by Gregson, J M
‘You don’t like it!’
‘It's not that I don’t like it.’ Tucker shut his eyes and mentally crossed his fingers. ‘You have a wonderful dress sense, dear, and look splendid in most things, to my mind — though I have to admit I’m biased, of course!’ He forced a lover’s smile, sidled up behind Barbara, and ran a finger round the patch of bare back at the top of the orange dress.
Mrs Tucker looked in the wardrobe mirror and saw only the sickly smile of a sycophant behind her. She turned irritably away from his touch and moved out of his sight into the dressing room. ‘You’re useless, as usual! I’ll end up making the wrong decision and then being blamed for it.’ She sighed at the injustice of it all.
Thomas Tucker sat down resignedly on the edge of the big bed and wondered if he dared to creep out of the bedroom during this interlude. He hesitated, and was duly lost. Barbara appeared like an avenging Valkyrie, framed in the doorway of the dressing room in bra and pants.
‘They go for cleavage, your Masonic friends, don’t they? Do you want me to see if I can still get into that low-cut turquoise number that used to get you so randy?’
Tucker remembered with mounting horror a drunken New Year’s Eve when Bacchus had triumphed over his normal torpidity of recent years. He sought for diplomacy, looked at Barbara in all her opulent glory, and was lost. ‘I don’t think I’d advise that, dear. As I said, they’re a nice bunch, but a rather conservative lot, and on this occasion discretion might be the better part of —’
‘All right, you needn’t say any more!’ Barbara did the outraged woman very well — and she composed an awful lot of outraged woman. She loomed over Thomas as he cowered on the edge of the bed. He caught a glimpse of the scene in the wardrobe mirror: it was reminiscent of one of the broadest of the seaside postcards of his increasingly distant youth.
Barbara pouted — which was considerably more frightening to her apprehensive spouse than her rage had been. ‘You don’t fancy me any more, do you, Thomas? You’d rather have the flighty young pieces you’re importing into the police force nowadays. I expect you spend most of your days leering at them. It’s no use expecting you to be content with what you’ve got at home.’ She moved her bare thigh against her husband’s leg and sighed dramatically.
Tucker controlled the urge to edge away from the contact, realizing that such a move could provoke real histrionics. Probably Barbara saw the scene as something out of Antony and Cleopatra, whereas he could think only of Carry On farce. He said unconvincingly, ‘You know that’s not true, dear. As the superintendent in charge of the CID section, I couldn’t possibly be seen to be eyeing up young female officers at work.’
‘But you’d like to, wouldn’t you? That’s what you mean, isn’t it?’ Barbara spoke the words in a rising whine, which was rather her speciality, then took his hand and placed it on her lower thigh, just above the knee. She said in a quieter, more intimate protest, ‘Oh, Thomas, where has the magic gone? What has happened to the warmth we used to have?’
Tucker watched his hand as though it belonged to someone else. Barbara eased her ample thigh expertly, allowing the hand to drop between the white pillars of her legs, eased herself fractionally downwards on the bed, so that his nerveless fingers moved an inch higher. He wanted to move that hand, but knew he must not. He had a clear vision of impending disaster but no idea how to avoid it; he felt like a passenger in a plane spinning out of control.
He said unconvincingly, ‘You’re exaggerating, dear. You’ll be the star of the show on Friday at the Ladies’ Night, as you always are.’ His reassuring chuckle rose into a high nervous giggle as the thighs closed like the jaws of a car-crusher upon his lifeless hand.
‘I used to say you should have been not just Thomas but John Thomas, the way you used to be at it in the old days. Insatiable, you were. At it morning, noon and night!’ Barbara closed her eyes and moaned softly in memory of that halcyon period. Then she slid a little lower on the edge of the bed and gripped the hand with surprising strength between the white vastness of her upper thighs.
Tucker’s head swam briefly. He shook it sharply, knowing that one of his domestic panic attacks was imminent. He could see no way out of this. Barbara now had her eyes firmly shut. A smile of expectation was spreading across her broad features.
