She didn’t understand what she could do to help me. Her lips moved, but no words came.
‘The fact that the mutilation was planned!’ I hammered the table with my fist.
She whispered: ‘Can you be so sure of that?’
I shook my head, not so much to dispel the uncertainty as the vision. ‘There was the shaving-soap bowl, you see, the one thing that gave us the identity fitting the fingerprints.’
‘I thought you were grateful for that.’
‘Oh, I was. Until I looked inside.’
‘Was there something inside that upset you?’
‘Yes, it upset me. There was nothing inside.’ Then I managed a weak smile. My face creaked. ‘You know, I doubt there’re many women who ever see the inside of a shaving-soap bowl. The cake of soap wears down in the same way every time. A dip in the middle, which gets deeper, like a crater, the further down you use it. That would be a difficult thing to match, if you wanted to fake it, without actually scrubbing out the soap with a shaving brush. Maybe, to play safe, it’d be better to leave no soap in at all, rather than a small amount that might look wrong. But why should a man clear out the last vestige of soap? It’d mean washing it out. Well, all right, I know. I’ve done it myself. I keep cuff-links and oddments in an old shaving bowl. But I don’t wash one out, and then tuck it away into the back corner of a bathroom cupboard. It was the point that finally told me the truth. A woman had done that. It had to be a woman who’d want to protect the Claytons from trouble, and the only one I could think might fit was Gabby Clayton, who was called that because she talked so much — but whose proper name could well have been Amelia.’
I squinted at her. Her eyes were huge.
‘You didn’t dare to allow the fingerprint men into your house, Amelia — this house. They wouldn’t have had to search very far for one odd print that matched the ones in the cottage. It would’ve been filled with them. Or they might’ve found one of mine! That was because the ones in the cottage were yours, weren’t they? It was the reason you had to produce something for me, with a set of prints on, and you chose a shaving bowl.’ I reached over and touched her wrist. ‘What was your husband’s name, Amelia?’
‘It was Arthur,’ she said softly, but quite steadily.
‘Arthur Clayton.’ I nodded. ‘That was another thing. Try as I might, I couldn’t get you to use his name. It was always: my husband. On the missing person report he was called Henry, which I suppose was his second name. But you couldn’t speak of him as Jack or Fred, or even Henry. My wife was Vera. In my mind she has to be Vera. So you played safe, and called him nothing.’
She was silent. I inclined my head. ‘Not so gabby, are we, now? But I suppose, things have happened...’
‘Don’t play with me, Richard. Like a cat with a mouse.’
I drew back. I’d meant it kindly. ‘There’s no missing husband. You are Gabby Clayton — I suppose Amelia Clayton —the mother of Coral. Maiden name, I wouldn’t be surprised, Trowbridge.’
‘How long have you known this?’
‘I’ve lost count of time,’ I admitted.
‘Then there was really no point in working so hard to discover that I hated Kendall,’ she said bitterly.
‘I had to be sure.’
‘For your wonderful theory? For this theory?’
‘For me,’ I protested.
‘But you had to pretend, and lead me on.’
‘No,’ I said violently. ‘I had to persuade them, Merridew and Donaldson. It didn’t matter how. I just had to keep you free, and let them go rushing off on a false trail. Do you think I could help in the arrest of whoever killed Kendall — even if it hadn’t been you? But it was you. I used every bloody dirty trick that I could, just on the chance that I’d hear the truth. I didn’t really want to hear it, because it involved that ghastly planning to mutilate...’
My eyes pleaded. But she wasn’t sufficiently prepared to offer me what I wanted. She had to deal with it in her own way.
‘I’d promised, you see,’ she said. Her voice was calm, now, resigned. ‘My husband had a breakdown. He was in a mental hospital. I was trying to hold on to my reason, but he was very ill. He made me promise that Kendall wouldn’t be allowed to go on living. Oh, I promised. I thought it would help him, but he’d handed it over to me. That night he got hold of something and swallowed it, and died. It about finished me. But I remembered what I’d promised, and it was for myself, too. And that helped me.’
