Stone Dead

by Jennie Melville

  The cat had got there before him and was sitting on the bonnet

  staring at him with cold eyes.

  Jamey reached out to push the cat off, but the cat was too quick,

  it leapt away with a hiss and a flashing paw.

  ‘Damn you,’ said Jamey, as he dabbed at the blood with a tissue.

  He threw the tissue after the cat.

  When he had gone the cat captured the piece of tissue and bore

  it off in his mouth.

  Triumph for cat.

  Upstairs in their bedrooms, Winifred slept soundly and even Birdie was relaxed as she looked at the dawn light through the window outside which the black cat perched.

  You were safe with the police.

  Chapter Four

  ‘What do you make of Birdie’s story of the woman in the car asking her to shop?’ Dolly, eyes heavy-lidded from lack of sleep, asked Charmian in the morning. Charmian looked brisk and bright, which annoyed her subordinate, but she was going to try not to show it. Charmian had made some coffee on her special apparatus in her office, which Dolly proposed, without being asked, to share with her and which might lighten her mood.

  Charmian’s office where they were meeting was not as tidy as usual: papers were scattered on the desk and on the floor. Charmian was collating several reports on a fraud case and was trying to get them in order. She usually had four problems on hand at once, and that of the missing women was, in some ways, the least important, yet the case was important to a side of Charmian that she kept hidden.

  The women were out there somewhere, perhaps dead already, perhaps captive, brutalized and terrified. Charmian could feel their pain.

  She ran over their names:

  Amanda Warren from Fletely. Found, with a plastic bag over

  head.

  Not yet found:

  Lily Green from Bredon.

  Daisy Winner, also from Bredon.

  Mary Jersey from Windsor, whose bank account had been

  robbed.

  Louise Sherry from Old Windsor.

  Too many, she thought, and all in such a short time. Jack the Ripper didn’t work faster.

  And this new body, who was she? It was vital to establish her identity.

  ‘I believe Birdie, it happened, it could have been the killer, the way the victims were caught. It’s a strange little story.’ And a nasty one.

  She thought about Birdie Peacock being accosted in the Triangle Shopping Precinct off Peascod Street and asked, as a kind and helpful-looking passer-by, to shop in the big supermarket and come back to the car with the shopping.

  It was possible that the missing women had been trapped that way because they now had two dead women with plastic bags over their heads.

  Three more still missing, she told herself, who might never be found. Birdie might have made the sixth. But she had drawn back, helped, so she would say, by her witchly powers.

  Dolly was still going on:

  ‘And then, finding the two bodies just as those two open that bookshop. They wanted publicity, they’ve got it.’

  ‘The wrong sort, I suppose.’

  ‘Not sure there is a wrong sort, not where crime books are concerned,’ said Dolly sourly. ‘When I went down to the shop this morning, people were forming a queue to get in, and Winifred and Birdie had the floorboards up in the shop. Looking for something unknown, they said.’

  ‘Witches, you see,’ said Charmian with a smile.

  ‘And I think Hallows might be there by now. I saw his car parked in the kerb next to the Incident Van. Deast and Chance have been informed and are waiting to hear from the pathologist to see how the body matches up with the missing women. Chance was interested. Deast said he knew already.’

  ‘Deast has an informant inside our outfit,’ said Charmian with a frown. ‘But I don’t know whom.’

  Dolly nodded. ‘I can tell you: it’s Jamey Lily, our new forensic expert. He’s working on that body at the moment.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Charmian was interested. It always helped to know of link-ups and relationships.

  ‘I get around the outskirts of Windsor more than you do. I’ve seen them more than once having a drink in the Rose and Crown in Merrywick. It’s almost in Cheasey and quite worth keeping an eye on. For other reasons, sure they do deals in drugs, probably not the hardest sort but the stuff kids like to take clubbing. In fact, they do have a club at the back by the river. Not that our friends were in there.’

  ‘I must remember that. I might pop in.’

  ‘You’re too well known, better leave it to me and Rewley. Mind, I can’t believe that pair were up to anything but I think both of them like picking up information.’

