Due Dilligence
by Catherine Aird
I must say I don’t like the idea at all myself," said Simon flatly. "Otherwise, I can see that it would be a very good place to live in."
"Quite," said Kenneth Marsden, the estate agent, patently unperturbed. The word was one he was very fond of using with his clients. It implied agreement without actually spelling it out. "Quite."
"Nor me," chimed in Simon’s wife, Charlotte, quickly. Too quickly.
"Quite," said the estate agent. Kenneth Marsden had found that this all-purpose word also usefully concealed disagreement by not actually spelling out the fact to prospective purchasers of attractive properties newly on the market in rural Calleshire. "I do understand, naturally. It was all very, very unfortunate."
"I mean," said Simon Cullen, "it’s not every day that something like that happens in someone’s house."
"Quite so." The man from Messrs Crombie and Marsden paused and then said judiciously, "On the other hand, it has at the same time to be remembered . . ." Kenneth Marsden was also in the habit of making all unwelcome pronouncements in the impersonal tense, " . . .that there are very few domestic properties in this country—especially genuinely old ones such as the Manor at Cullingoak—in which, over the years, somebody has not died"
"Naturally," agreed Simon, "but this death occurred only the other day, didn’t it?"
"Which is why the present owner wishes to dispose of it so quickly," said the estate agent smoothly. He then changed the subject with the skill born of long practice. "By the way, how did you happen to hear about the Manor being up for sale? We shan’t be advertising it until the end of the week."
"Somebody at work mentioned it to me." It was Charlotte Cullen who answered him, "and I rang my husband and got him to collect the key when he was in Berebury so we could see over the house while I could still fit it in. I’ve got to go abroad for the bank tomorrow."
Kenneth Marsden translated her message without difficulty. What she was actually telling him was that there would be no problems with money or mortgages.
"But the lady of the house didn’t just die, did she?" persisted Simon.
"My husband means that there was a fatal accident in this house," spelt out Charlotte for him. "Don’t you, Simon?"
Simon Cullen did not respond to this.
"I do understand," Kenneth Marsden hastened soothingly. Actually he understood a great deal more. He now knew which half of this couple, metaphorically, wore the trousers. This knowledge was as important to him as it would be to any experienced negotiator.
"The publicity . . ." pointed out Simon.
"Unfavourable," conceded the estate agent immediately. He allowed a little pause to develop before he said obliquely, "You yourselves would, of course, be benefiting from this to the extent that the property has been placed on the market at a substantially lower price than it would have been had the—er—unfortunate accident not occurred." Within the privacy of the partners’ room of Messrs. Crombie and Marsden, Estate Agents and Valuers, Kenneth Marsden had described the amount he had shaved off his valuation of the house as ‘blood money.’
"We do appreciate that," murmured Charlotte Cullen. "It is an important factor in our even considering purchasing a property such as this. I must say, though, that I agree with my husband that it is a very nice house . . ."
The vendor of Cullingoak Manor, to his eternal credit, had not demurred at Kenneth Marsden’s suggested figure. Indeed, for a money man—he was a stockbroker—Mr. Wertherby had shown very little interest in the prospective sale, only in disposing of the property at the earliest possible moment. Needless to say, Kenneth Marsden did not mention this now. Instead, he nodded his agreement with Charlotte. "Yes, indeed, Mrs. Cullen," he said easily. "It’s a very fine example of its period."
Charlotte, who was rising rapidly through the upper-middle echelons of the Bank of Calleshire where she worked, leaned forward and said, "Actually it was the price which first attracted my husband."
"I’m sure," said Kenneth warmly.
Simon said nothing.
"I hesitate to use the word ‘bargain’ in these particular circumstances," went on Marsden, matching spurious frankness with superficial if seemingly transparent honesty, "but there’s no denying that but for the tragic incident, the Manor at Cullingoak would be much more highly priced than it is today."
"My husband," began Charlotte again, ". . . was quite taken with the actual property, too . . ." She turned towards Simon and said, "Weren’t you, dear?"
Simon had long ago decided that Charlotte must have read in a women’s magazine that when the wife was the money-earner it was important that she deferred to her husband on each and every occasion where this was at all possible. And that her constant litany should be, "I’ll have to ask my husband." He also knew, however, that she did this only when his answer wasn’t important.
"The kitchen could do with a bit of work," said Simon spiritedly, "and the larder window needs fixing." He made both statements without any fear of being described as a ‘house husband’. Charlotte had never ever brought herself to tell the world that her husband had been made redundant from his job at the metal works in Berebury and that he stayed at home while she made the money. And quite a lot of money it was these days, too, to be sure. He wasn’t complaining about that. It was her end-of-the-year bonus, she had told him, that was going to make buying the Manor at Cullingoak possible.
