A Market for Murder

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘Timmy wants to get dressed. I said he should wait for you. His shorts are muddy. I can’t find any more.’

  The system for clean clothes was haphazard at the best of times. Drew had a feeling there would be nothing clean available. Most of Timmy’s clothes were almost certainly sitting in the laundry basket, awaiting attention. Karen’s insistence on living an ecologically benign lifestyle extended to not using the washing machine more than once a week. Drew approved, in theory. It kept the electricity bills down, and seemed to present no serious difficulties.

  ‘He can wear the muddy ones today,’ Drew suggested. ‘It is Sunday, after all. Nobody’s going to see him.’ Then he remembered that they were probably meant to go to see Karen in hospital that afternoon. How could they do otherwise? And how could he forgive himself for his deepening sense of reluctance?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Julie Grafton had been intending to make some phone calls, thanking people for letters and flowers, bringing them up to date with her state of mind, just making contact with other human beings. But she kept putting it off. It was Sunday, she remembered. People did family things on a Sunday. They didn’t like to be bothered by the phone. But even so, there were two or three who wouldn’t mind.

  It was nearly two weeks now since Peter had died. She wondered if there was a rule or formula for how a new widow was supposed to be feeling after this length of time. It would be interesting to know. She tried to remember her grandmother, after Grandad had died. All she could recall was the elderly woman – actually not quite seventy – walking briskly down the main street of Wakefield, greeting friends and holding tight to a long shopping list, while Julie tagged along behind her, under strict instructions from her mother to make sure Granny was all right. As far as she’d been able to tell, Granny had been fine. If anything she’d seemed rather more cheerful than she had in the weeks prior to being widowed.

  Of course, that had been different. Grandad had been ill, and a very cantankerous patient. It had obviously come as a relief when he did eventually die. With Peter, nobody could have expected it. She would be assumed to be still in shock, unable to believe the enormity of what had happened. Perhaps she was in shock. Perhaps that was the right word for this floaty feeling, this sense of irresponsibility and selfishness. Once she’d been told that Peter had made a will, so that everything came undisputedly to her, and that his sister had no intention of arguing about it, the worst immediate worry was removed. She wouldn’t starve. But every time she permitted herself to glance to the future, she was gripped with a panic that left her gasping. How would she ever manage by herself? She’d married at twenty-one, had almost never spent a night alone, and couldn’t begin to identify herself as a single woman.

  But that was dealt with by a stern refusal to look ahead. There was enough going on in the here and now; enough emotions to distract her from her terrors. Emotions of sadness, frustration and puzzlement. Somebody had actually shot her husband. This simple fact swirled around and around, obscuring a lot of what she would be thinking otherwise.

  It had to be because of his apple juice contract. She had warned him it would make him unpopular. ‘And you know how you hate it when people dislike you,’ she’d reminded him. ‘What are you thinking of?’

  ‘They’ll understand,’ he’d replied, with total confidence. ‘I’ll be a sort of third columnist. I’ll show them how grand organic juice can be, and that it doesn’t have to cost the earth. I’m doing this for the whole community. Forging links. It’s time they all realised that we’re never going to get rid of supermarkets. So we have to join forces with them. It’s absolutely obvious. Common sense. They’ll soon see it my way.’

  Julie had doubted it, but he had gone ahead with the contract anyway. She hadn’t realised that anybody else knew about it. Peter had sworn her to secrecy, and seemed intent on keeping it private until the very last moment. Presumably somebody at SuperFare had blabbed, and the whole thing had somehow leaked out. That, at least, had been her initial assumption when she heard he’d been shot. Strange, she thought now, how instantly she’d managed to explain it to herself. And how little she cared, then or now, about revenge.

  Maggs and Den had driven home after their steaks and debates, each feeling slightly dissatisfied. ‘We didn’t really get very far, did we?’ Maggs said. ‘I was hoping a name would leap out at us, once we all three got together.’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Den sounded vague. ‘I need to have more of a think.’

  Now, on Sunday morning, Maggs was impatient for his conclusions. ‘Well?’ she demanded. ‘Any progress?’

  ‘Not really,’ he admitted. ‘There is something about these three witches that’s niggling.’

