Slaying is Such Sweet Sorrow

by Patricia Harwin

  She looked at me again, savoring her triumph.

  “That was a really malicious thing to say,” she murmured. “Wasn’t it, Tib?”

  He smiled ruefully. “Not the classiest thing you’ve ever done, Kit,” he said.

  “I was just trying to help Peter!” I retorted, and that was as close to an apology as I would go. “And I’m going back to the police station now to try some more.”

  “Wait,” he said as I started toward the door. “I’ll come too.”

  “Oh, Tib,” she pouted, “don’t go! It’s late.”

  “Honey, you can see I have to help Emily and Peter, can’t you?”

  “You’re always with them. We’ve hardly been alone since we got here. And you know she doesn’t like me. Can’t we go home before we get involved in all this—unpleasantness?”

  “I know it’s not much fun for you, but I love my daughter too.”

  I left, disgusted to hear him practically begging her for permission to go. I figured she’d have him in bed in a matter of minutes, and probably on the train to the airport by tomorrow morning.

  So I was surprised, after I’d been at the police station for ten minutes or so, to see him come through the door. We looked at each other warily, like a couple of boxers reentering the ring.

  The desk sergeant had told me, with his usual reluctance, that John Bennett had arrived. A minute or so later he emerged from one of the corridor rooms, smiling in his solemn way, and came and pressed my hand between his.

  “I’m terribly sorry, Catherine,” he said, looking down at me mournfully from his six feet plus. He was my age, lean and shrewd, with silvery hair and an air of quiet strength. I felt more hopeful as soon as I saw him. “The whole thing seems incredible. I want to let you in on what they’ve told me since I got here, it probably won’t make it easier, but at least you’ll know why they’ve taken Peter into custody.”

  “Quin Freeman,” I heard behind me, and his large, square hand appeared, thrust out so that civility forced John to let go of my hand and shake his. “Mrs. Tyler’s father. You’re in charge of this case, are you?”

  “Well, no,” John said. “I’m actually a friend of Catherine’s from Far Wychwood. She called my wife and asked for my help, and I’m of course only too glad to offer it. Very pleased to meet you. I knew, of course, that you were visiting Emily. She’s waiting for us in incident room B, perhaps we could all adjourn there where we’ll have more privacy.”

  We were both on our way as soon as we heard Emily’s whereabouts. She was sitting in a folding chair at a metal table, in a room a little larger but just as forbidding as the one where I’d been interviewed earlier. Her caftan’s bright African colors were startling in the gray bleakness of the place. She was keeping herself firmly under control, sitting up very straight, her jaw clenched.

  I leaned over and hugged her.

  “It’s like a bad dream,” she said in a tight little voice. “Peter doesn’t understand what’s going on any more than we do.”

  “They let you see him?” Quin asked.

  “Yes, for a few minutes.”

  “I was going to insist on that, if they hadn’t.”

  “I assure you, Mr. Freeman, we shan’t deny Peter anything he’s legally entitled to,” said John. “Please have a seat. I hate to say this, but there is some rather strong evidence against him. First, as your daughter has told us, and I’m sure you’ll confirm, we know a call came through to Peter at their apartment at quarter past nine this evening. It was from Edgar Stone, and we’ve verified that it was made from his house. Apparently he asked Peter to come there, as he had something to tell him that couldn’t wait, something that would affect the two of them and nobody else, and in a profound way. Peter went over immediately, and when he reached the house he says he found the front door open as well as the door to Stone’s study, where we’ve determined the lock was violently broken.

  “He claims to have found Stone already dead. As he stood looking on in disbelief, he says, the victim’s wife appeared in the doorway, saw the body, and began screaming. Apparently she made her way to the stairs and was backing up them when the police, and Catherine, arrived.”

  “Why all the ‘he says’ and ‘he claims’?” I demanded. “That’s a perfectly believable story and I don’t see why you would doubt it. Somebody else got there earlier and killed him, that’s all!”

