Sergeant Cluff Stands Firm

by Gil North

  He thought, “What the hell! I’ll give her something to talk about.”

  He not only set the radio going a second time, he turned up the volume control as far as it would go.

  “Tell Cluff that,” he shouted at the wall. “I don’t care a damn. I’m all right now. I’m in clover. You rotten old hag, you’ll wish you had my luck before I’ve done. You’ll see. You’ll see!”

  “Why doesn’t he work?” Mrs. Toogood had said. “Why doesn’t he go out and get a proper job? Is she keeping him?”

  Wright made a rude gesture at the wall. “That’s what I think of you,” he yelled. “You interfering old busybody!”

  He kept the wireless on. At intervals he looked into the street through the parlour window. He got bolder than that. He opened the front door and stepped outside to satisfy himself that the street was empty. He couldn’t believe it at first. He didn’t trust in the evidence of his own eyes. It was true, all the same. Cluff had given up.

  He shut the door for the last time. He clicked the button on the lock. He looked at his watch and made up his mind: “I’ll go back tomorrow. First thing in the morning. I won’t pass another night in this house after this one.”

  “Wait a minute,” he thought. “Is there a will, or isn’t there? ‘If anything happens to me,’ she said, soon after we were married, ‘I want you to have everything.’ ‘Don’t talk about it,’ I said. ‘What could happen to you?’ I don’t need a will. I get everything anyway. Twelve hundred, fifteen hundred, for the house. A hundred or two more for the furniture. What she had left in the bank.”

  He decided to go to bed. He went upstairs. He took off his jacket and flung it carelessly over the back of the chair by the bed. He sat on the side of the bed. His suitcase lay open on the floor. He had not troubled to unpack it properly since his return from Thorshall.

  The minutes ticked away. He could hear nothing. His dreams dazzled him, alternating with his fears. His bowels were loose. He set off for the lavatory in the backyard.

  Two steps led down from the threshold of the back door. Wright walked forward, searching the night in case there was someone moving in the back street. His foot sank into a soft object, but solid enough to trip him.

  A nauseating stench penetrated his nostrils. He lost his balance and went flying on to the flags, landing on his hands, barking his knees. He looked at the steps in the light shining through the door. A viscous patch shone wetly. A slimy trail pointed to the sack over which he had stumbled, fetching it with him into the yard.

  He rose slowly. He gazed fixedly at the sack. A sack like any other sack. A sack like the sack he’d picked up himself, more than a week ago, in the fruiterer’s warehouse opposite the commission agent’s.

  He pulled himself together with an effort. He forgot why he was in the yard. He banged the door to behind him. He ran through the living-room, up the stairs. He seized his jacket and struggled with it to get it right way up. He grabbed his hat and his raincoat in the passage.

  In Balaclava Street, in Sevastopol Road, he didn’t care whether anyone saw him or not. He ran, out of Sevastopol Road, down the steps, over the stream. At the turn into the High Street he could go no farther. He could not breathe. He could not endure the pain in his side.

  He crouched in a doorway, gulping, sick. He pressed his hands to his ribs. His head hung and his legs were jelly. He leaned his face against the cool glass of a window. He couldn’t think straight. The dog. The dog that loved her. The dog that hated him. The dog that let the whole of Balaclava Street know every time he stepped into the house. The dog that yapped and whined. The dog, a week in the water, that had come home, sack and all.

  Heavy footsteps clumped on the pavement. On the other side of the road a constable passed, stopping as he did so to try the doors of the shops. Wright shrank into his hiding-place, terrified. He waited until the steps receded, and then they were coming back. He had to move.

  He edged from the doorway. He kept in the shadows of the walls and windows, grateful that it was nearly midnight.

  He moved in a dead world, in a world of the dead. The night was alive but its life was inhuman, invisible. The timelessness about him, the ancient buildings between their modern counterparts, the dark church, crushed him. There was nothing in the night and the things of the night pursued him.

