In all her careful and independent life, Audrey had avoided the trauma of rash deeds just as she normally avoided sunshine. Nor had she ever gone out looking for a man. Europe had been the setting for travels where she made friends with other woman travelers. Africa was a brutal assault on the senses similar to a series of blows from a spiked mallet. The poverty moved her to despair; the corruption angered her beyond belief, the smells made her delirious, the colors invaded her eyes, and the sun made her beautiful.
That was June: this was November. Abdoulie lay on her spare bed in the tiny spare bedroom of her small cottage and he had shrunk to fit. He had never been more prosperous, and he looked like a dying man. The squint in his eye and the crookedness of his teeth were more noticeable than they ever had been against the golden sand or the green vegetation which had crept down to the shore. He was as pale as he could be against her own white pillow. She perspired inside her blouse; the sweat on his skin shone like water.
She loved him to death and she wanted, more than anything else in the world, to kill him.
They had been married ten weeks.
They did not seem to notice a woman’s age, these Africans with the endless smiles for the tourists. Abdoulie had trembled when she touched him; he seemed drawn to her by invisible strings. He did not look at girls; he looked at her as if she were beauty incarnate. They had managed a whole repertoire of jokes with the aid of a small store of words and the universal language of gesture. The understanding between them seemed infinite. Undeniably genuine, provided it had seen its limitation, which was the scenery in which it grew. Neither of them saw this flowering love as being bounded by the beach. It was too fine a plant to depend on habitat. The hotel manager smiled benignly and touched his nose.
“Love is in the air, I think, Mrs. Barett. Or is it spring?”
After all, she reasoned then, while wondering gleefully about how Molly would react, what did she have to lose? It did not seem to her any great act of courage to fall in love and propose marriage; in fact it would have taken far more courage to walk away and know that she would spend the rest of her life wondering how it might have been. Sitting in her cottage with the roses round the door after the next round of educational cuts she had come away to escape, prematurely retired, financially okay and emotionally barren. No pupils, no one to look after, no sense of purpose. The opposite beckoned when Abdoulie told her he loved her and that love always found a way. Audrey Barett would educate this funny, sorrowful man who did not know the meaning of malice; she lulled herself to sleep with visions of benign influence while the air-conditioned hotel room chilled her overheated body to ice; she dreamed of her own triumph.
Now she was not only contemplating murder most foul; she was set on it. The light from the lamp outside cast strange shadows on the ceiling as the branches of the tree waved at her in breezy mockery. Fool, fool, fool; sighing and scolding at her, telling there is no fool like a liberated one. Audrey had aged a decade in as many weeks. They had never quite known one another in the biblical sense, as her daughter primly defined it. That had been one of those stored-up treats, which remained stored until after the use-by date until forgotten and no longer relevant. The knowledge gave her an inkling of what it had been like to be proud. There was something about herself she had not relinquished, even if the failure to do so had been because he had not wanted it; both of them had been paralyzed. There was still a little piece of England, perfectly preserved.
“I’m going to get married, Molly.”
“You never!”
“Well, he’s a widower and I met him on holiday and we get along just fine, why not?” There had not been a single tremor of doubt as long as she had been acting alone, organizing things, booking his flight as soon as she got home, paying for it without a murmur, looking into the whole vexed business of entry, being appalled and outraged, all that. Easier by far than telling Molly or her daughters, which certainly took the air out of her lungs.
“He’s black, of course,” she added as a throwaway line, not courageous enough to add that black was an illusion of a color and it was finding him asleep outside her bedroom door which had been the final decision time. Abdoulie slept like an angel, but the whole cut of his body adjusted to a concrete floor. A man accustomed to such, without the option of a bed, was a man who deserved better. You could not do damage to a man who had nothing. You could only transform him.
Silence on the end of a phone line was unnerving.
“Congratulate me, darling?”
More silence.
“Say something then.”
“I can’t. You must be mad.”
