How to Murder the Man of Your Dreams (21 page)

I picked it up and went over to the sink. “You have to think about your son’s happiness. And telling yourself he could have done a lot worse might sweeten the pill.”

“You’re right for once, Mrs. H.”—a brave smile—“the way the world’s going, my George could have got mixed up with some bit of fluff just out of the clink for murdering her last ten fiancés and presently working for an escort service.”

“Exactly,” I said through stiff lips as the specter of my initial meeting with Ben hovered in the air between us, and I had to keep my arms firmly at my sides to stop from shooshing it away. Mrs. Malloy hadn’t meant anything personal by her remark. She didn’t know that I had met my husband through Eligibility Escorts; nobody in Chitterton Fells had any idea, least of all Vanessa, and I would have killed before letting her find out.

“What’s got you so red in the face, Mrs. H.?”

“Nothing.… I mean the sun, it’s going to be a scorcher of a day.” Before I could continue with the weather forecast, the hall door opened with hurricane force, and Gerta appeared with the twins at her feet like bows on the tail of a kite. It took a full minute for me to work out whether she was talking in English or Swiss, partly because the words were all jumbled up but mainly because Abbey and Tam were climbing all over me as if they had not seen me since the day of their birth.

“Say that again, Gerta?” I addressed the plaits wrapped around her head, which was all I could see with a twin standing on each knee.

“I have telephoned the police station, Frau Haskell.”

“You did what?” Abbey fell through my legs and was rescued by Mrs. Malloy, who would no doubt charge me an extra pound for the favour.

“Such a terrible shock …” Gerta leaned against the table, incapable for the moment of continuing and, with
Tam half choking me, all I could think was that she had discovered a bar of soap missing from the bathroom and suspected foul play. “We have a
madman
on the premises, Frau Haskell!”

“Don’t talk so daft.” Mrs. Malloy retreated with Abbey into the broom cupboard. “Mr. H. is at work. I saw him going into the restaurant when I was waiting for me bus.”

“Not him.” Gerta shook her head so violently that her plaits swung loose from their moorings. “I talk about the crazy man I see from the nursery window, sitting on that low branch of the big tree, with his hands out in front of him and his foots going up and down like he is on the bicycle. And all the time he talking to someone who isn’t anywhere to be seen, ‘his angel’ I hear him say when I go to fall out the window.”

“That would be Mrs. Malloy’s son,” I said before the proud mother could emerge from the broom cupboard to defend his honour by administering forty whacks with the mop. “George would have been demonstrating the capabilities of the stationary bike he is manufacturing to Vanessa, who must have wandered out of your view for the moment.”

“Again I upset the apple cake!” Gerta bundled her plaits back in place with trembling hands. “I am the crazy one, that is what you will be thinking, Frau Haskell. First I think your cousin for a burglar and now I make this mistake.” A tear trickled down her cheek and, with the sensitivity that so often lurks within the soul of the small, dark, silent type, Tam toddled over and gave her knees a hug.

“Why don’t I ring the police,” I said, “and suggest this is not the most convenient time for a visit and perhaps they could come another day.” I escaped into the hall.

The policewoman who answered my call said, with enough acid in her voice to burn more holes in the receiver, that but for the previous call from this number coming in while the tea break was in full swing, someone would have been sent rushing to the scene. My apologies for the false alarm went down like a stale currant bun, and I hung up the receiver, torn between relief that I hadn’t been ordered to do thirty days’ community service and irritation with Gerta.

It was only by reminding myself that she was understandably prone to view all men as beasts as a result of her broken marriage that I was able to stick a smile on my face when I returned to the kitchen to find Gerta in her apron at the working surface, pounding her rolling pin into a circle of dough that already looked more suited for a sewer cover than a pie. My spirits were not lifted by the morose ballad she was singing about a false-hearted goatherd who callously played the accordion in a meadow of wildflowers while his damsel fair drowned herself in a mountain stream. The twins had retreated under the table and had their hands over each other’s ears, and one look at Mrs. Malloy’s face made me think seriously of joining them.

“If that woman don’t shut her gob, this flaming minute”—my much-put-upon daily help turned off the tap and lifted her bucket out of the sink—“I’ll stick her head in this here pail and hold her down till she don’t think drowning’s something to bloody sing about.”

