COFFIN WAITING

by

GWENDOLINE BUTLER

GEOFFREY BLES

52 DOUGHTY STREET, LONDON

COFFIN WAITING

“She’s a magnet for every lunatic between here and Land’s End,” groaned John Coffin, lord of a Metropolitan police division south of the Thames. “I adore her,” said young Juliet Duveen. “She’s a dishonest fraud,” said someone. “You bring trouble,” said the little masseuse. Life, for many people, orbited round Roxanne Roland, the beautiful, passionate, clever enigma, Welfare Officer at the local biscuit factory. And now she had roused the interest of Miss Isobel Ludbrook of the South London Society for Psychical Research, who insisted Roxanne was complaining of ‘manifestations’. And it was rather odd that Juliet should find a dead pigeon on the doorstep, that Roxanne should have a terror of walking into a room to find lifeless figures arranged in a conversation-piece. For that was just what did happen, and it was by no means the last horror.

Gwendoline Butler has received much praise for her creation of this nebulous, slightly seedy district of London, her deep interest in the relationships of her characters and the environment that has produced them. coffin waiting shows all her gifts to advantage

Also by Gwendoline Butler

COFFIN FOR BABY

COFFIN IN OXFORD

THE DULL DEAD

THE MURDERING KIND

© GWENDOLINE BUTLER, 1964

This book is fiction. All characters and incidents are entirely imaginary

First published in 1964

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY COX & WYMAN LTD., FAKENHAM

Extract from The Times of Friday, October 28th, 196-

The inquest was adjourned on three dead women.

Extract from the New York Herald Tribune of Saturday, October 29th, 196-

In London yesterday the inquest was adjourned on the bodies of three women found dead in one basement room in a house in South-East London. The police believe that the cause of death was the same in each case.

Headline in the Giornale d’ltalia of Saturday, October 29th, 196-

Another London Mass Murderer

Part One

I

IT WAS THE morning of Wednesday the 19th of October. Roxanne Roland, Welfare Officer in the large London factory of the biscuit makers, Bramley & Appleby, was working in her office.

She took three telephone calls. One was for the laundry over some lost overalls, the second was from her lodger, a girl called Juliet Duveen.

And the third was from a Miss Ludbrook.

“This is Miss Ludbrook here, Isobel Ludbrook, secretary to the South London Society for Psychical Research. I’m ringing in answer to your letter about your house. Of course, we’re very interested…”

“My house?” said Roxanne faintly. “Do you mind starting that sentence again - I don’t understand.”

“But you wrote, Miss Roland,” the voice protested with reproach. “You wrote to us, telling us that the house you inhabit, No. 4 Prince Consort Square, is haunted. Badly haunted, you said, riddled with manifestations. I think you used the word ’evil’.”

“Oh no, no,” cried Roxanne. “It’s not that way at all.”

“It must be that way in some sense, Miss Roland, or you wouldn’t have written.”

“I didn’t write,” said Roxanne.

“Oh but you did, Miss Roland.” The voice was openly indignant now. “I have the letter here. Wait a minute…”

“No,” said Roxanne faintly, “No, please don’t. Look, I’ll call you sometime later,” and with a trembling hand she put the receiver down, so that the line went dead at her end while still live the other.

“I’ll call you again, Miss Roland,” said the woman politely into the dead telephone.

She put the instrument down and stood there thinking.

Yes, it was a highly satisfactory reaction.

In the summer of her twenty-first year Juliet was swaggering hopefully from love affair to love affair. She had learned the technique of attraction. Stop. Go. Stop. Her performance was a superior affair.

Stop. You don’t interest me at all, how could you possibly imagine you could make look me twice? Go. Perhaps after all you are more interesting than I thought. Work harder at it. Yes, don’t be put off by my delicate cat-like yawn, you are cleverer, wittier, more attractive than I had imagined. Let’s, while making no promises, mark you, continue this. Stop again. You should learn to let well alone. Now I know you better I see we would never agree. What do you think?

It never failed. Conducted by Juliet with good humour and a very pretty face, it brought young men to her feet in swarms. Juliet had learnt her lesson painfully, the hard way; she had spent the years from seventeen to twenty falling hopelessly in love with people who never even noticed she was there. Wrathfully, she had resolved that now it should be her turn. But unluckily it was soon found boring. She couldn’t really fall in love. She was the victim of her own technique. She really was bored, she really did find her escorts trivial, and the process never brought her one step nearer the man with whom she could happily contract a marriage. (Juliet, having been much influenced by her father, a lawyer, always, quite unconsciously, thought of marriage in terms of ‘a contract’. He would give something, she would give something, together they would agree to be something. She was really very much her father’s daughter. It began to look as if she would end up an old maid.) She was in the mood to get down on all fours and worship someone and (young men proving so callow) this someone could be a woman. An older, cleverer, unmarried woman. This woman was Roxanne. Roxanne Roland.

In the district where they lived, Roxanne’s was a name to conjure with. Everyone knew her, from the police to the costermongers pushing their barrows. Most people praised her, but a curse or two was not unknown. It was almost impossible to have a luke-warm approach to Roxanne. Supposedly she was Welfare Officer at the big biscuit factory in Victoria Square, near the church and the main road. In practice this very far from exhausted her function in the district. She was confidante, adviser, marriage counsellor, nurse and vet as well. There were usually one or two lost cats and odd dogs living in her ramshackle house, either pausing on their way to more permanent homes or being nursed back to health by Roxanne’s gentle, clumsy, grubby fingers.

“I don’t know whether she’s a help or a nuisance to me,” grumbled John Coffin, D.D.I. of this district which stretched towards the south bank of the Thames in the shadow of Tower Bridge. It was a tricky neighbourhood, most of it extremely respectable and quiet but with an undertone that was raffish and violent. Certain streets were marked with stars in Coffin’s mind and these areas were patrolled by the police in pairs. The neighbourhood was not noticeably overawed by containing within it the palace of an Archbishop. His district, Coffin always felt, carried the memory not very far beneath the surface that the citizens of London had once murdered an Archbishop they hadn’t liked.

“She certainly keeps the girls at the factory on an even keel. Haven’t had an abortion for months.” (“They know they can keep their jobs after they marry,” said Roxanne’s voice, “and the factory provides a crèche. Go on, I say to them, enjoy yourself, why not?”) “But she’s a magnet for every lunatic between here and Land’s End.” He had spent a difficult morning helping Roxanne to coax two sisters into the bus back to Scotland without putting a bomb under the Scottish Office, which was what they had come to London to do, and he was still breathing heavily from his exertions. They had been strongly built girls. “I don’t know whether I couldn’t get on without her or whether I can’t stand the sight of her.”

“I adore her,” said Juliet and found, very much to her surprise, that this was exactly what she did. She wondered where she was placed in Roxanne’s list of lame ducks. She was surely in it somewhere.

She had known Roxanne exactly a year now and had lived with her in the ramshackle house in Prince Consort Square for almost three months. She had first met Roxanne at a party given by Juliet’s maternal grandmother, a powerful persuasive character called Lady Passey, and had at once been absorbed, sucked into the life that orbited round Roxanne. Juliet was at a loose end herself then, discouraged and depressed. She was twenty-one and believed there was no point in her life at all. She had tried being a nurse and had, alas, been a very poor nurse indeed; she had tried being intellectual, and now she was trying to be very gay and worldly, and this treatment, though it had undoubtedly worked for her grandmother, who had been successful all her life and also very happy, didn’t seem to work for Juliet. Perhaps when Roxanne saw her poor, pretty, unhappy little face, she took pity on her. At any rate she introduced Juliet to her own ethos, got her a job as a trainee welfare-worker at her own factory and made her start a course in social studies at the University of London. Juliet, struggling with economics and the factory laws and psychology for beginners, had not time to regret her career as ‘Véenus toute entière a saproie attachée’. In spite of her hard work she was looking plumper and prettier and everyone ought to have been pleased, especially Lady Passey, who rated everything by the effect it had on one’s looks. But Juliet had the idea her grandmother did not really approve of Roxanne.

She had moved in with Roxanne because it was close to the factory where they both worked, and because her father, now a High Court Judge, became more and more remote each year, and also because the house itself, old, gloomy and decrepit as it was, had charm with its view across the little churchyard to the church with its steeple and the vicarage where six cats, three dogs and two human beings lived in peace and contentment. That was in the beginning. Just lately, however, the house had seemed less charming.

But Juliet was her father’s daughter: she had not taken the plunge absolutely, she was not completely merged with Roxanne. She kept a room at her grandmother’s flat where she stored her party clothes and from which she sailed forth sometimes for a gay evening. She studied economics and psychology, but once or twice a month she went across the square to the church and sat through learned sermons on the Dead Sea Scrolls or the difficulties of believing in transubstantiation, or whatever happened to be interesting the vicar at the moment; and she did not join either of the two political parties which Roxanne brandished before her.

Thus Juliet unconsciously pursued the dualism within her, prompted perhaps by the never quite forgotten fact that she had once been a twin.

“Yes, I do love her,” she repeated aloud. “She’s so honest.” She was remembering an early conversation with Roxanne.

“There’s something I have to tell you if you are going to live with me.”

Juliet had looked up, waiting.

Roxanne had turned her head slightly away so that only her profile could be seen.

“When I was a little girl I lived with my parents in a house in Finchley. It was an ordinary sort of house, not very old, and not very nice. We lived in it for five years. And while we lived there this house had a poltergeist. You know what I mean?” She was speaking gently, seriously. “Knocks on doors and no one there; china thrown about, but hardly ever broken; furniture moved around.”

Juliet stared at her.

“It must have come from me, you know,” said Roxanne in a matter-of-fact voice. “The source of these disturbances is always a child on the verge of puberty. I was eleven. It must have been me.”

“Does it still go on?” asked Juliet in a small voice.

Roxanne smiled and shook her head. “No. We moved house and it never happened again. No. But I always have it in my head that I might cause something curious to happen again.” She took Juliet’s hand. “You’re so young, Juliet. So young. Would you mind?”

“No,” said Juliet nervously, and not, as she admitted to herself, very truthfully.

Both women had sat there in silence for a minute. In Roxanne’s mind was yet another picture: of clothes contrived into the appearance of living people; dummy figures, puffed up with false life; arranged in a conversation-piece. She had read of such things. She had remembered a description of a New England family suddenly discovering in their house such a tableau.

It was her private horror that this might happen to her; that she might walk into a familiar room and discover it to be full of faceless creatures. About this she could not speak, even to Juliet.

“Someone don’t like her, though, and don’t think she’s honest either,” said Coffin, reverting to the problem that he had on his mind. “Let’s look at it clearly. I’ve had anonymous letters accusing her of being a thief, two or three shops have had the same, and when she goes shopping she starts to find odds and ends in her basket she never paid for. I don’t like it.”

“Some lunatic,” said Juliet, fixing her big blue eyes on Coffin. She had been in love with Coffin himself once, although he hadn’t even noticed she was there (or had he? She still comforted herself with the thought that perhaps he had, a tiny bit), and she still regarded him as highly eligible.

“Oh yes, some lunatic,” said Coffin, rolling his eyes with heavy irony. “That’s always your solution. There’s only good people and bad in your system, isn’t there, Juliet? If they’re bad then they must be mad. Sane people can’t be bad. I don’t know how you come to be such an innocent, with a background like yours. You ask Roxanne, she knows better.

“Of course she might be doing it herself,” he went on, thinking aloud. They were seated in a small, dingy, noisy room which was Coffin’s office. His Divisional Headquarters had been built about 1909, designed, so he always felt, by an architect who liked dust and dirt, and two world wars had not improved it. There were rumours of a new building soon.

“Oh, no,” cried Juliet, unable to accept any attack on her idol.

Coffin stared out of the window. “But there’s something complex about Roxanne, isn’t there? She isn’t a straightforward character; she isn’t altogether what she seems, is she? There’s a lot there tucked away. You know it, I know it. It’s part of the charm.”

Juliet was silent. She smiled faintly.

“But she is our Roxanne, isn’t she? Our loyalty is to her. There is a relationship.”

Coffin did not deny it. “But that doesn’t mean anything, baby girl, or ought not to. One of the people I got fondest of in this life did in at least two people and probably more.” He sounded sad. “Ever such a nice bloke too. We really saw eye to eye.”

Juliet looked down at her hands, pretty hands, but cut and chipped and torn with work at the factory (for Roxanne insisted that Juliet should get some experience of the actual work of the factory before going over to the welfare side). Sometimes it seemed to Juliet that every instrument she picked up gave her a bite or a burn or a nip before she put it down. She remembered how Roxanne had put ointment on them and gently laughed at her, and she rejected Coffin’s point.

“No,” she said decisively as she looked up again.

For a moment they both thought of Roxanne.

“I don’t believe it about Roxanne.”

Roxanne was thirty-odd, thin, bespectacled, her flying hair touched with grey now. But this was hopeless as a description. It gave no idea at all of the real Roxanne, the charm, the guile, the energy; of the curving hollow cheek, of the beauty. Nor of the streak of truly electric vulgarity which could show. Electricity is either positive or negative and Roxanne’s vulgarity when it appeared, which it did spasmodically, was positive.

“Yes,” said Coffin thoughtfully, drawing back as from a great distance. “And now there’s this.”

“Yes,” Juliet echoed him gravely, even a little as if she was frightened. “Now there’s this.”

They both studied the thing that lay on the desk. It lay there limply, quietly - a dead pigeon. This was the reason for Juliet’s being here in Coffin’s office.

“Where’d you find it?” asked Coffin again.

“On the front doorstep.”

“Inside?”

“Outside. Just laid there.”

“And have you told anyone?”

Juliet shook her head.

“I just wrapped it up and brought it straight round to you.”

That was Juliet all over. There was a sort of innocent practicality about her. Another girl would have dropped the body in the dustbin or rushed away screaming; not Juliet, she wrapped the bird up and brought it straight round to the police.

Coffin hummed under his breath. “And how right you were,” he said eventually. “How right you were.”

“I thought you might be able to discover how it died.”

Coffin shook his head and ran a hand gently over the body. “It died from something. From a cat or not, I can’t say. But why your doorstep? Did your cat kill it?”

Juliet shook her head. “We don’t have a regular cat. Of course some pop in and out. Roxanne’s always looking after odd animals. Maybe that’s why, perhaps one of them killed it, only if so…”

“If so why just place it there on the front doorstep already stiff and dead? No cat did that. No - someone don’t like Miss Roxanne Roland…Or is it directed at you?”

Juliet looked alarmed.

“There’s a destructive element running through all this,” he went on. “I promise you there is…And where it’s coming from I just don’t know.”

“Do you think the bird was killed on purpose?” Juliet whispered.

“Where’s Roxanne?” asked Coffin in a rough voice, and suddenly he looked old and cross and tired. “Why don’t we have a word with her? It’s her house, her front door, and perhaps even her pigeon.” He made the joke grimly.

Roxanne, looking beautiful without her spectacles and frown with which she could look such a witch, rolled over on her back and enjoyed the warmth and the ministering hands. She had the idea (false as it turned out later) that no one knew about these indulgent sessions of hers. She didn’t want anyone to know, was ashamed to admit that Roxanne, so ruthless, tough and austere an enemy, was fiercely protective of her physical beauty. She was cherishing something there besides her beauty and she didn’t quite know what. She believed no one knew: she believed it was a secret between herself and her masseuse.

It was strange that Roxanne, who was in some ways such a public person, thought so much of her life was secret. There was a recurring motif in her life which dictated that what she thought of as her private treasures should be assembled and laid out for the public view from time to time.

“Chin up, just a little,” said her masseuse, whacking cream on to her neck. “Skin’s just a bit dry there, madam, and there’s a tiny, tiny little tension line round the mouth.”

“Ought to be hundreds,” said Roxanne, “the life I lead.”

The girl grinned; they knew each other of old. “That’s not what’s giving it to you,” she said, “it’s the life you don’t lead, not the life you do lead, that gives you tension lines.”

“And how is my life I don’t lead?” inquired Roxanne.

“You’ve got a little something worrying you, haven’t you?” said Prudence playfully, massaging the throat. A pulse began to beat beneath her fingers.

“No!” said Roxanne.

Prudence felt the pulse swell and throb.

“Head tight back into the pillow, madam,” said Prudence, a little alarmed at the violence she had summoned up.

Roxanne lay there for a moment, wondering if she was hearing the opening fanfares and drumrolls of an opera which was about to start. It was probably all imagination.

“No,” she said again, but this time more calmly.

“But then- you’ve had such an exciting life,” said Prudence admiringly; she had a highly romanticised view of her client and thought of her as a sort of dispossessed princess.

“Yes, haven’t I?” said Roxanne half ironically, closing her eyes and thinking of all the things she had done, and the possibly even more exciting and important things which she had not done: not getting killed in the war, not marrying Bruno, not being imprisoned for libel or treason or any of the other things that one way and another had seemed to threaten. Greece in 1944, India in 1947, Hungary in 1956, South Africa in 1959 - continents and peoples must wince when they saw her coming.

“You’ve got a lovely pink colour this week, madam,” said Prudence, anxious to soothe the pulse she could feel starting up again.

Roxanne asked herself fiercely, was it all imagination, the strange signs she had noticed lately about the house? Was the telephone call from Miss Ludbrook imagination? Was the voice imagination? Were the words imagination?

What was the phrase she had thought of? An opera about to start. A dramatic entertainment. ’Oh God!’ she thought, ‘And that’s just about what it is: a dramatic entertainment.’

“The pillow, madam,” cried Prudence, despairing of ever getting this tricky, wound-up customer to relax. “Oh, madam, you do take things to heart, a person like you gets too wound up…You make things so much worse. You bring trouble…”

Roxanne made her muscles go loose.

“Yes,” she said slowly. “I think you’re right. Maybe I am that sort of person.” And she turned over on to her face, well aware that she carried within herself the seeds of private despair and public disaster.

Juliet walked home rather glumly.

Just before she left Coffin’s office the telephone rang. After a few words Coffin covered the receiver and turned to Juliet “It’s my wife,” he said smugly. “She often rings about now.”

Juliet looked at him fondly, jealously. She still believed Coffin to be about the best bet any girl could have. She hoped Patsy, his wife, knew it.

She waved a hand in farewell. There was no more to be said between her and Coffin just now.

Her thoughts, as she assembled them, did not make a pretty picture. Roxanne was the focus of trouble of some sort. Juliet easily dismissed Coffin’s suggestion that any of the blows were aimed at her. In theory this could be so, in practice she knew her boring young life couldn’t provoke anyone. But Roxanne, the fascinating and ambiguous, was different. Plenty of people loved her. Or possibly only one. For a moment Juliet was even envious. No one hated her, she wasn’t important enough; she didn’t amount to anything at all.

As she strode along, feeling the warm sun on her back, Juliet totted up what had happened.

Coffin had had letters, and a couple of shops had had letters, accusing Roxanne of being a shoplifter.

Roxanne had found herself once or twice with goods in her shopping-basket that she certainly hadn’t paid for.

But so settled was the conception of Roxanne as the soul of honesty, so clear and commanding was her public figure that no one believed Roxanne capable of what she was being accused of doing.

Therefore the accuser, or manipulator, was either someone very stupid or someone who didn’t take Roxanne as a public figure at all seriously, someone who thought there might be a little chink in it all somewhere. The dead bird was different. The bird showed malice. Dirty, unkind malice. And Roxanne closed her eyes to it, wouldn’t take it seriously. Roxanne, who ought to know, if anyone did, how vulnerable the human animal was. It was true, of course, that Roxanne didn’t yet know about the bird.

Like her father, Juliet enjoyed following through a train of thought and sorting a puzzle out into its component parts. She sorted out this one. She saw the malice, she detected the scepticism, guessed at the stupidity, observed Roxanne’s reluctance to act.

A stupid bit of malice; this was how Juliet saw it that sunny October afternoon.

She was young enough to see it as just someone being horrid to Roxanne, nothing more. Nothing more dangerous.

She was truly concerned and worried about Roxanne, but it was a sunny afternoon, and although her mind was gloomy, her feet were not, and as she went along she gave a little skip and a hop.

From the top of the bus you could see the top of Juliet’s head as she bounced along. She looked young and innocent, poor Juliet, not a threat to anyone.

The bedroom in which Juliet rested, or did not rest, was at the top of the house. She was inclined to say sometimes that she slept badly, but all this meant was that perhaps she stayed awake ten minutes rather than two. A poor night for Juliet was if she woke half an hour before the ringing of her alarm clock.

And yet lately she had certainly been waking a good deal earlier than she wished.

She had been aroused by sounds of childish singing and shouting. More boyish than childish perhaps. But a young voice. The source of the voice remained elusive. To Juliet it was unreal, dream-like. She did not formulate the thought, but it was in the back of her mind that there was something wrong about it.

The boy was quiet this morning, though. He didn’t always operate. Perhaps he couldn’t always get out.

But if it wasn’t the boy, it was the milkman.

She lay there now, listening to the clank and clatter of the early milkman’s delivery and watching the sun on the ceiling of her room. She loved her room which, like everything in Roxanne’s ambience, was plain and battered and rather beautiful. Roxanne didn’t let her vulgarity appear among her possessions, only among her conversations, but the room’s cleanliness was the work of Juliet, who sometimes thought Roxanne wouldn’t care if her house and all that was in it disappeared under a burden of dust and cobwebs, rather like the Sleeping Beauty’s Palace. Perhaps that was what she was really like, dear Roxanne, thought Juliet, a Sleeping Princess.

All around Juliet under other roofs in the Square were sleeping her friends. Faces only a short time ago unknown, but now they smiled and nodded. There was the Vicar and Mrs. Freeman whose roof Juliet could just see across the plane trees, and the Hogg family in the house next door (most of the animals which wandered across the square to be fed and comforted by Roxanne had started life in that crazy household). On the corner lived Miss Tone who wrote historical novels, and in the flat below her lived Lotty and Bruno. Round the corner lived John Coffin and Patsy but they didn’t quite come into the group that lived in the Square. These were only faces which Juliet had been able to identify, to subtract from the crowd because they were particular friends (or some of them enemies) of Roxanne. Many many other families were packed into the Square, the houses were bursting with people of all sizes and colours. Some worked in the biscuit factory, some in the docks, some in the cosmetics factory on the main road, and one or two didn’t work at all, but lounged in bed all day, supported no one quite knew how. In the summer when the inside life spilled out on to the pavements and boys scuffled in the gutter and old women sunned themselves on doorsteps, and every radio and television shouted at its loudest, the illusion that Londoners were a quiet housebound people was utterly shattered. When she first came to live there Juliet had murmured hopefully to Roxanne that the Square was perhaps not quite respectable, that one or two houses were possibly a little raffish, but Roxanne speedily disillusioned her. “Ropers Walk, or Sir Thomas More Street, there you would have to raise your eyebrows a bit, but not here.” And indeed the Square, with the church on one side and the biscuit factory on the other, was watched over by both God and Mammon, as the Vicar once remembered in a sermon.

Juliet was alone in the house this morning because Roxanne had gone bustling off to a conference in Newcastle; she would be back by lunch-time.

Clink. Juliet identified it, the two-pint bottle of milk that landed daily on their doorstep.

Clink. That was another bottle, and slightly farther away.

The way they banged the bottles down, you’d think they’d break. ‘No wonder they wake me up,’ thought Juliet crossly.

She went to the window and looked down. It was a bright clear sunny morning; the street was empty except for the milk van just disappearing round the corner.

Only when she was back in bed did Juliet remember that she had seen another milk bottle, at the bottom of the basement steps. There was another door into the house there, only no one except the coalmen ever used it now.

‘Loopy,’ thought Juliet sleepily, and turned over comfortably in bed and went back to sleep.

Coming home that night she saw the milkman and his van outside the dairy. He was sitting on the step of the van counting out the day’s money.

“Why do you deliver one bottle of the milk at the front door and one at the basement door?” demanded Juliet.

“I wish they didn’t pay in money,” he grumbled. “I wish they didn’t have money. I wish it was all free…What’s three-and-nine and one-and-four?”

“No, even I know that’s wrong…” He laboured on. “And then that’s wrong, it’s not one-and-four, because that’s welfare milk and so she gets it cheaper…I’m in the wrong job, you know.” He looked morosely at the van which had lately replaced his horse and cart. “I only got the job because I liked horses and now I don’t even like people.” He started to back the van out of the road.

“You haven’t told me about the milk,” called Juliet.

“It’s for the other family, of course,” he said in a matter-of-fact voice as he disappeared.

Juliet stared after him. What other family? What other family? In Roxanne’s house? She hurried on round the corner, but the milk was gone when she got there.

Nothing in that, decided Juliet over a cup of tea. Of course the milk would be moved. Roxanne had taken it in. Or else the real other family (presumably it existed somewhere) had popped across from where it lived and taken in the milk, grumbling about the muddleheaded milkman while it did so. Not a large family, Juliet decided, as it only drank half a pint of milk. Perhaps it drank beer.

Tomorrow morning, saying nothing about it to Roxanne, she would nip down as soon as she heard the milk delivered and hand it back firmly to the milkman and urge him to find the right house for the other family. There was something about this delivery of the milk she didn’t care for. It was utterly trivial but possibly not insignificant.

But it never occurred to her to tell Roxanne. And this fact, if she had considered it, was probably the most striking and illuminating thing about the whole affair.

The next morning Juliet woke, heard the usual clatter of delivery, and slipped downstairs to get in the milk.

The basement was as always a dark moist gloomy place. Only an antique coke stove lived in it. Roxanne’s stray cats slept there and possibly a rat or two. Roxanne and Juliet always sat there on a winter evening because it was warm.

Juliet bounced down, sped along the gloomy passage and opened with difficulty the great, stiff door. It swung back, creaking and damp. It was like opening the door of the tomb.

But although she had been quick, someone else had been quicker: the milk was already gone.

Juliet stood there for a moment perplexed. This business of the milk was odd. And there was something else. As she stood there some other factor began unconsciously to worry her.

The silence gathered about Juliet and it seemed to her the house was not empty but full, full. The very quality of the house was in its silence. It stood by the churchyard and close to the river, whose water sometimes flooded it in winter. The smells of damp and old living lingered. It was a house with a kitchen below the level of the old graveyard where silver tarnished, food rotted and flowers drooped; it was a house where there were sinister creakings in the skirting of the walls and where not all those that visited it went entirely away.

II

THE MOMENTUM OF events increased.

“You’ve got to make Roxanne see this seriously,” had been Coffin’s advice. But there was no need. This time the arrow that struck Roxanne was not only barbed but poisoned.

Roxanne came back from her conference in Newcastle.

From somewhere she had received an extra fillip of life, a transfusion of vitality. She managed somehow to look at once tired, beautiful, haggard and radiant. Juliet gazed at her with the darkest forebodings. She knew very well what such an appearance in herself would have meant.

“Was it a good conference?” They usually walked to the factory together.

“So so.”

’Then that didn’t account for the radiance,’ thought Juliet, ‘But then I never thought it did.’

“And Bruno was on the train travelling back. We spent the whole night talking. I’d forgotten what a good talker he was.”

“It’s his trade,” said Juliet grimly.

“We got on splendidly.”

“I noticed that.”

Roxanne took her hand and said gently, “It’s good to have the bitterness gone.”

In the beginning, years and years ago, as Roxanne put it, it had been herself that Bruno was going to marry.

“I certainly served my seven years for Bruno,” said Roxanne wryly. “And seven years again.”

“I never knew the details,” said Juliet, remembering only that Lady Passey had murmured something about Roxanne having had some long-drawn-out love affair. (“If you could call it love,” she had added. “Not my idea of it. My, the quarrels they had. There was a time when people used to say you could see them quarrelling on every airport in Europe.”) It was true that people always noticed what Bruno did, he was quite famous, and as for Roxanne, there was no denying that she could draw eyes, as she was wickedly aware. Yes, they must have been something to see in the days of their youth.

“There was always some reason why we shouldn’t get married,” said Roxanne. “Some cross to pick up, some piece of suffering humanity to be saved. There was Greece, there was Sicily, there was Spain (there’s always Spain, you know). We kept putting it off. I agreed. I couldn’t seem to rate my claims to a petty little marriage very high. We went to Germany, we went to Australia, then he said, ‘Go to South Africa’. I went to South Africa. When I came back he was married. I went on rescuing people automatically. The funny thing is,” she added dreamily, “I don’t really like doing it, no taste for it, never have had. They annoy me. Every so often I want to say ‘Go on, sink in that bloody little puddle you call your life’.”

She looked at Juliet and laughed. “Yes, I’m glad to get rid of that bitter flavour.”

“I didn’t know there was any. You never showed it.”

“No. I didn’t to Lotty. How could I have, dear little Lotty, but I did show it quite a lot to Bruno. Who wouldn’t have? Not for not marrying me, but for making me his disciple. That I did resent. My free untrammelled will, you know…”

Then Roxanne added, in her usual honest fashion, “But, of course, I have to admit there were other people I could have married. One other person I very nearly did - a sweet person, a doctor in Oxford, called Dick Noble. I suppose I might marry Dick yet.”

They were passing the window of Lotty and Bruno’s flat and Roxanne looked up and waved.

“That was Lotty. She gave me a splendid recipe for fish pie.”

A fish pie traded in for Bruno. Juliet looked at Roxanne and felt she wanted to cry. ’Oh, Roxanne, I could to you for looking so happy just because Bruno speaks to you on a train.’ But she did not say this aloud.

She felt the hand which she still held. Roxanne’s face was glowing, but the hand within her own was deathly frigid and trembling slightly as if the great pulse of life behind it was slowly running down. Not for the first time she found Roxanne an enigma. So full of life, and yet so oddly cold. What a contradiction Roxanne was, Passion and Death. ‘I make her sound like Lady Macbeth’, thought Juliet.

“Funny about that boy you and Lotty complain of,” said Roxanne conversationally. “Next door, you think?”

“Yes,” agreed Juliet. “Very funny.” A picture crystallised before her eyes. A toy truck; a pair of skates; and a whistle.

These things she had seen in Roxanne’s own basement hallway this morning.

Did the boy live next door? Or was he perhaps closer?

And then did she, when you really came down to it, believe in the boy? Juliet fumbled with the problem in silence.

