Burning is a Substitute for Loving

  Bello:

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  Contents

  Jennie Melville

  Epigraph

  Epigraph

  Charmian and Harry

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Harry

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Charmian

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Jennie Melville

  Burning is a Substitute for Loving

  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

  THE PEOPLE

  Harry Elder (17 years)

  Jess and Eli Nelson

  Mr Cobb

  Joe Gallati

  Lacey Dodge

  Charmian Daniels

  THE PLACE

  Deerham Hills

  Epigraph

  Easter was the time, the time of crosses, hot cross buns. Harry heard the other Harry not this Harry. Words that he heard. Angry. Put it on the fire. Put her on the fire. Put them on the fire.

  Eenie, Eeenie, Killdale, Dimsdale. Diddy, Diddy. No

  Diddy. Dead. Better dead Eenie said. Better dead Eeenie

  said. Harry dead. The other Harry.

  Dead. Dead. Dead.

  Harry loves Eeenie.

  Charmian and Harry

  Chapter One

  Every case of homicide sticks out its own preliminary warning signs. Sometimes they are recognisable, sometimes they are not.

  The warning which Charmian Daniels, policewoman in Deerham Hills, got of her next case, seemed to her afterwards like a runner. A runner, not a rumour, not a rumble, but a runner, stretching out from the underground like the roots of a tree of strange growth. Later, she thought that her metaphor of growth and growing was oddly apt.

  This warning came in the form of a short episode which she witnessed and to which Charmian’s own reaction was about as odd as anything about it.

  Strolling in the sun, observing what she thought of as ‘her’ town (although she was Dundee born) she saw a family group which she knew. Old Mr Cobb, Eli and Jess Nelson and Harry Elder, aged seventeen. Grandfather, Uncle, Aunt and Nephew. She thought of them naturally in these terms; all their relationships centred upon Harry.

  Jess Nelson was carrying a shopping basket.

  Charmian paused at this point when she was telling the story to Grizel, the girl who worked with her on Deerham Hills police force.

  ‘Her shopping bag caught fire. It was extraordinary. I saw a little lick of flame and then it all went up.’

  ‘What did she do?’

  ‘She threw it in the gutter – it soon burned itself out. But what a thing to happen.’

  ‘But what made it happen?’

  ‘The two men were smoking. The boy was fooling around with matches. Could have been any one of them.’ Thoughtfully she added ‘I did wonder if any one of them did it on purpose.’

  Grizel stared; she put out her own cigarette very carefully.

  ‘Felt as though I wanted to go up, and shake one of them or all of them and say – Why did you do that? Tell me just why you did that.’

  Grizel recovered herself.

  ‘You’d have a job getting that past the Judge’s Rules,’ she said.

  ‘We don’t have the Judge’s Rules in Scotland,’ said Charmian absently.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘But we have something much worse called Corroborative Evidence. In fact you could say corroborative evidence was why I left Scotland.’ Then Charmian added, half to herself, ‘And yet, the odd thing is: I’m almost sure it was an accident.’

  ‘You look frightened,’ said Grizel. She was incredulous.

  It was only a touch, a brush with the future, without the sickening quality of the main impact, but it chilled Charmian.

  It was about the time of his seventeenth birthday that Harry began to feel more and more that there had once been another member of the family. For a long time this thought had been nudging his mind, edging forward into his consciousness. Now it poked its head right out.

  They were now four in the family. Harry, his aunt, his uncle (by marriage) and his grandfather. Surely they had once been five? There had been another member of the family. A woman.

  First it was a vague, remembered impression, then the confused picture of another body at the table, finally a definite presence. Someone who had taken him to the Zoo, someone who had taken him to the doctor, someone who had given him presents. Handed out punishments too for that matter. There was a clear impression of power.

  The memories came and went tantalisingly. Sometimes he was absolutely dead sure he remembered, and then again he became disconcertingly confused. After all, it looked as if, whatever he thought he remembered, everyone else had forgotten. She was never mentioned. No one ever said: ‘Remember how it was when Joan lived with us?’ or, ‘I do miss Edie,’ or even, ‘Thank God, Betty’s gone.’ If she had ever existed then she was obliterated, effaced from their mind. Not only dead but comfortably buried beyond recall. Only in Harry’s adolescent mind was she alive. It had to be admitted that she was stirring there along with pictures of men, all with faces somewhat resembling his own (or the face of Joe Gallati, his close friend), flying jets, mastering horses, dominating natives, or rising to confront vast enthusiastic crowds – all at the same time as getting top scholarships to Oxford and wondering what there was for tea, and if Aunty had fixed his best shirt yet. This was what made it so worrying to Harry. Was she after all a mirage summoned up by the urges of his own growing mind and body? He was the only member of the family self-conscious enough to ask such a question. Aunt, Uncle, and Grandpa all knew what they knew and what they didn’t know. Their knowledge, within its small boundaries, was absolutely dead-clear and solid. They knew how to conduct their own lives and how it should touch that of their neighbours; they knew a week has seven days, and Saturday and Sunday are days of rest, that pleasure lies in doing what you want to when you want to, and that food, drink, and sleep are, when you come down to it, the absolute bedrock of life. Accordingly they devoted a good deal of time to eating, drinking, and sleeping. Life they knew was a preparing for sleep and mindlessness. Sometimes Harry used to cry desperately (although, mind you, wordlessly) that surely life itself was a need to be satisfied? Even if he’d said it aloud they would not have understood.

