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

by MARGARET MURPHY

  ‘Molyneux’s darkroom,’ Nelson explained, hunching his shoulders against a cold trickle of rain that had found its way down the back of his neck, and thrusting his hands deep into his pockets.

  Two hours later they were inside Dermot Molyneux’s flat, crunching over debris and tasting the bitter, oily remains of the fire on their tongues. It was not yet light and both men carried powerful torches.

  Tim Dignan, the Fire Investigation Officer, his face sweating and smeared in soot, had led them in. ‘The fire started in the darkroom,’ he said. ‘Arson, no question of that. And there’s been some damage done before the fire was set. From what we can tell, he came to long enough to get out of the dark room, but he passed out in here.’

  ‘Where was he found?’ Hackett asked.

  ‘Near the phone. But the wire had been cut. The fire built to quite a pitch in the darkroom, but he’d got the door shut and that contained the worst of it — till the window shattered with the heat, but luckily people started to notice by then.’

  Nelson was prodded the mess underfoot with the toe of his shoe. A family grouping — they’d have to be informed. A collection of CDs greasy with smuts. Bands he’d never heard of but guessed must be Irish from the Gaelic titles.

  ‘Were there people around to notice after midnight on a Monday night?’ Hackett asked.

  ‘Studentland this, Terry,’ Dignan said. ‘They keep late hours.’

  Hackett nodded, glancing over at the door to the darkroom, which stood open, its paintwork blistered and blackened in places. Most of the damage in the main living room of the flat was from smoke and water. He didn’t envy the poor sods who’d have this lot to clear up.

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to get as much of the valuable stuff out before it’s wrecked?’ Nelson demanded. Equipment, some of it expensive by the look of it, lay broken on the floor.

  Dignan took a moment before answering. ‘We try to put people before property,’ he said, looking hard into the rheumy Nelson’s eyes. ‘The photographic equipment was wrecked by whoever started the fire. What did you think? That we came in here wielding fire axes and smashed the place up?’

  ‘Life’s bloody work,’ Nelson went on defensively. ‘Wanton bloody destruction.’

  Hackett wondered what had brought on this rare exhibition of empathy in the inspector. ‘Surely not wanton, sir — I mean, if it served a purpose?’

  Nelson fixed him with a look that would have pinned a lesser man to the wall. Hackett returned a bland, if vaguely expectant stare.

  Nelson did not actually concede the contest, but his next words were spoken with an unexpected mildness. ‘Perhaps “wanton” wasn’t quite the word I was looking for,’ he said, returning to a desultory prodding of Dermot’s personal effects. ‘Can that door be made secure?’ He nodded towards the entrance to the flat. The door, though still on its hinges, swung open, while the lock side of the frame lay twisted on the sodden carpet.

  ‘We’ll see to it before we leave,’ Dignan promised.

  Nelson frowned, flashing the beam of his torch to one side of the door. ‘Can anything be done about this?’ Nelson asked.

  Hackett and Dignan exchanged a surprised look.

  ‘Done about it? Salvage, you mean?’

  Nelson threw Hackett a withering glance. ‘Evidence, I mean.’ He directed his torch at the charred remains that had once been Molyneux’s PC. ‘Might be worth getting young Tact to have look at it.’

  Hackett thought there would be precious little to look at, but he had to agree, it was worth taking a squint.

  * * *

  It isn’t much of a room, John thought. All the same, it had hurt when that crazy policeman had looked around it with that expression of disapproval, of disgust even.

  He picked up one of the culture bottles and shook it. The flies lay in clusters on the oatmeal growth medium, stuck fast, not one living specimen remained. He shook his head. It had all made perfect sense. He gathered the other bottles to his chest, sweeping them to him, anxious that this evidence of his failure should not be found, smudging the pristine whiteness of his T-shirt with dust. Never mind, there would be time to change. He was in control now. Back in control.

  He threw the bottles into the waste basket and carried them downstairs, jingling as cheerily as a milkman’s crate. Nobody saw or heard him — the tenants, most of whom were students, had already gone out for the night, and he had the house to himself.

