HER HUSBAND’S KILLER an unputdownable psychological thriller full of breathtaking twists Read online

  HER

  HUSBAND’S

  KILLER

  An unputdownable psychological thriller full of breathtaking twists

  Please note this book was first published as Caging the Tiger

  Margaret Murphy

  Revised edition 2020

  Joffe Books, London

  www.joffebooks.com

  © Margaret Murphy

  First published as Caging the Tiger in Great Britain 1998

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The spelling used is British English except where fidelity to the author’s rendering of accent or dialect supersedes this. The right of Margaret Murphy to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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  ISBN 978-1-78931-536-3

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Acknowledgements

  ALSO BY MARGARET MURPHY

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  GLOSSARY OF ENGLISH SLANG FOR US READERS

  For Barbara Melling, whose optimism bolstered me throughout the wilderness years. You are dearly missed, my friend.

  O tiger’s heart, wrapp’d in a woman’s hide!

  King Henry VI, Part III, I.iv

  Chapter 1

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  He looks peaceful in death. It is as she had imagined it so many times before. His eyes are closed. Once so full of censure, so apt to accuse, at times so piercingly contemptuous. Now, mercifully, all of this is shut out from her, or rather within him, and she will never again feel the heat of his stare. There is no surprise, no fear in the strong muscles of his face, now relaxed, expressionless. So, she had remembered to close his eyes, a practised, gentle stroke of her hand over his face, just as she had released from his grip the sheets, straightening them, folding his hands neatly, one over the other.

  Frowning, she puts down her briefcase, eases the bag of shopping onto the bare boards. Something is not right. She studies the scene with detached interest. Afternoon sunlight billows in brief shallow bursts through the open curtain. Spring sunshine, chasing clouds. His body, naked beneath the sheets, lies calm, unmoved by the play of light, peaceful, still warm. His face is tranquil, beautiful as it always had been in repose, his hair, almost black against the white crispness of the sheets seems to catch and flare in the boisterous bursts of sunlight, and she glances anxiously at his face, afraid that the quick movement of light will stir him. She is safe, for his eyes are closed — she had not forgotten that. Drained by the effort of concentration, she longs almost to go to the bed and lie beside him but, still frowning, forbids herself. What is it?

  ‘Something’s not right,’ she murmurs.

  Ruth will know. She understands the symbolism of dreams, the arcane language. A slight rush of breath — the blood. So much of it. Too much. It has spilled onto the top sheet, red, glistening, not yet congealed. Sunlight flashes onto it with every passing cloud, its coppery smell weights the air. The smell which of late has banished her from the dissection room, a barrier to her presence and another cause for his ill-concealed contempt.

  ‘Helen? What is it?’

  The telephone receiver is in her hand. She can’t remember how it got there. She is in the hallway and Ruth’s voice comes to her again, more urgently, ‘Helen, has something happened?’

  Helen focuses on three bright drops of crimson spilling onto the floor as clouds part momentarily and sun bursts, sudden and hot, through the stained glass of the front door. ‘It’s not right,’ she repeats, as if that explains everything.

  Chapter 2

  Jack Nelson’s amber eyes took in the scene. A little, dark-haired woman sat at the corner of the scrubbed pine kitchen table at the centre of the tableau of three, her head drooping, hair falling onto her face, hiding most of it. She was shaking her head at something the other woman was saying. The second woman bent over her, a tall lean blond, firmly in control, she seemed to be offering advice. She had noticed him come into the room but ignored him and continued talking in a low murmur to the dark-haired woman. A little off to one side a man stood, apparently trying not to listen to what was being said. He straightened up and stepped towards Nelson, introducing himself as DS Hackett. The new guy. An import from Warrington. Tall enough and beefy, but ginger haired. In Nelson’s estimation that was a serious impediment; to Nelson, ginger hair was an irrefutable mark of weakness. He nodded to Hackett, barely glancing away from the two women, sliding his eyes over them as if searching for something.

  ‘Mrs Wilkinson?’ he said at last, and the smaller woman looked up. Nice eyes. Blue. Not showing much at the moment except bewilderment, but eyes that could betray her, given time.

  ‘Doctor.’

  For a few seconds Nelson let his eyes rest on the professor’s wife, on her pretty oval face and small, slightly pouting mouth, then her head drooped again, and she seemed to have forgotten him. He turned slowly to look at the second woman, raising both eyebrows in an ironical twist.

  The blonde woman rose to her full height, poised, pausing to notice his wet raincoat and dripping hair before repeating, ‘It’s Doctor Wilkinson.’

  ‘And you are?’ Nelson thought he saw a spark of humour kindle around the heavy-lidded eyes. A shade or two lighter than Dr Wilkinson’s, they gave out conflicting signals: impatient intelligence and bored indolence.

  ‘Ruth Marks,’ she said. Then, ‘Doctor Marks.’

