Roots of Evil (4 page)

Edmund said, in his silkiest, politest voice of all, ‘Yes. Yes, it was a great shock. But everyone has to die some time.’

Everyone has to die some time.

Even though Deborah had been over seventy, Edmund was very glad to know that he had not fumbled or bungled things. A swift, painless death, it had been. Anything else would have felt almost discourteous.

‘Of
course
you wouldn’t have fumbled it,’ Crispin had said, afterwards. ‘A gentleman to the last,’ he had added,
smiling the secret smile that Edmund always found so fascinating, and that he thought – hoped! – no one but himself ever saw.

Nobody had suspected anything wrong about Deborah’s death, and even if they had, they would not have dreamed that respectable Mr Fane would have…

Go on, say it.

Would have committed murder.

Murder. An old, old word that had smeared its bloody pawprints on the history of humankind. A word whose dark origins derived partly from the Middle English word,
murther,
taken from the Old English
morthor
. Akin to the Old High German word,
mord
.

No one would have suspected trustworthy, reliable Edmund Fane capable of committing
mord.

The post-mortem on Deborah Fane had been held within a couple of days – that was one of the advantages of living in such a small place, of course – and the conclusion was a myocardial infarct. Sudden and fatal heart attack. Perhaps there had been a slight puzzlement on the part of Deborah’s GP, who had told Edmund that apart from the angina which they were controlling well with the medication – oh, and a touch of arthritis – Mrs Fane had been in fairly good general health. But then he had said, oh well, you could not always predict when a heart was about to give way. Still, she would be a great loss to everyone who had known her.

‘She’s a great loss to me,’ said Edmund sadly. ‘I shall miss her very much.’

Short of the occasional domestic disaster – ‘Water pouring through
all
the bedroom ceilings, Edmund, and I cannot get a plumber to come out before
Thursday
!’ – Aunt Deborah had hardly ever phoned Edmund at the office.

‘I don’t believe in intruding into business hours, Edmund, dear,’ she had always said. ‘It’s important to respect a person’s place of work, and you have clients to consider.’

It had been a surprise, therefore, to hear her voice, shortly after nine fifteen one morning. Edmund had been engrossed in the complexities of a boundary plan relating to a right-of-way dispute for a farmer, and he had just been brought his coffee; he liked a cup while he looked through his morning’s post and generally arranged his day. Decent coffee, of course; he could not bear the instant powdered stuff. He had bought and installed a
good filter machine for the office, and he paid for properly ground coffee and fragrant Earl Grey tea. Considerate Mr Fane, such a generous employer. He did not expect his staff to swill the stuff indiscriminately, though. Two cups of coffee in the morning and two cups of tea in the afternoon were enough for anyone. If his staff wanted more than that, they could bring their own.

Into the phone he said, ‘Good morning, Aunt Deborah.’

‘I tried to reach you last evening,’ said Aunt Deb, without preamble.

‘I was at a Law Society dinner.’

‘Oh, I see. Well now, listen. Lucy phoned me at the weekend.’

‘How is Lucy?’

‘She’s perfectly fine except for that wretched neighbour who sings rugby songs in his bath – I do
wish
she wouldn’t live in that crazy flat! – but I haven’t phoned you to talk about that, Edmund. I’ve phoned you because Lucy’s been approached by a woman called Trixie Smith.’

‘Yes?’ Edmund spoke rather absently, his attention still more than three-quarters on the farmer’s assertion that not a soul had walked the alleged right of way for seven years.

‘This Trixie Smith – are you listening, Edmund? You sound very vague, I hope you haven’t got a hangover. Your father was always much too fond of a drink, and you don’t want to go the way he went—Anyway, this Trixie Smith is a teacher somewhere in North London, but she’s been studying for a doctoral thesis, and she wants to use the Ashwood murders as a main case study.’

The quiet, well-ordered office blurred for a moment, and Edmund had to take a deep breath before replying. Then he said, ‘Oh, not again. It only needs it to be the anniversary of the murders or for somebody to resurrect one of Lucretia’s films, and they come crawling out of the woodwork. You aren’t going to do anything about this one, are you?’

‘Yes, I am,’ said Deborah. ‘I’ve already phoned Ms Smith, as a matter of fact.’

‘You have?’

‘Yes. Rather an odd-sounding person. Abrupt. I said I didn’t know how much help I could give, but you know, Edmund, I was in my teens at the time of the Ashwood murders, so I remember quite a lot about it. Ms Smith – they all like to be called “Ms” these days, don’t they? – says she’d like to talk to me about Lucretia.’ It was typical of Deborah that she never referred to Lucretia as ‘mother’; or perhaps, thought Edmund, that was due to Lucretia herself.

He said, ‘She’ll be a sensation-seeker, that’s all.’

