‘Ah, there’s a notice here that says who holds the key. I’ll go and get it for you,’ he said.
‘Don’t bother.’
Christine sat down on the stone bench inside the porch, and stared straight ahead. Her features seemed still numbed by shock; only her hands were mobile, plucking restlessly at the fabric of her skirt.
Derek sat beside her, at a respectful distance but angled so that he could look at her. ‘How are you, my love?’
‘Physically? All right, thank you.’
They were silent for a few moments. Despite the warmth of the spring day, the interior of the porch was as cold as a stone tomb. Shivering a little, dispirited by Christine’s continuing indifference, Derek looked round him at the roof bosses mutilated by ancient vandalism, the damp-stained walls, the faded notices, the worn flagstones, the bird-droppings.
‘Let’s go somewhere else,’ he urged.
‘You go if you want to. I didn’t ask you to come here.’
‘I had to see you. I want to be with you, Chrissie. I can’t be happy without you.’
Her shoulders sagged. ‘How can you talk of happiness, after what’s happened to my mother?’
‘Oh my love –’
He stretched his hand towards her. It happened to be his damaged hand, the bandages now disarranged and grimy with use, and the thought crossed his mind that perhaps it was no bad thing to remind her that he had been suffering too. ‘I know it’s been a terrible shock for you, but the worst is over. We’re still us, and now we’ve got our future to think of.’
Christine shook her head, and said nothing more. She hadn’t even noticed his outstretched hand, let alone offered to rebandage it for him. ‘Which day am I due to have my stitches out?’ he asked presently in a humble voice.
‘On Friday. The casualty doctor at the hospital gave me a letter for you to give to the doctor when you go. It’s with my things at Sylvia’s. I’ll drop it in at the health centre for you.’
Derek hoped that this might be an opportunity to prolong their encounter in pleasanter surroundings. ‘I’ll come back with you to the house for it,’ he offered.
‘There’s no need. I have to go to the health centre anyway, to pick up my prescription before I leave for Derbyshire.’
‘You’re still set on going there?’
‘Yes. I should be fit to drive by the weekend.’
‘Oh, Chrissie … Why can’t we go somewhere together?’
She sighed. ‘We’ve been through all that, Derek.’
‘Well – if you must go away on your own, at least let me drive you there.’
‘I’ll be perfectly all right, thank you.’ She stood up, and for the first time took a look at him. ‘Anyway, your hand must make driving painful.’
‘It does,’ he said, holding it out conspicuously as he got to his feet. ‘But I wouldn’t mind, if only we were together. I love you, you know that.’
She turned and began to walk away down the churchyard path. He strode after her, and caught at her good arm with his good hand. ‘Do you hear me, Christine? I love you.’
She pulled away from his grasp and went on walking.
‘Sam is still missing,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘Don’t talk to me about love, Derek, until you’re prepared to tell me the truth about why you dragged him out to the forest on Saturday afternoon.’
‘The dog has nothing to do with this,’ he protested, following her out of the churchyard and along Church Hill. ‘What I’m concerned about is us.’
‘I’m concerned about Sam,’ she said, ‘because he can’t look after himself. You can, and so can I.’
She opened the front gate of Mrs Collins’s garden, walked through, and shut it against him without another glance.
Chapter Twenty Three
Right, then. Right. Derek drained his second glass of whisky. If Christine was more concerned for the wretched dog than she was for him, let her go to Derbyshire on her own. Let her do what she liked. But when she wanted to come back to him, she would have to make the first move, because he was damned if he would plead with her ever again.
It had been a bad afternoon. He had accelerated out of Wyveling in a fury, and spent the next few hours burning up petrol in an attempt to put as great a distance as possible between himself and his wife. At one point, seeing a signpost to Parkeston Quay, he had contemplated driving aboard a ferry bound for Holland. Losing himself on the Continent for a few weeks would not only teach Christine to appreciate him, but would get that bastard Packer off his back as well.
