Femmes Fatal (5 page)

“Why?” Mrs. Malloy asked, and it took a moment to sink in that she was echoing my question of a lifetime ago. “Why take me farewell bow at Merlin’s Court?”

I tried to say
Why do it at all?
but I couldn’t get my tongue around the words. She was buffing the gun on her cuff. “No need to say nothing, Mrs. H. It’s as plain as the nose on my face you think I’ve overstepped meself. And there was I, hoping you’d take it as the compliment intended. My house on Herring Street’s not a bad place to live, but when it comes to breathing me last, I’d always had me heart set on something classier. Somewhere with a bit of history.”

A sob in her voice, Mrs. Malloy laid the gun down, just out of grabbing distance, on the arm of her chair. Opening up the supply bag, she pulled out a black-edged hanky and dabbed her eyes. Daintily. So as not to smudge her mascara. “Mrs. H, we’ve had our differences, but there’s not one of me other ladies I’d want with me at the end.”

“Thank you.”

The hanky fluttered to the floor. “Is it too much to hope that one day me portrait will hang in the upstairs ’all?”

“I’ll have a mural done.”

The trick was to stay calm. What good would it do to grab for the weapon and risk blowing off my fingers in the attempt? A mother cannot function with hands turned into boxer’s mitts. My best bet was to try to dissuade her from making a fatal mistake.

“Mrs. Malloy, why kill yourself?”

“That will go with me to the grave.”

“Well then, how about a nice cup of … gin?”

Martyred smile. “One for the road? Better not. Never let it be said I wasn’t in me right mind when I handed me earthly treasures into your keeping.”

“What?” I sank into a chair that wasn’t there and had to grab for the desk.

Rummaging in the supply bag, she produced a china poodle and a brass Aladdin’s lamp. “No need to fall over yourself in gratitude, Mrs. H! Earlier, when I was downing the second bottle of tablets, I said to meself, ‘Roxie, old chum, there’s none will look after your bits and bobs like her at Merlin’s Court.’ ”

“Tablets?” Thank God this was washday! With luck I could use the rubber hose attached to the sink as a makeshift stomach pump.

“Don’t get your knickers in a twist.” Mrs. Malloy looked miffed enough to take back the statue of David she had fetched from the supply bag. Poor chap, he was missing one of his earthly treasures. “They was me indigestion jobbies.”

Oh, what a relief it was! Young David joined the china poodle and Aladdin’s lamp on the end table. Should I preach the sanctity of human life or ladle on the guilt?
How can you desert me, Mrs. Malloy, in the middle of spring cleaning?

“Are things really that bad?” I sidled toward her. “Why, only last week you were on top of the world because your horoscope predicted that the man of your dreams was about to enter your life.”

The worst possible thing I could have said. A moan erupted from the depths of Mrs. Malloy’s being. Her feather hat trembled.

“ ’E came, me Romeo! But ours was a love doomed from the bloody start.” Picking up the gun, she nursed it tenderly against her leopard bosom, as if it were the fruit of her loins, born of his love.

“There’ll be someone else,” I consoled, with all the triteness I could muster.

“When you’re on the lying side of fifty, Mrs. H, men aren’t thick as flies on damson jam. These last few years, most nights I’ve gone to bed alone and woke up alone. What kind of life is that for a woman who’s had more husbands than you’ve had hot dinners? In me young days I was never your sort, Mrs. H—glad to settle for being in a rut, married to the same chappie till kingdom come. But now …” A sigh that rattled the collection of inkwells in the glass-fronted cabinet.

My goodness, I thought, remembering Miss Thorn. Romance would seem to be rampant in Chitterton Fells. How I wished Reverend Foxworth were here. “There’s that passage from Leviticus,” I stammered. “The one about a time for every purpose under heaven. And don’t forget the seven years of plenty and seven years of famine. Could this be your time to lie fallow?”

“What?” She drew up her furry shoulders so that she resembled the king of the beasts in his royal ruff. “What the bleeding hell do you take me for—the Virgin Queen? I’m not made of stone, you know. I’m a Woman In Love.”

“And he’s married …”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Horoscopes always leave out the juicy bits.”

“The wretch left him years ago. Just upped and walked out one foggy winter’s night. My angel still can’t talk of it without turning white as a ghost. The old story. He found a note on the mantelpiece. And wasn’t one of them Hallmark cards, I can tell you that.”

