Flowers for a Dead Witch, page 8
‘Has anyone been to see him yet?’ asked Middleton.
‘Not yet, sir,’ said Blakey. ‘The rectory’s by the church, across the fields, and the men are still doing the centre of the village.’
‘I’ll go and see him myself, after we get the pathologist’s report,’ said Middleton. ‘A man of the cloth might be the next best thing to local police knowledge. What time will they have a report that adds up to anything?’
They said around three-thirty, sir.’
A patrol car came to a halt in the pub yard outside the window and a plainclothes man got out. He entered the parlour, stamping his feet on the doormat.
‘Got a lead at last, Chief Inspector,’ he said.
Middleton nodded.
‘The chap at the village garage—Wakes—says he was woken up early this morning by a car drawing up at the end of the lane leading to the graveyard—a Mini. Being a mechanic, he recognized the sound of the engine.’
‘What time was that?’ asked Blakey.
‘He didn’t check the time, Sergeant. But he reckons it was well past midnight, and it didn’t wake him up when it drove away.’
A clock struck half-past two, and they heard the landlord calling ‘Time, Gentlemen, please’ from the public bar at the other side of the wall.
‘That could have been the killer dumping the body,’ said Blakey. ‘It had to be at night. He couldn’t have risked it in the daylight!’
‘Quite so,’ said the red-headed chief inspector. ‘But what was he doing there again this morning?—when he attacked Miss Lestrange.’
Dr Mays had been called out to a confinement; he left a message with his wife—for Polly—to say that he would be round at the hall to see Miss Granchester in the late afternoon perhaps.
‘This appalling business has thrown his routine completely out,’ said Mrs Mays, who appeared to have sunk her near-hysteria in a determined attention to the commonplace warp and weft of a GP’s wife. ‘Apart from Miss Granchester, there are two other serious cases on the daily visiting list, and they’re all far-flung. Heaven only knows what time we shall sit down to dinner this evening.’ She had made up her face again recently. In close-up, Polly could see a heavy dusting of powder around her eyes and nose that did little to hide the fact that she’d been crying.
Polly herself had freshened up in the bathroom, and had discovered—to her horror—that there were brownish-yellow fingermarks on her throat.
‘Could you lend me a scarf, please?’ she asked.
Mrs Mays provided a silk Paisley square, which Polly folded and knotted high on her neck.
‘Griselda’s going to drive you back to the Hall,’ said Mrs Mays.
There was no arguing it: the girl was already in the driving-seat of a Mini outside the front door, pinch-lipped and staring coldly ahead of her. Her gaze never shifted as she leaned to unsnap the lock of the passenger’s door. As soon as Polly was in, she slammed off the brake and roared the little car away with a jerk.
They passed the Green Man, with the parked police cars, and turned down the village street towards Mondisfield before Polly broke the silence:
‘It seems fantastic that such a thing could happen in a small community like Denwich.’ There was nothing else to say. She sensed no hope of making communication with the girl, nor did she want it. The outrage of the attack upon her, and the traumatic experience of her return to the world of living and breathing people had left her with a desire to turn her back on Denwich, the dying edge of England and everyone on it. And that included this sulky-faced teenage beauty sitting beside her.
Griselda Mays wiped the misted windscreen with the back of her gloved hand, and said: ‘What kind of communities have you in mind, where murder is acceptable and commonplace? Smallness can be no criterion, surely. I seem to remember some of the most ghastly multiple killings of recent years have taken place in country districts—of your own continent!’ And the last phrase was a taunt.
She’s trying to fight me, thought Polly. And there isn’t anything left in me to fight with. Not today.
So she didn’t reply. A minute later, the gates of Mondisfield swam into view beyond the flickering windscreen-wipers. They lumbered up the rutted drive and over the moat bridge. The house looked cheerless in the rain, and self-consciously alien. And her little red sports car was parked outside the front porch.
Griselda braked with unnecessary violence in front of the house. She stayed Polly’s hand as it reached for the catch of the passenger door. Her lovely eyes were level and dangerous.
