Gemma Makes Her Mark, page 11
‘Yes good thinking, Mark. Let’s get her to spend next weekend at ours and we can come and stay here over Christmas and try to get it all finished then. There’s lots of room here and you’re right, the week between Christmas and New Year would be ideal. Dr Ferguson will be happy to get things done quickly and without too many questions, and so will the funeral people too.’
Gemma put her arms around Mark and kissed him.
‘I do fancy you when you take charge and spell out how you’re going to sort everything out. Let’s get back home after lunch, we don’t need to spend two nights here. We’ll make sure my mother’s comfy and I’ll leave her some sandwiches for tea. You can do what you want with me then.’
She hoped that, when it came down to it, letting him down gently might work but realistically was hardly confident it would. In fact, the way Mark had been recently, rather too needy and going on about their future together, she knew that was an absurdly optimistic expectation. Still, one thing at a time.
Wednesday 6 January 1982
It had been a long day and quite a stressful last couple of weeks but as Gemma poured a final drink for herself and Mark, whisky for him and a glass of wine for her, she felt a glow of something akin to satisfaction. Everything had gone so smoothly and basically just as they had intended. The funeral that morning had been a very low-key affair: firstly a service at the crematorium in Aldershot, the nearest to Farnham, and then a small gathering at the family house in Lynch Lane. Ruth had come down from London along with a couple who had known Anne and Jeffrey when he had worked at the Cunard office in London. They had stayed until early evening. Dr Ferguson had come, along with his wife, there had been two of Anne’s golfing friends and a few of the neighbours who’d got to know Anne since the party there last September. And of course, and seemingly more upset than anyone, Edith, along with her husband. That had been a surprise to Gemma as she had never seen or even heard mention of a husband, but Alfred turned out to be a surprisingly chirpy character who insisted on telling everyone how her mother had depended on Edith for just about everything. Her uncle’s partner Joseph had sent a condolence card from Spain but had been too ill to travel.
Gemma pulled her armchair over to the French windows, next to Mark, and looked out over the patio and lawn and to the fruit trees beyond.
‘I’ll be glad to get rid of this house, it deserves to have someone living here who appreciates it. You know, I always dreamt of being part of a big family here, I even had an imaginary one when I was younger. It’s a shame to say but it was never the place it should have been for me, or my dad, and probably not for Mother either. I wonder how long it will all take to sort out.’
Mark reached across and put his hand on her arm.
‘I think that’s probably for the best. Yes, it is a lovely place and maybe does deserve better; we’ve done what we planned and it’s time to move on. I can’t believe how well it’s worked out; as well as the house, you’ve just got the odds and ends from the will to deal with and it’ll all be over. I’ll organise selling off any bits and pieces worth anything. And you’ve sorted your job out as well so don’t have to worry about that anymore.’
Gemma was pretty confident that the will and her legacy would be no problem. When Jeffrey was ill he and her mother had prepared a will that left everything to Anne herself and then, if and when she should die, to Gemma. There were no complications and no additions, she was sure of that; her mother probably had no intention of dying when it was drawn up. It had been useful that after her father died, over four years ago now, his side of the family had had virtually no contact with Anne or Gemma since then. As well as that Anne herself had been an only child and had no family left apart from Gemma. Anyway she knew it wasn’t going to be anything like in those films and plays where everyone gathered in the living room while the will was read out to the accompaniment of knowing looks, nods and groans; and with the finger of suspicion pointing directly to the main beneficiary.
‘Well I’m going to see the family’s solicitors next week, they’re based in South Street right in the centre of town and have been there for ages apparently. I phoned them and spoke to one of the directors I think, he said he’d actually known Jeffrey quite well and that he couldn’t foresee any problems; and I’m the executor as well, which is fine apparently. It’ll just take a few weeks to finalise details about her assets and do the paperwork and then we can put this place on the market.’
They sat back and listened to the rain splattering on the patio and outdoor table and chairs. Their feelings of relief, satisfaction almost, were tempered with a difficult to explain air of gloom. Mark broke the silence.
