The Worried Widow

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘Only because you were at school with her a hundred years ago.’

  Molly refused to be distracted by references to her age. ‘We’ll talk about it in the morning,’ she said. She moved gently against him. Keith’s body was quiescent, his mind away toying with this new development, but she knew how to regain his attention.

  *

  In the morning, they did talk about it. They rose earlier than was their habit on a non-shooting Saturday and held their discussion over breakfast. For once, Keith and Molly were in full agreement. They would ignore the threatening phone-call except that Keith would be accompanied on his visits by both Molly and Deborah.

  Only their reasons differed. Molly’s faith in Keith was as blind as Mrs Hendrickson’s in God, and she wanted her old friend to have more help than the Almighty seemed willing to provide. Keith for his part always turned stubborn in the face of threats.

  Deborah, when she arrived at the breakfast table, was torn between a long-standing habit of following her father everywhere and impatience to get on with her engraving for Sir Peter; but the decision was made for her. Keith wanted both his ladies where he could keep an eye on them. In addition, during the inevitable delay while Molly made the house fit to be left, he loaded two small pistols. The percussion pepperbox pistol went into his own pocket and he slipped the little Derringer to Molly for her handbag. Threats, he knew, may not always be empty.

  The Hendrickson home was in the most exclusive corner of the town. To reach it they drove, through a dry and calm but overcast day, into Newton Lauder. They turned in the Square, climbing a hill and crossing the canal bridge, to enter a section of private road between farmland and the canal, terminating in a group of only eight houses.

  This small estate owed its existence to a local builder who, between the wars, had been inspired to aim near the top of the market, just below the purses of those who could afford to buy and run the large, old country houses. On sites of not less than half an acre he had built houses designed to capitalise on the seclusion and the views. He had been generous with space and meticulous with finishings and he had avoided any trace of the severity which the discipline of stonework imposed on traditional Scottish architecture. The result was a style of informal charm, almost of coziness. The houses had sold, even at the asking figures, and now fetched prices which made people hiss through their teeth.

  The builder, realising that he had exhausted his market, had hoped to extend the road and to add houses of slightly less opulence and cost, the values of which would have been dragged upward by the exclusiveness of the neighbourhood. But by then he had the richest in the town to contend with, and those gentlemen and their ladies had no intention of being invaded by lesser souls. A trust was formed and the adjacent land was purchased and let back to the farmer. Boswell Court (named not after the biographer but for an obscure saint) remained inviolate.

  The Hendrickson house was the fourth (and last) on the right-hand side. Vulgar numbers were not issued, or if issued were not used, in Boswell Court, and the house was known as Rowanbank. Landscaping had matured in the fifty years since the house was built. All the properties were well screened by hedges and specimen trees, but Rowanbank in particular turned an almost blank gable to the visitor, reserving its main outlook for the garden and the hills beyond.

  Keith parked the car in the hammerhead where the road ended and turned to Molly. ‘I want Deb to come and take notes while I speak to Mrs Hendrickson,’ he said. ‘You go and call on the neighbours. The wives may chat to you more freely than they did to the police.’

  ‘You’ll remember what you promised?’ Molly gave Keith a meaning look.

  ‘I’ll remember. There’ll be no screams in the night.’

  ‘All right, then,’ Molly said.

  ‘I won’t know which house you’re in,’ Keith said. ‘I’ll give three honks on the horn when I want you.’

  Keith, with Deborah in train, followed a neatly-paved drive round the Hendrickson house until he found the front door, sheltered by a deep porch which linked the door to a substantial garage. In this sheltered corner, Keith noticed, the spring bulbs were flourishing and the shrubs were at least a fortnight ahead of his own at Briesland House.

  Mrs Hendrickson answered the door herself. Live-in maids were not the tradition in Newton Lauder, the servant problem, for those who could afford it, being answered during the week by an elaborate network of ‘daily women’. At weekends, the family ate out or the lady of the house was her own menial.

  She looked doubtfully at Deborah, evidently assuming that her arrival on Keith’s heels was coincidental. ‘Mike and Beth haven’t arrived home yet,’ she said.

