THE INTERLOPER

by

GWENDOLINE BUTLER

GEOFFREY BLES 

52 DOUGHTY STREET, LONDON

THE INTERLOPER

From the moment she arrived in Creevey Buildings, Abbie Foret of Bowmont, Montana, U.S.A., realised she had made a mistake. For Creevey Buildings, whose impressive name on the estate agent’s list had so misled her, was in fact an ugly block of flats built in Edwardian times in the centre of London’s dockland, and its inhabitants led lives as removed from Abbie’s own as those of an African tribe. But Abbie was not the sort of girl to give up easily—even when the social incongruities of Creevey Buildings gave way to manifestations less explicable and considerably more unnerving. There was, for example, the copy of Journal of the Plague Year which persistently removed itself from the bookcase to other parts of the flat. There were the flowers in her sitting-room which never seemed to die; and the brass which remained brightly polished despite all the damp of a London autumn. And finally, there were Kate and Darcy, those two odd schoolgirls who became her inseparable companions until one of them disappeared in circumstances too strange to be ignored.

It was at this point that Inspector Coffin entered the story and began investigations which were to involve Abbie in a nightmare from which she felt she was never going to escape.

Also by GWENDOLINE BUTLER

THE DULL DEAD 

THE MURDERING KIND 

DEAD IN A ROW 

RECEIPT FOR MURDER

©Gwendoline Butler, 1959

First Published in 1959

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY WYMAN AND SONS LTD., FAKENHAM

A dolls’ rocking chair of the sort described in this book does exist

See: A History of Dolls’ Houses

Flora Gill Jacobs. Pub. Cassell, 1954

This book is fiction and all the characters and incidents in it are entirely imaginary

SEPTEMBER

Chapter One

WHEN YOU ARE ALONE IN A NEW TOWN YOU LOOK around for the things that are familiar, the things that remind you of home. And when the town is London and you are from Bowmont, Montana, U.S.A., there are not so very many things that do remind you of home.

Especially in the part of London where Abbie had landed. From Larch Drive, Bowmont, Montana, she had come to Creevey Buildings, Courcy Road, The Borough. The Borough is that district which lies south of the Thames over London Bridge and not far from the Tower of London. It is a district of docks, and warehouses and tall blocks of flats.

Abbie had chosen her flat at long range from home and she had chosen it under a series of misapprehensions. She had been deceived by the address. Courcy Street sounded so imposing and, since her purpose in coming to England was to study the development of certain baronial families in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, so eminently right for her. No one had told her that in South London the more aristocratic the street name the lower it was in the social scale. (Prince Imperial Read just round the corner from Courcy Street was practically a slum.) And then the name Creevey Buildings had been an attraction in itself. She was an enthusiastic reader of Jane Austen and many perusals of Persuasion with its vivid scenes in Marlborough Buildings, Bath, had convinced her that the term Buildings meant a pleasantly old and possibly Regency block of flats. She had no way of knowing, of course that Creevey Buildings were early Edwardian and had been built to house workers from the river, the warehouses and the nearby railway. Originally Creevey Buildings had been run by the London County Council, known locally as ’The Council’ but by now it had been forgotten, the long arm of the L.C.C. had been withdrawn and Creevey Buildings seemed to have vigorous life all its own.

It was a life from which Abbie at first seemed quite apart.

“Ruth amid the alien corn all right,” she told herself as she approached the steep flight of stones stairs, unable even in this moment of crisis, to stop her habit of thinking in quotations.

“Still you’ve got one friend already, Abbie,” and she laughed. “As of today, you’ve got one English friend.”

Today was Monday the seventh of September and some hours earlier Abbie had been on the boat train from Liverpool. She had chosen to land at Liverpool rather than Southampton so that she could see as much as possible of the country. “And it’s such a little island that it can’t make much difference.” Seen from three thousand miles away it did seem a little island, but once ashore it seemed to stretch out unaccountably, ‘but so green’, and Abbie had found the journey south long and tiring.

The train was not crowded and there were only two other people in the compartment besides Abbie. One was a stout woman who slept most of the time, waking up at intervals to smile sweetly and eat large sandwiches. A young man sat next to her. He was the sort of young man whom Abbie’s mother, far away in Montana, would have described as ‘homely but nice’. Abbie herself regarded him with caution. He was wearing a neat navy blue suit and a white shirt and collar and Abbie, unused to the social nuances of this new country, found herself unable to place him. Yet there was something about him that she thought she ought to know. Something brisk and neat and very clean and scrubbed.

And his voice which could have told so much to a fellow countryman meant, of course, nothing to Abbie.

“Hot, isn’t it?” said the boy.

Abbie nodded. She had a smut on her face, she was tired, and she was wondering how she had ever got on to the baronage of England as a subject for research.

“Mind you, you can’t count on it lasting. Not in England.”

Abbie nodded again. Somewhere, not so long ago, she had met with a person like this young man.

“Here today and gone tomorrow summer is, you might say.”

“You might, I wouldn’t.”

“American aren’t you?”

Abbie nodded.

“First trip.” This was a statement not a question so Abbie asked one.

“How do you know?”

“The way you are looking at things—that bridge, that church, that old house. I saw you.”

“It’s history,” said Abbie solemnly.

“My name is Joe and I live in London and I believe in history too although many wouldn’t.”

“My name’s Abbie.” Inside she was saying to herself, “This isn’t what I expected. Englishmen don’t rush like this.”

“Abbie,” said Joe. “Like one of the ruins that Cromwell knocked about a bit?” He was smiling at her.

Abbie frowned for a moment not knowing what he meant, then she laughed.

“I know that song. My grandfather used to sing it to me. He knew London. He came from Bow.” She smiled. “Poor Oliver Cromwell.”

“No,” said the young man seriously, “no, not Oliver. Tom, his great uncle. A lot of people never remember him. But it was he who did the knocking about,, for Henry VIII.”

“I ought to have known that,” said Abbie cross with herself. “I’m coming to London to study history.” There was a special note in her voice.

“Oh, London. Yes, its a fine city. I’ve seen New York, Sydney and London so I ought to know.”

“You have?”

“Yes, I have.” The amusement was unmistakable now.

“Well you’re lucky to have travelled so much.”

“I’m a sailor. An engineer.”

Ah, thought Abbie, that explains it. The Island Race, sailor kings, Kipling and all. I ought to have known.

“Yes, London’s a fine city. A good place to be happy in but a poor place to starve in. I ought to know.” He was sober.

“I thought no one starved in Britain now,” said Abbie, who knew all about the Welfare state and had once attended a debate (although not spoken) on it in Bowmont.

“Well, not starved maybe, pretty peckish, say.”

The train was losing speed now as it came into the outskirts of London. By this time Abbie and the young man were talking. Even their fellow traveller had woken up and was sharing her sandwiches with them. You get hungry travelling, she told them solemnly, it uses up so much energy, you see.

“What did you mean?” asked Abbie munching what tasted like ham and egg. “About believing in history?”

He thought. “I suppose I meant a lot of things. But what I meant chiefly was that I was going up to William Morris College, Oxford, to study history.”

“But can you do that?” Abbie was surprised.

“Sailors do read and write, you know. This isn’t Nelson’s day. And I’m an engineer, we’re usually literate.”

“William Morris College!” said Abbie continuing to speak in exclamations.

“That’s where they take people like me. I won’t go back to the sea, I suppose. And if I do well I’ll know all about the manorial economy of Europe in the thirteenth century.”

“Like me,” said Abbie happily. “I’m a historian too.”

The carriage was already darkening with the approach of London. The sandwich eater had dropped off for a light refreshing nap before the fatigues of arrival.

“I shall count myself your first friend in England.”

“Oh yes,” said Abbie. “I could help you maybe.” In far away Montana Abbie’s plump little mother had kissed her good-bye and given her usual practical advice. “Now Abbie’ don’t go round being a do-gooder. Remember what I say, and keep your fingers out of things.” And Abbie, remembering what she would rather forget, what was in part responsible for her flight from home, had nodded.

“Where are you going to live in London?”

“In Creevey Buildings, Courcy Road, The Borough,” said Abbie in a pleased voice.

“Are you indeed?”

Afterwards Abbie wondered at the expression on his face; it could mean so many things. There was surprise in it certainly, and amusement, but more, much more.

“I’m just longing to see it. Plain and Georgian.”

“It depends which George you have in mind. It may not be quite what you expect.”

The woman in the corner had woken up and was muttering about a porter. She started to get her numerous bags and pieces from the rack. Joe helped her.

Abbie herself was ready quickly. She called good-bye and plunged eagerly forward into London and Creevey Buildings.

And the smell of London rushed at her, the smell of dust and dirt and diesel oil and crowds of people, the smell of lorries and the red London buses. Faraway Bowmont, although a busy little town, still smelled of country, of the miles of grass and corn in which it lived. London smelt of city.

Creevey Buildings when Abbie first smelt them had a slight stink of fish and railway tunnel. But this was perhaps because the railway was just across the road. The stone steps up which she was carrying her bags seemed impregnated with a sort of disinfectant. There was nothing very attractive about Creevey Buildings but they had character, a very strong character and like most strong characters not all of it was nice. The house agent where she went to collect the flat keys had welcomed her with frank interest.

“We wondered what you’d be like. Bit of a puzzle to us you were, wanting to move into Creevey Buildings all the way from Montana.”

“I gave good references,” said Abbie stiffly.

“Oh yes.”

And you checked them, thought Abbie, looking at the cheerful but sharp face.

“You know what you’re getting, I suppose? But no, you can’t.”

Abbie put on her spectacles. She always thought better in her spectacles and they changed her appearance from that of a sleek-haired, delicate-featured but not pretty girl to a blue-eyed owl. It was delightful, and the estate agent felt it as strongly as anyone.

“I’ll look after you,” he said reassuringly. “And mind you, in some ways you’re getting a bargain, clean, well furnished, central.”

“And what else am I getting?” Abbie made the inquiry in a firm voice.

“History,” he said. “History.”

“I’ve heard a lot about that lately,” said Abbie. She did not know then that what the Londoner usually means by history is a certain amount of dirt.

“I’ll come round with you,” said the agent. His telephone rang. “Speaking. Oh no, Madam, not bugs, we haven’t had them since—oh—1926, it would be. Are you sure? Oh well yes if you say so; oh well yes if you want me to.”

He reached into a drawer, and took out a Flit gun, a bottle of D.D.T., and got up.

A door at the end of the room opened and a tall man in thick tweeds came out, walked across the room, giving Abbie a smile, and went out of the door. He looked as though he had not slept.

“That’s the boss,” said the man.

“Oh, you’re not?” Abbie was surprised.

“You joking? Of course the boss depends on me a lot. I’m the practical man as you might say, and he’s the inspiration. He’s had some good ideas, I must say.

Now he’s the one who sees the future for this part of London. This district will be the Chelsea of the ’seventies, he says, and he may be right.”

“Oh?” said Abbie, who did not know Chelsea.

The telephone rang again, and the man groaned.

“So sorry,” he apologised. “Got to be off. Can you find your own way? Good. One thing, you won’t get this trouble in Creevey Buildings.

“Glad to hear it,” said Abbie, wondering exactly what sort of trouble she would get there.

She was still wondering it as she stood with her bags arranged around her, her saddle bag hanging from her shoulder, on the pavement outside the Buildings.

“Want any help, dearie?” said a voice. A thick little woman with a red face stood watching her. “You’ll be upstairs, No. 24, top of the building. They said they had let it to an American and I’ve been watching out for you. Come in and have a cup of tea. My name is Flood.”

“Well, I think I’ll go on up.” Abbie was apologetic.

“Right you are. I’ll give you a hand.” The surprising little figure grasped both bags and shouldered them without any difficulty. “Nothing’s too heavy for me, my dear, it’s the knack and I picked it up from my dad. He was a railway porter, carried great trunks and cases round with one hand, leastways he did till he died, naturally he don’t do it now.”

“Naturally,” said Abbie idiotically.

“Although how are we to say what’s natural and what ain’t?” went on the woman. “You can tell there’s more going on than what we understand.” She lowered her voice. “Have you ever seen a flying saucer? They say you’ve had lots of ‘em your way.”

“I can’t say I ever saw one.”

“Just as well perhaps. You’re young. I’ve got my own ideas about them. Friendly though they are, I think. That’s my idea. Mind you, I’ve never seen one. I’m waiting for that.” She paused. “Here we are, top floor, all by yourself. Not a bad little place. Oh, we’re not common in Creevey. Keep ourself to ourself. And of course it’s classier up here on the top floor.”

Abbie felt in the bag which swung from her shoulder for the keys which the agent had given her and let them in.

“Couple of very nice ladies had this flat. One’s a teacher. Well, still have, I suppose I ought to say, seeing they’ll come back when you go.”

“Mrs. Belhatchet and Miss Toll,” said Abbie.

“That’s right, and I’m bound to say the names suit them. Still they’ve got spirit, look at them going off on a trip to America. Bold you know.”

“It’s not a jungle,” said Abbie. “They won’t get eaten.”

“But look at the way they are going, in a little tramp steamer and then driving all across America to the place where Miss Toll’s going to teach in a school. She’s gone on what they call an exchange. Her friend’s just gone for the ride.”

“Some ride,” said Abbie. She was looking round the little flat, and so was her companion.

“I’ve never had a good look before. They keep themselves to themselves. Pretty isn’t it? Bright.”

Either Miss Toll or Mrs. Belhatchet had a taste for colour and Abbie, remembering the letters which had been signed Geraldine Toll and which had spoken of the ‘urge to see the new teeming life of America’, the need ’for contact with the vitality and energy of the great continent’ thought that it was probably Miss Toll. The one communication she had had with Mrs. Belhatchet had been signed ‘Yours sincerely, Florence Belhatchet’ and that did not seem like someone who could paint a room this wild burning red. But Miss Toll had taste, for the bright red was tamed by the tall black and gold Chinese cabinet and by the black and white carpet.

“Good quality,” said Mrs. Flood fingering the carpet approvingly. “I’m in that business you know, my dear so I can tell.” She looked at the cabinet. “That’s real. Her dad must have been a sailor I reckon, these seafaring men bring back pieces like that occasionally.”

The rest of the flat was quiet, neat, clean and what Abbie called to herself‘homespun’.

When she was by herself she walked to the window of the room which would be her bedroom and looked out towards the street. She could see across the road to the old railway station and she knew from her researches into the district that this station was one of the oldest in London, pretty well the first, and she had equated it in her mind with the station that was building in Dombey and Son. So down there somewhere she thought had lived Polly and Toodle and Biler. Behind the station she could see the tops of ships and knew that she was looking towards the river and the docks. She knew also that to the left although she could not see it lay the Tower of London.

Below her ran a steady stream of traffic and buses.

“It said trams in my books,” she said disappointed. “I suppose it’s been changed. I would like to have gone along on a tram.”

She drew in a deep breath of content.

She finished her cigarette. Below, she saw a tall, long limbed girl walk past. It reminded her of something.

She drew back from the window sadly. You can come three thousand miles she realised and the thing you are running away from can come right back with you.

All the same she had the feeling that life was opening up for her. She felt a throb of excitement in her throat. She had cast off her shackles, she was away from home, she was adult.

Her first weeks in Creevey Buildings were lived in this state of deep, but suppressed excitement. They were peaceful hardworking weeks for Abbie, who went daily to pore over her records at the British Museum or the Public Office where she never quite lost her pleasure at having to sign her name in the big book. The day the porter knew her she wrote home about it.

She was fascinated by Creevey Buildings and she began to see why Miss Toll and Mrs. Belhatchet lived here. At first she had been a little puzzled why this presumably well educated couple lived in the Buildings.

But her little flat was pleasant, and if you liked a view of roof-tops and the masts of ships, which Abbie did, then you had a fine view. And then the population of Courcy Street and the buildings was interesting.

“They’re so damn interesting,” Abbie told herself.

Mrs. Flood had put it another way. “Miss Toll and Mrs. Belhatchet take a great interest in other people,” was what she had said, “and most of the people they are interested in live about here. They’re interested professionally of course, dear, Miss Toll’s a teacher. ‘I like a really bad child,’ she told me once. ‘Well it’s not what they liked in my day,’ I said, and she laughed. Mrs. Belhatchet’s the same, she’s not a teacher, dear, but one of these social workers, and she likes the bad ones too. More interesting, so she says. Well, so they may be but it seems hard on the good ones, doesn’t it? Round here used to be a real tough district in the old days. We’ve all tamed down a lot since then.”

Abbie looked out of her window at Courcy Street which looked dirty and grey but not a bit tough and remembered this conversation.

Down below Mrs. Flood started her television set. Abbie was to learn that Creevey Buildings lived a life severely regulated by the television. Between certain hours no one was to be seen and it was great bad manners to go calling at such times. Of course tastes varied. The Joneses on the bottom flat never watched anything with an acrobat in it because Mr. Jones being a stevedore by trade had enough of it at work and didn’t want any more. The Hendersons on the middle floor always had the sound on as loud as possible for anything to do with Russia because Mr. Henderson was the only Conservative in the building (on the whole Creevey Buildings had no politics but such as it had inclined to the left). Mrs. Flood always had her set on for the dancing and variety programmes, but she was not fussy and would listen to the sound radio rather than go without jokes and noise.

Abbie thought that if she had been an anthropologist she could have found plenty of material for a study of a society in miniature in Creevey Buildings. The Buildings had customs and a way of life all it’s own. Certain things, she discovered, they discussed, and others not at all. It was not altogether what she expected. For instance, bodily processes of some sort were readily spoken of. Bowels were quite respectable. Mrs. Jones was glad to tell almost everyone that she was regular and would have quite appreciated the attitude of old Prince Metternich who, receiving his last audience before his retirement, instead of uttering a few last words of dignified farewell announced instead that ‘you will be pleased to know that I have had a satisfactory evacuation of the bowels’.

And about sex too they could be quite explicit when they chose although very often it was in a private language of their own. Mrs. Jones called it the ’thing’ and Mrs. Henderson referred to it, somewhat crossly, as ‘nature’. But money and hire-purchase arrangements were never discussed. Family relationships were the most secret of all. ‘My Ernie’ was often mentioned, and also people such as ’Tim’s Nell’ but a cold stare and a rambling explanation were all that a question produced. Indeed questions were never much welcomed in the Buildings except when they came from the social worker from the local hospital who was always politely referred to as ’the lady visitor’. Her questions got answered, even if not truthfully.

Creevey Buildings like the rest of Courcy Street and its neighbourhood was a matriachy, Perhaps because of this children or at any rate babies were worshipped. For the first eighteen months of their lives they were beautifully dressed, clean and over protected; after this there was a rapid decline in the standard of care lavished on them, toddlers were often grubby and damp and small children downright dirty. But they were all spoiled.

There was no drunkenness in Courcy Street and not much violence; the worst faults were laziness and a deep preoccupation with self. No one from Courcy Street would ever devote their lives for the well-being of a remote tribe in Equatorial Africa or slave for years to assist the poor of India although they might sacrifice their life on the spot for a neighbour. And why not? For generations they had been the ones who needed help, they had been the ones the missionaries were out to get. It would take some time and long years of security for habits to change.

The roots of Courcy Street were deep in the history of London. Visiting social workers often spoke of the people there as rootless and shifty. But they were wrong.

Courcy Street was derived from generations of Londoners who had fought bitterly to survive at all. Some of the virtues which these workers praised such as stability and thrift were luxuries which their ancestors had not been able to afford and which would not have been much use to them anyway. They needed to be resilient and not deeply attached. They had adapted themselves for survival. They looked unstable as a social group but they were not; underneath there was a deep stability; their ancestors had survived and so would they.

All the same Abbie was a stranger, and knew she was a stranger.

And being in a strange town many things which might otherwise have seemed odd and curious are accepted as part of the newness of things without being examined. Only slowly is their frightening quality apparent.

This was how it was with Abbie.

Chapter Two

ONCE YOU HAD GOT USED TO IT, LIFE IN CREEVEY  Buildings was pleasant enough. Every day started for Abbie with coffee and rather stale rolls and ended with more coffee and a cigarette by the window in the sitting-room overlooking the road. In between she travelled either to the Public Record Office or to the British Museum to discover more about the baronage (extinct; it was true to say she was hardly interested in any surviving peer) of England. At the end of a month she had discovered a few extra facts about the families, nothing perhaps that hadn’t been known before, but she had learnt a lot about London life.

She had learned that Londoners make their own rules. She had noticed them crossing the road. You had to hand it to them, she thought, they didn’t let the traffic cow them. The Londoners did not dart across the road singly and terrified; they crossed in a body. This did not mean that they waited meekly for the traffic to halt, but rather that they stopped the traffic. Even London traffic, Abbie decided, hesitated to mow down a stream of fellow-citizens although it looked as though it would take anything else on. Perhaps the drivers were afraid of being lynched, she thought, observing the pale determined faces of the walkers.

She had learned also that a girl alone in London stands a good chance of going on being a girl alone in London, which was disappointingly not what her mother had told her. Mother had turned up in London in the good old twenties. She had had a roaring time sampling everything from night-clubs to the Boat Club Ball, then she had returned to America and married Mr. Foret, who was in heavy hardware. But then she was a student at a school of acting whereas Abbie took after Mr. Foret and was serious. Abbie began to regret her hasty departure from Joe on the station. The truth was that there had been an opportunity for a good exit, and Abbie who had a strong streak of drama in her (so perhaps she was not so unlike Mum after all) had been unable to resist it. Now she was sorry.

This was why most of her evenings ended up by her own window. However, she enjoyed it. It was peaceful and it was London.

From her room high up Abbie looked at the skyline of London. She thought she had never seen so many chimneys and churches. “It’s a city of chimneys and churches,” she told herself.

When she had time she wandered on foot in the city, studying old buildings and new. As she looked at the great blocks of flats which seemed to her to stand out so stridently among the smoke-blackened bricks of the older London she wondered what would be thought of them in a hundred years’ time. Would they say “But how wonderful with the hollows and recesses, the cubes within cubes, the feeling of volume. It fits in with the classic ease of Wren and even with the pointed Gothic. Did they realise how well they were building?” Or would later people simply say despairingly “How could they do it?”

She got to know the signs of the different days of the week. Monday was on the whole a dead day, with no one about and no street traders. Tuesday was a little more lively and by Wednesday if the weather was fine her evening scene was enlivened by barrows of fruit and ice cream, by strolling couples, and family shoppers. There was quite a lively market near Creevey Buildings. Abbie herself after a preliminary period of nervousness enjoyed shopping there. She usually went at the week-end, when she knew that the Buildings and Courcy Street awoke to their fullest life. Friday night and Saturday the fruit stalls were joined by traders in dress materials, stockings, handbags and large plushy dolls. (Children had a good time in Courcy Street, Abbie decided, from birth until the age of six their word was law, after that they did increasingly less well.)

This area of bustling and vivid life was dominated by the large public house known as the Red Bull and on account of this a trip to the market was known to the inhabitants of Creevey Buildings as ‘going up the Red’. Very soon Abbie was going up the Red with everyone else. She had a special fancy for the stalls of dress lengths and stood fingering the silks and woollens happily; they were often of surprisingly good quality. She had even ventured to shop at the old junk stall which stood next to the clothes dealer and on whose crowded barrows she had unearthed from among the broken vases and odd shoes a little piece of glass that she thought Venetian. Fondly she sent it off to her parents in Bowmont. Her father wrote back thanking her for the present which he said he admired. “Very pretty,” he wrote, “but from my memories of Venetian glass when in Venice as a youngster I should say it came from Birmingham. I remember those barrows. It was the Caledonian Market in my day. I suppose you found it under a pile of old shoes?”

“Been shopping in the Red, dear?” said her neighbour Mrs. Flood, seeing her come in one day with her arms full of bundles. “Got to be careful shopping there, you know.”

“Oh, I love it.”

“I dare say. But if you don’t keep a sharp look out they think nothing of slapping the prices up. Sharks, you know. Still they never get the better of me.”

“Oh it all seems so cheap!”

“You’ve got to think of the rest of us. Raises the prices for us too.” Mrs. Flood looked quite severe. Abbie had already learnt that Mrs. Flood had a keen feeling for money and although she felt that her sharp-eyed neighbour would do almost anything if the profit was high enough she could not really dislike her for this. Mrs. Flood had a great attraction for Abbie, the secret of which was her omniscience. There was no subject on which she did not offer all the answers. Or at any rate if she did not know she was always willing to make it up. In another walk of life she would certainly have been a successful politician. Even as a man she might have done more. But as she said to herself:

“My sex held me back, dear. I’d have gone far if only I’d been a man. Still I’ve had my moments. And I haven’t done so badly, no I haven’t. And then supposing if I had got taken up in politics what would there have been in it in the end? A title perhaps or someone writing about my experiences. Now my experiences are salted down in solid cash. I don’t need to live round here my dear if I don’t want to. I’ve got myself a nice little bungalow down on Canvey Island but I like it here. I like the smell of the streets.”

But Abbie thought that business too kept Mrs. Flood in town for there were a good many callers in the flat below and whatever trade she carried on was done in an undertone and with great discretion. Abbie thought of everything respectable or disgraceful but she never could really pin Mrs. Flood down to anything definite.

One evening, looking down from her window, cup of coffee in hand, Abbie saw Mrs. Flood get off the bus and cross the road to Creevey Buildings. The road was crowded with stalls and shoppers. But Abbie noticed that Mrs. Flood was observed, that the road was cleared quickly before her, that no one impeded her progress or even for that matter lingered near her.

So Mrs. Flood was much respected, was she? Or much feared?

Puzzled and a little disconcerted, Abbie turned back to her room and smoked a cigarette.

After a little while she strolled round the room looking at the books belonging to her landladies. She wondered which books belonged to Miss Toll and which to Mrs. Belhatchet. Sorting them out was a game which she played with herself. There were low white-painted bookcases round the room crammed full of books. Abbie looked at them with slight disapproval. No one who really loved books could cram them in that heartless way. She thought that neither of the two ladies could be of a delicate disposition. It was probably Miss Toll who went in for all the art books. Not that her books were any more sympathetically treated. Miss Toll also no doubt owned most of the novels which were all by the stars of the ’thirties’, names Abbie knew but never read. Rex Warner, Virginia Woolf, and Aldous Huxley. Her own taste ran more to Faulkner, but she loved the Victorians and was beginning to discover a taste for even earlier. Fanny Burney was a pleasure to someone who wished that Jane Austen had written just one more book. Fielding too was a writer to excite.

She stretched out a hand and took a thin red book from a crowded shelf. She looked with interest at Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. Defoe, the first great journalist, the begetter of the novel, the student of Roxana and Moll Flanders. Defoe who had stood in the pillory and died poor.

His Journal was sandwiched among a number of books on child psychology and juvenile delinquency so she decided it belonged to Mrs. Belhatchet, the Welfare Officer. As far as she could see this lady had no light reading. Except Defoe. Well, that was understandable perhaps. Defoe with his understanding of the prostitute and the pandar had probably provided Mrs. Belhatchet with some splendid case histories. Nevertheless it made Mrs. Belhatchet a more interesting person.

Abbie took another cigarette and curled up by the window reading Journal of the Plague Year.

The sun was down, the street lights were on when she had finished and London was peopled with ghosts. The ghosts of people who had listened with terror to the bell tolling for them, who had seen the funeral carts roll away, and looked into the pits of the dead.

Abbie drew a deep breath.

“But I suppose around here the plague would not be so deadly. This was south of the river, it would still be a quiet country village with the Thames running through.”

But the boats carried the plague and the pedlars and the traveller passing through on their way to what they hoped was safety and the green fields of Southwark had not escaped.

Abbie put the book back on the shelf. There was no reason for any special feeling, it was just an ordinary red-bound book in a row of other ordinary books, but all the same Abbie felt uncomfortable. For the first time a faint premonition stirred her.

She too had her ghosts.

The next day for the first time she found her immersion in the English baronage no longer total. She was not bored by tracing the births, marriages and deaths of her group of families but her thoughts were wandering back to Creevey Buildings. It was a very funny place, no doubt about that, and she wondered if she would find it more normal as a native born Londoner. She had a suspicion that she would find it less so rather than more. All the same she was fascinated by it. She had written home about her flat and had received a worried letter from her father suggesting she move. From her mother had merely come the statement that she had not yet located Miss Toll and Mrs. Belhatchet but would be inviting them over for a visit “just to be friendly”.

Creevey Buildings was peaceful in late autumn sun. The traffic rumbled by and there were friendly noises from the river. Round the corner a group of boys were mending a cycle, three or four girls were giggling over a magazine and watching casually over the babies of their families at the same time. A cat trotted down the stone stairs and rubbed against Abbie’s legs.

“Hello, sweetie.”

“Silly name for a cat,” said one of the boys, looking up from the cycle.

“Well maybe.”

“You American?”

Abbie looked at him and met knowledgeable black eyes. “You⁻know I am.”

He grinned. “Thought you might not admit it.”

“Well I’m not ashamed.”

