Daughters of Darkness

by Sally Spencer

Is he a mind reader – or just a thoughtful host?

  ‘A dash of milk would be fine,’ I say, reminding myself that this is supposed to be an interrogation, not a tea ceremony.

  He gives me my dash of milk – perfectly judged – then says, ‘So what is it you want to know?’

  ‘I’d like to know what motive you think the murderer had for killing your wife,’ I tell him.

  He shrugs. ‘She was a crazy person.’

  I shake my head. ‘With all due respect, Dr Stockton, that’s really not good enough,’ I say.

  ‘What do you mean, “it’s not good enough”?’ he shoots back at me, his tone taking on a hard edge that is meant to be a signal that he is on the verge of being offended.

  ‘You’re an intelligent man. You must have considered what happened from all possible angles, so I think it’s unlikely that you don’t know exactly what I mean,’ I tell him.

  He gives me a half-smile. ‘Maybe I do know – but I’m not the one being tested here.’

  ‘I wasn’t aware that either of us was being tested,’ I say.

  His smile widens a little. ‘Yes, you were.’

  ‘Yes, I was,’ I agree, and I smile too, because that’s the best thing to do when you’ve been caught out.

  ‘So why don’t you tell me why my answer isn’t good enough for you?’ he suggests.

  ‘If your wife had been murdered in some public place – say, for example, at a railway station – then the murder could be seen as a random attack by a deranged person. In that case, your wife would just have been unlucky to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. But it wasn’t like that at all, was it?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t.’

  ‘In this case, the killer took a train from London, then a bus, and then walked nearly a mile. So her motive for murder may not have been a logical one, but she did have a motive.’

  ‘Go on,’ he says.

  ‘There are two possibilities. The first is that the woman had something against anthropologists in general, so your wife was killed not for who she was but for what she represented. If that’s the case, then I’m no use to you at all, because I’ll never be able to find her. But if it was just any old anthropologist she was after, then surely she would have chosen one in a more convenient location.’

  ‘Agreed,’ he says.

  ‘The second possibility,’ I plough on, ‘is that the killer knew your wife at some point in the past, and your wife did something which offended her so much that her only possible response was to commit murder.’

  Stockton nods again. ‘Five minutes ago, I would have said you had no chance of catching the murderer,’ he tells me.

  ‘And what would you say now?’ I ask – because that’s what he wants me to do, and if being his dupe is the way to get his cooperation, then I’ll put on a jester’s cap with bells on if needs be.

  ‘Now, I would say you have almost no chance.’ He takes a sip of his tea, though it must be lukewarm by now. ‘What is it you would like to ask me, Miss Redhead?’

  ‘I’d like to know about the times in her life when your wife wasn’t living in Oxford.’

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘Forever.’

  ‘Grace was born in the Far East,’ he says. ‘Her father was a missionary out there. He went out on a two-year posting and never left. He and his wife are both buried in Papua New Guinea.’

  ‘Did they send Grace back to boarding school in England?’

  Stockton laughs. ‘The missionary society couldn’t afford fancy things like boarding schools.’

  ‘So where was she educated?’

  ‘In the local school, where there was one, and by her mother when there wasn’t. When she was seventeen, the head of the London office of the missionary society – who’d met her briefly on a fact-finding visit to PNG, and been very impressed by her – suggested that she should be tested by London University. The university agreed, and she took the examination at the British High Commission in Port Moresby.’

  ‘And passed with flying colours?’ I ask.

  Stockton looks at me almost pityingly.

  ‘Of course she didn’t pass with flying colours,’ he says. ‘The exam was aimed at students educated in the Home Counties, and she’d been brought up in the Papuan rain forest. She simply didn’t have the cultural background or values that were implicit in the examination, and she failed it in quite a spectacular manner. Fortunately, however, the tutor who marked the paper was perceptive enough to see that the brain behind all those wrong answers was a quite exceptional one. And then, of course, she had her languages in her favour.’

