Weycombe

by G. M. Malliet

  “‘Owning her sexuality’?”

  “It’s something I read in a women’s magazine. They must think we’re all morons.”

  “Besides,” said Rashima, “maybe Alfie was looking for someone to bring him to fullness as a male.”

  “Huh?”

  “Haven’t you seen the way he looks at other women? I mean, like, all the time?”

  “He never showed the slightest interest in me, so, no. And besides, he’s sick all the time.”

  “Men have to be dead to stop being interested in sex.”

  Well, yeah, there’s that.

  “You’re not jealous,” she said. “Say it’s not so. Alfie had a roving eye, nothing blatant or creepy, but—oh, aware, somehow. You probably just didn’t notice. I’m sure he looked at you too.”

  “Thanks. I guess.”

  The next question was the hardest to ask, but I had to know.

  “When?” Meaning, how long had these two, Dhir and Rashima, known and kept quiet? A corollary question was, of course, who else knew? In such a small place as Weycombe, the fact that Garvin hadn’t put a notice in the paper’s gossip column might be down to sheer forgetfulness on his part. “When did Dhir see them?”

  “When? See them, erh … ?”

  “Yes. Snogging, on the train. When did Dhir see them doing that?” That still got me. Will was not a kid anymore, and neither was Anna. Not even hardly. That they could not contain themselves, given the chance of being seen in public (a one hundred percent chance, as it turned out), spoke volumes for the lust propelling them into this idiotic display. Did Will actually think he was Lord Byron or something? I almost couldn’t credit him with it. It was so outside the staid, boring (yes, boring; boring as fuck) man he was, deep down. I suspected that the fact I knew how boring he was lay behind the infidelity. I knew too much. Or he had too much to prove.

  “It was six months ago.” Off my look, she rushed to add: “I only just found out.”

  Meaning, Dhir saw it as a guys-must-stick-together thing.

  But, wow. Wow wow wow. So it predated Anna’s politico affair? Although maybe it ran parallel. I wouldn’t put it past her.

  Rashima had been doing the same math I had.

  “It was just before what we saw at the party. You know, at Macy’s party. Dhir sort of thought she’d moved on so no need to say anything to you.”

  “Yes,” I said. “No doubt Anna thought our MP was a leg up on the power ladder.”

  “A leg over, more like.”

  I looked at her and despite it all, despite the anger ricocheting inside my head, I managed a smile. She returned it, soggy with tears though it was. Good old Rash.

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “You don’t think … ” she began. Her slice of cake was reduced to rubble, like a demolition site. I had absentmindedly hoovered up every bite of mine.

  “Don’t think what?” I put my teacup on the table, a bit too late. Tea had sloshed all over the saucer during these revelations.

  “You don’t think Will, um … ?”

  Of course I knew what she was getting at but I wanted her to say it aloud. I needed her to say it for me.

  “It’s just that, he was at that party, too. And if we saw, and we think Alfie saw, don’t you think Will saw, too?”

  “It’s a thought,” I said neutrally. It gave Will one hell of a motive. I was sure he had seen Anna and her latest conquest. I hoped it cut like a knife. “You didn’t see?”

  “See Will seeing them, you mean? No. No, I don’t think so … ” But her voice trailed off uncertainly.

  Given time, her memory might improve. Me, I was busy remembering yet another party, one of my Court Cookouts, where I saw a smile pass between Will and Anna. This would have been in August, well over a year before. These events had grown to include nearly everyone in our circle. The village doctor, the woman who owned the flower shop, friends from work willing to make the trek out from London. As I recalled, Macy and Barry had been there; Frannie Pope had even closed up her shop for the occasion. All the usual suspects.

  It was just a smile, I’d told myself, that was all. Innocent. You know, the way a baby smiles not because something’s funny but because it’s got gas. Okay, bad example, but you know what I mean. That kind of smile. An involuntary reflex. Someone smiles at us, we smile back. We humans have been doing that since we first swung down from the trees.

