A Necessary End

by J M Gregson

  ‘Oh, I agree. I think that chap Peach knows exactly what he’s about and the other one pretends to be thicker than he is. I felt as you did, that I’d had quite a grilling by the time they left me.’

  ‘I suppose it’s to be expected. As far as I can gather, the members of our book club are the last people who saw Alfred alive.’

  He glanced up at her sharply and found her watching him steadily, studying his reaction to that thought. He realized in that moment that they were assessing each other. They were each trying to decide whether, in this large and comfortable sitting room, with its wine and its nibbles and its courtesies, they were in the presence of a killer. It might be bizarre, but the whole business of murder was bizarre. And to them, but not to the police, quite novel.

  At one time, he would have lit a cigarette at this point. You didn’t do that now, not in other people’s houses. And he’d given up, hadn’t he? And he didn’t miss it, did he? Dick folded his arms and said as casually as he could, ‘Did you get the idea that the police felt they were getting near to an arrest?’

  ‘I felt that they weren’t. I felt that they were still gathering information and feeling their way. But they didn’t give much away yesterday. Even if they’d been on their way to your place to arrest you, I don’t suppose they’d have given me a clue about that.’

  He gave a brittle little laugh. ‘They weren’t. Actually, I had a good alibi for the time of Alfred’s death. I was eating a meal with an old journalist friend of mine from Bolton. I think they were duly impressed by that. I expect they’ll check it out – they have to do that, when they’re investigating a serious crime. But they’ll find it’s absolutely true.’

  ‘Of course they will. Whereas the woman who helped to set up the book club which now figures so largely in their thoughts has no such witness to account for her movements at the time of Alfred’s death.’

  ‘I’m sure they can’t entertain you as a serious suspect.’ He wondered if he should express more sorrow about Norbury’s death. But Sharon didn’t seem to regret it any more than he did. Both of them were more concerned with what was happening after the event than with any concern for the victim.

  ‘I’m not really sure what they think about me. Alfred and I had our differences, in the past. I didn’t tell them anything about that. Not their business, I thought.’ She grinned mischievously at him, and he glimpsed the very attractive young woman she must have been forty years earlier.

  It emboldened him to say, ‘I can’t think that they would suspect you. Except of course that it was you who ensured that Alfred was at that meeting on Monday.’

  ‘No. It wasn’t me.’ She was abrupt and very serious. ‘That was Enid Frott’s idea. I agreed to it, but it was her suggestion.’ She topped up his glass. ‘You and Alfred had previous, didn’t you? Did you tell them about that?’

  It was strange to hear that odd underworld phrase dropping from these gentrified female lips. He said, ‘That sounds quite sinister, “had previous”. We went back a few years, yes, but there’s nothing significant in that is there? But I didn’t talk to the police about it, no. I’m not quite sure why. I suppose I thought there was no point in muddying their investigations.’

  ‘I see. Well it’s all rather unpleasant, isn’t it? We are talking about murder, whatever we both thought about Alfred Norbury. Let’s hope they make an arrest soon and leave us to get on with our lives.’

  They clinked glasses on that, embodying as it did the comforting thought that neither of them had anything to fear in the matter. She insisted that he drank strong coffee before he left, then stood in the doorway of her house to watch him walk the length of the long drive to his car at the gates. The sky was very clear and the night still and cold now. Myriad stars shone white and steady against a dark blue canopy.

  Fosdyke’s last words stayed with Sharon as she went back into the big house. ‘Best that we don’t say anything to those nosy policemen about past times, I think. No point in wasting their time and stirring up trouble for ourselves.’

  FIFTEEN

  Enid Frott knew what she was going to say when she opened the door to the CID men. Keep it as light as you can, she’d decided. But let them know that you had friends in high places, that you weren’t merely a woman alone. ‘Well, I must say I’m impressed. I didn’t expect to find you working on Sunday morning! I shall commend your actions to Chief Superintendent Tucker, when I get the chance to do so.’

