This Way Out (6 page)

They backed apart immediately, laughing their apologies. Derek relinquished his infinitesimal responsibility, brushed aside her thanks, and strode back to his car. The whole encounter had been so casual, so brief, that there was no need to say good-bye.

But as he sat in his seat and looked through his papers again, he felt too disturbed to concentrate on his work. He was strangely conscious of his upper arm. Wondering why – rerunning the encounter as though it were a film – he recalled the moment of the collision, when her hair had flown across his face and his arm had been pressed against her body.

Specifically, against her full, soft, warm right breast; against what she, the lucky stranger, had, and his Christine had lost.

His pity for the father and daughter evaporated. Yes, it was tough for both of them. But when the old man died, as he might at any time of a merciful second stroke, his daughter would still be young, still whole. Whereas in Derek's family, it was Christine who was likely to die while her healthy old mother went on for ever …

Gripping the steering wheel with his strong hands, he felt all the frustration and anguish that he had seen in the old man's single eye. Felt, too, a mounting bitterness as he contemplated the fact that his own impotence was entirely self-imposed.

‘We should get going in about ten minutes.'

The driver of the Rolls had come hurrying back down the long line of stationary traffic, as satisfied with his news as though he personally had sorted out the jam. Derek nodded an acknowledgement and began to stow his work into his briefcase. He didn't want to re-open a conversation, but for some reason the man lingered beside the open door of the car, peering at the printed heading on his papers.

‘In insurance, are you?'

Derek wanted to get rid of him. He felt guilty that he had confided, even to a stranger, his fantasy of doing away with his mother-in-law.

‘Life assurance,' he said, knowing that it was a social turn-off. Most people, hearing the words, would have backed away hurriedly, expecting a sales pitch to follow. Maddeningly, the Rolls driver looked pleased.

‘
There's
a coincidence!' he said. ‘I was thinking only this morning that now I'm a married man I really must get some life insurance. Let me have your card, and we'll do business.'

‘It's assurance, not insurance,' Derek said stiffly. ‘There's no insurance against death. That's the one thing that's certain.'

The man scratched his dark curly hair. ‘Well, whatever,' he said cheerfully. ‘I'd like to buy some, and you might as well have the commission as anyone else. Let's have your card.'

Derek felt a growing dislike for him. ‘My company doesn't work on a commission basis,' he said, ‘and I don't deal with individual clients.'

But he was too good a salesman to let a prospect slip. He got out of his car, made himself more agreeable, and produced his card with the regional office address and telephone number. Before handing it over, he crossed out his own name and substituted a junior colleague's. As an afterthought, he obliterated his private number and address.

The driver of the Rolls thanked him with unnecessary warmth. They both looked up the road. There was still no sign that the traffic was about to move, but Derek prepared to return to his car. The man detained him.

‘By the way – do you often watch old films on television? You mentioned something about seeing vintage cars on film.'

‘Yes, I sometimes watch them. Why do you ask?'

‘I wondered if you saw last week's late-night thriller. The one about two men who meet by chance on a railway journey.'

‘
Strangers on a Train
? I have seen it, of course, but not recently. What about it?'

The man was looking at him with a smile. ‘I just wondered what you thought of it.'

Derek shrugged. ‘It's not one of Hitchcock's best, in my opinion. It certainly doesn't do justice to Patricia Highsmith's novel.'

‘But what about the theme, eh?' His smile widened as he spoke, but his dark eyes watched Derek closely. ‘Two strangers, discovering that they have similar problems and agreeing to provide a solution for each other … It's an interesting thought, isn't it?'

Derek stared at him in amazement. Good God, surely the man wasn't suggesting that they should commit murder on each other's behalf?

It was outrageously unbelievable. And yet there was something about the driver of the Rolls – the gleam of spittle on his sharp tooth as he drew back his lips – that gave him an alarmingly wolfish look.

