The Methods of Sergeant Cluff Read online

  He knocked again, harder. He knew the time it took for a caller at the front to be answered in Rupert Street, the raised brows of the people in their rooms at the back, the certain knowledge that anyone seeking that way of admittance must be making a visit of importance, the minutes necessary to set the rooms to right, to tidy the person.

  Feet shuffled in the house. A chain rattled. A key grated in a lock rusty from disuse. The mother, Mrs. Trundle, outlined in a rectangle of light shining into the passage at its farther end, faced him in the doorway. She led him without question along the passage. Steep stairs mounted halfway along, making the passage narrower.

  The living-room had a smell compounded of cooking and the body odours of the woman and of her husband, of their daughter too perhaps. The light showed her grey hair, home-tended, muzzed as if she had been sitting with her head in her hands, running her fingers backwards and forwards over her skull, and Cluff had taken her too much by surprise for her to rearrange it properly. She had not been big earlier in the day at the police-station but he saw her smaller now, dried-up, withered with conflicting emotions amongst which sorrow was the least. Brown shadows underlined eyes flecked with red. Her pinched lips and her cheeks alike lacked colour. She wore older clothes than when he had last seen her, long accustomed to preserving such finery as she could afford for her excursions into the streets.

  Clive pressed against his leg. Cluff missed nothing of the room’s appearance, too small by far for the three of them, father, mother, daughter. A worn armchair, its upholstery frayed into holes, leaking wisps of stuffing, faced its equally decrepit twin across the hearth, both relegated in their age from once-proud occupancy of the front parlour. An open fire, low, needing fuel, sulked in a high grate, part of a range that included an oven on one side and a hot-water boiler on the other. Coconut matting, trodden into strands, covered the floor, showing through its tears patches of flaking, stone flags. A stained cloth hid the top of a table against the rear wall, between the door to the passage and a door into the pantry under the stairs. A chair at the side of the table nearest the little scullery, its outer wall at right-angles to the living-room window, fronted a newspaper spread on the tablecloth. A pint mug, a knife, a fork, and a spoon were arranged on the paper.

  He could hear music, not near but providing a background to the atmosphere of the room. If the exterior walls of these houses were thin those dividing them inside were thinner. Nothing that happened in any room of this house would go unheard in another, or fail to have its meaning interpreted. Where was privacy for the people living in it? How could they get away from each other? How could they bridge, in surroundings like these, the gap between the generations?

  She heard the music as well, cheerful, its beat quick, anything but funereal. She looked hard at the wall containing the fireplace. She said, “They don’t care. She wasn’t their child.”

  “I don’t blame her for the money,” Cluff thought, the notes in the daughter’s wallet heavy against his thigh. “She’d a right to get away from this if she could. She didn’t ask to be born into it. Was she to sit down and bear it? Better to fight back than to accept and wail. Better to die using the weapons she had than go on miserable and broken.”

  The mother observed him, clandestinely, ready to glance away if he caught her at it. The absence of the father made him wonder. He felt as sorry for the father as for the daughter, more sorry because the daughter at least had made her escape and the father had no refuge. Cowardice conditioned the father to suffering; the circumstances of his existence forced him into hopelessness.

  Cluff searched his memory. His gaze wandered the room seeking to support recollection by tangible evidence. He could see no signs that children were a part of this household. He could not remember that Jane Trundle had ever had brothers or sisters.

  In spite of the close, fetid smell, the lack of ventilation, he began to realize that his first impressions were due to the poverty of the house not to the slovenliness of the housewife, another nail in the cross borne by the husband. The stains on the tablecloth were stains that no amount of washing had been able to efface, the newspaper an attempt to prevent more. The holes in the chairs had been darned until the material at their edges would no longer hold thread firm. The stone floor under the matting was swept and clean. The range shone, blackleaded, the handle of its oven mirrorlike. A precision, an order, raised an ugly head from below the surface appearance, compulsive in the woman, the harder to bear because not by the wildest stretch of imagination could it succeed in improving the house one iota. He could see the woman, as her frustration grew, placing more emphasis and more upon dusting and polishing, the house her god not her husband, her husband cared for less and less, subordinated to her new divinity. The mantelpiece was innocent of pipes. Neither ashtrays nor boxes of matches, nor spills of folded paper, lay anywhere about. Whatever smells made up the atmosphere Cluff breathed they did not include the scent of tobacco.

