On the same morning, I went to the bank to draw some cash – something I had to do for myself now Charles wasn’t here. The cashier said the manager would like a word. Our account was overdrawn. The manager suggested that I transfer some money from the deposit account.
As I was walking down the High Street on my way from the bank to the bus stop, Mr. Quale was sweeping the doorstep of the Bull Hotel.
“Morning, ma’am. Sorry to hear about Mr. Butter.”
“Thank you.”
“Very nice gentleman. I saw him just before it happened.”
“How did he seem?”
“Right as rain. He popped in for a quick drink – left a bit earlier than usual. Thought he must be in a hurry for his supper.”
“Earlier?” Charles had collapsed on the pavement outside the Thornhills’ house in Victoria Road a little after seven-thirty. “You mean later?”
Quale shook his head. “It was about a quarter-past six.”
“I expect he looked in at the shop on the way home.”
I said goodbye and joined the queue at the bus stop. Charles had never worked in the evening. I was standing there, turning over in my mind what Quale had said, when there was a loud tooting from the other side of the road. It was Marina Harper in her little two-seater.
“Hop in, Anne. I’ll give you a lift.”
I was tired, and it was beginning to rain. Otherwise I might have tried to find an excuse. I never knew quite what to make of Marina. She had fair, coarse hair and a high-coloured face with small, pale eyes. She was comfortably off – her father used to own the local bus company. We had known each other since we were children but we weren’t particular friends. And I was old-fashioned enough to feel that a wife should live with her husband.
Marina talked unceasingly as she drove me home. “I’ve just had a couple of days in town.” Her husband worked in London. He and Marina had a semi-detached marriage: his job kept him in London while she preferred to live in Lydmouth. “…and you’ll never guess who I met at a party last night. Elizabeth David – yes, really. Absolutely wonderful. Such style. She looks how she writes, if you know what I mean.”
“Elizabeth who?”
Marina raised plucked eyebrows. “Elizabeth David. The cookery writer. You know, she’s always in Vogue. And she’s written this super book about Mediterranean food. Why don’t you come to lunch tomorrow? We can try one of the recipes.”
Marina dropped me in Chepstow Road. After lunch, I went into the dining room. Charles kept cheque books and other documents relating to money in the top drawer of the bureau. I settled down and tried to work out how the money ebbed and flowed and ebbed again in our lives. I found the most recent bank statement among the pile of business letters which I had left on the hall table for Nigel. How I wished Nigel were here now.
At the date of the statement, our personal account had not been overdrawn, but it now was. In the week before his death Charles had made out a cheque for one hundred and eighty-nine pounds, nineteen shillings and eleven pence.
I leafed through the cancelled cheques enclosed with the statement. The one in question had been made out to H.R. Caterford Ltd and paid into a branch of Barclays Bank in Cardiff.
Feeling like a detective, I put on my hat and coat, walked to the telephone box on the corner of Victoria Road and consulted the directory. H.R. Caterford Ltd was a jewellers in the Royal Arcade. Suddenly the solution came to me: Charles must have bought me a present. The dear man knew I had been a little low since coming out of hospital in September. (Knowing one will never have children is a little depressing.) But in that case, where was the present?
On impulse I dialled the number in the directory. The phone was answered on the second ring, just as I was beginning to get cold feet about the business.
“Good afternoon,” I said. “May I speak to Mr. Caterford?”
“Speaking.”
“This is Mrs. Butter, from Lydmouth. Mrs. Charles Butter. I believe my husband—”
“Mrs. Butter. How pleasant to hear from you. You’re well, I hope?”
“Yes, thank you. I was wondering—”
“Oddly enough, I was just thinking of you. Only yesterday afternoon the lady who sold us the brooch came in with the matching ring. Platinum and opal. Said she didn’t want that either, because her daughter had told her that opals are unlucky unless you’re born in October. Not that you need worry about that, of course.”
“Oh?”
“As you’re one of the favoured few.”
“Oh,” I said. “Oh yes.”
“It’s rather a lovely ring. The opals are a perfect match for your eyes, if I may say so. Would you like to have a word with Mr. Butter about it? Then perhaps he could telephone me. I’ll hold it for a day or two. It’s always a particular pleasure to oblige an old customer.”
“Yes, thank you. Goodbye.”
I put down the phone and walked home. A platinum and opal brooch. Charles knew I didn’t like platinum. Then the opals: unlucky unless the wearer had been born in the month of October. My birthday was in March. And how could opals match my eyes? They are brown. Finally, Mr. Caterford had spoken to me as if he knew me. But until this afternoon I had never even heard of him.
The following morning, I found a rat. The rat-catcher had warned me this might happen. “That’s the trouble with them, look,” he had said. “You can never tell where they’re going to pop up.”
The rat was lying on the path by the old stable. It was dark, with a long tail. There had been a frost in the night and its fur was dusted with droplets of ice, like sugar. Actually, it looked rather sweet. Because of the frost, the ground would not be easy to dig, so I decided to bury it after my lunch with Marina Harper.
