MAKE ME A MURDERER

by

GWENDOLINE BUTLER

GEOFFREY BLES 

52 DOUGHTY STREET, LONDON

MAKE ME A MURDERER

Patsy (Cleopatra) Partridge and her stepsister Jenny were widely different. Jenny had married and settled down in their home-town in the Black Country, her life seemed ‘saltless, respectable and dull ’; Patsy had followed her actor father onto the stage. In spite of their early closeness the two felt slightly uncomfortable in each other’s lives; but this did not prevent Patsy from rushing to King’s Bromwich the instant she heard that mild Jenny had been arrested for the murder of a policeman’s wife. Her first interview with Jenny’s vitally attractive lawyer, Bryan Orraman, confirmed her suspicion that the case was not what it seemed, that Jenny had been arrested too hastily, that some of the characters involved in this drama had their shady side, that there was some reason why the independent Franchise Police were unable to prevent Inspector Coffin from taking a personal interest in the mysterious affair.

Also by Gwendoline Butler

DEATH LIVES NEXT DOOR

THE DULL DEAD

THE INTERLOPER

THE MURDERING KIND

© GWENDOLINE BUTLER, 1961

First published in 1961

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

This book is fiction

All characters and incidents are entirely imaginary

A note by John Coffin, Divisional Detective Inspector

Every story has as many sides as the people that move in it, and the people themselves are the last to know it. This is what makes the work of the detective most difficult.

A policeman who allows himself to get emotionally involved in a case he is investigating does so at his own risk.

(Coffin’s italics.)

PART ONE

THE MISSING FACE OF MURDER

Chapter One

THE CRIME WAS DONE AND MY STEPSISTER WAS ALREADY arrested by the time I heard about it. She was in prison when the telegram got to me and must have been there some hours. I call her stepsister but she is really my half-sister; we had the same mother but different fathers. We had a story that Jenny’s father had had an earlier marriage, that there had been some mystery before he married mother. But my mother would never comment on this story: we got no change when we asked her. Jenny’s father died before she was born and my mother married again so quickly that there is very little difference in our ages. We hover erratically between thirty and forty; perhaps Jenny’s age is more stable and more accurate than mine but then she takes after her father who was a bank clerk and I take after mine who was an actor. My name is Cleopatra Partridge, a name which has been no help at all in my profession; however, I am usually called Patsy. Father was playing in Antony, to give it its professional name, at the time of my birth. I suppose I ought to be glad he wasn’t in King Lear or he might have called me Goneril or Regan; he would never have called me Cordelia, that I know. He never saw me that way. “You’re Character, my dear,” he used to say, studying my face, “and that’s what Cleopatra is. Play it Grand, my dear, play it Grand.” (Dad always spoke in capital letters, like Queen Victoria.)

So far no one has asked me to play Cleopatra, Grand or otherwise, but like Dad, I keep hoping. Dear old Dad, an amiable, drunken figure. I can’t say he was a good actor, but he had true love and understanding of the theatre and a sort of deep reverence for it. And this he handed on to me. I may not be a great actress either (although I have widened my range since Dad knew me, and I would go so far as to say all parts are character parts. Is this Method?) but I am reliable. Producers know where they are with me. I am never late for rehearsals or performances, and I learn my lines; you won’t find me with bits of paper pinned up on the stage where the audience can’t see because I’ve been lazy. I keep my dresses pressed, and my make-up is daily as fresh and imaginative as I can make it. This is hard work and takes a lot out of you, especially on tour when you have food to get and shopping to do. A famous star travelling round with her dresser, secretary and admiring woman friend, gets all this done for her, but don’t imagine the average actress does. Or even the moderately successful one like me: and by now I have reached a much higher and more comfortable station in my profession than my father ever did. I am regularly in work (an important thing, believe me, in a trade where ‘resting’ is a far from relaxing process). I get good parts, and sometimes people even ask me for my autograph. I make a steady living and if I have admittedly seen more of the provinces than London, well, it looks as though television is going to alter that.

Jenny lives a more settled life than me. She is married, and I don’t suppose she has varied the colour of her hair since she got married, and I believe she never paints her finger-nails. We rarely meet; we exchange presents at Christmas when we are in funds and cards when we are not, and I suppose I am fonder of some of the people I work with and my old landlady than of Jenny. All the same there was a bond between us that did not break, born of the games we had played as children, the walks we had taken under the plane trees in the park near Hagley where we lived, when we both discovered simultaneously that the world was full of a number of things to be discussed, and which enables us, when we meet, to pick up again from where we left off.

Her life seems to me saltless, respectable, dull. She thinks I am vulgar, a little showy, and restless; perhaps I am.

At least, all this I would have said before she attacked the woman, and broke up her whole world, and mine too. I am telling you all this story objectively, not perhaps as it really happened, for who can know that? But as it happened to me.

* * * * *

The telegram came to me in Oxford after the matinee performance. It was a very hot day with a thick heat mist, not clearing until noon. My landlady brought it round to me, puffing a little from the heat. Her eyes were popping with excitement, but not curiosity; she knew what was in the telegram, she’d had a look. She handed it to me silently, speechlessly, her eyes praying to me not to rush away before she got her breath back.

The telegram was from near Birmingham. It had been sent nearly two hours ago and it said:

‘Your sister Mrs. Jenny Fisher remanded in custody here today, serious charge. Please communicate. Latham and Gordon, Solicitors, Bull-Ring Passage, King’s Bromwich.’

‘

I read it again because it didn’t seem to make sense the first time. I read it slowly, while people rushed all round me. I was wearing a long, pink, evening dress trimmed with dark fur, very hot to wear in that weather, and I remember picking at the dark fur till little bits came away in my hands so that the wardrobe mistress who was watching me clucked reprovingly, and Venetia Stuart, our star, tapped my shoulder and said with a grin as she sailed past:

“Remember that’s rabbit-mink you’re plucking, my dear, and rabbit, contrary to what you may have read in Beatrix Potter, is not hard wearing.”

I knew Bull-Ring Passage. Jenny and I had grown up in its neighbourhood. It is a high, narrow lane of shops, offices and warehouses. It is dingy and noisy but is still considered an eligible address for business houses, although I should have thought the lawyers would be moving out. Perhaps the central address makes up for the dirt and bustle.

Behind the Passage were the rows of little back-to-back houses that were not, even thirty years ago, an eligible address, but this was where Jenny and I skipped and scuffled in the gutters and pretended we were Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. It was one of our many addresses; Dad and Mum moved often, always within the same area.

“Telephone,” gasped Mrs. Merrick, my landlady; she was getting her breath back and her colour was going down.

“Yes, I could telephone.”

“No, I didn’t mean that.” She gulped down a breath of air; she was a darling little woman like a fish, a goldfish. “There was a telephone call for you, too. That’s why I came. Your brother-in-law.”

“Him!” Even at that moment I felt savage about him. He and Jenny had been married over eighteen years, they had three children and I still didn’t like him any better than I had that day Jen brought him in and he told me only unmanly men let their wives work and a woman’s proper place was the home. Well, he was still being a manly man and I still didn’t like him. “What does he want?”

“He wanted to talk to you, he wouldn’t say much to me. I shouldn’t say he’s a man much used to a telephone, is he? He mutters. Still, it was you he wanted and he said it was about your sister. He seemed to think you’d know.”

I sat down in my dressing-room and stared at the telegram again. A serious charge? What serious charge? Arson, robbery, murder? How could any of these be associated with quiet, gentle Jenny? I knew at that moment what I had forgotten all these years, that I loved Jenny as dearly as I had ever done.

Usually I so much enjoyed the warmth and disorder of my dressing-room; but now I did not see it, did not see the dress I had worn in the second act lying against a chair, with the spray of roses and the pearls falling against it. I ignored all the aids with which I built up on the stage an illusion of luxurious charming femininity. I had been poor so long I loved all these tools of my trade.

Venetia came in wearing a bright red Father Christmas dressing-gown and offered me a cup of tea. “Drink it up hot,” she commanded in that low, deep voice that sent the stalls reeling and the gallery into far from silent worship. “There’s nothing like taking a cup of tea hot. I remember when the blitz blew my front teeth out at six-thirty in the evening and me due to appear in Blithe Spirit at seven sharp. They were false of course.” Venetia’s genuine glamour could triumph over even false teeth and red flannel dressing-gowns; admittedly the dressing-gown, now well past its first youth, had come from Schiaparelli and smelt of Arpège. Venetia looked down at her dressing-gown and giggled. “I can read your thoughts. This has been a famous dressing-gown in its day. Got memories. Good job it can’t write a book.”

She picked up the telegram and read it seriously while I drank; she had put brandy in the tea, the blitz again no doubt.

“Only one thing to do: go.”

I nodded.

“I’d offer to drive you there in a fast car but I haven’t got it.”

“In dock again?”

“Not dock, hock.”

I nodded sympathetically. Venetia was always buying expensive cars and then failing to pay for them and so losing them again.

“The stories you tell,” said the dresser, who had been hanging up my dress. (According to Venetia they had known each other since they were both in the chorus in Chariot’s Revues.) “Never the same twice. The first time I heard that bomb story it was your leg.”

“I was hurt all over,” swore Venetia solemnly.

“Didn’t my brother-in-law say anything else?” I asked suddenly; I was rapidly taking off my stage make-up and replacing it with a street one. Surely he must have added something? He never willingly addressed a word to me, so something desperate must have broken his reserve.

She shook her head. “He wasn’t himself, though.”

“You’ve never met him.” Mrs. Merrick sometimes carried telepathy too far.

“All the same, dear, he wasn’t himself. He was all shook up. Been crying, I should think.” She glanced at Venetia and a look passed between them. But I didn’t know then how much those two guessed. “He said: ’Tell her her sister needs her.’”

Well, he hadn’t said that at the births of any of the three children, although I believe Jenny nearly died when the boy came; nor had he said it when he took himself and his workmates (he was an engineer, a bad one I should think) out on strike for six weeks because he thought he had been insulted. And although I knew he stood in the way, I don’t believe Jenny had wanted me either; they were a self-sufficient little family, a normal, ordinary little family.

But what was happening to Jenny was neither normal nor ordinary and yet it had sprung out of her past life as surely as wheat from the seed. Jealousy, envy, greed are common enough and they were the seeds. Poor Jen.

I was getting into my street clothes as I spoke. I caught a glimpse of my face in the mirror, broad-cheeked, blue-eyed, still faintly shiny with cold cream, not beautiful, but full, as Dad said, of character. I hoped it was nice character, but to be a success in my world you have to develop a sort of toughness.

“I want to know more. Jenny’s in trouble, yes, but what?”

Mrs. Merrick fingered the telegram and looked at me knowledgeably. Outside the high covered window of my dressing-room which looked on to an Oxford alley a newsboy was calling.

“Get a paper,” she said. “If there is any serious crime you can read about it.” I did.

BLACK COUNTRY CRIME: UNKNOWN ASSAILANT ATTACKS BIRMINGHAM WOMEN: Mrs. Ellen Chase of King’s Bromwich found unconscious in her house…

I read it dully. I was not surprised that they called Birmingham the Black Country, although it is not, because people always do confuse them. But they should not have muddled King’s Bromwich with Birmingham because it is ten miles away and a separate borough of 80,000 souls with a strong sense of its own identity and past. King’s Bromwich remembers when Birmingham’s address was: Birmingham, near King’s Bromwich. And when King’s Bromwich was the centre of a great baronial estate loaded with honours and privileges. True, today buses (it used to be electric trams) join it, with its works and factories, to Birmingham but it is still separate in the spirit.

* * * * *

Birmingham is crowded on a Saturday evening and it was evening by the time I arrived, although I caught the first train and it was fast. It was a fine evening although a mist was beginning to creep up again. The train from Oxford arrives at Snow Hill station in the middle of the town. I knew Corporation Street of old. I had played down it as a child, admired and envied its shop windows as a girl, but I had not been back for years. I came back to it now as a woman and it seemed smaller, dingier, and I missed the trams. What is there that is so romantic about trams? Is it because in some ways they are like ships and have the rolling, bucking movement of ships in bad weather? We used to take penny rides on them when we were little, and then jump off at the traffic lights just before the tram-stop. Why this was the thing to do I can’t remember, but it was de rigueur in my group. If you did it you were in, if you failed you were out. I was once carried the length of Corporation Street with my legs dangling because I lost my nerve at the crucial moment and hadn’t the courage to jump. It was a shaming experience.

I hadn’t the courage to jump now. I had half wondered, as I stepped from the train, if my brother-in-law Lester would be on the station to meet me. But his thin, wiry figure was not there. I was hardly disappointed. I was not fond enough of him for that, but it would have been reassuring to me. Somehow his absence seemed ominous.

I got a taxi out to the centre of King’s Bromwich, then I paid it off. I walked slowly through the crowds, climbed the steps, and came out into the street. I knew where I was going. Bull-Ring Passage was across the street, past the church of St. Luke and down the slope. I even knew what the street was going to look like. I had no new discoveries to make, except about Jenny.

Every large industrial city has a Bull-Ring Passage and it varies in age and dirt according to the age of the city. King’s Bromwich is an old industrial city and there are many rows of late eighteenth-century houses to be found there, gnawed into now by shop-fronts and warehouses.

Bull-Ring Passage was short, narrow and just as I remembered it. I walked along until I found number seven where Latham and Gordon had their offices. There was a lighted window on the top floor. A barrow laden with flowers was parked outside in the gutter. I walked over to it and decided on an impulse to buy some flowers. It was late on a hot summer evening and the flowers, poor little bunches of violets, sweet-Williams and wallflowers, were wilted and sad. I looked at them and thought of Jenny.

A boy came rushing down the flight of stairs in number seven. He looked about sixteen, but he was more perhaps, for he was one of those ageless adolescents who have looked that way since they were about twelve and go on looking the same, poor things, till age creeps up on them and they find they are thirty.

He stopped short when he saw me and came over. “Flowers, lady?”

I picked up a bunch of violets. “I’m looking for Latham and Gordon,” I said. “This is the right place?”

“Why should I know, lady?”

“I thought you just came down their stairs.” You can see from this conversation I was being pretty stupid. No excuse for me either. I came from these parts. I knew not to probe.

“Oh yes,” he drawled, “I deliver flowers there. Mr. Latham’s a real flower lover.”

“Odd man!”

“Oh, he buys them for an orphanage. Yes, that’s it. Invalid boys.”

“He’s kind.”

“Except he’s been dead for years. Those violets are not for sale, lady.”

He seemed to resent me, and not only because I was a prattler.

“Look,” I said. “If you don’t want to sell me flowers, then I don’t want to buy any.”

“No, no, it’s not that.” He shifted on his feet. “Oh, go on, take the violets.”

It came to me that it was my appearance he resented. I could see my reflection in the plate-glass window of the house next door (it contained the showrooms of a firm of sanitary engineers). There I stood in a white silk coat and dress and on my head the Paris hat from Mad Carpentier which was like an upturned flower basket, the petals looking a good deal fresher than those on the barrow. Venetia had clapped this hat on my head at the last moment. “You can’t go to see a solicitor without a hat” she had cried. “I know; I’ve been sued by the best solicitors in Europe. Without a hat they don’t trust you. Something to do with their legal training, I suppose.”

“The roses are too red, too white,” said the boy, looking at me.

I looked at him in astonishment. Little Puritan. You don’t expect a barrow-boy to take exception to a heavy make-up.

“Oh yes,” he said, still looking at me. “We get educated. Even in my class you can’t help picking up a little bit about Shakespeare. We’re not all barrow-boys from choice.”

“Jimmy Porter in person,” He did not respond to this but held out my violets.

As he did so I noticed a man in uniform looking at us from a doorway across the way. He was not a policeman, the uniform was that of a night porter or a commissionaire. He was hatless, and his collar was undone.

I paid the boy with half a crown and dropped the change so that a shilling ran into the gutter; the boy stamped his foot on it. I waited for him to remove it. But he showed no signs of doing so. Just watched me.

The man came over from the doorway.

“Let the lady have her money.”

“Who says she can’t?” The boy’s foot came up. “I’m not stopping her.” There was a brutality in his voice that had not been there before.

“Pick it up for her.”

The boy flexed his wrists, they were wide and sinewy and the hands were broad and very strong. They were old hands too, hands that had done all kinds of work and been chipped and scarred, but the nails had been filed and polished and there was a gold ring on the middle finger. Something metal gleamed for a moment at his wrist.

The man went white. “Get off,” he said. “Get away.”

The boy gave the barrow a push. “Be seeing you,” he said cockily, throwing the words back behind him as he walked. He had been aggressor, sustainer and victor all in one.

The man looked at me, silently asking me my business. I picked up my shilling, which no one had after all returned to me, and as silently refused to state it.

This neighbourhood had changed since I knew it; I felt now it was one where anything could happen and probably would. But it was more than that, there was a bad, neurotic, nervy atmosphere to that little encounter. I felt that if it was among people like this that Jenny had transgressed there was no hope for her.

“I’m sorry it should have happened,” said the man, decently and in apology. “We’re all a bit strung up here now. There’s a big police flap on.”

I knew at once that it was connected with Jenny.

In the offices of Latham and Gordon a telephone bell began to ring and was at once answered. Late as it was there was someone up there still waiting for me, and waiting to tell me about Jenny.

The wooden stairs creaked as I trod on them. Because it was high summer it was still light but there was very little light on the stairs which led up to the offices. One high window in the roof had been partly obscured by dark blue paint, put on in the war, I supposed, and never cleaned off.

The office door with its bright brass plate bearing the names Latham and Gordon was unlatched and I walked in. I have walked into a good many waiting-rooms in my life, although theatrical agents and railway waiting-rooms have been the most usual, but when all is said and done there is not so much difference between any of them. Some are cleaner than others, but there is usually the same smell of stale cigarette smoke and soot and I usually feel just as depressed in all of them.

There was no one in this room, which is not unusual either, and I stood still for a moment, clutching my flowers and my ridiculous hat, while I found my bearings.

This was a dark brown room; a room decorated by a man for men to use. There was a huge oak table; the biggest oak tables in the world always go to waiting-rooms and so do the smallest chairs. Someone had tried to cheer this room up with a red geranium in a pot but even this was going dark brown too, as geraniums will unless you give them light and air. There was a calendar on the wall, and also a fire extinguisher, to put out all hopes presumably, as there was nothing else inflammable in this room. In spite of the dark brownness everything was fresh and up to date, even the calendar was accurate, Saturday, June 11 th. The impression of efficiency was confirmed by the new telephone directory and the neatly arranged piles of newspapers. There was a bookcase full of law books which looked as though they were used, so someone here was a reader. A close look showed that the room had been made to look dark brown and old on purpose. There was a bag of golf clubs propped up in one corner and that too was no doubt a ‘prop’. Probably a law practice had clients that needed soothing and I was one of them.

Two doors led off from this outer room, one shut and one half open.

“Come in, come in,” an irritated voice called from behind this door.

He was sitting, lolling really, on a couch behind a table laden with letters, books, papers and a telephone. If I say lolling I don’t want to convey the impression of languor or laziness, on the contrary, he was crackling with life and vitality. He was waiting, not resting. He stood up and I could see he was an enormous man, huge, with bright blue eyes. We were both silent for a moment; perhaps neither of us had expected to see quite what we did see.

“Miss Partridge?” He smiled slightly. People usually did smile at my name, especially if they happened to know what went with it. I hated them for it. I didn’t hate this man though. He was too vital, too attractive. He made his impact all right.

I nodded. “Mr.—but I don’t know whether you are Mr. Latham or Mr. Gordon?”

“Orraman. Bryan Orraman. Mr. Latham is dead and Mr. Gordon lives in Stratford. There is also a Mr. Parker. I’m only a Junior Partner.”

A man with his way to make, then. And from the look of him he would soon make it.

I saw a carnation in a glass of water. So he had been buying flowers, or one flower anyway. He caught my eye and laughed. “Young devil! Blackmails me into buying flowers.” He added, “I’ve been waiting for you. Glad you got here.”

“I came as soon as I could. I’m an actress, you know.” I don’t know why I offered that as an excuse as it wasn’t one but I was really talking to keep off the moment when I had to learn about Jenny. It was like an operation, now that the moment for the knife had come I was frightened.

“Yes, I know you’re an actress. I’ve seen you act.”

“You have?” I had never played in Birmingham, not because I avoided it but because it never came my way. I was at Wolverhampton once where I never saw the light of day because I had fifteen changes of costume and every one of those damned dresses had to be ironed by me.

“On television. You were a nurse.”

“So I was. I rushed in and out with bowls. I don’t believe I said anything.” I’d said plenty at the time, though; everyone knows it is death to a rising young actress to be typed as a nurse. It does something to public esteem, whatever part you play afterwards they always seem to see the scalpel and the gauze behind it and dub you a saint or a bitch according to how they feel about you giving up nursing.

The subject of Jenny could not be longer delayed. “What is this about my sister? I suppose you know no one has told me anything. I’ve had nothing except this telegram and a telephone call from my brother-in-law. What is this about a serious charge? Is it serious?”

“Serious?” He looked at his hands. “As serious as the law can make stick.”

He offered me a cigarette. It was offered in an expensive, initialled case. I had already noticed the difference between this room and the outer room. No holding back here, no dark browns, but plenty of thick broadloom and comfortable chairs and a horrid but probably very expensive desk. Everything was very good quality, all nearly new but a bit forceful. It was the same with the cigarette case, it had a little too much of everything, too much gold, too much size, too much initial. I could see that he was still too much under the influence of what you might call Business Man’s Baroque, everything just a little too ornate, too much there. But I could see too that with him this would soon go, he would catch on that it wasn’t quite the thing, and then he would begin to sink into the background with the best of them. Indeed from his clothes, neat dark brown tweed, I thought this process was beginning. Only when I met him he hadn’t quite submerged yet.

“I don’t know how much you know about your sister.”

“Oh letters, Christmas presents. I’m on the move a lot and she’s concentrated on her home and children.”

“I see. You’re really out of touch then,” he said absently.

I stared. “What do you mean? Jen’s lived such a quiet life that there’s nothing to be out of touch with.”

“Then you don’t know that she twice came before the courts last year on charges of shop-lifting?”

“Shoplifting? Jenny?” That was difficult to understand. Jenny never cared enough for possessions in the old days to covet other people’s. If there had been shops selling babies or small children I would have said that before her marriage she might have shop-lifted one of them but since she had her own babies she seemed to me completely and absolutely satisfied. It was what made me so cross. Jenny had so much talent, so much charm, just buried in that back street.

“She got off the first time, no proper evidence was brought, there was only the daughter there in the shop with her, and the case didn’t stand. She got off the second time because she came up before a magistrate who took pity on her, and we took care to keep the girl out of the way. If there had been any suspicion she was using the girl to shop-lift it might have gone badly for her.”

He spoke carefully. I could see that he had believed in Jenny’s innocence completely the first time, had been sceptical the second time, and now, faced with a new charge, was deeply distrustful.

And yet he had taken Jenny’s troubles on his own shoulders. This was not just professional zeal. Beneath his control he was fidgety and nervous.

“But I can’t believe it of Jenny. She had such a happy, normal little home.”

It was my turn now to startle him.

“You really are out of touch,” he said slowly. “There’s plenty you don’t know. There have been bitter quarrels, so much so that the neighbour complained. And that brings us up to what happened yesterday.”

“Well, what did happen yesterday? That’s what I’m here to find out.” I had regained my poise; if the charge was one of shop-lifting then I had my own ideas and thought I would know how to clear Jenny.

“Your sister went to a house in Burnt Green yesterday, took up a poker, which she may or may not have brought with her (I wish I could be sure on that point, a great deal might hang on it. You see I’m being frank with you), and beat up the housewife there, Mrs. Ellen Chase, a young woman with three small children. They were in the house, by the way, which is going to titillate the newspapers when they find out.”

“Was it this?” I drew out the Oxford newspaper and pointed to the paragraph in the Stop Press. “Unknown assailant?”

He squinted at it: “That’s it. Only not unknown. We knew all right. Your sister got on a bus, and asked her way—left red flags out.”

“It’s impossible.” I knew Jenny had a quick, passionate temper, but she was gentle. And a poker. It conjured up a horrid scene in that quiet little house.

“You’ve got to believe it. We have witnesses. She admits it.”

“Who is Ellen Chase?”

“She was the woman your sister is jealous of, the cause of the quarrels. She thought your brother-in-law had been seeing too much of her.”

“I see.”

“I’m afraid you don’t entirely. The woman’s family deny it completely. There’s a sister and mother. They all say she was just an ordinary housewife with no interests outside her husband and family.”

“And my brother-in-law? Has anyone asked him?” I was bitter.

“He denies it too.” He tapped on the table before him. “All the same, he’s one of my troubles. He’s being evasive. Hiding something. I wish I knew what.”

“He’s not usually evasive.” This was true: he was famous for his bluntness.

“That’s why I’ve summoned you. If we are to find any defence then you must help me find it.”

“You think Jenny is guilty, don’t you?” I was studying his face.

“I’m not required to give an opinion,” he said stiffly, which of course was the same as giving one.

“But all the same, there’s a reservation about her guilt, a doubt in your strictly legal, unprejudiced, unmade-up mind. I’m used to looking at faces and I can see doubt in yours.”

“I hope that’s all you can see.” After a pause, he added: “There was a delay of two hours in getting the doctor. Relatives are usually quick at that sort of thing, and there were enough swarming about. It might mean something. I don’t know.”

“Burnt Green is quite near here, isn’t it?”

“Yes, very close.” He was abstracted. “I don’t think you are going to be a lot of help to me, Miss Partridge. You seem too remote from your sister. Is there anyone closer?”

I shook my head.

“And you don’t remember someone called Canny Walker? Does the name Canny Walker mean anything to you?”

I shook my head again after pausing for a moment to think about Johnnie Walker.

“Well, it’s a name that comes into this story somehow, only we don’t know where or how. Your sister fainted when she was arrested.” His tone was dry. Women who were tough enough to use pokers should be tough enough not to faint, he implied. “She was rather a long while coming out of it, and while she was semi-conscious she kept calling this name ‘Canny Walker’. The woman police sergeant who was there told me. ‘Sympathetic sort.’” He didn’t say sympathetic to whom so I suppose it was to him. “Canny Walker? Might be a man, might be a woman. I think it is a woman.”

“I still don’t know.” But I was thinking of Jenny, frightened, sick, and in prison. I knew what mere confinement could do to her, she was frightened of closed spaces, hated woods and cupboards and little dark rooms. I hoped they had given her windows. “They were pretty quick with Jenny, weren’t they?” Even then I didn’t see any significance in the look he gave me. “Locking her up. Police sergeants and all. We must get her out. Can’t we get bail?”

He looked at me with a frown. “Miss Partridge—” he began.

Then the telephone rang. He listened quietly, saying almost nothing. When he pat the receiver down he turned to me:

“We shan’t get bail on this charge.” Every word was weighted. “The woman is dead. The charge is murder.”

I could not mistake now the warning he was trying to convey.

“There’s going to be bad feeling over this case. You can feel it in the streets already. Mrs. Chase was an ordinary housewife, the neighbours liked her, it was unprovoked attack. And then there’s the other factor.”

I looked up.

“Didn’t I tell you? The murdered woman’s husband is a police detective.”

Chapter Two

I LAY ON MY BED AT THE HOTEL WESTERN. SEVEN DAYS HAD passed. Or was it seventeen? Time had lost its value. I had spent the time shuttling back and forth between Oxford and King’s Bromwich, playing a comedy in one place and a tragedy in the other. In the interval, the inquest and the magistrates’ hearing had taken place. Did you see the pictures of the inquest in the papers? Did you see a dazed anxious face at the back of the crowd? That was me, still wearing Venetia’s white hat. The memorable thing about the inquest was the speed and efficiency and its quietness. It was very, very quiet. All the business there seemed to be done in an undertone. The coroner’s jury was made up of ten men and two women. The coroner was a doctor. At the end of it we knew that Ellen’s death had been caused by a blow from a rounded metal object. This object had possibly been made of highly polished metal but it had certainly been very smooth. If you were the police you equated this with a poker they alleged Jenny had been carrying. So it was held that Jenny should go forward to her trial for her murder. She had a true bill of murder to answer for. I thought of what I now knew of her story. The two families had become friendly, had gone about together a bit (I knew what that meant: a local charity dance, the Sports Club dinner), and then there had arisen friction between the two wives. Jenny had been jealous of Ellen who was prettier, livelier and better dressed. It was a commonplace story except for its tragic ending. The only puzzle was to relate it to Jenny who wasn’t commonplace and wasn’t violent. I had been given no chance to meet her. There was a vague feeling of obstruction in the air.

It was about the time of the inquest that I first became aware of the rumours and hints that were circulating about the Police Force in King’s Bromwich. They were not popular. Overzealous was the kindest way of putting it. Behind this loomed the darker words of corruption and patronage. I didn’t know whether to believe in this or not. You get so used in England to believing that the police are always straightforward. Was it of importance that Ellen Chase had been the wife of a man in the Police Force? “They’ll get a conviction against someone for this case,” said one bystander to another at the inquest, “and they won’t care who, either. It’s a copper’s wife, see?” And then another man said: “Who are they covering up for?” There had grown up in King’s Bromwich a conviction that the Police Force was somehow not to be trusted, and this conviction had behind it a series of small grievances: little men harried, big men treated tolerantly; little cases disposed of rapidly, big ones dealt with diplomatically. Perhaps it all meant nothing. But my sister was in their hands.

I had been bowled over by Bryan Orraman. I had done my best but he had been too much for me. To fall in love at a glance must always be particularly irksome to a woman of spirit. I do not speak of men, for them no doubt it is a different matter, even a cause for congratulation: it shows they can do it. But a woman resents it on the whole, or once past her first youth she is inclined to do so. And now I had been without emotions for a long time. Not, you must understand, that my life had been bereft, without amusement, not at all, there had been plenty but it had been level-headed. And now there was Bryan Orraman. Could he melt five years of hardness, ten years of boredom?…And really, you know, I thought he could. Well, he would never guess how I felt about him. I didn’t propose to make him a present of the information.

But all the same, I hadn’t been completely honest with Mr. Orraman. I knew more about the shop-lifting than I told him; in a way I knew everything.

He had told me the story quite simply: Jenny and her eldest daughter Bridget had been shopping together; they had been together on both the occasions when there had been suspicion of shop-lifting. Bridget was almost eighteen now, Jenny’s eldest child. She was a changeling, a throw-back; thin, red-haired, and bright-eyed, she was not like her father or her mother either. The shop people and the police might believe that Bridget was a shop-lifter; Bryan Orraman might wonder; they might all make a mistake, but I could not. I knew.

I remembered the child who had fingered my make-up and stroked my jewellery; the child who could not resist bright things. I remembered one day in Woolworth’s, when she was quite tiny, how she had clutched and cried. And she hadn’t grown out of it. The last time we had met, four years ago when I was in pantomime, she had pocketed the Fairy Queen’s necklace while I was putting my eyeshadow on. You may think it unfair to condemn a child for the behaviour of a child, still more to condemn an adolescent because of it, but this child had developed pretty consistently and the little hands that had reached out for toys were still reaching out, and grasping too.

So that was one thing. And then I knew all about Canny Walker.

Canny Walker was an invention of Jenny’s in our childhood. We had once seen a little boy, (a local, I suppose, although as far as I knew, we never saw him again) throwing stones at a greengrocer’s window, but when the angry greengrocer came out, he was walking innocently down the road and it was a boy standing near by who got the whacks. We called him Canny Walker because he got other people into trouble but stayed out of it himself. Canny Walker was a well-dressed little boy wearing a stiffly laundered white shirt and a bow-tie with spots, so obviously someone loved him dearly. He was adapted to our own use, and ever afterwards, when we were playing at trickery and deceit (and we were no angels) we looked at each other and murmured ‘Canny Walker’.