“Leave that to me,” I said hastily as Gerta began another verse in which the goatherd ended up shaped like his accordion after an encounter with the father of the fair corpse. “I mean … I’ll take care of things here in the kitchen, Mrs. Malloy, while you go and get started on the other rooms.”

“I wouldn’t charge extra for doing the woman in!” Shaking her head at my inability to see reason, she teetered out of the room, slopping water from the bucket in her wake, which succeeded in bringing Abbey and Tam out from the table so they could chase after the soap bubbles. Luckily, by the time I had captured my unholy terrors and got them settled in their booster chairs with promises of breakfast on the way, Gerta had concluded her aria.

“That Mrs. Mop, she
hates
me!”

“No, no, she doesn’t.” I shuffled a bowl of cereal in front of Tam and restrained Abbey from climbing onto the table, where the sugar bowl beckoned. “She’s just a little edgy today, what with her son getting engaged and almost getting arr—” Biting my tongue, I produced my daughter’s breakfast, told both children to “eat up,” and then realized neither had a spoon. This omission remedied, I focused on Gerta, whose tears poured like water from a measuring jug onto the pastry, necessitating the use of more flour, in sufficient
quantity to whiten the air in the kitchen and turn my children into a couple of snowmen.

“I am a
big
nuisance to you, Frau Haskell!”

“Don’t be silly,” I said with all the conviction I could muster. “You’re an absolute boon, your cooking is out of this world, and the children love you!”

“Me
do!
” Abbey provided emphasis by banging her spoon on the table and crowing with delight. Tam, bless him, was too busy turning his bowl upside down, with horribly messy results, to express his monumental affection for Gerta, but when the flour had settled, she looked more cheerful.

“Then you don’t send me backpacking into the streets?”

“Of course not,” I said.

“For you, Frau Haskell and the little munchkins”—she hoisted up the pastry and squashed it back into a ball—“I work my fingers to the bones. I will make the strudel and the dumplings and the—”

“You mustn’t spoil us—” Removing Tam’s bowl from his sticky hands, I fought down an attack of indigestion.

“Nothing I do is too much!” Gerta beamed at me as she got busy with the rolling pin. “The rest of my life I spend in your service, for what pennies you choose to throw at me. When I am an old woman with the white hairs and the bent back, I will still be in this happy house, taking care of the great-grandchildren when they come for the visit, cooking for you and cleaning for you and answering the telephone—” She stopped. The rolling pin spun out of her hands and landed with a wallop on the floor within inches of Tobias Cat, who with a gleeful flick of his tail chased it under the Welsh dresser.

“What’s wrong, Gerta?”

“You will let Mrs. Mop kill me! And I will not say a word to stop you. When you go up the stairs for your sleep this morning, the telephone gave a ring and it is a woman speaking. She said her name was …”

“Yes?” I prodded.

“I don’t remember all of it.” Gerta pressed her hands to her head and turned white on the spot.

“The first name?” I encouraged her.

“I remember the first letter.” She brightened. “Her name it began with the S, that I will swear on your grave.”

Wiping off Tam’s face, then the table, I racked my brain and brandished a name in the air: “Sylvia? Does that sound right? Sylvia Babcock?”

“That could be it.”

“Well, never mind.” I scooped the twins out of their seats and watched them scurry over to the toy basket in the alcove. “She’s bound to ring back.”

“But not before lunch.”

“That doesn’t matter.” I laughed. “I can stand the suspense until our mystery caller’s identity is revealed.”

“But I have not explained, Frau Haskell.” Gerta jumped half out of her apron when Tam bounced a red ball in her direction. “The woman say she will wait to meet you in Herr Haskell’s restaurant. For lunch.”

My heart plummeted. The woman had to be Sylvia and she had chosen to meet me in a public place rather than at her house or mine so that when she burst into tears and begged me to take Miss Bunch’s dog back before she had a nervous breakdown, I would be unable to refuse, or risk looking like a monster in the eyes of everyone.

“She say lunch at noon, Frau Haskell,” Gerta added helpfully.

Bother! It was now eleven-thirty. There was nothing I could do for the moment but thank Gerta for the message. Being saddled with Heathcliff again while I tried to find him another foster home was hardly a fate worse than death. Ben would not be pleased, but marriage is not meant to be a never-ending round of merriment. Seemingly George Malloy had not yet grasped this concept; when the garden door opened he followed Vanessa jauntily into the kitchen, his face almost as red as his hair and glowing like the sun.

