This Way Out Read online

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered

  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

  At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.

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  Contents

  Sheila Radley

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty One

  Chapter Thirty Two

  Sheila Radley

  This Way Out

  Sheila Radley

  Sheila Radley was born and brought up in rural Northamptonshire, one of the fortunate means-tested generation whose further education was free. She went from her village school via high school to London University, where she read history.

  She served for nine years as an education officer in the Women’s Royal Air Force, then worked variously as a teacher, a clerk in a shoe factory, a civil servant and in advertising. In the 1960s she opted out of conventional work and joined her partner in running a Norfolk village store and post office, where she began writing fiction in her spare time. Her first books, written as Hester Rowan, were three romantic novels; she then took to crime, and wrote ten crime novels as Sheila Radley.

  Dedication

  For T.K.

  Chapter One

  Derek Cartwright had always considered himself to be a decent, honourable man. The thought of doing away with his mother-in-law would never have entered his head, if he had not begun to suffer from bad dreams.

  What shamed him most, as he recollected what was to prove only the first of several similar nightmares, was that he had no personal reason for wanting to strangle Christine’s mother. Far from hating Enid Long, he rather liked her. It certainly wasn’t some festering antagonism that had opened the window on his unconscious, bringing him out of his sleep in a cold sweat to stare with horror in the dark at his rigidly trembling imagined-murderer’s hands.

  Derek and his mother-in-law had always got on perfectly well together. There was no friction between them, open or concealed. She didn’t even irritate him much. He bore no grudge against her, wished for no revenge, had no sordid financial motive for wanting her dead. As he flopped back on his pillow, panting after waking from his third dream-struggle to squeeze the breath out of her, he forced himself at last to analyse their relationship. The conclusion he arrived at, with guilt and further shame, was that he longed to get rid of his mother-in-law simply because she was there.

  Enid Long was there, living at the Brickyard, the Cartwrights’ comfortable Edwardian house in the Suffolk village of Wyveling, entirely by accident.

  Until she wrote off her little Fiat by failing to take the 90 degree bend at Wolsey Bridge on the Southwold to Blythburgh road – no other vehicle was involved, but it was a warm summer afternoon and she admitted to a lunch-time gin and tonic and a possible subsequent lapse in concentration – she had been a vigorous and independent widow. Miraculously, considering that the car had landed on its roof in the grazing marshes, her injuries were relatively minor. But she had lain in the wreckage for over an hour before a passing lorry driver saw and rescued her, and she was badly shaken. The accident damaged her body rather less than her confidence.

  It was Derek who had suggested to Christine that they ought to ask her mother to come to Wyveling to recuperate after she left hospital, instead of returning immediately to her Southwold flat. He did so primarily in his wife’s interests, wanting to save Christine from an indefinite continuation of the long round trips she was making each day to visit her mother. To that extent, he acknowledged, he had only himself to blame for the fact that Enid was still there nearly a year later. But he had never for a moment imagined that Enid would want to live with them permanently.

  Enid Long was not a sentimental woman. Her relationship with her only daughter had always been one of distant affection. She and her husband Percy (the junior partner in both marriage and business) had owned the guest house – the Glenalmond private hotel – on the North Parade at Southwold where Derek had stayed with his parents for a decade of summers when he was a boy. When he returned, alone, in his late teens for the specific purpose of seeing Christine, Enid had encouraged their friendship and had put no obstacles in the way of their eventual early marriage. And although the couple had never lived more than an hour and a half’s drive from Southwold, Enid had made it clear from the start that she was too busy with her own affairs to take more than a detached (though generous) interest in theirs.

  Even after Enid was widowed (Percy having departed with a minimum of inconvenience to her, as a junior partner should) she had continued to live her own life. She kept the Glenalmond until she was in her late sixties, then sold it and bought a flat. There she spent each summer, involving herself busily in the life of Southwold; and each winter she took herself off for three or four months to an apartment she had bought as an investment in Majorca, where between summer lets she could warm her own bones in the Mediterranean sun.

  The only time she had ever previously stayed with Christine and Derek was in the November before her accident. She had taken them by surprise by inviting herself to Wyveling, at short notice, a few weeks after Laurie’s death.

  Laurie, the Cartwrights’fourth child, loving and very much loved, was handicapped by Down’s syndrome. A happy, boisterously affectionate girl who needed almost constant supervision, she had died suddenly at the age of fifteen from an undiagnosed heart defect, leaving her family—her mother in particular—bereft.

  While Laurie was alive, Christine had spent much of her time ferrying her daughter to and from a special day school for the mentally handicapped, thirty miles away in Yarchester. Laurie’s death had deprived Christine not only of her youngest child but of occupation and purpose.

