Fete Fatale

by Robert Barnard

  She stroked Gustave, as he slept the sleep of the ignorant in her lap.

  ‘Erik was ambitious. He wanted to get on. Umeå was just a starting-place for him. He wanted to move down to Stockholm, or Göteborg. But he didn’t get on. I think perhaps he wasn’t as good as he thought he was. That was why he’d had to come to England for his training. He hadn’t quite managed to get the right grades in Sweden. And he put people’s backs up too. He was very cold, bitter, sarcastic—and this grew and grew. Because he thought he wasn’t appreciated. I didn’t have much to do with him at the hospital, but I had to cope with him at home. He got colder and colder, more and more withdrawn. Eventually there was—nothing. You know?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t.’

  She glanced up at me, and then looked hurriedly down.

  ‘When my old dog died, I mourned her, but she was nearly fifteen, and she died naturally, and I’d loved her and given her a good life. After my people died, I never used even to come back to Britain on holiday, because I couldn’t take her with me. Erik said we shouldn’t have another dog. He said he was fed up with the noise and the smell, and the problems when she was on heat . . . By then things were pretty bad between us . . . I just went out and bought Gustaf . . . He was the only thing I had—the only company. You’ll never have known what it’s like when an animal’s the only thing one has. He was everything to me. Erik, you see, became . . . manic. It’s the only way to describe it. In the end he dimly saw it himself. He went into an institution, voluntarily. I visited him there, but he was like someone I’d never known . . . Then one night he . . . took something.’

  In the silence she added drearily:

  ‘I was very glad.’

  She bent to whisper secret nothings in Gustaf’s ear.

  ‘There was nothing to keep me in Sweden. I wanted to get away from that cold place. My widow’s pension was very good, because of Erik’s job. It would go even further in England. But there was Gustaf, and those cruel quarantine laws. Six months! Six months in a kennel!’ Her face lit up with a momentary passion, as it had not done when she told me about her marriage. ‘I do think it’s cruel! And silly! No other nation thinks it necessary. They all accept the anti-rabies injection. Why can’t Britain do the same? And even if it’s necessary for animals from Italy or Portugal and places like that, it can’t be necessary for Swedish ones. The country’s a damned sight cleaner and more health-conscious than Britain!’

  ‘Marcus thought it necessary,’ I said. ‘He felt strongly about keeping out rabies. He used often to marvel at the silliness of people who tried to evade the quarantine regulations.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I found out he felt like that . . . Anyway, there was this boy, this boy who lived next door. He was a bit rough, but nice, and rather in rebellion against all those dour, formal Swedes. You’ve no idea how punctilious Swedes can be, and he was a relief, and he came and talked often, when he was home. He was a sailor—he’d been in everything: merchant shipping, cruise ships, fishing-boats, the lot. One day he was round in my kitchen, and we were talking and laughing, and I was saying how I wanted, how I wanted, to get away, but that I couldn’t bear the thought of putting Gustaf in a kennel for six months. It would have been like a betrayal—after all he’d been to me in those terrible last years of marriage. I knew people who’d had their animals in quarantine, you see. One of them said to me: “You get a dog back at the end, but it’s not the same dog. Not your dog.” I couldn’t have borne it.’

  ‘I think that’s nonsense,’ I said briskly. ‘Animals adapt much more readily than we imagine.’

  ‘Not all animals,’ she said, almost fiercely.’ You wouldn’t have, would you, my precious? My angel . . . So that’s what we did. He had all the necessary contacts, of course. I sold the house, and arranged to have the furniture sent into storage in England. Then I took Gustaf across into Norway, to Bodø, and this boy had arranged with a Norwegian fishing-boat skipper to smuggle him on board. Then I flew to England, bought a car, and drove up to the West coast of Scotland, where I was to pick him up. It all went so wonderfully smoothly. It was worth every penny I paid. Then Gustaf and I drove down into Yorkshire, looking for somewhere to live. Yorkshire was nice, and far from Dorset, where I was brought up. It had always been one of my favourite counties. After Umeå even the Shetlands wouldn’t have seemed bleak. I looked for a house I could move into almost immediately, and we found one here. I couldn’t believe everything could have gone so well.’

  ‘But you still had to be very careful,’ I said. ‘I looked through the records this morning. I notice that you never used Marcus as a vet, though you pretended to me that you had.’

