What Dread Hand?

by Christianna Brand

  And she wrote once more: how much later, how many hours or even days later, who could tell? They found the words, almost indecipherable, straggling across the blotted and bloodstained page, off on to the boards of the table itself. ‘Not true…’

  Not true that the bird of prey waits to feed until the victim is dead.

  14

  Hic Jacet…

  ‘GOOD HEAVENS,’ SAID MRS. Fletcher-Store, ‘what a revolting jacket! Where on earth did you get it?’

  ‘I bought it off a man in the pub,’ said Mr. Fletcher-Store.

  ‘A man—what man?’

  ‘I don’t know—just a man.’

  ‘You really should be more careful what you buy off strangers in pubs,’ said Mrs. Fletcher-Store. ‘It’s awful. Looks like a dead sheep, turned inside out.’

  ‘Good lord!—just what he said his wife said.’ He looked down at the jacket doubtfully, flattening his chin against his chest. It was a brightish tan, true, but heavily fleece-lined and he’d fancied it had a—well—a bit of a Raffish look… And, lost in reverie, he saw himself, flailing his arms to shrug on the jacket as he ran across the tarmac to his waiting kite. ‘I thought it looked rather good,’ he said.

  ‘You thought it looked like the jolly old R.A.F.,’ said Mrs. Fletcher-Store, pronouncing it ‘raff’. ‘Wizard prang, old boy, and a couple of crates in the drink in my time, what, what: and if you don’t believe me—as well you may not!—a handle-bar moustache to prove it.’ She looked at her husband with something very much like loathing. ‘How I’ve lived all these years with such a miserable phoney…’

  ‘I was in the Raff,’ protested Mr. Fletcher-Store.

  ‘For six months. On the ground. And never saw a kite fly, except on Hampstead Heath. The ugly truth is, Gerald,’ she said viciously, ‘that you’re a phoney, a rotten, bombasting phoney, trying to cover up from all the world, yourself included and especially, that you’re nothing but a dud and a failure—never did a decent job in your life, never kept a woman in your life—except me, because I’m sorry for you; never even made a friend, except a few miserable pick-ups in pubs, bought with drinks you couldn’t afford. And now selling you jackets you can’t afford either…’

  ‘All right, all right,’ said Fletcher-Store. ‘I know.’

  ‘You know? You don’t know and you don’t want to know.’

  ‘I don’t suppose any man wants to know that sort of thing about himself. Especially if it’s true,’ he said. ‘And I don’t think it really does any good, quite so constantly reminding him of it.’

  ‘Then don’t go off spending money at that rotten little pub in Hartling and buying a lot of rubbishy tripe we can’t afford. You seem to forget that what money comes into this house is made by me. You with your shoddy little half-baked short stories—’

  ‘All right, all right,’ he said again. ‘Skip it. I’ve got the message. No more purchases in pubs.’ And he added, half to himself but loud enough for her to hear it, for it always galled her that in fact he was the better educated of the two: ‘Hic jacet.’…

  ‘Hick jacket?’ she said. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I was making a pun, dear,’ he said sweetly. ‘In Latin. It means you’ve slain me in the battle of the jacket. Hic jacet—here lies…’

  But she got the last word as usual, after all. ‘Oh, well,’ she said, ‘you were always good at that.’ He heard her footsteps pounding up the stairs, moving about the bedroom as she changed for her evening swim. After a little while the front door banged.

  He waited five minutes to be sure she wouldn’t come back for anything, and then went out to the tool-shed where he kept hidden his bottle of whisky: she hardly ever let him go to the pub, so this was next best. Just the right tot, or one’s brain got fuddled and he had some hard thinking to do—filled up with a good deal of water to make it last longer. He carried it back to the sitting-room, pulled up a chair to the moonlit window, and sat down to go on thinking out his plan to murder her.