I did not learn until later, when I was an adult, that everyone has a Canny Walker, a device for transferring guilt, a whipping boy, a way of escape. Sometimes we blame it on heredity, sometimes on environment, but it amounts to the same thing; life would really not be bearable without it.

If Jenny was calling herself Canny Walker then it looked like an admission, a confession of guilt.

But if I had not been quite straightforward with Mr. Orraman then neither had he been quite honest with me either. I could see that clearly as I lay there on the bed.

He had never seen me on television as a nurse; my name had been advertised certainly—but I had never appeared. I had broken my left leg two hours before the show and whatever Venetia might say, you cannot play a nurse before a television camera with a broken fibula.

Mr. Orraman must have gone to some trouble to search out this information about me and he deserved better luck with its accuracy. And I felt certain that he only went to great trouble if the matter was important to him.

There was room for thought here. He wasn’t quite easy about me. And he had thought me critical. I could see he didn’t like this much. I had touched him, not on a raw spot, he hadn’t got any raw spots, but in his professional pride where the leather was a bit thinner. I had implied that he might have done a better job for Jenny. We had met several times since our first interview in his office. I went back to one of those interviews in my mind.

“The police have been quick.” I had commented bitterly and critically.

“I think you must know,” he had said stiffly in reply, “that in English law no one can be sent to trial on a serious felony without the due processes of law.” (He’d got that out of a book.) “Everything was done properly,” he added, and that remark was the basic Bryan coming out.

All the same he didn’t like the speed at which things had gone any more than I did. Institutions in England are not usually so fast in their working. Possibly it was because of this that I was able to break through his iron determination to keep things within their normal lines.

“I’d like to see someone. Someone official.”

He hesitated. “There’s the Chairman of the Magistrates—a decent old boy called Marcus. You could see him. Not officially, of course.” He grinned, it made him look younger. “Oddly enough he would like to see you.”

He led me out to his car, a large, black one which he undoubtedly still called ’The Jag’, a name which he would soon learn to forget. The Jaguar represented conspicuous consumption all right, although it was consumption a little ragged at the edges; the car was not new, but clearly second-hand.

He got into it proudly; it must have been very dear to him anyway, and I found this touching, like a small boy with a present. I recognised this feeling in myself with mingled foreboding and pleasure; it was a symptom of my state. I had been this way before, but not for a long time. What amazed me about the business was the speed with which things were developing. I was already half-way along the first stage of love; the stage of recognition, when one was still content, even happy, for the love to be one-sided. The masochist being not far below the surface in every love-sick woman, one could even enjoy it. That wouldn’t last long, though.

“I’d better explain this man Marcus to you,” he said as we drove through the traffic. “He’s not by any means commonplace.”

Who is, I thought, when you dig deep enough? That’s one thing about the stage—it teaches you to look below the surface. I’ve acted in enough plays and the simplest plays were far and away the hardest to act, and the most obvious characters turned upon the subtlest of details. Now take that woman in Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea’, she was quiet, not much to say, you hardly notice her, but without her the whole play collapses, she is the focal point, the woman who is deceived in her husband, and I can tell you she was mighty difficult to play.

“Where does he live?” was all I asked. Bryan Orraman wouldn’t thank me for philosophising. In spite of the fact that my ego was on a downbeat I was glad I was wearing Venetia’s Paris hat.

“A bit farther down the Hagley Road.”

We were driving rapidly through the centre of the town which was now fairly bare of traffic late on this Saturday evening. King’s Bromwich has a fine town hall and some handsome houses but is not otherwise beautiful. If you call King’s Bromwich the Black Country you irritate the inhabitants, but all the same there is a blackness about it. A smokiness and a greyness but also an air of vitality, of sharpness and prosperity.

The magistrate, Mr. Marcus, lived in a side turning in Friary Hill, King’s Bromwich’s most select district. He had a pretty little house, rather neat and withdrawn beside a high hedge of sweet-smelling macrocarpa. Someone had been watering the garden and the night scent of flowers and leaves was strong. I love the smell of leaves and greenery, it is more evocative to me by far than the smell of flowers or wood smoke. It reminds me of my first love-affair, if you could call it that, when Jenny and I were still friends. We were both innocently, happily, delightfully in love with a picture of an Italian nobleman of the fifteenth century, painted, I think, by Mantegna. We used to walk through the park making up stories about him and that is why I think of the green leaves. My stories were the best but perhaps this was because Jenny already knew Lester and thus had an inkling of another type of love, which I suppose was beginning to be more real to her. That’s why I hated Lester: for clipping Jenny’s wings, for making something drab and everyday of a person who could have been so much finer. Underneath I hated him for taking Jenny’s imagination away. He was selfish even with her thoughts. In the end I became hostile to Jenny herself. You couldn’t blame Jenny for drawing away from me. For the first time I realised that I had been selfish with her too.

Although Mr. Marcus lived in a comfortable villa and we might have expected to have the door opened by a smiling, chubby matron we were in fact admitted by a manservant. At least, I took it he was a manservant; he opened the door and said ‘sir’ but otherwise there was none of the docile familiarity associated with good servants. Nor could you dismiss it by saying he was a rough diamond among servants: he wasn’t a diamond at all. If he was a gem (and he had the look of being treasured), he was a gem of another sort.

“It won’t do, you know,” he said. “You ought not to come nagging the old fellow. No good looking at me like that either. Well, you haven’t come to congratulate him, have you?”

Bryan Orraman grinned at him; evidently they knew each other.

“Be quiet, Albert, if it’s me you are talking about.” His master appeared in the darkness at the end of the hall. “Bring some coffee, there’s a good lad, and hold your tongue.”

He was a sturdy figure, tweed-clad even on that hot day, and smoking a pipe. A wave of hot scented tobacco floated on to me.

I moved cautiously towards him through the gloom of the hall, making my way more by smell than sight.

He guided us, still talking, into a book-lined room with windows opened on to a green garden. The garden was no bigger than the room but very lush and crowded with vegetables. There was hardly a flower to be seen but leaves and greenery everywhere. A thick belt of laurel hid the garden fence from us.

Mr. Marcus touched my hand and peered into my face; he seemed to be short-sighted. His own face was moustached and friendly.

“Where’s my specs?” he said fumbling in his pocket. “What a beauty, eh? You don’t mind me mentioning it? I’m a licensed old man, though I don’t know by what licence. Custom I suppose. Didn’t Bracton say (a thirteenth-century lawyer, my dear) that it only takes two precedents to make a custom?” And he darted a sharp look at Bryan Orraman.

“I don’t know,” Bryan answered. “Bracton’s not a particular study of mine. Not much use, you see, for the practice of criminal law in this city.”

“Oh, you’re no scholar. I’ve often told you so.”

“It wouldn’t be much good to me if I were. Experience goes for more in my branch of the work.”

I wondered when they would stop this bickering and get to Jenny. I saw that to them this was just one new episode in a playful quarrel that had gone on for a long time.

“It’s kind of you to let me see you,” I said to Mr. Marcus.

“Yes,” he said, removing his spectacles. “On the whole I think it is. Still, there were reasons. Special circumstances.” He added, “This is a bad case.”

“Bad for my sister.”

“Bad for everyone. Bad for your sister, bad for the victim, bad for the police.”

“I don’t see why.”

“You don’t?” He sighed. “No doubt you will though…And it’s bad for the neighbourhood.”

“Now that’s where you’ll have to let me keep my own opinion. Does the last matter?”

“Yes, it does matter.” He was sharp to me now. “Anything that calls out mob feeling matters and is bad.”

The more he spoke the more I could hear the broad sing-song vowels of the born Black-Countryman. He cultivated it deliberately, enjoying the speech of his district with a self-assurance impossible to someone like Bryan Orraman who was anxious to throw it off (it peeped through with him though). I could almost fancy Mr. Marcus’s background: an old manufacturing family, probably still retaining control of the original factory, whether it was a steelworks or a brass-foundry. I could almost place his native heath—Stourbridge or Brierley Hill or Halesowen. This loyalty of his I respected.

“This is my district. I know King’s Bromwich. I know the people pretty well. Oh, we’ve had a great deal of immigration lately, Scots, Welsh, even a few West Indians, but the population remains basically what it was. They’re conservative, hostile to foreigners, with very strong family loyalties to each other but reserved to strangers. Rough, putting almost a prize on violence, anyway esteeming it, superficially bad-mannered, but generous and good-hearted. It’s a bad district for trouble to start in. And you and your sister would be as foreigners to them.”

I nodded. We were not natives of King’s Bromwich, we had come to the district when I was a baby, in what you might call the last phase of my father’s life when he had pretty much given up the stage (or it had given him up) and gone over to managing a cinema, The Plaza, King’s Bromwich, better known locally as ’the Fleapit back of the Bull-Ring’. And you’ve got to remember how the Black Country felt about actors. It was suspicious, cautious. The locals respected you if you were rich and had clearly made a good thing of it, but if, like Dad, you clearly hadn’t, they despised actors. An unsuccessful actor was ‘not quite a man’.

‘Making a good thing of it’ was their standard. They respected money. And Dad didn’t. This separated us from King’s Bromwich. But I suppose unconsciously my values had been affected because I valued money too. Jenny was more like Dad, and this did sometimes make her an awkward companion because it came out in a disregard for appearances. She really didn’t mind if she was wearing a ten-year-old cotton dress and if the front-room curtains didn’t match. And on the whole people did mind about that sort of thing in King’s Bromwich.

“I don’t suppose she has ever been quite accepted by her neighbours, she comes from a different social class and had a different upbringing. Her husband, yes, he’s worked here and always has, they probably knew his father.”

“They’ve been damned unfriendly,” I said, thinking of how Jenny had lacked friends all her married life.

“I’m not trying to explain human nature to you: I’m simply trying to tell you that because of this crime they’ve turned against your sister…We had to get her to prison for her own sake.”

He was pink, flushed with the effort to make me understand what he thought important. He seemed essentially likeable. But of course I saw him at home. What was his official face? How had Jenny seen him? I could predict sternness in the lines from mouth to nose. What I could see even more clearly was the mould of common sense. He would sit on the bench, enthroned; he would pass judgement, and he would utter words by the light of straightforward, simple, relentless common sense. It was unnerving. I don’t have to tell you, do I, that I don’t regard common sense as always enough? But he was a kind man and an honest man, so I suppose by means of these qualities he arrived at a kind of justice in spite of his common sense.

A grumbling outside the door notified us of the approach of Albert again. He was carrying coffee. What he was grumbling about was not clear, but the words ‘giving the old man gyp’ were audible and I suppose referred to us, or it might have been himself, he looked capable of it.

“Albert doesn’t hold with all this talk about crime and punishment,” observed Mr. Marcus with amusement.

Albert caught what he said. “Those who has punishment to bear, bears it, and those who has to give it, gives it,” he observed oracularly. Adding: “Sometimes to hear Mr. Marcus talk you’d think he had more regard for the murderers than the murdered.”

“Albert thinks you’re weak,” commented Bryan Orraman.

“Oh no he doesn’t. Albert knows better, don’t you, Albert?” Albert grunted. “He has reason to know. Sent him up to the Assizes myself. And you were guilty, weren’t you, Albert?”

“I was so. And I’d do the same again, sir, I’m afraid. I’m a man of strong passions, and she roused them, poor girl.”

“I don’t like the way you say that, Albert.”

“Not if I knew I was going to get caught, though, sir,” said Albert politely. He was offering round coffee as he spoke. He had a very trembling, wobbling hand, and I took my cup from him very carefully. But somehow he spilled a little on me and on Bryan Orraman. He spilt a good deal on Mr. Marcus.

“Get out, Albert,” said Mr. Marcus, leaping to his feet and mopping his trousers. He sighed as the door shut behind Albert. “One of my lame dogs. He murdered his sweetheart at the age of eighteen. Good-looking boy he was then, but hasty. I promised him employment when he came out. Rather a comic figure, I’m afraid.”

He turned to me.

“I think we’d better take this as just a little friendly discussion. Forget I’m a magistrate, particularly forget that I am the one before whom your sister was charged. Impossible perhaps, but try. Let us then argue out why she was arrested. It wasn’t arbitrary, you know, or without justification.”

“I can see why she was suspected,” I said almost sullenly. The evidence against Jenny had been overwhelming. She had gone to the house, she had quarrelled with the dead woman, she had admitted to all of it. I could understand well why she had been arrested. What I could not understand was this underground anxiety, this troubled mind which was clearly reflected in Mr. Marcus and Bryan Orraman. I’m not a fool, I knew that an interview such as I was having with the magistrate was almost unprecedented. Why had he asked to see me? And why had Bryan brought me there? I thought they might not have the same motive. “I can see why she was committed,” I repeated, “but I don’t see the whole picture like you do.”

“There is evidence of premeditation. The poker.”

“I thought we didn’t know about the poker!” I said quickly. And from his face I could see that he knew. Or the police did. He covered it up by passing to a fresh point.

“She didn’t make a good impression in court. On the contrary. However, one doesn’t in all fairness hold that against her.” There was something in his conscious rectitude that annoyed. Damn it, I thought, he’s not only being judge but jury as well.

“There is something else you have to consider, and this is possibly, placed as I am, an improper question, but I ask it as a friend: Have you any reason to believe your sister is mentally unbalanced?”

I was silent; I could see them looking at me, and feel their minds pressing on me. I knew that they were saying without words, “It’s a way out, a way out. Admit that she’s mad.”

“She made a savage attack on the police, made silly accusations.”

“The dead woman was a policeman’s wife,” I said, thinking aloud.

“Police detective,” said Bryan Orraman, giving a swift look at Mr. Marcus.

Suddenly I saw what lay behind the official measures I had felt. The authorities were terrified of the gossip going round against the police, terrified of the implications; they wanted it all safely under the hatches, all battened down. I saw the expression on Bryan Orraman’s face. It was alert and watchful. So that’s why you brought me here, I thought, that’s what you wanted me to know. You couldn’t tell me yourself but you wanted me to be in a position to see it. You don’t want a conspiracy to go forward, but you don’t want to stick your neck out, an ambitious young solicitor can’t come up against the police without bruising his career, so you want me to do it. I gave Bryan Orraman full marks for deviousness.

I was suddenly angry with their male conspiracy to manoeuvre me. Nothing was going to be hushed up. “I’m not going to help you to say that,” I said loudly. “Jenny’s always been absolutely sane. Whatever there is I won’t ask her to hide behind that.” I followed this up. “And when can I see her? You can get me permission, Mr. Orraman, I suppose?”

He cleared his throat. “You don’t need permission. You can see your sister.”

I liked him for that.

Through a crack in the door I saw Albert. He had been outside listening, no doubt he always did this. He was probably a very well-informed Albert indeed. He saw I was watching him, but did not move. Instead he grinned.

Albert, I had just realised, in spite of his appearance was not a comic character. I wondered if Mr. Marcus grasped this. Certainly he treated him jocularly, but perhaps there was seriousness underneath.

The police were convinced of Jenny’s absolute guilt, more, they were deeply committed to it. This led, inevitably, to another step: the police had more information than they had disclosed. And what the police knew Mr. Marcus knew too. You could work out the implications of that.

All these things I could guess at. Certain knowledge would be less easy to get.

Back at the Hotel Western I added up what I knew: I had learnt something about Mr. Marcus, a good deal about Bryan Orraman; they had learnt something about me: that I was prepared to fight for Jenny.

But I had learnt something else too: Albert was by no means as devoted to his employer as he pretended. Albert would talk.

* * * * *

All malcontents have a crony, a confidant, a listener; they have to—without someone to hear them grievances lose their savour.

Albert had his in the barman of the Hotel Western, which was why I was there. It was an extremely uncosy hotel and Venetia would not have liked it at all, but it had the advantage of being in the district I wanted to be in and of this link with Albert. I thought I remembered this hotel from years ago, when it had represented to me the height of luxury and worldliness. Hadn’t Jenny and I once come in here giggling to sip a lemonade and pretend to be older than we were? If so I knew the way to the bar where I would presently go to meet Albert.

Albert had slipped the information across to me himself in a practised way which declared rather than hinted that he had a secret life of which Mr. Marcus guessed nothing. “If you’re looking for somewhere to stay try the Hotel Western, miss. Of course I’ve never stayed there, but I often pop in. The barman there is a close friend. He knew me before my little business, miss, and wrote to me regular and sent cigarettes, of course I never got them but that’s life for you, someone was happy.” And his little round eyes had glinted at me.

It was very nearly ten-thirty and this, Albert assured me, was when he got out. “Just a quick one before closing time,” he had said, almost winking. He could not quite wink because Bryan Orraman and his master were too close.

I sat on the bed and looked in the mirror, it was easy to do this as there was barely a foot between bed and dressing-table. It was made for midgets, this hotel. I remembered Venetia’s account of an hotel she had put up at when on tour, ’one of the low spots in her career’ (Venetia’s low spots were famous in the profession, they were the result of her equally celebrated extravagance which frequently let her in for periods of austerity: thus six Balenciaga dresses would necessitate two months of cheap hotels and no taxis while on tour, a new Rolls for Christmas would mean starvation at the New Year. Her friends and servants suffered with her, you never knew when dinner with Venetia meant the Caprice or vegetable hotpot. She was hardly ever in a flop, but when in a low spot would go out on some appalling tours. She once did Wigan, Aberdare and Newquay in one year, ending up in triumph at Drury Lane. But that was the year she built a house in the country). Venetia claimed that one hotel room she used while on tour had been so small that when she put her brassiere on she had to open the door.

In the mirror I saw that the silk suit that had looked so smart in Oxford now looked creased and crumpled. Venetia’s flower hat hung on a chair. I wrapped it up tenderly in tissue paper and put it into a drawer and went down to meet Albert.

The bar was emptying but I saw Albert at once. He had his back to me but he was reflected in a large gilt mirror and I could see his face; he was bending over a piece of paper he had flattened out on the table before him. I couldn’t see what it was except that it might have been a letter. He saw me then in the mirror and folded it neatly in his pocket. Every movement he made was neat and controlled, except when an occasional irritation swept over him, when his hands would twitch and shake. A tuft of greying hair was swept up into a little quiff over his round face and gave him the comic look which had convinced his employer.

“Evening, miss,” he said, standing up politely. “Let me get you a drink.” And he waved to the large girl behind the bar.

“Your friend not here tonight?”

“He had to get away early, so I hear,” said Albert. He sounded disappointed.

There was real affection between them, then. “He has a bit of trouble with his wife,” he added confidentially. It gave me suddenly a picture of these two men, drawn together in friendship by a common dissatisfaction with their life partners—a wife, Mr. Marcus—exchanging their confidences and their confessions, their grievances and resentments, this bar their only meeting place. It was a seedy place full of ugly furniture and smelling of stale cigarettes. It was not even comfortable as dirty, seedy places sometimes are. It was dreary.

My own life had had its rough passages but it had spared me things like this; it had not been so impoverished, it had been rich in human relationships. I had my job. If there had been anything wrong with it then it had been my own fault, the fault of getting bored too quickly which meant I had continually to seek refreshment. But I could love. I was suddenly grateful for Bryan Orraman. Poor Albert, the odd thing was that if I had been playing Albert I should have played him unsympathetically, made him into a mean little twister, but he wasn’t quite that. Face to face I felt sympathy. He had an inner core of sincerity in him; not a very large one, he was a shrivelled-up little apple, but it had hardly been a sound, sweet fruit to begin with.

Milly the barmaid was clearing up. She seemed to have a tolerant attitude to the licensing laws. Perhaps the police didn’t bother her much; that in itself was interesting. We kept coming back to the police.

A man came through a wing door leading from the kitchens and back parts of the hotel (and what they were like I shuddered to think). He looked at his watch and with a frown said: “Time you were finished up here, Milly.”

“Oh, there’s no hurry.”

“That’s not how I like things done.”

“Oh, you’re new with us. Now I tell you it’s all right. What the eye don’t see the heart won’t grieve over. And the eye don’t see.”

“Where’s John Wrench?” asked the boss. Albert pricked up his ears at the sound of his friend’s name.

Milly shrugged. “The usual.”

“I’d shoot her if she was mine. I can’t understand a chap going on liking a woman like that.”

“I don’t think he does like her,” observed Milly; “you’ve got quite the wrong idea of the situation.”

“I’d clear out.”

“You might. Old John can’t. He’s a decent sort. Anyway, where could the poor chap go to? You’ve got some funny ideas.” She looked across the room at Albert and said in a friendly fashion. “Better hurry up, Albert, the boss says out.”

He slopped his beer over me and it trickled on to my coat sleeve. Then I realised that he was nervous and that he had sat in front of the mirror deliberately because it gave him a view of both the room and the door. He was watching the door.

His little face was pinched and miserable beneath its cockatoo quiff. I leaned forward and gripped his arm. “Albert, what is it? What’s eating you, Albert?”

“It’s him. Marcus. He gets under my skin. I get underneath his too, you know. He calls me a joke, but he can’t always see it. But he’s stuck with me just like I am with him.”

“You could leave him.”

“Oh no I couldn’t. Look at me. I’m a wreck. I’m a joke. And he couldn’t be rid of me either. He’s talked too much about me, you see, about what he’s done for me and what I feel for him. Fat lot he knows about it.”

“It doesn’t sound a very happy relationship for him either.”

“Oh, he’s happy enough. No, we’re stuck together, me and him, like we was married.” So, in a way, I thought, they were.

Beneath this superficial grievance about what life had done to Albert (and for Albert, life and Mr. Marcus had a muddled identity, they were curiously intermixed) was another grievance, perhaps the beginning of everything.

“I could have been as good as him, if I’d had his opportunities. Who was he after all? His father owned a pot and pan factory, his grandfather was a master-nailer, and his great-grandfather worked in a forge.” I had not been so far out then, in my assessment of Mr. Marcus’s background. “My Dad worked with his.”

“I think he has tried to help you.”

But Albert was furious at this. “All very well. If he’d really included helping me to get off. But he couldn’t have that. I had to be punished. Let me rot it out and then called me back in tears. Thinks he’s God Almighty, you see. Judgement, punishment and then the kiss. But punishment first.”

Anger, long stored up, was giving him eloquence.

“That’s why I meant to talk to you. ‘I’ll help,’ I said to myself. ‘I’ll help her get off, anyway.’”

“You know something to prove Jenny’s innocence?” I said eagerly.

He looked at me vacantly. “Innocent? I don’t know about her being innocent. But I can fix her getting off.”

He believed she was guilty of course, guilty not of a quarrel, but of planned, premeditated murder. Perhaps it made very little difference whether Albert thought her guilty but it was one more sickening little pebble weighted in the scale against her.

“Well, go on, tell me what it is.”

He reacted like a child to sharpness and he sat there slopping his beer without talking.

“Is it about the poker?”

“The poker? No, I don’t know what about the poker.” His hand was gripping the glass so tightly and shakily that the beer was spilling again. I mopped at it angrily.

“The husband…” he began.

Milly had finished her cleaning and put on her hat and coat, she looked a good deal younger and prettier in them. “Turn out the lights when you’ve finished, Albert,” she said. She was locking the glass door that led into the side street.

As she did so a man pushed past her. She gave a little scream and straightened her hat. Albert said nothing but sat there looking.

It was the boy who had wheeled the barrow of flowers.

“Hello, Albert.” He was eating fish and chips from a paper bag.

Milly had unobtrusively disappeared through the door. Nothing could have alarmed me more.

“I’ll be walking home your way, Albert, and I thought we might go together.”

Albert looked at him, hypnotised, like a rabbit.

“Oh come on, Albert, I’m in a hurry.” He let the glint of metal appear at his wrist again; at first I thought it was a knife he had there, then I saw it was flatter, bigger.

Albert got up. So did I. “This is the second time I’ve seen you threatening someone with violence,” I said. I was trying to act the part. I am actually a very great physical coward; the one thing that was clear was that Albert was a greater; and there was a union between me and Albert after all. In spite of all the differences between us we had this in common: we were neither of us to be numbered among the good people who get up before eight, have breakfast and brush their teeth regularly with a view to living to a good old age.

“So it is,” he said levelly. “You would almost think I was doing it to impress you.” He was a cool young bird.

He let his weapon slip down into the palm of his right hand as he did so, the left hand still held the bag of chips. I saw then that it was a large steel hook that he carried.

Albert saw it too.

“I shall get the police,” I said.

“Go on, get the police. Let’s get them right here. Then I can talk.”

“What about?”

“Albert’s been pestering a couple of us boys. I just want him to stop.”

“That’s not true.”

“You don’t know what’s true and what isn’t.”

I looked at Albert, sitting there pale green and sick-looking, and realised that Albert was just silly enough for it to be true. The accusation wouldn’t improve his standing with the police, which was thin enough anyway. Any help from Albert was going to be as much a liability now as an asset. In any event it destroyed him as a witness.

The boy let the steel glint for a little longer, then slid it back. “On second thoughts I’ve changed my mind. You can walk home alone.” Then he raised his left hand and threw the bag of chips in Albert’s face. A few came my way.

It was his parting shot, and within a few seconds, before I could stop him, Albert had gone too.

I went up to my room and stood there for a moment surprised. Bryan Orraman was waiting for me. For a moment I was still Patsy the Girl Reporter and I fumbled for a smart joke, then my native blood asserted itself. “Oh,” I said weakly. “Do you want me?” As you can see, beneath the protean forms my work imposes on me nestles a stupid girl.

“I’m sorry to come round so late. There was a telephone call waiting for me when I got back. From the prison.”

“Well, what is it?”

He looked very weary.

“Your sister has changed her instructions to me. She will plead guilty.”

“But you can’t do that in a charge of murder.”

“She will make no defence. Tacitly, she will plead guilty.”

He put out a hand and rested it on my shoulder. I felt its pressure. So you did know, I thought, you knew all the time. I let it lie there for a moment, enjoying the contact, slipping imperceptibly towards the third stage of love: the stage of enjoyment.

“Good God, what’s that smell?” asked Bryan Orraman abruptly.

“Chips,” I said. “Chips.”

After he had gone and I was getting ready for bed I began to giggle hysterically. Our first tentative approach to an embrace, and I smelt of chips.

And then I thought about Jenny. The signals were up against Jenny all the way. It wasn’t natural.

I didn’t know what to make of it. I didn’t understand it at all.

Chapter Three

JENNY IS PRETTY. HAVE I TOLD YOU THAT? OR SHE HAD been. Now she was a ghost. A pale, thin creature hardly in the land of the living. I realised then what it would mean to Jenny to spend months, years, in prison. Some people are robust enough in personality to withstand it; Jenny was not, she was already part-destroyed.

There was a strange atmosphere surrounding her in the prison; there was no unkindness, no hint of roughness, but it was as if they had pegged her away in a remote world, out of touch, away from hope, as if she was no longer human. They had put her away in Limbo.

I saw her in a room which was a clean, ordinary room but with the shadow of the cell in it, that room with the high window and open lavatory in which Jenny had existed for days now. A woman police officer sat in the room with us but she stared at the wall; she was wearing a dark blue uniform with a badge on the lapels. I think it was when I first saw the badge I began to remember something that until then I had forgotten. The badge was an animal rampant, as the heralds say, and I think it was a lion. It reminded me that we had learnt about that lion in school.

The heart of the town was an old medieval franchise, and I recalled us reciting at school that a franchise ’is the delegation of public rights into private hands’, or that’s what it was in the Middle Ages, when the king (or so teacher said) could hand over police duties to a big landowner and get out of them himself while collecting a cash profit. This didn’t mean, as I remember teacher emphasising loyally, that the rights could be abused. If the job of keeping the peace wasn’t done properly then the king could resume the rights.

The rights of the franchise had dwindled and vanished and all that remained in King’s Bromwich was this tiny remnant.

The police force in this small area was called The Officers of the Peace of the City Franchise, and its men were known locally as Franchisers or Freemen. It had originally been under the control of one Serjeant of the Peace, but with the centuries it had expanded and grown and I believe it was now under a superintendent. Superintendent Marsh was the name I had written on a slip of paper in my handbag. This small police force was an island of autonomy, quite independent of the County Police, although I suppose it worked in with them. It was no toy, however, and it maintained a detective force of high skill. It had been one of the first police forces to set up a laboratory and maintain a scientific staff; it had developed a small training school for detectives. Development had been inspired possibly by the fact that two or three unusual murders had taken place within its precincts. The last of these murders had been dealt with by a bony quiet young man, then a sergeant and now the presiding superintendent. I suppose he would be about fifty. He had been used as a sort of bogeyman by local mothers in my youth on account of the powers said to lie beneath the quietness. I would be interested to meet him soon.

It was about Franchisers, and the ambiguous figure of the superintendent that all sorts of hints and suggestions were gathering in my mind. Justice is Money had been an axiom, apparently, in the Middle Ages. Perhaps it still was.

They did not, however, maintain a prison, and Jenny was lodged, as might be expected, in the county jail. But from the women’s uniform it seemed as though they had placed a member of their staff there to watch over her. The woman cleared her throat, glanced at me, and then went back to studying the wall again.

I suppose they all hated Jenny; the dead woman had after all been the wife of a colleague. Whatever had happened in that little house where Eddie and Ellen Chase had lived it remained true that Jenny had played her part in it.

Bryan Orraman had given me some advice. “Go easy,” he had said. “Go easy, she’s near breaking point.”

“I should have said she was beyond it.”

“No, she’s still putting up a good fight in her way”—there was almost respect in his voice. “But do as I say, go easy on her.”

“Remember that unless she changes her mind we’re not going to have any case to build up,” I pointed out grimly. He had got over his nerves and was on top again; I, on the other hand, what with love, the chips and Albert, felt much worse. I had also had my day of waiting, when I could do nothing and think of nothing but Jenny. The day had been enlivened by a long telephone call from Venetia and by nothing else.

“I’m going to act on the assumption that it will be changed. Try and dig something out about that family of hers. There must be plenty to dig, and they seem to have disappeared.”

I had telephoned Lester at the works, but he was not there. He was at home, I suppose, nursing himself, but I couldn’t telephone there as it was one of his meannesses not to have the telephone. I had also tried to reach my niece Bridget at the office where she had a job and she too was missing. Jenny’s family certainly were rallying round her; out digging deep shelters for themselves, probably, so that they would be safe anyway. I wondered who was looking after the younger children. Heaven help them if it was Bridget.

“Dig into the family,” Bryan Orraman had said, but I can’t say I was particularly keen for that to go too far, because family meant me, too, didn’t it? And there were one or two incidents in my life I’d rather Bryan Orraman knew nothing about.

“We are all of us guilty of putting Jenny where she is. Lester, her daughter Bridget, even me.”

“I include you,” said Bryan in a level tone. “I’m not counting you out.” Which was dear of him.

He motioned me to go forward into the anteroom. There was a man standing by the window and I think Bryan Orraman was surprised to see him. “Oh, hello, John,” he said. “Didn’t know you were up.”

“Just for the day. Got a customer here.”

“Not one of my boys?”

“No. In fact the Orraman Personal Rescue Scheme for boys seems to be doing well.” John was a tall, broad-shouldered Londoner in a neat dark suit. No one introduced us but I found out quite a lot about him later. I was sufficiently interested to inquire. He was John Coffin, a policeman from London. He was the Divisional Detective-Inspector for a district near the docks in south London, which meant that he was the keeper of the peace and conscience of a tough independent neighbourhood. He had a reputation for fair dealing, and just lately he had begun to earn one for cleverness because he had cracked one or two difficult murder cases. He was becoming famous in a small way.

A third man pushed through the door with that hereby-accident-done-on-purpose effect that policemen manage to achieve so effortlessly.

I suppose they were all there by chance, otherwise I might have thought they had come to look at me. The newcomer introduced himself: Superintendent Marsh of the City Franchise Police. He too was there on some other business, and indeed he looked deeply preoccupied and thoughtful with lines on his thin fair-complexioned face. He was in plain clothes, wearing a battered brown suit, the pockets of which were stuffed with papers and notebooks. He looked around him in a worried way.

