The Wychford Murders

by Paula Gosling

  Paddy and Luke exchanged a glance, silently agreeing there was no work here for them, save uttering those few empty words that would bring neither comfort nor explanation.

  Mr Tompkins saw them out, carefully closing the door to the sitting room, where the children stared unseeing at a muttering television set. ‘They didn’t tell me – mebbe they couldn’t – was she . . . was she raped?’

  Paddy had to look away from the agony in the man’s eyes.

  ‘No,’ said Luke, firmly. ‘As far as we can tell, her wage packet was all that he was after. Mr Grimes told us she was paid yesterday, as usual. There was no money in her handbag when we found it.’

  ‘Oh God,’ Mr Tompkins said. ‘It was little enough she got paid. To be killed for it . . . ’ But there was relief in his face. Luke felt as if he had fed a crumb to a starving man – and perhaps he had.

  ‘We’ll keep you informed, Mr Tompkins,’ he said.

  ‘When can we . . . when . . . ’

  ‘The coroner will be in touch with you some time today or tomorrow morning,’ Luke promised.

  They left the house and walked silently to the car. Paddy looked around at the street of small but charming houses. ‘This really is a lovely area.’

  Luke unlocked the car without glancing up. ‘It used to be,’ he said, bleakly.

  Chapter Two

  Jennifer Eames stood outside the chemist’s shop and looked up the High Street. There was a storm on the way. The afternoon was darkening, but late autumn sunlight still poured down on the golden stones of the buildings, giving the entire scene a strange, two-dimensional quality. As if the whole street were a set for some play or film. What would it be called?

  She glanced at her wristwatch. Darkness at 3:47? Something like that. A damp breeze tugged at her jacket, and she could smell rain in the air over the traffic fumes and the bitter tang of the marigolds in the flower-bed a few feet away. She’d promised to meet Frances in the Copper Kettle at four.

  ‘Oh, Dr Eames!’ Jennifer started, and turned. It was Mr Pelmer, the chemist. ‘I’m glad I caught you – I’m afraid you forgot to sign this scrip for old Mrs Biddle.’ He held out the form, and Jennifer felt herself flushing as she took it from him and fumbled in her shoulder bag for a pen.

  ‘Sorry, Mr Pelmer, I must have been distracted by something.’ She found the pen and put the paper against his window to sign it. The pen had to be shaken several times before it would agree to write uphill in this unseemly fashion.

  Mr Pelmer laughed heartily. He was a small man with a large shaggy head. He reminded her of a seaside donkey. He apparently believed a loud laugh was a sign of masculinity. It tended to startle those who were not used to it, and occasionally caused alarm in strangers, but Jennifer was becoming resigned to the sudden bray. She might as well, she thought – she’d be hearing quite a lot of it in the years ahead.

  ‘Why, that’s nothing,’ Mr Pelmer informed her with further deep chortles, as if medical mistakes were a prime source of comedy. Perhaps, to him, they were. ‘Your uncle was a devil for signatures. I could always tell what time of day he’d written a scrip. In the morning they were quite legible, but by evening surgery he was so fed up with all his patients’ moans and groans that they were often no more than a couple of scribbles and a straight line for his name. I used to tell Mrs Pelmer, it was me prescribing for his evening patients, not Himself.’ He stopped laughing. ‘No disrespect intended, of course.’ Mr Pelmer was testing the ground. He looked at her, speculatively.

  ‘Of course,’ Jennifer agreed, handing back the prescription form.

  ‘He’s a fine man. We miss him, terribly,’ Mr Pelmer continued. ‘There’ll never be another . . . that is to say . . . ’

  Jennifer smiled. ‘I agree. Many of his patients have told me the same thing. There’ll never be another like him.’

  Mr Pelmer gave her an odd, sideways look. ‘Fortunately,’ he said.

  Jennifer refused to be startled into betraying her charming and unrepentantly eccentric uncle, the recently bedridden Dr Wallace Cadwallader Mayberry. ‘Was that the only unsigned scrip?’ she asked, brightly. ‘I must get on – I have quite a few house calls still to make.’ Now, Jennifer, don’t start that, she told herself. You have four house calls, that’s all. Just four, and lucky to get them.

