Tickled to Death and Other Stories of Crime and Suspense

by Simon Brett

  Anyway, Jean knew that the lack of air was not the real reason for her doziness. Guiltily, she allowed herself to think for a moment about the night before. She felt a little glow of fragile pleasure and knew she mustn’t think about it too much, mustn’t threaten it by inflating it in her mind beyond its proper proportions.

  But, without inflation, it was still the best thing that had happened to her for some years, and something that she had thought, at thirty-two, might well never happen again. It had all been so straightforward, making nonsense of the agonizing and worry about being an emotional cripple which had seemed an inescapable part of her life ever since she’d broken up with Roger five years earlier.

  It had not been a promising party. Given by a schoolfriend who had become a teacher, married a teacher and developed a lot of friends who were also teachers. Jean had anticipated an evening of cheap Spanish plonk, sharp French bread and predictable cheese, with conversation about how little teachers were paid, how much more everyone’s contemporaries were earning, how teaching wasn’t really what any of them had wanted to do anyway, all spiced with staff-room gossip about personalities she didn’t know, wasn’t likely to meet and, after half an hour of listening, didn’t want to meet.

  And that’s how it had been, until she had met Mick. From that point on, the evening had just made sense. Talking to him, dancing with him (for some reason, though they were all well into their thirties, the party was still conducted on the lines of a college hop), then effortlessly leaving with him and going back to his flat.

  And there it had made sense too. All the inhibitions she had carried with her so long, the knowledge that her face was strong rather than beautiful, that her hips were too broad and her breasts too small, had not seemed important. It had all been so different from the one-sided fumblings, the humourless groping and silent embarrassments which had seemed for some years all that sex had to offer. It had worked.

  And Mick was coming straight round to her place after school. She was going to cook him a meal. He had to go to some Debating Society meeting and would be round about seven. Some days she couldn’t guarantee to be back by then, the demands of her charges were unpredictable, but this time even that would be all right. Harry Morton was the last on her round and he clearly wasn’t going to be any trouble. Covertly, with the skill born of long practice, she looked at her watch. A quarter to five. Good, start to leave in about five minutes, catch the shops on the way home, buy something special, maybe a bottle of wine. Cook a good dinner and then . . .

  She felt herself blushing and guiltily pulled her mind back to listen to what Harry Morton was saying. Fantasizing never helped, she knew, it only distanced reality. Anyway, she had a job to do.

  “I’ve got a bit of money saved,” Harry was saying, “some I put aside in the post office book while I was still working and I’ve even managed to save a bit on the pension, and I reckon I’m going to buy some really good tools. I want to get a ratchet screwdriver. They’re very good, save a lot of effort. Just the job for putting up shelves, that sort of thing. I thought I’d put a couple of shelves up over there, you know, for magazines and that.”

  “Yes, that’s a very good idea.” Jean compensated for her lapse into reverie by being bright and helpful. “Of course, if you need a hand with any of the heavy stuff, the Trust’s got a lot of volunteers who’d be only too glad to—”

  “Oh no, no, thank you. I won’t need help. I’m pretty good with my hands. And, you know, if you’ve worked with your hands all your life, you stay pretty strong. Don’t worry, I’ll be up to building a few shelves. And any other little jobs around the flat.”

  “What did you do before you retired, Mr Morton?”

  “Now please call me Harry. I was a warehouse porter.”

  “Oh.”

  “Working up at Granger’s, don’t know if you know them?”

  “Up on the main road?”

  “Yes. We loaded the lorries. Had trolleys, you know. Had to go along the racks getting the lines to put in the lorries. Yes, I did that for nearly twenty year. They wanted me to be a checker, you know, checking off on the invoices as the goods were loaded on to the lorries, but I didn’t fancy the responsibility. I was happy with my trolley.”

