by Anne Morice
“And no hope at all?”
“Very little. They kept him in the orthopaedic hospital for about six weeks, after which they told me there was nothing more they could do for him and I could take him home at ten o’clock the following morning. Thanks a lot!”
“And what about Mike?”
“What about him? Haven’t you heard enough?”
“I just wondered what his reactions were, whether he’d tried to make amends in any way?”
“Oh, he made regular visits to the hospital at first, but they soon dropped off when it became clear what a mess his damned meddling had landed us in. There hasn’t been a word from him for the last couple of weeks and that’s all the amends I want. The only ray of hope is that as time goes by Johnnie may get back to some of his old form, so that if there should be a vacancy in the home he was in before he’ll at least be fit enough to take it up. As long as Mike keeps away there may still be a faint chance for us.”
“Yes, I can understand how you must feel. I only wish there was something positive I could do to help.”
“Oh, we’ll get by, I expect,” Chloe said briskly. “No thanks to Mike, but at least the financial situation isn’t too grim. I can earn a bit by reading manuscripts and my mother left us this cottage and a half share in a little agency. It’s doing pretty well, as it happens, and they’ve just opened a new branch, so we shan’t starve.”
“That’s one comfort,” I said.
“And if you won’t mind my saying so, Tessa, the best way you can help is to leave things alone. I should imagine that his wife is far better off without him, and if she doesn’t realise that now she soon will. That’s mainly why I told you a slight fib just now when you were asking me about someone called Sandy. The fact is, I have heard Mike mention him once or twice and I suppose it was stupid of me to deny it. It was really just a feeble attempt to discourage you from going around questioning any more people. I honestly think that if everyone would mind his own business there’d be a lot less misery in the world.”
It was a chastening thought and one which gave me food for reflection as I drove towards the main road. So much so that I found concentration continually slipping away and was thankful when I was at last able to slide out of the London bound traffic by taking a right turn which I knew would eventually lead me through quiet lanes to Toby’s house at Roakes Common, where I had invited myself to lunch.
CHAPTER NINE
One of Robin’s forecasts turned out to be correct in almost every particular, the notable exception being that it was not a small boy who saw the human foot in the water but a twelve-year-old girl. She was on holiday with her parents in a hired cabin cruiser and one of her proud duties was to assist in manoeuvring it through the locks. It was while tying up to one of the posts, at the entrance to Temple Lock, that she made her discovery and it might have passed her by altogether if an excess of zeal had not caused her to lose her balance at the crucial moment and obliged her to fling both arms round the post for support. In doing so she knocked her plastic sunglasses off and they fell into the water. As soon as order was restored and the rope made fast, she had leant out as far as she could, sideways over the stern, in a futile attempt to retrieve them. They had floated tantalisingly a few inches beyond her reach and were bobbing gracefully along towards a clump of weeds just below the surface, between the post and the weir. She was studying the terrain and assessing the chances of their being caught and held there long enough for her to get the boat hook into position when she saw the tip of a man’s grey and sodden shoe. It was not floating on the water, but sticking straight up through the weeds, and being a fast-thinking girl she immediately lost interest in the glasses and went forward to the steering cabin to tell her father.
These facts only came to my notice later on, for all Robin would say when he telephoned me after lunch at Toby’s was that Mike’s body had been pulled out of the river and was now at the morgue awaiting a post mortem.
“You look rather disappointed,” Toby remarked when I had passed on the news. “But I suppose you could call it a happy ending in one respect.”
“For Chloe maybe, but not for Brenda. She was fighting mad when she thought he’d bolted with another woman, but all the stuffing will go out of her now. My guess is that she’ll spend the rest of her life wondering what made him do it and how she’d let him down.”
“I can’t help wondering a bit myself.”
“Nor can I. Do you suppose it had anything to do with the way he’d mucked things up for Chloe? It would have been a bad blow to his self-esteem, if nothing else.”
“Oh no, I can’t agree. These fantasy fairy godfathers can always put their failures behind them and dance on to the next good deed.”
“Then what reason can you suggest?”
“I daresay he didn’t have one. He was probably a little overwrought and fell in by mistake.”
“In broad daylight? Surely somebody would have fished him out?”
“How do you know it was broad daylight?”
“Because he disappeared between eight-thirty and nine-thirty in the morning.”
“But he needn’t necessarily have plunged straight in. He could have been on a blind somewhere first and finished up at night in the pub where they found his car. What more natural, when closing time came, to go for a stroll to clear his head before driving home? I can picture it all: the weaving gait as he lurches towards the river, the fatal stumble, the faint splash and smothered scream, before the waters close over his head.”
“You may be able to picture it like that, Toby, but I certainly can’t. For one thing, as I’ve told you so many times already, he never touched a drop.”
“How can you be sure of that? Just think of all the new and wonderful things you’ve learnt about him only this morning! However, I’ve got something else for you; how do you like the idea of his wife having pushed him in?”
