Ellis Peters - George Felse 02 - Death and the Joyful Woman (10 page)

And when they turned the corner into Hill Street, and saw the concreted apron frontage of the station alive with staring, chattering people, it appeared that indeed something had. The station faced sidelong to the street on the outer side of a wide curve, with a small garden and two seats in front of its windows, and then the concreted forecourt lined out into parking space for four cars. One of the four spaces was now occupied by a flat two-wheeled cart bearing a tin trunk, a small pile of old iron bolts and oddments, a tumbled mound of old clothing and rags, and a top-dressing of three small, silent, staring children. A somewhat larger child in his father’s cut-down trousers and a steadily unravelling grey jersey held by the head a shaggy, fat brown pony. A uniformed constable, with the admirably detached, impervious solidity acquired only after innumerable public embarrassments, sauntered about between the door and the waiting family, gently shooing the shifting crowd along if it became too stagnant, and hypnotising it into pretending to an indifference as monumental as his own.

“God!” said Duckett, as he parked his car. The constable permitted himself a fleeting grin on the side of his face which was turned towards them and away from the public view. “Has Grocott gone off his head and started bringing in all the tickney lot?”

“No, sir, this one brought himself. Claims he has important information.”

“So he got a load aboard before the pubs closed, and brought half the town along as well,” Duckett diagnosed disgustedly, and eyed the composed and dignified children, who looked back at him calmly, as though they had no doubts at all as to who was the alien and the savage. They were not full-blooded gipsies, they had not the soft, mysterious Indian features, the melting eyes, the delicate bones, but something in a coarser grain, olive and wild and sinewy, with a bloom of dirt. “What are they?” said Duckett gruffly. “Lays?”

“No, sir, Creaveys.”

“What’s the difference? Nobody knows who’s married to whom or which kids belong to which parents, anyhow. If you’re a Creavey you are a Lay.”

He stalked into the station, and pounded up three flights of stairs to his own office, with George at his heels. Grocott was at the door before he had time to be called.

“All right,” said Duckett, “let’s have it. That’s Joe Creavey’s pony, isn’t it?”

Joe was the Creavey (or Lay) who was almost no trouble; an occasional blind when business in wool rags and old iron was booming, and just once, with ample provocation, a determined assault with an ash-plant on his wife, but no major sins were recorded against him. He fed his kids, minded his own business without unduly annoying other people about it, and was unmistakably a happy and well-adjusted man.

“Yes, sir. Joe’s below with Lockyer. He came in just over an hour ago, saying he’d got important evidence in the Armiger case.”

Joe was well known in the seedier outer districts of Comerbourne, where he made regular rounds with his pony-cart, collecting rags and scrap, and a good many residents automatically saved their cast-off clothes for him. It was worth making regular use of him, because he would take away for you all kinds of awkward and unmarketable rubbish on which the Cleansing Department tended to frown if it was put out for their attentions; though what he afterwards did with some of the items no one cared to inquire. On this particular morning he had been round the shabby-genteel corner of town which housed Mrs. Harkness, and in addition to collecting the contents of her rag-bag he had thoughtfully lifted the lid of her dustbin in case there should be anything salvageable there. People often put old shoes in dustbins, sometimes in a state which Joe regarded as merely part-worn. He didn’t find shoes this time, he found gloves, and the gloves were aged but expensive leather gauntlets, with woven tapes stitched inside, lettered L.A. He took them instinctively, and only afterwards did he examine them closely, when he was pulled in at one of the suburban pubs and had his first pint inside him. It was then he found that the palm and the fingers of the right glove were stained and stiffened with something dark and crusted, and the left carried a few similar dark-brown stains here and there in its frayed leather. Joe knew who lodged with Mrs. Harkness, she was one of his regular clients; he knew what the initials L.A. stood for; and he knew, or was convinced that he knew, what had saturated and ruined those gloves, and why they were stuffed into the dustbin. He knew his duty, too; the police must be told. But his route to the station had taken him through four more bars before it triumphantly delivered him, and if there was anyone left in Comerbourne who didn’t yet know that Leslie Armiger had murdered his father and Joe Creavey had the proof of it, he must have been going about for the last couple of hours with his ears plugged.

