Dead Gorgeous

by Peter Lovesey

  Maybe he’d already dismissed the whole thing from his mind.

  She considered this a moment and discovered that it wasn’t the comfort it should have been. Deep down, she hoped he hadn’t treated the incident as unimportant. For all Hector’s hair-raising remarks, he was a stimulating companion. And he gave you his total attention.

  How Antonia could contemplate killing him was beyond belief. There was no question that she meant to do it. She’d got the death certificate ready. She’d talked about having him cremated. He was doomed. He might have been dying in agony at this minute if he’d eaten that curry.

  Rose started to shake. She went through to the kitchen and opened the larder and saw the space on the shelf where the brandy had been. She gave a moan as she remembered smashing the bottle.

  A cigarette, then. She found the packet and her lighter and sat at the kitchen table taking quick, shallow puffs, unable any longer to shut out the horror of what was happening.

  No wonder she was in a state. She was poleaxed by the conviction that she had come so close to poisoning Hector. And angry at her own stupidity and Antonia’s deceit. Above all, she was frightened.

  If Hector had died and his murder had been discovered, Antonia, up in Manchester, would have had a convincing alibi. The prime suspect would have been Rose herself.

  She winced, as if the pain were physical. As a schemer Antonia was in a class of her own. She had planned from the beginning to use her. There was a price to be paid for Barry’s death. It was naïve in the extreme to suppose the favour could be repaid by cooking a few meals for Hector. He was down to be murdered.

  ‘Not by me,’ she said aloud. ‘There was never any suggestion of that. Never.’

  Antonia seemed to think nothing of killing people. She’d pushed Barry under the train without turning a hair. She’d contrived to have Hector poisoned while she went to visit her mother. And – Rose shuddered as she remembered – she’d talked of waiting for Hector’s first wife to die – by drowning. At the time it had seemed incomprehensible. Not now.

  Pull yourself together and be positive, Rose told herself. How stupid of Antonia to think that the answer to every problem is murder. Hector’s only offence is that he won’t give her a divorce. Surely they can end their unhappy marriage in some other way?

  She drew more deeply on the cigarette.

  Then the inspiration dawned.

  If Hector won’t give Antonia a divorce because he’s a Roman Catholic, why shouldn’t she divorce him? If he’s the guilty party Antonia can take her case to court and win. She can have a share of his fortune, which she’s after, and she’ll be free to marry Vic.

  Above all, Hector’s life will be saved.

  Her mouth went dry as she pursued the idea. On what grounds could Antonia divorce him? Cruelty? That won’t wash. Desertion? Definitely not. Insanity? No. Failure to consummate? Unlikely.

  That left adultery. Antonia had brushed aside the possibility of other women. ‘No vultures circling overhead. I’d know.’

  In that case Hector has to be persuaded to take a lover.

  Rose plunged a hand into her hair and gripped it hard at the roots.

  It has to be me.

  I can’t, she thought. Jesus Christ, it’s only three weeks since my husband died. I’m a widow. I don’t love Hector. I’ve met him on three occasions. I’ve never been so embarrassed as when he made that pass at me in the kitchen and ended up calling me a fusspot. I don’t find him attractive.

  Do I?

  No use questioning my motives. Suddenly to be taken out for a meal after five years of being ignored is quite head-turning, but that doesn’t come into it. I wouldn’t dream of going to bed with Hector. Not unless everything altered and made it possible, anyway. And then not for many months . . .

  I must get this clear in my mind. I won’t be doing it for any other reason than necessity, to save him from being murdered, and myself from worse trouble than I’m in already.

  She felt groggy. That brandy would have been a lifesaver at this minute. There was some ginger wine somewhere in the front room. She collected it and poured herself a large glass.

  I’ll be the ‘other woman’ in a divorce case. Horrible. It’s sure to be in the newspapers. Mummy and Daddy will get to hear of it. They don’t read the gutter press, but plenty of people in the parish do. A divorce scandal is the very thing I was so desperate to avoid. I had Barry killed because I wouldn’t divorce him.