Yes, quite possibly he
was
crazy enough to mean it. But whether or not, there was only one effective reply. Derek drew himself up to his full height, and glowered down at the man.

‘Sod off,' he said contemptuously.

He got into his car, slammed the door shut and wound up the window. How the man reacted, he didn't know; he didn't deign to look. But as he sat gripping the wheel, willing the traffic to start moving, he found that he was sweating even more than the stuffy warmth in the car warranted.

His hands were shaking. He felt sick. He was appalled. But what appalled him was not so much the enormity of the man's proposition as his own instinctive reaction to it. Because for a moment – just for one moment, before his sense of morality took over – he had felt a
frisson
of excitement as he realized that here was a practicable solution to the problem of getting rid of his mother-in-law.

Honourably, Derek put the proposition out of his mind. But he regretted that he had given the driver of the Rolls his card.

True, he had taken the precaution of obliterating his home address and number. But though he had also deleted his name it was probably still legible, which meant that he could be traced through the telephone directory.

Derek sweated for a few days, afraid that the man might ring him at home, or even turn up at the Brickyard, with his wolfish grin and a renewal of his monstrous suggestion. But nothing like that happened, and by the end of the following week Derek was too much occupied with his work to concern himself any further.

His current preoccupation was with a presentation he was due to make at an investment conference in the west of his region, near Peterborough. The conference was being held at an old country hotel where he and Christine had spent the first night of their honeymoon, the Haywain at Nenford. They had returned for a happy weekend when Christine was carrying Laurie, and had said then that they must go there more often; but the birth of their handicapped daughter and the continuing responsibility of caring for her had made further self-indulgence impossible.

Christine's eyes had brightened when Derek told her that this conference was being held at the Haywain. He had thought immediately that they might reactivate the plan for their long-postponed weekend, but he said nothing because he was afraid that the small village with its cottages of local stone, once an important river crossing and a staging post on the old Great North Road, might have been spoiled by modern development. But as soon as he turned off the busy by-pass that had left the village backwatered, he saw that everything was still as he remembered it.

The hotel itself, a handsome stone-built early eighteenth-century coaching inn, high-gabled and high-chimneyed, looked just the same on the outside. But the interior that had creaked at its dusty joints sixteen years earlier had been discreetly renovated. It was now distinctly upmarket. Checking the tariff, Derek saw that a double room with antique furniture and a four-poster bed would cost a lot more than he'd expected. But hang the expense, Christine would love it. Come the summer, he determined, he would bring her here for a second honeymoon.

Always providing, of course, that she was well enough when the time came. And that her mother didn't make such an issue of being left on her own that Christine would decide that it wasn't worth the hassle.

Derek had made a point of arriving at the hotel early on the evening before the conference began, so that he could look round before the place became crowded. Having bought a drink at the bar, he carried it out into the garden. The previous week's warm weather had gone as suddenly as it came and this evening was back to normal for late April, long and light but sunless and too chilly to enjoy. Even so, Derek retraced the paths he and Christine had taken on their summer honeymoon, drawn irresistibly to the far end of the walled gardens by the smell and the slap of river water.

It was just the same now as it had been then. Or it would be, when the sun shone, and narcissi and tulips gave way to delphiniums and roses, and the riverside vegetation grew tall. Parking his glass, he leaned his elbows on the wall overlooking the river and smiled to himself as he saw again the old stone bridge with the nine or ten arches that carried the road across the water, recollecting how, newly married, he had run the length of the parapet, leaping across from cut-water to cut-water, showing off in front of Christine.

And she had shown off too, posing on the parapet while he took a photograph of her wearing the mini-skirt that was then the fashion and demonstrating that she had a very fine pair of legs.

Not that he had ever been a dedicated leg-man. For young hopefuls of his generation there had been legs wherever you looked, some of them decidedly unalluring. But though girls in those days had displayed their legs – in tights, of course – almost all the way, toplessness hadn't been invented. Perhaps, he meditated, that was why he had always found the female bosom so mysteriously attractive; and why Christine's loss had devastated him almost as much as it had her.