  “Except for this.” He lifted a tape player from the floor and set it on the table. “This call came in to the 999 emergency operator at nine-thirty-six precisely.”

  He pressed a button, and Edgar Stone’s voice filled the room, a panicky near-whisper.

  “Send the police to 225 St. Crispin’s Road. I’ve locked myself in the study. A man named Peter Tyler is outside the door, threatening me with a knife—he’ll kill me if he gets through the door. Send the police. Hurry!”

  “Stay on the line, sir,” the 999 operator’s calm voice said. “I’m dispatching police. Are you in immediate danger of your life, sir?”

  “Yes, damn it!” Stone’s voice growled. “He’ll break the lock at any minute. I tell you, he snatched up this knife, this letter opener, from my desk, and tried to stab me with it. I managed to elude him and lock the door, but he says he’s going to kill me!”

  “And this is someone you know? Don’t hang up, sir!”

  “Yes, yes, a colleague of mine, Peter Tyler—”

  The line went dead. We sat in stunned silence, staring at the tape machine as John turned it off.

  After a few minutes Quin blew out a heavy breath and said quietly, “Deathbed statement.”

  “Exactly,” John replied. He looked at Emily and me. “The statement of a victim as to his killer’s identity, given on the verge of death, is very powerful evidence. Mrs. Stone has identified the voice on the tape as her husband’s. She also said something about an altercation of sorts between Peter and Stone, earlier in the evening?”

  We didn’t answer, but I knew seven other people could testify to the way the man had goaded Peter and how furious he’d been, especially when he learned what had happened to Emily.

  “We’ll have nothing to say about that at present,” Quin said decisively. “Emily, I’m going to find the best lawyer around, and we’re going to beat this.”

  “Okay, what about fingerprints?” I broke in. “Peter wasn’t wearing gloves. If he’d broken in the door, if he’d used that knife, his fingerprints would be all over them.”

  “Actually, that turns out to be another point against him,” John said, almost apologetically. “The knife and the door handle had been wiped clean of prints. A man’s pocket handkerchief was found lying on the floor. Our lab has already performed an iodine vapor test on it. I’m afraid it is full of Peter’s prints. His only explanation is that he did not wipe the objects and has no idea how his handkerchief came to be there.”

  He stood up. “I know this has been a great blow to all of you. There is nothing more you can do here tonight. Why don’t you go home and get a little rest?”

  I reached for Emily, but Quin somehow got there first and had hold of her left arm before I could get the right.

  “Come on, baby, I’m taking you home,” he said. “I’ll be over first thing in the morning and we’ll straighten this out.”

  “I’ll come and spend the night with you,” I began, but she waved me away.

  “Just let Dad drive me home, I’ll take a sleeping pill. I know you want to help, Mom, but it’ll be best if you get some sleep too.” She kissed me, and her lips felt cold against my cheek. “We’re going to have a lot to get through.”

  So I let her go with her father, smothering the selfish little voice inside me whispering that he didn’t deserve to be the one she turned to. They had always been close, even more as she’d emerged from childhood and it had become clear she was more like him than me. They shared this careful, analytical attitude toward life, a disapproval of impulse and a distrust of emotion, and since I was the embodiment of both,
she and I couldn’t understand each other the same way she and her father did. Hurt feelings aside, I was glad he could be with her at a time like this. He would know better than I would when to offer love and when to step back.

  When I walked into the parking lot it seemed like a hundred years since I’d left it. That was the thing, I went on musing as I got into my car, that logical, lawyer’s mind-set Quin had, that had made his collapse before the power of love so incredible. All our friends, his colleagues at the law firm, everybody we knew back in New York had told me he was the last man they’d have expected to do such a thing. And I had trusted him completely for thirty years, ever since I’d met him at the foot of the Washington Monument, surrounded by cherry blossoms and hippies, at the big anti–Vietnam War march of 1971.

