Weycombe

by G. M. Malliet

  I didn’t care when or even if he managed to top himself. I just wanted to give him every opportunity. Worse case, he’d destroy the last shred of his mind and credibility even further if he did start putting two and two together about Anna.

  But I wasn’t interested in talking about all this now with Milo. Leave the past in the past, I say.

  He answers the question I haven’t asked. “No one knows I’m here. Even if they knew, would they believe it after all these years? Would they care? Almost everyone who cared about Anna is gone.”

  That included, of course, my dearly departed Will.

  A lie creates its own atmosphere. A shift in the air around the liar’s voice that makes the listener say Wait. Wait a minute. That’s not right. Something’s not right here. With Will, that feeling went on too long, happened too often.

  That night, Will’s last night, I sent a message from my own new burner phone telling him to meet me in Riverside Park, at our favorite picnic table.

  It had been a perfect night for a sting. Cool and clear, with the weather cooperating, and a new moon to provide sheltering darkness under the trees for Milo, Attwater, and Co.

  Will drove up to the park to find me waiting. I’d wrapped myself in a blanket and was sitting on top of our favorite table—a sight that used to drive him wild with desire, by the way. Now he just looked wild.

  “What’s all this about?” he demanded to know. He stomped his feet against the cold. His words emerged in puffs of white cloud. “What are you talking about?”

  It was just about his last live comment. I pushed the play button.

  Here is what Milo and his people heard on their receivers that night:

  Me: You killed her, didn’t you?

  Will: Of course I did. The faithless bitch.

  Me: Anna and Frannie both.

  Will: Of course, both. What are you, stupid?

  Me: But why Frannie?

  Will: Do you really have to ask? She knew too much.

  And moments later, I stopped the feed that was going directly into the mic. “Did you bring it?” I asked. A judicious pause before I screamed and began hammering against his chest with my fists. “So it was you? You admit it?”

  A confused burst of expletives from Will, who had grabbed my arms to pull me off him. I said, again live for the mic, “I promise I won’t tell anyone. Let me go!”

  “Jill, what the—?”

  “That hurts!”

  I dropped the agreed-upon word, “Indigo,” that told the cops I was in danger. I broke away as they rushed in, shouting, screaming at Will to put his hands up. I heard one shot, and another. And I ran for cover into the woods.

  I had recordings of his voice, lines I’d spliced together from the detective play he’d acted in at the local theater. I’d saved the recordings of those endless rehearsals when I would run lines with him at home after dinner. Seamless splicing was another skill I’d picked up at the BBC. They claimed, by the way, when they fired me, that I’d fictionalized some parts of the BM: London shows, editing and splicing and making up dialogue. Dialogue that could have occurred and should have occurred, in my opinion, but probably had not occurred. Whatever.

  It’s easy with a judicious edit or two to make someone sound as though they’re threatening you, confessing to a killing, confessing to the Kennedy assassination or whatever you want them to confess to. My own lines the cops heard that night as they listened in were much simpler than Will’s: “No! Don’t! Stop! Will, that hurts!” And so on. This was followed by Will’s rather maniacal laughter. He always overplayed that bit. I added some choking sounds of my own. It was really very good, quite convincing, if I do say so. Then there was a lot of “So it was you?” followed by “Don’t worry, Will, I swear I won’t tell anyone! I swear! Just let me go. Let me go!”

  And so on. Some of it recorded—overall, a nice mix tape of woman-in-jeopardy dialogue—some of it live as needed. Then I simply screamed in time-honored, wom-jep fashion, the scream of a woman frightened out of her wits. I am seriously good at that. I used to love playing in thrillers.

  I cut it a bit close, escaping from Will at the last minute, making sure he remained the slow-moving target that he was, frozen in place by confusion, wrong-footed, stunned by these unexpected developments. The cops were already charging in as I ran, giving them a clear shot.

