by Cathy Ace
When the doorbell rang, the couple stared at each other with surprise.
‘Who can that be at this time of night?’ snapped Gladys.
‘Why don’t you answer it and find out?’ mugged Ivor.
‘You do it, Ivor. I don’t like to unlock the door after dark. It could be anyone.’
Discarding the newspaper, Ivor pushed himself to his feet and lumbered to the front door. His wife also stood, hovering out of sight in the living room, straining to hear who could be calling.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ said Ivor. ‘We’ve not long finished tea, and we were going to watch a bit of telly, but I suppose so.’ He turned and shouted, ‘Gladys, company!’
His wife tottered forward to see who it was. ‘Really?’ Her expression softened from surprise to sympathy when she saw their late-neighbor’s elder son. ‘David. Hello. We were sorry to hear about your dad. Just talking about him, weren’t we, Ivor?’
‘We were,’ said her husband truthfully enough.
‘He’ll be missed. That’s what we were saying, wasn’t it?’
‘It was.’
‘Had a lovely voice on him, didn’t he, Ivor?’
‘He did.’
‘The choir will miss him terribly, won’t they, Ivor?’
‘They will.’
David Evans watched the couple shuttlecock their comments back and forth, then smiled wearily. ‘Thank you. You’re both very kind.’
‘Come in for a cuppa, will you?’ asked Gladys tenderly. ‘Let’s not stand here with the door open, heating the whole street. It’s cold out. Only to be expected, so close to Christmas. Come on in.’
The unexpected guest carefully navigated the narrow spaces between a worn, overstuffed suite and poorly-varnished, dark-wood furnishings draped with crocheted doilies until he sank into a well-used chair. Gladys reached past him to press the ‘Record’ button on the TV’s remote control before switching off the set.
‘Tea or coffee, David?’
‘Tea’ll be fine, thanks, Mrs Pritchard,’ he replied, removing his cap. He rubbed his balding head. ‘But only if it’s not too much trouble. I can’t stop long; they’ll be expecting me at home.’
‘The kettle’s just boiled, so I’ll be quick.’ Gladys bustled out of the room.
The electric fire sitting in front of the painted hardboard-covered grate hummed mournfully in the ensuing silence, the yellow light dancing behind the plastic coals doing little to make the room appear welcoming, or feel warm.
Ivor cleared his throat. ‘We saw the notice in the paper tonight. Funeral’s in two weeks, I see,’ he said in appropriately solemn tones.
‘Yes. It was the earliest we could get it booked. They’re backed up at the crematorium. I suppose it’ll give a lot of his old friends the time they need to arrange buses to bring them down to Swansea from the valleys.’
‘Gladys reckoned there’d be a load coming. Will the choirs all be travelling together?’ Ivor tried to sound interested.
David nodded. ‘I believe they’ll try to consolidate into just a couple of coaches. It’ll be good to see them there, and lovely to hear them, of course. Singing was Dad’s passion. He always said you couldn’t beat a male voice choir, but I suppose you know that.’
‘We were saying as much before you got here.’ Ivor searched for something more to add. ‘They’ll miss him.’
‘They will,’ replied the dead man’s son. ‘The grandkids have taken it hard, too.’
‘They would,’ agreed Ivor, summoning as much sympathy as he could muster. He and Gladys had, sadly, never been blessed with children.
Ivor beamed when his wife arrived. ‘There she is now.’ His tone suggested he’d been waiting for several hours to be rescued from a terrible fate.
Gladys pushed her fancy ‘hostess trolley’ through the door, bearing the best china and the teapot they never used. Ivor shot up from his chair as fast as he could, and noticed the sugar was in a bowl, not the usual bag, and the milk was in a little jug. There was even a plate of biscuits.
When they were all finally holding cups and saucers, Gladys said, ‘It’s lovely to see you, of course, David, but . . .’ Her unasked question hung in the air above the digestives.
‘They told me at the hospital you visited Dad the day he . . . on his last day.’ David’s hand trembled as he blew across his steaming tea.
‘Not exactly,’ replied Ivor. ‘It said in the paper he went on Thursday. We were there for evening visiting hours on Wednesday.’
‘He actually died on the Wednesday night,’ said David gently. ‘We put Thursday in the announcement because that’s when my brother and I arrived at the hospital, and it seemed . . . well, the right thing to do. Neither of us had been able to visit him since the Tuesday, you see. My brother Gerry had to go to Scotland on business first thing Wednesday, and I went to watch my two girls in a school concert that evening. It’s that time of year; one thing after another in the run-up to Christmas. The doctors had told us he was improving, so we thought it would be alright to miss a day. It seems you were the last visitors he had, and Gerry and I wondered how Dad had seemed. We knew he’d never have been the man he once was, but we were shocked when we were told he’d passed. We wondered . . . well, was he was in good spirits? Did he seem content? With neither of us being there at the end, it would be a comfort to know.’
Ivor thought David looked just the way he had when he’d kicked his rugby ball over the garden wall on so many occasions all those years ago, when the Evanses had first moved in. Even though he’d been a teenager at the time, he’d always had that lost-little-boy look about him.