“Blabbed it all over town, and pretty well brought a procession with him. He isn’t exactly drunk—not by his standard—but well away. Do you want him?”

“No,” said Duckett, “let him stew for a bit. I want the gloves, and I think I want young Armiger, too. If there’s nothing in this, now’s the time to talk to him, before we’re sure there’s nothing in it. But let’s have a look at these first.”

The gloves were produced, they lay on the desk with palms upturned, displaying the reddish-black, encrusted smears that certainly looked uncommonly like blood.

“Well, what do you think it is, Gorge?”

“Creosote, for one thing,” said George promptly, sniffing at the stiffened fingers, “but that doesn’t say it’s all creosote.”

“No, traces of roofing paint, too. Johnson had better run them up to the lab., and we’ll see.”

“You’re not thinking of keeping Joe overnight, are you?” asked Grocott.

“Eh? Keep him overnight? What, and dump all that tribe of kids into the receiving home when there’s no need? The Children’s Officer would murder me! All right, George, you be off and fetch the boy along.”

George made the best of a job he never liked, approaching the manager’s office discreetly without getting anyone to announce him, and making the summons sound as much like a request as he could; all the same, Leslie, coming up in haste from the warehouse, paled and froze at the sight of him. Once he had grasped the idea it wasn’t so bad; colour came back into his face and a defiant hardness into his eyes, and he went out by George’s side with a composed countenance and an easy stride, as though an old friend had called him. They had to cross either the shop or the yard, and George hoped he was right in choosing the yard, where Leslie was better known and better understood.

Nobody was deceived, of course, they’d be muttering and wondering the rest of the day; but a van-driver caught Leslie’s eye and cocked up a thumb at him and grinned, and one of the packers walked deliberately across their path so that he could offer a crumpled cigarette packet in passing. The boy looked harassed rather than cheered, but he smiled all the same, and accepted the offering; and with the first deep drag the pinched lines round his mouth relaxed. He sat beside George in the car, drawing deep, steadying breaths, and trying too hard to prepare himself.

“Mr. Felse,” he said in a constrained voice, as George slowed at the traffic lights, “could you do something for me? I should be very grateful if you’d go and see my wife for me.”

“You’ll be seeing her yourself in an hour or so,” said George equably. “Won’t you?”

“Shall I?”

“That depends on what you’ve done, so only you know the answer.”

“I hope you’re right,” said Leslie fervently. “I suppose you can’t tell me what this is all about?”

“You suppose correctly. You’ll soon know, but I won’t anticipate. Now let me ask you the one question I somehow never asked you before. Did you kill him?”

“No,” said Leslie without over-emphasis, almost gently.

“Then you’ll be going home to your wife, and the worst that can happen is that you may be a little late. She’ll forgive you for that, long before she forgives us for scaring you.”

Leslie was so unreasonably soothed and calmed by this tone that he forgot to take offence at the assumption that he was scared. He walked into the police station briskly, wild to get to his fence and either fall or clear it; and suddenly finding himself without George, had to turn back and look for him. He had stopped to speak to a boy in a grammar school blazer who was standing in the hallway.

“My son,” he explained as he hurried to overtake his charge. “He’s still hoping—and so am I—that I’m going to be able to drive him home. I should be off duty by this time.”

“Oh, now, look,” said Leslie with a faint recovering gleam in his eye, “I should hate to keep you after hours, I can easily come some other time.”

“That’s the stuff!” George patted him approvingly on the shoulder. “You keep up that standard, and you’ll be all right. Always provided you’re telling us the truth, of course. Come on, three flights up, and I’m afraid the taxpayer doesn’t provide us with a lift.”