  He was past the church, running again, driven from the shelter of the town. The rows of houses became houses semi-detached and detached. The houses ceased. The street-lamps ended by the last of them.

  The night was dark, rain-clouded. The limestone walls hemming him in were ghostly. No traffic of any kind either met him or overtook him.

  He was harried along the never-ending road. The country about him was immense, threatening. He could feel the chill repugnance it had for him and his own being grew smaller and smaller, until he was less than nothing. The moors towered on this side and on that. Their blackness merged with the blackness of the sky. They reached above him, groping towards each other.

  Sometimes the road wound through clumps of trees, wind-bent, clinging grimly to thin soil. Under the trees the darkness was darker, the silence more perceptible, the sense of the unseen more urgent. Wright limped. His feet were pinched in his pointed, pressed-paper shoes. Blisters swelled on the tops of his toes, on his soles, under his heels. Sweat ran down his cheeks. He looked about for indications that he was coming to the end of his torment. He did not know whether he was on the right road. In spite of all his effort he seemed to make no progress.

  At last he came to a sleeping village, an eternity away from Gunnarshaw. He crept through it. He had to stop more and more often. He had to lean on the walls, exhausted, drained of strength. He peered into the night, along the road by which he had come. He listened. He was sure that Cluff was coming after him.

  Cluff compelled him to go on.

  Another village, as silent as the last, but larger. Lines of cottages. The moors higher, heavier, wilder. Suddenly he increased his speed, regardless of the unlit windows. He hobbled and weaved, weeping at the sharp burning in his legs.

  He was through the village, in an unpaved lane, climbing. Water from the moor poured down the lane. He splashed along as if he was wading in a stream, his shoes disintegrating, his trousers soaked to the knees. The mud spattered him as he pushed himself forward. He bit at the icy air, which hurt his throat and made his lungs congeal.

  There was a gate in the wall to his left. Beyond the gate the lane became a track, losing itself on the open moor. Wright collapsed on to the gate. He hung there for a long time before his strength returned sufficiently for him to open it.

  He crossed a yard, as muddy as the lane, between a heap of manure and doors through which came the rattling of chains and the movement of animals. A high, solid wall held back the hillside. A shed was built against it, unenclosed, housing an old Land Rover. Past the shed an opening in the wall gave on to a long flight of steps, their treads worn.

  Wright crawled up the steps. He emerged on to a higher level, where a space had been flattened in the side of the hill. A barn reared over the shippons in the yard through which he had come. In front of him lay a squat, rectangular house. The trees on the slope behind it seemed to be growing out of its roof.

  He dragged himself between two patches of lawn supported by the retaining wall. A carriage-way circled the wall at the foot of the steps and came back in front of the house. He crossed the carriage-way and pulled himself on to a raised, flagged walk.

  A wooden porch protected the oak door of the farm. Wright fell into the porch. After a while he began to hammer the door with his fists. His blows were weak, little thuds on the wood. He waited.

  No one answered.

  Wright beat again on the door panels.

  Nothing moved in the house.

  He struck and struck in frenzy.

  Chapter XIV

  “Mother!” />
  The girl was young, no more than seventeen. She was rosy with sleep. Her body was firm and well-shaped. She wore a nightdress that was almost transparent. The nipples of her breasts were sharp and stiff and pointed. Her belly was flat, her thighs rounded. Her brown, wavy hair was muzzed about her face.

  The girl slept in a bedroom at the front of the house. The room was scented with youth, warm with the dreams of the night. The bed was hollowed where she had been lying. The pillow she had clasped to herself in her loneliness was crushed with the vision of her hopes.

  “Mother!” the girl called again.

  She stood, looking out into the street from the window of number thirty-four, not yet quite ready to face the day.

  Her mother shouted, “You’ll be late. Hurry up! Hurry up!”

  “But he’s there,” the girl objected to herself. “Just as he was for so long the night before last.”

  She remembered him by the lamp, watching and waiting, strong and virile. He was old, and what was callow youth to her? What had she to do with acned, inexperienced boys, wanting to lead her on Saturday nights into the dark ginnels off the High Street, wanting to press their amateur kisses on her lips, with a grating of teeth, in the fields in summer?

