Kelly attempted to speak to the emergency personnel at the site. Miss Bennington waited. No one paid attention to either of them, a has-been like him, a sweet little old lady like her.
"Can you step away from the scene, sir?” a fresh-faced uniform said. “You too, ma'am."
Kelly wanted to comfort her, tell her it was all for the best, but some things are truly best unsaid.
* * * *
Weeks later, Kelly left his Gore-Tex jacket and waterproof boots in Willa's front foyer. He made himself as comfortable as he could in the armchair across from her in the living room and accepted the Wedgwood cup with the steaming Darjeeling. He found he'd been hoping for that.
Willa sat on the camelback sofa, crossed her ankles, and listened intently. “Double suicide? How astonishing. I must say neither Cliff nor Leann seemed in the least depressed."
Kelly stared at his faded navy socks. “You can't always tell. That was the coroner's conclusion."
"Do you think they suffered? Drowning must be a terrible way to go."
"It appears they lost consciousness first. According to my contacts, they'd ingested a massive dose of oxycodone. I don't know if you're aware that's a powerful prescription widely used for chronic pain. They took more than enough to kill them each twice over."
Willa's brow furrowed. “But if they were unconscious, how did the car get in the river?"
Kelly found himself looking over to the silver-framed photo of Molly and Arnold. “Does it matter?” he said.
"I just don't understand how it could happen."
"Maybe it was part of their plan."
"So strange, that's all. They were sleeping, you said, and then the car just rolled into the river?"
Kelly met her eyes. “They were parked at the end, by the riverbank, they'd picked a spot with no guardrail, perhaps that's what they intended. We'll never know. They left a note, in her handwriting."
"Really? What did it say?"
Kelly said, “Something like: Please do not blame yourself. This has been a very difficult time for us. It is all too much. Much love, Leann and Cliff."
Kelly glanced over at her. “Perhaps the note was intended for you?"
Willa shrugged. “How sad. But why wasn't the note carried off by the water?"
"It was in the glove compartment, in a plastic bag. They obviously wanted it to be found."
"They were facing terrible business problems, but I never thought things were that serious. Where would they get this drug?"
Kelly said. “The Carsons were criminals. Oxycodone is a pain killer, but it has become a popular street drug. They'd have no trouble finding it."
Her eyes met his again. “You kept warning me, but I never imagined Leann and Cliff could . . . They didn't look anything like the Carsons."
"I could tell as soon as I saw them. But they were talented."
"But isn't it unusual for con artists to kill themselves?"
"Maybe some police force was closing in, other crooks breathing down their necks. They were scum, but maybe one of them was really depressed."
"I suppose."
"You weren't planning to lend them money? Bridge funding? An investment of any kind?"
"I didn't plan to help them.” Willa pushed back a lock of champagne-coloured hair. A splendid opal flanked with diamonds winked on her finger.
Detective Kelly found himself fascinated by it.
Willa stretched out her hand. “Lovely, isn't it? Did you know this was my friend Molly's engagement ring? I inherited her things, but this ring had been missing since before Arnold died. Luckily for me, it finally turned up. It was much too big for me. I had to have it resized."
"It suits you."
"Thank you for finding out what happened to Cliff and Leann and letting me know. I guess I should say the Carsons. The other policemen seemed to think it was none of my business and I shouldn't stick my nose in."
"I'm retired. Nothing to do but bird-watch and stick my nose where it's not wanted."
"It was certainly wanted here."
"You're a very nice person.” Kelly flushed as he spoke. He'd always been a bit hopeless.
"We have both been through a lot,” Willa said.
"Bird-watching helps me. Perhaps you'd like to join me sometime?"
Willa smiled. “I would like that very much. Since my hip replacement last year, I am ready to embrace life. And after all, it appears we already have so much in common."
Kelly stared. “I suppose we do."
"More than you think. Speaking of birds, you must join me for dinner. I do a lovely Brome Lake duck, Shanghai style, such a wonderful meal to share with only the best of friends."
Kelly raised his cup of Darjeeling, awkwardly. “In that case, here's to the best of friends."
Willa leaned forward and clinked her Wedgwood cup against his. “And to the best possible outcome."
Copyright © 2010 Mary Jane Maffini
[Back to Table of Contents]
Fiction: INCOMPATIBLES by Robert Barnard
Robert Barnard's latest book, AStranger in the Family, called by PW “an intriguing suspense novel” whose pages “readers will keep turning,” was published by Scribner in June 2010. Mr. Barnard is as adept at writing dark suspense as he is at producing the witty classical mysteries for which he is perhaps even better known. He tells EQMM he is not a reader of short stories, but as his many short story awards and nominations attest, he writes some of the best.
"My dad loved fairgrounds,” I wrote on a day in 1978, my pen pausing, trembling, before nearly every word. I have never believed in modern inventions that allow you to write faster, to erase your mistakes or first attempts, so that they are lost forever, whereas mine can be pored over by scholars and language students forever in Boston University's manuscript library of crime fiction, for which I was writing a short account of my life. “When the first signs of a fairground being set up appeared on the village green of Ormondskirk, Dad's nose would start to twitch, and he would begin to chart what rides there were, and how he and I would prioritise which were the best, which were new, which of the competitive stalls—pigeon-shooting, coconut-shying, or whatever—would most likely be winnable and whether the prizes they offered (cut-glass ashtray, novelty china bust of Marilyn Monroe) were worth the cost of competing.
