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Last Act of All

Page 23

by Aline Templeton


  He nodded, retreating sadly. As he reached the door, she added, with some measure of compunction, ‘In any case, I’m not fit company for anyone tonight. I wouldn’t like you to think I was ungrateful for all your help, but I’m in a very bad mood, best left to myself.’

  He brightened immediately. ‘If you change your mind,’ he said with a wave, and she saw him scuttle off across the square, as if anxious that his linens might be scorching.

  She turned back to her files. Once she had done this, she could go home. But home to what? Another inquisition from Poppy, a solitary Scotch and a TV dinner. Beef carbonnade…

  *

  ‘You must have been very sure I would come.’ Frances settled back into one of the big leather armchairs with a groan that was half-pain, half-pleasure as she relaxed her aching shoulders.

  The bottle had been standing on a side-table, already open, and he was pouring it into two goblets. The beef stew, on a hotplate beside it with a dish of baked potatoes, was sending out an aroma so exquisitely sensuous that she almost groaned again.

  ‘You would not expect me to be so crude as to suggest that when a lady says no she sometimes means yes. But you had, it seemed to me, the air of one in need of a confidant, and I, as you know, am the very persona of discretion.’

  ‘Even if The Sun offered you £100,000?’

  ‘Sadly, my dear Frances, at my advanced age large sums of money cease to have any great attraction. Tempus edax rerum — and when time has devoured the appetites which these funds might be expected to feed... But talking of appetites, may I help you to some of this?’

  ‘I thought you’d never ask.’ Frances eyed the heaping plateful hungrily. ‘That’s wonderful.’

  He served himself, then, sitting down with the air of one accustomed to bringing meetings to order, Now, first of all, tell me about that poor child. I’ve been thinking about her, and about the whole sad situation, all day.’

  ‘Stephanie’s remarkable. She’s not hard or uncaring, but she’s certainly tough. When I called in at the hospital she was eating a hearty meal and inclined to be indignant at her own naivety.’

  ‘She hadn’t suspected Edward?’

  ‘Not for an instant. She had always compared him to her father, I would guess, and had him pegged as a rather wimpish figure. She was even fond of him, in a slightly patronizing way, and of course she had come to depend on him quite a bit when Helena was in prison.

  ‘She drank the hot chocolate he had so thoughtfully brought up for her without a qualm, so it was only luck that saved her. The doctor said that when Edward emptied in the contents of the capsules and stirred it, quite a lot would sink into the sludge at the bottom. In fact it made her so sleepy that she didn’t even finish it. But even so, if Helena hadn’t found her…’

  She fell silent, looking into the fire.

  ‘And Helena? How is she?’

  ‘Not too good. They’ve got her in the private wing under sedation at the moment, but they think she’ll need a lot of psychiatric help. With all she’s gone through, it’s hardly surprising. She seemed almost punch-drunk, when she was trying to explain what had happened.’

  He nodded, but did not pursue the subject. ‘I think, you know, one tended to think of Edward rather as poor Stephanie did, though I was always aware of quite a formidable determination when there was something he wanted. Would you have got him, do you think, without this last mad effort?’

  ‘We were on our way to take him in, after I’d managed to get Martha Batemen to talk, on your suggestion. That’s what makes the whole thing so galling.’

  She allowed him to top up her glass, then had the satisfaction of seeing him, for once, totally confounded, as she told him Martha’s tale.

  ‘There are the families, now you mention it,’ he said slowly. ‘The Edes — a couple of them have done time for assault, and there are one or two others where a violent temper runs in the family, like red hair. But I had no idea... And to think that I believed I knew something about them.’ His tone was vexed. ‘Even Jane has never given me the slightest hint of this.’

  ‘You’re a foreigner too,’ she said brutally. ‘They may tolerate you, but you’re on the outside, by definition, because you aren’t privy to that sort of information. No one needs to be told, because they’ve always known. And they would view talking about it as breaking a tribal taboo. You almost feel they have different gods — ugly, primitive, powerful ones.’

