by J P Lomas
Instead they’d gone outside and bought coffee and buns to celebrate. To Sobers it seemed an odd coincidence that like Kennedy she’d also gone on November 22nd.
****
Jane was at home when she too was wrong footed by the news of Thatcher’s resignation. She’d been up until two the previous night staking out the Conservative Club and there had been no suggestion there that anything momentous would come of the result from the ballot in the first round. One old boy, who looked as if he had been a member since the days of Disraeli, had been boring for Britain about how Thatcher wouldn’t even have needed to stand in the second round if the rules hadn’t been amended from the margin of victory being calculated on 15% of the electorate to 15% of those whose who had voted, or something like that. Another of the red faced old majors seemed to think she’d scored an own goal by not voting herself.
There had been a few cheers for Heseltine, yet most of the members she’d met seemed very pro ‘The Lady.’ A few seemed to remember Margaret Mallowan, though more for her striking looks than anything else, whilst most recalled her husband fondly. They hadn’t seen the widow there since the funeral, which seemed to preclude a premeditated attack on the premises; however she got Clark and Turner to do a recce of the place for any jerry cans of fuel, or bicycle chains over emergency exits; just in case.
Most of the members seemed disappointed by the result which now meant there would have to be a second ballot to decide the leadership; having beaten Heseltine by 204 votes to 152, the Prime Minister was just shy of an outright victory. Under the new rules Heseltine was within the required 15% margin to force a second round. The only person who seemed cheered by the news was the bar manager, claiming another ballot would be good for business; in his view both candidates would surely support that. The inconclusive nature had a few nay-sayers muttering about a divided party being a Godsend for Labour, yet at least they could all be cheered by the fact they all made it out of the club alive that night. It seemed the Maggie Murders, if not Maggie had finally come to an end.
Unless of course the killer was waiting for a more certain result?
When Tim woke her up to tell her Thatcher had resigned she was shocked. She was well into her second mug of coffee before the news began to assume the shape of a tangible fact. A year before, she’d been consoling her normally unemotional elder son when he had discovered that ‘Doctor Who’ was to be cancelled after 26 years on the telly. Given that Leo’s love of the long running sci-fi show was one of the few constants in her son’s ever changing tastes she’d tried to empathise with him. And yet she still couldn’t get worked up about a TV programme; unlike Tim she never got the sniffles when a long running character was bumped off in one of their favourite dramas.
With Maggie’s departure she wasn’t sure how to feel? She’d never voted for her, though she’d considered doing so in ’79 and had been delighted to see the astronomic rise in her pay packet that Thatcherism had brought in. Tim might mutter about ‘blood money’, but after years of trying to make ends meet they’d found themselves very comfortably off on a salary which had at last seemed to reflect the important status of modern policing. And yet the way some members of the public now seemed to regard the police with active hostility made her feel less enamoured of their former premier.
All in all, Mrs T had become a constant presence in her life over the last decade or so and the thought of her going had become inconceivable. Like the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, the sudden speed of Maggie’s political demise had caught her unawares. Perhaps that explained her ambivalence to the news and the shock had yet to register fully yet?
It was only on the way into the station that the thought hit her. If Maggie was gone did that mean an end to the murders, or might her namesake have something else up her sleeve? In a way she hoped for the latter, otherwise it would be very difficult to get a prosecution in the case. It was terrible to hope there might be another killing, albeit she needed Mrs Mallowan to make a mistake.
****
L is for Lust
Tony found us together. Not just in bed, but in flagrante delicto. I remember looking up and seeing him framed in the doorway of our bedroom as I rode his best friend.
He should have been in London; I should have stopped. Yet I didn’t, some things are difficult to stop just like that. And he was there. Watching me come.
According to our calendar he was coming back on the Saturday. After meeting a designer, he was supposed to stay with his friend Jerry in Earl’s Court. They were meant to enjoy a few beers, catch up on old times and generally chew the fat. He wasn’t meant to catch me and Patrick at it.
By the time I’d got to the landing, I could hear the front door banging shut and the sound of our Mini starting up on the gravel. There was just a cloud of dust on the drive by the time I was standing starkers in our studio doorway; watching him disappear.
Tony was the only man I have ever loved. That probably sounds bollocks to most people. Well, it happens to be true. It was just we’d bought into a lot of that new age hippy shit flying around at the time and we’d both thought a bit of free love on the side was alright as long as no-one got hurt. The trouble was we had forgotten the rules of our game.
It was the end of the seventies and I’d just gone through the trauma of turning 30 and was trying to hold onto my youth, whilst Tony had hit the wrong side of 40 and was beginning to back pedal on the whole liberal philosophy he’d shown me, by becoming too involved with the heavy stuff as he used to call it. He’d kept on at me for a decade that money didn’t matter and it was all about that peace and love shit, yet when he started making some serious bread from our New Age designs he was no longer my Tony.
Gone was the happy go lucky, pot smoking free spirit who had swept me off my feet at Art School. The man who had been both my seducer and tutor. I thought he’d teach me the secrets of the universe. Tony was the poet, artist and lover who opened my eyes to a nomadic life of festivals, love-ins and star crazed nights under open skies. We had embraced the principles of free love and so the occasional time when we struck out on our own had never been a big deal to me.