  Derek, at forty-three the regional marketing manager for a highly rated mutual life assurance society, was out on the road a great deal. Their older children, Tim and Richard and Lyn, were all working or studying away from home. With no one now but the dog for company at the Brickyard, the property they had bought because it was ideal for a large family, Christine had begun to slip into the downward spiral of reactive depression.

  Enid’s telephone call announcing that she intended to stay with them for a few days had come as a great relief to Derek. Worried about his wife, and coping as best he could with his own grief, he had seen his mother-in-law’s impending visit as a sure way of taking Chris
tine’s mind off her sorrow. The following day, a cold, dark-clouded Saturday morning in November, he had hurried out with enthusiasm when he saw the Fiat negotiating the open gateway that led from the village street to his long gravelled front yard.

  ‘It’s very good of you to offer to come, Enid,’ he had said as he lifted her suitcase from the boot of her car. The lowest of the dark clouds had just begun to spit out a shower of hail, and they lingered under the car port – formerly a cart shed, set just inside the gateway and at a right-angle to it – until the precipitation stopped.

  ‘It’s not “good of me” at all,’ his mother-in-law had retorted briskly. ‘Sheer self-interest, Derek, I can assure you. I want to get away to Majorca, but I can’t enjoy my holiday if I know that Christine’s moping about here on her own all day. She can’t go on grieving for ever. She needs to find herself a job, and as soon as possible.’

  Enid Long was then seventy-five, but she looked ten years younger. Her dark eyes were clear, her cheeks healthily firm. The only indication of her true age was her drooping throat, and she always wore a smartly tied chiffon or silk scarf to retain it.

  She was a little overweight, but she had style. Her lower legs were the elegant shape of inverted champagne bottles, her silver hair was bouffant, her discreet make-up was expertly applied. She was accustomed to buy expensive clothes, which she chose in becoming colour combinations of moss-green, cyclamen, grey and violet. Derek had always admired the care his mother-in-law took over her appearance, confident that Christine, who had inherited her mother’s dress sense as well as her good features and slim ankles (though fortunately not her bottle calves) would when the time came progress just as smoothly to an ageless old age.

  ‘I could tell from her voice on the telephone,’ Enid went on, ‘that Christine’s making no effort at all to pull herself together. She needs something to galvanize her – and there’ll be nothing like having me under her feet all day to do that!’

  And Derek had laughed, almost for the first time since Laurie’s death. His mother-in-law’s attitude, as sharply invigorating as the shower of hail, was doing him a power of good already.

  ‘As soon as I’ve got Christine going again,’ Enid had continued vigorously, ‘I shall be off. You won’t want me hanging about here, especially now you’ve got your freedom. Because let’s face it, Derek—however much you loved Laurie, she was an encumbrance.’

  That had stung him, and he answered her with a rare anger: ‘She most certainly was not! We never thought of her as that.’

  ‘Never?’ Enid’s eyes were shrewd – a good deal harder than Christine’s – but her voice was not unsympathetic.

  ‘You wouldn’t be human if you hadn’t thought it sometimes, Derek,’ she had said. ‘If Laurie had been a child of mine, she would have had to go into residential care – but then, I had the Glenalmond to run. Christine’s like her father, soft-hearted; but I’ve always respected you for supporting her. You did what you both thought right, and Laurie turned out to be a lovable girl in spite of everything.

  ‘But did you ever think through what you were doing? Did you realize that you were voluntarily tying up your whole future? That’s what used to worry me. Between ourselves, I’m thankful for your sakes that Laurie died young. Oh, I don’t expect you to agree with me – not at the moment, anyway. And of course I shan’t say a word of this to Christine. But it seems to me that now the poor child’s gone, the two of you can start living your own lives for a change.’

  The hailstorm had stopped as abruptly as it began. Enid clutched her warm coat collar closely about her throat, and set off at a brisk trot up the yard towards the red brick, double-fronted, square bay-windowed house. Derek had followed thoughtfully, his steps obliterating her neat footprints as he crunched the newly fallen hail that temporarily covered the gravel with white icing.

  What his mother-in-law had said was so much in character that he thought no worse of her for it. Predominantly, he felt grateful to her for having kept her opinions to herself while Laurie was alive.

  There was something more personal that he felt, though; something so unaccustomed that at first he was hard put to identify the sensation that had begun to lift his spirits. It was years – fifteen, to be exact – since he had known what it was to be buoyed by optimism.

