“A charge!” Roger said. “In the magistrates’ court? You mean they may actually do that?”
“They’re entitled to do it. There was another witness to the event, so it wouldn’t be difficult for them, and they’ve had a good deal of trouble of this sort lately. They may want to make an example.”
“But if I pay...”
“I’m afraid I can’t accept payment, sir. The goods have been returned and in any case, it isn’t up to me to decide. I merely observed the lady slip them into a bag she was carrying and then fail to produce them at the check-out counter.”
“But I thought all the stores were terrifically insured against shoplifting,” Coralie said, “so even if I’d done something so crazy they wouldn’t have lost by it.”
“Coralie, please,” Roger said bitingly. “Don’t make things worse than they are.”
But how could anything be much worse than having the possibility hanging over him, as apparently he had, that his wife, the wife of the manager of the main bank in the town, might be charged with shop-lifting?
He spoke again to the man. “I’m not trying to excuse her, but my wife has been seriously ill recently and literally doesn’t know what she’s doing sometimes. And we’re moving away shortly, going to London. Perhaps that will affect the situation.”
“I’ll certainly include it in my report,” the man said. “How soon would that be?”
“Within a month at the longest.”
It would not be easy to arrange everything so soon, but if it had to be done to prevent the horror of the scandal here that Roger foresaw, it would have to be managed somehow. In London, where they were unknown, her strange behaviour, if it continued, could not be quite so disastrous. And for sure he would get her into the hands of a psychiatrist.
“Well, I’ll do my best for you, sir,” the man said, “and I dare say in the circumstances it may be no further steps will be taken.”
“There, didn’t I say he was kind?” Coralie said with a sudden charming smile. “Now I think I’ll go home if they aren’t going to arrest me.”
She stood up and left the office giving a little bow to the detective as she went.
For some time after the detective also had gone Roger sat staring before him, but it was not until the evening, shortly before his normal time for leaving the bank, that he wrote three letters. He did not dictate them to his secretary, but wrote them himself. One was accepting the appointment that he had been offered in London. One was resigning from his position in Allingford. One was to one of the larger house-agents in London. It was almost dark by the time that he reached home, but he felt a deep reluctance to go into the house to join Coralie. When he had put his car away in the garage he strolled out into the garden and wandered up and down the paths.
The colours of the flowers were all lost in the dusk. The pale pink clematis was a shadowy white, the forsythia looked almost black, the daffodils seemed to have vanished. Perhaps it was as well, he thought. In any case he was going to have to give it all up, so he might as well accustom himself to the idea that the colours, the scents, the ever-changing patterns there that had so delighted him, had been prepared for someone else. Someone who would probably change everything, pull up what he had cherished, add what had no attraction for him.
Suddenly feeling extraordinarily tired, he at last went into the house.
Coralie was talking to someone. He heard her as soon as he opened the kitchen door. She was at the telephone in the hall. Still not quite ready to talk to her normally, or to discuss what had happened that morning, he stayed where he was.
He heard her say, “But, darling, don’t you understand, your idea, it’s worked! I feel so excited. At first I didn’t think it was going to. Those people in the village shop were so bloody kindhearted that I believe I could have walked off with half their stock without their making a fuss. So today I took the risk of nicking a bra and some tights from the supermarket in town and made sure their detective saw me. But of course it might have meant getting involved with the police and being charged in court, which was a bit more than I was counting on... What?... Oh, he hasn’t come home yet, it’s quite all right, I can talk. And I managed to get the detective to go with me to see him, and the risk of the real scandal there’d be if the shop decided to prosecute scared him stiff and he told the man we were leaving for London in a few weeks. So everything’s going to be fine. It’ll be so easy to meet. Meanwhile I’ve seen no reason to tell him that the child wasn’t his...”
