This Way Out (27 page)

She said it with some pride, and Christine nodded again. The events of the weekend had conjoined into one hideous blur, but she could vaguely associate the name with a large man who had spoken to her at one point. ‘Yes, I remember him. He was very kind –'

But then, everyone had been very kind. She had been swamped with kindness ever since her mother's death, and she found that this was one of the hardest things to bear.

Christine knew that she didn't deserve such kindness. She felt an impostor. How could people – not only friends and neighbours, but the police as well – freely bestow so much kindness on her when she, Enid Long's only child, had been so unkind to her own mother? Unkind even on the day of Enid's death, when she'd been so angry with her mother for refusing even to look at her Southwold flat that they had travelled back to Wyveling in furious silence. So unkind that she had allowed her mother to go off to bed without attempting to make amends, or even wishing her good-night.

It was a terrible thing, to have parted for ever in such petty anger. Christine didn't know how she was going to live with it. She had already been racked by guilt on two occasions, but each time she had been able to take some positive action: first by devoting herself to Laurie's upbringing, then by taking her mother into her home. But what could she do now? Her life had suddenly been emptied of all purpose.

She had her husband, of course, but Derek wasn't dependent on her. He was perfectly capable of looking after himself. Dear Derek – he was such a good husband and he'd done his best to help her through this crisis, but he simply couldn't understand her relationship with her mother. He seemed to think she didn't care – though to be fair to him, it was only now her mother was dead that Christine herself had come to realize just how much she cared. And now it was too late to say so.

That was why she'd had to part company with Derek, temporarily: because he couldn't begin to understand her shock and grief and remorse. She knew she had hurt him, and she was sorry; she'd tried to explain that this was nothing to do with him, but he didn't seem able to take it in, and she couldn't go on explaining. At least he'd got his work to keep him busy, just for two or three weeks while she went to Derbyshire to sort herself out away from all this terrible local kindness. She had told her friend Trish that her mother had recently died, but she certainly didn't intend to reveal to her how it had happened.

‘Mrs Cartwright, dear!'

Molly Quantrill, her soft brown eyes brimming with sympathy, was calling her for her appointment. ‘Dr Rogers will see you now.'

Christine was sorry that it was Dr Rogers, her least favourite among the partners. It was he who had first examined her after Derek had felt the lump in her breast. Dr Rogers had always been most reassuring, but he was what her medical-student daughter Lyn spoke of scathingly as a paternalistic male doctor. He didn't encourage his patients to express their views, and Christine had never felt able to talk to him. Besides, she disliked his bristling eyebrows and unhygienic moustache.

He too greeted her with kindness, and offered his sympathy on her bereavement. He enquired after her general health, took her temperature and pulse, listened to her lop-sided chest, asked her a number of specific questions, and told her that she seemed to be in satisfactory physical health after her treatment. But when Christine said that she proposed to drive to Derbyshire on Sunday for a holiday, he vetoed it sternly.

A holiday, certainly, he agreed; but it was much too soon after her mother's tragic death for her to go careering off on her own. She had been badly shocked, and shocks like that took a long time to get over. Couldn't her husband take her? Well, if he was too busy at the moment, why not wait until he could spare the time? Much the best thing for her to stay quietly at home and give herself a chance to recover.

Christine said nothing. What was the point? As long as her health was satisfactory, she intended to go to Derbyshire as planned. She would be sensible about it, taking the drive slowly and making frequent breaks; all she really needed from Dr Rogers was a repeat prescription for the tablets she had had to take since her treatment ended.

As he wrote out the prescription, Christine remembered that she still had in her handbag a letter addressed to the practice.

‘My husband will be coming in tomorrow to have some stitches taken out,' she said. ‘He cut his hand rather badly on Saturday night, and some friends took him to the hospital casualty department. The doctor who stitched him up gave me this letter for you.'

