A Question of Guilt

by Frances Fyfield

  In the centre of the embroidered picture were two women, back to back on either side of an apple tree. The full skirts touched; flowered hats carried blossom and each held the same posy as they turned their heads towards each other in conspiracy. One face smiled a secret, the posy held as if to shield the words: the other face showed mock alarm, as if the creator had stitched household scandals into her rich woollen threads, enjoying the last laugh at her lord and master’s expense.

  ‘How much?’ Helen asked.

  A bad day at the stall, feet cold, mind dull, had made business poor and his manners worse. ‘Thirty pounds,’ he said, cheeky with indifference, too tired for all the usual chat and makeshift history, beyond the point of wondering if he had been drunk when buying all this stock for a fiver a time, wishing he were drunk in the selling. A poor bargainer, she gazed in pretence at hesitation, tempting the man to speak in lower figures because of her silence, while he shuffled hopefully against his will, and Helen stayed bent towards the embroidery.

  ‘I’ll give you thirty-five.’

  She straightened, as if pushed between the blades of her shoulders by the gruff voice behind, looked questioningly at the man, who shifted further into his canvas seat and scowled.

  ‘The lady’s first, Mrs Cartwright. Not seen you for ages. Thought we was too pricey for you up here. Not your kind of thing anyway, but there you go.’

  Helen froze, reluctant to turn, but having to look round into those stone black eyes. Recognising the woman herself, she was sure that Mrs Cartwright knew her just as surely from one brief encounter outside the Magistrates’ Court a month before in that subdued, but definite crossing of swords. She spun back quickly, not quickly enough to hide alarm and repugnance.

  ‘I’ll take the chairback, please,’ Helen said.

  ‘I’ll give you forty,’ said Mrs Cartwright solidly.

  Stallholder frowned, irritation apparent in the hands which rearranged the bric-à-brac within reach. Some profit assured, the rest forgotten in a surge of dislike.

  ‘This ain’t no auction, Mrs C. Lady was here first like I said, and I give her a price. Will that be cash?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sorry Mrs C. You can’t win ’em all.’

  Helen reached for her purse and the clean notes from the cash-machine which should have been spent on groceries, all pleasure suspended in wanting to escape the force of Eileen Cartwright’s eyes. She handed over the money, then turned with sudden resolve.

  ‘Look, you can have it if you really want it.’

  The woman smiled, curving her wide, thin mouth in a brief spasm, pretending amazement.

  ‘No thanks. What made you think I wanted it?’ Moving off abruptly as before into her ordinary unhurried step, still holding the handbag as a shield; plodding away, obscurely satisfied by the conclusion of some battle she knew she had won. There was triumph in the stride.

  ‘Take no notice, missus. Funny woman, that. Rich one an’ all. Does funny things. Knows her stuff. If she was ready to pay forty for it, you’ve got a bargain,’ Happy at the upturn in trade, thirty pounds in his pocket, warmer by the second.

  ‘Thanks. You were very fair about it,’

  ‘Make no difference really, does it? What can I do with a tenner? And a customer who wouldn’t come back?’

  ‘I’ll come back.’

  ‘Good on you, girl, you see you do. Want it wrapped? Only I got no paper …’

  The gilt chair-back with its secret-sharing ladies was surprisingly heavy. So was the effect of brushing shoulders with a manipulator under threat of imminent arrest for murder, who dared to march her way around her own domain as if nothing could ever curtail her liberty. There had been too many close encounters for one day. Thin and sharp, the hackles of alarm grew as Helen walked home, one eye behind her, one arm cradling a new, already spoiled treasure. She did not know if Mrs Cartwright was arrogant, brave, or possessed of secret knowledge, but there was something granting that macabre confidence which drained Helen’s own and made her want to run.

