The Morbid Kitchen

by Jennie Melville

  ‘He’s learning,’ said Dolly grimly. Their paths had crossed in the days before she had joined Charmian at SRADIC. ‘Who else was there?’

  Charmian looked down at her hands. ‘The photographers were the pair nicknamed Bill and Ben. I don’t think I know any other name. The scene of the crime people, I don’t remember the names, not important. The pathologist was Lloyd Jordan.’

  Dolly spoke with conviction: ‘ He’s good.’

  ‘I could see as a team they would have liked to clean me up with the suction hose that the forensics were going round with sucking up everything on the floor they could lift.’

  ‘But you stayed, beady-eyed.’

  ‘I stayed anyway, and so did Emily, although she looked very green … and then H. G. Horris turned up.’ Superintendent Henry Gervase Horris, newly transferred to the district from beyond the darkest reaches of the M40, and always known as HG. But no country bumpkin, he.

  Charmian looked back on the scene. A bright top light had been rigged up so the workers could see what they were doing in the darkish basement room. It was making the air hot, and smells of the living and the dead moved on the air. Charmian knew from experience that a mobile incident van was already parked outside, and that the neighbours and a few from the press were outside too. At the moment, early on, it would be the local press and stringers there first, but soon the men from London would be down. It was going to be that sort of case. She had already answered a few preliminary questions, as had Emily, but more would follow for them both. Very soon, if she read the sighs right, she and Emily would be offered tea and a ride home. Or in her case, no ride home; without doubt they had already checked the number of the smart red Rover car parked outside and knew it was hers. Indeed, the more worldly among them would have taken the trouble to learn the make and number of her car long since on the grounds that it was as well to know where she was.

  Emily had sat next to her on the stairs, close but separate, her body rigid. Charmian had put an arm around her, but had quietly withdrawn it when she felt the unyielding muscles which did not want sympathy.

  ‘It’s all right, Emily, we can go away if you like. I’ll come with you. Come on, let’s go. This is too much for you to bear.’

  ‘No.’ Emily stared straight in front of her. ‘I’m staying.’

  ‘There’s no need, my dear.’

  No answer. But Charmian heard a mutter. ‘Head man. We need a head man.’

  Extraordinary thing to say.

  ‘Yes, that’s Em,’ said Dolly, as she took this in. ‘I’ve heard her like that; she goes over the top. She ought to talk to Jim Towers, he’s interested in heads and murder.’

  ‘But by then,’ went on Charmian, ‘forensics had come across the big surprise.’ She shook her head. ‘And then I had to be there.’

  ‘Ah yes, the surprise,’ said Dolly. ‘Surprised me. What a thing! I was fascinated.’

  ‘Of course you were. Everyone was. The investigating team were. Probably out now checking on my movements on the day she died.’

  ‘Oh yes, where were you?’

  ‘Heaven knows, all those years ago.’

  ‘No alibi then,’ said Dolly gleefully. ‘You were probably in Windsor being interviewed for that job. Or looking for somewhere to live.’

  ‘Or just visiting my friend, Anny Cooper, who lives in Windsor, as she did then, and whom I have known for many years. Don’t forget any of that.’

  Hidden in the clothing of Margaret, if that was her name, the police had found a newspaper cutting.

  It showed a photograph of Charmian and gave an account of the new appointment she was about to take up, which was not the present one at SRADIC but the more orthodox police role which she had occupied before.

  Scrawled on the edge of the newspaper were the words: HELP ME. SAVE ME.

  Shortly after this discovery, perhaps deciding that they needed to be on their own, H. G. Horris and Jim Towers had conferred quietly and suggested that Charmian could go home.

  ‘Only if you wish, ma’am,’ HG had said. ‘Delighted to have you stay if you so wish.’ He had found his slightly stiff, old world manners a useful tool on many occasions.

  She had looked at Emily, who was still not making much of a response but was now clutching a mug of tea which Detective Amaryllis Barton, a kind girl, had handed to her. Horris was drinking his mugful, though.

  Charmian had nodded towards Emily. ‘I don’t want to leave her behind.’

