Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense Read online

  “Sit down, Miss Hendricks,” he said gently.

  Cora dropped into the chair by the bed. Could he possibly have seen that her legs were trembling?

  Marsden half-smiled, and stared at the half-full glass. In the same mild tone he spoke again.

  “Will it hurt?”

  For a second she could not answer: the shock drove the blood from her heart. Then she summoned her voice.

  “Why, Mr. Marsden, you’ve had it three times a day, right along. You know it doesn’t hurt.”

  His mind must be beginning to wander; he couldn’t last much longer in any event. Perhaps if she had let him alone he would have died without her help. But she couldn’t take that chance; he might outlast the time when Terry was due to meet her, or die when Staples was there.

  “I don’t mean the digitalis,” said Marsden evenly. “I mean the other stuff you put into it. From the bottle in your pocket.”

  She stared at him, speechless, paralyzed.

  “It’s for the money in the safe, isn’t it? I’ve been watching ever since you saw it. I could have given it all to you, and saved you from having to do this. But you see, I’m tired of all this nonsense. Staples wouldn’t finish me off, I know that. But you will. Thank you, my dear. I’m glad I had enough in the safe to tempt you.”

  She sat stunned, unable to look at him.

  “Only, it doesn’t seem fair to other people, later on. Money doesn’t last forever, you know, and you might be tempted again to —”

  He summoned all his strength for the last effort. His movements were quick and sure. He even managed to get the glass on the table again before he fell back on the pillow.

  • • •

  On Thursday afternoon, Dr. Staples, smiling as he remembered his daughter’s radiant face, rang the bell softly so as not to disturb Marsden. He waited. He rang again. Then, with a frown, he searched his pockets for the extra key which his friend had given him in the early days before a nurse had been needed. He frowned again, indignantly. He had never employed Miss Hendricks before — his regular nurse was ill — but the registry had recommended her highly. Surely she had not deserted a patient in the condition Marsden had reached.

  At the door he stood stock-still, feeling his face grow white.

  The room was full of flies. Marsden lay obliquely across the bed; brown patches had formed on his stringy neck, his mouth and eyes were open. On the bedside table, beside some wilted flowers, was a glass, with a little liquid still in the bottom. Dead flies lay in it and around it. The table-drawer was open.

  On the other side of the bed, slumped by an overturned chair, crouched Miss Hendricks. Her hair was disheveled, her uniform torn. There was dried blood on her right arm, and a long green bruise over a puffy swelling.

  Dr. Staples walked quickly to the bed, pulled back the tumbled covers.

  Miss Hendricks opened blank eyes. The doctor’s flesh crawled, as she began to giggle.

  Her right wrist was handcuffed to the left wrist of the corpse.

  CELIA FREMLIN

  ___________________

  1914–2009

  CELIA FREMLIN was born in Kingsbury, Middlesex, and studied classics at Somerville College of the University of Oxford. After her mother died in 1931, she looked after her father and worked a number of domestic service jobs, which was a way, Fremlin once said, to “observe the peculiarities of the class structure of our society.” That experience informed her first book, The Seven Chars of Chelsea (1940), while War Factory (1943), cowritten with Tom Harrisson, grew out of Fremlin’s wartime work with the British government’s Mass Observation unit polling people about how they felt about their daily lives, the war, and government.

  Fremlin married in 1942 and had three children, and in the midst of raising her family found the seeds for her first published novel, The Hours Before Dawn (1958), which won the Edgar Award for Best Novel in 1960. Fremlin’s debut is a disquieting look at a young mother with two small children and a baby, clearly in the throes of postpartum depression, who’s neglected and treated cavalierly by her distant husband, friends, and family, until the arrival of a lodger leads to strange events that have the heroine doubting her sanity.

  After such an auspicious start, Fremlin wrote fifteen other domestically oriented suspense novels over the course of her career, including Uncle Paul (1959), The Jealous One (1964), The Parasite Person (1982), and King of the World (1994). She also published dozens of short stories that were eventually collected in Don’t Go to Sleep in the Dark (1970), By Horror Haunted (1974), and A Lovely Day to Die (1984), the last in which I found “A Case of Maximum Need.”

