The Benefits of Death
Page 18
He had taken one of the tablets and had tried to find some other substance that resembled it sufficiently closely to pass for it. There had been nothing: the fawny shade of grey appeared to be unique. Then he had suddenly realised that, an aspirin tablet was, roughly, of the same size and that the colour could surely be added. It had taken him hours of patient experiment, but eventually he produced a bogus tablet. He put it in the bottle in her handbag.
Of course, he had not believed in success, consequently his conscience never troubled him. Not, that was, until Evadne failed to arrive at Charing Cross… How did a man live with himself when he believed he was responsible for his wife’s death? How did he live, torn between the mental maelstrom of terror at the thought of being caught out and the sick desire to be caught out so that he could be punished and thus expiate the sin?
He had been bewildered by Stymie’s death because that made nonsense of everything, but he had been too sick in mind really to try to understand it.
But Evadne had not taken the tablet. Even had she done so, it would almost certainly not have caused her death. Perhaps a moralist would still condemn, but lor him the need for expiation had vanished.
Quite suddenly, there came to him the memory of Jaeger as he said: “By the way, Mr. Leithan, I’d throw that bottle of tablets away, if I were you — it’s never safe to keep old medicine about the place.” Why should the detective have said such a thing? Had his “tidy” mind puzzled out all of the truth? Had he searched through the tablets and found the forgery?
*
Leithan ran from his car to the front door of Hideaway House.
When she opened the door and looked at him, Pamela did so with a wary, nervous, and half-defiant expression. He went inside and closed the door. “They’ve found her.”
She momentarily closed her eyes.
“The reeds were holding her under the lake in Roman Woods. She died from a coronary.”
Very slowly, she relaxed. She realised that for her, also, a private nightmare had ended.
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