The murder quadrille, p.2
The Murder Quadrille, page 2
And now Sarah found herself standing at the foot of the stairs, being told by an alien who was her legal spouse that she did not support him.
‘If we’re to compete with the big fish we need an injection of capital,’ said Martin, gripping the banisters as though they were prison bars, and looking down at her from his elevated position on the fourth step, enunciating every syllable as though he was addressing a simpleton. ‘We have to expand. More employees. Bigger premises—Maybe in the centre of town—or The West End.’
Silently Sarah stepped back, rolling the eternity ring round her finger with the tip of her thumb. Apart from the fact it sounded like lunacy to expand now, she wondered when she had she been squeezed out of the decision making process? And wasn’t the centre of town and the West End the same thing?
Although she had voluntarily removed herself from the cut and thrust of working life by working from home, as far as she knew she was still a director of their company, and had responsibilities, if only to counsel Martin, her co-director. She had already once saved the company from making a wild and extravagant move which they could not afford. Now Martin wanted to make an even bigger one. This was the first time he had ever made a business resolution without first consulting her.
Suddenly Martin let go of the banister and stepped down to her level.
‘I’m sorry, Sarah. I’ve been a twerp. I’m just a bit tense at the moment.’ He lowered his face towards her and put on a baby voice. ‘You will do the dinner, won’t you, sweetheart? Do it for Marti.’
He held his arms open for a hug.
Sarah stepped into his embrace. When his arms were around her she wondered why she had demurred. Poor Martin. He had got himself into a state. Like a child deprived of its teddy.
She’d do the dinner and she’d try her best to make it work for him. Perhaps then the bank would refuse anyhow, and it would all be over with. But at least she would have done her bit and the bank would, as ever, make the final decision.
This morning Sarah had gone shopping, buying the best fresh produce, and during the afternoon she prepared the meal for her husband and four people whom she hardly knew: Martin’s lawyer, Max Latham and his live-in girlfriend, Lisa Pope; their next door neighbour, a surly and brash American writer called Tess Brandon (whom Martin invited not only to make up the numbers but to impress the others with a famous-ish name, and perhaps to snare her as a future client) and, lastly, of course, the bouncing Czech.
Only an hour ago the guests had all arrived and stood in the dining room/conservatory, clutching drinks and making small talk.
The Yank author doled out her business cards to everyone present, and started describing in nauseating detail her morning’s work—sitting in on a particularly grizzly inquest at the local coroner’s court.
Sarah smoothed the edgy moment by calling everyone to sit.
As the guests took their seats round the prettily decorated table Kevin asked Sarah what she did—what was her job.
But before she had a chance to open her mouth Martin replied on her behalf.
‘Sarah’s a housewife.’ He gave a self-deprecating smile. ‘I am the hunter-gatherer in this household.’
Sarah suppressed a gasp. She was about to laugh when she caught Martin’s forbidding eye. She wondered what on earth he must have put down on those banking forms.
Then she remembered that though she was Martin’s business partner, and wrote the lion’s share of slogans and strap-lines, she wasn’t actually on the payroll. Maybe Martin was thinking about some legal point in the accounts, like National Insurance or pension contributions.
From that moment, once she had been introduced as a housewife, Sarah was ignored. As the guests chatted and champed their way through the crispy salad starter it was as though she was a mere ghost looking on from her position in an empty chair.
She never usually went to dinner parties. Now it seemed that by trying to have one of her own, she had become not so much the domestic goddess as the domestic slave.
In silence Sarah watched the guests rattle on about weather, traffic, holidays and all the other tiresome subjects which oil the discourse of society while regretting utterly having got herself roped into this make-believe, table-napkin-candles-and-cruet state of affairs.
After she had cleared away the dirty salad plates and served the main course, Sarah stretched out for the wine and topped up her glass.
It was a pleasant smooth red, a sturdy Chateau Neuf du Pape.
Throughout the meal Martin had referred to the wine by name—Clos de l’Oratoire des Papes. ‘Some more delicious Clos de l’Oratoire des Papes, Max?’ and ‘Jaunty little wine, Clos de l’Oratoire des Papes, don’t you think, Kevin? Trips across the tongue.’