When asked what her husband did Charlotte always replied with perfect truth that he was a bimetallist. Since she moved in the world of corporate banking, this was almost always taken by her office colleagues to mean that Simon was an economist who was concerned with monetary systems in which two metals are used in fixed relative values, not someone trained in the coefficients of expansion of all metals. Charlotte never disabused them of this misapprehension. When the more knowledgeable responded with remarks such as, "Gold and silver, I suppose," she would say uncertainly, "I think so, but I’m afraid it’s not really my field . . ." That people did not talk much about their work went without saying in banking circles, and the conversation would move on.
"I daresay that the owner might agree to that sort of repair being taken into account," the estate agent was saying to Simon, without for one moment revealing how very useful it was in a negotiating situation to have a few small bones to chew over. The smaller the bone the better, of course. In the world of the estate agent, work on a larder window was easily conceded, and the cost of an upgraded kitchen something to be wrested from the owner after a nominal struggle.
"Who is the owner, anyway?" asked Charlotte casually. "He wasn’t around."
"A Mr. Wetherby," replied Kenneth Marsden. "He’s naturally still very shocked at losing his wife, you know, and not too keen on going back to the house."
"I’m not surprised," said Charlotte Cullen. "Poor man."
Simon gave Marsden a hard look. "And I take it that the whole place has been re-wired?"
The estate agent looked pained. "I can assure you that the electrical system was the very first thing that was checked after the accident. It was found to be in good order," he gave a slight cough, "in spite of . . . everything."
"Everything?" queried Simon.
"Mrs. Wetherby’s electrocution seemed quite inexplicable. Mr. Wetherby was at work when it happened and so wasn’t able to help much with the coroner’s enquiries."
"Then there shouldn’t be anything for us to worry about, should there?" said Charlotte in the same decisive tones she used to wind up many a meeting at the bank.
"No," said Kenneth Marsden automatically.
Charlotte raised an enquiring eye in her husband’s direction and went through her routine. "What do you say, Simon? It’s up to you, of course, but I must say I like it . . ."
"Me, too," he said meekly.
"Right." She turned to Kenneth Marsden. "You can tell Peter Wetherby that we’ll take it."
"I don’t think you’ll regret it," said the estate agent heartily, shaking their hands as they left.
Simon Cullen was inclined to agree with him when, six weeks later, he and Charlotte duly moved into the Manor at Cullingoak. The larder window had been fixed and the men were due to come that Monday morning to improve the kitchen layout. Simon had no hang-ups about doing the cooking, belonging as he did to the very workman-like "if you can read, then you can cook" school of haute cuisine, but equally he saw no point in ever working under less than optimum conditions. He brought to the task of cooking the same attention and care that had served his previous employers very well until the advent of the worldwide decline in the heavy metals industry.
"Now, then, Mr. Cullen," said the foreman, "before we get started, can you just check that this plan here is how you want it all done? Measure twice and cut once, as my old boss used to say."
Simon switched the electric kettle on as a gesture of good intent before he joined the man peering over the drawings laid out on the kitchen table. "That’s right," he said after duly studying the design. He pointed to the door larder and with his hand sketched an imaginary journey round the kitchen in the direction of the stove via the work surfaces and the kitchen sink. "Store, wash, prepare, cook, serve . . . that’s how it should be."
The foreman scratched his head. "I hadn’t thought of it like that."
"Only if you’re right-handed," said Simon. "The lady who lived here before must have been a south paw."
"Both her hands had burns on them," the man informed him ghoulishly.
"Though they never did find out how she got them," chimed in his mate, Fred.
"Electrocuted in the utility room she was," said the foreman lugubriously. "But don’t you let that worry you. They went over that room with a fine-tooth comb after it happened."
"Couldn’t find a thing amiss, though," said Fred in his role as Greek chorus.
"They never did find out what went wrong."
"Really?" said Simon, absently moving in the direction of the worktop. The kettle had come to a boil and switched itself off. "Tea?"
"Milk but no sugar for me," said the foreman, undiverted. "Thought it must have been something to do with the ironing board, they did, because that was lying on the floor beside her when her husband found her. There was a pile of nearly dry washing in the laundry basket beside her, too."
"And a television," supplemented his assistant eagerly, "because she always did the ironing while she watched her favourite afternoon programme."
"My wife, too," said the foreman. "Thanks," he added, cradling the mug between his large dirt-ingrained hands. "I don’t know which channel, though," he added in the interests of accuracy, "because I’m not home then."