  He was eying her sceptically, and she was defensive. ‘Oh, I know it sounds whimsical. But I came on the vicar yesterday, praying after the Sunday service, and it gave me cold shivers. He seemed overwhelmed by a sense of evil gathering about him. If that was a response to a spiritual atmosphere—’

  He shook his head. ‘They’re not as heathen as you think, you know. Some will have suffered very troubled minds in these last few months, and they will have gone to him — told him something, but not enough. He’s been under a lot of strain, and that wife of his is more of a hindrance than a help-meet.’

  ‘You’re probably right. It’s the atmosphere of the place — it makes one fanciful. And I’m feeling upset about the whole thing anyway. Poor Coppins is taking the flak, but I can’t help feeling I sparked it all into action when I came to see Helena. Openers for the last act, if you like.’

  ‘Coincidence,’ he said crisply. ‘Nothing more than a curtain-raiser. It was bound to happen whenever Lilian announced that she was going to sell.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it was. And I suppose that even if Edward had done nothing further we’d have reached him sooner or later, given enough leg-work. He was always an obvious suspect, but then his alibi seemed rock solid. We questioned Willie Comberton twice, you know, and he was adamant about the time on his clock—’

  ‘Willie Comberton’s clock! But everyone knows—’

  ‘Don’t you start! Everyone has known everything, all along, except the poor benighted fuzz, but no one has thought to mention it. It’s been like working in the dark with sheets draped over the furniture.’

  ‘And have you managed to twitch them off now?’

  ‘Oh, Radley’s been extremely frank. He’s the despair of his lawyers – he’s wanted to tell us all about it.’

  ‘Boasting?’

  ‘No, not that, exactly. He just seems to think that once he’s explained it properly, no one could possibly blame him for what he did.’

  ‘Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner.’

  ‘Something like that. Apparently, on the day of Neville’s murder, he walked along to Comberton’s house with Helena’s watch, which had broken. Then at two-forty on Willie’s clock he went out through his back garden and up through the wood beyond to Radnesfield House, which explains why Sandra Daley didn’t see him from her window. Neville was, as it happened, in his study alone; they argued, then, when Neville turned round to get plans for the new estate out of his desk — simply to gloat, as far as I can make out — Edward seized the poker and struck him down. Then of course, he returned the same way, met the vicar, and there was his alibi, intact. Quite straightforward.’

  Tilson stared at her. ‘But how could he possibly have set that up — Neville alone, ready to be killed with a handy poker? I can understand the rest of the planning, all quite well thought-out, but—’

  Frances smiled wryly. ‘There wasn’t any planning. That was the irony of the whole thing — it was just the way it happened. Edward, you see, famously loses his temper — it’s what the Radleys do from time to time. But it passes quickly, and then he’s quite calm and normal and, indeed, detached from what he has done. He went up through Willie’s garden, not to escape observation, but because that was the route he had used since he was a child. He didn’t reckon on Willie’s clock providing an alibi; he hadn’t thought about it till we asked him, because he hadn’t planned to kill Fielding. He simply lost his temper when the man, as he saw it, refused to see reason. He wasn’t even being clever about fingerprints; he just happened to be wearing gloves becau
se it was a cold day.’

  ‘Then how in the world did he expect to get away with it?’

  Frances reflected, choosing her words carefully. ‘I think, you know, he believed at some level that within the village, no matter what he did, nothing could touch him. His ways were their ways, and as long as no one got in to dig too deeply, they were all able to cover up for each other. It might be quite instructive to analyse any accidental deaths over the last thirty years and see if any of them have the hallmarks of violence. Wife-beating, as far as I can make out, is endemic, and accepted as a normal part of life.

  ‘And then, of course, Radley had killed before, on impulse, when he fell out with his brother, and it had been made all right for him — very much all right, because he got exactly what he wanted. Insofar as he thought about it at all, I think he felt that here, in Radnesfield, the magic would work again. It almost did.’

  ‘But Helena! He seemed quite devoted to her — how could he let her take the blame?’

