Last Act of All

by Aline Templeton

  Stephanie, suddenly white, was on her feet, but Jim moved faster. ‘No, Steph, stay here,’ he said, setting off across the grass. His longer legs covered the ground faster, but she was close behind him as he wrenched open the garden door into Edward’s office.

  After a single glance he turned, blocking her view with his body, but not before she had seen the jade-green mohair jacket and the blonde hair, disordered above the smothering tapestry cushion, and the lifeless arm flung out as if in some brief struggle.

  It was her screams that alerted the rest to tragedy. Those in the garden clustered round first, as the girl, gasping hysterically, and supported by Jim, grim-faced, came staggering round the corner, but then they were hurrying from the house, too; Edward, Charles, Chris.

  Tamara had been standing aloof, with her usual watchful detachment, but it was a shrill shriek from her that made the distraught Stephanie look round.

  ‘It’s — it’s her!’ Tamara was pointing. ‘But she’s dead, she’s dead!’

  Coming from the house, Helena, her heart pounding, came running towards her daughter, to see her take one incredulous look and crumple, in a dead faint.

  *

  At last the lorry-crane had come, and the wreckage was being towed to the side of the road.

  Knowing the difficulties under which her colleagues laboured did not lessen Frances’s exasperation. She had told Helena she would be there promptly, and, until she came across this accident, had been making good time. Now she would be lucky if she got there before they had all finished their lunch and gone home.

  But there was still a fair number of cars standing in the square when she reached her destination. She parked hurriedly and jumped out.

  The Red House was looking pretty today in the unseasonal sunshine, pretty and peaceful. Strangely so, she thought, puzzled, glancing through the sitting-room window at the empty room. She rang the bell.

  The door was flung open, and Dyer stood there, the hall telephone in his hand.

  ‘Oh well, well, well,’ he said, putting it down, ‘and to think that they say you can never find one when you want one. You’re the lady detective, aren’t you? Radley said you were expected. All right then — this will give you something to detect.’

  She had dismissed as irrational the uneasiness she had felt. Wordlessly, she followed him through the hall and along the back corridor to where Radley, looking shaken, stood as if on guard outside a closed door.

  ‘In here,’ Dyer said brusquely, and Radley stood mutely aside.

  It was dark inside the little stuffy office, and it was a moment before Frances’s eyes adjusted to the light. Then she saw the figure on the couch, and caught her breath.

  ‘Helena?’ Her lips were almost too rigid to form the word.

  ‘That’s what they thought at first. But it’s Lilian.’

  ‘Lilian?’ Her astonishment was patent, and to Radley at least, offensive.

  ‘Were you expecting someone to kill my wife, Sergeant Howarth?’ he asked stiffly.

  ‘Not expecting, no.’ She left the subject there. ‘Has anything been touched?’

  ‘I lifted the cushion,’ Dyer said. ‘The vicar’s brat found her, and in her usual spirit of helpfulness went and told Stephanie her mother was dead. Stephanie and young Wagstaff came in and saw the body. Then Helena appeared, and Stephie fainted, and a few people screamed, then Helena got hysterical... Well, you get the picture. I came in and there was poor bloody Lilian. She’d borrowed Helena’s jacket, apparently, and with the blonde hair…’

  He paused for a moment. For all his air of sang-froid, Frances noticed that he had positioned himself where he could not see the body; now he glanced quickly at it, then looked away. ‘Well, like I said, I lifted the cushion, thought maybe we could still do something. But it’s — well, you could say it was unmistakable.’

  She was, indeed, in her limpness, unmistakably dead. The tumbled hair was across the face, and the head was still turned to one side, the body twisted; she had fought hard against her unseen assailant, and the travelling rug was wound about her legs as if she had lashed out, in vain. It had not been a peaceful death, and the face, mercifully obscured for the moment, would tell its own tale of agony and terror.

  Radley had not come right into the room; he stood, hesitating, in the doorway.

