Faintley Speaking

Chapter Three

LAURA

‘Teach me to hear mermaids singing,

Or to keep off envy’s stinging.

And find

What wind

Serves to advance an honest mind.’

john donne – Song

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Breakfast had been over for two hours and a half, and while the police officer had been questioning young Mark Street, Laura, and the sharp-eyed, yellow-skinned elderly lady with whom she had sat at table, had been for an exploratory walk along the cliffs and into the coves west of the bay where the two young people had bathed.

‘Mrs Bradley, I could do with my elevenses,’ observed Laura, when she and her employer came back to the eyrie of Cromlech village. ‘What about coffee and buns?’

‘Coffee for two, buns for one, and your valuable observations on the case of Street versus Faintley,’ said Mrs Bradley with a grim cackle.

‘That kid’s worried,’ said Laura. ‘I told him I’d go to Torbury myself and have a look round, but it didn’t really seem to ease his mind. I suppose that schoolmistress Faintley went off on a toot of some kind, but, if she did, it was hardly fair to take Mark along, do you think, to cover her questionable activities? Why will people try to remain respectable?’’

‘That question requires analysis, and, in any case, you mean respected, not respectable. Anyway, I have been talking to the boy’s father. He declares that Miss Faintley was the last kind of person to do anything rash or to prove herself unreliable. He pictures her as an essentially serious-minded woman, not popular with the boys, but extremely anxious to do her best for them, and, of course, for the girls, too.’

‘Parents often get weird ideas, though,’ said Laura, unimpressed. ‘I remember, when I was at school, we had a mistress whom everybody thought mousy and inoffensive in the extreme. There was an awful stink when it turned out that she had lifted all the school pots and shields and tried to pawn them. The pawnbroker brought them all back in a little handcart. She was found to be daffy, of course, but that only proves my point… that the parents and friends don’t know everything. Shall you accompany me to Torbury?’

‘No, child. The police will do everything in Torbury that is necessary. I shall take my knitting and sit on the cliff-top and enjoy the air.’

‘Not your knitting,’ said Laura. So Mrs Bradley went out for a walk, accompanied by a packet of chocolate, an ash-plant, and a Sealyham she did not know, but which elected to escort her on her way.

The determined Laura had an interview with Mark before she set out for Torbury. She wanted an exact description of Miss Faintley down to the smallest detail that Mark could remember. Mark repeated the description he had already given to the inspector and went off to play tennis with his father. Laura boarded a bus and nearly two hours later was in conversation with the assistant in the bookshop which Miss Faintley had stated she would visit whilst Mark was buying his film. She bought one of the new Penguins to add to her collection, but obtained no other satisfaction. The assistant had not noticed the lady Laura described, and had told the police so already.

‘It’s all right,’ said Laura, with that air of frankness and innocent credulity which had got her out of many a tight place at school. ‘It’s really nothing on earth to do with me, but she was staying at my hotel, so naturally I’m rather interested. She seemed to be distinctly a bookworm, a quality to which I am partial. Are there any other bookshops in the town?’

She repeated her efforts at each of three more bookshops, received no help and went in search of some tea. Another thought struck her. Whatever else Miss Faintley had done she must have lunched somewhere. Laura wished she knew whether the woman was a restaurant, a good-pull-up or a pub-and-snack person. She might easily, of course, be a milk-bar devotee. In a city the size of Torbury it seemed hopeless to go to every place which offered rest and refreshment. There was one other possibility of tracing some of her movements, but, again, it offered only the remotest chance of success. If she were a smoker she might have gone into a tobacconist’s shop. Unfortunately, not only was Torbury supplied all too liberally with tobacconists’ shops but she had not thought of asking Mark whether Miss Faintley smoked. Possibly, however, he would not know.

It occurred to her that this could be remedied. She went into a public call-box and rang up the hotel. The call was answered from the office and she was told to hold on. The reply to her question came through quickly. The chambermaid on Miss Faintley’s floor had emptied an overflowing ashtray each time she tidied the room.

‘Eureka!’ said Laura, as she charged out of the telephone booth and returned to the bus station. From there she looked for the nearest tobacconist’s, and discovered one next door but three to the chemist’s at which Mark had purchased his film. The assistant recognized the description of Miss Faintley at once. She had bought a packet of twenty cigarettes, had paid with a pound note, and had asked the way to the railway station.

