by Roy Lewis
It was another thought worth considering.
‘This is Kenton Lane, sir,’ said the driver. ‘Another twenty yards and we turn off into Woodrow Lane, which is a tarmac track but leads only to Mr Lendon’s home, really. It’s a private road.’
‘I gather that its privacy has been disputed.’
‘That’s right, sir. Especially since little Jenny Carson was murdered, there’s been quite a fuss about it. But Mr Lendon stuck to his guns, as far as I can make out.’
Crow was tempted to pursue the matter, but thought better of it as they were already into Woodrow Lane now. To their right a high beech hedge partly obscured the huddle of council houses that seemed to stretch across the whole area; to the left a skin of silver birch leanly screened patches of dense conifer interspersed with thick bushes of rhododendron. It was a small wood he was looking at, and quiet — yet not so small, either, he realized, as the car slid into the curving drive in front of Lendon’s house, and he saw the woods encircling the house and rising thickly against the hill beyond.
‘All this didn’t belong to Lendon?’
‘Oh no, sir. Just the private road and a small area to one side. I think it’s owned by a forestry company in London.’
Crow grunted, and eased his spindly legs out of the car.
He took care that his head was not scarred by the top of the door. In his eagerness on his first major case he had entered the station with blood running down his face from a scalp wound. It was not an experience he wished to repeat: he had had every sympathy with the desk sergeant who had goggled unreservedly at the sight of the tall spidery man with a bare, bloodstained skull.
As he crunched across the drive Crow gestured to the constable that he should join him. He rang the doorbell and then stepped back to survey the house. It was surprisingly unpretentious for such a setting: solid, square-built, lead-paned windows, oak and glass door, garage to one side, crazy-paved pathway, long lawns running into the darkness of the woods. Crow had seen better. He had seen worse, too. He glanced briefly at the old Ford that was parked in front of the garage and guessed that it would hardly be Charles Lendon’s car. It would never have gone with his image.
The door opened.
The man who faced John Crow was slightly built, of medium height, and nervous. Crow had long ago learned to discount nervousness in a man facing the police — it was usually an unreasoning nervousness.
‘You police? We’ve been expecting you.’
‘I’m Chief Inspector Crow.’
‘My name’s Barnes . . . but it’s my sister you’ll want to see.’
The little man took a deep breath, controlling himself, and smiled slightly. He led the way through the hall to the sitting-room.
‘The police, Alex. Inspector Crow.’
The room was dark, the curtains were drawn and one table-lamp served to light the room only inadequately. The room was as still as a painting and as quiet, but he was hardly aware of it as he looked at Mrs Alexandra Bell. Almost instinctively he glanced back to Barnes for it was difficult to believe that these two were brother and sister. Barnes was thin, but this woman was tall and built upon handsome matronly lines. Barnes’s clothes were neat enough but a little shabby; her dress was plain, dignified and uncreased. She shook hands with Crow and it was a firm hand belonging to a decisive woman, a woman of strength. Barnes gave an overall impression of self-effacement and indecision.
Alex Bell’s features were composed, her eyes veiled with dark lashes and Crow approved of the clean lines of her face, the straightness of her nose, the warm, full curve of her lower lip. She would have been a lovely girl; she made a handsome woman. She had been Charles Lendon’s housekeeper . . . Crow could not help wondering whether their relationship had been closer.
Barnes left them alone.
‘I’ve expected you all day, Inspector.’
Her voice had a rich depth. Her eyes, he now saw, were blue. She was in her early forties.
‘How long were you Mr Lendon’s housekeeper?’ He sensed the slight flinching at the past tense, and yet he could have sworn that she was not a woman given to such weakness.
‘Almost ten years.’
‘And the last time you saw him?’
‘The night he died.’
Crow breathed out slowly.
‘Perhaps you’d be good enough to tell me about it.’
Mrs Bell sat with her hands in her lap. Her face was slightly averted; unusual John Crow’s appearance might be, but, he suspected, Mrs Bell was a woman to take full advantage of her femininity, and the position she took up was to emphasize the regularity of her profile rather than to avoid looking at his unprepossessing skull.
