“Please, Stella. I said it was all over between me and Anita, and it is.” She turned on him in quiet savagery. “What does it matter now? If it isn’t one girl it’s another. Any kind of female flesh will do to poultice your sick little ego.”
Her cruelty struck inward and hurt her. She stretched out her hand toward him. Suddenly her eyes were blind with tears.
“Any flesh but mine, Frank,” she said brokenly.
Connor paid no attention to his wife.
He said to me in a hushed voice: “My God, I never thought. I noticed her car last night when I was walking home along the beach.”
“Whose car?”
“Anita’s red Fiat. It was parked at the viewpoint a few hundred yards from here.” He gestured vaguely toward town. “Later, when Ginnie was with me, I thought I heard someone in the garage. But I was too drunk to make a search.” His eyes burned into mine. “You say a woman tied that knot?”
“All we can do is ask her.”
We started toward my car together. His wife called after him:
“Don’t go, Frank. Let him handle it.”
He hesitated, a weak man caught between opposing forces.
“I need you,” she said. “We need each other.”
I pushed him in her direction.
9.
It was nearly four when I got to the HP station. The patrol cars had gathered like homing pigeons for the change in shift. Their uniformed drivers were talking and laughing inside.
Anita Brocco wasn’t among them. A male dispatcher, a fat-faced man with pimples, had taken her place behind the counter.
“Where’s Miss Brocco?” I asked.
“In the ladies’ room. Her father is coming to pick her up any minute.” She came out wearing lipstick and a light beige coat. Her face turned beige when she saw my face.
She came toward me in slow motion, leaned with both hands flat on the counter. Her lipstick looked like fresh blood on a corpse.
“You’re a handsome woman, Anita. Too bad about you.”
“Too bad.” It was half a statement and half a question. She looked down at her hands.
“Your fingernails are clean now. They were dirty this morning. You were digging in the dirt in the dark last night, weren’t you?”
“No.”
“You were, though. You saw them together and you couldn’t stand it. You waited in ambush with a rope, and put it around her neck. Around your own neck, too.”
She touched her neck. The talk and laughter had subsided around us. I could hear the tick of the clock again, and the muttering signals coming in from inner space.
“What did you use to cut the rope with, Anita? The garden shears?”
Her red mouth groped for words and found them. “I was crazy about him. She took him away. It was all over before it started. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I wanted him to suffer.”
“He’s suffering. He’s going to suffer more.”
“He deserves to. He was the only man—” She shrugged in a twisted way and looked down at her breast. “I didn’t want to kill her, but when I saw them together — I saw them through the window. I saw her take off her clothes and put them on. Then I thought of the night my father — when he — when there was all the blood in Mother’s bed. I had to wash it out of the sheets.”
The men around me were murmuring. One of them, a sergeant, raised his voice.
“Did you kill Ginnie Green?”
“Yes.”
“Are you ready to make a statement?” I said.
“Yes. I’ll talk to Sheriff Pearsall. I don’t want to talk here, in front of my friends.” She looked around doubtfully.
“I’ll take you downtown.”
“Wait a minute.” She glanced once more at her empty hands. “I left my purse in the — in the back room. I’ll go and get it.”
She crossed the office like a zombie, opened a plain door, closed it behind her. She didn’t come out. After a while we broke the lock and went in after her.
Her body was cramped on the narrow floor. The ivory-handled nail file lay by her right hand. There were bloody holes in her white blouse and in the white breast under it. One of them had gone as deep as her heart.
Later Al Brocco drove up in her red Fiat and came into the station.
“I’m a little late,” he said to the room in general. “Anita wanted me to give her car a good cleaning. Where is she, anyway?”
The sergeant cleared his throat to answer Brocco.
All us poor creatures, as the old man of the mountain had said that morning.
On a Day Unknown
Anthony Boucher
August Sangret, you are charged for that you, on a day unknown in the month of September, 1942, at Thursley, in this county, murdered Joan Pearl Wolfe.
This unconventional form of arraignment was necessitated by the condition of the body, which had been crudely buried for some three weeks. It was Private William Moore of the Royal Marines who found it, on October 7, 1942. On military duty on Hankley Common, Thursley, he saw a hand protruding from one of the mounds on the common. The hand had probably been jarred loose by the passage of heavy military vehicles. Private Moore called a sergeant, who called a lieutenant, who called the Surrey Constabulary, who called Dr. Keith Simpson and Dr. Eric Gardner, two of England’s greatest forensic pathologists.
The case was a splendid challenge to a pathologist; indeed it has been called the foremost triumph of forensic medicine since the Ruxton case of 1935, in which Dr. John Glaister and others solved the jigsaw puzzle of two female bodies which a Hindu physician had chopped into small pieces and strewn about the landscape. The body on Hankley Common was at least all in one place, if not quite in one piece; parts of it were mummified, other parts were completely eaten away. (Dr. Gardner, a precise man, noted that they removed two buckets of maggots before beginning the autopsy.) The most that could be determined as to identity was that the body had been young and female. There was no flesh left on the skull; and it was impossible to tell whether she had been pregnant or whether she had been raped. But it was quite possible to prove that she had been murdered.
Indeed the doctors were able to reconstruct the crime in some detail. She had been cut severely about the head and arms (presumably raised in self-protection); then she had been knocked to the ground, flat on her face, and her skull had been crushed by a powerful blow with a stick; afterward the body had been dragged along the ground. A stick found nearby fitted the skull injuries exactly. The knife must have been a peculiar one, with an odd hooked point
The pathologists performed a notable job of reconstruction on the shattered skull and it was later introduced in evidence — the first time that the actual skull of the victim had been introduced as an exhibit in an English court. The jury took it with them when they retired to deliberate. (... thou shell of death,/ Once the bright face of my betrothed lady,/ When life and beauty naturally fill’d out/ These ragged imperfections...)
Whether Joan Wolfe actually possessed beauty is doubtful; life she certainly enjoyed in abundance for as long as it was permitted to her. No photographs of her have survived; we do know that she had protruding teeth and dyed and redyed hair, but no male seems to have minded.
She was born on March 11, 1923, and lived to be nineteen and a half. She once said she was born in Germany; but she was talking to a German at the time, and amiability was always more important to Joan than facts. She was certainly English in speech and background, if of an English minority. The Wolfes were Roman Catholics, and Joan spent thirteen and a half years “in a very strict Catholic school.” She was devout and neither drank nor smoked.