“Yanks not always popular round here, you know.” He grinned again. “We read the wrong sort of newspapers round here.”

“You’re too intelligent.”

“Do you think so? Well to tell you the truth I think so too. I shan’t stay. I’ll go away. Cambridge in the end, I think, or maybe Oxford. I haven’t decided.”

“Are there many like you?” asked Abbie amused. “But I’ve met one before,” she went on thinking of Joe.

“That’s old Mimsy Flood’s cat,” he said changing the subject. “Her familiar you might say if you believe in witches.”

“I don’t.”

“Perhaps the cat does. We had a poltergeist here once. Know what that is?”

Abbie nodded.

“Wasn’t half good while it lasted. Furniture and china flying everywhere. A table came crashing out of the window. Then they took the poor kid that was behind it off to hospital and it all stopped. Some people said it was old Mrs. Flood all the time. But I believed that myself.”

His black eyes looked at her shrewdly. She found herself quite unable to decide whether he was having a joke at her expense or not.

She patted the cat absently and made her way upstairs. The little flat was still and quiet. She went out to the kitchen and carried her supper on a tray into the bright sitting room.

Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year lay open on the table before her.

She ate her supper thoughtfully, reading over her notes as she did so. The meal was finished before she allowed the thought that was in her mind to rise to the surface.

She had certainly put the book back on the shelves last night.

“Oh but anyone can forget,” she told herself as she put it again between the Reminiscences of a Probation Officer and First Principles of Child Psychology. “Look at the time Dad went off to New York and left two eggs boiling for breakfast.”

The next night Defoe had moved up the shelf to the end of the room.

And on the night after that it had once more come out of the bookcase and fallen on the floor behind. Only someone looking for it would have seen it, if then.

All that evening Abbie sat pretending to arrange her notes but really sitting up in a chair in uneasy thought. From the flats below floated up the usual evening sounds and smells. Mr. Flood had fish for supper and the family on the floor below that were listening to a variety show while the Joneses were listening to a dance band. Or perhaps not listening, thought Abbie, hearing the sound of angry voices raised above the band. Wednesday and Thursday were days likely for quarrelling, days without the spice of the pleasurable monied week-ends, or the quiet depressions of Monday.

At nine o’clock the bell of the front door rang. Abbie hesitated. She was ashamed to admit to herself that she did not want to open the door. Then she got up resolutely. After all it was probably only Mrs. Flood; she came up sometimes with half the pie she had just baked or an offering of pudding, having the idea, and perhaps accurately, that Abbie did not feed herself properly. “All this coffee,” she would grumble. “No worse than all your tea,” was Abbie’s reply (Mrs. Flood had always a pot of well stewed tea at her elbow). “Oh there’s nourishment in a good strong cuppa with two spoons of sugar,” the old lady replied.

So it was probably Mrs. Flood.

The bell rang again. But shortly, almost as if the caller was in doubt.

Two young girls stood outside. They could not have been more than sixteen. One girl wore a thick tweed skirt and a red jersey and the other a neat grey coat and skirt. A good school and a careful upbringing was written all over them. Nothing could be clearer than that they did not belong to Creevey Buildings.

Abbie looked at them in surprise.

“We’ve come to see Miss Toll,” said the tall girl in the red jersey. She had a rich warm voice, adult for her years. She went on doubtfully, “That is we came to see her.” She glanced at her companion, and rallied herself. “May we see her, please?”

“Miss Toll’s gone to America for a year. She and Mrs.

Belhatchet. I rent this flat.”

“What an enormous surprise,” said the big girl solemnly. “Are you sure it’s America? Well I can hardly believe it.” She put her hands in her pockets. “She seemed absolutely rooted here.”

“You can take up roots, you know,” said Abbie, who had.

“It’d be Mrs. Belhatchet,” put in the other girl, speaking for the first time. She had a gentle husky immature voice. “She’d be the arranger.”

“I’m beginning to get quite a picture of these two ladies,” Abbie laughed. “I’m told that Mrs. Belhatchet has always lived near here and that Miss Toll is of ‘good family’. From their books I can tell one of them, Miss Toll I think, likes pictures and books about pictures, and that Mrs. Belhatchet reads up on child psychology.”

“Oh they are both hot on that,” said the girl gloomily. “Can’t keep them off it. Always on to me because I was a child prodigy.”

“You were?”

“Oh the divine spark’s gone now. I’m an ex. Quite dull. There’s plenty of us around. Kids with a huge I.Q. who can read and write and compose sonatas at ten and then fade away into nothing as they get older.” She has all the patter, thought Abbie. “My speciality was thought reading. Miss Toll used to teach me when I was small. Of course not now. I’m at Fieldlands now.”

Even Abbie had heard of Fieldlands. Perhaps she had never heard of it before she crossed the Atlantic, but even in less than a month she had been informed about it. Fieldlands was the biggest and best of girls schools. She guessed that both the girls were pupils there and that the smaller, silent one was wearing the school uniform. There was something about the expensive dowdiness of the grey coat and skirt that only the most enlightened school uniform could have achieved.

“Oh dear. And I did so want to see her.” The large face was puckered and anxious. “I suppose you don’t know where she is?”

“No,” Abbie admitted. “No I don’t. But someone must. Someone must know where she is.”

Abbie held open the door. “Come in and have some coffee and I’ll do some thinking.” As she led the girls into her sitting-room she looked round, almost without knowing it, to see where Journal of the Plague Year was. But it remained snugly in its lodging.

They introduced themselves politely.

“This is Alice Kent, better known as Darcy, for reasons we don’t quite know any longer although we certainly knew once.”

“I acted the part of Mr. Darcy in a play about Pride and Prejudice” said Alice or Darcy in a husky voice.

“And I’m Catriona Broadbent but thank heavens you can call me Kate.”

Abbie made coffee from the tin of Instant Maxwell House that her mother had sent her and looked at the two girls in the big mirror over the fireplace as she did so.

It was probably typical of them that Darcy should be in school uniform and Kate wearing a bright skirt and sweater. She could almost swear that Kate had lipstick on as well. Darcy, however, was not negligible. Her head was covered with neat dark curls and she had a comfortable composed air. Looking at her eyes and mouth Abbie decided that she probably had a quiet but positive sense of humour. She would be good company. Kate, now sitting downcast and worried, showed all her feelings good or bad.

“We’ve got some days from school. Half term,” said Darcy who would always find it necessary to prove the legality of her movements. “And I’m staying with Kate’s family.”

“It’s pretty easy to get up here anyway,” said Kate. “Fieldlands is only a few miles out in Hertfordshire.”

They took the coffee politely and held it in their laps, with their legs crossed, doubtless as they had been taught at school.

“I’m not going to be any use to you, I’m afraid.” Abbie had been looking over her letters and papers which she kept methodically filed. “I have no record of their address. I did my business through the house-agent. That’s the answer: Try him—he will know.”

Kate drank her coffee, then put her cup down.

“I doubt it. In fact I know not. I’m his daughter.”

The sentence brought about one of those dead silences in the room which Abbie’s mother said meant an angel was passing over the room but which Abbie always thought must be a very heavy-footed angel. From what she remembered of her brief meeting with her house-agent he seemed an unlikely parent for Kate.

“Then it looks as though we’ve lost Miss Toll and Mrs. Belhatchet.”

Kate gave a laugh. “Oh they’ll turn up, you know. They must.”

“I’m sorry I can’t help you. Or can I?”

“I don’t know that it’s so very important after all.” She looked at Darcy. “Not at all really. I don’t know why I’m being so stupid. I only wanted to see the old things.”

Darcy smiled at Abbie. “Don’t you believe her about being stupid. She’s very clever really.”

“I should think you both were.”

“Should you really?” Darcy looked pleased. “But I don’t think I am. I like practical things, you know. I shall get trained as a games mistress I think. Unless I go on the stage of course. I may decide to do that.” She smiled at Abbie who thought that however seriously Darcy took her friend she did not take herself too seriously.

Kate had wandered over to the table where Abbie worked. “You’ve got some of your own things here. That little toy rocking chair, that’s not either Miss Toll’s or Mrs. Belhatchet’s is it?” She rocked it gently with a forefinger. “It’s pretty. Did it come from America? Rocking chairs are so American.”

Abbie shook her head.

“It’s quite new to me. It was a present from a friend who’s an archaeologist. He sent it to me as a sort of joke, I think. He said I had a rocking chair mentality. Not very funny.”

Yes, an archaeologist, Abbie thought grimly, and very very good at digging. But not always for ruins.

“You know an archaeologist?” Kate was impressed.

“Well, and so can you if you want.” There was amusement in Abbie’s voice. “I’ll introduce you if you like. He’ll be coming over soon probably on his way east.” After all she thought we are still on speaking terms, and heavens knows Kate ought to be safe with him.

Kate looked excited. The red of her jersey was reflected in the red of her cheeks. Abbie felt old and worldly. After all she certainly knew an archaeologist and a good many other people as well.

“What utter bliss,” said Kate, tripping over Darcy’s feet.

Darcy drew her feet in tidily and resignedly. “I feel you ought to know what happens when Kate meets people. The last time she was introduced to a man of distinction she managed to hook her foot round his ankle and he fell and nearly broke his knee. He was in plaster for weeks anyway.”

“No story loses in the telling with Darcy.” But Kate was willing to laugh at herself.

Abbie thought that if Darcy did go on the stage she would make a very good comedienne. Indeed it was clear to her that between Darcy and Kate the latter was the butt, the one to be laughed at.

“But you’ll come again, won’t you?” she asked as they left. “I’ll write you about the archaeologist.”

Abbie collected the coffee cups and rinsed them at the sink thinking about Kate, who at once attracted and repelled her, with a frown. Kate had said a very queer thing, rather perhaps had expressed herself oddly. T am his daughter” she had said, when it would have been more natural to have said, “He is my father”. That is: she allowed him a relationship but did not claim one for herself.

Odd happenings were beginning to mount up for Abbie. In the days that followed they seemed to become more and more.

For a week she appreciated the beauty and longevity of the bowl of flowers she kept in her sitting-room.

“Flowers last a long time here,” she said one day to Mrs. Flood, half joking.

“Do they?” Mrs. Flood opened her eyes wide. “Mine don’t.” Today she was dressed for going out in a smart black coat with a fur collar and a green and bronze feather cap. Beneath the cap dangled marcasite hoop ear-rings. She was well made up with a good deal of black mascara and to Abbie’s startled eyes she looked irresistibly like an elderly, but friendly parrot. A parrot with a knowing look in its eye. “Mine don’t,” she repeated.

Abbie went back and looked at her flowers with puzzled eyes.

On the next day she began to wonder why the brass on her front door (the Buildings were well supplied with brass on bell, number and knocker) was sometimes bright sometimes dull. Abbie, who had hardly met brass till she came to England, certainly never polished it herself. It was also about this time that she began to fancy the doors opened and shut as she walked up the stairs. But she never saw anything.

Did she really hear feet running either before or after her? She could not be sure.

These things only happened at intervals. For days the Buildings would be completely normal and down to earth. Then she would become aware of movements and once or twice she wondered if other books had moved from the shelves, but Defoe never wandered again.

But Abbie began to be very sure that Creevey Buildings was a very strange place.

Chapter Three

SHE LIKED MRS. FLOOD BUT EVEN THE OLD LADY BEGAN TO trouble her. By now Abbie perceived a certain regularity in the appearance of Mrs. Flood and understood what it meant.

When she appeared in her town blacks and her feather hat, as she did about once a month, she was out for important business. The more make-up on her face the more she was out to impress. These were big days and not very common.

When she wore, as she had when Abbie first saw her, an old skirt and jersey, she was planning a day at home. Such days were not so very common either. But when she had on a comfortable tweed coat and a deep fitting old brown hat, which in fact was her common everyday wear, Abbie was beginning to feel she was up to no good. She was so very unobtrusive in her brown clothes when her natural habit was to be as flamboyant as possible that Abbie could not help wondering why.

Mrs. Flood was prosperous, that was clear. She had plenty of clothes. Her best feather hats, although they looked much the same, were not the same, but one of six or seven hats worn in turn. And the ear-rings which Abbie had at first glance taken for marcasite might, on closer inspection, possibly have been diamond.

When she went out she always turned her rings with the stones towards the palms so that the stones could not be seen and the bump round her waist was possibly the bag where she kept her money. Abbie wondered more and more where she went on these expeditions.

“You have to be careful round here,” she said one day when they met on the stairs and Abbie was unable to hide her amused surprise at the careful clutch on the fat handbag.

“Oh but it looks such an honest neighbourhood.”

The old lady gave her a scornful look. “So it is. In its way. But I’m careful. Don’t put temptation in people’s way, I always say. And there’s been a nasty lot of petty crime round here. Shoplifting for one thing. Youngsters too. Not nice you know. Mrs. Belhatchet your landlady says there’s always a reason for it. Compensation she calls it. I don’t know. Sometimes I think some people are just plain wicked.” Her face beneath the jade green feathers was serious. “Of course you might wonder dear why I make such a fuss about my little possessions at my age. You can’t take it with you and that’s a fact. But I’ve got to think of my old age. I’ve never lived on the State and I’m not starting now. So I’m saving up for myself. Well, that’s all I’ve got to work for now.” She sighed.

“Oh I’m sorry.” Abbie’s sympathetic imagination already saw Mrs. Flood as the last survivor of a large family. “It must be terrible to be left alone.”

“That’s right dear, and there were seven of us in my family, four boys and three girls, all the girls died young except me and the boys were picked off one by one in their prime.”

“Accident, Mrs. Flood?”

“Accident? Accidents of life maybe. One brother killed in a fight, one killed in the war, or was it two?” She paused for a moment as if remembering.

“Yes,” prompted Abbie.

“One dead drunk and one died natural.”

“But that’s terrible.”

“You don’t know what life was like here in the old days. I’ve seen the gutters running with blood.”

“No!”

. “Well, the pavements anyway. I can remember the days when the Mosley boys and the Communists used to break up each other’s meetings. That’s not so far past when all’s said and done. And the strikes. Now I recall the dock strikes. Oh I was sorry for the men, sit down and rest your feet I said, and they sat in the gutters in the rain and I brought them out jugs of tea.”

“What all of them?”

“Oh well, I had help, dear. And before I knew where I was I was marching with the men.”

This Abbie could believe. A picture of Mrs. Flood, best hat on, marching with a banner, sprang at once to her mind.

“And then the police came along and the next thing that happened was I was up before the magistrate. Drunk and disorderly they said. I was framed of course. That’s how they treated the poor in those days.”

All Abbie’s free blood rose. “You wouldn’t get that with us,” she said.

“No, dear?” Mrs. Flood didn’t sound too sure. “Well when I came out I’d lost everything. Husband gone, home gone, and even my little tabby cat destroyed.”

“Oh surely not, Mrs. Flood.”

“Oh yes dear, you’d be surprised how nasty people can be. I had to build it all up again from scratch. And on the straight. Well I’d always been that of course,” she added hastily.

She then went on to give Abbie more sad little details. Being Mrs. Flood she could not help, however, mixing a joke or two in with the tears. At the end of it Abbie looked at her with respect.

“I think it’s been wonderful of you Mrs. Flood. Especially when your husband behaved so badly.”

“Rotten to the core, dear.”

“And I am sorry about the poor little baby.”

“Probably all for the best. Might have taken after his dad and that would never have done. For it was a boy, you know, although the doctor said how could we be sure. I had my feelings, I tell you dear.”

“Yes,” said Abbie hastily, she had already learnt how to sidestep the torrent of obstetric detail which Creevey Buildings delighted in.

Up in her sitting-room (she was beginning to think of it as hers although in fact it belonged to the absent Miss Toll and Mrs. Belhatchet) she prowled round checking up. Her flowers seemed normal, just about as dead as they should be, and Journal of the Plague Year was resting quietly in its shelf. She had formed the habit of looking for this as soon as she came in.

“You’re getting to be quite a worrier, Abbie,” she chided herself. “If it was anyone but you I would say you were getting imaginative, but that’s not like you, outside your work you’ve never had much imagination. Lack of imagination was one of the troubles, wasn’t it? You just didn’t realise what desperation could drive another person to do. You might almost be said to be phlegmatic, Abbie.” What was it the young archaeologist had said? A girl with her eyes closed? Not strictly true. But now Abbie felt she had four pairs of eyes and all of them anxiously watching all around her.

And this she supposed would have been just what her archaeologist, a young man called Sam, would have approved of. He was continually urging her to wake up to the world, not to just dream along, to open her eyes to people.

“I’ve had a funny feeling about this flat ever since I moved in,” she told herself. “Well there’s one thing I can do.” She got up and walked over to her writing table and took out a piece of paper with an air of resolution. “I can write to Miss Toll and Mrs. Belhatchet and tell them everything. They may think I’m a mad woman or they may write back and tell me it’s all a joke and I am too dumb to see it, but at least I can get in touch with them.”

Then she stopped. “But I can’t. No one can right now. They’re driving across a continent with no address left. I shall have to wait until they get to the end of their journey.” For no reason at all she felt miserable.

She picked up her pen and began writing. “Get on with it, Abbie. You’re not only being imaginative, now you’re being ridiculous.”

She had written two words when the bell rang. She stopped writing with a smile, convinced that those two friendly girls had called again.

When she opened the door it was Joe who stood there.

Her jaw dropped or would have done if she had not remembered her grandmother’s dictum, ceaselessly repeated, “Abbie, in any moment of surprise or alarm, keep your mouth shut, that way you can’t say anything you will regret and you’ll look better.”

When she thought that the time her grandmother would have considered suitable had elapsed she said, “How did you know where to find me?”

“Now how did I know?” Joe stepped past her into the room. “Now let me think how the great process works. First, “I’m a sailor, aren’t I? So I’m used to finding my way across oceans.”

“But how did you?”

“I went to your Embassy where I know a chap; we met on board ship once. He liked to talk and so did I. He talked about himself and I talked about, well I can’t remember now. Anyway he put me on to the list of all American students registered as working in the country and there you were.”

“Seems easy.”

“It was even easier. You said you were coming to Creevey Buildings and I didn’t think there was more than one Creevey Buildings in London.”

“You know it?”

He smiled. “I have to admit I do. Is it what you expected?”

“No. Different and then some.”

“Do I detect the sour note of experience?”

“No. Oh no, in a way I’m loving it.” Even without Joe in the room she caught herself in one of her fleeting glances at Journal of the Plague Year. It would have been a relief to tell him exactly what she found odd about Creevey Buildings but she had met him twice and had known him only a few hours. She found that she wanted to impress him, and not as a lunatic either. Up to now he had plainly found her a nice attractive American, she was not anxious that she should suddenly be transformed into what she called a neurotic creepy. The strength of this feeling took her by surprise. Sometimes she found it difficult to equate this new Abbie who had appeared lately with the old Abbie who had been a nice quiet girl living a quiet life and to whom a pretty bad thing had happened but who was getting over it.

“You’ve had your hair cut.”

Abbie looked at her cropped head in the mirror. “Well, yes I have. I’d always worn it at home in sort of bangs, curls and so on you know, but over here I saw one or two girls wearing it short and curled high like this, so I’ve gotten mine done too.”

“So you haven’t just been keeping your nose to the grindstone? And your mind on the barons of England?”

“No, but I’ve found out some interesting things.” And they plunged into a technical discussion in which terms like escheat and maritagium were casually thrown about.

In the middle Abbie got up and made some coffee.

“What I don’t understand,” she said, “is how you know so much about everything I’ve been talking about when it’s not particularly your subject.”

“You’re a very revealing person, Abbie. And in fact if you think about it, you have been doing most of the talking. I’ve been learning from you.”

“Yes,” said Abbie slowly. “You’re quite right. If I’m interested in a subject I do just bounce along. I think you’re pretty acute.”

“You mustn’t misunderstand how I feel about this work. I know I’m not going to be a great historian, perhaps not even very good at it, but it’s a way I like to think. As far as I do think that is,” she added, “and sometimes I do wonder.”

From the floor below came a curious sound of banging. Thump, thump, pause, then thump again.

“Whatever’s that?”

Abbie hastily went through what she knew of Creevey Buildings before answering. On Monday Mr. Sawyer on the floor underneath usually mended the shoes of his household. (For the Sawyer children it was a day to keep out of Dad’s way, for Dad was an artist and if a sole was not to his pleasure was apt to be peppery or even violent.) But today was not Monday. On Wednesday Mrs. Jones in the corner flat did her ironing. For some reason this was a noisy job too, although more in the way of singing and loud talk than banging. Anyway this was Friday.

“Oh I know,” said Abbie. “Friday’s the day the Jones girl who is in the chorus at the Frivolity is on the late house and she usually does a bit of what she calls loosening up when she gets out of bed.”

“She must be strong,” said Joe watching the windows shake.

“She’s quite a girl.” Abbie considered her acquaintance with the racy Sheila. “She’s not pretty and she has the longest legs I’ve ever seen. She says they’ve got her many a job by being three inches longer than her tallest rival. And she also says it’s a good job they don’t really have the back row of the chorus any more as she’d be there permanently on account of being so tall and looking like a horse.” The thought struck her that she might take her worries to the omniscient Sheila if they got too much for her.

“Yes, she always was tall even when she was a kid.”

“Oh you know her?”

“I told you. I know Creevey Buildings. I grew up round here.”

Abbie looked out of the window. Somehow up till now although she had certainly seen children around in Courcy Street, the whole neighbourhood had been imagined by her as if it had sprung fully grown from Athene’s mind. Or as if it were a stage set that had a present existence and no past and no future. She had not thought of anyone growing up there. Nothing could be farther away from the small town in Montana in which she had grown up. What sort of a life could a child have in Courcy Street?

“It’s not such a bad life,” said Joe reading her thoughts. “People always say children have more fun in the country, but I’ve never seen that myself. I’m not a great one for the fields and the open sky, they frighten me to tell you the truth. I like crowds. As a child I liked crowds and the pavements and the gutter to scuffle my feet in. And there’s always the river. Courcy Street’s not far from the river you know, and no child who lives here can ignore the ships and the wharves.”

“I suppose that’s why you became a sailor.”

“Yes, that, and about twenty other reasons all connected with eating and drinking and staying alive.”

Down below Sheila gave one last splendid ratatatoo with her feet and then was quiet. In another minute they heard a door bang and feet run down the stairs.

“Sheila’s off,” said Joe. He leaned out of the window and called, “Run, Sheila. You can go quicker than that.”

The girl looked up surprised. At that distance she had to screw up her eyes, but she recognised him and waved and shouted something that could not be heard, before she leapt on to a bus and disappeared.

“And did you live in Creevey Buildings?”

“No, not even in Courcy Street, but I went to school with them all, see? No, I lived in a little house that used to be tucked away between two warehouses. It may still be there for all I know if it hasn’t been knocked down and made into part of the warehouse. I’ve never been to see.”

“Did you hate it so much?”

“Hate it? I loved it. And it’s because I can’t bear to think how it may have changed that I don’t go. I lived there with my father. Just us two.” He was silent.

“Dad was quite a gardener and he made his little patch pretty good with what would grow in that used-up soil. I remember how he used to rush with his bucket and spade if he heard a horse pass in the hope there’d be some manure for his roses. I used to be ashamed. Isn’t that silly?”

Abbie shook her head.

“Of course you don’t get many horses now. But he wouldn’t like to think his roses were all gone and I wouldn’t like to think it for him.”

“Who lived in it after you?”

He drew down the window before he answered. “That I don’t know. We left, well we left a bit sudden, and I didn’t make any inquiries. There are some things you take with you when you move and some you don’t.”

“I know,” said Abbie, drawing in a sharp breath and thinking of all she had brought with her.

“And I had all I wanted from the old home. Anything I added to my picture of it would have been less good. Or that’s how I’ve felt until now. But now I’d like to go. Will you come? I’d like to show you.”

Abbie took a quick look round her room as she shut the door on it. It looked quite normal and still. “Stay as you are until I get back,” she whispered to it. “Just stay as you are.”

They walked in companionable silence down side streets away from the main road.

“This is getting near the river, isn’t it? asked Abbie presently.

“Very close.”

“You know although it’s so dirty and shabby I can’t help liking it. And yet it’s not a bit what I thought London would be like.”

At the end of the road through which they were walking there was an embankment, and a bridge and beyond that the glint of water under a street lamp.

“Oh, it’s the river,” said Abbie ecstatically. “I never thought we’d really get so close to it.”

Her companion laughed. “Not quite the river. It’s a creek.”

“What’s that?”

“A sort of canal. It runs into the river. Abbie, let me introduce you to Pickle Herring Creek and this is Pickle Herring Walk.”

The water splashed gently beneath the iron railings. There was nothing romantic about Pickle Herring Creek, and there was a smell of rope and oil and dirt.

Joe threw a pebble into the water.

“Wasn’t one great medieval fortune founded on herrings?”

“So they say. The de la Poles. Fish dealers, merchants, then Dukes and finally so close to the throne that only the execution of the last one satisfied the Tudors, that chronically suspicious family.”

“They had reason if ever a family did.”

Abbie laughed. “So they did.”

“Are the de la Poles one of your families?”

“No. Other people thought of doing them first. I like Pickle Herring Creek although it seems a different world from the British Museum.”

“There are so many cities in London. There is the smart London, and the suburban London, but this city by the river is an old city. The pickled herrings that used to be stored here fed the Londoners who knew the plague.”

Abbie frowned. “Funny you should mention the plague,” she said suspiciously.

“Why?” But he was not really listening. “Look. There’s my house. And it’s still there.”

The pair of them gazed with complete and childlike pleasure at the little house.

“Well, it’s come up in the world,” said Joe. “It’s outlasted the warehouse, and got itself a face-lift.”

The cottage, for it had once been a cottage when there had been fields and open ground close to Pickle Herring Wharf, had been painted white and had blue window boxes filled with small flowers. Where the warehouse had stood was now a large field ringed with a white painted fence. A notice board declared that this was a Playing Field for Children. Just for once the process had been reversed, and fields had come back to the cottage.

“Do you want to knock?”

“No. Let’s just creep away. I feel happy about it now and I’d like to leave it. If we touch it maybe it will disappear.”

But the house looked solid and contented in the light from the streets and Abbie felt contented too. She shook her suspicions from her. And because she wanted to prove to herself how normal she and everything in her world was she told Joe how sad she was for Mrs. Flood.

“Sad?”

“Why yes,” said Abbie explaining.

There was a cold moment of silence.

“But it’s not true,” he said. “I’ve known Mimsie Flood all my life. And there’s not a word of truth in it.”

OCTOBER TO NOVEMBER

Chapter Four

THE SHAME WHICH ABBIE FELT AT HER BEHAVIOUR stayed with her.

“If that boy had insulted me I couldn’t have been nastier. I just about poured boiling oil over him. Oh well, I suppose I don’t have to worry. I’ll never see him again. I’ll write a note and apologise and say I don’t know what came over me and that’ll be the truth. I don’t know myself these days.”

The boiling oil she had poured on her friend had been a flood of angry protestation. She certainly told me all this, was the burden of her complaint. Why should Mrs. Flood lie? Why should she indeed?

But afterwards Abbie wondered was it not likely in fact that Mrs. Flood had lied? She avoided her, but in the end she met her on the stairs. The old lady was bringing a bundle of salad up to Abbie and was looking, as even then Abbie, irresistibly literary, couldn’t help feeling, very Gampish.

“I’ve brought you a bit of lettuce, dear.” Then she looked at Abbie. “Well you look pretty green yourself, love.”

“Mrs. Flood, why did you tell me that long story about yourself? It wasn’t true.”

“And who said it wasn’t true?”

“Joe Ardente.”

Mrs. Flood started upon no long explanation. “Oh, he did? Well tell him this from me: listeners never hear any good of themselves.”

She said no more, but still gripping the salad, stumped back down the stairs.

Abbie, leaning against the wall, was left with the feeling that she had now alienated the two people who liked her most in this odd world.

“But one of them lied,” she whispered to herself. “Or both.”

Creevey Buildings was buzzing with its usual weekend evening life, voices and the smell of cooking (a good deal of frying went on in the buildings, not much fish but a great many onions).

At her front door she noticed that her brass was ominously bright. Her flowers were fresh and erect, a chill wind seemed to blow across the room almost as if there was a window open.

When she looked across the room she saw that there was a window open; she went across frowning to close it. On the top of the low bookcase she saw a few drops of water.

It was then that she saw a letter from her mother lying on the mat. It had been written well over ten days before and had, therefore, been a long while coming.

Dearie (wrote her mother),

I hope you are all right. You don’t sound at all well. Strained I’d say. Maybe it’s the weather. I guess you are having some nice cool weather if London is what I remember it as, and I daresay it hasn’t changed all that much in twenty years. Dad sends his love, and Grandma sends hers and tells you to remember all she told you. The carra trees are out in the garden and look lovely. Remember when we planted them? You and Josie dug them up again if I recall within two hours of your dad putting them in. I am getting your room done over while you are away. I hope you will like the colours I have chosen; it was to be a surprise, but I find I long to tell you. Will you like cinnamon and white with just a little sneaking dash of primrose yellow? Too early yet for primroses in England I suppose, they were so sweet. I have not been able to get hold of Miss Toll and Mrs. Belhatchet yet which is disappointing. I wrote to the Head Teacher of the school you said and they had never heard of them there. I guess you and I got things muddled somehow.