  Originally published in 1977 by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, it introduces eighty-seven-year-old Emmeline Fosdyke making a most unusual request of those who work at the Sheltered House of the Elderly, where she’s recently moved: “No, no telephone, thank you, it’s too dangerous.” Naturally, the workers are puzzled. What happens if Emmeline injures herself, or worse? But as Fremlin details with chilling effect, Emmeline isn’t just trying to protect herself but other people, who are in even more danger from the consequences of conversation.

  A CASE OF MAXIMUM NEED

  ___________________

  “NO, NO telephone, thank you. It’s too dangerous,” said Miss Emmeline Fosdyke decisively; and the young welfare worker, only recently qualified, and working for the first time in this Sheltered Housing Unit for the Elderly, blinked up from the form she was filling in.

  “No telephone? But, Miss Fosdyke, in your—I mean, with your—well, your arthritis, and not being able to get about and everything . . . You’re on our House-Bound list, you know that, don’t you? As a House-Bound Pensioner, you’re entitled—well, I mean, it’s a necessity, isn’t it, a telephone? It’s your link with the outside world!”

  This last sentence, a verbatim quote from her just-completed Geriatric Course, made Valerie Coombe feel a little more confident. She went on, “You must have a telephone, Miss Fosdyke! It’s your right! And if it’s the cost you’re worrying about, then do please set your mind at rest. Our Department—anyone over sixty-five and in need—”

  “I’m not in need,” asserted Miss Fosdyke woodenly. “Not of a telephone, anyway.”

  There had been nothing in the Geriatric Course to prepare Valerie for this. She glanced round the pin-new Sheltered Housing flatlet for inspiration, but she saw none. Its bland, purpose-built contours were as empty of ideas as was the incomplete form in front of her. “Telephone Allowance. In Cases of Maximum Need . . .”

  It was a case of maximum need, all right. Valerie took another quick look at the papers in her file.

  Fosdyke, Emmeline J. Retired dressmaker, unmarried. No relatives. One hundred percent disability: arthritis, diabetes, cardiovascular degeneration, motor-neurone dysfunction.

  The case notes made it all so clear. Valerie glanced up from the precise, streamlined data and was once again confronted with a person—an actual, quirky, incomprehensible person, a creature whose eyes, sunk in helpless folds of withered skin, yet glittered with some impenetrable secret defiance.

  Why couldn’t old sick people just be old and sick, the poor girl wondered despairingly. Why did they have to be so many other things as well, things for which there was no space allotted on the form, and which just didn’t fit in anywhere?

  “But suppose you were ill, Miss Fosdyke?” Valerie hazarded, her eyes fixed on all that list of incapacitating disabilities “Suppose—?”

  “Well, of course I’m ill!” snapped back Miss Fosdyke. “I’ve been ill for years, and I’ll get iller. Old people do. Why do I have to have a telephone as well?”

  Valerie’s brain raked desperately through the course notes of only a few months ago. Dangers to Watch Out For in Geriatric Practice. Isolation. Mental Confusion. Hypothermia. Lying dead for days until the milkman happens to notice the half-dozen unclaimed bottles . . .<
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  An easy job, they’d told her back in the office—an easy job for Valerie’s first solo assignment. Simply going from door to door in the Sheltered Housing block, and arranging for a free telephone for those who qualified, either by age or disability or both. She’d pictured to herself the gratitude in the watery old eyes as she broke the good news, imagined the mumbling but effusive expressions of gratitude.

  Why couldn’t Miss Fosdyke be like that? Eighty-seven and helpless—why the hell couldn’t she?

  “Miss Fosdyke, you must have a telephone!” Valerie repeated, a note of desperation creeping into her voice as she launched into these unknown waters beyond the cosy boundaries of the Geriatric Course. “Surely you can see that you must? I mean, in your situation—suppose you needed a doctor?”

