A Presumption of Death (12 page)

‘Look, I haven’t a clue really where Peter is,’ said Mary. ‘It was just an idle guess.’

‘I wish he were here,’ said Harriet, ‘for all sorts of reasons, but not least because in the middle of all this the local police have a squalid ordinary murder on their hands, and I’ve been asked to help, and of course . . .’

‘That’s a bit much,’ said Lady Mary. ‘Do you want me to ask Charles to get at the Chief Constable of Hertfordshire, and have them called off? Although, of course, you have done quite a bit of detecting yourself, one way and another, haven’t you?’

‘I don’t in the least mind being asked to help. But always before I could talk it over with Peter.’

‘Can’t you write to him?’

‘Of course I can write, care of someone – I’d better not say who; and I’ve even had one or two brief replies, and one transcribed from a telegraph message. But, Mary, think about it; Peter is in hiding and in danger, and when he gets a letter from home he surely doesn’t want reams of stuff about land-girls and villagers and who was fire-watching and who was flirting with whom. He just wants to know that we are all safe and we love him. And even if he could reply, do I want a contribution to cracking a sordid mystery in Paggleham? I don’t want him thinking about that, I want him thinking about how to accomplish his mission and get home safe and sound.’

‘Yes, I see. I do see.’

‘And yet telling him about things was always the great clarifier of thought processes. I’m lost without it.’

‘Then I think you’d better write to him anyway. Just write; don’t send the letters. If you haven’t got it solved when he turns up again he can read them then.’

‘Mary, that’s a very good idea. That’s just what I should do. Would you like a glass of Peter’s brandy as a nightcap?’

The morrow brought both bright sunlight, and Charles. Mrs Trapp put up a picnic – bread and ham and bread and jam – and the family made up a straggling expedition to the wood, carting the picnic basket and old blankets, and a flask of hot tea, and a huge stoneware jar of lemonade. Harriet pushed Paul’s pram as far as the gate to the field below the wood, and Sadie carried him the rest of the way. The holiday atmosphere infected all the children, who were skipping and dancing around the steadily trudging adults, all except Charlie who seemed rather out of sorts.

He tried several times to stop the march: ‘Here will do! Wouldn’t it be nice right here?’ before saying anxiously, ‘We aren’t going right into the wood, are we, Aunt Harriet?’

‘Not right in, Charlie, because some of us like the sunshine. Just on the edge, where we can choose between sun and shade.’

‘Okay,’ he said, visibly relaxing. ‘As long as we don’t go right in.’

‘We won’t,’ said Harriet. ‘But why shouldn’t we?’

‘It’s forbidden,’ he said.

‘No, it’s not. The wood belongs to your Uncle Peter. He bought it from Bateson’s farm last year.’

‘Oh, well, it’s just that it is very dangerous. Not forbidden, just dangerous.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘Someone. Can’t remember. Might have been Sam.’

Harriet was briefly mystified. She made a mental note to find out more about Sam Bateson, since he seemed such a strong influence on Charlie, but their arrival on the verge of the woodland, and the setting up of the picnic distracted her.

‘This is such a treat,’ said Charles. ‘You can’t imagine. Just a sight of green fields after months in London.’

‘The peaceful scene belies its appearance though,’ said Mary. ‘Harriet tells me there has been a local murder. Police baffled. What to do when Lord Peter is absent? Call in wife of famous sleuth.’

‘If I had a pound for every time I’ve been told the police are baffled,’ said Charles mildly, ‘we’d have a place in the country of our own. What’s it about, Harriet?’

Harriet waited until the children were playing a little way off before beginning to explain to Charles what had happened. She put him in the picture as well as she could. ‘It’s deeply mystifying,’ she said in conclusion, ‘because nobody knows much about the poor girl, though I’ve put Miss Climpson on to that. And because all – and I mean all – the people whose feelings she had hurt, or outraged might be a better word, you know what village people are like, Charles, very conservative. Where was I? Yes, all the possible probable and improbable suspects were down one of the shelters when it happened. You could hardly think of a more solid alibi. Besides—’

‘Besides what?’ he said. He was propped up on one elbow, lounging on the picnic blanket, with Mary stretched out beside him. She looked as contented and sleepy as a cat in a warm spot, but Charles was giving Harriet his full attention with an expression of brotherly concern.

‘However infuriating she may have been, however tarty people here found her, I don’t somehow think it would add up to the way she died. The way she was killed was so violent – so hands-on violent. That’s a lot of hatred. So that a wandering maniac who just encountered her by accident in the street seems the only possibility, and it can’t be a very likely one, besides offering no leads to the police at all.’

Charles reached round his wife for the pocket of the jacket that lay beside her, and pulled pencil and a little note-pad out of it.

