Tickled to Death and Other Stories of Crime and Suspense Read online

  “How?”

  “The previous ones were more obviously just demands for attention, she made pretty sure that she would be found before anything too serious happened. In this case . . . well, if you hadn’t walked into the room, I think she’d have gone the distance. Incidentally . . .”

  But Larry spoke before the inevitable question about why he came to be in her room. “Were there any other differences this time?”

  “Small ones. The way she crushed up all the pills into the gin before she started suggested a more positive approach. And the fact that there was no note . . .”

  Larry didn’t respond to the quizzical look. When he left, the doctor shook him by the hand and said, with undisguised irony, “I wouldn’t worry. I’m sure everything will work out for you.”

  The insolent distrust was back in that final emphasis, but mixed in the doctor’s voice with another feeling, one of relief. At least a new husband would keep Mrs Phythian out of his surgery for a little while. Just a series of repeat prescriptions for tranquillizers and sleeping pills. And he could still charge her for those.

  Subconsciously, Larry knew that the doctor had confirmed how easy it would be for him to murder his wife, but he did not let himself think about it. After all, why should it be necessary?

  At first it wasn’t. Mrs Lydia Phythian changed her name again (she was almost rivalling her husband in the number of identities she had taken on), and became Mrs Lydia Renshaw. At first the marriage worked pretty well. She enjoyed kitting out her new husband, and he enjoyed being taken round to expensive shops and being treated by her. He found her a surprisingly avid sexual partner and, although he couldn’t have subsisted on that diet alone, secret snacks with other women kept him agreeably nourished, and he began to think marriage suited him.

  Certainly it brought him a lifestyle that he had never before experienced. Having been brought up by parents whose middle-class insistence on putting him through minor public school had dragged their living standards down to working-class and below, and then having never been securely wealthy for more than a fortnight, he was well placed to appreciate the large flat in Abbey Road, the country house in Uckfield and the choice of driving a Bentley or a little Mercedes.

  In fact, there were only two things about his wife that annoyed him—first, her unwillingness to let him see other women and, second, the restricted amount of pocket money she allowed him.

  He had found ways around the second problem; in fact he had reverted to his old ways to get around the second problem. He had started, very early in their marriage, stealing from his wife.

  At first he had done it indirectly. She had trustingly put him in charge of her portfolio of investments, which made it very easy for him to cream off what he required for his day-to-day needs. However, a stormy meeting with Lydia’s broker and accountant, who threatened to disclose all to their employer, persuaded him to relinquish these responsibilities.

  So he started robbing his wife directly. The alcoholic haze in which she habitually moved made this fairly easy. Mislaying a ring or a small necklace, or even finding her notecase empty within a few hours of going to the bank, were common occurrences, and not ones to which she liked to draw attention, since they raised the question of how much her drinking affected her memory.

  Larry spent a certain amount of this loot on other women, but the bulk of it he consigned to a suitcase, which every three or four weeks was moved discreetly to another Left Luggage office (premarital habits again dying hard). Over some twenty months of marriage, he had accumulated between twelve and thirteen thousand pounds, which was a comforting hedge against adversity.

  But he did not expect adversity. Or at least he did not expect adversity until he discovered that his wife had put a private detective on to him and had compiled a dossier of a fortnight’s infidelities.

  It was then that he knew he had to murder her, and had to do it quickly, before the meeting with her solicitor which she had mentioned when confronting him with the detective’s report. Larry Renshaw had no intention of being divorced from his wife’s money.

  As soon as he had made the decision, the murder plan that he had shut up in the Left Luggage locker of his subconscious was revealed by a simple turn of a key. It was so simple, he glowed from the beauty of it.

  He went through it again as he sat in the cab on the way to Abbey Road. The timing was perfect; there was no way it could fail.

