by Simon Brett
“I really wouldn’t have any more of that, Joyce. It made you sick last time.”
“It wasn’t that that made me sick,” came the belligerent reply.
“What was it then?” asked Mrs. Pargeter lightly.
“It was . . . It was . . .” For a moment Joyce hovered on the brink of replying, but caution reasserted itself. “Anyway, why’re you telling me what I should do?”
“I’m not. I’m just suggesting—”
“Yes, you are!” Joyce bawled back. “No one lets me lead my own bloody life. All the time we were married, Chris kept telling me what to do. And he’s still telling me what to do from beyond the grave. And now Conchita tells me what to do and you tell me what to do and—”
“What do you mean about Chris telling you what to do from beyond the grave?”
“I mean . . .” Again Joyce teetered on the brink of confession, and again drew back from the edge. “I know what I mean. That’s all that matters. It’s none of your business, Melita.”
“Very well, if you say so.”
Suddenly Joyce started to weep. “Oh, Melita, Melita . . . Everything’s such a mess. I can’t do it.”
“Can’t do what?”
“Can’t do anything. Can’t do what Chris wants me to do. Don’t even really know what he wants me to do, but he’s got my curiosity aroused and I can’t just do nothing . . .”
“Chris is dead, Joyce. He can’t make any further demands on you.”
There was a bitter laugh. “Don’t you believe it.”
“Listen—”
But Joyce was in no mood for listening. No, Mrs. Pargeter feared, if anyone was cast in the listening role that night, she had drawn the short straw. Normally she wouldn’t have minded, but that particular night she did feel so tired. So exceptionally tired. She raised her hand to mask another yawn.
But the long night’s listening never materialized, because it soon became apparent that Joyce was at least as tired as she was. The sobbing and the maudlin recrimination were quickly swamped by yawns and, within half an hour, it required only the minimum of persuasion to get her friend into bed. Joyce insisted on having the ouzo bottle and a glass on the bedside table beside her, but, even before her light had been switched off, she was fast asleep.
And, within five minutes, so was Mrs. Pargeter.
chapter
EIGHT
* * *
Mrs. Pargeter opened her eyes and blinked at the bright parallelogram of light on the white wall opposite. She had not expected to sleep through. Usually she took a night or two to settle into a new bed.
Still, there was no doubting it was morning. She felt rested, though a little headachy. Perhaps she just wasn’t used to the retsina . . . Mind you, she hadn’t had that much of it. The second half-liter bottle had not been touched, and she hadn’t mixed it with anything else. She shared the late Mr. Pargeter’s views on the subject of Greek brandy and had never liked the aniseed taste of ouzo.
Her head still felt muzzy when she stood upright and wrapped round her a blue cotton dressing gown. Already the air felt warm in the bedroom.
She moved to the front windows. The shutters and tall glass doors were pinned back, the view obscured by gauzy curtains which bellied and slackened restlessly in the sea breeze.
Mrs. Pargeter pushed through them to the white glare of the sun, which challenged her aching head. But when her eyes accommodated to the brightness, the beauty of the scene melted away all thoughts of pain.
The tops of olive trees and cypresses shielded the sea frontage of Agios Nikitas from view, and Mrs. Pargeter looked straight out across to the blurred outline of Albania. The sea was of that uniform blue that one distrusts in travel brochures, its surface raked here and there by the lazy swirls of currents. A large cruise ship slid sedately across the center of the channel. The white sails of a yacht flotilla moved like formation seagulls over the blue. Nearer to the coast, awning-topped motorboats puttered along, searching for those secret bays which were rediscovered every day by new pioneers. A speed-boat, planing high out of the water, towed behind it the white smudge of a waterskier.
Yes, thought Mrs. Pargeter, I am going to like it here.
As she turned back into the villa, her shadow crossed a basking lizard which flicked out of sight, a black comma instantly erased from the whiteness of the wall.
