by David Nobbs
‘I’m afraid so. There is a certain Mrs . . .’
‘Please. Spare me the names.’
‘Yes. Of course. Let’s just say there are wronged women in Runcorn, Otago and Oklahoma City.’
‘Not to mention Knightsbridge.’
‘No, I wasn’t going to mention that. There is also, I have to say, Mrs . . . er . . . I really don’t know whether I should call you Mrs Eldridge or not . . . a certain irony attendant on the career of . . . your husband. He seems to have become quite a rich man, this man who ended up as Graham “Mr Con-Buster” Eldridge. He made all his money . . .’
‘As a con man.’
‘You knew!’
‘No. You said there was a certain irony. I made a deduction.’
‘You ought to be in the police force, madam!’
‘I hope you didn’t intend that as a compliment.’
‘He made his biggest killing out of the farmers of the Central American corn belt. He sold millions of bags of dyed plain flour mixed with earth and grated maggots as a new form of highly expensive fertiliser. He was lucky. The crops were exceptionally good that year due to the weather. He’d disappeared off the face of the earth long before the deception was discovered, leaving behind in Oklahoma City a distraught . . .’
‘Yes, yes.’
‘Sorry. That tact again.’
In the months that followed, Inspector Crouch, thoroughness his middle name, called on Kate on more than one occasion. He asked her if she believed any of her sons capable of murder. She said that she hoped with all her heart that none of them was. What would any mother say? He asked her if she thought all three of her sons could have conspired to free her from Graham Eldridge. She told him that he’d been reading too many detective stories. He reminded her that he didn’t read detective stories. Would she please answer the question? She told him that even in her worst nightmares she was incapable of imagining that her three sons would collaborate in a murder even to free her from somebody from whom she wanted to be free, and they knew she hadn’t wanted to be free from Graham Eldridge. She told him, in no uncertain terms, that he was obsessed with her sons because somebody had typed the words ‘Sorry, Ma’. Anybody could have done that. He asked her if she was aware that ‘Sorry, Ma’ were the last two words of Timothy’s fourth novel, Trouble in Torquay. She told him that she hadn’t known this as she’d been unable to get beyond page three of Trouble in Torquay. She asked him how he knew if he never read detective stories. He told her that Nigel had told him.
That evening she wrote to Timothy and said, ‘I sometimes wonder if somebody is trying to frame you by using your words “Sorry, Ma”.’ In his reply, Timothy wrote, ‘I was so relieved to read your comment about “Sorry, Ma”. Since you didn’t mention it, I’d begun to worry that you weren’t able to finish the book, and as you know it’s my favourite.’
On his next visit, Inspector Crouch assured Kate that the police were leaving no stone unturned in their search for Graham Eldridge’s killer. They’d already interviewed thirty-eight double-glazing salesmen, sixty-six farmers in Kansas and Oklahoma, twenty-three aggrieved investors in New Zealand, and those three wronged women, Jean in Runcorn, Joan in Otago and Evelyn in Oklahoma City.
‘I asked you to spare me the names,’ wailed Kate.
‘I’m so sorry,’ said Inspector Crouch. ‘The wife’ll kill me when I tell her I did that.’
‘You don’t discuss this with your wife!’
‘I have no secrets from the wife. She’s very useful. She has a nose for it. Many’s the criminal she’s helped me bring to book.’
‘Not in this case, though.’
‘Not so far. I haven’t finished yet. Thoroughness . . .’
‘ . . . is your middle name.’
‘Oh, I told you. This is a particularly difficult case to bring to a swift conclusion, Mrs Eldridge. Your husband was a ruthless, evil criminal who wrought havoc, resentment and hatred in his destructive trail through three continents.’
‘I loved him, inspector.’
‘Oh shit. There goes that tact again. Your sons, Mrs Eldridge, do not seem, in my judgement or the wife’s, to have a motive strong enough for murder. Many other people in three continents do.’
Kate knew now that she had never really believed in all that three continents business, but who can blame a mother for welcoming it at the time and persuading herself that there was nothing more that she could usefully do?