  And yet … And yet. Didn’t their eyes meet and linger for just a moment? Yes, I knew they had: sort of locked, just holding the gaze a second too long. Hadn’t it been a meaningful glance, an exchange with notes of banked passion, passion delayed or denied?

  Why was Anna smiling at my husband?

  Smiling what looked like an invitation at my husband?

  Stop it. Stop! I had ordered myself at the time. Their eyes met, the way your eyes will meet someone’s as you scan the room looking for the canapés, hoping for someone to talk to besides the software engineer you’re landed with at the moment. Will didn’t even like Anna. He’d said so often enough. Said he couldn’t stand pushy women like her. He’d been saying that since she sold us our house.

  And yet, still … Wasn’t there in her eyes that sort of yearning—that same look I’d once had for him? And he for me? And he, didn’t he sort of stare coldly, in that way he had that struck fear into my heart? Until suddenly that stare would thaw into a smile, a very sexy smile and my heart would thump into life again.

  Rashima tried picking up her own cup again with shaking hands and gave up the effort as hopeless. She clasped her hands tightly in her lap instead. Finally, she asked, “What will you do?”

  “Rashima, I only wish I knew what in hell to do. I suppose I should be packing or something.”

  “No, I meant, will you tell the police?”

  I shrugged. “Now I’m trying to think what to say. I can only repeat what you told me. After that, they’ll want to hear it direct from your husband. From Dhir. Will he do that? I mean, Dhir really can’t not tell them.”

  She looked a bit startled—this was moving fast, and I don’t think she’d thought much beyond putting me out of my misery by filling me in on the doings of my faithless husband. Of course she knew the police had to be told about their new suspect, but she probably hadn’t expected me to capitulate so readily to the idea.

  Besides: “I think Dhir planned to tell them today,” she said. “Since there’s been no arrest, knowing all this started to make him uneasy.”

  So that was that. It was out of my hands now.

  Que sera, sera.

  32

  I seldom dream, and I envy people who have those rich nighttime experiences, those movies playing in their heads in which they’re warned of disaster or told where to find the promised land. Or even where they left the car keys. How lucky dreamers are.

  I would like to have that. Some channel into the inner workings of my mind. A message direct from the other side with stock tips would also be nice. But I can count on one hand the dreams in my life I can remember, and none of them foretold great fortune.

  Frannie Pope was found dead the next day, however, and that night I spiraled into a clammy nightmare of a dream. In this dream I saw blood, rivers of blood, pouring from beneath the curtain that led to the back of her shop. I saw the shop itself, a chaotic mess of beads and sequins. I dreaded looking into her face in this dream but I had to, there was no choice; I’d been asked by the police to identify her and I couldn’t refuse. I began forcing my head to turn and I saw a knife sticking out of her chest and that was what finally woke me, my heart pounding so I could only think heart attack; I’m having a heart attack. I must have been thrashing around in my sleep; the bedclothes were flung everywhere. I reached for Will but he was of course nowhere to be found.

  It was Heather who found the body this time. She was standing on the village green w
hen I came along on my way to do some shopping. She was surrounded by a group of people, none of whom seemed to know what to do for her. Elizabeth Fortescue was practically holding her up as she sobbed.

  Heather saw me approaching. “It’s Frannie,” she said in a scalded sort of voice, her face awash with tears. “She’s dead. Someone stabbed her. Where the scarecrow was.”

  What this turned out to mean was that Heather had found Frannie propped in a corner in place of the shop’s scarecrow. Someone had put a Venetian mask over her face.

  Heather sobbed as she said this, great honking sobs, the freakish nature of the find having completely undone her. She said she’d walked in with Lulu and begun idly shopping around, looking for something to buy for her mother, never realizing the scarecrow in the corner was now in fact a corpse. Then she started to notice that straw had been scattered about everywhere and when she took a closer look at the scarecrow’s should-have-been-straw hands, realized it was not a scarecrow but a human being, and whoever it was wasn’t breathing. She saw the blood—she told us blood was everywhere, “bucketfuls of blood”—so of course that’s what turned up in my dream that night. She was smart enough not to touch anything but instead went screaming with Lulu down the High to the coffee shop, looking to find someone with a phone. Heather didn’t believe in mobile phones; they caused cancer.

