A New Lease of Death (10 page)

‘Take my advice,’ said Wexford. ‘Tear it up. She’s as mad as a hatter.’ But Archery had already slit open the envelope.

Dear Sir, he read

They tell me that you are a man of God. Blessed is he that sitteth not in the seat of the scornful. God has sent you to me and my baby. I will be at home this afternoon, waiting to thank you in person
.

Your affectionate friend, Josephine Crilling

Archery’s bedroom combined charmingly the best of old and new. The ceiling was beamed, the walls painted pink and decorated with a tooled design of chevrons, but there was also a fitted carpet, an abundance of lights on walls and bedhead and a telephone. He rinsed his hands at the pink washbasin (a private bathroom he felt to be an unwarranted extravagance), lifted the receiver and asked for a call to Thringford in Essex.

‘Darling?’

‘Henry! Thank heaven you’ve phoned. I’ve been trying over and over again to get you at that Olive Branch place or whatever it’s called.’

‘Why, what’s the matter?’

‘I’ve had a dreadful letter from Charles. Apparently poor darling Tess phoned her people late yesterday afternoon and now she’s told Charles the engagement’s definitely off. She says it wouldn’t be fair on him or us.’

‘And …?’

‘And Charles says if Tess won’t marry him he’s going to come down from Oxford and go out to Africa to fight for Zimbabwe.’

‘How utterly ridiculous!’

‘He says if you try and stop him he’ll do something dreadful and get sent down.’

‘Is that all?’

‘Oh, no. There’s lots and lots of it. Let me see. I’ve got the letter here. “… What’s the use of Father always ballsing on” – sorry, darling, does that mean something awful? – “on about faith and taking things on trust if he won’t take Tess’s word and her mother’s? I’ve been into the whole fiasco of the case myself and it’s full of holes. I think Father could get the Home Secretary to have the case re-opened if he would only make some sort of effort. For one thing there was an inheritance involved but it never came up at the trial. Three people inherited vast sums and at least one of them was buzzing around the place the day Mrs Primero died …”’

‘All right,’ said Archery wearily. ‘If you remember, Mary, I have a transcript of the trial myself and it cost me two hundred pounds. How are things apart from that?’

‘Mr Sims is behaving rather oddly.’ Mr Sims was
Archery’s
curate. ‘Miss Baylis says he keeps the communion bread in his pocket, and this morning she got a long blonde hair in her mouth.’

Archery smiled. This parish chit-chat was more in his wife’s line than solving murders. It brought her to him visually, a handsome strong woman who minded the lines on her face that he never noticed. He was beginning to miss her mentally and physically.

‘Now, listen, darling. Write back to Charles – be diplomatic. Tell him how well Tess is behaving and say I’m having some very interesting talks with the police. If there’s the slightest chance of getting the case re-opened I’ll write to the Home Secretary.’

‘That’s wonderful, Henry. Oh, there go your second lot of pips. I’ll ring off. By the way, Rusty caught a mouse this morning and left it in the bath. He and Tawny are missing you.’

‘Give them my love,’ said Archery to please her.

He went downstairs into the dark cool dining-room, ordered something called a
Navarin d’agneau
, and in a burst of recklessness, a half-bottle of Anjou. All the windows were open but on some of them the green shutters had been closed. A table in one of these embrasures reminded him with its white cloth, its tilted cane chairs and its vaseful of sweet peas of a Dufy that hung on the walls of his study at home. Filtered sunlight lay in primrose-pale bars across the cloth and the two places laid in silver.

But for himself and half a dozen elderly residents, the dining-room was deserted, but presently the door from the bar opened and the head waiter ushered
in
a man and a woman. Archery wondered if the management would object to the apricot poodle the woman fondled in her arms. But the head waiter was smiling deferentially and Archery saw him pat the tiny woolly head.

The man was small and dark and would have been good-looking but for his glassy, red-rimmed eyes. Archery thought he might be wearing contact lenses. He sat down at the Dufy table, ripped open a packet of Peter Stuyvesant and poured the contents into a gold cigarette case. In spite of the man’s obvious polish – his sleek hair, svelte suit, taut bone-smooth skin – there was something savage in the way his white fingers tore the paper. A wedding ring and a big gold signet gleamed in the soft light as he tossed the mutilated packet on to the cloth. Archery was amused to see how much jewellery he wore, a sapphire tie pin and a watch as well as the rings.

