A Little Local Murder

by Robert Barnard

  Mrs Withens still sat, like a stalagmite that is getting icy accretions minute by minute.

  ‘The only way you can maintain your reputation in the town is by pretending that the production team has fallen in with your wishes, or at any rate by letting people assume it, and allowing nothing to happen that will shake that assumption. This means that the people who finally appear on the programme should be people of whom you are known to approve, and you therefore immediately start writing to those you don’t approve of, telling them in violent, obscene language to lie low. You believe that the more vicious and filthy the letters are, the more terrified the recipients will be. You start with Mrs Buller and her daughter, perhaps, and then the vicar, and so on. After a time, I imagine you started enjoying your feeling of power, of making people uneasy and afraid, so you wrote more letters than you needed to, though probably you were quite happy to keep people like Mr Billington and Mr Jimson off the programme if you could. Sometimes you had something to go on in these letters – village gossip, old local history and scandal – but sometimes you had nothing, I would guess. I wonder if you had any reason to suppose that Mr Jimson seduces little girls, for example? But you knew that the mere suspicion of anything of that sort is fatal to a schoolteacher. And you enjoy thinking up things of that nature.’

  The frigid mask had not slipped a fraction, nor was a sound heard beyond her short intakes of breath.

  ‘The letters stopped when the murder took place. Naturally, you were terrified that the two things might be connected. The last was to Mr Edgar – following a phone call from Miss Potts last Monday, I would guess, telling you what she saw at the amenities meeting. Now, Mrs Withens, I think if you will just confirm what I’ve said, and answer a few questions, we might come to an agreement.’

  There was not a whisper of sound. Even the breathing was stilled.

  ‘If you’ll admit what you’ve done, there is a chance of hushing the whole thing up altogether, apart from informing my superiors.’

  Stony, impenetrable silence.

  ‘Then, Mrs Withens,’ said Parrish, getting up, ‘I shall have to ask you to come along with me to the station.’

  Not a muscle twitched.

  ‘I have a constable in the car. I presume you would not like to be dragged out of your own house. It is Saturday morning. There are plenty of people around outside to watch it happening.’

  In a series of drugged movements, as if she were in the last hours of a dance marathon, Mrs Withens rose from her chair. Her face was set in a parody of a tragic mask, and she forced her limbs forward as if in some kind of indescribable internal pain.

  ‘You might need a coat, ma’am,’ said Parrish as they came to the hall. She took her fawn spring coat from the cupboard, and put on her round flat hat with the unidentifiable flowers and the little wisp of veil. With every minute her movements became slower and heavier. Parrish stood by the front door, watching her.

  ‘Then perhaps we’d better be off, ma’am. Unless of course you would like to change your mind.’

  She stood still, her expression and bearing showing her to be on the verge of collapse. Her voice, when it came, was a low, hollow croak, less like Clara Butt than Boris Christoff singing against doctor’s orders.

  ‘Very well,’ said Deborah Withens.

  It was not the most explicit of confessions, but President Nixon had been allowed to get away with less.

  ‘Shall we go back to the drawing-room?’ Parrish said. Deborah Withens, recovering, stalked before him, and sat down, her coat still on, her face set in an expression of vicious foreboding. She looked like the bride’s mother waiting to be driven to church.

  ‘Now, Mrs Withens,’ said Parrish. ‘I’ll make a bargain with you. As far as the police are concerned, we can consider the matter closed if you will answer a couple of questions. Of course we may have to have a word with your husband – ’

  ‘Ernest!’ said Mrs Withens, her voice throbbing with tragic emotion.

  ‘ – because we don’t want a repetition. Beyond that we’ll keep the whole thing secret. But I must know a few things first.’

  Mrs Withens turned her head a fraction, as a signal of assent.

  ‘You sent one of these letters to the Mailers, did you not?’

  A nod, almost infinitesimal.

  ‘Was it to Mrs or Mr Mailer?’

  ‘Mister.’ The hollow tone had returned.

  ‘What did it say?’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Do you want the exact words?’ croaked Mrs Withens.

  ‘If you can recall them.’