  Every three months Lydia spent four days at a health farm. The aim was not primarily to dry her out, but to put a temporary brake on the runaway deterioration of her physical charms. However, the strictness of the fashionable institution chosen to take on this hopeless task meant that the visit did have the side-effect of keeping her off alcohol for its duration. The natural consequence of this was that on the afternoon of her return she would, regular as clockwork, irrigate her parched system with at least half a bottle of gin.

  And that was all the plan needed. His instinct told him it could not fail.

  He had made the preparations that morning, almost joyously. He had whistled softly as he worked. There was so little to do. Crush up the pills into the gin bottle, place the suicide note in the desk drawer and set out to spend his day in company. No part of that day was to be unaccounted for. Gaston’s Bar was only the last link in a long chain of alibis.

  During the day, he had probed at the plan, testing it for weaknesses, and found none.

  Suppose Lydia thought the gin tasted funny . . .? She wouldn’t, in her haste. Anyway, in her descriptions of the previous attempt, she had said there was no taste. It had been, she said, just like drinking it neat, and getting gently drowsier and drowsier. A quiet end. Not an unattractive one.

  Suppose the police found out about the private detective and the appointment with the solicitor . . .? Wouldn’t they begin to suspect the dead woman’s husband . . .? No, if anything that strengthened his case. Disillusioned by yet another man, depressed by the prospect of yet another divorce, she had taken the quickest way out. True, it didn’t put her husband in a very good light, but Larry was not worried about that. So long as he inherited, he didn’t care what people thought.

  Suppose she had already made a will which disinherited him . . .? But no, he knew she hadn’t. That was what she had set up with the solicitor for the next day. And Larry had been present when she made her previous will that named him, her husband, as sole legatee.

  No, his instinct told him nothing could go wrong.

  He paid off the taxi-driver, and told him an Irish joke he had heard in the course of the day. He then went into their block of flats, told the porter the same Irish joke, and asked if he could check the right time. Eight-seventeen. Never had there been a better-documented day.

  As he went up in the lift, he wondered if the final refinement to the plan had happened. It wasn’t essential, but it would have been nice. Lydia’s sister had said she would drop round for the evening. If she could actually have discovered the body . . . Still, she was notoriously bad about time and you can’t have everything. But it would be nice. . . .

  Everything played into his hands. On the landing he met a neighbour just about to walk his chihuahua. Larry greeted them cheerfully and checked the time. His confidence was huge. He enjoyed being a criminal mastermind.

  For the benefit of the departing neighbour and because he was going to play the part to the hilt, he called out cheerily, “Good evening, darling!” as he unlocked the front door.

  “Good evening, darling,” said Lydia.

  As soon as he saw her, he knew that she knew everything. She sat poised on the sofa and on the glass coffee table in front of her were the bottle of gin and the suicide note. If they had been labelled in a courtroom, they couldn’t have been more clearly marked as evidence. On a table to the side of the sofa stood a second, half-empty bottle of gin. The bloody, boozy bitch—she couldn’t even wait until she got home, she’d taken on new supplies on the way back from the health farm.

  “Well,
Larry, I dare say you’re surprised to see me.”

  “A little,” he said lightly, and smiled what he had always believed to be a charming smile.

  “I think I’ll have quite a lot to say to my solicitor tomorrow.”

  He laughed lightly.

  “After I’ve been to the police,” she continued.

  His next laugh was more brittle.

  “Yes, Larry, there are quite a few things to talk about. For a start, I’ve just done an inventory of my jewellery. And do you know, I think I’ve suddenly realized why you appeared in my hotel room that fateful afternoon. Once a thief, always a thief. But murder . . . that’s going up a league for you, isn’t it?”

  The gin hadn’t got to her: she was speaking with cold coherence. Larry slowed down his mind to match her logical deliberation. He walked over to his desk in the corner by the door. When he turned round, he was holding the gun he kept in its drawer.

  Lydia laughed, loudly and unattractively, as if in derision of his manhood. “Oh, come on, Larry, that’s not very subtle. No, your other little scheme was quite clever, I’ll give you that. But to shoot me . . . They’d never let you inherit. You aren’t allowed to profit from a crime.”

