Rosie Meadows Regrets...

by Catherine Alliott

  ‘Ah yes, she would.’

  ‘And even then all I had to go on was “up west somewhere”, so I hurtled up the motorway like a lunatic and went straight round to Alice’s, who hadn’t the faintest idea where you were but insisted on coming with me. Together we must have knocked on every conceivable door in London before she realized you must be here. What the devil’s going on, Rosie? I told you to stay put, for heaven’s sake, and I’ve had the police on the phone every five minutes asking if I know where you are.’

  ‘Oh God! You didn’t tell them?’

  ‘I didn’t damn well know! And now I find you holed up in an empty house like something out of Custer’s last stand. I fully expected to find furniture against the door and sandbags up against the windows.’

  ‘Nice idea,’ I said admiringly, ‘but actually there’s no need for any of that any more because I’ve just found out something simply marvellous. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me before!’ I clasped my hands ecstatically.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’ll never guess!’

  Joss ground his teeth. ‘Correct.’

  ‘Harry committed suicide!’ I squeaked. ‘Isn’t that wonderful!’

  Two faces looked at me blankly.

  Alice frowned. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Quite sure, only,’ I grimaced, ‘slight technical hitch. I can’t actually prove it. But anyway, never mind all that, come and meet the genius who planted the seed in my brain in the first place – here, through here!’ I hustled them joyfully through to the sitting room. Charlotte stood up uncertainly, hands twisting together.

  ‘Charlotte, this is my – well, my landlord, I suppose, Joss Dubarry, and Alice Feelburn who you probably remember from Ivo’s christening.’

  A few hellos were muttered and Alice and Charlotte exchanged the mutually incredulous looks of women who inhabit different planets. Charlotte stared at Alice’s swirling Indian skirts and Alice at Charlotte’s navy blue pleats and pearls.

  ‘I gather you think Rosie’s husband committed suicide,’ said Joss politely, for all the world as if he was inquiring if she grew her own vegetables or something.

  ‘Well, it’s just a hunch, of course.’ She looked nervously at me.

  ‘Oh, absolutely,’ I said quickly. ‘We’ve got no proof, no proof at all.’ I smiled at her reassuringly. ‘But if you think about it,’ I said, turning eagerly to the others, ‘it all makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Does it?’ Alice looked perplexed. ‘I don’t think so. I mean, why on earth would he want to do that? Take his own life?’

  ‘Oh, because – because I was going to divorce him, of course!’

  ‘Well, yes,’ she said doubtfully.

  ‘And,’ I cast about wildly, ‘and because he was so fat!’ I added triumphantly.

  She stared. ‘Bit extreme, isn’t it? I mean we all get depressed about our weight, but to resort to hara-kiri by way of a crash diet is –’

  ‘Absolute rubbish, I agree.’

  The funny thing was that no one’s lips moved when that was said. I swung round in the direction of the voice and to my horror saw – oh my God – Superintendent Hennessey, in her habitual blue overcoat, hands in pockets, collar turned up, walking up behind us from the kitchen, her trusty, uniformed sidekick on her heels.

  ‘You’ll have to do better than that, I’m afraid, Rosie. Oh, and incidentally, this isn’t rural Gloucestershire, you know, you really can’t go around leaving the back door open, you’ll get all sorts of odd-bods wandering in. I say, what a splendid gathering, do I know everyone? Rosie, perhaps you’d do the honours?’

  I gaped at her for a moment, thinking that actually what I’d much rather do was faint clean away on the spot. Why wasn’t she beetling back to Oxfordshire? What was she doing loitering in London still?

  ‘Righto,’ I croaked. God, she had a hideous knack of turning up at precisely the wrong moment, didn’t she? Perhaps that was what had attracted her to the force, the fact that everyone would always be so utterly dismayed to see her.

  ‘Um, well, this is Joss Dubarry, whose cottage I rent, and Alice Feelburn and Charlotte Boffington-Clarke. Superintendent Hennessey,’ I muttered with a brief nod in her general direction.

  ‘Delighted, delighted,’ she purred with what purported to be a smile but bitter experience had taught me better. ‘And all having a nice little afternoon tincture, I see,’ she said, eyeing the gin bottle. ‘I won’t, thank you, Rosie, got to keep a clear head about me. Now,’ she rubbed her hands gleefully as if she really had just wandered in on a drinks party. ‘Let’s see. You were hypothesizing, I think, before I so rudely interrupted, about a suicide, Rosie, is that right?’

