A Series of Murders

by Simon Brett

  It was W. T. Wintergreen.

  Chapter Sixteen

  SHE looked at him for a moment, her face still puzzled. Neither of them spoke.

  Then, suddenly, she fled.

  She showed a surprising turn of speed for a septuagenarian, and given Charles’s surprise and the fact that he was out of breath from his dash up the hillside, she had twenty yards’ start on him before he got his legs moving.

  He pulled after her and might have caught up to her over a longer distance, but W. T. Wintergreen had not far to go. She burst out of the clump of trees from which the shot had been fired and raced across the hillocks of long grass to a rough track, where her old black Beetle was parked.

  The driver’s door was open. She leaped in and slammed it. By the time Charles was close enough to do anything, the engine had sputtered into life. He just had time to catch a glimpse of the tear-stained face of Louisa Railton in the passenger seat as the car screeched away, sounding like a demented lawn mower.

  He stood still, sweating and breathless, as the Beetle diminished into the distance.

  Then, attempting to reorganise in his mind everything he had ever thought about the murders, he moved slowly back down the hill.

  Russell Bentley was not dead. When Charles came to think of it, he couldn’t imagine Russell Bentley ever dying – just going on being Russell Bentley for all eternity.

  He wasn’t even injured. Nor, though she was in a state of hysterics, was the makeup girl. The bullet fired from the hillside had missed both of them. By remarkable good fortune, though certainly aimed at Russell Bentley, what it had hit had been the bottle of Arterial Blood in the makeup girl’s hand. The ghastly stain on the star’s towel was courtesy of Leichner rather than of his own arteries.

  In fact, except for the makeup girl’s hysterics, the incident had had little effect on the Stanislas Braid production team. Russell Bentley was of the opinion that it hadn’t been a gunshot, anyway; he thought the bottle of Arterial Blood must have been flawed and have broken spontaneously. The makeup girl swore she had heard something, but she was in too emotional a state for anyone to take what she said very seriously.

  And Charles Paris, the one person who knew that a shot had been fired, for reasons of his own kept that knowledge to himself.

  The filming continued, and the Durlston Head scenes were finished before lunch, much to the delight of Ben Docherty. The weather had cleared completely, and there was every prospect of getting the Corfe Castle scenes shot within the time allotted. His precious budget looked as if it had survived another threat.

  Charles Paris went in the W.E.T. coach back to the hotel in Swanage. There was no point in his returning to Corfe Castle, and he told Mort Verdon that he would make his own way back to London.

  He packed quickly and at the hotel Reception organised a cab to take him to Bournemouth. From there he caught a train to Waterloo.

  And all the time he was on the train, Charles Paris sat and thought.

  When he arrived in London, he knew what he had to do, but he felt he needed some bolstering before he did it. Not his customary alcoholic bolstering, though; the situation was far too serious for that. No, he needed human contact. He needed to tell someone what he was about to do.

  What he really needed was to talk to Frances. He even got as far as standing in a phone box in Waterloo Station and lifting the receiver.

  But he chickened out. Frances would be at school. She could be extremely frosty and headmistressy when he rang her at school. Anyway, the memory of Sunday night’s shame was still with him. No, he should wait to ring Frances until he felt cleansed and virtuous, until he felt worthy of ringing her. He had a nasty sense that that feeling could be a long time coming. Reluctantly, he put the phone down.

  Then he looked at the departures board for the next train to Richmond.

  No killing time before this visit. He asked the taxi driver to take him straight to the cottage and watched as the cab drove away.

  The black Beetle was parked outside. He knocked on the door, and it was opened by W. T. Wintergreen.

  She looked strained, and her eyes were pinkish from recent tears. But she carried herself with a kind of calm dignity.

  ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘I had expected you might come.’ She stood back to let him into the tiny sitting room. ‘Can I offer you a cup of tea or coffee, perhaps?’

  There was something incongruous, given the circumstances, about these genteel observances. Charles refused the offer of refreshment with matching gentility.

