She was turning away from the car when he shot her. The single bullet through the temple would have been enough, but he blasted another one through the back of her head as she lay at his feet. Professional killers left nothing to chance. The soft noise of the bullets sounded loud in the thin air, even with the silencer on. But there was no sign of a response from any of the new houses in the quiet close. He was away from the scene and back at his car within two minutes, having seen not a soul. .
Sue Charles stared at the computer screen for a moment, then glanced at the clock and set about logging off. Sufficient for today. She liked to have something to polish when she came back to her latest book in the morning. If she added a few telling details to make the killing more convincing, it would help to ease her into the new working day. Then she could go on to develop plot and character and do more original and creative things.
When you’d been doing this for thirty years, you knew what worked for you and what didn’t in the writing process. She had a variety of little tricks to prevent her writing from becoming stale. This was one of them; the process of polishing eased you into the difficult business of trying to create something new each day.
She extracted the supermarket meal for one from the fridge and slid it into the oven. It never seemed worth spending time on preparing and cooking food when you were only catering for one. And everyone said how much better these ready-prepared meals were than they had been ten years ago. Most of them were quite tasty. Especially if you had a couple of glasses of wine with them.
She grinned wryly to herself. She found herself making these excuses to be a slattern nearly every day now, when there was really no need for them. She’d only herself to answer to, hadn’t she? Speaking of which — she went and looked at herself in the hall mirror. She’d found a couple of days ago that she hadn’t combed her hair all day; it had been flying untidy and unchecked at seven in the evening.
It was all right today. The grey tresses were disciplined, with only a few strands daring to leave their ranks. She couldn’t understand this fashion among the youngsters for irregular partings; it seemed to destroy the whole idea of dividing your hair in a certain way. But there were many things she didn’t understand and almost as many of which she didn’t approve about modern life. As a writer, she knew she mustn’t get out of touch with the generations behind her. The radio and the television were a great help, she supposed. She tried hard to listen to all the latest news and keep an open mind about what was happening and what other people said about it.
Sue Charles didn’t think she was becoming a recluse, but she was uncomfortably aware that most recluses probably thought that.
She had been a widow for almost four years now. Most people thought she had coped very well with her new status. Her work must have been a great help, everyone told her. She supposed it had, but she missed having George around when she was writing more than people knew. He had read each chapter as she wrote, correcting typing errors and making occasional tentative suggestions about character and plot. The house never felt emptier, nor writing a lonelier craft, than when she finished a chapter, breathed a sigh of relief, and realized anew that there was now no one to show it to if she printed it off.
She had been more prepared for her husband’s death than many of the widows she knew. When you married a man twelve years older than you, you were vaguely aware throughout the marriage that the odds were that you would eventually bury your husband. That had been George’s phrase, and she was still acutely conscious of those moments when she had stood at the graveside and looked down at the coffin with its neat gold plate in the pit below her. She recalled even the feel of the ridiculous little scoop with which she had sprinkled the damp earth at the priest’s invitation, watching the earth fall on the English oak. She remembered that odd mixture of relief and irritation which her husband’s religion had always brought to her; half consoling ancient rites and half mumbo-jumbo.
All the funerals she had attended since then had been cremations, as hers would be, many of them with humanist conductors. She was grateful for that, for she wanted no echoes of George’s passing. She was grateful, too, to her publishers, who still wanted her work in a recession, who continued to celebrate her modest success with equally modest contracts for new detective novels. It still gave her a secret thrill after all these years to add the bright new cover of the latest Sue Charles whodunit to the shelves set aside for her work in her book-lined study.
There was a clatter of cat flap in the utility room that adjoined the kitchen. She knew every familiar sound and what it meant in this bungalow. Losing your partner was like losing some peculiar extra sense, she sometimes thought. The other ones, particularly sight and hearing, became more alert to the seasons in the garden and to the small sounds around the house than they had ever been before.
Roland, her nine-year-old neutered cat, inspected the contents of his bowl and found them unsatisfactory. He walked across the kitchen, stared at Sue accusingly for fifteen seconds, and then strode away into the sitting room with tail erect and disapproval bristling in his every movement. It was good to have an animal in the house, though a cat wasn’t the companion that a dog was. But she didn’t like small dogs, and she didn’t think she had the time or the energy to cope with the sort of boisterous Labrador she and George had always enjoyed when they were younger.
The lasagne was almost ready now. The timer bell pinged on the cooker and she set the cutlery on the tray ready to take into the sitting room and the TV. Sloppy, but everyone did it, her friends told her, so there was no need to feel guilty. She was putting the salt and pepper pots on the tray when she heard a sound from the hall which she did not immediately recognize. Then she decided she knew what it was: the soft fall of a letter or single sheet on to the matt beside the front door. Not the heavy clunk of the postman, which usually denoted nothing more than the latest batch of junk mail. It was far too late for that, in any case, almost seven o’clock, with the sun gone behind the hill and twilight creeping in. Probably the latest leaflet from the pizza shop that had recently opened in Oldford, she decided. It was one of the little games she played with herself to offset disappointment, deciding just what the latest thing to come through her letter box might be.
She picked up the envelope as she carried her tray through to the sitting room. Addressed to her personally, so unlikely to be junk mail. Perhaps a friend who hadn’t wanted to disturb her. She felt a sudden irritation that the deliverer hadn’t stopped to exchange a word or two.
There was but a single sheet inside the envelope. The message was simple and stark.
RESIGN NOW FROM THE FESTIVAL COMMITTEE IF YOU WISH TO REMAIN ALIVE
FIVE
Peter Preston was in the midst of a trying day. They seemed to him to happen with increasing frequency as he grew older.
He tried the number again, with no great hope of success. But this time it was answered and a curt voice said, ‘Hilary James here. How can I help you?’
‘And who is Hilary James?’ He tried to keep the tone light and the impatience out of his voice.
‘I am Mr Carter’s secretary. Whom am I addressing?’
‘My name is Peter Preston. I knew Denzil in the days before he could afford to employ the services of a secretary.’
A pause whilst she scribbled the name on her telephone pad. ‘I see. And what is the purpose of your call, Mr Preston?’
‘I shall reveal that to Denzil. Please put me through to him.’