“The one …” At last his smile warmed his eyes. “The one I throttled one dark night because I couldn’t stand her noisy merriment one hour longer. She was like that dreadful Bludgett woman. Always smiling. Always laughing.” A shudder passed through Mr. Fisher’s gaunt body. “Fortunately, in my line of work I had no trouble getting rid of the body.”
“Don’t tell me,” I pleaded.
“Cremation isn’t for everyone. But I have never denied it has its place.”
“Poor Mrs. Malloy!” I meant only that she had been so woefully taken in.
“Now don’t worry,” Mr. Fisher hastened to reassure me. “In the cold light of day I realized I couldn’t let Roxie Malloy live to babble at one of her cosy Marriage Makeover sessions that I had done away with Madge, but don’t worry, I have no intention of disposing of Roxie’s body the way I did the wife’s. Two women disappearing on me is one too many. Yes, indeed, but no need to fuss and fume. In one of her more passionate moments Roxie told me how she intended to take her life here at Merlin’s Court, but you talked her out of it. A pity”—he rubbed his nose—“that you won’t be available to attest to that at the inquest. But being a Fully Female woman, she will surely have bragged about her suicide attempt at one of the meetings.”
“Where,” I stammered, “will I be?”
“You, Mrs. Haskell, are coming with me after I turn on the gas and position Roxie a little more comfortably.”
“No!” With a burst of furious energy, I lashed out with my fists. But if ever there was an exercise in futility, this was it. He reached into his pocket and drew out a gun, whose mean little eye did not waver from my face while Mr. Fisher turned on the spigot. And with that dreadful hiss sounding in our ears, he herded me into the hall. I was duly surprised that he chose to leave the house by way of the kitchen, which meant circumventing the prone figure of Mr. Bludgett, but he explained that his car was parked outside the garden door. For one wild, flickering moment as we trod around Jock’s grey overalls, I was convinced that the plumber would come to life and grab hold of Mr. Fisher’s legs, bringing him down. But no such luck. And, anyway, Mr. B could hardly be expected to view me in the light of a damsel in distress. He’d turned up here in response to my phone call of yesterday to fix the washing machine and had got bopped on the head for his pains. I could almost hear him saying, “Lady, couldn’t you have put your complaint in writing?”
By now, as must be obvious, my thinking was fuzzy in the extreme. When Mr. Fisher halted at the garden door, I watched him help himself to a couple of raincoats from the hook in the alcove and realized with a wry sort of amusement that one of them—the one that had been hanging underneath the other—was the very coat I had been hunting for while he had been making himself at home, doping poor Mrs. Malloy.
“Here, put this on,” He handed me the old one belonging to Dorcas, while he slipped on mine, changing gun hands as he went. My heart sank. “Nice to know, isn’t it, Mrs. Haskell, that the age of chivalry isn’t dead? As for myself, I can’t risk a drenching; I suffer with my chest.”
I didn’t answer. Once outside, the rain brought the stinging relief of acupuncture, deadening the surface of my mind, as well as my skin, still further. I knew I was in his car, and I guessed where he was taking me. But I wasn’t afraid. I wasn’t anything … or anyone. Not Ellie Haskell. Not Ben’s wife. Not the twins’ mother.
But Walter Fisher was apparently in the mood for a chat. “I didn’t expect to find Roxie at your house when I arrived, Mrs. Haskell.”
“Well, she was expecting you.” Staring at the windscreen, I saw Mrs. M’s face in the rivulets of rain, the corners of her mouth dripping downward. Would I ever speak to her again? Would I ever get to tell that I didn’t blame her for anything, that I blamed myself for misreading the signals she had been sending me?
Mr. Fisher—nothing would make me call him Walter—rested the gun against the steering wheel as we purred down the drive and out onto Cliff Road. “Roxie’s presence was a bonus, although you understand I’ve been trying to do away with her for several days now. It was only a matter of time before she went to the police. Never trust a woman. Just now, shame on her, she lied to me—said you had left the house with your husband and children. Most annoying of her to complicate matters. Particularly when I thought it would be so easy.”
A light went on in a shop window and inside my head. “You put something in her Fully Female Formula?”
