A New Kind of Killer, and Old Kind of Death

by Jennie Melville

  “It might be a good idea,’’ agreed Charmian. “Will this really make the news?’’

  “Probably not. There’s too much else going on. But it’ll get a mention. Just in case, you see, there’s more trouble on the way here.’’

  There will be, thought Charmian, looking about her, from the splendid buildings to the fierce young faces.

  Violence seemed all around, spreading up and down the social scale. These were what were called “privileged’’ young people, but they wanted their share of the violence. What was the relationship between this feeling and the behaviour of the young criminals she was studying? Such feeling was ostensibly disinterested and unselfish in its aim, but it didn’t really fill the same need as the wildness of her delinquents?

  “You’re not going to write a new series about university trouble?’’

  Shirley laughed. “It’s an idea. I might.’’

  “You did a good job on the last lot. I particularly liked the one on the girl who was a bigamist.’’

  “That was a natural. You know, I hardly had to edit it—I just put everything down just as it poured out.’’

  “What happened to her?’’

  “She had to go to prison for a bit,’’ admitted Shirley. “But her husband stood by her. Both husbands.’’

  “So there was a happy ending?’’

  “I don’t know about that. She wasn’t a girl for happy endings. Suicidal type. She gave me a bottle of morphine she’d been planning to take, a sweet and painless way out, she said.’’ Shirley patted her handbag. “I’ve still got it. I’ve always meant to get it analysed. She had a bad background, poor kid, and only seventeen.’’

  “Isn’t it dangerous dealing with these people?’’ asked Charmian.

  “Oh, I carry protection,’’ said Shirley, again patting her bag.

  “Know what case I’ve been studying lately?’’ Charmian said to Shirley. “ It’s a case of vandalism by six ten-year-old boys who ransacked a school in Southampton. They broke the desks, tore up all the books, and then emptied the ink on them. Afterwards, they started bonfires in all the rooms. All six boys had high I.Qs. For weeks before they did the school, they had been breaking into empty houses and shops. None of the parents had any idea how their children were spending their evenings. It’s a classic case.’’

  “I was sorry about Alda Fearon,’’ said Shirley awkwardly. “I don’t suppose you want to talk about it. If I can help, though,’’ she started to move away.

  “Shirley, you can help me. Yes. About a man,’’ Charmian frowned. “Someone I want to know about.’’

  “Someone well known?’’ asked Shirley, the journalist in her at once alert.

  “He may have been once. That is, he may have made the newspapers. Or his name may just be buried in the police files.’’

  “Oh, like that,’’ Shirley considered. “What name?’’

  “I wish I knew for sure. But he knew Alda and she knew him. She called him Eddie.’’

  “What is all this?’’

  Charmian said: “Alda’s job took her among people. She may have run across a killer here. We don’t know what situation she fell into. But her job was to go into strange houses, meet people, sum up situations, and I say that as a result of doing this, she became a victim.’’

  “What does that word victim mean?’’ said Shirley at once. “Explain.’’

  “How can I?’’ said Charmian irritably. “I’m not sure myself. But she got around, went into houses, visited homes. She was trained to keep her eyes open. Suppose she kept them too open. Suppose she saw a man quarrel with ‘ his wife and later that wife is gone, missing. Couldn’t that be dangerous knowledge? Or maybe she didn’t even have to see people. Maybe she just walked into a room and saw something she shouldn’t have seen.’’

  Shirley hesitated, then said, “I knew Alda a bit better than you may have realised. I wouldn’t say we were friends. But she had a side to her that needed sometimes to come out.’’

  Charmian thought that an odd thing to say, but she waited.

  “She talked about a man. Just once. She said he was a winner, a real winner and what a pity he had to be destroyed.’’

  “Had to be destroyed?’’ exclaimed Charmian in surprise. “What did she mean by that? Is he dead then?’’

  “No. She didn’t say so. More as if he had to have punishment.’’

