This Way Out (7 page)

Packer came to stand beside him and they both leaned on the stone wall, silent for a few moments, looking down at the river. The thick green water, unable to catch any light from the overcast sky, was darkly uninviting. A cold breath rose from its depths as it went slopping past. Derek, absorbed in the imagined horror of being left helpless by a stroke yet fully aware of his condition, found himself shrugging to ward off a shiver.

‘If I were in poor old Sidney's state,' said Packer at his shoulder, ‘I'd rather be dead.'

‘Much rather,' Derek agreed fervently.

‘Ironic, isn't it?' said Packer. ‘If we were to let an old animal suffer like that, we'd have the RSPCA after us. But then, we wouldn't let it suffer, would we? I wouldn't, and I bet you wouldn't either. We'd do the merciful thing, and put it out of its misery.'

Derek didn't answer. He was watching something half-floating in the water about fifteen yards downstream, something pale and inflated, wedged among the burgeoning rushes. Nothing significant; rural litter, possibly a plastic fertilizer sack.

But it had revived a childhood memory. When he was twelve or thirteen, he and his friend Mike had set out on their bicycles from Chelmsford with the intention of tracing the river Chelmer to its source in deepest rural Essex. They never got there, because they were easily distracted. And one of the distractions on their route that summer's day had been a mill pond, somewhere near Felsted.

As they'd mucked about, over the tops of their shoes in water and mud, they noticed something bobbing among the waterlilies on the other side of the pond. They couldn't reach it. Curious to know what it was – much bigger than a football, and greyish in colour; floating like a ball and yet so elongated that one end was submerged – they had begun to fling stones at it.

It was just about at the limit of their throw, and most of their shots simply made waves. The thing lurched and swung with the movement of the water, but it remained in the same position, as though the submerged end was anchored. When they did score a direct hit, the stone struck with a dull thump and bounced off.

Unwilling simply to abandon their find, they agreed without discussion that if they couldn't retrieve it they would sink it. Whooping and shouting, they rushed about the thistly field looking for larger, more effective stones.

It was Derek who found the half-brick, beside the five-barred gate in the hedgerow where they had propped their bicycles. Kicking off his muddy shoes and rolling up his splashed trousers, he had waded out among the reeds until he was nearly up to his knees in water. He could recall, even now, the foetid warmth of the mud that squished up between his toes as, swinging his arm to increase the momentum, he had hurled the missile across the pond with all his strength.

The brick fell with a mightly splash. It was such a near miss, and it made the thing shift so violently, that Derek knew he must have scored an underwater hit. Both boys had jumped and cheered, thinking he had freed it, because the floating end immediately reared up out of the water, fully into their view.

What he had seen, then, was that the thing had appendages. They looked incongruously small on that bloated body, but they were unmistakable: a stump of a tail and two stiff legs, the hindquarters of a dead dog, anchored in the shallow water by whatever weight had been attached to its collar before it was thrown into the mill pond to drown.

Perhaps it was an old dog that had been ‘put out of its misery' by someone unable or unwilling to afford a vet. Or possibly just an unwanted dog, callously disposed of. Recalling the whole incident – the thud of their stones on the drum-tight skin, followed by the rearing-up of that obscenely gaseous body, the sight of those pathetic paws, the stench of decay that had momentarily corrupted the breeze – Derek felt his stomach lurch; just as it had done on that long-ago morning when, half-sobbing with the pity and the horror of it, he had jammed on his shoes, and he and Mike had jumped on their bicycles and fled.

Now, leaning over another river in the unsought company of this man whose smile would widen from amiable to unpleasant, Derek fancied that he could catch again that same rotten-sweet smell. This time, a whiff of contagion.

He stood up abruptly. ‘If you're trying to put a proposition to me,' he said, tight-voiced with anger, ‘the answer is most emphatically
no
.'

Packer looked reproachful. ‘Not even to help a man in poor old Sidney's condition?'

‘You're not talking about help, you're talking about murder. And I am having nothing to do with it – or with you. If you feel so strongly about ending your father-in-law's life, do it yourself. But don't try to involve
me
.'