Wednesdays were always a frenzied day at the biscuit factory. For some reason, known only to the efficiency experts, and perhaps to God, with whom they more or less identified themselves, two separate shifts were worked that day at the factory. The women didn’t like it because the rest rooms were crowded. The canteen people didn’t like it (two dinners to get, and so close together). Roxanne and Juliet didn’t like it because everyone was irritable and clumsy that day. Only the biscuit-eaters of the world, presumably, liked it.

It was also the day Juliet stayed home and did the essay for her class on Industrial Law at the L.S.E.

Also on Wednesdays, but for reasons known to Roxanne and frequently explained by her to Juliet, the Keep-Fit classes were held. “Before the week-end they’re all too busy getting their hair curled and thinking about their boy-friends to spare the time, and after the week-end they’re too tired from their day of rest,” and she laughed.

“Roxanne, you are awful,” Juliet protested.

“No, mid-week is the only time.”

Roxanne was sorting the shoes provided by the factory management for the classes. Roxanne didn’t run the classes, the London County Council sent down a Miss Biggs for this purpose, but as Welfare Officer Roxanne was responsible for the equipment.

“Always seem to have a lot of odd left shoes,” she said absently. “I don’t know why. Perhaps we’ve got a lot of one-legged clients.”

“They don’t steal them, do they?” asked Juliet, shocked.

“No, of course not. I don’t know what they do with them, eat them perhaps.” She went on sorting shoes. “No. I know I make jokes about them, but we’ve got a very good set of girls here really. They’re the salt of the earth.” Her face was serious. The girls in the factory loved Roxanne, they admired and respected her. They liked her clothes, the way she looked, and even her jokes. There was a legend that her father was a duke and Roxanne really her ladyship. Juliet knew that Roxanne’s father was not a duke but a scientist, that he had died young, and his daughter hardly remembered him. One great influence had certainly shaped Roxanne’s life, but it was not her father. “Yes, the salt of the earth.”

It did just cross Juliet’s mind that perhaps the salt might not care to have its savour commented on in this way, but she acquitted her dear Roxanne of any form of patronage. It was just that Roxanne was unconsciously aristocratic and that it was this quality to which the girls paid tribute with their legend that she was really a duchess.

As for herself, she was humble and knew that the girls, many of them younger than she was, called her “Our Baby” and were more likely to mop up her worries than offer their own problems.

“There must sometimes be an idle, or a malicious one,” said Juliet, remembering her interview with Coffin, and looking at Roxanne with worried eyes.

Roxanne didn’t answer but just went on grimly putting away the shoes in the cupboard as if she was shutting away her problem with them.

“I don’t think anyone here hates me,” she said, when she had closed and locked the door. “Not here and now at this minute.”

It was now four-thirty in the afternoon, on Wednesday, October 19th, 196-.

They took a cup of tea at the canteen and went home.

On the way home Juliet at last spoke to Roxanne.

“Roxanne” - she was watching the traffic along the road as she spoke, not looking at her companion - “you know that boy we’ve complained about…the noisy one…I had the idea this morning that it wasn’t next door he lived, but with us. That he was somehow down in our basement.” They swung round past the church into the Square. In the silence she could hear the little puff of Roxanne’s breathing. She turned to look at her.

“Roxanne, you know?’

“It’s my house, remember. I’ve lived there for years. Noises you thought came from away across the street, I knew must come from inside the house, creakings, breathing, signs of life.”

Juliet was puzzled.

“Is he hiding? Are you hiding him? Did you bring him? Is that why the milk comes?”

“What milk? I don’t know anything about any milk. I’ll tell you something you may not have noticed, Juliet. Those songs and shouts…Did you notice? I don’t believe he was talking English.”

Neither was quite answering the other: it was a dialogue, but not a conversation.

“Is he a real boy?” asked Juliet.

“You’re too clever, Juliet,” said Roxanne in a cold, mean voice. “Too noticing, really.”

“I have something to show you at home,” riposted Juliet, thinking of the whistle, the truck and the skates.

Juliet and Roxanne went down to the basement together. Juliet was anxious to show Roxanne the truck and the skates and the whistle. They were still there. She was just a little surprised at this.

“It’s not a whistle, it’s a recorder,” said Roxanne, picking it up. “They’re quite common.”

“But I suppose it made those flute-like noises we heard?”

For answer Roxanne placed it to her lips. “It’s blocked in some way,” she said. “So he can’t have been playing that.” She blew harder and a thin keening note came out.

The note reverberated round the dark hallway, striking the paved floor and bouncing off the low ceiling. The air was damp and chill with the accumulated smell of all the generations that had used it. Juliet never was down there without hating it and wanting to be out of it. A bluebottle buzzed sluggishly round her. She brushed it away.

There was a faint remote echo. It was a thin wailing unpleasing noise.

Roxanne put the toy down hastily. She looked very white.

“Oh, I don’t think you ought to have played that note,” said Juliet, before she could stop herself. Roxanne did not answer. Perhaps she was thinking the same thing.

She gave herself a shake and put on her professional manner. “All the same, I should like to know how these things got here.”

“You don’t recognise them?”

Roxanne gave her a long look. If it had not been utterly impossible, Juliet would have said the look combined both hostility and suspicion. She flushed.

The two women stood there in the space between the narrow walls and the vault-like ceiling, the only light coming from a single heavily-shaded electric bulb. Juliet looked flushed and frightened; she was a tall girl, quite as tall as Roxanne, but without effort Roxanne made her feel quite small. Her stare caught Roxanne in a moment of absolute immobility. Roxanne’s black hair was untidy and her hands grubby, she was wearing an old tweed dress in which she had, after all, sat up all night, but she looked august and commanding.

The fly was buzzing again and this time it settled on the truck. There was a long brown streak there and as the fly rose, Juliet guessed that it was blood. She knelt down to see. It was nothing much, just a brown stain, but a feather was stuck there.

Roxanne picked it out of the truck and stared at it.

“That must have come from the bird.”

“The bird, what bird?”

“The pigeon.” Juliet was staring at the feather. “I found it on the front doorstep.”

“Are you sure it wasn’t a dove?” asked Roxanne.

“Are you mad, Roxanne? It was a pigeon.”

“Show me the bird.”

“I took it to the police.”

“You took it to the police?”

“Only to John Coffin.” Juliet was beginning to be nervous again. “Besides, it was a pigeon, honestly, Roxanne, just a poor little London pigeon.”

‘Like me,’ Juliet thought. “And someone killed it.”

That made two strange questions Roxanne had asked. One, what language had the boy spoken, and second, was the bird a dove? It all suggested that Roxanne was drawing on a fund of background knowledge. Perhaps Juliet did not think this all out clearly on the spot, but it was there, forming at the back of her mind.

“There’s something written on the truck,” said Juliet, who was still crouching by it. She peered at the letters. “It’s a name, I think, the name of the boy. Well, now we shall know. Oliver, no Orla…I can’t see.”

Having asked two strange questions, it now turned out that Roxanne knew.

“No…No…not Orla - Orlando…” Roxanne started to shiver and cry. Disconcerted, appalled, Juliet ministered to her. She took her upstairs and gave her a large glass of brandy and wrapped her in a rug.

“Oh God,” hiccuped Roxanne, sending out blasts of brandy. “It’s shame-making. How too too Sir James Barrie.” She was wandering unsteadily round the room. “A bloody little ghost. A blasted little left-over Peter Pan.” Tears poured from her eyes.

Uncomprehending, anxious, Juliet the innocent listened.

It was now five-thirty on the evening of Wednesday, October 19th, and the two women were alone in the house in which consumption and puerperal fever and typhoid had in their time claimed their victims, and in which there had been one fire and one flooding. Some houses are natural killers.

Elizabeth Garrow was a forewoman at the biscuit factory, where she had worked since she was fourteen. Her face didn’t show her age, and her figure was extremely trim; she knew how to buy clothes which suited her and a hat that flattered her face. Naturally, she never ate biscuits. At the moment she was wearing her thick top-coat and a small blue cloche.

She lived on her own in a three-room flat. Everything in it was just as she wanted it and no one else. So it had a certain eccentricity of which she was quite unaware. Practically everything in it was blue for one thing, because she loved blue and there were so many gorgeous blues, weren’t there? And then there were a dozen different pictures of dogs because she loved dogs (and after all there are so many different sorts of dogs, but you can’t keep a dog in a flat, can you?). There was a furry stuffed cushion that looked like a poodle dog and three ash-trays like white Scotties. She kept the room very clean; everything in it, including the dogs, was washed down regularly.

She was a serious woman. Once a week she went to evening classes and studied something practical like dressmaking or carpentry - it was pottery this session, hence the ash-trays. Every other Sunday she went to tea with her married sister. She had a friend and had had him now for the last ten years. He too was serious and steady. It was a harmless platonic relationship because neither of them wanted anything more. She was slow of speech, picking and choosing her words carefully. She did not gossip, but she was well plugged in to everything that went on in the district.

She had a problem. It was not her own problem, her own life had no problems, she had eliminated everything troublesome years ago, and turned a smooth rounded surface to the world with no awkward edges to catch. No, this was not her problem, and she was irritated that it should even temporarily rest on her shoulders.

She made herself a cup of tea, still wearing her coat and hat as an unconscious sign that this was not really her problem and she wasn’t letting it into the house.

Her problem was that she knew something she felt she ought to pass on. It was such a tiny trivial bit of information, but it wasn’t right. It wasn’t in the lease. Should she tell?

She liked communication to flow easily, with people knowing what they should know, and not learning what they need not. But in what class did this snippet come? She hated undistributed information. It sat on her heavily, like undigested pudding.

‘Perhaps it’s for breeding or for company,’ she thought wildly. But no, it seemed most unlikely that it was for breeding or for company that Miss Roland wanted a pigeon.

Miss Garrow’s worrying information came from her nephew, who was fifteen and a breeder of pigeons. He had about twenty birds, which was as many as his mother would allow, and took genetics very seriously. He would have kept newts and toads and white rats too, if there had been room in the back garden, though as it was the neighbours complained of the noise. He was a very clever boy, and quietly fanatical.

“They never seem to win any races, your pigeons,” complained his aunt.

“I’m not interested in races, I’m breeding them. Just so happens that pigeons have the right sort of genes for what I want to do.” He silenced his aunt, who was afraid of him anyway, and rightly so, for he was a formidable character.

But she respected his observation and shrewdness, which was why she took his information seriously.

One Sunday expedition to Club Row (just off Petticoat Lane: he did not of course buy his pigeons there, but presumably he liked to see what other breeders, who knew less about the structure of the genes, were doing), he heard a lady asking from stall to stall for a dove.

He followed her, interested and amused. But gradually he got the strange feeling that the lady didn’t care whether this dove was alive or dead. He wasn’t at all a sensitive boy but he was very acute and he noticed things. Eventually, he thought he recognised this lady as a neighbour of his aunt.

“The one that looks like a witch.” He added thoughtfully, “Or a queen.”

Only one neighbour who fitted that description, thought Elizabeth Garrow: Roxanne Roland.

“But watch out for her husband. He’s dynamite,” said her nephew.

But Miss Roland hadn’t got a husband. Or had she? There were many things in Miss Roland’s life that were not all known about.

“I don’t think she’s married,” said Elizabeth Garrow automatically.

“They were quarrelling and I heard him say: ’The numbered days of our marriage’.”

Then Elizabeth Garrow was silent. She was not unwilling to be convinced that Roxanne had once been married.

But if Roxanne did have a pigeon, then she ought to tell her friend, for he, clever, careful saving fellow, was the real owner of the house which Roxanne rented and there was a ‘no pets’ clause in her lease. He always insisted on that! No pets and no children. He might sometimes be obliged to overlook a child or two, but he never passed over a pet. Elizabeth felt no special loyalty to him, and they regarded each other’s business affairs with ironic detachment, even rejoicing a little if the other fell down on a deal. Had he given her help when her building society shares were discovered to be held in a nearly bankrupt organisation? But relations might be strained if she were later known to have heard about the bird and said nothing.

Miss Garrow had access to a set of keys to Roxanne’s house; she knew where to borrow these from her friend’s desk. But this would be bad manners. A good snoop round Roxanne’s establishment, although interesting and rewarding, was not something you did lightly to Roxanne.

Perturbed and slightly anxious, but by no means really aware of the magnitude of the situation in which she might find herself, she washed out her cup and saucer, dried them carefully and placed them in the cupboard next to a china dog. Then she put on her hat.

She would not yet tell her friend about the bird but she would call on Miss Roland and while she was there she could just look round to see if there was a bird.

But of course by then it was rotting in the ground where John Coffin had buried it.

The Rispoli family were grouped around their parents, all eight of them, from Laurence, aged twenty-four, to Ada, aged six. They made a handsome group with crisp curly hair and bright brown eyes. They looked like an Italian Renaissance painting.

The Rispoli grandparents had come from Italy seventy years ago and additions of Cockney and Irish blood had not affected their appearance any more than decades of London damp and cold had diminished their relentless fertility (there were sixty-four Rispoli cousins in the first degree). Genetically they were a very homogeneous group. But appearances were misleading; they were Londoners through and through.

The Renaissance picture held for a moment, then the group broke up.

“’Bye, Mum.”

“’Bye, Larry.”

“I’m off, Mum, I’m going skating.”

“Be in by ten, Doreen.”

Maggie Rispoli slipped away without a word. She did not say good-bye to anyone. Her mother looked round, aware that someone had gone out without speaking to her, but she did not see whom. No one really saw Maggie go. Short sight was another thing which the genes transmitted in the Rispoli family.

Maggie was seventeen years old and had been working in the biscuit factory for two years. She was a skilful but bored worker. Her fingers were busy packing but her mind was usually far away. Her everyday life was poor and inhibited, but her invented life was rich in incident. Her imagination was dangerously free. Lately, she had begun to feel as if she was taking part in a procession with her imagination beating the drum.

It was frightening but exciting.

Maggie shivered. She wasn’t a brave girl but the trouble was she wanted to be carried away on a rush of real events with a crowd of real people, never minding who got hurt.

The people about whom her imagination centred could hardly be called a crowd, but in Maggie’s mind they proliferated. There was Bruno whom Maggie found attractive, Bruno who loved Roxanne, Bruno who was married to Lotty. There was Lotty who was married to Bruno, Lotty who was good to Maggie, Lotty who was angry with Maggie, Lotty who was jealous of Roxanne. Then there was Roxanne, who was boss, Maggie’s detested rival and goddess all in one. Everyone had several faces.

But Maggie knew that there was dynamite enough in the situation she had dreamt up. Except that it was not a dream. There really was a situation in which all her characters were embroiled. The word ‘blackmail’ never crossed her mind.

She was not in any case looking for money, but a rich fund of events upon which to suck. The trouble with Maggie was that she was in love with all the faces of the characters in her charade.

Maggie paused under the street light. It was early evening but the street was empty. Maggie looked at it regretfully, she would really have preferred a crowd -she hated emptiness and quiet.

She tightened the belt on her waist, emphasising the solid curve of her hips and breast. She made a stocky attractive figure silhouetted against the light.

She stopped by a door. She wanted to beat upon it with her fists and shout: I’m coming in. You’d better open the door. I’m coming in, anyway.

She looked at her watch, trying to see the dial in the dim light. She had another door to knock upon, soon.

Angelica Tuffy darted across the main road, just avoiding getting under a bus. ‘Like a ruddy lizard,’ thought the driver, who had served his time in the desert and knew Alexandria.

There were four Miss Tuffys. The thin Miss Tuffy, the fat Miss Tuffy, the smart Miss Tuffy and the mad Miss Tuffy. Angelica was the mad Miss Tuffy.

The smart Miss Tuffy worked in a hat shop, which was why she was smart, the fat Miss Tuffy was a cook, and the thin Miss Tuffy and Angelica worked in the biscuit factory. Angelica was Roxanne’s secretary. It was inevitable really, given Roxanne’s character and Angelica’s character, that they should seek each other out.

Angelica’s vagueness, her inability to recall times, places, names or even facts, was murder in a secretary. But she had one priceless attribute: she liked people. She might not remember a face from one meeting to the next, she would probably never remember the name correctly, but she was invariably friendly and anxious to please. Roxanne had guessed almost at once that Angelica’s madness was the result of short sight and deafness so she had got her fitted with spectacles and a hearing-aid, but it was too late to alter the pattern of Angelica’s ways and she still went around not seeing and hearing properly, a real triumph of mind over body.

“Fancy me forgetting to tell Roxanne.” Angelica patted her pocket to see if she had the pad on which she scribbled all messages and errands. “What a mercy I had it all down, word for word, or I might have forgotten it completely.” As she walked she reflected how fortunate it was that Roxanne had telephoned the Tuffy home asking Angelica to call round to see her tonight or she might still have forgotten the Orlando message. Her sister Miss Melita had handed on Roxanne’s request, apparently delighted to see Angelica turn out into the night. “Completely,” repeated Angelica. She knew only too well how easy it was for Melly’s mind to wipe a sponge over everything. As it was she could remember vividly this message received on the telephone at the office just before she left for home. “Be in tonight at eight-thirty to see Orlando.”

What was the name she had heard? Was it Ladbroke? Teasing her mind with trying to pin down the name of the sender of the message, Angelica hurried on.

All her visitors just missed Roxanne. Juliet, only too pleased not to be alone, let them in one by one and urged them to wait in the warm downstairs sitting-room with the box-like coke fire where she and Roxanne always sat.

“She’ll be back soon,” she said hopefully. As she believed, Roxanne had only gone out for a few minutes to visit a girl at the factory who was sick.

Elizabeth Garrow wondered aloud if she ought to stay, Angelica Tuffy said she would not stay, but did, and Maggie Rispoli said nothing.

“This fire’s very warm,” said Miss Garrow, fanning herself.

“It does give out a heat,” agreed Juliet. But she herself felt deadly cold. “Orlando,” she thought uneasily, wondering what on earth this message meant. She eyed Angelica. Would they really see this strange boy?

“Eight-thirty” she said, hearing the church clock strike, “and Roxanne’s out.”

The four women sat there, sly little Maggie, and Angelica Tuffy, practical Miss Garrow and serious Juliet: all immature and highly vulnerable. The old house had wound them all in like fish it had caught.

They sat there in silence, the attempt at conversation giving over, heads bent listening. Waiting for Orlando.

III

ROXANNE CAME BACK to the house very late when all was still and dark. There had never been any noise. All the time she had been out, and in spite of what had happened within it, the house had been very, very quiet.

She paused for a moment to listen; there was no sound. She slipped up the stairs to her own room. No one ever went into Roxanne’s room except herself; she thought of it as a little cave into which she crept, threw off all the outer coverings with which she protected her personality throughout the day, and became herself. Roxanne really thought of all the masks and manners with which she covered herself in society as being false, and her real self the one which she was left alone with, as if it was not her mind and her imagination which contrived her trappings. But the truth was that the trimmings truly reflected what was underneath. Roxanne, who appeared tough, gentle, loyal, ruthless, affectionate yet unimpassioned, really had the elements of all this in her composition and did not know it. Her room reflected the muddle. It was the room of someone who neglected herself but took herself very seriously also. The furnishings were any style, and no colour matched or even harmonised with another, but the quality of everything from blankets to the carpet on the floor was of the best quality and made to last.

She paused by her mirror and stared at her face. She had been crying; and her face looked drawn and white, and with her good looks momentarily gone, she looked almost plain.

‘I don’t know what I’m crying for,’ she thought, studying her face in the mirror. ‘I ought to be happy, happy, I’m rehabilitated.’ But it was oddly painful to be rehabilitated.

She got into her bed (which she had forgotten to make that day and which consequently was not very comfortable) and drew the sheets up over her head, as if she wanted to shut out the day and the night as well.

The old house was very quiet. In the distance a train rumbled, a dog barked and a visiting cat could be heard knocking a dust-bin lid off. Or perhaps it was a rat.

Roxanne moved restlessly in her bed. She had a lot to think about tonight. Subjects and emotions that she had kept carefully fastened up for years were coming unbuttoned. Old fears, and old loves, and yes, she had to admit it, old hates were stirring.

This was not altogether Orlando’s fault.

She shivered at the thought of Orlando.

How monstrous that his name should be written on her wall. The name of a ghost.

Roxanne folded back the sheet and lay there staring at the darkness. Her room was lit by the light from a street lamp outside and as her eyes grew used to the darkness she could pick out one by one all the features of her room: the curtains looped back against the window, the dressing-table with its wide and empty mirror, the bookcase against the wall. In one corner of the room was a great dark locked cupboard and from this Roxanne quickly turned her eyes. It had been locked for ten years. She would never open it.

The light from the window did not penetrate to the middle of the room which was all in darkness.

The centre of the darkness was the bed, and at the head of it, herself.

For a time she lay there, secretly rather relishing the thought of herself as a dark, tortured soul. Always inside Roxanne was a detached observer who watched with irony the tragedies and comedies into which her life twisted itself.

Roxanne lay there trying to divert herself with the list of glorious luxuries which she would never own in the life she had chosen, but which she secretly desired: real pearls, a bag from Hermes, a coat of sables.

Her head moved on the pillow and out of the corner of her eye she saw something white.

It was unbelievable what she could see, and she felt her neck and arm muscles go rigid.

She didn’t feel fear - she had not understood the necessity for that yet; but she felt incredulity and anger.

Yet it was such a little thing. A scrap of white paper protruding through the door of the great locked cupboard.

Roxanne crawled out of bed and crouched by the cupboard shivering. Someone had opened the cupboard. She tried the door, which resisted her and refused to open. She kept the key in a drawer, but she had not touched it for years. Slowly she went over to look.

It was still there, tied with a piece of pink tape, as she had known it would be.

“Courage, Roxanne,” she invoked herself. “It’s only a cupboard filled with old clothes, books and letters. Nothing to hurt you.” And inside, her ironic commentator added: ‘It’s all dead in there, Roxanne. Only you can hurt you.’

Roxanne placed a big reading-lamp on her desk, buttoned her dressing-gown, and put the key in the lock.

The door opened. A closed-up musty smell of old paper and old clothes rose in her face. There was a shelf of old books and papers, notebooks and letters. There was a shelf of folded clothes, apparently mostly faded cotton dresses. A yellowing straw sunhat rested on top. Roxanne picked it up.

‘I’d forgotten that hat. How funny. I suppose I wore it practically every day for two months, and I’d forgotten its very existence.’

She put it back on the shelf and turned to examine the piece of paper which had been protruding from the door.

It was a perfectly plain piece of drawing-paper. She examined it with an expressionless face and then returned it to a shelf.

Roxanne could now guess which shelf had interested the searcher. Her books and papers had been investigated.

“Someone wants to dig me up,” she muttered. “Perhaps they’re going to write my obituary.”

She sat on the edge of the bed and considered. The discovery seemed utterly meaningless.

Unless you related it to the arrival of Orlando. Orlando, who seemed so monstrously to have survived.

Superstitious, credulous and yet deeply sceptical, Roxanne crouched there unable to make up her mind.

The old house was not quiet. The aged floorboards creaked, plaster fell in a dry rattle behind the walls, windows shook in a wind that was felt nowhere else. Every so often the stair treads groaned as if someone was walking up them.

Another spatter of plaster fell in the wainscoting like the sound of mice running. Then another.

All around her the old house was speaking to Roxanne.

At the third rush of plaster Roxanne raised her head to listen. Experienced in the ways of the old house she knew that these downfalls meant that the big chimney running through the centre of the house was dangerously overheated.

‘Juliet must have had a roaring great fire,’ thought Roxanne uneasily.

She knew Juliet had been sitting in the downstairs room by the coke stove.

She got up and went to the head of the stairs. The house was dark, if not entirely still.

Slowly Roxanne made her way to the lower sitting-room. She opened the door, turned on the electric light and then stopped.

A still group of figures sat round the table, seemingly carefully posed, poised as if for movement but lifeless.

A plump figure in a cherry-coloured skirt and jersey, with a tweed coat neatly folded on her lap, sat with her head tilted against the back of her chair. Next to her a thinner and older woman rested her head on her forearm against the table. There was a feather toque on the floor beside her. A young girl with carefully swathed hair, blue eye-shadow on her closed lids, and wearing a saffron-yellow dress, lolled vacuously between them. All was suspended life: they seemed neither quite dead nor quite alive, but hanging uneasily in limbo somewhere between the two. They were a tableau vivant, but the life had been sucked out: dummies who did not yet know they were dead and thought they might still get up and walk away.

All Roxanne’s old fears, all her memories of poltergeists and arranged groups rushed into her mind.

A silent wordless scream formed in her throat.

Some two hours later John Coffin walked slowly out of the room and out of the front door. Behind him he had left a confusion of photographers and technicians. He stood there in the dawn and watched the last of the four ambulances draw away. He was deeply, coldly angry. It looked as though dear, kind, loving Juliet was dead.

In their four-roomed flat the Tuffy sisters were quietly sleeping. One room, Angelica’s, was of course empty, but in each of the other three a Miss Tuffy was in bed. It was a self-contained flat and they led self-contained lives, ignoring each other as much as possible. They met in the kitchen which was common ground. Two Miss Tuffys liked each other: two didn’t; but they all joined in throwing up hands in despair at Angelica’s eccentricities.

“She put Gregory powder in the stew instead of curry yesterday,” Miss Emily Tuffy had said gloomily earlier that evening. She was the thin, dyspeptic Miss Tuffy who worked in the biscuit factory. “She’ll kill us all one day, she’s mad.”

“She don’t think,” said Miss Melita who was the cook.

“Doesn’t,” corrected the smart Miss Tuffy who was inclined to be pedantic.

“Oh, you always know best,” said Miss Melly; Miss Melita and the smart eldest Miss Tuffy were the two who didn’t like each other: years ago there had been a young man. All the Miss Tuffys hated to cook, including the professional at the job, but they all liked to eat regularly and well. As Angelica was the vaguest and far and away the sweetest-tempered she did most of the cooking; and because she was, after all, the mad Miss Tuffy, her cooking had occasional hazards.

“Where is she now?” It was late and all three were in the kitchen. Angelica’s supper was still on the table uneaten.

Emily Tuffy shrugged. “Haven’t seen her all evening. Out perhaps.”

“All the same,” said Melly, prodding the casserole before her, “I wish she’d come and eat her lovely liver and stuffed heart.”

“It was tough,” said Miss Emily with a shudder; she had often suspected her sister of being a suppressed cannibal.

“It was a mite tough,” agreed Miss Melita sadly. “That’s because you have to use such large animals, cows, ox and so on, it’s all you’re allowed to have.” She sounded indignant. “A smaller animal would be tenderer,” and she gave a sidelong glance at her sister which suggested that her cannibalism was barely suppressed.

“Well, I think she’s gone to bed with a book,” said Emily. “And I’m going to take my Ovaltine and go too.” Overjoyed at the thought of one more day over, she poured out a saucepan of milk.

“Yes, I expect you’re right,” said her other sister…

“Well, if you’re sure she won’t want it, I think I’ll finish up her liver and heart,” said Miss Melly.

She drew up a chair, and so they left her there, sitting at the kitchen table, greedily wolfing down the Ever and heart.

No one thought any more about Angelica again that night.

Miss Garrow’s flat was empty and dark. In the sittingroom the curtains were undrawn and the moonlight shone through drably. In the kitchen a tap continually dripped. Next door the television set played loudly till eleven o’clock without Miss Garrow’s angry fist banging on the wall to quieten it.

“Old cow’s out tonight,” said her neighbour Steve Tyne, a dock worker. His wife giggled and then said nervously, “Better turn it down, Steve. I shall have to meet her tomorrow.” Her husband laughed. “Maybe she’s dead,” he said.

Everyone had a good night in the Rispoli household too, everyone that is, except Maggie’s mother, Florence Rispoli. Her husband had gone to bed and to sleep long before his wife had become anxious about Maggie. The Rispolis went to bed early, because the day began for them before dawn with a trip to Covent Garden. The couple were usually in bed before ten, but Florence had stayed awake waiting for Maggie to come in. At twelve o’clock she awoke her husband, but he murmured something sleepily and dropped back into his dreams again. Because he had been ill and because anyway she protected him from worry, she let him sleep. At one o’clock she got up, partly dressed, went down to the room that overlooked the Square and sat there watching and praying. She had a favourite saint she always prayed to: Saint Ursula because she always seemed such a good, sweet-natured, hopeful saint. Presently, without knowing it, she too dropped into an exhausted sleep. All about her the house was warm and quiet and comfortable, fragrant with garlic and the smell of turnip and potatoes floating up earthily from the shop below.

She was awoken by the sound of motor-cars. She looked out and saw the lights of an ambulance. She watched, and saw it stop outside Miss Roland’s house. She watched sleepily with some interest. At this point it never occurred to her that it could have the least connection in the world with her Maggie. If she considered anyone in connection with Maggie’s absence it was the boy Franky Rickett. He had been hanging around Maggie for weeks now. Or she’d been hanging around him. It was six of one and half a dozen of the other. Probably they’d gone off on that bike of his, Maggie clinging to the pillion, and goodness only knew when they’d be back.

So she watched from the window at the ambulance waiting to see what happened. She saw a uniformed constable cross the road; there was another man, also a policeman, with him.

They came along the Square looking at the numbers of the doors. At last it dawned upon her. They were coming to her.

‘Oh God,’ she thought. ‘No, no. Not my Maggie.’

Even as she stood there watching, she saw a second then a third ambulance follow each other round the corner.

Her eyes dilated.

IV

An extract from the report of Detective Sergeant Dove to his superior John Coffin

I was called to the house in Prince Consort Square at 2.30 a.m., October 20th, by the constable on the beat, P.C. Purdy.

.…The constable had not given me quite an accurate report. He said four women were dead, but I saw straight away that the girl, identified as Juliet Duveen, was breathing. She muttered once or twice and the sounds as near as I could get them were ’Orland, Orland’. Rationalising this, I would suggest it was Roland. I sent at once for the emergency ambulance from the Tower Bridge Road Hospital. The police doctor was already on his way. Perhaps the constable really believed all four women were dead, or perhaps he was misled by Miss Roland, who said repeatedly in my presence that they were all dead, all four of them. She was not hysterical but composed. The impression she made was not quite straightforward.

When I saw them the four women were grouped in a circle round the table, as if they had fallen asleep naturally. One woman had her head resting on the table another was leaning back in her chair, and the girl Maggie Rispoli had been smoking. The cigarette had burnt down between her fingers, scorching the skin, before falling to the floor. She had blisters on her arm, possibly also caused by the cigarette.