  Will had the Browning with him, the gun I’d told him to bring along. We were there to set a trap for Anna’s killer, I’d said, and he’d need it for self-defense. The last thing the cops expected was for him to show up with a gun. When he reached for it, actually to hand it to me, they completely freaked out.

  I hadn’t enjoyed anything so much in a long time.

  I hadn’t told Milo about the gun, of course. He’d have cancelled the sting. I knew the cops would go wild when Will pulled out this honking great Browning. There were half a dozen of them, hyped up, all young and macho and dying to play the hero, to rescue the fair maiden. They saw the gleam of metal, they heard my frantic screams about the gun, and well … they’re trained in these situations to shoot to kill when they have no other choice. They told him to drop it and he just froze.

  If Will had shown up without the gun for some reason? Or if he’d done as he was told and dropped the gun? I’d improv it—grab the gun from his hands and have it “accidently” go off. In case he survived—well, I’d brought a knife to make sure he didn’t. Because his survival was the biggest risk to me. I could always tell the police I was so terrified I’d brought along a little something for self-defense. Just in case.

  “Do your best, prepare for the worst,” as my grandmother used to say. I think she got that one from the Bible.

  Of course Will had to die. As mad as his story would sound, there would always be some conspiracy nut to believe him. What I really wanted was for Will to rot in prison, but I had to settle for less. I couldn’t let him live to tell his story.

  From where Milo stood, what was going down was clear: I had screwed up my end of things; I had set Will off. I’d warned them already about his hair-trigger temper. From a distance what they saw was a woman struggling to break free of Will’s arms, fighting for her life. Milo, listening to the transmission, gave the signal to go in.

  In the end, of course, the knife wasn’t necessary. The police did the job they were trained to do.

  I also had transferred some photos from my phone to Will’s before destroying my old phone. I’d taken random photos of women in Weycombe Court in various stages of undress, women who seldom bothered to draw their bedroom curtains. Photos of Anna were a particular highlight of the parade of lovelies, taken from a spot hidden by trees in her back garden. These password-protected photos were on Will’s phone when he was taken down. It took their IT guys no time at all to break in. It was the descriptions of the photos by the kinkier news outlets that finally made Will’s mother leave the country. Oscar was a big help in getting that insider tip published.

  I’d thought it through dozens of times, rehearsing step by step how Will must have gone about killing Anna, so I could present my theory to the police, tied up with a ribbon when the time was right: Anna was killed early enough in the morning that Will still had time to get to the station and catch a train. He had arranged to meet her upriver, where he killed her, first stashing the kayak several yards downriver where the ground sloped to the shore, making the kayak easy to retrieve. He then paddled his way home, where he changed out of his gear into a suit. He figured if he was seen on the river—for example, by those Japanese tourists—well, his face was partially obscured by a scarf and hat. He was just another health fanatic out on the cold river.

  I happened to mention to Milo that I saw Will come home that morning to change. And that this was a complete departure from his usual morning routine. I’d never known him to kayak that time of day, especially not in October, in the cold. How very odd.r />
  I also left a pair of Will’s glasses in Anna’s car—she never bothered to lock her car any more than she worried about drawing the shades. No one in the Court bothered; it was gated, after all. The glasses were not conclusive evidence, but just one more matchstick on the pile I was set to ignite.

  None of this, the theories and the glasses and so on, needed to work. Certainly it didn’t need to hold up in court—I would make sure it never got that far. This was only to get the cops so certain they were in the right they’d be more likely to take him down.

  Of course Will’s mother cried bloody murder, but too late. She had a second stroke—the first minor one, when Will had left Weycombe to fly to her side, had weakened her. By the time she recovered enough to take in what had happened to him, the whole thing was history as far as anyone was concerned. Still, she hired solicitors to harass the police. When they got nowhere, she got on the horn to Whitehall. She petitioned her old schoolmates in the House of Lords and on Fleet Street, demanding an inquiry. But as the facts emerged even her oldest friends began to back off, saying that time would lessen the hurt, useful things like that.

