A Shock to the System

by Simon Brett

  ‘I quite understand, sir.’ The policeman’s soothing voice was another part of his training in the treatment of shock.

  Graham could still feel his face burning and the sweat starting on his temples. Still, a recently bereaved man has cause to look upset. He decided to capitalise on his physical symptoms and stage a little breakdown. ‘Oh God, to think of those magazines — deceiving Merrily — they didn’t matter — but it just seems so petty — and now she’s dead and. .’ He managed to produce some quite presentable sobs.

  ‘Have some more tea, sir.’ But the constable didn’t let him off the hook. ‘We still haven’t established why your wife wanted to go up to the loft, sir. She couldn’t have had any suspicion that the magazines were up there, could she, sir?’

  ‘What? No, it’s — oh my God!’ Graham manufactured a larger sob. ‘The sewing machine.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The sewing machine was up there. Oh, and she said she was going to make some curtains for the spare room. Yes, she talked about it Saturday lunchtime a couple of weeks back. Her mother was here, I remember.’ (If Lilian was going to tell the police her recollections, then she could also make herself useful and corroborate his.)

  ‘Yes, that must have been it — the sewing machine was up in the loft.’ Time for the big, weepy finish.

  ‘Oh God, she was going to do the curtains for me … As a surprise. . For when I came back. . Merrily. . And now she’s gone. .’ He judged it to be the moment when tears would be more eloquent than further words.

  The policeman was very sympathetic. He apologised for having to ask the questions, realised that Mr. Marshall was in a state of shock, and asked if he would feel all right to be left on his own.

  The last suggestion appealed strongly to Graham. The strain of curbing his glee was beginning to tell. Only one more thing he needed to know. ‘Where is Merr. . my wife. . her body?’

  ‘At the police mortuary, sir.’

  ‘Oh. I suppose I’ll have to sort out funeral arrangements and. . We both agreed we’d want to be cremated if. .’

  His voice faltered while his mind thought, Destroy the evidence, destroy the evidence.

  ‘I’m sure that’ll all be possible after the inquest, sir.’

  ‘Inquest?’

  ‘Of course, sir. With all violent deaths there has to be an inquest.’

  Sweat prickled on Graham’s forehead. He felt the emptiness of nausea. An inquest was something he hadn’t reckoned with.

  After the constable had gone, Graham took a large Scotch to steady him. Soon he would have to face Lilian and the children, but they could wait a little longer.

  News of the inquest had shaken him, but a core of confidence remained. He could cope. He would get away with it. The inquest was a formality. There was nothing a police investigation could find to incriminate him. If there had been, his reception on his return would have been very different.

  Mentally, he reviewed the crime, testing it for flaws, pulling it this way and that, probing for weaknesses.

  No, there was nothing. No careless fingerprint to expose him. His planning had paid off.

  Lucky, he thought wryly, that he had chosen the method he had. He thought back, with indulgent disbelief to his earlier ideas, to his fumbling attempts with the paraquat, to -

  Oh, my God!

  His body was seized by a tremor as violent as his first reaction to the old man’s death.

  The sherry bottle.

  He ran on legs of jelly to the shed. If the police had been in the house, investigating, inspecting, they might also have gone to the garden, might have found the adulterated sherry, might have started to harbour unwelcome suspicions of him, might have. .

  He snatched open the shed door.

  It all looked different. The clutter was gone, the lawnmower and tools stacked neatly against the wall. The seed trays, behind which the bottle had been hidden, were now piled neatly on the shelf.

  The sherry bottle, with its fatal contents, had disappeared.

  He reeled, clasping at the wall for support. The police must have been in, examined the whole building, taken off the sherry for analysis. .

  Graham thought he was going to be sick.

  But he wasn’t sick, and after a few minutes the rhythm of his breathing steadied. As he reasserted control over his body, he did the same with his mind. Keep calm, keep calm, he told himself. Think it through.

  Thinking it through helped. He had leapt to conclusions. It might have been the police who had been in the shed, but there were other explanations. Indeed, if it had been the police examining the building, why should they have bothered to tidy it? The shelves had been dusted down and the floor swept. That was surely beyond the scope of their investigation.

  Wasn’t it more likely, Graham thought with a little glint of hope, that Merrily had had one of her rare bursts of domesticity and attacked the shed herself? She had commented before on how much it needed tidying, and to do a major clear-out while he was away would have been in character, a flamboyant gesture to make him feel guilty on his return. Yes, and the policeman had quoted Lilian about Merrily’s ‘planning some tidying’.

  Fuelled by hope, he hurried to the dustbins. That’s where she would have put the rubbish she’d cleared out.

  But they were empty. Of course, the refuse collectors came on a Thursday.

  He was about to replace the lid on the second bin when he saw something. Just a scrap of damp cardboard which had stuck to the inside and escaped the refuse truck.

  It was a piece of the weed-killer box. The piece he had torn to funnel the granules into the sherry bottle.

  He slumped against the wall with relief. It was all right. Merrily had tidied the shed. She had consigned the damning sherry to the dustbin and it was now lost and anonymous in some council amenity tip. Graham was safe. His late wife had obligingly destroyed the evidence against him.