There was no sign of bruising or disordered clothes, or that they had become alarmed. There was no sign of violence on them. The police doctor confirmed this from his first superficial examination. The only one who showed signs of disturbance was the girl Juliet. She had fallen sideways out of her chair, possibly trying to get to the door.

The door into the room was unlocked, the window bolted on the inside. No sign of any entry from outside, no sign of violence. The air in the room was very warm and stuffy. This was probably from the fire in the porcelain stove. The women were flushed in the heat.

I went round myself to inform the families of all three dead women: Elizabeth Garrow of 126 Erasmus Buildings, Top Acre Street, lived alone, but a neighbour told me where her sister, Mrs. Lamb, lives. Maggie Rispoli, 6 Prince Consort Square: Mrs. Rispoli had already become alarmed at Maggie’s not returning home and was only waiting for morning before informing the police. Angelica Tuffy of 4 Linacre Road: the Misses Tuffy said they hadn’t noticed Angelica wasn’t home. They thought she had gone to bed early with a book. All three families said they had no idea why their sister or child should have called on Miss Roland.

Inquiries round the neighbourhood showed me that people are always dropping in on Miss Roland. She’s something of a public figure in the district, and it is nothing unusual for her to have visitors in and out all night. People in trouble seem to go to her. It seems likely enough that they called to see her, found her out, and waited around in the hope of seeing her. This at the moment seems the most likely solution. Perhaps we shall never get any closer.

An extract from a note written for the confidential information of Inspector John Coffin by the police doctor.

No, I do not yet know if they died from cerebral, diabetic or uraemic coma or a mixture of all three, one for each.

I may say here and now that the blisters on the forearm of the girl Rispoli interest me. There is also a sprinkling of them on her neck and right cheek. I rang up her doctor, who informed me that she did not have a particularly sensitive skin.

Roxanne Roland’s statement:

I came in at about twelve and went straight to bed. About an hour later I became alarmed and went downstairs. No, I don’t know why I was alarmed, I just was. I went downstairs and when I opened the door I saw them all. It must have been about one o’clock or perhaps a little later. I sat on the stairs and waited, then I went out into the street and found a policeman. No, the telephone was in with them. No, I don’t know what time that was.

(But Coffin knew that it was at five minutes past two, nearly an hour after she had gone downstairs.)

Coffin read these reports and read them again, tapping his table angrily. The reports puzzled and disturbed him disproportionately.

Juliet’s body was thin and straight under the hospital blankets. But she was asleep so that although there was worry it was no longer worry about her life. The worry now was how far the delicate mechanism of the brain had been affected by the unconsciousness due to asphyxiation. Derangement and insanity can ‘follow such unconsciousness when the brain and its arteries are deprived of oxygen.

Juliet lay there asleep. At intervals she made a little murmuring sound.

Was she still muttering Roland, Roland? The policeman who sat by her bed, the nurse who stood looking down on her couldn’t be sure. Probably she wasn’t really making sense.

Coffin came and went in her room within this period, and so did Roxanne and Lady Passey, Juliet’s grandmother. But Juliet seemed to prefer to sleep. The doctor said it was possibly just shock. No real need to worry yet.

“I’d like her to say something,” said Coffin wistfully. But Juliet appeared content to lie there in apparent sleep. “Anything, even if it didn’t make sense.”

Then one day, when nobody was by, she suddenly sat up in bed, said loudly and clearly, “Remember to ask the milkman. Remember to ask the milkman,” and then relapsed on to her pillows.

V

COFFIN DID NOT reveal his anger to Roxanne, who was still something of an enigma to him, and before whom he felt he must not betray himself. He did not forget that there was a great question-mark about her raised by Juliet and reiterated by his reports. But she sensed his mood all the same, and was puzzled and uneasy. She was still white and shocked.

“How did they die? What happened? Do you know yet?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

She shuddered, still preoccupied with her own reactions to the tragedy. “I shouldn’t have screamed like that.”

‘But you didn’t scream at all, my lady,’ said Coffin to himself. ’That was the extraordinary thing.’ Aloud he said: “Your guess is as good as mine.”

Roxanne put her hand on her chest; she could still feel the scream vibrating there. She had no idea that she had been completely silent, that no scream had forced its way out, that it had been completely internal. Even now she had no idea what impression she had made on the police, or of the picture she had presented with her perfectly coherent but weird speech to the constable about a ‘dead group’, and of the manner in which she had shown them the room, rather like a stony-faced guide at Madame Tussaud’s Waxworks. “This is Miss Garrow, this is Angelica Tuffy and this is Maggie Rispoli.” The police had been chilled.

“And the one girl wasn’t even dead,” said the young police officer from Coffin’s Division who had answered the call. “I saw her eyelids move while the old witch was showing us round.”

“She’s a beautiful woman and not even old,” said Coffin abruptly and then was sorry he’d spoken. He didn’t want, for a reason he couldn’t quite pin down, to seem in any way a supporter of Roxanne’s.

“She is?” The young policeman was surprised. “You wouldn’t have known it.” He was absorbed in his own picture of Roxanne: he gave a shudder. “I tell you, she knows more than she should about this business. I thought it straight away: you know more than you should, I said to myself.”

“Perhaps,” said Coffin. He added morosely “If she does then she’s out ahead of me. I don’t know anything. Right here and now it looks as though they died a natural death.”

“Not a mark on them,” agreed the young man. “They were just sitting there, comfortable-like and stone dead.”

Coffin moved irritably, knocking his wife’s picture to the floor. “One thing’s sure, they were not frightened to death. They just sat there waiting for someone to come and bury them.”

The young man shifted in his seat, thinking what a horrible way of putting things the old man had when he was moved, as now. “Not the girl,” he reminded Coffin. “You’re forgetting the girl. She must have been restless enough. The neck of her dress was all torn. And she was still muttering when I carried her out…Orland.”

Coffin paused with Patsy’s photograph in his hand. For the moment the magic of Juliet was stronger than the magic of Patsy, and the photograph slipped from his fingers.

“Yes, you put that in your report. She said Orland, Orland, and what she meant by that is anyone’s guess. They weren’t a couple of old clubmen calling each other Roland and Duveen. They called each other Juliet and Roxanne.”

“We can’t know what she meant until we know what was the last thought in her mind,” said the young policeman solemnly.

“It looks as though it was Roland,” said Coffin.

Now he studied Roxanne sitting there before him, and recalled this conversation.

“I’ll go back on what I said. When three women die like that, then it’s either suicide or murder or accident. We can rule out mass suicide. They hardly knew each other.”

“They hardly knew me,” whispered Roxanne, “but they were dead in my house.”

“That leaves accident or murder,” went on Coffin. “It could be accident. But I don’t like the look of it. I say it was murder.” He knew the signs, the subtle tiny signs of homicide.

“In my house?” cried Roxanne. “What were they all doing there?’ Why were they there?”

“I was hoping you could tell me that. You must know.”

‘If anyone does,’ he said to himself.

“But I don’t.”

“You do. Somewhere in your life is the reason why they were there.” And as she did not answer: “They must have had some purpose in coming to see you there and at that time.”

Roxanne just stared at him.

“I know they did have,” said Coffin. “Officially I have no reason to take any special line yet about this case. We still don’t know how the three women died. But unofficially I’m treating it as multiple murder.”

He glanced at the filing-cabinet at right-angles to his desk. There was a filing-cabinet side to police work. Small details were written down and deposited in the hope they would one day be useful. He was behind in his filing work. Everything, details of time and people, was swirling round loose in his head. He gave it a half shake as if to settle it.

It was sixteen hours after the discovery of the bodies by Roxanne, and it was now six o’clock in the evening. The newspapers with their headlines had come out. Coffin had grimly pursued the routine of his day - a breaking and entering in Lollard’s Close, an assault outside the Queen’s Road Maternity Hospital. In her hospital bed Juliet’s breath was still stertorous and laboured, each breath seemed shallower and slower than the last. Her heart was becoming tired.

Coffin was tantalisingly unsure of what case exactly he was investigating, but it was getting the headlines all right. The foreign papers had picked it up; it was in the television news.

“Don’t even know yet how they died,” he told himself. But now at six o’clock in the evening this was no longer strictly true. Guesses were being formulated. The doctors who were treating Juliet had come to some conclusion, which they had passed on to Coffin. The police doctor had reached a tentative answer.

Coffin tabulated certain things.

Item: the temperature of the room.

Item: the temperature of the bodies.

Item: the colour of their cheeks.

Item: - but about this he was only guessing - the quality of their blood.

He himself had quietly visited the families of all three dead women earlier that day.

Miss Elizabeth Garrow, forewoman in the biscuit factory, and Roxanne’s first visitor on that fatal evening (although the last to die, the doctors said), had lived in a tiny flat in a great new block of flats built by the London County Council on the edge of a great patch of empty bombed dockland. She had lived there alone in her three neat rooms.

Coffin interviewed her sister, Mrs. Lamb, who seemed too dazed to weep.

“I can’t believe Elizabeth’s gone,” she said, “I can’t seem to take it in.” Her son was with her, looking hostile but controlled. “It was luck you finding me here, I haven’t been here long, I came round to see if anything needed doing.” She looked round perplexed. “I don’t know what to do now I am here. I don’t like to leave all her nice things. I mean, it’s a temptation, isn’t it?”

“I’ll tell the man on this beat to keep a look out,” said Coffin.

“I don’t feel as though I know where Elizabeth is,” went on her sister, still looking round. “She’s not here, she’s not there in that place where they’ve got her body, she’s not anywhere, that’s what they mean by losing people, I suppose. I never understood it before, I thought it was just a way of speaking, but I see now it’s what really happens.”

“What about going out to the kitchen and making your mother a cup of tea while I talk to her?” Coffin looked at the boy. He sat down on a blue-damask-covered sofa, put his hands on his knees and tried to look gentle and not alarming. Mrs. Lamb relaxed a little, although still keeping an ear open for what was going on in the kitchen.

“Don’t break anything out there, Eddie,” she called.

“I won’t, Mum.”

“I can understand you missing a sister when you loved her,” said Coffin with sympathy.

“I don’t know about loving her,” said Mrs. Lamb, clasping and unclasping her handbag. “It wasn’t easy to love Bessie, I don’t reckon anyone could, she was so bossy. She always knew best. But I certainly do miss her.” And she looked round in an uneasy way.

“I should put that handbag down, Mrs. Lamb, before you break the clasp.”

“Yes.” And she put it down on the chair beside her, her eyes still moving restlessly round the room. She got up and closed the door to the kitchen quietly. Coffin wondered what was coming.

“I suppose she really is dead?” she asked in a whisper.

“Why, yes,” said Coffin, surprised. “I’m afraid she really is.”

“I always had a sort of feeling about Bessie, that she might rally when all was given up.”

“Not this time,” said Coffin.

“I wouldn’t put it past Bessie,” said her sister unconvinced. “She might beat you in the end.”

‘And you don’t look as if you’d be too pleased if she did,’ thought Coffin.

“Are you her heir?” he asked, suddenly illuminated.

“I think I must be, don’t you?” asked Mrs Lamb after a moment’s pause. “I mean there isn’t anybody else.”

“I thought she had a fiancé or a friend or something,” said Coffin, who had been doing a little inquiring first.

“Ha,” said Mrs. Lamb and no more.

The fiancé thus decisively disposed of, Coffin took up his next line of questioning. “What I really wanted to know was: do you have any idea of what could have taken your sister round to see Miss Roland yesterday evening?”

While he was talking, he was unobtrusively observing Mrs. Lamb and her actions and speech to see if there was any suggestion that she had a motive for killing her sister. Always supposing her sister to have been murdered, which he did not yet know for sure. He had no particular suspicion of Mrs. Lamb, in spite of her hopes of inheritance, but such behaviour was automatic with him. Out of the corner of his eyes he saw that the door to the kitchen had quietly opened an inch. He wasn’t the only interested listener. ‘I don’t trust that boy,’ he thought.

“No, I don’t have any idea.” Mrs. Lamb shook her head. “I hadn’t seen Bessie all the week, you see. We met on Sunday, but I was busy cooking lunch and Eddie talked to her more than I did.”

Coffin saw the kitchen door give a few more inches.

“Well, let’s call Eddie in, shall we?” he asked. “He practically is in anyway.”

Eddie marched in with his tray of tea. He had arranged the tray neatly and precisely with matched cups and a plate of sugar biscuits.

“I did talk to Aunty,” he said, efficiently pouring out tea and giving it to his bemused mother. “Or you might say she talked to me. She heard me say something about seeing Miss Roland down Club Row buying a dove.”

“A dove?” Coffin was transfixed.

“Well, all she got was a pigeon,” went on Eddie. “They didn’t have a dove. But Miss Roland took the pigeon quite satisfied. She didn’t seem to care much one way or another. Aunty was very interested in that. I can tell you.”

“You’re sure it was Miss Roland?”

“Oh, yes,” said Eddie confidently. “I described her to aunt. ’That witch woman’, I said, and she knew exactly what I meant. And that’s what worried Aunty, of course, because she knew Miss Roland was not allowed to keep birds or animals in that house. It’s in the lease. The house belongs to Aunty’s friend. He owns three or four along there. Doesn’t he, mother?” He appealed to his mother.

“Three,” she said briefly. “And a rotten landlord he is.”

“He’s fair,” said Eddie appraisingly. “You can’t expect more.”

“I expect that’s why Aunty went round to see Miss Roland…to check up if there was a bird.”

“Would she do that?” Coffin in his turn appealed to Mrs. Lamb.

“Wouldn’t she just?” said Mrs. Lamb, sipping her cup of tea; she seemed to have cheered up, as if she had somehow laid Bessie’s ghost.

Coffin nodded and stood up to go. He thought he had got everything he could from the Lambs.

“Mind you, that wouldn’t be the only reason she would have,” said Mrs. Lamb, still sipping her tea and with enjoyment too. “She was downright interested in Miss Roland lately.”

“Lately?” said Coffin, seizing on what was perhaps a strange word.

“She always admired her.” There was no doubt now about Mrs. Lamb’s enjoyment. “But the last month, I thought she seemed interested.”

“What do you mean, interested!”

Mrs. Lamb searched round in her limited vocabulary. “Interested, as if there was something strange about Miss Roland, and she knew it and wanted to find out more. So Bessie would, too,” she added half to herself.

“Excited,” said Eddie, plucking the word from his more sophisticated vocabulary.

The two stared at Coffin, bright-eyed.

‘Damn it’, he thought. ’They’re interested.’

The Miss Tuffys had their curtains drawn and the door locked. After a short delay he was admitted by a woman wearing an apron and scarf tied round her head.

“They’ve all been lying down,” she said. “But they’re up again now. I’ll tell them you’re here.”

Coffin followed closely behind her as she entered the sitting-room, and saw the Misses Tuffy seated round a fire. The room was overheated and stuffy. They seemed pleased to see him and even eager to talk. They were three very frightened women. It was as if the death of Angelica had let loose a virus which would presently run all through the family. He saw that up till now they had secretly considered themselves immortal. Only other people died. Now Angelica had let the cold wind in.

“Come nearer the fire,” said Miss Tuffy, who was wearing black. “It’s a cold night, Inspector. Or perhaps we just feel cold.”

“It’s the shock,” said Miss Emily. “I don’t feel as though I’ll ever be warm again.” Miss Melita said nothing, but poked the fire up.

Coffin made a sympathetic noise.

“Give yourself time,” he said.

“Ah, we will, if we’ve got it,” said Miss Emily frowning. “Angelica’s the first to go, but will she be the last?”

“We’re very upset,” said Miss Tuffy, smoothing her black dress, but the feel of the fine soft wool was no comfort to her today.

“The reason I’m disturbing you is that I wanted to ask you if you have any idea what could have taken your sister round to Miss Roland’s? I mean it must have been important.”

“Oh, she could have had a hundred reasons,” said Miss Tuffy. “I’ve been asking myself too. But it could have been any of so many things. She was always running round there. She was Miss Roland’s secretary.”

Coffin nodded.

“There’d be some message, some little errand. She thought the world of Miss Roland.”

“She always loved her,” said Miss Emily.

“No, there’s no use asking ourselves why she went, she had a good reason, but we’ll never know it. Only to think of it’s ending like that.”

“And Angelica too,” said Miss Emily, “So good, so kind, so gentle, she wouldn’t kill a fly.”

“I’ve seen her kill plenty,” said Miss Melita suddenly from the fire. “I’m not blaming her, but I certainly have.”

Coffin turned to her. He had already noticed that Miss Melita was the odd man out. To some extent the other two Miss Tuffys were singing a duet: Miss Melita was singing solo.

“She was so kind, so loving,” mourned Miss Emily, “Angelica was all heart.”

“I don’t suppose it was abnormally large,” said Miss Melly appraisingly. “And if so it wouldn’t be tender.” She went on: “Anyway, you know as well as I do that Angelica could be plain silly. She fussed about Miss Roland out of all proportion. Moreover, she had a very funny way of putting things.” Miss Melly had a funny way of putting things herself. “Didn’t she come home with some tale of dreams of herself laid out on a shelf in a great refrigerator?”

At this alarming evidence of precognition on Angelica Tuffy’s part Coffin felt chilled.

Miss Emily said, “I think the plain truth is she was worried about Miss Roland and wanted to watch over her. Or watch her,” she added.

Coffin wondered if this was an echo of the ‘interest’ of Elizabeth Garrow. ‘Interest’ from Miss Garrow might easily be converted to ‘worry’ in Miss Angelica Tuffy.

Miss Melly followed him out as he went to the door. “I suppose they’ll be opening her up, having a look inside to see what killed her?” she said in a low voice.

“They may have to, Miss Tuffy.”

“I thought so…I suppose I will be able to see her?”

Miss Tuffy brushed past her, and opened the door for him. “You mustn’t let her see the body,” she said in a quiet tone. “It’s so bad for her.”

As Coffin left he thought he heard Miss Melly say “Waste” quite loudly.

John Coffin had to tighten himself against the next and last interview. The Rispolis were the only family he knew out of the three, and in spite of the fact that Mrs. Rispoli did not like him and always made it clear that she did not like him, he was not looking forward to asking her about Maggie. From all he knew of Maggie Rispoli she was no joy at home and by no means her mother’s favourite child, supposing her to have one, which people said she hadn’t, except for Mr. Rispoli. But this didn’t mean that she was more likely to be friendly to Coffin now the girl was dead; on the contrary, he felt obscurely that the circumstances would nourish her dislike.

The vegetable shop was closed for the day and every curtain in the house was tightly drawn. His heart sank at this open declaration of an official formal show of grief. Inside the house he could hear the sound of weeping, but it wasn’t Mrs. Rispoli, who met him dry eyed, or the ten-year-old girl who had let him in. It was probably Mr. Rispoli, who had been told to cry by his wife: she told him everything he had to do.

They had their conversation in the hall with the overpowering smell of flowers and vegetables floating in from the closed-up shop. Later on there would be lilies for Maggie. Mrs Rispoli hadn’t liked Maggie much, but she would certainly see she got lilies to lie on her coffin.

“No, I don’t know in the least why Maggie went there last night. She might have had some message to take. She was a messenger in the factory and people sometimes gave her odd jobs after hours. She certainly had a purpose. Maggie did nothing without a purpose, poor child, God rest her soul. And if you want my opinion that purpose would be something that Maggie wanted. She always took what she could get.”

So there it was; all three women probably had a legitimate errand which took them to Roxanne’s house that night. But beneath their apparent business seemed a strong secret purpose. It was called inquisitiveness in Elizabeth Garrow, love in Angelica Tuffy, and self interest in Maggie Rispoli. It earned a different name in each woman, but perhaps it represented one and the same thing: some knowledge of Roxanne.

And what were you then to say about their visits ending in their death? Why had it happened? Chance? Their bad luck? Murder?

Or some evil quality about the house itself, attracting its victims to itself at the hour of maximum danger?

Roxanne, as unhappy as Coffin, had spent the day in a depressing attempt to do her work, eat and drink and talk, live a normal existence. It was depressing because it didn’t work and everyone around her could see it didn’t work. She ended up with a grotesque parody of a day. She had eaten a sandwich at midday, fending off the well-meant attempt of Lotty and Bruno to take her out. She was sorry to snub Lotty, but it would be particularly unbearable to see Lotty, and about Bruno she refused to think. He probably did think it would cheer and support her to see him, such was the character of Bruno. And since she was now, to use her own phrase, rehabilitated, she had no reason to fear or hate him. All the years of Bruno’s marriage, although Roxanne had shown him a smiling face, and turned his wife Lotty into a friend, she had been nursing underneath a mixture of bitterness and resentment which, deprived of expression, was all the stronger for not speaking. Last night as a sort of follow-up to their conversation on the train, she and Bruno had met for a drink and a talk and she learnt the real reason why he had not married her. Well, the bitterness had gone, but what had taken its place was something she could hardly analyse, but sadness for Lotty certainly had a place in it, and the residue was probably made up of irony and amusement. ’The joke’s on me all right,’ she thought. ‘I must learn to laugh at it sometime.’

She had dressed herself very carefully for this terrible day, after a sleepless night. She had put on a girdle and brassiere made for her in Knightsbridge, and a satin slip of pale aquamarine that had been sewn in France from silk spun in Italy, and she had dusted her skin with powder scented with jasmine and rose and sandalwood, nourishing her spirit, as she so often did, upon her private luxuries. So that all the time she talked to Juliet’s father and mother, and answered the police questions, all was silk and expensiveness underneath, while on top were her shabby and dusty tweeds.

And all the time she was talking, eating, drinking, moving, she was seeing the picture of the group of women quietly dead in her own house. For the first time in thirteen years the face of Bruno was blotted out.

And in its place had come a younger, stranger face, the face of Orlando.

The police were assessing facts and relating causes, asking questions and looking for reasons. She alone knew that she could supply in addition a gloss to their information: the appearance of Orlando. Perhaps she would have to tell the police about Orlando. But it would be difficult…She had the best reason in the world for thinking he was a ghost. Or at any rate non-living.

Now Roxanne faced Coffin.

“So it comes to this, Roxanne, I know by now that all three women had an ostensible reason for wanting to see you, but there was another one too. Perhaps their real purpose. They wanted to get a look at you. At ‘you’.” He paused and added irritably, “What’s the matter with you, Roxanne, are you the snake woman or something?”

‘Yes,’ said Roxanne to herself, ‘a ghost snake woman.’

Her hands were quietly shaking, but Coffin did not let her off the hook.

“Let’s go back a bit. All this trouble you’ve been having…”

She looked up sharply.

“Yes, Juliet told me…She came to me yesterday afternoon. She was worried.”

“She had no right…” began Roxanne.

“She had every right, as it turned out,” said Coffin grimly. “She came to see me about a dead pigeon, and within ten hours she was nearly dead herself.”

Roxanne was white. “Tell me about that dead pigeon.”

“Why are you so quick to ask questions about a dead pigeon and so slow to ask about Juliet?” asked Coffin bitterly. “Juliet came to me and rightly, I think, because she didn’t quite like what was going on around her. I don’t blame her. Let’s face the facts: anonymous letters to me, and the shops accusing you of being a shoplifter.”

“That’s nonsense,” said Roxanne, uneasily. “I didn’t take any notice.”

“All right, that was nonsense, I agree. But the dead pigeon wasn’t nonsense.”

Roxanne was silent.

“The whole thing adds up. The first stage was an attempt to discredit you by someone who doesn’t believe in you.”

“There must be plenty of those about.”

“But it hasn’t succeeded. It hasn’t succeeded, has it? You haven’t lost your job or left the district?”

“No, it hasn’t succeeded…except perhaps with me,” said Roxanne bitterly. “I am a little discredited with myself. I no longer believe in myself. But when did I ever, Coffin, when did I ever?” She spoke the words half gaily, half ironically, but with an undertone of real meaning.

Coffin knew a rhetorical question when he heard one, and in any case wanted to press on with his own question in this curious interchange, unlike any which he was used to in the plain brisk dialogues of his day-to-day life. In its allusions and undercurrents it was more like one of his conversations with Patsy. It was charged with emotion and allusions derived from God knew where, but that was what Roxanne did to you. Uneasily he realised it was loaded.

“That was what we might call stage one, Roxanne. The pigeon represents more serious business and I think you know it. Was it a threat?”

“No,” Roxanne apparently spoke with difficulty. “Not a threat…An intimation perhaps, but not a threat.”

“You’re using words I don’t understand.” He was watching her closely. “You know what a dead pigeon means round here? A dead lighter-man. You know? Or a seaman. A seaman would do.”

Roxanne shook her head.

‘There has to be some kind of build-up behind this’, Coffin thought. ‘Someone hates her, God knows who. Perhaps it’s herself. Perhaps it’s me.’

The telephone rang, he picked it up, listened for a moment, said “Good, Thank you”, and replaced the receiver.

“That was the hospital. If it’s any comfort to you, but I don’t know if it is, because I no longer understand you, Roxanne, Juliet is a little better.”

“Of course, you’re half in love with her,” said Roxanne, in a detached voice as if what she said had somehow no connection with her at all. “Well, I can understand that. I’ve been half in love with people often enough in my time.” As she put it, it sounded an inexpressibly dreary process.

“I am married,” began Coffin.

A smile flickered across Roxanne’s face.

“Oh, yes, I know. I remember meeting your mother. She’s an old friend of mine, did you know? I met her on the morning of your wedding. ‘My son’s a very lucky man’, she said to me, ‘he’s about to be unhappily married’.”

Coffin opened his mouth to speak and then shut it again. With Roxanne in this flow-of-consciousness, say-anything mood, something interesting might come popping out. It was probably the shock affecting her. But the shot had gone home: what could you say about his marriage? It looked like being an interesting psychological experience for both sides. But happy or unhappy the words hardly applied as yet.

“And do you know what she meant by that?” went on Roxanne to her imaginary audience. It certainly wasn’t only Coffin, she seemed to see quite a crowd there. “You’re more likely to be successful if you’re unhappy in love. All successful detectives ought to be unhappily married. It gives you an eager sharp cutting-edge. Look at me: I owe all my success to being thoroughly vicious in love. Or is it the other way round? I must get that clear one day.”

Coffin puckered his eyes at her, trying to see if she was joking or not. It was a bitter joke, if so.

“For that matter,” went on Roxanne, as if Coffin had somehow come back into sight again, “Juliet’s more than a little in love with you. In my jargon: she’s looking for a father figure. And why shouldn’t she? She’s never had one. That would certainly be among the reasons for coming to see you, whether she knew it or not.”

“She’s got a father.”

Roxanne smiled. “Deficient, wouldn’t you say?”

‘I’ll break this if it’s the last thing I do,’ thought Coffin.

He leaned forward and said in a level tone: “You’re behind all this in some way, aren’t you, Roxanne?”

After a long pause in which the sounds of traffic from the outside world could be clearly heard, Roxanne said: “No…And then, “No. Well, not in the way you mean it.”

‘And how do you know the way I mean it, Roxanne?’ asked Coffin, softly, silently, not aloud but to himself. He kept his eyes on Roxanne. In a little while she will tell me something,’ he thought. ‘Purdy was quite right. She’s weighted down with knowledge. I will tell her I know about the pigeon and that she was seen buying it, and she will let loose the whole burden.’

The ringing of the telephone broke up the moment.

Coffin picked it up, and listened. “Yes. Yes. Ta, Bill. What? Oh no, champion. No, I’m not angry. Anyway, if I am, it’s not your fault. Bye, Bill.” He turned to Roxanne. “I can tell you now what they died of.”

She looked up.

“They died of deprivation of oxygen.”

She stared.

“They died from your coke stove. It produced carbon dioxide and it slowly suffocated them. They sat there and went to sleep and never woke up. That’s what it looked like and that’s what it was. A sheer bloody accident. It happens to tramps in huts and night watchmen and old-age pensioners who damp down the fire and stuff up the cracks.”

He put his hands on the table and finished his speech, for it was a speech. “As near as I can discover, the house killed them.”

Lotty was waiting for Roxanne in the house, brave, tough little Lotty, who feared neither ghosts nor Bruno; she met her at the front door and after one look at her face put her arms round her.

“Straight to bed, Roxanne. And I wish you’d come and stay with us.”

“No, I won’t,” said Roxanne. She could hardly speak, but she could say that much.

They went up the stairs. Lotty had all the fights blazing.

“I’ve made everything comfortable, bed warm and there’s a thermos of hot milk by the bed.”

“I hate hot milk,” said Roxanne.

“So you do, love,” said Lotty. “Never mind, drink it up, it’s soothing and good.”

They paused at the top landing to draw breath. In contrast to the brightly lighted staircase, this part of the house was dark.

“Funny,” said Lotty. “I’m nearly sure I left the lights on.”

Roxanne said nothing.

The door to Roxanne’s bedroom was closed. Lotty was in front of Roxanne and hurrying forward to open it. She flung it open, then gave a scream and fell back against Roxanne, knocking her against the wall.

“It’s on fire. Get some water. We must put it out.”

Roxanne threw open the door. In the middle of her bed and from the shelves of her cupboard bright tongues of fire were licking upwards. She closed the door at once, and felt very sick.

“It started as I looked,” whispered Lotty. “It burst into flames as I looked.”

“I’m sure it did,” cried Roxanne. “That’s the classic way of poltergeists’ spontaneous fires.”

After leaving Roxanne, Lotty went to see her doctor. He was a plump, fair Irishman who had been educated in Dublin and, as he put it, the world. The world had been far and away the most important teacher. He was neat, cheerful and flirtatious; his medicine was negligible but his psychology was first-class. He was much sought after by the mothers of the neighbourhood as an accoucheur. He handed out plenty of anaesthetics, let them drink as much hot tea as they wanted, and gave them inefficient advice about birth control afterwards. He prescribed penicillin for everything else.

“And what can I do for you?” he asked, studying her face. She looked a bit anaemic, but otherwise all right.

“I’m having terrible dreams, doctor,” she said with a shudder. “I dream someone is trying to kill me.”

“And are they, d’ye think?” It was this sort of question, utterly spontaneous and irrepressible, that marked his character.

“It’s just dreams,” said Lotty. “I want you to give me something to stop me having these dreams.”

Dr. McCarthy scratched his head. Penicillin wouldn’t do here.

“And by what methods are you being murdered?” he asked, hoping for helpful information. If she thought she was being strangled then he could treat her for goitre or indigestion. It was a wide range, true, but he had treated wider, and no more of his patients died than any other doctor’s. But, on the other hand, if she thought she was being shot or stabbed, diagnosis was more difficult.