‘Just one thing,’ she said. ‘Just keep your darling hooks off Horrible Arthur. No! Please don’t bother to give me a well-turned argument about such a thing never having entered your mind. Just leave him alone, that’s all.’
Then the door was somehow open, and Polly was standing and watching the Mini roaring off down the drive.
There was a vision in her mind, of a boy crowned with a chaplet of paper roses, as she turned and ran her hand across the hood of her car.
The key was in the ignition. Ted Wakes must have devoted his Sunday morning to repairing and delivering it back to her.
It offered temporary escape—from everyone and everything.
It was about this time that one of Middleton’s men—in fact he was a young uniformed constable from Ipswich: a reinforcement to the CID squad, who had never met the red-headed chief inspector before that day—eased open a sagging, string-hinged gate and trudged through the ankle-deep ooze of a chicken yard to a passenger coach bearing the flaking livery of the late London & North Eastern Railway that stood, wheelless and over-hung with dripping clematis, at the far end of the yard.
It seemed incredible to the constable—an East Anglian, but town-bred and tidy—that anyone could be living in such decayed squalor; but there was smoke rising in the wet air from a tin chimney in the coach roof, and the door at the right-hand end—with its firstclass symbol part obliterated by the crudely painted legend: Rowbotham Knock Hard—was framed by a rickety trellis porch. Against all probability, the old railway coach was somebody’s castle.
His hard knock brought a face peering through the net curtains, and presently the door opened outwards. The expression on the old woman’s face was familiar to him, even after only six months on the beat: it was the look of the aged and very poor, who exist on the perilous seesaw between subsistence and starvation that can be so easily unbalanced by the heavy hand of authority. To her, his uniform might mean anything from a delay in the payment of her old age pension to a fine for not licensing her dog.
‘What do you want?’
‘It’s nothing much, ma,’ he said kindly. ‘We’re just making a few routine enquiries. Nothing to do with you, really, but we’re asking for everybody’s help.’
‘Enquiries?’ Her rheumy eyes were still wary. Then she saw him shrug forward his waterproof cape to make a shelter for his notebook. ‘You’d better come in then. But wipe your feet first.’
The narrow passage beyond the door was neatly carpeted with a strip of blue drugget, and the original birds-eye maple of the first class panelling was polished the way it must have been when the thing had carried top-hatted north country tycoons and their hobble-skirted wives down to London, for Deauville and Cannes. The young constable looked down at his caked gumboots.
‘That’s quite all right, thanks, Mrs Rowbotham. Won’t take a few minutes. Just a couple of questions. First, did you hear a car stop in the road last night?’
She shook her head. ‘No. We always sleep sound. Early to bed and early to rise.’
‘Second, have you anyone missing from here? And we’re interested in a woman. Do you have a woman relative, or a lodger perhaps, who hasn’t been home overnight?’
‘No. Nobody here but me and my old man.’
‘No relatives, friends or neighbours got anyone missing?’
She shook her head, bemused.
‘That’s all, then, Mrs Rowbotham, thanks for your help, and sorry for taking up your time. Good afternoon.’
Her husband was in the middle compartment of the carriage, which they had tricked out as a sitting-cumdining-room: a cased American clock, its face painted with a view of Gettysburg cemetery; a fretwork knicknacktory holding a display of Staffordshire figures and fairings; antimacassars on the two plum velvet armchairs; a pot-bellied stove that crackled companionably. He sat, grey hair cropped, with a shawl gathered over his thin shoulders, like a Trappist. The Mons star, Service and Victory medals of World War I dangled from his waistcoat breast, and he was sucking spoonfuls of boiled egg.
‘You didn’t tell him right, gel,’ he said, when she reentered.
‘What didn’t I tell him right, then, clever?’
‘Why, he was on about someone gone missing. And you know well enough that the parson weren’t at church this morning—and you the only one there,’cept for Biddy Machin and the gels from Morley’s Farm.’
His wife slid a hod of coke into the stove and slammed down the lid.