  ‘I brought my daughter to help me,’ Keith explained. ‘Deborah. She’s quite used to being Watson to my Holmes.’

  ‘Or Clouseau to his Dreyfus,’ Deborah murmured. Keith quelled her with a frown.

  Mrs Hendrickson shook Deborah’s hand and made no comment beyond raised eyebrows. ‘Do come in,’ she said. ‘Or do you want to see the summerhouse first?’

  Keith remembered Molly’s admonition against exposing Deborah to a scene which, if Mrs Hendrickson had been side-tracked by her discovery of the cigarette, might still be spattered with dried blood and brains. ‘Perhaps we could talk first,’ he suggested.

  The living room was spacious but with no suggestion that it was ever subjected to the indignity of being dined in. Chintzes and pastel colours prevailed, somehow echoing Mrs Hendrickson’s own gentleness and tranquillity. Windows, double-glazed and uncharacteristically broad for Scotland, looked east along the garden. The peaked roof of the summerhouse showed above a screen of evergreens. The view to the hills had been kept open, but there was no glimpse of neighbouring houses. The illusion of being deep in the countryside was carefully preserved.

  Mrs Hendrickson, true to her type, felt impelled to question Deborah about her schooling, aspirations and acquaintances. Keith waited for the polite minimum of time before reclaiming her attention.

  ‘Tell us about that day,’ he said.

  Deborah opened a school jotter on a rosewood side-table. She tried hard to listen as well as to record. Keith had given her no more than the barest outline of their task.

  The mild animation which had enlivened Mrs Hendrickson while exchanging trivialities with one of the younger generation faded and died. She visibly braced herself. ‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘It was the Saturday, a fortnight ago today, so I had Sam all to myself. No nurse, no daily woman. We woke quite early, about eight. To be honest, I could have slept on. I’d stayed up late to watch a play, you see.’ She nodded towards a huge television set. ‘But I sensed that Sam was awake and bored – boredom was his worst enemy after he became so dependent on others – so I roused myself to make a cup of tea. I brought him his breakfast in bed. He could manage very well, except that I had to cut things up for him because of his being one-handed. You’re sure you want to know all this?’ she asked anxiously.

  ‘We’d rather be told everything,’ Keith said. ‘You can’t say too much, but you could easily leave out something which could have turned out to be vital.’

  ‘I see. Very well. Usually I have to try to stop myself from running on, but this time I’ll let myself go.

  ‘I didn’t feel up to getting him into the shower, my back was still troubling me from the day before, so I gave him a sponge-down and helped him to get dressed and into the wheelchair. I got myself dressed and tidy while he used his electric shaver. There were a few letters, all bills. I slit the envelopes for him and he looked through them while I made the beds, then he gave them back to me to settle.

  ‘I took him outside after that. He was strong enough to work the wheelchair on the flat, but there’s a slight uphill to the summerhouse and anyway he had difficulty making it go straight, one-handed. It would have been a nice day for sitting in the garden, but he felt the cold terribly since his stroke. Anyway, he always preferred to be in the summerhouse with his things. It was a nuisance, h
aving to trail up the garden, rain or shine, whenever he wanted something – especially the lavatory,’ Mrs Hendrickson added in a decorous aside, ‘– but it helped him to feel independent to have a place which was all his own. I wheeled him there and took him inside and made sure that he had everything he wanted.

  ‘Then I came back to the house and got on with the odd jobs. Do you want to know what I did?’

  ‘If you can remember,’ Keith said.

  ‘I can remember every moment of that ghastly day. I’ve been over it often enough in my mind,’ Mrs Hendrickson said wearily. ‘I washed up the breakfast things. I wrote cheques and envelopes for the bills, stamped them and put them on the hall table for posting. I put some dirty laundry into the washing-machine. And I started to prepare something for our lunch.’

  ‘Can you put times to any of these things?’ Keith asked.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but no. I wasn’t watching the clock.’

  ‘Never mind,’ Keith said. ‘Go on.’

