The Bad Samaritan

by Robert Barnard

  “Such as?”

  “Such as: why is she making this confession at all? We had nothing on her, beyond her lying about her relationship with her husband—perfectly easily explained, when her husband had just been murdered. But we no sooner confronted her with those lies than she upped and confessed.”

  “She’s such a depressed and depressing little thing that I think I’d have decided that she just didn’t have the gumption to go on lying any more.”

  “I’m not sure I agree with the assessment,” said Charlie thoughtfully. “Maybe you don’t know her very well.”

  Rosemary nodded.

  “I don’t. I admit it.”

  “There’s more there than you allow for. Though what exactly it is I’m not sure I could say. But however you assess her character, I would have expected her to go on protesting her innocence to protect the position of her father, who depended on her. That’s one person she loves, even if that love isn’t returned with any great enthusiasm. As they always say: he’s all she’s got. Her thought, her solicitude, were all for him. And yet her confession, her arrest, would leave him alone. So at one point I asked myself: why?”

  “And the answer?”

  “The only convincing answer I could come up with was that the alternative was worse.”

  “His arrest and trial?”

  “Yes. Of course it hasn’t come to that because he’s been found unfit to plead.”

  There was a hesitancy in Charlie’s manner that made Rosemary ask, “And are you happy with that?”

  “Happy? Oh yes, happy we don’t have to put an eighty-year-old on trial and imprison him for the few years he has left in a thoroughly unsuitable institution.”

  “Well, to put it another way: do you think it was the right decision?”

  Charlie sat in the dim sunlight, pondering.

  “The psychiatrist was the best of the bunch we have to call on: sensible, down to earth, not one of those who’s crazier than the patient. He examined Unwin over a two-month period. At the end he was willing to declare him unfit to plead. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief.”

  “But it wasn’t an open-and-shut matter?”

  “No, it wasn’t. He had several reservations which he put in his report, no doubt to satisfy his professional conscience. There were aspects of Unwin’s behaviour that were not in accordance with the usual progress of Alzheimer’s disease or senile dementia. But he was the first to admit that you can’t be dogmatic about such things. And the fact is that the idea that Unwin is senile depends on his behaviour since the murder, his daughter’s testimony—one of the places where she was lying, I suspect—and a few stories Mills told about him to the St Saviour’s congregation. How often had you seen him in the last six or seven years?”

  “Just the once—the time I told you about.”

  “I should think that was true of everyone. His contemporaries had either died off or were in a similar situation to his own. Old people do get forgetful, confuse names, muddle up past and present. Mills could no doubt have told true stories about the old man that suggested he was far gone mentally.”

  “But what makes you think he wasn’t?”

  “The tears when he heard about Mills’s death. First I thought they were genuine grief. But later I heard from you about his nickname, ‘Onions.’ And I wondered whether this wasn’t a satirical commentary on his being able to produce tears at will.”

  “It was,” said Rosemary with relish. “The real waterworks. ‘Oh Lord, I have been a great sinner!’ with abundant liquid evidence of repentance.”

  “I thought that might be it.”

  “Oh, how nice it is to be able to laugh at things like that.”

  “Anyway, when I thought about the tears when Mills died, I realized that they were turned on in the old, practised way, and they fooled me, for one. I thought it was the most genuine grief I’d seen so far.”

  “But they had been fond of each other. Or rather, old Unwin had been fond of Stephen.”

  “That’s right. But I think things had gone downhill in recent years—probably ever since Unwin stopped being useful to Mills. He’d begun flaunting his women in front of him—we learnt this from . . . one of his girlfriends.”

  “From Janet. Don’t worry—I’ve guessed about that.”

  “Well, anyway . . . Unwin was a puritan of the old breed—possibly a fearsome old hypocrite to boot, but he would have been shocked and disgusted. Mills made satirical remarks about his physical and mental condition—we know that from Dorothy. And then he’d learned that his beloved furniture business had been sold off.”

  “Oh dear. Was that me?”

  “I think it might have been. I think that was the grudge he had against you.”

  “I seem to have had fatal effects in this business.”

  “If it hadn’t been you it could have been anyone. The fact is he only got out when the arthritis was in remission, when he tended to go off on his own. The likelihood was he wouldn’t see anyone he knew on those wanderings.”

  “But the business had been sold without his knowing?”

  “Yes. He’d made it over to Mills for tax reasons. When he took it over Mills stipulated that Unwin shouldn’t interfere—he shouldn’t even go back to his old shop. Actually it was a perfectly sensible condition. It’s everyone’s nightmare, the chap who had the job before you coming back and sticking his oar in. Unwin was a businessman himself, saw the point, and agreed without a qualm.”

  “But the business didn’t prosper under Stephen?”

