A Shock to the System (14 page)

‘Oh. But surely it's not illegal to –'

‘No, no. Fairly soft stuff, these were. No grounds for prosecution or . . . No, the interesting thing about them was that they'd been put up there quite recently. Get a lot of dust in a loft, you know. There was hardly any on them.'

Graham met the constable's eye, which was curious and unyielding. Embarrassed honesty, Graham knew, was what was called for, and that was what he supplied.

‘All right. I put them up there.'

‘Thought that must have been the case, sir.' The policeman nodded complacently.

‘Yes, I . . . I mean, lots of men buy material like that. It's no reflection on how well or badly your marriage is going . . .'

‘No, no, of course not, sir.'

‘So, anyway, I would sometimes look at that sort of stuff and . . . Anyway, one day I found my son in my study. He was looking for something in my drawers . . . something quite innocuous, a stamp or an envelope or . . . and it struck me that I didn't really want him finding the magazines, so I moved them up to the loft. Preparatory to chucking them out of the house.'

‘Of course, sir. When was this?'

‘Last week.'

‘Hmm. About what we reckoned. So you did actually go up to the loft last week?'

‘Yes.'

‘What interests us about that is . . .' the man paced his sentence ponderously, ‘why you didn't get a shock when you switched on the light?'

Graham had not been prepared for that. He felt himself colour and begin to sweat. ‘Well, that's simple. I ... I didn't switch it on.'

‘No?'

‘No. You see, we only moved into this house last year and, quite honestly, since getting the removal men to chuck various bits up into the loft, I've hardly been up there. I couldn't remember whether there was a light rigged up or not. So I used a torch. I was in a hurry, you see, because, well . . .' A little embarrassed cough. ‘Merrily was out just for a few minutes and . . . she didn't know I had these magazines and I didn't really want her to . . . to . . .'

‘I quite understand, sir.' The policeman's soothing voice was another part of his training in the treatment of shock.

Graham could still feel his face burning and the sweat starting on his temples. Still, a recently bereaved man has cause to look upset. He decided to capitalise on his physical symptoms and stage a little breakdown. ‘Oh God, to think of those magazines – deceiving Merrily – they didn't matter – but it just seems so petty – and now she's dead and . . .' He managed to produce some quite presentable sobs.

‘Have some more tea, sir.' But the constable didn't let him off the hook. ‘We still haven't established why
your wife
wanted to go up to the loft, sir. She couldn't have had any suspicion that the magazines were up there, could she, sir?'

‘What? No, it's – oh my God!' Graham manufactured a larger sob. ‘The sewing machine.'

‘What?'

‘The sewing machine was up there. Oh, and she said she was going to make some curtains for the spare room. Yes, she talked about it Saturday lunchtime a couple of weeks back. Her mother was here, I remember.' (If Lilian was going to tell the police her recollections, then she could also make herself useful and corroborate his.)

‘Yes, that must have been it – the sewing machine was up in the loft.' Time for the big, weepy finish.

‘Oh God, she was going to do the curtains for me ... As a surprise . . . For when I came back . . . Merrily . . . And now she's gone . . .' He judged it to be the moment when tears would be more eloquent than further words.

The policeman was very sympathetic. He apologised for having to ask the questions, realised that Mr. Marshall was in a state of shock, and asked if he would feel all right to be left on his own.

The last suggestion appealed strongly to Graham. The strain of curbing his glee was beginning to tell. Only one more thing he needed to know. ‘Where is Merr . . . my wife . . . her body?'

‘At the police mortuary, sir.'

‘Oh. I suppose I'll have to sort out funeral arrangements and . . . We both agreed we'd want to be cremated if. . .'

His voice faltered while his mind thought, Destroy the evidence, destroy the evidence.

‘I'm sure that'll all be possible after the inquest, sir.'

‘Inquest?'

‘Of course, sir. With all violent deaths there has to be an inquest.'