  Heather yammered out this story in bits, but we got the picture. She said she would have to move; she would go to the mountains and get Lulu to safety. Elizabeth finally walked what was left of Heather and her child home.

  The next day’s paper was full of the tale. Garvin was now beside himself, which was understandable. It was a wonder he didn’t pass along the reporting job on this particular case to someone else, anyone else, but instead he took it upon himself, putting his emotional involvement on bald display. I suppose in his shoes I’d have done the same, not trusted anyone but myself to the report, but it made him mix his metaphors with a certain gusto:

  “In a vile defilement of our precious village, and in a clear shot over the bow at the forces of law and order, Frannie Pope, one of our most beloved citizens, was found murdered yesterday inside her shop, Serendipity. In a morbid, obscenely callous act, her killers had dressed her in the scarecrow costume of one of her shop’s Hallowe’en displays. The grim discovery was made by a longtime customer who asks to remain anonymous.”

  Well, that wouldn’t last. Before long, Heather would be repeating the story she’d already told to all and sundry, complete with lurid embellishments like the buckets of blood.

  The thing was, I had just seen Frannie alive, not half an hour before Heather arrived on the scene. I would have to tell Milo that. I supposed he would also want to hear about Frannie’s rather mysterious late-evening visit to Will, and there went Will, landed in the thick of it again.

  As for me, I could only say with certainty that Frannie and I had had an innocuous conversation, that nothing was said out of the ordinary—certainly she’d said nothing to indicate she was waiting for a visitor with a sharp knife—but Milo would be trying to establish a timeline of what she did and who she saw in her last hours. At least I could tell him she’d been absolutely fine, no worries. She and I had talked about Anna, of course. We’d speculated some more as to who could have done such a thing. Of course, I hadn’t mentioned Will to her as a suspect.

  Frannie was thinking of taking in Anna’s dog, as she wasn’t sure Alfie would be up to walking him—a typical thoughtful gesture on her part. After I’d left her shop—I’d been there no more than ten minutes—I’d gone into the butcher’s and chatted with old goggle eyes for a bit, haggling over the price of the lamb chops I wanted for dinner.

  I returned home after witnessing Heather’s meltdown, poured myself some coffee, and pulled up the Anna file on my laptop. I looked back over the clues, looking at everything from the perspective of the police. What was missing? What was obvious? Who was the obvious suspect?

  And, who benefits? As far as Frannie was concerned, there was nothing that tied her with Anna, apart from that unexpected small bequest in Anna’s will. It wasn’t a large enough amount to be a clue, I didn’t think.

  I sighed. Agatha Christie would have seen lots of clues here. I used to read her all the time on the train to and from work. The situation with Anna and Frannie made me think of The Moving Finger, I suppose because that story took place in a typical little English village, like Weycombe, and described so perfectly the poison that bubbles beneath in places like this. The petty grudges that turn into life-and-death struggles. The closeness to nature and all that really entails. I don’t mean the cleaned-up animal parts that get shipped to Waitrose, wrapped in cling film. I mean the gritty awfulness of farm life, such as I had known. Lambs weren’t cute and fluffy; they were dinner.

  Frannie Pope had had no close relatives but in true Agatha fashion there might be a distant relative in Australia who had fallen on hard times and had come to England disguised as a maid or something, worming her way into Frannie’s household and good graces. I’d have to remember to suggest the lost relative theory to Milo, because Frannie was said to have a pretty penny set by. She had no particular expenses, apart from her house. She seldom traveled, except on business; she drove an ordinary little energy-saving car. She worked all the time and seemed to have few social outlets to spend her money on—dinners out or visits to the theater and such.

