Hand of Death Read online

  Ronald gave a quick nod to the other two men. The bank manager looked extremely relieved; a fine perspiration bedewed his brow and he mopped at it with a large white linen handkerchief. The estate agent merely shrugged. There were one or two titters from the group about the fireplace but they were mainly too intent on their own conversation to pay much attention to outsiders. Ronald steered Mrs Wyatt to the banquette and perched beside her, tensely. He was deeply shocked by the fact that a woman of her standing was on the brink of making a spectacle of herself. She had already almost finished her drink.

  ‘Finish your beer and have a drink on me, Mr Trimm,’ she said. ‘You can get me another gin, too.’ She began fumbling in her bag again and pulled out several pound notes. ‘Get yourself something stronger. Have a scotch.’

  ‘Not just now, thank you, Mrs Wyatt,’ Ronald said primly.

  ‘Well, get me a double gin and tonic, there’s a lamb, and don’t look so stuffy,’ said Dorothea.

  Ronald took a deep breath.

  ‘I think you ought to be getting along home now, Mrs Wyatt,’ he said.

  ‘Who wants to go home?’ said Dorothea. ‘There’s no one there. There’s nothing to go home for.’ She moved closer to Ronald. ‘It’s so sad,’ she said.

  She looked now as if she might weep. Ronald cast a worried glance round the bar, but there was no help coming. Everything depended on him.

  ‘I’ll take you home,’ he said. If she’d come here in her car, he must drive it, and walk back later for the van. A drunken woman was, at any time, a most distressing sight, and a drunken lady, which Mrs Wyatt was, was infinitely worse. She must be rescued from herself. ‘Come along,’ he said, standing up. He was good at ushering time-wasting non-buyers from the shop, able after years of practice to pick them out from genuinely interested browsers, and he used the same masterful technique now, waiting for her to rise.

  She did.

  Nancy Trimm was fond of saying that she and Ron did everything together and had no secrets from each other. Even in the hours when they were apart, she knew where he was, and if he was not in the shop she could reflect that he was bidding at an auction, visiting a dealer, or collecting or delivering goods for repair or renovation from one of his outworkers. Nanron Antiques had begun as a market stall in Middletown, run by Nancy while Ronald went on working in men’s wear in Middletown’s large department store; now it kept them both.

  They lived in Tellingford, at Number 15, Sycamore Road, a bungalow with a bay-windowed living area that led to a dining recess off the kitchen; the main bedroom at the back overlooked the neat garden with shaved lawn, beds for annuals, and productive vegetable patch. Tellingford, originally a small market town, had grown since the war and now included two industrial areas, one on each side of the river that ran through the centre. To house those who worked in the factories, estates of modern houses in various price brackets had been built wherever planning permission could be granted, and villages in the surrounding areas had expanded too. Crowbury, three miles away, was now considered exclusive; property there fetched high prices. The road through the village had been widened and improved; quality shops had opened, and there was now a specialist delicatessen shop as well as an old-fashioned general grocery, two butchers, a dress shop, a hardware store, a shop selling children’s clothes, knitting wool and haberdashery, a greengrocer, a newsagent and tobacconist, and Nanron Antiques.

  There was no parking problem in Crowbury, where just off the High Street there was a large, tree-lined square facing the church, and drivers on their way to Tellingford or Middletown often stopped to shop there. Weekend motorists, seeing the pretty shop fronts, some timbered under thatched or old tiled roofs, would pause to browse. There was talk of a tea shop opening in what had been a forge, and Clematis Cottage, now being renovated, had been sold to a potter. Nancy had seen, when they opened the shop, that Crowbury was a coming area; one day, she planned, she and Ronald would live there.

  When they met, Ronald was a carpet fitter at the Middletown department store where Nancy worked in the gift department. She made up her mind to marry him quite quickly, but first she set about improving his qualifications for the role of her partner, guiding him away from carpets to men’s wear when there was a vacancy. His appearance soon smartened up. Nancy aspired to a husband in business on his own and, because she had a mild interest herself in restoring china, which an aunt of hers had done as a hobby, she thought of antiques. They had class.

