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

by MARGARET MURPHY

  The shed was locked and there was nothing hidden inside the greenhouse. He was about to abandon his half-hearted attempt at unlawful entry when he heard footsteps approaching the back gate, and for a moment he froze. If he used the pathway to gain his hiding place by the bins, he might be heard. He retreated quickly across the lawn, leaving clear footprints on the wet grass, but perhaps Ellis would not notice. He hid behind the rose arbour just as the gate opened.

  Dermot risked one quick shot: the wind was blowing in his direction and should carry the click and wheeze of the shutter and auto-wind away from the house, but his heart thudded so loudly in his chest that he was seriously worried it would give him away.

  It wasn’t Ellis, but the new visitor carried the same three keys on a simple fob with a yellow tab. What was going on? He waited a couple of minutes and was contemplating sneaking up to the house, when a movement at the study window caught his attention and he fired off another shot. The light was fading and there was probably too much shadow to make it worthwhile, but he already had one clear picture and he could try and improve the definition in the dark room, or on the computer.

  He waited a further five minutes, wondering whether to leave or to try for another shot, failing to notice the face at the attic room window which overlooked the garden, didn’t see that he was being observed.

  * * *

  ‘David.’

  Clara had lost weight. Lost the sheen of good health and even better grooming which had cost him so much financially, and later — after she met Edward — everything he had ever wanted in life.

  ‘I need some things,’ he said. ‘Five minutes, I’m on my way.’

  Clara held the baby to her. He was asleep, exhausted no doubt, as she must be exhausted. She placed the baby carefully, almost fearfully, into his cot beside the bed then turned to look at her husband.

  Ainsley eyed her cautiously, wondering how she might react. For a second she seemed ready to fly at him, then she smiled briefly and, sweeping an overlong lock of hair from her forehead with the back of her hand, she said, ‘I’ll fix you something to eat — you must be starving.’

  ‘No. I won’t stay.’

  She laughed, a tentative, nervous sound that ended almost in a sob. ‘Yes, you did rather leave in a hurry.’ She half turned. ‘Your cheque book’s in—’

  ‘I have it safe now,’ he said, patting his jacket pocket.

  ‘David, I would never—’

  He had sounded harsher than he had intended, and she seemed wounded by the implication. ‘I know,’ he said, relenting. ‘I know, Clara.’

  She stood by as he placed folded clothing into binbags.

  ‘You really don’t have to move your things—’ A desperate edge had crept into her voice.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, firmly. ‘Yes, I do. I have to.’

  Her mouth worked and she almost lost control. She looked about her, as if trying to find a distraction from her extreme distress. ‘Where’ve you been staying?’

  ‘Rutherford put me up for a few days, then I found a B&B.’

  Rutherford, who so abhorred Ainsley’s smugness, had been unable to resist his deep unhappiness. Ainsley had heard Mrs Rutherford had murmured a warning about appearing to take sides but had agreed that they could not allow David to continue sleeping in his office. Ainsley had quickly recovered from the heavy drinking — too ashamed to let Rutherford’s children see him stumbling about the house, shambling and tearful — and from there, he had started piecing together a new life, of sorts.

  ‘This is such a big house,’ Clara said. ‘We needn’t be in each other’s way.’ It was said timidly, and Ainsley felt a sharp pain below his sternum. He pulled the drawstring on the third bin liner full of his clothing.

  Clara laughed shakily. ‘Funny,’ she said, ‘I always thought you didn’t care about clothes. And look at all this.’

  He half smiled, reaching to lift the first bag. Her hand closed over his, tightened, pulling against him. Their eyes locked, hers pleading, tearful. But he was beyond tears.

  ‘I need you,’ she said, looking away, and a tear fell onto the black plastic of the bin bag.

  ‘I know,’ Ainsley said quietly. ‘But you don’t love me. It’s not enough, Clara.’

  She nodded silently, moving out of his way. ‘The police took me in for questioning on Saturday.’

  He held his breath, waiting for the confession.

  ‘I was with Edward, at his house, the afternoon he was murdered.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me this.’

  ‘I went there to tell him it was over between us.’ She laughed, softly, tentatively, glancing over at the baby’s cot to check for signs of restlessness. ‘The police think I was the last to see him alive, and you know what that means.’

