Femmes Fatal (32 page)

“That’s as may be!” Hands on the black taffeta hips. “But you can’t tell me the chances of success aren’t a heap better with two of us to one of … whoever.”

“But it isn’t fair to you.”

“Yes, it bloody well is.”

“Why?”

“Because I say so!” Without deigning to look my way, she stalked to the door, saying she’d go and brew up. Heaven help the murderer who came knocking before Mrs. Malloy had had her cup of tea. To say I wasn’t glad to have her would be a lie. Had she still been wandering around in a post-erotic stupor, that would have been a different matter. But who can live on Cloud Nine forever? Her feet certainly seemed back on the ground. I could hear them trundling around the kitchen as I headed downstairs in search of my raincoat. Until I had that gun in my hip pocket I wouldn’t know a sane moment. It crossed my mind that I might be readying myself for a confrontation not destined to happen. But deep in my heart I knew the murderer was coming for me. Perhaps he or she was on the way even now. The rain didn’t help my nerves. It sounded like a person strumming on the windowpane to relieve tension … or deliberately annoy.

My raincoat wasn’t in the hall armoire or in the cupboard under the stairs. When I entered the kitchen, I was getting jumpy, and by the time I had searched the jumble of coats on the rack by the garden door, searched them twice, I was borderline frantic.

“Can’t find it?” Mrs. Malloy set her cup down with a rattle that started my teeth chattering.

“I haven’t been looking very hard.” So saying, I dived back into the hall, raced up the stairs, and began flinging open doors, peering behind chests, even crawling under beds. Most places I looked didn’t make sense, but I was no longer rational. My raincoat had become the enemy engaging me in a deadly game of hide-and-seek. And time, damn it, got into the game. I looked at the clock at ten o’clock, then again two minutes later to find it was twenty past. Would it have hurt Mrs. Malloy to come up and lend a hand? Coming from the bathroom where I had checked the clothes hamper and the medicine cabinet, I heard a thump … then another … followed by the sound of a door being closed ever so softly. Heart pounding, I edged across the landing. Nothing now, but the
spitter spatter
of rain on the windows and the creaking of the stairs under my feet. We should have stayed together from first to last. The temptation to call out her name was overwhelming, but without the gun, all I had for an ally was stealth! Oh, come on, Ellie, don’t be such a pansy! Pick up that perfectly hideous vase Aunt Astrid gave you for a wedding present and creep down the hall at the ready.

Someone was whistling a tune fraught with spine-chilling merriment while pushing open the kitchen door.

Crash!
I smacked that vase down on a flash of forehead and through a shower of shards saw a body go reeling backwards to land with a wallop that shook the house. Behind my closed lids, the list of suspects rose up in grim procession, like the ghosts of a drowning man’s past—all the old regulars, with Gladiola Thorn bringing up the rear. But when I forced my eyes open I saw a set of grey overalls spreadeagled on the flagstones, a spanner still clenched in the hand.

“Jock Bludgett!”

The sound of my voice startled me back to life but, luckily, did not do the same for Mr. B, the Bad Guy, for I’d always known in my heart that plumber was a killer. Chances were he could come round at any moment. I should look for something to tie him up with before I went looking for Mrs. Malloy. So I told myself, as I fought down waves of sickness and stared at the study door which was open just an inch. A tell-tale inch, because surely it had been closed when I went upstairs? Was my sidekick crouched behind that door, afraid to move, afraid to call out because she had no way of knowing whether the intruder had got me, or the other way round?

“Mrs. Malloy!” I found myself standing at that door, my hand on the knob, my voice creeping through the crack into the dusk within. No answer but the rasping breath of the wind and the
drip drop
of the rain. Unable to bear the terror of uncertainty a moment longer, I stumbled into the study to see Mrs. Malloy … sacked out on the floor in front of the hospital-green gas fire.

“Oh, my heavens!” I took two steps toward her before hearing an ominously soft sound from behind me. A shadow stepped from the wall.

“Mrs. Haskell?”

“Yes?”

“I think we should have a little chat.” The voice closed around my throat, squeezing the breath out of me as effectively as a powerful pair of hands. My chest hurt, but a merciful numbness was spreading through the rest of me as I turned to face … Mr. Walter Fisher.

“My thanks.” His guppy smile chilled the whole room. “My heartfelt thanks for taking care of the plumber. The plumber could have spoiled everything. But two down, one to go.”

