Who Saw Him Die? (3 page)

That made him grin again. ‘You're a marvel, Mrs Goodrum. And I love you too.
That's
why I was worried when we moved in. I want to make you happy, and I wasn't sure we'd done the right thing by coming to live in Breckham Market. You'd taken such a liking to this house and garden, but I was afraid that after living in London you'd find a small country town too dull. Now I've seen how well you've settled, though, I've stopped worrying.'

Jack turned his empty egg shell upside down in the cup, and bashed the other end for good measure. ‘So there's your answer, my dear,' he concluded cheerfully. ‘Is that a letter from young Matthew you've got there? How's he settling down?'

‘Very well, by the sound of things. He seems so much happier than when he was a day boy at the City of London School, with all that pressure from his father to do as well as
he
did when he was there. Matthew always longed to go to boarding school, and it was such a good suggestion of yours to let him finish his education at Saxted.'

‘I could just as easily have afforded Eton, if that was what you'd wanted,' her husband reminded her. His knowledge of public schools was confined to the names of Eton and the one nearest to Breckham Market, Saxted College. In his opinion, they were of equal standing.

Felicity smiled at him fondly. ‘I know, Jack. You're so very generous. But Saxted was a better idea. I prefer Matthew to be no more than twenty miles away from us, and out of reach of his father. You know how bitterly Austin resented my being given custody …' She shuddered at the recollection of her divorce proceedings, then looked again at her son's letter. ‘He asks after you, by the way.'

‘Does he?' said Jack eagerly. He was anxious to be liked by the boy because he knew that Felicity adored her only child.

She passed her husband the page of hasty scrawl and indicated the final paragraph:
How's Jack? Don't let him forget that he promised to take me shooting in the Christmas holidays!

‘I haven't forgotten,' said Matthew's stepfather with pleasure. He'd always wanted a son to pass on his skills to. ‘And, let's see, won't he soon be seventeen?'

‘Next March.'

‘Right, then it's time he learned to drive. Tell you what, my dear, I'll buy him a car for Christmas –'

‘Jack!'

‘Only a banger, but a reliable one. I know a farmer who's got some private roads on his land, and I can teach the boy how to handle the car there before he's officially old enough to drive. Then he can take the test and get his full licence as soon as he's seventeen.'

‘Oh Jack – and you've only just bought him a computer! You really mustn't spoil him.' Felicity paused, then looked anxiously apologetic. ‘He didn't
ask
you for a car, I hope? I heard him telling you, when he was here at half-term, that he'd already applied for a provisional licence.'

‘Ah, that was so's he could take part in a course on motor bike riding. He certainly didn't ask me for any transport – but I can remember well enough what it was like to be young! A boy of his age needs some wheels of his own, and a car's a lot safer than a motor bike.'

Her eyes bright with affection, Felicity stretched her hand across the table. ‘You
are
so kind.'

‘'s not kindness,' Jack said. ‘I reckon it must be love.' He reached out and took her hand, clasping it warmly and sighing with happiness. ‘By God, I'm a lucky man …'

In Jack Goodrum's former marital home, not far from Ipswich, breakfast was a more mobile occasion.

The residents of Factory Bungalow saw no point in getting up at any particular time. There was nothing to get up for. Doreen Goodrum and her daughters Sharon and Tracey had had no occupation in the two years since the family business was sold. Ever since Jack had left them, they had spent their mornings wandering aimlessly about the bungalow in their nightwear, eating and drinking as they went.

They felt no inclination to do more than a scant minimum of housework. Factory Bungalow had never been much of a place to live in. It was a small, immediately-post-war prefabricated building that had been given an extended lease of life by the application of a brick and tile skin. Its rural position, on a wired-in half-acre of rough grass and scrub at the side of the old wartime airfield road that led to the factory site, was solitary and unattractive.

