Murderes' Houses

by Jennie Melville

  ‘New library any good?’

  ‘Lovely. They made a good job there, all right,’ he said appraisingly. ‘But the funny thing is, the books are all the same. You think they’d have given them a shake round, wouldn’t you.’

  ‘Well, books are always books,’ said Charmian, amused.

  ‘So they are, and that, when you come down to it, is the real trouble about them. There they are – just two covers with a lot of words in between, perhaps seeming to tell a different story, but generally it’s just the same one, with a beginning and a middle and an end, and the words just put a bit different.’

  ‘It’s remarkable, then, how we enjoy them.’

  ‘Ah, but do we, or is it that we have been conditioned to enjoy them?’

  ‘You’ve been reading the wrong sort of books,’ cried Charmian.

  ‘Yes, and it’s unsettling for an old man of my age to read about people like Pavlov and realise all his life he’s just been answering bells. It’s a come-down after you thought you were free.’

  ‘But did you ever think you were free?’

  ‘Yes, I did. I knew I wasn’t free to travel round the world and enjoy myself like the Sultan of Morocco, but I thought that was just because I was a working man. I knew I had that sort of constraint. But I thought the things I decided about my private life were free. I knew I didn’t choose my job, because my old dad chose that. The lad can go on the railways, he said, and I did, but I thought I chose my own wife. Now I read she just rang the right sort of bell for me and I answered it.’

  ‘Yes, it is a poor sort of joke, I suppose,’ said Charmian thoughtfully.

  ‘It isn’t a joke at all,’ said the old man. ‘No, it isn’t a joke at all.’

  ‘If it is true.’ Charmian was striking back.

  ‘Oh, it’s true all right. One way and another, it’s true.’

  ‘But you’ve enjoyed your life,’ cried Charmian. ‘I’ve often heard you say so.’

  ‘Ah yes, but I didn’t know then it wasn’t really my life,’ said the old man with dignity. ‘Why, I might have been a completely different sort of man if I’d known in time.’

  ‘Now, look here, Fred,’ protested Charmian, remembering some of the tales he had told her. ‘You’ve already been a railwayman, a seaman, a cowboy, a bar-tender, a farmer and an old age pensioner. How many more men do you think you’d be able to pack in? I think you’re trying on your new part for size: an Angry Old Man.’

  He grinned at her.

  They both laughed. Charmian felt much better. Fred was usually good for a laugh and nearly always made her feel better, but there was frequently a little sour-sweet kernel inside his jokes, and she thought there was this time.

  ‘And how does this fit in with your comedian?’ she asked.

  ‘He’s fitting himself into the life the only way he knows,’ said Fred with conviction. ‘You wait and see. When you find him, it’ll be like I said – there’ll be something about him that makes him, in his own eyes, a joke figure.’

  ‘You got inside information?’

  ‘It’s a common enough type,’ said Fred dryly. ‘I’ve met it before.

  It exists, ready and eager to take its pound of living flesh off the rest of the human race.’

  The flesh-eater was already in business in Deerham Hills. He had slipped past Charmian’s observation posts without even noticing them. He came in with a crowd, mingled with a crowd, and stayed with the crowd. He had sense enough not to mark himself out. But Fred was right: in his own eyes there was something about him that made him feel no one would take him seriously.

  Charmian went on her way. She returned to her own office and got on with her routine work. Grizel her assistant was working at a desk in another corner.

  ‘Pratt’s still buzzing about the woman they fished out of the water,’ she said. ‘He wants to see you.’

  ‘I’ve got nothing to add. Anyway, he was so sure people were going to rush up and identify her.’

  ‘Now he’s not so sure.’

  Charmian grunted: an unpleasing masculine sound that she afterwards regretted. Grizel smiled. There was nothing masculine about Grizel, who had been married two months.

  ‘How are you getting on with your new neighbours?’ Grizel asked. ‘Coniston, isn’t it?’

  ‘Neighbour,’ said Charmian. ‘Only one.’

  ‘Sculptor, isn’t he?’