“Yew leaves.” Another of his pale smiles. “So felicitously available at the vicarage.”
“Yes,” I said, speaking automatically. “Mrs. Malloy mentioned there was a move afoot to cut down the yew trees because of fears about their toxicity.”
“I chopped the leaves up and put some in the jar of Formula. Simplicity itself. I can’t think what went wrong. Roxie claimed to be religious about taking the stuff.”
“So she was,” I said. “But we each had several bottles of Formula. It would have taken her a while to get to the one you’d doctored up. I do remember seeing her opening up a new one the night of the Wisemans’ party. She even mixed herself a glass, but it turned to goop before she could drink it. Instead …” I stared out the misted window. “Instead Gladys Thorn must have gone into the kitchen. She must have mistaken the Formula for a fibre laxative and …”
“Dear me!” Mr. Fisher shook his head. “What a waste!” Whether he meant a waste of good yew leaves or Gladys Thorn I hadn’t the foggiest. “Am I to understand,” he asked, steering cautiously around a bend in the road, “that when you confessed last night in the Chapel of Rest to being privy to a murder, you were talking about Miss Thorn, not my wife?”
“Certainly.”
“That shows you how naive I am.” Mr. Fisher tuttutted. “I truly thought she had expired of natural causes.”
“Mrs. Malloy never said a word to me about your wife. And the bitter irony is that if you had left well enough alone I don’t think she would have gone to the police. The Fully Female manual instructs that all confidences exchanged during lovemaking be accorded the sacred seal of the confessional, and Roxie wasn’t only religious about taking her Formula. She was a dyed-in-the-wool convert, prepared to uphold the code if it killed her.” I didn’t add he’d had something else working in his favour—namely that his Roxie had truly loved him. Love! A good servant but a poor master. Poor Mrs. M. My throat tightened. May she re … live in peace.
Chagrin showed on Mr. Fisher’s waxen features. In misjudging the lady he had complicated his life as well as hers and mine. Get him unsettled—that’s the ticket, I cheered myself on. He wasn’t used to having the bodies he transported talk back to him, so I would keep talking. The topic didn’t matter just so long as the lips kept moving.
“The morning after her tryst with you she was in a complete daze, and later turned up at my house out of the blue, but I never suspected she was in fear of her life. Even when she took up good works—helping out at the church—I put it down to the power of love. It never dawned on me she might be preparing to be putting her life in order.”
“No need to rub it in, Mrs. Haskell.” He pursed his thin lips. “Roxie knew I couldn’t let her live. What I can’t fathom is how she lasted this long. In addition to the Formula, I added my own special herbs to a packet she had from Fully Female.” Mr. Fisher carefully braked for a yellow light, turned onto Market Street, and shifted closer to the curb to make room for a woman on a bicycle. Her wave said it all: What a gentleman!
“Mrs. Malloy would seem to have been living under a lucky star … for a while. She is a no-nonsense woman.” My eyes never left the gun. “And I imagine she was expecting a straight-forward knife in the back, not the nix being put on her Healthy Harvest Herbs. But I think I can hazard a guess as to what happened there. The other day she couldn’t find her supply, probably because you had moved it, so she borrowed a packet from me. She must have returned the one with the yew leaves because we had a little episode with our cat, which I blamed on someone else.
May I be forgiven.”
Those last words brought Mrs. M closer than if she had been in the car with me. Was she already interviewing St. Peter and making it plain up front that she wasn’t going to get stuck polishing the Pearly Gates? Or could it be that there had been a miracle back at Merlin’s Court? Oh, please God! Let Mr. Bludgett come groggily back to life and go stumbling into the dining room to turn off the gas jet in the nick of time.
“We’re here, Mrs. Haskell.” Mr. Fisher cut short my prayer. He had pulled into a side alley, and through the tattered veil of rain I saw the sign Fisher Funerals creaking above the door. Cuffing the gun, he came around, helped me out of the car, and ushered me across a square of pavement and through a glass door into a showroom smelling of beeswax and gardenias, with wreaths on the walls instead of pictures and a floor space crowded with coffins—pardon me, cabinets—to suit every taste from baroque to Danish modern.