  Beyond the Passage, turning away from Helen’s progress to follow Mrs Cartwright exactly as he had been directed, Ryan was amused. Poor Miss West. You could have knocked her down with a feather. Quite accidental really, but he doubted if his Superintendent would see the joke. Fancy them two shopping in the same place, for such rubbish. There never was any accounting for taste. Ryan’s tastes were diffferent. Love made the world go round, not things, although he had to admit, having the odd new thing helped. Annie liked the new car: so did his wife. Annie liked his new suit, but his wife did not. Such was life, very puzzling when he thought about it. But there were duller ways of spending an afternoon than following a woman, even if she was Eileen Cartwright. As for the evening, he would make sure it was an improvement. He trudged up the street behind her, thinking ahead, watching.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Weeks after the end of Eileen’s freedom, Michael Bernard came to believe in his own, and woke with the hope that the first day of summer would be an improvement on any which had preceded it since the death of his wife. He called it death now, rather than murder. Four months on, and he could almost attempt to think of her without nausea and disbelief rising in his throat as if his neck were held in a claw. The sickness persisted although the actual discovery of Sylvia’s remains had been cool in comparison with the horror evoked in reviewing it. Despite that, and only in the security of his own bed, Bernard forced himself to consult the memory for accuracy, before filing it for future use, untarnished by more time. He did this to remind himself he was a disciplined man.

  Arriving home after a day frustrated by cancelled appointments, he had looked forward to the comfort of her presence. Two gins, a few light-hearted complaints with which she would sympathise in that absent way of hers. ‘Really, dear, you shouldn’t let them treat you like that …,’ music to his ears, even if the chronicle of her domestic triumphs and disasters which would follow was not. Scant attention would do for these and in any event he would have been amused if the saga of her afternoon included third-hand scandal about some marriage of their acquaintance learned over coffee or in the hairdresser. The evening promised less excitement than pleasure, comfort, predictable order, the apotheosis of an untroubled married life which ran on well-oiled wheels as long as she was not in her ambitious phase; not wanting another house or social circle where the accents were ever more clipped, the entertaining expensive, the women effusive and the holidays prohibitive. There dwelt a streak of meanness in Bernard. Children might have been cheaper after all.

  The front door was locked. Perhaps she had slipped out as she often did in search of some last minute goody from the delicatessen, and he was pleased to notice she was beginning to recognise the risk of burglary. This was the last, satisfied thought before entering his elegant home where each observation and each step to follow mounted to a climax of appalling conclusions, beginning with the sight of his wife’s feet facing him, her head inside the door of the downstairs washroom. (In pink, this one, with striped blind and matching paper, a bit overpowering he found.) There had been blood: he thought she might have fallen.

  ‘Are you all right, Sylvia? What have you done?’

  No light in the hallway, and the angle of body with hidden head made it difficult to reach for the switch in the washroom without planting his feet on either side of her torso into the increasingly obvious sticky fluid. A distinct smell rose from her, but no sound. In the dimness he could see her outline oddly slumped and twisted without any repose, a badly arranged doll placed on display by an unsympathetic hand. Bernard retreated slowly, conscious only of the slight gleam of the blood as sinister as her stillness. That, and the startling, mottled white of her half-exposed bra, glowing obscenely.

  His hand was steady as he phoned for the ambulance, not the police since the fact of death did not occur to him at once. She had been alive in the morning, irritatingly so, with her early offerings of warm croissants, and it followed she was alive now.
Standing away from her and waiting in the kitchen for the ambulance, he noticed the dirty cups and the crumbs on the wooden table, and from then on, he might have timed her demise precisely. He could have saved pathologists their trouble as soon as he saw this debris. Sylvia was so fastidious she never left dishes longer than minutes: they irritated her soul.

  In the kitchen, and before the onset of panic, Bernard blamed himself for his failure to touch her but could not cure it. In furtive glances around the door, he could see the offending feet sticking forward, ready to strike out and kick him, the disgust and cowardice fuelled by the realisation of not knowing what to do. Better wait as he did wait, sitting on a kitchen stool biting his thumb at the end of each impatient circling of the room. Sirens: a blind dash to the front door, leaping over the legs to find the large men beyond, comfortably competent and uniformed. One firmer hand switched on the light in the hall: he and Bernard approached Sylvia, and Bernard saw the indescribable mess of her face, beaten features, holed skull, matted hair, and pathetic, pleading hands. Retching and moaning, he had stumbled back towards the refuge of the sink. The ambulanceman phoned for the police, and Michael knew then she was dead.

