Murderes' Houses
Page 17
‘All over my body as well,’ he said. ‘ It’s an inherited thing, just a matter of genetics.’ The bitterness and self-pity in his voice were strong. ‘That’s what I’m like. Do you blame me for hating it? It makes me a joke.’
So he is a comic character after all, she thought. Fred was right. Because of this hereditary infliction, he has never trusted his relationship with women, he has twisted himself into a weapon. And even in her present predicament the irony of it was apparent; when all was said and done his disfigurement was relatively trivial. He was a fine-looking man. But this was obscured for the onlooker by something in his bearing and manner. Something more aggressive than shyness and more self-conscious than humility, something awkward and uncouth. Her seizing on the word ‘ gypsy’ had not been so far wrong. Suddenly a certain element of her former relationship with him became clear. It explained a problem about the case of Marley-Morgan which had always puzzled Charmian. Now she was puzzled no longer. ‘I see now why it was so easy for him to keep his relationships quiet,’ she thought. The women cooperated with him. They were always ashamed of him. Perhaps he isn’t so wrong to hate us all.
‘I’d like to hurt you with my hands as they have hurt me,’ he said, putting a long-felt wish into speech.
‘I’ll scream,’ said Charmian, feminine despair overcoming all self-control.
‘Yes, do,’ he said agreeably. ‘Everyone will hear you, but they won’t do anything about it. The English are ever so inhibited. You ought to know that, my dear. And I don’t mind you screaming. I shall enjoy it.’
‘I’ll struggle.’
He smiled, ‘Yes, yes, do. How little they taught you after all in that police training of yours.’ He flexed his hands gently. Charmian stared at them. ‘Fold your hands in your lap.’ Charmian did so. She didn’t wish to, indeed she wished not to
obey, but her hands moved quietly with a will of their own.
He smiled at her, and to her horror she felt her lips move in a
smile back. Then Coniston laughed.
‘So, before anything else you must write a little letter. It will be
in your own handwriting, written with your own pen, in your own
house. In it you will confess that you are guilty of whatever it
pleases the police to believe you guilty of and you are writing this
to say so before you kill yourself.’
All this time he had been twisting a small flat shiny object round
and round on the table in front of her. Her eyes followed it. In a
remote way she recognised it as her own pocket-knife.
‘Yes, it’s yours. It is easier if I have something belonging to you.
Don’t ask me why.’
This is ridiculous, thought part of Charmian’s mind, but part
listened and heeded him.
‘Say: you are my Master.’ He enunciated the words carefully.
Charmian did not speak. She could feel her lips tremble but she
did not utter the words he asked; her mind desperately held on. ‘Say: you are my Master,’ he repeated, still patiently and gently. The words rose to Charmian’s lips like a wave of sickness,
involuntary and uncontrolled.
He leaned forward eagerly.
Then the telephone rang.
Neither of them moved. The telephone rang again, rang for some
moments, then was silent. But the ringing of the bell had broken
a little of his hold over her. Charmian was in contact with the
world again.
Presently he started once more, rolling the bright knife quietly
in front of her: ‘Say: you are my Master.’
She did not speak.
‘Say: you are my Master.’ There was sweat on his brow now.
‘Say it! Say: you are my Master … Say it, damn you! Say it!’
Charmian got up, pushed her chair back and ran to the door.
She opened it and leaned there taking in great gulps of clean damp
air. The rain had stopped.
She was free. Behind her she could still hear Coniston muttering, but he did not try to come after her. Suddenly she leaned over in the bushes and was violently sick. When the bout was over she felt too weak to do more than drag herself to the gate and stand there, deaf and almost blind to the world around her, aware only of the great crisis of the emotions still unresolved within her.
She was still standing there, shivering and trembling, when Rupert Ascoll’s emissary, sent to fetch her, drove up in a car.
She never saw Coniston again. He died in the prison hospital, from natural causes, strangely enough, from an embolism, before he could be sent to trial for the murders of Florence Chandler and Velia Ryman. His other victims had never been mentioned in the indictment and they remained in the obscurity to which they had appeared to cling.
Charmian seemed to have escaped. But he had infected her. The poison was in her blood now, and a legacy of suspicion and distrust would stay with her. She had not gone entirely free.
Chapter Sixteen
CHARMIAN was swept back, almost at once, into the routine of work. Rupert Ascoll returned to London to deal with a double murder. Before he left he and Charmian had a brief interview. Charmian was withdrawn and polite; she did not respond to his overtures of friendship. She did however take time to write a short letter to Sergeant William Carter refusing decisively his proposal of marriage … ‘At least I know I don’t want that,’ she thought.
