No More Dying Then

Chapter 4

If Mike made the slightest effort at an apology, Grace decided, she wouldn’t say a word. Of course, he had to work and many times he couldn’t get away without putting his job in jeopardy. She knew what that meant. Before she came to be his housekeeper she had had men friends, some who were just friends and some, a few, who were lovers, and often she had had to break a date because there was an emergency on at the hospital. But the next day she had always phoned or written a note to explain why.

Mike wasn’t her lover but only her brother-in-law. Did that mean he owed her nothing, not even, common politeness? And had you the right to stand up your children without a word, even when your son was trembling with nerves at nearly midnight because he couldn’t believe he’d got his algebra right and old Parminter, the maths man, would put him in detention if he hadn’t?

She cooked eggs and bacon for the lot of them and laid the dining table with a clean cloth. Not for the first time she wished her sister hadn’t been such an excellent housekeeper, so correct and near-perfect in everything she did, but at least slackened to the extent of serving breakfast in the kitchen. Living up to Jean made life a bit of a burden.

She hadn’t meant to make a pun and she didn’t laugh. Her face hardened when Mike came down, grunted to the children and took his place at the table without a word. He wasn’t going to mention last night. Well, she would.

“That algebra was perfectly O.K., John.”

The boy’s face lit as it always did when Burden spoke to him.

“I reckoned it was. I don’t really care about it, only old Mint Face will keep me in if it’s not. I don’t suppose you’d give me a lift to school.”

“Too busy,” said Burden. “The walk does you good.” He smiled, but not too kindly, at his daughter. ‘And you too, miss,” be said. “Right, get going. It’s nearly half past.”

Grace didn’t usually see them to the door but she did today to make up for their father’s hardness. When she came back Burden was on his second cup of tea and before she could stop herself she had burst into a long tirade all about John’s nerves and Pat’s bewilderment and the way be left them all alone.

He heard her out and then he said, “Why is it that women” - he corrected himself, making the inevitable exception - “most women - can’t realise men have to work? If I didn’t work God knows what would happen to the lot of you.”

“Were you working when Mrs. Finch saw you sitting in the car in Cheriton Forest?”

“Mrs. Finch,” he flared, “can mind her own bloody business!”

Grace turned her back. She found she was slowly counting to ten. Then she said, “Mike, I do understand. I can imagine how you feel”

“I doubt, that.”

“Well, I think I can. But John and Pat can’t. John needs you and he needs you cheerful and matter-of- fact and - and like you used to be. Mike, couldn’t you get home early tonight? There’s a film they’d both like to see. It doesn’t start till seven-thirty, so you wouldn’t have to be home till seven. We could all go. It would mean so much to them.”

“All right,” he said. “I’ll do my best. Don’t look like that, Grace. I’ll be home by seven.”

Her face lit up. She did something she hadn’t done since his wedding. She bent over and kissed his cheek. Then she began quickly to clear the table. Her back was to him so that she didn’t see the shiver he gave and the way he put his hand up to his face like a man who has been stung.

Gemma Lawrence had put on clean jeans and a clean thick sweater. Her hair was tied back in a bunch with a piece of ribbon and she smelt of soap like a good clean child.

“I slept all night.”

He smiled at her. “Cheers for Dr. Lomax,” he said.

“Are they still searching?”

“Of course. Didn’t I promise you? We’ve borrowed a whole army of coppers from all the surrounding districts.”

“Dr. Lomax was very kind. D’you know, he said that when he was living in Scotland before he came here his own little boy was missing and they found him in a shepherd’s hut lying asleep, cuddling the sheep-dog. He’d wandered for miles and this dog had found him and looked after him like a lost lamb. It reminded me of Romulus and Remus and the wolf.”

Burden didn’t know who Romulus and Remus were, but he laughed and said, “Well, what did I tell you?” He wasn’t going to spoil her hopes now by pointing out that this wasn’t Scotland, a place of lonely mountains and friendly dogs. “What are you going to do today? I don’t want you to be alone.”

“Mrs. Crantock’s asked me to lunch and the neighbours keep coming in. People are very kind. I wish I had some closer friends here. All my friends are in London.”

“The best thing for worry,” he said, “is work. Take your mind off things.”

“I don’t have any work to do, unfortunately.”

He had meant housework, cleaning, tidying, sewing, tasks which he thought of as naturally a woman’s work, and there was plenty of that to be done. But he could hardly tell her that.