‘This might be our last night up here, it’ll be nice to get back to Petworth. We seem to have been away for ages and it’s been a bloody strain at times, but it’s worked out fine. Are you sure you’re okay with everything, Gemma? You must feel a bit weird.’
‘Yes, of course; you’ve sorted it all out brilliantly.’
Gemma asked Mark to light her a cigarette; she let the events of the past few days play back in her mind. She didn’t feel anything like remorse, she had done what she had felt was right, she had done it for herself and for her dad too.
***
Anne had died on Tuesday 29th December. Mark and Gemma had stayed over in Farnham for Christmas Day and Boxing Day and had made sure they had had plenty of heavy meals and lots to drink. In spite of the real reason for them being there it had been quite fun in a bizarrely black sort of way and Anne had obviously really enjoyed herself. Gemma had been quite happy to see that but it had no impact on her resolve; it was almost as if they were giving her mother one last hurrah and somehow it seemed to have made everything kind of easier. She could see what Mark had meant when he’d said it provided a weird form of rationalisation for it all.
Mark had stuck to his plan of adding a sizeable, and as it transpired fatal, amount of thallium salt to the Boxing Day dinner and they had gone back home on the Sunday afternoon. Just as they were getting ready to drive back on the Tuesday morning to see how she was, and to see if the thallium had done its business, Edith had phoned them in an evidently distressed state and said she couldn’t get Anne out of bed and feared the worse. Gemma had put her foot down and they got there within forty minutes and sure enough Anne was clearly dead and had been for a few hours at least.
Gemma had calmed Edith down as best she could and Mark called Dr Ferguson. He had come round straightaway and after examining Anne had signed the medical certificate and put down the cause as respiratory failure as a result of bronchopneumonia. It seemed a bit of a mish-mash of an explanation to Mark but he wasn’t about to complain. Dr Ferguson said how sorry he was but that it was perhaps not unexpected and told them to register the death at the Farnham register office and to get at least a couple of copies of the death certificate. Gemma had done that the next day and there’d been no comment when she’d said that they wanted the funeral as soon as practicable.
It certainly seemed to help that it all happened in the Christmas and New Year holiday period; it appeared as if everyone just wanted to move things along and to get on with a new year. The local funeral directors had called in with remarkable efficiency early on the Wednesday morning and it had all been planned and arranged with relatively little fuss. They were even able to fit in the funeral for the following week, particularly as Gemma said her mother had specified she didn’t want to be buried and a cremation was what they had agreed on. Edith had been more upset than anyone and Gemma resolved to make sure she gave her something when the will was finalised, maybe one or two of the vases as a keepsake and a few hundred pounds too.
Part Three: Autumn 1982
Sunday 19 September 1982
‘You can’t let him drag you down, Gemma, you’ve got to be your own woman. Surely now you don’t need to stay stuck out in the middle of nowhere. Why don’t you come and live up here in town? We’d have a great time; you could really go for it now. You’re an independent woman, after all.’
Rebecca had been one of the few school friends Gemma had kept in touch with even though they had seen little of one another since doing their A-levels at Farnham Girls Grammar School back in 1975. At that time, Rebecca and Gemma, along with a few carefully chosen others, had considered themselves as the ‘in-crowd’ at school – pretty well off, good looking and knowing it. They were the ones who had older boyfriends with access to cars. It was little surprise that since then she had developed a persona that was a kind of cross between a second wave feminist and an upper class debutante. They were sitting outside the Crown in Princedale Road, Holland Park, along with Victoria, who had been the Head Girl at Farnham in their final year. Although she had never been particularly close to Victoria, Rebecca had met up with her by chance when she’d been browsing the various boutiques and vintage clothing shops in Ladbroke Grove earlier in the summer. They’d gone for a coffee and cake at one of the trendy little cafés there and found out that, without having realised it before, they both worked for the BBC at Shepherd’s Bush, just the next tube stop down the Central Line from Holland Park. After catching up on the last few years, they had agreed to meet up during their lunch breaks whenever they could. It hadn’t been long before Victoria suggested Rebecca move into the apartment on Norland Square which her father had bought a few years previously as an investment. Rebecca had leapt at the opportunity.