  “That’s so strange.’’

  “She was a great one for crime and punishment,’’ said Shirley, looking at Charmian.

  “But I don’t understand how she’d talk like that,’’ said Charmian in bewilderment.

  “She was drunk. Alda did drink. Didn’t you know?’’

  “No.’’

  “Well, dead or alive, whichever he was, Alda certainly had a guilt complex,’’ said Shirley, with a sad little shrug. “And from what I know about people and life, I’d say that somehow or other she’d earned it.’’

  Suddenly it seemed to Charmian that Eddies or potential Eddies were all around her. Big little boys with swollen ambitions, little big boys with revolutionary hands, even girls with boyish faces.

  Would any one of them have killed Alda?

  After this she went up to her own room. Stuck in the door was a note for her telling her that a telephone call had come for her from Grizel which she had missed and asking her to ring back.

  But first she made notes of all she had seen, describing the young people and assessing their position in the group. Then she went downstairs to make her telephone call.

  “Hello?’’ said Grizel, sounding alert and cheerful. “You’re late. Been out to a party?’’

  “Sort of.’’

  “Well, don’t sound so grim about it. I’ve been finding out about Alda Fearon.’’

  “You have? Go on.’’

  “Not any details much. But she was mixed up with something. Seems there were young people concerned. Might have been about drugs.’’

  “Can you get any more, Grizel?’’

  “I’ll try. If it made a case, it’ll be on the books. If it never got that far, of course, it’ll only be hearsay.’’

  “You’ll get something more,’’ said Charmian confidently.

  “Oh yes,’’ said Grizel. “ I’ll get something.’’

  “There might be someone called Eddie concerned. Or he might be dead.’’

  “Oh yes?’’

  “But I think he’s alive. For my money, Eddie’s alive and kicking.’’

  Chapter Four

  Something was wrong in Charmian’s room when she got back. After a careful survey she came to the conclusion that it had been searched. Papers on the desk were disarranged. A pile of books above the drawer in which she kept her secret notes had been moved. Almost certainly the drawer itself had been tried but not opened. It was always possible, of course, that the drawer had been opened by a key. Charmian slid the drawer open. The thread of cotton, which she kept placed across her books, was undisturbed. So no one had looked inside.

  “I’d call it just a quick look round,’’ said Charmian, sitting down at her desk. She adjusted the papers on it, which had been left untidy. “ But by whom? I’d hardly call it a professional job.’’ She looked out of the window. “ By an amateur, then. But they’re all amateurs here.’’

  She made a second tour of investigation, this time paying particular attention to the undersides of tables and bookshelves. No bugs.

  “No,’’ she said, straightening herself. “Nothing taken and nothing left. No harm done.’’

  But almost at once she realised that another action had taken place in her room.

  She put her hand on some small crumbs of blue glass. She knew what they were. Someone had used a flash bulb in her room, and then accidentally broken the glass bulb and failed to clear it all away. A flash bulb meant a photograph.

  Her room had been photographed.

  She felt an ugly little prickle of alarm.

  “I’m watching them
and they’re watching me,’’ she said aloud. She went downstairs and made a hurried ’phone call to her centre.

  “I have to report, sir,’’ she said, “ that I am a subject for suspicion.’’

  “It’s just a chance,’’ said Don to his friends Lulie and Van. “She has to be either for us or against us. And she may be more for us than she realises.’’

  “She’s a policeman,’’ said Lulie. “I say you can’t trust her.’’

  “Policewoman, Lulie.’’

  “I call her a man.’’

  “She’s attractive,’’ said Don.

  “Oh yes,’’ said Lulie. “You think it might be you she’s for, don’t you?’’

  “I like her,’’ said Don coolly. “She could be a friend.’’

  “Sometimes I’m really frightened of you,’’ said Lulie.

  “No need to be.’’

  “That’s what I mean. Are you really that sure of yourself?’’

