Crime Writers and Other Animals

by Simon Brett

  ‘I see.’ Bury hesitated. ‘Well, your reaction to that makes me think perhaps I shouldn’t ask the next question I had in mind . . .’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘I was going to ask whether you knew of any other girl-friends he was seeing while he was going around with you?’

  Gina Luccarini’s furious reaction proved that the Inspector’s hesitancy about asking the question had been fully justified.

  It was time, Detective Inspector Bury decided, for a bit of straight talking to Jane Rudgwick.

  Her voice sounded strained when he rang her the next morning, but she was as co-operative as ever. No, she wasn’t going out. Yes, he was welcome to come round whenever he wanted to.

  Behind the spectacles, her eyes again looked very raw, as if she had been crying all night. And the pervasive flowery aroma which surrounded her made a sharp contrast to the exclusive perfume of Gina Luccarini.

  Now that he could contrast the mistress and the wife, Bury had no difficulty in sympathizing with – almost even condoning – Ralph Rudgwick’s behaviour.

  Vying with Jane’s scent that morning, there was also a smell of furniture polish. He knew that the sitting room had not just been done for his benefit, but that its cleaning was part of an obsessive daily ritual.

  ‘So, how’re things going?’ asked Jane Rudgwick, her small talk incongruous in the circumstances.

  ‘Our investigations are proceeding,’ replied Bury, all policeman. ‘My Sergeant’s making local house-to-house enquiries, to check whether anyone saw anything unusual. And forensic tests are continuing on various objects that were taken from the house, and, er . . . on your husband’s body.’

  ‘Oh. Oh.’ A sob trembled through Jane Rudgwick. ‘Excuse me . . .’

  She rushed from the room. When she returned, her eyes were redder than ever, and it seemed as though she had drenched herself in scent.

  ‘I’m sorry about that. It’s still . . . a shock, you know . . . When you mention . . . you know . . .’

  ‘Yes, of course . . .’ Detective Inspector Bury soothed, lulling her into relaxation before his sudden change of approach.

  ‘I want to talk about your husband’s infidelity, Mrs Rudgwick,’ he announced firmly.

  ‘Oh.’ She looked totally crestfallen. ‘You knew about that?’

  Bury nodded, but before he could say anything, Jane Rudgwick continued, pleadingly, ‘It was only the once, though.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Once. Only once that Ralph was unfaithful to me. In Paris.’

  ‘In Paris?’ Bury was too stupefied to do more than echo the words.

  ‘Yes. A couple of months ago. Ralph told me all about it. He met this girl in his hotel, and they had a few drinks, and got talking and . . . well, one thing led to another. He was heartbroken about what had happened. He said he was completely in the wrong, and he swore it’d never happen again, and he said he’d fully understand if I turned him out, but . . . our relationship wasn’t like that . . .’

  ‘So what happened?’ the Inspector asked dully.

  ‘Well, I was hurt, obviously – it would be foolish for me to pretend otherwise – and my confidence was hit, but I think in some ways it turned out to be a good thing.’

  ‘A good thing?’

  ‘Yes, because it made us talk about our marriage. You know, if something works, you tend not to question it, you just let it tick over, and perhaps I had been getting to the stage of taking Ralph a bit for granted. I mean, the fact that he succumbed to the girl in Paris . . . well, maybe it meant there was something he wasn’t getting from being married to me. So, anyway, we talked about it – talked about things in a way we hadn’t since the days when we were first engaged – and I think, though I’m sorry for what caused it, that in a strange way it made our relationship stronger.’

  ‘Ah.’ Bury realized he was almost literally gaping, and recovered himself sufficiently to ask, ‘Wasn’t there some thought of you going on that trip to Paris with your husband?’

  She looked at him in innocent puzzlement. ‘No. It would have involved flying. Ralph knew I hated flying. He would never even have suggested it.’

  ‘Oh.’ The Inspector tried once again. ‘And you really do believe that that was the only occasion in the course of your married life that your husband was unfaithful to you?’

