Murder by Suicide

by Veronica Heley

  She came out of the shop and bumped into Roy.

  He smiled down at her. ‘We really must stop meeting like this.’

  ‘People will gossip.’

  ‘Let them. I’ve got an appointment soon with the estate agents, but I could kill for a coffee.’

  ‘At the Sunflower Café? Why not?’

  She pushed her rage into the back of her mind and smiled as Chloe came forward to serve them. Mrs Dawes would hear by nightfall that flighty little Ellie Quicke had been seen flirting in the café with a goodlooking man. Who cared? Ellie didn’t.

  ‘You didn’t ring me back last night,’ said Roy, ‘but then I remembered I hadn’t given you my new address and phone number. I’ve rented a furnished flat nearby for a couple of months. Here’s my card. I’ve put the details on the back.’

  She took the card, and noted with a sense of shock that he’d moved into a flat in a road off the Avenue. Even closer to her than before. ‘So have you thought any more about a holiday?’

  She shook her head, trying and failing to put the row with Bill out of her mind.

  He leaned over to take her hand. ‘You’ve gone far away from me.’

  She shook herself, dislodging his hand. ‘Yes. I’ve just had a row with … oh, never mind. An old friend who thinks I don’t know what I’m doing.’

  ‘That’s what I’m here for, to help you …’

  ‘… to make decisions for me? No, Roy. You can’t do that.’

  He sat back in his chair, watching her as Chloe brought their coffees. ‘What’s up, Ellie? I thought we had an understanding. You weren’t like this yesterday.’

  Ellie flicked a glance at Chloe, whose bland expression belied the fact that she had certainly overheard what he said.

  ‘I’m confused,’ she said, knowing that this statement would go straight back to Mrs Dawes and into the gossip chain. Chloe left with a small but distinctive flounce. Black jeans today, black sweater with a lightningstrike logo on it.

  Roy tried to take Ellie’s hand again, but she removed it to pile sugar into her coffee. ‘Now what’s got into my little girl today?’

  Hmph, thought Ellie. Don’t try that ‘little girl’ line on me!

  She said, ‘You didn’t tell me you had a criminal record.’

  He drew back, eyelids fluttering. ‘Well, it wasn’t exactly …’

  ‘Nor about the divorce. Messy, apparently.’

  ‘That’s all in the past.’

  ‘Six months back? Three?’

  He shifted in his seat. Grimacing, trying on the charm. ‘Come on, Ellie, we’re both old enough to know that a man can make a mistake …’

  ‘So tell me about it.’

  11

  Roy took out cigarettes and lit up without asking her if she minded. She was surprised. She hadn’t smelled cigarettes on him, and his fingers were clean enough. Not those of a habitual smoker.

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ he said, catching her change of expression. ‘I’ve really given them up, but every now and then I go back to my old habits. You don’t mind, do you?’

  Without pausing for her consent, he went on, ‘What do you want to know? I married ten years ago, the daughter of the senior partner in the firm. I’d had several long-term relationships before, all very civilized, no commitment, no strings. But this was different. She was much younger than me, but she’d just been through a pretty bad experience with someone else and I thought – we both thought – that we’d be well suited. It did work for a while, but then … she wanted children and it didn’t happen.

  ‘We went for tests and it turned out she had some problem, might never conceive. I wanted to consider all the options, but she wouldn’t discuss it. I didn’t handle her well, I suppose. There were rows, and each time we rowed, we grew further apart. We stopped talking. She stopped cooking for me, not that she’d ever been that keen to spend time in the kitchen. Then she began to make eyes at a young architect in the office, just starting out, even younger than her.

  ‘I got home one evening, found a message on the answerphone from him, for her, asking her to meet him at a local pub. I went there and confronted them. She said she was leaving me. I said the sooner the better, as it had only been a business arrangement between us, after all. I’m not proud of that.

  We all three got drunk and chased one another through the country lanes. Yes, I ought to have known better. He crashed his Mini into a tree and I ran into him. We all three ended up in Casualty being breathalysed. Cuts and bruises all round. Fines, suspensions. She left the hospital with him and that was that. It was two years ago.’

