Murderes' Houses Read online

  ‘No,’ said Velia, doubtfully; she did sometimes wonder, when she looked at Dusty’s large, blood-red and glistening mouth.

  ‘And you want to wear a bit more make-up,’ went on Dusty, reverting to a favourite topic. ‘Makes you a bit more noticeable.’

  So far Velia had evaded Dusty’s efforts to make her noticeable. She had a strong feeling that involvement with Dusty meant trouble. There had been more than one Dusty in Velia’s life, there was something about Velia which inspired them, and one and all they had spelt trouble.

  Dusty had strong impulses to take other people’s lives to pieces and set them up more tidily than before. Of her three sisters, two had been divorced as a result of Dusty’s resolute advice, and the third had refused ever to speak to Dusty again.

  ‘And your clothes,’ went on Dusty.

  Velia muttered something about good taste.

  ‘They’re in such good taste they’re practically camouflage,’ ended Dusty triumphantly.

  Really Dusty could be quite witty sometimes, thought Velia. She had to laugh.

  Dusty joined in the laughing. She didn’t mind being laughed at. It made a change. Her eldest sister, who now lived at home, had taken to crying whenever she looked at her.

  ‘Well, just a touch of hair-dye then,’ she persevered. ‘I mean, you don’t imagine my hair is this colour naturally, do you?’

  Velia looked at Dusty’s brilliantly red frizz and did not imagine that it was that way naturally, nor could she believe that anyone had ever thought it was natural. ‘No hair-dye,’ was all she said.

  ‘But it can change your appearance completely.’

  ‘I know it can,’ said Velia, with honesty.

  Dusty was away with a cold at the moment (she was something of a hypochondriac anyway), and Velia was looking forward to having the office all to herself and working quietly forward till evening. She would probably stay late to finish things off. When Dusty got back she would be cross that Velia hadn’t let things pile up in a great muddle because this would have given Dusty scope for her particular talents, but Velia felt that by keeping in control she was asserting herself against Dusty, and somehow levelling the score between them: because, although she never, ever gave Dusty good advice in her turn, she felt she could have done.

  ‘Dusty,’ she would have liked to say, ‘if you quieten yourself down a little, stop dyeing your hair (I mean we all know it’s grey anyway), and choose clothes less like a jazzed-up warder’s uniform, you may find you can have a life of your own instead of busting up other people’s.’

  Velia stood in her kitchen dressed in her hat and coat, drinking her coffee. It was tidy, neat and rather bare, because Velia never had the money or the desire to make it more interesting. This wasn’t her real home, but just somewhere she happened to be living at this moment. Her real life had ended, temporarily, she was beginning to hope, permanently, she had once suspected, two years ago.

  ‘Two years a widow,’ she said. ‘It’s been a long time.’ Dusty was right: there was a gap in her life. She needed a husband. She knew that her soft, delicate features and pale complexion would not attract everyone, but she also knew that when her looks attracted they did so strongly. She knew some people wanted to look after her, even Dusty did.

  ‘I’m a pretty simple person,’ she thought, staring out of the window and looking back over her thirty-odd years. ‘I like the simple things of life. Small children. Apple blossom. Fresh chocolate cake.’ – There was an uneasy-looking chocolate cake cooling on a rack at that moment. Velia was no cook.

  And at the thought of what that cake meant, Velia’s spirits lifted.

  Things were looking up. They must improve now.

  She had company.

  She had a new lodger.

  She looked at her watch, then picked up the telephone.

  ‘Charmian?’ her voice was excited. ‘I’ve got a lodger. Oh! I am pleased. I was getting so alone in the house. A Mr Morgan …’

  Charmian’s voice crackled across the line and into the quiet room.

  ‘But Charmian,’ Velia’s voice was full of surprise. ‘Why are you going on so? It’s perfectly proper you know, the top floor’s almost a separate flat. Why, we may hardly meet! … Why, Charmian, I don’t see any harm at all … Yes, Charmian, I know he’s a man!’

  She put the telephone down and stood staring into space. She hated to hear Charmian talk like that. A slight, a very slight shiver started at the back of her neck and crept slowly down her spine.