  “I’m not going to shoot you.” He moved across and pointed the gun at her head. “I’m going to make you drink from that other gin bottle.”

  Again he got the harsh, challenging laugh. “Oh, come on, sweetie. What kind of threat is that? There’s a basic fault in your logic. You can’t make people kill themselves by threatening to kill them. If you gotta go, who cares about the method? And if you intend to kill me, I’ll ensure that you do it the way that gives you most trouble. Shoot away, sweetie.”

  Involuntarily, he lowered the arm holding the gun.

  She laughed again.

  “Anyway, I’m bored with this.” She rose from the sofa. “I’m going to ring the police. I’ve had enough of being married to a criminal mastermind.”

  The taunt so exactly reflected his self-image that it stung like a blow. His gun-arm stiffened again, and he shot his wife in the temple, as she made her way towards the telephone.

  There was a lot of blood. At first he stood there mesmerized by how much blood there was, but then, as the flow stopped, his mind started to work again.

  Its deliberations were not comforting. He had blown it. The best he could hope for now was escape.

  Unnaturally calm, he went to the telephone. He rang Heathrow. There was a ten o’clock flight. Yes, there was a seat. He booked it.

  He took the spare cash from Lydia’s handbag. Under ten pounds. She hadn’t been to the bank since her return from the health farm. Still, he could use a credit card to pay for the ticket.

  He went into the bedroom, where her jewellery lay in its customary disarray. He reached out for a diamond choker.

  But no. Suppose the Customs searched him. That was just the sort of trouble he had to avoid. For the same reason he couldn’t take the jewellery from his case in the Left Luggage office. Where was it now anyway? Oh no, Liverpool Street. Fumes of panic rose to his brain. There wouldn’t be time. Or would there? Maybe if he just got the money from the case and—

  The doorbell rang.

  Oh my God! Lydia’s sister!

  He grabbed a suitcase, threw in his pyjamas and a clean shirt, then rushed into the kitchen, opened the back door and ran down the fire escape.

  Peter Mostyn’s cottage was in the Department of Lot. The nearest large town was Cahors, the nearest small town was Montaigu-de-Quercy, but neither was very near. The cottage itself was small and primitive; Mostyn was not a British trendy making a fashionable home in France, he had moved there in search of obscurity and lived very cheaply, constantly calculating how many years he could remain there on the dwindling capital he had been left by a remote uncle, and hoping that it would last out his lifetime. He didn’t have more contact with the locals than weekly shopping demanded, and both sides seemed happy with this arrangement.

  Larry Renshaw arrived there on the third night after Lydia’s death. He had travelled unobtrusively by local trains, thumbed lifts and long stretches of cross-country walking, sleeping in the fields by night. He had sold his Savile Row suit for a tenth of its value in a Paris second-hand clothes shop, where he had bought a set of stained blue overalls, which made him less conspicuous tramping along the sun-baked roads of France. His passport and gold identity bracelet were secure in an inside pocket.

  If there was any chase, he reckoned he was ahead of it.

  It had been dark for about four hours when he reached the cottage. It was a warm summer night. The countryside was dry and brittle, needing rain. Although the occasional car had flashed past on the narrow local roads, he had not met any pedestrians.

  There was a meagre slice of moon which showed him enough to dash another hope. In the back of his mind had lurked the possibility that Mostyn, in spite of his constant assertions of poverty, lived in luxury and would prove as well-fleshed a body as Lydia to batten on. But the crumbling exterior of the cottage told him that the long-term solution to his problems would have to lie elsewhere. The building had hardly changed at all through many generations of peasant owners.

  And when Mostyn came to the door, he could have been the latest representative of that peasant dynasty. His wig was off, he wore a shapeless sort of nightshirt and clutched a candle-holder out of a Dickens television serial. The toothless lips moved uneasily and in his eye was an old peasant distrust of outsiders.

  That expression vanished as soon as he recognized his visitor.

