No More Dying Then Page 3

  “I’m out at work all day,” she said. “I’ve only just got in and my husband isn’t home yet. What’s happened? Has something awful happened?”

  Burden told her.

  “You can see the field from my window,” she said, “but I’m never here.”

  “I won’t waste your time, then.”

  “I hope you find him,” the girl said.

  The door of the Victorian house was opened before he reached it. As soon as he saw the face of the woman who was waiting for him he knew she had something to tell him. She was elderly, sharp-eyed and spry.

  “It wasn’t that man, was it? I’ll never forgive myself if it was him and I …”

  “Perhaps I could come in a minute? And may I have your name?”

  “Mrs. Mitchell.” She took him into a neat, newly decorated room. “I ought to have gone to the police before but you know how it is. He never did anything, he never even spoke to any of the children. I did mention it to young Mrs. Rushworth because her Andrew plays there, but she’s always so busy, out at work all day, and I expect she forgot to tell the other mothers. And then when he didn’t come back and the children went back to school …”

  “Let’s begin at the beginning, shall we, Mrs. Mitchell? You saw a man hanging about the swings field. When did you first see him?”

  Mrs. Mitchell sat down and took a deep breath. “It was in August, during the school holidays. I always clean my upstairs windows on a Wednesday afternoon and one Wednesday I was doing the landing window and I saw this man.”

  “Where did you see him?”

  “Over by the Forby road, Mill Lane, under the trees. He was standing there, looking at the children. Let me see, there was Julian Crantock and Gary Dean and poor little John Lawrence and Andrew Rushworth and the McDowell twins, and they were all playing on the swings and this man was looking at them. Oh, I should have gone to the police!”

  “You spoke to one of the mothers, Mrs. Mitchell. You mustn’t reproach yourself. I take it you saw this man again?”

  “Oh, yes, the next Wednesday, and I made a point of looking the next day, the Thursday, and he was there again, and it was then I spoke to Mrs. Rushworth.”

  “So, in fact, you saw him often throughout the August holiday?”

  “We had a spell of bad weather after that and the children couldn’t go into the field, and then it was time to go back to school. I forgot all about the man after that. Until yesterday.”

  “You saw him yesterday?”

  Mrs. Mitchell nodded. “It was Wednesday and I was doing the landing window. I saw the children come into the field and then this man appeared. It gave me a shock, seeing him again after two months. I thought to myself, I’m going to stand at this window and watch you and see what you do. But he didn’t do anything. He walked around the field and he picked some leaves, branches of autumn leaves, you know, and then he stood still for a bit, looking at the boys. He was there for about half an hour and when I was just thinking, I’ll have to get a chair because my legs won’t hold me up, he went down over the bank.”

  “Had he a car?” Burden asked quickly. “In the lane?”

  “I couldn’t see. I think I heard a car start up but it mightn’t have been his, might it?”

  “Did you see him today, Mrs. Mitchell?”

  “I should have looked, I know that. But I had told Mrs. Rushworth and it was her responsibility. Besides, I’d never seen this man do anything.” She sighed. “I went out at two today,” she said. “I went to see my married daughter in Kingsmarkham.”

  “Describe this man to me, Mrs. Mitchell.”

  “I can do that,” she said, pleased. “He was young, hardly more than a boy himself. Very slim, you know, and sort of slight. Not as tall as you, not nearly. About five feet six. He always wore the same clothes, one of those—what d’you call them?—duffel coats, black or very dark grey, and those jeans they all wear. Dark hair, not long for these days, but a lot longer than yours. I couldn’t see his face, not from this distance, but he had very little hands. And he limps.”

  “Limps?”

  “When he was walking round the field,” said Mrs. Mitchell earnestly, “I noticed that he dragged one of his feet. Just slightly. Just a slight little limp.”

  3

  The next parallel street was called Chiltern Avenue and access to it was by a footpath which ran along the side of Mrs. Mitchell’s house between her garden and the field. Burden went down Chiltern Avenue, calling at every house. The McDowell family lived at number 38 and the twins, Stewart and Ian, were still up.