  Frances turned from her scrutiny. ‘Mr Radley, would you please go and tell your guests that no one may leave, and keep them away from this part of the house and garden. Mr Dyer, perhaps you would now make that phone call? Ask them to get in touch with Inspector Coppins, and tell them I shall need a Criminal Investigation Unit and a police surgeon.’

  The matter-of-fact authority in her tone sent them on their way without discussion, leaving Frances alone with all that remained of Lilian Sheldon Fielding.

  She had never found herself in this position before. Usually, she came upon the results of violent crime as one of a team; this strange tryst was a much more intimate relationship.

  What did she know about Lilian? She was, by reputation, selfish and greatly disliked. Frances herself had observed no signs of real grief over her husband’s murder, though much paraded emotion, and there appeared to be no close friends or family. There had been no hint of an interest or objective beyond the enjoyment of the lotos-fruits of media success; Lilian, as far as she could tell, had led a purposeless existence which amounted to little more than the exploitation of a slim, sensuous body and an ephemeral commercial prettiness.

  She sighed. What would remain? Only ‘a rag, a bone, and a hank of hair’, a fast-fading memory, and not one person who would sincerely mourn her.

  It seemed a squandered life, and in some ways, this death was the more pitiable for that very reason. She had left so little behind, it was as if her killer had condemned her to extinction, like stamping on a butterfly. Poor pretty, shallow Lilian.

  Pity was all very well. But it was by the exercise of her professional skills that she could best discharge this oddly personal sense of responsibility.

  While her eyes automatically carried out the procedure that had been dinned into her — look, look, and then look some more — her mind began to race.

  Could this disaster, too, be laid at her door, or was she exaggerating the importance of the part she had played? Mentally, she fingered the notion of guilt, like some brilliantly-coloured toadstool, attractive and poisonous. Joe Coppins had accused her of arrogance in her assumptions about this case, and he was frequently right.

  More practically, then, could she, somehow, have stopped this, if the accident had not delayed her? Probably not; her attention would have been misdirected, guarding Helena rather than Lilian, who had, after the morning’s deliberations, been high on the list of suspects for Fielding’s murder. Well, this had certainly cleared her. The drastic method of eliminating suspects.

  She bent over the chesterfield, frowning in concentration, the body before her a problem now rather than a human tragedy. She dared not touch it until Forensic arrived, but studied its tortured position, knelt down to check the fingernails. Lilian could have raked her assailant with those long, manicured talons, and scratches on hands or face would be hard to disguise. But there was no sign of blood or tissue under the nails, as far as she could see, only a thread which looked as if it might have come from one of the cushions. There was another cushion on the floor; might her killer have used it to shield his hands from her desperate clawing?

  She got up and crossed to the garden door. Not much hope of fingerprints there, or from the door to the hall. Too many people would have grabbed the handles, without a thought for the sanctity of evidence, though the experts would try. You never knew when a print in context might be useful. The cushion — she glanced at it, where Dyer had thrown it down — was rough tapestry, and would do them no good.

  She dropped to her knees again, feeling across the carpet on the direct route between door and couch, looking for any unusual indication, but there was only the slightly sticky dampnes
s of earth from the feet of those who had come in, the faint smell of garden loam. They would check thoroughly when the Unit arrived.

  Time was passing. She was still seeing the room as the killer had left it; what could it tell her?

  He had taken quite a risk, coming in here, whether by house or garden door, and then committing a murder in full view of anyone who happened to be passing. Most people, of course, were on the lawn at the back, and by standing to one side of the chesterfield — she took up the position experimentally — you could be in shadow, with only the cushion in full view, and even then, considering the darkness of the room, only if someone stood close to the window and peered in, as Tamara Farrell must have done.

  A gambler, then; he would have had to take his risks coming in and going out as well. And people took risks because the stakes were high.

  But she did not, as yet, know what had been at stake. She needed to talk to people, get out and ask the questions they had failed to ask before. She sighed again.