  ‘Well, it’s possible, isn’t it?’ I muttered.

  ‘Oh, anything’s possible, but I’m afraid we need a little more than Harry’s weight problem to convince us.’

  ‘Oh well, of course!’ I laughed nervously. ‘I wasn’t suggesting that was the only –’

  ‘And since we don’t,’ she snapped suddenly, ‘have any more to go on than that fatuous suggestion, and since we do, on the other hand, have an overwhelming amount of evidence against you,’ she paused and I caught on her sharp eyes like barbed wire, ‘I’m afraid it’s my unpleasant duty to arrest you, Mrs Meadows. For the murder of your husband, the late Mr Harold Meadows. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned, something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say, may be given in evidence.’

  There was a stunned silence. I stared at her.

  ‘You don’t mean that,’ I breathed. ‘You surely don’t believe I did it.’

  ‘As I said,’ she said carefully, ‘an overwhelming amount of evidence suggests –’

  ‘Suggests,’ spat Joss. ‘That pretty much exposes the poverty of your situation, doesn’t it? You’ve got no real proof, no evidence, but so desperate are you to drag someone triumphantly down to the station and press charges that you’ll throw the book at anyone! Oh yes, time is marching on, isn’t it, Superintendent? This man died weeks ago and you’ve got to get a conviction under your belt pretty damn quickly or someone higher up the ladder is going to want to know the reason why, so you’ll make the cap fit just about anyone, including someone who you and I both know to be innocent!’

  ‘Mr Dubarry, I’ll ask you to hold your tongue!’ she snapped. ‘This is outrageous, you’re interfering with a murder inquiry and –’

  ‘No, you’re outrageous,’ interrupted Joss, stepping forward and pointing a finger in her face. ‘In fact, you’re way out of line. You’re doing your damnedest to force a false confession out of someone who you know is liable to crack with the right sort of pressure. You’re deliberately and callously instigating a miscarriage of justice.’

  ‘And you are deliberately obstructing police business! One more word out of you and you’ll be down at the station with her.’ She gave a curt nod to her friend in blue. ‘Cuff her, Jenkins.’

  ‘Cuff her?’ Joss said incredulously. I gave a little yelp of horror and shot behind him. ‘You’re out of your mind. I’ll have you up for false arrest, I’ll –’

  ‘OH ALL RIGHT!’ Charlotte’s cry cut through the proceedings like a knife.

  We swung round to see her pale and trembling by the window, nearly as pale and trembling as I was, in fact, as I offered my puny little wrists up to the sergeant.

  ‘All right,’ she repeated softly.

  There was a silence.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Boffington-Clarke,’ Superintendent Hennessey said, after a pause. Suddenly I realized she’d been waiting for this.

  Charlotte walked back from the window, arms tightly folded over her chest. She sat down on the arm of a chair and licked her lips.

  ‘It’s true,’ she muttered. ‘Harry did commit suicide. He told Boffy he’d done it, told him he’d added the mushroom to the pan.’

  ‘When?’ I said, aghast. ‘You didn’t tell me that!’
/>   ‘When they had lunch together at the club. On the day he died. He’d eaten it the day before, you see, but it takes at least twenty-four hours to get into the system. Boffy said he sat down as usual and ordered lamb cutlets and claret as if it was a perfectly normal Monday. He didn’t touch his food but while Boffy ate, he told him what he’d done. He said he couldn’t live with the ignominy and shame that Tim was threatening him and Boffy with, said his whole life had been a sham anyway but now that the precious little he did have – you, Ivo, Bertram’s house – was going down the plughole too, he’d lost everything. He said he realized he’d implicated you in his death but he’d done it in a moment of spite and he asked Boffy to see that you were vindicated.’ She looked at me. ‘Harry wanted him to undo the damage, you see, tell the police he’d taken his own life, but Boffy was too scared. He knew it would all come out if he did, his own involvement with Tim.’

  ‘You mean Boffy sat having lunch with Harry knowing he was going to collapse?’ I whispered.