  Maggs huffed impatiently. ‘I don’t think you should call them that. It’s silly. They’re not witches at all.’

  He shook his head. ‘I know. It was just the picture they painted. It seems to fit.’

  ‘Well, don’t get carried away. It sets the wrong tone, somehow. Gives the wrong idea. They’re probably not in any kind of alliance, when it comes to it. Mary Thomas isn’t directly involved in the farmers’ markets, for a start. Geraldine is all organisation and hardly any actual hands-on farming. They live in three different villages. How often do you think they actually see each other?’

  ‘OK. I get the point.’ He took a slow mouthful of coffee, almost forgetting to swallow it. ‘But they are important all the same,’ he said at last. ‘I think it all centres around them.’

  ‘Well, let’s find out then,’ she said impatiently. ‘I’m all for making things happen. We could sit around like this for months, with the trail getting cold, all the evidence washed away. People will forget and carry on as before. What proportion of murders go unsolved?’ She stared at him challengingly. ‘Just because everybody loses interest and wanders off.’

  ‘Mostly it’s obvious who did it,’ he said. ‘And mostly we get a lot of help from the public.’

  ‘We?’ she echoed. ‘Listen to yourself! This time we’re the public. Don’t forget that.’

  ‘No, I won’t,’ he said meekly. ‘Now, let’s hear the worst, then. How exactly are we going to make things happen?’

  ‘Ah! Well …’ She sat down facing him across the kitchen table. ‘I haven’t worked out the details yet. It can’t be any sort of re-enactment, because we haven’t got enough of an idea what happened. But I thought we might make some waves, and see what gets washed ashore. So to speak.’ She dimpled her plump cheeks at him. ‘Pretend we know more than we do. That sort of thing.’

  Den’s features crumpled in a grimace. ‘It sounds dreadfully – well, risky,’ he demurred.

  ‘No, no,’ she breezed. ‘Not at all. Just listen to this.’

  Drew took the children to see Karen that afternoon. A senior nurse met him at the door to the ward, and asked if she could have a word. A different policeman was positioned on sentry duty in the corridor.

  ‘Your wife is beginning to regain consciousness,’ the woman announced, with an air of someone bestowing a prize. ‘She might even speak to you, if you’re patient. She had a visitor yesterday evening who seems to have helped the process.’

  Drew glanced at the policeman. ‘Are you letting her have visitors, other than me?’

  ‘Oh, well, yes. If it’s somebody we know. And we were careful to keep an eye on her.’

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘Mrs Beech. Constable Plover was here at the time, and he knows her quite well, apparently.’

  ‘But—’ Drew felt alarmed and helpless. How could they be so blind as to think Geraldine Beech above suspicion? He himself could see no reason to remove her from the list of suspects. ‘But Karen’s been all right since then? I mean, she’s continued to improve?’

  ‘Oh yes. I think we’ll soon be able to say she’s out of the woods.’

  He had a fleeting image of his wife wandering blindly between great dark trees, lost and lonely, frightened and powerless. Oh yes, he thought, may she
soon get out of the woods.

  He ushered the children gently into the room. Karen lay exactly as before, flat on her back, still looking like somebody else. The dressing on the side of her head concealed most of the shaved area, and looked much less odd than might have been expected. It wasn’t that so much as her stillness, and the waxiness of her skin. She looked, Drew could not deny, like a dead body in his own cool room.

  With no warning, Timmy launched himself onto the bed in a flying leap, too fast for Drew to stand a chance of intercepting him. The child landed in a scrabbling muddle half on top of his mother, feet dangling as he struggled for a toehold amongst the framework of the bed.

  ‘Timmy!’ Drew hissed, afraid to shout. ‘Get off, you stupid boy.’

  But Timmy ignored him. He had one arm wrapped round Karen and was nuzzling into her chest. The sight made Drew shudder, and reach out to drag the child away. What if he’d killed her? It would be Drew’s fault, for not keeping him under better control.

  But it seemed there was no need to worry. ‘Timmy,’ came a low purring voice. ‘Hello, baby.’

  Stephanie and Drew were transfixed, rooted to the vinyl floor. Timmy burrowed harder. Karen opened her eyes.

