The Players And The Game (9 page)

He already had Plender’s report on Gordon’s statement. Sally put things a little differently when he asked about it.

‘I did go around with him a bit, but it was a dead loss. I mean, he talked about nothing but himself and his work all the time. After the second hour I stopped listening.’ Her smile showed fine large teeth.

‘So you packed him up. Did you suggest to him that Louise Allbright was interested in him?’

‘I think I did say something like that. Louise thought he was good-looking. So he is, if you like little men.’

But you like big men, my beauty, Hazleton thought. ‘She went out with him, as you know. Did she say anything to you about that? Putting it bluntly, Miss Lowson, did she say whether she’d had intercourse with him? I’m sorry if the question embarrasses you, but what she said might be important.’

‘It doesn’t embarrass me at all. The answer is no. I mean, she didn’t tell me, but I very much doubt it.’

‘Did she mention any other affairs?’

‘She told me she’d been to bed with a boy two or three times. At some pop festival last year. All she said about Ray was that she’d had a good time – that was the first time she went out with him. Afterwards she didn’t seem so keen. Perhaps he’d given her his lecture on journalism.’ Hazleton sensed an evasiveness in her response, especially when she went on talking. ‘I didn’t know her that well, actually just through the tennis club. I felt a bit sorry for her, really. I mean, she obviously wanted to have a man of her own, but she was nervous of going out to get one. You know she went to Keep Fit classes?’

‘Yes. It’s been suggested that she’d have been more likely to go for an older man. Would you think that was so?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘As far as you know, she didn’t go out at all with a man of that sort?’

‘No.’ For some reason the question seemed to make her nervous. When he probed round and round about it, though, like a dentist looking for a nerve end, he got no further response.

Neither Hazleton, Plender, nor anybody else working on the case, got any farther in discovering hidden depths in Louise Allbright. Her school-friends said she was the quiet type, her mother and father that she had always been a good daughter who never gave them a minute’s trouble – the Isle of Wight escapade now forgotten. The holdall had obviously been put in the London bus in an attempt to divert attention from Rawley, and if Hazel Palmer had not been passing by Planter’s Place it could have achieved that object, since the body might well not have been found for weeks. There was no clue to the meaning of the envelope fragment with a number on the back.

The sum total of discovery from these investigations was not great. Beyond the fact that her murderer owned or had access to a car there was no clue to his identity. Indeed, the assumption that he was male was not justified, nor was the use of the singular. It seemed likely that two people were involved, and they might be two women, or a man and woman. Also, it appeared likely that this was a murder without a rational motive, prompted by sadism.

‘And we know what a problem that kind of thing can be,’ Hazleton said gloomily to Paling. ‘People just don’t seem to notice anything connected with sex and crime. Remember that girl who was raped and killed and then dumped? Three boys saw a man take her body out of a car and put it in the bushes, five other people saw him too, and still nobody tried to stop him or do anything about it.’

‘Cheer up, these are the dog days. Here’s something interesting. You remember Anne Marie Dupont?’

‘The French girl? Of course.’

‘I wrote to her family – you remember they collected her things without our having a look at them? What was the name of that Inspector who thought they were of no interest? Hurley, yes, I’ll remember that. Anyway, I’ve had a letter from the sister with which I needn’t bother you – it’s in French–’

Supercilious bastard. Hazleton thought. Paling was known to regard himself as a French scholar.

‘She repeats that although her sister was interested in men (she doesn’t put it in quite that way) she wouldn’t have gone off for good without telling her family. But she found this letter among her sister’s things.’

He pushed a photostat across the table. The letter was typewritten, with no address at the top.

My dear Anne Marie

Thank you for the photograph. May I keep it? It is in front of me now as I write, and I think you look wonderful. So appealingly fresh and gay, and with that certain look in your eye which says you are French and not English.

And now, shall we meet? I hope so. I look forward to introducing you to the group. We are prepared to discuss anything and everything, as I told you. Nothing is barred! You ask about women members. Yes, there is one in particular. I want you to meet her. Can you be at the corner of Boundary Road at 6 o’clock on Friday evening? I’ll pick you up from there. Sorry I can’t ask you to come to the place where we meet, but there are reasons. I hope you can manage this, and look forward to seeing you.

Sincerely,

Abel.

‘Boundary Road,’ Hazleton said. ‘Near Rawley station. And I’ll tell you another thing. There aren’t many houses there, it’s all warehouses and factories. And Friday, May twenty-seventh, was the day she disappeared.’

