A Clubbable Woman (7 page)

‘I just wanted to say that I shall miss your mother, Jenny,’ said Alice Fernie.

The annoyance that had tightened her lips for a moment eased away. She could not remember anyone else saying this. They were all ‘dreadfully sorry’, it had come as a terrible shock to them, but no one had really suggested that Mary Connon would be missed.

‘Yes, I shall too,’ she replied, then feeling this was a bit too cold she squeezed the gloved hand which still rested on her arm and went on, ‘I know how much she relied on you.’

This was nothing more than the simple truth, she realized, as the words came out. Mary Connon had rarely mentioned Alice Fernie to her except in faintly disparaging or patronizing terms. Her lack of taste; the unfairly large wage her husband earned on the factory floor; the excessive subsidization by the ratepayers of council-house rents. She was capable of blaming the Fernies (‘and all those like them,’ she would say inclusively) for the very existence of the Woodfield estate. It had only been a very few years previously that Jenny had realized that the council estate had been there already when her parents bought the house. She had come to accept a picture of rolling countryside being savaged before her mother’s eyes as the bulldozers rolled in, prompted by the Fernies and ‘all those like them’. But Alice Fernie had been, perhaps by the mere accident of proximity, the nearest thing to a real friend she had. And now Jenny felt real gratitude that this large handsome woman who could only be in her early thirties had thought enough of her mother to accept the condescension of manner and get closer to her.

Closer than me perhaps, she thought.

‘How did you get here, Mrs Fernie?’ she asked. ‘Can we give you a lift back?’

There were no funeral cars other than the hearse. ‘I will judge what is fitting,’ she had heard her father say to the oblique remonstrances of the man from the undertakers.

‘No, thank you, dear. You’ll want to be with your dad. And I’m not going straight back anyway. ‘Bye now.’

‘Goodbye. Please call round, won’t you? I shan’t be going back to college till next month.’

I’ll have to watch myself there, she thought as she watched Alice move away with long confident strides, I could become as patronizing as Mum.

As she got into the car, she glanced back and caught the eye of the young man who could have been from the Foreign Office. He took a step forward. She thought he was going to come across and talk to her. But a rumbling, phlegmy cough from Fat Dalziel caught both their attentions and the young man turned away.

Policemen, she thought, angry at her disappointment, and slammed the car door.

Connon watched Marcus walk away from him down the path through the rank and file of headstones.

The car park was nearly empty now. The Evanses’ car was just pulling away. He looked after it thoughtfully. Gwendoline. He formed the syllables deliberately in his mind and smiled. All those youngsters competing to provoke the loudest laugh, craning forward to get the deepest view of bosom, pressing close to feel the warmth of calf or thigh, and imagining a returned pressure. Tales to be blown up into triumphs over a couple of pints. But the real triumphs were never boasted of, but remembered in secret; first with reminiscent delight, but soon with fear and cold panic.

Dalziel was gone, he observed, and his puppy-dog, Pascoe. Mentally he corrected himself. He had no reason for thinking Pascoe was merely that, though he was sure Dalziel would make him that if he got the chance.

And me, what would he make of me if he got the chance? he thought.

A parcel for the lawyers. Strongly wrapped, neatly labelled.

Samuel Connon. Wife-killer. There must be some long Latin word for a man who killed his wife. Dalziel might know it, though he probably wouldn’t admit to it if he did. Pascoe would know. He seemed a highly educated kind of cop. The new image. Get your degree, join the force, the Yard’s the limit. Or … leave school at sixteen, start as office boy. You can be assistant personnel manager by the time you’re forty. If you’re lucky. And if the general manager is a big rugby fan.

I’d better be getting down to Jenny. Poor Jenny. I wish I knew how hard this has hit her. Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps we should get away for a bit. Where? What on? There’s not all that much spare in the account. All this costs a bit. Even if you haggled over headstones. Now if I’d gone first, Mary’d have been sitting pretty. But what kind of man insures against his wife’s death?

At least they can’t say I killed her for profit. But it’d be nice to get away. Soon. When things had quietened down. It’d be nice to get far, far away. To somewhere as unlike this as possible.

Back to the desert.