  “Nobody of my age needs a doctor,” Miss Fosdyke retorted crisply. “Look at my case notes there, you can see for yourself the things I’ve got. Incurable, all of them. There’s not a doctor in the world who can cure a single one of them, so why should I have to be bothered with a doctor who can’t?”

  Obstinate. Difficult. Blind to their own interests. Naturally, the course had dealt with these attributes of the aging process, but in such bland, non-judgmental terms that when you finally came upon the real thing, it was only just recognizable.

  But recognizable, nevertheless. Be friendly but firm, and don’t become involved in argument. Smilingly, Valerie put Miss Fosdyke down for a free telephone, and left the flat, all optimism and bright words.

  “Hope you’ll soon be feeling better, Miss Fosdyke,” she called cheerfully as she made her way out, and then on her long lithe young legs she almost ran down the corridor in order not to hear the old thing’s riposte: “Better? Don’t be silly, dear, I’ll be feeling worse. I’ll go on feeling worse until I’m dead. Everyone does at my age. Don’t they teach you anything but lies at that training place of yours?”

  • • •

  “What a morning!” Valerie confided, half laughing and half sighing with relief, to her lunch companions in the staff canteen. “There was this poor old thing, you see, getting on for ninety, who was supposed to be applying for a free telephone, and do you know what she said . . . ?”

  And while the others leaned forward, all agog for a funny story to brighten the day’s work, Valerie set herself to making the anecdote as amusing as she knew how, recalling Miss Fosdyke’s exact words, in all their incongruous absurdity: “No, no telephone, thank you. It’s too dangerous.”

  Too dangerous! What could the old thing mean? Ribald suggestions about breathy male voices late at night ricocheted round the table; anecdotes of personal experiences almost took the conversation away from Miss Fosdyke and her bizarre attitude, and it was only with difficulty that Valerie brought it back.

  At eighty-seven!—she should be so lucky!—this was the general reaction of the others. Of course, the girls admitted, one did read occasionally of old women being assaulted as well as robbed—look at that great-grandmother found stripped and murdered behind her own sweet-shop counter only a few months ago. And then a few years back there had been that old girl in an Islington basement defending her honor with a carving knife. Still, you couldn’t say it was common.

  “At eighty-seven!” they kept repeating, wonderingly, giggling a little at the absurdity of it. Consciously and gloriously exposed to all the dangers of being young and beautiful, they could well afford to smile pityingly, to shrug, and to forget.

  • • •

  It was nearly three months after the telephone had been installed that Miss Fosdyke first heard the heavy masculine breathing. It was late on a Sunday night—around midnight, as is usual with this type of anonymous caller—and it so happened that Miss Fosdyke was not in bed yet; she was dozing uneasily in her big chair, too tired after her hard day to face the slow and exhausting business of undressing and preparing for bed.

  For it had been a hard day, as Sundays so often were for the inhabitants of the Sheltered Housing block. Sunday was the day when relatives of all ages, bearing flowers and pot plants in proportion to their guilt, came billowing in through the swing doors to spend an afternoon of stunned boredom with their dear ones; or, alternatively, to escort the said dear ones, on their crutches and in their wheel chairs, to spend a few hours in the tiny, miserable outside world.

  Just how tiny and miserable it was, Emmeline Fosdyke knew very well, because once every six weeks her old friend Gladys would come with her husband (arthritic himself, these days) to take Emmeline to tea in their tall, dark, bickering home—hoisting her over their awkward front doorstep, sitting her down in front of a plate of stale scones and a cup of stewed tea, and expecting her to be envious. Envious not of their happiness, for they had none, but simply of their marriage. Surely any marriage, however horrible, merits the envy of a spinster of 87?

  Especially when, as in this case, the marriage is based on the long-ago capture by one dear old friend of the other dear old friend’s fiancé—a soldier boy of the First World War he’d been then, very dashing and handsome in his khaki battle dress, though you’d never have guessed it now. Emmeline remembered as if it was yesterday that blue-and-gold October afternoon, the last afternoon of his leave, when she had lost him

  “He says you’re frigid!” Gladys had whispered gleefully, brushing the golden leaves from her skirt, all lit up with having performed a forbidden act and destroyed a friend’s happiness all in one crowded afternoon. “He says . . .”