‘The lab have given us a report on the machine that typed this. It was an Olivetti portable between five and ten years old, letters “a” and “e” rather worn, “c”, “t” and “l” slightly out of alignment. Thousands of them about, unfortunately. What else do you get from the letter?’

‘They haven’t met, so how did they get in touch? One of those friendship circles. The sort of thing where you put in an ad: “Gentleman in 30s, attractive, well-to-do, interested music and the arts, would like to meet attractive younger lady–”’

‘You’ve got the tone. And this was just the sort of girl who’d answer an advertisement like that, telling herself it was a joke but being a bit serious about it too.’

‘What about Louise Allbright? Isn’t she the sort of girl who’d have answered that kind of ad too? I think we may be on to something.’

Paling, who had already reached this conclusion, now applauded it. ‘What about the writer? Forty or round about, wouldn’t you say from the phrasing? “That certain look in your eye” and “We are prepared to discuss anything and everything.” No young man would write like that.’

‘Married. Or single with a landlady, but more likely married. That’s why he can’t ask her to the place where they meet. Lives in Rawley.’

‘Or works here, lives outside. What about his occupation?’

‘Not a manual worker. Some sort of professional job, I’d say. Not an important one, too fussy and pedantic. Civil Servant perhaps, assistant accountant who won’t get any higher, chief clerk, likes to think himself the pillar of the firm but will get the sack one day, that kind of thing. And I should say he’s probably nearer fifty than forty.’

‘Anything else strike you?’

‘The name, you mean?’ Paling nodded. ‘No, I don’t make anything of that. Except that it won’t be Abel.’

‘Would you say he might have had a religious upbringing? I don’t mean he’s a clergyman, but very likely a regular churchgoer, sidesman, choirmaster, something like that. Too far-fetched? Perhaps you’re right.’ Paling gave a delicate little laugh. ‘We don’t want to sound too much like Sherlock and Mycroft, do we?’

Hazleton, who had never read the Sherlock Holmes stories, ignored this. ‘If the two cases are linked – and we still don’t know for certain that they are, though it looks like it – then Louise belonged to this friendship circle too. That number on the envelope is presumably something to do with it. And if Louise had joined one of these clubs or circles she must have left some record of it.’

‘And if you find a choirmaster mixed up in it, we’re home and dry.’

Hazleton left thinking that the Toff wasn’t so stuffy after all. But the prospects that looked so promising came to nothing. The Services knew nothing about Anne Marie’s private affairs, and a letter sent by Paling to the sister in France brought a negative reply. A meticulous check on all Louise’s correspondence – which didn’t take long, because there was so little of it – revealed nothing connected with any friendship organisation. Since Louise had always been down to collect the post in the morning her parents did not know whether she had been receiving letters recently, but she had never mentioned such a thing to them as they felt sure she would have done. Allbright seemed to think that the whole thing was an oblique way of suggesting that his daughter was unpopular, and that this reflected on him. There were no friendship circles registered in or around Rawley, although this did not mean much since many of them were unregistered. The garden of Planter’s Place was dug up in the hope of finding Anne Marie’s body, and the nearby fields searched, without result. The characteristics of the Olivetti on which the letter had been typed were circulated, in case it should have come into a dealer’s hands, again without result. Progress on the case came to a dead stop.

The Vanes had at last asked the Lowsons to dinner, and the Services too. Alice had spent the afternoon at the bridge club where she and Mrs Clancy Turnbull won rubber after rubber, and she arrived home in too exhilarated a state to pay much attention to the cooking. It was not a comfortable meal. The first course was some kind of fruit concoction in jelly, and the jelly had not set properly. The boeuf Stroganoff that followed was as tough as leather, and in some mysterious way the sour cream in the sauce appeared to have curdled. The cheese, however, was impeccable. Now they sat out in the garden on a fine July evening, drinking coffee and brandy. It was Penelope who mentioned the Allbright case, saying that the police now seemed to think it was linked to the disappearance of their au pair.

‘I mean, they go on and
on,
asking all sorts of really personal questions about her which I absolutely – can’t answer. I can only keep on repeating that she was a silly little thing. I mean, I’m terribly sorry if something’s happened to her, but I will
not
be made to – feel guilty.’

