by Eric Brown
‘How did you find out for certain?’ he asked.
She smiled, but without humour. ‘I overheard him in his study,’ she said. ‘I was on my way to the kitchen for some toast, and I heard him on the phone. To her. He told her that he’d be with her soon, for ever – that “soon Xandra will be dead”. That’s when I knew that my husband was slowly killing me.’
Langham asked, ‘When was this?’
She held his gaze. ‘On Friday afternoon.’
He framed his next question, watching her closely. ‘And did you plan then to kill Edwin – or was it a later, spur-of-the-moment thing?’
She swallowed, regarding her fingers on the tabletop. The only sound in the conservatory was the ticking of the radiator and the occasional dripping of condensation droplets from the glass roof on to the paved flooring.
She nodded at last, as if she’d finally made the decision to tell him everything.
‘I was shocked, of course – stunned. There was no love lost between us, Mr Langham. I knew what kind of self-centred, self-obsessed man my husband was; I’d known all about his affairs in the early days of our marriage, but I had my son to think of, and a comfortable life in Oxford … And when I fell ill, it was all I could do then to hold my sanity together. I had no energy to waste on actively hating my husband. We led our separate lives.’ She shook her head. ‘No, I didn’t revile Edwin until I heard him say that soon I would be dead. And then it all fell into place, and I understood what he’d been doing.’
‘And you planned your revenge?’
She shook her head. ‘Oh, no, Mr Langham. I’m not that kind of person. This was no cold, calculated murder aforethought.’
‘Then what happened?’
‘I decided to have it out with him, tell him that I knew of his affair and that he was poisoning me. And then I planned to leave him.’ She smiled at Langham, bleakly. ‘Of course, I was aware that this was just what he wanted – me out of the way so he could be with his mistress. But there was little I could do to … to win, was there? It would be enough to see his reaction when I told him that I knew and that he’d failed to kill me.’
‘You could always have gone to the police and told them about the painkillers.’
She smiled at this. ‘I doubt very much that they would have believed me – and anyway, what proof did I have? No, I decided that I would simply tell him what I knew, and what I thought of him.’
‘And you did this?’
‘On Tuesday evening, when Nancy was sleeping, and I knew that Edwin would be alone in his study, I came down and confronted him.’
‘What did he say?’
She pursed her lips, as if in an attempt not to break down. She nodded very slowly to herself as she thought back to that fateful night.
‘He laughed at me, Langham. The bastard laughed at me! I had expected … oh, I don’t really know what I thought he’d do. Perhaps deny that he was poisoning me, tell me that I was imagining it all. But no, he simply laughed in my face, then said that he should have made sure of the job and poisoned me in one go. Then he took his torch and went out through the French windows to his beloved standing stone.’
‘And you saw red, took his revolver from the bureau, and gave chase with the intention of shooting—?’
She interrupted. ‘I took the revolver, yes, but even then, I had no desire to kill my husband. I wanted to frighten him, to … to make him see what an evil, egotistical monster he was. I followed him out to the stone and I told him this, and he countered with insults, calling me …’ She gestured. ‘It doesn’t matter what he said, but his accusations hurt me. He reached for the gun, and we struggled … He hit me and I staggered back against the stone. Then he came at me again, and I moved aside to avoid him, and raised the gun and fired.’
He lifted a hand. ‘One thing,’ he said, recalling that only the professor and Richard Wellbourne’s prints had been discovered on the weapon. ‘Were you wearing gloves at the time?’
‘I … I had a pair of lace gloves in the pocket of my dressing gown; I must have pulled these on before picking up the gun.’
He stared at her. ‘I thought you said you had no desire to kill your husband – and yet you had the foresight to pull on the gloves before picking up the gun.’
‘I don’t know what I was thinking, at the time,’ she said. ‘I was angry, Mr Langham.’ She shrugged wearily.
‘Edwin fell back against the stone and slid to the ground,’ she went on. ‘Even then, I didn’t believe he could be dead. It was only when I picked up his torch and shone it on him that I …’ She fell silent, then said, ‘I felt, then – and I am not proud of this – I felt at once elated and terrified at what I had done. I dropped the revolver and fled back to the house, fearing that the shot would have awoken Nancy. As it happened, I was in luck. She was still sleeping, and I returned to bed.’ She smiled across at him. ‘And oddly, Mr Langham, I slept very well for the remainder of the night.’
He looked to his right, through the glass. He made out the indistinct, blurred shapes of two people and a dog, playing on the lawn. Nancy’s laughter reached him as if from far away.
Xandra interrupted his thoughts. ‘What now?’ she asked.
‘If I were you, I’d phone Inspector Montgomery and make a full confession. Tell him all about the medication, and Edwin’s unfaithfulness. Impress upon him the psychological stress you’ve been under during the past few months.’ He sighed. ‘And most importantly, tell Montgomery that you fired the revolver to protect yourself from his further violence.’
She sat across from him, upright and oddly proud, then inclined her head. She rose to her feet, murmuring, ‘Yes, I’ll do that now, Mr Langham. Thank you.’
‘One more thing before you go,’ he said. ‘Did you know that Nancy was the professor’s daughter?’