  ‘Oh, no, once it came out, Boffy was going to get him to hospital. And Harry wanted to go. He was scared stiff by this stage, pale and trembling and in pain. You see, he’d thought that the moment the mushroom had passed his lips, he’d drop down dead, like something out of an Agatha Christie book; he hadn’t realized it could take up to three days. Boffy had just stood up to call an ambulance when Harry collapsed. Actually, Boffy said later that Harry wouldn’t have minded going like that.’

  ‘In the club, over the port,’ I breathed.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Mrs Boffington-Clarke, you will of course be able to give a full statement with regard to your husband and Mr Meadows’s involvement with Mr McWerther?’

  ‘I can’t,’ she whispered. ‘Boffy would kill me.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she said quietly. ‘At the end of the day, I don’t think he could have lived with Rosie going to prison just to save his own good name, do you?’

  Slowly I turned to view this icy-cool policewoman. ‘You knew about all this, didn’t you? You’ve known all along.’

  ‘Not quite all along. We’ve certainly had our suspicions and we’ve been following Tim McWerther for some time now, but we were never able to find out where he operated from. To this day we still haven’t discovered the exact location of the house because he rarely went there himself, just pulled the strings from a distance, and although we knew he had quite an impressive clientele, again, we had no specific details. No doubt Mr Boffington-Clarke will be able to enlighten us, give us a list of names.’ Charlotte went a bit green. Superintendent Hennessey turned to me. ‘We also had a feeling Tim might have pushed your husband over the edge, Rosie. I’m quite sure the note under the pillow wasn’t the first threat he received, just the first one Tim had brought to the house. I imagine there were plenty more through the post to both gentlemen. Am I right, Mrs Boffington-Clarke?’

  Charlotte nodded miserably.

  ‘So you knew he committed suicide then?’ said Joss.

  ‘Only for sure since ten o’clock this morning. When we searched this house. We found something rather interesting on the back of the bedroom door, you see.’

  ‘Oh?’ I gazed at her. ‘What was that?’

  ‘A Paisley dressing gown. Your husband’s Paisley dressing gown, the one he was wearing when he collected the mushrooms at your parents’ house?’

  I thought back, remembered him flapping down the lawn in it, his big bottom swaying from side to side. ‘Yes,’ I said slowly. ‘Yes, I think you might be right.’

  ‘Oh, we know we’re right, because in the pocket we found tiny spores. The minutest flakes of fungus. We’ve just had the results back from the lab, that’s why I was coming to find you. The spores are undoubtedly from the Panther Cap. There’s no doubt about it, the mushroom came out of his own pocket.’

  ‘So you weren’t coming to arrest me at all!’

  ‘Quite the contrary, but I’m afraid when I saw Mrs Boffington-Clarke here I couldn’t resist taking the opportunity of forcing her hand for the extra information we needed. Having you all assembled here together was really rather convenient. Sorry to have scared you like that, Rosie, but it was all to the good, I’m sure you’ll agree.’ She went towards the door. ‘I’ll be in touch with you soon, by the way, to take a statement, but it’s just a formality, nothing to worry about.’ She paused at the door, looking back. ‘This way then, Mrs Boffington-Clarke, if you please.’

  Charlotte looked startled. ‘Oh, y-you mean we’re –’

  ‘Off to take your statement, yes, that’s right.’

  God, she didn’t mess about, did she? We all watched dumbly as poor old Charlotte, white-faced and trembling, stood up and retrieved her coat and hat from the back of a chair. She wasn’t exactly frogmarched out of the room but she was certainly escorted from it rather closely. We held our breath as the front door closed behind them. There was a stunned silence. Joss, Alice and I looked at one another.

  ‘Well, bugger me,’ said Alice at last, with feeling.

  ‘Is that it then?’ I whispered. ‘Am I free?’

  ‘Certainly looks like it,’ said Joss. He began to smile. I shot a look at Alice, and the next thing I knew we were all rushing together, laughing and hugging each other. It was a bit like a rugby scrum actually, except that Alice and I were both crying a bit and I was very aware of Joss’s arm round my shoulders, so warm and so tight I wanted it to stay like that for ever. I was also aware that much as I loved Alice I couldn’t help wishing she was in Dar-es-Salaam, or somewhere equally far flung at this precise moment. A second later, however, we all broke away laughing and sniffing.