  ‘ “Your cold bitch of a wife,” ’ intoned Mrs Withens, in a voice scarcely more than a whisper, ‘“has been selling information to Cullings and Dawson. Ask her how much Jack Cullings gave her for the details of your tender on the new secondary school.” ’

  It was not quite what Parrish had expected.

  ‘I see,’ he said at last. ‘Was this just a shot in the dark?’

  There was a barely perceptible negative.

  ‘How did you know?’

  A strange expression came into Mrs Withens’s face, as if she were congratulating herself on her detective work.

  ‘Mailer’s firm puts in for most of the council contracts. The tendering is secret. Cullings and Dawson have been putting in bids just below theirs for more than a year. Ernest puts all the council business before me. Naturally. I could see there was a regular leak of information.’

  ‘Why Mrs Mailer?’

  ‘I followed her into Griffin’s in Barstowe a week or so ago. She went to the tearooms. I thought there must be something. It’s not fashionable enough for her. Jack Cullings was there, and she went past his table. They pretended it was an accidental meeting, but they didn’t deceive me. They just shook hands, but she passed something to him – a bit of paper. It was obvious what it was.’

  ‘I see,’ said Parrish. ‘Does it worry you, Mrs Withens, that your letter probably killed Mrs Mailer?’

  There was no need to ask. The face had set itself into its accustomed mask of self-approval. The shoulders had straightened to their usual determined angularity, as if prepared to fight single-handed against the moral shortcomings of the rest of the world. Mrs Withens had already justified herself to herself, and was preparing a face to meet the faces that she met.

  CHAPTER XIV

  EN FAMILLE

  The atmosphere in the police car was not a happy one as Inspector Parrish drove Stephen Feather out to the Mailers’. Stephen felt that he had been had: seven solid hours of interrogating Jimson, when his boss had known all the time he had had nothing to do with it, or was as near certain as makes no difference. He was not placated by being told that the motive had been the desire to give him experience of top-level interrogation, and that this had been a heaven-sent and unique opportunity. One reason for not being placated was a nagging suspicion that he had bungled over the bank-account business, and that with a tricky customer like Timothy Jimson this was unlikely to be the last they heard of it. Stephen looked broodily out into the torpid bustle of Twytching on Saturday morning. The Radio Broadwich van was parked outside the Lamb, and the technicians were loading in the last wisps of equipment. Hank was exchanging addresses with all and sundry, in the open-handed manner of one who knows he is quite safe from a visit. Harold was supervising, and Ted Livermore was standing sheepishly in the shadows. He had his arm in a sling and a black eye. Twytching’s week of glory and Ted’s of bliss had ended simultaneously.

  Arnold Mailer and Cressida looked as if they had been about to go shopping in town. But they were friendly, dumped their bags down in the kitchen, and Mailer gestured Parrish up the stairs towards his little study. Parrish shook his head.

  ‘I think I’d like to speak to both of you together,’ he said.

  They went into the cool, airless lounge, with its white leather suite, and its chrome, and its air of nondescript taste. As soon as he had asked to talk with them both, Parrish had sensed a jittery
element enter the atmosphere, and Arnold Mailer began talking too loudly. Parrish thought it was as well to get it over with as soon as possible. When they had sat down on their cold, expandable, adjustable, gently turning and rocking chairs, Parrish took out his notes and his bits and pieces of evidence, and began his unenviable task.

  ‘Cressida,’ he said. ‘I have an exercise book here. One of your English ones from Barstowe Grammar School.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Cressida, flashing him a child-like smile. ‘I saw you’d taken them. I wondered what you wanted them for.’

  ‘Now, do you remember writing an essay in this book, just after Easter? It was about Easter, in fact. And what you did with your mother – the walks you took, and so on.’

  The child’s eyes started swimming with tears. ‘Yes, I remember it,’ she said.

  ‘When exactly did you write that piece, Cressida?’ said Parrish, very gently.

  ‘Isn’t it dated?’ said Cressida vaguely. ‘I think it was the first subject Mr Jimson gave us this term.’

