An Uncommon Murder

by Anabel Donald

  I squatted by the window and thought. The best revenge is victory. What did I know, what could I use, what should I do?

  Escape. I couldn’t. Bars. Handcuffs. Bed. Anyway, try the bars. They looked solid, but the place had dry rot. I gripped the bars with my left hand, braced my legs against the wall, and pulled. They moved. I pulled again. They shifted further. Pull pull pull. My head throbbed. The bars came away in a rush of rotten wood and plaster. So far so good. I wedged the bars back up as best I could. They’d only deceive a very casual glance, but that might be all Charlotte would give them. If – when – she came back, I might have a second’s advantage if she thought I was still unconscious.

  No bars now. Toad could get out, she could climb down the scaffolding and away. I looked at her and dismissed the thought. She was naked and frail, almost certainly too frail to manage the climb. If she did reach the ground safely she was so out of it she’d probably come straight back into the house, and even if she didn’t she’d have to walk nearly a mile in the freezing rain to get help, and warmth.

  I was still cuffed to the bed. I pushed it back to its original position, fished out my penknife and opened two blades with my teeth. The larger, a weapon of last resort. The smaller, a potential picklock. Then I set to work on the lock with my clumsy left hand.

  I kept trying long after I knew I couldn’t do it. Toad had stopped talking. She was curled up in a foetal huddle, fleshless thumb between bloodless lips. She was asleep, or unconscious. I heaped more blankets over her and flexed my legs to keep the circulation going. My jeans were still damp and I hunched my shoulders inside my blessedly thick leather jacket. Lord, it was cold.

  I tried to think about the Sherwin murder, to decide whether I believed Miss Potter I’d been so sure I’d got my angle: a new candidate for murderer, a candidate who wanted to talk about it: the best of all sources. But Charlotte had been there. If she knew Miss Potter had done it, why hadn’t she said?

  I can usually rely on work as a distraction. However bad things are, I can concentrate on work.

  This time, I couldn’t. My whole body was listening for Charlotte’s footsteps. I was listening so hard, at first I didn’t believe my senses when I heard them.

  I closed my eyes and. played dead. The key scratched in the lock: I could hear the door open. ‘Toad!’ said Charlotte. ‘Wake up, Toad! Time for a bath!’ She sounded – normal; A normal mother, talking to a young child, holding a shotgun casually under her arm.

  ‘Hello Mummy hello Mummy hello Mummy . . .’

  ‘Come along. It’s time for your bath now. Is Alex awake?’

  ‘A bath a bath have I earned it oh thank you Mummy . . .’

  ‘Is Alex awake?’ asked Charlotte again, a steelier note in her voice.

  ‘Who’s Alex, Mummy?’

  ‘This is Alex, here,’ said Charlotte. ‘Has she been awake?’

  ‘Oh yes she’s been awake and she wanted to know about Tigger she’s a friend of Miss Potter’s she told me Miss Potter wanted me to put this blanket on . . .’

  ‘I’m sure Miss Potter wants a great many things she isn’t going to get,’ said Charlotte. ‘Do stop pretending to be unconscious, Alex. You’re not very good at it.’

  ‘I think your daughter is very ill, Mrs Mayfield,’ I said, left hand gripping my penknife tightly in case she came close enough to stab. She was standing about four feet beyond my longest reach, and she was pointing the shotgun at me. ‘Shouldn’t you call an ambulance? Now?’

  ‘I don’t want to go to hospital I’m not ill I don’t want to go to hospital and the tabloid press will get hold of it you know what the tabloids are like it’ll damage Daddy’s career. Daddy’s career is poised to take off he could be Prime Minister and then Mummy would be the Prime Minister’s wife and Charles would be the Prime Minister’s son and I’d be the Prime Minister’s daughter and I wouldn’t be so fat and we’d live in Downing Street actually I don’t want to live in Downing Street I want to stay at home I want to be here I’m going to decorate my room this room could be lovely when the treatment works and I earn some privileges I can have new curtains the windows face south-east . . .’

  ‘You shouldn’t have come here,’ said Charlotte to me, silencing Toad with a glare. ‘You see what I have to put up with. Toad is not well. She’s better here, with me. She’s not responsible for her actions.’

  ‘She should be in hospital,’ I said. ‘She’s very ill.’

  ‘It’s her own fault,’ explained Charlotte reasonably, patiently. ‘I gave her every chance. All she has to do is to eat. That’s not much to ask.’

