Crime Writers and Other Animals

by Simon Brett

  She opened her mouth as if to reply, but then hesitated, uncertain which way to jump.

  ‘So you haven’t seen the supposed body, Inspector?’ asked George.

  ‘No, I came straight in here to talk to Mrs Marshall. My colleagues went to examine the garage.’

  ‘You’d’ve thought they’d’ve come straight back out again if they hadn’t found anything in there . . . wouldn’t you?’ George observed casually.

  It took a moment for the implications of his words to sink in, and the point registered more quickly with Natalie than with the Inspector.

  ‘Oh no!’ she screamed, rising to her feet. ‘Oh, my God, no!’

  And, moving like a thing possessed, she rushed out of the cottage to the garage.

  The police had taken Trevor’s body out of the car and laid it on a sheet of plastic on the cement floor. Incongruously, he was dressed in his Father Christmas suit. His dead face was hideously congested and contorted.

  Natalie threw herself down on the ground, taking the stiff, cold body in her arms. Sobs shuddered through her frame. ‘The bastard!’ she muttered. ‘The heartless, cruel bastard!’

  The Scene of Crime team continued their investigations outside the cottage. A WPC comforted Natalie Marshall with sweet tea and sympathy in the kitchen, while in the sitting room Inspector Jeavons questioned her husband for background information about Trevor Roache’s death. George didn’t need any prompting; he was anxious to be as helpful as he could.

  ‘Trevor was Natalie’s lover, yes. He was the one we split up over. I suppose knowing we were back together again and that he had no more chance with Natalie must have made him do this dreadful thing.’

  ‘Did he strike you as a potentially suicidal type?’

  ‘I didn’t know him well – only met him a couple of times when he came here to do building work for us – but Natalie was clearly worried that he might do something like this.’

  ‘What makes you say that, Mr Marshall?’

  ‘She said as much in a message she left on my answering machine yesterday morning.’

  ‘Oh? Presumably that message would have been erased by now?’

  ‘Well . . .’ George Marshall looked sheepish. ‘In normal circumstances it would have been, yes, but the fact is . . . As you know, our marriage wasn’t going very well, and I did actually get to the point of consulting a solicitor about the possibility of divorce. He advised me to try and get some recordings of conversations with Natalie about Trevor and . . . well, her phone message more or less fitted the bill, so I – it seems ridiculous now Natalie and I are back together again – but I did actually take the tape out of the answering machine and put in a new one.’

  ‘You wouldn’t by any chance have that tape with you, Mr Marshall?’

  ‘Well, as it happens . . .’ George reached down to his briefcase and produced the tape and a small cassette player.

  The Inspector listened to Natalie’s message impassively, though his eyebrow twitched at the words, ‘My affair with Trevor’s come to an end. And he’s . . . taking it very badly. I’m . . . I’m really worried about what he might do, George.’

  When the message had ended, George Marshall said rather diffidently, ‘Actually, there is another tape . . .’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Well, when Natalie summoned me down here last night, I thought we were in for some kind of confrontation, so I followed my solicitor’s advice and . . . using this cassette player hidden in my briefcase . . . actually recorded a bit of our conversation . . .’

  ‘You’d better play it,’ said Inspector Jeavons quietly.

  Again the detective tried not to show any reaction, but was unable to suppress a flicker of interest when George’s voice asked, ‘So you’re genuinely afraid he might try to kill himself?’, to which Natalie replied, ‘I hope not. I hope the thought of his two little kids’ll stop him, but . . . yes, I have worried about it. He’s very unstable.’

  ‘So . . .’ the Inspector said when the recording ended, ‘it does begin to look as if the victim was predisposed to suicide . . . particularly when your evidence is taken in conjunction with the letters we found in his pocket . . .’

  He held out a transparent folder through which scraps of torn letters were visible. As if he’d never seen them before, George read the words, ‘. . . so far as I’m concerned, anything there ever was between us has long gone . . .’

  ‘That is your wife’s handwriting, is it, Mr Marshall?’

