by Simon Brett
“There is only one person in this room who had the motivation and the opportunity to commit this despicable crime. And that person is . . .”
Long experience of denouements had taught him how to extend this pause almost interminably.
It had also taught him how suddenly to swing round, point his finger at the Teapot and boom in the voice of the Avenging Angel, “Mr Alcott!”
All colour drained from the face framed by pot and lid. The pale mouth twitched, unable to form sounds. You could have heard a pin drop. The Rolling Pin, deserted by all faculties but a sense of timing, dropped.
“What? It’s not true!” the Teapot finally managed to gasp.
“But it is, Mr Alcott,” Inspector Walsh continued implacably. “All the evidence points to you. There is no question about it.”
“No!”
“Yes. And the sad irony of the whole crime, Mr Alcott, is that it was unnecessary. Our medical report reveals that Mr Cruikshank was suffering from terminal cancer. Had you only waited a couple of months, nature would have removed the obstacle to your plans.”
“What?” the Teapot hissed.
“I am afraid I am obliged to put you under arrest, Mr Alcott. And I would advise you not to make any trouble.”
“No!” the Teapot screamed. “You will not arrest me!” And its handle shot out to a desk drawer, only to reappear holding a small, black automatic.
Inspector Walsh checked his advance for a second, but then continued forward. “You’re being very foolish, Mr Alcott. Threatening a police officer is a very serious—”
“Stop or I’ll shoot!”
“Shooting a police officer is an even more serious—”
“I’ll fire!”
The room was silent. Except that she hadn’t recovered from the last time, you could have heard a Pin drop again.
And still the Inspector advanced on the Teapot behind the desk.
“I will fire! One—two—three. Right, you’ve asked for it!”
The entire room winced as the Teapot pulled the trigger.
There was a click and a flash of movement at the end of the gun.
When they opened their eyes, they all saw the little banner hanging from the barrel. BANG! it said in red letters.
The Orange began to giggle. Others would have followed her example but for the sudden movement behind the desk. The Teapot’s spout had reached into the other drawer and emerged with a gleaming knife appended.
“Out of my way, Inspector!”
Walsh stood his ground. The Teapot came lunging at him, knife upraised.
Suddenly, Joan of Arc interposed her body between the Inspector and certain death. The knife plunged up to its hilt into her chest.
The room winced again, waiting for the spurt of blood and her collapse.
But neither came. Joan of Arc pulled the knife from the Teapot’s nerveless spout. “NH257,” she said contemptuously. “Retractable-Blade-Dagger. Recognize it anywhere.”
This second failure (and the accompanying laugh) was too much for the Teapot. Clasping its handle to its lid, it collapsed backwards into the chair behind the desk. Then it slumped forward and, with cries of “Damn! Damn! Damn!” began to beat clenched handle and spout against the desk-top.
It must have been this which animated the biscuit-barrel. With a shrieking whistle, the lid flew off and a model clown on a long spring leapt into the air.
Then, over the screams and giggles, a disembodied voice sounded. It was an old voice, a tired voice, but a voice warmed by a sense of mischief.
“Hello, everyone,” it said, and the reaction showed that everyone recognized it. “If all’s gone according to plan, Rodney Alcott should by now have been arrested for my murder. And I will have pulled off the greatest practical joke of my career.
“The fact is, I’m afraid, that Rodney didn’t kill me. I, Hamish Cruikshank, killed myself. I heard from my doctor last week that my body is riddled with cancer. I had at best three months to live and, rather than waste away, I decided it was better to choose my own manner of departure. About which you all, I’m sure, will now know. I have prepared the custard pie, will shortly take the overdose of Mogadon and, as I feel drowsiness creep over me, will bury my face in the soft blanket of Polyfilla. Oh, Mr Cruikshank, I heard you all saying—plastered again.
“But, by my death, I will take my revenge on Rodney Alcott for what I have always regarded as his unpardonable crime. No, not his meanness. Nor his selfishness. What I refer to is his total lack of sense of humour, his inability ever to laugh at any joke—whether mine or someone else’s—and the fact that he has never in his life provided anyone with that most precious of worldly commodities—laughter.
“Well, it may have taken my death to do it, but let me tell you—Rodney Alcott’s going to give you a good laugh now!”
The recorded voice stopped with a click. Whether it was that or some other invention of the old man’s fertile mind that triggered the device, Hamish Cruickshank’s timing, to the end, remained perfect.
The ceiling-rose above the swivel chair opened, and a deluge of bilious yellow custard descended on the Teapot below.
And the staff and clients of Festifunn laughed and laughed and laughed. And Inspector Walsh and Sergeant Trooper couldn’t help joining in.
“And you’re not even going to charge him with threatening behaviour?” asked the Sergeant.
“No. He’s paid his dues. Gone to bed now with one of the Pillar-box’s remaining Mogadon. No, case is finished now. Just have another cup of tea, and we’ll be on our way. Mrs Dancer, do you think tea’s possible?”
Joan of Arc, who had lingered after the others had left, smiled a motherly acquiescence. “Don’t see why not.”
“All I want to do is put my feet up for ten minutes.”
