Gently Where She Lay

by Alan Hunter

  I let him go: I could do nothing else. There was no cover for some hundreds of yards. The nearest was the gorse scrub behind the golf-club pavilion, and Selly was between me and it. So I relaxed and watched him plod on his way while my lady and gentleman prepared to depart, each one favouring me with a dubious look which took in my wide-open shirt-front. They went: I resumed my jacket, but didn’t bother with the tie. By now the distance was too great for Selly to have recognised me if he’d looked behind him – which he didn’t. He’d changed his direction a little, to the right, and had crossed the road to the upper harbour; but this might have been only in order to pass behind the pavilion instead of in front of it. Patiently, I stayed where I was until his figure began to mingle with the gorses; then I rose and set off briskly on the shorter line to the pavilion.

  It was warm on the Common, though there was a faint sea-breeze from the hazy bay to the south-east. Now I was treading on short, gnawed turf and now wading through stretches of dusty tall grasses. I reached the road and the pavilion together; here I had to make a detour. On the other side, beyond the pavilion and gorses, the more remote and rough part of the Common stretched before me. It was more undulating, more scrubby, and included areas of bracken, ling and bramble; there were burns of gravel, and in the shimmering distance a faint reef of trees and a single dark smudge. The smudge was the holm oaks. Once more, it was impressed on me how fortunate we had been in the quick discovery of the body. In that far corner it might easily have stayed concealed until we searched the Common, perhaps weeks later. Because Vivienne might not have been quickly missed, or her absence have assumed immediate significance; the date, the time, the circumstances surrounding them, might all have been a closed book to us. I looked for Selly. There was cover enough now in the scrub and undulations and old choked pits, but unless he were deliberately concealing himself I must catch sight of him as he followed the line towards the holm oaks. I waited: no Selly, nothing that moved on the swart heath. Was it possible I had given myself away – perhaps hadn’t been so clever, sitting on the bench?

  When at last I did see him I silently cursed myself. He was far across to the right; it was my tidy mind which had been consigning him to the holm oaks. He had made no detour. His objective was clearly in the direction of the northern boundary. Now he was far away, perhaps half a mile off against the few hundred yards I had been anticipating. No need for cover! I went straight after him, resisting a second attempt to cut him off. Unfortunately, at this distance, I was frequently losing sight of him among the thickets of gorse and the declivities. The tiny figure would vanish with mysterious suddenness, leaving the heathscape empty for several minutes, then reappear on an unexpected bearing to involve me in an arbitrary change of direction. Also – in spite of his overdressed plumpness – he was maintaining an energetic pace, so probably I was not gaining on him, and might even be losing ground. I laboured sweatingly across gravel and ling, down and up hollows, past clinging gorse; and still I had no idea where my far-off quarry was heading.

  I arrived where he had been when I first picked him up again, and so in what must have seemed to him his most direct line. I checked back to the pavilion, then ahead into the heath: sure enough, I could see him directly in front of me. I looked beyond: a stand of tall trees: they closed the Common at its north-west boundary; for a moment I was baffled by the unfamiliar view-point, but then my mental map focused. Huntingfield School!

  I brushed off some sweat and hastened forward again. This really was something I should have foreseen! Selly had pretended he hadn’t known the girls, but he was a liar in every inch of him. If his wife had known them, wouldn’t he have done? The girls, I remembered now, had half-conceded an acquaintance with him. And it might have been more than that. He could have been involved with one or other of them. For him, they might represent a source of information which would be obstinately closed to myself. He wanted to question them, but to do it secretly. He must know of some way to make clandestine contact. This long hot tramp to the rear approach of Huntingfield had to include a fair prospect of a meeting at the end of it.

  I steered my course now less by Selly and more by the beckoning shade of the trees. It was impossible for me to reach them before he did but I wanted to be there at the first moment afterwards. Then, as I drew closer, I saw I was going to lose him; the foot-slope of the hanger was a jungle of rhododendrons; they formed a wide wild belt, advancing into the heathland, and stretching above to the pink shafts of a row of pines. I watched impotently. Selly approached them. His speck-like figure seemed briefly to waver. Then it vanished into the tall, dark bushes like an insect fading into long grass. Gone: I was reduced to dead reckoning, and any luck that might attend a deserving detective.