There was nothing like resistance to get her going and make her prove she was right. Audrey had always moved sideways in the face of conflict, found another way. She did not fight, she merged into shadows until the fuss was over and then came out triumphantly and went on as before. Besides, it was not so much her daughters and Molly she wanted to impress; it was neighbors who had seen her as dull, sensible, sexless Mrs. Barett, manless and dutiful this twenty years in an area where to be without a mate was to be without sin or life. Boring and sad, in other words. Audrey did not want that kind of respect, and there she would be, in the eyes of the newsagents, the butcher and the baker, in the eyes of her contemporaries at school, taking life in both hands and embarking on adventure. With a man so much taller, so much kinder, than any of theirs.
How was she going to kill him? It was three in the morning and the cold was complete. Poor little Abbie had pneumonia. All she had to do was open the window and strip the bed. He was used to sleeping on mud floors, let him try this.
Audrey tucked the duvet round his chin and sat back. There was never a violent burglar high on drugs and homicidally inclined when you wanted one. She would have paid such a beast to make a decent job of it, although she would have preferred to donate her life savings to an undertaker who would make it look as if her brand-new husband had died a natural and dignified death.
It was a long vigil, midnight to dawn, leaving far too much room for thought. There were many options, apart from the brutal remedy of ice. She could give him extra antibiotics, not known to kill a man, but never mind. Extra sleeping tablets. A parcel of antidepressants saved from a long and distant time, in the fridge. She could give him a cocktail of pills, she could poison him with the alcohol he loathed and say he had done it to himself. He was weak: he was sick to death. The doctor had given her an armory.
Abdoulie opened his eyes. He had the nerve to smile.
“Banjie,” he murmured. “Banjie.”
The name of a girl, the name of a town. Never her name.
Audrey was a neat-figured, neat-faced person with a good crop of outstanding gray-black hair, better-looking than many, but not so vain as to contemplate a wedding with white gown and all the jazz. Besides, they would need the money for other things. Someone would give him a job, surely, on the basis of his gentle temperament alone. Audrey had worked it all out on a piece of graph paper. It would take him a year, she reckoned; a year or less to learn the system. In the meantime, there was enough to buy him the clothes he patently adored, or there might have been if the man had the faintest idea of the value of money. He did not. He could not understand that if she was willing to buy him a suit worth eighty pounds, she would balk at the one priced at three hundred which he preferred. He did not understand why she lived in a cottage with low ceilings when there were other houses on the market. He did not (and she laughed herself sick at this one) understand the difference between rich and poor. If you had any money at all, you could buy the world. All this from a man who could sleep on concrete. Whose shoe size defeated condescending persons in shops and whose feet ached from the cold.
Abdoulie looked like a puzzled giant at their nuptials. These took place two weeks after his arrival. She had asked him if he was sure.
“Of course. Of course. I am very sure.” He had fingered the cloth of his imperfect suit, doubtfully, smiled his crooked smile.
Moved from the embrace of her arms, where her head nestled against his chest.
“Then,” he said, “we make love.”
Oh yes, he had caused a stir. But the modesty of the wedding, the Anglo-Saxon reserve of it, was simply another of her mistakes. He wanted her to look like something from television, the way she had never looked. He spoke his lines with the aplomb of Sir Laurence Olivier and he looked like Othello, but he might as well have killed her then, the way she would kill him now.
This kind of wedding meant nothing to him. He had no particular belief, he had said. Only the beliefs which were buried in his bones, made him mutter alien prayers and meant that this was no wedding at all. The same beliefs which made him a kind of thief.
Audrey was the sum of all her parts. She had wanted a man, this man, so gentle, malleable and different from the last, to complete the circle of her existence and surround that hole in the middle, making the vacuum a captive space which no longer bothered her. There’s always that space, her friend Molly had said: we are none of us born to know contentment at all times. Look at what you have achieved, Audrey, dear; take pride in that. A lovely home with roses round the door, the liking and respect of your peers, freedom, the ability to live with grace.
