HER HUSBAND’S KILLER an unputdownable psychological thriller full of breathtaking twists

by MARGARET MURPHY

  I want to run. I know, you see, that the drink must be acid to make the pearl dissolve, but I can’t move. I take it and he makes me drink. It tastes bitter. Then I wake up.’

  There was a silence of three or four seconds and then Nelson demanded, ‘Well?’

  Ruth raised her eyebrows. ‘Well what?’

  ‘What the hell is it supposed to mean? What am I supposed to make of it? Does it mean anything?’ Nelson demanded. ‘You must have some idea.’

  Ruth shrugged. ‘I’m a neurologist, not a psychologist. You’re the detective. You work it out.’

  Chapter 15

  Fear had made Dr Patterson timid: ‘I’m not your priest,’ he had said, regretting it even as he spoke. ‘Whatever you tell me cannot be held an inviolable secret.’

  Dr Wilkinson had accepted his anxious warning with a small nod, as though it was only what she had expected, and had left without another word.

  He had almost followed her into the hallway of the large old house which served as both surgery and home to the practice partners, but Sanjay had fought hard for what he had achieved, and he was not about to risk losing it over a scandal. He was ashamed to think this way, but he couldn’t change the fact that he didn’t want to hear what Helen Wilkinson had to say. It was, he knew, by an uneasy intuition, dangerous in a way that Inspector Nelson, for all his ill-suppressed violence could never be: what she wanted to tell him was the stuff of ruined reputations — perhaps not his, at least not directly — but such secrets, once out, had a way of tainting all they touched, even incidentally. He did not want that risk; the burden of sharing her secrets would, he was convinced, prove too hazardous.

  This refusal to share her secrets, even as an observer, had come as a shock to him. Until the moment that she had begun to take him into her confidence he had convinced himself that he would do anything to help. He had seen Helen Wilkinson through the first few months of pregnancy; the morning sickness, her doubts about having the baby, and her eventual acceptance and joy. Her husband’s affairs had been common knowledge throughout the university. He had admired Helen’s courage and dignity and sympathized with the hurt her husband caused her. He had attended her when she had been discharged from hospital after the miscarriage and had been deeply affected by her quiet strength despite an intense and poignant sense of loss. But friendship could be taken only so far, and only so much could be expected of him professionally, he reasoned. Nevertheless, he could dispel the feeling that his refusal to listen was cowardly, that he had failed her.

  * * *

  Helen had returned to her office just after four without any specific task in mind, but unable to face battling through the disorderly ranks of reporters outside the college gates in order to go home. They would, she knew, be there no matter how long she put off leaving, but she needed time to recover from Sanjay’s Patterson’s rebuff. She didn’t blame him; within the confines of the university, an Asian doctor was viewed in the same light as a woman academic: exotic, an amusing diversion from the norm, but to be treated with caution and regarded with suspicion, since either or both could bring the deadly spores of liberalism and change. So, although Sanjay had a good Celtic surname, inherited from his Scottish father, he was not, in the eyes of the college establishment, entirely to be trusted.

  A phone call from Edward’s father had demonstrated unequivocally how entirely she was alone. She was crying when Mick Tuttle came into the room; weeping silently, tears of loss and confusion and self-doubt and exhaustion. The cynic in her asked what precisely she had lost, and Edward’s image was supplanted by a fleeting vision of her baby, small enough to fit into the palm of her hand, so terribly, immutably still.

  After a brief confusion over the bruise on her face, Mick had accepted her explanation that she’d had an upsetting phone call and had made coffee in silence, giving her time to recover. She mumbled a ‘thank you’, accepting the mug, and he lowered himself into the chair opposite her, waiting for her to begin.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I thought I was finally getting myself together.’

  ‘Who was the call from?’ he asked.

  ‘Edward’s father. He and his wife are staying at the Chester Grosvenor.’ She looked wildly about the room. ‘Oh, Mick — what can I tell them?’

  He didn’t reply at first, but regarded her thoughtfully, his dark eyes brimming with sympathy. ‘You don’t have to tell them anything,’ he said. ‘They just want to be near their son, and now you’re the closest they can get.’