Over twenty years earlier, Connon had been sent to join his unit in Egypt at the start of his National Service. He had only been out there a couple of months when the regiment returned home, and at the time the few weeks he spent there seemed to consist of nothing but endless liquid motions of the bowels. He had been as delighted as the rest to return to England and it was this period that saw the blossoming of his rugby career. He had played only a couple of times since leaving school but now he became quickly aware of the advantages traditionally enjoyed by the athlete in His Majesty’s forces. His natural talent exploded into consummate artistry in these conditions and only the simultaneous service, as officer, of the current Welsh stand-off kept him out of the Army XV.

But something of his brief acquaintance with the desert did not easily die. It remained with him as dreams of luxury hotels in the remote Bermudas haunt some men.

He read anything he could get hold of on the desert. Any desert. He collected colour brochures and handouts from the travel agents. Fifteen days in Morocco. Three weeks in Tunisia. Amazing value. But always too much for him.

In any case the desert Connon really wanted to visit was not in any of the brochures, not even the most expensive. He recognized it by its absence, that is, he knew what he wanted was something out of the reach of a camera; something untranslatable into colour photography and glossy paper. He wanted rock that had absorbed terrible, endless heat for a million years, that had writhed in infinitely slow violence till its raw bowels lay on the surface, yet without a single movement noticed by man. He wanted sand which rose and fell like the sea, but so slowly that it was only when it drowned his own civilization that a man recognized its tides.

It was a vision he confided to no one. Least of all Mary, who had found his collection of travel brochures nuisance enough.

Perhaps Jenny …

He saw that she had got out of the car again and was standing against the bonnet looking up towards him. Otherwise the car park was now completely empty.

He began to walk towards her.

‘I wasn’t going to ask her anything,’ repeated Pascoe. ‘Not then. Not there. I felt sorry for her. Just standing there. She looked, I don’t know, helpless somehow.’

This, he thought, is a turn up for the book. Bruiser Dalziel lecturing me on tact and diplomacy. It was like Henry the Eighth preaching about marital constancy.

‘Well, watch it. We don’t harry people at funerals. At least not unless we think they did it. And we don’t think young Jenny Connon did it, do we?’

‘No, sir.’

‘You checked, of course?’

‘Of course. She was nearly a hundred miles away. We know that.’

‘It’s about all we bloody well do know. The only thing we make any progress with is the list of things we don’t know. Item: who had a strong motive to kill her? No one we know, not even the great Connie as far as we know.’

‘Strength of motive is in the mind of the murderer, sir.’

‘Confucius, he bloody well say. To continue. Item: what did he kill her with? A metal object or at least an object with a metal end, cylindrical in shape, long enough to be grasped probably with both hands and smashed right between the eyes of a victim who sits there smiling and doesn’t even try to duck.’

‘The pathologist’s report did say that Mrs Connon had unusually fragile bones, sir. Perhaps we’re overestimating the strength needed.’

‘So what? Thanks for nothing. And Mary Connon fragile? I don’t believe it. It couldn’t be true. With tits like those she’d have broken her collar-bone every time she stood up. To continue again. Item: who saw anything suspicious or even anyone anywhere near the house that night? Not a soul. Not even the eyes and ears of the Woodfield Estate, your friend Fernie. All he can swear is that Connon was rolling drunk. Which Connon can disprove with con-bloody-siderable ease.’

‘It does fit with Connon’s account, though. About his giddiness, I mean. Makes his story that bit stronger, don’t you think? And our doctor did find signs of a slight concussion. He’s still seeing his own man, too. I checked.’

Dalziel slammed his fist so hard on the desk that Pascoe broke his rule of stony non-reaction to his superior and started in his chair.

‘I’m not interested in the bloody man’s health. If he’s innocent, he can drop dead tomorrow for all I care.’

‘A sentiment that does you credit, sir. But there is one thing about this injury to Connon that’s a little bit odd.

‘What’s that, and why isn’t it in your report?’ asked Dalziel suspiciously.

‘Apparently irrelevant. But I felt you might like it, sir.’

Dalziel licked his lips and looked as if the task of strangling Pascoe personally and instantly might not be unattractive.

‘It’s just that when I was down at the Club, I talked among others to a chap called Slater.’