  Peach ignored the mention of higher rank and the connotation that he should tread carefully here. ‘All in the line of duty, Ms Frott. Murder overrides more petty policeman’s considerations like connubial bliss. Or overnight liaisons, in DS Northcott’s case. He wasn’t present when we last met. He’s a formidable presence, don’t you think? As Wellington said about his army, I don’t know what he does to the enemy, but by God he frightens me. He’s my hard man for when things turn nasty. But I’m sure they won’t do that this morning.’

  He gave her his bright Sunday-morning smile. But his words sounded in her ears as if he were responding to her warning about Tucker with one of his own. She asked if they wanted coffee, but he waved the offer aside and said it was still too early for that. ‘Won’t take long, this, Ms Frott. Well, it won’t if you are more cooperative and less obstructive than when I spoke to you last time. Perhaps I should have had DS Northcott beside me on that occasion, after all.’ He looked up interrogatively into the carved-ebony face of his companion, but received no affirmative expression from it.

  Enid tried to be firm. ‘I’m sure I was perfectly frank with you, Chief Inspector Peach. If I concealed anything you now think I should have revealed, it must have been purely accidental on my part.’

  ‘We now have access to Mr Norbury’s computer files, Ms Frott. He had also kept a more conventional manual file on you, dating back twelve years. Would you care to revise your attitude, in view of this?’

  Enid swallowed hard, telling herself that she had always expected this. ‘So I knew him in the past. What of it?’

  ‘You will need to tell us that, Ms Frott. At present we are interested in why you chose to conceal your history with Mr Norbury at our meeting on Thursday.’

  ‘I’m entitled to keep some things private, surely.’

  ‘In a murder investigation, very little can be kept private. We are allotted a large team to make sure that all the information surrounding the worst crime of all is available to us. Much of it, of course, will prove to be irrelevant and will be treated as confidential. When we unearth material which people have chosen to conceal from us, it will inevitably be examined in detail.’

  ‘You said on Thursday that you were here for an informal chat.’

  ‘Did I, indeed? Well, we always try to put people at their ease.’ He issued this blatant lie with the straightest of faces. ‘I seem to recall that I also said I needed you to tell me everything you knew about Alfred Norbury. This you patently omitted to do.’

  ‘I don’t recall this. I’m sure you must—’

  ‘“Assume I know nothing,” I said. I made it plain that I needed enlightenment, Ms Frott. You were eminently capable of delivering that to me and you conspicuously failed to do so. In such circumstances, we regard ourselves as justified in presuming some ulterior motive in our interviewees, do we not, DS Northcott?’

  ‘Indeed we do, sir.’ Clyde Northcott did not move, but he looked at the diminutive Enid Frott as if he might at any moment pick her up and hurl her against the wall of her property. ‘In such circumstances, we are entitled to interpret silence as a hostile response.’

  Enid wondered if he was quoting from some manual of police procedures. She said sullenly, ‘I didn’t mean to be obstructive. I merely kept quiet about certain things. I didn’t tell you any lies.’

  Peach was inexorable. ‘I suggested at one stage that you and Mrs Burgess and the deceased must be old friends. You denied that. You denied any previous close association with either Mrs Burgess or Mr Norbury.’

 
‘I think I said at one stage that we went back quite a long way. I told you that it was I who invited Alfred to join our book club group. I believe I said that I did that because we could rely on him to be both irritating and stimulating, and to get discussion going when others were more reticent. That surely implied previous knowledge of him.’

  ‘I accept that. But you also wanted me to think that such knowledge was relatively recent. It is such deceptions which make us wonder why you really wanted him in your group. Was it to give yourself the opportunity to wreak revenge, we are forced to ask? Did Mr Norbury prompt you towards thoughts of violent retribution, when he mentioned that he always carried a pistol in his car?’

  ‘That’s ridiculous! Why on earth should I be seeking revenge?’

  ‘That is something we must now investigate, Ms Frott. Why did you conceal the fact that Mr Norbury had mentioned this pistol on Monday night when we spoke on Thursday?’

  ‘I didn’t, did I? Well, it must have slipped my mind. I know I meant to mention it, before I saw you.’

