Come Home and Be Killed

by Jennie Melville

An excited woman stood apart from them talking to a uniformed constable. ‘ I knew there was something wrong as soon as I saw the car. Well, it didn’t look right, did it? Parked there.’ She added in a solemn tone. ‘And then I saw them inside.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Are they gone?’ The constable did not answer.

  Pratt came across to them. ‘You can go home now, madam,’ he said. ‘ I’ve got your name and address if I want you.’ He walked back gloomily to Sergeant Daniels. ‘We shall have trouble with that woman,’ he said. ‘I can see it in her eyes.’

  ‘You’re always seeing trouble.’

  ‘And I always get it, too.’

  An ambulance backed down towards the road and disappeared.

  Pratt, who had been watching it, shook his head slightly as if that stage was over. He started to move.

  ‘Come on, there’s plenty to be done. I’m going back into town. Daniels, you can do the coat and next of kin.’

  A coat had been found in the car.

  Now Pratt took it carefully in his hands. His thick fingers moving it delicately. ‘Blood?’ he said. No one answered. He had not meant them to. Woe betide the man who spoke out of turn with Pratt. ‘Whose blood? That’s your province Bob.’ Then he studied the fabric of the coat, a thick deep blue affair, vaguely military in cut. It was a good big size and not new. Not old, it had seen some little wear. He looked up at Charmian. ‘ This’ll be for you, Daniels,’ he said. ‘Shop, list of articles, date of sale. Make it definite.’ … And make it soon, his voice implied. There’s not got to be a chance of anyone saying ‘Oh not mine, not me, I don’t have any connection.’ And we’ve got to put it together quickly or all we’ll have will be a raincoat and a dead woman.’ … And it could be more than that, he added to himself.

  Charmian cleared her throat. ‘I’ll get on to it now?’

  ‘Twelve o’clock at night?’ Pratt studied her.

  ‘I know the owner of the big store in Deerham Hills. He’ll start me off.’

  A flicker of a smile crossed Pratt’s face but he only nodded. ‘Keep in touch,’ he said. ‘ We may need you any minute.’ He called after her, ‘And don’t forget the other part of the job.’

  He walked towards his car.

  The night sky shone down on Deerham Hills and one by one the little signs and indications of something very wrong were going out. There would be nothing more than one paragraph in the morning papers. ‘A grey car found’ it would say … But by the afternoon the papers would be loaded. Deerham Hills would have headline news.

  Deerham Hills was proud of itself and was not going to enjoy the notoriety soon to burst upon it. This crime took the lid off the life of Deerham Hills. People in Deerham Hills were good people, kind, quiet, taxpaying, church-going people who did not commit crimes of violence or sin in any way. And here was a crime in one of these good quiet families, and springing out of a mixture of human motives that Deerham Hills was not going to like. Because it was one of its virtues gone wrong that bred the motive. A house of your own, your independence, stand on your own feet and make good; this was what brought about murder.

  Another alarming thing was the stupidity of this murderer, the clever-clever stupidity that really did think it could get away with it.

  Greed and stupidity and arrogance and bitter family feeling tucked away under a mask of good business and enterprise. For a long time after this Deerham Hills wasn’t going to know whom to trust.

  Most alarming of all there was a streak of irrationality about this crime which really frightened Deerham Hills, when all was said and done, it was a mad project. ‘It wasn’t,’ they said looking nervously at each other, ‘the way you really behaved.’ The hands and mind which had so behaved had been among them, intimate, helping with the church bazaar, running the finance committee of the local play-group, a good business manager, a good friend. Apparently some contented, happy person. There was a vague unhappy feeling in Deerham Hills that you couldn’t touch pitch without being defiled. The play-club languished, the church became less of a social occasion.

  Over in the wrong part of Deerham Hills, Alfy Nicklin slept restlessly in his bed. He still had his worry on his mind, but he still thought that it was his worry, his private little problem, unaware that the coming weeks were to spotlight it and bring it right out to the public gaze.