By contrast the woman wore none. She was plainly dressed in a cream silk suit that matched her hair, and everything about her from the gauzy hat and hair to her crossed ankles was the colour of faint sunlight, so that she seemed to glow with a pale radiance. Outside the cinema and the pictures in Mary’s magazines, she was the most beautiful woman he had seen for years. Compared to her Tess Painter was just a pretty girl. Archery was reminded of an ivory orchid or a tea rose which, when lifted from the florist’s cube of cellophane, still retains its patina of dew.

He gave himself a little shake and applied himself
determinedly
to his
Navarin
. It had turned out to be two lamb chops in a brown sauce.

Between Kingsmarkham High Street and the Kingsbrook Road lies an estate of ugly terraced houses covered with that mixture of mortar and grit builders call pebble dashing. On a hot day when the roads are dusty and flickering with heat mirage these rows of dun-coloured houses look as if they have been fashioned out of sand. A giant’s child might have built them, using his crude tools unimaginatively.

Archery found Glebe Road by the simple and traditional expedient of asking a policeman. He was getting into the habit of asking policemen and this one was low in the hierarchy, a young constable directing traffic at the crossroads.

Glebe Road might have been designed by the Romans, it was so straight, so long and so uncompromising. The sand houses had no woodwork about them. Their window frames were of metal and their porch canopies excrescences of pebbly plaster. After every fourth house an arch in the façade led into the back and through these arches sheds, coal bunkers and dustbins could be seen.

The street was numbered from the Kingsbrook Road end and Archery walked nearly half a mile before he found twenty-four. The hot pavements running with melted tar made his feet burn. He pushed open the gate and saw that the canopy covered not one front door but two. The house had been converted into two surely tiny flatlets. He
tapped
the chromium knocker on the door marked 24A and waited.

When nothing happened he tapped again. There was a grinding trundling sound and a boy on roller skates came out from under the arch. He took no notice at all of the clergyman. Could Mrs Crilling be asleep? It was hot enough for a siesta and Archery felt languid himself.

He stepped back and looked through the arch. Then he heard the door open and slam shut. So somebody was at home. He rounded the sandy wall and came face to face with Elizabeth Crilling.

At once he sensed that she had not answered, nor probably even heard, his knock. Evidently she was going out. The black dress had been changed for a short blue cotton shift that showed the outlines of her prominent hip bones. She wore backless white mules and carried a huge white and gilt handbag.

‘What d’you want?’ It was obvious she had no idea who he was. He thought she looked old, finished, as if somehow she had been used and wrecked. ‘If you’re selling something,’ she said, ‘you’ve come to the wrong shop.’

‘I saw your mother in court this morning,’ Archery said. ‘She asked me to come and see her.’

He thought she had rather a charming smile, for her mouth was well-shaped and her teeth good. But the smile was too brief.

‘That,’ she said, ‘was this morning.’

‘Is she at home?’ He looked helplessly at the doors. ‘I – er – which one is it, which flat?’

‘Are you kidding? It’s bad enough sharing a house
with
her. Only a stone-deaf paralytic could stick living
underneath
her.’

‘I’ll go in, shall I?’

‘Suit yourself. She’s not likely to come out here.’ The bag strap was hoisted on to the right shoulder, pulling the blue shift tight across her breasts. Without knowing why, Archery remembered the exquisite woman in the dining room of The Olive and Dove, her petal skin and her easy grace.

Elizabeth Crilling’s face was greasy. In the bright afternoon light the skin had the texture of lemon peel. ‘Well, go on in,’ she said sharply, unlocking the door. She pushed it open and turned away, her mules flapping and clacking down the path. ‘She won’t bite you,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘At least, I shouldn’t think so. She bit me once, but there were – well, extenuating circumstances.’

Archery went into the hall. Three doors led off it but they were all closed. He coughed and said tentatively, ‘Mrs Crilling?’

The place was stuffy and silent. He hesitated for a moment, then opened the first of the doors. Inside was a bedroom divided into two by a hardboard partition. He had been wondering how the two women managed. Now he knew. The middle room must be where they lived. He tapped on the door and opened it.

