by Alice Castle
But after the high of being saved by her knight in shining armour, as usual there was a corresponding low. Harry saved his anger until Wendy was safely admitted to a ward at King’s College Hospital, and Katie had been despatched to fetch both the boys from Wyatt’s and take them home with her.
Beth shivered slightly as she’d remembered the long look he’d directed at her, as they sat on either side of Wendy’s bed. Beth dreaded to think what she’d looked like. First, she’d run full-pelt to Wendy’s side, then she’d been battered by her mother’s involuntary jerks and lurches, and finally she’d been tossed into the back of the ambulance. None of it was calculated to make her feel at her most soignée. Harry, of course, looked as ruggedly gorgeous as ever. If his blond hair ever got ruffled, it just enhanced his blue, blue eyes, the uncompromising planes of his face, and the impressive width of his shoulders. And a simple Shetland jumper and chinos could take all sorts of rough stuff without looking any the worse for it.
Under his gaze, she’d tried to rebundle her recalcitrant hair into its scrunchy and had shoved her fringe out of her eyes, but of course it had swung back as inexorably as a pendulum. She quailed slightly as she remembered his cold tones.
‘I suppose it’s no use my asking what the hell is going on?’
She’d been grateful, for the first time, that her mother was so poorly. At least it meant he couldn’t give in to what was clearly his greatest desire and shout his head off at her.
‘Well, Mum was on the bench—’
‘Listen, Beth. You may think I was born yesterday, but actually I bloody well wasn’t. This little caper has all the hallmarks of one of your crazy ideas. I’ve got used to you putting yourself in danger – I don’t like it, but I know you can’t help yourself because you’ve got a bit missing in your brain. But dragging your old mum into it?’
It was just as well Wendy had been unconscious, Beth thought, a tiny, tiny smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. Though Wendy always did her best, for reasons no-one understood, to appear at least two decades older than she was, she would still be horrified to be described as ‘old’. There was no logic to human behaviour, and absolutely none at all to her mother, thought Beth.
‘It was her idea!’ Beth had remonstrated, knowing it was a very weak retort – the kind of response that even Ben would have examined and discarded when being told off for one of his little transgressions. Mind you, Ben as an only child usually didn’t have anyone handy to blame things on, apart from Magpie and Colin, of course.
‘Look, I can explain,’ she’d tried again, but it seemed Harry had run out of either time or patience. He’d looked at his watch, grunted, and stood up abruptly.
‘It’ll just have to wait,’ he’d said, turning on his heel.
Beth had bowed her head and shrunk into herself. But then Harry had relented, and on his way out had done a little detour to kiss her quickly on the top of her head, put a warm, heavy hand on her drooping shoulder, and whisper, ‘They said she’ll be fine. Don’t worry. See you later.’
But Beth, alone now in the quiet room, had nothing to do but worry. Harry, for once, was right. She should never have put her mother in this position. Yes, it had been Wendy’s plan. But Beth had years of resisting her mother under her belt. She shouldn’t have gone along with it. And now Wendy was paying the price.
For the thousandth time, Beth wondered why she’d ever said yes. But she’d been so surprised when Wendy had rung, excited and full of the wheeze she’d dreamed up.
‘Listen, when you come along to the reconstruction at the Bridge Club, I’ll slip out just before break time and I’ll sit on the same bench as Alfie – and pretend to be dead! You watch everyone’s reactions, and the murderer will give themselves away,’ she’d trilled.
Beth, to be fair, had been full of doubts. ‘Mum, I’m not sure something like that will work, outside the pages of an Agatha Christie. Anyway, I bet the murderer will just keep a poker face, or maybe a bridge one – if that’s a thing.’
‘It isn’t a thing, actually, Beth. And I think you should take this idea seriously. This will save us loads of time. If we don’t do this, then we’ll have to check on the whereabouts and motives of all the people in the room at the time that Alfie might have been poisoned. Not to mention anyone who might have been passing in the park and could have slipped him something then.’
‘Surely he wouldn’t just take something offered to him by a random stranger?’ Beth had remonstrated.