“I expect I’ll just sit and play records,” she said, shifting a dirty cup from the record player to the floor. “Or read or something.”

“As soon as we have any news, I’ll come to you. I won’t phone, I’ll come.”

Her eyes shone. “If I were the Prime Minister,” she said, “I’d make you a superintendent.”

He drove to Cheriton Forest where the search was now centred and found Wexford sitting on a log. It was misty this morning and the chief inspector was wrapped in an old raincoat, a battered felt hat pulled down over his eyes.

“We’ve got a lead on the car, Mike.”

“What car?”

“Last night when they were out in the fields one of the search party told Martin he’d seen a car parked on Mill Lane. Apparently, he had a week off in August and he took his dog walking regularly up Mill Lane and three times he noticed a car parked near the spot where Mrs. Mitchell saw the man. He noticed it because it was obstructing the lane, only leaving room for single-line traffic. A red Jaguar. Needless to say, he didn’t get the number.”

“Did he see the man?”

“He didn’t see anyone. What we want now is to find someone who regularly uses that road. A baker, for instance.”

“I’ll see to that,” said Burden.

In the course of the morning he found a baker’s roundsman who used the road every day and the driver of a van delivering soft drinks who used it only on Wednesdays and Fridays. The baker had seen the car because, coming round a corner one afternoon, he had almost hit it. A red Jaguar, he confirmed, but he hadn’t taken the number either. And although he had been on the road the day before, be had passed the swings-field hedge at two and the car wasn’t there then. At half-past four two women in a car had asked him if he had seen a little boy, but he was almost into Forby by then. The red Jaguar might have passed him, might have contained a child, but he couldn’t remember.

The soft-drinks man was less observant. He had never noticed anything out of the way on that road, either recently or in August.

Burden went back to the station and had a quick lunch in Wexford’s office. They spent the afternoon interviewing a sad little stream of men, all shifty and most undersized, who at some time or other had made overtures to children. There was the retarded nineteen-year-old whose speciality was waiting outside school gates; the middle-aged primary-school teacher, sacked by the authority years ago; the draper’s assistant who got into train compartments that contained a solitary child; the schizophrenic who had raped his own little daughter and since been discharged from mental hospital.

“Lovely job, ours,” said Burden. “I feel slimy all over.”

“There but for the grace of God . . .” said Wexford. “You might have been one of them if your parents had rejected you. I might if I’d responded to the advances made to me in the school cloakroom. They sit in darkness, they’re born, as Blake or some clever sod said, to endless night. Pity doesn’t cost anything, Mike, and it’s a damn sight more edifying than shouting about flogging and banging and castrating and what you will’

“I’m not shouting, sir, I just happen to believe in the cultivation of self-control. And my pity is for the mother and that poor kid.”

“Yes, but the quality of mercy is not strained. The trouble with you is you’re a blocked-up colander and your mercy stains through a couple of miserable little holes. Still, none of these wretched drop-outs was near Mill Lane yesterday and I don see any of them living it up in a red Jaguar.”

If you haven’t been out in the evening once in ten months the prospect of a trip to the cinema in the company of your brother-in-law and two children can seem like high living. Grace Woodville went to the hairdresser’s at three and when she came out she felt more elated than she had the first day Pat came to kiss her of her own accord. There was a nice golden-brown sweater in Moran’s window, and Grace, who hadn’t bought a garment in months, decided on an impulse to have it.

Mike should have a special dinner tonight, curried chicken. Jean had never cooked that because she didn’t like it, but Mike and the children did. She bought a chicken and by the time John and Pat came home the bungalow was filled with the rich scents of curry sauce and sweet-sour pineapple.

She had laid the table by six and changed into the new sweater. By five to seven they were all sitting in the living room, all dressed-up and rather self-conscious, more like people waiting to be taken to a party than a family off to the local cinema.

The telephone calls had begun. They came in to Kingsmarkham police station not only from people in the district, not only in Sussex, but from Birmingham and Newcastle and the north of Scotland. All the callers claimed to have seen John Lawrence alone or with a man or with two men or two women. A woman in Carlisle had seen him, she averred, with Stella Rivers; a shopkeeper in Cardiff had sold him an ice-cream. A lorry-driver had given him and his companion, a middle-aged man, a lift to Grantham. All these stories had to be checked, though all seemed to be without foundation.