  The public gaze, when you came down to it, turned out to be the gaze of housewives over picture papers, teenagers taking in television news, long distance travellers listening to the news on their car radios, schoolmasters and lawyers, doctors and clergymen. It was the gaze of the people of Deerham Hills, magnified a thousandfold and focused on itself. That wasn’t what they didn’t like.

  Charmian drove her little car, this year’s green baby Austin, rapidly and well: she was immensely proud of her ownership: it represented a stage in her life: a stage as planned, that she had made two years ahead of schedule. Born in Dundee twenty-seven years ago, Charmian had fought every step of the way out and up. Perhaps it hadn’t been such a fight, there had been no actual discouragement, and her family, for what they counted, were behind her, but there had been the grind of poverty, of nothing coming easily or comfortably, always a fight. She had taken a degree in Social Science at Glasgow University and this too represented part of her drive, which came as much from character as circumstances, to do things the difficult way when she could so easily have taken a good degree at home.

  She had gone into the police force as a woman recruit, deliberately picking the very Force in Southern England. It could have been the Civil Service, or teaching, or business, but she reckoned the Police Force offered her what she wanted, a career, stability, a ladder to climb. She was climbing. In six years she had come up the ladder fast and had recently been promoted to the Detective Force as one of the few women officers. She had the rank of Detective Constable. The car represented a step. A house of her own would be another. She had yellow hair and big brown eyes and was certainly attractive and sometimes attracted but she let it rest at that.

  It was not perhaps surprising, given her background and character, that she had chosen a career which identified her with authority, but she had charity and love.

  In spite of six years, three in the county and three here, it was too prosperous and new and glossy for her to feel at home. She couldn’t quite get the Dundee stones and jute factories out of her mind. She still unconsciously held everything else up against it and criticised. But she had made many friends.

  Of all these friends the people she knew best were Sarah and Harry Burton … of Burtons. Burtons and Sons was that miracle of stores, a shop that was genuinely economical and gay without being in the least cheap or flashy: it sold furniture and clothes of good value and excellent taste, which were also smart and lively. Harry always said it reflected the good taste of his wife Sarah but Charmian thought that his had been the major share. Sarah, red-haired and ebullient, had been the first to persuade Charmian it was not necessary to go around when off duty dressed in an old tweed skirt and a home-knitted jersey: she had not yet made much headway on Charmian’s make-up but she planned to operate on that soon. She was Charmian’s dearest friend. Charmian knew she was quite safe to find them up now at this late hour and that Harry, who did all his own buying and had a photographic memory, would remember if he had ever bought in a line of raincoats like the one now carefully packed in a cardboard box at the back of her car.

  The lights were all on at their home. The architect who had built the new store had also built their house. Deerham Hills thought it eccentric but Charmian secretly loved it. She thought it was like a ship, white and clean and proud.

  Sarah opened the door to her. ‘Hello, we were just talking of you.’ She showed no surprise at seeing Charmian.

  ‘Were you?’

  Harry appeared behind his wife. ‘Sarah was talking. I was listening.’

  Charmian laughed as she put her coat down.

  ‘Have some coffee. I’ve got some brewing. We were working.’ Sara
h disappeared. She did all her own work besides helping Harry down at the shop. But then their house was a wonder of efficiency and automation.

  ‘I’ve come on business. I want you to help me, Harry.’

  ‘I’ll do that if I can.’ He looked at her enquiringly. ‘What is it?’

  Charmian laid the cardboard box down on the table. She took out the blue raincoat. It was crumpled, as it had been when it came into her hands, and a small square of material had been cut from the stained area. She spread it on the table.

  Harry met her eyes and he shook his head slightly. ‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to tell me anything. I sat on a jury once. I’ve got a few ideas of my own. But what do you want from me?’

  ‘Any idea if it was bought locally and also how recently? It seems to be fairly new as you see, but it may just not have been much worn.’

  Harry had been studying it. ‘I can answer the second straight away. It’s a new line. You couldn’t buy anything like this six months ago. Not in this country anyway. Special silicon prep. Got that gleam on it.’

  ‘And the first part?’

  He shrugged. ‘ That’s harder.’