  ‘Oh … sort of. Not professional, you know. Just interested. Has a shack at the bottom of the garden.’

  She had got the conversation expertly off Coniston. He had come to her using the name of an old family friend as an introduction. ‘Alec Livesey said to look you up,’ he had said. ‘I’m planning to settle down here.’

  Charmian herself had suggested he rent the house next door, which she knew to be partly furnished, while he looked for what he wanted. He seemed quite happy living on his own. As a friend of Alec Livesey there were predictions you could make about him. He would have a good balance in the bank, be polite to women but cautious in his friendships with them, buy his first car when he was forty and drive it for the next ten years. Alec Livesey was like this and so were all his friends. They were all unmarried. Coniston seemed to fit into this pattern, but he had more dash than Alec, and lately had begun to show unmistakably that he liked Charmian. She responded, and so was reluctant to talk about him to Grizel who had begun to look interested when his name came up.

  ‘You were working on the woman, what did you get?’

  ‘Nothing at all. There’s not going to be any easy way to identify her,’ said Grizel regretfully. ‘She had no letters on her, she didn’t use a laundry, and she had unremarkable teeth … I mean one dentist in a million might be able to identify her from the details we can give, but only one dentist in a million.’

  ‘What about an oculist?’

  ‘Now you’re a clever girl,’ said Grizel admiringly. ‘There were marks on her nose as you’ve noticed. But she carried no spectacles and unfortunately we can’t ask her what she suffered from.’

  ‘It’ll have to be the hard way then.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Grizel, thinking of what this meant: the monotonous going over of details of all the lost and mislaid women, checking them for size and age.

  ‘Is Pratt in?’ asked Charmian.

  ‘He is in. Can’t you hear him coughing?’

  ‘Yes, I can,’ said Charmian, with a frown. She thought Pratt was coughing too much to be healthy these days.

  ‘I’ll go in and see him then.’

  ‘His temper’s not so pretty, either.’

  It was a question of going in to see Pratt these days, the simile of the lion’s den being heartfelt if unconscious. But there was no one in Pratt’s room, although the last cough still reverberated round it. It was really remarkable the way this building kept the noises within it. She could swear she could hear Grizel’s breathing from the other side of the wall. Yes, there was that characteristic little puff and blow Grizel did when she was thinking.

  Inspector Pratt came into the room, still coughing. ‘It’s the heat,’ he said with irritation. ‘The temperature they keep this place makes me choke.’

  Charmian kept silent, but looked at him with sympathy. Sympathy, however, was never what Pratt wanted, and he soon repelled it now.

  ‘You took your time coming.’

  ‘I was out,’ said Charmian. ‘ So, we haven’t got anything fresh on the woman from the river?’

  Pratt grunted, making a noise surprisingly like the one Charmian had just emitted, who at once realised whom she had been imitating and blushed.

  ‘Well, contraiy to what ‘‘we’’ think (and I take it ‘‘we’’ means your young woman next door), there is something fresh. There is something I know and she doesn’t, little as she thinks it.’

  Charmian opened her mouth to defend Grizel, then, realising it was no use, closed it again.

  ‘She was murdered,’ said Pratt. ‘She was killed before she went into the river.’
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  ‘That isn’t fresh to me,’ said Charmian, with truth. ‘That’s what I always thought … She didn’t look like a suicide to me.’

  ‘You knew that she had been strangled before she fell into the water? And you knew it was with a stocking? And all that from one look? You’re clever, Charmian. If she’d been in the water just a little bit longer, even the doctors wouldn’t have known.’

  Charmian frowned.

  ‘She didn’t have a purse, she didn’t have a letter, she didn’t even have a handkerchief left on her. Suicides aren’t usually so anonymous.’

  ‘This woman is very anonymous.’ He sighed. ‘Too anonymous. She had been in a bad accident some time before her death, and that might help us to identify her. You know, for the first time, I find myself wishing for a job where the problems are packaged up with their names on, and where it doesn’t matter if the answer never turns up. Yes, I know what you’re thinking– ‘‘ Now the Old Man really is sick!’’ ’

  And as Charmian reached the door, he called after her: ‘Oh, there’s one other thing you can pass along to Grizel; it might interest her. This woman, she wore a wedding ring, had worn it for years and years according to the impression made on her finger, but she wasn’t married, not really.’