  Gusts of spiteful wind spat large chilly drops of rain. He hurried to the back, where the bins were kept, slipping once or twice on patches of slimy moss at the side of the house. By the time he was indoors again, a heavy shower was drenching the street and rainwater gurgled from a crack in the down-spout next to the front door.

  He ran back upstairs, shivering, and slammed the door of his flat behind him. It was cold. It was always cold in this room. He stripped off his T-shirt, now smeared with rust from the bin lid, overlaying the greyish dust from the bottles. He threw the shirt onto the pile of dirty clothing at the foot of his bed, then, visualizing the contemptuous expression on Inspector Nelson’s face again, he bunched the lot into a ball and stuffed it into the bottom of his wardrobe.

  Dispossessed of its clutter, the room looked sparse, grey, ordinary. He had once been proud of his Drosophila cultures, and of his skill in handling them — they weren’t easy insects, not if you wanted the best from them, but he could etherize, sex, and type fifty in less than five minutes. Where other students routinely lost flies into the lab when they came round unexpectedly, or else slaughtered them by over-anaesthetizing them, he knew almost by instinct how much would be just enough to do the job. Where others made their culture medium too wet, so the insects fell prey to fungal infection, or too dry, so they died of starvation, or their eggs, desiccated, failed to hatch, John’s Drosophila were robust, healthy, reliable experimental subjects — even the wild ones he’d brought in from his field studies.

  He didn’t know why he’d kept them for so long after everything had turned so disastrously against him, and he had allowed his carefully labelled batches to die. He had intended to throw them away, but, somehow he couldn’t bear to, and after a while, they had provided a perverse form of comfort to him, like the smell of his own sweat, and the pile of unwashed clothing at the end of his bed.

  He turned on the gas fire — no sense in being uncomfortable — and dragged a clean T-shirt over his head. Nearly ready now. He wondered if Helen had returned home and tried to imagine her reaction. Shock, anger, perhaps. He hoped she had understood the message, otherwise it had been nothing more than a petty act of spite.

  * * *

  Helen, alone at last, bolted the doors front and back of the house before returning to the bedroom. Soon first light would glimmer over the rooftops of the houses; already there were a few restless stirrings in the eaves of the front gable, where sparrows were nesting. This was something to be done under cover of darkness.

  She overcame her reluctance to cross the threshold, taking a breath before stepping into the room. Her heart thudded painfully in her chest and she turned her head away from the bed, avoiding the image that she would see: Edward, half sitting, chest bare. No, she would not think of it.

  She crouched beside the little wooden cabinet and braced one hand against the door, taking another breath, holding it, easing the catch with her thumb, opening the door a little at a time, cautiously as though afraid of some terror waiting to escape. A picture of the mouse, splayed, butchered, flashed into her mind and she felt her gorge rise. She pulled the door wide in her distress, dislodging the contents of the cupboard. Magazines, books, an audio cassette fell to the floor. And with them a knife. The blade was dulled, clotted with blood, and the handle smeared with the same rust-coloured stuff, dried and flaking.

  Earlier, she had picked it up with her bare hands and thrust it back into the cupboard, now the thought of touching it filled her with dread, a childish horror of the supernatural. How had this happened? They had looked in
every room, every possible hiding place, she and Mick together. She stared at the appalling spectre of the knife until she thought if she waited a moment longer she would go mad, then, carefully, she opened the food bag she had brought from the kitchen and tilted the magazine on which the knife had been resting. It slithered into the open mouth of the plastic bag with an unholy sound which drew from her an utterance of disgust and distress. She carried it at arm’s length through the house, unable to countenance the thought of having it upstairs with her, close to where she would be sleeping, but equally unable to rid herself of it. What if the police came back, searching bins, digging up the flower beds as they had done before? She would put it somewhere out of the way until she had thought about what to do. Could she trust Mick, tell him? Or Ruth — would she think she had finally lost touch with reality?

