Murder Has a Pretty Face Read online

  ‘That area is going up in the world, isn’t it? I noticed the other day. I suppose it’s because the houses there are good, solid and old-fashioned. It must be quite a new shop.’

  ‘Yes, it is. Selling mostly what they call “fun” furs, although the prices aren’t funny. And they carried a few really good pieces – mink and fox.’

  ‘And those are the furs stolen?’

  Adam nodded. ‘ Together with a few of the choicer “ fun” furs.’ He grinned. ‘One was a striped pale blue and pink knee-length fur smock. That should be easy to recognise.’

  ‘If we ever see it again.’ Charmian led the way to the door. ‘We ought to be able to put a name to the fur fancier, oughtn’t we? But no faces seem to fit.’

  ‘We’ll find one.’ Adam followed her down the stairs.

  ‘You’re an optimist.’

  ‘No, I’m not. No one with a name like mine is an optimist. You bring out the worst in people when you’re a man called Lily. Do you know, my grandfather had a perfectly decent name, L-i-l-l-e-y’ – he spelt it out for her – ‘ and then he changed it to Lily.’

  Charmian laughed, ‘So you say.’

  ‘No, it’s true. And he did it because he was a lazy man. Lily is easier to write. Anyway, my mother called me Adam to make up for it.’

  Charmian drove her own car. Usually she drove much too fast, but today as they went through the town centre she slowed to a crawl, her eyes studying the crowds.

  ‘Busy today,’ said Adam.

  ‘Yes, for a Monday. Some of the shops are closed, of course.’ She was still scanning the crowds. Then she looked away. ‘There she is. Over there, by the Baby Care shop.’

  ‘Who?’ But he knew who she meant: the new arrival in Deerham Hills, the woman who stood and stared.

  ‘She’s chosen her spot well, hasn’t she? Where else would you get more women passing than by a baby-shop?’ Charmian was braking the car; she found a parking-spot and drove into it. ‘Wait here. I won’t be long.’

  She got out of the car and hurried, with long strides, across the wide stretch of pavement to where the woman stood.

  As she got closer, she could see that a large length of cardboard hung from the woman’s neck, rather like an apron. Pieces of newspaper, some of their headlines scored under with thick black pencil, were stuck to the cardboard. Charmian wasn’t close enough to read what their message was, if any.

  Before she got any closer, a uniformed policeman appeared round the corner of the block; he strolled in the direction of the Baby Care shop, mildly but purposefully making his way towards the woman. As soon as the woman saw him, she swung on her heel and marched briskly away.

  ‘Damn,’ said Charmian. She returned to the car.

  Adam looked at her. ‘She got away.’

  ‘I didn’t want to catch her. Only to look at her face. Still, I saw something. Did you notice the way she walked?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You should have.’ Charmian started the car.

  ‘She’s only just gone round the corner,’ said Adam lazily. ‘ She’ll come back when you and the constable have gone.’

  ‘No, she didn’t see me.’ And Charmian drove away, very quickly this time.

  At Prettifurs, the fur-shop in Arden Avenue, they were met by the indignant owner. She introduced herself: ‘Jane Pretty. I came here because it was a good town. I could have stayed in Whitechapel Road and been robbed.’ She had a pile of brightly coloured furs bundled in her arms, striped black and yellow, red and green.

  No, you didn’t, thought Charmian. You came here because it was a prosperous town where women had money to spend on coloured furs. And you were right.

  She looked round the shop, which appeared prosperous, and thought: They have been buying them. And now someone has stolen them. ‘Will you get them back?’ Jane Pretty was a tall, plump lady with dyed red hair.

  Charmian did not answer.

  ‘Ah, well, everything’s insured,’ said Jane Pretty philosophically.

  ‘Have you lent your keys to anyone, Miss Pretty?’

  ‘Mrs Pretty. No, I have not lent anyone my keys. What do you take me for?’ She sounded indignant again.

  I take you for a very alert, sharp lady, thought Charmian, with a keen eye to what is good for you and for Prettifurs.

  ‘Those keys never leave my possession.’ And she brandished her handbag.

  ‘At night?’

  ‘Under my pillow,’ she said. ‘And don’t ask: these are the only keys to the shop, and I have never lost them.’

