Dead Romantic

by Simon Brett

  He hardly thought of Madeleine Severn after the last time that he saw her. Paul Grigson grew up.

  The murderer continued to work at the Garrettway School of Languages as if nothing had happened.

  After the tussle in the bed of Winter Jasmine Cottage when, with strength she did not know she possessed, Madeleine had snatched the knife from Bernard and stabbed him in the chest, she had gone very calm and worked out her escape-route. The nightdress, whose pleated front was soaked in blood, she had decided to leave. It was such a new purchase that no one could relate it to her. Taking it off and leaving it by the side of the bed, she had had a long, relaxing bath, then meticulously tidied up and removed every trace of herself from the cottage. She even picked a few red-gold strands from the pillow and checked for them by the dressing-table and in the bathroom where she had brushed her hair.

  Before midnight she was in her Renault 5 and driving back to Brighton.

  After the police had been summoned to Winter Jasmine Cottage the following Wednesday by Mrs Rankin, they started an exhaustive investigation into the murder. They questioned Bernard Hopkins’ employer and colleagues at the Garrettway School of Languages. The hint from Stella Franklin of a possible romance between Bernard and Madeleine led them to question the latter in considerable detail and for a while their suspicions were strong.

  They had, however, no evidence against her. The attack of eczema which had forced her to wear gloves meant that there were none of her fingerprints anywhere at Winter Jasmine Cottage. The remoteness of the location meant that no one had seen any arrivals or departures on the relevant night, and the frosty ground ruled out the possibility of her vehicle being identified by tyre-marks.

  Besides, Madeleine had an unshakeable alibi. Her niece, Laura, could vouch for her having been in the Kemp Town house all of the weekend. Laura had serious misgivings about supporting this lie, but she was more worried about her mother discovering how she had really spent the Friday night and, closing her mind to the implications, went along with it Yes, she informed the police, she had stayed up late on the Friday night talking with her aunt, and they had spent all the rest of the time together. There was no way that Madeleine could have been in Pulborough at the time when the police experts were convinced the murder had taken place.

  The one person who might have told a different story, Laura’s boyfriend Terry (whose mother had died when he was a child and who went back to Worcester every weekend to his unsuspecting wife), was never going to break her alibi. No one had any reason to connect him with the house in Kemp Town, and that was the way he intended things should stay. Apart from anything else, he was getting a little bored with Laura’s unquestioning devotion and had decided the relationship wasn’t going to go the distance. So when, a fortnight after the murder, his work in Brighton ended, he did not bother to call her again. (And when, a month later, Laura found herself to be pregnant and, not wishing to repeat Aggie’s mistake, arranged an abortion, Terry never knew anything about it. Nor did Laura’s mother. Nor did her aunt.)

  The other person who might have threatened Madeleine was Julian Garrett. He had, after all, seen her on the night of the murder, in the Garrettway School of Languages at a very unusual time and apparently in disguise. But Julian’s attitude to responsibility pervaded all aspects of his life. The idea that Madeleine might have murdered Bernard gave him a little ironic amusement, but he was never going to volunteer information that might link her with the crime. Leave well enough alone, thought Julian, as usual, and looked forward to the spring, when he would be able to bring a little romance into the lives of the new influx of nubile foreigners.

  The police investigation into Madeleine might have gone deeper, if they had not suddenly received new information from the Metropolitan Police linking Bernard Hopkins with a series of prostitute killings which had been going on over the previous five years. The manner of ‘Mandy’s murder closely echoed the other cases; samples of semen and saliva matched. So the enquiry went off in a completely different direction and the police moved towards the conclusion that the murderer was yet another prostitute whom Bernard had enticed down to a country cottage and who had turned the tables on him. Though questioning around the London underworld, particularly of friends of former victims, led nowhere, the new approach to the investigation had the effect of taking the heat off Madeleine. She even, later, received a letter of apology from the police for the pressure of questioning that she had undergone.

  So Madeleine Severn continued her life unchanged. Her virginity, like that of Bernard Hopkins, remained intact to the end of her life.

  Paul Grigson moved on. Tony and Sharon Ashton moved on. But Madeleine Severn, who had not really changed since her university days, remained the same. She dressed the same, she listened to the same music, she read the same poetry, she taught the same tutorials based on the same Oxford essays. She told people the same romantic derivation of her surname, about her descent from the Joseph Severn who had accompanied Keats on his last journey to Italy (conveniently forgetting that she had been the first to drop the ‘i’ from the family name of Severin).

  She continued to patronise her sister, though she did not get the opportunity to do the same to her niece, who moved away from Brighton after the abortion and never contacted her aunt again. Madeleine continued to inspire occasional crushes among her more impressionable students and, when questioned in quiet moments, would admit to the great sadness of her life, her perfect romance with a young man called John Kaczmarek, who unfortunately had died.

  As she grew older, Madeleine Severn’s mannerisms became eccentricities, but she was unaware of the change. Though she might hear people sniggering, it never occurred to her that she was the object of their amusement. Her sense of well-being, like her virginity, remained intact.

  And, when, very occasionally, images of a night spent at Winter Jasmine Cottage, Shorton, near Pulborough, flashed into her mind, she was able swiftly to dispel them. Some things she preferred not to think about.