  Suddenly Jean smiled at the old man, not her professional smile of concern, but a huge, genuine smile of pleasure that broke the sternness of her face into a rare beauty. Somehow she respected his simplicity, his content. It seemed to fit that the day after she met Mick, she should also meet this happy old man. She rose from her chair. “Well, if you’re sure there’s nothing I can do for you . . .”

  “No, I’ll be fine, thank you, love.”

  “I’ll drop round again in a week or two to see how you’re getting on.”

  “Oh, that’ll be very nice. I’ll be fine, though. Don’t you worry about me.”

  “Good.” Jean lingered for a moment. She felt something missing, there was something else she had meant to mention, now what on earth was it?

  Oh yes. His sister. She had meant to talk to him about his sister, sympathize about her death the previous year. Jean had had the information from a social worker in Bradford where the sister had lived. They tried to liaise between different areas as much as possible. The sister had been found dead in her flat. She had died of hypothermia, but her body had not been discovered for eleven days, because of the Christmas break.

  Jean thought she should mention it. There was always the danger of being thought to intrude on his privacy, but Harry Morton seemed a sensible enough old bloke, who would recognize her sympathy for what it was. And, in a strange way, Jean felt she ought to raise the matter as a penance for letting her mind wander while Harry had been talking.

  “Incidentally, I heard about your sister’s death. I’m very sorry.”

  “Oh, thank you.” Harry Morton didn’t seem unduly perturbed by the reference. “I didn’t see a lot of her these last few years.”

  “But it must have been a shock.”

  “A bit, maybe. Typical, though. She always was daft, never took care of herself. Died of the cold, she did. Hyper . . . hyper-something they called it.”

  “Hypothermia.”

  “That’s it. Silly fool. I didn’t see her when I went up for the funeral. Just saw the coffin. Closed coffin. Could have been anyone. Didn’t feel nothing, really.”

  “Anyway, as I say, I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, don’t think about it. I don’t. And don’t you worry about me going the same way. For one thing, I always had twice as much sense as she did—from a child on. And then I can look after myself.”

  Jean Collinson left, feeling glad she had mentioned the sister. Now there was nothing nagging at her mind, nothing she felt she should be doing. Except looking forward to the evening. She wondered what she should cook for Mick.

  Harry Morton closed the door after her. It was summer, but the corridor outside felt chilly. He shivered slightly, then went to his notebook and started to make a list.

  He had always made lists. At the warehouse he had soon realized that he couldn’t remember all the lines the checker gave him unless he wrote them down. The younger porters could remember up to twenty different items for their loads, but Harry recognized his limitations and always wrote everything down. It made him a little slower than the others, but at least he never got anything wrong. And the Head Checker had said, when you took off the time the others wasted taking back lines they had got wrong, Harry was quite as fast as any of them.

  He headed the list “Things to do”. First he wrote “Ratchet screwdriver”. Then he wrote “Library”.

  Harry knew his own pace and he never tried to go any faster. When he was younger he had occasionally tried to push himself along a bit, but that had only resulted in mistakes. Now he did everything steadily, methodically. And now there was no one to push him. The only really miserable time of his life had been when a new checker had been appointed who had tried to increase Harry’s work-rate. The old man still woke up
sometimes in the night in the sweat of panic and confusion that the pressure had put on him. Unwillingly he’d remember the afternoon when he’d thrown a catering-size tin of diced carrots at his tormentor’s head. But then he’d calm down, get up and make himself a cup of tea. That was all over. It hadn’t lasted very long. The checker had been ambitious and soon moved on to an office job.

  And now he wasn’t at work, Harry had all the time in the world anyway. Time to do a good job. The only pressure on him was to get it done before the winter set in. And the winter was a long way off.

  He read through all the Do-It-Yourself books he had got from the library, slowly, not skipping a word. After each one he would make a list, a little digest of the pros and cons of the methods discussed. Then he sent off for brochures from all the companies that advertised in his Do-It-Yourself magazines and subjected them to the same punctilious scrutiny. Finally, he made a tour of the local home-care shops, looked at samples and discussed the various systems with the proprietors. After six weeks he reckoned he knew everything there was to know about double glazing.

