Murderes' Houses

by Jennie Melville

  inheritance.

  First, a woman to get him into the situation where he could prey

  on another woman. The feminine touch.

  Second, dig in on character and background.

  Third, Money and then Fade-out.

  In, On, then Out, he thought, as he travelled round and round

  Deerham Hills in the bus.

  Only this time he wasn’t going to stop there.

  This was the first evening he had spent in aimless bus rides. It

  was a pity Charmian never saw him.

  Chapter Ten

  ON the morning after Morgan’s circular tour of the town on buses, Charmian awoke, still unaware of the discovery of Velia’s body the night before. She was probably the only senior member of the Deerham Hills police force who didn’t know.

  It was a warm cloudy morning. Charmian hated grey hot days when the sky seemed to hang over Deerham Hills and breathe on it. She knew as soon as she woke up she was going to hate the weather and everything about this day.

  She crawled out of bed, noticing a thin layer of dust over everything and the heap of unwashed clothes in one corner of the room. She had done some housework the day before, but not enough. No one could call Charmian clever about the house; she usually waited until everything was untidy, then cleared it all up in a burst of desperate energy. She hated housework. This morning the sight of it all depressed her. Yesterday it had looked clean, today it was dirty. That was the worst of houses, turn round and the flowers withered, the carpets moulted a special sort of fluff, and dust crept out of the floorboards.

  She tore her foot on a tack sticking through the carpet, and swore. Limping, she went down the stairs, took in the milk and her letters, and went into the kitchen. She could tell without looking that one letter was from Sergeant William Carter and the rest bills: it was that sort of morning.

  She put on the coffee pot and limped off. By the time it had boiled itself bitter she was ready to drink it. The toast was burnt too, but Charmian, who habitually ate burnt toast, did not notice. She was in one of those moods of which her mother complained when she said Charmian was too clever to look after herself properly. Charmian wasn’t always too clever to look after herself, only sometimes.

  As she sat there drinking black coffee and eating black toast and thinking black thoughts, the rain swept against the window. There was a distant rumble of thunder. The temperature did not go down, however, but seemed to rise with the humidity. Charmian, warmly wrapped in tweeds, felt prickly and uncomfortable. She took off the jacket from her suit and threw it aside irritably. Then she got up, picked it up, and laid it tenderly over the back of a chair. It was, after all, her new suit, and the only one she had.

  The telephone rang and she went to it slowly, expecting it to be either Pratt or Grizel. As she picked it up she thought that for her today there could only be news or bad news, nothing good. But the call was from her mother, ringing most unreasonably early.

  ‘Will you be home for Christmas, dear?’

  ‘No, I mean I don’t know, it’s much too early.’

  ‘Too early? My dear, I’ve made the puddings.’

  ‘I can’t tell what’s going to be happening around Christmas. We might have a crisis on down here.’

  ‘You could plan,’ said her mother.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Charmian, conscious that she didn’t want to. She said suddenly, ‘Mother, you are all right, aren’t you? You’re not ill or anything?’

  ‘Of course I’m all right.’ Her mother sounded irritated. ‘I just want you home for Christmas.’

  They ended up nearly quarrelling, as they so often did on the telephone, and off it, which was one of the reasons Charmian went home so little. Her mother was an obstinate, proud, forceful woman who liked her own way, and as Charmian was roughly the same, only more sophisticated, they clashed continually. It took a deep crisis for their real affection to show.

  ‘You puzzle me,’ Charmian said aloud, staring thoughtfully at the telephone after she had put the receiver down.

  Someone had been talking to her mother.

  All through their conversation there had been the indefinable sense of things unsaid, questions in the background; a third person was insinuating himself (or herself) between them.

  Himself or herself?

  Only two people had Charmian’s mother’s telephone number. Grizel, for personal reasons. Pratt for professional reasons.

  She absolved Pratt from the suspicion of ringing her mother up either late at night or early in the morning. That left Grizel.

  But one question only led to another. Why had Grizel telephoned her mother? And what had she said?

