This Way Out

by Sheila Radley

  Speechless with anger, but impotent to do anything else, Derek sat waiting. He watched Packer check that there was no traffic in sight, and then swagger briskly along the road beside the garden wall. Where the wall turned in at a right angle among the trees, Packer disappeared behind it.

  Within a few seconds Derek saw him emerge, apparently satisfied that he had found a suitably hidden parking-place. Standing on the narrow grass verge, Packer beckoned imperiously. Obedient still, Derek put the car in gear and began to roll.

  There was nothing premeditated about what he did then. His mind seemed to have closed down. But the mounting fear and loathing he felt for Hugh Packer released a surge of adrenalin that impelled him to attack, with whatever weapon he had available. On instinct, he shifted the engine into second gear, slammed his foot on the accelerator, turned the wheel and went straight at his tormentor.

  Packer saw him coming, but didn’t seem to believe what he saw. Quite clearly, from the initial look of annoyance on his face, it simply hadn’t occurred to him that Derek would ever fight. Then the man’s expression changed, from annoyance through perplexity to unease, and then to abject fear.

  Packer turned to run. Colliding with a tree trunk, he almost bounced back into the path of the car. Still trying to run, he twisted his body round, opened his mouth in frantic appeal and flung up his hands, as if to ward off the mass of metal and glass and rubber that Derek was propelling towards him.

  Outwardly calm, Derek felt a thump against the bumper and saw Packer shoot up into the air, growing a foot taller in front of his eyes. He braked, swinging the wheel to avoid the tree. Packer fell towards him, hands monstrously outstretched, momentarily filling Derek’s view before he landed with a crunch, face down on the bonnet. Then, slowly, as if he were shrinking, he began to slide backwards off the nearside of the car.

  Derek sat and watched as the man’s hands scrabbled for a grip on the smooth metal. Then one hand caught hold of the nearside windscreen wiper, pulling the blade away from the glass but clinging to it to arrest the body’s slide.

  Packer lifted his black curly head to reveal a bloodied face. His eyes were staring, his nose was awry, his mouth was closing and then gaping wide. He tightened his grip on the windscreen wiper. Veins stood out on his forehead as he struggled to pull himself higher. But as he did so, the wiper bent towards him under the strain, and his head fell with a thump. Leaving a smeared trail of blood on the paintwork, he slid sideways off the bonnet and almost disappeared. Only the forearm and the hand that clutched the tip of the wiper blade remained in Derek’s view.

  Everything was suddenly very quiet. The engine had stalled with the impact, and the reverberations of it had died away. Derek sat rigid, still without thought, watching that hand.

  Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the grip was loosening. The fingers, each with its crest of stiff black hairs, seemed to be losing their strength. But Derek kept on watching, fearing that any moment the hand would tighten and Packer’s menacing face would reappear.

  Instead, the hand went. One second it was there on the bonnet, weak but still flexed; the next, it had collapsed like a puppet’s and gone.

  Derek blinked and shook his head. He hardly dared believe it. He looked again, but there was nothing to see except the smears of blood on the bonnet of the car; and they convinced him.

  Packer was dead. He didn’t matter any more.

  But it was too soon to feel relief. Derek looked anxiously up and down the road. Was anyone coming? Would he be seen, and his car remembered?

  For once, though, luck seemed to be with him. The road was empty; his engine started sweetly. Backing away from what lay crumpled on the verge, he drove off without giving it a glance.

  Three minutes later, having encountered no other vehicle, he was able to mingle his car with the traffic on a busy road. Within ten minutes he was at a service station on the Newmarket by-pass, putting the Sierra through an automatic car wash. And no sooner had he watched the bloodstains on the bonnet being sudsed away, than relief came rinsing over him.

  He was free. All his Packer-related problems had disappeared. He had finally found a way out.

  Chapter Thirty Two

  Derek went straight to the Brickyard. It didn’t occur to him that Christine would be anywhere else.

  He walked in through the back door and along the kitchen corridor, and found her sitting on her tall stool at the ironing board, folding one of his shirts. ‘Dee!’ she said, looking across the board at him with surprise and concern; but he knew she wouldn’t have called him that if she hadn’t been pleased to see him.

  ‘Hallo, darling.’

  He wanted to give her a great hug and tell her how much he loved her; he wanted to tell her that everything was going to be all right from now on, as long as she still loved him. But it was difficult, with the ironing board in the way. Compromising, he leaned hopefully towards her. With affection, but briefly, she met his mouth with hers.

