The Lately Deceased

by Bernard Knight

  ‘All right, all right, constable, I get the drift,’ Meredith replied wearily. ‘Now, let’s try again, shall we? Hello, what goes on here?’

  The car had lumbered into the straight section of drive that ended in the lodge gates and as they approached they saw the old keeper, still clad in sou’wester and oilskins and looking like a lifeboatman lost in the heart of Oxfordshire, pushing the gates shut.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ called Meredith through the car window as they drove up. ‘Leave those gates open; there’ll be a lot of cars coming through soon.’

  ‘Mr Walker said to shut them and not to open them for anyone,’ retorted the old man.

  ‘Well, I’m telling you to open them and to keep them open. Otherwise you’ll be in right trouble. Now, where’s your telephone?’

  The lodge keeper looked stubbornly truculent.

  ‘He said I was to shut ’em, and shut ’em I’m going to, mister.’

  Meredith got out of the car and took the refractory old man by the shoulder.

  ‘Listen, Dad. I’ll get you locked up for life if you don’t get these gates open and keep them like it! We’re the police and I’m in no mood for arguing. Now where’s your phone?’

  ‘I’ve got no phone, only one up to the house.’

  ‘Damn! Damn! Damn!’ said Meredith quietly and the old gatekeeper grinned contentedly. He’d won the second round, even if he’d lost the first.

  ‘Any luck with that radio?’ Meredith said to Stammers, putting his head into the car.

  ‘Not a thing, unless you want a taxi!’

  ‘We may have to settle for that at this rate. All right, Constable, heave this car round and let’s get back to the house. The front tyre is pretty well off the rim, so take it steady.’

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Back at the house, everybody was gathered in the hall. Masters was sitting on the stairs, his coat off and his face chalky white. Lena Wright was doing things with clean handkerchiefs and a length of electric flex for a tourniquet. Meredith hurried over to him. ‘How is it, boy?’ he asked with kindly brusqueness.

  The sergeant was holding a cigarette between shaky fingers as Lena put the finishing touches to the improvised bandages. ‘It’s my arm, sir. Not so bad.’ he smiled weakly. ‘It doesn’t hurt.’

  ‘We’ve rung for a doctor and an ambulance. He should be here in a few minutes. You sit quiet for a bit,’ said Lena.

  ‘What happened to Al Capone?’ asked Abe Franklin, coming out of the sitting room with a tray full of large whiskies. ‘I reckon he won’t mind if we hit his liquor. We all need it, especially those two.’

  He nodded towards the pair on the stairs; Masters and Eve Arden, who was sitting a little higher up with her head against the comforting bulk of Geoff Tate.

  ‘I’m afraid he’s got away for the time being, but he won’t get far. We’re getting out a call to block the roads.’

  ‘There are a hell of a lot of roads round here to block,’ said Geoff. ‘I’m still quite shattered by all this, Superintendent. Did he really kill Margaret? I can’t believe it, even though I heard him confess it.’

  ‘He did – and killed Colin Moore.’

  Stammers came from the phone and took Meredith aside.

  ‘I’ve been talking to the local boys,’ he said. ‘They are going all out to get him. They didn’t like it much when I told them he’d shot our sergeant. They’re setting up blocks on all roads in a twenty-mile radius.’

  ‘You got the details of the car from Tate, did you?’

  ‘Yes, he reckons he had about six gallons of petrol still in the tank, so Walker can get a fair distance without a refill. It’s a nasty position, with that woman as hostage. I suppose she really was unwilling, Super?’

  ‘It didn’t look like a fake to me. There was no play-acting in what she did to his face. If you ask me he’s quite capable of blowing a hole in his girlfriend if he gets cornered. I’d better get on to London.’

  He went off to the phone and Stammers went over to speak to Masters.

  ‘How are you feeling now, lad?’ he asked.

  ‘Better every minute, thanks to these “medical comforts”!’ The sergeant held up a glass of Gordon Walker’s whisky. ‘What hopes are there of catching him?’

  ‘We’ll catch him all right; he hasn’t a chance in hell of beating the rap. What worries me is that he may well take it out on the woman.’

