A Shock to the System

by Simon Brett

  Its guest of honour seemed subdued, if not downright depressed. Whereas the previous crowds had lifted him to a feverish jollity, on this occasion the reality of his departure seemed to crush his spirit. He no longer had merry quips of golf and gardening to answer the enquiries about how he would spend his retirement; he replied, ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know how I’m going to fill the time.’ He no longer even pretended to crow at the prospect of increased leisure and his index-linked pension, but listened wistfully as his colleagues inadvertently excluded him by their talk of future plans. He looked like a man on the edge of a dark precipice, afraid and ignorant of how far he had to fall.

  His assistant, by contrast, was in ebulliently cheerful mood. He chatted lightly with his older colleagues and his new friends from Operational Research. He had whispered, complicit conversations with members of senior management. He flirted harmlessly with secretaries under the benign eye of Miss Pridmore. And every now and then, when someone mentioned his late wife, he looked appropriately grave.

  He saw Stella from time to time. She tried to pierce his bonhomie with meaningful looks, but achieved no deeper conversational engagement than the other girls. At one point she actually took his arm and hissed, ‘When are we going to see each other again, Graham?’

  ‘Soon, soon,’ he replied airily, and whisked away to share a joke with Terry Sworder.

  Eventually, after a great deal of drinking, a glass was tapped for silence and David Birdham gave a brief, professional encomium on George Brewer. He started with an ancient, mildly risque anecdote of George and a long-vanished secretary at a conference in Manchester, which achieved the required raucous laugh, then moved on to list the Head of Department’s qualities of good humour, patience and common sense, and to say how much they would be missed. He made a brief reference to ‘the cloud cast by recent events’ and assured ‘George’s successor, whoever he might be’ that he’d have a tough job in maintaining the high standards of his predecessor. David Birdham did not mention his personal view that George was ‘losing his marbles’ and had been ‘a brake on progress for years’. In conclusion, he asked everyone to raise their glasses to George Brewer, as Miss Pridmore wheeled in the gift to which they had all so generously contributed — a new golf trolley.

  After the applause had died down, George made a broken-backed little speech of thanks. Perhaps he was drunk, perhaps it was emotion, but he kept losing his thread. He mistimed his jokes, stuttered his gratitude, and kept reaching the same impasse when he mentioned what he would do in the future. Eventually he was left just looking at the golf trolley, which, like the previous gift of Newton’s Balls for his desk, now seemed only to advertise the emptiness of his life.

  As the speech spiralled down to silence, David Birdham took the executive decision of shouting ‘Jolly good show, George’, and leading a round of applause.

  After that the assembly dispersed rather quickly. Groups of the younger ones adjourned to pubs, the board members went down to their drivers, and members of the Personnel Department queued for final handshakes and farewell quips. One little group of hard-core drinkers, which Graham noticed included Stella, stayed resolutely and rowdily together, while the uniformed waitresses circled, collecting plates and glasses and putting away the remaining wine bottles.

  ‘I think I’d better go,’ said George abruptly in the middle of a long-winded effusion from the internal postman, and moved unsteadily but quickly over to the anteroom where the coats had been dumped.

  Goodbye, George, thought Graham. Last I’ll ever see of you, you boring old fool.

  Then he saw the gleaming golf trolley, abandoned and forlorn. Oh, God, last thing he wanted when he took over the reins on Monday was George stumbling in to collect his present.

  With a cheery cry of ‘Forgetful to the last’ tossed towards the group of drinkers, Graham pushed the trolley after its owner.

  He stopped in the doorway. George was fumbling on the floor. The volume of coats had pulled down a hat stand and he couldn’t identify his ‘British Warm’.

  ‘I’ve got something of yours, George,’ Graham pronounced jovially.

  The fuddled, sad eyes looked up at him. Then George rose and put a hand in his pocket. ‘I’ve got something of yours, too, Graham.’

