The Methods of Sergeant Cluff Read online

  “It’s hard enough for them as it is.”

  “They brought her up. She was their daughter.”

  Cluff opened the door of the interview room. He switched on the light under its white, porcelain shade, dispelling something of the gloom. He put his hat and stick on the bare table and threw a word at Clive.

  He studied them, side by side on the old, horse-hair couch set across the corner. The man especially had an air of unbelief about him, as if he refused to believe in the situation in which he was involved. If Cluff hadn’t known it he could have told at once they weren’t Gunnarshaw born, nor from anywhere near Gunnarshaw. The woman was toil-worn, grey-haired. The man had large, red hands scarred with healed cuts and a thin, furrowed face. They wore decent clothes, but cheap ones. The cold in the room made them cold. The man tried to efface himself as much as he could. He didn’t know Cluff except by sight and he was nervous, in the manner of his class, when confronted by the police. His eyes swam with tears. His wife’s face hardened into a grim, forbidding mask.

  The silence between them lengthened. Cluff slouched in the upright chair behind the table.

  “She was a good girl,” the man asserted suddenly, his words too quick, too hopeful, lacking the ring of truth. The silence was more intense afterwards for his outburst. His wife darted at him a rapid look of reproach. He lowered his eyes.

  “I trusted her,” the man said, striving to convince not Cluff, but himself.

  The woman put a hand to her mouth. She had a handkerchief squeezed into a ball in her palm. She pressed the ball of the handkerchief against her pale lips, stifling a protest.

  “She was a good girl,” Trundle repeated, a note of hysteria in his voice.

  Cluff asked, “Her friends?”

  “So young,” the father murmured. “It seems only like yesterday—”

  “It couldn’t have been hard,” Cluff said, not knowing whether he was telling the truth. “She didn’t suffer.”

  The man sobbed. He had his hands to his eyes, shutting out a picture he hadn’t seen but could see only too clearly. His wife stiffened, irritated by his breakdown.

  They sat without speaking, awkwardly, able even to hear the ticking of the clock in the outer office. The woman shuffled on the couch, her skirt rasping. Cluff felt her eagerness.

  The Sergeant got to his feet abruptly. He pushed his chair back and the legs of the chair scraped harshly on the wooden boards of the floor. The woman’s eyes, reflecting the bleakness of her existence, had no softness or pity in them. He read in her face her half-conscious desire to be revenged for the hurts she had endured, the hopes deferred until she was past hoping. The hate she had for her husband mounted in her, the sense of her loss the less because she knew how much more his loss had been.

  “I’ll get them to take you home,” Cluff said.

  He opened the door and showed them out. He listened to her whispers on the steps of the police-station, sibilant, unanswered, while they waited for the car to come round. He heard Mole’s voice: “What did you get out of them?”

  Cluff’s lips pressed firmly together.

  Mole said, “The woman knows.”

  “You saw the daughter. Was the mother ever like that?”

  “You’re right,” Mole agreed thoughtfully. “It’s hard to believe they’re related.”

  Cluff said, “They had to live together. They couldn’t get away from each other. The mother could never get away. The daughter with a chance still left in her life, the mother with none. She’ll never forgive her husband. She’d never have forgiven her daughter if her daughter had lived.”

  “You’re lucky. You’ll get the facts from her.”

  “More than the facts.”

  “The mother didn’t kill her.” Mole stared at the Sergeant. “Come,” he added. “You don’t believe that!” He waited. “Well? Why don’t you say something?”

  “What is there to say?”

  Cluff whistled Clive into his office. He sat in his chair, his eyes on the papers with which his table was littered, the pile of files high on his left. He made no effort to transfer them one by one, considered and dealt with, into the empty dip to his right. Now and then he looked at his watch. Clive, as much at home here as in the cottage, dozed.

  Mole could not settle. He kept going from his own room into the outer office, stealing surreptitious glances at Cluff’s door. “He’s not still in there?” he asked the man on the desk and went out before the constable could reply. “Haven’t you been in?” he said sometimes. “What’s he doing?”

