Last Act of All

by Aline Templeton

  She sat up, stung, but before she could defend herself he laughed wheezily, and went on. ‘I doubt if you would get anywhere. Unless they could see some future reason, one which they would accept, I think you would meet with a stone wall of the type they are so good at erecting.’

  All at once Frances felt sickened, and very, very tired. ‘Do you suppose it would weigh at all with the Radnesfield moralists that Mrs Radley might be at risk of meeting with a very nasty accident?’

  He looked startled, then pursed his lips in a soundless whistle, making him look oddly like a schoolboy, got up, for reasons which remained obscure, in an old man’s white wig.

  ‘You’re right, of course. It might be in someone’s interests to — er, dispose of her, I suppose—’

  ‘Discreetly, naturally. Yes, I’m very much afraid it might.’ She got to her feet. ‘I must go — I’ve taken up far too much of your time, but it has been most illuminating. Thank you, Mr Tilson.’

  He blinked at her reproachfully. ‘My dear, Maxwell, please. I am not so old that I like to think that the uppermost emotion a pretty girl has towards me is respect. Eheu fugaces!’

  She laughed. ‘I’m happy to call you Maxwell, and I don’t think respect is the right word. I think it’s terror. Helena Radley warned me you were dangerously perceptive, and I’m going before you discover all my secrets too.’

  He smiled. ‘Come and talk to me again. I collect people, you know.’

  ‘“Like slugs in a jam jar,”’ Frances quoted, and had the satisfaction of leaving him looking puzzled.

  *

  She slumped exhausted in her seat when she reached her car. Maxwell Tilson! What a murderer he would make, and he might have constructed their hour together as an exercise in misdirection. His alibi certainly warranted checking.

  How unpleasant it was to have a detective’s suspicious mind. She smiled ruefully, and pushed in a cassette as she drove off. The healing, ordered sounds of Bach’s Goldberg Variations flooded the car, and she could feel tension beginning to seep from her as she drove, her fingers picking out imaginary notes on the steering wheel.

  She would play one of them when she got home, as a soothing mental discipline, then have a Scotch, an omelette and a deep bath, and she would allow herself the indulgence of a late start tomorrow. Surely, with this week off, she could unearth enough to persuade them to re-open the case, at least.

  At last she swung the car into the drive of a neat, smug, suburban villa. Its one virtue was that she had her flat upstairs, while her mother lived a life of semi-independence below. The wheelchair to which Poppy Howarth’s failed hip replacement had confined her limited her sphere of operations to downstairs, without which barrier Frances thought she would surely have gone mad.

  A strange car sat in the driveway, and Frances sighed heavily. Mrs Clarke, the home help, went at five, and someone else always came to help her mother to bed. This must be a new one, and Poppy would have trapped her, talking. They would have to go through the usual charade, and tonight she wasn’t sure that she could bear it.

  She turned the key delicately in the lock, closing the door quietly, but Poppy despite her seventy-two years had ears like a bat, registering the slightest vibration of movement in her environment.

  ‘Hello? Is that you, dear? Come along in, I have a visitor.’

  Frances, pulling a childish face, entered the hub of her mother’s universe. The room was furnished in pinks and greens, with frilled lampshades and pleated velvet cushions.

  ‘You have to say this for Mrs Howarth, she’s never given in,’ Mrs Clarke was frequently heard to say, wryly.

  And she hadn’t. Courtesy of a beautician sent by the social services, Poppy’s crowning glory retained its hennaed red, and her nails were shining scarlet talons. Her mouth was a vivid, if haphazard, gash of colour, and the high-arched brows, such a feature in her youth, were still marked, even if improbably black and slightly askew.

  The helper, a pleasant-faced woman in a blue nylon overall, was sitting holding a cup of tea as if she weren’t sure how it got there. She looked round with evident relief when Frances entered.

  ‘Ah, there you are,’ said Poppy majestically. ‘Mrs Christie, my daughter Rose.’

  Frances forced a polite smile. Her mother had started using her hated second name, as a controlling mechanism, when her daughter had taken the deplorable and unfeminine step of joining the police force. Protest was vain, and frequently embarrassing.

