A New Lease of Death (24 page)

‘Then we went back. I wasn’t afraid of the house and I didn’t know what he meant by the old girl. I think when he said about giving me what he’d given the old girl I thought he meant his wife, Mrs Painter. He knew I’d seen him hit her. I found the body. You knew that? God, it was terrible. I didn’t understand, you see. D’you know what I thought at first? I thought she’d sort of burst.’

‘Don’t,’ said Archery.

‘If you can’t take it now, what d’you think it was like for me? I was
five
. Five, my Christ! They put me to bed and I was ill for weeks. Of course, they’d arrested Painter, but I didn’t know that. You don’t tell children that sort of thing. I didn’t know what had happened at all, only that Granny Rose had burst open and he had made it happen and if I said I’d seen him he’d do the same to me.’

‘But afterwards. Didn’t you tell anyone then?’

She had talked about finding the body and said it was terrible, but then there had been affectation in her voice. A child finding a murdered woman, he thought. Yes, all the world would recoil in shock from that. Yet for her that had not been the worst. Now as he asked her about afterwards he saw the trance begin once more to mist her face as the spectre of Painter – Painter on this very spot – rose before it.

‘He’d find you,’ she mumbled. ‘He’d find you wherever you were, wherever he was. You wanted to tell
her
, but she wouldn’t listen to you. “Don’t think about it, Baby, put it out of your mind.” But it wouldn’t go
out
…’ Her features worked and the blank eyes flickered.

‘Miss Crilling, let me take you home.’

She was standing up now, moving mechanically towards the house wall, a robot whose programming has failed. When her hands touched the bricks she stopped and spoke again, talking to him but into the house itself.

‘It wouldn’t go out. It went in and in, till it was
just
a little black wheel spinning and playing the same thing over and over again.’

Had she realized she was speaking in metaphor? He had thought of a medium’s utterances, but now he knew it had been more like a discordant record, playing the same horror each time it was pricked by the stylus of association. He touched her arm and was surprised when she followed him meekly and limply back to the chair. They sat in silence for some minutes. She was the first to speak and she was almost her normal self.

‘You know Tessie, don’t you? She’s going to marry your son?’ He shrugged. ‘I think she was the only real friend I ever had,’ she said quietly. ‘It was her birthday the next week. She was going to be five, and I thought I’d give her one of my old dresses. Sneak it round when
she
was with the old girl. Generous little beast, wasn’t I? I never saw her again.’

Archery said gently, ‘You saw her this afternoon in the chemist’s.’

Her new tranquillity was very finely balanced. Had he pushed it too far?

‘In the white blouse?’ she said in a dead even voice, so low that he had to lean forward and strain to catch it. He nodded.

‘That girl who hadn’t got any change?’

‘Yes.’

‘She was standing beside me and I never knew.’ There was a long silence. The only sound was the faint rustling of wet bushes, water-loaded gleaming leaves on the coach-house walls. Then she tossed her head. ‘I reckon I don’t notice women much,’ she
said
. ‘I saw you all right and the boy that was with you. I remember I thought the talent’s looking up in this dump.’

‘The talent,’ Archery said, ‘is my son.’

‘Her boy friend? I never would have told you!’ She gave a low cry of exasperation. ‘And, my God, I never would have told her – not if you hadn’t caught me out like that.’

‘It was chance, coincidence. Perhaps it’s better that I do know.’

‘You!’ she said. ‘That’s all you think about, you and your precious son. What about me?’ She stood up, looked at him and moved towards the door with the broken pane. It was true he thought, ashamed. He had been prepared to sacrifice all these other people to save Charles, the Crillings, Primero, even Imogen – but his quest had been doomed from the beginning because history could not be changed.

‘What will they do to me?’ Her face was turned away from him and she spoke softly. But there was such urgency and such fear in those six short words that their impact was as if she had shouted.

‘Do to you?’ He could do no more than get to his feet and stand helplessly behind her. ‘Why should they do anything to you?’ He remembered the dead man on the crossing and he remembered the needle punctures, but he said only, ‘You’ve been more sinned against than sinning.’