“Bob not here yet?”

John shook his head without saying anything.

“The sort of business he’s on ought not to take him long.” Then he turned to me. “Glad to see you, Miss Partridge. I heard you’d be visiting here this morning. I’ll be glad when you’ve seen your sister. We’ll all be glad when you’ve seen her.”

“You want me to get more out of her than you’ve managed to?” I said bitterly. “Why worry, you’ve done pretty well, haven’t you?”

His thin, weathered pink face went a little deeper pink but he controlled his temper. “I suggest you remember there are two parties to this business. There was a woman killed, remember.”

“You’re not paid to be a public avenger,” I said cruelly. But I was wrong there, in a sense every policeman is paid to be a public avenger, to implement the blood feud, and to do it with due process of law. This is why we all enjoy accounts of murder trials: we are revengeful. Marsh was top in that scene, though, because he remained calm and I did not. And he had something more to say to me.

“By the way,” he said, “I understand you knew the dead woman?”

There was a moment while he let this little fact drop like a pebble into a pool, sending out its own pattern. It destroyed my last belief that he was there by chance.

“Did I know her?” I thought for a moment. “You’re wrong there.”

“Oh yes. She was at school with you and your sister.”

“I left school at fourteen, you know. That’s quite a few years ago. I can think of plenty of people I know better than the kids I was at school with.”

He seemed unconvinced. “This one was different. You grew up beside her and her sister. She was Ellen Gold then. You called her Nelly.”

I remembered her then; a little plump, black-eyed girl with curls. No angel either, she bit me once. No, I hadn’t forgotten Nelly.

“Oh well, that explains it. I’d forgotten. I wouldn’t know her married name, of course.”

“I see,” he nodded. “But you visited her sometimes in the weeks before this came? Your description fits with that of a woman”—he hesitated slightly—“whom the neighbours saw.”

So there we were, it was out. The little fact he had been leading up to. “What makes you think so? Listen, until you told me I had no idea this woman still existed. I didn’t know whether she was alive or dead.” Because I could put the ring of truth in that I could see he half believed me. He didn’t want to, but he found he was doing it.

“You were seen.”

“There’s millions of people like me in the world. If that’s the sort of evidence you’ve got against my sister there’s going to be trouble.”

“There’s going to be that all right,” he said sombrely.

In the background John Coffin was still watching everything. Either he didn’t want to talk or they weren’t letting him. He was a very alarming man, though, for all he was so quiet.

A bell buzzed very quietly in the near distance and as if it was a cue the door opened to summon me to my sister.

“You don’t always tell the truth, do you?” said Bryan Orraman pleasantly as he showed me to the door.

“Not always,” I said. “What about you?”

“Not a hundred per cent. I’ll tell you something: there aren’t millions of people like you in the world.” He eyed me with respect.

* * * * *

Ellen Chase had been Lester’s first sweetheart, and Jenny, I had to admit, had shown jealousy of her. Ellen was oddly enough a girl who aroused strong feeling although she was so quiet and dark and ordinary. This quality had been noticeable even at school where she was always in and out of trouble, and she seemed to have kept it up to the last.

Of course you’ve guessed by this time that I’d been a little in love with Lester myself. It takes a little love to work up the resentment I felt. He had taken me my first bunch of flowers, and I had started knitting a pair of gloves. (I’ve never knitted a stitch since, so some good came of it.) Then he let me down with a great big bump. I’ve hated manly men ever since. He didn’t know he was doing it; he just met Jenny.

Jenny was waiting for me in the room at the end of the corridor. Outside I wondered for a moment how I would feel when we met again. The last time I had seen her had been on Wolverhampton station three years ago when we met for a rushed ten minutes between a pantomime performance for me and a train for her. And whatever the film Brief Encounter may have made you feel about the romance of a station for meetings for lovers, as a meeting place for sisters it is not ideal. Jenny had a cold and I was a bit above myself, because I had just landed the job I wanted, a particularly juicy character part that I thought would catch the critics’ eyes (as it did). When one party is up and the other down it’s never very good, there is no meeting between them. It seemed so horribly likely that this position would be repeated again. For a moment I regretted my pretty clothes and good grooming, automatic to me now after years of practice. I love my good clothes, it is to me one of the smaller pleasures of success that I can now afford good clothes. It was no pleasure to me then as I saw Jenny, and saw her eye rest on me and imagined how I must look to her—over-dressed, self-confident.

Our gaze met, and she smiled. Ridiculously, doubtfully, amazingly, Jenny smiled. And the doubts and hesitations faded away. I put my arms round her shoulders and rested my cheek against hers. At that moment I would have sold Bryan Orraman, my career, anything down the river for Jenny.

Then she drew away and gave that little cough she always gave when she thought emotion had gone too far. Now I don’t want to give the wrong impression about Jenny. There was more to her than perhaps you’ve understood. There was always an astringency that her general air of softness and gentleness didn’t lead you to expect.

I just stood there with my chiffon hat wobbling on my head and let tears pour. Mercifully mascara doesn’t run any more, which is progress.

“Dry up, Pug,” she said huskily.

The fact that she called me Pug, a name we hadn’t used since I was thirteen, made me realise how thin was the layer of her self-control. Almost at once she started in a rapid gabble which made me realise too how often she had been obliged to repeat her story, how much she took it for granted that even those she loved would want nothing else but to hear it.

She was well into it before I even realised what she was talking about.

“It was the hot weather, you see, you know I always have a bad time in the hot weather. I’m on edge.”

How awful, I thought, if a charge of murder should rise because of the capacity of a woman’s thyroid gland to absorb, or not absorb, extra work. Every word she was saying was somehow getting her in deeper.

“And there she was, you see, and I did hit her. I meant to. I’d been thinking about it all the way.”

“Where were you, Jen, when Ellen was discovered?” I asked. It suddenly seemed an important question.

“I don’t know. I don’t know exactly when Ellen was found. Her mother found her and she went to hospital first.” She put her hand to her head. “But I don’t know where I’d be. I expect I was at home. After…after I had this row with Ellen, suddenly the importance of it seemed to flow away, and I thought, oh what a fool I’ve been. I went to lie down and I went to sleep. I remember thinking: when I wake up I’ll make it up to her some way. But there she was, already dead, or as good as…” Her voice tailed away, and she didn’t finish the sentence. I looked at her nonplussed.

“Tell me about hitting her, Jenny. What did you do exactly?”

It was a cruel question I suppose but in any case she didn’t answer it and hardly seemed to hear it. She was far away.

“She’s had a sedative,” said the policewoman, briefly, removing her eyes from the wall. She got up and gave her a little shake. But in a gentle way.

“I know you went there and slapped her face. But did you go there and kill her with a poker? I’ve got to know. I can face it all if I know.”

Jenny roused herself.

“You can face everything for me, Patsy, can’t you? Except the fact that I’m guilty. You can’t face that. But you don’t have to face the shut-up feeling, the hopelessness, the fear. I face that all the time. And I can’t.”

“Why did you change your plea? Why did you say you were guilty? Jenny, you must change it. You must make a defence.”

“It doesn’t make much difference, does it, really?” said Jenny bitterly. “Except to the lawyers and the people who look upon a trial as a free show.” She was trembling. “There just won’t be a show, that’s all. You call it a defence: I call it a show. I quarrelled with her and she died.” She put her head on her hands and began to cry.

“She’s off again,” said the policewoman resignedly.

I looked down at my sister. ’Oh, Jen,’ I thought, ’There’s so much you haven’t told me, so much, so much.’

And frankly there was a lot I hadn’t told her either.

I took her hand; it was red and swollen. I exclaimed at the sight of it. “Jenny, your hand? What is it?”

She looked down at it without interest. “Oh that’s my eczema. I often get it. You know that.”

“I’ll get you something for it.”

She shrugged; she wasn’t interested. With terror I could see she was withdrawing again. I tried the spur.

“You need help. You’ve seen Mr. Orraman?”

“Oh yes, he came here,” she said wearily. “As large as life with his dispatch case, and his papers and his notebooks, all neat and all in order. That’s all I am to him, an entry in a notebook, a paper in a file. He can afford to be clean and neat and sit in judgement.”

There was a surprising echo of Albert in her voice, and I realised that this was because their situations had so much in common; they were those about to be judged.

I realised too that owing to our relative positions the picture each of us had of the people we were meeting was sharply different. To me Bryan Orraman was an attractive, vital companion. But to Jenny he was an official figure, detached from her problems yet obliged to busy himself with them. Kind enough but not deeply concerned. There was dislike, even fear in her voice. I suppose it was the same with Mr. Marcus. To me he seemed a weak, puzzled, kindly figure, but I doubt if he appeared that way to Jenny.

And how did I seem? Was I outside her circle of pain and suspicion? Sadly I supposed I was.

I feared very much for my sister’s sanity. She was solitary, sick, and terrified. It seemed to me that she was enduring a process equivalent to brain-washing. I doubted if she could stand up to it. No longer was it a question of a verdict, of guilty or not guilty before a judge and jury. If Jenny, my sister, was to survive as a person I must get her out of prison now.

* * * * *

The authors of many of the plays I have appeared in would have spoken with one voice in declaring that husbands ought to be investigated. So far none of us had even mentioned Lester, although he had been on my mind all the time.

I thought the only thing to do now was to go and see him without warning—not to give him time to prepare for me. It was time anyway that someone told him a few hard home-truths, and that someone was going to be me.

I ought to have known by now that nothing goes as you expect it, that life always offers you the unexpected. The unexpected was that I should feel sorry for Lester.

It was years since I had seen their little house and the first shock was the big ’For Sale’ notices plastered all over it. The second shock was Lester scrubbing down the front door and clearing up mess.

“Oh, hello, Patsy,” he said awkwardly. “Thought you’d be turning up.” He stood up, a check apron round his waist. He had got fatter and his hair was grey at the temples.

“Oh, Lester,” I said as I looked in dismay at the soot and pebbles and mud on Jenny’s pansy bed.

“Not locals,” he said. “They’ve been pretty decent. Just nuts from outside. Think it’s funny, I suppose.” He went on mopping up. “Know how many times I’ve done this? Twice a day. Twice a day since it started, since Jenny…” he hesitated. “Since Jenny went.”

“Here, let me help.”

“Not you, Patsy, spoil your Paris dress.” That was so like Lester, as soon as you were working up a bit of sympathy for him he knocked you back on your heels again. And silly too, Paris dress indeed, it was Manchester, not even London.

And then I saw he was raw-skinned, every nerve hopping, and I said nothing. Indeed, from his point of view I was just another onlooker.

“I see you’re getting out.”

He looked at the notices. “Oh, they were up before. We decided on all that months back. Or Jenny decided.”

“Jenny?” I inquired sceptically. “She decided to move? She loved it here.” Indeed it had been one of my grievances that Jenny was dug into her little house and garden.

Lester went on mopping and scrubbing for a while without answering. When he had finished he said, “I don’t think you have any idea what things have been like here this last summer and winter. You haven’t been around. You don’t know. Don’t get the idea that all this trouble started just last week, that it hit us out of the blue. No, it’s been brewing up for months. If it hadn’t been this it would have been something else. Jenny’s sick. She’s a sick girl.”

“Do you mean there was nothing between you and Ellen Chase?” I asked bluntly.

“Oh I knew her all right, but there was nothing else. It was all in Jenny’s mind.”

“Well, something must have put it in Jenny’s mind?”

He covered his face momentarily with his hand. “Do you think so? Well, you’ve got a lot to learn. Jenny didn’t need something to put it into her mind, it was right there in her mind of itself. It just grew.”

“That doesn’t sound like Jenny.”

“You haven’t seen your Jenny since you were kids together. Face this, Patsy, Your Jenny, the nice, shy, quiet, motherly Jenny, doesn’t exist.”

He let me go inside the house. I could tell he didn’t particularly want me to but I’d been walking in and out of his houses for nearly twenty years at intervals and he couldn’t think of any way to stop me.

He’d been doing his best to keep it in order, I will say that for him, but the trouble with being a man whose wife does everything is that he doesn’t know when to stop.

Suddenly I remembered the two boys and Bridget.

“Where are the children?”

“I sent the boys to their Gran’s. I sent them two months ago. That’ll give you some idea of how things have been here.”

“And Bridget?” I asked running a finger over a dusty shelf. “She’s not much of a little housekeeper.”

“She’s out,” he said after a pause. “She’s out.”

I could see he did not want me to go beyond into the little room by the kitchen. I wondered if there was someone there.

I threw the door open. My eyes wandered slowly round the room, a neat enough little room but dusty and untidy like the rest. Someone had pulled open a cupboard, and when they had done so a whole heap of stored-up bottles and glasses had tumbled forward on the floor.

I looked at them in horrified comprehension.

“That’s what I’m clearing up too,” he said bitterly. “She must have been at it for months on the quiet. Every day I’d come home and there she’d be all neat and herself and all the time when I was away she’d been—soaking.” He kicked at a bottle with his foot. “They say they get clever at hiding it from their friends. This is more than clever, this is genius.”

A terrifying picture of Jenny was gradually building up, a picture which made it harder and harder, more and more difficult to call her innocent. The Jenny I remembered, the calm, home-loving gentle Jenny was one thing, but this highly-strung neurotic, with a taste for gin, was another and one that few would hesitate to believe capable of hysterical murder.

I looked round the room, it was dirty, but there was a sewing basket and a pile of magazines and a bundle of knitting. A room is a good indication of a woman’s character, and this clutter was, I would have said, the bedrock of Jenny’s character.

All this disorder was comparatively recent too. A few months ago Jenny had been thinking of new frocks, preserves and spring hats.

It coincided, then, with the shop-lifting. And that brought us to Bridget.

“Are you all right?” asked Lester suddenly.

“Yes,” I said. I was probably turning green.

“Well, you’d better watch out,” he said impatiently, irritably. “Both you girls. My mother went at forty-five.” I suppose he thought he’d had enough, poor dear, of the women of his family.

I had got dust on my hands and I went to wash them in Jenny’s bathroom. I washed them on some bright pink, loathsome soap. As I came out I scratched my hands thoughtfully.

Lester was waiting for me outside.

“There is a little something you are keeping from me, isn’t there?” I asked gently. “Some little thing. You and I know each other well enough for that!”

“I swear there isn’t.”

“I never set much store by that sort of talking. I can tell you, Lester, you’re not being completely straight with me.”

“Well, if you’re right, I’m not likely to come out with it then,” he said with spirit. “You know me and I know you.”

“I’ll get it out of Bridget then. If she knows. Yes, she does know, I can see by your face. She’s probably a part of it. Where the hell is Bridget? Don’t think I was taken in by the ’out’ business. I know a lie when I hear one.”

“Out,” he repeated. “She’ll be back.”

“So that’s it,” I said. “Bridget’s gone. And you don’t know where.”

* * * * *

Not far away in Halesowen a little fat man was sitting, eating bread and cheese, and speculating. He did that every evening so we can be sure he was doing it that night. Speculating was his job, and bread and cheese he regarded as the ideal supper for a bachelor, creating no cooking and, with care, no washing up. He licked his knife and popped another pickled onion into his mouth.

I didn’t know about any of this at the time but as he always did this and as he was as regular in his habits as a sturdy little alarm-clock he must have done so then.

He stretched his feet, which were propped up on a chair, and sighed. Speculating was hard on the feet. Harder than anyone who didn’t have his job could suppose, certainly harder than he had imagined when he took it up. Speculating might begin and end in the armchair, but in the middle were long stretches of mooching round, watching and listening and this needed to be done on two feet. It was hard on the brain too, there was no doubt that to do his job you had to be a clever man. To do it well and stay unharmed you had to be very clever.

This day had been particularly tiring because of the heat, and because he had found himself walking miles around the back streets of Birmingham. The commission had been to investigate the background of a certain party. No one knew better than the cheese-eater how profitable the right sort of information, if arrived at, could be.

He got out his notebooks, and began to write slowly and carefully; he had trained himself to type because on reports it looked classier, not to say cleaner, but he preferred lead pencil for his own use. A photograph slipped from the book. It was the photograph of a girl in a light bathing dress with a bright smile and long, flowing hair. On the back was written: ‘Charming Charity, songs, dancing and patter, free from the 1st of January, 1956’

He clicked his teeth and put it back on the table. That belonged to his other job. There had in any case never been any hope of finding a job for Charming Charity, like her namesake best seen at home.

Then the telephone rang. “Hello, Tom speaking. Of course it’s me. Don’t be so cautious, you know me voice.”

He listened a bit longer. “What, lay off? But I’ve only just started. Getting interesting too, I tell you…That’s ungrateful, Albert, after the interest I’ve taken. Well, you’ll have to pay me expenses…”

The relationship between Tom and Albert had a long history behind it. They were collaborators and friends. Tom Crammer did not always place the very greatest reliance on the information provided by Albert but he always enjoyed getting it. Albert always presented his items with an interesting flavour. Albert knew how to dress things up so that even a simple picture of a man crossing a road became a vivid image of pursuit. I suppose he saw it that way.

But lately there had been a serious undercurrent to their association. Albert and Tom (whose business, when all was said and done, did not often involve anything more serious than a disputed divorce case) had come upon the whiff of real corruption. They had snuffed round it now for some time like a couple of interested but nervous dogs. The trouble was, as Albert said, it was so close to home.

Tom listened hard. “What? Are you sure? You’re putting the wind up me now, Albert. Right. I’ll be off. No use waiting is there?”

Then he put on his shoes and got a bag out of the cupboard, packed it, and put the cheese and bread away in the cupboard. He put a light coat on and picked up his hat.

Before he left he telephoned a telegram to an address in Margate. “Expect me tomorrow.”

He tiptoed down the stairs.

The stairs creaked behind him. He turned his head to listen.

He stood there in doubt, not knowing whether he had been in time in his flight or not.

He soon knew…

Albert too was putting the telephone down and quietly moving away from the instrument, but Mr. Marcus heard him and came padding over.

* * * * *

I went to Ellen Chase’s funeral which took place the day after the inquest. I told no one of my intention although I had considered it deeply. It was bad taste, you may say, but bad taste is a matter of proportion: you don’t worry about bad taste when your house is burning down. I felt it was important to me to go to Ellen’s funeral. Even to myself I could hardly elucidate the motives in my mind. But make no mistake, I went humbly and sadly.

There was no paraphernalia of mourning about Ellen’s funeral, no flowers and no black clothes. The service conveniently took place in the lunch hour so that everyone could attend. In fact it was a convenient funeral all round, except for poor Ellen. There was a small crowd of people up in front of the church and I placed myself in a seat several rows back. One or two of the faces seemed familiar as if I had seen them once in a dream and forgotten them, as it goes with dreams, until this very minute. They stared at me but did not know me. I was not surprised. If they were creatures in a dream to me, it was clear that for them I had no real existence. I have noticed before that people in a state of great emotion are the most withdrawn of people.

I joined in the prayers for Ellen. We offer up our wishes and hopes for the dead, we try to protect them with safeguards as if any danger we know of could still touch them. But perhaps in the end the dead are immune and it is for ourselves that we offer prayers.

I trusted so for Ellen’s sake; there was still a powerful lot of evil rolling round loose in this neighbourhood.

It was one of those dull, sultry days that you get so often in the midland counties far from the sea. It did not rain but the sky was grey and cloudy and the temperature high in the seventies. After the short service I stood on the steps outside the church and let Ellen’s mourners walk past me. No one came up to me, no one spoke, not even to each other, they just moved silently forward.

There was a terrible feeling about this funeral: they didn’t like Ellen, and they didn’t like each other very much either.

No photographers or reporters were present, possibly because the attention of the case was focused upon Jenny, not Ellen who was dead and about to be tucked away.

Two women pushed out in front of me. They were going on to the cemetery to which I would not go. I never really saw their faces as they kept their heads down and kept close to each other. They walked like two hard-pressed little animals (they were tiny women, hardly five feet either of them) with quick, anxious steps. Although they rushed past me I saw them pause irresolutely beside a group of people who had come out of the church ahead of them. This was a group of six people, and they, together with the two women, had really formed the nucleus of the whole congregation; they were the kindred. The older man with his wife gave me a little nod but I saw at once that it was a purely protective bit of politeness and they did not really think they knew me. His two sons stood by him, holding their hats and looking decent, quiet, nice people. There was a close family resemblance between all three men, a redness, a hairiness, a thickness of bone. The wives were different: one, a much younger woman than her husband, looked cross and put out, although still very pretty, and the other, a good, kind woman, looked embarrassed. I saw this woman put her hand on her husband’s arm and murmur something. He hung his head and looked wretched. So there was no joining forces between the two groups; the two little women stood still for a moment, then, as if moved by one set of wheels, they swung round and trotted down the steps into a waiting car.

Not a word had been said.

But there was someone missing. This play had been written for one more character: the plot depended upon it. I had played in enough dramas to sense that one character remained off stage. But who was it? I went round the circle of names in my mind. Is it you? Is it you? Is it you?

Broodingly I watched the small group of mourners slip away into the King’s Bromwich crowd. There was one woman left. She sauntered slowly forward. A quiet woman with big, dark eyes and white hair done in a neat bun beneath her good blue hat, and her I did recognise. I recognised her graceful swaying walk (always secretly my envy) and the way she folded her hands in front of her. I had watched that figure walk down a corridor in front of me often enough, and sat looking up at those folded hands.

More than that, hadn’t she been a close friend of Mrs. Cowan whose baby I had pushed out? Mrs. Cowan’s baby had been one of the many I had pushed out more for the coppers I’d earned than for any love of babies. Baby-minding had been one of the main moneymaking activities the girls of my age group took up in King’s Bromwich. It wasn’t entirely mercenary. You went for the highest money, yes, but a pretty baby and a handsome equipage had a prestige value too. Baby Cowan had not rated high. Lord, I could see Baby Cowan’s fat, cross face now, and smell the peculiar sticky smell of Virol that always hung about him; I could even see the pimple on his poor little nose. Mrs. Cowan’s husband had been a school-teacher and so had the woman I was watching now. Miss Le Boeuf: formerly a teacher at St. Caradoc Road’s Junior Mixed School, now retired. She had been my teacher. Yes, and Jenny’s and Ellen’s also.

I watched her walk away.

She was wearing nice clothes, and I remembered that she had made a good marriage. But she had kept in touch. Or, I thought, knowing Ellen, she had kept in touch. Without warning, released into my mind by the reference to Miss Le Boeuf’s marriage came the knowledge who was missing.

Eddie Chase had not attended his own wife’s funeral.

PART TWO

THE FACE I USED TO KNOW

Chapter Four

HOW OFTEN DO YOU SEE YOUR OWN FACE? REALLY SEE IT straight, as it is? And not with all the accumulated memories of how it was when you were young, when you were sad and when you were happy, when you were not as you are now? I suppose I see my face more objectively than most people because I am an actress, but the truth is that I don’t see it any more clearly than you do…for when I look in my mirror in the theatre I am studying it professionally, turning it really into another face, a public face, a face for the show.

I turned from Bridget’s photograph to my face and studied it in the mirror and Bridget’s young face seemed to look through it vividly, in all its passion. Children are often more like the siblings than their own parents, and Bridget was very like me, my bone echoed her bone. But there was an intensity and earnestness in the girl that I lacked, the less actress for it, maybe.

The police, and notably Superintendent Marsh, thought it was me. But I knew that it was not. It had been Bridget. She had been mistaken for me. We are very alike. She had been calling on Ellen. I could understand that she might try to see Ellen if any gossip (and of course it would) reached her ears. I was not at all sure that it was an accident she had been mistaken for me, there is twenty years between us, Bridget must have dressed the part. And this involvement was something that in the circumstances I could not allow. I had not seen Ellen for twenty years. True. But Ellen had seen me. I had not been quite open with the police.

Bridget had her own little reasons for murder, she was a thief, a petty thief, but a protected thief, and it was Jenny who had protected her. Was she still going on doing it? I was remembering some things about Ellen! I was remembering some of her little ways. She was capable of blackmail, an honest blackmail; a tell-tale, we called her at school, a ‘you-tell-teacher-what-you-did-or-I’ll-tell’ girl. She was good at it too: a dangerous gift for a policeman’s wife. It was more than possible she knew something to Bridget’s disadvantage. For that matter Ellen had something against me. And if it had got to the ears of Josiah L. Fish, producer and man of the theatre, I would never get the part he was dangling before me in his new show. And it wasn’t just any part. It was my part, my chance, my opportunity to be what Venetia was. And I’m not sure too if what Ellen knew wouldn’t have landed me in prison. She wasn’t the only one who knew it, of course, but she was far and away the most vocal.

But it was one thing to guess where Bridget had been on a particular afternoon and another to know where she was now. I might have been worried. But I wasn’t. That was one thing you could say about Bridget. She wouldn’t be dead, she was a fighter, somewhere she’d be in there fighting for her life; she wouldn’t give up, as Jenny had given up.

You might think I should have been looking for her, but in the first place I wouldn’t have any idea how to start, and secondly, I had an uneasy feeling that Bridget herself would burst into my life before long.

Bryan Orraman touched my arm tenderly. This was ominous…Tenderness too early in a love affair almost always means it is to be extinguished: not enough vitality (the cause of the quarrels), you see.

We had come a long way since our first meeting in his offices, at least I had, I was by now blissfully heading for the third stage of love where small things seemed significant. You wouldn’t think a hard-headed old mog like me could feel it. And of course I didn’t truly. To begin with there was Jenny; I couldn’t be happy with that on my mind, and then too I had the disconcerting impression that Bryan Orraman was nervous of me. Kind, friendly, affectionate, because he was that sort of man; even then I knew he was nice, but nervous. It was all that murder in my family.

Venetia had telephoned to say that my understudy had played my part perfectly, a state of affairs not exactly calculated to carry cheer to any actress’s heart. Still she was such a nice girl, and so pretty that it would have been downright mean to have hoped for failure. “I expect the dresses are too small,” had been my only hopeful comment. Venetia had laughed. “The hat’s a little too large,” she had said in that large, deep, quiet voice she adopts at will. “She hasn’t got a swollen head yet.”

Bryan picked up the photograph. “If you’re looking for the girl Bridget, she’s not at the address she gave. And what’s more she probably never was there.”

“I didn’t have an address.”

“The police did though,” he said, looking at the photograph. “Pretty girl. Or will be when she’s thirty.” That was the sort of man he was, it gave me hope.

“Well, I’m not really worried about her. She’ll get found. I’m worried about Jenny.”

“Yes.” He studied the papers on the table in front of him. “She’s the one with the charge of murder to face.”

We had been working in the hotel room, collecting material for Jenny’s defence. Because there had to be a defence. I knew that Jenny in the end would waken from her daze, and fight. But we couldn’t wait.

“I think you have to face it, Patsy. She killed.”

“You don’t have to give judgement.”

“I’m not trying to.” But he was cross with me.

“Well, she isn’t the only one in this family,” I said sombrely. “I’ve killed a man myself, if it comes to that.”

“What?” He swung round so fast that the papers on the table fluttered to the floor.

“Do you mind if I don’t go into it now?” I said wearily. “It’s not my day for confidences.”

I think it was the first time he saw me as I really might be, not enveloped in the romantic aura of a successful actress. He saw my kinship to Jenny. He was old enough to know that guilt does not necessarily mean badness. He didn’t think me wicked any more than I thought he was. Sadly I recognised that he was really a kind man. He didn’t want me or Jenny to be hurt. If the mincing-machine of the law managed to go round without mincing us in it he would be the first to be glad. But he couldn’t stop it, the law was like that. It was a painful moment: we had taken a little sharp, short step towards the truth. For me it was like ripping a bandage off a half-healed wound. The stitches held but it was a whole pain. For him, of course, it wasn’t quite so bad; he was still a little confused.

But it saddened and weakened me. I wanted to say: don’t forget I’m an actress; my truth is not necessarily your truth, my part not necessarily the part you gave me.

“Do you mind if we get back to Bridget? Where is it she isn’t?”

He looked at me oddly. “I don’t say she isn’t. I say she probably isn’t…She left a rather rum address.”

* * * * *

The sun was shining on the place where Bridget was staying. Shining and shining, right through. It was a bare, empty place. There was not a house at all. A house might have stood there once, but not for a long time. It was a bare, scrubby patch of ground between two shops, a grocer’s and a cheap shoe-shop.

I went into the grocer’s, and after buying a packet of biscuits said:

“Was there ever a house next door?”

The woman nodded. “There was once.”

“Bombed?”

“No.” She seemed to feel this was a bleak statement and added: “It just fell down. People who lived there said the rats ate the foundations away. But I don’t know. We get a lot of underground subsidence here, you know. Old mineworkings. There are some of the parts of the road you ought to say a prayer as you walk along.”

“This house is still here.”

She shrugged. “I’m not counting on it. I don’t live here and I take my money home each night.”

I stood outside in the sunshine blinking, and wondering whether to go away.

But my instinct about Bridget had been right. A cat wandered across the road and sat and looked at me. A small boy followed out of the shadow into the sunlight. He was licking an ice-cream and could hardly speak, but from the look on his face he was practically inarticulate anyway. Which was perhaps why Bridget chose him as a messenger, he wouldn’t be liable to give away any information.

“There’s a cat following you, miss,” he said, in a deep, broad Black-Country growl. Mum came from Oldbury, I should think. I looked round. There was in the hotel, which was not so far away, an aged and rakish torn-cat who trailed affectionately after me everywhere. I don’t know what made him take to me, we had nothing in common except a determination not to call ourselves beaten. But we were not reckless fighters. We had been in the fight long enough to know the penalties and that we did not mean to pay them. The chambermaid said to call him Tip. I’m surprised the old cat put himself out enough to follow me. I suppose the truth is he was curious. “We’ve not met,” I said, avoiding Tip’s bleary eye.

“’Course you have. Everyone knows old Tip,” and he bent down and rubbed the fur of Tip’s leathery ear. Tip didn’t purr or show any sign of appreciation; he remained stolidly there, watching and waiting.

“I know how,” the boy said. “Bridget said ‘Big blue eyes, hair any colour it’s dyed that moment, and a great pair of weepers hanging round the back of her hat’.”

He could talk then, in fact he could talk more than I’d bargained for: my hat did have streamers from a rather charming chiffon bow, Venetia would have objected to the word weepers. The word was a curiously old-fashioned one for him to use. But the Black Country was like that, full of unconscious archaisms. The Black-Country accent sounds uncouth and clumsy…and then you begin to realise it is not far removed from the pleasing country accents of the Warwickshire and Worcestershire villages, the home of Shakespeare’s rustics. The notes are submerged and distorted, but it is there.

This reflects the whole state of the countryside; as you drive through the Black Country you see villages swallowed up in the industrial area, half submerged but still recognisably villages. The early industrial processes of the nineteenth century were on a small scale, they were village industries and were often ones that could be carried on in one small household, all making for independence and vitality. The nailer and the small forges were typical.

“And where is Bridget?” I was following him across the rough ground. It was easier for him because he wore flat, white shoes and I was wearing gun-metal kid with stiletto heels. He looked round impatiently. “Come on. I’ve another job after this one. Come on, up this way, back of Raybould’s Forge.”

Raybould’s Forge was a long, low building and there was indeed the noise of distant hammering rather like the sounds at the beginning of The Ring where all the dwarfs are busily at work. I don’t know what Raybould made in his forge except that it wasn’t magic rings. If magic rings could be made anywhere then the Black Country would be making them but, as it was, Raybould made nails or brass door-knockers or hairpins. It was a small forge and I dare say its profits were in proportion, but no doubt Raybould was a happy man; he had his own business and was his own master. The Londoner would just as soon be part of a large combine but the Midlander likes to be his own boss. The risks are more, but the pleasures are fiercer, and besides, the chances of fixing the income tax are greater.

