THIRTY-SEVEN

Whatever the reasons for Dad’s absence from the scene, I had at some point to warn him that I had just unearthed another potential reason why he should stay at a barge-pole’s length from Ada. He didn’t have an answering machine, so I was temporarily stymied in that direction. I therefore sought first to apprise the plod of my suspicions.

Unfortunately, no sooner was I sitting in an office with Jean Abelson, wondering how to begin the explanation of my latest brain-straining theory, than Masson walked in. He did so without knocking, but then it was his office, so I could hardly raise strong objections. It brought him up short, though; Jean Abelson got up from behind the desk – his desk, I now appreciated – and went to a much smaller one in the corner of the room. He said nothing for ten long seconds while continuing to stare at me as he sat in the chair so recently occupied by his sergeant; only then did he ask, ‘What are you doing here?’

If outlining my theory was going to be tricky when the aural recipient of my wisdom was Sergeant Abelson, the thought of pouring my sweet nothings into the hairy lugholes of Inspector Masson was a daunting one indeed. I hesitated and he took advantage of this to produce a cigarette packet, shake one of its occupants loose, then place it between his lips. He eyed me with an amalgamation of curiosity, distaste and smouldering resentment as he lit it with a match taken from a box that proclaimed it was ‘England’s Glory’. Then, through a lungful of fume-laden air that he expelled with much satisfaction – as if he came from a planet with a distinctly smokier atmosphere and felt liable to continual asphyxiation if there was too much oxygen in the air – he pressed me for an answer. ‘Well?’

Prevarication was no longer an option, I realized. I found that I could not look directly at him as I spoke for I knew that his expression (of impatient disdain) would put me off; I thus had to look at the wall behind his head – it had a photograph of the Queen hanging upon it – as I sallied forth into my story.

‘I think I know who killed Marlene Jeffries.’ With which, nothing at all happened. Neither of them reacted, not even to scoff, or to laugh or even to sit back in amazement. The silence, as they say, sat heavily upon the three of us as they both continued to look at me until I asked, ‘Do you want to know who?’

Masson sucked as only Masson could; then he tapped the cigarette to dislodge some ash into an ashtray; one, I noticed, that was made of glass and was a present from Blackpool. I wondered how he had come by it; it was difficult to see Masson paddling in the sea replete with knotted handkerchief on his head and rolled-up trousers. He said, ‘Why not?’

‘A man called Mike Clarke. One of the parents at the school.’

I noticed that Jean had scribbled something down; presumably she was making a note of the name, although I suppose she could have been writing something rude about me. Masson enquired, ‘Why do you think he’s our killer?’

As I led him through my reasoning, my misinterpretation of what had been written on the gymnasium wall and how this suggested to me a potential motive for at least one of the murders, I glanced at Jean; she had her head bowed as if she could not bear to witness the tableau, as if she were a sensitive soul and did not care to stare heartlessly at self-immolation. I came to an end; it was much as T. S. Eliot had said, with a lot more of the whimper than the bang about it.

There was silence during which I brought my gaze back to the Inspector’s grizzled, not to say grisly, visage. As usual, it had upon it a look of impending anger, meaning I could not tell what he was actually thinking. He had finished his cigarette but, fear not, he had already captured and activated another.

‘That’s quite a theory.’

‘Not so much a theory, more of a hypothesis. I wouldn’t put it any more strongly than that.’

He waved this modesty impatiently away with a hand that held the cigarette. ‘Whatever you call it,’ he conceded, ‘it’s quite ingenious.’ In case I should accidentally mistake his comment for praise, he went on, ‘For which you have not a single piece of evidence.’

‘Not direct evidence.’

‘Not any kind of evidence.’

‘I think it’s quite plausible,’ I protested.

He enlisted Jean, a tactic which I think to this day was unfair; of course she was going to agree with him, wasn’t she? ‘What do you think, Sergeant Abelson?’

She surprised him, however. ‘It would explain some things about her murder. The extreme frenzy that seems to have been used, for instance.’

Masson stared at her for a moment, as if contemplating the sentence for such insubordination. Then he turned back to me. ‘Yes, it would. How did Mr Clarke find out that his daughter was being seduced by Marlene Jeffries? Did he see this graffiti? The one that says MJ loves JC?’

I didn’t for one second entertain the notion that I should correct his use of the Italian. ‘I don’t know.’

‘And how do you know that JC refers to Joanna Clarke?’

Well, I didn’t know, did I? It wasn’t a fully formed explanation, just a moment of inspiration, albeit one that I was sure was right. ‘I don’t know,’ I was forced to repeat.

‘And why did Yvette Mangon get sliced to death?’

‘I don’t know that either.’

‘And what about Mr Gillman? Did he have something to do with deflowering Mr Clarke’s daughter?’