‘But to sustain it. To hate him so intensely for so long!’
She gave a flat, humourless laugh. ‘It’s ironical, when you think about it. I joined the Prisoners’ Aid people, just to see if it was possible to get him out. How could I kill him in there? But there seemed absolutely no hope of a release at all. His sort of criminal, you know, they’re loathed even amongst the worst of the prisoners. But I had to try, and in trying I got to know him very well, and he himself managed to keep my hatred alive. Without that, of course, I couldn’t have gone through with it.’
‘You’re a remarkable woman.’
‘To a man it might seem so. I don’t know. But any woman would understand.’
‘But would they be able to plan it so completely? There he was, believing he’d completely dominated you with his personality, when all the time you were leading him on, offering to prepare his bungalow for him, moving into his own district, and pretending that was for him, discovering for him the details of his cottage...’
She smiled, softening a memory. ‘He was really a most abject coward,’ she said. ‘All that forceful masculinity he threw around, and at the first threat — the doll — he ran for the cottage.’
‘Would it take much courage to rape...’ I stopped.
She grimaced. ‘The pain has gone, Richard. It’s all right. I can live with it, now. Now, I can.’
‘So you’d got him running to the cottage. It was what you wanted, because that place couldn’t have been known by the Claytons.’
‘I’d found Kendall’s pistol in the bungalow, when I was tidying it. I like to get into all the corners...’
‘I’d realised that.’
‘So I’d found it. I thought to myself that dear Ted and Foster — now don’t you smile like that! — they’d been so kind to me. Anything at all I could do to keep them safe...well, I thought Kendall really ought to die by his own gun. Kind of poetic, you see. And that suggested a faked suicide. And he’d fortified himself away so well that it fitted. I visited him there twice, you know, the second time to do it...the first to check that it could be done.’
‘That what could be done? That you could mutilate...’
She reached out quickly, and this time managed to capture my hand. She kept hold of it, the pressure telling me something.
‘Now, now...Richard, let me explain. A substitution had been my original idea...but I didn’t know anything about fingerprints and things like that. I’d rather thought I’d set fire to the cottage, but then that nice sergeant of yours...’
‘Ken Latchett.’
‘Yes. Well, I’d gone to report a missing husband, and silly-like, laughing because I was nervous, I asked him if he’d need my husband’s fingerprints, and he smiled and said no, because they wouldn’t be on file — is that the correct phrase? —unless he’d been in prison. And Kendall had. So then I knew I wasn’t going to be able to fake the body, and I couldn’t see that the cottage would burn, either. I didn’t plan anything so nasty as...what you said. I simply changed the plan to pretending it was suicide.’
I blew out my breath in one long, continuing sigh. ‘Go on.’
‘I went there. The pistol was in my pocket, as you said. He saw me coming. He didn’t shoot at me, or anything like that, just tried to open the front door, but it’d jammed.’
‘I wasn’t so far out, then.’
‘And by the time he’d flung the window open I was beside it with the pistol in my hand—and that was when it went through the pane. He couldn’t believe it. He backed a
way, and I climbed through, and then suddenly I knew I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t be sure of actually killing him — and I couldn’t stand the thought of leaving a wounded man, not even him. So I made him back away, playing for time, to think.’
I nodded. ‘And?’
‘He’d leaned the shotgun against the wall. I didn’t see what he intended to do before it was too late. He snatched the shotgun up, but his hand slipped or something. It half fell, and half twisted, and suddenly it fired — right up into his face.’
Her mouth was distorted. She whipped a handkerchief from her sleeve and dabbed at her lips. Her eyes seemed deep-set above it, and dark.
‘He...went down, Richard. No sound...but he was writhing. I could feel his scream, feel it tingling right through me, but there was no sound. His hands...his fingers...were clutched into his face, and he didn’t die. I was screaming all the time, and it went on and on. There was only the shotgun. The pistol — somehow I’d put it into my pocket— it seemed so useless and paltry, and he wasn’t...still. There was only the shotgun. I picked it up, but I couldn’t see how to make it work. I kept pointing it and pulling the trigger...but he threshed around, and I couldn’t help him. Then suddenly it did fire. I didn’t know what I’d done, but it worked.’ She drew a deep, shuddering breath. ‘And at the time it was pointed at his face. But — he stopped moving, and he was at last still, and I was on my knees, sobbing...’
