by Simon Brett
‘Ah.’
‘For the last – I don’t know how long it’s been – must be getting on for six months – he’s had a mistress.’
‘Really?’
‘He has – had a flat in Covent Garden where he stayed two or three nights every week. When he’s been in London over the last few months, he’s spent most of his spare time with his mistress.’
‘Could I have her name?’
‘Gina. Gina Luccarini. She’s Italian,’ Jacob Keynes glossed unnecessarily. ‘A painter. That’s one of hers.’
The canvas he indicated was similar in style to the Middle-European anagram in the window. Bold swirls of bright colour. Angry. Slightly disturbing.
‘Would you happen to know where Miss Luccarini lives?’ asked the Inspector.
Jacob Keynes gave an address in Notting Hill. ‘But you won’t find her there at the moment.’
‘Oh?’
‘She’s in Italy. Gone to visit her mother. Flew out at the weekend. Saturday, I think.’
‘Hm. And, since Mr Rudgwick has been seeing Miss Luccarini, has he kept up with any of his other girlfriends? Or indeed picked up with any new ones?’
Jacob Keynes hooted with laughter. ‘I can’t see Gina tolerating that, Inspector. No, there’s a rule with mistresses – particularly hot-blooded Italian mistresses – they can just about tolerate their man spending time with his wife – even, though this apparently wasn’t the case with Ralph, making love to his wife – but if he starts anything else – anything extra-extramarital, as it were – then all hell’s let loose. And Gina, I imagine, would be capable of letting loose quite a lot of hell.’
‘Thank you, Mr Keynes,’ said Detective Inspector Bury with a quiet smile. ‘I’ll bear that in mind. So . . . it is your belief that Ralph Rudgwick was very serious about Miss Luccarini?’
‘Oh yes. He was in love with her, no doubt about it. And she with him. A very strong, passionate relationship. Ralph kept saying he would have moved in with her permanently – but for the fact that he was married.’
‘Doesn’t stop a lot of people these days, Mr Keynes. There is such a thing as divorce.’
‘According to Ralph, Jane wouldn’t hear of the idea. Anyway . . .’ he gestured round the gallery, ‘. . . Jane’s money bought most of this, and Ralph didn’t want to put his nice cosy set-up here at risk.’
‘Doesn’t that mean that Mr Rudgwick’s death puts you in financial difficulties, Mr Keynes?’
The gallery owner favoured him with a patronizing smile. ‘No, Detective Inspector. Money has never been a problem for me. If I choose to replace Ralph, I will. And, if I don’t . . .’ he shrugged, ‘. . . I’ll just run the place on my own.’
Bury looked thoughtful. ‘So . . . To recap . . . It is your assumption that Mrs Rudgwick killed her husband because she could no longer stand the humiliation of his flaunting his mistress at her?’
‘Something like that, yes.’
‘Did you ever see him actually humiliate his wife in public by appearing with his mistress?’
‘No. But then Jane was never there on such occasions.’
‘Oh?’
‘Jane hardly ever came to London. She stayed down in Henley. And tried to keep Ralph down there as much as possible too.’
‘How do you mean exactly?’
‘She kept being ill, so he had to go back home rather than stay in London. Well, at least she claimed she was ill . . .’
‘Meaning you don’t think she was?’
‘I think it was just her way of demanding his attention. Since she didn’t have any sexual power over him, she had to exert some other kind of control. Money was part of it, but her health was always there to fall back on. I mean, the whole of the last fortnight, for instance, Jane claimed to be ill. Poor old Ralph was having to commute from Henley every day – even stay down there some days. No opportunity to see Gina for anything more than the odd meal – very frustrated he was getting.’
‘And you think Mrs Rudgwick’s illness was pure fabrication?’
‘Well, the timing does seem a bit odd, doesn’t it? She’s so ill for two weeks that hubby has to go back home every night, but then when she wants to go off on her painting course – and when she knows that hubby’s mistress is about to go to Italy for a fortnight – she suddenly gets better.’
