Tickled to Death and Other Stories of Crime and Suspense (8 page)

But, even if the perfect solution came within days, there were many arguments for delaying the launch. The most potent was Melissa's recent death. Though at no point during the police investigations or inquest had the slightest suspicion attached to him, the coincidence of two accidents too close together might prompt unnecessarily scrupulous inquiry. It also made sense that Hector should continue to foster his image of solicitude for his step-daughter, thus killing the seeds of any subsequent suspicion.

The answer to Question A, therefore, was that the launch should be delayed as long as possible.

But the length of this delay was limited by the answer to Question B. Though with a sedately private matter like the murder of Janet, Hector did not fear, as he would have done in the cut-throat world of cleaning fluids, a rival getting in before him, there was still the strong pressure of market forces. The pittance Melissa had accorded him in her will would maintain his current lifestyle (with a conservative allowance for inflation) for about eighteen months. That set the furthest limit on the launch (though prudence suggested it would look less suspicious if he didn't run right up against bankruptcy).

In answer to Question C (what he humorously referred to to his Management Trainees as the “tennis shoe question”), there was a significant special factor. Since Janet was at boarding school in Yorkshire, where his presence would be bound to cause comment, the launch had to be during the school holidays.

Detailed consideration of these and other factors led him to a date of launch during the summer of the following year, some fifteen months away. It seemed a long time to wait, but, as Hector knew,
IMPATIENCE BREEDS ERROR
.

4.
RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT OF PRODUCT
(
A. THEORETICAL
)

He was able, at his desk, to eliminate a number of possible murder methods. Most of them were disqualified because they failed to meet one important specification: that he should not be implicated in any way.

Simplified, this meant either a) that Janet's death should look like an accident, b) that her step-father should have a cast-iron alibi for the time of her death, or, preferably, c) both.

He liked the idea of an accident. Even though he would arrange things so that he had nothing to fear from a murder inquiry, it was better to avoid the whole process. Ideally, he needed an accident which occurred while he was out of the country.

A wry instinct dissuaded him from any plan involving faulty gas heaters. A new product should always be genuinely original.

Hector went through a variety of remotely-controlled accidents that could happen to teenage girls, but all seemed to involve faulty machinery and invited uncomfortably close comparisons with gas heaters. He decided he might have to take a more personal role in the project.

But if he had to be there, he was at an immediate disadvantage. Anyone present at a suspicious death becomes a suspicious person. What he needed was to be both present and absent at the same time.

But that was impossible. Either he was there or he wasn't. His own physical presence was immovable. The time of the murder was immovable. And the two had to coincide.

Or did they?

It was at this moment that Hector Griffiths had a brainwave. They did sometimes come to him, with varying force, but this one was huge, bigger even, he believed, than his idea for the green tear-off tag on the
GLISS TABLE-TOP CLEANER
sachets.

He would murder Janet and then change the time of her murder.

It would need a lot of research, a lot of reading books of forensic medicine, but, just as Hector had known with the green tag, he knew again that he had the right solution.

4.
RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT OF PRODUCT
(
B. PRACTICAL
)

One of Hector's favourite sentences from his Staff Training lecture was: “The true Genesis of a product is forged by the R and D boys in the white heat of the laboratory.” Previously, he had always spoken it with a degree of wistfulness, aware of the planner's distance from true creativity, but with his new product he experienced the thrill of being the real creator.

He gave himself a month, the month that remained before Janet would return for her summer holidays, and at the end of that time he wanted to know his murder method. There would be time for refinement of details, but it was important to get the main outline firm.

He made many experiments which gave him the pleasure of research, but not the satisfaction of a solution, before he found the right method.

He found it in Cornwall. Janet had agreed to continue her normal summer practice of spending the month of August at the cottage, and early in July Hector went down for a weekend to see that the place was habitable and to take the motor-boat for its first outing of the season. While Melissa had been alive, the cottage had been used most weekends from Easter onwards and, as he cast off his boat from the mooring in front of his cottage and breathed the tangy air, Hector decided to continue the regular visits.