Then he remembered that he hadn’t got his passport with him.
Abandoning the idea, he drove back to Cambridge, parked his car at his hotel, and went out for a drink. He needed someone congenial to drink with, though; after the second whisky, it became imperative to find some friends to tell his domestic troubles to. And so he consulted his pocket diary for the phone numbers of two hockey-playing acquaintances who lived in Cambridge, good old Dave and good old Andy, and invited them to join him.
Derek’s subsequent recollection of the evening was hazy. The three of them had been in and out of several pubs, back-slapping and drinking and reminiscing. Then his friends had enquired about his bandaged hand, and that had reminded him of what he wanted to tell them: his wife, he heard himself say with a choke of grief, had unaccountably walked out on him.
Good old Dave and good old Andy, as solid a defensive pair as any forward could want behind him, both on and off the pitch, had given him exactly the support he needed. They’d refilled his glass, put fraternal arms across his shoulders, and assured him that if his wife had been misguided enough to leave a first-class husband like him, he was better off without her. Wives were ungrateful, irrational, and nothing but trouble, they said. Think yourself lucky, old mate! Now you’re a free man you can spend every evening like this, having a good time with mates who’re only too glad of your company.
For as long as it took them to drain their glasses, Derek basked in the glow of alcohol and true friendship. But then good old Dave and good old Andy looked at their watches, said Help, was that the time? and hurried home to their wives and families, leaving him more alone than ever.
He felt emotionally exhausted. Wanting to drown himself in sleep he bought a half bottle of Bell’s, for the second evening in succession, to take back to the hotel. But he needn’t have bothered. Tanked up already, he passed out on his bed partially clothed before he’d even got the bottle open.
Inevitably, his sleep was bedevilled by bad dreams. When he woke, sweating cold and crying out with anguish, it was because this time the face under his strangling hands was not Enid’s, but Christine’s.
And there was still the other prospective horror that he had to attend to: getting rid of Packer’s poor old father-in-law.
Next morning, as he sat sweating hot in the sauna at the health club, mentally going through Packer’s instructions again and again to be sure of getting them right, Derek knew that he couldn’t just hang about waiting for Sunday to come.
Today was Wednesday, the day Packer had said he would be driving up to Scotland. Since there would be no fear of meeting him on the old man’s property, Derek decided that he might as well go there now, today, to look the place over. It would give him an occupation, as well as easing the way for what he had to do on Sunday.
He showered, dressed, went into Cambridge to buy an Ordnance Survey map from Heffers, and took off for Newmarket. According to the map, the house Packer had pointed out was about four miles south-west of the town, on a minor road that went nowhere in particular.
It wasn’t until Derek was within half a mile of the place, on a tree-lined road that led straight to Winter Paddocks, that it occurred to him that he was doing a very risky thing. All he had thought of was the necessity of avoiding Packer; the house was so isolated that he hadn’t anticipated being seen by anyone else. Now, with stomach-dipping apprehension, he realized that precisely because the place was isolated, anyone who saw him wa
s likely to notice him.
If he parked his car anywhere near the house while he sneaked round the grounds – as Packer had parked his car by the bridge at Wyveling – he would probably be spotted by a local passer-by who would report the fact to the police as soon as the murder enquiry started. And whereas Packer couldn’t be traced through the car he had been driving, Derek could certainly be traced through his.
Alarmed, he decided to turn at the next convenient field entrance and belt back the way he had come. But then he took a deep breath and told himself to calm down. There were no other vehicles on the road at the moment, and the countryside was deserted. What possible risk would be involved in driving slowly past the house and making a mental note of the extent of its grounds, and the whereabouts of the field that the Pony Club would be using as a car-park on Sunday?
He eased his foot off the accelerator. On his right, a tall brick wall joined the road at a right angle and continued for about two hundred yards, its straightness broken by an inward curve towards a pair of ornamental iron gates. The gates were closed. The road was still empty. Derek slowed to a crawl, and prepared to take a good look.