  Without equipment, there was nothing further she could do here. Shortly, the team would arrive, and the last trace of atmosphere would vanish in a chaos of arc lights and plastic sheeting. She had only a few more minutes alone with the dead woman who knew no more than she did who her murderer had been.

  Someone had found a sleeping woman, and held that cushion ruthlessly over her face until her breathing stopped. The woman had displayed blonde hair, like Helena’s, and Helena’s distinctive green jacket. Had her killer actually murdered the shadow or the substance?

  But when Joe Coppins arrived, shouldering his way through the door, she knew he was in no mood to indulge her with the discussion of such theories. He had been dragged away from some domestic Saturday-fest, and finding his sergeant at the scene of the crime in a social capacity was another grievance. And he was not a stupid man; she read in the gathering blackness of his brow his immediate understanding of the reason for her presence, as she tried to explain what she believed to have happened before he erupted.

  It was his worst sort of rage. It was ostensibly over her disobedience, arrogance and criminal stupidity, but she knew him well enough to appreciate that what gave it force was the need to banish a darkling suspicion that the horrifying mistake might turn out, after all, to have been his. She hung her head and waited silently until the attack became less violent and more specific.

  ‘That’s women for you,’ he said with rancour, at last. ‘Don’t like anything to be straightforward — everything’s got to be complicated, hasn’t it? Seems to me as plain as the nose on your face — woman’s a convicted murderer; only just out of prison, and she’s turned into a homicidal maniac. I suppose you’ve got her under close guard, before she decides to run amok with a carving knife?’

  ‘Well, sir, she’s heavily sedated.’ Frances was ready to defend her, but for once it transpired that fortune favoured Helena. From the time she had left Lilian (alive, as the waitress who had taken in the aspirin could testify) to the moment, half-an-hour later, when Stephanie’s screams summoned her from the house, she had been in the presence of one or more of the catering team, and guests as well.

  Marshalling the evidence, Frances tried not to sound triumphant. ‘It does tend to suggest she might be in the clear for her husband’s murder too — unless you think there are two homicidal maniacs at large?’

  ‘Say “sir” when you’re being insubordinate.’ Deflated, Coppins groaned. ‘It’s not evidence, but you could be right, I’ll give you that, and if you are it’ll be an expensive business for Her Majesty’s Government. And we won’t come up smelling of roses, whatever we do.’

  *

  By Sunday morning an incident room had been set up in a portakabin in the forecourt of the Four Feathers, and representatives from most of the larger newspapers were encamped around the square. Coppins, a veteran of Press skirmishes, had opened the campaign with a warning that he was prepared to act on any complaint about harassment or trespass, and they were, for the moment at least, being fairly circumspect.

  At the church, there was once more an unnaturally swollen congregation. Leaving after the service, the groups of worshippers, mainly women, found cause to cross the street and hold murmured discussions near the cabin, where they could watch the Press and the police who came and went, and ensure that their fellow-villagers could not so far forget themselves as to gossip to foreigners.

  From inside, the low buzz of conversation had the threatening note of wasps disturbed in their nest, and a WPC looked up unhappily from her keyboard.

  ‘There’s a nasty atmosphere here, have you noticed? And we’ve been here all morning without a soul coming in. It’s not natural, that. Usually you have to beat them off with a stick.’

  ‘Got the Thought Police out, haven’t they?’ One of the uniformed sergeants jerked his head significantly towards the women. ‘We’re all going to have to get out there and knock on doors. Cosy up to them, a bit.’

  The woman shuddered. ‘Well, all I can say is, I want someone with me when I do.’

  ‘Ready when you are, darling!’ The youngest PC was grinning cheekily, but she did not smile back, and he wandered across to the window. ‘That’s Fancy Fanny now,’ he said, and returned hastily to writing up his notes.

  Frances parked her car, grabbed shoulder-bag and notebook and climbed out, directing a death-stare at a nearby journalist, who suddenly changed his mind about trying to chat her up.