  But the lost-relative angle would ignore the fact that her death was tied to Anna’s death—it had to be. That would be the angle the police would be working, and of course they would be fools not to. Murders, as I’ve indicated, just don’t happen in Weycombe, especially one murder piled on top of another like this.

  The most likely connection they’d be working was that Frannie knew something, and that that something had got her killed. Classic Christie stuff.

  Frannie had been the one, after all, who had been a witness of sorts to what happened with Anna that day by the river. If she had seen more than she knew she’d seen, if she had later pieced together two bits of the puzzle that had been missing before—well. Agatha would be all over that. The police would take longer to catch on. In fact, in real life, the killer would get away with it. It happens every day.

  There can always be that one person taking advantage of an existing situation. Someone Frannie had offended who saw a chance to do her in and make it look like a serial killer was on the loose. That was another theory to set before the police.

  The possible scenarios played themselves out in my mind. I found I was enjoying this, jotting down notes and connecting the dots, but it was a strange exercise, writing page after page without knowing the purpose. Would anyone ever read my notes, besides me? Could I somehow turn it all into a finished book? While I hoped the world would read it one day—whatever it turned out to be—there were other people’s feelings to consider. I knew enough about the laws of libel and slander to avoid the biggest pitfalls.

  But writers live in hope, buoyed by the smallest encouragement; we live on air and nothing is ever allowed to go to waste; to us it’s all inventory, transmogrified into a tale to tell at fireside.

  The intellectual exercise was taking me back to my days on BM: London. I used to watch the various shows being filmed, watch the actors filling out their roles. I don’t think I ever got it wrong in choosing the person to play the villain, and that generally was the most difficult role of all. Anyone can play the victim: a general air of cluelessness, a belief that no matter where they went or what they did, they were lovable and would never come to harm. It’s not that they were easy to cast, but they were, underneath it all, the same person. The same type. Another thing Agatha knew well.

  It was different with the killers. They were all charming, or at least plausible, in their own ways. And as I say, they had to have that look in their eyes. Nothing too obvious, nothing that shouted, “Yes, I’m a lunatic!” But that look, it was always
there, and the good actors knew how to capture it.

  Jason Monroe had that look. Plausible, charming when he felt like it, deadly. Should I tell Milo I had seen Jason at Frannie’s the morning of her death? Really, I had no choice. What I couldn’t decide was whether to tell him I’d also seen Will in the village when he had no business being there.

  I’d had some errands to run that fateful morning, and the bells of St. Chrysostom’s rang ten as I left the village shop with some Gruyère and biscuits. As I approached the High, I saw Jason leaving Serendipity. From a distance it was hard to say for sure but—yes, it was Jason. Knowing that he and Frannie had parted on bad terms, this surprised me.

  “She told me she’d had to fire him for theft,” I told Milo later that day. He’d given me his direct phone number, not just the general exchange where they weed out the cranks, and he’d told me to call anytime. Little did he know how often I’d be taking him up on that offer.

  When he arrived I had the kettle ready. He turned down the offer of tea until he saw I had McVitie’s digestives to go with it. It had begun raining hard and his pants legs, not shielded by his umbrella, were soaked. I handed him a dishtowel to mop up.

  Once again he settled his weight on a chair at the breakfast bar. “Could you see inside the shop?” he asked, leaning over to pat himself down.

  I shook my head. “I wasn’t near enough, and I was headed in the opposite direction. But our cul-de-sac intersects the High, as you know, and Frannie’s shop is to my right. I only happened to look in that direction to watch for traffic before I crossed.”

  “And that’s when you saw Jason.”

  “Pretty sure it was him. Yes. Oolong or green?” I showed him the tea caddies.

  “Whatever you’re having. So, how did Jason look?”

  “Normal, really. For Jason. If I’m honest, normal for him is skulking. He sort of creeps about.”

  There was more to tell Milo, but I hesitated, and in the end decided I’d said enough for a while. If he caught the hesitation he chose to ignore it, engrossed as he was in his dark-chocolate biscuit. Too bad I didn’t have any doughnuts.