  ‘It’s an illness,’ I said. ‘You’re right, she doesn’t know what she’s doing.’ I knew I couldn’t make the woman understand, but I had to try. My own dealings with her would end, one way or the other, very soon, and either I’d be back to my own life or I’d be dead. But Toad might recover, and then she’d still have her mother to cope with. ‘Look, Mrs Mayfield, it happens to plenty of girls, even from the best families, and their mothers are the worst people to handle it. There’s too much passion involved, too many hopes and expectations, too much guilt. She needs a doctor.’

  ‘Guilt?’ said Charlotte wonderingly. ‘There’s no guilt. She’s my child and I know what’s best for her. Don’t you dare give me that half-baked psychology, you little bastard from the slums with a common accent and a tin-pot career in the meejer, ruining my floors with your ridiculous boots. I’m a successful mother and a successful wife.’

  Toad nodded smiling agreement. I wasn’t sure which aspect of her mother’s tirade she found persuasive, but Charlotte was certainly carrying fifty per cent of her audience. ‘Charles is the success, I suppose,’ I said, hoping to divide mother and daughter, give Toad some fighting spirit. She must have plenty, somewhere: anorexics are stubborn as hell. You’d have to be, to starve yourself to death.

  ‘Charles is everything Ludovic and I ever hoped for,’ said Charlotte, readjusting the shotgun, I hoped merely because it was heavy. ‘Come along, Toad, bath-time. You’ve earned a bath.’

  Toad was puzzled. ‘No I haven’t actually you said I’d have to eat for three days before I had a bath I don’t think I’ve done that I’ve rather lost track of when I did eat but it’s just as well because you want to make me fat and I mustn’t get fat because the tabloids can be so cruel and they’d print fat photographs of me . . .’

  What? Was she rambling, or was she echoing what Charlotte had said to her? Even Charlotte couldn’t have been so vicious as to suggest to Toad that she was overweight, surely? But I’d got the impression up to now that she was merely a parrot. ‘Toad!’ I snapped. ‘Toad! Miss Potter wants you to answer my questions!’

  ‘OK,’ said Toad, smiling obligingly.

  ‘Why do you think the tabloid press will print fat photographs of you? You’re slim.’

  ‘I’ve always been fat Mummy told me that’s what they did in the newspapers like the Duchess of York they took fat photographs of her well they’d do the same for me because if you have my metabolism Mummy said you always have to watch what you eat . . .’

  I met Charlotte’s eyes. She wasn’t stupid. She knew that I knew what she’d done. Some treatment.

  ‘So I don’t think I’ve earned a bath and we must keep to the rules otherwise I won’t get better oh listen there’s Tigger barking that’s Tigger I can hear Tigger it’s definitely Tigger oh good . . .’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ snapped Charlotte, glancing despite herself at the remains of the late Tigger.

  It wasn’t Tigger, of course, and it wasn’t coming from inside the room, but a dog was barking. Outside.

  ‘That’s Joss,’ I said, to rattle her. ‘That’s Miss Potter’s spaniel. Joss. I’d know that bark anywhere.’

  ‘I’ll see to you in a moment,’ she said. Lightly, glee-fially. ‘Wait here.’

  She locked the door behind her, and took the key. It seemed to me the room temperature soared.

  ‘Are you sure it’s Joss I
can’t really tell barks apart can you? You must be a really doggy person . . .’ warbled sanguine, batty, dying Toad, ‘Gosh you were right he must have come with Miss Potter there’s Miss Potter hello Miss Potter . . .’

  ‘Do belt up, Toad,’ I said. She was beginning to rattle me.

  ‘Hello, Toad,’ said a muffled but unmistakable voice. ‘Could one of you open the window and let me in?’

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  I just couldn’t reach the window catch. The window was set in a deep embrasure and I couldn’t stretch far enough. The tips of the fingers of my left hand groped the air an inch or two shy of it.

  ‘Come along, Toad,’ said Miss Potter briskly, through the glass. She tapped the window sharply to attract Toad’s attention. ‘Come along now. I’m becoming extremely wet, out here, and I have had an arduous climb.’

  I shuffled the bed back, out of the way. Toad obediently addressed the catch. For a dreadful moment I thought she wouldn’t have the strength to release it, but Miss Potter helped her by taking the weight of the upper window. Then, wincing slightly (pain from her arthritic hands?) she slid the window up far enough to wedge her fingers beneath it, and seconds later, awkwardly but quickly, she was inside the room.