‘It’s pretty horrible, what they did to the other girl,’ Valerie Lowson said. ‘From what I hear she was pretty well cut to ribbons. We had the police round here. Sally knew the girl slightly. You knew her too, Paul, didn’t you?’

‘Oh yes, indeed. What were your movements on the night in question? And all I’d done was play tennis with her.’ Paul, who wore a blazer with brass buttons and very tight dark trousers, needed only a peaked white cap to look like a member of a yachting club.

‘Cut to ribbons.’ Valerie drank a little of her coffee and shuddered. ‘What kind of person could do a thing like that?’

Dick Service had been working on his pipe. Now it puffed away like a tiny steam engine. ‘Inadequacy. That’s the mark of sex criminals.’

Bob Lowson held up his hand. ‘Silence for the company psychologist. You mean the police ought to be looking for a henpecked man trying to assert himself? I thought it was poisoners who did that.’

‘And other sex criminals. Well, most criminals if it comes to that. They’re over-compensating for some inadequacy in their personal lives. Often it’s got social origins, they have the feeling that other people look down on them because of their birth or their limp or their bad breath or something. Sometimes it’s a straight sexual inadequacy, which can be prompted by anything, a single incident of rejection, the loss of a lover to a rival who’s younger and more attractive–’

‘Impotence?’ Alice was sitting near the french doors leading into her house, her face in shadow. She had said little during dinner. Now she spoke the word with emphasis.

Dick took out his pipe, put it back again. ‘Impotence? Yes, of course.’

Valerie leaned forward. The lamplight illuminated the gap between her formidable breasts. ‘I thought the psychologists believed that all these things go back to childhood.’

Given this golden opportunity, Dick dropped readily into the manner of the professor that he might have been if he had not settled for commerce and cash. ‘Perfectly correct. Everything goes back to childhood. In the life pattern of every serious criminal you will find some childhood disturbance. The most obvious is a broken home, furiously quarrelling parents, one child treated quite differently from the rest. But there are lots of other possibilities, like a financial crisis changing the whole pattern of life, a child’s separation from somebody he’s loved intensely, some traumatic incident at school with a master or a fellow-pupil. Anything that causes insecurity is a breeding ground for crime.’

Bob Lowson held out his glass for another brandy. He had drunk just enough to be genially bellicose, and to be prepared to underline the fact that Dick was, after all, the company psychologist and nothing more. ‘Don’t we all have things of that sort in our lives? I mean, look at me. I had an Irish nurse up to the time I was seven and I can’t tell you the things she used to make me do.’ His laugh boomed out. ‘But it doesn’t seem to have done me much harm.’

‘That would fit you, Paul,’ Alice said. She explained. ‘Paul’s mother ran away with a commercial traveller when he was five. Then his father cleared off and he was brought up by two aunts. They used to beat him when he was naughty, wouldn’t that be traumatic?’

‘Did they beat you, Paul?’ Bob said. ‘Did they now?’ Paul did not reply.

It is natural to suppose that psychiatrists are more perceptive than other people of nuances in speech, but in fact many of them are startlingly impervious to any feelings except their own. So now, although Valerie looked hard at her husband, who gazed blandly back at her, and Penelope Service shifted in her chair, Dick seemed unaware of anything uncomfortable in the scene. ‘Of course we’re all to some extent insecure. It’s the price we pay for being part of a highly complicated civilisation. The whole form of this civilisation – crimes, trials, prison sentences – makes us classify some people as criminals, bad elements in society, others as good elements. Essentially this is wrong. The “bad elements” are the ones on whom the greatest pressures have been applied, that’s all.’

Bob Lowson’s waistband was tight, there was a bulge at his crotch as his body sprawled in the armchair. ‘How do you know what pressures are applied to anybody, or how they adjust to them? How do you know, eh, Dick?’

This time the hectoring tone got through to Dick Service. He shrugged and was silent. There was a skirring sound as Alice’s chair moved and she went inside the house. Valerie said, ‘They seem to think from what I’ve read that two people were involved, a man and a woman. That wouldn’t quite fit in with your theories, surely?’

‘My belief is – and I can’t substantiate this in any way, I’ll give you that – that this might be a case of
folie à
deux
.’

‘And what’s that when it’s at home?’ Paul’s laugh sounded contrived, uneasy. ‘Do you know about this kind of thing, Penelope?’

‘You’d be surprised, the kind of thing I – know about.’ Penelope rolled her eyes. ‘You’d never believe the things people do. Don’t let Dick give you the horrors.’

