How to Murder Your Mother-In-Law

by Dorothy Cannell

  “I’d like to know why they got out of the car in the first place.” Ben shook his head over the vagaries of the older generation. “But you’ll be here for the spare key. Much appreciated, and if you’ll be so good as to step inside, I will get it for you at once, Constable …?”

  “Sergeant Briggs, and I’m afraid there’s a bit more to the matter than I have heretofore indicated.” Not budging from the step, the sergeant lowered his eyes to his notebook and folded back a couple of pages. Was he about to tell us that he had booked Dad and Tricks for unlawful parking on a public footpath, or for abandonment of a motor vehicle?

  “So what’s the upshot?” Ben asked without fear or trembling.

  “It’s not a pretty story, sir, but I will try to make it as straightforward and painless as I can.” Our man in blue stood eyes forward, helmet held high. “When I was approached by Mr. Elijah Haskell and Mrs. Beatrix Taffer, neither party was wearing any clothes.”

  “You’re joking!” Ben’s hand gripped my fist so tightly, I was afraid he would inadvertently arm wrestle me to the ground.

  “I’m not paid to amuse the public, sir” came the wooden response. “According to Mr. Elijah Haskell, he was invited by Mrs. Taffer to take a moonlight dip in the altogether. And when the parties returned to the beach they couldn’t find their clothes left by the water’s edge, and reckoned they must have been washed out to sea.”

  “No!” I wrapped my arms around Ben for fear he would swoon and crack his head on the floor. It was imperative that he keep his wits intact for his mother’s sake. A gasp was heard from the gallery above, and I feared tears would come raining down on us at any second. Stifled laughter, sad to say, was the contribution from the onlookers at the kitchen door.

  “Where are our Adam and Eve?” Ben inquired through gritted teeth.

  “I was able to open your car, using a little police know-how, and drove the parties over here after issuing a verbal warning about public indecency. If they’d been a couple of kids I’d have marched them down to the station”—the sergeant did have a heart beating under that uniform—“but having parents myself, sir, I know how it is.”

  “You need have no qualms about remanding Mr. Elijah Haskell to my custody.” Ben’s eyebrows came down over his nose like an iron bar.

  “I get you, sir, no hope of leniency from this end.” The notebook got clapped shut and tucked away. “I told the lady and gentleman to remain in the car while I had a word with you—let them sweat a little, was my idea.”

  “Come on now, love! You couldn’t expect us to stay cooped up while you dillydallied!”

  That was Tricks’s voice. For shame! A bundle made up of two people wrapped up in one blanket hobbled out of the shadows to mount the steps with the gait of participants in a three-legged race. I recognized the blanket. It was the one Ben kept on the backseat of the car to disguise the rips in the upholstery. “Wasn’t it lucky finding this?” Tricks enthused. “Elijah was getting goose bumps all over.”

  Poor Mum! It was a wonder she didn’t jump over the railing. The brazenness of the Taffer Woman! There she stood in the doorway, fairly bubbling over with merriment. She even risked her hold on the blanket to raise an obscenely naked arm and poke the sergeant in the ribs.

  “My knight in shiny silver buttons. We were never so glad to see anyone in our lives, were we, Eli?”

  Dad didn’t answer her. Shuffling over the threshold with his Siamese twin, he put his case to Judge Bentley T. Haskell. “Don’t stand there, son, like you’re looking at some two-headed freak straight out of the circus. All men make mistakes in their time, and there’s lots of excuses for me. You have to give me that!” His brown eyes were certainly soulful, and it was apparent his bald head had paled along with his face. “That dandelion wine I drank, at your request, was powerful stuff, and then there was that business with your mother. After thirty-eight years she drives me out of the house, drives me to ruin and public disgrace.”

  “Threw him right in my arms.” Tricks’s sigh ruffled the blanket. “But bless her heart, Mags doesn’t have anything to worry about. We were just having a bit of fun is all, going skinny-dipping like a couple of kids.”

  “Speak for yourself!” Dad roared. “I felt a hundred years old getting into that water, and I aged a couple of hundred more when I got out.”

