Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 103, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 625 & 626, March 1994

Early Retirement by Frances Usher

© 1994 by Frances Usher

Frances Usher has written and had published two children’s books, but she has always been interested in adult crime fiction, and this is her first effort. The story was submitted at a writers conference in the U.K., where it was evaluated by EQMM Readers Award winner Peter Lovesey, and eventually found its way to our offices. A special thanks to Peter Lovesey for his efforts on behalf of EQMM, and a warm welcome to Frances Usher...

It was in mid-July that Tony Minnifer loaded his books for the last time into the boot of his car and drove away from the comprehensive school from which he was taking early retirement. By early September he had decided to murder his sister.

It was a logical decision; Tony was a lifelong maths teacher, after all. The package of early-retirement measures thrust upon him by his education authority, desperate for staff cutbacks, and by his new headmaster, who believed that anyone who remembered the twelve-sided threepenny bit must be kept away from the young, had not left Tony a wealthy man.

“Only a pittance really.” He stared morosely out into the large neglected back garden.

“Never mind, dear.” His wife Stella lifted her head from a leaflet she’d picked up in the library. It was called Golden Age: Golden Stage. Only a month before, she’d been made redundant from her own job with a building society. “It says here the retirement years can be the most fulfilling, satisfying, and fun-packed time of your life.”

“Can be.”

Beaming grey-haired couples were pictured all over the leaflet, sitting outside their immaculate country cottages, leaning on the rails of cruise liners, hugging their unnaturally friendly grandchildren on some distant airport tarmac.

“Never mind that lot,” said Tony. “All I want is to get this garden in decent shape now there’s a bit of spare time. But I can’t even afford to do that properly.”

It was then that a picture of his only sister Marjorie came into his mind.

He blinked. Now, there was an idea. For the first time, early retirement began to hold out a possibility or two.

“We could always sell the car,” Stella was saying. “See if we could get bus passes instead.”

“No,” said Tony. “I think I might be needing the car for a while.”

Marjorie lived in Worthing. It was a dark, drizzling evening when Tony drew up outside her house.

“Well, Tony. Quite a surprise.”

Marjorie led him into the warm sitting room. Clearly, her accountant husband had left her well provided for.

“You don’t mind, do you?” She eased herself back into her armchair, her eyes fixed on the blue-bathed television screen. It was a Conservative Party political broadcast. “Only another moment or two.”

“Of course,” said Tony. He fingered the rolled-up tie in his pocket. He hadn’t worn a tie since the day he’d left the school.

The Tories would be holding their annual conference in a week or two. Unless he took action now, Marjorie would be there in the conference hall as usual, gazing adoringly at the platform with the rest of her well-fed sisterhood. He’d glimpsed her once on a news bulletin, taking part in a fourteen-minute ovation. He’d felt sick.

“Only a moment or two,” he said.

Perhaps she saw his reflection in the screen. Perhaps it was a sixth survival sense. She turned at the last second, saw him coming towards her with the tie stretched taut between his hands, screamed... and suddenly collapsed over the arm of her chair, her hands scrabbling at her blue twin set, her face purple with pain, terror, and plain simple astonishment.

Tony watched in awe as her chest ceased to heave. Then, slowly, he rolled up the tie again and put it back in his pocket.

“Damn,” he said. Trust Marjorie.

He reached for the telephone and began to dial for an ambulance.

The legacy made quite a difference to the Minnifers’ life. Once the Worthing house was sold Tony was able to buy all sorts of equipment and start laying out the garden in the way that recently he’d been dreaming of. He spent hours ploughing up the rough grass, moving earth, and scooping out trenches. On wet days, he drew plans on squared paper.

Stella, meanwhile, was extending her social life, attending coffee mornings and enrolling in afternoon art classes.

“Tony?” She stumbled towards him across the garden one November dusk. “Whatever are all those stones doing on the drive?”

Tony straightened up, wiping his glasses.

“I’m going to make a rockery,” he said. “Over there in the comer. I’ll see to it all tomorrow. I’m just off to the garden centre now. See if they’ve got any alpines I can buy. It won’t take long.”

The familiar door no longer said “Headmaster.” It said “Director of Educational Policy (Studies).” Tony drew a deep breath. Along a distant corridor he could hear the hum of a floor polisher. He pushed open the door.

The headmaster looked up, startled.

“Tony?”

In the shaded lamplight Tony could read upside-down headings on the documents spread on the desk. “Rationalisation of School Dinner Services,” he read, and “English in the Service of Industry.”

“Was there something you wanted...” The headmaster smiled uncertainly. “... Tony?”

“Yes,” he said, and moved round to the back of the desk. He braced himself against the notice board covered with flow charts and reached into his pocket.

