Who Saw Him Die? (2 page)

Whistling, he stepped into the shower cubicle and began to soap his body, enjoying the feel of rediscovered muscles under the thickets of greying hair. Soaped clean, he turned the shower to full volume and gasped with satisfaction as the water sluiced over him, running in streams down his strong, full thighs. Then. on an impulse of happiness, he inflated his lungs, flung back his head, and shouted his pleasure aloud. He had finally got rid of every trace of his former existence. At fifty-one years old, and thanks to his new wife Felicity, he felt that his life was just beginning.

Jack Goodrum knew enough now to acknowledge that for the past twenty-five years he had been a slob. For most of that time he'd been working so hard to build up his poultry products business that he hadn't cared what he looked like. Life had been nothing but work – hard physical, messy, smelly work – and fried meals and exhausted sleep. His only form of relaxation had been beer-drinking, and if that gave him – as it did – a sagging gut, what had that mattered?

Even when his business had prospered and expanded, he had taken no care of his appearance. He had the height to carry his weight, and his opinion at the time was that his size helped to establish him as a man to be reckoned with. He'd demanded rock-bottom prices from his suppliers, and as much work from his employees as from himself. To achieve these aims he had cultivated a loud voice, an aggressive manner and a menacing presence. He'd frightened the living daylights out of some of the cheating, idle bastards, but by God he'd got what he wanted out of'em!

By the time he'd finally made his pile, two years ago, by selling out to a national food manufacturer for a cool three-quarters of a million, it had seemed too late to bother about his appearance. Why should he? He was proud of being what he was, a self-made man. He had no hobbies other than propping up the bar of his local pub, in the village near Ipswich where he had lived all his life and had established his chicken-meat empire, and after his early retirement he began to do that for much of his time. The only difference in his habits was that he started buying drinks all round, to provide himself with companionship; and the fist that held his beer mug was newly bedecked with heavy gold rings.

But then he'd met Felicity Napier. That really was a piece of luck, the best thing that had happened to him in the whole of his life.

Towelling himself dry, revelling in cleanliness, he wondered with wry disgust what she'd thought of him at that first meeting. He must have stunk of beer – and probably of sweat, too, because in those days he'd thought himself clean if he wallowed in a bath and changed his underclothes once a week. It was still difficult to believe that a woman like Felicity could have entrusted herself and her teenage son to him with so little hesitation.

He'd asked her about it, as soon as they were safely married, but her answer had baffled him. ‘All I could see, when you came to our rescue,' she had said in her light, precise, middle-class voice, ‘was the shining armour.' Then she had added, by way of explanation: ‘Half a dozen cars had swished straight past us. You were the only driver who was kind enough to stop.'

It had been a filthy night, he remembered. The pub had just closed, and he was driving – as he always did, whatever the weather, because he was too fat and lazy to walk – the half-mile to his outlying home. He had seen ahead of him the flashing warning lights of a stationary car, and then his headlights had picked up two white, wet, scared faces …

‘'Course I stopped,' he had replied gallantly. ‘The minute I clapped eyes on you, I could see that you were special.'

‘Nonsense, you did it because you were kind. That was why I trusted you, Jack. No one but a truly kind man would have stopped in all that rain to help a bedraggled middle-aged woman and her great tall son. I felt secure with you. And when I blurted out my problem and you realised I had good reason to be panic-stricken, you took charge of us completely – even to the extent of driving us to a hotel and registering us in your own name, so that if my husband was following he wouldn't be able to find us. Then you had our car towed away and repaired, and you brought it to the hotel next day and stayed to enquire whether we were all right … I thought then that you were the kindest man I'd ever met in my whole life. I still think so.'

That had astonished Jack Goodrum when he heard it. He didn't believe in kindness. He'd always considered it a form of weakness, and he certainly hadn't made his fortune by showing
that
to anyone.