  Helen shook her head. Tears glistened on her lashes. ‘They want answers — they’ve read the papers, heard the speculation. The knife missing from the kitchen, the infidelity, my miscarriage — oh God!’ She covered her face with one hand. Mick gently prised the coffee mug from her grasp and set it on the desk, then he knelt beside her, and she thought of the pain in his knees and begged him not to.

  He put both arms around her and held her to him. She drank in scent of his cologne, feeling the heat of him through his shirt, grateful for the comfort of human contact.

  After a time, she subsided. The coffee was cold, and he made some fresh. She winced with him as he got slowly to his feet, testing the strength of his joints before putting his weight on them.

  Helen washed her face at the little vanity basin, and he passed her a towel from the hook next to it. They returned to their seats and at first she avoided his eye, but after a few minutes she looked up tentatively, nursing the coffee mug in both hands.

  He returned her look, his calm eyes unflinching, unjudging. Sunlight came and went in breathless bursts, barging out in brilliant ebullience and then disappearing, swallowed up by clouds which threw occasional drops of rain onto the windows. In these brief rushes of dazzling light, his eyes danced with colour, tawny flecks and hints of hazel and chestnut sparked from the dark, almost black depths of his irises, colours of warmth and compassion.

  Helen swallowed, took a breath and began. ‘Edward’s parents worshipped him. He’s an only son. I mean, he was. They have a daughter, but—’ She shrugged. ‘It seems archaic — implausible — doesn’t it, that boys should still be valued above girls?’

  ‘It’s sad, and it’s wrong, but implausible?’ he said. ‘No.’

  ‘Edward always had whatever he wanted, so he never learned that there are some things you can’t — shouldn’t have. He assumed that what he wanted was his by right, and his looks and his public-school charm ensured he always got it.’

  Edward was young when they had first met, and she still in her teens, a student, insecure. Edward had made something of a pet of her, liked to coax a smile from her. Not such an easy task in those days. She had felt singled out, blessed; his attention was a mark of distinction, it gave her confidence and eroded her self-hate. So, when he had pretended not to know her on her arrival at St Werburgh’s, she had been hurt — stricken even. Of course, it had been a pretence, she had realized that when the excitement of his subsequent gallantry and courtship of her had begun to fade, after the gloss of marriage had accumulated a few months’ dust. After that, she began to see Edward for what he was, and she despised the trick as infantile and cruel — a measure of his superficiality. Perhaps not all at once, but in small, shocking revelations, she saw his vanity and his monstrous narcissism.

  When she first knew him, as a student and acolyte, he had an angelic look in repose, which she had mistaken for innocence. She couldn’t have known then that the statuesque composition of his features had been carefully rehearsed in a mirror. With age, he had managed with this conscious control of his facial muscles to maintain a smooth, almost flawless mask, but the few lines and wrinkles he had been unable to avoid betrayed his inner self, emphasizing the meaner aspects of his nature. The deep grooves over his left eye gave him an effortless expression of superciliousness and a line, fine and indistinct as yet, from his right nostril to the corner of his mouth would, had he lived, have become a more or less permanent sneer.

  ‘His parents couldn’t see the
flaws in his character, the casual cruelty, the way he used and manipulated people,’ Helen went on. ‘For them Edward was — will always be — perfect.’

  ‘And you can’t make all the things he did and said unhappen. You can’t tell them all those things in the press are lies, is that it?’

  Helen sighed and nodded, relieved not to have to explain this, at least. She took a swallow of coffee to slake the terrible dryness in her throat. ‘After the—’ She took a breath. ‘After I lost the baby.’ She frowned, fighting for control. ‘I couldn’t think straight. Sometimes I couldn’t remember what I’d done or said. There were blanks. Blackouts. Some days, I couldn’t find the energy to get out of bed. And all the while he was carrying on his affair with David Ainsley’s wife’ — she couldn’t bring herself to say the name — ‘and tormenting me with my failure, as he saw it.’

  Mick gave a low, choked exclamation.

  ‘There was only one thing I wanted at that time.’ Helen was completely calm as she reached this part of her story. ‘I wanted Edward dead. I wanted to kill him myself. I even planned how I would do it.’ She brought her gaze level with Mick’s. ‘A knife between the ribs.’

