She was about thirty; a tall, slender young woman, with a pale, oval face and gentle brown eyes and dark brown hair brushed back from her forehead and tied in a ponytail with a blue ribbon.
I could have said that I had just been drinking coffee, but something made me accept the invitation. My impulse to stop in the lane when I saw her had been the result of a sudden desire to get to know her better, and to refuse her invitation would not be helpful in doing that. Dragging my trolley after me I followed her up the path to the door. The children paused in their game to stare at me, then started kicking the football again.
She took me into a small, low-ceilinged room with a little bay window with lattice panes and a great fireplace that took up nearly the whole of one wall, on the hearth of which there was still a heap of ashes from a fire of yesterday, or perhaps longer ago than that. The chairs were all covered in what had once been a flowery print, but which with fading and grubbiness had become mostly an indeterminate grey-brown. Books, children's clothes, a pair of Wellingtons and a large dish of fruit, filled up almost all the spare space in the room. But there was an elegant little eighteenth-century table standing in the window on which a glass vase filled with sprays of flowering cherry stood.
‘Do sit down — I'll get the coffee in a minute,’ she said.
In fact, it took her much longer than a minute, but when it arrived it was real coffee, freshly ground, not the instant coffee that Hugh had given me.
‘I suppose your husband's at work,’ I said. I knew very little about him except that he was an accountant who belonged to a firm in Otterswell.
‘Yes, and I'm sorry he's missed you,’ she said. ‘We've been wanting to talk to you about something for some time, only the truth is — well, we're a bit shy of doing it. If I talk about it now, will you promise to give me a quite honest answer. I mean, if you think what I'm suggesting is quite absurd, you'll say so. You will, won't you?’
‘I'll do my best,’ I promised, ‘but you make it sound rather formidable.’
‘Oh, it isn't formidable at all,’ she said. ‘I mean, for you. For us it is rather, particularly for Ernest; in fact, if he were here he might not let me talk about it, because he's a very modest person and he'd say I'd no right to trouble you with it. But I'm right, aren't I, you're very involved with the local dramatic society?’
I felt a glow of relief. I had thought that what she had said was going to lead up to murder, that it was going to turn out that she and her husband had some theory about the crimes or some such thing, but after all, it was only our poor old society, which had suffered so desperately during the last few days.
‘You want to join,’ I said hopefully. ‘You couldn't be more welcome.’
‘Well, yes,’ she said, beginning to twine her fingers nervously together. ‘We'd have to do that I suppose, though you wouldn't find that either of us has the least talent for acting. But perhaps you could teach us something about it. No, it isn't quite as simple as that. The fact is, Ernest has written a play and I think it's simply marvellous, and I've been trying to get him to send it to an agent to see if we couldn't do something with it, but when I get round to that he always tells me not to be ridiculous, nobody's going to be interested in it. But I think they would be, I really think they would. It's terribly funny, really good comedy, and it hasn't a big cast and it wouldn't be expensive to produce, which I know is very important nowadays, and it's about quite ordinary people, the kind you meet every day. And so I got the idea …’ She paused, looking at me diffidently, as if to see if I had already rejected what she was going to suggest.
‘You got the idea that our dramatic society might try it out,’ I said. ‘I think it sounds an excellent idea. You don't know how badly we need a nice piece of comedy to tide us over the next few months. Of course, I can't promise anything, but if you gave it to Hugh Maskell to read, he could tell you if there was a chance of our doing it. I'd like to think we were encouraging local talent. But in case you've never seen any of our productions, I ought to warn you, you might be awfully disappointed in what we made of it. We're very, very amateurish.’
‘But you think Mr Maskell wouldn't mind our asking him to read the thing?’
‘I'm quite sure of it. If you like, I'll take it round to him myself.’
‘Oh, that would be marvellous. I'd like to give it to you now, but I can't really do it without having Ernest's agreement. He's so nervous about showing it to anybody, he might be quite angry with me for doing it. But it'll be all right, will it, if I telephone you this evening, say, or tomorrow, to arrange about giving it to you?’