  Oh, God, what’s the alternative? Hector will be killed. He’s a decent man, utterly different from Barry. He takes a pride in his work. He treats me as if I’m a member of the same species, not some lower order. He made a terrible mistake when he fell under Antonia’s charm, but I can understand exactly how it happened. Knowing the force of Antonia’s personality, I can’t believe Hector had any part in his first wife’s death. He obviously misses her. He must have been rushed into marrying Antonia when he was most vulnerable.

  Killing him would be wicked. Indefensible. Yet Antonia will find some way of doing it, with my help or without. She wants him dead. And if she’s arrested, one thing is certain. She’ll name me as her accomplice.

  What it comes down to is the lesser of two evils. What would you rather have your daughter be, Daddy – an adulteress or a murderess?

  She lit another cigarette.

  If only there were more time. To be any use at all, the thing had to be accomplished before Antonia returned from Manchester. She would come back expecting to find Hector dead. Instead, she would be handed the alternative – an admission of his adultery.

  She reached for the bottle again.

  How soon, then?

  Tomorrow.

  With an effort to suppress her fears she gave some thought to the practicality of getting Hector into bed. Or getting into bed with Hector. She didn’t think of it as seducing him. If she’d read the signals right, he wouldn’t need much prompting. She hadn’t forgotten how he’d squeezed her hand in the kitchen at Park Crescent, or how he’d made her blush with his personal remarks in Reggiori’s. He was a foreigner, yes, and they got into muddles sometimes, but to say she had legs as good as Betty Grable’s and a ‘pretty fine bust’ couldn’t be put down to faulty syntax.

  She could cook a tempting meal, anyway. She’d cook that curry to perfection and serve it with a bottle of Burgundy. Then a spectacular dessert was wanted: why not peach melba?

  With the menu decided, she let her thoughts creep ahead. I have set a place for Hector at the oval table in the dining room. Before he eats he invites me to join him, but I insist with a demure smile that I have come there only to cook. I serve the meal and leave him to savour every delicious mouthful, telling him I have things to attend to in the kitchen. I wash the dishes and the pans and leave everything in immaculate condition.

  Then I offer him coffee.

  I ask how he likes it, and he doggedly says he would like it best if I will drink it with him. I weigh the suggestion solemnly and say instead that if he is kind enough to drive me back to Pimlico I’ll make coffee for both of us there.

  So I show him into the front room at Oldfield Gardens, where the fire glows warmly. I go to the kitchen to make the coffee. Presently I call out casually that if he looks in the sideboard he’ll find a bottle of champagne and two glasses waiting.

  The train of thought stopped abruptly. She flinched at the prospect of sex with Hector. She hadn’t even kissed him up to now. True, she wasn’t without experience, but compared with Antonia . . .

  She shivered.

  She would see how she felt in the morning.

  20

  Frost-patterns had formed on the inside of the bedroom windows. She scraped away a section to see if it was foggy outside and saw the words ‘Carelessness Kills’.

  A superfluous warning. She had already decided to buy fresh ingredients for the curry, regardless that the lamb alone would use up all her meat ration for that week. She couldn’t believe it was possible for Antonia to have introdu
ced poison into the vegetables, but just to be certain she would buy them fresh. Plus curry powder, which certainly couldn’t be left to chance.

  She was first in the queue for the butcher’s when he opened at 8.30.

  ‘Yes, for you, as it happens, I do have some prime lamb, Mrs Bell. People coming to stay?’

  ‘Not to stay. Just a meal for a … for some friends. People have been very kind to me.’

  ‘Glad to hear it. Does you no harm to have company. Takes your mind off things.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘That’s the spirit, my love. Never say die.’

  After the grocer’s and the greengrocer’s she took a bus to Regent’s Park and let herself into the house in Park Crescent. It wasn’t ten o’clock yet.

