Puppet for a Corpse Read online

  “It’s all right, Inspector, thank you. I … it’s just that I was still half asleep.”

  It was an admirable effort, but the flatness of her tone betrayed her. It had been far more than that, he could tell. He studied her face closely, shocked by her bleached pallor, the bruised hollows beneath her eyes and the dullness of the eyes themselves. Delayed shock, he judged. It would be inhuman to question her in this state. She needed a doctor, not a policeman.

  She was asking him what he wanted to see her about, seating herself on the chaise-longue near the window.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Thanet said. “It can wait until tomorrow. I can see you’re not well. I apologise for disturbing you.”

  Some of his colleagues, he knew, would find his attitude laughable. The weaker your adversary the better, they would say. And on occasion, with case-hardened villains, he would agree with them. But in a case like this, when even now there was no certainty of murder, only a suspicion of it, the idea of taking advantage of Gemma Pettifer’s condition sickened him. He began to move towards the door.

  “No, wait!” She lifted her hand imperiously. “I really would rather hear it now,” she said. “Otherwise,” and she gave a travesty of a smile, “I shall lie awake all night worrying about it.”

  She might have wanted it to appear a joke, but Thanet could see that she meant it. He hesitated.

  “I don’t think you’re really up to it.”

  “Nonsense. I’m fine, really. I told you. I was very soundly asleep, that’s all, when you knocked. And don’t apologise again, it’s not necessary. Now please, do sit down, Inspector. It’s all right, Mrs Price. Don’t look so worried. Give me a few minutes after the Inspector has gone and I’ll be down for supper. Something light. A little cold chicken and some salad, I think.”

  It was a brave attempt and Thanet saluted it by giving in, seating himself on the chair towards which she had waved him. Lineham sat down gingerly on the edge of the bed.

  “Now then, Inspector,” she said. She folded her hands in her lap and looked at him expectantly.

  “Would it surprise you, Mrs Pettifer, to learn that whatever it was that killed your husband, it wasn’t paracetamol?”

  “Not really. Because I still can’t, and won’t, believe he committed suicide. In which case I wouldn’t expect him to have been given what we normally use.”

  “But you’re still certain that it was paracetamol you gave him earlier in the evening?”

  “Oh yes, absolutely. I told you, we never kept anything else in the house—apart from the drugs my husband would carry in his bag, of course. But I would never have dreamt of touching those.”

  “Did you actually see your husband take the tablets?”

  She frowned, thinking back. “I don’t think so … No, I remember now, I went back into my room. I was more or less ready to leave by then and I realised I’d forgotten to put out the typescript I wanted to take with me—the play I wanted to discuss with my agent.”

  “Could you tell us exactly what you did do, from the time you came upstairs?”

  “I’ll try. Let me see … I got changed while my husband was having a bath. I’d made up earlier, before he got home. When I heard him come out of the bathroom I went downstairs, made the cocoa and took it up to his room. He was in bed by then. I put the mug down on his bedside table and went into the bathroom for the paracetamol. I returned to his room, handed him the tablets, then went back into my room. I took the typescript from the drawer in my bedside table and laid it beside my handbag on the bed. Then I went back into my husband’s room, to say goodbye to him.”

  “Had he taken the tablets?”

  “Well I assumed he had, naturally. After all, he wasn’t a child, Inspector. I didn’t feel I had to stand over him and watch while he took them.”

  “No, I can see that. What was he doing?”

  “Sitting up in bed, holding the mug of cocoa.”

  “Drinking it?”

  “He had both hands clasped around it, as if he was cold. When I came in, he put it down on his bedside table.”

  “Was there anything else on the table?”

  She passed her hand over her forehead, as if the strain of recalling all these details was beginning to tell on her. “No, I don’t think so. No, I’m sure there wasn’t.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “He said … he said …” To Thanet’s dismay her face crumpled and her eyes filled with tears. She reached blindly for a box of tissues which stood on a little table beside her.

  “Look, I really think we’d better leave this till morning,” said Thanet.

  She shook her head vehemently. “No. No, it’s all right. Really. It’s just that …” She blew her nose. “It was the last thing he ever said to me, you see, and I didn’t know … He said, ‘Don’t kiss me, darling. I don’t want you to catch my cold.’” Her lips twisted. “It just seems such a … trivial way of ending a life together.”

  Thanet had heard this many times before. “If only I’d known”, people would say. To be deprived of saying goodbye made them feel cheated, as though some premonition should have warned them to invest the occasion with a proper dignity. He sometimes felt that the ideal way to live would be always to treat each day, each encounter with loved ones, as one’s last. Only thus could one avoid the endless self-reproach, self-recrimination, with which so many flagellate themselves after a sudden loss. A counsel of perfection, of course, he knew that …

  “If only I’d insisted on staying …” she was saying.

  “It’s pointless reproaching yourself in that way. Your husband insisted, you said.”

  “I know. All the same … If I’d stayed, he might still be alive now.”

