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  Contents

  Jennie Melville

  Epigraph

  One . . . Dead Love

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Two . . . Lost Love

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Three . . . Last Love

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Jennie Melville

  There Lies Your Love

  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.

  Epigraph

  Titania:

  My Oberon! What visions have I seen!

  Methought I was enamoured of an ass.

  Oberon:

  There lies your love.

  Titania:

  How came these things to pass?

  O, how mine eyes do loathe his visage now.

  A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Act IV, Scene I.

  One . . . Dead Love

  Chapter One

  IN court the medical evidence was being taken. For the first time the whole court was on the alert. It was a hot afternoon, Friday, June 12, humid and sultry. The Thames Valley, in which lay the small town of Deerham Hills, was covered with thick grey cloud; there would be thunder before evening. Charmian Daniels stirred uncomfortably in her seat. Heat and incredulity alike were troubling her. She loosened her jacket, thus relieving her body a little, but the tension in her mind remained. She was prepared for the evidence, she knew what was coming, but she just couldn’t believe it.

  Jim King, the dead woman’s husband, stared blankly ahead of him. He, like the police, knew what was going to be said in the medical evidence.

  Deerham Hills was a growing town not far from London. Each year lately it had added more than a thousand inhabitants or so to itself. About two-thirds of these were adults moving into one of the new blocks of flats or housing developments, but the other third were born here in the town, either in Deerham Hills Hospital or the more select St Anne’s Mothers’ Clinic. There was beginning to be a substantial generation that was native born Deerham Hills. Of course, the town contained an older residue of families that had lived in Deerham Hills for the last forty years or more, but there weren’t so many of them now and they were beginning to be overpowered by the new ethos of the place. The fresh spirit of Deerham Hills marked progress by material possessions. If this year you had two new motor cars and were building a boat then you were not only a richer man but also a better man than last year when you only had one motor car and hadn’t dared think about a boat. The really wicked degenerating people were those who were not making a success in the world or whose parents had somehow impeded them through bad education or ill-health. Deerham Hills did not put this idea into speech (it was not, in any case, a very articulate society) but it acted upon it. The Mayor, the Town Council and the local Member of Parliament were all men who embodied success.

  And yet it was a good-hearted, friendly, responsible town which took its duties, once it had accepted them, seriously. Charmian, who had formerly been among its sharpest critics, had to admit you could live in worse places. She had been a sergeant in the Deerham Hills police force for some years now, long enough to know and be known by most of the important citizens. But in many ways she was still an alien, and still sensitively conscious that she was an ambitious Scots girl with her way to make in the world and every intention of doing so. Perhaps she was more aware of the dark pits and shadows behind Deerham Hills’ bright face than most, but then she had reason to be. It was her job. Moreover, in her own life there had recently been a deep, dark pit into which she had almost fallen.

  There was a hush as the witness cleared his throat before speaking. The whole room was momentarily still. But how absurd it is, thought Charmian, to say you could hear a pin drop. We are all quiet, everyone is straining to catch what this doctor has to say, but all the same there are plenty of noises to be heard which would obscure a pin. Here, in this room I can hear Inspector Pratt coughing, I can hear the clerk of the court shuffling his papers and I can hear my own breathing; outside the room I can hear a lorry and in the distance a train.

  Deerham Hills was well represented in the court room today. Charmian Daniels could see the manager of her bank, the owner of the local big food store, the woman who had worked with her on a committee for road safety and her own friend and hairdresser, Baba Druitt, who had just embarked on her third marriage. None of these people were witnesses or would be called to testify in any way, but they each had an interest in what was going on.

  The Coroner moved his head alertly and caught the expert witness’s eye, who at once started to answer the question which had been put to him.

  ‘I made a preliminary examination of the body on being summoned to see it on the afternoon of June 4th. It had already been examined by Mrs King’s own doctor.’ Like all medical witnesses he was at the same time anxious to get things quite precise and yet not say too much just in case he was wrong.

  ‘And what conclusions did you come to?’ asked the Coroner, who was not a doctor.

  ‘The face was flushed, there was a good deal of flushing all over the skin surface. The body was lying in a relaxed, natural position, seated in a chair as if she had fallen asleep there without being aware of what was happening. A box of matches was held in one hand and matches were spilt on her skirt.’

  ‘But none had been struck?’

  ‘Apparently none had been struck. I came to the conclusion that the dead woman had been suffocated by coal-gas, and that this was the result of an accident.’

  ‘Yes, we have already had the evidence of the Gas Board Inspector telling us that the tap of the gas fire had jammed,’ said the Coroner, looking down at his notes. ‘It was faulty.’

  —Might have jammed, corrected Charmian to herself, perhaps did jam, but I doubt it now, it would be too much of a coincidence.