  Her son, she claimed, was incapable of killing anyone: he barely knew the Anna Monroe creature. His so-called confession? It must have been staged, altered somehow. Or it wasn’t him at all!

  “You did this.” She had her chauffeur drive her all the way over to Weycombe one day to accuse me. “I don’t know how but you’re behind this. You needn’t think you’ll get away with it.” Politely, shaking my head in pity, I showed her the door. Poor old fruit.

  She didn’t shut up until all the evidence of Will’s affair with Anna started rolling in. Honestly, I think she could stand for him to be known as a murderer rather than as the faithless and conniving creep that he was.

  Eventually she disappeared into the south of France, where she waited for the scandal to die down. It never quite did. Will had made the famous White name infamous.

  Rossalind did force a standoff through her solicitors over where Will should be buried. She insisted it be not in Weycombe but on the grounds of his estate, where he would be “among his own kind.” She actually said this, looking straight at me. “His own kind.”

  She’s long gone now, a heart attack following yet another stroke. I got to keep the fucking pearls.

  But I’d let her have her way over a few things. I was like, whatever. I wasn’t going to win the burial scrimmage, which I didn’t care about, anyway.

  I won everything else.

  Had you been thinking Milo and I had a thing going on? No way. Attractive he may have been, but—no way.

  You know that saying that two can keep a secret if one of them is dead? He may have needed cash for his kid, for that expensive, experimental treatment he couldn’t afford, so I did consider bribery—I was going to be a wealthy woman once all this was over. But I figured Milo would need to be there for his son even more. That’s the upstanding kind of guy he was.

  Milo was solid. Although I’d had some reason to doubt that.

  That day of the BACK OFF note, I finally asked him: “You were in uniform the day I first met you. You never did say why. And now you’re back in civvies.”

  “Minor infraction of the rules. They wanted to remind me who was boss.” Remembering his demeanor around Attwater, his barely disguised contempt, his obvious chafing at the bit, I could see this.

  “You weren’t undercover, something like that?”

  He laughed. “Wearing a uniform? You are joking, right?”

  “I know. But I thought in some John le Carré spy story way, you were in clever disguise.”

  “This is Weycombe, for God’s sake.”

  It turned out he’d been suspected and cleared of getting someone an early release—checking the wrong box on the paperwork or something. The suspicion, never proven, was that he did it for money—I got all this from the ever-useful Oscar. Of course Milo claimed he was innocent. Oscar believed him. I had my doubts, and that’s when I considered trying to bribe him. Honestly? I didn’t think he was crooked enough to go for the big time.

  I’m sure I made the right choice. All I needed from Milo was to point his investigation in the direction I wanted it to go. He was distracted enough by his own problems to let it happen.

  Now, twenty years later, here he is in my flat. Somehow I don’t believe it’s just a friendly visit.

  “When did you start to doubt?” I ask. “Or did you doubt?”

  He doesn’t pretend, he knows exactly what I mean. “I suppose it bothered me later that you tried to put the finger on that vagrant. He was in jail, and there’s no way you could have seen him. Or anyone like him. As you yourself said, in Weycombe, we’ve got one token poor guy, and Roger was it.”

  I shrug. “A mistake. Mistaken identity. That happens all the time, right?”

  “Maybe. Could have been. That’s what I told myself.”

  “You had doubts but you didn’t report them.”

  He shakes his head. “Then of course there was the kayak. More than one person besides Will had access. More than one person was physically capable.”

  Home, change jackets, quickly back. The only way to make up the time was to use the kayak.

  “But that amounted to nothing. And Attwater’s opinions were worthless.”

  “What opinions?”

  Milo smiles, a flash of that same white smile that had so impressed me when first we met. “I think she just didn’t like you.”

