Guilty Consciences - [A CWA Anthology]

by Edited by Martin Edwards

  ‘She’s only trying to make things nice for us.’

  ‘What a pity she never succeeds.’

  ‘But she’ll be expecting me now.’

  ‘Tell her you’ve won a cruise to the Balearics and you’re going with a boyfriend.’

  ‘What boyfriend?’ Veronica said, throbbingly. ‘I’m entirely on my own.’

  ‘Have you been drinking?’

  ‘Stop!’ shrieked her sister. ‘You sound just like Mother.’

  ‘That’s the worst insult I’ve ever had,’ said Teresa, laughing. ‘I am now going to put down the phone, after which I shall never speak to you again as long as I live.’

  ‘Just before you do, tell me how I’m going to get out of going there for Christmas.’

  ‘Why don’t you break a leg? Better still, break two.’

  ‘You’re not taking this seriously.’

  ‘I promise you I am. What’s more, when I’ve finished this conversation with you, I’m going to ring her once again and repeat that we’re not going to come down. “Mother”, I shall say, “every Christmas of my life has been made a hell by your nags and sulks and insults and nastiness. But never again. It’s a choice between you and my husband - the husband, I may say, that you did your level best to prevent me from marrying - and I’m afraid my husband wins”. And if she tries to argue, I shall just put down the phone.’

  ‘Icy, but polite, huh?’

  ‘Icy, certainly. I shan’t bother too much about polite.’

  ~ * ~

  Ivy Lewis replaced the receiver and took a few deep breaths to calm herself. Rage surged inside her, making her heart beat double time, sending an ugly flush into her face. She glanced around and caught sight of herself reflected in the hall mirror. Quickly, she straightened her shoulders, lifted her head, pinned a smile on her face. Heavens above, caught like that, unawares, unprepared, she had almost looked . . . well . . . old.

  It was typical of Teresa, she thought, to play silly games, hoping Ivy would plead with her. Well (Ivy tightened her lips), she was not going to give her the satisfaction. You’d think she’d be grateful, inviting her and that doltish husband and those ill-disciplined children down every year. The amount of hot water they used was ridiculous, and there were other things. Noises from the bedroom and so forth. Quite blatant noises. When she’d mentioned this to Teresa, however, the girl had jumped down her throat.

  ‘Keith works hard and so do I,’ she’d said. ‘The time we spend together is very precious to us.’

  Ivy had said that she thought Keith could at least restrain himself while he was in his mother-in-law’s home but Teresa had flown into a rage.

  ‘Restrain himself?’ she’d shouted. ‘We’re married, for heaven’s sake. I know you refused to let poor Daddy touch you once Veronica was born, which is why he finally couldn’t take it any more and set up house with nice Barbara from the office, but Keith and I aren’t like that, all right?’

  Ivy had, frankly, been stunned that Teresa could accuse her own mother of not allowing her father his marital rights. She’d never wanted children in the first place, but she’d done her duty, provided him with the family he had asked for. What more did he want?

  And then on top of everything else, Teresa had the unmitigated gall to speak of ‘nice Barbara’. Talk about disloyal - but what else could you expect from someone so coarse, which she’d certainly not got from Ivy’s side of the family.

  ~ * ~

  The following afternoon, she stood in the wide hallway of her house and looked around. Maybe she would buy a second tree this year - it looked so nice, when people came, to have the little white lights winking. Not that many people did come. Good thing, too. Even the vicar didn’t call any more, after she’d asked him to leave his shoes outside. It had been raining and she didn’t want dirt and mud trodden in. The way he’d reacted! It was probably something to do with being gay. And, of course, when she’d mentioned it to the girls, Teresa had rudely demanded to know why a gay person couldn’t do the job as well as a pervert like Father Cyril Parker had been. Celibate, she’d snorted, in that ugly way of hers; it didn’t stop him from putting his hand up my skirt, that time he called round and you were out, Mother. Such a terrible thing to say! As if a man in a position of moral responsibility would do such a thing.

  Ivy tugged the ladder from its place under the stairs. Hanging the gold stars up on the ceiling was one of her favorite bits of Christmas decoration. They were all different shapes and sizes, attached to varying lengths of cotton and held in place by sticky tape. When they were hanging from the ceiling, the effect was magical. What those girls didn’t appreciate was the time and trouble she took to make things nice for them at Christmas time.

  ~ * ~

  ‘Are you coming to us for Christmas or not?’ Teresa asked. ‘Auntie Em’ll be here. And Dad’s coming, too. It’ll be the first Christmas he’ll have been allowed to spend with his grandchildren.’

  ‘Sounds wonderful,’ Veronica said wistfully. ‘A real family Christmas. But if I tell Mother I’m not coming to her, she’ll ring me day and night until I agree to go after all.’

  ‘Then lie,’ her sister said. ‘Take the phone off the hook. Get an answering machine.’

  ‘It’s all right for you,’ wailed Veronica. ‘ You live miles away and you’ve got a man to defend you. I haven’t.’

