Mrs Pargeter's Package (4 page)

CHAPTER 9

Mrs Pargeter moved out on to the balcony and took a long series of deep breaths. The innocent scent of flowers in her nostrils felt obscenely inappropriate. Life with the late Mr Pargeter had trained her well in coping with shock, but she had still been profoundly shaken by what she had seen. She swallowed back nausea, forced herself into a straitjacket of calm, took one more deep breath, and went back into Joyce's room.

The only way, she knew, was to dissociate herself, depersonalise what she saw, imagine that she had to examine the scene for some kind of test, that questions would be asked later. Horror can only be borne if one ceases to think of the individual identity of those involved; too much compassion can be crippling. All carers – doctors, policemen, ambulancemen – learn to cope by manufacturing a professional distance between themselves and the disasters they face.

As she had this thought, Mrs Pargeter realised that the necessity for distance applied equally to murderers, rapists and other violent criminals. It is only when one has ceased to think of people as individuals that one can perpetrate such horrific abuse to their bodies.

She looked down at the corpse. Thinking of it as 'the corpse' helped. The corpse, the deceased, the victim, the body . . . any word was better than a proper name.

The weapon which had severed the body's radial artery was plain to see. It lay on the floor, thickly streaked with brown blood and a volatile speckling of ants. The bottom of a broken ouzo bottle, a misshapen tumbler with one side rising to a deadly pinnacle of glass. It was the bottle that the deceased had insisted on having at her bedside the night before.

Easily done, Mrs Pargeter supposed – the contents drained, the bottle smashed, then one quick drunken slash across the wrist, rewarded by the welcoming embrace of oblivion.

She bent down close to the body's drained lips. Yes, there was an unmistakable smell of aniseed. The pillow, though dry, gave off a hint of the same perfume. Some of the ouzo – only a little, though – had been spilled.

Mrs Pargeter moved round the bedroom, sniffing, but nowhere else could she smell it. Presumably the deceased had consumed the entire contents of the bottle.

There was a wicker wastepaper basket by the dressing-table; inside it Mrs Pargeter saw shards of glass and the torn ouzo label. An uncharacteristically tidy gesture for someone about to commit suicide, she mused.

Not all the glass had gone into the wastepaper basket; there were a few tiny crystals and splinters on the marble floor nearby. She looked closely at the wall above the basket. On the white emulsion there were clear outlines of a few flat mosquitoes, swatted with paperbacks no doubt by previous tenants of the room. There was also, nearly three feet above the ground, a small arc-shaped indentation, from which a shiny trickle of dried fluid descended. She put her face close to the wall and once again smelt a nuance of aniseed. It seemed a reasonable deduction that the ouzo bottle had been smashed against the wall there.

Mrs Pargeter stood still, obscurely troubled. She looked across at the inanimate heap on the bed and thought for a moment.

Then she left the bedroom and went into the kitchen. She sniffed round the sink, but there was nothing to arouse her suspicions. She opened a drawer and found it to be well-stocked with cutlery, including two substantial and very sharp kitchen knives.

She closed the drawer and moved on to the bathroom. The ceramic base of the shower and its drainage outlet were completely dry. So was the washbasin, but from its plughole emanated the faint, unmistakable whiff of ouzo.

Mrs Pargeter stopped for a moment to assess this information and work out a possible scenario of events during the night.

The deceased had woken in the small hours, depressed and suicidal in the emptiness of her bereavement. She had drunk more ouzo to try and shift the mood, but the alcohol had only deepened her despair. She had decided to kill herself.

Up until that point the scenario was just about credible. The next bit of reconstruction, however, made it less convincing.

In her drunken and self-destructive state, the deceased had looked for a suitable means of suicide. Rejecting – or perhaps unaware of – the possibilities of the kitchen knives, she had decided to use glass from the broken bottle to cut her wrist.

But there was still some ouzo left. Rather than drinking it up or just letting it spill over the floor when she broke the bottle, the deceased had gone to the bathroom and emptied the residue into the wash basin. She had then gone back into her bedroom and smashed the bottle against the wall, considerately ensuring that most of the glass would fall into the wastepaper basket. Her suicide weapon thus neatly created, the deceased had meekly got back into bed, slashed her wrist with the vicious spike of glass, and slipped quietly out of existence.

Mrs Pargeter's credulity felt strained.

Any other scenario, though, did have considerable ramifications.

Like, for instance, the involvement of another person.