People poured into the station with tales of suspicious persons and cars seen in Mill Lane. By now not only red Jaguars were suspect but black ones and green ones, black vans, three-wheelers. And mean while the arduous search went on. Working without a break, Wexford’s force continued a systematic house-to-house investigation, questioning most particularly every male person over sixteen.

Five to seven found Burden outside the Olive and Dove Hotel in Kingsmarkham High Street, facing the cinema, and he remembered his date with Grace and the children, remembered, too, that he must see Gemma Lawrence before he went off duty.

The phone box outside the hotel was occupied and a small queue of people waited. By the time they had all finished, Burden judged, a good ten minutes would have passed. He glanced again at the cinema and saw that whereas the last programme began at seven-thirty, the big picture didn’t start until an hour later. No need to phone Grace when he could easily drive to Stowerton, find out how things were with Mrs. Lawrence and be home by a quarter to eight. Grace wouldn’t expect him on time. She knew better than that. And surely even his two wouldn’t want to sit through a film about touring in East Anglia, the news and all the trailers.

For once the front door wasn’t open. The street was empty, almost every house well-lit. It seemed for all the world as if nothing had happened yesterday to disturb the peace of this quiet country street. Time passed, men and women laughed and talked and worked and watched television and said, What can you do? That’s life.

There were no lights on in her house. He knocked on the door and no one came. She must have gone out. When her only child was missing, perhaps murdered? He remembered the way she dressed, the state of her house. A good-time girl, he thought, not much of a mother. Very likely one of those London friends had come and she’d gone out with him.

He knocked again and then he heard something, a kind of shuffling. Footsteps dragged to the door, hesitated.

He called, “Mrs. Lawrence, are you all right?”

A little answering sound came, to him, half a sob and half a moan. The door quivered, then swung inwards.

Her face was ravaged and swollen and sodden with crying. She was crying now, sobbing, the tears streaming down her face. He shut the door behind him and switched on a light.

“What’s happened?”

She twisted away from him, threw herself against the wall and beat on it with her fists. “Oh God, what shall I do?”

“I know it’s hard,” he said helplessly, “but we’re doing everything that’s humanly possible. We’re . . .”

“Your people,” she sobbed, “they’ve been in and out all day, searching and - and asking me things. They searched this house! And people kept phoning, awful people. There was a woman - a woman . . . Oh my God! She said John was dead and she - she described how he died and she said it was my fault! I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it, I shall gas myself, I shall cut my wrists . . .”

“You must stop this,” he shouted. She turned to him and screamed into his face. He raised his hand and slapped her stingingly on the cheek. She gagged, gulped and crumpled, collapsing against him. To stop her falling, he put his arms round her and for a moment she clung to him, as in a lover’s embrace, her wet face buried in his neck. Then she stepped back, the red hair flying as she shook herself.

“Forgive me,” she said. Her voice was hoarse with crying. “I’m mad. I think I’m going mad.”

“Come in here and tell me. You were optimistic earlier.”

“That was this morning.” She spoke quietly now in a thin broken voice. Gradually and not very coherently she told him about the policeman who had searched her cupboards and tramped through the attics, how they had torn away the undergrowth that swamped the roots of old trees in that wild garden. She told him, gasping, of the obscene phone calls and of the letters, inspired by last night’s evening-paper story, the second post had brought.

“You are not to open any letters unless you recognise the handwriting,” he said. “Everything else we’ll look at first. As to the phone calls . . .”

“Your sergeant said you’d have an arrangement to get my phone monitored.” She sighed deeply, calmer now, but the tears were still falling.

“Have you got any brandy in this – er – place?”

“In the dining room.” She managed a damp, weak smile. It belonged to my great-aunt. This – er - place, as you call it, was hers. Brandy keeps for years and years, doesn’t it?”

“Years and years make it all the better,” said Burden,

The dining room was cavernous, cold and smelling of dust. He wondered what combination of circumstances had brought her to this house and why she stayed. The brandy was in a sideboard that looked more like a wooden mansion than a piece of furniture, it was so ornamented with carved pillars and arches and niches and balconies.

“You have some too,” she said.

He hesitated. “All right. Thank you.” He made his way back to the armchair he had occupied before going to the dining room, but she sat down on the floor, curling her legs under her and staring up at him with a curious blind trust. Only one lamp was alight, making a little golden glow behind her head.

