To Kill a Wife (Inspector Peach Series Book 3) Read online

  To Kill A Wife

  J. M. Gregson

  © J. M. Gregson 1999

  J. M. Gregson has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1999 by Severn House Publishers Ltd.

  This edition published in 2017 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  One

  It was on a Wednesday evening that Martin Hume decided to kill his wife.

  He sat alone in the comfortable, cheerless house. He had watched A Question of Sport with no great interest. The sitcom which followed seemed to him even more banal than usual. He had finished The Times crossword.

  Murder came into his mind like an unexpected and welcome visitor, but it was not mere boredom which brought it there. He had often toyed with the thought of how Verna might die. She might have a heart attack at a moment of stress. Goodness knows, her life had enough stress: from her sexual excitements with others to her bizarre temper tantrums with him. She might succumb to a richly deserved skiing accident a thousand miles away from him. She might even walk obligingly under the proverbial bus. In his more baroque fantasies, she choked on her own vomit after one of her drinking bouts, or fell backwards from a hotel balcony while taunting him, the lips which had been twisted in scorn rounding suddenly into a black hole of terror as she realized too late that she was dying.

  But he knew in his heart that none of these things would come to pass. Convenient accidents were the stuff of fiction. Life just wasn’t like that: not his life, anyway. Verna would go on filling it with misery; would no doubt outlive him.

  Unless he took matters into his own hands. Murder. The thought sprang fully formed into his brain, clear and cold, as if he had walked under a waterfall. Within minutes, Martin could only wonder why he had never entertained the notion before. Life was a fragile thing; there were reminders of that every day.

  Verna’s wickedness might seem more than mortal, but even her life hung by but a slender thread. It just needed someone to cut that thread. This train of thought was so simple, so irrefutably logical that he should surely have followed it long ago.

  He revolved his wife’s death in his mind, picturing her corpse in a hundred different positions. Her expression in death was less varied: he saw her always with the same look of frozen surprise.

  Time passes swiftly when one is enjoying oneself. Martin had repeated that old cliché among his few friends, often, as an irony. Now, he found that over an hour had gone in a trice, as he explored the idea of making this thing happen. He could not remember when he had last enjoyed such simple, unalloyed pleasure as the thought of engineering Verna’s death now afforded him.

  While he allowed his mind to elaborate on this wonderful new idea, the television pictures flickered unseen before him and he was startled by the sound of Verna’s key in the lock. He could scarcely believe it was five to eleven.

  Martin feared for a moment that his resolve to kill her would show on his face. He need not have worried. She noticed nothing, and he wondered with a small, secret smile why he had feared her scrutiny. She never registered his emotions, did she? Unless he stood over her with a breadknife in his hand – one of the more vivid of the pictures he had painted for himself – she would never even suspect him.

  He followed her into the kitchen, watched her make coffee for herself and enjoyed rather than resented her failure to offer to make one for him. Her swift, graceful actions gave him pleasure now, as they had not done for months, even years. He could admire them dispassionately, as he might have enjoyed the silky movements of a leopard.

  She reached up for the jar, and the loose dress fell away from her arm, leaving it as slim, brown and youthful as it had been when he had courted her thirteen years ago. She tossed the sleek black hair clear of the nape of her neck in that careless gesture he had once found so attractive. He caught the mingled scent of sweat and perfume from her armpits, imagined for an instant that he could catch upon her the scent of the man she had been with.

  Verna’s lie came right on cue, almost as if his thoughts had prompted it. “Margaret sends her regards,” she said carelessly, stirring vigorously in the cup. “I just wish she’d concentrated on her cards. Her bidding was as erratic as ever.”

  Bridge was the usual excuse on Wednesdays. He wondered for a moment about the man who had been clasped by those slim brown arms tonight. How did he see the woman who had given her husband so much pain? And what account, if any, did Verna give of that husband when she and her lover lay exhausted after copulation, staring at the ceiling of some room he would never see? That image gave him no pain now; he found that his own new secret had banished the last vestiges of those hot, hopeless jealousies which he had once striven so hard to control.

  As Martin sat on the edge of the bed, Verna stood for a moment before him in her tiny, lace-edged pants, looking at herself over his head in the mirror, daring him to reach out and touch her. Then she peeled off the last of her clothes, stretched the limbs that in the subdued light of the bedroom were as lithe and unmarked as they had been when she was a bride, and climbed carefully into the space she had allotted to herself.

  Husband and wife lay on the extreme edges of their king-size mattress, as far apart as if they had been in separate beds. They had not spoken since their brief exchanges in the kitchen half an hour earlier. Verna fell asleep quickly, as she always did. Martin lay on his back with his eyes closed, listening to her deep and regular breathing. Her easy, untroubled sleep had often seemed like another, unconscious, insult to his troubled soul. Henceforward, he decided, he would sleep in the room at the other end of the landing, which he had always used after the worst of their rows.

