Killing with Kindness

by Anne Morice

  ‘Peter told me that you weren’t so much ill as immobile and if he’s right about that it’s just possible that the time will soon begin to hang rather heavy and that you’d consider helping me out with a small personal problem for which you’re certainly better qualified than anyone else I could ask. I won’t bore you with the details now, but if later on you feel able to give me some professional advice do let me know. I should be more than grateful. Yours . . .’

  I felt reasonably satisfied that he would rise to this bait, which I had purposely swathed in a certain amount of mystery, so as soon as the letter was posted I turned my attention to the next proposition, although, as it happened, I had barely got into my mental stride with it when there was a fresh development, requiring a fundamental change of strategy.

  I was kneeling on the floor, altering the hem of a skirt, the kind of tedious job best not performed in Robin’s presence lest he be driven into a dementia of nervous irritation, but which allows just the right amount of scope for the mind to range untrammelled, when he arrived home early from work and plopped the evening paper with deadly accuracy on the box of pins. Stifling the exclamations of rage and annoyance, I daintily moved it aside, but he said:

  “No, go on, read it! There’s something there to interest you.”

  “You mean the inquest? But I knew all about that in advance. Besides, I was there.”

  “Not the inquest, something new.”

  I spread out the paper and cast an eye over the front page. The banner headlines referred to a pile-up on a motorway, but further down and to the right of the page a more modest headline read as follows: ‘Second Body Found in Thames’.

  Beneath this were three short paragraphs, of which the first two had obviously been based on police handouts, stating merely that the body of John Masters, 23, of Warmenham-on-Thames, had been discovered by 56-year-old lock keeper, Mr Arthur Cook, in the early hours of Tuesday morning. He had been alerted to the tragedy by the sight of two wheels sticking up out of the water and investigation had confirmed that they were part of the invalid chair belonging to the deceased who, with his sister, Miss Chloe Masters, lived next door at Old Lock Cottage.

  He and Miss Masters had between them managed to raise the wheel chair out of the river and had discovered the dead man strapped in the seat. Artificial respiration had proved futile. Asked whether he suspected foul play, Detective Superintendent Meiklejohn of the Thames Valley C.I.D. said it was too early to comment.

  In his final paragraph the reporter drew the reader’s notice to the startling coincidence of this discovery having been made only a few hours before the inquest on Michael Parsons, whose body had been recovered several miles upstream, the jury having subsequently returned a verdict of homicide. Asked about a possible connection between the two deaths, the police again refused to comment.

  “You bet there’s a connection,” I said, dropping the paper and staring up at Robin, whose complacent expression showed that he was enjoying the sensation he had created quite as much as the expectation of dressmaking being abandoned for that evening. “The man who wrote this must be pretty dim. A child of ten could have found the connection with no help at all.”

  “I’ve no doubt you’re right, but the libel laws being what they are the editor would need to be a child of ten to print it.”

  “Why? I mean, I can see that the personal angle might have been a bit risky, but there couldn’t be anything libellous in revealing that one of the victims had worked for the same company as the sister of the other one.”

  “The company might not agree with you, nor the sister either. It would be rather suggestive.”

  “Of what?”

  “General skulduggery around the film studio, for one thing. People might get the idea that she had pushed her brother overboard because he knew something which connected her with the other man’s murder.”

  “But no one knew that the other one was a murder case when her brother died. It was only revealed hours later at the inquest.”

  “Really, Tessa, aren’t you being the dim one now? The murderer didn’t have to wait for the inquest to find out how Mike Parsons met his death. He or she would have known that perfectly well.”

  “So in that case why not have acted before? If her brother had really known something damning against her, I should have expected her to dispose of him ages ago. Why pick the very moment when, as you’ve pointed out, the two incidents couldn’t fail to be connected?”

  “Presumably because, if Chloe was responsible, she would have hoped that her brother’s murder wouldn’t be necessary. She could have gambled on Parsons never being found, or at any rate that so much time would have elapsed before he was that it would be impossible to establish the cause of death. The danger point for her would only have come when he was pulled out of the river within a week of his disappearance.”

  “Yes, I can understand all that, but what I still don’t see is why her brother should only have become a danger to her then. If he knew she’d killed a man he might have blurted it out at any time, especially as he was given to hysterical tantrums.”

  “Oh, I don’t suppose he would have known anything positive. It is more likely to have been some isolated piece of information, like her being away from the house during a certain period, which would have appeared quite innocent on its own, but would take on a more sinister aspect as soon as a dead man turned up.”

  “Well, you seem to have worked out a pretty firm case against Chloe. Is it still hypothetical, or do you know something that I don’t?”

  “No, I’m simply pointing out one of the conclusions which any logical mind could arrive at, once the link had been established between her and Mike Parsons.”

  “And what bothers me is that it is logical, and yet at the same time so absolutely false and incredible.”

  “That’s more like it!”

  “More like what?”