Simon decided this was not the moment for reciting the famous quote, "But what was the play like, Mrs. Lincoln?"
"Two lumps for me," said his mate, stretching his hand out for his tea. "They thought she must have died just before the programme came on at four o’clock . . . and that’s what the man who did the post-mortem said, too."
"Pathologist," supplied Simon.
"But they never found out how she came to be electrocuted," said the foreman, addressing himself to his drink. "Never."
"Funny, that," murmured Simon Cullen.
"It said in the paper that her husband was at work at the time it happened," expanded the foreman.
"At a meeting all afternoon," chimed in Fred. "It said that, too. About a dozen people there with him all the time."
"My wife spends a lot of her time at work in meetings," said Simon. "I know because she tells me when not to ring the office."
"If you ask me," opined the foreman, pushing back his chair, "most meetings are a waste of time. Let’s get started here, Fred."
Simon swept up the empty mugs and drifted off to take a look at the utility room with new eyes. It was situated off the kitchen and housed the central heating boiler and the washing machine as well as all the impedimenta associated with living in a sizeable house in the country—including Simon’s new green wellies. The Wetherbys’ ironing board was gone and Simon had stood the Cullens’ one in its place but otherwise the room looked very much as it must have done in the days of the previous occupants.
Propped up beside the ironing board and the radiator was the clotheshorse which Simon and Charlotte had brought with them from their old house. In fact, the only relic of the Wetherbys’ regime was one of those old-fashioned wooden clothes airers which could be lowered by a thin rope, loaded with damp washing and then hoisted back up to the ceiling above the boiler to dry.
Simon examined everything in the room with his customary care but was no wiser at the end of his survey. He did not know, in fact, that he had reached the same conclusion as the investigating authorities had—that something must have electrified the metal of the ironing board.
When he gave the men their tea in the afternoon he said, "You might just put a lick of paint on that small scratch on the radiator in there next time one of you has a paintbrush in his hand."
"No problem," said the foreman. "No sugar, thanks."
"Two lumps for me," Fred reminded him. "Worked out how it was done, have you?"
"Done?" said Simon.
Fred gave him a knowing wink. "They said the husband had got a lady love tucked away somewhere."
The foreman set his mug down and said sapiently, "What he had got was an alibi, so you mind what you say here, Fred."
Fred bridled. "There’s no smoke without fire. Besides, don’t forget that most murderers are widowers."
"Because they’ve killed their wives," nodded Simon. "I’ve heard that one before."
"Remember," pronounced the foreman magisterially, "it didn’t say anything about that in the newspapers—not even the Sunday ones."
"What did it say?" asked Simon, adding in spite of himself, "I suppose it is theoretically possible that the ironing board was live—electrified, that is—a long time before Mrs. Wetherby touched it . . ."
"Not before one o’clock it wasn’t," insisted Fred vigorously. "Ivy Middleton was here all that morning. She put the dirty washing in the machine and started it up before she went home like she always did, dinner-time."
"That’s right," said the foreman. "I was forgetting about Ivy. She touched that ironing board and she didn’t get an electric shock, did she, Fred?"
Simon and Charlotte hadn’t kept Mrs. Ivy Middleton on to do the rough housework. As Charlotte had put it so pithily when she ("they") paid for the Manor, "We can afford Cullingoak Manor—just—but not the extras as well." Ivy had rated as an extra and so Simon saw entirely to the running of the house.
"There could have been some cable and a time switch," he said. It was just as well Charlotte was at work. She wouldn’t have approved of his wasting the workmen’s time, let alone his gossiping with them like this. "You know, an electric wire from the nearest power point to the ironing board, timed to come live after Mrs. Middleton had left."
"Now, if I may say so, that’s where you’re wrong," said the foreman placidly. "The police thought of that, too." He took a swig from his mug. "It so happens that there wasn’t any such timer in the house or garden and believe you me, they searched for it."
"I can quite see that they would have," murmured Simon.
"And," the foreman tapped the table with his forefinger for greater emphasis, "they had a witness that the husband—Peter Wetherby, that is—didn’t leave the house before the police arrived so he couldn’t have hidden a timer anywhere outside the house."
"Got it in for him, haven’t you?" said Simon absently. "This Peter Wetherby." Suddenly something about the name jarred in his mind. He couldn’t quite place the memory but it was there, somewhere.
"Ironing boards don’t come alive on their own," shrugged the foreman, starting to get to his feet.
"I reckon," said Fred, "it was suicide."
"Suicide?" echoed Simon.
Fred nodded. "I think she connected a wire from the socket to the ironing board herself and her husband came home and found her and removed the evidence pretty quickly. Didn’t want anyone to know she’d done it because of this other woman, see?"
