Derek knew better. And now that they were in such close proximity, it seemed to him that Packer exuded the latent strength of some half-tamed animal. Glancing at the small man’s comparatively large hands, and at the unusually thick growth of hair that crawled from under his shirt cuffs and along the backs of his fingers, Derek felt a moment’s revulsion on behalf of the magnificent young woman Packer had married. No wonder she had looked unhappy. God, if only he could escape the man’s influence and go straight home to his own wife –
But if he did so, he’d be back to square one. And having come so far, mentally and emotionally, could he really bear to give up this opportunity to get rid of his mother-in-law? He tightened his grip on the steering wheel, trying to steady himself while conflicting wishes see-sawed in his mind.
‘I blew it, did I?’ the man was saying in an interested voice. ‘How did that happen?’ His tone changed: ‘Who saw me, and where?’
It had seemed such a good idea, at two a.m. Derek had reasoned that the fact that he hadn’t met anyone on the field path didn’t mean that no one had seen Packer earlier in the day. The man could well have been spotted without knowing it. He certainly couldn’t disprove that he had been seen. Got him, Derek had thought.
But now, as he explained that two of his neighbours had noticed a short, dark, curly-haired stranger walking along the path at the far end of their gardens, he felt less sure. Packer continued his cross-examination.
‘Short, dark, and curly-haired, eh? Was that how you described me to them, when you asked them if they’d seen me?’
Derek scorned the trap. ‘Of course I didn’t ask them! It was my neighbours who mentioned you to me, precisely because it’s so unusual to see any stranger walking along the path. They both described you, wondering if I knew you – and of course I said I didn’t. But you must realize that this makes the whole thing impossible.’
Packer was looking at him with what seemed like unqualified approval. ‘Well, well … I took you for an honest man, Derek – and here you are, lying with the best of us! That’s good. I wouldn’t work with you if you couldn’t think on your feet. But –’ His expression hardened as he jabbed his forefinger viciously into Derek’s ribs, making him wince ‘– I won’t work, either, with any man who’s fool enough to underestimate me. If you want my help – and you do – don’t ever call me an idiot again.’
Despite the fact that the window was half open, Derek felt a build-up of heat and tension inside the car. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. ‘But you can’t possibly be sure you weren’t seen, either on the path or somewhere else in the village,’ he argued. ‘How can we risk it?’
‘I’m sure,’ said Packer, ‘because I didn’t go anywhere near the path. I didn’t need to. I used to be in the Army – and after spending four years of my life training infantrymen, I should know how to use an Ordnance Survey map. I’ve studied – and since dumped – a large-scale map showing every detail of your village, including the footpaths. It also named larger properties such as the Brickyard. I drove along the main street just once yesterday morning, so that I could get a quick look at your house. Then I parked the car down by the bridge on the road to Doddenham, and used binoculars to check the route of the lane and identify your back garden gate.’
‘You must have been seen while you were doing that,’ insisted Derek. ‘It’s a quiet road, and the traffic is local. Somebody would have noticed you.’
‘They did. Two cars, one butcher’s van and a tractor crossed the bridge while I was there, and all the drivers gave me a glance. But shall I tell you what they saw? An old Ford Fiesta, with number plates that I’ve since changed; and a scruffy man hung about with binoculars and a camera, wearing a weatherproof jacket and a woolly hat. They saw a bird-watcher – satisfied?’
Derek was silenced. His head ached with conflict. Part of his brain was still trying to escape Packer, but another – perhaps the greater part – was beginning to respect the man’s cunning.
‘Don’t think I don’t know you’re trying to wriggle out of it,’ went on Packer. ‘But I’m not forcing you to stay parked here, am I? You’re a free agent. If you don’t want to co-operate, you can say so and drive off.
‘But you could have done that ten minutes ago, couldn’t you? I gave you the opportunity when you bolted. You didn’t take it, though. You deliberately sat here and let me come to you. Why? Because you know you need me.’
Acknowledging it, Derek lowered his head and abandoned the conflict.
When Packer spoke again, he sounded almost benevolent. ‘You’re a lucky man, Derek, d’you know that? I mean, to have met me.
‘True, it wouldn’t have been difficult for you to find someone else who shared your problem. There must be an army of middle-aged people out there, seething with frustration and resentment because they’re hog-tied by ancient dependants. Medical science has got a hell of a lot to answer for, in my opinion. Where’s the sense in old people being kept alive at the expense of younger people’s freedom?
‘All the same, your chances of finding a fellow-sufferer who had the guts to do something about it would have been pretty small. And even if you’d found somebody, the pair of you would almost certainly have botched it. An operation like this needs meticulous planning – and luckily for you I’m a professional.
‘I’ve already planned both phases of the operation. All you have to do is exactly what I tell you. Oh – and remember this: the Army taught me how to plan, and it also taught me how to be a bastard to anyone who doesn’t give me one hundred per cent support. If you let me down, in any way, the rest of your life won’t be worth living. Understood?’