Sarah sighed inwardly. It was embarrassing. It’s not as though the wine was some nineteenth century Chateau Lafitte or even a rare Chateau d’Yquem. Martin had bought it in the supermarket—a pick on the “special” wine shelves. It had cost him less than fifteen pounds. But from the way he handled the bottle you’d think the wine was from the long lost caves of Napoleon or had gone under the hammer at Sotheby’s for over a grand.
She took a glug and rolled it round in her mouth.
Although she was quite happy to be excluded from the small talk, all the same she was profoundly irritated by her new-found invisibility. Some years ago Sarah had seen documentaries about out of body experiences: incidents involving people who had technically died and then been brought back to life. They all described the same thing. First came a bright white tunnel. Then they were suddenly floating around on the ceiling watching themselves on the bed below.
This dinner party, Sarah thought, was something akin to this. Somehow she had been wiped out of the actual happening but could still see and hear everything with astonishing clarity.
She looked round the table. It was like scrutinizing bizarre creatures in a brightly lit display case in the zoo—a vivarium of human life. These strangers seemed so relaxed and at home here in her house. Martin caressed the crystal glass containing his precious wine. Max leaned into the conversation, occasionally slipping an almost imperceptible wink at Martin, while his flabby hand rested lightly on Lisa’s thigh. Lisa, apparently unaware of Max’s paw, chewed earnestly, glancing now and then at Max with dog-like devotion. Kevin the Czech (or was it really Kevin the Cheque?) was smiling blithely at Tess as she reeled off gruesome details of crimes she had researched for her novels.
‘There was this case back in the States a few years back where a man killed a woman and used a grease gun to fill every one of her orifices with highly flammable foam. Then he heaved her into a tin drum, poured on petrol and set the whole thing alight.’
‘Recipe du jour: femme farcie et flambée,’ Sarah said.
No one laughed. They didn’t even pause or look in her direction. It was as though she had not uttered.
‘But you see, that’s exactly what I mean,’ said Max, his voice slightly raised in eager animation. ‘The very fact that you, Tess, know about this means it was in no way a perfect murder. A murder only becomes perfect when there is no body –’
‘No, Max. No. No. I tell you, it’s been zillions of years since that was true. Lookit, I’ve done the research. Way back before World War Two there was your John Haigh—The Acid Bath Murderer. It made legal history worldwide: no corpse, just a couple of kidney stones.’ Tess was combative, taking Max on, man to man. ‘Since then—well, it happens all the time. Presence of a corpus delicti is not necessary to prove murder. Even without a body or a murder weapon they can catch you, incriminate you and execute you.’
‘You should tighten up your studies, Miss. You don’t mean Corpus delicti, which means the body of a crime—the presence of money, for instance, being proof of larceny. Corpus Delicti has nothing to do with dead bodies. You mean a corpse. You will find it’s the presence of a corpse which is not necessary to prove murder. Peter Falconio for instance.’
‘So what are you trying to say?’ Tess jutted her head forward and kneaded her napkin with nail-bitten fingers. ‘You agreeing with me on this, or what?’
‘No, I am not agreeing with you. The Falconio case came to court, therefore the murder was not perfect. But, I mean to say, you could commit a perfect murder. But for that to be necessary there must be no actual body—not even a living person who is known to be missing. I feel sure you could kill a vagrant, for instance, and, if you successfully disposed of his remains, and, if no one was around who knew or cared that he was missing, then there would be no murder investigation, no case, no trial. Therefore…’ He gave a magician’s flourish, ‘– a perfect murder.’
‘So that girl, the librarian.’ Lisa, anxious not to be seen as the bimbo she so clearly was, piped up. ‘What do you think, Tess? Run away or dead?’
‘Dead as a dodo,’ said Max, stuffing his mouth with a chunk of bread roll smothered in butter. ‘Lying in a ditch somewhere. Soon to be found by the ubiquitous “man, walking dog”.’
Sarah knew the case they were talking about. It was all over the papers. A young woman, Jane Grimshaw, had gone missing. A week had gone by since anyone had heard from her. Her mobile phone had been found down a drain, near to the pub where she had gone for a drink before she vanished.
Police feared the worst.
