Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 112, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 684 & 685, September/October 1998

The Secret by Eileen Dewhurst

© 1998 by Eileen Dewhurst

Eileen Dewhurst is primarily a novelist, only occasionally a short story writer, and in her stories she appears to revert to themes that she has treated at greater length in her novels. Crime writer and editor Martin Edwards once commented, “Dewhurst (is preoccupied) with questions of identity.” He notes that her first novel, Death Came Smiling (Robert Hale/75), was concerned with “identical twin sisters who have very different characters” — a subject she returns to here.

The weather was so hot in Provence at the time Monica Millican drowned herself in her twin sister’s swimming pool that her sister — the widowed Comtesse de Chameux-Periard — persuaded Monica’s husband Roland, via a telephone call to England, that it would be prudent for his wife to be cremated where she had died. A memorial service, the Comtesse suggested, could be held later at home.

Not, of course, that the funeral could take place in either France or England to the usual time scale, in view of the necessity for a postmortem examination and an inquest. But at least the local morgue had the best freezing facilities in the area, and the Comtesse, with her unique local influence, was able to arrange the funeral for the day immediately following the body’s release.

In view of Monica’s state of mind at the time of her death — she had had to resign from her teaching job and had already made an attempt to take her life in her own bathroom — Roland was required to be present at the inquest. As his French was so poor, he was given an interpreter through whom he was able to explain to the satisfaction of the coroner that his wife’s death was the tragically logical outcome of her behaviour over recent months. The coroner clicked his tongue sympathetically when Roland added that Monica had in fact been visiting her sister in an attempt to free herself from what had so sadly proved to be a clinical depression. A verdict was brought in of Suicide alors qu’elle n’était pas responsable de ses actes. “Suicide while the balance of her mind was disturbed,” as the interpreter, seeing Roland’s bewildered face, hissed into his ear.

“C’était gentille, cette pauvre Madame Monica!” sobbed the cook, when the Comtesse went into the kitchen on her return from the court. “Et comme enfants, ces deux petites!... ont du être mignonnes... y a une photo, Madame?”

The Comtesse found one after a search, and when she had shown it to the cook and to Roland she took it away and looked at it herself. At the two shyly smiling little girls who were Madeleine and Monica Thompson; clean, tidy, and precisely alike.

Which they never had been, of course.

As she gave instructions to her staff, wrote the letters and made the telephone calls arising out of her sister’s death, moved between the cool shade of the house and the dazzling sunshine of the terrace in intermittently successful attempts to avoid the brother-in-law she disliked but to whom she had been obliged to offer hospitality, the Comtesse found herself unable to stop thinking about those two little girls. Monica the one who had hung back, Madeleine the one who had led the way, the one who had been first to tell the time, tie her shoelaces, write her name. Even when Monica turned out to be the academic one, Madeleine had continued somehow to outshine her — perhaps because academic achievement was not something by which Madeleine set much store. For her, it was more important to be quick-witted, lovely to look at, exciting to be with. And married to a man with wealth and influence.

By the time Monica went up to Oxford, Madeleine was already establishing herself as a model. Whether she would have reached the top of her profession no one would ever know, because on a visit to Oxford to see her sister, Madeleine met Felix Brion, elder son of the Comte de Chameux-Periard, who was on a postgraduate course in comparative estate management, and embarked very soon afterwards on her second career as his wife.

Monica, meanwhile, who had never developed charisma, drifted into a lacklustre affair with a fellow undergraduate reading Mechanical Engineering, and married him a year after they had both gained Second Class Honours degrees.

Following her marriage, Monica continued to teach; but following hers, Madeleine, at her husband’s request, ceased to model. Her father-in-law died soon after his elder son’s wedding, and on inheriting the title Felix dedicated his working life to the extensive estate surrounding the family chateau in the valley of the Loire, an activity in which his wife had been gratified to assist him.

Neither marriage had been blessed with children. Monica had a couple of miscarriages and Madeleine never became pregnant — to the infinite disappointment of the Comte, who knew he had terminal cancer for some time before telling his wife and had hoped to leave a son and heir behind him.

So when he died, the chateau, the estate, and the title passed to his younger brother Andre. Not too much to Madeleine’s chagrin: She was sole heir to Les Pigeonniers, the property in Provence, and to her husband’s personal fortune, and although she had enjoyed assisting him in his running of the chateau and the estate, she lacked the energy and the motivation to relish the idea of shouldering the responsibility of them on her own. And, as Andre showed no interest whatsoever in the female sex, there was unlikely to come a time when she would be obliged to insert the word douairière — dowager — into her title.

