by J M Gregson
Toby was both excited and tired. He spilt his orange drink as he chattered about their football in the park, and a blob of cream from his cake fell first onto his shirt and then to the carpet. Verna made a great show of cleaning the carpet vigorously with detergent and mop, a domestic activity which Martin could never recall her doing before.
She muttered to her sister about standards, and how she wouldn’t have expected anything else. Martin saw Sue’s white teeth pulling vigorously, almost viciously at her lower lip, and willed her not to respond. She did not: nor did she look at him. She had grown up with Verna, and seemed to realize that any searching for outside support would make things worse.
It was, on the surface, just a ridiculous family spat, and Martin tried without success to place it as no more than that. This aggression, this raw malice towards the child after her morning affection, was only the inconsistency he would have expected from his wife. But at that moment, it seemed very important. He was pleased with the control Sue showed, just as he felt a small triumph in the annoyance her silence caused to Verna.
When the time came for the visitors to leave, Verna hugged the boy tightly against her for a moment in a caricature of affection, telling him he must come again soon. No one, not even Toby, believed that she meant it. She said the curtest of goodbyes to her sister, and did not even bother to issue any instructions to Martin as he went with them to the car.
Neither Martin nor Sue spoke for several minutes in the moving car, as if they feared that the woman they had left behind might somehow still hear them. Through the rear-view mirror of the Mondeo, Martin watched Toby’s head nodding as his eyelids drooped; in two minutes, he was happily asleep in his harness.
The car moved carefully along the quiet suburban roads. Sue watched the hedges and the flowering crab apples dropping smoothly away behind them. Presently, she said, “I don’t suppose she intends to hurt so much.”
It took Martin a long time to reply. Eventually, he said, “You don’t believe that.” This felt like a conversation taking place in slow motion.
“No, I don’t suppose I do. Most of the pain she causes is carefully calculated.”
He wondered what exactly had passed between the two sisters when he was at the park with Toby. He had enough experience of his wife’s malice to make a fair guess at the lines of battle.
The wide station approach was deserted on this bright Sunday afternoon. Though he had driven slowly, they had ten minutes yet before the train was due. Neither of them had been anxious to linger in that loveless house.
Martin drew the car to a stop with extreme care, watching the small innocent face in his mirror. Toby slept on, his head tilted forward, the fine childish hair dropping forward over his forehead.
Martin was aware of Sue looking at him from the seat beside him. He turned to look into the round, gentle face within its frame of golden curls. He expected to notice the faint freckling, which made her seem still so young; instead, he was conscious only of those remarkable bright-blue eyes. They seemed larger than he had ever seen them. Perhaps it was the moisture brimming at their margins which magnified the irises, affording them this remarkable dominance over the surrounding features of her face.
He made no conscious movement, yet he found himself kissing the broad, soft lips. And the lips welcomed him. Tremulous at first, they hardened a little in response. Sue’s arms crept around his shoulders. He wanted to freeze the moment, the softness, the unspoken harmony. The tip of her tongue slipped gently, experimentally, between his lips, then rested for a moment against his teeth.
It was Sue who eventually withdrew, but scarcely more than an inch. Just far enough to say tremulously into his ear, “We can’t, Martin.”
He kissed her again, savoring once more that gentle, unforced response. It gave him confidence. He held her at arm’s length, without letting her go.
The idea of killing Verna, which had so dominated his thoughts for the last four days, now seemed to have a context, an additional logic he had never entertained before. He felt a mastery which he thought Verna had long since destroyed returning to him.
Martin said simply, “We can, Sue. There are ways of making things happen. Just trust me.”
Three
Verna Hume had grown familiar over the weeks with the Velux window in this roof. No sound came through the double-glazed rectangle above her as she lay on the bed, reinforcing the illusion she cherished that she existed here in a private and better world of her own.
Lines came back to her from a poem she had studied years ago at school for A level:
For love, all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room, an everywhere.
John Donne it was, and a poem she thought she had long forgotten. The old boy knew a thing or two about sex and love. Well, this big attic room was now their world, hers and Hugh’s, and they would make it spin to their command.
She looked again at that soundless glass skylight, the only indication of that other, harsher world outside this room and her love. Today, the rectangle was blue. She liked that bright, uncomplicated color, with its promise of the sun somewhere else in the sky outside. But she had enjoyed looking at the rectangle last time, too, when the rain had run in swift rivulets down the slope of the glass and the gray wall of cloud above had seemed to be almost caressing the roof of the building. She was aware that she would have been well pleased with the appearance of that small section of sky, whatever its color. Love had that effect.
She recognized that what she felt for Hugh was love. It had begun like her other affairs, as a snatched interval of breathy physical gratification. Then pleasure had turned into passion, and passion into love. She had been surprised, and a little frightened. But love, even if you could never quite define the word, was what she felt. She was surely experienced enough to know her own reactions by now. She smiled, stretching her limbs luxuriously beneath the sheet, happy in that reflection.