  I marked the spot as well as I could and reached it five or six minutes after Selly. In the leafy mould beneath the rhododendrons I persuaded myself I could discern his footprint. But there was no path, and after a few yards I gave up my dubious tracking; just forged ahead through the hot dusty gloom and the whippy low twigs that seemed to favour face-level. I struggled up the foot-slope and emerged below the pines. Sky and bright sun showed dazzlingly beyond them. I could hear faint and irregular plunking sounds and a complement of distant girlish cries. I continued cautiously through the pines, through a belt of small birches, to a wall of yellow brick; and pulling up on this, I caught a glimpse of a playing-field with a number of soft tennis-courts at the further end. A tennis period! I hung on long enough to check that the players were upper-form girls. They were, and Selly had known they would be: his information about Huntingfield was significantly detailed.

  But plainly I had not been following him by climbing the slope at the pines; I had been too eager. Selly had gone further, to make his approach near where the girls were playing. I hauled up again to study the layout. Along the left of the playing-field ran a wire-mesh fence. Outside this, more rhododendrons, a few of them still in bloom. Then, by the tennis-courts, and inside the fence, was a patch of variegated azaleas, beside which were three or four garden-seats on which girls sat waiting their turn to play. They were gossiping and laughing among themselves, and I could see no mistress in the vicinity; but what I could see was a flaming red head moving vivaciously and tossing backwards in mirth. Diane Culpho: if she were there, would the others be far away?

  I dropped down and began to skirt the wall. It ended in a brick pillar with a ball on the top. Here the rhododendrons began again, but they had been planted hollow, with a path running between them. I moved along it as quietly as I could. The sound of the tennis-playing drew closer. Ahead, the neat lines of the rhododendrons had become confused and the path made a detour to the left. I negotiated the detour stealthily. Beyond was a small glade, with the rhododendrons thinning towards the wire fence; through a gap I could see the bright yellow, orange and blue of azalea blossom in open sunlight. The fence was unobstructed for a few yards at this spot, though shielded on the other side by the azaleas; and it was here Selly was standing, his fingers hooked in the mesh, with Pamela Rede facing him through the wire.

  I dropped back to make a quick appraisal, but there was no way to get within earshot. They were fifty yards off. The little glade offered no cover, and I couldn’t approach silently along the row of rhododendrons. I found a peep-hole and settled to watch. Pamela was facing almost directly towards me. A frail figure in a white tennis dress, she gave an impression of fearfulness, of vulnerability. She was shaking her head vigorously, her lips fluttering, and I could hear Selly’s angry, aggressive tones; there was something a little bestial, a little ape-like about the way he clung to the wire. Once or twice she glanced over her shoulder, but Selly’s growling voice snapped her gaze back to him; he exuded a magnetism which she couldn’t escape: her slim form trembled but remained quiescent. He was growing angrier and dragging on the meshes. Pamela’s head shook stupidly to and fro. Her face was pale, her eyes large, and I caught the tremulous denial of her tone. Then a woman’s voice sounded authoritativel
y at a distance. The spell broke. Pamela ran. Selly was left wrathfully shaking the wire and calling after her in a threatening growl.

  I came out of my cover and entered the glade. Selly heard me and turned, his face ugly. I walked up to him. I took him by the collar and sent him staggering some yards across the open space. He recovered and stood crouching, hands lifted, breath jerky and noisy, and I waited, praying, willing his attack, challenging the hate in his eyes. But he must have sensed it. Reluctantly, he controlled himself, dropping his hands and breathing lighter. I moved closer; I laid my hand on his shoulder and gave him a shove in the direction of the Common.

  ‘You bastard!’

  ‘Hold your tongue.’

  I was keeping him moving at a sharp pace. We’d come down the slope through the rhododendrons and now I was prodding him across a stretch of heather-bush.

  ‘Where are you taking me?’

  ‘Don’t you know?’