Derek elbowed the smaller man aside and began to stride back through the darkening gardens, where narcissi gleamed white beside the stone-paved paths. The lights were on in the hotel; bank managers and stockbrokers and solicitors and accountants would be assembling for tomorrow's conference, and he had never before felt so eager for their company.

He thought he had shaken Packer off. But the man had simply dodged round a yellow forsythia and was now blocking the way again.

‘I can't risk doing it myself, Derek,' he protested, low-voiced. ‘You know that. The police would suspect me straight away. Just as they'd suspect
you
if you killed your mother-in-law.'

‘I have no intention of killing her.'

‘You've thought about it, though. You told me so.'

Derek cursed himself for having been so unguarded. ‘I was joking,' he said.

‘Come off it!' said Packer. ‘Of course you've thought about getting rid of your mother-in-law. Who hasn't, at one time or another?'

‘What if I have? I wouldn't ever do anything about it. I couldn't. I couldn't bring myself to do it.'

‘But that's what makes this system so brilliant! Don't you see? You don't
have
to do anything to your mother-in-law. You just arrange to be somewhere else at a certain time, and then leave the job to me.'

‘As simple as that?' said Derek with heavy sarcasm. ‘Or would there be a little matter of my being expected to kill your father-in-law for you in return?'

‘Well yes. Naturally.' Packer seemed impervious to sarcasm. ‘But I'd fix it up for you, I'd make all the arrangements –'

Derek turned away in disgust. ‘You're
mad
,' he said.

‘I'm not, you know.
You'll
be the one who's mad. Mad with yourself for not having jumped at this offer, if your poor wife dies young and leaves you lumbered with her old Ma for the next twenty-five years –'

‘Damn you,' said Derek, slowly and quietly, though rage was swelling inside him until he felt that his ribs would crack. ‘Get out of my way – get out and stay out, you little
turd
.'

What happened next was entirely unpremeditated. Afterwards, as Derek held his throbbing right hand under the cold tap in his hotel bathroom, he acknowledged that effective action is much more difficult to take in real life than old films had led him to believe. What he had so instinctively launched had not been a clean, straight-to-the-jaw punch, but a hopelessly inexpert haymaker that felled Packer only because it caught him off balance. It had, he suspected, done more harm to his own hand than to the side of Packer's head.

Even so, Derek felt a considerable satisfaction. It was good, very good, to recall the man's look of pained surprise as he sprawled on his back in a flowerbed. Well worth a badly bruised hand.

Yes, he felt pleased with what he'd done. Greatly relieved, too, by the knowledge that the conspiracy to murder hadn't after all been his own idea. It wasn't his unconscious that had put forward the proposition, it was that evil little bastard Packer. If ever a man deserved to be knocked down, it was him.

It wasn't until after midnight, when he lay sleepless, that Derek realized that he had just abandoned the inhibitions of a decent, honourable lifetime. He had used – and justified the use of – violence against someone smaller than himself.

He had no sympathy for his victim. Far from it. With renewed unease he began to consider the possibility that the man, though comparatively small, couldn't be written off as proportionately weak.

Couldn't be written off at all.

Worrying about it through the early hours, Derek felt sure that he hadn't seen the last of Packer. He sensed, obscurely, that the man had somehow tricked him; had gained an advantage by deliberately tempting him to make that unprecedented physical assault.

Though it seemed that he had won this particular encounter, Derek had a guilty premonition that if the attack on his principles were to be renewed, he might yet succumb to the ultimate temptation.

‘In here, Dee.'

Stretching a smile over his dark thoughts, Derek followed the sound of his wife's voice and found her in her work-room. It was officially the dining-room, but except for major family gatherings they always ate in the kitchen, and the large dining-table was an ideal place for Christine to spread her furnishing fabrics.

Like the other main rooms in the Edwardian-built Brickyard this was large and light, with a squared bay window occupying one wall. The room was at the back of the house, facing west over the modest dip in the landscape that was the valley of the Wash brook.

Although the long gravelled yard at the front of the house abutted on the village street, with its dwellings and shops and comings and goings, from the back windows there wasn't a building to be seen within half a mile. This duality was one of the features of the Brickyard that had particularly attracted the Cartwrights when they first saw the property. They enjoyed being a part of the community, and yet they valued the privacy the house gave them.