  His sympathy for the father increased. Instead of regretting the father he was pleased that he had avoided the father. He had a picture of the father clearly enough in his mind without the need for more detail. He visualized the long misery of the father, deprived of even the poor comforts within reach of his pocket, badgered, brow-beaten, no master, no man. He saw the father, his life empty except for his daughter, the father’s heart breaking at the hostility between the women he had to live with, the father compelled to partisanship, unable to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, digging for himself a deeper pit whatever part he took. There had been no love here except the love of father for daughter and that resented, crushed, until in the end how could it be reciprocated?

  The Sergeant had to say something. He couldn’t go on standing there, like a statue, a man bewitched. He had already what he had come to learn and he needn’t have come because he had known it before, sparing himself the task of redoubling certainty. He sought for an explanation, an excuse however vague, to justify his visit, ill at ease with a pity that embraced both murderer and victim. He did not have to listen to them in Gunnarshaw to know what they were saying, to stand on the kerb and hear their voices as they went by him, to go into the shops or the offices or the public houses. They had something to talk about and let them make the most of it. “It’s her own fault,” they would be saying, puritan, moral, upright in character and beliefs like this woman with him. “You could see what she was. The way she dressed. Her boldness. Her brazen flaunting of her body.”

  They had seen only one side of the picture. They hadn’t seen this. Who was the victim, the girl for getting herself killed or the man who had killed her? In the excitement of the moment Gunnarshaw marked only the provocation she must have given, the manner in which she’d led some poor devil on until he didn’t know whether he was coming or going, until he’d done what he did and passed the point of no return. But what was black and what was white? Where was the pan that could call the kettle black?

  Cluff got a hold on himself. He said, “I’ve been talking to Jack Carter.”

  The woman’s face twisted, sneering, hostile, but Carter wasn’t the cause of it. Carter merely emphasized the final blow to her prized respectability, Carter the one hope her daughter might have had thrown to the winds.

  “He was too good for her,” the woman replied. “He’d have let her walk over him. She could have wiped her feet on him and he wouldn’t have complained.”

  Uninvited, Cluff sat down in one of the armchairs. Clive lay at his feet. His arm dangled, his hand touching the dog’s head.

  The woman continued, her voice lower, her eyes looking up at the ceiling, listening, “I tried to tell him what she was.”

  “Who?” Cluff thought. “Your husband or Carter?” He knew where the father was, up there on his bed, nursing his grief in solitude, unable to share with his wife either grief or joy.

  “If he’d killed her,” the woman said spitefully, “no one could blame him
. But he didn’t kill her. Not Jack. He worshipped the ground she walked on. He’d still have taken her, shoddy and secondhand as she’d let herself become.”

  The Sergeant’s eyes met the woman’s eyes. She dropped hers, outmatched. She asked, “Do you think I didn’t know?”

  “Men?”

  “A daughter of mine—”

  “Which men?”

  “Oh, she was clever! Would she have told me that? When could I get anything out of her?”

  He didn’t want her to go on. He said, “Did she come in at all last night?”

  “Wait! I’ll show you.”

  His face revealed nothing. Her movements upstairs were violent, noisy. She wrenched open drawers and banged them back, hurling them shut. She stamped her feet and dashed furniture aside until the ceilings shook. Her husband did not call out to her.

  She held a snapshot in her hand, blown up to postcard size. She hissed at Cluff, “What’s the use of pretending? You’ll find out for yourself if you haven’t done already.” She stabbed the snapshot at him.