  ‘No, I didn’t. Just to be on the safe side. The only time Gustaf needed one, I went into Darlington. There was just the possibility of awkward questions. Of course I should have told people here that I was from Sweden, but that I’d been in the country for more than six months—staying with relatives, for example. But I was afraid to bring the idea of abroad into things at all. Then I soon found I was making mistakes—the sort of mistakes that people do make who’ve been out of the country for a long time. Not big, vital mistakes, as a rule, but silly little mistakes that mount up and give them away, like crossing the figure seven. Often I didn’t even know I’d made them—as with “priest”, or asking for “packets” of cigarettes. And that was even more frightening than if I’d realized what I’d done. I should never have accepted the invitation to your place, since Marcus was really the main danger to me. I tried to withdraw from the fête, saying I wanted to go on holiday, but you know what a frightful bully Franchita is. My instinct, when I realized I was making mistakes, was to lie as low as possible till I’d been in the country six months—then I thought nobody would worry too much. They would punish me, but they wouldn’t . . . do anything to Gustaf. But I had to do the fête. Normally I’m quite a cool person on the surface. I’ve been a ward sister in a hospital, after all, so I’ve had to be. But sometimes the calm, efficient surface covers . . . panic! Flap! It was like that with Marcus, standing there by your stall as he did, watching everything. I started giving wrong change. That poor child was crying its heart out—I love children—and I spoke to him in Swedish! It was so natural. But with Marcus there!’

  ‘And he realized, did he?’

  ‘Oh yes. He realized. When I’d sold out, I packed up for the day and started off home. I went the long way round, by Castle Walk, to give Gustaf an extra run. He’d been such an angel all day, hadn’t you, my bestest boy? And then I heard footsteps, coming up fast behind me. It was Marcus. And he called my name, and I stopped, and he caught up with me and came right out with it at once. He said: “Mrs Nielson, how long have you been living in this country?” ’

  There was silence in the room. I thought about poor Marcus, sailing unawares and fearless to his stupid, unnecessary death.

  ‘He knew, you see. If I’d been long in the country, I wouldn’t still be making silly mistakes with the money . . . I tried to say I’d always lived here, but he shook his head. He started saying, “You do realize what rabies can do to people, how they die from it?” I was carrying my hat. I’d arrived, you know, rather overdressed for the fête, and I’d taken it off. It was you told me that new people often bought a hat from Franchita, and I’d gone off and bought one. A very staid, old-fashioned one, which I thought would be right for Hexton. It had a pin. I had my fingers on the pin as he spoke.’

  ‘And you had, of course, the necessary medical knowledge,’ I said, my voice harsh, as I tried to put the picture from my mind: the pin sliding into the vital area, Marcus falling . . .

  ‘Yes. I had the knowledge. I don’t think it was a matter of thought, of considering whether, of deciding. I just pulled the pin out of the hat, and stuck it into him. Between the ribs, into the heart. Then I pulled it out, and pushed him over the side, as he was dying . . . I’m not going to apologize, or ask forgiveness . . . I can hardly recognize that it was me who did that . . . I was in some
sort of trance, it came over me like a white heat, though I seemed perfectly cool on the surface. I walked on, then back home through town. I talked to people I knew, said what a successful fête it had been. Then I got back here, and I buried the pin in the garden, and then . . . Well, I can’t tell you what I felt then. The sense of shame and self-disgust . . . mingled with a sort of exhilaration. It disgusts me now. I hate myself now—and yet, when I thought I was going to get away with it, I was almost . . . congratulating myself.’

  She was stroking, obsessively, Gustaf’s head.

  ‘Well,’ she asked in a low voice, ‘what do we do now?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m not sure that we do anything. I should tell you that, apart from what you’ve just told me, which nobody has overheard, the police have no evidence whatsoever that you killed Marcus. Nobody saw you do it, noboby even saw him coming after you along Castle Walk. There is the pin, of course: they might be able to do something if they found the pin. But at the moment, there is no case.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ she said, putting Gustaf gently down on the sofa. ‘Perhaps they couldn’t prove that I killed Marcus. But they could very easily prove that I have only been in this country three months or so, and that I brought Gustaf in illegally. And they will kill him, of course. There is no longer any point . . . I could kill him myself, rather than waiting for them to do it. I have plenty stuff upstairs. But I don’t think I could bring myself to do that. I could kill myself—much more easily I could kill myself—but it seems more fitting to . . . expiate—is that the word?—what I did, some way. Helen, did you say there were policemen outside?’

  ‘Yes. One at the back, one at the front.’

  ‘It wasn’t necessary, you know. But how could you know? Will you do one thing for me? Will you take charge of Gustaf? Will you—will Marcus’s partner—make sure that . . . what has to be done . . . is done quickly, in the humanest possible way? Perhaps you could be with him for the first injection? He knows you.’

  She went to the door, without another glance at me or her dog. I heard her open the front door, and say to the policeman there: ‘I wonder if you would be so good as to come with me to the police station?’

  I took Gustaf in my arms, and from the front garden we saw them walking down the road towards town. Gwen Nilsson seemed be carrying on a polite conversation, in the quiet, cool and efficient manner that I had liked from the first.

