In A Dry Season

“Patience, laddie. That’s what I’m getting to, if you’ll slow down and give me the chance. It’s all that caffeine, you know. Too much coffee. Try a nice herbal tea, for a change.”

“I’ll do that. Tomorrow. But tell me now.”

“I found possible, and I stress possible, signs of manual strangulation.”

“Strangulation?”

“That’s what I said. And stop echoing me. If I needed a bloody parrot I’d buy one. I’m going by the hyoid bones in the throat. Now, these are very fragile bones, almost always broken during manual strangulation, but I say it’s only possible because the damage could have occurred over time, due to other causes. The weight of all that earth and water, for example. I must say, though, the skeleton was in remarkable condition considering where it’s been for so long.”

“Would that make it more probable than possible?”

“What’s the difference?”

“‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.”

Glendenning sighed theatrically. “And to think that fellow was a doctor. All right, shall we say it’s certainly not impossible, and even quite likely that the poor woman was strangled. Is that clear enough for you?”

“Before she was stabbed.”

“How would I know that? Honestly, Banks, you either have an overinflated opinion of the medical profession or you’re being just plain bloody-minded. Knowing you, I’d bet on the latter. But let us, just for once, be reasonable about this, shall we, and apply a little logic?”

“By all means. My, my, you’re grumpy this morning, aren’t you, Doc?”

“Aye. It’s what happens when my own doctor tells me to lay off the coffee. And I’ve told you before not to call me Doc. It’s disrespectful. Now, listen. The way this poor woman was stabbed stopped just short of chopping her into little pieces. It would seem very unlikely to me – not impossible, but very improbable, if you like – that her killer felt any need to strangle her after he had done this. The degree of rage involved would probably have left him quite exhausted, for a start, not to mention the anger vented, the almost postcoital relaxation some killers feel after perpetrating extremely violent acts. So I’d say the strangulation came first and then, for whatever reason, the stabbing. That kind of thing is statistically more common, too.”

“So why the stabbing? To make sure she was dead?”

“I doubt it. Though it’s true she may have still been alive after the strangulation, may just have lost consciousness. As I said, we’re dealing with anger, with rage, here. That’s the only explanation. In the vernacular, whoever did it got carried away with killing. Literally saw red. Either that or he knew exactly what he was doing and he enjoyed himself.”

“He?”

“Again, statistically more likely. Though I wouldn’t rule out a strong woman. But you know as well as I do, Banks, that these sorts of things are usually lust-related. Either that or they stem from very strong passions, such as jealousy, revenge, obsession, greed and the like. I suppose it could have been a wronged wife or a woman spurned, a lesbian relationship gone wrong. But statistically speaking, it’s men who do these things. I hesitate to do your job for you, but I don’t think you’re dealing with a run-of-the-mill sort of crime. It doesn’t look like a murder committed during a robbery, or to cover up a secret. Of course, murderers can be damnably clever sometimes and disguise one sort of crime to look like another. Fault of all these detective novels, if you ask me.”

“Right,” said Banks, scrawling away on the pad he’d pulled in front of him. That was the trouble with computers; it was bloody awkward to write on them when you were speaking on the telephone. “What about the parturition marks?”

“That’s exactly what they are, in my opinion.”

“So there’s no chance that they were also caused by the knife, or by time?”

“Well, there’s always a chance that something else could have caused them, some animal, friction from a small stone or pebble, or suchlike, though given where she was found I say we can pretty much exclude the chance of scavenger activity. After so long, though, it’s impossible to be a hundred percent sure about anything. But judging by the distinctive position and appearance, I’d say they’re parturition marks. The woman had a baby, Banks. There’s no saying when, of course.”

“Okay,” said Banks. “Thanks very much, Doc.”

Glendenning snorted and hung up.

All through February and March 1942, day after day, I followed the news reports. They were censored and incomplete, of course, but I read about the estimated sixty thousand British taken prisoner at Singapore, and about the fighting near the Sittang River, from where Matthew wrote Gloria another letter, telling her how things were pretty dull and safe really, and not to worry. Clearly, it’s not only governments that lie during wartime.

Then, on the eighth of March, we heard about the fall of Rangoon. Our morale at home was pretty low, too. In April, the Germans gave up all pretense of bombing military and industrial targets and started bombing cities of great architectural beauty, such as Bath, Norwich and York, which was getting very close to home.

I remembered when Leeds, only about thirty miles away, had its worst raid of the war, about a month before Gloria arrived. Matthew and I took the train in the next day to see what it looked like. The City Museum, right at the corner of Park Row and Bond Street, had taken a direct hit and all the stuffed lions and tigers we had thrilled over on childhood visits hung in the overhead tram wires like creatures thrown from an out-of-control carousel. I wanted to go and see the damage in York, but Mrs. Shipley, our stationmaster, told me York Station had been bombed, so no trains were allowed in. At least she was able to assure me that they hadn’t destroyed the Minster.

It was a miserable spring, though we had the sunniest April in forty years. There were the usual random shortages. Items simply disappeared from the shelves for weeks on end. One week you couldn’t get fish for love or money; the next it was poultry. In February, soap was rationed to sixteen ounces every four weeks; the civilian petrol ration was cut out completely in March, which meant no more motoring for pleasure. We still managed to retain a small petrol ration, though, because we needed the van to make pickups from wholesalers.

I followed the news far more closely than I had before, scouring all the newspapers, from The Times and the News Chronicle to the Daily Mirror, the minute they came in on the first train, cutting out articles and pasting them into a scrapbook, spending hours tracing meandering rivers and crooked coastlines in the atlas. Even so, I never managed to get a true picture of what life was like for Matthew out there. I could imagine it from my reading of Rudyard Kipling and Somerset Maugham, but that was the best I could do.

I wrote to him every day, which was probably more often than Gloria did. She was never much of a letter writer. Matthew didn’t write back that often, but when he did he would always assure us he was well. Mostly, he complained about the monsoons and the humid jungle heat, the insects and the dreadful terrain. He never said anything directly about fighting and killing, so for a long time we didn’t even know if he had been in battle. Once, though, he wrote that boredom seemed the greatest enemy: “Long stretches of boredom relieved only by the occasional brief skirmish” was the way he put it. Somehow, I had the idea that these “brief skirmishes” were a good deal more dangerous and terrifying than the boredom.

As time passed, we got used to Matthew’s absence and enjoyed what we could of him through his letters. Gloria would read bits from his to her (no doubt missing out all the embarrassing lovey-dovey stuff) and I would read from his to me. Sometimes, I sensed, she was jealous because he wrote to me more about ideas and books and philosophy and to her mostly about day-to-day things like food and mosquitoes and blisters.

That September, Pride and Prejudice, with Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson, finally came to the Lyceum. Gloria had just had a tooth extracted by old Granville after suffering toothache for several days. I told her I thought it was a crime the prices he charged for such poor work, but she countered that Brenchley, in Harkside, a notorious butcher, was even more expensive. As usual, Granville did more damage than good and poor Gloria had been bleeding from the torn gum for over a day. She was just beginning to feel a little better and I managed to persuade her to come to the pictures with me. As it turned out, she actually admitted to enjoying the film. That shouldn’t have surprised me. It wasn’t exactly the sharp-witted, ironic Jane Austen I knew from the books; it was far more romantic. Still, it made a nice change from all the silly comedies and musicals she had been dragging me to see lately.