Although the French windows were ajar the air was thick with smoke and the two ashtrays on a gateleg table were filled with stubs. Every surface was covered with papers and debris and the debris with dust. As he entered a blue budgerigar in a tiny
cage
broke into a stream of high brittle chatter. The cage swung furiously.

Mrs Crilling wore a pink nylon dressing gown that looked as if it had once been designed for a bride. The honeymoon, Archery thought, was long over, for the dressing gown was stained and torn and hideous. She was sitting in an armchair looking through the window at a fenced-in piece of land at the back. It could hardly be called a garden for nothing grew in it but nettles, three feet high, rose-pink fireweed, and brambles that covered everything with fly-infested tendrils.

‘You hadn’t forgotten I was coming, Mrs Crilling?’

The face that appeared round the wing of the chair was enough to intimidate anyone. The whites of the eyes showed all the way round the black pupils. Every muscle looked tense, taut and corrugated as if from some inner agony. Her white hair, fringed and styled like a teenager’s, curtained the sharp cheekbones.

‘Who are you?’ She dragged herself up, clinging to the chair arm and came slowly round to face him. The vee at the dressing gown front showed a ridged and withered valley like the bed of a long-dried stream.

‘We met in court this morning. You wrote to me …’

He stopped. She had thrust her face within inches of his and seemed to be scrutinizing it. Then she stepped back and gave a long chattering laugh which the budgerigar echoed.

‘Mrs Crilling, are you all right? Is there anything I can do?’

She clutched her throat and the laugh died away in a rising wheeze. ‘Tablets … asthma …,’ she gasped. He was puzzled and shocked, but he reached behind him for the bottle of tablets on the littered mantelpiece. ‘Give me my tablets and then you can … you can get out!’

‘I’m sorry if I’ve done anything to distress you.’

She made no attempt to take a tablet but held the bottle up against her quaking chest. The movement made the tablets rattle and the bird, fluttering its wings and beating against the bars, began a frenzied crescendo, half song and half pain.

‘Where’s my baby?’ Did she mean Elizabeth? She must mean Elizabeth.

‘She’s gone out. I met her in the porch. Mrs Crilling, can I get you a glass of water? Can I make you a cup of tea?’

‘Tea? What do I want with tea? That’s what she said this morning, that police girl. Come and have a cup of tea, Mrs Crilling.’ A terrible spasm shook her and she fell back against the chair, fighting for breath. ‘You … my baby … I thought you were my friend … Aaah!’

Archery was really frightened now. He plunged from the room into the dirty kitchen and filled a cup with water. The window ledge was stacked with empty chemist’s bottles and there was a filthy hypodermic beside an equally dirty eye dropper. When he came back she was still wheezing and jerking. Should he make her take the tablets, dare he?
On
the bottle label were the words:
Mrs J. Crilling. Take two when needed
. He rattled two into his hand and, supporting her with his other arm, forced them into her mouth. It was all he could do to suppress the shudder of distaste when she dribbled and choked over the water.

‘Filthy … nasty,’ she mumbled. He half-eased, half-rolled her into the chair and pulled together the gaping edges of the dressing gown. Moved with pity and with horror, he knelt down beside her.

‘I will be your friend if you want me to be,’ he said soothingly.

The words had the opposite effect. She made a tremendous effort to draw breath. Her lips split open and he could see her tongue rising and quivering against the roof of her mouth.

‘Not my friend … enemy … police fiend! Take my baby away … I saw you with them … I watched you come out with them.’ He drew back from her, rising. Never would he have believed her capable of screaming after that spasm and when the scream came, as clear and ear-splitting as a child’s, he felt his hands go up to his face ‘… Not let them get her in there! Not in the prison! They’ll find it out in there. She’ll tell them … my baby … She’ll have to tell them!’ With a sudden galvanic jerk she reared up, her mouth open and her arms flailing. ‘They’ll find it all out. I’ll kill her first, kill her … D’you hear?’

The French windows stood open. Archery staggered back into the sun against a stinging prickling wall of weeds. Mrs Crilling’s incoherent gasps had swollen into a stream of obscenity. There
was
a gate in the wire netting fence. He unlatched it, wiping the sweat from his forehead, and stepped into the cool dark cave of the sand-walled arch.