by Gee, Maurice
I asked Fernie if I could use the phone. He consulted behind his eyes.
“All right.”
I rang Andrew’s number. His wife answered. “Paul? I was going to ring you. I’ve just read the paper.”
Penny was not what I needed. Her passion for “deciding what should be done” led her unfailingly to moral precepts, heartily pronounced—“We must buck up, we must try harder.” I said I would ring the factory and I hung up. I had never phoned Andrew at work before and I had to look for his number in the book. When I got through his secretary told me he was in the wood-turning shop. She said she would ask him to ring me when he came back.
Fernie had listened without seeming to. “What do you want your brother for?”
“To get the name of a lawyer.” I saw how everything I did could count against me, and I asked Fernie if he would do his waiting outside. I said I was tired of having people lounging around my house.
He smiled. “Not long now, Mr. Prior.”
I went to the bathroom and had a shave. The face in the mirror looked like a murderer’s. It had muddy brown eyes with sore lids; a doughy nose; girlish lips that looked as though they’d been sucking plums. Celia couldn’t have liked me. Had I found out? Had I killed her? I searched for a gap in my life and a fear that I was on the point of finding it nearly made me cry out. Fernie came to the door.
“Bugger off,” I said. He smiled and went away.
I shaved. I grew calmer. There was no gap in my life. Somebody else had killed her. Farnon would find out. And Celia had liked me. Poor Celia, poor dear girl. It’s all over now, I told her. With approval, I felt my eyes fill with tears. Then, “Phony bastard,” I said. Why hadn’t she seen through me? Look at that arty hair curling round the ears. I slashed at one of my sideburns and took it off with two blows of the razor. Then I started to laugh. Childish, it was childish. Look at me, all lopsided. I told myself I should stay like that, as penance, like a Catholic. But I took the other sideburn off, trimmed them up, and put some after-shave lotion on my face. I went back to the den and told Fernie I was going to make another pot of coffee. A phone call came for him at half-past nine.
“I’ve got to leave now. The Inspector wants you to stay here. He’s coming to see you later on.”
“What’s happening?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“He must have found out it wasn’t me.”
I went outside and watched Fernie walk away. They must be busy, I realized, if they didn’t have a car to send for him. It was a cold windy day and I thought what a bleak start it was to the term holidays. Then I thought of Celia lying in a morgue while a rubber-gloved expert made an inventory of her parts. Thorax, lungs, liver. Where was her murderer? Who was he? Once I’d thought of a Maori face when I tried to picture criminals. Later it changed to pakeha—a relief to me. Neither would come that morning. I tried the stereotype: sex-fiend—mousy, wearing pebble glasses. The only face I could find was my own. I went inside and started to tidy the house. I threw the herb leaves into the fire-place and put The First Circle in the bookcase. Then because I was close to my chair I sat down. I remembered a girl in a London pub who had told me I looked like Jack the Ripper. No, I thought, it wasn’t me. Farnon knows. It was some bloody thug, some Maori. They probably had him by now. But I had to find out. The only person I could think of to ring was Jim Beavis.
Margaret Beavis answered the phone. I heard a quick indrawn breath as she recognized my voice.
“Jim’s down at Cascade Park. He’s helping the police.”
I thought “helping the police in their investigations”. But at the same time Margaret’s voice was running on. “They wanted local residents to help search the scrub. Jim volunteered. He’s one of the ones doing the edge of the creek.”
“Have they found anything?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think I should talk any more, Paul.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t think people should talk—”
“You mean because I’m a suspect?”
“No—”
“Your bloody husband’s more likely to have done it than me.” I hung up. I was trembling. I got a glass from the kitchen and poured myself a whisky. Then I thought it would look bad to Farnon if I had whisky on my breath when he came. I took the drink to my chair. To hell with him, I thought, to hell with Farnon. And to hell with Margaret Beavis, pin-headed bitch. (She’s a kind, sensible woman.) I wanted to be left alone. I wanted to think about Celia.
It was eleven o’clock before Farnon arrived. I went to the door to let him in. Glover was opening the garage. “What’s he looking for?” I asked.
“Just checking one or two things, Mr. Prior.”
Farnon was relaxed this morning. He asked me if I’d had a good night. Glover came in. He gave a quick nod to Farnon.
“All right, Mr. Prior. It seems you’re off the hook.”
I should have been angry. Instead I was grateful, as though he’d made me a gift. I said, “Thank you.”
He sat down. “You might be able to help us.” Glover took out his flip-pad. “Whoever did it we’ll get him. That’s certain now. We’ve got enough to go on. But you might be able to cut the thing short.”
I saw why he was relaxed. Last night he’d thought he had his man, he was keyed up for the last step. This morning he was back to routine work.
“How did you decide it wasn’t me?”
“Her finger-prints weren’t in the car. That was the first thing. Then we found another boy who’d been at the park…. Why didn’t you tell us Celia borrowed some books yesterday?”
“I didn’t think.”
“What were they?”
“Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman.”
“Yes.”
“That’s poetry.”
“The other one?”
“James Hogg. Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.”
Glover’s mouth went straight as he wrote it down.
