‘Dear God,’ murmured Aunt Clodie, and took Wally’s hand.
‘When the media spread the word that there was a maniac in the vicinity, a mad killer who’d now claimed two victims, he knew his plan for killing his wife would have an even sounder basis – she’d be bound to be named as victim number three.’
‘But he was in London when she was killed,’ Jennifer objected. ‘He was seen at his club at ten o’clock, and he was there in the morning, too. There were no trains, and he can’t drive. How did he get down here and back again in time?’
‘By the oldest road in England,’ Luke said, softly. ‘He came by water.’
‘By water?’
Their astonishment made it almost worth the telling. Few pleasures accrue to a copper at the end of a case – mostly he is sick of death and sicker still of mad excuses for it. In the innocent amazement of his listeners he found some solace. But not much.
Uncle Wally wheeled himself to the decanter and carried it over to replenish Luke’s glass as well as his own. ‘Well, get on with it, then,’ he said gruffly, and that was as much apology as Luke ever got for the old man’s temporary rejection.
‘He signed in at his club at ten – true enough,’ Luke explained, after soothing his raw throat once more with brandy. ‘Then he went to his room, waited for a quiet moment, and slipped out the fire escape. All classic stuff. Took a taxi to Paddington, and caught the ten-thirty train to Milchester.’
‘Milchester? But that’s twelve miles away.’
‘By river, only four,’ Luke said. ‘He’d taken the trouble to buy a small boat and rent a mooring there some time ago. Under a false name, of course. It was a moonlit night, but he could have managed it in the dark, once his eyes grew accustomed to it. He had a small outboard motor, and he came down the Purle as smoothly as you please. Arrived just before midnight. Tied up, strolled up the lawn, and let himself into the house. He knew Mark was going out with Jennifer. There were no live-in servants at that time, remember. Mabel was quite alone, and delighted to see her darling husband. He told her the moonlight was beautiful, and took her out to see it. No doubt he made her giggle like a girl, all romantic and unexpected.’ Luke’s voice was bitter, for whatever Mabel Peacock Taubman had been, she had been murdered for gain by a cold and calculating bastard. It was his job to catch the killer. Contempt for the killer was a private affair, always to be kept inside, according to regulations. But he was tired, tonight. So damn tired.
‘He killed her,’ he said, simply. ‘Then he got back into his little boat and carried on downstream to where the Purle joins the Thames, and then to Reading, where he tied up at a boatyard and walked to the station. He had rented a locker where he kept a donkey jacket and cap. He caught a train around six, with some other working men, and arrived at Paddington in plenty of time to dump his disguise, and catch a tube train back to the club. His luck – and killers always need luck – was the confusion in our communications with the Met. They didn’t arrive at the club until eight, giving him just enough time to get back into bed and start “snoring like a pig”. In his original plan, he hadn’t expected the body to be found until morning, of course.’
‘Would you have got him, eventually?’ David asked.
‘I’d like to think so, yes.’
‘But, why me?’ Jennifer asked. ‘Why did he try to kill me – and nearly kill Frances instead?’
‘Because Mark had announced he intended to marry you. Taubman had killed twice to eliminate women who stood between him and the manor, and saw no reason to let another one get in his way. He’d lost no time once Mabel was dead, remember, in getting Mark to agree to making the manor and estate into a limited company, with him and Mark as the two directors. If Mark died, it would be all his.’
‘Would he have killed Mark, then?’
‘It’s very possible. Right after Win Frenholm’s murder, when the whole uproar about the “maniac” began, he got at Mark’s medication. Emptied out the capsules, substituted sugar. Mark took them regularly – but they did him no good. Gradually, under the stress of our investigation and then his mother’s death, Mark’s condition worsened, as Taubman had intended it should.’
‘Mark had started to get full of himself and a bit pushy,’ said Jennifer, remembering how he had been at lunch.
‘I gather he was arrogant and impatient with the builders and servants, too. Then he decided that you would marry him, and announced your engagement as a fait accompli. He couldn’t imagine you refusing him, I suppose,’ Luke said. ‘So Taubman tried to kill you – and failed, thank God. The failure worried him. He was afraid you (or Frances, as it turned out) might have recognised him. And so he decided it was time to end the game. He got Mark into a particularly excited state, talking about the plans for the manor and so on, then put LSD or something similar (he has some very odd friends in London) into a couple of his sleeping pills, and gave them to Mark. You saw the result. Taubman knew that when Mark was put away, the deaths would inevitably stop, and assumed we would draw our own conclusions about who the “Cotswold Butcher” had been. I have no doubt that when Mark was “cured” and released, he would finally have been eliminated. Perhaps a “suicide”, out of remorse? Taubman would have managed it somehow, and achieved his end at last. He loved the house beyond anything. He had to own the house, owning it obsessed him. He didn’t care about anything but the house, and getting his own way. Even to killing whatever stood between him and his desire. After the first death, what did it matter? It gets easier, you see. Easier to kill, each time.’ Luke looked at them, bleakly. ‘We can’t have that,’ he said. ‘That’s got to be stopped.’