This was news indeed. Proud of her perspicacity, and the success which had at last attended it, Laura bought some cigarettes and went back to the bus stop. She boarded a bus which went to the station, and could not help wondering why Miss Faintley had not done the same thing. It seemed so very much more simple than asking the way in a shop. She knew, however, that she herself detested asking the way, and only did so as a last resort or if she happened to be badly pressed for time.

It took ten minutes for the bus to reach the station, and during that ten minutes Laura thought hard. There seemed no doubt that, if the tobacconist was right and it was Miss Faintley who had asked the way to the station, then the schoolmistress had abandoned Mark deliberately. The next question was whether she had formed this intention before or after leaving the boy at the chemist’s. If she had already decided to desert him when she issued the invitation at the hotel, then Mark (for all that it had seemed to Laura a highly unlikely theory at the time) might be right in supposing that he had been used as some kind of cover. Miss Faintley must have been interested that some person or persons should be misled into thinking that she intended to spend the day out with the boy, when, in reality, she proposed to travel by train to some destination at present unknown.

On the other hand, if the invitation had been given in good faith, then something must have happened in Torbury to make Miss Faintley change her plans. She could not have spoken to anybody on the bus; Mark would have mentioned that. She must have met somebody immediately the boy left her, and, in a very few minutes, rearranged her whole day without attempting to contact him and let him know.

Of the two theories, Laura much preferred the first. It was true that teachers, whichever their sex, were not apt to take children out for the day and then abandon them, but there was the practical question of time. Miss Faintley would have had to meet this acquaintance, buy the cigarettes, inquire the way to the station and receive (judging by the route Laura’s bus was taking) a complicated answer, if the second theory were to be tenable. Besides, Miss Faintley had been out of sight by the time Mark came by on that other bus on his way to the river, and all buses travelled up that straight long street from the bus station, past the chemist’s, the bookshop and the tobacconist’s, because there was no other way for them to go, so if Miss Faintley had been in the street Mark must have spotted her.

‘Unless she was still in the tobacconist’s when the kid came past on the bus… and, of course, most likely she was,’ thought Laura at this point. ‘And if she was, then the question of a time limit doesn’t seem quite so important. Yet she’d know… or, at least, she’d think . . . that Mark would come looking for her, and might try the tobacconist’s the moment he found she was not in the bookshop, so it wouldn’t make a very good hidey-hole. Besides, Mark couldn’t understand why Miss Faintley had offered to take him out. He was certain she couldn’t have wanted to. I think that the boy (and that includes me and my first theory) guessed right the very first time!’

Still feeling the flush of detective fever, Laura got off the bus and went to inquire at the station. She did not obtain any information there. A main-line West Country station in August was too busy a place for much notice to have been taken of anybody unless he or she had provoked a breach of the peace.

There was one thing more that Laura could do. She took the return route to the bus station, walked back to the tobacconist and asked whether the woman she had described had been alone. The tobacconist had no idea, and looked at Laura rather oddly.

‘I didn’t know they came in plain clothes,’ he said, not impudently but with a note of interrogation in his voice.

‘Who?’ Laura inquired.

‘Policewomen.’

‘Why shouldn’t they? It’s bound to be necessary sometimes.’

‘I suppose so, when you come to think of it. What’s she done, this woman?’

‘Absconded. I can’t tell you any more, you understand,’ said Laura, picking up her cue, ‘and she didn’t speak to anybody in the shop except to you?’

‘No. There wasn’t any other person here.’

Satisfied that there was no useful purpose to be served by remaining any longer in Torbury, and beginning to feel the need of her dinner, Laura caught the next bus back to Cromlech, and arrived at table to find Mrs Bradley just finishing her soup. Mrs Bradley ordered wine, and asked for an account of Laura’s adventures.

‘So I had better pass on to the police what I’ve found out,’ Laura concluded, ‘but it’s too late to bother about that to-night, unless I tell them over the telephone, and it doesn’t really seem to amount to all that much, does it?’

‘You will probably find that they know it already,’ said Mrs Bradley, ‘therefore I should not allow it to trouble you until the morning. Enjoy your dinner, and afterwards we will join the revellers in the hotel ballroom.’

By the time they rose from table the dining-room had almost emptied. Laura was stopped on her way to the lounge by Mark, who had been waiting for her to come out.