  “Your true form. Finding something to be perfectly logical, and therefore to be instantly dismissed, is just what I have come to rely on.”

  “Because truth and logic are not necessarily synonymous.”

  “And your feminine intuition, or whatever name it goes by at this moment, tells you that Chloe was incapable of murdering her own brother?”

  “No,” I admitted slowly. “That’s not so, now you mention it. I really believe she would be capable of murdering him for humane reasons; what they call a mercy killing in some circles. But I don’t see her as a coward and I can’t believe she would do such a thing simply to protect herself. Anyway, why couldn’t it have been a straight-forward accident? The garden slopes straight down to the river and he might easily have lost control of his wheel chair and gone in by mistake.”

  “Except that people in their right minds, unless they happen to be professional escapists, don’t strap themselves into a moving vehicle and then guide it full tilt towards a river.”

  “But Johnnie Masters wasn’t in his right mind. From what Chloe told me, he was both subnormal and hysterical and, having had a brief glimpse of him, I can confirm it. He looked like a terrified zombie. If it wasn’t an accident, I should say that suicide was the most likely explanation.”

  “There is a third possibility though, isn’t there? Or rather a variation on your second. Namely, that he and his sister acted in collusion in murdering Parsons and when he knew the game was up he killed himself to avoid the consequences. How do you care for that?”

  “Not bad. Chloe maintained that he still had the most tremendous crush on Mike, in spite of everything, but she could have been lying, I suppose. It was the one part of her story which couldn’t be checked. I still think it would have been reckless of her to have been quite so frank in describing her motives for wanting Mike out of the way, but it’s conceivable that she guessed they would come to light anyway and that she had nothing to lose by laying them all out herself. Not that I would repeat what she told me.”

  “One never knows what one may do until the circumstance
s arise,” Robin reminded me. “But it might be interesting to know who else she has confided in.”

  “Certainly not Brenda.”

  “No, and that raises a question, doesn’t it? Why not Brenda? She claims her relationship with Parsons was strictly platonic and yet, when he became such a menace, why didn’t she appeal to his wife to control him? Wouldn’t that have been the natural thing to do, if she had nothing to hide? Yet, as far as we know, she never made any attempt to get in touch with her.”

  “No one made any attempt to get in touch with her. She could as well have been the Man in the Iron Mask. And the single, universally known fact about her happens to have been a myth, although it was that which cut her off so effectively from the outside world.”

  “How do you know it was a myth?”

  “Well, I don’t really; at least, only in the negative sense that I’ve seen no evidence to support it. Tell me, though, Robin, how well informed are you on the subject of alcoholism?”

  “About the same as most people. That’s to say I know a good deal about the effects, a lot less about the causes.”

  “But even in your limited experience, would you have judged it possible for a long-standing addict to be able to drop it, just like that?”

  “Not without fairly drastic treatment, no.”

  “You wouldn’t for instance, imagine that a severe shock of some kind could have the same sobering up effect?”

  “You mean like someone driving a car when he was drunk and running down a pedestrian?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I suppose it’s not unheard of. It might certainly contribute to a cure, but I still doubt if it would be a permanent one without medical treatment to back it up. Although that’s precisely what you’d get, if you’d been responsible for an accident of that kind and been convicted of manslaughter. You’d get it over a long period in a prison hospital. On the other hand, if you’re leading up to the proposition that Brenda killed her husband and pushed him in the river while under the influence and then, having realised her mistake, foreswore alcohol forever, I should forget it. I’m afraid anyone who was that drunk would have lacked the necessary co-ordination. Besides, I doubt if remorse, however intense, would have been enough. You’d need drugs and therapy on top of it to get you through. In fact, I suspect that in a case of that kind the true addict would very soon resort to the bottle in even larger quantities to try and obliterate the memory.”

  “Well, thank you,” I said. “That’s given me a few ideas to work on.”

  “So now you have completely resolved the Brenda paradox?”

  “To tell you the truth, Robin, I felt I was making some headway with that already, but what you have just said has given me a new slant on Mike.”

  “Like who killed him, what for, and how, no doubt?”

  “Yes, to one of your questions,” I replied. “No, not yet to the other two, but I feel I’m making progress.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The fish in the Pinner pool rose with a majestic leap within twenty-four hours of my casting the bait. There was some wriggling on the hook, however, for his proposal when he telephoned to thank me was that I should call at his home for a wee natter.

  The prospect had only faint appeal, mainly because of fear of Madge being present in a chaperoning capacity, which would have an inhibiting effect on us both. So I insisted that I would not dream of invading his privacy, especially when he was unwell, and that my affairs could easily wait for a week or two. As an afterthought, I added that it would be impractical too, because there was a mass of claims and assessments which he would need to study and I should unfailingly leave the essential ones at home.

  There was a brief lull in our conversation here and in the course of it Alec remembered that he had an appointment with his osteopath the following afternoon and, having remembered it, swam gracefully into the net by offering to call on me immediately afterwards. We settled for a dish of tea at Beacon Square between four and five o’clock and as soon as he had rung off I picked up the telephone again and dialled Brenda’s number.