  Reluctant though she was to leave Ronald’s side, soon after they married she left the store and went to work part-time for an antique dealer. She started to pick up small objects at sales, and stored them in a cupboard at the flat where she and Ronald lived. Meanwhile, Ronald acquired some good clothes at staff discount, and a polished manner under the supervision of Mr Golding, head of men’s wear for the past fifteen years.

  At her market stall, Nancy began selling items individually priced which she had bought in job lots at auctions; she made a considerable profit. When her mother died – her father was killed in the war – her small inheritance went into a deposit on the bungalow, a year’s rent on the shop in Crowbury, and more stock.

  Ronald disappointed her by showing no aptitude for mending china or restoring furniture; he was not neat-fingered enough, and he wanted results too quickly. But he learned to buy wisely, and developed connections with local dealers, particularly one specialising in clocks, so that a good part of their business was outside the shop. Nancy sent Ronald out knocking in those early years. He soon knew enough to spot a bargain, and the manners he had learned in men’s wear inspired confidence in the gullible householders he called on in villages fifty and sixty miles away. Occasionally, even now, he would visit a hamlet in search of old women who might not yet be wary of door-to-door callers. Ronald, in any case, in his good clothes and with his nice way of speaking, was very different from the rough, tinker-like knockers who had spoiled the market. If he came upon some choice object worth a special effort, he would pay several visits over a period of weeks, doing odd jobs for the old person who owned the desired article – usually a clock – like fixing a shelf or wiring a plug, turning himself into a trusted friend. Then he would offer twenty pounds for some valueless thing – probably junk – adding that he’d pay a fiver for that old, shabby clock. After his careful groundwork, he was never refused.

  Nancy looked after the shop when Ronald was on the road. Buses which ran between Middletown and Tellingford every hour stopped at Crowbury, so she could travel independently. She had never learned to drive; somehow or other there had never been time. It didn’t matter, in the excellence of their partnership; perhaps it was even good for Ronald, she would fondly reflect, to maintain supremacy in this traditionally masculine area. A man liked to feel strong.

  2

  In his black tracksuit, George Fortescue blended into the scenery as he jogged round the streets of Crowbury in the dark. Sometimes he kept to the residential areas, where the streets were lit, and at other times, if there was a moon, he ran along the lanes. If a car approached when he was pounding down a road, he would be warned by its lights and would move on to the grass verge while it passed.

  At first, George had found that all his concentration was needed for the sheer physical effort of lifting one foot after the other, but as the days passed he began to pay more attention to his surroundings. He noticed aspects of life in Crowbury which he had never thought about before: through lighted windows he saw families at their evening meal, or the flicker of a television screen; he met people out with their dogs, often elderly men with a terrier on a lead. Battered cars, driven by youngsters on their way to Middletown for a night out, would roar by, and as he passed the various pubs their assorted clientele would be arriving or departing.

  On this damp Friday, George padded down the short drive of Orchard House and into Church Lane. The soft drizzle soon beaded his face and clothes, but as he ran on he forgot about it, concentrating on his breathing, trotting al
ong at a gentle pace. He circled the chestnut tree in the square in front of the church and ran on down a footpath linking Church Lane with the High Street once more. As he approached the Plough, the door opened and a couple came out on to the pavement. They crossed the road ahead of him, and he had to slow up to let them pass. He did not glance at them deliberately, for he felt no curiosity; one thing about jogging was that it detached your mind from life’s trivia. But he recognised Dorothea Wyatt.

  The Manor House, Crowbury, was never in fact the domicile of the lord of the manor but had once been a farmhouse on the estate of the neighbouring manor of Fordwick. It had been extensively renovated when it was sold off many years before, and the Wyatts had improved it still more. It was a pleasant, long, low house made of local stone, with an old tiled roof, set in four acres of land, most of it meadow which Dorothea let for grazing. A public footpath ran across the field at the end of the garden, and beyond, less than a mile away, was the river. There were trees round the house, a beech and larches, but the elms at the boundary had died and been cut down, leaving stark stumps by the fence.