  ‘There were three phone-calls. One was from my sister Louise, to ask whether I needed anything. I didn’t, but she said that she’d look in anyway during the afternoon. She was always very good about staying in the house while I went to the shops, just in case Sam wanted anything. The next – oh, but I should have explained,’ Mrs Hendrickson broke in on herself. ‘Sam had an extension in the summerhouse. He couldn’t make himself understood, but he liked to listen and I certainly never had anything to say that he shouldn’t have heard, except when the doctors phoned. The second call was for Sam. A very gruff, deep voice with a strong accent. I said that Sam couldn’t speak and the voice said, “He can listen, can’t he?”’

  ‘I could always tell when Sam was on the line because it had a sort of hollow sound when his receiver was off the hook and sometimes I could hear his radio in the background. I could tell that he’d picked up the extension, so I said that Sam was listening, and without a word of thanks the voice said “This is Hughie”, only he pronounced it “Shoogie”, the way Glaswegians do. So I hung up and got on with my work.

  ‘A little later, our next-door neighbours came visiting. Not Ben Strathling who’s next-door proper,’ Mrs Hendrickson explained carefully. ‘Mr and Mrs Albany live what would be across the street except that the street stops without running in between us, if you see what I mean, so I count them as being our other next-door. They’ve been very good about visiting and being some company for Sam. So I made coffee and we all went out and had it with Sam. He used to like that. In the old days, he hated what he called “poodle-faking” – such a funny expression! – but after he became ill he enjoyed having guests for drinks or coffee. He couldn’t join in the conversation except nodding or shaking his head, or writing it up on the screen of his computer-thing if it was important. When he tried to speak it was all garbled and it embarrassed people and he seemed to know that. And anyway he liked to use his computer for conversations because it left him with a sort of one-sided record which he could go over again later if he was bored and alone. That was the last time that I saw him alive,’ she added forlornly.

  ‘Did he seem quite as usual?’ Keith asked.

  Mrs Hendrickson wrinkled her brow. ‘It was hard to tell,’ she said. ‘You see, his face didn’t show expressions much, half of it being sort of frozen, and anything he wrote on the computer screen gave no hint of what tone of voice he’d have used. I thought that he seemed a bit low. Tired, perhaps.

  ‘Mr Albany stayed on with Sam when his wife left, and I came back to the house. Ian Albany’s a shooting man, as you probably know –’ (Keith nodded) ‘– and he used to talk guns with Sam and clean them for him, things like that. I don’t suppose they needed cleaning if they weren’t being used, but I think that having them cleaned helped Sam to believe that some day he would be able to use them again.’ She stopped and put a hand to her face. ‘I didn’t mean—’

  ‘I know what you meant,’ Keith said.

  She nodded, gratefully. ‘I sat down in here for a while, to have a little rest and read my book. I wondered whether to go out and see whether Sam and Mr Albany would like a drink, because it was getting on towards lunch-time. But Sam had a stock of drinks in the summerhouse and they were quite capable of helping themselves and anyway I soon saw Mr Albany coming down the garden and going away. He waved to me through the window. I was on the phone at the time. That was the third call, Sam’s physiotherapist wanting to change his appointment.

  ‘About half an hour later, I was just going to put the lunch on when the milkman came to the door. When I say the milkman, it’s really the milkman’s father-in-law. He comes round on Saturdays in a little van, to collect the money and take any special orders.’

  Deborah looked up from her careful note-taking in school shorthand. ‘Old Mr Rogers?’

  ‘That’s right, dear.’ Mrs Hendrickson paused and braced herself. ‘We had the usual argument, because he never knows anything about the days I’ve had too much milk left in the fridge and I’ve put a note out to say that I’d take one pint instead of the usual two. Or he always says he doesn’t. But he always knows when we’ve had extra, for visitors or the family being at home.

  ‘I’d just settled up with him, in fact we were still on the doorstep talking about something else, when I heard what I can only describe as a muffled bang from the garden side of the house. I nearly paid no attention, because it could have been somebody in the field or something, but I decided that it was time that I went and looked in on Sam anyway. So I went round the house and up the garden and . . . found him. That was at about a quarter past twelve.’ She kept her chin up but there was a definite quaver in her voice. ‘I think that that was the worst moment of my life. You’re not going to insist that I describe it all, are you? Please? I don’t think I could bring myself to.’