‘Ah, but it might not have been a stranger. It was probably someone who knew him – and hated him. Anyway, Beth, they always do reconstructions on Crimewatch. And then they catch the crook.’
Wendy had been so bubbly, Beth hadn’t had the heart to tell her that Crimewatch had been cancelled a few years ago, and had only solved a handful of cases, even in its heyday. And in any case, the chances of the miscreant blushing beetroot or fainting or shrieking or helpfully announcing their guilt by some other means, were negligible, in her considered opinion.
No, Beth had stupidly agreed because it had actually felt good, being involved in a conspiracy with her mum. They hadn’t even told Katie, which had made it feel even more special. She couldn’t remember ever having had a little plan like this with Wendy. Even when, years ago, they’d planned birthday surprises for her dad, it had always been her brother Josh who’d been roped into helping. Beth had stood on the sidelines, as astonished as her father when a fully-lit birthday cake was produced from the kitchen or a wrapped present materialised on his seat in front of the telly.
Wendy’s excuse then had been that Beth was too young and couldn’t be trusted to keep a secret. It was a stance she couldn’t keep up now that Beth was in her mid-thirties. Beth did wonder if things would have been different if Josh had been in the country, and had shared her own terrier-like interest in worrying away at puzzles. Would she have been left out in the cold yet again? As it was, she felt guilty that she hadn’t confided in Katie – especially as things had gone so badly wrong.
Oh well, that was just another parcel of remorse to add to the mountain she had on her conscience. And Katie was even now doing her another favour, looking after Ben while she sat at Wendy’s bedside. Her friend had already popped in to the house on Pickwick Road to check that Magpie’s bowl was brimming with her priceless cat food, and a very surprised Colin had been marched off to spend the night with his on-off doggy chum Teddy.
Beth texted Katie quickly to get an update on supper, and a reply pinged back immediately telling her not to worry, that all the homework had been done (What homework? thought Beth with another ramping-up of her guilt levels), and that they were all watching Cats and Dogs on the big telly in perfect harmony. She smiled at the picture and then sighed. At least Ben and Colin were having a good evening. And Magpie would be perfectly happy having a free run of the sofa without her rival butting his cold wet nose in.
She thought for a second, then before she chickened out, she rushed off a message to Harry. Thanks for everything today. You were wonderful. Miss you xxxx
It was probably the soppiest text she’d ever sent. But as soon as it disappeared from her screen, she somehow knew that it had plopped into the great abyss where half her missives to Harry ended up. He was not a believer in replying politely to everything. She sometimes had to wait days for an acknowledgement, and he often appeared in person long before a text was returned. She’d got used to it, but as she sat in the bleak, neon-lit room, by her mother’s ominously still form, she couldn’t pretend she liked it.
Chapter Twelve
Harry York’s legs dangled uncomfortably off the edge of his lumpy couch as he tried to find a comfortable reading position. He knew of old it wasn’t a simple matter. Every time he tried to get himself settled with a good book, it was a case of beating the sofa into submission first, like a recalcitrant suspect in a windowless interview room. Not that he’d ever use his fists to get a conviction, he thought quickly. He’d grown up watching cop shows like Th
e Sweeney and Prime Suspect, where bruises bloomed on interviewees’ cheeks shortly after the arrest and not long before a full confession, but nowadays such tactics were beneath contempt. And even if they did cross anyone’s minds, there was too much surveillance, from CCTV cameras in the custody area to meticulous recording of every interview.
Being too big for the furniture wasn’t a new problem. He’d reached 6ft 4in in his teenage years, but then he’d dreamed of the day when he’d buy his own couch and all the dangling would cease. He’d reckoned without a world of titches, though, and furniture designed accordingly. He sighed and shifted a leg across so that it reached the small table bearing his cooling cup of truckers’ tea. None of that fancy-nancy Earl Grey dishwater that Beth was constantly plying him with.
