The Worried Widow

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘There’s always hope,’ she said earnestly, ‘and we tried to keep him believing that he was going to get better. But they told me, in private, that it would take a miracle. So I prayed, of course. And it did seem that there were signs of an improvement. On his very last morning, he found that he could wiggle the toes on his right foot. Just a little bit, but he showed me and he was so pleased, we both were. That’s one reason why I just can’t believe that a few hours later he’d . . . do what they say he did.’ She choked on the last words and Keith looked away, drawing reassurance, as always, from the gracious room which was for him the symbol of his ascent from humble beginnings.

  Molly gave what comfort she could and Mrs Hendrickson dabbed at her eyes and managed to resume her brave front. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, several times. ‘It’s all been such a shock. And then that sheriff saying that he’d killed himself was just the last straw. I tried to tell him that my Sam wouldn’t do a thing like that.’

  ‘Anybody could do a thing like that, given the circumstances,’ Keith said gently. ‘If I ever have a stroke and get paralysed, I hope that Molly’ll leave the sleeping tablets within my reach.’

  Both ladies looked at him with reproach. ‘You shouldn’t speak like that,’ Mrs Hendrickson said, ‘especially not in front of Molly. It’s so wrong. We mustn’t throw the gift of life back in God’s face.’

  ‘But did Sam think that?’ Keith asked before he could stop himself.

  ‘Sam never could bring himself to believe in a personal God,’ she said sadly. ‘To him, science and evolution were perfectly satisfactory explanations for everything and he thought that all religions were just the outcome of wishful thinking. He wouldn’t often discuss it, he said that he was as entitled to his disbelief as I was to my faith and that I’d no more right to interfere with his atheism than he would have had to try to talk me out of my beliefs.

  ‘Sam just couldn’t conceive of a life after death. He challenged me once to guess what an after-life would be like and then, whatever I said, he pointed out that what I was trying to suggest could only be based on something physical and would be meaningless in purely spiritual terms. He wouldn’t accept that there could be other dimensions which we can’t even guess at.’ She gave a shuddering sigh.

  ‘Do you think that a man who couldn’t believe in an after-life would be prepared to extinguish himself totally?’ Keith asked.

  ‘Sam wasn’t afraid of death,’ she said. ‘To him, it would be just loss of individual consciousness. But he was a good man for all his disbelief. And he cared very much about his family. He’d provided for us very well, but a lot of his provision was by way of insurance policies and Sam knew all about suicide clauses.’

  Silence clapped down on the room. It was out in the open. The money motive. Keith had expected it. ‘Exclusion of suicide without limit of time?’ he asked at last. ‘Not just for one year or two?’

  ‘Without limit,’ she said. ‘I’m told that the sheriff’s verdict invalidates all his policies. We’ll get the premiums back and nothing more. But that really isn’t why I’ve come to you, Mr Calder,’ she went on. Keith thought that the sincerity in her voice sounded genuine. ‘Sam had other money put by. We can manage without his insurances. In a way, I’m almost relieved. You can have too good a start in life. It will be better for Beth and Michael to know that they’ll have to work. It may give them a spur to find their places in the world.

  ‘But I want your help to clear Sam’s name. People are saying terrible things about him. That he was dishonest. That there was some trouble coming that he couldn’t face. But Sam had strength, enormous strength. There was nothing he couldn’t face.’ She was lit now by an inner glow. She might have been speaking of a prophet or of some great hero. ‘Even after his stroke, I knew that he was a stronger man than most of them are for all their health. Somebody killed him, Mr Calder, and I’m asking for your help to prove it.’ She slumped suddenly and sipped at her tea. It was as if virtue had gone out of her.

  Molly was looking at him, a message in her eyes.

  ‘You’d have to speak to my partner,’ Keith said weakly. ‘He’s the money-man. My time doesn’t come cheap.’

  She waved that aside. ‘I’ll telephone him. I’m sure we can come to some arrangement,’ she said.

  Keith gave a mental shrug. He seemed to be committed. ‘Do you have any evidence at all?’ he asked. ‘Any kind of a starting-point?’