  Mick’s expression was serious, attentive, but it held no hint of repugnance and this gave Helen the courage to continue. ‘It was a fantasy, Mick, no more. Then one day I found the knife — the one that’s disappeared from the block, the one the police are looking for. I’d put it in my little cabinet by our bed. Except I couldn’t — still can’t — remember putting it there.’

  Perhaps he read the pain and confusion in her face, because Mick reached out and took her hand. ‘What did you do with it?’ he asked.

  ‘I returned it to the block. But, Mick, it’s gone again, and the police think—’

  ‘And you, Helen. What do you think?’

  She passed one hand wearily over her eyes. ‘I wish I knew. I wanted him dead — for the death of my child. I wanted to kill him.’ She looked at Mick. ‘A life for a life.’

  It wouldn’t be the first time she had felt that way. On that other occasion she had failed, but only just. And this had been better planned, carefully rehearsed. She shook her head, trying to clear her mind.

  ‘I’m so confused. I can’t separate the fantasy from—’ She frowned; she had been about to say, ‘from what really happened’, but she didn’t know what had really happened, she didn’t even know if she had been there.

  ‘I keep thinking, every time I open a cupboard or a drawer, that I’ll find the knife hidden—’ She stopped. The whole thing seemed too wild, too crazy.

  He considered, then nodded as though coming to a decision. ‘How about checking over the house together?’

  Helen looked up, startled. His hand, warm against hers, strong, increased its pressure slightly. She smiled, thanking him silently.

  * * *

  Isaac Smolder watched from his office window. Mick Tuttle had returned to his office, and Helen was standing alone in the quad.

  Those eyes! She glanced up at the windows, with their hundreds of glinting panes, reflecting fleeting cold light, and she seemed almost to look through and beyond Smolder. Yet he was certain she could feel his presence.

  He experienced again that compulsion to know her thoughts, to see inside her mind. What would she do without Edward? That man was foul, destructive, but perhaps she had needed the dubious security of his tyrannical control. He nodded to himself. He thought he was beginning to understand Helen Wilkinson: her confusion, her timidity and abhorrence of change had led her to accept less than she deserved.

  Her hair fell forward, curtaining her face. It gleamed with a warmth that seemed almost to challenge the feeble sunlight. He willed her to see him. To acknowledge him. She stood with her head tilted on one side, as if listening; an unconscious pose, but beautiful, like a carefully composed photograph, and he had a sudden, wild urge to capture that unstudied, natural moment.

  He glimpsed a movement in the doorway from the main building and looked down, simultaneously pulling a little away from the window, out of sight. Someone had joined her. From his vantage point above the quad he had seen a number of comings and goings: Helen and Ruth; Helen and Ellis; Ruth and Ellis, Helen and Detective Sergeant Hackett, but none was stranger, none more devastating than this. Helen with Mick Tuttle. Smolder felt a pain radiate like a starburst in his chest. He wanted to tear at it with his fingers, to excise it, but instead he turned back to his room and sat at his desk to begin writing his journal entry. To anyone passing his open door, the suffering in his face might seem no more than a dyspeptic spasm, but his heart was lacerated and it felt almost that he was bleeding internally.

  * * *

  In the refectory, Ruth Marks tore another cob of bread from her roll and smothered it with margarine. She opened the tiny jam pot, still holding the knife and watched the drama unfold. Ellis had flounced in moments before. His eyes were raw-looking and the dark circles beneath them attested to his lack of sleep.

  He threw an acid-damaged and dirty lab coat onto a table nearby, shaking with rage. Teacups were overturned and two of the technicians at the table jumped up, knocking over their chairs and protesting loudly.

  ‘Who took it?’ Ellis was red in the face, barely in control.

  A voice somewhere behind him grumbled, ‘It’s bloody disgusting, bringing that filthy rag in here.’

  Ellis wheeled on the man, a fellow graduate student with whom Ruth knew Ellis had a long term, low grade feud. ‘Mind your own bloody business.’ Breathless with fury, he turned back to the table. ‘Who took my money?’