  The Inspector’s curiosity got the better of him. He poked his head round Cluff’s door. He said, “It doesn’t matter about Barker,” and offered, “I can lend you more men if they’d be of any use.” He regarded the confusion on Cluff’s table, Cluff’s pen dry on its stand, Cluff’s pencils blunted and broken. He remarked, “You’ll have a job to catch up with that lot.”

  Cluff put his hat on his head and Clive jumped to his feet.

  “Can I give you a lift?” Mole wanted to know.

  Cluff left the station.

  Mole smouldered, unable to concentrate on his work. He went out to his smart little car, parked tidily round the back, dismally certain that Cluff would turn up results for which he didn’t deserve the credit, that the more far-fetched and irrelevant Cluff’s ideas were the more likely they would be to approach the truth. The Inspector told himself that, Cluff being Cluff, the murderer would probably walk in by himself and confess.

  Mole drove up the High Street on his way home for a meal. The street had wide pavements with trees planted at intervals along the kerbs. Broad ribbons of stone setts ran on both sides between pavements and carriageway. Temporary stalls, selling fruit and fish, drapery and sweets, stood on the setts. An ironmonger had appropriated the space opposite his frontage for a display of gas-cylinders and buckets, rolls of wire and tools. In two or three places collections of farm implements were on show.

  The street was busy, the day a market day, the pavements filled with people, only a trickle of them moving, many of them stout men talking in groups, unmistakably from the dales’ farms about Gunnarshaw. The whole town seemed to Mole to be populated with Cluffs. He was bedevilled with Cluffs, all dressed as the prototype dressed, with dogs the spit of Cluff’s dog, carrying sticks identical with Cluff’s stick. Their faces were as round and as heavy and as red. They looked just as solid and as slow.

  He caught sight of the real Cluff and braked suddenly to avoid running down a man with a crook. He continued on his way more slowly, but irritable because amongst all these Cluffs he still could not mistake the Cluff who mattered.

  Cluff, on the pavement edge by the library, nodded to his doubles, returning their “Calebs” with a “Fred” or a “John” or a “William” or a “Joe.” They knew as well as he did what had happened in the town the night before and, to make quite sure, a placard outside a newsagent’s broadcast the news to everyone except the blind or the illiterate. He occupied his present position, or one adjacent to it, on every market day and usually they stopped and chatted with him, about their farms and stock, the weather, the prospects for the coming season, accepting him as one of themselves, speaking of Cluff’s Head as if it belonged to him as much as to his brother. Today he got only brief acknowledgments. They left him alone apart from their greetings, not presuming on friendship.

  A girl came out of a chemist’s shop, seventeen or thereabouts, fair-haired, shapely, very fresh and pretty. She paused on the pavement to look up and down the street. She saw Cluff at once and her face turned scarlet. He read panic in her manner. She stood rooted to the spot, staring at her feet as if she hoped the flags would open and swallow her up.

  He walked to her. “I remember you,” he said and her flush spread down her neck to the collar of her coat. She glanced wildly about and he thought for a moment she was going to take to her hee
ls. He went on quickly, “I saw you watching me from your window in Balaclava Street.”

  “I didn’t know,” she told him, in a small voice.

  “She worked with you,” Cluff said.

  “She was older than me.”

  He waited but she didn’t add anything. He asked, “Isn’t your name Jean?”

  She had her eyes on Clive. “I’ve always wanted a dog,” she said.

  “He won’t bite.”

  “Or a cat.”

  “My brother gets more than he knows what to do with.”

  The girl uttered a sharp exclamation. Cluff turned to a man who had come up beside him, very neat and clean, in a subdued, unobtrusively checked suit, well pressed and almost new. The man said, “I’ve been expecting to see you all morning.” He had an air of arrogance about him, the appearance of a man who wouldn’t take kindly to contradiction. An ostentatious self-importance made up more than adequately for what he lacked in inches. He shot a look of displeasure at Jean, a David to Cluff’s Goliath.

