“How old is your sister?’’ said Pratt, coming forward.
“Eighteen.’’
“Description?’’
Grace looked vague. She remained silent. Possibly a description of her sister was an imaginative exercise beyond her powers.
“She’s tall, taller than me. As tall as her,’’ and she nodded towards Charmian. Charmian was about five foot seven inches. “Lovely figure. Not skinny, like hers.’’ Again Charmian came in for a look. She accepted the scorn tolerantly; she knew how Grace felt about her. “Black hair, black eyes. You should see her dance.’’
Pratt shook his head. Phoebe definitely didn’t sound like the homecoming type.
“And how old are you?’’ he said with a sigh. He didn’t have a daughter himself and Grace Chancey made him depressed. There seemed no point in propagation if the end result of years of evolution and then a stint of personal effort on the part of someone was Grace. He quite liked her, but too many Graces in a population and something funny would start to happen.
“Eighteen.’’
“Eh?’’ He was surprised. “ You said your sister was eighteen.’’
“We’re twins,’’ said Grace.
“You don’t sound very much like twins.’’
“We had the same mother but different fathers,’’ said Grace, looking earnestly in his face.
Pratt gave a startled glance at Charmian, who shook her head.
“Take her away,’’ he said.
“Come along, Grace,’’ said Charmian kindly. “ I’ll drive you home.’’ She couldn’t do much for Grace, but she could do that. One day, if she was lucky, Grace would get a postcard, without an address, from Phoebe. From Phoebe with love. Or, if she was even luckier, she might get a letter with a request for money. This would have an address, a temporary one. If she tried to find her there, Phoebe would have moved on. You couldn’t look for the Phoebes of this world, you only drove them farther away.
Pratt followed them out of the building, giving Grace serious advice.
“Stay home and don’t go making any more scenes. You might find yourself in trouble, real trouble. Haven’t you got a mother? Stay home with her.’’ He had little chance of discovering whether she had a mother or was likely to stay with her.
A small smart car stopped in front of them and Willie Burton nipped out. “Thanks for the lift, John,’’ he said to John Customer, who was the driver. “Don’t bother to get out.’’
“I will, though.’’ John Customer was already opening the car door.
“Well, don’t bother,’’ said Willie rather irritably, conscious once again, as he so often was, that John’s help usually came with strings attached. He wanted to manage this business on his own.
“Hello,’’ said Pratt. “What do you want, Willie?’’ He and William Burton were both Masons, and although Willie thought Pratt, self-righteous and Pratt thought Willie a stick in the mud, they had something in common; each knew John Customer could buy them both up.
Charmian too knew both Customer and Burton. They had come her way over a case in which one of John Customer’s vans had been stolen by a young railwayman who had used it to abduct a young girl and then crashed it, killing them both. Charmian remembered the whole episode with pain. The young girl had been pretty, virtuous and just fifteen, and even the boy might have come into line in the end. But a faulty brake on John Customer’s van put paid to that. Certainly the deaths had not been John Customer’s responsibility and no one had ever blamed him, yet it shadowed Charmian’s picture of him. In her heart she did hold him to account.
“I’ve come up about the body,’’ panted Willie.
“The news gets around fast,’’ said Pratt.
“I think I can help you identify it.’’
“I can help identify it,’’ cried Grace, who was showing signs of starting up again, thus confirming Pratt’s idea that something had gone seriously wrong with the whole reproduction cycle when it had produced Grace. “ Only no one believes me.’’
“Take her away,’’ he said briefly to Charmian.
Charmian turned to Grace and as she did so there was a sharp hissing noise in her ears and Pratt threw himself to the ground. Grace started to scream.
Nothing else happened and Pratt slowly got to his feet. John Customer was still standing by his car.
“I might have been hit,’’ he was saying, in a bewildered way. “Just think of it, I might have been hit.’’
“Someone’s shooting at us?’’ said Charmian, incredulously. “ Oh, shut up, Grace.’’
