This Way Out (16 page)

‘Of course she will,' said Christine, sliding into the car. ‘It's very good of you to offer, Vera, but Mum's already in bed, happily watching television. I've told her where we're going, and I've locked the front door, so there's nothing for any of us to worry about.'

‘And anyway,' said Les, clipping his own seat belt, ‘the old lady's got your beagle for company, hasn't she?'

Derek wished he hadn't said that. But luckily, Christine was calling good-bye to Vera at the time and didn't hear.

It was nearly ten o'clock when they drove out of the Brickyard, and well after midnight before they left the hospital. And in all that time Derek's hand had hurt so much – eight stitches, without benefit of a local anaesthetic – that he had had no difficulty in putting everything else out of his mind. Hadn't even tried to look at his watch until they were half-way back to Wyveling, when he remembered that it had been so sticky with blood that at some stage Christine had unstrapped it.

The two of them were sitting side by side on the back seat while Les Harding drove them home through the moonlit countryside. Derek was holding his bandaged, aching left hand up against his chest. His right hand was resting on his thigh, and Christine had tucked her fingers into his.

‘Wha's the time?' he asked blearily.

She took away her hand and looked at her watch by the light of the tiny torch on her key ring. ‘Quarter to one.'

Then presumably it was all over. Enid was dead.

The thought left him strangely unmoved. He seemed to be emotionally numbed. He closed his eyes and calmly tried to anticipate what he would see when he went up to his mother-in-law's bedroom – as he must, of course, immediately they got home, to protect Christine from the discovery.

At least Enid's face would be covered by the pillow. Derek was thankful, for all their sakes, that Packer had accepted his suggestion of smothering the old lady. And Christine had said that her mother was already in bed before they left, so with any luck no part of her would be visible. All he would see would be the frilly-edged, flowery pillow, and a mound under the matching quilt. He would have to lift the pillow, of course, just to make sure … and then he and Christine would be free at last.

He had expected to be, if not overjoyed, then at least filled with relief by the prospect of freedom. But now he found that he was strangely indifferent to it.

Having dreamed for so long of ridding himself of his mother-in-law, his indifference disturbed him. No, not indifference; distaste for something that had suddenly gone sour. He had wanted the freedom for his wife's sake, but now for the first time he looked beyond his own part in her mother's death and realized that while his ordeal was almost over, Christine's was about to begin.

However gently he tried to break the news to her, it was bound to come as a terrible shock. She'd get over it, of course; she'd realize that it hadn't been a bad way for her mother to go. But all the same, during the next few days it was Christine who was going to have to pay for the release he had thought he was giving her.

Poor girl, what had he done to her? As if she hadn't already had more than enough suffering! He felt himself begin to shiver uncontrollably.

‘Cold, Dee?' Lovingly, his wife slid her arm through his and held his good hand in both of hers. ‘Snuggle up, darling, soon be home.'

Sickened by guilt, Derek was incapable of returning the strong clasp of her hand, or welcoming the pressure of her breast against his arm, let alone of snuggling. Christine loved and trusted him; what he had done to her was unforgivable.

But then he recalled something Packer had said to him:
As a matter of fact, I've never killed anyone before. P'raps I shan't have the guts. P'raps when you get home you'll find the old woman still alive and kicking.

Please God, Derek found himself praying frantically, as the car's headlights lit up a signpost saying
Wyveling 1 (1/2) miles
: please God, don't let it have happened. Don't let me find Enid dead!

‘That's odd,' said Les Harding as he turned the car into the Cartwrights'long front yard. ‘Your outside lights aren't on.'

‘They were when we left,' said Christine.

‘Must've fused,' said Derek. He cleared his throat. ‘Give me your keys, love,' he added, glad of an excuse to enter the house first, ‘and you stay here while I find out.'

‘I'll bring my torch,' said Les.

Derek walked apprehensively towards the front door. One-handed, he turned the key, stepped inside and felt for the switches. They all worked. Packer must have switched off the outside lights before he left.

