Five Dead Canaries hf-3

by Edward Marston

  ‘That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘Is it? In telling me about what happened today, you’ll be going through the evidence you picked up. Daddy always says that you can’t do that enough. He sifts evidence time and again.’

  Keedy was persuaded. He gave her an attenuated version of events and stressed that she mustn’t breathe a word of it to anyone else. Alice not only listened attentively, she asked some pertinent questions and amazed him by showing she’d forgotten nothing of what she’d been told earlier. She remembered every name and every shred of evidence. While being shocked at the antics of Alan Suggs, the promiscuous driver, she was surprised at the ease with which anyone could borrow the key to the outhouse. The landlord had to bear the blame for that. When Keedy had come to the end of his account, she singled out one name.

  ‘Maureen Quinn went to church?’

  ‘She was consumed with guilt, Alice.’

  ‘Did you speak to the parish priest?’

  ‘No — why should I?’

  ‘Well,’ said Alice, ‘if she was there for hours on end, somebody would have noticed her and passed on the information. Roman Catholic priests keep a close eye on the families in their congregation.’

  ‘But, according to Mrs Quinn, they never went to church.’

  ‘That’s all the more reason why Maureen would have been spotted and reported. One of the women I work with is a Roman Catholic. Her priest is always dropping in at the house. She calls him a spy for the Almighty.’

  Keedy was thoughtful. ‘You might be on to something there, Alice.’

  ‘It’s only a guess but I think it’s worth looking into. The priest will know the family and be able to give you more information about them. He’ll also be aware of that explosion in Hayes. It’s common knowledge now. Maureen needs comfort and he’ll surely want to provide it.’

  Seated around the kitchen table, the four of them ate their supper in comparative silence. Diane Quinn made a few comments, Lily asked when she’d be going back to school and her father told her that he’d make the decision in due course. Maureen said nothing. Unaware of their presence, she ate her food without really tasting it. She gazed down at her empty plate and replayed in her mind the moment when she heard the explosion. It had blown her whole world apart. She didn’t hear Lily being sent off to bed or see her father pouring himself a glass of beer from a flagon. Only when her mother moved Maureen’s plate to the sink did she come out of her reverie. Diane sat down again and glanced across at her husband before speaking.

  ‘There’s something we need to discuss,’ she ventured.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Quinn, peremptorily. ‘She doesn’t go.’

  ‘Maureen must make her own decision, Eamonn.’

  ‘She’s not strong enough to do that. I’ll make it for her.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ asked Maureen, looking up.

  Quinn flicked a beefy hand. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Yes, it does,’ argued Diane. ‘It matters a lot.’ She turned to her daughter. ‘We’re talking about the funerals, Maureen. They can’t be far off. Your father doesn’t want you to go to any of them.’

  ‘I’m not having everyone staring at her,’ he said.

  ‘She can’t stay away. They were her friends. What will people say?’

  ‘Who cares?’

  ‘I do,’ said Diane, meeting his glare. ‘The families of the other girls will be very hurt if Maureen can’t even make the effort to go. They’ll feel betrayed.’

  ‘We have to put our daughter first, Di. She’s bad enough as it is. If she has to sit through five funerals, it will be a terrible strain for her. I want to spare her that.’

  Diane touched her daughter’s arm. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ replied Maureen in a daze.

  ‘I’ll come with you.’

  ‘Steer well clear,’ said Quinn. ‘That’s what I’ll do.’

  Diane ignored him. ‘I know it will be an ordeal for you, Maureen,’ she said, softly, ‘but I’ll help you through it. Think how upset Mrs Radcliffe will be if you don’t turn up. Then there’s Shirley’s family. She was a good friend — you played in the football team with her. And don’t forget Florrie. It was her birthday party. That’s where this whole thing started.’

  Maureen looked hopelessly confused and unable to come to a decision.

  ‘There you are,’ concluded Quinn. ‘She doesn’t want to go.’

  ‘Maureen hasn’t said that.’