  So naturally, it made it all the harder to bring out this other little worry. It was the birthday party that r
eally brought it to a head. Every year he had a birthday party. Birthday teas were a tradition in the Nelson-Cobb family, even Grandpa Cobb had one, and a fine occasion he made of it too. But there came a time when you questioned traditions. You asked yourself how and when they had started, and what purpose they served. It didn’t seem likely the birthday teas had started with Aunt Jess, Uncle Eli Nelson or Grandpa Cobb, that sedate trio; there was Grandma, of course, whom Harry had never known, but seen through Grandpa’s eyes (‘ I was terrified of your Granny, my dear’) she didn’t seem a starter either. It was more as if it had been begun by someone else. Someone off-stage.

  The house they lived in was small, but comfortable, and belonged to Grandpa although by now Aunty and Uncle had prescriptive rights. Harry never remembered living anywhere else, although sometimes Aunt talked as if he had once lived somewhere else as a baby. ‘I’m the only one of you three that was born in this house,’ she often said, and Harry usually took no more notice of this remark than he did of many of Aunty’s. But it did after all imply that he, like Uncle and Grandpa, had been born elsewhere.

  He had not so far concerned himself much with where he had been born, all his energies having gone into the business of getting himself from Deerham Hills Preparatory School, where the teaching was excellent, to the Deerham Hills Grammar School, where, he was beginning to suspect, the teaching was less excellent, and on to Oxford. He was an ambitious boy. He wanted to live his life in the optimum conditions; it was not just selfishness. He had already a sense of having surmounted a hindrance, of having come through a checkpoint in his life, of doing somehow much better than anyone could have expected. He wanted things to continue this way.

  Deerham Hills was a small but growing town of some seven thousand inhabitants, that is it had seven now and when the new development came next year it would have more, about forty miles from London. London was not conscious of having Deerham Hills clinging to its skirts but Deerham Hills thought about London all the time. Many of its inhabitants worked there. A good many shopped there. In fact, not to buy your clothes in London suggested that you were not of the haut ton. London was the centre for pleasure and amusement; it was the real source of the money that was spent so freely in the little town. Harry and his aunt and his uncle and his grandfather had lived in Deerham Hills for as long as he could remember, which made them unusual. Very few people had lived in Deerham Hills for longer than the first payment on their mortgage. It would be wrong however to think of it as not being a community, because they were very conscious of living in Deerham Hills, and distinguished it sharply from Fordton just across the river, and Amebury over the hill; and although they might not have roots in common they had common ideals. The whole of Deerham Hills was agreed that food-mixers and motor cars and deepfreezes were good, and that you were living the good life if you had them. So there it was, a right-minded, prosperous community, loaded with material possessions and not too careful of them. In fact, as the local police chief once remarked at a Rotarians’ dinner, the community was a positive incitement to any petty criminal. Deerham Hills, however, had very little petty crime. When things burst out there they were serious.

  Among these people Harry felt a sceptical observer. He and his best friend Joe Gallati, whose father was the postmaster, felt themselves to be a little wary and suspicious of the values of Deerham Hills, partly no doubt because material goods did not flow quite so freely in their households. This was a subject they often discussed along with careers and sport and sex and music and art and all the other topics their agile young minds touched upon.

  They delved in each other’s minds like young magpies.

  ‘What’s the first thing you remember, Joe?’ Harry asked curiously on one occasion when they were sitting drinking milk-shakes and ice-cream. ‘ The very first.’

  Joe considered. ‘I can remember putting our old Timmy cat in the oven and shutting the door on him and my gran beating me. I must have been about three. I hope I wasn’t any older because it was a rotten thing to do.’

  ‘Was the cat all right?’

  ‘Must have been, we’ve still got him.’

  Harry was admiring. ‘You are clever, I can’t remember anything much, not before I was around nine or ten. Yes, I reckon that gives you the palm.’ There was a rivalry between them as to which was the cleverer. They did not recognise any other intellects in Deerham Hills.

  ‘I don’t think you can necessarily equate memory with intelligence,’ said Joe solemnly. He was a little pompous at times.

  ‘Memory’s a choosy thing, isn’t it?’ said Harry. ‘Why should you remember one thing and not another?’

