R Raichev - Assassins at Ospreys

Payne had been examining the envelope. He tapped the letter with his forefinger. ‘Renshawe asks you to visit him. Says it would mean a lot to him if you did.’

‘Oh dear, yes. I have no idea what I should do about it. I haven’t written back or anything. I thought you might be able to give me some advice. I am in a quandary. Len thinks I shouldn’t.’

‘You shouldn’t,’ Colville said. ‘Let him rot. He wrecked your life.’

Payne looked at him. ‘Did you know him, Colville?’

‘I did. Not at all well. Long time ago.’ There was a silence but Colville said no more.

‘How does Ingrid come into this?’ Antonia asked with a frown.

‘Well, she came into the room that day.’ Beatrice lowered her voice. ‘Just as I’d started telling you about the letter. I couldn’t possibly give you any details with her in the room. I lost my nerve. Ingrid would flip if she knew that Ralph is not only alive but living just round the corner from here as well. She’d go and – I don’t want to think what she might do. I really don’t.’

‘She’d kill him, that’s what she’d do,’ said Colville.

‘Why should she want to do that?’

‘Well, you see, Antonia, I told her that Ralph had left for Nova Scotia, which was true, but I also said he’d died there,’ Beatrice started explaining. ‘I told her I’d read his obituary in the paper. She seemed frightfully disappointed. She said he’d had an easy escape. So much hatred! It can’t be good for her, can it? I read somewhere if you hate too much, you develop cancer. Ingrid still flies into rages at the mere mention of his name! Honestly.’

She loves that word ‘honestly’, Payne thought. Was there an antigram? He did some quick mental arithmetic. There was. Honestly – on the sly! How very interesting.

‘I personally don’t bear Ralph any grudges. I honestly don’t,’ Beatrice went on. ‘I did suffer, I know. I suffered awfully. My life was turned upside down by the accident, but it’s never occurred to me to want to kill him. Not even in my darkest hour.’

‘You are easily the nicest person who ever lived,’ Colville said.

She shook her head resolutely from side to side. ‘No, I am not.’

‘Yes, you are.’

No, she is not, Antonia thought. You fool.

‘I happen to be well adjusted, that’s all. Ingrid is not. Ingrid has always inhabited an agitated universe. Awful things keep happening to her. Let me give you an example. When she was a girl she had a pet owl called Cassandra and she doted on it, but one day the poor wretched thing swallowed the end of the cord for the window blinds. It was found swinging in the breeze upside-down – hanged! Can you imagine? Ingrid was distraught.’

‘I think she killed that bird,’ Colville said. ‘The way she killed those two bitches.’

‘Darling!’ Betrice protested. ‘Well, Ingrid is volatile. She was diagnosed as manic-depressive well before she lost her baby. She told me all about it. She said she tended to brood for hours on end on something trivial. She was prescribed all sorts of powerful drugs. Demerol? Then of course she had the nervous breakdown and that was – mega. They feared for her life. She kept harming herself. She wrote a frightfully disturbing poem called “Madrigals for Mad Girls”. She started having delusions. Once she imagined her doctor was Ralph in disguise and she tried to stab him in the eye with the paper knife from his desk. She underwent all sorts of very special treatments and it took her ages to recover.’

‘She never recovered,’ Colville said emphatically. ‘Au contraire.’

‘I know she’s been particularly horrid to you, darling, but do try to be fair.’ Beatrice sighed. ‘She still takes anti-depressants – when she remembers, that is. Her room is full of pills. Well, taking care of me seemed to help her. Len is not convinced, but she did get better for a while. She put on weight. She started taking an interest in clothes and flowers and things. We went places. That picture on the mantelpiece – Len, would you be so kind? Thank you, darling. Look at us! Just look at us. We are at Cliveden. Doesn’t Ingrid look in the pink?’

‘She certainly seems different from the time I met her,’ Antonia admitted.

The photograph showed a radiant Beatrice in her wheel-chair, a mink coat draped around her shoulders, clutching a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, and a plumper, smiling Ingrid, her eyes a little puffy, in a Yum-Yum haircut and encased in a silk magenta-coloured trouser suit with an embroidered front.

‘She looks like an ornament the Astors might have brought back from their travels in the Mysterious East,’ Payne murmured.

‘Yes! Doesn’t she just?’ Beatrice leant towards Antonia and whispered, ‘Your husband says such clever things.’

Colville’s smile, Antonia observed, was beginning to look as if it had been left on his face by an oversight.

Beatrice had become wistful once more. ‘We had such good times. All right. She’s deteriorated since.’

‘Tell them about the bitches,’ Colville prompted.

‘Ingrid had two dogs,’ Beatrice began after a pause. ‘A golden retriever and a pit bull – Pip and Taylor – both bitches, as it happens. She had them put down for being “control freaks”. She explained the dogs had been putting her under an awful lot of pressure. The funny thing is that Ingrid is something of a control freak herself. You saw her in Hay-on-Wye, Antonia. You noticed the way she acted? I am infinitely grateful to Ingrid, mind, but sometimes it did feel as though she’d injected me with some paralysing fluid. I am probably being fanciful, but every so often I’d get this most peculiar feeling. How can I explain it? As though I’d been cocooned in an undetectable glaze of fixative. Goodness, that does sound weird, doesn’t it?’

Payne murmured, ‘Perhaps she did inject you with something?’

‘I bet she did,’ said Colville. ‘She gave Bee all sorts of injections – vitamins, painkillers and so on. She had plenty of opportunity to do something to her.’

‘Well, there were times when I did feel my power of choice diminishing – my rational judgement about things weakening -’ Beatrice broke off. ‘My main worry at the moment is that Ingrid might do something terrible to Ralph if somehow she were to learn that he isn’t dead but living next door.’

‘What’s the connection between Ingrid and Ralph?’ Antonia was frowning. ‘And how did Ingrid and you meet?’

‘Oh, didn’t I say? I am hopeless at explaining things. Sorry, my dear. It was the accident. The accident brought us together,’ Beatrice said. ‘I was in hospital – bedridden. The worst time of my life! Ingrid paid me a visit. She sat beside my bed and stroked my hand. She said she intended to take care of me. It seemed the most natural thing in the world, it honestly did, at least at the time. I knew at once she was looking for a substitute, but that didn’t really bother me much.’

‘A substitute? What substitute?’ Payne looked puzzled.

‘For her dead child of course,’ said Beatrice. ‘ She lost her baby, you see. In the accident.’

Doppelganger

Payne stared. ‘In the same accident?’

‘Yes – she was in the other car. The one we collided with. She was seven months pregnant at the time. She survived but she lost her baby. She had a miscarriage.’

‘How terrible,’ Antonia said.

‘Oh, it was. Doesn’t bear thinking about!’ Beatrice flapped her hands. ‘It was the most tragic thing. Poor Ingrid was all alone in the world when it happened. She wasn’t married. She hated her parents. She had run away from home. She wasn’t in what is known as a “stable relationship” either. A caring, loving, understanding husband or boyfriend might have helped her recover, but that man – Ingrid’s boyfriend – the child’s father – was no good. He’d never really loved Ingrid.’