  ‘That must have been a very late meeting! What sort of a day have you had, Rose dear?’

  It was coming, inexorably. None the less, having shaken hands with Mrs Christie, she attempted escape.

  ‘Terribly busy, I’m afraid. In fact, I’m not fit company for anyone until I’ve had a bath and something to eat. If you wouldn’t think me rude, Mrs Christie—’

  ‘Poor sweetie!’ Poppy’s laugh tinkled out. ‘What was it today – personality conflicts in the staff-room, or the girls being difficult? Schoolgirls, even in the most select girls’ schools, do seem so different today from the way we all were, don’t they, Mrs Christie? I always think teachers like Rose do such a wonderful job.’

  Mrs Christie thought Mrs Howarth’s daughter a strange, awkward sort of girl; with her mother beaming upon her encouragingly, she had made a funny sound and left the room. And she had been no help at all in persuading her mother to settle down for the night.

  Minutes later she heard a piano upstairs being played loudly, with lots of crashing chords — something Russian, perhaps, though she was no expert.

  ‘Rachmaninov,’ Mrs Howarth supplied. ‘So talented — she teaches music, of course. And just the teensiest bit temperamental, I have to confess, as all musicians are!’

  Chapter Ten

  Sharon Thomas was looking even more oppressed than usual as she scurried to her work on Saturday morning. It was through no wish of hers that she found herself knowing what no one else knew, and if Martha discovered her concealing something, something like this — Sharon was a timid creature, and she shuddered.

  Her feet, she found, had made the decision for her, and she was standing on Martha’s doorstep, raising her hand to the dazzling brass of the knocker. She tapped gingerly, once.

  The door seemed to open at her touch and Martha stood on the threshold, like the trap-door spider waiting for her victim. She was wearing her working coat, ready to leave for the Red House.

  ‘Oh, it’s you, Sharon Thomas, is it? And what’s brought you round, looking as if someone’s stolen your tuppenny bun? Come to tell me the sky’s falling, have you?’

  Sharon, with a gulp, blurted out what she knew, and had the doubtful satisfaction of seeing Martha Bateman’s face take on a grimmer expression than she had ever seen before.

  *

  Frances was still in her dressing-gown when Helena phoned; she had forgotten to mention the party the day before, but now it had occurred to her that this was an ideal observation opportunity.

  ‘It won’t do any harm, either, if lots of people know that you’re not alone in the knowledge that Neville’s murderer is still at large,’ Frances said, and knew by the pause before her agreement that Helena had thought of that too.

  She made herself a pot of coffee while she planned her day. Saturday: unless some emergency had come up, Coppins would be off. She could sneak into headquarters and take a quiet look at the file, unquestioned, before she went off to Radnesfield.

  She dressed, then went to the piano, as she still did every morning, heaven knew why. She had been just not good enough to be a concert pianist, and wounded pride prevented her from teaching instead, but unless she spent ten minutes wrestling with the more awkward scales (D Minor Melodic today), she felt dissatisfied and out of sorts, the way other people did if they were prevented from working out.

  When she went downstairs, there were the sounds of Blessed Mrs Clarke working in the kitchen, and her mother was sitting at a low table with a tray of tea and toast. She had not put on her m
ake-up: her face was sleep-wrinkled and sallow, and her hair still a bird’s nest.

  ‘Morning, Mrs Clarke!’ Frances called. ‘Morning, Mother.’ She went across to peck her on the cheek.

  Disapproval pervaded the air like a miasma as Poppy noticed her coat. ‘Going out, I see.’ The statement was an accusation.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mother, but—’

  ‘Now, why should you feel you have to apologize? You know I don’t expect you to limit your social life, just because I’m a lonely old woman. I may be a burden to myself, but heaven forbid that I should be a burden to you.’

  The brave smile was one of Poppy’s better effects, but today Frances would not indulge her by taking notice. ‘I’m working this morning, but I should be back sometime in the afternoon, and then—’

  A gesture of one imperious, red-nailed hand stopped her. ‘No, no. There’s no need to make excuses. It’s your job, no doubt — though, with your responsibilities, one might have thought...’ She trailed into provocative silence.

