Talking to Strange Men (33 page)

Dearest Jennifer,

If you still want a divorce after we have not been together for two years I will agree. I will do anything you want. I can't bear you to hate me and I tell you honestly that I am saying this so that you won't hate me. A kind of bribe to make you like me, if you want to put it that way!

I am not going to say anything more about Peter. People do change. You changed me, as I expect you know, so perhaps you have changed him too. I want to say though that I love you. Nothing has changed that. If you change your mind about a divorce, come back to me. I will always want you back.

There were too many repetitions of ‘change' and ‘changed' but never mind, it was what he felt. Tears had come into his eyes and he felt them slowly run down his face. They were tears of self-pity, he thought, and he rubbed them furiously away. Remembering their love-making didn't help, the tenderness, the gradual mutual learning of joy. He wanted to write pleading words, to ask her for reassurance, just to tell him it hadn't all been pretence on her part, that she had for a while felt love and desire for him. But he was afraid that if he asked she would never answer that part of the
letter, so he wrote only: ‘always your loving John' and ended it.

Colin and his mother were supposed to be coming at about four, calling in during one of their drives. They had been away for a week's holiday in the Lake District where it had rained all the time. John got himself another ploughperson's lunch and then went out to post his letter. Most of the afternoon he spent looking at Colin's holiday snapshots. There were also a lot of slides which had to be put into a contraption Colin had brought with him and peered at with one eye shut. They were all views of green mountains and grey skies, not a living creature in sight. Constance Goodman, immediately on arrival, had asked him oddly:

‘Any news?'

‘Leave it, Mother,' said Colin.

It took John a while to realize – and by then they were looking at photographs – that they had expected to find Jennifer there, that Jennifer had returned to him as a result of the information they had given him. This was an attitude that now seemed naive, though he too had had faith in it once. The Goodmans had read about the arrest of the man for Cherry's murder. Would John have to give evidence? Would Mark Simms? Constance wanted to know if the police had been in touch with him.

‘He doesn't want to talk about it, Mother. You can see that.'

‘Not everyone is as inhibited as you are, chickie.'

‘If someone is inhibited the parents are presumably to blame, notably the mother, I should think.'

They bickered for a while. John gave them tea, took them round the garden, showing off his fuchsias and the pink lavender. The greenhouse was admired, though Constance said what a shame he had to keep the Honda in there, and they left with a basketful of tomatoes and capsicum. It was a daunting thought that for the rest of his life the majority of his evenings would necessarily be spent alone. This was the first time he had faced it. In the fiction he read single men were always in demand by hostesses, but John had never found that this applied to him. No doubt, he didn't move in those social circles. He couldn't recall that he had ever been
invited to one of the drinks parties given by neighbours in Geneva Road. A murdered sister, a departed wife, set a man apart; people were wary of him, not knowing quite what approach to make, what subjects to avoid.

He watered the greenhouse, removed the yellowing lower leaves from the tomato plants. The aubergines were very susceptible to greenfly and though it went rather against the grain he sprayed them, choking at the noxious fumes. When the door bell rang he hoped it might be Jennifer. Was he going to feel like that for years every time the phone or the bell rang? You had no control over your initial reactions, he thought as he went to the door. All your resolutions, determined cheerfulness, ‘pulling yourself together', were of no avail in preventing the leap of the heart, the spring of hope, the rushing into mind of the beloved name . . .

The woman who stood there wasn't Jennifer but Detective Constable Aubrey.

She said, ‘Good evening, Mr Creevey. May I come in for a moment?'

He nodded. He knew he must look mystified.

‘There's nothing to worry about. This isn't an official call.'

She followed him into the living room. The Goodmans had left their photographs behind and views of Skiddaw and Ullswater lay scattered all over the coffee table.

‘Have you been away?'

‘No, I'm afraid not. They belong to some people I know.' Why hadn't he said friends? Why not ‘friends of mine'? He began gathering up the pictures, replacing them in their yellow envelopes. She said:

‘May I sit down?'

