Fete Fatale (24 page)

‘And he realized, did he?'

‘Oh yes. He realized. When I'd sold out, I packed up for the day and started off home. I went the long way round, by Castle Walk, to give Gustaf an extra run. He'd been such an
angel
all day, hadn't you, my bestest boy? And then I heard footsteps, coming up fast behind me. It was Marcus. And he called my name, and I stopped, and he caught up with me and came right out with it at once. He said: “Mrs Nielson, how long have you been living in this country?” '

There was silence in the room. I thought about poor Marcus, sailing unawares and fearless to his stupid, unnecessary death.

‘He knew, you see. If I'd been long in the country, I wouldn't still be making silly mistakes with the money . . . I tried to say I'd always lived here, but he shook his head. He started saying, “You do realize what rabies can do to people, how they die from it?” I
was carrying my hat. I'd arrived, you know, rather overdressed for the fête, and I'd taken it off. It was
you
told me that new people often bought a hat from Franchita, and I'd gone off and bought one. A very staid, old-fashioned one, which I thought would be right for Hexton. It had a pin. I had my fingers on the pin as he spoke.'

‘And you had, of course, the necessary medical knowledge,' I said, my voice harsh, as I tried to put the picture from my mind: the pin sliding into the vital area, Marcus falling . . .

‘Yes. I had the knowledge. I don't think it was a matter of thought, of considering whether, of deciding. I just pulled the pin out of the hat, and stuck it into him. Between the ribs, into the heart. Then I pulled it out, and pushed him over the side, as he was dying . . . I'm not going to apologize, or ask forgiveness . . . I can hardly recognize that it was me who did that . . . I was in some sort of trance, it came over me like a white heat, though I seemed perfectly cool on the surface. I walked on, then back home through town. I talked to people I knew, said what a successful fête it had been. Then I got back here, and I buried the pin in the garden, and then . . . Well, I can't tell you what I felt then. The sense of shame and self-disgust . . . mingled with a sort of exhilaration. It disgusts me now. I hate myself now—and yet, when I thought I was going to get away with it, I was almost . . . congratulating myself.'

She was stroking, obsessively, Gustaf's head.

‘Well,' she asked in a low voice, ‘what do we do now?'

‘I don't know. I'm not sure that we do anything. I should tell you that, apart from what you've just told me, which nobody has overheard, the police have no evidence whatsoever that you killed Marcus. Nobody saw you do it, noboby even saw him coming after you along Castle Walk. There is the pin, of course: they might be able to do something if they found the pin. But at the moment, there is no case.'

‘You don't understand,' she said, putting Gustaf gently down on the sofa. ‘Perhaps they couldn't prove that I killed Marcus. But they could very easily prove that I have only been in this country three months or so, and that I brought Gustaf in illegally. And they will kill him, of course. There is no longer any point . . . I could kill him myself, rather than waiting for them to do it. I have plenty
stuff upstairs. But I don't think I could bring myself to do that. I could kill myself—much more easily I could kill myself—but it seems more fitting to . . . expiate—is that the word?—what I did, some way. Helen, did you say there were policemen outside?'

‘Yes. One at the back, one at the front.'

‘It wasn't necessary, you know. But how could you know? Will you do one thing for me? Will you take charge of Gustaf? Will you—will Marcus's partner—make sure that . . . what has to be done . . . is done quickly, in the humanest possible way? Perhaps you could be with him for the first injection? He knows you.'

She went to the door, without another glance at me or her dog. I heard her open the front door, and say to the policeman there: ‘I wonder if you would be so good as to come with me to the police station?'

I took Gustaf in my arms, and from the front garden we saw them walking down the road towards town. Gwen Nilsson seemed be carrying on a polite conversation, in the quiet, cool and efficient manner that I had liked from the first.

Ironically enough, they did not put Gustaf down. They don't always, though Gwen Nilsson didn't realize that. He was put into quarantine kennels for the remainder of his six months, then let out into the care of one of her neighbours, until such a time as she should be released from jail.

