Murder Among Us (3 page)

"I always thought," said Pearce, "that the old house looked downright creepy. The sort of place where if you opened a cupboard, a body might fall out."

Markby turned from the window and fixed him with a steely eye. "Thank you, that's the last thing I want to happen, especially if I'm standing by dressed like a penguin with a glass in my hand."

"Should be a bloomin' good bash!" said Pearce— who wasn't a reader of the society columns but recognised the signs of a good party about to start.

"Yes, it should be an evening to remember."

"Denis, darling?"

The man hunched scowling at the word processor which had been absorbing his entire concentration looked up, blinked and seemed to locate and identify his wife after a perceptible delay. "Sorry, Leah, didn't hear you come in."

"How are you getting on with the new toy?" Leah Fulton stooped to plant a light kiss on her husband's forehead.

He put out a hand and patted her backside absent-mindedly. "Bloody thing keeps going down. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I've read the handbook any number of times but it seems to have been written by one of these machines in the first place. You need the services of a MI5 cipher clerk to make head or tail of it. I read a paragraph of instruction and it sounds all right. Then I read it again and it seems to be complete mumbo-jumbo, utterly meaningless. I don't know why I bought this damn contraption. I was all right with the old sit-up-and-beg typewriter."

"Your accountant advised it, sweetie. Wish I could help but I don't know a thing about it. You'll get used to it."

"I doubt it!" Denis stood up, pushing back his chair. "I know every five-year-old child in the country can use

a computer nowadays but I'm obviously too far over the hill to learn. I could use a drink. So could you, I dare say? Good lunch with Elizabeth?"

He shot a sideways glance at his wife. She was looking relaxed and happy and fiddling about with the papers on his desk, setting them all straight. His habitual untidiness was anathema to her. Leah was an organised soul and not bad at organising other people. Why was she looking so damn pleased with life? Why not? Why was that little smile playing round her mouth? Was it a smile? Was he imagining it? But for God's sake, the poor woman could smile, couldn't she? What kind of a monster of a husband was he?

He waited for her reply, forcing down the unworthy suspicions, trying to look unconcerned, hoping he'd sounded normal. Getting himself into his usual stewed-up mess, in other words.

"The lunch was fine. Lizzie was—Lizzie. I'm devoted to her, naturally, but even when she was a little thing she wasn't the sort of daughter anyone could make a fuss of. Now I look at her and listen to her and think, is it possible she's only nineteen? She looks like a woman of thirty, talks like one of forty and frankly, frightens me. However, duty is done. We parted affectionately and with mutual relief. I don't have to get in touch with Lizzie nor she with me for at least another month."

As she spoke she led the way out of his study and set off towards the drawing room. Denis, following, took a surreptitious glance in a mirror and straightened his tie. Leah, with every hair in place, was, as usual, immaculately groomed from tip to toe. Presumably the late Marcus Keller had liked it that way. From wherever Keller was now his shade probably watched balefully over his once wife and her new husband, waiting for the signs of disintegration in her well-being which must surely come about now he wasn't around to take care of her and it was left to a prize idiot like Denis.

That Leah had married him when she could have had

anyone remained one of life's insoluble mysteries not only to him, Denis, but to their entire joint acquaintance.

Sometimes, about a dozen times a day in fact, Denis wondered why Leah had married him. It wasn't for money because she had plenty of that. Or rather she had a good part of Marcus Keller's. She certainly had more than he had, or ever would have. Being a food expert didn't pay the kind of money some people imagined and the late Mr. Keller still paid their household bills from the afterlife, as it were.

It wasn't because Denis was young (he was fifty-two) or handsome (he was losing his hair and his chest seemed inexplicably to be located where his waist used to be) or indeed because he was particularly anything. He was of course modestly successful in his own way, which was writing about food and wine, and the TV series had made him a household name. But that wasn't the sort of professional line he would have expected to attract the widow of a multi-millionaire who had dominated the financial world in his lifetime and whose portrait graced the boardrooms of half the financial institutions in the city, as far as Denis could make out.

