it’s there the problem is. No common ground. The family apparently thinks one thing, everyone else another. Someone’s lying, probably her. And she’s dead, and has left behind not a scrap of personal evidence, nothing to get at the truth of her personality with.’ He paused. ‘Unless . . .’

  ‘What?’ asked Betty Underwood.

  ‘Exercise books,’ said Parrish. ‘The little girl’s always writing. I wonder if it’s worth looking at her exercise books.’

  CHAPTER XI

  A CHILD AMONG YOU TAKING NOTES

  It was early evening by the time Parrish got to the Mailers’ again, a May evening full of nip and near-summer. He found Arnold Mailer and Cressida having toasted cheese on the sofa in the sitting-room, and only reluctantly conscious of anyone but themselves. He guessed that informal meals of this kind hadn’t been approved of before, and that their meal had the advantage in their eyes of homeliness and near-picnic conditions.

  ‘We’re trying to get used to our loneliness, Inspector,’ Arnold said, getting up as Parrish came in, and gesturing him unconvincingly to a chair. ‘It’s so strange to us, having only each other: it seems as though somehow we’re having to get to know each other all over again.’

  Parrish refused the chair, and made little apologetic noises indicating an unwillingness to interrupt as he awkwardly tried to explain himself and his mission.

  ‘I’m just collecting a few things, sir, just trying to . . . build up a picture, as it were, get an idea of . . . well, what sort of woman Mrs Mailer, er, your wife, that is, was. If you’ll excuse me I’ll just go upstairs and try to lay my hands on what I want. Naturally I’ll give you a receipt for anything I take.’

  ‘Of course you must just take anything you think might be useful,’ said Arnold Mailer. Cressida smiled at him her beautiful smile, and as he left to go upstairs they turned back to their meal, quite absorbed in each other.

  Parrish returned the few personal letters and papers Alison had left behind to her dressing-table, where they had lain openly in a drawer. The top of the table was littered with make-up and scent. To Parrish’s inexperienced eye they seemed to be all of an exclusive and expensive type: they were classically simple bottles, with unobtrusive, enigmatic labels, and they were ranged in military rank, each in its place waiting for its dead user. It was clear that the Margaret Thatcher cool exterior which Alison presented to the world was a surface which had taken her time and money to perfect.

  Cressida’s room was more lived in, and much more to Parrish’s liking. Games and books were stuffed higgledy-piggledy on shelves, and books lay open on spare spaces all around the room, half-read and waiting to be continued with. Cressida seemed to have a catholic taste, and to be at that intermediate stage between childish and adult reading. Since there were also several very old cuddly toys in places of honour on the high shelves it seemed as though the girl’s whole childhood was encompassed in the untidy little box of a room.

  The exercise books were stacked in a comparatively tidy pile right by the bed. Parrish flicked through several, discarding th
e maths, the geography and the Latin ones. After looking into them he discarded the French ones too: Cresida would only have started the language recently, and did not seem to his inexpert eye to be far enough advanced to say anything interesting in it. Slipping into his briefcase a collection of English books, and adding some history ones on the off-chance, Parrish crept downstairs again and went quietly out the front door.

  The Radio Broadwich team had resuscitated itself by now, and was somewhat blearily proceeding with the business of putting a programme together. It wasn’t the sort of job for a home-made hangover, and as Parrish drove past them he had the impression that tempers were frayed. They were all standing by a little van (the inevitable knot of onlookers around them) interviewing Mrs Brewer, who was reaping a just reward for a month of vehicularized shepherd’s pies and meat and two veg. Hank was bravely sampling something, without abating a jot of his joviality. The clatter of plates was meant to add verisimilitude, and it didn’t seem to be bothering anyone that it was by now nearly six o’clock and all self-respecting pensioners would be tucked up in front of children’s television. Parrish had a sinking feeling in his stomach that if Mrs Brewer had a choice of music to be played it was going to be ‘If I Can Help Somebody’.

  Back at the station, he caught Feather and Underwood in the middle of an intensely serious analysis of the case, including a detailed analysis of the murderer’s mind, which Parrish thought distinctly futile until they knew why the murder had been done. He scattered the exercise books on the table, and looked at them.

  ‘It’s a long shot,’ he said, ‘but a damned sight more useful than what you’re doing at the moment. The little girl seems to like writing, and at that age you’ve no great experience outside the home. So my idea is that we ought to get some reference or other that at the very least ought to fill in the background – tell us what sort of a mother this Mrs Mailer was, what sort of things she did with her time, give us some notion of what the home life was like there. With a bit of luck we may even get something more substantial, but I’m not banking on that.’

  He paused, shaking his head dubiously. Then he said: ‘All right, get reading.’

  Parrish himself had carefully kept his fingers on the exercise books that seemed most likely to fill in the picture for him. They were the most recent in date, and were marked ‘English Composition’. Two of them were labelled ‘Twytching Primary School’, and the other ‘Barstowe Grammar School’. He took the Twytching ones first, thinking them the more likely to contain local details. He accustomed his eyes to the square, neat, upright writing, not unlike that of some of his constables, and began reading himself into Cressida’s childhood.

  His first impression was that it was not surprising that Cressida Mailer had passed her eleven-plus (which still existed in the county more than a decade after the all-powerful gentlemen in Whitehall had issued the diktat decreeing its speedy fading from the face of the earth). He suspected that for her age – it must have been about ten at the time – her command of spelling, punctuation, sentence structure and style were well beyond her years, and especially remarkable in an age which seemed to consider such things dispensable frills or pedantic irrelevancies. There was a wonderful flow about her work, as if she could enter into a world of her own and recreate it effortlessly in words. The red pencil of the teacher had had little to do beyond correcting the odd ‘independant’ for ‘independent’, the sort of mistake that every self-respecting person makes at that age, and much later.