  What wounded him most was, first, the thought of his own miserable performance, and next, all the other indignities which followed. He was not so insensitive as to feel no disgrace for his feebleness in refusing to touch her death before the authorities did so: rejecting that body he could still embrace with passion, reacting to the sight with none of their disciplined reserve, being sick like a baby instead. For all this weakness, he had apologised incoherently, but the shame burned fiercely even before it was reinforced by the poker-faced men whose eyes and voices spoke louder suspicion in asking why he had not called them himself.

  ‘I didn’t realise she was badly hurt, so dead, I mean …’

  ‘Oh no, sir, I don’t expect you did.’

  Tantamount to violent rape, this levelling treatment, beginning with the assumption of guilt, although it took less than twelve hours in his case before the finger of the dead wife wavered. Meantime routine enquiries included the stripping of his house, removal of head hair, nail clippings, items of clothing, fingerprints, and a dozen subtler insults. Bad enough with an easy conscience, intolerable without, as officers of the law neatly removed his dignity layer by layer, reducing him to nothing, without a friend for comfort. Even in extremis he had known of none who could endure such exposure or trust; was forced to conclude how shallow was his acquaintance, how tenuous his links with his own kind.

  ‘Did your wife have any enemies, Mr Bernard?’

  The polite detective, as long and thin as a spear, his pointed questions hidden in a cloak of innocence. The same Mr Bailey who made him talk so fast, digested all his gabbling into information by the end of the night and day following, never stopped him or kept him to the point: found more of his life than any living soul, and although desperate to be liked, Bernard would never forgive him for it.

  ‘Enemies? No. Why should she? She was … harmless.’ It sounded like an insult. ‘A popular woman, plenty of friends.’

  Defensive, as if to say, we might have appeared strange, but we are not, an infantile protest looking for good opinion. ‘At least,’ his lawyer’s exactitude came to his aid, ‘if she had enemies, I do not know of them.’

  He knew nothing of Sylvia’s life, less of her soul, and the ignorance added to the guilt.

  ‘And her daily routine?’

  Again, ignorance: nothing more than her reports, and he no longer trusted the reliability of those. ‘So you don’t really know,’ Bailey had said, patiently repetitive, ‘about her daily life?’ No, when he came to think of it, he did not.

  Or her friends, apart from the sad conclusion that she had easily as few as himself. For all her industry, he had never seen how shallow was her existence, how superficial. Not the word he dared use, although it was the term in Bailey’s mind.

  ‘We were devoted to each other,’ he told Bailey half-way through the night, satisfying himself with this explanation. By then they were on more than nodding and smiling terms and Bernard’s humiliation was advanced by the knowledge that the Superintendent did not believe a word of it.

  ‘Have you any enemies Mr Bernard?’

  Easier covering his own tracks rather than obscuring the trail of conclusions left by his wife. No, none he was aware of. Yes, his practice was mainly conveyancing and probate; not the kind of area where passions ran high enough to turn on murderous lines, although it was true that clients could become unreasonable in their expectations, absurdly disappointed in results. Had he any objection if they examined his office? Well, yes. There was Michael’s face registering fear in every line, the spectre of his conscience looming large, dressed in Mrs Cartwright’s clothing, ready to challenge him. Since the very beginning of the questioning several hours before, there had flashed upon his inner eye so malevolent a vision of that lady that he had spoken yards of words to avoid speaking of her, knowing, as he had known when the ambulanceman had blocked him from the view of death, that she had been lingering there, somewhere in the background, a malicious shadow full of mute insistence on his silence. Deciding to disobey was Bernard’s decision taken under Bailey’s hypnosis, telling more than he needed to tell, not complete by any means, still too much.