  ‘Languages?’

  ‘Do you know how many languages are spoken in PNG?’

  ‘No,’ I admit, ‘I don’t.’

  ‘It has been calculated there are 820 languages, which is twelve per cent of the world’s total number of languages. And this, mind you, in a population of only five million. The majority of languages, in fact, are spoken by less than a thousand people.’

  ‘And Grace spoke one of these languages?’

  ‘Better than that. Because her parents had moved around so much, she was fluent in two of the languages, and had a good working knowledge of three more. That more than made up for any deficiencies, and she was immediately offered a scholarship.’

  ‘So she came back to England?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘In order for her to come back, she’d have to have been here before. And she hadn’t. She’d visited Singapore once, but that had been the full extent of her travel. The rest of her life had been spent solely in Papua.’

  ‘It must have been a great shock to her.’

  ‘It was – and to make matters worse, she arrived in Britain just as the war was starting to hot up. In fact, she’d hardly settled into her college accommodation when the Germans began bombing London almost on a nightly basis, and the college was evacuated to Cambridge. But she didn’t go with them.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Stockton laughs. ‘She told me that the reason she stayed was because a Trinka woman does not run – she stands with her people,’ he says.

  ‘What’s a Trinka woman?’

  ‘They’re one of the tribes her parents tried to convert, and they’re also the subject of her Ph.D.’ He laughs again. ‘She was half-joking, of course. What she really felt was that pursuing her own education was a self-indulgent luxury while there was a war going on, and she’d be far better employed making herself useful.’

  ‘What did she do?’

  ‘She worked part-time for the Ministry of Food, and part-time for a girls’ school in Southwark. That was in the daytime. At night-time, she was a fire warden. She wanted to operate an anti-aircraft gun, but everyone agreed that you could never have a woman doing that. They were wrong, of course – she’d have made an excellent gunner.’

  ‘When did you meet her?’ I ask.

  ‘I was just coming to that. We met in 1943. I’d been serving as a commando in North Africa, but I got unlucky and had to be invalided out. Anyway, they’d patched me up nicely in hospital and I’d managed to convince the powers-that-be I was fit enough to take part in the invasion of France.’

  ‘What rank were you?’ I ask.

  ‘Does it matter?’

  It didn’t a minute ago. But it does now – because you can sometimes learn as much from the questions that people don’t want to answer as from the questions that they do.

  ‘No, it doesn’t matter,’ I say, then add the cunning kicker, ‘not if it really bothers you to tell me.’

  ‘It doesn’t bother me at all. I just can’t see the point.’

  ‘Humour me, then.’

  ‘I was a major.’

  ‘You must have been rather young to be a major.’

  ‘There was a war going on, and with all the bullets and bombs whizzing around, there was quite a lot of what we euphemistically called “staff turnover”, so there was plenty of scope for stepping into dead men’s shoes �
�� I mean that literally. And since you seem so interested in my military progress – though I can see no reason why you should be – you’d perhaps like to know that I was a lieutenant colonel by the time the war ended.’

  ‘Did you win any medals?’

  ‘No,’ he says – and I’m sure that while it’s not actually a lie, it’s not entirely the truth, either.

  ‘What are you hiding?’ I probe.

  ‘I’m not hiding anything,’ he says, evasively.

  ‘Come on, now, Dr Stockton,’ I coax.

  ‘All right, I was offered the VC,’ he says.

  ‘What do you mean, you were offered it?’

  ‘I turned it down.’

  The Victoria Cross!

  The highest of all the military awards.

  For anyone who doesn’t know, it was created in 1857 by Queen Victoria (surprise, surprise!) and despite the fact that millions of British soldiers have been involved in all manner of warfare since then, it has been awarded less than fourteen hundred times.

  And he says he turned it down!

  ‘Why did you do that?’ I ask.

  And now I’m fired with a genuine curiosity that has little or nothing to do with the case.

