An Uncommon Murder

by Anabel Donald

  Instead, I read four of the vicar’s books, very slowly. The first author was a fascist, the second a snob, the third an enthusiastic gardener proud of her descriptions – the body lay, pallid face upturned to the silvered moonlight, half-obscuring a well-established border of lupins, rich hollyhocks, perennial poppies and vibrant delphiniums – the fourth . . . I didn’t let myself categorise the fourth. I just tried to read him.

  I cried myself to sleep, that night, too. I expect it was shock.

  The day after was different.

  The nurses were furious. They wouldn’t speak to me, though they gave me an abrasive blanket-bath. Two hours later my weights and pulleys were dismantled and I was bundled on to a stretcher, wheeled to a private ambulance and mantled again. Now I knew why the nurses were annoyed. Anything private annoyed them, for ordinary people. It was different if you were Ludovic Mayfield’s daughter, of course. I must still have been concussed because though I didn’t know where I was going, I didn’t ask any questions. I didn’t care, as long as I was moving.

  The ambulance stopped outside Barty’s house, he opened the door, and the attendants carried me up the steps to the back room on the ground floor. The last time I’d seen it, it had been a library. Now the walls were still lined with books, but the library table and most of the chairs had gone, and there was a hospital bed, a system of orthopaedic pulleys, a big bedside table with a telephone, and two nurses. They moved me on to the bed and trussed me up. I looked round for Barty but he’d vanished: gone back to work, I supposed, disappointed. I’d changed into Miss P.’s white nightdress and I was looking distinctly better than the last time we’d met. I also wanted him to explain what I was doing there.

  The nurses left the room before I got round to asking them to pass me a book: my doggy bag of hospital comforts seemed to have gone missing in the move. Then Polly came in, carrying her laptop and a holdall with the notes and tapes from home. She kissed me. She always kisses people.

  ‘Brilliant, brilliant, you’ve arrived! I didn’t visit you yesterday because we were trying to fix this up. We knew you’d have preferred your flat but the ceiling wasn’t high enough and there really wasn’t room for the nurses, and Barty hoped you’d like it here, and we knew you’d hate the hospital, and you are in a library, Barty says there are five thousand books, that’ll take you a week or two . . .’

  ‘Hang on, Polly, who’s paying for the nurses? I can’t possibly afford this—’

  ‘Barty is, at the moment, but he has plans . . .’

  ‘What plans?’

  ‘Barty’ll tell you later. How’re you feeling? Is it agony? You’re looking good . . .’

  She kept on talking, but I didn’t listen. I felt too uncomfortable. I’m always uncomfortable when people are kind to me, and I didn’t like the position I was in, moved around without warning, a guest in someone else’s house. If I was honest, though, of course I preferred it to the hospital. I’d hated the hospital.

  ‘Hey, Polly –’ I interrupted her, ‘what’s that?’ I pointed to a double white line of camera tape on the floor across the doorway, like a barrier.

  ‘That was Barty’s idea. That marks your territory from his. This room is an independent sovereign state, he said. No one comes in unless you invite them.’ He came up from the office at lunchtime and I invited him in. He was wearing his usual casual uniform, dark brown corduroy trousers, Canadian lumberjack shirt and old blue sweater. He was very familiar and very welcome. If I had to be anywhere except home, then I’d have chosen Barty’s. He never makes conversation and he never asks if you really mean what you say. Why would you say it, if you didn’t mean it?

  I’d already decided I didn’t want to discuss the Sherwin piece until I’d spoken to Miss Potter again, and he seemed happy to leave it. I thanked him for his arrangements: a bit charmlessly, I could hear myself, but I did my best. I was grateful. He’d been very thoughtful. He’d even got British Telecom to transfer my home number to the telephone by my bed.

  He was cautious about explaining his plan about paying the nurses I needed. I think he thought I’d bite his head off for interfering, but I felt too weak for head-biting and liked his plan, which was to get Ludovic Mayfield to compensate me for loss of earnings and cover my medical expenses in return for not selling my account of Charlotte’s last hours to the newspapers. Even more cautiously, he suggested that he negotiate the deal with Mayfield.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll leave it to you.’

