Burning is a Substitute for Loving Page 4

  There was another clearing house for gossip in Deerham Hills, and this was the old men’s meeting place in the park where they were just as quick and keen as the matrons in Lubbock’s. Tastes were more restricted and they did not cover such a wide variety of subjects, but they played their part, adding depth and tang and experience to an otherwise mediocre piece of news. They knew before anyone else that the headmaster of the Junior School was emigrating to Australia and they also knew his departure was connected with the pretty exchange teacher from Sydney whom he hoped to marry, but it was brilliantly inspired guesswork that let them know months before anyone else that the girl already had a husband way back home.

  Charmian thought about this story of the boy and all the social and sexual overtones it was loaded with. Yes, the boy would stand small chance of charity: this offence, if it was his offence, struck at all their hidden hatreds and fears, at their snobbishness, at their prudery.

  ‘Harry Elder?’ said Charmian aloud.

  And now she had brought the unease right out onto the surface, and knew it concerned her just as much as Harry.

  Across the road the telephone started to ring in the night. It rang for a long time unanswered. It did not disturb Uncle Eli Nelson, sleeping away the hours between the late night news headlines and the early morning bulletin; it did not disturb Harry dreaming of Oxford and fame. It disturbed Jess, wondering uneasily about her father who was never anywhere and knew nothing.

  She walked about the house restlessly. Where was Dad? Where was Dad now? He never went anywhere but he had certainly gone somewhere now. She had listened, hoping to hear him open the gate and walk up the garden path and into the front door. It was so late.

  She rushed to pick up the telephone.

  It was her father.

  ‘It was in the evening papers. All those women dead. I’ve been wandering round thinking. That’s why I went out – to find out what had happened. I had to know, Margaret.’

  He called her Margaret. She had even forgotten her proper name was Margaret and Jess only a nickname used because her mother was Margaret too.

  ‘It’s no good. We shall have to tell the truth.’

  ‘What is the truth?’ she said distractedly.

  ‘The truth — about Harry. The truth about us all.’

  ‘It’ll kill me, Dad,’ she said grimly.

  There was no answer. Only a sigh.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Dad? Dad, where are you? Dad, please don’t do anything. Dad? Dad, tell me where you are.’ But there was still no answer, only the sound of breathing, and presently even that seemed to die away as though the breather had fallen away from the telephone.

  She stood there, shivering and afraid.

  Chapter Three

  In a little while, as if in echo to the telephone in Jess Nelson’s house, the telephone began to ring in Charmian’s room. She reached out her hand sleepily and picked up the receiver from the table by her bed. She had been in a deep relaxed sleep, all thoughts of Harry, of arson and murder (if it was arson and murder) pushed from the surface of her mind, giving way to a dream about herself.

  ‘Hello?’ she said. The luminous face of her bedside clock showed the time: two-thirty.

  ‘Daniels?’ She was not surprised to hear Inspector Pratt’s voice. ‘We’ve got an old man down here. Was found in the shelter in the Park … the one they call the Old Men’s Shelter. He’s unconscious. Get down here. I’m sending up a car.’

  ‘Why me?’ mumbled Charmian.

  The telephone line buzzed and echoed faintly, reminding Charmian that in Deerham Hills no knowledge, no lines were secret. The community kept a sharp eye on itself through its lines of communications.

  ‘Because he’s probably related to the matter discussed with you earlier,’ said Pratt obliquely.

  Charmian put the receiver down. ‘I shouldn’t be woken up like this,’ was what she thought. ‘ No woman should.’ Charmian lay back and for a moment gave way to the irritation of being disturbed in her dream. She had been dreaming of the sergeant who had sent her the flowers, and although she certainly didn’t desire him as a lover and didn’t even like him very much at the moment, still it seemed more normal and proper to go on dreaming about him than be woken up because an old man was dying. She should have been disturbed by a kiss, or by the warm pressure of a shoulder, not by death.

  She was reminded of her mother’s strong outcry when Charmian joined the Force. ‘And now you will never marry,’ she wailed.

