Peter Abrahams - A Perfect Crime

“Francie, this is Mr. Savage, chief of police in Lawton Center,” said Roger. “Mr. Savage, my wife.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said the chief, speaking to Roger although his eyes were on Francie. “And it’s Savard. Joe Savard.”

“My apologies,” said Roger. “Will you be needing me any longer?”

“No,” said Savard. “Thanks for your help.”

“Think nothing of it,” said Roger. He came to Francie, took both her hands in his, said, “Oh, Francie. It’s dreadful, just dreadful.” Then he left, pausing to pick a few dead leaves from the base of a plant as he went out.

“Please sit down,” Francie said. Savard sat on the window seat, back to the morning outside, darkened by thick, low clouds; Francie couldn’t sit, but leaned on the arm of a chair by the fireplace, about three steps away. “What happened to Anne?”

“She was murdered sometime last night, Mrs. Cullingwood, in the cottage owned by your friend-” He leafed through his notebook.

“Brenda.”

He found the page. “It says here Countess Vasari.”

“She’s not a real countess,” Francie said, an unconsidered remark that made her sound like a pompous fool, exactly the opposite of her intent.

Savard looked up from his notebook. “What’s the difference?”

A good question. What had she meant? That Brenda was back to being plain Brenda Kelly again; that she didn’t want this man to form a false impression of her, Francie, because of some improbably and temporarily titled friend. “Nothing. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“There’s not much to interrupt at this stage. The lab guys are still at the scene and we haven’t got a suspect.” Savard closed the notebook, laid it on his knee. His hand was big, thickened by some sort of hard work, but not ugly. “I’m hoping for some help from you,” he said.

“Anything,” Francie said.

He nodded. “Your friend says she hasn’t been to her place for two or three years-she couldn’t remember exactly-and that you kept an eye on it for her.”

“That’s true.”

“How often did you go up there?”

“A few times a month in summer. Sometimes more.”

“And in winter?”

“Almost never.”

“When was the last time?”

A Friday. The day after she’d fallen through the ice. Ned had called her for the first time on her car phone, had been waiting there, surprising her on the darkened porch with his fury over her call to the radio show. She made the calculations in her head-it took longer than it should have because she kept remembering him out on the river: Wouldn’t there be something wrong with two people who could just throw it away? — and gave Savard the date.

He wrote it down. “Did you notice anything unusual when you were there?”

“No.”

“No sign of a break-in, or an attempted one?”

“No.”

“Nothing missing or out of place?”

“No.”

“Anything spilled, knocked over, broken?”

“No.”

There was a pause. Francie had a cast stone figure by Jean Arp on the bookcase-Roger’s wedding present to her, not a big or important one, but Arp nevertheless-and the policeman’s eyes were on it: whether taking it in or thinking about something else, she couldn’t tell.

His gaze swung back to her. “I assume you have a key to the cottage?”

“Two,” Francie said. “One for the gate, one for the door.”

“Have you ever lost them?”

“No.”

“Given them to someone else?”

“No.”

“Had copies made?”

“No.” Although Ned had asked for one, she now recalled: Might help if I had a key. It’s cold out there. But she’d never gotten around to doing it: everything had fallen apart first.

“You know of no other person with access to the cottage, then?”

“No.”

“Would you mind showing them to me?”

“Showing what to you?”

“The keys, Mrs. Cullingwood.”

They were in her car in the garage, hanging from the ignition. When she came back with them, Savard was standing by the bookcase, bent over the Arp, his hands behind his back. Francie almost said, You can touch it if you want.

But did not. Instead she said, “Here they are,” and handed him the keys.

Savard glanced at them, handed them back. Standing next to him by the bookcase, Francie sensed his physical strength. Not that he made himself look big or puffed out his chest-he slouched a little, if anything. Neither was he dressed in clothes designed to show off his physique-he wore a baggy gray suit, a little shiny at the elbows. But she sensed it, all the same.

“So Anne Franklin didn’t have keys to the cottage.”

“No.”

“Did she know your friend Brenda?”

“No.”

He nodded to himself. It suddenly hit Francie that this man, or an assistant, had probably asked Ned these same questions already, hours before, that he might be searching for discrepancies as well as facts. She was considering the implications of that, and how they fit with Ned’s instructions- nothing about you and me- when Savard said,“How long has she known about it, then?”

Francie felt a strange rush of blood to her face and neck, as though she were going scarlet; couldn’t have been, of course, not with her complexion. “It?” she said.

“The cottage.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Its existence and location,” Savard said.“When did you first tell her about it?”

Discrepancies: awareness that he might be searching for them was no help without knowing what he’d heard already from Ned. She stuck to the truth. “I never did.”

“So she made no mention to you of going up there?”

“We never discussed the cottage.”

Savard opened his notebook, read to himself. Francie, reading upside down, saw lines of neat handwriting too small to make out, culminating in a circled notation writ larger at the bottom of the page: FC-nexus? That scared her for many reasons, not the least of which was the presence of a word like that in the notebook of a man who looked like this. She realized she had no idea what was coming next.

“I wonder, then,” he said, closing the notebook, “how she found out about the cottage.”

“So do I,” Francie said.

“And what she was doing up there.”

Francie said nothing, was sure she knew the horrible answer to that question, lacked only the steps in between. Was silence the same as a lie? In some cases, like this one, yes.

“When was the last time you saw her?”

“Saturday night. We went to dinner, the four of us, after tennis.”

“How was she?”

“In what way?”

“Her mood.”

Francie thought of the scene in the locker room. “A little upset, at first.”

“Any idea why?”

“We’d just lost the match.” Was a partial truth the same as a lie? Ditto.

“Is that enough to upset a grown woman?”

“Ever play competitive sports, Mr. Savard? It was the club championship.”

Savard gave her a quick look; for a moment she thought he was about to smile, but he didn’t. “Who else knows about the cottage?”

“You mean that Brenda has it? Lots of people.”

“And were any of them acquainted with Anne, to your knowledge?”

Besides Ned, there was only Nora. Francie gave Savard her name and number. Why not? Nora knew Brenda, so he would have found her eventually.

Savard wrote Nora’s name and number in his notebook and said, “Then there’s your husband.”

“What about him?”

“I assume he knew about the cottage as well.”

Had Roger known? Francie had never told him: at first, for no particular reason other than the kind of marriage it had become-he wouldn’t even have expected to hear a detail like that-and later because of Ned. She gave Savard a careful answer: “Roger didn’t know Anne-they met for the first time on Saturday night.”