A New Lease of Death (11 page)

‘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 for 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 physio-therapist at the time. Anyway, the upshot of it all was that the boy friend 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 boy friend 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 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.’

8

The days of our age are threescore years and ten; and though men be so strong that they come to fourscore years, yet is their strength then but labour and sorrow.

Psalm 90. The Burial of the Dead

ALICE FLOWER WAS
eighty-seven, almost as old as her employer had been at the time of her death. A series of strokes had battered her old frame as tempests batter an ancient house, but the house was strong and sturdily built. No gimcrack refinements of decoration or delicacy had ever belonged to it. It had been made to endure wind and weather.

She lay in a narrow high bed in a ward called Honeysuckle. The ward was full of similar old women in similar beds. They had clean pink faces and white hair through which patches of rose pink scalp showed. Every bed trolley held at least two vases of flowers, the sops to conscience, Archery supposed, of visiting relatives who only had to sit
and
chat instead of handing bedpans and tending bed-sores.

‘A visitor for you, Alice,’ said the sister. ‘It’s no use trying to shake hands with her. She can’t move her hands but her hearing’s perfectly good and she’ll talk the hind leg off a donkey.’

A most un-Christian hatred flared in Archery’s eyes. If she saw it the sister took no notice.

‘Like a good gossip, don’t you, Alice? This is the Reverend Archery.’ He winced at that, approached the bed.

‘Good evening, sir.’

Her face was square with deeply ridged rough skin. One corner of her mouth had been drawn down by the paralysis of the motor nerves, causing her lower jaw to protrude and reveal large false teeth. The sister bustled about the bed, pulling the old servant’s nightgown higher about her neck and arranging on the coverlet her two useless hands. It was terrible to Archery to have to look at those hands. Work had distorted them beyond hope of beauty, but disease and oedema had smoothed and whitened the skin so that they were like the hands of a misshapen baby. The emotion and the feel for the language of 1611 that was with him always welled in a fount of pity. Well done, thou good and faithful servant, he thought. Thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things …

‘Would it upset you to talk to me about Mrs Primero, Miss Flower?’ He asked gently, easing himself into a bentwood chair.

‘Of course it wouldn’t,’ said the sister, ‘she loves it.’

Archery could bear no more. ‘This is rather a private matter, if you don’t mind.’

‘Private! It’s the whole ward’s bedtime story, believe me.’ She flounced away, a crackling navy and white robot.

Alice Flower’s voice was cracked and harsh. The strokes had affected her throat muscles and her vocal cords. But her accent was pleasant and correct, learnt, Archery supposed, in the kitchens and nurseries of educated people.

‘What was it you wanted to know, sir?’

‘First tell me about the Primero family.’

‘Oh, I can do that. I always took an interest.’ She gave a small rattling cough and turned her head to hide the twisted side of her mouth. ‘I went to Mrs Primero when the boy was born …’

‘The boy.’

‘Mr Edward, her only child he was.’

Ah, thought Archery, the father of rich Roger and his sisters.

‘He was a lovely boy and we always got on a treat, him and me. I reckon it really aged me and his poor mother when he died, sir. But he’d got a family of his own by then, thanks be to God, and Mr Roger was the living spit of his father.’

‘I suppose Mr Edward left him pretty well off, did he?’

‘Oh, no, sir, that was the pity of it. You see, Old Dr Primero left his money to madam, being as Mr Edward was doing so well at the time. But he lost
everything
on something in the city and when he was taken Mrs Edward and the three kids were quite badly off.’ She coughed again, making Archery wince. He fancied he could see a terrible vain effort to raise those hands and cover the rattling lips. ‘Madam offered to help – not that she had more than she needed – but Mrs Edward was that proud, she wouldn’t take a penny from her mother-in-law. I never shall know how she managed. There was the three of them, you see. Mr Roger he was the eldest, and then there was the two little mites, ever so much younger than their brother, but close together if you take my meaning. No more than eighteen months between them.’

