Blood Sinister (30 page)

At first it was an equal relationship. The three of them were drawn together, and took to hanging around and going out as a threesome. ‘At least, that’s what I believed,’ said Mrs Prentiss. So far, she had told her story in a dreamy undertone, as if it were the history of someone quite detached from her. But now a bitterness began to creep in. ‘I thought it was the three of us. But I see now it was always Phoebe. Always. Always. Right from the beginning.’

‘You mean – her and your husband?’ said Slider.

She nodded slowly, the now empty tumbler held in both hands before her face. ‘How could I compete with her?’

‘Weren’t they just friends? He said it was a purely platonic relationship.’

‘He told you that? What a
liar
he is! A man can’t be “just friends” with a woman. It doesn’t happen. I should know – God, I’ve lived with it all these years! All the Sophies and Stephanies and Carolines – all his secretaries and researchers and whatever else he liked to call them! Well, I put up with it. In a way, it didn’t matter, because he didn’t care a jot about them, the little sluts. But Phoebe – how could I bear that? It was different with her. He loved her.’

‘Have you any evidence that they had a physical relationship?’ Slider asked.

‘Evidence?’ She opened her eyes wide. ‘You should have
heard how he talked about her! He praised her to the skies. “Phoebe was so different – Phoebe understood – Phoebe had a real intellect.” Not like poor stupid Noni, oh no! And he was always ringing her. They’d talk for hours on the phone. He asked her opinion. They had lunch together. He was always dropping in on her. And you ask me if I had any evidence?’

‘It could still have been platonic—’

‘Men and women don’t have platonic relationships,’ she said flatly. ‘Not in the real world.’

There seemed no way of arguing with that. ‘But she was your friend too,’ Slider said.

‘We did everything together at college. And afterwards she was always there. She helped me, advised me. I trusted her – she always knew better than me what to do. She had a – a
grasp
of things. I’ve never been clever like Phoebe, but she said I had something more important, that I had talent.’ She rocked a little, mourning her friend. ‘She did everything for me, sorted out all my troubles. If it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t even have had Toby and Emma. Josh never wanted children – he hated his own father too much. But I wanted them so much. She told me just to stop taking the pill. I would never have dared. But she said he’d love the children once they were there, and of course he did. And when he found out what I’d done, she stopped him being angry with me. Took him away and talked to him and wouldn’t let him shout at me. She always loved Toby and Emma; and they loved her. They called her Aunty Phoebe. She used to pretend to tell them off about that, but she loved it really.’

She rocked harder, and the tears began to slip out. Slider kept very still, letting the story come.

‘Then when Emma went to school, it was Phoebe persuaded me to take up my career again, and made Josh use his contacts to get me on. He would never have bothered if she hadn’t nagged him. He never thought my career was important. But Phoebe believed in me. She said I could be great – and I
was
good, I was!’

She met Slider’s eyes in an appeal, and he nodded. ‘I know you were.’

She seemed appeased, and went on. ‘She always backed me up. When I got pregnant again and Josh wanted me to have an abortion because he said I was too old, she blew him up.
She said I must have the baby. She was always dead against abortion. She fought him tooth and nail and made him change his mind – anyway, made him leave me alone about it,’ she amended. ‘He was never really persuaded.’

‘Maybe he was worried about your health,’ Slider suggested.

She shrugged the intervention away. ‘She wanted that baby so much, almost as much as I did. When I lost it, it was her that cried. I couldn’t cry – it was all locked up inside me. But I couldn’t have got through if it wasn’t for her.’

She paused and wiped the tears from under her eyes with her fingers and, finding her nose was running too, rubbed it on the back of her hand – an unconscious reversion to the childhood state before appearances mattered, showing how far from her normal poise she had fallen in the crash of what had been her life.

‘It sounds as though she really was your friend,’ Slider said. ‘She must have loved you.’

