Murderes' Houses

by Jennie Melville

  Dusty too was prevented from thinking too much about Velia by the state of the running war with her sister. It was a war in which for a long time she had appeared to be the winner and was now beginning to wonder if she might not, after all, be the victim. Who after all had given up her peace and quiet, and spent a good deal of money into the bargain? Whose home was given over to a horde of little boys, even if she had eliminated their father? Whose sister never stopped wailing and repining, even if she no longer lived with a faithless husband, but a devoted sister? Who had to eat the worst food ever put on a table by homo sapiens just because her sister couldn’t cook? Just for one second Dusty had a flash of sympathy for the errant husband. He may have been just plain hungry. What if sister was incompetent at satisfying all appetites?

  Lately, however, her sister had quietened down. Life seemed different in the house, if not happier. Dusty brooded for a moment about this difference which she felt, trying to analyse the quality about it that made her uneasy. She could soon put her finger on it. Patricia was up to something.

  Outside the room where she was sitting, her nephews and nieces shouted and hammered as they had been doing all the week. They seemed to be making a battleship in the garden. Or it might be a submarine. Anyway, she was sure that nothing they made would be put to peaceful use. They made her despair of the human race.

  ‘I don’t think you’ll break your neck, if you fall from that tree,’ she said, suddenly sticking her head out of the window and addressing her eldest nephew. ‘ But there’s a good strong chance.’

  Her nephew slid down the tree, carrying a branch he had lopped off.

  ‘We’re building an ark.’

  ‘You are?’ In spite of herself Dusty was surprised.

  ‘For when the rains come.’

  ‘What makes you think they’re going to come?’

  ‘They’re bound to, aren’t they?’ he said, looking at her seriously. ‘Can’t you feel the atmosphere of brooding?’

  ‘I certainly can,’ agreed Dusty heartily, ‘but I didn’t know it was that.’

  ‘It’ll be Water, or a Great Fire,’ he continued. ‘We can’t guard against the fire, but we can guard against the water.’

  ‘My,’ said Dusty, in her surprise going back to sucking her thumb, as in youth. You’re seriously disturbed, child, she was thinking.

  ‘We shall enter it two by two,’ went on her nephew. He cuffed aside one of his younger siblings, and threw a stone at the cat.

  ‘You can count me out,’ said Dusty. ‘I’d prefer the flood.’ He looked at her enigmatically. ‘Can we have your big thermos jug, Aunty?’ he asked as he

  walked away.

  ‘No,’ said Dusty, returning to her book and cigarette by the fire.

  —Not borrow or use, she pointed out to herself, but have.

  She was enjoying her second cigarette and gloomily assessing

  the meaning of the smell of burnt meat coming out of the kitchen,

  when a sidelong glance through the window showed her that they

  already had her big thermos jug.

  ‘But we really need it,’ pleaded her nephew, clinging on to the

  handle.

  She gripped his arm. The boy had strong muscles and she could

  feel them tighten beneath her fingers.

  ‘I want it,’ she said.

  There was silence. ‘I want it,’ said his eyes.

  ‘I’ll take it now.’ She wrenched it from him. He let her have it

  politely enough. During the whole episode he had said or done

  nothing overtly threatening.

  ‘He’s strong,’ muttered Dusty to herself. She could feel herself

  trembling.

  Her sister came out of the house and stared at her.

  Dusty hugged her thermos flask to her chest. She stumped heavily

  into the kitchen and got herself a drink of water.

  Her sister giggled. ‘ Don’t let them get you down. They’re only

  playing.’

  Rapidly the children went on with the work. This time in silence.

  ‘You’ve been seeing Maggie again,’ said Dusty accusingly. Maggie

  was the happily married sister who refused to speak to Dusty. She

  said her marriage wouldn’t be safe if she did. ‘ That’s what!’

  Patricia smiled. And not only Maggie, she thought.

