A Lovely Day to Die (12 page)

“Listen,” she said, trying to speak quietly and control the quivering of her voice. “Listen, I don’t know who you are or why you’re calling me, but I think I ought to tell you that I’m—”

That I’m what? All on my own? Eighty-seven years old? Crippled with arthritis? About to call the police?

That would be a laugh! Anyone who has been an elderly spinster for as long as Emmeline Fosdyke knows well enough what to expect from officialdom if she complains of molestation. No, no policemen, thank you. Not any more. Not ever again.

But no matter. Her first few words seemed to have done the trick this time. With a tiny click the receiver at the other end was replaced softly, and Emmeline leaned back with a sigh of relief, even with a certain sense of pride in what she had accomplished. Funny how these sort of calls always came when you were least prepared for them—late at night, like this one, or even in the small hours, rousing you from your deepest sleep.

Like that awful time five years ago—or was it six?—when she’d been living all alone in that dark dismal flat off the Holloway Road. Even now she still trembled when she thought about that night, and how it might have ended. And then there was that other time, only a few years earlier, when she’d just moved into that bed-sitter in Wandsworth. There, too, the telephone had only recently been installed, just as it had been here …

Well, I
told
her, didn’t I? That prissy, know-it-all little chit of a welfare worker—no one can say that I didn’t warn her! I
told
her a telephone was dangerous, but of course she had to know better, she with her potty little three-year Training Course which she thinks qualifies her to be right about everything for evermore!

Training Course indeed!—as if life itself wasn’t a training course much tougher and more exacting than anything the Welfare could think up, if it sat on its bloody committees yakketty-yakking for a thousand years!

Nearly one o’clock now. Emmeline still had not dared to undress, or to make any of her usual preparations for the night. Even though it was more than half an hour since she’d hung up on her mysterious caller, she still could not relax. Of course, it was more than possible that nothing further would happen, that the wretched fellow had given up, turned his attentions elsewhere. Still, you couldn’t be sure. It was best to be prepared.

And so, her light switched off as an extra precaution, and a
blanket wrapped round her against the encroaching chill of the deepening night, Emmeline sat wide awake in the velvet darkness, waiting.

It was very quiet here in this great block of flats at this unaccustomed hour. Not a footstep, not a cough, not so much as the creaking of a door. Even the caretaker must be asleep by now, down in his boiler room in the depths of the building.

Emmeline had never been awake and listening at such an hour before. Her mind went back to earlier night calls when the sounds outside had grown sharper, louder. Did she hear them again?

Emmeline was trembling now, from head to foot. She’d never get out of it this time, never! Ten years ago—even five—she’d at least have been mobile, able to slip through a doorway, to get away from the house, and if necessary stay away for days, or even for weeks.

Not now, though. This time she would be helpless, a sitting duck. And as this thought went through her mind, she became aware, through the humming of her hearing aid, of a new sound, a sound quite distinct and unmistakable, the sharp click of the latch as her door handle was being quietly turned.

Softly, expertly, making no noise at all, Emmeline Fosdyke reached into the darkness for the long sharp carving knife that always lay in readiness.

*

It was a shame, really, having to do this to them, after having been so nice to them on the phone, after having given them her name and everything, and encouraging them to think that her tense husky whisper was the voice of a nervous young girl. It was a real shame; but then, what else could she do?

In the deep darkness, the unknown male lips coarse and urgent against her own, she would have her brief moment of glory, a strange miraculous moment when it really seemed that the anonymous, ill-smelling mackintosh of some stranger was indeed a khaki battle-dress of long ago; that the blind clutchings in the darkness were the tender caresses of her first love. For those few wild incredible seconds, in the meaningless grip of some greasy,
grunting stranger, she would be young again, in love again, under the poignant blueness of a wartime summer sky.

