The Crime Writer

by Jill Dawson

  After a while, my pacing soothes me. There’s no sign of him, the little man, the little figure, I need my head examined. I go to the window, pulling back the curtain to stare out over the dark garden, a sky spotted with only a few dull stars. I put my hand to my heart until it slows to an even beat. I lick my dry lips, tasting salt. No sign of Mrs Ingham, but who knows if the Mad Bat is lurking somewhere along with some invisible fox, bent on tearing the throats of the chickens, snapping rabbits’ heads from their bodies? I remember Betty and Nell, two friends in Islington, London, saying how they kept a timer in their guest bedroom. Every night light went out sharply at eleven thirty. Should anyone care to spy on us – and for us, ever vigilant, we had to assume they were – they must have wondered who was the tyrant for time-keeping, Betty or Nell.

  I chuckle a bit, then breathe out. Drop the curtain again and turn my attention to the snails on the window ledge. Watching my snails always relieves tension. There are a few more plastic bowls and saucers of snails now. I crouch to observe the glass tank, my latest addition, which is too big for the window ledge and is on the floor near the bed.

  Further dirt heaps have appeared, spilling their little beads of eggs, which I transfer to the saucers until they grow big enough to escape. I fetch my purse from downstairs and replace the bigger mating pair in another bowl, and watch them for a while. A mating can last for a whole day. It’s supremely consoling and mesmerising, so unhurried, so without any other consideration – if snails can be said to have considerations. I ponder this for a while.

  By the time I step into the bath I feel better. My pale body is longer and skinnier than I remember, like a great long yellow fish, the water giving it a sepia tint from the rust in the plumbing. I scrub myself with a thin sliver of white soap, veined with black, remembering with a twinge Sam’s glamorous bathroom. I must get some decent soap. I was being foolish and paranoid about Sam, about the return of it, of the Thing. There’s no one here. She’s not going to break off with me. Being in love with a beauty like Sam makes you skinless, is all. She’s a grieving widow and needs to play the part. It’s been one hell of a shock for her and she’s risen to the occasion magnificently. At any rate I should support her in her efforts and give her time; time is all she needs.

  ‘Nobody else sees me,’ the Thing used to say. ‘Maybe I only belong to you. Why should the others see me?’

  A quiver of pride, laced with fear. Special. I miss him, I realise. Maybe I wanted him to reappear. So familiar, so inexplicable. Mine alone, he was. Maybe I loved him.

  In the morning writing absorbs me. For some reason I wake refreshed, despite a night of dreams of Gerald, Sam and Smythson-Balby in a passionate threesome, and other things I can’t remember but know were pretty shady. Losing myself in the new novel for hours means that it’s noon before I wash, brush my teeth or fix myself breakfast. The delicious chaos of a successful writing morning. There’s nothing much in but a paper bag of button mushrooms I bought for the snails, but they rejected, so I fry them up with a clove of garlic and masses of butter and pile them on toast. There is a loud rapping on the front door at twelve thirty. I lift the curtain a little to see a cop car, and two policemen standing there.

  The room starts a curious drumming and shifting, as if I’m in a sandstorm. I unlock the front door.

  ‘Miss Highsmith? Miss Patricia Highsmith?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘May we come in? Some routine enquiries.’

  ‘Of course. Nothing’s happened? There’s nothing—’

  ‘Nothing to be alarmed at, ma’am. Like I say, just some enquiries.’

  They step in. Great clod-hopping black shoes. An older one and his little stooge: a young, pudgy one. Taking off their caps, holding them by the chin straps and standing awkwardly, taking in the fact that I’m wearing the robe over pyjamas and the floor is a welter of manuscripts and books; the smell of the recently fried garlic and the sound of my stomach rumbling. I put my hand on it. I scurry to push some papers away, to make space on the sofa for them to sit down.

  ‘May we come in?’ he asks again.

  They are in, but I nod distractedly.

  ‘Of course, I’m sorry. Do sit down. Care for a coffee or something?’

  ‘No, thank you, ma’am. Just a few questions, you know.’

  The older policeman puts his hat on the sofa so that he can produce something from his large pocket, in a plastic sealed bag.

  ‘We found a wallet. In fact, a fisherman handed it in. The most curious thing.’