‘Any luck?’ he asked in the tone of one conspirator to another.

‘A bit. Miss Faintley did mean to leave you on your own in Torbury. She went into a tobacconist’s and asked the way to the railway station.’

‘Oh, that’s old stuff! The police know that already. I never thought of looking in the tobacco shop. I didn’t know she smoked. They can’t find out where she went, though, or even whether she took a ticket. If that’s all you found out I’m rather glad I didn’t go with you. It was much better fun staying here.’

Laura stared and then laughed.

‘Well, I’m dashed!’ she said. ‘I wash my hands of the business after that!’

But this she was not permitted to do. She woke at six and raked Mark out for an early swim. He came willingly enough, and on the way down to the sands he pointed out to Laura the attractive path on the opposite side of the bay.

‘Bags we climb up there after bathing,’ he said. ‘The tide was too high last time. I meant to do it then, but I couldn’t get round. It’s nearly two hours later to-day. We might have done it yesterday morning, but there were too many people about. I’ve an idea it might be trespassing to go up there. I’m pretty certain there’s a whacking big house just behind those trees.’

‘If it’s trespassing we must certainly have a stab at it,’ said Laura warmly. ‘I strongly object to this business of parts of the coast being cut off from public use and made into somebody’s private property. Look here, I’ll tell you what we’ll do. We’ll bathe from much farther along the beach so that the walk to the foot of those cliffs will be split in halves, so to speak. What do you say about that?’

They were fortunate enough to have the sea to themselves again, and when, invigorated and thoroughly lively, they were chasing one another along the firm sand at the edge of the sea, the landscape was still without figures, and they began the upward climb without meeting a soul. There was only one fly in the ointment. The path did not seem to be private, after all. A short sea-wall had been built to conserve the foot of the cliff, which was fairly soft and as rose-red as the legendary city, and there were steps in this wall to enable people to gain the zigzag path from the beach. It was obviously a public right of way.

Two turns of the path, and the sea was for a moment out of sight, for the path was between high bushes on which curled reddish stems of deep-scented, rich-toned honeysuckle. Here and there among the grass grew wild scabious, and, as the path mounted higher, came clumps of gorse and another glimpse of the sea.

‘Well!’ said Laura, taking out cigarettes and a piece of chocolate. ‘I’m glad we came! Puff or suck?’

‘Suck, please.’ He accepted the chocolate gratefully and for a time they tramped silently upwards. Gulls in the huge cliffs perched on the dizzy ledges or plummeted through arcs of sky towards the sea. The bushes, except for the gorse, grew sparse and then ceased. Mark and Laura came out upon downland grasses where harebells grew and the birdsfoot trefoil was everywhere. There was spaciousness here. They were approaching the summit of the cliff, and the views to the east and west were again of horizon and coast.

‘Grand!’ said Mark. ‘I wish we were trespassing, though.’

‘We may be, in a minute or two,’ said Laura. ‘Unless my eyes deceive me, which, over this sort of thing, they seldom do, yonder looms a notice-board, and that of the baser sort, and I would risk a small and carefully-hoarded sum that on it appear the magic words we require.’

They strolled towards the board. It guarded a small stout gate which was strongly wired. In contrast to the bold and open headland, the owner of the gate had planted hawthorn hedges whose tops had weathered the gales but were now bent away from the sea. Any gaps in this formidable barrier… as Mark discovered by prowling… had also been fenced and wired.

‘Blow!’ said Mark, rejoining Laura, who was gazing speculatively at the enclosure. ‘Without doing a frightful lot of damage (for which, I believe, you can be jugged), there doesn’t seem a hope of getting in.’

‘I’ve got an idea,’ said Laura. ‘Don’t let’s bother now, but we’ll come out to-morrow morning and try from the other side. I’ve been thinking out the lie of the land, and I’ve some idea that you could work your way round to this point from that path which goes down by the side of the cliff-railway.’

‘Shouldn’t think so,’ said Mark. ‘I used that path yesterday while you were in Torbury, and all it does is to branch away under a tunnel. Then it comes out on the opposite side of the cliff-railway and beetles down to that road where cars can get down to the beach.’

‘Eyes and no eyes,’ said Laura severely. ‘Your objective was simply the beach, therefore you did not see what I saw when I went along there after bathing on that first morning when you warned me about the tide. You wait, and after breakfast I’ll show you. I’d thought of trying it by myself, but it’s far more fun with the two of us.’