As Abbie put the letter down Creevey Buildings which had quietened down burst into life again. Noises off, thought Abbie, and had a curious feeling that she had been thrust into a play without knowing what it was about and without knowing her part.

The weeks rolled on and September turned into October. The weather continued dry and warm and Abbie continued her life of scholarship, exploration of London and a cautious investigation into the life of Courcy Street. She missed Joe and frankly regretted her odd explosion of bad temper. Her greatest companions were the two girls with whom she was seeing the monuments of London. They seemed to have a great deal of time free from their school, but they explained that the policy of Fieldlands was to allow the elder girls a good deal of liberty provided it was well used. Presumably their trips with Abbie were regarded as educational.

Where does the movement start that brings you to a particular spot at a particular time was the question in Abbie’s mind as she lay in the grass in the autumn sun. Had it started for her last winter at home when the ground was frozen and she had talked and argued with the young girl who was her friend? Or had it begun even earlier in her childhood when she had first begun to stretch out towards the tastes and activities which were eventually to bring her to London.

Whatever it had been, here she was now in a London park enjoying the sun and the company of the two girls. They had gone together on a sightseeing tour of London, light-heartedly acting, and in the case of Darcy over-acting, the part of tourists. They had seen St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Festival Gardens, and the Tower of London.

In the Tower of London Abbie had taken her first big step forward to understanding the girls. It had happened when they came to the room where the various instruments of torture were kept. Abbie in a mild way was quite interested to go in.

But Kate leaned against the wall and with a white face refused to go in.

“Oh come on,” said Darcy, “I’m dying to see.”

“You go. I can’t. You know I can’t.”

“I won’t enjoy it without you. You’ve got to be there.”

“No, you don’t understand.” Kate looked sick. “I always think, supposing it was me.”

The two sorts of people, Abbie thought: those who identify themselves with the oppressed and those who don’t. Kate was one of the identifiers. All the same she felt uneasily aware that such a preoccupation with physical violence, even if it revealed itself in repulsion, was unnatural.

“I won’t enjoy it without you,” repeated Darcy.

“We shan’t go at all,” said Abbie, assuming the stature of an adult. “We’ll go to the park and rest.”

So they had come southwards to this park set in the dusty streets beyond Creevey Buildings. The park was bounded on two sides with great main roads along which ran red buses and heavy timber and paper lorries, but within it was a green and peaceful heart with lawns, flower gardens and tall trees. The place was crowded with people enjoying the autumn sun. Abbie recognised one or two faces from Creevey Buildings. They gave her the usual blank stare with which Creevey Buildings confronted friend or foe when abroad.

The three of them sat on the dry and yellow grass with a smell of hot asphalt floating across from the road, but the plane tree stretching above them was still thick and green. The girls took off their shoes and waggled their toes in the grass.

“I liked the Festival Gardens best,” commented Darcy. “I shall always remember going there.”

“You won’t be alone in that.” Abbie’s tone was dry. Darcy had left her mark on the Festival Gardens. Some people there would probably remember her rather than the gardens.

“They thought I was mad,” said Darcy.

“No they didn’t,” replied Abbie even more dryly. “They thought you were American.”

Abbie had been surprised and disconcerted by the calculated ebullience which could be displayed by an English girl of Darcy’s type. She was not prepared for it. Darcy had clowned, amusingly but flamboyantly. She had done so in a loud American accent. And Kate had played up to her. It revealed a light-hearted almost silly streak. It had also shown up the magnetism between them.

All things considered she was glad to get them into the park. She was violently attracted and yet puzzled by them. They lay by her side in the long grass. Kate’s skin looked warmed by the sun which had flushed her arms to a creamy pink. She had her head on her arms but she looked up as if feeling Abbie’s eyes on her and smiled.

“My old nanny used to say it was a good thing we couldn’t see ourselves as others see us.”

“Oh, so you had a nanny. People don’t much in the States.” Abbie was surprised again. Kate certainly did not give the impression of being the product of a careful nursery. There was an air of freedom about her.

“Well, mother didn’t look after me,” said Kate tartly. “She wasn’t that sort, she didn’t much like small children, I think, and she didn’t have the time anyway. She used to organise things a lot. Only I wasn’t one of them. But Darcy says I don’t know how lucky I was.” She gave Darcy an upward look.

“It isn’t so easy to distract the enemy as you seem to think,” said Darcy, withdrawing her eyes from the depths of the plane tree. She turned to Abbie. “If you want to like us you’ve got to see us as we see ourselves.”

“And how do you see yourselves?”

“Oh as free spirits, you know.” Darcy was half laughing. “Not bound by anything like some other people. We’re not going to fall into the usual trap of kitchen, cooking and kids, dear old mother Nature’s usual snare.”

“Oh you’ll marry some day,” said Abbie, with just that shade of tough obtuseness she had noticed in the behaviour of her elders towards herself.

Darcy smiled. “Kate and I will never marry. We will never find two men as interesting and amusing as we do ourselves.”

“It’s different.”

“Oh is it?” Darcy squared her shoulders in a gallant but curiously young gesture. “She’s the man in that outfit,” thought Abbie, understanding that it was not without significance that her pet name, chosen by Kate, was a masculine one with a hint of swagger.

“Oh everyone does marry,” said Abbie. She steadied herself against the shock of what she had discovered.

“Pour encourager les autres?” said Kate in a tone of bitter acceptance which stopped Abbie in full flight and made her realise that Kate was adultly aware of where she stood.

Darcy giggled. “I might have said that myself,” she said. She turned to Abbie. “There’s genuine telepathy between us, it’s not just our act, there always has been, I suppose there’s always someone in the world that’s on your wavelength, but very often you never meet them. Kate and I had that luck.”

Abbie regarded them. There was a union between them against the world, for the moment they looked at her out of eyes filled with the same mood. Sadly she perceived a blend of innocence and experience.

Oh you poor fools, she wanted to say, you can’t fly against the whole of life like that. It isn’t so easy. She felt a tremendous pity and liking for them. Didn’t they realise that the whole world was organised against them?

At the same time she was deeply shocked.

She decided to be brisk. “We’d better go for a walk,” she decided, and led them towards the flower gardens. In the heart of this garden was a little pool surrounded by trees and approached by green and slippery steps.

“You could have a bad fall here,” she said, moving cautiously.

“Yes,” agreed Kate absently. “You know, Abbie, it’s been so interesting today hearing all about the places as we’ve gone round. You know more about them than we do, although we live here. I’d like to do the sort of thing you do.”

“No reason why not,” said Abbie lightly. Remotely she seemed to hear her mother’s advice: Don’t go round being a do-gooder; but she rushed on, she must help this handsome impetuous girl. “I’ll lend you some books.”

“Me, too,” said Darcy.

Abbie nodded. “You, too.”

She knew what she wanted to do. “I must save them,” she told herself. “Not from the thing itself, I’m not setting myself up as a moral judge. What is right? What is wrong? What is the canon that we must obey? That life is complementary. Very well. We obey it. But don’t shoot down those who do not.”

For some time after that she did not meet the two girls, although she thought about them. She was working hard, meeting new people, and settling into her life in London.

She was beginning to sleep badly, waking easily and turning restlessly. She dreamt, too, excited dreams only half remembered once she woke, but through which the figures of the two girls moved disturbingly.

She began to be sure, too, that her flat in Creevey Buildings was disturbed, she hardly knew how to put it, but the curious word invaded came to her.

There was certainly evidence of an alien presence.

Nervously she began to wonder who in Creevey Buildings had access to her flat. She felt very isolated in this strange world in which it was up to her to sink or swim. She had always assumed she would swim, but supposing she sank? Who would care or who would even notice? She could disappear and no one would know. The family four thousand miles away in Montana would be no help at all.

“I’m frightened,” she said aloud.

She looked down into Courcy Street which was alive and full of energy and guessed that almost anyone could disappear without Courcy Street knowing or even caring very much. Courcy Street was so busy being alive that it could hardly think about anything else, which was natural enough. That was the great thing about Courcy Street and Creevey Buildings, they were uninhibited, vigorous and natural, but like nature itself they could be heedless and cruel. Abbie had no illusions about the good nature of Courcy Street or how far it could be relied upon.

However, there were people paid to take an interest in the life and death of the citizens of Courcy Street. There was, of course, the police.

Abbie put on her good blue coat and walked down Courcy Street to where she had observed the small old-fashioned and soot-blackened police station.

She did not go in, of course, but stood outside pretending to look in a baker’s shop window and wondering what to do.

She stood there asking herself what sane and assured words she could use to carry the conviction of her mad idea to the police who assuredly would neither welcome her nor want her. She shuffled her feet as she looked down at her white socked feet in the flat brown mocassins, aware that she looked very American as well as very young. She was not to know, luckily, that her recent experiences had given her face a pinched, wan look that was alarming.

Two old women dressed in humpy black coats, each carrying large shopping bags of cloth walked past her and up the steps into the police station.

“Public spirit is one thing,” said the first up the steps. “And no one can say we don’t show it. And no one can say I don’t approve of it and haven’t shown it in my time. (I took my turn at fire-watching in the old days with the rest of us).”

“And if you were asleep when the bomb fell good luck to you,” said her companion.

“But the police overdo it in my opinion,” said the other, ignoring her.

“Well, it’s their job.”

“Interfering!” She had paused at the bottom of the steps and every word was clearly audible to Abbie. “I may be only a cleaner here, but I shall tell that Inspector so. My Lallie says they have the police all over Creevey Buildings asking ever such funny questions. Quite upset her they did. Now why should they be worrying an innocent girl?”

“She’s forty,” said her friend.

“Girl I say. She’s a girl to me and always will be.

A girl’s best friend is her mother. Well, if they come to me I shall talk to them straight. I’ve got nothing to hide. I’ve always paid my insurance and my rent.”

“There’s a big investigation about something going on,” agreed the other. “Of course they’re always very sharp about the waste paper baskets, but I did happen to notice the other night.”

And here, tantalisingly, she dropped her voice. But Abbie, moving cautiously closer to them, heard the word “disappeared” uttered twice. And then she heard unmistakably “Pickle Herring Creek.”

The baker’s shop was also a little coffee shop and Abbie fumbled her way in to sit at a table by the window and drink some milky coffee into which against her will the proprietress had poured a great deal of sugar. “Poor little tike looks as though she’d lost five pounds and found a viper,” she said graphically to her husband.

The cleaners had poured their poison into Abbie’s ear.

As she sat there drinking her coffee and relaxing in spite of herself, a black police car drew up at the kerb and a man got out and walked towards Courcy Road Police Station. He was a square broad young man and he had policeman written all over him, that and something else too, a sort of sharp friendliness, which perhaps offered more than it gave.

“That’ll be young Coffin,” said the woman still hovering over Abbie with the sugar bowl. “He’s the new Divisional Inspector down at Courcy Street.” (Courcy Street knew from much experience all the ins and outs of police nomenclature and organisation and would have soon as made a mistake in title as would a debutante over the peerage.) “They says it’s a Devon name but he’s a local chap all right, been around here as long as I can remember.” There was pride in her voice and Abbie understood that it was a case of a local boy making good, even if the trade was uncongenial to most of his kind. “However, I don’t know that he’s ever solved anything,” she went on, making Abbie remember that there was another saying about local successes and that was that they were never honoured in their own country.

As the policeman passed the window where Abbie sat he looked in. For a moment their eyes met and then he was gone, jumping up the steps in one bound, coat tails flying and banging the door of the police station behind him.

Abbie reflected: “What could I tell him if I went? He knows more than I do. He knows something about Pickle Herring Creek.”

She began to regret even more bitterly the behaviour which had forced Joe away from her.

“I should have told him about the strangeness of Creevey Buildings, and the odd things that happen there. And he knows about Pickle Herring Creek too. Together we might have come to something.”

It struck her that just as Joe had found her out in London so she might find him. “It’s what he said himself. London’s just a lot of small villages. I know now that he and I are living in the same village. I can find him.”

Inevitably her feet turned towards Pickle Herring Creek.

And how could she tell him of the other things, the intangibles, the book that moved, the flowers that did not die, explain to him the feeling that the pattern which included Miss Toll and Mrs. Belhatchet embraced her also and that the stranger from Bowmont was being dragged into queer things in Creevey Buildings.

By daylight the Creek still had its odd attractions. The water was a greasy black with oil and scum on its surface, but it moved and shone in the sunlight. There were more wharves and warehouses on the other side. A line or two of empty barges were ranged along the side. Everything was quiet and there was no sign of police interest if any in truth existed.

“There may be someone still here who remembers Joe and can tell me his address now,” she thought as she walked up towards the cottage with the window boxes; although it was true he had not spoken as if there was likely to be a soul there that knew him.

She rang the bell at the cottage and observed a neat brass plate which said that this was the house of the caretaker in charge of the playing fields.

There was no answer to her bell. Then she saw the caretaker limping across the fields towards the house. He had a stiff leg, perhaps it was false, and a grey cat was sitting on one shoulder. He greeted her pleasantly.

“No, I don’t know the name,” he said. “I’m new here though.”

“He lived in this house once, during the war perhaps, before it was all so changed.”

Under her gaze the man’s expression changed, it became wary, but still pleasant. He shook his head. The cat put out a paw and patted it reprovingly.

Abbie stroked the cat, which allowed itself to be petted.

“You like cats, miss?”

Abbie nodded.

“He’s a good cat. Tom and I are together a lot. I go a good deal on what he thinks. Why don’t you try the house agent who runs all this property? He might know your friend.

“Baffin and Bent,” he said, pointing to a board. “Just around the corner from here and Courcy Street.”

“Yes,” said Abbie, “now you mention it, I know.”

This is a village, she was thinking.

She plodded round towards Baffin and Bent. “I could do with a cycle,” she thought as her feet began to drag.

The firm of Baffin and Bent lived in a newly painted office of what might be called Victorian classical. That is to say there was a portico and an impression of pillars (although they turned out to be economically painted on) and the windows were square and on the small side. The architect had obviously taken classical to mean a nice heavy front and not too much light.

The name Baffin and Bent was a trade name, as Mr. Baffin had died many years ago and Mr. Bent was really called Broadbent. There were no other partners. It appeared to prosper, or so Abbie thought as she looked at all the new paint and bright leather chairs in the waiting-room.

She recalled that it was Kate’s father she was going to see. Was it Darcy or Kate herself who had called him “the enemy”? The man she remembered meeting on her first visit, the tall dreamy man in tweeds had looked like no-one’s enemy except perhaps his own.

She realised at once that she had stepped into an atmosphere of crisis. To her surprise both Kate and Darcy were in the office too. She saw that John Broadbent had a thick clumsy blood-stained bandage round his head as if he had tried to bandage it himself.

While Kate was greeting her in a pleased way Abbie looked at it curiously. His back was to her at that moment, but he put his hand to it uneasily as if aware she was looking. Then she noticed he could see her in the mirror. Their eyes met.

“When did that happen?” she heard herself saying.

“I slipped in the park when I was out walking and fell on the back of my head. Nothing really.” He looked as if it still hurt.

“You might let me look. I was a nurse’s aid once one vacation.” She spoke lightly, but she felt as if she had received a blow. She did not look at Kate although conscious that Kate was still talking.

But the wound was clean enough and not deep; he was right, it was nothing important.

“Well it will take more than that to kill you,” she said with an attempt at humour.

“Yes, much more,” he answered heavily.

Kate was agitated. “I called out to you,” she said, “but you never looked where you were going.”

“I know that spot where you must have fallen,” said Abbie remembering the green and slippery steps in the flower garden. “Why should I suddenly be sure that Kate pushed her father?” she asked herself. And yet she was sure. The gap between intention and execution is a large one; she was convinced that Kate’s intention had been deadly.

She looked at Darcy sitting quietly by the table and wondered if she had been a witness.

Awkwardly she began to explain why she had come.

She was spared what might have been the embarrassment of inquiries by the effusiveness of the agent’s welcome coupled with the realisation that he was anxious to make inquiries of her.

“Well, Miss Foret, been wondering how you’ve been getting on. How’s Creevey Buildings suiting you, full of history, eh? You had my little girl round there, so I believe. If she’d told me why she went I could have let her know the two ladies were off to America. She won’t ask though.”

He spoke a trifle gloomily, even apprehensively, and Abbie could see that Kate was the girl to cause just those feelings in a parent. She was certainly very clever and if you looked at Mr. Broadbent perhaps too clever.

However, he soon gave evidence of being sharper than Abbie had seen reason to believe. “As a daughter yourself you’ll know all about that. Although I wonder sometimes if daughters do see fathers as human beings at all.”

Her upbringing and her experience, more limited than she always understood, had conditioned Abbie to think of tall, thick-set dreamy-eyed people as stupid; being lean, quick and nervous herself, she naturally thought of this as the mould of intelligence.

With more braveness than she might have felt had she been more experienced Abbie asked about the address of Mr. Ardente.

“I expect you know the people I mean.”

“I certainly do know the name. And I remember the young man. But where he is now I couldn’t say.”

“And you don’t look as though you care,” thought Abbie exasperated.

Then she realised that he was almost at the end of what he could bear. And at once Abbie herself felt stronger. “Well I’m not that bad,” she said to herself. “I’ve got a haunted flat, an abortive love affair on my hands, and I’m not at all sure I haven’t made friends with a potential murderess, but I’m stronger on my feet than he is.”

“You’d better come with me,” she heard herself saying to the girls. “Have you got to get back to Fieldlands tonight?”

The girls explained it was what they called their half-term holiday and that Kate was at home and Darcy just up for the day with a train to catch back home. She lived in a village not far from London.

One of their sudden bursts of high spirits, so puzzling to Abbie, then overtook the girls. They were almost giggling.

“You two ought to be on the stage,” John Broadbent said irritably. Abbie noticed he did not look at his daughter.

“We shall be,” said Darcy.

“Not me,” said Kate. She turned to Abbie.

“I’m going to be a student of history, like you, and then an archaeologist like your friend.”

“And how many lives are you going to need?”

Although Abbie spoke lightly she was disturbed at the variety of behaviour that Kate assumed. She could be gay, serious, sullen, even frivolous, superior and sometimes dull. She was not one girl but several. It was not easy to tell which surface would present itself next. Abbie herself was a person with a strongly shaped personality. Aspects of herself which she did not care for, she had firmly suppressed. Or until recently. Kate therefore made her uneasy and yet attracted her.

As she looked at Darcy and Kate, relaxed, happy, and gay, she wondered if any of her thoughts had any reality at all, if she wasn’t really completely off the beam, confused by this strange world.

She found their high spirits infectious when she got them to her little flat in the Buildings. They talked and laughed and ate a great meal which introduced Abbie to what they told her was high tea.

“It’s a mark of great social distinction,” Darcy solemnly assured her, “to have high tea.”

“It is? Then I’ve been socially distinguished for a long time,” Abbie assured her, “because I’ve been eating this sort of meal ever since I got here. Only with coffee instead of tea.”

Darcy walking round the room said, “The dear thing doesn’t see the social caste mark of tea.”

She was moving round the room as curious as a cat in a strange home, and, indeed, she did resemble a good-tempered young cat with her firm strong body and her short black hair and wide eyes.

“The room’s not quite so tidy as it was.”

“No, no, I’m not as orderly as Miss Toll and Mrs. Belhatchet. And yet I used to be very tidy. Only lately,” said Abbie puzzled, “I seem to have changed. Once I would have called myself a neat, tidy, unimaginative person. But am I now? The thing I’m not sure about is: am I making an impression on this place or is it making an impression on me?”

“What can you mean?” said Kate laughing.

Abbie shrugged. She was uncertain of so much.

“I shall have to go,” said Darcy getting up. “My mother’s expecting me.” She gave the other two a quick impatient look.t “Now I know what you two are going to do when I’m gone, you are going to have a good long talk. About everything, including me. Kate’s never stopped talking about you all the time since we last met you, so now she can talk to you.”

“Dear old Darc,” said Kate absently when she had gone. “I depend on her. Still she does take it out of one.”

Abbie had her own question ready to ask. “Kate, why did you want to see Miss Toll and Mrs. Belhatchet so badly that first time you called?”

“Oh, did I? But I don’t think I did really. It was just a visit, like now.” Kate had put on the composed social manner that Fieldlands taught its pupils.

“Yes, but you—” Abbie stopped. She saw that she would get nowhere. She asked another question. “Where did you try to find her? What did you do?”

“Oh I tried Miss Toll’s school and where Mrs. Belhatchet works, she’s a Probation Officer or something very similar, not a teacher, you were wrong there.” Kate was willing to talk freely now. “I didn’t try too hard at her office you can bet as they are so funny there. And I asked you. I didn’t try very hard.”

She gave Abbie a look. “Don’t try to mind-read, Abbie.”

Kate seemed endlessly capable of jerking Abbie to silence. Once more she wondered how much of this was her own imagination.

“That was a bad fall your father had,” she said carefully.

“Yes,” said Kate.

“A funny one.”

Kate flushed. “That doesn’t mean so very much. He just tripped. He does sometimes when he’s not well. He does get unwell.”

You mean he drinks, thought Abbie. But Mr. Broadbent did not look as though he drank.

“He might get a wound on the back of his head from falling,” said Abbie, determined to prick this girl. “But I don’t see how he’d get one on the temple, too. That’s the sort you get if someone hits you.”

Kate got up and took her coat. “What a nasty mind you have, Abbie,” she said coldly. She did not pretend not to understand. “No one hit father. It’s all in your imagination.”

Abbie heard her running down the stairs. She sat down heavily in a chair and picked up a book. Then she threw it from her. “I read too many books,” she said.

All around her Creevey Buildings settled into its evening life.

“I’m alien here!” cried Abbie. “And I don’t think Creevey Buildings likes people that are alien.”

DECEMBER

Chapter Five

IN THE SECOND WEEK OF DECEMBER WITHOUT WARNING a fog descended over London. It stretched from the estuary of the Thames by Sheerness and Southend across London to Hertfordshire.

Courcy Street was imbedded in it like a fly in amber. “Fog in London,” said Abbie happily; she had at last found a characteristic of London which was both acceptable and readily comprehensible to her. She had expected fogs and here was one. The market in Courcy Street was lit by gas flares hissing and steaming out into double tails. The fog hung over Pickle Herring Creek and the ships hooted constantly and sadly. Mr. Broadbent sitting in his warm bright office felt as if he was suspended in a warm cage in a black dark world. “This’ll make the trains late,” he said. The railway station which was just across the bridge from Courcy Street was running a fog service.

In the country round Fieldlands College the fog was lighter, less yellow, and more of a thick white mist. Fieldlands glowed through it in all its bright colours rather like a traffic signal. Educationally it liked to think of itself as a beacon. The school was empty now except for the caretaking staff and the Director (she was not called a Headmistress at Fieldlands) and she, too, was on the point of departure for her holiday which would be in France, although it was Christmas, for the staff of Fieldlands were encouraged to be travelled and cosmopolitan. Her room looked over the wide gardens. Fieldlands lay indeed in the fields. It took its name from the fact that it was built in what had been one of the three great open fields of the medieval village of Church End. The village itself was a mile away from the school (which preferred anyway to be called a college) and was an appendage of London, as indeed it always had been through its long history, having been part of the manorial estates of the Bishops of London. Fieldlands was built on a bungalow plan and, therefore, covered a great deal of land which its critics thought could have been put to more useful purposes. Only the theatre which looked like a chapel—naturally there was no chapel—lifted up its head. Next to it were the pigsties and the bricklayer’s yard where nature and the joys of labour were taught. Some people wondered how the cultured little girls (and they were genuinely cultured in a rather Bloomsbury kind of way) were arrived at after years among the fecund pigs and the dusty bricks, but the answer was that the staff was talented and devoted. They were also hard-worked. The Director worked particularly hard and she was looking forward to her holiday. But a telephone call from the airport which told her that all services were cancelled delayed her to the moment at which she was to be delayed irretrievably.

On the morning the fog lifted the Director became aware of unusual life in the garden below her bedroom window. There was a large black car and two men were getting out of it. As she had not done and never would in her innocent life do anything to summon the police to her she looked at them in wonder. But she was also sensible and she got up at once and dressed and went down.

A dark stocky young man came towards her. He had been walking up and down impatiently. He introduced himself as Inspector Coffin.

“I would like to ask you a few questions if you don’t mind.”

She shook her head half in assent half in refusal. “Wait a minute.” She rang a bell and eventually a large pot of coffee and cups appeared. Coffin drank it gratefully. He had been up most of the night. No sooner had he cleared up the pilfering case at the docks than this new affair had cropped up.

She did not say, but she was clearly thinking: you have been up all night, it is still very early morning, and yet you are here talking to me. This must be serious.

“Something has happened,” she said in a low voice.

Coffin squared his shoulders. “Something has happened. Or rather we think so. But if and where Fieldlands comes into it we don’t know yet.”

“You only think something has happened. Don’t you know?”

Coffin moved his shoulders nervously again, but he met Miss White’s eyes. “We shan’t know for certain till we find the body. But as things stand we are hoping you can help us.” He stood up. “I wonder if you’d mind looking at some clothing for us?”

Miss White looked down at a small heap of garments. There was a jersey, a skirt and a round felt hat. Placed upon the table beside them was a small rather battered pigskin handbag and ranged by the handbag were a comb, a small powder compact, and a little tube of lipstick.- She recognised them at once as Fieldlands uniform.

“They’re all wet,” she said with an involuntary shiver.

“Yes,” agreed Coffin shortly.

“Where did you get them?”

“Don’t worry about that now, Miss White.” They had come in fact from the oil-laden waters of Pickle Herring Creek, but Coffin was not willing to display this truth. “Can you tell me who they might have belonged to?”

“They certainly belonged -to a girl from this school. All our clothes, although not precisely what you could call a uniform, come from one manufacturer and have our name Fieldlands woven into them.” She turned the skirt over to display it on the underneath of the hem. “That’s why you came straight to me?”

Coffin nodded. “Can you tell us now who they might have belonged to? Make a guess,” he added looking directly at her.

Reluctantly she took up the jersey. It had been so folded that the back was hidden from her. As she opened it a great dark stain spread before her. It was oval but with jagged edges as if the blood had hit the jersey with a great spurt and then spread out.

“We don’t reckon that anyone could lose that much blood and live,” said Coffin, answering her unspoken thoughts.

Miss White held out her hands helplessly. “I don’t know where to begin. I can tell you who couldn’t have worn those clothes, I suppose, by consulting the records of height and weight. But it’ll take a long time and might, in the end, not help very much.”

“I think we’d better do it though,” said Coffin doggedly. “And in any case I’ll want a complete school list, please.”

Miss White became brisk and competent. “We shall need help.” She walked across the room to her telephone. “I’ll get hold of my secretary.”

“Wait a minute,” said Coffin, going after her. “Is she trustworthy, this girl? The less talk the better.”

“She’s not a girl. She’s older than I am. And you can take my word for it: she is completely and utterly trustworthy.” She gave Coffin an unhappy smile. “You don’t think that in a school of three hundred girls this is the first crisis we’ve had to deal with, do you?”

Fieldlands had a very good record system and it was well cross-indexed. But in the end Coffin stood up abruptly. “It’s no good,” he said. “There are no short cuts here. I shall have to try all the families.”

Miss White gave him an appalled look, but all she said was: “Don’t forget the two girls who are travelling. One is flying out to India and the other to Germany. She ought to have arrived. I’m not sure about Kumari.”

There was nothing in the papers yet, of course, but Coffin was called on by one journalist. He was the plump young man who represented the local paper and who was always on the alert to spot news to pass on to the big dailies. He confronted events with the wary but optimistic look of someone who hopes that life, however unpromising it appears now, will eventually do him a good turn. He was a great admirer of the Inspector’s. He had heard all about the clothes found in the water and was anxious to know what they meant. They might represent his good turn.

“Polly Rogers down at the café told me about the clothes,” he said. “It was her old man that dragged them in. What can you give me on it, Inspector? Or let me see them: that might be best. I could help you probably. I know all there is to know about this district.”

Coffin grunted.

“Come on, Inspector. I could get this into the News of the World.”

Coffin shook his head. “No news,” he said. As the day passed he heard from one family after another; each in varying stages of apprehension, anger and relief they informed him that their child was safe and well.

For good measure Coffin checked on the girls about whom Miss White had been certain that they could not have worn the clothes.

After an interval and a few moments of doubts they, too, were cleared.

Finally the reports on Anna and Kumari who were travelling were clear, too.

“That’s the end of that line,” said Coffin putting down the telephone. “A dead end.” He rubbed his head. “We’ll have to start another way. From the clothes themselves.”

He was getting anxious; every nerve told him that they should act quickly. Coffin did not admit to prescience, but he was a policeman of many years’ experience; he knew when events had the seeds of evil in them.