  The inquest on the drowned woman was very quiet. Deerham Hills took little, if any, apparent notice. The main preoccupations at the moment were the bye-election (their M.P. had died) and the Rose Show. Deerham Hills had no politics, only associations, and it associated its M. P. with a decade of not un-prosperous years, and so it proposed to elect his successor, without any fuss, from the same party. Only a few people in Deerham Hills were feeling the edge receding from their prosperity, and only the youngest age group of all, the school-leavers, were finding out the meaning of the word redundant.

  But if there was no public show of interest in the dead woman this did not mean that there were not a good many undercurrents of private interest swirling round in the town. It was discussed in the park shelter where the group of retired men held their club. The girls of Lubbock’s, the biggest food store in town, debated it thoroughly in their rest room; and the matrons of Deerham Hills discussed it at Blanche Moppett’s and Avril Henry’s, the two smart dress and hat shops.

  Charmian was aware of this subterranean interest without getting any useful information from it. It frightened her, though, by its intensity. She always had the feeling anyway that the secret life of Deerham Hills would surprise her if she ever got to know all of it. She probably did know as much about it as anybody; it was her job. She certainly knew something about it at this minute: she knew whose black car was parked every night on the corner of Haymaker Road and Spinney Lane, and where its occupant went, and why; she knew who was building the mysterious cottage with a swimming pool on Forest View Road, and why it was very unlikely the owner would ever live in it, let alone swim in the pool; she even knew who telephoned the Chief Constable every night at ten o’clock.

  She didn’t know where Tony Foss went with his cases, and she didn’t know who had attacked the Flete girl yet, but she would probably get to know both in time. The trouble with her method of assembling a mass of detailed information in her card-index system was that she often had material the true value of which she did not know. She couldn’t always see the over-all picture; it wasn’t humanly possible. She had a lot of trees, and did not always know the size of the wood. But that was police work. On the whole, she knew her method to be a good one, if at the same time she was aware that her card-index needed a good fortnight’s work on it to get out what might be in the cards. Perhaps she had information about Marley from Manchester and about the dead woman, Mrs Florence Chandler, without realising it. But she didn’t have a fortnight to spare. Maybe Deerham Hills would buy her a computer. She grinned at the thought of Deerham Hills admitting that mathematics had any place in crime detection. Even Pratt only grudgingly allowed forensic medicine its place, and really preferred a good, well-taken statement from the suspect. But Charmian set her sights higher, she knew that the future was with statistics, mathematics and science. She meant to get to New York, Chicago and Paris to see what policemen were doing there. (Terrible if it was all filled with Pratts.) The days of looking on scientific detection as black magic were over.

  Thus confident in the power of human reason, and especially of her own, Charmian worked on. But for the first time in her ambitious industrious career, her private life was taking precedence in her thoughts. The self-possession and control which Sergeant William Carter had never done more than dent had now been well and truly shaken by her neighbour Coniston. The effect on Charmian was to make her cross and critical. Clever women when they fall in love are always difficult and sometimes embarrassing.

  In the first place, she was not proud of him. A natural and even unconscious snob herself, she had always t
aken it for granted that when she did love she would love an educated person, or at any rate someone cleverer than she was. Coniston was not a particularly well educated man, and she rather thought she was cleverer. She had come round to the view that he was not a sculptor. He might have been a potter once. But in fact he was a sailor who had just retired from the sea and was trying to settle into a life on land.

  She did not come right out and say this to herself, of course. Nature wrapped it up for her. She felt shy and reserved when she was with him, not anxious to do anything ostentatious and showy. (Not like Grizel or her sister Sue when they were in love. They never stopped talking about the man in question, dragging his name into everything. It was one of the ways you could tell.) He felt the same way too; he seemed a shy, quiet man. This suited Charmian who anyway would have wanted to be the dominant partner in any union, if it ever came to that, but she was very far from contemplating marriage with Coniston. Which was remarkable, because Charmian had a straightforward, simple outlook and thought entirely in terms of marriage or un-marriage. (This was one of the things she had against Sergeant William Carter, the suspicion that in spite of his proposal of marriage he would have made other proposals, if he had dared.)

