Puppet for a Corpse

by Dorothy Simpson

  “Yes?” Lineham was engrossed now, eager.

  Thanet took out his pouch and began to fill his pipe, pressing the tobacco carefully down in the bowl with his forefinger as he talked. “Well, when I was thinking about it last night I began in the usual way, looking back and reassessing, the sort of thing we do all the time. Now this case was unusual in that, whereas we normally know from the start whether a murder has been committed or not, this time we were not sure. So I took that as my starting point.”

  “You mean, you began by looking at the reasons why we suspected that it might not have been suicide.”

  “Yes. Now, you go on from there.”

  Lineham’s eyes narrowed in concentration. “Well, first of all, there was general agreement that Pettifer had no reason to kill himself. His housekeeper, his wife, his secretary, his partner, all said the same thing, that he had no financial worries, he was in good health and he had no marital problems either.” Lineham’s eyes darkened and Thanet said quickly, “That’s right. That’s important. No one around him at any time suspected that there was anything wrong between them. Of course, we soon found out that Mrs Pettifer had a lover; but we still believed her husband had been unaware of this until, quite by chance, we discovered from his previous mother-in-law that Pettifer was sterile and must therefore have known about his wife’s infidelity for months, right from the time she first told him she was pregnant.”

  “Not by chance, sir.” Lineham was looking discouraged again. “I’d never have thought of going to see her. Why did you?”

  “A general uneasiness, I suppose, revolving around the question of children. Things just didn’t add up. The inconsistencies in Pettifer’s attitude were too great. He apparently took pains to make sure his second wife wouldn’t want children before he even asked her to marry him, yet everyone agreed he was over the moon when she became pregnant. Then Dr Lowrie told me that Pettifer didn’t really like children—that, although Pettifer became fond of his adopted son, initially he had agreed to the adoption chiefly to please his first wife. Anyway, let’s leave that for the moment, go back to the reasons why we suspected it might not have been suicide.”

  Lineham considered. “Well I suppose the first specific indication was that holiday booking. You don’t pay a couple of thousand quid for a holiday just a few hours before you intend to kill yourself.”

  Thanet was lighting up now and he waited until the match had burned down to the end before extinguishing it with a quick flick of the wrist and saying, “Quite. Go on.”

  “Then there was the car. Why bother to arrange for your car to be repaired if you know you’ll never need it again? And the next thing was the note.” Lineham was getting into his stride now. “The mis-spelling of Andrew’s nickname, I mean. That really did seem suspicious, because if Pettifer had always spelt it one way he was hardly likely to alter it, even under stress—and of course that rather peculiar spelling was the sort of thing that no one but Andrew would know about unless they had actually seen Pettifer’s letters to Andrew. And then we found out about the fingerprints. Why should Mrs Pettifer’s prints be on not only the port bottle but the tablet container and glass too, when according to her she hadn’t handled any of them? Later we found she’d given Pettifer the port for his birthday, but that didn’t explain the other prints away. Even more interesting, of course, was the fact that, although Pettifer’s prints were also on the bottle, they weren’t on either container or glass …”

  “Exactly. So by this point we had moved on from a general suspicion of murder to having a specific suspect.”

  “Mrs Pettifer. Yes.” Lineham was frowning in concentration. “Then came the discovery that she had a lover, which meant that she also had a possible motive for wanting her husband out of the way.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, next we got the PM results, which showed that Pettifer had been in perfect health, so that our last hope of finding a possible reason for suicide was gone …”

  “… unless, of course, he had killed himself through grief because he had found out that his wife had a lover.”

  “Yes, but at the time we still didn’t think he had found out. There was absolutely nothing in his behaviour to indicate that he had. On the contrary, everyone agreed that he was in the best of spirits …” Lineham stopped, his forehead creased. “Though it really is beyond me to understand why he should have chosen to carry on all those months as though nothing had happened …”

  Thanet waited. Would Lineham at last see the crucial significance of this aspect of Pettifer’s behaviour?

