Chapter and Hearse (3 page)

‘The kitchen needs a bit of work doing on it…' said Simon spiritedly. ‘And the larder window needs fixing.'

He made both statements without any fear of being described as a ‘house husband'. Charlotte had never ever brought herself to tell the world that her husband had been made redundant from his job at the metal works in Berebury and therefore that he stayed at home while she made the money – and quite a lot of money it was these days too, to be sure. He wasn't complaining about that. It was her end-of-the-year bonus, she had told him, that was going to make buying the Manor at Cullingoak possible.

When asked what her husband did, Charlotte always replied with perfect truth that he was a bimetallist. Since she moved in the world of corporate banking, this was almost always taken by her office colleagues to mean that Simon was an economist who was concerned with the monetary system in which two metals are used in fixed relative values and not – as he actually was – someone trained in the coefficients of expansion of all metals.

Charlotte never disabused them of this misapprehension, and when the more knowledgeable responded with remarks such as, ‘Gold and silver, I suppose,' she would say uncertainly, ‘I think so, but I'm afraid it's not really my field…' That people did not talk much about their work went without saying in all banking circles, and the conversation would move on.

‘I dare say that the owner might agree to that sort of repair being taken into account,' the estate agent was saying to Simon, without for one moment revealing how very useful it was in a negotiating situation to have a few small bones to chew over. The smaller the bone, the better, of course. In the world of the estate agent, work on a larder window was easily conceded, and the cost of an upgraded kitchen something to be wrested from the owner after a nominal struggle.

‘Who is the owner anyway?' asked Charlotte casually. ‘He wasn't around.'

‘A Mr Wetherby,' replied Kenneth Marsden, adding, ‘He's naturally still very shocked at losing his wife, you know, and not too keen on going back to the house.'

‘I'm not surprised,' said Charlotte Cullen. ‘Poor man.'

Simon gave Marsden a hard look. ‘And I take it that the whole place has been rewired?'

The estate agent looked pained. ‘I can assure you that the house's electrical system was the very first thing that was checked after the accident. It was found to be all in good order –' he gave a slight cough – ‘in spite of everything.'

‘Everything?' queried Simon.

‘Mrs Wetherby's electrocution seemed quite inexplicable. Mr Wetherby was at work when it happened and so wasn't able to help much with the coroner's enquiries.'

‘Then there shouldn't be anything for us to worry about, should there?' said Charlotte in the same decisive tones as she had used to wind up many a meeting at the bank.

‘No,' said Kenneth Marsden automatically.

She raised an enquiring eye in her husband's direction and went through her usual routine. ‘What do you say, Simon? It's up to you, of course, but I must say I like it…'

‘Me too,' he said meekly.

‘Right.' She turned to Kenneth Marsden. ‘You can tell Peter Wetherby that we'll take it.'

‘I don't think you'll regret it,' said the estate agent heartily, shaking hands as they left. Simon Cullen was inclined to agree with him when, six weeks later, he and Charlotte had duly moved into the Manor at Cullingoak. The larder window had been fixed and the men were due to come that Monday morning to improve the kitchen layout. Simon had no hang-ups about doing the cooking, belonging as he did to the very workman-like ‘if you can read, then you can cook' school of
haute cuisine,
but equally he saw no point in ever working under less than optimum conditions. Actually he brought to the task of cooking the same attention and care that had served his previous employers very well until the advent of the world decline in the heavy metals industry.

‘Now, then, Mr Cullen,' said the foreman, ‘before we get started, can you just check that this plan here is how you want it all doing? Measure twice and cut once, as my old boss used to say.'

Simon switched the electric kettle on as a gesture of good intent before he joined the man peering over the drawings laid out on the kitchen table. ‘That's right,' he said after duly studying the design. He pointed to the larder door and with his hand sketched an imaginary journey round the kitchen in the direction of the stove via the work surfaces and the kitchen sink. ‘Store, wash, prepare, cook, serve … that's how it should be.'

The foreman scratched his head. ‘I hadn't thought of it like that.'

