The Red Chairs Mystery

by L. D. Culliford

  For the first time, Rita McInnes sounded bitter. Jack leaned forward and pressed the ‘pause’ button on the tape-recorder, suggesting they take a short break. He asked Holly to fetch water and glasses from the kitchen. By the time she returned, the atmosphere in the room had improved. Taking a sip of water, the fugitive wife indicated she was prepared to resume her tale.

  ‘We carried on with the marriage, keeping up the appearance of being a happy family… Wayne insisted on that. He used to get angry with me and, to be honest, I used to blame myself for the problems we had. I lost all confidence in myself; stopped seeing the few friends I still had; avoided going out, except when absolutely necessary. They were dark days; but things improved once Hazel started school. Eventually, I decided to try and get a job again. That was when I went down and spoke to Mr Murry. I was so relieved when he agreed to take me on. I think that job saved my sanity; and of course it was there that I met the other Rita, Rita Punnett.’

  After mentioning the Australian’s name, her English counterpart brightened up, carrying on her account with a half-smile playing now on her lips. ‘Rita was a Godsend. I mean it! There was a psychiatric hospital in Brighton, which closed when they built the new one at Hangleton. The frontage only was listed, so a development company – not Wayne’s – had preserved that part somehow while turning the site into high-end luxury apartments. Mr Murry got the contract to sell some and rent the others. Rita was taken on to do the selling, while I concentrated on rentals. We were both part-time, but we overlapped a lot and covered for each other. Our ‘office’ was the show flat, and often there was just the two of us there together.’

  ‘I wasn’t comfortable with her at first. Rita was everything I wasn’t. She was outgoing and confident, always laughing and joking. You couldn’t help but like her, though; so eventually I, too, like everyone else, fell under her magical charm. She was a hard worker; but she wasn’t one for standing on ceremony. Often at lunchtimes, if neither of us had a client, she would insist we went somewhere for lunch… on expenses; including wine, in her case! But she didn’t need any alcohol to give her courage. Whether sober or tipsy, she had no qualms at all talking about herself. Quite quickly, I learned pretty much everything about her.’

  ‘She told me she grew up in Wollongong, on the New South Wales coast, just over fifty miles south of Sydney. Like me, too, she had a rotten marriage; but, unlike me, she did something about it. Wayne only hit me once in anger. He preferred to throw things around, especially when he had been drinking, like the time he threw a whisky tumbler at me in the bedroom when we were arguing about Hazel for some reason. I cut my hand quite badly, picking up the broken shards that time as I couldn’t see properly. My eyes were full of tears. Anyway, Rita’s husband, Clive, in contrast, used to get physically violent with her. That was standard behaviour.

  She said he was an airline pilot who she’d met while working as an air-hostess for a small freight and passenger company flying all over Australia out of Wollongong airport. His first marriage had broken down. She flirted with him, and he was soon hooked. They were married within a month of getting together… But he was the jealous type; always accusing her of becoming too friendly with other men, even if they were just customers of the airline and she was trying to make sure they were enjoying the trip. Anyway, Clive was adept at giving her bruises in places where it wouldn’t show when she had her uniform on. She always photographed them, though. Once he twisted one of her fingers until it became dislocated, and she had to go to the hospital, so she got one of the doctors to write her a report about it. As soon as she had enough evidence, she took it to a solicitor and, by threatening Clive with the police and charges of assault, quite quickly obtained her divorce and a very good settlement. That was when she decided to come over here to look up her British roots.’

  ‘I see why you and she might have hit it off’, Jack intervened. ‘Did she help you deal with Wayne?’

  ‘Not at first’, Rita replied. ‘I wasn’t ready to tell her about the problems in my marriage. I suppose I was still hoping that somehow they would improve… Silly really! I was too much under Wayne’s control to think I could do anything about the situation. That’s where Rita helped me most. She showed me what might be possible.’

  There was a long pause while the betrayed wife continued reminiscing in silence. ‘Please go on’, Holly broke in after a while.

