A Shot at Nothing Read online

  ‘Don’t want to be tied to me, you mean. Free to troll around after other women. Free to walk out on me…’

  ‘You know it’s not that.’

  ‘It’s because I’ve got the money and you haven’t.’

  ‘Not that.’ But his statement was contradicted by its emphasis.

  ‘Oh yes. Oh yes.’ I was on the attack now. We hadn’t before laid it out in words which couldn’t be withdrawn, that was the difference. It had simply hovered between us like an oppressive cloud, with thunder lurking in it. He saw no reason why we shouldn’t live together without marriage. Everybody’s doing it, he had informed me. I saw no reason for living together except with marriage. And all that was holding him back…

  ‘All you’re thinking about’, I shouted (and in somebody else’s house…it was unpardonable), ‘is this ridiculous idea that the man has to be the provider. Stupid! Antiquated! Revoltingly sexist! You make me sick, Oliver. So I intend—’

  ‘You intend to squander the bulk of your considerable fortune on a house, and then we’d have to exist on my police pension. That is what’s so ridiculous.’

  This idea had occurred to me while we’d been staying at the house of my friend, Heather Payne. But I couldn’t remember having expressed it.

  ‘And you’, I snapped back, goaded to it, ‘are forgetting that my considerable fortune, as you call it, comes from the artistic talent of my previous husband. A man has earned it. Isn’t that good enough for you?’

  But it was a mistake. I had said the wrong thing.

  ‘It’s because it comes from your previous husband, you silly woman you.’

  ‘Oh.’

  He smiled at my no doubt empty expression, then leaned forward and kissed me on the tip of my nose. I felt my lips quivering, and wasn’t certain whether I was about to break out in tears or laughter.

  ‘Let go my shoulders, you big oaf!’ I shouted, and the tears were mine, the laughter his.

  ‘We clearly wouldn’t last long as a married couple,’ he observed, his head on one side. ‘Virago, that’s the word for you.’

  ‘It’s beneath my dignity to tell you what you are, Oliver.’ I sniffed.

  ‘Let’s go and see the rest of the house.’

  But I caught at his sleeve. ‘I’d make you a solemn promise,’ I said, ‘that if you married me you could have a divorce at any time, and I wouldn’t oppose it.’

  He frowned. ‘Divorce is even more painful than marriage.’ He cocked an eyebrow at me.

  ‘You’d be able to claim maintenance from me. Doesn’t that appeal to you?’

  ‘Hah!’ he said. ‘Let’s go and see—’

  ‘You wouldn’t need to feel yourself bound to me, nor chained, nor riveted…’

  He laughed. ‘Divorce is when the rivet falls out. Like a pair of scissors. Then the separated two halves are useless on their own. Except for stabbing, of course, and usually in the back.’

  ‘I’d expect my scissors to have a firm rivet.’

  ‘You’re contradicting yourself, my sweet. You’ve just said—’

  ‘Let’s go and see the rest of the house. You’re spoiling it for me, Oliver.’

  ‘It’s already spoilt.’

  This time I allowed him the last word, because I didn’t know what he meant. We went to see the rest. I heard him muttering to himself about my being hopelessly old-fashioned, but I didn’t take him up on it.

  The whole place was crazy, a mixture of Victorian fussiness and what would have been, at that time, a courageous thrust at originality. Of course, I fell in love with it, as I had with Oliver because of his craziness, which is what it must have been if he wanted to live with me when I was quite aware that I’d be difficult to live with. Maybe, married, a little less, I assured myself.

  The house ought to have appealed to him, the criss-crossing of passages, and doors where you wouldn’t expect to find them, these usually opening into corners of large rooms when the centres of the walls were bare and available. But he made no comment—and placidly continued to make no comment—as though he’d decided I was past hope and the decisions were all to be mine; as though he knew there was no likelihood that we would ever be living there. That was how it was, his aloofness probably intentional, but I had to take a generous attitude as to his silence, and assume he wanted me to make an uninfluenced decision. Yet he must have observed the fact that I could barely contain my delight. I loved the strangely proportioned rooms. Long and narrow or nearly square; high-ceilinged and low-ceilinged, they were all delightful. In some way that I couldn’t tie down in my mind, the proportions seemed always to be right and the windows in exactly the correct places, even though not the obvious ones. And the furniture! Venerable and revered, now very dusty and without dust covers, it had previously been treated with care and affection

  ‘But why…why,’ I asked, ‘shouldn’t it be more expensive? Several times what’s being asked. And how long has it been empty? Tell me that.’