She moved through the bedroom to the back windows, whose translucent curtains strained outwards into the garden. Once through them, she stood on the little balcony, looking out on a scene perhaps more beautiful than that at the front.
The flowers glowed in reds, mauves, blues, pinks and yellows against the dusty green of their leaves. All were neatly trimmed and tended, many rising from cans and drums painted in a powdery blue. The pots nearest the villa, still shaded by the building’s edge, were circled with dampness. The white cement pathways had been punctiliously brushed. Whoever kept the garden in such a pristine state had already completed that morning’s servicing.
As she looked at the display, Mrs. Pargeter wished she knew more about flowers. She had always liked having a nice garden to walk in, but never taken much interest in how gardens got to be nice places to walk in. Nor had the late Mr. Pargeter had “green fingers” (other adjectives had been applied to his fingers with some frequency, but never “green”). However, when they lived in the big house in Chigwell, there had always been a continuing supply of labor to look after the grounds. The men who came to stay had all been happy to pay with weeding and digging for the privilege of a few days’ invisibility behind the garden’s high walls.
But, as she looked at the splendor of that array of Corfiot blooms, Mrs. Pargeter wished she had had a little more “hands-on” experience of horticulture. It would be nice to be able to give names to the flowers. She felt pretty confident about the geraniums, both the red and pink varieties, and would have been prepared to risk identification of the climbing plant with cornet-shaped blooms of bright blue as morning glory, but the rest stumped her completely.
Pretty, though. She could recognize that. They were all very pretty.
Distressing, she thought with mild regret, that there weren’t any better words to mean “pretty.” Always sounded so limp. Particularly when applied to a woman. “Oh, she’s very pretty”—huh, talk about damning with faint praise. Almost as bad as calling a man “sweet.”
Mrs. Pargeter grinned at the way her thoughts were flowing. When irrelevant ideas started to interconnect in her mind like that, it was always a sign that she was beginning to relax. Not bad, really, one night in Corfu and already the therapy was taking effect.
Yes, one long, relaxed night in Corfu. Her headache had gone now. How long had she slept? For the first time that morning she looked at her watch.
Good heavens! A quarter to twelve. It was years since she’d slept that long. Something in the Corfiot air perhaps?
She moved out of the shadow of the balcony and stood there, blinking, letting the sunlight wash over her. Soon she would have to have a shower, get dressed . . . what then? Wander d to Spiro’s to pick up her flight bag, mustn’t forget that . . . Have some lunch there too, maybe . . . (Mrs. Pargeter had already firmly decided that, though the package had been described as “self-catering,” breakfast would be the only meal prepared in the villa. And, if she was going to wake this late every morning, she didn’t think breakfast would figure very large in her daily schedule.)
She wondered if Joyce was up yet. Had her friend slept equally well, or been kept awake by her troubled thoughts? There was no sound from the other bedroom. Perhaps she’d already gone out. Down to the minimarket, maybe even to one of the beaches for a swim. If Joyce was doing things on her own, that was good. The two of them might have come on holiday together, but both had agreed that they didn’t want to live in each other’s pockets.
Mrs. Pargeter looked idly down at the white cement path and saw that she was causing a traffic hazard. One of her plump bare feet was blocking the advance of a
file of tiny ants. With uncomplaining efficiency, they had made a detour, circling the obstruction and then continuing their column in a perfectly straight line.
Amazing organization and discipline you have to have to be an ant. Amazing ability to sublimate your own personality to that of the community. Wouldn’t suit me, thought Mrs. Pargeter.
She watched where the line of ants was going. The file moved, relentlessly regular, along the path towards the villa. Then, making no concession to the change of plane, it continued vertically up the wall onto Joyce’s balcony.
Mrs. Pargeter moved forward and saw how the line progressed across the marble platform and under the billowing curtains into the bedroom. Intrigued, she followed them, wondering what attraction prompted this dedicated troop movement. And, come to that, why there was no returning line of ants.
