Murderes' Houses

by Jennie Melville

  Charmian was bewildered, outraged. ‘I can’t do that.’

  ‘I’m telling you what you must do.’

  ‘You’re not talking like a person,’ she cried.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or not a person I know.’

  ‘This is no time for me to produce my identity cards,’ said Pratt.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘It means that I might have to remind you I’m an Inspector in this Force, and your superior.’

  ‘No, wait a minute,’ said Charmian, as if she hadn’t heard him. ‘I know what you mean: you’re warning me.’ She said the words to herself as if she couldn’t believe them. ‘You’re warning me.’

  ‘We’ll talk about this again later,’ said Pratt. ‘And think about what I’ve said.’

  ‘Are you suspending me?’ shouted Charmian. But she said it to a closed door. Pratt had gone.

  Pratt went back to his room and sat down. He had not been entirely open with Charmian Daniels, but unhappily it had never been on the cards that he could be.

  ‘I’m delaying it, but not making it better. Far better to come out with it and have done with it … The scalpel is always better.’ And because his own acquaintance with the scalpel might be close, he winced. ‘But it wasn’t my choice.’

  And as he looked out of the window his eye fell upon the man whose choice it had been. He saw a tall, thickset man wearing a dark blue overcoat and no hat on his close-cropped head of black hair. He looked tough, self-confident and very fit. He walked rapidly up the steps and into the building with Pratt watching him until he was out of sight.

  This was Chief Inspector Rupert Ascoll of London. Whatever was said or done in the case, whose ramifications spread from Manchester to Deerham Hills, and in which the death of Velia Ryman might, or might not be an episode, would now be as he ordered.

  Pratt looked at him with apprehension and listened to his tread on the stairs. Any minute now the confrontation he anticipated would take place.

  As he expected, the footsteps went past his room and on towards the floor above where Charmian was.

  Chapter Eleven

  CHARMIAN was standing by her desk when Rupert Ascoll came in. He didn’t knock, simply threw open the door and walked straight in. For a moment Charmian did not know who he was, but she soon guessed.

  His arrival told her what she needed to know: she was in trouble.

  His action was both a warning and a signal.

  ‘Good morning, Sergeant’ Although he walked perfectly quietly into the room, he gave the impression of shouldering his way through a crowd. No crowd would halt him for long.

  ‘I don’t think you and I know each other?’

  Charmian shook her head, although it was only half true, they’d certainly never been formally introduced, but she knew who he was, and had once seen him give evidence in court.

  O yes, I know you, she thought, you’re the man who talked like an angel, like a brother, more, like a friend, to Alfie Margeram so that he thought you were his friend, and coughed all, but you put him away for twenty years and got promotion on the strength of it. I know you.

  ‘We’re in trouble, Sergeant,’ he said, sitting down.

  ‘We?’ thought Charmian, rejecting the sympathy, the sharing. ‘ I bet.’ But from that moment she knew how deeply she was in trouble.

  ‘I won’t beat about the bush,’ he said, fiddling with her papers on her desk and certainly, as she saw, reading as much of them as he could. ‘ You seem to have got yourself into a mess, Sergeant.’

  ‘O yes,’ thought Charmian, ‘I knew I’d come into it sooner or later.’ She said nothing. She knew this was unwise, she should have spoken straight away, made a sound of surprise, said anything, but the truth was she could not speak.

  ‘I suppose you know why I am here?’

  ‘To take over the investigation of the Velia Ryman and Marley business.’

  ‘I am here to investigate the death of Mrs Ryman. Exactly where the man Marley comes into it is another matter … if he comes into it at all.’

  ‘But,’ began Charmian. She had scarcely begun to see yet how deep her feet were in the mud.

  ‘Mrs Ryman was a friend of yours?’

  ‘Yes,’ Charmian nodded.

  ‘How close a friend was she?’

  Charmian hesitated. She found it difficult to put her relationship with Velia into words. She had liked Velia and wanted to help her; she had been drawn to Velia’s apparent quietness and gentleness. They were qualities she particularly liked, and perhaps in retrospect Velia hadn’t been so well endowed with them as she had imagined.