  I didn’t intend him to take this as a question, not expecting he would have the answer. But he had.

  ‘Just under six years.’

  ‘So why hasn’t it been sold?’ I nodded. ‘And why is the furniture still here?’

  ‘Presumably because it was cheaper than storing it. And of course, she’d have to bear in mind the possibility that she would return to it. But she might have found it difficult to imagine herself living here again.’

  ‘She, she! Who?’ I asked.

  ‘Clare Steadman. I told you that, Phil. Mad Harry’s granddaughter.’

  ‘But why wouldn’t she come back? And where is she now?’

  At that time we were in a wide room, rather barely furnished, whose double French windows looked out over a paved terrace and a lawn at the rear. Oliver walked over to the windows and stood there, his back to me.

  ‘I believe,’ he said, ‘unless they’ve moved her, that she’s in Benfield women’s prison, serving out a life sentence for murder.’ He turned to face me. ‘Heavens, Phil, if she were to get full remission she could well be out around now. I reckon you’re wasting your time looking at it.’

  It was as though this was what he’d been holding back in reserve, to throw it at me—though whether the fact of murder or of the imminent remission, I couldn’t tell. Why he hadn’t come out with this before I put down to his cussedness.

  ‘Poor woman,’ I said. ‘And the house empty for so long.’

  He was annoyed that I hadn’t asked the obvious questions. ‘Nobody cares to live in a house where murder has been committed.’

  ‘It was here? The murder?’

  ‘In this room,’ he said, his voice empty of emotion.

  I paused. The room was quiet and placid, with no murmurs left of violence. ‘And who was it this Clare Steadman killed?’

  ‘Her husband. One very dark and stormy September evening. She shot him…Harris Steadman. Mind you, he was about due for some kind of violent end. It’s just a pity that she was the one who did it.’

  ‘A pity for her?’ I asked, probing and suddenly alert, though I tried to sound casual.

  ‘Yes. A pity for her. There were numerous people, male and female, he’d been goading to a pitch where they’d have happily removed him from the district—permanently. I suppose she was the closest, so she got the most goading.’

  He was skating around it cautiously, but on thin ice.

  ‘Like the backmarker in a herd of cows?’ I asked, regretting the ineptitude the moment I said it.

  He didn’t reply to that, and was walking slowly round the room, idly opening the tall glass-fronted and now empty showcases that lined the walls. I knew he was seeing them full, and peopling this room with movement and frantic action. I walked over to the French windows and stared out over the terrace and the lawn beyond it. Rhododendrons, a little past their flowering period now, enclosed the lawn. Beyond them was the stretch of territory comprising the grounds. Now I could see the distant sheen of water clearly, and it was indeed a lake. I had al
ways dreamed of owning my own lake.

  ‘This was Clare’s house,’ he said at last, having decided how best to present it to me. ‘Her father’s before that, his father’s before him. Mad Harry Collings, that was. Clare’s father had his own fixations, and transformed the place into an almost unassailable fortress. He was eccentric, too.’

  ‘I’ll bet she’s not too stable, either,’ I said. ‘Runs in the family, does it?’

  I turned. He was frowning at me.

  ‘Stable enough,’ he said flatly. Then he went on, ‘If you’ll only let me explain. Clare’s father, as I said, turned the house into a fortress. You’ve seen the alarm lock at the front—that’s connected to the nearest police station, and the whole system runs right through the house. After the final locking-up at night, open one window or one external door, and they—the police—know at once. No alarms blasting away in the house, though. The idea was that we could sneak in on them and lay a hand on their collars.’

  ‘That sounds rather crafty. But wait a minute…it’d mean you could be lying in your bed with a burglar in the house, and there’s been nothing to warn you. I’d prefer the alarms. You could at least grab a poker.’