Dominic watched them climb to the first turn of the staircase and pass out of sight like that, his father’s hand on the young man’s shoulder. Was it possible that it was all over already? Leslie Armiger didn’t look like a murderer. But then, what murderer ever does? But he
didn’t
!

Dominic was convulsed by the secret, uneasy part of him that couldn’t help identifying itself with those in trouble, those trapped by circumstances and cornered, however deservedly, by the orderly ranks of the law-abiding. He felt the demon in his own nature, and trembled, knowing there was no end to his potentialities. He had to let part at least of his sympathy go out to the hunted, because the quarry could so easily be himself. Infinitely more terrible, it could be somebody who mattered to him so desperately as to make him forget himself. It could be Kitty! And yet he wanted not to be glad that it should be the young man in the worn, expensive suit, with the strained smile and the apprehensive eyes.

The surge of relief in his heart outraged him, and drove him out from under the desk-sergeant’s friendly but inquisitive eye into the impersonal pre-twilight of the September evening, to wait on one of the seats in the strip of garden.

So it was that he saw the red Karmann-Ghia swoop beautifully inward from the road to park beside the ragman’s cart, and Kitty swing her long, slender legs out from the driver’s door. His heart performed the terrifying manoeuvre with which he was becoming familiar, turning over bodily in his breast and swelling until he thought it would burst his ribs.

She closed the door of the car with unaccustomed slowness and quietness, and walked uncertainly across the concrete towards the door; and as she came her steps slowed, until within a few yards of the step she halted altogether, her hands clasped tightly in front of her, in an agony of indecision. She looked to right and left as though searching for the courage to go forward; and she saw Dominic, motionless and silent in the corner of the wooden seat, clutching his school-bag convulsively against his side.

He couldn’t believe, even when her eyes lit on him, that it would get him anything. He was just somebody she’d run into once, casually, and not expected to meet again. Probably she wouldn’t even remember. But her eyes kindled marvellously, a pale smile blazed over her face for a moment, though it served only to illuminate the desperate anxiety that instantly drove it away again. She turned and came to him. He jumped to his feet, so shaken by the beating of his heart that he scarcely heard the first words she said to him.

“Dominic! I’m so glad to find you here!” He came out of a cloud of fulfilment and ecstasy to find himself sitting beside her, his hands clasped in hers, her great eyes a drowning violet darkness close before his face. She was saying for the second time, urgently, desperately: “Is Leslie in there? They were saying in the shops the police fetched him from Malden’s. Is it true? Do you know if he’s in there?”

“Yes,” he said, stammering, “he came with my father. Only a few minutes ago.” He was back on the earth, and the bump had hurt a little, but not much, because of her remembering his name, because of her turning to him so gladly. It wasn’t as if he’d been expecting even that. And in any case he couldn’t be bothered with such trivialities as his own disappointments, while she carried such terrible trouble in her face.

“Oh, God!” she said. “Is he under arrest?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so—not yet—”

“Your father’s in there, too? I’d rather it be him than any of the others. I’ve got to talk to him, Dominic. Now I’ve got to.”

She released his hands with a vast sigh, and put back with a hopeless gesture the fall of smooth, pale hair that shadowed her forehead.

“I’ve got to tell him,” she said in a tired, tranquil voice, “because if I don’t they’ll only put it on to poor Leslie, and hasn’t enough happened to him already? I won’t let them touch him.” She lifted her head and looked into Dominic’s eyes with the practical simplicity of a child confiding its sins, relieved to exchange even for punishment a burden too great to bear a moment longer. “I killed his father, you see.”

DOMINIC TRIED TO speak, and couldn’t find his voice for a moment, and even when he did it tended to shift key unexpectedly, in the alarming and humiliating way he’d thought he was finished with; but Kitty didn’t seem to notice.

“You mustn’t say such things. Even if—if something happened that makes you feel to blame, that can’t be true, and you shouldn’t say it.”