‘There’s little to tell, really. He usually arrived back here between five and six. He was a little later that night but not unusually so. I had his evening meal ready for him about eight, as usual—’
She broke off, hesitating, then went on: ‘I live up above. There’s a small self-contained flat that Mr Lendon had constructed up there. I’ve lived in the flat for seven years. Each evening he required it I made him a meal. I did on that evening. After he’d eaten, he went out. I never saw him again.’
Patiently, Crow asked: ‘Can you provide me with more detail? I mean, how did he seem to you? What did you talk about? Did he say where he was going? Were you not aware of the fact of his non-return?’
Mrs Bell was helpful in her precision.
‘When he came home he seemed disinclined to talk. I was aware of a certain edginess in his manner; he seemed anxious about something, worried. As to what we talked about, well, I’ll be frank. We quarrelled. Violently.’
Crow regarded the woman facing him in the dimly-lit room and was again aware of the clean, undisturbed line of her profile. She was not afraid to tell him that she and Lendon had quarrelled. She was a woman of some confidence, and power, and repose.
‘What was it about?’
She shrugged, glancing quickly in Crow’s direction.
‘I can’t even remember how it started. I think the whole thing was born of his anxiety, of the worry that he had on his mind. I don’t know what it was, but something was upsetting him. Anyway, we started to quarrel and he . . . he said that it was time that I learned my place. I told him in no uncertain terms what I thought my place was. He laughed at me at that, and I completely lost my temper and I slapped him. I went upstairs. Shortly afterwards I heard him leave the house. I made no enquiry as to where he was going. I fell asleep on my bed, and didn’t wake until about three in the morning. I then undressed and went to bed, assuming that Charles . . . Mr Lendon had returned in the meanwhile.’
Her voice died away, somewhat theatrically. With some care, Crow framed his next question.
‘You will excuse me, Mrs Bell, but you talk of a quarrel, and of slapping him. Your relationship seems to have been . . . odd, for a housekeeper and an employer. You said that you told him what your place should be. What was that, Mrs Bell?’
She understood the significance of the question completely; her head came up and she looked him straight in the eyes. Her hair was dark, but he suspected it would display a russet tinge in the sunlight.
‘Charles Lendon should have married me seven years ago. He never did, but he should have done.’
‘You were lovers,’ Crow said flatly.
‘For seven years. When he established the flat here for me. He . . . he made promises.’
‘Of marriage?’
She shook her head.
‘No. He never said he’d marry me. He was honest in that. But he should have done. His method of seduction—’ and there was a certain cold irony in her voice—’was much more realistic. He offered me security in my widowhood, and he said that after he died I would be provided for. This house, for instance . . .’
Again those eyes held Crow’s with a level frankness.
‘You must realize that I was a widow, and my brother was . . . not well, and I had very little money. Moreover, Charles Lendon w
as an attractive man.’
Crow nodded acceptance and understanding. It was not his business how Lendon had conducted his life or his affairs, nor how Mrs Bell had assured her future. He was interested only in Lendon’s death, and the circumstances surrounding it.
‘Does your brother live here too?’
He sensed a certain reluctance in her, a protective reluctance which was borne out by her tone when she replied.
‘No. He visits me regularly, drives out perhaps three times a week. That’s his car outside. He suffers from nervous tension and is an out-patient in Canthorpe and a voluntary patient at the Linwood Convalescent Home. He . . . he has had an unhappy life. I am all he has. It was partly because of him that I accepted Charles’s suggestion . . .’
Crow was a little surprised at the tremor in her voice.
He had been impressed by her self-sufficiency, her control, her grasp of her emotions, but it was obvious that her relationship with her brother was a protective and deeply emotional one. Crow rose awkwardly to his feet.
‘I should like to have a word with your brother in a moment, Mrs Bell. But there are just two more things I want to ask you. First, you were aware of Charles Lendon’s reputation?’
She almost smiled.