She gave a little dinner party for her birthday that year, in her favourite restaurant, the Gay Hussar. Nigel had the freshwater crayfish and the smoked goose breast paprikash. There were just the nine of them round the table, and it was a jolly family occasion. They all knew each other, except for Timothy’s new girlfriend Anne, a very tall, thin pale girl with thick lips and a long, classical nose, and she seemed to fit in right from the start. Tokay, Bull’s Blood and laughter flowed freely. Kate showed no sign of grief, although, at sixty-three, she was developing deeper lines on her face. In fact she was on sparkling form. She told Anne that Timothy’s ex-wife Milly had wanted to be a musician, but had been too shy to say ‘oboe’ to a Goossens. She described her old school friend Caitlin Price-Evans as a tease who only revealed her true character in drink. On the surface she was full of love and sexuality, but after a few drinks she was nobody’s. She upset Don by telling him that he had a lifestyle ‘so boring that you have room for your car in your garage’. Nobody at the surrounding tables could have guessed that, less than six months before, this lady had come home to find her fifth husband (or her fourth if you took the view that it was impossible for one man to be two husbands, or not a husband at all in view of the fact that the marriage was bigamous) murdered.
But Kate had not forgotten Graham, and, at the end of the meal, she astonished everyone by ordering two bottles of champagne and nine glasses. Most of them knew her views on champagne. She’d said of it once, ‘Its charms fade with the day. It’s exciting before breakfast, exquisite with breakfast, rather marvellous after breakfast, very pleasant before lunch, fairly pleasant during lunch, perfectly acceptable before dinner, disagreeable during dinner and vile after dinner.’
‘Yes, I know,’ she said, as she poured the champagne into the nine glasses. ‘This isn’t the time for champagne, but I want you to drink a very solemn toast to the man I knew as Graham Eldridge.’
They looked at her in astonishment.
‘I know that Graham was a fraud,’ she said. ‘I know that right to the end he was saying the right thing and not always meaning it. I happen to believe that he’d become a new man in more senses than just his name. I believe that there was a new seriousness in him. I believe that his activities as “Mr Con-Buster” were undertaken partly at least in penance for his past sins. I believe he loved me truly. He may also have loved his previous wives truly. He probably only left them because he had to, in order to escape the law. I don’t believe that he would ever have left me. He wouldn’t have needed to. But even if I’m wrong, and Graham was fooling me, I had more than four years of travel, of comfort, of respect, of laughter and, above all, of fun. They cannot be taken away retrospectively. I want to say a big thank-you to Graham Eldridge, for the life he gave me. I hope you’ll all stand and join me in a toast.’
Most of the guests stood up straight away, although Timothy did so with evident reluctance. Anne didn’t stand until she saw that Timothy had. Maurice’s buxom fiancée Clare gave him a look, and she stood too. Finally, reluctantly, with an expression that suggested that he was reporting on the discovery of a massacre of nomads in some God-forsaken corner of the globe, Maurice stood too.
‘To Graham,’ said Kate.
‘To Graham,’ said her eight companions.
They sat down and sipped their champagne. Then Don stood up again. ‘We have to go,’ he said, ‘or we’ll miss the last train to Leatherhead.’
‘We have schnapps and another toast to come yet,’ said Kate.
‘Not for us, I’m afraid,’ said E
lizabeth. ‘We really do have to go.’
‘Can’t you get a taxi?’
‘To Leatherhead? It’d cost a fortune.’
‘Stay overnight.’
‘We have a babysitter.’
‘If I say to you that it’s important to me that you stay, what will you say?’ asked Kate.
‘I’ll say that we leave with regret, and with disapproval of the railway timetable,’ said Don.
‘If you blame us for being boring, when it’s British Rail that’s boring, I’ll be very upset,’ said Elizabeth.
‘No, no,’ said Kate. ‘I do understand.’
She kissed them goodbye, and as soon as they’d gone she ordered the schnapps and seven glasses.
‘I feel rather drunk,’ she said, after the schnapps had arrived. ‘It’s just as well my dear parents can’t see me. I have an announcement to make. I don’t expect it to cause much of a ripple. It’s something you’ve heard so often, after all. I’m getting married.’