  Ellie watched him as if she were looking at a soap opera on the television. ‘Does it still hurt?’

  ‘No, of course not. Well, perhaps a little.’

  She thought: it was your pride that was hurt. And mine? What do I feel? No, don’t probe, not just yet.

  He said, ‘I blame myself in a way. I was so much older, I ought to have managed better. But she wanted to go and I couldn’t stop her. I feared I might have to lose the house – our family house – at first, but then I managed to pay her off, so that was all right. They never married. What did hurt was seeing her toy boy doing so well in the business, favoured by her father. When he was promoted to partner, I decided to take early retirement. I arranged to continue to do some contract work for them, which worked out well enough but didn’t keep me fully occupied.

  ‘Last autumn I got restless. Not enough to do. I thought I’d look around, see if I could find a run-down property, drum up some business for myself. So I rented the house out for a year, put all my personal bits and pieces in store, and spent some time looking up old friends and relatives in different parts of the country. And found you.’

  ‘And found me,’ she repeated in a mechanical voice. His eyelids flickered and he blew smoke carefully away from her. Lying about something, she was sure. She replayed the scene in her mind and guessed: it was he who couldn’t give her children, not the other way around. But what man would admit to failing in that department?

  She said, ‘Why do you think your marriage stopped working?’

  He shrugged. ‘We wanted different things in life. She really married not me, but my house. Georgian house, three floors, quite perfect in its way. When she tired of that period, she went ultra-modern, minimalist. Lives in a penthouse in a converted factory now. Not a comfortable chair in the place.’

  Unlike me, she thought. I’m all cushy comfort and that’s what he wants. Not a lover, but a mother. Do I want to be a mother to him? I don’t think I do. Anyway, I’m not much cop as a mother. Look at Diana …

  No, don’t look at Diana.

  ‘Which reminds me,’ she said, gathering herself together. ‘I have to pick up the church notices from the secretarial place and deliver them to one of the stewards, and this afternoon I’m having another driving lesson. Then my daughter Diana is coming down tomorrow, which means I have to do a bit of tidying up and cooking, so …’

  He captured one of her hands and put it to his lips. The couple on the next table nudged one another and Chloe appeared at Ellie’s elbow, pen poised to write out the bill.

  He ignored them all. ‘Give me the benefit of the doubt, Ellie?’

  She smiled, constrained. ‘Of course.’ She removed her hand.

  ‘Two coffees, that all?’ said Chloe, meaning, ‘I’m watching you!’

  ‘Splendid, Chloe,’ said Ellie. ‘Will you pack me up one of your Victoria sponges to take away? Thank you, dear. Oh, and by the way, your cousin Neil has been round, asking if I had any gardening or odd jobs to do. Has he been working in that line for long?’

  ‘Not really,’ said Chloe, happy to break up the overcharged atmosphere at the table. ‘He was doing A levels, but my uncle got himself a new girlfriend and she didn’t like having him around, so he came down here to stay with Gran for a while. I’ll put the sponge in a box for you, shall I?’

  Roy realized this exchange had firmly replaced Ellie in her own world, which was
what she had hoped it would do. He helped her back on with her coat and handed over her shopping bag, while ostentatiously paying for the two coffees. ‘Dinner this evening?’

  ‘I’ll ring you if I can make the time.’

  Clearing up before the arrival of guests is always tiresome. She found Frank’s fountain pen under the settee. He had been fretting about it when he was in hospital and she hadn’t been able to locate it anywhere. That nearly reduced her to tears.

  She didn’t allow herself to think about Roy at first, because she was afraid she might uncover feelings of hurt and dismay. When she did allow herself to think, she found to her surprise that, after allowing herself a little wince at the way she had been taken in, she was amused and a little touched by his story rather than distressed.