  ‘Very little beyond what I’ve already told you,’ Mrs Hendrickson said. ‘But there are just one or two things. Yesterday, after the sheriffs enquiry, the police said that it would be all right for me to clean up the room.’ (Keith closed his eyes for a moment. That was all that he needed, the scene freshly cleaned and polished.) ‘With the children coming home for the weekend, I didn’t want the summerhouse to be as it was.’

  ‘You surely didn’t do the cleaning yourself!’ Molly exclaimed.

  ‘I thought that I owed Sam that much,’ Mrs Hendrickson said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. ‘It wasn’t just his mess, you see, it was really him. He wouldn’t have liked our cleaning-woman to be clearing up what he’d . . . left behind. I’d hardly started, except for wiping up the worst—’ She broke off, choking.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Keith said. ‘We understand.’

  Again, she gathered up her strength. ‘In the process, I moved a couch which stood against the wall. I was going to have it taken away, because it would never clean. Underneath, there was a cigarette which had burned its whole length. The tip was left and it looked like Sam’s usual brand. Mrs McShane, my daily woman, had cleaned and polished the whole place the day before and she’s very thorough, so I knew that it had been dropped on the day Sam died.’ She stopped and sighed again. ‘Poor Sam, he’d been a compulsive smoker all his life, and after his stroke it was the one pleasure he had left, although I don’t think that he could taste them any more. The doctors didn’t approve, but I thought that it was more important for him to be happy. A man who could survive a cerebral haemorrhage wasn’t going to be afraid of lung cancer.’

  ‘A man who was half-paralysed could easily drop his cigarette,’ Keith pointed out.

  ‘They were always slipping through his fingers,’ she admitted. ‘But Sam had been afraid of fire since he was a child and doubly so since his stroke, for obvious reasons. He had an electric bell just by his hand for emergencies and whenever he dropped his cigarette he kept his finger on the bell-push until I arrived, never mind if I was in the bath or whatever. And a cigarette which rolled under an upholstered couch would have made him frantic. He knew about the fumes which burning upholstery can produce.’

  Keith had started making notes. Molly, who knew the signs, sat back, well-satisfied.

  ‘It’s slender,’ Keith said, ‘but it’s there. A considerate man who was going to kill himself – which isn’t really inconsistent – wouldn’t throw his cigarette under the furniture. He’d smoke it right through and stub it out.’

  ‘I was just thinking the same thing,’ Molly said.

  Mrs Hendrickson was looking mildly concerned. ‘But why do you say that consideration and suicide aren’t inconsistent?’ she asked. ‘Suicide always seems to me to be the most selfish and inconsiderate thing a person could do, running away from your troubles and leaving others behind to cope with them.’

  ‘I said that,’ Keith said slowly, ‘because you’re making me visualise things, sad things that I’d rather not think about. I usually avoid thinking about age and illness and death. I prefer to have a vague mental picture of keeping all my faculties for another fifty years and then going suddenly in my sleep. You made me imagine being paralysed and a burden to my family. I’d probably decide that I’d be doing them a favour if I left them to get on with their lives instead of having to slave for me.’

  Mrs Hendrickson was shaking her head, but Molly spoke first. ‘You mustn’t think like that,’ she said. ‘It’s morbid. For somebody one loved, it wouldn’t be a burd
en.’

  ‘I thought of it as a privilege,’ Mrs Hendrickson said simply. ‘Sometimes I thought that life had been too good to me. My life would have been richer if I’d had a mission, but I’d never been granted the opportunity to serve others, or only in the way that one does for a husband and children, until Sam needed my help so desperately. It was almost as if God was testing me at last. And although Sam was a dear, good man, he never seemed to worry about being a burden. That was one good thing.’

  Silence fell again while Keith wondered whether anybody could be such a saint as this woman was painting herself. He wondered also whether she could really be talking about the Sam Hendrickson whose machinations over the years had scandalised even his colleagues in the trades union movement and whose inflammatory speeches had always been the first to be quoted only so that they could be condemned.