  But Charmian could not leave the little puzzle alone. ‘ I wonder what the connection between that pair is. I wonder if they were at school together. You can never tell with men. No, I can’t believe they were at school together. Deast probably likes seeing what Lily has to say. Can’t disapprove of that, sensible in a detective. Lily does come from Windsor, saw it on his GV. I was on the committee that appointed him.’

  ‘You never know. They could both be Masons. But men like to have associations. Perhaps they just play football together.’

  Charmian looked at her: ‘ You’re anti-men today?’

  ‘So so,’ said Dolly, but she did not amplify.

  Charmian wasted no sympathy, she knew only too well that Dolly specialized in lame ducks who always picked themselves up and went off with someone else. Very often to Dolly’s great relief, but not always.

  ‘Where’s Greg then?’ Better to ask the direct question, not hang about in the outfields of knowledge, that was what made a good detective.

  Greg was the latest, but you could never tell, another limping wounded male might have slipped in beside Greg and ousted him. It all seemed such a waste of time and energy.

  ‘Gone to Africa. Or it might be India.’

  That’s it then, thought Charmian, she minds, but she’ll get another one. Probably the man hasn’t gone anywhere, not even out of town, it’s Dolly sending him into exile.

  ‘Forgetting Deast and Jamey for the moment, although they make an interesting pair, the story about Birdie and the woman in the car must not get any publicity. If it was the killer, then he or she would be alerted to what we know. I don’t want that to happen. It’s got to be kept quiet. Get that across to Birdie for me.’

  Dolly nodded. ‘I expect Hallows will have rubbed that in, if he managed to get her up from the floorboards. No one more security conscious than Hallows.’

  ‘In fact, we’ll keep it, to ourselves, not telling Deast and Chance until we know if there is anything solid in it.’ She added: ‘There’s going to be enough jokes about the witches’ crime and spells shop without going public with something that might be wrong.’

  ‘They did have a ropey lot at that party. And I don’t mean the witches, I like them, even Frostie, she knows my mother, not that I approve of that, Mother being what she is, nit-picking crazy herself.’

  Dolly’s mother was a distinguished historian well known for riding her prejudices against fellow historians.

  ‘No, I was thinking of the woman who brought her doubles with her.’

  ‘I’ll be seeing her myself, and her past history is something I would like kept out of the papers for the moment.’

  ‘I don’t think that is going to be easy,’ said Dolly, throwing across the desk a copy of the local morning paper.

  Woman with Death in her Past

  Publicity Bureau Chief tells of her trial for murder

  ‘She seems to have spread the word herself.’

  Charmian read the few paragraphs. Nothing there she didn’t know.

  ‘What was it she did? Or didn’t do?’ asked Dolly.

  ‘She was charged with having killed her two best friends, one of them her cousin. Rehearsing a fight for a play with real weapons; they died, she didn’t, although she was injured. But they couldn’t prove anything, and the jury
let her off. She was good, plausible, in the witness box.’ Charmian folded the paper. ‘She’s still plausible.’

  ‘You think she was guilty?’

  Charmian said slowly: ‘I’ve never been sure. At the time, I accepted the verdict. With reservations.’

  ‘You knew her but she did not know you.’

  ‘No, I was just an observer at her trial. I never expected to see her again. Yet I recognized her at once in spite of the changes: she is grown plump and strong-looking. And yes, I think she did know me. She learnt my name.’

  ‘You are pretty well known. Photograph in the papers and all that.’

  Charmian smiled. ‘I try to keep the photographs ones that no one would recognize. But I think she knew my face, she does her research, I guess, that one.’ She drank some coffee. And she must have done some work on Birdie and Winifred and their shop to turn up the way she did. Not that Birdie’s slow on publicity herself.’ She added thoughtfully: ‘And I mean to drop in on the Janus show myself, unofficially, and without warning. Want to come?’

  She put her cup on the desk and reached out for her briefcase.