Thinking of Beth caused an automatic twinge, like putting weight on a pulled muscle. He’d received her text over an hour ago. For her, he was well aware that it was fulsome, mushy even. His fingers had hovered over the keys, thinking up replies. He’d even typed a couple. But what could he say? He knew she was in need of comfort. Her mother was lying in a hospital bed, for God’s sake. What kind of man was he that he couldn’t reach out to her with sympathy at a time like this?
But the trouble was that, as usual, it was Beth’s own fault that she and Wendy were in this predicament. He wasn’t a parent, he didn’t even have a pet (unless you counted his step status with Ben, Magpie, and Colin, which he didn’t), but he knew that training was important. If you kept letting people get away with stuff you didn’t like, wouldn’t they keep on making the same mistakes? The ones that drove you mad.
Why in a million years would Beth think it was a great idea to go along with a clearly cracked stunt like the one she and her mother had pulled today? She could blame it on Wendy as much as she liked, but in all the time he’d known the older woman, she’d shown less of a tendency to put herself in the line of fire than almost anyone he knew, whether the task was as simple as making a cup of tea or as onerous (relatively speaking) as picking up young Ben after school.
Harry wasn’t saying he approved of it, not at all. Much though he liked Wendy, he could see that she was lazy and self-centred, and therefore not particularly helpful as a parent. But for Beth to suggest that she’d go from this lackadaisical attitude to her daughter and only grandchild, right to the other extreme to offer herself as a guinea pig – no, a crash-test dummy – for a frankly insane scheme on behalf of a, what, a bridge partner? A sort-of collaborator in a part-time hobby? Well, he didn’t buy it, not for a minute. And the plan itself was so ridiculous it could only have been of Beth’s devising.
Just thinking about it all was raising his blood pressure again, when he was trying to get comfy and finish off The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. There was something so relaxing, so reassuring, about other sleuths’ problems. For a start, they were finite. There might be twists and turns along the way, but all the reader needed to do, if they weren’t in the mood to work, was to carry on turning the pages until the problem obediently unravelled itself. In this, Dorothy L Sayers’ fourth whodunit, the mystery surrounded the onset of rigor mortis and the setting was a reassuringly posh gentleman’s club, of the type that Harry had never once visited and didn’t expect to be invited to any time soon. It was all pleasantly removed from real life and washing over him like a warm bath.
He even loved Lord Peter Wimsey’s central problem, which was never to do with the corpse in hand but more a question of disguising his razor-sharp mind, in a time when being seen to be a hard-working aristo was to risk becoming horribly déclassé. Would that Harry had such troubles.
He moved his foot an inch, still searching for the sofa’s sweet spot, and disaster struck. He nudged the table a tad too hard and cooling tea slopped everywhere, soaking into his sock and dripping relentlessly onto the floorboards. If he didn’t get up and stop it, he knew from experience it would eventually soak through and stain his downstairs neighbour’s ceiling.
Harry leapt to his feet, and there was an ominous crack from the sofa. As he watched, the armrest sagged like a drunk on a Saturday night.
Bugger. That’s all I need. Now it was either a trip to Ikea – where he always confidently expected to bump into Sisyphus rolling a rock up the part of the maze that connected dining chairs to children’s furniture – or the simpler option.
Moving in with Beth.
He sat down again heavily, wet socks, broken couch, and puddle of tea notwithstanding. Had that time really come?
There was a jumper on the back of the sofa that could probably do with a wash. He dropped it onto the beige lake on the floor and swished it around with an already-sopping foot, while his mind worked overtime.
It was a big decision. One of the biggest he’d ever make. Was he ready? Was it the moment? Was he mature enough? And, more to the point, was she?
It never occurred to him for a second that Beth might say no.
Chapter Thirteen
Beth Haldane wasn’t the only person in south London who could prevaricate, Harry realised the next day. He’d remained rooted to his sad old sofa for quite a while last night. Even the clammy state of his socks hadn’t been quite depressing enough to drive him to move – until he’d surprised himself by finally shooting to his feet.