“But I did it, Dominic. I never meant to, but I did. He came to me, and he said: ‘I’m just going to kick Leslie out of here once for all, and boy, shall I enjoy it. And then I’ve got something to tell you. Not here, you come out to the barn, we can be quiet there. Give me fifteen minutes,’ he said, ‘to get rid of his lordship, and then come on over.’ And I wasn’t going to go, I’d made up my mind not to go. I got out the car and started to drive home, and then after all I didn’t, I went round by the lane to the road behind the barn, and parked the car along under the trees by that little wood, and went into the courtyard by the back way. I thought if I begged him just once more he might give in and take Leslie back, and start acting decently to them. After all, he was his son. I couldn’t get it into my head that it was really for keeps. People just don’t act like that. Leslie wasn’t there, only his father. He started telling me all his great plans for the future, all excited and pleased with himself, and he had a magnum of champagne and glasses set out on one of the tables. Oh, Dominic, if you knew how obscenely ridiculous it all was—”

His mouth ached with all the things he wanted to say to her and mustn’t; his heart filled his chest so tightly that he could hardly breathe. “Kitty, I wish there was some way I could help you,” he said huskily.

“You do help me, you are helping me, you’re lovely to me. You keep right on looking at me as if I was a friend of yours, and you haven’t moved away from me even an inch. But you will!”

“I won’t!” he said in a gasp of protest. “Never!”

“No, perhaps you wouldn’t ever, you’re not the kind. Let me go on telling you, it makes it easier, and my God, I need rehearsing, this is going to be lousy on the night whatever I do.”

He had her by the hands again, and this time the initiative had been his, and the warm, strong fingers clung to him gratefully, quivering a little.

“He’d had a brainwave,” said Kitty in a half-suffocated voice, laughing and raging. “If Leslie wouldn’t have me and join the businesses up,
he would
! He was going to marry me himself! That’s what the champagne and the excitement was all about. He didn’t even ask me, he
told
me. He didn’t even pretend to feel anything for me. When he put his arms round me and wanted to kiss me it wasn’t even sexually revolting, it was just like signing a merger. And I’d been trying to talk to him all the while about Leslie, and he hadn’t even heard me. I was so mad, it was so mean and ludicrous and horrible, I was out of my mind, I couldn’t think of anything except getting away. I just pushed him off like a demon. We were by the table at the top of the stairs, where he’d put the champagne and the glasses. I don’t know how it happened—he went off backwards, and stepped off the edge of the top stair, and went slipping and rolling and clawing all the way down and crashed on the floor. I ran down and past him to the door, I was terrified he’d get up and try to stop me. I wasn’t afraid of him, it wasn’t that, it was just that everything was so foul, I couldn’t have borne it if he’d tried to speak to me again. But he just lay there on his face, and never moved. I didn’t think anything about it, I didn’t stop to see how much he was hurt, I just ran back to the car and left him lying there. So you see, I killed him. And I’ve got to tell them. I never meant to, it never even occurred to me until I was in the car that he might be terribly hurt. But I did it. And I can’t let them go on thinking poor Leslie had anything to do with it.”

When she had finished she lifted her eyes and looked at him closely, already half sorry and half ashamed that she should be so weak as to unload this cruel and humiliating confidence upon a mere child, too old not to be damaged by it, and not yet old enough to be able to evaluate it justly. But it wasn’t a child who was looking steadily at her, it was a man, a very young man, maybe, but unquestionably her elder at that moment. He kept firm hold of her hands when she would have drawn them away, and his eyes held hers when she would have averted them.

“Oh, God!” she said weakly. “I’m a heel to drag you into this.”

“No, you did right, Kitty, really you did. I’ll show you. That was all that happened? You’re sure that was all? You pushed him and he fell down the stairs and knocked himself out. That was all?”

“Wasn’t it enough? He was dead when they found him.”

