Something in the other man's expression made him hesitate. The big Chief Inspector's face was a study in irony. He watched Wexford tap on the glass. The window was slid back and the girl inside lifted to them a face drowned in tears.
"This is a bad business," he heard Wexford say, "a very bad business, Miss Crilling."
"God moves in a mysterious way," said Wexford as he and Archery walked over the bridge, "His wonders to perform." He hummed the old hymn tune, apparently liking the sound of his rather rusty baritone.
"That's true," said Archery very seriously. He stopped, rested his hand on the granite parapet and looked down into the brown water. A swan sailed out from under the bridge, dipping its long neck into the drifting weed. "And that is really the girl who found Mrs. Primero's body?"
"That's Elizabethan Crilling, yes. One of the wild young things of Kingsmarkham. A boyfriend—a very close friend, I may add—gave her the Mini for her twenty-first and she's been a menace in it ever since."
Archery was silent. Tess Kershaw and Elizabeth Crilling were the same age. Their lives had begun together, almost side by side. Each must have walked with her mother along the grass verges of the Stowerton Road, played in the fields behind Victor's Piece. The Crillings had been comfortably off, middle-class people; the Painters miserably poor. In his mind's eye he saw again that tear-wrecked face down which grease and mascara ran in rivulets, and he heard again the ugly words she had used to Wexford. Another face superimposed itself on Elizabeth Crilling's, a fair aquiline face with steady intelligent eyes under a pageboy's blonde fringe. Wexford interrupted his thoughts.
"She's been spoilt, of course, made too much of. Your Mrs. Primero had her over with her every day, stuffing her with sweets and what-have-you, by all accounts. After the murder Mrs. Crilling was always taking her to psychiatrists, wouldn't let her go to school till they had the kid-catcher down on her. God knows how many schools she has been to. She was what you might call the female lead in the juvenile court here."
But it was Tess whose father had been a murderer, Tess who might have been expected to grow up like that. "God knows how many schools she's been to..." Tess had been to one school and to one ancient, distinguished university. Yet the daughter of the innocent friend had become a delinquent; the killer's child a paragon. Certainly God moved in a mysterious way.
"Chief Inspector, I want very much to talk to Mrs. Crilling."
"If you care to attend the special court in the morning, sir, she'll in all likelihood be there. Knowing Mrs. Crilling, I'd say you might again be called upon in your professional capacity and then, who knows?"
Archery frowned as they walked on. "I'd rather it was all aboveboard. I don't want to do anything underhand."
"Look, sir," said Wexford in a burst of impatience, "if you're coming in on this lark you'll have to be underhand. You've no real authority to ask questions of innocent people and if they complain I can't protect you."
"I'll explain everything frankly to her. May I talk to her?"
Wexford cleared his throat. "Are you familiar with Henry the Fourth, Part One, sir?"
Slightly puzzled, Archery nodded. Wexford stopped under the arch that led to the coaching yard of The Olive and Dove. "The quotation I had in mind is Hotspur's reply to Mortimer when he says he can call spirits from the vast deep." Startled by Wexford's deep voice, a little cloud of pigeons flew out from the beams, fluttering rusty grey wings. "I've found that reply very useful to me in my work when I've been a bit too optimistic." He cleared his throat and quoted, " 'And so can I and so can any man. But will they come when you do call to them?' Good night, sir. I hope you find the Olive comfortable."
7
Into how high a dignity ... ye are called, that is to say to be Messengers, Watchmen and Stewards...
—The Ordering of Priests
Two people sat in the public gallery of Kingsmarkham court, Archery and a woman with sharp, wasted features. Her long grey hair, oddly fashionable through carelessness rather than intent, and the cape she wore gave her a medieval look. Presumably she was the mother of this girl who had just been charged with manslaughter, the girl whom the clerk had named as Elizabeth Anthea Crilling, of 24A Glebe Road, Kingsmarkham in the County of Sussex. She had a look of her mother and they kept glancing at each other, Mrs. Crilling's eyes flicking over her daughter's string-thin body or coming to rest with maudlin watery affection on the girl's face. It was a well-made face, though gaunt but for the full mouth. Sometimes it seemed to become all staring dark eyes as a word or a telling phrase awakened emotion, sometimes blank and shuttered like that of a retarded child with an inner life of goblins and things that reach out in the dark. An invisible thread held mother and daughter together but whether it was composed of love or hatred Archery could not tell. Both were ill-dressed, dirty-looking, a prey, he felt, to cheap emotion, but there was some quality each had—passion? Imagination? Seething memory?—that set them apart and dwarfed the other occupants of the court.
He had just enough knowledge of the law to know that this court could do no more than commit the girl to the Assizes for trial. The evidence that was being laboriously taken down on a typewriter was all against her. Elizabeth Crilling, according to the licensee of The Swan at Flagford, had been drinking in his saloon bar since six-thirty. He had served her with seven double whiskies and when he had refused to let her have another, she had abused him until he had threatened to call the police.
"No alternative but to commit you for trial at the Assizes at Lewes," the chairman was saying. "...Nothing to hope for from any promise of favour, and nothing to fear from any threat which may be..."
A shriek came from the public gallery. "What are you going to do to her?" Mrs. Crilling had sprung up, the tent-like cape she wore billowing out and making a breeze run through the court, "You're not going to put her in prison?"
Hardly knowing why he did so, Archery moved swiftly along the form until he was at her side. At the same time Sergeant Martin took half a dozen rapid strides towards her, glaring at the clergyman.
"Now, madam, you'd far better come outside."
She flung herself away from him, pulling the cape around her as if it were cold instead of suffocatingly hot.
"You're not going to put my baby in gaol!" She pushed at the sergeant who stood between her and her view of the bench. "Get away from me, you dirty sadist!"
"Take that woman outside," said the magistrate with icy calm. Mrs. Crilling spun round to face Archery and seized his hands. "You've got a kind face. Are you my friend?"
Archery was horribly embarrassed. "You can ask for bail, I think," he muttered.
The policewoman who stood by the dock came over to them. "Come along now, Mrs Crilling..."
"Bail, I want bail! This gentleman is an old friend of mine and he says I can have bail. I want my rights for my baby!"
"We really can't have this sort of thing." The magistrate cast an icy scornful look upon Archery who sat down, wrenching his hands from Mrs Crilling's. "Do I understand you wish to ask for bail?" He turned his eyes on Elizabeth who nodded defiantly.
"A nice cup of tea, Mrs. Crilling," said the policewoman. "Come along now." She shepherded the demented woman out, her arm supporting her waist. The magistrate went into conference with the clerk and bail was granted to Elizabeth Crilling in her own recognisance of five hundred pounds and that of her mother for a similar sum.