Death in Summer

13

The detective inspector of yesterday, whose name has registered neither in the kitchen nor the drawing-room although it was repeated in both, is less dishevelled this morning. He is wearing a different tie and a clean shirt, the trousers of his brown suit pressed overnight. His name is Baker, christened Brian Keith, but known as Dusty among his friends and colleagues.

The hall door is open when he reaches it, leaving Denise Flynn on the car phone. The hall itself is empty, but the beaky-faced houseman appears, his unobtrusive tread suggesting to a detective’s trained observation a man who enjoys moving silently. Yesterday he had him down as slippery. There was a Maidment he arrested once, an unsuccessful embezzler.

‘You’ve been informed we have a description, Mr. Maidment?’ Since the opportunity is there, he feels he may as well start with this man as with anyone. He repeats the description that has come in, from a railway employee and kids playing on the towpath: a girl with a bundle, in a hurry on the towpath, nervous on the railway platform, a girl of slight build, with glasses, in a T-shirt with a musical motif on it, short blue denim skirt.

‘Ring a bell at all, Mr. Maidment?’

Hoping to hear in response, after the usual moment of blankness, that this could possibly fit a girl of the locality, the detective hears instead that this is a girl who recently came twice to the house, the first time after a nursemaid’s job that was advertised, the second in search of a ring she’d dropped.

‘When was this, Mr. Maidment?’

‘The ring was less than a week ago.’

This is confirmed when the question is put later to the father and the grandmother, who also agree that the description fits.

‘You’ll have the details, sir? Name, address? She would have passed all that on?’.

‘Ernily something, I think.’

Mrs. Iveson shakes her head. Emily was the one with frizzy black hair.

Other first names are mentioned, Kylie and Dawne, but it’s agreed that the girl in question was neither. No addresses or telephone numbers were retained, nor even known, none of the girls being suitable for the position.

‘The girl we’re talking about, would she have brought references? Would there be a name that comes back from being on a reference, sir?’

They remember a reference, passed from one to the other, then back to the girl. It hadn’t impressed them.

‘And the name on it, sir? Madam? Nothing at all comes back? Nothing jotted down, sir?’

‘It wasn’t necessary.’

‘The girl returned, I understand. A ring she lost while she was here?’

‘Yes.’ There is a pause. ‘We mentioned the girl yesterday.’

The man in the hall said the same, regretting he had not made more of this girl’s return to the house.

‘She just turned up, did she?’

‘She telephoned beforehand to ask if we’d found her ring.’

‘I understand, sir. And would she have given her name then?’

‘She may have. But I think I’d remember if she had.’

It has been a shock that the abductor is known; that shows in both their faces, his drawn and exhausted, hers nervily agitated. He remains still, motionless by the bookcases; she moves about, quite different from yesterday. He apparently was puzzled at first, when the girl was on the phone, not knowing who she was, then realizing she was one of the girls they’d interviewed.

‘You realized which girl particularly, sir?’

‘The last one who came, she said, and I remembered.’

‘I understand there have been phone calls to the house during the past few weeks. Nuisance calls.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you answered the phone yourself, sir, when the girl rang about her ring?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘You don’t recall exactly what was said, I suppose?’

‘She asked if the ring had been found.’

‘And of course it hadn’t?’

‘No.’

‘She then suggested coming out here again?’

‘While she was still on the phone I looked where she’d been sitting. There was nothing there.’

‘Did you expect to find something, sir?’

‘There seemed no reason why the ring shouldn’t be there. I asked her if she could let me have a telephone number. So that we could contact her in case anything came to light.’

‘But you didn’t think anything would.’

‘I’d no idea.’

‘And what number did she give you, sir?’

She didn’t give a number. If she had he would remember writing it down, and Mrs. Iveson interrupts to say that none of this makes sense. Why should a girl who’s hardly known to them tell lies about a ring? Why should she steal a baby?

‘It’s what we’re endeavouring to find out, madam. We can only find out by asking questions. There is no other way.’

‘We’ve told you what we can. We’re both of us beside ourselves with worry.’

‘I do appreciate that, Mrs. Iveson.’