Madeleine had been the Comtesse de Chameux-Periard for fifteen years at the time of her sister’s death, and Monica was in the thirteenth year of her marriage to Roland Millican. During their married lives the twins spoke to each other on the telephone every few months, sent each other birthday and Christmas presents, occasionally met. Over the years, the Millicans spent a few holidays at Les Pigeonniers, but Roland was the only one who enjoyed them, and the sisters’ regular meetings took place in London, where Madeleine went twice a year to shop and see friends. Monica, of course, always invited her twin to stay with her and Roland at their home outside Birmingham, but Madeleine regularly excused herself on the grounds that her time in England was short and the other people she wanted to see, the things she wanted to do, were in or near London.

Monica had always gone willingly to their meetings, the Comtesse mused as she moved restlessly about her house and garden. Partly, of course, because she enjoyed the rare break from Roland and the night at the Dorchester to which Madeleine always treated her. (Poor cow! the Comtesse thought, with a rush of contemptuous sympathy, pleased with so little. Poor weak, frightened, stupid cow!) But also because of their tacit agreement that occasional meetings were necessary for the preservation of their secret.

The secret that, despite being identical twins, the sisters did not like one another.

Monica had always made it plain to Madeleine that she considered her shallow and superficial, while trying to hide her envy of her sister’s place in the sun. No less obviously, Madeleine had no time for what she saw as Monica’s narrow life, and pitied her for her dullness and her boring husband with the lascivious gleam in his eye on those rare occasions when he encountered his wife’s glamorous sister.

But there was a social imperative with which both women had always felt it prudent to comply: Twins were supposed to feel themselves in a uniquely close relationship, particularly if they were identical.

Not that that had been so obvious since they grew up, the Comtesse reflected as she sat in her black at the funeral luncheon, murmuring responses to the people who came up to her to commiserate — not a great many, as she had lived somewhat reclusively since her husband’s death. Monica had met all the members of her sister’s small circle during the couple of weeks of holiday that had preceded her death, and several of them had remarked on how unlike one another the twins looked, forbearing of course to put into words the most obvious reasons why this was so: Madeleine’s fashion sense and Monica’s lack of it; Madeleine’s verve and Monica’s troubled stare...

But today a few of them mentioned that stare.

“Yes,” the Comtesse agreed. “Monica was troubled, I’m afraid. You sensed it?... Yes, I was aware of it too, but I never dreamed...” Here she paused to raise a scrap of white lawn to her lips. “I hoped she was enjoying herself... beginning to recover...” That was where she choked to a standstill. Not really having to fake her distress, because she was so wary of her final evening with Roland.

He came over to her the moment the last guests had taken their leave.

“You must be tired, Madeleine.”

She got to her feet, wishing he was not standing so close to her. “I’m tired of these clothes, and I’m glad it’s all over.” Almost all over. “I’m going to change. Don’t forget this, Roland.” She went to the side table where she had placed the urn when it had been delivered by an acolyte during the last stages of the funeral feast. Ashes were not usually presented to the relatives on the day of cremation, but the Comtesse was anxious to be rid of Roland at the earliest possible moment and had been financially persuasive.

She picked up the urn, which, to her distaste, felt slightly warm, put it into his unwilling hands. “Drinks on the terrace at half-past seven.”

The Comtesse prepared herself for the evening with particular care, and in her most elegant manner. She did not wish to encourage the gleam in Roland’s eye, but it was preferable to his other possible reaction.

Out on the terrace, where the brilliant colours of the day were paling to pastel under the darkening sky, she poured herself a stiff drink and sat down to await him, realising as she saw the glass tremble in her hand how everything since her sister’s death had taken a toll on her — the early-morning discovery of the body facedown in the pool, the shock waves through the house and village, the questioning, the inquest, the effort to appear more upset than she was and preserve the secret. Roland under her roof for a week had been the worst ordeal of all, but although the lustful gleam had appeared from time to time the Comtesse could not so far complain of his behaviour.

Tonight, though, was his last night at Les Pigeonniers.

The last time he and she would ever have to meet.

“Ah! Roland! Come and sit down. After you’ve helped yourself to what you want.” She waved her hand at the glass trolley with its array of bottles. “Have you been packing?”

A swift, keen look. “Not packing, no. Not yet. Not wanting to see the evidence around me that I’m on the way home, to tell you the truth. I don’t suppose I should say this, Madeleine, but I’ve been very comfortable here.”

