On the Edge [= Dead Gorgeous]

24

She was led out to a police car and seated in the rear next to a young officer with a Welsh accent who offered her a cigarette and struck a match for her.

‘Pimlico, is it, Mrs Bell?’

‘Oldfield Gardens. Have they finished with me, then?’

‘You can relax now.’

Relax? she thought. Jesus Christ, the chance would be a fine thing! She drew on the cigarette and saw it shake in her fingers.

I was almost murdered last night. There’s no question that Antonia tried to kill me. That was no pillow fight.

And it was no spur-of-the-moment attack. Antonia lured me up there, into a trap. She had the chloroform ready in the bathroom. Where could she have got hold of chloroform?

Vic! He works in a science lab. She and Vic are in this together.

Two’s company, three’s a crowd.

When I met Antonia, she didn’t tell me about Vic. I stupidly believed the desperate things we agreed to do were a secret between two women. A pact. Now I know Antonia has a stronger loyalty.

Antonia and Vic have decided to eliminate me. They think I doublecrossed them because I failed to poison Hector.

If they killed me, how would they hope to get away with it? It’s ghastly to think about, but how would they dispose of my body? They need the blank death certificate for Hector. Presumably they’d bury me in some deserted place.

‘Oldfield Gardens, is it, Mrs Bell?’

‘What?’

‘Where you live.’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Feeling shaken up, are you?’

‘Just a little. I lost my key. How am I going to get in?’

‘We’ll force the lock, unless you keep a spare under the mat.’ ‘No.’

‘Pity. Sensible, though.’

They turned into her street.

‘It’s the last one on the left.’

She stepped out of the car forgetting that she was still without shoes and gasped as her feet touched the pavement. The driver supported her arm and helped her through the gate.

‘Don’t worry, Mrs Bell. We’ll have you indoors in no time. PC Owen has a rare knack of getting through locked doors, haven’t you, Taff?’

Constable Owen rounded the front of the car. ‘We won’t need to. There’s someone inside.’

Rose had started to say that such a thing was impossible when the front door swung open and Antonia looked out.

The devil.

‘Rose, darling, what on earth has happened to you? Was there an accident?’

Rose went rigid.

The constable responded by bringing his hand more firmly around her arm. ‘Right, Mrs Bell. Got to get you inside.’

Antonia, her features creased in concern, stepped forward and came along the path. ‘She’s been missing all night. She doesn’t know what she’s doing or saying half the time. It’s the shock. Has she told you? The poor little soul lost her husband last month. Come on, my flower, you’ll freeze out here. I’ve got a lovely fire going in the front room.’ She reached out to take Rose’s other arm.

‘No!’

‘It’s tragic, officer. I don’t know what she’s been telling you, but I’ve known her for years. Isn’t that right, Rose? I won’t say how much I’ve done to help her these last weeks. That’s the way friends should be. We stick together like sisters.’ She looked into Rose’s eyes. ‘I mean it goes without saying, doesn’t it?’

Rose knew with numbing certainty what she meant. Never mind what went without saying. She’d said it. They stuck together. Sisters in crime.

She turned to the constable. ‘I want to get back in the car.’

Antonia smiled knowingly at the police and cast her eyes upwards.

The grip on Rose’s arm tightened. ‘Sorry, my love, but no can do. We’re on patrol. We need that seat for real villains. In you go. You’ll get pneumonia out here.’

He didn’t address her as Mrs Bell. That patronizing ‘my love’ told her that they’d swallowed everything Antonia had said. Blitzed by fear, anger and the cold, she allowed them to steer her into the house. She was through.

Constable Owen was talking to Antonia. ‘She lost her handbag and shoes in the tube. We’ve got a description. I suggest she tries London Transport Lost Property Office just in case.’

Rose felt like a hospital patient being discussed by the staff. She sank into an armchair in the front room beside the fire she’d laid for her romantic evening with Hector. The coal was well alight. She shut her eyes, shut out the world.

Antonia took charge. ‘Who’s good at making tea? I’d better do something about this poor lamb’s feet.’

She was too overpowering for the police. They made excuses and left so fast that Rose heard the front door close and the car being started before her bemused brain grasped that she was alone with the woman who’d tried to murder her.

‘Get those stockings off.’

She opened her eyes.

Antonia was standing over her with a bowl in her hands like an angel of mercy. Her voice slipped into a more mellow tone. ‘... or what’s left of them. You want to clean up your feet, don’t you?’ She set the bowl on the floor. ‘I had to use the kettle. The boiler’s out.’

Bemused and obedient, Rose felt under her skirt and unfastened the tattered stockings and peeled them off. The contact with the warm water was heaven.

‘Soap?’

Under the cool inspection of the green eyes, she worked on her feet. The soles were sore and the skin was broken in several places. They felt better for being clean and warm.

She looked up. ‘I can’t fight any more. Let’s get it over with.’

‘Mm?’ Now Antonia seemed bemused.

‘Finishing what you started yesterday evening. Killing me.’

‘Killing you, darling? You are confused. Why on earth should I want to do that? Oh, I don’t deny that I tried to put you to sleep for a few minutes, and I’m sorry it turned into the tussle it did. You certainly pack a punch.’

‘Antonia, I’m not that stupid. You came at me like a tigress after blood.’

