No Sorrow To Die

by Gillian Galbraith

  Feeling increasingly hot, and keen to get out of her sister’s company before she said something rash, she abandoned the paper collection and strode into the windowless kitchen, turning on the fan extractor and hoping for a rush of cold air. It seemed impossible to keep cool nowadays wherever she was, modern thermostats must all be set too high.

  How fortunate for me, she thought to herself as she set to work, picking up a pile of battered, slime-covered silver cartons from the table, that this generation chooses to live on carry-outs. So much less washing-up, but so bland, and goodness knows what it must do to the young people’s health. No wonder the boy always looked so pallid, so thin and positively sickly of late.

  Putting the cartons in the overflowing bin, she turned her attention to the sink, removed a couple of used teabags from the drain and lifted up a bottle of Fairy Liquid, the sole purpose of which seemed to be to act as a paperweight. Certainly, it had not been used for washing dishes. As she held it she noticed that an opened envelope with something inside it had stuck to the base of the bottle. Cautiously, she peeled it off. Now it was in her hand she was well aware that she should put it down again, or file it safely somewhere else, but she found that she could not resist the temptation to read it, to peek at it at least. The letter was addressed to Mr H. A. Brodie. The original India Street address had been scored out and, in Heather’s neat script, the Raeburn Mews one substituted. Maybe the letter would contain a declaration of strong feelings, friendship, or a love letter perhaps, something life enhancing and real. Maybe he had won a prize! She needed distraction, and Heather was in another room after all, so no-one would ever know, and Harry might not even mind if he knew, and he would never know so it could do no harm to anybody, could it? A single glance might well be enough. Filled with anticipation, she wiped her hands on a foul-smelling dish cloth and took a sheet of paper out of the envelope.

  ‘Heather,’ she shouted, forgetting in her surprise that she was not supposed to be reading the boy’s mail, ‘What’s this about? Was Harry going to have…’

  Before she had finished speaking, her sister came into the room carrying another letter in an official-looking envelope. She took the sheet of paper from Pippa. Reading it, her expression changed to one of despair. She glanced at the name and address on the envelope that Pippa still held and sat down heavily on a nearby stool.

  ‘What is it, Heather?’ Pippa enquired, sitting down beside her on another chair.

  ‘Nothing… nothing that I can’t fix.’

  11

  Sunday

  For some reason the fact that she had such a limited choice of clothes that morning, none of which remotely appealed to her, almost made her break down and weep. Instead Heather Brodie scolded herself roundly for her vanity, for her stupid shallowness, and in doing so managed to regain sufficient control of her emotions to continue sifting through her suitcase until she had got all that she needed. She looked disdainfully at the brown skirt and the blue shirt she had found. She had no recollection of packing them, and they would not go together at all. But she comforted herself with the thought that at least everything she was going to put on was clean, washed and ironed by her own hands. If only she had brought more clothes from India Street. Her make-up, too, would require attention if she was to appear confident and in control, if she was to seem to be the mistress of her own destiny.

  The sound made by the flushing of the lavatory travelled through the thin plasterboard walls and alerted her to Pippa’s imminent departure from the bathroom, but she waited until she heard her sister pad in her slippers across the corridor and close her own bedroom door before she made her move. Today, their usual insubstantial morning chitchat would be unbearable and was best avoided. Anyway, what did it matter how she had slept, or how Pippa had slept for that matter? That was all it ever amounted to, and her inability to feign interest might cause more offence and was almost bound to be misunderstood. She could feel her own nerves jangling, making her jumpy and prickly before they had even exchanged a word. A silly quarrel of some sort was inevitable.

  As efficient as ever, within less than fifteen minutes she had showered, dressed and put her face on, but instead of leaving the bathroom and going into the kitchen in search of breakfast, she sat down on the lavatory seat and waited, listening for the tell-tale noises made by her sister as she exited the flat on her way to church. Soon the characteristic tuneless hum which invariably accompanied Pippa’s removal of her waterproof from the coat-hook started up, interrupted by a thick ‘Bye bye, Heather’ spoken through the remains of the last piece of toast. Finally, a loud bang signalled that the front door had been shut.