  ‘Not close,’ she said eventually. ‘I hadn’t known her long. I suppose you could say I thought she needed a friend.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  Charmian shook her head silently.

  ‘She’s been a dangerous friend to you.’ He got up and walked about the room.

  ‘I don’t understand you.’

  ‘Is there anything else you would like to add to your picture of friendship with her?’

  ‘No,’ said Charmian, puzzled. ‘No, what could there be?’

  ‘Just two not very close friends?’

  ‘Yes.’ She was definitely alarmed now and her alarm was taking precise shape.

  ‘Right.’ He stood up. ‘Then I have to tell you that before she died Mrs Ryman left a letter, addressed to the police here, in which she accused you of insinuating yourself into an affectionate relationship with her and then suggesting a perverted relationship.’

  Charmian stared at him, unable to speak.

  ‘She further said that when she resisted, you became violent towards her and that she was frightened.’

  Charmian found words at last. ‘It’s monstrous.’

  ‘I should add that a witness has come forward who supports this story and has first-hand eye-witness evidence that backs up Mrs Ryman’s allegation …’

  He was watching Charmian alertly.

  ‘The man Morgan …’ began Charmian.

  ‘An independent witness,’ he said in a detached way.

  Charmian sat down. She found her legs, hands and face were trembling. She put a hand to her mouth to still it.

  ‘Have you ever had that sort of relationship?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Who are your close woman friends?’

  ‘Grizel Harkness, who works here. My sister … I don’t know if I’ve got any.’ Charmian stumbled over the phrases.

  ‘What about men?’

  Charmian was once again completely silent. ‘Come on. You understand what I am asking you.’

  ‘There’s nothing to tell.’

  He raised his eyebrows at her.

  Someone had once told Charmian that if Rupert Ascoll hadn’t decided to be a policeman he would have made a first-rate surgeon, but as she looked at him now she thought he should have been a butcher.

  ‘When did you last see Mrs Ryman?’

  ‘I don’t know. Some days ago, I think.’

  ‘And did nothing special happen then? Did you go in to see her? Speak to her, leave all just as normal?’

  ‘There was a quarrel,’ admitted Charmian, remembering.

  He regarded her silently.

  ‘I went to see her about her lodger. I thought, I still think he was the man from Manchester we’ve been looking for.’

  ‘Yes, I know about that.’ He stood up, as if he now had enough. ‘Right: you are suspended for the next three weeks, or until further notice.’

  ‘It can’t be,’ cried Charmian. ‘You can’t do that.’

  ‘We’ll go over everything in Mrs Ryman’s house and I’ve no doubt that we shall find evidence there to put you completely in the clear, but until we do that, think of it as a holiday, Sergeant.’

  He smiled at her, and Charmian hated him for the smile.

  ‘A holiday,’ said Charmian bitterly. A holiday which could wreck her career.

  ‘You hate me now, don
’t you. You think, even, that I’m enjoying it all a little bit.’

  Charmian was silent.

  ‘But ask yourself if that could be so … It’s bad enough doing what I’m doing: to like it would be dangerous to the point of lunacy.’

  More sympathy, more understanding, thought Charmian bitterly, rejecting utterly everything he said. She did not trust him.

  ‘You don’t understand me, do you?’ he said, looking into her face, not with sympathy certainly, but not nastily either. She could feel the force and magnetism that made him so formidable. ‘One day perhaps you will.’

  When Charmian got back to her house, exhausted and utterly miserable, the house was silent and clean and shining after Cathy’s efforts. Cathy had left a note on the table.

  ‘Sorry, I broke your plastic paper weight. I left the bits.’

  Charmian looked at the fragments of her piece of sculpture, her plaster fish. It seemed a remote tragedy.

  ‘Funny,’ she thought. ‘Yesterday it was a beautiful fish to me: today it’s a broken plastic paper weight to Cathy.’

  She put the pieces on the shelf with trembling hands.