  Keith could understand the widow’s reluctance to dwell on the scene. ‘I’ll get the details from somebody else,’ he said. ‘Tell me one thing. Was the video screen on his word processor switched on?’

  She thought back. ‘It was on,’ she said. ‘But there was nothing on the screen, only a sort of list of things it could do. So I switched it off, and the radio too. It was just an instinctive gesture, like closing a dead person’s eyes. Oh dear! From your face, that was the wrong thing to do. Could there have been a message on the other side?’

  ‘If his machine’s like mine,’ Keith said, ‘it switches between that list and the text every time you hit the ESCAPE key. But never mind that for the moment. What happened next?’

  ‘The next few seconds are just a blur.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Perhaps God was sparing me, just a little, by granting me a numbness. I think that I must have screamed, or at least called out Sam’s name. Ben Strathling came through the hedge from next door and Mr Hughes turned up and later I remember seeing Mrs Albany. It’s all a bit vague. Ben took over and Mrs Albany – Theresa’s her name, we call her Terry – took me back to her house.’

  Mrs Hendrickson’s hand was shaking and Keith could see tears in her eyes. He decided that she needed a change of subject before he pushed her any further. ‘Would you write us a letter,’ he said, ‘saying that you’ve engaged me, and any of my associates, to enquire into the circumstances of your husband’s death?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Of course. You want something to show to the police and other people? I’ve already phoned the neighbours and asked them to be helpful.’ She got up and moved to a small writing-desk which stood between the windows.

  ‘That’s it. Make two copies,’ Keith said. ‘To whom it may concern. Deborah can take one with her now, when she goes to join her mother.’

  Deborah snapped her jotter shut. ‘Oh, Dad!’

  ‘I am not taking you with me when we go out to the summerhouse,’ Keith said firmly. ‘Your mother would have a fit, even if you didn’t. And Mrs Hendrickson will find it quite distressing enough having me along, asking silly questions. You can go and call on anybody your mother hasn’t got around to.’


  ‘But I can’t go crashing in on people, just like that,’ Deborah protested. ‘At my age, they won’t take me seriously.’

  ‘Do you know any of the young people up here?’

  ‘Well, yes. I’ve been to two parties here and I think I’ve met them all.’

  ‘That’s enough introduction,’ Keith said. ‘Have a good gossip. You may be able to find out from the youngsters something the parents hold back from your mother. See if you can find out where everybody was when the shot was heard, and what else they saw and heard at around that time. If you’re half as good as your mother at getting people to talk about themselves, you’ll save me an age of time. I can always follow up where it seems necessary.’

  Mrs Hendrickson looked up from her writing. ‘The police asked everybody those sorts of questions,’ she said, ‘and Mr Munro said that he’d make their statements available to you.’

  ‘But if, as you think, they got the wrong answers, they must have asked the wrong questions,’ Keith said. ‘We’ll go over the ground again.’ He glanced at the two letters which Mrs Hendrickson gave him, nodded and handed one to Deborah. ‘You run along now, Toots. Give your mother some back-up. And, later, maybe you two can call on the milkman while I talk to Superintendent Munro.’

  *

  Deborah, grumbling, departed. Mrs Hendrickson, after fetching a light coat as a prophylactic against spring colds, led Keith by a side-door into the garden.

  The older paths were of gravel but a new path of concrete paving had been laid in an easy gradient along the shortest route to the summerhouse, thereby introducing the only straight lines into an otherwise delightfully informal garden but greatly simplifying the to-ing and fro-ing of a wheelchair. The summerhouse emerged gradually from behind its screen of greenery as they walked – a square building, more recent than the house, with a picture-window, overlooking the view to the east, stone walls presented to the north and south and, on the west side which they were approaching, doors, mostly of glass, which could slide and be folded so that the room could be thrown open to the garden.