“Come on. Hurry up. Bridget’ll be hopping. She isn’t half in a paddywhack this week.”

I digested this information. “And what’s Bridget to you? Do you work for her?” I looked into his fair, ice-creamy face, and I saw he was older and sharper by far than I had supposed.

“Work for her?” He had brought me up to a narrow door. “Work for her? Not more than I can help, you bet.” He banged on the door. “She’s my sister-in-law.” I received this news in stunned silence; he went on banging. I had not noticed this house but it stood behind a fence at the back of Raybould’s Forge. It was an unobtrusive, grubby house, sole survivor of what had once been a row of those red-brick bow-fronted houses which have so prominent a place in English family life. I wondered what sort of family lived there now.

Bridget opened the door herself, almost as if she had been standing there waiting for us, and I saw at once that she was not angry or cross, but distraught, distracted with worry. And there was something else too, she had changed, she was plumper, prettier, more solid, more of a person. This suggested to me that her unhappiness was not of long standing; Jenny had been miserable and unhappy for months, but not Bridget; she had found her feet, been happy. There was something odd in that.

Her appearance in itself was a shock. I have seldom seen a girl more loaded. She was covered with bright-coloured jewellery, gold bracelets were clamped on her wrist, big bird-cages hung from her ears, she had on a bright blue (and I must admit it was charming) necklace, and she was wearing a wedding ring.

“Hiya, jewel-box,” said her brother-in-law.

“Shut up,” said Bridget without looking at him. “And pop off,” she added tolerantly as if she didn’t expect him to pop, and for that matter he didn’t.

“Hello, Aunty.”

“You know I hate being called Aunty,” and I went past her into the house. And thus irritably, characteristically, we took up our acquaintance with each other. And it had to be that moment when the pull of affection asserted itself. I liked her, and wanted to understand her. You don’t always want to understand people just because they are good, you know. Sometimes you want to understand them because they are naughty.

“Patsy, then.” Bridget’s eyes followed me as I went into the house but she herself stood there still, then she turned again and looked up and down the street. There was something about the gesture, something of habit, of practice, that struck me.

“What are you doing?”

“Looking,” she said, her eyes still on the street. She stood there for a second, then drew in a sighing breath and shut the door. “Just looking.”

“You in trouble, Bridget?” I said bluntly.

“Trouble,” she laughed. “We’re all in trouble, aren’t we? Not even you are out of it, are you? Met Mr. Orraman yet?” And she laughed again. It wasn’t an unkind laugh but it was shockingly adult.

“I always thought you were such a happy family,” I said, puzzled.

Her face began to pucker up.

“Pull yourself together and tell me about it.”

It wasn’t at all the story I had expected to hear. Not really a story of love and romance but of two stray young birds befriending each other. Why these two, Enoch and Bridget, chose to get married I don’t know, for they seemed to love each other more out of pain than passion; they might as well have adopted each other. She had kept it a secret from her father.

“And the bracelets, Bridget?” I said gently, touching them with my fingers.

She smiled. “His idea. He thought I’d been deprived. And that if I had all the pretty things I wanted then I’d stop wanting other people’s.” She sounded wistful. I looked at her sadly, as if she, poor magpie, would ever stop wanting other people’s treasures.

“And how did you know I was here?” I asked suddenly, another thought striking me.

She looked at me blankly. “But Enoch saw you. You met him outside Bryan Orraman’s.”

So Enoch was the boy with the barrow.

“And how did he know me?”

“Photograph. Oh hell. You look like me!”

“I’d like to see Enoch,” I observed. “Where is he?”

“Working,” said Bridget briefly. The little boy made a sort of snuffling noise, and she turned indignantly. “So he is!”

“What all night? And today? You don’t know where he is. None of us do,” said the boy; he looked at her earnestly, half-frightened by what he was saying but wholly convinced of its truth. “He went out of this house yesterday and we’ve none of us seen him since.”

Enoch Flavell was missing.

Now it was out in the open Bridget seemed glad to talk. “And I’m so frightened he might be in trouble,” whispered Bridget. “He’s been so odd lately.”

“You’re dead right,” I thought, but did not say it aloud.

“You don’t think he’s just”—I hesitated—“well, cleared out?”

Bridget echoed me ironically. “One solid, happy little family. One family. Only I was the Black Sheep. I was the one to watch out for. I might lie or steal or probably worse.”

“You did steal, you know,” I said defensively.

“Have you ever stopped to ask why? Why I did it?”

I just looked at her. I’ve never been one of those who automatically like mixed-up adolescents. I’m not romantic that way.

“Why did you go on the stage?” she went on. “That’s your flight from reality, isn’t it?”

“Well, not quite,” I began, but Bridget took no notice. “Because we’re not one solid little family, that’s why. Just a collection of people who don’t get on very well but have the bad luck to love each other.”

“It can’t ever be bad luck to love someone.”

“You say that?” Bridget laughed. “You, with your experience? I, after my eighteen years, know better.”

“I after my thirty-seven years know better still,” I said dryly. “It’s worth it in the end,” and I said this knowing the feeling I had for Bryan Orraman. “It may not be better for them, the people you love, for let’s face it, love’s not always a gift, but for you in the end, it is worth it.”

She looked at me, half-sceptical, half-convinced, there was a good strong reason working on her for conviction and I knew it. “And, Bridget, you love someone now.”

Bridget closed her eyes. “No, you don’t know about us here. He wouldn’t do that, he couldn’t.” But you’re not quite sure all the same, I thought, looking at her face.

“Go to the police?”

Bridget laughed. Again that adult laugh. “Ellen was married to a policeman, wasn’t she? Don’t forget that, Aunt Patsy.”

I knew then that Bridget and her Enoch were mixed up with the death of Ellen Chase. Bridget had implicitly admitted it. And yet even as she did so she unconsciously but strongly asserted her innocence of murder.

But she was knowledgeable.

I was not at the bottom of things with Bridget yet. As I looked in her child’s eyes I knew that Bridget was hovering on the edge of complete comprehension. She, if anyone did, had all the pieces in her hands. And any moment now, she would see the facts as they were and would say “I know”. I hoped I was around when this happened.

Because you see one side of a picture very strongly you fall into the error of assuming everyone sees the picture the same way too. I did this with the police: I assumed that they and I saw the same picture of the crime.

I saw it as an ordinary enough murder, a murder of domestic issues. In this connection I was having thoughts about Ellen’s husband. There was not a shred of evidence to connect him with her death—not a shred. And people seemed to be falling over backwards to keep his name out of it. Perhaps this was because he was a policeman. I assumed that the police had seized upon Jenny so rapidly because Ellen Chase was a colleague’s wife. I assumed they were looking for revenge.

In short I had no idea of the sort of trouble they really had on their hands.

It was ironical: the Franchise Police and I both had trouble, genuine trouble, and we couldn’t meet face to face and talk about it. They had their reason and I had mine.

Bridget went to the window and looked out. Then she started to cry helplessly. “One night and almost two days,” she said. Little Brother who had been drinking all this conversation in, needless, to say, also started to grizzle.

Bridget looked down at him. He looked a sight. A long long day of eating ice-cream and loafing down the streets had left marks on his appearance, there was a white moustache of dried cream round his lips, chocolate round that, mud round his neck and up and down his cotton shirt. Now he was crying and mixing up the lot. He came over to Bridget and leaned against her. They were fond of each other, and she touched his head.

Then I saw her hands.

I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed them before except that I suppose I was distracted by the glitter of the jewellery.

They were red and blotchy and puffy.

She tidied up the little boy, not expertly, indeed I dare say Enoch’s little brother could have made a better job of it himself, but gently and with compassion. I saw the little boy had a spreading dark bruise on his cheek and Bridget’s fingers touched it tenderly. She met my eyes. “He hasn’t got a mother,” she said.

“He’s got a Dad, though,” I said, looking at the bruise, a hand had done that. “Or did the dog do it?”

She led the way into the back room. Just inside the room she hesitated for a minute as she cleared away traces of tears and tidied her dress and visibly took herself in hand as if she was an adult, about to go into a room full of children. I soon saw why. We were in a back kitchen, clean and neat and gay. A large family of children were seated round a big kitchen table covered with a white cloth and with tea already laid. There was bread and jam and a cake and what looked like a jar of fish paste. At one end of the table was a small plate of sardines. It was not a rich tea; they were poor here, then.

They raised clean expectant faces to Bridget who, with a composed air, took her place behind the teapot. She looked at me. “Bread,” she commanded briefly.

As I cut bread I reflected that this was the last thing I had expected, that Bridget’s incursions into crime and marriage should install her as the head of a large family, with me cutting the bread for it.

After the first shock had worn off and I could take them in I saw there were five in all, three boys, including Little Brother, and two girls, their ages ranged from sixteen or so downwards. The two eldest boys sat up by Bridget in clean white shirts and gay ties. Bridget managed them all, handing round tea, buttering the bread and keeping the younger ones off the sardines, which were reserved for the two wage-earners at the top. This was the Flavell family.

There was a vacant chair at the bottom of the table and I suppose this was where Enoch sat.

“Here, what about me, don’t I get a cup?” grumbled a voice. Lifting my head from the bread (and what a lot of bread-cutting you do when you have a family of that size) I saw, for the first time, that a man was sitting in an armchair by the fire. He had a dazed look as though something had hit him recently.

“I told you I’d be angry if you got drunk and hit one of the children again,” said Bridget crisply, but she poured him a cup of tea. “Here.”

“Aw, I didn’t hit out, I fell.” He limped over. “I didn’t mean no harm. But you think I’m a bad old lot.” He looked at Bridget hopefully to see if she would contradict him. She didn’t.

Little Brother, seizing his chance, had whipped a sardine. “No” said Bridget. “Put it back.”

“I earn too. I earned three shillings today.”

“You kept it all though. Didn’t put any in the housekeeping.”

“Have mine,” said one of the boys at the top. He had never taken his eyes off me ever since I set foot in the room.

They were a funny crew, all silently eating. I rather wondered what Enoch would have been like sitting at the end of his table. I never doubted that it was his table and that he had dispossessed the grumbler by the fire.

The grumbler was getting more alert, the tea had stimulated him. He looked up at me suspiciously, and poor chap, he had cause for suspicion. “Who’s that woman?” No one answered, for that matter they couldn’t, for Bridget had not introduced me. The Little Brother piped up. “It’s her Aunty,” he said with unfeeling precision.

There was a sound from outside and Bridget got up and stood listening. A car door slammed.

A big black car was drawn up outside the house. Bryan Orraman and the man called John Coffin whom I had seen at the prison got out and came towards the door. With them was a policeman from the Franchisers. Not one I knew.

“Do you know anything about a boy called Enoch Flavell?” asked the policeman.

Bridget drew in a sharp breath.

“Well, perhaps you call him Favell,” he said impatiently. “He calls himself different things.”

“You know I do,” said Bridget, her eyes on Bryan.

“He lives here, anyway,” said Little Brother.

“He’s a friend of mine,” said Bryan Orraman gently to Bridget. “I’m not out for him, you know.”

“That’s your way of putting it.”

“Look, I think it’s quite important that we get hold of him first. I’ve had some information.”

“You sound like a policeman…”

I saw a quick smile flip across the other man’s face. He was moving gently round the room taking everything in. He was a tallish, thickset man, slightly younger, I should judge, than Bryan Orraman, and with bright, attractive eyes.

“I had a telephone call a short while ago. The person who telephoned couldn’t do more than mutter a few words, he was sick or injured…but I thought I recognised the voice as Enoch’s. I think he’s needing help, Bridget, and we ought to get to him. He’s in trouble.”

Bridget did not answer for a moment. “How did you know it was Enoch?”

Orraman sighed. “He’s got the stoutest Black-Country accent I’ve ever heard; drunk or dying I think I’d know his voice.”

There was a pause. “He went to see Tom Crammer,” said Bridget helplessly, and she turned back to the window.

“Tom Crammer,” I said surprised. “Good Lord, I’d forgotten the old boy lived in King’s Bromwich.”

“Halesowen,” said Bridget without turning round.

Tom Crammer, Theatrical Agent and Detective. The old man was famous from John O’ Groats to Oxford Circus, or infamous, depending how you looked at it. I doubt if he ever got anyone a job in a theatre, but he had his uses, no doubt about that. He could give you inside information about every prominent theatrical and café society figure. In fact it was popularly supposed that he had come by his twin jobs via a position as a window cleaner. But he really had roots in the theatre. My father had known him when he was the most unconvincing red-nosed comedian touring the provinces and heaven knows there was competition. I don’t think anyone took Tom seriously as a theatrical agent but maybe he did better as a detective, although I doubt it.

The man from London gave a quiet whistle. “And his wife has put in a report that Tom’s missing. He didn’t get off the ten-ten train the same as he’d promised.”

“Well, Enoch couldn’t come to harm with old Tom,” I said.

“Listen, Aunty,” said Bridget from the window. “You’re being smart and witty and worldly, but the fact is Enoch’s gone, gone, gone,” and tears were pouring from her eyes. “I’m scared,” she said.

* * * * *

Tom Crammer was established on a main road in Halesowen. He had his office above a cinema, which was perhaps his idea of a good spot to attract custom. There was a discreet brass plate by the door. The door was locked.

Bryan Orraman peeped in the letter-box. “Heaps of letters on the floor. Not much else to see. Door gives straight on to a flight of stairs.” Those stairs were known in the Profession as the Scala di Seta.

A fly buzzed out through the letter-box and settled on Bryan’s face. He brushed it away absently.

“Tom isn’t there.”

“Isn’t he?” said the other man. He raised his face from the door. “Let’s hope not anyway.” He had a strange look on his face. He was by no means a poker face, he was lively and volatile, but the expressions were not always easy to identify. He was not a simple man to get to know and yet one wanted to. Life and warmth radiated from him. You knew at once that he was the sort children, lost dogs and old ladies looked to hopefully. He tried the door; it was not locked after all and the handle opened it. A flight of stairs covered in shiny green linoleum stretched ahead. The small hall and stairs seemed quite empty. No one was there at all. The air was very stuffy and hot. Bryan Orraman bent down and picked up the pile of letters.

But someone had been sick on the stairs. There was a trail of vomit.

“You’d better get back to the car,” said Bryan.

The policeman walked up the stairs. The buzzing of the flies seemed more obvious. It was the hot hour of the day.

There was no one on the stairs, no one in Tom Crammer’s tiny office, crowded with the full evidence of Tom’s twin professions. I looked round.

Do you know how for a moment when you see an object in an unexpected place you see it without comprehending? It is a series of projections and angles on which the mind, for a second, imposes no recognisable shape.

This was how I stared at the object under the sofa. It was a long roll of carpet, a bundle of old clothes, and then my mind asserted itself and I knew it was a human form. A body.

As I stared I saw a shock of dark hair, and through the bloody hair the pearly gleam of bone.

For a moment I wondered why he had crawled under the sofa and then I saw that the telephone had fallen there. He had been trying to telephone. Poor old Tom.

Then I remembered more about Tom; he was seventy if he was a day, and long since beyond a head of black hair.

So that left only Enoch Flavell.

* * * * *

There was a hiatus after the ambulance drove away. Bridget went in it. Shortly afterwards the police left.

The police reaction to this episode had been ambiguous. Enoch had met his injury perhaps by accident. But one of them hinted to me that the boy had been attacked because he had evidence that told against Jenny. “I don’t believe in coincidences,” he said to me coldly. In a curious sort of way the whole party seemed to have ganged up on me. I felt a mixture of reserve and hostility in their attitude towards me.

Once again I was visited by this feeling of a person off stage who should be there. There was some alien force at work. Had Eddie Chase been at his wife’s funeral? Who could tell me now? It was not a question I felt like asking of just anyone. Still, there was someone I could ask. The quiet, observant lady I had seen at the funeral. My old school-teacher. Miss Le Boeuf.

But how to find Miss Le Boeuf? I did not know her married name, and for all I knew she no longer lived in King’s Bromwich. I thought she did, though, somewhere in the back of my mind was a reason for believing this, and then the fact that Ellen was clearly still in contact with her (for Miss Le Boeuf as I remembered her was not one to put herself out too far) suggested she lived in the district.

For some reason I kept remembering the sour face of Baby Cowan and the sweet smell that hung about him; I remembered how he had once pulled out half a dozen strands of my hair, he had undoubtedly, due to the Virol intake, been a sturdy little fellow. Why had Miss Le Boeuf seen so much of Mrs. Cowan? It didn’t seem to me, looking back, that they could have had a lot in common. Then I remembered what they had in common. Jack Cowan. Miss Le Boeuf had married the up-and-coming young Mr. Jack Cowan. She was now Mrs. Jack Cowan, sister-in-law to the lady whose baby I had taken for walks.

At least I knew her name. I looked through the West Midlands telephone directory. Then I saw her name, Mrs. Hermione Cowan, and an Edgbaston address. So she was a widow, for remembering the upright rectitude of Miss Le Boeuf there could be no question of separation or divorce. Hadn’t she kept me and Jenny and Ellen and one other girl whose name I forget, weeping and wailing through the heat of one long summer afternoon while we finished off a composition entitled ‘How I spend my Leisure’? What you start you shall finish was built into Miss Le Boeuf’s life.

Hermione Cowan’s house in Edgbaston was as pleasing as she was, it spoke of a life of innocent dignity and order, all qualities I could do with a bit of in my life. I did envy her.

Hermione was weeding the garden and I almost fell over her. She straightened herself and turned deep-set eyes on me.

“Good afternoon, Miss Le Boeuf…” For a moment I forgot she was married.

“Good afternoon.”

“I’m Patsy Partridge. You won’t remember. You used to teach me, and my sister Jenny. You were at Ellen Chase’s funeral. So was I.”

“Yes. I know. I saw you there.”

“You did?” I took a breath. “I didn’t even see you look at me.”

“Since when did that mean I didn’t notice anything, Patsy Partridge,” she said tartly. Our eyes met and we laughed. I think I realised then for the first time that Miss Le Boeuf (it was no good, she was back to being Miss Le Boeuf, Jack Cowan or no) had actually liked her pupils.

We sat in two garden chairs on her trim lawn. I’d forgotten the security of her, the trust she inspired.

She didn’t know anything about who had murdered Ellen; but she did know an awful lot about Ellen.

She bent her head and picked at a dandelion. “I know nothing of the circumstances of the murder…although it shocked me deeply, Patsy”—and for a moment her hand trembled—“except for what I’ve read in the papers and frankly I’ve avoided them, but I want to say”—and she straightened her head to look at me—“that I do not believe that your sister Jenny could have killed her. It’s not in Jenny.”

“I know.”

“You were always the fierce one,” she said judicially.

After a pause, I said: “But I always thought we were all so quiet and good at school. Butter wouldn’t melt, I thought.”

She looked surprised. “You were devils. You had a terrible reputation. Not only you of course, the whole school. It was the tough one of the neighbourhood.”

“Go on!”

She nodded. “You nearly drove one young teacher away.”

“Did we really?” And I thought we were such a nice, innocent little lot. “Did she go?”

“No.” She set her lips firmly and I knew who the young teacher had been.

“By the way,” I said, “I didn’t see Ellen’s husband at the funeral. Was he there?”

Nothing could make this question sound quite normal and of course she saw this; she went back to studying her lawn again.

“I’m afraid I don’t know anything about that,” was all she said. “There could be all sorts of reasons, couldn’t there? I believe he’s a nice man, everyone speaks well of him. He comes from a nice family, I taught one of the brothers myself, and he was a good sort. He had standards. All that family have.”

I got up to go. She had made her contribution. Eddie Chase had standards. Ellen, she implied, had not. She would go no further. She had her loyalties to both sides.

“Thanks, Miss Le Boeuf.”

“Mrs. Cowan.”

“Mrs. Cowan, sorry.”

As I went out of the garden a thought struck me: “By the way, what happened to Baby Cowan?”

She was surprised. “Oh, he’s quite a distinguished physicist now.”

“Oh no!” I said. Terrible really, isn’t it, to think you’ve been wheeling the atom bomb around? “Whatever does his mother think of it?”

Mrs. Cowan, she was all Mrs. Cowan now, did not answer. She was digging away at her pansies; I watched her for a moment; it looked like she positively hated those pansies.

Had I understood her? Had I grasped what she was really getting at? I wondered.

But for the moment she had lulled my unease about Eddie Chase.

PART THREE

THE WRONG FACE OF MURDER

Chapter Five

THE MAN FROM LONDON WAS WAITING FOR ME IN MY ROOM at the Hotel Western when I got back late that night. He got to his feet when I came in. I had spent the intervening hours in the hospital with Bridget, waiting to see if her Enoch was going to come out of the state of deep unconsciousness and live. We still didn’t know.

Coffin, although I knew him to be a friend and acquaintance of Bryan Orraman’s, came into the picture because he was investigating a case which had brought him into the Midlands to co-operate with the Franchisers. There had been a series of peculiarly nasty crimes of violence in the Black Country, and there had been the idea that they were linked with London.

Coffin was fresh from an investigation which had brought him the awed and respectful esteem of his fellow policemen. He had just finished off the Barking Gang. So down he came from London with his drawling, elided, south London accent, his sharp eyes and his square strength. He was a man to trust, he was a man everyone, on whatever side of the law they were ranged, did trust. But naturally they were not grateful.

I trusted him, and my position was ambiguous enough, heaven knows. And once or twice I had even thought that if our positions had been different I would have liked him too. He wasn’t as exciting as Bryan Orraman but he was solid. I hadn’t met his mother then.

As soon as I saw him in my room I knew that all the suspicious feelings I had had about the progress of Jenny’s case were justified. He was here because he was interested. And he was interested because something was wrong.

“How’s the boy?” he said gravely.

I shook my head. “Holding his own. But what does that mean? Nothing. I could see that by their faces at the hospital.”

“Where’s the girl?”

“I took her home. At least I suppose it’s her home. Where is her home now?” I sat down on the edge of the bed. “And I don’t like the way you are talking about them. You don’t sound friendly.”

This was true—he sounded impersonal and official. I had yet to learn that Coffin had two faces and two voices, although he was never uncaring.

“She’s lost, poor child, if Enoch goes she’s lost.”

“She’s not in a good position anyway, whether he lives or dies,” said Coffin sadly.

There were three themes in the murder of Ellen Chase. First there was Jenny herself, her strange silences, and her strange submission to her fate. Jenny had never been a fighter but she had had her strengths. I should have expected her to show spirit at least. This led to Bridget.

The second theme was the police themselves. They had behaved out of character, seizing Jenny, arresting her so rapidly. The mills of justice usually grind slowly, this time they had chewed their victim up fast. Was it because the dead woman was the wife of a police constable? I had to ask that question. I had tried to answer it through shifty old Albert. Well, that had come to nothing. I should get nothing now out of that one. As for Crammer, it was only too clear that he probably knew a good deal but he was not available and not likely to be.

And then there was me and there was Bryan Orraman. We had to be counted in. So there were three great strands, all touching and all interwoven.

When I made this catalogue I had forgotten John Coffin. But he was there and would have to be found a place in my list.

“You haven’t come here just to ask about them,” I said.

He shook his head silently. This in itself was remarkable because by his appearance he was a man to whom speech came readily. Then I saw the look of strain on his face.

“Has something else happened?”

Again there was silence. This time he looked uncomfortable, even unhappy. I thought he was very tired. For the first time it occurred to me that to a man of Coffin’s sort such a job as he had now was a miserable one. He was a straightforward character; he was not a liar, nor a sneak, nor a bully, and what he was doing now demanded elements of all these things.

The feeling of the moment crept up on me. We sat in the close, dumpy little room and I had that feeling (do you know it?) when all the illusions, all the gildings, all the optimisms that pad life out with hope drain away and one sees things as they really are. It’s a rock-bottom feeling, but usually, with me, it doesn’t last long. I get my head in the sand again soon.

I got like it now. Here it is, I thought, this moment is true. And for once I wasn’t depressed. The clock ticked, and the woman in the next room thumped on the wall, and there was a smell of dry dust and old scent and I didn’t mind. Strange effect for a policeman to have.

“Let me do the thinking just for a moment,” I said. “The fact that you are here means you think my sister’s case has been wrongly conducted. You aren’t here just to investigate a murder.”

“I don’t know what you mean by just a murder,” he said. “I happen to think the human life, mean, sneaking, and rotten,” he added bitterly, “as it often is, worth saving. But no, for what good it is to you, and it won’t be much, I don’t think your sister went into that house to kill.

“We’ve picked up Tom Crammer,” he said suddenly, “And whatever he’s got to say he isn’t saying it. He was miles away in London when we got him. Says a friend of his put the wind up him by telling him another man was after his blood, and he just scampered. He is over seventy after all. You’d never think that, would you? And one way and another I dare say there are plenty after him.

“He says he got a fright just before he left because he thought he saw someone hiding on the stairs. Maybe he did.”

“And you don’t think he attacked Enoch?”

Coffin shrugged. “Says he never heard of him. But Tommy’ll find it difficult to shake this off. His office. His finger-prints everywhere and no one else’s. It’ll probably stick on him. But you and I know better.”

He turned to me suddenly. “You were there in that house with me. You saw all that was there. I’ve seen the same sort of thing too often before to mistake. It wasn’t natural. It was staged. It was a trap. That boy was sent there to a trap.

“You saw the carefully blacked-out light, and you saw the boy. He didn’t put up a fight. Didn’t have a chance to, probably.”

“He’s likely to die,” I said, “and if not die…”

“And meanwhile in safety and good health, eating a satisfactory meal and having a good night’s rest, is the someone who got the boy there, and knew enough to manipulate Tommy’s movements. That’s what we want: the hidden manipulator. Someone who knows how to arrange things and people, pull strings, make puppets of friends, put on an act.”

I looked at him, puzzled. “Are you getting at me?”

“You were out. You knew Tom Crammer. You knew the boy Enoch.”

“And who is supposed to have put me up to all this?”

“There could have been your sister,” he said, watching me.

“She didn’t do that, and you know it. There was a policewoman in the room all the time we talked. Don’t tell me she didn’t listen.”

He got up. “I just wanted to put you in the clear.”

“Thanks. That’s the way to do it all right,” I said with some bitterness. I didn’t believe him. I didn’t realise that this was one more manifestation of that quality in him that made his mother say “You’ll stick your neck out once too often, John Coffin.”

He perplexed me; I couldn’t see what his part was in all this. He had not given me one good, solid reason yet for visiting me this way.

I hadn’t yet caught up with the fact that the whole man was the reason.

I didn’t believe in him.

But what I had realised all the way through was that he had come to have a look at me. And this puzzled me as much as anything. I rubbed my hands, which were itching.

* * * * *

I recalled Jenny’s hands. They had been so bad. Indeed her whole appearance had been that of a sick woman. Sick and troubled.

Jenny must have sought advice, must have talked. “Do you know who she would have talked to?” I had asked Bridget.

Bridget shook her head. “I don’t know. She didn’t have friends much.”

I remembered how bad those hands had been. There was a medical query there, surely. Someone must have been consulted.

“What about her doctor? She must have had one.”

Bridget looked even more doubtful. “What? That toughie! I can’t believe Mother talked to her.”

It was an unfortunate description, but Bridget was a prejudiced observer and probably the doctor had been tough with her. All the same, my heart sank a little. Poor Jenny, surrounded by such people, and so untough herself!

Archery Bank, where the doctor lived, was a tough district too. I wondered why Jenny had chosen district and doctor. I soon discovered that Dr. Barnes specialised in psychiatric medicine. “Not loonies,” as the informative old local told me cheerily, with the certainty of one who has never had to doubt her sanity, “but poor things that are a little unsteady.”

Dr. Barnes was a thin, tense, intelligent-looking woman of about fifty with short, white hair and bright blue eyes. She had lovely hands.

She knew about Jenny’s skin troubles but she appeared little interested; it was just one symptom, she suggested.

“These allergies are often a response to emotional strain.” She was looking down at the wedding ring on her own hand. I wondered who had had quite the nerve to take her on. “It has to have a background, of course, and it has to be triggered off, but often it represents a stress.”

Stress. Well, I knew what that was. Bridget had said it: just a group of people who happen to love each other but can’t get on. This family pressure had turned Bridget into a girl who lifted trifles from shops and Jenny into a neurotic. Each of them, I suppose, felt a little guilty about the other. Except perhaps Lester. And then I remembered his face and knew that he did too. Did it perhaps go farther back, into my childhood and Jenny’s? Had we either of us come unscathed through our family troubles? Had Jenny resented her mother’s second marriage (to Dad of all people)? Had I resented my stepsister? In the past I should have cried rubbish. Now, I did not know.

“Of course she is a very impressionable person,” went on Dr. Barnes. “Easily influenced. I got the impression she was under the influence of someone very close to her. Not necessarily someone she saw constantly.” The bright blue eyes, were almost closed. “Someone she may have seen infrequently. But someone she trusted.”

“I wish I’d known.”

“I told all this to Mr. Orraman.”

“You told him?” I said slowly, reorientating my thoughts.

“Oh yes, he came down here, talked it over with me. I don’t think you’ll find he’s missed anything to help your sister.”

“When was this?”

“Oh, when it all started.” She looked at the file of notes; there was quite a sizeable bundle of them. “He was constructive.” She didn’t sound as if she liked Bryan Orraman much, and frankly, I doubted if she was taking to me. It was mutual.

“I noticed that her attacks seemed to follow a sort of pattern. A group of attacks would cluster together in the space of a few weeks.”

“You say attacks,” I said. “What do you mean exactly?”

Again the bright blue eyes were raised to mine. They continued to show sympathy and understanding, and something more rare, perception.

“It was basically always the same: there was stiffness and some paralysis of one limb, hand, foot, and so on. It passed off. I treated it as rheumatism. But I knew, of course, it was a neurosis. Whether she knew or not I can’t say. Probably. She’s intelligent. We were getting to the stage when we would have had to discuss it openly.”

“But that’s terrible. I can’t understand it.”

She shrugged, but kindly. “Hysteria. She was punishing herself.”

I was silent.

“You mustn’t be repelled. You must see it as a human being in distress and losing the fight, giving up.”

She was moderate, controlled, sympathetic, but I could see she wasn’t going to be any real use to Jenny. She had made up her mind and on the whole unfavourably to Jenny. She thought Jenny guilty.

“Sometimes these hysterical symptoms are the signs by which a more important illness reveals itself…schizophrenia often.” It was her offering: she was willing to testify that Jenny was mad.

For a moment she didn’t look as intelligent as I had thought.

She sat there calmly. She knew she was better balanced, better adjusted, more integrated than her fellows, there was no pride, no false assumptions here; she had been right in her chosen profession.

And yet there was a lack; she didn’t like people much, she didn’t like Bryan Orraman, she didn’t like me much. I saw why Bridget had called her a toughie.

She had always been the observer, the adviser, but she herself had stood outside, never distressed, never overanxious, she had no suffering to share with her patients except vicariously. She had no little history of efforts made only to fail, of emotions offered and misunderstood. My eyes wandered to the picture of the handsome, grey haired man on the wall, her husband. I wondered what he thought of it all. She saw me looking too, and her face crinkled into a smile. I envied her really, she was uninvolved, and I was in, right in.

Chapter Six

I WAS BEGINNING TO UNDERSTAND BRYAN ORRAMAN BETTER. I imagined that he reproduced faithfully, but without knowing it, his upbringing. I thought I could almost tell the books he had read as a boy, the heroes he had thought the most of, the people he had tried to imitate, and underneath it all the solid bedrock Black-Country Staffordshire. Some people do carry their past around with them preserved as if their character was cement; Bryan Orraman was one. It was sad really because I could tell that he wanted desperately to rise above his background, and this is pretty common, too, in such people. He was clever, and made his own way, and the Black Country’s was above all a society in which it was possible to rise, so perhaps he would succeed. He was a very busy man and seemed to have many irons in the fire.

“There’s someone I want to see. You’d better come with me,” he said. “It’s of interest to you.”

