This Way Out

by Sheila Radley

  Derek sweated for a few days, afraid that the man might ring him at home, or even turn up at the Brickyard, with his wolfish grin and a renewal of his monstrous suggestion. But nothing like that happened, and by the end of the following week Derek was too much occupied with his work to concern himself any further.

  His current preoccupation was with a presentation he was due to make at an investment conference in the west of his region, near Peterborough. The conference was being held at an old country hotel where he and Christine had spent the first night of their honeymoon, the Haywain at Nenford. They had returned for a happy weekend when Christine was carrying Laurie, and had said then that they must go there more often; but the birth of their handicapped daughter and the continuing responsibility of caring for her had made further self-indulgence impossible.

  Christine’s eyes had brightened when Derek told her that this conference was being held at the Haywain. He had thought immediately that they might reactivate the plan for their long-postponed weekend, but he said nothing because he was afraid that the small village with its cottages of local stone, once an important river crossing and a staging post on the old Great North Road, might have been spoiled by modern development. But as soon as he turned off the busy by-pass that had left the village backwatered, he saw that everything was still as he remembered it.

  The hotel itself, a handsome stone-built early eighteenth-century coaching inn, high-gabled and high-chimneyed, looked just the same on the outside. But the interior that had creaked at its dusty joints sixteen years earlier had been discreetly renovated. It was now distinctly upmarket. Checking the tariff, Derek saw that a double room with antique furniture and a four-poster bed would cost a lot more than he’d expected. But hang the expense, Christine would love it. Come the summer, he determined, he would bring her here for a second honeymoon.

  Always providing, of course, that she was well enough when the time came. And that her mother didn’t make such an issue of being left on her own that Christine would decide that it wasn’t worth the hassle.

  Derek had made a point of arriving at the hotel early on the evening before the conference began, so that he could look round before the place became crowded. Having bought a drink at the bar, he carried it out into the garden. The previous week’s warm weather had gone as suddenly as it came and this evening was back to normal for late April, long and light but sunless and too chilly to enjoy. Even so, Derek retraced the paths he and Christine had taken on their summer honeymoon, drawn irresistibly to the far end of the walled gardens by the smell and the slap of river water.

  It was just the same now as it had been then. Or it would be, when the sun shone, and narcissi and tulips gave way to delphiniums and roses, and the riverside vegetation grew tall. Parking his glass, he leaned his elbows on the wall overlooking the river and smiled to himself as he saw again the old stone bridge with the nine or ten arches that carried the road across the water, recollecting how, newly married, he had run the length of the parapet, leaping across from cut-water to cut-water, showing off in front of Christine.

  And she had shown off too, posing on the parapet while he took a photograph of her wearing the mini-skirt that was then the fashion and demonstrating that she had a very fine pair of legs.

  Not that he had ever been a dedicated leg-man. For young hopefuls of his generation there had been legs wherever you looked, some of them decidedly unalluring. But though girls in those days had displayed their legs – in tights, of course – almost all the way, toplessness hadn’t been invented. Perhaps, he meditated, that was why he had always found the female bosom so mysteriously attractive; and why Christine’s loss had devastated him almost as much as it had her.

  ‘Small world!’ said a friendly voice behind him.

  Derek turned, expecting to renew a business acquaintance, and found himself looking at the jockey of a man who had been at the wheel of the 1959 Rolls-Royce in the traffic jam near Newmarket.

  The moral guilt he had felt immediately after their encounter came flooding back, making him belligerent. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he demanded.

  The man took no offence. ‘Thought I recognized your back view as you left the bar,’ he said. ‘I’ve stopped for a break on my way home from a car auction at Retford. I’m in the trade, didn’t I tell you? I suppose you’re here on business – I gather there’s a conference tomorrow. To tell you the truth I haven’t got round to doing anything about my life insurance –’ he corrected himself with a chuckle: ‘life assurance I mean – yet. But I certainly intend to. Look, I’ve still got your card.’