  ‘I suppose because, without you knowing it, it’s something important to you,’ said Joe.

  ‘Yes,’ said Harry, ‘I suppose that’s it.’

  But the conversation threw him into a greater sea of puzzlement than ever. What did he remember and what didn’t he? What was important to him and what wasn’t? Why was there this strand floating out from the depths? And honestly, why was there such a lot he didn’t remember, as well as what he did?

  He would have liked to consult Joe but he did not tell Joe all his thoughts, any more, he was persuaded, than Joe told all his. Reserves between friends were right and proper.

  Instead he turned inwards more and more upon himself and tried to shell memories out of himself like peas. Not unnaturally, they did not come upon order. He tried word association … family … friend … absent … woman.

  ‘Woman,’ he muttered to himself, ‘woman … daughter … visitor … stranger …’ No images or pictures arose in his mind, except nonsense ones like people waving flags, and quite ordinary ones of people stepping on to aircraft. Then he tried place names to see what associations with other districts would do. But he had experienced so little outside Deerham Hills that he had very few names to use. Brighton. Nothing there except the time the school went to see the Pavilion and examine Regency architecture at a time when they had been studying the Settlement of Vienna. Worthing, another seaside town, where he and Uncle and Aunt, but not Grandpa, went on an annual holiday, and from which Uncle invariably came back with the reddest lobsterish sunburn in the whole of Deerham Hills. Uncle, who took his health seriously, believed that for a holiday to do you good you had to look as though it did you good. But Worthing did not help Harry at all, and really, except for his annual visit to hospital, he had hardly been anywhere else.

  So he tried another tack. He tried to decide why it was that sometimes he felt certain he remembered another member of the family and at other times so much less certain. If there was a censor then what emotions were involved? And the extraordinary thing was there was nothing there at all, not antipathy, or anger, or love, but a blank, or at any rate a blanket.

  ‘What’s that you were saying, dear?’ said his aunt absently; she was staring out of the window.

  ‘I wasn’t really saying anything,’ said Harry quite truthfully.

  ‘I’ve been watching that woman across the road,’ went on his aunt. ‘ I’m afraid she’s a cripple.’

  It was one of Aunt Jess’s passions; the spotting of cripples. She saw them where no one else did. One of the high spots of her life had been a day at Brighton where she had seen thirteen lame and halt in one day. It was one of the nightmares of Harry’s life that one day he would come in, with a sore foot or a blister, and the judgement would fall upon him.

  ‘Looks perfectly all right to me,’ he said, not even bothering to look. It was what you always said to Aunty.

  ‘Oh no, dear, you aren’t watching. See how her left foot drags? No, she’s a cripple,’ said his aunt with satisfaction. ‘Such a fine upstanding young woman too,’ she added sympathetically. ‘But she’ll run to fat later on, that pink-cheeked bright-haired sort always do.’

  This time Harry heaved himself from his chair and went to look. ‘Aunty,’ he protested. ‘She’s a policewoman. She can’t be a cripple.’

  He watched Charmian Daniels, whom he m
uch admired for reasons not entirely clear to him but in which her handsome figure was an unconscious part, go into the house where she had a flat. She did seem to be limping slightly.

  ‘What are you reading, dear?’ asked his aunt, switching her eyes from Charmian’s feet.

  ‘Hamlet,’ answered Harry, who had not in fact been reading it but brooding about what he had come to feel was his mystery.

  ‘Now there was a cripple,’ said his aunt brightening. ‘ Slouching all over the place.’ She had once seen a production of Hamlet, in which the hero had worn black velvet and limped.

  ‘Oh no, Aunt,’ protested her nephew. ‘He walked like that because he was desperately unhappy; it was to show it. He was the glass of fashion really, it says so in the text.’

  ‘It’s a very unrespectable plot anyway,’ declared his aunt. ‘In love with his mother.’

  ‘Oh, no one thinks that now,’ said Harry. ‘It’s all power politics really.’ But he was not arguing with her, they never argued, the love between them was too binding for that.

  Charmian who was indeed limping, and all because she had gone to a dance in slightly too-tight silver slippers, shut her front door behind her with relief and kicked her shoes off. She had rather large feet, natural enough in her profession; she was a big girl.

  She knew as well as Aunt did how much Harry looked at her, probably more than he should have done. But with a boy of that age living that sort of life, what could you expect? She thought he was the most watched over boy she had ever come across.

  She sat down and rubbed her toes. The silver shoes represented an attempt to re-establish a picture of herself as a woman. Lately she had had the disturbing feeling that in achieving success for herself in her career, which she was doing, she had lost sight of herself as a person.

  ‘Look at you,’ her young colleague Grizel Brown had said in wonder. ‘Do you ever do anything except work and make up your everlasting card index? Do you ever go out? Dance? Think you might get married?’