Burning is a Substitute for Loving Page 3

  She had a cautious, empirical approach to psychology, but she believed profoundly in the mind’s power to deceive itself, to offer up one subject in place of another. Harry was reaching out looking for something or someone certainly, but who?

  She had gone so far as to discuss the family with her landlady. Relations between Charmian and her landlady were often stretched if not strained. Charmian did not represent the ideal tenant; she was irregular in her hours, independent, and carrying always with her the suggestions of emergencies and alarm. She was not a cosy lodger for poor Mrs Fairlie. All this would Mrs Fairlie have gladly forgiven if in return Charmian had let her into the inside story of some of the cases she worked on. But Charmian never gave so much as a hint. Even when she returned one night with a sleeve torn out of her dress, her face scratched, and obviously shocked and weary, all she said was that she had been in an accident. Charmian, who thought she was merely maintaining an official discretion, would have resented the suggestion that she was reacting vigorously against her family background where everyone had always known what time Charmian came home from school, when she did her homework and what marks she got in class.

  She approached the question circumspectly.

  ‘It’s a pretty garden in the house across the way,’ she said. ‘ They must take great pains with it.’

  Mrs Fairlie agreed. ‘ The old man does it mostly. He always has. It’s one of his hobbies. It’s the quietest one, anyway.’

  ‘Some of the plants must have been there a long time,’ said Charmian, noticing a huge viburnum fragrans and sturdy rambling rose. ‘Have they always lived there?’

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Fairlie. ‘But nearly ten years I should say. Came here from Reading way, I believe.’

  ‘That’s quite a long time.’ Then that meant, thought Charmian, whatever there was to know about the Nelson-Cobb clan Mrs Fairlie knew it.

  ‘There was a family before them. Went to London. I believe, though, this house belonged to old Mr Cobb all the time. Someone said he lived there when he first married. But I don’t remember that,’ said Mrs Fairlie. She sounded regretful. Her eyes were bright: she was taking an interest. She stood there waiting expectantly. Mrs Fairlie never volunteered information. She gave it freely when asked but you had to know the right button to push.

  ‘Has it always been just the three of them?’

  ‘Yes.’ Mrs Fairlie was alert.

  ‘No other woman?’ asked Charmian.

  ‘Not that I know,’ said Mrs Fairlie: she was very interested now. ‘I told you.’

  ‘Well, I suppose they have visitors,’ said Charmian.

  ‘Not them. The boy has his friends in,’ declared Mrs Fairlie.

  ‘Well, then,’ began Charmian.

  ‘He doesn’t have girl friends,’ declared Mrs Fairlie decidedly. ‘Naturally not.’

  But that was unnatural really, wasn’t it? decided Charmian, thinking it over. The boy should have girl friends at his age. It was possible she could locate some of her disquiet in this area, because Harry seemed interested enough in her.

  She had finished tidying her room and was preparing a tray of coffee. Charmian was finicky in little ways and the tray which stood waiting had a linen cloth on it, polished silver spoons and sugar bowl and flowered china. She added the coffee pot and sat down by the fire to do her nails. Yesterday they had been bright lollipop pink for the dance. She had even painted her toe-nails to match, and she stared at them now and the large blister that was on her toe with a glum humour. Freud would have something to say about people who painted their toes just to go to a dance. She turned sharply, and perhaps unconsciously impelled, knocked over the flowers the police sergeant had sent her.