  On the whole, Gerald had decided, the odds were in his favour. For a start there need be no hurry: the sooner the better, certainly, but there might yet come to be almost a pleasure in listening to increasingly frequent tirades, when each word added fuel to a funeral pyre already crackling. And then there could be no obvious motive. No ‘other woman’—one reason for coming to this ghastly hole had been, according to Elsa, to get away from the other-woman menace; and certainly here, candidates were nil. And no money interest: they could just about eke out on her scribblings and his own: living cheap on the fruit and vegetables and eggs he was supposed to provide by his work on the small-holding. (Small-holding! A vile old pig and a lot of scrawny hens, and all that manuring and digging—he, who in his day…) And he fell into a reverie again of those old wild, wonderful times of the ditched crates and the pranged kites and the boon companions boasting together over the exploits of others—never of one’s own, by George!—over the tankards in the jolly old hostelries… And after all, given the chance, might not he too have been of that splendid company? A man was not born to failure: surely it must be fair to say that it was bad luck that had made him one?

  Well, in the matter of Elsa’s murder, he would not fail.

  The house was isolated: three miles from the hamlet of Hartling, six from anywhere else, fifteen from the Cathedral city inland. No neighbours, therefore, to be inquisitive; no friends even, as she had truly said—not here nor out of the past. No friends: only the little world of public house acquaintances, the Bills and the Barbaras, the Noras and the Toms, drifting in from the evening, drifting out into the night: nameless, homeless, without existence for one another beyond the lit bar and clinking glasses, the boasting and the well-worn jokes. And even those, left behind now, in the gay city lights. Well, all right, O.K., he thought: no friends—so no one to stand as witness to the real motive—that tongue of hers that could strip a man down, bare, to his shuddering soul: and was to be endured no more.

  The murder, he had decided, would have to be by drowning.

  She had been a well-known athlete in her day; leaped higher or run faster, he never could remember which, than anyone in the world or in England or only in Surrey; he never could remember that either. But first and foremost she had been a swimmer: she cherished old photographs of herself, half out of the water in the Back Stroke or the Butterfly or whatever it was, forging along, tiny and sinewy, the vanquished spluttering in her rear. Those days were gone and the muscle turning to thick white fat; but she struggled, all honour to her, to keep it down and she still loved to swim. That had been the main reason for settling on this house: that close by was the tiny, deserted bay of Kittle Cove; and there she swam, morning and evening, and could never get enough. All alone—for such pastimes were not for Gerald Fletcher-Store—she would run off, the old regulation black woollen bathing dress under a bright beach-robe; tucking up beneath the white bathing cap as she ran, her rough, curly brown hair. Twenty minutes there, along the wild, lonely cart track, twenty minutes back: half an hour or more swimming around. ‘Keeps you fit,’ she would say, slapping the back of a hard little hand against his flaccid paunch. ‘I’ve got enough to do to keep me fit, digging in that filthy garden,’ he would say, ill-temperedly.

  By drowning, then. An accident. But with such a good swimmer as she was, who would believe in an accident? His mind in the past had toyed, over a second whisky, with wild dreams of stopped-up snorkels and punctured water-wings, but she had no truck with such things: simply plunged in and swam to a rock far out, and dived off the rock a few times and swam round about it and swam back. No records being created, no foolish chances taken: no difficult currents to beware of. Just straight-forward swimming for the sheer love of it.

  If she were to drown then, she must do it while her murderer was well out of the way. To just go down there, push her head under the water and run screaming for help—that wouldn’t do at all.

  His wandering mind seemed to stand still all of a sudden: seemed to
come slap up against the idea and just remain there, contemplating it. It had been those words: ‘Push her head under the water.’

  What was drowning, after all, but water forced into the lungs? You could drown in three inches in a basin, you could drown in your bedroom at home, just as easily as you could in the sea.

  And then if you were found in the sea…!

  Force her head into a bowl of water: drown her. Carry her down to the sea and throw her in. (A detail here: could they tell if the water in the lungs was salt water or fresh? Fetch a bucket of sea-water then, and drown her in that. And tip that away somewhere safe, too: no salt-encrusted pipes or wilting garden-flowers to give the game away.)