  Cluff looked down his nose, making no effort to conceal his dislike of little, brash, assertive men.

  “I couldn’t close the shop,” the man said. “I’ve a duty to the public.”

  “Trade must have been good this morning.”

  The Sergeant prodded with his stick at a crack between the flag-stones, out of sympathy with men who talked too much, with too much authority, not entirely at his ease, preferring silent men as big as he was. They were alien to each other, Cluff and the chemist. The chemist had a dark-haired, foreign look about him, an urban sparkle, a Celtic restlessness the antithesis of Cluff’s northern ancestry, his descent from remote Viking ancestors, close on the sea to the elemental, as close on the holdings they carved out for themselves in the wild country when they drove inland from the coast.

  The chemist’s shop behind them had a bow window on either side of its recessed entrance, pseudo-antique, reconstructed from the original building to its proprietor’s own specifications. The name over the door, gold-lettered, discreet, read “Greensleeve.” The shop struck Cluff as pretentious and artificial, a confection in sugar unsuited to the masculine stomachs of a people bred to hardiness. He considered the huge bottles, filled with red and green and blue liquids, on the high shelves at the backs of the window spaces too gay and colourful. He could not remember when ornament and decoration had been valued in Gunnarshaw, when the feminine and tawdry had been accounted higher than the utilitarian.

  “You haven’t much time,” Greensleeve told the girl, “if you’re going to be back by one.”

  Cluff went on poking at the crack between the flags, conscious that the High Street was quieter, interest heightening. He had an impression of pricked ears, of a reduction in the pace of the passers-by, of necks craning and eyes peeping out of the corners of their sockets. Evidently Greensleeve felt it too, stranded with the Sergeant on a little island of isolation about which the tide of market day ebbed and flowed.

  “We can’t talk here,” the chemist said.

  Cluff followed Greensleeve into the shop. A counter ran down each side with another transversely between their ends, separated from them by gaps through which the assistants could pass. In the wall behind the rear counter an open door gave a glimpse of a dispensary.

  A girl in a white overall, in her late twenties, had the shop to herself, a long, slender girl with a pinched, sulky expression and a mouth pulled down at the corners by discontent. She watched Greensleeve’s jaunty progress to the dispensary and her eyes glittered. Cluff nodded to her, receiving in return a look whose meaning he could not interpret.

  They sat one on either side of a desk, the door into the shop closed, the walls about them fitted with shelves. A work-bench, with a sink at one end, ran under the shelves. A blue flame hissed gently from a nozzle on a water-heater. Measuring jars and test-tubes, pestles and mortars, a pill-rolling machine, flasks and other impedimenta of a chemist’s trade littered the bench. The smell of drugs was noticeable and not unpleasant, astringent, clean, antiseptic.

  A half-smile played on the chemist’s lips. Through a window over Greensleeve’s shoulder Cluff could see a yard, walled, with a big, brown-painted, two-leaved gate of solid planks.

  “I’ve very little help to give you,” the chemist interrupted Cluff’s thoughts.

  He tried to think back, to the many times before when he had met Greensleeve in the streets, or seen him in his shop, comparing that Greensleeve with this one, sensing some subtle change. The Greensleeve condescending to him was a brighter, healthier man than the man he could immediately remember, even more alert, cheerful, in a high good humour. The killing of one of his assistants hadn’t touched him. Greensleeve said, as if in answer to Cluff’s unspoken question, “After all, Sergeant, she only worked here. Her private life was her own concern.”

  “True.”

  A car in the yard, recently washed, still shone with a moist sheen. The brown leaves of the gate stood slightly ajar, revealing a narrow alley joining a road some distance off. Water patched the sloping concrete round the car. It still trickled in a turgid, shallow stream through the open gate, losing itself finally amongst setts like those in the High Street.

  “She was only a girl,” Cluff said.

  A woman crossed the space he could see between the leaves of the gate, from a tumbledown cobbler’s shop on one corner to the dingy, blacked-out window of a rag-merchant’s on the other.

