Vintage Crime

by Martin Edwards

  She’d worked it out so carefully, too. He was to have come home (late, as usual) to find his wife dead in a gas-filled bathroom. He was to have kicked and battered on the bathroom door: “Let me in, darling, let me in!” he was to have yelled, white-lipped at the keyhole, rattling and bashing, shaking the handle loose from its moorings, pushing until the hinges groaned and the door finally caved in before him. She saw him dragging her limp figure out of the bath, across the landing, long mousy hair dripping like Ophelia’s, and finally laying it on the bed, covering it with kisses.

  “Wake up, my darling… Oh, wake up!” he was to have sobbed, distraught with grief and with remorse. “Oh, Maggie, Maggie, come back to me! I love you…I need you…!”

  Too late the kisses. Too late the wild words of love. His tears of remorse would fall upon her dead face in vain.

  Or would they? It would be a shame, when you came to think about it, to be missing it all. How about if she stirred and murmured his name at some point in the proceedings, when he had suffered enough, had repented enough of his shortcomings? “Rodney…Rodney…!” she would whisper with her first faint breath of returning life: and from there to his promising to give up his demanding job and stay home in the evenings would be but a few delicious, night-long steps…

  With a surge of steaming water, Maggie had lurched upwards into a sitting position and turned off the unlit jets of the water heater, leaving only the pilot to do its feeble worst. Then she lay back once more into the water, warmed through and through, and blissfully expectant.

  And after all that, he hadn’t come into the bathroom at all! Hadn’t smelt the gas seeping out under the door – nothing! She’d lain there in the cooling water from midnight until a quarter past one, only to hear him slam the front door and go straight upstairs to the bedroom, closing the door behind him.

  For several minutes, Maggie had lain there, incredulous. Surely, when he saw the empty bed, he would come in search of her? She waited; the minutes passed; and presently, chilled and desperate, she dragged herself out of the now nearly cold water, wrapped a towel round her shivering body, and went to investigate – only to find him snoring peacefully on his own side of the big double bed.

  “I thought you must have stayed the night at your sister’s or somewhere,” he’d explained offhandedly the next morning: and on Maggie’s insisting that she “might have died!” he’d merely said “Ridiculous!” – then added: “You’d better phone the gas people and get them to send someone. It’s a waste of gas to have a pilot that keeps blowing out” – and with that he’d gone off to the office as if nothing had happened.

  “Ridiculous,” indeed! I’ll show him, she thought; and a couple of months later she did – or nearly. The occasion had been the “official entertaining of a Scandinavian diplomat – blond, and not a day over thirty-five – from which duty Rodney had come home at one in the morning to find a policeman at his door and an urgent summons to the local hospital.

  She’d intended, of course, that he should find the policeman at his door; also that he should have to rush to the hospital. But she hadn’t intended – well, of course she hadn’t – that as soon as he reached the hospital he should be told there was nothing to worry about. “She’ll be all right; she’s coming round nicely!”

  “Nothing to worry about” – when the whole aim and object of the harrowing, nerve-racking episode had been to make him worry! These damned interfering medicos – she hadn’t meant to “come round” at all, let alone as quickly as this, before Rodney had had so much as fifteen minutes of real anxiety! How could she have known that forty tranquillisers wouldn’t be enough to finish her off! Or that consuming them on a park bench on a freezing February night would actually detract from, rather than add to, their efficacy?

  “The cold gives a shock to the system, it delays the onset of coma,” Sister explained, with a touch of malicious triumph, pulling down Maggie’s lower eyelids, one after the other, while she spoke, and examining their inner surfaces for God knows what sign or symptom (dying was no simple thing, Maggie had discovered; it seemed to involve the most unexpected areas of the body, and to expose you to the most complicated and irrelevant procedures at all hours of the day and night). “And anyway,” Sister continued, still smugly, “you can’t kill yourself with tranquillisers no matter how many you take; they’re not strong enough.”

  How could Maggie have known? How did people find out these things?