“I don’t understand,” I bleated.

“The female sex is always so impatient.”

“What have you done to Mrs. Malloy?”

“I gave her something to make her sleep.”

“Oh, dear God! She thought you loved her.”

“So I did, for an entire night.” His eyes grew filmy with memory. “She cast her Fully Female lure. Her smile beguiled. And those throbbing thighs drove me to a frenzy of desire which could only be satisfied by giving myself totally into her power. And at the moment of epiphany, I told her about Madge.”

“Madge?”

“My wife.”

“The one who left you one dark night?”

“The one …” At last his smile warmed his eyes. “The one I throttled one dark night because I couldn’t stand her noisy merriment one hour longer. She was like that dreadful Bludgett woman. Always smiling. Always laughing.” A shudder passed through Mr. Fisher’s gaunt body. “Fortunately, in my line of work I had no trouble getting rid of the body.”

“Don’t tell me,” I pleaded.

“Cremation isn’t for everyone. But I have never denied it has its place.”

“Poor Mrs. Malloy!” I meant only that she had been so woefully taken in.

“Now don’t worry,” Mr. Fisher hastened to reassure me. “In the cold light of day I realized I couldn’t let Roxie Malloy live to babble at one of her cosy Marriage Makeover sessions that I had done away with Madge, but don’t worry, I have no intention of disposing of Roxie’s body the way I did the wife’s. Two women disappearing on me is one too many. Yes, indeed, but no need to fuss and fume. In one of her more passionate moments Roxie told me how she intended to take her life here at Merlin’s Court, but you talked her out of it. A pity”—he rubbed his nose—“that you won’t be available to attest to that at the inquest. But being a Fully
Female woman, she will surely have bragged about her suicide attempt at one of the meetings.”

“Where,” I stammered, “will
I
be?”

“You, Mrs. Haskell, are coming with me after I turn on the gas and position Roxie a little more comfortably.”

“No!” With a burst of furious energy, I lashed out with my fists. But if ever there was an exercise in futility, this was it. He reached into his pocket and drew out a gun, whose mean little eye did not waver from my face while Mr. Fisher turned on the spigot. And with that dreadful hiss sounding in our ears, he herded me into the hall. I was duly surprised that he chose to leave the house by way of the kitchen, which meant circumventing the prone figure of Mr. Bludgett, but he explained that his car was parked outside the garden door. For one wild, flickering moment as we trod around Jock’s grey overalls, I was convinced that the plumber would come to life and grab hold of Mr. Fisher’s legs, bringing him down. But no such luck. And, anyway, Mr. B could hardly be expected to view me in the light of a damsel in distress. He’d turned up here in response to my phone call of yesterday to fix the washing machine and had got bopped on the head for his pains. I could almost hear him saying, “Lady, couldn’t you have put your complaint in writing?”

By now, as must be obvious, my thinking was fuzzy in the extreme. When Mr. Fisher halted at the garden door, I watched him help himself to a couple of raincoats from the hook in the alcove and realized with a wry sort of amusement that one of them—the one that had been hanging underneath the other—was the very coat I had been hunting for while he had been making himself at home, doping poor Mrs. Malloy.

“Here, put this on,” He handed me the old one belonging to Dorcas, while he slipped on mine, changing gun hands as he went. My heart sank. “Nice to know,
isn’t it, Mrs. Haskell, that the age of chivalry isn’t dead? As for myself, I can’t risk a drenching; I suffer with my chest.”

I didn’t answer. Once outside, the rain brought the stinging relief of acupuncture, deadening the surface of my mind, as well as my skin, still further. I knew I was in his car, and I guessed where he was taking me. But I wasn’t afraid. I wasn’t anything … or anyone. Not Ellie Haskell. Not Ben’s wife. Not the twins’ mother.

But Walter Fisher was apparently in the mood for a chat. “I didn’t expect to find Roxie at your house when I arrived, Mrs. Haskell.”

“Well, she was expecting you.” Staring at the windscreen, I saw Mrs. M’s face in the rivulets of rain, the corners of her mouth dripping downward. Would I ever speak to her again? Would I ever get to tell that I didn’t blame her for anything, that I blamed myself for misreading the signals she had been sending me?

Mr. Fisher—nothing would make me call him Walter—rested the gun against the steering wheel as we purred down the drive and out onto Cliff Road. “Roxie’s presence was a bonus, although you understand I’ve been trying to do away with her for several days now. It was only a matter of time before she went to the police. Never trust a woman. Just now, shame on her, she lied to me—said you had left the house with your husband and children. Most annoying of her to complicate matters. Particularly when I thought it would be so easy.”

