Killing with Kindness

by Anne Morice

  A quick look at the counter revealed that Miss Streamline had not returned and I scuttled out of the shop and had pushed my way through half a dozen separate groups before realising that I was still holding the dressing gown. There was nothing to be done about it, however, because, as is so often the case, one side of the road was much more favoured by the pram and poodle brigade than the other, and in this respect my quarry had the advantage of me. Only the fact that she was unaware of being pursued and so had no reason to hurry and that I, having guessed her destination, could concentrate exclusively on darting in and out of the human traffic enabled me to catch up with her. Furthermore, I had retained a clear visual memory of the car she would be making for and in fact she was actually unlocking the driver’s door when I rounded the corner of the public lavatories and then abruptly switched to a normal walking pace.

  “Oh, hallo!” I said, strolling up to her in a leisurely fashion.

  She was behind the wheel by this time, but had not yet closed the door and I grasped the handle in an absent minded way and pulled it a little further open.

  There was an agonised silence and then she said:

  “Oh, hallo, Tessa! What are you doing in these parts?”

  “Visiting Mike’s widow. I think she’s in a poor way. You know, too sunk in misery even to go out and buy food. I’ve stopped off here to gather up a few supplies.”

  “Oh, I see. Well, rather you than me,” Chloe said, making a gesture towards closing the door.

  Hanging on to it with might and main, I said: “I was just leaving when I saw you getting into your car, so I took the opportunity to come over and say how sorry I was to hear about your brother.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I ought to have written really, but it’s so difficult to know what to say to people.”

  “That’s all right. I didn’t expect a letter.”

  “All the same, I truly am sorry. It must have been a hideous shock for you.”

  “Yes, it was, but I’m getting over it now. As you know, he wasn’t a normal young man. It would be hypocrisy to pretend that he had very much to live for. It’s a help to know that in many ways he’s much better off where he is.”

  “Why, yes, I suppose that is the most sensible way of looking at it. And what now? Are you planning to go abroad?”

  She had made another tentative move to shut the door, but the force suddenly went out of it and she dropped her hand back on the wheel, saying sharply:

  “No. What gave you that idea?”

  “Oh, simply that I thought I saw you coming out of the travel bureau just now. I thought you might be planning a trip somewhere, to get right away from things for a bit.”

  “Then you guessed wrong. It’s the last thing I have in mind. Apart from anything else, I couldn’t afford it and the first priority is to get back to work. You must have mistaken me for someone else.”

  She was wearing a white dress with a green chiffon scarf in the neck and green shoes, so it was not very likely that I could have, but I did not exasperate her further by persisting. I considered that she would have quite enough exasperation to contend with on the journey home, when she flayed herself for denying the charge quite so vehemently and in quite such detail. So I allowed her to tug the door shut at last and to slam the car into gear.

  There was of course nothing to prevent my going back to the travel agents to verify the matter for myself, but it hardly seemed worth the bother, since even an affirmative would still have left the burning question unanswered. At that moment I would have parted with all my worldly goods to know why Chloe had looked so utterly stricken when I had first accosted her.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  There was a film of dust on the birchwood coffee table, the fan of pleated paper covering the fireplace was more grey than white and the pile of magazines slightly out of alignment. It would have been logical to assume that Brenda was now so dispirited as to have gone beyond the healing powers of dusting and scrubbing, but this was not the case. On the contrary, the housekeeping obsession seemed to have diminished as her hopes rose and I found her, if far from cheerful, in a more calm and resolute mood than at any previous time. I explained that I had been worried by not getting any reply to my telephone call and she said:

  “Oh, I expect I was down seeing the bank manager. Didn’t I tell you I had an appointment with him?”

  “Yes, you did, but I thought that was last week.”

  “So it was, but I had to go back for another interview this morning. So many papers to sign, you wouldn’t believe! I thought my hand would drop off.”

  “I hope it all adds up to good news?”

  “Well, not quite so bad as I’d expected, let’s say. None of it takes the place of having Mike back, but I will admit it’s a relief to know we shan’t be thrown out on the streets. There’s a bit more in his deposit account than he’d let on and A.I.P. have been awfully good. I had a letter from them this morning saying they were going to pay me six months of his salary in a lump sum. Wonders will never cease!”

  “I’m so glad. And that probably means that you won’t have to worry about looking for a job, at least not immediately.”

  “Oh yes, I will. Don’t run away with the idea that I’m going to be comfortably off or anything like that. It’ll be an awful struggle, specially with the boys getting big and needing so many clothes and everything. But the bank says that what I ought to do is use this windfall from the company to pay off most of the mortgage, and then I might just be able to manage on what I can earn, with the interest from the capital.”

  “Well, that’s marvellous. There must be quite a hefty sum?”

  “Like I say, a bit more than I’d expected. Mike never breathed a word, but it seems he’s been depositing quite large sums in cash over the last year or so. The manager couldn’t account for it, except he thought it might be that Mike had lent somebody some money a long time ago and these were the repayments. Long time ago is right, for I can’t see Mike being able to dole out sums like that once we’d got married and bought this house. I bet whoever it is won’t keep up the repayments now, though. Still, mustn’t grumble, must I? We shan’t have to lose our home and that’s the main thing.”