  ‘But I don’t want to get married,’ thought Charmian, half resentful now of her dream which had seemed to imply that she definitely did.

  She heard a rustling at the door. Her landlady’s head poked round the door. She always heard the telephone.

  ‘Trouble?’ she said. Her eyes were bright and alert.

  ‘Yes,’ said Charmian, to herself. ‘You live on trouble. This’ll probably set you up for weeks.’

  ‘I heard the telephone.’

  ‘Of course you did,’ commented Charmian to herself. ‘Naturally, you wouldn’t miss anything as interesting as that.’ She swung her feet out of bed. ‘I’ve got to go out.’

  Mrs Fairlie clucked. ‘At this hour? I’ll get you a cup of tea. I’ll have a kettle on in a twink.’ Before Charmian could speak she was out of the room in a flurry of tartan dressing-gown.

  Charmian put on her clothes, gathered together pen, pencil and notebook.

  Her thoughts were occupied with the implications of Inspector Pratt’s words. ‘Related to the matter I discussed with you earlier.’ Related to Harry. An old man. That seemed to mean old Mr Cobb. What was old Mr Cobb doing to be found unconscious in a shelter down in the park?

  The clink of cup on saucer heralded the return of her landlady.

  ‘Is it something nasty, dear?’ she asked, dropping her voice.

  Nasty to Mrs Fairlie meant only one thing: is it loaded with sex? Sex was nasty, but it interested her.

  Charmian only grunted. Then, because she didn’t want to be rude to Mrs Fairlie, who was kind, she said: ‘ Not more than usual.’

  ‘It’s because of it being the night, you see,’ said Mrs Fairlie, stirring the tea.

  Charmian took it; the tea was very hot and sweet, and although she didn’t really like it, she found it stimulating. The car had not arrived yet and she found the time to go over to her desk to consult her records. As a detective Charmian had developed a technique of her own – or perhaps it wasn’t her own, perhaps she had based it upon the work of all criminologists. She collected together all the facts that came her way about as many of the local people as she could and neatly filed and cross-indexed them. But because even in Deerham Hills you can’t cover the whole field, she restricted herself to two or three main classes: those known to have come, innocently or otherwise, into the field of a police investigation; the adolescent; and those over seventy. The last group was included, not because Charmian thought them particularly prone to crime, but because they were themselves specially vulnerable to crimes against their property and their person. The records were kept in a sort of code of her own, and they were always discreetly locked up from the world. Charmian had a strong feeling that her popularity in Deerham Hills would not be increased if the existence of her files became widely known. (Inspector Pratt knew.) Just lately she had found herself increasingly wanting popularity in Deerham Hills. Not wide effusive popularity such as the Mayor and the matron of the hospital went in for but just to be acknowledged as a person you could like. In a policewoman it was a weakness, and she knew it.

  She had three main headings under which she grouped facts: they were crimes of violence, petty crimes, and miscellaneous. Miscellaneous was naturally by far the largest group, although petty crimes encroached. Crimes of violence were sparsely represented. Deerham Hills was law abiding. Charmian wondered if she might not be going to add a few new cards to this section.

  She turned to Mr Cobb and flipped through the cards. She didn’t remember ever entering his name and for a moment she thought she wasn’t going to come across with anything. Then she found one entry. One small entry.

  He, like Mrs Freda Masterton, had been a witness of the bad road accident last year. He had been standing on the pavement by Miss Lockhart’s shop, having, he explained, just crossed the road, and he had seen the two cars hit each other. He was just on that spot, near the corner where two roads met and where the stocking shop stood, at that time. It might mean nothing. But it was a faint, tenuous point.

  She tried, in the few remaining minutes before she was collected, to remember what she had known about the car smash. A sports car had hit a cyclist, the cyclist died outright and the motor driver had had a more protracted death. In addition, a bystander had had a leg broken and would probably always limp now. All in all it had been one of the nastiest little accidents you could wish to see. Exactly whose fault it was had been a question that bitterly divided Deerham Hills. No one knew the driver of the sports car, Robert Hedges, who remained an obscure figure, dead and alive, but everyone knew the girl on the cycle because she was the daughter of the headmaster of the local boys’ school. Unluckily, no one, not even the man whose leg was broken, had really seen accurately what was happening and the whole episode remained one big question mark.