  He plucked it from the top pocket of his navy blue blazer. ‘Derek Cartwright,’ he read out, apparently deciphering the deleted name for the first time. He smiled, offering friendship. ‘My name’s Packer.’

  Derek instantly turned aside and took a long slow swig from his glass, so that if the man held out his hand he wouldn’t see it. He didn’t want to talk to Packer, and he certainly didn’t want to get to know him. But he realized, now they were at closer quarters, that his guess about occupation had been well off course. Packer was insufficiently weathered for a jockey; his face and his hands were too smooth. A used-car salesman sounded much more likely.

  ‘I suppose you drive a company car,’ the man went on amiably. ‘But have you ever thought of getting a runabout for your wife? I’ve got an option on a very clean little –’

  He stopped abruptly and slapped his curly head in dismay. ‘Oh, I’m sorry – what must you think of me? You told me your wife has cancer. How is she?’

  ‘Improving, thank you,’ said Derek stiffly. ‘And she already has her own car. Excuse me, I’m going in for dinner.’

  Packer didn’t move. With or without intent he was standing immediately in front of Derek, blocking the garden path.

  The man was younger than him, and well-muscled. But Derek was fit; a former hockey-player of county standard, he still took part in the game as a referee. He had a considerable height and weight advantage over Packer, and he would have no trouble at all in shoving him out of his way.

  On the other hand, decent men don’t use physical violence, particularly against those smaller than themselves.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he repeated loudly. Packer, affecting not to hear, continued the one-sided conversation.

  ‘Glad about your wife … I only wish I could say the same about my father-in-law.’ Horizontal furrows ploughed deeply across the man’s forehead. ‘It’s grim, for a person to be in Sidney’s condition without any hope of improvement. You saw him, didn’t you? My wife told me that you helped her move him. What did you think of the old fellow?’

  At their previous encounter, Packer’s attitude towards his wife’s father had seemed to be one of dislike and dismissal. Now, he sounded so genuinely concerned that Derek began to wonder whether he had mistaken the man.

  Surely no one who had proposed setting up a conspiracy to murder could behave as calmly as Packer was behaving today? So perhaps he hadn’t meant it at all. Perhaps, thought Derek uneasily, the idea had sprung from the dark workings of his own unconscious. What he had instinctively interpreted as a serious proposition might well have been put forward by Packer as nothing more than a slightly off joke.

  Not that the old man’s stroke was a joking matter. But then again, anyone faced with the kind of burden that Packer had taken on when he married might find that sour laughter was the only possible alternative to despair. Acknowledging it, Derek felt obliged to be more civil. He relaxed his get-out-of-my-way stance and turned aside to rest an elbow on the wall while he finished his drink.

  ‘I was shattered when I saw the state your father-in-law is in,’ he admitted. ‘I’d had no idea what a stroke could mean. It’s the fact that he knows how helpless he is that’s so desperate.’

  ‘D’you think he does know?’

  ‘Certain of it. You can see the terrible frustration in his eye, poor devil. God, what an existence …’

  Packer came to stan
d beside him and they both leaned on the stone wall, silent for a few moments, looking down at the river. The thick green water, unable to catch any light from the overcast sky, was darkly uninviting. A cold breath rose from its depths as it went slopping past. Derek, absorbed in the imagined horror of being left helpless by a stroke yet fully aware of his condition, found himself shrugging to ward off a shiver.

  ‘If I were in poor old Sidney’s state,’ said Packer at his shoulder, ‘I’d rather be dead.’

  ‘Much rather,’ Derek agreed fervently.

  ‘Ironic, isn’t it?’ said Packer. ‘If we were to let an old animal suffer like that, we’d have the RSPCA after us. But then, we wouldn’t let it suffer, would we? I wouldn’t, and I bet you wouldn’t either. We’d do the merciful thing, and put it out of its misery.’

  Derek didn’t answer. He was watching something half-floating in the water about fifteen yards downstream, something pale and inflated, wedged among the burgeoning rushes. Nothing significant; rural litter, possibly a plastic fertilizer sack.