‘I was. Very much so. I take it, from the look on your face, that you are suggesting I might have resented his affairs. You forget, Inspector, I was his housekeeper. We were lovers, true, but it was a business arrangement. I do not pretend I was not fond of him, and I do not pretend I did not obtain some satisfaction from the fact that in spite of his affairs he always returned to me: I was a permanency, while the others were . . . ephemeral. But I knew of his affairs and they were little more than an irritation. No more than that. I was sure of my . . . place, as he called it.’
She was a very cool and self-possessed woman and one quite outside Crow’s experience. ‘My second question is the obvious one, do you have any idea who might have killed him?’
‘A solicitor makes enemies. A man who allows his sexual drive to overrule his discretion makes more. There were many who disliked Charles, many in Canthorpe. On the other hand, I know of none whose dislike was so positive as to lead to murder.’
She pronounced the last word without turning a hair.
Whatever her relationship with Lendon had meant to her over the years, it was perfectly obvious that it had left no wounding emotion, no deep sense of loss in her breast. It became apparent as Crow continued to question her, probing more closely for detail. Alexandra Bell was an intensely practical woman, remarkable for her firm grasp of life and its problems. Perhaps this was what an early widowhood had done for her.
‘I’ll be sending a man around this evening to go through all Lendon’s possessions in the house. You will, of course, leave them untouched.’
‘I have my flat.’ There was a certain touch of pride in her reply.
‘Will your brother stay here with you?’ She inclined her head.
‘Did Lendon like him?’
‘Charles,’ Mrs Bell replied with complete honesty, ‘disliked John intensely and John was afraid of him. John only came here when Charles was out: he always rang first.’
‘And the night Lendon died?’
‘John stayed at Linwood, the Canthorpe nursing home, after ringing me earlier. He didn’t come near the house, or Kenton Wood.’
Barnes confirmed her remarks a few minutes later when Crow spoke to him in the kitchen. The man had overcome his nervousness now and seemed quite at ease, apart from an inability to hold Crow’s gaze directly. Crow remembered Mrs Bell’s remark about Barnes’s nervous condition.
‘So you didn’t call here that night?’
‘No. I rang my sister and she said Lendon would be home for dinner so I didn’t come out. I took a short run in the car up on the London road, but I went back to Linwood fairly early, about eight, and had my usual nightly chat with the porter at the lodge.’
‘You and Lendon didn’t get on?’
Barnes laughed and shook his head.
‘He didn’t like me. He didn’t want me to come to see Alex so I didn’t come when he was here. But I didn’t hold it against him. It was his house, after all.’
There was now a certain insouciance in his manner that surprised Crow. Lendon’s death had obviously not affected Barnes, but that was hardly surprising since they had not been friendly. Nevertheless, there was an odd confidence in his manner that disturbed Crow. It was the confidence of a man who knew he could in no way assist the police with their enquiries because he had no information to give. . . but paradoxically such people, in Crow’s experience, rarely displayed such confidence. They were often the ones who were hesitant.
Crow heard a sound at his back and glanced over his shoulder. A shadow passed from the clouded glass of the kitchen door; Mrs Bell had been standing there, hovering like a disturbed, overprotective mother hen. Crow rose to go but Barnes said casually:
‘I hope you’re not going to bother Alex too much, Inspector.’
‘As little as possible, I assure you. We hope to get the whole thing cleared up quickly.’
Barnes nodded and stood up.
‘Besides,’ he said in an off-handed manner, ‘there are other people you could talk to more profitably than us.’
Crow paused with one bony hand on the door handle. ‘What do you mean by that?’
Barnes shrugged and failed to meet Crow’s eye. ‘Well, Lendon, he had women . . . some of them were married, you know, and then there’s Carson . . .’
‘What about Carson?’
Barnes licked his lips and hesitated, then rubbed his hands against his sides. A little of his nervousness seemed to have returned.
‘Well . . . Carson . . . you must know already what he’s been saying publicly about Lendon. You must know he even went to Lendon’s office and had a row with him. Alex was telling me that Lendon was furious about it. It wasn’t the first quarrel, of course; there was bad blood between them.’
‘Why?’