  ‘Now that is quite a curious piece of double thinking. He believes it to have been entirely her own fault; in fact, I’m not sure he’s ever forgiven her. If she had gone into the witness box and admitted guilt and penitence, as her lawyer recommended, it could have been a suspended sentence.’

  ‘Ergo, she deserved to go to prison.’ Tilson shook his head. ‘I hear what you are saying, but I can’t quite take it in.’

  ‘You should be used to it. They all behave like that around here, with that sort of Alice in Wonderland moral logic. Martha Bateman — but don’t let me get started on her twisted psychology, or we’ll be here all night. And I’m exhausted.’

  Replete, she yawned and stretched uninhibitedly. Tilson looked alarmed.

  ‘Now, you mustn’t go without telling me about Lilian.’

  ‘Lilian. Nothing to tell, there, really. That one, I don’t think we could ever have pinned on him, if he weren’t behaving as if he thought he should get a medal for doing it. The perfect crime, that was. He saw his chance, when Helena took Lilian to lie down; like another half-dozen people, he heard them talking, and of course he’d been on the look-out for his chance ever since Mrs Bateman had told him about Lilian’s plans in the morning. It wasn’t murder in a homicidal fit of temper, like Neville’s; it was quite cold-blooded. He heard the waitress say she was asleep so, with a quick look round, he slipped in, held the cushion over her face, and went out through the garden door after checking there was no one to see him. He went back in through the kitchen door, which is only a few yards away, and apart from that made no effort to cover his tracks — and basically there weren’t any.

  ‘Where he did fall down hopelessly was in the attempt on Stephanie’s life. And there, you see, he had tried frantically and quite incompetently to make it look like suicide. He told Helena that Stephanie was in a state the night before, when Helena was too doped to react, in an effort to set the scene. He said he had left the pills accidentally where she had taken them, but the mug on the table was full of powder dregs, while the capsules he had emptied — leaving fingerprint evidence all over them — were in the bin downstairs.

  ‘So he wasn’t clever at all, just lucky — if you could call it that. Certainly the devil looked after his own.’

  ‘Will he be fit to plead?’

  Frances shrugged. ‘His lawyer will strongly deny it, of course, and bring in any number of shrinks to expound in bewildering scientific detail the theory of hereditary insanity. They may be right, at that, but the prosecution can point out that all his efforts had good sound motives — solidly financial, in two cases, after all — and since his conduct is otherwise rational, he may be judged as fit to serve a prison sentence as the next man.’

  ‘Either way, I cherish little hope that he will be incarcerated for any realistic length of time.’ Tilson sighed. ‘The older I become, the less I understand the judicial system. Do you think he’ll kill again?’

  ‘Who knows? I don’t believe there will be meaningful rehabilitation, if you want the jargon. Perhaps this whole thing will tip him over the edge into insanity, or perhaps if his ancestral cess pit becomes an ordinary, not-very-attractive small commuter town, the focus of his obsession may be removed. We’ve played our part, anyway, and tomorrow the show will be somewhere else.

  ‘No, no thank you. I won’t have another glass of wine. I’m driving, and it’s time I did. I shall go home and have a long, scented bath in an attempt to get the stench of this whole thing out of my nostrils.’

  She got to her feet, yawning again. ‘Well, I certainly did the talking tonight. I hope you’re satisfied.’

  ‘My dear child, I have been honoured by your confidence, and feel positively sated after having the itch of curiosity so royally assuaged.’

  Frances sighed. ‘At least that’s a job finished, even if a botched job.’

  ‘Don’t blame yourself. You may have felt involved in events, but in Radnesfield that is a delusion. You are merely watching them take place from the other side of the glass.’

  She looked at him curiously. ‘Will you go on living here, after all this?’

  He did not hesitate. ‘Oh yes. You accused me of social voyeurism, once, in a telling image involving slugs. But with the merciless approach of second childishness, one recovers one’s boyhood fascination with the most extraordinary pets. I think I shall enjoy watching their adaptation to a new habitat.’