“Yes, we’ve got a sniper in Deerham Hills, didn’t you know?’’ asked Pratt. “But I forgot—you’ve been hunting for the runaway daughters. Yes, it’s getting like Chicago here. You all right, Willie?’’
“How often has this happened?’’ asked Charmian.
“Two other occasions, so far. A woman with her shopping basket going up Deerham Hills was popped at and a boy on a bicycle going to school. That’s all so far.’’
“Now us,’’ said Charmian.
“I’m afraid you got it this time,’’ said Pratt, going over to study Customer’s car.
Charmian realised that, although angry and grim, he was not alarmed in the way of a man who has just escaped personal injury.
“He won’t kill you, this chap,’’ said Pratt, “just make you look a nasty mess.’’
On the side of the car was a splash of green paint.
“Green this time,’’ said Pratt. “ It was red before.’’ He bent to the ground and picked up what appeared to be the remains of a plastic capsule. “ He fires off this little plastic cap filled with paint.’’ He fingered the flattened bit of plastic. “Some kind of a nut. We think he must work in the plastic factory on the London Road. He could make his little toys there.’’
“But what’s he after?’’ asked Customer; he seemed dazed by what had happened to his car.
“It’ll clean off, John,’’ Willie told him.
“I don’t know what he’s after,’’ said Pratt with a shrug. “Perhaps he has had a quarrel with his wife, perhaps he hates policemen. Maybe he just likes to splash paint.’’
“It’s the end of the world coming,’’ said Grace, starting to cry again. “I know it is.’’
“Is it?’’ said Pratt, turning to her with interest, as though Grace had inside information. Yes, there was no doubt about it, he was in an odd, wry mood.
“But will you catch him?’’ asked John Customer.
“Oh yes,’’ said Pratt with confidence. “We’ll catch him. In the end. We always catch actors like this one. He’s a comedian. He’s got a joke and we’ll find it. He’ll do it once too often and we’ll get him. People like him aren’t the trouble.’’
Jokers were easy. They had a joke and they had to go on making it. Often it wasn’t a very nice kind of joke, like the comedian who had shot at them, but the neurosis of their joke obliged them to go on and so they were caught. No, the trouble was people like the man who came out of nowhere, ravished and killed two little girls, and then went back to nowhere. They wouldn’t get him. And they might not get the killer and decapitator of the woman inside the coffin.
They could see movements in a clump of trees on a curve of the hill overlooking the hospital. Someone was moving fast through the undergrowth and far to the left another person was running after him.
“There they go,’’ said Pratt, focusing his eyes on the line of path through the wood. “He was shooting at us from the trees. Someone’s after him. We shan’t get him yet though. He’s got more time to go.’’
“He means something by it, I know he does,’’ cried Grace. “He’s heard the message and he’s trying to tell us. I heard about it in church.’’
“That’s the right place to hear it, then,’’ said Pratt. He gave Charmian a hard look.
“Come on, Grace,’’ said Charmian, taking the hint.
“I don’t want to go till I know what he’s going to say,’’ G
race declared, standing still and staring at Willie Burton. “Perhaps he can tell me if it’s my sister in there.’’ She stood her ground defiantly.
“No, it’s not your sister,’’ said Willie sadly. He knew Phoebe and like most people didn’t expect Phoebe to be back in Deerham Hills very soon. “ Phoebe’s not the sort of girl who gets killed.’’
Not yet, thought Charmian in a grim way. Give her time, give pretty Phoebe twenty years or so of wandering in London and she could turn up dead.
“No, this has nothing to do with Phoebe Chancey,’’ said William Burton, turning to Pratt.
“Everything has something to do with Phoebe, everything,’’ said Grace, staring down at the ground as she let herself be led away by Charmian. “That’s what they don’t understand.’’ And no doubt this expressed what she felt. “She might be lost anywhere, she might be found anywhere. How can I know except by looking?’’