  ‘Tomorrow I’m off to London again – I come and go you know – with George Rewley to hand over this report we have put together on crime and drugs in the Thames Valley, and I really haven’t finished my part of it yet … We aren’t saying anything new.’ She sighed. ‘But it has to be said. Every so often SRADIC has to come up with the figures, it’s what we were invented for, I think. George does it beautifully and I go to bring weight and because it is my responsibility.’ There was a faint touch of scepticism in her voice. ‘Sometimes I think I’ve had enough and will resign.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘When I got that official letter a year ago, I thought I was getting a life peerage at least, but it was just an earnest request to sit on another committee.’

  ‘Did you want a life peerage?’

  ‘Not really. Although I wouldn’t have said no. Humphrey would have been against it, though, he only approves of titles that are a thousand years old, preferably handed out by Edward the Confessor and no one later.’

  ‘How’s Humphrey?’ asked Dolly. She liked Charmian’s husband, a charming, kind, polite man, and thought Charmian was lucky to have him and ought to pay him more attention. Charmian was well aware of this belief and partly believed it herself, but had worked out a philosophy which involved a little healthy neglect of any man in your life. Dolly Barstow could do with a bit of it, she thought.

  ‘Oh, doing his course on drama in Slough University … I don’t think he’ll make an actor and he knows it but he loves every minute of it. He might come back and put some money into a little theatre somewhere.’

  Charmian’s husband had retired after a distinguished career in the more secretive side of the Foreign Office. He was said to know all the secrets which Charmian did not know, so between them they were a formidable pair.

  ‘It’s a funny old house down there,’ mused Dolly. ‘Good home, really, for witches and crime. I bet it’s had a past. And I don’t just mean the nearness to the old gaol.’

  ‘I didn’t want Winifred and Birdie to sell up and move in, but Winifred was determined and Birdie usually goes along with what she says. I couldn’t see them running a shop. Of course, in a way, it’s a selling idea: crime and witchcraft together. And the site was ideal, Winifred said.’ And besides, she had got it cheap. A fair price but not dear, she had said, ever the honest witch. Charmian had respect for Winifred and had learnt, over the years, to treat both white witches with circumspection: they could make things happen.

  Usually good things, but not always. Charmian had never forgotten what had happened to the old man who beat his wife, grandchild, horse and dog. He had fallen into the fire in his own grate and burned to death. Spontaneous combustion, Birdie had said, done to a crisp. Smugly, Charmian thought.

  Wife, grandchild, horse and dog lived on. The telephone rang and Dolly picked it up and then handed it

  over to Charmian. ‘For you. It’s Hallows.’

  Charmian listened, and Dolly saw her face change. ‘Right, then

  I’d better come down there. Let Chance and Deast know.’

  Superintendent Hallows had a deep commanding voice, with the huskiness of the long-time smoker, combined with the tetchiness of the man whose doctor had ordered him to give up smoking and cut back on the drink. He did what he could, but it was never enough, and he continued to smoke when no one was looking and to cough when he drank. It was a fact of life, he said, that in his trade you drank and smoked. It was one of the reasons he found working with Charmian Daniels hard to bear because she did very little of either now, whatever she had done in the past. There had been a past, so he had heard.

  He was a careful, precise worker who took this case of the missing women very seriously indeed. He had called in quickly to the Incident Van where Sergeant Tiger Yardley had been replaced by a youthful detective constable called Bland who was studying the reports of the previous night’s activity. They hadn’t found much except old sticks and stones as far as he could see. He stood up hastily when the Superintendent appeared.

  ‘Stay where you are,’ said Hallows, ‘ I’m going into the shop.’

  ‘Hello now, Miss Peacock,’ he said to Birdie’s trouser-clad bottom, sticking up from under the floorboards. ‘What are you up to down there?’

  He knew Birdie Peacock and Winifred Eagle of old as his wife was a long-time friend of theirs – a common interest in organic produce – although he had asked her not (one did not forbid one’s wife) to join the Society of White Witches. ‘It’s not a good career move for me, Isla,’ he had said.

  Birdie crawled out backwards, calling to Winifred who must be further under the boards. ‘Come on out, Win, it’s Tommy Hallows.’