"I don't know why you bother,” said my mother, lengthening her vowels to a drawl which she had found fascinating in a long-ago English film. “It's only for children—and only quite young children could be excited by a ride on the dodgems. Philip is well past the fairground stage."
"I'm not, Mum."
"'Course he's not, you silly b—"
Dad stopped there. He was always courteous to women, even as he mentally consigned them to an inferior level in his personal hell. “Fairgrounds are for the eternally young—people who can keep within them the magic and mystery of childhood. And people who can dare—can risk the unknown, the dangerous."
"I always said you should have been a preacher,” said my mother. “You'd have had them rolling in the aisles, those that were still awake."
"Silly bitch,” said Dad, thinking we couldn't hear him as he pottered out to the kitchen. “Does she think I go along with the garbage the ministers churn out every Sunday? Stuff to give us false hopes and dreams, stuff to keep us in our places?"
"I don't know where he gets all those ideas,” said my mother, who probably thought Karl Marx was an American slapstick comedian. “His people were all Methodists. Of course, my family were all C of E to a man, or woman, and they tried to persuade me it was never going to work, marriage to him."
"Well, whatever it is that's gone wrong,” I said, “it isn't because Dad is a Methodist."
"It's because he's an idiot, living in the past,” said my mother bitterly.
And she had a point. I was already quite well-read, through my habit of digging deep into the school library and the nearest town's one, and early on I suspected that my father was a creature of the turn o
f the century, or even earlier. He admired many American writers because he believed that the U. S. was a more democratic and egalitarian country than his own. He would declaim Walt Whitman to me while my mother was out, and he reread all his holdings of Jack London every second year. Of the British writers he liked Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells. I had progressed to Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood, and felt vastly superior to him in sophistication. At the same time, my love for him burgeoned.
Politically, my father invariably voted Communist. The Nottingham Oakwood constituency in which we lived managed to field a Communist candidate every election, who generally got about forty-five votes, except at one election when a candidate called George Windsor was standing, and he got about 250 votes from people who thought they were voting for a member of the royal family. My dad had been a Stalinist in the thirties, fell out of love with his hero at the time of the Nazi-Soviet pact, then continued to vote Communist into the age of Khrushchev, always protesting it was “they” who had lost faith, not him. He and I had lots of sharp debates on this topic, and I came to the conclusion that his ideal society was closer akin to The Wind in the Willows than to anything in Das Kapital. The two of us nearly came to a breach when I declared myself a Christian, but we came through it.
"At least you've become a Baptist,” my dad said, “not one of these Tory party at prayer’ lot, or someone who believes in the nonsense of infant baptism."
"You enrolled me in the Communist Party the day after I was born,” I said mischievously.
"That's quite different,” said my dad, “and you know it."
My memories of my parents revolved around their high days and holidays. In retrospect, I wondered that we could have functioned as a family, but probably at the time, the fifties, there were thousands of collapsed marriages, mostly ones which as a rule put up a show of unity, such was the pressure to conform. Our family was different, in that we put up no show.
One of the high days I remember was the occasion of my Grandma Dixon's funeral.
"Left!” shouted my mother when the steering wheel of the family Hillman Minx showed signs of turning right. “You should have gone left for the Ring Road, you fool,” she spat out. “We'll be late."
"Just what I wanted,” replied my dad. “Everybody should be late for funerals. Modern society has gone mad on them. You'd think life was so wonderful in the West that the afterlife is bound to be an anticlimax. We're going to take the country road and arrive agreeably late, pleading a traffic jam."
"You'd never hear the last of this if my mother was still alive."
"Agreed. But the whole point of the journey is that she's not. And you're as pleased as I am that the old bitch is gone."
This was attested in my memory by so many vitriolic characterisations of the dead woman by her daughter that there was no denial from the passenger seat.
"At least you're wearing a black tie,” said my mother, grudgingly.
"Ah, so I am. Bought it for old Ken Bradley, CP stalwart, yet lover of all the old habits and traditions. When he went, I knew the moment I heard that he would expect a black tie. . . . Good to have a bit more wear out of it, and on a happier occasion."
"Hmmm. You call yourself a Communist but you're really as conservative as the Archbishop of Canterbury."
And she had a point there, too. Christmas was a good example. Christmas always meant a roast chicken for Christmas dinner, (eaten at two) though as the sixties approached it was supplanted by a smallish turkey, which my dad said was “the same thing.” Cards were sent to neighbours and friends, people they saw nearly every day, and my dad's presents to me were kept a closely guarded secret, but one of them was always a book: Isherwood was still publishing then, and a new hardback was a real luxury, though more often it would be an H. G. Wells because his productivity rendered his output inexhaustible. I thought my father was the last man on earth to find Kipps and Mr. Polly funny.
