Cover Her Face (20 page)

Rose Cottage on the Nessingford Road was a late-eighteenth-century labourer’s cottage with enough superficial charm and antiquity to tempt the passing motorist to an opinion that something could be made of it. In the Pullens’ hands something had, a replica of a thousand urban council houses. A large plaster model of an Alsatian dog occupied all the window space in the front room. Behind it the lace curtains were elegantly draped and tied with blue ribbon. The front door opened straight into the living-room. Here the Pullens’ enthusiasm for modern décor had outrun discretion and the result was curiously irritating and bizarre. One wall was papered with a design of pink stars against a blue background. The opposite wall was painted in matching pink. The chairs were covered with blue striped material obviously carefully chosen to tone with the paper. The haircord carpet was a pale pink and had suffered from the inevitable comings and goings of muddy feet. Nothing was clean, nothing made to last, nothing was simple or honest. Dalgliesh found it all profoundly depressing.

Derek Pullen and his mother were at home. Mrs. Pullen showed none of the normal reactions to the arrival of police officers engaged in a murder investigation, but greeted them with a spate of welcoming miscellanea, as if she had stayed at home specially to receive them and had long awaited their arrival. The phrases tumbled against one another. Delighted to see them … her brother a police constable … perhaps they had heard of him … Joe Pullen over at Barkingway … always better to tell the truth to the police … not that’s there’s anything to tell … poor Mrs. Maxie … couldn’t hardly believe it when Miss Liddell told her … come home and told Derek and he didn’t believe it neither … not the sort of girl a decent man would want … very proud the Maxies were … a girl like that asked for trouble. As she spoke the pale eyes wavered over Dalgliesh’s face but with little comprehension. In the background stood her son, braced to the inevitable.

So Pullen had known about the engagement late on Saturday night although, as the police had already ascertained, he had spent the evening at the Theatre Royal, Stratford, with a party from his office and had not been at the fête.

Dalgliesh had difficulty in persuading the voluble Mrs. Pullen to retire to her kitchen and leave the boy to answer for himself but he was helped by Pullen’s fretful insistence that she should leave them alone. He had obviously been expecting the visit. When Dalgliesh and Martin were announced he had risen from his chair and faced them with the pathetic courage of a man whose meagre reserves have scarcely carried him through the waiting period. Dalgliesh dealt with him gently. He might have been speaking to a son. Martin had seen this technique in use before. It was a cinch with the nervous, emotional types, especially if they were burdened with guilt. Guilt, thought Martin, was a funny thing.

This boy, now, had probably done nothing worse than meet Sally Jupp for a bit of a kiss and cuddle but he wouldn’t feel at peace until he’d spilt the beans to someone. On the other hand he might be a murderer. If he were, then fear would keep his mouth shut for a little longer. But in the end he’d crack. Before long he would see in Dalgliesh, patient, uncensorious and omnipotent, the father confessor whom his conscience craved. Then it would be difficult for the shorthand writer to catch up with the spate of self-accusation and guilt. It was a man’s own mind which betrayed him in the end and Dalgliesh knew that better than most. There were times when Sergeant Martin, not the most sensitive of men, felt that a detective’s job was not a pretty one.

But, so far, Pullen was standing up well to the questioning. He admitted that he had walked past Martingale late on Saturday night. He was studying for an examination and liked to get some air before going to bed. He often went for a late walk. His mother could confirm that. He took the Venezuelan envelope found in Sally’s room, pushed a pair of bent spectacles up on his forehead and peered shortsightedly at the scribbled dates. Quietly he admitted that the writing was his. The envelope had come from a pen friend in South America. He had used it to jot down the times when he could meet Sally Jupp. He couldn’t remember when he had given it to her but the dates referred to their meetings last month.

“She used to lock her door and then come down the stackpipe to you, didn’t she?” asked Dalgliesh. “You needn’t be afraid of breaking her confidence. We found her palmmarks on the pipe. What did you do when you had those meetings?”

“We went for walks in the garden once or twice. Mostly we sat in the old stable block opposite her room and talked.” He
must have fancied that he saw incredulity in Dalgliesh’s face for he flushed and said defensively: “We didn’t make love if that’s what you’re thinking. I suppose all policemen have to cultivate dirty minds but she wasn’t like that.”