Things happened then that Kate thought only happened in Timothy’s books. Heads jerked upward in astonishment. Jaws dropped open. Hands were frozen in the act of raising glasses.
‘Another toast,’ said Kate. ‘To my fiancé.’
She stood. Nigel, Timothy and Anne, Maurice and Clare leapt up enthusiastically.
‘To the darling man I’m going to marry,’ said Kate.
The six of them raised their glasses towards her fiancé, all smiling broadly.
Walter looked like a labrador that has just discovered the Sunday joint.
17 Glenda
KATE JUDGED, FROM Glenda’s fart, that it was a quarter to four in the morning. Really, the regularity of these nocturnal eruptions was extraordinary. How shamed she would have been if she’d known. She often complained that there was a cabbagy smell in the ward of a morning. How mortified she would have felt if she had known that she was its creator. There are moments when ignorance truly is bliss.
Kate realised that she’d allowed herself to be diverted, during her exploration of the events that had followed Graham’s murder, by her memories of that extraordinarily pleasant evening in the Gay Hussar, when she’d paid her final tribute to her fifth husband (or her fourth or not a husband at all) and announced her engagement to her sixth (or her fifth or her second for the third time). She steeled herself to begin her great task at last, and fell asleep straight away.
She was awakened by a particularly explosive fart, followed by a moan and a gasp, and then silence, utter silence. Then there was a cry from the direction of Angela Critchley’s bed, a soft moan from the direction of Lily’s bed, nothing from the direction of Glenda’s bed. Kate was alarmed. Her heightened senses told her that one less woman was sleeping in the ward. She wanted to ring the bell and summon help, but that would destroy, at a vital moment, the fiction that her brain had gone. Then she realised that even to clasp her emergency bell and press it was probably beyond her feeble fingers. This was a great relief. There was nothing that she could do. But she couldn’t help worrying about Glenda. Caring had been instilled into her. It wasn’t easy to give it up.
Her overdeveloped sense of irony was at it again. How ironic that she should be pretending to have lost her mind in a ward in which half the patients had lost their minds and didn’t know it. How ironic if what she suspected had actually happened, and poor genteel Glenda had farted herself to death.
No more delay. It was time to begin. But to begin was frightening. It wasn’t as frightening as it would have been when she might have had to face the choice of having one of her sons arrested or shielding a murderer, but it was still frightening.
But how to begin?
She would begin, in the obvious way, by compiling a list of facts. Graham had been shot. His face had been covered by a list of double-glazing firms. One of the double-glazing firms had done the double-glazing in the room in which he was shot. Graham had exposed a con, what people now would call a scam, by a double-glazing firm not on the list – a very low-key con, not one of his major coups.
A nurse came in at last, a nurse whose footsteps Kate didn’t recognise. The nurse hurried out again almost immediately.
Also in the room was a name board for Leningrad railway station, and there had been a single sheet of paper on which there had been typed just two words: ‘Sorry, Ma’.
The words ‘Sorry, Ma’ were also the last two words – the typically sentimental words, she suspected – of Timothy’s fourth book Trouble in Torquay.
The only person who ever called her Ma was Maurice.
The nurse returned with Doctor Ramgobi. By that time Kate could recognise the footsteps of all the regular visitors to the ward. It was amazing how the deprivation of some senses led to the increased sensitivity of others. She could hear the sheet being pulled up over Glenda’s face.
‘Is that woman dead?’ asked Angela Critchley.
‘I’m afraid so,’ said Doctor Ramgobi.
‘I suppose it’d be selfish under the circumstances to ask what’s happened to my breakfast,’ said Angela Critchley.
‘It’s on its way,’ said Doctor Ramgobi.
Only Maurice among her three sons had been to Leningrad as far as she knew.