  He withdrew the hand. On his palm lay Graham’s gold cigarette lighter.

  ‘Thank you. I noticed I’d lost it somewhere. Never thought I’d see it again. Did I leave it in your office?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh. Where did you find it then?’

  ‘That’s the strange thing,’ said George Brewer slowly. ‘It came in the post this morning. Addressed to me. From some car-hire firm. Apparently they’d found it in one of their cars.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Graham went down by the stairs. He waited in the shadows of the Reception area until the lift arrived. The doors opened and George stumbled out, suddenly shorter and more bent, pulling his golf trolley incongruously behind him.

  Only one door was left open at that time of night and George had difficulty negotiating the trolley through it. Going down the steps to the pavement was also awkward. Graham did not emerge from the building until his quarry was moving along smoothly.

  He had to find out how much George knew, or how much he had pieced together. In his fuddled state, the old man had not elaborated, simply handed the lighter over, apparently more struck by the unusual circumstances of its return than suspicions as to how it might have got into a hire-car. But he wouldn’t stay drunk for ever, and there had to come a moment when he started to ask questions. Graham knew he must speak before that moment arrived, must pre-empt suspicion by some spurious explanation. He didn’t know what it was yet, but he felt confident he’d think of something.

  In the meantime he would follow his former boss and choose his moment to speak.

  George Brewer moved automatically. His footsteps had trodden the same route every day for over thirty years and no amount of bitter reflection would allow them to deviate. He forgot about his farcical appendage, the golf trolley, until he came to the steps down to Oxford Circus Underground Station.

  The almost expired season ticket was flashed at a collector deep in his newspaper and then George had to balance his trophy, his reward for all those years of service, on the unfolding escalator. That task, and the darkness of his thoughts, made him oblivious of his colleague at the ticket machine.

  Graham was annoyed. He shouldn’t have dawdled playing the private detective. He should have confronted George before, explained about the lighter, settled the business. Now he had to go through the rigmarole of going down on to the platform and accosting the old man there.

  George lived in Haywards Heath, so caught the Victoria Line Southbound to Victoria. It was about half-past nine. The station was relatively empty; the drink-after-the-office commuters had gone, and the cinemas and restaurants had yet to disgorge their home-going crowds.

  The trailing golf trolley was slowing George down, and Graham was close behind when they came off the second escalator. He could have spoken, called out, but he didn’t.

  George suddenly put on a spurt, an asthmatic run, as he saw the silver screen of a train across the end of the passage. But it was too late. The windows started to slide past. He had missed it. He stopped, panting, while the few unloaded passengers drifted past him. Then he moved forward on to the platform.

  Graham stayed, apparently absorbed in a cinema poster. He told himself he was trying to perfect his explanation of the lighter, but he no longer believed it. A pulse of excitement throbbed inside him.

  George stood with his back to the passage. He was holding the trolley handle with his right hand, while he looked from his watch to the indicator board. Graham checked no one was behind him and moved on to the platform.

  A look to either side. No one but George had missed the train.

  It took one quick, firm shove.

  Graham was walking back along the passage before George
hit the rails, so he didn’t see the flash as the metal of the golf trolley made contact. Nor the great shudder that whiplashed through his former boss’s body.

  He strolled along, following the ‘Way Out’ signs, and dumped his ticket in front of the still-reading collector, who was never going to check why a ticket printed at Oxford Circus should be delivered there.

  Up on street level, he felt the excitement breaking out, tingling like sweat all over his body. He looked at his watch. It was only seven minutes since he had left the Crasoco tower.

  His mind was working very clearly. He knew exactly what he had to do. He walked briskly, but not hurriedly, back to the office.

  He had been prepared to go all the way up to the conference room, but was saved the trouble. Stella and a couple of other tittering secretaries were just emerging from the lift.

  He walked straight towards her.

  ‘I waited for you,’ he said.