They had reached the drawing room. It was Leah's house and all the beautiful furnishings had been chosen by her and paid for with Keller money. Everything was done in Leah's taste. She had a liking for pearl greys, misty blues and salmon pinks. Denis who liked stark contrasts, black and white, splashes of scarlet and tropical greens, found these dawn hues muffling and soporific. He couldn't tune in to them and frequently felt like a sort of lodger in superior digs. Even worse, among the mauve-pinks and gilded rococo furniture of their marital bedchamber he sometimes felt he'd strayed into some upmarket brothel he couldn't afford.

Leah had sunk down in a chair and crossed her beautiful legs. She tossed back long shining chestnut hair and said mellifluously, "G and T for me, sweetie."

Denis, the booze expert after all, always poured the drinks. He busied himself at the cabinet now and wished

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he felt more like a man relaxing in his own home and less like a barman. It wasn't Leah's fault. It was a stupid neurosis of his own. Putting it bluntly, he couldn't manage to come to terms with his amazing good fortune in capturing Leah—and all the Keller millions with her. He kept thinking he'd wake up, and Leah, everything, would be gone. Or that something would happen to destroy it all. And something might, yet... Or already had. God, he felt so guilty.

"Denis? You've gone off into a brown study again!" Laughter gurgled attractively in his wife's voice.

"Urn, sorry ... one drink coming up!"

He crossed the room to hand it to her and went back to pour himself a scotch. When he was seated opposite her, nursing his tumbler and wishing he had a cigarette (he'd given up six months before on marrying Leah), she said:

"Are you worried about anything, Denis? I mean, apart from the wretched word processor?"

"No—do I look it?"

"Frankly, yes. And you've taken to mumbling in your sleep."

"Sorry..."

"And you keep apologising to me, which makes me nervous!"

"Sor—I mean, I hadn't realised I was doing it."

"Is it the party on Saturday at Eric Schuhmacher's new place?"

The scotch splashed out of Denis's tumbler and he dragged out his handkerchief and scrubbed at his knee where a damp patch stained it. "Lord, no, why should it be? I mean, it's straightforward. Eric wants me to give him a decent write-up and unless something really horrendous goes wrong, I shall." He fell silent, chewing his lip. Something really horrendous . . . For whom? For Eric?

"Denis ..." Now Leah was beginning to sound less concerned than cross. *'Honestly, you're going to have to see a doctor."

"Whaffor?" he demanded defiantly.

"Because you're a nervous wreck!" Leah paused. "It isn't anything to do with me, is it?"

"No!" he almost shouted.

"I keep forgetting it's a first-time-round marriage for you. I'm sort of used to being married, first to Bernie, then Marcus and now to you. But to you, well, being married must be like having a permanent intruder in your life."

"I'm very happy!" Denis leaned forward, clasping the tumbler tightly. "I swear, Leah. I was never so happy in my life."

"Well, look it, for heaven's sake! Or sound it! One or the other—preferably both!"

"It's just that I'm not like Bernie or Marcus, I'm not a financial wizard, a go-getter, possessor of a rapier brain at whose approach lesser mortals tremble. I'm just a scribbler about nosh who can't master his own word processor and I feel—"

Leah leapt up and came over to him. She put her hands on his shoulders and bending down kissed him, her long chestnut hair brushing his cheek, her perfume filling his nostrils and the warmth from her body seeping into his skin. As always, when she touched him like this, he felt he trembled from top to toe. He set down the glass and grabbed her, pulling her down on his lap.

"I love you," she whispered, twisting her arms round his neck.

He said desperately, "I love you too, Leah. I love you so much I ache."

"Margery?" Ellen Bryant paused by a display stand to straighten up a stack of expensive angora wools. "I'm taking this Saturday afternoon off. You can manage in the shop, can't you? This hot weather makes it a slow time. No one thinks about sitting home and knitting when the sun is beating down."

"Needles" was the name of the shop Ellen ran in Bamford High Street. It catered for home knitters, nee-

dlecraft workers and dressmakers and Ellen aimed for the best. Nothing in Needles was cheap, but people came from miles around to buy their wool, patterns, trimmings, embroidery silks and all the other bits and pieces associated with nimble fingers.