  I had come to New York from Cincinnati just in time for what everyone calls the sixties even though much of it, my part anyway, took place in the early seventies. I never got into the wilder aspects, the drugs and promiscuity, but the idealism, the faith in people’s underlying goodness, the abhorrence of war, were part of me before I ever got to New York. I had my master’s in library science and easily got a job in the public library system, made some friends, and positively wallowed in the city’s cultural riches. I hadn’t been looking for a man at all, so it was amazing to realize, a few months after we got back to New York from the march, that I was falling in love with this young public defender with shoulder-length hair and a passion for helping the poor. It was even more amazing to realize that he was falling in love with me.

  We had married and found a Manhattan apartment that we shared first with a stray dog called Charley, and then with our little girl. Quin had worked his way up, over the years, from the public defender’s office through bigger and better law firms, and finally into the high-powered one where I assumed he still worked. I had gone on in the library system and never risen above my original position, because I hadn’t anything like his ambition. I’d thought my life was pretty close to perfect, and though I missed Emily when she left us, I was proud of her Rhodes scholarship, happy when she found the right man, and quite prepared to move on into old age right there on West Eighty-third, beside Quin.

  I pulled up in front of my cottage, turned off the headlights, and sat there for a few minutes just looking at the place. It had taken me sixty years to learn that you can’t really plan the future, especially when it involves other people. There was no way I could have imagined, two or three years ago, that Manhattan by now would be only a memory, the library’s budget problems and the city’s scandals no longer on my radar, that I would be living alone in a seventeenth-century cottage in England. I couldn’t even have imagined owning a cat, I thought, as I caught sight of Muzzle slinking warily across the yard toward me. I’d never liked cats, but here I was catering to an old black tom that wouldn’t even give me the satisfaction of an occasional petting and purring session.

  I heard him slurping water from the bathroom faucet while I got into my nightgown and slippers. He had started doing that soon after he moved in with me, and after lifting him out of the sink a few times, I’d given up and now left it dripping for him. Since he spent most of his time wandering outside, picking up who knew what organisms, I didn’t feel like sharing a faucet with him, so I’d begun drinking and brushing my teeth in the kitchen. The bathroom sink had become Muzzle’s property pretty quickly, and I only wondered what he would claim next.

  I had formed the habit of listening to Book at Bedtime on the BBC every night. A very good reader was currently making her way through Mrs. Gaskell’s Cranford, and it was wonderfully comforting that night to curl up in the green baize wing chair in the parlor and listen, sipping a hot cup of Horlicks.

  When I got into bed I heard Muzzle settling himself in a corner of the bedroom, on a cushion I’d put down for him. He’d only go there after the light was out, and if it went on again he would be gone in a second.

  I was thinking about Peter as I settled into my pillows. Poor boy, spending this night in a jail bed! They couldn’t be very comfortable, and even if they were, the knowledge of what was happening to him would be enough to keep him awake. I tried hard to think of another way to clear him, since my first try had been such a spectacular failure, but my weary brain refused to cooperate, and soon I was asleep.

  Chapter Four

  The cloudy day my discontents records,

  Early begins to register my dreams

  And drives me forth to seek the murderer.

  —Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy

  You can never trust English weather for long. We’d had a three-day spell of beautiful spring days, so I wasn’t surprised to wake the next morning to the patter of rain on my slate roof. I looked at the clock on the nightstand and swore when I saw 6:00. It would have been lovely to turn over and fall asleep for another hour, but I had been wakened, as I always was these days, by Muzzle’s plaintive meowing from the floor beside my bed. I knew if I didn’t give him breakfast and let him out, it would just go on and on. Really, I should put his cushion downstairs somewhere and shut my bedroom door, I thought as I emerged from the covers into the damp, chilly air. But I knew I wouldn’t do that. There was something comforting about having a living creature in the room with me at night.