  “That’s really most unlikely. If someone is determined to commit suicide …”

  “But he didn’t!” she flared. “How often do I have to tell you? He couldn’t have …”

  “So you keep on saying. But have you ever given any thoughts to the mechanics of it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, we both know that as a doctor he would never have been so stupid as to go to bed with a container of pills and a bottle of alcohol on his bedside table. Agreed?”

  She nodded.

  “And so, if we rule out both suicide and accident, we are left with only one other alternative.”

  “Murder,” she whispered. “Go on, say it. I’ve said it over and over again in my mind and now I’ve just got to say it aloud. Murder, murder, murd …” She was shaking and her mouth was out of control. She pressed the back of one hand against her lips and stared at Thanet, her eyes huge and pleading, begging for understanding.

  “Mrs Pettifer,” said Thanet. “I really must insist that we continue this conversation tomorrow morning. After a good night’s rest …”

  “But don’t you see, I won’t get a good night’s rest if we stop now! Look, I’m sorry … It was just such a relief to get it out at last … Just give me a few moments and I’ll be all right …” She put her head back and took several deep, rhythmic breaths. Then she ran her hand through her hair, faced him gravely. “You see,” she said. “I’m fine now.”

  Thanet did see. He saw that Gemma Pettifer was able to discipline her physical reactions to a quite remarkable degree, somehow to divorce mind and body so that her outward behaviour gave no indication of her true feelings. It was, he supposed, an essential element of the actor’s craft. He had heard of actors who could be in a towering rage behind the scenes and could simply switch that anger off, could walk on stage and take part in the sweetest of love scenes without betraying even a hint of the true state of their emotions. So, how much could he believe of what Gemma allowed him to see? And yet … he studied her near-haggard appearance, the drained pallor of her skin … She had not known that she was going to have an audience tonight. Was he being unjust to her? Or—and he could not dismiss the possibility—was this the face of guilt?

  She was waiting, watching him intently.
“You were saying that we are left with only one other alternative, Inspector.”

  Mentally, he shrugged his shoulders. If this was what she wanted …

  “Murder, as you so rightly said, Mrs Pettifer. But if someone did kill your husband, how did he manage to do it? There was no sign of a forced entry, so how did he get in? And how did he administer the overdose?”

  “Well …” She fell silent, her eyes abstracted. “I suppose,” she said at last, “if it was some patient of my husband’s, someone with a grudge against him … One does hear of such things, after all. Someone who felt that he had been badly treated, or who had lost a relation—a wife, or even a child—and felt that my husband had been neglectful or had prescribed the wrong course of treatment …”

  Or a junior doctor who felt he’d been given a raw deal, thought Thanet. “Do you know of any such person?”

  “No. But then, I wouldn’t have. My husband never discussed his work with me.” She shivered and drew her robe more closely about her.

  Thanet remembered her revulsion towards any kind of sickness.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “Well, my husband was a very conscientious man. Even if he hadn’t been feeling well himself, if a patient had come knocking at the door Arnold might well have gone down to see what was the matter.”

  “Would he have let him in?”

  “Oh, I should think so. In any case, he would hardly have stayed talking on the doorstep in his dressing gown, would he?”

  “And then?”

  “Well, if the man had appeared distressed, Arnold could have offered him a drink …” She grimaced. “No, to be honest, I can’t see Arnold offering a patient a drink … Well, then, could this visitor have knocked my husband out, carried him upstairs and then have dissolved the tablets, got him to drink the solution while he was still dazed, before he came around properly?”

  “But your husband wasn’t knocked out. There was no sign of a blow to the head or indeed of any other sign of violence.”

  “Then it must have been someone he knew socially, someone to whom Arnold would have offered a drink. Then the drug could have been slipped into Arnold’s glass …” Her eyes flew open wide.

  “What is it?”

  “I’ve just thought. How stupid of me not to have seen it before, how incredibly stupid …”

  “What?”

  “Desmond Braintree! There was all that performance about an illegible prescription!” Breathlessly she related once more the facts given to Thanet by Dr Lowrie. “Don’t you see?” she finished.

  Had she had Braintree in mind right from the beginning of this conversation? Thanet wondered. Had he been watching once more a carefully calculated performance?

  “Mrs Pettifer,” he said, avoiding a direct answer, “let me just get this clear. You are suggesting that your husband’s death was murder, carefully arranged to look like suicide.”

  “Yes,” she said impatiently. “Of course I am, yes. And …”

  “Please, just a moment. Now, if that is so, perhaps you could help me to understand one or two points which are puzzling me.”

  “By all means, if I can.”

  Thanet gave her an assessing look. Was she fit to be challenged? He could scarcely stop now. He seemed to have manoeuvred himself into a position where he had no choice but to go on. And after all, he told himself, she had several times been given the opportunity to call a halt, if she so wished.

  “First, then,” he said, ticking off his fingers, “you tell us that your husband had a cold. But he didn’t. Two, you tell us that you gave him paracetamol, but we know that he didn’t take any. Three …”

  He paused. Gemma Pettifer was sitting quite still on the very edge of the chaise-longue, leaning forward and staring at him as if mesmerised.

