Like A Charm

'Tell me what you did last night, Cornelius,' I said, the words out of my mouth before I realized what a mistake I had made calling him by his first name. The colonel frowned and Lieutenant Clawson smiled in a particularly nasty way. 'Lieutenant Jubb, that is,' I corrected myself, too late.

'You know what I did,' said Cornelius.

The others looked at me, curious. 'Humour me,' I said, feeling my mouth become dry.

'We were celebrating the victory in Sicily,' Cornelius said. 'We drank some beer in the Nag's Head and then we went back to your house and drank some whisky.'

The colonel looked surprised to hear Cornelius talk, and I guessed he hadn't heard him before. Where you were expecting some sort of barely comprehensible rural Louisiana patois, what you got in fact was the more articulate and refined speech of the New Englander, a result of the time Cornelius had spent in the north.

'Were you drunk?' I asked.

'Maybe. A little. But not so much that I couldn't find my way home.'

'Which way did you go?'

'The usual way.'

'Through Brimley Park?'

Cornelius hesitated and caught my eye. 'Yes,' he said. 'It's a good shortcut.'

'Did you notice anything there? Anyone?'

'No,' he said.

I got that sinking feeling. If I could tell that Cornelius was lying, what would the others think? He certainly wasn't a natural liar. And why was he lying? I pressed on, and never had my duty felt so much of a burden to me before.

'Did you hear anything?'

'No,' said Cornelius.

'Do you know a girl by the name of Evelyn Fowler?'

'Can't say as I do.'

'About five foot three, good-looking girl. Wears nice clothes, makes a lot of them herself, has a Veronica Lake hairstyle.'

'Who doesn't?' said Cornelius.

It was true, there were plenty of Veronica Lake lookalikes walking around in 1943. 'She's been in the Nag's Head a couple of times,' I added.

'I suppose I might have seen her, then,' said Cornelius. 'Why?'

'She was raped and beaten last night in Brimley Park.'

Now, for the first time, Cornelius really looked me in the eye. 'And you think I did it?' he asked.

I shook my head. 'I'm only asking if you saw anything. It was around the time you left. And,' I dropped the tiger softly on the table, 'I found this near the scene.'

Cornelius looked at the charm, then turned up his sleeve and saw the missing spot on his bracelet. Clawson and the colonel both stared at him gravely, as if they knew they'd got him now and it was just a matter of time. I wasn't so sure. I thought I knew Cornelius, and the man I knew would no sooner rape and beat Evelyn Fowler than he would sully the memory of his own mother.

Finally, he shrugged. 'Well,' he said, 'I did tell you I walked through the park. It must have dropped off.'

'But you saw and heard nothing?'

'That's right.'

'Bit of a coincidence, though, isn't it? The timing and all.'

'Coincidences happen.'

'Where did you get that scratch on your cheek?' I asked him.

He put his hand up to it. 'Don't know,' he said. 'Maybe cut myself shaving.'

'You didn't have it last night when you left my house.'

He shrugged again. 'Must have happened later, then.'

'When you were attacking Evelyn Fowler?'

He looked at me with disappointment in his eyes and shook his head. 'You don't believe that.'

He was right; I didn't. 'Well, what did happen?' I asked.

'I think that's about enough for now,' said Lieutenant Clawson, getting to his feet and pacing the tiny room. 'We'll take it from here.'

That was what I had been afraid of. At least with me Cornelius would get a fair deal, but I wasn't sure how well his countrymen would treat him. I was the one who had brought the trouble, the one who couldn't overlook something like the little tiger charm found at the crime scene, even though I never suspected Cornelius of rape. But these men… how well would he fare with them?

'This girl who was attacked,' Clawson went on, 'is she still alive?'

'Evelyn Fowler? Yes,' I said. 'She's unconscious in hospital, but she's expected to pull through.'

'Then maybe she'll be able to identify her attacker.'

I looked at Cornelius and saw the despair in his face.

I thought I knew why. 'Yes,' I said. 'Perhaps she will.'

Within two days, Evelyn Fowler was sitting up and talking in her hospital bed. Before the Americans arrived, I managed to persuade Dr Harris, an old friend, to give me a few minutes alone with her.

Not surprisingly, she looked dreadful. The Veronica Lake hair lay limp and greasy around her heart-shaped face. She was still partially bandaged, mostly around the nose, but the dark bruises stood out in stark contrast to skin as pale as the linen on which she lay. Her eyes had lost that light, cynical, playful look and were filled instead with a new darkness. When she tried to smile at me, I could see that two of her lower front teeth were missing. It must have been a terrible beating.

'Hello, Inspector Palmer,' she said, her voice oddly lisping and whistling, no doubt because of the missing teeth. 'I'm sorry, it's a right mess you see me in.'

I patted her hand. 'That's all right, Evelyn. How are you?'

'Not so bad, I suppose, apart from my face, that is. And a bit of soreness… you know.'

I did know.

'He must have been disturbed or something,' she went on. 'I suppose I was lucky he didn't kill me.' She tried another smile and some of her natural sweetness and playfulness came through.

'Did you see your attacker at all?' I asked, a lump in my throat.

'Oh, yes,' she said. 'I mean, you can't help it, can you, when a great hulking brute's on top of you thumping you in the face? I saw him all right.'

'Did you recognize him?'

Here she paused. 'Well, it was dark, what with the blackout and all that. But I suppose in a way that's what made it easier.'

'What do you mean?'

'The blackout. His face, it just blended right in, didn't it?' She lowered her voice to a whisper and turned her head towards me. 'He was a nigger.'

'Evelyn, that's not a polite word to use.'

'Well it wasn't a polite thing he did to me, was it?' She pouted. 'Anyway, Jim, that's my sweetheart, Jim's a GI and he says them niggers are good for nothing and they have their way with white women at the drop of a hat. Said they're hanging them over there for it all the time. They're not the same as us. Not as intelligent as us. They're just like big children, really. They can't control themselves. I know what folks thought of me, that I'd go with anybody, but I wouldn't go with a nigger, not for a hundred pounds. No, sir.'

'Was it someone you recognized?'

'I'd know him if I saw him again.'

'But you'd never seen him before?'

'I didn't say that. My head still aches. I can't think clearly.'

'Did you scratch him?'

'I certainly tried hard enough… Funny thing…'

'What is?'

'Well, it's just a feeling I got, I don't know, just about when I was passing out, but at one time I could have…'

'What?'

'Well, I could have sworn that there were two of them.'

Apart from one or two brief consultations with Lieutenant Clawson and another US military lawyer called William Grant, the case was taken out of my hands, and whatever investigation was done was carried out by the US military. It's a sorry state of affairs indeed when a British policeman has no powers of investigation in his own country.

Naturally, the Americans were tight-lipped and I could discover nothing from them. Evelyn came out of hospital after a week and soon got back to her old self, and her old ways, though she seemed to be avoiding me. At least, she never came to the Nag's Head any more, and I got the impression that whenever she saw me approaching in the street she crossed over to the other side. I guessed that perhaps the Americans had found out about our little chat and warned her off. Whatever the reason, they were keeping everything under wraps and hardly a snippet of information even got out to the papers.