  Looking back, in her mother’s voice she detected anxiety and strain. She might even have been crying: her mother, who never cried, who hadn’t cried when her eldest son fell out of the tree he was climbing and was unconscious for five days, who hadn’t cried when the Tayside Mineral Works had paid off all its employees, including her own husband, and there was no more work. (Later she had been very angry and had almost cried then). Gloomily Charmian calculated that as well as being anxious her mother must be very angry.

  Charmian stretched out her hand to telephone Grizel.

  Grizel’s kitchen was full of the smell of frying bacon and hot buttered toast; no burnt offerings here. But this was because Grizel’s husband Ted was doing the cooking. Grizel herself was brushing her hair and talking. After her night’s sleep she looked young and refreshed and pretty. Her husband looked at her and marvelled that someone who had gone to bed with puffy red eyes and a nose shiny with tears could turn up in the morning with pink cheeks and a clear blue gaze. He was eight years her senior and felt it wouldn’t have happened to him.

  ‘You always feel better when you’ve slept on a thing,’ she was saying.

  ‘You seem to,’ said her husband. He had a headache himself.

  ‘Mind you, I didn’t enjoy last night,’ she went on with a frown. ‘But I’ve got it in perspective now.’

  ‘Good,’ said her husband, forking over the bacon. He himself wondered if he would ever get anything into perspective again; he was beginning to think he no longer had any horizon. He had Grizel and he liked teaching and that was it. Whether it was important that Velia Ryman had died and who it was important to, he could not work out. —I was surer of values and things when I was twenty than I am now, he thought, when it seems difficult. I am being slowly brain-washed by life.

  He had the bacon actually on the plates when the telephone rang. Grizel, who was nearest, picked it up, and answered Charmian at once.

  ‘No,’ she said straight away. ‘I didn’t ring your mother. Of course I didn’t. I wouldn’t do that.’

  Her husband watched his bacon chill slowly on the plate and heard Charmian’s voice crackle away on the other end of the line.

  ‘Well, you seem to be jumping to quite a few conclusions,’ Grizel said when it was her turn. ‘You don’t know anyone telephoned your mother … No, it certainly wasn’t and never would be me.’

  She returned to the table and sat down to her breakfast silently.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell Charmian about Velia Ryman being found dead?’ asked her husband eventually.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Grizel. ‘ She’ll hear soon enough … I didn’t think.’

  ‘You astound me sometimes,’ said her husband. ‘You really do.’

  But in fact Grizel knew perfectly well why she hadn’t said anything to Charmian: she was frightened to tell her.

  Charmian was thoughtful after she had telephoned Grizel. In her own mind, right or wrong, she was now clear that Pratt had, for some reason, telephoned her mother.

  Her mind connected his call irresistibly with Coniston. She hadn’t seen Coniston for two days, although she guessed he had tried to see her. She was trying very hard to cut him out of her life, but so far he was staying right in it, and she knew it was not a relationship of which Pratt would approve. If he knew anything about it
. She was almost sure he could know nothing about it. But even if he did know, and didn’t approve, it was none of his business and even less so to telephone her mother.

  For a moment she was so angry that she contemplated ringing up Pratt, but the strength of the official and unofficial relationship between them prevented her. He still had her respect.

  Thursday was the day her cleaning woman came to polish the house and do Charmian’s washing. Charmian gathered up all her dirty clothes and put them in a pile on the bathroom floor. If you didn’t make them obvious Cathy Farmer missed them. Charmian hoped that this week she wouldn’t wash the pink jersey with the white linen, thus leaving Charmian with nothing but pale pink handkerchiefs. Red tape might suit a policewoman but pink handkerchiefs definitely didn’t. She wrote a note saying ‘Dear Cathy, remember the pink jersey runs’ and pinned it to the sleeve, but Cathy probably wouldn’t read it. She was the most incurious person Charmian had ever met. Charmian put the money she owed her for last week into an envelope and wrote Mrs Farmer on it in large capitals, or else Cathy would screw this up automatically and throw it out too. She and Charmian hardly ever met but maintained their relationship precariously by means of these notes of which Charmian calculated about one in three actually got through to Cathy.