During those mad brief moments she could allow hard
masculine
fingers to fumble with her cardigan in the darkness, and with the buttons of her blouse, scrabbling their way nearer and nearer … A shame it was, a crying shame, that at exactly that moment, just before the eager questing fingers had discovered the sagging, empty loops of skin and had recoiled in horror—that was the moment when she had to stab the poor nameless fellow, if possible to the heart.

Had
to. It was self-defence. Even the law would have agreed about that, had the law ever caught up with her.

She’d
had
to do it—
had
to stab them all, swiftly and surely, before they’d had a chance to discover how old she was. And that she was no good.

A
T WHAT POINT
, exactly, did the embarrassment—the sheer, cringing embarrassment of the thing—change over into fear? And then the fear into outright terror, and the recognition of approaching tragedy?

Twisting the bedside lamp to a sharper angle, Agnes leaned closer, watching the uneasy twitching of her husband’s eyelids over his closed eyes. In the dim greenish light the lines appeared sharply etched in the face sunk against the pillows, and he looked suddenly, terrifyingly old. But of course illness—serious illness—can do that to a person, even within a few hours.

How many hours? Glancing at Lady Olivia’s bedside clock—for it was to their hostess’s bedroom that Bert had been carried, amid a muted turmoil of well-bred dismay, after his collapse at the dinner table just as the veal paupiettes were being served—glancing at the clock, Agnes noted, with a sort of slow incredulity, that it was still only a little after nine. Less than an hour had passed since Bert, glass of white wine still in his hand, had brought to a standstill in mid-sentence the amusing anecdote he had been relating to his neighbour, the local M.P.’s wife, and had quietly slewed sideways in his chair and come crashing to the floor, dragging with him a great swathe of shining linen tablecloth. With a dreadful clattering of Georgian china and priceless glass, he had subsided into a crumpled heap on the carpet, limbs twitching.

How
could
he? This (to her subsequent shame) had been her first and totally spontaneous reaction to the catastrophe. How
could
he!—and in front of all these important people, too! Lady Olivia’s antique dinner service, her precious glass! Fury, a whole raging, bottled-up decade of it, boiled up in Agnes during those
microseconds
of scandalized silence before the clamour began: the blinding, impotent fury of a wife whose husband has disgraced her,
has once again, and in the most public and unforgivable way possible, humiliated her—humiliated himself—in front of their friends.

No, not even friends. Friends, perhaps, could forgive these things, even within a week or two laugh at them. “Do you remember that awful night when old Bert ..?” But Lady Olivia and her entourage were
not
friends, not in this sense. They were too important to be friends, and too rich. All those smoothly successful men, those straight-backed women a-glitter with diamonds—they weren’t
friends,
but people whose favour must be sought, whose approval must be gained: tycoons, diplomats, television personalities. The catastrophe
could
not have been more awful.

Because, of course, they would all have assumed that Bert was drunk. Agnes herself assumed it. All those whiskies before dinner, and then those soft-footed waiters padding round the table filling her husband’s glass again and yet again …

Agnes knew his weakness, especially under stress. She had been watching every sip he took, counting every glass, ever since they’d arrived at the house. Even before they filed into the great dining room her nerves were already at snapping point on his account; and when at last the crash came, the ghastly glittering slither of silver and precious glass, she had found herself praying, before she could stop herself, Please, God, let him be dead! Please, God, let him not be merely drunk! To
die
at an elegant dinner table—that is socially forgivable. Anything less is not.

He wasn’t dead, of course; but nevertheless, everyone behaved beautifully, as of course they would in that kind of household. Without even a flicker of a glance toward her ruined dinner service or her smashed crystal goblets, Lady Olivia had calmed her guests, had had the victim carried solicitously and instantly upstairs to her own bedroom, and herself had telephoned the doctor.

“Suddenly taken ill,” was the phrase she used, in tones of ringing concern, clearly audible through the great dining room door; and neither by word nor by intonation had she given the
faintest indication of being aware that the patient had simply passed out.

Such is breeding. Slinking shamefacedly upstairs behind her disgraced and unconscious husband, Agnes could not but be vaguely grateful for it. Though she could scarcely breathe for shame at the thought of what Lady Olivia must really be thinking, it was a relief that she could be counted on not to say it.