  But for a time it looked as if Nan King had sat there with the matches ready to light the gas flame but had not succeeded in doing so before the gas asphyxiated her.

  ‘This was my tentative conclusion,’ went on Dr Morrows. ‘But on making a post mortem examination I discovered that there was considerable destruction of the red corpuscles and the formation of metheamoglobin.’

  Very few people understood the significance of what he was saying. Red corpuscles, metheamoglobin, the words meant little, but they could all interpret it as meaning something he had not expected to see. Jackson the banker covered his e
yes with his hands because he suddenly had a picture of Nan King, who had been his sister. John Lubbock, the owner of Lubbock’s, the fashionable and successful food store, fiddled with his watch, time was always short with him, but he would stay with this to the end; Nan had been his friend and partner. Baba Druitt looked sad, as though she had loved Nan. She took the hand of the woman next to her, Alice Evans, who had known Nan since she was Nan Jackson, and patted it. Alice and Nan had been friends since school days at Miss Juniper’s kindergarten. Charmian observed all this without expression, she had her own reasons for regarding them with reserve. But unconsciously she too reacted to the evidence being given, her hands clasped and unclasped themselves in her lap. The word metheamoglobin seemed to have no connection with Nan as Charmian recalled her. Nan King was a small, plump and beautifully dressed woman whom Charmian had envied. She was not this dead woman about whom they were talking.

  Charmian noticed that even as Baba Druitt patted her companion’s hand, her eyes were critically studying the blue-dyed hair. Under other circumstances she would probably have been advising Alice Evans to drop her present hairdresser and let Baba do her hair in future. Even as it was she could not prevent amusement and scepticism from appearing in her eyes.

  ‘As a result of carrying out the Stas-Otto process,’ the doctor was saying when Charmian heard his voice clearly again, ‘I was left with a residue to which I applied Milton’s reagent.’

  ‘And this indicated?’

  ‘That there was a large quantity of phenacetin in the stomach. Aspirin was also present.’

  —In other words suicide, said Charmian to herself. Not accident, not bad luck, but deliberate self-murder. Mrs King had swallowed a bottle of pain killer and then sat there and waited on the gas to see her out. But why had Nan King, pretty, rich, successful and loved, killed herself? It was a sour thought.

  What am I doing here? she asked herself. She heard Inspector Pratt give a quiet cough. What was Pratt doing here? Ah, that was the question. What was an Inspector of the Deerham Hills police doing at this Coroner’s Inquest on a woman who had died from a mixture of an overdose of phenacetin and aspirin and coal gas? She gave Pratt a sideways glance. He was sitting there, looking as neat and composed as always, shaken only by that queer little cough he had developed lately, and not saying anything. I am here, she told herself, because presently I have to stand up and describe again how I was called in as a policewoman to see the body. I have given this evidence once but now they will ask me again. Nan King’s husband has a lawyer here; he is prepared for trouble. But why is Pratt here? Was it just because he was a friend and neighbour of the Kings? Pratt was looking faintly puzzled, and this expression was probably mirrored on the faces of all present including her own. The terrible truth about Nan made them all seem hollow people.

  At this moment she saw a young plain clothes policeman edge his way into the hall and walk towards them. He was a trainee detective on whom Pratt was supposed to be keeping an eye. Pratt frowned when he saw him. The young man sat down next to Pratt and began to talk to him in a low voice.

  Charmian was not really listening to him, she was preoccupied with listening for the sound of her own name. She heard the word ‘Abbot’s End’. Abbot’s End was a lively and fast-growing district of Deerham Hills made up of a large council-subsidised estate and tidy squares of small owner-occupied houses. Abbot’s End shared in the prosperity which the whole of Deerham Hills enjoyed but was somewhat more aggressive about it. Or that was how the rest of Deerham Hills felt about the matter. The motor cars that were ‘borrowed’ in Deerham Hills turned up in Abbot’s End nine-tenths of the time; the arsonist who burnt down three churches and the fire station in two weeks lived in Abbot’s End, and when there was the mass fight at the College of Arts and Sciences the ringleaders and most of the fighters were adolescents from Abbot’s End.

  ‘All right,’ she heard Pratt mutter irritably. ‘So the girl’s missing. We know that. Girls do go missing.’

  ‘Three days, nearly four now.’

  ‘Arlette Grey,’ said Pratt.

  This was the first time Charmian had heard the name Arlette Grey.

  ‘Father’s a bank clerk,’ she heard Pratt add, as if in some obscure way that mattered. And then, ‘Well, go on, go and get the yellow motor car. Have a look. See what you make of it.’

  He turned back to the court, where the Coroner was on the point of announcing that the inquest on Mrs Nan King would be adjourned until a later date.

  John Grey, Arlette’s father, was a tall thin man with an anxious face. He always looked anxious, he had looked anxious for the three years he and his family had lived in Deerham Hills and he looked no more and no less anxious now his daughter Arlette was missing.

