Malice Aforethought

by J M Gregson

  She smiled up at him, slit the envelope with the slim, expert fingers which he had watched at a thousand household tasks over the years, handed him the sheet he now could not bring himself to read. ‘I’m to go in tomorrow,’ she said. ‘That probably means they’ll operate on Wednesday, all being well.’

  A curious phrase that, in these circumstances, he thought. He said, ‘It’s too soon. You need to build up your strength. You’re not ready for it.’

  She laughed. ‘You mean you’re not, don’t you, John? I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.’

  ‘But the tests — they can’t be certain yet that you—’

  ‘They did the tests the week before last, John. I’m all right — ready for the surgery. The sooner the better, I say. Get it done now, I’ll be ready to enjoy the spring. Might even drag you away for a holiday.’

  The spring seemed impossibly far away to her husband. He said, ‘It’s a big step, heart surgery. Still a big step, even with all the advances. You haven’t had time to think about it properly.’

  ‘I’ve thought about little else for the past few days, you great booby! I’m ready. Or I will be, when I’ve packed my bag and made arrangements to make sure my helpless husband survives while I’m having a good rest in hospital. Speaking of which, be off with you to work and let me get on with it!’

  She had almost to push him through the front door of the bungalow. He was just a big, vulnerable child, she thought, as she waved to his anxious, affectionate face as he reversed the old Vauxhall out of the garage and drove away.

  It was a relief to drop the wide, unworried smile. It could stay in the kitchen drawer with the cutlery until John came home in the evening and she needed it again. She picked up the phone and dialled her daughter’s number. ‘Jacky? The letter’s come. I’ve to go in tomorrow. That means they’ll be operating on Wednesday, I think.’

  ‘So soon? How do you feel, Mum?’

  ‘Apprehensive, to be honest.’

  ‘Of course you do. Shall I come over?’

  ‘No, I’ll drive over to you. I’d like to see the children. But I’ll come while they’re still at school. Then I can be frightened for an hour, in peace. And you can give me tea and sympathy. Or better still, gin and sympathy. I need a bit of Dutch courage to be cheerful again for your dad tonight.’

  She put the phone down and went and looked at the wedding photograph in the dining room, with a young John Lambert standing erect and protective beside that strange, pretty young woman who shyly held his arm.

  All men were just children really, in the most important things.

  ***

  Two days after the Coroner’s Court jury had brought in a verdict of murder by person or persons unknown, the coroner released the body of Edward Giles for a funeral.

  It was unusual, but the Oldfield coroner was a kindly man of much experience, aware of the community around him in a way an urban official might not have been. He was mindful of the feelings of relatives, of the need people felt to mark the end of formal grief with the ritual of a funeral. The deceased had died by asphyxiation caused by a piece of wire drawn tight around his throat; that was clear and hardly open to dispute, even by the most ingenious of defence counsels. There scarcely seemed the need to preserve the right for a second postmortem by a pathologist retained by the lawyers for the defence. Discreet enquiries by the coroner’s officer revealed that a burial, not a cremation, was planned for Giles. An exhumation would still be possible, in the highly unlikely event of its being required.

  So it was that on the morning of Monday, November 19th, Bert Hook found himself trying to make his considerable bulk unnoticeable in the Catholic Church of St Alban’s, Oldford. ‘Just pop in and keep your eyes open!’ Lambert had said, as if there was nothing to it. In truth, it was easier for Hook to escape notice than most of his colleagues. With his rubicund countenance and comfortable girth, he put most people more in mind of a publican or a farmer than a policeman. He set himself between two of the regular parishioners, towards the rear of the church. There he shrank into his dark grey overcoat and clutched his hymnal reverently. Even those people whom he had interviewed in connection with this death — and there were five of them there — did not remark him as they passed by him and moved to the more prominent pews at the front of the modern, brick-built church.

  Hook, who was as usual far more observant than those around him realised, noted varying degrees of grief in the principal participants in this ritual. The estranged wife of the deceased, sitting beside her father in the foremost of the family benches, gave little sign of emotion. Sue Giles watched impassively as the coffin of her husband was brought to the front for its final blessing from the priest. Standing beside her, the bearlike figure of her father, Colin Pitman, gripped his daughter’s slim arm in its covering of expensive black coat as the coffin arrived, as if to offer support. She smiled up at him reassuringly, and her father forced a small, answering smile onto his broad, nervous face. It was a moment of intimacy between the two, but Hook felt the gestures marked a further stage along her road to independence rather than any real grief and consolation.

  The impression was reinforced by the contrast between the demeanour of the wife and that of Ted Giles’s mother in the bench behind her. The poor woman was weeping silently and struggling to maintain some kind of control, whilst her husband offered her what support he could from the trials of his own grief. The worst funerals of all were always the ones where the parents were still around to see their child interred. Bert Hook had seen it before, but his heart was always wrenched by the sight. He forced his attention away to study the reactions of others in this near-silent drama.