  ‘Ah, yes. I heard Mr Teague was poorly again,’ nodded Mr Pelmer, sagely. ‘That will be The Mixture As Before, no doubt. I’ll have it ready.’ He beamed at her, and winked, all help and unknown secrets shared.

  ‘Good afternoon, Mr Pelmer,’ Jennifer said, and walked away before he could continue. Smug old fool, she thought, knowing it probably would be the mixture as before, unless her uncle had misdiagnosed. There was always that possibility. Over the last years, arthritis had slowly inhibited his activity and efficiency. He’d taken on a younger partner, David Gregson, but ever since her divorce he’d kept on hoping Jennifer would give in and ‘come home’, as he’d put it. Since it had been Uncle Wally who’d inspired her to become a doctor in the first place, she supposed he’d always known her capitulation would eventually come. Secretly she hoped he’d give up the idea, for she was ambitious, and had her eye on a consultancy in internal medicine. Whenever she came down for a visit he’d speak of the practice and the patients as if they were already her own. She would smile and then firmly change the subject. Perhaps he realised it was not what she wanted, perhaps he didn’t want to call in her affectionate obligation. It remained a kind of stand-off between two stubborn but loving personalities.

  Until about a year ago, when he’d started writing and phoning her, asking, then begging her to leave her hospital post in London and take over his country practice. At first she’d been annoyed that their unspoken non-aggression pact was being broken. She’d made vague promises, postponing the fatal day, hating herself for the procrastination. But gradually something in his voice and letters started alarm bells ringing in her doctor’s brain – that cold, objective place where analysis and ego stand shoulder to shoulder, looking out on a wayward world. In a way, Jennifer had been almost relieved when his mild stroke came along. Her diagnosis had been correct – and it made her break from London and frustrated ambition much easier.

  But not easy.

  Having lived in Wychford until she was fourteen, there was some sensation of ‘coming home’. The town looked much the same, but the people had changed, and herself most of all. She was not an innocent girl now, but a trained physician annealed in the wards and corridors of a London teaching hospital. Or so she kept telling herself.

  Her first problem on her return remained her biggest problem – Uncle Wally’s partner, David Gregson. He viewed her as a consultant might view a junior houseman – someone to do the dull work, not a proper doctor, yet. They had clashed several times already, and she could not foresee the situation improving. She knew she had a quick temper, but she also knew she was a damn good physician. She felt David Gregson’s resentment was unfair, and that his consistent refusal to share the responsibilities of the practice properly was tantamount to cutting off his nose to spite his face. He kept using words like ‘temporary’, and talking of the time when Dr Wally would be able to return to work. But that was impossible and they both knew it. He maintained the pretence ostensibly to keep Wally’s spirits up, but more for his own reasons, she suspected. He didn’t want to accept the inevitable, any more than she had wanted to accept it. But here she was, and here she intended to stay. The past months had told her she probably would have made no more than a competent consultant (and a woman needed to be far more than competent to get anywhere) – but she had a chance of becoming a very good GP.

  She turned into the Copper Kettle and took one of the corner tables for two. A few minutes later, Frances Murphy entered, waved, and came over. Wearing a green coat and a bright red scarf, she reminded Jennifer of a fine, ripe apple. She was a pippin within, too – her basic sweetness
overlaid with the sharp tang of an ironic turn of mind. She had a newspaper in her hand, and dropped it on to the table while she undid her coat, took it off, and then replaced the cutlery she’d swept on to the chair with it.

  ‘Would you believe it, there’s been a murder!’ she announced, dramatically. ‘Right here in Wychford, of all places!’ Frances had been born in County Cork, and the accent still clung to her words, giving a delicious roundness to her r’s and a faint lilt to her sentences. (Since she was on the plump side, however, references to her round r’s were not welcomed.) For the rest she was black of hair, fair of skin, and white of smile. She was a physiotherapist and had only lived in Wychford a few months herself when Jennifer returned. They had become good friends on the sound basis of being able to make one another laugh, but murder wasn’t that funny.

  ‘This will certainly startle Aunt Clodie,’ Jennifer said, picking up the newspaper. ‘She always maintains Wychford is the dullest town in Britain.’