“Grace is a virtue; virtue is a grace,
Grace is a naughty girl who will not wash her face.…”
Audrey chanted the words under her breath and wiped Abdoulie’s face, roughly. She could put the pillow over his head, press down and wait: she doubted he would even fight because he had never had any fight in him.
It would be a lovely funeral, better than a wedding.
She sat and considered how his premature death would give back to her what she had lost. She could see herself following the coffin to the crematorium, dignified in grief, wearing her black suit, holding her head high, admired by those who would give her the accolades of their pity, talking about her admiringly behind her back. Oh, she’s so brave. Brave to marry again in the first place, and them so happy, and him dying so soon. Extraordinarily sad. Tragic. She would be restored to her place in the pecking order, with the added cachet of widowhood and eccentricity. After all, no one had heard them quarrel. She and Abdoulie had never quarreled. They had merely been silent, with him frozen into ghostly quietness by his own despair. He could not admit mistakes; nor tell her in words the devastating homesickness which began to eat him like a cancer as soon as he finally got it into his mind that this was where, and how, he was supposed to live.
The despair had followed fast on the heels of novelty.
“What’s so wrong with it, Abbie? Why do you negate me by hating everything about this place? Why have you fouled up everything important to me?”
She spoke softly, the venom in her mind turning to plaintive speculation. He hated the cold, he hated the low beams of her cottage, he shied like a frightened animal in the supermarket, he did not like the food, and he treated her cat like something with the evil eye. The doctor said he could be allergic to the cat; the pneumonia was compounded by fits of wheezing. What a joke that would be if it was the cat killed him. She could bring it into the room, wake him up and watch him expire out of terror. Pathetic, a big man like that. And what was more to the point, it was his frigid, frightened, monumental, animal loathing which made her follow and detest all the same things which so affected him. She looked at her possessions and her status and wondered what they meant, mistrusting everything she had done and all she owned. All turned to dust as she gazed at it. He was like someone who had seized an exquisite piece of crochet and systematically reduced it to threads. He, who was without violence, had smashed everything to pieces.
On the nights on which murders take place, or so she had read, the wind howled outside; thunder and lightning heralded the worst crime known to man, but at the time, murder seemed the most natural thing in the world and the night had grown calm and clear. She looked out of the window at the village street, a tidy piece of England, far from the sea.
“Banjie,” he muttered, turning so that his face pointed to the white ceiling. “Banjie.” Then he opened his eyes, looked straight into her own as she moved closer to him. In his dream he screamed. Once, loudly. A single expulsion of desperate sound, before his eyes closed again.
Poor man, who would not hurt a fly.
You are not really a tolerant person, Molly had said. None of us, apart from those peculiarly gifted to the point of being a little mad, are so tolerant that we can be comprehensive about what we are able to accept about another. You liked his country; you didn’t love it or understand it, which isn’t your fault. Why should he suddenly love yours?
Because he loved me.
That, said Molly, is nowhere near enough. You can’t put cactus in a pond and expect it to grow. You can’t expect a husky dog to love the desert, even if it is a champion breed. Molly was expert on gardening and dogs.
He is so gentle, Audrey said; I cannot bear it.
There was sobbing from the bed. Audrey sat on the edge. She touched his face. His hand held her palm against his hot skin. She cradled his head and gave him water. She knew she had the power of life and death. He knew it, too and did not seem to mind.
“You had nothing,” she whispered to him. “Nothing.” That was where he had lied. He had had plenty. The only thing not included had been money.
