The Woman Who Was Not There Read online

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  Contents

  Jennie Melville

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Part Two

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Jennie Melville

  The Woman Who Was Not There

  Jennie Melville, a pseudonym for Gwendoline Butler, was born and brought up in south London, and was one of the most universally praised of English mystery authors. She wrote over fifty novels under both names. Educated at Haberdashers, she read history at Oxford, and later married Dr Lionel Butler, Principal of Royal Holloway College. She had one daughter, who survives her.

  Gwendoline Butler’s crime novels are hugely popular in both Britain and the United States, and her many awards included the Crime Writers’ Association’s Silver Dagger. She was also selected as being one of the top two hundred crime writers in the world by The Times.

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Tuesday

  A winter’s day in Windsor, that ancient town which changed and yet was unchanging. Because of the number of visitors and daily tourists, there was a floating population from which it was easy to disappear. A coach came in from London on an excursion. All the passengers dispersed, reminded by the driver that they must meet him again at the coach station by a certain hour.

  When they set off again that evening, one passenger was missing. No one noticed except the driver, who waited for a few minutes then departed. It was the way things went sometimes. He could not remember if the missing passenger was a man or a woman.

  At least that was what he said. As it happened, he remembered perfectly well: it was a woman.

  Disappearances, but also appearances.

  A town in which strange events could happen and where ghosts walked. It was said that on the right nights King George III could be seen leaning out of a window, looking mad and saluting his royal troops who were not there.

  And not only ghosts, but even odder, nastier figures were said to be on the move.

  In Leopold Walk (the Leopold was reputedly the youngest son of Queen Victoria) in the centre of the town, there were four Victorian houses, each narrow, detached, set in a row with one on the corner.

  It was a cul de sac, with a high brick wall facing the terrace. Once family homes, for the last thirty years or so each had housed a small business. Number four, at the end of Leopold Walk, held the offices of a small accountancy firm, number three belonged to a husband and wife architectural firm, small but prize-winning. And next door was a computer agency. All three businesses had one thing in common: they were very inward-looking; the men and women who worked there walked down the road or eased their cars into the difficult parking without appearing to have much to do with their neighbours. They passed number one and occasionally thought: odd place; but they shrugged and went on. Not their business.

  Number one Leopold Walk was different, it was dusty, shut up and neglected. Empty, yet not empty.

  Charmian Daniels, policewoman, looked down upon the diminutive figure walking at her side on the hill near the castle, whose conversation was worrying her; she could see how distressed her companion was. Fanny was talking, but not being quite as specific as she could be. What was it all about?

  ‘Come on, Fanny, tell me more. You said you had to talk to me, and now you’re just wringing your hands and weeping.’

  ‘Not weeping,’ said Fanny sharply. She had her pride, and weep in public she would not. A fearful tear in private, yes.

  Charmian shook her head. ‘Sorry, not weeping, Fanny.’ The two women had halted in the crowd of onlookers at the crest of the gentle hill. The soldiers were marching through the town as they did twice a day. They were young and erect and eyes straight ahead. One in particular attracted Fanny’s attention.

  ‘Lovely, isn’t he?’ said Fanny Fanfairly (real name Fanny Fisher). ‘I always love a soldier.’ She was staring at a tall young man in a bearskin and grey winter uniform, banging a drum as he marched with his companions of the Royal Guard from their barracks to the great castle on the hill. ‘Welsh Guards this month. But not as tall as they used to be, guardsmen aren’t. Not like they were in my day. They can’t get the men.’

  A tiny, fragile-boned old lady herself, she looked up hopefully for confirmation.

  ‘So I’ve heard,’ Charmian responded politely.

  ‘Policemen, too,’ said Fanny. ‘Smaller.’ She sounded pleased. Charmian did not answer. We’re big enough, she thought.

  Charmian had first worked in politics, straight from university, decided it was not for her, and became a copper. She had worked her way up from walking the beat to detective and on and up to becoming a high-ranking officer in charge of SRADIC (Southern Register and Documentation of Crime). She was a powerful woman, with her own investigating staff. She saw all important records of crimes and could initiate her own checks if she so desired.

  ‘Things change,’ she said soothingly to her old friend, wondering how she had become a friend of Fanny, retired tart and brothel owner. Fanny was not ashamed of her past, claiming that she had performed a necessary service well and brought harm to no one. She only wished it had left her richer. ‘A working woman,’ she had said, ‘and not ashamed.’

  ‘I like the Irish Guards best myself,’ said Fanny now. ‘I always had a weakness for them. Such men, they are.’

  You’d know, thought Charmian. Fanny was old and frail now, her bones thin as a bird’s and her face lined, but she still applied a bright shine of lipstick, dyed her hair auburn and touched up her eyes with liner and mascara. On her good days she looked ageless. Today she seemed to have shrunk within herself. Charmian knew she was about eighty.

  ‘So what’s up, Fanny?’ asked Charmian. ‘ Why did you want to see me?’

  Fanny frowned but did not answer.