It was at that point that Roger lost his head. Lunging across the kitchen, he seized her round the neck as she stood at the telephone and shook her and shook her until he knew that her neck was broken. She had replaced the receiver: there was no one to hear her screams. Then at last and somehow aimlessly he let her fall to the floor and stood looking down at her vacantly, as if he wondered what she was doing there.
It took him some minutes to decide what to do next. At last he moved her, but only to the bottom of the stairs, where he dropped her again, pulling her legs up on to the lower steps, spreading her arms out as if she had made a desperate attempt to save herself as she fell and arranging her with her face buried in the rug at the bottom. He thought it looked convincing. Then he telephoned Matthew Bayliss.
“Matthew, can you come round at once?” he asked. It did not matter that his voice was shaking, that was only natural. “Coralie’s had a terrible accident – tripped on the stairs – fallen – I’m afraid she’s – as a matter of fact, I’m sure... She had a very nasty experience this morning and was very shaken. I oughtn’t to have left her alone... Yes, yes, but please come.”
He put the telephone down, then he went into the sitting-room and threw the three letters that he had not yet posted into the fire. Was that what he had meant to do with them all along?
THE LONG WAY ROUND
Leo woke with a headache, and even before he had opened his eyes to the hard stripes of light that fell across his bed through the slats of the Venetian blinds, he knew that it was going to be one of his bad ones. There was the familiar band of pain above his eyebrows. There was the feeling of nausea. Soon it would be far worse. Daylight would became unbearable. He would probably be sick.
With a groan, he sat up, wondering where Melanie had put the codeine tablets.
Swinging his feet down on to the cool tiled floor, he sat on the edge of the bed, a lean, narrow-shouldered man who because of his baldness looked more than the forty-nine years that he was. Holding his head in his hands, he fought off the dizziness that made the room swim and the dark dots before his eyes glide about like tadpoles in a tank. Then he got up carefully and crossed to the corner where the suitcases were.
Both of them were open, but had been no more than half-unpacked. The evening before, when he and Melanie had reached the hotel, they had both been so tired that they had only grabbed at the few things that they had needed for the night, had drunk the double whiskies that they had had sent up to their room and had fallen into bed. The journey had taken about twice as long as it should have. There had been a two hour delay at Heathrow, another almost as long at Athens, then there had been difficulty about finding a taxi to take them to their hotel in Nicosia. Frustration and tension had had time to build up in Leo, enough to account for the headache this morning. Unless, of course, it came from plain fear. Yet he was not aware of feeling frightened.
From the other bed Melanie said, “What are you doing?”
“I want the codeine,” Leo said. “I’ve got a headache.”
“It’s the heat,” she said in a husky, half-awake voice. “You aren’t used to it, that’s the trouble.”
He was pawing about in the nearer of the two suit-cases, the one that had most of his own clothes in it.
“Damn it, where did you put the stuff?” he asked.
But as he said it, his groping hand touched something in the suitcase and he froze in horror, such horror that for the moment he forgot his headache. The gun. The gun buried in
a handful of socks. The gun that nobody knew he had, not even Melanie. Particularly not Melanie.
But how in the world had he managed to be such a fool as to leave it in the open suitcase all night, where Melanie, perhaps wakeful in the unfamiliar heat and looking for a book to pass the time with, might have found the thing while he himself slept deeply and unguardedly? Was it an omen, a sort of warning, that there was something wrong with his plan?
“Not in there,” Melanie said. “In the zip-bag.”
She got out of bed and came padding across the room towards him, her body formless inside her loose, pink-flowered, cotton nightgown. Her grey-streaked hair hung in limp strands about her bland, amiable face. A yawn split it open.
“Here it is.” She fished about inside the blue plastic bag that they had had with them in the aeroplane and brought out a bottle of tablets. “I put them in there in case you started a headache on the journey.”
Breathing hard, Leo pushed the gun down among the socks and closed the lid of the suitcase on them. He muttered, “Thanks.”
“Wait a minute,” she said. “I’ll get you a glass of water.”