  Don shrugged.

  “She’s watching us,’’ said Lulie.

  “And we’re watching her,’’ said Don. “ I had a quick look round her room.’’

  “And you weren’t the only one,’’ said Lulie. “Someone else was in there after you.’’

  “Who?’’ said Don at once.

  Lulie raised her shoulders. “I heard but did not see. I was here in your room waiting for you. Later, I saw her come back. So it wasn’t her either. Not you, not her. Someone else.’’

  There was quiet for some time on the floor where Charmian and Don Goldsworthy lived side by side. Charmian was working, putting aside all her other problems to concentrate on her academic work. She was determined to do well. She was reading and making notes for her dissertation which she still called, to herself, The New Type of Killer. Her notes included observations on drugs among school children and students.

  Goldsworthy and his two friends drank coffee and talked quietly.

  In the silent war between them there was, for the moment, a lull.

  Then a pop fan along the corridor put on The Rolling Stones. Immediately Wagner’s Hymn to the Sun was swooping and singing down the corridor. Soon, as Charmian knew well, angry feet would pound past her door and loud voices would demand silence.

  “Blast,’’ said Charmian; she put aside her work and waited. She went to the window and looked out. Because the subject of her dissertation, Alda and Eddie, drugs, and the trouble in the student body were all whirling in her mind, it was easy to make links.

  Alda’s work both as a policewoman and here in the University took her among young people.

  She had encountered Eddie somewhere on its course. Eddie could be a drug seller; Eddie could be an anarchist. Eddie could be both. And Eddie could have killed Alda. They were living in a world in which drug taking could start in a sub-world at school and go on into adult life.

  Shirley said it was the other way round and Alda was the threat to Eddie. Who could you believe?

  She opened her book, marked at the place where she had been reading. A slip of paper fell out.

  “Married women should stay with their husbands,’’ it said in neat, deliberate block capitals. “ You think you know, but no one can ever be sure.’’

  Someone out there hates me, thought Charmian.

  What Charmian was just then thinking about the trouble for youngsters starting at school, was that moment staring P.C. Ann Hooks from Trinidad right in the face. And it was in her mind that she would shortly be discussing her worry with Charmian. She wanted help, and Charmian was meant to be there to give them help, wasn’t she?

  Palmer’s Road School, if Ann read the signs right, needed all the help it could get. She didn’t know quite yet where the rot lay, but you could smell it as soon as you stepped inside the school. The headmaster seemed not to notice it and this was what was so worrying. Probably he’d lived with it so long that he didn’t know it was there. He might even, it was just gossip, be the cause of it. Not through any terrible wickedness of his own, for he was an upright and an honest man, but through an insensitivity Ann saw in him. He wasn’t specially smart at noticing the reactions of others, and because of this, in spite of his undoubted goodwill, he had created a bad atmosphere in the school. Bad bred bad.

  So he had a drug circle in his school. It started with the handkerchief sniffers.

  Handkerchief sniffers were experimenters on the way up to bigger things. On the handkerchief was tetrachlor-methane, the base of most common dry cleaners. This was small stuff and its users just wanted a giggle. (If you got stuck on it, of course, you could die of yellow atrophy of the liver, accompanied by stupor, delirium and coma.)

  Most of the handkerchief sniffers would get bored, grow up, and abandon the habit. But a few, built by nature to become addicted to something, would stumble on to the bombers and hearts and divers or whatever nickname was current in their generation for the hypnotics.

  And from then on a chosen few would move up to the “hard stuff’’.

  Palmer’s Road School was a home for all three circles.

  This looked like enough trouble for any school. But, in addition, Palmer’s Road had a little extra worry of its own.

  It was this worry that was perplexing Ann Hooks now. Palmer’s Road had a neurotic personality loose somewhere in it and she had to find out who it was.

  The rotten thing was it could be the young brother of the man she was in love with. Mark the way she thought about it: she was in love with him. She had no solid idea if he was in love with her.

