by M C Beaton
Melissa again, thought Maggie bitterly.
Fell went upstairs and washed and changed into a clean shirt and jeans. He could hear Maggie working in the kitchen. Ashamed of his bad temper, he called out, “I’m going to the bank before it closes. We don’t want the neighbours to see us digging up the cash box any time we want money.”
“Right,” called Maggie.
Fell did go to the bank and drew out a substantial sum. He planned to give a good part of it to Maggie. She never asked him for money. Then he stood, irresolute, feeling the sun beating down on his head. Dreams and fantasies were essential to a man like Fell. They were what kept reality at bay. He wanted the Melissa dream back and in his heart cursed the lawyer. Surely Melissa had her pride and didn’t want everyone to know that her business venture had failed. Perhaps he could advise her. Perhaps he could buy the remainder of the lease from her and start that bookshop, he thought, forgetting that the bookshop had been Maggie’s idea. He had a sudden rosy dream of poetry readings in the evenings, with himself reading to a small audience and Melissa gazing on him with admiration.
He set out for the health shop. He hesitated outside the door. Melissa was sitting at the back of the shop at a desk, buffing her nails. The shop was dark and there was a soft lamp behind her. She looked quite beautiful.
He smiled and opened the door.
“Why, Fell!” she exclaimed. “How nice.”
“Quiet day,” said Fell, looking around.
“Oh, one gets days like this from time to time. What brings you?”
“I thought perhaps we could discuss business, go through the books together.”
“You don’t need to bother about fusty old ledgers. It wouldn’t mean anything to you. I mean, dear, you’ve not had much experience of business, have you?”
“No, but – ”
“So why don’t I just lock up. I know a nice café down by the river, Gerald’s. We can talk there.”
He knew he should protest, that he really should see those books, but he followed her weakly out of the shop, and then to her car. She drove off competently and they went to Gerald’s, which was down on the riverside just below the Mayor Bridge.
Melissa found them a table in the café garden beside the river. “Let’s not talk business until we have tea.”
She was wearing a silky dress of peacock colours. She chatted about a film she had seen the night before as she poured tea and ate cream cakes. “Now, my little businessman,” she said, throwing a flirtatious look at Fell, “are you ready to come in with me?”
Fell clasped his hands together and looked at her beseechingly. “The fact is, Melissa, that I discussed your proposition with my lawyer and he says your business is in financial difficulties.”
“You didn’t trust me? Really, Fell, you are no gentleman.”
“If you are not in financial difficulties, then there is no problem,” said Fell. “We will take your accounts round to my lawyer.”
She put a hand over his clasped hands and said beseechingly. “Look, Fell, I’ll come clean with you. I have had a certain amount of difficulty, but I feel I am turning the corner.” Her thumb stroked his wrist. “With your investment, I could expand.”
Just then the sun slid from behind the trees on the opposite side of the river and cast a merciless light on Melissa’s face. He saw for the first time the wrinkles at the sides of her mouth, the pouches under her eyes, and above all, the calculating avarice in those eyes.
But he still wanted his dream back and said, “I have a proposition to put to you.”
“This is so sudden!”
“Seriously.” He outlined his idea of buying the lease, of the bookshop.
Melissa laughed. “My dear boy, it’s obvious you’ve spent your life waiting table. Do you think any of the cloth-heads in this little burg are going to flock to a bookshop? Get real!”
Fell drew his hands away and then stood up. “I have to get back to Maggie,” he said.
“Oh, your little friend. I’ll drive you back.”
“I’d rather walk.”
Fell turned and strode away. He could hear her calling to him, but he walked on.
♦
He walked and walked in the heat, trying to walk his misery away. He felt like a wimp, like a naive fool. He did not get home until half past eight. Maggie called down the stairs, “Is that you, Fell?”
“Yes.”
“I left some quiche and salad in the kitchen for you.”
“Thanks.”