  And likewise, how could she have known, the very next summer, on holiday, that if you can swim at all, however poorly, then it is impossible deliberately to drown?

  They’d gone to Ibiza this time for their holiday – if you could call it a holiday with Rodney working all day and all night on his wretched report – scribbling, crossing out, jotting down figures, frowning, staring blind as a stone into the glory of the summer sea: seeing nothing, saying nothing, as unaware of Maggie as if she were dead. It was on the sixth day of this holiday, a day of blue water and white, shimmering heat, that he’d told her, quite casually, at lunchtime, that he had to fly back to London that very afternoon. Yes, it was an awful shame; and yes, he’d try to get back within two or three days; but just supposing he couldn’t make it before the end of their three weeks, then…

  Then Maggie must stay on and enjoy herself. Just like last summer, and the summer before that, not to mention the Easter holiday they’d had in Madeira. It was always the same…Maggie staying on and enjoying herself in some awful foreign hotel where she didn’t know a soul…a surplus woman, eyed by her fellow-guests, served pityingly by the waiters, dragging out the remaining days of her “holiday” as if it was a prison sentence.

  And as if this weren’t enough, there’d been the quarrel as well – and this, too, followed the familiar pattern: But it’s my job, darling, don’t you see? Your job, your job, always your damn job, you never think of anything else, can’t you ever think of me for a change? Think of you – hell, who do you think I’m slaving away earning the money for? I notice you’re not behindhand in spending it – new kitchen unit – new curtains – wall-to-wall carpets! Hell, you’ve got everything! And expensive holidays thrown in! Do you realise what this hotel costs? – just bed and breakfast alone comes to—?

  Shut up, shut up, shut up, all you ever think of is money! Money, money, money! I hate your money, I don’t want your money, I just want you to love me, like you used to do…

  Oh Lord, oh God, don’t start that again! Look, dear, do please try to pull yourself together. I have to be at the airport by five, and I was hoping we could have one last swim…

  One last swim. Rodney must have been surprised at Maggie’s sudden silence, and at the way all the temper seemed to drain out of her. All of a sudden, she became quiet and co-operative, agreeing to join him for his swim…even walking into the sea ahead of him…

  How do people drown? How do they decide to swim this stroke, but not the next one…?

  At first, swimming away from the shimmering beach, away from Rodney fixing his snorkel in the middle distance, it had all seemed so easy. All she had to do was to go on swimming, on and on, through the warm silky water, until the end came.

  HOLIDAY BATHING TRAGEDY – she saw the headline in her mind’s eye; thought about Rodney seeing it too – covering up his eyes, perhaps, to shut out the terrible words…the terrible remorse…the despairing realisation of how much he had loved her…a realisation that had come too late…

  A small wave, whose coming she had not noticed, slapped against her face, a little peremptorily, and she spluttered for a second or two, coughed, and went on swimming – noticing, for the first time, that the water seemed colder than it had a little while ago. Her arms were beginning to ache, and her back too.

  YOUNG WIFE SWIMS TO HER DEATH.

  Well, fairly young. Thirty-three isn’t old, and the reporters would naturally want to make a meal of it if they could. MYSTERY OF DROWNED BLONDE
– well, not blonde exactly, but they could hardly say DROWNED MOUSE, could they – and then the coroner’s questions. Did the dead woman have any worries? Was she depressed? In financial difficulties? No, poor Rodney would have to answer: No, and No, and No. No, she had everything. Everything.

  THE WOMAN WHO HAD EVERYTHING – that would be the next headline. On the second day, that would be – the day after tomorrow.

  The day after tomorrow. As soon as that, she, Maggie, just wouldn’t be there any more. Sooner, actually. Much sooner. By this evening, probably. By the time the lights along the shore were switched on tonight, she just wouldn’t be there to see them.

  Another wave spluttered in her face…and another. Out here, the water was getting choppy, and very cold. She thought of turning back, then remembered why she was here.

