So much has changed. Tehran reduced to rubble; chunks of California and Oregon lost to the Big One; the London Eye, gone. Spare body parts being cloned at birth and kept in special repositories, just in case. DNA collected at birth and stored permanently, heightening crime solves around the globe.
Milo has gone somewhat to seed, is rounded where before he’d been all muscle and sharp edges. My guess? He drinks a bit. More than a bit. He has that same woozy alkie look about the eyes that my father had before he ended his life, still sobbing about my brother.
It seems to me I’ve spent half my life surrounded by weak, whiny men. And the other half getting rid of them.
Milo phones early one sunny Sunday, asking if he can stop by. He is … curious, at a guess. He wants to see how I turned out.
He exclaims for a while at the view from my balcony, over the Thames and across the city. It really is breathtaking, worth every pound I paid for it. I keep a little herb garden out there that catches what is left of the sun.
The sky this particular day is a dusky blue. The blue of my brother’s face the day he died. I took just a little too long coming back with that injector, that’s all. It really wasn’t my fault. I was distraught at my brother’s death, and not much more than a child myself; I’d done my best.
People are so credulous, but mostly they are lazy. Questioning pre-conceived notions, especially where children are concerned, is hard work. They don’t want to think too much, and so they think in stereotypes. Dame Agatha knew this, to her advantage. It was how she fooled the idle reader every time.
This is why I studied her.
“Why are you here?” I ask Milo. “Not that it isn’t good to see you.”
He turns and comes back in from the balcony. I think about giving him a little shove, but … too obvious, and too many prying eyes across the way. Every town and village has a Frannie Pope.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “I just wanted to say hello. And goodbye. That’s all. See how you were faring, after all these years.” He looks around. “It seems crime does pay. For some.”
I’ll not be led. “Why goodbye? Are you moving?”
“In a manner of speaking. The doctors tell me I’m dying, that I have only a few months. It seems I didn’t give up the cigarettes in time. Or it’s hereditary. Or it’s in my stars or something. Apparently nothing can save me. Not even all the new treatments can touch this.”
“I’m sorry.” The only thing to say. Never, “I know how you must feel,” because most people don’t and all of us hope we never get to find out.
“Sure. Thanks.”
I nod in solemn understanding, willing him to leave.
“Your place is beautiful—I’ve seen the photos in your interviews,” he says. “Still, I’m surprised you never moved away. Back to the US.”
“What for? This is my home now. England is my home.”
At first I had wanted to run away, but in the end, what I tell Milo is the simple truth: this is home. All the moving around when I was growing up—those days are over. I used to like all the fresh starts but now I’m getting older, weary of it. Plus, I’ve a beachhead established here. I’m known and respected as a writer in ways I never would be in the States. I don’t write potboilers for cash. Thanks to Will, I don’t have to.
“I’m sorry it didn’t work out. Your son and all. By rights it should have.”
He throws his jacket over the arm of a chair and settles in like he plans to stay awhile.
“When Anna Monroe was murdered,” he says, “I saw the case as a chance to exonerate myself, to prove myself to the force, you know? I still cared about that, even after they tried to kick me to the curb over nothing, really. It was a big case for those parts, the Monroe case, the biggest I was ever likely to see.”
I don’t care. Why are you telling me this?
“The thing is, Attwater wasn’t as dumb as she seemed. She just couldn’t prove her hunches.” He says this with a meaningful look. I can’t be bothered to ask him what he means. “She sent me in, thinking you would let your guard down with me.”
Thought so. Didn’t work, did it? I smile, a soft, puzzled smile, like you’d use with someone in an asylum. I wait.
“She’s gone now. Died last year.”
Fine. Why tell me?
“That bruise under your eye,” he said. “The day I came to talk to you about Colin Livingstone. You did that to yourself, didn’t you?”
Of course I did. I needed Milo to see for himself what a brute Will was.
“It wasn’t even a full-on bruise when I saw you. It hadn’t had time to darken into that. But I didn’t question it at the time. All I could think was what a shit your husband was. That made it easier to … you know.”
“Okay, yeah. I saw you arrive and I knocked myself a good one with a hammer. I knew you’d assume Will had done it.”
“Yes.” He sits, elbows on his knees, looking at me, taking me in for the person he’s finally realized I am.
Which is: brave and determined, if you ask me. I had stayed the course, having set a path for private justice. I had observed Will quietly for weeks, months, assessing the lies, my mind uncluttered by emotion. Once I was through lying to myself, I was strangely, eerily calm, able to think and plan my next move.
And I had followed through to the end.
I felt I knew Milo well, given that people don’t really change over the years, they just become more so. More set in their ways. Solving the murder of Anna was his way to prove himself, to win his way back into the fold, sure. But he also saw himself as a fearless rescuer of damsels. It’s a toxic mix.
There had been a lot of fun moments along the way. First I had to give Will a motive for killing his lover. And that motive was that Anna had wanted more; Anna, as was her way, wanted too much. I used the burner I’d found in the garage to text her the morning she died: Sorry but I can’t leave Jill. Let’s talk, usual time and place. W. Will clearly had lured her to that fatal meeting—at least it was clear as far as the police were concerned.
