Rose in Darkness by Christianna Brand Read Free Book Online Page B

anything of hers in her own car but there must be a sort of- feel. The light had come on automatically and she took a further step forward and yanked open the rear door also. ‘And nothing there either—’
    But there was something there. Something crouched, huddling, on the floor behind the driving seat, that flung out a clawed white hand, sick white as the sick white underbelly of a fish, and clutched at the black sequin monkey swarming up the black velvet trouser leg.... Something lying there, wedged down into that narrow space, that must have lain there all night—waiting: mottled face upturned, witless eyes uprolled, scrawny legs bent, stiffened hand outflung with the release of the opening door.... The blonde hair, dark parted, hung brassy, damp and unkempt; the tail of the pale blue plastic mackintosh was ruckled up on the seat behind, with a cheap little red woolly cap to match cheap little red woolly gloves. The throat and shoulders were rigid, the breastbone like a poor, plucked fowl, thrust up, unbeautifully exposed above the rim of beaded pink silk and a tawdry pink cardigan and the blue plastic mac. And on the pale, shining surface of the plastic, a bright dark patch of crimson lay like a fallen rose.
    Vi Feather. Vi Feather who just a few hours before had sat with those little clawed hands scraping in the money, behind her cage at the Wren’s Hill cinema—lying there dead, murdered, huddled obscenely in the back of the stranger’s car, with the white light glaring down upon her terrible face.

5
    T HE INVESTIGATION OF A CRIME , said Mr Charlesworth, pontificating, as they drove up to Hampstead—he was Detective Chief Superintendent now, and a little inclined to show off—was like reconstructing a collage which had been torn to pieces and distributed to the four winds. An area—and you didn’t even know its boundaries—was scattered over with hundreds and thousands of little bits and pieces, some of which, but by no means all of which, belonged to the original picture. And the little bits were all different: bits of stone, bits of stuff-bits of fur, bits of feather—bits of hair, bits of—
    ‘Haddock,’ suggested Sergeant Ellis before he could stop himself.
    ‘ Had dock?’
    ‘I got caught up in the rhythm, sir, and the alliteration. Sorry.’ All the same, thought Sergeant Ellis, privately grinning to himself, the skin of a fine Finney haddock would make a splendid contribution to old Charlesworth’s artistic endeavours.
    —and all these bits and pieces you must gather together, patiently seeking them out, chancing your arm as to whether or not they are going to fit into the picture; and patiently, painfully sort and separate them, the discards, the possibles, the probables, the certainties—and jiggle and fiddle them around until at last, by gradual degrees, they begin to build up to the picture you had in your mind....
    ‘Only of course, sir, like you were saying the other day—the important thing is not to have a picture in your mind. Not preconceived.’
    ‘Quite right, quite right,’ said Charlesworth, resorting in extremity to kindly patronage. ‘All I mean is that there is a picture—the picture of exactly what happened. And with all these bits and pieces, that’s what you’re trying to put together.’ And a picture, he suggested, in the end proves to have been based upon a certain composition. The same with a crime. The motive. Or a state of mind. Or simply some impulse, generated by fortuitous opportunity. ‘Something triggers off a murder, something impels it on forward and follows it through. That’s what’ll show up, that’s what forms the composition of your picture. Once get the composition, the shape of your collage, and all the little bits and pieces begin to fall into place. Like an archaeologist, building up the whole structure of ancient man from a single tooth. From the tooth he deduces the size of the jaw, and from the jaw he deduces the shape of the head, and