‘Fat Fred. I know him.’

‘Slater remembered Connon being laid out. But, he added casually and as far as I could see without malice, that he reckoned the boot that did the damage belonged to Evans, his own captain. He seemed to think it was just a case of mistaken identity.’

‘Fred would. He’s thick as pigshit, that one. But Arthur Evans isn’t made that way. He plays hard, but he’d never put the boot in.’

‘So?’

‘So Fred Slater should start wearing his glasses on the field. Or better still, give up. It’s indecent a man that size exposing himself in public. I don’t know how his wife manages him.’

He chuckled to himself at the thought and murmured, ‘Levers, I should think.’

‘Pardon?’

‘Sergeant,’ he said quietly, ‘is there anything we’ve left undone which we ought to have done?’

‘I don’t think so, sir.’

‘Right. Then somewhere, in some area we are covering, or have covered, lies the clue.’

‘The clue?’

‘There’s always a clue, boy. Don’t you read the Sunday papers? All this started somewhere and it wasn’t Boundary Drive. Or if it was, we’re not going to get much help there. Now where’s our best bet?’

Pascoe spoke like a bored actor who was thinking of things other than his lines.

‘At the Club.’

‘That’s right. I think I’ll just drop in there tonight. No, tomorrow. That’s a training night. They’ll all be there. Socially, I mean, for a pot of ale. If there’s anything known, they’ll tell me by chucking-out time. They’ll tell me.’

He spoke with some satisfaction.

Like a … but the phone interrupted Pascoe’s search for the right simile.

Dalziel nodded at it.

‘Well, get it, then.’

Pascoe lifted up the receiver.

‘Sergeant Pascoe here. Yes?’

He listened for a few moments then replaced the receiver and stood silent.

‘Not a private call, I hope, Sergeant,’ said Dalziel. ‘Or are you just playing hard to get.’

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said Pascoe. ‘No. It’s the Connons. They got home and there was a letter. For the girl, it seems. Something unpleasant. Connon wants us to go out there straight away.’

Alice Fernie had gone straight home from the funeral, not doing some shopping first as she had told Jenny. She possessed a great deal of natural tact as well as independence of spirit, a quality which had made possible her friendship with Mary Connon. But the journey had involved two buses and a great deal of waiting. So she had plenty of time to think.

Buses and trains both set you thinking, she thought. But not in the same way. Trains gave you a rhythm, sent you into dreams, cut you off from reality. Buses were always stopping and starting; traffic, road-junctions, lights; and of course, bus-stops. The world you passed through was observable. And real.

So was the world inside your head.

Buses were good places to worry on.

Alice Fernie was worried. She was wondering what the law might do to her husband if it caught up with him.

‘Hello there, Alice. What a grand drying day it is, eh?’

Maisie Curtis from next door had got on the bus and was easing herself into the seat beside her. They were both broad-hipped women and the woeful inadequacy of the Corporation’s transport service was very apparent. Alice didn’t mind. The Corporation didn’t provide much heating either and the warmth generated by the collision of two such large areas was very welcome.

‘Hello, Maisie.’

‘You’re looking smart. You’ve been to her funeral, then?’

‘That’s right.’

There was a short pause while Maisie paid her fare.

‘Many there?’

‘A few.’

‘Oh.’

She’ll want names, thought Alice resignedly. She’ll want a guest-list. And she’ll get it.

‘There’s no funeral meats, then?’

‘No. Everyone’s just going home. Quietly. Like me.’

‘Was there anyone from the police there?’

Alice sighed.

‘As a guest, I mean, a mourner. They wouldn’t be there official, would they? Not unless …’

‘What?’

‘Unless they wanted to watch him, keep an eye on him.’

‘Who?’

‘Mr Connon, of course.’

Alice shifted herself in the seat so that Maisie had to give a couple of inches. The conductor looked in awe at the overhang.

‘Why should they want to watch him?’

‘I don’t know. In case he decided to skip, that’s why. Well, he might, mightn’t he? If he felt like it.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like getting away.’

‘In his shoes, who wouldn’t feel like getting away?’

Maisie was used to deliberate obtuseness on the part of her neighbour and was neither distracted nor offended by it.