“What was she like?” asked Dalgliesh gently. “What did you talk about?”

“Anything. Everything really. I think she was lonely for someone her own age. She wasn’t happy when she was at St. Mary’s but there were the other girls to have a laugh with. She was a wonderful mimic. I could almost hear Miss Liddell talking. She talked about her home too. Her parents were killed in the war. Everything would have been different for her if they had lived. Her father was a university don and she would have had a different kind of home from her aunt’s. Cultured and … well, different.”

Dalgliesh thought that Sally Jupp had been a young woman who enjoyed exercising imagination and in Derek Pullen she had at least found a credulous listener. But there was more in these meetings than Pullen was choosing to say. The girl had been using him for something. But for what?

“You looked after her child for her, didn’t you, when she went up to London on the Thursday before she died?”

It was a complete shot in the dark but Pullen did not even seem surprised that he knew.

“Yes, I did. I work in a local government office and I can take a day’s leave now and then. Sally said that she wanted to go up to town and I didn’t see why she shouldn’t. I expect she wanted to see a flick or go shopping. Other mothers can.”

“It seems strange that Sally didn’t leave her child at Martingale if she wanted to go up to London. Mrs. Bultitaft would probably have been willing to look after him occasionally.
All this secrecy was surely rather unnecessary.”

“Sally liked it that way. She liked things to be secret. I think that was half the attraction of sneaking out at night. I had a feeling sometimes that she wasn’t really enjoying it. She was worried about the baby or just plain sleepy. But she had to come. It made her pleased to know next day that she had done it and got away with it.”

“Didn’t you point out that it would make trouble for both of you if it were discovered?”

“I don’t see how it could affect me,” said Pullen sulkily.

“I think you’re pretending to be a great deal more simple than you are, surely. I’m ready to believe that you and Miss Jupp weren’t lovers because I like to think I know when people are telling the truth and because it fits in with what I know so far of you both. But you can’t honestly believe that other people would be so accommodating. The facts bear one obvious interpretation and that is the one most people would put on them, especially in the circumstances.”

“That’s right. Just because the kid had an illegitimate child then she must be a nymphomaniac.” The boy used this last word self-consciously as if it were one he had only recently known and had not used before.

“You know, I doubt whether they’d understand what that word means. Perhaps people have rather nasty minds, but then it’s surprising how often the nastiness is justified. I don’t think Sally Jupp was being very fair to you when she used those stables as a retreat from Martingale. Surely you must have thought that, too?”

“Yes, I suppose so.” The boy looked away unhappily and Dalgliesh waited. He felt that there was still something to be explained but that Pullen was enmeshed in his own inarticulateness and frustrated with the difficulty of explaining the
girl he had known, alive, gay and foolhardy, to two officers of police who had never even met her. The difficulty was easily understood. He had no doubt how Pullen’s story would look to a jury and was glad that it would never be his job to convince twelve good men and true that Sally Jupp, young, pretty and already lapsed from grace, had been sneaking out of her bedroom at night and leaving her baby alone, however briefly, for the sole pleasure of intellectual discussion with Derek Pullen.

“Did Miss Jupp ever suggest to you that she was afraid of anyone or had an enemy?” he asked.

“No. She wasn’t important enough to have enemies.”

“Not until Saturday night, perhaps,” thought Dalgliesh. “She never confided in you about her child, who the father was, for example?”

“No.” The boy had mastered some of his terror and his voice was sullen.

“Did she tell you why she wanted to go to London last Thursday afternoon?”

“No. She asked me to look after Jimmy because she was sick of carting him around the forest and wanted to get away from the village. We arranged where she was to hand him over at Liverpool Street Station. She brought the folding pram and I took him to St. James’s Park. In the evening I handed him back and we travelled home separately. We weren’t going to give the village tabbies anything else to gossip about.”

“You never thought she might be falling in love with you?”

“I knew damn well she wasn’t.” He gave Dalgliesh one quick direct glance and then said, as if the confidence surprised him: “She wouldn’t even let me touch her.”

Dalgliesh waited for a moment and then said quietly:
“Those aren’t your normal spectacles, are they? What happened to the ones you usually wear?”