  She told herself that she had been flattered by his attentions, had allowed him to get closer to her than she perhaps ought to have done, out of perversity, loneliness, what have you. She might easily have been drawn into having an affair with him. Yes, her body would have liked that. She sighed. But …

  But she did not love him. No. And she was not the sort of woman who could take up with a man lightly, have a good time for a while and then move on. She was half-sorry about that. In a way, she wished she had more spirit of adventure. She thought she might well regret the passing of this opportunity to have a sexual relationship. Perhaps, when she was old and doddery, she would look back on the encounter with Roy and think fondly of the Might Have Been.

  On the other hand, it was a lot safer keeping to the straight and narrow. A great deal safer. And calmer. If a little dull at times. A pity, in a way, because marrying him and moving away from the parish would have solved so many problems.

  She picked up the two lists Rose had given her, and put them down again in the same place. She wasn’t going to do anything about them, anyway, so why keep them? She nearly dropped them in the wastepaper bin, but finally put them with other papers to be looked at – bills, National Trust magazines, an RAC membership renewal form. She must get round to writing to them.

  Her driving instructor had left a message on the answerphone cancelling her lesson because he’d got bronchitis. It was a nuisance, just as she’d got herself all psyched up. Now she’d have to wait for weeks, maybe, until he could fit her in again.

  She picked up the pile of papers which needed attention and took them through to the study. Frank’s computer sat on its mat, daring her to approach it. Nasty, sneery, smug machine. She thought she would rather like to turn this room into a proper dining room again, like Kate’s. Then she would have the perfect excuse to get rid of the computer and go back to her old electric typewriter.

  She dropped the papers on the flap of the desk. Rose’s two lists floated out and parachuted to the floor. Again she nearly disposed of them. Instead, she decided that, as they had taken so much trouble to make the lists, the least she could do was to look at them.

  John and Rose had each made up their own list, Rose in pencil on lined paper, John on a piece of coloured paper from the pad he’d bought himself. The two lists overlapped, of course. All the people they’d mentioned at lunch were there. Rose had added, ‘Working in the back room, I don’t see many customers, but I think the thin woman who works in the library bought one.’

  Ellie lifted Rose’s note to read John’s. The same names at the top, followed by a note saying, ‘Very fat woman, Thurs pms, buys good china. A dealer?’ and also, ‘Teenaged girl, v. short hair, dark blue school uniform.’

  That was it. Nothing much to go on. Ellie supposed she could always drop in at the library and ask the thin woman there whether she had bought one of the pads. Or hang around on a Thursday to see if the woman who bought china might drop in.

  No. She dropped the lists into the wastepaper bin.

  She bent down to retrieve them. Lilac paper. Ellie had had a lilac letter, and so had Nora. Ellie unpinned Rose’s note and set it aside. She stared at John’s note. There was something about it …

  The phone rang. Automatically she answered it, then wished she hadn’t, because it was Archie.

  ‘Gracious lady, I hear you have been a perfect saint and produced the notices for the church this week. I was ringing our beloved curate to ask who was doing them – a catastrophe with our dear secretary in the parish office, I hear – and he said you had kindly undertaken the job. I’m just about to go out, so I’ll come round to pick them up from you, shall I? Save you from coming out in the cold.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you, Archie. I did mean to drop them in to you this morning, but I got diverted and found them still in my basket when I got back. Don’t bother yourself. I’ll bring them straight over to you.’

  ‘No bother, dear lady. None at all. In five minutes, then. And perhaps, if you’re not doing anything for lunch, you might care to join me at the Carvery?’

  The phone went dead. Archie was not risking a refusal on the phone. Now she would have to decline his invitation face to face, and he really did have the most beseeching eyes. Rather like a poodle. No, not a poodle. A soppy black retriever.

  Yet there was a brain there. Frank and Archie had always been meeting about church affairs, and Archie was supposed to be something pretty bright in the financial world. She could ask him to help her with her finances … no, she couldn’t. He would use any such invitation as licence to take over her life. Archie was also looking for a cosy little wife. Yuck.