  “What are you looking at, Jean?” her mother asked.

  Her mother was grey and bent, untidy in her working-clothes, with no figure left.

  Jean looked at her mother and thought, “I’ll never let myself get like that. I won’t live all my life in a house in a street. I won’t nag and whine as if there wasn’t such a thing as love in the world. I’ll always be neat and attractive. My love will last. My husband won’t be driven to distraction, a piece of furniture like anything else in the house, worn and useful, but not a man any more, not a man as a man ought to be.”

  “You’ll be late,” her mother repeated. “And you’ll catch your death of cold in that disgusting thing. They’ll see you from the street.”

  Her mother was by her side at the window.

  “He’s not satisfied,” her mother said. “He’s right not to be satisfied. The coroner’s a fool.”

  “I’ve seen him often in the town,” Jean said, innocently. “A policeman, isn’t he—a detective?”

  “Don’t you know Cluff yet?” her mother replied. “Where have you been all your life?”

  “He’s not married,” Jean said, knowing much about him.

  “Not him,” her mother told her. “An old bachelor. He’s not the marrying kind.”

  Cluff had crossed the street. He turned the handle on the door of number thirty-three. He knocked, but he couldn’t get in. He looked at the windows on the upper storey. Jean imagined that he sighed. His head moved and she was certain that he saw her. Her heart leapt. Cluff passed up the slope of Balaclava Street.

  “What will Mr. Greensleeve say if you’re not there by nine?” Jean’s mother said. “Your breakfast’ll be cold too.”

  A cindered footpath separated the end of the row of houses from a pasture where sheep grazed. Cluff rounded the gable of the last house. He walked down the back street. Women, busy about their household duties, glanced up from their tasks and wondered.

  The Sergeant pushed open the gate of Amy Wright’s house. He halted, with his hand on the gate. He saw the sack under the living-room window, moved from where he had left it on the doorstep. He smiled.

  Cluff put his hand on the back door. It swung open at his touch.

  “Wright,” Cluff shouted. “Wright!”

  He entered and went through the scullery into the living-room. The lights were on and he switched them off. He climbed the stairs to the bedroom she had slept in and died in. He noticed the suitcase at once.

  The case was cheap, made of a substitute for leather. It held a cheap suit, a shirt and a handkerchief. A safety-razor and the remains of a bar of shaving soap were wrapped in a piece of tissue paper. The paper had stuck to the end of the soap as the soap dried.

  Cluff shook out the suit. He went through each pocket in turn. He let the suit drop and stared about him. His eyes strayed slowly, fastening for long minutes on each segment of the room. They came to rest on a wallet, humped as it had fallen from a pocket. The wallet lay half-under the bed, an inverted V, between the bed and a chair by the bed.

  He emptied the wallet. He found currency notes, some pencilled slips of paper, the writing rubbed and indistinct, a postage stamp or two. There was one letter, still in its envelope. The envelope was addressed to Wright in a woman’s hand, care of the commission agent at the office off the High Street. Behind the envelope a snapshot showed a woman posed by a five-barred gate. The wall of a house rose beside her. Hills formed a black background to the picture.

  He read the letter, his face showing his disgust at its contents. He looked for a long time at the snapshot. He thought that age meant nothing. He told himself that a woman in her thirties could be more lecherous and lustful and abandoned than a girl of seventeen, as shameless, hotter for a man, driven by the known, the experienced, her body, which had memory in it, crying out for repetition.

  “It never ends,” Cluff said quietly. “They go on like that to the grave. Like drunkards they stop caring what they get. Anything will do to satisfy them, anything in the shape of a man, Wright as well as any other.”

  Cluff crammed both letter and photograph into his pocket. His step, as he left the house, was jaunty, his expression content.

  “Sergeant!” Barker exclaimed in surprise, looking up from his desk. “Aren’t you on leave? There’s a letter here, in this morning’s mail. They spoke to you on the telephone—”

  “Mole,” Cluff said. “He checked on Wright’s story?”