  ‘Of course,’ she replied ingenuously. ‘I was very lucky, because I know some men are dreadful when it comes to that kind of thing.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bury slowly, ‘yes. And – I hope you don’t mind my asking – but your marriage, I mean the sexual side, was satisfactory . . .?’

  For the first time since he had met her, some colour came into Jane Rudgwick’s cheeks. ‘Well, it always seemed so to me,’ she replied rather coyly.

  ‘Ah,’ said Detective Inspector Bury, ‘ah, well . . .’

  And he began to invert everything he had ever thought about the case. They always said the wife was the last one to know. Ralph Rudgwick had peppered his married life with infidelities, and his wife Jane had never known about any of them. Not even about the grand amour that had come to her husband at the age of fifty-five.

  But, as he thought about it, Bury began to wonder just how grand the amour had been. He had Gina Luccarini’s word for it – and indeed that had been supported by Jacob Keynes – but, given the kind of character that was beginning to form in the Inspector’s mind for Ralph Rudgwick, they had perhaps both been deluded. A man who was capable of telling wholesale lies to his wife would have little compunction about doing the same to his mistress.

  Before he could sort through all the ramifications of his changed thinking, the telephone rang. Jane Rudgwick answered it.

  ‘Yes. Yes, he is.’ She held the receiver across. ‘For you.’

  It was the young Detective Sergeant, bumptiously pleased with himself. ‘I’ve got something. Old lady at the end of the road, apparently spends all her days snooping through the net curtains at everyone’s comings and goings.’

  ‘What about her?’ Bury asked, a little testily.

  ‘Early Friday evening, she saw a red Golf GTi arrive at the Rudgwicks’ house.’

  ‘How long did it stay?’

  ‘She doesn’t know. It was getting dark and she left her vantage point soon after to cook her supper. But she definitely saw it arrive about half-past seven.’

  ‘Hm. Well, that could be very useful information . . . if we happened to know someone who owns a red Golf GTi.’

  ‘We do.’ The Detective Sergeant was now downright crowing. ‘Gina Luccarini owns a red Golf GTi.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Bury. ‘Does she?’

  ‘But this is ridiculous!’ Gina Luccarini protested. ‘What makes you think that I would kill the one person I have ever really loved?’

  ‘I’m not yet saying you did,’ Detective Inspector Bury replied evenly. ‘I’m just asking you to answer some questions which might clarify a few points.’

  ‘Clarify a few points!’ She threw her arms in the air. ‘All right – ask me what you want to ask.’

  She was dressed on this occasion in black trousers and a buttercup-yellow silk blouse. Huge yellow kite-shapes dangled from her ears. Her perfume was heady, almost soporific, in the enclosed space of the flat.

  Bury clicked the answerphone once again, rewound the tape and replayed it. A cultured, male voice oozed charm from the machine.

  ‘Love, it’s me. Look, for reasons that are too complicated to go into, I can’t make it to your place tonight. But I’ve got to see you before you go to Rome – got to! So please come down here, as soon as you can. I’ll be alone after seven, and I’ll explain everything then – promise. I can’t wait to see you. I love you and I want to kiss you all over. See you very soon. Bye.’

  Bury switched the answerphone off and again asked, ‘Why didn’t you tell me about that? Why didn’t you tell me you went down to Henley on Friday evening?’

  Gina looked sulky as she reiterated, ‘I just thought i
t’d make things more complicated. I thought, since I didn’t see Ralph, it would be simpler to pretend I hadn’t been there.’

  ‘But you must realize that it makes your behaviour look extremely suspicious.’

  ‘Yes, now I realize that, but at the time . . . I am a person of passion, Inspector – if an Englishman can understand such a concept! Often I act before I think. When you ask me about Friday, I make a decision on – what you call – the spur of the moment, and now I can see it was the wrong decision.’

  ‘I think I would agree with you there, Miss Luccarini.’

  He let the silence hang between them. Small sounds came from the other parts of the flat, where the young Detective Sergeant and two uniformed constables were going through the artist’s belongings. She had given permission for the search, but then refusing it would only have increased their suspicions.

  A detail came back to the Inspector, of how, the night before, Gina had covered her confusion with a handkerchief when asked directly if she’d heard from Ralph on the Friday. Slowly, the case against her was falling into place.