I think the cracks began appearing when we settled down. It wasn’t that I missed the travelling, far from it. The material benefits we were now accruing made my life very comfortable and I enjoyed the commercial side of our venture. It was just that Tony was investing so much time in the creative side of the business, it meant I was feeling very neglected indeed. He had changed from the energetic and youthful lover I’d married one Winter Solstice into just another runner in the rat race.
It wasn’t even anything special about Pat; he was just a body on hand that night. Although perhaps it would have been better if Tony had caught me with one of the others? It’s just friends had never been off limits before…
Even now I’m still surprised by Tony’s reaction. When I first met him he probably would have joined us, but the look of complete betrayal on his face that morning told me we weren’t going to be able to laugh this one off over a few joints.
When I heard the car on the driveway that evening, I longed for it to be Tony. I remember seeing, but not watching Mrs Thatcher’s triumphal arrival at Downing Street on the ten o’clock news and hoping that the telephone would ring. My cry of agony when I saw the uniforms at the door was my heart breaking. I knew he was dead before they told me.
I realised I could never marry again out of love, but when the bills started mounting after Tony’s death I had to get money and security somehow. It seemed that Tony’s business acumen had not been his strongest suit and that he had borrowed more heavily than he told me. The meeting in London had not been with a designer after all, but had been a typically quixotic attempt by him to find another financial backer to prop us up. No longer desiring the bohemian lifestyle of my twenties, the only capital I could trade on was my looks.
My transformation from Hippy Chick to Belle of the Hunt Ball wasn’t that difficult; just a change of costume, a new idiom and catching up with
the Society circles mater and pater had wanted me to move in. With my figure and looks I was able to put the clock back a few years and pass myself off as mid-20s. Now that the life of a starving artist seemed less romantic, I made up for lost time and decided to bag myself a banker or toff. In the end I allowed a rich property developer from Exeter to believe that he had seduced me.
Jez felt bewildered. He’d been half expecting to find something on her computer, but nothing of this magnitude!
Was Mags a murderer? A multiple murderer even!
And even that unprocessed discovery wasn’t the bombshell it should have been. It was having his worst fears confirmed about her feelings for him – or lack of feelings to be more precise, which stunned him. Jez was now beginning to realise that he had been played like one of his games. Years ago it might have been his fantasy to have become the sex toy for some hot Amazonian beauty, but not now. He still had some dignity left.
In his head he’d been creating a world for them as detailed as any he had helped to conceive for JAC Games. Even when the financial downturn had made some of his scenarios look increasingly unrealistic, he had devised alternative futures in which they could be happy. And yet even the more implausible scenarios he had dreamt up had not been as fantastical as this. Having written games which destroyed the world in a fictional Armageddon, he was now experiencing his own personal apocalypse.
Like Bluebeard’s bride he shouldn’t have looked! If only he hadn’t tried to confirm his suspicions he might have lived in happy ignorance of Mags’ true nature. He might even have won her back, after all he’d only really wanted another peek at her financial records; the idea that there might be something about him in her files had only come as an afterthought…
Given the fact that Lin had said that Maggie had popped out, he’d felt today had been a perfect opportunity to put some of his fears to bed. And, if he was honest, the idea of putting Mags to bed that night hadn’t been far from his mind either. It was all very well keeping a low profile, but her husband had died over a year ago and it had been well over a week since Mags had visited Chez Jez. The fact that doing it at her place was against all the rules no longer bothered him, as he was beginning to resent the way she made all the decisions. It was time for him to assert himself, as his father’s mantra went ‘The sun shines on those who help themselves’.
By going around to her place he could kill two birds with one stone. There was bound to be an opportunity to check out her computer again and it was a near certainty that she wouldn’t be able to resist him in the flesh. If she came back unexpectedly, he could always claim to be cleaning up her files, not that her Apple seemed to have many problems in that respect. Her password had been laughably easy to crack and he was hoping that a cursory inspection would set his world back on its axis. Those annoying doubts first brought to light by that blonde policewoman and then resurrected by that red headed reporter needed to be washed away. It was just that he hadn’t expected an innocuous looking folder called ‘Housekeeping’ to have had so much dirt in it.
Quite a few things were beginning to form a very grim picture in his mind. If he’d been forming the edge of the jigsaw at the back of his mind over the last few months, now he was beginning to see the details. The chance discovery of a half empty packet of sleeping tablets now had a dark logic to it that he hadn’t been able to fathom a few months ago.
He clicked on the file entitled ‘M’ and wished he’d been able to stop after ‘A’.