A wide gravelled driveway led to a substantial, square, creeper-covered house set among lawns and flowering shrubs and mature trees. On one side of the drive was a great copper beech, its new leaves a translucent pink in the sunlight. The property was much more attractive than its name suggested, and far more imposing than Derek had imagined. Must be worth a fortune.
As he stared, impressed, something moved. The trunk of the copper beech had temporarily obscured his view, and now he saw with alarm that there were people in the gardens less than fifty feet away. A wheelchair with a huddled occupant was coming into sight: the old man in person, being pushed by his daughter, the generously built young woman who was wasted on that bastard Packer. She had evidently heard the car’s engine slow, and she was looking questioningly in Derek’s direction.
Panicking, he put his foot down and roared away. Fool! What a fool he’d been to take that risk!
How much had she seen? Had she hurried to the gate, identified the make of the car, noticed the colour, taken the number? If she had, then she would be sure to put the police on to him as soon as her father died. God, how could he have been so stupid as to give himself away like that!
He was almost back into Newmarket before he stopped jittering. As his heartbeat steadied, he forced himself to think logically about what had happened. And, logically, he had to admit that it was most unlikely that Belinda Packer would have done any of the things his imagination had suggested.
All right, so she had looked towards the gates when she heard a passing car slow almost to a stop. Well she would, wouldn’t she? Quite naturally, she would think that someone had come to call. But the owners of properties as attractive as Winter Paddocks must grow used to having their houses stared at by inquisitive passers-by, and when the car drove off again she would almost certainly have thought nothing more of it. Of course she wouldn’t have abandoned her father’s wheelchair in order to run to the gate to try to identify a passing vehicle!
Panic over.
Or at least, that particular panic was over. Derek’s moment of relief evaporated as he remembered that he still had to face Sunday’s ordeal. Sneaking up on a defenceless old man in order to swap a mug of orange juice for a deadly overdose of insulin might be a less distasteful way of committing murder than some, but it was still murder, and the thought of it gripped him with fear.
Supposing the old man saw him? Packer had said that his father-in-law always had a sleep after lunch, but what if the telephone were to wake him? True, since the old man couldn’t speak intelligibly he wouldn’t be able to give the intruder away; but that wasn’t the point. Derek was horrified by the thought that, in the act of swapping mugs, he might look up to see Sidney’s eloquent single eye fixed accusingly on him.
Would he have the callousness to go through with the swap while his victim watched? Would he have the nerve?
If he didn’t, Packer would kill him. But if he did, could he live with what he had done? Or would Sidney Brown’s stricken face begin to alternate with Enid’s in his already intolerable dreams?
Derek drove on. Too agitated to endure the snarl-up of race-day traffic in Newmarket, he circled back into the countryside. He felt thirsty, dehydrated by last night’s intake of alcohol, but although it was after mid-day and the pubs were open they held no attraction for him.
What he really needed was a haven such as he and Christine had once enjoyed at the Brickyard. He longed for peace of mind. He ached for the touch of love.
But the Brickyard days were over, and he had nowhere else to go. With the recent past a nightmare, and nothing in prospect but fear, he hustled through the maze of country roads in a desperate, instinctive search for some way out of his problems.
When he realized that he was back again on the road that led to Winter Paddocks he felt a genuine shock of surprise. He had formed no conscious intention of returning. But now he came to think of it … Now he came to think of it, this might be where he could find his solution.
He slowed as he approached the entrance, but this time there was no sight of Belinda and her father. His earlier worries about being noticed had gone, and so he pulled in immediately outside the closed gates and switched off his engine.
He knew now, for sure, that he wasn’t going to kill Packer’s father-in-law. He couldn’t possibly bring himself to commit murder; he wasn’t that kind of man. And what had just occurred to him was that if Belinda were to see and identify him while he was looking round this afternoon, then the operation would have to be called off. It would be far too risky to go ahead, knowing that Belinda would probably mention his name to the police at the subsequent investigation.