Violent, uninhibited sex was clearly called for, but Thomas knew that this solution was beyond his powers. He would have to offer to buy her a new dress for the Masonic Ladies’ Night. That offer would be accepted and exploited, but Barbara would see it for the evasion it was. She would take his money and go on complaining about his libido.
Then, when he felt that all was lost, salvation rang like an angel’s trumpet in his ears. Or rather, it chirruped. The sound of the phone came into this bad film he was living through like the sound of Hollywood cavalry. He started upright, snatching his lifeless hand violently from its imprisonment.
His precipitate movement shot his unfortunate wife from her perilous recumbence on the edge of the bed into a sitting position on the floor beside it. The noise and abruptness of her arrival there shook windows, light fittings, and every instrument upon the dressing table, but Tucker was oblivious to all in the delirium of his escape.
He ignored the phone on the bedside table, knowing that the scene in which he was such an unwilling player might be resumed rather than terminated if he used this extension. ‘Important call from work! Better take it downstairs,’ he flung over his shoulder tersely as he made for the door. Then, from the safety of the landing, he tried a regretful, ‘You’re never really away from this job, when you have my responsibilities.’
As he hurried down the stairs, he hoped the exultation had not been apparent in his voice.
Rather to his surprise, it really was a call connected with his work. The voice on the other end of the line was too agitated to announce itself. It said accusingly, ‘None of your people came to see me.’
‘Who is this, please?’ Tucker had recognized his caller, but he was playing for time, gathering his shattered resources together.
‘This is Darren Cartwright. You told me the matter would receive your most urgent attention.’
Tucker recognized one of his own phrases being quoted back at him. ‘Yes. And it did, Darren, I can assure you,’ he lied.
‘Well, there’s been neither sight nor sound of the senior police officer you promised me, either at home or at work.’
There wouldn’t have been, no. As Tucker had done nothing about Cartwright’s problem. He had meant to mention it to Percy Peach, to get the DI to go and see his Masonic friend about the threats he had been receiving, but he had been so glad to terminate his interview with Peach that morning that he had forgotten to mention it. He said, ‘I’m sorry, Darren. We’re under heavy pressure at the moment with these overnight disturbances among the Asian community. The officer I briefed must not have got around to it.’
‘So death threats aren’t a priority any more? Brunton is no longer subject to the rule of law?’
This was getting dangerously near to the kind of headlines which always loomed large in Tucker’s nightmares. ‘No, certainly not. The officer concerned should certainly have been in touch with you by now. I’ll give him a hell of a bollocking in the morning, I can assure you, Darren. You can confidently expect him to contact you tomorrow.’
‘He’d bloody better.’ Darren was surprised to find himself speaking like this to a CID superintendent, an office which he had always treated with deferential awe in the past. It showed how shaken he must be. ‘Otherwise you might have a murder on your hands, Superintendent Tucker.’
‘Oh, that’s a little melodramatic, Darren, I’m sure! I can assure you that, in my considerable experience, anonymous threats rarely result in anything more than —’
‘I’ve had another one.’
‘Another threat?’ Tucker heard the sound of heavy, disgruntled movements above his head, of a lavatory cistern flushing violently, and rejoiced that his own ordeal was
over.
‘This afternoon. I’ve kept it, this time.’ Darren Cartwright looked down at the sheet of paper he held between his trembling fingers. ‘It says that my time is up. That I’m going to be killed quite soon now.’
Three
Eric Walsh was proud of his ringing baritone voice. ‘Not formally trained, but I’ve had a few compliments over the years!’ he would say, smiling with what he hoped was a becoming modesty.
He had done Gilbert and Sullivan in his time, had been complimented in the local press on his Pooh-bah. He had made a convincing Offenbach gendarme as he ‘ran them in’ with a reedy Welsh tenor from the church choir. Now, in his mid-forties, he felt his days of singing glory were largely behind him. It was not that his voice had gone, but rather that he had noted a disturbing presence in his audience in the last few years, a person who was definitely not there for the music, but rather to unnerve the singer.
