Footsteps in the Blood

by Jennie Melville

  Besides, it didn’t ring true. What possible motive could there be for deliberate murder? The story as she’d been told it by Kate and Dolly provided no reason for Kate attacking the girl, other than in self-defence.

  Unless Kate wasn’t telling all she knew.

  ‘Any idea what lines Bister and Father are thinking along?’ Charmian asked Dolly.

  Charmian knew Chief Inspector Father, they had worked on a case together in the recent past. She had a wary respect for him, she did not always like his style, but he got results.

  ‘They haven’t said, and I’m supposed to be on leave although I hang around, but my guess is that they think the girl was on the prowl, met Kate late one night and got into a quarrel with her. Somehow, as a result of that, she got shot.’

  ‘Kate wouldn’t have a gun on her.’

  ‘That’s probably what’s worrying them.’

  ‘It must make them accept that the killer was someone outside, not Kate.’

  ‘I think they have the idea that there’s a lot more to it than they know.’

  So there is, thought Charmian. There has to be.

  ‘Is Fred Elm an on the case?’ She didn’t trust Inspector Elman not to go for the quick answer.

  Dolly shook her head. ‘On a course in Birmingham. He’ll be back.’ She kept all feeling out of her voice. Elman was a good boss to her in his way and she didn’t want to put him down.

  Also, she was in a very delicate situation herself, half a suspect and half imagining herself the victim.

  ‘Have you said anything about your own suspicions to any of them?’

  Dolly looked thoughtful. ‘I sort of mapped out a hypothetical case to Father over a drink and he didn’t like it at all. Wouldn’t wear it. Mind you, he’d had a few. Not sure if he remembers now.’ And she wasn’t sure if she wanted him to remember either. It might have been a mistake to talk at all, She needed a confessor quite outside the magic circle. Even Charmian wasn’t quite neutral, you could pick it up in her voice.

  Dolly sat hunched over her mug of coffee. The bright red mug had been made by Kate’s mother; a noted potter and artist, the mug belonged to her so-called ‘Red Period’, one of her best. Kate’s kitchen was red too, what there was of it, Kate not having done much to the room except paint it. The red reflected a sort of pinkiness on to Dolly’s cheeks so that she looked flushed. She was a pretty young woman, more muscular than she appeared, and highly attractive.

  Dolly and Kate had been good friends for several years now, but they were different in character and ambition. This was reflected in the clothes they wore: Kate’s were always more expensive and more flamboyant than Dolly’s conservative outfits. The different styles were carried through into their homes: Dolly’s was practical, comfortable and even cosy; Kate’s had great zest – you might not sit at ease, but you noticed where you were.

  But both young women were united in their respect and affection for Charmian Daniels; she was Kate’s godmother with a good record of loving help and support over the years, while for Dolly she was a role model whose distinguished career Dolly meant to follow. She had been a pathfinder in her time, had Charmian. There was an added complication at the moment for Dolly knew that a career problem loomed for Charmian who was being offered a new position of great trust. She desperately did not want to harm the upward movement of a woman she admired: this case might just do it. For herself, too, it represented a threat.

  She thought Charmian looked tired, as well-groomed as ever, but thin. Thinner than she remembered.

  For a moment both women sat in silence. Charmian broke the silence.

  ‘Where is George Rewley these days?’ Sergeant Rewley was an intelligent, subtle and sensitive young detective whom Kate had seemed to like a lot. ‘I haven’t seen him around lately.’

  ‘I don’t know. I think something went wrong between them, but I don’t know what. The trouble with Rewley is that he’s almost too perceptive, he probably saw a lot that other men would not notice, and he’d speak, because he doesn’t hide things, and you know Kate. She does bristle at criticism. You have to handle her.’

  ‘I would have thought Rewley could.’

  ‘But you have to want to,’ said Dolly shrewdly. ‘Rewley might not have wanted a relationship you have to handle like a bomb. Not all men do.’ Especially police officers who had a lot of that sort of work in their professional lives and liked a bit of peace at home. And Rewley, too, was in many ways a rather special person.