  ‘What are you doing down there?’ he said in his rough deep voice.

  ‘Oh Tommy, it’s something Charley suggested when we had dinner at his place … he seemed to think there might be something under the floorboards, and we thought we ought to look.’

  Superintendent Hallows, a man on his dignity, winced at the ‘Tommy’, but took a deep breath as Birdie emerged, snake-like, with Winifred after her. They were not as dusty as they might have been.

  ‘Right,’ said Winifred, shaking herself briskly and speaking in a businesslike manner. ‘ Good job you are here, Tommy. I don’t know what we’ve got, or what it means, but you’d better have a look.’

  Hallows, who had seen more than one dead body in his career, nodded without pleasure. Not a job he enjoyed, but he would do it.

  ‘Watch where you tread,’ Birdie advised. She handed him a torch.

  Winifred said: ‘ Stinks a bit. Take a deep breath before you go down. I didn’t. Regretted it.’

  ‘It’s the rat; said Birdie. ‘ Well, that and other things … I didn’t look too closely.’

  Taking the torch, Hallows inserted himself, feet first, into the aperture where the two women had lifted a wide section of floorboards. It was a tight fit.

  ‘You can crawl,’ Winifred called after him. ‘Floor level down there is lower than it looks. Just earth. Been there since the original house, I should think. Medieval.’

  ‘Thanks for the advice,’ muttered Hallows under his breath, casting his torch around as he did so.

  He saw the rat in time not to step on it. There was movement in the darkness his torch caught a flash of eyes. He swore gently.

  ‘The cat’s down there,’ came a voice from above.

  The smell was as rank and sour as Winifred and Birdie had suggested. He held his handkerchief to his nose as he ran the torch over the scene.

  Clothes. Women’s clothes. Neatly packed up in piles. Not old clothes, but not new either. And on top of them, a pile of plastic bags, several from charity shops like Oxfam or Help the Aged.

  The cat moved over them carefully, carrying a limp form in his mouth.

  ‘Get away, you devil,’ said Hallows.

  He had seen something el
se on the top of the bags which he was trying to assess. Was it what he thought it was? He moved away, to think about it. Better not get too close.

  The whole place smelled of death. Dead rats, perhaps. Old dead rats, he thought. Nothing in this place, not even the clothes, was new.

  Why did I think the clothes should be new? he asked himself, as he dragged himself out into the shop. Birdie had locked the door but several shoppers were peering in. ‘Second-hand clothes in several sizes, that’s what we’ve got here.’

  ‘What do you make of it?’ asked Winifred. ‘ Old clothes shop down there? Or clothes of a murdered woman?’

  ‘How closely did you examine that pile of clothes?’

  ‘Just a quick look and then I moved away.’ Winifred had her answer ready.

  ‘Right.’ Better not say more just yet. ‘Did this shop ever sell clothes?’

  ‘Never, as far as I know. Anyway, not exactly gift-wrapped, are they? Did you notice the carrier bags?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘So did we. And we thought about the dead woman. It was a nasty moment.’

  ‘There has to be a connection. Maybe just coincidence.’ Or perhaps the murderer did it here. But this he did not say aloud.

  Hallows drew in a long breath as the cat came leaping out of the hole, dead rat in his mouth, and laid it at Winifred’s feet. She looked pleased. ‘ It’s a love token, you see.’

  ‘I dare say, Winifred, but it’s rotten.’ Superintendent Hallows withdrew into the corner of the shop, and spoke to Charmian on his mobile. ‘I don’t know what it means, but there are three piles of women’s clothes with a selection of plastic bags … There has to be a connection with the poor soul in the garden … no, nothing from the pathologist yet about either body and nothing about Amanda Warren. Fred Place from the Middlesex Pathology Unit is working on her.’ And he was well known to be thorough but slow as death itself. If death was slow. It was to be hoped their man would be quicker.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Birdie barring the way to shoppers and explaining that the shop would not open today, but that if she was allowed she would put a little table of books outside for them. She had meant to do this all along, she was busily explaining when Charmian Daniels arrived.