“Same objection. How could she have done so without anyone noticing? At this time of the year the Thames is like Oxford Street a week before Christmas, as you well know. Besides . . .”
“Yes?”
“Well, Robin probably wouldn’t have any truck with this, but I honestly can’t see what her motive would have been. I daresay being married to Mike was a lonely and boring occupation for much of the time, but it’s going to be far more lonely and boring without him and obviously there were compensations. She was well provided for and living in her dream house and I expect all that will come to an end now. He may have been earning quite a lot recently, but people in our business hardly ever manage to save much, do they? Whatever his faults, and he does seem to have had a few which didn’t meet the naked eye, she can hardly fail to be worse off without him.”
“I’m not sure that I’ll have any truck with that either,” Toby said. “One never really knows anything about people’s circumstances except what they choose to reveal. For all you know, she may have another Mister in the background, all ready to take over the mortgage and the marriage bed.”
“You wouldn’t get that impression if you met her; but in any case there’s a much more factual objection.”
“I look forward to hearing it.”
“Several, in fact. I’ve already pointed out the obstacles confronting a woman desirous of pushing her husband into the Thames at the height of the holiday season, and before you tell me that she could have enticed him to some secluded spot and by some miracle hit on a moment when there was no one in sight, I must tell you that she simply could not have had the opportunity.”
“Oh, how can you say so? She has given you her version of how she spent the day, but naturally she would have left out that bit.”
“No, that’s the whole point, Toby. If the version she gave me was fictitious, why did she drag in so many details which could be checked? She lived such a tame, uneventful life that it would have been impossible to prove she was lying if she had described a day in which nothing whatever happened, not even a visit to the supermarket or the
man coming to check the electric meter. Furthermore, why bring her story to me at all? If she had pushed him in, surely the sensible course would have been to lie low and hope that he would never turn up at all or that when he did he’d be unrecognisable?”
“Because it might appear slightly callous, in the circumstances to say nothing about it and go quietly plodding on with the housework, as though one husband more or less made no difference.”
“In most households that might apply, I agree, but not to Brenda. She could always have stuck to her story that Mike had told her he had to be away on location. It’s not a very likely thing to happen, but masses of people would have confirmed that she was in no position to know that. They all tell the same story about his keeping her completely in the dark, so far as his work was concerned, and of using it as an excuse for his neglect.”
“In that case, what about the other one?”
“Chloe?”
“She appears to have had quite a sound motive.”
“Too sound by half. I mean, she’d hardly have confessed to it so openly if she was guilty, do you think?”
“Who knows? Blabbing away to comparative strangers is reputed to be quite a common failing among criminals. I daresay very few of them would ever be caught if they only knew how to exercise a little self-control.”
“Don’t let Robin hear you say that; and anyway I doubt if Chloe is the type to fall into that sort of trap. She’s a very cool number. On the other hand, let’s say for the sake of argument that Mike turned up at her cottage, all set to tangle her life yet again and she decided she’d had enough. She could have pretended to be willing to discuss whatever he had in mind, but not where her brother might overhear. It would have been the most natural thing in the world to have suggested taking a stroll along the towpath. In fact, it’s about the only place round there where you could take a stroll. She’s a fairly powerful girl, quite as strong as Mike I should imagine, and if she’d had the forethought to conceal a brick about her person, she could have knocked him out and heaved him in with no trouble at all.”
“Without anyone seeing? How would that apply to her and not to the wife?”
“Because of the lock. During the ten minutes or so when the gates are closed, all the craft coming downstream would have been completely sealed off. She’d only have needed to watch for anything approaching from the other direction and they’d be travelling slowly, getting ready to wait their turn to go in.”
“There you are, then. There’s your case all sewn up. Having thrown him into the water, she drives his car to the Strand, leaves it near the pub and then goes home to bed.”
“How?”
“Well, in the usual way, I suppose . . . draw back the bedclothes . . . one two three, jump?”
“I meant how did she get home? No car, remember, and it must be at least fifteen miles by road. No, I am sorry to say, Toby, that whether Chloe killed him or not, she couldn’t have done it in the way I’ve described.”
“Oh, what a pity! I feel quite cheated.”
“So do I, but the trouble is I’d overlooked his car, and, what is much worse, I’d forgotten about the current. Chloe’s cottage is between Cookham and Marlow, but Temple Lock, where Mike was found, is a long way upstream from there. Wherever he was put into the river, he must either have remained in that spot, or been pulled along the current. By no stretch of the imagination could he have drifted against it. I can guess what you’re going to say next.”
“Well that’s lucky, because I can’t.”
“You could have said that, instead of walking, Chloe and Mike went for a drive somewhere, having locked her brother in the cottage, that she killed him in some secluded spot just above Temple Lock, drove his car to the Strand and paddled herself home in a stolen punt.”
“And what is your objection to this brilliant exposition of mine?”