  They enquired after each other’s health. Christine said she was feeling much better, and Derek was thankful to see that she looked it. He was telling her that he intended to go and have his stitches out that afternoon when, with a clatter of nails and a woof, their beagle came pushing through the door behind him.

  ‘Sam!’ cried Derek. In truth, for the past two or three days he’d forgotten about the dog completely. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t overjoyed to see it. No wonder Christine was looking better! With the beagle’s return, Derek felt – however obscurely – that they were a family again.

  ‘Oh, Sam, you’re back!’ He crouched down, holding out his good hand. ‘Come to Dad, then, you great old silly –’

  The little tri-coloured dog was already half way towards him, stern wagging. Now it checked, its domed forehead wrinkling with perplexity. ‘Come on,’ coaxed Derek. ‘Good boy, good old boy.’

  The beagle skirted cautiously round him and stood at Christine’s feet, whining softly, watching him. Its tail still wagged, but without much enthusiasm. Fancying that he saw reproach in its eyes, Derek stood up abruptly. The dog was found, and he wasn’t going to think about the way it had been lost.

  ‘Have the police spoken to you yet?’ asked Christine. There was no alarm in her voice but his spirits plummeted. Oh God – had someone seen him on the Winter Paddocks road after all?

  ‘What about?’ he asked nervously.

  She continued with her ironing. ‘Chief Inspector Quantrill’s been trying to get in touch with you. He thinks you may be able to help him – something to do with Sam getting lost, I believe. He wanted you to ring him as soon as you got back.’

  Derek breathed again. ‘What’s the point, now Sam’s found?’ he said lightly. Then, ‘Oh, Chrissie – its wonderful to be at home with you. We’ve been through such a terrible patch, but it’s over now. Let’s forget all about it and make a fresh start, shall we?’

  Christine put down her iron. She was looking at him as though he were a stranger.

  ‘Derek,’ she said, with an emotional break in her voice. ‘Haven’t you forgotten something? My poor mother was brutally murdered, upstairs in this house, less than a week ago. How can I “forget all about it”? I doubt if I’d have been brave enough to come here this morning, if Sam hadn’t been with me. I certainly can’t come back here to live. If you and I ever make a fresh start together, it will have to be somewhere else.’

  He was shattered by disappointment. ‘“If we ever”? But we must – I can’t live without you. I’ll go anywhere, anywhere you like, as long as we’re together. I love you, Chrissie!’

  She sighed. ‘And I love you, Dee. But it’s no use pretending that things are the same, because they’re not. We’ve grown apart. We need a break from each other, for a time at least. You stay here, if what’s happened doesn’t worry you, and I’ll go to Cambridgeshire.’

  ‘Don’t you mean Derbyshire?’

  ‘No, I’ve changed my mind. I couldn’t be happy there, doing nothing and being of no use to an
yone. Sam and I have been invited to Winter Paddocks, to stay with Belinda Packer and her father.’

  Derek sat down abruptly, and stammered out his astonishment. Christine looked critically at the garment she was ironing.

  ‘You’ll want some new office shirts – Marks and Spencer, size 16½. Yes, I’ve met Belinda. She came to see me this morning, and we got on extremely well. I’m going to help her look after her father.’

  ‘But you’ve no idea how handicapped he is!’ Derek protested. ‘For heaven’s sake, Chrissie – you’ve been tied down for so much of your life, first by Laurie, then by your mother. I thought you’d be thankful to be free!’

  ‘Yes,’ she said soberly, ‘I suppose that’s what everyone must think. But in practice it’s different. I need to be needed, you see. I’ve felt adrift ever since Laurie died, as though I’d left some important business unfinished. And now Mum’s dead, too, I think that helping Belinda will give me a sense of purpose. Besides, the poor girl’s afraid of her husband. He’s a brute, and she intends to get a legal separation from him as soon as possible, and then a divorce. If I’m staying with her, it’ll help to keep him away.’

  Derek didn’t stop to analyse his emotions, or to think. His need for Christine was paramount, and he spoke from frustration and jealousy. ‘Well, you’ve no need to go to Winter Paddocks on that account! Belinda won’t have any more problems with her husband, because he’s dead.’

  ‘Dead? He can’t be … She was here talking about him, half an hour ago. What’s happened, Derek? How do you know?’

  He shouldn’t have told her, he realized that immediately. With anyone other than Christine, the mistake would have finished him. But as long as she was the only person who knew, he was sure he could make her understand. She had said that she still loved him; that was the all-important thing. As long as she loved him, he knew he could count on her loyalty.

