Sins Of The Fathers

7

Two people sat in the public gallery of Kingsmarkham court, Archery and a woman with sharp, wasted features. Her long grey hair, oddly fashionable through carelessness rather than intent, and the cape she wore gave her a medieval look. Presumably she was the mother of this girl who had just been charged with manslaughter, the girl whom the clerk had named as Elizabeth Anthea Crilling, of 24A Glebe Road, Kingsmarkham in the County of Sussex. She had a look of her mother and they kept glancing at each other, Mrs. Crilling's eyes flicking over her daughter's string-thin body or coming to rest with maudlin watery affection on the girl's face. It was a well-made face, though gaunt but for the full mouth. Sometimes it seemed to become all staring dark eyes as a word or a telling phrase awakened emotion, sometimes blank and shuttered like that of a retarded child with an inner life of goblins and things that reach out in the dark. An invisible thread held mother and daughter together but whether it was composed of love or hatred Archery could not tell. Both were ill-dressed, dirty-looking, a prey, he felt, to cheap emotion, but there was some quality each had—passion? Imagination? Seething memory?—that set them apart and dwarfed the other occupants of the court.

He had just enough knowledge of the law to know that this court could do no more than commit the girl to the Assizes for trial. The evidence that was being laboriously taken down on a typewriter was all against her. Elizabeth Crilling, according to the licensee of The Swan at Flagford, had been drinking in his saloon bar since six-thirty. He had served her with seven double whiskies and when he had refused to let her have another, she had abused him until he had threatened to call the police.

"No alternative but to commit you for trial at the Assizes at Lewes," the chairman was saying. "...Nothing to hope for from any promise of favour, and nothing to fear from any threat which may be..."

A shriek came from the public gallery. "What are you going to do to her?" Mrs. Crilling had sprung up, the tent-like cape she wore billowing out and making a breeze run through the court, "You're not going to put her in prison?"

Hardly knowing why he did so, Archery moved swiftly along the form until he was at her side. At the same time Sergeant Martin took half a dozen rapid strides towards her, glaring at the clergyman.

"Now, madam, you'd far better come outside."

She flung herself away from him, pulling the cape around her as if it were cold instead of suffocatingly hot.

"You're not going to put my baby in gaol!" She pushed at the sergeant who stood between her and her view of the bench. "Get away from me, you dirty sadist!"

"Take that woman outside," said the magistrate with icy calm. Mrs. Crilling spun round to face Archery and seized his hands. "You've got a kind face. Are you my friend?"

Archery was horribly embarrassed. "You can ask for bail, I think," he muttered.

The policewoman who stood by the dock came over to them. "Come along now, Mrs Crilling..."

"Bail, I want bail! This gentleman is an old friend of mine and he says I can have bail. I want my rights for my baby!"

"We really can't have this sort of thing." The magistrate cast an icy scornful look upon Archery who sat down, wrenching his hands from Mrs Crilling's. "Do I understand you wish to ask for bail?" He turned his eyes on Elizabeth who nodded defiantly.

"A nice cup of tea, Mrs. Crilling," said the policewoman. "Come along now." She shepherded the demented woman out, her arm supporting her waist. The magistrate went into conference with the clerk and bail was granted to Elizabeth Crilling in her own recognisance of five hundred pounds and that of her mother for a similar sum.

"Rise, please!" said the warrant officer. It was over.

On the other side of the court Wexford shovelled his papers into his briefcase. "A friend in need, that one," he said to Burden, glancing in Archery's direction. "You mark my words, he'll have a job getting out of old Mother Crilling's clutches. Remember when we had to cart her off to the mental unit at Stowerton that time? You were her friend then. Tried to kiss you, didn't she?"

"Don't remind me," said Burden.

"Funny affair altogether last night, wasn't it? Him being on hand, I mean, to show that poor kid his way to heaven."

"It was lucky."

"I only remember that happening once before, except in the case of R.C.s, of course." He turned as Archery slipped between the wooden forms and came up to them. "Good morning, sir. I hope you slept well. I was just saying to the inspector, there was a fellow killed out Forby way soon after I came here. Must be all of twenty years. I've never forgotten it. He was just a kid too and got it in the neck from an army lorry. But he wasn't quiet, he was screaming. All about a girl and a kid it was." He paused. "Did you speak, sir? Sorry, I thought you did. He wanted a clergyman, too."

"I hope and trust he got what he wanted."