  Stewart had never seen the man, for during most of August he had been confined indoors with tonsillitis and today he had been with his mother to the dentist. But Ian had seen him and had even discussed him with Gary Dean, his special friend.

  “He kept right under the trees all the time,” said Ian. “Gary said he was a spy. Gary went to talk to him one day but he ran into Mill Lane.”

  Burden asked the boy to describe him, but Ian lacked Mrs. Mitchell’s powers of observation.

  “Just a man,” he said. “About as big as my brother.” The brother in question was fifteen. Burden asked about the limp.

  “What’s limp?”

  Burden explained. “Dunno,” said Ian.

  Further down, in a house of the same vintage as Mrs. Lawrence’s, he encountered the Rushworth family. Rushworth, it appeared, was an estate agent in Kingsmarkham, and he had gone off with the search parties, but his wife was at home with her four unruly children, all of whom were still up. Why hadn’t she come to the police when Mrs. Mitchell had first warned her back in August?

  A little blonde woman whose stilt heels and long fingernails combined with a bouncing crest of hair gave her the look of a delicate game bird, Mrs. Rushworth burst into tears.

  “I meant to.” She choked. “I had every intention. I work so hard. I work in my husband’s office, you know. There’s never a moment to do anything!”

  It was almost eight and John Lawrence had been missing for four and a half hours. Burden shivered a little less from the frosty chill of the night than from the sense of impending tragedy, of coming events casting a long cold shadow before them. He went over to the car and got in beside Wexford.

  The chief inspector’s driver had left him alone and he sat in the back of the black official car, not making notes, no longer studying his map, but pondering deeply. There was very little light—he hadn’t switched on the interior light—and in the shadows he might have been a figure of stone. From head to foot he was grey—grey sparse hair, old grey raincoat, shoes that were always a little dusty. His face was deeply lined and in the half-dark it too looked grey. He turned slightly as Burden came in and fixed on him a pair of grey eyes which were the only brilliant sharp thing about him. Burden said nothing and for a few moments the two men were silent. Then Wexford said:

  “A penny for them, Mike.”

  “I was thinking of Stella Rivers.”

  “Of course you were. Aren’t we all?”

  “It was her half-term holiday too,” Burden said. “She was an only child of divorced parents. She also disappeared in Mill Lane. There are a good many similarities.”

  “And a good many dissimilarities too. For one thing, she was a girl and older. You don’t know much about the Stella Rivers case. You were off sick when it happened.”

  They had thought he was going to have a breakdown. Back in February it had been when the first shock of Jean’s death had abated, leaving grief and panic and the horror of his situation to pour in. He had lain in bed, sleeping when Dr. Crocker drugged him, shouting out when he was conscious that it was only the flu he had, that he must get up and go back to work. But he had been off work for three weeks and when at last he was better he had lost nearly two stone. Still, he had been alive, while Stella Rivers was dead or vanished from the face of her small earth.

  “She also lived with her mother,” said Wexford, “and her stepfather. On Thursday, February 25th, she had a
riding lesson at Equita, the riding school in Mill Lane near Forby. She had her regular lessons on Saturdays, but this was an extra one, arranged to take advantage of her half-term holiday. The stepfather, Ivor Swan, drove her to Equita from their home at Hall Farm in Kingsmarkham, but there was some doubt as to how she was to get home again.”

  “What d’you mean, doubt?”

  “After she disappeared both Ivor and Rosalind Swan said Stella had told them she would get a lift home in a friend’s car, as she sometimes did as far as Kingsmarkham, but it appeared that Stella had had no such idea and expected Swan to pick her up. When it got to six o’clock—the lesson ended at four-fifteen—Rosalind Swan, having checked with the friend, phoned us.

  “We went first to Equita, saw Miss Williams who runs the school and her assistant, a Mrs. Fenn, and were told that Stella had left alone at four-thirty. By now it was raining hard and the rain had begun at about four-forty. Eventually we made contact with a man who had passed Stella at four-forty and offered her a lift to Stowerton. At this time she was walking along Mill Lane towards Stowerton. She refused his offer which made us think she was a sensible girl who wouldn’t take lifts from strangers.”