The Inspector sank heavily into an armchair. As he did so, a loud flubbering fart broke the silence of the room.
At the door, Joan of Arc, without even turning round, said, “KT47. Whoopee Cushion. Hours of Fun. Your Friends Will Roar.”
PRIVATE AREAS
FAITH IS OFTEN the willing acceptance of what is demonstrably untrue, and the basis of marriage is faith. Once that faith breaks down, the marriage may break down too, and end in spite, despair, hatred or, as in the case of Henry and Vera Laker, murder.
Marriage, like other disputes, is a continual process of demarcation. Two people living together have to define their own boundaries, territorial, moral and emotional, and this takes a long time. What is more, the boundaries keep changing. However organized the couple are in dividing their lives during the early days of marriage, changing circumstances—the arrival of children, financial successes and failures, or just the inevitable advances of age—call for constant redefinition.
When Henry and Vera Laker married, in 1947, the boundaries had been comparatively easy to draw. He was thirty, and she ten years younger. He had seen active service during the War, while she had been at school for most of its duration, away from the dangers of bombs, with nothing but half-heard radio bulletins, unread newspapers, and the ever-present fact of rationing to remind her that it was on.
Age, then, and greater experience of the world, meant that Henry was the dominant partner. Society approved of this, for, though the War had brought many new freedoms to women, the institution of marriage was a conservative bastion and slow to change its traditional image. As all the clichés demanded, the man wore the trousers, his home was his castle, and he was the breadwinner.
All of these were true in the Lakers’ household. Henry commuted every day to the City, where he won the family’s bread. He worked in an insurance company for a salary undisclosed to his wife. At the beginning of every month he handed over her housekeeping, in cash—she did not have a bank account. In the first year of their marriage, she more than once found she had run out of money by the end of the month—particularly if it had the full complement of 31 days—and had to ask her husband for a supplement. On these occasions he scold
ed her, with the result that she learned to manage better. Within a couple of years she was even contriving to save a little each month.
When she did the shopping, she paid in cash. She had no credit accounts, and bills that came through the post were opened by, and paid by, her husband.
In the early years they did not have alcohol in the house and went out rarely. Vera had never been to a pub in her life. She would have demurred at the idea if Henry had suggested taking her into one (which he never did); and the thought of her going alone was as alien—and indeed on about the same level—as the thought of her soliciting on a street corner.
Once a year, just before Christmas, Henry took Vera to the annual firm’s dinner-and-dance, a function of excruciating politeness, during which the wives sat stiffly in dresses that showed their shoulders, until spoken to by the firm’s boss, to whom, for months afterwards, they were convinced they had said the wrong thing. Vera spent a long time thinking about what to wear for this occasion, which was completely wasted effort, because for the first five years of their marriage, she wore the same dress each year, with different “accessories”. (“Accessories” were then an essential part of the female wardrobe.)
Each year, Henry wore his father’s dinner suit, which very nearly fitted him.
At the firm’s dinner-and-dance—and indeed on other social occasions, when there were any—Henry led the conversation. He did not expect Vera to initiate a subject when in company. He would probably have been very offended if she had done, but Vera knew her place, and his good humour was not tested in that way.
The same distribution of responsibility carried over into the Lakers’ sex life. Their intercourse, whose frequency did not differ much from the national average, occurred always on Henry’s instigation. It was predictable and short, but Vera, knowing her duties, never opposed his demands or considered the possibility of variation. Contraception, in rubber form, was Henry’s responsibility. Like his salary cheque and the household bills, it was unseen.
Their home was as rigidly demarcated as if it had been fenced into units. The only area over which Vera had uncontested hegemony was the kitchen, though when the children arrived, she was allowed the same control of the nursery. In the rest of the house, she had cleaning, sweeping, and dusting rights; decoration and structural repairs were Henry’s province.
Substantial jobs in the garden were also his, digging, mowing the lawn, clearing leaves. Vera was delegated to weeding and the tending of flowers, which was held to be an appropriately feminine pastime.
The same went for the tending of children. And having them. Interest in such distasteful processes was not thought proper to a man and so, while Vera screamed and sweated her way through three labours under the unforgiving eyes of spinster midwives, Henry went to work as normal and spent his evenings in the pub, an atypical indulgence which the exceptional circumstances justified.
When the children had arrived, they very definitely remained Vera’s responsibility. Their feeding, their cleaning, even their illnesses, were not subjects Henry wished to know about. If they screamed during the night and woke him, he would turn over with a bad-tempered remark about her lack of control, and leave Vera to get up and quiet them. If she failed to do this promptly, he would be even more annoyed.
He could no more have changed a nappy than she could have paid a bill.
This then was their life in the early years of marriage. Both knew the boundaries; both respected them. Neither would have contemplated the idea of having an affair, even if the opportunity had arisen. Which it didn’t.
And, if asked, both would have said they were happy. They were married, and the life they lived was what marriage was. Anything outside their boundaries was probably dangerous, and certainly irresponsible.
They both knew human life was an imperfect system, and both thought they were getting as much out of it as most other people.
And when life’s deficiencies became too apparent, they both had escape routes to take their minds off the inadequacy of their existence.
