by J M Gregson
Even in her distress, her training made her wonder whether the girl at the desk in the adjoining room could catch her words through the wall.
“I don’t recall any agreement of that kind,” said Verna calmly. She was ready for this exchange, as Barbara was not: she had rehearsed the scene in her mind many times over the last few years.
“But you must remember. You MUST! It was your suggestion. After Michael’s funeral. You said—”
“I recall offering to help you. I recall providing money when you needed it, in return for your partnership in the business.”
“Yes. And you said I could buy back in whenever I was ready. You must remember that.”
Verna took her time, pretending to consider an idea which was new to her. Then she shook her head with an air of regret. “No, I don’t recall that, Barbara. I’m afraid you were mistaken in that idea. You were very upset at the time, of course.”
“I was, but I know what I know. It was your suggestion, or I wouldn’t have considered it: I’d never have given up my share of the business for good. Not for anything. I’d have sold the house first.”
“Have you anything in writing about this?” Verna had difficulty in keeping a straight face as she delivered the question; they had often laughed together about the naivety of men in the firms they dealt with, in not pinning everything down in official language. Now here she was, turning the argument against her colleague. For Barbara was still that: it was just that she could not own any of the business any more. She must be made to understand.
It was sinking in with Barbara that she was not going to get anywhere with this. She said sullenly, “You know I haven’t anything in writing. We’ve never needed that between us. But it was your idea in the first place.”
Verna furrowed her elegant brow, as if giving the matter serious thought. “No. I’m afraid I don’t remember any such arrangement. I’m sure I would if one had been made. And you know how I like to have things down on paper, whenever it’s possible. It would be most unlike me to suggest an informal arrangement like that, I think you’ll agree.”
It would. Barbara knew she was beaten, though she could hardly believe this treachery in her partner. Her employer. The bitter word drummed in her head and would not be dismissed. Her rage and frustration drove her to the assertions of moral right, which she would normally have dismissed as irrelevant.
“But it’s my business as much as yours. We started it together, and we’ve worked like slaves together.”
Verna shrugged her shoulders beneath the fine gray worsted of her jacket, listening to the desperate rising tone in Barbara Harris’s words as much as to the argument. That note of near-hysteria signaled that the discussion was over. She was careful to keep her own tones perfectly modulated. “That’s how I think of it too, Barbara. I wouldn’t dream of dispensing with your services.”
Verna paused, looking earnestly into the white, staring face opposite her, letting the audacious little threat sink into the ears beneath the now disheveled chestnut hair. “It’s quite clear who owns the firm, but that’s a straightforward business arrangement. Perhaps we could look at your terms as Chief Executive, if you’re not satisfied with things.” She raised an inquisitive eyebrow at Barbara, her face full of sweet reason and concern.
Barbara Harris rose from her chair, her hands trembling a little despite her determination to control them. She left without a word or a backward glance, because she did not trust herself in either.
Verna Hume sat at her desk for quite a long time without moving, savoring the completeness of her victory. She was quite fond of Barbara, but these things had to be done. It was about power, she supposed, really, investigating her motives for the first time. And power was important.
What she failed to appreciate, and not for the first time, was that it is dangerous to leave people feeling desperate.
*
Verna went home early that day. She wanted to prepare her arguments carefully for her meeting with Hugh on Saturday. She might tell him about Barbara Harris, about how she had confirmed her complete control of Osborne Employment.
Then she went to her wardrobe to pick out what she would wear. She found she was still nervous about her appearance when she met him at the weekends; she rather enjoyed the adolescent anxiety she felt about how her lover would react to her.
And she was determined that on Saturday, they would discuss their future. If he really was being evasive about their plans, as she sometimes suspected, it was important that she won him over and set his mind at rest. She was confident that she could do these things. She felt in control of herself and events around her after her meeting with Barbara.
When she got into the house, she found a message on the answerphone from her husband. Martin’s dry, unemotional tones said, “I haven’t seen you for two days or I’d have told you. I’m going to be away for the weekend, at a conference on financial planning. The Radley Arms Hotel in Oxford, if you should need to contact me. No doubt you won’t.”
Showing his independence again, was he? Well, she’d be rid of him in a few months. And he of her. She acknowledged, as she sometimes did when alone, what a bitch she’d been to Martin over the years. She must talk to him about the divorce, when he came back.
She felt again a little, unaccustomed surge of sympathy for poor old Martin.
Eight
Martin Hume enjoyed his weekend in Oxford.
The material provided by the organizers of the conference on financial planning was not exacting for him. He was amused to see many of the younger conference members diligently writing down information, which he had long accepted, and advice which seemed to him no more than common sense.
Martin realized that he had underestimated himself. Now he had this new interest in his work, he found he was really rather good at it. When he began his new life with Sue Thompson and Toby, he would assert himself more within the firm, show what he was worth, and demand that he was rewarded appropriately. It was good to feel competent, even expert, in the work area of your life. For too many years, it had scarcely seemed to matter to him.