Eric had retired with secret reluctance into the chorus; in a year or so, he would resign altogether from the Brunton Light Operatic Society. In his philosophical moments, he envisaged the glories of wine, women and song. He would cut down on the song a little, enjoy the wine as he always had, and indulge his passion for women to the fullest. He was not going to cut down on that.
Meantime, he had one important solo left to sing. He was to perform the song of welcome for the fair sex at the Ladies’ Night of his Masonic Lodge on the coming Friday. He was the natural choice, they all said: he nodded a quiet acceptance of this logic and was secretly delighted to be selected for the role. The ladies would be surprised and delighted by the rich melody of their welcome.
After eighteen holes of golf, Eric Walsh found that the showers at the Brunton Golf Club were an excellent sounding board for his vocal health. He tried a scale, increasing the volume delightedly, then launched into vocal gems from Oklahoma. There was a bright golden haze on the meadow — the corn had just reached the height of the elephant’s eye — and the tiles were ringing with that knowledge when the secretary of the golf club coughed discreetly behind him.
‘Terribly sorry to interrupt such a splendid recital, Eric, but I’m afraid there’s been a complaint — no, a request — from the ladies. Their changing room is on the other side of that wall, as you probably know, and they wonder if you could modulate the decibels a little. I didn’t promise them anything, but I said I would relay the request.’
Eric Walsh’s late companions on the golf course were doubled up with silent laughter in the changing room at this intervention. The secretary winked at them as he turned and went back to his office. He had a wry sense of humour and a capacity for keeping a very straight face. No one knew if there had been a genuine request from the invisible ladies, but Eric ceased his singing and fell into a low mutter of discontent about female golfers with his secretly delighted comrades.
He did not carry his resentment into the club lounge with him. Eric was a notable ladies’ man, an old-fashioned term which was still instantly recognized in golf clubs, as were Eric’s carefully preserved good looks. These were still sometimes described as those of a matinee idol. Some younger men were not quite sure what the term meant, but Eric Walsh knew, and he had no doubt that it was meant as a compliment.
To the women he met in the lounge, who might or might not have been the complainants about his singing, Eric was all smiles. He moved among them with a grace and a gentle banter which he always thought of as part of his charm, managing to pass a light remark about the coarseness of most men even as he carried a tray of drinks past a group of ladies and returned to the men who had played with him on the golf course.
His golling companions had taken the invitation of Eric’s forename to nickname him ‘Little by Little’, after Dean Farrar’s priggish hero, in recognition of the inordinate time he took to play his shots on the course. Moving now into the second round of drinks, they fell into tiresome jests about the slowness of his play and the remarkable volume and resonance of his voice. Eric smiled indulgently and retreated into a private consideration of his strategy for the Ladies’ Night on Friday.
If these tiresome companions of his knew what success he had enjoyed with women, they wouldn’t mock the stirring nature of his voice. If they knew the lady the vibrant baritone Eric Walsh had lately bedded, they would no doubt be even more impressed.
But as she was the wife of a prominent member of the Lodge, that, regrettably, must remain a secret.
*
Barbara Tucker was not the only woman wondering what to wear at the big night of the Masonic year.
Ros Whiteman, however, had several advantages over the superintendent’s wife. She was ten years younger, for a start, and looked even younger than that. She was also tall and slim, with a way of holding her head that was unconsciously proud, which set her figure off to its very best advantage. Ros had been a county tennis player in her youth, and at forty-five she still moved with the grace and suppleness of an athlete.
They made a lovely couple — so everyone said — she and John Whiteman. He was the sort of man who was more handsome as he approached fifty than he had been as a young man. The tracery of lines around his eyes and mouth gave an interest to his regular features which had been absent in his youth. His hair was still plentiful, and its increasing greyness at the temples had brought distinction rather than any sense of ageing to his head.