  ‘I killed some men – more than I care to remember – because that was the only way I could think of to fight the evil which was afoot in Europe,’ he says. ‘But I’m not proud of it – and I certainly didn’t want to be rewarded for robbing other human beings of their lives.’

  ‘You weren’t awarded it for killing people,’ I point out. ‘You were awarded it for your courage.’

  ‘Courage!’ he repeats, bitterly. ‘When Jesus and his disciples were in the Garden of Gethsemane, the High Priests’ men came and seized Our Lord. But when one of His own people fought back, and cut off the ear of one of the High Priest’s men, Jesus told him to desist. That is courage.’ He stops, and suddenly looks rather embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘I was preaching to you.’

  ‘That’s quite all right. Tell me more about meeting your wife.’

  ‘We met in ’43. We fell in love almost immediately, and were married within weeks. We both desperately wanted children. It would have made sense to wait until after the war before we started trying, but given the kind of soldier I was, we both accepted there was a good chance I would be killed, and a child would be my way of leaving a little of me behind.’ Stockton pauses, and – for once – looks uncomfortable. ‘Grace was a virgin.’ He pauses again, to take a breath. ‘We were both virgins, as a matter of fact. But we were lucky, and just before I re-joined my unit, we found that Grace was pregnant.’

  ‘She didn’t come with you?’

  ‘Absolutely not! She couldn’t have come where I was going. I wasn’t even allowed to tell her where that was.’

  ‘So what did she do?’

  ‘She stayed in London – she insisted on it. She still had her two jobs, and once the Blitz had ended, she devoted the time it freed up to what I suppose we would call social work these days, but back then we simply thought of as lending a helping hand where a helping hand was needed.’

  ELEVEN

  7th May, 1944

  The reason why Grace chose to cross the road outside the King’s Head to talk to Jane, who was standing on the opposite corner, could have been that Jane looked so forlorn and miserable that only someone with a heart of stone could have ignored her and just walked by on the other side.

  It could have been that – but it wasn’t.

  It could also have been that she felt an affinity with the other woman, because they were both so visibly pregnant.

  But it wasn’t that either.

  What compelled – almost commanded – Grace to cross the road, was that, even at a distance, she could tell that this woman, who was so totally different to her in every possible way on a superficial level, was her kimpum.

  She would have found it hard to explain to anyone else on this cold damp island what kimpum (which was a Trinka word) actually meant. She supposed the closest translation would be ‘secret sister’ or perhaps ‘hidden sister’, but neither of these words came anywhere near to really pinning down the concept.

  Family duties and responsibilities were at the core of Trinka beliefs, and the kimpum was merely an extension of that system. There was no rule by which you could recognize a kimpum – no criteria you could use to judge whether or not this person was the real thing. Indeed, not every woman even had a kimpum – but if you were one who did, you were expected to recognize her immediately when you caught sight of her, and to make yourself at one with her as soon as you could.

  So Grace crossed the road.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, ‘I’m Grace.’

  Jane looked her up and down – without really looking at all – then said, in a semi-wheedling voice, ‘I’m Jane. You haven’t got a cigarette, have you?’

  ‘No, I’m afraid I haven’t. I don’t smoke.’

  ‘Well, then, you’re no bloody use to me, and you can just piss off,’ Jane said harshly.

  ‘I’d like to talk.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t. If you’re on the game, you’re competition that I don’t want. And if you’re not on the game, you’ll only put customers off by standing there. So, like I said, you can just piss off.’

  On the game! Grace would have had no idea what Jane was talking about when she first arrived in London, because prostitution simply did not exist in Trinka society. But she had been there for nearly five years now, and she was getting to know how things in the corrupt and rotting so-called ‘civilized’ world actually worked.

  ‘I’m not “on the game”,’ she said, realizing, as she spoke them, how awkward the words sounded coming out of her mouth. ‘I’m only in Canning Town because I’m conducting a survey for the Ministry of Food.’