‘My God, I wish you did. Thaddeus — ’

‘They’re doing their best.’

‘Thank you, sir. So the girl preferred to return in person when she might have left a number? That didn’t strike you as odd, sir?’

‘I assumed she wasn’t on the phone. She mentioned looking for her ring on the drive, and on the lane she’d walked along. She was uncertain about where she’d dropped it. She said she was sorry for being a nuisance. The ring wasn’t valuable, she said, but there was some sentimental attachment.’

‘And it didn’t strike you as unusual, sir, that she should want to search your drive for an object as small as a ring? A period of time had passed, after all. Cars presumably had come and gone.’

‘A needle in a haystack, I thought. I think I said it.’

‘Which you must have said again when she arrived out here. The same day was that?’

‘No, some days later.’

‘And what precisely occurred then, Mr. Davenant?’

‘We looked together, down the sides of the sofa. We went upstairs to the nursery.’

‘Why was that, sir?’

‘Because my mother-in-law had brought the girl to the nursery when she was here before.’

‘And the ring was nowhere in the nursery?’

‘No, it wasn’t.’

‘So the girl went away then?’

‘She looked again in this room. She asked if she might, just to be sure.’

‘And there was nothing?’

‘No.’

‘And then she examined the drive and the lane she had walked along? Or had she done that already?’

‘I honestly don’t know.’

‘I don’t think she was looking for anything very much after she left the house.’ Mrs. Iveson intervenes again, calmer now.

‘You observed the girl, Mrs. Iveson?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you were…?’

‘I was where I was yesterday when Georgina was taken. In the shade of the catalpa tree.’

‘Anything about the girl, Mrs. Iveson, when you took her up to the nursery the day she came to be interviewed?’

‘Only that she wouldn’t do. The day she came to look for her ring she stood on the tarmac staring at me.’

‘Staring at you, Mrs. Iveson?’

‘Yes, I do remember that.’

‘I see. And did she leave a description of this ring, sir? Just in case?’

‘Soapstone, she said. Grey soapstone.’

‘And this time she would have left you some means of contacting her before she went on her way, sir?’

‘No, she didn’t.’

‘So if at some point the ring actually did surface, you still wouldn’t have known what to do about it?’

‘By then I really didn’t believe it had been lost in the house. If it turned up anywhere else, no, we wouldn’t have known what to do about it.’

‘Didn’t cross your mind, sir, that for some reason this girl was making the whole thing up?’

‘No, it didn’t.’

Detective Inspector Baker — known for his doggedness in the force, recently promoted after eleven successful years in the vice squad — considers it extraordinary that a would-be employee came to this house, was interviewed for a position, answered questions as to suitability and background, and walked away again without a note being kept of her name. That she later telephoned with a story a child wouldn’t have fallen for, and ended up being assisted to search for a non-existent item of jewellery beggars all reasonable belief. In a brief wave of nostalgia, the inspector recalls the quick-witted pornographers and street pimps whose prevarications and deceptions were so often and so precisely presented to him. There is a measured helpfulness about the man he has been questioning, a clear determination not to become emotional. The old lady’s in shock and can’t, of course, be blamed.

‘Well, there seems no doubt that it was this girl.’ He nods at both of them, but when he is asked if the establishing of this identification is going to make the search for the baby easier, he adopts the stony-faced reticence of detectives in films, hoping to conceal the fact that he doesn’t know. The girl was confident. She walked into a garden and took a sleeping baby, in full view of anyone who might have been at a window. Without a shadow of a doubt, she had previously established the lie of the land and the routine of the household, had clearly waited until the dog was out of the way; and having successfully collected the baby, took the path through the fields and then by the canal in order to avoid being seen on the lanes or waiting for a bus. She’d timed the whole thing so that she could slip on to the four twenty-three, which yesterday had run only two and a half minutes late. The confident ones are often the most dangerous.

‘She was normal, would you say, sir? From your observation when she returned that day?’

‘Normal?’

‘Manner and that. Her behaviour odd or peculiar in any way?’

‘She talked rather a lot, I remember.’

‘You can’t remember what about, I suppose?’