  “Three. You say that when you left your husband in bed that night there was nothing on his bedside table. But your fingerprints as well as his were on the bottle of port which we found on that table after his death and what is more your fingerprints and yours alone were found on both the empty glass and on the container which had held the tablets that killed him … Mike, quick!”

  Gemma Pettifer’s eyes had rolled up, her body had begun to sag, to slide. Both men leapt forward.

  They just managed to catch her before she hit the floor.

  16

  “She’s guilty, isn’t she?” said Lineham. “I mean, the way she reacted …”

  “I don’t know,” Thanet snapped. “And that’s the truth.”

  They were driving back to the office. When Gemma Pettifer had collapsed they had carried her across to her bed and summoned first Mrs Price, then Dr Barson, who had come at once. Thanet was still smarting from the memory of Barson’s comments when he had seen his patient’s condition.

  “I should have trusted my own judgement,” Thanet growled, “and not gone on when she insisted. I could see she was …”

  Lineham wasn’t listening. “It’s obvious she was just trying to put us off the scent by pointing us in the direction of Dr Braintree. We surely don’t need much more before we …”

  “Mike.”

  “… charge her. We still haven’t questioned her …”

  “Mike!”

  “… about the car, of course. But if she was here that night …”

  “MIKE!”

  Lineham cast an astonished glance at Thanet, who very rarely raised his voice. “Yes?”

  “Just ease your foot off that accelerator, will you? You’re making me nervous. And stop letting your imagination run away with you.”

  “Imagination! Those things you mentioned to her weren’t imagination, were they? Nor was her reaction …”

  “Maybe not. But neither are they conclusive enough to make me want to charge her. Just because she’s a liar, it doesn’t necessarily mean that she’s a murderer.”

  “I can see that. But the fingerprints …”

  “Their significance could be demolished by any good defence counsel. The container could well have been used before, handled by her on some previous occasion. Ditto the glass.”

  “But the fact that his prints weren’t on either of them …!”

  “I agree, that’s difficult to explain away. Nevertheless, it’s not enough for a conviction and you know it.”

  “Then there’s the note. If Pettifer didn’t write it, she’d have had a better opportunity to practise copying his handwriting than anyone.”

  “Yes, if. We still don’t know it wasn’t genuine. Anyway, you know how easy it is to come unstuck over circumstantial evidence. We need more than that, much more, before she could be charged.”

  “But there is more! There’s motive …”

  Grudgingly Thanet conceded that he had to agree to that.

  “And opportunity, too. Now that we know Lee’s car was seen in the vicinity that night.”

  “We don’t know,” Thanet objected. “We’re just assuming.”

  “Well, yes, I realise that, but you said yourself that it would be too much of a coincidence if there were two vintage Morgans in this case.”

  “I’m well aware what I said,” snapped Thanet.

  Lineham knew when to let something drop. He allowed several minutes to pass before he said diffidently, “As a matter of interest, sir, why didn’t you bring the matter of the car up first? I mean, that was why we went to see her, after all.”

  “Honestly, Mike, I sometimes wonder if you’re human! You could see for yourself the state she was in …”

  “If it was genuine. Well,” he said, to Thanet’s furious look, “you did say yourself that it was difficult to tell if she was acting or not.”

  “All right, Mike. Look, I’m sorry. There’s no reason why you should be getting the sharp edge of my tongue, just because I’m feeling guilty about her passing out like that. But it was a genuine collapse. Dr Barson was pretty unequivocal about that, wasn’t he?”

  They exchanged rueful grins.

  “Look,” Thanet said, “I c
oncede all the points you’re making. Dammit, I know that practically everything new we learn seems to point to her, and yet … The truth is, Mike, there’s something about this case that makes me very uneasy.”

  “Uneasy?”

  “Yes. It’s all wrong, somehow. Not just the things which don’t add up. It feels wrong. And I just can’t see why. What is more, I simply don’t understand why, if she did kill him and set it up to look like suicide, she should be handing us the theory on a plate, putting the noose around her own neck, so to speak.”

  Lineham had no answer to that. They had arrived back now, and they climbed the stairs to the office in silence.

  Thanet checked quickly to see if anything interesting had come in, but nothing had. He plumped down into his chair with a sigh. His back gave a protesting twinge. This was an infallible signal that it was time he went home. Ever since he had injured it a few years ago it had played up when he was tired. He eased himself into a more comfortable position and glanced at his watch: half past seven and the day’s reports still to do.

  “Better get on with it, I suppose,” he said.

  Lineham nodded, pulled his typewriter towards him and began to peck at it, two-fingered.

  But Thanet remained quite still, gazing into space. Gemma Pettifer bothered him. His feeling of guilt had ebbed and he was angry with himself for having over-reacted. After all, he told himself irritably, if she were guilty, he simply could not allow diffidence to put a straitjacket on him. Sooner or later she would have to be tackled and that was that. But next time he would consult Dr Barson first, insist that Barson accompany him, if possible. He made a mental note to ring Barson first thing in the morning.

  Meanwhile, there was another possible approach to the problem.

  “Fancy a trip to London tomorrow, Mike?”

  Lineham raised an abstracted face. “Sir?”