  The other two secretaries split off, giggling, armed with new gossip-fodder for the canteen. Stella gazed up at him. Her eyes were unfocused with alcohol, but full of relief and trust.

  They took a cab to her flat. As soon as they were inside the door he seized her. He closed his eyes as their flesh joined, and the recollection of that one push, the image of George Brewer frozen untidily in mid-air, gave Graham Marshall’s body a violent power.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  The news of George Brewer’s suicide, spreading round the office on the Monday morning, prompted much chattering and excitement, but compared to Robert Benham’s death, it was a small sensation.

  Partly, this was because it had very little surprise value. When most of the staff actually thought about it, they could see that George had been headed that way for a long time. Since the death of his wife, work had been his whole life, and he had made no secret of the dread with which he contemplated the void ahead of him. He was not the first to have done away with himself after a retirement party, and would probably not be the last.

  So, though everyone was of course suitably sorry and management tutted over another half-day to be wasted at another funeral, they could recognise the logic of the death. In a way it tidied George up and absolved them from guilt. The idea of his spiralling down to alcoholism in Haywards Heath might have been a spur to recrimination; the idea of him dead made a neat close to his particular chapter of company history.

  Graham moved into George’s office ‘for convenience’, and to give Terry Sworder more room. Terry, he had decided, would, once the Head of Personnel appointment had been officially ratified, make an excellent assistant. His research capabilities, coupled with Graham’s ruthless vision, would make an invincible combination.

  Stella was not treated in anything more than a professional way, and was kept busy through the day as Graham fired off salvoes of memos and letters under his ‘Assistant Head of Personnel’ title. In the afternoon she was called to Miss Pridmore’s office, whence she returned in tears, but Graham didn’t have the time to ask her the reason.

  By the end of the week, Stella was working on the Secretarial Reserve, prior to taking up a more permanent position in another department.

  And by the end of the week, too, George Brewer was, like Merrily Marshall and Robert Benham, a mere scattering of ash in a Garden of Remembrance.

  Graham worked late on the Friday evening. It was to be a long weekend, with the Spring Bank Holiday on the Monday, and there were preparations he wanted to make for the next week. He also knew that David Birdham was in a management meeting, and half-expected the phone to ring with confirmation of the new Head of Personnel appointment. But it was a confident, not a desperate hope; Graham knew the job was his.

  So, though there had been no message, he left the office at eight without anxiety. As he walked out of the Crasoco tower, he felt good. It was a week after George Brewer’s death and Graham Marshall felt he deserved a treat. So, without going home first, he took himself out for an expensive dinner at the Grange. He felt no strangeness in being on his own, though as he looked at the pampered couples around him, he wondered if maybe, in time, he might once again look for a female escort. Have to be very glamorous, of course, to match his new status.

  Tara Liston, now. . Hmm. Perhaps he ought to send her a note of sympathy after Robert’s death. .

  It was a thought. No hurry, though. He was under no pressure of any sort. He had all the time in the world.

  He arrived home after eleven, pleasantly drunk, went straight to bed and slept for twelve hours. All the tensions of the last weeks had caught up with him and, as he relaxed, he felt unbelievably tired. What he needed now was a slow wind-down over the Bank Holiday weekend; he needed to cosset, to pamper himself a little.

  He might have slept longer than twelve hours, if he had not been wakened by the sound of a key in the front door lock. He swayed, blinking, on the stairs and looked down into the hall to see Lilian Hinchcliffe.

  She looked wizened and unkempt, and was weighed down by a large handbag.

  He yawned. ‘Good morning. To what do I owe this pleasure?’

  She was silent as he came down the stairs and did not move until he was on the same level. Then, with surprising speed, she snatched something out of her handbag and, with a cry of ‘You’re not going to get away with it, Graham!’ launched herself at him.

  He was heavy with sleep and unprepared for the attack, but he managed to ward off the upraised knife, though it gouged through the dressing-gown fabric into his forearm. The pain stung him to action. With his right hand he gripped the knife-wrist, at the same time jerking his elbow up against Lilian’s chin.