She nodded. ‘He admitted as much, just before we took her in,’ she said. ‘Not that I let that affect my regard for the girl,’ she went on.
She moved around the table and left the conservatory, and Langham sat in the cloying heat amid the tropical plants and listened to the innocent peal of Nancy’s laughter.
TWENTY-FIVE
Nancy threw the ball in a great arc across the lawn and watched the dog scamper after it, her gaze far away. The girl had been lost in thought ever since Donald had gone inside.
She turned to Maria and smiled.
‘What is it?’
‘Last night, when I went to see Roy in his caravan,’ Nancy said, ‘he confessed.’
‘Confessed?’ Maria shook her head. ‘To what?’
‘I think you know. I’ve seen you watching him.’ She smiled and went on, ‘And I mean that in the nicest way.’
‘Confessed to what?’ Maria pressed.
‘I did wonder about his past, about what he did in the war. You see, one or two of the things he said, the stories he told … Well, they didn’t add up, or he contradicted himself. And then, of course, there was everything Randall said about Roy. I didn’t believe him, but he went on so …’ She shrugged. ‘After a while, I began to wonder if there was something in what my cousin claimed, after all.’
‘That Roy had never served in the RAF?’
Nancy nodded. ‘So last night, I was a little drunk … Back at his caravan, I asked him. I told him to tell me the truth, that I’d love him whatever the truth was – but that I’d be hurt if he didn’t trust me enough to believe that.’
‘And he told you?’
Nancy sniffed and wiped the back of a mitten across her nose. ‘He said I was right, that he’d never served in the RAF. He told me he’d lied about being the rear-gunner on a plane during the war. He said it all came about when he started working at Wellspring Farm, and he was wearing that old RAF greatcoat, and Richard and Harriet assumed he’d flown. And Roy didn’t correct them about that right at the start. And later, when Harriet asked him about the war, he found himself telling lies just so … so that he wouldn’t hurt her, he said.’
Maria nodd
ed. ‘I can understand that.’
‘Then he told me what he had done during the war and that I’d hate him for it. He said he was a conscientious objector and worked for a chap called Middleton Murry who was a pacifist and ran a farm in Suffolk for conchies. And when he told me this, he started to cry. He said he was ashamed of himself when it came out later what terrible evil Hitler and the Nazis had committed. So he left the farm and moved around the area, looking for odd-job work and … and denying his past.’
As Maria watched Nancy, tears trickled down the girl’s bright-red cheeks and sat there until she dashed them away with a mitten. ‘Oh, Maria … when he told me this, I couldn’t speak. There was something in here’ – she touched her chest – ‘that felt as if it was about to explode! Roy took my silence for condemnation, and he said he’d understand if I wanted to leave him and never set eyes on him again, but’ – she shook her head – ‘but even if he’d told me he’d been the bravest war hero in history, I couldn’t have loved him more for telling me the truth. You see, he trusted me! And I told him this, and his relief … Oh, it was wonderful to watch, Maria. It made me feel so happy!’
Maria reached out. ‘Come here,’ she said. She pulled the girl to her and planted a kiss on her hot forehead. ‘I’ve always liked Roy,’ she murmured. ‘He’s a good person.’
Nancy nodded, sniffing. ‘Isn’t he? He’s kind and gentle. He wouldn’t do anything to hurt anybody, in any way. I suppose that’s why he was a conchie, all those years ago.’
‘I admire him for telling you the truth,’ Maria said. ‘It proves how much he thinks of you.’
‘It does, doesn’t it?’ the girl said, laughing through her sniffles.
Bill nudged the ball closer to Nancy’s feet, and she laughed and said, ‘I know, boy. We’re neglecting you, aren’t we!’
She threw the tennis ball against the wall of the house, and it rebounded high up, bounced on the frozen snow in the drive and rolled beneath the professor’s Daimler. Nancy laughed and, her gait impeded by her oversized Wellington boots, she galumphed across the lawn to retrieve it. Maria watched her reach under the car and grab the ball from the gravel.
She stared at the dry gravel beneath the car, suddenly aware of her heartbeat.
Nancy returned, peering at her. She halted, the tennis ball clutched in her mittened hand. ‘Maria? Are you all right? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’
Maria forced herself to smile. ‘It’s nothing. Someone stepped on my grave, as the saying goes.’
Nancy laughed as Bill jumped up, trying to grab the ball from her hand. Nancy threw it across the lawn and Bill gave chase.
‘Do excuse me,’ Maria said, ‘but I need a quick word with Randall. Do you know where I’ll find him?’
‘He was in the study, going over some legal papers or something. I say … you won’t tell him anything about what Roy told me, will you?’
Maria smiled. ‘Of course not. This … It’s about something else entirely.’ She reached out and took the girl’s hand. ‘I’ll tell you what – later this afternoon, why not collect Roy and come round to the house, and I’ll mull some wine and we’ll sit before the fire and talk, all four of us. Promise?’
‘I’ll say.’ The girl laughed. ‘That will be wonderful. Mulled wine! Do you know, I’ve never had mulled wine before.’
‘I shan’t be long,’ Maria said, turning towards the house.