Which should not be long now. As with the lady recently who ran over her lover several times, and was released by the judge on the grounds that it was done at her difficult time of the month, so this case the judge (who arrived at the Court each day in his limousine, with his two poodles on the back seat) was positively complimentary: this was an act—a foolish, wicked act—that was done on the spur of the moment by a thoroughly upright and responsible person; it was the sort of murder that was unlikely to happen again, springing as it did from a most unlikely combination of circumstances; what was more—here the judge became benevolently
circumlocutory—the lady in question was going through The Change. Society would not be served, he thought, by a long sentence, so he gave her a very short one. ‘It's a wonder he didn't let her off with a £10 fine,' I said bitterly afterwards.

But really I found it very difficult to sort out my emotions. I've never been one of the ‘punish 'em until it hurts' brigade. But how could he be so sure that she would not do it again? How could he be sure that other people might not use his leniency as a precedent and an encouragement? Above all, I suppose, I asked: ‘Was Marcus's life only worth two years?' Her house is sold, and soon she will be out. She will collect Gustaf, and go and live elsewhere. No doubt she will be discreet about her past. She's had experience in that.

And yet there is another part of me that says something else. When Superintendent Coulton came the day afterwards to talk it over, before he went back to Leeds, he said:

‘I have to hand it to you. I'd never have thought of that motive. They say there aren't any new ones, but that
is
a motive I've never come across.'

‘Nonsense,' I said. ‘The motive was love. She murdered for love.'

And that, I suppose, was it. That was the reason why, in my less bitter moments, I didn't think so harshly of the judge.

Meanwhile Hexton goes on pretty much as before. Mary Morse has not been put away, but people have definitely realized that she's ‘gone a bit funny', in local phrase. She smiles at people royally as she walks down the High Street, she delivers moral pronouncements à propos of nothing to innocent bystanders, she writes letters of instruction to the local mayor. One would not be surprised, if her house had a balcony, to see her doing ‘
Urbis et orbe
' from it to imagined crowds of pilgrims. Her God bus never, so to speak, got off the ground. She now takes a taxi, alone, to Shipford for Sunday service. Hawkins, the local taxi-man, then ferries a Shipford high churchman back for the Hexton service, so the score is 1-1. Hawkins himself is a Methodist and attends chapel in the evening, so he serves both God and Mammon, though not in that order.

Father Battersby's services settled down to attracting about fifteen or twenty more people than Walter Primp's, and this is thought of as a great triumph. Franchita goes regularly to them,
because they seem to satisfy some of her inner hunger for drama. Otherwise she is slightly less bossy than before, but still makes regular visits to her dentist in Barnard's Castle. Howard Culpepper, I am quite sure, is fully aware of the purpose of these visits, but views them in the light of liberation for himself. Timothy Horsforth has moved away, to a flat in Darlington, and never returns, even for visits. I am occasionally allowed fill-in weeks of teaching at his father's school, but I like the man none the more. Rumours are beginning to get around about Fiona Weston . . . Visitors to Harrogate report that Thyrza Primp is almost permanently installed at the windows of Betty's Tea Rooms, glaring at the tourists, and making a Yorkshire teacake go a very long way indeed.

I never did escape from Hexton, you notice. Perhaps I felt some shame at having blamed it for the murder of Marcus. I was wrong, after all: a woman living in Hexton did kill him, but not Hexton, not the spirit of the place. And then, the Battersby affair had taught me that there was another Hexton, which was not all tea-drinking and gossip and social churchgoing and ‘nice' library books. This was a Hexton where it was perfectly possible to feel at home and be myself—not a particularly pleasant or comfortable thing to be, but it is the only self I have got.

There is one more reason why I have not left Hexton: a little over a year after Marcus's death, I married Father Battersby. But that is another and quite a different sort of story.

Originally published in Britain as

Disposal of the Living.

Copyright © 1985 Robert Barnard

Copyright under the Berne Convention.

All rights reserved. No part of this book

may be reproduced in any form without the

permission of Charles Scribner's Sons.

ISBN 978-1-4767-3722-5 (ebook)