Nursery Crimes Part 4

"Please!" The Sunday School teacher and the lay-preacher became the Detective Inspector. "You must let the child tell it in her own way." He smiled falsely at Zanny. "Now - Susannah - let's go through it again. You were teaching Willie to read. He didn't like learning to read. Did you get cross with him?"

"Oh, no! I loved little Willie." Daddy's words came back to her. "Like a brother."

"Brothers get 'it." Dolly remembered her "h", "I used ter hit 'im. Zanny didn't hit 'im." She added, "She didn't 'it 'im when 'e stuffed the p.r.i.c.kles down the back of'er dress. She didn't chase 'im round the pool and she didn't push 'im in -- she was all gentle like. She didn't sit on 'is 'ead neither -- and there weren't no bubbles -- nor no fish in 'is ear 'ole. If there 'ad been a fish in 'is ear 'ole, she'd 'ave squashed it with 'er sandal. She wouldn't let no fish nibble Willie - any more than she drownded 'im."

It was the longest speech Dolly had ever made in her life and she was well pleased with her performance. The pram was a beautiful shade of strawberry. She wondered if Zanny would throw in the embroidered pillow. The two little girls smiled at each other with a depth of complicity bordering on affection.

Zanny was the first to become aware of the arctic atmosphere. Mummy was like a statue of salt like the woman in the funny Bible story. Daddy looked as if he would happily decapitate Dolly and put her head on a spike. Sergeant Pritchard's eyes looked less amused. The old policeman looked positively malevolent.

"Zanny," he said, using her pet name with deceptive gentleness, "did you chase little Willie into the pond and drown him?"

"Oh, no!" Zanny said, "No -- no -- no!" She wasn't answering the question, but the inspector wasn't to know that. She was repudiating death - her own -messily and horribly contrived. And then, like the sun breaking through terrible storm clouds, she remembered and began to weep with relief.

"They've taken them away," she gasped. "They've taken the railings away. They sawed them off and put them on a lorry and took them to a factory to make aeroplanes for brave strong airmen like Daddy to fly over Germany because there's a nasty horrid war and people get killed - millions of people get killed all the time."

She got up and ran over to Daddy and flung herself onto his knee. He wouldn't let anything happen to her. The head bit was all right, but there was still her stomach and her neck. If they put her in a box like little Willie, then they would put all of her - head and all.

Daddy-cuddled her. "It's all right, baby. Of course you didn't harm Willie. We all know that."

Her denial had been quite splendid. Histrionically superb. To cap it, Clare had begun to weep gently, too.

Good.

Splendid.

What was all that about railings? Not that it mattered.

Graham looked at Humphreys and then at Pritchard and knew the battle was won. His uniform added drama to the scene. He had been wise to wear it. Keep all this in perspective, Zanny's brilliant outburst had implied. We're fighting a war, gentlemen. One little evacuee has an accident. Tough. But I'm sweet - innocent - and six years old.

He took out his handkerchief and began mopping Zanny's eyes. Dolly looked on imperturbably.

The two policemen got up to go.

"I'm extremely sorry if we've distressed the little girl," Humphreys said. And even more sorry, he thought, that we've distressed her mother.

"Not at all," Graham said frostily.

"Will you be speaking to her again?" Clare asked through her silken wisp of a handkerchief.

Humphreys said that he wouldn't. He decided to accept Moncrief's statement. The child was totally confused. Fancy being upset about the removal of railings now. Had she been guilty she wouldn't have thought of anything other than the crime. Crime? Guilty? A six-year-old? It really was a lot of nonsense. A wild little evacuee - a game of tag. That was it. Of course. What else?

He reached into his pocket for the bag of sweets again and pushed them into Zanny's hand. "There," he said, "there, there, it's all right."

Is it? Zanny thought, surprised. Is it really? It doesn't matter about Willie? You know about it and you don't care?

Luckily she kept the thought to herself. She snuffled and wept into Daddy's lovely blue uniform shoulder while Mummy showed the dear, kind - forgiving -policemen out.

Grandma Morton arrived on the afternoon train. Life had battered her for a long time and toughened her. Neither tender of soul nor of flesh she knew how to survive. The Lord, she believed, gave - but not very much - and what He gave He took away. She pictured Willie in the bosom of the Lord together with three of her other grandchildren and accepted it. She had long since ceased to question anything -- except perhaps the goldfish pond. In the middle of a war it was wrong to have a goldfish pond. You couldn't eat goldfish. You had to feed goldfish. She stood glumly contemplating the pond while Clare and Graham stood unhappily beside her. The euphoria following the departure of the local police had given way to an honest though wary sympathy. Here was a blood relative. Here was someone who truly cared.

"We are most awfully sorry," Clare said for the second or third time. "We really are most awfully sorry."

"A most appalling accident," Graham said.

Grandma Morton, like a great many aged deaf, held conversations in her mind which sometimes fell softly off her tongue like the susurration of dry leaves.

Clare, straining to hear, thought it might be a mumbled prayer - though surely the words fish and food had occurred? She didn't know what to say so she said "Amen".

