“Only the suffering he brought on himself,” the girl snapped. “He was a waster, out of his head on heroin, who just hung around the beach all the time. And then one day – Monday before last – he took an overdose and Rory just happened to be the one who found the body.” She looked at her lover with devout admiration. “At that moment Rory saw a way out of all our troubles. It was then the whole substitution plan came into his mind and he brought the body back here.”
“But surely – ”
“Tanya!” said Rory firmly. “I think we could do with something to drink.”
“There’s some white wine in the fridge.”
“No. Whisky.” He reached for his wallet and extracted a twenty-pound note. “Could you go down to the off- licence and get a litre of Grouse?”
“But – ”
“Now.”
She didn’t argue any more, but rose to her feet. Putting his arms gently on her broad shoulders, Rory planted a little kiss on her forehead. “Take care.”
“And you.”
Tanya flipped her shiny green anorak off a hook on the back of the door and left the bedsitter.
“She’s pregnant, isn’t she?” said Jude.
“Yes. How did you know?”
“I should have worked it out earlier from the fact that she’d gone off coffee, but what made me certain was the way you touched her just then, your concern for her, as if she was very fragile.”
“All right. So she’s pregnant. What have you got to say about that?”
“Nothing. Except I assume that’s the reason why you set this whole thing up?”
“The final reason, yes. The other reasons had been building for years.”
“Rory, men leave their wives for younger women every day of the week. Very few of them bother to set up mock-suicides to cover their tracks. Why didn’t you just talk to Barbara, tell her you wanted out?”
“I couldn’t do that!” A pallid transformation came over the dentist’s face and Jude realized the extent of the terror he felt for his wife. “Barbara would never have let me get away. And if she thought I was still alive, anywhere in the world, she’d come and find me. No, I’ve always known I’d only be safe if she thought I was dead.”
“So you really reckoned you could start over?”
“Not reckoned – reckon. It’s still going to happen. Tanya and I are going to live together in France and bring up our babies there. I’ve been salting away the money for months.”
The gleam in Rory’s eyes showed Jude how much he was caught up in his fantasies, how long he’d been nursing them, and how potent to the middle-aged was the chimera of one last chance, the opportunity to wipe the slate clean and make a fresh start. It also showed Jude that the man she was dealing with was not entirely sane.
“Tanya was meant to come into my life,” he went on. “It’s been a long time coming, and there’s been a lot of shit along the way, but she was meant to happen to me. She’s wonderful. She’s the first woman I’ve ever known who hasn’t expected anything from me. Anything I give her she regards as a bonus. She has no aspirations for me.”
The fervour with which he said the word bore witness to the agony of the years Barbara and her mother had spent trying to ‘make something’ of Rory Turnbull. Part of Jude could empathize with his need to take action, do anything that would break him out of that straitjacket, out of the suffocating aspirational gentility of the Shorelands Estate.
“Me and Tanya,” Rory Turnbull concluded proudly, “is a love match.”
And Jude could see how it was. Two damaged people who had asked for very little and been more abundantly rewarded than they’d ever dared to hope.
Appealing though this image was, it did not change the facts. “I’m sure it is a love match,” said Jude, “but does that justify murder?”
He gave her a pained look. “Tanya told you. The man died of an overdose.”
“No. Tanya may well believe that, because it doesn’t occur to her to question anything you tell her, but it doesn’t work for me. The logic isn’t there. This whole business has taken months of planning. Your cheating the NHS, your fiddling the Yacht Club accounts, planting the idea of your heroin habit, that’s all long-term stuff. I’m afraid I don’t believe you set it all up, on the off chance that, when the time came – the Monday before last – you’d stumble across a body the right age and shape who’d just conveniently died of an overdose. Sorry, call me old– fashioned, but I don’t buy that. You’d targeted the man for months.”
“All right.” He made the confession lightly. “Yes, I saw him first in the summer, down by the pier when I went for a walk one lunchtime. He asked me for money. I gave him some and thought how wretched he was – a man about my age, about my size, and he was reduced to that. And then I thought that, though I’d got all the things he hadn’t – the money, the job, the house – I was even more wretched than he was. It was round the time I’d started seeing Tanya. I was still at that stage trying to behave correctly, trying to do the decent thing – and it was tearing me apart.
“I saw the man a few times after that – just walked past him, maybe gave him money, maybe didn’t – but it was only when I knew Tanya was pregnant that the plan began to form in my mind. And, the more I thought about it, the more it started to obsess me.”
Yes, thought Jude, that’s the word – obsess.
“And, of course, because Tanya was pregnant, there was a time pressure. There were a lot of time pressures.”
“The Dental Estimates Board, the Fethering Yacht Club accountants…”
“All that.”
“So how did you kill him? Where did you kill him?”
“Here. I’d sent Tanya out to the cinema. She loves movies – particularly weepies. I’d given him the money for a lot of heroin. He’d had a hit. He was feeling good. I smothered him” – he gestured to the bed – “with that pillow.” Rory read disapproval in Jude’s expression. “Go on, he died happy. Better than the way it would have happened otherwise. Contaminated drugs…a fight with another addict…an infected needle…with someone like that it was only a matter of time. He was already lost.”
“No one’s lost, Rory. Not even at the very end. Anyway, didn’t you think who he was?”
“I didn’t know who he was.”
“He was a human being.”
“He didn’t matter.”
She was silent for a moment before asking, “And what made you change your plans?”
“Change my plans?”
“Yes. For your plan to work, the suicide in the car had to be staged as soon as possible after the man had died. The longer you left it, the more the body would decay and the more open your deception would be to exposure by forensic examination. Why didn’t you do it the night you killed him?”
Rory Turnbull grimaced. “Because of the bloody police.”
“What? Surely they didn’t know what you were up to?”
“No. The trouble was I wanted to leave it fairly late, so that there wouldn’t be many people around. But he’d died about six and – ”
“You mean you’d killed him about six.”
“Whatever. There’s a garage in this block that’s hardly used – that’s where my car is at the moment, actually. By midnight, which was the time intended to take the body down there, it had started to stiffen up.”
“Rigor mortis.”
“Yes. I’d meant to put him in the boot, but I didn’t want to risk giving the body any unexplained injuries by bending the joints, so I just laid him on the back seat with a coat over him. I left lanya here, as we’d agreed – we were going to meet in France a week or so later – and I set off. Just on the outskirts of Feth-ering, a car came towards me, flashing its lights.”
“Bill Chilcott.”
“Yes. I thought driving off at speed would draw more attention than stopping, so I stopped. Bill was just being charitable. He told me there were police staking out Seaview Road and stopping every car that came along.