“I’d like to know before morning,” he said.

By morning they were still no nearer an answer about the clothes, but they knew another story.

Abbie passed the days of the fog working quietly in her sitting-room high above Courcy Street. She was timid about venturing out in the fog, frightened of missing her way in the streets, of getting on the wrong bus and losing herself in this strange city. But she was happy enough poring over her notes and indexing them. She had a splendid card index and used it with enthusiasm. Sometimes she thought it was going to be a little hard to put anything together again from work that had been so severely dissected like a gutted herring.

As she worked pictures formed in her mind. Miss Toll and Mrs. Belhatchet setting off on their travels, but travelling where? She thought of hands moving round her room while she was not there, tidying her possessions, polishing brass, changing flowers, moving a beloved or much read book, Journal of the Plague Year. Could anyone feel like that about Journal? There must be some other reason. Was it Miss Toll behind it all? Everyone said she was the tidy one. Did these events have an objective reality? Abbie wondered if she was haunted or the room was. She was uneasily aware that there was a subtle distinction between the two.

And at the same time another current in her mind was occupied with the subject she was working on. She was beginning to build up a picture of their lives as hard-working, hardheaded landowners, chiefly concerned with the profits from their estates and their legitimate interference in the government of England. Not always very laudable, not always honest, not always very pleasant folk, but always surviving. Or this was how she saw them.

At the same time she realised that they lived in a world in which the plague was on the march. It was endemic. The cycle of plague outbursts which had begun with the Plague of Justinian had reached up to their lives, bringing with it successive plagues one of which was the fourteenth-century Black Death. These cycles had ended with the Great Plague of which Defoe had written. This in its mysterious fashion now touched her own life. The subject fascinated her.

She began to feel her mind was working on two levels, reality and imagination. Miss Toll and the barons of England uneasily jostled with Defoe and Courcy Street.

The iron hand which she had fastened upon her personality was beginning to loosen. Instead of order she was becoming conscious of disorder, of a yielding to impulse. On such an impulse she had gone to see the police and told them her fantastic story. On the whole she was glad she had done so. Although as far as she could see it had done no practical good it had released the tension within her. At times she thought she had a dream, the details had faded as dreams do, but there remained the memory of waters rising, and of blows struck at something or someone with a heavy weapon. Had she called it in her dream a hatchet?

She didn’t know whether she felt happy or unhappy, but she felt different.

She had made her peace with Mrs. Flood. This had come about easily enough. Descending the stairs to meet the postman she had met Mrs. Flood coming up. The old lady was weighed down with an enormous bundle of laundry and Abbie’s instinctive kindness as well as her mother’s training made her go forward at once to help.

“It’s me winter woollies,” panted Mrs. Flood. “Thanks a lot. I seem to be losing the knack of carrying heavy things these days. Old age, I suppose. Thought you were cross with me.”

“Oh no, Mrs. Flood!” The words were spontaneous, welling from the kindness of her own heart and meeting, so she thought, the kindness of Mrs. Flood’s. Once she had spoken them she was very glad. She felt the essential gentleness and good nature of the battered painted face looking at her. “I’m sorry I was so bad-tempered.”

“Well, I won’t deny I played you up a bit. There’s an easy explanation of the whole thing.”

“Yes?” Abbie looked expectant. Something in this puzzling world was about to be explained to her.

“The thing is I’m a bit of an actress. And things go to my head a bit. Oh I wasn’t drunk, never say it, but a bit above myself you might say.”

“You mean it was a joke to tell me all those things about yourself?”

“Oh no. It wouldn’t be funny, would it?”

Abbie agreed silently that it would not be funny. Not back home at any rate; she wasn’t so sure about this place.

“No, I meant that I just couldn’t help building up my part when you gave me the chance. You looked at me so big-eyed you know and I could see you think we are all rogues and ruffians here.”

What it meant was that Abbie had failed to understand the Londoner’s habitual mixture of hyperbole and understatement. She had not understood where Mrs. Flood was exaggerating (plain inventing, said Abbie’s puritan blood; the Forets, although now settled in Montana, came originally from New England) and where she was not.

“What you mean,” she amended wryly, “is that I’m just dumb.”

She took her letters from the postman and went back to her room. She looked at her post as she walked. She saw that she had a letter, postmarked Oxford, written in a hand that she had never seen before, but at once knew.

Dear Abbie (it began), I was going to tell you when I went off, but you were in such a paddy and wouldn’t listen, that I was going to Oxford. See you when I get back. If I may, that is. About Mrs. Flood, I don’t know what she’s up to, but she’s a very respectable old bird in spite of appearances. She’s never been to prison that I know of and I assure you, Abbie, that I do know. Dare I suggest that such a careful historian as you misread the evidence? She’s not eighty, you might recall, and she can’t remember the London Dock strikes of the nineties which is what she seemed to be telling you about so graphically. People are sometimes what they seem rather than what they say, Abbie.

Half angry and half amused, Abbie trudged upstairs. “I feel a fool, that’s what. And I suppose the police think me one, too. I imagine too much. I never did before though.” She stopped short. “Some of the things I don’t imagine. No sane person could. The flowers that don’t die, the books that move about.”

As she shut the door she looked round the room automatically to check on Defoe.

It was once again moved from where she had put it.

At this moment the door-bell rang.

She opened it to find a woman she had never seen before standing there looking at her with a flushed, distracted face.

She was a short plump woman of pretty middle age with beautiful white hair. At the moment she looked flustered and unhappy. She had probably been crying. Normally she was certainly a woman who dressed carefully and well, but today she was dressed in a hat that clashed with the coat of some dark material with a soft fur collar.

“They thought it would be best if a woman came to see you,” she said without preamble. “You don’t know me my dear, how could you, but, of course, I know you. My girl’s often described you. Darcy, you know.”

“Yes, I’ve met her and Kate,” said Abbie puzzled and rather alarmed.

“She’s disappeared,” said Mrs. Kent abruptly.

“Darcy?”

“Oh no not Darcy, thank God not Darcy. Darcy’s a good girl, she’s never been any trouble. No, it’s Kate.”

Abbie just stared; she was too horrified to speak.

“Her father put her on the ten-forty train to come out to us at Ash Hills, she was going to stay with us. He left her sitting in the carriage, he tipped the porter and kissed her good-bye, and no one has seen her since.”

She repeated her story. Kate had been put on the train and Darcy had arranged to meet her at the station. But Darcy had waited in vain. Kate never came. The train came and went without her.

Somewhere between London and Ash Hills in Buckinghamshire she had disappeared.

“Where is Darcy?” asked Abbie eventually.

“I have her down in the car below.” Mrs. Kent was inclined to be pettish now. “It’s ridiculous her calling herself by that name. But that’s how she and Kate are together. Secrets, letters, schemes. They are close about things. I blame Kate for that because Darcy’s always been so open really. Like me.” She put her hand wearily to her head as if it ached; probably it did. “We’ve all been tearing round trying to find Kate. As if we can. We shan’t find her until she wants us to, that’s my opinion. But the Broadbents thought we ought to come to you, you being such a friend of the girls.”

Darcy, sitting waiting patiently in the small black car as if she had done a lot of waiting already that day, was calm if fatigued.

“This child was so far from taking it seriously that she didn’t let us know Kate hadn’t turned up until late afternoon,” announced her mother in an exasperated way.

Darcy was unmoved. “I thought she’d come on a later train, of course. So would you in that fog. Kate’s all right I’m sure.”

“What exactly did happen?” Abbie was beginning to feel the strain of this insouciance now.

“I had driven down to meet Kate in the old station wagon.” Darcy’s mother groaned. “Yes, I know I shouldn’t have been driving, but I can drive and someone had to meet Kate and you were all out and anyway there it is. I didn’t see a soul. Not even a porter.”

“Could she have got off the train and been missed by you?”

Darcy thought. “Well, perhaps, but I don’t know how. It was very foggy, but not that bad. You could see. Besides if I did, where is she now?”

It was true. If Kate had simply been missed at the station then she would have turned up sooner or later protesting and annoyed, but safe and there.

Perhaps Darcy saw that her question had opened up disquieting vistas, for she said again, “But Kate’s all right. I wish you’d all stop fussing. She’s a sensible girl.”

But sense was not enough, as they all knew. Nor was it necessarily true. Kate was a charming girl, a girl of spirit and imagination, but Abbie did not feel she was exactly what you would call sensible. Far from it indeed.

“I don’t know any more about this than you do, but can we ever be sure how another person will act?” Abbie was thinking of another person in her life who had acted unpredictably and, as it turned out, tragically.

Darcy looked obstinate. She did not answer.

“And what did you do when Kate didn’t come?”

“I met the next train and then the next. I didn’t know quite what to do.”

“I can see that.”

“You should have come straight home at once,” said her mother firmly. “Wasting hours.” She shook her head at her daughter.

“And then?” asked Abbie.

“I waited on the platform a bit longer. I hung about and hung about. There wasn’t a soul around, hadn’t been all the time, it was foggy and getting dark.” She shivered. “I began to feel as though I was in Limbo, you know that place where the dead lost unlucky souls wander that can’t get a corner in heaven or hell.”

She’s under strain, thought Abbie. For the first time it struck her that the girl was more deeply disturbed than she appeared and that perhaps her reiterations that Kate was all right were more a plea for reassurance than anything else.

Chapter Six

THERE WAS NO TRACE OF KATE ANYWHERE ON EARTH alive or dead. As the time went on the presumption grew stronger that she was dead. Alive she would have turned up somewhere or somehow, there would have been some trace left somewhere that could lead the police to her.

There were two subsidiary mysteries connected with her disappearance. First were the mysterious clothes, certainly not Kate’s own, which had turned up in the muddy waters of Pickle Herring Creek. They had found no owner for them and the two indisputable facts about them were that they had been manufactured specially for Fieldlands School and that they were now covered with human blood. It was impossible to accept the coincidence that they had no connection with the disappearance of the school-girl, but the police wrestled in vain with the task of finding exactly in what way they were connected.

The other puzzle, and this admittedly worried them less, was Abbie. The police were very interested in Abbie. She was part of the mystery. She knew Kate Broadbent and when questioned about what she knew of Kate had been evasive and nervous.

Abbie had made a good impression as she had sat in Coffin’s sparsely furnished room with only the boxing gloves hanging over the door to give it decoration. But her composure had not been able to hide the tension underneath and the suppression by her of what she called “her hauntings” had not gone unremarked.

“She wasn’t telling all she knew by a long way,” said Coffin.

“They never do,” said his sergeant wearily. “Not the ones with a real story, only the psychos who’d tell you everything and more. You know we had a woman in here last week who told me how many children she’s had, when she’s had them, why, how and what for. And she only came into complain about her neighbour’s wireless. We might try to see what this girl is suppressing. And why she is. That may be of even greater importance.”

So a police file was opened on Abbie and she was the subject, although she did not yet know it, of many quiet watchful inquiries. The man who spoke to her milkman, the man who sat beside her on a bus, the constable who rang Mrs. Flood’s bell, and then went on to consult with the Director of the Round Room at the Public Record Office, were all adding to the details on Abbie.

The drag net was out for Kate. The railway terminus had been searched and all possible people racked with questions. Two porters remembered seeing Kate arrive with her father and get into the train, but no one could remember anything else. It had been a busy weekday and the first day of the great fog. In Hertfordshire a tearful Darcy had told and told again the story of how she had waited on a deserted platform for a girl who did not come. The train attendants had been questioned, but they either did not or would not remember Kate. The train had half a dozen stops before it arrived at Ash Hills where Darcy had waited, these also had been investigated, but at none of them had Kate been spotted. No one had seen a tall girl wearing a blue tweed suit and carrying a small case and a copy of History Today.

In a way the police were marking time. “We haven’t got her alive. And we haven’t got a body,” said Coffin. “All we’ve got are a few stories from more or less hysterical people and the clothes.” He drew a picture of a large buxom young woman on his blotting paper. “We might go further if we turn up more information about the clothes.”

The clothes themselves now rested in the police laboratory. The skirt was pinned on a sheet of paper on a table and the jersey, in which most interest had been taken, was pegged out on a board. The clothes were now wrinkled and dry, but the waters of the creek had left stains and grease behind. These stains had been examined and dismissed as of little significance. The stains of blood, however, had received the closest attention. On the front of the jersey just below the collar and spreading to the waist was a wide pear-shaped stain. On the shoulder was a thick stain spreading downwards with a few smaller stains pendant from it. It was to this stain that Coffin’s attention was now drawn.

“Looks like something rested there,” the pathologist pointed a finger at the woollen fabric. The fabric was slightly creased and the creases were stiffened with blood.

“So I notice,” said Coffin thoughtfully. There was a deduction to be drawn from this and although he was not yet in a position to draw it, he carried it in his mind. Also it sharpened the point of the question: who had worn these clothes?

“What about the blood grouping?”

“I tested for agglutinable substances. Group O.”

“We know from her school medical report that the girl was Group O.”

“Together with about 46 per cent of the population of Great Britain.”

“True enough. Still it doesn’t rule her out. We can still play along with the idea this blood was from her. And personally I think it was,” he added under his breath.

There was no more information to be culled from the blood at the moment, although Coffin thought use might be made of it in time.

He turned his attention again to the clothes themselves., The shop through which these clothes for Fieldlands were sold had already shrugged away the possibility it could give any information. Such clothes were sold in the Schools’ Department, these particular clothes probably had been, but to whom it was impossible to know.

“You say probably,” pointed out Coffin who was himself doing the questioning for the importance of these clothes remained as an irritable worry on his mind. “Why only probably?”

“There is the factory where they are made. Although the arrangement is that this particular style is reserved for us to sell to Fieldlands, we naturally have no real check.”

The clothing factory occupied the top floor of a building near Victoria Station. Coffin walked up an outside iron staircase passing the furniture makers on the first floor from which a strong smell of varnish floated, and the furniture polish industry on the second floor, from which a fierce smell of lavender scent floated out. The dress and cloaks factory, as it somewhat antiquely called itself, lived in an atmosphere of noisy machines, a smell of oil, and a good deal of dark green paint touched up here and there with liver brown.

Coffin found himself in a large room lit by strips of pale green tubing and crowded with different machines and worktables around which groups of people were working with flying hands. Most of the labour seemed either very young girls or middle-aged woman.

“This would have been what was called a sweat shop in the old days,” said Coffin whose social conscience had been sharpened by an ex-suffragette and very aggressive mother. His eyes wandered to the dark sheet of industrial regulations pinned up on the wall and wondered how many were being contravened.

“Anyway it’s clean,” he decided, rubbing his hands.

A large tin kettle was boiling on a gas ring in one corner with a huge brown teapot and a ring of cups standing near to it. Coffin decided that no one was being slave-driven at the moment and certainly the women looked far from frightened of losing their jobs, more bored, and probably in one or two cases they would have been quite glad to lose them and be forced out of the rut of their own laziness into finding something more congenial.

Coffin was a little disconcerted at finding himself in such an entirely feminine atmosphere; somehow he had not expected so many women. He stood there looking as irresolute as was possible for a person of his great determination and spirit.

A large girl wearing a flowered pinafore overall approached him. Coffin told her that he was looking for the manager. The girl turned to a woman working an electric sewing-machine at the nearest table.

“Here,” she shouted above the noise of the sewer. “Where’s Mr. Grimond?”

“Gawn out.”

Voices all round shouted that indeed Mr. Grimond was out.

“Out,” reported the girl without regret.

“Anything we can do?” shouted the women on the sewing machine. “I reckon most of us here know as much about the business as he does. Never here he isn’t.”

“Only since they had a young woman manager down below. He always used to be here before that.”

Diffidently, for him, Coffin explained he wanted to ask about the clothes supplied to Messrs. Draper and Dashwood of Oxford Street for the use of Fieldlands College. The woman at the machine knew at once what he wanted.

“Round full skirts, with pleats all round? Grey and brown? How I hate ’em. Takes me hours going round those seams. Fiddling, nasty job. Come to make a complaint, mister?”

Before Coffin could say more, and indeed while he was asking himself if there was any point in pursuing with her an inquiry she would not be competent, in spite of her claim of omniscience, to answer, there was an interruption.

An undersized figure staggered in under a high pile of miscellaneous rolls of cloths, which it threw on a large table.

“Bundles is up, girls.”

At once every able-bodied woman in the room (there were one or two figures forced to limp but even they hurried) sped down the room to the table and joined in what appeared to be a fight.

Coffin looked down for the woman who had been talking to him and saw that she had gone too, was indeed well up in the front of the fight, and had even got a bundle in her teeth.

“Get very keen, don’t they?” said a voice. He turned to see a neat stout little man in a dark suit whom he judged to be the amorous manager.

“But what on earth is it?”

“We wrap up our scraps of dress material and sell them for sixpence a bundle. Sometimes they have pretty good pieces in them, even whole dress lengths. It depends. There’s a good deal of rivalry for them.”

“Well, so I see.” Wrenching his eyes from the sight, Coffin explained why he had come.

He got the firm answer that no dress made according to this specification went anywhere but to the proper retailer. The little man was quite angry.

Coffin sighed. “Could one of the girls smuggle out a dress or two?” he said, thinking that anything could happen here and the manager might not know.

“Well, we don’t search them, but no. That’s my answer, no. If you can let me see the clothes I may be able to help more.”

“Yes, I thought of that.” Coffin produced the skirt and jersey, which had been carefully packed.

The manager examined them slowly. “There’s one thing I can tell you, although I’m afraid it won’t help you much. These were made a good long time ago. We haven’t been using cloth of this texture for about three and a half years. It was found too rough and we discontinued it.”

So the clothes for the moment led nowhere. It had not been possible to trace their ownership or their connection with Kate. Coffin walked along Pickle Herring Creek in hope that the place where the clothes had been found would suggest something to him. As it had been raining the Creek was sticky with a dark greasy mud and the waters looked turgid and unpleasant. A string of barges was passing slowly down the middle of the Creek towards the river. Coffin looked at them thoughtfully.

He had observed an old waterman sitting on the steps leading down from the Creek and he went back to talk to him.

“Is it possible,” he asked, “for something dropped in the Thames to float into the Creek here?”

“Depends where it were dropped. If it were dropped in down stream, the answer is no. If it were dropped in up stream the answer is p’rhaps.”

“And what about something dropped into the Creek, could that find its way into the Thames?”

“Maybe, and maybe not.”

“Still it could. Have you known it happen?”

“I’ve known everything happen round here, and so would you if you stayed round here long enough.” And he went back to pinning up a large hole in the front of his navy blue jersey.

Coffin looked along the Creek which was still shifting its waters lazily. “And where does the water in the Creek come from?”

“Out of the Thames, ’course.”

“Does it lead anywhere?”

“This creek leads into a canal. Halfpenny Canal. Unusual that is.”

Coffin had remembered the canal that oozed its way behind the railway station.

He went back to the Divisional Office at Courcy Street and gave the orders to his subordinates.

“Start dragging the canal at the back of the station. It’s called Halfpenny Canal.”

“Drag the Ha’penny Canal?” said his sergeant in surprise: he knew the canal well. “You got anything to go on?” He thought for a moment. “Yes, it might be worth trying at that.”

“Thanks,” said Coffin laconically.

He slumped in his chair. The picture that was beginning to form itself before his eyes was far from a pretty one. It was also inexplicable.

By now three and a half days had passed since Kate was reported missing. The fog had gone and the weather was that of a clear fine December. In the streets Christmas signs were many.

“You think she got off the train before it left and went off, or was persuaded off?”

“We don’t know when she disappeared,” said Coffin slowly. “We only know when she was reported missing. We only know what we were told, that she was left sitting in the train.”

Courcy Street market began to look very Christmassy with bunches of holly and bundles of Christmas trees. The stalls began to make a show of dolls and toys and elaborate Christmas stockings. The Indian scent stall, always a sign of feast days and holidays, arrived and began the sale of highly coloured and sickly perfumes.

Creevey Buildings themselves began to show small signs of the approaching season. It was hard to tell they connected Christmas with any festivity of the Church for Creevey Buildings except for a small Roman Catholic section tucked away in one corner of the building and rather looked down upon by the rest of the inhabitants on the ground that they were Irish and heathen, might have been Buddhists or Hindus for all this aspect of the holiday showed. However, child worship, always strong in Creevey Buildings, came out more than ever at this time. Enormously extravagant toys were purchased by even the poorer families, and great stocks of sweets were laid in for what at this season were known affectionately to the Buildings as ’the kiddies’. At other times they were known by less pleasing titles.

Abbie herself received her Christmas parcels from home and dutifully put them away in a drawer until the twenty-fifth. She was too troubled in her mind to enjoy them. She did her shopping in Courcy Street trying to enjoy the noise and life and bustle but she could not free herself from her preoccupations. Even the gas jets which flared above the stalls mingled in her mind with the fires that had flared beside the plague pits in 1660. And behind this was a picture from back home, suppressed, sternly rejected by Abbie’s conscious mind, but poking through, the picture of a limp wet figure carried on an improvised stretcher and the flaming light of torches in the darkness, and this perhaps was the reason the gas lights of Courcy Street burned so brightly in Abbie’s mind.

One afternoon, on her return with her usual careful pile of notes (she was really beginning to learn quite a lot about her group of families), she saw that a letter was waiting for her. It had been delivered by hand and presumably not long ago.

It was a letter from Kate’s father asking her if she would call. She was given no directions for finding their house, but she realised almost at once that they must live in a flat above the offices.

The broad staircase that curved up above Mr. Broadbent’s office led up to a white painted glass panelled door. Abbie rang the bell and waited. Mr. Broadbent let her in; he had lost weight considerably and his thick tweed suit seemed to hang loosely upon him.

“Glad you could come, kind of you,” he muttered.

On the wall above the fireplace was a coloured photograph of a woman Abbie took to be Kate’s mother. She had a look of Kate, but she was slighter and there was a tight nervous look around the mouth. Or perhaps she just hated having her photograph taken. Abbie reflected that she herself probably had much the same look in her own photographs.

“My wife’s not here. She’s had to have a few days’ rest. She’s in a nursing home as a matter of fact. You can understand how she feels.” He moved his hand restlessly over his head. “Well, you’ll know how we feel, you must feel pretty much the same yourself, you were such a friend of Kate’s.”

Not such a friend, thought Abbie in a surprised way. I didn’t know her all that well.

“I’ve never known her take such a fancy to anyone, except Darcy, of course. That’s why I asked you to come. I felt you might have some clue, some idea.”

“I’m afraid I don’t have though.”

“She’s seemed to be so settled and happy lately. It’s been a success sending her to Fieldlands. We were doubtful at first. The happiest three years of her life, she said.”

“It must be expensive.”

“Kate has her own money. From her grandfather. She’s got a good deal more money than I have. In trust, of course.”

Did he mind? Abbie wondered. There was that in his voice that suggested he did.

“That’s always the trouble, I suppose. My wife is inclined to resent it. And Kate knows it. Doesn’t make for peace in the home.”

They were a curiously detached family in the way they spoke of each other. Kate had said ‘my father’ remotely, coldly, and now he spoke as if Kate and his wife were not related. Even as she said the words to herself she knew.

“My second wife,” he said, almost as if he had read her thoughts.

Abbie looked at the picture on the wall that looked so like Kate.

“Yes, that’s Kate’s mother. I keep that there to please her, really. She didn’t like me marrying again. Seemed to grudge me the happiness, but there, I can’t blame her. She had a bad time. She’s not an easy girl, you know. I don’t know how you found her, but you can take my word for it there’s a lot in Kate. In some ways she’s been living a life of her own. I don’t know everything that has been going on with Kate. No, not by a long way I don’t.” There was a look almost of accusation in his stare at Abbie. “And, of course, it upset her losing her mother.”

“She died?”

“We were divorced. She is dead now. She died soon after the divorce. I kept Kate. Well, her mother didn’t want her.”

Poor rejected Kate, thought Abbie, with a mother who didn’t want her and a father who seemed more puzzled and ill at ease with his daughter than loving. In a flash of intuition she saw Mr. Broadbent as the man who was always a husband, but never a father or son. He would see everything through his wives’ eyes and perhaps neither wife had seen poor Kate very fondly.

“And I can tell you, what I didn’t tell the police, that this isn’t the first time she’s gone. She went off once before and we never knew where.”

“Why can you tell me if you can’t tell the police?” cried Abbie when the bell rang.

Coffin stood outside with his finger on the bell. By this time he had the benefit of considerably more information than when he last interviewed Mr. Broadbent. He had put his ear to that invaluable source of information, the neighbours. From them he had learnt enough to bolster up his growing suspicions. Courcy Street and the neighbourhood knew as much, about the Broadbent household as the Broadbents themselves. Reluctant as he always was to tap this source, Coffin was old enough in his craft by now to recognise its uses. Provided you understood its limitation, the gossip of the district could add immeasurably to your picture of the crime and the affected family. No family lives in a vacuum although it often thinks it does, and a London street is often as much a village as a hamlet on the Shropshire uplands. It’s a question of area, a few streets to the west or east and a family will be foreigners. (Oh, you’re one of the Courcy Street lot, a child from Prince Imperial Street will say, and a mother pushing her pram out from Creevey Buildings will not talk to a mother from Pickle Herring Street.) But within their home ground a family’s habits, income, and relationships can be accurately assessed. Talking to the police is another matter and a detective often came up against a wall of silence. Coffin, however, was a local and to him lips would be parted, if not exactly opened wide, in the confidence that he could read between the lines. His task was made easier by the fact that the Broadbents were as much public figures as the vicar, the Lady Visitor and Insurance Collector. (Creevey Buildings, of course, spoke to no one, as determined in their isolation as the legendary Cabots and Lodges.)

The gossip of the neighbourhood had told him of quarrels, of loud shouting quarrels between the girl and her parents.

“They quarrelled really loud,” one matron told Coffin. “You could hear it above the wireless.”

“Your wireless or theirs?”

“Mine, of course.”

“That would be loud then,” agreed Coffin, who knew his lady.

“Then they sent the girl away to school. Best thing they could have done, too.”

“What did you make of her?”

Abbie had called her ‘an intellectual girl’. The Sergeant had said “a nice quiet girl, good-mannered, what I’d like my daughter to grow like”.

“Well, they were right to send her away. They’d have had trouble with her else. She certainly had the lads of the village round her. I’m not saying it’s her fault. Maybe she didn’t do much or even notice them, but they knew she was there all right.” This was how a neighbour had seen her, a girl likely to make trouble, a girl probably already the cause of quarrels in the family. Coffin had a respect born of experience for this matron.

“How did she compare with Edith Black?” he said in a moment of inspiration.

“Not in Edie’s class, thank God,” she said fervently. “We couldn’t do with two like Edie. Not got Edie’s real genius for trouble. Remember when we had all the boys in Courcy Street fighting? But this kid has something of Edie’s streak of violence. Sometimes Edie really didn’t care what happened and that’s what caused the trouble.”

“What happened to Edie, by the way?”

“Well, you ought to know, Inspector, seeing you told her what to do. She married the boy who always said he was engaged to her. She’s got three boys and lost her figure. She hasn’t changed, though, the custom she does on that stall, you’d be surprised, considering it’s only bananas she’s selling.”

All this was in Coffin’s mind as he rang the bell for Mr. Broadbent. Such thoughts prepared him for this second interview with Kate’s father and warned him that this time he must look for a different man than the anxious parent he had seen the first time. He was not altogether surprised to see Abbie.

He had in any case come with a special purpose in mind. Half an hour before he set out a message had come for him from the parties that were dragging Halfpenny Canal and Pickle Herring Creek. The message was that they had found the body of a girl.

“I shall have to ask you to step round with me, Mr. Broadbent,” he said politely. “It’s a matter of identification, I’m afraid.”

Broadbent went white, but he was able to answer in a steady voice that he would come at once. Abbie was hidden behind him as he opened the door so that Coffin did not know she was there until he heard her cry of alarm at his news.

With his words all sorts of fears, till then almost unconscious, crowded into Abbie’s mind. Why had she been brought to the flat to see Broadbent? Why had there been so much emphasis on how well she knew Kate? Was it to implicate her deeply in this business?

She was sharp enough to read the thoughts in Coffin’s mind.

“Why is she here alone with Broadbent? How well did she know the girl? How well does she know him? Hope she isn’t getting too interested in him.”

But here he was wrong. Abbie’s mind was almost completely preoccupied with a man who had been dead for over two hundred years.

Chapter Seven

“WHY DO YOU THINK IT’S MY DAUGHTER?” ASKED Broadbent on the walk to the police station in whose sad little mortuary the body lay. “Does it look like her?”

Coffin did not answer; unconsciously he began to walk faster. Broadbent repeated his question.

“No, it doesn’t,” said Coffin shortly.

There was a pause. “I see what you mean,” said Broadbent in a thick voice. “After all she’s been gone some days.”

“I’m sorry to have to ask you to do this.”

“No, of course, I have to come.” His voice was dull.

Whatever his part in the story it was not going to be easy to show him the body of the girl who might have been his daughter. Who almost certainly was, in Coffin’s opinion.