  “It was your job,” Barker thought. “You shouldn’t have thrown in your hand like that. You shouldn’t have left it to Mole. He’s angry about it. He’s making a report.”

  “Leave it alone,” Barker pleaded. “It’s done with now.”

  “Well?” Cluff asked.

  “You’ve seen his statement,” Barker said.

  “Pointing a barn!” Cluff spat.

  “He knew how to do it.” Barker’s voice had a note of pity in it. “Mole rang up Thorshall. It was true.”

  “Seven miles,” Cluff said. “How long would it take you to walk it?”

  “Two hours,” Barker replied, after a pause.

  “The nights are long in winter,” Cluff said. “Two hours here. Two hours back.”

  “No,” Barker objected. “No. It isn’t possible. Someone would have seen him. Someone would have heard him.”

  Cluff said, “Her dog was missing. She didn’t have her dog.”

  “You saw the house,” Barker protested. “Would she watch him turn on the gas and listen to him go and stay in the bed to die?”

  “Yes,” Cluff said. “I think she would.”

  Barker’s young face looked shocked. His eyes were wide, his lips apart. The colour in his cheeks faded. Words tumbled in his mind, unable to escape. “You,” the words said, “the most normal, the most stolid, the most down-to-earth of us all. Your feet on the ground, rooted in the soil. Everything about you—what people mean when they talk of the countryman, the farmer, the man brought up amongst these hills. Unshakable. Unimaginative. Men like you don’t go off the rails. They don’t have ideas. Only facts mean anything to them.”

  “Must we always start with a struggle?” Cluff asked wearily. “With resistance? With clinging to life? Does there always need to be violence in murder?”

  “It’s no good,” Barker stammered, trying to hold fast to a link with sanity.

  “Don’t you see?” Cluff thought. “I knew her. I knew what she was. I knew the mistake she’d made. I knew she had no way out. She wanted to die.”

  “Murder with the full co-operation of the victim,” Barker was thinking. “If she was asleep?—If she didn’t hear him?—She
must have heard him. Anything else is too much to believe. He couldn’t rely on her not waking up. Or could he? If she had woken up, would he have waited until another time? I can’t believe it.”

  “She knew what he’d brought her to,” Cluff said.

  “Sergeant,” Barker pleaded. “Isn’t there somewhere you can go these next two weeks? The seaside perhaps. Or London. Where you’ll see new faces, where you don’t have to think about this.”

  “You’re a good fellow, Barker,” Cluff said. “But young. You know where to find me if I’m needed.”

  The Sergeant was opening the door to go out. Barker raised himself in his chair. He had his fists on the desk, supporting his body on stiff arms. He leaned forward. “Sergeant! If I can help. In my free time. When I’m off duty—”

  “It’s good of you,” Cluff said. “But you’re not a Gunnarshaw man. It’s my pigeon.”

  Chapter XV

  Sergeant Cluff left his car outside the bottom yard at Ghyll End. He let Clive out, warning, “Stay close. Heel! Heel!”

  He looked up at the barn above the shippons, burrowing farther into the hill. He passed by the shed near the steps that led up to the level of the house and stared at the Land Rover. He climbed between the two patches of lawn, on to the drive in front of the house.

  Behind the barn a line of loose-boxes, their floors higher than the barn floor, extended from the barn to join the gable end of the house. In the oblong, rising, three-sided space formed by the extension of the boxes and the barn and the end wall of the house stood a wheelbarrow, with a spade in it. There were traces of mortar on the cobbles. A ladder reared against the barn.

  He lifted his hand to knock at the door. The line of the house, at the end farthest from the barn, was broken by a dairy, which jutted nearer the driveway. The door to the dairy was at right-angles to the farm’s main door.

  The Sergeant let his hand fall to his side. He trod softly on the stone floor of the dairy. A second door led out of it into a wash-kitchen, with a huge copper encased in brick above a firehole.