The man who came through the heavy wooden door from the living room had fair hair and a nose that was just a little too prominent between his bright-blue eyes. He did not look at her but she liked that, taking the opportunity to watch his movements from between half-closed eyes.
He undressed discreetly at his side of the bed. Verna thought that it was a myth that men were less inhibited about these things than women. Hugh had been here when she undressed, but she had stepped out of her clothes without embarrassment, erect and firm, only just resisting the impulse to study her statuesque figure in the wardrobe’s full-length mirror when she got to bra and pants. Janet Reger helped in these things, no doubt, but it was nice to know that what little she concealed was properly formed. It gave a certain confidence.
Hugh, on the other hand, sat on the edge of the bed and slid his boxer shorts discreetly over his invisible ankles. Verna slid an affectionate index finger down his naked back. “Shy boy,” she teased, with that little throaty half-giggle, which he found so exciting.
He stopped for a moment, enjoying her touch on his flesh, catching her mischievous eye in the mirror. “I remember it being said that a woman in just her stockings is very erotic, whereas a man in just his socks is always ludicrous. I take these axioms to heart, you see, even though I can’t remember who says them.”
“Alan Plater,” she said, “in a television play.” She was proud of her memory, and Hugh, unlike some men, didn’t mind his women being clever. Woman, she corrected herself. He was only going to have one, in the future. They must talk about the future. But just now there were more urgent things in hand. Or almost in hand.
They were easy with each other beneath the single sheet. “Shy boy’s become big boy now!” she breathed into his ear, but it was less a joke than an acceleration of energy and joy. He took her violently, as she liked, and she shouted her pleasure at the friendly rectangle of blue above her, yelling the urgent four-letter imperatives at Hugh, which excited them both; feeling his passion rise, exulting as it spilt uncontrollably within her.
She lay still for long minutes, feeling the two of them as one, unwilling to break the spell. Then she began to knead the large muscles beneath his shoulder blades. Under these long smoothings of love, she felt his body stir, then slacken and relax still further. “My love,” she whispered, in an exquisite lethargy. “Oh, my love!”
It was Hugh who eventually broke the spell. “I have to go, darling,” he said.
How lightly people used that word! And how glad Verna was still to hear it on Hugh’s lips. “Back to the wife you’ve hidden from me for all these weeks?” she asked, enjoying the teasing, testing her own confidence in him and finding it still secure, as she had known she would.
“Back to work, my girl,” he said with a grin, levering himself on to his hands above her and savoring her flushed face amid the spread of her long black hair on the pillow for a final moment. “Got to earn a crust, you know.”
He shot quickly into the shower as she reached her hand towards his back. When he emerged from the dressing room, it was in collar and tie, with his blond hair carefully combed. She liked the contrast between this public, sharp-suited persona and the intimacy of the naked lover she had just enjoyed.
“He must be an important chap to drag you away from my charms so abruptly.”
“Wrong on two counts. My departure wasn’t abrupt. And it isn’t a man.” He grinned down at her, enjoying the little wrinkle of doubt which flickered across the smooth oval of her face. “It’s a woman. A rich widow, as a matter of fact. So I need to be at my smartest.” He checked his tie in the mirror, pretending not to study her reaction behind him.
“How rich? How old?”
He laughed. “Very rich. And sixty-eight. She wants to know how to invest the ill-gotten gains of a husband who wrote himself into some hefty share option schemes but forgot about heart attacks.”
“She sounds as though she needs your services almost as much as I do.”
“She does. But not the same ones. She’s refurbishing an office with new computers. Very expensive ones, I expect, when I’ve finished giving her the benefit of my expert advice.”
Verna sat up in the bed. “I’ll see you on Saturday, then. And we need to talk. To make some plans.”
“Sounds ominous.”
“It isn’t. You know it isn’t. But suddenly, with you, I’m happy to think about the future. I want to organize it.”
He looked up from the shoelace he was tying, serious for a moment. She loved him for that, too: the ability to recognize when things really mattered to her. “I know. We’ll find the time. It’s just that there always seem to be more urgent things, when we’re together.” He glanced for a moment at her calf, straying out from the sheet, and her bare shoulders, then into her dark, humorous eyes.
“I’m trying hard to blush, but I can’t make it.” She reached her arms up to him, and they kissed briefly before he left.
She waited until the last note of his car engine died away, then showered and dressed unhurriedly. She liked being alone in Hugh’s flat and the feeling of trust it left with her. The porter was in the hall when she stepped out of the lift. He said good afternoon politely, as she moved towards the high double doors and the street outside. Almost, she thought, as if I were already a wife here.
A cab purred obligingly alongside her before she had walked thirty yards but she ignored it, choosing instead the circuitous bus route. It would give her time to compose herself, time to become again that other person who lived out a half-life with Martin Hume.
As the green and cream bus moved ponderously along the side of the park, with its spring blossoms and fresh greens, she reflected on her relationship with Martin, a thing she had refused to contemplate for years. He thought her a slag. She knew that. And as far as he was concerned, he was right.