  ‘The trouble is,’ he went on, ‘that wrong decision you made means that you lied to me about Mr Rudgwick contacting you on the Friday. And if you lied to me about that “minor detail”, it does make me wonder whether you were lying to me about anything else . . .?’

  ‘No! I was not! Everything else it is the truth!’

  ‘So you’re sticking to your story that you drove all the way down to Henley and didn’t see him.’

  ‘Yes. I get there. I knock on the door – there is no reply. I try the back door. Nothing.’

  ‘Miss Luccarini, as I said, the forensic tests on the rubbish left in the Rudgwicks’ bathroom found some boutique tissues of the kind that you use which show traces both of gunshot residue particles and of your rather distinctive perfume.’

  ‘She must have planted them! Jane Rudgwick planted them. I have never been inside the house in Henley. I have keys for the flat in Covent Garden, but not for the house. I tell you, when I go there Friday at seven-thirty, I don’t go inside. There is no reply from the house. Jane has already killed him!’ she concluded on a spurt of anger.

  ‘But why would she want to do that?’

  ‘How many times do I have to answer the same questions! She did not want our happiness! She wanted to destroy it!’

  ‘Miss Luccarini, I don’t think Mrs Rudgwick even had any idea that you knew her husband.’

  ‘But she must have done.’

  ‘I think she thought she had a very happy marriage.’

  ‘But how could she think that? After the things Ralph said to me about their marriage—’

  ‘Yes, but he had reasons to say those things to you.’

  ‘What kind of reasons?’

  ‘Well, initially, to get you into bed with him.’

  Her eyes blazed and she tensed forward. For a moment Bury thought she was actually going to slap him, but she managed to control herself.

  ‘That is not true. Ours was a real relationship. Ralph and I loved each other.’

  ‘I think you’d find Mrs Rudgwick would use exactly the same words.’

  ‘But she was . . . she had . . .’ Gina Luccarini’s hands clenched and unclenched as articulacy deserted her. Then she shook her head and said softly, ‘I come back to the same thing – why would I want to kill a man I love?’

  ‘Perhaps if he’d betrayed you . . .?’ Bury hazarded casually.

  ‘But he did not betray me.’

  ‘When he went to Paris two months ago, he went to bed with another woman.’

  ‘What, with his wife? All right, maybe the hotel only had double beds. But, even in your peculiar, anaemic language, “going to bed with” does not mean the same as “making love to”!’

  ‘Ralph Rudgwick made love to a woman he met in the hotel.’

  For the first time, Gina Luccarini looked pale, paler even than the translucent Jane Rudgwick. ‘I don’t believe you. His wife was there, for God’s sake!’

  Bury shook his head. ‘His wife was not there. He told you his wife would be with him, but there was never any question of her going.’

  ‘But it was supposed to be our wonderful, romantic time together. You are talking nonsense. Why would he tell me his wife was going with him and so I could not go?’

  ‘Perhaps because he had already made arrangements to meet this other woman in the hotel . . .?’

  It took a moment for the implications of this to sink in, before the fury seized her. Her hands clawed at the bright print artfully draped over the arm of her chair, tearing through the thin fabric.

  ‘No,’ she moaned. ‘No . . .’

  Detective Inspector Bury pressed home his advantage. ‘And I think – in spite of this wonderful acting performance you’re giving me at the moment – you knew that. I think that’s why you killed him. Ralph Rudgwick was very vain, proud of his conquests. And he made the mistake of telling you about the latest one. That’s what signed his death warrant.’

  He found himself echoing Jacob Keynes’ words. ‘You could cope with the idea of him with his wife, but the thought of Ralph Rudgwick cheating on you with another woman – that you couldn’t tolerate. It reduced you to the level of just another in a sequence of purely physical relationships, another pick-up, another easy lay. And your pride wouldn’t allow him to get away with that.’

  She shook her head in a terrified, mesmerized way. Her full lips still shaped the word ‘No’, but no sound emerged from them.

  At that moment the Detective Sergeant appeared, beaming and cocky, in the doorway. In his hand was a dripping polythene bag, whose contents could be clearly seen.