  As if aware of what was happening, the nurse came in behind Drew. ‘Mrs Slocombe?’ she said in a normal voice. ‘Your family are here.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Karen, her voice just as normal as the nurse’s. ‘Timmy’s trying to crush me, I think.’

  ‘How do you feel?’ the nurse continued. Then, without waiting for an answer, she approached the bed and removed Timmy as casually as if he were a misplaced garment. ‘Let your poor mother breathe,’ she said easily, and stood him on a chair next to the bed.

  ‘I feel sort of – hollow,’ said Karen. ‘Like a dry husk.’

  ‘Any pain?’

  ‘Not really. I think my head would hurt if I moved. What day is it?’

  Drew finally managed to move and speak. ‘Sunday,’ he offered. ‘Sunday afternoon.’

  Karen exhaled, a little huff of laughter. ‘Should I ask what year it is?’ she said. ‘For all I know, I’ve been here for decades. Except …’ she swivelled her eyes to look at Timmy, who was leaning over her, ‘Tim doesn’t seem to have grown very much.’

  The policeman came to the doorway. ‘Has she woken up?’ he asked, his face as eager as a small boy’s expecting good news.

  ‘Indeed she has,’ the nurse told him, her voice all smiles.

  He came into the room. ‘Mrs Slocombe – I’ll have to ask you some questions as soon as you feel well enough. You probably don’t know what happened? It’s just …’ He squared his shoulders. ‘It does seem to have been a – well, a murder attempt.’

  ‘Yes,’ Karen agreed.

  Drew watched her in disbelief. Could she really be so completely normal, after having a bullet lodged in her brain, and surgery to remove it? After lying in a coma for almost three days?

  ‘I know who it was,’ she said now. Everyone in the room, Timmy included, held their breath. ‘But I still can’t really believe it,’ she added. Drew wondered whether he was the only one who noticed her voice losing power. Like a torch with a failing battery, a light was dimming as he watched her face.

  ‘Karen?’ he said. ‘Karen!’

  Her eyes flickered shut: down … up … halfway down … up a millimetre … and then firmly down. They remained closed. She sighed.

  ‘Oh!’ said the nurse.

  ‘Hmm,’ moaned the policeman.

  ‘Karen?’ Drew repeated.

  Keep calm came the silent command. This is not what it seems.

  It wasn’t, quite. Karen breathed, a shallow tentative breath. Drew clutched her warm unresponsive hand. Timmy pressed close to the bed, staring at his mother’s face. Stephanie inched forward, her eyes large.

  ‘She’s relapsed,’ said the nurse, unnecessarily. ‘It does happen. I’ll go and fetch the doctor. Don’t worry.’ This last she threw at Drew as she left the room.

  ‘Ohhh,’ the policeman murmured. ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘But she was all right a minute ago,’ Drew said, to an uncaring cosmos. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘She’ll wake up again, won’t she, Daddy?’ Stephanie said, her voice full of confidence. ‘She didn’t say anything to me. I want her to talk to me.’

  ‘Her head is still poorly,’ Drew explained. ‘She needs to give it a lot of rest. I expect the doctor will come and tell us all about it in a minute.’

  He heard again what Karen had said. Timmy doesn’t seem to have grown. It was a joke. Her last words had been a joke. Like Bugger Bognor, only better.

  But no, that hadn’t been the last thing she said. She’d spoken to the policeman last. He shook himself angrily. What was this about last, anyway? She wasn’t dead. She’d just gone back to the quiet still place she’d been in before. She’d emerged once; she could do it again. It was bound to be a slow process.

  ‘Maybe we’d better get out of the way,’ he said. ‘The doctor won’t want to find the room full of people.’ The policeman had already retreated to his post by the door. Drew found himself blaming the wretched man. Why couldn’t he have waited? Let Karen surface more gradually, speak to Stephanie – and him.

  It was worse now. Much worse. He’d seen her conscious, amused, her old self, and then lost her again. Like someone struggling to free themselves from the tentacles of a giant octopus, he thought. They come bursting one last time to the surface, gasping and optimistic, only to disappear again, forever.