But he had been able to relax, since selling his business. There was no longer any need for him to hustle and be aggressive, and for that reason he'd felt he could afford to stop and help the stranded motorist. The reason
why
he'd stopped, though, was simply that he'd been in no hurry to return home. There was nothing to go home for.

It wasn't kindness that had taken him back to the hotel the next day, either. He'd felt sorry for Mrs Napier and her son, but he'd never before gone out of his way to help anyone. She wasn't even much of a looker – thin, pale, jumpy, her eyes smudged round with weariness and big with fright. But she'd fascinated him, all the same. What she had was something that Jack Goodrum admired above all else in a woman: class.

His first girl friend had had class too. Not by a long way the first he'd mucked about with, experimenting behind the hedges on the way home from village school on summer afternoons, but the first girl he'd badly wanted. For a long time she had held herself aloof … but then he'd caught her looking at him from under speculative virgin eyelids, and he'd known that he could have her if he made the right approach.

Eventually he'd manoeuvred her into a secluded spot, with her back to a tree. Hot and urgent, he'd pressed himself against her. But her look of desire had changed abruptly to one of disgust, and she'd pushed him away. ‘You smell!' she had said.

After that, Jack Goodrum had stuck to his own class of girl. He'd thought he had completely forgotten that early incident. But something about Mrs Napier – her voice, her behaviour – had drawn him strongly. And this time he intended to make no mistakes.

On the morning after he had rescued the fugitives he'd astonished his wife by taking a bath and demanding clean socks and a clean white shirt. He'd then put on a new, sharply tailored light grey suit that he had purchased to celebrate the sale of his business. Before presenting himself at the hotel where he had established Mrs Napier and her son, he had bought and used a mouthwash, and had his hair shampooed and blow-dried.

He'd still looked all wrong, he knew it now. That suit was the wrong colour, the wrong cloth, the wrong cut. His tie was gaudy, his gold rings were flashy, his sideburns were ridiculous. He must have ponged of aftershave. But thankfully, none of this had seemed to put Felicity Napier off when he'd asked if he could see her again; and over the next twelve months, with her help, he had transformed his whole appearance.

The pleasure that could be derived from being permanently clean had come to Jack Goodrum as a revelation. Now, there was nothing he enjoyed more after his morning shower than putting on clean boxer shorts (how could he ever have endured the grottiness of those sagging grey underpants that Doreen had provided for him?), a fresh shirt and socks, soft cord trousers, soft woollen sweater. He felt right, good, on top of the world at last.

It had taken a long time. Felicity's divorce had been very difficult, and his own hadn't been as simple as he'd expected. Then, though he had bought the old house in April with the intention of having it renovated so that they could move in as soon as they were free to marry, it hadn't been ready until early October. They had been married for three weeks before they were able to take up residence. And even then, when they finally moved into The Mount nearly a month ago, an unexpected problem – more accurately, a little local difficulty – had cropped up.

Perhaps the problem ought not to have been so unexpected. Perhaps he should have anticipated it, and taken the precaution of buying a house elsewhere. But Felicity had so much liked Breckham Market, when he had driven her through the town on one of their house-hunting expeditions, and had fallen so irreversibly in love with The Mount, that even if the difficulty had occurred to him at the time he wouldn't have had the heart to disappoint her.

It wasn't until after they had settled in that the problem had come to his notice. Perhaps he had let it worry him unnecessarily, but he saw it as a potential threat to his new-found happiness and he couldn't ignore it. His luck had held, though – as his dreary first wife had prophesied it would – and the problem had been resolved. Now everything
was
perfect.

Whistling triumphantly, Jack Goodrum hurried downstairs to join his beloved second wife in the breakfast room.

‘G'morning my dear.'

It had seemed odd to him at first to give a formal daily greeting to his wife when they'd been snuggled in bed together not half an hour before; but Felicity seemed to set store by it, and he loved and respected her so much that he would do anything to please her.

She looked up from the letter she was reading. ‘Good morning, Jack.'