  He blinked at her benevolently, but suddenly the sharp bright eyes seemed cold, somehow inhuman, the hedgehog nose almost snuffling already in the anticipation of a succulent reward for this scrabbling in mud and dirt. She grabbed her coat and bag in almost indecent haste, and made for the door.

  ‘I really must go. Tomorrow we have Lilian’s inquest, as well as ordeal by Press and television. And tonight I’ll have ordeal by mother as well; she hates to see me mixed up in these sordid situations. She can’t understand why I don’t teach music in a nice girls’ school, and to tell you the truth I’m not sure I know why, either.’

  She thanked him profusely as she took her leave, but could not quite bring herself to bestow the kiss on the cheek he so obviously expected. None the less, he waved her off with undiminished good humour, the light streaming from the doorway behind him outlining his short, stocky figure and the aureole of fuzzy white hair.

  The street was deserted as she drove through Radnesfield for the last time, the lighted windows close-curtained and the pub in darkness.

  She groped for a cassette to slot into the player. It didn’t matter what; anything to blot out the Radnesfield fantasia which still beat so remorselessly through her brain.

  But as she reached the main road, the car’s headlights picked up the fingerposts at the staggered crossroads, and she paused for a moment to study them. ‘Radnesfield’, one said, the other ‘Dusebury’, pointing over the road in the other direction.

  ‘That was the crossroads in our life,’ Helena had said once, ‘when Neville chose the Radnesfield turning.’

  Would it have made any difference, anyway? Perhaps Dusebury was a pretty village, with a green and a duck-pond with white ducks, and an old grey stone pub full of jolly villagers, and the whole thing was just a freakish chance. Fielding had seen it as destiny, but perhaps he was no more than a discarded match tossed into a powder keg.

  Or had they brought it upon themselves? Nasty Neville and Helena, victim and martyr — had their sick little dramatic creations taken on an evil life of their own?

  There was never going to be an answer to that question. Turning the music up even louder, she drove away.

  If you enjoyed reading Last Act of All you might be interested in Past Praying For by Aline Templeton, also published by Endeavour Press.

  Extract from Past Praying For by Aline Templeton

  Prologue

  Christmas 1967

  The huge depression that settled down over Europe brought with it snow – soft, wet, dangerous stuff that clung like a damp sheet as it spread itself down into Northern It
aly, over the Alps and Switzerland, Austria, France, then at last across the Channel into Britain on Christmas Eve.

  But the man who stood bleakly at the upstairs window of the drawing room of the big house was not considering the prospect of a white Christmas. Giles stared unseeing into the snow-flecked darkness, the lines about his mouth taut with suffering. It was eight months now. Surely in eight months the raw agony should have subsided into some manageable ache.

  Restless in his mental torment, he turned. Mrs Beally, the housekeeper, had set up a Christmas tree, a poor puny travesty of a thing, its artificial limbs decked with gaudy lights and cheap ornaments. He looked at it, but saw instead, as if he could touch it, the tree that had stood there last year, and the years before that; huge, towering kings of the forest, hung with chains of popcorn and little patchwork dolls and proclaiming home and family and the joy of Christmas in a triumphal procession stretching back over twenty-four years.

  He shook his head impatiently to clear his vision, and when he looked again the little tree with its tawdry finery seemed to symbolize all that he had lost.

  He had conscientiously, or perhaps desperately, finished his hospital paperwork. He had nothing left to do, and tomorrow yawned empty before him, a chasm of misery as black as an open grave.

  Gervase had had the right idea. He usually did, particularly when it came to his own comfort.

  It was hard, though, for Giles to view the boy dispassionately. He was tall, blond and athletic, and managed his Oxford finals without neglecting either his sport or his social life. He had come up to London that autumn to St Theresa’s, the teaching hospital where his father was a highly successful consultant, to complete his medical training.

  Melody had been more objective, viewing her big handsome son with some amusement. But then, Melody was alive with humour, from her taffy-coloured curls to her size three feet, commonly encased in pastel suede shoes with three-inch heels.

 

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