"Well, no he didn't as a matter of fact. He died—unshriven is the word, I think. The vicar's car broke down on the way. Funny, I've never forgotten it. Grace was his name, John Grace. Shall we go?"

The Crillings had departed. As they came out into the sunshine, the policewoman came up to Wexford.

"Mrs. Crilling left a note with me, sir. She asked me to give it to a Mr. Archery."

"Take my advice," said Wexford. "Tear it up. She's as mad as a hatter." But Archery had already slit open the envelope. Dear Sir,

he read.

They tell me that you are a man of God. Blessed is he that sitteth not in the seat of the scornful. God has sent you to me and my baby. I will be at home this afternoon, waiting to thank you in person.

Your affectionate friend, Josephine Crilling

Archery's bedroom combined charmingly the best of old and new. The ceiling was beamed, the walls painted pink and decorated with a tooled design of chevrons, but there was also a fitted carpet, an abundance of lights on walls and bedhead and a telephone. He rinsed his hands at the pink washbasin (a private bathroom he felt to be an unwarranted extravagance), lifted the receiver and asked for a call to Thringford in Essex.

"Darling?"

"Henry! Thank heaven you've phoned. I've been trying over and over again to get you at that Olive Branch place or whatever it's called."

"Why, what's the matter?"

"I've had a dreadful letter from Charles. Apparently poor darling Tess phoned her people late yesterday afternoon and now she's told Charles the engagement's definitely off. She says it wouldn't be fair on him or us."

"And...?"

"And Charles says if Tess won't marry him he's going to come down from Oxford and go out to Africa to fight for Zimbabwe."

"How utterly ridiculous!"

"He says if you try and stop him he'll do something dreadful and get sent down."

"Is that all?"

"Oh, no. There's lots and lots of it. Let me see. I've got the letter here. '...What's the use of Father always ballsing on'—sorry, darling, does that mean something awful?—'on about faith and taking things on trust if he won't take Tess's word and her mother's? I've been into the whole fiasco of the case myself and it's full of holes. I think Father could get the Home Secretary to have the case reopened if he would only make some sort of effort. For one thing there was an inheritance involved but it never came up at the trial. Three people inherited vast sums and at least one of them was buzzing around the place the day Mrs. Primero died...' "

"All right," said Archery wearily. "If you remember, Mary, I have a transcript of the trial myself and it cost me two hundred pounds. How are things apart from that?"

"Mr. Sims is behaving rather oddly." Mr Sims was Archery's curate. "Miss Bayliss says he keeps the communion bread in his pocket, and this morning she got a long blonde hair in her mouth."

Archery smiled. The parish chit-chat was more in his wife's line than solving murders. It brought her to him visually, a handsome strong woman who minded the lines on her face that he never noticed. He was beginning to miss her mentally and physically.

"Now, listen, darling. Write back to Charles—be diplomatic. Tell him how well Tess is behaving and say I'm having some very interesting talks with the police. If there's the slightest chance of getting the case reopened I'll write to the Home Secretary."

"That's wonderful, Henry. Oh, there go your second lot of pips. I'll ring off. By the way, Rusty caught a mouse this morning and left it in the bath. He and Tawny are missing you."

"Give them my love," said Archery to please her.

He went downstairs into the dark cool dining room, ordered something called a Navarin d'agneau, and in a burst of recklessness, a half-bottle of Anjou. All the windows were open but on some of them the green shutters had been closed. A table in one of these embrasures reminded him with its white cloth, its tilted cane chairs and its vaseful of sweet peas of a Dufy that hung on the walls of his study at home. Filtered sunlight lay in primrose-pale bars across the cloth and the two places laid with silver.

But for himself and half a dozen elderly residents, the dining room was deserted, but presently the door from the bar opened and the head waiter ushered in a man and a woman. Archery wondered if the management would object to the apricot poodle the woman fondled in her arms. But the head waiter was smiling deferentially and Archery saw him pat the tiny woolly head.

The man was small and dark and would have been good-looking but for his glassy, red-rimmed eyes. Archery thought he might be wearing contact lenses. He sat down at the Dufy table, ripped open a packet of Peter Stuyvesant and poured the contents into a gold cigarette case. In spite of the man's obvious polish—his sleek hair, svelt suit, taut bone-smooth skin—there was something savage in the way his white fingers tore the paper. A wedding ring and a big bold signet gleamed in the soft light as he tossed the mutilated packet on to the cloth. Archery was amused to see how much jewellery he wore, a sapphire tie pin and a watch as well as the rings.

