Dark Undertakings (16 page)

He moved her gently aside and stepped into the house, closing the door quickly behind him. ‘Nobody saw me,’ he said in a whisper. ‘Your reputation’s safe.’

‘It’s a bit late to worry about that. And I’ll bet you one of the old dears next door spotted you through the lace curtains.’

‘Well, I’m here now, and I won’t stay long.’ His expression became more serious, as she watched him. His face was all curves: his eye sockets were deep, his nose rounded, his cheeks plump. Many times she had wished she was a sculptor and could make a copy of his head. His hair was white, despite his being only slightly over forty. ‘How are you, old girl?’

‘Oh, Gerald, it
is
good to see you. I was feeling sorry for myself, and wishing I had
someone to talk to. The dog died, you know, so I haven’t even got her for company.’

‘What – little Cassie?’ She was surprised he remembered the name.

‘That’s right. She was Jim’s, and I think she’s pined away already. I was never particularly fond of her, but she would have been another life around the house.’

‘You can get another one.’

‘Perhaps,’ she returned. ‘Gerald, you shouldn’t be here, you really shouldn’t. I … people will think badly of me, if they see you.’

‘Nobody could ever say you were a bad wife,’ he assured her. ‘Jesus, Monny, you’d been married for donkey’s years. You’d earned a bit of fun. And Jim wasn’t the type to be jealous—’

‘Oh, yes he was!’ Gerald shrank at the forcefulness of her words. ‘He would have been devastated if he’d known about us. And don’t start trying delicately to remind me that he wasn’t the most faithful husband in the world, either. Everybody knows the rules are different for men. I’ve been terrified since Tuesday that somebody was going to take it upon themselves to whisper to me that Jim had
liaisons
, or some such rubbish. They think a dead man’s fair game, and that there’s no more need to keep his secrets. They don’t consider my dignity.’

She absently took hold of Gerald’s arm as she
spoke, to draw him further into the room, where he couldn’t be seen from the street. Suddenly she became aware of the contact, and of the new freedom she had. There was at least no danger of Jim returning unexpectedly and catching them. Involuntarily, she gave a little laugh at the thought.

‘What’s funny?’ he asked.

‘Oh – life, I suppose. And death. Death is quite funny, I’m discovering. I never realised before.’

‘Tell me,’ he invited, frowning slightly.

‘It’s nothing I can spell out. Just the whole business, with doctors and undertakers and vicars. All sorts of meaningless rituals to go through. And most of it seems designed to make me forget what’s actually happened. That Jim’s in some fridge, cold and stiff and dead.’ She poked Gerald’s hand, pushing back his sleeve and taking his wrist. ‘Not like you – warm and
glowing
, somehow. Dead people don’t glow.’

‘
Dead People Don’t Glow
would make a terrific title for a crime novel,’ he said absently, staring intently at a corner of the carpet as some embryonic plot began to form in his head. Gerald aspired to crime writing, which was the single thing about him that Monica found ridiculous.

‘I woke up in the middle of last night, and I could see him, in that place, lying on some metal tray, just meat. Or a dollop of clay. Nothing. It gave me the horrors.’

‘You should take a sleeping pill,’ he advised.

‘Oh, really, Gerald.’ She looked at him again, with a kind of curiosity. Gerald’s wife had left him five years ago; he was very much available. She understood that this had already led to certain assumptions on his part, and the idea alarmed her. His clumsy lack of insight into how she was feeling similarly gave her pause. Despite his delicious eye sockets and fleshy lips, she wasn’t at all sure she really liked him as a person.

He was briefly injured. ‘Sorry,’ he murmured. ‘Do you want me to go?’

‘I think so,’ she said, simply. ‘You make things too complicated. We haven’t even had the funeral yet.’

‘Ah, yes. That was what I wanted to ask you. Do you think I should come to it?’

She looked at him again, this time in disbelief. ‘Of
course
I don’t,’ she snapped. ‘What possible reason could you have to do that? You scarcely even knew him.’

‘But I know
you
,’ he persisted. ‘You work for me. It would be perfectly appropriate.’

‘Oh, I see. Well, thanks for the thought,
but you’d better not. I wouldn’t know how to behave with you around. I’ll see you later – the middle of next week, when it’s all finished with. All right?’

