Last Act of All (26 page)

‘
Then how in the world did he expect to get away with it?’

Frances
reflected, choosing her words carefully. ‘I think, you know, he believed at some level that within the village, no matter what he did, nothing could touch him. His ways were their ways, and as long as no one got in to dig too deeply, they were all able to cover up for each other. It might be quite instructive to analyse any accidental deaths over the last thirty years and see if any of them have the hallmarks of violence. Wife-beating, as far as I can make out, is endemic, and accepted as a normal part of life.

‘
And then, of course, Radley had killed before, on impulse, when he fell out with his brother, and it had been made all right for him — very much all right, because he got exactly what he wanted. Insofar as he thought about it at all, I think he felt that here, in Radnesfield, the magic would work again. It almost did.’

‘
But Helena! He seemed quite devoted to her — how could he let her take the blame?’

‘
Now that is quite a curious piece of double thinking. He believes it to have been entirely her own fault; in fact, I’m not sure he’s ever forgiven her. If she had gone into the witness box and admitted guilt and penitence, as her lawyer recommended, it could have been a suspended sentence.’

‘
Ergo
, she deserved to go to prison.’ Tilson shook his head. ‘I hear what you are saying, but I can’t quite take it in.’

‘
You should be used to it. They all behave like that around here, with that sort of Alice in Wonderland moral logic. Martha Bateman — but don’t let me get started on her twisted psychology, or we’ll be here all night. And I’m exhausted.’

Replete,
she yawned and stretched uninhibitedly. Tilson looked alarmed.

‘
Now, you mustn’t go without telling me about Lilian.’

‘
Lilian. Nothing to tell, there, really. That one, I don’t think we could ever have pinned on him, if he weren’t behaving as if he thought he should get a medal for doing it. The perfect crime, that was. He saw his chance, when Helena took Lilian to lie down; like another half-dozen people, he heard them talking, and of course he’d been on the look-out for his chance ever since Mrs Bateman had told him about Lilian’s plans in the morning. It wasn’t murder in a homicidal fit of temper, like Neville’s; it was quite cold-blooded. He heard the waitress say she was asleep so, with a quick look round, he slipped in, held the cushion over her face, and went out through the garden door after checking there was no one to see him. He went back in through the kitchen door, which is only a few yards away, and apart from that made no effort to cover his tracks — and basically there weren’t any.

‘
Where he did fall down hopelessly was in the attempt on Stephanie’s life. And there, you see, he had tried frantically and quite incompetently to make it look like suicide. He told Helena that Stephanie was in a state the night before, when Helena was too doped to react, in an effort to set the scene. He said he had left the pills accidentally where she had taken them, but the mug on the table was full of powder dregs, while the capsules he had emptied — leaving fingerprint evidence all over them — were in the bin downstairs.

‘
So he wasn’t clever at all, just lucky — if you could call it that. Certainly the devil looked after his own.’

‘
Will he be fit to plead?’

Frances
shrugged. ‘His lawyer will strongly deny it, of course, and bring in any number of shrinks to expound in bewildering scientific detail the theory of hereditary insanity. They may be right, at that, but the prosecution can point out that all his efforts had good sound motives — solidly financial, in two cases, after all — and since his conduct is otherwise rational, he may be judged as fit to serve a prison sentence as the next man.’

‘
Either way, I cherish little hope that he will be incarcerated for any realistic length of time.’ Tilson sighed. ‘The older I become, the less I understand the judicial system. Do you think he’ll kill again?’

‘
Who knows? I don’t believe there will be meaningful rehabilitation, if you want the jargon. Perhaps this whole thing will tip him over the edge into insanity, or perhaps if his ancestral cess pit becomes an ordinary, not-very-attractive small commuter town, the focus of his obsession may be removed. We’ve played our part, anyway, and tomorrow the show will be somewhere else.

‘
No, no thank you. I won’t have another glass of wine. I’m driving, and it’s time I did. I shall go home and have a long, scented bath in an attempt to get the stench of this whole thing out of my nostrils.’

She
got to her feet, yawning again. ‘Well, I certainly did the talking tonight. I hope you’re satisfied.’

‘
My dear child, I have been honoured by your confidence, and feel positively sated after having the itch of curiosity so royally assuaged.’

Frances
sighed. ‘At least that’s a job finished, even if a botched job.’

‘
Don’t blame yourself. You may have felt involved in events, but in Radnesfield that is a delusion. You are merely watching them take place from the other side of the glass.’