  And, as Charmian stared, ‘Amazing isn’t it? They can’t tell me her name, but they can tell me that about her: something I don’t suppose she ever told anyone in her life. Yes, you and Grizel mush that one over and see what you get out of it.’ He sagged over his papers.

  ‘You ought to take that cough to a doctor,’ said Charmian as she closed the door.

  These two cases seemed specially designed to prove that life was hard for a woman, and that if it wasn’t some man would make it so, thought Charmian. The nameless man was devoting his life to seeking out the vulnerable spots of women and gobbling them up. The dead woman seemed to stand for all the unprotected approachable innocents who lined up in the wrong queue to get on the wrong bus.

  Grizel was out of the room when she got back, and for the moment she was glad to have it to herself. The trouble with having an assistant was that you always had to keep on top of yourself or she was doing more than assist you, she was being you. Even Grizel.

  She went over to the map of Deerham Hills which hung on the wall and studied it. The town was shaped like a star, stretching its arms in five directions. The river curved round the hill slightly to the west of the town centre. A few trees and a length of scrubby undergrowth still earned this area the name of Deerham Woods. Thousands of years ago it had been part of the great belt of oak trees stretching all across southern England. Now it was a pocket of greenery in the heart of the town and due next year to become a town park with seats and two park-keepers. Well, it would take it off the hands of the police, thought Charmian, who knew that it was a source of incitement to the crazy youth of the town. Every so often there was a scare that a man was lurking in the undergrowth and a police search took place, but they had never found anyone, although once or twice there had been traces. A man had once lived there for six weeks in a brushwood hut, a deserter from the army, but this had been years ago, in the war, before Sergeant Charmian Daniels’ time.

  Somewhere in this town she was gazing at was a woman who would attract the attentions of the man from the north. Charmian stared at the map as if telepathy would help her.

  Then she turned back to her desk to study the list of women he was already known to have preyed upon; perhaps there would be some consistent factor which would provide a clue to the type he went for as victims.

  There were four names available from Manchester, a mixed bag so far as Charmian could see. A woman of thirty-one; a girl of twenty; a woman of fifty – a widow; and another of twenty-six. Age didn’t seem to count. But as a matter of practical difference there must be age limits beyond which he could not operate.

  Yes, thought Charmian, and with a man like this you could put them as far apart as seven and seventy. This man would take the sweet-money from a toddler and rob an old lady’s knitting-bag if he could see his way to it.

  He must have a universal appeal, she decided, studying the list again. Three unmarried women and one widow. What did they all have in common? Charmian wondered. And these represented the ones who had come to their senses and complained. There must be plenty of others who had suffered but, had kept quiet. Or had been kept quiet. He seemed to have his methods. The complaints were spread over a period of ten years. The first was in 1954 and the last, involving the masseuse, this year. The sums of money involved were never very large, ranging from two hundred pounds (from the school teacher) to a thousand pounds (from the masseuse).

  He didn’t make his fortune out of it then, thought Charmian, drawing circles on the pad before her. And even granted that there are (and there surely must be) many we don’t know about, he must have some other way of making money too. A regular job? Another racket? She thought about it. Certainly it offered another line of approach.

  A clever fellow too, she decided, because all these years he had never seen the inside of a prison, never been caught. The women concerned – those few who had been willing to talk to the police at all – were hopeless from the point of view of identification. They would all know him if they met him again, face to face; but they gave such different descriptions, how was he to be found? At bottom they were ashamed and did not want to identify him. He had once been interviewed by the police, but the two officers concerned, who would certainly have remembered his face, had been killed in a car accident a month or two later. He looked like a lucky man as well as an evil one.

  How little we like to handle the word ‘evil’, thought Charmian, and yet this man is evil as well as being powerfully persuasive, and, according to Fred, a comic.