In their mid-twenties, living in the increasingly fashionable Notting Hill Gate to Holland Park area and with fancy-sounding titles for what was effectively secretarial work at the BBC, it had worked out nicely for both of them. They were keen to impress on Gemma the advantages of what they clearly felt was their current and cool lifestyle; and to be fair, it had certainly struck a chord with Gemma. Over the last few months, really since packing in her job with the probation service the previous December, Gemma had been getting more and more bored with life in Petworth. As she had planned, Gemma had given in her notice and left the office in Littlehampton not long before her mother, Anne, had been sorted. It was strange that neither she nor Mark ever really referred to themselves as murderers or killers and just seemed to see themselves as arrangers, expediters even, although passing it off as some form of involuntary euthanasia might be stretching a point.
Initially she had been kept busy, dealing with the will, the valuation of the house in Farnham, encouraging Mark to sell off whatever he could from the family’s belongings and all the attendant paperwork. There had been a period of almost basking in the after-glow of success and revenge and she and Mark had even had some quite pleasant times together. However, she hadn’t changed her resolve that she and Mark were never going to be forever. Since early summer, really, the lack of change and direction had been preying on her mind and she’d been getting increasingly tetchy. It struck her as ironic that as she tried to make it clear to Mark that she wanted to do more with her life he seemed to be ever more content with their lifestyle and to have become more clingy than usual – it was as if her trying to distance herself had the opposite effect on him.
The thing was that without work, and without any really close friends, she was finding him more and more irritating. Fair enough, he’d been great, he’d done what she, and they, had wanted but that was it for her. Some nice times together and reasonable sex weren’t enough for her, but whenever she mentioned wanting to do more by herself she could sense Mark’s panic and desperation almost, and she hadn’t bothered to pursue things. And then, to cap it all, last week he had even asked her if she wanted to marry him when she’d told him she was planning to go away for this weekend. The thing was that she wasn’t sure if Mark’s behaviour might not be a kind of camouflage, anyway; a part of her didn’t or couldn’t believe that he was quite as contented with life as he made out. He had taken to going to the local pub by himself and kept harping on about her lack of affection – by which he meant sexual interest, of course. Perhaps the message was getting across to him; but either way she knew she had to do something different with her life. It was in desperation almost that she had looked up and contacted her old friend Rebecca, a few weeks back now. Rebecca had told her that she and Victoria had met up and were living together and that they’d love to see Gemma. They had arranged for her to come up to stay for the weekend; and she was enjoying herself in a way she hadn’t for some while.
Although the Crown was still very much a local pub it was beginning to move slightly upmarket along with that part of West London in general. They were enjoying a pretty decent bottle of Mateus Rosé and the brief splash of an Indian summer, which certainly complemented one another. It was warm enough for them to be wearing crop tops over the designer jeans they’d picked up yesterday afternoon on a shopping trip down the King’s Road in Chelsea.
Gemma had come up to London on the Friday afternoon and the three of them had gone to see the widely acclaimed revival of Guys and Dolls at the National Theatre that night. After their Saturday afternoon shopping expedition, last night they had gone to town in more ways than one. Victoria, whose family seemed to be pretty well connected, was a member of the swanky Annabel’s nightclub in Berkeley Square and had booked the three of them in. She had helped persuade Gemma to buy a loose, flowy, knee-length dress in cream for the occasion from Peter Jones up by Sloane Square, along with some fancy, high-heeled, red sandal shoes. Gemma had never spent so much on her clothes but, as she told herself, she’d never been such a rich woman as now and she might as well get used to it.
The evening had been a great success: Annabel’s had been packed with what was obviously a very wealthy crowd but even so the three of them had attracted more than their fair share of attention. They’d hardly had to buy a drink all night and then had been driven back to the flat by someone who appeared to be a cross between chauffeur and dogsbody of the City banker who’d spent a couple of hours trying to get Gemma to go back to his own apartment with him, before doing the decent thing and seeing them all home for the price of her phone number and a kiss on the cheek.