  ‘You know I effing-well don’t know!’

  ‘So hold your tongue and keep moving.’

  ‘I’ve a right to know—!’

  I gave him a shove.

  One incidental fact I had established which bore no reference to Selly: from the school there was no practical way of taking a motor-vehicle on the Common. The steep slope itself would have been a sufficient obstacle, but the tangle of rhododendrons made any such undertaking impossible; while even if a car had reached the Common the terrain in this corner would have defeated it. Miss Swefling was declining in the bill of suspects (though of course, the circumstances did not eliminate her).

  ‘Look, I want to get back!’

  ‘What’s your hurry?’

  ‘Because I’m cheesed-off with this bleeding common!’

  ‘Something about it you don’t like?’

  He glared sweatily. ‘Get stuffed.’

  ‘I think you know this place,’ I said. ‘I think you’ve been here a few times before. You know enough to go straight where you want to go – which isn’t where we’re heading now.’

  He spat. ‘Are you going to pinch me for that?’

  ‘It’s a point I’m adding to a number of others.’

  ‘Oh clever. And the answer is a lemon.’

  ‘The answer begins at fourteen years.’

  He spat again and I poked his shoulder. He was getting fatigued, which didn’t grieve me. Over-many expense-account lunches and dinners were weighing down his hand-stitched, camel-skin shoes. We crossed two of the flat depressions and pushed through a belt of shoulder-high gorse; then, after another short struggle with heather-bush, we reached an area of scrubby grass and embedded gravel. The little clump of holm oaks was now close ahead of us. It consisted only of ten or a dozen trees. But they possessed in full that curious, self-intent animism which gives an uncanny aspect to a holm-oak. Haunted trees: they seem to watch you from another side of time. I marched Selly up to them. They grew in a rough square, as though planted there for some inscrutable purpose; at the east end was a gap, and we passed through it into the grove. Selly stopped just inside. It was dim and silent, with the dark-leaved boughs meeting overhead. He stared about, his eyes puckering. There were few signs to read in the dusty mould.

  ‘Do you know where we are?’

  ‘I can guess.’

  ‘Let me see you walk to the other end.’

  He just missed the spot where the body had lain, though whether by accident or design I couldn’t decide. He mopped away sweat, scowling.

  ‘Any use telling you I’ve never been here before?’

  ‘No. You’re too much of a liar.’

  ‘It’s bloody true, though. I haven’t.’

  ‘What were you doing up at the school?’

  He found a sturdy low bough and sank on it wearily. ‘So I know a bit more about the girls than I let on. You can’t blame me for wanting to keep quiet about that.’

  ‘How much?’

  He leered moistly. ‘I don’t tell tales on the ladies. It was Viv’s idea, to keep me at home. If you can’t beat them, join them.’

  ‘And you took advantage of it.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So you’re a bloody saint, aren’t you? And don’t think they needed any pushing. That school up there isn’t a nunnery, mate.’ He dabbed at the sweat. ‘But you’re right so far. Kids like that aren’t much fun. When I found them cutting it off with Viv it was all I needed: I blew.’

  ‘And just now?’

  ‘What about just now? I want some information, don’t I? With a b. like you breathing down my neck and shoving me around for damn-all.’

  I stared down at him: dripping, ugly, his eyes brazen with self-righteousness; then I broke a twig from one of the trees and began tracing an outline in the dry mould. Selly watched. The position may have been out, but I have an unfortunate familiarity with the shapes of bodies. When I finished it I could swear Selly was half-seeing the dead woman lying there in this chapel of trees. I tossed the twig away violently, making him start.

  ‘What do you know about Major Rede?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You went to his house.’

  ‘I was trying to figure—’

  ‘How well do you know him?’

  ‘I tell you I don’t!’

  ‘So what’s your interest?’

  ‘I haven’t got any!’

  ‘No interest. Yet you go to his house. Then you question his niece. You’re a liar.’

  ‘It’s the truth I tell you! All I know is that you were rollicking him.’

  His eyes were rounded (was there guilt in them?) and his mouth hung half-open. It was close in there among the trees: the mould smelled like stale urine.