  But it had revived a childhood memory. When he was twelve or thirteen, he and his friend Mike had set out on their bicycles from Chelmsford with the intention of tracing the river Chelmer to its source in deepest rural Essex. They never got there, because they were easily distracted. And one of the distractions on their route that summer’s day had been a mill pond, somewhere near Felsted.

  As they’d mucked about, over the tops of their shoes in water and mud, they noticed something bobbing among the waterlilies on the other side of the pond. They couldn’t reach it. Curious to know what it was – much bigger than a football, and greyish in colour; floating like a ball and yet so elongated that one end was submerged – they had begun to fling stones at it.

  It was just about at the limit of their throw, and most of their shots simply made waves. The thing lurched and swung with the movement of the water, but it remained in the same position, as though the submerged end was anchored. When they did score a direct hit, the stone struck with a dull thump and bounced off.

  Unwilling simply to abandon their find, they agreed without discussion that if they couldn’t retrieve it they would sink it. Whooping and shouting, they rushed about the thistly field looking for larger, more effective stones.

  It was Derek who found the half-brick, beside the five-barred gate in the hedgerow where they had propped their bicycles. Kicking off his muddy shoes and rolling up his splashed trousers, he had waded out among the reeds until he was nearly up to his knees in water. He could recall, even now, the foetid warmth of the mud that squished up between his toes as, swinging his arm to increase the momentum, he had hurled the missile across the pond with all his strength.

  The brick fell with a mightly splash. It was such a near miss, and it made the thing shift so violently, that Derek knew he must have scored an underwater hit. Both boys had jumped and cheered, thinking he had freed it, because the floating end immediately reared up out of the water, fully into their view.

  What he had seen, then, was that the thing had appendages. They looked incongruously small on that bloated body, but they were unmistakable: a stump of a tail and two stiff legs, the hindquarters of a dead dog, anchored in the shallow water by whatever weight had been attached to its collar before it was thrown into the mill pond to drown.

  Perhaps it was an old dog that had been ‘put out of its misery’ by someone unable or unwilling to afford a vet. Or possibly just an unwanted dog, callously disposed of. Recalling the whole incident – the thud of their stones on the drum-tight skin, followed by the rearing-up of that obscenely gaseous body, the sight of those pathetic paws, the stench of decay that had momentarily corrupted the breeze – Derek felt his stomach lurch; just as it had done on that long-ago morning when, half-sobbing with the pity and the horror of it, he had jammed on his shoes, and he and Mike had jumped on their bicycles and fled.

  Now, leaning over another river in the unsought company of this man whose smile would widen from amiable to unpleasant, Derek fancied that he could catch again that same rotten-sweet smell. This time, a whiff of contagion.

  He stood up abruptly. ‘If you’re trying to put a proposition to me,’ he said, tight-voiced with anger, ‘the answer is most emphatically no.’

  Packer looked reproachful. ‘Not even to help a man in poor old Sidney’s condition?’

  ‘You’re not talking about help, you’re talking about murder. And I am having nothing to do with it – or with you. If you feel so strongly about ending your father-in-law’s life, do it yourself. But don’t try to involve me.’

  Derek elbowed the smaller man aside and began to stride back through the darkening gardens, where narcissi gleamed white beside the stone-paved paths. The lights were on in the hotel; bank managers and stockbrokers and solicitors and accountants would be assembling for tomorrow’s conference, and he had never before felt so eager for their company.

  He thought he had shaken Packer off. But the man had simply dodged round a yellow forsythia and was now blocking the way again.

  ‘I can’t risk doing it myself, Derek,’ he protested, low-voiced. ‘You know that. The police would suspect me straight away. Just as they’d suspect you if you killed your mother-in-law.’

  ‘I have no intention of killing her.’

  ‘You’ve thought about it, though. You told me so.’

  Derek cursed himself for having been so unguarded. ‘I was joking,’ he said.