The foreman said, "You’re a great one for your theories, Fred, but it don’t get the work done. Come along now, let’s get started here or we’ll never be done."
Over the next few weeks Simon had to agree Fred’s suicide theory was the most tenable. Something like a kettle flex could have been plugged into the nearest power point and the bare wires at the other end made to touch the metal of the ironing board. Turn the switch on, clasp the ironing board, and Bob’s your uncle. A married man becomes a widower in no time at all. And all the husband would have had to do in order to destroy any evidence of a suicide was to put the proper plug back on the appliance before he rang the police—the work of a moment—and no-one would be any the wiser. Oh, and perhaps change the face of the plug in case there were burn marks there, too.
He gave this thought whenever Charlotte was away. She was away for the bank rather a lot these days. At least he thought it was for the bank until they telephoned one weekend needing to speak to her urgently and he referred them to their conference but they said they weren’t having one. That was when he remembered what it was about the foreman’s use of Peter Wetherby’s Christian name that had bothered him. Charlotte had known it even though the estate agent had only given them his surname. When he came to think of it, she had known, too, about Cullingoak Manor being for sale at a low price before it had even been advertised. That still didn’t explain how Mrs. Wetherby had died while her husband was well away from the action unless it had been by her own hand. Simon Cullen was rapidly coming to the conclusion that it hadn’t been. That was when he laid his plan.
"Darling," he said to Charlotte the next evening, "I think I’m going to have to have a couple of nights away next week. Uncle George wants me to go up to Yorkshire to see him."
"Fine," she said. "Remember me to the old boy. Not that I’ve seen him since the wedding."
"No more you have," he said. Charlotte didn’t much care for his relations. "I’ll go on Tuesday and be back Thursday evening . . . that all right?"
"Fine," she said. "By the way, before I forget, I may be back a bit late on Friday. We’ve got a big meeting at the bank Friday afternoon." She smiled. "Salary review committee—mustn’t miss that."
"Not on any account," he agreed gravely.
Simon studiously avoided the utility room when he got back to the Manor on Thursday evening. He and Charlotte had a quiet evening together. "You might switch the washing machine on first thing, Simon," she said as they went upstairs. "I went through my summer clothes while you were away and want to get them ready for storage."
"They’ll all be beautifully ironed," he said, "by the time you get home."
"It’s getting too chilly to wear them now. I must say I was quite glad of the central heating when I got in yesterday."
"The afternoons are getting cooler," he agreed amiably.
As soon as Charlotte had left for work on Friday morning—the day of her big meeting—Simon entered the utility room very carefully. He didn’t switch on the washing machine, though. Instead he examined the room with extreme caution. There was indeed a plug in the power socket and a length of flex tucked away behind the radiator. It ran, almost out of sight at ground level, to the nearest leg of the ironing board. Fred had been right about that, anyway.
But he wasn’t into metals and Simon was. Also behind the radiator, firmly taped to it, was what he had been looking for—that which would make the whole thing live. But not just yet. Not until the heating warmed the radiator.
"Clever," he murmured to himself appreciatively. "Very clever." It was a short metal bar which neither the police nor anyone else would have looked at twice had they noticed it lying around. It was half copper and half steel lengthways. It was pressed firmly against the back of the radiator, the copper side set alongside, but not touching, one of the two wires in the flex—which had been scraped bare. He checked the thermostat and found that the central heating was set to come on at three o’clock as usual. Simon thought it would take about an hour for the copper part of the bar to heat up enough to expand to touch the flex and complete the electrical circuit. He went back to the kitchen to wait for something to happen to establish that he was alive and well while Charlotte was away at work.
At twelve o’clock their next door neighbour came to the door. "Your wife has just rung me, Mr. Cullen, to say she thinks she can’t have put the telephone back on its hook properly because she keeps getting the engaged signal."
"I’ll check," he said, knowing it would be so. "Thanks for letting me know . . . Like a coffee?"
"Some other time, if I may, please . . ."
"I’ll look forward to that," he said and meant it. His neighbours really were very agreeable people indeed. Getting to know them in future was going to be a pleasure.
When Charlotte got back at six o’clock he was out of sight behind the utility room door. She went straight there, calling out his name as she did so. He did not answer but when she was right inside the room and standing, puzzled, in front of the ironing board, he stepped out quietly from behind the door and gave her a gentle push towards it. She put out her hands to save herself and screamed as she touched the ironing board.
At his trial, before pronouncing a life sentence on him, the judge described Peter Wetherby as the clever, calculating and callous killer of the two women in his life.
The End