Chantal Plassy was being consoled elegantly some distance away by a distinguished-looking grey-haired man in an expensive suit.
‘I ought to go and speak to Tara,’ Alison said. ‘So please excuse me. You will come back to the house? Just a buffet lunch.’
She pressed Meredith’s hand and moved away towards a slim young woman whose pale features were set in an expression of deepest misery. Meredith wondered whether Alison or Toby had persuaded Jeremy to relent and allow Tara to attend. As Meredith watched, Alison put an arm round the girl’s shoulders.
‘I’ll be glad when this is over,’ Alan Markby said by Meredith’s ear. ‘Jeremy looks as if he needs a good stiff drink.’
James Holland was still talking earnestly to Jeremy and still getting as little response. As they watched, Toby joined in and his presence seemed to rouse Jeremy from his trance-like state. He nodded and mouthed a few words. James Holland, perhaps satisfied now that Jeremy was in good hands, left them and came over to Alison. There was a brief conversation and they all began to move off in a straggling procession towards the gate and the cars parked beyond. In the background, partly concealed by the shadow of the church building, Meredith glimpsed two men with spades, leaning on their tools and waiting for the area to be cleared so that they could complete their task. She shivered.
Jeremy had joined his wife and they had moved up to the head of the group. They reached the gate first and, as they passed through it, the others saw Jeremy sway and then crumple to the ground. To the onlookers it all seemed to happen, as shocking things often do, in slow motion. To Meredith, Jeremy’s figure in the dark overcoat seemed to deflate slowly and fold in on itself. Alison put out her hands as if in some way she could catch him and keep him upright and as he was. Toby leapt forward but he, also, was too late. His fingers caught Jeremy’s sleeve but the dark figure continued its inexorable collapse until it sprawled on the ground and stayed there, unmoving.
The spell was broken. They all ran to the spot. Jeremy was now supported on Toby’s arm and his face was contorted, his breath coming in spasms. Alison knelt by his side, holding his hand and calling his name desperately. Behind them, Chantal Plassy clung to her husband’s arm, her face frozen in horror. Markby summoned the ambulance, but before it could reach them Jeremy’s gaze clouded and the painful breathing stopped altogether.
At Overvale House Mrs Whittle took the telephone call, then went into the dining room. She gazed briefly at the untouched buffet, so neatly laid out, before she began methodically to take it all back to the kitchen.
Chapter Fifteen
Alan Markby, Meredith and Toby were sitting in Alan and Meredith’s favourite pub, the Saddlers’ Arms. It was early in the evening and the place was only a quarter full. From the bar came a murmur of voices as two regulars settled in. The barman was taking time to chalk a careful message on a blackboard above their heads. ‘Special today,’ it read. ‘Sausages and mash with leeks. Vegetarian broccoli and pasta bake.’ They were the same specials as last week and, very likely, they’d be the specials next week, but nobody cared. If there had been any change to the familiar menu, there might even have been some murmurings of discontent. The customers of the Saddlers’ Arms liked things to remain just the way they were.
Although it had rained sporadically throughout the day, a ray of evening sunshine was now falling through the window and across Meredith. It picked up golden highlights in her brown hair matched by the gleam of the horse brasses tacked to the ancient blackened beam above her head. Alan Markby smiled at her and she smiled back.
Toby, intercepting the smiles, looked sad for a moment. Aloud, he said, ‘So you matched up the tyre treads, after all?’
Markby turned his attention to him. ‘The van treads, yes. We found the Rusticity van’s tracks by the woods, too. The ground was softer there, hadn’t dried out, and we got better prints. Forensics went over the interior of the van and found traces of Fiona’s blood. It was just the evidence we needed. The photograph of Ted and Fiona together made it hard for him to deny his involvement but we had to link him to the body itself. He should have resisted the temptation to be clever and left her lying on the track by the woods. On top of that, the mobile phone he’d left in the office at the firm turned out to be Fiona’s. But he hasn’t been denying it. Ted’s main problem is that he can’t resist showing off. He was showing off when he put Fiona’s body in the lake. He’s showing off now, telling us about it. Oddly enough, it’s a common enough criminal trait. A planned crime like murder must of necessity take place in secret. But secrecy is galling to the murderer. He wants to show the police and anyone else interested how clever he is, how he can hoodwink anyone. Murderers are especially sure of their own cleverness and it’s particularly satisfying to them to tease the police. It’s like dangling a piece of string, with a twist of paper tied to it, above a kitten. The kitten can see it but he can’t catch it. “Catch me!” the murderer wants to say. “Look, here I am. Are you quick enough or am I quicker?” Ted says putting Fiona in the lake was a joke. I think it was intended to bait us and yes, it was a joke, Ted’s private joke, laughing at all the rest of us.’
