Crime Writers and Other Animals (3 page)

‘Why're the letters torn?' asked Trevor.

‘God knows. He probably started to get rid of them, but then couldn't bring himself to
lose any souvenir of me
.' She made the last five words heavy with irony, then quickly reverted to the businesslike. ‘Right, the tumble-drier hose is in a plastic bag in the hall. You fix that and then come back for him – OK? Got some gloves, have you?'

Trevor nodded, pulled a pair of gardening gloves from his pocket and put them on as he left the room.

He was back within five minutes and bent to hoist up George's snoring body. ‘No, we'll do it together,' said Natalie, also putting on gloves and picking up a rubber-covered torch. ‘You take one arm, I'll take the other.'

George half woke and mumbled something incoherent as the lovers lifted him out of his chair. His legs even helped them in a loose-limbed shuffle as they guided him out into the frosty darkness. But he didn't regain consciousness.

Trevor had left the door of the detached garage open. The Volvo was in place. With surprising ease, they manhandled George into the driver's seat, where he slumped sideways against the headrest. He grunted a little as he settled, but still did not wake.

Natalie handed the torch to Trevor. ‘I'll just go and get the note and the bottles,' she whispered.

While she was gone, Trevor ran the torch beam along the passenger side of the car to check his handiwork. One end of the tumble-drier hose was firmly attached with insulating tape to the exhaust pipe. The other end led into the car, clamped in place by the nearly closed passenger-side front window.

Natalie returned and reached unsentimentally across her husband's body to place the near-empty bottles of brandy and sleeping draught on the seat beside him. Then she drew a folded sheet of paper from her pocket.

‘What does it say?' asked Trevor.

She opened the letter and held it up to the torch beam for Trevor to read.

TO WHOEVER FINDS ME – and I hope it's you, Natalie. And I hope what you find will really hurt you, when you see what your cruelty has driven me to. I love you. I've always loved you, and the thought of you with someone else is more than I can bear. I'm killing myself the same way that your first husband did – and that's deliberate. It's meant to hurt you – to make you realize what an unfeeling bitch you are. I hope the rest of your life is really miserable. I'm glad to be out of it.

Trevor looked up as he finished reading. ‘Pity it's not signed.'

‘I thought of pretending it was an insurance document or something and getting him to sign, but it wasn't worth the risk. And the police'd spot it if I tried to forge his signature.'

Trevor nodded. He looked suddenly awkward, young and frightened. ‘So . . . now . . . do we . . .?'

‘Yes,' Natalie replied firmly. She reached a gloved hand into her pocket and took out George's bunch of keys. Briskly, she put one into the ignition and turned it. The engine fired first time.

‘How long're you going to wait till you discover him?' asked Trevor.

‘Till the morning.' Natalie slammed the car door, led Trevor out of the garage and closed its doors behind them.

He was trembling in the cold air as Natalie put her arms around him. ‘When did you say the kids get back?'

‘Nine,' he gulped. ‘Round nine.'

‘Good.'

‘I'll have to be back then. They'll be very excited. Got to do my full Santa routine.'

‘Eat the mince pie and drink the brandy they leave out for him?'

‘That's it.'

‘What about the carrot for the reindeer – you don't eat that too, do you?'

‘Bin it. Have to be careful it's nowhere they might find it, mind. Spoil the whole boring charade, that would.'

Though his words were light, Trevor was still quivering with shock. Natalie pressed her body against him, and felt his infallible lust begin to replace the fear. ‘Come to bed. I've got some sexy new undies to show you.' She chuckled throatily as she remembered something. ‘But first – go and put on your Father Christmas costume.'

The dressing-up and the bond of their shared guilt brought their sexual pleasure to new heights. When Trevor slipped away at ten to nine, Natalie glowed with fulfilment, and with the knowledge that nothing could now stand in the way of their happiness. She slept surprisingly peacefully and deeply.