  And Charmian believed her. But someone, somewhere, had been able to make a copy of her keys.

  It had been exactly the same with the owner of the other furrier’s which had been robbed. ‘I always keep my keys safe,’ the elderly owner had protested. ‘And when I have to be away – I have another business in Manchester – I leave my wife in charge, and she is even more careful.’ His wife was a carefully groomed lady with hawk-like eyes under blue-grey hair, and Charmian believed in her competence. Still, someone had used their keys.

  So it would be necessary to check the firms that had installed their security systems. Two separate firms, she noted.

  ‘I do regret that pink and blue tabard,’ said the owner of Prettifurs. ‘I was going to wear it myself.’

  ‘Oh, is that what it was, a tabard?’ said Adam. ‘I thought it was a smock.’

  ‘No one wears smocks now,’ said Mrs Pretty dismissively. ‘No, it’s a tabard.’ She looked in their faces and read the signs.

  ‘You two off, then? Will I be seeing anyone else? Or is this all that happens?’

  Charmian said nothing, but Adam said: ‘You might get someone else in, asking a few questions. And, if we get any news of your property, of course we will let you know.’

  ‘Oh, you won’t get anything back. Don’t know why you bother. If you are bothering. Don’t even know why you came just now.’

  On the way back, Adam said: ‘Are we going to tour the town looking for the woman?’

  Charmian shook her head. ‘No, I know where she is.’

  He was surprised. ‘Where?’

  ‘As you said: she went straight back to where she had been before, outside the Baby Care shop. That’s her place for today.’

  ‘I thought you wanted to see her face?’

  ‘I’ll go back at the end of the day,’ said Charmian.

  ‘You put a lot of faith in her predictability.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Charmian seriously. ‘No, I don’t. I think she is totally predictable in some things, such as her hanging on at one place, and totally unpredictable in others, such as her future behaviour. That’s what makes her alarming.’

  She drove rapidly back to the Central Police Station, and parked. Then she sat back and looked up at the building.

  ‘Does it strike you that something is up?’ she asked after a moment.

  ‘No.’ Adam was surprised. He thought: She’s getting imaginative. ‘Why? All looks quiet.’

  ‘That’s just it: everything’s too quiet. Not the normal pattern of behaviour for this hour of the day.’ She looked at her watch: twelve noon. ‘And there’s a group standing talking in the front lobby.’

  Adam looked at her doubtfully. He knew those colleagues of his, and they very often stood in a group talking. He wanted to say, ‘ That’s a bit elaborate, isn’t it?’ but he was never quite sure when she was joking. Also, he was just a little bit afraid of her – more so than he really liked to admit to himself. And, finally, she had an unnerving trick (surely it was no more than a trick?) of being right.

  Then one of the talkers, a man called Harvey, caught sight of them sitting in the car, and came to the door and waved.

  When they got into the hall, someone else, not Harvey but a woman police constable, Edith Baughan, said loudly to Charmian: ‘Walter Wing’s crashed his car on the M1.’

  Charmian hurried up to her own room, a question on her lips.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Agnes, as soon as Charmian opened the door. ‘He’s not dead. But bad. I knew that old Jag was no good.’ She was almost in tears. ‘ I’ve had his wife on the phone. She wants you to ring her. She’s frightfully angry. Or that’s how she sounds.’

  ‘I don’t suppose she is, really,’ said Charmian. ‘ It’s just how it takes you at first.’

  ‘She wants you to ring her.’

  ‘Later,’ said Charmian, who did not fancy making the call. She could not yet help bind anyone else’s wounds when her own skin still bore scars. ‘How did it happen?’

  Agnes shrugged. ‘No details, just the bare message from the hospital. No other car involved. He managed it all on his own. Just like Walter.’

  ‘And you know what it lands on your plate, don’t you?’ said Adam, sitting down at his own desk, and looking at the two women.

  ‘Yes,’ said Charmian. ‘The man in the river. Since I was the chief recipient of Walter’s thoughts.’

  ‘He fancies you, you know,’ said Agnes.

  ‘You’re hysterical,’ said Charmian coldly. ‘But it will certainly be assumed that I knew most of Walter’s thoughts on the subject of the man in the river. Which I don’t.’