  From across the road she heard the steady whirr of an electric drill saw start up, and knew that old Mr Cobb was working away at one of his hobbies, probably making a sedan chair or something. He made fake antiques and spent weeks digging out worm holes. (Harry said his grandfather spent hours working out exactly where signs of wear and tear would fall: the result, said that sharp observer, would not have deceived a child, the essential lunacy of the task showed through.) Very soon now Mrs Fairlie would go across and complain; she was convinced his machine interfered with her television set. She would go across and point this out and Mr Cobb would explain politely that it couldn’t be his machine because it was fitted with a suppressor and Mrs Fairlie would invite him to come across and see for himself. He would come and two hours later they would still be sitting by the set, drinking coffee and grumbling to each other. This happened about twice a month. Presumably they both got a lot out of it. Charmian often wondered how they had managed before Mrs Fairlie got her television set. He was a gentle old man, with a well-developed sense of humour who, except for his monthly trips to Mrs Fairlie, never seemed to go out. There was a recognised gathering place in the heart of Deerham Hills for pensioners and retired men; they all sat on a seat in the sun in the city park. There was a glass shelter too for wet weather. It was a sort of club. Charmian observed them automatically as part of her job. She knew who was in favour and who was not, who was respected and who sat at the end of the row, very slightly frozen out. The first cold weather thinned them out, but a residue always remained, withdrawing to the bandstand to promenade and talk. Old Mr Cobb was never there. But the whole family seemed enclosed.

  But the electric drill did not go long tonight, not long enough to bring Mrs Fairlie out, and soon all fell quiet. She could see the light on in Harry’s sitting-room but the curtains were drawn.

  Then, to her surprise, she heard the door of the Nelson house click and the old man, who never went anywhere, came out and trotted quietly down the road. He was wearing a dark raincoat. He was almost certainly, she thought, carrying something. She believed she saw the point of that short burst of the electric drill now. It was none of her business but thoughts shaped and formed: she had always assumed that he sat out all those evenings with Mrs Fairlie sitting there all the time drinking coffee and talking. But supposing he hadn’t? Supposing sometimes, he took the chance to go off by himself and no one was the wiser?

  Charmian missed the arrival of Joe Gallati, Harry’s friend.

  Behind his drawn curtain Harry was sitting talking to Joe. He knew very well that his aunt hadn’t wished Joe to visit this evening, but Harry had his own kind of obstinacy and Joe was here. They saw a lot of each other.

  ‘What do you want?’ asked Joe; he was anxious to get back to his work. He was a short, thick-set, dark-haired boy whose grandfather had been an Italian immigrant. Joe veered between rejoicing in his Italian blood (because it made him feel cosmopolitan) and hating it (because it made him feel inferior). He was in an undecided state anyway at the moment, unable to make up his mind whether to go for being a great surgeon or a great bio-chemist. He and Harry were both agreed that you went for something: nonentity was not for them. But now he wanted to get back to his books. He worked regular hours: six until nine every evening, ten to twelve on Saturday. On Saturday afternoons he took exercise (he played soccer in winter and tennis in summer) and on Sunday he read, with pleasure and contempt, the Sunday newspapers.

  His relaxations were detective stories and standing in the big local chemist’s reading the Lancet and the B.M. J. from cover to cover until they chased him out. His parents, a relaxed, unambitious couple often wondered what they had done to get this methodical dynamo. ‘I often feel he’s sorry for me for not having done better in my time,’ said his father privately to his wife in bed. Joe was kindly, however, and let them know he hoped to provide handsomely for them in their old age, and, his Italian blood coming out, would provide a dowry for his baby sister. ‘Now what is it you want, Harry?’ he asked impatiently. He had twenty more pages of Time, Space, and Mathematics, which he was not supposed to be reading, but he liked to be ahead of the science master, to cover before ten o’clock.

  Harry’s voice was unsteady. ‘I tell you; it shook me when she came out with it.’ He hesitated. ‘I
still don’t know whether it’s something important. Or something so silly I ought to laugh it off.’

  Torn between the secret pressure he could not tell Joe and the one he must, he stumbled for words. Joe waited.

  ‘I want you to tell me what we did this lunch time. After school dinner I mean.’

  Joe’s eyes grew round and bright with perplexity. Also with anger.

  ‘You got me round here to go through that? If you had to know, why not on the telephone? Well, don’t answer and don’t interrupt, if that’s what you got me round here for, then you spent your lunch reading in the library and talking to me.’

  ‘I was there all the time?’ said Harry. ‘Are you sure?’

  Joe didn’t answer.