  And by then he had ruled out quite a few of the systems on the market. The best method, he realized, was to replace the existing windows with new factory-sealed units, but, even if the Housing Trust would allow him to do this, it would be far too expensive and also too big a job for him to do on his own.

  The next possible solution was the addition of secondary sashes, fixing a new pane over the existing window, leaving the original glass undisturbed. There were a good many proprietory sub-frame systems on the market, but again these would be far too expensive for his modest savings. He did some sums in his notebook, working out how long it would take him to afford secondary sashes by saving on his pension, but he wouldn’t have enough till the spring. And he had to get the double glazing installed before the winter set in. He began to regret the generous proportions on which the Victorians had designed their windows.

  He didn’t worry about it, though. It was still only September. There was going to be a way that he could afford and that he could do on his own. That social worker was always full of offers of help from her network of volunteers, but he wasn’t reduced to that yet.

  Then he had the idea of going through the back numbers of his Do-It-Yourself magazines. He knew it was a good idea as soon as he thought about it. He sat in his armchair in front of the fireplace which was now hidden by a low screen, and, with notebook and pencil by his side, started to thumb through the magazines. He did them in strict chronological order, just as he kept them stacked on their new shelf. He had a full set for seven and a half years, an unbroken sequence from the first time he had become interested in Do-It-Yourself. That had been while he was being harassed by the new checker. He chuckled to remember that he’d bought the first magazine because it had an article in it about changing locks and he’d wanted to keep the checker out of his flat. Of course, the checker had never come to his flat.

  He started on the first magazine and worked through, reading everything, articles and advertisements, in case he should miss what he was looking for. Occasionally he made a note in his notebook.

  It was on the afternoon of the third day that he found it. The article was headed, “Cut the Costs of Double Glazing”. His heart quickened with excitement, but he still read through the text at his regular, unvarying pace. Then he read it a second time, even more slowly, making copious notes.

  The system described was a simple one, which involved sticking transparent film on the inside of the windows and thus creating the required insulation gap between the panes and the film. There were, the writer observed slyly, kits for this system available on the market, but the shrewd Do-It-Yourself practitioner would simply go to his local supermarket and buy the requisite number of rolls of kitchen clingfilm and then go to his hardware store to buy a roll of double-sided Sellotape for fixing the film, and thus save himself a lot of money. Harry Morton chuckled out loud, as this cunning plot was confided to him. Then he wrote on his list “Kitchen Clingfilm” and “Double-Sided Sellotape”.

  As always, in everything he did, he followed the instructions to the letter. At first, it was more difficult than it sounded. The kitchen film tended to shrivel up on itself and stretch out of true when he tried to extend it over the window frames. And it caught on the stickiness of the Sellotape before it was properly aligned. He had to sacrifice nearly a whole roll of clingfilm before he got the method right. But he pressed on, working with steady care, perched on the folding ladder he had bought specially for the purpose, and soon was rewarded by the sight of two strips stretched parallel and taut over the window frame.

  He was lining up the third when the doorbell rang. He was annoyed by the interruption to his schedule and opened the door grudgingly to admit Jean Collinson. Then he almost turned his back on her while he got on with the tricky task of winding the prepared film back on to its cardboard roll. He would have to start lining the next piece up again after she had gone.

  Still, he did his best to be pleasant and offered the social worker a cup of tea. It seemed to take a very long time for the kettle to boil and the girl seemed to take a very long time to drink her tea. He kept looking over her shoulder to the window, estimating how many more strips it would take and whether he’d have to go back to the supermarket for another roll to make up for the one he’d ruined.