‘Why was Fred Baldwin there last night?’ Jennifer asked. They had left the others inside, and were walking in the garden. Jennifer was ostensibly seeing him to his car. They were taking the long way round. And round.
‘He thought Mark had killed Win Frenholm,’ Luke said. ‘He’d worked it out – because of the car he’d heard start up. He knew Mark had an MG, and he decided – from the line of our questioning – that Win had had an affair with Mark. He tried to convince himself it wasn’t true – but in his heart of hearts he knew what she was, all right. Funny thing is, the MG he heard was Mark’s. Mark was driving off from in front of the Woolsack as Basil ran back up from the towpath to the High Street. Basil recognised the car, and decided there and then that Mark was the ideal one on whom to pin the murders. The fact that Mark had been so near the scene at around the right time was one of the many good reasons I suspected him, as it happens. Anyway, Basil stood in the shadows until Mark had passed, then went back over the bridge, across the lawn, and in through the back door in time to greet Mark coming through the front. Luck of the devil, they call it, I believe.’
‘Poor Mark,’ Jennifer murmured, remembering his confusion and fear as the ambulance doors had closed behind him.
‘Yes, well, Fred Baldwin had formed this idea about Mark killing the Frenholm girl, and wanted to confront him. Maybe even kill him – but I doubt that. He’s a decent man. I think he would have beaten him up a bit, and then brought him to us. But Mark never came out into the grounds alone – until last night.’
‘And then he came out with a vengeance,’ Jennifer said, sadly.
‘At least he’s not really crazy, just unbalanced through being deprived of his normal medication, plus the dose of LSD. Fortunately, it was a happy trip for him, according to the consultant at the hospital. He’ll recover,’ Luke said, evenly. ‘And when he does, there will be plenty to keep him busy.’ He chuckled. ‘Including getting your car out of the dry moat.’
‘Wasn’t Frances wonderful?’ Jennifer said.
‘I wish I’d seen it,’ Luke agreed. They walked on companionably, neither wanting to end or change the situation just yet. It was Jennifer who spoke, eventually.
‘You know, Frances told me this morning that she thought it had all been about love, really,�
�� Jennifer said, reflectively. ‘Different kinds of love – possessive love, obsessive love, perverted love, frustrated love, love going wrong, getting twisted and changed, destroying things, destroying people. It’s very sad. Love shouldn’t be like that.’
He stopped abruptly and took her into his arms. She was shivering. ‘You should have worn a jacket.’
‘I don’t feel cold inside,’ she said, into his shoulder. ‘Quite the opposite, in fact.’
He tilted her chin up with a gentle finger. ‘I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear that. So I’ll show you,’ he said, and kissed her.
After a moment, she pulled away. ‘Luke – we have to talk.’
‘That sounds ominous,’ he said. He kept his voice calm and natural in the darkness, but her tone, her words, and the hesitation in her body told him things he had hoped never to know. Still the dreamer, aren’t you? he scolded himself. Duck – here comes reality.
‘After what’s happened – about my accusing David and all – I don’t know whether I’ll be able to go on working with him. He came back exhausted, and so resentful. Oh, I’m not blaming you, I’m blaming me, entirely. But if we had differences before, they’re nothing to what I’ve created now. The trouble is, I want to go on working here. Uncle Wally must retire, and the practice is growing.’
‘I want you, Jenny. I want to marry you.’
‘Yes, I know. And a great deal of me wants to marry you,’ she said.
‘What do I get?’ he asked, trying to keep it light. ‘Nose, ears, and elbows?’
‘Heart, mostly,’ she smiled. ‘It’s my head that’s causing the difficulty.’
‘The same head that made you run away from me twenty-two years ago?’
‘Same head. I’m a doctor, and I never want to stop being a doctor.’
‘That’s no problem.’
‘But I want to be a doctor here. I want to work things out with David. I’ll never be settled until I’ve made that work.’
‘That’s a problem,’ he agreed, reluctantly.
‘So – can we just – wait a bit?’
‘Could you be more specific?’ he asked. ‘What exactly has to wait? The wedding? Fair enough. You and I? Not so fair, Jenny. I’m no plaster saint.’