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ said Harry. ‘ But my aunt says I wasn’t.’ He whispered. ‘Joe, can you be somewhere you didn’t know and that you don’t remember?’

  Downstairs, Uncle Eli, listening to his radio, had the uneasy feeling that extraordinary things were happening in this house behind his back. Things customarily did happen behind his back. This was because his face and his ears and his eyes were always turned towards his wireless. Listening was how he spent all his leisure time. He never missed a news bulletin; he took them all in, seven o’clock, eight o’clock, and back on again as soon as he was in from work, from early morning to late at night. It was as if he feared that life might creep up on him from behind if he didn’t keep a sharp eye on it.

  For a moment he turned his head away from the latest news about the latest monkey circling silently in space and listened to the noises of the house instead. Harry upstairs, that was normal. Joe with him talking at this hour, that was not normal. Dad’s working-room quiet and still, abnormal. Dad out, very abnormal indeed. Only the noise in the kitchen of his wife making a pot of tea before going to bed was just as usual.

  He heard Joe and Harry come down the stairs and presently Harry went up again alone. ‘Tea’s made, Harry,’ he heard his wife call. Soon she went to the foot of the stairs and called again. With a sigh he turned the volume louder … They were off the monkey now and on to sterling. Sterling seemed safe enough, so for a minute he could relax. He leaned back with a sigh and lit a cigarette.

  He had finished it before he realised that the tea hadn’t been brought into the room and instead of the comforting noise of cups and saucers being rattled round there was dead silence. He went to the door and listened. He walked forward a few steps.

  His wife was sitting in the kitchen, the tea tray in front of her, staring straight forward. There was something fixed and rigid in her expression that frightened him, and although he had long ago resolved to let her go her own way and not worry, he went up and put a gentle hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Where’s Dad?’ she said, still staring in front of her.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I ought to keep him on a lead.’

  You do keep him on a lead, he said to himself. Then he realised that the rigidity, which he had thought of as anger, was really deep worry and alarm. For a moment it touched him too. ‘She’s overreached herself now,’ he thought.

  Aloud he said: ‘What’s the matter with Harry?’

  ‘He didn’t like something I said to him … I don’t think he’s being straight with me.’ She sounded unhappy.

  ‘Well, boys grow up,’ he said. ‘ You’ve got to expect a boy to have secrets.’

  ‘I’d be glad if this is a secret,’ she said bitterly. ‘ I’m expecting to find the whole town but me knows. Old Mrs Uprichard told me. Yes, I know she’s a gossip: But all right, she saw what she told me. Harry. Standing there staring in the shop window. Behaving like no High School boy should.’

  ‘Is it today you are talking about?’ he said, glad to extract a solid fact from the morass.

  ‘I never said anything about today,’ she cried incoherently. ‘I never meant today.’ But in an odd sort of way this just underlined it.

  Something funny about today, his mind registered.

  Harry listening on the stairs didn’t know what to make of it. His bewilderment was extreme. It wasn’t so much that he didn’t know what his aunt meant as this horrible feeling that he ought to know.

  Sounds, hardly forming into words, rose to the surface of his mind, dredged up from God knew where. He fumbled for what it was. Thainnights, vainnights, fennits. It meant nothing to him. But crouching there on the stairs, it was strongly in his mind as a word to use. Sounds from out of the past.

  ‘Be a man, not a mouse,’ had been Joe’s parting remark to him. It was one of their joke phrases. This time, though, Joe meant it. Joe was brave. Harry, as far as he knew, was not. But he loved his aunt and if it was necessary in some obscure way to back her up, then he must do it. How strange if the upshot of all this business was that he should find himself braver than he had thought.

  ‘Mumbo jumbo,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Mumbo jumbo.’

  Assuming a boldness he did not feel, he went into the kitchen to have his tea.

  There were the three short rings on the bell which meant it was for her. Charmian went down and there was Inspector Pratt on the door-step.

  ‘Hello, Daniels,’ he said, a little awkwardly. ‘I want to talk to you.’