‘Well, let’s try an orderly approach to it,’ he said. ‘If everybody in the village who had any motive based on knowing the woman was in the shelters, then either, one, the murderer knew her before she got here, and came to find her. Or, two, there is in fact a way out of one or other of those shelters. Or, three, one or other of the very few people who were outside – fire-watching or on ARP duties or what have you – is the one you want. Or, four, she wasn’t killed because of who she was, but because of where she was.’

‘She was in the middle of a village high street, under a bright moon,’ said Harriet. ‘And just seconds before, nearly the entire population of the village and half the airmen posted in East Anglia had been scurrying about.’

‘Perhaps she saw something being done by someone who had supposed that they would not be seen, precisely because everyone would be in the shelter.’

‘I don’t think a wandering maniac can be the right option, Charles,’ Mary chipped in, ‘because how would a wandering maniac have known about a dance for the airmen, and then a practice air-raid?’

‘The wandering maniac doesn’t need to have known about anything; he isn’t planning his crime, he just in a mad way does it at a moment’s notice,’ said Harriet. ‘That’s what makes him such an enticing possibility. Perhaps the only possibility.’

‘Hold on,’ said Charles. ‘I know our dear Peter has a mind that hops all over the place, and I know how often his is the method that delivers the goods. But like most policemen I can’t do detecting by jumping to conclusions. Dogged is what I have to be. Tempting as he is, I wouldn’t go for the wandering maniac until I had carefully excluded the other possibilities.’ He tore the page he had been writing on out of his notebook, and handed it to her.

‘Your Superintendent Kirk is a good man,’ he added. ‘I expect he’s dogged too, but he gets results. I rather admire a policeman who doesn’t mind asking for help. Most of us can use it from time to time.’

They were interrupted by Charlie, leaving the game of rolling down the sloping field below them to come and ask his father, ‘Dad, when we get home could you have a look at my crystal set?’

Charles Parker promised his son that he would.

Miss Climpson’s letter came on the following Monday. The house was very quiet, saying goodbye to their parents again having visibly depressed the Parker children, and a thin drizzling rain having ruled out cricket on the lawn. They were upstairs reading, or model making, and Harriet sat down to read Miss Climpson carefully.

I went down to Brighton last week, as soon as I got your letter, and I found Wendy Percival’s parents quite easily, by asking at the offices of the local newspaper. Even in these days the murder of a local girl is headline news. The Percivals did not want to talk to me at first, although I tried my most SYMPATHETIC manner, but when I explained that Lord Peter had sent me to help in the hunt for the murderer they changed their minds, and asked me in, and helped me with all my questions. I hope you don’t think it very SHOCKING of me, Lady Peter to say that Lord Peter had sent me, but it’s very
close
to the truth, because I’m sure if he were at home he
would
have sent me, and I’m afraid I get used to telling little white lies in my line of work.

I must just tell you something QUITE beside the point, dear Lady Peter: Mrs Percival told me with great indignation that in the first week of the war last September troops arrived in the town, and put barbed-wire rolls along all the beaches, and those concrete tank obstacles on the promenade in case of enemy invasion. And very shortly afterwards train-loads of evacuees arrived, to take refuge in a place of safety. ‘I
ask
you!’ she said. I told her it wasn’t our place to ask, really, but it does make you wonder who is in charge, Lady Peter, doesn’t it?

Ever your sincere friend, and do please give my salutations and good wishes to
dear
Lord Peter, if you are able to write.

And, well, thought Harriet, who
was
in charge? People like her sister-in-law, Helen, Duchess of Denver, who thought, or so she had said, that it would take only one bomb falling on a seaside resort packed with children from London and the industrial towns to create a total collapse of morale, and civic disobedience. Meanwhile their grip on their own duties was such that they could fortify a beach and send hundreds of children to play on it in the same week . . .

Setting herself to expound the case of Wendy Percival, including everything she knew about it, in an orderly manner was an interesting discipline. Also it brought Peter’s presence almost palpably into the room; it was for him she was writing, and to his thought patterns, his likely questions and reactions that she was addressing herself. And this process brought before her very lucidly and immediately a pre-eminent difficulty. She could hear Peter’s light and rapid tones, with that undertow of seriousness audible to her when he discussed a crime; how had she ever managed to believe that he took these matters lightly, as a game of some kind? How hard it was now to remember how little she had once known and understood him! She could hear him saying that motives were a distraction. Never mind why, he used always to say, when you know how you know who. But, Peter, this time, she told him, writing rapidly in her large scrawling hand, there just isn’t any mystery about how. You could ask the pathologist if you were here, and he would tell you in rather sickening detail about a lethal assault.
Why
is the problem – it just is. When we know why we’ll know who, or when we know who we’ll know why. And so far attempts to find a motive are failures. Of course people are muttering about the victim’s morals, but if every young woman who behaved like that were murdered we’d have bodies piled up like haystacks. It’s just not
substantial
enough a reason. We must be looking for something much more personal. And the dead can’t tell us, can they?