Packer would be furious, of course. Derek would have to ring him on Saturday night to tell him of the ‘accidental’encounter, and no doubt the man would give him an earful of invective. But that wouldn’t matter. However much Packer might rage about his incompetence, he couldn’t accuse him of lack of zeal. As long as Derek hadn’t finally refused to take part in the operation, Packer would have no reason to kill him.
Besides, it had begun to seem most unlikely that the man would ever carry out that particular threat.
Having seen Winter Paddocks, Derek felt certain that Packer wasn’t trying to get rid of his father-in-law just because the old man was a burden both to himself and to his daughter. What Packer really wanted, without doubt, was access to Sidney’s considerable wealth. And in those circumstances, why would he waste his time and ingenuity on killing Derek? Packer’s sole concern would surely be to find another way of disposing of his wealthy father-in-law without himself coming under suspicion – and that, reflected Derek with some satisfaction, should take the bastard a long, long time.
The wheelchair had come into view again. Belinda was pushing her father through a distant part of the gardens. With a lightened heart Derek opened the gate and hurried towards them along the sun-warmed gravel paths, past the copper-pink beech, past the blueing racemes of wisteria that covered the side wall of the house, past the sun-room, the tulip-bordered terrace, the lily pond, the lawns. Then, as he drew near the father and daughter, his pace slowed.
He had been seen. The wheelchair was stationary, turned towards him, and the old man was staring at him with a penetrating single eye. But his own gaze was on the tall, fair young woman who stood waiting for him, her heavy-lidded eyes shyly averted but her back straight, her throat splendidly curved, her figure full and strong and whole.
God, she was magnificent –
Now he knew why he had come.
Chapter Twenty Four
At Wyveling, the police were swarming over the Brickyard again. This time they were searching for evidence to support the detectives’ theory that Derek Cartwright knew why his house had been targeted for a break-in.
Sergeant Lloyd had of course given Mrs Cartwright a more tactful reason fo
r wanting to borrow the keys of her home. They would like to take a second look round, she had said simply, and Christine had expressed neither surprise nor objection. She herself would need to go back to the Brickyard later in the week, she told the sergeant, to pack what she wanted to take to Derbyshire, but she dreaded going into the house; the police were welcome to borrow the keys again, if that would help them find her mother’s murderer.
Christine might have been more concerned had she known exactly what the police intended to do. This time, instead of concentrating on the scene of the crime, they went through the building systematically from the attics to the cellars: investigating every cupboard, moving every article of furniture, emptying bookcases, rolling back carpets, prizing up floorboards, sniffing the contents of containers. When they had finished with the house they turned their attention to the outbuildings, the front yard, the garden and the dustbins.
But nothing came to light that could be regarded in any way as suspicious. In terms of criminality (though not perhaps of housekeeping; Hilary Lloyd, who would have liked her own flat to be immaculate but resented spending her free time on housework, was always heartened to find how much grubbiness lurked in the corners of even the best-kept homes), the Brickyard was clean as a whistle.
There was no evidence that Derek Cartwright had been engaged in any kind of activity that he might want to conceal from the police. Nor was there any sign of the items that Cartwright had listed as having been stolen. Quantrill’s theory that he might have hidden them on his property, as a cover for the theft of something incriminating, proved to be completely unfounded.
Sergeant Lloyd was still reluctant to believe that a burglar who had committed murder on the job would have hindered his getaway by taking the goods with him, but she solved her problem by instigating a search of the areas bordering the field path between the back gate of the Brickyard and the car-park of the Five Bells. On Wednesday morning, one of the missing items – an old briefcase in which Derek Cartwright had told them he kept his spare chequebooks and credit cards – was discovered in the spinney at the back of the pub, dumped in a bed of stinging nettles just off the path.
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