  “Yes, indeed. I couldn’t be more delighted.”

  “I’ll be able to pay back your loan, of course,” Brenda said stiffly, as though this might have been the thought behind my rejoicing.

  “Oh, forget it, there’s no hurry whatever. It’s simply that I’m pleased for your sake. As you say, none of it will bring him back, but it’s great to know that some things will go on just the same and that you’ll have a certain amount of security.”

  “Oh yes, but for how long I don’t know, with prices shooting up the way they are! Still, I’ve been thinking over what you said about buying a car. I always take your advice, don’t I? Perhaps I’ll ask my brother-in-law to look out for some cheap little second-hand one. It might be a saving in the end, with fares going up too.”

  “Very good idea. You won’t get nearly so depressed and lonely when you’re mobile, and it will make all the difference to the boys.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t bother if it wasn’t for them, would I? The trouble is, I don’t know whether I’ll ever master the driving well enough to pass the test; and another worry is how I’m going to afford driving lessons. I went into the motoring school after I left the bank this morning and they told me it takes at least twelve lessons for the average person of my age. Sometimes as many as fifteen. I daresay I’ll need even more than that, being such a nit about mechanical things. Mike did his best to teach me several times, but it was hopeless.”

  “Well, that’s often the case between husbands and wives, but it’s a pity you haven’t got some friend who would let you practise on their car. That’s really the only way to cut down on lessons.”

  “Well, I haven’t. Not a single one that I’d care to ask such a favour of. And I can’t see my sister letting me near their precious car when I go up to
stay with them. No, I can’t think of anyone.”

  “Well, I can,” I said. “How about me?”

  “You? Oh no, I couldn’t possibly, Tessa.”

  “Why not? In fact, what’s to stop us having a go now, this minute?”

  “Oh no, I wouldn’t dare, honestly. Besides, isn’t it against the law to drive without those L plates?”

  “Not so long as we keep off the road. We can see about those later on, when you’ve got the hang of it. Just for today you can practise starting and stopping in the drive.”

  “What about your car though? I’d be scared stiff of smashing it up. Suppose I forgot which one was the brake and couldn’t stop?”

  “Never fear, I’ll be ready with the handbrake. And you’re much more likely to stall the engine and stop of your own accord. That’s what beginners usually do.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “And beginner she most definitely was,” I reported to Robin. “So there’s another possibility gone up in smoke!”

  “What possibility is that?”

  “The one I mistakenly got hold of when you were reading out the list of things they found in Mike’s car. If you remember, it included the Highway Code, which struck me as odd at the time because it’s more a thing you’d associate with a learner driver than a fully fledged one and it occurred to me that Brenda might have been lying when she said she couldn’t drive and had secretly been taking lessons. Starting with that, I worked it out that she could conceivably have driven their own car down to the Strand with Mike’s body dumped in the back.”

  “I suppose you’d gone a bit further with it than that?”

  “Oh yes, a lot. Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that she’d returned to the house after seeing the boys off to school and found him still asleep in bed, perhaps snoring with his mouth open, or something equally disagreeable, and a sort of madness had come over her, so that she’d seized the pillow and held it down over his face until he’d stopped breathing. Then afterwards she’d have been faced with the problem of disposing of him, and so I thought she might just have left him covered up in the bed and told Barry and Keith that he’d gone to work after all. The garage would have been locked anyway, so they couldn’t have known the car was still inside. Then around midnight, when all the houses in sight had their lights off, she might have hauled him downstairs to the garage.”

  “Wouldn’t that have woken the children? She’s no amazon, by the sound of it, and dragging a dead body down a flight of stairs would have involved a fair amount of thumping and bumping.”

  “Well, I don’t know, Robin. Perhaps she could have thrown him out of the window?”

  “But even though he was dead, I think the effects of a fall like that would have shown up in the p.m., you know. Also there would still have been the business of dragging him to the car, and out again and into the river when she arrived there. No mean feat for a single-handed female, but I suppose your answer to that would be that she used the missing punt pole to push him off the bank and into the flowing part of the river?”

  “No, as it happens, I had a slightly better idea than that, or at any rate more elaborate. In one of my conversations with her she mentioned that they owned a rubber dinghy, and then she corrected herself and said they used to own one until Barry started fooling about with it and caused it to capsize. They’re such docile children that there seemed to be a slight discrepancy there, as I realised as soon as I met them.”

  “Even the most docile can be devilish sometimes, but I suppose you think the truth of the matter was that she put her husband’s body in this dinghy and sent it for a trip down the river? I must remind you that no dinghy has turned up so far.”

  “No, but if she’d loosened the screw to allow the air to escape very gradually, just before she launched it, it would have kept afloat long enough for her to push him out a good distance, far enough anyway to get caught in the current before it sank. However, before you raise any more objections, I must tell you that you are preaching to the converted. It’s too bad but there it is, because my whole case rested on her being able to drive a car at least adequately enough to cover the mile and a half down to the river without bashing into anything, and that, I am now convinced, is the one thing in the world she could not have done.”