  Charmian heard a car turn the corner of the road and come to a stop, very quietly, outside the house. She picked up her coat.

  As she crossed towards the door she looked out of the windows at the Nelson house. Two windows were showing lights on the ground floor. This was the sitting-room. There was a light on in the bedroom on the floor above, this was the room shared by Eli Nelson and Jess. As she looked a light came on in the room next to it. This was Harry’s room.

  Behind his lighted window Harry was s
itting on the edge of the bed feeling sick. The sickness at this moment was more mental than physical, but any minute now it might edge over and then he would be physically sick. Aunt Jess had roused him from his sleep with a quick poke, and a whispered:

  ‘Come on downstairs, something’s happened to your grandfather.’

  The whirling ceased in Harry’s head and he stood up. Now his mind was clearer it was full of the problem: What could have happened to his grandfather? He had a vivid picture of the old man as he had last seen him. The time had been just before his friend Joe Gallati came. He had been hovering in the bathroom when Harry came in for a glass of water. In spite of his defiant words to his aunt, he still couldn’t swallow his pill without water, and he had the feeling that the pill or the ghost of it was still sitting there somewhere between his teeth and his throat.

  ‘Hello boy,’ Grandpa had said. He looked clear-eyed and sprightly. Not at all the sort of person ‘something happened to’ in the night. — It should be Uncle, was Harry’s sudden reaction. He’s the one who’s anxious, who’s always fussing about his health and worrying over the world. Not Grandpa. It’s the wrong one.

  ‘Taking your medicine? There’s a good boy.’

  ‘I wish I didn’t have to. I’m fed up with it.’

  ‘No, it’s right for you to take it.’ Grandpa was solemn.

  ‘That’s not what you say to Uncle,’ complained Harry. He looked at the row of laxatives, patent medicines, lotions and ointments that stood on the bathroom window.

  ‘He takes too much,’ said Grandpa. ‘Pills to send him to sleep and then more to keep him awake.’ He picked up the bottle of pink sleeping tablets that represented Uncle Eli’s oblivion from the burden of the world. He weighed the bottle in his hands. ‘ There’s only one reason a grown man needs these … And that’s when he needs a good long lasting sleep.’

  ‘I suppose that’s just about what Uncle thinks.’

  ‘Not him,’ said Grandpa, with a short laugh.

  A question formed in Harry’s mind. Had he ever seen Grandpa put the bottle down? Or had he kept it in his hand?

  He got up and went to the head of the stairs. He could hear Aunt Jess’s voice and he felt a pinch of anxiety: he must find out what was up with Grandpa.

  And at this moment, of all ridiculous times, a thought flared into his mind: how do I know he is my grandfather?

  And following this: How do I know I am myself?

  You know yourself by hearsay. You took their word for it. Long ago the voices started coming through, someone said Good Harry, or what a pretty baby Harry is, or naughty bad Harry. You took it in, and from then you built on it, you knew that this hand which touched and built bricks, this head which was heavy, sleepy, or full of ideas, this leg which you could see, was you and you were Harry. You went on from there, accumulating yourself like a treasure. (A doubtful treasure, Harry the cynic suggested.)

  But there was a check. Also a sense of cloudiness. His head began to feel dizzy again.

  He started down the stairs towards the sitting-room from which he could hear the sound of his aunt’s voice.

  ‘Where?’ asked Charmian briefly.

  ‘We’re going straight to the hospital.’ The driver was a man Charmian knew well. He had been a detective in the C. I. D. with her until he was injured in a fight; after his recovery he was transferred to the work he did now.

  ‘Pratt’s down there now,’ he went on.

  ‘With the man?’ Charmian was slightly surprised.

  ‘I rather think he was down there anyway. The girl Lacey Dodge has come round.’

