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  Contents

  Jennie Melville

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Jennie Melville

  Murderes' Houses

  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

  ‘Siegfried is longing for his Mother … In Fafner the dragon, Siegfried meets the Terrible Mother … He meets her not on terms of seduction but of mortal combat.’

  Robert Donington: Wagner’s Ring and its Symbols

  From the Personal Column of the Deerham Hills Courier

  Wednesday, June 19, 196–

  Master to Pupil. Glad to have news. Miss you too.

  Business proceeding well. Will telephone usual number

  tomorrow at eight.

  Friday, October 3, 196–

  Master to Pupil. Agree to plans. Coming home. Will

  communicate date in usual manner.

  Tuesday, October 7, 196–

  Master to Pupil. Coming home tomorrow.

  Chapter One

  FROM her new office in the bran-new police building Charmian could see across the road to the equally new Town Library and the Youth Employment Office. The bus station was to the right, but still well within her range. The police station was cream stone and the Library and Employment Office were in matching blue brick. Very pretty, Charmian thought. She was also well pleased with her view. Charmian was strategically placed to keep a watchful eye on that part of the population of Deerham Hills which most concerned her: the young and the old. She could see the young ones going in to talk over jobs with the Employment Officer (they were beginning to get a lot of what was euphemistically called ‘redundancy’ amongst young people in Deerham Hills; how could you be redundant when you had hardly had a job? – Charmian called it unemployed) and their parents were going into the Library to choose books. Some of the young ones read, but not many. She was also interested to see the comings and goings in the bus station. Why for instance had Tony Foss, aged seventeen, got on a bus three times last week carrying a large suitcase? He didn’t have a job as an errand boy, he didn’t have a job at all. Tony Foss had a lively reputation as the Al Capone of Deerham Hills, but Charmian thought it was mostly boredom. Why did it have to be the ones who needed hard work who were always redundant?

  Charmian Daniels had been living and working in Deerham Hills as a policewoman long enough for people to be used to the sight of her and her little car, but she didn’t think of it as home. She hardly knew what she did think of as home these days, certainly not Dundee where she’d been born, or Glasgow where she’d gone to college. Perhaps home was now the very small area encompassed by the walls of the new house she’d recently bought on an estate on the edge of Deerham Hills. The house was midget-sized but it was sparkling with new paint and new fitments. Everything was new about Charmian at the moment, her office, her house, even her shoes. She removed the left one gently with her right foot and let it slip to the ground. Either one foot was larger than the other, or the shoes didn’t fit.

  The new police station, replacing the old one sited behind the town hospital, seemed like a large acoustic shell in which noises vibrated. She could hear feet clicking up and down the staircase, she could hear someone typing, she could even hear Inspector Pratt coughing. Everyone had so much room in this new building. So much room and not enough quiet. In spite of soundproofing and composition floors there was still a constant vibration of sound. You felt the sound even if you couldn’t hear it. Charmian wondered if a river ran underneath the place, so that the whole building acted as a sounding board.

  It was a pleasant early summer day and Deerham Hills, even as seen from Charmian’s window, looked at its best. Deerham Hills was a growing town not far from London. There was a small, neat, old town and all round it a rapidly expanding new town with each year fresh shops and blocks of flats and offices. Deerham Hills looked different every year but hardly anyone ever said this aloud because most of its inhabitants had only been there three or four years anyway and didn’t know any better. And yet to Charmian, who had been there six years, there was an underlying character to the town which remained true. It was a town which quietly but unreservedly declared its devotion to the material things of this life. It had more cars, more dishwashers, more children per family than the average for the rest of the country. It had fewer books, fewer pictures, less time for thought than the average for the rest of the country. And the average, thought Charmian sadly, was pretty low anyway. But if you had a better than average standard of living you had to pay for this in work and not contemplation, and Charmian acknowledged it. She bowed to the same god herself; the house she was living in now was being paid for by a ruthless pruning of extra expenditure on books, papers, trips to the theatre and holidays. —When did I last read a book? thought Charmian, let alone buy one; and what was it? The memory of the Householder’s Manual stirred uneasily in her mind, and she hastily substituted in her mind The Golden Bowl, which she certainly had on the table by her bed. At least I use the library, she told herself. I must use it more often. The new librarian (to match the new library) was becoming one of her friends. It was the librarian who had recommended Henry James. ‘ Very soothing to read in bed,’ she had said. But Charmian didn’t find him soothing at all and frequently got lost in the long sentences, while finding his prose style so hypnotic that Inspector Pratt had sent her last report back with the comment that he couldn’t understand why she kept contradicting herself. For him it was enough if a sentence had a subject and object and a verb, and he preferred them not too widely separated from one another.