  “Larry. I hoped you’d come to me. I read about it in the papers. Come inside. You’ll be safe here.”

  Safe he certainly was. Mostyn’s limited social round meant that there was no danger of the newcomer being recognized. No danger of his even being seen. For three days the only person Larry Renshaw saw was Peter Mostyn.

  And Peter Mostyn still hadn’t changed at all. He remained a pathetic cripple, rendered even more pathetic by his cringing devotion. For him Renshaw’s appearance was the answer to a prayer. Now at last he had the object of his affections in his own home. He was in seventh heaven.

  Renshaw wasn’t embarrassed by the devotion; he knew Mostyn was far too diffident to try and force unwelcome attentions on him. For a little while at least he had found sanctuary, and was content for a couple of days to sit and drink his host’s brandy and assess his position.

  The assessment wasn’t encouraging. Everything had turned sour. All the careful plans he had laid for Lydia’s death now worked against him. The elaborate fixing of the time of his arrival at the flat no longer established his alibi; it now pointed the finger of murder at him. Even after he’d shot her, he might have been able to sort something out, but for that bloody sister of hers, ringing the bell and making him panic. Everything had turned out wrong.

  On the third evening, as he sat silent at the table, savagely drinking brandy while Mostyn watched him, Renshaw shouted out against the injustice of it all. “That bloody bitch!”

  “Lydia?” asked Mostyn hesitantly.

  “No, you fool. Her sister. If she hadn’t turned up just at that moment, I’d have got away with it. I’d have thought of something.”

  “At what moment?”

  “Just after I’d shot Lydia. She rang the bell.”

  “What—about eight-thirty?”

  “Yes.”

  Mostyn paled beneath his toupee. “That wasn’t Lydia’s sister.”

  “What? How do you know?”

  “It was me.” Renshaw looked at him. “It was me. I was flying back the next morning. You hadn’t rung. I so wanted to see you before I left. I came to the flats. I didn’t intend to go in. But I just asked the porter if you were there and he said you’d just arrived . . .”

  “It was you! You bloody fool, why didn’t you say?”

  “I didn’t know what had happened. I just—”

  “You idiot! You bloody idiot!” The frustration of the last few days and
the brandy came together in a wave of fury. Renshaw seized Mostyn by the lapels and shook him. “If I had known it was you. . . . You could have saved my life. You bloody fool! You . . .”

  “I didn’t know. I didn’t know,” the Little Boy whimpered. “When there was no reply, I just went back to the hotel. Honestly, if I’d known what was happening . . . I’d do anything for you, you know. Anything . . .”

  Renshaw slackened his grasp on Mostyn’s lapels and returned to Mostyn’s brandy.

  It was the next day that he took up the offer. They sat over the debris of lunch. “Peter, you said you’d do anything for me . . .”

  “Of course, and I meant it. My life hasn’t been much, you’re the only person that matters to me. I’d do anything for you. I’ll look after you here for as long as—”

  “I’m not staying here. I have to get away.”

  Mostyn’s face betrayed his hurt. Renshaw ignored it and continued, “For that I need money.”

  “I’ve told you, you can have anything that I—”

  “No, I know you haven’t got any money. Not real money. But I have. In the Left Luggage office at Liverpool Street Station I have over twelve thousand pounds in cash and jewellery.” Renshaw looked at Mostyn with the smile he had always believed to be charming. “I want you to go to England to fetch it for me.”

  “What? But I’d never get it back over here.”

  “Yes, you would. You’re the ideal smuggler. You put the stuff in your crutches. They’d never suspect someone like you.”

  “But I—”

  Renshaw looked hurt. “You said you’d do anything for me . . .”

  “Well, I would, but—”

  “You can go into Cahors tomorrow and fix the flight.”

  “But . . . but that means you’ll leave me again.”

  “For a little while, yes. I’d come back,” Renshaw lied.

  “I . . .”

  “Please do it for me, please . . .” Renshaw put on an expression he knew to be vulnerable.

  “All right, I will.”