She rested her head back on the pillows and bit at her lip as if trying to pull it back into place. ‘Angela was the oldest. Time flies so I reckon she’d be twenty-six now. Then there was Isabel, named after madam. They was just babies when their Daddy died and it was years before we saw them.

‘It was a bitter blow to madam, I can tell you, not knowing what had become of Mr Roger. Then one day just out of the blue he turned up at Victor’s Piece. Fancy, he was living in digs just over at Sewingbury, studying to be a solicitor with a very good firm. Somebody Mrs Edward knew had got him in. He hadn’t no idea his granny was still alive, let alone in Kingsmarkham, but he was looking up somebody in the phone book, in the line of business, sir, and there it was: Mrs Rose Primero, Victor’s Piece. Once he’d come over there was no stopping him. Not that we wanted to stop him, sir. Pretty nearly every
Sunday
he came and once or twice he fetched his little sisters all the way from London and brought them with him. Good as gold they were.

‘Mr Roger and madam, they used to have some laughs together. All the old photographs they’d have out and the tales she used to tell him!’ She stopped suddenly and Archery watched the old face swell and grow purple. ‘It was a change for us to have a nice gentlemanlike young fellow about the place after that Painter.’ Her voice changed to a shrill whistling shriek. ‘That dirty murdering beast!’

Across the ward another old woman in a bed like Alice Flower’s smiled a toothless smile as of one hearing a familiar tale retold. The ward’s bedtime story, the sister had said.

Archery leaned towards her. ‘That was a dreadful day, Miss Flower,’ he said, ‘the day Mrs Primero died.’ The fierce eyes flickered, red and spongey blue. ‘I expect you feel you’ll never forget it …’

‘Not to my dying day,’ said Alice Flower. Perhaps she thought of the now useless body that had once been so fine an instrument and was already three-quarters dead.

‘Will you tell me about it?’

As soon as she began he realized how often she must have told it before. It was likely that some of these other old women were not absolutely bedridden, that sometimes in the evenings they got up and gathered round Alice Flower’s bed. A tale, he thought, paraphrasing, to draw children from play and old women from the chimney corner.

‘He was a devil,’ she said, ‘a terror. I was scared
of
him but I never let him know it. Take all and give nothing, that was his motto. Six pounds a year, that was all I got when I first went out into service. Him, he had his home and his wages, a lovely motor to drive. There’s some folks want the moon. You’d think a big strong young fellow like that’d be only too glad to fetch the coal in for an old lady, but not Mr Bert Painter. Beast Painter was what I called him.

‘That Saturday night when he never come and he never come madam had to sit all by herself in the icy cold. Let me go over and speak to him, madam, I said, but she wouldn’t have it. The morning’s time enough, Alice, she said. I’ve said to myself over and over again, if he’d come that night I’d have been in there with them. He wouldn’t have been able to tell no lies then.’

‘But he did come the next morning, Miss Flower …’

‘She told him off good and proper. I could hear her giving him a dressing down.’

‘What were you doing?’

‘Me? When he come in first I was doing the vegetables for madam’s lunch, then I popped on the oven and put in the meat tin. They asked me all that at the court in London, the Old Bailey it was.’ She paused and there was suspicion in the look she gave him. ‘You writing a book about all this, are you, sir?’

‘Something like that,’ said Archery.

‘They wanted to know if I was sure I could hear all right. My hearing’s better than that judge’s, I
can
tell you. Just as well it is. If I’d been hard of hearing we might have all gone up in smoke that morning.’

‘How was that?’

‘Beast Painter was in the drawing room with madam and I’d gone into the larder to get the vinegar for the mint sauce, when all of a sudden I heard a kind of plop and sizzle. That’s that funny old oven, I said, and sure enough it was. I popped back quick and opened the oven door. One of the potatoes had kind of spat out, sir, and fallen on the gas. All in flames it was and sizzling and roaring like a steam engine. I turned it off quick and then I did a silly thing. Poured water on it. Ought to have known better at my age. Ooh, the racket and the smoke. You couldn’t hear yourself think.’