Fell was sitting at the table, staring at an untouched plate of food, when Maggie came into the kitchen. He looked up. She was wearing the green chiffon dress and high heels. Her hair shone and her green eyes looked large and luminous behind the new contact lenses.
Fell tried to smile. “You look much too good to be going out with Peter,” he said.
“I shouldn’t be too late. You look awful. What have you been up to?”
“Just walking. Walking too long in the heat. Don’t worry about me.”
She hesitated and then she said, “I’m off, then.”
“Have fun.”
Maggie went reluctantly.
Fell had looked so shattered, she longed to stay with him. She walked through the evening streets to the Red Lion. Peter was already there and she saw from his flushed face and bright watery eyes that he had already been drinking. He rose and tried to kiss her on the lips, but Maggie quickly turned her face so that a wet kiss landed on her cheek. “What’ll you have?” asked Peter.
“Just orange juice,” said Maggie, hoping that her choice of a non-alcoholic drink would slow him down. But he returned with an orange juice for her and a suspiciously dark glass of whisky for himself.
♦
Fell found he was waiting and waiting for Maggie to come home. It was nearly midnight. At last he could not bear the stuffiness and silence of the little house where the ghosts of Mr. and Mrs. Dolphin seemed to be standing over him, calling him a failure. He remembered he had forgotten to give Maggie any money. The money he had drawn was upstairs in his bedside table. He went out, setting the burglar alarm, and walked to the Red Lion, but the pub was dark and closed for the night. He could not bear to return home and thought he would go down and walk along by the river. Sometimes there was a cool breeze from the water.
He made his way across the gardens to the riverside. The black water chuckled lazily past.
He was standing by the water on a little jetty used by the pleasure boats when he received an almighty shove on his back and tumbled headlong into the water. He struggled desperately to the surface, but his struggles took him out to the middle of the river.
And Fell could not swim.
∨ The Skeleton in the Closet ∧
Seven
MAGGIE had a horrible evening. Peter grew progressively more drunk and maudlin, yet she had neither the experience nor the courage to leave him and go home. They ended up at a noisy cellar disco which to Maggie was like a scene from hell with the smoke-filled heat of the room and the strobe lights that hurt her eyes. And then, to her relief, Peter sank down in a chair and promptly fell asleep. Guiltily, feeling that she should at least waken him and help him home, Maggie picked up her handbag and went up the stairs from the disco and took great gulps of fresh air.
She set off in the direction of home. A group of youths shouted at her, “Where you going, love?” and strung across the street, barring her way. She slipped off her high heels and ran in the opposite direction, down towards the central bridge of the town. Only once she had reached the middle of the bridge did she stop, panting. There were no sounds of pursuit. She had saved and saved to buy her little old car to take her to and from work, for Buss, which could look like something out of a Merchant Ivory film during the day, could be a dangerous place for a woman on her own at night. Drugs had crawled into every town and village in England, with the resultant crime.
The night was once more still and quiet. Then she heard a faint sound from the riv
er below and leaned over the bridge. In the light of a security lamp in a house by the river, she saw a head rise above the water, flailing arms, and then the head disappeared. She did not stop to think. She climbed up on the parapet of the bridge and dived in. She surfaced and swam to where she had seen that head just as, with a great gasp, Fell’s white face appeared above the water. She reached him and said, “Don’t struggle. It’s me, Maggie. Turn on your back. No don’t clutch me, or we’ll both go under.”
He did as he was told and Maggie pulled him towards the shore. She ploughed towards a low grass bank. “You’ve got to help me, Fell,” she said. “I’m not strong enough to pull you out.”
With Fell’s last remaining strength he crawled on his hands and knees up the grass and collapsed on his face. Maggie, grateful for all those swimming classes and life-saving techniques she had learned years ago, turned him on his side and began to pump the water out of him. “I’m all right,” spluttered Fell weakly. “I kept my mouth closed nearly every time I went down.”