“In a way you’re right, Grace,’’ said Charmian as they drove away. “Don’t think I don’t see it.’’
But she wasn’t really paying much attention to Grace. Instead she was thinking: but it isn’t that easy. Supposing all things do relate to each other? And in a way isn’t that a belief we all subscribe too? Yet, isn’t the way they relate so infinitely complicated that it’s beyond us to see? We can only be stumbling about on the outskirts.
Take Deerham Hills for instance. In Deerham Hills they had an unidentified dead woman who was also headless; they had Grace Chancey whose sister was missing; they had a joker who was going round letting off paint pellets; and they had a station-master who was offering, almost certainly wrongly, to identify the body. (He ought to have been attending to the robbery in his office, which was yet another event they had on hand.) In addition they had, as Charmian knew well, five and possibly more runaway girls.
Some of these happenings were almost certainly related to each other, but which? And how?
“You need to be God,’’ thought Charmian, shaking her head.
She looked back, down the slight slope towards the hospital and saw Pratt and Willie Burton walking away from John Customer and going into the building.
Chapter Three
“Perhaps ‘identified’ isn’t quite the word,’’ said Willie. “No, pehaps I shouldn’t have actually said ‘identified’.’’ Face to face with Pratt he was becoming a little nervous. “Identified is too strong a word.’’
“Tell me what the word is, then,’’ said Pratt patiently. He was used to Willie and knew that you couldn’t hurry him. Nothing ever had hurried Willie. It was just as well, really, when you considered what must be some of the strains of Willie’s life. He took it well, Pratt thought, yes, he took it well, and yet when you came to think of it every day of his life must contain a moment that brought him sadness. You’d never know it to look in his face, though. He must have his compensations.
“Why, it’s like this. I’ve been telephoning down the line. You know how it is when you’ve got to satisfy your mind about something?’’ He paused, as if hoping for comment.
Pratt was silent. He couldn’t give any recommendations one way or another to someone who still hoped to get his mind satisfied. From his own experience, you couldn’t do it. If you satisfied it on one thing, then you unsettled it on another.
“And of course, in a way, it’s certainly my responsibility,’’ went on Willie, when he saw nothing was going to come out. “ I should have had the papers on the handling of that coffin. And I don’t have,’’ he said triumphantly. “As I said to your second man who came down—you did know you sent two?’’ He broke off.
“I wasn’t personally responsible for sending the first one. I didn’t know then that you’d had trouble yourself. I sent young Forbes to check up where this coffin came from.’’
“But I had no papers, you see, nothing to show where it had come from. Not really. I suppose I had the bits if I could have found them. So I telephoned.’’
“That’s fine. If you hadn’t done it then I should probably have asked you to do it. You saved me a job. Thanks.’’ Pratt was really trying.
“The coffin was put on the train at Midport,’’ said Willie simply. “I can’t get you any further back, but that’s where it was put on.’’
Midport was a large dour city, famous for its engineering skills. Plenty of women could disappear from Midport without anyone noticing particularly. No doubt many went because they wanted to go, and who could blame them if they found somewhere better than Midport to live? But one or two perhaps had been tucked into untimely graves. How to know? Pratt looked gloomy. His writ, he felt, did not run in Midport. Moreover, beyond Midport, which was not on the sea, lay the vast hinterland of the English Midlands. Now they would never identify the woman, he was sure.
“No, I wouldn’t say you’d exactly identified her for me, Will,’’ he said, “ but you’ve put me one step ahead. Thanks.’’
“I’m a public servant.’’
“But don’t talk about it, will you?’’
That was exactly John Pratt, and it was exactly calculated to ruffle Willie Burton.
They were parting on cool terms as usual. Also as usual, only Willie Burton knew it. Pratt still thought he had tried and succeeded.
“I’ll give you a lift down, Willie,’’ said Pratt, suddenly remembering about Willie’s wife and the strains of his life with her. “There’s no more for me to do here. They can finish off without me.’’