  ‘Clara—’

  ‘They can’t prove anything. They haven’t even got enough to charge me. They let me go after eight hours. They searched the house — our house — but of course they found nothing.’

  ‘I don’t know why you’re telling me this.’

  ‘I had to leave Henry with Cloë Sallis. She wasn’t pleased. But the alternative was to bring social services in. She says he slept for six hours. That’s more sleep than I’ve had in the last three days. It was humiliating, David, having to ask for her help, for that reason. She knew, of course. Everyone does.’

  ‘It’s not my problem,’ he said, avoiding her huge, hungry, tearful eyes.

  ‘No,’ she said, with an effort of control. ‘It’s our problem. We can deal with it.’

  ‘I’ll see that you and the boy of provided for.’

  ‘Your son!’ she screamed with sudden ferocity. ‘Henry is your son!’

  He looked at her with real pity this time. Then, shaking his head, started to take his belongings down to the hired van below.

  Chapter 19

  They walked part of the way back along the Roman walls. Helen had been prepared to slow her pace to a shuffle and was surprised that Mick was able to stride along with her; she even had difficulty keeping up at times. The wind by now was fierce. It buffeted them, changing direction with capricious inconstancy, slamming into the walls and creating vortices which snatched the breath from their mouths. They conceded defeat, retreating, laughing, to the relative calm of the street below.

  ‘Maybe we should phone for a taxi,’ Helen suggested.

  ‘Are you tired?’

  Helen saw the concern in his face and felt a slight shock in the realization that he should think her frail. Did she really look so ill? ‘Not unless you are,’ she said, somewhat defensively, but was unable to suppress a smile when he laughed. ‘Smugness doesn’t suit you,’ she added.

  She was relieved that there were no reporters in evidence outside the house. ‘Best thing I ever did, going to my parents for the weekend,’ she commented.

  ‘Best thing ever?’

  She paused, with her hand on the gate, feeling that the genuine curiosity he had shown in asking the question deserved serious consideration. It seemed that her absence had deterred the reporters, resulting in a huge improvement in her quality of life. Also, a candid exchange between herself and her mother had been long overdue. She knew now that she could never be to her parents what they wanted her to be, simply because she was not Robbie. This had been a painful revelation, but it had also been a kind of deliverance from the years in which she had hated herself and had tortured herself with futile yearnings: if she had supervised him more closely; if she hadn’t been so keen to appear the cool older sister; if she had called the ambulance sooner, or her parents . . . And yet there was unfinished business — the waste of two years of her life. It would shock her mother to know that Helen only considered it a waste because she hadn’t achieved what she had set out to do, as far as Robbie’s dealer was concerned. Helen was ashamed of her feelings, but she could not make them go away, and so she had told no one and tried not to think about it. Sometimes it worked, but not always.

  Someone had finished the j
ob for her while she was in prison — a drugs-related shooting, the police had called it. Helen had felt thwarted; she had had her chance and blown it. Perhaps there was something within her that was dangerous, bad.

  Still, in all, the letting go of years of self-recrimination had given Helen strength. She had mended no bridges, dressed no wounds, but at least now she was reconciled to the fact that she would have to learn to go on alone, since her parents were stuck in the past, experiencing the same grief, the same pangs of suffering and remorse as they had more than ten years before.

  She smiled at Mick; he was still waiting for an answer. ‘If not the best, then certainly the most beneficial thing I’ve done in years.’

  She made coffee while Mick fiddled with the radio, trying to tune in to Jazz FM. Mission accomplished, he sat back and watched Helen through half-closed eyes.

  ‘Unbelievable!’

  Mick roused himself from a pleasurable, if imagined, caressing of the curve of Helen’s neck. ‘What is?’

  ‘Not what, who. Ruth.’ Helen straightened up from the fridge. In one hand she held a bottle of milk and in the other a white cardboard box. ‘She keeps bringing me little delicacies, trying to “tempt my palate”, as she calls it. This looks like the latest. Fancy sharing a pudding with me?’

