Mrs Pargeter 02; Mrs, Presumed Dead

∨ Mrs, Presumed Dead ∧

Forty

The police were called, and Kirsten’s threatening of Mrs Pargeter with a swordstick, witnessed by Truffler Mason, was sufficient for them to arrest her. The suggestion of a cocaine-dealing connection prompted searches in ‘Perigord’, where enough evidence was found to break up a considerable drug-smuggling network. Then, under interrogation, the Norwegian girl confessed to the murders of Theresa and Rod Cotton.

In fact, the general assumption that the police had been satisfied with a husband-kills-wife explanation of the first murder was untrue. The case had remained very much open, and at the time of Kirsten’s arrest, the police enquiries had still been progressing. At their own pace.

A pace which, Mrs Pargeter noted with quiet satisfaction, was rather slower than her own.

♦

The surface of life in Smithy’s Loam soon closed over the murders; all appeared as it always had appeared. And no doubt, beneath that gleaming surface, the old secrets were joined by new secrets, and all those secrets, in the cause of middle-class gentility, were kept secret.

The planning application for the Indian restaurant was, incidentally, turned down. But when, a couple of months later, another application was filed to turn the same premises into an up-market French restaurant, there was unaccountably no opposition from local residents.

♦

The lives of the daytime denizens of Smithy’s Loam went on much as before.

At ‘High Bushes’ Fiona and Alexander Burchfield-Brown still tried to live up to their false standards, and Fiona spent much of her time agonising over her next, inevitable lapse from those standards.

In ‘Perigord’ at least there was a happy ending. Her husband’s rearguard action against their divorce settlement having been finally exhausted, Sue Curle got the hoped-for custody of her children. She did not engage another au pair, arranging instead to spend more time at home, to fit her work around the children’s school and holiday commitments. And the frequency with which her boss, Geoff, had to come and consult her while she was at home suggested that he might, in time, take up more permanent residence.

At ‘Haymakers’ the ending was less traditionally happy. Vivvi Sprake discovered that her husband Nigel was having yet another affair with yet another secretary and realised finally that that was just the sort of man he was. She was then faced with a decision. Should she make a fuss and challenge the stability of their marriage? Or should she quietly accept the situation and keep an eye open for the kind of diversion for which her brief encounter with Rod Cotton had given her an incipient taste? She opted for the second alternative, and her children had a lifetime supply of motel soap.

In ‘Hibiscus’ Jane Watson slowly came out of her shell. Though the shock of her fears about Theresa Cotton and Mrs Pargeter had put her back in a terrifying way, she had even at that time been emerging from the breakdown, and with each day that separated her from her stay at the Church of Utter Simplicity, she got better. Beginning with short, informal coffee mornings at Mrs Pargeter’s, she soon began to lose her fear of people and start to lead a more normal social life. And her recovery may well have been speeded by the news that the Church of Utter Simplicity had been closed down after police investigation into its financial affairs.

Inside ‘Cromarty’ Carole Temple still found deep fulfilment in her relentless persecution of specks of dust. And if her husband’s unusual sartorial tastes ever caused any discord in their marriage, it was not visible through the house’s highly polished windows.

And at ‘Acapulco’, Mrs Pargeter, her life animated by regular chauffeur-driven trips to London, worked out the six months which she had promised herself to spend in Smithy’s Loam.

With the firm intention that, at the end of that six months, she would move on.