‘Quite all right,’ I said. ‘But tell me something, there aren't any murders in it, are there?’
‘Not one.’
‘That's all right then. Just for a minute I was afraid … you see, murder's so often made into a comedy nowadays, isn't it, and we couldn't do with that at the moment.’
The door opened and Mrs Henderson came in.
She began to say, ‘I'll be going now, Mrs Askew …’ when she caught sight of me and looked startled.
‘I didn't know you was here, Mrs Chance,’ she said. ‘How are you keeping?’
‘About as you'd expect, in the circumstances,’ I said. ‘Have you come to work for Mrs Askew?’
‘That's right, just two mornings a week,’ she answered. ‘Of course, Mrs Loxley doesn't want me any more, and I need the money. I'll have to find some other work as well, but this is tiding me over, and Mrs Askew really needs the help. I'd do a couple of mornings for you, Mrs Chance, if you'd care for it.’
I could hardly believe my ears. One of the disadvantages of life in Raneswood was that it was almost impossible to get domestic help of any kind and I was really very tired of being tied to a vacuum cleaner, furniture polish, soap powders and all the other necessities of a civilized life. In a few minutes I had arranged that Mrs Henderson should come to me on Tuesdays and Fridays.
She stood looking round the Askews’ sitting room with a smile of grim pleasure on her face.
‘Of course, I've hardly begun here,’ she said, ‘but we'll soon put it to rights. About that man we both saw at the gate, Mrs Chance, have they found out yet who he was?’
‘Not that I know of,’ I said.
‘They haven't told you anything about it?’
‘Nothing at all.’
‘A queer thing, wasn't it, the way we both thought it was Fred Dyer, when it couldn't have been. When you thought about it, his hair was the wrong colour, and then the way he was wearing gloves, and had come up to the house on foot, not in his van, and being so rude to both of us, which Fred Dyer never was. I couldn't say I ever took to him. I always felt there was something wrong about him, but he was never rude. All the same, I don't understand why he's disappeared if he wasn't the man at the gate.’
I tried to explain to her about Fred's blackmailing of Kevin Bird, that that in itself was an offence and since it meant that he had kept his knowledge of the Edgewater murders to himself, was a very serious one, but she seemed to find it difficult to take in and lost interest in it.
‘Well, good morning, Mrs Askew,’ she said. ‘I'll be in again on Thursday. Good morning, Mrs Chance, I'll see you tomorrow.’
She let herself out.
Victoria Askew gave me a crooked little smile.
‘It's an ill wind …’ she said. ‘You don't know how hard I've tried to get help since we came to live here. But I don't think I'd ever have gone to the length of committing murder to get it. And I suppose the same could be said of you. But you haven't got two noisy, violent, badly brought-up children to cope with, so your motive isn't quite as strong as mine. They're going to hate it if our house gets tidy. About that man, Fred Dyer
‘Yes?’
‘D'you think they'll catch him?’
I did not answer at once. It was because at just that moment my eyes had fallen on a photograph on top of an over-filled bookcase, a photograph of the two Askews, standing side by side, wearing shorts and shirts and holding
tennis racquets, and there was no question about it, Ernest Askew was tall and lean and broad-shouldered and given the right clothes and a red wig could have been the man at the gate.
Not that I believed for a moment that he had been. In fact, I took that sudden thought of mine as a warning. I was letting the whole subject become an obsession. I was seeing tall, lean, broad-shouldered men everywhere.
Victoria repeated what she had said. ‘Do you think they'll catch him?’
I got to my feet. ‘I haven't any idea. I don't know how clever he is. Now, I must be going. And let me know what your husband would like me to do about his play.’
She thanked me warmly as I set off for home.
I tried to convince myself as I went that the play would turn out to be a masterpiece; that without knowing it we had been nursing a genius in Raneswood. Something that was terribly funny, with a small cast and about ordinary people sounded very promising. But the chances that it was anything but very dull and amateurish were actually very small. However, it would be for Hugh to tell the enthusiastic young woman that her husband was no genius. He would do it kindly, but would be firm and explicit. Probably he would judge wisely too. I reached our gate and went up to our door.