Ellen looked complacently around the shop now, a wonderful treasure house glowing with the jewel-like colours of the wools and silks. Just in front of her was a special display in shades of mauves and purples of which she was particularly proud. She was clever at showing things off to their best advantage. She knew how to make the best of her own natural advantages too. Unthinkingly, she straightened her sweater and pushed up its sleeves. Her bangles jingled musically.

"Oh, yes, Ellen," said Margery Collins quickly. She brushed away a wisp of untidy hair and blinked eagerly at her employer through her large round steel-rimmed spectacles.

The blatant heroine-worship in Margery's brown eyes would have embarrassed most people but Ellen usually accepted it with amusement and, frankly, as no more than her due. Margery was such a mouse but at least she had the sense to recognise it. Unlike Hope; what a mess that woman was! Hope's reaction towards Ellen had been one of jealousy from the start and it was only to be expected, thought Ellen serenely. However, something about Margery's admiration just now irritated and those devoted brown eyes reminded her of a spaniel.

4 'Just lock up as usual—and I'll see you on Monday morning!" she said a little sharply.

"Right you are!" breathed Margery, adding daringly, "I hope you'll have a nice time—wherever it is you're going."

"I doubt it!" said Ellen brusquely and poor little Margery looked appalled at her own temerity at asking in the first place.

Ellen lived over the shop. It was a comfortable flat and opening the door to it gave her the same kind of satisfied glow that gazing round her business did. She

reflected on her good fortune as she climbed the spiral stair. The building was unusual for this area where so much was built in stone. It was timber-framed, black and white, with a jutting upper storey supported by carved corbel heads which grimaced down at passers-by. It was known locally as "the Tudor house." Apart from the church, it was the oldest building in Bamford to survive in anything like its original form and its appearance certainly helped to entice people into the shop.

She made a decent living from Needles and didn't pay Margie a vastly generous wage. Let's face it, no one else would have employed Margie, so dowdy and without interests in life except the shop and some sort of ultra-strict religious sect she attended on Sundays. Ellen knew she terrorised and exploited her assistant but she salved her conscience with the knowledge that it would all be made up to Margie one day. Not that Margie knew this. It would be a big surprise. But not for a long time yet, let's hope! thought Ellen as she closed the door of her living room.

She dismissed all thought of Margery Collins. She had, goodness only knew, enough other things to think about. For Ellen was by no means as pleased with life as it appeared and as she had been, say, a year ago. Dissatisfaction had crept in, a tiny worm in the centre of the apple, gnawing away at her peace of mind. She wasn't a woman to do nothing, and so she'd done something . . . convinced at the time it was right and proper and her due. But then it hadn't quite gone as she'd envisaged. Perhaps she ought to have planned things better. The whole business was a damn nuisance. In a way she wished she hadn't started any of it. And there was Hope and her wretched determination to make a scene at Springwood Hall. But Ellen was going to turn up all right that Saturday.However she had her own reasons for it and they had nothing to do with preserving mausoleums of old houses.

She took the envelope from the letter-rack on the desk and pulled out the slim sheet of paper. She'd read it

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through so many times it was beginning to get quite grimy. The typewritten message was disagreeably blunt and it was unsigned.

"We can discuss this better face to face," it read. "It should be possible on Sat at SH. I'll see you there and let you know when there's a chance to slip away for a private chat. I am assuming you'll be there. I really think this opportunity ought not to be missed."

The tone of the note was a mixture of the informal and the peremptory. "What a nerve!" she muttered. "Ordering me to turn up!"

However, the writer was keen to maintain a facade of civility. Even so, Ellen wasn't used to people taking that kind of line with her. She always took care to make the running, took pride in doing so. Meeting opposition of any kind had come as quite a shock. Not that she couldn't deal with it.

"I'll go," muttered Ellen. "Why not?" She crushed the note in her hands and tossed it carelessly towards the wastepaper basket in the corner. It bounced off the rim and unobserved, rolled under the unit housing her music centre. "I'm not scared to spell it out, face to face. I hold all the cards, when all's said and done!"