  She fetched up in the kitchen. The police had already searched here, dusting for fingerprints. Yes, here would be best. She opened the third drawer from the top of the sink unit, the drawer in which she kept oddments, keys, wrapping paper, measuring tape, bits of string. The knife nestled like a dangerous animal on top of a coil of coarse string. Helen wanted to bury it beneath the clutter, but she could not bring herself to look at its stained steel and the brackish brown remains of blood on the handle any longer, so she slammed the drawer shut and fled the room, afraid to look over her shoulder, unable to go to her bedroom until she had showered and scrubbed her hands and arms until they were raw.

  Chapter 21

  Ruth slept badly, dreaming of boxed doughnuts that turned into squirming, screaming mice as she bit into them. So, when the doorbell rang, waking her from a new permutation in which Helen was performing an operation on Tuttle’s legs without anaesthetic, explaining with cold rationality that all that was required was a little self-control on his part, she tumbled out of bed gratefully.

  Nelson and Hackett were taken aback at her wild appearance.

  ‘You,’ she grunted, ungraciously, and retreated, scratching her head and yawning.

  She left the front door open which the two policemen took as an invitation and stepped inside. The hallway was cold, a grey, nondescript replica of rented accommodation in any town and city just about anywhere. The two men exchanged a look and then followed her upstairs.

  Her flat was a maelstrom of ideas, themes and colours. Where Ellis’s room had been chaotic, an undisciplined mess of unfinished work and insanitary slovenliness, without purpose, Ruth Marks’s flat seemed to reflect a mind that held so many enthusiasms that it rebelled against the constraints of order and ordinariness, so that dour and disturbing prints of Munch’s work were displayed on the same wall as a poster of patchwork intensity by Klimt and watercolours of the Cheshire countryside were hung next to Picasso prints. On her crowded bookshelves popular fiction vied with texts on neural networks and the silicon brain. Hackett scanned the mantelpiece; it was cluttered with postcards, curling with age and filmy with dust. He concluded that Ruth Marks was something of a hoarder. Wooden carvings of the three wise monkeys were arranged in a semicircle, in a conspiratorial huddle, partly obscuring a photograph of Helen Wilkinson, bundled up in a dark overcoat, and looking upwards in a dreamy pose. The remains of a Chinese take-away lay discarded on the low table next to the sofa, bringing a faint savoury whiff of stir-fry and the jaded smell of cold bean sprouts. Over all hung the too-familiar sweetish smell of marijuana.

  ‘Dr Marks,’ Nelson began.

  Ruth had her back to them. She scratched at her side with one hand and waved Nelson down with the other. ‘Give me a minute, will you? I’ve had a bloody awful night.’ She stumbled to the far end of the room to a bank of steel shelving, which was covered by blue trelliswork at one end, dividing off the kitchen from the living area.

  Hackett raised his eyebrows, but Nelson seemed content to give her time while they took in details of her living arrangements. Her PC rested at one end of a folding dining table, in a rather elaborate turret-style bay. Journals and papers lay on the table and were arranged with seeming purpose around the typist’s chair by the computer. At the other end of the table was a microscope with a binocular viewer. In a cabinet designed for displaying glassware and ornaments, there were more of the little bottles they had seen in Ellis’s flat, but these contained vibrant communities of tiny insects which seemed to stream constantly in solid black rivulets along thin strips of filter paper, from the cobalt blue food matter to the cotton wool plugs. There was room for flight, too, in this microcosm of existence which Nelson found strangely claustrophobic.

  Ruth had set a pot of coffee to filter. She stopped suddenly, setting down the mug she held with a clatter, and turned, her eyes wide. ‘Helen?’

  ‘She’s all right, as far as we know.’

  Ruth looked from the inspector to the sergeant, then drew the lapels of her slightly shabby dressing gown together and, tying the cord more tightly, reached for a loaf of bread from a large earthenware pot. She continued her breakfast preparations in a thoughtful mood. Within minutes the flat was filled with the dually tantalizing smells of coffee and toast. Hackett wondered fleetingly if this was an attempt to mask the smell of marijuana, but recalling the doctor’s insatiable appetite for carbohydrates, he decided that the food preparations were intended to satisfy another, quite different need.

  Ruth carried her meal and three mugs of coffee through to the living area, nodding vaguely in the direction of a large, grubby linen-covered sofa. Nelson took up position at one end, sipping at his coffee and eyeing Ruth with a speculative stare.