Inside, the bungalow was packed with showy furniture and expensive electrical appliances. Nothing was more than two years old, and some of the more attention-demanding items of equipment – the microwave oven, the dish-washer – were so evenly covered with unfingermarked dust that they were clearly never used. Jack Goodrum's original family had, it seemed, enjoyed one enormous shopping expedition and then lost interest in their acquisitions.

Their present lethargy was understandable. They had all worked so hard in the poultry-meat business – the girls, now twenty-three and twenty-one, since their earliest teens – that the abrupt ending of their jobs had disoriented them. Spare time was such a foreign commodity to Mrs Goodrum and her daughters that they had no idea what to do with it.

It was not that they had wanted to continue with the business. Doreen had been exhausted by it at the end of the first ten years. Slaving all hours in the factory, as well as looking after her husband and children and the home, was wearing her out and she had begged Jack to sell up.

‘We can't
afford
to, woman!' was all he had shouted by way of reply. And whenever she had renewed her plea, as she struggled through another ten years of unremitting hard labour, he had given her the same answer.

‘Good God, I've just bought you a refrigerator,' (and later, a washing machine; later still, a tumble-dryer) he had added with a bellow of exasperation. ‘I'm doing as much for you as I can, woman! What
more
do you want?'

Even when Jack did at last decide to put the business on the market, there had been a further eighteen months of work and worry before the sale was completed. Productivity had to be not only maintained but improved on, he insisted, if they were to sell the business for what it was worth.

And so Doreen and the girls had buckled-to again, standing as usual on the production line because they were none of them confident enough with figures to ask for a sitting-down job in the office. But at least, during those final eighteen months, Doreen had had time to accustom herself to the idea that her long hard slog was nearly over. The prospect of being able, shortly, to stop working in the factory
for good
entranced her. She longed for that wonderful moment.

But when it actually did come, on the day when the business was officially transferred from J.R. Goodrum Ltd to the new owners, and Doreen was able to hang up her overalls for the last time, she had sat down in Jack's office and burst into tears.

‘
Now
what's the matter?' he had hissed. The room was occupied by smooth legal and financial men, assembled to celebrate the satisfactory outcome of months of negotiation, and Jack was wrestling with the unfamiliar wiring of a champagne cork. ‘For God ‘s sake stop blubbing, woman, and fetch over the glasses!'

‘Let me help you, Mrs Goodrum,' one of the smooth men had said. And everyone, it seemed, had turned to look at her.

It was too much. All those posh voices, all those smart suits and crisp shirts, all those closely shaven chins and clean hands … Doreen had struggled to fit into her best mail-order dress for the occasion, but she knew that her body looked ungainly and her yellow-grey hair was a mess. She gasped for air as a hot flush suffused what she knew to be her homely face. Over-wrought, humiliated, she had run bawling out of the office and away from the factory and back to the grimy familiarity of her home.

‘I dunno what you're goin'on about!' Jack had said when he eventually rolled in. His new light grey suit couldn't disguise the fact that he was as ungainly as she was, but he had always been satisfied with his appearance. Now, awash with champagne and toweringly pleased with his business achievement, he was mystified by his wife's lack of gratitude.

‘I've given you everythin'you ever wanted, haven't I?' he pointed out, tipsily aggrieved.
‘Haven'
I? I've worked and provided for you all these years, and bought you everythin'I could think of to make your life easy.
Everythin'
. You
an'
the girls. An' now I've done what you wanted an'sold the business, jus'so's you can do absolu'ly nothin'for the rest o'your lives … So what are you still blubbin' for, you schupid woman?'

Doreen didn't really know.

She was accustomed to think of herself as being stupid. Jack had often enough told her so, in the course of their married life. She knew the production side of the business – the transformation of cheap, prematurely worn-out battery hens into valuable soup and pie-meat – inside out, but she had been content to leave the administration to her husband.

She didn't even know how much the business was eventually sold for. It hadn't mattered to her. She had had so little opportunity to spend money, in the whole of her life, that she hardly knew at first what to do with the housekeeping increase Jack gave her.