“It’s about religion. Calvinism.” I was more defensive than yesterday: I wanted to please them.
Farnon showed no emotion. He went on before Glover had finished writing. “There was a car there with the door open. The books were lying on the ground. The boy put them back inside and he saw your name in one of them. He goes to your school. But he says the car wasn’t yours because it didn’t have a scratch along the left side.”
I saw why Glover had gone into the garage. “I’ve been meaning to have it painted,” I said.
“The boy put the books on the front seat. We think he’s lucky the murderer didn’t come back.”
“Yes.”
“Did Celia know any fair-haired men?”
“I don’t know.”
“We found someone who might have seen him. A woman who drove up Farm Road yesterday afternoon. She passed Celia going into the gully. She also saw you going back inside.”
“I don’t remember—”
“She noticed a small blue car—blue or green—parked off the road on the other side of the gully. There was a man standing beside it. All she can say is she thinks he had fair hair.”
“He must have watched us.”
“We had a look at the place this morning. You can see your house and the gate and the whole stretch of road. Our guess is he watched her all the way. But we don’t think she would have got in the car unless she knew him.”
“Or unless she’d had too much sherry,” Glover said.
Farnon smiled slightly. “Bob’s not too happy with your part in this. Nor am I, to tell the truth.”
“It was only a small glass.” I wanted nothing now except that they would trust me—I wanted to help. I was guilty about the sherry. (Recognizing guilt has always been a form of expiation with me—quick and almost painless. But Farnon and Glover weren’t going to let me use the trick.)
Farnon said, “It’s a question of how much her judgement was impaired. She wasn’t the sort of girl to get in a car with anyone?”
�
��No.”
“Unless she was more careless than usual?”
“She wasn‘t. It was half an inch. A child could have drunk it.”
“A child did,” Glover said.
“All right, Bob. We’re going to believe you, Mr. Prior, but I think I should warn you now, this business of the sherry’s going to come up. You can probably make it easier for yourself by helping all you can.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“You might be able to give us a short-cut. You knew her better than anyone outside the family. She talked to you about herself. What you do is, you write down the name of every man she ever mentioned. If you can’t remember names you write down descriptions. If you don’t know that you write down what she said. Okay?”
“Yes.”
“Have you got a pen and paper?”
I fetched them and sat down again. I thought. There weren’t any names. “She liked ugly men.”
“Enough of the jokes, Mr. Prior.”
“I’m not joking. That’s what she said. There’s a chap who works in one of the butcher shops. She said he was fabulous —the ugliest man in Wadesville.”
Glover was looking mutinous, and Farnon said shortly, “All right. Write it down.”
I wrote. “There was a student she met at a National Orchestra concert. She had a cup of coffee with him and he wanted to take her out.”
“Did she go?”
“No. She said he had bad breath.”
“What was his name?”
“She called him Bertie Wooster. Look, don’t get mad at me….”
In the end I had three names and two descriptions. I handed the paper to Farnon. He looked at it sourly.
“You’re a great help, Mr. Prior.”
I offered to make them a cup of tea. Farnon said no and jerked his head at Glover. In the hall he said, “I’ll be back to see you. I’ve got a feeling about you. You’ve got something for me, even though you mightn’t know what it is.” I told him I was anxious to help.
“Have you had a report from the pathologist?”
I was on the porch by then and he was half-way down the path. He looked back at me. For a moment I thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then he said, “We’ve got some preliminary stuff. You’re sure you want to hear it?”
“Yes.”
“She wasn’t raped. He didn’t touch her that way.”
“Thank God.”
“You think so, Mr. Prior? She was half scalped. He tried to rip her hair out.” He held up his thumbs. “Her throat was crushed.”
“All right.” I turned away.
“And before he strangled her he tried to kick her inside out.”
“All right.”
“You still want to thank God?”
I went inside and closed the door. In the den I saw the pad and pen I had used lying on the table by my chair. I picked them up and wrote, Celia. Celia Inverarity. Her throat was crushed. I’m sorry, I wrote, I’m sorry. Dear girl. I looked at the paper for a while, then screwed it up and burnt it in the fireplace.
I went to the room where I kept school materials and took the top book from the pile of 3 Professional English project books. It belonged to a boy called Peter Adderley. I ripped the used pages out—I would not be going back to Wadesville College—and carried the book to the den. I fetched scissors and paste, cut the news item on Celia’s murder from the Express, and pasted it over the first few pages. I sat down and thought. After a while I wrote, Celia was eleven the first time I saw her. She was wearing a blue dress and white socks and sandals. Her hair was done in the tightest pigtails I had ever seen. We were in her father’s shop. I had just come back from Europe and had not seen Wadesville for fourteen years. It was no longer the town I was born in. Everything was changed and I felt lost. I remembered the way it was in the thirties….
It did not seem strange to me that I had begun so soon to write about myself. I would come back to Celia. But I had to find a shape. Shape might be understanding.
I had covered five or six pages when the phone rang. I went into the hall, thinking it must be Farnon.
Andrew said, “Paul? You wanted me?”
I felt something between a sinking of the heart and the shock of accident. I tried to get rid of him and back to my writing.
“It’s all right now. Thanks for ringing.”