  The library was busy this morning and most people who came and went seemed to be carrying several books, so perhaps she had been a little harsh in her judgments on Deerham Hills.

  But she hadn’t been harsh in one judgment, she thought, looking down on the report on her desk, and unconsciously kicking off her other shoe, as if her feet already hurt. The report covered the last twelve months in Deerham Hills and district and dealt with juvenile crime. The result could be summed up in one of Inspector Pratt’s short sentences: ‘There was more of it.’

  Charmian flicked over the pages of the report, most of which she had written. None of the cri
mes was really serious. They didn’t have murder, arson, or rape among their juveniles (although one boy was reported to have tried it and got his nose broken by the stalwart virgin), but they had break-ins, and petty theft, and Peeping Toms. And in this sphere, too, they seemed to be getting more than the national average. Inspector Pratt was not pleased. Juvenile crime wasn’t his special interest, but he expected it to toe the line like everything else. Charmian studied her own statistics again. Perhaps it did all emanate from Tony Foss, who was a criminal influence, if ever she saw one. There was one serious case on her books at the moment, and at the thought of the Flete girl, she frowned.

  She looked out of the window to the bus station and there Tony Foss was again, getting on a bus with a suitcase. She never saw him come back with it, though. For that matter, she never saw him come back.

  The bus station was as busy as the Library. Friday was a busy day everywhere in Deerham Hills. She could see half a dozen faces she knew. There was Mrs Carey with her little brood of children, any one of whom might come Charmian’s way any minute, so wild and crazy were they. There was old Mrs Uprichard, known locally, and with splendid justification, as the Town Crier. Then there was plump Mr Charley Fox who had once headed the list in Charmian’s mind of Murderers Wanted (only it had been a mistake and they got someone else for what wasn’t, in the end, quite a murder. Charmian didn’t give herself any prizes for that case). People said that Mrs Charley Fox was going to produce a little Fox, but surely it wasn’t physically possible at her age? Charmian smiled. And there just getting off a bus was Rachel Lawson, the Headmistress of the Girls’ High School, looking rather flushed and hurried. Trouble, thought Charmian, making a note in her mind to see what facts she could relate it to. Unhappily, she thought she knew.

  Charmian’s method as a detective was simple and classic. She was a patient fact-gatherer. It was what she enjoyed doing. She was observant herself, bright-eyed and alert to the behaviour of the people around her, and in addition she knew where to go for information. She knew in which shops the gossip circulated freely, and she visited them regularly enough to get to know the girls who worked there; she knew that in the shelter in the park and the new one in the bus station there were two groups of observant, elderly men who met daily to smoke and talk: these were excellent clearing houses for gossip. Here, too, she was a friendly visitor when it suited her to be. In addition, and perhaps more important, she had her paid informers, ‘Charmian’s stool-pigeons’as her boss, Inspector Pratt, called them. There was an ordinary, quiet man down by the railway station, another who kept a newspaper shop, and a third whom Charmian refused to name, refused even to admit to, but whose dark, quiet mind she found most useful of all. She was half-ashamed, half-fearful of her last informant.

  All the facts she collected were fixed for ever in Charmian’s retentive mind. She filed them, but the box and her index cards were only the apparatus which anyone could have used. The real value was in Charmian’s massive memory, her feeling for detail, and her patient measuring-up of one fact against another.

  Sergeant Charmian Daniels was a pretty name and Charmian when she was animated was pretty too. When thoughtful, her face was too strong and thin and austere to be other than formidable. It was not a cold face, though, and reflected Charmian’s feelings more powerfully than she knew. She thought of herself as a cool, detached observer, but underneath was love and passion and joy in people. She loved and hated the world much more than she had grasped; she did not yet understand her own nature very well, but all the same she was capable of amusement at it. She could see the joke even if it did sometimes seem more like a grim sort of irony. She thought she was cold and hard, but of course she wasn’t, she not only cared, she wanted to interfere.

  She was twenty-seven, a graduate of Glasgow University, and a clever, tough young woman doing well in her chosen career. Her red motor car and her little house were symbols of this success. She was a Sergeant, and although for women the ladder of promotion was hard to climb, she never doubted that she would climb it. She would stay a few more years in Deerham Hills and then make the move to London. She knew, in a secret part of her mind, that she would always choose to be a small fish in a large pool, rather than a big fish in a small pool. So far there had been no serious check to her steady upward push. She was poised, determined and obstinate.

  She moved her feet restlessly round under the table, pushed them into her shoes, and stood up.