  Together with shyness nature lined up several physical symptoms. She stammered when she was with Coniston, had some difficulty in finding the words she wanted to use. She got headaches just when they were due to meet; and became forgetful, lost keys, purses and her watch, all before an appointment with him. Sometimes she forgot when she was due to meet him and arrived late. So, anxious, shy, stammering, forgetful, she was naturally impeded from going anywhere with him … And, most strange manifestation of all, she swelled up. Her body seemed to increase in size, perhaps with tension, so that very often when she had arranged to meet him, or he was going to call at her house, she was held up, puzzled and resentful, as she struggled with a zipper or belt.

  He suffered similar impediments and was shy and strange sometimes. But never forgetful. He was always there, on time, waiting for her.

  Still, people were beginning to talk. No one who counted knew yet, of course. Pratt didn’t, nor old Mrs Uprichard, who always knew everything and told it too (that was however only a matter of time, the old lady would surely get to know); but Grizel knew, and was watching with ironic amusement. She had her own ways of marking the progression of the affair. Briefly, she knew it by Charmian’s evasions. From non-committal answers when his name was mentioned, Charmian turned to silences, and from silences to downright lies. Grizel knew they met two or three times a week, but not because Charmian told her so. She knew it because on these nights Charmian was over-careful in clearing away all work, and packed up her desk and papers as if she was preparing to leave them for ever. There was something eerie to Grizel in this silent clearing of the decks.

  ‘And why all this secrecy?’ she asked her young husband angrily.

  ‘She’s ashamed, I think,’ he said slowly. He usually took his time answering her. He was a school-teacher and had learnt the hard way not to rush into speech. It was coming in very useful in marriage.

  ‘Ashamed?’ repeated Grizel, even more angrily. ‘Of what? Of him, of us?’

  ‘Of herself,’ he said after a pause. In his way he was a sharper observer than his wife, and he had taken particular notice of Charmian because he saw that she was a powerful, if unconscious, influence upon his wife. He wanted to be the only one influencing Grizel. He had seen that Charmian, although highly intelligent, was also highly emotional. A tricky combination; the more so as she appeared to ride roughshod over her own emotions, pretending they weren’t there. You can’t go on doing that for ever, he thought.

  ‘She’s under heavy pressure,’ he pointed out to her. ‘Pratt ill (if he is ill, I don’t quite accept that, I think you two are being a bit imaginative there), this murder hunt on, the trouble over the Flete girl. Yes, the combination’s there all right. But you’re quite right to be worried, all the same,’ he went on. ‘There’s a funny feeling about it all. Unnatural, distorted.’

  ‘I can’t think Charmian would ever do anything that wasn’t good and honest and true,’ cried Grizel.

  ‘No,’ said her husband thoughtfully.

  Two weeks can be a long time. Dangerously long. In this time you can contract, develop the full symptoms of and die from typhoid, galloping tuberculosis, meningitis, and even rabies: you can meet and marry: you can conceive and carry out a murder. You can be healthy, uncommitted, guiltless, and in two weeks’ time you can be buried.

  The statistics showed that a percentage of the inhabitants of Deerham Hills were headed for one or other of these fates within the next two weeks.

  ‘Charmian?’ said Velia. She was lying back on her bed, her head drooping, almost naked. The room was very hot. ‘Charmian, there is something I have to say. Something I must say. This is the time for me to say it.’

  There was no answer.

  ‘You thought I was frightened of you? So I am. I am frightened of you all right. Here and now, I am frightened of you.’ She did not move from her position on the bed. ‘But Morgan says I have to be brave. So for him I am brave. So, no Charmian. No. Our friendship must not go on. It’s no good. The things you suggest—.’ Her voice faltered. ‘ Suggested,’ she amended. Now she did raise her head.

  ‘It’s wicked, Charmian. Unnatural.’ There was deep feeling in her voice. ‘Wrong, very wrong.’

  There was no answer.

  Velia started again.

  ‘Charmian?’