The knot in Derek’s stomach tightened. He sat rigid behind the steering wheel, staring straight ahead. The situation was unreal. He couldn’t believe that he was actually there, in his own car, on the familiar open space of Angel Hill between the creeper-covered Georgian façade of the Angel hotel and the Great Gate of the former Abbey, with cars neatly parked all round him and an ice-cream van doing a sunny day’s trade ten yards away, allowing this poisonous little man to talk him into committing murder.
Whatever Packer said, Derek knew that he couldn’t do it.
It wasn’t any longer a question of trying to wriggle out of the conspiracy. The conflict in his mind had resolved itself in Packer’s favour. But the actual commission of murder was another matter, one that he’d already contemplated and dismissed.
‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘It’s no good – I know I can’t.’
‘Can’t what? I’m not asking you to do anything, initially, except keep out of the way. Where’s the problem?’
‘I’m talking about … the other end of the operation. I couldn’t bring myself to kill anybody. I certainly couldn’t touch that old man.’
‘You don’t need to touch him,’ said Packer, benevolent again. ‘I knew I couldn’t rely on you for that, so I’ve made your job as simple as possible. Sidney’s a diabetic, and he’s going to slip into a coma one day when my wife and I are out and there’s only an untrained minder with him. I’ll explain the details when you need to know them. Basically – to set your mind at rest – all you’ll have to do is switch his plastic beaker of orange juice for one laced with insulin. Easy. No problem.’
As far as he could recollect, Derek had never before in his life bitten his fingernails. He wouldn’t have known how to go about it. Now, deprived of both willpower and initiative, he found himself instinctively trying to cram the nails of all four fingers of his right hand between his clenched teeth. He removed them long enough to say, ‘Yes, but –’
‘Look,’ said Packer: ‘there’s nothing selfish about what we’re planning, is there? We’re not doing this for our own benefit. Poor old Sidney’s a burden to himself as well as to my wife. You said yourself how wretched he looks.
‘And as for your mother-in-law – she’s already lived out her own life. It’s not right that she should be battening on the two of you in her old age, when y
our wife is fighting against cancer. Any loving husband would put his wife first in those circumstances. Just remember that you’re doing it for her sake.’
Packer got out of the car and went round to the driver’s side.
‘I’m going for a walk,’ he said, jerking his thumb towards the Abbey gardens that lay beyond the Great Gate. ‘Come on if you’re coming.’
As he watched the man strut off, conspicuously dapper among the lunch-time ice-cream lickers, Derek was aware that he was being given one final chance of escape. All he had to do was to switch on the ignition and drive away.
But that would require an act of will that he no longer possessed. With a numbing sense of inevitability, he got out of his car, locked it and followed.
Chapter Nine
Five minutes later Derek was sitting on a bench in the Abbey gardens, with a note pad and pencil provided by Packer, making sketch plans of the interior of the Brickyard. Packer himself, at the other end of the bench, was engrossed in the financial pages of the Daily Telegraph.
Derek found it almost impossible to draw the lines straight. His hands were shaking, and they left dark smudges of sweat on the paper. But he concentrated fiercely on doing the job he had been given, leaving himself no room to think about its true purpose.
Operation Brickyard, as Packer had briefly referred to it, was planned to look like a burglary gone wrong. Derek was to give himself an alibi by going out for an evening with his wife. Packer would then break in, and take some of the Cartwright’s valuables. At the subsequent investigation, the police would believe that Mrs Cartwright’s mother had met her end because she had disturbed the intruder. There would, Packer said, be no reason for the police to look for any other motive; nor would there be any possibility of their tracing the burglary back to him. And Derek would of course be completely beyond suspicion.
It sounded watertight. Professional, as Packer had promised. Derek felt an unwilling admiration for the man. He was thankful that Packer had taken charge, and that he himself had been relegated to the role of burglar’s accomplice.
Ordinarily, of course – in his former decent honourable life, Before Packer – Derek would never have given anyone the plans of his house. The Brickyard was his and Christine’s sanctuary. He would have been appalled by the thought of an imminent burglary, not so much because of the loss it would entail – he was, after all, comprehensively insured – but because it would invade their privacy. Any suggestion that he would one day facilitate a break-in would have seemed to him outrageous beyond belief.
But their privacy had already been invaded, even before Packer. Their domestic life had been disrupted by Christine’s mother. Having their house burgled was, it seemed to Derek, a small price to pay for a restoration of their former state.
What would happen to his mother-in-law in the process was something he tried not to think about. It was, thankfully, out of his hands.
He made no attempt to ease his conscience with a spurious justification for Enid Long’s murder. Only a thoroughgoing bastard such as Packer would suggest that the end could possibly justify the means. It was precisely because Derek knew in his heart the enormity of what he was doing that he was now co-operating so willingly with Packer, offering up the plans of his home, and his possessions, as a form of expiation.
His sense of unreality persisted. There were dozens of people strolling past within a few feet of their bench, laughing and talking, carefree, but Derek felt as isolated from them as though he and Packer were still behind the windscreen of his car. He could see smiles and birds and flowers and sunlight, but he seemed unable to distinguish the voices or hear the birdsong or catch the scent of the hyacinths or feel the warmth of the sun.