“Didn’t care enough to send the very best!” Awful of me to be so flippant, but for the first time since this nightmare started, I was beginning to think this was all a storm in a teacup. So long as no one got shot. Mrs.
Malloy gave the gun a buff with her furry cuff and laid it on her lap. Savour the moment. Do not consider the possibility that it might be one of those trigger-happy models ready to go off if she crossed her legs.

“If the wife is out of the picture …” I ventured.

“Out of sight don’t mean out of mind.” Mrs. Malloy’s rouged cheeks quivered and her eyes grew misty under the neon lids. “For some reason he can’t forget her. I tell you, Mrs. H, I’ve done me bloody best to shut him out of me heart, but it’s no cop. From the moment—a fortnight Tuesday—when our eyes met across the crowded bingo hall, I’ve known me fate. In all England or out there in the great blue yonder, there’s none but Walter Fisher for Roxie Malloy. Life’s not worth a salt twist in a packet of crisps without him. When Walter is near, I feel forty again. Me whole body goes snap, crackle, pop.”

Jealousy, mingled with a bitter-sweet sadness, flamed within me for a moment, only to be quenched by the name Walter Fisher. Why did it ring a bell? A doleful bell.

“Mrs. H, he’s come over two or three nights …”

“For dinner?”

“On business. He’s been talking to me about …”

“Yes?”

“Prepaying me funeral.”

“You don’t mean …?” But of course she did! Her Mr. Heartbreak was none other than Chitterton Fells’s one and only funeral director and embalmer. I’d met the gentleman a few years back when he came to offer his condolences, along with a bill for services rendered, on the occasion of Uncle Merlin’s interment. Extraordinary! The man was such a weedy chap. Mr. Walter Fisher seemed as unlikely a sex object as … Miss Gladys Thorn.

Lost in thoughts of Walter, Mrs. Malloy ignored my dumbstruck amazement. “Always the perfect gentleman, Mrs. H.”

“Darn!”

“Never so much as a hand on my knee. And then last night when I’d unbuttoned me blouse—just the top ones, on the off chance—he started talking about
her
. Mrs. Fisher. To hear him you’d think the woman was a saint. Never a cross word. Always bright and bubbly. Always laughing. Isn’t it enough to make you spit?”

“Absolutely. Makes a lot more sense than killing yourself.” Torn between sympathy and irritation, I closed in on her, hands locked in prayer. “Come on, Mrs. Malloy, put the gun away. I’ll make us a nice cup of tea and we’ll try and figure how to reel in Mr. Fisher.”

Blast! So far this had been a hellish day. But enough is enough. Already the babies had been left so long they had probably outgrown the clothes they were wearing. Without a “Pardon me,” I stepped up to the mat and plucked the gun from Mrs. Malloy’s knees in the same way I would have taken a rattle from Abbey or Tam.

If looks could kill, I’d be needing Mr. Fisher’s professional attentions myself. “No need to mince words.” She huffed onto her four-inch heels. “You don’t mind me doing meself in, so long as it’s not in your house on your time. A pity them tablets was only for indigestion. Any minute now it could all be over. Me eyes would roll back in me head and me knees would do the limbo bend. Well”—mighty sniff—“beggars can’t be choosers. I’m off to throw meself over the cliff.”

“Not if I have to pump a few rounds of sense into you.”

Shocked to the core, I looked down at my hand, the one pointing the gun at my faithful daily, as if itching to put another notch on my belt. I didn’t believe this.
What would I say to Ben when he came home tonight and asked what I had done to keep busy? This had to be a bad dream, although it felt more like a bad western. Right on cue, the desk clock struck high noon. When the last note shivered into silence, Mrs. Malloy teetered on her high heels, then slumped back in the leather chair.

“Oh, my God, I’ve shot her!”

Impossible. There had been no sound, unless … could this be what is meant by a deafening blast? And to think how recently I had been sweating the small stuff. All that nonsense about whether or not to keep my one o’clock appointment with Fully Female. I was a murderess. I would spend my children’s formative years in Holloway. I put the gun in my apron pocket and approached the corpse. On the count of three, I darted a touch at her dangling arm. Oh, my God! Her feather hat slid sideways, falling on the floor like a bagged bird, and at the same moment … the eyes of the corpse opened.

“Promise me,” she rasped.

“Anything!” She was alive!

“Make sure I’m buried in me plum taffeta with the sequins and me sealskin stole—you’ll have to get it back from the cleaner’s. And one more thing … Tell Mr. Walter Fisher to eat his heart out when he closes me coffin lid.”

