Sins of the Fathers (24 page)

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.

Outwardly he was cold. He was coatless and the night was chilly. You expect a winter's night to be cold, he thought. There was something depressing and wrong about a cold summer night. November with flowers, a November wind that ruffled the ripe leaves of summer. He must not find omens in nature.

"What d'you call it," he said to Charles, "when you ascribe emotions to nature? What's the expression?"

"The Pathetic Fallacy," Charles said. Archery shivered.

"This is the house," he said. They got out. Number twenty-four was in darkness upstairs and down. "She's probably in bed."

"Then she'll have to get up," said Charles and rang the bell. He rang again and again. "Pointless," he said. "Can we get round the back?"

Archery said, "Through here," and led Charles through the sandy arch. It was like a cavern, he thought, touching the walls. He expected them to be clammy but they were dry and prickly to the touch. They emerged into a dark pool among patches of light which came from french windows all along the backs of houses. A yellow square segmented by black bars lay on each shadowed garden but none came from Mrs. Crilling's window.

"She must be out," said Archery as they opened the little gate in the wire fence. "We know so little about them. We don't know where she'd go or who her friends are."

Through the first window the kitchen and the hall showed dark and empty. To reach the french windows they had to push through a tangle of wet nettles which stung their hands. "Pity we didn't bring a torch."

"We haven't
got
a torch," Archery objected. He peered in. "I've got matches."

The first he struck showed him the room as he had seen it before, a muddle of flung-down clothes and stacked newspapers. The match died and he dropped it on wet concrete. By the light of a second he saw that on the table were the remains of a meal, cut bread still in its paper wrapping, a cup and saucer, a jam jar, a single plate coated with something yellow and congealed. "We might as well go," he said. "She isn't here."

"The door's not locked," said Charles. He lifted the latch and opened it quietly. There came to them at once a peculiar and unidentifiable odour of fruit and of alcohol.

"You can't go in. There isn't the slightest justification for breaking in."

"I haven't broken anything." Charles's foot was over the threshold, but he stopped and said over his shoulder to his father, "Don't you think there's something odd here? Don't you feel it?"

Archery shrugged. They were both in the room now. The smell was very strong but they could see nothing but the dim outlines of cluttered furniture.

"The light switch is on the left by the door," he said. "I'll find it." He had forgotten that his son was a man, that his son's adult sense of responsibility had brought them there. In that dark, evilly scented place, they were just a parent and his child. He must not do as Mrs. Crilling had done and let the child go first. "Wait there," he said. He felt his way along the side of the table, pushed a small armchair out of his path, squeezed behind the sofa and felt for the switch. "Wait there!" he cried again, much more sharply and in a spasm of real fear. Previously in his passage across the room his feet had come into contact with debris on the floor, a shoe, he thought, a book dropped face downwards. Now the obstruction was larger and more solid. His scalp crept. Clothes, yes, and within those clothes something heavy and inert. He dropped to his knees, thrusting forward hands to palpate and fumble. "Dear God...!"

"What is it? What the hell is it? Can't you find the light?"

Archery could not speak. He had withdrawn his hands and they were wet and sticky. Charles had crossed the room. Light pouring into and banishing that darkness was a physical pain. Archery closed his eyes. Above him he heard Charles make an inarticulate sound.

He opened his eyes and the first thing he saw was that his hands were red. Charles said, "Don't look!" and he knew that his own lips had been trying to frame those words. They were not policemen, not used to sights such as this, and each tried to save the other from seeing.

Each had to look. Mrs. Crilling lay spread on the floor between the sofa and the wall and she was quite dead. The chill of her body came up to Archery's hands through the pink flounces that covered it from neck to ankles. He had seen that neck and at once had looked away from the stocking that made a ligature around it.

"But she's all over blood," said Charles, "It's as if—God!—as if someone had sprinkled her with it."
 

*17*

I held my tongue and spake nothing; I kept silence, yea, even from good words; but it was pain and grief to me.
—Psalm 39. The Burial of the Dead

"It isn't blood," said Wexford. "Don't you know what it is? Couldn't you smell it?" He lifted the bottle someone had found under the sideboard and held it aloft. Archery sat on the sofa in Mrs. Crilling's living room, worn, tired, utterly spent. Doors banged and footsteps sounded as Wexford's two men searched the other room. The people upstairs had come in at midnight, Saturday night happy, the man a little drunk. The woman had had hysterics during Wexford's questioning.

They had taken the body away and Charles moved in his chair round so that he could not see the crimson splashes of cherry brandy.

"But why? Why did it happen?" he whispered.

"Your father knows why." Wexford stared at Archery, his grey gimlet eyes deep and opaque. He squatted opposite them on a low chair with wooden arms. "As for me, I don't know but I can guess. I can't help feeling I've seen something like this before, a long, long time ago. Sixteen years to be exact. A pink frilly dress that a little girl could never wear again because it was spoilt with blood."

Outside the rain had begun again and water lashed against the windows making them rattle. It would be cold now inside Victor's Piece, cold and eerie like a deserted castle in a wood of wet trees. The Chief Inspector had an extra uncanny sense that almost amounted to telepathy. Archery willed his thoughts to alter course lest Wexford should divine them, but the question came before he could rid his mind of its pictures.

"Come on, Mr Archery, where is she?"

"Where is who?"

"The daughter."

"What makes you think I know?"