  ‘Well… I’m not sure how it happened exactly’, she said. ‘Rita used to talk about her freedom, how wonderful it was to have cash in the bank, to travel and everything. As well as admiring her, I suppose I began to feel envious. “You are lucky!” I think I told her one day; and she must have picked up my change of tone. She immediately asked me why I said that. Up until then she seems to have swallowed my lies about being a dutiful wife with a perfectly happy family. Anyway, I remember sitting in the sun, in the garden of a lovely country pub somewhere, suddenly crying my eyes out. Rita went and bought me a large glass of wine, and we sat there for ages, long past when we should have been back at the show flat, while I poured out my sorry list of troubles… Do you really want to hear about all this?’

  Jack simply motioned for her to go on.

  The 7th

  Chapter

  They were travelling back. After doing his stint at the wheel, Jack was dozing in the passenger seat when Holly, driving the Mondeo with more care and attention than formerly, felt compelled to break the silence.

  ‘Have I got this right, Jack?’ she started. ‘When Rita McInnes told her Aussie namesake she was unhappy in the marriage, they became accomplices… Together they organized her escape from Wayne.’

  Sleepy, her companion remained silent for a few moments, collecting his thoughts. They had remained in the cottage listening for almost two hours, and there had been a lot to take in.

  ‘Yes’, he agreed eventually. ‘It seems Punnett was so incensed by McInnes’s story that she persuaded her to run away again, convincing her that with careful planning, a successful getaway was possible.’

  ‘And our Rita was doubtful because her first attempt had failed so badly’, Holly added.

  The woman had told them how, the first time, she had asked her boss Mr Murry for a month’s unpaid leave. She had also withdrawn a thousand pounds in cash from the couple’s joint bank account; then she had gone to Eastbourne, checking randomly into a nondescript B & B a few streets away from the seafront. ‘I needed time on my own to think things through’, she had said. ‘I just left… Went by train! It seemed so easy; but then, as time passed and the money began to run out, I didn’t know what to do.’

  A lawyer she consulted had not been very encouraging, saying that she had few grounds for divorce, giving her the unwelcome advice to go home and patch things up with her husband. Foolishly perhaps, she had then contacted her mother, hoping she would send some extra money to tide her over for a bit longer; but her mother straightaway telephoned Wayne, who drove immediately to Eastbourne to collect her.

  ‘I felt so sorry for her when she told us about that’, said Holly. ‘She must have felt properly trapped… And things didn’t get easier.’

  ‘I often feel sorry for people’, replied Jack, ‘But you can’t let your feelings rule your mind, especially if crimes have been committed.’

  ‘But has a crime been committed?’ Holly asked. ‘It only counts as fraud if you adopt another name with the intention of profiting at the expense of another person or organization. In this case, Rita McInnes became Rita Punnett with the help of the original Mrs P. She did not use the new name for financial gain at all.’

  ‘You have to admit it was a clever scheme’, said Jack, recalling to mind some of the details.

  Rita Punnet’s grand-parents, her father’s parents, had apparently lived all their lives in Sheringham where her grandfather had been a fishmonger. The couple had two sons, but one – the elder – died of diphtheria when he was still a toddler. The
other, Rita’s father, emigrated, leaving for Australia on the government-subsidized scheme for just ten pounds, in the days before Australia changed over to dollars. He was lonely on the ship, but he met a girl in Melbourne. They moved to Wollongong where he found a job. The couple were soon married and their daughter was born, but the marriage soon floundered. Rita had told her English friend the story of her mother like this: “The Sheila didn’t stick around… Went back to Melbourne!” “And when I grew up”, she had added, “I was the same… Itchy feet! I left school at seventeen and went up to Sydney as soon as I could… Hung around The Rocks and King’s Cross, dossed down in Centennial Park… It was fun!”

