Crime Writers and Other Animals (19 page)

‘Perhaps if he'd betrayed you . . .?' Bury hazarded casually.

‘But he did not betray me.'

‘When he went to Paris two months ago, he went to bed with another woman.'

‘What, with his wife? All right, maybe the hotel only had double beds. But, even in your peculiar, anaemic language, “going to bed with” does not mean the same as “making love to”!'

‘Ralph Rudgwick
made love to
a woman he met in the hotel.'

For the first time, Gina Luccarini looked pale, paler even than the translucent Jane Rudgwick. ‘I don't believe you. His wife was there, for God's sake!'

Bury shook his head. ‘His wife was not there. He told you his wife would be with him, but there was never any question of her going.'

‘But it was supposed to be our wonderful, romantic time together. You are talking nonsense. Why would he tell me his wife was going with him and so I could not go?'

‘Perhaps because he had already made arrangements to meet this other woman in the hotel . . .?'

It took a moment for the implications of this to sink in, before the fury seized her. Her hands clawed at the bright print artfully draped over the arm of her chair, tearing through the thin fabric.

‘No,' she moaned. ‘No . . .'

Detective Inspector Bury pressed home his advantage. ‘And I think – in spite of this wonderful acting performance you're giving me at the moment – you knew that. I think that's why you killed him. Ralph Rudgwick was very vain, proud of his conquests. And he made the mistake of telling you about the latest one. That's what signed his death warrant.'

He found himself echoing Jacob Keynes' words. ‘You could cope with the idea of him with his wife, but the thought of Ralph Rudgwick cheating on you with another woman – that you couldn't tolerate. It reduced you to the level of just another in a sequence of purely physical relationships, another pick-up, another easy lay. And your pride wouldn't allow him to get away with that.'

She shook her head in a terrified, mesmerized way. Her full lips still shaped the word ‘No', but no sound emerged from them.

At that moment the Detective Sergeant appeared, beaming and cocky, in the doorway. In his hand was a dripping polythene bag, whose contents could be clearly seen.

‘Taped on to the inside of the lavatory cistern, Inspector,' he announced. ‘Oldest trick in the book.'

Gina Luccarini looked at the pistol and continued to mouth silently and helplessly. She no longer looked beautiful or sexy. She looked like a beached fish.

And the sweat of terror had soured the aroma of her expensive perfume.

Jane Rudgwick stood in the pale pink bathroom of the house in Henley and looked at herself in the mirror. She had taken off her glasses and her pale blue eyes looked clear and sparkling. The previous day they had been puffy and red, but a long night's sleep had healed them.

She found, after all the traumas of the previous weeks, she was finally beginning to relax.

The knowledge that Gina Luccarini was in prison, awaiting trial for the murder of Ralph Rudgwick, contributed significantly to Jane's feeling of security.

It hadn't really been so hard. All marriages are unknowable – that was the single fact that had made the whole thing possible.

The man who tells his mistress that his home life is terrible, that his wife is frigid and refuses to give him a divorce, is a stereotype of modern life.

As is the devoted wife at home, blithely unquestioning of her husband's fidelity, the little woman who is, in obedience to tradition, ‘the last to know.'

All Jane Rudgwick had had to do was to play variations on those stereotypes.

The outline of her plan had been formed from the moment she found out about Ralph and Gina's relationship.

She had known about the other women, of course, but they had not worried her. Ralph had only gone with them for sex, an activity for which Jane had no feeling except a mild revulsion. The other women had at least deterred him from attempts to offload his restless libido on to her (though pretty early into their marriage he had given up any attempts in that direction). And the squalor of his furtive couplings had given Jane further ammunition with which to vilify her husband when she felt the need.

Because, of course, she had always been in control. Her money, and the threat of her withdrawing it from the Keynes Rudgwick Gallery, had always ensured that.

At one stage, when Ralph had been fulminating particularly violently against the trap in which she had incarcerated him, she had briefly worried that he might resort to murder to resolve the situation.