  If they had but known it, at that moment the same woman was taking it out on the man – and less than five miles away.

  As the big Humber sped away from the lodge gates, gathering speed on the deserted open road, Pearl sat tensely in the nearside seat. Gordon had no clear idea of where he was driving. He wanted merely to get away from the house as fast as he could and have time to think. He drove as fast as the road and the darkness would allow, with the gun nestling between his legs.

  The road opened out a mile beyond Long Manor and he put his foot down until the speedometer was hovering on the seventy mark. Soon they arrived at a junction and he turned onto a major road and headed west.

  Pearl sat silently, her head bowed, but her eyes watching every move the man made. After a time, he glanced sideways at her and spoke.

  ‘Sorry about all that fracas in the house, Pearl,’ he said soberly. ‘Regrettable but necessary.’

  He reached out and gently took her hand in his. She offered no resistance and he went on.

  ‘Am I forgiven, my dear?’

  A cold shiver ran down Pearl’s spine; he had asked the question just as if they were making up a lovers’ tiff. Playing for time, she turned her head and smiled at him, then moved closer to him and put her other hand on his knee.

  ‘That’s more like it, darling,’ he said relaxing. ‘I knew you’d understand … hey, you damned bitch!’

  His voice changed to sudden fury as Pearl shot out her hand from his knee to the ignition switch and plucked out the key.

  The car checked instantly – deprived of its power and with the dead engine braking it hard, it swerved and juddered until Walker slammed down on the clutch and brakes. Pearl took advantage of the seconds in which he was thus occupied to pitch the key into the back of the car. Then she dived for the pistol she knew was lying between his knees.

  The next moment, she was wrestling for her life as Gordon abandoned the car to its own devices to fight for possession of the gun.

  ‘You little bitch!’ he screamed. ‘This is where you get it once and for all.’

  His fingers closed round the barrel of the gun and, with his overriding strength, he began to wrest it from her grasp. Desperately, she clung on as her hand was bent agonizingly back. Just when she knew she could stand no more, the front wheels of the car struck the grass verge. The heavy vehicle mounted the strip of turf and rolled head first into the ditch beyond.

  In that moment, Gordon involuntarily released his hold on the weapon and Pearl acted without a second’s hesitation. She raised the automatic and fired point-blank into Gordon’s chest, and again and again, until the new magazine was empty.

  The deafening noise of the shots and the smell of the explosive in that confined space, to say nothing of the appalling presence of the dead man, drove Pearl out into the night. She forced the door open and slid down into the ditch. The sodden undergrowth and a torrent of muddy water drenched her legs but she was beyond caring.

  She clambered up onto the road and ran in the direction they had been going. She ran wildly for a few yards, sobbing into the wind and veering blindly from side to side, the gun still clenched tightly in her hand. Running and sobbing, she plunged on up the black abyss of the road, until she had covered several hundred yards. It was then she saw car headlights approaching from the far distance.

  She quickened her pace until she was running madly towards them. The lights came rapidly nearer and soon were bathing her in their bright glare. The car lurched to a stop in front of her and two uniformed police jumped out to meet her.

 
‘All right, miss, we’ve got you. Everything’s all right now!’

  The first man put his arm around her shoulders while the other gently prised the pistol from her grasp. They led her to the car, where a plain-clothes man was holding open the rear door for her. She was shuddering like a terrified child. As she sank back gratefully into the cushions, the driver turned to his companion.

  ‘She must be the woman they described in that general call. I wonder where the bloke is?’

  It was Pearl who answered the question.

  ‘He’s down there,’ she said. ‘In the car – he’s dead! He tried to kill me, so I shot him.’

  The big black car slid off to look for the remains of Gordon Walker.

  Two hours later, the sitting room of Long Manor was thronged with people drinking coffee poured from a great steaming jug that Bodger had made. Masters was sitting next to the local doctor, who had dressed his wound and said it was the nearest miss to a large artery that he’d seen since he was in the Eighth Army. Meredith had undertaken to drop his sergeant off at a hospital on the way home for a further check-up.

