‘Where’s Claire?’ Patty asked. The children were something they had in common. Angela’s daughter and Jennifer were friends.
‘She’s at my mother’s,’ Angela said. ‘She stayed there last night so I could be at the school. She’s better off there today. I don’t want her troubled by this unpleasantness.’
She spoke as if murder were a trivial inconvenience. Patty stood awkwardly, unsure how to go on. The room was hot and she felt suddenly flushed. Perhaps she should make some excuse about having called to see how Angela was, then leave. But she thought of her father, waiting at her home, desperate for some information which would dramatically prove the innocence of the woman Patty realized, now, she knew little about. She sat resolutely on the small grey sofa.
‘Have the police been to see you?’ she asked.
Angela looked at her, unoffended but disapproving. She wished Patty would go away. She did not want to be reminded of the police or Harold Medburn. She wanted to forget about that now. And how big and clumsy Patty was, with that shapeless old coat and long scarf! She seemed to take up all the space in the room. Yet it was impossible for Angela to cause a scene, to tell Patty that it was none of her business. She sat, tense and upright, on a chair with her back to the window.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘They were here this morning.’
It had been a surprise when Ramsay and Hunter arrived and began, almost at once, to ask about her relationship with Harold Medburn. She had thought she had managed to keep the thing secret. The knowledge that the village was discussing her, grinning, as the young policeman had grinned at the thought of the two of them together, she young and beautiful, Medburn unpopular and unattractive, was worse almost than the indignity of having to answer the policeman’s questions. She had got rid of them as quickly as she could and given away as little as possible.
‘I saw you with Harold Medburn on the evening of the committee meeting,’ Patty said. ‘I told the police.’
Angela stared at Patty with expressionless blue eyes.
‘I thought it might be you,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry,’ Patty said. ‘ It seemed important. I didn’t think until later how awkward it might be for you.’
‘No,’ Angela said bitterly, showing emotion for the first time. ‘You never do think, do you? It’s easy for you with your husband and your family and your friends in the village. That’s all you want.
You’ve got everything you need. You never think of people like me. I hate it in Heppleburn.’
It’s not all I want, Patty thought, but it was not the time to explain her problem. She had been shocked by Angela’s outburst. She felt that the woman hated her and she wanted to make things better between them. She was accustomed to being liked.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. ‘It must have been a dreadful shock when Harold Medburn died. Especially when you were so close to him.’
Angela did not reply immediately. She stared, and for a moment Patty wondered if she had said the wrong thing again. Angela thought at first that Patty might be sneering at her, laughing at her liaison with Medburn, but Patty seemed so earnest and confused that it was impossible after all to doubt her sincerity.
‘Yes,’ Angela said. ‘It was a shock.’
There was another silence. The gas fire hissed and outside the street lamps came on with a sudden orange light. In a moment of weakness, caused by her tiredness and the other woman’s sympathy, Angela felt she wanted to talk about Harold Medburn. She wanted Patty to understand about him, in a way that the police with their intimate, tasteless questions had been unable to. Since she had left school she had been without friends. Patty, with her intrusive good will, was the best she had.
‘I thought Harold could give me something different,’ she said. ‘I want more than this.’
Patty followed her gaze around the square little room. The house was smaller than her own home, but Angela had made it stylish. It seemed more spacious than it was.
‘It’s fine,’ she said encouragingly. ‘It’s big enough for the two of you.’
‘No,’ said Angela crossly, frustrated because she could not find the words to explain. ‘ I don’t just mean the house…’
She wanted to tell Patty that she aspired to a certain dignity, to a lifestyle that did not involve struggling for every penny, making do with second best.
‘I’ve not got any skills,’ she said at last. ‘I can’t go out and earn a good living. All I’ve got is the way I look and the fact that men find me attractive.’
There was a pause.
‘You mean you went with Harold Medburn for money?’ Patty asked. She could think of no tactful way of putting it. She was shocked, not by Angela’s confession, but because she had never guessed. Everyone on the estate thought that Angela led a life of great respectability.
‘I don’t usually take money,’ Angela said.
‘Oh,’ said Patty, perhaps a little disappointed.
Angela looked at her again with clear blue eyes. ‘I take other things,’ she said. ‘I take meals in good restaurants, trips to the theatre, clothes. From Harold Medburn I could have taken marriage.’
‘You would never have married him!’ Patty cried, shocked to indiscretion. ‘What could you have seen in him?’
‘Comfort,’ Angela said. ‘He had a lot of money, you know. More than you’d realize. He’d a lot saved and he’d not spend it on himself. He’d have bought me a nice house and furnished it as I wanted.’ She hesitated. ‘He loved me.’
She thought, with a vivid horror, of his leering face, his insistent pressing hands, his moist tongue, and was glad that he was dead.
‘He loved me,’ she repeated calmly. ‘He said he would leave his wife for me.’
‘Would you have married him?’ Patty asked. The thing seemed to her inconceivable, grotesque, like the fable of Beauty and the Beast.
‘I don’t know,’ Angela said. Then she seemed to reconsider. ‘No,’ she said. ‘ I don’t think I could have married him.’ But there are worse things, she thought, than marriage to Harold Medburn.
‘Did you tell him that?’
Angela shook her head. ‘ I hoped when it came to it, he wouldn’t be able to leave his wife.’
‘Last night he’d made up his mind to leave her.’
They looked at each other. Both were amazed at the ease with which Angela had confided in Patty. They felt that they had known each other for a long time and that each was being entirely honest. Yet they still disliked each other.
‘Did you phone Mr Medburn yesterday evening?’ Patty asked. ‘After we had left the school at half past four?’
‘No,’ Angela said. ‘ The police asked me that. I never phoned him at home.’
‘Were you expecting to see him at the party?’
‘Yes,’ Angela said. ‘He’d told me that he wanted to dance with me.’ She gave a slight shudder, as if she were cold. ‘I was glad,’ she said, ‘when he didn’t turn up.’
‘Do you think his wife killed him because she was jealous?’
‘I don’t know,’ Angela said. She seemed almost indifferent. ‘Who else would have done it?’
‘Nobody liked him,’ Patty said. ‘Everyone with kids at the school wanted rid of him.’ She paused. ‘Had there been any other women before you?’
‘Probably,’ Angela said. ‘He was that sort of man.’
‘Was there someone in Heppleburn?’
‘He never talked about it,’ Angela said. ‘He wanted me to think I was special, the first apart from his wife. In a way it was true. He might have had other women but I was special. He wanted me. I was the only person he was willing to spend money on. You know how mean he was. He would have done anything for me.’ She spoke in the same matter-of-fact voice but added bitterly, ‘At least, nearly anything.’