  ‘Siegfried,’ she said aloud. ‘Siegfried.’

  When Velia got to the office she was surprised to find another girl there already typing away. At first she was displeased. Strangers meant enemies in Velia’s rather primitive dictionary, but by the time she had taken her hat and coat off and started work she was enjoying company.

  ‘Are you going to be here permanently?’

  The girl laughed. ‘What’s permanently? No, I’m only helping out till Dusty gets back. She’s always crying out aloud and saying what a lot of work there is down here.’

  ‘Oh, so you know Dusty then?’

  ‘Who doesn’t? Not very easy to overlook Dusty, is it?’

  ‘I’ve never managed to,’ admitted Velia cautiously.

  ‘I’m from the typing pool in the Almoner’s Office. I’m April Miller. Now we really work down there. Not like you girls dealing with the private block.’

  ‘It’s a good job.’

  ‘And of course you know why Dusty took it? She just loves to know the details about other people’s private lives.’

  Velia laughed. ‘You don’t learn all that much,’ said Velia, who had regretted it herself. ‘I mean, it’s all a bit cryptic.’

  ‘No, even Dusty couldn’t get much out of it. Still, that’s why she does it.’

  That makes two of us, thought Velia. It explained one or two things about Dusty, though.

  But all the same she wasn’t pleased with this disruption of the pattern which had established itself. For some reason she felt uneasy. Coming on top of Charmian’s forbidding reaction to her lodger (yes, that was precisely the way to put it), it made Velia feel jumpy.

  They took their tea-break separately. April Miller went first. She was gone for rather longer than the ten minutes they were allowed and Velia was beginning to feel thirsty when April came back, banging the door behind her.

  ‘What kept you?’ said Velia plaintively.

  ‘You know what’s happened?’ said April, her voice high. ‘ They’ve found a dead woman in the river over by the hill … Everyone’s talking about it …’

  Velia put her hands down on her typewriter and did not answer.

  ‘Yes, here in Deerham Hills,’ went on April. ‘Just think of it.’

  ‘People die everywhere,’ said Velia sadly. She hated to hear of death.

  ‘She was drowned … They don’t know who it is, of course, you couldn’t tell … not by looking.’

  Velia shuddered.

  ‘The police are there. They’d have to be. Oh, isn’t it terrible?’

  April sat down at her table and started work again.

  ‘Well, you can go out to tea now,’ she said briskly, stimulated by her brush with death.

  ‘I’ll just finish this first,’ said Velia, slowly typing on.

  ‘You’ll hear all about it down there, I can tell you. Let me know if there’s anything fresh.’

  ‘I’ll listen,’ promised Velia.

  ‘I mean like who it is.’

  ‘They won’t know yet,’ said Velia. It couldn’t possibly be Dusty, this poor dead woman in the river.

  Why ever should I think it would be Dusty? she asked herself.

  As soon as she was out of the room she hurried to a telephone. She closed the door of the box and dialled the house where Dusty lived with her eldest sister and a lot of children. It usually took a long while to get through to Dusty on the telephone. There was always confusion at the end of the line, and they often acted as if the
y didn’t want to admit that Dusty was with them. Tension mounted while she waited. There was no reason, no real reason, outside fantasy, why it should be Dusty’s body that had been found at the edge of the river. But all the same, by the time she heard Dusty’s voice she was so relieved that she was alive and not drowned dead that she could hardly speak.

  ‘Hello,’ growled Dusty in a voice which showed that she had been asleep and wasn’t pleased at being disturbed.

  ‘Oh, Dusty, have you got a cold? You really have got a cold?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ But Velia couldn’t help, even in her relief, noticing that Dusty’s voice didn’t sound as if she had a cold.

  ‘And is that why you are away today?’

  ‘What else?’ Dusty sounded even gruffer, positively sulky. ‘Is that all you rang up for? Well, let me tell you I’m standing in a draught.’

  ‘And it wasn’t anything to do with … ah, Friday?’ asked Velia, getting it out.

  There was a pause.