  ‘It is dated, yes,’ said Parrish. ‘But there’s something odd about this essay. Do you see?’ He handed the book across to her. ‘The page that it’s written on is a little bit larger than the page on either side of it – it protrudes over their edges very slightly.’

  Cressida nodded, and seemed about to speak.

  ‘And if you look in the middle of the book,’ said Parrish, hurrying forward to get the girl out of it, ‘where it’s stapled together, you’ll see that the staple holes on this page don’t quite correspond with the others – new ones have had to be made, to fit this page in. So it looks as if you’ve taken a page from another exercise book and put it in here. See, if you follow the page through, back to the first half of the exercise book, it looks as if you’ve had to rewrite parts of two of your earlier essays. The ink is slightly different in shade. And you’ve had to put in Mr Jimson’s marks as well, in both places.’

  It was out. There was complete silence in the room, and one could almost see in Cressida Mailer’s young face the working of her brain. Arnold Mailer seemed about to speak, but Parrish stopped him.

  ‘May I put a case to you, Cressida? I think that one day over Easter or after you were playing with the Jimson children, and you were getting cards and games and things out of their sideboard, and you found a letter at the bottom of all the muddle there – a very funny-looking letter, which made you read it. It said . . . it accused Mr Jimson of . . . of some rather unpleasant things. Perhaps you didn’t understand. Perhaps you asked someone about them. I don’t know. But I think you remembered this after your mummy died. And I think you made sure that whenever anyone saw you after that, you were writing, or had a pen in your hand. Eventually someone was going to think “that little girl’s always writing. I wonder if she saw anything that might provide a clue!” Even a dumb policeman might think of that. And they were going to be led straight off on to a false scent, probably leading them towards Mr Jimson, which is exactly what happened for a bit. That exercise book was what they call a put-up job, wasn’t it, Cressida? Now, why would you want to send us off on a false scent?’

  ‘To protect me, Inspector,’ said Arnold Mailer. He rose sharply from his chair, with a sort of resignation about the gesture, as if he considered himself already under arrest, and was relieved, and wanted to be going.

  ‘No!’ said Cressida.

  ‘That’s what I thought, sir,’ said Parrish. As they both stood face to face he noticed again what a big man Arnold Mailer was. As a rule his self-effacing courtesy, and his gentleness, rather hid that. Sometimes he almost seemed not to be there. But his sudden gesture drew all eyes to himself, and even Feather noticed it, and the bigness of his hands.

  ‘She did it to protect me, Inspector,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know about it until after the exercise books were taken away, or I would have made her tear it out. Can we get this over as quickly as possible, Inspector? I suppose you know by now what happened?’

  ‘I know that you did in fact receive an anonymous letter,’ said Parrish. ‘It was silly to deny it. I also have a very fair idea of what it contained.’

  Arnold Mailer drew his hand across his forehead. ‘Then you’ll know it was a pretty nasty shock. Last Saturday it was. Seems much longer. At first I thought it must be some nasty-minded crank. I decided to ignore it. I wish to hell I had. But you go on thinking about these things, that’s the devil of it. They sort of fester. This one did, anyway. It tied in with so much – the loss of these contracts we’d been putting in for in this area, things that we’d normally be able to bank on, or at least get our share of. Not matters of life and death to a big firm like ours, but useful. And then, I’d been worried recently because Alison had been buying things which she didn’t seem to expect me to pay for. I thought she was running up bills, and I was afraid they were going to all descend on me at once. But they never came. I’d decided she must have been saving money out of her allowance, and yet . . . well, it didn’t seem likely. So it all hung together, and I thought and thought about it all weekend.’

  ‘And you set a trap?’ asked Parrish.

  ‘Yes. Does that sound dreadful? I couldn’t think of any other way. It was the simple, old-fashioned sort. I left my briefcase in the study, and stuck a hair over the envelope containing the details of our tender for a new fire-station in Croxham. That was Monday. Then I went to the amenities meeting.’

  ‘And when you got back the hair was unstuck.’