  ‘Ah yes. You’d send ‘em running, Phil. But what her father did do, to make things more secure, was have proper mortice locks put in every internal door in the place. Look…’ He turned to the door by which we had entered. It had a lock as well as a normal door handle. Oliver turned the key, and the lock made a reassuring clashing sound, then he rattled the door to demonstrate how firm it was, how, in fact, it didn’t even rattle. ‘The idea was that if a burglar did get in, he’d have to start work again even to get beyond the room he’d entered, and then more work to get inside the next one—and so on.’

  ‘By which time the gallant police would have swooped in and cut off his retreat? I see. Very clever. But hold on. In that event…Oliver! Are you telling me that you were the gallant police on that particular evening? The murder evening, I mean. I wondered how you seemed to know so much about it—the house and the murder.’

  He pouted, then nodded his head ruefully. ‘Too much, for my liking.’

  But—after nearly six years—that didn’t explain his reluctance even to come here, I thought.

  I was beginning to understand Oliver rather comprehensively. He was about to tell me something he knew I wouldn’t be pleased to hear, and was approaching it cautiously, edging round it as he tidied up the facts in his mind. I had to adopt a casual and almost disinterested attitude, so that he wouldn’t detect that I was critically alert. Otherwise I’d have had to drag it from him, and our delicate relationship would have been in jeopardy.

  ‘You did tell me you’d patrolled this district in a police car,’ I offered tentatively.

  ‘True. But that was a year or so before this all happened. I’d transferred to the CID by that time, and just happened to be the closest when the burglar alarm call came through. I’d been to see a farmer who’d had trouble with his neighbour about a fence. It was late…ten thirty-ish…when I picked up the call. The alarm system had been triggered at Collington House. I knew where it was…’

  ‘Of course.’

  He hesitated, then got on with it. ‘There was a thunderstorm, and that delayed me a bit. The rain was bucketing down. It must’ve been Harris Steadman himself who’d triggered the alarm when he threw open the French windows. These windows here. Or it could have been Clare, when she opened the front door and ran out. Which meant that Harris Steadman must have set the alarm when he got home, by punching the button in the hall. In any event, when I got here the front door was closed, but unlocked. Of course, I’d come about a possible break-in, so I had a quick look round outside, and then, as the front door wasn’t locked, I walked in and found my way to their sitting-room. That’s the one right opposite this one, across the corridor. I still didn’t know what to expect, of course, or what’d been going on, but I could hear her inside the sitting-room, sort of sobbing, and when I looked in she was sitting with the phone in her lap. She’d made a 999 call, but not about a break-in. No. About a shooting incident—when I could get any sense out of her. My sudden appearance seemed to send her over the edge. I mean…you make a phone call asking for help from the police, and you’ve barely put the phone down when one walks in. Just like that. She—’

  ‘I do get the point, Oliver.’

  Why, I wondered, was he sounding apologetic? No—he wasn’t being apologetic, he was trying to justify her reactions.

  ‘She just stared at me and passed out,’ he went on. ‘I managed to bring her round. At that stage I knew nothing about what had been going on. What was so strange was that she was wearing her husband’s waterproof shooting jacket, and she was soaked, drenched, dripping.’

  ‘Hadn’t she got any live-in help?’

  ‘No. Let me get on with it, Phil, please. He’d been out shooting, I gathered. Harris Steadman, that is. And he’d been caught in the storm. When I could get one sensible word out of her, all she could say was that she’d shot him. She used the word “killed”. And she told me he was dead in the gunroom—this room. See the cases all around the walls? They’re gun cases. Each one held two guns at that time, and there’re twenty-one cases. That’s forty-two shotguns—and loads of cartridges in that cabinet over there. And each gun was a collector’s piece. All hers, inherited from her father. Put together, they were probably worth more than the house. And there was also a shotgun that Steadman owned. We found that one lying on the hallstand.’

  ‘There’re no guns here now,’ I pointed out. ‘The furniture’s here, but no guns.’