  ‘I don’t think I heard that,’ he said, grinning. ‘D’you want to run it by me again?’

  He wanted jam on it. I wouldn’t say it twice. I saw a ghostly Annabel nodding and smiling approval, as it was. I shifted irritably: my leg hurt, my feelings were confused and my head felt as if it was stuffed with Spanish moss. I was glad when he left soon after.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Next day, Wednesday, was better still. I felt unexpectedly at home, partly because Barty had brought in a radio and a television, and piled books around me. The nurses were OK, too, both black, one tall and plump, one short and wiry. The short one was stronger. Neither of them told me I drank too much coffee or complained about making it, both of them were deft with bedpans.

  The evening before, Barty’d done a good deal with Mayfield. So good, I wouldn’t be surprised if Annabel helped. Mayfield’s pairing for my nurses, for my loss of earnings, and for my silence. Fine by me. I’ve got far more out of the deal than a per diem plus even my most imaginative expenses.

  By the next day I was still only about seventy-five per cent clear-thinking but I was well enough not to dodge the Miss Potter issue any longer. It was decision-time. Did I write and publish the piece, and land Miss Potter in it right up to her silvery bun, or did I file it under Altruistic Interment?

  I couldn’t understand my own hesitation. She was over seventy, after all, and had had plenty of life. At least some of it was of her own choosing. She’d had seven glorious years in Kenya, and not all the rest of the time had been bad. She’d certainly been Queen Bee down in Warwickshire, an indefatigably worthy, much admired member of the community. Not a barrel of laughs for most of us, but her line. If she was convicted she’d have plenty of scope for good works in prison, for heaven’s sake.

  I could make pots and pots of money, I knew I could, if I played the story right. She wouldn’t lie and deny it, and she hadn’t told me in confidence. Besides, I had her confession on tape.

  On the other hand, she had saved my life.

  That was her business, her decision, I told myself I never asked her to.

  She was due to visit me at eleven. At about ten to, my phone rang, again. It had been busy; a surprising number of my friends and acquaintances had heard about my injuries (Polly?) and called to ask after me. This time, it was Ready Eddy.

  ‘How come you never called me back on the Sherwin murder?’ he said.

  ‘Sorry. I’ll explain some time,’ I said. ‘Something else came up.’

  ‘So d’you want the information, or not?’

  I tried to sound interested. ‘Yes, please, Eddy.’

  ‘No hard evidence. But I had a drink with Ronnie Macleod. He’s long retired, but he was the D/S on the case.’ He paused, a dramatic, stringing-it-out pause.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You should have got back to me. I wanted to warn you to keep that source of yours, the Potter person, well away from shotguns. Macleod reckoned she did for Rollo Sherwin, or that if she didn’t, she knew perfectly well who had.’

  I couldn’t summon up any excitement, though Eddy deserved plenty. ‘Why didn’t he say so at the time?’

  ‘He tried to. His guv’nor wouldn’t wear it, he was convinced it was the wife. It’s solid information, Alex, Macleod was a good copper Trust your Uncle Eddy.’

  I thanked him, though I was a little annoyed that my discovery had been pre-empted by D/S Macleod, agreed I owed him several, though we didn’t specify what, and rang off just as the short wiry nurse opened th
e door to Miss Potter.

  I still hadn’t decided what to do. I thought that seeing her might help. She looked terrific: neatly dressed as ever, healthy, upright, pink-cheeked. She was carrying the mug she’d bought for me as part of her manipulation campaign, and more grapes. I’d left the last lot in hospital, for the nurses.

  Oh, well. Oh, well. She was a sporting old trout, and I owed her one.

  We spoke at the same time.

  ‘I’ve decided not to publish,’ I said.

  ‘I have misled you, Alex,’ she said.

  We both stopped. Then the remaining twenty-five per cent of my brain came back and I made the link that had eluded me the last time I’d seen her.

  I had two scenes in my head, both with Miss Potter.