‘Oh, the Bible!’ she cried. ‘Don’t quote the Bible to me.’ He said nothing for he had not done so. ‘I’m going upstairs,’ she said strangely. ‘When you see Tess would you give her my love? I wish,’ she
said
, ‘I wish I could have given her something for her birthday.’

By the time he had found a doctor’s house he felt all hand, nothing but hand, a throbbing thing that beat like a second heart. He recognized Dr Crocker at once and saw that he, too, was remembered.

‘You must be enjoying your holiday,’ Crocker said. He stitched the finger, filled a syringe with antitetanus serum. ‘First that dead boy and now this. Sorry, but this may hurt. You’ve got thick skin.’

‘Really?’ Archery could not help smiling as he bared his upper arm. ‘I want to ask you something.’ Without stopping to explain he put the question that had been troubling him all the way from Victor’s Piece. ‘Is it possible?’

‘Beginning of October?’ Crocker looked closely and not unsympathetically at him. ‘Look, how personal is this?’

Archery read his thoughts and managed a laugh. ‘Not that personal,’ he said. ‘I am, as they say, enquiring for a friend.’

‘Well, it’s extremely unlikely.’ Crocker grinned. ‘There have been cases, very few and far between. They make minor medical history.’

Nodding, Archery got up to go.

‘I shall want to see that finger again,’ the doctor said. ‘Or your local G.P. will. You’ll need another couple of injections. See to it when you get home, will you?’

Home … yes, he would be home tomorrow. His stay in Kingsmarkham had not been a holiday,
anything
but that, yet he had that curious end-of-a-holiday feeling when the resort one has stayed in becomes more familiar than home.

He had walked along this High Street every day, more frequently even than he trod the main village street at Thringford. The order of the shops, chemist, grocer, draper, were as well known to him as to the housewives of Kingsmarkham. And the place was certainly pretty. Suddenly it seemed sad that he should hardly have noticed its prettiness – more than that really, for prettiness does not go with grace and dignity – but would associate it for ever with a lost love and a failed search.

Street lamps, some of them of ancient design and with wrought iron casings, showed him alleys winding between stone walls, coaching yards, flowers in a few cottage gardens. The weak yellow light bleached these flowers to a luminous pallor. Half an hour ago it had been just light enough to read print by; now the darkness had come down and lamps appeared in windows fronting the crevices between bulbous bloated cloud. There was no moon.

The Olive and Dove was brightly lit and the car park full. Glass doors separated the hall from the cocktail bar and he saw that it was crowded. There were groups and pairs of young people, sitting on high stools, gathered round the small black oak tables. Archery thought he would give everything he possessed to see Charles among them, throwing back his head in laughter, his hand resting on the shoulder of a pretty girl. Not a beautiful, intellectual, tainted girl – just someone pretty and dull and
uncomplicated
. But Charles was not there. He found him alone in the lounge writing letters. Only a few hours had elapsed since his parting from Tess, but already he was writing …

‘What on earth have you done to your hand and where have you been?’

‘Hacking away at the past.’

‘Don’t be cryptic, Father. It doesn’t suit you.’ His tone was bitter and sullen. Archery wondered why people say that suffering improves the character, why indeed he had sometimes thoughtlessly said it to his own parishioners. He listened to his son’s voice, carping, querulous and selfish. ‘I’ve been wanting to address this envelope for the past two hours, but I couldn’t because I don’t know where Tess’s aunt lives.’ Charles gave him a sour accusing look. ‘You wrote it down. Don’t say you’ve lost it.’

‘Here.’ Archery took the card from his pocket and dropped it on the table. ‘I’m going to phone your mother, tell her we’ll be home in the morning.’

‘I’ll come up with you. This place goes dead at night.’

Dead? And the bar crowded with people, some of whom were surely as exacting as Charles. If Tess had been with them it would not have been dead. Quite suddenly Archery made up his mind that Charles must be made happy, and if happiness meant Tess, he should have Tess. Therefore the theory he was formulating would have to be made to work.

He paused on the threshold of his bedroom, put his hand to the light switch but did not press it. There in the darkness with Charles behind him there flashed
across
his brain a picture of himself and Wexford that first day at the police station. He had been firm then. ‘Bitterly, bitterly against this marriage,’ he had told the Chief Inspector. How utterly he had come round! But then he had not known what it was to crave for a voice and a smile. To understand all was not merely to forgive all, it was utter identification of the spirit and the flesh.