Noni stared at him. ‘Yes, that’s what I thought. But I see now it was all an act. It’s only in the past few years I’ve started to realise what was really going on. Now I know what a fool I’ve been. She was playing me along, while she and Josh carried on behind my back. It was them all the time, the two of them, heads together, laughing at me. I was the outsider.’

‘But it was
you
he married,’ Slider said.

‘Yes, and how he regretted it!’ she cried bitterly. ‘He only married me because she’d gone away somewhere. The moment she came back he brought her home, and after that they started their game of making a fool of me.
That’s
the real reason she made me have the kids – to keep me out of the way. She was jealous and wanted him to herself. I didn’t see it at the time, but I see it now.’

‘But you said she really loved the children – and they her.’

‘Yes. She did. I suppose she couldn’t help it. Oh, I don’t know! Leave me alone, can’t you! She’s dead now, and it’s all over. It doesn’t matter any more. Nothing matters any more.’

She began to cry in earnest, putting her face into her hands. It was plain she was deeply confused about the situation; that she had loved her friend and even now, having convinced herself that there had been an affair going on, didn’t want to believe it.

Slider saw how the layers of emotion – of love and admiration,
of hurt and jealousy – had been confounded by a basic lack of understanding, an inability really to see what Phoebe Agnew had been about. A woman like her was so different from Noni that her motives must always have been a mystery. What you don’t understand, you can only interpret according to your own lights. So, there could be no friendship without sex between a man and a woman; and an unmarried Phoebe could only have been jealous of and therefore hostile towards Josh’s wife Noni. Add to that Noni’s emotional breakdown following the loss of a child and the failure of her career, and the comparison of that with Phoebe’s burgeoning success, and you had a seething cauldron of love and hatred that could easily spill over into action.

Probably it went all the way back to university, when Noni had wondered what clever Phoebe saw in her, and the seed of doubt was planted. Perhaps the soil was already fertile: didn’t they say that all actors were insecure? That they became actors to escape from themselves into personae that they could control? And then Phoebe had to go on from strength to strength, winning fame and awards, while Noni never made it to the top, and had only her marriage to comfort herself with. And even in that one poor sphere of achievement, all she had to hug to herself, it seemed Phoebe outshone her. Josh liked Phoebe better, praised her to his wife. Naturally the wife came to think that a philandering stud like Prentiss must be having an affair with her. So the stage had been set for the action in which Anona Regan was sure she could play the leading role with conviction.

The tears were subsiding now. Swilley had found a box of tissues on the dresser, which she put down before Mrs Prentiss, and mopping up was now taking place.

‘Tell me what happened on Thursday,’ Slider said.

The story came out painfully. Despite Joanna’s caustic comments, Josh Prentiss hadn’t been wrong about Noni’s being at a difficult age. She had started to have menopausal symptoms and was feeling unhappy, unloved and unattractive, especially as she and Josh had fallen into a pattern of hardly noticing each other. He was busy with his career, and she had nothing much to do, with the children gone, her own career in ruins, and her husband away from home more and more of the time.

But on Thursday he had said he would be home all day – he hadn’t mentioned his intention to go out in the evening – and
following the hallowed advice of women’s magazines through the ages, she had decided to try to make herself attractive to him. She began by taking an interest in his work and making bright conversation; but when he dismissed her rather testily, she had turned to plan B and concocted a delicious meal for him. It, or the wine that accompanied it, had done the trick, and she had been able to persuade him into bed, where they had engaged in the first sexual congress in many a long moon. So her chagrin and fury had been all the greater when he jumped out of bed and rushed away afterwards with what she thought was a lame excuse. She felt spurned.

Left alone, she had brooded on her wrongs and, as she had done more and more lately, blamed Phoebe for all of them.

‘So you went round to her flat. Oh, yes, I know that,’ Slider said. ‘You were seen going in. There’s no point in denying it.’

Mrs Prentiss sighed. ‘All right. I went to have it out with her,’ she agreed on a downward note.

‘You didn’t know your husband was going there that evening?’

