Not a Very Nice Woman

by John Eider

Grey gave the time and date to the tape, before adding, ‘…present are Sergeant Smith, Constable Mills and Inspector Rase; interviewing Lidia Mars, formerly Ludmila Sergeyevna Grechko.

  ‘How would you like to be addressed?’

  ‘By my given name, now I’m to be free of him.’

  ‘Ludmila Sergeyevna…’

  ‘Just Ludmila: we Russians carry our fathers around all our lives; but I’ve been free of him too these four years now.’

  ‘Just Ludmila then.’ (She smiled.) ‘Now, this interview relates to a series of crimes that we believe your husband…’

  ‘Former husband: I’ll never be in a room with that man again.’

  You might have to be, and it might be a courtroom, thought Grey. ‘…that we believe Patrick Mars may had been involved in, yet for which he has given us an alibi apparently confirmable by yourself. Ludmila, were you at the house on Mansard Lane during the evening of Monday of this week or the early hours of Tuesday?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or during the evening of Tuesday of this week and the early hours of today?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where were you in fact at these times?’

  ‘I’ve been in London, with my mother.’

  ‘Her immigration case is being heard this week, I believe.’

  ‘I’m supporting her.’

  ‘When did it begin?’

  ‘On Monday – I travelled on Sunday, and stayed at a hotel.’

  ‘So you cannot confirm your… Patrick Mars’ alibi?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you know why he might have lied to us to say you were with him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘When were you intending to return?’

  ‘I don’t know. The case is still going on, and I am keen to get back to it.’

  ‘So you had no plan to return this evening?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And so how come you have come back this evening?’

  ‘Because Patrick phoned me and demanded I return that minute and come straight home. He said I’d had long enough with my mother, and that I’d stayed away too long, that I was letting him down being away so long and that a good wife stays at home with her husband.’

  ‘Did he give any specific reason why you must return?’

  ‘He said there was an emergency, that I’d caused it by not being here, and that he needed me back right away.’

  ‘You’d caused it?’

  ‘Everything’s my fault with him. Even when I’m not there he finds a way to blame me.’

  ‘What time did he phone?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Around lunchtime. I caught the first train I could.’

  Mars thought fast in his interview, thought Grey: he calculated how quickly he could contact Ludmila, get her back here, and drill her in what to tell the police to confirm his alibi before they tracked her down for themselves.

  ‘How did you feel about this request to come back?’

  ‘I was fuming. I knew I had to go back, but I was going to give him hell for it.’

  ‘Would he have enjoyed that?’

  ‘Probably not, but then we argue often. We can both live with it.’

  ‘You said just then that you’re now “free of him”. Why are you glad to be free of your husband?’

  ‘You ask me that, after what I tell you?’

  ‘Tell me more.’

  ‘He’s proud, pig-headed, impossible to live with! He wants the house kept just as it is, everything in its place, everything tidy. He won’t change anything, won’t let me bring friends over: he says we make too much noise and make a mess. He say’s they’re all alcoholics and that we break his precious things.’

  ‘And what makes him say that?’

  ‘I have friends – other wives whose husbands don’t talk to them – and when they come over I entertain them: we have food and drinks and laugh. Is that unusual? He hates laughter except his own. When he comes home early and finds us there he gets grumpy and won’t talk to them, and goes to his room.’

  Grey noticed her wavering between the past and present tense, as though she still hadn’t aligned herself to the reality that those days may well be over.

  ‘His own room?’

  ‘He has his own room where he likes to read: like a study, with a view of the back garden.’

  ‘And the breakages?’

  She looked down at the featureless table, ‘Once he came home and a piece of glass had got broken, a vase on the windowsill. One of us had knocked it – it could have happened at any time, Inspector.’

  ‘What was it like?’

  She looked at him quizzically, as if wondering how that could be important, then tried to remember, ‘All spikey and different colours. You couldn’t put many flowers in it, but it did look nice when the sun shone through it.’

  Cori gave Grey a look as if to say, that had been his mother’s.

  Ludmila continued, wholly present tense for now, ‘He always panics when the cleaners come, he worries they’ll break something. He can’t look.’ She suddenly gasped as though in disgust at some recalled memory, ‘He asks me to watch them: he thinks, because they might be from Poland or Romania it’s as though we’re all one country. He think’s I’ll have an…’

  ‘An affinity?’

  ‘Yes, an affinity with them, because we’ve all travelled over from the “same” place. But they hate me, the girls, because I got to be the wife and they’re only the cleaners, that they have to work and I don’t. Ha, they think I don’t work every day?

  ‘Anyway, I bought another vase – it cost a lot, and was the closest I could find – but he wouldn’t have it there in the window, and moved it away.’

  ‘Was it valuable?’

  ‘The broken one? He never said,’ she quietened, ‘but it meant a lot to him, it upset him. I felt sad for him.’

  ‘You mentioned “his precious things”?’