Sweat prickled on Graham's forehead. He felt the emptiness of nausea. An inquest was something he hadn't reckoned with.

After the constable had gone, Graham took a large Scotch to steady him. Soon he would have to face Lilian and the children, but they could wait a little longer.

News of the inquest had shaken him, but a core of confidence remained. He could cope. He would get away with it. The inquest was a formality. There was nothing a police investigation could find to incriminate him. If there had been, his reception on his return would have been very different.

Mentally, he reviewed the crime, testing it for flaws, pulling it this way and that, probing for weaknesses.

No, there was nothing. No careless fingerprint to expose him. His planning had paid off.

Lucky, he thought wryly, that he had chosen the method he had. He thought back, with indulgent disbelief to his earlier ideas, to his fumbling attempts with the paraquat, to –

Oh, my God!

His body was seized by a tremor as violent as his first reaction to the old man's death.

The sherry bottle.

He ran on legs of jelly to the shed. If the police had been in the house, investigating, inspecting, they might also have gone to the garden, might have found the adulterated sherry, might have started to harbour unwelcome suspicions of him, might have . . .

He snatched open the shed door.

It all looked different. The clutter was gone, the lawnmower and tools stacked neatly against the wall. The seed trays, behind which the bottle had been hidden, were now piled neatly on the shelf.

The sherry bottle, with its fatal contents, had disappeared.

He reeled, clasping at the wall for support. The police must have been in, examined the whole building, taken off the sherry for analysis . . .

Graham thought he was going to be sick.

But he wasn't sick, and after a few minutes the rhythm of his breathing steadied. As he reasserted control over his body, he did the same with his mind. Keep calm, keep calm, he told himself. Think it through.

Thinking it through helped. He had leapt to conclusions. It might have been the police who had been in the shed, but there were other explanations. Indeed, if it had been the police examining the building, why should they have bothered to tidy it? The shelves had been dusted down and the floor swept. That was surely beyond the scope of their investigation.

Wasn't it more likely, Graham thought with a little glint of hope, that Merrily had had one of her rare bursts of domesticity and attacked the shed herself? She had commented before on how much it needed tidying, and to do a major clear-out while he was away would have been in character, a flamboyant gesture to make him feel guilty on his return. Yes, and the policeman had quoted Lilian about Merrily's ‘planning some tidying'.

Fuelled by hope, he hurried to the dustbins. That's where she would have put the rubbish she'd cleared out.

But they were empty. Of course, the refuse collectors came on a Thursday.

He was about to replace the lid on the second bin when he saw something. Just a scrap of damp cardboard which had stuck to the inside and escaped the refuse truck.

It was a piece of the weed-killer box. The piece he had torn to funnel the granules into the sherry bottle.

He slumped against the wall with relief. It was all right. Merrily had tidied the shed. She had consigned the damning sherry to the dustbin and it was now lost and anonymous in some council amenity tip. Graham was safe. His late wife had obligingly destroyed the evidence against him.

He returned to the house for another large Scotch. That panic had passed, but other problems remained.

Whenever he was in danger of complacency, there was always the inquest to worry about.

It was a bad ten days.

Deaths generate work for the survivors. And the death of the active mother of two children generates more work than most. Though he had often castigated her minor inefficiencies, and though he had early recognised her native laziness, Graham was still surprised at how much Merrily had done, or perhaps by how much needed to be done by other people now that she was dead.

Unfortunately, the person who saw it as her God-given role to do most of these things was Lilian. Though Graham was glad of the help, he wished that it had come from another quarter.

Immediately after Merrily's death, her mother had taken Henry and Emma to the custody of her flat, but as soon as Graham returned, they all came back to the Boileau Avenue house. Immediately Lilian took domestic control, and her approach had an unnerving air of permanence. Within three days she spoke of the spare room as ‘my room' and by the end of the week was saying it would be more practical to sell her flat, ‘since I'm going to be needed here'.

