16
Ten minutes later the doorbell rang.
Isabel glanced out of the window. She could see Charlie’s father standing on the doorstep. She went downstairs and opened the door to him and said ‘Yes?’ inquiringly.
‘Oh – is everything all right? I heard a noise – it seems silly – it sounded like a shot,’ said the young man rather awkwardly.
Things next door had been strange for some days. There were the late arrivals at night – or rather, in the small hours – and Charlie’s return in tears on Sunday morning after Mrs Robinson’s harsh dismissal. Charlie and his parents always thought of Isabel as Mrs Robinson, but Robbie was Robbie to them all. Then there had been Mrs Robinson’s bonfire on Sunday afternoon; she had been seen putting a table on the fire – old rubbish, probably, being turned out before the move, but Charlie’s parents had never seen her working in the garden or lighting a fire before: all such jobs were Robbie’s.
‘It was the boiler you heard,’ said Isabel smoothly. ‘Some sort of backfire. It will have to be attended to. I’ve turned it off.’
‘Oh, I see,’ said Charlie’s father, feeling foolish.
‘Kind of you to call,’ said Isabel in a grim voice. ‘Wait, will you? Robbie has some things for your little boy.’ She moved back into the hall and called upstairs, ‘Robbie? It’s Mr Pearce from next door. You’ve got those toys. Shall I come and fetch them?’ She paused. ‘He may not be able to hear me,’ she said. ‘He’s lying down. He isn’t feeling very well. I’ll just fetch them. We’re moving on Saturday, and Robbie wants – er – Charlie to have them before we go. Wait a minute.’
She did not invite him in. Charlie’s father stood on the doorstep while Isabel ascended the staircase in a majestic, unhurried manner. She was gone only a few minutes, returning with the soldier and the other toys that had been in Robbie’s top drawer.
‘Thanks very much,’ said the young man. ‘Charlie will come and thank Robbie himself before you go.’
Isabel closed the door upon her caller and looked at the clock: five minutes to seven. Charlie’s father would remember that she had been speaking to Robbie at that time.
When the gun went off, Robbie had fallen to the ground. Isabel had snatched the gun from him and stood it against the wall, well away from him. For all she knew it might go off again. She looked at Robbie who was trying to stand up, moaning slightly and holding his hands to his eyes. She saw that the shot had buried itself in the wall, low down near the skirting board.
Robbie cringed away from her.
‘You’re ill, Robbie,’ Isabel told him in her normal stern voice. ‘Come along upstairs.’
She took him by the arm and pulled him to his feet. Robbie allowed himself to be half led, half supported, up the stairs to his own room where he collapsed on the bed, curling up, knees to chin, in a helpless posture.
Isabel looked at him with scorn. Her mind was moving fast. She went down to the bathroom and took four tablets from her bottle of sleeping pills. They were Mogadon and looked like aspirin. She rarely needed them but kept them for the few times, such as sales weeks, when she felt overstimulated and sleep was elusive. She took them upstairs, with a glass of water, and made Robbie drink them down.
‘They’ll do your headache good,’ she told him. ‘You’ve got one, haven’t you?’
Robbie nodded. He was scarcely aware of her actions. At this moment, Charlie’s father called, and when Isabel returned to Robbie’s room to fetch the toys he was lying with his eyes closed, almost drowsing.
After Charlie’s father had gone, Isabel took a glass from the kitchen. She put on the rubber gloves she kept by the sink and polished the glass well. Then she filled it with whisky. Back in Robbie’s room again, she dissolved more sleeping pills in the glass while he lay there, eyes closed, moaning a little. She did not think they were very strong pills and they might not be enough for her purpose: she would have to embellish her plan, and her eye had fallen on the polythene bags so conveniently waiting.
She put an arm round Robbie’s shoulders and raised his head.
‘Drink this, Robbie. It will do you good,’ she said, and held the glass, cloudy with the drug, to his lips. ‘It’s whisky,’ she added, as he grimaced.
Robbie was too far gone to protest at the taste. He drank the mixture, Isabel making him hold the glass, and when it was all gone she put it down on the floor beside the bed, then tipped it over on its side, for realism. She had brought the bottle of pills up with her, and she pressed his fingers round it, then set it on his chest of drawers.
She waited a few minutes, until he seemed to be asleep, before she slipped one of the polythene bags over his head and shoulders. It ballooned with his breath. She took a tie from his drawer and secured it around his neck to prevent oxygen entering. She had read of such suicides. She lifted Robbie’s hands and pressed them to the bag in case the shiny surface retained prints, then laid them down again.