  A post-doctoral student, dark-haired, lightly tanned from a brief trip to his parents’ time-share in Spain, relaxed, sure of his welcome, strolled over, carrying a tray. ‘What’s up?’ he asked, casually pushing the lab coat to one side and sliding the tray onto the table.

  ‘Ellis is bitching again.’

  The graduate student had spoken up a second time, deliberately baiting Ellis. He was bigger, a rugby player, also fitter than Ellis, and he looked like he’d put up with about as much griping and foot-stamping as he was prepared to from the smaller man.

  ‘I just want to know who stole my money!’ Ellis shouted, addressing this statement to those seated at the table, as an appeal to their decency and a means of deflecting the anger of the rugby player.

  ‘No one stole it.’ The woman who had spoken, a small, mousy-haired Masters student, riffled through the pockets of the filthy lab coat and finally fished out a one-pound coin. ‘We swapped it for a couple of fifty p’s.’

  Ellis’s eyes grew rounder, emphasizing the dark circles around them. ‘You took my money. My personal property.’

  This was an old grouse: in the research lab, a good deal of ‘swapping’ went on, but most people, both students and staff, were philosophical; the odd filched biro or stick of chewing gum had to be balanced against a pleasant working relationship with the rest of the crew. Ellis could not — could never — accepted this. What was his was private; no one had the right to touch his property, borrow his lab coat, rummage through his pockets, or swap one coin for another. To a man of his closed mentality, it was intrusive at best and criminal at worst.

  One of the technicians spoke up, smiling foolishly. ‘I needed fifty p for the coffee machine. You know it won’t take one-pound coins—’

  ‘You bloody bastard!’

  The post-doctoral student seemed unruffled by Ellis’s exhibition. ‘Listen, man,’ he said, smiling the crooked smile that the girls found so irresistible. ‘You’ve got to get used to give ’n’ take in a research lab. Graham didn’t mean anything by it. Chill out, will you?’

  Ellis’s eyes bulged. Ruth could see a blood vessel standing out on his temple.

  ‘He’ll burst something,’ Ruth muttered, scooping more jam onto the last little ball of bread without taking her eyes from the scene.

  ‘You give it back. I need those fifty p’s. You had no right! They’re my personal property!’ he was screaming
now.

  Graham, the technician who had taken the coins rolled his eyes. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, John, get a life.’

  * * *

  Helen telephoned Ruth from home, some hours later. Mick had helped her search every inch of the house — supervised her might be a more accurate description, since she insisted on Mick checking with her every cupboard and drawer, every bookshelf and box file, no longer trusting the evidence of her own eyes.

  ‘Do you want me to come over?’ Ruth asked.

  ‘No . . . I think I’ll make an early start in the morning, see Edward’s parents and then go and visit mine — try and shake off the tabloid hacks for the weekend and get my research submission completed. Thanks for your comments, by the way. I’ll incorporate them into the discussion.’ Her face grew hot, hearing her words as Ruth would hear them: forced, stilted.

  ‘About to schkip town, huh, schweetheart?’

  Helen smiled. She could imagine Ruth drawing her lips back from her teeth to get the Bogart lisp just right. ‘I’ve told Sergeant Hackett where he can reach me. He suggested leaving a few lights on at home and slipping out the back way.’

  ‘He’s such a nice man!’ Ruth exclaimed. ‘You know, if he wasn’t already spoken for, I’d set my cap at him myself.’

  Helen shook her head, smiling. Ruth was irrepressible. ‘I’ve told him you have a key, in case of emergencies — I hope you don’t mind.’

  ‘A key? To my place, or yours? Hey! And what about Mick Tuttle?’

  Helen was stunned for a moment. She had given Mick a key to the back gate so that he could let himself in and out without being noticed by the reporters camped outside. ‘Mick?’ she faltered.

  ‘Well, did he pop in for coffee as he’d threatened?’

  ‘Oh!’ Helen laughed, realizing her mistake. ‘Yes. He was very sweet.’

  Ruth made balking sounds at the other end of the line. ‘Sweet! Helen, really. Why don’t you call him nice and be done with it?’