But she soon realized that he never would. Ralph Rudgwick didn't have that kind of strength in him.

Unlike his wife.

From the moment Gina Luccarini appeared on her husband's scene, Jane Rudgwick knew that she was different from the other women. This time there was more than sex involved.

And, instead of his customary shabby duplicities, this time he made no attempt to keep the relationship a secret from Jane. He told her everything about it, calmly announced that he wanted a divorce and, when she refused him that option, spoke seriously of getting out of the Keynes Rudgwick Gallery and trying something else.

It was this that had made Jane determined to teach him a lesson. Sexual jealousy was an alien concept to her, but she did deeply resent the idea of her husband finding happiness with someone else.

She decided that it was not just Ralph who should be taught a lesson. The woman who had had the effrontery to engage her husband's love should share in the punishment that Jane was preparing for him.

The idea of killing Ralph and having Gina convicted for the crime was so blissfully tidy that Jane Rudgwick hugged herself for days after she had thought of it.

The details were simple. It was really round the time of the Paris trip that the plan had crystallized. Jane knew her husband was intending to take his mistress on the jaunt, and she just had to choose her moment to announce that she herself wished to go. Ralph had remonstrated, but knew too well how Jane could make his proposed idyll a misery, so quickly caved in and put Gina off.

Jane had waited till they were actually at the airport before changing her mind. She knew by then it was too late for Ralph to salvage his previous arrangement with Gina.

Borrowing her husband's keys and getting Gina's copied had presented no problem. Nor had a trip to Notting Hill Gate on a day when she knew Gina to be out of town. A search of the flat had quickly revealed Miss Luccarini's tastes in tissues and perfume, as well as allowing Jane to reconnoitre a suitable hiding place for the pistol when the appropriate moment came.

All that was required then was a fortnight of bullying, blackmail and generally bad behaviour in the run-up to Gina's departure for Rome. The only risk at that stage had been that Jane really would frighten her husband off, make him act on his oft-spoken intention to cut loose and move in with his mistress.

But Jane Rudgwick knew the man's fundamental weakness, and her judgement of his character had proved to be correct. He had fretted and whinged, but stayed around.

Getting him to invite Gina to Henley had been a potential problem, but in the event easily negotiated. It was the threat of Jane not going on her water-colour course and thus preventing him from seeing his mistress at all before her departure for Rome that had clinched it.

Suddenly, mid-afternoon on the Friday, Jane had announced that yes, she felt better and she
was
going on the course, but she was worried about what Ralph might get up to in her absence, so she would stop every hour or so to phone and check up on him.

A man with any real character would have ignored this, but Ralph was very weak. He still hoped to find some solution to his situation that would combine having Gina with retaining his position in the Keynes Rudgwick Gallery set-up. For that reason he wanted to keep Jane sweet (or at least as sweet as she ever got).

So his only way out had been to do as he had done for most of his married life, and go along with what his wife said.

Jane had timed the announcement that she really was going to the Lake District very carefully. Her rival, she knew, tended to go out to a gym every afternoon between half-past three and five. By choosing quarter-past three as the moment to unleash her decision, Jane was certain that Ralph would try to contact Gina as soon as possible to let her know the change of plan.

She had waited outside his study door until she heard him leave the inevitable message.

Then all she had to do was to tell him to go upstairs to fetch her bag and, once he was in the bedroom, shoot him with his own gun.

That was the bit she had really enjoyed. Three wonderfully satisfying tugs at the trigger. And, on her husband's face, a very rewarding expression of surprise giving way, first to terror, and then to oblivion.

She had wiped the gun on some of Gina's tissues, already impregnated with the artist's perfume, and thrown them into the bathroom waste-bin.

She had turned up the thermostat in the bedroom, having read somewhere that an overheated environment could make it more difficult to establish the exact time of a corpse's death.