The room into which he showed Broadbent was both depressing and drearily without dignity. It had been added to the back of the police station when the Courcy Street Station became a Divisional Headquarters and it was, therefore, new enough, but its depressing quality was due to the clearness with which it expressed the view that stone dead has no fellow.

“And no ears either,” muttered Coffin, for the room, although discreetly shuttered, caught the full blast of the traffic at the junction of Courcy Street and Tower Bridge Street. There was a strange symphony compounded of the drum of motor-cars, the heavier roar of buses and lorries, and the occasional shrieks from passing trains. It was not often that the room had an occupant, an occasional drunk who in the vivid language of his mates had slipped over the side, for most of the corpses in the area found their way first to a hospital. You had to be indisputably, dreadfully dead to be delivered here.

The body at which John Broadbent was asked to look was not pretty.

The canal which ran into Pickle Herring Creek was lined with wharves to which barges heavily laden with timber were dragged. Beneath them trailed heavy cables swinging to and fro in the movement. The corpse in its gentle drift had swung against them. Once or twice as the body got nearer the Thames a tug had twisted the body with the speed of its motion. And always there was the water, the saturating pulping decaying water.

It seemed likely also that in addition to post-mortem injuries there had been much damage before death. The head had been injured and perhaps the hands. It was not easy to be sure and so far there had been no extensive medical examination. That would come. Coffin wanted to get an identification and he felt sure he would get one. He had an absolute conviction that this was the girl.

“The right age, the right sex, the right place.” He realised that he would still have to explain how the girl, supposedly placed on a train speeding away to Hertfordshire should turn up in a London canal, but he had his own ideas about that.

Before showing the body to Broadbent he showed him first a sodden dress. Clothes, he thought, were playing a big part in this’ case. He still had to make some relevance of the other clothes. They had not come from this body.

“I can’t tell,” said Broadbent, unhappily picking over the dress from which the water and the oil and the dirt of the canal had removed all colour and even taken character away from the fabric itself. “It could be something of hers I suppose, but how can I be sure. No one could identify that.”

Silently Coffin showed him the body. There was a long pause, while Coffin waited in confident expectation of what would follow.

“It’s not Kate,” said John Broadbent in a low voice. “This girl could be anyone. But I don’t think it’s Kate.” His voice gained in strength. “No, it’s not Kate.”

Two people now were preoccupied with the guilt of John Broadbent. One was Coffin and the other was Abbie who was slowly becoming certain of his guilt. He looked guilty.

Against her will Abbie turned her training in research towards an investigation of Broadbent; she wanted to find out if he could be the sort of person capable of the deeds she had imagined. She wanted, perhaps without fully knowing it, to prove that some of her wild thoughts and speculations were based on reality and were not derived solely from her imagination.

“What about finger-prints?” suggested Coffin’s young assistant when John Broadbent had left. “That’s the obvious thing, isn’t it?”

Coffin was silent for a few minutes before he answered.

“You would think so, wouldn’t you? But before I got Broadbent round here I went to his flat and got permission to take away something with the girl’s finger-prints on them. But someone, and the cleaning woman says it wasn’t her, had polished everything the girl could possibly have handled. Her own room was scoured.”

“But doesn’t that create a fair presumption that the girl is Kate Broadbent and that her father knows it?”

“Yes,” said Coffin after a pause. “But presumption isn’t enough. Oh well, we shall get the finger-prints in the end, I suppose, if we search hard enough. The trouble is that blasted school of hers has been cleaned up, too. But there must be something down there that holds a print of Kate’s. Still, whatever the public thinks finger-prints are not magic and first we have to isolate it and identify it. You’d better get down to it and give it priority.”

She had formed the habit of sitting drinking coffee in the baker’s shop near the police station. The coffee was good even to Abbie who found English coffee odd. “Like soup it is the way they drink it, putting hot milk in it and all,” she said to herself. But here, in the baker’s shop, you could get good hot black coffee and sometimes even cream to put in it. Anyway no one looked at you as if you were a lunatic or asking for an ulcer by drinking black coffee. As she sat there she would brood upon the police station and wonder if in there they could answer all her questions. She never again saw the women who had so tantalised her ears with their stories of strange goings on in Creevey Buildings. One day doubtfully she spoke about it to the woman who had brought her the coffee and who had become a sort of friend of hers.

“A police search?” said the woman. “Oh, we have those often round here. Near the docks, you see. I daresay something was missing and they would think Creevey Buildings knew about it and so it would likely. Always things getting pinched. I remember once a cargo of French wine came in and one of the casks of wine got broken, accidental on purpose you know, and all the men unloading the ship were having sips, well sips, great long drinks more like it. The word got round, too, and not only the crew unloading the ship were having a drink by a long way. They didn’t know anything about the wine, thought it was a sort of light ale, it was a hot day and they were thirsty (they mostly are thirsty) and before you could turn round the wharf was littered with bodies, either unconscious or sleeping it off. Looked like a revolution it did. So you see the police have always to keep their eyes open and if the river police tipped them the word that stuff was getting out of the docks they’d be bound to look around.”

Abbie was convinced. It seemed much more likely that the police had been looking for missing cargoes than for Miss Toll or Mrs. Belhatchet.

“Shows the danger of an ideé fixe” she told herself. There had been no untoward happenings in her room lately, and she had begun to believe the cold voice of reason which told her she had always been imagining it. If only Journal of the Plague Year would stop moving round she would be quite certain of it, but it remained tiresomely itinerant.

“It’s bad about that girl, isn’t it?” asked the woman watching Abbie. “How many days is it since she was missing? Ten, is it?”

Abbie stirred her coffee. “It’s worse than you know,” she thought. “I can’t tell you about it.”

Aloud she said, “Do you know the family?”

“Oh well, you know how it is, I know about them and who they are. Never spoke to the girl, wouldn’t know her by sight, but I know Mr. Broadbent.”

She rearranged the cakes on a stand. They were gay cakes, covered with icing and decorations, not very eatable perhaps but pretty to look at.

“Of course there’s been a lot of talk. They say he’s not a very nice man. It’s true there was a lot of quarrelling. We all know that, but quarrels aren’t everything are they? Plenty of people who quarrel are fond enough underneath. They may be like that. After all just because you shout at your daughter it doesn’t mean that you are going to do away with her, does it?”

She stopped aghast at what she had said. Then she started again.

“He got his start when old Mr. Baffin died and left him the business. It wasn’t so much then, but it grew after the war. I remember it well. And, of course, Broadbent’s put a lot into it. His first wife had money (she was a queer sort, dreamy, never knew where you were with her). The present Mrs. Broadbent, she’s sharp enough, and with her tongue, too. They say Broadbent’s hard up lately, but still we all are, aren’t we?”

Abbie walked slowly down Courcy Street hunched in her thick blue coat. There was no fog and the sky was blue, but all the same it was a hard clear cold nasty day.

She recalled how she had wanted to help Kate and Darcy and how arrogantly she had been certain that she could. But people were tougher, more firmly set in their own paths than observers often understood. She had given the girls no help, perhaps she had even harmed them. Whatever she had meant to do, emotionally she had encouraged and excited the girls. She was convinced that Kate had tried to harm, if not to kill, her father, and she was equally sure that John Broadbent had now killed Kate. At the root of it all she saw the hapless relationship between the two girls, Kate and Darcy. It was bound to produce violence. With the same unpleasing clarity of the day she perceived that she was inextricably part of the affair. She had no reason to fear for herself, but she did fear. The whole uneasy sea of suspicion and misunderstanding rose up around her.

Creevey Buildings stood before her black and uncomely. Abbie who had been first irritated and then amused by it found it depressing. She did not want to go in but she had nowhere else to go.

She saw that she was being watched by the boy to whom she had once before spoken. He was lounging against the wall, but he was watching her alertly.

“I’m detecting,” he said. “We’ve had a crime round here, you know.”

Abbie nodded.

“Of course we’ve had them before, but not like this. They’ve been dragging the canal.”

Abbie looked sick. So the body which Coffin had talked about had come from the river. She knew what that meant. She had seen a body from the water before this.

One by one the inhabitants of Courcy Street were adding their detail to the burden of knowledge which Abbie sustained. It was like a child’s tower of bricks, it rose higher and higher but the last brick would destroy it.

Abbie tried Mrs. Flood’s door in search of company which, however unpredictable and dotty, was anyway kindly and safe. But she rang and got no answer. She remembered she had seen her neighbour go out in her best clothes and smelling heavily of the best Indian scent from the Market. So today was obviously one of her ‘Big Days’. As if to confirm this Abbie saw a note tucked in a milk bottle. “No milk today,” it said. “Same as usual tomorrow.”

“’Tisn’t a sip of milk she needs after one of her days out,” said the boy who had slipped up the stairs silently. “Something stronger my mum says. Have you heard her singing?”

She looked at him reproachfully. “I thought you were a nice boy.”

He was surprised. “So I am. It’s true isn’t it?” He looked at her, and then because he was a nice boy he put out a hand and touched her arm. “You don’t half look green.” He summed her up with the acuteness of Courcy Street. “You’re missing your boy friend. You don’t have to hang around here waiting. Why don’t you go to see him?”

Abbie took a sudden resolution and her spirits rose with it. “I surely will. When’s the next train to Oxford? William Morris College. Why didn’t I think of it before?”

Coffin, too, was trying to build his tower of bricks. John Broadbent by failing to identify the body had refused to supply one brick and now another one was about to be removed.

The telephone rang.

“That body,” said the voice. “It can’t be the Broadbent girl’s I’m afraid.”

“Why not?”

“The height’s all wrong.”

“How do you mean?”

“We have her recorded height taken at her school. Five foot six. She might have grown taller, but she didn’t shrink. This one is five foot four and a half.”

As Coffin put the receiver down on this news which was both unwelcome and unexpected, John Broadbent was shown in to him. He was moving unsteadily, almost as if he was drunk.

“I’ve remembered something, I don’t know why I didn’t remember before. But there was a woman sitting in the carriage where I left Kate. Find her. She must know something about what happened. At any rate she will know where and when Kate left the train. Find the woman,” he repeated desperately, “find the woman.”

Coffin’s tower of bricks gave a preliminary wobble.

Chapter Eight

PADDINGTON WELCOMED ABBIE WITH ITS USUAL SMELL OF old fish and soot. She had already noticed how often you smelt fish in Britain; she supposed it was something to do with being an island, although come to think of it the smell was usually strongest the farther you got from the sea. It was quite strong on Oxford station too, and you couldn’t have a county much deeper inland than that. It was very nearly the deepest the Danes had got into England, mused Abbie. They came up the river, past Wallingford, and burnt Oxford twice. She could imagine it all. The smell of fish disappeared with the gasworks as her taxi bore her away from the station and into the town.

They passed over a little bridge. Abbie leaned forward.

“Oh, is that the Thames again?”

The driver shook his head. “Thames? No, miss, that’s the Oxford canal.”

“What a lot of canals there are in England,” said Abbie leaning back. She had noticed an odd flat accent in his voice not heard by her before. “Were you born here?”

“Me, miss? No, I’m a Berkshire man myself.”

The taxi took Abbie into a series of crowded main streets. She looked at them sadly. Courcy Street did not have so many buses. Was this the quiet remote University town of which she had dreamed?

Then her taxi slowed down to cross the traffic lights near Magdalen Bridge and as they halted for a second she was able to look about her. The traffic miraculously cleared away and behind her was the long curve of the loveliest street in Europe. She looked from the square tower of Magdalen to the spire of St. Mary’s and beyond again to the city church. She saw the fronts of the colleges, few of them perhaps distinguished in their own right, merge into satisfying perspective and she gave a pleased sigh of relief; this was how it should be. Then her taxi was over the bridge and it was gone.

“Which college was that on the left, with all the little towers?” she asked.

“Couldn’t say, miss, I’m sure,” he said with his eyes on the road. “I’ve never been in any of them.”

“What never?”

“Oh no, miss. Never had the time. Although come to think of it when I was first married I did take the wife into that big one they call Christ Church, and when she saw the big stone flight of stairs leading up to their hall, all she said was ‘Goodness, imagine having to scrub that down.’ So, as it seemed to depress her, we never went again.”

“I’d like to have known which one that was. It had such a bleak façade, like a prison. I can imagine interesting things going on there.”

“Let me see now. First on the left. I might know the name if I think…Ah, that would be Old Souls College.”

He looked satisfied although Abbie felt uncertain. “I can’t find that in my guide book,” said Abbie.

“Look it up under Other Institutions,” he said with confidence.

He swung the car up Headington Hill, “Now as it happens I know William Morris College. I had one of the young gentlemen who go there lodging with me for a term. They’re a bit different from most of these undergrads. They have to be hardworking men with a good background before they can go there. They have to have served their time in some trade or other and want a bit more education. Some chap in the nineteenth century thought of it. The boy I had was a very nice one from Bermuda. He wanted to be a lawyer. They mostly wanted to be lawyers as far as I could gather.”

“Yes,” said Abbie, imagining some sprig of an old colonial family.

“Yes,” said the driver and went back to his musing.

Very soon they stopped before a long low red brick building set in overgrown gardens. The house had clearly started as an Edwardian villa and been added to. Abbie could see all kinds of porches, covered passage ways and outbuildings. What she could not see was people. The whole place looked deserted.

“Ah, they’d be off on their holidays,” said the driver cheerfully.

“Oh, goodness!”

“Well, all the other ones are so I suppose this lot up here will be too. Shocking long holidays they have.” He settled back in his seat. “And what work is it after all when all’s said and done? Just looking at a book or a bit of writing.”

“It’s very exhausting,” said Abbie severely, but she was abstracted. The whole place was empty. How was she to find Joe now?

“Still it’s not right. I worked an eighty-hour week when I was a boy. That was in the old days.”

“Well, you don’t work it now,” Abbie was exasperated. “My goodness, I’m an historian but I reckon I don’t live half as much in the past as you people. You’re always talking about the old days in Britain. Why should a man work an eighty-hour week? What good did it do you?”

“I reckon you’re one of those revolutionaries.”

“I reckon I am.”

The front door of William Morris college opened and the figure she most wanted to see appeared.

“Joe,” she said joyfully.

He swung her in, had her sitting down by a fire in what appeared to be a large sitting-room devoted entirely to students, and was offering her a cigarette before she knew what was happening. Somewhere in between there had been a good deal of laughter.

“You’re jolly lucky to find me here. Everyone else has gone down, but we stay up two weeks later than anyone else, and I stayed up later than that to do some work. I’ve got a lot to make up.”

“Here, what about me?” said a voice.

“Oh the driver!” exclaimed Abbie.

Joe paid him off and they went back to the fire.

“I just had to come and see you. I need to talk to someone sane. Everything’s been so beastly in Courcy Street. No, not Mrs. Flood, I know I was silly about her, she got a good joke out of me. But I mean Kate.”

Joe regarded her soberly. “I didn’t know you knew the girl.”

Trying to marshal her facts in the orderly, precise way she had been trained, Abbie told her story. By the time she had ended she had included everything from the vagaries of Journal of the Plague Year and the flowers that would not die to the suspicions she nourished about John Broadbent. She stopped short of wondering aloud if she was being haunted by a ghost, but she admitted all her other terrible fears.

“Kate’s gone. I know she has. But where? And where do I come in? I’m being written into the script. I’m sure of that.” She was almost in tears.

Joe poked the fire. “Yes, well I can see how you feel, but I think you’re getting worked up over something that perhaps isn’t there. I think I might come up and see Coffin. I have been wondering in a sort of way if I should on account of an idea of mine on the subject.”

“You mean you know him?”

“I know all the policemen there ever have been in that area. My father was one, didn’t I tell you?”

“No, no, to tell you the truth I sort of imagined he was a criminal from the way you spoke about him.”

Joe burst into laughter. “Abbie, your imagination! I won’t say you’ve got too much, but it runs wilder than it ought in a girl of your education.”

“Everything’s so strange here, strange and yet familiar at the same time. I feel alien and yet knowledgeable. Can you imagine that?”

“You’re just a sad little Alice in Wonderland lost down an uncomfortably nasty rabbit-hole.”

They passed a tall man huddled in thick tweed overcoat and several scarves as they walked out of the gate and down into the town. Joe hailed him affectionately.

“That’s my room-mate. He’s still around, too.”

“Your room-mate,” repeated Abbie, “but he’s a black man.”

“You’re not as liberal as you seem.”

“You’re right there,” said Abbie after a regretful pause. She was learning too much about herself these days and some of the knowledge she could have done without.

“All the same I don’t think you’re right to suspect John Broadbent. It’s a terrible thing to think. What reason would he have to begin with?”

“Money,” said Abbie. She did not say what else, but Joe knew.

“In those circumstances and remember so far we only have your view of it, he’s more likely to send her to a psychiatrist. Be sensible.”

He went on. “I don’t think he’s the sort of man to care about money. I know him pretty well. He’s partly responsible for my being here. I doubt if I’d have come if he had not found the way and badgered the right people to get me a grant and then badgered me to accept. There’s more to him than you think.”

“He seems such a very obvious man.”

“You see him too close, a foreground picture, well that gives you one view, but it isn’t enough, not the complete picture, people have a background with diminishing perspective, a side view, too. They have friends and relationships that aren’t always clear, they’ve done things that don’t appear when you see them full face. Come on, I’m going to take you to see someone who might give you a new line on John Broadbent.”

A red bus of a darker red than the London buses Abbie was so accustomed to now carried them down the hill into the town. They got out in the crowded centre of the city and walked past Woolworth’s which was staggeringly glossy and headed towards a dark old college.

“Oh, a proper college!”

“That’s right,” said Joe. “You tactful little creature.”

“Wait a minute,” she looked down at her feet. “What’s this funny cross on the road?”

“That’s where Bishops Latimer and Ridley perished in the flames four centuries ago.”

“The fire was here?”

“Just where you are.”

For a moment the centuries rolled back and Abbie was very close to the plague pits of London. The figure of Daniel Defoe seemed to stalk by her side. She drew back her foot, neatly avoiding the wooden cross and entered the dark college lodge.

The now familiar smell of fish, mingled surprisingly with the smell of brass polish, hit her nostrils. What a lot of smells there are in this country she thought faintly. The smell of fish was easily explained on this occasion by three large boxes labelled ‘Best Manx Kippers’.

“Hello, Mr. Ardente,” said a small spectacled man emerging from behind a curtain. “Mind the fish. They’ve sent it in mistake. Two hundred pairs, and who’s to eat it now the young gentlemen have gone down? The Senior Common Room won’t want to eat it every day for the next six weeks. But that’s what they’ll get, fried kipper, grilled kipper, kipper omelette, kipper mousse, kipper fricassé. You’ll have ’em all purring I told the bursar. That’ll be a change he says.”

“Where’s Frederic?” asked Joe.

“He’s round the back.”

“I’ll just pop round. See you in a moment, Abbie.”

Abbie filled in the time looking at the lodge. There was no doubt about it, the entrance was not quite what she expected. The kipper boxes had been a shock and so were the notice-boards, stuck with odd bits of paper. Will all gentlemen, demanded one notice, please see that their guests are out of the college by midnight? Any guest found asleep in the college will be reported to the dean of his college. Some wit had inserted ’or her’ before the word college. Another notice urged all owners of bicycles to register them with the police and in any case not to pile them up outside the library. Yet another list was of names: Peter Barley, John Jeans, McCarlick of the Isles. And at this list Abbie looked with pleasure. McCarlick of the Isles now, that did look impressive.

A tall spare figure went through the lodge followed by a second man, for accompanied was hardly the word to use of the figure trotting behind.

“But that supposition can be ruled out,” said the tall man not looking at his companion but throwing the words forward into space. “It is contained in the Fido-Fido theory.”

“Wittgenstein,” ventured the second figure, increasing its speed.

Joe appeared at the door and beckoned to her. They went round the back to a cobbled space that might once have been stables where a man was sitting on a box polishing shoes and reading a book propped up on another box at the same time. The book was Clinical Disorders of Hydration and it was being compared with another book written in German. She looked at the reader with respect.

“This is Fred,” said Joe.

“Excuse me if I just get on with these shoes, will you? Dr. Dier wants them in a particular hurry.”

“Fred’s his scout,” said Joe. “His servant, you know.”

Something about the shoes, which were long, narrow and battered-looking, reminded Abbie of someone.

“Is Dr. Dier tall, thin and a quick walker?” she asked.

“That’s him. He says he does all his thinking on his feet. I think he does it all aloud, too.”

“Then I saw him just now. There was another, quite young man with him. Or almost with him.”

“Yes, that would be a pupil. He was giving a tutorial.”

“But term’s over,” said Joe.

“Not for Dr. Dier. He hasn’t got to this term yet. He’s still finishing off the term before.”

Abbie looked at him with caution, she was not going to laugh before she saw whether there was a joke or whether she was the joke. She’d been bitten by this curious English sense of fantasy humour before. But the speaker was clearly not English, his speech and appearance proclaimed him to be from a country farther east, although certainly European.

The shoes done, Fred closed his book, took off one pair of spectacles and put on another.

“Now I can shake hands.”

“Fred will keep shaking hands,” said Joe, sitting down on a box. “I keep telling him that he’ll never be a social success here while he keeps shaking hands so much.”

“You and me both,” said Abbie, holding out her hand. “I keep doing it, too.”

Fred took it. “In any case all I want to be is a good doctor, and that I think I shall be.”

“Fred’s from Yugoslavia,” said Joe, “he didn’t like the government, so he left.”

“A refugee,” explained Fred calmly. “But I was a most comfortable one. I brought all my books and my dog. And now I work here and arrangements are made for me to study. I shall do well.”

“Fred came out on my boat, we called in at Split and he came out on it,” said Joe. “Fred, that brings me to what we came round here about. John Broadbent.”

“I have been thinking about him, too. He is having a bad time. I have seen about the daughter. What can we do to help him, my friend?”

“I’m not so sure. It seems as though the police suspect him of murder. Abbie here does, too.”

“You know him?”

“A little,” said Abbie gruffly.

“Then you cannot know him well. He is not at all the man to kill, especially his own daughter.”

Put like that it did sound incredible. But Abbie thought that although they knew the man she knew the circumstances.

“Tell her about him, Fred,” said Joe.

Fred held out his hands, “It amazes me that it cannot be seen for itself. He is a good man. Not a man who will step out and say look I am your friend and do nothing, but a man who without saying it, saying indeed nothing about himself, will act the part of a friend. I owe him much.”

It appeared that John Broadbent had established himself in England as a kind of employment agency for men like Fred.

“For consider, we can come here, but in order to stay we must have jobs. Jobs for people like us are not easy. For the labourer or the miner or the engineer, yes, that is easy, but for professional men like me, who want to go on with their profession, jobs must be found which give us the opportunity to study and establish ourselves here. It is not easy.”

But John Broadbent had many contacts and many friends and he had become an unofficial but much sought-after provider of such jobs.

“And mind you, he makes nothing out of it. Not a penny.” He seemed impressed by this.

“Well, no,” said Abbie who austerely took this for granted.

“He manages this college’s estates in London. They own much property along the river, wharves and so on. That is why they are so rich. And he got me this job. Where they make opportunities for me to study at the hospital here. Meanwhile I clean shoes and polish tables. I quite enjoy it. And my gentlemen are kind, they do not, of course, really believe that the education of any foreigner can really equal that of an Oxford gentleman or scholar, but they are tolerant. They do not indeed take me seriously, but they are kind.”

“John took you seriously.”

“Yes, he did indeed. Why should I talk of him as if he were dead. He has real sympathy with the underdog, the comic character, the alien. I suppose because he always felt one himself.” He turned towards Abbie.

“If you did not see this about him you did not know him, but once seeing it you could never think of him as a murderer. Not in the circumstances you describe. There are some in which any one of us might be a murderer. Mind you I do not say they were a normal English family, because they were not. The girl herself now was very odd.”

“She didn’t seem so to me,” said Abbie.

“She was certainly very clever, very clever, but a girl with a very intense life of her own.”

“She was just a schoolgirl.”

“You think so? Well in some respects yes. Did you meet her friend Darcy, too?”

Abbie nodded.

The porter appeared. “Fred, Dr. Dier’s after his shoes. Says he’s got to go for another walk.”

“Another little foible of his,” said Fred. “He has to walk in clean shoes. Well, I must take them up.”

“Goodbye,” said Abbie. “I know you will be a great success as a doctor here, and that you were right to leave your country.”

“I am sure of it. Why in my country a doctor is not even allowed a motor-car of his own. Imagine! I shall have several.”

Joe and Abbie left together.

“He’s a good chap. Don’t take too much notice of that remark about cars. Why shouldn’t he want a car? We all set ourself material symbols. That’s his. Perhaps we might not be so superior if we lived in a country where material symbols were also political symbols. Not all good things are done from the right motives. You’re still in the way of thinking people are all black or all white, aren’t you, Abbie?”

“It isn’t such a bad way to be.” Abbie had taken several shocks in this way.

“Except it has little relation to how things are.”

He looked at her. “It’s you I want to help, Abbie. Has it struck you that in all this the biggest puzzle is you?”

Chapter Nine

WHILE ABBIE WAS TRAVELLING TO OXFORD A JOURNEY of another sort was being undertaken. In its way it was not the least of the journeys which was to be made.

Two middle-aged women were in the kitchen of a house in the small town of Thane in north Buckinghamshire. They were standing by the electric stove waiting for the kettle to boil.

“Make it a nice strong cup, Cecilia.”

“I usually do.” The water was poured in. “I should think you could do with a cup. Well, here it is, your first day back, and we’ll say no more about it. Let bygones be bygones.”

“I don’t mind talking about it. I think I’d feel better if I did. I’d like to explain.”

“Drink your tea.”

“You don’t want to listen. You’ve got that hard note in your voice.”

“I don’t think I’ve showed much hardness to you, Mary, collecting you from hospital and all. Some sisters wouldn’t.”

“Yes, I know you’ve been kind. But if you’d let me…”

“I don’t want to know about it. I should think you’d rather keep the details to yourself. Sordid. And gin, too. Stuff we none of us ever touched as girls. What would mother think? Oh, drink the tea. The doctor said you’d got to be built up, so take sugar.” She shook her head. “No! Look I’m changing the subject, aren’t I? Let me change it.”

“Mother didn’t have a son who…”

“Mother had her troubles, she had us, didn’t she? But she didn’t drown them in drink. Oh, drink the tea…”

“The doctor was a nice young man.”

“Tell me, Mary, what did they do to you in hospital? Was it horrible? I’ve heard they’re very brutal with cases like you.”

“Oh they were good to me, good.”

“You’ve forgotten I expect. Your memory’s going. Bound to be. And that reminds me. I told the neighbours you’d had a bad heart attack. After all they knew you’d collapsed in Woolworth’s (I don’t know why you couldn’t have chosen a nice quiet shop), that soon got round, and I couldn’t say you were blind drunk—worse, in an alcoholic coma. So remember, it was your heart.”

“I’ll remember.”

“Well I want you to have a good time now you are here. Get out, see some shows, we’ll go together. I live quite a gay life you know. You’d be all the better if you were taken out of yourself. You want to make some friends. But, of course, you’ll have to get yourself cured, now I’m speaking straight, no one wants a friend who’s liable to be found stretched out like a log and with a suitcase crammed full of old bottles when the police came to open it. That wasn’t very nice for me, was it? I had to come and see it. Would this be your sister, they said, and would this be her bag?”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Oh, I don’t mean to reproach you. But you’ve got to look facts in the face, after all, the same as anyone else.”

“Yes, well I wanted to tell you.”

“Now I’ve said we won’t talk about it.”

“I’ll have some more tea then, thank you, Cecilia.”

“You’re getting a bit more colour back. You looked like a corpse in that hospital. Are you sure you can’t remember what they did to you there? You were unconscious for two days and then they were giving you treatment, so they said, for over a week.”

“They were just nice to me. I’ll have a look at the paper, I think.”

“Oh, you don’t want to see that.”

“Well as a matter of fact I would like to. And you never brought me one all the time I was there although I asked.”

“I had other things to think about.”

Mrs. Mary Barnet sat sipping her tea and reading the paper. Her sister made a slight attempt to take it away but she was in truth a little nervous of Mary, because she suspected a violence in her.,The reader sat quietly drinking and turning the pages without talking.

Cecilia drew a breath of relief. It was going to be all right. “Let’s have a look at that bit if you’ve finished,” she said, putting out a hand.

Mary started to hand it over. Then something caught her eye. “Here, wait a minute.”

“Oh come on.”

But Mrs. Barnet was methodically reading a paragraph which told the story of Kate’s disappearance and said that the police were now looking for a woman who was thought to have got into the same railway carriage with the missing girl. It did not say that Inspector Coffin was searching for her with scepticism, convinced that she existed only in the imagination of John Broadbent.

“You don’t want to read that,” said Cecilia irritably.

“Yes, I do,” said her sister. “And you know why. I was on the train. I remember the girl.”

“Oh it couldn’t have been.”