For the rest, it was crackers, white wine, and port afterwards, the Queen's broadcast at three o'clock, then a snooze, and then a row about whether my father should do the washing up (he clung to traditional behaviour patterns for the sexes, but usually gave in and, with me, did the gigantic mound of plates and utensils in a gathering atmosphere of grease, grievance, and rebellion).
Perhaps surprisingly, Billy Holdsworth was popular in Ormondskirk. He was “different,” people said. Then again, he knew everyone, and not just their names, but their histories, their tastes and preferences, their emotional lives. Going through the village was for him the passage from friend to friend, and everyone got their bit of his time.
"Look at him,” said my mother one day, registering his progress from our large bay window. “You wouldn't think no one can get a word out of him in this house, would you?"
"We both get plenty of words out of him in this house,” I said.
"When he's in that sort of mood,” said Mother, not averse to having it both ways.
As our house became for me little more than a base camp, and as university loomed, the situation between my parents changed slightly. The pair that would be left behind (as I had every intention of leaving them behind) constituted themselves as government and opposition, permanently at odds. What was said had to be contradicted and mulled over in debate. The late fifties were the declining years of the Age of Macmillan, with the old charlatan arousing contrary instincts in Billy and Doreen, as I had started to call them. One day the prime minister was a fine gentleman of the old school for one of them, and a posturer and a liar for the other. The next day the positions would probably be reversed, with my dad's communist convictions making not an iota of difference to his stance on anything. “Granted that the whole setup is a tawdry sham that will soon be swept away,” he would say, before launching into a paean of praise for Macmillan's landownerly ties with the working man. Doreen liked what she called “a clean bill emotionally,” which meant she didn't like politicians who played around casually, or were popularly reputed to. “He's a man of principle,” she would say, and fall into a silent fantasy in which she was a glamourous political hostess and he was a young political hopeful. She used that phrase the day the Profumo affair broke. Unfortunately she used it of Mr. Profumo himself. “He's a man of principle,” she said. “And look at his beautiful wife. I used to love her when she was in films. Blanche Fury, Kind Hearts and Coronets. You could see her in a coronet. Always the perfect lady. . . . “
"Toothy upper-class nag,” said my father. “No wonder her poor hubby felt the need to play around a bit."
By this time I was about to go up to Edinburgh University for a preliminary interview. “It's nice and far away,” I said to my friends, “without being the other side of the earth, like Aberdeen.” My intention was to get a holiday job every vacation so I could cut my stays at home to two or three days three times a year during vacations. My resolution was strengthened by the increasingly deranged arguments at home. Granted that every family in Britain was chewing over the facts and fictions of the Profumo affair, my own family's chews were particularly trying, since there was no intention of getting to the facts of the matter, merely the emotional need to score points off the other.
"There's more in this than meets the eye,” my dad would say. “I expect Macmillan himself is caught up in it."
"Macmillan himself!” Doreen shrilled. “You're up the wall. He's a man of tremendous integrity."
"He's got about as much integrity as a used-car salesman. And then look at his wife, if you can bear to. She's been having it off for years with a Tory MP. Well-known fact."
Dad had got that fact from a regular at the Lion and Unicorn, an elderly man who took Private Eye solely to find out who was sleeping with whom.
"Go on! A woman as ugly as that? You're off your rocker."
"That's probably what drives Mac to bosomy dolly-birds."
I banged the door on my way out. I had had more than enough of them—eighteen years of it. I was on my way to an interview at the history depar
tment of Edinburgh University, but my parents were too preoccupied with their idiocies to wish me luck.
It was the same when, at summer's end, I left the house to go to Edinburgh, to the poky room in a cold stone house that seemed to me like heaven and the start of a new life. I was, as I passed through the kitchen and out through the back door, privy to a fragment of their current cause of disagreement.
"It was Newcastle-upon-Tyne,” my father was saying. “It started with a penny stall in the market there."
"You're off your head,” my mother said. “It was a stall, but it was in Nottingham."
"You're confusing it with Boots, you silly—"
As always, my father pulled himself up when the general nature of the word he was about to utter was obvious to all his listeners. I, as always, banged the door. It was the only way to make them aware of my existence. I walked to the bus stop, my mind full of the journey to Edinburgh, and a whole three months (at the least) away from my irritating (when they were not boring) father and mother. Heaven!
It didn't work out like that. I was no sooner arranging my little store of “things” in that paradisal Edinburgh room next morning when there was a banging on the front door, and a reluctant unchaining and unlocking of it by my landlady. As I was setting down to my task, conscious of knowing nobody in Auld Reekie, I heard my name. When the two policemen came into the room I said the only thing that occurred to me.
"It's my mum and dad, isn't it?"
And that was my first encounter with murder, which I've built my life around and made my living from. It was horrible, but I was conscious all the time that I was excited as well. And there was, hanging over it, as it hung over all my parents’ sayings and doings, the ridiculous.
The neighbour caught it well. He'd come in with some late tomatoes from his market garden.
"Cooee!” he shouted. “It's only me."
He heard from the living room the voice of my father.
EQMM, September-October 2010 Page 29