  ‘They ought to twin it to Calglannon, then,’ Frances said. ‘The dullest village in Ireland, distinguished only by the excitement caused one day by my mother’s pressure cooker exploding. I can still see her with the carrots in her hair.’ She beamed at Jennifer. ‘Do you ever suppose they have any of that lardy cake left?’

  ‘I thought you were going to start a diet this week,’ Jennifer said, absently, absorbing what details the Chronicle had concerning the murder.

  ‘No, that was last week,’ Frances said. ‘This week I’m going on a bender. Or is it blinder?’ The waitress came over and she ordered tea and cakes for two, having ascertained that the lardy cake had been demolished earlier by some tourists. ‘Who was it that got killed, then?’ she asked, trying to read the paper upside-down. In her off-duty hours, Frances was trying to become a writer. She’d had a couple of stories published, and was currently working on a novel. Everything was grist to her mill, and if natural curiosity was an indicator of writing talent, Frances was bound to be a success one day. ‘Beryl Tompkins,’ she spelled out, slowly. ‘Oh.’ She sat back and looked distressed. ‘Oh, dear.’

  Jennifer glanced up at her tone. ‘You knew her?’

  ‘Yes. You should, too. She’s in your practice. Dr Gregson referred her to Mr Blythe, and we’ve been treating her at the clinic. Four degenerate discs.’

  ‘I don’t think I ever saw her.’ Jennifer tried to place the name and couldn’t. ‘Was it before I came?’

  ‘Perhaps it was,’ Frances said, vaguely, leaning back for the waitress to put down the tea-tray. ‘I was trying various treatments, but she said they weren’t doing her any good. Of course they weren’t, I told her, as long as she kept up her work at the factory, pushing that great divil of a waxing machine around. But she needed the money, she said. Poor woman, lying there, murdered in her second-best shift.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ Jennifer demanded.

  Frances looked at her reproachfully. ‘Well, it says she was coming back from her cleaning job, doesn’t it? She’d hardly wear best for that, now, would she?’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’ The thought of the woman being found murdered in her old clothes made it seem more sad, and cruel, somehow – even her dignity had been slaughtered. It was like Frances to pick up that small detail. She glanced through the rest of the story. ‘It says she was killed on a path that runs from the photo-processing plant down to the main road. And that her throat was cut from ear to ear.’

  Frances was pouring out the tea, and nearly missed the cups. ‘The plant is just up the hill from the hospital,’ she said, thinly. She put down the pot, and took a long drink of the scalding tea. ‘I’m glad I’ve kept the car, after all,’ she said, with a gasp.

  ‘You mean you’re still driving it?’

  ‘And why shouldn’t I be?’ Frances demanded.

  The thought of Frances in charge of a car always made Jennifer plan her own journeys carefully. Frances hated machinery of any kind, and the enmity seemed mutual. If ever there was a human being with whom machinery did not co-operate, it was Frances Murphy. Regularly, her small car leapt forward without warning into traffic bollards and walls. Trees had been known to leave the forest simply to force her into ditches. At work, sunlamps melted plastic couches or went sulkily into eclipse, and whirlpool baths whizzed themselves into foaming maelstroms that overflowed onto everyone’s shoes. At home, her oven lay cold and dark or burned unmercifully every scone or pie she attempted. For Frances, wide-eyed in an inexplicably malevolent world, television sets fused, irons scorched, hair driers frizzed, and tin openers went for her thumbs. She said it was either fairies or the Revenge of the Twentieth Century. On the whole, she favoured the fairies.

  ‘Better a flat tyre than a cut throat, I suppose,’ Jennifer conceded.

  ‘Better neither,’ Frances said, picking up another cream cake and glancing across the street. ‘I see Mark Peacock has closed early again. The tourists must be flying back to their star-spangled nests.’

  Jennifer followed her glance. At Peacock’s Antiques, the lights were out and the Closed sign hung, slightly askew, on the door.

  ‘That’s odd,’ she said, but offered no more.

  Frances, warned off by her expression, changed the subject. ‘How goes the war between you and David Gregson, then?’

  Jennifer was startled. ‘What made you think of him?’