As soon as she was in the bathroom, running the water until it came fairly cold, he opened the case again, whipped the gun out of it, rolled it in a pullover that he could not possibly need in this heat and thrust
them to the back of the top shelf of the wardrobe cupboard. Melanie was not a tall woman. She would not think of reaching up to put anything else there.
She came back with a glass of water.
“I suppose it’s all right to drink the water here,” she said. “If the British didn’t leave much else behind them when they went, they probably left a good water supply. Shall I ring for breakfast now, or d’you want to give the pills time to work first?”
“Just as you like. Now, if you want to.”
Leo swallowed two tablets, made his way back to his bed, lay down and buried his face in the pillow.
He heard Melanie pick up the telephone and ask for two breakfasts to be sent to their room. Then she began to wander about, beginning to do some unpacking. Leo wondered what she would have done if she had come on the gun. Putting it in the suitcase had of course been a risk, but he had thought that the chance of the cases being opened between London and Nicosia was small. He had known that ever since all that hi-jacking trouble the hand-baggage of passengers going to the Near East was searched before they left Heathrow, and in fact Melanie had had to open her handbag and the blue plastic bag, and they had had to walk through an electro-magnetic beam between two posts, which somehow or other would have revealed it if they had been carrying any object made of metal. A man just in front of Leo had been stopped and questioned because he had had what had turned out to be a big bunch of keys in his pocket. But neither of the suitcases had had to be opened on the journey. That they might be examined in some way like the hand luggage was a risk Leo had decided to take. And everything had gone just as he had hoped. When he and Melanie had arrived in Nicosia there had been no one on earth who knew that he possessed a gun. The first part of his plan had been achieved completely successfully.
But then he had left the gun in the open case all night...
In spite of the heat, he shivered.
He had found the gun one day, and the ammunition too, in the dusty loft of a tall, decrepit house in the old part of the town where he and Melanie had their antique shop. They had just bought up the contents of the house for the sake of the few good pieces in it, when the widow who had lived there for thirty years had died. They often made that kind of deal with executors after a death, disposing of the rubbish in the house in one of the cheaper salerooms, and they always went very carefully through what they found in lofts. For astonishing things could sometimes be found there. More than once they had discovered quite valuable things, jewellery, old silver, old books, the existence of which their owners seemed to have forgotten. Once they had found a bottle of potassium cyanide, enough to kill off a whole family, with a few dead moths in it. They had found very compromising letters and once an unexplained skull. At one time Melanie had searched as diligently through these things as Leo. But lately she had grown reluctant to climb ladders, saying it made her head swim, and it had come about that Leo had been alone when he had found the gun, found it and slipped it swiftly, furtively, hardly knowing why he was doing it, back into its box and put it on one side, among the other things up there that had seemed to be worth keeping. Later he had put the box on a shelf in the storeroom behind the shop, a shelf which was too high for Melanie to reach without climbing one of those step-ladders that she did not like. And there it had stayed for six months....
“Beautiful morning this morning,” the waiter who brought them their breakfast told them happily. He was small and brown-skinned, with a wide smile and big, dark, sparkling eyes. “Fine sunshine. Beautiful.”
“Isn’t it always beautiful here?” Melanie asked. “The advertisements say so.”
“Ah no, not always,” the waiter said, looking as if it saddened him inexpressibly to damage such a charming illusion. “Very changeable. Last week we had storm. Great wind, rain, terrible. But no storm today. Sunshine, everything beautiful.”
As he went out Melanie said, “They’re very friendly, aren’t they? They don’t seem to have anything against us now, whatever they had in the past.”
“Only against each other,” Leo answered. “Greeks and Turks, water and oil. Each lot would like to finish the others off. I can’t think why the rest of us don’t let them get on with it. What’s the coffee like?” Strong coffee sometimes helped with his headaches.
“Pretty watery,” Melanie said when she had poured some out and sipped it. “That waiter was a Greek, wouldn’t you say? I thought he had a Greek sort of look about him.”
