A Cure for Dying

by Jennie Melville

  Then she looked at him as he stood talking with one of his guests and realised that was exactly what he was. It was a farewell party he was giving. He had warded off death for a good while now, but his time was coming and he knew it. He was saying goodbye to his little family.

  She wondered if Humphrey understood this, and guessed he did. About the others she was not so sure, they had looked so happy.

  ‘Time we moved off,’ said Humphrey. ‘The first chukka will start in five minutes. They are always punctual when the Royals are here, especially if one of them is playing.’

  Charmian found she was able to take at least an intelligent interest in the game. Her diligent study of An Introduction to Polo by Marco had paid off. It had also given her some respect for the late Lord Mountbatten. As a young man he must have been very hard working to have been a naval officer, to have played polo as well as he did and to have written such a lucidly clever book about it. He was rich too, of course, and no doubt that helped. And those were leisured days.

  But thanks to him, she now had some idea of the subtleties of ‘striking’, and of the skills involved in ‘riding-off’ and the system of ‘calling’. It still looked a rough, tough game, but she understood now that there were rules. But it was hard on ponies as well as men.

  ‘Sturdy little beasts, aren’t they?’ murmured Humphrey at her elbow. ‘Tommy used to bring in ponies from the Argentine, they are much the strongest because of working with the cattle, but I don’t know if he’s been able to do that since the Falklands. Spoilt things a bit,’ he added reflectively.

  ‘Spoilt a lot of things.’ And quite a few people’s lives.

  ‘Some Argentinians are coming back into the game here,’ said Humphrey seriously, as if this was all that mattered. What a man he was for concentrating on the matter in hand. No doubt a contributing factor in his success.

  She still had little idea which side was winning when the interval came and was too proud to ask but, from the pleased murmurs all around her as they sallied out onto the pitch to tread in the sods, she guessed it was the side all her luncheon-party friends supported. Even on this point she could not be clear since it was a well mixed international group with a clutch of Americans, several Frenchmen and at least one German.

  Without surprise she saw that Kate was walking by Tommy Bingham’s side, her head bent towards him, her whole attitude one of graceful, affectionate support. Tommy was plainly enjoying her attentions. Kate could be a good girl sometimes, her godmother thought.

  The soft turf was not doing the heels of her pretty, pale leather shoes any good and she would rather not have been trudging dutifully around grinding in her heels, but everyone else was. Suddenly a few feet away she saw the Trust twins, one on either side of Mr Pilgrim who was thus satisfactorily captured. The bridal party, she thought. For the first time the two women were not identically dressed. Flora was in a flowered silk dress and the bride, if that was what she was, wore a thin chiffon in blue and white spots. The separation between them which she had foreseen was beginning.

  She excused herself to Humphrey and made her way towards them. Both women looked pleased to see her. Flora smiled, but Emmy delivered herself of the first complete sentence that Charmian had heard from her.

  ‘Miss Daniels, this is John Pilgrim, my husband-to-be.’

  Mr Pilgrim gave an uneasy smile. There was something in that smile that constituted a confession and convinced Charmian that he knew who she was, but before he could speak, Miriam Miller had forced her way through the crowd. ‘Flora, Emmy, dears, can I have a word?’

  As Emmy and Flora turned to Miriam, Charmian took the chance to speak to the bridegroom of destiny. She had been learning things about Mr Pilgrim.

  ‘Mr Pilgrim, or Joseph Archer or Eddie Turner, or whatever name you prefer, I hope you will make Emmy happy and go on making her happy. Since as far as I know you are not married to anyone else, your marriage to her will be legally binding whatever name you marry under.’

  ‘You don’t need to worry, Miss Daniels,’ Mr Pilgrim gave a nervous cough. ‘ I don’t know what you know about me, but I’m done with all that. I want to retire, Miss Daniels, I assure you, I want to retire. I am marrying to retire. I mean to be a good husband to Emmy. She suits me down to the ground.’

  And so did her money, Charmian thought, but there was something about the new Emmy that made her think that she could look after herself. Perhaps she always could.