She had a lovely smile, and happy eyes. Her new husband's chest expanded with pride as he saw the transformation he had brought about in her. When they'd first met her face was so deeply lined and her fair hair so prematurely grey that he'd assumed her to be his own age, or older. But that was what twenty years of marriage to that bastard Austin Napier – a gentleman born and bred, a London barrister, no less – had done to her. In fact she was just forty. And now that she had escaped from the man and had survived a bitterly contested divorce, her face had become almost miraculously smooth and untroubled.

She lifted it as Jack passed her chair. He bent to her and they kissed on the lips, frankly, almost like children, and yet with a tiny cross-current of sensuality that sent him to his own chair with a grin on his face. He sat down at the pretty breakfast table (sunshine coloured cloth, earthenware with a botanic garden design; a small bowl of late flowers from their own garden; and at his place a glass of fresh grapefruit juice, a rack of toast and a boiled egg) and unfolded his napkin. Felicity, as neat in her Liberty housecoat as she would be during the day in skirt and lambswool sweater, poured freshly ground, freshly made coffee. As she passed his cup, their eyes met. Smiling, they both shook their heads in mock bewilderment, dazzled by the good fortune that had brought them together.

For both of them their second marriage was a complete beginning again. Their courtship had been that of a shyly respectable Edwardian couple, with decorous friendship blossoming into affection. They had no expectation of love and no requirement of it, because neither of them had cause to set much store by that emotion.

Nor was there any sexual element in their relationship before they married. Felicity, who equated sex with indignity and pain, could hardly bear, in the early days of their marriage, to be touched. Jack had hoped for marital intimacy – his first wife had shut up shop after their second daughter was born, and he'd never had the time or spare energy for girl friends – but he wasn't sure whether he'd still be up to it. He didn't want the humiliation of trying with Felicity and failing; and he certainly didn't want to distress or hurt her.

But because their affection was genuine, they found that they enjoyed being close. When they set up home in The Mount they agreed to have separate bedrooms, but they soon discovered that there was comfort and reassurance in sharing a bed for at least part of the night. Gradually, Felicity learned to trust her new husband's embraces. Gradually, Jack learned to be considerate with his new wife. Together, they found the experience of sex more pleasurable than either of them had ever thought possible. They also found, on occasions when they chose to abstain, that an exchange of tenderness could be just as satisfactory, in its way, as conjugation; every bit as soporific, and even more conducive to love.

What finally brought them to the realisation that they had fallen in love was the fun they began to share in bed. Being playful and absurd was a new experience for both of them. Jack loved to make Felicity giggle. He considered it another achievement, all the more unexpected because, in company, she always looked and sounded so precise, almost prudish. The knowledge that when they were cosy together she could be both funny and sweetly silly endeared her to him completely. And because she could relax so unhesitatingly in his arms he knew without doubt – and with considerable pride – that his love was returned.

‘You seem particularly happy this morning, Mr Goodrum,' she observed as he began his breakfast.

He grinned at her. ‘I've got good reason to be, haven't I?'

‘
Apart
from that, I mean.' She looked at him with quizzical affection. ‘There's an air of relief about you, as though you've just sorted out some kind of problem. Have you?'

‘D'you wonder I'm relieved?' he parried. ‘It hasn't been comfortable, having the inquest on that drunk who fell in front of the Range Rover hanging over me. But we can forget about it now, thank God.' He gave his egg a casual thump with the back of his spoon, crushing the shell. The egg was cooked just as he liked it, the white firm, the yolk slightly runny. He dipped in a finger of toast – no butter, he was a reformed character now – and munched with contentment.

‘Yes, of course the accident's been a worry for you,' his wife agreed sympathetically, ‘even though everyone knows it wasn't your fault. But your problem went back further than that, didn't it? Something's been bothering you almost from the day we came here.'

He looked up from his egg, surprised and slightly on guard. He hadn't realised that she was so observant. ‘D'you reckon so?'

‘Oh yes.' Felicity smiled at him. ‘Feminine intuition,' she explained. ‘Or perhaps it's simply because I love you …'