‘I saw that,’ said Tess. ‘Her folks and co-workers were on TV, begging for her to phone home, to contact them.’
‘Utterly unconvincing,’ said Max. ‘A lot of ghouls. They love the cameras, these people. Think it’s an audition for The X Factor. Either that or they couldn’t stand the girl.’
‘Max says the police aren’t fools,’ said Lisa, reporting the information as though Max was not sitting beside her, his hand resting on her lap. ‘They usually put people on the telly only to expose them, cos they know they’re as guilty as sin and the victim is already lying in a ditch somewhere.’
‘All these ditches,’ said Sarah, still hovering on the ceiling. ‘Where do these killers find ditches in London?’
‘Exactly! Look at Soham.’ Tess topped Lisa’s remark, and ignored Sarah’s.
‘Plus,’ Sarah shrugged. ‘Why do people wrap up dead bodies in carpets? As though a body isn’t heavy enough to start with!’
‘The killer himself made an appeal for help.’ Tess held her knife and fork in the air and laughed. ‘Can you believe it?’
Sarah wondered if perhaps she really was undergoing a near-death experience.
‘The egotism of the guilty mind! It’s unparalleled.’ Tess laughed, then furrowed her brow and grew very serious. ‘Profilers can see through it, though. Once these people are on film, profilers watch the tapes frame by frame, noting each tic, each tiny gesture—the flickering eyelid, the twitching toe, “the tell” which ultimately betrays them.’
‘According to the TV, the profiler on this case reckons it was the same man,’ said Martin. ‘The same man who killed that girl last year.’
‘Marina Sutton.’ Max interrupted with a show-off matter of fact delivery, which Sarah perceived was aimed at showing Tess that he also knew everything to do with anything about murder. ‘Body found on the Common, partially submerged in the fishing lake.’
‘A lake this time, not a ditch,’ said Sarah to herself.
Martin talked over her: ‘A loner, they said.’
‘Yeah! Like the partying, pub-going Yorkshire Ripper was a loner! Didn’t he slip out of one of his own shindigs to kill some whore then slipped back to party a bit more? And wasn’t Dennis Nielsen the life and soul of the Welfare office where he worked. Loner! I don’t think so.’ Tess spoke with the sing song of the professional know-all. ‘It’s just easier for Society to blame loners, or to believe that loners are more capable of depravity, because Society doesn’t like loners.’
‘You only say that because you yourself are a loner.’ Sarah spoke a moment before she realised that, though what Tess said might be true, it was rude to point it out. But Tess hadn’t heard her, and ploughed on without caring about her opinion. ‘Society wants everyone to be one of a couple, like y’all. Society detests individuals.’
‘Don’t be silly, Tess.’ Lisa cuddled up to Max. ‘I think it’s nice when people are couples.’
‘Like Bonnie and Clyde, you mean.’ Sarah found Lisa’s loyalty even more irritating than Tess’s confidence. ‘Or Myra Hindley and Ian Brady?’
‘Exactly,’ said Lisa, who clearly did not appreciate the references. ‘It’s natural to live in pairs. Look at Noah’s Ark!’
Sarah laughed aloud as Lisa leaned forward and bestowed one of her irritating winsome smiles upon Kevin the Czech and said: ‘I’ll bet you have a lovely wife, Kevin.’
Was Lisa finally making an unforgivable social gaff? Kevin had a distinct air of gayness about him. The wedding finger, Sarah saw, sported a gold band—but then, maybe he had gone through a civil partnership.
‘My wife has only just moved over from the Czech Republic. She doesn’t speak good English, I’m afraid.’
Sarah wanted to take hold of Martin and shake him. They had done the unforgivable thing: not inviting the man to bring his wife to dinner. Why hadn’t Martin bothered to find out? How much easier the evening could have been with a nice Czech wife instead of the insufferable Miss Know-it-all from next door?
Kevin lifted his hands, as though guarding himself from criticism. ‘My wife prefers to stay at home in the evening, as we have two young children.’
‘Two!’ Lisa radiated joy on his behalf. ‘How lovely. How old are they?’
‘The little girl is three, and the boy is still a baby—ten months.’
Sarah could not believe that despite this eruption of cosy domesticity at the table, Max and Tess were still on the trail of serial killers.