  Miriam turned her attention to Charmian. ‘I’ve heard that Brian Gaynor has tried to kill himself.’ Her eyes were big and blue, demanding information.

  ‘Not true as far as I know.’ Though he might feel like it or wish he could.

  ‘But they haven’t been seen, any of them, for days now.’

  ‘They’ve gone to stay in a house on the coast while things are sorted out.’

  ‘And Joanna? One has heard such things.’

  Charmian looked away. ‘No, Joanna is not with them. She is having … treatment.’

  ‘In hospital?’

  Charmian was evasive. ‘Not quite a hospital.’

  ‘Is there anything one can do? I liked that child.’

  ‘If there is, I will tell you.’ Someone like Miriam, independent and clear-minded, might be a very good friend for Joanna eventually. She would need friends. ‘I will be seeing her one day soon.’

  ‘She’s such a brave child. She was so brave about it when her brother hurt his leg, fell on a nasty piece of rusty iron, went in really deep, blood pouring out, and she coped beautifully. So good of her when she’s terrified of blood.’

  Charmian considered Miriam’s words as she walked back to the pavilion with a silent Humphrey. ‘You’ve got your thinking face on,’ he said. ‘ I won’t interrupt.’

  ‘I am thinking.’

  Blood again. Frightened of blood.

  One of those little facts no one ever bothers to tell you about. A girl who didn’t like the sight of blood, a girl who had just started menstruating and might well be sensitive about that too. Charmian guessed that this case was not wrapped up, ready to be put away.

  Somehow it was not over, she had not seen the end of it.

  Dacre Park was a sedate, decrepit country house, built by a war profiteer after the Battle of Waterloo and run down in two successive great wars, which had been bought up by a far-seeing local authority in the 1960s for no great sum and turned into a residential home for children too difficult and worrying to stow away anywhere else.

  The Park had never been a place of great beauty since the original Dacre had wanted value for money in bricks and mortar rather than taste, but it had developed into a family house of some charm which had endeared itself to successive generations until the last Dacre had died in the Normandy landings. Now it was imbedded in a cluster of modern buildings and had a sad air about it, like a good old dog somehow tethered to a mongrel puppy.

  ‘Have you been to Dacre before?’ Ulrika was doing the driving, negotiating the bends of the narrow Berkshire lane with skill.

  ‘Heard of it. Never visited.’ Charmian was hanging onto the door nearest her, wondering what would happen if there was something parked round the next bend. They whizzed past a field of cows. ‘Is country air meant to be good for disturbed kids?’

  ‘This looks like deepest country, but it isn’t. There’s an industrial belt dependent on Reading to the west,’ Ulrika nodded westward, taking her eyes dangerously off the road. ‘And a new town, Brinkley, growing up fast to the east.’

  Almost a week had passed since Joanna had attacked her mother, then run away. This visit by Charmian had not been easy to arrange. The doctors had advised against it, even now it was only set up under Ulrika’s supervision. During this period there had been no more murders, nothing that came near to an attack on women, no threats. Even Chief Inspector Merry seemed to be coming round to the idea that all the trouble had emanated from Joanna after all. Proof he had not, acceptance he was beginning to admit to. ‘See what you c
an get,’ he had said to Charmian. ‘ You could be right, after all. Get her to say something.’

  ‘Do you come often?’ she asked Ulrika.

  ‘As often as I have a patient here. It’s a good place, does a good job, sheltering the children, offering various forms of therapy. Educating some of them.’

  ‘How long do they usually stay at the Park?’

  Ulrika shrugged, again a risky manoeuvre considering the speed at which she drove. ‘As long as they need. A year. Until they are sixteen, anyway. After that date, they are either free or in prison.’

  ‘And what happens today?’

  ‘I have the whole outfit lined up: Joanna, her parents, the brother if he wants to come, and her social worker. Oh, and her case worker at the Park. Then we talk. And talk. Something the Gaynors have been conspicuously bad at.’

  ‘And yet he’s a professional talker.’

  ‘I expect that is why.’

  ‘And if they don’t talk?’