They also enjoyed the view. The back windows overlooked a down-sloping lawn where, at this season, clumps of daffodils blew beneath a pear tree in full blossom. The lawn was bounded by a tall old hedge, bustling with birds, and in the hedge was their private gate leading to a field path where they walked the dog.

Overtopping the hedge were the chestnut trees that stood in a group in the meadow beyond, their candles still yellowy-green but promising an outburst of white. Further away, lower in the dip, were the greyer-green tops of the willows that grew beside the brook. Then the land rose again, vivid with winter barley, towards a pink-washed farmhouse backed by late-leafing oak trees on the far side of the little valley. Further still, the flint tower of Doddenham church stood up against the wide East Anglian sky.

It was a pleasant outlook. Unspectacular, quintessentially rural, utterly peaceful. The only movement—apart from wind-blow, the darting birds, clouds skittering across the sky, and Sam the beagle scouring the hedge-bottom for rabbits—came from infrequent local traffic on the minor road that crossed the far slope on its way between Wyveling and Doddenham.

Today, though, the view from the tall window was partly obscured by a swathe of fabric in a swirling, leafy design of blues and greens and lilacs that complemented the plain blue-grey of the wallpaper. Christine, balanced on a stepladder, her prosthesis riding higher under her blouse than her remaining breast, was stretching up to hang a curtain.

‘For heaven's
sake
!' Derek protested, hurrying forward. ‘My love, what are you
doing
?'

‘Exactly what it looks like,' said his wife cheerfully. ‘I finished making these new curtains this morning and I wanted to get them hung before you came back from the conference. Do you like the colour?'

‘Yes, it's fine … but why on earth couldn't you have waited for me to hang them? Come down this minute, Chrissie, and let me finish the job. You'll hurt yourself if you stretch up like that.'

‘No I shan't. I have to do stretching exercises to strengthen my shoulder, so I might as well be productive about it. If you want to help, you can put the hooks in that other curtain for me.'

Derek had always reckoned to do his fair share of the routine household work. He'd had plenty of practice during the long years when they were training Laurie to feed and dress herself, and again since Christine's operation. But putting hooks in curtains had never before come into his province, and he hated jobs that were self-evidently fiddling. Besides, he wasn't sure how the hooks fitted into the tape, and masculine pride inhibited him from asking for instructions. And anyway, his right hand was still painful.

‘Sorry, darling. I'll have to leave that to you, my fingers are a bit swollen. I managed to shut my hand in a door.'

‘Honestly, Dee …' Christine scolded him affectionately, leaving the curtain half-hung while she sat down on the steps to take a rest. She looked tired, as she so often did now, but unusually cheerful. ‘How did the conference go?'

‘Fine,' he said brightly.

‘And how was the hotel? The Haywain?'

Derek assured her that the hotel had been fine, too. He couldn't hope to put the place and its alarming new associations out of his mind, but he had no intention of talking to her about it. ‘And how have
you
been, my love?'

‘Oh, such a wonderful thing has happened!' Christine's news was obviously of more interest to her than the hotel. ‘I've met someone else in the village who's had a mastectomy. I don't suppose you know her – Sylvia Collins from that thatched house on Church Hill. I only knew her by sight, and I had no idea she'd had the operation. But we started chatting yesterday morning while we were waiting for the library van, and then she invited me to tea.'

‘That's good,' said Derek, genuinely pleased for his wife but finding it difficult to sound enthusiastic when his own new acquaintance was so alarmingly on his mind. ‘Nice for you to make a friend who's in the same situation.'

‘It's more than just “nice”!' Christine's eyes were brighter than he had seen them for months. ‘I can't tell you what a relief it is to be able to talk to someone who knows all about it. Sylvia had her operation two years ago, and she's feeling really well now. She's encouraged me to join the Mastectomy Association – I was given all the leaflets about it before I left hospital, but I just didn't want to know at the time – and we're going to work together to raise funds for the Yarchester Hospital scanner appeal. Oh, you can't imagine how wonderful it is not to feel isolated any more! Not to feel desperate about being a lop-sided freak …'