“It was. I remember. She sat there carrying a little case and she had her gloves and a book on her lap. I spoke to her. I shall have to go to the police.”

She got up and so did her sister.

“Don’t be a fool. You were drunk.”

“No,” said Mary simply, “not then. That came later because I’d seen my son. I wanted to tell you that, but you wouldn’t let me.”

“If you weren’t, they’ll say you were. I can’t let you go. Don’t you see, there’ll be so much publicity, how you were drunk, how you’re always drinking. Don’t be a fool.”

Mrs. Barnet looked at her thoughtfully. “You stopped me seeing those papers last week. You didn’t let me see them on purpose.”

“Well we don’t want everyone to know, I mean the neighbours.” She was crying.

“I shall have to go. Why this girl is missing. And it’s not only that.” Mary read the paper again. It reported concisely the fact that Kate had disappeared eleven days ago. That she had last been seen sitting in a railway carriage waiting for the midday train to depart. No one had seen her since, but the police thought that she had probably disappeared in London.

“It’s not right what it says here. I don’t understand. There’s something very wrong.”

“The neighbours,” said Cecilia with a wail.

“Shut up about the neighbours. You’ve got false values if anyone has. I’m going.” And she pushed her sister aside. “And if I have had something stronger than tea to drink when I come back it’ll be nothing for you to worry about.”

“But you’ll kill yourself.”

“Then you’ll have still less to worry about.”

Mary was putting on her hat and coat. “Pooh, I stink of tea. I let that hospital get me down. Why, I was sorry for myself. I thought I had a lot to put up with. I didn’t know my luck. I was even nearly grateful to you. More fool me. I’m alive, I can talk, eat, breathe, live. And I’m not a stuffed duck like you.”

“Mary,” called her sister.

But it was too late. The door slammed behind Mrs. Barnet and Coffin’s tower of bricks had collapsed.

Inspector Coffin saw a woman with some quality that made her out of the ordinary when she entered his room. She was emaciatedly thin (this was due to her preference for drink rather than solid food), but her skin was clear and had a look of health (this was due to the efforts of the doctor and the nurses in the hospital she had not long left), and her eyes were bright. This was due to anger but Coffin could not know this, although he soon discovered.

“Are you hiding?” she demanded. “I try to see you with some information you’re supposed to be asking for and it’s just like getting into the Kremlin, and about as friendly.”

She sat down in a chair with the air of one who has come to stay now she is here.

Coffin scratched his head and offered her a cigarette. “I’ve been out, you know.” He was being cautious. He distrusted her appearance in the case. It was too opportune. He wondered if she knew John Broadbent. Perjury was not unknown, especially in a murder charge. He didn’t want to accept what he thought she had come to say because his case against John Broadbent was disappearing and he believed in it. He still believed, moreover, that Kate was dead, and was still inclined to believe that her body was lying now in the mortuary.

“I was the woman who was in the train with the girl who’s disappeared.” She did not say ‘dead’ because as far as the public was concerned Kate was still only missing although tongues were beginning to edge round to the word murder.

“Why haven’t you come forward before? This case has had a lot of publicity. You must have seen the newspapers.”

“Well I didn’t. I’ve been in hospital.”

Coffin rang the bell for a constable with pencil and paper for notes. “You’d better tell me all about it.”

After a moment’s pause for thought she repeated to Coffin much what she had told her sister. She had got into the train, she had seen Kate, whom she described. She had even seen John Broadbent, whom she also obligingly described, pat his daughter’s shoulder, check her luggage and wave her good-bye.”

“It’s a pity we didn’t know this before,” said Coffin slowly. He was thinking hard.

“Well I collapsed. In Woolworth’s. You can check on that.”

“We will do.”

She drew a deep breath and looked him firmly in the face. “I’m a drunk. Someone’s going to tell you this soon enough and it might as well be me. I’m a drunk, and the evening after I saw her I was in hospital with toxic alcoholism.”

A tough witness, thought Coffin. Counsel could blow her evidence to the sky. Who’s going to believe her? And he was tempted.

“But I wasn’t drunk then. And I saw her.”

Coffin looked into her eyes desperate with truth and conviction slowly overcame him. He believed her.

“All right then,” he said irritably. “So she said goodbye to her father and he went off. So where did she leave the train then, where did she go? We know she never got to meet the girl at Ash Hills.”

“But that’s just it,” said Mary Barnet. “I saw them. I saw the two girls. I saw them meet each other and kiss.”

Chapter Ten

“I DON’T THINK I WANT TO REMEMBER,” SAID DARCY. “You can’t ask me to remember what I don’t.”

“Won’t,” corrected her mother sharply.

She was flushed and almost in tears. It was quite clear to Coffin that she had no control over her daughter and that there was friction between them. At the same time he could see that Mrs. Kent held Darcy in deep affection.

“When you were a little girl you always used to tell me everything.”

“She isn’t a little girl now,” Coffin pointed out dryly.

Darcy herself was sitting rigidly in one corner of the big sofa by the window. The angularity and awkwardness of adolescence, usually in her case masked by assurance, spread over her like a rash and made her look younger and at the same time more resolute than Coffin had remembered. He had not really observed her very sharply before. Then she had been someone who had failed to meet Kate, someone with a negative part to play in the affair, someone to whom nothing really happened. Now the position was altered and his whole picture of the disappearance of Kate was being radically revised.

On the way to Buckinghamshire, which does not take long in a swift police car urged on by an anxious man, he had counted over to himself the problems that faced him. At the head of all stood the statement that Kate Broadbent was gone and he had to find her dead or alive. Branching out from this was his belief that he had found her already in the body from Halfpenny Creek. But John Broadbent refused to accept the body as that of his daughter and the police pathologist had pointed out that there were discrepancies between Kate’s vital statistics and those of this dead girl. The problem of the stained and dirty clothes which had first led him to Fieldlands he put aside for the moment as being a subsidiary question.

He had also to understand the position of Abbie; superficially she seemed on the periphery of the affair, but he felt uneasily aware that she played a much greater part in the story that he had yet grasped. Where did she come in, this strange child? He was still happily ignorant of the miasma of strange happenings which Abbie had detected about her and about which she had formed her own obsessive theory. He knew Courcy Street and Creevey Buildings so well that had she perhaps told him all these things he would have seen the solution straight away. But Abbie the alien, the puzzled, the almost lost, kept this part to herself in fear.

But the question biting most sharply into Coffin’s mind at the present was how a girl who was supposed never to have arrived had in fact been seen to arrive, and to be greeted by a kiss from the very girl who had started the story of her disappearance.

“There are too many girls in this case,” he told himself grimly as he watched Darcy’s face.

“Oh come on, miss,” he said. “We won’t eat you. No one’s accusing you of anything. Considering how you led us up the garden we’re all being remarkably kind.”

There was still no answer.

“Come on now, we’ve got someone who actually saw you meeting Kate Broadbent.” He let this sink in, determined he would get the truth out of Darcy, then said, “If you want to tell me that this witness has made a mistake then you should have said it straight out, see? By hanging back like this you leave us no alternative but to believe she did see what she says she saw. You met Kate, you kissed her, and you went off together.” He stood up and glowered down on Darcy. “All right then, where is she now?”

Darcy edged a little further into the sofa. “If she was a mouse she’d go down the crack,” thought Coffin, but he hardened his heart. He had seen girls in distress before. He thought of the girl whose body had swayed and rolled in the river and he continued to stare at Darcy with cold eyes.

The room was very warm and Coffin began to fidget in the heat. He wasn’t used to the luxury of so much heat. He decided it must come from central heating because the small pretty log fire was more decorative than hot and could by no means have provided this tropical warmth. He looked round and saw a metal grille directly behind him. He could feel the warm air on his cheek. The furnishing of the room was as lavish as the heating. The floors were waxed and on them rested thick mustard yellow rugs, the chairs and the sofa were covered in a paler shade of yellow tweed and the curtains were a striking chartreuse silk. In addition there were one or two pieces of furniture in dull light woods far removed from the more usual walnut, mahogany and oak. It was easy to see that in order to qualify for inclusion in this house a piece of furniture had to be both expensive and unusual but in spite of this the general effect could have been duplicated in the pages of any smart magazine. The most impressive thing about the room was that it was all absolutely new. Nothing in the room could be more than a year old. Money had been poured out heedlessly and not so long ago.

The thought of the money the room represented reminded Coffin what he had always known, that Fieldlands was a very expensive school. If the money Kate Broadbent would inherit would pay the fees then it must be worth having indeed.

In a polite voice he asked Darcy’s mother if she would mind leaving them alone for about ten minutes. She got up at once but she looked worried.

“I won’t eat her,” he said gently. “But she’s got to talk to me. You can see that.”

“You’d better tell me, Darcy,” he said when the door closed. “You met Kate all right, didn’t you?” He took a deep breath and counted ten while he waited for an answer.

Then she nodded.

“Well, you’d better go on a bit farther, hadn’t you? What happened next? And where is she?”

“I don’t know,” whispered Darcy. “She hasn’t let me know. She said she would.”

Now that her composure was cracked she talked nervously and jerkily; she was not far from tears.

“Kate wanted to get off on her own, her father didn’t bother her much but he asked questions. We’ve got our own life to live, Kate and I, we hated all the questioning and the nagging. Love your family, people say,” said Darcy bitterly. “But supposing they don’t love you? Then they feel like an enemy always spying on you. That’s how Kate felt.”

“Is it?” said Coffin, eyeing her questioningly. “And you too,” he thought to himself.

“We meant to escape, after all we had each other.”

“So you did,” observed Coffin quietly.

“And Kate had some money, of course she couldn’t really touch it till she was eighteen, but we meant to go on the stage.”

“Did you indeed?” said Coffin surprised, for once.

“And that was why Kate had to go off. She had a contact!” said Darcy grandly. “Someone who could help. We were going to keep ’the enemy’ completely in the dark.”

“They were out of this world, the pair of them,” thought Coffin sadly.

He saw Darcy square her shoulders in the way Abbie had observed to be a habit.

Then her face puckered up and looked little and old.

“But I loved her. You’ll never understand. People like you never understand. I loved her.”

What are the forces behind a relationship of this sort? Coffin asked himself. Fear first perhaps, fear of the unknown which turns to the familiar; and then pride, which clings desperately to its own identity, but possibly, he thought simply, it came about often because it was the easiest, because the want was there and the alternative did not readily offer itself.

“And that’s where Kate was going. She never meant to stay with us at all. After I met her she was going off on her own, and so she did. But she was going to write and she hasn’t.”

“What were you going to tell your parents when Kate didn’t come?”

“Oh I was going to tell my parents she had cancelled at the last minute, they never notice much, they’d have believed it, and of course I was going to let Kate’s father think she was here. She meant to be back in a day or two.”

“You were frightened, weren’t you?”

Darcy flushed. “Kate was so odd. I lost my head. And my mother got frightened and telephoned Mr. Broadbent. It was all up then.”

“So you tried to cover up for Kate as well as you could by telling this story that she never arrived?”

“Yes, that’s it,” said Darcy with relief.

“You could have thought of a better one,” Coffin told her with feeling. “And this contact was nameless?”

“I think she once used the name Peter. But I’m not sure if it wasn’t a joke.”

“Well you know it was a man?”

“I think so,” Darcy seemed undecided. “I do think so. It would be, wouldn’t it?”

“Probably,” said Coffin thoughtfully. “And where was she going to meet him?”

“Birmingham, I think. We’re on the line for there you see. She said Birmingham.”

“But you didn’t believe her? You don’t seem to have trusted her altogether, do you?”

Darcy looked away. Her lips set in that close line that Coffin was beginning to know.

“You know, I don’t think you two planned this very carefully,” said Coffin. He was angry. He had stampeded Darcy into a confession but he had an irritating feeling that it was only a partial confession and that he would not have got even this had it not been made necessary by the evidence of Mrs. Barnet. The girl Kate must have quite a hold on this one he thought, considering how quiet she’s kept.

“You could have saved everyone quite a lot of worry if you’d come out with this earlier,” he pointed out.

Darcy looked at him in silence for a few minutes. Then she said, as if to a very stupid child: “But you know she has disappeared now.”

He told Mrs. Kent what he had learnt; then he sent her in to her daughter.

She rushed into speech. “Oh poor little Kate, how unhappy she must have been at home.” (He did not tell her that apparently her own daughter had been equally unhappy. She would find that out.) “She has seemed so wretched lately. And I knew she wasn’t happy about her stepmother. We’re so lucky there as a family, we all like each other. And then of course new people always influenced Kate. She was very much taken up with that American girl, and that sort of thing is often not a good influence is it? But there, she’s only a child. I am so relieved that you think she’s safe and well.”

“Alive anyway,” said Coffin grimly. “It begins to look like it.”

“I must go and speak to Darcy. She’ll be in such a state. Of course she’s been so naughty too. And I mustn’t pass that over. She has no excuse. We’re such a family.”

“She’s lucky to have a mother,” Coffin told her gravely, watching the woman’s blue eyes and anxious flushed face.

“I do try to watch over her.”

Coffin said good-bye. He was departing with his mind even more confused than on his arrival. He put on his coat and absently regarded a cupboard in the hall. It was as flamboyant as the rest of the furniture he had seen.

“Nice wood,” he said.

“Oh, that cabinet,” said Mrs. Kent. “It is nice, isn’t it? It was the first thing we bought when we were married.”

She watched him out of the house.

Coffin walked to the gate which was large and ornamental and also new like the rest of the house. Then he thought of something. He turned back and went into the house.

The woman and the girl were standing staring at each other. Both were in tears.

‘Scene in progress,’ thought Coffin. Aloud he said to Darcy, “That story about the theatrical contact. You didn’t really believe it, did you?”

Darcy studied his face as if seeking the answer there. “No,” she said eventually. “No, I didn’t really believe it.”

“But you believe she went to meet somebody?” This time Darcy nodded without any hesitation.

Birmingham knew nothing of Kate Broadbent; she had never been seen or heard of there. “She wouldn’t be, of course,” grumbled Coffin. The days were ticking away. “Who would remember by now? She was totally unmemorable in looks.”

But Birmingham after a bit produced a body that it thought might be Kate’s so Coffin, armed with photographs and measurements, went up for a preliminary look. There was no point in distressing John Broadbent again. He had already dredged his mind of all the possible information about his daughter that could help and he had said again and again that as far as he knew his daughter had no friends in Birmingham. “Which means absolutely nothing,” Coffin pointed out to anyone who would listen, “as we already know.”

The Christmas holiday was very close when he made his trip to Birmingham and in a more cheerful mood he would have enjoyed the decorated shops and crowded streets. Like all Londoners he found it difficult to take any other city seriously and continued to believe inwardly that they must be villages really. But Birmingham forced belief upon him.

He made his way to the hospital which was on the outskirts of the city and lay in pleasant open grounds.

“Well, show me the body,” he demanded.

“Not dead yet,” said the doctor who greeted him. “With any luck she won’t be, either. She’s been in some sort of car accident, we think. Can’t be sure as she was found lying in a ditch unconscious and so far hasn’t been able to speak to us. We’re trying hard to trace her family but so far we haven’t succeeded. That’s why we got hold of you. Fits in with the particulars you’ve been circulating about the Broadbent girl.”

“Is she very badly hurt?”

“Badly concussed. Probably going to be all right though.”

They went into a small cubicle curtained off from the main ward. Coffin approached the bed.

He stood there considering the girl who lay there limply, breathing heavily through a bruised and swollen nose. She had straight black hair falling back from a white freckled face. ‘With that particular colouring,’ he thought, ’the eyes ought to be hazel when open.’

“No, it’s not her. Physically they have a lot in common but facially there is no resemblance at all.”

“Sorry to have got you all this way for nothing then.

We’re pretty keen to find out who she is ourselves, naturally.”

“Well, she’s not Kate Broadbent. Wrong social class to begin with. This girl’s been in a factory. Worked hard too, poor little beggar. Look at her hands. Probably Irish, although that’s just a guess. I hope you identify her.”

“She’ll identify herself when she comes round, poor child.”

“Try the hotels,” suggested Coffin. “Or the factories.”

Over coffee in the doctor’s room, which was decorated with holly and ivy for Christmas, Coffin was thoughtful. “Strange,” he said, “what a difference a fraction of an inch here and there can make. All the information you sent to us about this girl here tallied with what we know of Kate Broadbent, her age, her height, her colouring, yet all can be set aside because of the minute differences in the placing of the eyes, the width of the nose and the shape of the cheek.”

“Yes,” said the doctor, “I know what you mean; everything else can fluctuate and change—the skin, the hair, the weight and the height. But these other things remain constant.”

Coffin took his departure. “A waste of time,” he decided, “except for that chap being so decent.”

He had still one further place to call. The Birmingham police had discovered that a girl who could have been Kate had been seen in Birmingham with a young man on Snow Hill Station. They thought they knew the young man.

A polite plain-clothes detective took Coffin to the lad’s home. It was a tiny back-to-back house in the centre of the city near the fish market. There was no sign of actual poverty about the house though.

“All wage earners,” said the local detective. “Plenty of cash, but the lord knows how they spend it.”

The door was opened by the boy’s mother, a youngish woman dressed with great smartness in a tight black skirt and jersey with four choking rows of pearls and big drop ear-rings. She was holding a mirror and a lipstick in her great red hands and she went on with her make-up while she was talking.

“Oh he’s away to his job,” she said, drawing her lips back in a grin to get the effect of her lipstick. “And I’m just off to mine.”

“Where does he work?”

“At the Beef Stew Restaurant, the other side of the Bull Ring. It’s a very classy place for city gents. I’m going there myself. I’m the chief assistant waitress. Just wait while I get my coat and we’ll go together.”

The detective was confiding when she had gone back into the house (she had first carefully shut the door, leaving them on the doorstep), “I know this boy. I won’t say he’s ever done anything wrong because he hasn’t, not that we’ve caught him out in anyway, but he’s been around when others have. He’s too big for his boots.”

Coffin was tolerant. He also had been too big for his boots.

The woman returned, wearing a short square coat of some shaggy fur and a scarf rolled in a turban round her head. Talking cheerfully she led them to the Beef Stew. She seemed to bear them no ill will for chasing her son but to be grateful for some company. Coffin wondered what her life was.

The Beef Stew restaurant was in a basement underneath a row of shops. On one side was a notice saying ‘Cold Beef Stew* (“Shouldn’t care for that,” murmured Coffin) and on the other a notice saying ‘Hot Beef Stew ’.

The boy was summoned by his mother and came running up the stairs from even deeper levels below the street. He was thin, wiry, and apprehensive. He gave the local man a hostile look. When they told him that they wanted to know if he had been at the railway station with a girl he screwed up his face angrily.

“I know you’re out to get me.”

“We shan’t get you for anything you haven’t done.”

“You aren’t fussy.”

“That’s not true.”

Coffin intervened. “Look, I know and you know that he knows it isn’t true” (the boy muttered something), “but the main thing is to find out who he was there with.”

“A friend,” said the boy promptly. “A girl.”

“That we know. What’s her name?”

They took a long time to get this, but eventually Coffin was told that it was Barbara. The surname was refused. It crossed Coffin’s mind that the boy did not know it.

“You wouldn’t know her anyway and I don’t want you bothering her.”

But Coffin was patient and eventually learned that this mysterious girl lived in London, was older than the boy (who looked about eighteen, but was probably younger), and that his mother didn’t like her.

“I gave her a ring.” Coffin raised his eyebrows. “Just for Christmas,” said the boy hastily, “only for Christmas.”

The local detective laughed. The boy’s face lengthened into long thin lines.

“I gave her the ring for reasons that had nothing to do with getting engaged or getting married. I gave her the ring because I loved her. And she took it because she didn’t love me. I haven’t seen her since. Probably never will. Now are you satisfied?”

“He’s not tough yet,” thought Coffin watching him, “but a few more knocks like that and he will be.” But it was possible this girl was Kate so Coffin produced a photograph and showed it.

“Was this the girl?”

The worry cleared from the boy’s face. “No,” he said at once, “not her. Oh it’s a bit like, the eyes and the nose, but the look is all wrong really.” He drew a battered little photograph from his pocket. Coffin saw that at some point someone had stabbed at it savagely with a pencil and then tried to erase the damage. He took it gently. The face had a superficial resemblance to Kate, enough to explain why it had been thought to be her, but it was less forceful, meaner, and yet prettier.

“You won’t talk to Mum?” asked the boy as they parted. Coffin shook his head. “I tell you one thing,” went on the boy, “about that girl in your photograph. You won’t ever find she goes around with boys.”

Coffin looked at him doubtfully.

“I’m right you know. I can see it in the photograph.”

Coffin left for London with the feeling that his day had produced nothing of importance, but the truth was that he had met with and passed over one fact of great significance.

Once back in Courcy Street Coffin felt that he would have to start his search for Kate from another angle. He could no longer scratch along the surface following pointers like the word Birmingham, but he must plunge deeper below and try to understand Kate herself. He must try to see the world from behind her eyes. Then he might discover when and where she had gone.

Pursuing this aim he went first to her family. The Broadbents’ first wild apprehensions of the early days of Kate’s disappearance had faded into a resolute and dogged bearing of each day as it came. Mrs. Broadbent, always edging towards hypochondria, had retired into a nursing home, but even there she had to bear her daily burden of responsibility towards the girl she had not loved or at any rate not loved enough. John Broadbent’s was a more obvious tragedy, and he carried it obviously. He had lost weight, was untidy and abstracted, and it was possible that he was drinking. He was always a man whose emotions could be clearly seen, his loves and affections, hates and prides would always be big and bold and exactly what they appeared to be. There was no subtlety in him.

As Coffin looked back at what Kate’s life had been in this household it seemed to him that she had been a misfit. She had seemed to recognise it herself and probably her parents had done also. Possibly this was why they had sent her away to Fieldlands. “But no,” John Broadbent told him unhappily, “she chose it herself. She wanted to keep her distance from us. That was her way of doing it.”

As a child Kate had been brilliantly clever, but these powers had faded as she grew into adolescence. “She couldn’t stay the course,” Coffin told himself sadly. “Perhaps that is what lies behind all this.”

He thought that rooted in a happy home Kate could have withstood everything that beset her as she grew up, but the Broadbent home had not always been happy, and Kate had bitterly resented her father’s second marriage, although it had brought him happiness. He enjoyed ministering to his almost professionally sick wife. He had found his first wife, and perhaps Kate, too, altogether too healthy for him.

Coffin remembered how her father had repeated the phrase about ‘keeping her distance’. He had said it again and again as if it rankled. “She kept her distance,” he said. “She went to this school, she made her friends, the girl Darcy, and now this American, but what they meant to her or she to them I don’t know. There was a blankness in the face she turned to us.”

“There is one thing, however,” he said as Coffin prepared to depart. “She kept a diary. I can give it to you.” He got it from a locked drawer. “I’ve had a quick look at it. As far as I can see there is nothing in it at all, it’s hardly even kept up, but for what it’s worth I give it to you. You may make something of it.” The book was a thick square blue leather volume of the sort meant to cover five years. Coffin took it eagerly and put it in his pocket.

As well as talking to her family Coffin listened to the gossip of Courcy Street about Kate. Courcy Street always professed to know more about any scandal or piece of news than the parties concerned. It usually did, too. In Creevey Buildings they told him that they were not at all surprised about Kate: there had been portents. Three weeks ago old Mrs. French had succumbed at last to the illness which had been threatening her for the last eighty years, that was one death; two weeks ago young Peter Allen had fallen down the hold of the ship he was working on and broken his back, he wasn’t dead yet, but the prognosis was bad, that was two deaths; and things always went in threes, didn’t they?

The housewives of Courcy Street, Mrs. Flood and even the pale tense figure of Abbie reinforced this impression.

Kate was dead, was the verdict.

The Inspector went home early and, as his mother put his supper before him, took the diary out of his pocket and studied it. Soon it became clear to him that John Broadbent had not described it quite fairly. Kate had made no attempt to write it up regularly, but when she had filled in a day she had done so in detail and with interest.

“Don’t get kipper on that book,” commanded his mother.

“I’m thinking.”

He let his food get cold as he turned the pages.

September Third.

Term starts today. Only in a small way though with a few seniors arriving early to get settled. Darcy and I are promoted to this on account of ‘a good sense of responsibility’ (they little know!) Last year I was disappointed in Fieldlands. I suppose I had expected too much of the place because in spite of it being everything that Courcy Street is not, i.e. liberal, cultured, gentle and quiet, it didn’t seem quite what I wanted. I’m a streak wild I think and everyone at Fieldlands is so good. All the same my plan to come here was right. They are happier without me at home, although they’d rather die than admit it. (Why should I think of anyone dying for me?) But after all why shouldn’t they be happier without me? I can’t blame them, although I feel a bit sad sometimes. I mean to try and keep my distance, it’ll be easier all round.

September Twenty-third.

Darcy is full of plans. She has a high opinion of me. So have I. I can’t quite see us on the stage, although I don’t tell Darcy that. We practise our act as if we believed in it, though. You’d think we really could read each other’s thoughts. So we can a little, I believe. Is this significant?

There were no more entries for September and Coffin finished his supper, which under his mother’s ironical eye he now saw to be ham and not kipper. Then he started on October.

October Third.

Darcy’s a good friend. But I wonder if I’m quite fair to her. Probably not, I’m afraid. We have quite ghastly quarrels sometimes. Still usually it’s so nice being with her. United we stand divided we fall. We practise a lot.

I’ve made a new friend, one of the very nicest, an American. She’s odd, though, I can’t help thinking. Still so am I,

October Fifth.

Meeting this American has changed my ideas a lot. I’d like to be an archaeologist, I think. This won’t be popular in all quarters, I’m afraid, but it is my money.

From my point of view I suppose it’s a good thing it was left to me with the Bank as trustee, although I do intend to be generous with it. I can’t do much for Dad at the moment the way it is tied up short of dying and letting him scoop the lot. Business is not so good lately Dad says. This I can believe.

Not everyone understands what a complicated thing a family is, but I am beginning to. What I am to Kathy (funny that my step should have nearly the same name as me. What would Freud say?) and what Kathy is to me and Dad is to both of us is all so bound up together and mingled that it is all part of the same thing. I’ve put that badly, but what I mean is expressed in a phrase I read somewhere, “No man is an island.” I like that.

October Twenty-ninth.

The trip to London was fun. All my trips have been fun. I am working hard, though, because after all I have to think of my future and I am ambitious. I’m wondering if Abbie really likes Darcy. Understandable.

I wonder about Fieldlands. In spite of its air of being unconventional it is madly conventional really. The truth is that Fieldlands is for nice straightforward, honest people who take themselves seriously, but I’m beginning to feel that I am none of these things. Not straightforward (I feel great twisty depths in me. Can depths be twisty?) only tolerably honest (I’ve never been put to much test, I’m afraid, but I’m a liar), and certainly not nice. Not nice at all. Darcy says we are different. And by the standards of say Courcy Street we certainly are.

There was nothing much for November. Only one entry.

November Fifteenth.

Fieldlands had a celebration today because it had been a school for twenty-five years.

December contained one last entry.

December Second.

It’s odd, but I’m almost beginning to be afraid. When you’ve fancied yourself a free agent it is uncomfortable to discover that you are part of someone else’s machine. But I won’t do it for that way madness lies. It’s all been the biggest shock. I see I’ve been so stupid. I go on making my plans for Christmas and my life almost as if I believed in them, but the truth is I am playing a part.

The picture of Kate that came from Coffin’s reading was a different one from that formed by listening to people talking about her. No one had used the words kindly or thoughtful of her, but this was what sprang from the pages. She was a girl who had cared.

All the same he put the book aside with a depressed feeling. He had made up his mind. He agreed with Courcy Street. Kate was dead.

He had also come to another conclusion. He accepted what the boy in Birmingham had said. Kate had not gone to Birmingham to meet a young man.

Some hours later Coffin walked down Halfpenny Road into Courcy Street. By about ten in the evening the street was very quiet. He passed shuttered shops, curtained windows with lights behind and bus stops with no one waiting by them. Many windows had lighted Christmas trees standing in them and to Coffin, who could remember the Christmases when depression and war had sent the ships away from the river behind Courcy Street and darkened the windows, there was something gay and heartening in these mass-produced symbols of prosperity. “Why not Christmas trees?” he asked himself.

At the bus stop nearest to Creevey Buildings a woman stepped from a southbound bus and dropped her tightly packed brown handbag at his feet.

“Hello,” he said. “Broken anything?”

“Oh no, Inspector Coffin, nothing thank you.”