She came up to him and gently touched his face, rested her head on his chest, subservient in this and only this. ‘Neither am I,’ she told him. ‘And Cottingham isn’t so very far away, after all. Don’t you get days off?’ She paused, delicately. ‘Nights off?’
He stood very still for a moment, and then he sighed, relief and regret mingled with a smile. ‘This is going to cost me a fortune in petrol,’ he told her.
It was a kind of capitulation.
The river Purle murmured between its banks, glinting here and there with the reflection of the waning moon between racing clouds. The water’s surface was ruffled by a fleeting wind that danced away and then came back, stronger every time. Later, rain would come.
In the High Street the display of bath salts and bile pills in Pelmer’s glowed under the fluorescent lights, one of which was flickering and would soon go out.
The lights of the houses in town went out, too, one by one. They were already out in the craft centre, at the manor, and in Frances Murphy’s flat. In the hills above the town, an owl swooped across a rustling field. Moments later a mouse shrieked and was still. The clock in St Mary’s tower struck midnight, then one, then two.
Wychford slept.
At peace.
At last.
If you enjoyed The Wychford Murders don’t miss out on the second book in Paula Gosling’s Luke Abbott series:
DEATH PENALTIES
After her husband’s tragic death Tess Leland has finally started to piece her life back together – but someone is determined to take it apart again . . .
Whilst looking after her ill son Max and trying to re-kick start her career as an interior designer, sinister occurrences are starting to make Tess frightened for their lives. A break in, a burglary, threatening phone calls from unknown sources and vicious practical jokes all form a terrorising campaign with an anonymous culprit – could this be the person responsible for her husband’s death?
It’s for Sergeant Tim Nightingale and his boss DCI Luke Abbott to find out in Paula Gosling’s taut, gripping and suspenseful mystery Death Penalties, the second novel in her Luke Abbott series.
Turn the page to read the captivating first chapter now . . .
ONE
‘Dad! You’re driving too fast!’
He didn’t answer the boy. He was driving too fast, but he didn’t know what else to do, because the dark green hatchback that had been following them since they left the house was gaining ground. He couldn’t make out the driver’s face, for light glared in his rear-view mirror, reducing the man in the car behind him to a menacing silhouette. He could just see the pale hands where they gripped the wheel.
Whoever he was, he drove very well, keeping pace, and closing the gap a little, every minute or so.
Maybe he was after Max.
They wouldn’t. They couldn’t be that angry. Could they?
He put his foot down harder.
It was a long, straight street, unusual in this part of London. Cars lined each side of it without a break, squeezed together right up to the crossing. Large ash trees overhung it, their branches thick with leaves. The warm summer rain that had been falling all day had ceased only moments before, leaving everything dripping and sparkling in new sunlight. The sky was opening, the gunmetal grey splitting like curtains to reveal vibrant blue. The sudden, unexpected illumination seemed even greater against the retreating clouds, each crest a cauliflower billow of fire-edged white.
Their brightness blinded him.
That was why he didn’t see the old man step out.
When Max shouted, he straight-legged the brake and clutch pedals, twisted the wheel hard, too hard, felt the wheels lock and the tyres skid on the wet surface, felt the jolt as they hit the front end of the last parked car, felt the roll begin, saw the street become the sky with the astonished face of the old man drifting past like a pink and white balloon, heard the incredible screech of metal scouring the asphalt with a scream not unlike his own, high and thin. The car landed on its side, still moving forward.
Clockwork, running down.
A film, frame by frame.
Suspended in his seat belt, he saw the rush of gutter water surge towards him across the bonnet, followed by the approach of the yellow-painted edge of the kerb with its overhanging fringe of grass, each muddy green blade sharp and distinct. Then came the cracked cement of the pavement, with a crumpled crisp bag, bright blue and red, lying on it.
The bag caught in the edge of the windscreen.
He stared at it.
Read the words ‘Ready-salted’.
It was all so clear.
And then they hit the tree.
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Paula Gosling
Paula Gosling was born in Detroit and moved to England in 1964, where she has lived ever since. She worked as a copywriter and a freelance copy consultant before becoming a full time writer in 1979. Since then she has published close to twenty novels and has served as the Crime Writers’ Association Chairman. Her debut novel, A Running Duck, won the John Creasey Award and has been adapted into the films Cobra, starring Sylvester Stallone, and Fair Game, starring Cindy Crawford. The first novel in her popular Jack Stryker Series, A Monkey Puzzle, also won the Golden Dagger award for the best crime novel of 1985.
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First published 1986 by Macmillan
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Copyright © Paula Gosling 1986
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