I must get this clear in my mind. I won’t be doing it for any other reason than necessity, to save him from being murdered, and myself from worse trouble than I’m in already.
She felt groggy. That brandy would have been a lifesaver at this minute. There was some ginger wine somewhere in the front room. She collected it and poured herself a large glass.
I’ll be the ‘other woman’ in a divorce case. Horrible. It’s sure to be in the newspapers. Mummy and Daddy will get to hear of it. They don’t read the gutter press, but plenty of people in the parish do. A divorce scandal is the very thing I was so desperate to avoid. I had Barry killed because I wouldn’t divorce him.
Oh, God, what’s the alternative? Hector will be killed. He’s a decent man, utterly different from Barry. He takes a pride in his work. He treats me as if I’m a member of the same species, not some lower order. He made a terrible mistake when he fell under Antonia’s charm, but I can understand exactly how it happened. Knowing the force of Antonia’s personality, I can’t believe Hector had any part in his first wife’s death. He obviously misses her. He must have been rushed into marrying Antonia when he was most vulnerable.
Killing him would be wicked. Indefensible. Yet Antonia will find some way of doing it, with my help or without. She wants him dead. And if she’s arrested, one thing is certain. She’ll name me as her accomplice.
What it comes down to is the lesser of two evils. What would you rather have your daughter be, Daddy — an adulteress or a murderess?
She lit another cigarette.
If only there were more time. To be any use at all, the thing had to be accomplished before Antonia returned from Manchester. She would come back expecting to find Hector dead. Instead, she would be handed the alternative — an admission of his adultery.
She reached for the bottle again.
How soon, then?
Tomorrow.
With an effort to suppress her fears she gave some thought to the practicality of getting Hector into bed. Or getting into bed with Hector. She didn’t think of it as seducing him. If she’d read the signals right, he wouldn’t need much prompting. She hadn’t forgotten how he’d squeezed her hand in the kitchen at Park Crescent, or how he’d made her blush with his personal remarks in Reggiori’s. He was a foreigner, yes, and they got into muddles sometimes, but to say she had legs as good as Betty Grable’s and a ‘pretty fine bust’ couldn’t be put down to faulty syntax.
She could cook a tempting meal, anyway. She’d cook that curry to perfection and serve it with a bottle of Burgundy. Then a spectacular dessert was wanted: why not peach melba?
With the menu decided, she let her thoughts creep ahead. I have set a place for Hector at the oval table in the dining room. Before he eats he invites me to join him, but I insist with a demure smile that I have come there only to cook. I serve the meal and leave him to savour every delicious mouthful, telling him I have things to attend to in the kitchen. I wash the dishes and the pans and leave everything in immaculate condition.
Then I offer him coffee.
I ask how he likes it, and he doggedly says he would like it best if I will drink it with him. I weigh the suggestion solemnly and say instead that if he is kind enough to drive me back to Pimlico I’ll make coffee for both of us there.
So I show him into the front room at Oldfield Gardens, where the fire glows warmly. I go to the kitchen to make the coffee. Presently I call out casually that if he looks in the sideboard he’ll find a bottle of champagne and two glasses waiting.
The train of thought stopped abruptly. She flinched at the prospect of sex with Hector. She hadn’t even kissed him up to now. True, she wasn’t without experience, but compared with Antonia...
She shivered.
She would see how she felt in the morning.
20
Frost-patterns had formed on the inside of the bedroom windows. She scraped away a section to see if it was foggy outside and saw the words ‘Carelessness Kills’.
A superfluous warning. She had already decided to buy fresh ingredients for the curry, regardless that the lamb alone would use up all her meat ration for that week. She couldn’t believe it was possible for Antonia to have introduced poison into the vegetables, but just to be certain she would buy them fresh. Plus curry powder, which certainly couldn’t be left to chance.
She was first in the queue for the butcher’s when he opened at 8.30.
‘Yes, for you, as it happens, I do have some prime lamb, Mrs Bell. People coming to stay?’
‘Not to stay. Just a meal for a ... for some friends. People have been very kind to me.’
‘Glad to hear it. Does you no harm to have company. Takes your mind off things.’
‘I hope so.’
‘That’s the spirit, my love. Never say die.’
After the grocer’s and the greengrocer’s she took a bus to Regent’s Park and let herself into the house in Park Crescent. It wasn’t ten o’clock yet.
She took her shopping into the kitchen and unloaded it on the table. She’d managed to get a brick of Wall’s ice cream for the peach melba, so she stacked that with the ice trays in the fridge. The meat also went into the fridge. She took out what was left of the lamb Antonia had supplied, wrapped it in newspaper and stowed it in her shopping basket. The suspect curry powder joined it.
Her reason for coming so early wasn’t to do with cooking.
She’d woken about six in a changed mood from the near-panic of the night before. She’d reached a decision. She would search for evidence that Antonia had poisoned Hector’s food.
She needed to be certain. Sex with Hector was an alarming prospect but she was prepared to face it if she could find proof that his life was under imminent threat.
She would look for evidence of poison. A good detective would have known what to do. He would have had the food analysed by a toxicologist.
She had to search for the poison itself, or the container it came in.
And (because she really ought to keep an open mind) she would also look for that letter from Antonia’s mother. The letter that supposedly summoned Antonia to Manchester to put Lucky the luckless dog out of his misery. She would be surprised if the letter existed. She was pretty certain that these few days of absence had more to do with putting Hector down than Lucky. But she was here to find out the truth.
Might as well start with the obvious and the most unpleasant, she thought. The dustbin. After sifting through muck and rubbish for twenty minutes everything else will be like picking daisies. She opened the back door.
Two dustbins, one empty and the other only half full, thanks to Antonia’s dislike of cooking. The smell wasn’t as suffocating as it might have been because the contents were mostly dry. She moved them piece by piece into the empty dustbin. The wrapped vegetable parings she had placed in there herself the day before, a pile of newspapers and magazines, a cornflakes carton, a couple of tea packets, several salmon tins (for that pampered cat?), a whisky bottle, a wine bottle, a laddered stocking, cigarette butts and packets, a matchbox, some razor blades, combings of blonde hair, a lipstick holder and some packets of ash and cinders that she unwrapped and sifted with a stick.
She defied the freezing air long enough to check everything again and stack it in the original dustbin.
She came in and ran the hot tap for a wash, glad that the dirtiest job was over and untroubled that it had yielded nothing.
Next on her list was Antonia’s dressing room. In a house this size it was inconceivable that Antonia didn’t have a room of her own.
The act of going upstairs didn’t need to be charged with tension just because it was unexplored territory. She’d made up her mind to treat it casually. On the wall up the staircase there was a collection of framed photographs of allied fighter planes, so she paused to brush up on her aircraft recognition. Nobody likes being alone in a strange house, she told herself, unless like me they’re making a search for something.