As soon as I opened it, I realized that Brian was having yet another of his long conversations on the telephone. That it was a long one I deduced from the way that he was sprawling comfortably in the chair in the hall, beside the telephone. He gave me a smile as I passed him on my way to the kitchen to unpack my trolley, and went on talking, obviously to Judy, because his voice had the peculiarly intimate sound that it always had when he spoke to her. I wondered which of them had rung the other and on whose bill the call would appear. When I had finished my unpacking, I went to the sitting room, where I found Malcolm, drinking sherry. He got some for me and I began to tell him about my visit to Hugh and his doubts about his ability to live contentedly in a house designed by a mass murderer.
‘I don't believe I could do it myself,’ I said, ‘but I should have thought he was tough enough to do it.’
‘And it's what he'll probably do,’ Malcolm said, ‘unless he decides to leave Raneswood altogether. But it might not be easy to sell.’
‘It's a nice house,’ I said, ‘and people have short memories. To someone who didn't actually know Kevin, it probably wouldn't really signify much that he designed it.’
‘Frances … Malcolm …’ It was Brian suddenly coming into the room. ‘I've just been having the most extraordinary conversation with Judy. Really extraordinary. Oh, I do wish she'd been here all along, she's so much more astute than I am. She's come up with an astonishing idea. At least, it's astonishing to me, only now I can't think why it never occurred to us at the beginning.
It's about the man at the gate. She's pointed out that it's perfectly possible for a man to disguise himself as himself. D'you understand me?’
For a moment I did not, then I saw what he meant.
‘You mean the man really was Fred Dyer all the time.’ I said.
‘Yes, Fred Dyer, disguised so that he couldn't possibly be really himself, in a red wig that just couldn't be mistaken for his own red hair, and wearing gardening gloves, which he normally never did, and arriving on foot instead of in his van, and being careful that you and Mrs Henderson would see him and describe the disguise to the police. Of course, he wasn't expecting you to arrive at just that minute, that was a bonus, because your belief in the disguise carried more weight with the police than Mrs Henderson's alone would have done. It's really so simple once you've thought of it.’
So simple that it looked as if our murder might have been solved on the telephone by a woman in Cheshire.
‘But why did he do it, Brian?’ Malcolm asked. ‘Even if he's the father of Avril's child, I don't believe for a moment he's in love with her.’
‘Avril's child?’ Brian said in a puzzled way, and I remembered then that though I had told Malcolm all about Avril's pregnancy, Brian still did not know of it. So I told him about it and Malcolm repeated that he did not believe Fred was enough in love with Avril to do murder to get her.
‘He did it for money,’ I said, suddenly seeing everything very clearly. ‘He did it for ten thousand pounds.’
‘Isn't that rather a cheap rate as murders go?’ Malcolm said.
‘He may have realized it was as much as he could get. He wanted to get to Australia and have a bit to set him up when he got there. Ten thousand pounds would be quite useful.’
‘Of course, what you're really saying,’ Malcolm said, ‘is that the person behind the whole thing is Avril. Had you thought of that?’
‘Oh yes, I believe I've had a feeling all along that that might somehow be the answer. That alibi of hers in London was just a little too convenient.’
‘But why should she want to murder Peter? Divorce isn't a problem nowadays, and actually, she could just have left him. Haven't we talked about that?’
‘Money again. I don't think she has any of her own.’
‘Well, what are we going to do about it? Tell Judy's inspiration to the police?’
‘Of course,’ Brian said.
‘Let's think about it,’ I said. ‘I'd rather like to talk to Avril before we do anything, to see if she's got any answers to what we're saying.’
‘You don't really think she has, do you?’
‘I'd still like to talk it over with her.’
‘Well, let's have another drink and go on thinking about it,’ Malcolm said.
We'd had our second drinks and some lunch before I set off to have the talk I wanted with Avril. I did not really know what I wanted to talk to her about, but it had something to do with that unborn child of hers. The child, I thought, that probably never would be born, for if we were right that she had arranged with Fred to have Peter murdered, then it seemed likely that she would choose to have an abortion, rather than to have a child when she was in prison.