  “I don’t have time to suffer with you, Dad.” Ben patted his dressing gown as if expecting the spare key to the Heinz to materialize inside the pocket. “If Sergeant Briggs will kindly wait while you and Mrs. Taffer put on some clothes, you can drive him back to the police station, preferably after taking Mrs. Taffer home, then book yourself in at the Dark Horse. While I’m trusting you to stay out of jail, I will be looking in on Mum to see if by some miracle she hasn’t gotten wind of what’s happened.”

  My poor darling. Little did he realize she had heard every word. Ah, how my heart ached for him, as well as for Mum, when she made her presence known.

  “Thank God for you, son, At least something good came out of my unholy union with that … Judas!” We all looked up to see her standing at the bars, this woman for whom love’s song had turned into a dirge. “But don’t anyone go thinking I’m upset. Far from it! Elijah and Bea can carry on to their wicked hearts’ content. After all, they’re both free as the wind. So if you’ll all excuse me, I’ll go back to my bedroom and rearrange the furniture. I could put up with it the way it was for a few nights, but now it’s settled that I’ll be living here permanently, so I’ll want the place looking halfway decent.”

  A hush descended upon the hall when she vanished from the scene. For several moments Sergeant Briggs stood with his helmet clapped over his heart, and then Jonas—a sight to behold in his nightshirt and Wee Willie Winkie cap—leaned over the railing to proclaim the words that brought tears to my eyes and a sob to my throat: “It is a far better thing that she does than she has ever done, it is a far better rest she goes to than she has ever known.”

  “Don’t go asking me to weep buckets for her.” Mrs. Malloy stood her ground in the middle of the kitchen. “Some people earn every hard knock they get.”

  “How can you be so callous?” Still in my dressing gown, my hair piling down my back, I staggered over to the sink and poured myself a strong slug of water. After a sleepless night I was as bleary-eyed as the morning, which was as close to rain as I was to tears. “What,” I asked, “did my mother-in-law ever do to you?”

  “She came into my bedroom last night and ordered me to turn down the radio. What’s more, she brought that dog of hers along, for intimidation purposes, and it cocked its leg”—Mrs. M. sucked in an outraged breath—“on the chair where I’d put me undies.”

  “Sweetie’s been taking male hormones to help her through a difficult menopause.”

  “If I’m upsetting you, I’m sorry.” Mrs. M. showed her contrition by removing my empty glass and filling it with orange juice. “Here, take this to steady your nerves. If you must know, the real reason I can’t stand the woman is the way she treats you. Think about it! She wouldn’t even come to your wedding.”

  “I thought at the time it was because I was Church of England. But now I realize the ceremony would have brought back too many memories of the wedding she never had.”

  “She never appreciates a thing you do.” Mrs. Malloy shook her two-tone head. “Lord knows you’ve got your faults, Mrs. H., but do you ever hear me complain?”

  “Never,” I lied.

  “The woman’s only happy when she’s miserable! So she should be over the moon the way things turned out. Mark my words, she’ll be crocheting herself a hair shirt before this day is over.”

  “We have to make allowances.” I took a sip of orange juice and felt stronger.

  “There’s no talking to you.” Mrs. Malloy wiped her hands off on the nearest dishtowel. “So don’t come crying to me when you’re worn to a frazzle and Mr. H. has followed in his father’s footsteps and left you for a woman who doesn’t have circles under h
er eyes. Nipped off to work in a hurry this morning, didn’t he?”

  “There was an emergency at the restaurant.”

  “A likely story.”

  “He was upset at having to take my car and leave me at the mercy of the buses. As soon as he has a free moment Ben is going over to the Dark Horse to have a talk with his father about patching things up all around.”

  “Or you’ll have your mother-in-law with you for the rest of your life. For it’ll be you who goes first, see if it isn’t! By the bye, where is Mrs. Sunshine, if I may be so bold as to ask?”

  “Upstairs, giving the twins their baths. She said she would take over that job in future along with giving them their religious instruction and—”

  I broke off when a rat-tat-tat came at the garden door and a horribly distorted face peered through the pebbled glass.