“No special method,” said Lotty. “I just have this terrible feeling it’s about to happen, that someone is after me: then I wake up. - I’m frightened of fire,” she added, half to herself.

“It’s a pity you can’t be more precise,” said Dr. McCarthy, regretfully. “Fire, did you say?”

“I want you to help me get over these dreams, not have them better.”

“I could give you a sleeping tablet.” Dr. McCarthy drew his prescription pad towards him.

“I’m asking you to get rid of my trouble, not encourage it.”

“No, no.” He was soothing. “I’ll give you a little sedative. Twice a day.”

But when he checked her name and address, and remembered what he had read in the newspaper, he wondered if perhaps her unconscious mind was not warning her of some very real danger.

Coffin had heard the fire bells ringing through the street and was not surprised to be called to the telephone once again and learn that it was Roxanne’s house.

“That’s a hungry house,” he said to himself.

VI

COFFIN SLEPT ON his problem; Roxanne, drugged, slept too, and only Juliet, slowly coming alive again, was wakeful.

In the morning Coffin was still obsessed with the three women who had died.

They were all of them loaded with some tale, some fable, some gossip about Roxanne Roland. ‘What was it?’ he worried.

Sergeant Dove (he was a local man) tried to look intelligent. “Well, we can’t ask them.”

Coffin ignored him.

“Where were they getting it from?”

“That’s only the same question another way round.”

“It’s one we can answer though,” said Coffin, without getting excited. “You can answer it.”

“Me?”

“Yes, boy. Think about it. They were getting fed this tale from some common source. It sticks out a mile. That’s point one. The other point is: they can’t have been the only ones. There must have been others. Plenty of others. You get out and find them.”

Dove groaned. “Give me a time scheme to check or a deserter to find and I’m O.K. But this - it’ll be like finding a needle in a haystack.”

“No, it’s not, because you know the haystack, it’s this district.”

“Twenty thousand souls.”

“You can limit it a bit. Think, boy, think. Some things point to the biscuit factory as the source. All the women and Miss Roland work there.”

Dove got up and put on his coat. “What a welcome visitor I’ll be. I remember how pleased they were to see me when the Barber kid was missing.”

“Be friendly. Don’t go in like the wrath of God.”

“The trouble is they all know me too well down there. I was at school with most of them or their husbands.”

“You should have worked harder at school.”

“I did work hard. It’s what I said. They all know me too well. There’s no awe.”

“It’s a village,” agreed Coffin. “But I don’t go for this awe stuff. I like them to trust me and feel friendly. And to talk to me because they trust me. I don’t try to create awe.”

Dove did not answer. He could have told Coffin that there was no need for him to create awe, the district felt plenty for him as it was. If the phrase ‘evil eye’ had been in common use, then Coffin would have earned it. His bright searching blue gaze was much feared.

“I’ll go down there and be friendly,” he said wearily. “They won’t like me any better for it, worse, probably, but I’ll be friendly.”

“Now, Fred,” said Coffin, but he had already abandoned the subject, “Some evidence points to the biscuit factory but not all: the girl Juliet knew nothing specific, Roxanne Roland herself hasn’t heard…”

“She’d be the last to hear.”

“Not necessarily. I don’t agree with you there. She’s had plenty of experience of dirty malice, has Roxanne…” He was thoughtful. “No, it’s not clear where all the stories are coming from. Or why. It could be the factory, and again it could be somewhere else. You get out. Do some field work. Find out what women there are talking like this and where they got it from.”

“I’ve got plenty I could be doing,” grumbled Dove, “Instead of going round listening to women’s gossip. It’s not a case, you know.”

“What makes you think I’m taking you off the other thing? You can fit this in as well. Our job is crime prevention, as well as detection, and don’t you forget it.”

Dove looked at him.

“If there isn’t a murder done yet, then there will be, if we don’t watch out.”

“Are you joking?”

“And I’m not at all sure there hasn’t been murder already.”

In Roxanne’s house there was now mess and chaos upstairs and down. Coffin found Roxanne wearily straightening up one room for her own use. He walked in the half-open door and up the stairs.

“Oh, it’s you,” said Roxanne, without stopping her work. “I thought it might be a reporter again.”

“Had ’em round here, have you?”

“What do you think?” Roxanne went on with her mopping up.

“The firemen left you in a fair mess,” said Coffin looking round.

“I could have put it out with less water myself,” said Roxanne bitterly. “In fact I would have, only Lotty telephoned before I could stop her.”

Not far from Coffin’s Divisional Headquarters stood the flats where his mother lived. She was nicely placed over a row of shops. Coffin had thought she might do her shopping here to save her walking about, but his mother, although on very friendly terms with the shop owners, still travelled back daily to the shops she had patronised all her married life.

He found his mother in bed, wearing a bright red bed-jacket and two shawls, sipping tea and reading the papers.

“Shut the door,” she said, without looking up. “I can smell it’s you that’s come in. You smell like a police court.”

“Mum, you’re a woman,” said Coffin, sitting down on her bed and nibbling a lump of sugar from the tray.

“I was once. I’m so old now I’m practically sexless.” She huddled deeper in her shawls. “You’ve brought a lot of cold air in with you. I’ve got a bad cold.” And she coughed twice.

“Still if there was some gossip, some tale going round amongst the women, something pretty secret, you’d probably know it?”

“I don’t know what you mean by that…Come out into the open.”

“I mean is there any story going the rounds about Roxanne Roland?”

“You mean like is she a shoplifter?” Mrs. Coffin raised her eyebrows, delicately picked out in a pale blue.

“Yes, like that, I know about that, but something even more, something with a real edge on it that could grip people’s imaginations,” said Coffin. “I don’t know quite what it could be, but something possibly frightening.”

His mother was silent. “I didn’t know it was going round,” she said at last, “but what they could have got on to is the fact that Roxanne was little Rosy Roland. I remember because I’m the sort that does remember. I don’t suppose Roxanne would want that brought up. She must think it’s all safely buried.”

“Rosy Roland?” questioned Coffin.

“Don’t you remember the Calico Lane Ghost? The knockings and flying crockery and the dancing furniture? That was Roxanne. She was only about ten. It was a sensation while it lasted, but it didn’t last long, the whole outbreak came and went. Some people said Roxanne did it all herself quite consciously. I think she did it but not consciously. I didn’t know her then, of course, but I read it in the papers and I must admit I’ve read it up since I did get to know her. I think she was genuine, poor little beast. Wonder how much she remembers.”

“Everything, I should guess,” said Coffin getting up. “Well, thanks. I thought maybe it was something like that. Some people believed she was genuinely loaded, psychically speaking, and some didn’t. What did she believe, do you think?”

“People like Roxanne always believe the worst about themselves, don’t they?” said Mrs. Coffin obliquely. “They hate themselves really, don’t they?”

“You clever old devil,” said her son, apparently understanding her completely.

And Mrs. Coffin settled back on her pillows with a surprisingly coquettish toss of the head in one so old and chesty and sexless.

“Don’t forget to buy your wife some flowers,” she called after him as he left.

“Is it true that as a little girl you were a sensation as Rosy Roland?” asked Coffin, repressing the temptation to say, ‘and my mother says you hate yourself’.

Roxanne went on with her scrubbing. “Yes,” she said eventually. “So what?”

“There could be some connection.”

“With what?”

“With the slander campaign that seems to be going on all round you, the funny things that seem to be happening, the dangerous things, if I can put it that way.”

“You can put it that way,” said Roxanne, standing up and meeting his gaze.

“But where’s the link?” persevered Coffin. “Where’s it coming from, who’s doing it?” And, as Roxanne didn’t answer, “Don’t mind me, I’m only thinking aloud.”

“You’ll light on a victim soon,” said Roxanne. “Me, for preference.”

“Is that what you think?”

Roxanne turned away. “Let me get on with my cleaning.”

“You look better,” said Coffin. And oddly it was true.

The stuffing was back in Roxanne, she was fighting again, and as Coffin came closer he caught a whiff of Quadrille, always Roxanne’s scent of optimistic moments.

“I’m acting,” she said briefly.

“No, you’re not,” said Coffin looking at her. “Not altogether.”

“You can sink so low,” said Roxanne. “And then you start to rise again. I ought to know, I’ve been down there before.”

Coffin did not answer her directly. Lately he had had the feeling that he too was spiralling downwards in his relations with his lovely, successful and increasingly absent wife.

“Have I got your permission to go down again to the room?”

He didn’t have to name the room. The room where the group of women had slept themselves to death was ’the room’.

“I’m having the stove taken out,” said Roxanne in a steady voice. “And the chimney swept. Ought to have had it done before.”

“When? Not today?”

Roxanne nodded. “This morning. The workmen will be here soon. They’re going to knock it down with great hammers, bang, bang, and I’m going to help them.”

“Let me get down there first.”

The room had not been touched since he saw it last, the ashes were still in the fire, the table still Uttered with the debris of the police and the doctors who had passed in and out. Even the curtains were still drawn. Coffin switched on the light and moved round the room, inspecting objects methodically. Dove, who knew him well, would have given him one look and said that Coffin knew what he was looking for.

He went to the windows and examined the frames. They had been very efficiently sealed up with specially prepared tape. But Roxanne had explained that: “We did it for the winter to keep out draughts and save fuel. Lotty helped us.”

‘Pity Lotty didn’t mind her own business’, thought Coffin, as he studied windows and door. He was whistling slightly.

Then he went over to the grate and studied the fine pale ash that was the residue of the killing fire. He picked up a little of the ash between his fingers, then still whistling he examined the coke hod. It was a fancy hod made of copper and brass. He picked it up and rattled it. There was still some fuel left inside. He had a look. Then his whistling stopped.

Within a few minutes of Coffin’s going downstairs the telephone rang in the room where Roxanne was working. She hesitated for a moment, then, thinking it might be for Coffin, she picked it up. A brisk cheerful woman’s voice with a faint Scots accent spoke to her.

“I said I’d call you again, Miss Roland. This is Isobel Ludbrook, Secretary to the South London Society for Psychical Research. I’m sorry I have been slow in ringing you again about your letter.”

“I never wrote,” said Roxanne faintly.

“But I’ve had other things to do,” went on the voice with its faint accent. Was it Scottish? “Of course we’re immensely interested in the house now, three women dead was it? And your fire?”

“How did you know about that?”

“And very interested in you too, Miss Roland. Especially since knowing you were Rosy Roland. Tell me, Miss Roland, were you a fake then, too?”

“What are you trying to do to me?” said Roxanne, almost screaming into the telephone.

This time it was Miss Isobel Ludbrook who put the telephone down after listening to Roxanne’s voice for a minute.

“Hysterical,” she commented. “I must ring again later when she’s calmed down. She’s a coward, of course, a moral coward.” And her thin lips curved in scorn, making her chubby face look hard and angry. As a matter of fact she was a hard, angry woman, her looks belied her spirit.

Roxanne heard John Coffin come running up the stairs. He was holding something screwed up in newspaper, something about the size of a pudding.

“What’s up with you?” he said.

“Did you hear the telephone ring?”

“Did it ring? Never heard it.”

“I was just wondering whether I really had a call or imagined it.”

But he was already leaving her and talking over his shoulder. “I’m not interested in what you’ve heard or what you’ve imagined. And I don’t want any dandy little story about ghosts and manifestations. Anyone got a key to this door? Ever leave your keys around?”

“Oh yes,” said Roxanne. “We all leave keys at Mrs. Rispoli’s - you know, in case the coal comes while we’re out - or the window cleaners or the painter. We all dome, Lotty, the Vicar.”

“I’m locking the door, Roxanne. I’ve locked the door of the room downstairs and I want it to stay locked. Have you got a key? Right, toss it over. No one’s to come in, I’ll be sending a man round…And don’t go out, I want to talk to you, Roxanne.”

And then he was gone, running down the stairs and out of the door.

Roxanne watched him go, puzzled and frightened. Then she saw that something had dropped from his bundle. It was small and black, something like coal or more like coke, but not either. Roxanne stared and her heart beat faster. Now she was really frightened.

The day, beginning fine, had turned to rain. Freddy Dove hated rain but scorned to carry an umbrella. Policemen didn’t carry umbrellas. Life was hard enough anyway, without umbrellas, for a detective who lived in a district where everyone knew his face. Rain dripped off his hat, off his nose, and down the back of his neck. He was wet through and tired.

He passed a fellow he knew, a boy who’d been at school with him, Victor Spencer, riding nice and dry in his own car, with a job as salesman for a butter-and-cheese company, a good paying indoor job, a clean neat job. Ten years ago Freddy Dove had had the edge on Victor and been better at maths. Now he was getting splashed with mud from Victor’s car. Still, he waved his hand and tried to look cheerful. No good letting everyone know you knew you were fed up with yourself.

“Hello, Freddy?” He turned to a voice at his elbow. A fat red-faced man was catching him up. Freddy’s heart sank. It had been no mistake that he’d fancied a question in the voice. Peter Planter always asked questions. Everything he said was in the form of a question, even yes and no seemed to carry elements of doubt within themselves so that you never knew whether he was coming or going. He had been a terror at school.

T know too many people,’ Dove said bitterly inside himself, ’Too many people.’

“How are you? What have you been doing? Where are you going?”

Fred answered rapidly while Peter drew breath. “Home.” One thing with Pete, you only had to answer the last question, he couldn’t remember the lot any more than you could. You didn’t have to answer the truth either, and in fact Fred hadn’t.

“I heard you left the Force?”

“No.” Fred was surprised into answering the truth.

“Well, I only heard it.” Pete sounded disappointed. “Are you on a case? Tell me about it? Can you talk about it?”

“No,” said Fred; there was a certain monotony to conversations with Peter.

“Shame, because I could have helped you?” That was the other thing about Pete, he was endlessly, painfully helpful.

“I don’t think so, Pete, and anyway we have to do it the hard way on our own.”

“You couldn’t give me a clue?”

“I’m the detective, Pete, not you.”

“Well, you certainly have a nice job, just talking to women.” Peter sounded hurt. “How many did I see you talking to while I was watching?”

“Watching while you were supposed to be working? It was thirty-four, Pete.” Fred took a deep weary breath. “Thirty-four women at ten minutes each…Work that out in minutes and hours, Pete, and then say policemen are lucky.”

As early as three women and some forty or fifty minutes after leaving John Coffin (because ten minutes for each woman didn’t work out strictly and was only a round figure to keep Pete Planter quiet), Fred had been ready to tear his hair. Would have torn it, probably (he was capable of the theatrical gesture) if it hadn’t been thinning fast, emphasising the trials of a detective’s life.

Thelma Mason, Mrs. Susy Thin and Mrs. Sickert, their faces were already jumping round in his mind, mixing up hair and eyes, noses and chins. Their voices and words he had clear enough in his mind because he had made notes. Mrs. Susy Thin, aged thirty-two, and Dove’s own contemporary: “I never listen to any gossip. There’s always plenty of gossip going round here, but I don’t know any of it. I have three kids and that’s enough for me. The places to go if you want gossip are the launderette in Brook Street and the biscuit factory. I never heard any story about Miss Roland. Yes, I know Miss Roland because I used to work at the factory. There’s always gossip about Miss Roland. I did hear a story that she’d been seen shoplifting but that’s the sort of story you do hear round here. Little souls they’ve got, some people. A neighbour of mine was away for a week and they said she’d left her husband because I would have done, but I don’t think she went to her mother, I think she went off with her boy-friend because she’d had her hair dyed, and you wouldn’t do that to go home to mother. No, I don’t know who told me the story about Miss Roland because like I said I don’t listen to gossip.”

Miss Thelma Mason, seventeen: “No, I don’t know Miss Roland and I don’t know any stories about her. There’s plenty of stories going about but no one’s told me any about her. She’s too old for me and my friends to know. Why she’s so old she probably had a life while I was getting born. Here, isn’t she that spooky woman? I wouldn’t listen, but it was real spooky.”

Mrs. Sickert, probably aged about forty, but as Dove hadn’t been at school with her he didn’t know and wasn’t asking: “You must fancy yourself, asking me if I hear any stories, I work hard for my living running this shop. If you think I have time to listen to stories, you’re mad. I never pause to draw breath or sit down, I work straight through from eight a.m. to six in the evening, unpacking goods, checking them, dragging in great cases, marking up prices, selling goods, wrapping up goods, kicking goods around, what makes you think I have time to talk? I hardly have time to breathe. We never even wash our hands in this place. What do you mean, the Shop Assistants Act of 1945? My employer has never heard of it. I doubt if he can even read. He can count though, my, he can count all right. Anyway, I don’t like to talk about folk like her. How do I know what she’s like? Everyone knows, it’s what everyone says. She’s queer. No, of course that’s not gossip, gossip is saying what’s not true. What everyone says, that’s not gossip, that’s true.”

No, I never gossip, and I never listen to tales, but here’s what I heard. Dove was getting quite cynical. He trudged round, wet through, increasingly depressed and conscious that he was going to miss his dinner. Ostensibly checking up on the alibis of Samuel Preddle and Albert Wells who were suspected of a break-in at the Old Farmhouse Dairy, at the same time keeping open a weather eye for the whereabouts of Jem Taylor, who had escaped while on his way from one prison to another, and whose home was three streets away, Dove was also trying to frame questions about gossip and Miss Roland as unobtrusively as possible. Which wasn’t so unobtrusive. One woman he spoke to rapidly withdrew her offer of a cup of tea as soon as he worked round to the subject. He saw pretty soon that Coffin had handed him a hot job. ‘More kicks than ha’pence in this,’ he thought, missing the cup of hot sweet tea for a moment almost under his nose. ’As if I didn’t know it. I always hate it when the boss plucks ideas out of the air like this one.’

Beryl Palmer, Margery Williams, Joan Sharrett, Ellen Richards, Shirley Combes. No, I never heard anything about Miss Roland. Matter of fact, I never heard of Miss Roland. If you’re interested, though, I can tell you plenty about…Oh, yes, I did hear stories about Miss Roland, about the house, really. Funny things went on. No, I didn’t listen any more. I didn’t like to hear about it…Oh, that woman, my friends told me that…

Yes, I did hear about her. Someone said that she had infestations or manifestations perhaps it was. No, I don’t know exactly what a manifestation is but it sounds bad…Shirley Combes was apparently a mute. Or, anyway, speechless.

But there were two women who presented a sharper, clearer picture in Dove’s mind, and whose words he recalled vividly, accompanied by gesture and expression. Neither of the two women professed to know Roxanne well, although both knew her by sight.

First, Elizabeth Lesly, a lovely intelligent girl. Dove remembered her face and her serious, slow way of speaking, as if she wanted each word to make its full impact.

“Yes, I have heard quite a lot. No, I don’t mind talking about it. I was interested, you see…Yes, I had heard that Miss Roland had been found with things in her shopping-bag she hadn’t paid for, but I didn’t believe she had stolen them, and what’s more I don’t think anyone believed it. You don’t believe that sort of thing about people like Miss Roland. There are some things they’d do and some things they wouldn’t. It’s a question of character. No, we all believed if there were things in her basket then there were things in her basket but she didn’t steal them. No, the truth as I see it is that she does have paranormal psychic powers. The goods in her bag could have been the result of kinesis. She is certainly able to transport objects. No, I don’t believe in ghosts. I’m not using the word ghost. But I do believe in E.S.P. - Extra-Sensory Perception. Roxanne has it. No, I’m still at school. Yes, very interested, and hope to be a doctor”.

And the second girl: “Oh, it’s you. Come in and wipe your feet. Dripping wet, you are. No, of course I’m not pleased you’re wet. But I bet it’s cooled you down, hasn’t it? What was it you said to me? Oh, we’re friends again, are we? Yes, I guessed you’d have something you wanted…Oh, I don’t mind telling you what’s going the rounds about Miss Roland. I’m surprised you haven’t heard. It’s right up your street. People say she’s got a ghost, that things jump about in her house, that she’s haunted by a boy called Orlando.

“Believe it? Well of course there’d have been a riot if people believed it. But they remember it. And now these women are dead (was it really a sex crime like the papers are hinting?) and the fire, well, they are wondering what’s wrong, you’ve got to ask that, haven’t you?…It isn’t that I don’t like you, but well you can see yourself, you’re hardly with me. Even now you’ve got half your mind on some other woman…And dripping wet!”

Women, women, women, names, faces, and voices all in a kaleidoscope. Ghosts, gossip, and manifestations and murder and Roxanne. Now a boy called Orlando. And on top of it all, he was dripping wet and hungry.

He summed up: as a result of his digging around he had discovered some twenty women who had stories or had heard stories about Roxanne. The exact nature of the stories varied.

Twenty was not perhaps many women but they were sitting on the top of a whole heap of others, and probably represented at least double that number that he hadn’t come across, and perhaps more.

He considered the twenty women again. Of these he regarded at least five as liars. Willing, cheerful liars who were telling him what he wanted to hear as far as they could and who probably didn’t really have any genuine tale at all. This left fifteen.

Fifteen only, not a lot of women, but more than enough for him, in his present mood. The kaleidoscope started up again. Women, names, faces and voices circled round him, making his head ache.

Dove and John Coffin met at the entrance to Divisional Headquarters.

“Well, I’ve broken Sammy’s alibi and I think Albert’s goes with it,” said Freddy wearily. “And I’ve also been playing your game.”

“My game?”

“You know: twenty questions.”

“It’s not a game any more, Fred, boy.” Coffin drew a bundle from under his raincoat. He opened it on the table in his office. On the spread-out newspaper was a handful or two of black wood-like fragments. “Found this in the coke hod in the Roland house, and some remains in the fire. Know what it is?”

Fred looked. He fingered it.

“Take it,” said Coffin. “Won’t kill you.”

“I gave stuff like this to my dog once: it’s charcoal.”

“Charcoal,” agreed Coffin. “And that makes it murder.” He added, “We’ll have to let the relatives know. You can do that, Fred, tell them about the charcoal.”

He gave a further order. “Fingerprint the room they died in. Some prints we can identify easily. Others not. We could finger-print the whole neighbourhood, and maybe I will if I get desperate enough.”

VII

IN COFFIN’S OFFICE,with windows shut and steaming up against the rain and cold, the two men sat side by side, poring over reports and exhibits. A list of names, a heap of charcoal, and a bundle of scientific reports.

“Any reactions from the families about the charcoal?” asked Coffin.

“None. Except Miss Melly Tuffy. She says it nearly happened to her once when she was a landgirl during the war, only a cow died instead and it made lovely eating.”

“I wonder if it’s true, and if so, who she’s told it to.” said Coffin alert.

Dove shrugged: “The world.”

They were drinking tea stewed so black that Dove, who had inherited the frail physique of his Dove ancestry, already had indigestion.

“Wonder if I’m getting an ulcer,” he said.

“You keep your mind on your work and not your stomach and you’ll be all right.” Coffin poured himself out another cup of tea. “Now this is where we are: by finding the charcoal in the fire and in the hod which was used to fill it I think we can be ninety per cent sure that someone tried to murder Miss Roland. Charcoal is much more dangerous than coke and immeasurably more dangerous in the fumes that it gives off than coal. It’s quite lethal, unless there is plenty of air, and this room had been virtually sealed up. Whoever did it, knew that.”

“We don’t have a motive,” said Dove, carefully feeling his stomach under his ribs. Yes, there was definitely a tender spot.

“Not for the women. I think they were there by accident. Coincidence.”

“Their bad luck?”

“But we have a motive for Miss Roland. Someone didn’t like her, didn’t like her at all.”

“Why were the women there, then?”

“Well, in addition to what you call their bad luck, I think they were all, in their way, concerned with Miss Roland.”

“I don’t believe in coincidences,” said Dove.

“I don’t believe in happy ones,” said Coffin sadly, “but I see plenty of tragic ones. It’s the genuine tragedy, the way things coincide fatally. It’s life…Besides, be fair about it, these women had been worked upon. It’s only fifty-fifty coincidence.”

“It was a lucky coincidence for Miss Roland she was out,” said Dove. There was a long pause. Both men realised he had said something important, and they sat there for a moment assessing it.

“Let’s work that one out,” said Coffin. He spoke in a mild, polite, abstracted way. ’As if I’m not really here’, thought Dove. He sipped some tea and immediately regretted it.

“Either it isn’t an accident Miss Roland was out, in which case it probably wasn’t a coincidence about the three women being there that night and Miss Roland knows more about the whole business than we’ve thought—”

“Not more than I thought. It’s you that always thought she was out in the clear,” interrupted Dove.

“Or else it still wasn’t an accident she was out, but someone else was doing the planning, in which case one of the four women concerned was the destined victim. Or, logically, all three. This I don’t believe,” said Coffin thoughtfully. “Or else it was just an accident, a lucky one, and Roxanne and Juliet or both were the ones meant to be killed.”

“And Miss Roland slipped through,” said Dove, in whom it apparently rankled.

“But I think we really can eliminate some of these alternatives: the killing took place in Miss Roland’s house, there’s no evidence that these women were deliberately lured there, only that they were all in the state of mind where they might go. No, to my mind coincidence set the pattern for what happened and the wrong people got killed.”

“I always have a strong feeling that the person who was meant to get killed is the one who did get killed,” said Dove.

“Oh, you’re just an old-fashioned policeman.”

Coffin swept his papers together and drank some more tea. Outside the wind and rain were getting noisier.

“You’re going at it the hard way,” Dove pointed out. “Look at your theory: it invents a hypothetical person whom we’ve got to find. Whereas we’ve got Miss Roland.”

“I find it more difficult to believe Roxanne Roland killed three people, one of whom was her friend Juliet Duveen.”

“Oh, but you’re not seeing it straight,” said Dove, and then fell silent.

Coffin too was silent. Dove was the second person (Roxanne had been the first) to suggest he was himself emotionally bound up with this problem.

“Now think about this hypothetical person,” went on Dove. “This person takes chances.”

“Murderers do.”

“But his chances don’t come off. They miss. The wrong people get killed.” Dove plugged on. “You couldn’t count on killing someone with this charcoal jazz. Likely, but not certain.”

“This person didn’t set out to kill,” said Coffin. “Hadn’t you realised that? Didn’t care one way or another. Murder was not essential. Pain, fear, terror were.”

“I don’t see how you can know that,” cried Dove.

“Guessing. But it’s good guessing. Because we do have evidence of this hypothetical person, Fred. Have you forgotten what you were doing today? That chain of stories you picked up? That’s your evidence this person exists. All these women were getting fed these stories from one common source. Our person.”

“You may have something there,” said Dove.

“Let’s go back over what you got.” Coffin turned the teapot upside-down, nothing came out. “You know, I think there was something wrong with that tea, Fred, I’ve got indigestion now.” He picked up Dove’s list. “Now you’ve got about twenty names here of women who’d picked up a story of some sort. You eliminate about five. I trust you on that, you know them. That leaves fifteen. Not many, but you say, and I know, that they represent a much greater number whom you haven’t questioned. Now who told them?”

“I went into that.”

“Of course you did.”

Dove looked down at his notes again. “They fell into three groups really. One lot just reacted in anger and wouldn’t give a straight answer. They were the ones who said they never gossiped but couldn’t get it out fast enough all the same. Then there was a middle group who just pointed back to another member of the group, so that was going round in a circle. And then there was a group who said they didn’t remember and stuck to it.

Perhaps I’d been going at it a bit heavy-handed by then and frightened them.” He looked up from his notes. “That was as far as I could take it.”

“That was good work, Fred, and now we know what you must do next.”

Dove looked up.

“You must go out and break down groups one and three. They were stringing you along. Not all of them, but some of them. Some of them certainly know who they got the tale from, or the variant they were handing on. Perhaps you did frighten them, Fred. You can be heavy-handed. Or perhaps they just like lying. Or maybe they didn’t like your face. But you get out and make them tell the truth. It’s there all right.”

“But supposing there isn’t a common source, supposing it’s just widespread over the whole neighbourhood?”

“You don’t give up, do you, Fred? Well, if there is, or isn’t, you’ll find out, won’t you?”

Dove sighed. “And Sammy and the boy who’s on the run and probably got a gun?” He paused for a moment, uneasily conscious of the rhyme and wondered if Coffin thought he was making a joke.

“You’re off those now and concentrating on the case. Because it’s now a case of murder.”

“Are we ready for the inquest?”

“No, we’re going to ask for an adjournment.” He picked up a piece of charcoal and studied it. “Pity one piece of charcoal is so like another bit. I’ve got a man looking for the place it was bought, but he won’t get anywhere. You can buy it in any hardware store, and housewives use it for starting boilers. You buy it by the bag. Anyone could buy it who knew.”

“This must have been bought in bulk,” said Dove, thinking of the size of the firegrate and the heat of the room.

“That’s what he’s asking about, but he won’t get anywhere. You could buy it bag by bag and build up a store.”

“Then this person we’ve invented…”

“I’m glad you share responsibility, Fred, for the act of creation.”

“This person,” went on Dove, ignoring him, “must live local. Very close. Tiresome business and tricky too, transporting the charcoal to the fireplace without someone noticing…So he’s not only local but must have a jolly good reason for coming and going to the house.”

“Might even live in it?” said Coffin, eyeing him. “Isn’t that what you mean?”

“I never said so.”

“As I said, you don’t give up.”

Fred Dove was silent. He was well aware his Dove blood made him obstinate but he thought he was right and John Coffin wrong.

“But of course the person who planned all this is known intimately to Roxanne Roland,” said Coffin. “Of course. I thought you got that. And there’s something about this person we know already.”

Dove looked up. “I don’t know it.”

“You do if you think. This person is interested in fires. Twice fire has been used. For some reason this person is preoccupied with fire.”

“Yes, but—” began Dove with a puzzled frown as he thought it over. He was uneasy working with Coffin when he started plucking things out of the air, especially when later on you so often saw them embodied in flesh and blood and walking about.

“I know what you’re going to say: that two petty little fires in a bed and cupboard is a muting, a diminuendo, after the lethal business with the charcoal, and that seen logically as an attack on Roxanne it seems a lessening of menace and tension. It’s trivial, unimportant, after the first episode. But supposing it isn’t? Supposing it’s a fresh start? Supposing it points to something?”

“I wasn’t going to say quite all that, or in those words,” murmured Dove.

Coffin was almost correct: say fifty-five per cent correct. The fires in Roxanne’s bedroom did represent a beginning; they were an introduction. But they were something else as well.

