Tickled to Death and Other Stories of Crime and Suspense (3 page)

“Well, Larry, I dare say you're surprised to see me.”

“A little,” he said lightly, and smiled what he had always believed to be a charming smile.

“I think I'll have quite a lot to say to my solicitor tomorrow.”

He laughed lightly.

“After I've been to the police,” she continued.

His next laugh was more brittle.

“Yes, Larry, there are quite a few things to talk about. For a start, I've just done an inventory of my jewellery. And do you know, I think I've suddenly realized why you appeared in my hotel room that fateful afternoon. Once a thief, always a thief. But murder . . . that's going up a league for you, isn't it?”

The gin hadn't got to her: she was speaking with cold coherence. Larry slowed down his mind to match her logical deliberation. He walked over to his desk in the corner by the door. When he turned round, he was holding the gun he kept in its drawer.

Lydia laughed, loudly and unattractively, as if in derision of his manhood. “Oh, come on, Larry, that's not very subtle. No, your other little scheme was quite clever, I'll give you that. But to shoot me . . . They'd never let you inherit. You aren't allowed to profit from a crime.”

“I'm not going to shoot you.” He moved across and pointed the gun at her head. “I'm going to make you drink from that other gin bottle.”

Again he got the harsh, challenging laugh. “Oh, come on, sweetie. What kind of threat is that? There's a basic fault in your logic. You can't make people kill themselves by threatening to kill them. If you gotta go, who cares about the method? And if you intend to kill me, I'll ensure that you do it the way that gives you most trouble. Shoot away, sweetie.”

Involuntarily, he lowered the arm holding the gun.

She laughed again.

“Anyway, I'm bored with this.” She rose from the sofa. “I'm going to ring the police. I've had enough of being married to a criminal mastermind.”

The taunt so exactly reflected his self-image that it stung like a blow. His gun-arm stiffened again, and he shot his wife in the temple, as she made her way towards the telephone.

There was a lot of blood. At first he stood there mesmerized by how much blood there was, but then, as the flow stopped, his mind started to work again.

Its deliberations were not comforting. He had blown it. The best he could hope for now was escape.

Unnaturally calm, he went to the telephone. He rang Heathrow. There was a ten o'clock flight. Yes, there was a seat. He booked it.

He took the spare cash from Lydia's handbag. Under ten pounds. She hadn't been to the bank since her return from the health farm. Still, he could use a credit card to pay for the ticket.

He went into the bedroom, where her jewellery lay in its customary disarray. He reached out for a diamond choker.

But no. Suppose the Customs searched him. That was just the sort of trouble he had to avoid. For the same reason he couldn't take the jewellery from his case in the Left Luggage office. Where was it now anyway? Oh no, Liverpool Street. Fumes of panic rose to his brain. There wouldn't be time. Or would there? Maybe if he just got the money from the case and—

The doorbell rang.

Oh my God! Lydia's sister!

He grabbed a suitcase, threw in his pyjamas and a clean shirt, then rushed into the kitchen, opened the back door and ran down the fire escape.

Peter Mostyn's cottage was in the Department of Lot. The nearest large town was Cahors, the nearest small town was Montaigu-de-Quercy, but neither was very near. The cottage itself was small and primitive; Mostyn was not a British trendy making a fashionable home in France, he had moved there in search of obscurity and lived very cheaply, constantly calculating how many years he could remain there on the dwindling capital he had been left by a remote uncle, and hoping that it would last out his lifetime. He didn't have more contact with the locals than weekly shopping demanded, and both sides seemed happy with this arrangement.

Larry Renshaw arrived there on the third night after Lydia's death. He had travelled unobtrusively by local trains, thumbed lifts and long stretches of cross-country walking, sleeping in the fields by night. He had sold his Savile Row suit for a tenth of its value in a Paris second-hand clothes shop, where he had bought a set of stained blue overalls, which made him less conspicuous tramping along the sun-baked roads of France. His passport and gold identity bracelet were secure in an inside pocket.

If there was any chase, he reckoned he was ahead of it.