On the following morning they left the hotel again at six. Laura, accustomed to what she considered to be the dilatory opening of hotel front doors, had no scruples, at that hour of the morning, in breaking out of any place in which she happened to be staying. If the front door had a lock and the key was not there, she merely got out of a window in the lounge. Her argument was that at six in the morning all proper burglars were in bed and that therefore there was nothing anti-social in leaving a window open behind her.

At the Whitesand, however, the early-morning egress was simple. There were merely bolts top and bottom of the outer doors. The inner ones were swing doors and offered no obstacle. A short time later, Laura was wishing that it had not been easy, or, indeed, possible, to leave the hotel that morning.

She and Mark were again equipped for swimming, but this time they turned left instead of right along the front, and, coming to the cliff-railway, they crossed behind its upper platform and took a shaded ferny path of slopes and steps which ran alongside the railway track to about halfway down the cliff. Here the path proper, as Mark had pointed out, crossed the line by means of a tunnel, but there was also an ill-defined track which continued beside the line, and, instead of dipping, suddenly rose upwards to a shoulder of wooded hill.

It ended at a wall from which could be gained a view of the bathing beach below, but before the wall was reached there was a tremendously steep, bare scree which inclined at a desperate angle and offered a hare-brained chance of reaching a path below. Laura and Mark slipped, slithered and shot down this slope, and found themselves in a curiously shut-in little valley. On the farther side of it the entrancingly narrow path they had seen from above squeezed upwards between a wattle fence and some trees.

‘Come on!’ said Mark. ‘This is good!’

The path climbed steeply but steadily until, at a sudden bend, it came out upon a wide, green space which reared at a stupefying gradient and showed a bent hedge at the top and a tiny gap in the hedge where the path went through.

Laura and Mark toiled onwards, their calf-muscles aching and their backs bent nearly double to assist them in clambering up. At the gap in the hedge the prospect of a further climb met them, but, in any case, there was a gate, and beyond the gate was a large bleak house, cut off from the open country by an iron railing of insurmountable aspect and most repellent mien which reinforced the bent hedge. There seemed no doubt that the owners of the house did not propose to have their privacy violated, for the gate, which was also of iron, showed the same unwelcoming face as the powerfully-constructed railings.

Laura and Mark stood at the gate and looked through. Mark gave the gate a slight shove, but it did not budge. Around the house were long-neglected flower-beds, weed-ridden and sprawling with nasturtium. The freely-flowering roses were small, and were choked by convolvulus and bindweed. Everywhere was the bright and deadly pink of the greater willow-herb.

In contrast to all this decay and obvious neglect, the path from the gate to the house had been carefully sanded. On its level greyish-brown surface there was never a footmark, although the surface here and there had been blown a little by the wind. Beyond that, the sand had not been disturbed, and it was obvious that it had not been laid down long.

‘Queer sort of place,’ said Mark. ‘I shouldn’t want to be about here much in the evening. Are we going to climb over the gate, or what?’

‘We’re in full view of some of the windows of that house,’ Laura pointed out, ‘and as there are curtains to one room it doesn’t look as though the house can be empty. There is a caretaker living there, I should think. Still, having come so far, and the day being young, it seems a pity to go all that way back, so what I say is, let’s take a pop and see what happens.’

They climbed over. The gate was not wired. They skirted the house, walking on the unkempt, weedy lawn. The garden on the other side was wild. The high bluff before them showed only the sky, with a gull turned to silver in the sun. When they got to the top the land dipped again, and they could see the wired hedge, and the post, and the back of that notice-board which they had resented two days earlier.

Mark went up to the board and gave the post a slight kick, but the post seemed firm in the earth and as he was wearing tennis shoes he merely hurt his toe. Laura was prowling along by the side of the hedge, looking for a thin place where possibly they might push their way through.

Suddenly she stopped. She had come to a dip in the ground and in the dip someone was lying. She could see that it was a woman, but her head was hidden in a gorse-bush, and there was something so odd in this as a choice of head-covering that Laura’s heart thumped oddly and she felt sick. Regardless of the fact that she was on private property, she said urgently, ‘Hi, you! Are you all right?’