She took away the bathroom glass and returned it to its place, washing and polishing it. The police would assume that after she had gone out, Robbie had come downstairs and helped himself to the whisky and the pills.
She must, therefore, go out.
First she went out to the car and brought in the bag containing Robbie’s pathetic disguise. She put the items back in the drawer where she had found them. There was no way of telling how much time she had: the policeman who had come to the shop that afternoon might decide to call.
She intended to say that after she got home that evening, she had heard a sound like a shot from upstairs. She had found Robbie in her room, lying on the floor with a gun beside him. She had moved it from his reach, and he had muttered something about the raid on the bank but she hadn’t been able to make sense of what he was saying.
She might be asked if she thought he had tried to shoot himself, and she would reply that she supposed he had. He had been behaving strangely lately.
But she had told the policeman that afternoon that he had not been acting strangely. She would have to say that naturally she had said that: her husband’s behaviour was a private matter. She would never have imagined he could be responsible for the bank robbery, but of course it explained everything, she would add. If only she’d known.
She had already planned to go out for the evening, and when Robbie was lying down she had gone ahead, she would say. She might be criticized for this.
‘You mean you left your husband alone in the house after he’d tried to shoot himself? And with the gun still in the house?’ she imagined herself being asked.
‘I didn’t know what to do,’ she would reply. ‘I wanted to talk it over with a friend. And I wasn’t late home.’
She dare not be late: this could not be left till the morning, it would seem too callous. She would look in on Robbie after she returned and would discover his weird suicide. He must have thought it the only thing to do after robbing the bank, she would say, and wondered if she would manage to squeeze out a tear.
She put the rubber gloves back in the kitchen. Then she telephoned Beryl, who was overjoyed at the opportunity to offer her supper unexpectedly, although it would have to be somewhat scratch at such short notice.
‘Something rather upsetting has happened, Beryl,’ Isabel said. ‘Robbie isn’t at all well. I want to talk to you about it.’
She would have to ask Beryl to say that their evening together had been prearranged: it will make it easier, she would say, and Beryl would gladly agree to that small deceit. She’d tell Beryl the version of the shooting that the police would hear later; it would be a good chance to rehearse.
There was no more to be done. Isabel left the house, locking Robbie in; for all she knew, he was already dead.
Detective Inspector Thomas rang Wendy’s bell at eight o’clock the next morning. He had been up for most of the night.
Wendy was dressed, and eating Weetabix. She knew at once that something more had happened, and stood back silently to let Thomas into the room.
‘Miss Lomax – Wendy,’ he began. ‘I’ve got some very bad news.’
An icy feeling filled the pit of Wendy’s stomach. Robbie had been arrested. But it wasn’t her fault, she told herself quickly; she’d told no one about the gloves.
‘It’s Robbie,’ she said.
‘I’m afraid so,’ said Thomas, and added, ‘I’m very sorry, he’s dead.’
For an instant Wendy stared at him.
‘No!’ she said. ‘No! He can’t be!’
‘I’m afraid he is,’ said Thomas.
‘But – but the bank raid –?’ Wendy put her hands to her mouth, aghast.
‘He did it.’ Thomas said. ‘We were just beginning to catch up with him. Had you guessed? The phone calls?’
‘I knew,’ said Wendy, almost whispering. ‘But not till Sunday. It was the gloves – they were in his car, in the locker. He didn’t know I’d seen them.’ She sat down and folded her arms across her body as if to comfort herself. ‘I know I should have told you,’ she said. ‘But I just couldn’t.’
That terrible woman, Mrs Robinson, had said that her husband had been away for the weekend but that she did not know where he had gone. So he’d been with Wendy. What a toil, thought Thomas wearily.
‘But how did he die?’ Wendy asked, and then answered her own question. ‘He must have killed himself.’
‘No,’ said Thomas. No need for Wendy to be told now that it looked as if Robbie had tried to kill his wife, though Mrs Robinson insisted he had tried to shoot himself; when this failed, he had tried another method, she maintained.
‘He was murdered,’ said Thomas. They’d be charging her this morning.
‘Murdered?’ Wendy stared at him, horrified, her face white.
‘An attempt was made to make it seem like suicide,’ said Thomas.