  Gerald’s billfold. The nasty-coloured leather, darkened by seawater but otherwise, well, it doesn’t look much the worse for wear. Something so mundane, as masculine and ordinary as golf clubs, as pipes and tobacco pouches, as tweed jackets and leather buttons, now transforms itself into something sinister. Dead, chilling, waterlogged.

  I find I can’t say anything.

  ‘Fisherman found it on his boat,’ the officer continues, ‘tangled in some nets. Like it had been flung there. He thinks perhaps the owner did just that. Pretty amazing when you think of it, if he was trying to throw it away but accidentally landed it on a moored boat.’

  I swallow and my voice comes out a little high. ‘Yes! Extraordinary.’

  ‘Unbelievable,’ the tubby one interjects.

  ‘And how does this . . .’

  So he opens the billfold with painstaking slowness and the tubby one smiles inanely at me, as if we’re on a television game show together, waiting to hear the question read out. Nervous thoughts jab at me. What is in the billfold? What are they doing here? What is it that links Gerald to me? I almost expect – crazily – some kind of note in there, some full account of what happened, written up by Gerald to damn me for ever. I run my tongue over my teeth, wishing I’d brushed them this morning; wishing the acid, frightened taste in my mouth would go away.

  ‘The wallet belongs to a gentleman called Gerald Gosforth, who passed away a few weeks ago at Aldeburgh. Money still there. So we know he wasn’t robbed.’

  They know he wasn’t robbed? What does this mean? Where is it leading? I feel my face becoming hot, and I flatten my cool palm against it, trying hard to keep my eyes on his.

  ‘We’ve assumed he committed suicide, actually, from some clear indication we’ve had from others, you know. Let’s just say he wasn’t the most faithful of husbands and might have got himself into a tight spot with money at the bank where he was a senior director, too.’

  He looks directly at me to be sure I follow. He must have noticed how red my face is, and what meaning will he put on it? I drop my eyes, and can only hope he thinks I’m embarrassed by the implication, by the mention of Gerald’s unfaithfulness. I swallow again, trying to moisten the dryness in my throat.

  ‘So, just one small thing. Inside the wallet, we find this.’

  He unfolds a small square of paper, and hands it to me. In Gerald’s writing, Pat Highsmith, Bridge Cottage, High Street, Earl Soham, Suffolk.

  The effect is like a mule-kick, a blackout, a falling off an edge. I hear myself murmuring something incoherent while my mind is going like sixty. Holy crap. Gerald’s writing: how ugly it is, like the writing of a big, sloppy twelve-year-old boy. And the great lunk wrote my address down. What to say? I glance at the window, the opened curtains, and a figure – the milkman – passing. At the dead ashes of the fire in the grate. At my typewriter: perky, waiting, a clean sheet of paper rolled. All paused, waiting, my life seemingly clicking past me on a strip of film while I stare at the piece of paper in my hand, and Gerald’s dumb, dreadful, condemning writing.

  Why didn’t I look inside the billfold? Destroy it? Fear surges like a bubble bursting in my heart.

  ‘I – sorry, I have go to the bathroom.’ I shove the paper back at him.

  The room shakes again, contracts. My papers and my novel – the sheets bolt upright, sharply alert at the typewriter – swerve into view as I rush past them to the stairs, thunder up to the bathroom. What light can they possibly put o
n my strange behaviour, on my burning face, my obvious upset? Think, think. What to say, what to say?

  The two officers look embarrassed when I come back down. There’s the loud rush of the cistern flushing above our heads.

  In the bathroom I’d splashed cold water on my face, buried it in a towel. Tried to think, to calm down and prepare something. I could say that Sam was here, sure, we’re friends, that’s known. (Hadn’t she said the police didn’t trouble to ask the address of where she stayed that night in Suffolk? What an extraordinary blunder! How casual they are, these cops, how foolishly British around well-spoken beautiful ladies.) I could say she was hiding here from him, hiding a (male) lover from him, Gerald was chasing her, she’d taken refuge with me; they had a row, he drove off to the coast in anger, must have waded out to sea?

  Now I’m rubbing slightly damp hands on my bathrobe, pulling it tighter at the waist, redoing the tie, and they’re watching me closely.

  ‘Of course, Miss Highsmith, we don’t need all the details,’ the cop says. He’s been scratching at one slightly out-of-control curly eyebrow with a fingernail.

  I’m wondering what my face is doing, what my heart is doing, beneath my ribcage.