‘Only if you're right-handed,' said Simon. ‘The lady who lived here before must have been a southpaw.'

‘Both her hands had burns on them,' the man informed him ghoulishly.

‘Though they never did find out how she got them,' chimed in his mate, Fred.

‘Electrocuted in the utility room, she was,' said the foreman lugubriously. ‘But don't you let that worry you. They went over that room with a fine-tooth comb after it had happened.'

‘Couldn't find a thing amiss, though,' said Fred in his role as Greek chorus. ‘They never did work out what went wrong.'

‘Really?' said Simon, absently moving in the direction of the worktop. The kettle had come to the boil and switched itself off. ‘Tea?'

‘Milk but no sugar for me,' said the foreman, undiverted. ‘Thought it must have been something to do with the ironing board, they did, because that was lying on the floor beside her when her husband found her. There was a pile of nearly dry washing in the laundry basket beside her too.'

‘And,' supplemented his assistant eagerly, ‘because she always did the ironing while she watched her favourite afternoon programme on television.'

‘My wife too,' said the foreman. ‘Thanks,' he added, cradling the mug between his large, dirt-ingrained hands. ‘I don't know which channel, though,' he added in the interests of accuracy, ‘because I'm not there then.'

Simon decided that this was not the moment for quoting that famous question, ‘But what was the play like, Mrs Lincoln?'

‘Two lumps for me,' said his mate, stretching his hand out for his tea. ‘They thought she died just before the programme came on at four o'clock … and that's what the man who did the post-mortem said too.'

‘Pathologist,' supplied Simon.

‘But they never found out how she came to be electrocuted,' repeated the foreman, addressing himself to his drink. ‘Never.'

‘Funny, that,' murmured Simon Cullen.

‘It said in the paper that her husband was at work at the time it happened,' expanded the foreman.

‘At a meeting all afternoon,' chimed in Fred. ‘It said that too. About a dozen people there with him all the time.'

‘My wife spends a lot of her time at work in meetings,' said Simon. ‘I know, because she tells me when not to ring the office.'

‘If you ask me,' opined the foreman, pushing back his chair, ‘most meetings are a waste of time. Let's get started here, Fred.'

Simon swept up the empty mugs and drifted off to take a look at the utility room with new eyes. It was situated off the kitchen and housed the central-heating boiler and the washing machine, as well as all the impediments associated with living in a sizeable house in the country – including Simon's new green wellies. The Wetherbys' ironing board had gone and Simon had stood the Cullens' one there in its place, but otherwise the room looked very much as it must have done in the days of the previous occupants.

Propped up beside the ironing board and the radiator was the clothes horse which Simon and Charlotte had brought with them from their old house. In fact, the only relic of the Wetherbys' regime was one of those old-fashioned wooden airers, which could be lowered by a thin rope, loaded with damp washing and then hoisted back up to the ceiling above the boiler to dry.

Simon examined everything in the room with his customary care but was no wiser at the end of his survey. In fact, had he but known it, he reached the same conclusion as the investigating authorities had done – that something had electrified the metal of the ironing board.

When he gave the men their tea in the afternoon he said, ‘You might just put a lick of paint on that small scratch on the radiator in there next time one of you has a paintbrush in his hand.'

‘No problem,' said the foreman. ‘No sugar, thanks.'

‘Two lumps for me,' Fred reminded him. ‘Worked out how it was done, have you?'

‘Done?' said Simon.

Fred gave him a knowing wink. ‘They said the husband had got a lady love tucked away somewhere.'

The foreman set his mug down and said sapiently, ‘What he had got was an unbreakable alibi, so you mind what you say here, Fred.'

Fred bridled. ‘There's no smoke without fire. Besides, don't forget that most murderers are widowers.'

‘Because they've killed their wives.' Simon nodded. ‘I've heard that one before.'

‘Remember,' pronounced the foreman magisterially, ‘it didn't say anything about that in the newspapers – not even the Sunday ones.'

‘What else did it say?' asked Simon, adding in spite of himself, ‘I suppose it is theoretically possible that the ironing board was live – electrified, that is – a long time before Mrs Wetherby touched it.'