  “She was twelve, wasn’t she?” Burden put in.

  “Twelve, slight and fair-haired. The man who offered her the lift is called Walter Hill and he’s the manager of that little branch of the Midland Bank in Forby. If misguided, he’s perfectly respectable and had nothing to do with her disappearance. We checked and double-checked him. No one else ever came forward to say he had seen Stella. She walked out of Equita, apparently believing she would meet her stepfather, and vanished into thin air.

  “I can’t go into all the details now, but of course we investigated Ivor Swan with the utmost care. Apart from the fact that he had no real alibi for that afternoon, we had no real reason to believe he wished harm to Stella. She liked Swan, she even seemed to have had a sort of crush on him. Not one relative or friend of the Swans could tell of any trouble whatsoever in their household. And yet …”

  “And yet what?”

  Wexford hesitated. “You know those feelings I get, Mike, those almost supernatural sensations that something isn’t, well-well, quite right?”

  Burden nodded. He did.

  “I felt it there. But it was only a feeling. People boast of their intuition because they only care to remember the times they’ve been proved right. I never let myself forget the numberless times my premonitions have been wrong. We never found the least thing to pin on Swan. We shall have to resurrect the case tomorrow. Where are you going?”

  “Back to Mrs. Lawrence,” said Burden.

  An anxious-looking Mrs. Crantock admitted him to the house.

  “I don’t think I’ve been much help,” she whispered to him in the hall. “We aren’t very close, you see, just neighbours whose children play with each other. I didn’t know what to say to her. I mean, normally we’d discuss our little boys, but now—well, I didn’t feel …” She gave a helpless shrug. “And you can’t talk to her about ordinary things, you know. You never can. Not about the house or what goes on in the neighborhood.” Her forehead wrinkled as she made a mammoth effort to explain the inexplicable. “Perhaps if I could talk about books or—or something. She just isn’t like anyone else I know.”

  “I’m sure you’ve done very well,” said Burden. He thought he knew very well what Mrs. Lawrence would like to talk about. Her idea of conversation would be an endless analysis of the emotions.

  “Well, I tried,” Mrs. Crantock raised her voice. “I’m going now, Gemma, but I’ll come back later if you want me.”

  Gemma. A curious name. He didn’t think he had ever come across it before. She would have an outlandish name, either because her equally eccentric parents had labelled her with it or—more likely—she had adopted it herself on the grounds of its originality. Suddenly impatient with himself, he wondered why he kept speculating about her in this irritating way, why every new piece of knowledge of her he acquired gave immediate rise to enquiry. Because she is, or soon will be, involved in a murder case, he told himself. He pushed open the living-room door, his mind full of the flamboyant, wild and outrageous image he had made, and stopped, taken aback at what he saw. Yet it was only what he had left behind, a white-faced frightened girl, crouched in a chair, waiting, waiting …

  She had switched on an electric fire, but it had done little to warm the room and she had wrapped herself in one of the shawls he had seen, a heavy black-and-gold thing with a long fringe. He found he couldn’t picture her with a child or imagine her reading bedtime stories or pouring out cornflakes. Sitting in some club, yes, singing and playing a guitar.

  “Would you like some tea?” she said, turning to him. “Some sandwiches? I can easily make sandwiches.”

  “Don’t bother for me.”

  “Will your wife have something for you when you get home?”

  “My sister-in-law,” he said. “My wife’s dead.”

  He didn’t like having to say it. People immediately became embarrassed, blushing or even recoiling slightly as if he had some infectious disease. Then came the rush of awkward insincere sympathy, meaningless words to be gabbled through and then as soon forgotten. No one ever looked as if they really cared, or no one had until now.

  Gemma Lawrence said quietly and slowly, “I’m so sorry. She must have been quite young. That was a great tragedy for you. Now I can see what has taught you to be kind to other people who are in trouble.”