  Several uniformed Oxfordshire police were there, including a chief inspector and the two officers who had picked up Pearl on the road. They had brought her back to the house and she was now in bed with a large dose of a sedative, Mrs Bodger sitting with her.

  The Leighs had assumed the duties of hosts, and Webster was revelling in the fascinating work of bartender. Geoff stood near the hearth with his arm around Eve, pressing Meredith for more information.

  ‘Come on, Superintendent, tell us the whole story. The man’s dead so you can’t fob us off with all that jargon about us being witnesses at his trial. Tell us the grounds on which you got a warrant for Gordon Walker’s arrest?’

  Meredith sipped his coffee while he considered this.

  ‘Well, there’s a good deal in what you say, Mr Tate,’ he admitted. ‘Not a lot of harm can come from filling in some of the details now, I suppose.’

  ‘Did you know all along that Colin Moore didn’t kill Margaret?’ demanded Barbara Leigh.

  ‘No, ma’am, I did not. Up to the time of the inquest, I believed he had killed her, though I must confess I was not entirely happy about it. I didn’t like our reports on the suicide note, though the suicide set-up itself was most convincingly staged. Even now I’ve no proof of how it was contrived.’

  ‘Well, I can confirm that Gordon did kill Colin,’ Eve interrupted, ‘because he told Pearl and me so, in that dreadful bedroom.’

  ‘Yes, by then I was sure of it,’ said Meredith. ‘He must have done it within twenty-four hours of killing his wife. He was supposed to have spent that Friday night with you, was he not, Mr Tate?’

  ‘Yes, he did.’

  ‘Were you with him all the time? I mean, could he have slipped out without your knowing?’

  ‘I wasn’t with him any of the time,’ Geoff replied. ‘After you turned us loose on the Friday afternoon, I spent the rest of the day with Miss Arden. Both of us went back to my place at about eleven o’clock with the idea of cheering Gordon up. As a matter of fact, I had a bit of a conscience for having left him on his own for so long – but when we got there, he wasn’t around. He had left a note saying he had gone out and that I was not to wait up for him.’

  ‘And did you wait up for him?’

  ‘No, I didn’t. I drove Miss Arden home and, as he still wasn’t back when I got in, I went to bed.’

  ‘Did you hear him come in later?’

  ‘No, I heard nothing at all. But he was there all right the next morning.’

  ‘Did you ask him where he had been?’

  ‘Yes. He said he had been tramping the streets. He was clearly pretty het up, and I can’t say I was altogether surprised.’

  ‘He told Pearl and me that he spent that night at Hampstead in the garden of the Moores’ flat,’ Eve chimed in. ‘Colin hadn’t then been traced and Gordon wanted to get at him before the police did. He was hiding close by when the constable accosted Colin, and he was still there when Colin was driven off in the police car. He was still there much later when Colin came home in a taxi.’

  ‘This is most interesting, Miss Arden,’ Meredith said, turning on the charm. ‘It fills the gaps in my investigation, so please go on.’

  ‘Well, when Colin came back, Gordon was waiting for him. I don’t know what sort of story Gordon pitched him but they entered the flat together, and were sufficiently pally to start drinking together when they got inside. Gordon said he got Colin very drunk – I shouldn’t think that was very difficult as I gather Colin bad been drinking all day. Then Gordon sold Colin the idea that he needed a pick-me-up and produced some doped concoction that soon put him out cold.’

  ‘Walker drugged Moore good and hard,’ Meredith confirmed ‘The pathologist found massive quantities of a barbiturate drug inside him. Its purpose, of course, was to keep him quiet while Walker rigged up his gas chamber and typed the note.’

  He shook his head regretfully. ‘I accepted that note against my better judgment; but I was influenced by the fact that it was the only loose stone in an otherwise stable structure.’

  ‘What made you change your mind, then?’ Geoff asked. ‘What made you decide today that Gordon was your man?’