  ‘It wasn’t that I wanted to think of him, it’s that I didn’t want to think about that poor murdered woman,’ Frances said, resolutely folding the newspaper and dropping it on to a chair beneath the table. ‘Still on speaking terms, are you?’

  ‘Oh, yes, but through clenched teeth,’ Jennifer said. ‘It would be easier if he didn’t live in the house with us. As it is, we have to be polite to one another at meals, as well as discussing the business of the practice and conferring on patient care. God, it’s hard work.’

  Frances tsk-tsked companionably. ‘His patients think the world of him. He’s always been very nice to me, very helpful. I don’t understand why you don’t get on with him. He’s been marvellous with your uncle, you know.’

  Jennifer sighed. ‘I know he has. That just makes it all the more difficult, because it must just be me that’s wrong. But, dammit, it isn’t me. It’s him. He’s not being fair. Or sensible. I’m a good doctor. I can be of enormous help in the practice, but does he use me fully? He does not. If I were a nephew instead of a niece, I’m certain it would be different. The plain fact is, he’s a woman-hater.’

  ‘Didn’t his marriage break up recently?’

  ‘Yes. But I don’t see why he should take it out on me.’

  ‘You’re handy, and you over-react,’ Frances observed. ‘Why not?’ She pushed the plate of cakes towards her. ‘Have the last cream doughnut. It will give you strength.’

  ‘I need all I can get,’ Jennifer agreed. ‘Especially if people are going to start getting murdered around here. A few more close encounters with David Gregson’s bloody wounded ego, and I may turn killer myself.’

  Chapter Three

  ‘Mark, you mustn’t! I forbid it!’

  Mark Peacock looked at his mother pleadingly. ‘It’s the only way, the only hope we have of holding on to this place. You don’t want to move into a poky little flat in some seaside town, do you?’

  His mother shuddered. ‘Hardly. But letting strangers in . . . it’s too ghastly. I don’t want them here, they wouldn’t be the kind of people I’d choose to invite into my home. It’s taking money for hypocrisy.’

  ‘Money is what it’s all about, Mother.’ Mark felt hopelessness taking hold, yet again. It was not the first occasion they’d had this conversation, but he wearily prayed it would be the last. Time was running out. ‘I’ve sold exactly three antiques this week, for a total profit of less than fifty pounds, and with winter coming things will only get worse, not better. You can’t go on living this myth of the lady of the manor wh
en we haven’t got enough in the bank to cover the first mortgage, much less the second. Once our available capital fell below that level, the bank manager began giving me the eye and holding up my cheques.’

  ‘Mark!’ Her horror was genuine, if over-dramatised.

  ‘I didn’t say he bounced them, just that they were a little slow in going through,’ Mark said. ‘But bouncing them isn’t far away, and somehow I’d always pictured myself as the father of bouncing babies, not cheques.’

  ‘You’re not even married.’

  ‘That’s hardly my fault – you’ve never approved of any of the girls I’ve been interested in, you’ve gone out of your way to discourage any . . . ’

  His mother was momentarily distracted. ‘Since you persist in going out with totally unsuitable girls, I can do little else. I don’t know why we sent you to those expensive schools – it doesn’t seem to have instilled any values in you whatsoever. A man in your position . . . ’

  ‘I have no “position”, Mother, other than a half-crouch engendered by the increasing burden of this house,’ Mark said, petulantly. ‘If it weren’t for that ridiculous will of Father’s, drawn up when I was a child . . . ’

  ‘You’re still a child,’ his mother snapped. ‘You have a fatal attraction for shiny toys. The least little tart catches your eye.’

  ‘Jennifer Eames is hardly that.’

  She looked perturbed, suddenly. ‘Is that who you’re thinking of, then? I thought . . . ’

  He looked defensive. ‘What? You thought what?’

  She turned away. ‘One hears things, dear. One is not totally out of contact with the village, you know.’

  ‘No, I don’t know anything of the kind,’ he snapped. ‘Would you care to elaborate on that?’

  She started to speak, then apparently thought better of it. ‘No, dear, I wouldn’t. Boys must have their toys, I suppose. I thought you had finished with Jennifer Eames, anyway.’ It was a question.