  HG had let a doubtful look pass over his face, he wasn’t going to let Charmian call the tune. Not any tune. ‘ It is her house. I might have some more questions, you know how it goes, ma’am, one can’t always say in advance.’

  Flannel, Charmian summed up. ‘She’s told you all she knows. Just as I have about the newspaper cutting.’

  ‘Now that is strange.’ HG’s eyes were bland and yet sharp at the same time. ‘Just what you feel ought to be important and yet when we do find out, if we ever do, it may mean nothing much at all.’ He shook his head. ‘You don’t remember the dead woman at all?’

  ‘You don’t know for sure who she is yet.’

  ‘It’s a pretty good guess though. No, it’s Margaret Drue alright. The pathologist will confirm it, you’ll see. The clothes look right, and that’s where I’d like to have another go at Miss Bailey here. She may remember more if she gets a look at the skirt the woman was wearing. You can see the colours.’

  Emily had been listening after all. ‘ I saw the skirt when we opened the door. It’s yellow with a stripe. I don’t remember it clearly but I remember a striped skirt, but it’s Margaret, I know …’ She didn’t look at either of them, ‘And the head, I can tell you whose head it is. I mean, we know, don’t we, who lost a head. Alana, Alana. What game are you playing, pretending you don’t know?’

  HG reverted to the bland approach. ‘I think you should get home, miss, we can talk tomorrow. It’s early days yet. I’ll see you get a lift home.’

  ‘I’ll take her home,’ Charmian said.

  ‘Good of you, ma’am, thank you.’ He tilted his voice from the bland to the gentle rustic. ‘Just one last thing. What made you decide to open up the downstairs room today?’

  ‘I have to sell the house. The house agent said it had to be opened before he could put it on the market.’

  ‘And why today, miss?’

  ‘No special reason, the first chance I had, that’s all.’

  ‘I see. And you, ma’am?’ He turned to Charmian. ‘What about you being here? Any special reason?’

  ‘I was asked.’

  He didn’t have to mention the newspaper cutting with its cry for help. His posture, the swivel of his eyes to the cupboard in the room behind him, told it for him, and he shook his head. ‘A coincidence, then, just a coincidence. They happen a lot more than we like to think.’

  Coincidence. Charmian raised an eyebrow. I’ll think about that one. What is a coincidence? It is arbitrary and unexpected. Does a coincidence mean anything? Or is it just that man is a superstitious animal always looking for the voice from the skies to give an answer? As it happens, I think I detected another coincidence in my quiet look at the corpse, and you must have done so also. And I wonder if you are calling it coincidence.

  ‘We won’t bother you, ma’am,’ said HG smoothly. ‘I’ll ask Amaryllis, pretty name isn’t it, to take Emily home.’ He nodded towards the detective. ‘I’ll get her to run Emily home.’ He lowered his voice, although Emily gave no sign of listening, but kept her eyes fixed on the basement room where the police were working. ‘She might talk more freely on the way home to a stranger, and there’s a lot there to say, I think.’

  You don’t look like someone who believes in fairy tales in spite of your country style, and I’m not sure if you are credible in that role either, because there is a touch of the city in your voice, but you don’t expect her to say much to Amaryllis.

  You just don’t want her to talk to me.

  Fair enough.

  As
she went out to her car, she saw the morose faces of Eddy and Albert peering from their cab window. No home for them yet.

  ‘As it turned out,’ she said to Dolly Barstow, ‘I did drive Emily home. I had no sooner got in my car than I was called back. Emily wouldn’t leave the house and HG thought I might be the one to persuade her.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘In the end. I just took her arm, and told her she was leaving … She could have walked, she doesn’t live far away from the old house. She lives in a grotty bedsit in Habsburg Street.’

  ‘Been there. Did you go in?’

  ‘Wasn’t asked.’

  ‘It’s a tip. She’s an unhappy girl.’

  Dolly, meticulous herself, found it easy to equate disorder with unhappiness. Charmian, not so tidy, could see the fallacy here. ‘She might just be lazy.’

  Charmian got up to refill her cup. ‘I’m almost surprised that Horris let her go. You could see the questions floating round his head: was the body there when the family covered-in the room? Was the head there too at the same time? Did they put them there?’