  George sighed. ‘Yes, I’m afraid it is. Hard not to feel a bit sorry for Mr Roache, isn’t it?’

  ‘He also left a note.’ The Inspector produced another transparent folder, through which could be seen a printed sheet which began, ‘TO WHOEVER FINDS ME – and I hope it’s you, Natalie. . .’ At the bottom of the page was scrawled in biro the name ‘Trevor’.

  ‘Of course, we’ll have to check the signature’s genuine, but I don’t have many worries on that score. No, Mr Marshall, I’d say we’ve got an open-and-shut case of suicide here.’

  But during the afternoon a few details emerged which made the case look less open and shut. The signature on the suicide note was found to match no existing samples of Trevor Roache’s handwriting; it began to look increasingly like a rather crude forgery.

  Then there was the mud, grass and cement dust found adhering to the back of the dead man’s Father Christmas costume. These traces suggested that, rather than walking voluntarily to the garage and to his death, Trevor Roache had quite possibly been dragged there while unconscious.

  What had rendered him insensible was quickly found. His children, before being taken into the care of their grandparents, confirmed that they had left out a glass of brandy and a mince pie for Father Christmas. No, they had not put any brandy butter in the mince pie. And yet the dead man’s stomach was found to contain traces of brandy butter, heavily laced with a sleeping draught. The police found some corresponding brandy butter, also drugged, in a supermarket pot in Natalie Marshall’s fridge.

  Marks on the frosty ground between Trevor’s cottage and the Marshalls’ garage doors supported the hypothesis that his body had been dragged across the intervening ground.

  Most damning of all were the deep heel prints left by the person who had dragged him. They had been made by the sharp points of stiletto heels.

  The police hadn’t got quite enough to arrest her on the spot, but it was no surprise when they asked Natalie Marshall to accompany them to the station for further questioning. Before she was taken away, she was allowed a brief moment alone with her husband. They stood in the garden, out of earshot of the police, in the dusk of Christmas Day, the frosty air prickling at their cheeks and fairy lights twinkling overhead.

  ‘You bastard!’ Natalie hissed. ‘You won’t get away with this.’

  George blinked mildly through his spectacles. ‘Oh, I think I will. You can’t tell them what really happened without incriminating yourself for attempting to murder me.’

  ‘Attempted murder would get a lighter sentence than murder.’

  ‘Sure. Well, that’s a decision you’ll have to make for yourself. Anyway, if you’re already thinking of plea-bargaining, it looks like you’ve accepted what’s going to happen to you . . . darling.’ He smiled an infuriating smile.

  ‘God, I hate you!’ Natalie seethed. ‘I’ll tell the police how much I hate you.’

  ‘They’ll think you’re just saying that to divert suspicion. They have my word for it that we’re reconciled . . .’ he chuckled, ‘. . . and had wonderful sex last night to celebrate the fact.’

  ‘How did you do it, George?’

  Her husband shrugged modestly. ‘I knew what you were planning. I brought brandy and brandy butter with me, and, while I was getting our scrambled egg last night, substituted mine for yours, putting most of your drugged stuff into the supermarket pot in the fridge. So I was eating ordinary brandy butter and drinking ordinary brandy.’

  ‘And what I destroyed last night was the supermarke
t stuff?’

  George nodded cheerfully. ‘That’s right. Then I just pretended to pass out and stayed that way, while you fetched Trevor and manhandled me into the garage. I knew it’d take a while before the fumes in the car built up to noxious levels, so I stayed for five minutes after you’d closed the garage doors, then let myself out.

  ‘All I had to do after that was wait till Trevor went back to his cottage and follow him. Through the window I watched him with his kids, saw them putting out the mince pie and brandy by the fireplace for Father Christmas. When he went up to put the kids to bed, I nipped in, replaced the brandy with some of your drugged stuff and put a huge dollop of doctored brandy butter in the mince pie.

  ‘Thereafter it was just a matter of waiting and watching. Eventually Trevor ate and drank the stuff. Pretty soon after that, he fell asleep, out cold in his armchair. I’d brought a pair of your stilettos with me for the purpose, and wore them as I dragged him across to the garage. The rest you know.’