  But tonight he smiled in the darkness, listening to the quiet rhythms of his wife’s sleep, hugging his secret like a comfort against his breast. Only he knew that Verna was going to die.

  Two

  The station dated from the prosperous days of Victorian railway mania. There had been six platforms once, and troop trains had carried Lancashire lads from here to the horrors of Gallipoli and the Somme, in the war to end all wars. The Great War that generation had always called it; it had produced not permanent peace but Hitler and his holocaust and another war. The platforms had dispatched Brunton men all over the globe, to a second catalogue of deaths.

  The station was quieter these days. It had been given a new facade, an uneasy compromise with the urban development around it. But the ghosts of the past, of brave farewells and of raucously happy holiday week emptyings of the town, echoed still within its capacious interior. Martin Hume remembered waiting on the flagged platform for the Blackpool train as a small boy, before his father had bought their first car. The steam about which his father had spoken with such enthusiasm had gone by then, but the noise had still been deafening to his small ears as the monster roared into the station from the adjacent tunnel. Martin could recall even now how the grasp of his right hand had tightened ner
vously on his mother’s gloved fingers, while his left clutched his bucket and spade, ready for the day of sun and sand which lay ahead.

  The memories flooded back as he waited with only four other people in the high entrance hall, beneath a peeling sign over a long-disused Left Luggage Office. He looked through the archway to the day outside, checking that it was still fine for the three-minute walk back to his car. In the late morning of this April day, clouds scudded quickly across a bright blue sky, but rain was not far away. The remains of the last shower were still gathered in small puddles across the tarmac of the side road where the station lay.

  The weather matched his mood. He always looked forward to the visits of his sister-in-law and her small son with a mixture of pleasure and apprehension. It was not because he had any fear of Sue, who was so different from her sister that she was a source of undiluted delight to him. His apprehension stemmed solely from the way experience told him that Verna would treat her sister and her nephew.

  His disquiet dropped away as he saw Sue coming down the steps with Toby’s small hand clasped carefully in hers. He saw her an instant before she saw him, and thus caught the small frown of concentration on her broad forehead, which he found so attractive. When she spotted him, her face lit up with the open affection which made her at once so pretty and so vulnerable.

  Sue was three years younger than her sister. He realized with a shock that she must now be thirty-two. She certainly did not look it. Part of her attraction to Martin was the contrast in appearance between the sisters. Where Verna was willowy and dark, with shoulder-length black hair and eyes like charcoal, Sue was shorter, sturdy, with even a suggestion of plumpness. Her dark-blonde hair curled naturally and tightly, framing an active, open face. She had eyes of a remarkable blue; azure, he had heard it called, though he claimed no expertise in such things. There were freckles still faintly visible beneath her pale, smooth skin, and a tendency to blush, which she found embarrassing but he thought wholly becoming. Where Verna’s face seemed designed to conceal and to hurt, Sue’s was fashioned to reveal and to respond.

  “What ho, Toby!” Martin called, and watched the small round face change from boredom to delight as swiftly as only a five-year-old’s can.

  “Can we go to the park?”

  The child wasted no time on greetings. Long before he was installed in the car, Toby had established his priorities. The boy remembered his last visit and the fun they had had then. Martin felt absurdly flattered.

  “Don’t you go bothering Uncle Martin now,” said Sue, buckling the rear-seat safety belt carefully around the small figure.

  Toby’s legs were so short that his sandals only reached to the edge of the seat; he twitched his toes experimentally, then shared a conspiratorial grin with Martin over the back of the driver’s seat. With an infant’s acuity, he was aware that the battle was already won: they were going to the park with the football. As the blue Mondeo moved away from the town and into the wallflowers and cherries of suburbia, the small boy sang tunelessly to himself.

  Verna was waiting for them in the neat garden. She sized up the party unhurriedly as they left the car and came round the path to meet her. Then she said, “You look well, Susan. Working life obviously suits you.” She always called her sister Susan, in defiance of her wishes and everyone else’s practice, like an obstinate mother asserting her rights.

  Sue said, “I can manage the job at the office full time, now that Toby is at school.” She wondered why she was so certain that her sister’s every comment was a veiled criticism, and why she had to rise to the bait and defend herself.

  “I suppose it isn’t too demanding,” said Verna dismissively. She turned her attentions to Toby, visiting her most dazzling smile upon him. “And how’s the man of the house getting on? You get bigger every time I see you, young man. I shall have to hear all about that school, shan’t I?”

  Martin had thought of his wife as the Wicked Witch of the West as far as children were concerned; she had certainly been quite appalled at any suggestion that she should produce any of her own, even in the days when she had permitted him access to her precious body. Now, characteristically, she set out to charm her nephew. And succeeded.