  Ronald helped Dorothea out of her car, a Saab, which he’d enjoyed driving and he’d managed it well, unfamiliar though it was and much livelier than his van.

  ‘Have you got your front-door key?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s too big to put in my bag,’ said Dorothea.

  She went round the side of the house to where a water butt stood on bricks under a spout, and fumbled beneath it, coming up with a long iron key.

  The front door was made of solid oak, the original one dating from when the house was built. Dorothea had some trouble fitting the key in the lock, but she managed at last, opened it and went in, and Ronald, who still held the keys of the car, followed. There were lights burning in the hall in which they now stood, coming from a room on the left where the door was open, and shining down the stairs from the landing above. The wireless was on; light music played loudly.

  ‘Shut the door, for God’s sake,’ said Dorothea. ‘Don’t let in the cold.’

  Ronald obeyed. He put her keys down on a gleaming oak dresser which must have been well over two hundred years old. He saw a fine oak carved cupboard against one wall, and a little spinning wheel by the hearth in which was an iron basket grate and firedogs. A solid fireback spanned the chimney wall. A Windsor chair stood at the other side of the fireplace. Ronald, twitching almost visibly like a hound on the scent, went to look at it; it was made of yew. Such pieces rarely went through his hands; they were too good, too perfect, fetched too high a price.

  ‘Come along,’ Dorothea was calling. She had disappeared through the doorway of the room from which the music was coming.

  Ronald thought about his van, still parked in Church Lane, and the damp walk he would have to fetch it. He thought about Nancy and their meal. Then he went into Dorothea’s sitting room.

  It was not large. It was comfortably furnished with a modern sofa, but one easy chair was Edwardian; another, wing-backed, earlier still. They had been re-upholstered in velvet. There was a mahogany tallboy between the two windows at which hung full-length gold brocade curtains. A sofa table, heaped with magazines, stood against a wall. Ronald saw a posset pot and a pair of Worcester vases on top of the tallboy.

  ‘You’ve got some lovely things, Mrs Wyatt,’ he had to remark.

  ‘Yes. Most of them belonged to my husband’s family but I’ve picked up one or two myself,’ said Dorothea. ‘I keep my jugs and some more china bits and pieces in the other room.’ She gestured towards a door on the right.

  Ronald had sold her a Coalport jug which Nancy had repaired; she’d noticed the neat mend at once, and he’d reduced the price. After that, whenever she had looked at an object in his shop, he had always pointed out any blemish, however expertly restored. It would not do to deceive a woman like Mrs Wyatt, who was one of Crowbury’s leading residents.

  Dorothea turned down the radio.

  ‘I always leave this on when I’m out, to frighten the burglars,’ she said. ‘And it makes the house nicer to come back to. I don’t like the silence. It’s horrid, living alone, especially at night. I haven’t got used to it yet, and my husband died three years ago. That’s why I go to the Plough, when I can’t take it any more.’ She seemed to have sobered up now. ‘How about a drink, Mr Trimm? Won’t you join me?’

  Ronald glanced at a plain brass carriage clock on the mantelpiece. It was just after half-past seven. Another five minutes wouldn’t make a lot of difference.

  Nancy Trimm had made beef olives for dinner. She never called the evening meal by any other name; supper was a snack, or a late-night repast after some festivity. The table was laid with the plated cutlery they had always used since she had picked up the tarnished and incomplete set years before, and good glasses – not matched goblets but odd ones, not worth much if put in the shop. Nancy liked things nice.

  To follow the beef olives, there was apple amber. Fruit was good for the health, and there were plenty of apples from their own Bramley tree stored in the shed. When they had bought the bungalow, one of its attractions had been the large garden; houses and bungalows being built now had no space for fruit trees in their minuscule plots. With their freezer, Ronald and Nancy kept themselves supplied with vegetables for most of the year. It did Ronald good to get out there in the garden on a Sunday, no matter what the weather, and when the evenings were light he’d put in an hour or so after work most days. Never on a Friday, though, and when he was at a sale he might return too late for even half an hour’s hoeing. Apart from the garden’s usefulness, working in it made him tired – too tired for any of that unpleasantness.