  She took her shopping into the kitchen and unloaded it on the table. She’d managed to get a brick of Wall’s ice cream for the peach melba, so she stacked that with the ice trays in the fridge. The meat also went into the fridge. She took out what was left of the lamb Antonia had supplied, wrapped it in newspaper and stowed it in her shopping basket. The suspect curry powder joined it.

  Her reason for coming so early wasn’t to do with cooking.

  She’d woken about six in a changed mood from the near-panic of the night before. She’d reached a decision. She would search for evidence that Antonia had poisoned Hector’s food.

  She needed to be certain. Sex with Hector was an alarming prospect but she was prepared to face it if she could find proof that his life was under imminent threat.

  She would look for evidence of poison. A good detective would have known what to do. He would have had the food analysed by a toxicologist.

  She had to search for the poison itself, or the container it came in.

  And (because she really ought to keep an open mind) she would also look for that letter from Antonia’s mother. The letter that supposedly summoned Antonia to Manchester to put Lucky the luckless dog out of his misery. She would be surprised if the letter existed. She was pretty certain that these few days of absence had more to do with putting Hector down than Lucky. But she was here to find out the truth.

  Might as well start with the obvious and the most unpleasant, she thought. The dustbin. After sifting through muck and rubbish for twenty minutes everything else will be like picking daisies. She opened the back door.

  Two dustbins, one empty and the other only half full, thanks to Antonia’s dislike of cooking. The smell wasn’t as suffocating as it might have been because the contents were mostly dry. She moved them piece by piece into the empty dustbin. The wrapped vegetable parings she had placed in there herself the day before, a pile of newspapers and magazines, a cornflakes carton, a couple of tea packets, several salmon tins (for that pampered cat?), a whisky bottle, a wine bottle, a laddered stocking, cigarette butts and packets, a matchbox, some razor blades, combings of blonde hair, a lipstick holder and some packets of ash and cinders that she unwrapped and sifted with a stick.

  She defied the freezing air long enough to check everything again and stack it in the original dustbin.

  She came in and ran the hot tap for a wash, glad that the dirtiest job was over and untroubled that it had yielded nothing.

  Next on her list was Antonia’s dressing room. In a house this size it was inconceivable that Antonia didn’t have a room of her own.

  The act of going upstairs didn’t need to be charged with tension just because it was unexplored territory. She’d made up her mind to treat it casually. On the wall up the staircase there was a collection of framed photographs of allied fighter planes, so she paused to brush up on her aircraft recognition. Nobody likes being alone in a strange house, she told herself, unless like me they’re making a search for something.

  One of the stairs creaked under her weight and there was an immediate thump from the floor above. She wasn’t alarmed for long. The cat came down to meet her at the turn before the next flight. She scratched the top of its head.

  ‘Later. I wouldn’t forget you, would I, Raffles?’

  She reached the first floor and started opening doors. A study, evidently Hector’s, with design drawings on the walls, a rolltop desk and leather furniture. Next to it a library stuffed to the ceiling with technical books in several languages. Then, stale from disuse, a spare room that Antonia would probably have called the glory-hole. Anyone wanting to hide something had unlimited scope in this house. The dressing room was still the likeliest place. She went up to the next floor.

  The nearest door was open and she glimpsed two brass bedsteads with a polar bear rug between them, so she went in. The walls were papered in a startling geometric design of overlapping pink arcs and blue triangles, neither restful nor romantic – which summed up Antonia, Rose thought. Hector’s pyjamas lay across the black eiderdown on the bed to the right. They were conspicuous, to put it mildly – bright red with white spots that played tricks on the eyes and moved about like the lights in Piccadilly Circus. She refused to believe they were Hector’s choice. She put the blame on Antonia again until it occurred to her that they must have come from America, where Hector had lived some years. On second thoughts she decided polka dot pyjamas were like modern paintings. You might very well grow to like them as they became more familiar.

  Through the door on the opposite side and into Antonia’s dressing room. She got a shock as she met her own reflection in a wall mirror.