  He shut up once he had me on my way to the kitchen, and followed at my heels, even brushing quickly across my legs for encouragement while I opened the cat food can. Once he was settled to his bowl I could start boiling the water for my steel-cut oatmeal and for instant coffee. I would still have to let him out before I carried my breakfast into the dining room, or I’d be eating it to another chorus of meowing. Even on rainy days he had to do a quick patrol of the area, but I’d have to remember to let him in again before I went to Oxford. As he stepped warily onto the doorstep, I brought in the pint of milk the roundsman left every morning, and the Oxford Times that lay beside it.

  The murder of Edgar Stone dominated the front page, with a mercifully blurry photograph of Peter being led, handcuffed, into the police station. I argued with the newpaper story while I ate breakfast, furious at its neutral tone. People reading it might actually think he was guilty! Which was absurd—although that phone call to 999 was a problem. If it weren’t for that, I would have no trouble coming up with other suspects, because everybody who knew him seemed at least to dislike Edgar Stone.

  I washed up my few dishes, took a shower, and got into slacks and a sweater, trying all the time to figure out why Stone would have fingered Peter instead of the real killer. By the time I was into my raincoat Muzzle had had enough of the wet outdoors and was back on the doorstep, reaching up to paw at the doorknob ineffectually.

  “It’s never going to work,” I told him as he scooted through the door. “Not without an opposable thumb.”

  I turned the heat up a little, to keep him comfortable, and hurried out to the car. Driving into Oxford I heard the radio weatherman cheerily predicting a full day of rain, not even offering the hope of “sunny intervals,” as they sometimes did. I passed Stone’s house, closed and dark, and wondered how his poor wife was coping. She was well rid of her sadistic husband, but such a shock couldn’t have done her mental condition any good.

  Emily had given me a key to their apartment, and I used it in case she was sleeping, although it was almost eight-thirty now. As soon as the door swung open I realized how dumb it had been not to call first. Quin and his woman were already there.

  Archie jumped up from the sofa where he’d been sitting between them, ran to me, and threw his arms around my legs, immobilizing me in the doorway.

  “Nana,” he said happily.

  I knew better than to confine him in a hug. I just rubbed his curls and said, “Archie.” He responded, “Ow!” and backed away, and I realized his head was still tender from the bump yesterday.

  Emily came across and gave me a kiss, murmuring, “I should have called you when they came. I just didn’t think.”

  “Neither did I,” I whispere
d back. “Don’t worry, I’ll be good this time.”

  Her face was pale and strained, her eyes pink-rimmed. I put my arms around her and for a moment we stood there in a three-way hug, before Archie bounced back to Quin.

  “Nana, taypay!” he announced, waving his arms at Quin, so I was forced to look at him. He was holding a small portable tape player on his lap.

  “Hi, Kit,” he said, smiling. Of course I didn’t answer. I glanced at the girlfriend and saw with satisfaction that she looked sulky and was obviously, as he had said, not having much fun.

  Archie started punching every button on the little machine at once.

  “No, no,” Quin said, taking hold of his hand. “You don’t get any music that way. This is what you do,” and he set one small finger on a button and pressed it down. A shrill, saccharine voice came from it, singing, “Oranges and lemons, Say the bells of St. Clemens, You owe me four farthings, Say the bells of St. Martin’s—”

  Archie’s eyes got bigger, and he stared at the player as if it were magic. When the singer paused at the end of the song he breathed reverently, “Taypay!”

  “It’s yours,” Quin said, putting Archie’s hand around the machine’s handle. “When the music stops I’ll show you how to hear the other side.”

  The girlfriend grimaced when Archie leaned against her leg, examining the tape player. She moved a little away, out of contact with him, and didn’t see Quin’s brief frown as he noticed her distaste for his grandson.

  Archie ran over to Rose, his shy young nanny, making herself as inconspicuous as she could in a straight chair at one end of the room. “Vofe, taypay!” he informed her.

  “Ooh, isn’t it lovely?” she said, glancing furtively at Quin. Rose, I knew from past experience, was highly susceptible to older men with dominant personalities, and she appeared to have developed a crush on her employer’s father. “Isn’t your granda kind to give you such a nice gift?”