Eight Murders In the Suburbs

by Roy Vickers

  With the single exception noted, Jeremy seemed to be cut in the pattern of an ideal husband. He was an almost incredibly good-tempered man. When small things went wrong—caused, perhaps, by her unpunctuality or forgetfulness—he never blamed her. With a patient smile, he would beg her not to blame herself. Patience, indeed, was the keynote of his domestic life—though she had heard him speak sharply and even angrily on the telephone to a subordinate at his warehouse.

  He was very considerate, too. He ordered the picture papers for her. When he thought she did not understand the news of the day he put himself to the trouble of explaining. She was not interested in the kind of news that had to be explained, but she appreciated his desire to entertain her.

  The second phase of the marriage began with the first formal dinner party. In Benchester, the social traditions of the middle class lingered. Elsie assumed that success would pivot on her dress and that Harridge’s would carry her to triumph.

  She did not suspect that there might be a ritual with which she was unfamiliar—such as being ‘taken into dinner.’ For a moment she was angry with Jeremy for his thoughtlessness in not warning her. The knives and forks, too, were laid out on a system not employed in the restaurants which she had frequented. But she was quick as a town sparrow at that kind of thing and was soon able to feel that she was catching up, while standing by for surprises.

  The conversation showed a lamentable tendency to run into blind alleys. There was, for instance, the weather which, to Elsie, was purely a problem of adjusting one’s clothes. But Jeremy’s friends talked about it as if it were a sort of business, making plans about it for months ahead. Another stumbling block was gardening—apparently, she was expected to know the names of all the flowers and how they grew. The worst humiliation of all was when she herself turned the conversation to London. These incredible provincials seemed to know London as well as they knew Benchester—more accurately, they knew a London which was as remote from Elsie as Budapest. Her dress held its own, but that was about all you could say for it.

  “I was a flop! I’ve let you down to your friends, Jeremy. I’m ever so sorry about it.”

  Perhaps she hoped he would tell her she was exaggerating—that a little strangeness on both sides must be expected at first—that her different way of looking at things was itself attractive to his friends. Unspoiled charm, you could call it, at a pinch. Anyhow, it would be nice if he were to say it.

  “It’s of no importance whatever, my dear. I assure you that you have not—as you put it—let me down. Get rid of that fear, if you have it, Elsie. In no circumstances—whatever might happen—could you let me down. I told you as much when I asked you to marry me.”

  “Dear Jeremy! You are so kind to me!” she sobbed.

  Lying awake that night she found his words repeating themselves in her memory. He was very kind to her. But he had a funny way of saying kind things. Sort of legal way. As if he didn’t want to be kind to her but had to be. It was her first approach to the truth about her marriage, but she was slow in following it up.

  The dinner parties, including those given at home, spread over three months, interspersed with callers whose, calls had to be returned. She rarely made the same gaffe twice, but carefulness was not enough. His friends showed no personal interest in her. Within the framework of tolerable behaviour, people tended to leave her out of the conversation.

  The solitary exception was Millard, a go-ahead auctioneer who had been a senior Gas officer in the Kaiser’s war. But the nature of his interest was soon obvious—and Elsie had snubbed him, with some enjoyment.

  In six months, it all petered out and there followed a period of blessed, if monotonous, peacefulness, in which she no longer had to scan the picture papers for drawing-room topics. Nobody cut her: chance meetings always evoked a civil exchange. But invitations were neither given nor accepted. Eighteen months after their wedding, she faced the facts.

  “All your friends have dropped off because of me!”

  “If that does not distress me, why should it distress you?” The patient smile had come into action.

  “Jeremy—did you know it was going to happen like this?”

  She had found out that he would never tell the smallest lie, even in trivial things, to save his own or anyone else’s face.

  “In so far as I considered the matter at all, I was aware that your early circumstances had been so different from theirs that you would not be likely to have much in common. It will leave us more time together, Elsie. I am afraid you do not care for chess. We must get a little variety into our evenings. Perhaps you would like a radiogram?”

  “That would be no good if nobody ever comes here to dance,” objected Elsie, who knew no other use for music.

  She heard him take a long breath.

  “I have an idea!” he exclaimed. The patient smile took on the semblance of a grin. “You teach me to dance!”

  The idea of teaching the good sheriff to dance was too much for her. She laughed until she was crying bitterly and he was doing his best to soothe her.

  “Don’t cry, Elsie! Those are real tears.” He sounded almost frightened. “Elsie! When you cry, you accuse me of failure. You’re robbing me of my right to make amends. Elsie, I’ll do anything within the moral law to make you happy.”

  He was so worked up that he lost his shyness, and by the next morning Elsie had forgotten how it all started. But his words echoed deep down in her subconsciousness, waiting, as it were, to swim up into her mind.

  Dancing being barred, Grantham began to take her regularly to the better of the two local cinemas. He was honorary secretary of the Benchester annual fair, an institution of more than a thousand years standing and so of national interest. The rent paid by concessionaries for the three days alone covered more than half the rates of the sizeable town. Grantham’s position entailed a good deal of confidential clerking. Elsie gladly agreed to help, preferring a little work to parlour games. As she had a neat, legible handwriting, everybody was pleased.