  White wardrobes with glass handles were built along two walls. She opened a door and gave a long low murmur of envy. She was no authority on furs, but she recognized mink, ocelot, silver fox and chinchilla and plenty she couldn’t name but would have gone through fire to wear. A lustrous black coat with raised shoulders and no collar that must have been straight from Paris, it was so fashionable; three or four sensational capes for evening wear; and a heap of tempting hats and collars and things on the shelf above.

  She couldn’t resist running her fingers through the chinchilla. If I had just one of these I’d be in my seventh heaven, she mused, but all of them. Small wonder Antonia refuses to be parted from them.

  She wrenched herself away and crossed the room to the walnut dressing table, a long, low arrangement of drawers in a curve with three tall mirrors embellished with Art Deco rosebuds and ribbons. Resisting the temptation to try the spray scents on top, she opened and closed each of the drawers quickly to get an impression of the contents, lingering a moment at the one containing jewellery.

  You’re here to look for poison, she told herself.

  Any time she had reason to hide an article – usually nothing more sinister than a birthday present for Barry – she tucked it among the smalls at the back of her underwear drawer where nobody but herself had any business to look. Here in Antonia’s bedroom it seemed as sensible a place as any to begin the search.

  She ran her hand through the layers of satin and crêpe de Chine and felt sick with envy as she thought of her day running up her parachute-silk undies.

  No bottles, phials or pill-boxes. Antonia kept plenty in there to make a man’s heart race, but nothing to make it stop.

  The second drawer was deeper and had something more promising pushed to the back behind a nightdress – an antique rosewood box with mother-of-pearl inlay. Rose lifted it out. By the size and weight it probably contained letters or photographs. Frustratingly it was locked and there was no sign of a key. She cleared a space for it on top of the dressing table, opened the next drawer and almost at once found a tin containing curlers, safety-pins and other odds and ends including hairgrips. The lock on the box looked a simple fastening, so she tried poking the end of a hairgrip upwards through the keyhole. After a few attempts something clicked inside.

  She opened the box.

  On top was a photo of Vic, the lover, in cap and gown at some university ceremony. There were several old letters postmarked in the war years. A picture of an aircrew beside a Blenheim bomber. Printed dance invitations, pressed flowers, some twenty-first birthday cards. The sort of collectio
n most women keep somewhere. No phials of poison. No letter from Manchester. She clicked her tongue impatiently. She was about to close the box when she noticed that the padded underside of the lid was hinged and had a small hook and hasp where it could unfasten. She eased it open. Out fell a folded document.

  She’d seen it before. It was the death certificate Antonia had stolen from the Registry Office. The certificate intended for Hector. Nothing had yet been written on it. She held it a moment. The paper was shaking in her hand. Her impulse was to rip it to pieces, yet she hesitated.

  Tear it up, the inner voice prompted her. And another immediately countered: don’t – unless you want Antonia to know that you came up here and went through her things.

  She folded the certificate and replaced it where she had found it and fiddled with the lock until it clicked back into place. She replaced the box in the drawer and told herself she was there to look for other things.

  Where else?

  She decided to try the top shelf in each of the wardrobes. They were too high for a proper inspection, so she carried across the stool from the dressing table and stood on it. She reached in among a collection of belts and hats.

  And froze.

  A sound had come from downstairs. She was certain it was the front door being opened.

  She held her breath and listened.

  The front door clicked shut, beyond any question. She strained to hear. It was doubtful whether someone’s tread on the hall carpet would carry up to her. A pulse was beating so loudly in her head that she could easily have taken it for footsteps.

  Seconds passed. She let out a tremulous breath, like a swimmer just out of the water, and drew in more air.

  A board gave a sharp creak. Then another. Whoever had entered the house was coming upstairs.

  It can only be Hector, Rose told herself to stave off panic. Who else could have let themselves in? He must have come back from work to fetch something. He’s going to that room on the first floor that he uses as his office. He won’t have any reason to come up here.