  She produced a jigsaw, the large pieces perfectly suited to the small chubby hands which her slim fingers guided over the mahogany of the little used dining-room table. Martin and Sue were left surveying the tops of the two bent heads, the tousled golden one so absorbed in its task, the dark one so conscious of the effect it was contriving, even as it uttered phrases of encouragement to the child who pressed against her side.

  “Make us all a coffee, will you?” Verna said without looking up. It was a demand, not a request. And it could have been addressed to either of the observers.

  Martin and Sue found themselves together in the kitchen, combining, without a word, upon the simple task allotted to them. They were too inhibited to speak, too aware of the ears beneath the black hair in the dining room beyond the open door, of the brain registering with an amused contempt their every action and reaction.

  They were halfway through lunch before Verna mentioned the husband who had left her sister two years earlier. “Do you hear much from Bernard?” she asked casually. She was helping herself to salad, shaking the olive oil carefully from the greenstuff, as though that and not her question was her main concern.

  “I don’t hear at all,” said Sue, a little too quickly, as if she had been waiting for the matter to be raised. “And that suits me. I hope I never see him again!”

  “Oh dear!” Verna shook her head with a small, secret smile. “It’s always so sad, I think, when a relationship which once promised so much leads to such bitterness. A pity it couldn’t end in a more civilized way. But men’s attentions stray so easily, once you allow them to do so.”

  She was being the mother again to Sue, thought Martin, and the worst, most insufferable kind of mother, who saw the departure of a man as wholly the fault of a wife who had not striven hard enough to keep him. He had never known the mother of these very different daughters: she had died when Verna was twelve and Sue was nine. He wondered what that long-dead woman would have thought of the way her elder daughter treated her husband, of the casual pieces of contempt Verna reserved for him, of her string of equally casual affairs.

  Sue did not want to talk about Bernard. She found her hands creeping up the fabric of her loose dress and caressing her shoulders which had been so often bruised by her husband’s drunken blows in the last months of their marriage. It was as if she needed to reassure herself, even at this distance, that the flesh was healed and unmarked. She had never told Verna about those blows, and she would not do so now. She said grimly, “Bernard has got out of our lives. All I ask is that he stays out.”

  “Well, you know best, Susan, I’m sure. It just seems such a pity.” Verna smiled. “He was rather gorgeous, after all. And so well endowed.” Verna smiled reminiscently, so that both her listeners were left wondering if she had extended her voracious sexual attentions to her brother-in-law at some time; it was exactly the speculation she had intended to plant. “And it’s always such a pity when children are involved. I’m sure Toby misses his father.”

  At the sound of his name, the child’s open face turned expectantly towards the aunt who had amused him so expertly before the meal, and Sue leant automatically towards him in protection. “Toby was scarcely three when Bernard left. I’m sure he barely remembers him. And that’s how I want it to stay.”

  She put her arm protectively round the small body. The child, who understood nothing of the reasons, picked up the tension between two of the adults upon whom he depended; she felt the young muscles tightening.

  Verna watched mother and son for a moment. Then she shrugged. “It’s a pity you feel so defensive about it, but it’s understandable, I suppose.” Her gesture said that anyone with reasonable personal resources would have made a much better job of things.

  Immediately after the meal, Martin took t
he insistent Toby to the spacious park, which the burghers of the town had established a century earlier for the benefit of Brunton’s hard-working citizens. He was apprehensive about leaving the sisters together, but his nephew was not to be denied. He trotted impatiently along the half mile to the broad expanse of grass beside the towering trees.

  Toby’s vigor and enthusiasm outstripped his skill, as was natural for a five-year-old, but his strength and balance had improved considerably in the six months since they had last been here. He managed to give the light plastic ball several resolute thumps with his right foot, though when Martin encouraged him to try to kick with his left foot, he fell into a hilarious heap without making contact. By the end of their session together, he was learning to time his kick on a moving ball, as Martin rolled it slowly towards him.

  He was tiring now, flushed with excitement and effort, but when Martin announced that this was definitely the last one, the boy watched the ball with fierce concentration as it bobbled slowly towards him, then crashed it joyously past his uncle and into the corner of the goal they had set up between the two young oak trees. Adult and child were equally delighted.

  Martin clutched the ball under one arm and stretched out the other to take charge of the small, hot hand. They made for the ice-cream stall and the two cones which were the perfect culmination of their half hour’s exuberance. Then they walked past the lake with its ducks and swans, and Toby looked with the disdain of a practising footballer at the scene of which he had once been part, where infants threw bread at their parents’ direction to the quacking hordes.

  Toby chattered excitedly all the way back to the house, while his uncle grew silent, wondering what exchanges were taking place between the two very different women who awaited them there.

  It was obvious that there had been enmity and high words. Verna’s brow was creased, her dark eyes narrowed and trained upon the carpet. She roused herself at the sight of the boy, but the effort of will she had raised to charm him during the morning was beyond her now.