Their palliatives were predictable, each supplying to the imagination what, for each, the real relationship lacked.
For Vera, it was romantic fiction, which she read voraciously through all sorts of domestic crises. The books calmed her, taking her back to the days of her extremely innocent early adolescence, when a legitimate girlish pastime was “waiting for Mr Right”, living in expectation of the arrival of a deus ex machina, upright, honest and strikingly handsome, who would come into her life and change it, without effort, to a continuing dream of unbroken fulfilment.
Marriage to Henry had not altered these interior fantasies. His less-than-godlike appearance, his less-than-godlike generosity in flower-giving and other romantic gestures, the messy little reality of sex—none of these had impinged on Vera’s dream world. She still waited for Mr Right.
The fact that she had achieved the peak of her adolescent aspirations, and found a real man to marry her, was irrelevant. The Mr Rights who lived in her mind, undergoing constant minor alterations according to what she was reading at the time, had nothing to do with Henry. She was not even disappointed that Henry was not like them. She had never expected him to be; indeed, if he had borne any similarity to them at all, she probably would have been disappointed, deprived of a certain richness in her fantasy life. She wished to guard her dreams intact.
These dreams were not erotic. Possibly Vera was not very highly-sexed. Her upbringing would definitely have discouraged any such tendency, and Henry’s perfunctory attitude to sex was not calculated to stir latent passions.
No, the Mr Rights in her mind did not rip off her clothes and leap on her. They were very decorous, and rarely seen without the full uniform of evening dress. They were surrounded by roses. They wore them in their button-holes, sent her huge bunches of them, and presented her with individual blooms at every meeting. They were usually seen across dinner tables, or on balconies against summer evening skies. They were tall and strong, their only weakness manifested in a certain mistiness in the eyes when they looked at her. They understood her, all of her.
And they did their job well. They kept her calm, they kept her off smoking, drinking and tranquillizers. They satisfied needs in her, whose existence her husband did not even suspect.
Henry also had needs unsatisfied, but his were different. His mind, like hers, was peopled by figures who had taken up residence in early adolescence and continued their occupation, with only cosmetic changes, through his messy wartime sexual encounters and the regularities of marriage. His squatters were female and as physical as Vera’s were spiritual. In place of evening dress, they usually wore nothing. Any garments they did have were distinctly impermanent—blouses to be ripped open in a spatter of buttons, brassières with capitulating clasps, skirts that flew up at will, suspenders that unpopped at a finger’s pressure, and briefs that melted away before his probing hands.
They were born, not of books, but of pictures. Postcards, on the whole. Grubby black and white scenes of ineptly posed women, faces leering with blank allure, bodies splayed out for the unknown viewer. Sometimes there were men, too, humourlessly thrusting away at them. Their plots were no less predictable than those of Vera’s books, and the relief they supplied was just as effective, and just as harmless.
Henry kept his growing collection of pictures in the room designated his “study”, in a locked filing cabinet. Its drawer was labelled “Accounts”, a sufficient deterrent to Vera’s curiosity, which was anyway not strong.
In the evenings, after supper, he would frequently go upstairs to “go through his accounts”. On these occasions he would lock the study door, a needless precaution, because, if Vera did want to make contact, she would just shout to him up the stairs.
What he did with the contents of his “Accounts” drawer was his own affair. It caused no noticeable harm to his character or his marriage, and indeed may have helped to alleviate the pressures caused by their collision.
So both Henry and Vera had areas in their minds of privacy which could not be invaded, and from which they drew strength.
Henry had one other private area which could have been invaded by Vera at will, but one of the earliest ground-rules of their marriage forbade such intrusion, and Vera felt little urge to break the terms of the treaty.
His other secret was his diary. Every evening when he went to bed he would fill in the allotted space, and replace the book by the bedside, where it would remain all day. While he was at the office, Vera would clean around it, occasionally picking it up to dust its cover; never would she contemplate opening it. The notion did not occur to her that the diary might contain anything to surprise or alarm; she thought her husband’s life as predictable as her own.
This lack of curiosity was completely justified. The nightly entries were no more than a catalogue of trains caught and clients met. Whole weeks would pass with the days’ records indistinguishable. Every word was humdrum fact; there was no chronicle of emotions, no expression of aspirations, no comment on international or domestic events. Why he kept the diary at all was a mystery, probably even to himself. It was a habit he had got into while in the Forces, maybe in an attempt to differentiate, or at least to count, the soldier’s identical days.
And when Henry Laker developed a habit, it stayed with him. So the diary stayed by the marriage bed, unread by Vera. It was, perhaps, a symbol of trust in a marriage otherwise devoid of symbols.
And so their lives continued. There were material changes. The children grew up. There was a bit more money around, and slowly Henry overcame his instinctive parsimony to the extent of keeping a bottle of sherry in the cupboard and taking the family on an annual holiday to the sea. They moved twice, each time to a slightly larger house.
And in each move, the filing cabinet moved to a new “study”, its drawers firmly locked. As time went by, the “Accounts” section spread, first to two, then three, and finally all four drawers, reflecting the enrichment of Henry’s fantasy life.