Marina lived in Raglan Court, a modern block of flats overlooking Jubilee Park. The place was very nice, I’m sure – if you like hard, modern furniture and American gadgets. There was a lounge-cum-dining room with a huge picture window overlooking the park and a serving hatch to the kitchen. The air stank of garlic.
“I’ve just made dry martinis,” Marina said. “You don’t mind if I put the finishing touches to lunch, do you? We can talk through the hatch.”
As she poured the drinks, light glinted on a silver brooch she was wearing. Rather a pretty brooch with opals set in it.
Not silver: platinum?
“That’s a lovely brooch,” I said.
“Yes, it is pretty, isn’t it?”
“Aren’t opals unlucky?”
Marina laughed, a gurgle of sound like water running out of a bath. “Not if you’re born in October. Then they’re lucky. Now why don’t you sit here while I finish off in the kitchen?”
I watched her through the hatch – the flash of a knife, the glint of platinum – and all the time she talked.
“I thought we’d have filet de porc en sanglier. It’s one of my Elizabeth David recipes. Pork that tastes like wild boar. The secret is the marinade. It has to be for eight days. And you can’t skimp on the ingredients either – things like coriander seeds, juniper berries, basil. There’s a little shop in Brewer Street where you can get them. I think it must be the only place in England.”
While Marina talked, the rich, unhealthy odours of the meal wafted through the hatch into the living room. In my nervousness, I finished the drink more quickly than I should have done.
“Can I get you a refill?” she called.
I stood up. “I wonder if I might – is it along here?”
“Second on the left.”
In the hall, I opened my handbag and took out Charles’s Yale key. Holding my breath, I opened the front door. I slipped the key into the lock and twisted. The key turned.
I drew it out of the lock, closed the door quietly and darted into the sanctuary of the bathroom. Marina was wearing the brooch. The jeweller in Cardiff had thought that Marina w
as me, had thought that she was Charles’s wife. So they must have been in Cardiff together, and acting as if they were a married couple. The key in Charles’s pocket fitted Marina’s door. There could be only one explanation for all that.
It is strange how in a crisis one finds reserves of strength one did not suspect existed. Somehow I went back into the living room and accepted another dry martini. Somehow I made myself eat the ghastly, overflavoured pork which Marina served up with such a triumphant flourish that I wanted to throw the plate at her. I even complimented her on her cooking. She said that she would give me the recipe.
The meal dragged on. It was far too heavy and elaborate for lunch. Marina served it in the French manner, with salad after the main course, and then cheese before the pudding. So pretentious. What was wrong with our British way of doing things?
When at last it was time to go, Marina came into the hall and helped me on with my coat. She bent forward and kissed my cheek.
“I have enjoyed this,” she said. “Let’s do it again soon. I’m running up to town for a night or two but I’ll be in touch as soon as I get back.”
I walked home. The rat was still lying on the path between the house and the stable. I manoeuvred its stiff body into a bucket with the help of a spade. The ice had melted now, so the fur gleamed with moisture. I carried the bucket into the stable. I looked at the various places where the rat-catcher had left the poison. All of it had gone. I wondered whether there were more rats. It was then that the idea came into my mind. I remembered the Kipling story.
Nigel and Charles thought Kipling was the greatest writer of the century. They were particularly fond of his Stalky stories, which are about unpleasant schoolboys at a boarding school. I had read them in our early days, when I’d been friends with both Charles and Nigel, just before Charles and I became engaged. A wife should try to like the things the husband likes. But I hadn’t much liked these stories.
Their favourite story was one in which the boys kill a cat with an air gun. They push its dead body under the floorboards of a rival dormitory. The cat decomposes, and gradually the smell fills the dormitory, growing stronger and stronger, and more and more loathsome. If a cat could do that, I thought, so could a rat.
It was just a silly idea – childish, undignified and in any case impossible to carry out. I left the rat in the stable and went inside for a cup of tea. During the rest of the day, however, I could not help thinking about the dead rat. And about Marina.
Marina was going to London. I had a key to her flat, which she did not know I possessed. If I went there tomorrow evening, after darkness, there would be very little risk of my being seen. As the evening slipped past, the idea seemed more and more attractive. It wouldn’t harm Marina to have another smell in that evil-smelling flat. And it was a way of making a point about her beastly behaviour. There was no excuse for adultery. There was no excuse for stealing my husband.
The following evening, I wrapped the rat in newspaper and put it in my shopping bag. Fortunately I’m not squeamish about such things. I slipped a torch into my pocket, walked up to Raglan Court and let myself into the flat.
I was not afraid. Indeed, I had the oddest sensation that it could not be me, Anne Butter, doing this. I went into the kitchen. This was where Marina’s nasty foreign smells came from – so this was the place for the rat. I didn’t turn on the light. I unwrapped the rat and let it fall to the linoleum.
The gas cooker was raised on legs a few inches above the floor. I used a floor mop to push the body underneath. The torch proved to be a blessing. With its help I was able to see that there was a gap between the wall and the back of the cupboard beside the cooker. With a little manoeuvring of the broom, I pushed the rat into the gap. Even if Marina looked under the cooker she would not be able to see anything. I didn’t think it would be long before the rat began to smell: the flat was centrally heated, and the kitchen was the warmest room.