I had hoped not to be in the position of petitioning the Inspector without first persuading Jean Abelson to support my cause; this was exactly what I had foreseen would happen if I waded straight in on the redoubtable senior plod person. I told myself that it was no use getting impatient with him, or reacting to his over-the-top sarcasm. ‘I rather thought you might work out the details of the theory.’

‘Hypothesis,’ he butted in quickly and, I thought, with undue nastiness.

‘Yes,’ I conceded. ‘. . . Hypothesis.’ Out of the corner my eye I caught once again Jean looking upon the spectacle doubtless in much the same way as members of the audience had once watched heretics arguing their case with the Spanish Inquisition; there was a definite touch of ‘I told you so’.

‘Perhaps Yvette Mangon and Marlene Jeffries raped her.’

‘Possibly,’ I agreed, and immediately regretted my enthusiasm.

‘And what? Gillman watched? Or did he join in as well?’

I stayed silent on that one, my sensitive nose for these things telling me that he was being facetious. There was a pause which can be most accurately described as ‘brooding’, before he asked, ‘And you think I should investigate this possibility?’

Well, yes, I did, so I said, ‘I’m sure you’d be discreet about it.’

‘I’d bloody have to be, wouldn’t I? I could upset a lot of people, Dr Elliot.’

‘Isn’t that an occupational risk?’

I could see him running that reply through his sarcasm detector; fortunately he seemed to find it bereft thereof. He changed tack, ‘Do you use green ink, Doctor?’

This was a right Chinaman googly and it left me standing at the crease wondering what had just happened. ‘Not habitually,’ I admitted cautiously, just in case he was seeking to make me incriminate myself.

‘Every time there’s a murder, we get a fair few letters written with the stuff. Some of them are in capitals, some of them are so poorly written they’re almost indecipherable, and all of them are anonymous.’ I was beginning to see what he was getting at but he wasn’t going to let me break in to his little diatribe. ‘And every single one of them has a theory about the murder.’ He looked at Sergeant Abelson. ‘They make quite amusing reading, don’t they?’

She nodded dutifully. ‘They can be quite extraordinary.’

‘A lot of them are just people attempting to make trouble, either for us or for the people they’re accusing. Another large proportion is from crackpots – people who insist that they have incontrovertible proof that the killing was done by Jack the Ripper, or Martians, or the KGB, or even the devil himself. Not a few are from clairvoyants, in contact with the deceased. They all have some common characteristics – most of them demand a reward (whether or not one has been offered) and all are completely unproven.’

‘Well, I’m not claiming a reward . . . and by definition I’m not anonymous.’

He gnawed at his teeth for a bit, the cigarette idly turning to ash and smoke as his forefinger tapped the desk blotter. ‘No, you’re not, are you?’

I didn’t know what I was to say at that so, in line with a strategy that I have generally found the most successful in these situations, I said nothing. Jean was looking on with pity in her eyes. Masson stood up. ‘You have privileges, Dr Elliot. Unlike most members of the public, you are allowed into my office and I can’t just screw up your “hypothesis” and throw it in the round filing cabinet in the corner. I find myself sitting here and listening to you.’

I shrugged and smiled; I didn’t mean to annoy him but somehow it always seemed to take him the wrong way, as it did now. It was with a display of great forbearance that he said, ‘The only problem that I have, Doctor, is that at present I don’t have a better theory, and I’m starting to get desperate, and there are people upstairs who are starting to get desperate, too’

I saw Jean’s eyes widen slightly as he admitted this.

I enquired of him, ‘What about Albert Stewart? Is there anything to link him with any of the deaths?’

‘He and Gillman weren’t the best of friends is about the best it gets. Stewart blames Gillman for persecuting him when he was in his class; apparently barely a week went by when Gillman wasn’t giving him detention, or even caning his hand, so he definitely bore him a grudge, but we can’t find any such link with Yvette Mangon, and Marlene Jeffries wasn’t around when Stewart was at school.’

‘How does he feel about lesbians and homosexuals?’

He grunted. ‘The psychiatrist tells me that Stewart isn’t too fond of poofs – says it’s to do with his military training – but he’s not too worked up over lesbians.’

‘No motive there, then.’

‘Not if you believe psychiatrists.’ He sounded as if he didn’t, particularly. He chewed for a while, perhaps on a rubber band, perhaps on his own tongue, perhaps on a wasp, then he declared, ‘You’re almost certainly wrong, but should you be right and I am found to have ignored you, I won’t just be for the high jump, I’ll be hung, drawn and quartered by the powers that be.’ He sounded bitter; once again, it seemed that I was making trouble for him. He turned to his sergeant. ‘Go with the doctor and check out the graffiti, Sergeant, and then do some background checks – but do them quietly. Then, when we have put the good doctor’s mind at rest, we can get on with solving this case.’