“But, you know, what you’re suggesting really,” said Dove, slowly digesting it all, “what it works out at, you’re suggesting this is not all over.”

Two important observations in one evening were higher than his average.

A picture of the murderer was certainly forming now. Coffin had accurately ticked off some points and Dove, in spite of, or perhaps because of his scepticism, had put his finger on certain others.

A planner. But a chance-taker too. A planner who took risks. An unlucky planner who didn’t always pull things off accurately, but a selfish person who certainly didn’t care.

A person known to Roxanne and probably knowing her intimately, and having ready access to her house.

A person who was obsessed with fire.

And above all and beyond anything a person who hated Roxanne.

Surely there were not so many like this about.

Part Two

VIII

MISS ISOBEL LUDBROOK  sat by her telephone, one hand resting on it meditatively. She found her telephone endlessly useful; she did a good deal of her work on this telephone, which was a pale blue instrument, most unlike the usual office equipment. But, then, her work too was unusual.

Her job as secretary to the South London Society for Psychical Research was only an honorary and part-time one, but when she worked at it she put her whole heart into it. Her attitude to the subject of psychical research was critical and sceptical. She was out to destroy.

She wasn’t a petty or trivial person, though. Her scale was grand.

She was a small woman, somewhere between thirty and forty, about the same age as Roxanne, whom in some ways she resembled. They had a great deal in common. But they could never be friends.

Miss Ludbrook had quite a dossier on Roxanne which she had collected diligently over the time since her interest, and indeed her hostility, had been aroused by Roxanne. There were copies of newspaper reports: the newspapers themselves must remain intact in the files of the libraries where Miss Ludbrook had consulted them. She would never have cut them surreptitiously, because she had a strong sense of property. Indeed, it was partly because she suspected Roxanne of having no sense of property that she distrusted her: Roxanne was too free, too liberal altogether for Miss Ludbrook.

In addition she did quite genuinely think Roxanne was a fraud and a cheat.

There was a knock on the door. She roused herself from her meditations and called “Come in”, and then immediately regretted it.

“Are you in or out?” said a gay voice.

‘Out,’ she wanted to say. ‘Definitely and certainly out to you, all the time.’

She detested little jokes of this sort. Couldn’t the woman see? But all she could do was to stare blankly. “I’m always always in,” she said.

“Well, so you are. You’re the most home-loving person I know.”

“Someone has to answer the telephone. It’s important in this house.”

“It’s not a doctor’s house.”

“Well, I have my own work to do. I do lots of voluntary things,” she said proudly: ‘which is more than you do, my fat friend’, she felt like adding.

Her fat friend sat down heavily and put her handbag on her lap.

“I admire you for that. I tell everyone the way you work, the things you do. It means a lot to me, knowing you, being able to talk to you.”

“Thank you.”

“Oh, you mustn’t laugh. I mean it. I’m a hungry person. Starved really, hungry for people.”

“We all are.”

“Ah, not like me,”

Fat friend starved was quite a funny idea. Miss Ludbrook laughed.

“I can see you’re anxious to get back to that telephone…

“I do have one or two calls to make.”

“I’ll leave you then. I’m a worker too, don’t forget. People would probably die if it wasn’t for me and people like me.”

“Some people might.”

“You’re always so reasonable and moderate. That’s what I enjoy. You don’t go starting fires you can’t put out.”

“No.” And then irritably: “I wish you wouldn’t keep going on about fires.”

“Me keep going on?” Fat friend stood up. “I’ll close the door, shall I?”

“Yes, do.”

‘And give it a good big bang,’ she felt like shouting, as the door was drawn to behind her friend. For what was there in this friendship but a beautiful symbiosis?

Miss Isobel Ludbrook was interrupted once again in her morning’s work by a man trying to sell a special fine in cosmetics. His was the only agency to use men, and it worked on the good old-fashioned principle that a woman will take a compliment from a man she will be suspicious of coming from another woman. This beauty expert was Mr. Gardiner, he was the agency’s most powerful salesman, he practically was Home Beauty Advice Ltd., and as a matter of fact he owned it. His wife’s small capital had started it, and his energy was making it a success. They were expanding rapidly. They had started off with Home Hair-Tint and Treatment, had introduced lipstick and powder and foundation lotion, and this year would be bringing out their own perfume in tiny blue-and-pink bottles. Blue and pink were good selling colours, never ask why. The original idea had been to appeal to the quiet home-loving sort who were too shy to shop for the right sort of cosmetics. But there weren’t too many of that sort around any longer, and Mr. Gardiner had soon realised that his real appeal was to the strong sense of their own importance most women have. “This powder is mixed only for you.”

“This cream matches your skin only.” That was what sold.

As soon as he saw Miss Ludbrook he realised she wasn’t one of the quiet, shy sort. She might very easily be one of the highly personalising possessive sort, though. Her first words convinced him that she was.

“I don’t buy from the door,” she said coldly, but her eyes were taking in the display bag he carried and there was interest in them.

“And I don’t sell at the door,” he returned promptly. “I couldn’t do it, not and do myself justice. It’s not my policy, madam. I shall need a table to set out all I have got in my bag, and a chair for you, and possibly a mirror, although I always carry one. But you’d do better with your own.”

“I have everything in the world I need,” she said, in a voice and with eyes that plainly showed she had not.

“We can all of us do with a little more of what I’m setting out here, madam,” he said. “It’s encouragement, it’s hope, it’s cheerfulness. No, it’s not magic, madam, but if you look as though you’ve got all those vital qualities, then very soon you will have them. It’s appearances I’m selling, madam.”

He was going into what he called his psychological uplift patter.

“I don’t believe in beauty only being skin-deep,” she said, fingering a lipstick and looking at the colour of the face-powder.

“But isn’t that just what I’m telling you? You believe you look fine and you will look fine. It’s all from inside.”

“Perhaps I could get that belief a little more cheaply than at your price,” she said dryly, studying his price list.

“Confidence doesn’t come cheaply.”

“You’re right,” she said with intensity. “It doesn’t.”

Mr. Gardiner made a good sale. As he emerged, having set her up with lipsticks, nail-varnishes and several creams for night and day, even he was a little surprised at himself. ‘You could sell that woman anything,’ he told himself. ‘She’s very suggestible.’ But he was only half right. She was very suggestible, but only about the means, not the end. You could sell her anything, but only if she wanted what it would bring.

“I’ll send you the scent I mentioned,” he said, turning round to wave good-bye. “A free sample. My pleasure. I’ve got the name and address.”

His customer wasn’t listening though; she was already reaching out for her pale blue telephone.

As Mr. Gardiner got into his car, thinking about her, a vague feeling of puzzlement and disquiet settled upon him, for reasons which he could not quite identify. He was an observant man and a tentative one. In the end he might remember.

It was entirely right and proper that Miss Isobel Ludbrook should deal in ghosts, for her life was, at this time, peopled with ghosts.

First there was her own ghost; a small, blundering, always-getting-second-best ghost. Looking back, it seemed to her that the blonde, hopeful figure had continually been cheated. Whatever she had got, it had never been quite what it seemed. She saw herself as shy, tender, unaggressive, the one who gets put upon, overlooking the determination, the strong desires, the self-will. It was an almost classic example of not seeing your ghost as others see it.

But above all she was absorbed with the violent attractive ghost of the young Roxanne. Roxanne as a child, with the manifestations that seemed to hang around her, which might be a fraud, a trick on her part, and might not.

Roxanne as a young woman, with her beauty at its peak, and her really deep bewilderment about what to do with it. Roxanne, whose life at this time was spent trying to do things for other people when all the time she had no idea what to do for herself. And now the elder Roxanne, who contained within herself both the other Roxannes, and who still found herself a puzzle and a problem.

Miss Isobel Ludbrook had taken trouble to inform herself thoroughly about all these three Roxannes. She sat now with her rather plump fingers caressing the telephone.

“It’s really time I telephoned again,” she told herself. “She’ll be wondering where I am.”

And at the thought of just where she was, she gave a little deep throaty chuckle. She appreciated the joke for just one second, then Miss Isobel Ludbrook, Honorary Secretary, Chairman, committee woman, only member and sole begetter of the South London Psychical Research Society, picked up the telephone to dial Roxanne.

Later that week, Mr. Gardiner remembered what troubled him about his customer.

The name by which he had heard her identify herself on the telephone as he left was not the same as the one he had written in his address book.

So his customer was not only suggestible but two-faced as well.

Part Three

IX

JULIET WAS SITTING up in bed, looking bright-eyed and pretty.

“Clever girl,” said Coffin.

“For getting better?” Juliet raised her brows.

“For being alive,” said Coffin grimly.

Juliet frowned. “I didn’t do it on purpose, you know. I don’t know what happened. It isn’t that I can’t remember, but there isn’t anything to remember.”

“You just sat there and went to sleep?”

“We just sat there. I suppose now I went to sleep. But one hardly remembers falling asleep, you know. I mean, can you? One knows afterwards, and you tell me now I did sleep. But all I remember now is sitting there and just thinking…”

“What?” Coffin leaned forward.

Juliet shook her head, she even smiled faintly. “I can’t remember that now. Goodness, it probably wasn’t important.” She frowned again slightly. “Anyway I’m better and I’m coming home tomorrow.”

“So you are,” said Coffin. He felt depressed. He had brought her flowers and books (chosen by Patsy) and chocolates. But he did not want her coming home, back to the house in Prince Consort Square, that grubby fire-stained hungry house.

“Don’t you want me to come out?”

“If you must, you must, I suppose.” He put his flowers on the bed-table. Patsy had chosen roses; they suited Juliet.

“Yes, I certainly must,” said Juliet irritably. “Poor Roxanne, I couldn’t leave her now. I have to think about Roxanne.”

“I’m thinking about Roxanne too.”

Juliet was immediately jealous, she couldn’t help thinking of Coffin as in some sense, Patsy or not, her property. She looked down so that he shouldn’t see the spark in her eyes. “I suppose we all think about Roxanne. There’s a sort of magic about her, isn’t there?” In spite of herself her voice sounded wistful.

“You’ve got a pretty powerful strong magic of your own,” said Coffin gently.

“Have I?” She looked up, pleased.

“What were you saying in your sleep, Juliet?” asked Coffin suddenly. “Are you sure you can’t remember? As if it was a dream, perhaps?”

“Was I saying anything?” Juliet opened her box of chocolates, carefully chose one and offered the box to Coffin, who shook his head. He could see her tense her shoulders, but not with the effort to remember, he was prepared to bet, more likely the effort to forget.

“Don’t try to remember, then,” he said, suddenly exasperated. “It sounded like Roland.”

“Did it? Did it?” Juliet sat straight up in her bed.

“No, it wasn’t Roland!”

“No, it wouldn’t be Roland.” He couldn’t help sounding ironic.

“It was Orlando,” said Juliet, still sitting bolt upright and staring straight forward. “I remember now. It was Orlando…”

Orlando, knight of the Holy Roman Empire, friend of Charlemagne, paladin of the Dark Ages, the most admired hero of the centuries that followed, ranked equal with Achilles, Hector, Alexander and King Arthur. Orlando, celebrated in epic and chanson de geste, an inspiration to Ariosto and Milton. Orlando, hunter and warrior; Orlando, little lost boy. Now his name was right out in the open.

“And I’ve remembered too,” said Juliet speaking rapidly and almost shouting. “We must ask the milkman, he knows, he must know about the boy.” And she leaned back on her pillows exhausted.

“So now we have to find and question a milkman,” said Coffin to Dove. “We go from one thing to another, don’t we?”

“It ought to be easy enough to find the milkman,” said Dove. “I don’t suppose it’ll do us any good, but we can find him and ask him questions. I can just see me doing it. Do you know anything about a boy called Orlando? Do you leave him half a pint of milk every day? Do ghosts drink milk?”

“Now you’re muddling me,” said Coffin mildly.

“Just to think,” went on Dove, “If you hadn’t gone poking round and finding charcoal we wouldn’t have had a case of murder. It would be a nice, messy accident and no trouble to anyone.”

“You say the damnedest things,” said Coffin.

Coffin had called on Dove in his home to consult over Juliet’s story. Juliet had poured out her account of the signs of a boy being found in the house in Prince Consort Square: the toys, the scribbling on the wall which looked like “Oliver” but which Roxanne had oddly identified as “Orlando”. And in addition she had told Coffin of the two outside pieces of evidence (only she hadn’t used that word) which seemed to prove that Orlando had an objective existence: the testimony of the milkman who said he had recently started serving milk to a new family; and then the message brought round by Miss Angelica Tuffy, that Roxanne was to stay home and wait for Orlando.

“And I feel as though we just sat there waiting,” said Juliet, staring at Coffin with clear blue eyes. “I know I was thinking about Orlando and wondering who he was and where he came from. Perhaps Angelica knew…”

Once she had started talking, Juliet seemed relieved to be able to tell him everything about how she had spoken to the milkman, and what he had said, of what she and Roxanne had found in the basement of the house, and how very strange Roxanne had been. Coffin told Dove that he thought the Orlando theme fitted in with the stories circulating about Roxanne and ghosts and ectoplasm and manifestations of spirits.

“Orlando fits in there somewhere.”

“But is he real?” cried Dove, desperately anxious to put his feet down on solid earth.

He looked round his room, with the blazing gas fire, the paper he was reading, the radio on the table, and the toffee papers on the floor. These were real. This was what reality was; this apparatus of things you could touch, be warmed by, and eat. He didn’t believe in the intangible.

He had found it hard enough to accept John Coffin’s theories yesterday of a mysterious person, a person who was preoccupied with fire, who was a chance-taker, who was a planner. At least he had managed to rationalise it as a working hypothesis. But the introduction of a new figure, a boy called Orlando, was more than he could take.

“He must have a sort of reality,” said Coffin slowly. “He’s real to Roxanne Roland, Angelica believed in him, and Juliet half does. But if you mean is he real in the way this room is and you are and the house is, then the answer is no, I don’t think so. Not unless I’m prepared to accept the existence and reality of ghosts which at the moment I am not.” He looked round Dove’s pleasant bachelor room. “No, I believe it’s all part of the fabrication that someone is spinning around Roxanne Roland. And the interesting thing is: why is she so susceptible to it?”

Dove shrugged. He found himself not more than half believing in Coffin’s logic. They had a case of murder? All right, treat it as that, and not go playing around with all this character background, this mystery buildup. “All we want to know is who did it and why, how, and when, and be able to come up with enough evidence to satisfy the Public Prosecutor’s Office.” Even a judge and jury didn’t matter so much in Dove’s view. All he wanted was a case good enough to go to court with. He didn’t regard himself as responsible for the eccentricities of judge and jury. ‘What is motive, when you come down to it?’ he pondered, laboriously following out his train of thought, ‘it’s something we are never going to be quite sure of, something chancey that is created between character and opportunity. And isn’t this stuff that the boss is rigging up really related to character?’ He paused, aware that he had arrived at a truth, but not quite sure how to handle it.

“What we want to do,” he said finally, “is to find who bought charcoal and had the opportunity to place it on the fire. And then, if we’re lucky, just one tiny bit of evidence to show that she did put it on the fire.”

“Yes, that would be luck,” said Coffin, but without irony. “Meanwhile, you can get on with checking those women; those who couldn’t remember and those who said that one of the others whose name you’ve got on the list handed them out the tale, and press them hard, because some of them somewhere are hiding something.” He was well aware that Fred Dove had never really accepted his picture of the murderer as they had discussed it earlier. “I notice you say ‘she’. Still clinging to the idea that it’s Miss Roland? You don’t give up, do you?”

“I’m not ruling it out any more than you are,” said Dove firmly. “And isn’t it most likely that the murderer is a woman?”

“It’s not only most likely, it’s a hundred per cent inevitable,” said Coffin. “If Roxanne Roland was the intended victim, and taking her character and appearance and past, then a woman is the one most likely to hate her.”

“And what if Miss Roland wasn’t the intended victim?” cried Dove, who had half a truth and meant to keep worrying it.

Half a truth wasn’t very much to be going on with, but it might be enough.

By next day the weather had cleared and it was fine and sunny again. It looked like being a good autumn. Not for Sergeant Dove, however, who was still reflecting on the nature of reality. He didn’t put it that way; what he said to himself was, ’Either the boss is mad or I am.’ Not a good day either for John Coffin, who had before him the reports of the charcoal search. Not a lot was sold in the hardware shops in his district but enough to make it clear that it wasn’t a thing any shopkeeper remembered selling. People bought it to light stoves and boilers but many people had gas pokers and those who hadn’t used firelighters impregnated with what smelt like paraffin. The smell of paraffin seemed to have attached itself to the report handed in by Detective-Constable Brian Bray, a smart young man with his eye already on Coffin’s job, or one like it. He had produced what results he could, and, as Coffin was uneasily aware, had done what he could to make them look better than they were.

Bray had produced a list of four names. These four people were the only ones he had been able to trace as positively remembered for buying charcoal. Coffin looked at them without hope. He hadn’t expected anything and it looked as though he hadn’t got it. How easy to buy charcoal anywhere in London, and out of it, for that matter.

John Armstrong, caretaker of Lavender Road Infants’ School. Coffin remembered the school as being a grubby one-story building that depressed him. If he and Patsy had any children, and for a moment he let himself think uncomfortably about their relationship, then they would not go to this school. He remembered the caretaker too, an elderly man with fading blue eyes and a limp. Bray had added a note here that the caretaker was a regular buyer of charcoal, that it was charged to the school account, and that he certainly seemed to need it for his aged furnace.

Mrs. Hannah Prendergast, aged eighty, or so Brian Bray thought, nearly blind and more likely to do herself in with the charcoal than anyone else. Besides she’d still got her bag of charcoal unopened, and he’d seen it.

Phyllis Evans, aged thirteen. She said she was buying it for her mother, but her mother when questioned denied all knowledge. Brian had noted: something funny here, no doubt, but I don’t know what. No connection traceable with Miss Roland or Prince Consort Square. Anyway, they’re M.D. the lot, and the mother’s got a wicked temper.

A woman, aged between twenty and fifty. The assistant who sold charcoal recorded the sale because they keep sales slips but can’t remember sale, can’t remember details about woman, might even be a man. Brian Bray’s notes: I couldn’t get anything further on this one. The assistant wasn’t inventing anything, but she wasn’t a very bright girl.

Coffin pushed the list away from him. He felt addled and sour. This morning he had had his first major quarrel with Patsy. His first major married quarrel, he corrected himself. There had been plenty enough before. He wondered unhappily why Patsy, so cheerful and equal in her dealings with others, seemed to have a sharp little whip she kept specially for use on him.

He studied the list again. Better make Bray pursue the schoolgirl Phyllis Evans. There was probably nothing in it at all, but it wouldn’t do Brian any harm to have to go back and try again.

“Go back again and check on the girl,” he advised. “Have a look round and see what you can dig up. She’s not telling the truth. Find out why. Or the mother isn’t.” He got the impression that Bray was reluctant to face the fierce Mrs. Evans again.

When Brian had gone, he picked up the telephone. It might be a good idea to get some photographs and have Bray check them with the shop assistant who couldn’t remember anything. It was unlikely but possible she might remember something when shown a face.

He spared a passing thought for poor Fred Dove, plodding round from woman to woman questioning again all those who had heard a tale about Roxanne Roland but who couldn’t remember who had told them.

Joan Sharrett, Elizabeth Lesly and Angela More hadn’t even been names to Sergeant Dove before this week, now he felt as if he knew them intimately. They represented what little fresh evidence he had been able to gather for John Coffin.

Thelma Mason, Margery Williams, Rosalind Phelps, Edith Chivers and all the rest, in spite of Coffin’s optimistic phrase about ‘pressing them hard’ had proved resistant to Dove’s pressure. They stuck to whatever they had said: either they did not know where they had picked up this story, or else they pointed firmly to one of the others whose name Dove already had. ‘Perhaps I didn’t press them hard enough,’ he thought weakly. ’Or more likely the boss is wrong, and there is no one source which is feeding them but the stories just naturally arose, a sort of common truth.’ This was his own belief. Only in about three of the names was there sufficient query to make him try once again.

He had been to call on Joan Sharrett twice and Angela More three times before finding them in, and on each occasion had sat waiting for them in their homes.

He knew now that Joan Sharrett lived surrounded by fish and birds. There were three tanks of fish in the Sharrett living-room and three cages of canaries. In the garden beyond he could see an aviary. He was let in by Mr. Sharrett, an ancient cod-like man. Mrs. Sharrett did not appear, but Dove had a lively expectation that she would look like one of the birds. Fin and feather apart, the Sharretts seemed perfectly normal, nice people and anxious that their Joan should help if she could. If she could be found.

“She isn’t in much,” admitted Mr. Sharrett. “What with her job and her friends we don’t see much of her. You should have tried her place of business.”

“I have,” said Dove…“They said she hadn’t been in today.” He did not add what else the manager of the grocery store had said but perhaps Mr. Sharrett guessed.

“She’ll pop in,” he said uneasily, paddling with his little hands like fins. “She’ll pop in there, and here too in the end. She always does.”

“Well, I wish you could give me some idea. This is my second visit.”

“Ah, but I can’t.”

“When did you last see her?”

Mr. Sharrett called to the kitchen, “Mother, when did we last see Joan?”

“Breakfast the day before last,” came a flutter from the kitchen. It seemed to come from high up.

‘Mother, you up there on the ceiling,’ Dove wanted to call out.

“I’m on the window,” went on the voice from the kitchen, apologetically. “Excuse me not coming in, but I find it difficult to get down once I’m up. But it was breakfast the day before yesterday we last saw Joan…to speak to that is, I saw her on the stairs yesterday, and coming out of the bathroom this morning.”

Dove rolled his eyes in despair. No wonder they kept birds in cages and fish in tanks; they knew where to find them when they wanted them. Joan they didn’t.

“What does she do?” he asked them.

Mr. Sharrett shook his head. “I don’t know.”

There was the sound of a key in the door.

“Ah, there she is now.” Mr. Sharrett stood up and so did Dove. “There’s a policeman here to see you,” he said, moving into the hall.

“I’ve called twice but you weren’t here. Your father says you’re not in much.”

“Never in, are you, Joanie?” piped a voice from the kitchen.

“Go on, I’m here all the time.” She turned to Dove. “They just don’t see me through all the birds and the fish.”

There was a crash from the kitchen. ‘Heavy noise from a little bird,’ thought Dove, surprised.

“Mother cleaning the window again?” said Joan irritably. “I’ve told her a thousand times she hasn’t got wings.” She moved forward, “Well, she’s broken something this time, that’s apparent.”

“Before you pop off,” began Dove, unable to stop himself dropping into the jargon of the house.

“I think Mother’s broken her cage,” said Mr. Sharrett, appearing at the door. There was a tremendous squeaking in the kitchen and Dove wondered if Mrs. Sharrett would come fluttering in.

“You’d better stop her flying off, then,” said Joan over her shoulder to her father, and to Dove, “Now, what is it you wanted me about?” She listened in silence. “I told you, I don’t remember,” she said with a frown. “Now, if you’ll just pop off I’ll get in to Mother.”

Dove gave himself a shake to free himself from the world of fantasy into which the Sharretts had plunged him. “You told me you had heard stories about Miss Roland of Prince Consort Square, but when I asked you who told you these stories you first said you didn’t know and then said that Shirley Taylor told you. But Shirley Taylor says you told her.”

“She’s telling fibs,” said Joanie calmly. “Everyone knows Shirley Taylor’d say anything.”

“Well, I don’t think she is this time.”

Joanie shrugged. “We can go on like this all night.”

“You tell me,” said Dove. “Or else by God, I’ll find out what you do with your time and tell your parents.”

“It’s like I told you,” said Joan, “I am here. They just miss me.”

“Your parents aren’t blind or mad,” said Dove crossly. “Unless your mother is a bird, which I’m beginning seriously to believe.”

There was a tremendous squeaking from the kitchen. “It’s only been Dad having you on, a sort of joke, he’s got a sense of humour.” She got up to go to the kitchen. “And don’t worry, that’s not mother screeching, only her parrot, and it was the parrot’s cage that got broken, not Mum’s.” At the door, and over her shoulder, she said, “I can see you’re the persevering sort. It was Maggie Rispoli told me. I didn’t want to say, because she’s dead. I don’t like to talk about the dead.” A look of genuine dread crossed her face, then she went on. “You can see yourself out.”

Dove did not know whether to believe Joan Sharrett’s attribution of the story or not. On the whole he was inclined not to believe it. It might be another showing of the Sharrett sense of humour. But all the same, he thought he would bear in mind what she had said when he saw Elizabeth Lesly and Angela More again. He had it in mind to interview them both because of an uneasy feeling that both had behaved a little oddly when re-questioned. He was torn between a strong desire to go back to Coffin and report no progress on this particular line, and curiosity to find out why both girls, who seemed to know each other, had both, when pressed, said the other had told them the saga. It might mean nothing at all. He decided to concentrate on Elizabeth since he had seen Angela second. The odd thing was that when he pointed out to Angela that Elizabeth named her as her source of information she seemed quite willing to change her mind and accept responsibility. But he didn’t believe her, not even enough to press her. Probably there was nothing in it, just a bit of shuffling round between two schoolgirls who weren’t as clever as he’d thought. But he was angry.

“All right, if you two girls won’t come right out and explain who fed you this tale, perhaps you can remember where!” he said to Elizabeth. He saw at once that he’d got something, also from her face that she was going to deny it.

“It’s all so silly,” she said sulkily. “I don’t know why you keep picking on me.” She didn’t seem either as nice or as clever as in the first interviews. She began to look like a girl who could be very awkward if she chose.

“You and a dozen or so others,” said Dove, but he thought he’d better get both feet out of this quick, or he’d end up facing a charge of upsetting young girls. Because she’d seemed friendly and innocent he’d talked to her, unwisely, without an adult being present. It had been a mistake.

“I shall end up by thinking you two invented it all.”

But she was too intelligent for that and she only smiled rather unpleasantly. “You’d never think that. You wouldn’t be round here asking me questions if you thought that.”

But because she was intelligent she saw the implications of what she had said, how she had really admitted that her memory about where and how she had heard the stories about Roxanne Roland was sharp and vivid, and she fell silent. Then she took a deep breath and suddenly looked young and a good deal less confident, and much nicer again.

“Well, you won’t tell my mother?”

“I can’t promise.” Dove looked at her. “Now can I? But I do promise to do my best not to have to.”

“Maggie Rispoli told us. We met her in a coffee bar. But we’re not supposed to go to the coffee bar, not in school uniform anyway, and my mother doesn’t like me to know Maggie. She doesn’t think she behaves well. Didn’t, I mean.”

“You did know Maggie, though?” asked Dove, to keep the ball rolling while he considered what she had told him.

“Of course I did. We’re the same age, we went to the same school before I went to the Grammar. Mother forgets all that. I quite liked Maggie.”

“All right, don’t get upset. So Maggie told you. And who told her?”

But Elizabeth only shrugged.

Stalemate, Dove was thinking. That just about sums it up: stalemate.

“So Maggie Rispoli was the little errand-girl of the gods, was she?” said Coffin thoughtfully, when he heard the news. “One of the women you questioned earlier did say Maggie, but we discounted that.” He leafed through his notes. “Looks like that one wasn’t such a liar after all.”

“I don’t know if the gods come into it. I don’t know who does. Did the girl start it up all on her own, do you think?”

Coffin shook his head. “I don’t think so, do you, Fred? She wasn’t clever enough or spiteful enough. And she didn’t have the information to hand. No, it was fed to her. She was used. And from that it follows - it was by someone she knew!”

“We don’t know,” said Dove sourly. “We’re not a mite farther on.” His feet hurt.

“You’re not looking at this squarely,” said Coffin. His tone was alert and hopeful. “We’ve got a solid fact.”

Fred Dove gave a half laugh, half groan. “Solid?”

“It’s a fact, though, Fred,” said Coffin patiently. “There’s more than one way of getting at a fact and we’ve got one. Now we’ve got to see what that fact gives us.”

Dove shifted in his seat, letting his eyes wander out of the window. He could see Brian Bray getting into his car. There must be private money there somewhere. He, Dove, couldn’t afford a car like that, couldn’t afford a car.

“There’s one fact we do know, about Maggie that fits in,” went on Coffin. “She was not a clever girl and she was a girl who, according to her mother, liked a secret, liked to pretend she knew things, but I think the murderer overlooked or ignored this aspect of Maggie because there was something else about Maggie that attracted, Maggie was employed as a messenger in the biscuit factory. That was her daily job. I think that means the murderer thought of Maggie as a messenger.”

“So?” said Dove.

“So I think it means the murderer works in the factory too.”

“I’ve been saying that all along,” said Dove. ‘In one way and another.”

“Now we’re saying it my way. Now we know.”

Dove got to his feet. “So I suppose we start going through the factory from the managing director downwards?”

He paused at the door. “Do you know what I think? I think we’ll be wasting our time. There’s still nothing come up that points away from Miss Roland…And plenty that looks directly her way.”

On his way home Coffin noticed Miss Melita Tuffy sitting in a car which was parked at the junction on Czar Street with Prince Consort Square. She was sitting in the passenger seat and at first he could not see who was the driver. As he got closer he recognised Lotty Brown.

‘Strange couple to be pals,’ he thought. But everyone knew everyone else round here.

‘What I want is a disciple,’ Coffin told himself wryly. ‘Not a Sergeant with a highly destructive line in criticism and a wife who…’ But he didn’t finish that sentence.

Instead he picked up the report which Detective-Constable Brian Bray had handed over to him just before Dove had arrived, with the comment that in his opinion there was nothing in it at all. Bray had interviewed the girl Phyllis Evans who had said she was buying charcoal for her mother: which her mother had denied. Bray didn’t have at all a vivid or striking way of putting things, but all the same the little scene came across very clearly to Coffin There was Bray, large and neat and determined, and there was the frightened, grubby, scatty pair, mother and daughter. They had demonstrated with tears and cries of anger, and, Coffin had no doubt, there had been minor threats on Bray’s part. The upshot had been that in the end the mother had produced the charcoal and admitted Phyllis had bought it. She seemed to have no use for it, however, and Bray drew his own cynical conclusions. “The charcoal is little asked for round here and is stored in this particular shop in a dark corner. The assistant would have to turn away for a few minutes to get it. I think Mother is training the kid to lift a few tins of sardines and peaches from the counter while the charcoal is being fetched…I put the wind up them and I don’t think they’ll be asking for charcoal for a while. It’ll probably be methylated spirits.”