The girls had had plenty of ideas, of course. They wanted clothes, to begin with; then holidays. Sharon, who was engaged to the firm's sales manager, had set about planning the slap-up wedding that her father promised her. Her younger sister Tracey, who had no intention of tying herself to any one man, preferred to talk her father into giving her the money for a car so that she could racket about Ipswich having a good time.

Doreen, too, had thought about having a holiday. She collected brochures by the armful, but couldn't make up her mind where to go. And anyway, Jack wouldn't consider going with her and she was unnerved by the thought of staying in a hotel on her own. So she settled, instead, for having the bungalow redecorated inside and out.

She would really have liked to move. Preferably to the seaside, Lowestoft or Felixstowe. Even Jack had spoken about the possibility of moving, though all he'd wanted was to be nearer the village pub.

But then a change had come over him. He had started taking frequent baths, and wanting clean underclothes and shirts. Doreen was puzzled. One thing about Jack, he'd never before bothered with girl friends; and if he had just acquired one, why had he immediately given up wearing his new gold rings and his dazzling new ties?

His attitude towards her had altered, too. He began to be much kinder. And although he said no more about moving house, it was at this time that he had offered to have Factory Bungalow redecorated. The new owners of the poultry-meat business had decided to transfer the operation to one of their more modern plants, and close down the old site. This would put an end to the flow of heavy lorries past the bungalow which would then, as Jack pointed out, become nice and quiet, and easier to keep clean.

‘You can buy new furniture, an'all,' he'd said generously. ‘Might as well do the job properly while you're about it. No, I don't mind what you buy, you please yourself entirely. Take the car and go to Ipswich for the day. Order whatever you like, and tell'em to send the bill to me!'

If only she'd had the sense to realise what the crafty devil was up to … But then, though she hadn't loved him for years, and had never much liked him, it simply hadn't occurred to her that Jack would cheat her out of the fortune she had helped him to accumulate.

The first Mrs Goodrum was an angry woman.

Physically, she was in rather worse condition than she had been on the day, two years previously, when the business was sold. Then, she had neglected her appearance because she had no time to spare. Now, she neglected it because she couldn't be bothered with it. She was fatter, greyer, far more unkempt.

But emotionally she was much stronger. She had recovered from the exhaustion that had caused her to weep on the day of the sale.

If Jack had remained loyal, she might well have been plunged into depression by the wealthy purposelessness of her life. But his defection, possessed of everything except the refurbished marital home, the five-year-old Ford Granada and a lump sum that barely provided her with enough to live on, had given her a grim sense of purpose.

Not only grim, but righteous. It wasn't just her own interests she had to look out for; there were her daughters –
Jack's
daughters – to be cared for, too. Because old as they were, it now seemed that she was going to remain responsible for the pair of them for the rest of their lives.

What had happened to her daughters might have happened anyway, of course. Even if Jack had stayed with them, and they'd had all that money – or if he'd persuaded her into the divorce but had had the decency to treat her fairly – the girls'lives might still have gone wrong. But that was no reason to let her ex-husband get away with his crime.

Besides, it wasn't just his own family that Jack had cheated. He'd done down his one-time partner, Dave Wheeler, too. And there were others who'd been after him, calling at the bungalow, telephoning day and night, all wanting to know where the old bastard had got to …

It was finding Jack that had been the problem, for all of them. Doreen hadn't seen him – at least not close enough to speak to – since he'd announced his intention of getting out of the way while the bungalow was being refurbished. Women's affairs, he'd said; no point in their having
him
hanging round. Thought he might buy a new car and travel about for a week or two, see what he could do in the way of business. If she needed to get in touch, his solicitor would know where he was.

Since then, their only communication had been through Jack's lawyers. And although Doreen had eventually engaged a local solicitor to handle the divorce her husband asked for, Jack's sharp city advisers had run rings round them both. Doreen's subsequent attempts to trace her ex-husband and demand her rights had been a failure.