He thought of Isabel Robinson’s hysterical raving in the night. The Harbington inspector had called him when he discovered that the dead man had worked at the bank which had been robbed. Mrs Robinson had said that a detective from Blewton had been to her shop in the afternoon, inquiring about her husband. She said she had no idea that he was involved with the robbery, but her prints had been found on the dark glasses in the drawer. She’d lied a good deal, it seemed, and her lies about the shooting were not clever: the angle of the shot in the bedroom for instance, did not look like a suicide’s aim, and there were spare cartridges in the dead man’s pockets. Suicides didn’t expect to miss. She could have only one reason for not telling the police what had really happened with the gun.
In the end, the woman had raged, ‘She’s not having him, that woman – whoever she is. He’s mine,’ and had muttered something about ‘Wendy’s table’. It had taken most of the night to put it all together and there were still some loose ends to tie up. All the things used in the robbery except the toy pistol were in that bleak attic room. A more accomplished villain would have destroyed the evidence, but Robbie hadn’t even got rid of the gloves. The pistol might yet turn up, but there was plenty to nail him without it.
‘How?’ Wendy asked. ‘How did she do it?’ For it had to be Isabel who had killed poor Robbie.
‘Sleeping pills,’ said Thomas. ‘And whisky. He wouldn’t have known anything.’
Wendy could learn later about the polythene bag. At first the Harbington CID had thought they’d got an accidental death, a sad man breathing carbon monoxide for kicks and going too far. But the woman had hurried to tell them about the bank and the disgrace if Robbie were charged with the robbery. They’d got on to her then, quite fast.
‘Poor Robbie,’ said Wendy again. ‘He was so unhappy.’
‘Not all the time, surely?’ said Thomas curtly. He’d had a pretty good weekend, for instance, with this girl. ‘Think about the good bits,’ he advised, and added, ‘You won’t be involved.’ Not if he could help it.
‘He knew we weren’t going on together,’ Wendy was saying. ‘He was very miserable on Sunday night, when we parted.’
Thomas felt his heart lightening at this news.
‘It had nothing to do with you,’ he said. ‘His wife found the things he’d used for the raid – his disguise. She didn’t want the publicity of his arrest and trial. But she wasn’t quite clever enough.’
There had been none of his prints on the bathroom cabinet, where the medicines were kept. It was difficult to see how he had fetched the bottle without leaving some trace of his visit to the bathroom, which was so clean and well polished that it bore no signs of his presence in it at all.
The Harbington inspector had been disgusted. To him, the only bright aspect of the whole case was that one of their mysteries had been solved: a missing shotgun had turned up. They hadn’t begun to find out how Robbie had acquired it.
‘People like this, with everything they can want,’ the Harbington man had said. ‘How can they do such things?’
‘We both know it happens all the time,’ Thomas had answered.
‘She murdered his soul first,’ said Wendy slowly, looking at Thomas at last. ‘Over all those years they were together.’
‘Yes,’ Thomas said. ‘People do that to one another. Look – have some coffee. I’ll make you a fresh cup. And mine’s gone cold, too.’ He bustled about, preparing it, then sat opposite her among the remains of her breakfast. ‘Drink it up,’ he said.
‘I should be going to work, I’ll be late,’ said Wendy.
‘Never mind about that,’ said Thomas. ‘Look – couldn’t you go away for a few days? What about that friend of yours, the one where we went for the pistol? Could you stay there for a bit? Till the fuss has died down?’
If she was around, she might be questioned; the super might insist, when he saw the report. But she wasn’t an essential witness. The press would like her angle, though, and might uncover the whole story.
‘I’m going to Scotland on Saturday to stay with my mother,’ said Wendy.
‘Could you go today?’ Thomas asked.
‘My holiday doesn’t start until Saturday,’ Wendy said.
‘I think we might arrange something with the bank,’ said Thomas. He’d already had a talk with the manager, upon whom he had called before coming here, rousing him before his alarm clock had rung. Nigel could not believe that quiet, dependable Robbie had robbed his own bank and had met such a dreadful fate, and kept wondering what head office would have to say about the disgrace.
Thomas looked at Wendy. He’d have to take it very gently.
‘When you come back,’ he said in a light voice, ‘maybe you’d help me fix up a picnic for my two lads. I’m not much good at that sort of thing.’
About the Author
Margaret Yorke is one of the most renowned British female authors of the mystery novel. She was born in Surrey but she spent her childhood in Dublin, Ireland before moving to England in 1937. During World War II she worked as a driver for the Women’s Royal Naval service, and after the war she became the first woman to work in Christ Church library, Oxford.
She served as Chairman of the Crime Writer’s association between 1979 and 1980, and went on to win the 1993 Golden Handcuffs award, a prize given to the UK’s most popular crime writer. She was also awarded the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger in 1999.
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