He flushed. ‘I'm sorry. Yes, of course.'

She was wearing jeans, a striped shirt and a zipper jacket, masculine clothes, a man might have worn them without looking odd, but she remained powerfully feminine. He had seen that face in a picture somewhere, a reproduction in a book perhaps, those delicate features and that rosy translucent skin, the barely defined eyebrows, the red-gold hair. It was a pleasure to look at her, though academic only while Jennifer existed and came between his eyes and all other pretty faces.

She said in her pleasant gentle way, ‘I came to talk about your sister Cherry, Mr Creevey.'

He nodded, wary now.

‘Your visit on Monday, your talk with Mr Fordwych, it seemed to leave so much unanswered. What I really want to say is if you're upset or worried about what Mr Simms said to you, could you try not to be? Making false confessions is so common, it happens all the time.'

‘But why?' he said. ‘Why would anyone say he'd – done murder, when he hadn't? I thought you didn't believe me,' he added.

‘Oh, we believed you. Let's just say we rather wondered that you ever believed him. It occurred to me that you might have been in a particularly receptive state for that sort of thing. Forgive me if I seem to probe. Had you been very depressed or nervous or anything?'

He looked at her, beginning to understand many things. ‘I think I was on the edge of a nervous breakdown for months but I never quite tumbled in.' He said quickly, ‘I still don't see why he'd make something like that up.'

‘There are quite a few possible reasons,' she said thoughtfully. ‘He might have resented something about you. I mean, perhaps he thought you weren't really interested in him, didn't listen while he talked? Is that possible? That he was lonely and wanted your attention and felt he didn't really get it because you – well, you had problems of your own?'

‘It's more than possible,' John said. ‘Miss Aubrey – Detective Constable – I'm sorry, but what do I call you?'

‘Call me Susan.'

Somehow he didn't feel he could quite do that. He was sorry she had suggested it. It was too intimate. He framed his question again. ‘Are you saying he was prepared to do anything to get my attention?'

‘Something like that. People do suffer intolerable feelings of rejection, solitariness, sensations of being in glass walls, belljars, you know. And then he might also feel guilty about your sister. I'm not saying there's any possibility he killed her, there isn't, but he might feel guilty in other ways. Perhaps, for instance, for not calling for her that evening when he said he would but nearly an hour later. You didn't know that?
It's all in his statement he made sixteen years ago. He had been going to break with her. He was going to tell her so, but he got there late and she had already left – with the man who is charged with murdering her, as we now know.'

John stared at her. ‘So he did feel responsible for her death?'

‘In a way. How much do you know about your sister, Mr – er, John?'

So it was true. Mark hadn't lied about that. ‘Everything, I think.'

‘Mark Simms had found out she had other lovers. Often he felt he would have liked to kill her. Do you begin to understand now?'

‘Are you a psychologist?' John asked.

‘I used to be. I did psychology at university.'

He offered her coffee and she said thank you, yes, she would like that. While she drank it he talked a bit about Cherry, not speaking of her multifarious inexplicable love affairs or of her and Mark, but asking why she had been killed. Had she – and he tried to put it delicately – behaved in such a way to Rodney Maitland as to bring about her own death? Susan Aubrey said she didn't think so, Cherry knew him, after all, had probably gone innocently with him when he offered her his escort to her bus stop. Maitland, who lived in London, had only come home to his native city that afternoon, had left again immediately after the killing. That was why he had never been investigated, never suspected, while hundreds of local men were fingerprinted and their blood groups examined. He was, it appeared, one of those men who derived sexual satisfaction simply from killing a woman, from surprising her by sudden attack and strangling her before she could utter. Cherry had fought him, she had put up more fight than the others, she had not submitted to her fate . . .