  Even though he missed and mourned for Laurie he had felt, ever since she had been buried, a lurking sense of relief that the problems she represented had gone with her. At first he had refused to acknowledge the thought. When it persisted he had declined to dwell on it, out of loyalty to his wife and their dead child. But now that Enid, tough old bird that she was, had not shrunk from putting it into words, he was ready to admit to himself what he had denied to her. Yes, Laurie had been a burden.

  He had never discussed this burden with his wife. It wouldn’t bear discussion. From the moment they were told of the Down’s diagnosis, one-day-at-a-time had been their agreed philosophy. But Derek had looked ahead, as any life assurance man does, and had been alarmed by what he saw.

  Caring for a mentally handicapped child was demanding enough. The prospect of caring permanently for a mentally handicapped adult was dauntingly different. For himself, it might not have been too difficult because he had his work to take him away from home. But for Christine, a lively and intelligent woman who had once planned to make a career as an interior decorator when their children had grown up, it would have meant a life-sentence of domestic imprisonment.

  The thought that she was now freed from that burden gave Derek immense pleasure. There were sure to be some sad months ahead, for all the family. But it was secretly exhilarating to think that, once Christine’s paramount grief had eased, the two of them would at last be able to plan an active, interesting future.

  With admiration for his mother-in-law’s shrewdness and discretion, and with a genuine affection for her, he had welcomed her into his home.

  Enid’s brisk and unsentimental presence at the Brickyard soon had the desired effect on her daughter. Christine, who found it easier to be fond of her mother in her absence than in her own kitchen, had rapidly decided that it was time she set about finding a job. Satisfied, Enid had repacked her suitcase and buzzed off in her Fiat to Southwold, en route for her long winter holiday.

  The following summer, having crashed her car, Enid had allowed herself to be taken to the Brickyard to recuperate. A year later she was still there.

  Physically, said the doctor, she was in very good condition for her age. But her age was now showing: she was slower of speech, and on her feet; her hairstyle was deflated, her lipstick was shakily applied. Worse – despite having been persuaded by her daughter and son-in-law to spend the winter in Majorca as usual, though in a hotel rather than the apartment – she had never regained her confidence.

  When Enid was active, she had rarely bothered to read the newspapers. Now she bought them in quantity, with a preference for the easy-to-read and the sensational. The newspapers told her that violent crime, particularly against the elderly, was rapidly increasing. Nervous since her accident, Enid began to regard herself as a member of an endangered species.

  Despite the fact that she knew Southwold to be one of the quietest and most respectable of seaside towns, and that she was not personally acquainted with anyone who had been burgled, let alone attacked, she convinced herself that it would be the height of folly to return there to live alone. She was afraid that she would be mugged while she was doing her shopping, or – more probably and – that she would be murdered in her bed by a burglar.

  Derek said everything he could to reassure her. In actuarial terms, he told her, she was every bit as safe on her own in Southwold as she was with them in Wyveling. As soon as she was back in her own flat, among her friends, she would wonder why she had been worried. Why didn’t she try it?

  His mother-in-law, now comfortably ensconced at the Brickyard with all her clothes and the most treasured of her possessions, didn’t think she could take that risk; at least
, not until she felt her usual self. ‘Next week, perhaps –’ she would say.

  But next week never showed any sign of coming.

  Enid was now seventy-six years old. Derek knew that a woman of that age, in average health, has a further life expectancy of eleven years. What depressed him more was that her true life expectancy was probably a good deal longer than that.

  Enid knew it, too. She included the local weekly newspaper in her reading, and on several occasions she had commented on the fact that it had become almost commonplace for elderly people – women in particular – to celebrate their centenaries.

  ‘And here’s another one,’ she had said cheerfully to her daughter and son-in-law one evening, as she showed them the newspaper photograph of a very lively looking birthday girl. ‘I only hope I’m as good as that when I reach a hundred!’

  It was during the course of that night that Derek had the first of his bad dreams.

  Chapter Two

  ‘You’re chasing rabbits again.’

  ‘Uhh?’

  Derek struggled into consciousness. His heart was pounding, his lips were drawn back in a snarl, his throat was so dry that it hurt him to swallow. Sweat stood cold on his forehead. His stomach seemed to be undulating, moving in panicky corrugations as he fought his way out of yet another homicidal dream.

  Christine’s bedside light was on. Propped on her left elbow, half-turned towards him, her own face in shadow, she was watching him. Instinctively he covered his face with his hands. For a guilty moment he thought that she had been a spectator at his dream; that she had seen – could still see – him as a murderer.

  ‘Chasing rabbits,’ she repeated. And now he realized thankfully that there was nothing but affection in her voice. ‘You’ve been twitching and panting, just as Sam does in his sleep.’

  Sam was their soppy old beagle.