  Apparently not. Lineham shook his head sharply, as if to clear it of confusion. “I just can’t see …”

  “Leave it for the moment. You will, shortly, if I’m not mistaken. Get back to the post mortem.”

  “Yes, well the other interesting thing about that was that there were no signs of the cold which Mrs Pettifer claimed was the reason why her husband had gone to bed early and she’d had to dose him with paracetamol. And, when we asked around, we discovered that no one else had noticed any cold symptoms. For that matter, we later heard that there were no traces of paracetamol in his stomach …”

  “In short, her story was riddled with discrepancies.”

  “Exactly. And then,” Lineham went on eagerly, “to cap it all, we discover that the night Pettifer died Mrs Pettifer got her lover to drive her down to Pine Lodge from London in the middle of the night. She claims she did this in response to her husband’s request during a phone call which she says he asked her to make, and also says that when she did get here she couldn’t get into the house and drove straight back to London in a huff. Lee confirms that they drove back almost at once, but he didn’t go up to the house with her and the point is that she was there at Pine Lodge alone for ten minutes or so round about the time Pettifer took the overdose. So, not only did she have motive, she could well also have had opportunity. But …” Lineham paused.

  “Yes, this is where it becomes interesting, isn’t it? But …”

  “But,” Lineham went on slowly, picking his words now as he thought aloud, “so much of what she said or did seemed incomprehensible. Why, if she had killed him and arranged it to look like suicide, did she keep insisting it couldn’t have been? Why produce the holiday booking, to back up what she was saying—why not just keep quiet about it? Why say he had a cold if he hadn’t? Or claim to have given him paracetamol if she didn’t? Why, above all, if she did murder him, didn’t she give herself a decent alibi, rather than go off to spend the night in a London hotel with her lover. And why volunteer the information that she and Lee had made that suspicious dash down to Sturrenden in the middle of the night when she had no idea that we were already on to it? There’s the possibility of course that she was trying to deflect suspicion by appearing to be ultra-helpful, a bewildered innocent, so to speak, but that still didn’t explain why her story was riddled with discrepancies. Unless …” he said hesitantly.

  Lineham was almost there. Thanet found that he was holding his breath. He was aware, too, of an uncomfortable emotion which was rather difficult to identify. What was it? he asked himself while he waited. Chagrin, perhaps, that by simple logic Lineham was apparently about to arrive at the solution which Thanet had thought attainable only by his own more intuitive approach?

  “Unless she said and did all those things in good faith,” Lineham concluded.

  He sounded bewildered, disorientated, as though he had scaled what he thought was the mountain peak only to find further heights stretching away ahead of him.

  “Go on. Go on, dammit. Don’t stop. Follow it through.”

  “But how, sir? I just don’t see where all this is leading.”

  “You will. You will. Just go on. If she said and did all those things in good faith …”

  “Then,” said Lineham slowly, “I suppose someone must have convinced her that they were true.”

  “Who?” said Thanet softly.

  “It could only have been …”
Lineham stopped. “No, it couldn’t have been.”

  “Who? Dammit, say it, man.”

  “Pettifer?” Lineham’s face was a study in bewilderment.

  Thanet gave a slow, satisfied nod. “Pettifer.”

  “But that’s crazy!” Lineham burst out.

  “Is it? Just think about it, Mike. Why, for instance, should he say he had a cold, if he hadn’t?”

  “To make her feel sorry for him? So that she wouldn’t go to London? No, it couldn’t have been that. She said he insisted she went. And, if we’re working on the premise that she’s been acting in good faith, telling the truth all along … It’s no good. I just can’t see why the hell he should lie about a thing like that.”

  “Oh, come on, Mike. Don’t give in!” Thanet puffed over-vigorously at his pipe in his urgency and a shower of sparks cascaded over his lap. He jumped up, flapping his hand at them. “And stop grinning, will you?”

  “Shall I dial 999?”