  ‘Very well. You don’t know the Major. But you knew of his acquaintance with—’ I stabbed a finger at the outline.

  ‘But I bloody didn’t!’

  ‘You’re lying.’

  ‘I’m not! It’s what I came here trying to find out.’

  ‘And you did find out.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘You bullied it out of Miss Rede.’

  ‘Ask her – bloody ask her! She swore blind there was nothing in it.’

  ‘But you know there is.’

  ‘I’m telling you I don’t! It was you who gave me the idea.’

  ‘And you liked it, didn’t you? The Major has money.’

  He scuffed at the sweat. ‘Just get stuffed.’

  I broke off another piece of twig and added some detail to my outline: hands, placed together on the breast, the way I had seen them in the photographs. The killer had been a respectful killer: he’d left the body decently composed. Even if he’d been a loving husband he could scarcely have killed and arranged the corpse with more tenderness. Selly’s eyes followed the twig glassily. I could see him trying to moisten gummy lips.

  ‘Have you sent a bloke to Eastwich?’

  ‘Yes.

  Again the tongue rasping his lips.

  ‘Suppose no one remembers me?’

  I shrugged, sketched a line to represent the chin.

  ‘Look . . . give me a chance!’

  ‘You want to confess?’

  ‘No! But I’m not the bugger you’re trying to make me.’

  ‘So what sort are you?’

  ‘I’m bloody human. Not a saint, but a human being. I never hated Viv, never wanted to injure her. I couldn’t help it if we didn’t click.’

  ‘You’re a liar.’

  ‘All right then!’

  ‘A bully. A whoremonger. You think it’s smart to corrupt schoolgirls.’

  ‘All right, all right!’

  ‘Why give you chances? How many did you give the woman who was here?’

  He stared at the diagram, his breath coming roughly. Now I had scored-in the division of the legs. A crude scrawl, as though someone had scratched a weak copy of a sepulchral brass: but the proportions were good. It was a woman who lay there in the dust.

  ‘You didn’t love her.’ />
  He swayed his head.

  ‘You felt your marriage had been a cheat. You resented her. She’d become an obstacle. She didn’t merit any compassion.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that!’

  ‘Wasn’t it? With you neglecting her all the time? Would she have taken up with those girls in the first place if your behaviour had been less callous? And when she did, it was your excuse. You didn’t try to understand her. She had taken a false step – fine! Now you could pack your bag and go.’

  ‘But I never hated her!’

  ‘How far off was it?’

  He made a weaving motion with his head. ‘You won’t believe me, so what’s the use? But I was fond of her in a way.’

  ‘Not in any way that shows.’

  ‘Because you don’t want to bloody know! But we could be friends, a sort of friends. It wasn’t all rows and putting the boot in. Just sometimes it was going for us. We could be pals, do things together. So it didn’t last, didn’t make a marriage, but it didn’t make us flaming enemies either.’ He jerked the sweat away from his forehead. ‘And what about me, my point of view? If I drove Viv into fooling with girls, didn’t she drive me into chasing other women? We bloody tried, but it wasn’t there. She knew, I knew, it was no damn good. I’m a whoremonger, right, but what made me one? Anyway, Viv could understand that!’

  ‘Your wife connived at it?’

  ‘She bloody did. Or else why did we stick together for two years? That was her way of making it up to me, letting me have a free hand. But it wasn’t for ever, and she knew it. We were planning a split before the girls. She was getting the cottage and a good allowance – anything bloody callous about that? For all I know she set it up, letting me walk in on a session. I was dragging my feet, compris? She wanted to get shot of yours truly. So I went, and I didn’t come back, but that didn’t mean I didn’t understand her, and I’m sorry now, bloody sorry, that Viv had to finish up like this.’ He lunged to his feet. ‘And you know something? I’m not just out to save my own skin. I want to find out who did it to Viv, I want to see that bastard behind bars. If it’s bloody Major Rede I want to know that. I want to beat the sod into a pulp. Whoever it is I’m going after him. You’d better lock him up before I know.’