  ‘I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry,’ said Toad, ‘I’m so glad you’re here Miss Potter but I’m sorry my room’s such a mess but it’s the treatment you see . . .’

  ‘Quiet, Toad. Everything will be all right now. Just be quiet while Alex and I have a talk. Cover yourself up, my child. It’s very cold.’

  ‘Alex said you’d want me to put on a blanket and I did I did but then I stood up and it fell off . . .’

  ‘Toad, if I want you to speak again I shall say so,’ said Miss Potter firmly, and Toad sank down on to a pile of blankets and squirrelled herself into it.

  Outside, the dog was still barking. Presumably Charlotte hadn’t found it yet. If she was looking for it, not coming straight back.

  ‘I can’t undo the handcuffs,’ I said. ‘You’ll have to handle Charlotte on your own. Unless you’ve brought the sas.’

  ‘The vicar is downstairs. It is his dog you hear I wedged my silver brooch, open, inside the unfortunate creature’s collar with the pin pressing into its neck, to create a diversion. I – I haven’t called the police. A mistake.’

  She wasted no more time on apology, if that was apology. She stood, soaked, Barboured, trousered, to me enormously comforting, surveying the wreckage of her schoolroom and the results of Toad’s treatment. Several strands of white hair had escaped from her bun and were plastered to her cheek, she was breathing heavily, but otherwise she seemed composed and competent.

  In her presence, my confusion over the Sherwin murder was resolved. I believed Miss Potter. If she said she’d killed Rollo, it was true. I left the question of Charlotte’s presence to think about later. If there was a later.

  ‘Take Toad,’ I said. ‘Send the vicar back for me. I can look after myself.’

  ‘How did Charlotte manage to overpower you?’

  ‘Sorry. My mistake. She hit me with a shotgun.’

  ‘It would be unwise to leave you, I think.’ Pause. ‘Toad, have you cleared the old schoolroom equipment from the upper cupboards?’

  ‘No, Miss Potter,’ said Toad brightly. ‘No, I haven’t. I’ve been busy.’ Then she met Miss Potter’s eye and hung her head. ‘Actually, I kept them on purpose. I wanted to keep them. They reminded me of you, and Aunt Penelope.’

  ‘That’s good,’ said Miss Potter. ‘Alex, move the bed under the cupboard near the window, if you can. Quickly.’

  I obeyed the order, puzzled. Did she envisage stunning Charlotte with a globe, or choking her with chalk? My efforts with the bed disturbed Tigger, and the stench increased. Miss Potter paid no attention. ‘That’ll do,’ she said, and scrambled up, first on the bed, then on the bedhead, where she balanced precariously and groped inside the cupboard, emerging with a small wooden box which she passed to me. It rattled.

  ‘Handcuff key,’ she said. ‘If those are the handcuffs from the dressing-up trunk. The label should be readily identifiable.’ Then she returned to her excavations of the cupboard.

  Bark, bark, from outside. The dog sounded frantic, now. Was Charlotte still down there?

  I put the box on the floor and opened it. Several labelled keys: sure enough, one said HANDCUFFS. The box was sandalwood. The old, faint, sweet smell (Kenya?) lifted my spirits as my trembling left hand worked at the key.

  ‘Those aren’t the handcuffs from the dressing-up trunk,’ said Toad, blithely, crushingly. ‘Those are Charles’s handcuffs. He stole them from a policeman in Windsor. For a dare.’

  The accounts I’d heard of Charles had not endeared him to me. He had never been my favourite person. Now, I heartily agreed with Lally’s friend Toby. Charles was a dickhead.

  It was worse, now, to be cuffed, because I’d been so sure I’d soon be free, we’d all be free, of this room and that woman. I kept going with the key anyway, but it didn’t fit. Things didn’t look good. Unless the vicar was an ex-rugby player and his dog a pit bull terrier. Bark bark bark.

  ‘Tell me about the vicar and his dog,’ I said.

  ‘Kipper is a mongrel.’

  ‘Large? Fierce?’

  ‘A dachshund/spaniel cross.’

  ‘And the vicar?’

  ‘Mr Routledge had the call late in life. He was previously an administrative grade civil servant in the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘What are you looking for?’ I was partly talking to shut out the barking. If it rasped my nerves, it would be worse for Charlotte, I hoped.