  The next impression was that the girl must have had a very good teacher. He wondered whether it might be little Miss Marriot of the Drama Group and the Amenities people. She was the pink rosebud type in appearance and manner, but Parrish had always suspected her of concealing something energetic and imaginative in her make-up well beyond the power of Twytching to bring to the surface. The exercise book suggested that, whoever it was, she and Cressida had enjoyed a close and fruitful relationship.

  Some of the essays were conventional enough. ‘My Favourite Animal’ was one, and Parrish remembered that there were no dogs or cats in the Mailer home. But there was no repining at this in the essay. Cressida had chosen no run-of-the-mill animal of this sort. She had written on the giraffe – a vivid, impressionistic piece about its movement, its ‘long-legged grace’, its ‘haughty splendour’, and how feeble, limited and unadaptable mere humans must appear to ‘the lordly, long-necked kings of the forest’. It was a delightful little piece, and the remarks written in a school-mistressy hand underneath showed that it had been highly appreciated.

  Other subjects were more imaginative. Towards the end of her last year in the Twytching Primary School the teacher had made the class embark on a series of related stories, in which they created an imaginary country for themselves, and peopled it as they chose. Cressida had come up with a Brontë-like confection which she called Morganaland. It was apparently an undiscovered island in the Pacific, peopled by a number of clans, quarrelsome, jealous and treacherous, not unlike the early Scots. They were ruled over by a Queen, a cold, ambitious, deceitful woman, totally unscrupulous in playing off one clan against another, one admirer against another, equally ruthless in sending this man to his execution, or arranging the sudden knife in the dark for another. It was a remarkable little scenario, running in all to over thirty pages. Its progress was punctuated by marks and remarks from the teacher, and Parrish was pleased to see that she expressed no objection to the raging, romantic bloodthirstiness of it all. Instead she seemed taken by the graphic nature of the writing, the bravura style.

  All this was fascinating, but not in the personal way which might have been useful. When he took up the first of the Barstowe Grammar School exercise books Parrish noted an immediate change of tone. The change of school could have done it, and the mystic qualities the English attach to the age eleven. Certainly the tone and feeling of the essays were damped down, in comparison with the earlier ones, and Parrish suspected the change of teacher had not been to her benefit. This new one seemed not to welcome extravagance, perhaps had ridiculed luxuriant verbiage, and so had not been given it. Again, the subjects set for the essays had been decidedly unimaginative, and had evoked a corresponding response. ‘The First Week in a New School’ was the opening essay in the book, and here Cressida’s few linguistic flourishes had been underlined, and ‘exaggerated’ written in the margin. There was little personal in the piece, beyond the fact that her father had brought her to school on the first day. Later in the term she had been given subjects such as ‘A Description of a Building’, ‘Autumn’, and ‘For and Against Compulsory Games’. The essays were flat. In January the first piece had been about her Christmas, the inevitable topic. Parrish learned that the Mailers had had duckling à l’orange, with a sorbet to follow, but little more.

  The notion that Cressida’s teacher had little imagination when it came to thinking up essay topics was reinforced when he found as one of the topics after the Easter break a piece called ‘What I Did Over the Easter Holidays’. That was the sort of thing that even Charles Lamb would have flagged over. But as he started reading, his interest was caught.

  ‘Mummy decided,’ the essay began, ‘that we should do things together this Easter. She said that since I had gone away to school she hardly knew me any more. I was very excited, and wondered what we should do together.’

  At last, thought Parrish, at last she is going to give something of herself. How odd that she should have managed to keep it out of her essays all this time.

  ‘First we did a lot of cooking together,’ Cressida went on. ‘I like cooking, and do it fairly often if I get the chance, but now we tried some very unusual recipes: saltimbocca from Italy, chicken and almonds from China. I tried to imagine as I was cooking the sort of people who would eat them in their own country. Mummy let me do things myself, and gave good advice about the sort of spices to use, and how much to put in. She said the whole art of cooking is in the spices.

  Then we went to some films in Ba
rstowe and Broadwich, including The Railway Children, and to the theatre in Norwich, which was Private Lives by Noel Coward, which was very funny and entertaining, though the people were a bit silly and I couldn’t understand why they got divorced if they were really in love with each other after all.

  We went for some long walks too, which was nice of Mummy because I don’t think she really likes walking, and has not got the right shoes for it. One day in the afternoon we went nearly to Croxham and walked in the woods there. There were all kinds of wild flowers out, and we saw a squirrel right close up. It looked at us for a long time, with its paw up against its cheek as if it was considering us. Then it flicked its tail and scuttled away. That was a funny walk, because a little bit later we were walking quietly in case we should see any more strange animals or birds when we suddenly heard a little scream and laughter, and I saw a girl get up from behind a bush and start to run away, but a man popped up and grabbed her and they disappeared again. We were very surprised, but we just walked on quietly. I think it must have been a little girl playing with her daddy, but I was too short to see him properly. Anyway, that’s what Mummy said it was, but she said it was best not to talk about it.

  I like going for really long walks, because there is always something interesting to see and hear.’

  Parrish sat back in his desk chair, thinking, digesting this turn. Finally he turned to Sergeants Underwood and Feather, who were deep in parsing and the causes of the French Revolution, and not seeming to get much out of them, and said rather hesitantly: ‘Can I read something out to you?’

  They both put down their books, and Parrish read haltingly the essay dated April 30th. When he finished there was silence for a minute, and then Stephen Feather said: ‘We’re on to something.’

  Parrish twisted his face into an expression of pain, as he sometimes did when he was thinking, and then said: ‘Yes, I think so. But what?’