It was the Lady Visitor from the hospital. A plump well-dressed cheerful person whose mild manners masked a resolute nature, she kept a foot in both worlds. She was as much at home playing whist with old Mrs. West in Creevey Buildings as she was playing bridge with gay old Lady Passey from Chelsea who was in hospital having a rest cure after persisting in imagining herself young enough for winter sports at an age when indoor sports (she was fond of them too) were more fitting. Lady Passey was an old friend of Coffin who had once helped her daughter and granddaughter in a crisis. The Lady Visitor was well known to Coffin who summoned her help in all the crises which could afflict the women of Courcy Street. She came into use somewhere between a doctor and a police officer. She was relentlessly equable. None of the stories poured out to her shocked her, she refused to be shocked. This was sometimes irritating to the unlucky story teller who very often wanted her to be shocked. But “Yes dear if that’s what happened then that’s what happened. Now let’s see what we can do to tidy things up,” was her almost invariable reaction to the sagas of doom, violence and twisted relationships that were told to her. Coffin was terrified of her. She was aided in the domination she achieved over her far from docile patients by a remarkable characteristic. She was able to maintain an unwinking blue-eyed stare which never flickered. Some of the more superstitious of her clients had been known to murmur uneasily of the evil eye and one sailor, who had served in the Mediterranean a good deal, went so far as to say a prayer before facing her.

Coffin helped her sort out the numerous bags and parcels she was carrying and walked a little way down Courcy Street with her.

“You got away from that woman in Lower Prince Imperial Street who was making that song and dance?”

“Oh yes, Inspector. Once I’d convinced her that she wasn’t having a baby, only a bad attack of indigestion, she was no trouble at all.”

“Rather an optimist, wasn’t she? At seventy-one?”

“Oh she has a very low I. Q.”

“She must have.”

They walked for some steps in silence. Then: “I suppose you’re looking for this poor, girl Kate Broadbent?”

Coffin nodded. “Any hope that you know where she is?”

She shook her head. “No. I’d have been round to see you at once if I’d heard anything. I hear a fair amount of gossip in my job, of course. I can’t help it. If I didn’t chat with them a bit they’d think I was being superior. Besides after a time you do get interested. I have to know when to keep my tongue quiet of course.”

“I’ve never asked you to betray a confidence.”

“Inspector, you know very well you’ve asked me to do everything, legal and illegal, in your time; and will again, I dare say.”

She looked worried. “The trouble is that the things they say may be right. All the same it’s taking the child’s character away. And she’s only a young girl. You know what Creevey Buildings is like, the whole of Courcy Street for that matter, they don’t take kindly to strangers. They know Kate, she’s local. They don’t know the other one and so they think harm of her.”

“I get you,” said Coffin. “I know the world.”

“Oh you know what I mean?” There was relief in her voice. “I really couldn’t bring myself to pass on the things they’ve been saying. But as you know…” She went on more happily, “Lady Passey sent you her love. She’s never forgotten you. She thinks you’re so manly.”

Coffin squared his shoulders and lookecd pleased. “I bet she’s not changed.”

“Well, do you know, she has. She’s not dyeing her hair any more. You see her grand-daughter Perdita is going to have a baby and Lady Passey thinks that although a grandmother can have dyed hair it won’t do for a great-granny. So she’s letting her hair go white. And I really think it will look quite charming because her eyes are so blue and she’s thinking of having just a tiny deep blue beauty spot tattooed on her left cheek.”

“Really?” said Coffin; Lady Passey always took his breath away. “She’ll still look quite striking won’t she?”

He waved good-bye to his companion who murmured that she was just off to play whist with Mrs. West. “She can’t sleep, poor old thing.” Coffin pointed out that Mrs. West cheated. “Oh my dear, I know she does. Why shouldn’t she? But I cheat too.” And she trotted off.

Coffin walked slowly down Courcy Street behind her until she was opposite Creevey Buildings. He looked up to the top flat and up to Abbie’s lighted uncurtained window.

He saw a figure pass in front of the window and blot out the light for a second.

“I wonder what they are saying about you in Courcy . Street?” he said, rather sadly, because he thought he knew.

Chapter Eleven

BEHIND HER UNCURTAINED WINDOW ABBIE WAS AFRAID. She was moving in a world she did not understand. She was the outsider in a complex group which knew its own rules and she did not. She was Gulliver among the Houyhnhnms; she was Samson in Gaza; she remembered that Joe had called her Alice, she was down the rabbit hole all right, and the animals had turned nasty.

Every morning she woke early and lay in bed, wondering if this was really happening to her Abbie Foret, aged twenty-three, white, a Bachelor of Arts, a girl of education and background, and apparently also a coward, a fool, and a self deceiver. As she lay there she listened to the rain dripping outside, for the cold blue weather which had blessed her trip to Oxford had changed into a muggy damp. It would be a green Christmas. Where is Kate? she wondered. And where are Miss Toll and Mrs. Belhatchet? Is it wet where they are too? Although she woke soon she usually lay in bed until late so that Creevey Buildings was quiet with the children at school and the women doing their housework before she rose.

She had begun to be aware once more of small events happening. But whereas before such events had been odd but not unpleasing, her flowers had seemed endowed with mysterious life, her flat was kept clean, her brass well polished, now it seemed as if the whole process was reversed. The change had crept in imperceptibly. A pool of muddy water before her door, her milk bottle knocked over and broken, her loaf of bread dabbled in the mud, these were part of a series of such events. At first she took these things for a run of tiresome accidents just as before she had taken the earlier events as luck. “I suppose I’m just naturally dumb,” she told herself. “Things have to get up and hit me before I take them in.”

Each day it was something different, there was a versatile mind behind the misfortunes that dogged her. Abbie would clean up the mess, take her precautions with the bread, the milk and her letters so that this particular accident would not happen to her again, and there would be something else. The most difficult time of all was a time of peace, a lull when nothing happened and when life seemed normal. But Abbie knew it was not normal; it was just lurking, waiting for her to relax before striking her again.

Sometimes as she sat over her morning coffee, which she now took stronger and more often, she would try to make a reasonable picture of what was happening. At this stage there seemed to her to be three alternatives.

She had a poltergeist. She had read about such things and in a certain frame of mind this seemed the most likely answer to all the strange things that were happening to her. And because she was still obsessed with Defoe and death and Journal of the Plague Year, she had half begun to think that it had something to do with Defoe, or at any rate someone who had lived when he did. Then sometimes she thought it was the ghosts of Miss Toll and Mrs. Belhatchet that were troubling her, although she wasn’t even sure after all if they were dead. She felt convinced, too, that Miss Toll’s spirit would be neat, tidy, and well intentioned, whereas this present ghost was dirty, nasty, and unkind.

In other moods she rejected this, put all thoughts of ghosts and Defoe away and was strictly rational. She knew that all that was troubling her came from Courcy Street. Possibly from Creevey Buildings itself. They must hate her very much, she decided. She had obviously offended them in some obscure way. No doubt it had been some stupid interference in their customs which she herself had hardly noticed. She knew that laissez-faire was in many ways the creed of Courcy Street.

But against this theory was the fact that Creevey Buildings remained obstinately kind, and even Courcy Street seemed polite and welcoming when Abbie met it. The kindness seemed genuine, too, not hypocrisy or acting.

Even now Mrs. Flood was banging on the door with some breakfast for Abbie. The chink of the cup and saucer was quite audible.

“Here you are, my dear,” she said when Abbie sleepily let her in. “Just you pop back into bed and take this nice hot tea and bit of buttered toast. You don’t eat enough, you know, I’m always telling you. I can’t think what your Mum would say if she was to see you, you know. You’re as skinny as a rabbit.” She put a jersey round Abbie’s shoulders and lit the electric fire. “Not that you have to worry at your age, you still look pretty.” Abbie smiled. She knew Mrs. Flood was trying to cheer her up.

“I never drank tea before I came to England, Mrs. Flood, but now I like it.”

“That’s right, dear, of course you do. I’ll just give the room a bit of a tidy up for you.”

“Oh don’t trouble, Mrs. Flood.”

“No trouble, my dear. As long as I don’t get down on my poor old knees (for then I couldn’t get up again) I’m like a two-year-old.” Abbie knew now what Mrs. Flood reminded her of: it was a kind hospital nurse tending a patient who was incurably ill. The old lady was moving round the room tidying books into piles and hanging up clothes.

There had been a change in Abbie. She had arrived in England a neat girl with rather precise orderly ways. Her own mother had been known to say that she was fussy about the way her possessions were placed about her room and how her dresses were arranged in her cupboards. This meticulousness was reflected in her whole personality. She was a careful thinker who liked her thoughts and emotions to settle into neat little shapes. It was characteristic of her that her chosen work should be the collecting and collating of hundreds of tiny details to be fitted meticulously into a work of scholarship. She herself knew that when her work was finished it would be careful and accurate, but without a wide imaginative sweep.

But since she arrived in England her imagination seemed to have got the upper hand and was daily increasing in power. At the same time her tidy ways were being dropped. For some time past her room had been excessively muddled with clothes, books and papers in heaps as she dropped them. Her once well ordered procession of meals had degenerated into a perpetual picnic, as Mrs. Flood had observed.

Even more significant was her attitude to her letters. Her letters from home were no longer treasured and preserved; lately they had been hardly answered and the last two of all lay unopened and unread.

Abbie herself was still spruce, but disorder was creeping up on her appearance also. Her hair was not as shining as it had been when she arrived, although it was longer and oddly paler. She spent a lot of time sleeping during the day because she always seemed tired or was at any rate willing to blot out the disorder which surrounded her with swamping sleep. She still went to the British Museum and Dr. Williams’ Library, but irregularly, and she had achieved such a withdrawn and off-hand manner that her fellow students gave her odd looks. They did not appreciate the sudden outbursts of loquacity which varied this detachment and they were downright alarmed at her absent-mindedness which seemed to make her only too likely to step straight out into a stream of traffic without warning or off the edge of a Tube platform.

Abbie herself was aware of the powers which seemed loosed within her, but she felt unable to resume control. It seemed as though the rigid mould in which she had hitherto confined herself was being melted and there was nothing she could do about it. She had cast herself for the part of a self-controlled, intelligent, orderly young woman, but the part was gradually being wrested from her. She herself traced this, in as far as she was able to do so, to her deep worry over Miss Toll and Mrs. Belhatchet and Kate. She did not recognise this as a symptom rather than a cause, although she had a dim perception that perhaps it had all started earlier in that business at home about which she preferred to forget.

She watched Mrs. Flood over the tea cup. The old thing seemed friendly enough and probably was. She scowled slightly as a pile of her papers and notes fell to the ground. Without surprise she saw that the book into which Mrs. Flood was shovelling them so happily was Journal of the Plague Year. So that was in the bedroom now was it? Itinerant again, eh? “I’ll burn that book,” she muttered fiercely.

Then she stiffened. “What’s that?” she said pointing.

“What’s what, dear?”

“That filth on the coat you’re holding. Horrible. Someone’s put it there to torment me.”

Mrs. Flood looked surprised. “I don’t know what you are talking about. That is I can see what you mean, but it’s nothing like that, my dear, see, it’s just a streak of mud. You must have leaned against something. Look, I’m brushing it off.”

Their eyes met. One pair bright and young and terrified and the other knowledgeable, old and anxious.

So this brought Abbie to her third alternative: that she was going out of her mind. Nothing had been objective, it was all entirely inside herself. She was mad.

Later that morning Abbie put on her coat and set out to find Joe. She was driven by the horrors in her own mind. Either she was obsessed or she was haunted Either way she was invaded.

It struck her that she seemed constantly to be tracking this young man down and she smiled wryly. This also was contrary to her usual habits. She remembered the young archaeologist; she had certainly not made a line for him in her earlier trouble, but then he would not have been much help. Joe was like a rock; a British rock, the rock of Gibraltar maybe. She recalled that she was carrying round in her pocket a letter from the archaeologist. She had had it for days without opening it. Sitting in the bus she tore it open languidly and read it. It contained little news that she wanted to hear, although she would have enjoyed it once, and she read it cursorily.

“Fergy is getting married” it said, “and Sherwood and Lydia already are. Everyone seems to be getting married. Not me, of course, and presumably not you so far. You haven’t changed, Abbie, not for the last ten years, which is ten years too long in one of your age. Loosen up a bit, will you?” She read on, “About the little chair I gave you. Glad you like it. But it’s funny you should ask. I’m not sure if you ought to have it. I found it in a junk shop last time I was over” (the young man was now painfully digging a site in Asia Minor) “and thought you might like it. They told me it was a copy, but the more I think about it the more I feel sure that it was not a copy, but the original in which case it ought to be in a museum. To explain: they told me that it was a little replica of a rocking chair found in a plague pit in London. One wonders how they got it.”

Abbie put the letter back in her pocket. Coincidence? She did not believe in coincidence. She felt very cold. The woman pressed next to her in the seat looked at her curiously and then stared straight ahead as if not anxious to look again.

Joe spent his vacation in a hostel for students near Victoria Station. It was gay and clean and cheap. The only real drawback was the noise which was considerable what with traffic at the front of the house, trains at the back and young men running up and down the stairs inside. There were silence hours for students, but unfortunately these did not affect the traffic. Joe had a room to himself in the vacations because he had a lot of work to do. Otherwise quite a lot of people shared rooms. Next door to Joe lived a young actor called Anthony. They were close friends and Anthony had listened to many of Joe’s solemn (Joe could be very solemn) disquisitions on life, learning and Abbie. There had been a good deal of Abbie lately. Anthony listened gracefully, hearing about one word in ten because he was always mentally rehearsing his latest part, and was in any case preoccupied with girl troubles of his own. He inclined his rather long neck towards Joe and let him talk. At intervals he would say: “She is a nice girl, Joe.” (Not pretty, though, was his reserved judgement) or “Quite right, Joe” or “That’s a boy, Joe.” Nothing more was really required of him.

He was with Joe when Abbie arrived this time. He got up quickly and still being The Obliging Friend murmured something about making some coffee and departed. He had seen Abbie’s face.

“Portrait of Medusa,” he muttered to himself as he hopped down the stairs. “Or do I mean of her victims? Something frozen anyway. Hello there, Paul, did you invent anything today?” Paul was an ardent young scientist. “Not today,” said Paul modestly. “I musn’t be greedy, tomorrow, possibly.”

Abbie had hardly noticed that Tony had been there at all. She brushed her hair back from her face with a hand that trembled.

“Are you all right, Abbie?” But he knew this was a foolish question for Abbie was clearly not all right. No one who looked as she looked was all right. “Well, I’m glad you’ve come because we can have some coffee and talk. Tony will be back in a moment with some hot coffee. I wonder if I’ve got any brandy. You look as though you could do with some brandy.” He got up and started to look in his drawers, keeping up all the time a steady flow of conversation. He was trying to soothe Abbie. Presently he saw that she had relaxed a little and was sitting quietly by the gas fire with her hands, those dreadful hands that had been tearing at her scarf, lying in her lap with only an occasional spasmodic movement which would be immediately echoed in a twitch of her lip. Otherwise she was still.

In a minute she got the letter she had just received from her pocket, Journal of the Plague Year from her bag and arranged them on the little table in front of her. “Let me tell you what has been happening,” she pleaded.

“Yes do.” Joe was encouraging. “But wait and have some coffee first. You don’t mind talking in front of Tony?”

“No, of course not.” In spite of herself a faint smile came to Abbie’s lips. “I am sure he makes a good audience.”

Joe took this as a sign of restoration and was cheered by it.

“I’m sorry to let myself go like this. I can’t think why I always behave like this in front of you. I’m quite self-contained usually. You know I think I would like some coffee.”

“And here it is,” said Tony swinging in with a tray.

“You’ve got quite a professional flourish.”

“Thank you, Abbie. But I will not hide from you that when ‘resting’ I spend quite a lot of time ‘waiting’ if you get me. I think I can say when all else fails you see before you the future head waiter of the Ritz. Naturally I mean the Ritz in Paris. I adore their blue and white china.”

“Probably make more money.”

“Alas yes, almost certainly that would be so. But I am an artist, my soul craves expression, and it won’t find it in lobster out of season and the best vintages.”

“Hamlet or nothing?”

“No no, I don’t see myself as a tragic actor dear, I’m more the comic type. Unluckily not the broad comic type or I’d go on television.”

He was pouring coffee with an ease and grace that testified to the training he had received on the stage rather than in the restaurant. He had achieved his desire, he had made Abbie laugh.

“Now, my dear souls, I shall leave you to talk.”

“No need to overplay the part,” said Joe, sitting down with his coffee.

“Stay, please,” said Abbie. She drank her coffee and then began her story. As she talked the two young men exchanged glances over her head. She did not look at them but kept her eyes on the fire, only occasionally touching the book and the letter.

Joe was puzzled. He lived near Courcy Street, he knew Creevey Buildings, and he knew that the people were not capable of the imaginative malice that could produce the type of persecution which Abbie so vividly described. If annoyed Courcy Street might break a window or daub a door with paint but it was not up to anything more subtle. It wasn’t clever enough for one thing and too lazy for another.

The attitude of Abbie was another puzzle. He had persuaded her that she was not being persecuted by John Broadbent, only to have her work up another persecution. Did she really think of it in those terms? But it seemed she did.

“I’m not inventing this, you know,” she said, looking at them at last.

“But I don’t believe Courcy Street would do this to you. Why should they, Abbie? Just ask yourself that. They don’t dislike you as you seem to think. I’ve talked to them. You know I think they’re proud to have you there in a way; it pleases them to think that an American would want to live among them. I know they seem a rough, tough lot to you, capable of almost anything but honestly they are not. I should call them decent rather slow people. Not up to the sort of nastiness you seem to think anyway.”

“You’ve misunderstood me. I don’t think Courcy Street is behind this.”

The two young men looked at each other cautiously. They were not at all alike but they were drawn into a moment of resemblance by the similar expression on each face, composed of suspicion, doubt and anxiety.

Abbie went on speaking, carried away it seemed by her own words. She drew a picture in imagery so forceful that what she described was seen even by the two sceptical young men. She added up all the things that had happened to her in her flat in Creevey Buildings and she pointed out that the most persistent phenomenon was the moving of the book. “Before I noticed that I swear everything seemed normal. After that nothing did. It started you might say when I first read the book. It fascinated me from the beginning, I admit that. I felt it was all real. I could see everything as he had seen it. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book where the mind of the author spoke so clearly to my mind. But though reading the book was the beginning maybe, it wasn’t the cause. I am sure that behind it all is the conjunction of two events: my reading Journal of the Plague Year when I did, and my having been given this toy, this model of a rocking chair found in the excavations of a plague pit on the outskirts of London.” She leaned forward and showed them the letter. “Read what it says. I feel pretty sure that my rocking chair is not a replica but the real thing. And as I see it these two happenings opened my mind to another mind. A dead mind. The mind of Defoe.”

Joe looked down at the floor because he wanted to say: But I don’t see why the mind of Daniel Defoe should take it out of you in such a petty way. If he did anything surely it would be on a grand scale, not dabbing your door with mud, upsetting your milk and killing your flowers. Aloud he said mildly, “I’ve never thought the dead bothered with things like that.”

“I don’t say he is responsible for all the malicious tricks but through opening my mind to his I have let in others too. The mean and the silly who go on being mean and silly wherever they are. Don’t you see that is why I am so frightened? Wherever I go I shall take it with me. The girl with the poltergeist.”

“I just can’t believe it,” Joe spoke with honest conviction. “Abbie are you sure you are not ill in some way? You look it. After all remember what you told me about the girl at home, the one who was your friend and whom you encouraged to defy her parents. She drowned herself and you blame yourself. Wrongly, I think. But after all it is bound to result in some sort of delayed shock.”

“I’m not going out of my mind, if that’s what you mean. Oh, I’ve worried about that too, but not any more.”

“Listen, Abbie, you don’t have to go out of your mind to get things from a funny angle. I’ve had it happen to me. At the end of the war in Korea when I suppose I was all in, I got the idea my best friend was changing into a leopard. Why a leopard? But there it was. I wouldn’t tell anyone but you and only you because you are like this. Tony knows, he was around.”

“I was the leopard,” said Tony charmingly.

“But the point is an overwrought imagination can do a lot.”

Abbie frowned and put on her spectacles. She always maintained that she thought better in her spectacles.

“You certainly brought it all home to me,” said Tony. “I can just see it. The dark smelly night air, the great pits, the creaking carts and the bodies.” He gave a shudder, it was a well controlled shudder though and one which would have got across to the gallery as well as the stalls.” You’re certainly a great little historian.”

“But is she, though?” Joe was on his feet. “My brain is beginning to tick over.” He went to his shelf of books, and drew out a thick green volume. “Here we are. Daniel Defoe, born 1659, died in Rope Maker’s Alley 1731. Published Journal of the Plague Year in 1722. In 1706 he tackled a ghost story: The True Relation of the Apparition of Mrs. Veal. He was a novelist and a journalist. Yes, that’s what I thought. Have you seen the point, Abbie?”

She frowned. “Let me see the book.”

“Take it and brood on what you see there.” He watched her for a few minutes, then he shook his head. “And you call yourself a researcher. Shows what a fixed idea can do to a critical mind. All right. Lecture from Joe. Now as I see it, Abbie, you feel that there is some direct link between your mind and the hideous experiences of someone who lived through the year so vividly described by Defoe. And that you have become haunted.”

“Put like that it does sound dotty. But there it is. That book does seem to have a life of its own and odd things have certainly been happening. You admit that?”

“But it depends on Defoe, doesn’t it? It was through his book your mind was penetrated as it were? And you felt as if you were reaching through to the experiences of a man who lived in that terrible year of the plague 1665?”

She nodded. A little impatiently now. “Living through a year like that would leave an indelible impression on a man’s mind, an impression the centuries would not wipe out. Like living through Hiroshima, say.”

“But that’s just it. Look at the dates, Abbie, work it out for yourself. Defoe, born 1659. His Journal of the Plague Year was published in 1722. Defoe never lived through that year as an adult. He was six years old. The whole Journal is a magnificent fake, not a piece of reporting but superb fiction, and you can compare it with his other novels, Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders. But Journal is a joke on its readers. Abbie, you can’t be haunted by a joke.”

It really doesn’t matter, he told himself, whether what I say hangs together as a good argument, provided it carries conviction to Abbie. And he saw that it did. The tightness flowed from her face. The bubble of unreality in which she had enclosed herself was pricked, and likeliness and good common sense flooded back.

“I have been a fool. You’re quite right Joe. I’m so stupid. A little critical intelligence was all this situation needed. Well whatever’s going on I guess I can cope with it. Not to be haunted is something. Plain straight persecution I can take.”

“It may not even be that.”

“I won’t give up everything, Joe, at one fell swoop.” Abbie was almost laughing.

They talked a little longer and then Abbie went off. Joe let her go reluctantly.

“I would come with you if I could but I’m committed to this man who is calling.”

“I don’t want you to.” She was gay. “I shall do my Christmas shopping. In the Market.”

She put on her big tweed coat, wound her scarf round her head and departed.

“She’s very nice, your girl friend,” said Tony watching her go. “Very nice indeed. A real charmer. But is she absolutely loopy?”

“No,” Joe’s face was sober. “She’s strung up. She’s been through a lot, she’s imaginative and highly emotional (although she thinks she isn’t), but she’s not loopy. Something uncommonly nasty is certainly happening in Abbie’s flat in Creevey Buildings.”

Abbie got off the bus and walked down the street market studying everything with the interest of someone who has been out of the world and has just come back into it. Everything was at once colourful and yet cloudy in the smoky dusk of the winter afternoon. “It’s deep mid-winter,” said Abbie to herself with pleasure. One or two stalls had small braziers burning and one had a paraffin stove. All the stall holders had thick scarves and wore old woollen or leather gloves with the fingers cut out. There was Christmas everywhere and all the stalls except one were decorated with Christmas lanterns, streamers and balloons. The exception was the Indian scent stall whose proprietor maintained he was a Hindu in the face of all probability as he was large-boned, curly-haired and, when clean, of a fair complexion. All the decorations were for sale of course and there was one stall given over entirely to the sale of monstrous big crackers, Father Christmas hoods and masks, and plastic Nativity scenes.

Abbie stopped in front of the sweet stall, which was filled with large jars and boxes of brightly coloured sticky sweets.

“Like a few, lady?” asked the owner persuasively, running a few jellies through his fingers. “Have one to tempt you?”

“Go on, miss,” encouraged his neighbour at the fish stall. “They may not taste nice but they are wholesome.”

“You be careful what you say,” said the sweet seller. “I dare say I could have the police on you for that.”

“Oh no you couldn’t. I’ve gone into it careful. Nice is an expression of taste, and who is to say but me whether I find your sweets nice or not? (And I don’t.) But wholesome is a question of fact. I dare say they are wholesome, come to that. That’s to say I’ve never actually heard of anyone dying after eating them or even being took seriously ill; they may not be much the better for them but that’s their look-out.”

“I’ll have a quarter,” said Abbie, feeling she must buy a few sweets after that speech.

“That’s right, miss, don’t risk a penny more than sixpence and dear at that.”

“The trouble with you, Harry, is that you don’t know what you are talking about. These here that miss has chosen are my new line. Right delicious they are, filled with healthful fruit juices and delicious glucose sugar.” He picked out a strong orange one. “Try this.”

The fishman took it, popped it into his mouth and then began to grimace, but gradually a look of reluctant pleasure spread over his face and he reached out his hand for another. “Bob,” he said, “you’re right. I take it all back, you’ve got a winner. They are better than beer. In fact I’ll give up beer for them. Miss, take a pound. You won’t regret it.”

A small crowd had formed behind Abbie and a woman now pushed her way forward. “Here,” she said “I’ll have a pound.”

“So will I,” said another woman. “Don’t shove, you behind.”

“Form a queue,” said the delighted sweet merchant. “Take your turn, ladies. Plenty for all.”

Abbie, wandering off through the crowd and clutching in an amazed way a two-pound bag of sweets, looked back at the stall now crowded with customers. She saw fishman and sweet seller exchange pleased looks and understood that she had been the victim of the Londoner’s favourite sport. As she gave a last look she saw the fishman take a well-earned drink of beer. “Needs it after those sweets I reckon,” she thought.

She was happy though; she had been released from her prison by an act of her own will. She walked cheerfully through the crowd. Behind her, always following, but never observed, came a face she would have recognised.

At the scent stall she paused to study the bottles. They were as brightly coloured as the sweets she was carrying and probably made from much the same raw materials. There was an overpowering sweetness in the air.

“Try a bottle,” urged the salesman adjusting his turban.

Abbie looked at them. The Kiss of Death. Target for Tonight. Doom Apple.

“Not very cheerful names.”

“No,” said the salesman briefly. He was not selling good cheer.

“Thank you, I think I won’t have any.”

“No, maybe you’re right. Perhaps you are more an outdoor type.” He searched among his bottles. “Try this. He held out a bottle simply labelled “Timber Wolf.” He opened it and waved it under her nose. “Lovely, see?”

Abbie choked and her eyes began to water at the harsh peppery smell lightly tinged with oil of cloves.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “Your friend is waving to you. No,” as Abbie looked ahead, “the one behind.”

“I can’t see anything.”

“Well, perhaps it wasn’t a wave,” he said uneasily. “Just a movement of the hand. I thought it was for you, though.”

Abbie moved off through the crowd. She paused for a moment by the flowers. They were lovely. She particularly admired the chrysanthemums with their rich deep winter colours. They reminded her of Kate. For the first time a true grief for the girl invaded her. Some people might believe Kate was alive, but she herself could not. She was as sure she was dead as if she had looked upon the dead face of the girl. Sometimes in her dreams she had thought that she did and then it seemed to merge with the face of the other dead girl she had seen.

She hovered for a moment near the yellow flowers wondering whether to buy, then she decided not to. The flowers she had at home would still be fresh.

The Father Christmas stall was next. It offered a present from Father Christmas who, with a brick red face and a cotton wool beard, stood ready with his sack to give a present to every child for two shillings, a price which most people present at once pointed out was gross overcharging when the presents themselves cost about sixpence. So pointed were some comments that Father Christmas, talking with difficulty through his beard, was driven to point out that he had to cover his expenses. Finally he complained that he had to travel every day from Croydon. “Use your reindeer, dad,” said the crowd.

Abbie walked past the last stall into the darkness and quiet at the end of Courcy Street. When she came to Creevey Buildings she began to hurry, remembering that she had been out for all the short winter’s day, that she was tired and hungry but happy. She repeated this to herself. Happy. Her ghosts were laid, she had been over-imaginative and stupid, but she was herself again. For the moment she even forgot about Kate.

As she walked on the figure that had been following her slipped ahead to take a shorter cut.

Abbie let herself into the flat and put her sweets on the table. She had even put the kettle on before she noticed.

The flowers which she had left that morning fresh and gay in the glass cup were faded and dry.

They were quite dead.

Chapter Twelve

COFFIN HAD NEVER BEEN SIDETRACKED FROM HIS MAIN problem, which was to find Kate. One by one the strands which had first engaged him in the case were to lead him to the truth.

Abbie had been present in his mind from the beginning. He had known of her arrival almost as soon as it had happened. He was always well informed about what took place in his district; he knew the people and he made it his business to listen to what they said. He had half expected trouble to arise from the curious arrival of the American in such a neighbourhood, and so he had not been surprised to find Abbie playing her part in this strange business. “Stands to reason,” he told himself, “that she’d be a queer bird to come here in the first place.” When he saw Abbie he was puzzled by her because she was not quite what he expected. She seemed such a nice quiet gentle girl, and yet violent events hung around her. Eventually he sent a detailed cable off to America; it would do no harm to know what there was to know about Miss Foret.