  She returned to her scrutiny of John’s note. The doorbell rang. Blast! The man must have sprinted over the Green to get here so quickly.

  It wasn’t Archie. It was young Neil, dusting off his hands.

  ‘I finished that, missis. Anything else?’

  Ellie blinked, then looked where he indicated. The tubs containing the dead conifers had been removed. The concrete slabs covering Kate’s front garden had been swilled over and scrubbed clean. The slabs looked even worse now than when the eye had been led to the decaying wooden tubs and their contents, but that wasn’t Neil’s fault.

  ‘She said she was out today, but that if I cleared all this stuff away, no messing, you’d tell me what else she wanted doing. She said you’d pay me and she’d pay you later.’

  Ellie blinked. ‘She didn’t tell me this.’

  ‘I saw her early this morning, when she was on her way out. She said she’d phone on her mobile to you and tell you it was all right.’

  ‘Are you so short of cash that you can’t wait till Monday?’

  He shuffled around in his shabby trainers and she thought that, yes, he probably was. Mrs Dawes would be happy to house him, but living on a widow’s pension, she would expect him to pay for his keep. Then he would need to go out of an evening, chat up the girls, sink a few pints. He had done a good job.

  What could she find for him to do for her? She couldn’t ask him to tackle any other jobs for Kate until the new garden design was agreed. It was too early in the year for him to mow her lawn, but there was some tidying up he could do for her on the herbaceous border – that is, if he knew the difference between a camellia and a forsythia, which she suspected he didn’t.

  ‘My garden shed needs a good tidy out, if you’d like to do that? Take everything out onto the lawn, sweep out the floor and – yes, there’s a fraying cable that needs mending. If you like, you can wash out the plant pots I used for bedding plants last summer, which I put away all dirty. When you’ve got everything out and clean, I’ll show you what to put back, and what to throw. Right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Well met, my dear lady! Surveying the domain, are we? Have we time for a spot of nosh at the Carvery today?’

  It was Archie, puffing a bit from a short journey taken without the benefit of his car, which he’d parked a little way up the road. He was genteelly overlooking Neil’s presence. Ellie saw the boy take in the details of the newcomer’s appearance, and knew it would be all round the parish by nightfall that Archie had wanted to take Mrs Quicke out for lunch.

  ‘Than
k you, Archie, but I’m attending to the garden today. I’ll fetch the notices for you, shall I? Neil, come through the house and I’ll show you what I want done.’

  It was another quarter of an hour before she could get back to John’s note. She took it to the window and slanted it this way and that. Then she scrabbled around in Frank’s desk until she found the magnifying glass he had used now and then to help him mend his glasses.

  She found the colourful handwritten poison-pen notes she had received, and the last letters sent to Nora. She laid them side by side on the table. After a while she put all but one of Nora’s letters to one side and studied that one, comparing it with John’s note, and the letters she had received.

  She rubbed her eyes. She simply could not be seeing what was right before them.

  She switched on Frank’s desk lamp, and pulled it towards her. Now the evidence was even clearer.

  The last letter Nora had received and the ones Ellie herself had been sent had a very slight stain down the right-hand side. The edges of the paper were ruffled, as if they had come into contact with water, or perhaps tea. Someone had quickly mopped up the liquid, but had left traces behind if you knew where to look.

  You wouldn’t really see it if you just looked at one piece of paper in isolation, but when you had several before you the sequence of events was clear.

  Ellie placed John’s note under the others, and the stains matched perfectly. There was no doubt about it: the letters had come from the pad John had purchased and which he was still using for notes.

  It couldn’t be.

  But it was.

  No. John could not possibly, could never have written those notes! But suppose he had?

  Why should he do such a thing? There wasn’t a mean thought in his head. He’s retired, his wife’s always ill, never enough money for travel and good holidays, which is what he wanted to do when he retired. That doesn’t make him the sort of person who writes those horrible letters. He would never have persecuted poor Nora like that, or sent her a wax cat and killed a real one, or thrown paint at Nora’s door, or worked a computer.