A Recipe for Murder Read online

  Through the windscreen of the Jaguar, Avis saw the call-box and braked. There was a lay-by road, serving a row of shops, and she drew into this to park behind a van which was unloading. She opened her handbag and brought out a slim gold cigarette case and picked out a cigarette: she snapped open a gold lighter. Did she really mean to make the phone call? she asked herself, a little frightened but also, to her surprise, more than a little excited.

  When Kevin had proposed to her, he’d bemused her with tales of success. She’d seen herself as the wife of an internationally acclaimed author, hostess to the famous. Reality? A small, cramped, mean little cottage, no help, hardly ever going out, never going abroad, unknown to the famous. ‘Before it’s orchids, afterwards it’s dandelions.’

  So now she was going to pick those orchids for herself.

  She left the car and dropped the cigarette on to the pavement, unaware that since lighting it she had not once smoked it. She went into the call-box, placed some money ready, and dialled.

  A woman, her voice thick with the local burr, said: ‘Who is it?’

  ‘I want to speak to Mr Powell.’

  ‘’Ang on.’

  There was a short wait before a man said: ‘Powell speaking.’

  ‘You sound as if you’re a bit huffy to-day.’

  ‘Are you sure you’ve got the right number?’

  ‘Now don’t get pompous. I told you the first time we met, I can’t stand a man becoming pompous.’

  His tone changed. ‘Where was that? At the midsummer ball?’

  ‘No clues.’

  ‘We danced three dances together.’

  ‘Did we?’ She remembered the way his hand had fondled her back even during the first of those three dances and how he’d smiled when she’d demanded he stop it, as if he had sensed her mood of discontent. ‘The most eager lecher of them all,’ her mother had once said, ‘is the man of fifty who’s beginning to wonder how much longer he’ll be active and is desperate to convince himself it’ll be a long, long time.’

  *

  It was three weeks later, on the third of August, when Avis telephoned Fiona Holloway.

  ‘Look, love, will you do me a favour?’

  ‘Of course I will,’ Fiona answered eagerly.

  ‘Cover if Kevin rings and tries to get hold of me: I don’t suppose he will, but just in case. I’ve told him I’m spending to-night with you.’

  ‘Where will you be if I do need to get hold of you?’

  ‘That would be telling!’ Then, with intentional cruelty, she added: ‘I’ll do the same for you some day.’ As if Fiona could ever need that kind of help!

  ‘When are you coming up, Avis? It’s simply ages since you’ve been …’

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve been terribly busy. But I will drop in sometime and see you.’ As she said goodbye and rang off, she imagined the hurt expression on Fiona’s face; thick, heavy, her face was topped by hair of such a bright ginger shade that it looked as if it must be dyed, but wasn’t. Jumbo, they’d called her at school, with all the callousness of the young.

  Avis returned from the call-box to the Jaguar and drove off. If Kevin had been even half successful, then, instead of being on her way to the motel, the two of them could have been now driving down to Duen-sur-Mer, still largely unknown to most holidaymakers, still chic, where they had had their honeymoon. Life had been all champagne bubbles then.

  *

  The Red Barn Motel was midway between Ferington and Hemscross, on the lower Canterbury road. Twenty cabins, faced with unbarked wood, were set ten on either side of the double storey brick building which had originally been a public house. In this central building was the reception desk, a restaurant, and a bar.

  Avis walked through to the reception desk. ‘You’ve a cabin booked for me. Mrs Smith.’

  ‘That’s right, Mrs Smith.’ The receptionist wondered why people never stopped working the Smith, Jones, and Brown routine. His gaze wandered down her body.

  Normally, she would have met his visual lechery with cold disdain, but now it added an extra dimension of excitement. She smiled at him.

  ‘Number ten cabin. That’s the end one to the right, as you go out of the door. If you’ll just sign the register.’ He swivelled a heavy ledger round on the counter. ‘Would you be kind enough to pay the twelve pounds fifty now, please.’

  She drove the Jaguar the hundred yards to the end cabin and backed it into the garage in one lock — she was a competent driver. She picked up her small suitcase and went through the inside doorway into the very small lobby, off which led the bedroom and bathroom.

  In the bedroom there were two single beds, two wooden chairs, two bedside carpets, two bedside tables on one of which was a phone and on the other some plastic flowers and a ‘Notices to Guests’, and a gorblimy dressing table.

  She placed the suitcase on one of the beds, lifted the lid, brought out the bottle of whisky which lay on top of the clothes and carried this over to the dressing table on which was a plastic tray with mugs and a water container. She poured out a strong whisky and added only a little water. Normally abstentious, excitement was urging her to drink heavily.

  She raised the glass in a toast. To the second Mrs Julian Powell.

  *

  Powell’s father had been a farm labourer who never knew what it was like to enjoy security: he lived all his married life in tied cottages and his wages were never quite enough to meet the family’s expenses. He died, arms lacerated by a cutter which he had tried to clear without switching off the power, two years before he would have retired on a pension that would have given him at least the illusion of security. Powell’s mother had been a small, faded woman who had been meek and mild in most things, but who would fight the devil himself if the needs of the family demanded this. She had had four children, three boys and one girl. Tim stayed on the land, a solid, dependable labourer like his father. Reginald drifted to the towns and, rootless, became mixed-up with the outer criminal circles. Maude went behind the Dutch barns with various lads, became pregnant, and married. But Albert, denying his heritage became rich.