‘Not before one o'clock it wasn't, insisted Fred vigorously. ‘Ivy Middleton was here all that morning. She put the dirty washing in the machine and started it up before she went home, like she always did, dinnertime.'

‘That's right,' said the foreman. ‘I was forgetting about Ivy. She touched that ironing board and she didn't get an electric shock, did she, Fred?'

Simon and Charlotte hadn't kept Mrs Ivy Middleton on to do the rough housework. As Charlotte had put it so pithily when she – they – paid for the Manor, ‘They could afford Cullingoak Manor – just – but not the extras as well.' Ivy had rated as an extra and so Simon saw entirely to the running of the house.

‘There could have been some cable and a time switch,' he said in spite of himself. It was just as well Charlotte was at work. She wouldn't have approved of his wasting the workmen's time – let alone his gossiping with them – like this. ‘You know, an electric wire from the nearest power socket to the ironing board timed to come live after Mrs Middleton had left.'

‘Now, if I may say so, that's where you're wrong,' said the foreman placidly. ‘The police thought of that too.' He took a swig from his mug. ‘It so happens that there wasn't any such timer in the house or garden, and, believe you me, they searched for it.'

‘I can quite see that they would,' murmured Simon.

‘And,' the foreman added, tapping the table with his forefinger for greater emphasis, ‘they had a witness that the husband – Peter Wetherby, that is – didn't leave the house before the police arrived, so he couldn't have hidden a timer anywhere outside the house.'

‘Got it in for him, haven't you,' said Simon, ‘this Peter Wetherby?' Suddenly something about the name jarred in his mind. He couldn't quite place the memory but it was there, somewhere.

‘Ironing boards don't become live on their own.' The foreman shrugged, starting to get to his feet.

‘I reckon,' said Fred, ‘it was suicide.'

‘Suicide?' echoed Simon.

Fred nodded. ‘I think she connected a wire from the socket to the ironing board herself and her husband came home and found her and removed the evidence pretty quickly. Didn't want anyone to know she'd done it because of this other woman, see?'

The foreman said, ‘You're a great one for your theories, Fred, but it don't get the work done … Come along now, let's get started here or we'll never be done.'

*   *   *

Over the next few weeks Simon had to agree that Fred's suicide theory was the most tenable. Something like a kettle flex could have been plugged into the nearest power point and bare wires at the other end made to touch the metal of the ironing board. Turn the switch on, clasp the ironing board and Bob's your uncle. A married man becomes a widower in no time at all.

And all that the husband would have had to do before he rang the police was put the proper plug back on the appliance – the work of a moment – and no one would be any the wiser. Oh, and perhaps change the face of the plug in the wall in case there were burn marks there too.

He gave this thought whenever Charlotte was away – she was away rather a lot these days for the bank. At least he thought it was for the bank until the bank telephoned urgently one weekend to talk to her and he referred them to their conference and they said they weren't having one.

That was when he remembered what it was about the use of Peter Wetherby's Christian name that had bothered him. Charlotte had known it even though the estate agent had only given them his surname.

Now he came to think of it, she had known too about Cullingoak Manor being for sale for a low price before it had been advertised …

It still didn't explain how Mrs Wetherby had died while her husband was well away from the action unless it had been by her own hand.

Simon Cullen was rapidly coming to the conclusion that it hadn't been.

That was when he laid his plan.

‘Darling,' he said to Charlotte the next evening, ‘I think I'm going to have to have a couple of nights away next week. Uncle George wants me to go up to Yorkshire to see him.'

‘Fine,' she said. ‘Remember me to the old boy. Not that I've seen him since the wedding.'

‘No more you have,' he said, since his relations weren't much liked by Charlotte. ‘I'll go on Tuesday and be back Thursday evening. That all right?'

‘Fine,' she said. ‘By the way, before I forget, I may be a bit late back on Friday – we've got a big meeting at the bank Friday afternoon.' She smiled. ‘Salary review committee – mustn't miss that.'