  ‘Detective Inspector Nelson,’ he said, showing his warrant card perfunctorily. ‘Now we’ve got the formalities out of the way, perhaps you could tell us what happened, Dr Wilkinson.’

  Her head rose and he caught a glimpse of anxiety in her large blue eyes and a flash of white teeth as she prepared to answer.

  ‘Helen isn’t well enough to talk.’

  Nelson scowled angrily at Dr Marks. ‘You’re her GP, are you — Doctor?’

  ‘I’m her friend, and it doesn’t take a medical degree to see that she’s in shock.’

  He held Dr Marks’s gaze for a full half minute, but it seemed the doctor was insusceptible to the smouldering heat of his stare. The wide attractive mouth even curved into the beginnings of a smile, as though, having scrutinized his grizzled features, the rainwater dripping into his eyes and
irritating his skin, she had conceived some private joke against him, and Nelson, who was unused to such a level return of his most searing glare, was close to being routed. When the doorbell rang, interrupting their silent tussle, Sergeant Hackett, who had watched the exchange with interest, thought he detected a hint of relief in the inspector’s eyes.

  The visitor was Dr Wilkinson’s GP, Indian or Arab, Nelson guessed, with the unlikely name of Patterson. Ruth Marks had telephoned him. He nodded at the two police officers and then, without asking for permission, led Helen Wilkinson through to a room off the wide hallway. Dr Marks followed them and Nelson, accepting reluctantly that there was nothing he could do until the GP had finished his examination, rounded on Hackett.

  ‘You’ve let that ruddy woman run the whole show — letting her phone the GP. Allowing her to twitter on to Wilkinson — I don’t suppose you know what she said to her? I don’t suppose you got any sense out of the wife?’

  Hackett eyed his new boss with cool composure. Jack Nelson — nicknamed Jack the Knife — had a reputation which extended far beyond the small patch of Cheshire he had worked since entering the force twenty-five years ago. Some said he had earned the name because he was sharp, clever. Others, who had been at the receiving end of his irascible intolerance of less-than-messianic zeal for the job, said he was called the Knife because he was a back-stabbing bastard who wasn’t above giving the blade a final twist after he’d struck it in. Hackett, who had been on the force a good deal longer than his pale, unblemished skin and youthful looks at first indicated, knew that there were reasons for Nelson’s behaviour.

  ‘Dr Marks had already made the call when we arrived, sir.’ He paused, then added, ‘I’m afraid I couldn’t get any more sense out of Dr Wilkinson than you did.’

  The sergeant’s pale green cats’ eyes and boy-smooth face showed no outward sign of insolence, but Nelson, who was sensitive to such things, thought he caught a whiff of insubordination. He produced a handkerchief from his pocket and dried his face. ‘Talk me through events so far,’ he said.

  Hackett gave a clear, concise and pointedly unhurried report. ‘Dr Marks says she got a call from Dr Wilkinson at four-fifteen. She came straight over. When she found the professor’s body, she called us and the GP. We arrived at four forty-five. The police surgeon and SOCOs got here just before you did.’

  ‘Weapon?’

  ‘A knife—’

  ‘I flaming know that, Hackett! There’s a few pints of blood spilled over the sheets in the bedroom, and a ruddy great gash in the poor bastard’s chest to account for it.’

  Nelson had reached the house less than twenty minutes earlier, shaking the water from his raincoat, ill-tempered and breathless from having to walk from the next street where he had been forced to park his car — tourists unwilling to pay the parking fees in the town centre and more bloody tourists booked into the B&Bs which cluttered this end of Chester.

  He had stamped dirt onto the mosaic tiling of the vestibule and had tramped more into the threadbare pile of the green-and-blue runner of the hallway. At the bedroom his progress had been halted by the police surgeon and his team. One stab wound. Fatal. Punctured the heart. Fairly recent — one to two hours old. He had been obliged to view the body from the doorway.

  ‘I was about to say,’ Hackett resumed, unruffled, still in that warm, measured tone, ‘there’s a knife missing from the block in the kitchen. A boning knife.’

  ‘How do you know it was a boning knife?’

  ‘Dr Marks told me. The others have been taken away for forensic exam.’

  ‘What time did Dr Wilkinson arrive home?’

  ‘I haven’t been able to question her yet, sir.’

  Nelson uttered a grunt of disgust. ‘I’ve had enough of this!’ He strode through the hallway to the door opposite, through which he had seen Wilkinson and Marks disappear with the GP and was reaching for the handle when the door opened. He gasped, surprised, not by the sudden appearance of the dark-skinned GP, but by the marked contrast between this room and the rest of the house. Even in his foul mood Nelson had been struck by the faded complexion of colour. There was a contrived air of refined dilapidation in the worn blocks of herringbone flooring and the carpets that covered the centre portions of the rooms in miserly, washed-out squares. The walls of the bedroom were painted dove white and there were no paintings. The skirtings were slate-grey — even the curtains were patterned in an indeterminate series of beige and grey stripes. The most vivid colour in the room was the gout of blood splashed immoderately over the fresh white sheets.