  Someone in the New Yorker wrote of Robert Durst, “What the villain always knows, ultimately, is not why but why not.” That’s it, exactly. If there’s no heaven or hell, why not, indeed? Why not go for the life you want?

  Is there a God? I actually believe there is, although I haven’t allowed it to get in my way unnecessarily. If worst comes to worst, I’ll call for a priest and confess—hedge my bets. But heaven is not a question that makes me hunger for answers. Only the here-and-now is guaranteed.

  At Oxford I went along one day to hear a talk by a famous atheist—a scientist known mostly for his disputes with the university’s theologians. I can still hear him say, this handsome guy with the jutting brow and the shock of silver hair: “Look into the face of a child as it is slowly destroyed by disease, poverty, and ignorance and tell me there is a living God.”

  And there you have it.

  But there are miracles along the way, wherever they come from, some invisible helping hand. And that day in my flat, Milo told me of one.

  “The recording of your conversation with Will, of his ‘confession’ before he died—someone misplaced it,” he told me. “Lost it, actually, because it never turned up. One of those bureaucratic snafus that can happen when the protocol on an evidence locker gets ignored once too often.”

  “I didn’t know there was a recording.” I should have known it wasn’t just a live feed.

  “Standard procedure, sure. Of course there was.”

  “I see,” I said. “Go on.”

  “But the thing is, there were one or two odd gaps. Nothing glaring. Nothing you’d notice if you weren’t looking for it. Some odd phrasing. And Will—he sounded genuinely surprised in places, puzzled. At least, I thought so. He started to ask something like, ‘Why are you playing that?’—words to that effect. It could have been, ‘What are you playing at?’ and probably it was. It was a bit garbled. But we had some new kid on the team, a young woman, who started poking around and wanting the recording authenticated. There was talk of having an expert examine it. Attwater thought it was a waste of time. ‘Why would we waste budget on that?’ she asked. ‘We were all there and heard what he said. And we can testify to what we heard.’ They got into a bit of a contest over it but of course Attwater won. And then, it went missing.”

  I’m miffed. I’m a self-taught whiz in the recording studio and I don’t like having my expertise quest
ioned. The recording I played that night for the waiting team of police was seamless, I’d swear it was.

  I couldn’t have overlooked any detail. What gaps? There were no gaps. So even if they recorded the whole conversation, did it matter?

  Milo sees the wheels turning. I look out the window, at my million-dollar view.

  Counting up the bodies.

  When I first met Will, he’d had a girlfriend. I think I told you about her. The one his mother thought was so great: Penelope or Clarice or Cordelia, one of those posh names. The one who up and left Will one day, breaking his mother’s heart.

  The poison I got from Rossalind’s stable took care of her. I even thought if I got the chance, I might try to pin it on old Roz, but I never could figure out a clear motive for her. I kept some poison in reserve, though. Because you just never know when something like that might come in handy.

  I’m sorry about Milo. I really am. After twenty years, he should just have left it alone. Curiosity/cat.

  But you can trust no one, not even a slightly bent cop with a short time to live. He might be in a come-to-Jesus mode, especially with his diagnosis, and I can’t have that. Some cases are not meant to be solved. Some secrets are meant to be taken to the grave.

  I stretch out my neck, like an animal seeking the sun. I’m tired. It no longer matters, I think. It’s too hard to prove at this long distance.

  But I won’t be found out. I’m young—fifty-five is young these days, when the life expectancy for women is 120 years.

  Live free or die.

  “It’s all right,” he says. “It had to be done.”

  Something tugs at a corner of his mouth, some sad smile of bitter remembrance, and I know. I know even before he says, “I loved Anna. And I’d have done anything to get the man who did that to her. I had Will in my sights early on. I just needed you to help me bring him down. This I did for me, and for no one else.”

  I nod. Weighing, judging. Live or die?

  Had Milo disappeared the recording?

  “She was on her way to meet me that morning. In the park. We always met in Riverside Park. Whenever we could. As often as we could.”