‘He said he was going out on Government business. I knew that was a lie. I knew he was going to see a woman. But I didn’t think it was Phoebe. He never tried to hide it when he was going to see Phoebe – he just told me straight out.’

‘So what happened?’ Slider asked.

‘I walked round there, but when I got to the door I could hear voices inside. A man’s voice. She wasn’t alone.’

‘Did you recognise the voice?’

‘No, I couldn’t really hear well enough. I could just hear it was a man. So I—’ She paused for a long time, her eyes fixed on some internal horizon. ‘I gave it up and went home,’ she concluded feebly.

Slider leaned forward a little. ‘That’s not true,’ he said sternly. ‘I thought you were going to tell me the truth?’

‘I am,’ she said faintly.

‘You didn’t just go round there to talk to her, did you? You wouldn’t have needed the key for that.’

‘The key?’

‘The key to Phoebe Agnew’s flat.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said, but she was looking at him now. She seemed appalled and fascinated at the same time.

‘You took the key to her flat, which she had given your husband long ago, and which hung on the rack alongside those to your children’s flats. Did that seem like an insult to you? Anyway, you took the key so that you could slip in without her hearing. And what else did you take with you? A pair of tights, was it?’

Noni’s lips moved, but no sound came from them.

‘Phoebe never wore tights, did she? She
always
wore trousers, so the odds were she didn’t even possess a pair. Anyway, you could hardly have taken time out to search for them when you got there, so you took your own. You knew she’d been drinking heavily recently, and you thought that with luck she’d be pretty well out of it by half past eight, so if you let yourself in you could creep up on her and get something round her throat before she knew you were there.’

‘I wouldn’t really have done it,’ Noni whispered, her face drawn with horror. ‘You can’t, can you? Not how ever angry you are, you can’t kill a person – not unless you’re mad.’

‘But you were mad,’ said Slider. ‘Mad with jealousy. This woman who had been your friend had outshone you all your life, and now you thought she’d stolen your husband from you. So killing Phoebe Agnew wasn’t enough. You wanted to punish your husband as well – your husband who had made love to you that afternoon, and then left you to go to his other woman. You had to kill her, and make it look as though he had done it. You had to make it
absolutely certain
that he would be charged with the murder. When did you hatch your monstrous plot, Mrs Prentiss? And how did you get hold of the condom full of your husband’s semen?’

Mrs Prentiss stared at Slider as if he were the hangman approaching with the noose. ‘I didn’t—’

‘And then, when we came to question you, to make absolutely sure we’d suspect him, you told lies about where he was, so that when we found out they were lies we’d think you were trying to protect him. Everything you said to us, that sounded so innocent, was meant to incriminate him. A very long game you’ve been playing, Mrs Prentiss, and it almost worked. But you were careless. You left your fingerprints behind. We’ve found your fingerprints – in a flat you say you’ve never been in.’

She went cheese-coloured and doubled up, and Swilley came
round the table to take hold of her neck and push her head down between her knees. ‘Take it easy. Don’t try to sit up. Breathe slowly and deeply – that’s right.’

When she had recovered enough to speak, she said falteringly, ‘You’re wrong, so wrong—’

‘I don’t think so. That’s how you hurt your back, shifting her body to the bed. You had no old back injury. And you told your husband you’d slipped down the stairs.’

‘That’s true, I did say that. But I didn’t kill her! Listen,’ she said desperately, ‘and I’ll tell you.’

It was like a madness that had taken hold of her, she said. When Josh got out of bed, saying he was going out, she had felt as though he had slapped her face. After making love as they had, she had thought he would spend the evening with her. She asked where he was going, and he said it was Government business. She screamed that that was a lie, he was going to see some woman. He lost his temper and yelled back. Then, apparently realising that arguing was only slowing him down, he calmed down and repeated that it was Government business, and added that the only woman he ever saw apart from her was her best friend Phoebe. Presumably he thought that would allay her jealous fears. Instead it had convinced her that Phoebe was at the bottom of all her troubles.