  He’d been eight when he’d gone with his father to the home farm of a large estate. The owners had been away and they’d been taken by the head cowman to see the main house from the outside. The house had overwhelmed Bert. He’d no idea that any building could be so huge. Then, as he’d continued to stare at the south face, he had experienced a growing and urgent belief, incredible in view of his background, that one day he would own such a house and estate. Being eight, he’d promptly told the two men this. His father, a man of great understanding, had listened gravely, but the head cowman had jeered at such nonsense. ‘The only way you’ll ever get to live inside a house like that will be as a pissy-weak indoor servant.’

  But for the fact that his mother had always been of an unyielding moral character, it might have been supposed that Bert’s father had not been Powell. The rest of the family were not bright, but he was sharply intelligent; where they drifted with life, not knowing or caring where they were going, he fought life, determined to wrest from it all he wanted: where they met failure with resignation, he met it with curses and increased resolution.

  At eighteen, after two years of night school, he gained a scholarship to an agricultural college and changed his first name from Albert to Julian. By twenty-seven he was assistant farm manager to the Lastey estate in Shropshire, five thousand acres of rich farm land which bordered the Severn. Most men would have been proud of attaining such a position, but ambition left him discontented even when it became clear that the farm manager would be retiring soon and there was every chance of his being offered that position. Even as farm manager, he would be a very long way from being the wealthy landowner he was determined to become. How to grab hold of the next rung of the ladder and climb?

  Judith Duffield was too tall, her shoulders too broad, her features were plain and heavy and unless she was very careful her upper lip bore the beginnings of a moustache. But
her father had left her sixteen thousand pounds, when that was quite a large sum of money.

  Fifteen thousand pounds was the asking price for Shufflewood Farm: four hundred and fifty acres of once rich farmland which had been allowed to run right down, five large outbuildings in need of repair, a couple of worn-out tractors and some equipment, and a herd of thirty cows which were said to be Ayrshires, but whose mothers had obviously wandered.

  Judith, four years older than Powell, had received several proposals from men who had decided that beauty wasn’t everything, but Powell was the first who persuaded her that he really needed her for herself. The strength of his cause had lain in the fact that he genuinely and desperately did need her because Shufflewood Farm was a bargain.

  During their fifteen years at Shufflewood Farm she learned, at first with bitterness, then with resignation, that need and love were not synonymous: he learned, with a growing sense of resentment, that she was nobody’s fool. She wouldn’t sign the farm over to him. What he never had the wit to realise was that beneath those unfortunate looks was an infinite capacity for affection and had he ever shown her real love she would have happily signed over to him everything she owned.

  At the end of those fifteen years the nearby town had doubled in size and Shufflewood Farm now lay on its northern outskirts. A property developer offered half a million pounds for the farm and then raised this to three-quarters of a million when the competition began to grow. The Powells sold.

  Tregarth House, in the parish of Finchstreet, was set in a park of twenty-five acres. Beyond the park was the home farm of seven hundred acres and a further fifteen hundred acres of woodland. The deeds were made out in Judith’s name, despite all his efforts to have her agree to their being in their joint names.

  Tregarth House was Edwardian, built on the site of an Elizabethan manor. Architecturally it was unremarkable, aesthetically it was clumsy and even absurd, not least because of the crenelated and pillared entrance porch. There were three floors and a wing, containing twenty-three bedrooms (fourteen of these were on the top floor, small, cramped, and for the servants), six bathrooms, a billiards room, two sitting-rooms, a dining-room, a breakfast room, a library …

  Powell liked to stand on the small balcony leading off the upstairs sitting-room and remember how, when he had been eight, that head cowman had said that only as a pissy-weak indoor servant would he ever live in a big house. Now the house, fields, and woods were his (which is how he saw them). Beyond, six miles to the south, was the sea: sometimes he even felt as if he were master of that as well.

  *

  Powell drove a Rover 3500: he liked comfort and prestige, but not ostentation except in the matter of land and beasts. At fifty-one he was hard-muscled and on many days he spent the same hours in the fields as his men. His face mainly suggested strength: rugged, chunky feature were overlaid by wiry hair, only now faintly tinged with grey: his brown eyes held steady and his chin was pugnaciously square: only his mouth betrayed his one weakness, a driving lust equal to that of any of his prize Romney Marsh rams.

  On the journey to the Red Barn Motel his imagination was stretched with the pictures of the pleasures to come.

  4

  For Steven Ballentyne, there had never been a tomorrow: life was to-day. He and Jane had had seven years of excitingly happy marriage and then he had died on a tennis court, just after a wild and hilariously missed smash. He left memories whose exact details might fade but whose colours could not, a large number of debts, and a widow who for many months had wanted to die.