  The first was in the Stratford hospital. She is standing by my bed, on the point of departure, smiling as she talks about cars. I say, ‘You told me you knew nothing about cars,’ and she says, ‘No. You thought so, and I did not correct your assumption.’

  The second was in the BMW on the motorway, with me crawling along in the slow lane praying not to be spotted as a drunk by the motorway police. A distraught Miss Potter has just declared her feelings for Rollo. ‘I loved him; she says. ‘And you killed him?’ I say. And she bows her head, a tragic mute. A silver-headed, sanctimonious, treacherous old trout, lying by her silence.

  She was a literal truthteller. She could lie me into the minor leagues by omission, by implication, by suggestion, but she told the literal truth. And she never actually told me that she’d killed Rollo. It was a relief to have my brain back. I re-ran her description of his death, and she’d never stated that she was the murderer I’d thought so, and she hadn’t corrected my assumption.

  Charlotte Sherwin had done it. Of course. Charlotte had done it, because she was selfish and cold and dead common. Charlotte had done it for all the reasons I’d imagined as I sat across the kitchen table from her in that chilly and dreadful house, because she wouldn’t let Daddy leave Mummy and sue the sofa from beneath her. He probably couldn’t have taken the house, but Charlotte would have believed her father when she heard him tell her mother, furiously, resonantly, that he would throw them all out.

  It has taken me much longer to explain this than to think it.

  ‘You thought Rosalind had done it,’ I said. ‘You confronted Rollo, just as you described, but you didn’t shoot him. You couldn’t. Maps. You had to follow your maps, and your map said duty and self-control and responsibility and thou shall not kill. But why did you think it was Rosalind?’

  ‘I am glad to find you recovering from the concussion,’ she said. ‘May I sit down?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘It is as you suppose. I left Rollo alive, and closed the door behind me. Then I heard him speaking, again. “Hello,” he said. “What are you doing here?” ’ She paused. ‘I could not, of course, continue to eavesdrop.’

  ‘Why not? You’d eavesdropped up a storm just before.’

  ‘I owed no loyalty to Lady Sherwin. Her treatment of others was never such as to earn my consideration. I need only remind you of her declared views on the brave pilots who fought and died for us in the Battle of Britain. But Rosalind was a different matter. So I continued to walk away. I had reached the hall by the time the gun went off, so by the time I returned to the scene, the door was open and the room was empty! Apart, of course, from the body of Lord Sherwin.’

  ‘But why did you think it was Rosalind he was speaking to when it must have been Charlotte?’

  ‘His relationship with Rosalind was in the forefront of my mind. I knew his interlocutor must have been hidden under the sofa, and I thought that it was a – youthful, loverlike prank.’ How she must have hated that thought, at the time, since she was neither youthful nor his lover. ‘But finally,’ she went on, ‘it was Lord Sherwin’s tone of voice. It was – indulgent, affectionate. The tone he had used to me on the two occasions when . . .’

  ‘When he treated you as a lover?’ I phrased the comment deliberately.

  ‘You are giving me the best butter, Alex,’ she said, but I could see the thought pleased her.

  ‘And I suppose he used the same indulgent, affectionate tone to animals and children?’ So did Barty. He also, sometimes, used it to me.

  ‘Exactly. Even to Charlotte, whom it would not be unfair to say he disliked. I did not think of Charlotte at the time, but I now see how foolish I have been.’

  ‘So you covered for Rosalind.’

  ‘Yes. I thought the guilt must be chiefly his, and she had been almost a daughter to me. You can imagine my distress when my recent dealings with Charlotte, and my observation of her treatment of Toad, led me to suspect that my assumption was wrong. I had behaved deplorably, throughout.’

  She looked at me, almost in appeal.

  Time she stopped wallowing. ‘Not throughout,’ I said briskly. ‘Only once a week and twice on Sundays. It didn’t matter to Rollo.’

  ‘No. It did matter to Toad.’

  There was nothing to be said, so neither of us said it.

  After a while she cleared her throat. ‘Now you can explain why you had decided not to exploit what you must have thought to be a highly lucrative discovery.’