  ‘And why did we have to meet in the middle of Windsor and not in your house? I would have come there, you know that.’

  Once Charmian had lost her cat and Fanny had read the tag round the creature’s neck and brought it home. From that meeting a friendship, of a kind, had grown. If Fanny trusted anyone in the police service she trusted Charmian.

  ‘I felt like the open air.’

  ‘Right. Well, the way the wind is blowing, the air is very open.’ It was a chill January day with a hint of snow.

  ‘Sometimes you need a woman,’ muttered Fanny.

  Charmian said gently: ‘ Is there trouble where you live?’

  Down Peascod Street, turn right into Brunswick Street and then a few yards to the left turn right into Adelaide Passage was a row of small early nineteenth-century houses, once the homes of artisans but now prized by the gentry. In one of them, the last of its kind, a theatrical lodging house since the turn of the century, Fanny had a room and a kitchen; she shared a bath with the lodgers as they came and went.

  ‘No, they’re good to me there,’
said Fanny, her head down.

  ‘So they should be.’ Charmian knew the Neederlys who ran it, as the family had done for generations, and knew that they politely accepted that Fanny was a resting, retired performer living on a small income, not the former owner of a brothel in Knightsbridge. ‘I was always top of the heap,’ Fanny had said once with some pride, ‘and could have been rich if I hadn’t been such an extravagant piece. And I treated the girls well; one of them married a duke, you know.’ Fanny probably had more in the way of savings than she admitted to, and had indeed once been on the boards, but Charmian was doubtful about the duke.

  ‘You know about my inheritance … left me by a dear old friend.’ It was a statement and not a question, made with a mixture of pride and anxiety. ‘ I keep an eye on it, you know. Watch it. Regular as clockwork, I am.’

  ‘Sure. You told me.’ Several times. And you told everyone who would listen as well. ‘ I didn’t know you kept watch. Is there any trouble with it?’

  If Fanny wanted to talk to her about it, then there probably was trouble since Fanny regarded her as a kind of goddess in a machine who could solve problems. She had already sorted out Fanny’s pension and the tax on her small investments. On which subject she was far from sure that Fanny had told all the truth, but Charmian knew when to stop digging and leave well alone.

  But the inheritance was a strange affair. An old admirer (or so Fanny admitted William Beckinhale had been before old age had removed him from the scene) had bequeathed to her an ancient house in Windsor. Fanny had been exceedingly proud, undecided whether to sell it or move in. The house, she knew, had been neglected for years.

  ‘I went to take a look this week … just a check, you know, but I have to wait for probate of the will before it’s really mine. But I didn’t see why I shouldn’t take a look through the windows. And I’ve gone on doing it. No harm there.’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Charmian reassuringly. She wondered where the conversation was leading.

  ‘Besides …’ Fanny hesitated. ‘There had been a sort of a business there …’

  The road was clearing as the Guards marched into the castle and traffic and pedestrians began to move forward.

  ‘Come along, I’ll show you.’ Fanny walked forward with her delicate, mincing gait. She always wore high-heeled shoes in which she stepped carefully over the cobbles.

  ‘Wait a minute … This business, Fanny?’ said Charmian, a wordless question in her voice. She raised an eyebrow.

  ‘No, not that,’ said Fanny hastily. ‘Not exactly … I’ll explain when we get there.’

  She led the way across the road which led up to the castle, then through the old Market Street to a narrow turning, Princess Victoria Louise Street. This was Leopold Walk.

  Charmian paused at the corner, forcing Fanny to slow down. The street was narrow and cobbled with a high wall on one side and four houses on the other.

  ‘Mine is the one on the corner,’ said Fanny. ‘Freehold property. All mine.’ She sounded gloomy.

  ‘Well, that’s lovely. You can sell it. Or live in it.’

  ‘The thing is …’ Fanny hesitated, as if she did not know how to put it. ‘It has … people in it.’

  ‘Tenants?’

  ‘You could call them that.’

  ‘You can get them out. Ask them to leave.’

  ‘Not this lot,’ said Fanny.

  Charmian stared at her. ‘Come on, Fanny, what is this?’

  ‘They don’t walk and they don’t talk … I think they move, though.’

  The house fronted straight on to the street, three narrow floors with a window on each, detached, with a wild garden behind. It looked as though it shared the garden with the house next door, and the one beyond, although bushes and a ragged hedge suggested there had once been boundaries. At the side of the house was a small barred window which looked as if the ground level had risen and half buried it. Fanny led Charmian straight up to the front window which gave on to the street. It was curtained, but there was a gap in the curtains.

  ‘Take a look. I did.’

  Charmian put her face up to the window. The window was dusty but she could see into the room. It was set out as a dining room with heavy oak furniture, Jacobean or Tudor in style. A man sat at the table and a serving maid leant towards him; he appeared to be touching her waist.

  ‘Wax,’ said Fanny. ‘Old English kitchen behind, with naked kitchen maid, you can’t see that from here. Tudor on the ground floor. Eighteenth century above, Regency, that lot … and Victorian on the top floor.’