  ‘Tell me about his shotgun,’ Keith said. ‘Shooting seems an out-of-key hobby for a union executive.’

  ‘In a way I suppose it was,’ Mrs Hendrickson said. ‘He’d been shooting ever since he was a boy, he said, and he wasn’t going to give it up. He did a lot of clay pigeon shooting. And he was a member of a syndicate in East Lothian. He kept what you’d call a low profile about that, because it wasn’t the sort of image his members expected.’

  ‘Did he have just the one gun?’

  ‘He had three, but I couldn’t for the life of me tell you any more about them. You’d better come and see for yourself.’

  ‘I’ll certainly do that,’ Keith said absently. His mind was racing ahead. There would be so few lines to follow. ‘What about cartridges? What brands did he use?’

  Mrs Hendrickson sat up suddenly. ‘That was the other thing I meant to tell you,’ she said. ‘Sam had his guns in the summerhouse with him. He liked to have them around even if he couldn’t use them any more – I think that they were just familiar and friendly reminders of better days. But I’ve always been told that you should keep guns and ammunition separate, so I had his cartridges locked away safely in my wardrobe. I was going to give them away to somebody but I never got around to it.’

  Keith was looking at the widow with new eyes. From being an indignant relict who, instead of facing the facts, was determined to drag the rest of the world round to her point of view, he was now seeing her as a lone campaigner for what she believed, rightly or wrongly, to be the truth. Or was there, he wondered, a difference? ‘The cartridge which fired the shot,’ he said. ‘Was it the same brand as the others?’

  ‘The gun and cartridge were on a table in the courtroom,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to look at them after the first glance, but later I thought the cartridge had been an unfamiliar colour. It was green. I thought that the others had been blue, so when I got home I went and looked and they were blue. So when I went to tell the police about the burned-out cigarette, I mentioned the cartridge as well. Mr Munro said that it was too late to re-open the case, and that if I wasn’t satisfied I could think about consulting you. He said that I shouldn’t expect you to do more than report on the likelihood of Sam having . . . done what they said, but he did say that they would certainly consider your findings very carefully.’

  Keith sat up and frowned. ‘Superintendent Munro suggested that you come to me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A long, thin Highlander with a face of gloom and a voice like a rusty hinge?’

  Mrs Hendrickson nodded.

  ‘Did he really?’ Keith said. ‘Well, well!’

  Chapter Two

  The former schoolfriends walked out on to the gravel together. ‘The Jaguar belonged to the union. It had to go back. But it was too big for me, anyway,’ Mrs Hendrickson said bravely.

  Molly stood at the front door, anxiously watching her friend drive off, slowly and carefully, in a small and tired-looking car. The Jenny Kerr whom she had once known had always made her feel protective.

  When the car was safely out of sight, she came back to the study. Keith was staring absently at a corner of the ceiling. While Molly waited patiently for a return of his attention, she gathered the used cups on to the trolley.

  The tiny sounds broke Keith’s concentration. ‘I’ll have some more tea,’ he said suddenly. ‘If there is any. Don’t make fresh.’

  Molly fetched a clean cup and sat down again. ‘She hasn’t changed,’ she said as she poured. ‘She always had the knack of finding the right person to solve her problems and then persuading him – it was usually a boy – to go to work for her.’

  ‘I believe that,’ Keith said. ‘She’s very feminine, for all she’s getting on a bit.’

  ‘She hasn’t given you much to work on, though. He could have found a cartridge in a pocket. I’m always finding them in yours.’

  ‘Maybe. Although, if he’d been paralysed for some months, all his clothes must have been through his wife’s hands over and over again. A woman as conscientious as she makes herself out to be would surely have found and removed any twelve-bore cartridges. They’re heavy and not exactly small.’ Keith buttered another scone before going on. ‘One curious thing is that nobody’s mentioned a note.’

  ‘Do suicides always leave notes?’