  ‘Not very convincing, that, is it? That statement about the firearm was surely quite melodramatic. From what we have now learned of Alfred Norbury, I can only assume that it was meant to be so. It seems to me very strange that you should have chosen to omit it from your account of the meeting on Monday night.’

  ‘I didn’t choose to omit it. It slipped my mind, that’s all.’ But that sounded ridiculously unlikely, even to her as she spoke it. She sighed. ‘All right. I didn’t tell you about the pistol precisely because it was melodramatic. It was the sort of thing Alfred produced to make him the centre of attention.’

  ‘So you didn’t believe him? You didn’t think it was important?’

  ‘I believed him. It was the kind of precaution he would take – he always said he believed in self-help.’

  The contempt came out as she spoke. Peach said quietly, ‘You didn’t like Alfred Norbury, did you, Ms Frott?’

  She spoke very slowly now. ‘No, I didn’t like him. Everything I said about him being intelligent and lively and stimulating and useful within the group is genuine. But I didn’t like him. I realized how much I didn’t like him when I saw him in action on Monday. I saw the way he was planning to humiliate the youngest woman in the group and I detested it. He saw Jane Preston as a challenge and he was going to take her on and try to make her look silly.’

  ‘Jane Preston struck us as a woman well capable of looking after herself.’

  ‘Maybe. But Alfred was ruthless, once he was determined to get the better of you.’

  ‘As you know to your cost.’

  Peach spoke very quietly, but she knew with that simple phrase that he had won. It was a statement, not a question, and it told her that he knew what she had wished to conceal. She said with a world-weary resignation, ‘As I knew to my cost, yes. You say that you have access to his files.’

  ‘We’d rather have the full story from you. What Norbury recorded are facts and opinions which are entirely his own. I’m sure we’ll have a more balanced version if we now hear your account of events.’

  He sounded sympathetic, almost therapeutic. This was a radical change from the aggression he had shown in their meeting on Thursday, when she had told him almost nothing and thought she had fended off the CID attention. Enid wondered now how she could have been so naïve as to think that. She said dully, ‘You know about Frank?’

  Peach glanced at Northcott and the big man shut his notebook and put away his ball-point pen. Percy said softly, ‘I presume you mean Frank Burgess, your late employer. Yes, we know that you had a relationship with him.’

  ‘A long-term relationship.’ She smiled bitterly. ‘It was the classic businessman’s affair, if you take the bare facts. High-powered, self-made tycoon falls for his PA and seduces her. He sees a younger woman who’s available: she is bowled over by the trappings of wealth and power and is only too willing to leap into bed with him. Except that it wasn’t quite like that, or it didn’t seem so to us: I expect everyone says that, though. We resisted for a long time – by which I mean that we both knew we were attracted to each other but didn’t acknowledge it for months and didn’t go to bed together for several more months.’

  ‘You’re saying that this was a serious and prolonged relationship.’

  Peach was pushing her on and she recognized it. ‘It was. Frank said he was going to leave Sharon and set up house with me. I had no ties and was free to do as I pleased. Embarrassment was the only thing I had to contend with: it would surprise you if you knew how strong a factor that was for me. I’d been Frank Burgess’s PA and in unofficial charge of the office for ten years. I’d been a pillar of respectability. I was now going to break up the boss’s marriage and carry him away as a rich trophy to set up house with me. I wasn’t looking forward to the reactions among my colleagues.’

  ‘I can appreciate the upheaval and gossip that would cause in a small but prosperous private firm.’

  ‘Can you? Well, I suppose you might be able to. Except that I didn’t really have the power to carry it through, when it came to it. They say the wife always wins in the end, if she wants to, don’t they? And Sharon Burgess wanted to. I don’t blame her. Frank Burgess was a very lovable man. Worth fighting for.’

  It seemed for a moment as if this neat, controlled, sixty-three-year-old woman might burst into tears. The thought of what might have been is one of the most powerful of all human emotions; that thought for a moment excluded all other considerations from her mind. It was left to Peach to drag her back to the matter of murder. He said gently, ‘We need to know how Alfred Norbury relates to all of this.’