She drank her brandy and for a long time they sat without talking. Then, warmed and calmed, she began to speak about the lost boy, the things he liked doing, the things be said, his little precocious cleverness. She spoke of London and of the strangeness of Stowerton, to herself and her son. At last she fell silent, her eyes fixed on his face, but he had lost the embarrassment which this trusting childlike stare had at first occasioned in him and it didn’t return even when, leaning forward with quick impulsiveness, she reached for his hand and held it tightly.

He wasn’t embarrassed, but the touch of her hand electrified him. It brought him such a shock and such sudden turbulence that instead of the normal reactions of a normal man enclosing the hand of a pretty woman in his own he had the illusion that his whole body was holding her body. The effect of this was to make him tremble. He loosened his fingers and said abruptly, breaking the now heavy and languorous silence, “You’re a Londoner. You like London. Why do you live here?”

“It is rather ghastly, isn’t it?” All the harshness and terror had gone from her voice and once more it was soft and rich. Although he had known she was bound to speak in answer to his question, the sound of her beautiful voice, quite normal now, disturbed him almost as much as the touch of her hand. “A dreadful old white elephant of a house,” she said.

“It’s no business of mine,” be muttered.

“But it’s no secret either. I didn’t even know I had this great-aunt. She died three years ago and left this house to my father, but he was dying himself of cancer.” With a peculiarly graceful but unstudied movement she raised her hand and pushed away the mass of hair from her face. The full embroidered sleeve of the strange tunic she wore fell away from her arm and the skin glowed whitely, faint golden down gleaming in the lamplight. “I tried to sell it for my father, but no one wanted it, and then he died and Matthew - my husband - left me. Where else could I go but here? I couldn’t afford the rent of our flat and Matthew’s money had run out.” It seemed like hours since those eyes had first begun staring at him, but now at last she turned them away. “The police,” she said very softly, “thought Matthew might have taken John.”

“I know. It’s something we always have to check on when the child of – er - estranged or divorced parents is missing.”

“They went to see him, or they tried to. He’s in hospital, having his appendix out. I believe they talked to his wife. He married again, you see.”

Burden nodded. With more than a policeman’s natural curiosity he passionately wanted to know whether this Matthew had divorced her or she him, what he did for a living, how it had all come about. He couldn’t ask her. His voice felt strangled.

She edged a little closer towards him, not reaching out for his hand this time. Her hair curtained her face. I want you to know,” she said, “how you’ve helped me. What a comfort you’ve been. I should have broken down completely tonight if you hadn’t come. I should have done something dreadful.”

“You mustn’t be alone.”

“I’ve got my sleeping tablets,” she said, “and Mrs. Crantock is coming in at ten.” Slowly she got to her feet, reached out and switched on the standard lamp. “She’ll be here in a minute. It’s five to now.”

Her words and the sudden brightness brought Burden sharply back to reality. He blinked and shook himself.

“Five to ten? I’ve just remembered, I’m supposed to be taking my family to the pictures.”

“And I’ve stopped you? Would you like to phone? Please do. Use my phone.”

“Too late, I’m afraid.”

"I’m dreadfully sorry.”

“I think my being here was more important, don’t you?”

“It was important to me. But you must go now. Will you come again tomorrow? I mean you yourself.”

He was standing in the doorway as she spoke. She put her hand lightly on his arm and they were close together, their faces only a foot apart. “I - yes . . . Yes, of course.” He was stammering badly. “Of course I’ll come.”

“Inspector Burden . . . No, I can’t keep calling you that. What’s your first name?”

“I think it will be best if you . . .” he began, and then, almost desperately, “It’s Michael. People call me Mike.”

“Mike,” she said, and at that moment, as she dwelt on the name, repeating it softly, Mrs. Crantock rang the bell.

Grace was curled up on the sofa and he could see that she had been crying. The enormity of what he had done for a moment overcame that other enormity, the urgency of his body.

“I’m terribly sorry,” he said, going over to her. “The phone box was full and later . . .”

She lifted her head and faced him. “We sat here and we waited for you. When you hadn’t come by eight we had our meal, though it was ruined. I said, ‘Let’s go just the same,’ and John said ‘We can’t go without Dad. We can’t let him come home and find us gone.’ ”

“I said I’m sorry,” said Burden.

“You could have phoned!” Grace said passionately. “I wouldn’t say a word if you’d phoned. Don’t you realise, if you go on like this, you’ll - you’ll destroy those children!”

She went out and the door closed behind her, leaving Burden to thoughts that were neither of her nor his children.