  ‘You could have had.’

  ‘Except for Mother’s attitude.’

  ‘You should have stood up to her. Stephen was exactly right for you.’

  ‘But a bit of a wimp, to be put off by her.’

  ‘Just a pragmatist. He could see the trouble she’d cause if he married you and he very sensibly moved on. If you’d had the courage to tell her to get knotted, you’d be a happily married woman now.’

  ~ * ~

  The gold stars drifted in the air currents caused by the heat from the radiators and caught the light from outside, throwing bright shadows on to the walls of the hall. It looked wonderful, Ivy thought. She picked up a six-pointed star and reached for the last empty space on the ceiling, right in the corner of the hall. Stretched to the limit of her reach, she pressed the cotton thread with its piece of sticky tape against the plaster. Just as she lowered her arms, the star fell away. She lunged after it, caught it and then found herself falling, her leg jamming between the struts of the ladder, the whole thing crashing down on top of her. Her head hit the tiled floor and she blacked out.

  When she came to, it was dark outside. From the sitting room she could hear the sound of some quiz show on the new plasma screen TV she’d bought three months ago. There’d been a real fuss when she accused the man who came to install it of stealing her rings, said she’d call the police if the shop didn’t do something about it - and after all that, she’d found them on the kitchen window sill, hidden behind the pot of thyme. She hadn’t called the shop back to let them know -she’d have looked so foolish.

  There were no lights on and the house felt extremely cold. She tried to get up and found that the slightest movement sent intense pain flooding through her body. My hip, she thought. I’ve broken my hip. One of her legs was bent at an unnatural angle; when she tried feebly to push away the ladder, she couldn’t shift it. The worst thing was not the pain but the cold. Her hands felt like blocks of ice; her feet were numb.

  Surely she had not been unconscious for so long that the central heating timer had switched itself off for the night. If she didn’t get warmed up soon, and have the doctor look at her, she might . . . she might even die.

  The possibility hovered over her in the dark hallway like a giant bird of prey.

  But someone would be bound to come. The mailman, for instance. She could shout, when he pushed open the letter box to put the letters through. An appalling thought struck her. That would mean lying like this, in the cold and the dark and pain, until somewhere around eight thirty or nine o’clock in the morning. Even later: this close to Christmas, the postal deliveries were always delayed; she�
�d had words about it only the other day, called up the local supervisor and complained, said she didn’t pay her rates in order not to receive her mail until eleven o’clock in the morning. As it turned out, there had been no mail for her that day, but it didn’t alter the fact that it was a downright disgrace.

  Suppose the mailman didn’t come? She looked over at the telephone. She tried to pull herself forward on her elbows but the pain from her hip was so excruciating that she fell back, her mouth filling with saliva, nausea clogging her throat. The sharp edge of the ladder cut into her neck; she tried to push it away but the effort rammed it against her leg and she screamed aloud. The sound jolted her into more awareness. If she screamed, no one would hear; this was an exclusive residential area and each house was set well apart from its neighbors. If she had moved to a smaller house, as Tom wanted her to when the girls left home, she might have stood more chance of catching someone’s attention. That was when he’d asked her to agree to a reduction in alimony payments, but she’d refused. She didn’t see why she should subsidize him and Barbara. Not that she was worried about money, because there’d been a very nice sum when her father died and a great deal more when her mother went. It was just the principle of the thing.

  Surely, she thought, as the hours went by, Teresa would telephone to say she hadn’t meant it, of course she and the children wanted to come for Christmas. Or Veronica. They’d been speaking of it just a couple of days earlier, though Veronica had sounded so reluctant that Ivy had said tartly if Veronica had something better to do, then of course she mustn’t feel obliged to spend Christmas Day with her mother, after all, it was expensive getting in supplies for everyone, and if they were all going to behave like spoiled children, it wasn’t worth the trouble.

  As dawn began eventually to break, her stomach growled, reminding her that she hadn’t eaten for some time. And her throat was as dry as a desert. Merely thinking about it made it even dryer so that she began coughing, and then choking. At the back of her throat was an iodine taste she recognized as blood.

  She must have lapsed into unconsciousness again. The telephone woke her from some deep state of non-being. She guessed that it was now the afternoon. Above her head the gold-paper stars drifted gently. At least the heat had come on again, though the hall tiles were still freezing cold. She screamed, startled at the weakness of her own voice, as though hoping that whoever was at the other end would hear her. After a while, the answering machine kicked in and she heard her sister Em’s voice, hesitantly explaining that she wouldn’t be able to come down for Christmas this year, she had to . . . erm . . . spend the . . . erm . . . holiday with an old friend who was . . . erm . . . very ill.

  Em had never been any good at lying and Ivy knew she was lying now. What old friend? Ivy wanted to shout. You haven’t got any friends. But Em had put down her phone.