  They had skipped the banoffee pie on offer at the restaurant and Mick had worked up a renewed appetite fighting against the wind on the walk back to Helen’s house. ‘Mind you don’t drip!’ he warned.

  Helen set the box down on the scrubbed kitchen table. It seemed one of the cakes had leaked jam, for the base of the box was oozing sticky red juice.

  ‘Doughnuts,’ Helen said, smiling. ‘Ruth has a thing for them.’ She cut the string and opened the box lid.

  ‘My God.’ Mick looked up into Helen’s face. It was frozen, ominously still.

  Inside the box, on a square of balsa wood, was a white laboratory mouse. It was splayed in a way that always made him think of crucifixion. Each tiny paw was pinned through its centre and stretched out, to place the body wall under tension and facilitate the dissection.

  Helen began to shake so violently that he feared she might convulse. Mick stood and put both arms around her, pulling her away. Once outside the door, Helen came to as if waking from a hypnotic trance.

  She struggled free of him. ‘I’m going to be sick.’

  He let her go, knowing that his slow ascent of the stairs would only impede her. By the time reached the bathroom after her, she was already rinsing her mouth out. Then she had splashed her face with water.

  ‘Helen, who would do this to you?’ he asked.

  ‘Did you see?’ She ignored his question, focusing on something in the middle distance. Something so real and tangible, that he almost fancied that he could see it too.

  He frowned, nodded. Yes, he had seen. So much blood! Whoever had done this, had killed the animal by severing a vein and allowing it to bleed to death slowly. Then it had been expertly dissected. The oesophagus and rectum ligatured with cotton before being cut, then the stomach and small and large intestines had been carefully lifted out of the body cavity, displaced to the left of the body and arranged in a lyre shape to display the mesenteric blood vessels fanning across the transparent connective tissues in a delicate filigree arrangement of red blood vessels and off-white adipose tissue. All this, he had seen, but what she had meant by the question was the last part of the dissection, the part calculated to hurt her most: the pouched uterus exposed — showing, beneath the thin, pink muscle of its walls the clear outlines of seven fully formed foetuses.

  * * *

  Sergeant Hackett’s eyes roved about the room, searching for something unusual, something that might serve as a clue to who or why. The kitchen was neat and orderly, a prosaic picture of banal domesticity — except for the package at the edge of the table.

  ‘The blinds?’ he asked.

  ‘I drew them when I arrived,’ Ruth Marks answered. Helen’s first instinct, as before, had been to call her friend before she called the police. ‘I’m sorry if I’ve done wrong, sergeant, but the last thing Helen needs right now is her picture in the paper again.’

  He nodded, a neutral acknowledgement of the facts, taking in, subliminally, the lack of one knife from the wooden block next to the window, a gap tooth, unsightly, obtrusive in its absence. It had not been found, despite an extensive search of the Wilkinsons’ garden and all the gardens adjacent to it — they had even sifted through the mulch in the drains along the street, but the murder weapon had disappeared, dropped no doubt, in the canal or the Dee, where it would rust quietly until nothing remained but a reddish sludge.

  There were no signs of a break-in, and the SOCO had found no fingerprints on the cardboard box.

  ‘Who’s got a key to the house — apart from Dr Wilkinson, that is?’ Hackett asked.

  ‘Me,’ Ruth answered. ‘Her mother, I think. That’s all.’

  Mick Tuttle cleared his throat. ‘I have a key to the back gate.’

  Ruth stared. ‘I had no idea!’ she exclaimed, and Hackett thought he caught an expression somewhere between amusement and exasperation.

  ‘Helen was concerned about the press interest. The side passage generally wasn’t watched too closely.’ He shrugged.

  ‘Do you have a key to the house?’ Hackett asked.

  Mick shook his head.

  Ruth opened her mouth to ask a question, then seemed to change her mind, smiling a little to herself.

  Hackett asked the question for her. ‘When did she give you the key?’

  ‘A couple of days ago.’

  Hackett wondered if the professor was not the only Wilkinson who had been having an affair. Mick returned his stare calmly.

  ‘Any ideas about who might’ve—’ Hackett waved in the direction of the white box.

  Ruth shrugged. ‘Virtually everyone knows about Helen’s miscarriage after the newspaper articles, Sergeant.’