  ‘It’s a museum of costume,’ said Charmian.

  ‘You could call it that,’ answered Fanny. ‘I daresay some did. But not what they went for.’

  ‘You’ve been inside?’

  Fanny produced a key. ‘Mr Grange of the solicitors let me have this. He didn’t see why not – he’s been inside himself and had a look. Surprised him, I think. Did me a bit. The ground floor is fairly mild, but it hots up as you go up the stairs.’

  She was opening the front door and motioning Charmian inside. A puff of stale, dusty air, yet still scented with ancient aromas of sandalwood and chypre, mingled with other, stranger smells.

  ‘A private club, I think,’ said Fanny, standing still. ‘Or a gentleman’s amusement for his friends. I don’t know if money passed hands. My friend who left it to me said he inherited from his uncle, but I don’t know about that.’

  ‘How odd that I’ve never heard of it.’

  ‘You wouldn’t, closed up for years.’

  ‘The police usually know about things.’ Not to mention the neighbours, Charmian thought. What a place.

  Fanny shrugged. ‘Private, like I said.’

  Charmian took a deep breath; she didn’t know whether to laugh or not. Fanny’s inheritance was a kind of judgement on her, and perhaps intended to be so. ‘ What did your old friend think you would do with it?’

  ‘I don’t know. Sell it, use it, live in it.’ Fanny started to walk up the stairs. ‘Come on, have a look.’

  Charmian followed her up the narrow stairway. Ahead, a double door opened.

  The Regency room was charming, the furniture, of delicate mahogany and brass, looked genuine. The curving sofa was covered in striped yellow satin, now somewhat faded and dusty.

  On the sofa sat a woman dressed in a transparent muslin. She was stretched out in an enticing fashion before the man who sat next to her.

  ‘Dear me,’ said Charmian.

  ‘Yes,’ Fanny nodded. ‘It takes all tastes, doesn’t it?’ She closed the door, almost, Charmian thought, as if she was frightened the pair would get out. Without adjusting their clothes.

  The house was so arranged, she soon realized, that the erotic heat was raised with each floor level.

  The top-floor room was a bedroom furnished in heavy Victorian style. A woman lay on the bed; she appeared to be in the process of undressing, her legs wide spread; across the room stood another woman, bare breasted. A male figure sat on a chair. Or did he sit? There was something fixed and unpleasing in his posture. He was about to move. He wore a striped shirt, and a stiff white collar, but naught else. His bodily equipment was not left to the imagination.

  ‘My, my,’ said Charmian. ‘Interesting suggestions here … saleable, I should think.’

  ‘Oh, shut up.’ Fanny turned away. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, it’s worse than you think.’

  Charmian savoured her anger, wondering what lay behind it. Fanny was not usually so sharp with her. ‘Is this the lot?’

  ‘There’s an attic,’ said Fanny. ‘I haven’t been up there.’

  Charmian said: ‘You could call all this a museum piece.’

  ‘She’s moved,’ said Fanny, ‘that one on the bed. Her legs weren’t like that the first time I looked.’

  ‘You may have disturbed things … I daresay the limbs are jointed.’ For use, she thought. These mannekins had not played an entirely passive part in love games. ‘I should think
they are valuable.’ There would certainly be a market if you knew where to look. Fanny need not despair of a profit.

  There was no enthusiasm in Fanny’s voice. ‘They move, you see. Move about the house, for all I know. Something’s got into them.’ She closed the bedroom door very carefully – there was no lock – then began to descend the stairs.

  Or into you, Charmian thought. She let Fanny lead her down the stairs.

  At the front door she said: ‘Why did you bring me here?’

  ‘To show you. To tell you they moved. Do you believe it?’

  Charmian said in a level voice. ‘No.’

  Fanny opened the front door, let Charmian pass through it, then locked it behind them. ‘All right. Fair enough. But I told you.’

  Out in the street, the rain falling on the cobbles, Charmian asked her where she was going now. ‘Can I give you a lift? I have the car not so far away.’

  Fanny considered, ‘I shall go to the club; I’ll walk thank you, it’s not far. I need the air.’

  The club was for the elderly residents of inner Windsor. Fanny had three close friends, all women whom she met there regularly.

  ‘Right.’ Charmian kissed Fanny gently on the cheek. Something was puzzling her, over and above Fanny’s remark about the wax figures moving, but she could not put a finger on it. ‘Look after yourself. And sell the place; I would.’

  Fanny watched Charmian walk away.

  The local police must have known about the wax figures and the nature of them; the police always knew about that sort of thing. Charmian wondered whom she could ask for information about that strange house. Her colleague Dolly Barstow who worked with her on SRADIC, always well informed, was too young to know much, if she had heard of it at all. She needed an old-timer.

  She considered who there was: Superintendent Horris was old enough but had only recently come into the Windsor area. George Rewley had sharp antennae but was on the young side. Then she remembered Inspector Frank Felyx, just retired, and whose father had served in the district before him. It was said he remembered all that there was to remember.