‘There you have it.’ Max took his hand off Lisa’s thigh and slammed his palm down on the tablecloth. ‘People are stupid. Their arrogance betrays them.’
Sarah had to stop herself laughing aloud. Boston Legal’s Denny Crane in three dimensions. Even more pathetic actually—embarrassingly stagy, like that ancient old ham, Perry Mason. Similar bulky figure too.
‘I say that there is a recipe for the perfect murder, but it can only happen if the perpetrator is able to override their inevitable arrogance. Let’s face it, such a person feels superior because they have taken that one thing which can never ever be replaced—Life. And if they want to get away with their achievement and all its glory they must suppress their pride in their super-human act, or at least keep it to themselves, while shrouding it in quiet reason and empathy.’
Sarah watched Kevin. Was he bored by all this gory talk? He looked perfectly at ease. His elbows rested on the table, his chin balancing on the tip of his steepled fingers, his dark rat eyes darting from one pair of moving lips to the next. Perhaps when you usually spent your days adding and subtracting numbers, it was fun to be included on gruesome little junket like this.
‘So where are you from Kevin? Prague?’ she asked.
‘No. Javornik. It’s a small town in Silesia.’ He glanced in Sarah’s direction, his concentration momentarily distracted. ‘The Mountains. The Sudetes.’
‘Psychopaths don’t feel empathy.’ Tess spoke with her mouth full. Sarah caught a flash of green and white—chewed potato and pea. The Nigerian flag. ‘But they are also particularly good at acting, therefore could easily assume the mantle of empathy to protect themselves. Most psychopaths are extremely intelligent narcissists.’
‘I’m sorry, Kevin.’ Sarah thought she might try to steer the conversation away from murder and back to geography. ‘The Sudetes? Is that what we learned in school history as The Sudetanland?’
Kevin smiled and nodded. ‘That’s right.’
‘I’m not talking about psychopaths.’ Max sighed, implying Tess’s information was irrelevant. ‘Any Joe Bloggs can murder. You should meet some of my clients. I can assure you they’re hardly in the MENSA league.’
‘I thought you were a company lawyer, Max,’ said Kevin, turning briskly away from Sarah to join the clan. He shot Martin a quizzical look. Sarah wondered whether this had been some vital information previously supplied on the bank forms. Lawyer: Max Latham, specialities include company law and murder.
‘I am a Tom of all Trades, Kevin.’ Max spoke with a flourish that would put a Victorian actor-manager to shame. ‘Master of all.’
‘Jack, don’t you mean?’ said Lisa quietly. It was obvious she was not in the habit of contradicting the great man.
‘Either appellation will serve the purpose.’
‘He’s very modest,’ said Lisa, the vanguard, bearing Max’s blazon. ‘Max is a genius. He can do everything. He’s one of those—oh what are they called—I think it starts with R…’
‘Rottweilers?’ said Sarah, slumped back in her undetectable bubble.
‘Ranph…something…Rrr…Rrr…Rrr…’ Lisa sounded like a child impersonating a motor car. ‘Oh, I remember.’ She squealed and clapped her hands. ‘Max is a Pre-Raphaelite.’
Sarah snorted, imagining Max with long red crinkled hair, wearing a mauve velvet dress, floating lifelessly along in one of those water-filled ditches of his.
For the first time since they had all sat down Martin made eye contact with her, giving a breathy tut.
The ignominy of her husband’s rebuke was the final straw.
Sarah decided to interpret his exclamation as a signal for her to take away the plates and bring in pudding.
It was going to happen. Tomorrow morning she would leave him.
‘If one of us, for instance, wanted to commit a murder and get away with it, the first thing we would need to understand is the difference between the egotism of the guilty mind and the anxiety of the innocent.’
Max continued sounding off, his back slightly turned away from her as Sarah gathered his plate.
She felt as though she was playing the role of a parlour maid in some seedy Patrick Hamilton boarding house. She was almost tempted to say something like ‘Cor blimey, sir, these crocks ain’t ’arf slippy,’ before pulling an imaginary dangling cigarette butt from her clamped scarlet lips and grinding it out with a peep-hole-toed sandal.