  The GP stepped back, allowing Nelson into the sitting room. Its colours were vibrant, almost glaring, after the dignified shabbiness of the rest. One wall was hung with a huge abstract in orange, gold and green. Another was decorated with a mural of tropical plants. Bookcases stuffed with books, journals and multicoloured box files ranged from floor to ceiling along one side of the room and a picture window looked out onto a large, walled garden, already thick with primroses and daffodils.

  ‘My patient isn’t well enough to answer questions, Inspector,’ the doctor said, taking possession of the situation, and with it the woman Nelson needed to interview.

  Where have I heard that before? Nelson thought. The doctor looked ill at ease. Nelson guessed this was his first appointment. Young doctor, eager to impress, to establish himself, and since he was already on the university health care listing, he had apparently taken his first few steps up the ladder of professional success. Not a bad placement. He knew about positive discrimination rules and, glancing back at the handsome and athletic GP, wondered if it applied to mixed race.

  The professor’s wife was lying on her side on a sofa bed set at an angle, facing the picture window. He couldn’t tell if her eyes were open, but he sensed from the tension and the careful control of her breathing that she was awake, waiting for him to leave. Well, he wasn’t about to make it easy for her.

  ‘We need to talk to Dr Wilkinson as a matter of urgency, Dr Patterson,’ he said, with as much civility as he could muster, given the circumstances. From the corner of his eye he could see Ruth Marks watching him, that look of indolent amusement masking an intense scrutiny.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ said Patterson. ‘You can see she isn’t up to questioning just now.’

  ‘Her husband has been murdered. We haven’t time to observe social niceties.’

  * * *

  Dr Patterson looked into the ravaged face of the inspector. His uneven complexion, a barometer of his feelings, had taken on an angry flush. From habit, Patterson made a rapid diagnosis: chronic alcoholism; some degree of liver cirrhosis judging by the slight jaundice, particularly visible around the whites of the eyes; acne rosacea, caused and then exacerbated by the drinking binges — spirits, rather than beer, judging by the gritty edge to Nelson’s voice. A more subjective assessment detected a glimmer of incipient madness in the policeman’s amber eyes. Patterson was afraid of the inspector and unsure of his ground, but he would not back down. Helen was relying on him. ‘I have my patient’s welfare to think of,’ he said. ‘I cannot allow an interview until I have examined her in the morning.’

  Nelson glowered from Patterson to Ruth Marks, and Patterson was struck once again by the wild wolf-like tint to the inspector’s amber eyes. Then suddenly and unexpectedly, the detective turned and left the room.

  * * *

  ‘Has he gone?’

  ‘We’re alone now,’ Ruth answered. Patterson had followed shortly after the inspector, leaving a prescription, should Helen consent to taking something to help her sleep. Ruth knelt beside her and stroked her hair. Helen watched her silently for some time, deeply troubled; she was struggling with something she wasn’t sure she wanted to say and didn’t know how to ask. When the words finally came, they sounded somewhere between fear and hope.

  ‘He really is dead, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ruth said. ‘He really is.’

  ‘Oh.’ Helen stared past Ruth at the primroses
, flattened like tissue paper by the last heavy downpour. ‘I thought—’

  ‘What did you think?’

  Helen shrugged. What could she tell Ruth? That she had thought this was another of her fantasies, a stage set — her revenge on Edward? Sometimes, as now, she felt a sapping of her energies, as though her mind had limped away from her body, the dissociation of the one from the other acting as a prophylactic, a barrier to the disease she feared was infecting her mind, anaesthetizing the almost physical pain she felt, acting as a balm. Called back to herself, it was often difficult to reassemble the two, to become one again, whole, entire. It was as if her dislocated selves could never quite realign. As a child she’d had an operation to correct a strabismus. For years her mother had taken her on the long trek from Bolton to the children’s hospital in Manchester, grinding along on jerky old buses and all, it seemed to her childish perception, to play a game in which she was required to peer through a viewer at two frames; on the left a tiger, fangs bared, on the right a cage. She had to put the tiger in the cage by twisting the knobs on the side of the apparatus. Helen supposed they could tell by the degree of misalignment how much more work needed to be done on her lazy left eye. What had seemed a perfect capture to her might be out by a few centimetres to the normal eye. Was this how she appeared now to Ruth, struggling to superimpose her two disparate selves one on the other, trying to cage the tiger, and failing?

  Chapter 3

  So. It really happened. I really did it, and he really is dead. No dream or illusion. No fantasy. The planning, which had been so pleasurable, such a comfort in its way, had been carried forward, put into effect, just as imagined. The timing was so right! The knife slipping sweetly through the intercostal muscle and into the heart tissue in one smooth, silky motion.