‘I don’t think she is,’ said Aunt Deb. ‘She wants to talk about all the people involved in the Ashwood case, not just Lucretia. I was there that day, and so—’

This time the room did not just blur, it tilted as well, and Edmund had to grasp the edges of the desk to stop himself from falling. From out of the dizziness, he heard his voice say, ‘I didn’t know you were actually there when – on the day it happened. You never told me that.’

‘Didn’t I? But I used to go to the studios with Lucretia sometimes – you knew that.’

‘Yes, but…Don’t you think,’ said Edmund after a
moment, ‘that it might upset you to talk about it all? I mean – Lucretia’s death and everything…Won’t it be dreadfully painful?’

‘Oh, not at this distance,’ said Deborah. ‘It all feels as if it happened to someone else. You’ll understand that when you’re older, Edmund.’

A pulse was beating inside Edmund’s head, each hammer-blow landing painfully on the exact same spot, rapping out a maddening little rhythm against his senses, over and over.
She-was-at-Ashwood-that-day, she-was-at-ASHWOOD
…said this infuriating rhythm.
She was there when it happened, she was THERE
…

He forced himself to take several deep breaths, but the pulsating hammer blows continued.
What-did-shesee
…
?
they said.
What-did-she-see-that-day-at-Ashwood
…
At ASHWOOD
…
?

‘And it isn’t as if any of this is going to be published and made into a best-seller or anything like that,’ Deborah was saying. ‘It’s a – a scholarly thing that Miss Smith’s going to write. She’ll be dealing mostly with the psychological aspects.’

‘How very modern of her.’

‘Don’t be sarcastic, Edmund, it doesn’t suit you. I suppose you ate too much rich food at the Law Society dinner last night and it’s given you indigestion: it always did make you disagreeable, indigestion…’

‘I do not have indigestion—’

‘…a good dose of Andrew’s liver salts, that’s what you need. If you haven’t got any you’d better get some on your way home tonight. So now, here’s the thing: I’m almost sure Trixie Smith is genuine, but I thought it
might be better if you made the call setting up the meeting. You wouldn’t mind doing that, would you? She’s perfectly agreeable to driving up here at the weekend, and I can give her some lunch while we talk. But just in case she has got a – what d’you call it? – a hidden agenda, I thought a call from a solicitor would let her know that I’m not some half-witted old dear, all on my own.’

‘Nobody would ever call you half-witted,’ said Edmund automatically, and without warning the pulse stopped. An enormous silence flooded the inside of his head, and he saw, quite clearly, what he must do. From out of this huge silence, his voice said, quite calmly, very nearly absent-mindedly, ‘Still, now that you mention it, it would be quite a good idea for me to make the call. Give me the number and I’ll ring now. Or – no, wait a moment, I’m going out to a client’s house later this afternoon, and I’ll be driving past the end of your lane. How about if I call in and phone from your house? I’d rather do that; they’re such a gossipy lot here, and if anyone overheard—’

Deborah said certainly they did not want any of Edmund’s staff to hear such a conversation, not even that nice secretary who was so very reliable, or the good-looking young man who looked after the conveyancing work. If Edmund was not expected anywhere later, perhaps he would like to stay on to supper, she said.

‘That’s an offer I can’t refuse,’ said Edmund and rang off.

It was important to remain perfectly calm and not to give way to nerves, although Edmund thought he might
have been forgiven for doing just that; you did not expect to be confronted with the dangerous resurrecting of your family’s ghosts while reading your day’s post, and you certainly did not expect those ghosts to come packaged, so to speak, with warnings about indigestion and a throwaway remark concerning the infamous
locus in quo
of a murder.

(
She-was-there
…said his mind, starting up its maddening tattoo again.
Deborah-was-there…What-did-she-see
…
?)

As he drove to the house Edmund’s mind was working furiously. There must be no investigations of the Ashwood case – no prying researches so that some unknown female could write the letters MA after her name, no books written by sensation-seeking chroniclers, no idle delvings by anorak-garbed enthusiasts, or journalists constructing Fifty-Years-Ago features…

There must be no elderly ladies growing garrulous with increasing age, reliving memories, talking about the past to anyone who might listen.

The past…

The truth about Ashwood’s past must never surface, no matter the cost.

Tea and scones were set out for Edmund with the slightly slapdash generosity that had always characterized Aunt Deborah’s hospitality.

Edmund, accepting the cup of tea, said, ‘What I think I’d better say to this woman is that…Oh, keep still a moment, Aunt Deborah – there’s a spider crawling on your neck—’ He set down the cup and went over to her chair.

‘Ugh, how horrid – flick it off for me, Edmund, you know how I loathe spiders—’

There was no spider, of course; what there was, brought into the house in Edmund’s pocket and now carefully concealed in his hand, was a hypodermic syringe, unobtrusively taken from a medicine cabinet years earlier, when Deborah Fane’s husband had had to be given intravenous injections of heparin and nitroglycerin for his failing heart by a nurse who came in every day. Edmund had taken the syringe after William Fane died, and had kept it at the back of a drawer in his own house. You never knew what might come in useful; Crispin had instilled that in Edmund shortly after that last university term, and it was a good maxim.