‘
Folie à deux
is unusual, but not all that rare.’ Dick was not to be deflected. ‘It’s a psychological condition in which two people whose behaviour apart from each other is harmless, or within the limits of what we call normal, behave quite differently when they are together. Then they may commit various anti-social acts. Sometimes they may attack each other, more often their relationship acts as an incitement to criminal acts, arson, theft, murder. My own belief is that
folie à deux
was present to some degree in the Moors Murders. I don’t believe Myra Hindley would ever have done anything of that kind unless she’d met Brady. Or there’s the Cleft Chin case just after the war, when an American deserter met a striptease dancer in London. They both told lies to each other, saying they were gangsters. Then they behaved like gangsters. They ended up killing a taxi-driver.’

‘I’m getting the horrors,’ Paul said. Valerie waved him down.

‘No. I’m interested. So what do you think they’d be like, these people?’

Dick ignored his wife’s warning glance. ‘The man, about forty, some sort of early traumatic experience, personally rather timid. Some subordinate occupation, not likely to own a firm or be managing director of it. If he is, it’s unsuccessful. Possibly married, may have children, unsatisfactory sexual relationship with wife. Very respectable, that’s important. A pillar of society. The woman I don’t see so clearly. I should say she’s subordinate to him – these relationships are almost always based on some master-servant feeling – and so it’s hard to say what she’s like. I’d need to know more about the facts.’

‘You ought to give the police the benefit of all this. I mean it, you really should. I’m sure our friend the Chief Constable would be interested.’ This time the sneer in Bob’s voice was unmistakable. Dick Service coloured. Penelope got up to go, and so did Valerie. There was a crash from inside.

Paul ran in and the others followed him. Alice was half-kneeling in front of an open cupboard door, looking at her hand. Blood was dripping on to the carpet. On the floor was a water jug in fragments. Paul acted quickly and efficiently, getting antiseptic and bandage. Penelope helped Alice to a sofa, where she sat looking straight in front of her.

‘I cut myself. I was looking for photographs to show you, then I knocked over the jug and cut myself.’

Paul tied the bandage. ‘But we don’t keep photographs in with the jugs and glasses, do we, love?’ He said as an afterthought, ‘What photographs?’

They were on the floor. Dick picked them up. They showed two small boys with neatly brushed hair, wearing school uniforms. Behind them like sentinels stood two tall women, each with hands on the shoulders of one of the boys.

‘The aunts?’ Dick said.

‘And Paul. And his brother. Enough to cause a trauma, don’t you agree? I’m sorry, I’m perfectly all right now.’

Ten minutes later they had all gone. Alice said, ‘I’m sorry about the dinner. It was stupid, inefficient. It won’t happen again.’

‘It’s not important.’ He put a hand on her arm and she jerked away.

‘Don’t touch me. I don’t want you to touch me.’

‘You let me bandage your arm.’

‘That was different.’

After they got home the Lowsons argued about whether or not Alice had tried to cut her wrists. ‘With a man like that for a husband she might do anything,’ Valerie said. ‘I tell you, Bob, there’s something wrong with him. Did you hear the way she said “Impotent”?’

‘He’s under lots of stresses, I’ll give you that. I’ll have to do something about it if it goes on.’ He stared at Valerie’s powerful arms. ‘You’re looking very masterful tonight.’

She looked at him and sighed. ‘Not
that
again.’ As they were going up the stairs she said, ‘You were pretty awful to Dick Service. He may be a boring man, but there was no need to go on like that.’

‘If I have behaved badly I must be punished,’ he said meekly.

‘You were so pompous about that case, darling,’ Penelope said as they undressed for bed.

‘Was I? People seemed to be interested.’

‘No, you really were – pompous. Didn’t you see how Bob Lowson was getting at you?’

‘He’d had too much to drink.’

You’ll land yourself out of a job if you’re not careful.’ She paused. ‘Do you suppose it was right, all that stuff you said? About, what do you call it,
folie à
deux
?’

‘Quite possibly. Very likely. Why?’

‘It struck me about Paul. There’s something wrong with that marriage.’

‘So?’

‘I wondered why the police asked him to account for his movements the night that girl was killed. I wondered what he was doing when Anne Marie went.’

‘You’re talking rubbish, Pen.’

‘Poor Anne Marie. She wasn’t much good, but she was rather – sweet. I don’t like to think she might be – dead.’