  ‘No. That’s true. We…the police forensic squad, that is…took them all in for examination. They’ve been stored for her. Free. They still belong to her. But Harris…’ Oliver had begun to use his Christian name, so must have known him. ‘Harris treated the collection as though it was his own. I don’t mean he used them. No—he had his own gun, as I said, for his own personal enjoyment.’

  ‘Enjoyment?’

  ‘Oh yes. He thoroughly enjoyed shooting birds out of the air.’

  ‘I’m beginning to hate him.’

  ‘But he’d have justified it. He’d have told you it was only like farming, though this was grouse and partridge. The only difference was that pigs and cattle and sheep went to slaughterhouses, but shooting was the only way to kill game birds.’

  As Oliver seemed to be supporting this point of view, I flared in abrupt anger at him. It was out before I could trap it. ‘But the slaughterhouse people don’t enjoy it, damn you.’

  He raised his eyebrows at me. ‘I’m expressing his attitude to it, Phillie. So that you’ll understand him.’

  ‘And understand her?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘You mean she enjoyed the same pastime?’ I couldn’t bring myself to call it a sport.

  ‘No. Her father taught her to shoot when she was very young—took her on shoots in her teens. But she never hit anything. She hated it, and aimed elsewhere. But she could handle a gun. It was just that she’d never been able to bring herself to kill anything.’

  ‘Anything, as you put it, except her husband? Didn’t you say she shot him?’ I nodded at him reprovingly. He was being too supportive towards her.

  ‘Not purposely,’ he assured me.

  ‘No?’ I was beginning to dislike this Clare Steadman, who had Oliver’s stubborn support. ‘But all the same…you say she’s in prison for it.’

  ‘I’m quite certain she didn’t murder him. Shoot him, yes. By mistake. Murder, no.’

  ‘So why…what is it you know, Oliver?’

  But he wouldn’t allow himself to be tied down. I’d never known him so terse and evasive. Now he seemed to head off on a different line altogether, changing the direction of it with an almost insulting rejection of my protests.

  ‘They’d had a row…’

  ‘Not in cold blood, then,’ I said acidly.

  He ignored that. ‘They’d had a grand ro
w in the sitting-room opposite. He’d come home, all wet and cold and in a foul mood, and the storm was still crackling all around the house. We discovered he had a good reason for his anger, because a friend of his he’d met on the shoot had told him he was about to instruct his solicitor about some debt or other, which Harris couldn’t repay. He was a partner in a company, not large—only twenty-three employees. But he was on the sales side, and the profits had been poor recently. He’d got his life in a financial tangle. He was a lousy businessman, a rotten employer, a liar, a cheat and a bully. That night, he’d apparently come home with some idea that Clare would sell some of her guns to help him out. Or something like that. They got to shouting at each other, she accusing him of throwing money around on his women—which was true. I knew that. And he was shouting at her that she had a man of her own as a lover, and he knew about it, and if she wouldn’t help him out he would spread it around…stupid, really. What would it signify, these days? But all these things came out when my superintendent got her to the point of making statements. The causes of the quarrel I heard second-hand. But the details of what happened that evening I knew first-hand, because I was here, on the spot, that night.’

  ‘Now wait a minute. Wait, Oliver. What did that mean? Heard it second-hand? If you were a CID sergeant, surely—’

  ‘They took me off the case. Personal involvement.’ He shrugged, staring past my shoulder.

  ‘You mean—’

  ‘One of the first things she told the superintendent was that I was the lover that Harris Steadman had been referring to.’ He pouted. ‘Gentleman friend, she called me.’

  2

  I had not examined the room in any detail, my attention having been concentrated on Oliver. This seemed the time to do it. What he had said was as good a reason as any to apply myself, now, to a more careful survey. Not that I would be able to concentrate on it, not after his flat statement. That there had been previous women I had begun to realise—it would have been surprising if there hadn’t been—but here, at last, had appeared one with a more solid background, one who might have earned the courtesy title of mistress. Which was what he wanted me to be. After all, if one mistress was in prison, he might be expected to fill the empty space with another, if only until the first was released. Good heavens, I thought, was that why Oliver was reluctant to marry me? Because he was waiting for the genuine loved one to be available again? Then he would live here…but not with me.