A Little Local Murder

by Robert Barnard

  ‘Do you have any private fortune of your own, sir?’ said Stephen calmly, beginning to enjoy himself.

  ‘No, none.’

  ‘And yet you manage to maintain your house and a car on a schoolmaster’s salary?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘May I ask how?’

  ‘Strict economy and a modicum of common sense,’ said Timothy, and again pursed his lips into silence.

  ‘Your bank account shows – ’

  ‘My WHAT?’

  ‘Your bank account shows that over the past year or more you have been putting in – ’

  ‘It is totally illegal to examine the bank account of any citizen. A special warrant is needed, and application has to be – ’

  ‘ – putting in what amounts to a regular income in addition to your monthly salary from the County. Fairly regular sums of fifty, a hundred and even more have been paid in. Now, sir, would you like to tell me – ’

  ‘I would NOT.’

  ‘ – what these were for?’

  ‘NO.’

  ‘Are they, for example, income from your writing?’

  Silence.

  For the moment Twytching’s Torquemada seemed to have reached an impasse in his conduct of the questioning.

  • • •

  When Parrish collected his pint of best bitter from the bar of the saloon at the Lamb, he sensed an Atmosphere. The lowering features of Tom Billington resembled nothing so much as cloud on Table Mountain. However, nobody seemed aware of it in the snug corner by the window where Ted and Harold had ensconced themselves, looking their last on all things Twytching. Ted was in high good humour, making ‘in’ jokes about the programme which only Harold could understand, and Harold’s tetchy, dehydrated condition of earlier in the evening had yielded to the mollifying influence of three gins and tonic. Watched by the locals (who now the programme was in the bag seemed more willing to reveal their opinion that this was an odd pair and no mistake) Ted and Harold were relaxing after the completion of a job well (in their opinion) done.

  Parrish lapped up the froth from the top of his glass and went towards them. Harold waved excitedly and shrilled a welcome.

  ‘Lovely!’ he said. ‘You know, I’ve suddenly realized what we’ve been missing on the programme. It’s the Law. We ought to have had the Law. But you’re all so discreet, so anonymous, so “don’t mention us by name”. But how on earth can the lovely people of Twytching, Wis., learn to love their twin town without hearing from its typical English bobby?’

  Parrish spread himself into a chair, and expanded into geniality with the first good draught of beer.

  ‘And what was it you were wanting to ask us, then, Inspector?’ said Ted Livermore.

  ‘Well, now,’ said Parrish, ‘you’ve got it in one.’

  ‘Ah, and there’s me thinkin’ it was the pleasure of me company he wanted,’ said Harold in a mock-Irish accent and twisting the ends of his mouth down into a tragic droop.

  ‘It’s no more than a few loose ends, really,’ said Parrish. ‘We’ve established that Mrs Mailer was no friend of your Big White Chief, by the way, so I’m afraid she put it over you there, sir.’

  ‘Clever little dodge,’ said Ted without rancour. ‘Pity she got done in – we could have done with her this week.’

  ‘Barrel-scraping, that’s what we’ve been doing,’ said Harold, in a whisper which by morning was all over Twytching.

  ‘Now, the day she came to see you – am I right in thinking that was the day Mr Thring came to Twytching, sir?’

  ‘That’s it, Inspector,’ said Ted. ‘He came as the advance party, as it were.’

  ‘Bearing the flag, or possibly carrying the can,’ said Harold.

  ‘Do you remember the exact date, sir?’

  ‘I’ll look in my diary,’ said Harold, leaning down and diving into the green shoulder-bag on the floor beside him. ‘Here it is! One should always have something outrageous to read on the train.’

  ‘Importance of Being Earnest,’ said Parrish.

  ‘Real little Lord Peter, aren’t we?’ said Harold, flicking through the pages. ‘Goodness, how time flies! Seems like only yesterday Jocelyn and I said our farewells, and here it is – January! That’s a really poetic bit I wrote then, Inspector – you’ll have to let me read it to you some time. Now where were we? Late March – no, early April. Here we are: April 10th. When I die April 10th will be engraved on my heart.’ He fluttered his eyelashes in the direction of Tom Billington, who was not in the least responsive.