Coffin put the report down and picked up the telephone.

“Is Bray there?” he asked the desk sergeant.

“He was just going out, I think, sir.”

“Well, get him back.” He sat there for a moment, waiting, and staring at the report. One line of inquiry after another seemed to be petering out before his eyes. He might have to give Dove best in the end. He could hear voices muttering in the room at the end of the telephone line. One of them was certainly Brian Bray’s, he knew its clear, echoing, confident tones. He remembered that Bray was wearing a neat town suit and striped shirt, a little too fashionable for a detective, and wondered what was up.

“Bray?…You can pick up the file of photographs of all the women connected with this case, the Tuffys, the Garrow woman and her sister Mrs. Lamb, Roxanne Roland and Miss Juliet Duveen, and Maggie Rispoli, and go round to the shop where the assistant remembered selling the stuff to a woman between twenty and fifty and show her all the pictures.”

“What, now?”

He was going off somewhere, thought Coffin, and for a moment the idea of Brian Bray all dressed up and nowhere to go amused him.

“Yes, now,” he said ruthlessly. “And I’ll be at home waiting for the answer.”

Patsy was home when he got there, eating a meal before going off for the theatre. She smiled at him and poured him out some coffee. It was good strong powerful coffee, just exactly like Patsy herself.

“I wish you were staying at home and not going out tonight.”

“I’m going to work. Not out. It’s not a party of pleasure. I work at it.”

“Yes, I know you do.”

“I agree with you it’s a pity the play is going on and on. It’s boring. Bad for the cast too.” Patsy briskly took the top off a boiled egg. She looked at its white and yellow face, frowned and then took a tiny spoonful as if she didn’t quite like the flavour. Coffin didn’t notice. He was deep in his own thoughts.

“Tell me, if the play went on running for years, would you still act in it?”

“No.” Patsy put down her egg spoon and pushed the egg plate far away out of sight. “No. I can tell you quite definitely that I would not. No.”

“Oh, good,” said Coffin brightening. “I was beginning to think I’d married that play.”

“Don’t worry,” said his wife. “You hadn’t.” There was a little flick of the whip in her voice and Coffin looked up.

“You shouldn’t have married an actress,” said Patsy in a detached reasonable voice, as if she had put the whip away. It was only out of sight though. “That’s your trouble.”

“No.” Coffin was bewildered. “I love being married to an actress.”

“Yes. Provided she isn’t acting.”

“That’s not true. I’m proud of you. I tell everyone.”

“You don’t want a wife,” said Patsy, getting the whip out again. “You want a trophy.”

Her husband got up and walked over to the window. Patsy had turned their top-floor flat into a delightful theatrical establishment. The windows were clouded with ninon and hung with toile de Jouy. Geraniums bloomed in white pots on the window-ledge outside.

“I don’t know how you manage to get geraniums to bloom in the winter,” said Coffin.

“They’re artificial.”

Coffin turned from the window. “You give yourself all the best lines.” She smiled. “But then you’re writing the play.” He came round to the table and looked at Patsy, who was back to spooning egg thoughtfully into her mouth. “But will this play run for years and years? Perhaps it wasn’t meant to? Perhaps you weren’t writing yourself a life part?”

“You’re not doing too badly for lines yourself,” remarked Patsy critically. “You’re delivering them well, too.”

“Oh, they say that inside every man there’s an actor struggling to get out,” said Coffin.

“Don’t you underestimate yourself,” advised Patsy, this time decisively rejecting her egg.

“What are you doing with that damn egg?”

“I’m playing my part in this dreamy little play.”

Her face in the table light seemed thinner and a little white under its make up. She looked, Coffin thought, more beautiful. Success and a little acclaim had polished her.

“A promising young marriage strangled at birth, that’s what they’ll say about us,” he said as he watched her.

“Not the only thing we’ll be able to strangle at birth either,” said Patsy gloomily.

“What?”

“Disgusting isn’t it, at my age?”

Coffin did not answer. He was absorbing the information she had so casually handed out.

“Venetia thinks it’s the cat’s whiskers,” went on Patsy, not looking at him directly. “Buying a mink-lined cradle.”

“You told Venetia before you told me?” Coffin’s face was very white.

“Yes,” she looked up. She was surprised to see that Coffin was deeply, painfully hurt.

While they were staring at each other the telephone rang on the table by the window. Coffin went over to it.

“Brian Bray here, sir,” said that cheerful clear voice. “I’ve got the name of the woman who bought the charcoal. The photographs did get results. I thought they might. And it certainly is someone connected with the biscuit factory,” went on Brian Bray, who had sat in on the conference between Coffin and Dove. “But it won’t do you any good.”

“Why not?”

“Because she’s dead.”

“What?”

“It was Angelica Tuffy.”

Later that evening a taxi turned the corner into Prince Consort Square, passed the church and the vicarage and stopped outside Roxanne’s house. Roxanne and Juliet got out. Juliet was muffled up in a fur coat, the gift of her grandmother.

“Takes getting almost killed to get real beaver out of Gran.” But her face framed in the soft collar looked pretty and pink. She hadn’t lost in looks at all because of her illness. Roxanne, on the other hand, was pinched, all nose and eyes. Her witch-look, which had so greatly interested Elizabeth Garrow’s nephew, was strongly in evidence.

“You know, I’m really glad to be back,” said Juliet. “Isn’t that surprising?”

“Very,” said Roxanne dryly. She paid off the driver. “Frankly, I’m surprised you came. Your grandmother didn’t want you to.”

“No, neither did John Coffin,” said Juliet happily.

Roxanne looked at her and sighed. “You and me both,” she said. “Well, I suppose you know what you’re doing.”

“But I’m not doing anything.” said Juliet, opening her big blue eyes. “Of course I wouldn’t. I adore Patsy too. I’ve decided to be like you, Roxanne. Just love people.”

Roxanne gave her a strange look. “Oh, that’s what you think I do, is it?”

“You always look so beautifully and tragically embittered. It’s my ambition to look like that when I’m your age.”

“You try it,” said Roxanne. She opened the front door. Before going out to meet Juliet, she had turned on all the lights and heating. A wave of hot scented air rushed out at them. Juliet felt it and started to cough. Roxanne glanced at her quickly and shut the door behind them. It shut with a heavy bang.

They stood for a moment in the hall while Juliet coughed.

“I thought you were better,” said Roxanne anxiously and irritably.

“I just have a stupid little tickle,” said Juliet, through her coughs. She began to struggle out of her coat. Her pretty little red feather hat had got pushed to one side, and gloves, handbag and books were scattering everywhere. Roxanne went to help her.

They were picking up everything Juliet had dropped, and laughing and feeling cheerful and busy when suddenly Roxanne gripped Juliet’s arm.

“Did you hear that?”

“What?” Juliet’s eyes grew big.

“Three sharp raps…

“I don’t think I heard anything. I was coughing and laughing.”

Roxanne stood there with her hands stiffly by her side, her head bent to listen.

“As if the play was about to begin,” she said.

“That’s only in France,” said Juliet, beginning to look frightened. “It’s your imagination, Roxanne.”

“Do you hear that, then?”

“What?”

“A creaking noise. As if something was being wound up.”

Around them the house, so brightly lit and hot, creaked and rapped with age and the currents of hot air, truly as if it was winding itself up for something.

Far away in the sewers and underground stream beneath the house, the clannish yet internecine rats slithered silently through the dark.

And upstairs in their brightly lit hot cage Roxanne and Juliet were frightened.

Then the telephone rang.

X

ROXANNE WENT TO answer the telephone in her cold, green-and-white sitting-room. She stood by the table holding the telephone in her hands and staring at a Piranesi print of the prison in Rome. Downstairs she could hear Juliet coughing. ’They should never have let that child come home,’ she thought, ‘she’s not well enough.’

She heard the voice on the telephone for a moment without recognising it.

“Isobel Ludbrook speaking.”

Roxanne did not answer. This was what the house had been working itself up for, no doubt. Miss Isobel Ludbrook was coming in for the kill.

“Isobel Ludbrook here, speaking as usual as secretary of the South London Society for Psychical Research…”

Roxanne took a deep breath that came fluttering across the telephone lines in a way very satisfying to Miss Ludbrook’s ears. They were her ears and another woman’s ears, too, as a matter of fact.

“I know you’re there, Miss Roland, I can hear you breathing.”

“Go on talking, Miss Ludbrook, I want to hear you.”

“What did you say? I can’t talk just to amuse you, Miss Roland.”

Roxanne was staring hard at the Piranesi print, absorbing its detail in a way she had never done all the years it had been in her possession. The print had been a gift from Bruno and she had admired it and thought it valuable (which it was not) and so she had kept it. And in a way she had built her life around it. She had chosen this old house in this old square to go with it, decorated the house to match its age to match the print, and taken a job in the district to suit the house. It was like The House That Jack Built. How typical that it all should be built round the engraving of a prison. It was a picture she would never have chosen.

Roxanne found her voice. “Why are you talking with an Irish accent this time, Miss Ludbrook? It was Scots before. Have you forgotten which you are?”

There was complete and utter stillness from the other end of the line. Roxanne had found a way to silence Miss Isobel Ludbrook at last.

Roxanne put the receiver down. She no longer believed in Miss Isobel Ludbrook. Roxanne did not think she existed, and neither did the South London Society for Psychical Research. Miss Ludbrook was not what she pretended to be. She was a fabricated person and not a real one.

‘She’s a liar,’ thought Roxanne. ‘But how did she know all that about me?’

It was borne in upon her that there was only one source from which all her information could have come.

Roxanne herself.

There were many things in her life which Roxanne had never told anyone, not even Juliet, but about most of them she had written in her diaries: the diaries which she now kept behind the locked doors of the cupboard in her bedroom. Suppose the things which she had written in her sickness and weakness had been read! She recalled the occasion on which she had certainly imagined her cupboard to have been opened.

Hardly aware that she was moving, Roxanne went up the stairs to her bedroom, ignoring Juliet still coughing in the hall below, and opened the doors of her cupboard.

On the bottom shelf a pile of her diaries still lay, tied up in string. Red books, blue books, yellow and green. Roxanne had never used a proper diary, which would not have contained space for all she wanted to say; she had bought school notebooks.

She could see without even counting that more than half were gone. Some time during the last year a friend or enemy had quietly made away with the books, had gone off you might say, with half of Roxanne’s life. The important half too. A jury had been empanelled to sit upon the books and Roxanne knew without being told that it had found her guilty.

But so many people had access to her house. How could you pick out one as the thief? The thief had counted upon this fact.

There had been something very familiar to Roxanne in Miss Ludbrook’s voice behind its camouflage of Scots and Irish accents.

Roxanne closed the cupboard door and no longer bothered to lock it. Pandora’s furies were out.

‘I’m surprised you’re not more surprised, Roxanne,’ she told herself.

But the truth was, she wasn’t surprised at all.

So many people had access to Roxanne’s house. There was Miss Elizabeth Garrow, whose friend owned the house and retained for his own use a full set of keys. There were the Tuffys, for Angelica had a key, although it was never to be found when she wanted it. There was Maggie who was nosey and Lotty and Bruno and the Vicar’s wife, and numerous strays of all shapes and sizes to whom Roxanne had at one time or another given the run of the house. As a matter of fact if you leaned heavily on the front door it would open anyway. It was such an old, decaying rotten house that the wood was brittle with fungus and the stone damp with mildew and about it all the time was the atmosphere of a house that was not only decaying but degenerating.

“I hate to think of you all alone,” said Juliet, once more in bed and sitting hunched up against her pillows. She was in her own room in Roxanne’s house. “I don’t feel I’m any good to you up here in bed as soon as I get back.”

“I shan’t be alone. Lotty’s going to look in later.”

“Oh how kind of her.”

“Yes. Isn’t it?”

“And just like her.”

“Yes. She’s been in and out a good deal lately.”

“She couldn’t bear to leave you alone.”

“No,” said Roxanne with a faint smile. “I think she found she couldn’t.”

“I do admire the way you two have made a friendship. Did you do it, do you think, or was it Lotty?”

There was a pause while Roxanne thought, then she said: “It was sort of half and half. Yes, that’s it. Half and half.”

Juliet frowned. Roxanne had a funny way of putting things sometimes.

“A bit from me and a bit from her. Whether you like it or not, a relationship of any sort is a two-sided affair. You give and you take, but across the barrier is the other person, also giving and taking. You want to remember that, Juliet.”

“I do remember it.”

“No. You’re a baby. You think you can take a line and call it a relationship.”

“You’re hard, Roxanne.” Juliet sounded surprised.

“Well, it wouldn’t be difficult to be, anyway,” said Roxanne thoughtfully.

Juliet looked round her room, which had been tidied up and put in order by Roxanne herself.

“You know what’s wrong?” she said. “There aren’t any animals. Where have they all gone? There’s usually an old cat or two and weren’t there two birds?” She saw Roxanne’s expression. “Oh, the birds are dead. They were in the room with us. But what happened to the cats? They weren’t there.”

“I found them homes when all this started. Actually one of them had a perfectly good home of his own, only he preferred us. I just made him stay away.”

“Oh, what a shame. It does seem funny without your strays.”

“Well, apart from anything else,” said Roxanne in a harsh voice, “they couldn’t stand the police tramping in and out all the time.”

“I wish I remembered more about that night,” said Juliet. “I remember them coming in, one after the other, and asking for you.”

“Oh, it was one after the other?”

“As I remember. It all seemed normal and usual. People always drop in to see you. I mean they did do, didn’t they, Roxanne?”

“They did. They haven’t been quite so frequent lately. Even the stray dogs seem to feel there may be safer spots.”

Roxanne was grimly amused. She failed to see how much Juliet wanted reassurance.

“You know, Roxanne,” said Juliet. “This is the first time we’ve been alone since that evening.”

“We’re not going to be alone now,” said Roxanne. “I told you. Lotty’s coming.”

“And you remember we found that writing on the wall., Orlando, you said. A little lost boy, you said. I’ve been wondering terribly about Orlando, Roxanne.”

“I will tell you all about Orlando. You’re just about the one person I could tell…I was just about your age. A bit older. It’s a loony time, isn’t it, darling? That’s why you’ll understand about Orlando. It’s my own name really you know. Roland, Orlando…nothing to it.”

Juliet stared at her trying to understand.

“Orlando was a child I thought I might have. We were in Italy, Bruno and I. Orlando is an Italian name.” Roxanne looked down at her hands, battered and red but still a lovely shape with oval nails. “He had no objective reality, my poor Orlando. It all started in my mind with a statue of a boy holding a dove in Tivoli. A living dove, Juliet. But it’s all in my diary. He was just imagination. But it seemed such a wonderful idea that Bruno and I should have a child and the child be called Orlando. I wrote it all down in my diary. I thought Bruno wrote it in his heart. But he didn’t. He married Lotty. Sometimes I think Orlando was the biggest ghost between Lotty and me, not Bruno.”

“But Roxanne—” began Juliet. She was embarrassed.

“And then when I saw that writing, and the toys lying about, and remembered you complaining about the noisy boy; I thought that I had given Orlando a sort of life, after all…I had conceived him and he had to be born. He came here as a ghost, a rather dangerous one, poor little soul,” said Roxanne dreamily.

“Roxanne, what horrible things you are saying.”

“Do you think me neurotic?” said Roxanne, turning on her briskly.“Well, I suppose it must look like that, but as it turns out, I am not…that stage didn’t last long.”

“Why are you looking amused, Roxanne?”

The front door bell rang twice, and Roxanne went down to answer it. “If I am looking amused it’s not because I think it all very funny, but because I suddenly feel justified. Do you know what justified means? It means free from the penalty of sin. That’s what has happened to me.”

“Now you look mad, Roxanne,” breathed Juliet.

Lying in bed she heard the front door bang and heard Lotty’s clear, calm voice. She was almost sure she heard the words “beef tea”. It would be so like Lotty to insist on beef tea. T shan’t drink it, though,’ decided Juliet. ‘I hate beef tea.’

She was a little shaken, too, in her allegiance to Roxanne.

Presently she heard voices and feet coming up the stairs and Roxanne and Lotty came into the room together. Lotty was holding Roxanne’s hand and giggling. Lotty was wearing a dark cloth coat which didn’t suit her as well as clothes usually did, and which made her look the least bit dowdy. Whereas Roxanne, as Juliet suddenly realised, was looking wildly beautiful.

‘It’s as if she needed, Lotty to come’, thought Juliet. ‘Like some sort of terrible vampire.’

She sat there in her warm bed in the too-hot house, with her hands neatly in her lap like a good child, and thought about John Coffin. ’Oh, dear Coffin, I do wish you’d come and get me. I’m here in this, house, which Roxanne says is winding up for something, and I do think Roxanne is mad.’

‘Hello, Juliet darling,” said Lotty. “My, you’re looking pretty.”

“Ravishing, isn’t she?” said Roxanne, sitting on the bed. “But she always is.”

“She’s so young,” said Lotty.

“I don’t feel young,” said Juliet. “Far from it, in fact.”

“At your age it doesn’t matter how you feel, you still go on looking relentlessly young. It’s nature.” Roxanne’s eyes were bright and the tones of her voice just a little higher than usual. Juliet believed Lotty had noticed this too.

Roxanne left the room for a moment and came back with a tray on which were three glasses and a bottle of brandy.

“We’ll all have a drink.”

“Oh, I don’t think I will,” said Lotty. “I don’t drink much. Hardly at all really.”

“You can’t refuse me now in my own house,” said Roxanne, pouring out three glasses.

Juliet took hers when it was offered, wondering rather doubtfully if she was going to like sleeping in a room smelling of brandy. She sipped a little. Roxanne took a great swig of her drink. Lotty placed hers on the side table and pretended it wasn’t there. Out of loyalty to Roxanne Juliet took another larger drink.

“Come on, Lotty, drink up,” said Roxanne.

“Well, I won’t, if you don’t mind.”

“Ah, but I do.”

“I came to see Juliet, not to get drunk.” Lotty sounded tart, and it was something she could do well. There was lots of character behind her pleasant, smiling, plump face.

“There’s absolutely no reason to get drunk unless you want to,” said Roxanne.

Juliet leaned back against the pillows; she felt a little dizzy herself, with the brandy and the heat and the cross women’s voices.

“I’m not used to drink like you,” said Lotty.

Roxanne smiled. “Rubbish,” was all she said.

“I don’t know what you mean by that. You’re being very odd and offensive this evening,” said Lotty, standing up.

“I’ve always found you irritating,” said Roxanne simply, “and at last tonight I’ve decided to tell you.”

“You don’t imagine that comes as any surprise to me? The times I’ve hardly been able to stop myself telling you exactly what you’ve got written all over you: that you’re an unprincipled woman.”

“What a maddening woman you are, Lotty. Yes, absolutely maddening.”

Roxanne put her hand behind her to steady herself. Juliet saw and so did Lotty.

‘Wonder if she drank much of that brandy before she brought it in,’ thought Juliet.

“I’d like a nice cup of tea,” she said in a wavering voice.

“You’re drunk, my dear,” said Lotty to Roxanne. “Drunk. You silly girl.”

“I’ll go down and get you some tea,” said Roxanne. “Don’t take any notice of Lotty while I’m gone, she likes taking away my character.” And she walked, fairly steadily, to the door.

“I don’t think she is drunk, you know,” said Juliet uneasily. “She’s just - well, excited.”

“I think she needs watching. Careful watching, I don’t mind telling you.”

“Oh, no,” said Juliet faintly, who knew from experience that this always meant something unpleasant was coming.

“That is why I came round this evening,” went on Lotty ruthlessly. “Hasn’t it struck you the oddness of the things that happen about Roxanne?”

Juliet stared at her wide-eyed.

“Hallucinations, oh, call them ghosts and manifestations if you like, its politer, but any psychologist will tell you that these things are subjective, they don’t exist at all really, they come from a disorganised, frustrated personality. God only knows what she’s managed to convince herself of…”

There was silence.

“Come home with me, dear.” Lotty took her hand.

“Bruno and I will put you up and tomorrow…” (Lotty always lisped slightly in excitement) “you can go to your granny. You should never have come.”

There was a sound of crashing china from below, which suggested that Roxanne and a tea-tray had gone down together.

“Roxanne would never do anything violent,” said Juliet, withdrawing her hand. “She’s not a violent woman.”

“She’s a very passionate one, at all events,” said Lotty.

There was a further crash from the kitchen.

“God damn it, her life has been riddled with violence,” cried Lotty in a loud voice. “Oh, you’re blind, blind.”

“I’m not deaf, anyway,” said Juliet.

“She’s a wicked neurotic woman, and it’s time someone had the courage to come right out and say it,” cried Lotty.

“Well,” said Juliet after a pause. “I don’t think it ought to be you that said it, because I don’t think it took any courage for you to say it. I think you wanted to say it.”

“You’re as bad as she is. Stay with her and grow like her and watch what you’re going to grow like. I wanted to help you. Now I won’t. You deserve whatever this house has got in store for you.”

Juliet watched Lotty run out of the room and go crashing down the stairs; she was unhappily aware that she had got up a splendid little quarrel with Lotty on her own account.

She heard another crash, farther up the stairs this time, and it sounded as if someone had fallen.

Presently Roxanne came stumbling in, rather flushed, carrying a tray with a steaming teapot and two cups.

“What was that noise?” asked Juliet raising herself on one elbow.

“I fell over the cat.”

“I thought they’d all gone away.”

“This one’s come back.” Roxanne bent her face over the tray. “Or perhaps it was Lotty. They look rather alike, don’t you think?”

In spite of herself, Juliet giggled. Lotty did look like a fluffy little yellow tabby.

“She was a jolly cross little pussy cat.”

“She seemed to have a great deal to say about me,” observed Roxanne, lifting her head from the tray.

“You were listening?”

“You were shouting.”

Roxanne poured out the tea and handed Juliet a cup. “You realise what she said? How did she know that half the things that happened when I was a child were a fraud?”

“I realise what you have said.” Juliet was appalled at this revelation.

“You realise what she is.”

“I am beginning to realise what you are.”

Roxanne smiled. She stretched out her hand to the telephone. “Do you know what I am going to do? I’m going to report someone to the police. I’m going to report Miss Isobel Ludbrook.”

“Yes,” said Coffin when he had listened to her. “Yes, I could check on Miss Isobel Ludbrook.”

“So Angelica Tuffy bought the charcoal and Maggie was the messenger girl. They seem to have planned their own murder.” Dove was sceptical. He was always sceptical of anything young Bray brought in. They were rivals. Anyway, this was nine o’clock on a dark morning, a time when he felt least willing to believe in anything. He could hardly even believe in himself. He felt null, a void, a nothing. He couldn’t stop yawning.

“It must mean something,” said Coffin, scratching his cheek where he had cut himself shaving. He felt angry and fierce. “It’s just up to us to find out what.”

“I could spell out what it means in three letters.”

“You mean thirteen,” corrected Coffin sourly. “Roxanne Roland. I’m beginning to believe you’re right. She could have got Angelica to buy the charcoal; no one better. Angelica was her secretary. And she could have used Maggie…although I must say I don’t get that. Why spread rumours about herself?”

“She might reckon on you thinking just that.”

“That would be clever-insane,” said Coffin, after thought.

“That’s what I’m always saying about her,” said Dove triumphantly. “She looks the part.”

“I still don’t get the spreading of rumours about herself.”

“It’s on a par with the stuff as a kid, which is the material she’s using now. A sort of repressed hysteria. Exhibitionism. A wanting to be noticed.”

“You’re using big words this morning,” was all Coffin said. “You really do like her, don’t you?”

“She worries me.” Dove had an obstinate look.

“Let’s split the difference,” said Coffin equably. “You go on and find out more about the Tuffy angle, and I’ll worry about Miss Roland.”

Dove sighed. “I can have a car, I suppose.”

“No, you can walk. It’s only just around the corner.”

“They’re more impressed if I come by car.”

“I don’t want them to be impressed.”

“But it’s difficult, like I told you. They’ve known me a long time…They’re all loopy, you know.”

“Everyone’s loopy to you this morning, Fred.”

“They’ll all be out at work.”

Coffin looked at the clock. “You’ll just get them if you hurry. They don’t start the day early round there. I’ve seen them.”

“Anyway, you have to get down there,” he said, standing up abruptly. “They’re making a fuss about the body. They want it back.”

“The body?” Dove stopped yawning.

“They can’t have it. The inquest’s been adjourned. You can go down and tell them.”

“Why do they want it back?”

“How do I know?” Coffin was impatient. “Why do people want bodies back? Don’t like to think it’s not buried, I suppose.”

Breakfast-time was no time for calling on the Tuffys. They hated each other most of the day; in the mornings they hated everybody. Dove could tell straight away they hated him.

The smart Miss Tuffy (who didn’t look smart with her hair not combed) stared at him sulkily over her cup of coffee, and thin Miss Emily Tuffy brushed the crumbs from her lap and prepared to go out as soon as she saw him, and fat Miss Melita Tuffy stared at him hungrily. She was sitting near the fire toasting a piece of bread. It was apparent that an argument had been going on between the sisters about this.

“I don’t know why you don’t use the toaster I bought,” he heard Miss Tuffy say.

“Bought,” said Miss Melita Tuffy contemptuously.

“At least it makes a good job of it - doesn’t just singe the bread.”

“Fire’s more natural,” said Melly Tuffy.

“I’m afraid that piece of toast is burning now,” pointed out Dove politely. “It’s quite black.”

“Just charcoal,” said Miss Melly casually. “Good for you.”

“Not always,” said Dove, thinking of Miss Angelica.

Except for the police and the families no one knew that the three deaths were due to charcoal poisoning. The newspapers were still speaking about a sex maniac, a mass killer, a multiple murderer. On the morning paper spread out on the Tuffys’ breakfast table Dove could read the headlines:

SOUTHEAST LONDON MASS KILLER STILL AT LARGE. Even the foreign newspapers had taken the case up, commenting gleefully that when you got down to it all the best murders were British.

“This is just a coincidence, but I wanted to ask you about your sister, your late sister,” he corrected carefully, seeing their affronted look, “about her buying charcoal. You don’t use it yourself, I suppose, for anything?” Then, seeing they looked blank, “For lighting fires?”

“We’re all-electric,” said Miss Emily, “Well, practically,” she added, looking at the open hearth by which Miss Melly still sat. “Anyway, for cooking,” she said, giving her sister a pointed look.

“And of course we’re not artists,” said Miss Tuffy, putting on her smart look. “And certainly not Angelica.

You might think because of her vagueness she was the artistic one of the family, but I can tell you she was not. She was very coarse-fibred in some ways, was Angel.”

“Ah, it wasn’t that sort of charcoal,” said Dove.

“Coarse fibre only needs special treatment,” said Miss Melly in a dreamy voice. “Wine, herbs, marinating.”

“We’re talking about Angelica, not cooking her,” said her sister Miss Tuffy sharply.

“Meanwhile, there’s nothing you can tell me about the purchase of the charcoal by your sister? She has been definitely identified, you know. You can’t suggest any reason she might have for buying it? Who could have asked her?”

Miss Tuffy shook her head. “My sister might have bought it for someone in the factory, one of the neighbours, someone she met on the bus, or even for herself. I don’t see how you could pin it down.”

“Unluckily it’s my duty to try and pin it down,” said Dove, getting out his notebook. “Can I have any names you can suggest.”

“Mrs. Burrow, Mrs. Rispoli, Mary Eagle, Sophy Pett, Joan Cole”, began Miss Melly Tuffy with a malicious look, “Miss Roland, Mrs. Lotty Brown, me, my two sisters…”

‘She’s putting in every name she can possibly think of in connection with her sister’, thought Dove, with his heart sinking: another great whacking list of contacts to plod around.

“Wait a bit,” he said. “You’ll have to give me the addresses…These must be all the women your sister knew.”

“That’s it,” said Miss Melly. “That’s what I’m telling you. That’s what my sister was like. She’d do it for anyone.” And this time the malicious humour in her face was unmistakable.

“Right,” said Dove. “Well, I’ll get them all down.” He wrote industriously, if not very legibly. “I dare say I’ll manage to prune it down a bit.” Anything to remove the smug smile from Miss Melita’s face.

“I dare say.”

“By the way,” he said as he rose to go. “I’m sorry it’s not possible for you to have your sister’s body back. The Chief Inspector said you were worrying. It’ll have to be after the inquest, I’m afraid.”

Miss Tuffy and Miss Emily stared at him in surprise.

“It wasn’t me worrying”, said Miss Emily.

“I know nothing about it,” said Miss Tuffy, and she turned accusingly to Miss Melita toasting her toes by the fire.

“All right,” said Miss Melly sulkily, “so it was me. You two don’t seem to care about Angelica’s body. Almost as if you’ve forgotten it. I can’t forget”. Fat tears welled up in her pale blue eyes. “I can’t bear to think of Angelica’s body stiffening on that cold shelf. Unwanted.”

“The Inspector just wished you to know that he’d do what he could to get a move on, but of course you’ll have to wait until after the inquest. That’s not so long now.”

He shut the front door behind him with a grateful sigh. “They’re all loopy in there. Mad as hatters.”

“Another great list of women,” he said glumly, producing his notes for Coffin’s benefit.

“We’ll be selective about this list, Fred,” said Coffin in a good-humoured way. “I think we’re in a position to be now, don’t you?”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“We’ll start -with the names we’ve heard of,” said Coffin simply.

“Some of these women I’ve been to already,” said Dove, studying the list. “They’re going to be pleased to see me back again.”

“Start with Mrs. Rispoli, Mrs. Lotty Brown, and Mrs. Lamb. She’s not on the list, but she’s Miss Elizabeth Garrow’s sister and she may have been able to ask a favour of Miss Angelica as well. Anyway, I’d like to cover the families of all three women that died.” He shook his head, as if to shake a clear thought out of it. “There’s a connection, I’m sure there is.”

“But you don’t know what or where?”

“Now you’re writing popular songs.”

“I don’t know why you’re suddenly so cheerful.”

“No. I’ll tell you some time,” Coffin smiled.

In the interval between Dove’s two visits, he had telephoned Venetia Stuart. If nothing else, Venetia was usually good for a laugh.

“What’s this I hear about you buying us a mink-lined cradle?”

