Vintage Crime

by Martin Edwards

  The courage, maybe, actually to commit suicide? Or even, just possibly, the courage to face the consequences of loving an ambitious, highly strung man stretched almost beyond his limits by responsibilities and pressures such as he had never known?

  The Nuggy Bar

  Simon Brett

  Murder, like all great enterprises, repays careful planning; and, if there was one thing on which Hector Griffiths prided himself, it was his planning ability.

  It was his planning ability which had raised him through the jungle of the domestic cleaning fluids industry to be Product Manager of the GLISS range of indispensable housewives’ aids. His marriage to Melissa Wintle, an attractive and rich widow with a teenage daughter, was also a triumph of planning. Even his wife’s unfortunate death three years later, caused by asphyxiation from the fumes of a faulty gas heater while he was abroad on business, could be seen as the product of, if not necessarily planning, then at least serendipity.

  But no amount of planning could have foreseen that Melissa’s will would have left the bulk of her not inconsiderable wealth to Janet, daughter of her first marriage, rather than to Hector, her second husband.

  So when, at the age of fifty-two, Hector Griffiths found himself reduced to his GLISS salary (generous, but by no means sufficient to maintain those little extras – the flat in Sloane Street, the cottage in Cornwall, the Mercedes, the motor-boat – which had become habitual while his wife was alive) and saddled with the responsibility of an unforthcoming, but definitely rich, step-daughter, he decided it was time to start planning again.

  Hector Griffiths shared with Moses, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and other lesser prophets and evangelists the advantage of having written his own Bible. It was a series of notes which he had assembled during the planning build-up to the launch of NEW GREEN GLISS – WITH AMMONIA, and he was not alone in appreciating its worth. No less a person than the company’s European Marketing Director (Cleaning Fluids) had congratulated him on the notes’ cogency and good sense after hearing Hector use them as the basis of a Staff Training Course lecture.

  Hector kept the notes, which he had had neatly typed up by his secretary, in a blue plastic display folder, of which favoured Management Trainees were occasionally vouchsafed a glimpse. On its title page were two precepts, two precepts which provided a dramatic opening to Hector’s lectures and which, he had to admit, were rather well put.

  A. EVEN AT THE COST OF DELAYING THE LAUNCH OF YOUR PRODUCT, ALWAYS ALLOW SUFFICIENT TIME FOR PLANNING. IMPATIENCE BREEDS ERROR, AND ERROR IS EXPENSIVE.

  B. ONCE YOU HAVE MADE YOUR MAJOR DECISIONS ABOUT THE PRODUCT AND THE TIMING OF ITS LAUNCH, DO NOT INDULGE SECOND THOUGHTS. A DELAYED SCHEDULE IS ALSO EXPENSIVE.

  A third precept, equally important but unwritten, dictated that before any action was taken on a new product, there should be a period of Desk Work, of sitting and thinking, looking at the project from every angle, checking as many details as could be checked, generally familiarising oneself with every aspect of the job in hand. Thinking at this earlier, relaxed stage made it easier to deal with problems that arose later, when time for thought was a luxury and one had to act on impulse.

  It was nearly three months after Melissa’s death before Hector had time to settle down to the Desk Work for his new project. He had been busy with the European launch of GLISS SCOURING PADS and had also found that clearing a deceased’s belongings and sorting out a will, even such a simple and unsatisfactory one as Melissa’s, took a surprising amount of time. Janet had also needed attention. Her mother’s death had taken place at Easter, which meant that the girl had been home from her Yorkshire boarding school. Janet, now a withdrawn fifteen-year-old, had unfortunately been asleep at the time of Melissa’s accident, had heard nothing and so been unable to save her. Equally unfortunately, from her step-father’s point of view, she had not been in the bathroom with her mother when the gas fumes started to escape, which would have solved his current difficulties before they arose.

  But, as Hector always told the eager young men in beige suits and patterned ties on the Staff Training Courses, success rarely comes easily, and the wise manager will distrust the solution that arrives too readily.

