Assisted far more by the account in Dawn Chorus than by the court proceedings, I roughed out a story as soon as I got back to my flat after a pub lunch in the Earls Court Road, and then I put my notes aside to ferment and then mature.
The story was commonplace enough. The murdered woman had spent some time in America, according to the sleazy old party who gave evidence of identity, and had been lodging in London for a matter of six years. During that time she had had visitors of both sexes, some of whom claimed to be relatives, although the landlady did not believe this.
The landlady had no rules against visitors. (This I got from the newspaper. It was not mentioned at the inquest.) They were, according to her, all of them respectable people, quiet, well-behaved, never stopping more than a couple of hours and certainly never staying the night. The reporter who recorded this had managed, with cunning skill, to query most of it without actually appearing to cast doubt on the landlady’s assertions. I am sure he was worth his pay. I knew his work, and admired it, although I could not have emulated it. Suffice to say that, however close to the wind his paper sailed, so far it had never been involved in an action for libel, although there were rumours of sums having exchanged hands out of court.
When I learned that the murdered girl had had a baby with her when she arrived and that the child had been taken into care only after the death of the mother, I discounted the Dawn Chorus innuendoes. Ladies of doubtful virtue do not discourage their clients by having to get up in the night to soothe or feed an infant, nor do they want a six-year-old sharing the bedroom. Also, as the reporter, to his credit, did not fail to point out, the child had never been neglected or ill-treated.
One item which the newspaper had got hold of was that the girl was on her way to find out more about a situation as chambermaid in a hotel near Brighton when she met death. How she had come to hear of the post remained a mystery. The landlady thought she had heard of it through a friend, not by reading an advertisement, but there was no proof of this, or of who the friend might be.
From that journey she never came back. When she did not return, the landlady took it for granted that she had been given the job and had begun work, but after a day or two, during which the girl had not come for the child, the landlady began to wonder, especially as one or two people came to enquire after the girl and she could tell them nothing. Then a young reporter somehow got hold of the landlady’s story and asked for the address of the hotel, but all that she could supply was its name. He went to the police. He knew the London to Brighton roads very well, he told them, but had never seen a hotel, pub or roadhouse with the name the landlady had given him.
A few days later the body was found washed up near Hastings. It had not drowned; there were no signs of sexual assault; death had resulted from stab wounds, one of which had penetrated the heart.
The police began their usual painstaking work and the papers soon dropped the case. Shorn of any salacious details, it made dull reading after its first impact. I myself was somewhat disappointed in it as it stood, but I set aside my notes again, with the reflection gained from Rabindranath Tagore that ‘Truth in her dress finds facts too tight. In fiction she moves with ease.’
I never wrote the story because, merely through a chance meeting with a friend I had not seen for years, I was caught up in a far better one. All the same, I did go to see the landlady.
‘You’ll have to pay me for my time and trouble,’ she said. ‘I’m sick of giving you lot something for nothing. Show me a couple of quid and I’ll show you her room, what I have not yet let, and I’ll answer your questions up to a quarter of an hour, my time being money.’
‘I’ll skip the bedroom,’ I said. ‘That ought to be worth at least another five minutes of your time.’ I gave her one pound and showed her the other, to be handed to her when our conversation was finished.
‘You might as well be one of them mean-fisted coppers,’ she grumbled; but she answered my questions and received her money well within the agreed time.
‘You say she was after a job in a hotel. Did she have a job before that?’
‘Bits of charring. I reckon, though, as she got bits of money from America, where she come from.’
‘What makes you think so?’
‘She got letters regular with postal orders in ’em.’
‘How do you know that they came from America?’
‘I don’t know it. She always got to the front door before I did, to pick up the post.’
‘If you know the letters contained postal orders, I still wonder what makes you think they came from the United States. Dollar bills or something in the nature of a cheque would be more likely.’
‘That ’ud mean a bank. She never went to no bank, only to the post office.’
‘You followed her, then?’
‘No. I wanted to buy a stamp for me own letter to my boy what’s serving the Queen in Germany, didn’t I?’
‘Did she ever stay out at nights?’
‘She’d have been out of here P D Q if she had. This is a respectable house I’d have you to know.’
So that was that, and my notes remained unused.
2
Chance Encounter
« ^ »
When I ran into Hardie Keir McMaster after a lapse of seven years it was at one of the more unlikely places, for it was outside the south door of a church. There had not been a wedding or a funeral; neither was it a Sunday, so I could only conclude that he was there for the same purpose as I was. This was to take a look at the church itself, a most surprising thing for him to do. At college he had been one of our ‘hearties’ with, so far as anybody knew, no interest in either art or architecture.
As well as being a freelance journalist, I am a novelist and biographer. With regard to the first, I look hopefully for commissioned articles and can supply these on any subject covered by the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but for the other two I please myself. At the time I had just published my third novel. My biography of Horace Walpole was still selling, and the royalties had just come to hand, so I was taking a little holiday, ‘resting’ as actors call it, and that morning I had driven in my car to Herefordshire to look at Kilpeck church.
Kilpeck church is unique. I had heard of it from friends and had seen photographs of its south door. I was prepared for the south door, but not to see McMaster standing in front of it. I was more than surprised, but I could not mistake that massive six feet three, those mighty shoulders, the firmly planted feet and, still less, that Viking thatch of yellow hair. I went up and thumped him on the back.
It was an ill-judged act. He swung round and nearly knocked me flying. However, he collected me, planted me in front of him, held me at arms’ length and said, ‘Well, I’m damned. Just the very man!’
‘How are you, Hara-kiri?’ I asked. He had been given the title at college. He had played prop forward for us and some wit had christened him with a joke on his first names of Hardie Keir because it was alleged to be tantamount to committing suicide if you tackled him on the field. Off it, a sucking dove might have envied him and even striven to emulate him, for he was normally the gentlest and most amiable of creatures.
‘Corin Stratford, by heaven!’ he shouted. ‘What on earth are you doing here, you old son of a mermaid?’
‘Taking a photograph of the south door of this church, when you move your great carcase out of the way,’ I said. Unmistakeably of its period, the south doorway of Kilpeck church nevertheless bears some striking and unusual features. Like many late Norman doorways, it is extensively decorated, and among the decorations are two warriors wearing trousers, Phrygian caps, and tunics of chain mail. I had read that the whole doorway is a representation of this sinful world of lust and strife, but it also holds a promise of better things to come, for in the concentric double tympanum arch is the Tree of Life, and on the jamb a writhing serpent is shown, head downwards in defeat.