“Not mink, dear, no, that would be hardly hygienic, and the littlest bit like the birth of the Romanovs or the christening of Ghengis Khan, but the very best ruffled nylon. Much prettier really. Anyway, the baby won’t care. It’s just for the mum.”

“I don’t think the mum likes the whole idea at all,” said Coffin in a low voice which revealed a good deal to Venetia.

“Oh, my dear,” Venetia began to laugh, “and she’s behaving like Flora producing the spring. Hadn’t you noticed?”

“I didn’t know,” mumbled Coffin, startled and delighted.

“You’re measuring your personality against hers, and you think if she goes up you’re bound to go down and vice versa. You’re not relaxed about this marriage, Coffin, that’s your trouble.”

“You may be right.”

“You go back to solving your crime and let Patsy have this baby. You’ve both got a full-time job, so leave it at that.”

Venetia had never come so far out in the open with her criticism, and yet, paradoxically enough, he had never felt surer of her support.

“Thanks,” he said. “I think I will do that.”

When he put the receiver down he found that his hand was trembling slightly.

Venetia’s hands too were trembling as she ended the call. “You’re a very good actress,” she praised herself. “Better than you thought. You can make even unconvincing stuff sound convincing.”

“You know one thing that strikes me about all these names?” said Coffin to Dove.

“What?”

“They’re all women.”

“I know that.”

“All our lists have been women. We’ve never come within measurable distance of thinking of a man as the murderer.”

“Yes, that’s true,” said Dove.

“So a woman is almost certainly the murderer. And that leads us to a consideration of the motive. Women don’t usually murder other women. They may knock off an inconvenient husband or a worrying suitor, but women, no.”

“So?”

“That brings us to their other sort of motive. Direct gain, like Mrs. Waddington, Nurse Palmer or the Peckenham murderer…They never got the murderer there but it was almost certainly the woman.”

“Don’t see it being money here.”

“We can’t be sure, but probably not, although sometimes this type of murder is for pathetically small sums of money, but on the whole, I agree. So that brings us to the other motive…. Jealousy. There’s a man somewhere in this.”

“I suppose you think you’re saying something profound.”

“I think I’m saying something true.”

“It’s a little difficult to fit out any of these three women with the sort of background that’s going to bring in that sort of motive,” said Dove sceptically.

“If you could see your way round those three women and the sort of set picture you’ve formed, and give your ideas a shakeup, we might get at some sort of motive,” said Coffin. “Because there has to be a motive.”

He met Dove’s eyes.

“Yes, I know what you’re thinking, it’s what you’ve always thought: there is no motive but a mad one.”

“Well, I’ve got something,” said Dove, still worrying away at his half truth.

There was a large coloured photograph of Maggie at her first communion hanging in the hall of the Rispoli house. A bunch of carnations and a candle stood on the table underneath. Coffin knew at once what had happened and his heart sank. Maggie had been sanctified, and it would now be very difficult to get any concrete information about the dead girl out of the family (although plenty of emotion), while anything that seemed to reflect on Maggie would be suppressed at once. But nothing would reflect on Maggie. Coffin knew how the Rispoli mind worked. Everything in her life would be viewed teleologically with her death in mind and everything in it would now cast a lustre on Maggie. Maggie henceforth was good, all her actions had been good, and everyone had loved her. If you waited long enough the process would be reversed and honesty take its place (the Rispolis were very honest people) but just at the moment the cult of Maggie was at its height.

Mrs. Rispoli greeted the two men politely. Unlike the Tuffys she did not seem worried about the disposal of Maggie’s body. Perhaps it suited her just as well to leave it where it was and concentrate on the new Maggie she was creating. It might have been hard to forget that Maggie alive had been inquisitive, greedy and secretive, if you had her poor little body lying there to remind you of reality.

“Anyone else home, Mrs. Rispoli?” said Coffin.

“Dad’s in the shop,” said Mrs. Rispoli, with a backward toss of her head. “All the rest are out. What is it?”

“Just a few more questions.”

“Won’t I do?”

“Better than anyone probably, Mrs. Rispoli, but I was afraid you were getting fed up with answering them. And also I was looking for a stupid member of the family, which you are not, who might be more communicative, which you won’t be either.” (Like Dad, for instance, but he had little hope of getting to talk to Dad.)

“Come in and sit down.”

“The thing is, Maggie appears to have been spreading some stories about Miss Roland which I wonder if you know about? I’d like to know where she got them from.”

“Maggie never said anything that was not true.”

“No, of course not. I didn’t mean that.” Coffin cursed his tactless use of the words ‘spread’ and ‘story’. Still, what else had Maggie been doing? “In any case I’m not interested in their truth or untruth, I have my own ideas about that, but I want to know their source.”

“You think it has anything to do with her death?”

“I don’t know. It may have. Anyway, I’d like to know. Who was close to Maggie, told her things, talked to her.”

“I was, of course, and all her sisters.”

“Apart from you,” said Coffin patiently. He had never seen. Maggie pass even the time of the day with her sisters.

“Her school teacher, Mrs. O’Flaherty,” said Mrs. Rispoli brightening. “And Father Flynn.”

“Anyone else?” Coffin was grimly amused at Mrs. Rispoli’s concentration on the official and the family, as though Maggie had been a shy little schoolgirl, instead of the teenager who once tripped through the town in stiletto heels and painted her eyelashes blue.

Mr. Rispoli stared through the glass panel of the door from the shop and then came in.

“Hello,” he said cheerfully. He seemed pleased to see Coffin. “Want me?”

“No, you can go back,” said Mrs. Rispoli. She liked to have the reins firmly in her own hands. She always acted for her husband, and, if possible, spoke for him as well. She was large and slow spoken, he was small and neat and the best dancer in the whole of Coffin’s district.

“I wouldn’t mind having a word with you,” admitted Coffin. “But I don’t suppose you can help. I’m only trying to get a list of Maggie’s friends. But her mother’s helping me.”

He could hear Dove breathing heavily at his elbow, probably with impatience.

“I don’t know that Maggie had many,” said Mr. Rispoli.

“Everyone loved our Maggie,” said her mother hastily.

“I’m talking about friends.”

“Well, perhaps it isn’t a friend I’m wanting,” said Coffin, staring into the distance. “Just someone who knew her well and whom she trusted.” He turned to her mother, “And not Mrs. O’Flaherty and Father Flynn.”

“The people she worked with,” said Mrs. Rispoli, staring into his face as if she was trying to read what was there. “Like Miss Roland, maybe. And she was fond of Miss Tuffy. All the Miss Tuffys were good to her. And Mrs. Lotty Brown. She showed Maggie how to fix her hair.”

“Like the time she dyed it yellow and it went green,” put in her father, on whom the death concept did not seem to have the same uplifting effect as on the rest of the family.

“You should go to church more and not talk about the dead like that,” retorted his wife.

“If we go bashing around the subject like this we shall never get anywhere,” mumbled Dove.

“I’ve made a note of all those names. Right you are then, Mrs. Rispoli,” said Coffin. “How well did you know Miss Angelica Tuffy?”

“I didn’t know her at all. Except as a customer and by hearsay, of course.”

“Which probably means quite a lot,” put in Dove.

“They called her the mad Miss Tuffy, but she was very kind. I wouldn’t call her mad.”

“She was a customer, was she? What did she buy?”

Mrs. Rispoli stared. “Fruit, flowers, veg. That’s all there is to buy here. And to tell you the truth the fat one shopped more than she did. She’s the cook, after all.”

“She never asked for charcoal?” said Coffin, sticking to Miss Angelica.

“Charcoal? We don’t keep that. What would Miss Angelica Tuffy be buying charcoal for?” She was thoughtful, weighing up all she knew.

“I wish I knew,” said Coffin sincerely. “Quite a lot of charcoal, it was too. Bags of it. I think someone must have asked her to do it.”

“The same person who you think my Maggie listened to?” asked Mrs. Rispoli suspiciously.

“Yes. I believe so.”

“I don’t believe in this person,” said Mrs. Rispoli stoutly.

Coffin heard a noise from Dove behind him. “I’m afraid my sergeant doesn’t either,” he said.

“Wait a moment,” said Mr. Rispoli, pushing forward. “All this talk about charcoal…This is how Maggie died. It was not accident but murder. You suspect Miss Tuffy?” Too late Coffin saw that he wasn’t one of the stupid Rispolis after all, but one of the clever ones, probably the original clever one of them all. Mrs.

Rispoli seemed to shrink in size. No doubt she was used to this transformation of her husband at will.

“I know something about that charcoal.”

“Well, come on.”

“I saw it going into the house,” said Mr. Rispoli with decision. “I didn’t know what it was then but I know now.”

“How was it going in?”

“Miss Tuffy took it in. She was carrying it in. She made two journeys from the kerb because there were several bags. That’s what reminded me. You said bags.”

“And who let her into the house?” said Coffin. “Who let her in? This is important. Take your time.”

Mr. Rispoli frowned, as if remembering.

“She let herself in,” he said slowly. “She went down to the basement door and let herself in. She had a key.”

“We always knew she had a key,” said Coffin. “We always knew that.” Then he said, “Why did you say she made two journeys from the kerb? She must actually have been walking up the street, mustn’t she?”

Mr. Rispoli frowned with the effort of remembering. “It was the kerb, though. They were piled up there…I know,” he said triumphantly, “She must have come by car. Yes, that’s it. Before I really started to notice, out of the corner of my eye I saw a car draw up and she got out.”

As they turned the corner towards where Mrs. Lamb, Miss Garrow’s sister, lived, Coffin said: “You know, I think it’s going to come to the point where I’m going to have to finger-print the whole neighbourhood to see if I can match any of the prints in that room.” He sounded more thoughtful than despairing.

“Funny the way they all had or could have keys. Maggie could have got a key, Miss Garrow could have got a key, anyone in the whole wide world could have had a key for that house for the asking, or even without it!”

“Live the way Miss Roland does, and that’s what happens,” said Dove sourly. “I always said that line of keeping an open house and being a great big friend to everyone would get her into trouble.”

“I don’t remember you saying it, but no doubt you thought it, Fred.”

They had arrived at the big bleak block of flats. Since their last visit immediately after the death of Miss Garrow, a repainting scheme had started and some of the doors and windows were now gay with paint, the rest still dark and dirty.

“Mrs. Lamb still hanging on in her sister’s flat?” said Dove.

“She may be planning to live there for ever for all I know. Wouldn’t put it past her. She struck me as having an eye for the main chance.”

“I, don’t know how it is,” said Dove, “but I’ve begun to like women less and less since this case went on. I used to have quite an eye for them, too.” He sounded sad and lamenting.

“You’ll get it back. Well, here we are. Think they’re home?”

“I got the impression Mrs. Lamb never went out.”

“You didn’t necessarily get the right impression, nor were you necessarily meant to.”

But there were footsteps coming along to open the front door.

“Oh.” She seemed surprised. “You’ve come back.”

“You’re staying on here, are you, Mrs. Lamb?”

“Only to look after Elizabeth’s things till everything is settled up, you know. My boy Eddie is with me. Of course I knew you’d be back again. You haven’t got to the bottom of Elizabeth’s death. You won’t in a hurry, either. You may never find out who did it.”

“No?”

“No. It’ll be one of those unsolved mysteries like the Marie Celeste and who killed Rasputin.”

“We know who killed Rasputin. You didn’t talk like this last time I saw you, Mrs. Lamb.”

“Ah, but I’ve had time to think since then. After all, Elizabeth was my sister. The blood’s there when all’s said and done. And living here among her things, her very own chosen things, has made her come very close.”

“And why are you so sure we won’t find out how your sister died?”

She looked down at her hands.

“It’s such a silly thing really, and my boy tells me I’m all wrong. He’s very clever and sees it all quite different from the way I do. But Elizabeth was my sister, you see. I don’t usually go against…”

“You mean because she was your sister you feel you see things more clearly than your son could?” asked Coffin patiently.

“Yes, that’s it.” She sounded relieved at being understood. “It’s not mad, you know, but I’ve sort of concentrated.” She looked round the room. “And it being among Elizabeth’s things…” her voice trailed off. Then she started up again, and in a loud determined tone. “My sister didn’t have any idea she wasn’t coming back here. I could tell from the way she left things. Never entered her head she wouldn’t be back to put water in the daffodils and cook the prunes she was soaking, and there were no secrets in my sister’s life, I can tell you that, nothing to make anyone kill her. I’ve been through all her things and I can tell.”

“I understand all that and I’m sure you’re right.”

“Yes, I am. My sister was a clever woman in her own way, Inspector, and if she didn’t have any reason to think she was going to be killed, then there wasn’t any.”

Coffin gave her a long, straight look.

“It was chance, bad luck, not her murder at all. That’s what I believe.”

“I believe it myself.”

“And that’s why I think you’ll never find out properly who killed her. You’ll never be quite sure. Oh, I’m not saying you’ll never arrest and charge anyone. I expect you will. You usually do, don’t you? But you won’t be sure. Not really.”

Coffin did not answer.

He asked her the routine questions he had come there to ask her, but there seemed very little point. There was no longer any doubt that she or her sister had not instructed Angelica Tuffy to buy charcoal, and had not spread rumours about Roxanne Roland. She might know who had, but that was about all.

“No. My sister knew Miss Tuffy, of course, but I don’t. Not even to nod to. I don’t even know what she looked like.”

“Did you know Maggie Rispoli?”

She shook her head. “I know who she was. Elizabeth talked about her. She had a lot of trouble with Maggie. She called her a trouble-maker.”

“She was that,” agreed Coffin.

“We’ve always kept ourself to ourself, me and Lizzie, it’s how we were brought up. You might say we weren’t able to make close friends. My sister was interested in Miss Roland, and she admired Mrs. Lotty Brown. Her husband helped Lizzie get this flat, pulled a few strings, you know, but there was nothing close.”

She began to sniff.

“It seems so terrible she should die as she did: with a group of people she hardly knew, and for a reason that was nothing to do with her.”

Her son Eddie appeared at the door.

“Dry up, Mum. You can bet Aunt Lizzie isn’t crying, wherever she is.” He glared accusingly at the policemen.

“The awful thing is, I didn’t know I loved her till she was dead. If you’d asked me when she was alive I’d have said Lizzie was a nosy, interfering, bossy woman who I could do without fine.”

She was crying freely now.

“I hope you’re satisfied,” said the boy to Coffin.

“Why aren’t you at school?”

“Holiday.” He turned back to his mother to comfort her. The word “Rasputin”, which seemed to obsess her, burst through her mutterings again.

“She’s mad,” said Dove, on their way out. He was beginning to think everyone was, including himself. “All that stuff about Rasputin.”

“No, she’s not mad,” said Coffin absently. “Sharp as a needle in a way. She’s just upset.”

They walked in silence for a while.

“The thing about Rasputin was that he wouldn’t die,” said Coffin suddenly. “That was the remarkable thing. Poisoned, shot, he still hung on. That’s the point about Rasputin.”

‘Now you’re mad, too,’ thought Dove.

They passed the house in Prince Consort Square in which Roxanne and Juliet lived. Everything about it was quiet and orderly; the policeman, until recently kept unobtrusively on guard, had been withdrawn, there were no sightseers. It looked an ordinary house.

Both men looked up as they walked, but neither of them spoke. Dove was realising that you could dislike women and still be preoccupied with them. He had just seen Thelma Mason and she hadn’t lost her power over him one bit. He wasn’t emancipated, as he had hoped: in the awkward position of loving her and not liking her, he felt thoroughly ill at ease. Coffin was quiet because a great many thoughts were crowding into his mind, wagging their tails and trying to attract his attention.

By now it was nearing noon and the streets were busy with traffic and shoppers.

“Come and have something to eat, Fred, I didn’t eat too well at breakfast this morning. Wasn’t feeling like it.”

“You’re taking this too hard,” said Dove, who was beginning to take it hard himself.

“This and a million other things. We’ll go into Len’s. The coffee doesn’t exactly poison you, especially if you stick to tea.”

“Len’s smartened this up since I was last in here,” said Dove, looking round. The room was decorated in black and white and crimson with bamboo chairs and trailing ivy on the walls. “Remember it when it used to have dark brown benches and little booths?”

“I liked it better then, more private…I forgot to tell you that they picked up Sammy last night. Not before time, he’d nearly broken his wife’s nose in a quarrel, so he was obviously boiling up for something violent.”

“He’s a nasty little boy,” agreed Dove. “I didn’t waste my time altogether, then, that day.”

“You didn’t waste it anyway…I think your lists have done the trick.”

Dove looked up.

“A new name’s been appearing in our last two lists. Have you noticed?”

And since Dove, although thoughtful, did not answer, Coffin said:

“Mrs. Lotty Brown.”

“Lotty Brown,” repeated Dove, surprised, so that the name echoed backward and forward between them for a second, and Len at his counter looked up in surprise. It was a name he knew as well. “Lotty Brown?” said Dove, still digesting it, and making the name a question now. “What sort of a motive would she have?”

“If you could just see round the figure of Roxanne Roland as the killer,” said Coffin, using the expression he had used before, “then Mrs. Lotty Brown would have a motive all right.”

“To kill all those women?”

“To kill Roxanne Roland.”

“Ah, now we come down to it,” said Dove with perfect humour. “Who was killing who?”

“I’ve always thought, if Roxanne Roland was not the killer, and I agree with you, it’s always been on the cards that she was, then only one alternative is possible, she herself was meant to be killed.”

“And Mrs. Brown would have killed her?”

“It’s beginning to seem perfectly possible. She was in a position to manipulate Maggie. Remember she was a friend who helped Maggie, we have Mrs. Rispoli’s own words for that.”

“And the Tuffys certainly knew her,” agreed Dove.

“She could have got Angelica to buy the charcoal…And remember, Dove, she has a car. Rispoli thought a car was used.”

“Are we absolutely sure that the person who spread the tales, the malice person, is also the murderer?” asked Dove.

“I think we’ve got to be. I don’t believe in a plethora of persons all hating Roxanne Roland.”

“I don’t know what to believe, and that’s a fact,” said Dove slowly. “But accepting your line-up - Miss Roland, Mrs. Lotty Brown - what’s the motive?”

But even as he spoke he knew what Coffin would answer. He had heard the story of Roxanne’s youth. It was not the secret she supposed it to be. She herself had told the story too often in confidence to too many people. A garbled jumbled version was common knowledge, part of the tradition that clung to Roxanne, and that you passed on when you introduced her name. Roxanne the beautiful eccentric with her romantic past. Roxanne the thwarted, the jilted, the disappointed. This was what Dove himself had been building on when he spoke of her as the killer. But there was another side to the picture. There was Bruno who had jilted her, and there was Lotty whom he had married.

“Yes, she might hate Roland,” said Dave reluctantly, “especially if she thought her husband still had a hankering after her. Roland’s a very fascinating woman, there’s no doubt about that, even when she is looking like a witch.”

At the word “witch” Coffin frowned, but he put the thought aside for the time being. “I don’t believe he ever has given up loving Roxanne,” he said. “I don’t believe you do give up loving people like her. But in any case I’m afraid Mrs. Brown may have had very concrete reason for thinking he was still in love with Roxanne.” He told to Dove the story Juliet had told him, of the meeting between Roxanne and Bruno on the train, and of Roxanne’s great beauty as she had spoken of it, as though something had revived in her. “Lotty may well have thought they were off again, and she was going to get left behind,” he said grimly.

And all the time, while he discussed this with Dove, his thoughts were occupied on another level with the word “witch”. The boy Eddie Lamb, Elizabeth Garrow’s nephew, had professed to have seen Bruno and Roxanne (she looking like a witch), shopping for the unfortunate pigeon which Juliet later found dead. He had heard the words “our’ marriage” used.

The café was filling up with cheerful chattering groups of students from the Technical College across the road. There was no doubt about the source of Ten’s newly found prosperity. It was based on higher education. Even Len himself was feeling the influence and was taking evening classes in Russian. He could hardly talk the Queen’s English, only the vernacular of the district, but he was learning to speak Russian. Coffin wondered who interpreted Len to the Russian teacher. He looked round the room, recognising some of the faces. Most of them looked intense, eager, lively, if slightly grubby, and reminded him of the boy Eddie Lamb.

“We’ll have to get that boy,” he said suddenly aloud, startling Dove, “and make him go through the whole thing word by word, letter by letter.”

“You think jealousy of the husband and Roland?” said Dove, still clinging to the thought he could follow.

“That’s it.”

“It’d have to be some jealousy,” said Dove sourly. “What a world.” He was off men, off women, off wives, off marriage.

Eddie Lamb was not expecting a visit from Inspector Coffin. He was not expecting anybody. He had sent his mother to have a rest and was happily cooking himself some lunch, and considering what he should do with his free afternoon. Free afternoons didn’t, come his way very often. His mother, under Aunt Lizzie’s guidance, believed in keeping boys occupied. He whistled softly at the thought of his liberation. With any luck there would be more afternoons like this afternoon. He could go to the library and change his books and then have coffee somewhere; he could go to see a film -but he was very selective and this week there was nothing showing that earned his interest; or he could go and call on a fellow bird-breeder, a one-legged ex-soldier called Joe, and have a pleasant and scholarly discussion about genetics. But he was thinking of giving up birds and going over to newts. The generations were quicker and you could get more done. He was interested in heredity and Joe was interested in birds, that was the difference.

He buttered himself some toast, added some of Aunt Lizzie’s home-made marmalade (sparing her a thought as he did so), and sat down in the sun with his book.

He was mildly put out when the front door bell rang.

“What, you again?” he said, seeing Coffin standing alone at the door. He hastily swallowed his mouthful of marmalade toast; there was something undignified in being caught with a mouth full of food. But he saw at once that he could have been standing on his head and Coffin would hardly have noticed, he was too deeply preoccupied.

“Better come into the kitchen. We don’t want to disturb Mum. Unless it’s her you want?” But somehow he knew it was not. There was nothing Mum knew, she was an empty sieve, whereas there was perhaps something he knew. “You didn’t bring the other one with you?”

“What other one?” said Coffin from the depths of his own thoughts.

“Your sergeant.”

“Oh, Dove? He’s gone to pick up a man who’s wanted for robbery with violence and whose best friend just phoned in his address.”

“That’s the sort of friend to have,” said Eddie, swallowing.

“I expect the friend thought it might be his turn next; he was the only one left with any money.”

“But will he go with your sergeant, then?” Eddie was half fascinated, half horrified. “I mean will he let himself be arrested?”

“Not easily,” said Coffin grimly.

“Why are you telling me all this?” said Eddie, swallowing as if the marmalade toast wouldn’t quite go down.

“I wanted you to see that police work is dead serious, perhaps dangerous. I wasn’t sure if you got it.”

“What does it matter if I do or don’t?”

“I suppose I want to be sure that you told me the clear truth…You haven’t quite yet, have you?”

There was a pause.

“You mean you’re threatening me?” said Eddie.

“I could be. I’m not, but I could be. If I had to be.”

Eddie sat down at the table and laughed. “You didn’t have to come here and wave a stick at me. You just ask me your questions and I’ll answer them. I’m not going to tell lies.”

“But I think you have, told a lie,” said Coffin patiently.

Eddie shrugged. “We’re all telling lies all the time, aren’t we? Whether we know it or not. You tell me what this he is and I’ll tell you if I can do anything about it.” It was Eddie in this mood that had made his aunt Elizabeth find him frightening.

Too clever by half, thought Coffin with hostility. But he was hostile because he was also anxious and nervous.

“You told a story of seeing Miss Roland buying a dove.”

“Pigeon.”

“Pigeon,” went on Coffin impatiently. “And talking with someone, a man, who used a phrase, which you overheard, ’The numbered days of our marriage.’”

“That’s right.”

“That was the lie. I don’t believe it was Miss Roland.”

“I didn’t lie,” said Eddie indignantly. “That was true. I told Aunty and she agreed.”

“You told your Aunt - she knew Miss Roland well. Have you ever seen Miss Roland?”

“I know her.” For the first time he sounded uncertain of himself.

“Have you ever seen her?”

“Well…no. No.”

“We all lie one way and another,” quoted Coffin back at him grimly. “That was your lie. Being too sure of yourself.”

He drew from his pocket a packet of photographs which he had spent half an hour collecting. There were several of a man, the same man, and three or four of two different women.

Coffin showed him first the photograph of the man.

“Have you ever seen this face before.”

Eddie bent over. “Oh yes, that’s the man I saw.”

“Do you know his name?’

Eddie shook his head.

“You ought to read the papers more, instead of books on birds,” said Coffin. “You see his face in them quite often.” It was Bruno.

He laid down a photograph of one of the women.

“Know her?”

Eddie looked confused, and did not answer.

“Can I take it that is no? No? Make up your mind.”

“I think it’s no,” muttered Eddie.

“And now this…” Coffin slipped another picture down.

“Yes, I’ve seen her,” said Eddie, but the triumph was gone. “She’s the woman who bought the bird and who was with the man.”

“We all lie,” said Coffin. “You were seeing with someone else’s eyes. You let your aunt identify her with a phrase. That was Mrs. Lotty Brown.”

“She had a witch look,” muttered Eddie. “Aunty said Miss Roland could look like a witch, so did this one. It was in her face.”

Coffin shivered. He had seen the significance of the phrase which the boy had overheard: “the numbered days of our marriage.” These words had been a puzzle, a phrase still to be understood, but now they had a clear meaning. They spoke of a marriage tie about to be ruptured. Here was a motive for anyone, and it had been explicitly stated from the beginning. If indeed you could ever know the beginning, and he spared a moment to think of what might have been the beginning, and whether it had started with Bruno or Lotty or Roxanne.

“What happened to the milkman?” Coffin demanded on returning to the office. “The one who delivered the extra milk that worried Juliet and whom I asked you to get?”

“We lost him.” Dove had returned unruffled from his task of bringing in a violent man. Indeed the experience had cheered him up.

“What do you mean, lost him?”

“He left his job the day before we called there and so far we haven’t got track of him.”

“Was he in trouble?” asked Coffin, thinking fast.

“No: he said he was going to emigrate to a country where they liked horses. He didn’t say which one; if there is one left.”

“Get on to the Emigration Offices, then.”

“I have done.” Dove sounded hurt. “They’ve never heard of him.”

“What about the Labour Exchange?”

“He hasn’t been round to them.”

“He can’t be dead,” said Coffin crossly. And the moment the words left his mouth he knew that he could indeed be dead. The other boy, Eddie Lamb, had been in no danger because no one knew about him. But the milkman was known to have information that, once the three women were dead, was lethal.

“You couldn’t kill a great healthy lad,” he said, thinking aloud.

“He wasn’t all that strong,” said Dove slowly. “He was frail physically and had been ill. That’s why he had to have an open-air job.”

“What happened when you called where he lived? They must have some idea where he is?”

Dove shrugged. “Told them the same story about horses.”

Coffin got to his feet. He looked at the clock. By now it was late afternoon. He had meant to ring Patsy. He sighed as he stretched out his hand to the telephone.

“What happened about your man?” he said to Dove, remembering the arrest.

“Ned Darkin? He came along nicely,” said Dove with satisfaction. “I think he was quite glad to see me really, the friend who turned him in is two feet taller than he is and in a nasty mood.”

“Is Ned a midget, then?” said Coffin, his hand suspended over the telephone.

“Five feet something, but the other boy’s a giant.”

“He must be.” Coffin waited for the telephone to ring out in his house. He could see the telephone in his mind; it was ringing by the bed, and Patsy was probably doing her face before setting out to the theatre. She always got there over an hour before the curtain rose.

The telephone rang but there was no answer. He could imagine it ringing out in an empty room, then he could imagine Patsy lying on the floor ill or unconscious, then he looked at the calendar and knew it was matinee day and Patsy had been out for hours. He put the receiver down and relaxed.

‘Shocks like this aren’t good for expectant fathers,’ he thought.

Dove was watching him with interested eyes and he remembered that although Dove might not always be the brightest detective in the division, he was unbeatable on the private life of his friends. The Dove ancestry, which brought with it a tendency to hypochondria and high blood pressure, also ensured a passionate and well-informed interest in the doings of his companions. Unconsciously this was probably why Dove had chosen to become a policeman, and a detective at that. He wanted to be the one who knew.

“Come on,” Coffin said, not meeting Dove’s eyes. “Let’s go down to the lodging where this milkman lived. I can’t believe they told all they knew. They must, anyway, know how he went and whether he took luggage.”

It was a pleasant little house in which Dick Gay had lived while he worked as a milkman for the big London dairy patronised by most of Prince Consort Square. The elderly couple with whom he had lodged were as helpful as they could be. But they knew very little. Dicky had come in one day at lunch-time, paid them up, packed his bag, and departed.

“And did you really think he was going to emigrate? Just like that?” said Coffin.

“Oh no, of course not. I wasn’t born yesterday. He was clearing out because he was frightened,” said his landlord, Frank Reeves. “I’ve seen frightened men before. But to tell you the truth I thought it was you chaps he was afraid of, and I thought to myself, if there’s trouble coming, you don’t want any of it, so I kept quiet and let him go…And it doesn’t look as if I was far wrong,” he added, giving Coffin a look.

“He isn’t in any trouble himself,” said Coffin. “Not with us, anyway. But I’d certainly like to know where he is.” He looked hopefully at Mrs. Reeves. “You got any idea, Mrs. Reeves?”

“No,” she shook her head. “I wasn’t in when he went or I’d certainly have got more out of him,” and she gave her husband a reproachful look. “He was a boy you could do anything with if you wanted. He’d have told me. And I wouldn’t have let him go. Out into the rain like that.”

Mr. Reeves fidgeted and looked embarrassed. “I am sorry now: I admit it.”

“I’d be very glad if you could get him to come back, Inspector. His room is just as it was.” Mrs. Reeves was earnest.

“Can I have a look round it?” Coffin got up and followed her upstairs. Dove stayed downstairs talking to Mr. Reeves. There probably wasn’t anything to be got from the old man, but he might come out with something if he talked long enough.

“Know your Dad, don’t I?” Coffin heard Reeves, and heard Dove’s resigned “Probably.”

“You’re really worried about Dick, aren’t you?” asked Mrs. Reeves, as she showed him into the bare neat room.

“Yes, I am.”

“I am, too. Going off like that isn’t the sort of thing he would do.”

“It isn’t the sort of thing anyone does without good reason,” said Coffin, his eyes moving round the room. He opened the wardrobe, but it was bare of clothes. He opened the drawer of the table by the window, but this too was empty.