  Underneath however he felt sick and frightened. He had known from the very beginning that his daughter was dead. He did not say to himself: I will never see her again. He knew he would see her again, but he also knew that he would see her in some unimaginably horrible circumstances. The first policeman he had spoken to had been optimistic, jocular even. Girls of eighteen did disappear, he had said, if you could call it disappearing. ‘Any minute now your daughter will walk back in,’ he had said. Only the first policeman had been so cheerful and as the days passed and Arlette still did not walk back in or communicate in any way, the police attitude became bleaker. John’s wife, Jane, was crying, but he could not cry.

  ‘I hate this place,’ she said in a loud voice. ‘I hate this house, I hate this street and I hate this town.’

  Her husband sat with his head on his hands. She might just as well have said she hated him too.

  ‘We’ve never been happy here. I wish we’d never come.’

  ‘We only came to take advantage of the good education grants so Arlette could go to university,’ said John Grey.

  Arlette was a first-year student at London University where she was studying social science. Her first term report had been good, the second less good, the third looked like being a question mark.

  ‘And that’s where all the trouble began,’ said Jane Grey in triumph. ‘It may be she knew someone there who has …’ She stopped and began to breathe deeply but irregularly.

  ‘Yes, you were always against it.’

  ‘A delicate imaginative girl, I knew … And now someone she met there has probably …’

  ‘Oh, hush.’

  But his wife went on: ‘ We don’t know what sort of people she has met there. Arlette’s such an innocent girl, how could she tell? … I tell you we don’t know what sort of friends she has made.’

  ‘I don’t think she has made any. She never said so.’

  But his wife was off on another track. ‘And now we shall have the police all over us, lifting everything up, taking us apart, asking questions.’ Her voice began to go high. ‘You can imagine the sort of questions they’ll ask me about Arlette. How shall I feel answering them to a man?’

  ‘They’ll send a woman.’

  ‘I hope they don’t send that Daniels woman,’ said his wife vindictively. ‘ I certainly wouldn’t want to talk with her. You know what they said about her last autumn?’

  ‘It wasn’t true, though,’ said her husband. ‘She was innocent. Never did anything. Don’t take it so personally, Jane.’

  ‘Don’t take it personally!’ cried his wife in a high voice. ‘Are you mad? My only daughter and you say don’t take it personally. What other way can I take it?’

  ‘You don’t really like her,’ burst out her husband, as if he was full of emotion he must express.

  ‘I love her.’

  ‘Love her, yes. Like her, no. Why pretend?’

  Jane was already off again, back to the subject she had already started upon. He did not go on.

  ‘I never did like the sound of that fair-haired girl Arlette mentioned. She sounds a bad girl.’

  ‘I don’t remember her,’ said John Grey wearily. ‘Anyway, I don’t suppose she has killed Arlette. If Arlette is dead, we have t
o look for a man.’

  ‘In the end, yes,’ said his wife with that cold logic of which she was capable. ‘But we have to think about this girl.’ She added thoughtfully, ‘I may even have seen her.’

  She frowned.

  She was the clever one in the Grey family. Arlette had the imagination, John Grey had the heart, but Jane had the brains. It didn’t make for a particularly happy family.

  The same afternoon a bundle of clothes was being disposed of in the basement room of a small house in Deerham Hills. The house was in Laurel Rise, a long street of houses close by the Deerham Hills College of Arts and Sciences. Only six of the homes in this street, those which were on the crest of the hill so that the ground fell sharply away behind them, had basements. At either end of the road the ground was flat and there were no basements. This basement was crowded with unused furniture, trunks, packing cases and piles of old books and newspapers. It was however a neat orderly place and very warm and dry. In one corner a modern coke-burning furnace had been installed. This was alight, even though the day was so hot.

  Just by looking at the basement you could tell that the members of the household were painstaking, methodical people; that they were a married couple (there were two sets of matched luggage); and that they were probably childless. They had intellectual tastes running to the severer kind of weeklies, and the instincts of the magpie; nothing was ever thrown away. They had been living in this house for at least ten years. The newspapers at the bottom of the heap were dated 1954.

  The bundle of clothes rested on a piece of old newspaper on the floor. On a closer examination it could be seen that the principal item of clothing was a much worn old grey skirt wrapped round a soft leather bag. Spilling out of the bag were three school books, a pencil case, and a girl’s handbag with the initials A.G. on it. Careful hands replaced the books inside the bag and fastened the catch. Nothing spilled out, no lipstick fell from the handbag, no paper fluttered from the notebooks, nevertheless the bundle had left its impression on the room. The bundle was an intruder; no outside influences could be introduced into this careful room without disturbing it. Moreover the bundle had a strange sweet smell hanging about it as if something had been spilt upon it. This scent remained on the air.