Inside the room her questions were answered. The single line of ants stopped by the side of the nearer bed, where it joined a mass, an orgiastic melee of other ants.
Ants gorging themselves on the browning pool of blood that disfigured the spotless marble floor.
Other ants had climbed up the brown-stained sheet which dangled off the side of the bed. They moved in hungry confusion over the white crumpled linen.
And over Joyce Dover’s equally white, equally crumpled body.
And ants seethed round the dried-up gash on her wrist, through which Joyce Dover’s lifeblood had flowed away.
chapter
NINE
* * *
Mrs. Pargeter moved out onto the balcony and took a long series of deep breaths. The innocent scent of flowers in her nostrils felt obscenely inappropriate. Life with the late Mr. Pargeter had trained her well in coping with shock, but she had still been profoundly shaken by what she had seen. She swallowed back nausea, forced herself into a straitjacket of calm, took one more deep breath, and went back into Joyce’s room.
The only way, she knew, was to dissociate herself, depersonalize what she saw, imagine that she had to examine the scene for some kind of test, that questions would be asked later. Horror can only be borne if one ceases to think of the individual identity of those involved; too much compassion can be crippling. All carers—doctors, policemen, ambulancemen—learn to cope by manufacturing a professional distance between themselves and the disasters they face.
As she had this thought, Mrs. Pargeter realized that the necessity for distance applied equally to murders, rapists and other violent criminals. It is only when one has ceased to think of people as individuals that one can perpetrate such horrific abuse to their bodies.
She looked down at the corpse. Thinking of it as “the corpse” helped. The corpse, the deceased, the victim, the body . . . any word was better than a proper name.
The weapon which had severed the body’s radial artery was plain to see. It lay on the floor, thickly streaked with brown blood and a volatile speckling of ants. The bottom of a broken ouzo bottle, a misshapen tumbler with one side rising to a deadly pinnacle of glass. It was the bottle that the deceased had insisted on having at her bedside the night before.
Easily done, Mrs. Pargeter supposed—the contents drained, the bottle smashed, then one quick drunken slash across the wrist, rewarded by the welcoming embrace of oblivion.
She bent down close to the body’s drained lips. Yes, there was an unmistakable smell of aniseed. The pillow, though dry, gave off a hint of the same perfume. Some of the ouzo—only a little, though—had been spilled.
Mrs. Pargeter moved round the bedroom, sniffing, but nowhere else could she smell it. Presumably the deceased had consumed the entire contents of the bottle.
There was a wicker wastepaper basket by the dressing table; inside it Mrs. Pargeter saw shards of glass and the torn ouzo label. An uncharacteristically tidy gesture for someone about to commit suicide, she mused.
Not all the glass had gone into the wastepaper basket; there were a few tiny crystals and splinters on the marble floor nearby. She looked closely at the wall above the basket. On the white emulsion there were clear outlines of a few flat mosquitoes, swatted with paperbacks no doubt by previous tenants of the room. There was also, nearly three feet above the ground, a small arc-shaped indentation, from which a shiny trickle of dried fluid descended. She put her face close to the wall and once again smelt a nuance of aniseed. It seemed a reasonable deduction that the ouzo bottle had been smashed against the wall there.
Mrs. Pargeter stood still, obscurely troubled. She looked across at the inanimate heap on the bed and thought for a moment.
Then she left the bedroom and went into the kitchen. She sniffed round the sink, but there was nothing to arouse her suspicions. She opened a drawer and found it to be well-stocked with cutlery, including two substantial and very sharp kitchen knives.
She closed the drawer and moved on to the bathroom. The ceramic base of the shower and its drainage outlet were completely dry. So was the washbasin, but from its plughole emanated the faint, unmistakable whiff of ouzo.
Mrs. Pargeter stopped for a moment to assess this information and work out a possible scenario of events during the night.
