The Maggie Murders (32 page)

Even now I’m still surprised
by Tony’s reaction. When I first met him he probably would have joined us, but
the look of complete betrayal on his face that morning told me we weren’t going
to be able to laugh this one off over a few joints.

When I heard the car on the
driveway that evening, I longed for it to be Tony. I remember seeing, but not
watching Mrs Thatcher’s triumphal arrival at Downing Street on the ten o’clock
news and hoping that the telephone would ring. My cry of agony when I saw the
uniforms at the door was my heart breaking. I knew he was dead before they told
me.

I realised I could never marry
again out of love, but when the bills started mounting after Tony’s death I had
to get money and security somehow. It seemed that Tony’s business acumen had
not been his strongest suit and that he had borrowed more heavily than he told
me. The meeting in London had not been with a designer after all, but had been
a typically quixotic attempt by him to find another financial backer to prop us
up. No longer desiring the bohemian lifestyle of my twenties, the only capital
I could trade on was my looks.

 My transformation from Hippy
Chick to Belle of the Hunt Ball wasn’t that difficult; just a change of
costume, a new idiom and catching up with the Society circles mater and pater
had wanted me to move in. With my figure and looks I was able to put the clock
back a few years and pass myself off as mid-20s. Now that the life of a starving
artist seemed less romantic, I made up for lost time and decided to bag myself
a banker or toff.  In the end I allowed a rich property developer from Exeter
to believe that he had seduced me.

Jez felt bewildered. He’d been
half expecting to find something on her computer, but nothing of this
magnitude!

Was Mags a murderer? A multiple
murderer even!

And even that unprocessed
discovery wasn’t the bombshell it should have been. It was having his worst
fears confirmed about her feelings for him – or lack of feelings to be more
precise, which stunned him. Jez was now beginning to realise that he had been
played like one of his games. Years ago it might have been his fantasy to have
become the sex toy for some hot Amazonian beauty, but not now. He still had some
dignity left.

In his head he’d been creating a
world for them as detailed as any he had helped to conceive for JAC Games. Even
when the financial downturn had made some of his scenarios look increasingly
unrealistic, he had devised alternative futures in which they could be happy.
And yet even the more implausible scenarios he had dreamt up had not been as
fantastical as this. Having written games which destroyed the world in a
fictional Armageddon, he was now experiencing his own personal apocalypse.

Like Bluebeard’s bride he
shouldn’t have looked! If only he hadn’t tried to confirm his suspicions he
might have lived in happy ignorance of Mags’ true nature. He might even have
won her back, after all he’d only really wanted another peek at her financial records;
the idea that there might be something about him in her files had only come as
an afterthought…

Given the fact that Lin had said
that Maggie had popped out, he’d felt today had been a perfect opportunity to
put some of his fears to bed. And, if he was honest, the idea of putting Mags
to bed that night hadn’t been far from his mind either. It was all very well
keeping a low profile, but her husband had died over a year ago and it had been
well over a week since Mags had visited Chez Jez. The fact that doing it at her
place was against all the rules no longer bothered him, as he was beginning to
resent the way she made all the decisions. It was time for him to assert
himself, as his father’s mantra went ‘The sun shines on those who help
themselves’.

By going around to her place he
could kill two birds with one stone. There was bound to be an opportunity to
check out her computer again and it was a near certainty that she wouldn’t be
able to resist him in the flesh. If she came back unexpectedly, he could always
claim to be cleaning up her files, not that her Apple seemed to have many
problems in that respect.  Her password had been laughably easy to crack and he
was hoping that a cursory inspection would set his world back on its axis.
Those annoying doubts first brought to light by that blonde policewoman and
then resurrected by that red headed reporter needed to be washed away. It was
just that he hadn’t expected an innocuous looking folder called ‘Housekeeping’
to have had so much dirt in it.