  But what difference between ‘finding’ her dead in the sea, and having in fact drowned her there? They could still say you had pushed her head under the waves and then gone for help. An alibi—that was what one was going to need: an alibi. And his mind had got going again and worked cold and clear. Drown her here, put her body in the boot of the car. Have somebody in the house for an hour at least, while Elsa was supposed to be sporting it down in the bay. Get rid of the alibi, drive down to the cove—‘I began to get anxious when she didn’t return’—dump her in the sea: fish her out again and go for help. Time of death established by the post mortem—a couple of hours earlier: but a couple of hours ago, one would have been sitting chatting, safe at home.

  Only—chatting with whom? Who, in all this wasteland of dank woods and distant coast-line and beastly narrow lanes, would come to sit for an hour, chatting with him? And on the very night that the accident was set to occur. Not a soul had ever been to this house during the ten months of their resentful occupancy; every evening he sat, while Elsa went for her swim, and banged at his typewriter, listlessly trying to bash out a short story. (She would not let him write during the day: the hens and the pig and that horrible vegetable garden claimed him then. She said that the stories paid less than would cover the produce from their land; and in fact that was true. But when she was gone, he thought, off in reverie again, he would do not one more hand’s turn on that filthy soil. If he had all day to write, no sneering interruptions from her—then, damn it all, he could really get going, he could really make a big thing of it; he knew.)

  An alibi, then; an alibi! Someone who would keep company with him for an evening.

  He could go to the pub, of course. What about that? Leave her dead, drive over to Hartling, spend an hour there; drive home, ‘find she wasn’t back’, drive on down to the cove, programme as before. But then, who was to say that he had not done just this?—drowned her before he came to the pub, gone back and pretended to find her. No: somebody must actually see her start off to the cove, alive and well; who would then spend the next hour and a half with him. And he got up to wash out the whisky glass and put it away before she got back; and dropped the glass and, picking it up, pricked his thumb on a splinter: and thought, exultantly: ‘That’s it!’

  It made him sick to do it, but when the time was ripe he contrived to get the fingers of his left hand entangled in the cutters of the lawn mower; and, making rather more fuss than was necessary over the mangled mess—but that was in character—said to his wife: ‘What on earth shall I do? I’ve got this commissioned series hardly started and I couldn’t type a word with this.’ The series—six short stories of the war-time R.A.F.—had, needless to say, been commissioned by Mr. Fletcher-Store and by no one else.

  ‘Oh, well, Gerald, you really are too careless for words,’ said Elsa.

  ‘I didn’t do it on purpose, my dear, did I?’ he suggested, grinning up his sleeve.

  ‘Can’t you write it in long-hand, like I do?’

  ‘I can’t write in long-hand, you know I can’t.’ This was true. Every author has his own taboos and she was writer enough herself to know that unless he saw the words before him in print, no words would come. ‘If I could type,’ she said, ‘I suppose I’d have to do it for you; only I can’t.’ It was typical of her to resent the bare idea of doing for him, what she was not going to have to do anyway.

  ‘I suppose I shall just have to chuck it in,’ he said.

  ‘Chuck it in! The first and only chance of actually making a little decent money out of this rubbish of yours.’ She thought it over. ‘I suppose we couldn’t find a typist anywhere, in this God-forsaken hole?’

  She had said it. She had actually suggested it herself. He had reconnoitred already in the pub at Hartling; now he went off and returned triumphantly to say that a female called Mrs. Butcher, whose husband worked late shifts or over-time or something, had been a typist before her marriage; and would be very happy to drive over in her Mini-car for an hour or two each evening, and help him out. He would think over the stuff as he dug and delved, said Gerald—for the bad hand was not to stop him from the necessary work with the vegetables and hens—and then she could take it down in shorthand, type it out next day and bring it back. Mrs. Butcher, small, diffident, genteel, began to make her appearance at regular intervals. Elsa continued to go morning and evening for her bathe. Concealed in the tool shed stood a bucket of salt water, ready for The Day.