  ‘Oh, Friday,’ said Dusty. ‘What was there special about Friday?’

  For the moment Velia wondered if Dusty had indeed forgotten. But no, Dusty never forgot anything.

  ‘We had a quarrel.’

  ‘Oh. You call that a quarrel?’

  ‘No, no, I suppose not.’ Velia remembered the scene with the papers all over her desk and Dusty so angry. Unnecessarily angry in Velia’s opinion. It had been unnecessary for Dusty to be so angry, and unnecessary for Dusty to return to the room just then to be so angry. ‘Well, if you say not,’ she said hastily, because she could hear Dusty’s powerful breathing. ‘I’m glad you’re feeling better, Dusty,’ said Velia in a humble voice.

  ‘Did I say I was? No, it’s my job to get back. We’ve always got so much work on our hands.’

  ‘We’ve got April helping us.’

  ‘We have? Then I’ll certainly be back on Monday.’

  Velia put the receiver down. She came out of the telephone box to find at least two other women waiting to make calls, one clearly a patient, and the other a nurse. She continued unsteadily down the stairs to have her tea.

  They stared after Velia’s retreating figure.

  ‘Had she been crying, nurse?’ whispered the patient.

  ‘Well, if she had I don’t know why,’ snapped the nurse who had no patience with anyone’s troubles but her own.

  Velia sat in the canteen and absorbed the warm tea with pleasure and comfort and gradually her nerves quietened down.

  There was no harm done. Dusty was all right. There had been no quarrel. No real quarrel. The dead woman had not and never could have been any concern of hers. Her little world was intact. But it was like she said: it didn’t suit her to be unmarried and live alone. She needed company and help. Otherwise she got in these stupid states of emotion. She was more glad than ever her lodger was arriving tomorrow. And although she had told Charmian the two sets of rooms were quite separate and she and her lodger need hardly meet, in practice she intended that they should meet, and often.

  She went into a dream. In this dream, although it was certainly all about Velia, she didn’t look like the present Velia at all. She was younger to begin with and definitely more sophisticated. Nor did she wear the present Velia’s subdued clothes; she wore smart hats and gay cocktail dresses. She even had a fur wrap. The nature of the fur escaped Velia; she liked to think it could be mink, but she doubted if even the dream Velia got mink, and decided on musquash cut to look like mink. Because after all, wasn’t that what the dream Velia herself was like: musquash cut to look like mink? A little sadness crept into Velia’s dream.

  She stirred her tea and came back to the present, which wasn’t, after all, too bad, and was going to get better.

  She counted up her assets; she had a pretty face, a good figure, a pleasant, if timid nature, and a few pounds saved up.

  Surely that was a wife to come home to?

  The woman who had come drifting into Deerham Hills had had grey hair which she had worn long, probably in a bun or roll at the nape of her neck. Now it was loose and free and trailed over her shoulders. She had been wearing a neat dark coat and skirt, but they were muddied and shapeless now. About her features it was impossible to say anything.

  Five years ago another body had been found not far from where this one had rested: a boy’s body, and it had easily been proved that he died after jumping from the bridge which spanned a higher reach of the Deer, a mile away at Abbot’s End. For a while the bridge had quite a vogue and one or two other jumpers had a go but all were rescued, perhaps to their own relief.

  But everything had been known about that boy, and nothing was known about this woman. The boy had come from Abbot’s End, an estate on the outskirts of Deerham Hills, he had been ill and unhappy, he had been in trouble with the police and he lived in a house overlooking the bridge.

  It had even been possible to make the prediction that he would jump sooner or later.

  This woman was no one. Or very nearly no one. She was as near to being no one as you can be when you have lost your name and your features.

  ‘So what do we know about this dead woman?’ asked Inspector Pratt, easing up on his cough.

  ‘We don’t know who she is,’ said Charmian.

  ‘No. And that’s interesting in itself, isn’t it? … Still, she may have had a handbag with her when she jumped.’

  ‘If she jumped.’

  ‘Oh, you know about the bridge at Abbot’s End.’

  ‘I know two other people jumped.’