Over his shoulder Charles said, ‘Can’t you find the switch?’ His hand came up and met his father’s on the dry cold wall. The room flooded with light. ‘Are you all right? You look worn-out.’

Perhaps it was the unaccustomed gentleness in his voice that did it. Archery knew how easy it is to be kind when one is happy, how nearly impossible to feel solicitude in the midst of one’s own misery. He was suddenly filled with love, an overflowing diffused love that for the first time in days had no specific object but included his son – and his wife. Hoping unreasonably that her voice would be soft and kind, he moved towards the telephone.

‘Well, you are a stranger,’ were the first words he heard and they were sharp with resentment. ‘I was beginning to wonder what had happened to you. Thought you must have eloped.’

‘I wouldn’t do that, darling,’ he said, sick at heart. And then, because he had to set his foot back on the path of constancy, he took a grotesque echo, ‘Kingsmarkham isn’t conspicuous for its talent. I’ve missed you.’ It was untrue and what he was going to say next would also be a lie. ‘It’ll be good to be home with you again.’ That lie would have to be
changed
into truth. He clenched his hand till the hurt finger burned with pain, but as he did so he thought that he and time could make it true …

‘You do use some extraordinary expressions,’ Charles said when he had rung off. ‘Talent, indeed. Very vulgar.’ He was still holding the card, staring at it with utter absorption. A week ago Archery would have marvelled that a woman’s address and a woman’s handwriting could provide such fascination.

‘You asked me on Saturday if I’d ever seen this before. You asked me if I’d heard it. Well, now I’ve
seen
it, it’s rung a bell. It’s part of a long religious verse play. Part of it’s in prose but there are songs in it – hymns really – and this is the last verse of one of them.’

‘Where did you see it? In Oxford? In a library?’

But Charles was not listening to him. He said as if he had been meaning to say it for the past half-hour, ‘Where did you go tonight? Had it any connection with me and – and Tess?’

Must he tell him? Was he obliged to root out those last vestiges of hope before he had anything real and proven to put in their place?

‘Just to have a last look at Victor’s Piece.’ Charles nodded. He appeared to accept this quite naturally. ‘Elizabeth Crilling was there, hiding.’ He told him about the drugs, the wretched attempts to secure more tablets, but he did not tell him everything.

Charles’s reaction was unexpected. ‘Hiding from what?’

‘The police, I suppose, or her mother.’

‘You didn’t just leave her there?’ Charles asked indignantly. ‘A crazy kid like that? God knows what she might do. You don’t know how many of those tablets would poison her. She might take them deliberately to that end. Have you thought of that?’

She had accused him of not considering her but even that taunt had not prompted him. It had simply not crossed his mind that he was doing something irresponsible in leaving a young girl alone in an empty house.

‘I think we ought to go to Victor’s Piece and try to get her to come home,’ Charles said. Observing the sudden animation on his son’s face, Archery wondered how sincere he was and how much of this spurt of energy was due to a desire to do something, anything, because he knew that if he went to bed he would not sleep. Charles put the card away in his pocket. ‘You won’t like this,’ he said, ‘but I think we ought to take the mother with us.’

‘She’s quarrelled with her mother. She behaves as if she hates her.’

‘That’s nothing. Have you ever seen them together?’

Only a glance across a courtroom, a glance of indecipherable passion. He had never seen them together. He knew only that if Charles were alone somewhere and miserable, on the verge perhaps of taking his own life, he, Archery, would not want strangers to go to his succour.

‘You can drive,’ he said and he tossed the keys to his son.

The church clock was striking eleven. Archery wondered if Mrs Crilling would be in bed. Then it occurred to him for the first time that she might be worrying about her daughter. He had never attributed to the Crillings ordinary emotions. They were different from other people, the mother deranged, the girl delinquent. Was that why, instead of being merciful, he had merely used them? As they turned into Glebe Road he felt a new warmth stir within him. It was not too late – especially now she had found some release – to bring Elizabeth back, to heal that old wound, to retrieve something out of chaos.