Ivor and Gladys exchanged a glance as David sipped his scalding hot tea.
At an almost imperceptible nod from her husband, Gladys said, ‘To be honest, your father wasn’t at all well, David. Though I have to say, that evening we saw him at the hospital, he did finally have a bit of color in his cheeks. We’d been in and out of next door with food for him for about a month, and I did bits of shopping and so forth, just to keep him ticking over, so to speak. He’d not wanted to go out much. Not feeling up to it, he said. That last heart attack did for him, though.’
David blew across his steaming cup, his eyes wide and sad.
Gladys continued, ‘In a way it was lucky for him that he’d managed to get himself out and about a bit when it happened, otherwise – well, who knows how long it would have been before someone would have found him in the house. I dare say that would have been me, too. But, as it was, that nice man Sooly – I can’t say his whole name, because it’s too complicated, so he lets me call him Sooly – he saw what happened. Do you know the man I mean, him at the shop on the corner?’ David nodded. ‘Well, he did the right thing phoning the ambulance when he saw your father fall down on the pavement.’
‘Yes, I understand it was his quick actions that saved Dad that day,’ said the grieving son.
Gladys nodded. ‘It was. And him not speaking much English, too, poor dab. Well, enough to run a shop, I suppose, but, you know, not much real conversation. I happened to be coming back from town, and I was walking from the bus stop. And there was your dad being carted off by the ambulance. I could tell just by looking at him that he wasn’t good, but I’d been thinking that for a couple of weeks. He’d reached the point where his teeth looked too big for his face. Never a good sign, that. And he was getting on, after all. Eighty-five, wasn’t he?’
David smiled sadly.
‘Good innings, really,’ said Ivor.
David put down his tea. ‘So they say.’ The man didn’t sound convinced. ‘The thing is, Gerry and I were wondering if Dad had – well, just given up, I suppose. You see, the doctors said they were puzzled that he went as fast as he did.’ He unzipped the top of his plaid-lined, waxed-cotton jacket a little. ‘He’d been doing well, they said, and then he was gone.’
Ivor rallied. ‘Well, what do they know, these doctors? Just youngsters, all of them. When it’s
your time, it’s your time. As the wife said, he was obviously not a well man. She might be right when she says he had a bit of color about him, propped up in that bed there, but I don’t know. Maybe they just filled him full of drugs to make him look a bit perkier. He was weak, but in good spirits, mind you; talking about when he could come home and get back to his singing. We chatted about this and that, didn’t we love?’ Gladys smiled. ‘How things were around here, could we keep an eye on the house for him, that sort of thing. But then he got tired, and asked if we could pull his curtains around him, ’cos the lights were a bit bright, and we left. He was a bit quiet but – you know – alright, I suppose.’
‘So Dad seemed quite . . . happy in himself then?’ asked David with the eyes of a hopeful child.
‘As happy as he ever was when he wasn’t singing,’ replied Ivor. Gladys nodded.
David stood, grim-faced, the dark circles beneath his eyes telling the tale of his grief and loss. ‘Well, thanks for that at least. I suppose you’re right; even the best of doctors can’t always be certain of things, can they?’ He forced a smile. ‘We’ll see you both at the funeral, of course.’ It wasn’t a question.
‘Wouldn’t miss it for the world,’ said Ivor, also rising to his feet. ‘Have you made any plans for next door yet? Gladys and I were saying we thought you’d probably sell up.’
David shook his head. ‘Actually, we think we’ll hang onto the old place. Gerry and I talked about it; his eldest is at university now, just started here in Swansea, so we thought it would be a good idea to keep it. His son and a couple of fellow-students will live there for the next few years. It’ll save them paying rent to someone else. Of course, they won’t move in until the new term begins, after Christmas. Then, when they’re all finished, maybe Gerry’s younger son will use it. After him, then my girls will be about ready for it. If they all decide to go to university or college in this area, of course.’
Ivor felt Gladys reach for his hand. She gripped him tightly.
‘Young people living next door? That’ll make a change, won’t it, Ivor?’ she said quietly. ‘I hope they’re nice.’ She forced a laugh.
David’s reply was warmed by genuine affection. ‘He’s a good kid, is Gerry’s eldest. He’s studying geography, but he’s a wonderful musician too. Got a lovely voice he has – must have inherited it from his grandfather. And he plays the bassoon. All three of them who’ll be moving in are musical types. Classical, of course; none of this rock-band stuff. Bassoon, clarinet and violin, they play. It’ll be nice for them to have somewhere they can rehearse in the evenings.’ He pulled at the collar of his jacket, and tugged the zip upwards, flapping his cap onto his head as he left. ‘See you at the funeral,’ he called, as he slid into the leather-upholstered seat of his large, sleek car.
Once the front door was locked, Gladys burst into tears. ‘All those years listening to John singing – and now more noise? I don’t know if I can take it, Ivor. I thought all that was behind us with him finally gone.’