  “I think it was the recession rather than Mills that sent it into a tailspin. You see all these rather desperate ads, don’t you, on television: no interest for the first two years—that kind of thing. Heavy, traditional English furniture is not what people buy when times are hard. When Mills found the shop was making very little money for him, he sold it for what he could get and ploughed the money into his dubious East European activities.”

  “Bringing in illegal immigrants?”

  “That and much, much more.”

  “But it’s hardly a motive for murder, is it?”

  “Not by itself. It was cumulative, I think. The old man had loved his business, lived for it and for his religion. He’d welcomed Mills as a son-in-law because he recognised him as a superb businessman who would take over after him. I think when he realised that the firm had been sold when things were difficult, when he realised his son was a common womaniser who had just used religion as a way of sucking up, when he became the butt of his cruel jokes, I think he realised that Mills had been using him for years, had made a complete fool of him. I think for the last few months, maybe years, he’d hated him. Probably it brought him and his daughter closer together than they’d ever been.”

  “I see. And I suppose the hatred and resentment would have gone on smouldering until the old man died without Stephen being murdered if the opportunity hadn’t presented itself.”

  “Exactly. What really happened that night was not that Dorothy Mills came to Herrick Park looking for her cat. In fact, she was on her way up to bed when she saw through a crack in the door that the light was still on in her father’s flat. She’d taken him his nightcap more than an hour earlier, and usually he’d have been well in bed by then. When she went in she found he’d gone wandering, as he had more than once before.”

  “I suppose he could have done that when I saw them on the park, and she’d come and got him.”

  “Exactly. The park was where he most often came. Now, what Dorothy said had happened to her was probably what happened to him. He probably told her about it later. He walked over to the park, then wandered around it, and eventually heard and saw the fight from a distance. Whether he recognised his son-in-law we can’t say, but when it was over he went to where the man lay, saw it was Stephen . . .”

  “Then cut his throat?”

  “Yes.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Well, we don’t know how long he thought about it or what sor
t of thought he was capable of. I’m not denying he was old and confused, just that he was senile. Dorothy had by this time come on to the park. She saw the figure of her father in the distance and ran over to him. By then it was already done, and his jacket sleeve was covered with blood . . . . That was another thing that worried me with her account.”

  “What?”

  “Not enough blood. You cut someone’s throat and it really spurts blood.”

  “That must have made getting him home difficult.”

  “Difficult and dangerous. There’s a stretch of well-lighted road between the park and the Ilkley Road, as you know, and she could avoid it only by taking a very long way round, which he probably couldn’t manage. She solved it by making her headscarf into a sort of sling, which hid most of the blood. When she got home she washed him clean in a plastic bowl—she knew from those television crime series (isn’t television wonderful?) that it is very difficult to get rid of all traces of blood in a modern plumbing system—then went out and disposed of the bowl and the bloody scarf in a skip. Unwin’s jacket was the most dangerous thing: she put it in a plastic bag and dumped it in a large bin on the Ilkley Road which she knew was emptied every day. Then all she had to fear was her father giving things away, so she really had to tutor him in how he should behave when the murder came out. He was sharp enough to take her point and follow her direction—a practised old hypocrite, I suspect.”

  “She seems to have been rather clever.”

  “Yes. I said I didn’t go along with your assessment of her. Granted the situation she was presented with, she showed great presence of mind.”

  “How do you rate her? What kind of person is she?”

  Charlie shook his head.

  “I don’t know. I just can’t fathom her. Unloved, neglected by both husband and father, seething with humiliation and resentment. But I don’t feel her character. Anything I know, I’ve been told by her, which is different. I feel I know what kind of man Mills was by now, but I don’t feel I have the same knowledge of his wife.”

  “People say she’s going to move.”

  “I don’t blame her. Though there’s always the danger that she’ll simply be even more lonely in strange surroundings. Still, there’s nothing to keep her here. And she’s used to loneliness—probably prefers it.”

  “Will she have any money?”

  “Sure. The house will bring in plenty, even in the current state of the market; and the legitimate side of the business is saleable: it was a good idea, and there will be people who can carry it on. Personally I hope they don’t continue to employ Brian Ferrett, but we can’t do anything about that.”

  “Was that Mills’s assistant?”

  “Yes. In it up to his ears, but we can’t charge him.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’ve probably heard about the Crown Prosecution Service. These days they don’t let us charge anyone unless it’s almost one hundred per cent sure we’ll get a conviction. It’s very frustrating. On Ferrett we had no more than fingerprints in number 94—that’s the place where all the dubious business was transacted—and a description in a letter. We might have had a hope if we’d managed to get hold of Stanko—of Milan Vico.”

  “Well, I’m very glad you haven’t.”

  “Have you heard from him recently?”