Brandy? Dinner sent up for her on a tray? Even a cup of tea? Agnes shook her head to all these, still speechless with shame; and presently Lady Olivia, her duty by the two disgraced guests correctly, even graciously, performed, swept elegantly from the room.

What poise! What savoir faire! Crouched guiltily by her husband’s bedside, Agnes could not help feeling a stab of unwilling admiration. By now the mess would have been unobtrusively cleared up, and the dinner party would be in full swing again, with Lady Olivia effortlessly setting her guests at ease, passing it off as if this sort of thing happened every day.

Well, that’s aristocracy for you, Agnes reflected wryly. Bred into the bones it was, over hundreds of years, this unflappable presence of mind, this imperturbable façade in the teeth of absolutely anything. Poor Bert, with all his passionate social climbing, he would never make it, never. It took a thousand years; and Bert, at forty-three, had been at the job for barely ten.

And anyway, just look at him! Couldn’t even hold his liquor, let alone display these other, more regal forms of self-command!

And it was now, looking down at her husband’s still face in the green-shaded lamplight, that Agnes became conscious of her first qualm of fear.

Because this didn’t look like drunkenness—not the kind of drunkenness she’d grown used to over the years. Where were the hiccups, where was the heavy, stertorous breathing, the throwing-up over someone else’s carpet? The awful insufferable humiliations rose up out of the past—and suddenly they seemed like mere pinpricks in the context of this new and unfamiliar dread. She would have given anything now to see a return of the familiar,
disgusting symptoms; how willingly would she have rushed, at this very moment, in all the old familiar panic, for towel and basin to save Lady Olivia’s heirloom bedspread!

But there was no need. Not this time. Already he had gone beyond this sort of thing. In the greenish light she looked again at her husband’s face, and it appeared waxen, and very still. Even the twitching of the eyelids had ceased, and he lay as if dead, only the faint jerky rise and fall of the sheets showing that he was still breathing. Breathing too rapidly, too unevenly, as if his lungs and heart were already faltering in their rhythm.

She wished desperately that the doctor would come. Dare she make a fuss about it—ring the bell at the bedhead—bother someone? Was it
done
to ring for your hostess’s servants, even if someone was dying?

Turning the lamp away from Bert’s face, she leaned over and tried once again to rouse him.

“Bert!” she said, quite loudly, “Bert, wake up! It’s all right, everything is going to be all right, Lady Olivia isn’t angry, she—”

But it was no good. She shook him, spoke loudly into his ear but there was no drunken, inconsequential mumbling in response, no clumsy groping of half-conscious hands. The hand she held in hers was limp and cool, it reminded her of lilies. White lilies, and the proximity of death.

Death! How could such a thing be possible? Bert
dying
! Greedy, self-indulgent, go-getting
Bert?
Impossible! Death just wasn’t his thing.

When
would
the doctor arrive? An hour now since he’d been summoned—surely he’d have realised it was an emergency? A man of forty-three collapsing suddenly—why, it might be
any
thing.

Heart attack? Stroke? Raking through her sparse medical knowledge, Agnes tried to recall those last minutes before the catastrophe. Had Bert looked odd in any way? Ill? Had he been behaving strangely? Certainly, in the drawing room before dinner, he had looked nervous and agitated.

From her observation point at the far end of the room, Agnes had watched him arguing heatedly with a slim supercilious young man—a television star, as she learned later—and losing the argument. Not that she’d been able to hear from that distance what either of them was saying, but she could tell by the insolent set of Bert’s shoulders, by the arrogant gesture with which he thrust his empty glass at a passing waiter, that he had been worsted.

But not ill, no. Just at a disadvantage, out of his depth in this company, and too proud, as always, to admit it to himself.