The unreal part is that I wasn’t gibbering with terror. My only explanation is that in my case horror had exercised an anesthetising effect. My mind told me I was destined for the fate which had befallen poor Mrs. Fisher and all those dinners I had burned to a crisp. But I didn’t believe it, even when the villain of the piece gave a start which I would have considered artsey-fartsey if Freddy had enacted it on stage.
“Someone’s coming!”
I heard it too—the sound of a car pulling into the alley and, breath catching in my throat, the fading throb of the engine being turned off. Whoever it was didn’t matter. I wasn’t asking for the sheriff or the troops with Rin Tin Tin woofing up the rear, only your off-the-street Joe with adequate hearing. Time for the scream of a lifetime! I had my mouth open and my vocal cords primed when Mr. Fisher reminded me that he had a gun by waving it under my nose. And the next thing I knew, he was hustling me through an archway hung with purple velvet, to where the smell of death was strongest—into the Chapel of Rest.
“Hurry!” A savage poke at my back sent me stumbling towards the altar where Miss Thorn’s coffin reposed in all its mournful splendour.
I strained my ears for the sound of the outside door opening and couldn’t be sure if I was indulging in wishful thinking. “Don’t let me keep you, Mr. Fisher,” I said, “if you have a customer in the back.”
“One more peep and I kill you and whoever comes in.”
“You won’t get away with this.”
“And, like all women, you talk too much.” Mr. Fisher was now practically treading on my heels and his breath came out in chesty wheezes as he said, “Lift the lid.”
“You heard me.” A really painful jab this time, as I strained to catch the sound of footsteps. None were forthcoming as I slowly raised the coffin lid. What was I supposed to say to Miss Thorn: Move over and make room for me?
She wasn’t there.
“Get in.”
Oh, the sick slippery feel of that white satin, but I kept telling myself this wasn’t happening, even as Mr. Fisher hauled off his … my raincoat and—persnickety man—tossed it in after me. Mustn’t raise eyebrows by being caught in ladies’ attire, must we, Walter? I hope my jeering smile chilled his blood as he closed the coffin lid. One does so like to have the upper hand at such times.
Darkness. Even when I opened my eyes.
Instinctively, I sensed that the air was rationed and I would have to recycle like crazy. And there wasn’t a lot of elbow room (or nose room for that matter), but other than that things could be worse. I could already be dead, instead of waiting for Mr. Fisher to come back and finish the job once he got rid of his customer.
The darkness grew rank with terror, which eased a little when I thought of Ben and his claustrophobia. Thank God he wasn’t the one in this pickle. And thank God for my miracle! That thud wasn’t my heart. I had jostled my raincoat. And inside the raincoat pocket was Mrs. Malloy’s gun. Forget the morning nap, Ellie, there are nappies to wash and the day to be saved. My fingers inched sideways and felt the gun. Any moment now I would weasel it into my hand, and with my finger on the trigger, burst out of my narrow cell, the quintessential Fully Female woman.
So much for heroics. I wasn’t to be allowed the privilege of rescuing myself. At least not as planned. Before I could say boo, my coffin lid was inched upward and I found myself gaping into the ever-handsome, if ashen, face of Lionel Wiseman.
“My word! Mrs. Haskell!” He backed down the altar steps, kicking aside a couple of wreaths in the process.
I sat up in my satin coffin pointing the gun at him. “Sorry, Miss Thorn isn’t receiving callers.”
“What is this? Some kind of dare you cooked up with the other Fully Females?”
“Your questions,” I said, sitting up, “are best addressed to Mr. Walter Fisher, who I would assume is currently lurking behind one of those purple hangings.”
“My dear lady, I think I should call a doctor.”
“Shush!” I silenced him with a lift of the hand, the one holding the gun. I heard escaping footsteps, then a car starting up outside very close to the building, and it dawned on me why I was having this conversation with Mr. Wiseman undisturbed. Walter Fisher, Murderer, had hopped it, possibly because even he thought that getting away with three murders in one day was pushing it, but more probably because he had seen the gun in my hand. “I really don’t think you should bother Dr. Melrose,” I told Mr. Wiseman. “He will be having a quiet day at home with Flo, talking about his retirement as he poses for one of her paintings. Much better to phone the police, they’ll have a grand time chasing down Mr. Fisher. Life is so dull in Chitterton Fells.” Stretching my arms above my head I took a deep, reviving breath of gardenias. “Oh, Mr. Wiseman, before you make that call, would you mind telling me what brings you here?”