  For another six months his inescapable kindness flowed over her. Then she bolted back to London with fifteen pounds and a couple of suitcases.

  Chapter Three

  She put up at a hostel and applied unsuccessfully to have her old job back. She went to an agency, who submitted her to a test and told her that she was too slow and that her fingering was defective—which she acknowledged to be true. She would need a refresher course—and she could not afford one. There came to her the first suspicion that she had made a fool of herself in running away.

  The hostel—which she had formerly thought good enough—she now discovered to be an abominable place. The bedroom was dirty and cold, and the food uneatable. Two years of well-fed indolence had changed her perspective. In a few days, restaurants and a few other such necessaries had made an alarming hole in her reserve.

  Grantham picked her up through the agency, decided that it would be prudent to let her have a week of it. Then he buttonholed her as she returned wearily to the hostel in early evening.

  “I have taken rooms for us at the Savoy,” he said. “We can go home when we’ve had a little holiday and we need never mention the last miserable week for the rest of our lives.”

  “I’ll pack my bags and join you in half an hour. You are very kind to me, Jeremy,” she said, and for the first time did not mean it.

  Dimly she had begun to realise that he was not, in the accepted sense, kind to her. He had now revealed that he wanted her even more than she herself wanted a life of well-fed indolence. To this she was able to add that he did not want her as other men sometimes want wives who run away by themselves. She knew well that he never thought of her like that except when he ‘lost his head.’ And he always tried not to lose his head.

  She had tried to break away and had failed. She returned to Benchester with a feeling that she was being dragged back in chains, but that the chains, in some inexplicable way, weighed more heavily on Jeremy Grantham than on herself.

&
nbsp; The patient smile had lost none of its impersonal benevolence. His kindness continued unabated. Her new, undefined resentment made her exploit it. Soon, she was running Millard on a string, occasionally allowing him to share her table when she took morning coffee while shopping. She invariably reported such incidents, endowing Millard with an attractiveness which he did not possess for her—in the vain hope of arousing her husband’s protest.

  In time, she was playing the game of seeing how far she could go. She submitted him to calculated interruptions. She indulged in tantrums. She was an hour late for dinner. But she never plumbed the depth of his tolerance, though she exhausted her energy and her cunning in the attempt to exasperate him at least into some angry rebuke.

  Elsie was not consistent, any more than she was heroic. There were times when she was ashamed of her conduct.

  “I’m sorry I’ve been so beastly. You must hate me sometimes.”

  “Never!” he asserted. “You have done nothing for which you need apologise to me.”

  “I’ll try to behave better in future.”

  “Please do nothing of the kind.” His tone gave his words the force of an earnest entreaty. Then came that other phrase she had heard so often before: “If it doesn’t distress me, why should it distress you?”

  She felt that she was on the brink of a discovery but lacked the ability to widen her investigation. Nevertheless, she became intuitively aware that he derived some kind of satisfaction out of being kind and forgiving when she was making an unreasonable nuisance of herself. He liked forgiving her. So he liked her to do something he could forgive. She lost her sense of power over him and stopped trying to irritate him.

  Illumination came, indirectly, through a chance phrase which she overheard at the Fair. With another friend of Jeremy’s was Millard, who had soured under her refusal to advance their relations. Both men greeted them as they were leaving a flower marquee. A moment later Elsie discovered that she had dropped a glove, probably in the marquee, and turned back. As she passed behind them Millard remarked to his companion:

  “Poor old Grantham! Still wearing his hair shirt. Must be her looks.”

  The phrase ‘hair shirt’ eluded her. At home, the abridged dictionary failed to give enlightenment. She would find out from Jeremy himself. But she would go carefully about it, in case it meant something dangerous.

  “There’s something I wanted to ask you about—I read it in the paper yesterday—can’t remember what it was.” She rang the changes on that, and then: “Oh, I remember! It was about somebody wearing a hair shirt. There isn’t such a thing, is there? What does it mean?”

  “It was a medieval form of torture. Monks would wear a hair shirt to atone for sin.” He added: “In modern English, it means something humiliating and painful which you’ve imposed on yourself as a punishment.”

  So it did mean something dangerous! Elsie felt her cheeks burning, felt the heat spreading in a tidal wave over her whole body. Suddenly it had all added up. Jeremy was a sort of monk himself—he regarded that night at the Gulverbury as a deadly sin. Making amends! But not to her, to himself. He had married her as ‘something humiliating and painful’ imposed on himself as a punishment for ‘losing his head.’ She was precious to him because he hated every minute he spent with her.

  There floated in her mind’s eye the day of her mother’s funeral. All that trouble having a baby and struggling to bring her up in decency, and then have a man wear her as a hair shirt! Her hand closed on a table knife. A moment later, she dropped it and giggled. How silly! You couldn’t kill anybody with a table knife.

  She could go back to London again. She would need a refresher course. She would also need, she now understood, a strength of character which was beyond her reach. Actually, of course, she would go on being a hair shirt. The niche reserved for the housing of her self respect had been walled up, so it didn’t matter any more what she did.