“Oh yes,” he said. “Indeed there was.”

It was quite dark outside. He’d brought a large plastic compost sack with him and it wasn’t too difficult to drag the body, decently wrapped and trussed, over the polished floor the short distance to the outside door. He’d already backed the car close up. Lifting the bundle high enough to topple into the car boot was harder, but he managed it safely and soon he was driving into his garage at home with a warm sense of satisfaction.

Pleasurable, he decided. That was the word. It had been perverse of Marjorie to have had that heart attack at the last moment. Saved trouble, of course. But the plan had been ready, and it had been disappointing not to carry it through.

Still, he’d done it this time. He’d made a start.

The rockery looked very nice in the comer of the garden.

“Sort of substantial,” said Stella, viewing it from the kitchen window. “Gives the garden quite a focus.”

“So will the pool,” said Tony, drying a plate. “That’s my next job. It’s going to be—”

“Shush a minute.” Stella turned up the radio. “Did you hear that? About those young criminals? Whatever are things coming to?”

“I know.” Tony nodded his head. “Makes you think, doesn’t it?”

The research had taken some time, but time was what he had plenty of. And he’d tracked him down now.

Wayne Wilkinson.

To Tony’s relief, Stella hadn’t argued when he’d told her he was going up to London for the weekend.

“Feel a bit — well — cooped up at home,” he said. “After all the hurly-burly of school. Thought I’d look up old Alan again. Get him to take me round some of the sights for a day or two. If it’s all right with you, dear.”

“Of course.” Stella smiled, shuddering faintly to herself. She remembered Tony’s old friend Alan and how he’d behaved at their wedding. “You go and enjoy yourself, Tony. Do you good to get away from the garden.”

He followed him all day Saturday, the pale pink scalp under the cropped hair unchanged since classroom days. He remembered how the boy used to sprawl back on his chair when reprimanded, digging the point of his pen deep into the back of his hand, and the light blue eyes that stared insolently into his own.

“So?” he’d say. “Gonna make me or something?”

Wayne Wilkinson.

There were tattoos now on the backs of his hands and a swastika glittered on his black T-shirt. Tony watched him from across the street, selling illiterate racist magazines. He observed him on the football terraces, jostling and spitting, screaming obscenities with his mates. He trailed him round the streets, saw him shoplifting. Finally he came to rest in the shadows outside a gay disco. Wayne and a group of others were operating a stakeout.

It was nearly three in the morning before the chance came. Wayne had set off alone behind a couple in blue denim, their heads bent, their hands linked.

The boy was so intent on keeping up with them that he knew nothing of Tony’s presence at all, until he felt the whip of the tie around his throat.

“Coffee, dear?”

“Lovely.”

Stella took the mug and sipped, lifting her face gratefully to the warm spring sunshine. A blackbird was singing in the apple tree.

“Oh, I do like sitting here,” she said. “All that work you put into it, Tony.”

Tony smiled. “Worth it, dear,” he said. “Even digging that huge great hole half the night, putting in the plastic liner — all of it. All worth it.”

His eyes followed the flashing Golden Orfes as they darted and turned in the clear, sparkling water. The purple irises were already tall and budding at the margins of the pool. Soon dragonflies would skim across the surface like threads of shot silk.

Clean, he thought. Clean and pure and washed. Couldn’t wish for a better place myself when my time comes.

The main project in the garden after that was the herbaceous border.

“Plenty of mulch, Mr. Minnifer,” advised the man at the garden centre. He’d become quite a friend of Tony’s by now. “That’s what herbaceous borders need. Lots of well-rotted manure, compost, anything like that. Anything you can get your hands on.”

“Oh, right,” said Tony.

He’d seen the woman on the lunchtime news. She was a member of a think tank on education. She was declaring there was no possible connection between the size of a school class and the quality of learning that took place.

“It just needs a bit of discipline by the teachers,” she said. The interviewer’s hair blew in the wind but her blond curls remained unmoved. “All it takes is competence.” Her voice reminded Tony of a cut-glass vase his mother had once owned.

It was almost too easy. Her address was listed in an old Who’s Who he picked up at a jumble sale.

He was waiting for her one warm evening as she drove towards the wrought-iron gates that led to her eighteenth-century manor house home. Seeing him step out of the bushes, she faltered and reached to wind up the window, but there was no time.

If there had been, she might have told him about her son, about how she’d just taken him to boarding school. But as the maximum number of pupils in a class at that school was twelve, this might not have helped her plight as far as Tony was concerned one little bit.

The lupins were splendid that year, and so were the delphiniums and peonies. When Stella brought her new friends Jane and Angus round one evening for a drink by the pool, Jane was full of envy.