At eight o'clock the next morning, anyone who happened to be passing would have seen Natalie Marshall go out of her front door and cross to the garage as if to get the car out. They would have heard her catch her breath as she opened the garage doors, seen her dart in with a hand over her mouth to switch off the Volvo's engine. They would have heard a scream as she identified her husband's slumped body, and seen her rush in panic back into the house.

In fact, there was no one there to witness these events, but Natalie knew how important it was to go through the whole scenario correctly. And she knew how important it was to get the right note of shock and hurt into her voice when she rang the police to tell them that her husband was dead.

Detective Inspector Jeavons looked across at the woman sobbing on the sofa in the cottage's expensively furnished sitting room. ‘And had he ever spoken about taking his own life?'

Natalie Marshall, giving the performance of her life, nodded in anguish. ‘Yes, I'm afraid he had. Particularly recently. Oh God, I feel so terrible about it.'

‘It's only to be expected, Mrs Marshall. Must be an awful shock for you.'

‘He meant it to hurt me, you know. Doing it right on my doorstep, right here.'

‘I wouldn't know about that,' said the Inspector, stodgily. He paused. ‘When you went into the garage this morning, Mrs Marshall, you didn't make any attempt to revive your husband . . .?'

‘No. He was obviously dead. And I couldn't stay in there – the whole place was full of fumes. Goodness knows how long he'd had the car running.'

‘I assume you didn't hear it being switched on or anything?'

She shook her head decisively. ‘You can't hear what's happening in the garage from inside the house. It could have been any time.'

‘Well, the police surgeon'll be examining the body now. And my other colleagues'll be checking out the garage. We'll know more details soon.' The Inspector selected his next words with delicacy. ‘Do you feel able to tell me why your husband might have wanted to kill himself?'

‘Jealousy, I'm afraid – and despair. Our relationship was over. I'd fallen in love with someone else. He just couldn't come to terms with that.'

‘No.' The Inspector nodded sympathetically and was about to say something else when he heard the front door open. ‘Ah, be the forensic people, I imagine.'

They both looked towards the sitting-room door. It opened, and, with a breezy ‘Happy Christmas, darling!', in walked George Marshall.

All the colour drained from his wife's face. The rawness around her eyes, once again created by applications of soapy water, showed stark red in the white mask. ‘George . . .' she murmured in disbelief. ‘George . . .'

Her husband looked quizzically at their visitor. ‘Don't believe I've had the pleasure . . .'

The policeman reached out a formal hand. ‘Detective Inspector Jeavons.'

‘Oh yes? Some problem? Been a burglary locally, has there? I don't know, you'd think they'd have the decency to spare people over Christmas,' George burbled on, ‘but then nobody seems to have any values in this country any more. In the old days—'

‘Excuse me,' the Inspector interposed, ‘but who are you?'

‘What, you don't know? Sorry, I'm George Marshall.'

‘This lady's husband?'

‘Yes, that's right.' The little man looked puzzled by the detective's incredulous reaction. ‘What's the matter?'

‘Mrs Marshall telephoned us this morning saying that you'd committed suicide in your garage.'

It was George's turn to look incredulous. ‘
What
?'

‘Your wife said you'd attached a tumble-drier hose to the exhaust of your car and switched on the ignition.'

‘Good heavens! She must have been getting confused. That's how her first husband killed himself.'

‘Oh, really?' said Inspector Jeavons, with a hint of a raised eyebrow.

‘But why on earth am I supposed to have committed suicide?' asked George in amazement.

‘Mrs Marshall said that you were in despair over her having taken another lover.'

‘Well, I was pretty cut up about it, yes, at the start, but that's all forgotten now. Natalie and I are back together again.
And how
– after last night!' He managed to imbue his last words with unambiguous salaciousness, which he then amplified. ‘Goodness, did she make me welcome – exotic lingerie, stiletto heels, the full number. It certainly felt like Christmas for me! Christmas and my birthday rolled into one!'

He chuckled, then, for the first time since he'd come into the room, looked directly at his wife. He could see how quickly Natalie's mind was working, as she tried to produce the right reaction to her new circumstances. Any denial of what George was saying was likely to raise awkward questions from Inspector Jeavons about what had really happened the night before. For the time being, shocked silence remained her best policy.