  In the peace and quiet that followed, Heather Brodie looked in the fridge. Seeing only goat’s milk, she rejected the idea of cereal in favour of stewed apple with cream, a treat, if sprinkled generously with brown sugar. But once the bowl was in front of her, looking exactly as she had imagined it would, she found that she hadn’t the appetite even to taste it and put down her spoon. Then, remembering with affection their mother’s thrift, she carefully placed the bowl back on the fridge shelf, together with a twist of paper on which she had written ‘untouched’.

  The taxi driver, a bumptious individual sporting dark glasses against the grey, sunless northern sky, seemed determined to engage her in conversation. Though his overtures were met with monosyllabic replies, he continued pestering her relentlessly until, eventually, she responded. Talking to him would be less of an effort than not doing so, she thought. If she was lucky he would do all the work anyway. So, when he said in his matey Liverpool accent, ‘You’re going to St Leonard’s Street are you? You work there then?’

  She replied, ‘No – no, I don’t work there.’

  ‘Reporting a crime at the police station are you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Theft, is it theft then? I’ve been burglarised myself, you know. I know just how it feels, them in your house and everything. Like a rape, sort of. First time it happened we were living in Portobello, and the next time it happened it was where I live now, Silverknowes. Know what I think? I think they ought to confiscate all of them thieves’ possessions. That’d teach ’em to take other people’s stuff, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, it would,’ she replied earnestly.

  ‘What they take of yours then?’

  She racked her brain trying to think what to say, then a ready-made list forced itself into her consciousness: ‘Em… a wallet, my husband’s wallet, a computer, my jewellery case…’

  ‘Your jewellery case?’ he interrupted, sounding appalled on her behalf, ‘was there much in it, then, by way of jewellery?’

  ‘A necklace… a ring, a brooch or two, sentimental value…’ she began, wishing that she had never weakened and entered this ludicrous conversation. Then inspiration came to her and she asked, ‘And you? What did they take from you – in the first robbery, I mean – and in the second, of course.’

  By the time the cab drew up outside the police station, the man was still busy listing his stolen possessions, occasionally adjusting their details, reminding himself that the music centre taken was a Sanyo, not a Panasonic, and that the CD collection nicked from Portobello, no, from Silverknowes, had belonged, not to his daughter, but to his wife. Stepping out onto the wet pavement, she gave the cabby a very generous tip, finding herself unexpectedly grateful for his incessant animated chatter, an endless stream which had kept at bay her own thoughts, her own demons.

  When she told the man at the reception desk that she had come to see DCI Bell, the old fellow nodded and asked her in a bored tone what her visit was in connection with. For a second, she was stumped, unable to answer, and then she pulled herself together. ‘To confess…’ she said, marvelling at the words as she spoke them, almost overawed by their implication. Saying them out loud to another person for the first time, to a stranger, made them real in a way that, up to that moment, they had not been. Safely inside her own head, they meant nothing, like a daydream of some drea
dful revenge or a song unsung. The receptionist looked almost affronted by her answer and she heard him mutter down the phone, ‘Yes… a lady here wants to see DCI Bell, says she’s come to confess something. No, I don’t know what… course not… no, I didn’t like to ask her.’

  The only windows in the interview room were snibbed tight shut, and the smell of cleaning fluid in the place was overpowering. On top of its scent, some kind of floral air-freshener had recently been sprayed in the space, strong enough to take the breath away and burn the back of the throat. Her immediate instinct was to turn round and walk straight out of the room again, but, instead, as instructed, she took her place at the table.

  Opposite her, and already seated, she recognised the female Sergeant who had interviewed her in the flat. She seemed to have aged in the last few days, with dark circles under her eyes, and appeared distracted.

  When the male Inspector entered the room he looked straight through her, as if she was some lower form of life not needing to be accorded the normal courtesies. He had a wide choice of seats, and ostentatiously chose the one furthest away from her. There he slumped over his mug of coffee, staring into the middle distance, choosing not to meet her gaze. He looked unkempt, slightly sordid, she thought, as if he belonged in the cells rather than on the floor above them. Once he was seated, their DCI, the stout, officious woman, put down the telephone.