If Maurice had murdered Graham it would be absurd of him to point to the fact by leaving a name board for Leningrad station and a note saying ‘Sorry, Ma’. Unless it was a double bluff. Rather a dangerous double bluff, though. And Maurice was a very direct kind of person. If he murdered, he’d murder out of love and fury, a passionate hot-blooded murder, unless . . . oh Lord, there were always these unlesses . . . unless he was taking care to make it look like a very un-Maurice-like murder. But would he? Could he? She was going round in circles. It all felt very unreal, as if she was using futile mind games to explore other people’s mind games. She began to get the same feeling of ennui that she got from attempting to read Timothy’s books.
She was in the mood to welcome any interruption and was delighted when yet another new nurse caused an eruption by asking Angela Critchley, ‘Have you moved your bowels yet today?’
‘How dare you?’ thundered Angela Critchley. ‘I have been coming to this hotel for twenty-seven years, and I have never been asked such a question. What business can it possibly be of yours? Or does your computer system set aside special rooms for the constipated?’
‘This isn’t a hotel,’ said the nurse. ‘It’s a hospital. You’re a sick old lady.’
‘A hospital! I see. I wonder why nobody told me. I’m sorry, dear, what was the question again?’
‘Have you moved your bowels this morning?’
‘Yes, dear. Definitely.’
‘Good. Well done.’
‘Or was it yesterday? I’m sorry, dear. I don’t remember.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said the nurse wearily, but of course it did. By their bowel movements shall we judge them.
Maybe, thought Kate, turning back to the daunting task that she had set herself, it was all meant to seem like one of Timothy’s novels. Did Timothy have the nerve to murder anyone, let alone his mother’s husband? If he did murder someone, would he do it in the manner of one of his books, like someone playing ‘in the manner of the word’? Certainly he had also used the words ‘Sorry Ma’. Was he capable of committing a murder in the style of one of his books, with the addition of touches intended to implicate Maurice? Would he not realise that these touches would be more likely to exonerate Maurice?
Kate’s antennae were even more sensitive than usual that day. She knew that Douglas was there even before she heard him mumbling, ‘Can I see her?’ She heard the sheet being pulled back. The silence of his look was deafening. She could picture the love on the face of this old man whom she had never seen, neatly dressed, she imagined, trying to keep up standards, perhaps an MCC tie, with just a touch of egg on it. His gravely whispered ‘Thank you’ seemed to be not a whisper at all, but a roar of rage. She heard the sheet being pulled back again. When Douglas cleared his throat it was like th
e rumbling of a volcano, and Kate realised to her horror that he was about to address the ward.
‘Ladies,’ he said, his voice on the verge of breaking, ‘I want to thank you for making my Glenda’s last days on earth as happy and peaceful as you could.’
I did nothing, thought Kate. Angela Critchley had wanted her out of what she believed to be a single room. Lily Stannidge had called her a ghastly woman. Only Hilda had been friendly to her, and only Hilda wasn’t there to hear Douglas’s little speech of thanks. More irony.
Kate felt a sudden sharp pain. Perhaps she needed to move her bowels. She felt so helpless. The pain grew worse. Maybe she was dying. She couldn’t press a button or raise her arm or shout. How could she even think of solving a murder when she was so helpless and pathetic?
Think. Take your mind off the pain, Kate Copson.
Why would Timothy murder Graham? Because Graham had praised one of his novels insincerely? Kate had met a few novelists in her later years, in her literary days, in her famous times. One of them had refused to talk to a critic who’d described his work as meretricious. There had been an awkward dinner party to which two feuding novelists had been invited by a hostess who didn’t know that they were feuding. It was still possible, for someone with eagle eyes, to see where the fish cake had landed. But the most violent statement she had ever heard from a writer had been from a notoriously thirsty poet who had said, ‘I could murder a pint.’ Critics, plagiarists, agents, editors, publishers, publicists, publicans, interviewers, adaptors, bookshop owners and authors of best sellers, she had heard them all reviled by authors. But to murder a member of the public because his praise of your work was insincere, surely not?
Did Timothy know that Graham was a fraud? Could he have murdered him because of that, to save his mother who didn’t want to be saved?
Could Maurice have murdered for that? Had he known even worse things about Graham, things that had never come out?
The pain did pass. Probably just wind. Something she’d eaten had disagreed with her. Correction. Something she hadn’t eaten had disagreed with her.