“Just lie still,” ordered Maggie, sitting back on her heels. She looked around in a dazed way. How quiet it was! Not a soul about to witness the drama. Maggie did not believe in God, but she suddenly remembered a mild preacher saying, “If there is no God, how do you explain coincidence?” Why should she of all people have been at the right place at the right time? If Peter had not passed out, she would still be in the disco.
Fell sat up. “I think I can make it home.”
“I left my bag up on the bridge. Wait here and I’ll see if it’s still there.”
When Maggie walked across the grass and then up the winding path which led to the bridge, she found her legs were shaking. She began to cry, tears pouring out of her eyes and down onto her soaking dress. She found her handbag where she had left it and made her way back to Fell.
He struggled to his feet when he saw her coming. “What happened?” asked Maggie.
“Someone pushed me.”
“Let’s get home quickly,” said Maggie. The dark night was suddenly full of menace. “We’ll need to call the police.”
“No,” said Fell, shivering despite the warmth of the night.
“Why? Someone tried to kill you.”
“I don’t want that Dunwiddy probing into our lives. It could have been some malicious youth, some nutter. I mean, who would know I couldn’t swim?”
“Let’s hurry. I’m frightened.”
Fell put an arm around Maggie’s waist and they hurried homewards. As they reached the town square, Maggie could hear raucous voices quite near and the sound of breaking glass. The youth of Buss, possibly her earlier tormentors, had probably smashed a shop window.
As they reached home, two police cars raced past.
Maggie forced her trembling fingers to deal with the burglar alarm. Only once they were safely inside, with the burglar alarm set, did Maggie’s trembling and shaking stop.
“Let’s get out of our wet clothes,” she said. “Fortunately for us, the river’s unpolluted, so we shouldn’t need tetanus shots. I forgot to switch the hot water on.”
“We’ll put it on now and change into our dressing gowns,” said Fell.
Maggie clutched his arm as he was about to go up the stairs. “Do you believe in God, Fell?”
“I’ve never thought much about it. Why?”
“It seems so odd that I should have been there at the right time.”
“I know. You saved my life and I’ll never forget it.”
“Oh, don’t feel beholden to me in any way,” said Maggie urgently.
Fell smiled at her in a way that made her heart turn over. “Impossible. Let’s get out of these wet clothes.”
“My new dress is ruined and I’ve lost my shoes,” mourned Maggie. “Mind you, I sweated so much in that wretched disco, it’s probably ruined anyway.”
“Which disco?”
“I’ll tell you sometime.”
As Maggie took off her wet clothes in her bedroom and scrubbed herself down with a towel, she decided not to tell Fell that she had endured a miserable evening with Peter. He might feel she was becoming too much a permanent part of his life. She guessed his earlier misery had been caused by disillusionment about Melissa, but was shrewd enough to guess that Melissa might be soon replaced with another dream, another fantasy woman.
Maggie put the old wool dressing gown she had worn since her schooldays on over her nightgown and carefully took out her precious contact lenses, marvelling that they had not been lost in the river, popped on her thick glasses and went downstairs and began to heat up a pan of milk on the kitchen stove.
When Fell joined her, she poured two glasses of hot milk, added a dash of brandy to each, and they carried them into the sitting room.
“It really was the most amazing coincidence,” said Maggie, tucking her legs under her on the sofa. “I mean, I’d left the disco to walk home and there were these youths bothering me. I ran away in the opposite direction and when I knew they weren’t following me, I stopped in the middle of the bridge.”
“Why didn’t Peter walk you home?”
“Oh, he got called out on a story,” lied Maggie quickly.
“Someone must have been following me,” said Fell. “I thought I was the only one by the river. It was all so quiet. I was standing on that wooden jetty when someone gave me a great shove. I struggled to the surface but found myself out in the middle of the river. I’m frightened, Maggie. We’ve got the money. Why don’t we go away for a bit?”
