A Clubbable Woman (18 page)

‘… if we in our own bumbling way had caught up with him? No. Well, thank you both very much indeed for your time.’

‘Not at all,’ said Noolan. ‘I’m sorry yours has been wasted.’

Hurst left without a word.

‘Andy,’ said Noolan. ‘Don’t make such a big noise round the Club, eh? You put me in an embarrassing position.’

‘I shall be so quiet you’ll never notice me. In fact, with your permission, I’ll start now and stop here for a while. All the best fictional detectives do it. Have long thinks, I mean.’

‘Be our guest,’ said Noolan and went back into the social room leaving the large figure, head wreathed in cigarette smoke, seated at the top of the big committee- sized table.

He was still there two hours later when the whistle went for no-side.

‘A curious game,’ said Antony as they drove away from the ground. ‘Especially when seen through a glass, distantly.’

They hadn’t cared to join the small crowd of spectators in the old stand, but had remained in the car parked about twenty-five yards behind one of the goals.

‘A poor game,’ replied Connon, ‘seen from no matter what distance.’

‘Why?’ asked Antony, with a polite interest which ten minutes later had turned into the real thing.

Whatever else you know, Jenny’s father, he thought, you certainly know your rugby. At least I think that if I knew my rugby, I would be in a good position to acknowledge that you know yours.

But he knew enough about the game to recognize the scope and justice of Connon’s analysis.

‘Now I feel I could watch the game again,’ he said when Connon finished.

‘Nothing is repeatable,’ said the older man. ‘Not even the moments that we relive a thousand times.’

Connon fell silent and Antony, great talker though he was, knew when conversation was not being invited. The rest of the drive home passed in almost complete silence.

But I like him, thought Antony as they got out of the car. He might do for me very well. I could not bear a dull father-in-law. And Jenny, now Jenny, there’s the find of the century.

He went towards the front door with pleasurable anticipation. But there was no reply to his enthusiastic bell-ringing and Connon, coming from closing the garage, had to get his key out to open the door.

The house was quiet and felt empty.

‘Jenny! Jenny!’ called Connon.

There was no reply.

‘She can’t have gone far,’ said Connon. ‘She’ll be back in a minute I expect. Probably gone round the corner to the shops.’

Probably, thought Antony, but he didn’t feel happy.

He went upstairs to change out of the heavy boots he had (unnecessarily) decided were good rugby-watching gear.

As he passed Jenny’s bedroom door, he saw it was ajar. He pushed it gently open and looked in.

The room was quite empty. He looked at the furnishings, the pictures, the bed with its rich crimson bedspread. Seated on top of it was a fluffy white dog, its red tongue grotesquely hanging out, its head lolling to the side. It was a nightgown case and his eyes lit up as he saw it.

Quickly he moved into his own room, grabbed his pyjama top and returned. His intention was simple, to substitute this for whatever garment he found in the dog.

But as he went across the room to the bed, something on the dressing-table caught his eye. It was a large sheet of paper with writing all over it.

Antony was a man with considerable respect for individual privacy. Looking at other people’s letters was not something that attracted him. But something about the sheet of paper, lying with its contents reflected unreadably in the mirror, drew him towards it.

He picked it up.

‘Dear Christ,’ he said.

He read it again.

‘Dear mother of God!’ he said.

His pyjama-top dropped from his hand.

‘Antony? Anything wrong?’

Connon stood in the door.

‘I found this. On her dressing-table.’

He reached out the letter.

Connon read it with one sweep of the eyes. Then without a word he turned and ran downstairs. Antony walking out of the room to the landing heard him dialling the telephone.

Three numbers only.

‘Give me the police,’ he said. ‘Quick.’

‘As obscene letters go,’ said Dalziel, ‘I’ve seen worse.’

‘Is that supposed to be some consolation?’ asked Connon.

‘It’s pretty graphic I should have thought,’ remarked Antony, trying to hide his tremendous concern under a calm exterior.

‘Oh yes. It’s graphic. It’s that all right. Crudely so. But it’s not perverted. This is all good straightforward stuff.’

‘For God’s sake, Dalziel!’ exploded Connon. ‘Can we cut the expert critical review and get on with the job of finding out where Jenny is!’

Dalziel made squelchy soothing noises in his throat.