Blinking in the sudden brightness, he saw that Packer had carried out at least the first part of his undertaking. The door of the living-room was open and all the audio and video equipment had been piled in the hall, as if ready to be shifted out. The door of the hall cupboard was also open, and its contents were scattered on the floor.

‘Hell's bells,' said Les Harding at his shoulder. ‘You've been burgled, old man!'

Derek's mouth was dry, his throat constricted. Unable to think of anything appropriate to say, he let out some kind of croak. He knew that he must go up to Enid's room, but he seemed to be incapable of movement.

It was Christine who got him going. Pushing past him into the lighted hall she took one look at the mess, drew a gasping breath, and went straight to the point.

‘Mother! What's happened to Mother?'

Derek caught her up at the foot of the stairs, seizing her in both arms regardless of his injury. ‘No, Chrissie, no! Let me go first. You stay with Les –'

Thrusting her into their neighbour's care he took the stairs two at a time, switching on lights as he went. The door of Enid's room was closed. He paused for a moment, trying to quieten his panicky breathing, then turned the handle and pushed the door ajar.

He wanted to hope for the best; but he knew immediately, from the profundity of the silence that issued from the dark room, that Packer had done the job. His mother-in-law was dead.

Pushing the door wider, he took two steps inside. Enid's bed was behind the door, out of the line of light from the corridor, but he could see a tumble of bedclothes and the shape of her body – not neatly covered, as he had hoped, but apparently lying on rather than in the bed.

He reached out for the light switch. Before putting it on he took a steadying breath, and it was then that he noticed the intrusive smell. Enid's room invariably smelled sweetly dusty, of face powder and violet-scented talc. But this smell was rank, alien, as though a visiting animal had left its spraints.

He switched on the light. Enid was lying sprawled on her back across the bed, a fluffy slipper dangling from the toes of one bare projecting foot.

Packer had not merely done the job, he had done it with what looked like an obscene enthusiasm. From the lividity of her face, her swollen tongue and the bruises on her neck, it was apparent that Enid had not been suffocated but strangled. And from the way her nightdress had been bundled up to expose her aged flesh, it seemed that murder alone had not been enough to satisfy him.

If his mother-in-law were ever to be found dead in suspicious circumstances, thought Detective Chief Inspector Quantrill darkly as he left his Breckham Market home the following morning to start the Wyveling investigation, his colleagues wouldn't need to go far to find the murderer.

Douglas Quantrill and his wife's mother cordially detested each other; had done so ever since they first met. Instead of giving him credit for admitting responsibility for her daughter's pregnancy and doing the decent thing by agreeing to get married, Phyllis Barratt had never forgiven him for seducing Molly.

To be fair (and with a father's hindsight) Quantrill acknowledged that the news that their nicely-brought-up girl had been impregnated by a twenty-one-year-old National Serviceman they had never even heard of must have come as a great shock to Phyllis and her husband. But their shock had been nothing in comparison with his own.

Molly, at nineteen, had been very attractive; but he wasn't in love with her and it wasn't marriage that he'd pursued her for. The loss of his freedom had blighted his young manhood, and it had always rankled with him that Molly's mother, while insisting on a rapid wedding, should have made it so abundantly clear that he was not and never would be good enough for her elder daughter.

The fact that he had buckled down to family life and had eventually made progress in a respectable career had failed to change Molly's mother's attitude. Her husband Jim had been cordial enough as soon as their daughter was safely married, but Phyllis had made it her life's work to be critical of her son-in-law.

Luckily for the young Quantrills, Jim Barratt's job had taken him and his wife and their second daughter Mavis to the north of England. Mavis had married an approved suitor and settled in Harrogate, and visits from any of them to Breckham Market had been mercifully infrequent.

But now Phyllis was widowed. She was old, she had heart trouble, she was unsteady on her pins, her sight was failing. Although she kept insisting that she wanted to remain in her own house in Northallerton, it was clear to her daughters that she could no longer live alone. Something, they agreed, would have to be done about her.

