But the sexual predilections of Mrs Maciver seemed to me irrelevant to my work. Indeed, if as Gallipot believed, Maciver too had his suspicions about her, then that just gave him something else to distract his mind. A cuckold who couldn’t come to terms with being a nobody, the more noise he made, the more absurd he would look.
So one day in March I started packing my bags, thinking my task here was done. Then the phone rang in my hotel bedroom.
It was Gallipot asking me to call round at Moscow House. His form of words was studiedly casual, but I read the urgency underneath.
I was there in five minutes.
I found Gallipot in the lounge with Kay. She was in a semi-catatonic state, sitting bolt upright, pale as death. Looking utterly beautiful. Yes, that struck me very forcibly. Tragedy often destroys female beauty. Not in her case. Quite the opposite, she seemed made for grief.
Upstairs in the study I found Maciver. He was dead with a deep wound on the top of his head. On the floor close by was a bloodstained ice axe, the one which you will recall seeing mounted on the wall alongside the portrait of Mr Maciver in outdoor mode.
There was a letter on the desk. I read it.
It was from his son and it accused Kay of attempting to seduce him during a recent visit home, an attempt which was the culmination of a whole series of incidents of sexual harassment ever since his stepmother had come into the house.
The sequence of events seems to have been that Maciver was returning from London where he had been attempting to interest a newspaper in his campaign. Their response had been cautious. They get this kind of thing all the time and they aren’t interested in committing time, money or personnel unless there’s some real evidence there’s something in it for them.
But Maciver, ready to take any interest as encouragement, was much enthused, and he’d rung Gallipot on his way back to fill him in and demand a progress report. Gallipot, wanting to get a fuller picture of just what the paper had promised, arranged to call at Moscow House for a consultation. In the meantime-we pieced this together later-Maciver got home, read the letter, and confronted his wife with its contents. She denied it, blaming the son. Maciver, his mind already dark with suspicion, did not know what to believe. In any case, there was no comfort to be found in any version of the truth. But one thing he was certain of. He wasn’t going to let Kay out of the country with his daughter. They were due to fly out from Manchester the following morning. Maciver told her the trip was off. Kay protested. Maciver got angry, and I do not doubt his anger made him talk as if absolutely persuaded that his wife was totally to blame for the situation. He told her that she should go to America herself, that he didn’t care if she never came back, and that in any event he didn’t want her anywhere near his family, and in particular Helen, ever again.
For this and for what happened next we have only Kay’s account. She said that when she reacted strongly to this threat-she seems to have been genuinely, indeed almost obsessively, attached to the girl-he became physical and tried to manhandle her out of the room, perhaps intending to throw her right out of the house.
They struggled and crashed against the wall with such force the ice axe became dislodged from its mounting and came tumbling down, unhappily landing point first on her husband’s balding skull.
Now though it is certainly possible that a violent collision with the wall could have disturbed the display mounted there, whether an axe falling a matter of a few feet could attain a momentum sufficient to cause this damage I cannot say. A proper forensic examination would doubtless have established this one way or the other.
But it did not seem to me that this was either necessary or desirable. I deal in facts and practicalities. The way I looked at it was that, no matter how sceptical their initial response, any newspaper which had just been offered the kind of story Maciver was touting around was going to sit up and take notice when they heard that, a few hours after he left their offices, he’d died in very suspicious circumstances.
My first concern was Kay Maciver. It was no use doing anything if she proved hellbent on ringing the police and telling them all. But as she came out of her initial shock, I realized that here was a woman of extraordinary mettle. She didn’t know who the devil I was, of course, but I’d rung Tony Kafka and explained the situation and he came straight round to talk to her.
Mr Kafka is a man of rapid thought and ingenious device and finding he shared my appraisal of the situation we rapidly worked out what had to be done to protect the interests of all involved.
We were completely open with Mrs Maciver. There was no other way. I told her that we had to devise an explanation of her husband’s death which did not involve her. She said again that it was an accident and I said it didn’t matter. His death in unusual circumstances so soon after his attempt to persuade the newspapers that something fishy was going on at Ash-Mac’s was bound to arouse their suspicions. She appreciated the undesirability of this, being, of course, privy to all the firm’s officially unofficial dealings, but I think it was her awareness of how the truth could affect her relationship with Helen that made her co-operate so fully with our proposals for a cover-up.
Suicide was the obvious solution. Jumping from a high place might account for the damage to the head, but that involved getting him out of the house and taking him to the high place. Also it made it more difficult to make the tragedy unexceptionable even to the most sceptical tabloid eye. No, it had to be in situ, behind a locked door. The shotgun cabinet in the study provided the obvious weapon, and careful channelling of the shot would provide a means of obliterating the earlier head damage.
We didn’t go into this detail with Kay, of course, but she did appreciate the need to authenticate the death in all ways possible and rather than run the risk of a forged suicide note, it was she who, at Kafka’s prompting, suggested the use of the Dickinson poem.
She had her cases already packed and her stepdaughter’s. I now instructed her to take them with her when she went to pick up Helen from school but instead of bringing her home as planned, tell her that a severe frost was forecast for that night which would make the cross-Pennine roads very dicey early in the morning, so they were going straightaway and would spend the night in an airport hotel.
Once in the States, we told her to hire a car and get lost. The longer it took to find her with the sad news, the more time she’d have to get herself together.
Kafka had no doubts from the start about her ability to cope and the more I saw of her, the more impressed I was. Once motivated, she moved with speed and determination and soon she was on her way to pick up Helen. Kafka and I agreed it would be best to put as much space as possible between Kay’s departure and Maciver’s death to dilute any suspicion of cause and effect. We fixed on March the twentieth. Kafka undertook to provide evidence of Maciver making increasingly agitated attempts to contact him during this period, while I set about applying my specialist skills to stage-managing the fake suicide.