  ‘He’s bound to start from the idea that they did. And to go from there to conclude that the family did the killings.’

  Charmian stared at her coffee cup. ‘The elder ones, anyway. Emily was at school.’

  ‘They were suspected at the time of killing the child, but no proof turned up and then when Margaret was missing, that let them off the hook. I was very junior at the time, but I remember the case. It was looked on as a police failure.’ She was thoughtful. ‘The word was that the team investigating the murder never felt the Bailey father and daughter were in the clear. Chief Inspector Seldon was in charge, I don’t know if you ever knew him?’

  Charmian shook her head. ‘He’d retired before I came on the scene. I’ve seen his photograph, though, in a group, he was getting a medal or handing one out, he looked a tough.’

  ‘He was. I didn’t know him well, obviously, but the legend was that he could drink anyone under the table, and that was saying something for then. Things have changed a bit. I was very junior and he was one of what we used to call the old school, and women in his view were there to make tea and see to the children. The fact that I had a degree would have alarmed him even more if he had ever noticed me. I don’t think he did. But he had the reputation of being shrewd and thorough. The tale has it that he was never happy about the case; he knew they had never got to the bottom of it. He had to accept that Margaret Drue had killed the child, the coroner’s verdict named her, so it was the official line, but I don’t know that he ever believed it himself. And of course they never traced her.’

  ‘She’s turned up now,’ said Charmian with feeling, ‘and with my name in her pocket.’

  ‘I heard it was tucked in her knickers.’

  ‘Her brassiere, in fact.’

  ‘Coincidence, HG called it.’

  ‘Well, it was.’

  ‘I hope so. I swear that Emily did not know it was there, and did not expect to find the body and the head. I saw her face. Let’s call it an oddity that I was there and the paper was found.’

  ‘But? There is a but, isn’t there?’

  ‘There was another oddity in that room, and one I am sure that Superintendent Horris observed for himself: I saw the neck of the dead woman and I think an attempt had been made to cut off her head.’

  Dolly looked at her gravely. ‘Just shows the murders were done by the same person.’

  ‘Yes, sure. With a bit of an obsession with heads. The cutting off thereof. And Emily said that we needed a head man, and now you tell me that there was a “head man” present. Inspector Jim Towers. It’s too many coincidences for me.’

  ‘I won’t hear a word against Jim Towers,’ said Dolly.

  ‘Not saying one.’

  ‘He’s one of the best young inspectors we’ve got.’

  Charmian grinned at her. ‘Like him, do you? Good.’

  ‘He’s married.’

  ‘And I suppose you like his wife too?’

  Dolly paused. ‘She’s a bitch.’

  ‘That’s a harsh judgement.’ And not like Dolly.

  ‘She tells lies.’

  ‘About you?’

  ‘It has been known.’

  ‘Ah.’ Dolly had a gift for falling for the wrong men. A married colleague with a bitch of a wife fitting into this category. There was strong emotion here, she was being protective of Jim Towers.

  Charmian conceded. ‘Let’s drop the word coincidence: let’s call it a synchronicity of events.’

  Dolly looked at her warily. ‘And that means?’

  ‘Come on, you’re an educated lady. It means a linkage of events.’

  ‘All right, I accept that, events are linked.’

  Charmian looked at Dolly and drew her own conclusions. She did not approve of affairs between colleagues but it happened and she was in no position to be censorious, having been down that road herself, but sex always softened Dolly’s acuteness and it had done so now.

  ‘I wish I knew how my linkage came in. I didn’t get more than a glance at the newspaper cutting (it looked torn rather than cut, by the way), nor the date nor the edition, before the forensic man whisked it away.’

  ‘It was one of the local newspapers.’

  ‘How do you know that? Ah, I know you, your young man leaked it to you.’

  A slight pinkiness appeared on Dolly’s throat and travelled up to the face. It would have been a blush on anyone less composed, and she admitted nothing. ‘Well, it has to be a local newspaper, probably the Herald, and he isn’t my young man.’ She would liked to have said: And how’s your marriage? I understand that you and Humphrey live more or less split lives. But I expect you would say that was due to your work patterns.