“About Jenny? To help her?” I asked alertly.

“I don’t know about that,” he said. “We shall see…I hope so. You might call him a character witness. We shall need all the help we can get in that way.”

“It’s someone who knows Jenny well?”

“She was there every day,” he said surprisingly.

“And you mean this person will speak up, say what a good person Jenny is, and that she couldn’t murder? But supposing he doesn’t?”

“The thing is to ask a question you can get the right sort of answer to,” he said patiently; not as if he had any faith or trust in Jenny at all, but as if it was all manoeuvre and management.

How had Jenny spent her days? What did she do with herself? Cooking, shopping, cleaning house. Yes, of course, but what else also? She had a job. That surprised me; it didn’t somehow fit in with my picture of Jenny, but I was beginning to think I had always been a little bit wrong about Jenny. And of course I could see how it was, a lot of housewives had jobs now. Jenny had a job in a flower shop. There was a barrow standing in a side alley. It was a poor little shop, more of a fruiterer’s and greengrocer’s than a flower shop and I was not surprised it had a barrowround to eke it out. Then I remembered that the first time I saw the boy Enoch he had been pushing a barrow loaded with flowers, so perhaps there was a connection.

The owner of the shop and his wife were standing side by side behind their counter looking rather like Mr. and Mrs. Noah. Late middle-aged, plump, not prosperous, not at all good-looking, they were real and solid. It seemed right somehow that they should sell earthy potatoes, plump tomatoes and pungent onions. The woman was gentler and seemed less hostile to me than her husband. (If I thought about that hostility at all, I was still puzzled and worried by it.)

The proprietor and Bryan Orraman knew each other; to my surprise the man seemed to know me too and gave me a short, unfriendly nod. In spite of the whole feeling that I had about this affair with Jenny—that I was putting my face in where it not only wasn’t wanted but was actively resented (even Bryan Orraman didn’t really like the way I was hanging around)—I took this painfully. I like to be liked. It’s a weakness but there it is. It soon came out why he disliked me; it had been handed over to him. From Enoch.

“He didn’t like you.” When the man said this it explained the anger of that first meeting with Enoch outside Bryan Orraman’s. “He said you were standoffish and too snobbish to remember you had a family in the Black Country.” Enoch had seen me through Bridget’s eyes, and to Bridget it had seemed as if I despised them and rejected them. Perhaps she wasn’t far wrong.

The woman gave me a small placatory smile.

“I didn’t know my sister had a job,” I said to her.

“Oh yes, dear. Been with us for some time now. We’ve always worked together very comfortable, although I wouldn’t call your sister easy to know, would you, dear? She did the books and accounts. She’s a good head for figures, your sister.”

I nodded.

“I think at first she took the place for the occupation, she was lonely when her youngest went to school, but later on she was glad of the money…I think he kept her a bit short,” she said, lowering her voice. “Oh not his fault, doing a lot, house, car, telephone, all the trimmings, they all do it now, and you can’t blame ’em, can you?” All the same I thought her estimate of Lester was roughly the same as my own. She went on tolerantly, “Dad and I never had the trimmings, and I can’t say I missed them, but after all times change and if you see everyone else having them then you want them too, don’t you? No blame in that. Now Dad and I never had much money and a ride in a motor car’s a treat to me to this day, but we had a good time of it all the same, didn’t we, my old dear?”

Love and affection flowed between them, but he didn’t answer. He wasn’t a talker, was Dad.

“And I’ll stand up anywhere and say what I think about your sister,” she said. One remark seemed to speed from her without any firm link with the next, except in the unconscious processes of her mind. I wondered how this was going to come out in the witness-box. “Now that Ellen, she was a flirty sort.”

“Didn’t mean no harm,” said her husband.

“No, I dare say not, Dad, but people thought harm of her. And then the men did play up to her.”

“They didn’t mean no harm.”

“No, I dare say not, Dad”—she spoke deliberately. “Although I notice you always gave her the ripe plums and good measure in peas. But harm has come of it.” She turned to me. “What you don’t realise, my dear, is that your sister loved her husband. They were married.” She put deep feeling into her voice at the last word.

“Doesn’t seem much of a foundation for a marriage, does it?” I asked bitterly. “Meanness, playing up to Ellen, unhappiness.”

“Oh, my dear,” she said, “you haven’t got an idea, have you? You can build it on nagging and meanness and roughness and it’ll go on. If a marriage takes, it takes, and you can’t stop it. And if it doesn’t take, then all the love and affection and co-operation in the world won’t make a marriage of it. I reckon that’s what they mean by marriages being made in heaven.”

She was a dear. My heart warmed to her but I was thoughtful. She was all on Jenny’s side, but would her total effect be favourable to Jenny? I felt that in her warm cynicism and affectionate acceptance of life as it was she would show Jenny up as a distressed and genuinely unhappy woman. So far from doing good she might do harm.

I wondered that Bryan did not see this fact. I felt perturbed that on this point my judgement should be sharper than his was. He might be a very bright lawyer, but was he very bright about people?

All the same it wasn’t quite real, that episode. There we all were, all genuine, all telling the truth, all trying to help each other. But there was something about it that didn’t quite measure up to reality.

The street away from the shop led into a shabby, main thoroughfare. There was a jeweller’s shop, and cinema, and a restaurant with the words ‘Joe’s Chips’ written above it. Next door to the Chips was a large building that looked as if it might once have been another cinema. ‘Glidadrome’, it said. The finest roller-skates in the Midlands. I remembered that I used to rollerskate as a child, not that I was ever any good at it.

“He’s one of my best clients,” said Bryan suddenly, looking up at the name of the owner, S. Kadwich.

“What does that mean?”

“It means that he is litigious, but only when he has a good case, and that he pays his bills,” said Bryan dryly. “He’s had three large-scale cases in the last four years.”

“Is that good going?”

“Very good. We got to the High Court last time. I think we might manage to push it even farther next time.”

I looked at him to see if he was joking, but apparently he wasn’t.

“Do you dance?” he said suddenly, seizing my elbow, and rushing me over the road.

“Sometimes.”

“Will you come to a party?”

“I’m here incognito,” I reminded him.

“You can wear dark glasses.”

“I don’t know that I’ve anything suitable I could wear.”

“I expect a girl like you has lots of smart dresses,” he said, studying Venetia’s smart hat. It was the first trace of naiveté in him. As a professional man he was alert and sophisticated, but I began to see that as a private person he might be uncertain and ingenuous. “Something really glamorous and Londony?” he said wistfully.

I got it then: in my lengthening career I have been the Jilted One, the Other Woman, and even sometimes the Jilter, but this was the first time I had been a Prize. He wanted to take ’the Smartest Girl’ to the party.

It was a good party. Surprisingly, it was not, as I had expected, in a private house, but in a room in a large hotel. The party was clearly to celebrate something, but no one ever, told me what, although there was a lot of champagne and very pink smoked salmon. Bryan led me about, proudly introducing me as Patsy. You judge a man by his friends so I believe I liked Bryan’s friends, they were so welcoming and generous but they were odd friends for him. But he was different here, too. He was more talkative, simpler, more boisterous, than I had expected. And he was doing it all so intently.

He danced with me seriously, putting every ounce into it. It was a ritual to him, but a ritual that satisfied.

Over in one corner a plump middle-aged woman was sitting behind a tea-tray. It says a good deal about the party that she was actually pouring it and people were drinking it, although I personally have never seen a champagne tea-party before. She was as clearly the hostess as if she wore a little label.

I went over to her.

“Hello, dear. I saw you come in with Bryan. He’s a boy, isn’t he? And I gave you a wave but you never saw. Well, I can’t blame Bryan for only seeing you. What a pretty girl you are.” She was so nice, she meant every word. She poured me out a cup of tea. “Cream, dear? And it really is cream. That’s one of my little luxuries. And, after all, it is my evening, isn’t it?”

I smiled at her.

“And I’m so glad you’re going to take an interest in our Bryan, he needs a little bit of relaxing, he does.”

“Yes, he is a bit unrelenting.”

“Ah, I see you know what I mean.” She studied my face, even putting on diamond-studded spectacles to do it. Apparently she was satisfied because she tucked them back in their gleaming case and patted my hand. “Well, you’ve got to remember he never had the advantages of a family life, dear.”

“Whatever do you mean? Is he an orphan?” Now I came to think about it there was something isolated about Bryan.

She did not answer. A dreamy look came into her eyes. “I remember his Gran. Used to get up on a chair and sing ’The Honeysuckle and the Bee’.”

“Go on! So did my Gran.”

“I expect all our Grans did, love,” she said with a smile.

“I could do it myself, come to that. It’s a grand song.” She looked at her tray. “Another cuppa? Or something stronger? Ooh, it’s lovely being rich.”

“Course it is,” said another woman coming up. She was older, with a red, cheerful face.

“We’ve done it at last. Our luck’s in. My Ted’s done it.”

“You too, Doreen,” said the other one. “You’ve worked.”

Doreen looked at her hands; they wore diamond rings and polished nails; but they were scarred and battered. I had already noticed the same things about other hands in the room. There was money here but it had been worked for; often with hard, manual labour. “Yes, I’ve worked,” admitted Doreen. She burst into laughter. “Still, there’s been fun. I’ve had many a laugh. And always good friends.”

“And been one, Doreen,” said the other woman, her face going redder.

They patted each other’s hands.

They were a group, bound together by common aspirations. All the same, I noticed that the ones who had got to this party were the successful ones, the failures still languished at home, I suppose. So that if you were a failure in this group you got kindness, sympathy and help. But you didn’t get asked to parties.

An extremely pretty grey-haired woman wearing a bright pink satin dress came and sat down beside me. She wanted a good look at me and made no pretence of it.

“We think the world of old Bryan here,” she said. “Good old Bryan, he’s one of the best, you know. Look at him, life and soul, isn’t he?” She settled a little wrap of creamy-coloured mink over her shoulders. I saw that most of the people in the room must be much richer than Bryan was. “He can keep it up too,” she added admiringly. “I’ve seen him still going strong at three in the morning, and at work next morning.”

“The last one was younger but not so good-looking,” she said suddenly, eyeing me appraisingly.

“Maud,” said my hostess sharply. “Your tongue is showing.”

I understood it then. His professional personality was so strong that instinctively he felt the need for a counterpoise to his other aspect. He found it in being a social, party-going figure with his car and pretty lady. But the result was a dichotomy; he was two people. Something, some day, would blow him wide open. The two sides didn’t match.

Chapter Seven

I HAD TAKEN IT FOR GRANTED THAT ALBERT LIVED AT MR. Marcus’s, but he only went there by day, and he had a room of his own to go back to. I wondered what sort of little hole Albert crept into at night? It would be warm and snugly furnished with odds and ends acquired by him. No one knew better than Albert how to feather his nest. He was quite a cosy little figure in his way, was Albert.

I went round there late one night having got the address from the barman at the Hotel Western, who had returned to duty. There was a smell of frying bacon as I climbed the steep stairs to Albert’s room at the top of the tall old house at the back of the station. The door was on the jar when I got there, as if Albert had just stepped out for a minute. It was a long, narrow room, and Albert, who did not lack imagination, had divided it into three parts with the window at the end as the focus. The sheets on the bed were turned neatly back and a book was placed ready on the table by it, there was bread and butter arranged on a plate, a kettle steaming, and the bacon was frying in the pan on the gas-ring by the window. There was a smell of lavender floor-polish and everything was bright and shining as if Albert had been doing his housework. It was a happy, private room, and Albert had achieved it at last. I felt bad for disturbing him.

I heard Albert pattering down the passage, humming happily to himself, then he pushed open the door; he had an empty trash-can in one hand and two tomatoes in the other. He stopped short when he saw me, then he put the can down under the sink in the corner, adjusted a screen round it and went over to the frying-pan and looked at it severely.

I cleared my throat. “The bacon’s all right. I looked at it.”

Albert gave me a long, earnest look.

“I hope you were wise to come here,” he said. “That’s all. I suppose you know what you’re doing.

“Well now you are here, you might as well make yourself comfortable. Want a bite to eat? I’m just making some coffee.” He speedily and deftly made a brew in an earthen jug and put it in the oven to strengthen. “Well, come on, out with it? What is it?”

“I wanted to ask you what you were going to tell me that evening Enoch stopped you.”

Albert did not pretend he had forgotten but his face went tired. “I thought that would be it. Well, I don’t know that it was so much. I just thought that you might remember that Ellen Chase’s husband was a policeman and that the police don’t seem too keen on digging up the family background. I don’t suppose there’s anything in it.”

“Have you any special reason for saying that, Albert?”

“No. No special reason. Except you might say I don’t like policemen.” He pushed his plate away. “Oh, go on, you’re taking the flavour of the bacon away.” He looked like a depressed and irritable child.

“And you don’t like Mr. Marcus much either?” I didn’t make it a question, it was somewhere between that and a statement.

“I’m not in a position to like or dislike the old boy. He’s been good to me, in his way, I grant you that. But his way is not my way.” He poured out the coffee and sat brooding over a steaming cup. “I don’t say he hasn’t been generous to me, but he likes being generous, it’s a pleasure to him. I was a gift to him, really.” Poor Albert, tied up and delivered in a bundle as a gift to Mr. Marcus.

“Someone killed that poor girl, didn’t they?” went on Albert, sitting there with his shoulders in a tired hump. “Well, it wasn’t me. I’ll tell you this”—he dropped his voice. “Just before she died she was getting some money. I don’t know where she got it from but she was getting it.”

I finished my coffee, which was really just a shade too bitter (like poor Albert) and got up to go. I looked down at the small, hunched figure, at the room so individual and odd. “It’s strange, isn’t it, Albert, how you and me and Bryan Orraman and Mr. Marcus are bound together?”

“It’s the Law that binds us together,” said Albert. “The Law that touches us all.” And not unnaturally this thought depressed him even further.

I went down the stairs, leaving Albert drinking his coffee. Then I heard feet and Albert calling my name. He pushed something heavy, wrapped in a linen cloth, in my hand and prepared to depart.

“That’s for you. You know where to put it to use. It’s the best way, I tell you. Prison’s no place for a woman for life. And it might be worse than that, mightn’t it?”

Under the lamplight in the street I opened Albert’s bundle. Wrapped in a coarse, white linen napkin was a heavy service revolver. I didn’t ask myself how Albert had come by it; you can buy such things quietly if you know where. Nor did I ask myself what Albert expected me to do with it. He was offering me a way out.

I understood what the gun represented to Albert, why it had been acquired; it was his escape if his life became beyond what he could bear. I discovered within myself a great sympathy for all the people who were struggling against all likelihood to build themselves up, and succeeding, but always with the thought behind them that they might fail in the end.

I walked the long way home and dropped the bundle in the fishpond in the little park behind Caffey’s store. I watched it slide into the green water, there was hardly a splash. It could rust there for ever.

There was not going to be any way out like that for me or for Jenny.

* * * * *

The next day I went to where Ellen had lived. She was the one person who mattered that I had not troubled much about yet.

Ellen’s house was just what you might have expected it to be, small, neat, prettyish and rather grubby. Ellen was never a great one for washing. Now I remembered that of her. Suddenly a picture of the girl came back. I remembered us all three at school, Jenny, me and Ellen. Ellen and Jenny had secrets. Well, they had them still, I reflected sadly. At school Jenny and Ellen had been law-abiding citizens and I had been rather a ruffian. I could hear the sound of footsteps running across the school playground and it was my feet I was hearing. I was running away from Jenny and Ellen and I was hugging in my arms a precious box containing some of their secrets…two lipsticks, a box of powder (no foundation cream, they couldn’t afford that), and a box of powder rouge in a bright orange colour, all Woolworth’s best. I had already lavished all over me a bottle of Phul-Nana scent, and no doubt could be traced as much by my smell as by the noise I was making. I remember now I was shouting. I was shouting for Jenny. The odd thing was that although appearances were against me, I was not stealing their precious box (except for the scent, and I still love scent) but was saving it from discovery by Mum. I was bringing it to them, not stealing it.

Ellen never believed this though (she was rightly afterwards married to a policeman), and in revenge she locked me in the girls’ lavatory, a sturdy stone structure in the playground with heavy wooden doors with only half a top. (Designed, of course, as I see now, just to prevent silly little girls getting stuck in them.) I didn’t wait for authority to release me, I can remember yelling and screaming blue murder.

I don’t remember now whether I really thought that they would leave me, or whether what I did was the first of my carefully staged acts. There has always been in me a repressed desire for melodrama, a desire to play Adrienne Lecouvriere, Tosca, and poor Camille; the grand gesture appeals to me. At any rate I climbed out over the top and appeared for the moment unsteadily on the roof, rather like Petroushka at the end of the ballet, before I slipped and broke my ankle. I have limped ever since when tired.

Ellen owned up. She was honest, if unlikeable.

But I held it against her. And don’t think I didn’t know it, either. It wasn’t the sort of resentment I wrapped up and only brought out at intervals. I thought about it every time my ankle twisted underneath me. I forgot Ellen’s face as the years went by but I remembered what I had against Ellen.

But it seemed very petty and childish now I was standing outside the dead Ellen’s house. I wondered as I stood there looking at where she had lived if her death had really had its beginnings in those faraway days when we had played and quarrelled and when the greatest insult we could hurl at Ellen was that she was, however unwashed, teacher’s pet.

I wondered about that washing. Why had Ellen been such a grubby merchant? Wasn’t it something about her father? He had been an eccentric, and held some base belief that washing was weakening. I can see him now, meeting Ellen from school, with his shopping-bag on his arm, meekly doing his wife’s shopping, perpetually out of work, always apologising. His wife supported them by working in a factory, which was less common then than now, and Ellen’s father ran the house. He did it badly so I suppose he had to have some sort of alibi and his weakening theory was one. He wasn’t a man who could have supported his own incompetence without something of an apology even to himself. As children, Ellen and her sisters all had runny noses, all were untidy, but they were comfortable and happy and they knew everything. Dad was a tremendous gossip and the girls took after him. They loved Dad. We all did, really; he was a great raconteur. I shan’t easily forget the saga he told us about Sweeney Todd the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. The whole school had nightmares after that. There was something very real about his detail. Especially those sausages. And not a sausage got eaten in our street for weeks afterwards. He put us off cheese the same way by telling us that if you looked in a magnifying-glass you could see maggots walking around with boots on.

So it was probably from her Dad that Ellen got the store of information she certainly had. She was the one who knew when the infants’ teacher had a quarrel with the head teacher, and she was the one who knew where the head boy’s missing sister went to. But I don’t think it was her Dad who put her up to the use she made of it, that was something from Ellen herself. I don’t remember Mum. She was always at work, I suppose.

Her Mum let me in. I recognised her at once from the resemblance to Ellen, although I hadn’t thought about her for years. She was wearing dark spectacles and carrying a book (I could just see the title, Dangerous Girl) and I remembered that she had had little curiosities of her own. She was a great reader of newspapers and magazines; she even used the city library, and in our street hardly anyone ever read a book. This made her odd. In our highly individualistic and indifferent society no one had cared. She had offended none of their real shibboleths, she was not ‘stuck up’, she was not mean, she was not unkind. So they called her ’funny’ and left it at that.

I took my hat off as I entered, in an entirely instinctive gesture of respect; my little hat with the flowers seemed too sad here.

“You don’t remember me, Mrs. Gold,” I said, dragging her name back from the recesses of my memory. “But we used to know each other once in Hailey Street.”

“Really?” she said absently, not caring, and still keeping her finger in her book.

When I told her that I was Jenny’s sister she stiffened, but she showed no hostility. I suppose in the last few days she had learnt to bear things quietly.

“Do come in,” she said politely. Something in her voice revealed to me that she must originally have come from a different, and what we used to call better class than Dad. This could have been a great crime in Hailey Street and evidently she had known it and covered up.

How strangely one’s picture of a person can change. As a child I had seen Ellen’s mother as an old, tired, funny woman, and for twenty years since then I had gone on thinking of her like that, but now, when I looked at her with the eyes of an adult I saw that she was not old, that her eyes behind her dark spectacles were sharply observant, and that although her face was wrinkled and far from clean (evidently she had shared Dad’s views on that topic) it was attractive.

And more than all this, I saw that she was clever. Ellen and Dad and all the little sisters hadn’t been clever, and I imagined all that cleverness in Mrs. Gold spilling over into Hailey Street and wasting, emptying out and leaving only poor, funny little Mrs. Gold behind.

“I came round to see if there was anything I could do.” I was awkward.

“I think everything’s been done that could be done,” she said, with perhaps a touch of irony.

“How is Mr. Gold?” I asked, taking a deeper step forward into awkwardness.

Her expression softened. “He died two years ago.”

“Oh, I am sorry.” Somehow I had the impression I had stumbled upon something important here. I could hardly tell how this was conveyed to me, by the expression on her face, by the movement of her hands, and most of all perhaps by the faint suggestion in her manner that I ought to have known of this.

“He had cancer of the liver. He was himself to the last. More, even. Like he had been as a young man,” she added proudly. I realised then, what I had never seen as a child, that Dad’s eccentricities and his failure to keep a job had been due to drink.

By this time we were well inside the sitting-room of Ellen’s house. It was very ordinary, although easy and comfortable; superimposed upon it were various discomforts and. muddles that I took to be evidence that Mrs. Gold had been staying here.

She was not alone; her unmarried daughter Betty was there with her. This woman stood up nervously as I was led in. She just stared as I was introduced. Well, I could understand that members of my family were not popular here.

“I want you to know,” said Mrs. Gold, “that there was nothing in that story of your sister’s about Ellen and her husband. My Nell was absolutely straight. Absolutely straight that way,” she repeated.

Betty fidgeted with the tablecloth in front of her. She blinked nervously, fluttering her pale eyelashes. She had a strange bone structure. The top of her head was flattish and the space between hairline and eyebrows was very narrow and so was the next division between eye-socket and cheek-bone. Some faces you see can be endlessly duplicated, but when you looked at her you thought, ’This is a face that’s not going to be repeated.’

‘How could I have forgotten how?’ I asked myself.

“That’s right,” she agreed, fixing her mother with those pale blue eyes. “But we don’t need to explain to her. We don’t need to apologise for our Ellen.” There was the memory, the ghost, of old heat and old quarrels in her voice. I could see that these two, mother and daughter, would not see eye to eye, and that disagreement between them would become accentuated by living together here alone for there were signs that they were both staying here, knitting on the table, ironing half finished, tea in the pot. I thought that they had quarrelled recently. Although they had left their mark on the room, and it was littered with signs of their living, yet all this was superficial, and underneath I could see Ellen’s room and Ellen’s way of living. I tried to understand it because it was vital to me to understand Ellen.

There was a set of comfortable chintz-covered armchairs, conventional and ordinary, a little polished table, stained now by the bottom of the teapot and by wet saucers. There was a desk and on it a pile of letters and a pipe-rack hanging down. There was a typewriter on a table of its own near the window and a V.H.F. radiogram stood by a television set. They were an impressive and expensive couple, and rather above the style of living represented by the rest of the room. I wondered about that.

“You are staying here?”

“We came when Ellen was killed.”

“We were coming anyway,” said Mrs. Gold absently. She put her book on the table, unnoticing that her youngest daughter had given her a hard stare. “Ellen telephoned and asked us to come. I’m still working, you know; she telephoned me at my work. Well, that job’s gone, I suppose.” She was philosophical. “My daughter was just an ordinary girl, living an ordinary life, she ought not to have died the way she did. She had her worries, troubles of course, like all of us.”

“Oh, Mother, do shut up,” cried her daughter.

She was more self-conscious than the older woman but much less clever; she did not realise that her attitude was just as revealing as her mother’s talk. She turned to me, half aggressive, half defensive. “Look, I can see why you’ve come here, and don’t think I don’t see it. You’re scouting around. Well, you’ve got to defend your sister, if you can. Personally I think it’s got beyond that, but with us it’s different. Ellen’s dead. Dead.”

Mrs. Gold went on with her part of the conversation.

“They had everything they wanted. Eddie let Ellen have everything she wanted. She was getting a lovely new home ready to move into on the Friary Estate. I think myself my son-in-law was a little unreasonable once that—”

“Oh shsh.”

“But between married people you can’t judge,” went on Mrs. Gold, unheeding. “I said to Ellen ‘Remember he’s your husband…’”

“Mother!”

“I’m not judging him,” said Mrs. Gold, turning her dark spectacles on her daughter. “I said to Ellen, ‘You don’t know yet, Ellen, what’s in his mind. Don’t be hasty.’”

“Mother, we don’t know” wailed her daughter. “You were told not to talk.”

“He may have been misled, he may be mistaken, I said.”

“You’re doing this on purpose,” said her daughter suddenly, with a sharp change of tone; she had almost forgotten I was there. Or so I thought until she came round and thrust her face into mine. “Go away. All this dragging things out. Why can’t you leave it?”

“Oh dear, now you’ve started her off again,” said her mother. She took off her spectacles and put down her book. “You are a naughty girl,” she said, patting her daughter’s shoulder. “Now come upstairs and let me sponge some cold water on your face and give it a nice dab with Cologne.” They were following an obviously well-known ritual. I thought she was quite mad, but she wasn’t, only uninhibited; she had inherited her mother’s cleverness without any of the ballast which marked Mrs. Gold, who had sunk through several layers of society and dumped herself firmly in the working-class without worrying.

For some time I had been conscious of a strange smell that was seeping all over the house and now it was unmistakable. “Something’s burning,” I said. They took no notice and went upstairs together. After hesitating for a moment I went out into the kitchen. All these houses are built on the same plan and I knew the way about.

I went along the narrow passage and down the one step into the kitchen. Clouds of smoke were coming from the gas cooker, and a smell of burning potatoes. I took them off, and dropped them into the sink. The little kitchen had a battered look as if a whirlwind had passed over it and I suppose this was Mrs. Gold; she had never been much of a one for domestic matters and perhaps this accounted a bit for Dad. Too many burnt potatoes and a man might well take to the bottle.

The door to the tiny garden stood open. The grass was smoked and burnt by the heat of a long summer. No one had watered it for at least three weeks, and the little rain had not helped. The carnations which only a fortnight ago had been a bright sweet red were wilting, the blooms dying on the stems; the roses were neglected; the grass uncut. (When, later, I described all this to Bryan Orraman, he gave me a long, hard look, as if he thought I had noticed too much.)

I stood there for a moment wondering whether to go or stay, then I went in. I could tell by the steady murmur of voices from upstairs that they were up there to stay for a time. They seemed to be arguing. “Damn,” said a voice; that was Betty, no doubt about that.

I went back to the sitting-room, picked my hat up from the chair, shouted up the stairs that I was going and opened the front door. Then I hesitated and went back. I looked round the room confirming the impression I had already taken. I looked at the dried-up, unused pipes in the rack, the gardening magazines for the last month curled up unopened, the pile of unopened letters, the dog leads.

There was a notable absence in this house. The master of it was not at home.

Mrs. Gold appeared at the head of the stairs. “Tell you know your way about,” she said ironically.

“I’m just off.”

“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” called a voice from behind; Betty obviously.

I walked away weighing up my impressions. You can see for yourself what they must have been: there was a strong suggestion of trouble between Ellen and her policeman husband. To my eyes there were signs that he had cleared out. I wondered why I had not thought of this before.

I didn’t of course know what the trouble was, and it was very possible that to know would not help. But it was the first support for Jenny’s story there had been.

The Chase house was one of a row of pleasant little houses which must have been built about fifty-odd years ago. They were built in the bow-fronted, double-breasted pairs so beloved of English builders, but they were solid and agreeable. The street was one of a district of such houses.

As I walked a new question began to form itself deep down in my mind. I have always had a strong sense of locality, of place. I became aware of a place as I would of a person—that is, I take in its personality as well as its features. Some districts have a very strong personality, and others, like people, are dull; while some, like one’s enemies, are never going to be congenial. What you have to remember is that none is quite the same; a suburban street in Croydon might look, to the superficial observer, just like one in Finchley, but there is a difference, even if only in the colour of the front-door paint fashionable locally or the most common type of car, for these do have fashions in different districts. And between London, the Midlands and the North there is a whole world of difference.

Anyway I thought I recognised the feel of this neighbourhood. On the other hand I had certainly never used this side street before. But there was something familiar about the sweep of that main road ahead. Can I describe the nature of the district to you?

It was a quiet, respectable neighbourhood, not rich, but modestly comfortable. Rows of small well-cared-for homes lay behind a busy main road. There was nothing smart about it, but nothing shabby either. There was a faint smell of lacquer from a nearby garage, there was a sound of the railway, and a distant noise of a factory. All these intangibles were subtly crying out to me.

At any rate it was as familiar to me as the flavour and bouquet of a wine would be to a connoisseur. But when had I come to know it?

There was a seat placed for walkers to sit at the top of the slope I had been climbing. It was shady and pleasant and I sat down on it for a minute to observe and think. A young woman with a small child was already sitting there. She was a lovely girl with a quietly meditative expression. She sat there smoking peacefully and seemed not to have noticed that her small son was pouring sugar from a packet taken out of her basket into neat little heaps on the ground. He made discovery certain however by shovelling sugar on a little ice-cream spoon into the heels of her slingback sandals. Even then she was so restrained, merely saying, “Sugar doesn’t go in shoes, dear,” that I began to wonder if he was her own child. I have noticed that it takes one’s own flesh and blood to raise the really fierce angers. He emptied it out of her shoes where the heat was already making it a sort of fudge and looked round at mine. I tucked them under the seat. His mother, if she was his mother, lit another cigarette and said gently as she had spoken to the boy, “In some ways it’s easier to let him do what he wants.”

“I don’t think I will, all the same,” I said firmly. I saw what she meant though when I felt small, sticky fingers prodding my legs.

“He’s all wound up,” she said calmly (she wasn’t though, she was the least wound-up person I’ve seen).

“We’ve had a nasty lot of things happening round here. It’s bound to tell on the kiddies,” and she popped a sweet in her mouth. “Murder, you know.” She finished the sweet and took out a pear. “It’s not usual round here,” she added. “It’s a very good-class neighbourhood. Old-fashioned, you know, but good.” She sorted round in her basket for something more to eat, what with her own consumption and the activity of her son there wasn’t much left, but she found something. It looked like a half-wrapped chocolate bar and after fighting off her son she started on this. “Why, some of the people have lived here for over fifty years,” she said, as if that put them definitely before the Flood. I had another look at her: she was probably twenty, a wife and mother, and fifty years was indeed another world to her. “Generations of them, my husband says,” she added solemnly. I felt I would have liked to see the husband whose words she repeated with such respect. She had more information to give. “One of the oldest houses is going to be knocked down and a new estate is going up. The Old Friary it was called and now it’s going to be the Old Friary Estate. Don’t know who the old Friar was,” she said.

“Oh, one of those old medieval monks,” I said vaguely. I didn’t know very much more than she.

“Neighbour of mine is buying a house there. Fridge, deep freeze and two sorts of washing machine. Classy, you know. Still, he’s earned it. And so has his wife. Bankrupt three times,” she said, taking a bite out of an apple that she had found tucked in a pocket only half eaten. “Three times bankrupt but he’s done it at last. Got to hand it to him. ‘And how does your wife feel,’ I said to him, ‘riding about in her own car after sixteen years of pushing the pram?’ She must feel strange, you know. Still she’s not putting on airs. And why should she? It might be my turn next.” Both she and her neighbour were characteristic of Black-Country society. It was a society pushing upward, with some casualties, many failures, but full of optimism, ready to buy and sell, take risks, be bankrupt three times on the chance the fourth attempt would succeed. As it very often did. It was full of signs of conspicuous spending: the Jaguar cars, the mink wraps, the diamond eternity rings. Riches here were likely to be too new to be hidden; if you had them you showed it and were glad to. Only the comparatively old rich like Mr. Marcus would hide the symbols. I thought I numbered Bryan Orraman among the throng pushing upwards. Perhaps I was one myself.