  ‘You’d better start thinking your own, then,’ said Adam.

  ‘On one other point there is something I want done,’ said Charmian crisply. ‘Go round to all the principal jewellers, fur-shops, and high-class dress-shops – there aren’t so many in a town like this – and get them to tell you what their security arrangements are. In detail, please. And then I want to see them.’

  ‘Including the shops that have already been done, I suppose.’

  ‘You suppose right. One of your nice neat lists, Adam.’

  ‘And I’ll type it for you,’ offered Agnes.

  ‘Don’t bother. I’ll do it myself. With two fingers.’ And he stumped out.

  Charmian and Agnes watched him depart. ‘He didn’t want that job,’ commented Agnes.

  ‘But he does lovely lists,’ said Charmian absently.

  Later that day, with Walter Wing undergoing surgery and with shock and anaesthesia wiping like a damp towel over all his ratiocinations on the dead man, Charmian received the pathologist’s report on the murdered man found in the river.

  It was delivered by Dr Matthew Scobie, a huge Scotsman.

  ‘The subject was a man aged between thirty-five and forty-five, so I would judge. In life he was probably about sixty-eight inches tall, and weighed about one hundred and twenty-six pounds. Thin, but muscular. No scars, no obvious signs of identification. Dressed in a shirt and grey trousers, socks which had been slightly weighted with cement, as you know. The stuff set round his ankles and feet.’

  ‘Cause of death?’

  ‘He was not drowned, but strangled by a ligature.’

  ‘With what ligature?’

  ‘We don’t know. The marks indicate something with the texture of a towel.’

  He hesitated, then drew out a photograph taken on the mortuary slab. ‘But there’s something else.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A bruise here, and another one here.’ He pointed with delicate fingers, as if touching the dead body itself. ‘The foreskin is torn, and there is bruising internally at the radix of the penis. And a scraping of the skin in the groin.’ He looked at Charmian. ‘Unmistakable signs of force, you know. And spermatogenesis was taking place.’

  Charmian blinked. ‘You aren’t telling me he was raped?’

  Dr Scobie shrugged. ‘ Call it what you like.’

  ‘Could he have done it himself? To himself?’

  ‘Well,’ he hesitated. ‘Anything can happen – but this time, no. There were bruises on his wrists and ankles: he was tied. In fact, some of the cord which tied the ankles still remains. Bruises on his back, too, as if he was beaten.’

  Charmian sat there thinking. Finally, she said bluntly: ‘Were the sexual injuries done manually?’

  ‘I thought you’d ask that.’

  ‘It makes a difference to picturing the scene.’ She hesitated. ‘ It’s bizarre.’

  ‘I’m going to make it even more bizarre for you. I think not manually – I found tiny traces of plastic. Minute but identifiable.’

  ‘You mean that, well – a kind of gadget, a contrivance, was used on him?’ Dr Scobie nodded.

  ‘He seems to have had a bad time,’ said Charmian.

  ‘Ach, I’m afraid he may have had, puir wee fellow.’

  The subject had been five feet eight inches tall, but Dr Scobie was at least ten inches taller.

  The news spread around the station instantly and subterraneously.

  ‘Of course, he could be wrong,’ said Agnes sagely. ‘The old boy’s imaginative on the subject. I’ve noticed.’

  Charmian’s reaction was enigmatic, or so her colleagues thought, and her tone neutral. ‘It’s an interesting idea,’ she said. But she trusted Dr Scobie, and she did not think him imaginative. Far from it, in fact. I find what is suggested bizarre, she thought. And the woman hanging about in Deerham Hills is bizarre, too. That makes two of them.

  But later that day she went down into the centre of Deerham Hills, and took up an observation-spot. The woman had moved a few yards but was still more or less where she had been that morning.

  From where she now stood Charmian could see that the cardboard display-card hung around her neck was covered with newspaper cuttings, each heavily underlined here and there, usually beneath words in headlines, with a black felt-tipped pen.

  Carefully, unobtrusively, Charmian moved up closer until she could read the headlines. But the words underlined seemed to make no sense. To Charmian they were just a meaningless collection of newspaper cuttings. She was trying to get a better look to make something of them when the woman moved away smartly, as if alarmed.