“What I’d give for a husband like yours,” she said to Stella. “Angus—” she gave a little laugh. “Not much use in the garden, I’m afraid.”

Stella gazed at Angus thoughtfully. He was tall and fair, with warm, dark-brown eyes.

“Never mind,” she said. “Gardens aren’t everything in life, are they?”

It was perhaps soon after this that Tony Minnifer began to grow a little irritable. Somehow, even now, he still hadn’t achieved the fulfilling, satisfying, fun-packed early retirement that Golden Age: Golden Stage had promised.

He’d tried to make the world a better place, a cleaner place. And yet...

It was Wimbledon Fortnight, perfect weather for once. This would be the first year he wasn’t in the classroom, condemned to evening highlights while he still wearily marked exercise books.

He lay back on the sofa, trying to enjoy it. Surely he’d earned a rest.

“Not watching this, Stella?” he said. “Thought you liked tennis.”

“It’s my local history group,” Stella said. “We’re exploring the environment today. I might be a bit late.” She was gone.

Tony shrugged and turned back to the screen.

There was a new whiz kid this year, a teenage girl born in Eastern Europe, trained in Florida, her hair in bunches and a nasal twang of a voice that spat out insults through a mouthful of teethbraces.

The media loved her. By the end of the first day she’d collected a nickname and a clutch of fans who followed her everywhere, hoping for worse excesses. The newspapers had begun begging for someone to “Crush this kid.”

A challenge, Tony thought. Idly, he began working out how it could be done. A quick trip to London, mingle with the autograph hunters, then—

Better not. Kid like that would be surrounded by security. Shame, though.

The lawn would have been the place for her, smooth and green and velvety as the Centre Court itself.

There was one more, in October. But it wasn’t the same. It was almost as if he were just keeping his hand in.

The man had had to go, of course; a local builder responsible for buying up a perfectly harmless copse, grubbing up all the trees, dotting around some “Luxury Executive-Style Homes” — each completed by a triple garage and a stunted rhododendron bush — and christening the whole revolting result Woodland Way.

“I’ll woodland way him,” Tony promised himself, heaving the sack-covered heap out of the boot. The builder had been a hefty man and Tony wasn’t getting any younger.

“Under the new patio for you, I think,” he said to the builder. “See how you like the feel of concrete running over you.”

He slaved to get the patio finished by the weekend. Somehow the joy had gone out of it a bit; the purity. And where was Stella? She never seemed to be around now when he needed a bit of praise.

On impulse, he rang Angus and Jane and invited them to a barbecue, beginning to savour the notion of roasting meat on the patio.

“Yes, lovely,” said Jane, but her voice was listless. “Angus isn’t actually here at the moment, but I’m sure he’ll come along.”

“Good,” said Tony heartily. “Great.”

But, by the day of the barbecue, everything had changed.

Angus didn’t feel much like going, but he supposed one had to make an effort. He walked round to the Minnifers’ road and in at their front gate.

He sniffed. There didn’t seem to be any whiff of smoke from their back garden. Odd, that. Surely it was time to get the thing lit up.

“Left you?” said Stella.

Angus nodded. “Last Monday. Found a note on the table. Bit hackneyed, really. I hadn’t realised. She knew all about it, you see.”

“About—?”

“Us.”

“Ah.”

Stella fiddled with her bracelet, leaning back against the freezer. Outside the kitchen window, it was already dark.

After a minute, Angus said, “Stella?”

“Mmm?”

“Where’s Tony?”

Stella smiled sadly.

“He’s... gone, Angus. I don’t think we’ll be seeing him again.”

“You mean—” Angus frowned. “He knew about us, so he buggered off like Jane?”

Stella shook her head. “I thought it was enough,” she said. “More than enough, perhaps.”

She stroked the lid of the freezer lovingly, and then straightened up and crossed to the window. They stood close together, arms round each other, looking out at the dark garden.

“Fulfilled,” she said. “Satisfied. He was happy while it lasted. And, really, he’d got the garden into very good shape. Who was I to stop him? Early retirement isn’t easy, you know, Angus.”

“I suppose not.” His eyes were puzzled, searching her face.

“It was time,” she said. “It could have been cabinet ministers... royals... So much trouble there’d have been...”

She summoned a smile.

“We mustn’t get downhearted. There’s a lot we can do, Angus, to cheer each other up.”

He nodded, a little doubtful.

“Gardening, for instance,” she said. “I’m thinking of going down to the garden centre tomorrow to buy a sundial. I thought it would look nice all laid out with fancy paving.” She gestured into the darkness. “Out there, in the middle of the roses.”

Her voice became pleading.

“A memorial sort of thing, to Tony. To mark the passing hours. You’d help me, Angus, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you, Angus?”