‘I bet he’s not laughing now,’ Toby observed grimly.
Markby sipped his pint. ‘In a way he still is. Being caught, even being convicted, doesn’t alter the murderer’s mindset. He still thinks he’s cleverer than the rest of us. He has no morality as we understand it. He has no compassion. He sees no reason why he can’t act just as he wants to. He began his criminal career with a murder. As you know he’s been telling us how, as a ten-year-old, he slipped into Miss Kemp’s cottage to see if she had any spare cash lying around on that fatal Sunday. She disturbed him and he struck out. If you ask me, it wasn’t the first time he’d stolen from her.The old lady was getting confused and probably hadn’t missed the odd pound or two. Later on, he practised the same kind of opportunist theft from unlocked cars and by taking advantage of open doors or windows. It landed him in a young offender’s institution.’
‘Where he met up with Steve Poole and they set up a business. He could have gone straight,’ Meredith said. ‘It seems such a pity.’ She pushed back her thick brown hair with both hands and the gold highlights rippled.
‘Going straight was proving hard work physically. He and Steve were working all hours for modest return. Ted suddenly saw himself presented with the opportunity to make some easy money. From the moment he recognized Alison, he knew he could turn it to his advantage. At first he wasn’t sure how, but then he was tempted to tell Fiona the story and Fiona had an axe to grind of her own. She resented Alison, a resentment fuelled at a distance by her own mother in Switzerland. Chantal seems happily married now but after her divorce from Jeremy she went through several unsatisfactory relationships and she envied the security she’d lost and which she saw Alison enjoying. She’d persuaded her teenage daughter that she had to be sent to the hated boarding school in England, not because that suited Chantal but because of the divorce which meant Chantal couldn’t offer Fiona a settled home.
‘Fiona came up with the idea of the letters and Ted was happy to go along with it. He had to handle it carefully and not frighten Fiona off. His long-term objective, when she was so involved she would find it hard to get out of it, was to start asking for money. That was what Fiona misunderstood. She was a rich young woman and she didn’t understand how the prospect of a golden goose would appeal to someone like Ted. She thought at first she was using Ted to write letters and give Alison a fright. But she wasn’t stupid and she soon began to be suspicious of his intentions and to realize that, just possibly, Ted was using her. When Meredith and I turned up that day for lunch, and the whole thing was discussed in detail, she began to get seriously alarmed. She phoned Ted on her mobile and arranged to meet him in their usual spot down by the woods early the next morning. She told him the letter-writing had to stop. Ted however had no intention of stopping. Nor did he trust her not to own up to what they’d done. She had a loving famil
y. They’d be shocked and disappointed if she told them but, after an almighty row and some recriminations, they might well forgive her. She was Jeremy’s only child, after all.
‘But he had a criminal record and he had actually printed off and posted the letters. No one was going to be magnanimous towards him. Jeremy Jenner would want someone’s head on a plate, and it would be Ted’s. Jeremy couldn’t pretend the letters hadn’t happened and he’d want to exonerate his daughter. Ted would be the fall guy. He’d go to gaol. It would be the end of the business he and Steve Poole had so laboriously built up. Poole wouldn’t forgive him. So he killed her. Later, when the wretched Darren tried his hand at blackmail, he killed him. Killing gets easier.’
Toby said quietly, ‘Those are not the only deaths he’s responsible for. We’ve mentioned Freda Kemp’s, but we oughtn’t to forget his part in Jeremy’s.’
After a silence, Meredith said, ‘Yes, there’s Jeremy’s.’