By contrast the woman wore none. She was plainly dressed in a cream silk suit that matched her hair, and everything about her from the gauzy hat and hair to her crossed ankles was the colour of faint sunlight, so that she seemed to glow with a pale radiance. Outside the cinema and the pictures in Mary's magazines, she was the most beautiful woman he had seen for years. Compared to her Tess Painter was just a pretty girl. Archery was reminded of an ivory orchid or a tea rose which, when lifted from the florist's cube of cellophane, still retains its patina of dew.

He gave himself a little shake and applied himsell determinedly to his Navarin. It had turned out to be two lamb chops in a brown sauce.

Between Kingsmarkham High Street and the Kingsbrook Road lies an estate of ugly terraced houses covered with that mixture of mortar and grit builders call pebble dashing. On a hot day when the roads are dusty and flickering with heat mirage these rows ol dun-coloured houses look as if they have been fashioned out of sand. A giant's child might have built them, using his crude tools unimaginatively.

Archery found Glebe Road by the simple and traditional expedient of asking a policeman. He was getting into the habit of asking policemen and this one was low in the hierarchy, a young constable directing traffic at the crossroads.

Glebe Road might have been designed by the Romans, it was so straight, so long and so uncompromising. The sand houses had no woodwork about them. Their window frames were of metal and their porch canopies excrescences of pebbly plaster. After every fourth house an arch in the facade led into the back and through these arches sheds, coal bunkers and dustbins could be seen.

The street was numbered from the Kingsbrook Road end and Archery walked nearly half a mile before he found twenty-four. The hot pavements running with melted tar made his feet burn. He pushed open the gate and saw that the canopy covered not one front door but two. The house had been converted into two surely tiny flatlets. He tapped the chromium knocker on the door marked 24A and waited.

When nothing happened he tapped again. There was a grinding trundling sound and a boy on roller skates came out from under the arch. He took no notice at all of the clergyman. Could Mrs Crilling be asleep? It was hot enough for a siesta and Archery felt languid himself.

He stepped back and looked through the arch. Then he heard the door open and slam shut. So somebody was at home. He rounded the sandy wall and came face to face with Elizabeth Crilling.

At once he sensed that she had not answered, nor probably even heard, his knock. Evidently she was going out. The black dress had been changed for a short blue cotton shift that showed the outlines of her prominent hip bones. She wore backless white mules and carried a huge white and gilt handbag.

"What d'you want?" It was obvious she had no idea who he was. He thought she looked old, finished, as if somehow she had been used and wrecked. "If you're selling something," she said, "you've come to the wrong shop."

"I saw your mother in court this morning," Archery said. "She asked me to come and see her."

He thought she had rather a charming smile, for her mouth was well-shaped and her teeth good. But the smile was too brief.

"That," she said, "was this morning."

"Is she at home?" He looked helplessly at the doors. "I—er—which one is it, which flat?"

"Are you kidding? It's bad enough sharing a house with her. Only a stone-deaf paralytic could stick living underneath her."

"I'll go in, shall I?"

"Suit yourself. She's not likely to come out here." The bag strap was hoisted on to the right shoulder, pulling the blue stuff tight across her breasts. Without knowing why, Archery remembered the exquisite woman in the dining room of the Olive and Dove, her petal skin and her easy grace.

Elizabeth Crilling's face was greasy. In the bright afternoon light the skin had the texture of lemon peel. "Well, go on in," she said sharply, unlocking the door. She pushed it open and turned away, her mules flapping and clacking down the path. "She won't bite you," she said over her shoulder. "At least, I shouldn't think so. She bit me once, but there were—well, extenuating circumstances."

Archery went into the hall. Three doors led off it but they were all closed. He coughed and said tentatively, "Mrs. Crilling?' The place was stuffy and silent. He hesitated for a moment, then opened the first part of the doors. Inside was a bedroom divided into two by a hardboard partition. He had been wondering how the two women managed. Now he knew. The middle room must be where they lived. He tapped on the door and opened it.

Although the french windows were ajar the air was thick with smoke and the two ashtrays on a gateleg table were filled with stubs. Every surface was covered with papers and debris and the debris with dust. As he entered a blue budgerigar in a tiny cage broke into a stream of high brittle chatter. The cage swung furiously.