  Sarah appeared with a big brown pot of coffee and a plate of orange buns. ‘Have one of my buns.’

  Charmian groaned. ‘Must I?’ … for Sarah, who could do everything else, could not in the Scots phrase ‘bake.’ ‘One day I’m going to come round and teach you how to make gingerbread and soda cake and girdle scones.’

  ‘You do that.’ Unperturbed, Sarah was pouring out coffee.

  ‘Half a dozen stores in the vicinity stocked that line from November onwards. Including us.’ Harry was going on with his own line of thought.

  ‘And in Deerham Hills itself?’

  ‘Only us,’ admitted Harry. ‘No one else carried that line. We had it exclusively.’

  ‘Will you examine this then and tell us if it passed through your stores?’

  Sarah was pouring coffee. ‘Don’t mind me,’ she said placidly. ‘I like people to talk as if I’m not here.’

  Harry bent over the coat, he studied it carefully looking at the sleeves, the pockets, the hem and inside the lining. Inside the lining was a small linen tag with a printed number.

  ‘It has our mark on it,’ he admitted. ‘Yes, it passed through our stock rooms.’

  ‘If you went over your records, do you think you could trace who bought it?’

  He shook his head. ‘Doubt it. Might pinpoint the date of sale.’

  ‘I’ll get you to do that, Harry.’

  He was looking grave. ‘I reckon this has got so that after all you’d better tell me more about it.’

  Charmian thought for a moment. Pratt had not told her to say nothing, but he had assumed she would keep a still tongue. On the other hand, by tomorrow evening at the latest, and probably sooner, the whole of Deerham Hills was going to know.

  She reckoned up and decided on a half-truth.

  ‘Two women have been reported missing.’

  What else could you say? It didn’t add up. Could you say: For the last six months we have been investigating the rumour, the allegations that these women murdered the man who was husband of one and stepfather of the other.

  ‘And are they missing?’ Harry was speaking.

  ‘They’re away from their home all right,’ said Charmian grimly. ‘But in what sense they are missing I’m not sure. I’m rather inclined to think that everyone concerned …’ In her own mind she corrected herself, no not everyone … ‘knows where they are all the time.’

  Harry was too acute: he looked at her doubtfully, then drew back his unspoken question.

  He picked up the coat again, ‘I can tell you one more thing,’ he said carefully. ‘ You get to have a second sense about clothes if you work with them as much as I do. This coat has never been worn. I can always tell. I don’t mean I can tell if it’s been tried on, or anything like that, but I can tell if a human body has lived and moved around in a garment. It does something to it. And this coat has never been worn. But it has been kept folded up in a box or case.’ He traced the imperceptible almost invisible lines. ‘Someone kept it packed up in a car or some such ready for use maybe.’

  Charmian said, ‘So it belonged to a woman who travelled around a good deal?’

  Sarah looked up from her coffee tray sharply. ‘Who said anything about a woman?’ she asked. ‘For all it looks such a gay colour we’ve sold as many of those coats to men as women. That was what’s so new about them.’ She looked accusingly at Harry. ‘And Harry knows it. I bet he knows right now who he sold that coat to. Him and his sixth sense. He’s probably seen that coat packed up in someone’s car.’

  Harry looked white.

  Six weeks ago at the Deerham Hills Club which was known as the Penguin Club because there was a pool for swimming (although swimming was not the main activity of the club), Harry had seen the coat.

  ‘I was having dinner there alone because you were away visiting your mother. Remember Sarah?’

  Sarah nodded. ‘Yes, I think so. It was when Mother had her burglary.’ She grinned. Mother had lost nothing, but the burglar, whom Mother and her Boxer dog Samson had captured, had lost a chunk of clothing and his whole self-confidence.

  ‘I met Rob. You don’t know him, Charmian, but he’s a local business man. Good sort. I don’t come his way much nor he mine but we like each other all right when we do. He seemed at a loose end. His girl was away or something. So was I.’

  ‘Who’s his girl?’ asked Charmian absently. ‘I do know Rob. By sight anyway. Thirtyish, dark hair, pink cheeks, plumpish?’