  The girl posed against a groyne, on a sandy beach, half-turned to the camera, laughing, her eyes provocative. A brassiere hardly hid the swelling of her breasts, the cleft between them deep and tantalizing, the nipples pointed against the cloth. She paraded her round, white belly, dimpled with a neat navel. Nothing else except a triangular band of material, thin, tied tight, gaping over her hips, broke the nakedness of her flesh.

  Cluff studied the picture. White houses, shaded by exotic-looking trees, formed a background. The light was sharp and clear and brilliant, the sky cloudless, the sea glinting, the beach a rash of striped umbrellas and canvas backrests on the sand, of bodies next door to nudity, men and women alike.

  “She didn’t know I’d seen it,” the mother said. “She kept it hidden away. She couldn’t fool me. I knew where to look.”

  “It’s not in England,” Cluff murmured.

  “She’d bigger ideas than that. A week at Blackpool wouldn’t have done for her.”

  “It costs money to travel.”

  “I wasn’t hard on her. Only for her own good—”

  He wondered how the mother measured, what scale the mother had for good.

  He said, “Only a girl—”

  “A—” the mother began and managed to stop herself. A trace of fear haunted her stony eyes. The little by which she had escaped revealing to Cluff the full count of her envy and her longing calmed her. She bit back the epithet on the tip of her tongue. She returned to the question Cluff had asked before she left the room. “Earlier than usual,” she told him. “In and out as she always did. Prinked and painted and powdered. Dressed like a street-walker.”

  “With Carter?”

  “What are you saying?”

  The fire in the grate was no more than a tiny heap of blackening ash, the room cold, without comfort, like the woman he sat with.

  “What time?”

  For a moment she was far away.

  “Try to remember.”

  “No later than six. I wouldn’t dare to ask at the shop. I’d be afraid of what I might hear. I never expected she’d keep her job as long as she did.”

  Cluff fidgeted, feeling dirty for listening to her.

  “She behaved as she liked.”

  He prepared to get up. Something in her nailed him to his seat.

  “I’d no help from her,” the woman complained, switching to self-pity. “She left me to do everything. I’m not as young as I was.”

  “She worked,” Cluff said.

  “Work! That! She came in at all hours of the night. She lay in bed in the mornings. If she’d had a lock on the door of her room she’d have shut me out.”

  “I’m not married,” Cluff said. “I’ve no children of my own.”

  “You’re lucky. You don’t know how lucky you are.”

  Cluff neither agreed nor disagreed.

  She said, “He never corrected her. He always gave way to her. He left it all to me. I warned him when she was a child. I told him over and over again what he was doing. I said she’d come to a bad end. I knew all along this would happen.”

  Cluff looked past her, slack in the chair, face still expressionless, unsurprised. The doorway into the passage framed the husband, the father, swaying, ghastly. His head trembled above the open neckband of his shirt. His bony chest was hairless. He hadn’t delayed to put on his trousers. Thick, woollen drawers encased bowed legs, tucked at the ankles into socks moist with sweat. How long had he been there? His eyes flamed with a knowledge of his wife’s ultimate treachery. She had destroyed the last barriers against the flare of their mutual hatred.

  Cluff climbed to his feet, a mourner at the death of a marriage that could not be broken while they lived, because this was Gunnarshaw and they lived in Rupert Street and were middle-aged and had to exist, both of them, on the pittance the man earned, because, more than anything, they were respectable and the wife could not tolerate, if the husband could, what the neighbours would say. The man could no longer deceive himself about the extent of his wife’s disloyalty. Everything between them was finished and had to go on still, as it had always done.

  “Go back to bed,” Cluff advised softly.

  He walked slowly across the floor and the man moved back, against the panelling enclosing the stairs, to let him pass. He saw the man’s eyes and he put his hand momentarily on the man’s arm, the lightest of touches. Clive followed him along the passage and the man had nothing, not so much as a dog.