  ‘Well,’ Elaine Bell said, crossing her arms and sounding stern, ‘I understand that you’ve a confession to make.’

  ‘Yes,’ Heather Brodie answered, sitting up straight, making herself as upright as possible, readying herself for the confrontation, the series of challenges, she was anticipating. To her relief her voice came across as strong and confident, as if it belonged to someone unintimidated by the setting or the situation.

  ‘On you go then,’ the DCI continued, as if encouraging her in something innocuous like a theatre audition or the opening speech in a school debate. Conscious that they were all now staring expectantly at her, Heather Brodie cleared her throat and said, ‘I’ve come to confess to the murder of my husband, Gavin. I killed him…’ Then she stopped abruptly, hoping that she had now said enough, enough for their limited purposes at any rate. What more could they need?

  ‘How?’ the DCI asked, leaning towards her, ‘how exactly did you do it?’

  She hesitated before answering, blinking as she gathered her thoughts. ‘First of all I drugged him, gave him an overdose of his own drugs. Then I… I cut his throat using our kitchen knife.’ As she said it, she made a horizontal slitting motion with her right hand as if she was cutting her own throat.

  ‘But why?’ Eric Manson demanded. ‘Why did you do that? Cut his throat, if you’d already poisoned him?’ The room was now in complete silence, the DCI’s gaze fixed on her interviewee.

  ‘Because… I lost my nerve. After I’d given them to him, I wasn’t sure that the drugs would do the trick – kill him, I mean.’

  ‘Why didn’t you give him more?’

  ‘He was comatose by then, he couldn’t drink. Anyway, to tell you the truth, I didn’t think of it.’

  ‘What did you give him in the first place?’ Eric Manson persisted.

  ‘Em… the Nortriptyline and the Oramorph, a mixture of the two, but…’ she said, now sounding slightly impatient, ‘I’m not sure why you need to know all of this, though. It’s like twenty questions, or something. I’ve already told you that I’m confessing to this. I’ll plead guilty at my trial – to Gavin’s murder, I mean. You needn’t worry.’

  Feeling oddly indignant that they felt the need to interrogate her, she glared at each of the police officers in turn.

  ‘Right,’ Elaine Bell said coldly, returning her glare. ‘Let’s get down to business, then, shall we? The Nortriptyline and so on – where did you get it from?’

  ‘The bottles?’ Heather Brodie began, ‘over time, I mean. Every time we got a new prescription I’d collect it – well, draw off a little of the contents and store it for later use. I stockpiled the stuff. Quite a lot, well, enough, anyway. Actually, when the time came there was enough in the bottles.’

  ‘How would you know what “enough” was, and which of his drugs to give him?’ Alice asked.

  Heather Brodie hesitated for a few seconds, and then replied, ‘It wasn’t difficult. Don’t forget, I’d been giving him his medication every day for months and months. I know the effect each one has on him. Anyway,’ she added, sounding more confident. ‘I spent six years as a nurse before I married. A while ago, of course, but I haven’t forgotten everything I learnt.’

  ‘And the burgled stuff,’ Eric Manson said, ‘the wallet, the computer and so on, what did you do with that? And why, why did you do it, take your own things?’

  ‘I took the computer and the rest of it so that it’d look like an “outside” job, then you’d be looking for a thief, someone who’d just come in. Obviously, once I’d cut his throat I knew that no-one would doubt that he had been murdered, so I needed to make it look as if someone had come into our house and killed him, someone who’d been robbing our house or whatever.’

  ‘What did you do with the stuff?’ the DCI enquired.

  ‘I dumped it, in the first place I could think of… er… down by the Dean Bridge in amongst the bushes there. And some of it I put in the river. I threw the knife into the Water of Leith, the jewellery case, the wallet too.’

  ‘Giving your husband an overdose of his own drugs…’ Alice said slowly, ‘poisoning him with his own medication? Didn’t it occur to you beforehand that you’d be found out? Even if you hadn’t finished him off with a knife?’