He even enjoyed the tour of Oxford which had been organized as a relief from the sessions on the course. They climbed Carfax Tower and saw the glory of the dreaming spires, on a day which had just enough heat haze to dim the view towards Cowley and the industrial part of the city, which made town visually so much less attractive than gown. Then they trooped through an ancient college, and gazed up like tourists at the high ceiling of the Sheldonian, while listening in awe to the guide’s account of this last English stronghold of Latin speeches.
When the party’s collective gaze was directed towards Balliol and the spot where Cranmer and the other martyrs had been burnt four and a half centuries earlier, his imagination was led to that other, less public, death which was to reframe his life. For a moment, he even considered arson as a means of disposing ofVerna. If she could be trapped, or better still left unconscious, in a burning house, she would suffocate long before the flames got to her: he had no wish that she should suffer unduly. And the fire would destroy the evidence, with luck.
With luck. He did not like that phrase. The whole thing would be too chancy. Someone might intervene before his wife’s death was achieved. And a fire would be far too difficult to organize if it was to appear that he was not in the area at the time. It would pinpoint the time of Verna’s death, the very thing he had to disguise in order to leave himself in the clear. Regretfully, he gave up the idea. But even the elimination of certain methods was progress, he thought. He was beginning to get the details of this killing clear in his own mind.
When the rest of the party moved dutifully into the Oxford Story Center to receive their illustrated potted history of the town and its fortunes through the centuries, Martin slipped away and sat for a while in the gardens of Pembroke College, watching the comings and goings of the busy young people who lived there. For the first time in ages, he wished that he had stayed on at school for another y
ear, as his sixth form master had asked him to, and taken his chance of joining this privileged golden crew for three precious years at university.
If he had only opened up those horizons… if he had only met Sue, not Verna, all those years ago… Before the sweet conjectures of what might have been could turn bitter, he moved on, walking briskly down to Magdalen Bridge and thence into Christ Church Meadow. He walked swiftly by the Cherwell, his mind too busy to notice the ground he was covering as he began to make his plans.
When he eventually sat down, he found himself on a bench overlooking the Thames, watching the broad, slow sweep of the river, willing it to still his mind, which was racing too far ahead. It was delicious but premature, this blueprint of the life he would lead with Sue and Toby. There was one other piece of planning that was an essential preliminary.
He had to dispose of Verna
But his excitement was justified, he thought. He had reached a further, almost a final, stage in the knowledge of how he was going to be rid of his wife.
He would book himself another weekend like this one. No, an extended course: four days, perhaps. The firm would be pleased enough to give him the extra couple of days, if he pointed out that he was giving up his weekend to further his knowledge. If he chose the right course, it might even be useful to him, in the career he planned to resurrect. Something with management studies grafted on to financial concerns. He was going to be a pillar of the firm, in due course.
He would even pay his own course fee, if necessary. But no, that would be a mistake. He mustn’t appear to have been too eager to go on the course when the police came to examine his conduct at the time of Verna’s death, as they undoubtedly would. Martin felt a new surge of excitement at that thought. Not fear, just a thrill in the knowledge of the forces he was going to unleash and the importance of what he was planning to do.
Four days would be quite enough to confuse the issue; that was what he had gathered from his research. Apparently, it was nothing like as easy to determine the time of death as some crime writers liked to suppose. And that applied even when bodies were discovered quite soon after death. After four days or more in normal house temperatures, it would surely be impossible for the police to pinpoint the exact time of Verna’s murder. It was the first time he had used that word in his planning: a little frisson of exultation ran through the silent figure by the Thames.
He would have to decide whether or not to leave the central heating on in the house: everything would have to look as if Verna had been carrying on normally for the period when he was away. That kind of detail appealed to Martin. Retiring to his hotel room when most of the other course members adjourned to the bar that night, he even made some notes on paper.
There would be the milk order to organize. If the man left their daily pint on the doorstep for four days, it might excite interest among their normally incurious neighbors, or even in the milkman himself. Perhaps they should cancel their order altogether, and buy from supermarkets. Verna would have done that long ago; it was only Martin’s loyalty to old institutions which meant that they still had milk delivered. But they must cancel the delivery forthwith: it would merely excite suspicion to do it on the eve of Verna’s death.
And he must give some thought to the contents of the fridge. A few frozen meals; some cheese, ham and tomatoes; perhaps a little sliced bread in its wrapper. There would be sell-by dates on some of these, but that wouldn’t matter, if he bought carefully and late. It might be possible to indicate that Verna had died in the middle of a weekend she planned to spend at home.
And he would have to make it look as if her bed had been slept in. He did not know whether the police automatically investigated the area of a suspicious death with such thoroughness, or even whether they had the right to search through his property like that. He wished he had watched some of the television crime series more closely. But he could check it out. He would make sure that he gave proper attention to every detail of this business.