‘It’ll have to be, I suppose,’ he pouted. ‘You’ll be back at work on Wednesday, will you?’

She gave a little cry. ‘Wednesday’s my birthday! The first day of the rest of my life …’

‘I’ll see you then,’ he confirmed, and departed after a fleeting, featherlight kiss.

Drew was making notes. He had lain awake much of the night, worrying. He now had only four days in which to gather sufficiently strong evidence that Jim Lapsford had been the victim of a clever murder; evidence strong enough to present to the police, or the Coroner. He had a whole mountain of facts and hints and possible leads, but still nothing tangible.

‘You were restless,’ Karen said with more irritation than sympathy. ‘I don’t need to ask why, do I?’

‘It’s really getting to me,’ he admitted. ‘Only four days to go now, and I haven’t got anything definite. If the cremation goes ahead, I don’t know what I’ll do.’

‘Why do anything? What difference will it make?’

Something about her impatience, the faint whiff of accusation, tipped him back into the nightmare he’d forgotten until now. At some point in the small hours, he had dropped off to sleep, only to be haunted by the event that he could never quite escape.

In the busy, short-staffed chaos of the Royal Victoria Hospital, Drew had found himself on the paediatric ward the previous November, working the night shift. He’d been covering for sickness amongst the staff, and had not been properly briefed or trained in what was a specialised branch of nursing. Baby Nicholas had been brought down from Intensive Care, well on the road to recovery after a nasty attack of pneumonia. He was ten weeks old, and had not thrived as he should have done since birth.

The baby’s mother had three other children at home, and no husband. She came to visit when she could, but never stayed the night, as most mothers did. The other babies on the ward were all off the danger list, and also had parents popping in to feed or simply observe them, during the night. Nicholas was Drew’s main charge. He was a nice little baby, undersized, but with a placid manner, and Drew had played
with him for a few minutes before he dropped off to sleep. His temperature and heart rate were monitored, but all other machinery had been removed. He was breathing well without assistance.

The ward was quiet, as midnight came and went. Whispering people tiptoed back and forth, and Drew relaxed. He even started to consider paediatrics as a specialty for the future. The babies seemed to respond well to a man, and many of the mothers remarked on how good it was to see him there. When he checked Baby Nicholas, at 1 a.m., the child was showing no overt cause for concern, despite a slightly lowered temperature and a skin colour just a shade less pink than an hour earlier. Drew fleetingly wondered whether a few minutes of oxygen would help, but it seemed unnecessarily unkind to wake and disturb the baby. He would cry, which in turn couldn’t fail to stir up some of the others.

He tucked the blanket tighter, and resolved to make another check in twenty minutes. Caught up in conversation with a restless mother, it was half an hour before he went back. Nicholas was still sleeping peacefully, but his colour had darkened again. His heart rate was fractionally slower, too. But Drew believed it to be within normal limits, and something
that often happened in the small hours of the night. He ran through his options: administer oxygen; take the baby back to Intensive Care; call a houseman; pick the baby up and assess his condition when awake. He had never set up an oxygen chamber for such a small child, and knew it needed to be very carefully monitored. He doubted whether he was authorised to do it unsupervised. By rights there should be at least two other people within calling distance, but there were only nurses of the same standing as himself, each with their own ward to deal with. He could go and consult one of them, but pride prevented him. He leant over Nicholas, listening to his breathing, and concluded that he was in no danger for the time being.

An hour later, a buzzer sounded above the baby’s cot. His heart had stopped. Drew shook himself out of the semi-doze he’d fallen into, and hurried over. He lifted Nicholas free of his coverings, still not unduly worried; machines could give false alarms, and it barely occurred to him that there could be a serious problem. But the child was limp in his hands, the eyes half open. Drew gave a startled cry, which echoed around the corners and corridors, but brought no assistance. Even then, he was loathe to make a commotion, to bring the clattering cacophony of the resuscitation trolley.

But he had to, and it all got taken out of his hands, and baby Nicholas officially died at 4.15 a.m. Shakily, Drew gave his account of the events of the night, and everyone agreed that the signs had not been sufficiently clear to justify any intervention. He was told, repeatedly, that he had done nothing wrong.