  Charmian stared after her. It was impossible for her not to see the woman as a symptom of something wrong in Deerham Hills. Perhaps even a warning.

  Chapter Two

  The girls were having a meeting. Just a cosy little domestic sociability, all four of them on their own, almost a party.

  ‘Champagne or tea?’ asked Diana. Baby gave a happy giggle. Diana looked towards the table. ‘Or coffee or whisky?’

  ‘Champagne,’ said Baby.

  ‘Whisky,’ said Phil. ‘Give me a fag, Baby.’

  ‘My hair’s wet,’ protested Baby.

  ‘Well, I’m under the dryer,’ pointed out Phil. ‘You’re mobile.’

  Baby teetered over on her four-inch high heels.

  ‘Honestly, those shoes,’ said Diana. ‘What those heels are doing to my carpet!’

  ‘Well, light it!’ said Phil to Baby, cigarette in her lips. ‘Light it for me.’

  Baby obliged.

  ‘I do deplore the return of stiletto heels,’ said Diana.

  ‘I wasn’t old enough to wear them first time round,’ said Baby.

  ‘That’s a lie,’ said Phil, but she said it without malice.

  ‘High heels suit me. I need the extra inch or two. Otherwise, I’m such a little thing.’

  ‘Dry your hair,’ said her employer. ‘You’re dripping all over my floor.’

  ‘You’re besotted about that floor. Don’t keep on about it.’

  They were all seated in the open-plan ground floor of Diana’s hairdressing salon among the basins and hairdryers and potted plants, with the blinds drawn over the windows against the gaze of passers-by. The salon was closed for the day. Phil was actually sitting under a dryer with her hair in rollers; Baby was blow-drying her hair by means of a little hand-held machine; and Diana was halfway through the new cut she was giving herself.

  ‘Sure these rollers will give me a casual wave?’ asked Phil, leaning forward and studying herself with a worried look.

  ‘You’re quite right to worry over that carpet, Diana,’ said Bee Dawson, the fourth member of the party, going back to an earlier subject. She was usually a sentence or two behind everyone else; she liked to think things over before she spoke. ‘But you need more cleaning help here.’ She looked around the littered floor.

  ‘I did have a cleaner, but she was always taking time off to visit her sick son in hospital, so I gave her the push.’

  ‘Help costs,’ said Bee seriously. On money she was usually prompter to speak.

  ‘I call Bee my accountant,’ said Diana fondly. ‘My little accountant.’

  ‘I bet she’s six feet if she’s an inch,’ said Phil, turning round in her chair and peering from under her dryer. ‘And thin with it. Not so little.’

  ‘It’s a term of affection.’

  ‘Oh, good,’ said Phil. ‘ Now we know.’

  ‘I am an accountant,’ said Bee, once again picking up a dropped stitch. ‘Your accountant. And I don’t know where you’d be without me.’ She had a thin, serious, bespectacled face.

  ‘In prison, I expect,’ said Phil, leaning forward and studying her hair in the mirror. ‘And we might end up there anyway.’

  ‘No,’ said Diana. She stood up, a tall, striking figure, one side of her hair cropped short, and the other flowing. ‘ I’d die first.’

  Bee groaned. ‘Oh, Di.’

  Phil looked up at Diana. ‘You know, except for your height, you’d never know you two were sisters. I mean, you’re a beautiful woman, Diana.’

  Diana was dismissive. ‘Half-sisters. Different dads. But it’s mothers that count.’

  ‘Oh, that’s true,’ said Baby. ‘My mum’s lovely.’

  ‘When did you last see her?’ demanded Phil. ‘Three years ago, I’d say.’

  ‘But I think about her,’ said Baby.

  ‘We’ve still got the old place where we lived as kids,’ said Bee, coming in late, as so often. ‘ Bit of a barn, full of outhouses and old sheds, but I’m used to it. I tried to fix it up a bit. Needs a new path. I made a start. Lonely since Mum died. I don’t live there, but Di and I pop in. Still seems sometimes as if Mum’s still there. She was on pain-killing drugs for ages before she died, poor love. I feel as if she’s there. But Di doesn’t. Di, we ought to get rid of some of those drugs. Get rid of the house, too, I suppose.’