  He returned to the house for another large Scotch. That panic had passed, but other problems remained.

  Whenever he was in danger of complacency, there was always the inquest to worry about.

  It was a bad ten days.

  Deaths generate work for the survivors. And the death of the active mother of two children generates more work than most. Though he had often castigated her minor inefficiencies, and though he had early recognised her native laziness, Graham was still surprised at how much Merrily had done, or perhaps by how much needed to be done by other people now that she was dead.

  Unfortunately, the person who saw it as her God-given role to do most of these things was Lilian. Though Graham was glad of the help, he wished that it had come from another quarter.

  Immediately after Merrily’s death, her mother had taken Henry and Emma to the custody of her flat, but as soon as Graham returned, they all came back to the Boileau Avenue house. Immediately Lilian took domestic control, and her approach had an unnerving air of permanence. Within three days she spoke of the spare room as ‘my room’ and by the end of the week was saying it would be more practical to sell her flat, ‘since I’m going to be needed here’.

  This was not at all how Graham had visualised his future. If all his wife’s murder had achieved was to replace her with her mother, it had been a wasted exercise. Lilian around the house was even more annoying than Merrily. She hadn’t even her daughter’s minimal efficiency. Though she made much of dressing the part, with housecoats and turbanned scarves, her aptitude for housework was nil. Years of being cosseted by domestic staff and helpful lovers had left her without the basic skill of assessing a job and deciding how long it would take.

  The kitchen floor would be left half-washed, two garments put in for a whole cycle of the washing machine, the Hoover would be abandoned half-way up the stairs, as Lilian launched herself into another scene.

  Needless to say, her daughter’s death gave her full scope for drama. Her shock and misery were no doubt real, but through them Graham could detect a core of satisfaction, even of triumph.
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  Lilian knew that Merrily’s death had pushed her centre-stage and strengthened her power-base in the family. Her old complaint that no one needed her any more (though Graham had his doubts that anyone ever had needed her much), could no longer be justified.

  But consciousness of her advantage did not stop the tears and the wailings and the scenes. She had lost her favourite daughter, she was alone in the world. Graham, now firm in his habit of objectivity, watched through these outpourings, feeling nothing but contempt. The situation could not continue for ever, but he would have to bide his time before he sought its solution.

  His own behaviour he monitored with care. For him to appear unfeeling might raise suspicion, so he needed the occasional breakdown to maintain his image as the shocked and grieving widower.

  In presenting this front he was helped by his panic over the inquest. The outsider only sees the physical manifestations of mental turmoil, not its cause. Hot flushes, sweating, restlessness, uneven speech patterns, sudden fluctuations of mood are all signs of a troubled mind, but the same symptoms could be triggered equally by the death of a much-loved spouse or the fear of being exposed as a murderer. Even through his anxiety, Graham could feel a perverse satisfaction that the cause of his discomposure could be so readily misinterpreted.

  The inquest did worry him, there was no doubt of that. Though so much in the planning of the murder had worked in his favour, there were still too many variables about which he knew too little. How skilled was the police’s forensic investigation likely to be? Had he left some blatant clue to his sabotage? Was foul play suspected?

  Occasionally confidence again flooded his being, but such moments of peace were rare. He worried that his preparations had not been sufficiently meticulous. If he ever committed another murder (and something told him that if he got away with this one, it was not impossible that he might) he would take a lot more care.

  But never for a moment did he regret having killed Merrily. His anxiety was only about his chances of getting away with it. Her absence brought new inconveniences, but those could be resolved. He felt again that mixture of apprehension and excitement that had always preceded examinations at school. The inquest was his latest and most demanding test.

  If he passed that one, nothing could stop him.

  The inquest was not an isolated event; there were more police enquiries before the bereaved Marshall family and Lilian Hinchcliffe appeared in the Hammersmith Coroner’s Court. Graham underwent further meticulous questioning, which paradoxically he enjoyed. He had the feeling of being in a game, a quiz-programme perhaps, but one for which he had made adequate preparations and one which he stood at least a fifty/fifty chance of winning.

  His daughter also, as discoverer of the body, suffered further questioning. The shock had told badly on her and in her emotion she became more of an adult. Not, though, the sort of adult who appealed to her father. She took on more and more of her mother’s mannerisms, which were of course Lilian Hinchcliffe’s mannerisms. As her grandmother’s influence grew, Emma became more like her. It was as if, with her daughter removed, Lilian immediately worked to replace her with another clone. Emma was fully recruited into the exclusive conspiracy of womanhood. The two now wept and emoted in unison.

  Henry was apparently taking his mother’s death less hard. With the brutality of adolescence, he was even heard to make jokes about it. A psychologist might well have recognised this behaviour as a defence and discovered the suffering core of a bewildered child, but Graham was no psychologist and did not feel the interest to investigate.

  With the frail link of Merrily removed, his children seemed more than ever strangers. Four of them sat side by side in the Coroner’s Court, but to Graham the others were irrelevant. He was the champion, in peak condition, though he still faced the most daunting challenge of his career.