  ‘Not all of it,’ Natalie objected. ‘I still swear it was your body I found in the car this morning.’

  ‘Oh yes. When I heard you getting up, I moved Trevor’s body out – bit tricky that, he was already stiff with rigor mortis – but I managed. I tucked him under the front of the Volvo and got into the driver’s seat myself. I knew you wouldn’t look too closely once you’d identified me. Then, as soon as you’d gone, I got out and put Trevor’s body back in place.’

  The light of hatred burned in Natalie’s eyes as she stared at her husband. ‘But how? How did you know what I was planning?’

  George smiled complacently. ‘Wasn’t difficult. You’ve never had that much imagination, Natalie. As soon as I heard you mention the tumble-drier hose on the answering machine, I knew exactly what your murder method would be.’ In response to her quizzical look, he went on, ‘Because it was exactly how your first husband died, wasn’t it? Even down to the detail of using a tumble-drier hose.’ George Marshall let out another gleeful chuckle. ‘I should know. I was the one who fixed that.’

  All colour drained from his wife’s cheeks. ‘You? You killed Robert? You mean, it wasn’t suicide?’

  ‘No, of course it wasn’t. You’d never have married me while he was alive, and I very much wanted you to marry me. Generally speaking, Natalie,’ he concluded smugly, ‘I get the things I want.’

  ‘But . . .’ Now there was a pleading look in his wife’s eyes. ‘Don’t you still want me, George?’

  ‘Oh no,’ he replied. ‘Not any more. Not since you took up with Trevor. I found that very hurtful, you know, and I was determined to punish you for what you’d done to me. Now I’ve had my proper revenge, I’ll give you that divorce you so wanted, darling. No percentage for me being married to someone who’s in prison, is there?’

  It was at that moment Inspector Jeavons came forward to lead Natalie Marshall to the waiting car.

  From his sitting-room window, George Marshall watched the police convoy disappearing down the lane. He dialled his mistress’s number. And when she answered, he said, ‘Happy Christmas, darling.’

  BEST BEHAVIOUR

  I know how to behave. I do. That’s one thing my papa taught me. It’s really the most important thing he left me with – knowing the right way to behave.

  And I never thought it was cruel. He had my best interests at heart. I know he did. If there was any cruelty involved, then he was only being cruel to be kind. He often used that expression. ‘Edmund,’ he’d say, ‘I’m only being cruel to be kind.’ And I respected that. Even though the things he did sometimes hurt, I could still respect his reasons for doing them.

  It’s a matter of justice, you see. Being fair to people. Not just being fair to yourself – that could so easily become selfishness – but being fair to everyone else you come into contact with. ‘We’re social beings,’ Papa would say. ‘Humankind’re social beings, and one’s success as a member of humankind is demonstrated by how well one relates to other human beings. You have to behave, Edmund. Never knowingly do harm to another member of the human race.’

  Those were the values Papa dinned into me from a very early age and, from the time I could understand what he was talking about, I very quickly came to respect what he stood for.

  He was entirely consistent, you see. His rules were clear. He never punished me for something that I didn’t know at the time – or at least understood pretty soon afterwards – was wrong. ‘Bad behaviour must never go unpunished,’ Papa used to say. ‘Otherwise it’s bound to lead to worse behaviour.’

  Papa didn’t have any truck with the view that, equally, good behaviour should be rewarded. ‘Good behaviour should be instinctive. Good behaviour brings its own reward. Though, in fact, for you, Edmund, good behaviour is not good enough. Any son of mine must always be on his best behaviour.’

  So that’s what I always aspired to. And, most of the time, achieved. When I fell short of Papa’s high standards – no, of my high standards (‘It’s within you, Edmund,’ he always used to say. ‘It should be instinctive within yourself.’) – then I knew punishment was inevitable. But it was perfectly fair. I knew the rules. I’d broken them. I had failed as a member of humankind.