  No, Janet was still with him, and he did not regret the time he had devoted to her. His plans for her future had not yet crystallised but, whatever it was to be, prudence dictated that he should take on the role of the solicitous step-father. Now she was such a wealthy young woman, it made sense that he should earn at least her goodwill.

  He smiled wryly at the thought. Something told him he would require more of her than goodwill for the occasional handout. The flat in London, the cottage in Cornwall, the motor-boat and the Mercedes demanded a less erratic income. He needed permanent control of Janet’s money.

  But he was jumping to conclusions. He always warned Manage-ment Trainees against prejudging issues before they had done their Desk Work.

  Hector Griffiths opened the blue folder on his desk. He turned over the page of precepts and looked at the next section.

  1. NEED FOR PRODUCT (FILLING MARKET VOID, INCREASING BRAND SHARE)

  It took no elaborate research to tell him that the product was needed. Now Melissa was dead, there was a market void, and the product required to fill it was money.

  Unwilling to reject too soon any possibility, he gave thought to various methods of money-making. His prospects at GLISS were healthy, but not healthy enough. Even if, when the Marketing Director (UK) retired and was replaced by the European Marketing Director (Cleaning Fluids), Hector got the latter’s job (which was thought likely), his salary would only rise by some 25 per cent, far off parity with the wealth he had commanded as Melissa’s husband. Even a massive coincidence of coronaries among the senior management of GLISS which catapulted Hector to the Managing Director’s office would still leave him worse off.

  Career prospects outside GLISS, for a man of fifty-two, however good a planner, offered even less. Anyway, Hector didn’t want to struggle and graft. What he had had in mind had been a few more years of patronising his underlings in his present job and then an early, dignified and leisured retirement, surrounded by all the comforts of Melissa (except for Melissa herself).

  So how else did people get money? There was crime, of course – theft, embezzlement and so on – but Hector thought such practices undignified, risky and positively immoral.

  No, it was obvious that the money to ease his burdens should be Melissa’s. Already he felt it was his by right.

  But Janet had it.

  On the other hand, if Janet died, the trust that administered the money for her would have to be broken, inevitably to the benefit of her only surviving relation, her poor step-father, desolated by yet another bereavement.

  The real product for which there was a market void, and which would undeniably increase Hector Griffiths’ brand share, was Janet’s death.

  2. SPECIFIC DESCRIPTION OF PRODUCT

  Fifteen-year-old girls rarely die spontaneously, however convenient and public-spirited such an action might be, so it was inevitable that Janet would have to be helped on her way.

  It didn’t take a lot of Desk Work to reach the conclusion that she would have to be murdered. And, following unhappy experiences with the delegation of responsibility over the European launch of GREEN GLISS SCOURING PADS, Hector realised he would have to do the job himself.

  3. TIMING OF LAUNCH

  This was the crucial factor. How many products, Hector would rhetorically demand of the ardent young men who dreamt of company Cortinas and patio doors, how many products have been condemned to obscurity by too hasty a schedule? Before deciding on the date of your launch, assess the following three points:

  A. HOW SOON CAN THE PRODUCTION, PUBLICITY AND SALES DEPARTMENTS MAKE THE PRODUCT A VIABLE COMMERCIAL PROPOSITION?

  B. HOW LONG WILL IT BE BEFORE THE MARKET FORCES WHICH REVEALED A NEED FOR THE PRODUCT
ALTER? (N.B. OR BEFORE A RIVAL CONCERN ALSO NOTES THE NEED AND SUPPLIES IT WITH THEIR OWN PRODUCT?)

  C. WHAT SPECIAL FACTORS DOES YOUR PRODUCT HAVE WHICH CREATE SPECIAL NEEDS IN TIMING? (e.g. YOU DO NOT LAUNCH A TENNIS SHOE CLEANER IN THE WINTER.)

  Hector gave quite a lot of Desk Work to this section. The first question he could not answer until he had done some serious Research and Development into a murder method. That might take time.