Quite a few things were beginning
to form a very grim picture in his mind. If he’d been forming the edge of the
jigsaw at the back of his mind over the last few months, now he was beginning
to see the details. The chance discovery of a half empty packet of sleeping
tablets now had a dark logic to it that he hadn’t been able to fathom a few
months ago.

He clicked on the file entitled
‘M’ and wished he’d been able to stop after ‘A’.

M is for Murder

 I hadn’t planned to kill
Gerald when we met. It was only later that the idea came to me when we visited
Egypt on our honeymoon. I’d taken along ‘Death on the Nile’ as a suitable book,
as I’d been a sucker for reading thrillers since boarding school. Not only was
it a useful diversion from the less than thrilling consummation of our
marriage, it began to give me ideas about how to have my cake and eat it. A
divorce would have given me far too small a slice for my changing appetites…

The metaphorical cake in
question being Gerald’s rapidly rising fortune and yet the key to unlocking
this would be patience. The problem with fictional murderers seemed to be they
were always in too much of a hurry. Within days of the first murder, bodies
would begin piling up on the village green, as Death toured rural England. To
avoid this descent into Arcadian carnage, I calculated that I could tolerate
living with Gerald for the immediate future; given he worked such long hours,
finding someone else to fulfil my carnal needs would be easy. I could certainly
wait long enough for him to turn his short term investments into ones which
would leave me very comfortably off as his widow. 

If I’d pushed him into the
Nile on our honeymoon, or smashed him over the head with a wine bottle at home
I’d have been first in line for a life sentence. No, I needed a more diverting
narrative to avoid detection and one which would give me time to plan his
demise with due care and attention. I found my inspiration in another Christie
classic – ‘The ABC murders’ – the idea of concealing one killing in a string of
seemingly unrelated murders carried out by a supposed lunatic was a brilliant
conception.

Copying the ABC murders would
be problematic. As Gerald was a Mallowan, I’d need to bump a dozen people off
before I got to him. I’d also have to persuade him to move to Modbury or
Manchester. Murdering a total of thirteen people (a particularly unlucky number
for the Andersons of Axminster) would also be difficult and time consuming. I’d
also be lucky to get to Davies in Dartmouth before being banged up…

Yet the principle of hiding
his murder in a sequence of apparently unconnected crimes appealed to me. The
Miss Marple story ‘A Pocketful of Rye’ gave me the solution I was looking for;
use a nursery rhyme instead. Well that was easy as Gerald had seen the
possibility of a quick buck in the business Tony had left me with and had given
me the finances to make a go of it. With his name on the company’s books he’d
joked that now he was the Candlestick-maker and we just needed to buy up a
butcher’s and a baker’s to complete the set. The fact that he cracked this joke
when taking me on a hubristic detour to see a couple of houses he was putting
up in Littleham also helped me choose the perfect first victim. That was the
best Sunday joint I ever bought…

Timing was another consideration.
Gerald was obviously rich when I married him, but he wasn’t yet in the
millionaire stakes. His portfolio still needed time to expand and develop. I
felt I could give him the luxury of working up until his retirement before
killing him. No point in killing the goose before it laid the golden nest egg.

As Maggie Thatcher seemed to
embody the spirit of this new age of individualism and entrepreneurial spirit,
I planned the first killing to coincide with her re-election. It would also
commemorate Tony’s death and most importantly it would keep the story out of
the news. No one was going to give a toss about an elderly butcher dying in
Devon during Maggie’s re-election triumph.

As for how I would kill them,
the answer was simple – fire. My husband had burnt alive and so would they. It
was also a practical solution; I could not imagine physically sticking a knife
into someone, or taking a shotgun to them. Well, I could imagine it and I
didn’t want to. What if they didn’t die straight away and I had to stab them
again and again as they moaned in front of me or even worse put up a fight?
Guns and knives would also be easier to trace. I estimated that pouring petrol
through a letterbox would not be that difficult. The fact that the butcher’s
shop had iron bars over its windows also made it a perfect death trap.