Dr Rogers opened the envelope and glanced at the scrawled note it contained. Christine, standing and buttoning her coat, saw that he was frowning. ‘Er – sit down, please, Mrs Cartwright,' he said abstractedly, reading the note again and gnawing at his moustache.

Christine sat down, puzzled, while the doctor read it a third time.

‘I don't believe I've met your husband,' he said.

‘Probably not. He's one of those lucky people who're never ill.'

‘Is he a worrier? Any business problems, would you say?'

Well, of course Derek was a worrier. Why else would he have those bad dreams that woke him, twitching and sweating and whimpering, night after night? But she wasn't going to tell Dr Rogers that.

‘My husband has a responsible job, and I've no doubt he does have the occasional worry. Why do you ask?'

‘And what about your personal relationship?'

Their personal relationship was most certainly not a subject that Christine wanted to discuss with Dr Rogers. ‘What about it?' she replied civilly.

‘Mrs Cartwright –' said the doctor slowly, swivelling in his chair. He was so clearly searching for words that Christine began to feel alarmed. ‘There are some people who find it almost impossible to talk about their problems. But when they reach a point of desperation, they sometimes put out what we call a cry for help.'

Christine stared at him, the surface of her mind irritated by the condescension of the doctor's ‘what we call'phrase, the rest of it swamped by anxiety.

‘Do you mean –? Are you trying to tell me that Derek's cut was a suicide attempt?'

‘No, no. Please don't imagine that. There was nothing potentially life-threatening about the injury. But I'm afraid – according to the doctor who stitched them – that the cuts were self-inflicted.'

Christine could have laughed with relief. ‘But we know that! Derek went out to the kitchen to make himself a sandwich. He was carving a joint of cold meat, and the knife slipped, so of course it was self –' She paused. ‘Did you say
cuts
? Plural?'

‘I'm afraid so. One cut can be accidental, but a second cut almost – but not exactly – in the same place can only be deliberate. That's the reason for this note. We don't want your husband to do anything quite so drastic again, do we? And now we know about it, perhaps we can try to relieve some of his problems.'

Christine nodded dumbly.
Poor Derek
was all she could think, gulping at the glass of water the doctor offered her;
my poor Dee
.

‘When your husband comes to have his stitches out,' continued Dr Rogers, ‘whichever partner sees him will try to find out what's wrong. But if, as I rather suspect, it's a personal matter –' he quirked his eyebrows at Christine ‘– then you are the only one who can help him.'

‘What makes you think it's personal?' she said dazedly.

‘Oh, come, Mrs Cartwright – here you are, badly shocked less than a week after a tragic bereavement, and your husband is too busy at work to take you away? So busy that he can't even spare the time next Sunday to do the driving for you?'

He put a kindly hand under her elbow and led her to the door. ‘Try some bridge-building,' he advised. ‘And if you can't do it on your own, ask Mrs Quantrill for the address of the Marriage Guidance Council.'

The doctor had handed her over to his receptionist, saying that Mrs Cartwright needed a quiet rest before she drove home. Mrs Quantrill had taken her to a small side room, and had trotted in a few moments later with a cup of tea.

Resting on an examination couch, Christine drank her tea and wept. After a time, having decided what she must do, she wiped her eyes and combed her hair and went to the pay-phone in the foyer.

First she rang Derek's office, and discovered that they had heard nothing from him since Monday.

Then she rang directory enquiries, and asked for the number of his hotel. She was greatly relieved when the hotel receptionist confirmed that he was staying there, but her relief turned to anxiety when she learned that although Derek's things were still in his room, he had not slept there the previous night.

She began to panic. Oh God, what had happened to him? Was he so desperate because she had ignored his appeals that he was now seriously contemplating killing himself? Oh no, not that –

Her hands were shaking so much that it was difficult to search through her bag, but eventually she found what she was looking for. ‘If there's anything you want to know, or if you need to talk,' Val the policewoman had said as she gave her the printed card, ‘just ring me.'

Without a moment's hesitation, Christine dialled the number of Breckham Market divisional police headquarters.

