A New Lease of Death (25 page)

Outwardly he was cold. He was coatless and the night was chilly. You expect a winter’s night to be cold, he thought. There was something depressing and wrong about a cold summer night. November with flowers, a November wind that ruffled the ripe leaves of summer. He must not find omens in nature.

‘What d’you call it,’ he said to Charles, ‘when you ascribe emotions to nature? What’s the expression?’

‘The Pathetic Fallacy,’ Charles said. Archery shivered.

‘This is the house,’ he said. They got out. Number twenty-four was in darkness upstairs and down.

‘She’s probably in bed.’

‘Then she’ll have to get up,’ said Charles and rang the bell. He rang again and again. ‘Pointless,’ he said. ‘Can we get round the back?’

Archery said, ‘Through here,’ and led Charles
through
the sandy arch. It was like a cavern, he thought, touching the walls. He expected them to be clammy but they were dry and prickly to the touch. They emerged into a dark pool among patches of light which came from French windows all along the backs of houses. A yellow square segmented by black bars lay on each shadowed garden but none came from Mrs Crilling’s window.

‘She must be out,’ said Archery as they opened the little gate in the wire fence. ‘We know so little about them. We don’t know where she’d go or who her friends are.’

Through the first window the kitchen and the hall showed dark and empty. To reach the French windows they had to push through a tangle of wet nettles which stung their hands.

‘Pity we didn’t bring a torch.’

‘We haven’t
got
a torch,’ Archery objected. He peered in. ‘I’ve got matches.’ The first he struck showed him the room as he had seen it before, a muddle of flung-down clothes and stacked newspapers. The match died and he dropped it on wet concrete. By the light of a second he saw that on the table were the remains of a meal, cut bread still in its paper wrapping, a cup and saucer, a jam jar, a single plate coated with something yellow and congealed.

‘We might as well go,’ he said. ‘She isn’t here.’

‘The door’s not locked,’ said Charles. He lifted the latch and opened it quietly. There came to them at once a peculiar and unidentifiable odour of fruit and of alcohol.

‘You can’t go in. There isn’t the slightest justification for breaking in.’

‘I haven’t broken anything.’ Charles’s foot was over the threshold, but he stopped and said over his shoulder to his father, ‘Don’t you think there’s something odd here? Don’t you feel it?’

Archery shrugged. They were both in the room now. The smell was very strong but they could see nothing but the dim outlines of cluttered furniture.

‘The light switch is on the left by the door,’ he said. ‘I’ll find it.’ He had forgotten that his son was a man, that his son’s adult sense of responsibility had brought them there. In that dark, evilly scented place, they were just a parent and his child. He must not do as Mrs Crilling had done and let the child go first. ‘Wait there,’ he said. He felt his way along the side of the table, pushed a small armchair out of his path, squeezed behind the sofa and felt for the switch. ‘Wait there!’ he cried again, much more sharply and in a spasm of real fear. Previously in his passage across the room his feet had come into contact with debris on the floor, a shoe, he thought, a book dropped face-downwards. Now the obstruction was larger and more solid. His scalp crept. Clothes, yes, and within those clothes something heavy and inert. He dropped to his knees, thrusting forward hands to palpate and fumble. ‘Dear God …!’

‘What is it? What the hell is it? Can’t you find the light?’

Archery could not speak. He had withdrawn his hands and they were wet and sticky. Charles had
crossed
the room. Light pouring into and banishing that darkness was a physical pain. Archery closed his eyes. Above him he heard Charles make an inarticulate sound.

He opened his eyes and the first thing he saw was that his hands were red. Charles said, ‘Don’t look!’ and he knew that his own lips had been trying to frame those words. They were not policemen, not used to sights such as this, and each had tried to save the other from seeing.

Each had to look. Mrs Crilling lay spread on the floor between the sofa and the wall and she was quite dead. The chill of her body came up to Archery’s hands through the pink flounces that covered it from neck to ankles. He had seen that neck and at once had looked away from the stocking that made a ligature around it.

‘But she’s all over blood,’ said Charles, ‘It’s as if – God! – as if someone had sprinkled her with it.’

17

I held my tongue and spake nothing; I kept silence, yea, even from good words; but it was pain and grief to me.