I went home. Then it was simply a matter of waiting. Waiting for Nigel and waiting for the rat.
A few days later, Marina arrived on my doorstep with a small parcel in her hand.
“For you,” she said, smiling. “Just a little something.”
I had to ask her in for coffee. The parcel contained a copy of Elizabeth David’s A Book of Mediterranean Food.
“The lovely thing about cooking is that when the pleasure’s shared it’s somehow doubled,” Marina said. “You won’t be able to get a lot of the ingredients in Lydmouth. Perhaps I can find what you need in London.”
During the next two weeks, I saw Marina regularly. I even asked her to lunch. Many of Elizabeth David’s recipes were really very simple. I found one – tarte à l’oignon et aux oeufs – which turned out to be very like the flans I used to cook Charles. Marina said my tarte was quite marvellous.
Why did she do all this? Why was she such a hypocrite? There were two possible explanations: either she felt guilty about stealing my husband, or she was doing it because she derived a malicious pleasure from pretending to be my friend.
On the second occasion I had lunch with her, I was sure I could smell a faint blueness in the air, an uneasy hint that lingered in the nostrils. After the meal, I helped Marina carry the plates into the kitchen.
I sniffed.
“Can you smell something?” Marina asked.
“Well...”
“I keep thinking I can. I must turn out the cupboards. And the larder.”
No more was said about it until a day or two later, when Marina drove me up to Cheltenham for a matinée at the Everyman. In the interval she brought up the subject again.
“Do you remember that smell in the kitchen? I think it might be drains.”
“Have there been complaints from other flats?”
“Not as far as I know. I’ve got someone coming to have a look.”
Two days later, she came to tea and gave me the next instalment. Unfortunately the plumber had turned out to be rather good at his job. He had soon realised that the smell was not from the drains. He pulled out the cooker and found the decaying body of the rat squeezed between the cupboard and the wall.
“It was quite disgusting,” Marina said. “It looked as it smelled, if you know what I mean. Anyway, the plumber was quite marvellous. He got the wretched thing out of the flat and now things are beginning to return to normal.”
“Isn’t it odd having a rat in a modern flat?”
“Apparently they are very agile creatures, and you never know where they are going to turn up. The plumber suggested that I get someone in.” Marina shivered, rather theatrically. “Just in case there are any more.”
“We had rats in the stable,” I said. “The rat-catcher soon sorted them out. I’ve got his address if you’d like it.”
Marina took out a little leather-bound diary and made a note of the details. As she jotted them down, the brooch gleamed on her cardigan. Platinum and unlucky opals.
The rat man came and left poison under the cooker and in the larder. Marina told me all about his reluctance to leave the poison in the kitchen, about the strictness of his instructions to her. This was just before she went up to London for the weekend. She was going to a party, she said, where she hoped Elizabeth David might be present.
“I know I’ve only met her once, but I feel I know her really well – as well as I know you – just through her writing.” Marina patted my arm – she was always touching me, which was one of the things I disliked most. “I’ll tell Mrs. David I’ve been making converts in Lydmouth.”
I was in a quandary for the whole weekend. Should I or shouldn’t I? It was such a good opportunity, presented to me, as it were, on a plate. It would make up for the rather tame performance of the rat. I didn’t want to hurt Marina, of course, or not seriously. But there would be very little risk of that. The amount of poison that would kill a rat would surely give a human being nothing more than a mil
d bilious attack.
All weekend I toyed with the idea. What if? What if? On Sunday evening, when it was dark, I put on the headscarf and the raincoat and left the house. I had the torch and the key of Marina’s flat in my pocket.
Everything went as smoothly as last time. In the refrigerator was a saucepan containing what I now knew was ratatouille. It smelt quite disgusting. The rat poison was on saucers, one under the cooker and the other in the larder. I took a little of the poison from each and rearranged what was left on the saucers so that they both looked untouched. I stirred the poison into the ratatouille. To my relief, it seemed to dissolve very quickly. I wondered if it would taste. With luck the ratatouille was so strongly flavoured that it would mask any additions.
I went home. That night I dreamed of Nigel. Funnily enough I had always dreamed more about Nigel than about Charles. On Monday morning, I woke with a light heart. Now I could put the past behind me and look to the future. In a sense, there had been nothing personal about what I’d done at Raglan Court. It had not been a question of being vindictive – merely of doing my duty.
I was washing up after breakfast when a man walked past the kitchen window and knocked on the back door. It was the rat-catcher again. He was a grubby little man with a baggy tweed jacket and a collarless shirt.
“Morning, ma’am. Just come to see how the little fellows are getting on.”
“I really don’t know.”
“No dead ’uns?”
“Who knows?”
“Shall I take a look? See if they need a second helping?”
A few minutes later, the rat-catcher came back. “They took it all. I put down a bit more.”
“Good.” I opened my handbag and took out my purse. “Were there – were there any bodies?”
Vintage Crime Page 23