There was no answer; neither (she knew) had she expected one. She looked back. Mark had swarmed up the post and was now clinging on to the notice-board and gazing out to sea. For the moment he seemed occupied, so Laura took out her towel, covered her hands with it to protect them as far as possible from the gorse prickles, and drew aside the bush.

The woman was dead. There was no doubt about that. The manner of her death was also apparent. A knife, of the type used by Commando troops during the war, had been thrust very neatly and cleanly into the side of her neck. Laura let the gorse fall back and was in time to intercept Mark, who had relinquished his impromptu crow’s-nest and was so soft-footed in his tennis shoes that she had not heard him approach.

‘Keep off,’ said Laura. She held her towel, now full of gorse prickles, between Mark and the dead woman.

‘Why, what’s up?’ asked Mark. He looked scared, and, suddenly, very much younger than his age. ‘It isn’t Miss Faintley, is it?’

‘Heavens, no!’ said Laura, in a hearty, unnatural voice. ‘Come on back, and make it slippy. No, look here, we can’t spare all that time. We’ve got to break through this beastly hedge! Let’s take up that post and use it as a ram! There’s somebody ill in that dip. We must get some help. Look, Mark, do something for me. Get through this wretched hedge somehow, and go to our hotel for Mrs Bradley. She’s a doctor. Ask her to come at once. Now, all hands to this beastly post!’

Her powerful muscles and Mark’s co-operation soon had the post out of the ground. His swarming up it had loosened it. Mark at last charged his way through the hedge where the battering-ram of a post had aided exit, and, scratched, bleeding and breathless, ran down the zigzag path towards the sea. Laura waited until he was well down the slope, and then, with one last look at the body, which, from Mark’s description, she felt certain was that of Miss Faintley, she walked slowly towards the house.

It was a fair-sized place, judging by the number of windows and the length of the side she went towards, but only the one window was curtained. She walked forward as quietly as she could, and peered in. There was nobody to be seen, so she knocked at the door, but, although she knocked again, and yet a third time, there was neither answer nor sound.

Laura tried the door, but it was either locked or bolted. Her excuse, if anybody came, was the body lying in the bushes, but she found that she needed no excuse. The house was most certainly empty. She peered in at other windows, went round to the kitchen entrance and knocked there, even shouted aloud in order to attract attention, but nothing came of any of this.

She returned to the body, but realized that by tramping about she might be destroying evidence, so, in the end, she returned to the notice-board which was now lying on the ground, a witness of her illegal behaviour. While she waited for Mrs Bradley she spent the time in widening the gap in the hedge. Then she crawled through it, sat on the cliff-top and stared thoughtfully out to sea. There was plenty to think about. Miss Faintley inquiring for Torbury railway station, and Miss Faintley dead on top of the Cromlech cliffs did not seem to make sense until it occurred to Laura that Miss Faintley had not intended to travel by train, but had had an appointment to meet someone at the station.

‘And he brought her up here and did for her,’ Laura concluded. ‘Must be one of those insane sex crimes. How deadly dull, and how horrible!’

Mrs Bradley arrived with Mark as guide, crawled through the gap which Laura had considerably enlarged, and sent Mark back to breakfast.

‘And now, child,’ she said briskly, ‘what have we here?’

Laura took her to the spot.

‘Hm!’ said Mrs Bradley, rising after she had examined the wound. ‘A very pretty piece of work, neat, skilful and clean. She was killed somewhere else… on that newly-sanded path, we may conclude, unless other evidence is forthcoming. You had better go at once for the police. I’ll stay here until they come. I presume, from the clothing, that this is Miss Faintley. I take it that Mark has not seen the body?’

‘No, I took care of that, of course,’ said Laura. She nodded, and bounded away.

Mrs Bradley knelt down again as soon as Laura had disappeared. There was something more interesting than at first she had thought about the weapon. She took out the small magnifying glass which she invariably carried, and examined all that she could see of the knife. Almost the full length of the blade had been driven home, but she was able to examine the way in which the top of it met the hilt. The knife was not of the Service type, after all. It was, although a neat and powerful job, home-made. Well-forged and even handsome though it was, there was still no doubt that the work had never been done by Wilkinson’s.

She doubted whether this fact would help the police very much. Private manufacturers of lethal weapons do not usually advertise their wares, and it was unlikely, she thought, that the murderer’s fingerprints would be on record.