My husband was therefore
unwittingly complicit in the butcher’s death, as the site he was developing in
Littleham gave me easy access to the back of that old man’s premises. I also
met my second victim at one of the charity events that Gerald liked to show me
off at. That is to say I met Mrs Baker – it had never occurred to me until that
point that I needn’t kill an actual baker. It was fairly easy for me to work
out that the man Connie was bidding with at the auction was more than just a
friend; I for one wasn’t surprised to see they left early. They were clever
enough not to leave at the same time, but when you know the moves yourself it’s
easy to see them in other people.

From the gossiping chorus I learnt
she was married to a cripple and such a defenceless specimen seemed ideal for
my second victim; he’d never out run the flames! Befriending Connie was easy
enough and she soon found a kindred spirit in her new friend. By our third
meeting we had already guessed each other’s true natures and by our fifth
meeting we’d taken to describing our regular drinks as our AA meetings: in this
case Adulterers’ Anonymous.

At times we shared lovers too.
Not at the same time, she had some standards, yet she was never averse to
taking risks.  I took a gamble setting her up with one of my lovers on the
night of her husband’s death, yet it was a risk I was certain she would take. I
knew her type by then and it was easy for me to engineer a chance meeting
between the two of them at the Royal Standard.

 What would I have done if
Connie hadn’t taken the bait? I would just have waited for another opportunity.
With Connie that was sure to present itself sooner or later. If only Thursday
nights had been her regular night with Councillor Howard I would have been in
the clear, but it seemed she could only use Fridays for their meetings. And by
the time I killed Connie’s husband I thought the whole ‘butcher, baker and
candlestick-maker’ business would be out in the open anyway.

The Maggie Murders was just
another piece of good fortune that fell my way and it also allowed me to pace
the killings. Given the usual gap between elections it also ensured I wouldn’t
become too greedy, or reckless. It would allow four or five years between murders
and give me a possible deadline of 1993 for killing Gerald. This allowed 13
years for the calf to become fattened and then I could live the life of the
merry widow. Fortunately, the booming state of the economy, twinned with the
treacherous nature of her supporters gave me the opportunity to complete my
plan early. Now it’s just a case of sitting tight for a few more months, before
relocating to my nest egg in Rio.

Without her, I can’t see the
point of remaining in Perfidious Albion…

‘Interesting reading, darling?’

Jez looked up from his lover’s
computer.

Maggie Mallowan was looking down
at him; wielding a wrought iron candlestick holder in her right hand.

The picture of the yacht she’d
seen in the Mallowans’ elegant library kept coming back to haunt Jane as she
hammered down the road leading to Exmouth. Well she managed to put on a fair
lick until the stretch of dual carriageway came to an end at Topsham. She then
found herself stuck in stationary traffic waiting for a herd of cows to cross
the road just outside of Exton; flashing lights and sirens were no proof
against cattle. Frustrated by her lack of progress, she tried to focus on why
her hunch had sent her haring down to Exmouth, as the opening line of the
nursery rhyme kept playing on a loop in her head – ‘Rub a dub dub, three men in
a tub.’

 Maggie Thatcher may have chosen
to step down, rather than contest a second round, but Jane felt that the
arrogance their prime suspect had displayed in her interview last year meant
that she still had another trick up her sleeve. She’d killed three men to
secure her fortune, but there was still the possibility that the fortuitous
link with Thatcher had become more than that now. The idea that Maggie Mallowan
would step back into the shadows like her near namesake, was not one Jane was
comfortable in accepting.

Mrs T had been brought down by
the men in her party and Jane felt that their killer might not forgive that. It
could well be that the local Conservative Club, or the White Rabbit gentleman’s
club would be her targets and yet the fact that her husband not only had a boat
– a very expensive tub by all accounts, but also had it moored at the former
docks which had made his fortune, made Jane fearful of some new horror being
planned for Exmouth’s newly opened marina.