  He felt ashamed of himself and shame made him stammer. “I—well … I think I would like those sandwiches if it isn’t any trouble.”

  “How could it be?” she asked wonderingly, as if the polite conventional phrase was new to her. “Naturally I want to do something in return for all you’re doing for me.”

  She brought the sandwiches in a very short time. It was evident they hadn’t taken long to make. Ham had been roughly placed between two doorsteps of bread and the tea was in mugs without saucers.

  Women had been spoiling Burden all his life, serving him food on dainty china from trays covered with lace cloths, and he took a sandwich without much enthusiasm, but when he bit into it he found that the ham was tasty and not too salty and the bread fresh.

  She sat on the floor and rested her back against the armchair opposite to him. He had told Wexford there were many more questions he wanted to ask her and he hazarded a few of them, routine enquiries as to John’s adult acquaintances, the parents of his school friends, her own friends. She responded calmly and intelligently and the policeman’s part of his mind registered her answers automatically. But something strange had happened to him. He was absorbing with a curious unease a fact which the average man would have observed as soon as he laid eyes on her. She was beautiful. Thinking the word made him look away, yet carry with him, as if imprinted on his retina, a brilliant impression of that white face with its good bones and, more disturbingly, her long legs and full firm breasts.

  Her hair was vermilion in the red firelight, her eyes the clear water-washed green of jewels that are found under the sea. The shawl gave her an exotic look as if she were set within the frame of a Pre-Raphaelite portrait, posed, unreal, unfitted for any ordinary daily task. And yet there was about her something entirely natural and impulsive. Too natural, he thought, suddenly alarmed, too real. She is more real and more aware and more natural than any woman has a right to be.

  Quickly he said, “Mrs. Lawrence, I’m sure you told John never to speak to strange men.”

  The face whitened. “Oh, yes.”

  “But did he ever tell you that a man had spoken to him?”

  “No, never. I take him to school and fetch him home. He’s only alone when he goes out to play and then the other boys are with him.” She lifted her face and now there was no guard on it. “What do you mean?”

  Why did she have to ask so directly? “No one has told me they saw any stranger speak to John,” he said truthfully, “but I have to check.”
>
  She said in the same uncompromising level voice, “Mrs. Dean told me a child was lost in Kingsmarkham last February and never found. She came in to tell me while Mrs. Crantock was here.”

  Burden forgot that he had ever allied himself with Mrs. Dean. In savage, unpoliceman-like tones he burst out before he could stop himself, “Why the hell don’t these busybodies keep their mouths shut?” He bit his lip, wondering why what she had said brought out so much violence in him and the desire to go next door and strike the Dean woman. “That child was a girl,” he said, “and much older. The kind of—er—pervert who needs to attack girls isn’t likely to be interested in a small boy.” But was that true? Who could yet understand the mysteries of a sane mind, let alone a diseased one?

  She drew the shawl more closely about her and said, “How shall I get through the night?”

  “I shall get you a doctor.” Burden finished his tea and got up. “Didn’t I see a doctor’s plate in Chiltern Avenue?”

  “Yes. Dr. Lomax.”

  “Well, we’ll get some sleeping pills out of this Lomax, and a woman to stay the night with you. I’ll see you’re not left alone.”

  “I don’t know how to thank you.” She bowed her head and he saw that at last she began to cry. “You’ll say it’s only your job and your duty, but it’s more than that. I—I do thank you. When I look at you I think, Nothing can happen to John while he’s there.”

  She was looking at him as a child should look at its father but as he could never remember his own children looking at him. Such trust was a terrible responsibility and he knew he shouldn’t foster it. There was more than a fifty-fifty chance now that the child was dead and he wasn’t God to bring the dead to life. He ought to say that she mustn’t worry, mustn’t think about it—how cruel and stupid and insensitive!—but all he could say in the face of those eyes was, “I’ll go for the doctor now and he’ll see you get a good night.” There was no need to add anything but he added, “Don’t sleep too long. I’ll be back with you by nine.”