‘So,’ Toby said to Alan, ‘what is murder? You’ll have a legal definition of it. I have a moral one. Ted Pritchard killed Jeremy. Oh, I know it was his heart which gave out,’ he went on, before either of the others could comment. ‘We knew his heart wasn’t in good shape. It might have helped if he’d been a more expressive sort of guy. You know, broken down and sobbed on Alison’s shoulder, got it all out. But that wasn’t Jeremy’s style. He stayed buttoned up and kept it all contained, smouldering away inside him. In the end, the built-up stress was just too much. But you can still put his death at Ted’s door.’
‘It’s not so simple, is it?’ Meredith objected. ‘Why not say Dorothy Pritchard, formerly Travis, was behind all their deaths? She brought up her adored son Edmund, known to us as Ted, with an obsessive devotion and filled him with her own particular kind of poison.’
‘Old hag,’ growled Toby. ‘It all started with her. She accused Alison and persuaded that dinosaur, Barnes-Wakefield, that he needn’t look any further for his murderer.’
Markby sipped his pint thoughtfully. ‘Yes, Jess Campbell feels much the same way as you, I fancy, and was disappointed she couldn’t find anything with which to charge Mrs Pritchard, or Travis, whatever you want to call her. The odd thing about it is that looking at it without personal emotion getting in the way, if you can, Dorothy Pritchard has had a hard life. One might even feel sorry for her in other circumstances. Her husband, Travis, had been a poor provider and finally deserted her. She lived in a poor area of the country where there was little work for an unskilled woman so she had to go out cleaning for a living. Can you imagine how she felt when her son, the only good thing in her life, came running home to tell her he’d attacked her employer, Freda Kemp? Then finding he’d actually killed Miss Kemp? Of course, she tried to cover it up. It wasn’t the right thing to do but it was the human thing, the thing a mother would do. Now, because Ted is almost certainly going to gaol for a long time, she’ll be deprived of even his visits in that home she’s in. She’ll sit there with her useless hands, unable to do anything and with nothing to look forward to. She’s not a woman who ever had time for hobbies, even reading, and I doubt she’s developed any now. The company in that home mostly consists of people much older than herself and even if they’re willing to chat to her, she’s not the sort of woman to indulge in long chats. I think that’s punishment enough, don’t you?’
‘Perhaps I could feel more sympathy for her if she’d accept some responsibility for what happened to Alison …’ Toby began and then fell silent.
Markby shook his head. ‘People can rewrite history in their heads with remarkable success. That’s what Dorothy Pritchard has done. She’s still saying that, if anyone killed Miss Kemp, it was Alison. Even though one part of her brain knows that the accusation came from her alone and that Alison had nothing to do with Miss Kemp’s death, another part of her brain has adopted the fiction that she and Edmund really did nothing on that fateful Sunday afternoon. You won’t persuade Dorothy to change her tune. She sees herself as a martyr and Edmund a victim of others’ misdoing. He was led astray as a teenager and so ended up in a young offenders’ centre. He was led astray by Fiona Jenner and conned into writing the letters on her behalf. When she was told about Fiona, she burst out into a tirade against another young woman ‘who only got what she deserved’. Some people envy the rich, but Mrs Travis nurses a terrifying hatred for anyone more fortunate than herself. Her hatred of Alison is as strong today as it ever was.
‘Her influence on the child Edmund must have been considerable. That and the humiliations he suffered at school, which even his old teacher remembered, led the youngster to see the world as owing him some recompense. He had a right to pilfer spare cash from Miss Kemp. He had a right, later on, to steal it from careless members of the public. He had a right to plan that Alison should be made to pay him, literally, for all the trouble she’d caused him. The road leading to murder is sometimes a long one. Edmund Travis was an unhappy little boy whose sensitivities were warped and blunted. Much of that can certainly be laid at his mother’s door. That way murder lies.’
‘The trouble Alison caused him!’ Toby exploded. ‘That’s more than warped, that’s lunacy! Poor Alison did nothing!’
‘But it’s how he sees it,’ Markby repeated patiently. ‘Alison belongs to the fortunate of this world. Such people see others, like Ted and his mother, struggle and do nothing to help. I’m not saying it excuses any of the things he did. I’m just saying that’s how Ted sees it.’