She
looked at him curiously. ‘Will you go on living here, after all this?’

He
did not hesitate. ‘Oh yes. You accused me of social voyeurism, once, in a telling image involving slugs. But with the merciless approach of second childishness, one recovers one’s boyhood fascination with the most extraordinary pets. I think I shall enjoy watching their adaptation to a new habitat.’

He
blinked at her benevolently, but suddenly the sharp bright eyes seemed cold, somehow inhuman, the hedgehog nose almost snuffling already in the anticipation of a succulent reward for this scrabbling in mud and dirt. She grabbed her coat and bag in almost indecent haste, and made for the door.

‘
I really must go. Tomorrow we have Lilian’s inquest, as well as ordeal by Press and television. And tonight I’ll have ordeal by mother as well; she hates to see me mixed up in these sordid situations. She can’t understand why I don’t teach music in a nice girls’ school, and to tell you the truth I’m not sure I know why, either.’

She
thanked him profusely as she took her leave, but could not quite bring herself to bestow the kiss on the cheek he so obviously expected. None the less, he waved her off with undiminished good humour, the light streaming from the doorway behind him outlining his short, stocky figure and the aureole of fuzzy white hair.

The
street was deserted as she drove through Radnesfield for the last time, the lighted windows close-curtained and the pub in darkness.

She
groped for a cassette to slot into the player. It didn’t matter what; anything to blot out the Radnesfield fantasia which still beat so remorselessly through her brain.

But
as she reached the main road, the car’s headlights picked up the fingerposts at the staggered crossroads, and she paused for a moment to study them. ‘Radnesfield’, one said, the other ‘Dusebury’, pointing over the road in the other direction.

‘
That was the crossroads in our life,’ Helena had said once, ‘when Neville chose the Radnesfield turning.’

Would
it have made any difference, anyway? Perhaps Dusebury was a pretty village, with a green and a duck-pond with white ducks, and an old grey stone pub full of jolly villagers, and the whole thing was just a freakish chance. Fielding had seen it as destiny, but perhaps he was no more than a discarded match tossed into a powder keg.

Or
had they brought it upon themselves? Nasty Neville and Helena, victim and martyr — had their sick little dramatic creations taken on an evil life of their own?

There
was never going to be an answer to that question. Turning the music up even louder, she drove away.

If you enjoyed reading
Last Act of All
you might be interested in
Past Praying For
by Aline Templeton, also published by Endeavour Press.

Extract from
Past Praying For
by Aline Templeton

Prologue

Christmas 1967

The
huge depression that settled down over Europe brought with it snow – soft, wet, dangerous stuff that clung like a damp sheet as it spread itself down into Northern Italy, over the Alps and Switzerland, Austria, France, then at last across the Channel into Britain on Christmas Eve.

But
the man who stood bleakly at the upstairs window of the drawing room of the big house was not considering the prospect of a white Christmas. Giles stared unseeing into the snow-flecked darkness, the lines about his mouth taut with suffering. It was eight months now. Surely in eight months the raw agony should have subsided into some manageable ache.

Restless
in his mental torment, he turned. Mrs Beally, the housekeeper, had set up a Christmas tree, a poor puny travesty of a thing, its artificial limbs decked with gaudy lights and cheap ornaments. He looked at it, but saw instead, as if he could touch it, the tree that had stood there last year, and the years before that; huge, towering kings of the forest, hung with chains of popcorn and little patchwork dolls and proclaiming home and family and the joy of Christmas in a triumphal procession stretching back over twenty-four years.

He
shook his head impatiently to clear his vision, and when he looked again the little tree with its tawdry finery seemed to symbolize all that he had lost.

He
had conscientiously, or perhaps desperately, finished his hospital paperwork. He had nothing left to do, and tomorrow yawned empty before him, a chasm of misery as black as an open grave.

Gervase
had had the right idea. He usually did, particularly when it came to his own comfort.

It
was hard, though, for Giles to view the boy dispassionately. He was tall, blond and athletic, and managed his Oxford finals without neglecting either his sport or his social life. He had come up to London that autumn to St Theresa’s, the teaching hospital where his father was a highly successful consultant, to complete his medical training.

Melody
had been more objective, viewing her big handsome son with some amusement. But then, Melody was alive with humour, from her taffy-coloured curls to her size three feet, commonly encased in pastel suede shoes with three-inch heels.