  “Attractive,” Cluff added.

  A hosepipe sucked at a tap in the yard wall to the right. It snaked, rubbery and supple, for the car, its mouth empty and gaping.

  “Possibly,” Greensleeve went so far as to agree.

  “You must have noticed it.”

  “I’m older than you are.”

  “It makes a difference?”

  “I’ve the advantage of you, Sergeant. I’ve been married for thirty years.”

  “Of course.”

  The yard was Greensleeve’s, the car Greensleeve’s, Green-

  sleeve a power in the town, amongst the most prominent of its citizens, prosperous, respected, a finger in every pie. Cluff’s old, stained coat, his battered hat, the uncreased pipes of his trousers contrasted with Greensleeve’s smartness, a bull in the presence of a gadfly.

  “There’s not much for a girl to do in Gunnarshaw,” Cluff said.

  “Gunnarshaw’s the same as a hundred other towns. It has its amusements, harmless maybe, but sufficient—”

  “For a girl like that?”

  “You assume too much.”

  A shade of violence in Greensleeve’s reply startled him a little. He lifted his head and looked across the desk at the chemist. Greensleeve’s fingers busied themselves in shuffling precisely a heap of correspondence. The chemist allowed his sleeve to rumple on his arm so that a gold wristlet-watch appeared.

  “I’m keeping you?” Cluff asked.

  “It’s your privilege.”

  “That’s why she was killed.”

  “I’m not sure I follow—”

  “Because she was young. And pretty.”

  “If you say so.”

  “What other reason could there be?”

  “You’ve more facts at your disposal than I have.”

  Cluff wanted to turn his head to see what it was behind him Greensleeve was staring at. The papers on Greensleeve’s desk rustled. Pharmacopoeia and catalogues were stacked on top of a green, brass-bound safe in a corner.

  Greensleeve, more uncertainly, told Cluff, “I see you know about him.”

  The Sergeant waited.

  “It’s not pleasant for me,” Greensleeve excused himself.

  “Nor for me.”

  “He pestered her. I suppose you heard about him from Jean?”

  Cluff neither admitted nor denied the chemist’s assumption.

 
“But it can’t be,” Greensleeve went on. “She’d have nothing to do with him.”

  Cluff’s eyes were vague and empty.

  “They couldn’t have had anything in common,” the chemist persisted.

  “A youth?” Cluff said. “Gaunt, with an undernourished look about him? The sleeves of his jacket too short? His trousers climbing up his calves? Boots, not shoes? A flat cap with a broken neb instead of a hat?”

  “He couldn’t have expected to remain anonymous. The whole town must have seen him at one time or another. He hung about the shop evening after evening.”

  “Last night as well?”

  “Surely you don’t need my confirmation?”

  “Your word carries weight.”

  “Every night recently.”

  “She left with him?”

  Greensleeve frowned.

  “He followed—?”

  “I shouldn’t like to feel myself the cause—”

  “It’s your public duty.”

  “Put like that—” Greensleeve spread his hands in a gesture of resignation.

  “And the time?”

  “What time do we all close in Gunnarshaw?”

  “I shouldn’t have asked.”

  Cluff moved for the door to the shop. He opened the door. He paused in the doorway, his fingers still clutching the knob, an impression in his mind of rapid, flurried movement. The assistant he had passed on the way in stood behind one of the counters, idly busy with a display of cartons. She breathed quickly, struggling to control her breathing. He stared hard at her. Either she did not realize that the dispensary door had opened or she was pretending not to know he was there.

  “You’ve been helpful,” Cluff said over his shoulder, remaining in the doorway.

  “I’m glad,” Greensleeve said.

  “She worked late sometimes.”

  Greensleeve’s voice sounded annoyed. “Occasionally she stayed on to assist me with my returns.”

  “Not last night?”

  “No.”

  He heard Greensleeve behind him and stepped into the shop. The girl at the counter listened, not watching now what her hands were doing, looking past Cluff at her employer. A carton slipped to the floor. She bent to retrieve it.