Last Act of All (25 page)

Frances
barely heard her. ‘Last night, I thought I had it at last — he just seemed to fit, somehow. But this morning I went right through that evidence, and there isn’t a crack. He left the house, walked straight to Willie Comberton’s; someone saw him going in there; left at twenty to on the grandfather clock — Comberton’s unshakeable on that — then was met by the vicar seven minutes later—’

Martha
was staring at her, her shoulders sagging once more. ‘Comberton’s clock? His alibi?’ Her cackle of laughter was humourless. ‘Well, you lot don’t know nothing around here, do you? Comberton’s clock, that’s a byword in this village.’

‘
What do you mean? It was checked by a constable on the Monday after Fielding’s death, and it was almost exactly right.’

‘
That were on Monday. Well, Monday it would be right, wouldn’t it? He winds it and sets it right Sunday night, but being he’s a clockmaker, he won’t admit he can’t make his own clock run true. By Saturday, it’s all of twenty minutes out, though he won’t agree to that, will he? Everybody knows that.’

‘
Oh yes,’ Frances said bitterly. ‘Everybody who matters doesn’t have to be told. And as a result of your selective discretion, two people are dead, and one has been wrongfully imprisoned. What about poor Helena Radley?’

Martha
dropped her eyes. ‘Nothing we could do — nobody asked us, did they, and Mr Edward, he told me she would get off…’

‘Oh, what’s the use? I’m simply wasting my time. I’d better get round to the Red House before he decides that he really has a taste for it.’

She
was on the way to the door when she sensed Martha’s unnatural stillness. She turned, to see that the woman’s high colour had drained from her cheeks.

‘
I — I couldn’t get in this morning,’ she stammered. ‘You put it out of my mind. But there were a note on the door, saying they was all sleeping late—’

Frances
was out of the house and running along the street towards the Red House before Martha could get to her feet.

*

Helena’s heart seemed to stop. After a second of frozen immobility, she grabbed Stephanie frantically, turning her over, and her body flopped slowly and horribly on to its back. Too horror-stricken to scream, she felt the cheek; it was still warm, though clammy, and the faintest of faint breaths was still moving the dry, parted lips.

‘
Oh, thank god, thank god,’ she sobbed, starting to slap at the girl’s cheeks in an attempt to rouse her. ‘Edward! Edward!’ she screamed, finding her voice, and heard him taking the last flight of stairs two at a time.

‘
Stephanie – overdose!’ she gasped as he came in and stood, looking shocked, on the threshold.

‘
Oh no! the pills?’

She
nodded.

‘
It’s my fault – it’s all my fault!’ He was wringing his hands. ‘I must have left them there, after I gave her one. How could I be so criminally careless, when she was so distraught—’

‘
Never mind that! An ambulance, get an ambulance!’

‘
My dear,’ he said gently, putting an arm round her shoulders, ‘perhaps the police…’

‘
She’s alive!’ she snapped. ‘For heaven’s sake, hurry!’

‘
Alive!’ he said, and he was very still. ‘Are you — are you sure?’

‘
Yes, yes,’ she sobbed. Now go!’

She
barely registered his footsteps going down the stairs again, slow and heavy, as if he were carrying a great weight. She was concentrating on her child, willing her to take the next breath, calling to her, shaking her, trying to bring her back to the life that was almost visibly ebbing away.

She
tried to raise Stephanie, but the girl was as big as her mother, and in her inert state too heavy to lift. Perhaps Edward would manage, get her moving, while she phoned.

She
flew downstairs, calling, ‘Edward!’

He
was standing in the hall, the telephone in his hand, jiggling the rests. ‘That’s strange,’ he said, without turning. ‘It seems to be out of order.’

‘
Then fetch the police! They’re only across the square, and they’ll know what to do.’

But
he didn’t move. And at that moment, she saw the trailing flex of the telephone, pulled from its jackpoint.

For
a fraction of a second, her brain refused to register the implication of what her eyes had seen. Then she was across the hall, wrestling with the key in the front door.

But
it was stiff, her fingers were clumsy, and he was on her, his arms pinning her hands to her sides, dragging her back from the doorway to help, safety and sanity.

‘
Helena, Helena,’ he kept groaning, as if in pain. ‘I didn’t want this — you made me do it, Helena!’

He
was not a great deal taller than she, but his strength seemed to her, in her terror, almost superhuman. But this was her daughter’s life as well as her own, and lashing out, biting, scratching, she fought like an alley cat.