There was a cupboard by the bed. A small plastic-covered case the size of a typewriter lay there.

“He’s left his tape-recorder behind,” said Mrs. Reeves. “He loved it too.”

Coffin picked it up. “There’s a tape on it.” He looked round the room for a plug. “Mind if I play it?”

After a moment of silence the room was filled with sounds of a boy laughing and talking and playing a few flute-like notes on some instrument.

Mrs. Reeves looked amazed.

“I shall have to take this,” said Coffin, picking it up. “I’ll give you a receipt.” So this was how Orlando had, in part, been created. ‘Anyway, that explains why the machine was left behind - it was safer here.’ But he did not say this aloud.

“All right, Mrs. Reeves. I’ve seen enough.”

They went back down the stairs.

“He had a bundle of newspaper cuttings,” said Mrs. Reeves. “All about the women who died in that house. He knew the house, of course, and some of the people. He cut out everything he could about it, and he asked me to save whatever was in my paper. He didn’t take a paper regular, but we do.”

“Did he take all that with him?”

“He left it behind. I thought he might take it, but no, he screwed it up and left it.”

“And have you still got it?”

Without saying a word, she went to a cupboard under the stairs and silently produced a bundle tied up in string. It was quite a weighty bundle. To Coffin’s surprise some of the newspaper cuttings were in French and German.

“Could he read French and German?” he asked.

She shook her head. “He looked at the pictures though…He said he thought they had a lot of stuff the English papers dared not print.”

“So they do have,” said Coffin. “And not all of it true.”

“I hope you find him,” whispered Mrs. Reeves.

“I hope so too.” Coffin did not sound optimistic.

“He needs looking after with health like his. Seen the inside of every hospital in London in his time, poor boy.”

“Has he? How long was he with you?”

“Five weeks. He came straight to us after one of his bouts in hospital.”

A small crowd was gathered outside the Canute Hospital for Seamen in Harold Hardrada Road, close by Tower Bridge. They were staring at the figure of a man lying curled on the pavement, half in the gutter and half out. He was still except for an occasional moan and slight twitch. Someone had put a coat over him. Two men were supporting his head.

Presently a porter, then a couple of nurses and a doctor appeared from the hospital.

“He just collapsed,” said a woman eagerly. “I was right by. He was walking along. Then he suddenly staggered, and slid down on to the pavement.”

“Poor devil,” said the porter. “He looks bad.”

“Must be a heart attack,” said someone.

“Ay, he looks a hearty case,” said a man.

“Poor kid, he’s only a boy,” said the first woman sympathetically.

“Get him into the hospital,” said the doctor, after feeling his pulse. “It’s not heart, anyway.”

The man on the pavement groaned and opened his eyes.

“It’s the pain,” he gasped.

“Where is it?” asked the doctor, quickly bending over him.

“In my stomach.” His voice was weak. Then he said in a final gasp “I think…I’ve been poisoned.”

His eyes closed.

Back in their office, Coffin tossed the bundle of newspapers to Dove.

“See what you can make of these.” Dove took them and started out of the room. “Wait a bit…The boy took all his things, except these and a tape-recorder, packed a case and departed. So he had some plan in mind. Where would you go if you were him?”

“Another lodging?”

“I think he wanted to get out of the district.”

“Take a train or a bus to another part of the country?”

“He didn’t have much money.”

Dove shrugged. “Jump under a bus, then.”

Coffin nodded. “Right. We’ll check all the men’s lodging-houses, railway and bus termini and hospitals in the area. You take the newspaper cuttings and come back if they give you any ideas.”

But there was nothing in the reports from the lodging-houses, and nothing from the hospitals. The reports from the railway stations and bus termini were inevitably slower to come in, but when they did so, were negative.

Dove, re-entering with the cuttings, had nothing to report either.

“Nothing here that I can see, except that he took an extreme interest in the Prince Consort Square affair.”

“He did that,” said Coffin. He sat thinking before he spoke.

“You know I’m beginning to get a different picture. Not a picture of someone who’s been murdered or who’s done away with himself, like I thought at first. But of someone who perhaps always does this on finding himself in an awkward situation - he packs his bag and walks out. Someone who is solitary and keeps his own counsel. Someone who knows hospital routine and has been in and out of all the hospitals in London…Let’s try the hospitals again, Fred.”

Dove stared.

“Not for an accident this time. But for someone who collapsed outside or near their gates, someone whose illness perhaps they can’t diagnose.”

Dove gave a tuneless little whistle. “Like that, eh? One of those. A comedian. You could be right.”

“Illness might be his solution to a problem. It might be a solution he’s tried before. What we know about him suggests it could be. The Reeves didn’t really know him too well, he’d only been there five weeks. And significantly, he came from a hospital to them and this job with the dairy.”

“It’s worth trying.”

“I want him to make that identification,” said Coffin standing up. “I need him. And we’ve got this in our favour - if he’s been in and out of every hospital in London, as his landlady suggested, then he must be quite a well-known figure.”

“Och aye, he’s the one you want,” said the doctor at the Canute Hospital, meeting Inspector Coffin in the entrance hall. He was a small thin, irascible Scot. “And you’re welcome to him. He’d never have got in if I’d been on duty, I can tell you.”

“You know him, then?”

“Intimately,” said the doctor, rolling out the syllables. “He’s been in here four times, three standard admissions, following upon a doctor’s letter (different doctor each time, I may say), and once after a collapse in a shop conveniently close to us. Conveniently close,” he said, rolling the syllables again with irony.

“Quite a regular, then?” said Coffin.

“He’s had every organ x-rayed, he’s had a laparotomy, and a brain-probe, he’s had everything short of a hysterectomy, and that only because his sex precludes him…And this only in the hospitals I know about. I’ve no doubt he’s managed to get into one or two I know nothing whatever about. And there’s nothing the matter with him. He’s as fit as you and I. A little emptier and more scarred perhaps, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.” He gave a dry little laugh. “But there’s nothing the matter with his body.”

“It’s a sort of hobby?” suggested Coffin.

“Man, it’s his life,” cried the doctor.

He threw open the door of a small room.

“Here’s a visitor for you.”

Dick Gay was sitting on a chair by a suitcase. He looked forlorn and a little frightened. The trip hadn’t worked out a success.

“You can’t put me in prison for it,” he said defiantly. “I haven’t done anything wrong. I was ill. I am ill now, only that lot won’t believe it.”

The little doctor watched sardonically.

“You’d better tell me about it,” said Coffin, sitting down.

The doctor looked at his watch.

“Fifteen minutes you can have, then we need this room.”

“Goodbye, doctor,” said Dick plaintively. “I’d have made a good patient if you’d have let me.”

“Goodbye, Mr. Gay, and don’t let me see you back here again.” He whisked out of the room, white coattails flying.

“He’s a hard man,” said his rejected patient. “He wouldn’t believe me, but I can tell you…I’ve been poisoned.”

“Have you, though?” said Coffin surprised.

“She gave me a cup of cocoa, I often had a cup of cocoa there, on my round, and we had a talk. She was fed up with me, because I was worrying about the milk I used to leave in the basement of Miss Roland’s…I knew more than she wanted me to know.

“I took the cocoa and then when I finished my rounds I had a terrible pain, really gripping, you know, and I thought to myself she’s done me, she’s poisoned me in the cocoa.”

‘Like Madeleine Smith,’ thought Coffin.

“So what did you do?”

“So I went home, packed my bags, and came round here, meaning to go into the Emergency department. But I collapsed in the gutter before I could get here because the pain was so bad.”

“And had you been poisoned?”

“I don’t know,” said the boy. “They said here, no, I hadn’t, but they washed out my stomach and gave me an enema.”

Their eyes met.

‘Well, we’ll never know now,’ thought Coffin. ‘You just might have been telling the truth for once. She might have poisoned you.’

He shook his head slowly.

“By her, you mean Mrs. Lotty Brown? Yes?”

“Yes,” said Dick. “She asked me to deliver the half pint of milk at Miss Roland’s basement door. And she got me to play a snatch of this tape recording every morning as I delivered the milk.”

“Where did she get it from?”

Dick shook his head. “Some school she was interested in, I think. It was quite genuine.”

“In its way.” Coffin was sardonic.

“Well, yes, in its way…She wanted to tease Miss Roland with it. Some story,” he muttered. “It was made up”

“It was made up all right,” said Coffin, getting up briskly. “You’ll have to come and make a statement.”

“Make a statement?” The boy’s hands and eyes started to flutter nervously. “I couldn’t do that, honest. I like Mrs. Brown.”

Coffin did not answer.

Dick Gay gave a small bleating sound and slid neatly off his chair on to the floor, and closed his eyes. His head rolled sideways.

Coffin went to the door, shut it carefully behind him, and speaking to a nurse trotting quickly down the corridor, said: “Nurse, I’m afraid there’s someone ill in there.”

Then he poked his head round the door, and meeting Dick’s eye winked.

“Why shouldn’t the poor chap have his pleasure?” he said to himself as he departed.

A great load had rolled from his heart. He had his case set up. He felt in the mood to be good even to lunatics.

“It begins to add up now,” he said to Sergeant Dove. “Mrs. Lotty Brown bought the bird, she asked the milkman to deliver the milk, she almost certainly started the girl Maggie off on her round of telling tales. She could have got Angelica Tuffy to have ordered the charcoal. And probably her finger-prints are all over that room.”

“She could answer that one,” said Dove. “She’s a friend of the house.”

“But they are there. And she could have got a key to the house if anyone could. She could have got it from Maggie Rispoli, from any of them, from Roxanne Roland herself.”

He stared thoughtfully into space as if seeing a picture of the house and the dead women.

“We’ll have to go and see Mrs. Lotty Brown, Fred.”

On the spur of the moment, still cheerful, he picked up the telephone and asked to speak to Juliet.

“Just to tell you,” he said happily, “that I’ve remembered to speak to the milkman, that’s all,” and he put the receiver down.

Like many ideas that lead to disaster, it seemed such a good idea at the time.

XI

“HE’S REMEMBERED TO speak to the milkman,” said Juliet aloud, raising her pretty eyebrows. Roxanne was by the window and Lotty was at the door, so they both heard her. “I do wonder what it was I thought the milkman should be interviewed about. It’s strange how one is when one’s ill. Things seem important.”

She was glad to have something to say, because Roxanne and Lotty didn’t seem to be speaking much. It wasn’t quite clear why Lotty had come visiting again. Not for a talk, anyway.

Lotty hadn’t anything to say for herself at the best of times, no one could call her conversation sparkling, but it was usually to the point. Probably the quarrel on her last visit had made her think silence was safer. Her eyes were tranquil but her hands fiddled with a book of matches in her lap.

“Do smoke,” said Roxanne irritably. She thrust a cigarette towards Lotty.

“I’m trying to give it up,” said Lotty, in a serious voice.

“You don’t have any vices as it is,” said Roxanne even more irritably. “Or not nearly enough.”

“Yes, isn’t it tantalising of me?” said Lotty, with one of those brilliant smiles which made her beautiful.

“I think Lotty has her own little vices,” said Juliet, who was watching Lotty closely.

“Your stay in hospital has made you quite sharp,” observed Lotty.

“I was a nurse once, don’t forget - I shouldn’t take as much barbiturate as all that, Lotty.”

“I don’t take any.” Lotty was sharp. “I have some tablets for my nerves.”

“I never knew you had nerves.” Roxanne looked bewildered.

Lotty gave a short laugh. “You, you wouldn’t notice if your house caught fire. I’m as nervous as anyone else.”

“That’s not aspirin you’ve been taking, Lotty,” said Juliet dryly.

“And you’re nosy,” said Lotty, with spirit. “That’s your vice.”

She took her time in going. She refused to be shown out and it seemed a long while before the house was empty of her. Funny way to put it, thought Juliet, but that was how it felt.

“Well, that’s her gone,” she said, after a long pause.

It was a depressing evening to an unexpectedly enjoyable day. Roxanne and Juliet had had some visitors, which was probably just as well. They had faced each other at breakfast, each a little wary of the other after the scene of the night before. They drank coffee and ate toast with all the time the figure of Lotty making a silent third. Neither of them intended to be the first to mention her.

It had been a relief when the door bell rang just before midday and there was the sound of bustle at the door.

“Come to see you, me dear,” said a voice Juliet half recognised. “And I’ve brought me nephew Henry.” The precise archaic way of speaking was the clue. It was Roxanne’s friend, Dr. Dick Noble. Roxanne had known him for years and their affectionate half-romantic, half-pretence relationship had endured where other more vital connections had failed.

“We have one thing in common, anyway,” Roxanne used to say. “We don’t take ourselves seriously any longer. I no longer expect anything from Dick and he hasn’t very high hopes of me.”

“But he’s famous,” Juliet had protested, after meeting Dick Noble for the first time. “A famous scientist.”

“He picks up the pieces of other people’s work,” Roxanne had said, “and knits them together. That’s all. He never does anything original. Never will. He’d be the first to admit it.”

But now as he came into the room with the beautiful dark boy, his nephew, Juliet succumbed, as she always did, to his charm, his delicate air of being the last of the ancien régime, and his title. She couldn’t be her grandmother’s descendant and not be a snob. She did like a lord, even when it was only the courtesy title of the younger son, completely unused by its owner. The nephew, of course, was the genuine article; peer of Great Britain and Ireland, baron of this, earl of that and marquis of Cloud Cuckoo Land. There was a fairy-tale quality about the pair of them.

Dick and Roxanne kissed affectionately.

“Lovely flowers,” said Roxanne, taking a huge bunch of freesias and jasmine. “Where did you get them?”

Her visitor smiled. He always knew where to get things out of season. It was the only affectation he allowed himself, the last hangover from his gilded youth. Otherwise when the smile was gone he looked thin and tired and rather ill. Roxanne saw this too perhaps, because she took his hand and held it for a moment silently.

Juliet and the nephew smiled at each other. There was a strong family resemblance between him and his uncle in the shape of the mouth and the socket of the eyeball, which had been breeding true for the last three centuries and would still be dominant when this pair were dry and dead. On their left hands the little finger was as long as the second finger. This too was part of the inheritance. Centuries ago a gene had mutated when an heiress had married her twice fold cousin and the mutation had gone on obstinately reproducing itself in each generation. By now they were proud of it, and not to have it would practically have produced an accusation of bastardy.

Juliet smiled again, thinking he seemed a silent boy. Unconsciously she curved her pretty lips and bent her head gracefully. She managed to give the impression of having been addressed and complimented without a word being said. The figure of Coffin removed himself just a little into the wings. Another play was going to take the stage.

“I came along to cheer you,” said Dick, taking off his coat and handing over a bottle of something wrapped in silver paper with a silver bow. “I’ve only just got back from the States and had no idea all this was going on.”

“You might have read it in the papers even there, I should have thought,” said Roxanne wryly. “Oh, my special scent.”

“Well, one of them,” said Dick, smiling at her. He glanced at Juliet and his nephew. “Let’s jerk these two from their silent communion, shall we?”

Roxanne laughed.

“You ought to have married me when I asked you,” said Dick.

“The first time or the last time?” asked Roxanne.

“The first time. We would have had six children by now and you wouldn’t have been living here.” He glanced with distaste round the room.

“What, mix my lovely plebeian genes with your decadent aristocratic ones?” said Roxanne, trying to joke. “Besides, I’m against hereditary titles.”

“You wouldn’t have got one with me,” said Dick.

“Anyway, I’m probably barren stock. Like Queen Elizabeth,” went on Roxanne with a trace of bitterness.

“Sometimes I feel sorry for the poor human animals.

No sooner do they reach the peak of their mental and physical power than they break everything up by breeding on their own account, diverting and trapping energies and powers that perhaps ought to be used in other ways. It’s so difficult to know what to put first, especially for women. We ought to invent a better design. Nature’s always about three-quarters of a million years out of date.”

“It depends on whether you think of yourself as an end-product or part of the conveyor-belt,” said Roxanne. “Some people are definitely end-products - they’re what the whole human race has been aiming at, the best it can do, men of genius of one sort or another, and they ought, I suppose, to be respected as such, whereas other people are nothing but part of the conveyor-belt for genes and ought to reconcile themselves to what they are as quickly as possible.”

“And which are you?”

After a moment’s thought, Roxanne said: “I reckon I’m just a dead end.”

“How ruthless you can be!”

“Do you know, I think I am,” said Roxanne, as if surprised.

“And managing, too.”

“That as well,” agreed Roxanne, her face looking drawn. “Oh, Dick, you’re waking up such a lot of memories that would be better asleep. The silly, silly things I’ve done with my life…I’m ashamed. I’d like to make myself smaller and smaller till I could hardly be seen.”

Dick put his arm round her and she rested her head on his shoulder.

“I’ve done some pretty silly things, too. Who hasn’t?”

“What a comfort you are, Dick. No wonder you’re such a good doctor, your patients must adore you.” Roxanne straightened her hair.

“I’m not that sort of doctor, I’m only research. I never have patients. But you never listen,” said Dick, a trifle sadly.

Roxanne moved her eyes round to where Juliet and Henry were still sitting almost mute, but now very close together on the sofa.

“No, it’s all right,” he said, following her glance, “they haven’t heard a thing.”

The tone of his voice penetrated Roxanne’s self-pity and she stared at him anxiously. “Dick,” she said, and then questioningly, “Dick?”

“No,” he said, taking her hand and folding his own over it gently, “No and No and Not.”

But Juliet had seen and wondered, and she thought in her heart that certainly Roxanne was one for getting the last emotional content out of an encounter and that perhaps a young and happy marriage wouldn’t be such a bad thing after all. She smiled beautifully at Henry and accepted an invitation for the next week. They managed all this in about three sentences. It was a new type of courtship for Juliet, and she thought she enjoyed it. Still waters run deep, she thought, watching that lovely dark face, and he may be very very passionate…of course, it could always be, she thought, observing his careful dress, that he was narcissistic and it was his own face he was in love with and not hers.

All the same, the thought of Henry was stimulating and comforting all through the arrival and the conversation of Lotty.

“I wonder what she came for?” Juliet asked as the door finally closed behind Lotty.

Roxanne did not answer at once. “I must ask for her key back,” she said absently.

“Henry’s lovely looking, isn’t he?” said Juliet, going back to where her thoughts really were at the moment. “He seems so good, too.”

“Oh, all that family are terrifyingly conscientious and noble - it’s the most exhausting thing about them. They’d be quite perfect otherwise.”

Roxanne sounded irritable and Juliet murmured something about its being very nice.

“If you want to spend the next fifty years of your life with someone so relentlessly right-thinking - and, mark you, there’s a great family of them - then you have him,” said Roxanne sharply, as if she saw exactly what was in Juliet’s mind, and when Juliet looked as if she did after all find this prospect attractive, “Oh he’s pretty enough now, I grant you, but what will he be like when he’s fifty?”

Juliet opened her mouth and then shut it again without finding anything to say. She had been hurt, but beyond her own hurt she could see that Roxanne was speaking angrily because she herself was in misery and pain. She started to cough.

“Dick’s dying, did you know that?” cried Roxanne, averting her face.

Juliet shook her head between her coughs.

“Dying. I could see it in his face. He’s known it for a long time. I realise that now…And I love him, and it’s too late. He asked me to marry him, and the ridiculous thing is I only turned him down because he was always wanting to marry everybody. He was famous for it. And now it’s too late.”

“Poor Roxanne,” she whispered, knowing that for Roxanne it would always be too late.

For a moment they sat in silence; Juliet who loved far too many people, and Roxanne who could never really love anyone at all.

Juliet started to cough again.

Then she sat up with a jerk. “Can you hear that sound?…A sort of creaking, cracking, crumbling noise?”

Roxanne laughed. “No, no, that’s all over. Finished. Done with.” She went over and hammered with her clenched fists on the wall. “Creak away. Creak away,” she said, still hammering. “I don’t care for you any more. I’m not frightened.” And for good measure she kicked the wainscoting.

But Juliet was staring at the door.

“Roxanne,” she said hoarsely. “What’s that? It looks like smoke.”

Roxanne strode to the door and tugged at the handle. It did not move. Her last kick at the wainscoting seemed to have been too much for the warped and decaying woodwork. The old door was jammed firmly into place.

“She was lying, wasn’t she?” said Coffin to Fred Dove.

They were back again from a brief interview with Lotty Brown. It had been brief because Lotty had refused to answer questions.

“I am innocent,” she said. “Innocent.”

But Coffin had been quick to notice that she did not say she knew nothing. He thought this significant.

“Yes, she was lying,” nodded Dove. “That wasn’t the way an innocent woman goes on. I know it.

“Yes.” They were both of one mind now. “She was the woman behind all the malice business and she was the one who fixed the murder, and she was Miss Isobel Ludbrook. She meant to get Roxanne Roland and she got the others…Maybe she didn’t originally mean to kill Roxanne, just frighten her, but it worked out at murder.”

Just for a moment Dove looked as if he was still hanging on to his old idea about murders never being by accident, then conviction in what Coffin was saying asserted itself.

The telephone rang.

“Yes?” said Coffin. “They are? Right. Splendid.” He turned triumphantly to Dove. “The finger-prints in the room are hers. They’re all over all relevant articles. She ought to have worn gloves.”

They sat for a moment in silence, tired but satisfied. Coffin stood up. “Well, that’ll be it…We can go round and get her.” This wasn’t the part of a case he enjoyed, and in all the special circumstances of this case, he wasn’t looking forward to it. He stood for a moment looking down at his desk.

“Fred,” he said thoughtfully. “When we were talking to her just now, did you get the impression she was waiting for anything?”

“Waiting?” repeated Dove.

It was then they heard the fire-engine.

XII

THE FIRE GOT a grip on the house very quickly. It started in the basement room with the stove, worked its way into the front, and then seemed to leap up the stairs. The old house creaked and shivered.

“It’s a fair blaze,” said Mrs. Rispoli as she watched from her bedroom window. “It’s like the Blitz, isn’t it?” She always said this of every emergency from a premature birth to the time the water mains flooded their storage room and rotted the potatoes. There was some truth in it this time, though.

“Lots of people out there,” muttered her husband.

A fire-engine and tender had arrived, and as they watched, a police car drew up and two men got out. The crowd of onlookers grew silent.

“Put your coat on, old girl. Let’s go down.”

In the street they could hear the roar and crackle of the fire, and the steady pulse of the fire-engine pump, and smell the dry singeing smell of wood and paint and metal scorching and burning.

The firemen were swarming all over the two neighbouring houses to prevent the fire getting at them too. A ladder was being run up the side of the house.

“Where’s Miss Roland?” called Coffin hoarsely.

A fireman appeared up the basement steps, his face speckled with black ash.

“She’s still inside. And the girl…We’re trying to get at them.”

The ladder had reached the room in which Roxanne and Juliet must be, but it was impossible to see them through the smoke and flames.

“Can you do it?” asked Coffin.

The man looked at the house appraisingly.

“Oh yes, yes I think so…We’re getting it under, the main danger to them is the smoke…I never knew a fire smoke so,” he said.

Great black clouds of smoke were pouring from the house and over the onlookers.

People began to cough and choke.

“The men will have to put masks on,” said the fire chief.

“The women can’t wait,” cried Coffin; he was gasping himself. “They’ll be dead.”

“We’ll all be dead if we don’t put masks on,” said the chief desperately.

Mr. Rispoli drew his wife back into the crowd.

“It was a bad house,” he said. “Let it burn out, I say.”

“Once they’ve got Miss Roland and her friend safe,” cried his wife.

“Oh, it’ll claim another victim, that house will, before it’s done,” said her husband. “You see.”

There was a crash of glass as the fireman on the ladder reached the window and smashed his way in. Coffin found himself gripping the arms of Dove beside him. Dove was murmuring something under his breath.

The fireman disappeared.

The street fell silent. No one spoke. Even the beat of the pump seemed to disappear in the great suspended silence.

Inside the house Roxanne and Juliet crouched on the floor by the window. The window was an old-fashioned one with small panes of glass. Like the door it was old and warped and only opened a few inches. Roxanne had shouted from it for help, but she could not crawl out of it, and even if she could, they were on the top floor of the tall house. Roxanne had wrapped Juliet’s head in a coat. She herself hid her face in her skirt. The room was filled with thick black pungent smoke.

“I can’t seriously be in danger of death,” thought Roxanne. “Not me. Not here. Not now.” She looked down at Juliet who had ceased to cough, and almost to breathe, except in little choking gasps. “But she may be if they don’t get to us very soon.”

There was still emerging anger and a strange clairvoyance. “Lotty arranged this fire,” she thought, “as she arranged the other deaths. I’ve got to survive to beat Lotty.”

Beyond the sound of the fire she was distantly aware of the noise from outside which seemed oddly enough to have no connection with her predicament.

She dragged herself up to stare out of the window. Behind her Juliet rolled over on the floor, drawing up her legs and stretching her arms forward over her head, unconsciously taking up the position of those who die by fire.

The fireman re-appeared lurching under the weight of the still figure over his shoulder. No one spoke as he made his slow-unsteady progress down the ladder, then as his foot touched the ground, a whisper started up.

“She’s all right…He’s going back to get the other woman.”

The crowd breathed and moved again like a horse that has been standing still too long.

“This fire was never started normally,” said the fire chief, coming up the basement steps again and approaching Coffin. “Someone’s been sprinkling paraffin all over the floors and walls in there. You can still smell it.”

“We’ve got her now,” said Coffin later, when he heard the story of Lotty’s visit from Roxanne.

He had by this time the report on the fire in his hands, and knew that it had certainly been the result of arson.

When he had spoken with Roxanne and Juliet he also knew who had started it. Lotty.

“You say she was a long while leaving your house tonight?”

“We heard her go down the stairs. But she didn’t hurry. Then it seemed ages before we heard the front door close - if we ever did hear it.” Roxanne frowned. “But I think Juliet heard it. She more or less said so.”

“Let’s hope she can testify,” said Coffin grimly. “After two sousings like she’s had, she’ll probably end up dead. She’s taking oxygen like a baby at the moment.” But he knew that he had enough evidence on Lotty Brown. “She’ll never wriggle out of this,” he said to Dove. “She had the means, the opportunity and the motive. Those earlier small fires were her rehearsal…I said they were a beginning.”

“It’s all circumstantial,” said Dove, as if it still worried him.

So the house claimed its last victim in Lotty. She went for trial and was convicted by the verdict of the jury. She did not hang, but was sentenced to life imprisonment. So much came out at the trial, all Roxanne’s loves and hopes and dreams were splashed over the newspapers. Her private life was once more public sport.

Lotty maintained a complete silence. But she had certainly spread the lying rumours about Roxanne, she had certainly helped bring in the charcoal. Mr. Rispoli identified her with great precision. She had lit the fire in the house. She had a very adequate motive: she hated and was jealous of Roxanne. She believed she had real reason to be jealous. Her very silence convinced the jury she was guilty.

But Lotty did not serve her sentence. She hanged herself in her cell one night.

A wardress was subsequently dismissed.

An extract from The Times of April 26, 196-New Development in London Mass Murder.

A second confession. Was justice done?

XIII

THREE WEEKS AFTER Lotty’s death the police were called in to protect Miss Tuffy from the violence of her sister. Miss Melita had attacked Miss Tuffy with a knife and had seemed prepared to shear the very flesh from her bones.

The horrified police officer who came in found the place a shambles. They had been fighting in the kitchen near the stove. A great pan of water was bubbling on the gas, as if in preparation for a stewed meal. He drove back Miss Melita, and lifted up Miss Tuffy.

“Mad,” he murmured, still trying to keep off Miss Melita.

“She’s not mad, only hungry,” panted Miss Tuffy, on the edge of hysteria.

The police officer felt the same way himself. He also felt sick.

“Why shouldn’t I be?” cried Miss Melly. “She’s devoured me long enough all these years, eaten my heart, my life, my love.”

“She never forgave any of us for her young man,” said Miss Tuffy before she fainted.

“I got Angelica,” shouted Miss Melita. “I arranged for her to go to that room and die. I even got her to buy the charcoal that killed her. I got her, and I’ll get you.”

Miss Melita was taken away to hospital. And there, although the doctors certified her mad, she made a complete confession of the murder of Angelica Tuffy. The deaths of Maggie Rispoli and Elizabeth Garrow had been just accident. “A bonus,” as she put it kindly. Miss Melita provided the details of the method, and claimed she had conspired with Lotty Brown, but without letting her into the secret that it was murder she planned. She had lured her sister to the room on the night in question by pretending Roxanne had summoned her there.

She was frank about her motive. She had hated Angelica for having stolen her young man twenty-five years ago. She had hated all her sisters, but Angelica first and foremost. She admitted that she hadn’t been sorry to see Maggie die, too. Maggie had been sharp-eyed and prying. Maggie was better dead, and Maggie’s inquisitive character, which had taken her round to Roxanne’s house that night, had seen to it that she did die. It had worked that way for Elizabeth Garrow also. Miss Melita made it sound so reasonable.

The doctors kept quiet about Miss Melita’s hunger for human flesh. Cannibalism in one form or another is not unknown in Western Europe, but it is rare to find a taste for it so frankly confessed.

Coffin was disturbed. He considered re-opening the case. But it was too late to help Lotty. And she had certainly been guilty…But he realised that he had never quite grasped before to what extent Miss Isobel Ludbrook had been a composite character.

Maggie the messenger had stood in a relationship to Melita Tuffy as well as to Lotty Brown. Both of them were in a position to use her. Angelica’s purchase of charcoal could have been at the instigation of her sister as well as that of Lotty. Lotty had done a great deal, but had she done everything? Had she known she was cooperating in murder?

Perhaps Dove had been half-accurate all along when he said the right people (Angelica and Maggie) got killed. And also right when he said this was a mad murder.

Coffin knew he was never going to be quite sure.

No one was ever going to be quite sure.

By himself he went round to look at the spot where the house had stood. Nothing stood there now. What the fire had left had been demolished. He stood for a moment on the foundations.

He thought that the house itself provided the answer to one great question which still worried him. Why had Roxanne’s house, whatever view you took of the murders, been chosen as the setting for the crime? He decided, superstitiously, that it was the nature of this house to provoke violence.

And underneath, deep in the ground, the hidden river which had long ago run freely through the fields outside London, now imprisoned in the sewers of the city, no longer used the old house as a sounding board, making it creak and groan as the heavy rains of autumn and spring drained away. There would be no more ghosts in Prince Consort Square because there was no old house to echo the moans of the underground water.