As I walked down towards Jane's bungalow, I was filled with a disturbing sense of pity, though whether it was for Avril, or for her child, who even if it were to be born into this unhappy world would never know the love of parents, the contentment of home, the companionship of other little ones, I could not have said. I walked on with a stubborn sort of determination, doing my best not to think too carefully of what I intended to say. When I reached Jane's bungalow, I saw the Loxleys’ car in the road in front of it, so it appeared that the police had allowed Avril to remove it from the garage. I rang the bell and was greeted by a wild barking of dogs.
I had forgotten about the dogs. They seemed to be loose in the house but I heard no sound of footsteps coming towards the door, so it seemed possible that both Jane and Avril had gone out, perhaps to lunch in the Green Man. But I rang again, and this time I heard lagging footsteps inside and an irritable voice, telling the dogs to be quiet. The door was opened by Avril. The dogs came plunging out at me, sniffing round my ankles, jumping up at me, as if I was a dear old friend of theirs whom they were delighted to welcome. Avril repeated her command that they should be quiet, and gradually they calmed down.
‘They're very nervous,’ Avril explained. ‘They can't understand why they've been brought here.’
She looked very nervous herself, her face pallid and drawn, her hair, usually so smoothly brushed back from her face, hanging loosely on her shoulders. ‘Jane's out,’ she went on. ‘Was it her you wanted, or me?’
‘Actually you, Avril, if we can have a quiet talk somewhere,’ I said.
‘Then come in,’ she said, and made the dogs allbw me room to pass into the house. ‘I think Jane went shopping in Otterswell and won't be back for some time, but in any case, I've got my own two rooms here, where we can be quite private, if that's what you want. It's really a very good arrangement. We get on very well when we meet, but we're quite independent of one another.’
She had led me into a room at the back of the bungalow, with windows that overlooked the stretch of lawn behind it. The room was small but
comfortable, simply furnished, with easy chairs covered in a cheerful striped material and light cream curtains. There was something impersonal about it, however, as if Avril had not yet made any impression on it.
‘Are we going to talk about something serious?’ she asked, with a forced note of cheerfulness in her voice.
‘Fairly serious,’ I said.
‘I was afraid so.’ She flung herself down in a chair, gesturing to me to take another and giving an artificial little laugh. ‘I could see it in your face as soon as I saw you. Oh God, everything's become so damnably serious, hasn't it? Is it about my baby?’
‘Partly.’
‘I wish Lynne hadn't told you about it. Soon everyone's going to know all about it, and they'll all be giving me advice about what I ought to do. But I don't want advice. I want a little peace so that I can make up my mind myself. D'you think that's unreasonable?’
‘Not if you know all the facts,’ I said. ‘I've a feeling perhaps you don't.’
There was something wary in the way she looked at me.
‘Which facts were those?’ she asked, trying to sound facetious.
‘That it can almost certainly be proved that Fred Dyer was the man whom I saw at the Loxleys’ gate,’ I said. ‘That he'd disguised himself as himself, if you see what I mean. He'd turned himself into an exaggerated version of himself, with that wig that was just too red to be really his hair, and everything else about him being just a bit wrong, so that Mrs Henderson, whom he planned to meet when she was leaving the house should swear it couldn't have been him. Then I came along, and I was ready to say that too. I was sure until this morning that the man couldn't have been Fred. Now I'm sure that it was.’
A look of deep antagonism had replaced the wariness in her eyes. It made her face rather frightening.
‘What happened this morning to make you change your mind?’ she asked.
‘A telephone call from Judy Hewlett, Brian's wife. It was she who pointed out that one can disguise oneself as oneself. And once we'd thought of that, all the other things seemed to fit together. Avril, I haven't come here to frighten you. I felt I ought to warn you. I felt you ought to have some time to think over your position and see if you've any answers to the things you're going to be accused of.’
Seeing is Believing Page 15