  Chapter Seven

  THE police station in Deerham Hills seemed extra hot and crowded. Charmian was beginning to dislike her brightly coloured office with its view across to the Library and the bus station. And she thought that if Grizel treated her any longer with this combination of tact and hawk-eyed observation she would begin to hate her too. She had no difficulty in guessing what Grizel was observing, and what she was being tactful about. Coniston. She said the name again: Coniston. She had no means of knowing that Grizel was also anxious about her physical state.

  ‘She’s just not focussing,’ she complained to her husband. ‘She’s so abstracted. I don’t believe she notices I’m there.’

  ‘Oh, I expect she does,’ said her husband, with a better appreciation of the impact of his Grizel when she was trying to be unobtrusive.

  ‘Why, yesterday she didn’t have any lipstick on.’

  ‘Yes, I agree that does make her pretty odd – remarkable.’

  Grizel looked at him suspiciously. Give her a month or two, she thought, and she’d teach him that you don’t use the same sarcasms on your wife that you use on a class of little boys.

  ‘You keep your mind on your work and let Charmian keep her mind on hers,’ advised her husband. ‘How’s the Flete business?’

  ‘Not too good.’ Grizel looked worried. ‘ But keeping her mind on her work is just what Charmian’s not doing.’

  Grizel was wrong. All the time, whatever the surface preoccupation of her thoughts, Charmian was deeply concerned with the dead woman, Florence Chandler, and the man Marley; and behind them loomed her worry over Velia and Morgan. The figures rotated in her mind like dummies on a roundabout, with Morgan and Velia constantly pushing round to shove aside Mrs Chandler and Marley.

  She hadn’t seen Velia since the day they had parted in anger, but she had tried once or twice to telephone. There was never any answer.

  As an alternative method of approach she tried to telephone Velia at her hospital office. Only Dusty answered, and she seemed abstracted, as if she had troubles of her own and didn’t really care about Velia any more. Her voice sounded thick, almost as though she had been crying. Impossible to think of Dusty crying, but she might be in an emotional crisis of some sort.

  Her news, such as it was, was disquieting. Velia had left the office and wasn’t coming back to work. She spoke as if she didn’t care if she never saw Velia again.

  ‘I might want to ask you something myself,’ s
aid Dusty abruptly. ‘I suppose the police do help?’

  ‘What?’ said Charmian, taken by surprise.

  ‘No, it’s ridiculous. Forget it. Sorry I spoke.’ As if I could be frightened of my own nephew, she thought.

  She’s in trouble, decided Charmian, and thought at once of Morgan.

  But these two weeks had not been without success. Additional information about Marley and Mrs Chandler was gradually filtering in from all the channels of investigation Pratt and Charmian had opened up. None of it looked important, but all of it might, in the end, add up to something. So Charmian grimly and methodically went through the reports, scrutinising all the facts, significant or trivial. With Marley all facts were relevant.

  They knew now, for instance, the earliest appearance on record that Marley had made in Manchester. Early in 1951 a woman whose name was Rose Anne Phillips had made a complaint to the Manchester police that a man had tried to get money from her by threats. She was a woman of thirty-five. There was no description of her appended, but Charmian thought that she must have been tall and athletic and probably tough. The development of the story bore this out. Rose Anne Phillips taught games and physical training in a large girls’ school. She had been teaching there for two years, having come to the school from a post in London. The man, whose name appeared in her complaint (and he made no other appearance, Charmian noted bitterly) as Preddle, had tried to get money from her by accusing her of improprieties with some of the girls at the school. He had evidence, he said, which he would hand over to the police unless she gave him money. Miss Rose Anne Phillips was more than a match for this however. She removed from him by force what he called his evidence, put it in her handbag, seized her accuser by the arm, and started off to the nearest police station. If it hadn’t been, she complained, for the fact that she sneezed and he got his arm loose, she would have hauled him up before the sergeant in charge of the station. As it was, Mr Preddle was never seen again. Under that name. Miss Rose Anne Phillips later joined the Force herself. No doubt she thought they needed stalwart recruits.