It had been dark for about four hours when he reached the cottage. It was a warm summer night. The countryside was dry and brittle, needing rain. Although the occasional car had flashed past on the narrow local roads, he had not met any pedestrians.

There was a meagre slice of moon which showed him enough to dash another hope. In the back of his mind had lurked the possibility that Mostyn, in spite of his constant assertions of poverty, lived in luxury and would prove as well-fleshed a body as Lydia to batten on. But the crumbling exterior of the cottage told him that the long-term solution to his problems would have to lie elsewhere. The building had hardly changed at all through many generations of peasant owners.

And when Mostyn came to the door, he could have been the latest representative of that peasant dynasty. His wig was off, he wore a shapeless sort of nightshirt and clutched a candle-holder out of a Dickens television serial. The toothless lips moved uneasily and in his eye was an old peasant distrust of outsiders.

That expression vanished as soon as he recognized his visitor.

“Larry. I hoped you'd come to me. I read about it in the papers. Come inside. You'll be safe here.”

Safe he certainly was. Mostyn's limited social round meant that there was no danger of the newcomer being recognized. No danger of his even being seen. For three days the only person Larry Renshaw saw was Peter Mostyn.

And Peter Mostyn still hadn't changed at all. He remained a pathetic cripple, rendered even more pathetic by his cringing devotion. For him Renshaw's appearance was the answer to a prayer. Now at last he had the object of his affections in his own home. He was in seventh heaven.

Renshaw wasn't embarrassed by the devotion; he knew Mostyn was far too diffident to try and force unwelcome attentions on him. For a little while at least he had found sanctuary, and was content for a couple of days to sit and drink his host's brandy and assess his position.

The assessment wasn't encouraging. Everything had turned sour. All the careful plans he had laid for Lydia's death now worked against him. The elaborate fixing of the time of his arrival at the flat no longer established his alibi; it now pointed the finger of murder at him. Even after he'd shot her, he might have been able to sort something out, but for that bloody sister of hers, ringing the bell and making him panic. Everything had turned out wrong.

On the third evening, as he sat silent at the table, savagely drinking brandy while Mostyn watched him, Renshaw shouted out against the injustice of it all. “That bloody bitch!”

“Lydia?” asked Mostyn hesitantly.

“No, you fool. Her sister. If she hadn't turned up just at that moment, I'd have got away with it. I'd have thought of something.”

“At what moment?”

“Just after I'd shot Lydia. She rang the bell.”

“What—about eight-thirty?”

“Yes.”

Mostyn paled beneath his toupee. “That wasn't Lydia's sister.”

“What? How do you know?”

“It was me.” Renshaw looked at him. “It was me. I was flying back the next morning. You hadn't
rung.
I so wanted to see you before I left. I came to the flats. I didn't
intend
to go in. But I just asked the porter if you were there and he said you'd just arrived . . .”

“It was you! You bloody fool, why didn't you say?”

“I didn't know what had happened. I just—”

“You idiot! You bloody idiot!” The frustration of the last few days and the brandy came together in a wave of fury. Renshaw seized Mostyn by the lapels and shook him. “If I had known it was you. . . . You could have saved my life. You bloody fool! You . . .”

“I didn't know. I didn't know,” the Little Boy whimpered. “When there was no reply, I just went back to the hotel. Honestly, if I'd known what was happening . . . I'd do anything for you, you
know.
Anything . . .”

Renshaw slackened his grasp on Mostyn's lapels and returned to Mostyn's brandy.

It was the next day that he took up the offer. They sat over the debris of lunch. “Peter, you said you'd do anything for me . . .”

“Of course, and I meant it. My life hasn't been much, you're the only person that matters to me. I'd do anything for you. I'll look after you here for as long as—”

“I'm not staying here. I have to get away.”

Mostyn's face betrayed his hurt. Renshaw ignored it and continued, “For that I need money.”

“I've told you, you can have anything that I—”

“No, I know you haven't got any money. Not real money. But I have. In the Left Luggage office at Liverpool Street Station I have over twelve thousand pounds in cash and jewellery.” Renshaw looked at Mostyn with the smile he had always believed to be charming. “I want you to go to England to fetch it for me.”