To Quantrill, the solution seemed simple enough. If his mother-in-law couldn't look after herself, she would have to go into a home. But the two sisters, after long telephone consultations, declined to consider any such thing. Their mother had looked after them throughout their childhood, Molly told her husband, and now it was their duty to look after her. They had devised a plan for having her to live with them turn and turn about, for six months at a time, and as Molly was the elder she proposed to take the first turn.

Quantrill had objected vigorously, but his wife refused to budge. After all, she pointed out, he wouldn't see much of her mother because he spent most of his time at work. And now that they had moved to Bramley Road, he couldn't claim that they hadn't enough room.

Looking after one's old parents wasn't just a duty, either, Molly had continued. It was a matter of conscience.
She
didn't want to have anything to feel guilty about for the rest of her life, or to go on reproaching herself for after her mother was dead. And Quantrill, who had made the pressures of his job an excuse for neglecting his own mother during her last ailing years and had been (privately, he'd thought) deeply remorseful ever since her death, had been shamed into acquiescence.

But the reality of having Molly's mother in residence was worse than either of them had anticipated. Phyllis Barrett was as censorious as ever, and now cantankerous with it. Far from being grateful to her daughters for conspiring to take care of her, she had made it plain on her first evening with the Quantrills that she would never cease resenting being uprooted from her own home. And in the middle of that night, when her son-in-law was called out to the murder, she had stood in his way, dressing-gowned and propped up on her walking-frame, berating him for lack of consideration because the telephone had woken her.

‘We shall just have to make allowances,' Molly had said defensively next morning. Quantrill was snatching a quick breakfast before returning to Wyveling, and his wife and teenage son had joined him in the kitchen for a low-voiced discussion before Phyllis put in an appearance. ‘She's bound to be upset by the move. After all, she's eighty-four …'

‘Eighty-four's nothing,' said Peter, a note of malicious glee in his voice. He was still hobbling painfully on crutches, five months after an accident on a forbidden motor cycle had nearly killed him, and he had already signalled his intention of milking sympathy and supplementary pocket money from his grandmother. ‘She'll probably live to be a hundred.'

‘Not if I have anything to do with it, she won't,' Quantrill had pronounced. In reality, of course, he had seen too much of the devastating domestic repercussions of murder ever to contemplate committing it himself. But even so, he couldn't help indulging in a moment's fantasy before setting off to investigate the death of Enid Long.

As a matter of policy, and with the approval of his Superintendent, Chief Inspector Quantrill had postponed the start of the investigation until the morning after the murder. Certain routines – calling in the police surgeon, the photographer, the pathologist, cursorily checking all the rooms, ascertaining the point of entry – had to be gone through as soon as possible, but Quantrill saw no point in having the entire murder squad fumbling about the house and grounds by artificial light. Much better to put the place under guard during the hours of darkness and postpone the detailed investigation until they could see what they were doing.

There was of course no question of the murdered woman's daughter and son-in-law returning to the house, even had they wanted to do so, until the police had finished with it.

Temporary accommodation had been offered them by the neighbour who had witnessed the evidence of burglary, but Mrs Cartwright had begged to go to a particular local friend instead: a fellow cancer-sufferer, her husband had explained, Mrs Sylvia Collins of Church Hill. Having caught a glimpse of her mother's body Mrs Cartwright was understandably distraught, and the police surgeon had given her a sedative.

Quantrill had assigned a policewoman, Val Thornton, to the Cartwrights, to remain with them night and day for as long as was necessary. It always helped a murder victim's family to have one particular officer with them, not only to provide practical support and keep away unwelcome visitors but to encourage them to talk through their shock. This also helped the detectives, because very often some vital scrap of information would emerge from one of these rambling, unpressured conversations.

In this case, though, when it was the victim's son-in-law who had discovered her body, a formal witness statement from him was going to be necessary. Quantrill had already spoken to Derek Cartwright during his initial visit to the scene; now he wanted a longer informal discussion before the witness made his statement.