  Details had followed—surprisingly intimate for that day and age, but unforgettable. Only later, emboldened partly by old age and partly by a changing climate of opinion, had Emmeline found herself wondering how responsive Gladys herself had proved to be over the subsequent 55 years. Naturally Emmeline had never asked, nor would Gladys ever have answered. But maybe Gladys’ tight bitter mouth and the gray defeated features of the once carefree soldier boy were answer enough.

  The visit on this particular Sunday had been more than usually exhausting. To start with, there had been seedcake for tea instead of the usual scones, and the seeds had got in behind Emmeline’s dentures, causing her excruciating embarrassment and discomfort; and on top of this, Gladys’ budgerigar, who had been saying “Percy wants a grape!” at intervals of a minute and a half for the last eleven years, had died the previous Wednesday, and this left a gap in the conversation which was hard to fill.

  And so, what with the seedcake and the car journey and the boredom and the actual physical effort of putting up with it all, Emmeline Fosdyke arrived back at the Sheltered Housing unit in a state of complete exhaustion. She couldn’t be bothered even to make herself a cup of tea, or turn on the television; she didn’t feel up to anything more than sitting in her armchair and waiting for bedtime.

  She hadn’t meant to fall asleep. She’d learned long ago that when you are old, sleep has to be budgeted just as carefully as money: if you use up too much of it during the day, there’ll be none left for the night. So she’d intended just to sit there, awake but thinking of nothing in particular, until the hands of her watch pointed to a quarter to ten and it would be time to start preparing for bed.

  But it is hard to think of nothing in particular after 87 years. Out of all those jumbled decades heaped up behind, something will worm itself to the surface; and thus it was that as Emmeline’s head sank farther and farther toward her chest, and her eyelids began to close, a formless, half-forgotten anxiety began nibbling and needling at the fringes of her brain—something from long, long ago, over and done with really, and yet still with the power to goad.

  Must hurry, must hurry, must get out of here—this was the burden that nagged at her last wisps of consciousness. Urgency pounded behind her closed eyes—a sense of trains to catch, of doors to bolt, of decisions to make. And now there seemed to be voices approaching—shouts—cars drawing up—luggage only half packed.

  Slumped in her deep chair, Emmeline Fosdyke�
��s sleeping limbs twitched ever so slightly to the ancient crisis; the slow blood pumped into her flaccid muscles a tiny extra supply of oxygen to carry the muscles through the dream chase along streets long since bulldozed; her breath came infinitesimally quicker, her old lungs expanded to some miniscule degree at the need for running, running, running through a long-dead winter dawn . . .

  It was the telephone that woke her. Stunned by the suddenness of it, and by its stupefying clamor erupting into her dreams, Emmeline sat for a few moments in a state of total bewilderment. Who? Where? And then, gradually, it all came back to her.

  It was all right. It was here. It was now. She, Emmeline Fosdyke, eighty-seven years old, sitting comfortably in her own chair in her own room on a peaceful Sunday evening. She was home. She was safe—safe back from that awful outing to Gladys’ house, and with a full six weeks before she need think about going there again. There was nothing to worry about. Nothing at all. Nothing, certainly, to set her heart beating in this uncomfortable way, thundering in her eardrums, pulsing behind her eyes.

  Except, of course, the telephone, which was still ringing. Ringing, ringing as if it would never stop. Who could possibly be telephoning her on a Sunday evening as late as—oh, dear, what was the time? With eyes still blurred by sleep, Emmeline peered at her watch and saw, with a little sense of shock, that it was past midnight.

  Midnight! She must have been dozing here for hours! That meant that even with a sleeping pill, she’d never—

  And still the telephone kept on ringing; and now, her mind slowly coming into focus, it dawned on Miss Fosdyke that she would have to answer it.

  “Hello?” she half whispered, her old voice husky and tremulous with sleep. Then from force of habit she said, “This is Emmeline Fosdyke, 497-6402. Who . . . ?”