  ‘It’s not a criminal investigation. Family affair. Routine enquiry.’

  The other man, the younger one, makes a sound, a nervous sound, not quite a cough. They seem to think I’m following. I shake my head a little, but my thoughts still won’t clear. I’m thinking of Sam, Sam, lovely Sam, fiddling with her necklace, that habit she has of bringing the lapis-lazuli pendant up to her mouth to touch it with her tongue, unaware that she’s doing it . . .

  ‘A man has died and his wallet has been found. It would help to know the – ahem – circumstances. We don’t necessarily need to pass them on to his – ahem – bereaved wife, upset her with details about things she probably has a strong suspicion of already, you understand?’

  Sam’s tongue, edging towards vivid blue. Pauses. I try to take in what he’s saying. They don’t need to pass the details on to his wife. Because they think it’s simply this. Gerald was having an affair. They are asking me this. I’m sorry to have to ask you, ma’am. Were you the mistress of Gerald Gosforth? And he visited you at this address? And the date was? And you last saw him at . . .? The older policeman makes notes. I hardly hear my answers. He asks me something more – was Mr Gosforth begging me to go away with him, perhaps? No, I manage. He was asking me to rekindle an old affair. I refused.

  The only crime a British cop can imagine from a woman like me: having intercourse outside marriage. He replaces the cap on his fountain pen.

  And now the cop is staring again at Gerald’s note. ‘We will convey the property to his wife – we have to do that, of course. But I don’t see any need to include this, do you?’

  The square of lined paper, torn from a notebook, Gerald’s writing. The cop is – astonishingly – folding and tearing it, striding over to my cold fire and scattering the pieces there, on top of the soft grey ash. Gerald’s handwriting, the one piece of evidence that links Gerald to this house, to me, in tiny pieces.

  I run a hand through my bangs. I feel that my face has cooled, during his questions, the blood draining. Perhaps I’m very pale, now. And the room, with all the trauma and shapeshifting that’s been going on, stills.

  I try to look like the secret mistress of a man like Gerald, and a tragic, guilty one at that.

  The two cops stand up. Tweedledum and Tweedledee. One reaches for his cap on the sofa arm; the other swings his by its strap. The body has been cremated, the billfold found and explained, what other possible evidence can there be? I’d like to dance around them, rubbing my hands. Instead I rub at my eyes, as if holding back tears.

  I recover my voice. ‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘Matter of fact, it’s been . . . you know.’

  ‘Of course. We’ll see ourselves out. Good afternoon to you, ma’am.’

  The older officer takes the sealed plastic bag and the billfold and drops it back into his deep pocket. The younger policeman smooths down his jacket over his portly stomach and replaces the hat on his head. The back of his neck blazes with reddening shaving burns and a crop of spots. Rookie. Just failed to sniff out your very first real-life murderer, you foolish, foolish child, I can’t help thinking as I close the door behind him.

  After that first time, my first sighting of Sam at that publishing party, her perfect heart-shaped face imprinted itself indelibly. The Grace Kelly elegance of her neck, her stylish hair, her elongated lines, and eyes the colour of a blaze of Texan bluebonnets in spring. That little fizz between us at the table after Gerald’s outburst. I knew she had registered me, as I had her. I tried to remember where I’d heard the gossip about her having an affair with a woman, and if it was reliable. Was it Peggy who’d told me? Peggy was the host of that first dinner party. Or maybe Rosalind – who was more to be trusted: Rosalind was in a long, open relationship with a woman, had lived in Britain, knew the London scene. Because one didn’t want to make a stupid move with someone like Sam. Nothing crummy or ugly; not with someone so . . . poised.

  After a while, Sam was all I thought about. I found out from Peggy her address and next time I was in London I took a bus to Highgate and walked down her street. Sparrows twittered madly at me as if I was stepping into a birdcage and I walked with my heart jabbering louder than they were, rendered almost breathless by the terror of being discovered. Was that a blonde head at a window? A slender hand? Would she have vermilion geraniums in her window box or were those hers – the blue hyacinths (I preferred to think of hers being the blue)?