  The proceedings were short. The Coroner called a variety of witnesses. A doctor gave the evidence of the post-mortem on Merrily’s little body. A statement by Emma was read out. Lilian described her arrival at the house on Emma’s summons and the policeman, whom she in turn had called, stated what he had found. The electrician who had surveyed the house for rewiring confirmed his views of its lethal state. The Coroner regretted this terrible tragedy to a young family, spoke of the need for constant awareness of the dangers of superannuated electrical systems, and a verdict of accidental death was recorded.

  Graham Marshall had cleared another huge hurdle.

  The cremation had been set up in advance; only the Coroner’s verdict was required before the arrangements could proceed.

  It was fixed for the following day. Lilian scoured the house for black and kitted out herself and the children like something from a Dickens serial on BBC-2. Graham wore a light suit and a black knitted tie. He tried to keep the bounce out of his step as he walked from the hearse to the crematorium chapel.

  It was as he would have wished it. Clean, anonymous, functional. It reminded him of the hotel in Brussels where he had been only ten days before.

  The officiating clergyman also achieved anonymity. His short address made no secret of the fact that he had never met Merrily. Her virtues were generalised, her identity withdrawn into platitude.

  The turnout was small. Beyond the family, the odious Vivvi and a couple of other representatives of Merrily’s gynaecological Mafia had come, but none of their husbands had deemed the occasion worth a day’s leave.

  At the back of the chapel Charmian sniffed quietly, alone. She had tried to greet Lilian, but her mother had cut her dead, shepherding the children away from their aunt as if from a flasher in the park.

  Lilian and Emma also snuffled throughout the service. Henry remained balefully impassive. Graham managed a few coughs and throat-clearings that could have been interpreted as emotion and which contained the exhilaration inside him.

  At the appointed moment the anonymous curtains slowly closed on the futile expense of the pale pine coffin. When they slowly reopened, the ponderous conjuring trick was done. The coffin had vanished, consigned to the fierce blue gas jets within.

  And Merrily was gone. A powdering of ash to be scattered. More plantfood for the roses in the Garden of Remembrance.

  The feeling of power surged through Graham like lust.

  The few friends shook hands with the family outside, murmuring stock condolences. No arrangements had been made for a drink afterwards and none seemed required. Vivvi and her coven drifted away.

  Charmian was the last out of the chapel. She had spent a moment repairing her make-up. The tears were gone, but she was still in the grip of deep emotion.

  Lilian bridled instantly at the sight of her prodigal daughter. ‘Come on, Emma. Henry. We must be moving.’ She started towards the car. Then turned back to her son-in-law.

  ‘Graham.’

  ‘I’ll be along in a moment.’

  Lilian’s parting sniff contained more affront than suffering. Charmian looked at her brother-in-law. The grey eyes were full of pain, but had not lost their knowing quality. He felt a strange bond with her, an urge to confide, to tell her what he had done, in some obscure expectation of praise.

  But he said nothing, just her name. ‘Charmian.’

  The grey eyes still held his stare. They disconcerted him. They seemed to see too much. He looked down at the ground, conscious of a scuff-mark on one of her black patent shoes. ‘Graham, I want to talk to you. It’s very important.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Charmian. ‘It’s about Merrily’s death.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ‘My feelings about Merrily are complex. Always have been. Now she’s dead they are even more confused.’

  Graham’s eyes wandered round Charmian’s living-room as she spoke. It was the evening of the cremation. He had left Lilian to settle the children and gone out without specifying his destination. Deviousness, covering his tracks, was becoming a habit.

  His flickering glances took in the dark brown paint, the l
oaded pine bookshelves, the terra cotta plant pots suspended in harnesses of knotted string, the giant floor cushions, the hand-woven rugs on the wall. It was all yesterday’s trends, dating from the time when Charmian was at her most successful, when pop journalists were being snapped up as feature writers, when she had had a regular column in one of the Sundays. She had been married then, too. The house had been a mutual project, the work of a pair of London trendsetters. But now the marriage and the column were long gone. Charmian survived as a freelance journalist, spreading her net ever wider to increasingly obscure publications as the impetus of her reputation slowed. If she had not received the house as part of the divorce settlement, her life would be precarious; as it was, she was safe but not affluent. Her surroundings reflected this. The paintwork was a little battered, there was too much dust, the windowpanes wore a filter of grime.

  Through the front windows Graham could see the spiked railings that protected the steps down to the basement. He had a quick image of a body impaled on them, one viscously gleaming point emerging from the stretched bulk of clothes. Anyone who jumped from the upstairs window would land like that. So would anyone who was pushed.

  Pleasing fantasies of murder methods were now part of the regular stock of his thoughts. His imaginative life, he felt, had been considerably enriched since he became a murderer. Railings, yes, good. With comparable satisfaction he noted the tangle of wires and adaptors that fed the randomly assembled stereo components. He didn’t want to repeat himself, but the set-up offered plenty of opportunities for electrical accidents.

  It was all hypothetical, of course. Casual conjecture. He was merely making a professional assessment of the situation and its possibilities. At the moment he had no reason to kill Charmian. It rather depended on what she felt such urgency to discuss with him.