‘Hm.’ The Inspector tapped his chin reflectively. ‘And did Ralph Rudgwick ever talk to you in detail about how unsatisfactory his marriage was?’
‘Well, no. Not in so many words. But, come on, I didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce it from the circumstances, did I?’
‘No,’ said Detective Inspector Bury slowly. ‘No, perhaps not.’
In the pastel sitting room, Jane Rudgwick looked as puffy-eyed as ever at their next encounter, which took place on the Monday afternoon. Once again an invisible miasma of scent floated around her.
‘So you drove up to the Lake District for your painting course, Mrs Rudgwick?’
‘Yes.’
‘Arriving there at ten o’clock in the evening.’
‘Ah. You checked?’
‘Yes, Mrs Rudgwick. Now, assuming Friday evening traffic, and assuming you drove up the M5 and M6—’
‘Oh, but I didn’t.’
‘What?’
‘I hate driving on motorways. All that traffic, all going so fast. No, I drove up through Cheltenham, Worcester, Shrewsbury and so on . . . All the minor roads.’
Well, that’s in character for this little mouse of a woman, thought the Inspector as he observed out loud, ‘Must’ve taken you a lot longer.’
‘Yes, but it put less of a strain on my nerves.’
‘Of course. So what time did you leave the house on the Friday?’
‘About three.’
‘And was your husband here when you left?’
‘Yes. He hadn’t gone into the office that day.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t know, Inspector.’ The puffy eyes blinked ingenuously through the glasses.
‘And you didn’t have any argument before he left?’
‘Argument?’ Jane Rudgwick echoed the word, as if it was in a foreign language she didn’t speak. ‘Me and Ralph? No.’
‘Are you suggesting that you never argued?’
‘We didn’t have anything to argue about.’
Detective Inspector Bury let that pass for the moment. ‘So, Mrs Rudgwick, would you say yours was a happy marriage?’
‘Oh yes,’ she replied, ‘yes,’ as if she were surprised that he had even thought to ask the question.
He changed tack. ‘According to our records, Mrs Rudgwick, your husband owned a pistol.’
‘He did, yes. He used to be quite keen on target shooting. Hadn’t done it for a year or two, but in the past he did. Was a member of a club, that kind of thing.’
‘Mm. The gun that killed him was similar to the one he owned . . .’
‘Ah.’ A sob welled up in Jane Rudgwick’s throat at this reminder of the reality of her husband’s death.
‘. . . but we haven’t been able to find his gun anywhere in the house.’
‘I think he used to keep it locked in one of the desk drawers in his study.’
‘We’ve looked there. No sign of it. We’ve looked everywhere.’
‘Oh.’ She appeared genuinely puzzled by this information.
‘On the other hand . . .’ Detective Inspector Bury timed his coup de théâtre carefully ‘. . . we have found traces of gunshot residue particles on some tissues in a bag of rubbish.’
‘What rubbish?’
‘The rubbish that had been tied up in a plastic bag and placed in your dustbin, Mrs Rudgwick . . .’
‘Oh.’
‘. . . which would appear to have come from your bathroom.’
‘Yes. Yes, it did. I emptied the waste-bin from the bathroom when I got in on Sunday.’
‘After discovering your husband’s body?’
‘Yes.’
�
��And before contacting the police?’
She nodded again.
‘Don’t you think that’s rather odd behaviour, Mrs Rudgwick?’
But again, the only reply she could give, in a wondering, almost childlike voice, was: ‘Well, I like to have everything tidy.’
Detective Inspector Bury was silent in the car back to the station. He hadn’t worked before with the Detective Sergeant who had been assigned to the case, and did not find the young man particularly congenial. Certainly not congenial enough to be elevated into any kind of Dr Watson confidant role.
How pleasant it would be, Bury thought wryly, always to work with the same sidekick, to have one of those sparky, joshing relationships between Inspector and Sergeant so beloved of crime novelists and television series. What a pity that real police duty rosters didn’t work like that, and that only occasional coincidence would find him paired with the same assistant on two consecutive cases.