  He sat edgily on the chair his hostess had indicated. Reading his mood, she said, ‘You don’t need to feel any anxiety, Mr. Paris. It’s all over now.’

  He sensed that she was telling the truth and relaxed partially.

  ‘So I suppose it’s just confession time,’ said W. T. Wintergreen with a sigh.

  ‘I suppose it is.’

  She nodded slowly. ‘It is my intention to make a full confession to the police. However, Mr. Paris, I am quite happy to run through the details for you if you so wish.’

  ‘I would be most grateful,’ he said, amazed at how easily he was dropping into her own, slightly formal, style of speech.

  ‘Yes. You see, I have not been unaware of your interest in this little . . . series of murders.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘And I congratulate you on finding out as much as you have. As someone who has spent much of her life bending her mind round the problems of detective fiction, I can recognise a brain which works in a similar fashion.’

  ‘Oh, thank you.’ Charles really appreciated such a professional compliment, but once again he couldn’t help being struck by the incongruity of this conversational square dance.

  ‘I suppose,’ said W. T. Wintergreen in a manner that was almost languorous, ‘it is the fiction that is to blame for everything that has happened. I don’t mean because it was crime fiction that I wrote. That is irrelevant. What you have been investigating have not been the actions of an unhinged old lady who can no longer distinguish fictional crime from real crime. No . . .’

  She was silent. The faded eyes were unfocused behind their spectacles.

  But she pulled herself together before Charles had to prompt her. ‘No, I suppose you might say that I have been protecting my creations.’

  ‘Stanislas Braid? Christina? Sergeant Clump?’

  She nodded slowly. ‘Yes, yes, that is exactly it. When you were last here, Mr. Paris, I remember our discussing the creative process, discussing how involved writers become with their characters.’

  ‘How much of themselves they put into those characters,’ Charles suggested gently.

  ‘As an actor, of course you would understand. Well, most writers can cope with the problem. They get deeply involved with their characters while they’re writing the books, but then they . . . have a break, go on holiday, they . . . get back to normal. I suppose it depends really on how much else they have in their lives. In my case, there hasn’t been much else in my life.’

  ‘Looking after your father till he died?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not, I gather, the easiest of men.’

  ‘No, not the easiest. Very jealous and – He was jealous of my writing. He was the reason why I stopped writing.’

  ‘So, as your own life became more circumscribed, more claustrophobic – looking after your father, looking after your sister – you retreated more and more into the world you had created in your fiction.’

  ‘Yes.’ She let out a brittle little laugh. ‘I gather the American enthusiasts of the crime-fiction genre have now designated a special category of the “cozy” British mystery. And I suppose it is a “cozy” world. Everything looked after, everything tied up. All emotions neatly cut off at the ends, not fraying and tangling like real emotions. A sense of justice, the knowledge that Right will triumph, reinforced, of course, in the days when I was writing, by the existence of the Death Penalty. At the end of the book the criminal would be unmasked, and the rea
der could sleep easy in the confidence that the murderer was meeting his Final Retribution.’

  ‘And then, of course, there was the character of Stanislas Braid himself, wasn’t there, Winifred?’

  ‘I cannot deny that he had a certain appeal for me.’

  ‘A lot easier to deal with than most of the real men you had encountered.’

  W. T. Wintergreen allowed herself a little smile. ‘More containable, certainly.’

  ‘A lot easier to deal with than your father?’

  Her mood changed abruptly. ‘These murders,’ she said, ‘this series of murders. I expect you have gathered most of what happened, but I’ll spell it out for you.

  ‘First,’ she continued briskly, ‘that dreadful actress. I’m afraid I had been in a very emotional state ever since the idea of the television series was mooted. It had been a long time since I wrote the last Stanislas Braid book, and all this new interest brought back a lot of things I thought I had forgotten. I was unhappy with many of the ideas that the television company proposed. The actors and actresses did not look as I had visualised the characters, though I may say you, Mr. Paris,’ she conceded, ‘were not physically inappropriate for the part of Sergeant Clump.’