  ‘What I meant was who would bear such a grudge against her that they would break into her house and leave a butchered animal in her fridge. But you think the real message is the murdered pups?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ruth said firmly. ‘I do.’

  ‘And you think anyone who knew her would do this? I had no idea she had so many enemies.’

  Ruth sighed, spreading her hands in a gesture of helplessness. ‘I misspoke. Helen’s students adore her. She’s reasonably well liked among her peers — bearing in mind that St Werburgh’s is a bastion of chauvinistic, misogynistic fundamentalism.’

  ‘It could be someone jealous that she got a senior lectureship.’ Mick Tuttle said.

  Ruth fixed her gaze on Tuttle, her eyes ice blue, now, analytical. She seemed to measure him against some paradigm and find him wanting.

  ‘Could be,’ she replied.

  Hackett couldn’t decide if it was mistrust or dislike that filtered through the cool blandness of Dr Marks’s expression as she scrutinized her colleague.

  A thump overhead broke the silence and with it the wordless exchange between the two academics. Hackett was out into the hall first. Helen was supposed to be resting in her study downstairs. He mounted the stairs two at a time, not pausing to think of the danger he might be running to.

  Helen stood at the door to the bedroom where her husband’s body had been found. She was pale to the point of deathliness. On the dimly lit landing her face seemed to glow with pearly light. She smiled tentatively.

  ‘I’m afraid I stumbled,’ she said. ‘I’m feeling rather weak.’

  Ruth pushed past Hackett and helped Helen to the staircase.

  ‘What are you doing up here?’ Hackett asked.

  ‘It’s her bloody house, Sergeant,’ Ruth answered angrily.

  Hackett had to concede. It was, as Ruth Marks said, Helen Wilkinson’s house, after all, and he supposed this restless prowling was only to be expected given that her property had been invaded in this way. Violated was the word that came to mind. Nevertheless, Hackett walked to the
end of the landing to check the two doors which stood slightly ajar. One, a box room: spartan, empty, soulless; Edward Wilkinson had used it as a study, but apparently had preferred mostly to stay in his university office when pressure of work — or Clara — demanded. The other door led to the front bedroom. Hackett felt an unaccustomed premonitory dread as he put his hand on the door handle of the bedroom and eased the door open.

  The room was empty, undisturbed, expect by some turbulent spectre of fear which he felt had emanated from Helen.

  When he returned to the kitchen the SOCO was clearing away the last of his gear and Mick Tuttle was pouring black coffee into mugs. He raised the pot and Hackett nodded his thanks. Helen was sitting at the table, staring at the spot where the box had lain; a damp patch remained, cleaned of blood, but darker than the rest of the old pine. A faint smell of bleach hung in the air.

  The atmosphere Hackett had sensed in the room upstairs was here, too. Stronger, a solid, almost tangible presence. The SOCO glanced uneasily at him as he secured the clasps of his equipment case and Hackett set about trying to find something to say. Then the shrill chirrup of his mobile phone shattered the silence, and everyone jerked convulsively before relaxing, grateful for an end to the oppressive stillness.

  Hackett spoke briefly, sharply, questioning, and then he was gone, taking the SOCO with him and leaving the three remaining occupants of the room bewildered.

  Chapter 20

  Hackett arrived outside the Victorian frontage as the ambulance was leaving. ‘Smoke inhalation,’ Nelson said. ‘Plus a bloody great skull fracture. He’s lucky they got to him in time.’ He nodded in the direction of a small knot of firemen, greasy and black-faced, who had just come out of the house and now seemed to be conferring about what action to take next. Two of the men turned and went back into the house, stepping over the fire hose which trailed inside the building.

  ‘Any other casualties?’

  Nelson shook his head. The flare of the sodium street lamps and the sharp glitter of blue-red, blue-red in rotating splinters from two police cars and a fire engine cast unflattering shadows on his ravaged face. It was raining heavily now, battering down. The unpredictable gusts of the storm had made the job of fighting the fire more difficult, but it seemed to be contained more or less to one room and the fire service appeared to be bringing it under control. The one window billowed orange-tinged smoke into the night, but there were no flames.