  CHAPTER 18

  AFTERWARDS

  Ironically enough, they did not put Gustaf down. They don’t always, though Gwen Nilsson didn’t realize that. He was put into quarantine kennels for the remainder of his six months, then let out into the care of one of her neighbours, until such a time as she should be released from jail.

  Which should not be long now. As with the lady recently who ran over her lover several times, and was released by the judge on the grounds that it was done at her difficult time of the month, so this case the judge (who arrived at the Court each day in his limousine, with his two poodles on the back seat) was positively complimentary: this was an act—a foolish, wicked act—that was done on the spur of the moment by a thoroughly upright and responsible person; it was the sort of murder that was unlikely to happen again, springing as it did from a most unlikely combination of circumstances; what was more—here the judge became benevolently circumlocutory—the lady in question was going through The Change. Society would not be served, he thought, by a long sentence, so he gave her a very short one. ‘It’s a wonder he didn’t let her off with a £10 fine,’ I said bitterly afterwards.

  But really I found it very difficult to sort out my emotions. I’ve never been one of the ‘punish ’em until it hurts’ brigade. But how could he be so sure that she would not do it again? How could he be sure that other people might not use his leniency as a precedent and an encouragement? Above all, I suppose, I asked: ‘Was Marcus’s life only worth two years?’ Her house is sold, and soon she will be out. She will collect Gustaf, and go and live elsewhere. No doubt she will be discreet about her past. She’s had experience in that.

  And yet there is another part of me that says something else. When Superintendent Coulton came the day afterwards to talk it over, before he went back to Leeds, he said:

  ‘I have to hand it to you. I’d never have thought of that motive. They say there aren’t any new ones, but that is a motive I’ve never come across.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘The motive was love. She murdered for love.’

  And that, I suppose, was it. That was the reason why, in my less bitter moments, I didn’t think so harshly of the judge.

  Meanwhile Hexton goes on pretty much as before. Mary Morse has not been put away, but people have definitely realized that she’s ‘gone a bit funny’, in local phrase. She smiles at people royally as she walks down the High Street, she delivers moral pronouncements à propos of nothing to innocent bystanders, she writes letters of instruction to the local mayor. One would not be surprised, if her house had a balcony, to see her doing ‘Urbis et orbe’ from it to imagined crowds of pilgrims. Her God bus never, so to speak, got off the ground. She now takes a taxi, alone, to Shipford for Sunday service. Hawkins, the local taxi-man, then ferries a Shipford high churchman back for the Hexton service, so the score is 1-1. Hawkins himself is a Methodist and attends chapel in the evening, so he serves both God and Mammon, though not in that order.

  Father Battersby’s services settled down to attracting about fifteen or twenty more people than Walter Primp’s, and this is thought of as a great triumph. Franchita goes regularly to them, because they seem to satisfy some of her inner hunger for drama. Otherwise she is slightly less bossy than before, but still makes regular visits to her dentist in Barnard’s Castle. Howard Culpepper, I am quite sure, is fully aware of the purpose of these visits, but views them in the light of liberation for himself. Timothy Horsforth has moved away, to a flat in Darlington, and never returns, even for visits. I am occasionally allowed fill-in weeks of teaching at his father’s school, but I like the man none the more. Rumours are beginning to get around about Fiona Weston . . . Visitors to Harrogate report that Thyrza Primp is almost permanently installed at the windows of Betty’s Tea Rooms, glaring at the tourists, and making a Yorkshire teacake go a very long way indeed.

  I never did escape from Hexton, you notice. Perhaps I felt some shame at having blamed it for the murder of Marcus. I was wrong, after all: a woman living in Hexton did kill him, but not Hexton, not the spirit of the place. And then, the Battersby affair had taught me that there was another Hexton, which was not all tea-drinking and gossip and social churchgoing and ‘nice’ library books. This was a Hexton where it was perfectly possible to feel at home and be myself—not a particularly pleasant or comfortable thing to be, but it is the only self I have got.

  There is one more reason why I have not left Hexton: a little over a year after Marcus’s death, I married Father Battersby. But that is another and quite a different sort of story.

  We hope you enjoyed reading this Scribner eBook.

  * * *

  Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Scribner and Simon & Schuster.

  CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

  or visit us online to sign up at

  eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

  Originally published in Britain as

  Disposal of the Living.

  Copyright © 1985 Robert Barnard

  Copyright under the Berne Convention.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book

  may be reproduced in any form without the

  permission of Charles Scribner’s Sons.

  ISBN 978-1-4767-3722-5 (ebook)

 

 

 
lter: grayscale(100%); -moz-filter: grayscale(100%); -o-filter: grayscale(100%); -ms-filter: grayscale(100%); filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share