“What? But I'd never get it back over here.”

“Yes, you would. You're the ideal smuggler. You put the stuff in your crutches. They'd never suspect someone like you.”

“But I—”

Renshaw looked hurt. “You said you'd do anything for me . . .”

“Well, I would, but—”

“You can go into Cahors tomorrow and fix the flight.”

“But . . . but that means you'll leave me again.”

“For a little while, yes. I'd come back,” Renshaw lied.

“I . . .”

“Please do it for me, please . . .” Renshaw put on an expression he knew to be vulnerable.

“All right, I will.”

“Bless you, bless you. Come on, let's drink to it.”

“I don't drink much. It makes me sleepy. I haven't got the head for it. I—”

“Come on, drink.”

Mostyn hadn't got the head for it. As the afternoon progressed he became more and more embarrassingly devoted. Then he fell into a comatose sleep.

The day after next the plane ticket was on the dining-room table, next to Peter Mostyn's passport. Upstairs his small case was packed ready. He was to fly from Paris in three days' time, on the Wednesday. He would be back at the cottage by the weekend. With the money and jewels which would be Renshaw's lifeline.

Renshaw's confidence started to return. With money in his pocket, everything would once more become possible. Twelve thousand pounds was plenty to buy a new identity and start again. Talent like his, he knew, could not be kept down for long.

Mostyn was obviously uneasy about the task ahead of him, but he had been carefully briefed and he'd manage it all right. The Big Boy was entrusting him with a mission and the Little Boy would see that it was efficiently discharged.

A new harmony came into their relationship. Now that his escape had a date on it, Renshaw could relax and even be pleasant to his protector, Mostyn glowed with gratitude for the attention. It did not take much to make him happy, Renshaw thought contemptuously. Once again, as he looked at the prematurely aged and crippled figure, he found it incongruous that their bodies had ever touched. Mostyn had never been other than pathetic.

Still, he was useful. And, though it was making huge inroads into his carefully husbanded wealth, he kept the supply of brandy flowing. Renshaw topped up his tumbler again after lunch on the Monday afternoon.

It was then that there was a knock at the door. Mostyn leapt nervously to the window to check out the visitor. When he looked back at Renshaw, his face had even less colour under its thatch. “It's a gendarme.”

Moving quickly and efficiently, Larry Renshaw picked up his dirty plate, together with the brandy bottle and tumbler, and went upstairs. His bedroom window was above the sloping roof of the porch. If anyone came up, he would be able to make a quick getaway.

He heard conversation downstairs, but it was too indistinct and his knowledge of French too limited for him to understand it. Then he heard the front door shut. From the window he saw the gendarme go to his bike and cycle off towards Montaigu-de-Quercy.

He gave it five minutes and went downstairs. Peter Mostyn sat at the table, literally shaking.

“What the hell's the matter?”

“The gendarme . . . he asked if I had seen you.”

“So you said you hadn't.”

“Yes, but . . .”

“But what? That's all there is to it, surely. There's been an Interpol alert to check out any contacts I might have abroad. They got your name from my address book back at the flat. So now the local bobby here has done his bit and will report back that you haven't seen me since last week in London. End of story. I'm glad it's happened; at least now I don't have to wait for it.”

“Yes, but, Larry, look at the state I'm in.”

“You'll calm down. Come on. Okay, it was a shock, but you'll get over it.”

“That's not what I mean. What I'm saying is, if I'm in this state now, I just won't be able to go through with what I'm supposed to be doing on Wednesday.”

“Look, for Christ's sake, all you have to do is to catch a plane to London, go to the Liverpool Street Left Luggage office, get the case, go to somewhere conveniently quiet, load the stuff into your crutches and come back here. There's no danger.”

“I can't do it, Larry. I
can't.
I'll crack up. I'll give myself away somehow. If I were like you, I could do it. You've always had a stronger nerve for that sort of thing. I wish it were you who was going to do it, because I know you
could.
But I just . . .”