  “No need to jump out of your skin,” Mrs. Malloy scolded. “It’ll be that Freddy come to cadge breakfast.”

  Brightening considerably, I went to open up. My cousin would listen to my tale of woe, make his usual ribald comments, and I would get things back in proportion. Only one problem! The man on the step wasn’t Freddy. He was a neat little man with hair parted down the middle and a pair of owlish glasses.

  A new milkman perhaps? Caught off balance by this further disruption in the cosmic order, to say nothing of being caught in my bare feet and dressing gown, my smile may have promised more than I intended. Say, six pints a day—instead of the usual four.

  “Mrs. Haskell?”

  “Yes!” A glance at his pinstripe suit forced me to reevaluate his profession.

  “I am Peter Savage.”

  “You’re selling something?”

  “Unfortunately not.” He was studying me as if I were a painting in the Louvre.

  “Then who …?”

  “I’m a vagrant,” he replied, very much in the way that someone might have announced he was a bank manager.

  On closer inspection, I saw that Peter Savage’s suit could have done with a pressing and he was wearing one navy sock and one grey with brown shoes, but he was clean-shaven and his teeth were as white as the kitchen sink. Humanity demanded that I ask him in and provide a hearty breakfast. Common sense insisted I do nothing of the sort. Merlin’s Court was set well back from the road, a good ten minutes’ walk from its nearest neighbour, the vicarage. And upstairs I had two babies, a mother-in-law, and Jonas, who would unhesitatingly defend my honour, to the death, with an umbrella taken from the hall stand.

  “I’m looking for odd jobs.”

  “Are you?” I said.

  “Your cousin Freddy Flatts kindly provided me with a letter of recommendation.” Mr. Savage dug a hand into his pinstripe pocket and produced a folded sheet of paper.

  “I’ll bet my bloomers it’s a forgery,” contributed Mrs. Malloy from the rear. But I recognized Freddy’s writing when I unfolded the note, which did indeed ask me to extend the man a helping hand.

  “Please come in.” Beckoning him inside, I closed the door, racking my brains for something for him to do.

  “I could mow the lawn,” he suggested.

  “Sorry,” I said, knowing Jonas would pack his suitcase if I let anyone touch his lawn mower. “We’re letting the grass grow.”

  “I’m good at windows.”

  Perfect, I thought. And then remembered that Mr. Watkins, the window cleaner, was due to come that very morning. And from what he had told me last time, Mr. Watkins had already lost Lady Kitty Pomeroy as a client on account of her fault-finding.

  “If he really wants to make himself useful”—Mrs. Malloy sized up the applicant through narrowed rainbow lids—“he could murder your mother-in-law, Mrs. H. I’m sure you’d pay handsomely.”

  “Always one for her little joke,” I told Mr. Savage. “Why don’t you sit down and have some breakfast before we plan your workday?”

  “How kind you are!” He might have been addressing an angel floating down from heaven as he seated himself on a chair, feet together, hands neatly folded in front of him on the table. “Porridge will do very nicely, with perhaps a couple of rashers of bacon to follow. Only one sausage, and the egg not too well done, thank you so very much.”

  “Fried bread and tomato?” Mrs. Malloy’s voice was sweeter than a bowl full of sugar.

  “I mustn’t be a bother.”

  “What, you? Never!” Bang went the frying pan on the stove, slap went the bacon onto the working surface, crack went a couple of eggs into a bowl. Talk about actions speaking louder than words. Mrs. M. was telling me in no uncertain terms to goof off, take a pew, rest my feet while someone else did the work. In order not to feel like a complete parasite, I smoothed out the tablecloth and laid out the cutlery before sitting down across from Mr. Savage.

  “I suppose you’ll want orange juice?” Mrs. M. bumped the refrigerator door shut with her rump and came at us with the glass jug.

  The gentleman cocked his head. “Is it fresh squeezed?”

  “I stomped the fruit with me own bare feet” Plonk went the jug in the middle of the table; a tidal wave of juice foamed over the lip and Mr. Savage nervously gripped the arms of his chair.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Malloy.” I darted her a look as she returned to her frying pan, which was spitting and hissing as if flaming mad.