Grandma Morton, embarra.s.sed that her whisperings had left the locked parlour of her mind and reached the outside world, tried to cover up with a booming "Awful war, innit it?" It was her favourite catch-phrase and useful on all occasions - particularly this one. But for the awful war little Willie would still be living in Birmingham with his mum and dad. The death of his mum and dad was a much greater tragedy than the death of little Willie. When you were seventy-three you needed your son and his wife to cushion your few remaining years. You mourned little Willie, but he had been that much extra weight on your back. She had spent sleepless nights wondering what would happen to him and to little Dolly when she eventually pa.s.sed on. This particular solution had been furthest from her mind - in fact, quite a shock.

She looked up at the sky. "Gawd moves in most mysterious ways," she said, "'is wonders to perform."

Clare, immensely relieved that the blame was to be attributed to celestial sources, smiled wanly at Graham. Relaxing perceptibly he smiled sadly back. It was lucky the old girl was so deaf. Whatever Zanny - or Dolly -- might say would just bounce around harmlessly. Well, he hoped it would. Reparation of some kind would have to be made to the old woman. Keeping Dolly with them and doing the best they could for her was the only reparation he could think of. Despite its hazards, it had to be done. A present of cash, though obviously badly needed, would be so much blood money. A hamper of black market food wouldn't have any sinister implications. The farms around had plenty of b.u.t.ter and eggs and bacon. It wouldn't be difficult to drum up local sympathy. The old biddy would return to Birmingham laden with gifts.

In the meantime the inquest had to be got through this afternoon -- and then the funeral.

Grandma Morton who had attended many funerals in her time had never attended an inquest. She sat through this one, dozing after a heavy lunch and not hearing a word of it, to be told by a radiant Clare at the end that it was accidental death, which, of course, she knew already. She wondered why Clare looked so pleased. The Squadron Leader looked pleased, too, but in a more restrained way. He was sorry he couldn't stay on the extra few days for the funeral, he told her, but he had to return to his air base. "Awful war, innit it?" she said, excusing him, and he agreed. In a moment of brilliant character a.s.sessment he slipped her a small bottle of gin to drink in bed if she found sleep elusive. "To drown me sorrows," she said, interpreting it her way.

Dolly, who had watched the surrept.i.tious gift being pa.s.sed, frowned in disapproval. Zanny's posh folks never got p.i.s.sed -- or if they did they got p.i.s.sed politely. They didn't sit up in bed in the middle of the night and sing "Abide With Me" and then break the chamber pot by falling onto it in the dark. She listened, crimson-cheeked, as Clare took her grandmother to the bathroom to clean her up. Zanny, who had been awakened by the crash, went to see what was happening. The only grandmother she had ever had any contact with was Mummy's mummy who was known as Grandmamma. She wore a white hair-piece to camouflage her thinning hair and at night put her teeth in a gla.s.s bowl with a lid on it. She used Pears transparent soap and cleaned her skin nightly with Oatine cream. Her nightdress was woolly and white with lace at the neck and wrists and her feet were clean. She smelled nice.

Grandma Morton was different.

Zanny, un.o.bserved by Mummy who was too distraught to notice (why the h.e.l.l had Graham behaved like a lunatic?), made a note of all the differences and then went into Dolly's bedroom to report on them.

She sat on the end of the bed in the dark and wrapped the eiderdown around her.

"My grandmamma," she said, "doesn't need bathing."

Dolly was silent.

"And she doesn't do silly things in the night."

Dolly wriggled lower in the bed.

"When she sings hymns, she sings them in church. And she doesn't need sticking plaster on her bottom."

Dolly, despite her shame, giggled. She hoped very much that Grandma would return to Birmingham in double quick time after the funeral and not stay on here doing things she shouldn't. Zanny's mummy hadn't de-nitted her - and the bath tonight had been forced by circ.u.mstances - but she had put a rubber under the sheet when she thought no one was looking. Grandma, later, had taken it out and hidden it in the wardrobe.

"Wot does she think I am," she had asked Dolly, aggrieved, "inconnynent?"

"Mattresses don't grow on trees," Dolly had replied, mystifying her.

Dolly's blood bond might be with Grandma, but blood tended to run thin when not satisfactorily nourished. Her bond with Clare was the bond of a comfortable environment. There were rats in the Birmingham tenement, here there was a dear little hamster. Bread and marge and dripping didn't compare with Clare's well-stocked larder. In Birmingham you were sometimes hungry, you were often cold. The Germans dropped bombs on you. Here your little brother got drowned in a goldfish pool, but you were warm and well fed and your nightie had yellow roses on it. A golden-haired little murderess sat on your feet at the bottom of the bed, but the bed was in a pretty room in a lovely house with a beautiful garden . . . with a pool in it. She could cope with the pool. She could cope with Zanny. Today Zanny had given her the strawberry-coloured doll's pram. As arranged.

"Will you go back with your Grandma?" Zanny, zooming in on her thoughts, asked hopefully.

"Will I heck!" Dolly retorted, breathing out the aspirate explosively. "And get off me bleedin' feet."

It would be unwise, Clare decided, in fact it would be too harrowing, for Zanny to attend the funeral. She wasn't at all sure that Dolly should go either, but couldn't do anything about it when Grandma Morton insisted. The service wouldn't put thumb-screws on Dolly's conscience. Her conscience was clear and sweet. Zanny's conscience was beyond Clare's understanding. When you were that young you probably didn't even have one. Her own Catholic childhood came back to her. She had gone to her first confession at the age of seven -- at the age of seven you were supposed to know. Zanny, at six, quite obviously didn't. And with some considerable luck no one else would know either.