“First of all that the boatman at the Strand hasn’t reported a missing punt; only a missing pole.”
“Oh well, no one is infallible. He may not have noticed.”
“Surely he would have noticed if someone had pinched one of his punts in broad daylight? It could only have been done after dark, when he had gone home.”
“Quite so.”
I shook my head: “Not so at all. You see, all the locks are closed at sunset, so she couldn’t have gone more than a few miles by river. The only remaining alternative is that they met by arrangement at the pub, she having left her own car somewhere nearby, but that’s not really feasible either. I simply cannot see them sitting side by side in his car until well past closing time when the whole area is deserted, at which point he allows her to conk him on the head and drag him off down to the river. No, it’s too ridiculous to contemplate and I am afraid the answer has to be suicide. I do wonder why he did it, though?”
“There could be a thousand reasons. Obviously he wasn’t quite the simple soul you took him for.”
“No, but he had his good points too, whatever Chloe may say, and it’s sad to think of him ending his life so drearily. Rough on the boys too, when they learn the truth.”
“Your sentiments do you credit, but I shouldn’t lose a moment’s sleep over the last one. If you can’t puzzle out why he did it, I see no reason why any coroner should. It will be put down to accidental death.”
“Yes, I hadn’t thought of it, but you’re probably right. It’s a consoling thought.”
A short lived one too, as it turned out, for less than twenty-four hours had passed when Robin gave me the result of the autopsy and it established conclusively that death had not been caused by drowning. I suspected that even the most charitable coroner might have some trouble in postulating that a man could have accidentally fallen into the river, having first accidentally suffocated himself to death.
“Wheels within wheels,” Toby remarked, when I telephoned the news, for he likes to be kept abreast of events, so long as he is not required to play any active part in them. “You mark my words!”
I wish I had too, because as things turned out he was so absolutely right.
CHAPTER TEN
Sympathy with Brenda’s ordeal in identifying her husband’s remains, plus the inability to expunge the disagreeable images it created, prompted me to make several attempts to ring her up. The first was at half past nine in the morning, but there was no reply and, concluding that she was doing some shopping after seeing the children on to the school bus, I waited for an hour before trying again. Still no reply, either then, or on my third attempt just before lunch. It had occurred to me by then that her number might be out of order, so I enlisted the operator’s help. However, this got me nowhere because after a few whirrs and clicks I was back with the ringing tone again. Whereupon she informed me that my number was ringing for me now, and disappeared into the ether before I could comment.
There is nothing to compare with such little bureaucratic pinpricks for setting one off on a defiant course, however ill-advised, and I had gathered up my bag and keys and marched out of the house within three minutes of putting the receiver down and certainly without stopping to consider what I might be letting myself in for.
The answer to that one appeared, initially, to be a forty mile drive with nothing whatever at the end of it, for when I pulled up outside 32, Hill Grove, I saw a young woman walking slowly away from the house, wheeling a wispy, flaxen-haired tot in a pushchair. Reaching the gate as I alighted, she first shook her head at me and then turned it away to glance back at the house.
She herself was a waif-like creature, heavily pregnant, wearing a pale blue smock and flat-soled leather sandals. Her head was tied up in a chiffon scarf, which failed to camouflage the lumps and bumps of hair rollers underneath, and she looked weary as well as anxious.
“No one at home?” I asked her.
“I guess that’s what we’re meant to think, only it isn’t true. She’s in there, I’d say, and so are the kids. Trouble is, she refuses to open up. My name’s Fay Burnett, by the way,” she added, h
olding out her hand.
“How do you do? I’m Tessa Price.”
“Nice to meet you. Haven’t I seen you before?”
“On the screen, possibly. Calling myself Theresa Crichton.”
“Oh, sure, I remember now. I heard you on the radio only the other day. You a friend of Mrs Parsons?”
“Not really. I knew her husband fairly well.”
“Then you’ve heard what happened? Him being drowned, I mean?”
“It’s why I’ve come. Not much use though, if she won’t let me in. Are you quite sure she’s there?”
“She has to be. The boys didn’t get the bus this morning and she doesn’t have a car now. Besides, I lifted the letter box flap to try and take a look inside and I could hear people moving around. She’s always like this, did you know? I’ve been around to call on her several times, but she won’t open the door. Hell, I don’t know why I bother, but it’s on account of the kids mainly. I’ve got three of my own, in addition to number four due next month. This one is Claire, by the way. Say hello to Mrs Price, Claire.”
“Hello, Claire!”
“You know, I just can’t stop myself worrying about Mrs Parsons shut up in there on her own. One shouldn’t repeat things, but you were a friend of his, and from what I hear she has this drinking problem . . . did you know about that?”
“I’ve heard rumours, but I wouldn’t let it worry you too much. Personally, I think they’re exaggerated. Anyway, you shouldn’t be standing about like this. Can’t I give you a lift home?”
“No, it’s okay. We only live just a way up the hill a bit.”