  ‘God, the relief!’ I gasped, wiping my nose attractively on my sleeve. ‘Oh God, I really thought that was it for me, thought my number was up – you know, come in Rosie Meadows, your time in the free world is over and your stay at Strangeways is about to begin! Oh, the joy, the relief and – gosh, I must ring my mother! Yes, I must ring Mum, tell her to let Dad out of the potting shed, tell her to ring Philly and – oh Christ, Philly!’ I clutched my head. ‘Heavens, I simply must speak to Philly because – God, how awful, to think I actually accused her! Accused my own sister! And all because she had a few poxy books in my attic. Remember, Joss? Those mushroom books! How strange,’ I said slowly, ‘it must just have been a complete coincidence, she must have bought them and forgotten all about them. Don’t you remember how we thought it was her, Joss?’

  ‘I do,’ he said slowly. He was looking at Alice. Alice had turned a bit pink.

  ‘What?’ I said, looking from one to the other. ‘What is it?’

  ‘You know, don’t you?’ she muttered, raising her pale blue eyes to his.

  ‘I had a fair idea,’ he said quietly.

  I stared at them, dumbfounded. ‘What?’ I demanded.

  Alice turned to me. ‘I put them there,’ she said calmly. ‘That time you were first accused by the police. You know, when you rang me in a complete panic and I dashed down to be with you, stayed the night. On the way down I bought those books in a second-hand book shop in Burford. When you’d gone to bed that night I went up to the attic to get some of her old books, steamed off the Ex Libris labels that Philly had written her name on and slapped them into the mushroom ones. Actually I was going to put them prominently in the bookcase downstairs so that someone would find them pretty damned quickly, but at the last minute I chickened out. I didn’t quite have the nerve, so I just shoved them back in the attic on the off chance that the police might search the place and find them, which of course they did, but they didn’t have the nous to look in the boxes.’

  ‘But … why?’ I stared at her incredulously. ‘Why on earth would you want to –’

  ‘Incriminate your sister? Oh come on, Rosie, I loathed her, for God’s sake. I hated her. She stole my husband, for crying out loud – she ruined my life!’

  I gazed at her in astonishment. ‘You knew,’ I breathed.

  ‘Well of course I bloody knew, we
all knew, didn’t we? It’s an absolute classic, a regular little modern morality tale.’ She walked to the fireplace, then turned, a pained expression on her face. ‘I surely don’t have to fill you in, do I, Rosie? You do know the story? The one about the flirtatious, bottom-pinching husband who meets a beautiful, intelligent girl at a dinner party – yours, incidentally – and is absolutely astonished when she not only returns his oafish, hot looks over the salmon mousse but actually arranges to meet him the following week at a motel?’ She laughed quietly. ‘He couldn’t quite believe his luck, the poor bastard. Never had such a steaming success. So off he scurries, and they duly have a sordid little bunk up, and then blow me if it isn’t swiftly followed by another one the following week, and then another, until it quickly becomes a regular little Wednesday-night fixture at – guess where? Not the nasty sordid motel any more, but my very own rose-clad weekend country cottage!’ She threw back her head and rasped out a hollow laugh. ‘Yes, my cottage,’ she breathed at the ceiling. Then her blue eyes came back at us, blazing. ‘Oh, she’s not in love with him of course, this beautiful, intelligent girl, she’s just amusing herself. And why not? She’s bored, you see. Bored with being top dog at the PTA, bored with being chairwoman of Cancer Relief, bored with growing her own vegetables and winning all the prizes at the village show, bored with her perfect house, her perfect garden, her perfect pillar of the community lifestyle, and what she needs now is a bit of knobbing. Yes, that’s it, she thinks, knobbing! That’ll make a nice change from Countdown and Ready Steady Cook. Now, who shall I have? Ooh yes, I know, I’ll borrow dowdy old Alice’s husband. He’ll do, he looks keen enough and he pops down here once a week on business. Yes, that’s it, I’ll have hers. So what if Alice has two small children? So what if she’s my sister’s best friend? So what if it’ll leave her life in tatters, I’m Philippa Hampton, for heaven’s sake, I can do whatever I like!’ Her voice rose shrilly here and she stopped for a moment. I realized she was struggling for composure, breathing hard. Poor, brave, strong Alice. I gulped.