Megan let out a ‘Huh’, which was the audible equivalent of a shrug. ‘Al is dead. Nothing’s going to change that. How he died is almost a detail.’
‘Just a moment, Megan. Until recently, Detective Inspector Rollins was convinced that I murdered Al. Convinced in particular by the evidence you gave her.’
‘The evidence about you having had an affair with Al?’
‘Yes, of course, that evidence. Which you knew to be untrue. And I was thinking it might help, help us both, if we could meet up and talk through how you managed to convince yourself of something so demonstrably untrue.’
‘Oh, what – you’re proposing to heal me, are you?’
‘Just talk to you. Just try to recapture the closeness there once was between us.’
‘There never was any closeness between us, Jude! And certainly none once you started to steal Al away from me. If you hadn’t gone to bed with him and broken everything up, Al would still be alive, and we’d still be married! That’s the truth of the matter. So don’t you come talking to me about trying to “recapture the closeness” between us, because it was never there! Goodbye!’
After the phone had been slammed down on her, Jude did not attempt to ring back. Megan had not been inventing lies to incriminate her old friend. In her twisted mind she had genuinely come to believe that what she asserted was the truth. There were some people it was impossible to help.
But that final telephone conversation unsettled Jude for a long time.
Both she and Carole were shocked, but at a deeper level unsurprised, to hear of Oliver Parsons’ death. Arriving at his home directly from Woodside Cottage, Rollins and Knight had received no response when they rang the front doorbell. Opening the garage door to see if they could effect an entrance that way, they had been driven back by the fumes of carbon monoxide.
The paramedics who were summoned found Oliver Parsons dead in the driving seat of his Range Rover. Beside him was a fully printed-up copy of his confession.
He had achieved the classic ending to a Golden Age murder mystery.
Once the shock had subsided, Jude felt sadness but also a sense of inevitability. Oliver Parsons’ life, she now recognized, had ended with the death of Aileen. Since then he had just been going through the motions.
Nor could she feel much regret over what happened to Burton St Clair. Justice, she knew, did not always conform to the strict dictates of morality.
‘I should have seen it coming,’ said Carole, as they sat that evening over Sauvignon Blanc in the kitchen of High Tor. Gulliver snuffled serenely in front of the Aga.
‘Seen what coming?’
‘What Oliver Parsons did.’
Unusually for her, Carole had brought her laptop downstairs. ‘Look. I should have realized.’ She turned the machine round so that Jude could see the screen. ‘From the second paragraph.’
And Jude read another extract from Best Served Cold by G. H. D. Troughton.
‘There’s no point in being too kid-glove about this, Danvers,’ said Sir Gervaise Montagu. ‘You’ve been shown up as a wrong ’un fair and square.’
‘Hanged if I know how you tumbled to the gag.’
‘I wouldn’t use the word “hanged” too lightly if I were in your shoes. You’re as guilty as blazes and you’d be convicted by any court in the country.’
‘Yes, it does rather look as if I’ll soon be kitted out with a hempen necktie.’
‘No way round it, Danvers old man. Unless of course …’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m going to take a turn around the rose garden. But I happen to know that Dexter Hogg keeps his service revolver in the top drawer of his desk right here in the library.’
‘Does he, by Jove?’
‘Yes, and his ammo too.’
‘Righty-ho.’
‘I don’t need to tell you the decent thing to do in these circumstances, do I, Danvers?’
‘No, Montagu, you don’t. I may be a cad and a bounder, but at least I’m British, and I know when to do the decent thing.’