  There were no letters lying on the doormat. So even if the postman had come, she would have missed him. There was no milkman either, to leave his pint outside and so perhaps alert the neighbors to the fact that it had not been taken in. She’d rung the dairy so many times to complain that the milkman was cheating her by adding several pints on to each month’s total that the dairy had refused to go on supplying her.

  Slowly the hall darkened again, as she fell in and out of consciousness.

  ~ * ~

  She woke to hear the back door handle being rattled, then the door being forced open. Two dark shadows tiptoed into the hall. ‘Looks like the old bat’s gone out,’ someone whispered.

  ‘Sitting room’s over there,’ said the other. ‘You get the TV, the video, the silver on the sideboard; we’ll take the microwave when we leave. You start loading up the van while I nip upstairs and see if there’s any jewellery worth taking.’

  Ivy watched him from the corner of the hall. In the dark, he didn’t notice her. She wanted to call out for help, but between her fear and her thirst and the dryness of her throat, she couldn’t get the words out. Couldn’t even manage so much as a whimper. When he came downstairs again, he was carrying the small three-drawer jewelry chest which held her good things, and as he came quietly across the tiles, she recognized him immediately: it was the man from the shop where she’d bought the new TV.

  ‘Serve her right, the vindictive old bat,’ he said, nodding at his mate, who was carrying the big plasma screen TV. ‘Pure poison, she is, never has a good word for anybody, and talk about mean . . . Lost me my job, she did.’

  ‘Been out of work since then, haven’t you?’

  ‘That’s right. The kids aren’t going to have much of a Christmas this year, I can tell you.’

  ‘Maybe we’ll get a good price for this little lot.’

  ‘Hope so. Vicious old bat.’ As he went past the ladder, he kicked it hard; Ivy fainted again from the pain. She heard the men go out through the back door and the sound of a van starting up.

  ~ * ~

  The phone woke her again. After eight rings, the answering machine kicked in. ‘Mother? It’s Veronica. I’m terribly sorry, but I’m not going to be able to come for Christmas after all. I have to go away for the . . . the whole week. I’d thought I’d better let you know now, before you go out and buy the turkey.’

  ‘Help!’ Ivy croaked.

  ‘I’m really sorry, Mother. But I’ll definitely get over to see you before the New Year, all right?’

  ‘Help me!’

  But Veronica didn’t choose to answer. She’d always been like that, totally selfish and self-obsessed. Even semi-conscious, Ivy could tell that like Em, she was lying, just like that business with Father Parker - or was that Teresa? It didn’t matter.

  Ivy tried to lick her dry lips but her tongue was equally dry. Her throat was swollen. She was having difficulty focusing her mind, but she thought she must have been lying on the floor for several days now, unable to move. And she’d soiled herself.

  ~ * ~

  ~

  ‘Well, I did it! Rang Mother and told her I couldn’t make it for Christmas. And so far, she hasn’t rung me back to start arguing.’

  ‘So we’ll expect you for lunch, shall we?’

  ‘With bells on. I can’t wait. I’ll go down and see her afterwards.’

  ~ * ~

  At midday on December 27, Veronica Lewis rang the doorbell of her mother’s house. After a while, she rang again. She knocked as well. Then she stepped back and looked up at the bedroom windows. No drawn curtains, no lights left on. She tried to peer through the letter box but Ivy had covered it with a piece of felt, in case the local hooligans tried to push dog excrement through.

  When Veronica said that was highly unlikely, Ivy had pursed her lips. ‘Young people today - they’ve got no respect for others.’

  After a while, Veronica pulled out her cell phone and dialed her mother’s number. She could hear the phone ringing inside the house and then the answering machine kicking in. Was Mother out shopping? Veronica had left a message earlier to say she would be coming down.

  Perhaps Ivy had gone out, just to punish her, to make her feel even more guilty than she already did, though she’d phoned every day, hoping to wish Mother a happy Christmas.

  But really it had been such fun this year, the kids happy for once, and Keith singing a funny song and all of them creased with laughter at Dad’s jokes, and Barbara gathering the children round her and reciting ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas’ from memory, like a real grandmother, instead of getting at them all the time.

  Veronica dialed once more. There was still no response, and when she peered through the leaded-glass insert in the front door, all she could make out was the stars which hung from the ceiling, twinkling and shining, and Ivy’s coat, or a garbage bag or something, lying on the hall tiles.

  Relieved, she went back to her car and drove away. She’d drop by again later.

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  ~ * ~

  FROM MINOR TO MAJOR

  A Case for Jack Colby

  Amy Myers

  Amy M
yers has written many crime and historical novels, and is currently at work on a new series featuring Jack Colby, in collaboration with her husband Jim. Jack is a car detective, working with a specialist Kent police crime unit when he is not at Frogs Hill Classic Car Restorations.

  ~ * ~

  I

  t’s me, Jack. I’m back in town.’

  That was the first phone call I had had from Matt Redwell in well over thirty years. We’d been childhood chums of a sort - the sort you’re sneakily glad to be rid of, which had been especially so in Matt’s case.