  ‘I should have taken a job like teaching, instead of so recklessly going into the police force, you mean. Mother, I was really angry last night. You put me in an impossible position.’

  The faded blue eyes drifted off into the middle distance, vague and unfocused. ‘I don’t know what you mean – I get confused…’

  ‘Of course you don’t. You know perfectly well – oh, what’s the use? I’ve got to go now. Mrs Clarke will see that you’re all right, and I’ll phone you if by any chance I’m delayed.’

  Poppy didn’t reply, only directing a baleful stare at her daughter’s departing back. Impatiently, she tinkled a brass bell on the table at her side, and Mrs Clarke appeared, a dish-towel in her hands.

  ‘You won’t forget the sandwiches for my bridge game this afternoon, Mrs Clarke, will you?’

  ‘No, dear, I won’t,’ the other woman said patiently, only adding, ‘Not now you’ve reminded me four times, no,’ once she was safely out of earshot.

  Outside in the car, Frances hesitated. It could be a long day when you were all on your own. Perhaps she should have stayed at home. But she had promised Helena, and in addition, a certain unease was festering — that strange little village!

  She sighed as she started the engine. Guilt! If it didn’t exist, mothers would invent it. It seemed to be the inevitable lot of any woman in a family situation, and it was enough to put you of the whole idea. Which was, perhaps, fortunate, since the world seemed conspicuously lacking in young men prepared to adapt to the working schedules of female detective-sergeants.

  ‘Thought you were off this week,’ the uniformed file clerk said to her when she requested 5337/JC/FH.

  That was all she needed — questions about why she wanted to waste her precious leave on a file for a case that was closed.

  ‘I wasn’t sure I could survive a week without seeing you, Ron, and it’s the best excuse I could come up with.’

  She winked, and the man, grinning, went off to fetch it. She took it back to the CID office, empty this morning, and settled down.

  The interviewing had been, as she suspected, perfunctory. There were preliminary statements from those who would have been principal suspects initially — Helena, Edward, Lilian, Chris Dyer, George Wagstaff, Jack Daley — and mainly carried out before forensic had come up with all the damning evidence. At that point, the investigation had been scaled down; police forces didn’t have the manpower to waste on unnecessary enquiries.

  Then there were the more detailed statements, concentrating on the case against Helena, from Sharon Thomas, Tamara Farrell and Sandra Daley.

  She flipped through them. Most, as one would imagine, were unsupported accounts, though a few, like Wagstaff, Radley and Daley had alibis of a sort, more or less confirmed. Radley’s seemed pretty solid — they had actually moved fast enough to have checked the clockmaker’s timepiece and got the vicar’s confirmation on Monday, before Helena was arrested. Similarly, Wagstaff’s wife and son had claimed he was in view of one or other all afternoon, if you found that convincing. Daley had a gap or two in the course of the afternoon, but no more than quarter of an hour here or there unverified. In a place the size of Radnesfield, that could be significant. Or not.

  Frowning, she moved on to Sandra Daley’s statement and studied it. Now, that was interesting. She had a large window in her kitchen; if she had been working there all afternoon, as she claimed, she was almost bound to notice anyone going up to Radnesfield House from the village. She had mentioned only Stephanie and Helena, yet Tamara Farrell, by her own admission, had been in the little wood below the house for at least the latter part of the afternoon. Had she another way of getting there, or was Sandra’s statement, for some reason, incomplete? Come to that, no one was nearer to the scene of the crime than Sandra herself, with no one to watch her mount the path; Tamara had seen Helena but not Stephanie, so, according to Helena’s evidence, the murderer had been and gone by that time.

  Sandra certainly had reason enough to hate Fielding, once she found out that he had been two-timing her. That, of course, went for the other women he was laying as well, and their husbands, though they did not seem to feature anywhere in the profile of the crime. She scribbled a note on the pad at her side.