But doing nothing was wrong in itself, he concluded. Never again would Drew err on the side of inertia. His nightmares since then had all involved watching something or somebody die, hands loose and helpless at his sides, his mind repeating,
It’s not your responsibility, you don’t have to act. It isn’t up to you.
But he knew it was. Everything depended on him. If he didn’t act, then nobody else was going to.

He tried to explain it to Karen, knowing that she was deliberately refusing to understand his terror of history repeating itself. ‘Lightning doesn’t strike twice,’ she told him. ‘And anyway, they told you the baby would probably have died, whatever you did. He had much more wrong with him than they realised. The post-mortem showed that.’

Words did nothing to change what he knew. He couldn’t ever tell her how it had really been. How he had been afraid of waking the baby up in case it cried, afraid of being told off for making a fuss and calling in an exhausted
houseman. How small fears could make you commit large sins.

And now the dilemma was visiting him again. It was as if he was being tested, given a chance to get it right this time. He could no more sit back and let Lapsford be cremated than he could watch another baby lose colour and warmth until it died before his very eyes.

He had, in the course of the long night just over, come up with a plan. It might be risky, or doomed to failure, but he was determined to follow it through.

In the notebook he had written:
Gerald Proctor. David Lapsford. Roxanne Gibson. Other girlfriends? Jim’s workmates? Means. Motive. Opportunity.
An arrow traced a path down the page, from
Means
and under it he wrote,
Poison
. After deep thought, he added,
Lethal injection
. He couldn’t think how else it could have been achieved; not without any signs of violence or a struggle. Staring at the page, he realised helplessly that he had no idea of any motive, apart from the suggestion that Mrs Lapsford might have been carrying on with the dentist, and therefore possibly not too unhappy to have her husband out of the way.

It would be easiest to start with Proctor. Already he had phoned the surgery and
pretended to have toothache. An appointment had been made for four-thirty, and he was going to lie to Daphne, saying he wanted to go with Karen to the doctor about a problem they’d been having. Let her assume it was a fertility matter, he thought; that was bound to gain him some space as well as sympathy.

There was, of course, a much more direct route he could take. He could telephone the Coroner’s Officer, anonymously, and suggest to him that he should be taking an interest in the sudden death of Jim Lapsford. He promised himself that if he had failed in his various investigations come Monday morning, then this is what he would do. The mere thought of it frightened him. His voice would be recognised, he would somehow give himself away, he would lose his job and be humiliated. At worst he could be arrested for wasting police time. And then, with no evidence, they might not even bother to pursue the matter at all. They might assume he was a crank or someone with some kind of grudge.

There
had
to be evidence. He had to find someone who wanted Jim Lapsford dead, and had means and opportunity to commit the deed. If only Lazarus could turn up something at the laboratory, everything would be so much easier. But Lazarus was a faint hope, given his limited
access to all the materials necessary to test for a dozen different poisons. It would be folly to rely on him. Worse than that, he realised, with Lapsford now embalmed, there was much less hope of finding supporting evidence in the body tissue.

There was, of course, also the body of the dog. The knowledge that it might contain inside it the whole solution to the question of
Means
was acutely frustrating. He could not work out a way of getting it examined, without landing himself into deep trouble. If he took it to a vet, they’d ask a lot of awkward questions, and probably take far too long to supply any results. If he took it to Lazarus, his friend would laugh in his face, assuming he’d gone crazy. There might possibly be some laboratory in Woodingleigh which would hasten a swift analysis, but short of slipping them a hefty sum of ready cash, he didn’t know how he would persuade them to co-operate. Even private clinics would probably want some kind of authorisation before affording him their services.

He left for work in a gloomy mood.

A hand-delivered envelope lay on the mat inside Sarah and Dottie’s front door. Sarah picked it up, bending easily at the waist, noting with pride how supple she still was, compared to Dottie.

‘It’s from Monica,’ she said to the empty hall.

‘Did you say something, dear?’ Dottie’s voice had a hint of impatience in it. ‘I can’t hear you.’