  ‘It was due in part to Martin Myers, who has been lying unconscious in Whittington Hospital since the night Mrs Walker was murdered. Just over a week ago, he made a fleeting return to consciousness – or partial consciousness – during which time he repeated a few words which might have had some bearing on Mrs Walker’s death. Or they may just have been the ramblings of a sick mind. We couldn’t tell for sure and neither could the doctors who were attending him. Either explanation was equally likely. Well, I could afford to take no chances; I had to play it safe and so I asked for an adjournment of the inquest in the hope that Myers would make a fuller recovery in the interval, or that the line of investigation suggested by his mumbling might bring something new to light.’

  ‘Do tell us what his mumbling suggested to you,’ Eve begged.

  ‘Well, his words were “poor Margaret – I must tell them”. Now what, if anything, did he mean by that? As I said just now, it could have had no deeper significance than the shock of Mrs Walker’s sudden death coming to the surface of his subconscious mind. But it could have had a direct bearing on the circumstances of her murder. It was the word “them” that worried me; who did he mean by “them”. If he meant us, the police, the inference was that he was in possession of information that ought to be made known to the coroner. But what that information was, we could only guess.’

  Meredith stopped to collect his thoughts.

  ‘What then?’ asked Geoff Tate.

  ‘During the next few days we set aside our earlier conclusions and worked on the assumption that someone other than Colin Moore was the killer, and that Martin Myers knew who that someone was. We re-examined all the evidence, rechecked all the witness statements, and got precisely nowhere. The only thing in Moore’s favour was the amateurish typing of the suicide note, and even that could be explained by the effect of the alcohol and drugs that he had taken. Moore just had to be the killer – everything pointed to it.’

  ‘So what changed your mind?’ asked the indefatigable Barbara.

  ‘This morning, two things happened which changed the whole picture. The first of these was that we got the laboratory reports on the skewer believed to be the murder weapon, and the second was that Martin Myers recovered consciousness again, and this time there could be no doubt as to his lucidity.’

  ‘What did he say this time?’ Geoff asked.

  ‘He told us a great deal, the gist of which was that he had spent most of the early part of the party with Margaret Walker, during which time she became a little tipsy and had made him the unwilling recipient of her confidences. Near to tears one minute and giggling foolishly the next, she told him of her life with Walker and of her detestation of Mrs Moore. She said she wanted to hurt Walker a
s he had hurt her and generally carried on in the way one expects of a woman scorned. She talked about the early days of their marriage, about how she had ridden Walker on a tight rein when she had held the purse strings and he was nearly broke – and how he had later escaped her restraining hand when he became financially independent of her. Her only hold on him now was her capital. He wanted that, she said – he’d always wanted it, but from now on she was going to make damned certain he never got it. Tomorrow she would make a new will. That would finish him for good. And so she went on, at great length. Poor Myers, not knowing how to escape, was forced to listen to these revelations and was further embarrassed by her attitude of extravagant affection towards him every time she thought Walker was looking in their direction. Spite, jealousy and disappointed womanhood, doubtless inflamed by unaccustomed alcohol, aroused the instincts of the vixen in this normally mild-natured woman.’

  Stammers thought that he had never before heard Old Nick being so loquacious.

  ‘More than anything now, she wanted to hurt Walker, and she wanted Myers to see her do it. To this end, she got unsteadily to her feet, and invited Myers to enjoy the dismay on Walker’s face when she told him what she proposed to do. But, in the event, Walker showed none of the dejection that his wife had forecast. Apparently, he listened patiently to what she had to say, nodding his head once or twice, as though in agreement, and then quietly sent her back to where Myers was waiting. Of drama there had been none.’

  The audience was now hanging on to the superintendent’s every word.

  ‘Of course, while Margaret was alive all this meant very little to Myers; as far as he was concerned Margaret was just a disappointed woman whose tongue had been loosened by drink. But once Margaret was dead it took on a new significance. Just how significant Myers didn’t know, because, by the time he left the party, there was no suggestion of foul play. Nevertheless on his way home that night, it occurred to him how very timely Mrs Walker’s death was from Walker’s point of view. He was so impressed by the coincidence that, instead of retiring to his bed, he took a walk round the neighbourhood to think things out. And, perhaps because he was so engrossed in his thoughts, when he did return to his basement flat, he fell down the stairs leading to it.’