  ‘I owed you one,’ I said. ‘Let’s leave it there, OK?’ The whole thing made me uncomfortable. ‘You tell me why you spun that elaborate fantasy about Rollo’s death.’

  ‘I told you the truth,’ she said. ‘I described the events, and my feelings. I had never spoken about that time. I could never talk about – Rollo.’

  ‘He sounds extraordinary,’ I said. I lied.

  Chapter Thirty

  I’d signed my statement, when the Warwickshire police sent it, but actually the inquest was adjourned. The whole thing was being kept as quiet as the combined efforts of the police, the coroner, Ludovic Mayfield, and Conservative Central Office could manage. That still wasn’t very quiet, and Mayfield’s chance for the leadership had gone. For days after, Toad’s plump teenage face stared up at me from the newspapers: for nights after, her Belsen face haunted my sleep.

  How could I have been so stupid? I’d sympathized with lonely Rosalind and lonely Miss Potter but I’d assumed that Toad was all right, just because she was posh and had parents. Even with all the evidence piling up round me – Barty’s sadistic father, the Sherwin children rattling, ignored, around their loveless house, what I knew of the entirely unmaternal Charlotte – I’d preferred to cling to my cosy preconceptions. I’d cornered the market in outsiders: only people I approved of were allowed to be misfits.

  I despise smugness and prejudice, and I’d been blinded by both.

  I told Barty all I knew about Rollo’s murder, and that I was killing the piece. ‘You don’t want to write it, with Charlotte as killer?’ he asked. ‘Considering you can’t libel the dead?’

  ‘Miss Potter isn’t dead. She’d look a prat, and she doesn’t deserve to.’ Then I realised he was having me on, ‘You wouldn’t let me, anyway,’ I said. ‘Just forget it. I’ve been paid.’

  ‘I’m interested that Miss Potter’s feelings matter to you.’

  I wasn’t going to go into it. I didn’t think I’d see much of her in the future. Our relationship was over. Although she was visiting me every day at present, Mayfield was giving her back the lodge at a low rent until she died: soon she’d be off, back to the country, where she belonged.

  The verdict at the inquest on Toad was Death by Misadventure. Then she was cremated, ten days after Bloody Saturday. I’d have liked to have gone to the funeral, but I was still attached to pulleys and likely to remain so for at least two more weeks. By then I was feeling much better and very restless. I rang around for work: nothing till the New Year.

  I sorted out my Sherwin notes, reminded myself to tell Ready Eddy next time I spoke to him that his good copper, D/S Macleod, had been half wrong about Miss Potter, and chucked the lot. I wasn’t even going to file them.

  I also had a pile of clippings I’d b
een collecting since Charlotte’s death. As I chucked those, one caught my eye. Quotes from Ludovic Mayfield: ‘I had no idea my daughter had returned from India . . . my wife was devoted to the children . . . I can only assume that she thought Toad would be happier at home. I never dreamt that Toad was so ill, or my wife so desperate.’

  I hadn’t taken that in, before. I pulled the other clippings out of the bin-liner and went through them. There it was again, and again, and again. ‘I had no idea my daughter had returned from India ...’

  He was lying. Toad’s high-pitched voiceless babble was as clear in my mind now as it had been when I first heard it: ‘They made me come back and I went to see Daddy in London . . . but Daddy didn’t look at me even . . . he was looking at a photograph of Charles.’ He had known, all right, and he hadn’t cared. ‘He said Mummy knew best and Mummy would look after me . . .’

  In 1958, Laura had loaded the gun and Charlotte had fired it. In 1990, too, help for her enterprise had been close at hand. Mayfield had known, but he had shut his eyes. So, in a much smaller way, had Miss Potter. So had I.

  It didn’t help to think about it.

  Anabel Donald

  Anabel Donald has been writing fiction since 1982 when her first novel, Hannah at Thirty-five, was published to great critical acclaim.

  In her thirty-six-year teaching career she has taught adolescent girls in private boarding schools, a comprehensive and an American university. Most recently, she has written the five Alex Tanner crime novels in the Notting Hill series.

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