  If the movements of Sue Giles were under strict control, the actions and reactions of the other two women who interested Hook were more revealing. Connie Elson, the woman who claimed Ted Giles had been intending to marry her, arrived ten minutes before the coffin, stalked to the front of the church, looked with a flash of contempt at the benches set aside for family mourners on the right, and established herself in the first pew on the left of the aisle. She was erect and proud as she marched past the unnoticed Hook, clad in a straight black coat whose only decoration was jet beading down the front. She had a broad black hat which some might have considered rather too dashing for a funeral, black high-heeled shoes, and black silk gloves. When she passed Hook, he noted that she was made up carefully, discreetly, and no doubt expensively.

  When the coffin arrived and she turned herself briefly towards it whilst the priest recited the opening prayers, he saw that she was weeping. The mask given to her by her make-up was washed away, and in profile she looked all of her forty-six years, the oldest and perhaps the most tragic of the three women who had been in their different ways close to Ted Giles, and who had as a result been drawn into the investigation of his murder. To Bert’s mind, her unashamed grief gave her a particular dignity, as she held herself erect within the strange tableau at the front of the church. He felt a sudden, unprofessional shaft of pity for this woman, seemingly the most vulnerable of all the people involved in this strange case. She might well be the richest of the three, but Bert fancied she was going to have the emptiest life, after this was over. Even if she wasn’t locked away as the killer of her lover: Hook, who doubted if Ted Giles would ever have married her, made that automatic reservation.

  In appearance at least, the third woman involved could hardly have presented a greater contrast. Where Sue Giles was low-key, watchful, correct, and Connie Elson was a weeping monolith of grief, Zoe Ross might have dressed for a shopping trip rather than a funeral. She arrived, breathless but relieved, no more than a minute before the pall-bearers brought the coffin to the front of the church. She was hatless, clad in a green coat and brown low-heeled shoes. Only the flimsy dark-blue scarf at her neck might have been seen as a concession to mourning. She moved down the aisle with swift, short steps and slid easily into the bench behind Connie Elson.

  With her ponytail of shining brown hair, he
r supple and graceful movements, her slender, athletic figure, she might almost have been the daughter of the more statuesque figure in black in front of her. She certainly looked younger than her thirty years. Hook had to remind himself that this composed young woman was the same one who had come to their notice because she had screamed her jealousy and frustration at them in the obscenities of an anonymous phone call, with her emotions completely out of control.

  He saw her in profile when she turned towards the coffin for the priest’s opening prayers over it. She brought her hands up from her side and clasped them in prayer for the soul of Edward Giles, as the priest urged them all to do; it was a simple, unforced gesture, which in her had the force of a balletic mime. Zoe Ross had the fragility of youth and grace to set against the shuddering grief of Connie Elson. Yet Hook saw with a little pang of surprise that Zoe too was weeping, silently, with no visible movement of her slim body, like a Botticelli Venus surprised into grief.

  The requiem mass proceeded, and Hook watched the three women and the single man who were his leading suspects. There was no sign of the other man who must be included in that list, Graham Reynolds. That was only to be expected: the man who plans to marry the estranged wife has no place at her husband’s funeral. Bert was glad for the sake of the grief-racked parents that Graham Reynolds had chosen to remain at his post in Oldford Comprehensive. Whatever the rights and wrongs of a broken marriage, it would be difficult for them to see the man taking over from their son as anything other than an interloper at his funeral.

  The school was represented by Michael Yates, the nervous young man who had talked to them about Ted Giles when they had begun their enquiries in the school. His movements were jerky, his manner gauche, but when the organist played for the hymns, he led the singing in a warm, firm tenor, which emerged with surprising power and confidence from his gangly frame. He smiled his recognition at Hook as the mourners trooped out of church behind the coffin, the only one of the people they had spoken to during the week of the investigation who acknowledged his presence.

  Bert kept on the periphery of the scene at the cemetery, huddled in his overcoat against the chill November breeze, prepared to offer conventional sympathy to any of the mourners who approached him. None did. Each seemed preoccupied with the silent, central presence of the polished coffin, as it was brought to the grave and lowered carefully on its ropes to its final place of rest. The wife stood beside the weeping parents, dutifully mute, grim rather than grieving. She threw a single pinch of earth into the grave when the box of soil was offered to her, then took a step backwards and looked no more into the hole where the body of her late husband had been laid. Instead, she stared straight ahead. Her father shook his head at the offer of soil and holy water to cast upon the coffin. Colin Pitman’s thoughts were all for his daughter. He stood behind her, raising a hand to each of her shoulders, holding her as if prepared to defend her from some physical assault. She did not turn her head to look at him, but raised a single small black-clad hand and placed it over his massive bear paw.

  On the opposite side of the grave, Connie Elson and Zoe Ross were separated by three other mourners. Hook watched each of them in turn take the little phial of holy water and a handful of earth and cast it upon the lid of the coffin below them. Each of them stood for a long second afterwards, looking down upon the plate with Edward Giles’s name and age upon it, as if loth to take this final leave, and then stepped back, Connie Elson heavily, Zoe Ross with the same unthinking grace which seemed to inform all her movements. Probably neither of them could have seen clearly the bouquets and sprays of flowers which they dutifully inspected with the other mourners.