  ‘Oh everyone does in the end. The Park somehow works it. It’s a good place. Understaffed, underfunded and under threat, of course, like all these institutions.’ There was a small car park with several empty spaces, one marked Dr Seeley. ‘Oh by the way, I ought to warn you to protect yourself. I’ve seen evil popping out of the walls at these sessions sometimes.’

  ‘Protect myself, how?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. What do you usually do? Pray or think good thoughts.’

  Ulrika parked her car, locking it carefully, and led Charmian in to be introduced to the Principal and the Warden. The first, a man whom Charmian recognised as someone she had seen in court one day, arguing on behalf of some young offender. The Warden she had never met before, but she seemed a bright and aggressive young woman wearing the standard uniform of ragged jeans, buffed trainer boots and a thin sweater.

  Ulrika might say that Dacre Park was understaffed, but there seemed plenty of people about. As far as she could judge there must be some six workers or so to every young inmate, which no doubt explained why these children seemed stronger and more aggressive than their protectors. They knew they were that important.

  ‘Why are all the women dressed like men?’ Charmian asked, as they sat in a great empty room, ringed with upright chairs, waiting for their party to arrive. ‘Jeans and boots?’

  ‘Isn’t it just practical working clothes?’ Ulrika looked down at her own attire. She too wore the same clothing, her boots were newer and more expensive, her shirt prettier, otherwise it was the same.

  ‘I think it’s for self-protection. I believe I would be nervous myself if I worked here.’ The children who were meant to be so weak, seemed so strong. Strong in their indifference, strong in what was possibly wickedness. Power did not seem balanced the way she had expected at all. It might be an illusion, of course. In the end society probably had the stronger hand to play.

  The clock struck and, promptly on the hour, their party filed in. Brian first, then Annabel who looked pale, Mark after them and finally Joanna with her social worker and her case worker from the Park.

  Without a word, they sat down round the room, staring at Ulrika and Charmian. It might not be hostility, but it was not friendliness either.

  With some dismay, Charmian observed that the two female Gaynors were now dressed in the penitential uniform of jeans and trainers and sweaters. It didn’t augur well.

  No one spoke. The minutes ticked by. One hour had been allotted to this interview and it looked like passing in silent communion.

  Ulrika looked at Charmian. ‘You start,’ she said blandly.

  Charmian heard her own voice say, ‘Mr Gaynor, the rumour is going round Merrywick that you have committed suicide. Do you want to comment on that?’

  ‘I have committed suicide, I should think anyone could see that. Professional suicide, anyway. More than one way of doing it, you know. And what’s more, I have taken the whole family with me.’

  ‘Not me,’ said the boy, Mark. He looked red and fearful. ‘ I’m not dead, Daddy.’

  Annabel started to cry silently, but she put an arm round the boy and moved her chair so that she could take her husband’s hand.

  Brian removed his hand and went up and knelt before his daughter. ‘Joanna, forgive?’

  Joanna did not answer. Presently she turned her chair to face the wall, then she walked slowly out of the room. The two social workers hurried after her. Presently one of them came back in and delivered her message.

  ‘Joanna asks me to say that in less than three years she will be sixteen. Until then she wishes to stay here and she does not want to see any of you again.’

  They sat out the rest of the hour in silence.

  At the end of it, Ulrika stood up and said briskly. ‘I think we may be able to do better than that next time. In spite of what you might think, we made a good start.’

  On the way home, Charmian said: ‘Did you really mean that about a good start?’

  ‘Oh yes, I see a lot of hope there.’

  ‘I thought it was awful. Quite horrible.’

  ‘Oh well, I told you to protect yourself.’

  Joanna might begin to look a hopeful case, as if they would succeed in casting out her devil, but the trouble was once you let evil out of the bag, where did it fly to? Come to that, where had it already flown to?

  ‘I suppose that hole, that conceptual hole, or real hole, as you think of it, that seemed so important—’

  ‘Was indeed important,’ broke in Ulrika.

  ‘Was really a hole in the family that she was trying to fill? Was she absolutely conscious of it, or was it a manifestation beyond her control that she could hardly put a name to? Family life is the devil,’ said Charmian. ‘ Perhaps we’d all be better coming out of eggs.’