  He let himself out into Rupert Street, the house silent behind him. He closed the door. The cool wind blew on his face and he was grateful for it.

  He looked down at the photograph, clutched in his fingers. She smiled up at him in the dim gas-light. This was Rupert Street. She wasn’t Rupert Street. Couldn’t Carter, who was Rupert Street and Charles Street rolled into one, have seen it? Had Carter so little sense that he set himself to reach for the stars?

  Chapter VI

  He took the towpath instead of turning down Charles Street to the road.

  The mill was far behind him. It was accident, more than intention, that he happened to be returning towards the centre of the town. The gable ends of the rows of houses alternated with the spaces that marked in turn the yards at their backs and the grass-grown, weedy streets at their fronts. Curtained windows glowed, the yards on to which they looked palely suffused with their light. Occasionally a back door opened, patching the dark more brilliantly. Shovels scraped in coal-places. The tread of people visiting the outside lavatories rang hollow on stone, accompanied by the flush of cisterns. Now and again snatches of voices reached his ears, the complaining tones of a woman, a man’s angry exclamation, the wail of an infant, the startled cry of a child assaulted for some peccadillo.

  He could not see where he was putting his feet, the path dark, no light falling on it, the gables of the rows blank. He walked surely despite the darkness and the puddles, the potholes hollowed by weather and neglect, not hesitant or stumbling, his feet confident in the manner of his ancestors bred to the roughness of the moors.

  In the shadows ahead the shadow of Clive ranged. A whiteness on the black water revealed itself, as Cluff came abreast, a swan, still, alerted by the dog, watchful. He could not recall ever having seen a swan on the canal before. It pleased him and he stayed by it for some time, speculating on its origin, the reason for its being there, its probable destination.

  A swing-bridge to his left led from a break in the embankment to a farm track on the opposite bank. Beyond the bridge, on his right, the shuttered bunkers of another mill frowned on him. A tall chimney soared above the bulk of weaving-sheds, tapering, its top invisible.

  There were buildings now on both banks, parallel with the banks, their walls fencing the towpath on this side and the edge of the canal on the other. A second swing-bridge joined the spli
t trace of a paved road. Lights blazed in the windows of a hospital. The canal widened into a basin, overhung by the cowled hoods of loading bays, a couple of cranes poking their jibs over the water. Two or three ships’ lifeboats, converted into the semblance of cabin cruisers, top-heavy and unwieldy, moored against a concrete wharf. A cow in the holding-shed of the town slaughter-house bawled suddenly and briefly.

  The canal narrowed, going under a stone bridge. The towpath sloped almost level with the water. His feet echoed and he had to bend his head to avoid the curved stonework. On the other side of the bridge he climbed, reluctantly, the worn treads of steps mounting to the street.

  It must have been later than he had thought, his progress up the canal bank slow and interspersed by his frequent stops. The shops were closed, the traffic on the road sparse, people on the pavements few. In the distance a road junction, with a traffic island in the middle, marked the meeting of the road he was on with two others.

  He wandered on, his brain woolly with half-formed impressions, which he made no attempt to clarify or catalogue. He stopped at the junction, faced with the alternative of turning left into the High Street or right along the main road that would bring him to the outskirts of Gunnarshaw on the south. He thought of his car in the High Street, and of Barker. He took the road, crossing at the island, choosing to walk on the darker pavement, away from the bright, deserted foyer of a cinema, red neon letters shining on its façade above the glass porch sheltering its entrance.

  He walked a long way and went to the other side of the road and came back until he could see the lights of the cinema again in front of him. Instead of passing it he turned into a side-road, plunging into a maze of unadopted hilly streets. Lights in the window of a corner shop astonished him a little. He went closer and the smell of cooked food stirred his empty stomach. Clive moved eagerly about his legs, letting him know that the dog had not fed either since breakfast.