Wolf to the Slaughter (10 page)

‘Be more careful next time,’ he said. ‘We’ll be keeping an eye on you.’ He saw that he had made her angry, for the colour faded utterly from her face. It was as if she had blushed white. There was a thin silver chain round her neck. As a schoolboy, Drayton had read the Song of Songs, hoping for something salacious. A line came back to him. He had not known what it meant, but now he knew what it meant for him. Thou hast ravished my heart with the chain of thy neck . . .

‘An eye on us?’

‘This shop’s got a bad enough reputation as it is.’ He didn’t give a damn about the shop’s reputation, but he wanted to stay there, hang it out as long as he could. ‘If I were your father with a nice little business like this I wouldn’t touch that filth.’

She followed his glance at the magazines. ‘Some like them,’ she said. Her eyes had returned to his face. He had the notion that she was digesting the fact that he was a policeman and searching for some brand mark he ought to carry about on him. ‘If you’ve finished with the sermon, I’ve got Dad’s tea to get and I’m going to the pictures straight after. Last house is seven thirty.’

‘Mustn’t keep what’s-his-name waiting,’ Drayton sneered.

He could see he had nettled her. ‘His name’s Ray if you must know and he lodged with us,’ she said. ‘He’s gone, left. Oh, come off it. You needn’t look like that. I know you saw me with him. So what? It’s not a crime, is it? Don’t you ever stop being a cop?’

‘Who said anything about a crime? I get enough crime in the daytime without the evenings.’ He went to the door and looked back at her. The grey eyes were large and luminous and they had a trick of appearing always full of unshed tears. ‘May be I wished I’d been in his shoes,’ he said.

She took a step towards him. ‘You’re kidding.’

‘Men usually kid you about that, do they?’

Her fingers went up to the little insincere smile that was just beginning and she tucked one of the bitten nails between her lips.

‘What exactly are you trying to say?’

Now she looked frightened. He wondered if he had been wrong about her and if she were really as inexperienced and innocent as a tempera madonna. There was no gentleness in him and he did not know how to be soft and kind.

‘If I’m kidding,’ he said, ‘I won’t be outside the cinema at seven thirty.’ Then he slammed the door and the bell tinkled through the old sagging house.

‘Believe it or not,’ Wexford said, ‘Monkey doesn’t want to go home. He’s had a nice comfortable bed at Ruby’s and God knows how many free meals, but he’d rather spend his weekend in what he calls “this contemporary-type nick”. He’s scared stiff of coming face to face with Ruby. Just as well, since I haven’t the faintest idea what to charge him with.’

‘Makes a change,’ Burden grinned. ‘Our customers appreciating the amenities. May Be we could getourselves in the AA Guide, three-star hotel, specially adapted for those with previous convictions. Anything from the lab yet?’

‘No, and I’ll take my oath there won’t be. We’ve only got Ruby’s and Monkey’s word that it was blood at all. You saw it, you saw what she’d done to that carpet. Char-ing may be a lowly trade, but Ruby’s at the top of it. If I were Mrs Harper I wouldn’t grudge a few sheets of handmade paper to get my house cleaned like that. She must have nearly killed herself washing that carpet. The lab say she used every cleanser in the book short of caustic soda. Oh, sure, they can sort out the Chemiglo from the Spotaway. The trouble is they can’t sort out the blood, can’t even say what group it is.’

‘But they’re still working on it?’

‘Be working on it for days. They’ve got buckets full of muck from the pipes and drains. I’ll be very surprised if they find anything. It’s my bet our couple never went anywhere but that room in which they doubtless left a couple of hundred fingerprints . . .’

‘All carefully removed by the Queen of the Chars,’ Burden finished for him. ‘The girl may be still alive, sir.’

‘Because they left together and because the man’s getting her out of there at all seems to show regret at what he’d done? I’ve had all the hospitals and all the GP’s checked, Mike. They haven’t had sight nor sound of anyone with stab wounds. And it must have been stabbing, a blow on the head and that much loss of blood and the victim would never have been able to stand up, let alone stagger to a car. Moreover, if she’s alive, where is she? It may only be assault we’re up against or unlawful wounding, but whatever it is, we have to clear it up.’

Monkey Matthews gave them a crafty look when they returned to him.