At the same time he felt oddly distanced from himself. He watched and listened from somewhere above his head as he explained the sketch plans to Packer, and as he did so he mentally congratulated himself on the clarity of his exposition, and on the coolness with which the two of them were discussing the operation in a public place.
‘Any alarms?’ asked Packer.
‘No, we’re in a low-risk area. We’re very security-conscious, though. The doors are solid, with bolts and chains and mortice locks. The windows are all of the sash type. The large ones have secondary double-glazing, and all the catches have locks on them. I go round last thing at night to check that everything’s secure.’
‘What about when you go out for an evening? Do you check all the windows then?’
‘We hardly ever do go out, what with one thing and another. But as long as we weren’t leaving the house empty, and I knew that all the downstairs windows were closed, I could overlook the fact that one of them wasn’t locked.’
‘Which one?’
Derek pointed on the plan to a small room on the north side of the ground floor. ‘The pantry.’
‘How big is the window? If a burglar were to smash the glass, undo the catch and push up the sash, could he get through?’
‘A burglar your size, yes.’
Packer asked for details: of the fastening on the gate that led from the field path to the garden, of the ground between the gate and the house, of the composition of the paths round the house and the ground immediately below the pantry window; of the interior of the pantry, of the door handles, of the floor-covering of the passages, the hall, the stairs.
‘And when I’m in, what am I looking for? What have you got that would interest a burglar?’
‘The usual, I suppose.’ Derek began to offer the items that he knew were prime targets because they were easily saleable, but Packer cut him short.
‘Have some sense! How d’you expect me to haul a video recorder and a hi-fi along the field path? I want the small stuff – silver, jewellery, pocket antiques.’
Derek took a rapid mental inventory. The family had acquired all kinds of decorative and collectable bits and pieces over the years, as every family does, but little of it was of any intrinsic value. The best things belonged to Christine, and for her their value was predominantly sentimental.
No, he wasn’t going to have her deprived of them. It wouldn’t be fair. Any personal loss must be his; and so he told Packer where he kept the two small silver cups he had won for athletics when he was at college, his gold cufflinks, the silver cigarette case that had belonged to his father, and the camera his children had given him on his fortieth birthday.
‘What else?’ said Packer.
‘Isn’t that enough?’
‘Not nearly enough to murder for.’
Suddenly angry, not with Packer but with himself, Derek sprang to his feet and strode away from the people and the flowerbeds towards the Abbey ruins. How could he have been so thoughtless as to support the plan for a burglary!
He had been in favour simply because he hadn’t, until now, considered what a real burglary would entail. Worse, he hadn’t taken into account the effect it would have on his wife.
He wasn’t closely acquainted with anyone who had ever been burgled, but he had of course read about it, and seen the Crimewatch programmes. And Packer was right. An opportunist burglar who was so wound up as to kill anyone who disturbed him would ransack the house, not search considerately for a few insignificent items. But if the burglary were to be made realistic, Christine would be horrified by the violation of their home.
How could he do this to her, poor girl, after all she had been through? Slowing his pace, he stared bleakly at some fragments of monastic stonework that poked out of the grass like ancient fangs and molars. God, what a mess he was making of his attempts to help the wife he loved …
He turned on Packer as the smaller man caught him up. ‘I won’t have Christine upset, she’s suffered enough. Don’t you bloody dare take her treasures and wreck our home!’
Packer eyed him coldly. ‘You’re talking like a sentimental fool. If I don’t do a proper job, the police’ll be suspicious.’
‘I don’t see why.’ Calmer after his outburst, Derek was thinking on his feet again. �
��You want to leave the impression that you were disturbed on the job, right? That somebody called out from upstairs … So why couldn’t that have happened before you had time to get very far? If you start by searching the hall cupboard –’
‘Hall cupboards aren’t worth searching.’
‘This one will be, I guarantee. And there’s another thing: the police aren’t to know that you’re on foot, are they? You’ve no need to pull the living-room apart because there’s about two thousand quid’s-worth of video and audio equipment in there, all immediately get-at-able. If you shift it out into the hall, the police’ll assume you were intending to load it in a vehicle. That should convince them – and confuse them as well.’
Packer thought for a moment or two, then nodded. ‘Not a bad idea. Anyway, I don’t want to stay in the house any longer than I have to, so pulling it apart would be a waste of time. All right, I’ll leave most of it untouched.’
Derek felt so relieved that he found himself thanking the man.
They walked on. ‘What time does the old woman go to bed?’ said Packer.
As if watching from a distance, Derek saw the two of them pass between a double row of cherry trees, treading on a path carpeted brownish-white by fallen blossom. He heard his calm reply: ‘She usually goes up to her room about ten, then watches television in bed.’
‘But if you and your wife are out, is she likely to stay up until you come home?’
‘I really don’t know. We haven’t ever left her alone in the house for a whole evening.’
‘Then it’s time you did. Try to persuade her to go upstairs as usual. It’ll be simpler if she’s in bed.’
Derek’s stomach lurched, bringing him back to reality. He stood still. This was it. He could no longer ignore the purpose of the operation.
This Way Out Page 8
