That’s what Sue told me.”
“But Sue was –”
Mrs Pargeter raised a magisterial hand for silence. “No, I’ve worked it out now. I should have realised before. Sue was lying. You were the one who was there and she was the one who was out. Out with her lover, of course, with Geoff. But she didn’t want anyone to know about their affair, so when I asked if she’d been in when Theresa called, rather than raise questions about her absence, she said yes. She’d been in, you’d been out. And when the police started interrogating her, the lie became even firmer.”
“She thought she could keep the affair quiet,” said Kirsten, her vowels even more deformed than usual by contempt, “from her husband.”
“Yes, but you knew about it, didn’t you?”
The Norwegian girl shrugged. “Maybe.”
“Oh, you did. And you used the knowledge to blackmail Sue.”
“How do you mean?”
“That’s why you never did any work for her. You were useless as an
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Mrs Pargeter didn’t quite know what she was talking about herself, but as she went on, she found everything got clearer. Her mind was working well, seeing relationships between previously unregarded details, building up little chains of logic and joining them together into longer chains.
“I’m talking about drugs,” she hazarded.
The girl in the armchair stiffened, telling Mrs Pargeter that she had hit a bull’s-eye.
“Nice little set-up you’d got here. Cocaine mostly, wasn’t it? Easy enough to buy the stuff in the London clubs you were always going to. Easy enough to send it back to Norway in those many letters you kept sending back. And maybe a little local dealing for anyone who wanted it…Like Rod Cotton, for instance…Fitted his Yuppie image, didn’t it, cocaine?”
“So what if you’re right?” asked Kirsten sourly. “I don’t think the knowledge is going to do you much good.” She waved the swordstick menacingly. “Come on, where is this notebook?”
“Oh, I’m not ready to tell you yet,” said Mrs Pargeter with a complacent smile.
Kirsten rose from her chair. “Then maybe I’ll have to make you tell me…”
“Torture? Hmm, it might take a long time. And of course you always might kill me by mistake. Or suppose I screamed…? I have rather a loud scream, you know. Neighbours might notice.”
“I have to get that notebook, and I’ll be getting it by whichever method it is needed,” said Kirsten, sinisterly ungrammatical.
“I’ll tell you the best way of getting it.”
“What’s that?”
“It is for you to wait till I give it to you.”
“Don’t be silly, old woman!”
“No, listen. I will give it to you, I promise. And I won’t say any more about it…” Mrs Pargeter smiled ingenuously “…
“OK,” said Kirsten. “That’s a deal.”
What kind of naive old idiot does she think I am, Mrs Pargeter wondered. If her past behaviour’s anything to go by, only a few seconds would elapse between my handing over the notebook (assuming, of course, it existed) and her running me through with the swordstick.
“All right. Where is the notebook?” Kirsten went on.
“I’ll tell you. But in a minute. I just want to check out first if I’m right about how you killed Theresa Cotton.”
Kirsten shrugged and looked at her watch. “Five minutes, then you give me the book. Or…” She waved the swordstick meaningfully.
Yes, thought Mrs Pargeter, this girl really must have written me off as stupid, if she thinks I think she’ll let me survive once I’ve spelled out the details of her crime. Still, it’s all helping in my current game of playing for time.
“Right, this is the way I see it, Kirsten. You supplied cocaine to Rod, probably while he still had a job, and then certainly during that spell after he lost his job. You used to come over to the house here.”
Suddenly she saw how she had misinterpreted Carole Temple’s references to someone younger coming to ‘Acapulco’ while Rod was there, someone with two children to look after. She had assumed that had meant Vivvi, but in fact it had been Kirsten. And their dealings had not been in sex, but in drugs.
“So?” said Kirsten. She was bored and looked at her watch.
“When Theresa came to the house and said she knew about your cocaine-dealing, you thought she was about to shop you to the police. Which was why you decided you had to kill her.
“Easy enough to do. You could go out of the back of ‘Perigord’ and round by the path to the garden gate of this house. Sue had been given a key when she came in to water the plants. Maybe you used that, maybe you’d had a copy made…anyway, that was how you got in then – and how you got in tonight, come to that. When you got Rod’s tie I don’t know, but it wouldn’t have been difficult.
“So you came in, strangled Theresa – she gave no resistance because you caught her by surprise…she probably even obligingly died on the polythene sheet she was using for packing her belongings. Then you sealed up her body in the convenient polythene, put it in the freezer and locked it.
“And of course you found a nice little bonus here, didn’t you? Two thousand pounds, very handy. Have a nice few days shopping on that.
“Hmm…” Mrs Pargeter smiled grimly. “It was using the freezer that should have made me realise it was you.”
“What you mean?” asked Kirsten, with her first flicker of interest.
“Well, hiding the body that way was risky. It would have been discovered at some time – after the six months of prepaid storage, if not before. So the person who killed Theresa had to be someone prepared for that risk, someone who knew that within six months – in your case, less, two months – they’d be out of the country.
“Anyway, there’s another reason I should have worked out it was you.”
“What?”
“The murderer also had to be someone who knew Rod’s real situation, who knew he was out of a job. And I think he kept in touch with you during the six months after he left here.”
“Why should he do that?” the girl asked languidly.
“For the same reason he’d made contact with you in the first place. Cocaine. I think, whenever he had some money during that dreadful decline, he would get in touch with you to buy more of the stuff.”
“Maybe,” Kirsten acknowledged.
Another hideous piece of the jigsaw fell into place. “And I think that’s why he died,” said Mrs Pargeter softly.
“What do you mean?”
“For the last time in his life, he had money. Oh, what a fool I was – I gave him a hundred pounds. And he wanted to spend it on cocaine, so he rang you, and – ” Mrs Pargeter’s thoughts accelerated. “Oh, my God, yes. I remember, when I got back from seeing him, Sue had just had to come back from work, so that you could go out. Some excuse…what was it? Oh yes, visa ran out, you had to go to the Norwegian Embassy. I don’t think you went anywhere near the Norwegian Embassy that day.”
“No? And where do you think I did go?” the girl asked coolly.
“I think you went to the Embankment and found Rod. I think maybe you waited till the evening – it would have been easier in the evening – and then you asked him to walk down towards the river to do your deal. And I think when you reached the parapet of the river, you pushed him over it.”
“It is possible,” Kirsten conceded. “You could never prove it.”