He
seemed impervious to the wounds she was inflicting. She was forced to give ground, until at last he had backed her into the corner of the staircase.

They
were face to face now, and she could see that there were tears pouring down his cheeks. ‘Edward,’ she begged, frantically, ‘please — don’t do it! Please let me go! I’ll help you, do anything—’

Unspeaking,
he shook his head. She was totally cornered now. His body weight held her pinned, her left arm immobilized by the angle of the stairs. Slowly, still shaken by sobs, he raised his hands, and now they were beginning to tighten round her throat.

He
had left her right arm free. Groping blindly, with nothing left but the instinct for self-preservation, her fingers encountered something — something fine and feathery; the draping fronds of cupressus.

She
had set them there herself, a lifetime ago, on Saturday before party guests started arriving. It had been an effective arrangement; daffodils, freesias, cupressus and winter jasmine in a holder set on top of the huge heavy-based pewter candlestick which always stood on the chest at the foot of the stairs.

Her
sudden lunge took him by surprise, and then it was in her hand — two pounds of weighted metal. The flowers cascaded to the ground as she brought it up with all her strength, making sharp contact just above his left ear.

His
eyes widened in shock, pain, and, it seemed, reproach, before his hands loosened from about her throat and he slumped to the floor to lie, as if laid out already for burial, on a bier of crumpled spring flowers.

‘
Oh god, oh god, what have I done?’ She dropped the candlestick, and with her hands over her mouth as if to stifle a rising scream, backed away from her victim.

In
the grip of shock, she knew only that she must open the door, though it needed painful concentration to steady her hands enough to turn the key. At last she wrenched the door wide just as Frances Howarth appeared at the gate, a constable hurrying up in her wake.

At
the sight, Helena, dishevelled and frantic, stopped dead, then burst into peal after peal of hysterical laughter.

‘
Just — just the person I wanted to see! You can tell me. I’ve killed my husband — do you hear me? I’ve killed him. And what I want to know — what I want to know is, if I’ve served my time for killing one husband when I didn’t, but I’ve killed another one instead, is it all square?’

Chapter Fifteen

It was half-past eight when Frances drove wearily back to Radnesfield. There were files she must collect before she could start making her report, and she preferred to fetch them tonight. Then, with luck, she need never set foot in this evil little place again.

The
operation was winding down and the trailer was in darkness, the extra manpower that had been drafted in already deployed elsewhere. She let herself in, snapped on the light and looked round at the piles of papers on the worktop with revulsion.

It
had been a long, gruelling day. The lingering pressmen still staked out in the square had found themselves with ringside seats for the dramatic events of the morning, and tomorrow’s papers would no doubt feature sensational headlines and a lot of rhetorical questions about police effectiveness. What fun it must be, she thought savagely, as she sorted through a mountain of statements, to be able to ask questions without dealing with the answers people gave you.

There
had been television cameras, too, of course, and poor Joe Coppins dragged out of his meeting to explain this mayhem during a police investigation. He had done a sturdy job of stone-walling, but in the context of shots of Stephanie being carried out on a stretcher, and Edward, the square of plaster on his head clearly visible, being marched to a car in handcuffs, it all sounded distinctly lame. They had dragged out all the footage from Helena’s trial too, and got one of the more magisterial interviewers to make the point that surely this must raise the question of wrongful imprisonment, to which the answer could only be yes.

It
didn’t feel quite like that from this side. Helena had pleaded guilty on the expensive advice of a leading barrister, after all, and for the record books, cleaning up Lilian Sheldon’s murder in less than forty-eight hours wasn’t so bad. But she would have to admit that it didn’t look good, and that she felt responsible.

Coppins
was in the front line, because it was his case. Technically. But by a conspiracy of events — no, she corrected herself scrupulously, by a conspiracy of events
and
her own determination to fly solo, she had become involved, as bystander, catalyst and even participant. She hadn’t taken him into her confidence, exposing her fledgling theories to his shrewd scrutiny, partly because she didn’t like being wrong and partly because she had wanted, childishly, to lay down all the cards and say ‘Gin!’

She
had gone to him before she left for Radnesfield, and offered to put in her resignation. She had been sincere, but in her current mood of acid self-appraisal she admitted there had also been a touch of secret pride in her own high-mindedness.

Across
the desk, he had looked at her sardonically from under heavy brows.

‘
Nice little spot of drama to round off the day? I should have thought today’s events would have satisfied anyone’s appetite for histrionics.’