  Back in Sheringham, at some point, Rita’s grandfather had bought the fisherman’s building in The Driftway and converted it into a refrigerated cold-store for fish and seafood. He was supplying a good number of restaurants and hotels around Norfolk by then. Unfortunately, he soon after developed a devastating neurological disorder. When the illness struck, and when the inevitable prognosis of continual deterioration, the gradual and cruel loss of essential functions until a premature death, was explained to him, with no prospect of successful treatment, he had the cold-store converted into two dwellings: one to move into, and one to let out, so that his wife would continue to have some kind of income after he’d gone. Then, weakening steadily, he sold off the original family home and the business.

  The unfortunate man’s granddaughter, Rita Smith, who became Rita Punnett, knew about this only in the vaguest outline, however. She did remember that her father’s aged mother used to send her birthday and Christmas cards every year when she was young; but she had never taken the opportunity to ask anyone much about her forbears. When her father succumbed at forty-five to the same tragic condition that had taken his father at fifty-five, it was too late to enquire. Only when the solicitor read her the brief ‘Last Will and Testament’, leaving her everything, did she discover that, in addition to modest savings, only a few thousand dollars, she also owned a property overseas. Her grandmother, Mrs Smith, in advancing years, it seems, had sold off the second half, but retained one side of the building as her own to live in. On her death, the deeds had been transferred to Rita’s dad, and now they had become hers.

  There was no question of her inheriting the family illness, she discovered. It passed down the male line only. Nevertheless, the unexpected windfall had helped prompt her decision to leave Clive Punnett and eventually visit the home country; not that she felt particularly British. There was clearly no chance of work for her in Sheringham, a small town, she felt, so she had come to Brighton after once enjoying a day-trip there from London. While working at Murry’s, she had continued to use her New South Wales driving licence, and this had given her an idea.

  ‘It was Rita who finally persuaded me to leave Wayne once and for all’, Rita McInnes told Holly and Jack. ‘She said divorce would be easy if I left and we stayed separated for a couple of years. I just needed to disappear; and the best way, she said, was to assume a new identity for that period. That’s why she offered to let me become Mrs Punnett.’

  It sounded very strange at first, but when her new friend explained how they could bring it about, she had agreed. Rita P then went ahead and applied for a UK driving licence using a photograph of Rita M, getting her to sign the application form. They did puzzle about how to get someone to countersign the photograph and application. Mr Murry was a possibility, but it would put him in an awkward position later, they agreed, and McInnes vetoed the idea; so then they decided that they probably had to try bribery.

  Rita Punnett had been seeing a local businessman she had met one night in a pub. She and the bloke both knew it was a fun relationship, but not one that either expected to last. Because of his gambling addiction, nothing lasted for Percy Edwards anyway. His first wife had tried to stay loyal, but the losses and the lies had strained the marriage past breaking point after fifteen years; and, as for his second wife, she had not even endured the grief he put her through for as much as fifteen months. Percy was lucky, though, to have inherited a printing business, which was basically run for him by a competent manager. Money came into his account on a regular basis, although it was seldom enough to keep pace with his appetites. He was especially vulnerable to the risk – and only occasional reward – dished out by the greedy and impersonal fixed-odds betting terminals to be found in every bookmaker’s in town. When Rita explained that her friend needed a favour, and was willing to pay £200 for a couple of signatures, Percy did not think twice.

  They used the address of one of the still empty flats in the new development, and Rita P had her utility bills redirected there for a short period. That enabled Rita M to use the driving licence and some electricity statements to set up a bank account for herself in the name ‘Rita Punnett’, an account which she began topping up with cash removed in unsuspiciously small amounts from her joint account with her husband. Mr Murry was in the habit of paying his staff a generous bonus every year, and Rita asked him for once to give it to her in the form of a cheque made out to Rita Punnett, explaining that it was to repay a loan that she did not want Wayne to know about. It was a large sum, but Andrew Murry complied without asking awkward questions, as she knew he would, and she paid it directly into her new account.