‘I’ve run out of fags.’

‘I daresay Detective Constable Bryant will get you some if you ask him nicely. What d’you want, Weights?’

‘You’re joking,’ said Monkey, stuffing a grubby paw into his jacket pocket. ‘Forty Benson and Hedges Special Filter,’ he said importantly and he brought out a pound note from a rustling mass that might indicate the presence of others like it. ‘Better make it sixty.’

‘Should last you till breakfast,’ said Wexford. ‘Rolling in it, aren’t you? I can’t help wondering if that’s Geoff Smith’s fee for silence you’re sending up in smoke.’ Stroking his chin, his head on one side, he looked speculatively into the other’s simian face. ‘How did you know her name was Ann?’ he asked almost lightly and with a deceptive smoothness.

‘Oh, you’re round the twist,’ Monkey said crossly. ‘You don’t never listen to what you’re told.’

When they came out of the cinema a light rain was falling, very little more than a clammy mist. Lamps glowed through the translucence, orange, gold and pearl-coloured. The cinema traffic coming from the car park swam out of the mist like subaqueous creatures surfacing with a gurgle and a splash. Drayton took the girl’s arm to shepherd her across the road and left it there when they reached the pavement. This, the first contact he had ever had with her body, sent a tremor through him and made his mouth dry. He could feel the warmth from her skin just beneath the armpit.

‘Enjoy the picture?’ he asked her.

‘It was all right. I don‘t like sub-titles much, I couldn’t understand half of it. All that stuff about the woman letting the policeman be her lover if he wouldn’t tell about her stealing the watch.’

‘I daresay it happens. You don’t know what goes on in these foreign places.’ He was not displeased that the film had been sexy and that she wanted to talk about the sexiest part of the plot. With girls, that kind of talk was often an indication of intent, a way of getting on to the subject. Thank God, it wasn’t the beginning of the week when they’d been showing that thing about a Russian battleship. ‘You thinking of nicking any watches?’ he said. She blushed vividly in the lamplight. ‘Remember what the character in the film said, or what the sub-title said he said. “You know my price, Dolores.” ’

She smiled her close-lips smile, then said, ‘You are awful.’

‘Not me, I didn’t write the script.’

She was wearing high heels and she was almost as tall as he. The perfume she had put on was much too old for her and it had nothing to do with the scent of flowers. Drayton wondered if her words had meant anything and if the perfume had been specially put on for his benefit. It was hard to tell how calculating girls were. Was she giving him an invitation or was the scent and the pale silvery stuff on her eyelids worn as a uniform might be, the battledress of the great female regiment who read the magazines she sold?

‘It’s early,’ he said, ‘only a quarter to eleven. Want to go for a walk down by the river?’ It was under the trees there that he had seen her on Monday. Those trees arched dripping into the brown water, but under them the gravel path was well-drained and here and there was a wooden seat sheltered by branches.

‘I can’t. I mustn’t be late home.’

‘Some other night, then.’

‘It’s cold,’ she said. ‘It’s always raining. You can’t go to the pictures every night.’

‘Where did you go with him?’

She bent down to straighten her stocking. The puddles she had stepped in had made dark grey splashes on the backs of her legs. The way she stretched her fingers and drew them up the calves was more provocative than all the perfume in the world.

‘He hired a car.’

‘I’ll hire one,’ Drayton said. They had come to the shop door. The alley between Grover’s and the florist’s next door was a walled lane that ended in a couple of garages. Its cobbles were brown and wet like stones on a cave floor that the tide has washed. She looked up at the high wall of her own home and at the blank unlit windows.

‘You don’t have to go in for a bit,’ he said. ‘Come under here, out of the rain.’ There was no more shelter there than in the open street but it was darker. At their feet a little gutter stream flowed. He took her hand. ‘I’ll hire a car tomorrow.’

‘All right,’

‘What’s the matter?’ He spoke harshly, irritably, for he wanted to contemplate her face in repose, not working with anxiety, her eyes darting from one end of the alley to the other and up at the rain-washed wall. He would have liked eagerness, at least complaisance. She seemed afraid that they were watched and he thought of the thin beady-eyed mother and the mysterious father lying sick behind that brick bastion. ‘Not scared of your parents, are you?’