‘Take it easy,’ he said. ‘We have her description out. Every policeman in town’s on the look out for her. I’m sure she’ll have come to no harm.’

‘Thanks,’ said Connon. ‘You realize there was no envelope with this thing. And there’s only one post on Saturday and this had arrived well before I left?’

‘Yes, sir. We realize that. So now you’re imagining that he, whoever he is, popped this through the letter-box, waited till she had had time to read it, then rang the bell and invited her to take a stroll with him. Now is that likely?’

‘Only if,’ said Connon slowly, ‘only if it was someone she knew well.’

The same thought had crossed Dalziel’s mind much earlier, but he still found it hard to believe. In his experience those who wrote letters like this were unlikely to follow them up, at least so rapidly.

But there was something disturbing about the letter. Not just in its contents. He had been speaking nothing less than the truth when he put it well down the list of those he had seen.

No, there was something else.

The door of the lounge opened, and Pascoe came in. They all looked at him, Dalziel interrogatively, Antony hopefully, Connon fearfully.

A single shake of the head did for them all. He went across the room to Dalziel.

‘Nothing yet, sir. We’ve got everything on it we can.’

He was plainly as concerned as anyone else there, really concerned, not just professionally.

Antony found himself quite liking Laurel after all.

He went up to the two detectives and coughed delicately.

‘Forgive me for my effrontery,’ he said. ‘But my father always taught me never to be afraid of pointing out the obvious. I’m sure you have noticed the implication of the letter, that the writer has in fact observed Jenny undressing for bed? I just wondered if you also knew, as I’m sure you do, that her bedroom’s at the rear of the house?’

‘So?’ said Dalziel.

‘Well, as I know from personal experience it’s almost impossible to get to the rear of this house from the front when the door at the end of the passageway between the garage and the house wall is locked. There is a very stout trellis on the other side of the house, with an equally well-barred door in it.’

‘Through someone else’s garden?’ said Pascoe.

‘From my brief observation of Mr Connon’s hedges, he seems to have a peculiar fondness for a near lethal mixture of African thorn, briar rose, and bramble.’

‘May we, Mr Connon?’ said Dalziel, setting off without waiting for an answer.

They all stood in the rapidly darkening garden, most of them glad to have even the illusion of activity to take their minds off the unchanging situation.

It was a long garden, the kind of length which only generous pre-war builders gave to house-buyers.

There’d be a two-bedroomed bungalow tucked away there on a modern estate, thought Pascoe. Not that it bothers me. A bachelor gay.

The hedges were as Antony had described them. The door to the garage passage was bolted and locked, as was the door in the trellis work on the other side.

‘You always keep these locked?’ asked Dalziel.

‘Always at night,’ said Connon. ‘It’s habit. One of us, Mary and me I mean, always checked. Sometimes both. It was a bit of a joke.’

It was growing very cold in the garden. There was frost in the air. None of them was wearing an overcoat and Antony shivered violently.

‘Over the tree?’ suggested Pascoe.

A large sycamore tree growing in the front garden had branches which stretched along the side of the house over the trellis.

‘I don’t know,’ said Dalziel. ‘Possible, but I don’t see why. He could hardly know he was going to get a show for his efforts, could he?’

‘No,’ said Pascoe, glancing at Connon and Antony. ‘I don’t suppose he could. Shall we go back in? It’s a bit chilly out here.’

Connon took a last look back at the gathering gloom before he stepped into the house.

I know what he’s thinking, Pascoe told himself. If they don’t find her before it’s dark …

He didn’t much like the thought himself.

Dalziel still wasn’t happy about the letter. He let the others go on, sat down on a kitchen stool and took it out of his pocket. Pascoe stepped back into the kitchen.

‘There you are,’ he said.

‘You checked the house?’ asked Dalziel, not raising his eyes from the sheet of paper he held gingerly before him.

‘Yes. She’s not tucked away here.’

‘Then she’ll probably be all right. Sergeant, read this letter again.’

Silently Pascoe looked over his chief’s shoulder and read. He felt again the anger which had gripped him when he first saw it.

‘Any comment?’

‘Well, sir, it’s not really the same kind of vein as the last one, is it? I don’t know if we can tell really much about such things, but I’d have said it wasn’t from the same man.’