He had been a grey man in a grey suit in his twenties, but nowadays his dignified appearance brought a sense of gravitas to his pronouncements, even when the actual words did not carry any great weight. People listened to John Whiteman when he spoke as Master of the Lodge, and he usually got his way on matters of policy. He was head of a family firm of solicitors which had operated in the old cotton town for over a hundred years, and the law always compelled a certain respect, particularly in those completely ignorant of its workings.
His wife was more nervous in the privacy of her own bedroom than those who saw her only in public would have believed possible. Ros Whiteman knew that she would be on show at the Masonic Ladies’ Night, and she was human enough to want to be seen at her best. Other women would be eager to see what she wore, would dissect her outfit and the effects it had on the assembled company.
Ros claimed sometimes to be amused by the Masons. She teased her husband about little boys and their secret societies, about their absurd love for the rituals of membership, and she had genuine reservations about secrecy in a modern society.
But she didn’t want to let either herself or her husband down on his big night. Not in the present circumstances.
Everything was in place. Her hair appointment was booked for Friday morning. The small presents which would be presented to every lady on the evening were ordered and ready at the shop: she would collect them on Thursday. The menu and the table placings had been settled long ago. It remained only for the Master’s wife to decide what she would wear on his big evening.
In the empty house, Ros Whiteman got out the dark blue, low-cut dress she had planned for weeks to wear and prepared to inspect herself critically in the privacy of her bedroom. She laid the dress carefully on the bed and slipped off the jeans and shirt she had been wearing to clean the house. She could not find much fault with the shape she examined for a moment as she stood in bra and pants before the cheval mirror. The stomach was still flat. The breasts in the expensive bra might no longer qualify for that favourite trash novel description of ‘pert’, but they had certainly not slumped with the passing years.
The face. Ros had always said herself that you could not escape the face. The one which gazed back at her from the mirror was not without lines. The skin had no longer the smoothness which would excite young men — but she had no interest in young men. The high cheekbones and straight nose of her youth were unimpaired, and a little skilfully applied make-up around the eyes would disguise the inevitable passing of the years. And Friday night’s audience would surely not be too critical; there would not be many women there younger than she was.
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The phone rang before she could pick up the dress. She had been expecting the call, yet it still made her start with surprise. Or was it excitement? she asked herself. She picked up the phone and sat half-naked on the edge of the bed.
*
Darren Cartwright had sent his personal assistant home. She was a married woman who appreciated being able to collect her two young children from school in the afternoons. She had offered her efficient secretarial services for a pittance to secure a post with hours which suited her. And Darren for his part didn’t want anyone around when he dealt with the less savoury parts of his business life. The people he employed to ensure that this distasteful but highly productive section of his activities ran smoothly had strict instructions to ring him only at home or in the late afternoons at the office.
Since the threats had begun to arrive, he had taken to locking the door of his office whenever he was alone. He told himself that it was highly unlikely that anyone would attack him here, in broad daylight, with a busy building society branch conducting its business at the front of the building. But you couldn’t be too careful, he thought: like many a man before him, Darren Cartwright found clichés a comfort in times of stress.
Darren was completing one of his more private calls when he was startled by a sharp rapping at the locked door of his premises. He concluded his instructions into the mouthpiece of the phone hastily, but a second, even louder knocking came as he set the receiver back into its cradle. His first thought when he opened the door a reluctant five inches was that his anonymous threatener had come in person to carry out his mission.
There stood a squat man, unsmiling, impatient, with a startlingly white bald head and a jet-black moustache, which seemed to add to his menace. Darren made to shut the door again, but the man thrust his fist and his foot forward into the narrowing aperture. Darren recoiled as he saw the fist raised, then realized that it held a photograph of his unsmiling visitor and the details of his name and rank beneath it. A police warrant card. Cartwright fell back in relief, and his caller was in the room as swiftly as a soldier storming a machine-gun post.