  ‘Hugh Packer was one of my clients,’ he began, careful with his explanation. ‘That was why I went to Winter Paddocks, to see him, but he was away. Then Belinda told me what a violent man he was – how he’d married her for her father’s money, and was trying to get rid of the old man with an overdose of insulin.

  ‘Well of course, knowing that, I wouldn’t have him as a client any longer. I was driving away from the house this morning, after Belinda had gone, when he arrived unexpectedly. We met just outside the gates. He tried to stop me, to talk, but I didn’t want anything to do with him. I accelerated, and suddenly there he was, right in front of me. There was absolutely nothing I could do –’

  Christine, iron in hand, was staring at him with horror. Derek watched apprehensively as the blood, which had made such a welcome return to her cheeks, drained away, leaving her white and ill. ‘And you ran over him? You killed him? Oh, how dreadful – what a terrible experience for you!’

  ‘Yes – yes, it was.’

  ‘What about the police? What do they say?’

  Derek swallowed. This was going to be the difficult part. ‘I haven’t told them. No – listen to me, Chrissie, you must understand. There was no one else there. No witnesses at all. When I saw that Packer was dead, naturally I drove straight off to find a telephone.

  ‘But then I realized that the police would start asking questions. They’d find out that Packer had been cruel to his wife, and that I’d spent a couple of nights at Winter Paddocks – though not making love to Belinda, I swear – and they’d assume that I did it deliberately. If I told them, I could never convince them that it was an accident.’

  Christine abandoned the iron. Her pallor had been replaced by a flush of anger. ‘What do you mean, Derek? “If you told them”? Of course you must tell them! Accidents happen, the police know that. They’ll be able to judge how it occurred from your tyre marks. You’ve got to tell them – you can’t leave a man lying dead on the road.’

  ‘But Chrissie, darling, you must think this through. The police may get it wrong. They may misinterpret my tyre marks, and then I’ll run the risk of being tried and imprisoned, just for an accident. Surely you don’t want that to happen?’

  Christine looked at him with incomprehension. ‘Well of course I don’t. But that isn’t a valid reason for not owning up. It’s a criminal offence to cause a road accident and not report it. Besides, hit-and-run drivers are despicable. I couldn’t possibly live with you ever again if I knew you’d been responsible for someone’s death and were too cowardly to admit it. I don’t see how you could live with yourself. What’s happened to you, Derek? You always used to be such a good, honest man.’

  ‘But it’s not as if I’d knocked down an innocent person,’ he argued desperately. ‘Hugh Packer is evil. Chrissie – more evil than you know. Surely you don’t expect me to give myself up for the sake of someone like that?’

  ‘You can’t start playing God, Derek. It isn’t for you to judge whether a person deserves to live or to die.’

  Her moral certainty embittered him. All very well for Christine to take that stand, when she had absolutely no idea what had really happened.

  Everything he had done, first to release her from the burden of her old mother and then to escape from Packer’s malign influence, had been done out of love and compassion for his wife. And now, just when it had seemed that he’d at last freed himself from the resulting entanglements, he realized that his love for her held him trapped. He could do one of two things: report Packer’s death, or not. Whichever he chose, he would irrevocably forfeit what mattered to him most, Christine’s love for him.

  In comparison with the loss of that, the prospect of any legally devised punishment seemed to be of little consequence. He was too exhausted, mentally and emotionally, to withstand police questioning or to care any longer what happened to him. When he made his final appeal to Christine, it was not for his own sake but for hers. Better for her that she should despise him as a coward than that she should find out exactly how her mother came to die.

  ‘But Chrissie, you don’t know the half of it. I can’t explain, but if we involve the police, it’ll bring us nothing but unhappiness. Please, please, say you’ll support me – for your sake as well as mine.’

  She stood for a few moments, looking at him, saying nothing. Then she gave him a sad, fond smile. ‘Of course I’ll support you, Dee. Don’t worry – everything will be all right.’

  She began to walk towards him. He held out his hands to her, but she walked straight past him to the telephone.

  ‘Breckham Market police?’ he heard her say. ‘My husband wants to report a fatal accident.’

  Copyright

  First published in 1989 by Constable

  This edition published 2012 by Bello an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world

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  ISBN 978-1-4472-2664-2 EPUB

  ISBN 978-1-4472-2663-5 POD

  Copyright © Sheila Radley, 1989

  The right of Sheila Radley to be identified as the

  author of this work has been asserted in accordance

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