All cases have a moment of decision, a moment which is later seen as the climax because afterwards there is a steady unravelling. The Greeks called it the moment of bathos.

He was at home with his mother. She had lovingly prepared her usual meal of fried fish. Coffin noticed that as a detective he ate a lot of fish. He was never sure whether this was because his mother found that her whist club absorbed a deal of her time and she could buy the fish ready cooked, or whether it was because she thought fish was good for the brain. There was evidence on both sides. He was an affectionate (and also a hungry) son, so he ate his fish.

His mother watched him observantly while he ate. “You’re only picking.”

He stirred the rich brown tea which Mrs. Coffin served with her fish suppers. “I’m thinking, mum. You know this district well enough, don’t you?”

“I should say so. Since we moved only Mrs. Flood knows it better. But she was born here and I’m a Lambeth girl. Naturally she’s more in their confidence, but my guesswork is better, I’d say. Of course, having you as my son limits me, they don’t always want me around. You can understand that.”

“There’s something going on here that I don’t understand. What’s the gossip in Courcy Street?”

“Nothing going on that they know and you don’t. They’re as puzzled as you. It’s not like the time they were all selling black market meat or the time they all knew who stuck the knife into Johnny Fish and wouldn’t tell.”

“Or the time they knew who hit me on the head,” observed her son, “and they wouldn’t tell that either.”

“There’s been a good deal of talk about the American girl. That’s only to be expected, of course. She’d have been talked about even if she was normal and she doesn’t seem to be that. She has hallucinations or something. Mrs. Flood says it makes her quite uneasy.” She lowered her voice. “Mrs. Flood says there’s been a funny feeling about the top floor of Creevey Buildings ever since she came to stay there. Mind you I don’t know that I’d call Creevey Buildings a normal place at the best of times. Some people say the American girl is mad and others say it’s not her fault. You can take your choice.”

“And what does Mrs. Flood say? After all she sees most of her.

“She says she’s mad,” said Mrs. Coffin reluctantly. “Loopy, you know. Such a pretty young thing, too. But Mrs. Flood says she thinks she’s being persecuted and that’s always a sure sign. If it’s not one thing it’s another the girl complains of, so Mrs. Flood says. And you know yourself she came to you.”

“Oh you know about that do you?” said Coffin. “I never told you. Well, I see what Mrs. Flood is suggesting: paranoia. Maybe.”

His mother shrugged.

“If only we could find Kate Broadbent.” Coffin got up in his exasperation. “We’ve had the drag out for her for days now and we don’t get on to her. Where in England can a girl hide?”

“Courcy Street thinks you’ve found her already.”

“You mean the body? But look, Kate was seen alive and well getting off that blasted train. We’ve no reason to believe she’s dead. And in any case the body has not been identified as hers. Mr. Broadbent says it isn’t and the pathologist says the measurements are wrong. That’s one of my other worries. Who is the dead girl?”

“What about finger-prints?” said the knowledgeable Mrs. Coffin.

“I’ve said this before, finger-prints are not magic. We’re working on it, of course, give us time and we shall turn something up. But I don’t want to wait.”

“If the pathologist had said it could be Kate would you have accepted what her father said? And wouldn’t you have looked at the meeting of the two girls rather differently?”

“I don’t see how we could all be wrong,” he said, troubled.

“People often have a motive for being wrong.”

He went away from his mother to do a late evening’s work in a deeply disturbed state. The cable from Bowmont, Montana, came in while he was away. He read it silently. He now knew the story of the drowned girl which Abbie had told Joe.

“Has it struck you,” asked his Sergeant, an agreeable young man called Charles, “that although we have found out hardly anything about Kate, we have built up quite a picture of Abbie Foret?”

“We know she thinks she is being persecuted, we know she is a friend of Joe Ardente. We know she built up a quick friendship with the two girls Broadbent and Kent. We know she is clever and we are beginning to think she is psychopathic.”

The students Abbie met each day at the British Museum or the Public Record Office had reluctantly allowed Coffin to extract from them the statement that Abbie was ‘queer’. They were puzzled and repelled by her silences, her dreaminess and the inexplicable absences in one who had been so regular and reliable a worker.

“And now we know,” said the Inspector, “that in her home town, just before she left to come over here, she was involved in an unpleasant incident. A girl she knew pretty well, a slightly younger girl, called Betsy Baker, who had been a sort of pet of Abbie’s, and whom she was encouraging to take up training as a nurse, drowned herself in a fit of depression. Betsy Baker was a moody girl with a bad mental history, she had told her friend she meant to kill herself, but Abbie didn’t believe her. There was a good deal of feeling about it locally and Abbie was sent away by her parents. She wasn’t to blame, of course, but there does seem a curious parallel between Betsy and Kate.”

“Are you suggesting Kate Broadbent has drowned herself?”

“I’m not suggesting anything. I’m not in a position to, but I am beginning to wonder if Miss Abbie Foret hasn’t made away with her somehow.”

All the time Coffin’s mind went back to what his mother had said. As he hunched over the papers on his desk he was realising that not one of the three men who had been concerned with the identification of the dead body had had an open mind. Not John Broadbent, not Inspector Coffin, not the pathologist who had examined the body; he least of all, supposed Coffin, because without knowing it he had had to bear the full pressure of the minds of two. men who did not want the body to be Kate.

John Broadbent’s motives were simple. He wanted to believe his daughter still alive, he did not wish to see her in the distorted body he had been asked to view. And he had, of course, another reason. When Kate died he inherited some, if not all, of the money that was in trust for her. Just because he needed the money so much, and Coffin was beginning to guess how much for there had been rumours of bankruptcy, it would have been intolerable to him to have acquired the money in such a way. Because John Broadbent had reason to wish his daughter dead, he was passionately anxious to believe her alive.

Coffin thought that his own position was more ambivalent, superficially he had at first both wished and believed that the body from Halfpenny Creek was Kate’s, but had he been so certain underneath? He had not wanted to accept John Broadbent, a man he trusted and liked, as the murderer of his own daughter. He had not wanted to believe that Kate, who was so gay and full of life, could be dead. But underneath there had been another motive for rejecting the identification. “I just didn’t want the case to end there,” he admitted to himself. “People say that policemen are too busy to be imaginative, but it’s not true. We’re not machines after all. Life around Courcy Street has been routine lately. The usual round of stupid casual violence and petty theft. I was looking for something bigger. I didn’t want the case to end there.”

Kate was missing and a body had been found in the water near her home. All other evidence to the contrary, was it likely that this was Kate?

You couldn’t get round the scientific evidence. The body from the creek did not tally in its vital statistics with what was known about Kate. It was shorter, slighter. But. how much did this mean? After all the details about Kate had been supplied by Coffin who had got them from her school medical record. There was room for error.

He had a photograph of the original medical sheet in his room and he glanced again at it. He read down the list.

Age Weight Height Guardian ft. in.

Ann Abbot 16 years, 8 st. 5 2 John Abbot, 11 months             Parkview, East

Ham.

Kate Broadbent 16 years, 9 st. 5 6| John Broadbent, 3 months     #160;       3 Courcy

Grove, S.E.

Eliza Ellis 15 years, 7 st. 5 o Ph. Ellis, The 10 mths. 3 lb.        Loaming, Eden,

Perth.

Age Weight Height Guardian Shirley Jones 16 years, io st. 5 4 H. Jones, 2 months               Abbot’s Rest,

Port Rees, South Wales.

He studied it again. He had made no obvious mistake. He sat there staring at it.

Later that night he took courage, and, feeling lonely and tired, he drove himself to the Pathological Laboratories.

“Here’s a joke,” he told himself, “the youngest and by no means the cleverest, Divisional Inspector going to see the Grand Panjandrum himself to ask if his department could possibly be wrong.”

Although it was late he knew he would find Dr. Rover working, everyone in the business knew the old man, and to work until long after midnight was his most famous habit.

Coffin looked at his watch. Well after ten-thirty, and a nasty night. He could see that the lights were on in the building ahead of him. He got out of the car and walked towards the building. A pane of glass outlined by a distant light in a corridor behind reflected his face. He looked at himself wistfully. He didn’t look the same somehow. This case had’ taken it out of him. Some of his bounce had gone. “How shall I put it?” he thought. “Shall I say: Are your chaps really incompetent?” He considered Dr. Rover’s temper. “This is the bravest thing I ever did.”

Directed by a weary, but unsurprised, night porter, he found Dr. Rover sitting in his office. He was delicately eating a cheese sandwich with a flask of coffee standing ready to be drunk.

Coffin, in whom the fish supper and anxiety had produced nausea, felt his stomach turn over.

“My dear boy,” said Dr. Rover, leaping forward, “have a chair. You’ve gone quite green!”

After that it was surprisingly easy to put what he had to say into words.

“And who did the report for you?” asked the old man with a sharp look.

“Wood was the name, I believe,” said Coffin miserably.

“Oh, that poor fellow. He’s not with us any longer I’m afraid. He didn’t really enjoy pathology. Not everyone’s cup of tea. Women make very good ones oddly enough, although we don’t employ them here. You’d better let me look up the records.”

He disappeared and was gone for about ten minutes, eventually reappearing with a bundle of papers and the night porter bearing a tray of tea.

“Have some tea, Inspector. A cup just now will do you good.” He hummed quietly to himself as he studied various type-written sheets. Coffin recognised the tune, although no one could call Dr. Rover musical; it was “John Brown’s Body.”

“I’ll tell you the truth. The poor young man was having trouble with his wife. That was what was upsetting him. I’m afraid he got quite violent with her. It would all have been brewing up while he was at work on this. He didn’t have his mind on his job. Otherwise he would have been more cautious to you.”

“You mean he was wrong?” asked Coffin. So his mother was right. People have a reason for being wrong, she had said, and the pathologist had been a man with a reason. No wonder he had not been clear of mind when his own tragedy, had been playing itself out.

“Not wrong,” said Dr. Rover. He very rarely admitted that any of his staff were actually wrong. “The body length of the dead girl is just about five feet five inches and it seems established that Kate Broadbent was just over five feet six inches.”

“Well?”

“A more experienced man would not have failed to point out to you that this apparent difference might not mean very much.”

“Then he was wrong.”

“You don’t understand, Inspector. Let me put it like this. Height is not such a straightforward subject as you seem to think. Consider this for instance: the cadaver stature is maintained by Manouvrier (and this is backed up by other researchers) to be two centimetres greater than that of the living subject.”

“That doesn’t help me,” said Coffin after a moment’s thought.

“No, but I wanted you to see for yourself that height is not, cannot be, considered as a rigid constant. The point that is more relevant is that it has been established recently that the body height diminishes during the day. It settles down by something between half-an-inch and an inch. You have to allow that margin, which, of course, differs from person to person.”

“You know the doctor in Birmingham as good as told me that,” said Coffin thoughtfully, “and I didn’t take it in. It looks as though we can assume that this body from Halfpenny Creek is Kate Broadbent.”

“I’ll look at it myself,” said Dr. Rover. “But I’ll tell you one other thing. I’ve just read the report on her injuries and this is my belief: whoever killed the girl from Halfpenny Creek knew her and hated her.”

And Coffin, who knew how close are love and hate, understood that he had to search among Kate’s closest friends for her murderer.

The next day when no new information had come in and he sat at his desk morosely aware that he was marking time he began to wonder if this case would ever be solved. John Broadbent had bowed his head to the police insistence that this was his daughter when shown the body a second time. He had left silently and Coffin had watched him go, all his new certainty on the subject retreating again. Were they right this time?

Coffin sat there sweating in his shirt sleeves.

“Did you know,” said his Sergeant coming into the room and placing a docket on the table in front of Coffin, “that we had Kate Broadbent on our books?”

“What?”

“There you are. It didn’t come to anything. But it was when they had that wave of shoplifting in the Courcy Road area. She wasn’t the only one, of course.”

Coffin studied the document. “I see,” he said eventually. “Well it explains a lot. One of Mrs. Belhatchet’s interests, I notice.”

“So after all we did have her finger-prints?”

“No, they were never taken. It didn’t come up. I think we’ve got them now, though. On her hair-brush left at the school.”

Coffin nodded. He wiped his forehead, hot in spite of his shirt sleeves. “I must get a call through to America,” he said. He spoke wonderingly. Courcy Street did not make such calls lightly.

He gave the instructions for Mrs. Belhatchet to be called in Venture City. He had obtained her address and he felt sure the two women would now have arrived.

“They had better,” he said irritably.

He had a long time to wait until he heard that booming deep familiar voice.

Mrs. Belhatchet was a substantial woman, and on the telephone she sounded it. She was five feet eleven and a half inches. “Missed six feet by a hair breadth,” she used to say complacently. She was broad, too, and looked as if she would have made a fine policeman, which in fact she had, as she had been a policewoman for twenty years in one of the toughest districts of east London. She had left eventually to become a social worker associated with a clinic for children in the shadow of Tower Bridge. She had a rocklike temperament and was never either optimistic or depressed which was probably just as well in her job where both states of mind would have been out of place. No one knew what had become of Mr. Belhatchet.

“I’ve waited two hours to take this call.” She sounded surprised at her own kindness.

“Miss Toll there?”

Mrs. Belhatchet laughed. “No I let Geraldine go out. She’s learning to aqua-plane. Can you aqua-plane, Inspector? No? Well it’s a very difficult thing to learn, especially when you are fifty-two; and Geraldine is set on learning. She thinks it’ll take her the rest of her stay in Venture City. That’s where we are, Inspector, Venture City. Very remote, but quite lively when you get there.”

“Do they do much aqua-planing in Venture City?” asked the Inspector absently.

“No, I don’t think they do. Come to think of it, I don’t believe I’ve seen anyone else. But Geraldine is keen and she’s found someone to teach her. She’s a changed woman.”

“She must be,” said Coffin, thinking of calm neat Miss Toll. “You know we’ve had trouble here?”

Mrs. Belhatchet was serious. “I know now. I’ve been hearing strange things. There have been letters from friends.”

Coffin could imagine those letters. No tale would lose in the telling.

“By all accounts this American I’ve let my flat to seems very queer,” went on Mrs. Belhatchet. “I wonder if the poor child’s all there or not.”

Coffin, too, had heard all about Abbie’s obsessions. The truth was that the fears Abbie thought were her secret were public property.

“I’ve heard,” he admitted.

“Well what’s one to make of that, eh?”

“I want to ask you about Kate Broadbent,” he said.

“Of course I know her well. Know the father, too. I’ve had quite a lot to do with him one way and another. I’ve always found him a very decent sort. Weak, perhaps, in some ways. I can’t stand that new wife of his, but, after all, he had a bad time with his first who was as cross as a crow, and if he liked someone else better, well that was his affair. Some people” (and Coffin knew this meant Mrs. Flood) “said that he hadn’t been off with the old love before he was on with the new, but I never really believed that. I think his first wife was quite as glad to divorce him as he was her. She was bored with family life.” She paused for breath. “The fact is I’ve been worried about Kate for a long time. I’ve always thought her a girl bound to fall into trouble. Oh there’s no harm in her, but where some people are born to be happy she was born the other way. Look at her childhood, she was unnaturally precocious and her mother let her lead a very unwise life. In some ways it’s as stunting for a child to be too clever as it is for it to be too stupid. By the time she was fifteen Kate was rudderless; she didn’t really know if she was growing up or growing down.”

Beneath Coffin’s hand lay the cable from America and the piece of tape cut from the soaked and bloodstained clothes. His hand tightened over them.

“And yet I haven’t turned up very much information about her,” he said. “For all I can find out she’s been living quietly like any schoolgirl down at that school of hers.”

“That’s because you’ve been looking in the wrong place for the wrong thing.”

Suddenly the room seemed too hot and too quiet.

“You’re a professional at observing things, I know. It’s your job. Well it’s mine, too. And where you by your training see the crimes, the petty illegalities, I see what is abnormal. I have been trained to see and to record those traits which, although not necessarily criminal yet make people very vulnerable.”

“Poor Kate, you make her sound so neurotic. I suppose children from torn-up homes tend to be like that.”

Mrs. Belhatchet sounded surprised. “Oh, no, I never think of Kate like that. She isn’t unstable. When she was fifteen it was true she was a girl in a muddle, but she was tough, she outgrew all that. When I last saw her I thought that she’d come to terms with her world; she knew it could make her unhappy, but she wouldn’t let it beat her. No, I was thinking of the other one. Kate wasn’t the only one whose parents had parted you know. The girl Darcy’s mother has re-married. Darcy took the new name of Kent. Her own father, weak you know, but nice, went abroad.”

“That’s right. It’s in the records. And now you put your finger on it; it explains a lot.”

“I have to confess that I, too, have kept my records. I made a copious case history. Wrong of me, perhaps, but the case interested me and I had opportunities for observation that others didn’t get.”

“You mean the shoplifting? The two, Broadbent and Kent, were mixed up in it.”

“That was only a symptom, Inspector, a sign of something deeper between them. I made my own observations and kept my own notes and they are deposited in my flat. If you study them, Inspector, you will see that I always feared violence. It was implicit in the situation. I feared most for one or other of the parents, but it has struck one of the girls. If Kate is dead, there is only one possible killer.”

Coffin replaced the receiver.

“She’s right, of course. Everything was laid on the table for me to see only I was slow. There was that woman with a houseful of new furniture practically shoving the truth at me. None so deaf as those who won’t hear.”

Chapter Thirteen

ABBIE WAS LEARNING THE TRUTH AT LAST, SHE WAS NOT going out of her mind, and therefore she had not in some inexplicable access of dottiness placed the dead flowers in her room herself.

Nor was she imagining it. The flowers and their very deadness, everything that had happened, had an objective reality.

And if she was not mad, likewise she was not haunted either. Her obsession with the seventeenth century had faded from her mind already. (That it had been there at all hinted a curious frame of mind. There was room for thought there. She was not quite herself.)

There was only one thing left to believe: everything had really happened, it was happening still, and a living hating human being was behind it.

Conviction possessed Abbie that she knew who this person was. “There’s only one person left whose life I’ve tangled with,” she said.

Down in the courtyard she could hear, but not see, a small boy calling for his cat. “Puss, puss, puss.” The cat did not come, of course, and she heard the voice calling at intervals. “Fish, fish, fish,” it called now.

There was a smell of frying onions floating up from the floor below, and the usual noises. In the distance she could hear the sound of carol singers. It reminded her that it was Christmas. It also reminded her that she had not read her letters from home. She pulled them from her pocket.

Her mother wrote:

Dear Abbie, as you haven’t answered my last two letters, Dad and I have decided that you must be unwell. Not really ill, we think, or we would have heard somehow, but just below standard. I expect you haven’t been eating properly, you stupid. You never were any good at cooking.

Abbie could almost hear her mother’s placid amused voice.

Anyway we have decided to splurge and to take that European trip soon. We shan’t be with you for Christmas [I must stay with Gran for that), but pretty soon after as we fly out on the day after Christmas. Keep your fingers crossed as you know how I feel about flying. It will be good to see you again, and we thought that we might be really extravagant and whisk you off to Egypt to get warm {international crises permitting), so that your father could see the tombs of the Pharaohs, which it turns out he’s wanted to see all his life. By the way, your archaeologist friend was ringing for you…

“He can ring,” thought Abbie, but the letter, so full of normal happy love, seemed to emphasise the sinister importance of the flowers.

Downstairs, she heard Mrs. Flood bang her front door. Leaning out of the window Abbie saw her cross the road and go to the bus stop. Even at this distance it was possible to make out that she was wearing her best clothes. Abbie knew now that Mrs. Flood’s task on this occasion was to go out collecting the rents on the numerous well-built houses she owned, surprisingly, in a remote southern suburb. So Mrs. Flood was out for some hours. A damp breeze of London smoke blew in through the open window.

It was unpleasing somehow to know that Mrs. Flood was out.

“I could shout and shout and no one would come. But why would I want to shout.”

The noise of Creevey Buildings had quietened into one of its momentary lulls. There were often seconds when the whole life of the Buildings seemed suspended.

In the silence Abbie heard a dry rustling sound. At first she thought it was outside, but when it came again she knew it was in the flat with her.

She opened the bedroom door and then stepped back in horror.

Half in, half out of the bed was a monstrous figure dressed in red. At first she thought it must be alive and then she saw she was looking at a stuffed, dead image. A Father Christmas hood and mask had been tied around her pillows.

At the same moment as she perceived this she remembered that she had heard the rustle of the paper hood only a second before.

Slowly, stiffly, she moved her head.

There was a figure standing in the corner of the room. Abbie looked at it dazed and unrecognising. It was as if she had never known the face at which she now looked. Then the figure moved and Abbie’s senses came back. Darcy stepped from the corner of the room. She was wearing a neat dark coat and skirt and looked young and girlish.

“You came back too soon,” she said in a tired voice. “In a few minutes I should have finished.”

For a long moment Abbie found herself unable to speak. At the end she said in a confused way: “So it has been you all the time…But I suppose I knew.”

“No,” said Darcy quickly. “You didn’t. You couldn’t have done. I’m too clever.”

“Perhaps I didn’t know at first. But I guessed in the end. As soon as I began to think about it I knew. Oh, Darcy.” Even now Darcy had her appeal for Abbie.

“I got myself a key cut, you know. I’ve had one for a long time now. I didn’t have one at first, of course, that’s why we had to call on you, me and Kate, but I have one now. Stole it from Mr. Broadbent.”

“But why, Darcy, why?”

“Kate and I had to find the records old Belhatchet had kept about us. Oh I knew she had done. I’m quick about that sort of thing. It was none of her business. But it gave her a handle over us and we couldn’t afford that, Kate and I. The enemy were suspicious enough anyway.”

“The enemy,” said Abbie. “Was I an enemy?”

“Not at first. But you became one to me later. At first when I came searching through the books I used my opportunities to do nice things for you. But when I came to hate you then I tried to torment you. It wasn’t very difficult to think of ways. The flowers, for instance. I took yours out and put dead ones in. I usually got the dead ones out of one of the dustbins at the back.”

Abbie felt sick.

“Or if there weren’t any I used to walk up and down on yours. That did it. In a sort of way I enjoyed it. I’ve always liked the feel of other people’s property beneath my fingers. As Mrs. Belhatchet knew.”

“You tried to kill Kate’s father,” said Abbie.

“Well, tried, that’s one way of putting it, I suppose, I came very close to it, is how I would put it. But Kate failed me. She wasn’t as strong as me. I don’t think she ever realised the full magnitude of my plans for us both.”

Poor Kate, thought Abbie, and I thought that this was the one to save.

“And then you began to influence her. Oh don’t say you didn’t because you did. I don’t know why I didn’t kill you.”

Darcy was quite composed, but tears were pouring down Abbie’s face.

“But I do know. I loved Kate.” Darcy smiled. “Yes, truly loved. And to kill is to love. Yes, that’s what I mean, you think I’ve put it the wrong way round, but it’s not so. The act of killing is the act of loving.”

She looked at Abbie. “What a wet girl you are.”

“But you planned your killing, don’t you see that’s what makes it so utterly terrible. I think I could forgive you if you’d done it in anger or passion.”

“Funny words from you, you school marm. Anyway, why should you forgive? Who asked you to? But, of course, I didn’t want to be a Borstal exhibit for the rest of my life, to have all my talents and energies shut up for life would destroy the point of the whole thing. So I wore my old clothes, and hit Kate on the head till she died, and it didn’t take long although it was horrible. I didn’t look much. She didn’t struggle, and I think in a way she wasn’t surprised. Then I drove her and the clothes to London and dropped them in the water. Near to Mr. Broadbent’s office so that he could be suspected. I rather hoped it would be thought she’d just disappeared, but in any case I was prepared to lie like Ananias, a man I’ve always thought I’d like,” said Darcy.

But in spite of her words Abbie could see she was not so bold, not so confident as she pretended.

“You’re not so clever,” she said, and was at once ashamed of having done so.

There was a pause. “No,” said Darcy sadly. “No, because I miss Kate. I couldn’t know how much I would. There’s only one thing to do really now and that is to kill myself.”

Her great eyes were fixed on Abbie’s face now and held Abbie’s gaze.

“There’s your gas fire,” she said. “It wouldn’t be difficult. Or long.”

Abbie tried to move her eyes and found she could not. Darcy’s eyes in her pale face were compelling, almost hypnotic. She gave a deep sigh.

“I never thought of that.”

“Think about it now,” said Darcy softly, almost as if she knew her mastery.

Abbie hesitated and tried to move her hand to her pocket in which was her mother’s letter, but she could not reach it and her hand fell to her side. Suddenly she knew that this was what she had been so strongly longing for.

“Very well,” she said. “Together.” She repeated the last word to herself. “Together.”

The smell of gas floated under the door, and first up and then down the stairs, until gradually it seeped into the whole of Creevey Buildings where it mingled with the smell of frying food.

“The death wish must be very strong in you, young lady,” said Miss Herbert, by which name the Lady Visitor was now known to Abbie. “I don’t believe you are grateful to me even now for saving your life.”

“Yes I am,” said Abbie, sitting up in the bed in Mrs. Flood’s best bedroom. “But the process wasn’t very pleasant.”

“Dying often isn’t. Or living. You weren’t sick much. I couldn’t have done it, though, if your young man hadn’t behaved with the good sense he did. He turned off the gas and got the two of you out. She had you hypnotised, that girl.”

Abbie hesitated; she found it difficult to ask. “Did you save her?” she asked finally.

“Yes,” said Miss Herbert. “She came round. Pity. Better dead.”

“Oh no,” cried Abbie. “That’s what you mustn’t say. It’s not true. She’s young, so talented, there’s too much good in her to wish her dead. Give her time.”

“She’ll have that,” said Miss Herbert.

“She really loved. You must be able to turn to good someone who can love. Most people never do.”

There was silence. Miss Herbert straightened the sheet on Abbie’s bed. She could hear the sound of Mrs. Flood arriving with a tea-tray. She was remembering what Coffin had said when he had been called to the gas-filled flat and had looked down and seen Abbie coughing and vomiting. “She’s as neurotic as the other one,” he had said in exasperation.

Then from the depths of her experience she dragged up a judgement.

“Give it twenty years,” she said. “In twenty years we can cast up our accounts and see where was the good and where was the bad. Yes, come in, Mrs. Flood.”

Abbie was allowed one other interview that day. It was with Joe.

“The one person I didn’t ever suspect,” she said, looking at him, “was you. Otherwise I suspected everyone. Even myself.”

“Not to mention the dead and gone Daniel Defoe.”

“I’ve sent the little rocking chair to the British Museum. If it’s genuine they ought to have it, and if not I shall burn it.”

“And what about the donor?”

“He won’t know or care much.” She smiled. “It wasn’t exactly a love token. More of an unlove token.”

“I was wrong.”

“Oh the wrong thoughts you and I have had would fill a book.”

“You’re looking better. More colour in your cheeks.”

“Oh the doctor says I’d got anaemic, due to wrong feeding, all my own fault. And that it accounted for my sleepiness and the curious feeling of oppression. The things that happened were real, or most of them, but I made them worse because of the way I felt. And the doctor did say that what happened back home contributed to it. I still blame myself terribly over that.”

“No need,” said Joe briefly.

Abbie shook her head. “I can’t pass it off like that. I was too self-important. I was Miss Know-All and Do-Right. I see that now. Well, I’ve had it knocked out of me. And I can’t pass the blame about this business either.”

“You couldn’t help it. All the ingredients of tragedy were there. You were the catalyst.”

“It’s chipped a big hole in my self-esteem. When I came round and took in what I had done and what had happened I felt so hopeless. Even now I can’t believe it’s possible to hope again.”

“You must. Look forward, Abbie.”

“You’d better see me in my native habitat,” said Abbie, smiling at him, “before you pass judgement on me. I’m really quite an ordinary girl.”

“I doubt the word ordinary.”

She looked at him doubtfully. “But I know now that ordinary girls have impulses, emotions, hopes and fears I never dreamed of. I nearly died, Joe; if you hadn’t come looking for me that night, I would have died. And I wanted to do it. Remember that. As I stood that night it was what I wanted. Suppose it seemed easy to slip out of things again?”

“That won’t happen, don’t you see? Life will take hold of you, there’ll be love, marriage, children,” and he gripped her hand. He had one last fleeting anxiety—would life ever completely hold Abbie?—before rushing confidently on. “You’ve got me now, Abbie, and I’m a man.”

Gwendoline Butler

Gwendoline Butler’s steady success has been built upon the variety of her previous detective stories, each of which has been utterly different from the last. She cannot be pinned down into any formula: her characters are always individual and interesting and her plots usually have an unexpected twist. She is the wife of a history professor at St. Andrews university, and before her marriage set out to be a professional historian herself. She admits that it was the detection in history research that she most enjoyed.

Other books by Gwendoline Butler

THE DULL DEAD

THE MURDERING KIND DEAD IN A ROW

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