‘Of course. I was so flaming mad that I lashed out and lost control.’ She laughed. ‘You know me.’

‘You’re lying. It was planned. You had a pad of chloroform.’

Antonia was ready to justify anything. ‘Sweetie, I trusted you and you let me down. Instead of cooking that meal for Hector you threw it away and went to Reggiori’s.’

‘I was afraid I’d poison him.’

‘Obviously.’

‘Well, I knew you wanted to get rid of him. I couldn’t knowingly poison anybody. That’s hideously cruel.’

‘You knew damn all. I didn’t say anything about poison.’

‘You didn’t need to say anything. It was obvious.’

‘What you’re telling me, Rose darling, is that you felt sorry for the poor beggar. Let’s put our cards on the table. You developed quite a pash for my old man. I saw the warpaint and the glad rags last night. I never had a cook who wore pearls and French perfume. Is it any wonder I lashed out? Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t that I was jealous. It was the deceit. You and I had an understanding.’

‘And for that you’d murder me?’

‘Not you, darling.’

‘For God’s sake, Antonia! You tried to chloroform me.’

‘Only to put you out for a bit. I couldn’t trust you any more, could I? I just meant to give you a whiff and get you out of my hair while I attended to Hector.’

Rose pressed her lips together and glared back, too angry to speak, refusing to be soft-soaped.

‘In the event,’ Antonia continued in the same breezy manner, ‘you ran off into the fog, which saved me some trouble. When Hector came in I was ready for him. And now I need your help with some lifting.’

Rose stared at her.

‘The corpse, darling. It’s lying in the hall at home. We’ve got to move it upstairs to the bedroom before we fetch the undertaker. It’s got to look as if he died in bed. The face is slightly marked like yours. Not enough to cause comment, fortunately.’

Every muscle tightened. ‘This isn’t true. You’re a liar.’

Antonia sighed. ‘I can’t deny that, kitten. I did mislead you yesterday. Didn’t want you getting in the way. This time Hector really is dead. I slapped the chloroform over his face the minute he stepped through the front door yesterday evening. Put him to sleep and then smothered him with a cushion.’ She picked her handbag off a chair and unfastened it. ‘Look, I’ve filled in his name on the death registration certificate. And the date.’

Rose saw the name boldly inked in. A few words written on paper proved nothing and she wanted to say so but her throat had tightened too much for speech. The description of Hector’s death in that entrance hall in Park Crescent was horribly credible. Suddenly she wanted Antonia to be lying, desperately wanted her to have invented this grotesque admission of murder, even though it meant another deathtrap had been set for herself. She couldn’t cope with the thought of Hector dead.

She’d thought she was beyond the point where anything could hurt her. This extinguished the last hope of any future. She handed back the paper.

Antonia took her silence as satisfaction. ‘Get something on your feet and we’ll go now. I’ll get you some breakfast there. There’s nothing here.’

Rose stayed seated. She had just come to her senses. There was a flaw in what was being suggested. ‘You don’t need my help. You’ve got Vic to assist you. If there really was a body he could lift it.’

‘Vic?’ From the pitch of the voice it might have been the Archbishop of Canterbury. ‘Vic doesn’t know Hector is dead. God, we don’t want Vic to find out.’

‘Stop playing the innocent, Antonia. He’s your lover. I know you’ve told him everything because I was there in your house yesterday morning when you sent him to check whether Hector was poisoned. Do you understand? I was there. I came early. He didn’t see me, but I saw him. He went up to the bedroom and looked inside. And then he went downstairs and used the telephone and I’m certain he was phoning you.’

She treated it casually, walking out of the room and into the kitchen as she spoke. ‘You’re right about one thing, Rosie dear, he did phone me. Weren’t you near enough to listen? Pity. Listen, how can I get it into your head that there wasn’t any poison in the damned curry? That meat was perfectly edible and so was everything else.’

Rose dug her fingers into the arms of the chair. ‘In that case, why did you give Vic a key and send him to the house?’

‘This is gospel truth,’ the answer came back from the kitchen. ‘He wasn’t looking for a corpse. He was trying to find out whether you’d spent the night with Hec.’

Rose frowned.

Antonia came back with a towel that she was twisting between her hands. ‘Yes, I sent him round, Rosie. I’ve been staying with him in Knightsbridge instead of visiting my wretched old Mum in Manchester, as if you hadn’t guessed.’

‘How much does he know?’

‘Vic? Sweet F.A., darling. He thinks all this was a love trap for you and my sneaky little husband, and I must say, I had suspicions of my own when I learned from Hector’s own lips that he’d taken you out to dinner.’ She let that sink in. ‘I’d better confess that it wasn’t the total surprise to me that I registered yesterday. That was a little mischief on my part. I wanted to hear it from your own angelic lips. Actually I’d already talked to Hec on the telephone yesterday morning, playing the doting wife, enquiring whether you’d made him a decent curry. He was positively chirpy when he told me he’d taken you to Reggiori’s instead. Apart from being bloody annoyed I was curious to know what it amounted to. After all, if you two had given me evidence of adultery I could have divorced him. No need for a funeral. Unluckily for Hector, Vic couldn’t find a single brown hair on the pillows.’ She let the towel unfurl and tossed it to Rose. ‘Pity. You could have saved me no end of bother.’