‘To tell the truth, I didn’t really listen.’

‘Spoke about the baby, did she?’

‘I don’t think so. More about herself. There was something to do with a mother in Australia.’

‘Ah. And nothing else comes back, I suppose?’

‘She said that she’d put flowers on my wife’s grave.’

‘My God!’ Mrs. Iveson’s invocation is an anguished mutter, which seems to the detective aptly to sum up this whole extraordinary affair.

‘And do you think she did, sir?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Yau didn’t think the girl was on anything, sir?’

‘Drugs, you mean?’

‘They sometimes are.’

‘She could have been. That didn’t occur to me.’

‘No reason why it should have, of course. With someone who was a stranger to you.’

There is a silent moment, incidentally there when the questioning ceases. The girl has taken her chance, the detective muses, attracted by the baby she saw when first she was shown the nursery. It could be something misheard, that she placed flowers on the grave of a woman she never knew. Most likely it is that, he speculates, but does not say so.

The local search that Maidment predicted is not carried out: the immediate locality is of less interest now. Again, for hours, the telephone does not ring. All morning there is silence. No breakfast is taken, no lunch. It is the afternoon of the day Thaddeus has dreaded when the news comes, preceding WPC Denise Flynn, who later carries the stolen baby from the police car to the house.

‘A shut-up building,’ Maidment says, ‘that used to be a home for unwanted children. A lad poking round found her.’

Aghast, Zenobia turns from the sink, a potato half scraped in her hand. She is hungry, and so must everyone else be. She has made sandwiches for the police who have returned yet again, feeling that they, too, are probably in need of food. The kitchen quarrel which brought a coolness in the night seems to belong to some distant time, and plays no part now.

‘Was the girl…,’ she begins to ask, intending to inquire if the girl responsible for the stealing was frightened off by the lad poking round, or has been found and apprehended. In fact, with the three words hanging, she is answered without addition to them.

‘No one else was there but the baby, with food laid out on the floor, not that it was of use to her. As far as can be ascertained, the next thing was she got carried by this lad through the streets, to the quarters of the Salvation Army.’

Zenobia does not entirely follow this, wondering where the Salvation Army comes into it. She does not speak, knowing it is unnecessary, since her confusion is apparent in her face.

‘The lad shouldn’t have been in a house due for demolition, but there’s no fuss made about that. A few marbles short, by all accounts, but no one’s on about that either.’

‘He couldn’t be-?’

‘We know who took her, dear.’

Never in all his years in other people’s houses has Maidment garnered so much or so richly in so brief a time. The disappointment of missing the news of Mrs. Ferry’s death when it came is amply compensated. Pleasure flushes his edgy features, lights his eyes, causes a mild quivering of his lips when he reports what he has to. Observing these signs of his excitement, Zenobia is concerned for him; but her concern is slight, for the relief she experienced when the child was found continues so joyfully to possess her that all other emotions fall back. And what does it matter how the crime was committed, or even by whom, now that the thing is over? Private by her bedside, she has already knelt in gratitude.

‘Sugar lumps for the dog.’ She hears her husband repeat what he has stated several times already. ‘Chocolate or mixed sweets, a burglar’s ploy Loitering with intent under four pairs of eyes.’

He extracts a packet of cigarettes and a lighter from a pocket, and for an alarming moment it seems to Zenobia that he may light up in the kitchen, which he hasn’t done since their first position as a couple, the morning they came down to discover the water tanks had overflowed in the night.

‘Didn’t I say I didn’t like the look of her,’ he’s saying now, ‘the time she came back with her story?’

With the cigarettes and lighter still safely in his palm, he moves towards the passage that leads to the yard. In the doorway he selects a cigarette and returns the packet to his pocket. Left to him, he says, he wouldn’t have let her in that day.

Zenobia has little memory of the girl who is suspected, having glanced only once in her direction that afternoon, when the landing curtains needed a stitch. She looked an unremarkable girl as far as Zenobia can remember, small and peering a bit, the way a short-sighted girl might, nothing special. It all just goes to show, Zenobia’s view is, and silently she gives thanks again.