I introduced him to Gerta, who made a quick exit on the grounds that she needed to take the twins up to the potty. Then for five minutes I listened to the besotted fellow extol my cousin’s social acumen in arranging their wedding, which would include a reception at Merlin’s Court for five hundred of her very, very closest friends, featuring a sit-down dinner with Ben doing the food and
Mrs. Malloy and I in charge of the washing up. While I endeavoured to look enthusiastic and murmur the right noises, Vanessa stood like a Royal Doulton figure in her pale green negligee, with a posy of flowers in her china-white hands. And suddenly lunch with Sylvia Babcock, with whom I had never been great chums, became the most enchanting of prospects.

So at eleven forty-five I left the house with her wedding present tucked under my arm and drove off, confident that Abbey and Tam would be fed and put down for their naps, and reasonably hopeful that I would not return to find Mrs. Malloy had plugged Gerta into a light socket. Passing St. Anselm’s Church, I glimpsed someone moving among the shrubbery in the vicarage garden. It proved to be Eudora. She looked listless and beige in a skirt and cardigan that seemed superfluous, given the heat.

Parking the car outside Abigail’s, I felt a little guilty that I had not stopped to pass the time of day with Eudora, although what one could say to cheer up a woman whose husband was about to undergo a sex-change operation I had no idea. To become the talk of the tabloids, I thought as I mounted the steps and passed under the green and gold awning and into the restaurant, would be hell on earth for anyone except a publicity-starved celebrity. And even that sort of fame must grow thin. Something I did not have to worry about, I was reminded by the gilt-framed mirror behind the reception desk. I was reflecting that Ben would be well-advised to get rid of the evil-looking glass before it put any other patrons off their lunch by reminding them they already had pounds to lose, when Ben himself came through the main dining room doorway. He strode towards me, eyes alight and hands outstretched.

“Ellie! What a wonderful surprise. No one told me you were coming.” He looked towards the young woman at the desk, whose striped frock so perfectly matched the Regency-period wallpaper that I had mistaken her for a standard lamp.

“I didn’t make the reservation,” I said quickly as she stared at the book in wild-eyed terror. “And I hope Sylvia Babcock thought to do so. Because from the looks of it, you have close to a full house.”

“Then you’re not here for an impetuous lunch with your husband?” Ben quirked a wistful smile as he continued to hold my hands and look deep into my eyes. Never had he looked more uncompromisingly handsome. His dark, elegant looks appeared to particular advantage against the early-nineteenth-century ambience of Abigail’s foyer, and I felt like a worm for disappointing him.

“I’ve brought Sylvia’s wedding present.” I tapped the gift-wrapped package under my arm. “But I think she wanted to have lunch in hopes of persuading me to take Heathcliff back.”

“That dog?” The love light flickered out of Ben’s eyes. “Or should I say that
horse
? Ellie, if he moves into the house, I move into the stables.”

“Babcock … Babcock,” the receptionist muttered as she ran her finger down the reservation page. “I don’t see the name here; could the lady have used …?”

“An alias? I don’t think so.” I shook my head. “But perhaps you wrote her down under ‘Sylvia.’ ”

“I don’t see that either, but then, sometimes I have trouble reading my writing, particularly when I’ve used my left hand because I was holding the telephone in my right.” This admission was made in fear and trembling because the temperature in Ben’s vicinity had dropped dramatically. “Oh, yes … here’s a reservation beginning with an
S
 … but I can’t read the rest of the name.”

“We could have a glass of wine together before your friend gets here.” Thoughtful Ben unknit the ravelled brow of care and placed an arm around my shoulders, but I had to go and spoil things.

“Darling, I wish we could, but it’s twelve o’clock already.…”

Whereupon Ben bowed stiffly as if releasing me from my promise to dance the minuet with him and retreated into the dining room to make sure a table was ready and waiting.

I stood looking after him, consumed by a ridiculous wave of remorse and of something irrevocably lost, when I heard footsteps entering the foyer. I turned to see a pink-haired lady, past the first bloom of middle age, coming
towards me with a broad smile on her face and her feather boa fluttering. And at that moment I realized with a sinking heart that I wasn’t meeting Sylvia Babcock for lunch.