“Yes, he was dead. But you didn’t kill him.” He knew what he was about to do, and it was so terrible that it almost outweighed the sense of joy and completion that he felt at knowing her innocent, and being able to hold out the image of her in his two hands and show her how spotless it was. Never in his life before, not even as a small, nosy boy, had he betrayed a piece of information he possessed purely by virtue of being George’s son. If he did it he was destroying something which had been a mainspring of his life, and the future that opened before him without it was lonely and frightening, involved enormous readjustments in his most intimate relationships, and self-searchings from which he instinctively shrank. But already he was committed, and he would not have turned back even if he could.

“Listen to me, Kitty. All that was published about Mr. Armiger’s death was that he died from head injuries. But it wasn’t just falling down the stairs that did it. It’s only because of my father’s work that I know this, and you mustn’t tell anyone I told you. After he was lying unconscious somebody took the champagne bottle and battered his head in with it deliberately, hit him nine times, and only stopped hitting him when the bottle smashed. And
that
wasn’t you! Was it?”

She whispered between parted lips, staring at him in a stupor of horror and incredulity and relief: “
No
—no, I didn’t, I
couldn’t
—”

“I know you couldn’t, of course you couldn’t. But somebody did. So you see, Kitty, you didn’t kill him at all, you didn’t do anything except push him away from you and accidentally stun him. Somebody else came in afterwards and battered him to death. So you see, there’s no need for you to tell them anything. You won’t, will you? There’ll be nothing in this glove business, they won’t touch Leslie, you’ll see. At least wait until we know.”

She hadn’t heard the half of that, she was still groping after the release and freedom he was offering back to her. The warm flush of colour into her face and hope into her eyes overwhelmed him with a kind of proud humility he had never experienced before.

“You mean it? You wouldn’t just try to comfort me, would you? Not with fairy stories? But you wouldn’t! Oh, Dominic, am I really not a murderess? You don’t know what it’s been like since yesterday morning, since they told me he was dead.”

“Of course you’re not. It’s true what I’ve told you. So you won’t tell them anything, will you?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, “I must. Oh, Dominic, what should I have done without you? Don’t you see, I don’t even mind now, as long as I’m not—what I thought I was. I don’t mind anything now. But I must tell them, because of Leslie. I can show them that he’d gone, and his father was still alive. I can prove he didn’t kill him.” She looked down at him, and was distressed by his consternation, but she knew what she had to do. “I’ve got this far and I’m not turning back now. I’ve had enough of concealing information. At least I can see that Leslie’s safely out of it.”

“But you can’t,” protested Dominic, catching at her wrist and dragging her down again beside him. “You can only prove he didn’t kill him in the short time you were there. They might still think he came back.
Somebody
came. And don’t you see, if you tell them what you’ve told me, they’ll think you’ve left out the end, they’ll think
you
stayed and finished him off.”

“I don’t see why you should say that,” said Kitty, wide-eyed. “
You
don’t think that,
you
believe me. Why shouldn’t they?”

“Well, because their business is
not
to believe—and how can you prove it?”

“I can’t,” she agreed, paling a little. “But I can’t turn back now, I couldn’t bear to. You don’t have to worry about me any more, the most wonderful thing anyone could have done for me is done already.
You
did it.”

If she hadn’t said that, if she hadn’t suddenly touched his hot cheek so lightly and fleetingly with her fingertips, he might have been able to protest yet once again, perhaps even to persuade her. But her touch snatched the breath from his throat and the articulation from his tongue, and he couldn’t say a word, he had to stand and watch, suffocating, mute and paralysed, as she turned to leave him; and when she looked back just once to say quickly: “Don’t worry, I won’t say a word about you,” he almost burst into tears of frustration and rage because he lacked the power to shout at her that it wasn’t about himself he was worrying, that he didn’t care about himself, that only she mattered, and she was making a terrible mistake, that he couldn’t bear it, that he loved her.