  “What a blow! But cheer up, Tessa! She could have been fooling you, couldn’t she? Pretending not to understand about the gears and so on?”

  “So now that I’ve chucked my theory out of the window you start to pick it up? But it’s no use, Robin. I was half prepared for her to put on that sort of act, naturally, and I tried every dodge I knew to catch her out, but she never made a false move. Or rather, she never made a correct one. In the first place, we’d been slogging away for about five minutes and getting absolutely nowhere before I realised her toes were barely brushing the pedals. She happens to be short in the leg, but it turned out that she thought everyone had to drive in those conditions. It had simply not occurred to her that she could push the seat forward. When we’d got that sorted out I kept on at it for about half an hour and she was a jelly of nerves by the end of it, with tears pouring down her face. She kept telling me that she’d been through all this with Mike and that he’d finally had to admit defeat and I believe her, I really do.”

  “And yet it was her idea to take lessons from a professional?”

  “That’s true, but I doubt if she’s so keen on the idea after this experience. I think I succeeded in destroying what remnants of confidence she had, because up till then she had managed to kid herself that it was as much Mike’s fault as hers that she was such a dud.”

  “And why not? Husbands are notoriously the worst people to teach their wives. Probably he was tight lipped about it and made her more nervous than ever?”

  “No, on the contrary. He was obviously rather a sadistic man under that meek and mild manner, but his sadism took rather a novel form. He seems to have destroyed people mainly by kindness. Brenda implied that he never lost his patience during these gruesome driving sessions and that what really unnerved her was the awful sense of inferiority and the knowledge that she was letting her angel down.”

  “How sad! While he, presumably, had no idea of the effect he was having on her?”

  I did not reply to this because the conclusion was so much at variance with my own view of the matter that I was afraid that comment might lead to futile arguments about psychological insights, etcetera, and after an expectant pause Robin continued more seriously:

  “Well, I am sorry that one of your cherished theories has to be thrown out, but perhaps it was all for the best. I must now confess to you that it contained one major flaw which you haven’t even heard about yet.”

  “Why haven’t I?”

  “Partly because you’ve hardly given me a chance to tell you. It concerns the actual murder, rather than its aftermath, but it completely rules out the postulation of Mrs Parsons having returned to the house that morning and finding her husband snoring his head off.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because it defies belief that a man would get up, go out to the garden and begin cutting a hedge, and then become so bored after a few minutes that he downed tools, returned to his bed and promptly fell fast asleep again.”

  “Hang on a minute! You don’t mean to tell me that someone actually saw him clipping the hedge? But how could they have? It’s behind the house, so you can’t see it from the lane, and it’s not overlooked by any of the neighbours. At least, not unless one of them further up the hill happened to be perched on the roof with a telescope.”

  “No, this wasn’t a neighbour. Enquiries among them didn’t turn up a thing, as you rightly predicted. This was a much more valuable witness. Name of Peter Wood. The cowman, no less.”

  “Oh no! Really?”

  “Yes, really, and you can see how splendidly he fits the bill? Not only impartial, in so far as he knew both the Parsons by sight, though had never spoken to either of them, but by the ver
y nature of his job he can set the time when he saw Mike to within six or seven minutes.”

  “Because of the cows, I suppose?”

  “Right. Barring electricity cuts and suchlike emergencies, the routine is the same every morning and at nine o’clock, near enough, he brings them back from the milking parlour into the field which adjoins the Parsons’ garden. He doesn’t have to go right into the field, of course, but the gate is only about fifty yards from the hedge and on the morning in question he had a clear view of Parsons at work on it. And there’s something else I must tell you.”

  “Okay,” I sighed. “Spare me nothing, now you’ve started.”

  “After he’d been standing there for a few minutes he heard a telephone bell and he saw Parsons drop the shears and run back into the house. I’m sorry, love, but I couldn’t have told you all this before. I’ve only just heard about this Peter Wood myself.”

  “And he’s a reliable witness, I take it?”

  “Oh, eminently, I’m afraid. Middle-aged chap, worked for the same farmer for fourteen years, before those new houses were even built.”

  “So that’s the end of that chapter,” I said sadly. “We can close it now,” and, with a perversity there is no accounting for, had no sooner uttered these words than I began to think about it harder than ever. Somewhere, in something Robin had said, I felt sure lay the key to the whole puzzle. I was convinced of it, even though reconciling myself to the fact that it might be days or even weeks before I hit on it.

  “Of course, it doesn’t mean dismissing Mrs Parsons entirely,” Robin said, as though to console me. “Nothing does that until someone else is proved guilty, but the difficulty with her, along with all the other suspects, great and small, is that so far it has been impossible to establish the time of death, or even to pin it down to within workable limits. Unless it ever becomes known where Parsons went and what he was doing between the time he was seen cutting the hedge and his car turning up outside the pub two or three days later, I can’t see that they have a cat’s chance of finding the culprit. Unfortunately, the trail was cold long before they got to it and every single lead has simply fizzled out.”