“People usually are.” She had made a nestling movement into her lounge chair before deciding it might appear provocative. “But you’ll be glad everything’s sorted.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

She watched him survey the bottles, select the scotch and generously pour, throw in two ice cubes. Swirling his glass so that the ice clinked, he strolled over to the nearest of the other lounge chairs and threw himself down.

“Ah! That’s better! Old ticker been playing up a bit today. Has to be the strain, I suppose. But I’m bearing up.”

“Good for you, Roland.”

What a wimp! the Comtesse thought. Seeing himself now as a desirable male on the loose, but still the same pathetic Roland Millican using the excuse of his dicky heart to tout for sympathy. Still the same meagre figure with the stooped shoulders, round pink tonsure, small mean mouth, and close-set suspicious eyes...

In which the lascivious gleam was back as he leaned towards the Comtesse’s chair.

The Comtesse’s desire to be rid of him was suddenly so strong she could scarcely contain it. Dinginess seemed to spread physically from his unlovely body, casting a film over the sparkling landscape beyond the terrace.

“You’ll be glad to get home, Roland, get on with your life. I hope the memorial service goes well, I’m sorry I don’t feel up to being there.” The Comtesse had no parents alive to be distressed by her nonattendance. “And I’m sorry I failed to help Monica. I’ll always feel that if she hadn’t come to me she might still be with us.”

“Forget it.” Roland made a nestling movement in his turn. The Comtesse had never seen him so relaxed. “If she hadn’t done it here she’d have done it somewhere else. She’d made up her mind.”

“Weren’t you afraid... Didn’t you wonder when you came home from work that you might find—”

“She’d promised to pull herself together. So I hoped...”

Hoped she might have broken her promise? She wouldn’t put it past him. “Yes, of course. Well, I’ll try not to feel guilty. And if she wasn’t happy...”

“She should have been!” Roland exploded indignantly. His drink splashed over the edge of his glass as his body jerked, and the Comtesse watched it spread like string across the creamy stone floor. “She had everything she wanted. A nice house — well, not on the same planet as yours, of course, but a nice house — and a nice garden where she enjoyed working. Things weren’t so easy when she stopped earning, but we didn’t have to count every penny and I never complained.”

“You feel she’s let you down, don’t you, Roland?” the Comtesse inquired softly.

“I... Well, yes, in a way I do, you know.” There was admiration, too, now in the pale eyes. “You’re very perceptive, Madeleine. And very, very beautiful.” The light of lust was growing into a powerful beam, and the Comtesse had to suppress a physical recoil. “You know, I’m beginning to think I chose the wrong sister. But you were always so busy with other people. Rather more than you are these days, it seems to me.”

Now the Comtesse had to suppress a terrible desire to laugh. “What do you mean, Roland?”

“I mean... I don’t have to go home, you know. Well, I do, of course, for the time being, the memorial service and all that, and I suppose the look of things, but afterwards... I’ve a few weeks of holiday due to me.” He was near enough to lean forward and place a hand on her bare knee. Her revulsion and disgust were so strong they made her choke, and she was able to move her knee without seeming to rebuff the hand as she searched for a tissue. “Oops!” he said. “Am I as bad as that?”

Roland in rare jesting mood made her think of a puppy panting its hope that a ball is about to be thrown for it to retrieve. “Look, Roland... Whatever I feel or don’t feel doesn’t come into it. How can I explain? I may look like a free woman, but I’m still a Chameux-Periard, and the Chameux-Periards guard their widowed family members. Ruthlessly. The way the Mafia guard theirs. You understand?” Grinning, the Comtesse drew a finger melodramatically across her throat. “I’m not saying my husband’s family is on the wrong side of the law, but they have that in common with the first family of crime. Unless, of course,” she went on, “a subsequent attachment is seen to be serious and honourable, when it can be approved by the family. This happens very rarely, and as you must realise, Roland, there can never be anything between you and me which could be seen in that light. All right?”

“All right, Madeleine, yes, of course.” Roland drained his glass, looked at his watch, and rose to his feet. “Still half an hour before dinner, think I’ll get my things together. It’s an early flight.”

“A good idea, Roland.” And there was a chance he might follow it up by sending a message down to say he was having a bad reaction to the funeral and would she mind if he missed dinner and had a tray sent up to his room...

Relaxing into her lounge chair, Monica Millican watched the disappearing figure of her husband and knew with relief and in triumph that the last and most dangerous hazard had been overcome.