A light went on in a shop window and inside my head. “You put something in her Fully Female Formula?”

“Yew leaves.” Another of his pale smiles. “So felicitously available at the vicarage.”

“Yes,” I said, speaking automatically. “Mrs. Malloy mentioned there was a move afoot to cut down the yew trees because of fears about their toxicity.”

“I chopped the leaves up and put some in the jar of Formula. Simplicity itself. I can’t think what went wrong. Roxie claimed to be religious about taking the stuff.”

“So she was,” I said. “But we each had several bottles of Formula. It would have taken her a while to get to the one you’d doctored up. I do remember seeing her opening up a new one the night of the Wisemans’ party. She even mixed herself a glass, but it turned to goop before she could drink it. Instead …” I stared out the misted window. “Instead Gladys Thorn must have gone into the kitchen. She must have mistaken the Formula for a fibre laxative and …”

“Dear me!” Mr. Fisher shook his head. “What a waste!” Whether he meant a waste of good yew leaves or Gladys Thorn I hadn’t the foggiest. “Am I to understand,” he asked, steering cautiously around a bend in the road, “that when you confessed last night in the Chapel of Rest to being privy to a murder, you were talking about Miss Thorn, not my wife?”

“Certainly.”

“That shows you how naive I am.” Mr. Fisher tuttutted. “I truly thought she had expired of natural causes.”

“Mrs. Malloy never said a word to me about your wife. And the bitter irony is that if you had left well enough alone I don’t think she would have gone to the police. The Fully Female manual instructs that all confidences exchanged during lovemaking be accorded the sacred seal of the confessional, and Roxie wasn’t only religious about taking her Formula. She was a dyed-in-the-wool convert, prepared to uphold the code if it killed her.” I didn’t add he’d had something else working in his favour—namely that his Roxie had truly loved him. Love! A good servant but a poor master. Poor Mrs. M. My throat tightened. May she re … live in peace.

Chagrin showed on Mr. Fisher’s waxen features. In misjudging the lady he had complicated his life as well as hers and mine. Get him unsettled—that’s the ticket, I cheered myself on. He wasn’t used to having the bodies he transported talk back to him, so I would keep talking. The topic didn’t matter just so long as the lips kept moving.

“The morning after her tryst with you she was in a complete daze, and later turned up at my house out of the blue, but I never suspected she was in fear of her life. Even when she took up good works—helping out at the church—I put it down to the power of love. It never dawned on me she might be preparing to be putting her life in order.”

“No need to rub it in, Mrs. Haskell.” He pursed his thin lips. “Roxie knew I couldn’t let her live. What I can’t fathom is how she lasted this long. In addition to the Formula, I added my own special herbs to a packet she had from Fully Female.” Mr. Fisher carefully braked for a yellow light, turned onto Market Street, and shifted closer to the curb to make room for a woman on a bicycle. Her wave said it all: What a gentleman!

“Mrs. Malloy would seem to have been living under a lucky star … for a while. She is a no-nonsense woman.” My eyes never left the gun. “And I imagine she was expecting a straight-forward knife in the back, not the nix being put on her Healthy Harvest Herbs. But I think I can hazard a guess as to what happened there. The other day she couldn’t find her supply, probably because you had moved it, so she borrowed a packet from me. She must have returned the one with the yew leaves because we had a little episode with our cat, which I blamed on someone else. May I be forgiven.”

Those last words brought Mrs. M closer than if she had been in the car with me. Was she already interviewing St. Peter and making it plain up front that she
wasn’t going to get stuck polishing the Pearly Gates? Or could it be that there had been a miracle back at Merlin’s Court? Oh, please God! Let Mr. Bludgett come groggily back to life and go stumbling into the dining room to turn off the gas jet in the nick of time.

“We’re here, Mrs. Haskell.” Mr. Fisher cut short my prayer. He had pulled into a side alley, and through the tattered veil of rain I saw the sign Fisher Funerals creaking above the door. Cuffing the gun, he came around, helped me out of the car, and ushered me across a square of pavement and through a glass door into a showroom smelling of beeswax and gardenias, with wreaths on the walls instead of pictures and a floor space crowded with coffins—pardon me, cabinets—to suit every taste from baroque to Danish modern.