  ‘It would be cruel to force her, Di.’

  ‘Think how it will look if she doesn’t go.’

  ‘You can be there instead of her. Say that she’s too poorly.’

  Diane paused to consider. ‘Perhaps we should ask Father Cleary,’ she said at length. ‘He’ll be able to advise us.’

  ‘Keep that nosy old so-and-so away from here.’

  ‘He’s our parish priest, Eamonn. He’ll know what the decent thing to do is.’

  ‘I’m not letting him back into my life again,’ said Quinn, bitterly. ‘I had enough of Father Cleary when we first moved here. He was always calling in to cadge a cup of tea and tell me how to bring up my children. He was here so often that he might as well have moved in with us.’

  ‘Don’t exaggerate.’

  ‘He downright pestered us, Di. In the end, I was sick of the sight of him.’

  ‘We’re not talking about you,’ she reminded him. ‘When he came to see Maureen, he helped. That’s all I care about. He soothed her. Father Cleary knows how people feel when there’s been a disaster in their lives. He understands what Maureen must be going through.’

  ‘Well, he can keep his advice to himself.’

  Diane looked at her daughter again. ‘Would you like to talk to Father Cleary?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Shall I ask him to call again?’

  ‘I don’t know, Mummy.’

  ‘You must have been thinking about the funerals.’

  ‘I have,’ admitted Maureen. ‘I’ve been thinking of nothing else all day. If I go to one of them, it will bring it all flooding back and I don’t think I could bear that. I don’t want to let anyone down, Mummy, but to be honest, I’m terrified of going.’

  ‘There you are,’ said Quinn, triumphantly. ‘I was right.’

  After his meeting with the superintendent, Marmion went to his office and sat at his desk while he reviewed the facts of the case once more. If only one victim had been targeted and killed, his job would be much more straightforward. There’d simply be one person’s background to explore instead of five. When he added Maureen Quinn to the list, he realised what a mass of material they would assemble, most of it turning out to be irrelevant in the course of time. Other investigations had left him starved of information. In this case, he had far too much of it. When he opened his notebook, he was daunted by the number of names he’d already recorded in connection with the crime, and he suspected that there would be many more before the case was solved.

  It was time to leave. Having dismissed his driver for the day, he travelled home by bus and walked the last few hundred yards down streets that had a reassuring familiarity. Nobody else was about. Marmion hoped that his wife would have had the sense to go to bed. He was always overcome with remorse if he kept her up late. When he saw the light through the living room curtains, he knew that Ellen was still there and reproached himself for not leaving Scotland Yard earlier. He let himself into the house and hung up his coat and hat before peeping into the living room. Ellen was sound asleep, slumped in a chair with an open book in her lap. Marmion smiled and crossed the room to plant a delicate kiss on her head. As he picked up the book, an envelope fell out of it and landed on the carpet. He retrieved it at once.

  ‘Hello,’ he said to himself, ‘what do we have here?’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Exhaustion finally got the better of June Ingles. Though she tossed and turned for hours, she finally fell into a deep sleep. She came o
ut of it when the birds were heralding a new dawn. The first thing she noticed was that her husband was wide awake, sitting upright beside her and frowning with concentration. June made an effort to shake off her drowsiness.

  ‘Did you get any sleep?’ she asked.

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘You need it, Brian. We both do. Let the doctor prescribe sleeping pills.’

  ‘I don’t need any pills,’ he said, bitterly. ‘The only thing that would make me sleep again is to have Florrie back with us, and that’s not going to happen.’

  ‘We have to get used to the fact.’

  ‘It will take time, June.’ He suppressed a yawn. ‘I’ve spent half the night thinking about the letter I’m going to write.’

  ‘What letter?’

  ‘It’s that headline in the newspaper,’ he said. ‘“Five Dead Canaries” — it was tasteless, indecent and incorrect. Florrie wasn’t a canary. She was a wonderful daughter with a lovely disposition. She was an individual, June, and deserves to be treated as such, not tossed into a common pot labelled “canaries”. It’s demeaning.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have read that paper if it was going to upset you.’