  “So how do you know Freddy?” I asked our guest.

  “We met in the course of my business, Mrs. Haskell.”

  “You mean before …?”

  “Oh, no! In my former life I was a schoolmaster living in Harold Wood, Essex, and I don’t know that your cousin was ever in that vicinity. We struck up a friendship a little over a month ago when I was busking—”

  “What?”

  He removed his glasses to polish them with his serviette. “Doing my song-and-dance act outside the bus station. Freddy stopped to toss some change in my cap. He told me I sounded as good as the original recording artist.”

  “A nice compliment.”

  “Not really.” Mr. Savage rearranged his knife and fork. “He had spotted me as a fraud. And I trust that you, who are so beaut—benevolent, will not think too badly of me. I had, you see, a radio in my pocket and was lip-syncing.”

  “That must have taken a certain skill.”

  “Only courage, in standing up to the hoots and hollers whenever I cut from a song for a late-breaking news bulletin, or an advert for fish fingers. But your cousin couldn’t have been nicer. He agreed to give me singing and guitar lessons.”

  “Here’s something to keep your vocal cords going!” Mrs. Malloy planted a steaming plate in front of him. The bacon was pink in the middle and golden around the edges. The fried egg resembled a little mobcap, white and puffy with a pretty edging of lace, the fried bread was done to a golden turn, and the tomato sent up little rosy wisps of steam. When my plate arrived—Mrs. Malloy is the old-fashioned sort who believes in ladies last—I would have been tempted to offer her a job if she hadn’t already worked for me.

  “You forgot the sausage.” Mr. Savage tempered this criticism with a forgiving smile. “Never mind. I can fill up on toast if you’d be kind enough to make some. And lemon marmalade, if you please. My mother made me eat orange marmalade as a child, and I’ve never liked it.”

  “Will there be anything else?” Mrs. M.’s voice came down on his head with the force of a frying pan.

  “I think we are ready for tea, aren’t we, Mrs. Haskell?” From the sound of him, we might have been an old married couple sitting in a tea shop with our menus propped up against the sugar bowl and our shopping bags blocking the aisle.

  “Here’s the pot.” Mrs. Malloy plonked that down, complete with one of Mum’s crocheted cozies. “I’ll let you pour your own! I’m off to relax for half an hour, scrubbing the bath.”

  “She’s one in a million,” I said, absently doing up the top button of my dressing gown as the hall door slammed with such force it practically blew the tablecloth over our heads.

  “As is your
cousin Freddy.” Mr. Savage polished off the last grease spot on his plate and uttered no more than a token protest when I offered to trade him my full platter.

  “Freddy understood completely when I told him I had always hated teaching arithmetic to children who shot spitballs at me and set off stink bombs in the classroom, and how one day, just like that, I decided to pack it in, pack my bags, and set off to follow my dream of becoming a rock star. I planned to hitch rides, but realized after the first ribald toot that a hitchhiker’s thumb, like a green one, is something you either have or you don’t. So I hopped on a bus, took it as far as it went, got on another, and ended up in of all places Chitterton Fells.”

  “Do you have a family, Mr. Savage?”

  “My mother.” He sliced into my tomato, sending up spurts of red. “There’s no denying I took the coward’s way out in leaving a note on the mantelpiece and creeping out of the house at dead of night. But you’d have to know Mother. She still walked me to school every morning and picked me up afterwards.”

  “A little overprotective” was all I could say.

  “She made me hand over my paycheque and gave me just enough pocket money for essentials.”

  “So you weren’t able to bring much cash with you.”

  “I thought I was headed for fame and fortune, but since my radio scam was uncovered I haven’t picked up enough loose change to buy new strings for my guitar, let alone eat enough to get my daily allowance of vitamins and minerals. So this morning I came to see Freddy and he was so kind as to send me here. But when he described you, I never guessed, never dreamed that you would be such a vision of … kindness. Dammit!” Mr. Savage blushed and washed out his mouth with tea. “I’m stammering like a sixteen-year-old. But that’s the way I feel sometimes—as if my whole life is opening up for me. Did I tell you that your cousin has offered to give me music lessons so I can get back on the road?”