  So there he was in Manchester, a large area in which he had operated quite happily until blown out of it by something.

  By what? thought Charmian. There might well be something to investigate there.

  A sudden thought came to her, and she studied the list of victims again. They were all women of some position, having responsibility. A bank cashier, a school teacher, a masseuse and a nurse. Skilful, clever women, above average in attainments and intelligence. Perhaps in some way they were the more vulnerable because of their responsibilities.

  She handled the thought, turning it over and over, while her eyes were focussed on the scene outside the window. She saw a young woman run to meet a man with her hands outstretched. She saw them meet and go off together.

  ‘It could be them,’ she thought, ‘Or them,’ and her eyes turned towards an older couple quietly pacing up and down talking. Then she gave her head a shake. ‘You can’t suspect every couple you see.’

  Grizel came into the room, her face streaked with dust, and carrying a file of papers.

  ‘Been down in Records,’ she said cheerfully. ‘It always was a dusty hole, and, my goodness, it still is. Why did we bring all that dirt with us when we moved round to the lovely new building?’

  ‘Which I hate,’ said Charmian, her eyes still looking out of the window.

  Grizel laughed. ‘Which Pratt hates too. Says he’s allergic to it, says it gives him a cough.’

  ‘It doesn’t, though,’ said Charmian, turning round from the window. ‘He’s a sick man, I think.’

  ‘He’s certainly got a cough.’ But she looked at Charmian uncertainly. ‘He’s a pretty tough boy, though, I don’t know that I’d call him sick.’

  ‘You always were a cheerful girl, but since you’ve got married you’ve been positively optimistic.’ Charmian turned back to the window. ‘What were you doing down in Records?’

  ‘Looking for something that wasn’t there.’ She added, ‘Hell. I’m off. I’m going up to the Girls’ High School about the Flete girl and then off home.’

  Charmian remained by the window. Behind her she could hear the sounds of Grizel quietly tidying away before going home to the new husband. Grizel never worked late these days if she coul
d help it. She turned round to look. ‘Pretty, too,’ Charmian said eyeing her, ‘ as well as optimistic.’

  ‘It’s the hormones,’ said Grizel. ‘Bucks you up no end. You should try marriage some day.’

  Charmian knew she was referring to Sergeant William Carter whose tentative advances Charmian had not only repelled but stamped upon; both parties were a little bruised from the clash. She touched her pocket where there was a letter from him and wondered what Grizel would say if she knew that he had started writing again. But of course Grizel did know, she and her husband were friends of Bill’s, and that was why she had spoken.

  ‘You concentrate on your hormones,’ she said dryly, ‘ and I’ll manage mine.’

  ‘You might wish some day you’d taken notice of me.’ Grizel sounded exasperated. ‘ You underestimate yourself.’

  ‘And what do you mean by that?’ Charmian swung round.

  ‘I mean you’re not a machine, and if you go on treating yourself as one, something will fly apart.’

  ‘You mean you hope?’ Charmian laughed, her sudden anger gone. ‘Come off it, Grizel, get home to your newly wedded lord, and leave me to the gypsies.’

  Why did she use the word gypsies? she asked herself. Was there some association in her mind? Gypsies were dark weren’t they?

  ‘Gypsies will be all you’ll get,’ said Grizel, departing, but she too was laughing now; who was Sergeant William Carter to come between two friends.

  Left alone Charmian was about to turn back to her desk when she saw the figure of a woman she knew walking slowly towards the car park which bordered the bus station. It was not a figure she expected to see and so it held her attention. You didn’t expect to see a headmistress out of her school at twenty minutes past three in the afternoon, especially when a police officer is on the way up to see her. Rachel Lawson was unmarried, in her late thirties, and a high-powered, aggressive neurotic. She was a very successful headmistress and popular with her pupils, but in Charmian’s eyes (and Grizel’s too, she suspected, since the business of the Flete girl) she was dynamite. If something stopped her steady progress upwards she would blow up. Unstable, thought Charmian, watching her progress through the crowd, brilliantly clever, but unreliable.