I made sure to hand her burner phone over to Milo, who reached his own conclusions: She’d not taken “no” for an answer. They’d fought.
I told Milo on the day of the threatening letter all my darkest suspicions about Will, that Will had as good as confessed to me. I knew for sure he was guilty, I said, but … Somewhat to my surprise, that was all Milo needed to hear. From that moment on, he acted accordingly. Never questioning. My hero.
They would need more evidence. I gave them more.
Of course I made a slip or two.
“The pool guy,” he says, reading me. “You said you could see the pool house from your first floor window at the Weycombe house.”
“And?”
“I assumed you meant you could see from what we Brits would call the first floor—the floor above the ground floor. But from what an American would call a first floor, you couldn’t see who went in or out. I should have asked you to clarify.”
I’m not going to enlighten him now. It was a very minor invention, intended to reinforce Anna’s credentials as a woman who slept around. So maybe I misspoke a bit. So what. “You’re right. You should have asked.”
He smiles. It’s one of those sad, accepting smiles of someone too weary to fight over trivial lies. I used to use that smile with Will.
“Then there was that woman at the lingerie shop. She told us your husband had been a customer, and she recognized you when you came into her shop. Checking up on why he’d be buying items that were much too large for you.”
“You’re calling that some sort of clue?”
“The only real clue we had,” he counters, “was that dress. The dress missing from Frannie’s shop. It was the only blue one in its size, and it was not in the inventory she’d taken just the day before, so the lack was noticeable. We guessed it had been shoplifted
, for want of a better word—chances were good, by her killer.”
Yes, yes, yes, fine. In a fit of spite and madness, I’d stolen a dress from Frannie’s shop, stuffed it in my shopping bag as I was leaving. For once she had something in stock that wouldn’t make me look like a refugee from the Woodstock festival. And, well, it’s not like stealing, is it? Frannie would never miss it.
“She could have made a mistake, don’t you think?” I say. “In the inventory? This sounds like a very minor connection. Tenuous at best.”
I soon realized I was playing with fire with that dress, and the next time I went to Walton-on-Thames I put it in a bin outside the Sainsbury’s.
“We looked everywhere in the village for it,” he says. “Attwater put me on it—the sort of demeaning floater task she liked to hand me in those days. It never turned up. But there was nothing to link it directly to Frannie’s murderer. It was tenuous, as you say.”
“Another dead end,” I say. “Too bad.”
“But do you know, from Fannie’s inventory description, it may have been the blue dress you were wearing the day you called me over—the day you got the poison pen letter? Long sleeved with ‘ruching’—I had to look it up: ‘ruching.’”
What foolishness on my part. And what luck he never made the connection. But if he’d asked me about that dress, I would have said I’d ruined it with bleach and thrown it away.
The real mistake I’d made in the beginning was going to Miss Kitty’s, but what did that prove? The visit was a giving in to impulse before I realized I had a balancing act ahead of me that would require complete control: of myself, of the investigation. If I ever became a suspect, I needed to be sure there was a lineup of others a good solicitor could quickly pin things on to defuse any case that might be made against me: Jason, Colin, Macy, to name a few. Alfie, in a pinch. But in the end, I needed to make sure they had one suspect only, and provide them with the evidence to back it up: Will.
“But it wasn’t the same dress,” I say. “So another blind alley?”
He nods, his eyes never leaving my face. “Like that threatening letter you received.”
I say nothing. Of course I sent it to myself, making sure only Will’s prints were on the paper and envelope. It was necessary that the police know me as his terrorized victim.
“Killing Frannie is what I never understood. She was harmless. A bit of a scatterbrain. Why did you have to kill her?”
“You’re taping this, are you?”
He pats his shirt in a “search me” fashion; shakes out his jacket, empties his pockets. “I’m retired, remember? No warrant. No authority. Off the force.”
I give him a puh-leeze look but I see he’s got nothing on him.
“Shoes?” Just in case. “Watch?”
He takes them off, turns them over. There’s no hidden mic slotted into the heel or bug built into the watch in true MI6 fashion. But one cannot be too careful.
“Okay,” I say. “I can tell you what might have happened. You ask, why Frannie? I thought you knew. She was a blabbermouth who knew too much.” Frannie started piecing a few things together and realized who it was she’d seen that day on the river. She saw my two jackets, the red and the blue, hanging side by side in the hall closet the evening she came over to bend Will’s ear.
The day she died—all right, fine, the day I killed her—she’d been fussing in the corner with that scarecrow display, her back to me. Just thinking aloud, not editing her thoughts. Babbling. She was putting some jeweled bracelets on the scarecrow’s wrists when suddenly she stopped, turning as she spoke, brain not fully engaged with mouth.
“Do you know, Jill, I just remembered. As Anna argued with that person that day, the sun broke through and a flash of sunlight gleamed off something—something shiny on the other person’s wrist. Just as Anna turned away—in fear or to try to end the argument, I don’t know, but I saw it. The person was wearing short gloves, and I could see … diamonds, it had to be—bright and glittery. A jeweled watch. They were waving their hands around in this sort of wild, threatening way.”