What a crazy world. What a crazy day. I hadn’t shot Mrs. Malloy, but it said a lot about my state of mind that I thought I had. Apparently Jock Bludgett had been right when he said I needed more than a new pump. Mrs. Malloy certainly needed more help than I could give and there was no time to lose with the clock ticking on like a bomb and the babies to be fed.

“Mrs. Malloy, don’t move.”

Racing out into the hall, I skated across the flagstones,
took a peek into the kitchen, blew Abbey and Tam a kiss, got goo-goos in reply, dodged back past the gawking suits of armour, and without pausing to regulate my breathing or shuffle my thoughts into a neat pile, picked up the telephone and dialled one of the few numbers I know by heart.

Answered at the third ring.

“St. Anselm’s vicarage.” The wary voice belonged to Mrs. Pickle, Rowland’s daily.

“Emergency!” I shouted. “I must speak with—”

“Just a mo.”

Silence, then a clunk as she laid the phone down. Mrs. Pickle takes her own sweet time about everything. She calls it being conscientious. Standing on the dais, treading water like a kiddy locked out of the loo, I pictured her dusting off the receiver and straightening the paper and pens on the table before setting off at a snail’s pace, looking back over her shoulder every third step because she didn’t like leaving even a telephone caller unattended in the vicarage hall. Might come back to find a couple of church bulletins missing.

Chewing on the telephone cord, I counted out her imagined footsteps going down the hall. The muffled thump of a door closing. Then all was swallowed in deadening silence. Would Mrs. Pickle have quickened her pace had I given my name? Remembering Jonas’s idea that she was sweet on him, I could have kicked myself. The minutes dragged on and I began to long for the music that had been piped into my ear during my phone call to Fully Female. But Mantovani was not in my immediate future.

Voices crackled in my ear. Naturally I assumed Mrs. Pickle had unearthed Rowland from his study, but disappointment was only a screech away.

No clue as to the identity of the screecher. But a man—who wasn’t Rowland—spoke, not into the phone,
but obviously close by, in one of those whispers that have more carrying power than a shout.

He was answered in screeching accents by a woman who was not Mrs. Pickle. Would Mrs. P have left a divorcing couple cooling their heels, if not their tempers, in the hall? Never! Besides, that scenario didn’t work. What I had tapped into sounded more like an untoward meeting than the grand finale.

“This has come as a nasty shock.” The man’s voice blew in my ear like a rush of chill air through a ventilator. “It won’t do at all, you know. For twenty years I’ve thought myself safe from your wanton ways.”

“Does this mean you’re not thrilled to see me?” The female voice vibrated on the verge of hysteria.

“Enough! In the name of what we once shared, I ask you to vacate these premises.”

“Not until I have spoken to your wife.”

“Never. You’re not worthy to enter the same room as that saintly woman. If you try, I’ll take whatever steps are necessary …”

“Gladstone, how can you be such a cad?”

Fade-out, leaving me trapped in the place where fact and fiction merge. I could only suppose I had been listening to a keyhole dramatization of the life and times of the great prime minister. A man carved in stone, before ever death saw his statue installed in Westminster Abbey, but whom modern muckrakers suspect of taking more than a political interest in ladies of the night. It didn’t surprise me that Mrs. Pickle toted the wireless around while polishing. Heaven forbid that someone abscond with it while her back was turned.

Had the woman forgotten me? How long would she take to come back and tell me the vicar was nowhere to be found? Glaring at the receiver, ready to chew on it in frustration, I was clobbered by a chilling thought. What if Mrs. Malloy, encouraged by my absence, made
a break from the house by way of the window? At this very moment she might be skittering on her four-inch heels down the gravel drive, bent on hurling herself off the cliff edge.…

Dropping the phone—my heart as much a lead weight as the gun in my pocket—I was at the study door before I knew how I got there. Shoving it open, I beheld Mrs. Malloy’s fur coat slumped across the desk. No need for heart failure—she wasn’t in it. A rhinestone clip glinted in her two-tone hair as she stood stuffing the china poodle and other earthly treasures into the supply bag.

“Won’t do to ply me with liquor.”

“I wasn’t …”

“Nor kind words neither.” She settled the feather hat on her hat, then took it off and handed it to me. “Here, give this to that bloody cat to remember me by once in a now and then. Well, that’s it then, except for this.”