  But, even if the perfect solution came within days, there were many arguments for delaying the launch. The most potent was Melissa’s recent death. Though at no point during the police investigations or inquest had the slightest suspicion attached to him, the coincidence of two accidents too close together might prompt unnecessarily scrupulous inquiry. It also made sense that Hector should continue to foster his image of solicitude for his step-daughter, thus killing the seeds of any subsequent suspicion.

  The answer to Question A, therefore, was that the launch should be delayed as long as possible.

  But the length of this delay was limited by the answer to Question B. Though with a sedately private matter like the murder of Janet, Hector did not fear, as he would have done in the cut-throat world of cleaning fluids, a rival getting in before him, there was still the strong pressure of market forces. The pittance Melissa had accorded him in her will would maintain his current lifestyle (with a conservative allowance for inflation) for about eighteen months. That set the furthest limit on the launch (though prudence suggested it would look less suspicious if he didn’t run right up against bankruptcy).

  In answer to Question C (what he humorously referred to to his Management Trainees as the “tennis shoe question”), there was a significant special factor. Since Janet was at boarding school in Yorkshire, where his presence would be bound to cause comment, the launch had to be during the school holidays.

  Detailed consideration of these and other factors led him to a date of launch during the summer of the following year, some fifteen months away. It seemed a long time to wait, but, as Hector knew, IMPATIENCE BREEDS ERROR.

  4. RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT OF PRODUCT (A. THEORETICAL)

  He was able, at his desk, to eliminate a number of possible murder methods. Most of them were disqualified because they failed to meet one important specification: that he should not be implicated in any way.

  Simplified, this meant either a) that Janet’s death should look like an accident, b) that her step-father should have a cast-iron alibi for the time of her death, or, preferably, c) both.

  He liked the idea of an accident. Even though he would arrange things so that he had nothing to fear from a murder inquiry, it was better to avoid the whole process. Ideally, he needed an accident which occurred while he was out of the country.

  A wry instinct dissuaded him from any plan involving faulty gas heaters. A new product should always be genuinely original.

  Hector went through a variety of remotely controlled accidents that could happen to teenage girls, but all seemed to involve faulty machinery and invited uncomfortably close comparisons with gas heaters. He decided he might have to take a more personal role in the project.

  But if he had to be there, he was at an immediate disadvantage. Anyone present at a suspicious death becomes a suspicious person. What he needed was to be both present and absent at the same time.

  But that was impossible. Either he was there or he wasn’t. His own physical presence was immovable. The time of the murder was immovable. And the two had to coincide.

  Or did they?

  It was at this moment that Hector Griffiths had a brainwave.

  They did sometimes come to him, with varying force, but this one was huge, bigger even, he believed, than his idea for the green tear-off tag on the GLISS TABLE-TOP CLEANER sachets.

  He would murder Janet and then change the time of her murder.

  It would need a lot of research, a lot of reading books of forensic medicine, but, just as Hector had known with the green tag, he knew again that he had the right solution.

  4. RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT OF PRODUCT (B. PRACTICAL)

  One of Hector’s favourite sentences from his Staff Training lecture was: “The true Genesis of a product is forged by the R and D boys in the white heat of the laboratory.” Previously, he had always spoken it with a degree of wistfulness, aware of the planner’s distance from true creativity, but with his new product he experienced the thrill of being the real creator.

  He gave himself a month, the month that remained before Janet would return for her summer holidays, and at the end of that time he wanted to know his murder method. There would be time for refinement of details, but it was important to get the main outline firm.

  He made many experiments which gave him the pleasure of research, but not the satisfaction of a solution, before he found the right method.

  He found it in Cornwall. Janet had agreed to continue her normal summer practice of spending the month of August at the cottage, and early in July Hector went down for a weekend to see that the place was habitable and to take the motorboat for its first outing of the season. While Melissa had been alive, the cottage had been used most weekends from Easter onwards and, as he cast off his boat from the mooring in front of his cottage and breathed the tangy air, Hector decided to continue the regular visits.