  I wrote her a letter and tore it up. In the letter I told her she reminded me of my very first love, Rachel Barber, a little flame-haired six-year-old I’d played dolls with in Barber’s bookstore in Fort Worth. And I began to get sick with thinking of her and it never occurred to me that she thought about me too. And then one day a miracle happened, it really was a miracle, and she appeared in the vestibule outside my apartment in Paris, where the concierge had let her in, flopping white gloves onto her pocketbook – thwack – and saying in that English voice: ‘I hope you don’t mind? Peggy gave me your address. I’m in Paris for the weekend. I thought you might come to the theatre with me because I don’t speak a word of French . . .’

  I shut the door on her. I can’t believe I did it, but I did. And then I heard her tinkling laugh and got my first gust of her perfume, a light smell like pale jasmine tea, as I reopened it a crack. She was smiling, and so was I.

  Later, she said: ‘That’s when I knew you felt the same about me! You were so shocked at seeing me there. That door closing was pure reflex.’ It was. I closed the door because a dream had just become real. I wasn’t ready. I hadn’t even brushed my teeth. And there she was, shimmering in a shantung silk shirt dress of cobalt blue – fragrant, graceful, and impossibly lovely. And such confusion drummed in me. What could I make of it? Was I reading too much into it? Was she even there alone? She surely hadn’t travelled all that way just to see me.

  I thought back to that other moment, the first glance between us across the dinner table. The fizz. What had our eyes registered? Perhaps simply this: that we already knew one another from somewhere. That we would be friends. No, that wasn’t it, that wasn’t the feeling at all.

  So then she swept into the apartment – my usual litter of ashtrays, half-drunk whisky glasses, papers, books, coffee cups – and I mumbled my apology for the state it was in and she smiled and her big naughty eyes widened. She waited while I put on a clean white shirt, some black slacks I hoped might be smart enough for the theatre. She sat primly on the sofa in my study – the only room I had besides my bedroom – and I peeped at her through the open door; noticed her earrings, big cream buttons, the jacket that had been hung over her arm now folded on the sofa. How neat she was! Like a fashion plate! And then a feeling like a snake, electric, speeding through my body, as I pictured something else. Tumbling. Her tumbling on my bed, her dress askew, h
er legs bare. What on earth was under that blue silk, all that tautly held perfection? What level of need, desire, could drive a woman that contained to come to Paris to see me?

  In the theatre – a bad Molière as it turned out, Le Misanthrope – she leaned in close and whispered: ‘I read a novel. A marvellous novel, called The Price of Salt. Nothing had ever moved me as that novel did. I thought: Ah . . .’

  I was grateful for the dark: I knew my face would be flaming. Mention of that novel, even now, years later, always brought that welter of feelings. Not quite shame, no. More, a simple horror of exposure. I literally squirmed in my red plush seat.

  A couple of theatre-goers beside us tutted in annoyance as Sam leaned in again to whisper:

  ‘And then Peggy told me. Claire Morgan – she’s here! She’s in London, in fact her real name is—’

  ‘Pardonnez moi, Madame, mais—’

  ‘So sorry! Je m’excuse, Monsieur!’

  She giggled lightly at her poor French accent, turning her charming smile to the behatted creep behind us, who had just leaned forward and tapped her shoulder. ‘Shall we go?’ she said suddenly, and stood up.

  Outside was a blue evening, soft with rain, the sound of it sizzling, like fat bubbling in a pan. The trees showed the tiny buds of spring, sharp as arrows. The smell of her wafted towards me, imprinting itself. Something earthed, something sweet: pastry. I thought of a cake store I knew in Paris, in the rue des Feuillantines near my favourite library, a place that we would one day soon sit in together, and the fragrant things that would be between us then: tea, cinnamon, Hawthorne. Matter of fact, why didn’t I ask her straight away? ‘When can we see one another? Will you have lunch with me?’ It wouldn’t have been the first time: in New York I was known for my bluntness knocking up against my shyness. Something about Sam silenced me.

  ‘Do you happen to have a cigarette?’ I managed to ask, and she fetched one from a silver case inside her pocket book.

  ‘Do you suppose there’s a place to get a coffee round here?’ Sam asked. We were in the Latin Quarter, standing in the street, while I searched for my lighter. I felt in both pockets, then realised I’d left it at home and had to hand the cigarette back. A child with chocolate-button eyes had been watching us standing there, me frisking my pockets, and he was immediately in front of us, presenting his dirty palm for a coin. Sam fumbled in her pocket book again and handed him some francs, looking at me, and my heart made an answering leap as the boy ran away.