I was round the table in rapid strides, took her shoulders in two rock-firm hands, and bent close to her head.
‘It’s all right,’ I whispered. ‘Don’t say any more.’
She shook her head.
‘Shall I guess for you?’ I offered. ‘You’d be there, and you couldn’t say how long. And there was panic...but not for long, knowing you. And...you realised you’d got to go on with what you’d planned. But nothing was like you’d planned at all.’
She looked at me with swimming eyes. ‘I wanted to run. The window was open, and it would’ve been so easy. But...there was that hole in the window pane, so I couldn’t make it look like suicide, and there was Kendall, and he couldn’t have done that to himself. And I’d really made it worse for Foster and Ted. So I sat on that seat and tried to steady myself, and think. And gradually I realised that I could use my original idea after all, because now I could really claim him as my missing husband, because he hadn’t got any fingerprints.’
I smiled, trying to encourage her, because it was costing her a lot to say it. ‘But he had. He’d got ‘em all over the cottage. But that wouldn’t stop you. The world champion cleaner-upper. All you’d got to do was a complete clean-up of anywhere his hands might have touched, and the substitution of your own.’
‘It took me five hours, Richard. Five hours, in there with him.’
‘You were very thorough. We never found any print but the one set — your own. And that...I snapped my fingers in realisation. ‘That was how you came to find the rusty old shotgun.’
‘I was doing the soap —’
‘The soap!’ I cried. ‘I knew there was something strange about that. The last time he’d touched it hadn’t been to wash himself, but to open a new packet...what a coincidence!’
She smiled weakly at my enthusiasm, and went on as she’d started. ‘I was doing the soap, my hands under the tap, squeezing one piece into a new one to leave a good impression, when that thumping started. It gave me quite a turn, so I went to see what it was...and there was the gun...and it gave me an idea...’
‘Clever you. And all the time...’ I stopped. Abruptly she’d buried her face in her hands. I spoke in anguish. ‘Amelia! I didn’t realise. You must have been so very upset. More than that — the drawing on Kendall’s bungalow window! It took you...how long to recover? A day? Two days?’
She lifted her face, drawing her fingers down her lips. ‘I thought I’d never stop shaking. But after two days I knew I’d got to get things moving. I was keyed up, with my story all prepared. It was all true, you know, everything relating to Kendall, and everything I told you about Arthur. There, you see, I can use his name now without thinking. Everything, of course, except that he hadn’t left me recently. He left me seven years ago. So, I had to face it, and quickly. I could have simply left the car, anywhere, but I needed something more dramatic, something to attract police attention. So I set fire to it.’
‘And got me.’
‘I suppose it could’ve been worse.’ A hint of a smile.
‘But I wasn’t really what you wanted, was I? You wanted somebody who’d start a nationwide search for Kendall, as the murderer of your husband. But I didn’t get going on it, and you fumbled the identification.’
‘It was so silly!’ she said. ‘There I was, and I’d gone through so much, and when it came to it — the one thing that I needed to make it all so reasonable — and I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t claim that the...the creature on that trolley was my husband. It would’ve been a complete betrayal of Arthur’s memory. Is that very stupid, Richard?’
‘Not stupid at all.’ Stupid, perhaps, to ask such a question.
She straightened her shoulders, and laid her knife and fork neatly on her empty plate, staring at it, not believing that it could be empty.
‘I’ve got some tinned rice pudding, if you’d like me to warm it up,’ she suggested dully.
I nearly broke into laughter. ‘Not really.’
‘Then what do you want?’ she burst out. ‘What now?’
I waited for her to look up. I tried to be very serious.
‘What I really wanted was for you to marry me, Amelia, though of course that wouldn’t have been possible if they’d put you away.’ I held up my hand. She’d been half on her feet. ‘No, let me say this. You’ve made things very difficult, you know. Legally, we can get married at any time. But Donaldson’s busy hunting for a live husband, and how would it look...’ I grinned. ‘Imagine...Donaldson as best man!’