  All over now. A feeling of safety intervened to dull the memory of the shame. Silly fool to have held his breath so long while the bloodstained carpet was replaced and Eileen unfussily arrested, all this time postponing life and grief, no thinking of poor Sylvia submerged in the tide of her own death, pushing at his own survival. That large young detective coming to his door, ‘S’all right, sir. Thought I’d let you know, we got Mrs C inside,’ grinning in triumph, expecting him to be pleased, which he was, but only now. Rising to make coffee far superior to Sylvia’s, Bernard tried to feel the luxury of grief, missed her comforting presence, admired the reverie of his own sadness. Then he opened the post and forgot her again.

  Brown window-envelopes usually signified nondescript contents and Sylvia had always dealt with them, pouncing on all the mail in the endless hope that it might contain a surprise, but any bill, however large, would have been preferable to this uncompromising order to attend the trial of R. v. Cartwright, Central Criminal Court, on a date to be fixed. Michael’s legal expertise was not in such arenas, but he knew the witness order for what it was, a prescription for humiliation, an invitation to public cross-examination of his life. He had hoped his bald and guarded statement of facts which said nothing specific to influence guilt would be agreed, simply presented along with other innocuous evidence of plan-drawers and body-removers. Eileen’s choice of revenge, complete with her hallmark: she had drawn blood, required more. If not your heart and soul, my dear, I’ll have your reputation, and God in heaven, she had the means.

  Bernard suffered sharp memories of cosy conversations with a witch.

  ‘My wife doesn’t understand business,’ he had told Eileen. ‘Refreshing to discuss things with a woman, you know. A woman who knows the terminology, as well as the art.’ In essence, it was true, with any woman who adored him; even a woman as plain as this was always a mild stimulant. Michael did indeed talk frankly of business. ‘All this is in confidence, Eileen, you know, you won’t discuss it with anyone, of course.’ Heavy lunches and amusing tales, clients’ secrets he had no business revealing, details of his own practices which unforgiving jurymen could only consider, well, sharp; certainly not blunt in the sense of honest. A few deals on property where he had taken advantage of his knowledge of an impending death and secured the pickings of death for the benefit of himself rather than the beneficiaries; a kind of insider trading in the estate of the deceased. Harmless, of course, only done where there was plenty to spare, not actually robbing anyone in particular, you understand. Eileen, scavenger of old lace and treasures from those who were indiscriminate through terminal poverty, understood the syndrome very well. Following hearses, she had said; and
they had laughed about it.

  Slumped at his breakfast table in the ruins of the day, Bernard would have given his heaven and earth to remove Eileen as she had removed Sylvia, began to understand the anatomy of hatred although he did not yet seek Eileen’s remedies. Only the desire to kill was appreciated rather than the practice. He stood and threw the coffee cup against the wall with every ounce of strength, watched the stains appearing on the wood and the liquid dribbling slowly. The deafening crash of Sylvia’s favourite china freed him for several panting seconds. But he was Sylvia’s husband, and Sylvia’s habits died harder. He bent, picked up the pieces and wiped the mess thoroughly and mechanically.

  But as soon as he recovered, there was more. As he left his house he saw it on the branches of the shrub which shielded the entrance, one brightly coloured glove, Sylvia’s emerald leather glove, matching the emerald coat she had paraded for his approval the autumn before. Her winter glove blooming in spring, caught among the fresher leaves like a garish blossom. The shattered day collapsed around him, and Bernard, never a stout party, fell to earth with it.

  In the general regime of Helen’s life, nothing changed. Her phone was engaged every time Bailey rang, day and evening. On first acquaintance it had crossed his mind that she was busy to hide a vacuum: now he recognised another of the same breed whose acquaintances, colleagues, masters and servants would find the weak link of conscience. When finally they spoke, she sounded harassed, but to his relief the pleasure in the tone was unmistakable.