  She looked in vain for any record of interviews carried out in the village. There had, after all, been the burning in effigy and the death threat, but thanks to her over-slick detective work, no one had considered questioning any of the locals except Sharon Thomas, and she certainly wouldn’t volunteer anything they hadn’t quarried out with a chisel. Maxwell Tilson had not been interviewed. She couldn’t quite see what his motive might be, and murder as an intellectual exercise would be unusual, to say the least.

  Leaning back in her chair, she shut her eyes in concentration, trying to tease out the strands that were so messily interwoven. Sometimes — though heaven help her if Joe Coppins ever found out — characters emerged in her mind like themes in a piece of music, and she could already hear the shrill, titupping strings that indicated Sandra Daley, and the ponderous bassoon notes of Edward Radley. But beneath it all, she could feel a ground bass, swelling and insistent, marked by a harsh discordancy — the theme of Radnesfield itself.

  She opened her eyes, shaking her head to clear it. This was self-indulgence. ‘Don’t waste your time with bloody nonsense!’ She could almost hear Coppin’s diapason roar.

  The next step was to record, as best she could, her recollection of the interview with Helena. She typed for half an hour, then sat back to analyse what she had written, and the notes she had made from the file.

  The evidence was still an amorphous mass. The statements, as they stood, were rambling and incoherent, full of inconsistencies and gaps you could drive a bus through. Yet some sort of shape was starting to emerge.

  With a certain amount of overlap, Fielding’s enemies fell into three definite categories. There were the village people — the largest body, this — resentful of the changes he was about to impose on their way of life, and, according to Maxwell Tilson, amoral at the very least.

  Next, there were those with some deep-seated and personal reason for hatred. That could mean Jack Daley, and the other husbands like him — the cuckolds, their sexual shame exposed — or even Helena herself, who could not be scientifically eliminated from the enquiry.

  Finally — and this was the group which must come most heavily under suspicion if contiguity of time were significant — there were those for whom Neville’s decision would mean a serious change of circumstances. Wagstaff, for instance; Chris Dyer, of course; even the vicar, dismayed and helpless without his wife; Lilian.

  Here she paused. That had, after all, been her first instinct. Was it really in any sense likely that the languid, posing Lilian had wielded a poker to such deadly purpose?

  Motive, means and opportunity: these were the textbook cornerstones of any murder enquiry, and instinctively she reverted to them as an aid to structured thought.

 
The mainsprings of motive were, by convention, gain, revenge, blood-lust and principle. Well, score two out of four for Lilian on that; blood-lust seemed improbable, and gain covered the only principle Lilian Sheldon Fielding was likely to cherish.

  Opportunity wasn’t lacking. With Sharon in the kitchen, who was to see Lilian tiptoe downstairs to the study? Neville, trusting, his back turned; the means, which she knew to be to hand...

  She added her own personal fifth indicator. Character? A moody drift of saxophone suggested itself, but that could become strident. Yes, on reflection, there might well be steel beneath the candy-floss. Lilian could repay investigation.

  But then, on this basis, Helena would score high as well. She wasn’t going to build any satisfactory case on such shifting sands as these.

  She looked at her watch, then hastily shuffled the papers back into their file. It was time she was heading for Radnesfield, and once more she was aware of the faint, uneasy tingle of concern.

  *

  Edward was fussing; there was no more charitable way to describe it.

  ‘Well, at least we’ve got a glorious day,’ he said for the fourth time. ‘You know, I do believe it’s mild enough to open the doors into the garden, so that people can spill out and it won’t be such a crush.’

  ‘Why not?’ Helena agreed. ‘But not your office, Edward, with all your papers littered around.’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’ He contemplated traffic flow moodily. ‘It’s a pity, though — they could have got out into the garden that way. Still, I suppose they can use the door at the back of the hall, and—’

  He was interrupted by the telephone, and came back looking gloomy. ‘That was Annabel Gray. She and James have this wretched ‘flu that’s going about. The Stanningtons called off last night too, did I tell you? Simon’s gone down with it.’

  ‘Yes, you did. But does it really matter? Dozens of people are coming anyway. Oh, and I phoned Frances Howarth. She’s going to look in.’