At
nineteen, she had laughed into enslavement the tall, serious young doctor, come to her home town of New Orleans to do a year’s specialization in its famous hospital. Within the year, he had married her and swept her off to England, to the dismay of her warm, affectionate and extended Southern family.

The
double-cream drawl had become a little less pronounced over the years, but nothing changed her sunny nature. Coming home from hospital, tired and frequently depressed, Giles’s heart still lifted twenty years later to the lilt of that voice calling, ‘That you, sugar?’ and the clip of small feet in perilously high heels scurrying across the parquet floors.

A
son to follow in his footsteps was the only other thing he had ever wanted, and, for twelve years, all they seemed likely to have. As an only child (the son of elderly parents, now dead) it seemed to him a natural family.

The
late addition of a daughter was, if he were honest with himself, unwelcome as well as unexpected. With Gervase away at school, he had Melody’s undivided attention once more, and he resented sharing it now with a girl child who appeared to regard him as little more than an alarming stranger.

But
Melody doted on her daughter. She called her Missy, in Southern style; Giles used her given name, finding the pet name awkward on his tongue.

Missy
was not, like Gervase, a fearless and outgoing child. In temperament, though he failed to recognize it, she was not unlike Giles himself, and worshipped her lovely, laughing mother with round adoring eyes; in company she held her skirt as if presciently afraid that she might lose something so infinitely precious.

So
the world ended for Missy, in the spring just before her ninth birthday when, aged forty-four, her mother died after a mercifully brief but painful illness, from the type of cancer which was Giles’s own speciality.

It
was a bitter irony; one of the foremost experts in that field of research, he could do nothing to save this one vital life, and it tormented him.

His
work became a blind obsession. Gervase was part of it; for Melody’s sake, he must join Giles in research for a cure which might, all too easily, be the work of more than one generation.

His
daughter, however, was irrelevant to him, almost like a pet for whom his wife had conceived an unwarrantable affection, and he made provision for her in that spirit. He dealt with her physical welfare by appointing the first housekeeper he could find, and saw to it that she was taken daily to her little private school, but did not think to warn them of her loss. It never occurred to him that she, in his eyes a baby still, could experience grief as great as his own, and infinitely more destructive.

His
mourning was self-centred, all-absorbing, and there was no space in his heart for her suffering. Indeed, he found it hard to curb his irritation when, in the rare times that he was at home in her waking hours, she followed him about like a shadow, even pressing herself to him with the ill-judged insistence of a fawning cur.

Gervase,
too, missed his mother, but he was embarking on the excitements of a flat in London and a new career. Arriving home a week before Christmas, he took one look round the house, desultorily run by Mrs Beally and haunted by wisps of laughter no longer heard, and announced that he was going skiing in Kitzbuhel with a party of friends.

So
Giles was left facing Christmas alone with his daughter. He had refused the pressing invitation of the American relatives, believing that there he would feel worse, not realizing then that there could be no worse. Perhaps he should have sent the child on her own; perhaps he might think about it later, if she was too demanding.

But
the question did not really occupy his thoughts. His mind had drifted again, mouthing the dead-sea apples of memory, when the door opened and his daughter insinuated herself into the room. She was pale and too thin, with an aura of insubstantiality about her, and she paused on the threshold, sniffing the air, as it were, like an animal poised for flight.

Lost
in his own thoughts, Giles did not hear her approach, and jumped as she slid her hand into his.

‘
Don’t do that!’ he said sharply, dropping her hand and taking a step back. Then, controlling himself with an obvious effort, he said more gently, ‘I’m sorry, but you startled me. Shouldn’t you be in bed? What time is it?’

‘
It’s only nine o’clock. I’m going up soon.’ She shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot.

Trying
not to sound impatient, he said, ‘Did you want something?’

Her
eyes swept up to study his face. ‘Er – no, not really. I just – I just wondered what was happening tomorrow?’

For
a fleeting second he had the impression that this was not what she had originally intended to say, but it was swept away in a flood-tide of dismay as he looked down at her beseeching expression.

‘
I – I’m not sure. I must make a phone-call,’ he said, turning abruptly and almost running downstairs to his study.

***

Left alone in the big room, the child stood silent for a moment, then, half-turning as if in conversation, she said, ‘What do you think? Do you think he’s got it yet, Missy?’

She
knew, really, that she was sort of talking to herself, but after – well, afterwards, it had been a comfort to have an imaginary friend. Missy, she called her, because when she had been Missy everything had been all right, and she had been happy and strong and clever and loving and loved.