Sarah went back into the living room, where Dottie was on the couch with the local newspaper and the mug of coffee which comprised her breakfast. ‘A note from Monica. Listen to this.
I’ve decided to have Jim brought back here on Monday, so he can spend his last night at home. If you’d like to come and see him, please just call in during the evening.
What do you make of that?’

Dottie considered. ‘Well, it’s what people always used to do. I remember my Gran in the front room, candles all round her, flowers everywhere. I was about fourteen, and thought it was lovely. She looked very contented, I remember. As if she’d finally got what she wanted. She was never a very easy person to please when she was alive.’

‘But these days – well, it seems ghoulish, somehow. How will Monica sleep with a body in the house? I’m not sure I like the idea of being next door to one, either.’

‘As for sleeping with a dead body, it seems she’s already done that, and survived. Funny the bit about his last night. I mean, he’s already had that, don’t you think? But it’s a nice gesture.
I’ll certainly go round on Monday and pay my respects.’

Sarah made no reply. The letter in her hand was making her feel agitated, as if it called for some immediate action. Such a reaction was unusual for her, which only compounded the disturbance. Should she go and speak to Monica now? Should she ask if they could help with the funeral in some way? The trouble was, they had little social contact with the Lapsfords. She glared at the top of Dottie’s head. This should be something they discussed and agreed on. Instead, they seemed to be all at odds about it. Dottie had been quite cross with her for the way she’d tackled that young funeral man yesterday, going on about slander and a lack of evidence. As if that mattered, in the circumstances!

A car drawing up outside with a violent squeal of brakes attracted her attention, and Dottie lowered the paper. Both peered out of the window and watched a young man jump out and stride up Monica Lapsford’s front path.

‘It’s her David,’ said Sarah.

‘Early bird, anyway. Maybe she’s just told him about the plan to bring his dad home, and he doesn’t like it. He doesn’t look too happy.’

‘Very likely,’ agreed Sarah, more for the sake of harmony than genuine sentiment. She had
barely exchanged five sentences with David since living next door to his mother, and would make no claims to predicting his reaction to anything. He had struck her as a somewhat effete young man, with his bony limbs and floppy hair. The older one seemed to have more backbone.

‘Well, there’s nothing in the paper,’ Dottie announced, dropping it onto the floor beside her. ‘I don’t know why we bother with it.’

Sarah gazed at her in surprise. ‘This isn’t like you, Dottie, being so tetchy. What’s brought it on?’

Dottie shook her head. ‘I’m not quite myself this morning. This has always been a restless time of year for me, ever since I retired. September always meant a new term, new courses to study, fresh beginnings with another intake of children. And instead of that we drift along here, and the man next door has to go and die like that. And we seem so helpless, when I’m sure we should be doing something.’

Sarah raised her eyebrows. ‘I must say it’s good to hear you acknowledge that Jim’s death might have more to it than meets the eye, at last.’

Dottie sagged suddenly. When she spoke it was with a mixture of apology and resignation. ‘Oh, take no notice of me. I’m in a bad mood. I didn’t sleep properly last night.’

‘No wonder,’ Sarah said with a burst of compassion. ‘We’ll go over on Monday, then, shall we?’ She flourished Monica’s note.

‘Oh, I suppose we’ll have to. We owe it to Monica, poor woman.’

‘I’m not sure that we should waste too much sympathy on her,’ said Sarah, slowly. ‘That boyfriend was round again yesterday, just after supper. I didn’t mention it to you at the time. Carrying a huge bunch of chrysanths. Don’t know how he’s got the nerve.’

Dottie gave her a reproving look. ‘Now don’t go making any more hasty judgements. We don’t know he’s her boyfriend. That’s just jumping to conclusions.’

‘It isn’t, Dottie. You know it isn’t. When we’ve both got the evidence of our own eyes.’

Monica’s pleasure at seeing her younger son lasted barely a minute. He began shouting at her before he was properly inside the house. Dottie’s guess had been accurate as to the nature of his complaint.

‘Philip phoned me last night. He says you’re having the coffin here on Monday. How
could
you, Mum? That’s so disgusting. You must have gone mad.’

Monica stood her ground, and waited for him to stop. Then she turned round and led the
way into the kitchen. ‘Coffee?’ she asked, in a strong, cool voice.