  Charmian looked at the clock. It was early yet, an hour before Cathy came. She was always dead on time.

  ‘I really ought to let Cathy go,’ Charmian thought. ‘Anyone would be glad to employ her, for all she’s just a mechanical woman and not a human being at all. I can’t really afford her. Ought not to afford her.’ Her mind ticked uneasily on.

  Slowly she got on her coat, gathered her things, bags, notes, pen, pencil, pencil-sharpener and eraser too (Charmian believed in being prepared), and went slowly to the front door. Her foot still pained her a little.

  She closed the door behind her carefully. I have made a life for myself, was in her mind. I have a house, a car, a career, that’s not nothing.

  Very soon after she had left the house the telephone began to ring.

  She stopped in surprise when she got to her room. Inspector Pratt was standing at her desk, staring down at her correspondence. He looked up when she came in.

  ‘You’re early,’ he said. ‘I just tried to telephone you.’ He tapped the papers. ‘You’re getting a bit behind with all this paper.’

  ‘I am.’ Charmian never made excuses to Pratt; it was part of her success with him. ‘ That’s why I’m in early, to catch up.’

  ‘I tried to telephone you.’

  ‘I heard you say that,’ said Charmian.

  ‘There’s something you have to know.’

  ‘So I’m beginning to think,’ said Charmian.

  ‘And something I want to know,’ he said almost to himself.

  He faced Charmian. ‘We had a call last night to go to Twenty-nine Upperhill Gardens …’

  ‘But that’s where …’ began Charmian.

  ‘Yes. It’s where Mrs Velia Ryman, whom I understand now to have been a friend of yours, lived.’

  Charmian stared at him. ‘Lived?’ she said. ‘Has she gone somewhere?’ Later, she was to wonder how she could be so stupid.

  Pratt’s lips tightened. ‘She’s dead … She was found dead last night by two women, one a neighbour and one a friend … She had been strangled.’

  ‘So her lodger was the man we were after,’ said Charmian. ‘Morgan and Marley were the same. This proves it.’ She felt sick.

  ‘I don’t know what it proves,’ said Pratt, in that new half-petulant, half-worried manner he had lately. ‘Nothing you or I want it to prove, no doubt.’

  Charmian went over to her desk and sat down. There was no doubt about it: she did feel sick. She swallowed.

  ‘There’s something you’ve got to understand about Velia Ryman,’ said Pratt. ‘She was very far from being what she seemed.’

  During the night detectives had turned over Velia’s possessions, what there were of them, and certain unmistakable conclusions had emerged. Her married name hadn’t always been Ryman, for one thing.

  ‘But, in a way, I’ve always known that,’ said Charmian slowly, her wave of sickness subsiding. Velia, the sad little widow. Velia the keen housewife, the good little Velia, had never rung completely true. There had always been a hint of play-acting about her. You didn’t have to be too clever or too observant to see it. Even Dusty had noticed it. It was part of Velia’s babyish appeal. ‘ I knew Velia was a little bit of a liar.’

  ‘She was rather more than that.’ Pratt sounded grim. ‘Or shall we say she wasn’t playing at it? She was a professional.’

  It was a minute before Charmian really took this in. Still under the shock of hearing of Velia’s death, she did not at first grasp the importance of what he was saying.

  Velia Ryman had carried her past around with her, packed into three suitcases, and the police had not found it difficult to make out. She had even kept a diary. Poor Velia was inveterately given to putting things in order. She had been born Velia Dibben, and had been educated at Laybrook Road School, Streatham. There was a photograph dated 1938 of her in a school group, looking chubby and round-eyed, and aged about seven. In no time at all she was Velia Morgan, and writing in a diary how lovely it was to be married. There was a photograph of Velia Morgan, who still looked like Velia Dibben, but none of her husband. After Velia Morgan came Velia Richards, who seemed to be parted from her husband and living a separate existence, although she still mentioned him lovingly as a force shaping her life. So, although parted, they were not severed. Velia Richards looked less like Velia Dibben and rather more like Velia Ryman. Poor Velia, the careful archivist of her own life, she had soon made clear her own guilt. In a little while the police could be sure that Velia knew what her husband had been up to and had suffered it, perhaps even helped. She had been the woman he always came back to.