  ‘How could I help it? Someone put it through our letter box.’

  ‘Yes,’ said June, ‘but they didn’t mean to offend you. They thought we might be interested in what was being said about the explosion.’ She sat up and put the pillow at her back. ‘What else have you been thinking about?’

  ‘It’s that idea of Mr Kennett’s.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not at all sure about that,’ she said, worriedly.

  ‘Neither was I when he rang yesterday evening but I’ve been mulling it over. It’s very kind of the factory to make the offer. After all, Florrie’s birthday party was a private matter,’ he emphasised. ‘It wasn’t the management’s responsibility. Yet Mr Kennett says that they’ll bear the cost of the funerals for the victims.’

  ‘But is it what we want?’

  ‘It will relieve us of the burden of organising it.’

  ‘Yes, but Florrie will just be one of five people lowered into a grave. There’ll be nothing personal about her funeral. It will be shared.’

  ‘They died together and should be buried together.’

  ‘A moment ago,’ she noted, ‘you were complaining about that newspaper headline robbing our daughter of her individuality. The funeral will do the same.’

  ‘No, it won’t. It’s a different matter altogether.’

  ‘I’d still like Florrie to have a service of her own.’

  He was insistent. ‘Do you want us to be the odd one out, June? What if the other four families opt for a joint funeral and we refuse? We’d get a lot of criticism.’

  ‘Who’s to say that everyone else will accept Mr Kennett’s offer? I’m not sure that they will. Apart from anything else,’ she pointed out, ‘the victims didn’t all go to the same church. Jean Harte, I know for a fact, didn’t go to any church.’

  ‘Mr Kennett made allowances for that,’ he said with a touch of impatience. ‘He realised that the services themselves might take place in different churches but the burials would all take place together at the cemetery. It’s only a question of timing, June. Florrie might have a separate service but a shared burial.’

  ‘I still don’t like the idea.’

  ‘But it will simplify everything.’

  ‘That’s what I’ve got against it, Brian.’

  ‘It will also save us money.’

  ‘That’s an awful thing to say,’ she complained. ‘I’m surprised at you for even mentioning it. This is Florrie we’re talking about. No expense should be spared at her funeral. We can afford it and we should pay it willingly.’

  ‘We’ll foot the bill for the flowers, naturally.’

  ‘What about after the funeral?’

  ‘We join the others at the hotel.’

  ‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘We mourn our daughter in the midst of strangers.’

  ‘Don’t get so worked up about it, June. They’re not all strangers. We know Jean’s father and Shirley’s husband and we’ve bumped into Agnes Collier and her mother a few times while out shopping. We’re in this together,’ he reasoned. ‘It’s a tragedy common to all five families and we mustn’t imagine we’re not part of it.’

  June was both wounded and puzzled. She strongly disapproved of the notion of a shared event and she couldn’t understand why her husband had agreed to it. As a rule, he always put privacy first. She was surprised when he even gave Kennett’s invitation serious consideration. The revelation that he viewed it as a means of saving money was a profound shock to her. His salary enabled them to live a comfortable life. Her husband was generous and June lacked for nothing. Yet he was now trying to cut back on funeral expenses. There was another shock in store for her.

  ‘June …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Something else has been on my mind as well.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I’m wondering if we should sell the house and move to somewhere smaller.’

  Harvey Marmion was in a good mood when he climbed into the car beside Joe Keedy. The news about his son’s forthcoming leave had given him a real fillip. Hoping to surprise his companion with the information, he was taken aback when he learnt that Keedy was already aware of it.

  ‘You didn’t tell me that you’d be seeing Alice last night,’ he said.

  ‘You didn’t ask, Harv.’

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘As pleased as the rest of us that Paul is coming home,’ said Keedy. ‘He’s had a hard time over there. A break was long overdue.’

  ‘There’s only one problem, Joe. It increases the pressure on us.’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘We don’t want to be bogged down in this investigation when my son comes home. We need to have the whole thing done and dusted.’