Mrs. Crilling wore a pink nylon dressing gown that looked as if it had once been designed for a bride. The honeymoon, Archery thought, was long over, for the dressing gown was stained and torn and hideous. She was sitting in an armchair looking through the window at a fenced-in piece of land at the back. It could hardly be called a garden for nothing grew in it but nettles, three feet high, rose-pink firewood, and brambles that covered everything with fly-infested tendrils.

"You hadn't forgotten I was coming, Mrs. Crilling?" The face that appeared round the wing of the chair was enough to intimidate anyone. The whites of the eyes showed all the way round the black pupils. Every muscle looked tense, taut and corrugated as if from some inner agony. Her white hair, fringed and styled like a teenager's, curtained the sharp cheekbones.

"Who are you?" She dragged herself up, clinging to the chair arm and came slowly round to face him. The vee at the dressing gown front showed a ridged and withered valley like the bed of a long-dried stream.

"We met in court this morning. You wrote to me..."

He stopped. She had thrust her face within inches of his and seemed to be scrutinising it. Then she stepped back and gave a long chattering laugh which the budgerigar echoed.

"Mrs. Crilling, are you all right? Is there anything I can do?"

She clutched her throat and the laugh died away in a rising wheeze. "Tablets ... asthma..." she gasped. He was puzzled and shocked, but he reached behind him for the bottle of tablets on the littered mantelpiece. "Give me my tablets and then you can ... you can get out!"

"I'm sorry if I've done anything to distress you."

She made no attempt to take a tablet but held the bottle up against her quaking chest. The movement made the tablets rattle and the bird, fluttering its wings and beating against the bars, began a frenzied crescendo, half song and half pain.

"Where's my baby?" Did she mean Elizabeth? She must mean Elizabeth.

"She's gone out. I met her in the porch. Mrs. Crilling, can I get you a glass of water? Can I make you a cup of tea?"

"Tea? What do I want with tea? That's what she said this morning, that police girl. Come and have a cup of tea, Mrs. Crilling." A terrible spasm shook her and she fell back against the chair, fighting for breath. "You ... my baby ... I thought you were my friend ... Aaah!"

Archery was really frightened now. He plunged from the room into the dirty kitchen and filled a cup with water. The window ledge was stacked with empty chemist's bottles and there was a filthy hypodermic beside an equally dirty eye dropper. When he came back she was still wheezing and jerking. Should he make her take the tablets, dare he? On the bottle label were the words: Mrs. J. Crilling. Take two when needed. He rattled two into his hands and, supporting her with his other arm, forced them into her mouth. It was all he could do to suppress the shudder of distaste when she dribbled and choked over the water.

"Filthy ... nasty," she mumbled. He half-eased, half-rolled her into the chair and pulled together the gaping edges of the dressing gown. Moved with pity and with horror, he knelt down beside her.

"I will be your friend if you want me to be," he said soothingly.

The words had the opposite effect. She made a tremendous effort to draw breath. Her lips split open and he could see her tongue rising and quivering against the roof of her mouth.

"Not my friend ... enemy ... police friend! Take my baby away ... I saw you with them ... I watched you come out with them." He drew back from her, rising. Never would he have believed her capable of screaming after that spasm and when the scream came, as clear and ear-splitting as a child's, he felt his hands go up to his face. "...Not let them get her in there! Not in the prison! They'll find it out in there. She'll tell them ... my baby ... She'll have to tell them!" With a sudden galvanic jerk she reared up, her mouth open and her arms flailing. They'll find it all out. I'll kill her first, kill her ... D'you hear?"

The french windows stood open. Archery staggered back into the sun against a stinging prickling wall of weeds. Mrs. Crilling's incoherent gasps had swollen into a stream of obscenity. There was a gate in the wire netting fence. He unlatched it, wiping the sweat from his forehead, and stepped into the cool dark cave of the sand-walled arch.

"Good afternoon, sir. You don't look very well. Heat affecting you?"

Archery had been leaning over the bridge parapet, breathing deeply, when the detective inspector's face appeared beside him.

"Inspector Burden, isn't it?" He shook himself, blinking his eyes. There was comfort in this man's steady gaze and in the shoppers who flowed languidly across the bridge. "I've just come from Mrs. Crilling's and..."

"Say no more, sir. I quite understand."

"I left her in the throes of an asthma attack. Perhaps I should have got a doctor or an ambulance. Frankly, I hardly knew what to do."