  ‘I had thought about it beforehand, yes. But I don’t agree. I reckoned I’d be all right. You saw the condition that he was in. There was nothing left of him, he was knocking on death’s door. People would just think he’d died of the disease.’

  ‘Then why did you do it?’ Elaine Bell shot back at her. ‘If he was knocking on death’s door anyway, you didn’t need to do it. You wouldn’t have had long to wait, would you?’

  Heather Brodie looked defiantly at the DCI and said in a hard, determined voice, ‘You couldn’t begin to understand, could you? You have no idea, no idea… I did it because I had had enough. Enough. He was supposed to die by last July, then by this June, but he just hung on – clung on like a desperate rat, drooling and dribbling, hissing and muttering, having “accidents”, spitting… He’d hit me twice, lashed out at me like a madman, caught me once in the eye and the other time on the jaw. He wasn’t human any more.’ She hesitated briefly, letting the meaning of her words sink in. ‘He’d become a beast, a miserable, vicious beast… an animal in nappies.’

  ‘And the insurance policy?’ the DCI asked, looking down at her notes.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, you wouldn’t get any money, would you, if he died after February 2010.’

  ‘Yes,’ she hesitated, ‘that’s right, I wouldn’t. But where did you find the policy?’ She smiled politely at Elaine Bell, as if expecting an answer from her.

  ‘In your desk,’ Alice replied.

  ‘It’s his, it was his desk, actually.’

  ‘And now,’ Alice continued, ‘why are you telling us all of this now? Why did you come here today to confess to your husband’s murder, why not yesterday or the day before – or tomorrow for that matter?’

  ‘Because,’ Heather Brodie said, meeting her gaze steadily, ‘things have altered, haven’t they? You’ve all changed tack, and now you’re after Colin, my Colin. You think he’s involved – supplied the drugs, or whatever. My “accomplice”. Well, he didn’t. I told you, he didn’t need to. I’d been thinking about how I would do it, if things got too bad, for weeks, if not for months.’

  ‘Your toy-boy,’ Eric Manson butted in, rolling his eyes heavenwards.

  ‘How do you know we’re after Colin?’ Alice asked.

  ‘Because someone at his work, a friend, told me that you’d collected him.’

  ‘You�
��re coming here today, confessing to us today… because you want to spare Doctor Paxton any more questioning?’ Alice enquired, scepticism apparent in her voice.

  ‘No, of course not. It’s because I don’t want him involved, I’ve told you. Because he’s not involved. He had nothing whatsoever to do with it. He’s not the one who killed my husband, I am. He had no idea I was going to do it. Probably wouldn’t believe it if you told him.’

  Once they were outside the interview room, Elaine Bell folded her arms again and turned to her Inspector, saying in a low voice, ‘So, what do you think, Eric? Think she did it? Seems pretty believable to me.’

  He nodded, his brow corrugated in thought. ‘Aye… she knew about the overdose, the type of drugs used, about where all the “stolen” stuff was. Not a word of any of that has been in the papers. The only way she could know about it would be if she’s the one – the one who did it, eh? How else?’

  ‘Alice?’ the DCI said, keen to get a further opinion. The Sergeant shrugged her shoulders. ‘Yes, maybe. Maybe she did it, but I’m not sure… I’m just not sure.’

  ‘Not sure about what, exactly?’ Eric Manson retorted. ‘She’s just told us that she did it. So why don’t you believe her? What’s not to believe?’

  ‘Her confession… I’m not completely convinced that it’s true, it doesn’t ring quite true. The gesture, the throat-slitting one – she used her right hand, did you see?’

  ‘So?’ the Detective Inspector snapped.

  ‘So… you, Ma’am, when you were reading out your notes, told us that the Professor said in the P.M. that the killer was likely to be left-handed… It’s on the board too.’

  ‘Aha, that’s right,’ Elaine Bell confirmed. ‘That’s what he said, the killer’s likely to be left-handed. Not is left-handed, only likely to be.’