She was obliged to leave Deerham Hills and go to Birmingham where the Flete girl had been discovered hiding in lodgings, having taken a job in a local Woolworth’s. Charmian felt sure that the girl’s mother, whom she had never trusted, had somehow connived and assisted at her running away. She brought the girl back with her. The solitary job suited her; she didn’t want to see people.
On that evening on her way to clear up her desk she passed Pratt’s office and saw him standing there by the telephone. She was surprised to see him, and had supposed him to be still absent. Their eyes met and she waited for him to say something. She expected some gesture, perhaps even an apology. Then she saw that he was not really noticing her at all.
‘It’s not malignant.’ Tears were pouring down his face. ‘Would you believe it. It’s not malignant.’
‘I’m so glad,’ said Charmian, not really comprehending.
‘It’s my wife. I had to take her to London for an operation in a hospital there. I stayed with her for a bit. That’s why I’ve been away.’ He seemed surprised, as if the whole world must have known. ‘And they just this minute phoned through with the news. She’s going to be all right.’
‘I thought it was you … And your cough?’
‘My cough?’ Pratt looked bewildered, then he laughed. ‘That’s the heat inside this building, I told you so.’
You and your near-tragedy, thought Charmian, and I in my small corner with mine.
Dusty Butcher’s sister looked down at her, lying trussed up like a chicken in the bottom of the homemade boat, and turned to her son: ‘You’re a very naughty boy doing that to Aunty. Why you might have killed her!’
‘Let me out,’ muttered Dusty through the scarf, her own scarf, which covered her mouth.
Frightened, Patricia knelt down and cut the cords and helped her sister up.
‘I don’t know what you thought you were playing at,’ she said to her son. Dusty looked terrible and might really be ill this time.
‘I wasn’t playing,’ he cried. ‘She was ballast.’
But the rain had stopped and his conviction in his own lightness was a good deal less.
‘Hours, days, I’ve been there,’ muttered Dusty.
‘No, not days,’ corrected her sister. ‘And I’ve been looking for you, Dusty.’
‘Anyway, you’ll have to go,’ declared Dusty, as she limped into their house. ‘He’s dangerous. He got me in there to look at something, and then he had me done up in ropes. I tell you, he meant to kill me.’
‘You’re welcome,’ said Dusty, as she stumped into the house. ‘All of you.’ She looked around angrily for her eldest nephew.
But he was already out of the house and on his way to the library to consult a book about mines.
Perhaps he had read the portents wrongly.
Perhaps it wasn’t a boat that was needed. Perhaps he should dig a tunnel.
‘I will dig deep, deep, and in the innermost cavern I will imprison my dearest enemy,’ he said.
He never doubted he would have a dearest enemy. He thought perhaps it was his mother.
But he was cleverer than Coniston-Marley-Morgan, and in him the emotion would turn eventually to ambition and creation.
The man in the brown tweed overcoat who had acted as a go-between for Patricia and her husband never visited Deerham Hills again. He had fulfilled his task of brother, and although he thought they were welcome to each other, it was not for him to pass judgment. He must get back to his own job. He was a debt-collector, not a pleasant occupation but one that suited him. He disappeared into his own life.
Charmian sat late in her office that night. She was glad to be back. But she couldn’t feel normal. Her feeling about her work as a policewoman had changed. It had been to her, if not quite a game, at least something with rules she had made herself. But she saw now that it was really a matter of life and death for police and criminal. The relationship between them was essentially a tragic one. Her own relationship with Coniston had somehow epitomised this truth.
‘I’d do better to resign,’ she decided.
She felt sick and bruised, like a gladiator who has only just escaped. She could hear the telephone ringing in the next room, people talking urgently in the corridor, and footsteps running up the stairs. There was work for her to do. But I can’t go into the arena just yet, she thought.
Grizel came running into the room.
‘The Flete child’s willing to speak,’ she panted. ‘She’s going to tell us who is responsible. And also, it explains why Rachel Lawson has been going on so oddly. She knew all the time and wouldn’t speak because she thought so much of the boy.’
Charmian stared at her.
‘It’s important.’
‘Yes. It’s important.’ Slowly Charmian got to her feet, then she started to move more quickly.
Grizel put her arm round her waist as they went to the door.
‘And do you know what? I’ve found out what Tony Foss does on his bus trips. You’d never believe it but …’
Talking together, they moved out of the door to deal with the Flete case.
Copyright
First published 1964 by Michael Joseph
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