  ‘Oh come on, Dolly. You’re more than just interested. It’s got closer than that. But you’re right … it’s none of my business, I won’t talk about it.’

  ‘While we’re not talking about me, I’ll tell you about Rewley.’

  Charmian kept in close touch with Rewley both personally and professionally; she was surprised. ‘Something I don’t know? What is it?’

  ‘He’s had a flaming row with Anny Cooper.’

  ‘Everyone always does have a flaming row with Anny.’

  Charmian loved her friend Anny, whom she knew George Rewley found a difficult mother-in-law, a tricky relationship in itself so everyone said. She had never had a mother-in-law herself although she had once been one. Only for a very short time before the relationship had changed into one more dangerous when she had fallen in love with her married stepson. Long past now and better forgotten, except you never did forget. That was the great truth of all time.

  ‘And he’s planning to ask for leave, take the child away and bring it up himself.’

  ‘That might not be a bad idea.’ It would help his grief for Kate. Mad ideas, which on the surface you could call this one, were often the best. ‘ But what about the nannies and nurseries?’

  ‘He can’t afford those, obviously. He’s going to do it all himself.’

  ‘It takes more than one year to bring up a child.’

  ‘Well, he knows that, of course, but you can’t think ahead more than that, Charmian. Or I guess he can’t. Not at the moment.’

  The child was six months old and Rewley was probably only now coming to face the true pain of Kate’s death.

  Charmian thought about it. ‘He’s working well, he hasn’t let his standards drop.’ Dolly Barstow and George Rewley were important workers in SRADIC. ‘I know I’ve kept him on routine work.’

  ‘He knows it too.’

  SRADIC, under Charmian’s rule, was a feared institution. Ostensibly, the unit oversaw and checked all records, of persons and cases, but Charmian had a watching brief: she could call any record, any person in. To hear that SRADIC had either been called in or was interested struck terror in the bravest investigating team.

  She was involved in this new case, whethe
r she liked it or no. ‘I might need his help,’ she said. ‘ Work might be best of all for him. And no …’ she held up a hand … ‘I know what you are going to say: that looking after a baby is work too. I think he may have to do both. And it might be better for both of them, Rewley needs intellectual satisfaction.’

  Dolly was opening her mouth to protest that such an unsubtle comment would never have been made by her, not for nothing had she listened to some of her married friends complaining of the hard slog and low stimulus level of life with babies, when the telephone rang.

  It was Jim Towers. And somehow Dolly picked up the tones of his voice. Charmian caught her eye. My God, she really loves this man. And I don’t want her to. In my heart I have been saving her up for Rewley. Rewley after Kate.

  She remembered some words of Humphrey’s after one of her outbursts: life does get out of hand sometimes.

  Life had got out of hand again.

  He had a pleasant voice, quiet and gentle. ‘I thought you would be pleased to know we have found where the newspaper cutting came from: the Windsor and Datchet Warden. I’ve got a photocopy of the whole page, would you like it faxed to you?’

  Charmian thought she would like to see him with Dolly, it would help her to understand them. Did he care for Dolly? She wanted to know. ‘ Where are you?’

  ‘In the office, ma’am.’ The office was in the HQ and just across the way from her own office.

  ‘What about coming round?’

  Jim Towers hesitated. The body in the cupboard, the head of the child, two cases in one, had caused furious activity in the CID, they were under pressure to produce a result quickly now that the media (how they hated that word, he’d called them the newspapers and the TV and the wireless for as long as he could), but you did not easily turn down a request from the head of SRADIC.

  ‘On my way.’

  Dolly had been listening. ‘You did that on purpose.’

  ‘No, it’s business.’

  Jim Towers had wished to come, the newspaper cutting was his way of getting a meeting. He must have something to say, make some point.

  The two women sat in companiable silence. Charmian had created an atmosphere of peace in her office on purpose, it was how she wanted to feel when she worked: at one with her pictures and the books on the wall, alert, in this world, but calm. Her neat, portable word-processor had the lid down, while the printer and her fax rested behind closed doors to her right.