‘He’s nuts!’ insisted Toby.
‘No,’ Alan said, ‘he’s as sane as you or I.’
‘How is Alison?’ Meredith asked Toby. Toby’s jaw had set and he was settling in for an argument. It seemed the moment to drop the matter of Ted’s state of mind.
He turned his attention to her. ‘Coping fairly well. Chantal cleared off after the funeral and that helped. Alison’s had experience of dealing with traumatic situations, as we know. She’s quite tough, really, when she needs to be.’
‘That’s what Fiona said,’ Meredith murmured.
‘She could have coped with the letters better if she’d been alone,’ Toby went on. ‘If it had concerned no one but herself she’d have taken some action, perhaps even gone to the police. It was because she was worried Jeremy would find out, and what the effect would be when he did, that she found it impossible to do anything. Now, of course, that’s not an issue.’
A small group of people came into the pub, chattering and laughing. Its tiny bar was filling up and the evening was underway. Someone was even ordering the vegetable bake. Toby looked towards the newcomers and grimaced.
‘Life goes on.’
‘Yes,’ Markby said. ‘It does.’
‘Do you remember,’ Toby asked him,‘the occasion we saw Ted Pritchard here? He didn’t normally drink in this pub. He was a customer of the Feathers. Do you think it was coincidence he was here that evening or was he checking on us?’
‘I think he was checking on us,’ Markby said promptly.
‘Do you think he heard us talking about Cornwall?’ Toby went on. ‘And tipped off George Melhuish to look out for us, for me and Meredith?’
‘He hasn’t said so,’ Markby told him. ‘It’s just possible.’
‘And what,’ Toby asked with a grim smile, ‘do you think he planned to do with me, after he’d dealt with Meredith?’
‘He hasn’t told us that, either – yet.’ Markby gazed blandly into the distance. ‘Perhaps he wasn’t so worried about you.’
Meredith gave him a reproving look but he affected not to see it.
‘Point taken,’ said Toby equably. ‘I wouldn’t have worked out he was Edmund Travis. Still, I suppose he might have had it in mind to tidy things up completely, and tricked me into meeting him by the woods where he used to meet Fiona.’
‘He might, indeed,’ Markby agreed.
‘What will Alison do now,Toby?’ Meredith asked him, changing the subject again.
He brightened. ‘Well, I’ve got this new posting
, as you know. Warsaw. I go out there at the end of the month. Once I’ve settled in a flat, Alison’s planning to come out for a holiday. It will get her right away from this place and give her a chance to think what she’ll do about Overvale House. She’ll sell, I think. As she says, it’s too big and it has too many gruesome memories. After that, I don’t know. But she’s resourceful. I think she’ll be OK, given enough time.’ He checked his wristwatch. ‘Speaking of time, I have to get back. I told her I’d only be a short while.’
‘I hope we see you again before you leave,Toby,’ Meredith said.
He grinned at her. ‘Sure you will. And Warsaw’s not too far away to prevent me coming back here to dance at your wedding, as I said I would.’
He shook Markby’s hand and made for the door. When he reached it, he turned and gestured in farewell. Markby had moved his arm to put it along the back of Meredith’s chair. The ray of evening sunlight now fell across them both and the rest of the bar room was a dusty, shady place inhabited by shadowy figures. Toby looked at the pair of them for a moment, a rueful smile crossed his face, and he was gone.
‘What do you think?’ Meredith asked Alan. ‘Alison’s only forty-eight. She’s a nice-looking woman. Perhaps Toby needs someone older to look after him. Given his inclination to think about marrying within the family …’
‘Don’t!’ Alan begged. He put out his hand and gently laid it over her mouth. ‘Don’t matchmake for him! It doesn’t bear thinking about. Forget about him. Think about us.’
Jess Campbell closed the door and gazed round the rented flat. She loathed this place. But, with luck, it wouldn’t be home for much longer. She’d gone into the financial aspect of it and she was well able to take on a mortgage. She’d make an offer for Meredith’s house. She meant to get in touch with Meredith and tell her tomorrow.
Ann Granger Page 28