  “Just keep your mind on the job,” growled Thanet, sitting down again. If he heard another joke about the Fire Service … He had never lived down the day when he had unwittingly set his wastepaper basket alight with an imperfectly extinguished match, just before leaving the office. It had been several years before the burnt carpet had finally been renewed amidst much grumbling from above about waste of tax-payers money, rank carelessness and the dangers and undesirability of smoking (the Chief himself being a non-smoker, of course).

  “Come on, now. Why should he have deliberately misled her?” Thanet persisted.

  Lineham gritted his teeth in frustration, thumped his fist on his desk. “It’s no good. I just can’t see it.”

  “All right, calm down. Let’s try another tack. Go back to what you were saying a moment ago, that he must have known about his wife’s unfaithfulness for months, right from the moment he first learnt she was pregnant, but that he apparently did nothing about it. Thinking about him, about the sort of man he was, how would you have expected him to react when she told him?”

  Lineham considered. “I was thinking about this, last night. I’d guess he would have been very upset, of course, but he wouldn’t have shown it at the time … Partly because he was a very controlled sort of person and partly because he couldn’t have let her know that her news had immediately told him that she was being unfaithful to him, without giving his secret away.”

  “That he was sterile. Yes. So, to cover up his real feelings, he pretends to be pleased. Then what?”

  “I’m not sure. When he’d had time to think about it, I imagine he’d have been very angry. I certainly don’t think he could have dismissed it from his mind. We know from what Dr Barson told you that he was the type to bear a grudge and if he was feeling thoroughly disillusioned … I think he’d have wanted to punish her.”

  “Yes, but how?”

  “Well, there was no point in confronting her with it. She might simply have left him to go to her lover. And even if she didn’t, things would never have been the same between them again. Anyway, that wouldn’t exactly have been punishing her, would it? And we know he didn’t disinherit her.”

  “Which in itself is interesting, isn’t it?”

  “So what was the point of killing himself! It just leaves her free to go to Lee as a rich woman.”

  “Slow down, Mike. You’re in too much of a hurry. Try to think yourself back into his mind. He wants to punish her. And the problem is, how? Now, look at that thought in the light of what he actually did. What did he do?”

  “Well … nothing, so far as I can see.”

  “I don’t think that’s quite true. Think back to what everyone said about him, about their marriage.”

  “That everything in the garden seemed to be rosy, you mean?”

  “Too rosy?”

  Lineham’s eyes narrowed. “You mean, that it was deliberate policy, on his part, to give that impression?”

  “Think of the day he died. They all agreed that he was in unusually high spirits, didn’t they?”

  “You mean, that was all a sham? A calculated attempt to mislead them?”

  “Them, yes. And, perhaps … us?”

  “Us? But …”

  “So think, Mike. What have we got now? A desire for revenge, on his wife. A deliberate effort to mislead everyone who knew him and, as a consequence, anyone who might investigate his death. So that everyone would say that he had no possible reason for suicide …”

  Thanet stopped. Lineham’s eyes had gone blank, his mouth had dropped open. He looked, quite literally, stunned.

  “You see?” Thanet said, on a long exhalation of satisfaction.

  Lineham’s lips moved, but no sound emerged. Finally, “He set her up …” he croaked. “That’s what you mean, isn’t it?” He was silent for a moment or two then he burst out, “But that really is crazy! Absolutely stark staring bonkers! Sorry, sir, but you can’t seriously expect me to believe that in order to punish his wife he decided to kill himself so as to get her convicted of murdering him! Talk about cutting off his nose to spite his face!”

  “But why not? Don’t you see, it’s the perfect solution. In one fell swoop he gets his revenge on his wife and makes sure she won’t be free to go to her lover or to inherit.”

  “Perfect solution! Aren’t you forgetting one small detail, that he has to kill himself off in the process?”

  “Ah yes. Well, that’s the snag I mentioned to you earlier.”