Missy
said, ‘Why don’t we wait until he comes out of the study and go down and see? If he hasn’t opened it we could take it away and silly old fat Miss Jenkins would never know.’

‘
That’s bad. We shouldn’t do bad things like that.’

‘
It’s not bad, it’s sensible. Otherwise he’ll be cross, and you know you hate it when he’s cross.’

The
child shuddered. ‘I know. But it’s because of what you told me to do that I got in a mess anyway.’

Miss
Jenkins had been angry, very angry. Miss Jenkins was short and plump with round gold spectacles, and she was usually a cosy, rather jolly headmistress. But as Miss Jenkins talked fiercely of bullying and cruelty it seemed as if she changed into some kind of monster before the eyes of the frightened child.

‘
I simply cannot imagine what has possessed you, and I shall be writing home to say that this sort of evil behaviour – I can only call it that – must stop. You’ve made several children very unhappy, and poor little Sophie was distraught after that note you put in her desk. She’s been deeply upset by her parents’ divorce, and we must all be very kind to her.’

The
girl felt a shaft of self-pity. Sophie would see her father every week; it wasn’t as if he’d gone away for ever, like her own mother, but no one was told to be specially nice to her. It did not occur to her that no one knew.

‘
Yes, Miss Jenkins,’ she said dutifully.

‘
There can really be no excuse for this. We’ve all been upset by it – very upset – because we are a happy community, with no place for wicked, spiteful little girls who enjoy making people miserable. Do you understand?’

‘
Yes, Miss Jenkins.’

‘
So will you promise that this will never happen again? Because if it did, we would ask you to leave the school.’

‘
Yes, Miss Jenkins,’ she said a third time, dully. Miss Jenkins didn’t want her either; was there anyone, anyone at all, who did?

Behind
her spectacles her headmistress’s eyes were softer now, though puzzled. ‘I hope you mean that. I’m very disappointed in you, you know. You used to be such a nice child. Well, we’ll leave it at that, and hope that this has just been a temporary fit of naughtiness, shall we?

‘
Off you go, now. Have a happy Christmas and come back your old self, will you?’

It
had all been Missy’s idea, of course. She herself would never have thought of writing the notes. When she saw that Lucy’s new coat came from a thrift shop and she hadn’t money for tuck, she knew she should be sorry for her, and for Sophie Chambers who looked miserable all the time, now that her daddy had gone away with someone else. But misery loves company, and something inside her was glad other people were sad as well, even if she was afraid she was sadder than any of them.

‘
Make them cry,’ Missy advised. ‘If they’re crying, they’re sadder than you are. You’re not crying.’

She
had tried crying, until she had no tears left, and it didn’t change anything. So she didn’t cry now, but once Missy had told her what to put in the letters – nasty, poisonous things that nice people didn’t say – the other girls cried and in some horrible way it made her feel better.

But
then Miss Jenkins had found her out. She didn’t know how – perhaps she was a witch – and things were even worse. She’d never had a best friend – when Mommy was alive she didn’t need one – but now everyone hated her.

Missy
refused to take the blame. ‘It was only because you were so dumb you got caught. Do it better next time, Dumbo.’

After
that, she was so cross she didn’t speak to Missy for days. And now she had, Missy was just trying to get her into trouble again.

‘
Go away,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to talk to you any more.’

Her
father had not returned. Slowly she climbed the stairs to the pretty attic bedroom which Mommy had filled with every treasure a little girl’s heart could desire.

She
crossed the room to her white and gold chest of drawers and opened the bottom one. Tucked away at the back was a Christmas stocking, with her name knitted into the welt at the top. She took it out, unfolded it and stroked it as lovingly as if it had been a living thing.

There
was no point in hanging it up. She could not bear to find only a horrid skinny emptiness in the morning, instead of the mysterious wool-clad bulges that had always greeted her.

She
sighed, a sigh from the bottom of her heart which ended in a dry sob, then she folded it neatly and put it away.

***

Mrs Beally, savagely stuffing the turkey in the kitchen, was muttering resentfully. She had been hurrying to get everything prepared, so there would be nothing for her employer to do but lift the turkey out of the oven and carve it, and she could get away first thing to her Karen’s to have a proper Christmas Day with the family. She even had stashed in her bag a bottle of bubbly which no one would miss from the cellar, so they could get a good start to the festivities.