  Strange jobs you got in the Force. A few days ago: the man from the park who died in hospital. Today—this.

  In the end it had been she who had identified the man. She’d been hanging around the station, waiting to go off duty, when an elderly woman had hurried in. With half an ear she’d listened to the woman putting her complaints to the man at the desk. She had a weak, husky voice.

  “My lodger’s away,’’ she whispered.

  “Have you lost him, ma’am?’’

  “It’s three nights now since he hasn’t come home. I’m worried. Perhaps I should have come in before,’’ she hesitated, “but he’s such a quiet man. I didn’t want to worry him.’’

  “Perhaps you should have come, ma’am.’’

  “I did speak to the policeman who comes down our road. But then, you see, he’d only been gone a few hours and the policeman said not to worry. And I haven’t seen him since.’’

  “What’s your lodger’s name, ma’am?’’ said the man at the desk, drawing his book towards him. Ann still wasn’t really listening.

  “Mr. Martin,’’ she said.

  “Christian name and age?’’

  “He had letters with F. Martin on them.’’

  “Well, there aren’t so many names beginning with F,’’ said the man cheerfully, “so let’s call him Fred.’’

  “Frederic,’’ she said hesitantly. “ Yes, I think it was Frederic.’’

  “Age and last seen wearing?’’ continued the man briskly.

  “About fifty, I think.’’ She sounded doubtful. “ He looked older than he was. He was so grey and thin. He had bad health. Yes, bad health.’’

  Ann had come forward. “I think I know the man. I saw him,’’ she said slowly.

  They took the other woman, into another room and questioned her. What she said seemed to fit the facts. She identified the man who had died. And so he could be buried.

  So the man found dying in the park now had a name and semi-identity. Somehow this made Ann feel better about him.

  But still uneasy. Just as she felt wretched now about Palmer’s Road School.

  No causal connection between the two, surely, but each aroused the same sick feeling in her. It was quite frightening how she was repelled. Surely there was something too positive about her emotions.

  Not right, so Charmian Daniels said, for a policeman to be emotionally involved. Emotionally involved! Ha, ha!

  Yes, some of this misery she could hand o
n to Charmian, other aspects, not.

  Chapter Five

  The next day began quietly, with students going to classes in an orderly fashion. The first sign of trouble came when the Professor of Chemistry found some difficulty in opening the door to his lecture-room to begin lecturing. There was a door which opened on to the platform from which he spoke, and it was this which seemed blocked. He shoved heartily and it gave a little, but then stuck again. Giving up this way in, he walked round the corridor and in through the main door by which the audience entered.

  He halted at the entrance. Now he could see why his door wouldn’t open. Sitting propped against it were two of the largest men in his class.

  He scowled at them. They were large, but not stupid, being two of his cleverest students; he had no wish to alienate them.

  “Will you kindly move, please, gentlemen?’’ he said softly.

  At once they rose politely, and walked away. They sat down in the front row and folded their arms.

  The Professor began his lecture. For the first ten minutes all went well. Then feet began to tap quietly all round the room.

  He ploughed on gamely for a few minutes and then came to a stop, waiting. As soon as he stopped the tapping stopped too.

  He started again and the feet began again.

  Angrily, he gathered together his papers and stalked out.

  His audience rose silently and watched him go.

  The next focus for trouble was in the Physics Building where a young assistant lecturer was setting out a demonstration. She was jumpy and nervous. She was young enough to feel close to the students themselves but certain rumours had reached her and she feared physical violence.

  She had got the apparatus almost in position when she heard a scuffling movement behind her. A file of students, all masked, pushed into the room, each carrying something under his or her arm.

  “I’ve nearly finished putting this up,’’ said the young woman nervously. “Can’t you wait.’’

  There was no answer but as the procession moved in the leader threw a bag of flour over the floor. Then he walked on and out by the next door.