  ‘More like six,’ said Pratt, looking at the woman. ‘We’ll have another two or three after her, I dare say.’

  The bridge at Abbot’s End was only six years old; it had been built when the construction of the Abbot’s End estate made the widening of the road and hence the bridge a necessity. From the beginning the bridge had been a trouble centre. Children ran along the parapet and regularly fell off into the water. With equal regularity the inhabitants of Abbot’s End threw old bottles, old tins, and cast-off clothing into the river from the bridge. It was also the stamping ground for the youths of Abbot’s End. Here, on the bridge, they met their girls and here, if they wanted a fight, they had it. Abbot’s End was the estate of which Deerham Hills was ashamed. To admit that you lived in Abbot’s End was to admit you couldn’t afford to live anywhere quieter or more select.

  ‘That’s her contribution to life,’ went on Pratt.

  ‘And what’s ours?’

  ‘Oh, don’t you worry,’ said Pratt easily. ‘In a little while we shall have anxious relations calling or phoning to ask us if we have got her. Someone’s looking for her.’

  He started to cough again.

  But no one did come, and as time passed it was clear that no one was going to come, and that what Inspector Pratt and the Deerham Hills police had on their hands was an unidentified woman.

  What they did not know was that her handbag, the absence of which puzzled the Inspector, was still there in the river. It had gone into the river with her, and had only become separated from her at the very end. The blue and grey plastic pouch was still there, resting in the shallows, waiting to be found.

  The handbag had been cleared out by careful hands before its immersion. A letter with the woman’s name and address had been removed, her library tickets had been taken out, and her diary had been torn up.

  But tucked away in a small pocket, unnoticed, there remained a railway ticket – a second-class return ticket from Deerham Hills to Manchester.

  Chapter Two

  CHARMIAN did her rounds the next day, going from place to place at which she might possibly gather information about a new man arriving in the town. But it was an unrewarding search. For once no one knew anything and there wasn’t even any fresh gossip. This didn’t necessarily mean anything, her sources were not omniscient, although they liked to think they were, but it was disappointing. They usually gave her a start-off which even if it afterwards proved inaccurate (and the chances were fifty
-fifty) somehow seemed to get her moving. And movement seemed imperative; she didn’t want to end up with a screaming, beaten woman on her hands, possibly even a dead one, and let that be the way she discovered X. Pratt wouldn’t like it, to begin with, and Charmian would be ashamed.

  But although she went patiently round, there was nothing, nothing, nothing. She ended up talking to Fred, one of her oldest friends, in the shelter in the park. The group of which he was doyen had recently moved there from its winter quarters by the bus station, and looked hopefully to enjoy the summer sun. Strangers were not welcome.

  ‘This man you’re looking for,’ asked Fred. ‘What’s he up to?’

  She hesitated, but it was usually safe to tell Fred anything. ‘Money with menaces,’ she said briefly. ‘From women he fascinates and terrifies, and sometimes beats up.’

  ‘One of those, eh?’ He rolled a cigarette: he grew his own tobacco. ‘He’s a comic character then, not serious, remember that when you’re looking – a comedian.’

  ‘I think he’s very serious indeed,’ protested Charmian. ‘I take him seriously.’

  ‘I put it badly. He’s wicked all right, but he’s comic … to himself, underneath. He can’t take himself seriously and believes no one else can, and maybe he’s right. That’s why he makes his living by frightening women. When you find him you’ll find he’s got something about him that makes him comic … he has wall eyes, perhaps, or he’s very short, or there’s something.’

  ‘You may be right. Self-hate can build up into crime.’

  She made a note to check Velia’s new lodger for this quality. She had telephoned Velia last night and got no reply. Late hours for a little bird who professed no social life. She smiled: she never quite believed all Velia told her.

  ‘There’ll be something about him,’ said Fred. ‘ You’ll see.’

  ‘Quiet life you’re all having,’ she said to Fred.

  He shrugged. ‘It’s the time of the year. Nothing in the papers either, is there? Have you noticed? I’m reduced to reading books. But you can’t do nothing, can you? I mean if you can’t do anything, it’s better to read, isn’t it.’