Not a Very Nice Woman

by John Eider

It was only once both Glass and Rose were gone, after strolling through the rooms of the Mars house to gather his thoughts, that Grey remembered that the letter left by Derek Waldron was still in his pocket, he not having had a chance to open it in that morning’s rush. He tore the envelope quickly and read a well-presented hand-written letter of the sort you rarely saw any more. It began:

  Inspector Rase,

  Apologies first of all for drugging you. As I write at Rachel’s table you sleep soundly feet away. I trust the effects will have worn off by morning, by which time I may not be here to explain myself; hence why I write now.

  I have to do it, you appreciate that. What that man has done is not for the law to have him answer to, it’s for Stella’s friend, Charlie’s friend, to put right (though I feel an unlikely avenger).

  You were their friend too, their last friend, the one who got to know them best. You’ve learnt about their being on the Council (I noticed your slip just now, though Rachel didn’t pick up on it) and you also found Stella’s lost family, and the mad-headed son.

  Perhaps I ought to have written “damaged” son, for isn’t that how we look at them now, criminals, murderers, as being victims themselves? Yet it doesn’t seem to help us, does it? Doesn’t bring down the crime rate, doesn’t help us reach these broken souls before they hurt our friends. But I digress…

  A bit of sleight of hand that earlier, if you don’t mind my saying: your asking Rachel to put up the wife of her friends’ killer; but seeing her here and your telling us she couldn’t go home confirmed my intent. You see, I quite quickly made three – I hope – fairly reasonable deductions: one, that the lady you brought here tonight was escaping a man; two, that for the Inspector himself to be worrying about her wellbeing in the middle of a murder case meant that that man was somehow involved; and three, that if she couldn’t go home then the man was still at their house.

  I’m afraid what other facts I possess are gleaned through base theft and eavesdropping. You see I’ve been listening in to the radios of the men and women who’ve been posted here these recent days: to their instructions, directions, place names, road names. What can I say? I have a genuine curiosity. I heard an hour ago, standing with tonight’s Constable as I took him a drink, that there were officers at Mansard Lane. All I needed then was the house number, and that I have just found on letters and bills in Ludmila’s bag.

  I found something else too: Ludmila’s surname – Mars – and from somewhere in another life I remembered it as Stella’s. This oddly seals things, confirms my deductions, and makes Stella’s killer her son? Another deduction, but he can only be. This makes my task no easier.

  Not that I can go back from this point – I dread to think what crime I’ve committed doing what I have to an officer on duty. Had I not found the address in Ludmila’s bag I suppose I would be out now listening for your panda cars or watching the streets for activity; but as it is I know precisely where I must go, and so have time to try and write this properly.

  And so I sit here writing this, unable to sleep but neither able to move yet: I can’t do anything until it’s light and there’re people on the pavements. I cannot say my plan will succeed, but know it won’t require much luck to do so. It will only take as long as watching for the house number, skipping up his drive, letting myself in, and getting one lucky blow before your watchers have me pinned or he gets one lucky counter-blow.

  (You’ll have noticed another confession there: yes, I have Ludmila’s keys. I didn’t even need to slip her a Mickey Finn from Rachel’s cabinet, she was already spark out.)

  Does he rise early, the man? I’ve no way of knowing. If not then I’ll have to rush to find him in bed before your men are upon me, not that he deserves to die in such comfort. Once he is dead then there will be a kind of closure about it all, a finality, an arc played out among the heavens and returned to earth to meet its concluding point. The saga of Dunbar, Prove and Mars will be over, the three of them dead, none left to kill or be killed. I may not manage it of course, and may be done for myself, but I am incidental to the story, a minor figure not worthy of remembrance.

  The letter went on this tone, its morbid reflection all manna for the soul undoubtedly, but Grey needed details.

  What poor Charlie has to do with it I don’t know, but then there is so much I don’t. Please don’t think the rest of this letter is the answer to your case; though I know I should explain one more thing: You can’t have missed that I alluded back there to having known Stella before she came to the Cedars, back when her name was Mars. You’ll also recall that I haven’t mentioned this fact in our discussions up to now.

  Yes, I did know her very vaguely and many years ago; no, I didn’t tell you and I’m not sure why now; and no, I know of nothing that had happened to her in-between; except that when I knew her once she was married and vivacious, and when I knew her again she was neither. She came to the Cedars single, her past undiscussed, and her vitality replaced with a stoicism that even I at times struggled to admire. She had also quite forgotten me.

  …I return to my letter after ten minutes spent silent at the table, you breathing peacefully nearby and asking me the question I’d yet to answer for myself: why hadn’t I told you of the past? The answer came in the form of another question: Can you keep a secret so long that you forget that you are holding it, forget what you actually know? That day in the Eighties when she pitched up at the next-door flat I nearly fell over my front doorstep, yet she gave me no more a look than to suggest I help her with the boxes she was carrying. After an hour I invited her into my flat for tea, where she asked me my name, who I was, what I did? I soon learnt she wouldn’t broach such questions asked of herself, also that I was already couching my answers in such a way as to not give away that we’d any common ground. Central to these thoughts, cemented in place by the end of that first day, was the casually devastating realisation that she had evidently played a larger role in my earlier life than I had ever played in hers.