The boy almost snatched them from his nose and closed his hands over the lenses in a gesture which was pathetic in its futility. Then, realizing the significance of that instinctive gesture, he dug in his pocket for a handkerchief and made a show of cleaning the lenses.

His hands shook as he pushed the spectacles back on his nose where they rested lopsidedly, his voice croaked with fright: “I lost them. That is, I broke them. I’m having them mended.”

“Did you break them at the same time as you got that bruise over your eye?”

“Yes. I knocked into a tree.”

“Indeed. The trees around here seem curiously hazardous. Dr. Maxie grazed his knuckle on the bark of one, I’m told. Could it have been the same tree?”

“Dr. Maxie’s troubles are nothing to do with me. I don’t know what you mean.”

“I think you do,” said Dalgliesh gently. “I’m going to ask you to think over what we’ve said and later I shall want you to make a statement and sign it. There isn’t any tremendous hurry. We know where to find you if we want you. Talk it over with your father when he comes in. If either of you want to see me let me know. And remember this: someone killed Sally. If it wasn’t you, then you’ve got nothing to fear. Either way, I hope you’ll find the courage to tell us what you know.” He waited for a moment but his eyes met only the glazed stare of fear and resolution. After a minute he turned away and beckoned Martin to follow.

Half an hour later the telephone rang at Martingale. Deborah, carrying her father’s tray through the hall, paused,
balanced it on her hip, and lifted the receiver. A minute later she put her head round the drawing-room door.

“It’s for you, Stephen. The ’phone. Derek Pullen of all people.”

Stephen, home unexpectedly for a few hours only, did not look up from his book but Deborah could see the sudden arrest of movement and the slight tensing of his back.

“Oh Lord, what does he want?”

“He wants you. He sounds pretty worried.”

“Tell him I’m busy, Deb.”

Deborah translated this message into the semblance of civility. The voice at the end of the line rose into incoherence. Holding the receiver away from her ear Deborah made soothing noises and felt the well of hysterical laughter which nowadays was never far submerged. She went back to the drawing-room.

“You’d better come, Stephen. He really is in a bad way. What on earth have you been up to? He says the police have been with him.”

“Is that all? He’s not the only one. Tell him they’ve been with me for about six hours all told. And they haven’t finished yet. Tell him to keep his mouth shut and stop flapping.”

“Hadn’t you better tell him yourself?” suggested Deborah sweetly. “I’m not in your confidence and I’m certainly not in his.”

Stephen swore softly and went to the telephone. Pausing in the hall to balance her tray, Deborah could hear his quick impatient expostulations.

“All right. All right. Tell them if you want to. I’m not stopping you. They’re probably listening in to this conversation anyway … No, as a matter of fact I didn’t, but don’t let that influence you … Quite the little gentleman, aren’t you … My
dear man, I don’t care a damn what you tell them, or when or how, only for God’s sake don’t be such a bore about it. Goodbye.”

Moving out of earshot along the gallery, Deborah thought sadly, “Stephen and I have grown so far apart that I could ask him outright whether he killed Sally without being certain what answer I’d get.”

Dalgliesh and Martin sat in the small parlour of The Moonraker’s Arms in that state of repletion without satisfaction which commonly follows a poor meal. They had been assured that Mrs. Piggott who, with her husband, kept the inn, was noted for her good plain cooking and plenty of it. The expression had struck ominously on the ears of men whose travels had inured them to most of the vagaries of good plain English fare. It is probable that Martin suffered most. His war service in France and Italy had given him a taste for continental food which he had been indulging ever since on holidays abroad. Most of his spare time and all of his spare money was spent in this way.

He and his cheerful, enterprising wife were enthusiastic and unsophisticated travellers, confident of their ability to be understood, tolerated and well fed in almost any corner of Europe. So far, strangely enough, they had never been disappointed. Sitting in deep abdominal distress Martin let his mind ramble on
cassoulet de Toulouse
and remembered with yearning the
poularde en vessu
he had first eaten in a modest
hotel in the Ardèche. Dalgliesh’s needs were at once simpler and more exacting. He merely craved simple English food properly cooked.