“Couldn’t tell the difference myself.” Leo sat up, reaching for the cup that she held out to him. “Oh God, this stuff is muck!”
“And the toast’s soggy,” Melanie said, swinging her bare feet as she sat on the edge of her bed. “But why worry? It’s wonderful to be here, isn’t it? And if you don’t feel like driving to Kyrenia to see Uncle Ben this morning, we can go in the afternoon. I was looking in the guide-book last night and it’s only about fifteen or sixteen miles from Nicosia. Actually, it might be better to go in the afternoon, because then it won’t look as if we expect to be given lunch. D’you know, I’m really looking forward to seeing the old boy again. I miss him.”
The telephone rang.
Melanie picked it up, listened, replied, put it down again and said, “It’s someone from the travel agency. They’ll deliver the car to us here at ten-thirty.”
“I’m not going anywhere till this head clears,” Leo said.
“I’ll drive,” Melanie said. “You needn’t worry. They drive on the left here, don’t they, like reasonable people?”
“Just leave me in peace for a bit, can’t you?” Leo said. “I’ll be all right presently.”
In fact, it was mid-afternoon when the two of them got into the hired car and set out to find the road northwards to Kyrenia, where Melanie’s Uncle Ben had lived for the last year. They began by losing their way and found themselves in the old Turkish city at the heart of Nicosia, a place of intricately interwoven one-way streets, old houses that overhung the pavements, blazing horns and throngs of pedestrians who strolled across the streets, right in front of the car, without considering for a moment, so it seemed, that this might put their lives in danger. The car was appallingly hot from having stood in the sunshine for several hours. The sky was a glittering arch of unbroken blue.
Leo drove. He was an aggressive, bad-tempered driver. By the time that he had extricated the car from the old city and found the wide road that curved around it outside the walls, he was abusing all other drivers, all pedestrians and Melanie, for having failed to read the map correctly.
“Never mind,” she said in her calm way, “we aren’t in any hurry. Now we’ve got to find that turnin
g on the right. It ought to be coming quite soon, if we haven’t passed it already.”
“Well, for God’s sake, keep your eyes peeled!”
A minute or two later they came to a big roundabout and saw the road to Kyrenia branching off it. Leo swung into it and speeded up. But almost immediately the road narrowed and then was obstructed by a barricade of oil drums. Leo had to bring the car almost to a standstill before a dark-haired, dark-skinned man in uniform waved them on through a gap in the barricade.
“What was that about, d’you suppose?” Melanie asked as they speeded up again afterwards. “It was almost like a frontier, wasn’t it? D’you think that’s what it was? I mean, have we just gone from Greek into Turkish territory, or the other way round? What do you think he was, that policeman, Greek or Turkish?”
“I can’t tell the difference, I told you, and I couldn’t care less, so long as they don’t bother us,” Leo answered.
“Well, I can tell the difference,” Melanie said after a moment. “This is Turkish where we are. The names over the shops are all written in ordinary letters. But the Greeks use the Greek alphabet, don’t they?”
They drove on towards the open country.
It was flat at first, a lot of it boggy-looking waste land, with fields of barley here and there and a few blue patches of flax. Most of it had a rather desolate air. The fields were empty, and except for an occasional cyclist, there was not much traffic. But all of a sudden, coming from the direction of Kyrenia, they saw two army jeeps. Both had their headlights on, looking like sickly, jaundiced eyes in the brilliance of the afternoon sunshine. The soldiers in the jeeps wore light blue berets, and all of them were blonde, almost startlingly so in this island of dark people. On each jeep was a plate that read, “United Nations.” Then behind them, one after the other, nose to tail in an astonishing stream, came cars, ordinary cars, not army vehicles of any kind, but Austins, Morrises, Vauxhalls, Volkswagens, large and small, and all filled with ordinary-looking people in everyday clothes, not in uniform.
The Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas and Other Mysteries Page 10