“Just a minute. What’s going on? Penny’s been on the phone trying to tell me something about a girl who’s been killed.”
“There was a murder. A girl I knew. She was strangled at Cascade Park. The police thought I might have done it.”
There was a silence.
“You? That’s absurd.”
“I know it’s absurd. But I was the last one to see her. I wanted the name of your lawyer.”
“Lester Bowman. Watters and Bowman.”
“It’s all right. I don’t need him now. They’ve got a suspect.”
“Who?”
“A man with fair hair, in a Mini like mine, blue or green. A woman saw him and some kids saw the car.”
Another silence, longer. “Andrew?” I said.
“Sorry. My secretary wanted me. Stupid woman.” Stupid, for him, was a kind of swear word. “This girl. Penny said her name was Inverarity. Does that mean she was Charlie’s daughter?”
“That’s right.”
“How’s he taking it?” Andrew had it fixed in his mind that Charlie and I were still friends. I had given up trying to explain.
“I haven’t seen him.”
“The police think they’ve got someone, do they?”
“A fair-haired man. That’s all they know.”
“It lets you out.”
We went on like this for a while, then he asked me to dinner during the week. I said I would call Penny and let her know. Back at my writing, I found I couldn’t go on. The neat little groove Andrew had run in since our mother’s death produced in me even now an impatience that was close to anger. For God’s sake man, I wanted to say, shake yourself, break out, do something. How, I wondered, had he managed to marry Penny—and father a child?
I made some lunch and started again. After a while I found my way back to my place. I wrote through the afternoon. A little after five I drove to the “Golden Mile” and bought some vegetables and meat. Outside a dairy the Telegraph billboard said: Wadesville Girl Slain. Murder Hunt. I bought a copy and drove home.
There was a picture of Celia on the front page. She was in school uniform. Another picture showed Farnon briefing his men at Cascade Park. In the front row of the locals was Jim Beavis, in Fair Isle sweater and tramping boots. The search had turned up nothing. I read about the fair-haired man, the car, the missing copies of Leaves of Grass and Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner with the name Paul Prior in them. There would be a run on libraries, and some disappointed borrowers. But I felt a little sick—I was lucky to have got out of the shopping area without being recognized. I wondered if Farnon would tell the reporters I’d given Celia sherry.
There was nothing in the paper about Charlie and Joyce.
After dinner I settled down to write again. I had come to my meeting with Celia, and was working with a feeling of unease and excitement; conscious both of controlling and of being controlled. I was taken at moments by a simple almost superstitious dread: at the end of this, completing it, must be the murderer. I was aware too of no longer being safe in my den. All my life I had kept people out. For women, other acquaintance, I had learned the trick of switching on an ordinary room. And for the den I had shaped a Celia who was not a real one. Now, here, was the real one. I finished Peter Adderley’s book and started on another.
Towards nine o’clock something thumped on the front wall of the house and rattled across the porch. Part of my unease was a sense of being in danger from Wadesville. This was the first attack.
I turned out the light and listened. There was a sudden chatter of stones on the roof. One of my bedroom windows shattered. A cheer came from the road. I h
eard it with relief. Children. This was something I could handle. I opened the front door and went on to the porch. Another cheer went up. My schoolteacher’s ear caught the uncertainty in it. “Go home,” called out. There were a dozen of them: shadowy figures in the diluted light of the street-lamp by the hollow.
“Pansy Prior,” sang one of the boys. (Tonight they would not call me “Pepsi”.)
“Go home before you get yourselves in trouble.”
“What did you do to Celia, Pansy?”
“Yeah, yeah?”
“Windy Prior. Pansy Prior.”
“Hey Windy, who’s next on your list? Is it Barbara Carson?”
“Pauline Jones?”
“How about Pauline? She’s got big tits.”
They were naming sixth-form girls. I had recognized the leaders by now and I called them by name. “Go on, Spencer. Take them away. Mason. You’re not stupid enough to think you can get away with a thing like this.”
“Yah, Pansy Prior, Jack the Ripper.”
“If you’re not gone in two minutes I’ll call the police.”
“They’ll arrest you, not us.”
“Get out.”
“Not before we’ve cut your balls off, Pansy.”
This brought shrieks of laughter. I turned from the edge of the porch towards the door. At once stones began to thud around me. One hit the back of my knee. A cheer went up as I hobbled to the door. Another cracked into the side of my head. I thought I was going to black out. I managed to get inside and slam the door. Blood trickled down my cheek. There was blood in the cheering too. They’d burn my house, they’d butcher me. But I had forgotten my threat. They must have thought I was phoning for the police. They used their stones up quickly and rode off shrieking into the hollow and up the hill towards town.
I bathed my scalp and went to bed. I lay awake sweating and shivering. The children had had their turn. What would the adults do?
In the morning I cleaned up the mess. Every window in the front of the house was broken. I nailed sacks over them, picked up the glass inside, and swept the porch. It was covered with river-bed pebbles taken, I guessed, from the Japanese garden outside the Borough Council offices. The exercise made me calmer. I decided not to lay a complaint. In a few days, when I had finished my writing, I would leave Wadesville for good.