Then I knew how I had come to know this place: I had been here before.

The night I had come to visit Mr. Marcus with Bryan Orraman I had come to this neighbourhood.

I turned a corner into a quiet well-kept leafy street. It was where Mr. Marcus lived. I could make out the position of his house, although it was hidden by trees.

I had come in a circle and the ground was rising. From the little hill on which I stood I could also see Ellen Chase’s house. I calculated that Mr. Marcus’s house stood almost exactly behind it. The garden walls must touch.

Someone in a hurry could climb over the fence from Mr. Marcus’s house and walk into Ellen Chase’s kitchen.

Chapter Eight

DANGER COMES IN DIFFERENT FORMS. TO ELLEN, WORKING away innocently (although innocence is comparative and to my mind Ellen could never be totally innocent) in her kitchen that day, cooking apple tart, there could have been no suggestion of danger from her garden. But murder could come climbing over the garden wall as well as walk through the door.

I wondered I hadn’t thought of it before. Mr. Marcus could climb as well as anyone, I suppose. But I soon saw that I need not restrict my suspects to Mr. Marcus alone, although I would put him high on the list. Anyone could come and go in that garden. He didn’t keep a watch. But it would have to be someone who knew Mr. Marcus and his garden. I thought longingly of Albert again, Albert who knew something and who would like to tell, but who had been frightened. And once again this brought me back to Mr. Marcus, he was so much the most likely.

I seized on Mr. Marcus with relief; he was my scapegoat. There are many layers to truth, many depths in the mind. With part of my mind I almost believed in Mr. Marcus’s guilt. This was because I so desperately wanted to do so.

I wanted other people to believe in him too; it wasn’t going to do me any good if I was the only person. But it would have to be done tactfully. I couldn’t rush up with flags shouting, “What about Mr. Marcus being guilty?” How would I put it to Bryan Orraman? Could I say to him cynically, “Look, you and I probably don’t believe that Mr. Marcus is guilty of anything much” (he had a little something on his conscience, I swear to that, though), “but he could be framed?” And what answer would be made me if I did?

I could at least take one small positive action. Perhaps without knowing it I had already decided to do so because my feet were walking towards Mr. Marcus’s house. I could see if the garden wall could be climbed.

The comfortable suburban house was still and quiet in the sunlight. No one about in the garden, not a sign of life behind the trim white curtains. It was easy enough to get in anyway; I saw no one, I rather hoped I would meet Albert’s beady little eyes round a turn in the path. I’d see he didn’t get away easily. But I didn’t see him. You never do see anyone when you’d be really glad to. Anyway I wouldn’t put it past Albert to be lurking behind a curtain keeping well out of my way while enjoying a good look. Then he could write it all down in his little black book, I was sure he kept a black book.

I saw a narrow flag-stone path leading round the back of the house, it was very rustic, and twisted crazily and was loaded with little stone goblins and bunnies painted red. But the bunnies won hands down. I saw no one. So there was a streak of whimsy behind Mr. Marcus’s solid down-to-earth manner; it was this he had in common with Bryan Orraman, there was an unsteadiness of taste in him, too. Now there is no whimsy in me. I looked at the bunnies and the bunnies looked morosely back at me.

It was a very well kept little garden, not a weed to be seen, every plant living its own life and not interfering with another. I felt quite wistful: that was what life ought to be like. I noticed it was a garden for adults only; birds, children and cats, keep out, it shouted. Nor was it a restful garden. I don’t suppose the owner ever sat in it. There were high green hedges enclosing it on three sides, and the fence at the bottom. This was hidden behind a barrier of lupins. The coarse, peppery smell made me sneeze. Allergies are one of the things Jenny and I have in common and I could tell straight away that I was allergic to these lupins; they were pale pink and I have never liked pale pink. But I pushed them aside and there was the fence. It was quite high on this side as the ground fell away to Ellen’s house. But it would be quite possible to climb it and there was even a little pile of bricks which could have been arranged into steps. I put another pair of bricks on the top and stood up and peered over. I could see through a belt of rose bushes into Ellen’s house. More, I could see straight into her kitchen where Mrs. Gold and Betty were now drinking some tea.

I got down and stood dusting my hands. At that moment I was prepared to sacrifice Mr. Marcus or anyone else.

I looked at those bricks again. They had dried earth trampled into them. It really did look very much as if someone with mud on his shoes had stood on them. The very earth around had a churned-up look. It had rained a week ago last Thursday. The last rain we had had. The ground would have been clay on the day Ellen died. The earth had set into long ridges as if ploughed.

As I walked out of the garden I saw that there was a small cage propped up on some more bricks. Faint cheeps were coming from it in this birdless garden. There was a lame little bird with one leg gone and someone had contrived a little false stump for it. The bird didn’t seem very happy with it but it was trying. I knew it had been Mr. Marcus, I couldn’t see Albert putting his hands to work for a bird and producing the neat little peg.

Then I knew I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t rig a trap for that harmless, kind little man, even if it would work. And I was clever enough to see it might not work. I was a lying jade but I couldn’t do that. Jenny had been used, had been innocently sent on to a contrived stage, but we would have no more of it.

“Goodbye, Admiral Benbow,” I said softly to the bird.

I knew the face of the murderer by now. I could draw his lineaments, but I still did not admit the name myself. I used words like accident and justifiable, although I knew them to be incompatible and contradictory. I knew too, that this murderer, if I would allow the name, was a true murderer, one with murder in his heart. This heart was moved by fear and self-pity, only there was precious little other pity there. This was the person who had killed Ellen.

I see as I write all this that, like most biographers, I have unconsciously been giving a portrait of myself also.

I knew too that more or less consciously I had created a character for Bryan Orraman. I had put myself before him as I wanted him to see me. We all do this more or less but perhaps I, as an actress, did it more consciously than most. But circumstances were pressing on me…I couldn’t quite hang on to the character I had created for him. It grew shady at the edges and the old me peeped out. At this stage I was still hoping, still manoeuvring, still thinking that perhaps I might keep him, him and Jenny.

And myself, because I had to save myself too.

But I was not mistaken in the importance of the garden. It was to have a great, almost immortal significance for me.

* * * * *

Someone had surely stood there watching Ellen. The person with the most reason to watch Ellen, the person who could have watched Ellen closely every day of his life but might have reason for wanting to watch her at a distance: Ellen’s husband.

There was trouble in Ellen’s life, her mother had hinted as much. It seemed to me now that the most important thing in the world at the moment was to get an interview with Detective-Constable Eddie Chase.

* * * * *

He was not at home, he was not at work, he was not on holiday. The Franchise Police were remote on the subject. He was on leave, they said, when I telephoned from a callbox on the edge of the Friary Estate. Great automatic shovels were working all round me, piles of bricks, cement and stakes of wood showed that the Friary Estate was still growing. I remembered that the Chases had been going to move to a new house and recalled that it was to have been on the Friary Estate. It seemed luxury level for a detective constable.

I followed up my telephone call with a personal visit. I saw a large, clean, polite man in a flyblown office (there were so many flies in King’s Bromwich that summer) and he was just as communicative as his colleagues. He did not exactly refuse to speak but he came very close to dumbness. He had a funny way of putting things, too. “I’ve given you all the help I can, miss,” he said, after telling me the Chases’ home address, which I knew, and the mother-in-law’s address which I already knew. He wasn’t calm. He was bitter. “If you’re wanting more it’s not here. I’ve lived in the same place as the man for twenty years, worked with him, and I can tell you his home address and he’s not there. Well, I’m sorry that’s how it is, but I think you’ll admit that he’s got good reason for not being there. Would you be there?” He didn’t really want me to answer, he was having an argument by himself.

I didn’t rest with him and eventually they let me see a smaller man, but in a bigger room, who was clearly very senior indeed. His task was manifestly to calm me, to soothe me, to quieten me, to halt me. In a way he succeeded; the quiet reticence, his air of simply not knowing stopped me for a time. I went away. But I could not stop thinking and analysing my impressions. And in the end the thoughts shaped themselves pretty clearly in my mind towards one conclusion: that the police were keeping Eddie Chase hidden. He had information which was vital to the prosecution of Jenny and they were keeping him on ice until the trial.

But you can’t keep a man altogether hidden, especially you cannot sever all connections between the man and his home district. If I went there often enough, if I hung about, if I watched for the postman and the tradesmen, I might pick up some sign of where Eddie Chase was.

So there began a period when I was a sort of ghost about the district, hoping to see Chase, watching and waiting for something. After a time, although I clung doggedly to my task, I hardly knew for what. It was a sort of fever with me.

I did not tell Bryan Orraman all of what I was doing, but I told him a great deal. He listened gravely. I had begun to wonder lately if he suspected me. We were no longer growing closer; he was moving rapidly away from me. We were at the stage of discontent. Perhaps this was part of my trouble. Bryan Orraman seemed to have no home, unless it was his black Jaguar car. For a long time I thought this was home and mother combined to him. He certainly loved it like a baby. As far as the present was concerned I don’t think I was far wrong, but for the future Bryan had other plans.

He chose one hot afternoon to let me see them, or perhaps he didn’t choose it. I think he took everyone along there when he could, and most people had seen all they wanted. I was new to it and I went with my tail wagging. I’d have gone to the moon.

By this time I had formed certain conclusions about him. He was much more than the thin-blooded young professional man he seemed at first glance; he was much more unusual and yet a more ambiguous character. I didn’t quite know what made him tick. Not that I held this against him, in fact it was part of his attraction. He was not as straightforward as I had expected.

“I’d like to take you to see something,” he suggested rather shyly at the conclusion of one of our business talks.

He drove through the town towards the edge of the built-up districts until we came to an area of more or less country. Houses were going up, though, so that it would soon become suburban. We went up a steep, wooded hill. It was necessary to leave the car because the road was not made. Even although it was a hot, dry day there was a fresh wind blowing. It struck me as a particularly desolate and chilly spot, so that what came after hit me with particular shock.

At the top of the hill there was a clearing in the wood. Bryan strode eagerly forward. I stumbled, tearing a stocking in a branch, but he didn’t see, let alone stop, he was too busy talking to me.

“And this is where I will build,” he said, with enthusiasm in his eyes. There was dust in mine. A large bare space stretched in front of us and he spread out his arms. “A pretty big house, I expect.”

He walked me round, pointing out the best features of his house, while I stumbled behind. “A big bay window here, you see, where the view is best. We shall have to knock down the pines, of course. All warmed by indirect heating.” I don’t think he knew what that was quite. “White walls, I think.” He walked over to another side of the bare earth, “Bathroom here, dressing-room next.”

“What about a ballroom?” I said. But he ignored this. He was too busy going round marking out the limits of his palace, picking up a brick here, a stone there, like a magpie.

“And I suppose you’ll drive in one night with twenty black slaves to build it for you?” He didn’t get what I meant; that’s the trouble with these empire-builders, they are barely literate and have absolutely no sense of humour. He’d never heard of Thomas Sutpen.

“We get very little coloured labour round here,” he said absently. “Now here’s a loggia” (he got that word right), “where my wife can sit and pour tea in the summer.”

I shivered; I thought that a cold, chill wind would always blow around and through this big house. “You’ll need a silver tea-service.”

“Got that,” he said briskly. “It’s in the bank.”

I looked at him and the wind seemed to freshen. On this subject, he was, to all intents and purposes, mad.

I knew then that whoever poured the tea from the silver teapot, it wouldn’t be me.

So between work for Jenny and my frustrated love-affair, I buzzed about like an angry bee.

Enoch was still unconscious, still far away. Each day one asked the same question and got the same answer and wondered again how long a human being could lie unconscious with the brain cells shrinking and withering, the tiny impulses that move between them to shape intelligence dying away so that everything that went to make the mind would die, and if he lived at all it would be as an idiot. There is a living that is worse than dying; once I would never have believed this, but I was coming to see it. Bridget I never saw. She was always at the hospital.

So I wandered about the district. It was quite interesting once you studied it and I came to know certain things about it pretty well. I knew the regular procession of events there, the baker, the milkman, and the greengrocer, and what time they got their posts. I got to know some of the inhabitants, although what they made of me I can’t think. That mad woman that’s always asking questions, I expect.

You mustn’t think during this period I lost my grip on my appearance, I had trained in too hard a school to do that. I made up my face, put on my clothes as meticulously as usual. But I was having trouble with my hair, it wouldn’t keep down and fell about my face awkwardly. Venetia kept telephoning. She had accepted that I was out of the cast for a bit; they had reached London now and would be opening in a week, but she was anxious about me. I had hardly ever known Venetia anxious about anyone (anyone human, that is; I’ve known her fret herself into a tizzy over a pet monkey) and I was touched. “At least let me send you some more clothes,” she urged.

John Coffin reappeared intermittently in my life, always with an abstracted worried look and nothing much to say for himself. For a natural talker he seemed very quiet. He was watching me, and sometimes I caught him giving me long, strange, almost affectionate looks. Although I didn’t know it then he too was having troubles of his own; his superiors were questioning his activities in the Black Country sharply, and there was a suggestion that he might be recalled.

He too had been having telephone calls from London: in his case from his mother, Mrs. Coffin. Only her telephonings were strictly business. She was busy tapping all the lines of information, of which she had plenty. One of the people she knew was Venetia. They had danced together in the chorus somewhere in the days when both were shaping up for their future careers, which in one case was to produce a star of the legitimate stage and in the other a young and successful detective. I suppose roughly the same talents and value of endurance and nerve were required. Another person she knew was Tommy Crammer’s wife. She was a spry old bird of eighty whom Tommy had married for her money when she was a mere girl of sixty-five. But she had outlived it, or outdrunk it, and was likely to outlive Tommy too. Tommy was trying to prove that he could not have hit Enoch on the head because he was on the train at the time, but he was not too unhappy as suspicion was having a wonderful effect on business for him.

But he knew what he was doing; in the whole case he never put a foot wrong.

The neighbourhood was tougher than it looked, as is always the way in the Black Country. For instance, next door to the manager of the local co-operative store, a respectable and rather nervous man (I had never seen him but I now knew his two children by sight and they clearly took after him) lived the biggest rogue (and the nicest) in the Midlands. He was a lorry driver and an ex-black marketeer, and in the money. And next door to him lived a large, tough man who owned a small business in Halesowen that he would never talk about, so what they did there was nobody’s business. I hardly ever saw the menfolk, they were gone during the day and I had cleared out by the time they got back at night. I had enough sense not to hang about at night. During the day I saw their wives when I took my long, desultory walks.

The Chase house was shut up again, and showed no sign of life.

Only slowly did I change my mind about the police and Eddie Chase. Little pointers, small signs, indicated to me that the police were watching too. And this meant that they did not know where he was.

The police suspected Eddie Chase and it was this that was embarrassing them so much. But they had no more idea than I had where he was.

He had totally disappeared.

Chapter Nine

IT WAS ABOUT THIS TIME THAT I NOTICED THE DOG. HE WAS a small brown animal, regular in his walks as I was in mine, and pretty nearly as noticeable. He had a wall eye, a lame back leg and two of his front teeth stuck out in a sort of leer. All the same he had great charm. He always took the same walk to the gate of the Chase house, in, out, then up the hill again. It almost looked as if he was checking up. Then I remembered the dog-lead hanging up in the hall of the Chase house. So I followed the dog as it went up the hill; at Mr. Marcus’s house it stopped, gathered itself together and jumped, not without difficulty, over the low brick wall. I peered over but it had pushed its way through the shrubs and disappeared.

A passer-by saw me looking and considerately told me not to worry. “That dog’s loopy you know,” he said. “Eccentric. They get like that sometimes.”

“Do you know whose dog it is?”

He shook his head. “It’s a local, though. Always around. Especially lately. But, as I say, it’s loopy.” He looked loopy himself for he was wearing a green blazer striped with blue and a matching straw boater. For a moment I thought he might be a member of my own profession wearing his stage dress and then I saw the significance of the square wooden box under his arm and his sports bag: he was representing his club at an afternoon’s bowls. He saw me looking at his finery and raised his boater, half proud and half embarrassed, before trotting off.

I went into the garden for a second time. The bird was gone and a tortoise was crawling slowly across the grass. A deck chair was standing on the lawn but it must have stood there for some time because the grass underneath was yellow. I saw the dog limp down the path; it sniffed at the chair, but only casually as if it was not really interested, and then hurried on, three legs carrying one leg. At the bottom of the garden the dog turned left and went to the small garden shed made of stone.

The shed was like the hut in Hansel and Gretel, for it was tiny and pretty with a porch and little windows. The ‘dog went over and scratched at the door.

I walked towards the door to examine it. I was curious. The door, as I had guessed, was locked. I rattled the handle but it held firm. The dog, after looking at me hopefully, sat down to wait.

To wait. I considered that. Unless the dog was a fool, and it didn’t look too bright, then it had waited here before to some purpose. After a bit I saw that it didn’t matter a bit if the dog was loopy, because it was habit that counted with dogs.

I tried the door again, this time shaking the handle very hard and pressing against the door. The brown dog growled and showed its two remaining front teeth. I patted its head and it forgot its anger and wagged its tail. It was that sort of dog.

I looked in through the dirty pane of glass. The cobwebs were quite thick and it was really not easy to see, but I thought I could see something very strange.

I thought I could see a camp-bed. Well, it could have been.

* * * * *

I waited by a bus stop; by now I was in a great hurry to produce my story of the shed. And I thought I would try it out first on Bryan Orraman’. A bus came down the hill, but it sailed past without stopping to pick me up. I turned my face towards the centre of the town and started to walk. Farther down the hill I could see my young friend with the small boy; she was pushing a pram, and by the regular movements of her hand from bag to mouth I could see that she was eating still. What the boy was doing was not clear, but no doubt it was something dangerous.

Then suddenly I saw, hidden between two houses, the shop that Jenny had claimed she had called in at after the fight with Ellen. I could understand why Jenny had called it a chemist’s shop, because the window was full of advertisements for aspirin, but in fact it was a general shop.

All the same, the police had been very careless if they had missed it. They had not missed it in fact. I was told when I went in to inquire that they had been there twice. The woman in the shop declared that she had never seen Jenny. No one in the least like her had ever come into the shop.

I wasn’t quite convinced by her. After all, here was the shop, placed more or less where Jenny had said, and if she could be shown to have called in here then it indicated that she had left the Chase house when she claimed.

But the woman continued to shake her head with her eyes full of sympathy. They were lovely eyes too, big, brown, cow-like eyes.

“I’m sorry I can’t help. I told the other policeman too,” she said. “I can’t say she was here, if she wasn’t, can I? I told the same story each time. That shows I was telling the truth, doesn’t it?”

It was a strange way of putting it, and frankly, I thought it might show she was not telling the truth. But why should she lie? “Which policeman was that?”

“The London one; he’s an attractive man, isn’t he?” and she stared solemnly at the big mirror she kept, no doubt by design, above the counter just where she could admire herself in it. She was a strange figure to see behind the pots and pans and packets of Brillo. I looked down at her hand and saw that she was married. She saw me looking too and flipped the hand under the counter. I could feel myself frowning.

All the same, there was something reminiscent of Jenny in this shop. There was some small thing which I could not yet pin down and which was familiar. Or anyway, something I had seen before. I looked along the shelves which were stacked with pan cleaners, scrubbers, soap, detergents and steel wool.

I looked again at the brightly coloured packets of pink soap. One was unwrapped, and a strong, sweet smell rose up to me. I remembered that smell, and as I touched the soap a faint, faraway itch started in my hands.

Bridget’s hands, Jenny’s hands, and my hands. I remembered now that my hands had started an irritation after I had used similar soap in Jenny’s house. If there was one thing Jenny, Bridget and I had in common it was allergies.

So Jenny had come here and had bought soap.

It was the first small confirmation that her story might be true.

But this woman would never admit it. She stared at me with her big, blank, kind brown eyes and just smiled. She had no reason for silence. Only she was silly and obstinate, and determined not to be mixed up. Perhaps she or her husband had once been in trouble with the police. I thought of the way she had hidden her wedding ring, and knew it was the husband.

* * * * *

I never got to see Bryan Orraman in his office. There was a call to go to the hospital waiting for me when I got back to the hotel. The hospital was quite empty of people I knew when I arrived there. Not even Bridget was there. I thought she had probably been absorbed back into that tremendous family. She could withstand even the death of Enoch, if he did die, when she had them, especially as he had not run away from her and she had her pride intact. I could see that what Bridget had always needed, and what she had now got, was a big, solid family life; a husband didn’t matter so much. A deep love and need for children was what was strong in Bridget; it was as the mother she saw herself. I had always known that Jenny was the crucial figure in Bridget’s life and not Lester.

Enoch had become conscious; he had called together enough life to ask for me, to insist, as I don’t suppose the hospital wished him to have visitors. And yet his face when I saw it didn’t look friendly or pleased, he was past that, I suppose. Past everything, except a dreadful straining anxiety. He didn’t even have the same face: the boy who had stood in the street below Bryan Orraman’s office had been bonny, full of vitality and spirit. This face wasn’t handsome, it was plain and yellow. He didn’t look like a boy in bed, but a little old man.

To my surprise John Coffin was sitting by the bed. He got up and came over to speak to me quietly; he lowered his naturally resonant voice. “He’d made up his mind to see you, so the doctors gave permission.” He paused for a moment. “In any case you have a right to know what is being said.”

Without answering this, I turned to the bed. The nurse was straightening a sheet, and she too had something to say. “Keep your voice down,” she commanded. “He can hear although his ears are bandaged.”

I bent down over Enoch. “Hello,” I breathed. He stared at me for a moment as if he didn’t recognise me. “I’ve lost my memory, you know,” he said. “I can’t remember very much about this morning.” I caught Coffin’s eye. More than a week had passed since we found Enoch unconscious. “Go along with him,” said Coffin under his breath.

“That’s all right, Enoch,” I said. “What is it? Why do you want me?” I think I had a feeling even then of what I was going to get.

“My mind is full of it,” he said, “but I can’t get the details clear. I keep thinking of you, and seeing your face,” He stared at me. “I know I had to get to Mr. Orraman and tell him…”

“Tell him what?” I prompted.

“What I got from Tommy Crammer…”

“And what did you get from Tommy?”

“I was to ask about the old man.” His voice was mechanical. I had the impression that he had been repeating this story endlessly to himself, half aloud, half in that hoarse whisper. He hardly knew now what the words meant, but his mind had been full of this message when he was attacked, so the shadow of it was still there to worry him; he still cared. He was puzzled and uncomprehending, but if he was to have any chance to live at all, he must void his mind of the burden it carried. “The old man,” he said again. Did he mean Mr. Marcus?

“Who sent you on this errand?” I asked.

He looked puzzled; a sweat appeared on his cheeks. I put out my hand involuntarily to stop him speaking. To my surprise he moved his head sharply back with a thin cry. The nurse swung round; she had been listening of course, although she pretended otherwise. Everyone always was listening all through the case.

“I think it was you.”

I heard Coffin take a deep breath, and I remembered, as how could I forget, that Coffin had said the boy had been sent to a trap. This then was the story Coffin thought I had a right to hear.

“Well, don’t worry,” I said, patting his hand which he did not withdraw this time. “Thanks for telling me. Remember you’re the boy who threw the chips at me and Albert?” They had landed mostly on me, I thought.

“That was a mistake,” he said, relaxing for the first time, and almost smiling.

There was more to come yet for me; I thought I had faced the worst, but it wasn’t so.

“Where’s Bridget?” I asked as Coffin saw me to the door of the hospital. “Why isn’t she here?” I didn’t really care; I thought I knew.

He didn’t answer, so I asked again, more sharply: “Where’s Bridget?”

“She’s with her mother.”

We were walking down the hospital steps, and at the bottom I saw the black Jaguar car. Bryan Orraman got out and stood waiting. He looked questioningly at Coffin, who shook his head. “No one has told her,” he said.

“Your sister attempted suicide last night,” said Bryan Orraman. He looked very weary. “No, don’t worry, she didn’t make much of a job of it, they brought her round all right. That’s the least of it really.” He meant that Jenny had destroyed what remained of faith in her if not herself.

“How?”

Coffin’s expressive hands went to his neck; I don’t believe he even knew they had moved, but I understood how Jenny had tried to commit suicide.

“I ought to have guessed,” I said remembering Jenny’s hysteria when I had last seen her. “And I had hopes for her. I had found some confirmation of her story.”

“That’s no longer enough for her,” said Coffin. “She doesn’t want hope. She wants out.”

In my mind I saw Jenny’s bed in the prison ward. I could see it as if it was hidden behind a thick pane of glass. It was a sort of parody of the bed I had just left. Bridget was kneeling by the side, and I think Lester was there. I couldn’t see very clearly.

“I must go to her.” I took a step forward but Coffin drew me back and shook his head. “Leave them alone.”

It was at this moment I took my great step forward. Until this moment I had been playing a double game, but now I could do so no longer; I could not let my sister be the sacrifice in any game of mine.

In Coffin’s face I saw confirmation that we had both, from our different points of view, reached the same decision.

“What heavy pressure can you put on a woman,” asked Coffin sadly, “to make her prefer to hang herself on a bit of electric flex rather than to struggle for life?”

It was a question he did not answer then. But he returned to it on another occasion.

Chapter Ten

A LARGE YOUNG MAN CAME OUT OF COFFIN’S OFFICE AS I walked towards it. He was wearing a short blue jacket and tight blue trousers which clung like elastic to his ankles, displaying yellow socks and shiny black shoes, but his strong, rather pugnacious features, and the extreme cleanness of everything about him cast a thoroughly respectable air over these rakish garments. He was familiar to me, there was something about that righteous stare, it had looked at me out of the eyes of Little Brother; he was a Flavell. I didn’t recall him at the tea-table, but maybe he had been out working. He looked like one of the working Flavells as opposed to the drinking Flavells like the father, and the idling Flavells like Little Brother.

“Goodbye, Mr. Orraman,” he called over his shoulder. So Bryan was there too.

Well, whatever the interview he had had with John Coffin, whatever information he had passed on, he had acquitted himself honourably and efficiently, and was now off home to his breadwinner’s sardine tea. You didn’t have to be a fortune-teller to see that. It was written all over him. He turned round as if he knew I was watching him, and I could see there was a faint ring of pink round the eyes, so perhaps he wasn’t as sure of himself as I had thought. He looked about sixteen.

My own future was obscure. I wondered what Ellen’s mother, Mrs. Gold, would have predicted for me. I remembered that in the old days she had been good at telling fortunes from tea-cups. It would take quite a teacup to contain the fortunes of me and Jenny now.

Jenny was the enigma. “It all comes back to what has always been the real worry,” said Coffin, “which is, why is your sister behaving so oddly? She is behaving oddly, you know. She’s frightened, very frightened, and yet she’s making things worse for herself.”

“Being frightened often does just that for you,” I pointed out.

“Would you call her a brave person?” he asked me suddenly.

Jenny was not brave. She was less brave, in any conventional way, than I was, and that wasn’t setting a high standard. She had many fears, she feared rats, disease, fires and dark places, she even feared things that crawled and some things that flew; most of all she feared violence. But she had her own sort of courage, a kind of endurance, a fortitude. She could take things if she had to. Some people never can.

Something was digging in my back; I dug my hand into the chair and pulled out a large grandfatherly-looking pipe. It had been smoked too. I hadn’t the least doubt in the world who it belonged to. I handed it to Coffin. “Your last visitor left that.”

He took it from me and placed it in a drawer. “He’s not old enough to smoke it,” he said. He was rather cross. He thought, quite rightly, that I was putting him off. Well, what could I say? Was Jenny brave? Brave for what? How could I answer?

“She ought to speak up,” said Coffin impatiently,

“there’s plenty there to come out, I’m sure of that all right. And not healthy knowledge either.”

“And yet you say you think she is innocent. I don’t understand you.”

Coffin focused his impatience on me. I felt like a fly being frizzled in the electric light. “I think she is in contact with someone who is not innocent.” He let this make its impact, and then added, “She knows who is guilty. Or thinks she does,” he ended thoughtfully.

Even flies have their feelings, they are capable of irritation. “Why are you taking such an interest anyway?” I demanded. “This isn’t your case. Aren’t you supposed to be investigating the Franchise Police?”

“There may be a connection,” he said. He remained unirritated. He hadn’t even noticed the poor old fly.

Bryan Orraman got up and walked round the room. He was a little shocked at my attitude. He and Coffin had advanced in intimacy and friendship. I felt this without understanding it.

“Do you think so?” he questioned with a serious face, giving me a frown. “A link?”

“A missing link,” said Coffin.

There was only one character off-stage, only one actor missing, and I knew the time had come for him to be found. But I didn’t want to be the one who pointed it out. It is a truism that it is always the murderer who comes up with the important discoveries, and the corollary of that is: when in doubt, keep your mouth shut. I looked at Byran, wondering what he would say, half willing him to speak.

It was my second interview with him already that day. We had met in the shabby little room at the Hotel Western. The meeting had been at my suggestion. I knew that after our interview outside the hospital he had wanted to disappear. He murmured something about work, but Jenny and I were work. He could not evade me, he must do his duty even though the bill was one he would never present.

I had asked him to call, naming a time, but when he came he was early or I was late, it doesn’t matter now, but it was one of those occasions which go left-footed from the beginning.

By now the atmosphere of my dingy room, at first rejected, scorned, risen above, had become as good as home to me. I welcomed it, I sank back into it thankfully. There were two mirrors in the room. One was small and bad and stood above the dressing-table; on the wall there was a larger one with a good clear reflection. It was significant of my state that I had come to prefer the mirror on the dressing-table which sent my left eyebrow up and lengthened my nose. I would look at it when I came in and think to myself comfortingly: Well, that’s you again.

The pile of clothes which Venetia had sent me were piled up untidily in the corner. I never wore them, never thought of them, I stuck to my silk suit and my hat which had been Venetia’s. They still looked pretty good to me. I thought I was invulnerable.

The maid who cleaned my room used to look at my neglected clothes with loving eyes. She thought I was a fool not to wear them. But you can’t fight a murder case and keep your nail varnish unchipped. She was a nice woman with a line in cheap scent which irritated me until I got used to it. She came from London, which was strange, as although there is a good deal of migration from the Midlands to London, it doesn’t usually work the other way round. She explained this as being due to marriage. “And that was my mistake, dear,” she said, patting a box from Debenham and Freebody’s, “(reminds me of home, lovely old Vere Street), and I should have known better. I’m not appreciated. I say scratch my old man and you’d find a caveman underneath. They’re hard on women up here. There’s some men that really do think a woman’s a lower kind of animal and I seem to run into a lot of them up here. Take my advice, dear, and marry somewhere else.” I knew she had seen me with Bryan Orraman. She knew him of course, she knew everybody, and he was, after all, a public figure, even if his public was made up of litigants, crooks and petty offenders. “A very nice good-looking man but hard,” was how she summed him up to me. “A woman’d have to dance to his tune.” But one might like to do that, I thought.

I was still thinking it as I plodded round my room, hat still on head, getting ready for his visit. There were certain things I had to do.

His knock coming smartly on the door made me jump.

I looked round the room from bed to dressing-table, from dressing-table to narrow wardrobe and wondered where you could hide something that had to be hidden, and which were the places the alert searcher would go straight for. But there was a second knock on the door and so I hid what I held in my hand behind my skirt. It felt clumsy and heavy. It was a small electric travelling-iron and, because the makers had discovered that irons need weight to work efficiently, it was much heavier than it looked. A handy little weapon, I had called a similar iron once.

“Your hat’s crooked,” said Bryan, without preamble. It was as if he had made up his mind to behave naturally but found it harder to achieve than he expected. I looked in the mirror for the first time for days, and saw myself as he saw me: impeccably made up, for my training there had withstood everything, but thinner, and wearing a forlorn, greyish hat. Venetia’s gay little piece of Paris nonsense had been dragged around, worn too much, neglected, till it looked like a clump of lily of the valley that the storm had hit. I understood then that between me and Jenny and Bridget there was a deep resemblance; in time of stress we all three tried to run away from ourselves.

