but might I suggest that “a thin lot of good” is a more appropriate expression?’
He laughed drily, demonstrating the huge gulf between his sensibilities and those of normal human beings.
‘How much did anyone else know of what you were doing, Dr Potter?’
‘Very little. Mr Arkwright didn’t want to know any details. He thought they might distress him… which indeed they might well have done. He just did what I asked of him without asking any questions.’
‘Yes,’ Ank agreed bitterly, ‘and I feel pretty dreadful about the whole business now that-’
‘Be quiet!’ If Dr Potter had been looking for a demonstration of his power over Ankle-Deep Arkwright, nothing could have been more effective than the way those two little words brought instant silence. ‘Of course, there were drawbacks to his complete ignorance. If Mr Arkwright had known more about my experiments, he wouldn’t have investigated the dead girl’s room and so inconveniently supplied you with the name of a real person, Mrs Pargeter.
‘Still, couldn’t be helped. Generally speaking — until the last few days when I’ve been forced to keep him out of the way down here, Mr Arkwright has been very biddable. As I said, remarkable how ready people are to do as you wish, when you know enough about their criminal background. Though, as you pointed out, Mrs Pargeter… I don’t have any dirt on you.’
‘No.’
‘So…’ he continued, his voice growing ever silkier with menace, ‘I can’t be confident of buying your silence with my own, can I?’
‘No,’ she replied defiantly.
‘Which means I may have to effect your silence by some other method…’ Muddy eyes gazed thoughtfully at her.
The ambulance man with the gun volunteered, ‘Blow her away, shall I?’
Dr Potter winced at this crudeness. ‘No, for heaven’s sake. I don’t want to have to dispose of a body with bullet-holes in it. No, I think some kind of “accident” may be more appropriate…’
‘Like the one you arranged for Lindy Galton?’ suggested Mrs Pargeter, determined to keep him talking for as long as possible.
‘Dear me, no,’ he replied fastidiously. ‘I don’t like repeating myself. Anyway, even the notoriously dim British police force might get suspicious if a second corpse were to succumb to the embrace of the Dead Sea Mud. But I think it should be an “accident”, none the less…’
He mused for a moment, then looked at her with glee as a thought struck him. ‘Of course, you are somewhat overweight, aren’t you, Mrs Pargeter…?’
‘It’s never worried me.’
‘No, but no one’s to know that. No one like a coroner, say. You wouldn’t be the first’ — he chose his word carefully — ‘ mature woman to have died from over-exercising.’
‘I don’t take any exercise. I never have. You can’t make me exercise.’
‘Oh, but the beauty of the situation is that I can, Mrs Pargeter. I can.’
‘But why should I be found in Brotherton Hall, anyway? I’m not booked in here or-’
‘Mr Arkwright is extremely proficient at falsifying registration records,’ oozed Dr Potter, ‘as I believe you’ve already discovered.’
This was too much for Ank. ‘No! I’m not going to be party to anything that hurts Mrs Pargeter! All right, I’ve done some stuff for you I wish I hadn’t, but-’
He got no further. At a signal from Dr Potter, the ambulance man with the baseball bat swung it upwards to connect with the point of Ankle-Deep Arkwright’s jaw. His body sprawled backwards to slump against the wall.
Stan the Stapler made a move forward, but he was caught in the hollow at the back of his neck by the butt of the other ambulance man’s automatic. He too crumpled to the ground.
‘You stay with them,’ the doctor curtly ordered the one with the gun. ‘You bring her,’ he told the other.
Stowing his baseball bat under one arm, the ambulance man locked the other round Mrs Pargeter. She tried to struggle, but could do nothing against his superior strength.
‘Where to?’
‘The gym,’ Dr Potter replied.
She realized just before they got there what he had in mind. Nothing so crude as hanging her from ropes or crushing her with weights. No, it would be the passive exerciser, the one that Kim had tried to lure her on to.
She could do nothing. She was not strong enough to break free and there seemed little point in screaming or arguing. She knew Dr Potter would be impervious to argument, and she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing how terrified she really was.
So she submitted while towels were wrapped round her wrists and ankles to prevent marking by the ropes with which she was bound on to the passive exerciser’s lounger-like surface.
‘The first bit,’ Dr Potter told her solicitously, ‘you will not find unpleasant… quite relaxing, actually. After about half an hour your limbs’ll start to ache and you’ll begin to sweat. From then on the pull on your muscles will get harder and harder, and the strain on your heart will get greater and greater…
‘I’ll be very surprised if you’re still alive by four o’clock. We’ll come back at six to remove the ropes… but don’t comfort yourself with the idea that if you’re still alive then you will have survived. This isn’t a trial by ordeal, Mrs Pargeter, it’s just a convenient way of killing you. So, in the unlikely event that you are still breathing at six o’clock… we’ll finish you off.’
The two men backed away and Dr Potter, a satisfied smile on his parchment-like face, threw a switch on the passive exerciser’s mounting. As he had promised, the first movements felt reassuring, soothing, even relaxing.
And what a comfort it must be to you, Mrs Pargeter,’ was his parting shot, ‘to know that you will die having lost an enormous amount of weight.’
Dr Potter let out an abrupt laugh; then he and the ambulance man left the gym.
Mrs Pargeter felt her unresistant body fold and unfold to the relentless rhythm of the exerciser. The sensation was still almost obscenely pleasant, but she knew that it would not long remain so.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
She was extremely annoyed. Not at the prospect of dying. That, Mrs Pargeter knew, had been an option from the moment of her birth, and life with the late Mr Pargeter, though wonderfully fulfilling, had kept the possibility of sudden death ever to the forefront of her mind.
No, it was the manner of her proposed dying that offended her. For Mrs Pargeter to end her days on an exercise machine was just so out of character. Of course, no one who knew her would ever imagine that she had got on to the thing voluntarily, but there might be people less familiar with her who thought the death was for real, who imagined that she, like many others of her age, had expired in an ill-judged attempt to recapture her lost youth. It was that thought she couldn’t tolerate.
Still, it didn’t seem she was going to have a lot of choice in the matter. The seductively soothing motion of the passive exerciser was now becoming more stressful. The machine itself had not accelerated — it maintained the inexorable evenness of its rhythm — but Mrs Pargeter’s unaccustomed limbs were beginning to feel the strain. With each rise and fall she could sense a mounting tension in her shoulders and a regular tug at the back of her knees. Sweat had started to trickle into all the crevices of her body.
Not only was it an inappropriate death, Mrs Pargeter thought ruefully, it was also an extremely cruel one. A death that would take such a long time, apart from anything else, slowly sapping her body’s strength, slowly winding up the tension around her heart.
‘This is not the way I want to go!’ she shouted suddenly. ‘I would like it known that this is not the way I want to go!’
She felt better for saying it. Not that she deluded herself anyone might hear her. The gym was a long way away from the bedrooms in which the righteous guests of Brotherton Hall dreamed of self-indulgence. There was