  Keedy’s laugh was hollow. ‘You’ve got a hope!’

  ‘We’ll get a breakthrough soon. I can feel it coming.’

  ‘I can’t say that I share your enthusiasm. It’s still early days.’

  The car was driving swiftly towards Hayes and taking a route to which it was becoming accustomed. Knowing exactly how long they had before they got there, the detectives planned the day ahead.

  ‘I’d like to learn more about Florrie Duncan,’ said Marmion.

  ‘Her father won’t even let you through the front door, Harv. The same goes for Reuben Harte, by the way. He’s the one who thought you looked shifty.’

  Marmion was piqued. ‘Don’t keep ribbing me about that.’

  ‘I told Alice. She thought that it was funny.’

  ‘I hope that’s all you told her about this investigation,’ said Marmion, sternly. ‘I don’t want you divulging information. One detective is enough in any family.’

  ‘The subject never even came up,’ said Keedy, looking through the window. ‘We had other things to talk about.’

  ‘Keep it that way. As for Florrie Duncan, I’d like to know what the neighbours thought of her. I’m not going to do any snooping myself. If her father caught sight of me in the road, he’d probably chase me away with a garden fork.’

  ‘We can deploy some of our men there. They’ve finished house-to-house calls in the vicinity of the Golden Goose. That turned out to be a futile exercise.’

  ‘It had to be done, Joe. It’s unfortunate that nobody saw suspicious behaviour near the pub. Customers came and went all the time. The neighbours were so used to seeing traffic in and out of the Golden Goose that they stopped looking at it.’

  ‘The bomber must have come at night.’

  ‘How would he have got into the outhouse?’

  ‘With the key, I expect.’

  ‘That would have meant breaking into the pub after dark and that would have been dangerous. No,’ decided Marmion, ‘the landlord is pretty lax about security but I still bet that he’d check that the outhouse key was on its hook before he went to bed. Whoeve
r borrowed it, did so during the day and slipped off to plant his bomb when everyone else was boozing in the bar.’

  ‘Are you going to speak to the landlord again?’

  ‘That’s my starting point, Joe.’

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘I’d like you to talk to Maureen Quinn again. Try to get her on her own. Her mother owes you a favour after the way you found her daughter at the church. Tell her you’d like a private word with Maureen.’

  ‘There’s something I’d rather do before that, Harv.’

  ‘Oh — what’s that?’

  ‘Another visit to that church may pay dividends,’ replied the other. ‘The priest lives in the house next door to it. I reckon he’ll have been made aware of the fact that Maureen spent hours in church yesterday. He may even have called on her. At all events, he’ll know the Quinn family and be able to give us the sort of information we might not get from anyone else.’

  Marmion was impressed. ‘That’s a good idea, Joe. I wish I’d thought of it.’

  ‘So do I,’ said Keedy under his breath.

  Since he had no telephone, the message was delivered to Jonah Jenks by hand. When he heard the envelope drop through the letter box, he thought at first that it would be another card from one of the neighbours, expressing their sympathy at his loss. Instead, it was a letter from the munitions factory on headed paper. Bernard Kennett, the works manager, offered his condolences and raised the possibility of a joint funeral for the five victims. Since they’d been employed at the factory, he’d been authorised to say that all expenses would be met from management coffers. The letter stressed that no compulsion would be involved. The families of the deceased were free to make their own decision about the funerals of their respective daughters.

  Jenks was touched by the unexpected sign of compassion. He viewed the munitions factory as an enemy, a huge, relentless machine that enslaved thousands of women and sent them home with ruined complexions. It had cut short his daughter’s burgeoning career as a musician, eating into her practice time and coarsening her hands so much that she could no longer conjure the same mellifluous notes out of piano and violin. Enid had denied that filling shells had had a deleterious effect on her playing but her father knew what he heard. Her talent had been compromised. After reading the letter again, he decided that the factory owed his daughter something and that the invitation should be accepted.