“Really.”
“Which means it had to be a woman, don’t you see? Only a woman would wear a dainty watch like that. A little diamond thing, diamonds all round the face and band.”
She looked at me, at my wrist. At me sliding one hand over my wedding gift from Will.
“Like yours.”
A sort of expectant look came over her face, as if she hoped I might be able to clarify what was puzzling her. Fortunately, I was.
“And those jackets. Last night. Please tell me I’m wrong. Jill?”
I couldn’t choke her the way I had Anna. I’d lost that element of surprise Milo had talked about, and besides, Frannie was a big woman, tall, arms like a stevedore. Despite her age, she could leverage her weight against me in a struggle. I’d brought no weapon; it was supposed to be a friendly chat to find out if she’d realized the significance of the two jackets. To convince her those jackets were Will’s, if so. But it was too late for all that.
I suppose a good lawyer could have demolished her account of what she thought she’d seen, that day by the river, a dotty old woman like Frannie, but I was not taking the chance. Live free or die.
There was a letter opener on the shop’s desk. Make do and mend, as my grandmother used to say.
Milo’s eyes on me now, as if he can read the memories on my face. “We realized, of course, that we only had your word that you’d seen Jason at Frannie’s shop that morning. No one else claimed to have seen him. Or Will, for that matter.”
Yes, it may have been unnecessary to toss them both in like that. I always did have a tendency to embellish.
Killing Anna was easy compared with Frannie. But up until the last second, I wasn’t sure I’d go through with killing Anna. I always carried a knife in my fanny pack for protection. The habit was a holdover from my time in London, coming home late most nights. I liked the idea of surprising an attacker by fighting back; sometimes I almost hoped someone would try it on. This particular knife, a Swiss Army knife, belonged to Will. Afterward, I threw it in the river. They spent days diving and dredging for the weapon I kept hoping they would find, as it had his initials engraved on it. It turned up weeks later, washed ashore. By then it was just a bonus, the final nail in Will’s already sealed coffin.
I wore gloves against the cold so only Will’s prints were on the knife. I knew from BM: London that they can lift prints off an object even if it’s been soaking in water. It was fairly risk-free to attack her that time of year: there were fewer people about because of the weather, except for old Frannie, of course. Bad luck, that. Of course I wanted to be the one to “find” the body to explain my footprints on the steep embankment. In the struggle Anna and I had ended up partway down the slope, the overhead foliage concealing what was happening.
As she fell, already dying, there was another stroke of bad luck: she made a grab for my scarf and took it down with her. I couldn’t scramble after her without chancing my own neck, and I’d never be able to crawl back up. So I ran home and changed into my red jacket, threw the blue fleece jacket and gloves in the washer and turned the machine on in case they held any trace of Anna’s blood. Then I launched the kayak from the back garden and, muffled to the eyes with a different scarf and hat, paddled to retrieve that damned scarf from her body. There was no explaining it if it were found on her. Then I paddled home, put away the kayak, ran back to where I could see her body from the path, and called it in. The whole thing took less than half an hour from the moment she died.
When Frannie noticed the two different-colored jackets hanging in my hall closet, the scarf and hat I’d been wearing were in there, too. There was never really much question: she had to go. Even if I convinced her the jackets belonged to Will, which would be handy for setting him up, there was no way—not once her mind flashed on that diamond watch.
“What about Jason?” Milo asks. “You didn’t … ?” He leaves the question hanging with a delicate pause.
What an insulting suggestion. “Jason was an addict, you know that. Addicts die.”
Jason overdosed shortly after Anna died. Collateral damage, it came as a surprise to no one. While Jason did remind me of my brother, I had nothing to do with his death. Not directly. What he did in the privacy of his own bedroom was his business.
But what a karmic way to deal with someone who rummages through your stuff looking for drugs on the pretext of stopping by to return a casserole dish. You could say, and I do, that Jason did it to himself. I had no idea he’d root around in my bathroom cabinet—how could I possibly know any respectful, law-abiding citizen would do such a thing when left alone in my house for five minutes?
Still, there was a possibility Jason had started to suspect. There was something in the looks he gave me during his intermittent flashes of sobriety, when his face wasn’t glazed in addict sweat and a devil wasn’t peering out of his yellowing eyes.
That last time I saw him at his father’s house … Whatever he knew, or thought he knew, his head was so messed up I couldn’t take the chance. Even people running their mouths in some brainless way can trip over the truth, like Frannie did, and get the police looking at things from a different angle.
So I invited him over a couple of times on whatever pretext—a condolence meatloaf or something like that to take back to his father. And I deliberately left him alone—a sudden errand calling me away—with an array of my prescription pills in the medicine cabinet. Pain pills from when I’d wrecked my ankle, and a few more from a visit to the dentist. The leftover script from my shrink. I never throw any of that stuff away—Yankee thrift. I also left a nice assortment in my purse, which I left open on the table, knowing he couldn’t resist. The guest bathroom had another stash for him to pilfer, which he did. The little shit also took a twenty-pound note out of my wallet. Because that’s what addicts do, and they think people don’t know.
Weycombe Page 29