  Ulrika drove on in silence. Then she said, using words she had used before, ‘There’s more than one sort of family, you know.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  But Charmian was a sensible, practical police officer, with a long experience of crime. Behind delinquency – even serious crime – was poverty, bad housing, and unemployment, not evil. Surely she was not obliged to believe in evil? Even less must she believe it could reach out and touch her.

  Nevertheless, she was glad of the presence of the healthy hedonist Muff in her house and of the lively company of Kate. All seemed to be going well with Kate at the moment. Her parents might, after all, not be divorcing and she was fascinated by Johnny.

  ‘I’m persuading him to take a university course,’ she announced. ‘He says he’s had enough of horses for the time being.’

  ‘Does he want to do this?’

  ‘I can work it. He’s very bright, you know. Anny thinks he’s a good thing.’

  Briefly, Charmian wondered if Johnny was a younger version of Mr Pilgrim because one only had to see Anny, her clothes, and the manner of her life, to know that there was money about. But she decided to give Johnny the benefit of the doubt.

  ‘I’m glad they’re not divorcing,’ she said of her friend Anny and her husband.

  Kate gave a tolerant shrug. ‘It’s the way they like to live. Couldn’t stand it myself, but it suits them. Apart, together, fighting, making-up, that’s how it’s been for years. It’s a way of life. Literally, I think. I mean, it saves them killing each other.’

  Charmian gave her a surprised look.

  ‘Has it never occurred to you, godmother?’

  ‘People don’t kill each other as easily as that,’ said Charmian.

  ‘Don’t they? I think they do. Depends on the family. Something genetic, running in the blood.’ It was lightly said, but perhaps meant all the more for that. ‘And I never said easily, it would never be easy.’

  ‘And what about you? What about your blood?’

  Kate laughed. ‘That’s what I like about Johnny. I could never kill him. I’d be safe, he’d be safe.’

  ‘What makes you so sure?’

  ‘It’s just something I feel about Johnny. We match. Our genes w
ould pool well. Making good blood, I suppose you could call it.’

  The opposite of making bad blood. ‘You are a funny girl,’ and Charmian touched her affectionately.

  Good blood, bad blood, menstrual blood, equine blood.

  ‘Blood is an interesting subject,’ she thought. ‘ I’m sure it was the sight of her own blood coming from her cut leg that morning in her grandmother’s flat that sent Joanna over the top.’ And waking up to a man’s face peering down on her, of course. With her background that would be alarming enough.

  But Kate was still talking. ‘By the way, Johnny says his boss is pretty bad. Had one remission after another. But now no more. They’re all praying for him to get better or their jobs are gone. Not only that, they love the old boy.’

  ‘I didn’t think them the praying sort.’

  ‘Well, whatever they do instead. Cast spells or something.’ She added casually, ‘Like another cup of coffee?’

  In the county-police forensic science laboratory on the outskirts of the busy town of Slough, where the work on the ‘forensic debris’ collected in and around the three murder victims was being done, they were also interested in blood. Any trace of blood on anything was automatically tested and given a grouping. A careful cross-reference was being kept.

  It so happened that Dr Stanley Easterborough, the principal scientific officer involved, had also been the man to whom had been entrusted the bundle of clothes worn by Charmian Daniels when she had been attacked.

  At that time he had examined all the clothing for any blood that might have come from her attacker. He had been assured that Charmian herself had not bled; He had done his work, filed his report, trusting that someone of intelligence would read it, and pushed the clothes away in a drawer. It had been a busy day.

  But now, a few weeks later, on that very morning when Charmian was drinking coffee in her kitchen, he found himself in a housekeeping mood. When he was feeling happy he liked to do some tidying up, and on this day he was in a splendid mood. An article he had written for a distinguished academic publication had been accepted for publication, which was the more satisfactory when he had also learned that one written by his enemy and rival for the top job had been turned down. That sort of thing cheered a chap up. What is more, he had made a very early start, coming in with the dawn chorus because he wanted a day off tomorrow. It was barely breakfast-time yet, and no one except the cleaners were around.