  Charmian considered. She knew her difficult Kate, who seemed to work through men like washing her hands. A pity. Rewley could have been a help just now.

  ‘It’s a pity she has a gun at all,’ she said aloud.

  ‘As long as it’s the wrong gun,’ said Dolly.

  Charmian gave her a sharp look. It had to be the wrong gun.

  ‘I tell you I don’t feel confident of anything at all,’ said Dolly, responding to the look.

  The voices in the next room stopped. For a perceptible moment there was dead silence.

  ‘Good or bad?’ asked Dolly. Then she answered herself. ‘Beats me.’

  The door opened and Kate and Sergeant Bister came into the kitchen. Kate did not have the air of a girl who had just gone through a searching interview. She looked composed, having regained any self-confidence she might have lost in that earlier brush with Charmian. She met Charmian’s eyes with what her godmother called her ‘ matter-of-fact’ look. That was a good sign.

  Sergeant Bister’s expression was harder to read. Perhaps he was pleased with himself. That was a less good sign.

  Charmian was thoughtful. From what she had heard of Bister he knew where he was going and was not likely to have been misdirected even by the lovely Kate. That easy confidence of Kate’s, product of money and social class, could be self-delusive.

  Kate said: ‘I think the sergeant might like a cup of coffee. Pour one for me too, Charmian, please. I’ve just got to go and get something.’

  ‘Three guesses what it is,’ murmured Dolly under her breath.

  Sergeant Bister heard but ignored her. ‘Kate and I have gone over the night when the girl was killed, and the other episodes. I think I’ve got a clear picture.’

  ‘I wish I’d been here,’ said Dolly. ‘I might have heard or seen something.’

  ‘But you were in London?’ Just as well, Barstow, he thought to himself, or you’d be in more trouble than you are.

  ‘Yes. As you know.’

  ‘Having dinner in London at the Stafford Hotel? Nice place.’

  ‘It was a family dinner party,’ said Dolly, ‘to meet my mother’s new husband.’

  Her third, isn’t it? thought Bister, who had checked. Out of interest really, because he did not think it added anything relevant to the case, but he always checked everything. In any case, it told him a bit more about Dolly Barstow in whom he was interested. Professionally and privately interested.

  He took his cup of coffee. Black but with three lumps of sugar.

  Must be like syrup, thought Dolly, as she handed it over. Charmian, seated by the window, had retired to the sidelines. Dolly could see she was watching and wouldn’t say much.

  All three of them had been aware of noises from the next room, as of drawers being opened and shut. Soft noises of irritation from Kate, followed by one final loud bang of a drawer.

  Kate came back into the room carrying a soft, brown leather sac with a zip top. It had a vaguely masculine air. The type of bag a man might carry his shaving gear in.

  ‘Couldn’t find it at first. I’d really forgotten where I’d put it.’ She tossed it on the table. The bag was not new and had been well worn.

  Sergeant Bister unzipped the bag. It fell into two separate halves, two little pouches lined with silk. On one side, nestling in newspaper, was a gun.

  The gun. Kate’s gun.

  ‘Haven’t touched it since India,’ she said blithely. ‘Didn’t touch it then. You’ll find the gun has not been used.’

&
nbsp; Bister was studying the bag, carefully touching nothing. ‘ I’ll have to take it away.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Is that how you brought it from India?’

  Kate nodded.

  ‘Surprised it got through the checks.’

  ‘It did. In my hand luggage. I think there was some sort of crisis on that day, they were processing us through like sausages, or perhaps it’s always like that at Delhi airport, but I’d sort of forgotten I had it. Otherwise I expect I would have dumped it somewhere.’

  ‘And this side?’ queried Bister, pointing to the leather bag. ‘ What was kept on this side?’

  There was a crumpled nest of paper on the other side, a hollow shape that had once held something.

  ‘So what was this side?’ asked Bister smoothly. ‘Did you have two guns, Miss Cooper?’

  Kate, no longer, formality and distance restored. He didn’t look such a jolly, easy young man any more, he looked quite stem.