The deceased had woken in the small hours, depressed and suicidal in the emptiness of her bereavement. She had drunk more ouzo to try and shift the mood, but the alcohol had only deepened her despair. She had decided to kill herself.
Up until that point the scenario was just about credible. The next bit of reconstruction, however, made it less convincing.
In her drunken and self-destructive state, the deceased had looked for a suitable means of suicide. Rejecting—or perhaps unaware of—the possibilities of the kitchen knives, she had decided to use glass from the broken bottle to cut her wrist.
But there was still some ouzo left. Rather than drinking it up or just letting it spill over the floor when she broke the bottle, the deceased had gone to the bathroom and emptied the residue into the washbasin. She had then gone back into her bedroom and smashed the bottle against the wall, considerately ensuring that most of the glass would fall into the wastepaper basket. Her suicide weapon thus neatly created, the deceased had meekly got back into bed, slashed her wrist with the vicious spike of glass, and slipped quietly out of existence.
Mrs. Pargeter’s credulity felt strained.
Any other scenario, though, did have considerable ramifications.
Like, for instance, the involvement of another person.
Suppose, Mrs. Pargeter conjectured, another person had been involved . . . ? Suppose the deceased had not moved from her bed, but the other person had drained the ouzo bottle, smashed it and slashed the deceased’s wrist . . . ?
A lot more details fitted into that scenario.
It raised certain new problems, though. Chief among them was why the deceased had not resisted the attack on her. She might have been asleep at the moment of assault, but the cutting of her wrist must have wakened her. Surely she would have screamed or . . . ? Surely Mrs. Pargeter would have heard something . . . ?
But Mrs. Pargeter had heard nothing. She had slept very deeply. Quite exceptionally deeply.
A new thought struck her, a thought which might explain both her own exceptionally deep sleep and the passivity of the deceased.
She moved quickly from the bathroom to the kitchen. She opened the fridge. Almost everything that had been there the night before was still there. Bread, cheese, jam, ham, sausage, long-life milk, the bottles of white wine. Only two items were missing.
She knew what had happened to the bottle of ouzo.
But where was the square plastic bottle of mineral water?
She searched through the kitchen. She looked in the waste bin outside the kitchen door. She searched her own room. Keeping her eyes averted from the sheet-shrouded body, she searched the other bedroom. She searched the living room and the bathroom.
The bottle of mineral water had disappeared. Its contents could not be checked for the powerful soporific she now felt sure it had contained. In just the same way that it woul
d be hard to trace the drug in the ouzo which had rendered Joyce so pathetically unresistant to her fate.
Joyce. For the first time since seeing the body she had let herself think of her friend once again as a person. Mrs. Pargeter caught sight of her face in the bathroom mirror and saw the tears begin to flow.
And she determined from that moment that she would find out who was responsible for this ultimate depersonalization of her friend.
Because Mrs. Pargeter knew now that she was dealing, not with a suicide, but a murder.
chapter
TEN
* * *
In the confusion of the night before, Mrs. Pargeter had not unpacked her suitcases, but that morning the minute she opened the first one she knew that someone had been through them. Everyone has their own style of packing and, although her possessions had been punctiliously replaced, tiny details—a silk sleeve folded too tight on its tissue paper, a pair of sandals too accurately aligned—betrayed the intervention of an alien hand.
So while Mrs. Pargeter had been unconscious, someone, confident of the sleeping drug’s efficacy, had calmly searched her belongings. The knowledge gave her an unwholesome, tainted feeling, almost as disturbing as the shock of what had happened to Joyce.
Mrs. Pargeter went through to the other bedroom and checked the suitcases. Her friend, she knew, was an untidy packer, but the neatness with which her clothes had been laid out confirmed the unsurprising truth that Joyce’s possessions had also been examined.
For a moment Mrs. Pargeter wondered whether the search might have been the main purpose of their nocturnal visitation. Was it possible that Joyce had woken, seen a stranger going through her belongings, and been killed merely to prevent her from identifying the intruder . . . ?