  She slowly picked up the pieces of her life. The large house had to be sold because she could not afford the mortgage repayments: the capital which remained after paying off the mortgage company covered all the other debts, but left only a few thousand pounds over and above them. She had trained as a secretary before marrying and so found little difficulty in getting a good job in Ferington, with a firm of local solicitors. She moved into a flat whose rent was more than she should have afforded, but from the sitting-room, six floors up, she could look over a forest of roofs to the green fields beyond the town.

  She was attractive rather than beautiful, warm-natured rather than passionate. She was always neat, but never bothered as to whether she were dressed in fashion: she used a little make-up when she remembered to do so.

  At six-thirty on Tuesday she carried the typed witness statement through to one of the partners’ office.

  ‘Thanks a lot for staying on,’ Reynolds said. He looked at his watch. ‘I’m afraid it’s late and I shouldn’t have asked you to complete it to-night, but we’ve got to get the papers to counsel as soon as humanly possible … How about having a drink as a thank-you?’

  ‘No, thanks. As a matter of fact, I’ve a date a little later on.’

  ‘Oh, well, some other time.’

  She left. She collected her handbag from her room, put on a lightweight mackintosh to save carrying it, and went downstairs and out to the street.

  Despite the extensive development Ferington had endured, Bank Street was still virtually as it had been thirty years before: the road of the Forty Thieves the old locals called it because along it were many of the town’s solicitors’, architects’, and accountants’, offices and three out of the four banks.

  A soft wind came up the sloping road to flap the hem of her mackintosh against the backs of her legs. Suddenly, and for no readily discernible reason, she was reminded of Steven … Why did memories still suddenly rush in to harass her emotions and turn the world black? She ought, she decided, to have accepted Reynolds’s offer of a drink: after all, he had never shown any of the traits of an office Romeo.

  She walked up to the T-junction, to the left of which the road had been filled in to form a pedestrian precinct. She was hungry, yet for the moment she dreaded returning to the empty flat … Some of the shops had late night opening and a stationer was one of these. She went inside.

  The books were in the middle of the shop. From the moment she could first read, she had turned to books for pleasure, interest, amusement, or comfort.

  ‘Are you about to do some starving author a good turn and buy his book?’

  She turned and smiled at Scott. ‘I would if I could. But books cost so much these days that all I can do is look at them in the shops. There’s one on costumes I thought I’d buy — until I saw the price.’

  ‘How much — ten pounds?’

  ‘Nineteen pounds ninety-five pence.’

  ‘Ouch! But just think — at normal royalties that would be one ninety-five in the author’s pocket.’

  ‘Do you always think of books in terms of what they make the author?’

  ‘What other way is there of looking at them?’ He grinned. ‘Don’t tell me you believe in that awful tag, art for art’s sake? Remember your Johnson.’

  ‘Johnson was a horrible old cynic.’

  ‘The perfect definition of a professional author.’

  ‘I refuse to believe you write just for the money.’

  ‘You think that there must be easier ways of starving?’

  ‘I’ve read all your books.’

  ‘That’s probably a unique claim.’

  ‘One day you’re going to write something important.’

  ‘Now how do I respond to that? I can’t modestly deny everything you’ve just said because the inference is that all I’ve written to date is unimportant and I agree.’

  ‘You always denigrate your own writing, don’t you? Why? Is it really embarrassment? Your work isn’t as good as you meant it to be and therefore you can’t accept it’s as good as it is?’

  ‘I’m not prepared to answer questions like that without due notice … Look, are you in a hurry?’

  ‘Would I be standing here, just chatting, if I were?’

  ‘Good. Then come and have a coffee or a drink?’

  She hesitated.

  ‘I’m a grass widower for the night and I’m stuck on page forty-one and waiting for inspiration to strike. It ofte
n strikes when I’m having a drink with a friend.’

  ‘All right. Let’s go and await the coming.’

  *

  Avis picked up her glass and stood. ‘Have another drink, Julian?’

  ‘I don’t want another drink, I want —’ began Powell.

  ‘You’ve made that very obvious.’ She laughed. She walked from the chair to the gorblimy dressing-table. In the mirror, she could see him, sitting on the bed. Red-faced, sweating, and very frustrated. She poured herself a large whisky.

  ‘Why the hell —’ He stopped.

  ‘Why the hell what?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  She added a little water to the whisky, returned to the chair.

  He said loudly: ‘Why d’you say to meet here if you weren’t going to …’ He stopped again. A man of crude passion, he suffered a strange inability to put that passion into words.

  ‘I wonder why so few men ever learn to be subtle?’ she remarked.

  ‘What d’you mean, subtle?’

  ‘To sit back and enjoy the travelling instead of always desperately rushing to arrive.’

  She was a bitch, Powell thought bitterly. She’d led him on and then suddenly slammed the gate and laughed at his frustration. She didn’t understand how a man could be overwhelmed by his needs. Years and years ago, Tim had said to him: ‘I tell you, Bert, it’s like a bloody gut-ache that drives a bloke crazy.’ Was this desperate sensuality the one legacy left to them by their father?

  Unexpectedly, she came and sat on the bed by his side. Immediately, he lost all sense of resentment and knew only the violent need. He put his arm round her and felt her snuggle up against him.