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Kate said in a stiff voice, ‘I am really quite sure I never did. I kept toilet bottles on that side.’

  Sergeant Bister produced a large plastic bag into which he carefully inserted the leather sac, unzipped, almost untouched by him.

  ‘What type is the gun, Sergeant?’ asked Charmian.

  ‘Looks like a neat blue Spanish pistol. Four-inch barrel,’ he said, ‘But I could be wrong. I’ll know for sure when I’ve had a closer look.’

  ‘And is that the type of gun that killed Nella Fisher?’

  ‘Can’t say at the moment, ma’am.’ He turned to Kate, ‘You won’t be going away, will you, Miss Cooper?’

  ‘No, certainly not,’ she said, still stiff.

  Charmian got up and stood by Kate in a protective way. It was Dolly who saw Bister and his accompanying and silent constable to the door. Then she came back, her face grim.

  ‘Pretty lethal moment, wouldn’t you say?’ Dolly asked. ‘I always knew he was a bastard.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ said Kate. ‘He was only doing his duty.’ She dumped all the cups in the sink and ran water over them. Thanks for being here, both of you. But I’ll be better on my own now. Thanks.’

  Without waiting for an answer, she swung off to her bedroom and shut the door.

  Thus dismissed, outside in the rain, Charmian and Dolly looked at each other without a word. No comments were necessary.

  ‘How like Kate to forget where she’d put the gun.’ Dolly started to climb to her own flat. ‘You going to do anything about all this?’ Her tone was doubtful, as if she was saying: But would it be wise?

  ‘Damn it, I love the girl,’ said Charmian. ‘ I don’t know if I can.’

  ‘I said he was a bastard,’ said Dolly, as she stumped upstairs.

  ‘I’d like to talk to you, Dolly,’ Charmian called after her.

  ‘Dinner here tomorrow, right?’

  ‘Right.’ And we’ll get hold of Kate as well, was the promise behind the acceptance.

  As Charmian got into her car, she realised she would have to take a hand, but it would need arranging. And probably scupper a career prospect of her own.

  As she turned the car, she looked at the wide stretch of grass on which Nella Fisher had died. Now it looked peaceful, the turf very green and damp. She wondered what it had looked like on the day of the murder.

  Chapter Three

  A look back at Monday September 28,

  then on to Friday October 6

  Nella Fisher’s body had been found on the scrubby piece of turf which stretched between the facade of the flats and the road. A small screen of evergreen bushes and newly planted trees curved in a semicircle in the middle of it, shielding the flats from the road.

  It had also partly hidden the body of the dead girl.

  She had rested among the laurel bushes, as if she had staggered there, mortally wounded, to die. Her body did not look arranged, but casual, as if she had dropped there, like a doll, without realising she was dead.

  After the discovery, screens had been set around the area while photographs and measurements of an essential sort were taken and while the Scene of the Crime Officer settled the first moves in the investigation. At this stage the police did not anticipate any difficulty in finding the killer. They were sanguine of success. In this sort of killing, many people could usually name the likely murderer. They had only to locate those persons and they would be on their way.

  They knew the girl. Her identity had soon been established by the library card in her pocket. It was a surprise to them that she could read and used a library, for they knew her as a troublesome character who used several aliases.

  She drank, not a lot, but she seemed to have a weak head, and had been found drunk outside the museum and picture gallery in Nelson Street behind the railway station; she was suspected of using drugs, of passing them and possibly dealing in them. But this was only police suspicion, nothing had been proved. She came from a family of criminous tendencies called, as it suited them, Fisher, Seaman, Waters or Rivers. They seemed to like an association with water of some kind, salt or fresh. This family, a widespread clan with many tentacles, came from the village of Cheasey in Buckinghamshire, now subsumed into the industrial complex of Slough, where it was widely known as the drug centre of the district. It also headed the lists for abortions, rapes, and muggings. You kept out of Cheasey if you could and avoided its denizens. Cheasey was reputed to have the highest percentage of criminals per hundred of population, outside some London boroughs. Some people blamed this on the nearness to Heathrow, others to inbreeding, pointing to the Cheasey dwarfs. These were an extended family of small, heavily bodied men (they ran to men) with short legs. But it had to be said that they were among the hardest working and most respectable inhabitants of Cheasey. They took jobs in the stables at Windsor and Ascot, worked in the circus at Slough, or ran errands as messengers almost like characters from The Ring. The neighbourhood of Cheasey accepted the Tiny Tippers – as they were called – without comment, as it accepted the Fisher-Rivers-Seaman clan. Dog did not eat dog in Cheasey. No one is perfect.