  As far as Bert Hook could see, none of the four people he was interested in spoke a word in that sorrowing group. Yet he was sure each of them was aware of the others. And aware also that someone standing quietly beside that grave could have killed the man who lay within it.

  ***

  On the Monday evening after the funeral, the man who had not attended it, Graham Reynolds, went to see Sue Giles. He walked through the ancient market town to the prosperous suburb on the outskirts where the woman he planned to marry lived. It took him only twenty minutes. He didn’t use his car because cars were such a giveaway. And though there was no reason why he should not be seen consorting openly with Sue, a natural caution made him secretive about his movements.

  He looked suddenly over his shoulder several times on his journey; the last occasion was when he was three-quarters of the way up the drive to the big house. There was no evidence that he had been followed. He wouldn’t have put it past that steely-eyed Superintendent to have put a police tail on him — not that even the best-trained observer would have seen him doing anything he shouldn’t. He and Sue had spoken on the phone, but this was the first time he had visited her since the body had been discovered and they had been questioned. Wednesday, that had been, in her case, and Thursday in his. It seemed much longer than four days ago.

  Sue knew he was coming. She shut the front door quickly behind him and threw herself into his arms. They spent a long moment like that, not kissing each other, feeling the warmth of the familiar body against and around them, closing their eyes and feeling the security they brought to each other. Then he released her, kissed her briefly on the lips, and stood without letting go of her, looking down into the blue-green eyes he knew so well, sighing his relief that they should be together again.

  ‘How was the funeral?’ he said. ‘As difficult as you expected?’

  She thought for a moment. ‘No, it wasn’t really. It was an ordeal, of course, but not as bad as I expected. Ted’s parents were terribly upset, of course. I managed to convince them I was sorry about the death without lapsing into any real hypocrisy about Ted. I didn’t pretend to be grief-stricken.’

  He wanted to question her further about it, to convince himself that it had all gone smoothly, but he sensed that she had had enough of it. ‘Were the police there?’ he said.

  ‘That Sergeant was there — the one that came to see me with the Superintendent and took notes. He was at the back of the church. I didn’t see him until I was coming out after the service, and I pretended I didn’t recognise him then. I don’t know if he went to the cemetery or not; I didn’t see him there, but he might have been somewhere in the background, I suppose.’

  ‘Your dad was with you?’

  ‘Yes. I think he thought I was going to be more upset than I was. I suspect he was quite disappointed that I didn’t need more support from him to get through it.’

  ‘He’s a good bloke, your dad. Very fond of you.’

  There was no need for him to have said that. He was stating the obvious and both of them knew it. But they found, now that they were together as for days they had longed to be, that they were talking like strangers. They went on like that for the next twenty minutes, saying polite nothings, talking like distant acquaintances who feared to stray into topics of conversation where they might have embarrassing disagreements. The death which they had thought would bring them together was at present dividing them. Both of them felt it; neither was prepared to voice the thought.

  Well, it was early days yet. The image of the funeral, of the scenes when the coffin was brought into church and when she had stood with the others at the graveside, were bound to be etched firmly upon her mind’s eye tonight. Graham wished that he could have been there, at her side. He felt shut out that it should have been so. But he knew it wouldn’t have been appropriate, that it would have been wrong if he had been there. People might have seen him as exulting in the death of his rival. And it certainly wouldn’t have helped Ted’s parents to see him there, while their son was set in his final resting place.

  They had discussed all that before, in the days between the death and the funeral. It was silly that the absence they had agreed for him should now be intruding between them. They had several drinks, sitting together on the sofa, wondering what to say next, as they had never done before. The alco
hol had little effect. Because neither of them cared to acknowledge their unexpected difficulties, they did not voice them, so that they could not laugh at the foolishness of it and change the atmosphere.

  At ten o’clock, they slid into Sue’s big bed and made love. It was as muted as the rest of the evening which had led to it. Neither of them spoke; they handled each other as carefully as youngsters in bed together for the first time. But without the passion which might have carried young people through, Sue thought afterwards. She lay for a while with her head crooked in his arm across the pillow, with both of them on their backs, as they had often done before. It was usually a time of great intimacy, when they talked about anything and everything, about the future they would have together. Or when they were peaceful, comfortably warm with each other, as intimate in silence as in the exuberance of the sex which had preceded this quietus.

  Tonight the silence seemed more tense, as if it needed to be filled with the reassuring words which neither of them could muster. And when he rose and went away to his own home, as they had agreed it was wise that he should, it felt to both of them a squalid act, almost a betrayal. From the darkness of her bedroom, she watched him walk in the starlight down the long drive, moving quite swiftly. Too swiftly, like one glad to be away, she thought.

  He did not once look back at the silent house.

  Thirteen

  The late husband of Constance Elson had made money in a variety of ways. A lot of money. Most of the later ways had been legal; as he amassed a fortune, he found it easier to go on accumulating money by methods which were perfectly acceptable. He had a shrewd eye for small companies with good ideas. He moved in during the early stages, when they were in need of finance, and he drove bargains which made him a very rich man when three of these businesses eventually reached the stock market.