‘Don’t s’pose you need me any more,’ said the driver as he dropped me.
‘Not immediately,’ I said, giving him a generous tip. ‘But I’m sure I’ll use you again sometime.’
‘Always available,’ he said with a smile. ‘Give me a call.’
I stood and watched him drive away. Even though he didn’t know it, his friendly face every morning and evening had done much to keep me sane during the stress of the past weeks. And I’d miss him.
I went in to my quiet, lonely house.
Now what did I do?
I wandered aimlessly from room to room, unable to settle to anything, and ended up, as always, in the kitchen.
I looked at the broken lock.
‘I think it’s finally time I fixed you,’ I said out loud to it, and I dug out my toolbox from beneath the sink.
I had hoped it was just a matter of securing everything back into place, but the lock wasn’t just hanging off the wooden door, its metal casing was also twisted and useless, so I used a screwdriver and a pair of pliers to remove it completely.
I tried to straighten out the casing but without success and, if anything, I made it worse. I decided that I’d need a replacement lock, which was a bit of a shame as the broken one was old and in keeping with the age of the house.
Maybe I’d be able to match it with a modern reproduction. No time like the present, I thought, and I knew exactly where to go to find one.
There have been markets in Banbury since Anglo-Saxon times and one was still held in the centre of the town every Thursday and Saturday.
One of the regular stalls was run by a man with whom Amelia and I had become quite friendly over the years, since we’d moved into the Old Forge. He dealt in specialist hardware, especially little bits and bobs that you couldn’t get anywhere else. And much of his stuff was aimed at people like us, owners of listed buildings, for whom English Heritage laid down strict regulations concerning what we could and couldn’t use in repairs on our houses.
If anyone had a replacement lock of the right sort, it would be him.
Today was a Thursday and, if I asked him now, he might be able to delve into his huge stock at home to get the right part by Saturday. Otherwise I’d have to wait a whole week.
I drove my 174 m.p.h. supercharged Jaguar sports car into Banbury at a very sedate pace, and not just because I was worried about picking up another three points on my licence, something which would have triggered a ban. The collision with the tree and my resulting injuries had undeniably made me far more wary.
I parked as close as I could and shuffled down to the market square.
‘Hi, Bill,’ said my friend, warmly shaking my hand. ‘Haven’t seen you for a very long while.’
‘No,’ I replied. ‘I’ve been rather busy.’
‘I’m so sorry to hear about your lovely wife,’ he said. ‘Dreadful thing. I was so shocked, as I’d been talking to her only a few days before she died. She dropped by for a chat and to buy something.’
He spent several minutes talking about Amelia’s last visit to his stall, not that it made me feel any better. Would I ever get used to her not being around? Eventually, I showed him the broken lock.
‘I can’t match it exactly,’ he said. ‘But I think I can get pretty close. Come again on Saturday and I’ll see what I can find in the meantime.’
‘Thanks,’ I said.
As I drove home, I mulled over what the market stallholder had told me and, instead of immediately going in through my own front door, I went across the road to the Fadeleys’ place and rang their bell.
Nancy answered.
‘Hello, Bill,’ she said. ‘Dave and I have been thinking of you a lot these last few days. You must be pleased with the outcome of the trial. I heard it on the news.’
‘I suppose so,’ I said. ‘At least no one will still think that I’m responsible for Amelia’s death.’
‘Would you like to come in for a cuppa?’
We sat in her kitchen, alongside her vast array of cookbooks, and, while we were drinking the tea, I asked her a question.
After about fifteen minutes or so, I got up to go.
‘Dave will be home from London around seven,’ Nancy said. ‘Would you like to come over and join us for supper? I’m making seared scallops in a champagne cream sauce.’
It sounded delicious and a huge improvement on my usual individual ready meals, but I didn’t want company — not tonight.
And I had far more important things on my mind than eating.
I sat on the cold hard stone kitchen floor of the Old Forge and sobbed.
I had come straight home from Nancy’s house and searched for something and, to my absolute horror, I had found it almost immediately.
Not that I was pleased that I’d found it. Far from it.
It would have been infinitely better if I hadn’t.
For all her mental health problems, and whatever her brother might have claimed, Amelia hadn’t been stupid. Quite the reverse. She had been a very smart lady, very smart indeed. But she hadn’t been able to hide everything — not forever — and not from me.
I couldn’t drag my eyes away from what I’d found. It was only small and I might have never noticed it, that was if I hadn’t been expressly looking for it.
But I had been, and there it was.
Again, I felt sick.
Just like the jury, I deliberated with myself and came to the only logical conclusion from the evidence, a verdict beyond a reasonable doubt.
Amelia hadn’t been murdered at all.
She had committed suicide.
The police were very accustomed to investigating unexplained violent deaths to determine if they were really murders made to look like suicides. But now they needed to have a closer look at Amelia’s death, as I had done, and then they would likely come to the same conclusion as I had, that this had been a suicide made to look like murder.
Was she really that scheming?
Yes, she was. Especially when it came to her brother.
Furthermore, Joe hadn’t been lying after all.
Amelia had indeed called her brother on that Tuesday evening to arrange their strange rendezvous at the disused pub car park in Wroxton for the following morning, knowing that, when she failed to appear, he would eventually drive to our house and find her cold dead body. And she had done that partly to prevent me from having the trauma of finding her, but mostly in the hope and expectation that Joe would be accused of her murder.
She had killed herself at a time when she knew I had the cast-iron alibi of being at a charity dinner in Birmingham, and made it look like murder so I could still collect her life insurance money. Perhaps she hadn’t realised that, by pre-deceasing her mother, Joe would have inherited all of the estate.
But maybe she had.
Had she appreciated how important motive was to the police? Was that, indeed, part of her scheme to frame her brother from beyond the grave?
I thought she had been much better in the few months before her death, and her talk of ‘ending it all’ had seemingly faded. But it had always been there in the background and her mother’s cancer diagnosis, together with Joe’s final hate-filled email, had caused it to rear its ugly head again, only more so.
Amelia had known all about her mother’s cancer — Jim and Gladys Wilson from Weybridge had made that perfectly clear. Had she just not told me in order to prevent me from working out her plan?
I wanted so much not to believe that she had killed herself after all that expensive therapy, and after I had worked so hard to prevent it, but...