Death on Account

by Margaret Yorke

  DEATH ON ACCOUNT

  Robbie had been planning a raid on the bank for months. The alarm system was the main risk. Each till was equipped with a foot pedal which triggered a warning within seconds to the main security network, but before the police could be summoned, two or three minutes must elapse: vital ones, and enough. In the years that Robbie had been at the branch it had never been robbed, though once a security van leaving with the wages for a local factory had been held up. At first he had thought of robbing a different bank, for he felt loyal to his own and it was a sort of treachery to plot against it. But he knew the customs of his own branch; he knew the staff; and above all, he was so much, by this time, a respected elder figure that he would never be suspected when he walked in, just after the raid, and discovered what had happened.

  Death on Account

  Margaret Yorke

  Copyright © 1979, Margaret Yorke

  All the characters and events in this

  story are imaginary. Any

  resemblance to real places or people

  is coincidence.

  Contents

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  About the Author

  1

  He heard her key in the door.

  The body sprawled on the floor, arms spread, blood seeping from a bullet wound in the head. Two women and a man, frozen in shock, huddled against the wall away from the masked gunman. The dead man lay at their feet; he had been shot first in the stomach and then, when he lay groaning on the ground, in the head.

  Robbie could not wait to find out what happened next. He switched channels on the television set and when she came into the room he was apparently absorbed by a current events programme. He did not look away from the screen when she entered.

  Isabel, stepping on high heels, crossed the room and adjusted the volume control. She tweaked one of the heavy silk curtains which was not hanging straight.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I can see you’ve had a profitable evening.’

  Robbie glanced at his wife. He looked at her plump neck, the skin crêpey now, and red, but the flesh solid, and imagined the pneumatic feel of her rounded shoulders under his hands. What would it be like to take that coarse neck between his fingers and squeeze it? He stared at her, imagining the look of incredulous horror that would fill her ice-blue eyes as she realized his intentions: they would start to protrude from their sockets; her face would suffuse with colour and at last she would go limp, fall away from him, be silenced for ever. It would be wonderful.

  But none of this happened.

  ‘Yours was obviously a success,’ he said. She was still wound up, colour high and cold eyes bright.

  ‘As if you cared,’ Isabel replied.

  Robbie didn’t, but if he could endure her barbs and refrain from planting any of his own, she might soon go up to bed and he would be able to switch the television back to the thriller without missing much of the action.

  Isabel Robinson had been supervising a charity fashion show at the Crown Hotel, and when it was over she had spent some time in the hotel bar with the other organizers. She owned a dress shop, Caprice, in Harbington’s High Street, and had supplied the garments for the display.

  ‘You’ll have got some new customers,’ Robbie said. ‘And publicity, I dare say.’

  ‘I should hope so. I’d hardly bother, otherwise,’ said Isabel. ‘Bring in the dresses.’

  ‘But you’ll have to take them back to the shop in the morning,’ Robbie protested. ‘Why not leave them?’

  ‘They might be stolen and they’d certainly get crushed,’ said Isabel. ‘I never leave stock out at night. You know that.’

  So Robbie carried in thirty or more outfits and arranged them around the dining room, some spread across the table and others hanging from the door, while Isabel made herself tea in the kitchen and while the television thriller continued, unseen, upon its way. Then he put Isabel’s new Golf car away in the garage and locked it. He brought the keys in and put them on a hook in the kitchen.

  Isabel took her tea upstairs. Robbie heard her heavy tread ascending, then the bedroom door closing. He went back to the sitting room and switched channels: the thriller was just ending and he was in time to see a police car halt, tyres screaming. Two policemen sprang from it and raced towards a distant figure fleeing along a quayside. There were shots, a scream, then a splash as a body fell into the water. Robbie’s pale face was intent as he watched. Crime didn’t pay; the perpetrators were very often caught. But it made exciting viewing.

  It was nearly midnight when he went to bed. First he prepared a tray for Isabel’s morning tea. By taking this up to her each day, he delayed her arrival downstairs until it was time for him to leave for the bank. He ate his own breakfast in peace, cereal and toast, while watching the birds disporting themselves on the table he had made for them outside the kitchen window. He put crumbs out for them before eating himself; tits, finches, humble sparrows – all were welcome.

  He crept upstairs, avoiding the tread that squeaked, and went softly past Isabel’s door to the second flight which led to the top floor of their old house. Here Robbie slept in a small bedroom under the eaves. Long ago, when they came to this house, this room had been intended for a baby, but no child had come to occupy it. The room was starkly furnished with a narrow iron bedstead, a painted chair and a chest of drawers. Robbie, when he took it over, had built a wardrobe across one end, with hanging space and shelves inside, and a key; but Isabel never came up here. Robbie had removed himself from the large front bedroom with its twin beds five years ago, when he had flu, saying he did not want to infect Isabel, though she was never ill. He had never moved back, and later, with the help of a plumber friend, he had fitted up a washbasin, lavatory and shower in the second attic room so that now he had his own quarters, independent of Isabel. He had been thinking of getting a portable television set to keep up there too; then he could have watched what he liked. He might have managed to pass whole days without ever seeing Isabel. But it was too late now for that plan; they were to move.