‘Get on with your tea, you daft ha’porth,’ she said. ‘The lad was asking after a woman. The parson ain’t a woman.’
CHAPTER VII
What she was looking for, she decided, was the noise and the looks and the smell of ordinary people; and the crowded, wide streets of a town. The road unrolled before her. Soaked fields and hedgerows swept past. Cute villages of half-timbered houses with their upper storeys overhanging the roadway; private and self-regarding. And not a soul. She thought nostalgically of the cosy pub in Cambridge, where she had gone with her girl-friend May: the quiet hum of commonplace talk, and the friendly girl behind the bar, with her photos of her sister who had emigrated to Canada with her husband and baby. But she was driving almost diametrically opposite from Cambridge, surely.
The town took her unawares. A turn in the road brought her to a wide promenade skirting the sea; and all on the left were tall terraced houses of white stucco: Suffolk Residential Hotel, Seaview, Robbinsholme, Riviera Guest House, Bed and Breakfast, Apartments Vacant. Cast-iron lamp standards and public conveniences. Billboards and people—people scurrying from the rain under umbrellas, for sure, but fellow-humans of the commonplace world outside.
She eased her car through the traffic of a crowded high street; and took an esoteric pleasure in having to stop for a red light, where she was able to flip a gay wave in reply to a wink from the driver of a truck alongside.
The high street widened out into an open square, on the seaward side of which was the boxy glass-and-concrete entrance complex of a pier, with a Union Jack flapping over a central arch. Beyond that, the pier straddled the North Sea on high stilts. She turned the car in under a glass awning, nose to the pavement, and cut the engine. Immediately in front of her a red neon sign spelt out, Pier Bar.
The bar was closed. Obedient to British licensing laws, it would remain so for the next two-and-a-half hours—she was informed of this, with incredulity, by a passer-by who saw her trying the door. But there was a kayf next door, he said.
The cafe was self-service. Tea and coffee were dispensed from twin urns by an elderly woman in a beehive hair-do with pearl stud ear-rings. She was washing dirty cups in a sink behind the counter, without the benefit of drying. An imp of curiosity drove Polly to peer over and see the sinkful of brown sludge in which the marginal ablutions were being carried out. She turned hesitantly, like someone who has forgotten something, and walked quickly out of the nearest door—which led into a pintable parlour, where the slamming beat of piped pop music played counterpoint to the sound of the one-armed bandits.
An attendant in a cubby-hole looked up from his paperback to give her two shillings’ worth of coppers. There were six small boys trying the machines in turn, and none of them took the slightest notice of Polly. She crossed to the centre aisle, where the machines were standing in two lines, back to back, and let the first bandit take her for threepence. Two lemons and a bunch of cherries—and what the hell am I doing in this ghastly place, with its smell of stale tobacco smoke and its painted frieze of Donald Duck and Co?
She moved dully down the line, expending her coppers as quickly as the machines would swallow them. It was a big town, an important east coast resort—surely there would be a large hotel somewhere: a crowded, impersonal place of deep carpets and the discreet hum of polite conversation in a palm court lounge, where she could be served tea and crumpets by a friendly old waiter? Yes, that was it.
Twelve more pennies and then off.
The next machine was an odd man out among the nickel-plated, enamelled bandits: it was cased in old mahogany, like a grandfather clock, and the legend on its fretted top read:
A Hanging
Insert Id and witness a genuine British execution.
Behind the glass front was a representation of a Victorian prison façade, with towers and castellated battlements and great double doors. Intrigued, she slid a penny into a worn slot. Nothing happened for a few moments. Then a bell tolled, and a row of marionettes in blue appeared on the ramparts. The gates flew open to reveal a scaffold, where the condemned man stood with a minute bag over his head and the rope in place. A parson wagged an arm, stiffly, at the doomed man (a last blessing—or an admonishment?). The bell tolled again, the trapdoor opened and the tiny marionette jerked, for the umpteen thousandth time, on the end of his little bit of rope. The doors closed. Clockwork machinery whirred to a halt. End of show. The simple pleasures of the animal-loving British.