  Yes, of course, the girl, thought Charmian, Pratt had two cases. Or was there, as he believed, some connection, so that it was one case?

  Charmian suddenly had the feeling that this affair, which at first seemed so restricted, concerning only a few people here in Deerham Hills, was wide open, could reach anywhere, touch anyone.

  There was no one immediately to be seen in the hall of the Deerham Hills Cottage Hospital, except a sleepy night porter prowling about in the back by the telephones. He appeared to be waiting for a call.

  Inspector Pratt soon appeared however.

  ‘I want you to relieve the constable on duty at the bed,’ he said. ‘He’s coming round a bit. Muttering. He may make some sense. You can’t question him of course.’

  Rapidly he told Charmian the story. The old man had been discovered in the shelter in the park well after midnight, by a constable. At first assumed to be dead drunk, it had soon become apparent that he was doped. There was no smell of alcohol upon his breath and none of the disorder of drunkenness about him. He was neatly disposed of upon the length of a seat in the shelter, his head upon the newspaper. It was the folded newspaper that arrested the attention of the constable who was an intelligent man.

  So far he was anonymous. A nameless man.

  He did not remain nameless long. The wardmaid working in the night-duty kitchen saw his face and knew it. She was the sister of a neighbour and she knew his name and his address.

  ‘He’ll do better with a woman,’ said Pratt looking worried. ‘ He’s old and fussed’ … ‘and drugged and dying,’ he might have added. ‘Besides, it’s important to me that you pick up anything he says … if he says anything. He’s not conscious, of course, you can’t question him.’

  ‘So you said.’ It was not like Pratt to repeat himself.

  Mr Cobb was in a small room, quietly painted in pale blue and white. At intervals a nurse disturbed Charmian’s vigil.

  ‘I have been here before,’ thought Charmian. She remembered now that in her first few days in Deerham Hills she had sat beside the bedside of a girl who had tried to drown herself. The girl had recovered. Or Charmian believed she had. How odd that she couldn’t quite recall. But other events had blotted out the memory. How cruel and unfeeling it seemed that she could not remember. But it was true that an ache in one’s own finger was more memorable than someone else’s agony. Not that the girl had been in agony. As Charmian remembered she had been sick and sorry. Nor was this sleeper in agony. He was very still, though. She leaned forward and looked at him.

  The nurse opened the door. ‘You won’t disturb him?’ she said.

  Charmian shook her head. It did not seem to her possible that anyone could ever disturb that deep sleep again. What dreams or what nightmares formed and dispersed in his mind no longer appeared on the surface. He was too far away, too far gone.

  Perhaps something of this appeared in her face for the nurse spoke.

  ‘He is going to come round, you know. He hadn’t time to absorb very much. And we have given him stimulants, by injection. His pulse is much stronger.’

  She closed the door.

  Charmian wondered what Inspector Pratt was doing, and how the girl Lacey Dodge was. From this it was a natural transition to Harry, with whom her thoughts were deeply absorbed anyway. Wasn’t Lacey a friend of Harry’s? Or was it her sister? Hadn’t she lately, just lately, thought there was something there? It was probably Lacey, who was nineteen and who was older than Harry, rather than her sister who was about the same age. Harry’s tastes, as far as she knew them, appeared to be for older girls.

  Harry. What was there about Harry that framed the questions in one’s mind? What quality either in him or in his ways. He was a normal, clever, ambitious boy. Charmian, who was clever and ambitious herself, recognised the quality and style of Harry’s brains and aspirations. They were out of the ordinary. He was an exceptional boy in Deerham Hills. One day, if he didn’t get into trouble first, he might do big things. The power was there. That was probably what was worrying. You sensed all that power floating about in Harry, not yet quite anchored, capable of anything, and subconsciously you asked yourself if it was not, in fact, dangerous, liable indeed to be turned to anything. Probably Harry asked himself this question too. He was a boy with a question on his mind.

  The old man in the bed stirred and muttered. Charmian leaned forward to catch what he said. It sounded like ‘ought’ or ‘ought ’er.’ Charmian knew well enough that suicides dwell on compulsives.