Sins of the Fathers (10 page)

"We met in court this morning. You wrote to me..."

He stopped. She had thrust her face within inches of his and seemed to be scrutinising it. Then she stepped back and gave a long chattering laugh which the budgerigar echoed.

"Mrs. Crilling, are you all right? Is there anything I can do?"

She clutched her throat and the laugh died away in a rising wheeze. "Tablets ... asthma..." she gasped. He was puzzled and shocked, but he reached behind him for the bottle of tablets on the littered mantelpiece. "Give me my tablets and then you can ... you can get out!"

"I'm sorry if I've done anything to distress you."

She made no attempt to take a tablet but held the bottle up against her quaking chest. The movement made the tablets rattle and the bird, fluttering its wings and beating against the bars, began a frenzied crescendo, half song and half pain.

"Where's my baby?" Did she mean Elizabeth? She must mean Elizabeth.

"She's gone out. I met her in the porch. Mrs. Crilling, can I get you a glass of water? Can I make you a cup of tea?"

"Tea? What do I want with tea? That's what she said this morning, that police girl. Come and have a cup of tea, Mrs. Crilling." A terrible spasm shook her and she fell back against the chair, fighting for breath. "You ... my baby ... I thought you were my friend ... Aaah!"

Archery was really frightened now. He plunged from the room into the dirty kitchen and filled a cup with water. The window ledge was stacked with empty chemist's bottles and there was a filthy hypodermic beside an equally dirty eye dropper. When he came back she was still wheezing and jerking. Should he make her take the tablets, dare he? On the bottle label were the words:
Mrs. J. Crilling. Take two when needed.
He rattled two into his hands and, supporting her with his other arm, forced them into her mouth. It was all he could do to suppress the shudder of distaste when she dribbled and choked over the water.

"Filthy ... nasty," she mumbled. He half-eased, half-rolled her into the chair and pulled together the gaping edges of the dressing gown. Moved with pity and with horror, he knelt down beside her.

"I will be your friend if you want me to be," he said soothingly.

The words had the opposite effect. She made a tremendous effort to draw breath. Her lips split open and he could see her tongue rising and quivering against the roof of her mouth.

"Not my friend ... enemy ... police friend! Take my baby away ... I saw you with them ... I watched you come out with them." He drew back from her, rising. Never would he have believed her capable of screaming after that spasm and when the scream came, as clear and ear-splitting as a child's, he felt his hands go up to his face. "...Not let them get her in there! Not in the prison! They'll find it out in there. She'll tell them ... my baby ... She'll have to tell them!" With a sudden galvanic jerk she reared up, her mouth open and her arms flailing. They'll find it all out. I'll kill her first, kill her ... D'you hear?"

The french windows stood open. Archery staggered back into the sun against a stinging prickling wall of weeds. Mrs. Crilling's incoherent gasps had swollen into a stream of obscenity. There was a gate in the wire netting fence. He unlatched it, wiping the sweat from his forehead, and stepped into the cool dark cave of the sand-walled arch.
 

"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 foi 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 physiotherapist at the time. Anyway, the upshot of it all was that the boyfriend 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 boyfriend 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 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 has 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 or 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 kiddies 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.