‘No, it’s you. The way you look at me.’

He was nearly offended. The way he looked at her was something calculated and studied, a long, cold and intense stare that a good many girls had found exciting. A stronger desire than he had ever felt was increasing that intensity and making a contrived mannerism real. The poverty of her response almost killed it and he would have turned away from her to walk off alone into the wet night but for the two little hands which touched his coat and then crept up to his shoulders.

‘It’s you that frightens me,’ she said. ‘But that’s what you want, isn’t it?’

‘You know what I want,’ he said and he brought his mouth down on hers, holding her body away from the cold, clammy wall. At first she was limp and unresisting. Then her arms went round him with a fierce abandon and as her lips parted under his, he felt a great thrill of triumph.

Above them a light appeared as a bright orange rectangle on the dark bricks. Before he opened his eyes Drayton felt it like pain on his eyelids.

She pulled away from him slowly with a long ‘Aah!’ of pleasure, a sigh of pleasure only begun to be cut short. ‘They’re waiting up for me.’ Her breath was light and fast. ‘I must go in.’

‘Tomorrow,’ he said, ‘tomorrow.’

She could not find her key at first and it excited him to see her fumbling and hear her swearing softly under her breath. He had caused this sudden gaucheness, this disorientation, and it filled his masculine ego with the joy of conquest.

‘Tomorrow, then.’ The smile came, shy and tantalising. Then the door closed on her and the bell made its cold harsh music.

When he was alone in the alley and the light from above had gone out, he stood where they had kissed and passed his forefinger across his lips. The rain was still falling and the street lamp glowed with a greenish sulphurous light. He came out into this light and looked at his finger with the long smear of pale lipstick. It was not pink but the colour of suntanned flesh and he fancied that with it she had left on his mouth something of herself, a grain of skin or a trace of sweat. On the front of his coat was a long fair hair. To have these vestiges of her was in itself a kind of possession. Alone in the wet street, he passed his tongue lightly across his finger and he shivered.

A cat came out of the alley and slunk into a doorway, its fur dewed with fine drops. There was no visible sky, just vapour, and beyond the vapour blackness. Drayton put up his hood and walked home to his lodgings.

To the south of Kingsmarkham and overshadowing the eastern and southern sides of Pomfret lie twenty or thirty square miles of pine woods. This is Cheriton Forest. It is a man-made plantation, consisting mostly of firs and larches, and it has a stark un-English beauty, giving to the green plains beneath it the appearance of an Alpine meadow.

A new estate of small white houses has sprung up on the Pomfret side of the forest. With their coloured front doors and their decorations of cedar board they are not unlike chalets. To one of these, a yellow-painted house with a new car port, Detective Sergeant Martin took himself on Sunday morning, looking for a man called Kirkpatrick.

The door was opened promptly by a girl of about seven, a child with large eyes and a cowed look. Martin waited on the doorstep while she went to find her mother. The house was built on an open plan and he could see a little boy, as pale and wary as his sister, playing apathetically on the floor with alphabet bricks. The woman who came at last had a pugnacious face. She had the roseate breathless look of those who suffer from high blood pressure. Her blonde hair was dressed in tight shiny curls and she wore red-rimmed glasses. Martin introduced himself and asked for her husband.

‘Is it about the car?’ Mrs Kirkpatrick said savagely.

‘In a way.’

The children crept up to their mother and stood staring.

‘Well, you can see he isn’t here, can’t you? If he’s crashed the car I can’t say I’m sorry. I’d say good riddance. I hope it’s a total write-off. When he brought it home here last Monday, I said, “Don’t think you’ll get me to go joy-riding in that thing. I’d rather walk. If I wanted to make an exhibition of myself in a pink and white car with purple stripes I’d go on the dodgems at Brighton,” I said.’

Martin blinked at her. He had no idea what she meant.

‘The other thing he had,’ she said, ‘that was bad enough. Great old-fashioned black Morris like ahearse. God knows, we must be the laughing stock of all the neighbours.’ She suddenly became aware of the staring listening children. ‘How many times have I told you not to come poking your noses into my private business?’ she said viciously. The boy wandered back to his bricks, but it took a savage push to move the little girl. ‘Now, then,’ she said to Martin. ‘What’s he done? What d’you want him for?’