  ‘Oh, thank you,’ said Charles.

  ‘But the girl . . . the girl who was meant to be Christina . . . In all the books her fair hair and blue eyes are described. Suddenly for me to see this . . . swarthy Mediterranean type . . . was a profound shock. And she was so far from the soul of the character.’

  Charles had wondered how long it would take before souls came up again.

  ‘Actually killing her,’ said W. T. Wintergreen, ‘was an impulse, hardly a decision. That morning, at the end of the break, I saw her walking out of the studio. I was near the study set. I took the candlestick, hit her with it in that little room, pulled the shelves down on top of her, and returned the murder weapon. The whole sequence of events took . . . less than a minute, I would think. Afterwards I could hardly believe it had happened, it was all over so quickly.’

  Charles looked thoughtful. ‘For someone who has devoted so much of her life to devising devious and ingenious methods of killing people, your own first attempt at murder was a bit amateur.’

  ‘I agree. As I say, it wasn’t a rational choice, just the impulse of a moment of insanity.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But it seemed to achieve the right effect. The dreadful girl was gone, and suddenly the new Christina is everything she should be. She looks right, and she has this wonderful ethereal quality of childish innocence.’

  Charles cleared his throat, recollecting the real character of Joanne Rhymer.

  ‘So I did not feel guilty about the murder. It seemed to have been right. Everyone seemed happier. And though I was slightly shocked that I could have been capable of something like that, I was able to put it from my mind.’

  ‘You had no intention at that stage of committing further murders?’

  ‘Good heavens, no.’

  ‘So what did Tony Rees do to make you change your mind?’

  ‘Ah.’ She was silent for a moment. ‘Well, you may recall during the recording of the second episode that there was an unfortunate exhibition in the studio?’

  ‘When Ben Docherty banned you from the premises.’

  ‘Yes. Extremely regrettable. And for me devastating. Because, although much of what was happening to Stanislas Braid caused me deep disquiet, I was obsessed by the series. I still felt a need to watch everything that happened, every rehearsal, every piece of filming. I felt it was . . . my baby.’

  She used this phrase as if she had just coined it and nobody in the history of the world had ever used it before. A tear glistened in her eye. She reached up under her glasses and brushed it clumsily away before going on. ‘I was devastated by the prospect of being excluded from my own series, so I had to find some way to keep in touch.’

  ‘And Tony Rees saw you out of the studio,’ Charles suddenly recalled.

  ‘Exactly. When we reached the Reception of W.E.T. House, I asked him whether, for a financial consideration, he would keep us in touch with the production schedule.’

  ‘You chose the right person. For a financial consideration Tony Rees would have done anything.’

  ‘He certainly didn’t need too much persuading. But at least we now had a way of keeping vaguely in touch with what was going on. Of course, we were not allowed in the studios, but they couldn’t keep us away from the filming.’

  ‘So you and Louisa were down at Swanage from the start?’

  W. T. Wintergreen nodded, and in Charles’s mind a whole new set of ideas tumbled into place. ‘In fact, you were in that pub I went into on the Sunday evening. You were sitting in the alcove with Tony – you had your backs to the door – and he only came up to me in such a friendly way because he didn’t want me to see you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the reason he spilled his drink over me was only to distract my attention while you two went out of the pub.’

  ‘That is what happened, yes.’

  ‘I’ve just realised something else,’ Charles continued in a burst of excitement. ‘You and Louisa were in the crowd, all wrapped up in anoraks, when we were filming in Corfe Castle. And that was why Tony Rees wanted to borrow Mort Verdon’s schedule for the next episode. He gave it to you up at the castle that afternoon.’

  A nod confirmed this.

  ‘So why did he have to be killed?’ asked Charles quietly.

  ‘He said he had actually witnessed the murder of Sippy Stokes.’

  ‘I see.’ Charles was pleased to have another of his conjectures proved right. ‘And he wanted a large price for his silence?’

  ‘A much larger price than I could afford to pay.’