  ‘Could you tell me what you did on that day, sir?’ asked Parrish.

  ‘I love all these “sirs”,’ said Harold. ‘Well, let’s see. I ate mountains of home-made scones and special country-recipe fudge. Let me not think of it, O Lord, or I shall be made mad! Frankly I don’t care if I never touch another . . . oh, well, yes – let’s see: I talked to lots of the ladies – Mrs Carrington, Mrs Buller, the meals-on-wheels lady – Mrs Brewer, isn’t it? Then there was that Val Rice – I was watching her technique, I can tell you. And the cat lady, and the handicrafts lady. Oh, practically the whole town, Inspector, was laid before my conquering feet. And then, of course, that was the day I had my dramatic confrontation with Medusa.’

  ‘With who, sir?’

  ‘Deborah Withens. Doesn’t it sound too Emily Brontë?’

  ‘What exactly did you talk about, sir?’

  Harold Thring gave a highly coloured account, making it sound rather like one of the more stirring passages of Il Trovatore. Parrish de-coloured it by several shades, and felt he probably had the rough idea. After all, Deborah Withens was fairly Verdian.

  ‘And so you had to make it clear to her, did you, sir, that she would not be on the programme?’

  ‘Of course, Inspector. Ted could tell by a glance at the letter she wouldn’t be suitable, couldn’t you, my sweet? Anyway, the Yanks don’t want to hear interviews with Chairmen and Mayors and things - it would make us sound like Toytown! Mr Growser, sir!’ concluded Harold, with a spirited imitation of Larry the Lamb.

  ‘And you also got across the idea, did you, that she wouldn’t have a say as to who was and was not on the programme?’

  ‘Not on your life, she wouldn’t,’ said Harold. ‘The idea!’

  ‘And you got out alive, sir?’ asked Parrish, downing the last of his pint.

  ‘We have our defences, Inspector,’ said Harold, with a brave-pathetic smile. ‘We’ve developed them over the years.’

  ‘One thing before you go, Inspector,’ said Ted Livermore. ‘Now this Timothy Jimson . . .’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘Was that just a routine matter you took him in for?’

  ‘I can’t discuss that, sir, obviously. Shall we just say that he is still helping the police with their enquiries?’

  ‘Would you say there was any question of our – shall we say, finding it best not to use the interview with him?’

  ‘That I couldn’t say, sir,’ said Parrish. ‘But I suppose in these cases you always find it advisable to have an interview in hand, just in case, don’t you?’

  ‘Oh NOOO!’ shrieked Harold, sending several scalps in the bar tingling with horror in the conviction that the Twytching gytrash was on the trail. ‘Not more fairy cakes, I couldn’t stand it! Not another glass of parsnip Riesling.’

  ‘Thank Heavens we’ve still got Hank,’ said Ted, looking towards the other end of the bar, where the enormous figure of Hank was soaking up the sheer Englishness of it all, and being fed beer and smut by the locals.

  ‘I insist, I insist it’s either the cat lady or the flower-arranger,’ said Harold. ‘Which shall it be?’

  ‘You might say flower-arranging was cultural, mightn’t you?’ said Ted.

  • • •

  Timothy Jimson watched with distaste written all over his face as Sergeant Feather drew from a drawer in front of him a Barstowe Grammar School exercise book. Timothy had not gone into schoolmastering from a sense of vocation, nor had he developed one o
ver the years. He had taken it up because he had failed to penetrate those bastions of privilege the Foreign Office, the BBC and The Guardian, and because a routine muddle at the British Council had left him without a job just when he had been expecting to go spreading D. H. Lawrence and Peter Maxwell Davies among the remote tribes of the Sudan. It is easier to go into school-teaching than to get out of it, and over the years nobody from any of these bastions of privilege, nor indeed anybody from the Mirror or the Sun, had been so struck by his literary endeavours as to offer him a means of escape. Over those years he had developed a contempt for his pupils, a protective shell of sarcasm against their brutalities, and several techniques for minimizing the cruel workload. He never liked being reminded that he was a teacher, and he certainly did not relish discussing any aspect of his job with a jumped-up mediocrity whom he had once made a feint of teaching.

  ‘Do you recognize this?’ asked Stephen.

  ‘An exercise book,’ said Timothy.