She recalled the smaller fire
ships the English had used to help destroy the bigger galleons of the Spanish
Armada and wondered if their killer had a similar plan for the marina. Gerald
Mallowan’s yacht might have been called ‘The Iron Lady’; however it had been
constructed out of far more flammable materials and with the right amount of
preparation could be turned into a very effective modern day fire ship. A fire
would spread very quickly among the other sailing boats berthed at the pontoons
in the harbour and given that a lot of the expensively priced apartments built
on the site of the former warehouses and silos had been constructed in a faux
New England style, it meant that their colourful wooden frontages would go up
like matchwood if the conditions were right.

It might have been fanciful, but
as she waited for the cows to cross the road, Jane could picture dozens of
boats burning in the marina, surrounded by a ring of fire as the apartments
encircling the harbour caught light. As the last cow ambled into the field on
her left, images of some ‘Death on the Exe’ style Gotterdammerung at Exmouth’s
newly opened marina flashed through her head, she pressed her foot on the
accelerator and hoped the darkening, winter sky was not an omen of an
opportunity already missed.

As Jane shot past the Royal
Marines’ base at Lympstone Commando, she just hoped that many of the second
home owners hadn’t chosen to come down to Exmouth this weekend. Given the sheer
number of apartments, a conflagration of these clapboard buildings, which
looked as if they would be more at home in Long Island Sound than Lyme Bay,
could kill more people than the King’s Cross Fire. Perhaps that was what Maggie
Mallowan wanted? The people who could afford to live in the new marina were not
locals; they were prosperous incomers from the South East who had grown rich
during the economic boom of the 1980s and who had reaped the benefits of
Thatcherism. And they were the very type of people who had turned on Maggie
when the going got tough.

As she roared into the town where
it had all begun seven years’ ago, she hoped that there would be some back-up
to meet her at the marina. She also hoped that Colonel Redfern had sent along
the marines’ bomb disposal team; he might be a bit of a pompous arse, but at
least he was a bit of a pompous arse on her side!

Darkness had fallen by the time
she reached the old docks. Two patrol cars with their lights flashing were
already parked by the entrance to the marina and a couple of military jeeps
were already inside the complex. Coming to a halt by the development office,
where Nigel Byrne had picked up his most infamous passenger three years before,
she scarcely had time to consider the millions of pounds idling at anchor in
the marina. All she needed was to find which one of these yachts might light
the blue touch paper. Thankfully, the Harbourmaster was already at her side as
she stepped from her car and pointing out to her where ‘The Iron Lady’ was
berthed.

The uniforms were already in the
process of evacuating the area and the wail of more emergency service vehicles
could be heard in the distance. Meeting the captain of marines in charge of the
bomb squad, she pointed out Mallowan’s yacht berthed alongside one of the
central pontoons. The whole scene was eerily deserted and there were few lights
on in the apartments overlooking the harbour, whilst all the boats appeared to
have been in hibernation; this at least would mean fewer casualties should her
worst fears have been confirmed.

The earlier murders had happened
much later at night than this and yet if their murderer had had her hand forced
by Thatcher’s resignation, then there was every possibility she might have
changed her timing. She watched as one of the marines approached the yacht. A scene
like this should have been happening on the streets of Belfast, not on a jetty
in a millionaire’s playground in East Devon! The heavily armoured man, doing
the most dangerous job in the world, slowly approached the potential fire ship.

Jane half wondered if someone
like Jez Carberry might be trussed up and bound inside the boat, awaiting his
fate like Edward Woodward’s sacrificial policeman in ‘The Wicker Man’. She
sensed that she had detected the hidden currents which would cause that
particular relationship to drift towards the rocks. It seemed clear to her that
the love struck young man was clearly besotted by the elegant and ravishing
widow; however she felt that Mrs Mallowan had regarded Jez with nothing more
than a show of affection. Lust yes, love no. She’d noticed during their last
interview the tell-tale signs that Jez was beginning to lose some of his
youthful allure; even Debbie had said that he had looked jaded during their
interview and was very far from being the hot, young stud she had imagined.
Whereas with her looks and recently acquired fortune, Mrs Mallowan would never
be short of eligible young suitors.