Carefully kept, as well, had been the memory of a conversation with the nurse, who had still been called a district nurse because people were old-fashioned in this part of the world. You had to be very careful with intravenous injections, she had said, that was why she had to come in each morning. The syringe had to be correctly filled, so that you did not inject air into a main vein and risk causing an embolism.

Embolism?

Air bubble in the system, said the nurse, rather flattered to be sought out and talked to by Mr and Mrs Fane’s attractive nephew, pleased at being able to impart information. Mostly the body could adjust to a small air bubble and absorb it, but if you introduced a big enough pocket of air into one of the large veins – the femoral vein, say, or the jugular – that pocket of air could travel to the heart inside of a couple of minutes, and the heart
would stop. The nurse had noticed that it was a murder method sometimes utilized by writers of whodunnits. It was probably not quite as cut-and-dried as the books made out, but the principle was perfectly sound. Hadn’t Dorothy L. Sayers used it in a book?

Edmund had said, with polite regret, that he did not read detective books – ‘Too busy studying, you know’ – and the nurse went off thinking what a charming young man he was, so obviously grateful to the relatives who had been so kind to him. She wondered if he had a girlfriend at university. Or he might be gay, of course; the really nice-looking ones often were. Ah, well.

Edmund did not read detective books, but he could and did read the encyclopaedia, and he had looked up embolism at the next opportunity. Sure enough, there it was.

‘Embolism, from the Greek,
embolos
, meaning stopper or plug. Obstruction of a blood vessel by material which has been carried along in the bloodstream. Commonest cause is detachment of a blood-clot, portions of growths on heart valve, pieces of tumours, fat, masses of bacteria, and in some instances, air bubbles…’

Air bubbles. Airlock in the system, just as the nurse had described it. The same thing you sometimes got in a car or a central heating system, bringing the car or the heating system to a full stop. Bringing the human body to a full stop? That was how it sounded. Introduce a big enough bubble of air into one of the large veins – for instance by jabbing in an empty hypodermic syringe and pressing the plunger – and the chances were that death, swift, painless, silent, undetectable death, would result
within minutes. That was interesting. It was something to tuck into your mind and remember. One day it might be necessary to find out if it really did work.

It had worked that afternoon all right. As Edmund pressed the hypodermic’s plunger, Deborah Fane had given a little gasp, as if of surprise, and then her head had fallen forward. Edmund stared down at her, and after a moment felt for a pulse at the base of her throat, and then beneath her ear. Nothing. But let’s be absolutely sure: this was not a time to take risks or make assumptions. He felt for a heartbeat. Nothing. She was dead, the embolism thing had happened, and presently Edmund would phone the local GP, slightly panic-stricken at coming in to find dear Aunt Deborah apparently dead in her armchair.

The tiny pinprick on Deborah Fane’s neck had not even been noticed, because no one had thought there was anything that needed noticing. Aunt Deb’s angina, a known and existing condition, had already taken the pathologist three-quarters of the way to a verdict of heart failure caused by a severe angina attack. In reality, it had been
murther
– the Old English
morthor
– but no one had realized this. Edmund had not really expected that anyone would, but it was still gratifying to know that he had not overlooked anything, and that he had foreseen everything.

He had not, it was true, foreseen that the house would be willed to Michael Sallis’s absurd charity, and he did find it sad that Aunt Deborah had not told him about this. Edmund had thought there had been better trust
between them – it just went to show you could not rely on anyone. But losing the house was not disastrous, and it would take a few weeks for probate to be granted so there was plenty of time for Edmund to make a thorough and orderly search of the house – several thorough and orderly searches in fact – to assure himself that there was nothing incriminating anywhere.

Still, as he moved about the empty rooms after the mourners had left, he realized that he was constantly glancing over his shoulder as if he expected to see Aunt Deborah watching him from a doorway, her head twisted a little to one side where he had jabbed the hypodermic in…

Sheer nerves, that was all.

The shameful ghosts from the early years in Pedlar’s Yard did not often return, but when they did they always brought back the old fear and the memories of all the nights spent shivering under bedclothes, helpless with fear and misery and despair. How did I stand it for so long?

The fear had not always been there. To start with it had only been a question of avoiding the anger and the drunkenness – and of escaping from the belt with the hurting buckle which was sometimes used on your back and which was used on Mother more often than anyone ever knew. She had never complained, and she had never told anyone about it because there had not been anyone to tell. In those days – it had been the early 1970s – and in that environment, there had not been such things as battered wives’
refuges, or brisk, well-meaning social workers, or even telephone numbers that could provide help. In any case, the Pedlar’s Yard house did not have a telephone. And Mother had had an odd streak of stubbornness. When you married, she said, you exchanged vows, and vows ought not to be broken. Your father married me when no one else wanted me and I was grateful. (And he was very charming when he was younger…)