  Chapter Twelve

  DUSTY spent the next three days at home to recover from the shock of finding Velia. She spent them in bed, pretending to read, but really lying there staring glumly into space. She had taken a knock all right. Velia’s death had brought mortality home to her. Why, it might happen to Dusty. It was worse than a death in the family. Much much worse, she decided, thinking about her own family. Her sister brought the food to her in bed, not in the quantity or quality that Dusty would have liked, but good enough to keep her there without protest. Her sister had really gauged it very well. Too little food and Dusty would have been out of bed in a flaming temper; too much and too rich and Dusty might have stayed there for life. She didn’t mind Dusty being confined to bed for a while, in fact just at the moment it suited her pretty well, but she didn’t plan to wait on Dusty for the rest of her days.

  Dusty finished her coffee (too weak but hot) and picked up her magazine again. For Dusty reading meant reading a magazine. The magazines she preferred were smart glossy ones for women, and the part of them which she read with most devotion were the pages dealing with Beauty Care. She folded back the magazine to the page headed How To Make Your Skin Lovely All Day, and read it ardently. Her big round face was flushed with concentration. Reading, so far, was not improving her looks. After a little while she put the magazine down with a sigh. Nothing new, nothing she hadn’t read about twenty times before. She was always hoping that this time she would be handed over some valuable little hint that would do the trick, but she never was. There must be some secret, she thought, that other women knew and she didn’t.

  On the dressing-table three rows of jars and bottles testified to the thoroughness with which Dusty followed the advice of the magazines she read. Daily she put on cream and then rubbed it off again, she patted her skin with lotion and dried it with powders, she painted it with essences and anointed it with oils, she did everything she was told and never succeeded in looking any different.

  ‘I ought to give it all up,’ she said, staring at her reflection in the mirror of the dressing-table where she could see herself hunched up against the pillows. Even sick and in bed she only looked frowsty and ungroomed and not pale and pathetic. ‘And anyway I could have two heads and no one in this house would notice.’

  But she was wrong there, because her eldest nephew would certainly have noticed. He might not have seen fit to pass on the information, but he would certainly have noticed.

  In the mirror Dusty saw him appear silently at the door and study her.

  ‘Is it time for tea?’ she asked hopefully.

  He shook his head. ‘Mum’s out.’

  ‘So,’ thought Dusty. ‘Again?’ she said out loud.

  ‘She has to get out.’ He was defensive, as always, about his mother.

  Yes, and for what, thought Dusty. She had the gravest doubts about what her sister was doing with her spare time. Or rather, she hardly had doubts at all; the only problem was to put a name and face on the target. That it was a man somewhere she knew. He could hardly be far off either, as Patricia never had very long away from the house. Long enough though. Dusty had a very pictorial mind and at once she had a vivid picture of her sister rolling on a soft bed with this man. Her legs twitched irritably on her own bed of sickness.

  ‘Get her out of one bit of trouble and she straight away goes off looking for a fresh bit,’ she muttered quite audibly, remembering too late, when he saw the boy’s face, that the bit of trouble was his own father.

  ‘If it isn’t tea time, then I shall go to sleep.’ And she closed her eyes, expecting him to take the hint.

  ‘How tall are you, aunty?’ he said, without moving.

  ‘Five feet three inches.’

  ‘And you weigh about 130 pounds.’ He eyed her appraisingly.

  ‘Nine stone and a quarter,’ admitted Dusty.

  ‘That’s a pretty high density.’

  ‘Are you calling me fat?’ Dusty was furious.

  ‘Oh, you’re not fat, Aunty. Just solid.’

  Dusty took a deep breath and controlled her anger. ‘If you’ve got nothing else to do why don’t you go and make me a cup of tea? You can do it, you’re supposed to be so practical.’

  ‘All right.’ He was surprised but willing.

  When he had gone Dusty lay back and closed her eyes. The tea seemed to take a long while to come.

  ‘I’m as thirsty as an old dog,’ she said. At once her imagination presented her with a picture of a fat rough-haired terrier with a large red tongue. She rolled her head on the pillow. ‘ Pant, pant,’ she said.