  ‘The twelve-bore,’ said Miss Potter.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The shotgun; I told you. Colonel Farrell intended to commit suicide with a shotgun. Rosalind and I purloined it, but we could not return it to the gun-room, so I concealed it here. With a box of cartridges. Ah!’

  She passed me the gun; she brought the cartridges with her as she climbed, carefully, down to the floor.

  ‘Will it still work?’ I asked, stunned, stroking the barrel lovingly.

  ‘It was clean and oiled when it was hidden. I made sure of that, naturally. It is a valuable gun. Besides, the threat alone may be sufficient. Give me the gun and replace the bed, Alex. Quickly. I need a clear line of fire from the window to the door.’

  I obeyed. In this mood, Miss Potter commanded respect. She broke the gun, with difficulty (would her hands hold up?) and loaded.

  ‘How much help can we expect from the vicar?’ I asked.

  ‘He is a witness. I did not attempt to explain the circumstances. It would have taken too long to convince him. Besides, I wasn’t sure what we would find.’

  ‘Do you think Charlotte will give up, now the vicar’s here?’ I knew the answer myself, but I wanted to be wrong.

  ‘No,’ she said.‘I’m going outside the window, now. Do not worry, Alex. She may surrender to a threat of force.’

  And Toad may recover and lead a normal life, and we may see the resurgence of the British manufacturing industry, and sanctions may work on Saddam Hussein, I thought, watching her heave herself laboriously through the window.

  Toad started to wail. ‘Don’t leave me don’t leave me don’t leave me it’s all right when you’re here . . .’

  I understood her feelings.

  The barking had stopped. Irrationally, I knew that meant Charlotte would come back.

  I was frightened. I could taste the fear. The taste was familiar: like loneliness and anger. Stomach acid, I supposed.

  ‘Mummy said I could have a bath I want a bath I want a bath ...’

  Miss Potter was outside the window, the gun propped on the sill, her body half-protected by the wall. She must be crouching. Could she do it? Would her body hold out? She was way too old to scramble up scaffolding in the rain. Would her fingers be strong enough to pull the trigger? The gun would be stiff.

  I hudd
led my body into as small a space as I could, and settled down to my least favourite occupation: waiting.

  I didn’t have to wait long. Charlotte came back, confident and happy, the gun held loosely in her arms. She stood in the doorway. ‘You’ve opened the window, Alex.’

  ‘I opened the window,’ said Miss Potter, from her hide. ‘Good evening, Charlotte. Put that gun down please, or I will shoot.’

  ‘You ridiculous old woman,’ said Charlotte blankly. ‘What do you think you are doing? Where did you get that gun? I never invited you to my house. Leave at once.’

  ‘Where is Mr Routledge?’ Miss Potter’s tone was conversational, so normal Charlotte was led to answer normally.

  ‘Seeing to his wretched dog. Then he’s going to look at the boiler. It’s broken down, you know.’

  ‘No it hasn’t no it hasn’t you told me you’d turned it off until I ate something that’s what she told me Miss Potter honestly I don’t think it’s broken at all . . .’

  There was spite in Toad’s voice. Miss Potter’s presence gave her the strength to oppose Charlotte. I remembered Lally’s remark, ‘She hates her mother.’ Perhaps Miss Potter could use her, but I couldn’t see how.

  Miss P. went on. ‘Most inconvenient, having to leave the house unheated. There may be serious consequences for the furniture. . . . Mr Routledge is extremely good with his hands, of course. Put the gun down, Charlotte. We’ll help you lay fires in the downstairs rooms. At least we can save the Chippendale chairs and the Regency dining table.’

  ‘If the furniture is damaged it’ll be entirely Toad’s fault,’ said Charlotte. ‘She has no sense of responsibility.’

  ‘I’ve got a sense of responsibility I really have I’m really trying I know I owe it to Daddy and Mummy and Charles and Tigger and Miss Potter . . .’

  We all ignored Toad.

  Since I gathered Miss Potter’s policy was to keep Charlotte talking, I wanted to give her a hand, but apart from a passing tribute to the lasting qualities of the Sherwin-owned iron beds, I was all out of observations on country house maintenance. ‘Mrs Mayfield was outside the gun-room when her father was shot,’ I said. ‘She told me her mother did it.’ As a change of subject, I thought the lack of elegant neatness was more than compensated for by intrinsic interest.