  Chapter Four

  The mind of Elsie Potter was barely capable of grasping a moral abstraction. She did not put it to herself that Jeremy Grantham was subjecting her personality to a form of protracted murder from which, being herself, she could not escape. In its own thought forms, her intuition perceived that he was using her as a guinea pig for an experiment in moral rectitude—that to him her hopes and fears, her good and ill temper and her attempts at companionship, were all part of the experiment.

  Nor, at this stage, did she consciously set herself to the task of murdering him. She was a creature of reaction. She found herself spending more and more time in day-dreaming about killing. Just killing in general.

  In this matter the films were obviously unreliable. You shot a man; and if he was a bad man he died at once. But if he was a good man he often turned out to be only slightly wounded, or at least he lived long enough to deliver one of those speeches that sometimes made you cry. Perhaps Jeremy would be rated as a good man. Anyhow, she hadn’t a gun.

  The fantasy persisted throughout the winter. Her self-respect, which had given no trouble when it had a niche of its own, now asserted itself in a disturbing manner. She was eating and sleeping badly. At times she would wander about the house for an hour on end: at other times she would sit stock still neglecting her few duties, thinking of nothing at all.

  The sudden passing of her melancholy can be timed, almost to the minute. It occurred at a little after half-past ten on the first night of June, 1934. They had been to the pictures. On the hall table, addressed to Grantham, was a brown paper package, much bespattered with sealing wax.

  “That’s the Report Book!” said Grantham. “Bewley must have brought it just after we left. That means the committee are in a hurry. We shall have to look sharp about filling it in.”

  “We can begin now, if you like?” said Elsie indifferently.

  “Certainly not! You’re tired, my dear, and so am I. You can start on it tomorrow while I’m at the office. It’s—hm! ten thirty-one, to be precise. The staff has gone to bed.” And then came that dreadful little speech he made every night throughout the summer months. “I may as well go and turn off the gas main. No need to take unnecessary risks!”

  Gas was used for cooking and for stoves in the upper rooms. In the winter, it was left on at the main because they liked to use the stove when going to bed. The hypothetical risk of fire was no greater in summer than in winter. Yet, nearly every night of summer he had that absurd little excuse about unnecessary risk. If only he would put it into other words sometimes—

  The gas!

  It was as if the words had been shouted inside her brain. The listlessness slipped from her with her cloak. The childish fantasies of guns and poison and pushing people over cliffs vanished in a clear-cut plan. Every detail flashed instantly into place, making a single picture in her mind’s eye.

  Grantham had put the package in the morning room and passed through the baize door to the kitchen quarters. Elsie hurried up to their bedroom, whipped off an undergarment and thrust it into the flue of the gas stove, above the asbestos and out of sight.

  Jeremy’s bed was nearer the gas stove. She would have to walk round in the dark. She measured the distance with her eye—had time to pace it out before he appeared. She did not know that she was smiling.

  “Elsie, my dear, you look happy!”

  “Do I! I expect that’s because I feel better.”

  “I am so very glad. When you are miserable, I get the feeling that everything I have tried to do for you has achieved nothing.”

  That was what made him miserable—the fear that the experiment was failing and that he was wearing the hair shirt for nothing. She warned herself not to get angry with him or he might lie awake.

  She succeeded in keeping him pleased with himself and he did not lie awake. She had suffered much from his snoring, before she had grown used to it, but now she was glad of it. She slipped out of bed, took her measured paces to the gas stove. The films were reliable instructors in the danger of fingerprints, so she turned on the tap of the
gas stove with the hem of her nightdress.

  Shutting the window was the next step. If the sashes screamed as they did sometimes the noise might wake even Jeremy and she would have to say that she was too hot and was trying to open it wider.

  She applied pressure gradually and the sashes did not scream. The snoring maintained its even timing. The door was ever so much easier than the window.

  On her way downstairs in the dark, two of the stairs creaked. Even if the servants heard it on the top floor, which was unlikely, they would take no notice.

  In the hall, she stood for a minute or more in the dark, listening. Then she passed through the baize door to the kitchen quarters. She did not turn on the light. The blinds had not been drawn, and there was enough light from the stars.

  In the act of touching the main tap, she snatched back her hand. Over the sink, a dishcloth was hanging, to dry. With the cloth, she turned the main tap full on. With the cloth, too, she turned one of the taps of the cooker, to check: when the low hiss of the gas told her that she had made no mistake, she turned it off. She replaced the dishcloth on the hanger above the sink.

  Back through the baize door to the morning room, which Jeremy called his study. She sat down and contemplated the fact that the gas was flowing up the pipe into the room in which Jeremy was sleeping.

  The servants would get up at seven, and at eight would bring early tea for Jeremy. She must sit in that chair until half-past six. It was now only a little past midnight.

  Suppose she failed? Suppose Jeremy woke up before the gas had time to kill him and came downstairs and found her there? She laughed silently. She would tell him that she had tried to kill him—and let him see if he could make amends for that!

  He wanted to make her happy. He would succeed, tomorrow. She gave little thought to the life of well-fed indolence, believing that the law compelled a husband to make provision for his wife.