It was nine o’clock when the policeman finally knocked at the door. The house was quiet. The children were in bed and Jack was still sleeping. Jim sat beside her and felt awkward because there was nothing to do to help. She would not talk to him. She felt that by an effort of will she could arrange the facts so that Paul Wilcox had not been killed after all. She could persuade herself that she had made a mistake. She had seen not Paul Wilcox but a bundle of rags that had been dumped in the ditch. And if he were dead, it might be possible to convince herself that there had been an accident. He had been knocked down by a frightened driver on the grey, badly lit road. She heard the knock at the door but was so tense with the strain of these thoughts that she could not move. Jim let Ramsay into the house and the policeman walked straight into the living room as if he were a family friend.
‘I can’t stay long,’ he said in a low voice. He seemed eager not to wake Jack. ‘As you can imagine there’s a lot to do.’
‘So it was Paul Wilcox?’ Patty said. She had known all along that it was.
Ramsay nodded.
‘Was there anything I should have done?’ Patty said. ‘ Perhaps I should have tried to revive him. But I thought perhaps I shouldn’t touch him.’
And I couldn’t have done it, she thought. I couldn’t have got any closer to him. I would have been ill.
‘No,’ Ramsay said firmly. ‘There was nothing you could have done.’
He began to leave the room when suddenly Jack woke up with a start, like a character in a badly written situation comedy. It was so like comic acting that Patty wondered if he had been asleep at all.
‘What’s going on?’ he said. ‘What happened?’
‘Paul Wilcox is dead,’ she said.
‘You told me that earlier,’ he said. ‘But how did he die? Was it a car accident? Or was he murdered?’
‘Mr Wilcox was murdered,’ Ramsay said reluctantly. She thought he was embarrassed as if there was something he had failed to tell them. ‘It’s too early to be certain, but it seems that he was strangled.’
‘There you are!’ Jack struggled out of his chair. He had lost all trace of fatigue. ‘You’ll have to let Kitty go now.’ He was already planning her return home. He would get champagne, the real stuff. He had never in his life drunk champagne.
Ramsay was silent for a moment, as if considering how much to say.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s too late for that.’
‘What do you mean?’ Jack was puzzled. ‘You know that she can’t have killed Paul Wilcox so it’s obvious that Kitty isn’t the murderer.’
‘Oh yes,’ Ramsay said. ‘That’s obvious now. I don’t believe Mrs Medburn killed her husband.’
‘Well!’ Jack was beginning to get angry. ‘When are you going to let her go?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Ramsay repeated. ‘ I’ve got some terrible news for you.’ He hesitated. ‘Mrs Medburn’s dead. She committed suicide this afternoon. She hanged herself.’
‘Why?’ Jack cried. ‘I told her I’d get her out. Why didn’t she trust me?’
He turned on Ramsay. ‘You killed her. If you’d let her go earlier she’d still be alive.’
‘No,’ Ramsay said. ‘ She was never frightened of captivity.’
‘Then what was going on? What were they doing to her in that place?’
‘Nothing.’ Ramsay spoke gently. ‘She left a note for you. Perhaps you’ll understand then. She was afraid, I think, of being released.’
Chapter Nine
After Kitty Medburn’s suicide Ramsay, according to his colleagues lost all sense of proportion. He spent all day and most of the night in Heppleburn and if he slept at all it was in the chair in his office.
‘It’s the divorce,’ Hunter said. ‘It’s finally caught up with him. That and guilt because the old lady killed herself.’
Hunter, who had always wanted an inspector’s salary, watched Ramsay’s slow disintegration with satisfaction, and took as little part as possible in the inquiry. So Ramsay ran the investigation almost alone and made up his own rules as he went along. He felt he had nothing to lose.
Monday, the day after the second murder, Angela Brayshaw received the letter for which she had been waiting. It had been posted on the preceding Thursday and had been unaccountably delayed in the post. If it had arrived on time, she thought, she would have been saved a troublesome and unpleasant weekend. The letter was from Harold Medburn’s solicitors and informed her that she was the sole beneficiary of his estate. She wondered briefly how her mother would take the news.
Jim had offered to stay at home with Patty. She was touched by his concern but sent him to work. She preferred to be alone. Besides, she felt that only the normal domestic routine would prevent her from dissolving into panic. There was nothing to prevent her following the usual pattern. Jack had insisted on going home the night before. They were worried about him – he seemed so blank and withdrawn – and they had not wanted to let him go, but Patty could understand that he needed to be alone and it was a relief to have him out of the house. So she tried to put the horror of the day before from her mind. Surprisingly she had dreamed not about Paul Wilcox, but about Ramsay. In normal times she might have been concerned by this obsession with a stranger, by the dreams, the excitement. She always considered herself happily married and avoided contacts which might make her dissatisfied with Jim. Now, with her security shattered anything seemed possible and she clung to the image of Ramsay, as if he alone could make her happy again. From the beginning she had been attracted by him. It seemed now he was the only man strong enough to set her world to rights.
That morning she got up a little early. She was calmer and more efficient than she might otherwise have been on a Monday. She even had time to wash the breakfast dishes and make the beds before walking the children to school. They too were quiet and subdued.
The playground was crowded with parents. Even the careless mothers, the slatterns, who usually stood on the doorstep unwashed and undressed, to wave their children out alone, were there this morning. They would have heard of the murder. Patty was aware of stares and whispers. They would have heard too that she had found the body. Patty stood alone and waited until Andrew and Jennifer were safely in the school.
When she got home Ramsay was sitting in his car outside her house. He saw her approaching and got out to stand on the pavement. He might have been a lover impatient to take her into his arms. It would have been warmer, she thought, to wait in the car. The fog had lasted all night, but now, as she walked down the road towards him the sun broke through the mist. It was a hazy globe above his head.
‘I need to talk to you,’ he said.
‘One of your men came last night and took a statement.’
She could not make polite conversation with him; She wanted to be honest but she was not sure what he wanted. It would be easier if he went, then she could resume the ritual of the day.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘It’s not that. I need your help.’
‘Do you want to come in?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you out. Where shall we go?’
She thought of the previous day, of the children’s appeaclass="underline" can’t we take the car and go to Whitley Bay? ‘Let’s go to Whitley,’ she said. It represented safety, the time before the walk up the gloomy lane, the possibility of fun.
‘Why not?’ he said.
It was a big car and he seemed to drive off very fast. There was something reckless and exhilarating about driving to the coast beside an attractive man and she thought again that the old rules of her life no longer applied. He pushed in a cassette which played loud music – opera, she thought. It was hot in the car and she found it hard to breathe. He smelled of pipe tobacco and leather.