Perhaps they would soon find a name for the woman in Midport and perhaps the Midport police would know all about her and perhaps the case would fold up quickly. A lot of ‘perhapses’, but that was how he felt about it. There had been a time when he didn’t want a case to fold up, when each case was going to be the big case that made his name, but he had got older and his name, such as it was, was made, and all he wanted now was a quiet life with cases that faded away. He was tired and didn‘t want to try any more. Then he remembered the dead girl. Plump, but with small bones, she hadn’t had the strength for much of a struggle. Someone had to put up a fight for her, and John Pratt was the man who was paid to do it.
“You ought to get a car, Willie,’’ he said, as he walked over to his own.
“What good would a car be to me, even if I could afford it? It isn’t as if I could take Ella for a drive.’’
“Couldn’t you?’’
“No, she can’t bear the motion of the car, it makes her dizzy. She’s much better off at home.’’
“That’s where she mostly is, isn’t it?’’ asked Pratt.
“All the time,’’ answered Willie. “All the time.’’ Strangely enough, anyway to Pratt’s ear, he didn’t sound sad. Cheerful even, as if having a wife who had to stay home all the time was even an asset. As perhaps it was, debated Pratt. It wouldn‘ t suit everyone, he added to himself, but then Willie Burton always liked a quiet life.
“You stay friendly with Customer?’’ said Pratt, as he turned the car. “ Since school?’’
“Since then. Me and Leonora Smith, as she was then, John’s wife. She knew my wife. Not that she was Leonora then. Noreen it used to be. Snooty Noreen, we called her.’’
“Nice name.’’
“That’s why she hates us all now, I suppose.’’ He was philosophical. “Not that she’s ever home or we ever see her.’
“Nice looking woman, though.’’
“Isn’t she!’’
They drove on in silence.
“Drop me anywhere down here,’’ said Willie, as they approached the town centre. “ Don’t go out of your way.’’ He seemed to be enjoying the ride.
“We’ll probably catch up with your breaker-in,’’ said Pratt, as he opened the car door. “I’ll let you know.’’
“I don’t think you’ll find him,’’ said Willie, hopping out. “Just some kid. That’s the way it’ll be. You won’t get him.’’
“Well, I shall go on looking,’’ said Pratt.
A tall thin girl with long blonde hair p
assed directly in front of them. She was wearing a shiny red plastic coat and matching boots. She was a fairly striking figure, although something dry and heedless in her face robbed her of some attraction.
“She’s new here,’’ said Willie promptly. “ Nice girl. Remind you of anybody?’’
“No.’’
“Funny. She does me.’’ He looked thoughtful. “Still, she’s new here all the same.’’
“You don’t know everyone who lives here.’’
“She’s new,’’ persisted Willie. “ She came in yesterday on the two-ten from London. Didn’t know her way around. I think she said she was called Brigitta something-or-other. Can’t even speak English properly.’’
“What’s she here for?’’
“That’s your sort of question, not mine. I don’t know. Visiting. Working.’’
“Goodbye,’’ said Pratt, driving off before Willie could irritate him any more. He particularly hated people who knew his job better than he did himself, and Willie did this all the time. “ If anything comes up about your business. I’ll let you know. You didn’t lose much, did you?’’
“Not even my three pounds ten.’’
But Pratt was gone. The dead woman in the coffin was claiming him again. She had no head and no hands. But she could grasp. It was amazing how much of a personality she remained in spite of death. The murderer who had cut off her head, perhaps in case its tongue should speak, had forgotten that bodies talk too. They talk of comfortable easy living or rough hard knocks, they talk of poverty and dirt, of clean rooms and regular eating; they talk, sometimes very vividly, of love and cruelty. They talk of how they were killed and of the hours and days before their death; they talk of where they lay afterwards and how long.
A Different Kind of Summer Page 4