  ‘The particular essay,’ said Stephen, tapping his finger on the page. ‘Do you recognize that?’

  Timothy cursorily read down the first page. ‘Probably one of my kid’s efforts,’ he said. ‘Probably first or second year.’

  ‘If you’d just read to the end, sir,’ said Feather.

  Timothy continued over the page, and read to the end, betraying no great emotion, though his breathing was very short.

  ‘Odd little piece,’ he said.

  ‘You’ve read it before,’ said Stephen.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘You’ve put a mark at the bottom.’

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ said Timothy violently. ‘One doesn’t actually read all this damned stuff. You don’t imagine that I spend all my time on the vapourings of these semi-literate morons, do you? I’ve got five different classes for English, and they all write an essay a week. It’d drive me to the bin to read all that rubbish.’

  There was a pause while Stephen Feather wondered whether teachers’ reports were such a good substitute for exams after all. When he thought his contempt for Timothy Jimson’s methods had been made obvious enough, he said quietly: ‘Actually, we thought Cressida Mailer was probably an exceptionally bright child.’

  ‘Oh, is it Cressida?’ said Timothy off-handedly. ‘She plays with our lot now and then. I suppose she’s not a bad prospect, as kids go these days.’

  Timothy Jimson was one of those teachers who never gave high marks, and never admitted that a pupil might be bright. Bright pupils were a threat to his mediocrity.

  ‘So you don’t recall reading the essay before, then, sir,’ said Stephen, ‘even though you put a mark on it.’

  ‘No, I don’t. I may have skimmed through it. These pieces are all the same.’

  ‘Hardly, in this case, sir. You do see the implications of what Miss Mailer wrote, don’t you?’

  At last a flush, of anger perhaps, spread over Timothy Jimson’s cheek, and robbed him of all semblance of calm.

  ‘Yes, I do see the implications, and I do see what you’re getting at, and of all the ham-fisted attempts at detection – ’

  ‘The connection with the anonymous letter you received was obviously something we had to follow up.’

  ‘There is no connection.’

  ‘You have never been to Croxham woods with anyone other than your family, then, sir? Never with anyone from Barstowe Grammar – one of your girl pupils, for example?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be seen DEAD with one of those tittering, snotty-nosed, gym-slipped excrescences,’ yelled Timothy. ‘It’s all someone’s dirty-minded fantasy, as you well know.’

  ‘Those sums you’ve taken out of your account recently,’ said Stephen, with an adroit change of gear that left Timothy in mid-splutter. ‘What were they for?’

  ‘I’m always writing cheques,’ said Timothy. ‘Who isn’t?’

  ‘This was a fifty in April, and a seventy-five a week ago. They were in cash, and were in addition to your usual weekly sums. What were they for, Mr Jimson?’

  ‘My God,’ said Timothy. ‘And they talk about the citizen’s rights to privacy, and we are supposed to be protected against noise and pollution and computers storing personal data, and snoopers from the Social Security, and it turns out that all the damned police have to do is go along to your bank, and the manager says “Come in and look at the accounts. Take any you please! Fascinating reading!” My God, the editor of The Times is going to hear about this, I can tell you.’

  Stephen had an uneasy feeling that he might have been a bit too open about what he knew about Jimson’s bank account. It occurred to him that a hardly-worth-considering overdraft in the region of twenty-five pounds might find itself called in sooner than he had expected. But he kept his cool admirably, and merely said: ‘The sums were fifty pounds in April and seventy-five earlier this month.’

  There was silence while Timothy digested his eloquence, and then he said with a feeble show of defiance which showed he knew that the matter was not going to be allowed to rest there: ‘They were taken out to meet personal expenses.’

  ‘That doesn’t explain,’ said Stephen, ‘why your expenses were so high in April and May.’

  There was a long pause, and finally Timothy made the sort of superhuman effort a climber makes to maintain a precarious finger-hold on the rock-face.

  ‘They were paid to a printer in Colchester,’ he said.

  It was far from what Stephen had been expecting.

  ‘Indeed, sir? For what?’

  ‘To print copies of my play. Troy Weight, you know. I . . . er . . . had it printed at my own expense.’