Like Rebecca, Victoria was delighted to catch up with another old school friend and also with the prospect of having some different people to hang around with. She was full of herself; clearly in her element at being the one who’d brought the three of them all together and organised their weekend activities.
‘We were bloody amazing last night; and you, Gemma, that Simon, he couldn’t take his eyes off you and had made sure he’d got your number. And those other two guys who sent the bottle of champagne over, did you see the looks we were getting. My God, Rebecca’s right, you’ve just got to come and live up here. Why not buy somewhere yourself? Like you said the other day, you’ve got your own money. I mean, I know I’ve got Daddy’s but that’s not same as your own.’
It certainly sounded pretty tempting but then there was Mark. Gemma’s plan had been to extricate herself from Mark soon after her mother’s death but dealing with her family’s estate and selling the house in Farnham had taken longer than she had envisioned and they were still together, and, unless she had misread him, as far as Mark seemed to imagine, were pretty much a permanent fixture.
Even though she never intended for her and Mark to be forever, and even though she had basically used him to get things sorted out, Gemma did feel a twinge of guilt as well. She and Mark had been together for getting on for two years now and to be fair they had had their moments. It was always an option that they could do what Mark plainly wanted and settle down with enough money to live more than comfortably for as long as they wished. The thing was that she wanted something more, or at least different. It wasn’t just the weekend in London; she couldn’t help feeling that he held her back, that what he wanted was fine for him but not for her. To put a more positive spin on it, she didn’t think it was the best thing for Mark anyway; he might go on about how pleased he was with things, but he wasn’t the type to sit back and just take it easy. He might be a good deal older than her but he was still only in his mid-thirties.
Enjoying the wine and sun, Gemma was flattered and excited that Victoria and Rebecca were so keen on her moving up to London.
‘Yes I suppose I could, the thing is Mark. He assumes we’re going to stay together and I didn’t tell you this, he even asked me to marry him the other day when I told him I was coming up here. Typically desperate, really. I’m not sure he really meant it but the thing is I do feel bad about it.’
Rebecca and Victoria couldn’t contain themselves. Rebecca started.
‘Oh Gemma, like I just said, he’ll drag you down, you know that, you’ve said so yourself. You must put yourself first.’
Victoria chipped in.
‘Yes, and you’ve told us you don’t really love him anyway. Look, he might be a nice guy, I’m sure he is, but you can’t spend your life with him just because of that. You know you’ll have more fun up here with us around.’
She paused to let Gemma think before pushing on.
‘Look ,why don’t you stay tonight as well? There’s no rush for you to get back to Sussex, is there? We could go and eat at the Belvedere – it’s brilliant, it’s some sort of seventeenth-century mansion apparently, on Abbotsbury Road. Daddy knows the manager or something and the food’s meant to be amazing. We can talk it through, it always helps to get things out into the open and to have someone who’ll listen. You can stay with Rebecca and me whenever you want while you’re getting everything fixed.’
Gemma realised they were just being honest and she knew they were trying to help and were right too; of course, what they didn’t know was that she and Mark had planned and carried through the murder of her mother and that she had to be pretty careful with how she handled him. She had been assiduous in making sure that there was no direct evidence linking her to her mother’s death: she’d bought none of the poisons, except the mushrooms, of course, but there were no receipts involved there, and she knew she could manage Roger easily enough if she had to. As well as that, given Mark’s previous record, she had more than enough on him to ensure it would be straightforward enough to put all the blame and guilt on him should it come to it. She was well aware that, logically, if it came down to his word against hers there would only be one winner, but nonetheless she was also well aware that he could at the very least make life more than a little awkward for her. As well as that, though, she did acknowledge that Mark had helped her avenge her father’s death and life and she never intended to be unfair to him, or to hurt him unnecessarily. She would try her best to let him down as gently as possible. Anyway, that was all a little beside the point for now: why not stay another night? She was beginning to like London and could see herself having a future here.