  For the first time in my experience, she answered immediately, and then went straight into another string of complaints. It appeared that the Halifax contingent had left at dawn, to avoid the worst of the traffic, and that after only a few hours alone in the house she had already reached desperation point.

  As usual, her plaintive, self-pitying tones jarred on the nerves and I heard myself saying:

  “Now, come on, Brenda, take a pull. It can’t be as bad as all that. After all, even when Mike was alive you were accustomed to spending long periods alone while the boys were at school.”

  “Yes, but that was different. I knew they’d be back at four and there was their tea to get, and usually Mike’s supper to think about as well. I had things to keep me occupied, but now the hours just crawl. You don’t know what it’s like to be in this state.”

  This was unanswerable and I allowed her to go whining on, which she did by saying:

  “Anyway, that was before we knew there was this murderer about. In those days I thought of murder as something that happened in the newspapers, but now I keep wondering all the time who he could be and who’s next on the list.”

  “Do you mean you feel you might be in danger too?”

  “Well, wouldn’t you? If he’s some kind of maniac who had a grudge against Mike, why stop there? That Superintendent Micki whatever his name is told me they were going to keep a watch on the house and I’ve seen one of their cars parked down by the corner of the field, but what’s the good of that? What’s to stop anyone creeping up here through the woods at the back, or even running me over when I go down to the shops? I bet you’d feel afraid if you were me.”

  Oddly enough, she was right, although I did not believe that her danger came from either of the two sources she had named, still less that there was anything I could do to avert it. However, I suggested driving down to keep her company for an hour or two, which she agreed to without much enthusiasm, and then I said:

  “In the meantime, Brenda, perhaps it would be a good idea to give yourself a job of some kind.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “Well, I’m sure the house is already too spick and span to need any attention, but if you could find a few odds and ends to do in the garden it might take your mind off things.”

  I could almost feel her shudder and she said in a high-pitched voice,

  “Oh no, not that, I couldn’t possibly. It’s worst of all in the garden. That hedge and everything . . . I sometimes think I’ll never force myself to go near it again.”

  Conscious of having been a trifle insensitive, I endeavoured to make amends by leaving London with all speed, and arrived at Hill Grove exactly an hour and a half later.

  The front door was locked and remained so until long after the last chime had died on the air, but the gloomy forebodings which this inspired were instantly wiped away by her appearance when she did arrive. She looked flustered, but had discarded her sunglasses for once and there was colour in her cheeks. Her hands were smudged and her hair dishevelled, making her look quite human, as well as a lot prettier than usual.

  “I took your advice,” she gabbled. “Set myself to a job of work. It wasn’t a bad idea really, but I must look a sight. Mind waiting in the living room while I have a wash? Then I’ll make some coffee.”

  “Oh, don’t bother about that. Can’t I give you a hand with whatever it is you’re doing?”

  “Well,” she said doubtfully, “it would be nice to finish it, now I’ve got started. I don’t know when I’ll ever bring myself to go back to it. Fact is, I’ve been sorting out some of Mike’s personal belongings. You know, clothes and that. The shoes are the worst problem. I don’t believe they take them at the jumble, but I thought some of his other things might go. Come up and see what you think. Sooner or later I’ve got to make myself realise that I’m never going to see him again and I thought it might ma
ke it easier not having all these reminders of him everywhere I turn.”

  “Very wise. And if you’re serious about giving some clothes away I do know a charity who would be delighted to get their hands on them.”

  “It seems wicked in a way, but I don’t know of anyone who’d want to wear them and I don’t suppose they’d fetch any cash. I suppose your place might be the best answer. The only trouble is getting them there. I don’t much fancy carrying a lot of heavy parcels down to the post office on foot. Besides, it’ll cost the earth in postal charges. Or do they pay those at the other end? They should do by rights, don’t you think?”

  “Perhaps so, but I’m afraid they don’t. However, that’s no worry because their headquarters are in Kensington, so if we pack them all into my car I can drop them off on my way home.”

  “Oh well, that’s all right, then. Thanks.”

  “You’d better put some paper and string round them,” I said, following her upstairs. “And make two separate parcels, while you’re about it. Those which need cleaning in a separate one.”

  “Oh, they pay for the cleaning, do they? Well, that’s something.”

  I did not disillusion her and she went on,

  “Not that there’ll be much needed in that way. Mike always saw to it himself. It was a habit he’d got into early on in life and he was fanatical about wearing anything that was the slightest bit soiled.”

  I cannot explain it but there are certain words in the English language which bring me out in a rash and soiled happens to be one of them. However, with a perversity which remains equally mysterious, the more her speech and attitudes jarred on me the greater my sense of obligation became. Perhaps it was because I could see nothing but wretchedness behind and ahead of her and other people’s misfortunes always engender a sense of guilt.