Psalm 39. The Burial of the Dead

‘IT ISN’T BLOOD,’
said Wexford. ‘Don’t you know what it is? Couldn’t you smell it?’ He lifted the bottle someone had found under the sideboard and held it aloft. Archery sat on the sofa in Mrs Crilling’s living room, worn, tired, utterly spent. Doors banged and footsteps sounded as Wexford’s two men searched the other room. The people upstairs had come in at midnight, Saturday night happy, the man a little drunk. The woman had hysterics during Wexford’s questioning.

They had taken the body away and Charles moved his chair round so that he could not see the crimson splashes of cherry brandy.

‘But why? Why did it happen?’ he whispered.

‘Your father knows why.’ Wexford stared at
Archery
, his grey gimlet eyes deep and opaque. He squatted opposite them on a low chair with wooden arms. ‘As for me, I don’t know but I can guess. I can’t help feeling I’ve seen something like this before, a long, long time ago. Sixteen years to be exact. A pink frilly dress that a little girl could never wear again because it was spoilt with blood.’

Outside the rain had begun again and water lashed against the windows making them rattle. It would be cold now inside Victor’s Piece, cold and eerie like a deserted castle in a wood of wet trees. The Chief Inspector had an extra uncanny sense that almost amounted to telepathy. Archery willed his thoughts to alter course lest Wexford should divine them, but the question came before he could rid his mind of its pictures.

‘Come on, Archery, where is she?’

‘Where is who?’

‘The daughter.’

‘What makes you think I know?’

‘Listen to me,’ said Wexford. ‘The last person we’ve talked to who saw her was a chemist in Kingsmarkham. Oh, yes, we went to all the chemists first naturally. This one remembers that when she was in the shop there were two men and a girl there too, a young man and an elder one, tall, fair, obviously father and son.’

‘I didn’t speak to her then,’ Archery said truthfully. The smell sickened him. He wanted nothing but sleep and peace and to get out of this room where Wexford had kept them since they had telephoned him.

‘Mrs Crilling’s been dead six or seven hours. It’s
ten
to three now and you left The Olive at a quarter to eight. The barman saw you come in at ten. Where did you go, Mr Archery?’

He sat silent. Years and years ago – Oh, centuries ago! – it had been like this in school. You own up, you betray someone, or everyone suffers. Funny, once before he had thought of Wexford as a kind of headmaster.

‘You know where she is,’ Wexford said. His voice was loud, threatening, ominous. ‘D’you want to be an accessory? Is that what you want?’

Archery closed his eyes. Quite suddenly he knew why he was prevaricating. He wanted the very thing that Charles had warned him might happen and although it was contrary to his religion, wicked even, he wanted it with all his heart.

Charles said, ‘Father …’ and when he got no reply shrugged, turned his dull shocked eyes to Wexford. ‘Oh, what the hell? She’s at Victor’s Piece.’

Archery realized that he had been holding his breath. He let it out in a deep sigh. ‘In one of the bedrooms,’ he said, ‘looking at the coach house and dreaming of a heap of sand. She asked what they would do to her and I didn’t understand. What will they do to her?’

Wexford got up. ‘Well, sir …’ Archery noted that ‘sir’ as one might notice the re-assuming of a velvet glove. ‘You know as well as I do that it’s no longer lawful to punish with death for certain …’ His eyes flickered over the place where Mrs Crilling had lain. ‘… certain heinous and grievous offences.’

‘Will you let us go now?’ Charles asked.

‘Until tomorrow,’ said Wexford.

The rain met them at the front door like a wave or a wall of spray. For the past half hour it had been drumming on the roof of the car and seeping in through the half-open quarter light. There was water laying in a small pool at Archery’s feet but he was too tired to notice or care.

Charles came with him into his bedroom.

‘I shouldn’t ask you now,’ he said. ‘It’s almost morning and God knows what we’ll have to go through tomorrow, but I have to know. I’d rather know. But what else did she tell you, that girl at Victor’s Piece?’

Archery had heard of people pacing a room like caged beasts. He had never imagined himself so strung with tension that in spite of utter exhaustion he would have to find release by crossing and recrossing a floor, picking up objects, replacing them, his hands, shaking. Charles waited, too wretched even for impatience. His letter to Tess lay in its envelope on the dressing table and beside it the card from the gift shop. Archery picked it up and kneaded it in his hands, crumpling the deckle edging. Then he went up to his son, put his hands gently on his shoulders and looked into the eyes that were young replicas of his own.