‘I think you’re right. But something else too. You’re our expert here. Making allowances for the natural exaggeration of this kind of mind and the rather stereotyped language, does that sound to you like Jenny Connon?’

Pascoe was puzzled.

‘Well, I don’t know,’ he began, but Dalziel wasn’t finished.

‘And look at this paper. Look at the way it’s folded. You know what I think …’

But he didn’t finish. Outside in the hall they heard the front door open, footsteps pattered along the polished parquet floor and a light high voice cried, ‘Daddy? Antony? Are you there?’

Pascoe’s stomach did a quick flip-over, he beat Dalziel to the door by a full two yards and almost fell into the lounge.

Jenny was being embraced by her father and Antony looked as if he was standing in the queue.

‘Welcome home, Jenny,’ said Dalziel. ‘We were worried about you.’

She turned and saw them. Her face lost some of its animation.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘You’re here.’

‘Jenny, what happened?’ said her father. ‘Why did you go out when you got the letter? You should have phoned us at the Club.’

‘Got the letter?’ she said. ‘Oh, the letter. You found it?’

Dalziel held it up gravely. Her face suddenly lit up with understanding.

‘And you thought … oh, I see. Daddy, I’m so sorry.’

She put her arms around him again. Antony still stood patiently in the background. Connon looked puzzled.

‘Sorry? What for, dear?’ he asked.

Dalziel answered.

‘Jenny is sorry she inadvertently misled us all, I think. You see,
she
didn’t receive the letter. It wasn’t meant for her. She found it. I think.’

‘Among your mother’s things!’ said Antony with sudden understanding.

Connon’s grip on his daughter relaxed.

‘You mean, that letter was sent to Mary?’ he said, incredulous. ‘To Mary? No! She would have told me. You don’t receive a letter like that and not …’

His voice tailed off and he sat down heavily on the arm of a chair.

‘Where did you find it, Jenny?’ asked Pascoe gently.

There were tears in the girl’s eyes now.

‘In the wallet pocket of one of Mummy’s old handbags. I thought I’d better turn everything out, you see, and then this came up. I just glanced at it, I didn’t want to pry, but I had to look to see if it was important. I felt ill when I read it. It wasn’t what it said, I mean I’ve read books and heard jokes just as bad, it was just the thought of Mummy getting it. I went into my own bedroom and sat on the bed for a few minutes. But then, I don’t know, I got a bit frightened. The telephone rang, but I didn’t answer it. I just got my coat and went out. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, you know, but I wanted to be near people. So I got a bus into town. I thought I’d walk down to the Club and see you and Antony there, Daddy, but there were so many people, I could hardly move. I’d almost forgotten it was so near Christmas. Anyway I realized I’d have missed you at the Club, so I turned round and set off back. It took me ages. I’m sorry. I should have phoned. I didn’t want you to find the letter before I’d told you about it.’

She was crying hard now, tears coursing down her face over the pale curve of her cheeks.

‘Sergeant,’ said Dalziel, ‘perhaps you’d take Miss Connon upstairs and ask her to show you where she found the letter.’

He waited till the door closed behind them.

‘Now Mr Connon, I’ll want to talk at length to you about this, you realize. But quickly now while Jenny’s upstairs, do you have any knowledge, any suspicion even of the source of this letter?’

‘None. Nor did I even suspect its existence,’ said Connon. ‘Superintendent, could this have anything to do with Mary’s death?’

‘I don’t know. I really don’t know.’

The door opened again and Pascoe came in alone. He motioned with his head to Antony, who nodded and went swiftly out of the room and up the stairs.

‘Well, Sergeant?’

Pascoe held up a large envelope.

‘I’ve put them in here. Three more in all, sir. In the same place. Jenny must have just got hold of the first. And, sir.’

‘Yes.’

‘Mrs Connon’s bedroom is at the front.’

‘It’ll soon be Christmas,’ said Pascoe inconsequently. Dalziel’s gaze wandered suspiciously round the room as if seeking signs that someone had had the effrontery to deface the slightly peeling wall with festive decoration.

‘What do you want, Sergeant? A present?’ he asked sourly.

It’s getting him down, thought Pascoe with a frisson of pleasure for which he was instantly and heartily ashamed.