It was an hour after midnight when Martin concluded a series of thoughts of this kind. He found that he had covered both sides of an A5 sheet of paper with notes in his small, neat hand. He looked through them twice, mentally ticking off the eight areas of concern he had pinpointed. Then he tore the sheet into small pieces and flushed it down the lavatory in the en suite bathroom.
He was still awake at two, some time after the last rumblings of the hotel plumbing had signified that his fellow conference attenders were all abed. He had always had a good memory, and he was confident that he had committed his musings of the evening safely to it. He was aware, however, that the most important question of all had still to be answered.
Very soon now, he must decide exactly how he was going to kill Verna.
*
For most of Sunday, the conference kept Martin’s mind fully occupied. He even volunteered to chair one of the small-group sessions on Inheritance Provision; it was a role he would never have consented to a few months earlier.
He was gratified, as well as a little surprised, to find that he enjoyed the experience. He took pleasure in guiding the discussion into the areas most likely to be useful, taking care not to speak too much himself, bringing out the expertise available in the more diffident members of the group. When the whole conference assembled again in its plenary session, his account of his group’s findings and suggestions was the most precise and the most cogently presented of the three reports from the subgroups.
By the end of the day, Martin was aware of the changes occurring in himself; he was rediscovering skills which he had almost forgotten he possessed. He realized that he was preparing himself for the more dominant role he proposed to adopt in the working life ahead of him. He was contemplating the future with optimism, even with eagerness. It was good to know that his heightened sense of life and its joys was going to extend into his work as well as his personal life.
He dwelt on these things as he drove the two hundred miles up the M40 and then the M6 towards Brunton. He did not hurry, but the traffic thinned as the evening wore on. After he had stopped for a leisurely coffee at Hilton Park service station, there were noticeably fewer lights racing towards him along the ribbon of the M6. For the first time in years, he moved back into Lancashire without feeling depression dropping upon him at the prospect of resuming his tortured married life.
It was almost midnight when he dropped down the long slope to the Ribble and left the motorway near Preston. Twelve minutes later, he skirted the high sycamores on the fringe of the park and turned the car into the tunnel of darkness which was a leafy cul-de-sac by day.
Suddenly, he was very tired after his successful weekend and the long drive back. But it was a pleasant fatigue, like those he remembered at the end of long Sunday hikes with his father in the summer days of his boyhood. He did not want to talk to Verna, even to see her, it would not be the right conclusion to this successful weekend. He willed her to be out of the house, as if already the mere effort of his newly positive mind would be sufficient to direct the woman from his path.
The notion seemed to work. He turned the car between the high gateposts of Wycherly Croft, his lights picking out the nameplate of the house, with the rather twee picture of a Pendle witch on a broomstick beneath it. There were no lights in the dark cliff of brick, which loomed against the sky. Verna was out, then. He found it difficult to dismiss the absurd idea that it was his own determination which had expelled her. Probably that merely showed how tired he was.
He was anxious to isolate himself in his own room and shut the door against the wife who would soon be removed from his life. For the first time, now that her death was near, he feared that she might read something of his thoughts in his face. Tomorrow, all would be well and he would deceive her without effort. Tonight, he felt in desperate need of a long, refreshing sleep.
The house seemed even larger than usual, silhouetted as it was against the moonless sky. Its emptiness accentuated all sounds. Even his key as he inserted it into
the lock seemed to him to rasp unnaturally loudly. When he pushed the door inwards, the wind rushed past his shoulders into the blackness beyond, crashing shut a door on the landing above. He started with fright, almost cried out at the thought of an intruder in the blackness ahead of him. Then he realized that it was no more than the draft he had admitted, which had slammed the unseen door.
Hastily, he put on a light in the hall, noted the long mirror, the light fittings, the telephone with its white, unsullied notepad beside it. Everything just as he had left it. But why should he ever have expected anything else? Verna, whatever her darker vices, was a tidy woman.
He put lights on in the kitchen, the lounge, the dining room, his study, slipping his hand round the door of each room to the familiar switches, filling the place with light to flood away the foreboding which had fallen upon him with the darkness and the sound of the unseen door. Then he made himself a pot of tea, deciding that he would take it up to his room, knowing that Verna would not disturb him there if and when she returned.
He was aware as he came back into the hall of a faint, sour smell that he could not identify. When he could not place the scent, he tried to shrug it away, as he went wearily towards the bed which seemed ever more desirable. But as he mounted the stairs, the odor became stronger. He turned on to the landing and tried the bathroom, but there was nothing unusual in there. He put the tray down in the room where he now slept and went along the corridor to the main bedroom he had relinquished to his wife.
He set his hand a little tentatively on the brass handle of the door, which had slammed when he had entered the house, as if he still feared that there might be an intruder waiting within. But in truth it was the smell which made him move so reluctantly. It rolled upon him now like a tangible thing out of the darkness, as though only the shut door had held it back. It was when he switched on the light that he realized that it was the smell of death.
Verna lay sprawled upon the double bed, with one leg draped stiffly over the edge. Her shoe had fallen to the carpet beneath the slim foot. Her dark hair was spread all on one side across the pillow.