  She was tired, though; so very, very tired. Little cramps were running down her legs, and there was a sort of heavy numbness in her limbs which made it hard to keep going.

  How do people drown? How do they? How do they prevent their exhausted, obstinate muscles from swimming just one more stroke…and then another? Exhausted, frozen, tied in triple knots with cramp, still the damn things keep on functioning…one stroke…another…another…

  Another wave slopped into her face; and almost before she had got her breath, came a second one. They were coming at her faster now, more spitefully. She was aware of a threat in them now, veiled as yet, but unmistakable…each time it was harder to get her breath, to cough away one little dollop of water before the next sloshed against her nostrils.

  It would get harder still. This, of course, would be the way the end would come. The moments of recovering her breath would become fewer and fewer, the coughing more desperate until, at last, that wave would slosh into her lungs which couldn’t be coughed away at all. Not ever.

  With what seemed like her last strength, she swivelled over on to her back so that her face need not take the brunt of every oncoming wave; raising her weary head for a second she glimpsed, terribly far off, the line of the beach, and the tiny, sunlit holiday-makers, like dolls in the distance. This is it, she thought; now I can’t get back; and with the thought, there came into her body a huge and terrible force, surging from somewhere behind her ribs and spreading everywhere, into every limb. It gripped her as a terrier grips a rat, carrying her triumphantly where it intended she should go.

  “Had a good swim, darling?” asked Rodney, not raising his eyes from the journal he was reading; and Maggie, slumped down on the sand beside him, could not believe that he would not, in a few moments, notice her shuddering limbs, her face; hear the thundering of her heart.

  But he didn’t; and within minutes the shuddering had begun to subside, the heartbeats to slow down. Colour was returning to her face, and she lay there in the hot sand hating her body for its flawless functioning, for the perfection of its survival mechanisms, and for the speed with which it knew how to recover from almost anything. Of what use was her decision to die, in the face of her body’s tigerish determination to stay alive? All those billions of cells in there, what did they care about the misery, the humiliation and the futility of her existence? They were all right, Jack, multiplying and dividing and regenerating, carrying on with their petty little life cycles, with never a thought of what it all added up to for her! She was the one who had to take the consequences of their blind, idiot determination to keep going, damn them!

  Damn them! Damn them!

  * * *

  It must be past midnight by now – well past. Slumped deep in the wing-chair, Maggie stirred a little; tried, feebly, to sit up straight; but the whole thing was too difficult. The muted lamplight still seemed too bright for such sensitive retinas as hers, newly returned from the dead, and so she closed her eyes once more. Against the swirling blackness behind her lids she tried to picture Rodney’s home-coming – which surely could not be delayed much longer, so late as it was?

  There was no possibility, this time, that he’d be able to ignore the thing, she’d set the scene much too carefully. To start with, she’d left the milk on the front step ever since this morning; to come home after midnight and find two full milk bottles still outside the front door would surely arrest any man’s attention? On top of this, she had left the back door swinging open into the black, blowy garden, so that the first thing Rodney would feel as he stepped into the hall would be the icy November draught sweeping through the house. What the hell is going on, he would inevitably wonder, striding across the hall and into the kitchen to slam the back door. And then – angrily at first, but presently with growing anxiety – he would go in search of his wife.

  Not in bed? Not watching television? Not in the bathroom? And she couldn’t be out, not possibly, for neither of them ever went out without locking the back door and all the windows. And as he moved, with growing unease, from room to room, he would notice – if he hadn’t noticed it already – that the whole house was in darkness. What could she be doing, sitting in total darkness, making never a sound…? And now, at last, his heart would begin to thump with fear…

  But there was something wrong somewhere. This delectable vision of Rodney’s anxiety and concern contained some discrepancy…there was something that didn’t fit properly… Her brain, with slowly returning clarity, groped uneasily for what it was that could be amiss; but it was not until, by some chance, she blinked her eyes open again for a moment that the thing hit her with a sledgehammer.