‘Good boy!’ Nancy said as Bill dropped the ball at her feet.
Maria moved through the manor to the professor’s study, her mind racing with the possibilities and the permutations. She dismissed the obvious assumption and examined those less obvious, and by the time she reached the open door of the study, she wondered if she had arrived at some approximation of what might have happened at the manor on Tuesday night.
Across the empty room, the French windows stood ajar. In the distance, next to the standing stone, Randall Robertshaw stood smoking a cigarette and staring down at where his father had met his end.
She crossed the room and slipped outside.
She walked across to the standing stone, her approach silenced by the snow. ‘Hello,’ she said as she came up behind him.
He started and swung around. ‘Oh, it’s you.’
‘I didn’t mean to startle you.’
He removed the cigarette from between his lips and smiled at her. ‘You didn’t,’ he said. ‘I knew you were here – at the house, I mean. I just wondered how long it might be before you sought me out. You have a habit of bearding me with awkward questions.’ He gestured with the cigarette. ‘I saw you out there, playing with her.’
‘At least, this time, you aren’t drunk.’ She regarded him levelly. ‘What’s the real reason you dislike Nancy so?’ she asked.
‘The real reason? Isn’t the fact that she’s a clueless little nitwit enough?’
‘She happens to be quite the nicest girl I know,’ Maria replied. ‘And she’s been through a heck of a rough time over the past couple of years. Your treatment of her does you no favours, Randall, fuelled as it is by greed.’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘Greed?’
‘Oh, come on, now. You know the truth as well as I do. Did your father tell you, before he died – did he tell you the truth about Nancy?’
He feigned ignorance. ‘The truth?’
‘Surely, Randall, you know that she’s his daughter?’
He held out his cigarette and regarded its glowing tip, considering her words. ‘No, honestly, I didn’t. But it begins to make sense now … Just before Christmas, I’d been beastly to her, and Pater blew his top. He hauled me into his study and told me that he intended to change his will and that when he eventually died – if my mother pre-deceased him – the house and everything he owned would be divided equally between Nancy and me.’ He smiled. ‘I must admit, it was something of a shock.’
‘You must really have resented her even more then.’
‘As if that were possible!’ he muttered. He pointed his cigarette at her. ‘But don’t get it into that pretty head of yours that what he told me about changing his will had anything to do with his death.’
She returned his smile, without humour. ‘Oh, I’ve worked that out,’ she said. ‘To get at his assets would be too obvious a motive. You’re not that much of a fool.’
He leaned against the standing stone, affecting nonchalance. ‘Then what kind of fool am I?’
‘You’re no fool at all,’ she said. ‘In fact, in some ways you’re a very clever young man.’ She paused, then went on, ‘How did you discover that the professor was slowly poisoning your mother?’
He arched his eyebrows. ‘My, you are perspicacious. How did you find out, might I ask?’
‘I didn’t – that was Donald. But I asked you first.’
He finished the cigarette and flicked it into the snow, watching it as it expired with a curl of smoke. ‘Quite by chance, as it happens. Last weekend, just after he’d rushed over to Spencer’s surgery, I found him in his study decanting some of my mother’s pills from one bottle to another. I quite startled him, and he looked hellish guilty. I hardly thought anything of it at the time, but then it came to me that my mother’s recent decline dated from the time he’d taken over administering her medication. Nancy used to give my mother her pills of an evening, you see.’ He shrugged. ‘I knew just what a self-centred, self-serving chap he was … and I began to wonder if it was possible that he was poisoning her. I knew he had the keys to Spencer’s surgery, and he went over there from time to time in order to check up on him, or so he said. He would have been able to help himself to whatever drugs he required. Of course, I knew nothing about the type of medication my mother was on—’
‘So you phoned your uncle?’
He regarded her coolly, then nodded. ‘I told him of my suspicions, and he said he’d run a check on his stock. He phoned me back a couple of hours later, quite shaken. Two vials of codeine were missing, and he said that this drug, to someone in my mother’
s condition, depending on the dosage, would prove fatal within a month or so. Her kidneys would have been unable to process the drug, he said.’
‘When was this?’
Randall thought about it. ‘I discovered my father monkeying with the pills on Sunday morning, and I consulted Spencer the following day, on Monday.’
‘And a day later, on Tuesday evening, your father was dead.’
Randall looked up into the sky, frowning. It had begun to snow again. Maria turned her collar up against the wind and wished she’d remembered her hat in the rush to leave the cottage.
She hunched her shoulders and dug her hands into her pockets. ‘Randall, would you care to tell me exactly what happened here on Tuesday evening?’
He smiled at her and tried to bluster. ‘Well, apparently, it was rather hectic,’ he said, ‘what with old Wellbourne barging in, all in a huff about the disputed land. He and Pater were at it hammer and tongs—’
‘I mean after that,’ she interrupted, ‘when Richard had gone home. What happened then?’
He shrugged, avoiding her gaze. ‘What on earth makes you think I know anything about that?’
She said, ‘Because you didn’t go over to your uncle’s place at six o’clock on Tuesday evening. In fact, you were with him, in town, at no point that night. You were here at the manor all the time.’