  There remained only to set up a scapegoat, just in case by any chance the fact that Elsa had not drowned naturally might come to light. He began to drop small hints into the receptive ear of Mrs. Butcher. Mrs. Butcher was ever so surprised that Mrs. Fletcher-Store should care to go swimming all alone even on these moonlit nights. ‘Yes… Well…’ said Gerald, not actually speaking the words: ‘if she is alone.’ And permitted himself a sigh and resolutely went forward with the work. And he would see Elsa off—taking his time about it, to accustom Mrs. Butcher to a ten-minute absence—and come back into the room wearing a troubled look, a look of wretchedness resigned. ‘Got to put a good face on things,’ he once volunteered to Mrs. Butcher; and seemed about to blurt out confidences but, thorough gentleman that he was, bit the words back. Mrs. Butcher exuded sympathetic understanding but remained mute. What she thought of Mr. Fletcher-Store’s Raff reminiscences also remained unspoken.

  The day came: an evening of moonlight, conveniently obscured by drifting patches of cloud. While Mrs. Butcher sorted out her work, he walked to the gate with Elsa and a short way down the path, as he had recently taken to doing ‘to be out of the woman’s way—she gets into such a flap’. Beyond the gate were some heavy rhododendron bushes and behind these he had left the bucket of salt water, and beside the bucket, the fleece-lined jacket. ‘Good heavens,’ said Elsa, in her irritable way, ‘what on earth’s that doing here?’

  ‘I must have dropped it,’ he said, not bothering what excuse he made; and stooped and picked it up. And in a moment it was round her body, back to front, and tightly belted, pinning her arms to her sides, its over-long sleeves muffling her hands and the possibility of scratching claws. And he had whipped out the bucket and pushed her head into it. She fought and struggled with all her wiry strength but he was half her weight again, and she strait-jacketed in wool and leather. Even before he could have hoped for it, it was all over. He pushed the body in beneath the bushes, tipped the water out of the bucket, hurried back to the shed and, with the jacket, left it there. And in no time at all, was back with Mrs. Butcher, the glass of whisky in his hand: it was a naughty little secret he had taught her to share with him, to account for passing minutes; this time he had had it all ready to hand. ‘Well, now,’ he said, ‘let’s get on.’

  But the hand that held the glass was shaking and, ‘You look rather pale, Mr. Fletcher-Store,’ said Mrs. Butcher, all little-woman concern.

  Even this he had been prepared for. ‘Damn hand’s pretty painful,’ he confessed. ‘Didn’t want to say anything.’ And indeed the struggle with Elsa had wrenched unpleasantly at the bandages, the whole thing was now violently throbbing. ‘Digging celery today; probably opened up the wounds a bit.’ He had even dug some celery, to make that ring true.

  ‘I don’t think you should be using it, honestly I don’t, for all this heavy outdoor work.�
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  ‘Someone has to do it. Not that I mean… Clever woman, my wife, you know,’ said Gerald, stoutly. ‘Got to stick to her writing—that’s where the money lies. Famous in her day, you know. Not much fun for her, stuck out here,’ he added, after what appeared to be a moment’s rueful reflection. ‘Not after all that. Damn good-looking she was, you know, and a bit of a girl for the—’ But he broke off and looked away and took a gulp of whisky. ‘All quite innocent, Mrs. Butcher, of course.’

  ‘Oh, of course,’ said Mrs. Butcher, playing up to dear Mr. Fletcher-Store’s conjugal loyalty.

  ‘Not many people around here, Mrs. Butcher? I mean,’ he said, putting on an air of surreptitiously feeling his way, ‘not many people of—well, of our sort of age, you know? No one she could pal up with?—she and I, of course I mean.’

  But no, Mrs. Butcher knew of nobody this side of Hartling and after that it was, well a very church-y crowd, all centring on the Cathedral, all as it were turning their backs on this part of the country and facing towards the city. ‘It’s mostly farmhands and so on, who go to the pub in Hartling; even the farmers go into town for their amusements, in these days of fast cars. Fred, my husband, he works for old Lord Hartling, you see, or we wouldn’t be living out this way, I can assure you. If, any time,’ said Mrs. Butcher, timidly, ‘you and Mrs. Fletcher-Store would care to drop in on us for an evening… But I’m afraid I wouldn’t be much company for someone like her…’

  Mr. Fletcher-Store made civil noises but she could see how abstractedly he gazed out of the window towards the bay where his lady supposedly disported herself in and out of the water with her problematical love. ‘Well, I suppose we must get on, or we shall never get done.’