‘What she told me,’ he said, ‘needn’t matter to you. It would be like – well, someone else’s nightmare.’ Charles did not move. ‘If you will only tell me where you saw the verse that is printed on this card.’

The morning was grey and cool, such a morning
as
occurs perhaps three hundred times a year out of the three hundred and sixty-five, when there is neither rain nor sun, frost nor fog. It was a limbo of a morning. The policeman on the crossing had covered his shirt sleeves with his dark jacket, the striped shop blinds were rolled up and sluggish steps had grown brisk.

Inspector Burden escorted Archery along the drying pavements to the police station. Archery was ashamed to answer Burden’s kindly question as to how he had slept. He had slept heavily and soundly. Perhaps he would also have slept dreamlessly had he known what the inspector now told him, that Elizabeth Crilling was alive.

‘She came with us quite willingly,’ Burden said and added rather indiscreetly, ‘To tell you the truth, sir, I’ve never seen her so calm and sane and – well, at peace, really.’

‘You want to go home, I suppose,’ Wexford said when Burden had left them alone in the blue and yellow office. ‘You’ll have to come back for the inquest and the magistrates’ court hearing. You found the body.’

Archery sighed. ‘Elizabeth found a body sixteen years ago. If it hadn’t been for her mother’s self-seeking vanity, greed for something she had no claim to – that would never have happened. You might say that greed reached out and destroyed long after its original purpose had been frustrated. Or you might say that Elizabeth bore her mother a grudge because Mrs Crilling would never let her talk about Painter and bring her terrors to the light of day.’

‘You might,’ said Wexford. ‘It could be all those things. And it could be that when Liz left the chemist’s she went back to Glebe Road, Mrs Crilling was afraid to ask for another prescription, so Liz, in the addict’s frenzy, strangled her.’

‘May I see her?’

‘I’m afraid not. I’m beginning to guess just what she saw sixteen years ago and what she told you last night.’

‘After I’d talked to her I went to see Dr Crocker. I want you to look at this.’ Archery gave Wexford Colonel Plashet’s letter, silently indicating the relevant passage with his bandaged finger. ‘Poor Elizabeth,’ he murmured. ‘She wanted to give Tess a dress for her fifth birthday. Unless Tess has changed a lot it wouldn’t have meant much to her.’

Wexford read, closed his eyes briefly and then gave a slight smile. ‘I see,’ he said slowly and restored the letter to its envelope.

‘I am right, aren’t I? I’m not juggling things, imagining things? You see, I can’t trust my own judgment any more. I have to have an opinion from an expert in deduction. I’ve been to Forby, I’ve seen a photograph, I’ve got a letter and I’ve talked to a doctor. If you had the same clues would you have come to the same conclusions?’

‘I’m sure you’re very kind, Mr Archery.’ Wexford gave a broad ironic grin. ‘I get more complaints than compliments. Now, as to clues and conclusions, I would, but I’d have been on to it a whole lot sooner.

‘You see, it all depends on what you’re looking for
and
the fact is, sir, you didn’t know what you
were
looking for. All the time you were trying to disprove something in the face of – well, you said it – expert deduction. What you’ve found now achieves the same result as the other thing would have. For you and your son, that is. But it hasn’t changed what for justice is the
status quo
. We would have made sure we knew precisely what we were looking for at the start, the basic thing. When you come down to that, it doesn’t matter a damn to you who committed the crime. But you were looking through a pair of spectacles that were too big for you.’

‘A glass darkly,’ said Archery.

‘I can’t say I envy you the coming interview.’

‘Strange,’ said Archery thoughtfully as he got up to go, ‘that although we both held such opposing opinions in the end we were both right.’

Wexford had said he must come back. He would make his visits short, though, short and blind, his eyes opening only in the court he could see out of this window, his words mere evidence. He had read stories of people transported to strange places, blindfolded and in shuttered cars, so that they should not see the country through which they passed. In his case he would be prevented from seeing visions and associations with those visions, by the presence of those he was legitimately allowed to love. Mary should come with him and Charles and Tess to be his shutters and his hood. Certainly he would never see this room again. He turned to give it a last glance, but if he hoped to have the last word he was disappointed.