Tickled to Death and Other Stories of Crime and Suspense

by Simon Brett

  But this expansion of source material made only small changes to the voracious women who peopled his imagination. True, they came out of the shadows of monochrome into full colour, and their posing shook off all trace of inhibition, but the images in Henry’s mind while he “went through his accounts” remained those of his adolescence, with the slightest of variations.

  Vera’s Mr Rights didn’t alter much either. Their dinner jackets changed in cut, they even occasionally appeared on beaches in neatly-pressed leisurewear, their faces were moulded by the plastic surgery of imagination into the outlines of television stars, but their impeccable manners and—more important—their respect for, and understanding of, Vera remained exactly as when they had first visited her in her teens.

  So, while marriage kept their bodies claustrophobically together, Henry and Vera Laker’s minds drifted further and further apart.

  But, even so, there need never have been a crisis, a moment when the clash of their fantasies detonated the explosion that led to murder. Plenty of marriages survive till death with the partners’ private fantasies intact, secret hatreds, lusts and disappointments dying, unvoiced, with their owners.

  And it could have happened with the Lakers.

  But it didn’t.

  Partly, it was external pressures. The world they found themselves in in the late seventies was very different from the one they had married into in 1947. Sex was no longer a subject for secret mutterings, quiet talks and ambiguous allusions; it now screamed out from every hoarding, every cinema, even the hitherto decorous television screen.

  Their children, in spite of an upbringing which had combined conventional morality with shamefaced obscurantism on the subject, had a completely different attitude to sex. For them it was another consumer product, something like the alcohol, records and clothes they so lavishly bought, something to be enjoyed. Any other view of it provoked derisive laughter and talk of “hang-ups”.

  The fact that their children were so patently—indeed blatantly—promiscuous made it hard for Henry and Vera not to feel their own attitudes were being challenged.

  It was not a good time of life for either of them, anyway. Henry was nearly sixty, but the lusts of the body showed no signs of diminishing. On the contrary, they seemed stronger and less amenable to control. The provocation of a cinema poster or the unbrassièred relaxation of one of his sons’ girlfriends could stir him in seconds to paroxysms which were but ill satisfied by “going through his accounts”.

  And now that naked girls lounged on every hoarding, the efficacy of his drawersful of pictures seemed impaired. Part of their potency for him had always been their secrecy. They were objects not readily available. They were his. Private. But now everyone could get them. He found more explicit material than his own collection under his fifteen-year-old son’s bed. His imaginative life was diminished, sullied.

  And, inevitably, as age encroached on his horizon, and the new world blared its message of instant fulfilment, he began to have doubts, to fear that perhaps he had not led his life as effectively as he could. Perhaps all the time he had spent “going through his accounts” had been a poor substitute for reality. As everything he read now screamed at him, the world was full of real flesh-and-blood women, hungry for men’s attention.

  Had he deluded himself all these years?

  Had he missed out?

  Vera’s confusions resolved themselves into the same question. She found the physical changes of her late forties difficult to cope with; the long knowledge of their inevitability did not make the reality any easier. The body which she had managed so long without thinking about it suddenly became capable of cruel surprises.

  And the mind which she had always subdued also threatened to become uncontrollable. She realized the precarious nature of the mental balance she had achieved in her adult life. Her old resource, the conjuration of a smiling Mr Right, was no longer adequate. Instead, her mind filled, unbidden, with images of different men, crude physical figures whose animal quality both appalled and intrigued her.

  For the first time in her life, Vera Laker felt lust.

  It wasn’t focused; it had nothing to do with her continuing occasional couplings with Henry; it was just a fierce restlessness, stirred embarrassingly by the sight of a youth on a bicycle or the flash of a torso in a television commercial.

  And this new imperative cast doubts on all her previous life.

  Had she repressed her true nature all those years?

  Had she missed out?

  And yet it need not have led to murder. Plenty of couples suffer comparable pressures and regain individual equanimity and a mutual relationship. It was inevitably a time of stress: they could no longer ignore the fact that they were getting old; the children had left home and removed Vera’s raison d’être; retirement loomed for Henry like a great void.

  But they would have coped, had a bad couple of years, and then come through.

  If it hadn’t been for the diary.

  It started as an accident, an accident that could have happened at any time during their marriage, but in fact came about after thirty years.

  Vera was dusting the bedroom. She did this with the same ferocious doubt that now attended all her actions. Should she be doing it? In a world where strident women proclaimed their rights on television, wasn’t she making herself a laughing-stock? Was she any better than a slave, a passive instrument of masculine will?

  These self-lacerating thoughts, together with the pills her doctor (inevitably male) had patronizingly prescribed, made her clumsy, and, as her duster flicked savagely at the bedside table, it dislodged Henry’s diary, which fell on to the carpet.

  Open.

  The entry was for about a month before.

  “May 10th. Up 7.30. Office 9.15. 10.00 Meeting with Carson, Brown and Fuller. Lesley’s farewell drinks in the Feathers at lunchtime. 3.00 Policy. Planning Group Meeting. Home 6.30. Watched some television. To bed 10.30.”