He liked it down there. He liked having the boat to play with, he liked the respect that ownership of the cottage brought him. Commander Donleavy, with whom he drank in the Yacht Club, would often look out across the bay to where it perched, a rectangle of white on the cliff, secluded but cunningly modernized, and say, “Damned fine property, that.”

The boat was a damned fine property, too, and Hector wasn't going to relinquish either of them. Inevitably, as he powered through the waves, he thought of Melissa. But without emotion, almost without emotion now. Typical of her to make a mistake over the will.

She came to his mind more forcibly as he passed a place where they had made love. During the days of their courtship, when he had realized that her whimsical nature would require a few romantic gestures before she consented to marry him, he had started taking her to unlikely settings for love-making.

The one the boat now chugged past was the unlikeliest of all. It was a hidden cave, only accessible at very low tide. He had found it by accident the first time he had gone out with Melissa in the boat. His inexperience of navigation had brought their vessel dangerously close to some rocks and, as he leant out to fend off, he had fallen into the sea. To his surprise, he had found sand beneath his feet and caught a glimpse of a dark space under an arch of rock.

Melissa had taken over the wheel and he had scrambled back on board, aware that the romantic lover image he had been fostering was now seriously dented by his incompetence. But the cave he had seen offered a chance for him to redeem himself.

Brusquely ordering Melissa to anchor the boat, he had stripped off and jumped back into the icy water. (It was May.) He then swam to the opening he had seen and disappeared under the low arch. He soon found himself on a sandy beach in a small cave, eerily lit by reflection of the sun on the water outside.

He had reappeared in the daylight and summoned Melissa imperiously to join him. Enjoying taking orders, she had stripped off and swum to the haven, where, on the sand, he had taken her with apparent, but feigned, brutality. When doing the Desk Work on his project for getting married to Melissa, he had analysed in her taste for Gothic romances an ideal of a dominant, savage lover, and built up the Heathcliff in himself accordingly.

It had worked, too. It was in the cave that she had agreed to marry him. Once the ceremony was achieved, he was able to put aside his Gothic image with relief. Apart from anything else, gestures like the cave episode were very cold.

When, by then safely married, they next went past the cave opening, Melissa had looked at him wistfully, but Hector had pretended not to see. Anyway, there had been no sign of the opening; it was only revealed at the lowest spring tide. Also by then it was high summer and the place stank. The council spoke stoutly of rotting seaweed, while local opinion muttered darkly about a sewage outlet, but, whatever the cause, a pervasively offensive stench earned the place the nickname of “Stinky Cove” and kept trippers away when the weather got hot.

As he steered his boat past the hidden opening and wrinkled his nose involuntarily, all the elements combined in Hector's head, and his murder plan began to form.

4.
RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT OF PRODUCT
(
C. EXPERIMENTAL
)

Commander Donleavy was an inexhaustible source of information about things nautical, and he loved being asked, particularly by someone as ignorantly appreciative as Hector Griffiths. He had no problem explaining to the greenhorn all about the 28-day cycle of the tides, and referring him to the tide tables, and telling him that yes, of course it would be possible to predict the date of a spring tide a year in advance. Not for the first time he marvelled that the government didn't insist on two years in the regular Navy as the minimum qualification for anyone wishing to own a boat.

Still, Griffiths wasn't a bad sort. Generous with the pink gins, anyway. And got that nice cottage over the bay. “Damned fine property, that,” said Commander Donleavy, as he was handed another double.

The cycle of the tides did not allow Hector Griffiths to become an “R and D boy” and get back into “the white heat of the laboratory” again until his step-daughter was established in the cottage for her summer holiday. Janet was, he thought, quieter than ever; she seemed to take her mother's death hard. Though not fractious or uncooperative, she seemed listless. Except for a little sketching, she appeared to have no interests, and showed no desire to go anywhere. Better still, she did not seem to have any friends. She wrote duty postcards to two elderly aunts of Melissa in Stockport, but received no mail and made no attempt to make new contacts. All of which was highly satisfactory.