And at dinner?—the abortive beginnings of dinner, that is, which were all that either he or she was destined to enjoy. From across the huge mahogany table she had watched him, with wifely anxiety, launching into conversation with Mrs Beltravers, wife of the Conservative M.P.; had watched him boasting, as usual; describing how he’d used his influence to quash the Council’s plans for a Remand Home just next to the Arts Centre—was he
sure,
Agnes remembered wondering, that this had been a Labour project and not a Conservative one? Not that it mattered, you could see from Mrs Beltravers’ glazed expression that the affairs of her husband’s constituency bored her into the ground.

And at least Bert was eating, Agnes remembered noting.
That’ll
settle all those whiskies, she had reflected with satisfaction, watching him polishing off a plate piled high with assorted hors d’oeuvres. Duck pâté, jellied oysters, prawn darioles—wasn’t it rather a faux pas, Agnes remembered wondering uneasily, to be eating the lot like this, as if he’d been starving for a week?

But now, sitting at his bedside in a growing turmoil of anxiety, Agnes had few thoughts to spare for the etiquette of the thing; ideas far more sinister were beginning to take possession of her.

Duck pâté! You could get food poisoning from duck pâté. And from shellfish, too. She’d heard of people collapsing like that, suddenly, from food poisoning, though of course it was more usual for the symptoms to appear after an hour or so. On the other hand, if it was food poisoning, you’d expect the other guests to be affected too. The chance that Bert alone …

Chance? It was only now that Agnes became clearly conscious of the direction in which her uneasy thoughts were leading. She felt herself gripped by a violent trembling; sweat broke out on her forehead and on the palms of her hands; her stomach seemed to be tying itself in knots within her.

Murder
!
Deliberately administered poison! A poisoned helping of pâté—or poisoned oysters? Poisoned
anything,
in fact, from that lavish table, groaning with exotic and unfamiliar foods. And Bert—poor, gullible Bert, who for all his social pretensions knew no better than she did how these weird things
ought
to taste—poor Bert (and she could sympathize with this, for she was the same) would have swallowed
anything,
no matter how bitter or
unpalatable,
rather than show his unfamiliarity with such delicacies.

And if someone, knowing him well, aware of his hidden social ineptitude, and of his pride, and choosing to take advantage of this knowledge—But
who
?
Who, of all this glittering throng, could be Bert’s enemy?

Most of them—that was the answer. A man like Bert, pushing his way ruthlessly to the top, thrusting aside everything and everyone that stands in his way—such a man is going to make enemies. Somewhere along the way, had he pushed too hard? Trampled too blindly over feelings of whose intensity he was unaware? Stirred up against himself a hornets’ nest of revenge and hate? Was this then, in the end, what Bert had earned for himself by all his struggles, all his social climbing, all his single-minded self-aggrandisement? Murder, death by poisoning?

The sheer horror of the thing seemed to take Agnes’s breath away. Her head swam, her heart pounded in her ears. The effrontery of it, too! The dreadful, cold-blooded simplicity of the method! A little pharmaceutical knowledge, a little insight into Bert’s vainglory and his precarious self-conceit, a few moments alone in the dining room, and the thing was in the bag. A verdict of accidental food poisoning would be a near-certainty.

*

Especially, of course, if
two
of the guests were known to have come down with it, one being lucky enough to have survived. As Agnes,
the blood pounding in her brain, slumped sideways in her chair and slipped unconscious to the floor, Bert slid swiftly from under the blankets and hurried to her side.

The carefully chosen green light already made her features look close to death, just as his had looked; but this time the illusion was fast becoming reality. For some minutes—maybe half an hour—he sat with his finger on her failing pulse, his ears intent on the harsh, uneven rattle of her breath. When both had finally ceased, he got to his feet and hurried quietly along the corridor to the head of the great curving staircase.

Peering, half hidden by shadows, over the oak banisters, he was able to watch Lady Olivia ushering her guests from the dining room into the great hall; and when she managed, unnoticed by anyone, to flash a swift glance up in his direction, he gave her the thumbs-up sign.

It had all gone off like a dream.