Peter Lovesey - Murder on the Short List

“What were you going to do with it — stick it into my arm?”

“No. Remember how we were drilled to return to the same spot just behind the tramlines beside the umpire’s chair? If you watch tennis, that place gets as worn as the serving area at the back of the court. The ballboys always return to the same spot. My plan was simple. Stick the needle into the turf with the sharp point upwards and you would kneel on it and inject the ricin into your bloodstream. I’m telling you this because I want the truth to come out before I die. I meant to kill you and it went wrong. Stanski dived at a difficult ball and his arm went straight down on the needle.”

“But he went on to win the match.”

“The effects take days to kick in, but there’s no antidote. Even if I’d confessed at the time, they couldn’t have saved him. It was unforgivable. I was obsessed and it’s preyed on my mind ever since.”

“So all that stuff in the papers about Voronin being an assassin...”

“Was rubbish. It was me. If you want to go to the police,” he said, “I don’t mind confessing everything I’ve told you. I just want the truth to be known before I go. I’m told I have six months at most.”

I was silent, reflecting on what I’d heard, the conflicting motives that had driven a young boy to kill and a dying man to confess twenty years later.

“Or you could wait until after I’ve gone. You say you’re a journalist. You could write it up and tell it in your own way.”

He left me to make up my own mind.

Eddie died in November.

And you are the first after me to get the full story.

Almost there. Donna Culpepper looked ahead to her destination and her destiny, the top of Beachy Head, the great chalk headland that is the summit of the South Downs coast. She’d walked from where the taxi driver had left her. The stiff climb wasn’t easy on this gusty August afternoon, but her mind was made up. She was thirty-nine, with no intention of being forty. She’d made a disastrous marriage to a man who had deserted her after six weeks, robbed her of her money, her confidence, her dreams. Trying to put it all behind her, as friends kept urging, had not worked. Two years on, she was unwilling to try any longer.

Other ways of ending it, like an overdose or cutting her wrists, were not right for Donna. Beachy Head was the place. As a child she’d stayed in Eastbourne with her Gran and they came here often, ‘for a blow on the Head’, as Gran put it, crunching the tiny grey shells of the path, her grey hair tugged by the wind, while jackdaws and herring-gulls swooped and soared, screaming in the clear air. From the top, five hundred feet up when you first saw the sea, you had a sudden sensation of height that made your spine tingle. There was just the rim of eroding turf and the hideous drop.

On a good day you could see the Isle of Wight, Gran had said. Donna couldn’t see anything and stepped closer to the edge and Gran grabbed her and said it was dangerous. People came here to kill themselves.

This interested Donna. Gran gave reluctant answers to her questions.

“They jump off”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, dear.”

“Yes, you do. Tell me, Gran.”

“Some people are unhappy.”

“What makes them unhappy?”

“Lots of things.”

“What things?”

“Never mind, dear.”

“But I do mind. Tell me what made those people unhappy.”

“Grown-up things.”

“Like making babies?”

“No, no, no. Whoever put such ideas in your head?”

“What, then?”

“Sometimes they get unhappy because they lose the person they love.”

“What’s love?”

“Oh, dear. You’ve such a lot to learn. When you grow up you fall in love with someone and if you’re lucky you marry them.”

“Is that why they jump off the cliff?’”

Gran laughed. “No, you daft ha’porth, it’s the opposite, or I think it is. Let’s change the subject.”

The trouble with grown-ups is that they always change the subject before they get to the point. For some years after this Donna thought falling in love was a physical act involving gravity. She could see that falling off Beachy Head was dangerous and would only be attempted by desperate people. She expected it was possible to get in love by falling from more sensible heights. She tried jumping off her bed a few times, but nothing happened. The kitchen table, which she tried only once, was no use either.

She started getting sensuous dreams, though. She would leap off the cliff edge and float in the air like the skydivers she’d seen on television. If that was falling in love she could understand why there was so much talk about it.

Disillusion set in when she started school. Love turned out to be something else involving those gross, ungainly creatures, boys. After a few skirmishes with over-curious boys she decided love was not worth pursuing any longer. It didn’t come up to her dreams. This was a pity because other girls of her age expected less and got a more gradual initiation into the mysteries of sex.

At seventeen the hormones would not be suppressed and Donna drank five vodkas and went to bed with a man of twenty-three. He said he was in love with her, but if that was love it was unsatisfactory. And in the several relationships she had in her twenties she never experienced anything to match those dreams of falling and flying. Most of her girlfriends found partners and moved in with them. Donna held off.

In her mid-to-late thirties she began to feel deprived. One day she saw the Meeting Place page in a national paper. Somewhere out there was her ideal partner. She decided to take active steps to find him. She had money. Her Gran had died and left her everything, ninety thousand pounds. In the ad she described herself as independent, sensitive and cultured.

And that was how she met Lionel Culpepper.

He was charming, good-looking and better at sex than anyone she’d met. She told him about her Gran and her walks on Beachy Head and her dreams of flying. He said he had a pilot’s licence and offered to take her up in a small plane. She asked if he owned a plane and he said he would hire one. Thinking of her legacy she asked how much they cost and he thought he could buy a good one secondhand for ninety thousand pounds. They got married and opened a joint account. He went off one morning to look at a plane offered for sale in a magazine. That was the last she saw of her husband. When she checked the bank account it was empty. She had been married thirty-eight days.

For a long time she worried about Lionel, thinking he’d had an accident. She reported him missing. Then a letter arrived from a solicitor. Cruelly formal in its wording, it stated that her husband, Lionel Culpepper, wanted a divorce. She was devastated. She hated him then and knew him for what he was. He would not get his divorce that easily.

That was two years ago. Here she was, taking the route of so many who have sought to end their troubles by suicide. Some odd sense of completion, she supposed, was making her take those last steps to the highest point. Any part of the cliff edge would do.

She saw a phone box ahead. Oddly situated, you would think, on a cliff top. The Samaritans had arranged for the phone to be here just in case any tormented soul decided to call them and talk. Donna walked past. A short way beyond was a well-placed wooden bench and she was grateful for that. She needed a moment to compose herself.

She sat. It was just the usual seat you found in parks and along river banks all over the country. Not comfortable for long with its slatted seat and upright back, but welcome at the end of the stiff climb. And it did face the sea.

In a moment she would launch herself. She wasn’t too scared. A small part of her still wanted the thrill of falling. For a few precious seconds she would be like those sky-divers appearing to fly. This was the way to go.