This was not at all how Graham had visualised his future. If all his wife's murder had achieved was to replace her with her mother, it had been a wasted exercise. Lilian around the house was even more annoying than Merrily. She hadn't even her daughter's minimal efficiency. Though she made much of dressing the part, with housecoats and turbanned scarves, her aptitude for housework was nil. Years of being cosseted by domestic staff and helpful lovers had left her without the basic skill of assessing a job and deciding how long it would take.

The kitchen floor would be left half-washed, two garments put in for a whole cycle of the washing machine, the Hoover would be abandoned half-way up the stairs, as Lilian launched herself into another scene.

Needless to say, her daughter's death gave her full scope for drama. Her shock and misery were no doubt real, but through them Graham could detect a core of satisfaction, even of triumph.

Lilian knew that Merrily's death had pushed her centre-stage and strengthened her power-base in the family. Her old complaint that no one needed her any more (though Graham had his doubts that anyone ever had needed her much), could no longer be justified.

But consciousness of her advantage did not stop the tears and the wailings and the scenes. She had lost her favourite daughter, she was alone in the world. Graham, now firm in his habit of objectivity, watched through these outpourings, feeling nothing but contempt. The situation could not continue for ever, but he would have to bide his time before he sought its solution.

His own behaviour he monitored with care. For him to appear unfeeling might raise suspicion, so he needed the occasional breakdown to maintain his image as the shocked and grieving widower.

In presenting this front he was helped by his panic over the inquest. The outsider only sees the physical manifestations of mental turmoil, not its cause. Hot flushes, sweating, restlessness, uneven speech patterns, sudden fluctuations of mood are all signs of a troubled mind, but the same symptoms could be triggered equally by the death of a much-loved spouse or the fear of being exposed as a murderer. Even through his anxiety, Graham could feel a perverse satisfaction that the cause of his discomposure could be so readily misinterpreted.

The inquest did worry him, there was no doubt of that. Though so much in the planning of the murder had worked in his favour, there were still too many variables about which he knew too little. How skilled was the police's forensic investigation likely to be? Had he left some blatant clue to his sabotage? Was foul play suspected?

Occasionally confidence again flooded his being, but such moments of peace were rare. He worried that his preparations had not been sufficiently meticulous. If he ever committed another murder (and something told him that if he got away with this one, it was not impossible that he might) he would take a lot more care.

But never for a moment did he regret having killed Merrily. His anxiety was only about his chances of getting away with it. Her absence brought new inconveniences, but those could be resolved. He felt again that mixture of apprehension and excitement that had always preceded examinations at school. The inquest was his latest and most demanding test.

If he passed that one, nothing could stop him.

The inquest was not an isolated event; there were more police enquiries before the bereaved Marshall family and Lilian Hinchcliffe appeared in the Hammersmith Coroner's Court. Graham underwent further meticulous questioning, which paradoxically he enjoyed. He had the feeling of being in a game, a quiz-programme perhaps, but one for which he had made adequate preparations and one which he stood at least a fifty/fifty chance of winning.

His daughter also, as discoverer of the body, suffered further questioning. The shock had told badly on her and in her emotion she became more of an adult. Not, though, the sort of adult who appealed to her father. She took on more and more of her mother's mannerisms, which were of course Lilian Hinchcliffe's mannerisms. As her grandmother's influence grew, Emma became more like her. It was as if, with her daughter removed, Lilian immediately worked to replace her with another clone. Emma was fully recruited into the exclusive conspiracy of womanhood. The two now wept and emoted in unison.

Henry was apparently taking his mother's death less hard. With the brutality of adolescence, he was even heard to make jokes about it. A psychologist might well have recognised this behaviour as a defence and discovered the suffering core of a bewildered child, but Graham was no psychologist and did not feel the interest to investigate.

With the frail link of Merrily removed, his children seemed more than ever strangers. Four of them sat side by side in the Coroner's Court, but to Graham the others were irrelevant. He was the champion, in peak condition, though he still faced the most daunting challenge of his career.