She often wondered why she treated him so badly. He asked for it, of course, but that was too easy an answer. For months, she had had no feeling for him but contempt, but she now felt pity, a stirring of guilt within herself. They said that love lit up one’s whole being, making one more generous towards others as well as the loved one. Perhaps it would be so. She would behave better to Martin in these last weeks of their relationship than she had for years.
She would even be able to give him the divorce she had refused so often. Maybe he would take up with that goody-two-shoes sister of hers. For the first time, she felt no impulse to destroy anything those two might have. It was true then: love was a benign influence, spreading its ambience outwards to a wider circle.
It was only as she walked the short distance from the bus to her home that a tiny anxiety pricked her. Hugh had avoided talking about their long-term future together. Again.
Four
Once he had decided that he was going to kill his wife, Martin Hume remained calm and relaxed in the months which followed.
Verna’s steady stream of petty cruelties seemed unimportant, now that he could see an end to them. An end, moreover, which he would control. She would die when he determined she should. And where he chose. And how he chose. It was many years since he had felt so much in command of his own life and the course it was going to take.
His work improved. He had always been a competent accountant, but his employers had noticed a decline in imagination and commitment as his marriage tumbled into disaster. They had confined him of late to routine clients, where the work was straightforward and the possiblities limited. Now, he began to show a new confidence and a new interest, and his colleagues became aware of him again as a man, not a cypher; a man with his own views and preferences, rather than the unnoticed automaton he had become.
Martin began to go to the pub for lunch with his fellows, as he had not done for years. He indulged again in the office banter which had by-passed him for so long, enjoyed teasing and being teased. As he saw his revival remarked among the men and women around him, he was amused. But he was careful to keep the source of it concealed.
He hugged his secret to himself, treasuring it as a diamond beyond price. A dangerous diamond, of course: no one must even suspect why he was suddenly the Martin of old. But when he was sure of his privacy, when he was locked in the lavatory cubicle at work, or on one of his long, solitary walks, or on his own in Wycherly Croft, the detached house he had bought to house the family he had never had, he reveled in the knowledge of what he was going to do.
There was no hurry. It was important that what he was going to do was planned to the last detail. If anyone suspected he was guilty of his wife’s murder, the whole point and the whole benefit would be lost to him. Not for him one of those untidy domestic killings, where pathetic people, driven beyond endurance, killed in a frenzy of temper or frustration and were immediately arrested. There had been times in the past when he had thought it might end like that. But the decision to take his destiny back into his own hands had given him a new strength and a new coolness.
He had several possibilities in mind. There were modern poisons which were virtually undetectable; he had found out a surprising amount about them in the reference library, taking care not to ask for assistance in case there should be questions after Verna’s death. It seemed that actually obtaining the chemicals he wanted might be the stumbling block, but he was investigating that.
There was strangling, which he sometimes thought he would enjoy. When Verna’s taunts were at their most cruel, he had often imagined taking that slim throat in his hands, the hands which had previously never threatened her with violence. There would be satisfaction in watching the horror spring into those glistening black pupils, as she realized, too late, the unthinkable thing that was happening to her.
The difficulty with that was that he would be the obvious suspect. Perhaps if he went away after he had killed her, then returned to ‘discover’ her body after several days, he could get away with it. He would wear gloves, of course. And he could arrange all the signs of a break in. Perhaps the neighbors would ring the police while he was still absent if they saw a broken window and m
ilk accumulating at the door.
But that method was too inexact to appeal to his tidy mind. There was no knowing how long it would take for someone to notice that things were not as they should be in the quiet avenue where people kept themselves carefully to themselves. And he was not in the habit of going away on his own. It would look suspicious to the police, even if they could prove nothing. And the police did not let go easily when they had a murder suspect; he had seen enough accounts of real and fictional crime during his lonely nights with the television to know that.
Asphyxiation was a promising method. You could kill a healthy woman in less than a minute by holding a pillow firmly against her face, without leaving too many signs behind. And if he took the body somewhere else afterwards, dumped it perhaps in one of the big disused gravel pits which were within ten miles of the house, it might not be found for months.
Perhaps the best method of all would be to contrive something which would appear to be an accident. A fall, perhaps. Or an electrical fault, which would kill Verna in an instant, before she knew anything about what was happening to her. It wouldn’t be easy for him to engineer, but it was worth thinking about. He had plenty of time to plan it.
And he was a man who enjoyed planning.
*
Thirty miles away in her village council house, the prospective victim’s sister wondered about the changes she had noted in her brother-in-law.
Sue Thompson had too busy a life for prolonged deliberations about the new elements which entered into it. She took Toby to school each day, then caught the bus into town to reach her desk in the office by quarter to ten. She was already doing more responsible work than the copy-typing, for which, she had been employed. She was trusted to draft letters, to deal with phone enquiries, even to take small decisions.