  The lamp! The reading-lamp, casting its dim beams across her field of vision – it shouldn’t have been on at all! She hadn’t switched it on – she knew with absolute certainty that she hadn’t. It had been bright afternoon, the room bathed in slanting autumn sunlight, when she’d sat down here to take the pills – there was no possibility at all that she’d have had the lamp on…and now, with an awful growing suspicion, she noticed something else.

  The desk. Rodney’s big desk, wide open, and all that litter of papers – it hadn’t been like that this afternoon! It had been shut and locked – as Rodney was always accustomed to leave it – and her suicide note had been standing in solitary state on the bare polished surface – not flanked, as it was now, by papers, files, documents…

  The terrible suspicion grew, it became a certainty, monstrous and almost beyond belief. Rodney must have already come in! Come in here, switched on the lamp and seen her! Seen the note: seen her unconscious, the pills beside her! Seen her – and gone away! He had done nothing – attempted nothing – to save her! He must even – so monstrous was his unconcern – have pushed right past her dying body to get at his desk!

  And what then? What does a man do next, after he has looked down at his wife’s unconscious face, and decided to let her die? Where does he go from there?

  Away, of course. He gets the hell out of it all. And now a new vision, hallucinatory in its intensity, took over behind Maggie’s eyelids. She saw Rodney, guilty and secretive, padding about this room in the dim lamplight, hastily shuffling together his most important documents, cramming them into his briefcase, all the time keeping his eyes averted from the awful figure in the chair, who might or might not be dead, and who might yet, like some avenging spirit, rise up and accuse him…

  And what next? Off upstairs to pack an overnight bag? By a tragic chance, Your Honour, I happened to be away from home that night… By the time I got back, it was too late…

  Something like that…and swift upon this thought, followed another in Maggie’s brain: perhaps he is still here! Perhaps, if I got out of this chair, and tiptoed up the stairs very quietly?

  And it was only now that Maggie discovered that she actually couldn’t move. It wasn’t, as she had supposed, mere weakness and lethargy, the aftermath of her overdose; it was actual paralysis of every limb, against which her muscles seemed to brace themselves in vain. Only her head was still mobile, and raising it a little she looked down, and saw, with numbed incredulity, the ropes
which bound her legs and arms; felt the bruises and the weals; and identified the strange stiffness of her jaws as a gag, professionally secured.

  And so Maggie got her headlines after all.

  DIPLOMAT’S WIFE, BOUND AND GAGGED, DEFIES FOREIGN SPY RING

  COURAGE OF YOUNG WIFE SAVES SECRET GOVERNMENT PAPERS

  BLONDE FOILS INTRUDERS SINGLE-HANDED

  Reading, in column after column, of her courage, her re-source, her cool-headedness, Maggie did not know what to think, or which way to turn: she did not even know how to counter the undeserved admiration, the hugs and kisses, which Rodney was lavishing upon her. He didn’t seem to want to listen to the true story.

  If it was the true one? What Maggie presumed had happened was that the intruders had seized on this extraordinary chance of getting into the house without breaking in, had made their way to Rodney’s study, switched on the light – and seen Maggie. They would not have stopped to ask questions, they were professionals, binding and gagging her would have been a matter of seconds.

  Was it the strange, unresisting limpness of her body that had scared them? Or the suicide note, which they would have seen as soon as they began to rifle the desk? Whichever it was, they plainly had not wanted to get mixed up in it, and had fled.

  That was how it probably was. Almost certainly. And yet…and yet…? There were these bruises, over and above the marks of the rope. Wasn’t there just the possibility that Maggie hadn’t been quite dead to the world when her assailants had arrived? That she had fought back, protecting her husband’s interests, powered by some blind, enormous instinct below the threshold of consciousness, and far beyond the reach, now, of her drugged memory? An instinct as enormous and as invincible as the one which last summer had wrenched her out of the depths of the sea? Had she indeed mysterious powers inside her – an untested courage of which, in ordinary life, she knew nothing?