  “Just a one-minute phone call to say he’s all right. I don’t need anything else. I wasn’t in love with him, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “I was just so sad for him—running away from the fighting, having to leave his wife and baby behind.”

  Charlie hesitated, shuffled his feet, and then said, “Actually, we know quite a bit about Milan Vico now. Nothing criminal or to his discredit. But we’ve never had the slightest hint that he was married.”

  “Oh.” For a moment Rosemary was nonplussed. “You mean they were just sympathy getters?”

  “Something like that. I expect they were relatives—a sister or a cousin and her child, say—whose photographs he had brought with him.”

  Rosemary thought and then said, “It doesn’t make any difference, you know, not to how I see him. I expect if I were alone in a foreign, hostile country (because that’s what this is), I’d make a play for all the sympathy I could get from anyone who seemed kind or well disposed. I didn’t befriend him because he was brave and truthful or the soul of honour.”

  “You befriended him because he was a nice boy and slightly pathetic.”

  “That’s probably true. And as a son substitute.”

  “How is young Mark?”

  “Hmmm. There’s been a slight improvement. He sometimes stops himself before he makes a horribly pompous remark (I always know what the remark would have been). Or he says, ‘I know you’ll say I’m being pompous, but—.’ I suppose you could say there’s been a slight increase in self-knowledge. But I still feel very remote from him.”

  “Well,” said Charlie, sliding off the wall and dusting the seat of his track suit, “I won’t apply for the vacant post of son substitute.”

  “Please don’t. I don’t see you as one at all. You may be nice, but there’s nothing of the pathetic about you.”

  “Oh, I’m not even nice. And I was—am—a lousy son.”

  “I don’t believe that. Anyway, I certainly wouldn’t want pathetic policemen, though a few more nice ones wouldn’t go amiss. I’ll try to make do with what I’ve got. Janet’s a lovely daughter, I like her boyfriend, and Paul’s come out of this best of all: loving and loyal and steadfast—everything a husband should be.”

  “I notice you don’t put the final spit and polish to his car before service any longer.”

  “No, aren’t I awful? One awakening leads to another, I suppose. It suddenly seemed too ridiculous to go on doing it.”

  “Anyway, I’ll take my girlfriend along to St Saviour’s to hear him sometime.”

  “Oh, I didn’t say he was a splendid preacher,” Rosemary laughed. “Workaday, but no more than that.”

  Charlie raised his hand. “See you,” he said, and crossed the road and started jogging round the perimeter of the park.

  There was a watery sun shining now, and Rosemary bent down to pick up her puppy, who had begun throwing himself against the wall. They crossed the road and walked under the trees, the puppy snuffling happily and independently. Rosemary’s thoughts were far away. It was here that, for her, things had all started. Not for the main participants, of course. For them the thing had started long ago, probably when Dark Satanic and poor Dorothy had met. But for Rosemary life had changed suddenly here on Herrick Park; and as a consequence her life had become horribly, fatally involved with the affairs of a man she disliked and shrank from. Well, in that her instinct had been right.

  How she had so suddenly lost her belief in God was still a mystery to her. The suddenness of its leaving her seemed almost, ridiculously, like an act of God itself. But she did feel, as she walked under the trees, her eye on her lovely new dog, with the everyday activities of the park going on around, that the very suddenness and out-of-the-blueness of its going was an indication that one day, possibly, it would return to her, descend, envelop her with the same odd unpredictability. Sometimes recently she had got as far as hoping that it would.

  OTHER BOOKS BY ROBERT BARNARD

  The Masters of the House

  A Hovering of Vultures

  A Fatal Attachment

  A Scandal in Belgravia

  A City of Strangers

  Death of a Salesperson

  Death and the Chaste Apprentice

  At Death’s Door

  The Skeleton in the Grass

  The Cherry Blossom Corpse

  Bodies

  Political Suicide

  Fête Fatale

  Out of the Blackout

  Corpse in a Gilded Cage

  School for Murder

  The Case of the Missing Brontë

  A Little Local Murder

  Death and the Princess


  Death by Sheer Torture

  Death in a Cold Climate

  Death of a Perfect Mother

  Death of a Literary Widow

  Death of a Mystery Writer

  Blood Brotherhood

  Death on the High C’s

  Death of an Old Goat

  About the Author

  Robert Barnard (1936-2013) was awarded the Malice Domestic Award for Lifetime Achievement and the Nero Wolfe Award, as well as the Agatha and Macavity awards. An eight-time Edgar nominee, he was a member of Britain’s distinguished Detection Club, and, in May 2003, he received the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award for lifetime achievement in mystery writing. His most recent novel, Charitable Body, was published by Scribner in 2012.

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1995 by Robert Barnard

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.