‘Jenny, of course. Jenny Carson. She was murdered in the woods, up there.’ Barnes gestured out through the kitchen window towards the skyline beyond the house. ‘There’s a path up there which leads through the wood as a sort of short cut. Children from the council estate play in the woods and if they’re late for school, they use the short cut. Carson reckoned, and rightly, that they wouldn’t need to take the short cut, not along that path at all if only Lendon would allow them to use Woodrow Lane. But Lendon wouldn’t, and someone up there caught Jenny Carson and . . . killed her.’
The little man took a deep breath. His eyes were fixed on the quiet trees, still against the evening sky.
‘Carson’s been after Lendon ever since, to open that right of way. I think you ought to see Carson. I think it was Carson who could have killed Charles Lendon. Ask him where he was when Lendon died. Ask him if he killed Lendon for revenge. Ask him . . .’
Barnes suddenly seemed hardly aware of Crow. His voice dropped until it was little more than a whisper.
‘It was a cold dry night when they found her. Frosty. It had been that way for days. Maybe that was why the police haven’t been able to find much to help them, because hard ground doesn’t show much. And she was such a little girl, she couldn’t have done much to fight him off, fight off that man who killed her. We all helped to search, we all came beating through the woods and it was Edwards from Hamberley who came across her in the end. Her face was all black somehow we couldn’t understand that but it was the dirt and the terror and the throttling hands. She’d been dragged under some bushes and there were long scratches down her arms and along her legs and her left ankle was broken and her tongue was almost bitten through. They said she must have tried to scream and he’d jammed a hand under her chin and teeth and they must have almost severed her tongue with the force . . .’
Crow listened with mounting distaste. Barnes had taken part in the search, he must have seen the body, probably gone to the inquest, listened w
ith an avid, fearful fascination to every detail of the girl’s death and now it was as though he was not talking about a little girl at all — he was using the expressionless tones of a police surgeon.
There was something of the ghoul about John Barnes. But the man was right, Crow thought, as the car turned into Woodrow Lane towards the council estate. He would have to pay a visit to Carson. Other thoughts flickered into his mind: Alexandra Bell, a calm, controlled woman, a splendid woman in so many ways, and yet there was a calculation about her, an iron in her character that made him feel she’d stop at little to achieve her own ends. He thought of her, and the timetable of Lendon’s movements the day he died, his reason for visiting the Old Mill, the question as to why he’d walked rather than driven. Then there were the files in the office, the quarrel overheard by Cathy Tennant. He wondered briefly whether he ought to have a word with Chief Superintendent Simpson about Barnes, for he felt that something about the man did not ring true. He shrugged the thought aside: the Carson case wasn’t his business, he had to look at all these other pieces, the small, unconnected and perhaps insignificant pieces. Would they fit together, form a pattern of action, a pattern of behaviour?
A pattern for murder?
Chapter 8
After John Crow had left him James Carson walked into the sitting-room and sat in the easy chair. Its arms were badly worn, picked by restless fingers during these last terrible months. It was over these arms Jenny used to clamber to put her chubby arms around his neck, when she was three. From this chair he used to watch her play in the back garden, muddying his freshly planted seeds, trampling the early daffodils in the first excitement of a spring sun.
During those short years she’d been with them he’d seen the glow in her red, winter-livened cheeks, seen the sun in her bright hair and the happiness in her laughing mouth, when she was seven.
He remembered the outing to the cinema when she was eight; when they returned he’d sat in this chair and watched her spread out her books and toys in front of her. Her ninth birthday, now, that had been a laughing time, when Jenny had hugged the enormous teddy-bear that Uncle Jack had brought her from Liverpool, and she’d chased the Terry girls round and round the room in a wild tempestuous game of blind man’s bluff. It had been a good birthday, that last one, she’d enjoyed it to the full and he’d thought how he’d always try to make sure that all her birthdays would be enjoyable. She had, of course, behaved as most young children do on such occasions — she’d eaten and eaten, and drunk far too much and had protested that it wasn’t time for bed and had fallen asleep even before her father had left the bedroom. He had stood there that October evening, and watched her in the cool darkness, marvelling that sleep could come so quickly, and so rosily, and so happily . . .