  Timothy Jimson couldn’t have looked more embarrassed if he had just admitted to playing sex-games with little girls.

  • • •

  Parrish collected the notes and reports waiting for him in the outer office, and looked at the clock. It was nearly ten. He looked towards Constable Lockett, and nodded in the direction of his own office. ‘Are they still there?’

  ‘Yessir. Seems to be taking them quite a time.’

  ‘Perhaps he’d better stop the night. We could give him the choice between that and going home with a guard on his house. I expect he’d see the point.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Constable Lockett, ‘though he doesn’t seem to be a very reasonable body.’

  ‘He’s got a brain when he cares to use it,’ said Parrish. ‘It’s just that his picture of himself keeps getting in the way.’

  ‘Could I ring the little wife, perhaps, and tell her not to worry?’ said the soft-hearted Constable Lockett. ‘She’s a sensible body, but she must be wondering.’

  ‘Ay, do that.’ Parrish mused a moment. ‘Doesn’t it make you wonder sometimes how two people actually manage to see enough in each other to get themselves married? You look at peop – ’

  But he was interrupted by an obvious case in point. A hesitant cough from the door told them they were not alone, and a moment later the inconsiderable figure of Ernest Withens slid into view, looking as usual as if his existence was a thing he would not like to be held responsible for. On this occasion his natural tendency towards self-obliteration was augmented by a particularly painful hesitancy.

  ‘Er, Inspector, er . . . do you think . . . I know you must be busy . . . but just a short moment . . . I don’t think I’d be troubling you unnecessarily . . . if you could manage it . . .’ He faded to a halt.

  ‘Of course, sir, naturally. I’m afraid my office is in use at the moment. Would you mind coming in here, Mr Withens?’

  He led the way to a tiny office, hardly more than a box, which Sergeant Underwood used when she was reprimanding erring school-children or shop-lifting pensioners. He nodded Ernest Withens to another of the hard, upright chairs, a replica of the one in which Timothy Jimson was at that moment squirming, and then sat down himself behind the desk.

  ‘Deborah doesn’t know I’m here,’ said Mr Withens, as if assuring Parrish that they were safe from surprise attack. ‘She thinks I’m at a meeting
of Drains and Sewage.’

  ‘Really, sir?’ said Parrish. ‘Well, perhaps we could come to what it was you wanted to see me about.’

  ‘It’s said, Inspector,’ said Ernest, suddenly losing confidence again, ‘that you’re interested in these . . . er . . . anonymous letters that have been . . . er . . . going around.’

  ‘That’s right, sir.’

  Words seemed to fail the Chairman at this point, and instead he dived dramatically into his bag, and drew from it a paperback book, which he flourished feebly towards the Inspector.

  ‘Inspector, last night I found this.’ It was a paperback copy of the Report of the Longford Commission on Pornography. ‘I happened to take it from the shelves last night, while Deborah was out,’ said Mr Withens. ‘I often do, you know. It has some most extraordinary things in it. But now – look at page 97. And page 453.’

  Parrish turned as directed. On those pages words had been cut out with a razor-blade. From his memory of the letters he guessed them to have been in one case ‘male brothel’ and in the other something like ‘sexual relationships’. It had been done very neatly, whatever one might think of the decision not to throw away the book afterwards.

  ‘I thought I ought to show you,’ said Ernest, now almost puppyish in his eagerness.

  ‘If I were you, sir,’ said Parrish, closing the book and handing it back to him over the desk, ‘I should put this back on the shelf where you got it from.’

  Mr Withens’s disappointment was pitiful to behold. His face fell, like a silent film comedian’s.

  ‘You do understand what this means, don’t you?’ he said, almost forcefully. ‘Do you mean to say you’re not going to do anything about it?’

  ‘I didn’t say that, sir,’ said Parrish. ‘But you’ve not told me anything I didn’t know already. I’ve just got reports from the CID confirming my guess. No, no – I don’t mean that I’m not going to do anything about it.’

  ‘Aaaah,’ said Ernest, leaning back in his chair.

  ‘I’m merely suggesting it would be much better in every way if you yourself were not involved.’

  This agitated Ernest beyond anything. ‘Me, involved, Inspector? Of course I can’t be involved. I imagined that would be understood.’