Peter Robinson - Not Safe After Dark

‘Look, Mrs Peplow-’

‘Let me finish.’ She ground out her cigarette butt in the bowl. ‘Foxgloves, indeed! Do you think he could manage to brew up a dose of digitalis without leaving traces all over the place? Do you know what he did the first time? He put just enough in my Big Mac to make me a bit nauseous and make my pulse race, but he left the leaves and stems in the garbage! Can you believe that? Oh, I became very careful in my eating habits after that, Mr Quilley. Anyway, your little plan didn’t work. I’m here and he’s dead.’

Quilley paled. ‘My God, you killed him, didn’t you?’

‘He was the one with the bad heart, not me.’ She lit another cigarette.

‘You can hardly blackmail me for plotting with your husband to kill you when he’s the one who’s dead,’ said Quilley. ‘And as for evidence, there’s nothing. No, Mrs Peplow, I think you’d better go, and think yourself lucky I don’t call the police.’

Mrs Peplow looked surprised. ‘What are you talking about? I have no intention of blackmailing you for plotting to kill me.’

‘Then what…?’

‘Mr Quilley, my husband was blackmailing you. That’s why you killed him .’

Quilley slumped back in his chair. ‘I what?’

She took a sheet of paper from her purse and passed it over to him. On it were just two words: ‘Trotton – Quilley.’ He recognized the neat handwriting. ‘That’s a photocopy,’ Mrs Peplow went on. ‘The original’s where I found it, slipped between the pages of a book called Signed in Blood by X. J. Trotton. Do you know that book, Mr Quilley?’

‘Vaguely. I’ve heard of it.’

‘Oh, have you? It might also interest you to know that along with that book and the slip of paper, locked away in my husband’s files, is a copy of your own first novel. I put it there.’

Quilley felt the room spinning around him. ‘I… I…’ Peplow had given him the impression that Gloria was stupid, but that was turning out to be far from the truth.

‘My husband’s only been dead for two days. If the doctors look, they’ll know that he’s been poisoned. For a start, they’ll find high levels of potassium and then they’ll discover eosinophilia . Do you know what they are, Mr Quilley? I looked them up. They’re a kind of white blood cell, and you find lots of them around if there’s been any allergic reaction or inflammation. If I was to go to the police and say I’d been suspicious about my husband’s behaviour over the past few weeks, that I had followed him and photographed him with you, and if they were to find the two books and the slip of paper in his files… Well, I think you know what they’d make of it, don’t you? Especially if I told them he came home feeling ill after a lunch with you.’

‘It’s not fair,’ Quilley said, banging his fist on the chair arm. ‘It’s just not bloody fair.’

‘Life rarely is. But the police aren’t to know how stupid and unimaginative my husband was. They’ll just look at the note, read the books, and assume he was blackmailing you.’ She laughed. ‘Even if Frank had read the Trotton book, I’m sure he’d have only noticed an “influence”, at the most. But you and I know what really went on, don’t we? It happens more often than people think. A few years ago I read in the newspaper about similarities between a book by Colleen McCullough and The Blue Castle by Lucy Maud Montgomery. I’d say that was a bit obvious, wouldn’t you? It was much easier in your case, much less dangerous. You were very clever, Mr Quilley. You found an obscure novel and you didn’t only adapt the plot for your own first book, you even stole the character of your series detective. There was some risk involved, certainly, but not much. Your book is better, without a doubt. You have some writing talent, which X. J. Trotton completely lacked. But he did have the germ of an original idea, and it wasn’t lost on you, was it?’

Quilley groaned. Thirteen solid police procedurals, twelve of them all his own work, but the first, yes, a deliberate adaptation of a piece of ephemeral trash. He had seen what Trotton could have done and had done it himself. Serendipity, or so it had seemed when he found the dusty volume in a second-hand bookshop in Victoria years ago. All he had had to do was change the setting from London to Toronto, alter the names and set about improving upon the original. And now…? The hell of it was that he would have been perfectly safe without the damn book. He had simply given in to the urge to get his hands on Peplow’s copy and destroy it. It wouldn’t have mattered, really. Signed in Blood would have remained unread on Peplow’s shelf. If only the bloody fool hadn’t written that note…

‘Even if the police can’t make a murder charge stick,’ Mrs Peplow went on, ‘I think your reputation would suffer if this got out. Oh, the great reading public might not care. Perhaps a trial would even increase your sales – you know how ghoulish people are – but the plagiarism would at the very least lose you the respect of your peers. I don’t think your agent and publisher would be very happy either. Am I making myself clear?’

Pale and sweating, Quilley nodded. ‘How much?’ he whispered.

‘Pardon?’

‘I said how much. How much do you want to keep quiet?’

‘Oh, it’s not your money I’m after, Mr Quilley, or may I call you Dennis? Well, not only money, anyway. I’m a widow now. I’m all alone in the world.’

She looked around the room, her piggy eyes glittering, then gave Quilley one of the most disgusting looks he’d ever had in his life.

‘I’ve always fancied living near the lake,’ she said, reaching for another cigarette. ‘Live here alone, do you?’

Francis must belate, surely, Reed thought as he stood waiting on the bridge by the railway station. He was beginning to feel restless and uncomfortable; the handles of his holdall bit into his palm, and he noticed that the rain promised in the forecast that morning was already starting to fall.

Wonderful! Here he was, over two hundred miles away from home, and Francis hadn’t turned up. But Reed couldn’t be sure about that. Perhaps he was early. They had made the same arrangement three or four times over the past five years, but for the life of him Reed couldn’t remember the exact time they’d met.

Reed turned and noticed a plump woman in a threadbare blue overcoat come struggling against the wind over the bridge towards him. She pushed a large pram, in which two infants fought and squealed.

‘Excuse me,’ he called out as she neared him, ‘could you tell me what time school gets out?’

The woman gave him a funny look – either puzzlement or irritation, he couldn’t decide which – and answered in the clipped, nasal accent peculiar to the Midlands, ‘Half past three.’ Then she hurried by, giving Reed a wide berth.

He was wrong. For some reason he had got it into his mind that Francis finished teaching at three o’clock. It was only twenty-five past now, so there would be at least another fifteen minutes to wait before the familiar red Escort came into sight.

The rain was getting heavier and the wind lashed it hard against Reed’s face. A few yards up the road from the bridge was the bus station, which was attached to a large modern shopping centre, all glass and escalators. Reed could stand in the entrance there just beyond the doors, where it was warm and dry, and still watch for Francis.

At about twenty-five to four, the first schoolchildren came dashing over the bridge and into the bus station, satchels swinging, voices shrill and loud with freedom. The rain didn’t seem to bother them, Reed noticed: hair lay plastered to skulls; beads of rain hung on the tips of noses. Most of the boys’ ties were askew, their socks hung loose around their ankles and their shoelaces snaked along the ground. It was a wonder they didn’t trip over themselves. Reed smiled, remembering his own schooldays.