HER HUSBAND’S KILLER an unputdownable psychological thriller full of breathtaking twists

by MARGARET MURPHY

  I found a beetle in my bathroom this morning — nothing exotic, only a carabid. It wasn’t even a particularly interesting specimen. Rather small and with a dull greenish tinge — commonplace. It was trying to climb up the sides of the bath. It would find a scratch in which it could momentarily gain purchase, then it would slip, scrabbling hopelessly back into the well of the bath. I was transfixed for a time, watching it. Struggle, climb, slip, grip. Struggle, climb, slip, grip.

  Something about the way the sun dazzled, honeyed, warm through the glass and a faint whiff of new growth which came in through the open window made me recall a day . . . It must have been a holiday, summer maybe, but the way the light sparkled both silver and gold makes me think that it must have been one of those rare spring days which is almost too hot to bear and you begin to believe that the rest of spring and all through summer will be warm, temperate, golden. I can’t have been more than nine years old; all gap teeth and scabby knees. I was playing alone, as was my preference, squatting in the dust at the kerbside, winding molten tar onto a stick, building a stock which I planned to hide and burn later, and make believe I was a medieval knight.

  I was in the lane that ran across the top of the street. Prospect Street stood alone, fields bordering one end and a pitted, pot-holed lane the other. My mother had sent me out to play because I was getting under her feet — an expression I scorned, for it gave the impression that I was a clingy child and although I liked to watch her, I had no real need of her. She was an interesting behavioural model, no more. So, she sent me to play; not with the other children — she had long given up on that idea — just out. Away from her. So that I couldn’t watch her with my clever, observant eyes. I was distracted from my torch-making by a movement on the periphery of my vision — a giant black beetle.

  The image in my mind’s eye was so sharp it made me gasp. I had forgotten it — not just its appearance, but the very fact of its existence and now, standing in my bathroom so many years later, I see it with such clarity I might almost be there. The edges of its thorax and wing cases shimmering violet in the heat haze, a multi-layered metallic sheen of green and black and shades of blue — I see it so clearly. It’s at least three centimetres long. Its waxy, articulated limbs make tiny scratchy sounds on the ruined tarmac. I bend down, put my ear to the roadway to hear. Scratch, scratch, scratch. The heat from the tarmac is searing but I keep my face close to the ground, testing my endurance while watching the beetle lumbering on like a clockwork toy, its belly raised on its spindly legs, a fraction above the damaging heat. It moves in a straight line, purposefully, as if it has somewhere to go, reminding me of the hard lads who stalked the high street in town, swinging their arms, with their fists clenched. I watch the beetle’s meaningless journey from my giant’s perspective, and it stares back with its blank red multifaceted eyes, as plump as berries.

  I will it to see me, but it carries on, its ridiculous, inefficient, barbed feet scraping the tarmac. Suddenly I want it to notice me with an urgency that borders on hunger. It continues, clawing forward, as if I don’t matter, even though I could do anything I want to it and it couldn’t do a thing to stop me.

  I purse my lips and blow a sharp puff of wind. It freezes momentarily. Road dust lifts like powder, I can taste the grit on my teeth. The beetle waves its antennae and then the maddening paddling motions begin again. It is too much. I pick it up. It feels like one of those fake insects — joke toys — the kind of plastic they use for spiders and bats and bluebottles in the joke shops. For a moment I wondered whether it was a practical joke. I half expect to hear muffled laughter from the field behind the hedge. I turn it over, looking for the groove where the key fits to wind it up. I look around me while the beetle keeps up its incessant paddling motion, trapped between my thumb and forefinger, a fixed diagonal pattern, like rowers with bad timing. I scream into its mute face:

  LOOK AT ME!

  It appears to quiver, but then it carries on, as though convinced the pointless movements will eventually set it right. I am close to tears with frustration. I want to crush it, to hear the crack of is outer armour and the wet squelch of its soft inner pulp, but that would be too swift: with the impotent rage of a child I want it to know the power I have; I want it to feel my presence and I want to make it suffer. I take it to the side of the road and build a ring of stones. Then I put the violet-purple beetle in the centre. The stones are big and for a time it circles, probing with its antennae, then it starts climbing, but I had chosen smooth pebbly stones, constructed into a sheer wall, and it keeps slipping back.