Polly bowed her head in distaste—and saw a pair of tweed trouser legs ending in brown brogue shoes.
He—whoever he was—was working the machine that backed on to the Hanging thing, and the rest of him was entirely hidden from her. She hardly gave him a thought till she moved on to the next one-armed bandit—and the brogue shoes moved with her.
It still wasn’t important. Not till a wayward impulse caused her to linger and use up six pennies, then move quickly to the next machine, and then the next.
Every time she looked down he was opposite her.
A pick-up. He must have come in through the street door and marked her down as a likely pick-up. Come the end of the line of machines, and Mr Small-Time Casanova would in all probability contrive a confrontation; maybe a tiny head-on collision and a scattering of dropped pennies that he hopes I’ll help him to gather up. Not on your life, buster!
Polly dropped the remaining coins into her pocket and headed straight for a pair of glass doors leading out on to the pier. Eyes fixed firmly ahead of her, and never looking back.
The rain had stopped, and it was unexpectedly warm in the shelter of the wrought-iron and glass windbreak that ran down the centre of the pier. The air was tinglingly fresh, but with that tangy, half-appetizing ocean smell of decaying seaweed and molluscs. After the seedy pin-table parlour, it was an enchantment.
Half-way down the pier an old man in a Breton beret and ankle-length raincoat was fishing. He cast his long rod; she heard the silken hiss of the line and the plop of the baited hook in the crawling, grey sea. She walked towards him. It was curiously still and quiet on the leeward side of the windbreak.
He smiled round at her: a very old man with a simian face burnt mahogany by the sun; drooping white moustache. His head was nodding with ague, and his hands knotted with arthritis.
‘Not much biting today,’ he said. ‘Going to give it just this one go, then back home for tea. You a visitor?’
‘Sort of.’
‘American, eh?’
‘Canadian.’
‘Got a nephew in Denver. That far from where you are?’
‘Quite a way.’
Nodding, he eased himself down into a sitting position on a wooden box, and hunched his thin shoulders. The fingers of his right hand, frail-looking as the claws of a small bird, were laid along the nylon line, and it occurred to her that he relied on the sense of touch to tell him when the fish were biting; surely those old eyes couldn’t see the tiny red float rising and falling down there.
When the float shuddered and disappeared, he was ready for it; jerking at the rod and rising stiffly to his feet.
‘It’s a big’un! Get hold of the net and be ready to take it! The net, lass … don’t stand there gawping!’
She fumbled the handle of the net that was leaning against the rail of the pier; by the time she had picked it up again, the old man was reeling in his line, and the flapping fish was clear of the water. It looked very big, and full of fight.
The old man was quivering with excitement and fatigue; the effort of raising his heavy catch to the height of the pier was draining his strength; he was sagging against the rail, and levering the bent rod across the top of it.
‘I’m … going to whip it over,’ he croaked. ‘Get ready to catch!’
Totally involved, now, against her will, she tensed herself by the rail and held out the net. The dancing fish dipped towards the water as the line sagged; next instant it was jerked high in the air above her head. She made a blind thrust with the net—and got it caught up in a loop of the line.
The old man screamed despairingly: ‘Now look what you’ve done!’
The fish landed with a thud on the wooden planking near her feet and began a tortuous fandango of death. Both she and the old man were caught up in a cat’s cradle of nylon coils.
‘Grab hold of it, then!’ he cried. ‘Before it goes over the side.’
She stooped and took the fish by the tail during a moment of stillness. Her skin crawled with revulsion at the slimy touch. Then it flipped effortlessly out of her grasp.
‘Do something! Grab it with both hands! Don’t let it get away … it’s my fish!’ His legs had gone from under him, and he was sprawled back against the rails, beret awry on the bald dome of his head, tears of senile petulance streaming over his cheekbones.
‘Don’t lose my lovely fish, you silly young bitch!’
Frightened and angry, she lunged again and made contact with both hands—one at the narrowness near the tail, the other just behind the dilating gills.
‘Get the hook out … and drop it in the bucket!’ croaked her old tormentor.