  ‘Come off it!’ said Packer. ‘Of course you’ve thought about getting rid of your mother-in-law. Who hasn’t, at one time or another?’

  ‘What if I have? I wouldn’t ever do anything about it. I couldn’t. I couldn’t bring myself to do it.’

  ‘But that’s what makes this system so brilliant! Don’t you see? You don’t have to do anything to your mother-in-law. You just arrange to be somewhere else at a certain time, and then leave the job to me.’

  ‘As simple as that?’ said Derek with heavy sarcasm. ‘Or would there be a little matter of my being expected to kill your father-in-law for you in return?’

  ‘Well yes. Naturally.’ Packer seemed impervious to sarcasm. ‘But I’d fix it up for you, I’d make all the arrangements –’

  Derek turned away in disgust. ‘You’re mad,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not, you know. You’ll be the one who’s mad. Mad with yourself for not having jumped at this offer, if your poor wife dies young and leaves you lumbered with her old Ma for the next twenty-five years –’

  ‘Damn you,’ said Derek, slowly and quietly, though rage was swelling inside him until he felt that his ribs would crack. ‘Get out of my way – get out and stay out, you little turd.’

  What happened next was entirely unpremeditated. Afterwards, as Derek held his throbbing right hand under the cold tap in his hotel bathroom, he acknowledged that effective action is much more difficult to take in real life than old films had led him to believe. What he had so instinctively launched had not been a clean, straight-to-the-jaw punch, but a hopelessly inexpert haymaker that felled Packer only because it caught him off balance. It had, he suspected, done more harm to his own hand than to the side of Packer’s head.

  Even so, Derek felt a considerable satisfaction. It was good, very good, to recall the man’s look of pained surprise as he sprawled on his back in a flowerbed. Well worth a badly bruised hand.

  Yes, he felt pleased with what he’d done. Greatly relieved, too, by the knowledge that the conspiracy to murder hadn’t after all been his own idea. It wasn’t his unconscious that had put forward the proposition, it was that evil little bastard Packer. If ever a man deserved to be knocked down, it was him.

  It wasn’t until after midnight, when he lay sleepless, that Derek realized that he had just abandoned the inhibitions of a decent, honourable lifetime. He had used – and justified the use of – violence against someone smaller than himself.

  He had no sympathy for his victim. Far from it. With renewed unease he began to consider the possi
bility that the man, though comparatively small, couldn’t be written off as proportionately weak.

  Couldn’t be written off at all.

  Worrying about it through the early hours, Derek felt sure that he hadn’t seen the last of Packer. He sensed, obscurely, that the man had somehow tricked him; had gained an advantage by deliberately tempting him to make that unprecedented physical assault.

  Though it seemed that he had won this particular encounter, Derek had a guilty premonition that if the attack on his principles were to be renewed, he might yet succumb to the ultimate temptation.

  Chapter Six

  ‘In here, Dee.’

  Stretching a smile over his dark thoughts, Derek followed the sound of his wife’s voice and found her in her work-room. It was officially the dining-room, but except for major family gatherings they always ate in the kitchen, and the large dining-table was an ideal place for Christine to spread her furnishing fabrics.

  Like the other main rooms in the Edwardian-built Brickyard this was large and light, with a squared bay window occupying one wall. The room was at the back of the house, facing west over the modest dip in the landscape that was the valley of the Wash brook.

  Although the long gravelled yard at the front of the house abutted on the village street, with its dwellings and shops and comings and goings, from the back windows there wasn’t a building to be seen within half a mile. This duality was one of the features of the Brickyard that had particularly attracted the Cartwrights when they first saw the property. They enjoyed being a part of the community, and yet they valued the privacy the house gave them.

  They also enjoyed the view. The back windows overlooked a down-sloping lawn where, at this season, clumps of daffodils blew beneath a pear tree in full blossom. The lawn was bounded by a tall old hedge, bustling with birds, and in the hedge was their private gate leading to a field path where they walked the dog.