  Rita Punnett had been to Sheringham to inspect her property before coming to Brighton. It had remained unoccupied for a number of years and was full of antiquated furniture, all of it covered in cobwebs and dust. Now she hired some cleaners, a clearance firm, a plumber and an electrician, bought some new furniture, and soon had the place quite habitable; a suitable bolt-hole for her friend. Rita McInnes bought a suitcase, some new clothes and toiletries, and stashed them in a cupboard at the show flat. Everything seemed to be ready, except that she did not feel she had put enough money into the new account to last until she could get work, and this gave her an excuse to hesitate. Despite her Australian friend’s confidence, it still seemed an enormous risk to be taking. Wayne could be very vindictive, even violent, and there seemed so much that could go wrong.

  Mrs Punnett was of the firm opinion that her friend should go ahead and scarper as soon as possible. The flats were being let or sold in increasing numbers, and it seemed likely that Mr Murry would soon give his temporary employee her notice. Mrs P urged Mrs M to leave before that happened, particularly because she had also decided to return to her home country, which she was missing. She tried hard, with the assistance of copious amounts of Chardonnay on several occasions, to persuade Rita to make her break and run for it, but the frightened woman continued to resist.

  ‘I worked out why later’, McInnes told Jack and Holly. ‘I didn’t see it at the time, but there was a deep-seated block in my brain against abandoning Hazel. Fear of failure and dreading Wayne’s reaction were the obvious reasons for hesitation, but there was part of me that simply could not leave that child behind.’

  ‘So Rita went home to Australia, but we kept in touch. She bought us both one of those hand-held computers so that we could speak to each other face-to-face. It’s very odd, you know, speaking to someone who has just got up when you are preparing for bed. This was the most convenient time for me, though, when Hazel was asleep and Wayne was still out working or whatever he was doing. We spoke nearly every day.’

  ‘So, what changed, Rita?’ Jack finally asked. ‘What made you leave when you did?’

  ‘Well, it was Hazel’, Rita replied, reluctant to admit it. ‘I just got so angry with her one day; and then I finally realized that she wouldn’t care if I was there or not. Wayne has always been very lenient with her, and I’ve always been the disciplinarian… Not that I’ve been very effective. She has her father on a string, if you ask me, indulging her every whim; so she started standing up to me. We had some wonderful times together when she was younger. I suppose I had been hoping we could find that happy harmony again… Anyway, shortly before I left, Wayne started bringing one of his young emp
loyees to the house on one transparent pretext or another. Susie, her name was.’

  ‘Ah!’ Holly could not hold back the exclamation. She looked up quickly at Jack, whose glance up at the same moment seemed to confirm her own thoughts. ‘Wayne McInnes had lied to them.’

  ‘Do you know something about this?’ Rita asked, catching the unspoken communication between the two.

  ‘We’ve met her’, Jack replied, retaining as best he could the look of a poker player. ‘But please carry on.’

  ‘Well, Wayne clearly had the hots for Susie. It was shameless. This kind of thing had happened before, but it was never so blatant. I walked into the living-room one day and they were sitting beside each other holding hands, looking very much like I had interrupted them kissing. I was angry, of course, but what I said was, “Please don’t take the risk of making such an exhibition of yourself in front of your daughter”, and at this point Hazel followed me in. I hadn’t realized she was behind me; but what surprised and hurt most was when she said, “I think it’s rather nice when two people like each other”. She was so bold about it. I don’t know if you can imagine how I felt. It was dreadful… She obviously knew Wayne and Susie were carrying on, and she evidently approved of it. Even worse, she blamed me for it. “You’re always so cold, Mum!” she said to me once, “No wonder Dad looks elsewhere for affection”.’

  ‘I tell you, I ran from the room that day. I just fled upstairs and wept. My heart was broken… That’s when I decided to leave. Rita had left me her car to use. It was in a lock-up garage in Hove, and I had transferred my suitcase and a few other things there before she left. When the day came, I disguised myself from any CCTV cameras with a big floppy hat and just strolled down with the key, got in the car and drove north. I was in Sheringham, here in this house, by teatime… It was such a relief!’