So, on the day of the spring tide, she made no comment on her step-father's decision to take the boat out, and Hector felt confident that, when he returned, he would still find her stretched lethargically in her mother's armchair.

He anchored the motor-boat in shallow water outside the cave entrance, took off his trousers (beneath which he wore swimming trunks), put on rubber shoes, and slipped over the side. The water came just above his knee, and more of the entrance arch was revealed. On his previous visit the tide cannot have been at its very lowest. But the entrance remained well hidden; no one who didn't know exactly where it was would be likely to find it by chance.

He had a flashlight with him, but switched it off once he was inside the cave. The shifting ripples of reflection gave enough light.

It was better than he remembered. The cave was about the size, and somehow had the atmosphere, of a small church. There was a high pile of fallen rocks and stones up the altar end, which, together with the stained glass window feel of the filtered light, reinforced the image.

But it was an empty church. There was no detritus of beer-cans, biscuit packets or condoms to suggest that anyone else shared Hector's discovery.

Down the middle of the cave a seeping stream of water traversed the sand. Hector trod up this with heavy footsteps, and watched with pleasure as the marks filled in and became invisible.

The pile of rubble was higher than it had at first appeared. Climbing it was hard, as large stones rocked and smaller ones scuttered out under the weight of his feet. When he stood precariously on the top and looked down fifteen feet to the unmarked sand below, he experienced the sort of triumph that the “R and D boys” must have felt when they arrived at the formula for the original
GLISS CLEANING FLUID
.

In his pocket he found a paper bag and blew it up. Inflated, it was about the size of a human head. He let it bounce gently down to the foot of the rubble pile, and picked up a large stone.

It took three throws before he got his range, but the third stone hit the paper bag right in the middle. The target exploded with a moist thud. Shreds of it lay plastered flat against the damp sand.

Hector Griffiths left the cave and went back to get his step-daughter's lunch.

5.
PACKAGING (WHAT DO YOU WANT THE PRODUCT TO LOOK LIKE? WHAT DOES THE PUBLIC WANT THE PRODUCT TO LOOK LIKE
?)

“The appearance of your product is everything,” the diligent young men who worried about their first mortgages and second babies would hear. “Packaging can kill a good product and sell a bad one. It can make an original product look dated, and an old one look brand new.”

It could also, Hector Griffiths believed, make the police believe a murder to be an accident and an old corpse to be a slightly newer one.

As with everything, he planned well ahead. The first component in his murder machine was generously donated by its proposed victim. Listless and unwilling to go out, Janet asked if he would mind posting her cards to Melissa's aunts in Stockport. She didn't really know why she was writing to them, she added mournfully; they were unlikely ever to meet again now Mummy was dead.

Hector took the cards, but didn't post them. He did not even put stamps on them. You never knew how much postal rates might go up in a year. He put them away in a blue folder.

There wasn't a lot more that could be done at that stage, so he spent the rest of his time in Cornwall being nice to Janet and drinking with Commander Donleavy at the Yacht Club.

He listened to a lot of naval reminiscences and sympathized with the pervading gloom about the way the world was going. He talked about the younger generation. He said he had nothing to complain of with his step-daughter, except that she was so quiet. He said how he tried to jolly her along, but all she seemed to want to do was mope around the cottage or go off on long walks on her own. Oh yes, she did sketch a bit. Wasn't that her in a blue smock out by the back door of the cottage? Commander Donleavy looked through his binoculars and said he reckoned it must be—too far to see her clearly, though.

If he was in the Yacht Club in the evening, Hector might draw the Commander's attention to the cottage lights going off as Janet went to bed. Always turned in by ten-thirty—at least he couldn't complain about late hours. She was a strange child.