  It was not, to put it mildly, exciting. If that represented the worst secret that the forbidden room of this particular Bluebeard’s castle contained, then his wife had little to fear. No grounds for anxiety. Even the one unknown name, Lesley, even if it were female and not a surname, belonged to someone who had clearly left the firm. To harbour suspicions about her would be obviously inappropriate.

  And yet the name stuck in Vera’s mind.

  Along with the fiercely physical men who had gatecrashed her demure fantasies, had come women too. Not women to whom she felt attracted, but shadowy, silhouetted women, seen always in the distance with a man.

  The man was Henry.

  Again, the new public frankness was partly to blame. When every television play was about men having affairs, when women in newspapers and novels constantly denounced masculine deceit, it was natural for her to start wondering about Henry. He had always seemed so distant from her, so contained, so unromantic. Previously, she had just thought that that was his nature, but increasingly she began to wonder if he was like that because all his affections were directed to another woman. She knew nothing of his life from the moment he left the house in the morning to the moment of his return at six-thirty. She met his colleagues at the firm’s annual dinner-and-dance, and other rare social occasions, but they talked about nothing except work. Anyway, they were hardly likely to volunteer information about an office romance of Henry’s. Men conspired together in their deceit of women; every modern novel told her that.

  So it was quite possible that Henry was conducting an affair with someone in the office.

  More than possible, it was likely.

  Had probably been going on for years.

  Round the office everyone knew; and she, Henry’s wife, stuck at home, the only one in ignorance, was a long-standing office joke. Sly, disparaging remarks were made about her every time Henry went off with . . .

  Went off with who?

  Now that she had read the diary, she could supply the name.

  Lesley.
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br />   She didn’t check back through the entries for further references. The one insight had been sufficient. Henry, for years, had been having an affair with Lesley.

  This knowledge polarized her feelings for her husband. What had previously been acceptance and apathy was now stripped down to bare hatred. She found herself staring with fascinated loathing at the breadth of his neck as he, unthanking, ate the meals she prepared. As he dressed, unaware of her, in the mornings, she gazed at the porcine grossness of his bristly body.

  To think that he had deceived her for so many years, had accepted all her care and work, while his mind was with Lesley. While he was thinking of being in bed with Lesley. And, no doubt, when he was actually in her bed, Lesley and Henry would laugh at the expense of Vera, poor, stupid, unknowing Vera.

  It was only a matter of time before she mentioned Lesley’s name. Something so constantly in her mind had eventually to be voiced.

  It happened when Henry came home an hour late one evening, at seven-thirty rather than six-thirty. This was almost unprecedented in the long history of their marriage. He was hardly ever late without prior warning.

  During that last hour’s waiting, the day’s hatred grew to an intensity that frightened Vera. Now there could be no doubt. Now he was blatantly staying out with his mistress.

  His signature tune of key in the lock and slamming door announced his arrival. Vera was almost surprised; in her mind he was never going to come back. He had moved in with Lesley, might return for some clothes but basically had recognized the end of the marriage.

  He stumped into the kitchen, where she stood, frozen, by the cooker.

  “Delayed for an hour outside Clapham Junction,” he snorted. “Some bloody fool had thrown himself on the line.”

  Vera laughed harshly. “Oh, you weren’t with Lesley?” she found herself saying.

  Henry looked up blankly. “Lesley?”

  “Yes, Lesley. You know—Lesley!”

  He still looked uncomprehending.

  “The Lesley,” she spelled out, “who used to work in your office, and who had a farewell drinks party on May the tenth.”

  Henry’s face clouded with anger.

  “Have you been reading my diary?”

  The revelation of Vera’s betrayal of trust had a profound effect on Henry. The long-established ground-rule of their marriage had been broken; now his wife might be capable of any perfidy. He felt absolved of all responsibility for her. He had looked after her for thirty years, and this was how she had thanked him.

  But there was more to it than that. The moment had shaken him profoundly, and the strength of his perturbation was so great because she had mentioned Lesley. Not only mentioned her, but implied that Lesley was the sort of girl with whom he might have an affair.

  Vera had in fact confirmed Henry’s growing conviction, that he was the sort of man who should be having an affair with a young girl.

  Because Lesley had affected him greatly during the short time she had worked in his office. It was guilt at his secret concupiscence that had prevented him from mentioning the farewell party to Vera, afraid lest some embarrassing blush might betray his thoughts.

  Lesley had been eighteen, revelling in the new knowledge of the effect her body had on older men. She had dressed in the abandoned way all young girls now affected, fully aware of the magnetic contours of her free-hanging breasts and tight buttocks. Henry had not been the only man in the office driven almost apoplectic by her presence.

  She had stayed briefly with the firm, quickly bored by insurance and anxious to flaunt her secretarial and other skills in the more glamorous worlds of advertising or television.

  Henry had lusted after her fiercely whenever he saw her, though she did not replace the long-lease residents of his imagination. It was still the wild women of his adolescence with whom he “went through his accounts”.

  But Vera’s betrayal changed that. Her belief that he could be having an affair reinforced his own. Henry’s imaginings, like Vera’s, now focused on the individual reality of Lesley.