‘
Sir—’ she protested, but he held up his hand.

‘
Spare me! I’ve had a long day. You’ve still got an awful lot to learn, sergeant, haven’t you? If this is the worst you ever have to take in the police force, you can count yourself lucky. And if you offer yourself up as a martyr, you’re inviting people to throw stones.

‘
You didn’t point out that I should have listened to you in the first place, and I might even agree with you, if I were into self-flagellation, which I’m not. Take it from me, as a sport, it’s over-rated.

‘
Just use the wits the good lord gave you, Frances, will you? Write it up so it looks as good as you can make it, then we’ll keep our heads down for a bit. They’ll be so grateful to find we didn’t beat anyone up round the back of the station or plant evidence on them that they’ll probably give us a citation.’

So
she still felt responsible, but now she felt foolish as well. Yes, it had been a very gruelling day. She was tired, and foul-tempered, and when the tap came at the door, even the sight of Mr Tiggywinkle poking his nose round it, almost sniffing the air like his namesake, was not engaging.

‘
Can I help you?’ she said, ice forming on the words as she spoke.

He
looked comically crestfallen. ‘That’s a very forbidding greeting, I always think, don’t you? I don’t want to disturb you—’

She
did not quite say, ‘Then go away,’ but the thought hung almost audibly on the air between them.

‘
I’m sorry. I shall, of course, withdraw immediately and leave you to your labours. It was merely that I happened to see your car arrive, and wondered whether you had eaten? Jane has left me a quite enormous beef carbonnade — she has rather a way with it, I fancy — and if I had a guest, it would justify opening a bottle of an interesting Rioja I’ve been anxious to try.’

Beef
carbonnade. She had not eaten since an early breakfast, but she shook her head. ‘You’re very kind, but I have one or two things to finish here, and then I must get back.’

He
nodded, retreating sadly. As he reached the door, she added, with some measure of compunction, ‘In any case, I’m not fit company for anyone tonight. I wouldn’t like you to think I was ungrateful for all your help, but I’m in a very bad mood, best left to myself.’

He
brightened immediately. ‘If you change your mind,’ he said with a wave, and she saw him scuttle off across the square, as if anxious that his linens might be scorching.

She
turned back to her files. Once she had done this, she could go home. But home to what? Another inquisition from Poppy, a solitary Scotch and a TV dinner. Beef carbonnade…

*

‘You must have been very sure I would come.’ Frances settled back into one of the big leather armchairs with a groan that was half-pain, half-pleasure as she relaxed her aching shoulders.

The
bottle had been standing on a side-table, already open, and he was pouring it into two goblets. The beef stew, on a hotplate beside it with a dish of baked potatoes, was sending out an aroma so exquisitely sensuous that she almost groaned again.

‘
You would not expect me to be so crude as to suggest that when a lady says no she sometimes means yes. But you had, it seemed to me, the air of one in need of a confidant, and I, as you know, am the very persona of discretion.’

‘
Even if
The
Sun
offered you £100,000?’

‘
Sadly, my dear Frances, at my advanced age large sums of money cease to have any great attraction.
Tempus
edax
rerum
— and when time has devoured the appetites which these funds might be expected to feed... But talking of appetites, may I help you to some of this?’

‘
I thought you’d never ask.’ Frances eyed the heaping plateful hungrily. ‘That’s wonderful.’

He
served himself, then, sitting down with the air of one accustomed to bringing meetings to order, Now, first of all, tell me about that poor child. I’ve been thinking about her, and about the whole sad situation, all day.’

‘
Stephanie’s remarkable. She’s not hard or uncaring, but she’s certainly tough. When I called in at the hospital she was eating a hearty meal and inclined to be indignant at her own naivety.’

‘
She hadn’t suspected Edward?’

‘
Not for an instant. She had always compared him to her father, I would guess, and had him pegged as a rather wimpish figure. She was even fond of him, in a slightly patronizing way, and of course she had come to depend on him quite a bit when Helena was in prison.

‘
She drank the hot chocolate he had so thoughtfully brought up for her without a qualm, so it was only luck that saved her. The doctor said that when Edward emptied in the contents of the capsules and stirred it, quite a lot would sink into the sludge at the bottom. In fact it made her so sleepy that she didn’t even finish it. But even so, if Helena hadn’t found her…’

She
fell silent, looking into the fire.

‘
And Helena? How is she?’