She had always known she was capable of bringing it off, from the moment she had stood at her kitchen window that rainy morning in the school holidays looking down the narrow garden and realizing that her life as it was was not worth living. For the first time, from the lowest point even she had ever reached, she had squared up to fate and decided to bend it to her will. It had denied her Felix as a husband, but she would secure her place as his widow and his heir...

She had loved Felix and, she was sure, he had begun to love her. But then Madeleine had come to Oxford on a flying visit and swept him away with her. You do understand, don’t you, darling? We’re made for each other. And it isn’t as though you and he...

Not quite then, no, but it would have been.

With Felix gone, it hadn’t seemed to matter to Monica whether it was Roland or anyone else. But she had been married for only a few weeks when she had begun to wish it was nobody...

She threw her first wobbly the very evening she decided to take matters into her own hands. Not having the dinner ready when Roland got home from work, telling him she wished she was dead. She kept on telling him, and the following week she cut her wrists in the bathroom — crying so loudly as she did it that he was there to bind them up before she had done more than scratch them. Then she resigned from her job and went to a psychiatrist, and then it was on record that she was mentally disturbed.

She had never been tempted to let Roland into the secret, so she was able to suggest to him that going to see Madeleine might be of help.

Roland had seized on the idea. It just might do the trick, she had seen him thinking, and even if it didn’t it would give him a few weeks without her and the strain she was putting on his dicky heart.

Madeleine, on the telephone, had obviously found it hard to believe that her sister could want to visit her, but after a pause for thought she said she supposed that at least the sunshine, the idleness, and the absence of Roland might be therapeutic, and told Monica to come if that was really what she wanted.

It had continued to be as easy. Monica presented herself in France as even more dull and dowdy than she was in England, and was amused to see how Madeleine’s wary suntanned face relaxed when they met at the airport and she was assured that her sister would not be her rival. Madeleine’s relief, in fact, had made her generous, and she had let Monica help herself to her shorts, bikinis, slips of dresses — all of which fit, as Monica had dieted discreetly to the specifications of her sister’s most recent photographs.

After a couple of weeks Monica’s skin, too, was a golden brown, and she wore Madeleine’s emerald-green bikini the day she joined her in the pool for her regular dawn swim and held her head under the water.

Changing the wedding rings had been a fraught moment, but both had slipped off easily enough in the early morning cool. The hazard after that was to get back to her room and cut her hair the inches necessary to turn it into Madeleine’s. But she had already worked out where the scissors had to go, and Madeleine — as she had seen initially from the photographs — had been content not to meddle with the natural ash-blond with which nature had endowed them both. In case it should be observed that Monica’s hair was a little shorter in death than it had been in life, she had left the clippings where they fell — on and around Monica’s dressing table — as evidence of a last pathetic attempt by the dead woman to look more like her sister.

As for the language... Monica had read Modern Languages at Oxford, and despite living so long in France, Madeleine was lazy and had spoken English to her husband and as many other people as possible. Monica had listened to her with her staff and quickly realized that her own knowledge of French still outran her sister’s. But she had played it down, limping, stumbling, asking people to speak more slowly, apologising to Madeleine for having got so rusty. And even their own mother had been unable to tell their voices apart.

She’d been practising Madeleine’s signature for as long as she’d been acting out her depression, and their handwriting had always been the same. And Madeleine had actually mentioned her intention of finding a local dentist now that her London wonderman was talking of retiring...

So that was it, really, apart from Roland. And Roland, now out of sight and so soon to be out of mind, had shown her that her crime had paid.

Getting slowly to her feet, Monica followed him into the house and locked herself into her beautiful new bedroom. Even before cutting her hair after Madeleine’s last swim she had taken the little bottle from Monica’s handbag and hidden it at the back of one of Madeleine’s drawers. Now she took it out and held it in her hand, reading the label: Digoxin tablets: one to be taken once a day. It is dangerous to exceed the stated dose.

She hadn’t expected Roland to recognize her, but she had brought the pills with her just in case — the reserve bottle he kept at the back of the medicine chest. If he had been suspicious she would have put a lethal dose into the glass of scotch he always took up to bed with him and which Madeleine always put into his hand as they said good night, and no one would have known whether his unhappiness at the loss of his wife had made him suicidal or merely careless...

Reluctantly, Monica threw the pills and the label down her sister’s private lavatory and flushed them away. She would have relished killing Roland, punishing him for the years of sadistic belittlement, but that would have been to tempt the fate she had at last bent so successfully to her will.

And the second-best thing about a perfect murder was that it cut out the need to commit any more.