  ‘Taped on to the inside of the lavatory cistern, Inspector,’ he announced. ‘Oldest trick in the book.’

  Gina Luccarini looked at the pistol and continued to mouth silently and helplessly. She no longer looked beautiful or sexy. She looked like a beached fish.

  And the sweat of terror had soured the aroma of her expensive perfume.

  Jane Rudgwick stood in the pale pink bathroom of the house in Henley and looked at herself in the mirror. She had taken off her glasses and her pale blue eyes looked clear and sparkling. The previous day they had been puffy and red, but a long night’s sleep had healed them.

  She found, after all the traumas of the previous weeks, she was finally beginning to relax.

  The knowledge that Gina Luccarini was in prison, awaiting trial for the murder of Ralph Rudgwick, contributed significantly to Jane’s feeling of security.

  It hadn’t really been so hard. All marriages are unknowable – that was the single fact that had made the whole thing possible.

  The man who tells his mistress that his home life is terrible, that his wife is frigid and refuses to give him a divorce, is a stereotype of modern life.

  As is the devoted wife at home, blithely unquestioning of her husband’s fidelity, the little woman who is, in obedience to tradition, ‘the last to know.’

  All Jane Rudgwick had had to do was to play variations on those stereotypes.

  The outline of her plan had been formed from the moment she found out about Ralph and Gina’s relationship.

  She had known about the other women, of course, but they had not worried her. Ralph had only gone with them for sex, an activity for which Jane had no feeling except a mild revulsion. The other women had at least deterred him from attempts to offload his restless libido on to her (though pretty early into their marriage he had given up any attempts in that direction). And the squalor of his furtive couplings had given Jane further ammunition with which to vilify her husband when she felt the need.

  Because, of course, she had always been in control. Her money, and the threat of her withdrawing it from the Keynes Rudgwick Gallery, had always ensured that.

  At one stage, when Ralph had been fulminating particularly violently against the trap in which she had incarcerated him, she had briefly worried that he might resort to murder to resolve the si
tuation.

  But she soon realized that he never would. Ralph Rudgwick didn’t have that kind of strength in him.

  Unlike his wife.

  From the moment Gina Luccarini appeared on her husband’s scene, Jane Rudgwick knew that she was different from the other women. This time there was more than sex involved.

  And, instead of his customary shabby duplicities, this time he made no attempt to keep the relationship a secret from Jane. He told her everything about it, calmly announced that he wanted a divorce and, when she refused him that option, spoke seriously of getting out of the Keynes Rudgwick Gallery and trying something else.

  It was this that had made Jane determined to teach him a lesson. Sexual jealousy was an alien concept to her, but she did deeply resent the idea of her husband finding happiness with someone else.

  She decided that it was not just Ralph who should be taught a lesson. The woman who had had the effrontery to engage her husband’s love should share in the punishment that Jane was preparing for him.

  The idea of killing Ralph and having Gina convicted for the crime was so blissfully tidy that Jane Rudgwick hugged herself for days after she had thought of it.

  The details were simple. It was really round the time of the Paris trip that the plan had crystallized. Jane knew her husband was intending to take his mistress on the jaunt, and she just had to choose her moment to announce that she herself wished to go. Ralph had remonstrated, but knew too well how Jane could make his proposed idyll a misery, so quickly caved in and put Gina off.

  Jane had waited till they were actually at the airport before changing her mind. She knew by then it was too late for Ralph to salvage his previous arrangement with Gina.

  Borrowing her husband’s keys and getting Gina’s copied had presented no problem. Nor had a trip to Notting Hill Gate on a day when she knew Gina to be out of town. A search of the flat had quickly revealed Miss Luccarini’s tastes in tissues and perfume, as well as allowing Jane to reconnoitre a suitable hiding place for the pistol when the appropriate moment came.

  All that was required then was a fortnight of bullying, blackmail and generally bad behaviour in the run-up to Gina’s departure for Rome. The only risk at that stage had been that Jane really would frighten her husband off, make him act on his oft-spoken intention to cut loose and move in with his mistress.