That broke her up. It was some time before I could edge another word in.
‘No — seriously,’ I said. ‘They wouldn’t even let you leave the district without somebody, somewhere, keeping an eye on you. And there’re the Clayton brothers. Your lovely brothers-in-law. How long before they see the truth?’ I had a thought, abruptly shocked. ‘I suppose they know nothing about it all?’
She shook her head. ‘And I’ve been terrified of meeting either of them by accident. But now...d’you think they’d say a word?’
‘I’d kill ‘em both first. All right...so it’s a matter of time. In the end, the case’ll be put in the pending run, and the watch for your husband will he closed down. But I can’t wait for that.’ I reached for her hand. ‘Can you?’
Her eyes shining, she shook her head. ‘But what can we do?’
‘I’ve laid something on,’ I said briskly. And after all, I’d used Ken! I got up from the table, spurred by the thought, standing and looking out of the window. ‘Already I’ve suggested it to Ken Latchett. I’ll appoint myself official watcher of Amelia Trowbridge. My sense of duty carries me on into retirement! I’ve at last found something I really want to do with it. I, personally, will make sure that Amelia Trowbridge, of this parish, is kept under close surveillance. They’ll love that. It’ll save three men on duty per day, and the cost of the phone tap and the letter interception.’
‘And how d’you propose to manage that?’ she asked to my back. I heard her chair scrape back.
‘You’ll pack up what you’ll need, and you’ll move in with me. How much closer could you be watched? The beauty of it is that nobody will be surprised. That bastard Patton’s capable of anything, my dear, and it’ll just be another of my underhanded tricks.’ I turned quickly from the window. ‘What d’you say to that?’
‘We’d be living in sin,’ she pointed out. As old-fashioned as me!
‘So we would. For a while.’
‘I’ve always wanted to live in sin. It’s so romantic.’
I turned and glanced out at the site hut. ‘The ne
ws will already be on its way, but I don’t see why they should be in on everything.’
I twitched the blind cord, and watched the slats overlap, and felt her arms come round my waist from behind, her head against my shoulder.
‘I’ll help you pack,’ I offered. Turned to her. Saw beyond her eyes at last. ‘Later.’
If you enjoyed Face Value you might be interested in A Death to Remember by Roger Ormerod, also published by Endeavour Press.
Extract from A Death to Remember by Roger Ormerod
1
I was sitting at a corner table in the lounge of the Winking Frog, nursing a half of bitter and wondering whether to eat there, when I suddenly remembered I’d had a car. What provoked this thought was the sight of a large, pallid man in boots, jeans and anorak standing in front of me with his pint glass almost lost in his fist, and who was saying: ‘Mind if I join you?’
I couldn’t have put a name to him, but the sight of him had prompted the thought: what the hell happened to my car?
‘What the hell happened to my car?’ I asked angrily, the anger surprising me because I had nothing on which to base it, and no clear reason to aim it at him.
He sat opposite me. His smile was apologetic. He half reached forward with his left hand in a gesture that I realised was intended as reassuring.
‘It’s in a corner of the servicing bay. Only wants the battery charging and the engine turning over...’ He stopped, tilting his head. His blond hair tumbled over one ear. ‘You don’t know who I am, do you?’ There was genuine anxiety in his voice.
The mention of a servicing bay, and of turning over the engine, had provided the necessary information. The mental image was of a garage, and then of an office overlooking the yard at the back, and I had him. Clay...no, Clayton it’d been. Christian or surname? I hesitated, not sure whether I ought to be friendly or aggressive, not willing to commit myself.
‘Tony Clayton,’ he said, and I realised he was feeling as tentative as I was, though it had to be for a different reason. It was unlikely that he, too, suffered from a deficient memory. He would know where he stood in this world, his viewpoint firmly established, but I was still rebuilding mine. I needed any help I could get, but not from Tony Clayton.
Face Value (Richard and Amelia Patton) Page 19