  The Robinsons spent few evenings together. Isabel often stayed on at the shop, or went over to the second branch, recently opened in a town twenty miles away and run by her former assistant, Beryl Watson. Sometimes she was away on buying trips. Robbie had a large workshop in the garden of 49 Claremont Terrace, and he spent hours there making furniture; he made tables and chairs, stools and lampstands, and he sold what he made to a shop in the town, but the work took time so that his turnover was small and the profit not great. He was secretary of the Horticultural Society and on alternate Tuesday evenings sang with the Harbington Choral Group. By these means he managed to keep out of Isabel’s way most of the time.

  Sometimes she gave dinner parties for people she wanted to cultivate: councillors and their wives; other shopkeepers; an occasional customer. Robbie had to be on duty then, as host. Unknown to the guests, he always cooked the dinner. Isabel would accept their praise for the delicious meal and Robbie would smile ironically to himself as they expressed envy of his luck in having married such a cook. He never claimed the credit due to him; that would have added to his humiliation.

  Isabel was, in fact, a very good cook, but soon after their marriage she had set about turning Robbie into another. Her capability, and his own inexperience, had brought them together. She wa
s a catering manager with the NAAFI when Robbie was doing his army service. She had trained as a cook and caterer and had taught for a time; then, still unmarried at thirty-three, she had gone abroad with the NAAFI. So long ago, to be unmarried at that age was to be a failure and Isabel meant to acquire a husband at almost any price. She soon noticed the quiet young man with the nice manners, and Robbie found her competence reassuring. He never recalled suggesting that they should marry: one evening, at a dance, he found that he was kissing her – afterwards he was not even sure that this was what had happened, but their lips had met. Then it seemed to be assumed that they would marry. Protesting would have been rude; he let it drift, took some slight initiative with kisses and a little more, and was married. He ignored the crude comments of his companions; true, Isabel was not a willowy blonde, but she was very capable. Robbie, whose mother had died when he was eight, thought that he would be safe with her.

  She resigned after they were married, when Robbie’s service was over and he went into the bank, and she worked in a hotel for some time, as housekeeper. She always earned more than Robbie, and she saved enough to start the dress shop. Harbington at that time was expanding, and lacked such a shop; because she had innate business sense and a great deal of general experience, Isabel soon understood the market she had entered and the shop became very successful. Robbie, she planned, would become in due time the manager of a branch of the bank, while she would run a chain of shops.

  But Robbie had not become manager, and now it was obvious that he never would. Some years ago he was moved from Harbington in a sideways promotion to another branch, sixteen miles away in a suburb of Blewton, a large industrial town. He was the first securities clerk there, a responsible position, and he was unlikely to rise any higher. One of the women cashiers was older than he was, and so was the supervisor, but the rest of the staff, including the manager and the chief clerk, were much younger. Robbie was a failure, and Isabel often told him so. Their comfortable style of living, as she said, was paid for by Caprice.

  They had bought 49 Claremont Terrace very cheaply because it was in a nearly derelict condition. Over the years, doing most of the work himself, Robbie had restored and improved it and now it was worth a lot of money. Isabel said that the area was going down, because several of the houses around had been turned into flats and were occupied by young families with children who played in the street and dropped Coke tins in the gutter. Skateboards had appeared recently as an added hazard. Young men tinkered with motorcycles at weekends, making a noise as they tested the engines and tore up and down what should be a quiet residential road. When a fish-and-chip shop opened on the corner, Isabel decided it was time to go. She had put down a deposit on a new neo-Georgian house at the far side of the town, and 49 Claremont Terrace was for sale.

  Robbie did not want to move. He had lived in this house for more than twenty years, and he had personally transformed it from a shabby ruin to a well-kept, spruce residence – the agent’s description, and accurate. He had made the garden, nurturing all the shrubs and plants from cuttings and seedlings. He knew most of the neighbours, anyway by sight, and every Sunday Charlie Pearce, aged nine, helped him wash the two cars – Isabel’s Golf and his own old 1100. Charlie came to the workshop sometimes, too, and was making a three-legged stool under Robbie’s instruction. Before Charlie there had been other boys, and when Charlie grew too old there would have been a young one coming along, a surrogate son for Robbie – almost, by now, a grandson.

  Isabel meant to put an end to all this.

  The new house was in a development of seven, and there would be no Charlie. Isabel had decreed that in the unfortunate event of some of the neighbours actually breeding, Robbie was not to invite their children to help him. Children were noisy and tiresome. If brought into the house, they left sticky fingermarks everywhere, and might walk with dirty shoes across her new pale carpets.

  The former breakfast room at 49 Claremont Terrace was now an office, and here on Saturdays Robbie did the books for Caprice. When Isabel opened the first shop, he had fitted it out, building the partitioned changing cubicles and the display racks. Now, Isabel and her partner could afford a professional shopfitter to design and prepare the second shop and to remodel the original one.