  ‘Funny sort of life,’ commented the detective who was examining her papers. ‘ I’ve seen some queer ones, but she beats the lot. She knew what he was up to. Must have done.’ He pointed to an entry in Velia’s diary, dated some years back. ‘I am going to take a course in First Aid this winter. It might be useful to us some time for me to be able to call myself a nurse. Anyway, I’d like the uniform.’ ‘She got the uniform all right,’ he went on. ‘There it is on that chair; she was packing it up to take when he stopped her. I wonder what she thought about it all then?’

  But she wasn’t a real person, this Velia whose name kept changing. She kept trying to establish her personality, dress it up, make it stand on its own feet, but she could never quite do it.

  ‘She wasn’t the innocent little victim; she was part and parcel of Morgan’s life,’ said Pratt. ‘And he wasn’t her lodger, he was her husband.’

  The marriage lines had rested in the bottom of her case, Velia Dibben to Siegfried Charles William Morgan (if that was his real name), in Manchester in 1951. There is very often a woman like Velia in the lives of men like Morgan, Richards, Freddie, Marley, whatever his true name was. George Joseph Smith had Edith Pegler.

  ‘She was a liar, a hysteric.’

  Velia was a type all policemen know, unstable, imaginative, stupid and yet sharp, not always criminal but often in trouble, drifting about uneasily on the shady side of life; a woman capable of morbid excitement, apt to do anything, a potential danger, who because she had no real stability of her own could always break up other people’s. In police jargon: a wild bird that could sing.

  Charmian said, ‘A canary. A bloody little canary.’ And she covered her face with her hands.

  ‘You didn’t know?’ asked Pratt, as if he wasn’t sure if he would prefer her to know or not. He looked at her unhappily.

  ‘No. No, not like that.’ For the moment Charmian was heedless of Pratt, forgetful that she was a policewoman, remembering only that she had liked Velia and had tried to help her. ‘ I’ve been very imperceptive.’

  ‘Mm.’ Pratt played with a pencil from the tray on Charmia
n’s desk. The sounds of the day were beginning to filter in from outside, the noises of feet, of voices, and of typewriters. As usual the room, flooded with light, was growing warm. Pratt shifted uncomfortably and started to sweat a little.

  ‘Well, there’s one thing,’ said Charmian, raising her head, as if she had made a new start. ‘We know who killed her and why she died.’

  Pratt looked non-committal, but Charmian rushed on.

  ‘They must have quarrelled and Morgan killed her … He is growing in violence.’

  ‘That could be one interpretation,’ said Pratt without expression. ‘There could be another.’

  Charmian went on, ignoring his last remark, and gaining in energy. ‘And you see where that leads us? There is another woman still to be found. Velia is dead, all right, but she wasn’t the woman he was after, this killing is just an extra, we still have to find the other woman, the original victim.’

  She stood up, and imposed control upon herself. ‘Anyway, that’s my job now.’

  Pratt put the pencil down.

  ‘It won’t be my job. I shan’t be around for a time. I may have to go into hospital.’ He wasn’t telling the strict truth and he knew it, but he preferred to put it this way.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Charmian; now she thought she saw the reason for Pratt’s early appearance in her room. She felt awkward and sad, emotions she saw reflected in Pratt. ‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated.

  ‘I’m glad to go.’ There was no denying his sincerity.

  ‘You’re very brave.’

  ‘Brave? No, I’m not brave. I’m a coward.’

  ‘I’ll do my best while you’re away …’ she said, still awkward.

  ‘It won’t be your job either, Charmian,’ he said moving away. ‘No.’

  Charmian stood quite still. ‘Of course I never expected to be in charge of the investigation,’ she said stiffly.

  ‘You can’t touch it at all. You knew her. You’re off it entirely.’ His voice sounded thin and angry. ‘You’ve got some leave owing to you: take it now.’ He started towards the door.