Nursery Crimes Part 11

Cool b.a.s.t.a.r.d, Thomas thought, who had missed the pallor, the flush, and heard only the voice - very level.

"What makes you think," he asked gently, "that the poor little gel was drowned?"

Murphy was beginning to feel. He kicked at some groundsel at the base of the wall and then gouged it out with the toe of his boot. They must have capsized it - the b.l.o.o.d.y inefficient yobs. He should have stopped them taking it out to sea. He should have gone over to them and ripped their b.a.l.l.s off.

The Welsh policeman was looking at him pretty hard. The normal affinity between the Welsh and the Irish thinned in the gaze. Murphy, trying to regain some sort of emotional equilibrium, said the first thing that came into his head.

"Groundsel," he said, "for Miss Sheldon-Smythe's budgerigars."

"Oh?" said Thomas, surprised.

Murphy picked up a couple of roots of it, shook off the soil, and put the groundsel on the wall beside him. Dirty finger-nails, Bridget had said. There were thick smears of soil over his halfmoons. Her nails were like filberts -bright red with polish. His blood had been wiped off by her soft white finger. When they had made love. He liked the old-fashioned way of describing it. Love. A smell of burnt gorse. A white towel.

Thomas joined him on the wall. "Why drowned?" he asked again.

'They went in a boat, didn't they?" asked Murphy.

"I don't know. Did you see them going in a boat?"

"They were getting into a boat."

"You didn't watch while they went out to sea?"

"No." He had been too crazy with rage. He had a.s.sumed they had gone out to sea.

"Are you trying to tell me, sorr," he asked, still on the surface commendably calm and exceedingly polite, "that she was not drowned?"

Thomas picked up a piece of the groundsel. Did birds eat this stuff? "Oh, yes," he said, "she was drowned all right - poor little gel. By that I mean the water got into her lungs. But she might have been knocked unconscious before it did, if you see what I mean."

"You mean," Murphy was aghast, "that she was murdered?" "Oh, no," Thomas soothed. "Oh, no, no, no. Not necessarily - not necessarily at all. She was found in a gully under water. The gra.s.s on the clifftop is very slippy. She might have got too close to the edge. On her face she fell. Hair between two rocks. Got held there. Lots of possibilities, of course. How many yachtsmen did you see?"

Murphy didn't hear the question. His head felt like a witch's cauldron. It boiled, it bubbled, it seethed, it threw up obscene sc.r.a.ps of carrion. And then it calmed down.

Thomas was repeating the question.

"I don't know, sorr - two, mebbe three."

"What were they doing?"

"One of the sods had his arm around Bridget."

This time Thomas skimmed off some of the emotion from the top of the cauldron and gave it a good hard look. Oh, well, it wasn't surprising. It occurred to him that Murphy might be the best choice to make the identification -- a preliminary identification - before her parents were informed. They would identify her officially, of course. Mother Benedicta had offered to go along. She could still go, and sit in the car: if it turned out not to be Bridget she wouldn't be subjected to an unnecessary ordeal. The enquiry as from now would be pushed up the line a bit. As sergeant he hadn't all that much authority.

He put his thoughts to Murphy. "If my superiors okay it -- and if Mother Benedicta agrees -- would you be willing to go to the mortuary to identify her?"

Yes, Murphy said, he would be willing. He would need to change his suit. He had a navy-blue serge one, would that do?

No need for a chapel suit, Thomas told him, in these circ.u.mstances. Just a clean pair of boots, maybe, and trousers with no mud on them.

Murphy went into his cottage to get himself ready just in case. He ran the hot tap in the sink but the water wasn't hot enough so he put it in the kettle to boil. When it boiled he couldn't remember what it was boiling for. He raised the kettle high and poured it away. It steamed around his face and got into his eyes. When he and Bridget had bathed each other it had taken four kettlesful to make the water in the tin bath warmer than tepid. She had made fun of his sulphur soap.

He stood very still in the middle of the kitchen and then he threw his head back and all the pain that was rolling around inside him came out as a mighty roar.

Thomas, half way across the lawn, heard something that sounded like a trapped animal. There wouldn't be any snaring around here - very pretty these convent gardens - very civilised. He must have imagined it. It wouldn't happen here.

"It's time," Graham told Clare, "that you and I - both -forgot what should have been forgotten a long time ago."

They were sitting at the breakfast table. They were not eating breakfast. The eggs and bacon were congealing on their plates. The morning newspaper was on the floor.

"It is time," he repeated, "to put it out of our minds." Since the war he had managed to put a great deal out of his mind. Most of the unpleasant tapes that had run through the recorder during the last few years he had successfully wiped clean. This particular tape - this Zanny tape - had lost some of its clarity, but it refused to be destroyed. It had lain at the back of the drawer semi-forgotten - and now there it was again, louder and clearer than ever.

In the shape of a paragraph in the local weekly.

"Tragic Death of Young School Teacher" was the heading in heavy type, and underneath in small print: "Whilst on a school picnic the death occurred very tragically of Miss Bridget O'Hare (nineteen), a school teacher at the local convent. She was accompanying the senior girls on a day's outing to Coracle Bay. It seems that after spending some while on the beach she went for a stroll on the cliffs, just a few minutes walk away from the venue of the picnic. The following morning her body was found in a ravine at the base of the cliffs. An autopsy is being carried out. Much sympathy is felt for her parents and for the Mother Superior at the convent."

"Zanny," he pointed out, clutching at straws, "is not a senior girl. She is fourteen."

Clare removed the straw. "The senior school starts at fourteen. Zanny moves up automatically whether she pa.s.ses exams or not. And she did pa.s.s the last one. Somehow. Are you going to eat your bacon?"

"No."

"Neither am I."

Clare removed both plates to the kitchen and then brewed up fresh coffee, She wished her hands would stop shaking. She wished Graham wouldn't keep trying to console her with his voice while his eyes plainly begged her to console him. He was forty now and looking it. This morning he looked older.

Earlier they had had a row about contraception. She was thirty-six, he said, and her reproductive days would soon be over. To leave things any longer would be dangerous. Dangerous -- that was a laugh!

"If we had a son," she said, returning with the coffee, and to the original cause of the argument, "he'd probably have two heads with horns on them."

"Zanny is a perfectly nice, normal, young girl." He wished she wouldn't exaggerate everything. He wished he could believe that Zanny was a perfectly nice, normal, young girl. He did, most of the time. Most of the time she was a delight. He was immensely proud of her. Most of the time.

"It's lucky," she said, "that today is Sat.u.r.day."

"Why?"

"You don't have to go to the office."

Although quite a successful accountant, he preferred days that were not working days. But why state the obvious? Clare's remark however was not quite as ba.n.a.l as it sounded. "We could," she said, putting a sweetener into her coffee, "go and see her."

"See Zanny - why?"

"Well -just pay a visit."

"It's the middle of term - we can't just pay a visit."

"I've done it before -- when you were in Africa. I took her and Dolly shopping."

"Why?"