  He liked it down there. He liked having the boat to play with, he liked the respect that ownership of the cottage brought him. Commander Donleavy, with whom he drank in the Yacht Club, would often look out across the bay to where it perched, a rectangle of white on the cliff, secluded but cunningly modernised, and say, “Damned fine property, that.”

  The boat was a damned fine property, too, and Hector wasn’t going to relinquish either of them. Inevitably, as he powered through the waves, he thought of Melissa. But without emotion, almost without emotion now. Typical of her to make a mistake over the will.

  She came to his mind more forcibly as he passed a place where they had made love. During the days of their courtship, when he had realised that her whimsical nature would require a few romantic gestures before she consented to marry him, he had started taking her to unlikely settings for love-making.

  The one the boat now chugged past was the unlikeliest of all. It was a hidden cave, only accessible at very low tide. He had found it by accident the first time he had gone out with Melissa in the boat. His inexperience of navigation had brought their vessel dangerously close to some rocks and, as he leant out to fend off, he had fallen into the sea. To his surprise, he had found sand beneath his feet and caught a glimpse of a dark space under an arch of rock.

  Melissa had taken over the wheel and he had scrambled back on board, aware that the romantic lover image he had been fostering was now seriously dented by his incompetence. But the cave he had seen offered a chance for him to redeem himself.

  Brusquely ordering Melissa to anchor the boat, he had stripped off and jumped back into the icy water. (It was May.) He then swam to the opening he had seen and disappeared under the low arch. He soon found himself on a sandy beach in a small cave, eerily lit by the reflection of the sun on the water outside.

  He had reappeared in the daylight and summoned Melissa imperiously to join him. Enjoying taking orders, she had stripped off and swum to the haven, where, on the sand, he had taken her with apparent, but feigned, brutality. When doing the Desk Work on his project for getting married to Melissa, he had analysed in her taste for Gothic romances an ideal of a dominant, savage lover, and built up the Heathcliff in himself accordingly.

  It had worked, too. It was in the cave that she had agreed to marry him. Once the ceremony was achieved, he was able to put aside his Gothic image with relief. Apart from anything else, gestures like the cave episode were very cold.

  When, by then safely married, they next went past the cave opening, Melissa had looked at him wistfully, but Hector had pretended not to see. Anyway, t
here had been no sign of the opening; it was only revealed at the lowest spring tide. Also by then it was high summer and the place stank. The council spoke stoutly of rotting seaweed, while local opinion muttered darkly about a sewage outlet, but, whatever the cause, a pervasively offensive stench earned the place the nickname of “Stinky Cove” and kept trippers away when the weather got hot.

  As he steered his boat past the hidden opening and wrinkled his nose involuntarily, all the elements combined in Hector’s head, and his murder plan began to form.

  4. RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT OF PRODUCT (C. EXPERIMENTAL)

  Commander Donleavy was an inexhaustible source of information about things nautical, and he loved being asked, particularly by someone as ignorantly appreciative as Hector Griffiths. He had no problem explaining to the greenhorn all about the 28-day cycle of the tides, and referring him to the tide tables, and telling him that yes, of course it would be possible to predict the date of a spring tide a year in advance. Not for the first time he marvelled that the government didn’t insist on two years in the regular Navy as the minimum qualification for anyone wishing to own a boat.

  Still, Griffiths wasn’t a bad sort. Generous with the pink gins, anyway. And got that nice cottage over the bay. “Damned fine property, that,” said Commander Donleavy, as he was handed another double.

  The cycle of the tides did not allow Hector Griffiths to become an “R and D boy” and get back into “the white heat of the laboratory” again until his step-daughter was established in the cottage for her summer holiday. Janet was, he thought, quieter than ever; she seemed to take her mother’s death hard. Though not fractious or unco-operative, she seemed listless. Except for a little sketching, she appeared to have no interests, and showed no desire to go anywhere. Better still, she did not seem to have any friends. She wrote duty postcards to two elderly aunts of Melissa in Stockport, but received no mail and made no attempt to make new contacts. All of which was highly satisfactory.