  Robbie was not needed, except, like the hangers on the rails in the shops, as a fitment.

  As Robbie drove to work the day after Isabel’s fashion show, he thought about the television thriller he had been watching the night before. The shooting had taken place in a bank. The robber had not planned his raid with enough care: it was folly to tackle a bank single-handed when there were several customers in it; he should have watched to discover the quietest time in the week and picked that moment for the hold-up.

  The quietest time at his branch on the outskirts of Blewton was Wednesday afternoon: half-day closing. Some of the shops paid in their takings at lunchtime, so the tills were well stocked, but there were few withdrawals that afternoon and though two cashiers were nominally on duty, there was usually only one till operating at a time. There would be no problem about leaving a getaway car outside at that time, for the street was always empty then.

  Robbie had been planning a raid on the bank for months.

  The alarm system was the main risk. Each till was equipped with a foot pedal which triggered a warning within seconds to the main security network, but before the police could be summoned, two or three minutes must elapse: vital ones, and enough. In the years that Robbie had been at the branch it had never been robbed, though once a security van leaving with the wages for a local factory had been held up. At first he had thought of robbing a different bank, for he felt loyal to his own and it was a sort of treachery to plot against it. But he knew the customs of his own branch; he knew the staff; and above all, he was so much, by this time, a respected elder figure that he would never be suspected when he walked in, just after the raid which would take place in his lunch hour, and discovered what had happened.

  He had imagined it all many times. He parked, every morning, by the recreation ground which was just round the corner from the bank: five minutes’ walk. There was a public lavatory, discreetly screened by laurels, in a corner of the ground, and he would go into it to don his disguise. It was usually empty on Wednesdays, though in the school holidays small boys ran in and out. The raid would have to take place in term time, for its success depended on there being no one around. Its success depended, too, upon a getaway car being easily found. The area around the recreation ground was usually well stocked with parked cars, and Robbie had observed that there were always some with the key left in the ignition. After assuming his disguise, he would steal one of these cars, which he would have already marked down; he would drive it to the bank, walk in and demand the cash from the only till operating, and be away in two or three minutes, round the corner again and back into the lavatory, to emerge as himself with the money concealed in the carrier bag which held his sandwiches. It would not be a greedy raid: he would be content with the haul from one till, so the money would not be bulky to carry.

  But a getaway car would never be there on a Wednesday afternoon: the streets were deserted then. So the robbery wouldn’t take place. It was just a game, something to think about when confined in his domestic prison.

  He was sure he could carry it out without being caught, given the right circumstances: a getaway car available on a Wednesday between one and two o’clock; the bank free of customers, with only one cashier on the counter. And a gun.

  2

  On the way home from the bank, Robbie stopped quite often at the Star in Birley. It wasn’t so much the beer he enjoyed as the company. The innkeeper was a retired naval man who told stories about his foreign travels that were often hard to believe but always gripping, and the regular callers included villagers from the area as well as passers-by like Robbie. When Isabel began her scheme to move house, Robbie had suggested they should move to Birley: it was closer to Harbington than Blewton, so stil
l easy for her to get to Caprice, and no further from the second shop. But Isabel did not want an old, quaint village house; she wanted gas laid on and the urban comforts she was used to and some of these would be lacking in Birley.

  One of the people Robbie had got to know during the years when he had been calling at The Star was Wilfred Hunt, a farmer, who dropped in occasionally for a pint. As a boy, Robbie had spent happy months in the country with an uncle and aunt after his mother died, and he enjoyed talking to the farmer. Under the impression that Robbie was unmarried, Wilfred Hunt had, one evening, invited him back for supper. There was hotpot from the Aga cooker, apple pie, home-made bread, and cheese, eaten round the big scrubbed table in the kitchen. Wilfred’s wife was a cheerful woman who was used to feeding extra mouths without advance warning, and Robbie felt easy and relaxed in the friendly atmosphere. He discovered, after the meal, that Wilfred’s accounting system was flawed and helped him devise a better way of keeping his records; later, he found a young woman who had once worked in the bank and now, married, acted as a travelling farm secretary, to help him. She came once a week.

  The evening after Isabel’s fashion show, Robbie called at the Star and found Wilfred in the bar. His wife May was away, looking after their married daughter who had just had her second baby.

  Wilfred took Robbie back to the farm for supper. There was cold gammon, a huge piece cooked by May before she left, and Wilfred heated up some thick soup from a big jug in the refrigerator. After they had eaten, the farmer took Robbie out to the yard to look at a cow which was due to calve. The nights were cold, and Wilfred was keeping her in; her box was lined with thick straw, and she smelt warm and sweet, surveying the two men – Robbie incongruous in his business suit – with large, patient eyes. She seemed rather restless and Wilfred thought she might drop the calf soon.

  Back in the house, they went into Wilfred’s study, a shabby, comfortable room with leather-covered armchairs, Wilfred’s big, flat-topped desk, shelves of farm records and documents, and a gun cupboard, glass-fronted, holding Wilfred’s shotguns and two rifles.