“The ring.” For a large man his voice was awfully small.
“What?”
“Frightfully embarrassing, Mrs. Haskell.”
“Go on.”
“If you insist.” He straightened up without managing to look as tall as usual. “At the time of Gladys’s death I made the foolish gesture of saying I wanted her engagement ring buried with her. However, upon reflection I realized that sentiment has its place …”
“In your pocket?”
“My dear lady, it is a very expensive piece of jewelry. Where can it be? Where is Gladys?”
“You didn’t …” My heart suddenly went out to him. The poor two-timer. “You didn’t decide it would be more fitting to have her ashes scattered inside the church organ, and arrange for her to have a Show Case funeral?”
“No! Never heard of such a thing.”
“Then my guess is that the next of kin—in this case, Miss Thorn’s brother Gladstone—stepped in and requested it in the interests of economy and …” I looked away from him. “… and making absolutely sure she wouldn’t turn up again, twenty years from now.”
I reached up a hand and let him help me onto my feet. “Life is very expensive, but dear Mr. Wiseman”—a smile was growing inside me ready to burst out and shine—“it is worth everything you pay for it.”
Something had told me Mrs. Malloy would be all right. And so she was, because Ben had listened to his male intuition—that inner voice which told him that I hadn’t levelled with him. Halfway to London, he told Freddy he was turning round and they arrived back at Merlin’s Court to find Mr. Bludgett busily resuscitating Mrs. Malloy using the plumber’s mate—the trusty plunger. It did the trick so well that Mrs. M was able to spill the beans in record time, and before Freddy had the twins out of their coats, Ben was on the phone to the police. They caught up with Walter Fisher a half hour later; by which time neither the car nor he were in one piece. He had gone over the cliff on the far side of the point on the outskirts of Pebblewell. Mrs. Malloy, all stiff upper lip, insisted the case would have been different if the officer in charge had been female. Never send a man to do a woman’s job. When I received the news, my feelings were awfully muddled. The horror that I had submerged came bubbling to the surface. There was relief
that the bogeyman was gone, blotted out, never to return. And there was sadness for Mrs. Malloy, although I got the feeling she might recover when she telephoned me that evening to say she was dumping every drop of her Fully Female Formula down the sink.
“Good idea,” I told her. But much to my surprise, Ben wasn’t one hundred percent behind the idea when I told him what she had said.
“I don’t know, Ellie.” He was lying on the bed, a hand cupped behind his head, a book lying flat across his stomach. “I’m beginning to think I was looking at Fully Female with a closed mind. Just listen to this.” He turned the volume over and read in a gloating voice:
“That old saying about an Englishman’s home being his castle should be updated. How much sweeter, dear Fellow Female, to say that an Englishman’s bed is his castle. Whatever battles he must fight out in the cold, cruel world, between the sheets he is king.”
“Give that to me!” I snatched the manual from him. “How can you laugh like that?”
“How can I not?” He sat up very still, his eyes turning to darkest emerald. “I have to laugh from the sheer joy of having you safe with me.”
“I don’t understand why you aren’t furious with me for not telling you what I was up to. Particularly when we had just had that go-round about Fully Female.”
“This was different.” He moved over to make room for me on the bed. “What you did was crazy, Ellie, but I understand why you did it, and why you couldn’t tell me.”
“You would have stopped me.”
“You’re damn right.”
“I didn’t feel I had a choice.”
“Oh, Ellie!” He pulled me into his arms and scattered kisses gentle as flowers upon my face. “Don’t you see? I never asked for your soul—only your heart.”
Breathless, I lifted my face to his. “It’s yours, always and forever. I only went to Fully Female because I was afraid. I was afraid that childbirth had made me lumpy and unattractive. I was afraid to want you”—I buried my face against his shoulder—“in case you didn’t want me.”
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