  ‘So you pushed him out of the window in the castle ruins?’

  ‘It was not intentional murder. Again, I wasn’t thinking straight. I was angry. There was a scuffle. He fell. I didn’t know at the time that he had died.’

  ‘Convenient that he had, though.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Very convenient.’

  ‘Which brings us,’ said Charles, ‘to Russell Bentley.’

  ‘Russell Bentley . . .’ W. T. Wintergreen looked drained; the emotional strain of her confession was beginning to tell.

  ‘Let me say what I think happened, Winifred. You tell me if I’m right.’

  She nodded acquiescence.

  ‘It wasn’t what he was doing to the Stanislas Braid character that worried you so much as what he was doing to the Stanislas/Christina relationship. His constant desire to play down the emotion between the two of them upset you. That relationship was for you one of the most important parts of the books, and he was trying to kill it. Then, during the filming in Corfe Castle, you heard Russell arguing that one of your favourite scenes, the avowal of Stanislas and Christina’s love for each other when their lives were threatened, should be rewritten. You found the rewrite in Will Parton’s room, with the note on it saying that it was all Russell’s idea, and from that moment Russell Bentley was your next target. Am I right?’

  ‘You are right,’ she conceded graciously. ‘This morning I hid myself near where you were filming and when my opportunity came, I shot him. My third murder.’

  ‘No,’ said Charles.

  ‘No?’

  ‘You missed. Russell Bentley isn’t dead.’

  W. T. Wintergreen slumped with a little sigh against her chair. ‘Thank God.’

  There was a long silence in the tiny sitting room. Finally, Charles asked, ‘Where’s Louisa?’

  ‘Upstairs,’ W. T. Wintergreen replied softly. ‘Upstairs. I will go to prison. I will not be able to look after her anymore. Louisa needs someone to look after her.’

  ‘Yes.’ Charles smiled grimly. ‘Can I see her, Winifred?’

  The bedroom was on a scale with the rest of the cottage. It was decorated in the subtlest of pastel shades. The wallpaper was almost white, with a tiny motif of a pale yellow
flower. Under an eiderdown of the palest pink, her head propped up on a pillow of the same colour, lay Louisa Railton.

  Her hair was neatly brushed and laid out across the pillow. Her eyes were closed, and her body was completely relaxed. There was no movement.

  Charles looked across at the old crime writer. Down Winifred Railton’s lined cheeks tears flowed unchecked.

  ‘There,’ she said, ‘Mr. Paris. The last in my series of murders.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  ‘NO,’ SAID Charles Paris. ‘It’s the first.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that you have never murdered anyone outside your fiction. Until today. And this’ – he indicated the body on the bed – ‘I think would qualify as a mercy killing rather than a murder.’

  ‘I did kill them,’ W. T. Wintergreen asserted. ‘I did.’

  Charles shook his head.

  ‘Why don’t you believe me, Mr. Paris?’

  ‘I don’t believe you partly because of your personality. You say you committed the murders in fits of irrationality, but you aren’t the sort of person to suffer from fits of irrationality. Your head is far too firmly screwed on for you to behave as you claim to have done. Yes, the Stanislas Braid books are very close to your heart. And yes, you were upset by some of the things W.E.T. was doing to your property, but you wouldn’t have committed murder – not for something like that.’

  ‘You don’t know. You don’t know me that well,’ she objected defiantly.

  ‘Another give-away,’ Charles went on, ‘was your reaction just now when I told you Russell Bentley hadn’t been hurt this morning. If you were the crazed, irrational creature you claim to be, you would have been disappointed because the latest in your series of murders had failed. But no, you were relieved, deeply relieved that another life had not been wantonly lost.’

  There was a silence. Then she announced firmly, ‘I’m going to the police, and I’m going to tell them exactly what I’ve told you.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure you are,’ said Charles. ‘And maybe they’ll believe you, and maybe they won’t. I should think, if someone like me can see through your story, professional police investigators won’t have much difficulty in doing the same.’