Buffet for Unwelcome Guests(83)
He waited five minutes to be sure she wouldn’t come back for anything, and then went out to the tool-shed where he kept hidden his bottle of whisky: she hardly ever let him go to the pub, so this was next best. Just the right tot, or one’s brain got fuddled and he had some hard thinking to do—filled up with a good deal of water to make it last longer. He carried it back to the sitting-room, pulled up a chair to the moonlit window, and sat down to go on thinking out his plan to murder her.
On the whole, Gerald had decided, the odds were in his favour. For a start there need be no hurry: the sooner the better, certainly, but there might yet come to be almost a pleasure in listening to increasingly frequent tirades, when each word added fuel to a funeral pyre already crackling. And then there could be no obvious motive. No ‘other woman’—one reason for coming to this ghastly hole had been, according to Elsa, to get away from the other-woman menace; and certainly here, candidates were nil. And no money interest: they could just about eke out on her scribblings and his own: living cheap on the fruit and vegetables and eggs he was supposed to provide by his work on the small-holding. (Small-holding! A vile old pig and a lot of scrawny hens, and all that manuring and digging—he, who in his day….) And he fell into a reverie again of those old wild, wonderful times of the ditched crates and the pranged kites and the boon companions boasting together over the exploits of others—never of one’s own, by George!—over the tankards in the jolly old hostelries….And after all, given the chance, might not he too have been of that splendid company? A man was not born to failure: surely it must be fair to say that it was bad luck that had made him one?
Well, in the matter of Elsa’s murder, he would not fail.
The house was isolated: three miles from the hamlet of Hartling, six from anywhere else, fifteen from the Cathedral city inland. No neighbours, therefore, to be inquisitive; no friends even, as she had truly said—not here nor out of the past. No friends: only the little world of public house acquaintances, the Bills and the Barbaras, the Noras and the Toms, drifting in from the evening, drifting out into the night: nameless, homeless, without existence for one another beyond the lit bar and clinking glasses, the boasting and the well-worn jokes. And even those, left behind now, in the gay city lights. Well, all right, O.K., he thought: no friends—so no one to stand as witness to the real motive—that tongue of hers that could strip a man down, bare, to his shuddering soul: and was to be endured no more.
The murder, he had decided, would have to be by drowning.
She had been a well-known athlete in her day; leaped higher or run faster, he never could remember which, than anyone in the world or in England or only in Surrey; he never could remember that either. But first and foremost she had been a swimmer: she cherished old photographs of herself, half out of the water in the Back Stroke or the Butterfly or whatever it was, forging along, tiny and sinewy, the vanquished spluttering in her rear. Those days were gone and the muscle turning to thick white fat; but she struggled, all honour to her, to keep it down and she still loved to swim. That had been the main reason for settling on this house: that close by was the tiny, deserted bay of Kittle Cove; and there she swam, morning and evening, and could never get enough. All alone—for such pastimes were not for Gerald Fletcher-Store—she would run off, the old regulation black woollen bathing dress under a bright beach-robe; tucking up beneath the white bathing cap as she ran, her rough, curly brown hair. Twenty minutes there, along the wild, lonely cart track, twenty minutes back: half an hour or more swimming around. ‘Keeps you fit,’ she would say, slapping the back of a hard little hand against his flaccid paunch. ‘I’ve got enough to do to keep me fit, digging in that filthy garden,’ he would say, ill-temperedly.
By drowning, then. An accident. But with such a good swimmer as she was, who would believe in an accident? His mind in the past had toyed, over a second whisky, with wild dreams of stopped-up snorkels and punctured water-wings, but she had no truck with such things: simply plunged in and swam to a rock far out, and dived off the rock a few times and swam round about it and swam back. No records being created, no foolish chances taken: no difficult currents to beware of. Just straight-forward swimming for the sheer love of it.
If she were to drown then, she must do it while her murderer was well out of the way. To just go down there, push her head under the water and run screaming for help—that wouldn’t do at all.
His wandering mind seemed to stand still all of a sudden: seemed to come slap up against the idea and just remain there, contemplating it. It had been those words: ‘Push her head under the water.’