‘Small world!' said a friendly voice behind him.

Derek turned, expecting to renew a business acquaintance, and found himself looking at the jockey of a man who had been at the wheel of the 1959 Rolls-Royce in the traffic jam near Newmarket.

The moral guilt he had felt immediately after their encounter came flooding back, making him belligerent. ‘What the hell are you doing here?' he demanded.

The man took no offence. ‘Thought I recognized your back view as you left the bar,' he said. ‘I've stopped for a break on my way home from a car auction at Retford. I'm in the trade, didn't I tell you? I suppose you're here on business – I gather there's a conference tomorrow. To tell you the truth I haven't got round to doing anything about my life insurance –' he corrected himself with a chuckle: ‘life
assurance
I mean – yet. But I certainly intend to. Look, I've still got your card.'

He plucked it from the top pocket of his navy blue blazer. ‘Derek Cartwright,' he read out, apparently deciphering the deleted name for the first time. He smiled, offering friendship. ‘My name's Packer.'

Derek instantly turned aside and took a long slow swig from his glass, so that if the man held out his hand he wouldn't see it. He didn't want to talk to Packer, and he certainly didn't want to get to know him. But he realized, now they were at closer quarters, that his guess about occupation had been well off course. Packer was insufficiently weathered for a jockey; his face and his hands were too smooth. A used-car salesman sounded much more likely.

‘I suppose you drive a company car,' the man went on amiably. ‘But have you ever thought of getting a runabout for your wife? I've got an option on a very clean little –'

He stopped abruptly and slapped his curly head in dismay. ‘Oh, I'm
sorry
– what must you think of me? You told me your wife has cancer. How
is
she?'

‘Improving, thank you,' said Derek stiffly. ‘And she already has her own car. Excuse me, I'm going in for dinner.'

Packer didn't move. With or without intent he was standing immediately in front of Derek, blocking the garden path.

The man was younger than him, and well-muscled. But Derek was fit; a former hockey-player of county standard, he still took part in the game as a referee. He had a considerable height and weight advantage over Packer, and he would have no trouble at all in shoving him out of his way.

On the other hand, decent men don't use physical violence, particularly against those smaller than themselves.

‘Excuse me,' he repeated loudly. Packer, affecting not to hear, continued the one-sided conversation.

‘Glad about your wife … I only wish I could say the same about my father-in-law.' Horizontal furrows ploughed deeply across the man's forehead. ‘It's grim, for a person to be in Sidney's condition without any hope of improvement. You saw him, didn't you? My wife told me that you helped her move him. What did you think of the old fellow?'

At their previous encounter, Packer's attitude towards his wife's father had seemed to be one of dislike and dismissal. Now, he sounded so genuinely concerned that Derek began to wonder whether he had mistaken the man.

Surely no one who had proposed setting up a conspiracy to murder could behave as calmly as Packer was behaving today? So perhaps he hadn't meant it at all. Perhaps, thought Derek uneasily, the idea had sprung from the dark workings of his own unconscious. What he had instinctively interpreted as a serious proposition might well have been put forward by Packer as nothing more than a slightly off joke.

Not that the old man's stroke was a joking matter. But then again, anyone faced with the kind of burden that Packer had taken on when he married might find that sour laughter was the only possible alternative to despair. Acknowledging it, Derek felt obliged to be more civil. He relaxed his get-out-of-my-way stance and turned aside to rest an elbow on the wall while he finished his drink.

‘I was shattered when I saw the state your father-in-law is in,' he admitted. ‘I'd had no idea what a stroke could mean. It's the fact that he
knows
how helpless he is that's so desperate.'

‘D'you think he does know?'

‘Certain of it. You can see the terrible frustration in his eye, poor devil. God, what an existence …'