  Ruth cleared some textbooks from an armchair covered in the same material as the sofa and dropped them at her feet; apparently, she remained immune to Nelson’s intimidatory tactics. ‘So,’ she said, ‘If it’s not Helen, why are you here? What’s happened?’

  Hackett was almost relieved she hadn’t made some flip remark which Nelson could use to cruel effect later.

  ‘I’d like you to tell us about John Ellis’s relationship with Professor Wilkinson,’ Nelson said.

  ‘Relationship?’ Ruth seemed ready to laugh but perhaps their grim expressions guided her to caution. She eased herself onto the chair and rested her coffee mug on the arm. A little coffee had slopped over the edge and she wiped it on the linen before saying, ‘Ed’s narcissism may have bordered on the psychotic, but he was strictly hetero.’

  Hackett saw a muscle twitch in Nelson’s jaw at the use of the word ‘psychotic’, but he remained admirably calm, giving Hackett the nod to take the lead.

  ‘Professor Wilkinson saw Mr Ellis on the day he died. We know there was an argument. Ellis made threats,’ he explained carefully. ‘We also know that Mr Ellis’s research grant was guaranteed until autumn this year, so the row couldn’t have been about funding. But they did have an almighty ding-dong and Ellis left the place screaming abuse at the professor. We’d like to know why.’

  ‘Why don’t you ask him yourself?’ Ruth’s tone was uncharacteristically wary, even apprehensive.

  ‘He’s beyond questioning,’ Nelson replied.

  ‘Beyond. Are you saying—?’ Ruth asked sharply.

  ‘John Ellis took an overdose of barbiturates and alcohol yesterday evening,’ Hackett explained. He felt Nelson tense beside him. ‘He died sometime between three and four this morning.’

  ‘Poor, stupid bastard,’ Ruth murmured.

  ‘We have photographs,’ Nelson said.

  Ruth sipped her coffee. ‘Photographs?’ she said.

  Nelson took two black-and-white pictures from his pocket and handed them to Ruth. Ellis entering the Wilkinson’s house. Ellis placing a white cardboard box in the fridge.

  Ruth studied them for a long time. ‘Compelling,’ she said, at last.

  ‘So, you see why we would like to know exactly what went on in the meeting between Ellis and Wilkinson on the day of the professor’s murder.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ Ruth said, passing the photographs back to Nelson. ‘You think John killed Ed in a fit of rage and then did h
imself in out of remorse, is that it?’

  ‘We’re not jumping to any conclusions, Dr Marks.’

  ‘Why not ask Valerie, Ed’s secretary?’

  ‘Yes,’ Nelson said. ‘We know who she is. Professor Wilkinson gave Mrs Roberts strict instructions to work on a recording of a report he wanted typing up, so she was wearing headphones at the time. She heard voices raised, but not the details.’

  Ruth smiled. ‘Discreet as ever. Good old Valerie.’

  ‘Dr Marks?’ Hackett prompted, when it became apparent that she did not intend to say more.

  ‘I don’t honestly see what I can tell you, gentlemen.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Nelson, softly, ‘I think you do.’

  Ruth looked uneasily from one to the other.

  Nelson’s smile was like cheese wire: thin, sharp and potentially dangerous. ‘We’ve spoken to Alice Chambers, the Senate representative who is managing the departmental reorganization. She says the Dean of Faculty got an anonymous email yesterday.’

  ‘The message?’ Ruth asked impatiently.

  ‘Said Ellis had been cooking the results. It suggested a comparison of his lab book with the data he’s due to publish in his thesis. Miss Chambers said she had called Ellis to a meeting with the Dean of Faculty and one of the pro-vice chancellors. It was scheduled for ten o’clock this morning. They wanted a satisfactory answer to the allegations.’

  ‘Which of course the stupid little prick wouldn’t be able to give them,’ Ruth said bitterly. She shook her head. ‘And you think I sent the message, is that it?’

  ‘Anonymous mailings are traceable, given the right expertise and a little co-operation from the electronic mailer,’ Hackett said, repeating what Jem Tact had told him just over an hour earlier.