Chief Inspector Quantrill was not best pleased to have been excluded by Sergeant Lloyd and WPC Thornton from their long conversation with Christine Cartwright. Christine would probably talk more freely without him there, Hilary had said, adding that the three of them were going to do it over morning coffee in the comfort of Breckham Market's best hotel.

‘Well?' he demanded impatiently, when she returned to the office. ‘Does Mrs Cartwright know where her husband is?'

‘No, she has no more idea than we have,' said Hilary. ‘Quite genuinely, I mean. She's not doing a cover-up for him, Val and I are both confident of that.'

‘Why does she think he deliberately cut himself?'

‘Like us, she assumes that he must be having an affair. It's very difficult for her to admit it, after umpteen years of what she thought of as an ideally happy marriage, but that's what she realized on Saturday, when he was so obviously lying about why he took the dog out in the rain. She sees the business of cutting his hand as a cry for help after the row they'd had.'

‘Humph,' said Quantrill, who regarded such goings-on as wimpish. ‘Still,' he admitted, ‘it must have taken a hell of a lot of courage for the man to make an initial cut, and then enlarge it –'

‘Yes. But I can believe that he might have put himself through the ordeal because of a deep emotional conflict. I can't believe he'd do it just to facilitate a break-in.'

Quantrill agreed, but pensively. ‘And what about Cartwright's disappearance last night? How does his wife account for that?'

‘Emotional conflict, again,' said Hilary. ‘Apparently she went right off her husband after her mother's murder. It was nothing to do with him, it was her relationship with her mother that was the problem, but in effect she brushed him off when he was seeking a reconciliation. When she heard that the cuts were deliberate, she thought immediately that he must have taken her withdrawal to heart. Val and I have tried to persuade her that he wouldn't have done anything suicidal, but that leaves her convinced of the other possibility – that he's gone back to the girlfriend.'

‘And that's what you think?'

‘Yes. But I'd feel easier if we put out an alert for him, just in case he's contemplating anything stupid.'

‘I agree about the alert,' said Quantrill, ‘but for a different reason. This case smells to me of collusion. I don't want his wife to be alarmed, but we need to find Derek Cartwright as soon as possible and sort him out. I want him to be either completely eliminated, or charged.'

‘Charged with what?'

‘You're not going to like this, Hilary. I know you've told me to stop going on about mothers-in-law, but this case doesn't begin to make sense unless we reverse our previous assumptions. Perhaps Derek Cartwright wasn't colluding with a burglar who just happened to kill the old lady. Perhaps he arranged the burglary as a cover for his mother-in-law's murder.'

An alert went out on local radio and television on Thursday evening, saying that the police were anxious to know the whereabouts of Derek James Cartwright of Wyveling, last seen in the Cambridge area and known to be driving a slate-blue Ford Sierra, registration number F 285 KAH.

But in the rural isolation of Winter Paddocks, the car was securely garaged, and Derek and Belinda were neither listening to the radio nor watching television.

Douglas Quantrill had devised a master plan to enable him to keep both his sanity and his temper while his mother-in-law was in occupation of his home. Quite simply, it involved staying right out of her way.

So far, it had worked. The bungalow was large enough for him to dodge her, and his irregular hours meant that he could make a point of avoiding her regular meal-times. But Thursday evening was going to be different: Alison, his favourite daughter, who lived and worked in Yarchester, was coming home to see her grandmother. Molly had arranged a family supper for the occasion, and Quantrill was much too fond of Alison to attempt to duck out of it.

At first it went reasonably well. Quantrill let the others do all the talking and embarked on his meal in peace, proudly aware of what a lovely girl Alison was, and observing how affectionately and patiently she dealt with her grandmother. But then he made the mistake of asking Peter to pass the salt.

His mother-in-law immediately upbraided him for eating too much salt. It was very bad for a man of his age, she informed him. He was simply asking to be carried off by a heart attack – and who would provide for his wife and family then, she would like to know?