  In the kitchen she could hear sounds of doors being opened and slammed. At last she heard feet and the clink of cups coming closer. She sat up in bed.

  ‘Here you are, aunt.’

  On the tray was a large brown mug of the sort you might mix the dog’s medicine in, a large kitchen spoon and a bowl of sugar. The mug was full of a dark brown fluid.

  ‘What’s that?’ Dusty stared at the mug.

  ‘Your tea.’

  ‘I’m sick, I’m ill, I need looking after. You can’t bring me stuff like that.’

  ‘I made it the way you make tea … It took a while to boil up.’

  ‘Boil up,’ shrieked Dusty. ‘ What are you trying to do? Poison me? It’s not soup you’ve been making. You pour on boiling water. You infuse it.’

  ‘It tastes all right.’ He gave it a sip. ‘Powerful, anyway. I should think it would buck you up.’

  ‘And look what you’ve served it in … That old mug. I haven’t seen it for years. We had it in the war. Why give me that?’

  ‘I couldn’t find anything.’

  ‘There’s stacks of china. Cups and cups in the cupboard.’

  ‘Mum hasn’t done much washing-up lately.’

  ‘I bet she hasn’t. But even if she hasn’t washed anything for three days, there still is plenty. I’ve got all my best china, the Worcester I saved up for, in the dining-room … And don’t tell me you didn’t know it, the times I’ve stopped you using it for a game.’

  She saw the expression on his face.

  ‘Here, you’ve had my china. My best china, my lovely Worcester. You’ve got it in that old ark of yours.’

  And before he could stop her Dusty was out of bed and off down the stairs.

  In the kitchen there was indeed a great pile of dirty dishes in the sink (although the Crown Worcester was not among them), but more sinister than this were many empty spaces on the shelves and hooks, spaces not entirely counted for by the washing-up yet to be done.

  ‘You’ve had my best electric kettle,’ said Dusty, breathing heavily. ‘No wonder you took such a long time to make the tea. You’ve got it in that ark of yours. What good is my best tea service and an electric kettle going to do when the deluge comes?’ She was red with fury.

  She rushed to the
garden door and tried to open it; he caught her arm, surprising her with his strength.

  ‘Whatever are you doing, Dusty?’ cried her sister from the door. She came into the room and put her shopping bag on the table.

  ‘Ask him what he’s doing,’ panted Dusty, ‘ taking all my things and hiding them.’

  ‘Go and get everything you’ve taken and bring it back,’ commanded his mother, giving her son a push towards the door. ‘There’s no need to get so upset, Dusty.’

  ‘Asking me my height,’ cried Dusty, leaning against the door and facing her sister. ‘Asking me my weight … What’s he doing, measuring me for my coffin?’

  ‘He doesn’t mean any harm,’ muttered her sister, closing the door behind her son with a bang.

  But he had heard her.

  ‘I do mean harm,’ he shouted through the door. ‘I do.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  CHARMIAN stayed up all night, moving restlessly about her house, smoking and drinking coffee. She made no attempt to sleep, and had not even changed out of her clothes. Her mind was trying to grapple with her problem and reduce it to proportions she could handle. There were some moments when, dazed, she could hardly even understand what had hit her, and at these moments she cried with anger. At other moments she grasped it fully and knew that unless the case was cleared up soon and she was manifestly innocent, her career was ruined. She did not believe she would face a charge of murder, but whether she would or not seemed trivial to her compared with the effect on her life. Whatever happens, I shall never be the same again, she thought, believing and half hoping it would be so. She was still young enough to think that any change in her character must be for the better, a development and not a deterioration. Strangely, at these wide-awake moments when everything seemed in ruins, she did not cry but stared bleakly at the future. She was discovering something about her own nature: she was discovering that she was not so strong and self-sufficient as she had thought: all her life she had been buoyed up by a sense of purpose and achievement, and if that went she was not sure whether there was anything to put in its place. Perhaps I was only strong because I was a success, she thought, and not a success because I was strong.