  Last. The word would not go away. He couldn’t get a grip on the slippery surface of hope. His insides felt heavy and thick with despair.

  The doctor came, listened to the nurse’s account of what had happened, lifted Karen’s eyelids, checked her monitored readouts, and almost shrugged. ‘We’ll just have to wait and see,’ he said.

  ‘But …’ Drew wanted much, much more than this.

  ‘I’m very sorry, Mr Slocombe. The brain is a fragile, unpredictable thing. We don’t know how much damage has been done. The effects of a bullet can be very wide-ranging. We know, clearly, that a good deal of it must be undamaged. Your wife recognised the people around her, remembered the moments before she was attacked, and could evidently see and hear normally. All this is extremely good news. But there is a lot more to it than that. The bullet was lodged in an area of the brain that seems to work as a kind of back-up. It’s in the hindbrain, an area known as the “pons”. Well,’ the man smiled ruefully, and toyed with a lank strand of hair at the back of his own head, ‘if you must have a brain injury, this is probably the best part to have it.’

  ‘Why?’ Drew felt intensely irritated, all of a sudden.

  ‘Because it doesn’t affect consciousness, memory, identity – the stuff that makes a person who they are, if you like. All that, as I say, appears to be intact.’

  ‘So you’re talking about the part that controls breathing, muscles, heartbeat,’ Drew supplied angrily. ‘The part that keeps a person alive.’

  ‘Not exactly, no. She is obviously breathing on her own, for a start.’

  ‘Thank you, doctor,’ Drew interrupted. ‘I think I understand. I was a nurse, you know. I’ve seen people in comas before.’

  ‘Ah. Right,’ said the doctor, and stood there, at a loss for words.

  ‘We’d better go and find something for the children to drink. And I’ll phone my colleague. She’ll be wondering how things are.’ He ushered the children out of the room, with a backward glance at Karen. Surely she’d wake up again in a minute?

  Only when on the phone to Maggs did he properly remember what Karen had said. ‘Geraldine Beech visited her,’ he also recalled. ‘The policeman knew her, so he let her in.’

  Maggs wasn’t interested in Mrs Beech. ‘She said she saw who shot her?’ she repeated. ‘But didn’t give you the name?’

  ‘It’s crazy, isn’t it,’ he admitted. ‘But somehow that didn’t seem very important. Not compared with giving Timmy a cuddle,
and asking her how she felt.’

  ‘Did she speak to the Beech woman?’ Maggs’s interest abruptly revived.

  ‘No, I don’t think so. She didn’t wake up until Timmy climbed on her.’

  ‘Poor you. It must have been terrible. But it’s very hopeful, surely? If she can wake up once, she can do it again. It’s bound to be fits and starts for a while.’

  ‘Bound to be,’ he agreed hollowly.

  * * *

  Geraldine Beech was trying to contact Maggs at the same moment as Drew phoned her. The engaged signal exasperated her. She’d waited more than twenty-four hours as it was, before deciding she had to do something. Now it seemed as if there wasn’t a moment to spare.

  She slammed the receiver down and paced her spartan living room, thinking hard. She’d been a fool to ask Karen that question, and then leave it at that. She now knew too much, and not enough, all at once. Karen had seen her attacker; she knew who it was. But Geraldine hadn’t asked for identification. She could have whispered one name after another, until a responsive squeeze gave her the answer. It would have been easy. So why hadn’t she done it?

  Well, she consoled herself, it probably wouldn’t have been so easy. Karen might have become agitated, causing her fragile brain further damage. She might have squeezed at the wrong name. She might not have wanted Geraldine to know. And the policeman on the door might have noticed something going on. The only certainty was that Geraldine could not now rest until she knew who it had been.

  She would have to flush the killer out of hiding, she resolved. Because it was, surely, the same person who had murdered Peter Grafton. She had to pretend she knew who had done it, that Karen had confided in her. She would offer herself as bait, tempting the person to have another go at silencing those who presented a danger.

  But would the killer cooperate? Was there a limit to the murder attempts a person would undertake? It seemed almost farcical, looked at like that. Better, perhaps, to creep away unobtrusively, to leave the country and hide somewhere. Would that be seen as an admission of guilt in itself?