  ‘Oh yes, it was unstuck.’ Mailer drew his hands through his hair and looked very tired. Parrish wondered how many hours’ sleep he had had since Monday. But he shook the weariness out of himself, and continued: ‘I don’t know if you know, Inspector, but Alison was my secretary before we married. She knew all about the business, what to look for, where it would be, who would be interested in buying the information.’ His voice was bitter. ‘I loved her all our married life, and yet I don’t suppose she thought twice about what she was doing.’

  There was nothing anyone could say to that. If there was ever anybody whose thoughts were all for one person, it was Alison Mailer.

  ‘But you must realize,’ resumed Mailer, ‘that it was just done for the money – not to spite me, or anything. I have no money myself in Allington’s – that’s my firm. She knew we would suffer no financial harm, at least not in the short term. She never could think further than that. She just wanted pocket-money for herself. It’s difficult to imagine – for me – still. I bought her everything she asked for, if it was humanly possible. We’ve never saved, always lived up to our income, because there’s always been something she wanted. I suppose the more she had, the more she wanted, and so eventually she had to do this. I realize I didn’t know her.’

  ‘So what did you do?’ asked Parrish gently.

  ‘She was in the kitchen, making herself a nightcap. We started to – well, what can you say, except that we had a row? She hardly bothered to deny what she’d done: it almost seemed as though she – she despised me too much to bother. She started sneering – at what I earned, and so on. Said she expected me to have made the big time by now, got on, moved to London, expected us to have made friends with people who mattered. She didn’t bother to wrap this up in fine words – it all came out, just like that. It was all so petty, so vulgar, and selfish. I hate to think of it.’

  ‘But she touched a raw nerve?’

  ‘What? Oh, I suppose so. Suddenly I saw red, some sort of pure rage came over me. She turned away – you know that graceful way she had – as if the matter was too trivial to concern her anymore. There was a cutlet bat on the table – ’

  ‘A what, sir?’

  ‘One of those heavy things you bash meat with. To make the slices thinner. We’d had Wiener Schnitzel for dinner, and she’d been using it. I took it up and hit her with it twice. She fell on the kitchen table. And that’s really all there was to it, Inspector. Would you let me say goodbye to Cressida, and then we’ll – ’

  ‘It�
��s not true!’

  ‘Cressida!’ Mailer’s voice shot out with whiplash clarity, and he took both her wrists in his hands, and seemed to be squeezing them until Cressida gasped with pain. He looked into her eyes, hard, and then let her arms drop, and made sharply for the door, motioning Parrish to follow him. But Cressida was not to be silenced so easily.

  ‘It’s not true,’ she repeated, sucking her red wrists, and looking at Parrish with a terrible intensity, passion burning in her eyes. The furious obstinacy of the expression suggested to Parrish something she must have got from her mother. ‘Daddy’s telling you this to cover up for me. He wants to shield me. It wasn’t like that.’

  Conscious that she had all eyes on her, and that she could not now be ignored, Cressida sat down again, and seemed to be reliving the scene.

  ‘I’d been reading, and I heard them quarrelling. I came downstairs. Mother was standing on one side of the kitchen table, Daddy was walking around. She was saying horrible things, that woman, disgusting things in that calm, snaky voice of hers. The cutlet bat was on the dresser. I’d used it to make dinner. I made the dinner. I always made the dinner, and that woman pretended I just helped, as if I was playing. I took the bat. They hadn’t seen me because they were starting to shout. It’s very heavy. I swung it, and bashed the back of her head, like I had the meat.’

  ‘This is nonsense, Inspector, utter nonsense,’ shouted Arnold Mailer. ‘Just sick fantasies.’

  ‘She fell forward on to the table. It had a plastic cloth on. She was completely still. Daddy turned around, and he looked for a moment as if he couldn’t believe it. Then he ran over and took the bat, and hit her with it again, with the side. “Now no one can say you killed her,” he said. He did it for me, but she was dead already. I know it.’

  No one said anything, for there was nothing to say. Arnold Mailer was looking desperate, and finally he turned to Parrish. ‘This is the most horrible nonsense, Inspector. You know a child would never do a thing like that. She’s been completely upset by this whole business. She doesn’t know what she’s saying.’