Suppose, Mrs Pargeter conjectured, another person had been involved . . . ? Suppose the deceased had not moved from her bed, but the other person had drained the ouzo bottle, smashed it and slashed the deceased's wrist . . . ?

A lot more details fitted into that scenario.

It raised certain new problems, though. Chief among them was why the deceased had not resisted the attack on her. She might have been asleep at the moment of assault, but the cutting of her wrist must have wakened her. Surely she would have screamed or . . . ? Surely Mrs Pargeter would have heard something . . . ?

But Mrs Pargeter had heard nothing. She had slept very deeply. Quite exceptionally deeply.

A new thought struck her, a thought which might explain both her own exceptionally deep sleep and the passivity of the deceased.

She moved quickly from the bathroom to the kitchen. She opened the fridge. Almost everything that had been there the night before was still there. Bread, cheese, jam, ham, sausage, long-life milk, the bottles of white wine. Only two items were missing.

She knew what had happened to the bottle of ouzo.

But where was the square plastic bottle of mineral water?

She searched through the kitchen. She looked in the waste-bin outside the kitchen door. She searched her own room. Keeping her eyes averted from the sheet-shrouded body, she searched the other bedroom. She searched the living-room and the bathroom.

The bottle of mineral water had disappeared. Its contents could not be checked for the powerful soporific she now felt sure it had contained. In just the same way that it would be hard to trace the drug in the ouzo which had rendered Joyce so pathetically unresistant to her fate.

Joyce. For the first time since seeing the body she had let herself think of her friend once again as a person. Mrs Pargeter caught sight of her face in the bathroom mirror and saw the tears begin to flow.

And she determined from that moment that she would find out who was responsible for this ultimate depersonalisation of her friend.

Because Mrs Pargeter knew now that she was dealing, not with a suicide, but a murder.

CHAPTER 10

In the confusion of the night before, Mrs Pargeter had not unpacked her suitcases, but that morning the minute she opened the first one she knew that someone had been through them. Everyone has their own style of packing and, although her possessions had been punctiliously replaced, tiny details – a silk sleeve folded too tight on its tissue paper, a pair of sandals too accurately aligned – betrayed the intervention of an alien hand.

So while Mrs Pargeter had been unconscious, someone, confident of the sleeping drug's efficacy, had calmly searched her belongings. The knowledge gave her an unwholesome, tainted feeling, almost as disturbing as the shock of what had happened to Joyce.

Mrs Pargeter went through to the other bedroom and checked the suitcases. Her friend, she knew, was an untidy packer, but the neatness with which her clothes had been laid out confirmed the unsurprising truth that Joyce's possessions had also been examined.

For a moment Mrs Pargeter wondered whether the search might have been the main purpose of their nocturnal visitation. Was it possible that Joyce had woken, seen a stranger going through her belongings, and been killed merely to prevent her from identifying the intruder . . . ?

But no, that didn't work. The circumstances of the murder, its disguise as suicide, suggested a degree of premeditation which was at odds with that scenario.

Mrs Pargeter felt certain that whoever had entered the Villa Eleni during the night had intended to kill Joyce. And also to find something that Joyce had brought with her to Corfu. Whether the murderer had been successful in the second part of his or her mission, there was no way of knowing.

Mrs Pargeter was grimly thoughtful as she dressed. She would have liked to take a shower, but didn't want to risk disturbing any evidence. Though uncertain how sophisticated forensic investigation would prove to be on Corfu, she knew that the less she touched the better. It went against her notions of hygiene, particularly after the sweatiness of the long day before, but, in the cause of criminal investigation, she confined her toilette to copious applications of deodorant and Obsession.

She couldn't even use mineral water to clean her teeth, so she forced the toothpaste round with her tongue. Fortunately, she always kept a little breath-spray in her handbag, and a couple of puffs from that gave her the confidence to go out and speak to people.

She did one more slow circuit of the villa, to check that she hadn't missed anything. She gazed for a long, sad moment at Joyce's body, which seemed distanced and shrunken in death. Then she looked outside at the front and back for signs of the murderer. Entering the premises would have presented no problem – in a climate like that, French windows were almost always left open at night – so she had no hopes for signs of forcible entry, but there was a distant possibility of a footprint in the dust or sand.

Nothing. Whoever had tended the garden had swept the cement paths too diligently for any trace to remain. That of course raised the question of who the careful gardener was. Had the watering and sweeping been part of some regular daily routine, or were they done that morning on special orders? As he or she swept, had the gardener been aware of the horror that lay a few yards away, hidden only by flimsy net curtains?