M is for Murder
I hadn’t planned to kill Gerald when we met. It was only later that the idea came to me when we visited Egypt on our honeymoon. I’d taken along ‘Death on the Nile’ as a suitable book, as I’d been a sucker for reading thrillers since boarding school. Not only was it a useful diversion from the less than thrilling consummation of our marriage, it began to give me ideas about how to have my cake and eat it. A divorce would have given me far too small a slice for my changing appetites…
The metaphorical cake in question being Gerald’s rapidly rising fortune and yet the key to unlocking this would be patience. The problem with fictional murderers seemed to be they were always in too much of a hurry. Within days of the first murder, bodies would begin piling up on the village green, as Death toured rural England. To avoid this descent into Arcadian carnage, I calculated that I could tolerate living with Gerald for the immediate future; given he worked such long hours, finding someone else to fulfil my carnal needs would be easy. I could certainly wait long enough for him to turn his short term investments into ones which would leave me very comfortably off as his widow.
If I’d pushed him into the Nile on our honeymoon, or smashed him over the head with a wine bottle at home I’d have been first in line for a life sentence. No, I needed a more diverting narrative to avoid detection and one which would give me time to plan his demise with due care and attention. I found my inspiration in another Christie classic – ‘The ABC murders’ – the idea of concealing one killing in a string of seemingly unrelated murders carried out by a supposed lunatic was a brilliant conception.
Copying the ABC murders would be problematic. As Gerald was a Mallowan, I’d need to bump a dozen people off before I got to him. I’d also have to persuade him to move to Modbury or Manchester. Murdering a total of thirteen people (a particularly unlucky number for the Andersons of Axminster) would also be difficult and time consuming. I’d also be lucky to get to Davies in Dartmouth before being banged up…
Yet the principle of hiding his murder in a sequence of apparently unconnected crimes appealed to me. The Miss Marple story ‘A Pocketful of Rye’ gave me the solution I was looking for; use a nursery rhyme instead. Well that was easy as Gerald had seen the possibility of a quick buck in the business Tony had left me with and had given me the finances to make a go of it. With his name on the company’s books he’d joked that now he was the Candlestick-maker and we just needed to buy up a butcher’s and a baker’s to complete the set. The fact that he cracked this joke when taking me on a hubristic detour to see a couple of houses he was putting up in Littleham also helped me choose the perfect first victim. That was the best Sunday joint I ever bought…
Timing was another consideration. Gerald was obviously rich when I married him, but he wasn’t yet in the millionaire stakes. His portfolio still needed time to expand and develop. I felt I could give him the luxury of working up until his retirement before killing him. No point in killing the goose before it laid the golden nest egg.
As Maggie Thatcher seemed to embody the spirit of this new age of individualism and entrepreneurial spirit, I planned the first killing to coincide with her re-election. It would also commemorate Tony’s death and most importantly it would keep the story out of the news. No one was going to give a toss about an elderly butcher dying in Devon during Maggie’s re-election triumph.
As for how I would kill them, the answer was simple – fire. My husband had burnt alive and so would they. It was also a practical solution; I could not imagine physically sticking a knife into someone, or taking a shotgun to them. Well, I could imagine it and I didn’t want to. What if they didn’t die straight away and I had to stab them again and again as they moaned in front of me or even worse put up a fight? Guns and knives would also be easier to trace. I estimated that pouring petrol through a letterbox would not be that difficult. The fact that the butcher’s shop had iron bars over its windows also made it a perfect death trap.
My husband was therefore unwittingly complicit in the butcher’s death, as the site he was developing in Littleham gave me easy access to the back of that old man’s premises. I also met my second victim at one of the charity events that Gerald liked to show me off at. That is to say I met Mrs Baker – it had never occurred to me until that point that I needn’t kill an actual baker. It was fairly easy for me to work out that the man Connie was bidding with at the auction was more than just a friend; I for one wasn’t surprised to see they left early. They were clever enough not to leave at the
same time, but when you know the moves yourself it’s easy to see them in other people.
From the gossiping chorus I learnt she was married to a cripple and such a defenceless specimen seemed ideal for my second victim; he’d never out run the flames! Befriending Connie was easy enough and she soon found a kindred spirit in her new friend. By our third meeting we had already guessed each other’s true natures and by our fifth meeting we’d taken to describing our regular drinks as our AA meetings: in this case Adulterers’ Anonymous.
At times we shared lovers too. Not at the same time, she had some standards, yet she was never averse to taking risks. I took a gamble setting her up with one of my lovers on the night of her husband’s death, yet it was a risk I was certain she would take. I knew her type by then and it was easy for me to engineer a chance meeting between the two of them at the Royal Standard.
What would I have done if Connie hadn’t taken the bait? I would just have waited for another opportunity. With Connie that was sure to present itself sooner or later. If only Thursday nights had been her regular night with Councillor Howard I would have been in the clear, but it seemed she could only use Fridays for their meetings. And by the time I killed Connie’s husband I thought the whole ‘butcher, baker and candlestick-maker’ business would be out in the open anyway.
The Maggie Murders was just another piece of good fortune that fell my way and it also allowed me to pace the killings. Given the usual gap between elections it also ensured I wouldn’t become too greedy, or reckless. It would allow four or five years between murders and give me a possible deadline of 1993 for killing Gerald. This allowed 13 years for the calf to become fattened and then I could live the life of the merry widow. Fortunately, the booming state of the economy, twinned with the treacherous nature of her supporters gave me the opportunity to complete my plan early. Now it’s just a case of sitting tight for a few more months, before relocating to my nest egg in Rio.