  The look in Jane’s eyes said she had absolutely no idea what any of that meant – and really didn’t care one way or the other – and Grace realized that she would have to adopt another approach.

  ‘How much do your customers usually pay you?’ she asked.

  ‘What’s that got to do with you, you nosy bloody cow?’

  ‘If you take me back to your place for a little talk, I’ll pay you a pound,’ Grace said.

  ‘I don’t do women,’ Jane told her, contemptuously. ‘Everybody’s got to draw the line somewhere, and that’s mine. To tell you the truth, I think the whole lezzie thing is bloody disgusting.’

  ‘I don’t want to have sex with you,’ Grace said – and she found herself wondering just how two women could possibly have sex. ‘All I want is for us to have a talk.’

  ‘So we just have a talk, and you give me a pound?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Jane held out her hand. ‘Give it to me now then.’

  To give her the money would be a mistake, but it would also be a mistake not to give her the money. Grace took a one pound note out of her purse, tore it neatly down the middle, and handed one half to the other woman.

  ‘You’re not stupid, are you?’ Jane asked.

  There was a certain grudging admiration behind the comment, and that, Grace supposed, was at least a start.

  TWELVE

  ‘Grace stopped working at the ministry and the school about two weeks before Julia was born,’ Derek Stockton says. ‘She never returned to the ministry, but after a couple of months she did go back to the school for a few weeks.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then she left.’

  ‘Do you mean she left the school or that she left London?’

  ‘Both. She came to Oxford.’

  ‘Which raises two questions,’ I say. ‘Why did she leave London, and why did she choose Oxford?’

  ‘She left London because she was almost hit by a doodlebug …’ Dr Stockton pauses, and looks at me inquiringly. ‘You do know what a doodlebug is, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, it’s a V-1 missile – a flying bomb.’

  ‘And that made her realize it was not j
ust her life she was risking by staying there – it was our baby’s as well. Your second question is, why did she come to Oxford? And the answer is that she came here because she already had somewhere to live.’

  ‘She had relatives here?’

  ‘No, her only living relatives were her father and mother. But I’d started studying at the university before war broke out, and I owned a flat on St Giles.’ He pauses again, as if he wants to assess how I’m taking this, and when my face gives nothing away, he continues, ‘I’ve never been what you might call rich, Miss Redhead, but I’ve always been comfortably off.’

  ‘And she stayed here until the war ended?’

  ‘Yes, by the time I came back, she’d already transferred her studies from London University to St Luke’s, and was well into her bachelor’s degree.’

  ‘I don’t ever recall seeing her in college,’ I admit.

  ‘That’s because we didn’t think it was healthy for us both to work in the same college, and so she accepted a fellowship at Balliol.’ Stockton takes another sip of his cold tea. ‘We were married for nearly thirty years,’ he resumes. ‘We weren’t constantly together – we both did lecture tours, and she went to New Guinea several times to conduct fieldwork – but we were together more than we weren’t, and it’s sometimes difficult to accept that it’s all over.’

  I want to ask him if his religion makes it easier to bear – if he can accept it all as part of God’s plan, and if he believes that when he dies they will be reunited. But this is just curiosity on the part of Jennie the atheist (who is searching for something – anything – to commit herself to), and it has nothing to do with Jennifer Redhead PI’s work, so instead I say, ‘Since you don’t recognize the woman on the CCTV, it’s most likely she will have known Grace either in London during the war, or on the lecture circuit, although we can’t dismiss the possibility that they met when Grace was doing her fieldwork.’

  ‘Agreed,’ Stockton says.

  ‘How likely is it that the killer knew her in London?’

  ‘Not very likely, I would have thought. If she hated Grace that much, why did she wait nearly thirty years to do anything about it?’

  That’s true, but it’s hard to see one of the people from the rarefied society in which she’d moved since then doing it either.