Such questions would have to be asked. And answered. But, Mrs Pargeter told herself firmly, they were questions for the Corfiot police. Though the tragedy came so close, there was no reason for her to become involved in its investigation.

She tried to clamp a lid firmly down on the seething broth of inconsistencies and possibilities that boiled inside her mind, and set off to report a death.

Almost directly overhead now, the midday sun was ferocious and enervating, but the direct track to Spiro's did not seem so steep as it had the night before. Partly, of course, that was because Mrs Pargeter was going down rather than up, but, as she looked across in the daylight at the other, curving path she had taken with Joyce and Ginnie, the longer route appeared to be at least as steep and, here and there, even steeper.

Mrs Pargeter crammed the lid firmly down on that speculation too.

The taverna was open, but there were not many customers. It was not yet one o'clock, and the lunchtime trade wouldn't really get going for another hour. The Secretary with Short Bleached Hair and the Secretary with Long Bleached Hair sat over glasses of Sprite. Both wore bikinis that constricted their plump flesh like rubber bands; and already their white curves blushed from incautious exposure to the Mediterranean sun. They were engaging in a little come-hither banter with the beautiful Yianni, who was being polite, though clearly uninterested, as he swept round the tables with a broom made of bunches of twigs.

At another table sat Ginnie, doing her promised problem-solving stint. Mr and Mrs Safari Suit, dressed exactly as they had been the day before, were the ones with problems, and they appeared to be bending the rep's ears unmercifully. Ginnie, Mrs Pargeter noticed with interest, had a scratch on her face and the beginnings of a black eye, which had not been there the night before. On that detail too Mrs Pargeter did not allow herself to speculate.

She looked cautiously towards the table where she and Joyce had sat. It was on the edge of the eating area and had not yet been reached by Yianni's broom. She saw with relief that the flightbag still remained under her seat. Casually, she moved across, as if to look out over the bay, and picked it up.

She had not yet decided who should be the first recipient of her dreadful news. The person she wanted to tell was Larry Lambeth. He was the most sympathetic contact she had on Corfu and she needed to share some of the emotions building up inside her. Also, his background would make him a useful sounding-board for conjecture about the crime.

But this was a murder case and protocol must be observed. The local police should be notified as soon as possible. (Mrs Pargeter had always been a great believer in keeping the police supplied with as much information as she reckoned they could cope with.) Spiro was the one with a telephone, so presumably at some point he must be involved in contacting the police, but Mrs Pargeter decided that Ginnie should be the one to know first of Joyce Dover's death.

Mr and Mrs Safari Suit, however, appeared to be settled in for a long session of complaint. 'I mean, the brochure,' Mr Safari Suit was saying, 'didn't indicate that the Villa Ariadne was so far up the hill, and it's not as if my wife doesn't have her varicose veins to contend with. I really think the tour operator should move us into another villa nearer to sea level and my wife and I are also very disappointed that the crockery supplied in the . . .'

If ever Mrs Pargeter had had news that would justify breaking into a conversation, now was that moment, but it was not her style to create unnecessary shock and distress. No, she would bide her time, wait until Ginnie was free, and then break the news to her discreetly.

So she sat down at an adjacent table, ordered a coffee from Yianni (a Nescafe – she couldn't take that gravelly, sweet Greek stuff), and waited.

Mr Safari Suit went on at inordinate length, but eventually, unable to think of anything else to complain about, set off to take some photographs of Mrs Safari Suit against a background of fishing boats.

Mrs Pargeter moved across to the next table and Ginnie gave her the professional smile of someone who had just coped with one whingeing nit-picker and is fully prepared to face another. 'No major problem, I hope?' she asked breezily.

'Well, yes, I'm afraid there is. It's Joyce.'

'Oh dear. Still unwell, is she?'

'Rather worse than unwell, Ginnie. Joyce is dead.'

'What?' There was a fraction of a second's pause. 'Oh no. That's the holiday rep's nightmare. I've been lucky, I've never had one of my clients die on me before. Oh, how dreadful. What happened?'

It was what had happened in the pause after Ginnie had said 'What?' that interested Mrs Pargeter. There had been a grinding gear-change in the girl's reaction, and after that gear-change she had been back in control. She had responded with appropriate concern and, if that concern had been selfish rather than compassionate, it had still been the proper response of a professional faced with a professional problem.

But her first reaction, the one expressed in that almost breathless 'What?', had been one of naked fear.

The fear of someone who had just had her worst imaginings realised.