  Nella’s family had known the date of her funeral but had not wished to attend it. They didn’t like funerals.

  In spite of the police department’s low opinion of Nella Fisher, who had certainly been a trouble to them, having bitten one police detective’s nose (for sticking it where it wasn’t wanted, to use her own phrase), the girl had made an attempt to get out of Cheasey ways. She had worked hard in her last year at the big school in Slough, and taken as many O-level exams as the teaching staff thought she might achieve. She passed English language and literature, but at a very low level, and failed history and social sciences. They were honourable failures, her teacher told her. Thus equipped with two low passes and two high failures, Nella attempted to get a place at the polytechnic in Windsor, but competition was high that year and she failed.

  She was disappointed, and for some weeks she hung around the buildings off Alma Road and near St Mary’s Church, pretending she was a student. She had eaten in the student canteen and slipped into lectures as if she belonged there. She called herself Elly Seaman at the Poly and said her father was in the navy. She had a way of insinuating herself into other people’s lives. At school she had hung about one of the teacher’s house, not saying much, but sitting in his garden and playing with his dog. He had found it an oddly unnerving experience and on the advice of the Principal of the school had told her to keep away. The same thing had happened in the end at the polytechnic. She had been spotted as a cuckoo in the nest and warned off.

  It was interesting that the educators felt a certain sympathy for Nella yet the police did not. They did, after all, get the rough side of Nella’s character, because at the same time as she was seeking education she was also indulging in all those antisocial practices that brought her into contact with the police. The two activities seemed to go in tandem with her. In fact, the very da
y she attended her first lecture at the Poly – on ‘The Origins of the Legal System, Anglo-Saxon England to Henry I’ – and took notes with the best of them, was also the day she bit her first policeman.

  By one of those coincidences which happen more often than they should, as if life believed in a theory of clusters, both Dolly Barstow and Kate Cooper had been in the polytechnic building at about the same time. Dolly was there on police business, investigating a string of petty thefts, and Kate, who was by training an architect and by nature a wandering scholar, was in the library reading books explaining Assyrian building styles.

  They had never noticed Nella, but it was possible that she had observed them, since all three had eaten in the canteen.

  On that misty autumn morning the girl’s body was seen by a respected local inhabitant, Edward Dick, owner of the employment agency with all its allied activities, who was out walking his dog. She had already been found by the milkman on his round who had rung the police and was now waiting by his van for them to arrive. He was glad to see Mr Dick because the sight of so much blood had sickened him.

  ‘Poor kid,’ he said, ‘ poor kid.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Edward Dick, taking a look. He restrained his dog who was at once pulling on the leash and beginning to whine.

  He knew Nella Fisher. She had tried to get on the agency’s books but because she seemed to have no skills which he could market he had turned her away.

  But he knew her face.

  Should he walk on, or stay here and support the milkman? Milk deliveries were going to be late today.

  He decided to hurry on, ignoring the pleas of the milkman, and as he turned the corner of the road where he lived, he heard the arrival of the police car. There’d be an ambulance next, but they wouldn’t move the body until the police surgeon had had a look. He knew a bit about police procedure, having served as an auxiliary police constable.

  And goodness knows when the milkman would be released to deliver the milk.

  This reminded Edward Dick that he would be short of milk himself, in that case, since he was one of the roundsman’s customers, so he turned his feet towards a machine outside the grocer’s that sold milk and took a carton home.