  It was a week before he did anything about it, a week of sliding concentration at the office and loaded silences at home.

  Then, suddenly, he saw a way of reconciling the confusions in his mind, of mixing the now-inadequate charms of his old fantasies with the flesh-and-blood of Lesley.

  It was through that organ of now-invaded privacy, his diary.

  The idea came to him in a moment. When, after Vera’s resentful supper, he had gone upstairs to “go through his accounts”, he took the diary with him.

  The filing cabinet drawers remained locked. He opened the diary, and started. He was surprised how easy it was, how natural. For the first time, his diary became a record, not of facts, but of thoughts. Two private areas merged.

  “8 July. Up 7.30. Office 9.15. 11.00 Actuarial Review. Canteen lunch. Met Lesley there. She said she was desperate for me, and suggested I went back to her flat. We got a cab, and with great difficulty managed to keep our clothes on until we got to the flat. We were hardly inside the door before she was down on her knees, ripping open my fly and . . .”

  He wrote on in the same vein for an hour. All the fantasies he had shared with the shadow-women of his teens were shared on the page with Lesley. He wrote on and on, spilling over the allocated space for the 8th of July, on and on. It was in the middle of August when he stopped.

  He felt better than he had for years. Through the diary he had reconciled the demands of fantasy and reality; he felt an integrated personality.

  And, also, he was taking a justified revenge on Vera. If she was going to read his diary, then he’d damned well give her something worth reading.

  Surprisingly, it was a week before she opened the book again.

  Every night for that week Henry retired upstairs after supper, and wrote with a demented concentration many a professional novelist would have envied. He reduced the size of his handwriting, fitting two lines where one was ruled, but by 14 July, he was mid-way through December and contemplating buying another diary.

  It was, as it happened, on 14 July that Vera opened the book.

  Again, really, it was an accident, the diary again displaced by reckless dusting. This time it fell open at the middle of September, the pages curling with the intense pressure of the pen that had covered them.

  And this time Vera read everything.

  At six-thirty she was waiting behind the front door for Henry’s return. She carried a meat tenderizer.

  It was when Henry turned to close the door that she hit him first. Then, as he fell, she just went on hitting him. When she stopped, exhausted, his head might have been a lump of meat.

  Vera directed the police investigators to the diary, by way of explanation of her actions. That led them to interview Lesley at her latest job in an advertising agency.

  She remembered Mr Laker’s name from her time with the insurance company, but she couldn’t remember which one he was or what he looked like. To her, they had all been just old men.

  THE THIRTEENTH KILLER

  THE WOMAN WALKED into St Mary’s churchyard at a quarter past one in the morning on 13 February, and felt the crackle of money in her coat pocket. It was reassuring, but not reassuring enough. Not enough money, in fact. One five-pound note and four ones. The second man had said he only had four, and, since the job was done and he had threatened to throw her out of the car, she had been in no position to argue.

  Just two punters—not a lot for a cold night’s work. Two depressed kerb-crawlers, desperate for their perfunctory relief. She knew she had been working a bad pitch, but the other girls had been around for a long time and had territorial rights. Most of them had protectors to enforce those rights, too. Couldn’t expect it to be easy starting up in a new town.

  And she’d had to leave London. The size of the rents had driven her out of Soho, and none of the club-owners were going to offer her anything now her looks had gone. It was ironic to think that only eight years before s
he’d been Big Tony’s girl and queened it at the Salamander Club. But cancer had wasted Big Tony away to nothing, the Salamander had been sold up and reopened as a specialist cinema club, and now she was just a tired old whore trying to make another start.

  She’d chosen the town deliberately because of the Thirteenth Killer. Since he’d started his reign of terror, it was said that the girls were keeping off the streets. Meant there might be a chance for someone who was brave enough, or desperate enough, to move in and clean up. She was certainly desperate enough; she tried not to think about the need for bravery.

  But nine pounds for a night’s work was hardly cleaning up. The rent on her room was 23 a week. And it wasn’t even a room she could work from; it was a good couple of miles from the best pickings. Besides, the landlord lived on the premises, and she’d soon be out on her ear if she started bringing men back. She’d tried to get a place in Nelson Avenue, the so-called “Red Light Area”, but once again she had been up against a lot of girls with traditional rights. It meant her only chance was working the streets, working in cars, with all the attendant risks.

  But she didn’t let it depress her. Depression required the exercise of imagination, and that was something she had deliberately curbed all her life. She knew she would survive, and things might get better. That thought wasn’t born of optimism—optimism again was a function of imagination—but it was a logical assessment of her chances.

  Because now she had another source of income. A chance encounter had opened up new possibilities. Her hard face wrinkled into a smile as her worn-down heels clacked across the path between the tombstones.

  She was so engrossed in her thoughts that she didn’t see the tall figure detach himself from the yew tree’s shadow. Nor did she hear his swift approach across the deadening grass beside the path.

  The harsh smile was still on her lips as the brand-new bicycle chain was whipped over her head and snatched tight round her neck. Only a clicking noise came from her mouth as the hands in their blue rubber gloves pulled the chain tighter and tighter.