‘
Not too good. They’ve got her in the private wing under sedation at the moment, but they think she’ll need a lot of psychiatric help. With all she’s gone through, it’s hardly surprising. She seemed almost punch-drunk, when she was trying to explain what had happened.’

He
nodded, but did not pursue the subject. ‘I think, you know, one tended to think of Edward rather as poor Stephanie did, though I was always aware of quite a formidable determination when there was something he wanted. Would you have got him, do you think, without this last mad effort?’

‘
We were on our way to take him in, after I’d managed to get Martha Batemen to talk, on your suggestion. That’s what makes the whole thing so galling.’

She
allowed him to top up her glass, then had the satisfaction of seeing him, for once, totally confounded, as she told him Martha’s tale.

‘
There are the families, now you mention it,’ he said slowly. ‘The Edes — a couple of them have done time for assault, and there are one or two others where a violent temper runs in the family, like red hair. But I had no idea... And to think that I believed I knew something about them.’ His tone was vexed. ‘Even Jane has never given me the slightest hint of this.’

‘
You’re a foreigner too,’ she said brutally. ‘They may tolerate you, but you’re on the outside, by definition, because you aren’t privy to that sort of information. No one needs to be told, because they’ve always known. And they would view talking about it as breaking a tribal taboo. You almost feel they have different gods — ugly, primitive, powerful ones.’

He
was eying her sceptically, and she was defensive. ‘Oh, I know it sounds whimsical. But I came on the vicar yesterday, praying after the Sunday service, and it gave me cold shivers. He seemed overwhelmed by a sense of evil gathering about him. If that was a response to a spiritual atmosphere—’

He
shook his head. ‘They’re not as heathen as you think, you know. Some will have suffered very troubled minds in these last few months, and they will have gone to him — told him something, but not enough. He’s been under a lot of strain, and that wife of his is more of a hindrance than a help-meet.’

‘
You’re probably right. It’s the atmosphere of the place — it makes one fanciful. And I’m feeling upset about the whole thing anyway. Poor Coppins is taking the flak, but I can’t help feeling I sparked it all into action when I came to see Helena. Openers for the last act, if you like.’

‘
Coincidence,’ he said crisply. ‘Nothing more than a curtain-raiser. It was bound to happen whenever Lilian announced that she was going to sell.’

‘
Yes, I suppose it was. And I suppose that even if Edward had done nothing further we’d have reached him sooner or later, given enough leg-work. He was always an obvious suspect, but then his alibi seemed rock solid. We questioned Willie Comberton twice, you know, and he was adamant about the time on his clock—’

‘
Willie Comberton’s clock! But everyone knows—’

‘
Don’t you start!
Everyone
has known everything, all along, except the poor benighted fuzz, but no one has thought to mention it. It’s been like working in the dark with sheets draped over the furniture.’

‘
And have you managed to twitch them off now?’

‘
Oh, Radley’s been extremely frank. He’s the despair of his lawyers – he’s wanted to tell us all about it.’

‘
Boasting?’

‘
No, not that, exactly. He just seems to think that once he’s explained it properly, no one could possibly blame him for what he did.’

‘
Tout
comprendre
,
c’est
tout
pardonner
.’

‘
Something like that. Apparently, on the day of Neville’s murder, he walked along to Comberton’s house with Helena’s watch, which had broken. Then at two-forty on Willie’s clock he went out through his back garden and up through the wood beyond to Radnesfield House, which explains why Sandra Daley didn’t see him from her window. Neville was, as it happened, in his study alone; they argued, then, when Neville turned round to get plans for the new estate out of his desk — simply to gloat, as far as I can make out — Edward seized the poker and struck him down. Then of course, he returned the same way, met the vicar, and there was his alibi, intact. Quite straightforward.’

Tilson
stared at her. ‘But how could he possibly have set that up — Neville alone, ready to be killed with a handy poker? I can understand the rest of the planning, all quite well thought-out, but—’

Frances
smiled wryly. ‘There wasn’t any planning. That was the irony of the whole thing — it was just the way it happened. Edward, you see, famously loses his temper — it’s what the Radleys do from time to time. But it passes quickly, and then he’s quite calm and normal and, indeed, detached from what he has done. He went up through Willie’s garden, not to escape observation, but because that was the route he had used since he was a child. He didn’t reckon on Willie’s clock providing an alibi; he hadn’t thought about it till we asked him, because he hadn’t planned to kill Fielding. He simply lost his temper when the man, as he saw it, refused to see reason. He wasn’t even being clever about fingerprints; he just happened to be wearing gloves because it was a cold day.’