  “Snag!” Lineham took a deep breath and with a visible attempt at self-control and reasonableness went on, “Look sir, I don’t want to be rude or … insubordinate, and I know you’ve come up with some pretty weird ideas before and you’ve been proved right, but …”

  “This time, you think I’ve gone over the top, right? Don’t worry, Mike, I can sympathise with how you feel. And I must admit, I felt exactly the same myself, when I first worked it out—congratulations, by the way. You did it, didn’t you?”

  “Did what?”

  “Worked it out. Yourself.”

  “Did I, sir?”

  “Well, I admit I had to give you a little nudge now and then, but …”

  “No, I didn’t mean that. I mean, I’m just not convinced we’ve reached the right conclusion, that’s all. Look, sir, Dr Pettifer was an intelligent man. If he really was as vindictive as you seem to think he was, why not work out a way of taking his revenge that would not only leave him alive and kicking but would give him the pleasure of seeing his wife suffer. This way he wouldn’t even have the satisfaction of knowing if his plan had worked.”

  “Perhaps he was past caring. Anyway, crazy as it may sound, I’m convinced that that’s the way it was.” Thanet tapped out his pipe and crossed restlessly to the window. “The trouble is, Mike, there’s a piece of the puzzle missing. Somewhere there’s a piece of information which would explain everything, something that would make us say, ‘Ah, yes, so that’s why he did it.’”

  The telephone rang. Lineham picked it up, listened, glanced sharply at Thanet. “I’ll tell him,” he said, a grin spreading slowly across his face. “I expect he’ll come out right away.” He replaced the receiver.

  “Well?”

  Lineham continued to grin.

  “Mike, if you don’t take that silly smirk off your face and tell me … Who was that, anyway?”

  “If you’d answered the phone and I’d asked that question, I think you’d have said it was Fate, sir.”

  “Mike …” Thanet felt like grinding his teeth.

  “It was Mrs Pettifer. Urgent, she said.”

  “Did she tell you what it was about?”

  “She didn’t want to discuss it on the telephone. But apparently she had a letter this morning. Which, she says, will explain everything.”

  We must look like two Cheshire cats, thought Thanet, as he said, “What are we waiting for? Let’s go.”

  22

  “I gather she didn’t say who it was from,” Thanet said.

  Lineham shook his head. H
e was driving fast, but with concentration. “Said she’d rather not say, until she sees us.”

  “I wonder …” Thanet knew that there was really no point in speculating, but couldn’t help himself.

  “Her husband?” suggested Lineham, with a mischievous glance at Thanet.

  “One of those ‘Voice from the Grave’ things, you mean? A bit melodramatic, don’t you think? Besides, he’d hardly have written two letters, surely? If he’d had anything to say, he’d have said it in the suicide note.”

  “Except that suicide notes are always made public. Perhaps he didn’t want anyone but his wife to read this one.”

  “Possible, I suppose. How did she sound? Mrs Pettifer?”

  “Relieved, I should say.”

  “Relieved …” mused Thanet. “Anyway,” he said as they turned into Brompton Lane, “we’ll soon find out now.”

  Mrs Price answered the door promptly. There was an earthenware jug of chrysanthemums and copper-beech leaves on the oak blanket-chest this morning, their glowing colours reflected in the highly polished surface. “Mrs Pettifer will be down in just a moment.” She led them into the drawing room.

  “How is she today?” Thanet asked.

  Mrs Price gave a slight shrug. “Seems a bit better. More cheerful. I think she had some good news in the post this morning. Didn’t touch her breakfast, though.”

  Footsteps could be heard on the stairs and a moment later Gemma Pettifer entered the room. Traces of yesterday’s despair still lingered in the dark smudges beneath her eyes, but the beaten, defeated air had quite vanished away. This morning she had taken trouble with her make-up and her hair was newly washed, floating about her shoulders in a gleaming curtain. She was wearing another filmy Indian cotton dress, this time in a pale, limpid green which emphasised the colour of her eyes. For the first time Thanet recognised that illusion of beauty which she always succeeded in creating upon the stage. This was the Gemma with whom Pettifer had fallen in love. She was carrying an envelope and a heavy book.