  Papa himself avoided doing unwitting harm to other members of the human race by not having a lot to do with them. We didn’t see many other people as I was growing up. There was just Papa, Mama and me. ‘We don’t need other people,’ Papa used to say. ‘We’re self-sufficient. We are fortunate – unlike a lot of the poor bastards out there – to be a secure, loving family unit.’

  And he was right – we were fortunate. Money was never a problem – we always had enough to eat, we lived in a nice house, I was sent to a private school. It was all very nice.

  And I’m proud to say, Mama and Papa never had any of the problems with me that you read about other families having with growing children. They were never going to see my name in the papers . . . not, that is, until this current business. And now they’re both dead, so it’s not as if any amount of cruel lies in the tabloids can cause them any anxiety. Not now. Not any more.

  My father’s teaching stood me in good stead, though, you know. I didn’t backslide after he died. No, the training Papa had given me was so good that Mama never had to raise her voice to me. I was permanently on my best behaviour.

  But I don’t want to sound like I’m a goody-goody, not to give that impression, no. I do have my . . . I was about to say ‘vices’, but I think ‘vice’ is probably too strong a word. ‘Vice’ means doing things to other people, body things, things with your secret bits. And I’ve never felt the urge to do any of that, don’t understand why people make such a fuss about it. No, for what I do, ‘indulgences’ is the word I prefer. Yes, I do have indulgences.

  There are only two, really. Two big ones. They’re hot buttered toast with golden syrup on, and Children’s BBC. And, well, actually, now I come to think of it, there is sort of a third. My parents always hated the idea of my name being shortened, but now I tell people to call me not ‘Edmund’, but ‘Eddie’.

  All right, you could say I’m reacting, greedily taking the things I wasn’t allowed when I was a child, but I don’t think mine’re too bad, as indulgences go. Other people do much worse things.

  And by Papa’s rules . . . you know, about not doing harm to another member of humankind . . . well, I can’t honestly think that my indulgences harm anyone. No matter how much Children’s BBC I watch and video, no matter how much hot buttered toast with golden syrup I eat, nobody else gets hurt by it.

  Mind you, the golden syrup does make me fat. I was always big – used to get rather unkind things said about my size when I was at school – but since Mama died, I have got a lot bigger. She used to keep an eye on how much golden syrup I ate, used to say, ‘Hold back, Edmund, enough is enough, you know,’ but since she died . . . well, there’s no one to stop me. But, like I said, nobody gets hurt by it.

  I’m lucky. I know I’m lucky. My parents left me enough money
so that I won’t ever have to work. Probably that’s just as well, because the few interviews I did have for jobs didn’t turn out very well. I think my size put people off, partly, and then they did seem to ask very difficult questions. I admit there are a lot of things I don’t know about, and the subjects on which I am good . . . like Children’s BBC . . . well, they didn’t ask about them. The experience rather put me off applying for other jobs.

  But I’m lucky, too, in that I have friends. Not that many, but there are some children round where I live and I get on well with them. They know about Children’s BBC, you see, so we’ve got things to talk about. I often meet them in the park, near the children’s playground. I’m too big to go on any of the swings or anything . . . I’d probably break them if I did, I’m such a big lump . . . but it’s a good place to meet the children.

  I get on better with them when they’re on their own. I buy sweets for them. Never go out without a couple of bags of jelly babies in my pockets. The children like those. (So do I, actually!) But I only give them sweets when they’re on their own. Their parents don’t seem to like the children talking to me. Sometimes they say rather cruel things. Things that wouldn’t pass muster under Papa’s rules. I’m another member of humankind, and the things they say do do harm to me. What’s more, I think they do it knowingly.

  Still, in the park I quite often see children on their own, so it’s not all bad. I tell them to call me ‘Eddie’. I like it when I hear their little voices call me ‘Eddie’. Of course, the children get bigger and seem to lose interest in talking about Children’s BBC with me. But there’s always another lot of little ones growing up.

  I’ve got so many children’s programmes videoed that I sometimes think I should ask some of the children to come back home with me to have a good watch and lashings of hot buttered toast with golden syrup. But I haven’t done that yet. I don’t know why, but something tells me it’s a bad idea.