Ivor put his arm around his wife’s heaving shoulders and steered her into the sitting room, where he settled her into her chair. His heart was thumping. He’d seen the same horrified expression on his beloved wife’s face when John Evans had perked up in his hospital bed, and had begun to talk happily about getting home, and starting to sing again.
Then Ivor had spotted the huge syringe with a long, thin needle lying unattended on a little cart beside the man’s hospital bed. He knew that injecting a whole container full of air into the tubes plugged into a person’s veins killed them in a way not even the doctors could always spot. He’d seen it on one of Gladys’s TV programs a few months earlier; she liked to watch those ‘real emergency’ ones, where they save people’s lives – or don’t. In one of them, a nurse had talked about how, sometimes, little air bubbles weren’t really dangerous at all, saying how they got it wrong on telly all the time. She’d even showed how much you needed to pump into a person to be sure to make it fatal. It was quite a lot. Handy to know.
So that was what Ivor had done to John, to stop him coming back to the house next door to sing again. He’d fussed about a bit at the side of the chattering man’s bed, and had pushed the air in the syringe into one of John’s tubes. All he could think about at the time was that he wanted Gladys to be happy; that was all Ivor had ever really cared about.
It only took him a minute to do it, while Gladys was picking up something the man in the bed opposite John’s had dropped onto the floor. Then Ivor had said goodbye to John for the last time, and had closed their soon-to-be-late neighbor’s curtains around him. It had been surprisingly simple, and he hadn’t felt so much as a single twinge of remorse since he’d done it. Quite honestly, until Gladys had told him about the notice in the newspaper, he hadn’t even been sure it had worked.
It seemed he’d got away with murder alright, but now?
Music students? Next door? For years?
The news couldn’t have been much worse. And just before Christmas, too.
Afterword and acknowledgements
As you can see from the copyright page, some of this work dates back to 1988. The story ‘Dear George’ was written in a car park on Baker Street, in London, in 1987, and won the right to be published because of a competition being run by a women’s magazine. The launch of that anthology, ‘Murder and Company’, brought me into contact with some ‘real authors’ for the first time in my life and – though I enjoyed it tremendously – I couldn’t turn my attention from the business I had just established, despite the further boost I received when the story was selected to join others by well-known authors like Peter Lovesey and Ruth Rendell in a collection being put together specifically for the English GCSE syllabus in the UK.
I ran my business until 1999, then sold it, and moved to Canada where I taught at the University of British Columbia, then Simon Fraser University. It was while I was teaching there that I was approached by the wonderful Martin Jarvis, OBE, and Rosalind Ayers, asking if they could produce ‘Dear George’ for BBC Radio 4. Of course, my family all almost burst with pride when my words were broadcast for the world to hear; the death of my father soon thereafter gave me the kick up the backside I needed to get back to fiction writing, and I produced, and self-published, a collection of twelve stories called ‘MURDER: Month by Month’ in 2007. Quite a few of the works in this anthology first appeared there; they have been reedited to allow me to apply what I hope is some useful learning, acquired by writing what I estimate to be more than 1,500,000 words as I have crafted The Cait Morgan Mysteries and the WISE Enquiries Agency Mysteries.
In 2008 I produced a collection of four novellas; ‘MURDER: Season by Season’ joined my first volume when I approached a Canadian publisher with the idea they should ‘release my characters’ via a ransom note – you know the sort of thing . . . letters cut out of a newspaper and all. They then published what has become to date eight books in the Cait Morgan Mysteries series. Thank you to TouchWood Editions in Victoria, BC for having faith in me. The first time Cait made an appearance in print was in ‘MURDER: Month by Month’ in the story ‘The Corpses Hanging Over Paris’, which is in this collection; when I revisited these first three Cait Morgan stories I was amazed to realize she’d truly ‘found her voice’ in them, back in 2007; from that voice came all those other books. Indeed, the main reason for republishing these works is to allow those who have read about Cait Morgan and the WISE women to find out ‘how it all started’.
I was also pleased to discover that my original tale about the four women who set up the WISE Enquiries Agency also showcased the women readers have come to know through the, so far, four books in The WISE Enquiries Agency Mysteries, published by Severn House Publishers. That said, there were more changes for me to make when rewriting ‘Miss Parker Pokes Her Nose In’ because, through four books, I have developed the characters’ backstories in ways this ‘genesis’ story didn’t acknowledge.
Other stories that app
eared in that first volume haven’t fared so well, and do not appear in this collection; it’s quite amazing how the passage of just ten years can make some key elements of a story seem anachronistic. Those ‘missing stories’ will be reworked, and are likely to appear in the future – freshly minted for a new age.
As for now, I have no idea where my writing life will take me over the next few years. My first novel was published in 2012, and here I am five years later re-self-publishing my earliest works. Sometimes we need to step back before we can march forward. I hope you’ll come with me on that journey. I’ve met and worked with so many wonderful people in the past decade – the decade since most of these stories first appeared. Thanks to Anna Harrisson (editor) and Sue Vincent (proofer) for this collection. Through it all my family has cheered, and my husband has supported me. Thank you to everyone for the learning, enjoyment and fulfillment.
Cathy Ace, November, 2017.