There was a crumb of stony bread on the wall. Burden flicked it into the water and a swan dived foi it. "It's mostly in the mind with her, Mr. Archery. I should have warned you what to expect. Threw one of her scenes on you, did she?" Archery nodded. "Next time you see her I daresay she'll be as nice as pie. That's the way it takes her, up one minute, down the next. Manic-depressive is the term. I was just going into Carousel for a cup of tea. Why don't you join me?"

They walked up the High Street together. Some of the shops sported faded striped sunblinds. The shadows were as black as night, the light cruelly bright under a Mediterranean blue sky. Inside the Carousel it was darkish and stuffy and it smelt of aerosol fly spray.

"Two teas, please," said Burden.

"Tell me about the Crillings."

There's plenty to tell, Mr. Archery. Mrs. Crilling's husband died and left her without a penny, so she moved into town and got a job. The kid, Elizabeth, was always difficult and Mrs. Crilling made her worse. She took her to psychiatrists—don't ask me where the money came from—and then when they made her send her to school it was one school after another. She was in St. Catherine's, Sewingbury for a bit but she got expelled. When she was about fourteen she came up before the juvenile court here as being in need of care and protection and she was taken away from her mother. But she went back eventually. They usually do."

"Do you think all this came about because she found Mrs. Primero's body?"

"Could be." Burden looked up and smiled as the waitress brought the tea. "Thanks very much, miss. Sugar, Mr. Archery? No, I don't either." He cleared his throat and went on, "I reckon it would have made a difference if she'd had a decent home background, but Mrs. Crilling was always unstable. In and out of jobs, by all accounts, until she ended up working in a shop. I think some relative used to give them financial assistance. Mrs. Crilling used to take days off from work ostensibly on account of the asthma but really it was because she was crazy."

"Isn't she certifiable?"

"You'd be surprised how difficult it is to get anyone certified, sir. The doctor did say that if ever he saw her in one of her tantrums he could get an urgency order, but they're cunning, you see. By the time the doctor gets there she's as normal as you or me. She's been into Stowerton once or twice as a voluntary patient. About four years ago she got herself a man friend. The whole place was buzzing with it. Elizabeth was training to be a physiotherapist at the time. Anyway, the upshot of it all was that the boyfriend preferred young Liz."

"Mater pulchra,filia pulchrior," Archery murmured.

"Just as you say, sir. She gave up her training and went to live with him. Mrs. Crilling went off her rocker again and spent six months in Stowerton. When she came out she wouldn't leave the happy couple alone, letters, phone calls, personal appearances, the lot. Liz couldn't stand it so eventually she went back to mother. The boyfriend was in the car trade and he gave her that Mini."

Archery sighed. "I don't know if I ought to tell you this, but you've been very kind to me, you and Mr. Wexford..." Burden felt the stirring of guilt. It wasn't what he would call kind. "Mrs. Crilling said that if Elizabeth—she calls her her baby—went to prison ... it might mean prison, mightn't it?"

"It might well."

"Then she'd tell you something, you or the prison authorities. I got the impression she'd feel compelled to give you some information Mrs. Crilling wanted kept secret."

"Thank you very much, sir. We shall have to wait and see what time brings forth."

Archery finished his tea. Suddenly he felt like a traitor. Had he betrayed Mrs. Crilling because he wanted to keep in with the police?

"I wondered," he said, justifying himself, "if it could have anything to do with Mrs. Primero's murder. I don't see why Mrs. Crilling couldn't have worn the raincoat and hidden it. You admit yourself she's unbalanced. She was there, she had just as much opportunity as Painter."

Burden shook his head. "What was the motive?"

"Mad people have motives which seem very thin to normal men."

"But she dotes on her daughter in her funny way. She wouldn't have taken the kid with her."

Archery said slowly, "At the trial she said she went over the first time at twenty-five past six. But we've only her word for it. Suppose instead she went at twenty to seven when Painter had already been and gone. Then she took the child back later because no one would believe a killer would wittingly let a child discover a body she knew was there."

"You've missed your vocation, sir," said Burden, getting up. "You should have come in on our lark. You'd have been a superintendent by now."

"I'm letting my fancy run away with me," Archery said. To avoid a repetition of the gentle teasing, he added quickly, changing the subject, "Do you happen to know the visiting times at Stowerton Infirmary?"

"Alice Flower's next on your list, is she? I'd give the matron a ring first, if I were you. Visiting's seven till seven-thirty."