She was gone. The darkening doorway swallowed her, and it was in any case too late. He sat down again, huddled in the far corner of the seat, and wrestled with himself painfully until his mind cleared again, and presented to him the most appalling implication of the whole incident, producing it with cruel aplomb, like a magician palming an ace out of the pack. He had robbed her even of the defence of ignorance! He, and no one else. If she’d gone rushing in there as she’d wanted to, and poured out her story as she had to him, they’d have seen the glaring hole in it at once, just as surely as he had. They’d have questioned her about the weapon, about the injuries, and she wouldn’t have known what they were talking about, and her manner and her bewilderment would have rung true past any mistaking. And worse, she’d never tell them about his treachery, and explain how she got her information, because that would get him into trouble. One slip to warn them that she knew how that death had come about, and they’d be absolutely sure she was responsible for it. The details had never been published, only a handful of people knew them—and one other, the murderer. He’d as good as convicted her.

His manhood, so recently and intoxicatingly achieved, was crumpling badly, slipping out of his hold. He ought to get up and march in there after her and tell them honestly about his lapse, but he hadn’t the courage, the very thought of it made him feel sick. It wasn’t just for himself he was such a coward, it was his father’s job, his whole career. C.I.D. officers ought not to discuss their cases in front of their families. They’d been the exceptional family, proud of their solidarity, disdaining to doubt their absolute mutual loyalty, over-riding conventional restrictions because they were so sure of one another. All this had made perfect sense while that solidarity remained unbreached, but now he’d broken it, and how did it look now? His father was compromised. He would have to own up, it was the only way he could even try to repair the harm he’d done to Kitty; but he’d have to do it in private, to his father alone. Maybe there’d be some grain of evidence that would extricate Kitty, and make it unnecessary for confession to go any farther. Supposing George felt he had to resign, supposing—

He longed for George to come and take him home, so that he could get the first awful plunge over. But when at last a step rang on the flags of the hallway and he jerked round in hope and dread to see who emerged, it was only Leslie Armiger, stepping lightly, buoyant with relief. He walked like a new man, for the old gloves he’d discarded after painting the garden shed where he kept his materials had yielded a great many interesting substances, creosote, bituminous dressing, several kinds of paint and lacquer, but not a trace of blood. As soon as he’d seen them he’d laughed with relief; he could have kicked himself for the imaginative agonies of anticipation he’d inflicted on himself, all on account of these ancient and blameless relics. His position now was actually neither better nor worse than it had been before this tea-cup storm blew up, but there was no doubt that the recoil had raised his credit all round. Especially with himself; this feeling of liberation was more than worth the scare.

Detective-Sergeant Felse had been called away from the interrogation to interview someone in his own room, but Leslie didn’t know who it was, or whether the caller had anything to do with his father’s death. He didn’t know, and he didn’t care. He was on his way home to Jean, still free and almost vindicated, and never again would he scare as easily as that.

It was ten minutes more before George came out to speak to his son, and then it was only to say tersely that after all he wouldn’t be able to leave for some time yet, possibly several hours, and Dom had better get on home by bus. He wasn’t going to have an opportunity to unburden himself here, that was obvious; his father was gone again almost before he could open his stiff lips to get out a word.

Miserably he took his dismissal and went home; there was nothing else to be done. He countered Bunty’s queries with monosyllables, sat wretchedly over his tea without appetite, and refuged in his corner with textbooks he couldn’t even see for the anxiety that hung over his eyes as palpable as fog. Bunty suspected a cold coming on, but he repelled her attempts to take his temperature so ill-humouredly that she revised her diagnosis. Something on his mind, she reflected with certainty, and it isn’t me he wants, so it must be his father. Now what, I wonder, have those two been doing to each other?

It was twenty to ten before George came home. He looked tired and frayed and in no mood to be approached, but there was no help for it. Bunty fed him and allowed him to be quiet, though she knew by old signs that there was something on his mind, too, that would have to come out before long. It was without prompting that he leaned back wearily at last, and said in a voice entirely devoid of any pleasure or satisfaction: “Well, it’s all over bar the shouting. We’ve just made an arrest in the Armiger case. We’ve charged Kitty Norris.”