  The sun was pouring into her room. The architect had provided pale-blue Venetian blinds for just such an occasion, but Charmian had not the least intention of drawing them down. She liked to feel that she had only to raise her head and see who was coming or going in Deerham Hills.

  She did so now, standing for a moment to stare at the buses and the travellers.

  But Charmian couldn’t keep an eye on all the immigrants into her town.

  The River Deer, which circled Deerham Hills, running eastwards towards the sea, was fed, just before it approached the town, by another little stream. The Deer was a slow-moving, green river stocked with coarse fish and a few fresh-water eels. As it ran eastward it carried with it the body of a woman, slowly turning it round and round, but always carrying it further towards the town. The body had only recently risen to the surface of the river, swollen and made buoyant by its own body gases. Lethargically the river carried its burden, until eventually it deposited it on the edge of the woods which fringed the hill. A lot of rubbish rested there: the river had the habit of dropping off some of its load at this spot. The body stayed there in company with a kettle, an old bread bin, a boot and a man’s hat.

  Charmian picked up her telephone as soon as it started to ring. Inspector Pratt was speaking. ‘I’ve had a call from the north,’ he said swiftly. ‘ From Manchester. And as it concerns women I’m passing it on to you. We’ve got a stranger coming into town. There’s a man moving into our district. He’s known to prey on women. Gets money from them. He can be violent. Manchester thought violence was growing on him.’

  ‘Right,’ said Charmian. She was getting it all down.

  ‘Description?’ she asked.

  ‘No description,’ said Pratt laconically. ‘No proper description. Sometimes he looks fair-haired with spectacles, sometimes dark with excellent sight, sometimes he’s plumpish, sometimes thin.’

  ‘A character actor,’ said Charmian sadly.

  ‘That’s it. No one’s ever got a good look at him,’ said Pratt. ‘But you don’t have to worry, because he’s basically a man.’

  ‘I have reservations,’ said Charmian. ‘Well, tell me his form.’

  ‘You’re joking, of course. He hasn’t got one. No convictions.’

  ‘No, that follows.’ Charmian drew a circle on her pad and put a dot in it. ‘And how are they sure he’s coming our way?’

  ‘The last victim heard him say so in front of her. She told us his plans. She is our informant. She seems to have picked up more about him than most – perhaps she was bright. She was the one who said he was thin.’

  ‘What name?’

  ‘The last name he was using was Marley.’

  Charmian grunted.

  ‘Oh, and one other thing,’ said Pratt. He cleared his throat. He always seemed to have a cold lately. ‘One last bit of information … He always works with a woman – not always the same woman.’

  Charmian stared out of her window.

  Women, thought Charmian, automatically separating herself from the rest of her sex, as if she was not a woman. Women. At a conservative estimate there were about ten thousand women in Deerham Hills, and of these perhaps a third were simple or gullible enough to be fair game for this faceless man who was coming here to batten on one of them, and frighten her, take her money and repay her with violence.

  What sort of women will he go for? Charmian asked herself. A young one, or an old one? An attractive one or a gawky unsure one?

  Of all the women in Deerham Hills at this moment which one will attract him
as a victim? How does he scent them out? Will it be someone whose name is already on my list? Pretty Susan Hedges who crashed her car on the roundabout and who hates her family? Or Anna Watson who owns two hairdresser’s shops and has an illegitimate son away at school whom she loves? Donny Upton who has been in prison herself once? Aren’t these the sort of women he would go for?

  Slowly Charmian clarified her mind.

  The victim would be a woman with a certain amount of money.

  She would be a woman who was either easily frightened or somehow susceptible to pressure.

  She would be a woman without too many friends but in the habit of going about to libraries, cafes or cinemas, because after all she had to be met with. A completely cloistered woman wouldn’t do, nor would the busy queen of a social whirl.

  But above and beyond everything else, she would be a woman without a man in her life, either unmarried, or a widow.

  Velia Ryman lived in a new cheap house in Deerham Hills and lived there alone. She had done so for almost two years now, and her lips drooped wistfully at the length of those two years. She had a small-boned delicate face which easily looked lost and wistful.

  ‘I ought to have a husband,’ she said into the mirror where she had been studying her expression. ‘Anyone can see it. It’s written all over me.’

  She studied her face again. ‘ Well, perhaps it isn’t. But it ought to be.’

  She finished making up her face and put on her hat. She had a part-time job in the hospital helping with the typing and filing records and generally giving secretarial assistance where needed. Velia was efficient in a quiet, subdued way, as if she didn’t want to draw attention to herself.

  ‘You don’t need to act so timid, Velia,’ said Dusty Butcher, who worked with her there. (Dusty herself was a plump ex-Wren, who was certainly not timid.) ‘We won’t eat you.’