‘So you are saying, Mr Marshall, that you spent last night here with your wife?'

‘Yes. Sleeping in the same bed. Well, not sleeping
all
the time,' George added, with another vocal nudge.

Inspector Jeavons turned a stern gaze on Natalie. ‘So, Mrs Marshall, have you been wasting police time? Did you make up this story of finding a body in your garage?'

She opened her mouth as if to reply, but then hesitated, uncertain which way to jump.

‘So you haven't seen the supposed body, Inspector?' asked George.

‘No, I came straight in here to talk to Mrs Marshall. My colleagues went to examine the garage.'

‘You'd've thought they'd've come straight back out again if they hadn't found anything in there . . . wouldn't you?' George observed casually.

It took a moment for the implications of his words to sink in, and the point registered more quickly with Natalie than with the Inspector.

‘Oh no!' she screamed, rising to her feet. ‘Oh, my God, no!'

And, moving like a thing possessed, she rushed out of the cottage to the garage.

The police had taken Trevor's body out of the car and laid it on a sheet of plastic on the cement floor. Incongruously, he was dressed in his Father Christmas suit. His dead face was hideously congested and contorted.

Natalie threw herself down on the ground, taking the stiff, cold body in her arms. Sobs shuddered through her frame. ‘The bastard!' she muttered. ‘The heartless, cruel bastard!'

The Scene of Crime team continued their investigations outside the cottage. A WPC comforted Natalie Marshall with sweet tea and sympathy in the kitchen, while in the sitting room Inspector Jeavons questioned her husband for background information about Trevor Roache's death. George didn't need any prompting; he was anxious to be as helpful as he could.

‘Trevor was Natalie's lover, yes. He was the one we split up over. I suppose knowing we were back together again and that he had no more chance with Natalie must have made him do this dreadful thing.'

‘Did he strike you as a potentially suicidal type?'

‘I didn't know him well – only met him a couple of times when he came here to do building work for us – but Natalie was clearly worried that he might do something like this.'

‘What makes you say that, Mr Marshall?'

‘She said as much in a message she left on my answering machine yesterday morning.'

‘Oh? Presumably that message would have been erased by now?'

‘Well . . .' George Marshall looked sheepish. ‘In normal circumstances it would have been, yes, but the fact is . . . As you know, our marriage wasn't going very well, and I did actually get to the point of consulting a solicitor about the possibility of divorce. He advised me to try and get some recordings of conversations with Natalie about Trevor and . . . well, her phone message more or less fitted the bill, so I – it seems ridiculous now Natalie and I are back together again – but I did actually take the tape out of the answering machine and put in a new one.'

‘You wouldn't by any chance have that tape with you, Mr Marshall?'

‘Well, as it happens . . .' George reached down to his briefcase and produced the tape and a small cassette player.

The Inspector listened to Natalie's message impassively, though his eyebrow twitched at the words, ‘
My affair with Trevor's come to an end. And he's . . . taking it very
badly. I'm . . . I'm really worried about what he might do, George.'

When the message had ended, George Marshall said rather diffidently, ‘Actually, there is another tape . . .'

‘Oh?'

‘Well, when Natalie summoned me down here last night, I thought we were in for some kind of confrontation, so I followed my solicitor's advice and . . . using this cassette player hidden in my briefcase . . . actually recorded a bit of our conversation . . .'

‘You'd better play it,' said Inspector Jeavons quietly.

Again the detective tried not to show any reaction, but was unable to suppress a flicker of interest when George's voice asked, ‘
So you're genuinely afraid he might try to kill himself
?', to which Natalie replied, ‘
I hope not. I hope the thought of his two little kids'll stop him, but . . . yes, I have worried about it. He's very unstable
.'

‘So . . .' the Inspector said when the recording ended, ‘it does begin to look as if the victim was predisposed to suicide . . . particularly when your evidence is taken in conjunction with the letters we found in his pocket . . .'