  Harry nodded. ‘Sounds like him. He’s been seeing a lot of Janet lately. I don’t know her other name. We had a drink together.’

  ‘More than one no doubt,’ said Sarah dryly.

  ‘A couple maybe. Then we decided not to have dinner at the Penguin. You know what they’re like there—bit of pineapple wrapped up in dressing on a lettuce leaf and a pork chop.’

  Charmian shook her head slightly: she didn’t yet dine at the Penguin. She wasn’t a member and the prices for the chunk of pineapple were high.

  ‘So we went on somewhere else.’

  Up to this minute it had not dawned on Charmian that Harry found some personal embarrassment in telling this story.

  ‘I don’t know why those drinks hit me so, I was tired I suppose, but I’ve been tired and I’ve often taken more to drink. I wasn’t in any sense drunk even at that, but I was softened up. So when Rob met with two of his girl friends it seemed reasonable we should all spend the evening together. I can’t remember now whether one of them was Janet or not …’ he frowned. ‘I think she was…’

  ‘I thought she was away.’

  ‘She seemed to turn up. It’s a blur. Perhaps she only talked about Janet… It was in her car I saw the coat.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’

  He traced his big finger along the seams. ‘I recognise the faint shadings of dirt where it’s been folded. See, it makes an S.’

  ‘Why on earth didn’t he tell me this on the quiet,’ Charmian asked herself. But she saw that this probably was the way to send Sarah through the roof. In effect he was saying to her: it was entirely unimportant. So Charmian believed, but would Sarah?

  She saw Sarah looked puzzled, and a little disconcerted, it was not yet a look of suspicion, more the awareness of a world she had not known existed.

  It might make no difference to their marriage: on the other hand it might make a good deal: you couldn’t tell.

  Charmian felt sad. This was what was going to happen all over Deerham Hills.

  Charmian got in her little car and headed it quietly round the hill and up towards where Kathy’s house stood, all lights blazing through the night.

  Kathy was up from the basement by that time, the furnace, strangely enough, was working just as it should, so it must be nerves that was making Robert and her so hot.

  She got to the top of the stai
rs just in time to hear the faint ping that marked the end of the telephone call. She gazed suspiciously at Rob.

  ‘And where were you calling?’ she asked. Her hair was crumpled and she had just a little coal dust on her left cheek but she looked pretty, and younger and more feminine than Robert had ever seen her.

  This ought to have softened him, but somehow it didn’t, because it only underlined what he had to do. What it did bring home to him however was that you can do so much for money, but beyond it the human frame exacted its own price.

  ‘I was checking with the police; they’ve got no news,’ he added hastily.

  Kathy nodded. She had come up the stairs carrying the shovel and it slipped from her grasp. As they both bent to pick it up their hands touched. Kathy’s fingers twined themselves almost unconsciously round Rob’s. They were warm and soft and gentle; in spite of himself he found himself gripping them firmly and comfortingly.

  ‘You Judas,’ he told himself desperately.

  Kathy closed her eyes in a tired kind of way and rested her head on Robert’s shoulder. And when she opened them again no further concealment was possible. ‘I think you’re pretty attractive,’ she said. ‘ No don’t say anything, there’s nothing to say. I do find you attractive, but,’ she added thoughtfully, ‘ I don’t know that I trust you very much. I wonder if it’s possible to go for someone and distrust them so much at the same time?’

  ‘Very nearly,’ said Rob, ‘ not quite possible, but very nearly. I know because I’ve tried.’

  ‘I used to think that you liked me too. You like Janet best maybe but you could grow to like me.’

  Kathy pressed her lips against his, she did it delicately and hesitantly at first because she was, after all, Kathy, but with increasing passion. They stood like that for a minute, the kissing and the kissed, the lover and the loved, before Rob moved.

  ‘Whoops, Kathy,’ he said, ‘let me get my breath back.’

  The mood was broken.

  Kathy straightened her hair and put on her dignity again. She might not have much left except dignity but she had that.

  Over the top of her head Rob saw the headlights of a car come up the road and stop outside the house. There was a brisk official police look to the way it came to a stop. His time was running short.