  Dunbar, Prove and Mars. They sound like a firm of solicitors. Oddly I mourn none of them, regret none of their ends. You find that strange? The only sadness is the children Stella won’t now help, won’t find the potential of when their teachers are too busy and the Head too wrapped up in Government reports. That school has been a bad one for years, and there’s not one person in town that doesn’t know it. She was the only one not prepared to let a certain number of children slip through her fingers as a bad lot, unhelpable, or be thought to be doing well enough to not to have worry if they couldn’t do even better. I know little enough of these matters bar what Stella taught me: and that is that education is about care, about constant vigilance, about not letting today’s relentless focusing on exam averages and league tables take our eyes for one moment from the children in our stewardship, lest a single one of them slip between the floorboards. It is a brave soul who’ll raise a child in Britain today.

  She wasn’t a happy woman, but she did good, she made others happier, and all after having her own life harmed in ways I only guess at. What those in life who find the first excuse to absolve themselves of their own bad behaviours could learn from this woman, who lost whatever inner joy gave her her spark, and yet could still think of others. Perhaps the fact of the hardness she adopted to deal with life made it easier to be cruel to be kind, to push the kids, to demand results no matter how unpopular it might make her. Someone who valued others’ opinion of themselves might step back from making themselves so unloved… I wonder if I’ve ever written a sadder sentence?

  You’ll notice I’m drifting into supposition there, for I do not know her story, only piecing the little I do know together. But then look at my immediate situation: I am alone after midnight at a table in the flat of a woman lying drugged in the next room, the Inspector of police in a similar state not ten feet away. I am drinking not enough to get drunk but only to hold my nerve as I contemplate what lies ahead. As such my mental waters are hardly likely to be placid. There is a school of th
ought suggesting that so repressed is the English gentleman that only when his very life is in danger is he allowed to show emotion. Is that why I now leave to face a murderer, because I need the release?

  For those facts that you confirmed to me, I thank you, but it it’s for me to finish this. I failed twice in my duty to protect my friends; now I must put myself at risk if that is what’s required to put that right. And do not feel guilty yourself, Inspector, for remember I have found out for myself where this man lives. You have given nothing away.

  Thank you for your help, thank you for being their final friend.

  Yours,

  Derek Waldron,

  The Cedars,

  Southney

  Grey sat back after digesting that epic, not sure what it told him, only glad that Derek’s plan didn’t seem to have been fulfilled. He had missed his injured correspondent leave in the ambulance, but walked out of the house and caught a medic packing up his fluorescent Volvo,

  ‘The man you were treating, what were his injuries?’

  ‘Nothing major, just generally roughed up. He was very disoriented though, and given his age we have to be careful.’

  ‘”Very disoriented”, thought Grey. Yet his direction of travel had seemed certain enough the night before.

  The next half-an-hour was not pleasurable. Cori not available to travel with, he found a space in the backseat of one of the patrol cars scouring the streets for Patrick Mars. This also kept him out of the way of senior officers judging his conduct; although the others in the car were Glass’s people, and would have heard, or heard of, Glass’s broadside in the hall. At least being junior to him, and they being occupied with the search, left him free from criticism for a while.

  Not that he wasn’t beating up himself. That he had messed up was obvious, but he hadn’t yet worked out precisely how. There were specific decisions made: taking Ludmila out of the hotel, for one; but she and the other residents of the Cedars had been safest of all last night. What else? Not backing Glass in taking the risk on arresting Mars last evening: that had been a big call; but he would make the same decision again, as not even Glass could not have believed how careless Mars would be in leaving evidence scattered around the house. There was a logical flaw, and that was in not deducing Derek Waldron’s part in all this. Yet who could have predicted how he’d act?

  He cursed Superintendent Rose too, for butting into the argument in the hallway before he could issue any defence, and so leave the impression with Glass either that he had no defence or that he needed his boss to defend him. But most of all he hated Glass, who’d singularly messed up his operation and then blamed him for everything.

  The half hour was only relieved by a call from Cori, relating the stellar batch of facts: those of Esther finding the letter; of her having a brother, Peter; of her calling him that night and how he might then have called their father.

  ‘And I think Mars hid in the plants at the end of the corridor,’ she had concluded, ‘That’s how nobody saw him when they went to their rooms at ten o’clock.’

  In the backseat of the squad car he by turns lamented his lot and mulled the case over, as Rose requested he do. Up front the radio crackled: Mars was on the Hills estates.

  Chapter 26 – Emergency