  The heat is baking, and I sit a small distance away, in the shade of the hawthorn hedge already in leaf and speckled with clustered tumescences of flower buds. It takes half an hour for the beetle to reach the top of the stones.

  Do beetles feel triumph?

  Smiling, I flicked it lightly with one fingernail and it tumbles into the centre of the arena, onto its back.

  Do beetles feel despair?

  It kept climbing up and I kept flicking it back.

  The sun is like a solid mass, battering down, relentless, fierce, pitiless. I feel like the sun, its power is vested in me.

  The big black beetle must have been slowly cooking in its own juices. I remember wondering how long it would go on until it collapsed from exhaustion. After an hour or so I got bored. I thought, why doesn’t it just fly away? I knew beetles could fly, so why didn’t it just take off? How could I know then that there were beetles as earthbound as humans?

  I make an obstacle course for it out of broken bits of hawthorn and blackthorn twigs. The blackthorn I make into a kind of barbed wire perimeter, but the beetle doesn’t seem to mind the thorns; in fact, it makes the climbing easier. I am hot and thirsty by now and the game hadn’t gone as I had planned. I am angry — furious — with the beetle. I hate it for its brutish stupidity, for its barbed black legs, for its inability to fly, and most of all for its refusal to notice me. I pick it up and impale it on a vicious spike of the blackthorn, finding the soft tissue between its thorax and abdomen.

  It minded that all right. It noticed that. I felt weak and strong at the same time. I was trembling, breathless, but the punishment of the beetle had given me power; I had broken through a barrier which had, until that point, prevented me from being what I could be. Even as a nine-year-old, I understood the portentousness of that moment. The beetle’s legs flailed, and its antennae waved blindly in a futile attempt to find escape. Avoiding its pincer-like jaws, I broke off each antenna near the head. Strange, I had expected it to scream, but it didn’t make a sound. I stuck the twig in the centre of the circle of stones and left the hated creature twitching on its spike, its mechanical legs winding down to eventual stillness.

  I went back the next day, but it had gone. The arena was still there but the twig and the beetle had vanished.

  I don’t know how long I stood watching the beetle in the bath, but when I came to the sun had tracked beyond the corner of the house so that the little beetle now toiled ineffectually in the shadow of the bath rim and only a faint gilding of light remained on the naked tips of the shrubs at the back of the house. It was a small creature, unlike the other I had found. Insignificant.

  I picked the bleach bottle up from the windowsill, but it was empty. I reached for the hot tap, but something made me pause and, on impulse, I bent and cupped my hands, scooping up the beetle and releasing it through the window, fanning my fingers like a conjurer releasing a dove. At the instant of release its name flashed into my mind: Carabus nemoralis.

  Chapter 7

  The smell of food and the noise of conversation hit them like a solid mass. Helen actually took a step back.

  ‘God,’ Ruth muttered, misinterpreting the action, ‘Half the faculty’s here.’

  Helen stood blinking for a moment. The artificially high pitch of the voices above the clatter of cutlery on plates invoked a vivid recollection of meals in her old high school canteen. ‘Cabbage,’ she said.

 
‘With custard by the smell,’ Ruth said, her nostrils flaring involuntarily. ‘Sure you don’t want to eat in town?’

  ‘I might be recognized,’ said Helen. ‘And I’ve had reporters trailing round after me whenever I set foot outside the house — or the university walls.’

  They had come to the college refectory because Helen had declared a sudden ravenous hunger and her fridge at home had been empty. ‘A gleaming example of minimalism,’ Ruth had commented, dryly, lifting the one solitary yoghurt tub from its lonely position on the middle shelf and checking the date on the lid suspiciously. ‘I can’t say I approve of your standards of housekeeping.’

  ‘I haven’t felt much like eating recently.’