  Her free hand clawed up at his face, scoring lines of pain as he snatched his head away. He leant back against the stairs, pulling her off-balance, then slammed her right wrist hard against the newel post until the knife clattered from her grasp. As he did it, he felt the heavy handbag thumping against his side and her free hand clutching on to his ear.

  He shook himself painfully free and reached out his right hand to clamp round her jaw, forcing the mouth open as he pushed her away to arm’s length. From there her reach was too short to do any harm to his body and she had to content herself with scratching and pinching at his hand.

  ‘What the bloody hell’s all this for?’ Graham demanded.

  ‘I’m going to kill you!’ she screamed, fluttering ineffectually in his grasp.

  ‘Why?’ His tone, he knew, was one of infuriating irony.

  ‘Because you’re mad.’

  Again the word stung and, before he was aware of doing it, he brought the back of his left hand hard against her mouth. She wheezed with pain and her struggling stopped. A gleam of blood showed where the lip had bruised against her teeth.

  ‘Now come on.’ Graham had control of himself again.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You killed Merrily.’

  He laughed aloud and, still keeping his mother-in-law at arm’s length, propelled her into the sitting-room. He positioned her in front of an armchair and gave a little push. She subsided, the violence drained out of her.

  Graham sat down on the sofa. ‘So I killed Merrily, did I?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If that’s the case, how come the police didn’t mention it at the inquest? How come that even their second investigation, prompted by your poison-pen letter, also drew a blank?’

  Lilian had coloured at the mention of the letter. ‘I know you hated her, Graham. Look at you, you haven’t shown a moment of regret since she died. You were just delighted to get rid of her, and the children and me.’

  ‘That is hardly a crime,’ Graham drawled. ‘I think you’d find a good few husbands who, offered the opportunity of painlessly shedding their families, would leap at the chance.’

  ‘You planned it all. You knew it was going to happen. While you were in Brussels, while Merrily was looking after the house and tidying up for you, you knew she was doomed.’

  ‘Any proof?’ he asked, with
a needling smile.

  ‘I haven’t any proof about the electricity. I’ve got proof. . proof that. .’ She lost momentum suddenly, her bluster deflated. She tried to disguise the look but Graham had seen her eyes drop to the handbag slumped at her feet.

  ‘What’s in there, Lilian?’

  She made only token resistance as he snatched the bag from her and drew out its contents.

  ‘Well, well, well.’ He separated the words with slow irony. He held up the sherry bottle. Time had not helped to dissolve its contents. Still through the green glass he could see the strange sediment of blue granules. Still over the label was stuck his own felt-penned warning: ‘POISON. NOT TO BE TAKEN.’

  ‘So where did you get this from, Lilian?’

  ‘Merrily tidied the shed.’ Her voice was sulky and resigned.

  ‘Two days before she died. I helped her.’

  Of course. Merrily’s last accusatory gesture, the preparation for the scene of marital recrimination she did not survive to play.

  ‘And you found this bottle. What did Merrily say?’

  He was unworried, but intrigued. Had the discovery alerted Merrily’s suspicions? He liked the idea, liked the idea of his wife’s fearing him, of her last mortal thought in the loft, as the current slammed through her, being the realisation of her husband’s power.

  Lilian flushed. ‘Merrily. . didn’t see the bottle.’

  He understood. His mother-in-law, thinking it to be full, had snatched the sherry from the shelf and hidden it in her bag.

  ‘And you only saw the “POISON” label when you got it home?’

  She was too depleted to make any attempt at denial.

  ‘Oh, Lilian.’ He shook his head in mock-sympathy. Then changed his tone. ‘You spoke of this as proof. Proof of what, may I ask?’

  ‘Proof that you planned Merrily’s death,’ she replied, emptying her diminished arsenal of defiance.