The thoughts that he kept to himself in the car ran on Jane Rudgwick. He had by now concluded that her naivety and the general pallor of her personality must be a front. Nobody could really be that wishy-washy.
But if she had killed her husband, she seemed to show little instinct for self-preservation. Bury had given her a good few opportunities to defend herself and she had taken none of them.
For example, he had pointed out that the soiled tissues from the dustbin did not correspond to any others found about the house. The boxes in her bathroom and bedroom contained plain white ones, while these had been coloured boutique tissues.
But Jane Rudgwick’s reaction had not been to seize on this as proof that someone else had been in the house. All she said was that she hadn’t looked closely at the contents of the bathroom waste-bin, just tidied it up automatically.
Again, when Detective Inspector Bury had reported that preliminary examination of her husband’s corpse suggested he could have died any time on the Friday afternoon or evening, she had not hastened to assert an alibi about the time of her departure, nor offered specific details of the route she had taken for the Lake District.
And when he commented on the strangeness of her illness of the previous two weeks and the way it had suddenly got better on the Friday, her only response had been, ‘Yes, that was odd, wasn’t it?’
All these reactions were so unusual that Bury found himself unable to take them at face value. Nobody could be that naive. No wife could be so totally unaware of her own candidature as a murder suspect.
And, given what he had heard about the Rudgwicks’ marriage from Jacob Keynes, Detective Inspector Bury felt sure that Jane Rudgwick was hiding something.
Back at the station, he managed to shake off his unwanted assistant by delegating some routine phone calls to the Detective Sergeant. When he reached his office, Bury discovered that there had been a call for him from Gina Luccarini. The number she had left was a London one, and his surmise that she had returned from Italy on the news of her lover’s death was confirmed as soon as he got through to her.
‘A friend told me. I came straight away. It is a tragedy!’
Her voice, heavily accented and operatic in its intensity, contained none of the crumbling weakness of Jane Rudgwick’s grief. It was passionate and furious.
‘She killed him! It is wicked. She is the – what you call – dog in the manger. Because she could not have him, she is determined no one else shall.’
As he had done with Jacob Keynes, Detective Inspector Bury made her spell out who she was talking about.
‘His wife, of course. Jane.’ Gina Luccarini spoke as to a child. ‘She is a monster!’
This description seemed so at odds with the faded, blinking, red-eyed figure with whom he had spent the afternoon, that Bury could not help asking, ‘Have you ever actually met Mrs Rudgwick, Miss Luccarini?’
‘Well, no. I only heard about her from Ralph – and that was enough! From the start of their marriage, she allow him no sex-life at all. She use her money to have power over him. She treat him like garbage!’
Again, this behaviour seemed grotesquely inappropriate to the image Jane Rudgwick presented to the world, but Bury knew well the impossibility of imagining the inside of a marriage. And he found that the increasing incongruity of casting Ralph’s widow in the role of murderer had the perverse effect of intensifying rather than weakening his suspicions of her.
‘I think we ought to meet, Miss Luccarini.’
‘Of course. Please.’
‘Would it be all right if I were to come and see you this evening?’
‘Yes.’
‘What time would be convenient?’
‘It does not matter. As late as you like. You think I will have any chance of sleeping after what has happened?’
Everything about Gina was as vibrantly colourful as everything about Jane was drab. It was not hard to sympathize with Ralph Rudgwick’s choice.
The sitting room of her apartment in Notting Hill was painted deep red, the walls animated with her own explosive canvases. Bright printed fabrics drooped from the windows and were draped with random elegance across the furniture.
She was probably thirty-five, vivid in a dress of blood-red silk, which showed the full length of her black-stockinged legs. The red was picked up in heavy flamboyant earrings and on full lips. Her hair had the rich darkness of espresso coffee, and the same colour blazed with fury from her eyes.
Around her hung the musky sensuality of a perfume whose expense severely restricted the numbers of its users.
Just as Jane Rudgwick could be viewed almost as a parody of the boring, frigid, Anglo-Saxon wife, so Gina Luccarini was perfectly cast as the tempestuous, sexy, Latin mistress.