The turn of speed hadn’t come because he’d made up his mind about Beth and Pickwick Road. Far from it. He’d simply changed course, and put the dilemma away on a really, really high shelf at the back of his consciousness. Because, if Wendy had been poisoned, then most likely, so had Alfred Pole. That meant an investigation should be instigated. Right now.
It was yet another victory for Beth. For a rank amateur, she had a surprising hit rate when it came to odd goings-on in her vicinity. This time, she had her mother to thank. Wendy had been convinced there’d been something suspicious about the old man’s death from the off. Now they’d both be smug that he was cottoning on at last.
He hated to be playing catch-up to his Beth. She was like a tiny but razor-sharp thorn in his side – when she wasn’t the woman of his dreams, that was. But despite the fact that he’d be making her day by opening up the Alfie Pole business, it would be a relief to get going on the case. If there was one thing that he and Beth always seemed to agree on, it was that there was nothing like a nice juicy murder.
***
Is there anything worse than murder? Beth thought, sitting by her sleeping mother’s bedside. Though she had now widened her net of recriminations to include Wendy, for having thought up this crazy idea in the first place, Beth was still cursing herself roundly – and of course the killer, whoever they were, for making it all necessary.
Wendy hadn’t stirred for hours. In a way, it was one of the most peaceful times they had ever spent together. The little figure in the bed had lain still and silent all night long while Beth, upright, watched the black rectangles of the windows turn gradually to iron grey and then become sludgy with the dawn, like milk stirred into mushroom soup. She’d be good for nothing today, that was for sure.
When her phone pinged at 8am, she knew it must be Harry at last. Her heart leapt. She dragged it out of her bag and pored over the screen. But no, it was Katie, with the strange news that the Bridge Club had been asked to gather at Belair House again, this time by the police. Katie seemed to have got herself on the email list, which was definitely a plus. But what on earth was Harry up to? And why hadn’t he told her about it himself?
The frown under her fringe was deepening into a groove by the time a frayed doctor burst through the door. He wasn’t the one who’d seen Wendy initially, but had a competent if self-important look about him. His dark eyes were all but obscured by large, heavy-rimmed glasses, and his thick black hair was slicked down with enough gel to keep a boy band going for weeks. For once, there was no gaggle of students in tow. Either Wendy’s case was considered too serious to be a teaching opportunity, or Harry had asked the hospital to be discreet. Beth hoped fervently it was the latter.
&n
bsp; The doctor, who reassuringly looked a year or two older than her, examined Wendy briefly, held her limp wrist, bent over the bed, and then said very loudly into her ear, ‘Wake up, Wendy!’
Beth squawked in alarm. Surely this was no way to treat a very sick woman. But then, to her astonishment, Wendy blinked a couple of times, opened both eyes, smiled widely at the man, and batted her eyelashes at him.
‘Good morning, doctor,’ she said coquettishly, and levered herself into a more upright position.
Beth, who’d sat on the edge of her seat all night, not getting a wink of sleep and imagining Wendy was hovering between life and death, felt all her usual exasperation with her mother rushing back in to fill the space which had been hollowed out by remorse.
‘You’re feeling much better. You’ll be home soon,’ the doctor said, delivering both statements in a clipped voice that brooked no argument.
At this, Wendy instantly wilted. ‘But, Doctor…’ she quavered.
Even Beth, who was rapidly beginning to suspect her mother was up to her usual tricks, was a little stunned. ‘Surely, Doctor, she’s been very sick…’
‘Yes, she has, but she’s fine now. No lingering after-effects after atropine poisoning. Right as rain now, I expect.’
‘Hang on a minute… atropine poisoning? Is that definitely what it was?’
‘Definitely. There are characteristic symptoms. “Hot as a hare, blind as a bat, dry as a bone, red as a beet, and mad as a hatter.” I’m told you had all those, Wendy?’
Both Wendy and Beth nodded, Beth remembering all too clearly the terrible scene on the bench when Wendy had lurched around like a maniac.
‘Are you saying it was deliberately administered?’ Beth asked the doctor.
‘Must have been. Unless you took it yourself, Wendy?’ The doctor raised his voice slightly when addressing her.