  Her eyes were gritty after only four hours’ sleep, and she was bad-tempered after an early-morning exchange with Poppy, who could not decide whether outraged respectability or morbid fascination were her uppermost emotion. It was going to be a hard day.

  The church doors, Frances noticed, still stood open. The vicar was probably in the vestry, disrobing. This might be a good moment to speak to him; in her experience, the vicar was often the person most sensitive to the emotional temperature in a small community.

  She pushed open the inside door and went in, pausing for a moment to allow her eyes to adjust to the darkness inside.

  The interior was small, very old and very plain, with Norman arches and panes of clear glass. The flagstones were worn in a pathway from the door down the central aisle; small, overhead radiators still bravely burning did little to dispel the airless chill.

  It should have been peaceful, but Frances sensed disharmony, even before she identified the sound — a whispered, sobbing gabbling which came from the figure in a white robe kneeling at the altar rail, clutching at it and swaying, the head flung back as if the eyes were raised in frantic supplication to the ornate silver cross on the altar.

  She checked, unwilling to intrude. She had no business here, where a man in agony reached out so desperately to his God. He seemed oblivious, but she retreated as silently as she could. She had almost reached the door when the thready, half-heard words began to take a remembered pattern.

  ‘Lord... thy people... most precious blood... be not angry with us for ever.’

  Her own lips soundlessly shaped the response, ‘Spare us, good Lord.’ She had heard the words a hundred times, in the years before the ancient litany with its uncomfortable spiritual power had fallen to modern embarrassment. As the frenzied muttering continued, she found herself supplying those words she could not hear.

  ‘From all evil and mischief; from sin, from the crafts and assaults of the devil; from Thy wrath and from everlasting damnation — Good Lord, deliver us!’

  A fit of shivering took her, and forgetting caution, she plunged out. It was familiar, yes, but never before had she heard it spoken by a man who sounded in mortal fear that the devil he named stood at his very shoulder.

  Reaching daylight and fresh air, she gasped, bracing herself and clenching her chattering teeth.

  The journalist, still lingering like a jackal circling the lion’s kill, noticed her rub her hands together.

  ‘Cold in there, is it?’ he called cheerfully.

  ‘Cold,’ Frances agreed, tersely, as she si
de-stepped his approach, but she was talking about a chill more ancient than that of old grey stones.

  *

  Ten minutes later, juggling a file of statements, Frances let herself into Radley’s office at the Red House where Joe Coppins had established himself, as was his custom, at the scene of the crime. It was a habit which Frances found invariably embarrassing and frequently macabre. She had to force herself not to show her distaste as she entered.

  The corpse, of course, had gone, but the dent in the cushion into which the head had been forced, was still there, along with a few blonde hairs. The travelling rug lay in a tangle, half-on, half-off the chesterfield, and the windows, the door-handles and the table beside the sofa displayed the greasy traces of aluminium powder.

  For a second, he was unaware of her presence, and she thought he looked discouraged and depressed, seated slumped in Radley’s old wooden revolving chair. He was always hard on his own mistakes, and this one was serious.

  But noticing her, he sat up at once, shooting her a shrewd look from under furrowed brows.

  ‘Shrinking violet today, are we, sergeant? Wishing it was time to take the Lower Third for music instead?’

  She had told him, in an unguarded moment, of her mother’s determined fantasy, and had since regretted the confidence. He used it like a blunt instrument whenever he felt her reaction was feminine, or middle-class, or over-educated, or in any other sense undesirable.

  She said coolly, ‘No, sir,’ and went to sit on a library stool.

  ‘Right,’ he said crisply, ‘let’s face it and get it over with. We made a total balls-up. Somebody died because we didn’t get it right. You figured out we were wrong before I did, but it’s still something we’re both going to have to live with. Then there’s wrongful arrest, the lot. God knows what they’ll have in store for us. But that’s for later.

  ‘This is now. New day, new problem, and the best we can hope for is to get this wrapped up as quickly as the last one. Only this time — just for variety — we end up with the right person behind bars. OK? So — tell me a story, Frances.’