Susan Aubrey's sympathetic manner tempted John to begin confiding in her about Jennifer, to tell her what had brought about his near-breakdown, but he resisted doing so. He had an idea that people who were trained psychologists kept a scientific attitude towards an opening of the heart, listening to confidences with a clinical detachment. It was only after
she had gone, thanking him for the coffee, calling him John, that he thought how, if he had told her of his mental state he must also have told her of his therapy, the mini-Mafia and its codes he had penetrated. Perhaps he should have told her. The novel idea came to him that it was his duty as a citizen to tell the police about this gang's activities and such instructions as that of ‘remove and eliminate', for example. Now he had extricated himself from it with no harm done, he ought at least to inform the police of the drop at cats' green. He would do so on the following day. During lunchtime he would do it, he resolved, setting off for work on Friday morning. It wouldn't do to take any more time off.

Within an hour of his reaching Trowbridge's something happened to put everything else out of his head.

IT WAS THE
first day of the sale. All those plants that no one was going to pay the full price for at this season, overblown geraniums, herbs that had flowered and grown straggly, bushy begonias, were to be displayed on trestle tables at thirty pee each. It should have been set up by the time the garden centre opened but at ten-thirty Gavin was still selecting the plants and trundling them out of the greenhouses. That was when the elderly couple and their granddaughter or whatever she was turned up. They made as usual for the mynah's cage.

‘Those two, they treat this place like a zoo,' Sharon said to John, ‘always bringing that kid to see the mynah. They've never even bought a packet of seeds.'

‘They don't do any harm,' John said.

Les had come up to them.

‘They want to buy the mynah.'

‘There you are, Sharon,' John said. ‘That's better than a packet of seeds.'

He went over to the man, explained that the price of the mynah was eighty-five pounds.

‘It's not in the sale then?'

‘No, it's not in the sale,' John said, smiling.

‘It's a lot of money but we reckon it's worth it, don't we, Mother? We've taken a long time to make up our minds, it's not a snap decision, we've really thought about the responsibilities involved.' The serious tone and earnest look suggested it might be the fostering of a child he was embarking on. ‘We've read up on the subject, we've had books from the library.'

John was tempted to say something to the effect that he knew he could safely entrust the mynah to their keeping but of course he didn't. It was at this point though that he first thought of Gavin. He felt glad Gavin was out in the back, busily occupied, for although at that time he had no real notion of how strongly Gavin felt about the mynah he suspected that if he had been in the shop he would have attempted to discourage the sale. Started talking about Newcastle's Disease or
Gracula religiosa
being dangerous to children. In fact the little girl was poking her fingers into the cage, feeding the mynah from a packet of assorted fruits and nuts, and it was taking her offerings quite gently. The man meant to pay cash for it. Four twenty-pound notes and a five-pound were carefully unrolled. They had evidently called at the bank on their way here.

‘Do we get his cage as well?' said the little girl.

‘Yes, how much is that?' A look of near-dismay made it plain he had made no provision for this in his budgeting.

‘The cage comes with the bird,' said John. ‘Part of the package.'

They went off, carrying the mynah, towards the car park. John was watching them place the cage, with absurdly tender care, on the back seat of an aged Morris Minor, when Gavin came into the shop from the back. He started telling John that two of the shubunkins had fungus. Then he saw the empty space where the cage had been.

‘Who's moved him?'

‘That old couple bought your Dracula.' Sharon's tone was
very slightly malicious. ‘They've just this minute gone. Never even gave him a chance to say goodbye.'

Gavin rushed out of the front door. The Morris Minor had already gone, would by now probably be turning out on to the main road, but he was off in pursuit of it, pounding up the long gravel drive.

‘He was very keen on that bird,' Les said.

After a minute or two Gavin came back, not flushed but white-faced in spite of his exertions. His eyes had a wild look. He said hoarsely:

‘We've got to get him back. I'll buy him off them. I was going to buy him anyway, I've been saving up. I'd nearly got enough.'

‘Why didn't you say?' John said. He was beginning to understand. ‘You could have had him at a discount or on hire purchase or something.'