“Thank you for coming,” I said nervously.

“You asked me to come and I’m here.” This was not a promising beginning and I’m bound to say his face didn’t look promising either. He had become as suspicious of me as an old cat. Restlessly he tapped the chair where he was sitting. He was wound up tight like a wire and ready to unspring at a touch. He took a cigarette from the box with the initials on it.

“Can I have one?” I asked apprehensively. And there was no act about it, you’d be nervous faced with an angry man, and a man who wasn’t going to express his anger but let it rumble underneath, stoking up hidden fires. He thought I had deceived him; if it came to that I had deceived him. He gave me the cigarette without a word. It was a vile cigarette. He seemed to be chastising the body as well as the spirit. After a puff or two I held it in one hand unsmoked; I was keeping the other hand behind me until I could let the burden it held drop unobtrusively on the padded seat. I really congratulated myself on the way I was managing: there was something in being an actress after all.

“I have something to tell you,” I added.

“A good deal, I should imagine,” he said with an evilly angry smile. It felt evil where I was anyway.

I sat still for a moment to gather my forces; the trouble with writing your own dialogue is that you have to make it sound natural. “I’ve been able to confirm part of my sister’s story,” I began. I told him about the shop and the woman in it. “The trouble is, though,” I concluded, “I don’t know how many people would set much store by this allergy thing.”

“Very few, I should imagine.”

“I knew you’d say that, of course. But all the same, it is the truth, and the truth has a way of surviving and coming out on top.”

“You think that?” He was expressionless.

“It’s a challenge, of course.”

“Of course. Have you anything more to offer?”

“Yes.” My heart was beating fast. “I think I have found policeman Chase.”

That really shook him. He didn’t say a word but just sat there looking at me and smoking; then for a second, he paused in his smoking:

“Where?”

I leaned forward and poured out my story. I explained that I thought the man was camping out at the back of Mr. Marcus’s home. I had prepared it all very carefully, but I sounded hasty, nervous, and incoherent. I carried conviction.

When I sat back, I felt that I had, in a way, established something.

“Now you can do something for Jenny, can’t you?”

“Yes.” He put out his cigarette and his face looked sad.

“Now I can do something for Jenny.”

To my surprise he kissed me as he went.

As I turned back from the door, I saw that, although hidden behind me, the heavy iron had been perfectly visible to Bryan Orraman in the mirror.

I wiped my hands; they felt wet and sticky.

Coffin too had been having his own troubles while he had been investigating his own case in co-operation with the City Franchise Police. The Franchisers were not welcoming. You couldn’t expect them to be. Their iron discipline, their guardsman-like smartness in deportment and turnout were their pride and ought to have sufficed to protect them from the impertinence of a man down from London; it galled them that it had not. Coffin’s work was conducted from a large but depressing room overlooking a railway line, which had formerly been a cloakroom and still had a lot of hooks and coat-hangers in it. It could have been cleared out, but it hadn’t been; that showed what the Franchisers thought of Coffin. Presumably when Coffin stopped work it would go back to being a cloakroom. He looked acutely uncomfortable in it and rather unhappy. The joke among the Franchisers was that he was missing his mother. John Coffin was assisted in his inquiry by another ‘independent observer’, as they say at U.N.O., a dour man from South London, who was usually silent, and the two men sat together in depressed silence among the piles of notes and papers they were collecting. The responsibility however was Coffin’s and the newspapers spoke of it as ‘his’ investigation. After a first period of silence a wave of criticism had appeared.

I took little notice of it to begin with, preoccupied as I was with my own worries, but I got the newspapers with my breakfast at the Hotel Western and gradually the sheer persistence of the criticisms got through to me. Coffin, never, I should judge, a tactful man, was pricking thin skins everywhere. (Official skins are constitutionally thin.) The Franchise Police didn’t like having him there anyway; the County Police were on the alert for offence, which Coffin unluckily seemed ready to oblige with. In addition Coffin had been saying that the increase in the crimes of violence was somehow the fault of the district; that it encouraged violence; that it had false values. For instance, he had come right out and said that “any trouble here is the trouble of the people who live here; they didn’t have it dumped in their laps, it grew right up with them”. And on another occasion he said: “I’m not going to be in a hurry. I’m not digging out what’s of slight value, but the whole of a life.”

The district didn’t like what Coffin was turning up. It was a proud, prosperous, money-minded society that had made up its mind long ago what were the prizes to aim at and didn’t like finding out now that some of the prizes were shoddy. It had its values and it lived by them, they were material, and easily seen. “Oh, don’t think I condemn them,” said Coffin once. “I share them too, in a way. I think it’s better for a man to ride to work in a car rather than to walk to work with holes in his shoes. But I don’t think it’s right for him to drive over anyone who happens to be in the way.” He added, “Nor do I want him to get the car by straight stealing or some underhand technique.” Bryan Orraman, who was present at the time, was sceptical. “I don’t believe in corruption.” He got his answer: “I never believe in corruption,” said Coffin. “It’s a portmanteau word that doesn’t amount to a lot in this country. But I believe in stupidity and greed and carelessness and put together they often add up to the same thing.” Of course none of this inside story was known to me directly, but it was to Bryan Orraman who reported it to me wryly. This was in the days when he still did tell me things.

As I sat now observing the two men I could see very clearly that there was a growing relationship between them. They were constantly together on business of one sort or another, but it was more than that. They were congenial, and I would have said there was a sort of affection between them. This puzzled me, and in a distant way, alarmed me too. I suppose, subconsciously, I saw it for what it was: a gesture of understanding and sympathy, rare of its kind, from John Coffin. I think I knew certainly that the sources of the affection that flowed between them were in him. I doubt if Bryan had much love to give outside himself. But I also knew that as John Coffin went up, so I went down. Life is like that. No one stands on the fulcrum, or not for long. The gods refuse.

At this moment John Coffin sat at his desk his hands resting on, deliberately obscuring so I thought, a pile of papers which had the air of being legal documents. I couldn’t see exactly what they were although I had a good look. They were carefully arranged and so were Coffin’s large hands, but a few red seals were showing. Bryan could see all this as well as I could. He was fidgeting round, and it struck me that he would have liked to ask what they were. But his lawyer’s training held and he said nothing. I wish he had asked now. Looking back, I wonder if Coffin dangled them in front of us on purpose? These papers reminded me of something I had seen before and for a moment I could not remember what this was. Yet I dimly recalled actually setting my name on it. Insurance, possibly, I thought. Then I remembered.

A large policeman without uniform brought us each a cup of tea and it was the cup of tea which reminded me, because it reminded me of my mother. Two years ago I had bought a little house for my mother. Mother lived with me and not Jenny, feeling the same way as I did about Lester. We had discussed papers like these in the bright new kitchen she was so pleased with. Could we really afford it or couldn’t we? Would it work out? We had pored over the title deeds to our property with great pleasure, learning such words as messuage and tenement and easement and abutment, savouring every drop of right or property. It was the biggest thing we had ever owned. Or almost owned. The title deeds were transient visitors through our hands as we had to raise a mortgage. “I can always take a lodger, my dear,” Mother had said, “if we find expenses getting a bit high.” But so far we never had, although we had come perilously close to it the time I was in a show that closed after one night, and the time we had a strike of all the electricians so that no one could come to the theatre even if they had wanted. But lately, thanks to Venetia and television we had been comfortable. As a matter of fact I wonder what lodger would have been comfortable with Mother because she was a lady who knew her own mind and everyone else’s as well, as a rule. Now she was immobilised by the sudden onset of arthritis which hit her one day when she woke with sudden fever and great stiffness. But in a way I was glad she could not travel to Jenny and me now. I knew Mother, and the only thing that could have made conditions worse for us would have been Mother’s help.

Coffin flicked the papers unobtrusively out of sight; I guessed then that they were important. Sometimes a gesture of this sort can be as revealing as speech. He didn’t wish me to see them, therefore it was of consequence to me if I saw them and therefore I could guess what they were. I knew as plainly as if he had told me that he was holding the deeds of the Chase house. What I didn’t know was whether they were of the new house they were buying, or the old house in which Ellen had been killed.

He did not discuss the papers. Instead, he returned to the point from which we had started. “There are pressures and pressures aren’t there? I’ve been wondering if we haven’t all been under pressure from one side without knowing it.”

“So?” Bryan lit a cigarette and offered one to Coffin. I refused. Had Bryan always smoked so much? I couldn’t remember. “And what side would that be?”

Coffin was chewing away on his cigarette as if he had never had one in his mouth before. “Our weakest side. The side of our fears. There’s a sharp psychologist at work somewhere.”

“What about the police?” asked Bryan.

“This is a damned awful cigarette.”

Bryan overrode this almost peevish interjection with dignity. “What you say applies to them, I think. They are not seeing straight. They think you are getting a case lined up against them.” He paused and glanced at Coffin, who said nothing. So Bryan went on. “And they are nervous about Detective Chase. They think that Chase has skipped. They don’t really want to find him, so they don’t find him. They think logically and with some show of justification that Jenny murdered Ellen Chase. But they also think, deep down inside them, that Chase may have murdered his own wife and fled. But they may be wrong on both counts.”

“I think they are wrong,” said Coffin shortly. I knew in that moment he was out on a limb, someone was putting pressure on his fears too.

“But where is Chase? Well, we have the smallest of leads, haven’t we? We have the dog.” He glanced at me as he spoke.

* * * * *

The three of us, odd conspirators, because we were acting from different motives and interests, went forth in search of the dog.

It was high afternoon in Burnt Green, the part of the town where Mr. Marcus lived, with the sun beating down on the roads and a smell of hot tar arising from the sticky surface. Cars were parked at intervals along the road, and a lawn mower hummed not far away; an ice- cream van tinkled out its cadence of sickly inviting notes, hovered by us, then seeing we did not take up the invitation went irritably off. It was Saturday afternoon, but nerves were feeling the heat.

The Marcus garden was still empty, the house still lifeless. I was certain now that the windows were locked and the door bolted.

“He’s away,” said Coffin, with a wave of his hand. Bryan seemed unsurprised, as if he knew this already, but of course he was a friend of Mr. Marcus.

We went up to the shed. The dog was there again, this time sitting waiting with his back against the door.

Coffin nodded at Bryan and together they forced the door. It was not difficult, as it was old and warped. Inside there was a gloomy green light through the dirty windows and a sour-sweet dust rose from the ground, beaten up by the disturbance of their entrance. There was a smell of tarry rope, seeds, creosote, and something that I couldn’t quite place.

The bed was in the corner with blankets piled neatly at one end. The blankets were old and thin, but clean, and pungent with mothballs. A pair of shoes was tucked underneath the bed, and by them, also just under the bed, stood a jar of tobacco.

The dog jumped on the blanket and sat there with a staid satisfied air. As I have said already, he was fundamentally a stupid animal. He had no reason to be satisfied.

The whole set-up conjured up the picture of an old man. This puzzled me. Chase had been young.

Coffin examined the blankets, ignoring the dog’s quiet protest. The blankets looked as if they had been stored there for years unused; moths flew out of them. He picked up the shoes and stared at them. They were old and dusty and cracked. No foot had enjoyed comfort in that shoe for a long time.

“Careless,” said Coffin, as he replaced the shoe. He picked up the jar of tobacco and sniffed. The tobacco in the jar was stale, and the pipe resting on top of it was bone dry.

“Still think he’s here?” he asked Bryan Orraman.

Bryan had been watching him. “I don’t know what to think. No. He has been here, but he has cleared off. Some time ago, too, I should judge.”

I stared out of the window at the clay soil, cold soil, rich soil, good soil for roses.

“Poor devil,” said Bryan unexpectedly. “Holed up here and then on the run. Well, he hasn’t been found yet, so the chances are he has got abroad. Had he got a passport? Not that it matters. He could have gone off on one of the day hops to Boulogne or Calais. He’ll probably never turn up. He won’t have much of a life in front of him. Always frightened and always suspicious.”

For a moment I believed this picture. Then the essential unreality of it struck me. It was shadow play.

“I tell you what,” said Coffin. “I don’t think anyone has been here at all. I think it’s a fake, a fraud. Nobody has been staying here. Maybe someone hoped to make it look like that. But it wasn’t a very strong hope. Or they didn’t care enough to fake it properly!”

He walked out of the shed.

There was a patch of ground about six foot long with a lupin clump at one end and a wilting rose-bush at the other. It was a sheltered spot. Not overlooked. Anyone working there would be invisible.

He kicked at the soil, then bent down and ran a handful of dry earth through his fingers.

Then he went back to the shed for a spade.

We had found Eddie Chase.

Chapter Eleven

THE BODY OF EDDIE CHASE WAS LYING CURLED UP UNDERNEATH a few spadefuls of clay outside the shed in Mr. Marcus’s garden which someone had tidied up so carefully, and over which his poor old dog had watched.

And so Eddie, who had been a private, even a secret character, was now a public character, and everyone knew everything about him and his ways. They knew that he had married Ellen Chase when they were both only twenty and that he had loved her very much, that he had a quick temper. Everyone knew also that Eddie had died because of a blow on the head which had fractured the skull and sent it pushing into the cerebrum, there to sever all those tiny nerve-centres and complexes which had gone to make up Eddie Chase. He had been killed by a blow from the same smooth, metal object which had killed his wife. If you believed in mortality there was an end to it.

But what very few knew, because the police did not announce it, was that Eddie had died at precisely the same time as Ellen. He had died with Ellen. So that all the time his loyal and loving colleagues had been looking for him, while suspecting him of wife-murder and other felonies, he had been lying innocently dead. I knew this because Coffin told Bryan Orraman and Bryan told me. There was also some suggestion that Eddie’s death might possibly have been an accident: he had an abnormally thin skull. It seemed likely then that Ellen had died because of what she might know of her husband’s murder as much as any blackmailing activities on her own account.

Eddie had been buried there in the garden while Mr. Marcus was living in the house, and that was something for Mr. Marcus and Albert to explain away. Mr. Marcus was brought back from Brighton, where he had been resting, to offer his explanations. No one was in the way to find out what these were because his lawyers, who were not Bryan Orraman’s firm, immediately stopped his mouth. Equally promptly, they discovered that there were any number of ways by which outsiders could come and go in that tight little garden without Mr. Marcus knowing. For instance, the gate was rarely locked; the bottom of the garden was invisible from the downstairs windows; Mr. Marcus was often away (Albert wasn’t, though) and so on. Mr. Marcus became another public figure. His face and that of Albert appeared in the newspapers looking out with large, surprised eyes.

I found myself the object of sharp scrutiny from the police. They had from me the statement of what I had discovered at the shop, and I well know they checked the story, because a doctor called on me and examined and tested me for allergies. As a result of one of the pricks I received on my arm the whole of my left side became swollen and itched. I believe they questioned the woman in the shop and got nothing out of her at all; I knew that large, sullen face would not speak.

They asked me about the dog, too. When had I first noticed it? And why had I thought of following it? Stupid questions, I thought, but they worried me.

I waited for them to liberate Jenny. She could not have been the killer of Eddie Chase. His body altered the whole pattern and meaning of the murder. It was no longer a question of one woman killing another in a fit of passion. Someone had appeared on the scene, after Jenny’s quarrel with Ellen (and remember Jenny had never actually admitted that she did more than strike Ellen down with her hand), and killed her. So I waited anxiously for Jenny to get free. But nothing was done. The phrase ran: ’The present evidence does not allow it.’

The weather broke and the heat of midsummer was replaced by a steady and depressing rain. Bridget called on me, bringing me a tweed coat of her own to wear. It was strange how people kept pressing clothes on me. Did I look so draggled? I accepted the coat but I soon saw that it was only an excuse for calling. Bridget had something to tell me. She looked pale but much happier. Her mother was getting better (physically anyhow, mentally I feared for Jenny), and Enoch would live. She told me with pride that she was going to have a baby. It was the last straw. I wanted to cry.

When she had gone I sat for a long time considering. I knew without being told that with this new fact we were approaching the last act of the tragedy. ‘I haven’t told Mother yet,’ she had said, ‘but of course I’m going to when there is a suitable moment.’ She was bursting with pride, poor little beast. My contemplations included the unpleasing thought that if I didn’t act soon the whole case was going to be rolled up like a sheet of linoleum with Jenny still inside it.

There was a knock on my bedroom door. I opened it, wearing my tweed coat. “I was just going out,” I said.

Bryan Orraman accepted this without comment, although he looked carefully at the tweed coat. He pushed me right inside and walked over to the window where he studied the view of greasy black roof-tops with a few factory chimney-pots to liven it up.

“The police believe they have found some new evidence,” he said without looking at me. “They believe they have found the murder weapon. For sure this time. Officially I shouldn’t know about this so soon. Unofficially, I do. Decent of them really.”

I was a little surprised, but not much. I had been followed lately. And I was not at all surprised at them telling him. Nor did I think it particularly decent of them.

“I don’t think you are taking this in, Cleo,” he said. He was agitated, the smart young solicitor was facing something bigger than he had faced before. I felt a small satisfaction in this. He valued me that much then. “They have found the weapon. Dumped. Abandoned. They found it in a park not half an hour away from here, in Smethwick. And it hadn’t been there more than an hour or two, if that. It’s a crowded park. There was blood on it. A bit. Not as much as they’d hoped for, maybe,” he added with a touch of humour.

I didn’t say anything. I don’t think he wanted me to. I moved over and stood by him at the window. “You haven’t been out by any chance?” He touched my arm. It was quite dry, but I could see he didn’t set much store by that. There are ways of keeping dry.

Down below in the street there seemed more people about than I would have expected to see. And they were not moving much, the majority were just standing quietly watching. They seemed to be waiting.

The chambermaid tapped on the door and came in with some of my clothes which she had been washing and pressing. She rubbed her hands down her white apron and without taking her eyes off me, managed at the same time to get a look at Bryan Orraman. I went to my handbag and got her some money: she had looked after me pretty well these last few weeks. On an impulse, because I liked her, I gave her my bottle of scent too. She flushed pink with pleasure and said thank you. “And good luck to you, miss,” she added.

I don’t think Bryan even noticed that she had been there. He was still staring out of the window.

“I’ve been on the telephone to Venetia.”

“That makes you one of the many. Everyone talks to Venetia on the telephone.”

“Venetia has talked pretty freely.”

“Venetia usually does.”

“She has told me that you were released by your own request several times in the weeks before the show opened in Oxford. You were free to be in King’s Bromwich if you wished. And you had a motive. Ellen had something against you, and she was a blackmailer.”

Poor Ellen, it is true that she was a blackmailer but it had been in a very small, curious way. She wasn’t really interested in money, it was just as in the old days at school, she liked to threaten that she would ’tell teacher’.

“I saw the iron you had in your hand that day,” said Bryan huskily. “You meant to hide it from me, but I saw it in the mirror.”

“I know you did.”

“Haven’t you got any more to say than that? What about Venetia?” He was facing me now. I felt afraid.

“Lies, all lies,” I said as steadily as I could manage.

“Why should she lie? No, you know she didn’t. You are the one with the lies. You have been lying from the beginning.”

There was a mixture of hope and misery in his face as he looked at me.

I put my hands over my face. It was too painful for me to see Bryan Orraman’s expression. He didn’t want to do this to me. I knew that he didn’t. But he would do it if he had to. He was made that way.

“I think they have your finger-prints on the iron,” he said with that dreadful mixture of triumph and despair.

I recalled the old saying about giving the guilty enough rope to hang themselves. Had there been enough rope in my case?

Have you seen what I have been trying to do all this time? To act my guilt. I wanted them to believe me guilty. Everything about me was an act.

“Will they anyway let Jenny out?” I managed to say.

* * * * *

The room filled with people. I saw the chambermaid, still clutching the bottle of scent, pressing herself against the wall outside, trying to see and yet not be seen; I saw the manager looking distracted, and lastly I saw the large, solid forms of the Franchise Police. They had come for me with bell, book and candle. I knew now what the people in the street had been watching; they had been watching the police. I knew what they were waiting for: they were waiting to see me.

Bryan Orraman stood back: he looked confused and unhappy.

I heard and yet did not hear what they said. I knew well what was happening to me though. I was charged, arrested, and made ready to be imprisoned. In my heart I had been preparing for this minute for a long, long time; but when it happened I was completely bewildered.

“And will you let Jenny out? Is my sister free?” I heard myself repeating.

The senior policeman, a fair-skinned, blue-eyed man, looked at me frozen-faced. “No, we shall not be releasing your sister,” he said. “And I don’t think you can have listened very carefully to the terms of your arrest.

“You are not charged with murder, but as an accessory before, and after, the fact.”

Chapter Twelve

I HAD BEEN UTTERLY DECEIVED. THE FACT THAT I HAD deceived myself made no difference. I was arrested by Superintendent Marsh of the Franchise Police, which persuaded me that my arrest was entirely the effort of the Franchisers. But I saw Coffin lurking in the background looking anxious and miserable. I regarded him as a traitor. The discovery of Eddie Chase’s body had given the police exactly what they wanted. Till we found him they had not been quite sure if Eddie himself had not killed his wife. But with him dead that left only me and Jenny. And they had a motive too. Oh, they didn’t think that Jenny had killed both husband and wife out of jealousy. No one believed that story any more: they believed that Ellen had been blackmailing me.

The scientific evidence showed that Eddie had been buried very soon after his death. The way he lay, the bacteria spreading in the soil, the grasses and scraps of weeds caught in his clothes, the very food in his stomach, had all been made to bear their witness that he had been dragged to a speedy and incompetent burial in that shallow grave.

He had been hidden so that the police would think, as they nearly had thought, that he had killed his wife. This had been the plan until a better culprit had presented herself: Jenny. The police believed and did not hide their belief that they regarded me as the schemer, the prime mover. There was so much truth in their version: it had the essentials in it. And because the near-truth, the half-truth, the almost truth is so often more convincing than the truth itself, I feared it would be enough to hang me. And, of course, there was one other thing about the hiding of the body which was never expressed but was certainly thought: two bodies makes it a hanging business.

I gathered a few things together to take with me. As I turned mechanically to put on my hat at the mirror (although why should I care how I looked?), I saw a grimace of pain cross Bryan’s face, and I noticed that I had put on the battered hat made of lily of the valley. What a long way I had come since Venetia popped it on my head and we laughed.

At the door, just as we went out, the superintendent halted, and asked me a question that surprised me: “Have you got legal aid?”

I suppose I looked startled.

“I mean, have you got a legal adviser?”

“Yes,” I said, thinking it was self-evident. He was satisfied and let me go on.

A thick wall came down round me. All the afternoon a sense of isolation grew on me. The food added to this impression. It was bread and marge and red jam and a doughnut on a tin tray. There was sweet, sugary tea; for shock, I suppose. A good tea, no doubt, but I didn’t fancy it. I was wearing my own clothes but somehow I felt like a leper. It was a frightening claustrophobic feeling.

I was reminded of a time when I visited the Louvre. They had a made-up Egyptian tomb of an early dynasty. This mastaba was a heavy stone structure with massive walls and a tiny entrance. It was more like a cave than anything else. For a second I felt walled up in it, as if I would never get out and the world would never get into me.

This was how I felt now. It is not true that stone walls do not a prison make nor iron bars a cage: they do. Only a very special sort of personality can withstand the pressure of actual imprisonment.

I was desperate to see Jenny, and I had to see Bryan Orraman. I kept walking up and down as I waited for him, lifting my head at a sound from outside, looking for him. He must come soon because he was my legal adviser. Not that I was without visitors. Bridget came, looking miserable and forlorn, but unable quite to hide the centre of happiness within her about the child and Enoch.

Surprisingly Lester appeared, looking sheepish but kind, and bringing me cigarettes, which I didn’t want, and a pile of magazines. Poor Lester, he did his best but he only succeeded in making me feel that I was going on a long journey and I’d be lucky if I ever got back from it. There was something about the way he shook hands when he went away that made me feel he personally was saying good-bye.

There was a knock on the door. I looked up eagerly. Surely this must be Bryan? It had to be Bryan. But it was the Prison Librarian wheeling in a trolley of books. Books in my mastaba? Well, even passed-away Egyptians had the Book of the Dead left with them. I accepted her ministrations. “You choose,” I said. She took a look at me and then down at her books. “I don’t believe I’ve got anything you’d like today,” she said with a sigh. “I don’t believe you’re in the mood for reading.” She started to wheel the trolley out, then at the door she turned suddenly and said: “I saw you act once. In The Rose Without a Thorn.” I remembered the play, I had acted in it once at Wolverhampton in Repertory. “I got beheaded in that,” I reminded her gloomily. “You were lovely,” she said, and turned back abruptly and walked away.

I had an ally.

I took up again my restless walk round the room. Bryan never came. Then I started asking to see Jenny; I asked every official that I saw. From their response I knew at once that the walls of my mastaba were real. I would only get to see Jenny with the utmost difficulty. I might never see her at all. In the eyes of the law we were confederates and accomplices, and as such we must not be allowed to meet.

But I had to see Jenny. All my plans had miscarried. Everything that I had thought so cleverly arranged had gone wrong. Now Jenny must speak.

I wanted to see Bryan equally urgently: pressure must be put on him too.

My next important visitor was the policeman who had arrested me. I didn’t take to Superintendent Marsh. I could see that, probably, if you were on good terms with him, he had a nice, honest face. But I wasn’t in the position to be appreciative. Honesty wasn’t, in my opinion, enough at the moment.

“It’s all an absolute and complete mistake,” I said. “I can explain everything. Get me Mr. Orraman.”

“I don’t know if I can do that,” he said doubtfully.

“Don’t know? You must; he’s my solicitor. I have a right to see him, haven’t I?”

“He’s your sister’s solicitor,” he corrected. Then he left me for a few minutes and I could hear the soft noise of his voice. He had a nice Westmorland accent, which even in my extremity I couldn’t help admiring and casting as Sympathetic Character Part, and I could hear it lilting on. He must have been speaking on the telephone.

“I’ve just called Mr. Orraman,” he said as he came back. “And I put your request to him…” He paused, evidently a little embarrassed. I wondered just what he had heard about Bryan and me. No doubt there had been gossip. “And he says he won’t act.”

* * * * *

They found me another solicitor. He was a calm-eyed gentle man of about fifty with bad catarrh. He looked like a doctor. I didn’t refuse to see him when he came, but I could tell that he didn’t believe in me or my cause. He was simply doing his duty, and earning a little money. He didn’t look as though he was very flush. He was polite, though, which Bryan wouldn’t have been. He was absolutely no help at all.

Even then I remained calm and reasonable. But I began to insist that I saw Jenny. “Only let me talk to Jenny. I’m sure now that I can get sense out of her. You will be able to understand everything when we have both explained.” And then, when they took no notice of this: “It’s my right to see my sister.” But apparently it was not my right.

At last I said to them: “Talk to Jenny. Ask her. She wants to see me. We must talk.”

“I don’t believe your sister does want to see you,” my solicitor said doubtfully. He kept brushing away at his blue suit with the back of his hand as if he was more interested in that than in me. “I don’t believe you quite realise the position.” He sat there thoughtfully for a few minutes, still massaging his suit, then said: “I will inquire.”

He returned very quickly, and said in a quiet voice: “I am afraid you are mistaken. Your sister does not want to see you.”

I knew he was wrong about that, Jenny would certainly want to see me, and I certainly needed to see and to talk to her. But there are none so blind as those who have made up their minds and I knew I should never convince him.

I muttered something ungracious and he looked at me helplessly; I think he would have liked to have washed his hands of me there and then, but he was a man with a conscience and he couldn’t quite do it. Also I think he was hard up (that suit was so very shiny) and needed the money.

So I persisted. Every time I saw anyone, anyone at all, I asked to see Jenny. Finally I got my way. I had practically given up expecting success when it happened. The Prison Governor came to see me and, before I could utter my usual demand, told me that I was being taken to see my sister.

I was suspicious at once. That’s what life in prison does for you. I trusted hardly anyone. I thought that they wanted to watch me and Jenny together, that they wanted to listen and observe so that they could add more incriminatory material to what they had already.

But all the same I felt confident that, face to face with Jenny, I could persuade her to talk, and that together we could proclaim the whole story and be believed.

They took me down a passageway painted in cream colour and rather smelly, although in a hygienic sort of way. My legs wobbled. “What’s the matter with you, Patsy?” I demanded. “Can’t you walk?”

There was a bright light, and under it was sitting Jenny. She got up slowly when she saw me. She looked very frail as I advanced towards her confidently. Here was my moment at last, not quite how I had worked for it, but here, anyway, was Jenny.

I pleaded with her. “Please,” I said. “You must talk now, Jenny. You tell the truth, let everything come out. Why you’ve acted the way you have. It’s time for the truth now, my dear.”

But Jenny would not even meet my eye. She turned away. “You?”she said. “You? Who would believe a word you said?”

And she said it despairingly, and bitterly. It was as if all her love and trust in me had drained away.

I saw Jenny once again after that, when we both had to appear side by side in the Magistrate’s Court to be charged formally. It was not Mr. Marcus who presided but a man I had never seen. Everything was quite polite and brisk. At first I couldn’t see why they had made Jenny appear again, unless they thought she would get away with something. I understood when they read the charge: the new gravamen of feloniously doing away with Eddie Chase had been added to the original one of murdering his wife.

Then I saw Bryan Orraman was there in court too.

The newspapers say that I began to shout. But it isn’t true. I didn’t shout. I began to speak in that clear, carrying voice I had practised for the stage. I didn’t get many words out when they dragged me away. My solicitor went on about dignity when he had me alone. But what did I care about dignity? I wanted to be heard.

PART FOUR

THE VIEW FROM THE OTHER SIDE

(Extracts from a collection of documents.)

Chapter Thirteen

AN EXTRACT FROM A PRIVATE REPORT OF INSPECTOR COFFIN

.…These people are in good standing in their own neighbourhood. I checked with the neighbours wherever I could and although they were not anxious to talk I got a good deal from them. I regard this unconscious verification of my view as important. Mrs. Jenny Fisher: is reported of well by her neighbours even although there is no personal friendship and they say she is shy and withdrawn. Her closest neighbour, Mrs. Arthur Brown, widow, said that she made several attempts over the years to be friendly, but she thinks these were ‘misunderstood’. As Mrs. A. B. drinks I think this very likely, but she’s a good-hearted old girl and a shrewd observer. Says she thought they were a ‘happy family’ although ’they had their quarrels’.

(She says nothing about Mrs. Jenny Fisher’s alleged drinking. Would she have missed a thing like this? I find this interesting.) Miss Partridge: is very well-spoken of in the theatre, where they say she is reliable. One friend (statement attached) says she has ‘vivid imagination’. Her London landlady called her ‘genuine’ and as she seemed the sort that questioned every halfpenny in case it was a forgery, I thought this something. No debts and no emotional entanglements ( ’at the moment’: see statement from friend attached). Deeply fond of sister. Eddie and Ellen chase: more difficult to get much on them as people, for obvious reasons, didn’t like talking. They weren’t reserved and withdrawn, anyway, far from it, so what there is to know I feel I got on to quite easily. They didn’t have a secret life, which is a bit of a turn-up. Ellen believed to be ‘a bit of a schemer’ and ‘quarrelsome’, but she was not disliked on that account as ‘she always had a joke in her’. Eddie much liked as a ‘quiet chap’ although a neighbour who served in the army with him (see statement attached) said ‘he had a wicked temper when he liked ’. So you can read between the lines here.