She watched the man in the
protective suit make a signal to his colleagues and saw more marines
approaching the boat. Unlike their colleague, they were dressed in their normal
fatigues and she began to feel some of the tension escape from her body. In
fact the elegant boat eating up the mooring fees on the site of the former
docks, held no further horrors for the case. There was nothing more murderous
about it than the cost of its upkeep; which was far more than Jane had ever
paid for her mortgage, even with the latest rises. According to the bomb squad,
Mrs Mallowan hadn’t been planning to turn it into a fire ship, or Viking
funeral ship; this tub at least was safe.

It was only when the call came
through from Osborne that she felt she could finally put her doubts aside and
put the expensive surroundings of the marina behind her.

****

‘Dead...didn’t mean to… can’t
find a pulse…’

The switchboard operator had yet
to ask which emergency service was required.

‘Upstairs in the library…please
come quickly…’

What words could be distinguished
between broken sobs seemed to indicate that both the police and ambulance
services were going to be needed.

‘Just came at me. I had no
choice…’

If this was a hoax, it was a very
convincing one.

‘It was an accident…you’ve got to
believe me…had no choice…please help me…not moving…’

There were yet more sobs.

It took the switchboard operator
several more minutes to calm the caller down. Finally, she got them calm enough
to state the address that the police and ambulance crew would be sent to.

‘4, The Crescent, St. Leonard’s.’

Well at least the emergency
services should get their tea served in some decent china for a change,
reflected the switchboard operator.

****

Jane and the DCS reached the
crime scene within minutes of each other. Jane had half expected to see the
building in flames, destroyed by a vengeful wife like Thornfield or Manderley.
Well she was half right – there was at least a dead wife to contend with.

‘Miss Scarlet in the library with
the candlestick, ‘reflected Osborne, ‘not the most original of crime scenes…’

‘He did say she came at him with
it and it’s just as effective as a piece of lead piping.’

Jane indicated the heavy wrought
iron candlestick holder which lay besides Maggie Mallowan’s body on the floor.
There was no visible mark on the woman’s body and even in death she still
looked elegant and stylish. Her ash blonde hair tumbling over her forehead
disguised the spot where her temple had struck the marble edge of the hearth.

‘Do you buy his line of
self-defence?’

Jane considered for a moment what
she knew of Jez Carberry and Maggie Mallowan.

‘I think it more than likely,
sir. I can’t see any motive for why he would want to kill her.’

‘Apparently he’d hacked her
computer and found her diary on it.’

‘Well that’s convenient.’

‘We’ll need to get the tech boys
to check it out. It’s possible he could have planted it there himself.’

‘What was he looking for on her
computer?’

‘It seems he was getting jealous
of her, felt that she was keeping something back from him, which I suppose she
was and began rooting around in her personal stuff.’

‘I’d put any jealousy down to
her. She’s the one with the toy boy.’

‘Be it as it may, he looked up to
find her coming at him with a candlestick holder…’

‘And he just pushed her back in
self-defence?’

‘Seems that way, Jane. Looking at
her heels, I’d say she’d have one hell of a problem keeping her balance in most
situations, let alone carrying a heavy candlestick holder in her hand… the
slightest of touches could have sent her flying.’

The DCS squatted down to point
out the expensive stilettos on the victim’s feet. Though he thought victim
seemed an incongruous word to use for their suspected killer, now lying supine
by the fireplace. Her heels were certainly longer than Osborne had seen on any
woman outside the worlds of ‘Dallas’ and ‘Dynasty’.  He indicated to the
photographer that he should ensure he got a close up of her shoes.

‘Killer heels, eh?’

‘You said it, sir.’

‘Well let’s get lover boy down
the station and find out what he knows. I’ve a feeling we may just have come up
with a result.’