  At first, Nancy had to endure it. They’d been going out together for some time – to the cinema, walks in the park on Sundays. Working in the store, as they both did, Saturday had been a full day like any other. He came to tea to meet her mother; he had no family of his own now. Like her, he had lost his father when he was very young and had been brought up by his mother. This was a bond for them; another was the fact that they were only children. Ronald’s mother had died when he was seventeen. When Nancy and he met, he was living in digs in Middletown; he was only twenty when they married, but she was twenty-eight and getting anxious. Nancy had been out with several young men before Ronald came along, but sooner or later they all wanted one thing and, when this was denied them, that had been the end of it. But she must marry; to be unmarried was to be a failure, to advertise that one had been passed over. That was before Women’s Lib made it possible, even admirable, to choose independence, or to say that one had chosen it.

  In the end, Ronald had wanted the same thing as the others. The kisses he planted on her reluctant lips grew more demanding; she felt, one evening after her mother had gone up to bed, hard urgency in his body pressed to hers. She’d let it happen, at last, on a summer’s day when they were in the country. Ronald, carried away, had not noticed her own lack of enthusiasm as he moaned and heaved, then lay inert upon her. The pain had been severe, too. She was reluctant to permit it again but, when she did, it wasn’t so bad, and after a while she was even able to detach her mind and pretend it was happening to someone else.

  He didn’t talk of marriage, so she made him. That was before the Pill. After the wedding, she pretended she’d had a miscarriage. For quite a long time she convinced him that the doctor had decreed restraint, and after that she made him take precautions on the few occasions when she allowed him contact. It never happened now; she made quite sure of that.

  Apart from this aspect of it, which Nancy preferred to ignore, she favoured married life. Ronald had proved an apt pupil in all she set out to teach him, and his appearance had improved as his coarse, sandy hair became flecked with grey. He was not tall, but not short either, and he had kept his figure. They were respected in their circle of acquaintances, intimate with nobody, but on friendly terms with neighbours and fellow traders.

  Nancy kept the bungalow impeccably. When Ronald walked through t
he door in the evening, his slippers would be waiting on the mat and he would leave his shoes in the hall. This was not for his comfort, but lest he bring mud indoors. His dinner – always ample and tasty – would be ready. Afterwards, if gardening was not possible, there might be catalogues to consult, or a small woodwork repair too minor to be passed on to the cabinet maker he used. Ronald was not encouraged to help with household tasks. The kitchen was Nancy’s territory and he was not welcome there; once, he had almost attacked her at the sink, coming up behind her and grasping her round the waist, his body tight against her. He’d been drinking before he came home; she’d caught it on his breath. She’d managed to get away that time, and she’d taken care that such a thing never happened again. All that was quite unnecessary. Mutual support in the business, a respected position in the neighbourhood, and modest comfort in the home were the things that were important; shared interests were essential to a good marriage, and the business gave them those. Besides that, a man must be well looked after, as was Ronald. He could have no cause for complaint.

  She knew he often went to the Plough on Fridays, and would be ready with her tactics for physical evasion when he returned, though for years now she had been unmolested. Providing he kept to just the one evening and did not stay long at the pub, she was prepared to overlook this little failing.

  But he was always home by eight, and this evening, when the hands of the functional electric clock on the living-room mantelpiece said eight forty-five, Nancy did begin to wonder what had happened. She went to the window more than once to see if the van was in view. Perhaps it had broken down. Not for the first time, she wished the shop was on the telephone, but there was a box nearby and Ronald used that if he needed to make calls. In this business, the telephone was an expensive luxury. Surely it was impossible for him to have an accident between Crowbury and Tellingford? He knew the road so well.