Maggie brightened. With a fantasy as rosy as anything Fell could have concocted, she conjured up a picture of both of them lying on a tropical beach under the palms.
“On the other hand,” said Fell, “there’s a part of me that now knows that if I run away from this, I’ll consider myself a wimp and a failure for the rest of my life.”
The dream burst. “Then we go on,” said Maggie quietly.
“You know, Maggie, I don’t think there can be anyone quite like you.”
Maggie blushed with pleasure.
“I just hope Peter is worthy of you.”
Maggie’s heart sank. She had a sudden vision of Peter when she had last seem him, slumped in a chair under the strobe lights, his mouth hanging open and snoring drunkenly.
“He’s just a date,” she mumbled.
But Fell was not paying attention. “I drew some money out of the bank. I must give you some. You never ask for any.”
“You don’t need to pay me. You don’t owe me anything.”
“Only my life. But I did draw out the money for you before you saved me. Please take some.”
Maggie thought of her dwindling savings and then nodded. “Well, just some for the housekeeping.”
“And a new dress. That pretty one must be ruined.”
“I’ll see if the dry-cleaner’s can do anything with it. Let’s go to bed and then we’ll try that Fred Flint tomorrow.”
They went upstairs and then stood together on the landing. “Good night, then,” said Fell. He had a sudden impulse to kiss Maggie, but turned instead and went into his room. What on earth would Maggie think of him?
Maggie awoke during the night. She heard Fell cry out. She leaped out of bed and went to his room. He was tossing and turning and making those inarticulate strangling cries which people make when they are actually screaming in the middle of a nightmare.
Maggie sat on the end of the bed. “Shhh,” she said. “Maggie’s here.”
The cries ceased and his sleep became calm. She stroked his hair back from his forehead with a gentle hand. She was suddenly engulfed with such a wave of love for him that she felt frightened. How could she maintain an easy, friendly manner towards him with such overwhelming love?
She went back to bed wondering why she should be cursed with such intense feelings. Such love was for poets, not for plain Maggie Partlett.
♦
Every morning they awoke, Fell and Maggie hoped that the stifling weather would have broken, but the n
ext day was as close and muggy as the one before. At least at the beginning of the heatwave there had been days with a slight refreshing breeze.
They had both slept late.
“It seems odd,” said Fell as they set out for the library.
“What does?”
“All last night. Like some awful dream. In fact I had an awful nightmare during the night that men were chasing me to shoot me and then a beautiful woman came into my dream and said, ‘Shhh, it’s all right, Fell’.”
“What did she look like, this woman?”
“Blessed if I remember.”
They walked into the library. Maggie was relieved to see that the pretty librarian was not on duty. Instead there was a middle-aged, motherly woman at the desk. They asked for the voters’ roll and took it over to a desk and sat side by side and began to scan the names, street by street.
“This could take all day,” mourned Maggie, “and I wish it wasn’t bound so that we could take a page each.”
They searched on and then decided to break for a quick lunch.
After buying sandwiches and eating them on a bench outside the library, they returned to the voters’ roll.
It was approaching five o’clock and Fell was just pausing to rub his tired eyes when Maggie cried triumphantly, “Got it!”
“Where?”
“Right here. Jubilee Street. Number ten.”
“I saw a Jubilee Street recently,” said Fell. “I know, it was when we were walking to the railway station. It’s one of those roads just before you get to the station. Shall we go now? Or leave it until tomorrow?”
“May as well get it over with. We’ll take the car.”
They drove in silence towards Jubilee Street, each wanting to forget abut the whole thing now, but not wishing to back down in front of the other. Despite the heat, the nights were drawing in. Maggie no longer relished the idea of being out in the streets of Buss after dark.
“Turn left here,” said Fell. “This is Jubilee Street and there’s number ten.” Maggie stopped the car. The houses had been built for the railway workers in the last century, a row of red brick cottages. They all looked well-kept.
“But no signs of great wealth,” said Fell as they got out of the car.