  Had he taken any notice of Jean, he would have seen that she looked tired, fatigue stretching the skin of her face to show her features at their sharpest and sternest. Work was getting busy. She had ahead of her a difficult interview with Mrs Grüber, whose Yorkshire terrier Nimrod had developed a growth between his back legs. It hung there, obscene and shiny, dangling from the silky fur. The animal needed to go to the vet, but Mrs Grüber refused to allow this, convinced that it would have to be put down. Jean feared this suspicion was correct, but knew that the animal had to make the trip to find out one way or the other. It was obviously in pain and kept up a thin keening whine all the time while Mrs Grüber hugged it piteously to her cardigan. And Jean knew that she was going to have to be the one who got the animal to the vet.

  Which meant she’d be late again. Which would mean another scene with Mick. He’d become so childish recently, so demanding, jealous of the time she spent with her old people. He had become moody and hopeless. Instead of the support in her life which he had been at first, he was now almost another case on her books. She had discovered how much he feared his job, how he couldn’t keep order in class, and, though she gave him all the sympathy she could, it never seemed to be enough.

  And then there were the logistics of living in two separate establishments an awkward bus-ride apart. Life seemed to have degenerated into a sequence of late-night and early-morning rushes from one flat to the other because one of them had left something vital in the wrong place. Jean had once suggested that they should move in together, but Mick’s violent reaction of fear against such a commitment had kept her from raising the matter again. So their relationship had become a pattern of rows and making up, abject self-recrimination from Mick, complaints that she didn’t really care about him and late-night reconciliations of desperate, clinging sex. Always too late. She had forgotten what a good night’s sleep was by the time one end had been curtailed by arguments and coupling and the other by leaving at half-past six to get back to her place to pick up some case notes. Everything seemed threatened.

  But it was restful in Harry’s flat. He seemed to have his life organized. She found it an oasis of calm, of passionless simplicity, where she could recharge her batteries before going back to the difficulties of the rest of her life.

  She was unaware of how he was itching for her to go. She saw the evidence of the double glazing and asked him about it, but he was reticent. He didn’t want to discuss it until it was finished. Anyway, it wasn’t for other people’s benefit. It was for him.

  Eventually Jean felt sufficiently steeled for her encounter with Mrs Grüber and brought their desultory conv
ersation to an end. She did not notice the alacrity with which Harry Morton rose to show her out, nor the speed with which he closed the door after her.

  Again he felt the chill of the corridor when the door was open. And even after it was closed there seemed to be a current of air from somewhere. He went across to his notebook and wrote down “Draught Excluder”.

  It was late October when she next went round to see the old man. She was surprised that he didn’t immediately open the door after she’d rung the bell. Instead she heard his voice hiss out, “Who is it?”

  She was used to this sort of reception from some of her old ladies, who lived in the conviction that every caller was a rapist at the very least, but she hadn’t expected it from such a sensible old boy as Harry Morton.

  She identified herself and, after a certain amount of persuasion, he let her in. He held the door open as little as possible and closed it almost before she was inside. “What do you want?” he asked aggressively.

  “I just called to see how you are.”

  “Well, I’m fine.” He spoke as if that ended the conversation and edged back towards the door.

  “Are you sure? You look a bit pale.”

  He did look pale. His skin had taken on a greyish colour.

  “You look as if you haven’t been out much recently. Have you been ill? If you’re unwell, all you have to do is—”

  “I haven’t been ill. I go out, do my shopping, get the things I need.” He couldn’t keep a note of mystery out of the last three words.

  She noticed he was thinner too. His appearance hadn’t suffered; he still dressed with almost obsessive neatness; but he had definitely lost weight. She wasn’t to know that he was cutting down on food so that his pension would buy the “things he needed”.

  The room looked different too. She only took it in once she was inside. There was evidence of recent carpentry. No mess—all the sawdust was neatly contained on newspaper and offcuts of wood were leant against the kitchen table which Harry had used as a sawing bench—but he had obviously been busy. The ratchet screwdriver was prominent on the table top. The artefact which all this effort had produced was plain to see. The fine marble fireplace had been neatly boxed in. It had been a careful job. Pencil marks on the wood showed the accuracy of measurement and all of the screws were tidily countersunk into their regularly spaced holes.