  Helen had remembered that she had done some shopping on her way home the previous day but, when Ruth checked, she found the carrier bag of spoiled food on the bedroom floor, where Helen had left it.

  ‘You’d’ve thought the police would have the sense to pack a few bits of shopping away—’ Ruth stopped. ‘What?’

  Helen was laughing. Real laughter. No hysteria, she just found the whole thing hilariously funny. Ruth was torn between annoyance and relief. ‘I’m sorry,’ Helen said, making an effort — and failing — to compose herself. ‘I just had this image of Inspector Nelson packing away my perishables.’ She went back to giggling.

  Ruth smirked. She had to admit, the idea of the mad-eyed policeman fussing over Helen’s supermarket shopping did create a farcical picture. She reached into the carrier bag, which she still held in her hand. ‘Can you account, Mrs Wilkinson,’ she said, imitating the rasp in Nelson’s voice, ‘for the bloody kitchen roll in this bag?’ She lifted out a dripping twin pack and dropped it into the kitchen bin. The pork joint Helen had bought had thawed and leaked over the entire contents of the bag. Helen paled, but Ruth had found the character of Inspector Nelson, the cadence of his voice, the manner of speech. ‘I mean, can you assure me that this pork was outdoor reared? That it was treated with respect, allowed to roam free, to roll in shit? (Green, naturally.) Has it feasted on swill? Organic, of course — and was it humanely laid to rest?’ She stopped as Helen bolted for the door and tore upstairs to the bathroom. Ruth listened to her retching painfully for some minutes, then she followed her.

  ‘You okay?’ she asked, leaning against the door jamb.

  Helen pulled herself to her feet, using the bathroom sink for support. ‘Great,’ she said tightly, flushing the toilet, and then running a sink full of cold water and rinsing her face.

  Ruth handed her a towel. ‘Sorry,’ she mumbled. ‘I wasn’t thinking. I shouldn’t have mentioned the blood.’

  ‘Leave it, will you?’ Helen sighed into the silence that followed. ‘It doesn’t help to talk about it, Ruth.’

  ‘How would you know? You’ve never tried.’

  ‘I’ll phone Mum and Dad and then we’ll go to the canteen.’

  Ruth had been sufficiently chastened to forget to correct Helen. The refectory — for this was the only permissible term amongst the established members of the faculty — was hot and the combined smells of boiled mince and over-boiled vegetables, chip fat and sweet puddings, were overpowering. Helen asked for vegetable soup and a bread roll. Ruth’s selection took a little longer, and consisted of high fat, high carbohydrate, low-fibre fillers.

  ‘I don’t know how you eat so much junk and stay so slim,’ Helen remarked.

  ‘Bulimia.’

  It was said with no hesitation and in such a matter-of-fact tone that Helen turned, slopping a little of her soup onto the tray. ‘You are joking?’ she asked, unable to read her friend’s expression.

  ‘You don’t think it’s funny?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  Another guilty pang: Ruth more than anyone, knew that for the past three months eating even enough to sustain herself had been an effort of will for Helen.

  She turned down the corners of her mouth and raised her shoulders. ‘Sorry,’ she said, and meant it.

  They moved on, edging between tables, looking for a quiet corner. The college rented out the undergraduate accommodation to foreign students during the vacations, and they were all here today, practising their English on each other with an assiduousness that was at once touching and amusing. A few of Helen’s third-year students, in to continue their honours project work, smiled up at her as she passed, embarrassed, unsure how to greet her, but anxious to convey their sympathy.

  They ended up sharing a table with Mallory and his entourage. Ainsley sat at a table for two, looking so morose that even the foreign students didn’t venture to ask if the unoccupied seat was free.

  ‘Either DA isn’t getting his nooky or his wife is getting hers away from home,’ Ruth said, grinning wickedly, as they took their places.