‘When did you last see Ralph Rudgwick?’ asked Detective Inspector Bury, after refusing offers of coffee or alcohol.
‘We had lunch on Wednesday.’
‘And – I hope you don’t mind my asking – that was just lunch . . .?’
‘Yes. We had thought then that he would be coming here on Friday night – after his wife had gone off for her water-colour course.’
She deluged the last three words in contempt. ‘Is not that typical of her – of Mrs Jane Rudgwick – that she should work on water-colours! And of course she had no talent. She is just a weekend painter. Pale, drab, useless – and she killed my lover!’
This reminder of the facts of the case which, in Jane Rudgwick, would have prompted sobbing, seemed only to make Gina Luccarini angrier. She was the type whose grief manifested itself in an active, rather than a passive way.
‘You described Mrs Rudgwick as “pale”, Miss Luccarini, but I thought you said you’d never seen her . . .?’
‘I have not. But I have heard a great deal about her from her husband. I feel I know her – know every cell of her pathetic, bloodless body!’
‘Yes, yes, I see,’ said Bury, not quite sure of the correct response to these arias. ‘But, as it turned out, you did not see Ralph Rudgwick on the Friday night . . .?’
‘No,’ Gina Luccarini replied. ‘No, I did not.’
‘He was probably already dead by then . . .’ the Inspector mused, interested to see what reaction this deliberate insensitivity might provoke. ‘Did he contact you on Friday?’
‘No,’ Gina replied through what, for the first time in their encounter, could have been a sob. She swept up a purple silk handkerchief from the arm of her chair and rubbed it brusquely against her face to cover the lapse.
‘Presumably, Mr Rudgwick talked to you about his marriage?’
Gina Luccarini was once again fully combative as she replied, ‘He told enough for me to know that it was a marriage only in name – that there was no love, no passion.’
‘But he didn’t go into detail?’
‘No. It was not an interesting subject – not one that we wished to talk about more than we had to. We had more interesting things to do with our time.’
‘Yes. Of course. It is true, though, is it not, that Mr Rudgwick wanted to live with you,
but his wife wouldn’t give him a divorce?’
‘That is true. That is what he told me, yes.’ Another gust of anger swept through Gina. ‘She was a dreadful woman! She gave him no freedom at all. Two months ago, Ralph he has to go to Paris for an auction. He is going to take me. We will have wonderful, romantic two days. Then suddenly his wife – Jane – she say she want to go. Right at the last minute. Once again she spoil our pleasure.’
‘Do you think she did that deliberately?’
‘I think so. Why else so suddenly? She could not make Ralph happy herself, and she was determined nobody else would do so. She is, as I say, a monster!’
‘So you have no doubt that she knew about your relationship with her husband?’
‘She must have known. Everyone knew. We make no secret. We go to restaurants, opera. We are a unit. I have keys to his flat, he has keys to my flat. Whenever Ralph is in London, we are together.’
‘Of course, Mrs Rudgwick was very rarely in London.’
‘No, but she still must know. She lives with the man. No woman can be so stupid and insensitive not to know.’
‘Maybe not.’ Bury was thoughtful for a moment. ‘And how long had you and Mr Rudgwick been seeing each other?’
‘We met at a private view. Five months ago. It was instant attraction, you know.’
‘Yes. And, er, I hope you don’t mind my asking this, Miss Luccarini . . . but do you know if Mr Rudgwick had had mistresses before you?’
After what Jacob Keynes had said on the subject, it had occurred to Bury that Gina might find this suggestion insulting, but the tornado of reaction it prompted left him in no doubt that she did.
‘What are you suggesting: that I am just one in a long line of – what you call – “totties”! That he just pick me up for a bit of sex! That it was not a serious relationship!’
‘No, no, no.’ The Inspector finally managed to calm her. ‘I was just asking. I mean, he had been married for nearly twenty years. If his relationship with his wife was as unsuccessful as you’ve suggested, then it might not have been surprising if he’d looked elsewhere before he met you.’
‘He did not!’ she snapped. ‘He met me, and for the first time he knew what it was to be in love – to be really, fully in love!’