  ‘His house is like a museum, a…’

  ‘Shrine? Tribute? Memorial?’

  ‘Yes, maybe like a memorial.’

  ‘Who to?’

  ‘To his family, his past.’ Her attitude suddenly hardened, ‘His precious family, but where are they? There’s not one of them around, not one who visits.’

  ‘Did he talk of them?’

  ‘It’s who he doesn’t talk about, like they’ve left a hole.’

  ‘Their presence, you mean? A space left where they ought to be?’

  She nodded eagerly, it having been put as she understood it.

  ‘Please, go on.’

  ‘Like, I don’t know if he ever had a brother or sister.’

  ‘And what of his parents?’

  At this she paused, ‘He did mention his father, in terms of the house, “Dad built this”, “Dad was proud of that”.’

  ‘He said it with pride?’

  ‘Yes, that is why he keeps things as they are, because they were how his father had them.’

  ‘But his mother?’

  ‘His mother wasn’t known to me. He never mentioned her and I learnt not to ask. But he remembered them both, you could tell: their things must be left as they were, not changed, barely even dusted over by the cleaners. Certain items: furniture, pictures.’

  ‘”Pictures”?’

  She shook her head in remembrance, ‘He has a painting, over the fireplace, of black mountains and this horrible bear. I hated that picture, but he wouldn’t let me move it, I had to sit with it… over me.’

  ‘Looming..?’

  ‘Yes, looming over me, whenever I was in the room; looming, like those mountains, like that bear! I wanted to put it outside, move it, even just to the hall, anywhere; but he wouldn’t let me. He said his parents had bought it for him and he wanted it “where I can see it every day”.’ She snorted in derision.

  ‘And he felt like that about a lot of things?’

  ‘Certain corners of the house, old furniture, wooden panels. I found them gloomy but he wouldn’t let me move them or repaint them, e
ven re-varnish them as they were very dirty, some of them. You know how varnish can go black.’

  The grimness of the image required fresh questions to counter it,

  ‘Ludmila, had either of you been married before?’

  She demurred.

  ‘You haven’t been,’ he guessed, ‘but Patrick has?’

  ‘I haven’t, no. I was only Twenty-one when I came here.’

  ‘But your husband?’

  ‘No… I don’t know. He never mentions anyone… but once he was on the phone, in the other room, talking to someone loudly, like a lawyer. He was saying, “What is she demanding? What does she want now?” and then, “What do you mean, she doesn’t want anything? So what are you calling me for?”’

  ‘You didn’t wonder who it was he was talking about?’

  ‘I knew before we met that he was older than me, that he would have had other women, maybe children.’

  ‘But you never asked?’

  ‘He never told.’

  ‘And there was nothing said about other Mars’s?’

  ‘Like I say, they were missing. Though in that house it felt like they were all around.’

  ‘But even with all this you would have stayed with him?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. But if he’s in trouble I want no part, not when it’s nothing to do with me. I’ve supported him enough.’

  This struck Grey dumb a moment, and she spoke to fill the silence,

  ‘Well it’s his company, isn’t it; his “boys”? But what’s that to do with his home, and with his family, and with me?’

  Grey realised a misapprehension had been allowed to remain too long,

  ‘Ludmila, I’m afraid it’s not to do with his company, in fact… Did Patrick ever talk of his mother?’

  ‘No, I told you.’

  ‘But – what am I asking here? – did he ever say anything that gave you the impression that he even knew if she were alive or dead?’

  ‘No. Is she? I know nothing of her.’

  ‘Did he ever mention a place call the Cedars?’

  ‘The old people’s home? No, never. Is that where she..? Maybe his company did security there? I don’t know.’

  ‘Ludmila, you won’t have seen the local papers this week, and so you won’t know that a woman living there was killed on Monday night,’ (Ludmila went rigid in her seat.) ‘and a man from there killed on the Hills estates the night after. Mrs Mars, we…’

  ‘I don’t want to do this. Let me leave, please. Let me out of here.’ The woman was shaking and this motion was transferred to her chair that now scratched on the floor, she gripping the handles as if unsure of whether to push herself up out of it or hold onto it for support.

  ‘You are in no trouble, you are not involved,’ implored Grey; but that was not what was bothering their interviewee, guessed Cori present throughout; rather it was the notion that the Inspector was obviously driving at: that the man she had been living with these four years was a killer.

  Ludmila’s panic settled into a kind of cold dread, as Cori asked the female Constable at the door to fetch a doctor and went around to the other side of the table.

  ‘This interview is suspended at…’ began Grey; but Ludmila was talking over him and so his hand hovered over the Stop button; she continuing,

  ‘Those arguments we had. You don’t know what we would say, what we’d shout, how we’d threaten to kill each other, destroy each other’s favourite things. He’d say I’d never see my family again, I’d say I’d burn down his house when he was at work; he’d say he’d hit me, I’d say I’d stab him; he said he’d kill me. He said he’d kill me…’

  Chapter 18 – A Fork in the Road