Then she had driven up to Notting Hill Gate. She had time. The difference between the journey to the Lake District by the back routes she said she was using and the motorways she really intended to use was considerable.

She watched her rival leave the apartment block on the abortive journey to Henley, slipped inside the flat, planted the murder weapon in the cistern, and then set off in her car for the motorways leading north.

A pleasant weekend's water-colouring, and back to Henley on the Sunday evening.

Yes, thought Jane Rudgwick, it really has all been very satisfactory.

Soon I'll be able to relax completely. But not quite yet. Still have to keep up the appearance of the grieving widow. You never know who might be watching.

So Jane Rudgwick picked up her atomizer of cheap scent and, bracing herself for the pain, once again sprayed it into her open eyes.

I didn't invite her to the office. When your office is your bedroom you play these things a bit tactfully. Last thing you want to do is frighten a client off and, though I'm not one of them, there are a lot of funny people about. I don't know that there are actually more of them in Brighton than anywhere else, but it often seems that way. Maybe it's an occupational hazard. My line of work means, almost by definition, the only ones I meet are the misfits. The lonely. The sad. And loneliness and sadness can so quickly sour into something nastier.

Or maybe I am drawn to them on the old ‘birds of a feather' principle. My former wife certainly said as much towards the end, as our marriage spiralled down into insult and recrimination. She said a lot more, too, in those last sick days when every statement of hers was a loaded grenade from which every response of mine seemed to take out the pin.

Anyway, she's long gone and I'm still in Brighton, still no doubt demonstrating all those negative attributes she catalogued with such relish. Mooching around what the estate agent called a ‘studio flat', but what ten years ago would have been called a ‘bedsitter', and what I now have the nerve to call an ‘office'. When there are no jobs you're qualified for, why not stick a shingle on the door and set up on your own?

Perhaps I disqualified myself from other work. Getting busted for drugs didn't help. I started on that after my wife walked out. Stupid, stupid, I know, but at least I did manage to crack it in the end. Not before the police had found the stuff on me, unfortunately. And prison records aren't exactly assets in these days of mass unemployment.

I sometimes think, having got off the drugs, I could get off the vodka too. I will, one day. But I don't feel quite strong enough yet.

So, anyway, as I say, I had to set up on my own. Can't lose, really. Even if you don't get any business at all, you're no worse off than you were.

Anyway, I do get occasional business. Sad people who think a little information will at least explain their sadness. Frightened people who feel reassured by the illusion of protection. Cowardly or fastidious people who want someone else to perform unpalatable services. Even dying people who think they've still got time to tie up the loose ends.

Some I can help. Some know even when they contact me that they're beyond help. I close my mind to their circumstances and send bills to all of them. They all pay, except for the one or two who don't survive. I disapprove of sending bills to the recently bereaved.

And the trickle of money that comes in helps to keep me in the manner to which I have accustomed myself: ‘the office', with its bed, its table, its two chairs, the clothes chest, the vodka-bottle cupboard, the shower, the sink, the microwave and – its one good feature – the long window that ignores the terracing of roofs beneath it and looks straight out to the shifting edge of the gunmetal sea.

I don't actually have a shingle on the door. People tend to come to me by word of mouth. I'm not in
Yellow Pages
, either. But I suppose, if I were, my name, B. Cotter, would be listed under ‘Detective Agencies'.

She edged into the pub, as tentative as a kitten testing a duvet for landmines. My first impression was that she was attractive. She recognized me from the description I'd given her, but with some surprise.

‘I didn't really believe it when you said your hair was bleached.' She perched a neat but cautious buttock on the chair opposite me.

‘Why not?'

‘Well, for a detective . . . I mean, I'd have thought a detective should melt into the background. Bleached hair does kind of stand out.'

‘You mean I don't look like your idea of a detective?'

‘No. Not at all.'

‘Seems to answer your objection. Doesn't matter how much I stand out, so long as no one thinks I look like a detective.'