  ‘Not the ones who do it as a sudden, desperate reaction. But, of the ones who do it as a premeditated act, I think it would be a rare suicide who didn’t leave some kind of a message behind. You might want to escape from the troubles of this life, but your instincts would surely insist that you left some signs that you’d been around. Footprints in the sands of time. Mine would, anyway. Unless I was so overwhelmed by whatever I was getting away from that I couldn’t think about anything else.’

  ‘If his right hand was paralysed—’

  ‘You’d expect him to leave a message on his word-processor, up on the screen where it would catch the eye. But, of course, that would in reality only be a tiny electronic trace. The first person along would only have to switch it off if they didn’t want the message found. If, for instance, they didn’t want it to be suicide. Or some people are compulsive switchers-off of electrical things. Of course, if he’d also put it on to disc or tape . . .’

  ‘You could always go and take a look,’ Molly suggested. ‘You’ve got a good two hours before we eat.’

  Keith looked at his watch. ‘Not tonight,’ he said. ‘There’s no hurry now. Mrs Hendrickson promised that she wouldn’t touch anything else. I’ll make a start in the morn. I’ll use the rest of today to finish up my report on Mr Wilmington’s gun-barrel.’

  ‘Have you done all your tests?’ Molly rather liked Mr Wilmington, a vague-mannered schoolteacher who never called at the shop without spending a few minutes gossiping about his pupils.

  ‘At last, yes.’ Keith was grateful for the change of subject. He felt uneasy in trying to imagine the mental state of a suicide, as if he himself might somehow become infected with that ultimate depression. ‘He’s not the first owner to come crying to me with a burst gun-barrel, blaming a faulty cartridge. It nearly always turns out to have been caused by a badly-made or carelessly-used gun. Most often it’s an obstruction in the barrel. Snow or mud or cleaning materials.’

  ‘And this time?’

  ‘This time, it really was a faulty cartridge,’ Keith said. ‘He was lucky not to lose any fingers, although it’s surprising how often they do get away with it. Would you like to give me a hand tomorrow? I need an extra pair of eyes and ears and somebody to take notes.’

  ‘I was going to make a start on the laundry,’ Molly said reluctantly.

  The front door closed with a slam which rocked the house. ‘Deborah’s home from school,’ Keith said. ‘Bang goes peace and quiet. She might like to go along with me tomorrow. It’ll be Saturday.’

  ‘Do you think it’s suitable for a young girl? She’s given you a hand with things like faked or stolen guns before now, but violent death—’

  ‘I don’t think it’d do her any harm,’ Keith said. ‘It might even help her with growing up.’

  ‘She’s too mature fo
r her years already,’ Molly said.

  ‘I’d keep her away from anything gruesome.’

  ‘If you leave her behind she’ll only spend the day mooning around the house, getting under my feet and asking where you’ve gone and when you’ll be home again.’ Molly thought over her duties and decided that the laundry could wait. ‘All right, I’ll come with you. Then, if Deborah wants to tag along, I can make sure that you don’t let her get messed-up or hysterical.’

  ‘As if I would!’ Keith said.

  *

  The telephone rang soon after Keith and Molly had taken to their bed. Keith tried at first to ignore the nagging whirr of the bedside extension. He had folded Molly in a goodnight embrace and by now, with their nightwear around their respective neck and ankles, warmth and comfort were turning to delicious excitement.

  The most hardened satyr could not have ignored that summons, even with Molly quivering with laughter against him. Keith bit back a rude word and leaned over Molly. Even that small action nearly undid his resolve, but he lifted the phone and made room for it between their two heads.

  ‘Mr Calder?’

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘Be careful how you go in the Hendrickson affair.’ The voice was unrecognisable, artificially deep and both muffled and metallic as if it were coming through cloth and an open-ended tin can. Keith felt Molly stiffen against him.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Keith asked.

  ‘Never you mind who. Poke around if you must. Charge your fee. But, if you love your family, leave the official view as it is or you’ll be a sorry man.’

  The connection died and the dialling tone came on.

  Keith leaned across Molly again to hang up the phone. This time, the contact meant nothing. ‘I’ll be damned!’ he said. ‘The widow may have been right after all. Who’d have thought it?’

  ‘I thought it,’ Molly murmured.