  Mallory gave her a sour look, then turned at a forty-five-degree angle so that she was presented with his shoulder and half his back. Ruth rolled her eyes at Helen. She reached past Mallory for the salt cellar and began shaking the container intemperately over her plate of chips. Grains fell in a flurry on her food, the plate rim, her tray, the table, a few even dusted the cuff of Mallory’s ancient tweed jacket. Mallory glared at her over his shoulder and she smiled back sweetly. She ate rapidly, spearing four or five chips on her fork and jamming them into her mouth. While she chewed, she smeared her bread roll liberally with the contents of several of the tiny tubs she had picked up from the dish by the cash register, then she made a sandwich with the remainder of the chips.

  Such anger, Helen thought, as she sipped at her soup, trying not to think of it as food, because any acknowledgement at a conscious level would summon the nausea she had suffered since January. Surely Ruth hadn’t meant what she said about being bulimic? But you never could tell with Ruth. Anger and hunger were, in a way, synonymous in Ruth’s mind. Anger at being delayed in her inevitable progression to the top of the academic tree — and it was inevitable, for Ruth was one of those rare people who can, without hesitation, be called brilliant — and who hunger for the opportunities academic success would provide. Ruth had never been interested in material gain. What she wanted was acclaim, a chance to air her views and expound her theories before an audience of academics who would see her as a scientist, rather than a woman; to research under circumstances of generous funding, using state-of-the-art technology, rather than the five-year-old computer programs and hardware which represented the best St Werburgh’s could provide. Helen saw her established as a grande dame of science, the sort of woman the media would love to consult because of her unguarded comments, her passion for her subject — and her Oxbridge-sculpted English accent.

  Helen admired Ruth for her clearness of purpose, her vision, and was grateful to her as a reliable friend. Although Ruth had despised Edward, he had held a grudging respect for Ruth, a sneaking admiration for her intellectual ability and research skills.

  Helen nodded to herself, smiling a little to think that her only friend of whom Edward had approved, had been a woman. This was both ironic and predictable: ironic because Edward believed women intellectually inferior to men; predictable, because he routinely flirted with Helen’s women friends. Of all of them, Ruth was the only one who had not been taken in by him. ‘Passive immunization,’ she had said. ‘I saw what happened to you and the others when he got bored. They say a standing prick has no conscience; well you could add that a flattered fanny shows no judgement. I’ve a natural distrust of flattery — and I’ve never yet been proved wrong.’

  Stirring the cooling soup with her spoon, Helen resolved to try another mouthful, but this was a task to be approached crab-wise, and as a distraction she concentrated on her surroundings. The big, low-ceilinged basement room was clad in tongue-and-groove pine, in a style popular in the sixties. It had oxidized to an almost chestnut orange-red and was overlaid with nicotine and vaporized cooking fat. The university had introduced a no smoking policy eighteen months previously and efforts had been made to remove the stench of cigarettes, but it had seeped into the
wood, and on warm days it exhaled into the refectory air. The floor — chequered black-and-white tiles — had its usual grubby tint.

  Helen looked around at the faces, familiar and unfamiliar, and felt that strange detachment which had become almost a part of her since the New Year. New Year. Time of hope. New resolutions. She frowned. And what have I resolved? she wondered. Rutherford was there, talking in his studied, courteous manner to a postgraduate researcher — Helen couldn’t remember his name — looking like a prep school master instructing an acolyte in the art of conversation. Helen liked Rutherford, but Edward had dismissed him as ‘a Cambridge queen’. Mallory and his group buzzed like angry wasps to her left, she studied Mallory’s profile for a few minutes, wondering how he came to be so embittered with life. She knew he had little chance of retaining his post in the reorganization — Edward had told her as much — dismissing Mallory as ‘lax, lazy, incompetent and entirely without ideas’. In this instance, though she hated to admit it, Edward had probably been right: Mallory had not published anything in the past few years, he was pinning everything on John Ellis, and it was unfortunate for both of them that the PhD student had taken Mallory as a role model. She had not examined Ellis’s research closely, of course, since it was not her field, but Edward had shown an ominous interest in his work in the last month, and she knew they had argued on the day Edward had been murdered. Ellis was a skinny, rangy young man, no match physically for Edward, but Edward himself had proved that strength was not needed to wound the heart, only a sharp blade and a steady hand.