LITMIR.BIZ

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I must struggle to be myself as well as her, she thought before going on:

      There’s a funny thing about her. She never goes out. Well, hardly ever. I have heard tales that she sometimes hires a car and drives to a first night where she sits in the back of the box wearing white gloves and clapping. Or not clapping if she’s displeased. Then she has supper at the Savoy and drives back.

      So she’s not quite a recluse. The house was a shock at first, but the bit we live in is all right. The rest, cobwebs, dear, and dust. Apparently the Miss Havisham thing goes back to when she lost her son. It’s a form of agoraphobia, I suppose. It’s what Miss Havisham could have had, if you think about it.

      But there’s something even odder. She drinks a bit. And one night she let out that she doesn’t believe her son is dead. Just gone. One day he might come back. And these last few days she’s acted as if she’d had messages from Heaven that he’s on the way. Oh, poor lady. Most of the time she’s so sane, too. I suppose it’s the gin talking. We all have our fantasies.

      I won’t tell you mine, but I will say there are some gorgeous men here. Two policemen (yes!). One so fair, one so dark. And there’s Eddie Kelly. And a pretty good musician who’s our stage manager.

      I think I’ve clicked. It might even be the real thing. There’s something very sexy about a slight maiming, isn’t there? The Byron thing. He’s very attractive, rather brutal, I suspect.

      Stella finished her letter and posted it.

      That afternoon she got the call from John Coffin which obliged her to go to the police station and collect Rachel Esthart and take her back to Angel House on the bus. A journey not without difficulty as Rachel was withdrawn and hostile. The sympathetic union between them was now so strong that Stella felt sick, angry, and yet frightened at the same time and knew this was how Rachel felt.

      Florrie met them at the door, and Stella handed her silent charge over.

      ‘Come on, Mrs Esthart, love. What happened?’ she said to Stella.

      Stella told her side of the story.

      ‘Come on, love,’ said Florrie to her mistress. ‘What’s behind it? I knew something was up, keeping it to yourself, weren’t you? Tell old Florrie.’

      For answer Rachel produced a card. It was a plain white correspondence card with a gold deckled edge, a slight pink shadow, hardly a stain, marked one edge. It said:

      I am sending a present to my mother. It will arrive on May 1st from my mother’s son.

      ‘Yesterday was May 1st,’ said Rachel. ‘It’s late.’

      She was like a child whose birthday had been overlooked, but at least she was talking.

      Florrie said defensively, ‘I blame the drugs they give her. She’ll be herself when they wear off.’

      ‘I am myself.’

      ‘I think that card is wicked. A cruel joke.’

      With the bleakness of returning sanity, Rachel said: ‘Either the card is honest, and my son is around. Or somebody hates me.’

      Next day the first body arrived, afloat in the river, but late for its appointment. It had got caught in the chains attached to a string of barges. This had delayed its transit up river. Otherwise the tide would have deposited it sooner.

      Attached to the body in a pocket, soaked but legible, was a white correspondence card. It said:

      A present for my mother.

CHAPTER TWO

       The Shape of the Murderer

      The first body, that of a young woman, was found soon after dawn by a lighterman going to work his barges. The tidal river has its own pattern and sets its own working hours, so he was early to work. The tide rose about five o’clock, but it was full summer and a fine day so he had light enough to see what was there at the wharf on Fidder’s Reach.

      When he had taken it in, Will Summers, lighterman and waterman of the river for thirty-odd years, not without experience of dead bodies, was sorry that he had seen so clearly. I’m never going to forget that sight, he told himself, I shall never forget that girl, poor kid. She’s going to come back every so often and be like a member of the family.

      He knew it was a girl from the clothes, otherwise he might have been confused, for the face had been terribly beaten by the chains in which she had become entangled, and a piece of rope had lashed her legs, tearing at them. There were no fish much in the river, but there were eels and some of them must have found her. Or perhaps a river rat, venturing out at night to eat. The pathologists would identify the likely causes of the marks.

      She was wearing a pretty flowered cotton dress. Or at least, it had been pretty once, brightly coloured in red and blue, but it was stained and dirty now. Her shoes had gone, but a necklace of white beads remained around her throat. Will Summers took that fact in because of all the things about her only the white, china beads remained unspoilt. They gleamed in the water. They were what he had first seen and reached out a hand to touch.

      The water moved darkly around the body, unpleasantly thick and brown. The barges had been towed along late yesterday and lined up in a string to be unloaded on Ellers Wharf. At some point they had found the body (or it had found them) and brought it along with them.

      ‘I never saw that happen before,’ said Will Summers to himself. ‘First time I ever saw that. But anything’s possible in the river.’ The river was a living entity to him, a character fully alive and operational in his working life. He respected it and feared it. Never more so than now. Then he saw how it happened with the girl. It was her hair, her lovely long and beautiful fair hair, that had become entangled in the chains. She would have to be cut free.

      He made for the telephone to call the police. On the wharf was a wooden shed which served as an office, the telephone was in there. His foreman was sitting down going through some papers and drinking a mug of tea. He looked up in query.

      ‘I’ve got a deader.’ He dialled 999. ‘And I don’t like it, Ted, I don’t like it.’

      ‘They’re none of them good.’

      ‘You haven’t seen this one …’ His hand was trembling so much that the telephone shook. ‘I can’t get this bloody number.’

      Ted took the telephone from him. ‘Here, let me.’ He put his mouth to the instrument and shouted. ‘Police.’

      After he had got his message across he went outside to take a look for himself. Soon he came back and went across to a cupboard on the wall which he unlocked, taking out a bottle of colourless liquid to pour good helpings into two mugs. ‘Here’s yours, Will. Drink up.’ It was rum, transparent before the burnt sugar was put in to colour it, and immensely strong. Never ask where it came from. ‘It’s my silver wedding anniversary today. Nice way to bring it in … Not that it’s not better in some respects than the day itself. I was out of a job and on casuals. No way to start a married life. At least this war’s put us to rights there, Will. Never be out of a job now.’

      ‘No.’ Will drank up. Both men had seen the river in the Depression when men crowded at the dock gates to be picked out one by one for casual work, favoured men first. The war, in a way, had been a godsend. ‘Not in the docks, any road.’

      ‘Not anywhere. It’s different now. Got a welfare state now, you know. This lot know what they’re doing.’

      ‘They better.’ He took a deep drink. ‘You always were an optimist.’

      The two men finished their drinks. ‘So what about the one outside?’ asked Ted.

      ‘Murder. She’s been murdered, that one.’

      The

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