The dawn was beginning when she went downstairs to let the cat back indoors. Autumn had been fine. The sky was streaked with red, delicately pretty. No comparison to the awesome splendor of the West African sunset, where Audrey had fallen in love. Where a man could bury his heart in the sand and let the clouds take his head. Murder belonged with the dark. Audrey became efficient with the daylight. She waited, impatiently, for the hour when other people would be in their offices, ready to receive calls and respond to her authoritative voice. In the meantime, she busied herself, frowned over her bank balance, shrugged and planned the week. She pushed down the bitterness inside her with the same determination she used to knead bread. She suppressed all the feelings of insult and outrage and put them to one side together with all those comfortingly violent sensations which had been her companions for the night. She was not, after all, that kind of woman.
Yes, she was. She was no better than she ought to be and worse than he was, suffering in silence, turning his face to the wall while she planned necessary termination. He had not pleaded; he had not even considered violence. He was what she first discovered, a good man, in his way. He had never wished her harm, would never do as she had done, contemplate hurting her. Audrey was not ashamed about any of her decisions.
It was ten o’clock when she went upstairs. His eyes were closed, his sleep profound and peaceful, as if he had known what she was doing. She flung back the curtains and let in the sun. Pale, watery, English sun.
“You’re going home,” she said firmly. “In a day or two. When you feel a bit better, eh?”
It was the look of intense relief that he could not begin to hide as his eyes flew open and his face came alive, which made her want to weep. Such an innocent, totally unaware of what she had been thinking. Of course he would rather have nothing.
After he had gone, both of them laughing and crying at the airport and making meaningless promises, she came home and cleaned the house. Stripped his bed and wondered if she would ever use it again. Prepared a barrage of explanations to save what dignity she could. Vowed she would never say a bad word about him. Audrey felt bereft and utterly relieved about her soldierly behavior. He had never seen into her soul, never guessed she could be so foul.
Turning the mattress in order to resettle it upside down against the divan base, she found the knife at the level of the pillow. It was an unfamiliar, lethal-looking thing, sharper than the ones the tourists bought for fun.
Ready for her.
On balance, Molly said, she should be grateful. The discovery redressed the delicate balance of one, last night.
Published in twenty-one languages and having best-selli
ng novels in the United States, Canada, Italy, Great Britain, Germany, Sweden, and Australia, ELIZABETH GEORGE is truly an international success. She has won the Anthony award and has been nominated for both the Edgar and Macavity awards. Recent books include Playing for the Ashes and in the Presence of the Enemy. When she’s not working on her next novel of psychological suspense, George teaches creative writing at the Coastline Community College.
The Surprise of His Life
Elizabeth George
W hen Douglas Armstrong had his first consultation with Thistle McCloud, he had no intention of murdering his wife. His mind, in fact, didn’t turn to murder until two weeks after consultation number four. Douglas watched closely as Thistle prepared herself for a revelation from another dimension. She held his wedding band in the palm of her left hand. She closed her fingers around it. She hovered her right hand over the fist that she’d made. She hummed five notes that sounded suspiciously like the beginning of “I Love You Truly.” Gradually, her eyes rolled back, up, and out of view beneath her yellow-shaded lids, leaving him with the disconcerting sight of a thirtysomething female in a straw boater, striped vest, white shirt, and polka-dotted tie, looking as if she were one quarter of a barbershop quartet in desperate hope of finding her partners.
When he’d first seen Thistle, Douglas had appraised her attire—which in subsequent visits had not altered in any appreciable fashion—as the insidious getup of a charlatan who wished to focus her clients’ attention on her personal appearance rather than on whatever machinations she would be going through to delve into their pasts, their presents, their futures, and—most importantly—their wallets. But he’d come to realize that Thistle’s odd getup had nothing to do with distracting anyone. The first time she held his old Rolex watch and began speaking in a low, intense voice about the prodigal son, about his endless departures and equally endless returns, about his aging parents who welcomed him always with open arms and open hearts, and about his brother who watched all this with a false fixed smile and a silent shout of What about me? Do I mean nothing?, he had a feeling that Thistle was exactly what she purported to be: a psychic.
Women on the Case Page 13