  He followed her into the house and up the stairs. ‘Sorry to disturb you so late.’

  ‘It’s not so very late,’ said Charmian.

  ‘You’re off duty.’ But are you ever off duty? he asked himself, half irritably.

  Charmian waited silently.

  ‘I don’t feel happy about this Mallow Street fire. Three women have died, one of whom I knew pretty well. I’m taking it personally I suppose.’

  Charmian was silent. She frowned slightly at the word ‘personally.’

  ‘I’m well aware it’s never personal with you, Daniels.’ He probably wouldn’t have said this if he hadn’t been so upset, but her silence seemed like a criticism. ‘But it happens to all policemen in the end, even the best of us. You’ll probably find it happens to you sometimes in the next thirty years.’

  ‘You think it was arranged, not an accident?’ Charmian was thinking aloud.

  ‘I don’t know. But if it was an accident then it’s an accident I want to know more about.’ He added. ‘ The Gas Company say the gas came from the little cooker in the back room. They’re only shacks really, those shops on Mallow Street, behind their smart fronts.’ His voice was angry.

  ‘Sounds all right,’ said Charmian.

  ‘It sounds all wrong,’ said Pratt. ‘Four women standing there in the shop and then it blows up all round them. Why didn’t one of them notice it?’

  ‘We shan’t ever know that, shall we?’ said Charmian slowly. ‘Unless the girl Lacey Dodge can tell us anything.’

  ‘She’s hardly in a position to talk at the moment. If indeed she ever is.’ His face looked very tired, and Charmian remembered that Lacey Dodge was a friend of his daughter.

  ‘But there’s something more than this, isn’t there?’ asked Charmian. She knew her Pratt. He hadn’t come out, probably cutting some entertaining of his wife’s, just because he was worried. He was used to worry. It was his job.

  He nodded.

  ‘I was in at the Station this evening, and I thought to do some checking. Miss Lockhart came in this morning early. She saw Barker.’

  Charmian nodded. Barker had been on duty in the morning. He had been Grizel’s partner at the dance. He was a brawny, cheerful cockney.

  ‘She took back her complaint about the boy staring in her window and embarrassing her customers. Said she’d made a mistake. Three times this last week she’s been in complaining and today she takes it back.’ He added: ‘Barker got the impression she was frightened.’

  ‘Imagination?’

  ‘You know Barker. His imagination doesn’t work that way … And he got this impression before she was killed. Not afterwards. He thought she might have been threatened.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Charmian. ‘I can see w
hat you’re working up to.’

  ‘And mark you: this time she said Boy, not Boys. Boy. She was thinking of one.’

  ‘You want me to find this boy?’

  ‘It’s your sort of job. He’ll be under eighteen to begin with. I’d rather you did the questioning.’

  ‘Any details about this boy?’ asked Charmian.

  Pratt was silent.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘We don’t have to play a game. You know who the boy is. Barker knew at once from her description. She didn’t know but he did. In a town like this when anything like this comes up a name is put on it. Right or wrong.’

  The community of Deerham Hills operated a communication system of great efficiency. There was one great central clearing house in Lubbock’s the big food store and supermarket. Lubbock’s was in two parts, the older and smaller of which was served by assistants and the larger and newer of which was a self-service store. The owner, John Lubbock, grandson of the founder, had opened the supermarket ten years ago when Deerham Hills began to grow fast. With great shrewdness he retained the original store as the home for expensive and high quality food. To shop in Old Lubbock’s was now a status symbol and meant you used French tinned foods, Italian cheeses, wild rice and garlic in your cooking. But everyone went to the supermarket for the ride. It was fun. Gossip and speculation started to filter into Lubbocks as soon as the store opened at eight-thirty in the morning. A piece of news was fed in at one end of the store, met and detained for a moment by the usual huddle round the bargain table, and then sent off home, substantially added to, with every shopping load, a free gift from Lubbock’s. No holds were barred and everything could be and was said. Thoughts a matron would shudder to utter in her own home she could express freely in Lubbock’s.