And so their marriage rubbed along. And might have rubbed along for a good many years, but for one thing.
Greg Lincoln fell in love.
It was unwished for, it was inconvenient, but it was a fact. Greg, who had never regarded women as more than means of gratification, had fallen head-over-heels in love.
Inevitably, the woman he fell for was as tough and cynical as he was. Vicki Talbot. They’d met at a pre-Christmas drinks party. She had had in tow a husband called Alan, in whom she clearly took as little interest as Greg did in Shelley. A few drinks and a quiet chat in a kitchen sticky with mulled wine led to an agreement to meet the following afternoon for what both knew would be a sexual encounter. Like Greg, Vicki showed no coyness. She had no illusions that there might be anything romantic involved, while Greg looked forward to carving another notch on his metaphorical bedpost, before moving on to his next conquest.
And yet, from the moment he had made love to Vicki Talbot, he could not eradicate her image from his mind. At the age of forty-six, Greg Lincoln, hard-bitten, self-serving Greg Lincoln had fallen calamitously in love. Not the kind of warm love that might make him feel good about himself, but an obsessive, jealous love, over which he had no control. Thoughts of what Vicki might be doing when he was not with her burned like hot wires through his brain. The idea of anyone else just being in her company, let alone touching her... He tried to force his mind away from the images that tortured him, but to no avail. Greg Lincoln was hooked.
The agony had been increased by the fact that, after a series of torrid, snatched encounters running up to the holidays, he’d actually had to meet Vicki socially on Boxing Day. A drinks party given by mutual friends, an occasion of jaded bonhomie, no one really yet ready for another celebration after the excesses of Christmas Day itself. It was the kind of occasion at which Greg could normally excel, drinking too much, patronizing Shelley, getting cheap laughs from his less quick-witted friends.
But at this drinks party he was like a coiled spring, his mental radar aware only of where Vicki was standing, who she was talking to, who placed a casual hand on her arm. He thought he would explode if he couldn’t get just a moment alone with her. The prospect of their reaching the end of the party, of Vicki being whisked away by the odious Alan with nothing more than a communal wave and wishes for “A Happy New Year”, was more than Greg could bear.
There were moments at the party when he thought Vicki was feeling the same pressure. At times he thought he could read an undercurrent of anguish in her jokey social manner, but he couldn’t be sure. Though it had never bothered him much before, he was brought up hard against the impossibility of knowing what went on inside a woman’s mind.
They did get their snatched moment, ironically in the kitchen, mirroring their first fatal encounter.
“I need you,” Greg hissed in desperation. “I have to be with you all the time.”
“Nice idea,” said Vicki, in a manner that sounded sincere, “but there is a problem.”
“What? There’s no problem we can’t get round.”
“Shelley. You can’t be with me all the time if Shelley’s on the scene.”
“It’s the same with you and Alan.”
“No,” she said contemptuously. “I only stay with Alan because I have expensive tastes, and he can afford to cater for them. With you and Shelley it’s different.”
“What do you mean?”
Her greyish-blue eyes found his. “I mean that you and I can’t be together unless Shelley is out of the equation.”
Further intimate conversation was prevented by the entrance of a very drunk Alan. “You two having a secret snog, are you?” he asked with a guffaw that cut through Greg like a serrated blade.
For the next twenty-four hours, he kept trying to analyse the four words Vicki had spoken. “Out of the equation.” What did they mean? That he should leave Shelley? He could do that readily enough. That he should divorce her? Shelley’s Catholicism might make that more difficult, but it was not insoluble.
Greg Lincoln, however, knew Vicki had meant more than that. Coming so close to the reference to her expensive tastes, there was only one conclusion that could be reached. Greg had no money of his own. Divorce from Shelley would leave him virtually penniless. But were Shelley to die, he would inherit all of her estate. At the start of their marriage they had made wills, each naming the other as sole beneficiary. All at once the meaning of the phrase “out of the equation” became blindingly clear.
Once he had decided to murder his wife, Greg Lincoln felt a lot calmer. And he started to think in a very logical way.
The most important consideration was that Shelley’s death should look like an accident. And ideally should happen while her husband was absent from Lovelock Manor. His plans would be ruined by any suspicion attaching to himself. Shelley would have to die, Greg would have to play the grieving widower for a suitable length of time (or at least till probate on the estate was sorted out), and then he could be with Vicki Talbot for ever.
He spent most of Boxing Day evening striding restlessly around Lovelock Manor, assessing various forms of domestic accident. Rewired electrical boobytraps, loosened carpets on the stairs, combustible gas leaks in the kitchen... he contemplated them all, but none promised the guarantee of success. And many would put him too near for safety to the scene of the crime.
Through the night too he lay sleepless, his mind churning over other ways of eliminating the woman who lay softly sleeping beside him. And it was only as the gleamings of a truculent winter dawn could be seen through a crack in the bedroom curtains that Greg Lincoln’s great idea came to him.
Rather than in the house, it would be much easier to engineer his wife’s death in the garden.
At lunch the following day, Shelley was surprised when, for the first time in their relationship, Greg showed some interest in her hobby. “Will you be doing gardening stuff over the next few days?” he asked casually.
“Yes, I’ll hope to,” his wife replied. “Dan’ll be back at work tomorrow, and there’s a lot we need to do.”
“I’m sure there is,” he replied with an uncharacteristically generous smile. “Planting seeds and things...?”
“More planning this time of year.”
“You and Dan in a huddle in the shed?”
“Yes, a bit cold to be outside too much.”
“I’m sure. I was just interested, Shelley...”
“Yes, Greg?” There was a pathetic hopefulness in her look. Was her husband finally getting interested in gardening?
“...because I’ve got a golf thing on tomorrow, so I won’t be here.”
“Ah.” She looked crestfallen.
“But you’re here today, are you, Shelley?” She nodded. Greg smiled and took an envelope out of his pocket. “Unless, of course, you decide to go off and spend these...?”
A hundred pounds-worth of gardening tokens, which he had been out to buy that morning. There was a childlike gleam of excitement in her eye as she took the present. For Shelley the tokens represented the possibility that her husband might finally be showing some interest in her life. For Greg they were a means of getting his wife away from Lovelock Manor while he devised a way of ending that life.
Predictably, she went straight off to a garden centre. Greg Lincoln made sure that her car was out of sight, before moving to explore what was new territory for him, the garden of Lovelock Manor. As he pottered around, his mind catalogued potential murder methods. Poisoning, yes... there must be plenty of poisons in gardens. Commercially available mixtures to kill off weeds and insects. But how much would be needed to kill a healthy woman in her forties? And, more importantly, how could she be persuaded to swallow the stuff...? In a manner that would appear to be accidental...?