I got on to an interesting sort of sub-world. I don’t think I’d grasped before how people never quite cross off in their mind their childhood links and impressions. It struck me that all the group I was interviewing were extraordinarily tenacious of them. Striking, too, how much intermarriage there has been. Plants married Prices married Hickmans married Plants again. Same trades, too. Mechanics, foundrymen, bricklayers, and masons mostly. Explains a bit. Bryan Orraman tells me that he’s always felt an outsider himself although he’s lived here all his life and been accepted in so many ways. I’m not putting any-stress on this, I’m just saying it’s interesting. Shows the sort of people they are.

I feel that no one here mentioned was telling me the complete and absolute truth. This confirms my previous impression.

REPORT BY DR. DAVID KENT-CARR, CONSULTANT PSYCHIATRIST (made to Bryan Orraman for the purposes of the Defence)

.…later in my report you will see I make comparisons with other case histories.

I have examined Mrs. Jenny Fisher on three occasions now. She does not co-operate. She is typically withdrawn, detached and superficially careless of her surroundings. This state has succeeded a stage of acute anxiety. But I formed the impression that underneath she is still anxious and alert, and on this account my prognosis is fair. Her intelligence is high.

In my opinion we have to take into account a triangular relationship: mother-daughter-sister. I have had opportunities of observing all three, although Miss Cleo Partridge showed great (and to my mind significant) hostility, and have concluded that they react upon and influence each other a great deal. Certain symbols for instance are common to them all. All three are addicted to wearing rings and brooches (markedly of bright colours). Mrs. Fisher wears only one ring but she attaches great importance to it and never removes it. They all retreat into a fantasy world of one kind or another at the slightest threat. I do not think it insignificant that Miss Partridge should be an actress and her niece a shop-lifter. Imagination highly developed in all three and they stimulate it in each other.

I suggest you examine any narrative put forward by any one of them for symbolisms and misplacements. Any narrative structure erected by any one of them is likely to be false and suspect. A subject of this sort believes her own lies.

With reference to Mrs. Jenny Fisher I must say that great hostility and suspicion is often shown in these conditions to the person who previously has been the most trusted and who may have rendered the most effective help. In these circumstances it is wisest for the person concerned to extricate himself completely…

POLICE DOCTOR’S REPORT. Mrs. Jenny Fisher’s physical condition is normal with no organic trouble of any kind. Slight anaemia. Any sadness, blunting and withdrawal from the outside world, any general slowing-up of mental and physical activity is by way of being a reactive depression. Probably shock condition. I see no reason to look for a more complex solution.

(Note scrawled in pencil—obviously for the benefit of a colleague: In other words she may be neurotic but she ain’t mad!)

2. Miss C. Partridge. Physical condition excellent. No sign of any mental clouding. All responses normal and adequate. An extremely difficult and hostile subject to examine.

POLICE DOCTOR’S PRIVATE REPORT TO JOHN COFFIN

I was able in the end to do an electroencephalogram and it was damned difficult to do in the circumstances. In the end I had to do one on myself too! You can see the chart if you like—if it means anything to you. What will interest you is that it did indeed display a pattern of electrical activity indicating immature function.

EXTRACT FROM THE REPLY OF ALEXANDER DUNBAR, ESQ., q.c., to Mr. Bryan Orraman who had suggested that there are grounds for a plea of guilty but insane

.…in the circumstances I see that you are obliged to hand over the preparation for the defence to Mr. Purchase. I see no grounds however for altering the plea.

A COMMENT SCRAWLED BY COFFIN

I think we have not got the whole truth here. There is no sure rock in this case.

I trust no one.

* * * * *

The newspapers started to come out with headlines about a psychiatrist advising on the King’s Bromwich murder case. ‘Insanity Plea’? they queried. And the reading public toyed with the idea of the crazy imaginings of two hysterical women, with their own reasons for committing murder.

PART FIVE

FACE TO FACE

Chapter Fourteen

SO THEY CONTINUED TO BUILD UP THEIR CASE AND IT WENT forward to the Assizes at Birmingham, and the dignity of the law of England was maintained.

But all the time behind the official business John Coffin was at work. He knew that a tissue of lies had been created before him.

He did a series of expeditions: in his own time, for he was no longer officially at work in the Black Country. He called on the solicitor now acting for Patsy Partridge, he went to a branch of Barclay’s Bank in Maypole Lane and asked about house mortgages, he made a private telephone call to a friend in the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions. Finally he went to the Franchisers’ Police Headquarters, where to his surprise, for he had thought them dour, obstinate men, he found himself not unwelcome.

Mrs. Coffin telephoning from London, Bryan Orraman from his office, and his own Divisional Sergeant from the Divisional Office overlooking the River Thames were told that Inspector Coffin was unavailable, unavailable, unavailable. Mrs. Coffin turned over and over in her hands the photograph of Patsy which her son had cut from a magazine and treasured in the pocket of a jacket now sent home to her. “Like a kid,” she said looking worried, “just like a kid.”

After some hours of talking Coffin walked out of the main door of the Franchisers’ large, red-brick building. He stood for a moment enjoying the fresh air. He was remembering an interview he had once had with a prisoner just convicted of fraud: a man called Gregory who had got away with seventeen thousand pounds (ten of them still unaccounted for) and paid for it with nine long years. “How did you feel?” he had asked. “Did you think you’d get away with it?” Gregory shook his head. “You always know you’ll get caught in the end,” he said. “—But somehow you never believe it. You never believe it can happen to you.”

Coffin stood there brooding until the hostility which had been delicately suspended in his mind, precisely counterpoised against love and affection, suddenly swelled, became hard and heavy as a stone, and dropped, filling him with resentment and pain.

It was a dangerous state of mind for a policeman.

* * * * *

The small figure of the prison librarian scuttled across the King’s Bromwich Bull Ring on her way to visit Bryan Orraman. A bird’s-eye view revealed her shabby black out-door coat and her smart high-heeled shoes (she was proud of her feet and always bought good shoes), it showed the little straw hat with the big brim that shielded her face, and the spectacles with the bright-red-coloured frames. She never wore make-up and today she was pale and tense. She had an errand to do. Two errands in fact, for she had one other call to make before Mr. Orraman.

The smell of fresh coffee came to her nose, and she looked longingly at the tea and coffee shop. She wondered if she could spare the time for a cup of dark brown fragrant coffee, it would make all the difference in the world to her morale. She hadn’t been getting much coffee lately; prisons went in more for pale, watery tea. The church clock struck ten-thirty. She hesitated for a second, then sidled into the shop in the wake of a couple of early morning shoppers, who were already carrying paper bags and parcels and talking happily and loudly. Miss Killearn could not talk happily and loudly but she could shelter gladly in their noise and sip her coffee. The coffee was hot and strong and she added sugar lavishly. She asked in a whisper for a Bath bun and butter. Miss Kill-earn’s blood which had been cold for a long time now began to warm up.

The other women were dragging their purchases out of their bags and considering them. A rosy sweater lay across the table and a plump hand stretched across to feel it. “Well, the colour’s you, dear, just you, but does it fit? If you ask me, you’re more of a thirty-six than a thirty-four.” ’Even thirty-eight’d be skin-tight on her,’ thought Miss Killearn, in whom the old Adam was not quite dead. And then her heart repented as the woman, size thirty-eight, twenty-eight, forty-two, turned a large, cheerful face towards her and offered a cigarette. Miss Killearn accepted it gratefully. “To tell the truth you don’t look quite the thing.”

“I don’t feel it,” admitted Miss Killearn, puffing away. “You look a mite grey. Not feeling ill? I hope you don’t mind me saying so, but you could use a bit more make-up.” “When I’m myself I usually do,” said Miss Killearn. She sipped her coffee and dragged at her cigarette, half unconsciously prolonging this minute before she was out into the hard, cold world again. The two women, their good deed done, turned back to the rose-coloured sweater and took no further notice of her.

Silently the librarian rose, settled her large straw more firmly on her head, and sped off as if the fiends of hell were pursuing her; she thought they might be.

Panting, she arrived at Marks and Spencers. She leaned against the wall by a weighing machine and straightened her hat which had gone askew again. “I ought to get a bigger head,” she murmured hysterically to herself. She stopped her giggles and looked around. No one had noticed her; she reflected that in this hurly-burly, more like the modern equivalent of a medieval fair than it was a shop, no one would ever notice anything. She gazed wistfully at a large drawing of a lady in a crinoline, commemorating Mr. Marks’ and Mr. Spencer’s hundred years of shopkeeping; she stared, willing to be caught up for the moment in anyone else’s world, then she sighed. Well, in a hundred years her trouble wouldn’t amount to much. Not surprisingly there was very little comfort in this thought, and she pushed up the stairs to Electrical Equipment.

She had to pass a rack of gay nylon underwear to get there and she hovered for a moment, surprised at the strength of the attraction of a cherry nylon nightdress for her. It seemed extraordinary to her that at this minute, this very alarming minute, she could want to go over and finger and admire it. She could even imagine herself in it and that, frankly, beat everything. She tore herself away and shot up the stairs to the long counter of electric lamps and fires and irons.

There in a timid whisper she asked a question of the assistant. Then she closed her eyes and waited for the skies to fall. But she was greeted with the usual politeness of that excellent store and although the girl didn’t know the answer to the query she went to get someone who would.

It was soon time to get on to Mr. Orraman’s office, and however much she wanted to linger her feet got her there quickly. Panting again Miss Killearn crept up the stairs. She never had proper control of her breathing from beginning to end of the episode.

All appeared normal and orderly in the office. An office-boy of somewhat elderly appearance, with the distinct beginnings of a beard, was arranging some tea-cups on a tray. The secretary looked up from her typewriter in surprise. Then she got up and moved gracefully forward to cope with the situation; she was a beauty with big blue eyes and long fair hair that must have dangled forward into her typewriter.

“Are you sure you are all right?” she asked; she couldn’t see much of her visitor’s face because of the hat and the spectacles, but she could hear the breathing and that was alarming.

Bryan Orraman looked up in surprise too as his door was flung back. He was standing before a whole pile of papers. “I told you to keep out,” he said irritably.

“Miss Killearn,” said his secretary before she hurried away.

“I’ve never seen her before,” said Miss Killearn, surprisingly. “But of course I was only here in the evenings, wasn’t I?”

It was a good line and I was proud of it; it breathed possession, poise and calm, none of which I properly felt. I took off Miss Killearn’s big hat.

Bryan still said nothing; I suppose he couldn’t believe his eyes, and I don’t know that I blamed him. I made a pretty incredible picture in a coat and dress too small for me and a hat that was much too big. I took off the spectacles, the better to see him with.

Eventually he said: “Why aren’t you in prison?”

“Ah, that’s the question, isn’t it? I said sitting down to rest my feet, those tiny shoes of Miss Killearn’s pinched. “I really ought to have a grudge against you, but I haven’t. The whole thing is too big for that.”

He put his hand out towards the telephone and then drew it back. “I don’t know why you’ve come here.”

“I wouldn’t have come pestering you, you know, but without you the full story of me and Jenny and Bridget (because of course Bridget comes into it, too, she’s the real beginning) cannot be told.”

He took a deep breath, made up his mind which side of the great divide he stood, and moved over and put his arm round me. I shifted away. “No, no, Miss Killearn wouldn’t care for it, and she’s still here in the spirit if not in the clothes.”

“Who’s she?”

“Miss Killearn? I thought you might know her. She’s the prison librarian, and she’s lying in her petticoats under my bed. Oh, she’ll say it was all my fault, and that I overpowered her, but in her heart she knows she didn’t struggle, because she likes actresses and she particularly admires me.”

“So do I,” said Bryan Orraman staring at me; he’d never seen me without my make-up before. “I admire you. I really do, in fact I hand it to you. But you’ve come at the wrong time to get help from me.”

I didn’t know then what he meant.

I produced a receipted bill from the pocket of Miss Killearn’s coat. It came out jumbled up with a cluster of toffee papers and old bus tickets, Miss Killearn not being the tidiest of souls, but it was distinct and clear.

“It’s about that travelling iron that we are supposed to have used to kill Ellen and her husband with.”

He nodded. “So?”

“I only bought that iron two weeks ago. Chase had been dead and so had Ellen too long then for me or Jenny to have killed them with it.”

That surprised him. Then he said: “You’ll have to prove that, Cleo. Where did you buy it?”

“Marks and Spencers.”

He shrugged. “A lot of irons are sold there.”

“You mean they might not remember? But not many irons are sold as the result of the exchange of two pairs of white nylon knickers. And that’s what I did. I bought the nylons in Oxford and exchanged them in Birmingham for an iron. They remember that transaction, Bryan. I took care they should. I’ve been there to remind them.”

“And the date?”

I did not answer his question, instead I said: “I did it on purpose, Bryan. I intended they should remember.”

“Well, go on, you can’t be meaning to stop there. Some more story has still to come.”

“It isn’t the real weapon. And you know that too.”

There was the rattle of tea-cups outside the door and the elderly office-boy put his head round the door; Bryan jerked his head round angrily and shouted at him to get out.

“Do you remember, Bryan, what Jenny said about Canny Walker? The little boy who could shift the blame?”

“I remember what you told me about him,” he replied shortly.

“I’ve found him too,” I said softly. “And this time he shifted the blame for murder.”

“Who?”

In the office outside I could hear voices and the noise of fresh arrivals. I must hurry. “You,” I said. “You and you and you.”

Oh, maybe he wasn’t the real little boy, not the real Canny Walker of our childhood but he was another of the same kidney. “You framed Jenny for this murder. Ellen was blackmailing you and so you killed her, and then you saw that Jenny suspected.”

“And am I supposed to have performed the same service for you?” he inquired sceptically.

“No, I don’t accuse you of that.”

“You told me yourself that you killed a man.”

“You must learn not to take me too literally. He’s not dead. As far as I know he’s still walking about the back streets of London or maybe Manchester.”

“But you said so.” He really could not believe that other people could lie and get away with it. He could do it, but other people couldn’t do it to him.

“I’m an actress, remember,” I said. “And I built myself up as a guilty person deliberately. All the things you think you discovered about me, all the things you saw that you suppose you caught me out on, such as seeing me holding the iron behind my back, were built up by me on purpose. I wrote the play, produced it, and starred in it too.”

I watched his face to see if my words carried conviction. I knew I had very little time; I could hear voices and the sound of feet in the outer office.

“I don’t know what you are up to,” he said helplessly.

“This is madness. But it’s too late now. I’m in enough trouble without you in on top of it.”

His office door was pushed open with a rough movement. In the doorway I saw a crowd of people: The Superintendent of the Franchise Police, John Coffin, a young plain-clothes policeman, and behind them the excited, horrified face of the bearded office-boy.

The policemen saw me all right because John Coffin came over and stationed himself beside me, half protectingly and half warningly, but they did not address themselves to me. Instead Superintendent Marsh approached Bryan and, formally introducing himself, arrested him for the fraudulent conversion of moneys and properties not belonging to him.

His secretary gave a scream. “No, no!” she said. “Not Mr. Orraman, he’s as straight as a die.”

The detective hardly spared her a look. “So straight,” he said ironically, “so straight it’s taken us fifteen months’ work to catch up on him. So straight you’ll be lucky if you’re not involved yourself.”

She moaned and covered her eyes. “I can’t believe it.”

But I was not surprised. I had seen all the signs in his ostentation, his rich friends, and his megalomania over the house.

It was the motive; Ellen could have used this for blackmail, supposing that she knew, and I thought she did. I remembered her mother saying that there had been trouble between Ellen and her husband, and the girl Betty shushing her up.

Bryan stood there without answering; he looked bewildered and lost. His eyes met mine for a second as if he had never seen me and never known me. Coffin behind me took a grip on my arm. I wrenched it free and took a step forward.

“I accuse him of framing my sister and me on this murder charge,” I shouted in a shrill voice.

“And I accuse her of being an absolute bloody liar,” said Bryan, keeping his tone low and looking down at the pile of papers on his table. Only reluctantly did he raise his eyes.

We confronted each other; two versions of the same story stood face to face. Which was truth, which was untruth? The truth lay between us.

“And which of you two splendid performers am I to believe?” demanded Coffin sardonically, exploding into sudden rage.

* * * * *

Stretching away behind all the relationships I had seen and recognised between all of us concerned in this case, Jenny, Bridget, Enoch and the two Chases themselves, was another hidden set. I had seen the spider-thread made up of connections, desires, interests, woven between me and Bridget and me and Jenny and me and Bryan and me and Enoch, but I had missed their true relationships with each other. It was the world seen from another angle. Possibly it was even another world.

And in this other world, underworld if you like, Bryan Orraman and Bridget and Enoch had known each other well. The two youngsters had admired Bryan. I had never never asked how Enoch and Bridget got to know each other in the first place, but in fact the intermediary had been Bryan. He was a great figure in the rum little world those two lived in, he was the patron, the helper, and the big brother. Well, the moral of that is: don’t trust your big brother.

Enoch Flavell had been helped by Bryan Orraman in the days just after he left school, when he got into bad company, and although never actually in trouble with the police, came very close to it. Bryan had made a point of helping any people like Enoch he came across. He called it his ‘personal rescue scheme’ and there had even been a praising article about it once in a local newspaper. I suppose Bryan liked that. He could do good things and perhaps he meant well to begin with but there can be no doubt that its real impetus was that it appealed to the other side of him, and of course he found it useful to know criminals. Crammer and Albert, those two shady characters, knew about this side of Bryan and recognised him for what he was. Nosy and prying, they convinced themselves that Bryan was the killer, and then, characteristically, were terrified. Albert longed to attack and hurt Bryan but he was always frightened. Bryan seemed to have a hypnotic effect on some people.

* * * * *

It was Bridget who now came back into the picture, bringing Albert with her. He came into the room with a short, fat little figure wearing a bright Prince-of-Wales check suit: Tommy Crammer.

The room was the office of the superintendent at the Franchise Headquarters. It was not a room I had seen before and it was one I would be very glad not to see again. I sat there with John Coffin and Bryan Orraman while the superintendent made angry telephone calls about my whereabouts. He refused to part up with me, though, due processes of law or not; he said he had questions to put to me.

Bridget looked tired but flushed; no doubt she was finding life exacting, but it was also exciting. She was rehabilitated, no longer was Bridget the lost one, she had found her feet. I recognised at last that she was her father’s daughter: she had his same strong sense of moral purpose. Albert had a triumphant glare on his face; I couldn’t tell whether this meant he would do me harm or good. Tommy just looked jovial because the physical structure of his face with its plump, pink cheeks, round, blue eyes and little nose, was such that any other expression was practically impossible.

There was no doubt that Bridget was in charge of the party; she nodded at John Coffin, then came straight across to me. She looked me in the face in a questioning sort of way and then relaxed as if she had found there what she wanted. “You’re one of us. It’s like Mother said, we’re the ones that have to learn the hard way.”

Then she turned back to Bryan Orraman and forgot me. “I’ve talked to Enoch. Don’t think you can escape there. He may not be able to see the real truth, but I can. It was you sent him off to Tommy Crammer’s office, and you were waiting there. You warned off Albert and Tommy. Silly things,” and she looked at them scornfully. Albert muttered something but Tommy kept silence, still smiling. “The last thing Enoch saw before he was knocked unconscious was your face coming close to him, and his last thought was that he must get to Aunt Patsy.”

Bryan had been the man who had sent Enoch up to Tommy’s top flat, where he himself had been waiting at the top of the long flight of slippery stairs. He had to try to eliminate Enoch because of the fear that the boy, when he thought the matter out would know who had killed Ellen Chase. How real this fear was we should never know. The boy was a sharp observer but whatever he had known had been driven from his head by concussion. Perhaps there was nothing at all. It was a measure of how far Bryan had gone from reality that he had acted so brutally over a threat that might never have existed. Had his features allowed it I should have said he looked frightened.

“For a long time,” Bridget went on, “I’ve thought you had too much influence over Enoch. You thought I was jealous, didn’t you? But it wasn’t that. I thought you were bad for him. Encouraged him to be violent. And when I listened properly to his story about calling on Tommy Crammer the night he was attacked, although he couldn’t sort it, Z could. He’d got it back to front!”

A reversal had taken place in Enoch’s mind; his last memories had been of the face of his attacker and of the need to tell me, but he had transposed them. The blow that struck at him had jerked the brain just as the fragile strands of memory were forming in the mind; the connections had held but the signals had gone wrong. Enoch had been like a man who knew the road he had to walk but no longer knew north from south or right hand from left hand.

The look of triumph broadened on Albert’s face, and I knew he had at last found his victim, his scapegoat, in Bryan Orraman. It could never have been Mr. Marcus; they were too tightly bound together, and to sacrifice him would have been to sacrifice himself. But Bryan satisfied him as someone who had been in authority over him and now would know his fall. Tommy’s part was more ambiguous, but from his perky, if half-scared look, I thought he could see some profit in it for himself.

Bryan had once boasted to Albert of how to deal with a witness you wished to destroy.

“The first thing to do,” he had said to Albert, “is to build up a bad picture of the character you want to destroy, get them drinking or thieving, or anyway let people believe they do. You’ve only got to drop a hint here and a hint there or see that a few bottles drop out of the right cupboard. That’s stage one. Stage two is to frighten the person you have chosen because that person knows what you’re doing even if no one else does. That’s where understanding people comes in, you have to choose the right sort. Then get them in a weak position where nothing they say will be believed anyway.”

Bryan had been talking of the conduct of a court case, but Albert was sharp enough to see the extension of this technique to Jenny. Jenny had been used in this way. Albert had particular reason to notice it because this weapon had been turned against himself. The suggestion had been made to Enoch, an inflammable customer at the best of times, that Albert pestered young boys. But Bryan had gone too far in trying to frighten Albert, because a frightened Albert was a sly, dangerous Albert. He was also an extremely knowledgeable Albert, to whom a garrulous Mr. Marcus had talked too freely over the past years. He knew that Ellen had been blackmailing Bryan Orraman, and he knew that any prolonged investigation of the death of Ellen would turn up the importance of Orraman in her life. Perhaps that explained why Bryan had buried the body of Eddie Chase in Mr. Marcus’s garden. He wanted to make sure that Mr. Marcus was implicated.

Between the beginning and the end of any life there is always a period when you can start to become something better or sink to something a good deal worse.

I do not say there is ever any going back; once embarked on a course of murder there is no return, and for Bryan Orraman there had probably been no going back since he set his angry face against the world in childhood.

But for him I think the danger point had been passed when he conceived the plan of using Jenny as an instrument. It was a denial of her humanity, and because he denied it to her, he lost it himself. He became less and less a rational feeling human being, more and more a creature caught in a machine. The denial carried its own punishment with it; he became more stupid, more careless, and less able to protect himself. It is in this sense that he was his own enemy. He destroyed himself. The last dangerous moment came when he took the little wavering affection there had been between us and let it strengthen him to sacrifice me.

He began to tremble.

I had been right when I had thought that something one day would blast him wide open. He had done it to himself.

Jenny had in a way offered herself to Bryan as a substitute, for she was so fatally anxious to take to herself the blame for Bridget’s shop-lifting. I suppose a psychologist would say that she wanted to suffer for someone. She was a kind of spiritual masochist and I suppose she always had been. It was the root of my real deep quarrel with her. Bryan had suggested subtly to Jenny that the person guilty of murder was Bridget and Jenny had acquiesced in the hoisting of this burden on to her shoulders also.

And so there was Jenny tied up by her own compulsions.

“But when Mother knew that I was going to have a child and that I was three months on the way she knew I couldn’t be guilty.”

It sounded like a non-sequitur but I knew it wasn’t, and even if I hadn’t there was a great strength and certainty about Bridget and carried conviction.

“Jenny will talk now,” I said. “She won’t be afraid. And the truth will stand up, Bryan, because it is the truth.” I turned to Coffin, who had been very quiet, speechless, I suppose. “If you look among those golf clubs I guess you will find the real weapon among them!”

Chapter Fifteen

POOR OLD MR. MARCUS WAS IN THE PRISON HOSPITAL; THE body in the garden had given him a heart attack. He had been mixed up in the frauds with Bryan Orraman but he had known (I do not say what he might have guessed) nothing about murder. The family business had been busted long ago, all his money had been spent and he needed more. His highly respected façade had been that and no more. The fact that he should have been the magistrate dealing with Jenny’s case showed the horrid intimacy of the district. At the time when he had been giving me good advice about my sister he had on his own mind the fact that he and Bryan Orraman had sold an estate, split up into building lots, which they had already mortgaged and of which they did not possess the freehold, deeds. They had got a false signature on the deeds transferring the property; they were signed in the name of Mr. Marcus’s father, an old man who had lived on till quite recently, over ninety, withdrawn and slightly dotty but able to sign his name. In fact he went on signing it even after he was dead and some months in his grave. I suppose Mr. Marcus was able to convince himself somehow that what he did was right and not dishonest because he had been able to preserve that wonderful show of honesty and uprightness. It was so convincing that it must have had some reality.

Ellen had threatened the partners with blackmail; the fact that it was to some extent a benign and friendly blackmail did not make it less dangerous. To someone like Bryan Orraman, perched precariously on the edge of success or prison, it was a sharp knife cutting at the picture of himself that he had formed, and he could not allow the possessor of such a weapon to go on living. Especially when her husband was a police detective. This had been the cause of the trouble between Ellen and her husband of which people had spoken. Eddie was shocked and angry at his wife’s behaviour. As Miss Le Boeuf had said: he had standards, even although his own life, when it came to be uncovered, had its own little evasions and deceits. Ellen and her husband had been a threat to Bryan although looking back one could see sadly that it was not one that needed have been answered by death. But reason played the least part in Bryan Orraman’s motives; the strong drive came from the need to create and maintain himself as the founder of a family, the master of a great house, the builder of a way of life. On this point he was hardly sane. And from such ambitions violence and tragedy often spring but also greatness; they create the Borgias, the Bolingbrokes, and the Bonapartes.

“When did you first suspect him?” asked John Coffin; it was the classic question.

I could answer easily. “From the beginning. From the very start. When he lied to me about seeing me act. Oh not of murder, not then, only very very slowly. But I knew he was not straight. So I built myself up as a guilty person, to see what he would do, and also, of course, to get Jenny out before she went mad.”

“You nearly went too far there,” said John Coffin. He looked at me half admiringly, half fearful. “How did you do it? How did you act so good?”

“How did I? Damn it, I’m an actress.” Suddenly this was the last insult, the last madness, and I burst into tears.

Coffin comforted me efficiently but his face was sad. He had grown to like Bryan Orraman in many ways. Not until he read the report of the electro encephelograph that he had got done on Bryan Orraman by a trick did he credit what he had started to think. He found then that the Franchisers had been anxious about Bryan for some time. There is a police joke about watching the solicitor who’s too pally with the police and there’s a lot of truth in it.

By this time I knew that there was much more in the background of the case than I had understood. The involvement of Bryan Orraman with Jenny had a long history. He had a good emotional reason for hating her and for substituting her for himself.

She symbolised all that he had hated in his childhood and also all that he had needed and missed: she had had what he wanted; she had had what should have been his. The story that he had told of what happened to him as a boy had not been false but it was not true either. The father who had died young, the mother who had been drowned before she could come back to claim him from the old relative where he had been left were his way of telling a story he found otherwise unbearable. Probably he almost believed in what he said, the repression of painful facts had been genuine enough.

He was Jenny’s brother. The child of her father’s first attachment, there had been no marriage; he was the fabled child in whom we had only half believed.

And with this knowledge the whole ramshackle top storey of the relationships between people which I had seen and thought I understood was swept away and I seemed to look down into a rabbit-warren of connections underneath.

Perhaps I had always known unconsciously, and repressed my knowledge. Perhaps the unrecognised likeness to a loved person explained my rapid falling in love with him.

Jenny had known for some time and characteristically she had kept quiet about it because she was ashamed of the relationship and what it revealed about her father; her knowledge explained why she had sought him out as an adviser and why she had trusted him. But all the time she had felt guilty in denying the relationship, and this emotionally reinforced the guilt she already felt about Bridget, and so made it easier for her to accept part of the sacrifice. Bryan Orraman was acting out again the part of his childhood that he had hated, with someone else there getting the whacks.

The story was told me by my mother. She arrived in Birmingham bringing with her the usual atmosphere of bonhomie and bossiness.

“I told Jenny. It was her right to know, girl,” and I knew by this turn of speech how moved she was, she never used this archaism except when under stress. “He was her brother, not yours. She had a right to know.”

We would have to help Jenny, she would need all the help we could give her, but it could be done.

“And Bryan Orraman?” I asked. “Did he know?”

“Must have done, dear,” said my mother sadly. “I’ve always kept in touch on the quiet. He didn’t have anyone, you see.”

She hobbled a bit but she could walk. “My new treatment,” she said. “Painful but good. I look better, don’t I? More colour in my face?” I wanted to giggle; Mother always made up with a good undercolouring of pink and lavish black on the brows so that her face never lacked colour. She didn’t wait for an answer. “Mind you, I had no idea what he was up to,” and she sighed. “I blame myself.” She creaked over to the window. “I must say this place hasn’t changed much in thirty years. The view’s the same, the furniture is the same and the dust looks the same. I hear you came across Albert Peak?”

“You knew him too?”

“Lord, yes. Knew the poor girl he done in too. Went to Sunday-school with her. And guess who went with us? Young Monty Marcus. I tell you, Cleopatra”—Mother was one of the few who occasionally gave me my full name. I suppose she liked it—“this is a dangerous place to live in. Everyone knows everything, no one forgets anything. People have long memories round here.”

She had come loaded with presents. She was a good present-giver; presents which at first sight seemed impossible usually turned out to be something you treasured for years. This time she had a pair of bed-socks for me that I couldn’t immediately see the use for but no doubt soon would, a clock for Bridget (all those kids, she explained obliquely) and a red woollen jacket for her unborn great grandchild, that the little creature would probably find its most treasured possession. “Bright red to cheer it up, poor beast,” she explained. “It’ll need something. What a world, what a world.” But as she didn’t look downcast I knew that everything she personally valued had come through.

But I could not shake my mind free from its preoccupation with Bryan Orraman who had had so many good qualities and who had not been saved. In prison he had developed distinct signs of functional mental disorder The doctors said that it was probably a form of schizophrenia. But I knew that it was simply that the dreamer had withdrawn more securely into his dream.

He had had a strange fascination for us two sisters. He had very nearly been the death of both of us. Even now I had not entirely cast off his spell. I wondered about Jenny.

“Was he hypnotising her?” I asked John Coffin.

He shook his head. “I doubt it. Not in the accepted medical sense. Not as we use the word hypnotism. But yes if you mean by force of an immensely stronger personality and by the knowledge he had of her. He manipulated a human being in a state of distress. Your sister was very near to giving way before all the pressures bearing upon her, and Orraman knew it and used it. That was wicked.”

It was significant that he had dropped the use of the Christian name. Whenever Coffin spoke of Bryan after this, and he mentioned him only when forced, he did so formally and curtly.

“You might remember too, Patsy, that he poisoned your sister’s mind against you. In the end she thought you were trying to ruin both Bridget and her.”

“She was sick,” I said. “They both were.”

“May be.”

He had one more question to ask me, and not without anxiety either, for he wasn’t quite sure what I was capable of. “What was it you’d done, Patsy? What did Ellen know? What dreadful crime did you commit? Or was that one more act?”

I laughed. “I once appeared as the nearest approach to a bubble-dancer allowed in Great Britain. I wasn’t so very naked, but certainly it was enough to stop old Joss employing me, he is so full of rectitude and has grown so rich on it. And what was worse, I was very bad at it. That would be the end with Joss; he can’t stand incompetence. They hissed me off the stage. And that’s next to incredible for a bubble-dancer.”

* * * * *

Far away in London, although I did not know of it then, Mrs. Coffin was using her telephone.

“Hello dear, is that you? I’ve been longing to tell you. Official at last. Well, nearly. My John’s getting married. No dear, not a policewoman; an actress. No, a very respectable girl. What? Thirty-five she says…”

Mrs. Coffin put her feet up on the sofa, rested her head, and settled back for a long chat.