  Her sigh was so deep that it shook the whole of her slim body, so radical that they wondered for a moment if it was the prelude to a confession. ‘It’s simple, really. Alfred Norbury found out about our relationship. We thought we were being very discreet, but lovers are always absurdly over-confident about that, aren’t they? And always wrong. People always get to know. But not the wife. She’s usually the last to know, isn’t she? You may not believe this, but Frank and I were both very concerned about Sharon. She’d been a good wife and mother and she’d done nothing wrong. We wished to hurt her as little as possible.’ Enid gave a brittle, unexpected laugh. ‘Doesn’t that sound trite?’

  Peach gave her another prompt. ‘What did Norbury do, Ms Frott?’

  ‘He taunted me for a few weeks. I think he wanted to see what he could get out of me, what he could gain from the situation. But I had nothing to give him, and Frank wasn’t prepared to be held to ransom. I think Frank thought he could call Norbury’s bluff, because he never understood men like Alfred. He was a bigger man than that and he couldn’t believe that Norbury would be so petty as to tell Sharon about us merely to gratify his own pique and display his own sort of power.’

  ‘But he did just that.’

  ‘Yes. Alfred did it in his own warped way, of course. He planted a rumour with one of the town gossips whom he knew wouldn’t be able to control her tongue. Within a couple of weeks, Sharon heard about us, as he knew she would. She confronted Frank and brought matters to a head. He didn’t deny it. And as I said, wives always win in the end, if they wish to. Sharon wished to.’

  ‘And yet you two are friends now. You set up the book club together.’

  There was a long pause before Enid said, ‘Friends of a sort. She invited me to Frank’s funeral. He was much older than both of us, of course, so it seemed inevitable that we should both be around when he died. She rang me to say that she wanted me there at his funeral. I said that it wasn’t appropriate, but she said that she’d given a lot of consideration to the matter and she thought that it was. We were the only two women who’d been really important in Frank’s life and she wanted us both at his funeral. I appreciated that and I attended. It was a little while after the funeral that she revived the idea of the book club; it was my idea in the first place, but it became from that time onwards a joint venture.’

  ‘But
it was you who suggested that Alfred Norbury should be a member of the group.’

  ‘Yes. I suppose I thought that my resentment of him had cooled over the years, but I found that it hadn’t.’

  She allowed herself her first smile in many minutes. It was a bitter one. She followed it by staring challengingly at Peach across her living room. The DCI responded with a mirthless smile of his own. ‘The obvious question now. Why did you invite a man who had done so much damage to both of you to participate in this new venture?’

  Another sigh, not as radical or as body-rending as the previous one. ‘Obviously you have to ask that and obviously I was expecting the question and prepared for it. I could say passions cooled over a decade, and with Frank dead that is true to an extent. It would also to be true to say that I, and I suppose to a lesser extent Sharon also, wanted to see whether Alfred would have the bare-faced cheek to accept an invitation to join something as innocent as a book club. I hadn’t seen him for years, and I don’t think Sharon had either. Everything I said earlier about him making a stimulating and active member of the group is absolutely true. I think both Sharon and I wanted to see him again after a number of years of recovery from his earlier efforts to destroy one or other of us. Call it female curiosity, if you like. Call it what the hell you please!’

  Her fury against the dead man sprang out in the last sentence. Peach let her anger and frustration hang for a moment in the quiet, warm, elegant room. Then he asked solemnly, ‘Did you invite him to join your new book club venture so that you might give yourself the opportunity for revenge, Ms Frott?’

  ‘No, I didn’t. I consider that a logical question to ask and I don’t resent it, but the answer is no.’

  She was gazing at the carpet, so it was a surprise when the next question came to her in DS Northcott’s deep, emollient voice. ‘You said that Mrs Burgess took the initiative in pushing forward the idea of the book club, although it had been your suggestion in the first place. Do you think she sanctioned Mr Norbury’s membership because she had intended harm towards him and thought the club would provide her with opportunities?’