She just nodded and winced as she did so.
Then I picked up the telephone to call the police and an ambulance.
We waited outside for the police, sitting on the top step. It was a mild evening, the sky a burnt orange streaked with long grey wisps of cloud. The rain had stopped and the drying brown and lemon leaves rustled in the breeze. I was grateful to be out in the fresh air again. We both sat silently and breathed in deep for a while. I held Alice’s hand, which was shaking as much as mine. Then I asked her why she had come to Miss Scott’s house and what had happened upstairs.
“I asked to see you,” she said. “I’d noticed your car when I arrived. The same one I saw parked outside school earlier today. She tried to tell me you weren’t here, that she had two cars. We talked, argued. Then she admitted you’d been here but said you’d started feeling ill and had to lie down.”
“That bit’s partly true,” I said, remembering the sweet strong tea, no doubt masking the taste of whatever drugs she had added. Benzodiazepine, she had said.
“I was more than suspicious by then, so told her I wanted to go up and see you. She asked me if I fancied a drink first. I said no. Things were pretty tense between us, but I didn’t expect what happened next. I stood up and said I wanted to go upstairs and see if you were all right now. She came at me with the poker. Luckily I managed to dodge the blow and it smashed a lamp or a vase or something. We struggled, she dropped the poker. I used my knee on her. I don’t really remember what happened after that except I’ve never been in such a fight before. It seemed to go on forever.” She shook her head. “I think I got to the point where I didn’t care how much I hurt her as long as she stopped trying to hurt me.”
“It was a fight for your life,” I said, squeezing her hand. She winced at the pain. “Sorry. She’d have killed you, too.”
“How could she hope to get away with two murders just like that?”
“She’d gotten away with murder before. She was desperate. Her plan was unravelling. But what made you come here? We thought Miss Scott was Barnes’s victim, didn’t we?”
“First off, it was just a feeling. You know, like you hear about in those American cop shows. Something stinks, or feels ‘hinky.’ Is that the right word? Something felt not quite right, anyway, and I was getting more anxious. It was gnawing away at me all the time I was trying to concentrate on teaching my class. I couldn’t stop thinking about you and Barnes and Marguerite Scott. After class, I got back on my computer and looked up everything I could find about her husband’s disappearance. There wasn’t very much, and most of what was there was there because he was a fairly important player in the financial field. Sort of famous. He has his own Wikipedia page, at any rate. He was forty-five at the time of his death, probably about twenty years older than his wife.”
I was in my early fifties, having retired early. “Forty-five’s not old,” I said.
“As that’s my age, I would have to agree with you. But I said ‘older,’ not old. Anyway, one thing that leaped out at me was the date of his disappearance. September 28, 2010. That was seven years from the time Marguerite Scott came back from lunch drunk and got her marching orders. I can’t prove it, but I’m sure she’d been out with Barnes. Anyway, I knew already that her husband’s body had never been found, that he was supposed to have drowned, and I also knew that it takes seven years before an official declaration of death can be issued in absentia. That made me think. The inscription, Marguerite Scott’s erratic behavior around that date, her cold and distant manner. I was starting to think by then that I must have misread the whole business, got it backwards, and that Barnes wasn’t about to harm Miss Scott but was somehow her accomplice, and perhaps the point of the inscription was to remind her that she really did like killing, or really had killed, not that he was going to kill her. That was when I decided to follow you out here.”
“And I’m glad you did,” I said.
“I know it wasn’t very logical thinking. I mean, the police can’t have suspected anything back in 2010, or they would gave questioned her more thoroughly. Besides, she was in a cafe with lots of other people when her husband drowned. Lots of people saw her. She had the ideal alibi.”
“Only it wasn’t her husband who drowned,” I said. “It was Barnes. And he didn’t die.”
Alice needed a few stitches here and there and some tape around her ribs, while I had my ankle set, which meant I had to walk with a stick for a while. Fortunately for me, Marguerite Scott had dragged me down the cellar steps head first rather than feet, so except for a few bruises around my lower back, I was otherwise in fairly decent shape for a man my age, the doctor said.
A few days after our ordeal, the forensic team dug up two bodies on Marguerite Scott’s property. One belonged to her husband, George Scott, who, as I had explained to Alice and the police already, had never made it to Cornwall for the holiday on which he supposedly drowned. The other body, far fresher, was Barnes Corrigan, who had been dead only since the end of September, not so long after he had sent the Browning to Marguerite Scott. Both had their throats cut.
Marguerite Scott was still in hospital under observation. Fortunately, her skull hadn’t been fractured, but she was suffering from serious concussion, and she had a hell of a headache. As yet, she hadn’t told the police anything, but it was just a matter of time. Besides, the superintendent told us that they already had plenty of evidence to convict her even if she didn’t confess.
As regards cause of death, we were informed a little later that the search team had found enough benzodiazepines in Miss Scott’s house to knock out a small army. The superintendent also remarked that, given the amount of blood in the soil around the makeshift graves, she must have dumped the bodies in before cutting their throats, so as not to leave traces of blood in the house. As both George and Barnes had not been dead, but merely unconscious, when they were killed, their hearts had still been working to pump blood from the throat wounds. There were no traces of benzodiazepines in what was left of George’s body after seven years, but the pathologist had hopes of finding traces still in Barnes’s system. Not that it mattered; we could all imagine how she killed her victims. First she incapacitated them with drugs, then she dumped them in a shallow grave and slit their throats before burying them. Nice woman.
And now I knew why Miss Scott had been worried enough about the inscription I had showed her to risk killing me, too. If the wrong people had found out about it, Barnes Corrigan and his whereabouts would have become an issue. Surely someone somewhere would have missed him. Miss Scott had clearly surmised that I wasn’t going to stop asking questions about the inscription, and she was right to believe that. I knew when I first saw the words that there was a warped and vindictive intelligence behind them, though I will admit I had no idea that I would experience such an abrupt reversal and discover that the most warped and vindictive intelligence in the whole affair lay elsewhere, in the form of Miss Scott herself. My initial analysis had been terribly flawed, seeing the whole thing as a teacher-student relationship and Barnes as the psychopathic intelligence behind it all. But that wasn’t the case at all.
I would like nothing more than to finish by saying that Alice Langham and I were married in such and such a church on such a such a date, but we weren’t. Alice had no desire to marry again, and I had no objection to our living together, so I sold my little pile of stones up in Ripon and moved into her bijou Lincolnshire cottage. Alice still teaches at Linford School, where she is something of a celebrity, and I still enjoy the occasional day out browsing the second-hand bookshops, only now I examine what I buy far more closely. Sometimes, in these chilly winter evenings, we sit before the crackling fire and, at Alice’s request, I read to her my translations of Ovid. The erotic poems, of course.