"Listen to me," said Wexford. The last person we've talked to who saw her was a chemist in Kingsmarkham. Oh, yes, we went to all the chemists first naturally. This one remembers that when she was in the shop there were two men and a girl there too, a young man and an elder one, tall, fair, obviously father and son."

"I didn't speak to her then," Archery said truthfully. The smell sickened him. He wanted nothing but sleep and peace and to get out of this room where Wexford had kept them since they had telephoned him.

"Mrs. Crilling's been dead six or seven hours. It's ten to three now and you left the Olive at a quarter to eight. The barman saw you come in at ten. Where did you go, Mr. Archery?"

He sat silent. Years and years ago—Oh, centuries ago!—it had been like this in school. You own up, you betray someone, or everyone suffers. Funny, once before he had thought of Wexford as a kind of headmaster.

"You know where she is," Wexford said. His voice was loud, threatening, ominous. "D'you want to be an accessory? Is that what you want?"

Archery closed his eyes. Quite suddenly he knew why he was prevaricating. He wanted the very thing that Charles had warned him might happen and although it was contrary to his religion, wicked even, he wanted it with all his heart.

Charles said, "Father..." and when he got no reply shrugged, turned his dull shocked eyes to Wexford. "Oh, what the hell? She's at Victor's Piece."

Archery realised that he had been holding his breath. He let it out in a deep sigh. "In one of the bedrooms," he said, "looking at the coach house and dreaming of a heap of sand. She asked what they would do to her and I didn't understand. What will they do to her?"

Wexford got up. "Well, sir..." Archery noted that "sir" as one might notice the re-assuming of a velvet glove. "You know as well as I do that it's no longer lawful to punish with death for certain..." His eyes flickered over the place where Mrs. Criling had lain. "...certain heinous and grievous offences."

"Will you let us go now?" Charles asked.

"Until tomorrow," said Wexford.

The rain met them at the front door like a wave or a wall of spray. For the past half hour it had been drumming on the roof of the car and seeping in through the half-open quarter light. There was water lying in a small pool at Archery's feet but he was too tired to notice or care.

Charles came with him into his bedroom.

"I shouldn't ask you now," he said. "It's almost morning and God knows what we'll have to go through tomorrow, but I have to know. I'd rather know. But what else did she tell you, that girl at Victor's Piece?"

Archery had heard of people pacing a room like caged beasts. He had never imagined himself so strung with tension that in spite of utter exhaustion he would have to find release by crossing and re-crossing a floor, picking up objects, replacing them, his hands shaking. Charles waited, too wretched even for impatience. His letter to Tess lay in its envelope on the dressing table and beside it the card from the gift shop. Archery picked it up and kneaded it in his hands, crumpling the deckle edging. Then he went up to his son, put his hands gently on his shoulders and looked into the eyes that were young replicas of his own.

"What she told me," he said, "needn't matter to you. It would be like—well, someone else's nightmare," Charles did not move. "If you will only tell me where you saw the verse that is printed on this card."
 

The morning was grey and cool, such a morning as occurs perhaps three hundred times a year out of the three hundred and sixty-five, when there is neither rain nor sun, frost nor fog. It was a limbo of a morning. The policeman on the crossing had covered his shirt sleeves with his dark jacket, the striped shop blinds were rolled up and sluggish steps had grown brisk.

Inspector Burden escorted Archery along the drying pavements to the police station. Archery was ashamed to answer Burden's kindly question as to how he had slept. He had slept heavily and soundly. Perhaps he would also have slept dreamlessly had he known what the inspector now told him, that Elizabeth Crilling was alive.

"She came with us quite willing," Burden said and added rather indiscreetly, "To tell you the truth, sir, I've never seen her so calm and sane and—well, at peace, really."

"You want to go home, I suppose," Wexford said when Burden had left them alone in the blue and yellow office. "You'll have to come back for the inquest and the magistrates' court hearing. You found the body."

Archery sighed. "Elizabeth found a body sixteen years ago. If it hadn't been for her mother's self-seeking vanity, greed for something she had no claim to—that would never have happened. You might say that that greed reached out and destroyed long after its original purpose had been frustrated. Or you might say that Elizabeth bore her mother a grudge because Mrs. Crilling would never let her talk about Painter and bring her terrors to the light of day."

"You might," said Wexford. "It could be all those things. And it could be that when Liz left the chemist's she went back to Glebe Road, Mrs. Crilling was afraid to ask for another prescription, so Liz, in the addict's frenzy, strangled her."

"May I see her?"

"I'm afraid not. I'm beginning to guess just what she saw sixteen years ago and what she told you last night."

"After I'd talked to her I went to see Dr. Crocker. I want you to look at this." Archery gave Wexford Colonel Plashet's letter, silently indicating the relevant passage with his bandaged finger. "Poor Elizabeth," he murmured. "She wanted to give Tess a dress for her fifth birthday. Unless Tess has changed a lot it wouldn't have meant much to her."

Wexford read, closed his eyes briefly and then gave a smile. "I see," he said slowly and restored the letter to its envelope.

"I am right, aren't I? I'm not juggling things, imagining things? You see, I can't trust my own judgment any more. I have to have an opinion from an expert in deduction. I've been to Forby, I've seen a photograph, I've got a letter and I've talked to a doctor. If you had the same clues would you have come to the same conclusions?"