The Duel

Her main fear was that she would be disturbed before it was over. She could imagine people running in and dragging her off Stan, the policeman putting on hand cuffs and taking her away to prison, endless interrogations demanding to know why she had killed her husband. Would they think it was assisted suicide or that she wanted revenge for her murdered lover? Nobody came.

After fifteen minutes she got up and removed the pillow and shirt. There was no heart monitor so she held her makeup mirror to his lips, trying to detect any hint of breathing. Again she searched for a pulse. Then she replaced the pillow under his head and fastened the oxygen mask, put the shirt in her bag, bent and kissed Stan's forehead and walked out.

She was tired from lack of sleep as well as from the shock of what she'd done. Disconcertingly, she felt exhilaration, the tears streaming down her face. The policeman on the entrance got up from his seat and looked at her with alarm.

"Go home and get some sleep," he said kindly. "Things will look better when its light."

Seated in her car in the car park, she realised she had nowhere to stay and she couldn't face the two hundred mile drive home. Dawn was just brightening the eastern horizon. She curled up in her seat and went to sleep.

It was eleven o'clock when she was woken by the ringing of her phone. Her neck was stiff, her mouth dry, the events of the night like a dream.

The call was from a ward administrator who regretted to inform her that her husband had died during the night. Suzie waited for what would follow, but that was it. The administrator advised her that if she wanted to collect her husband's effects, they would be held on the ward for twenty-four hours.

Suzie got out of the car and saw that she had been given a parking fine while she slept. She retraced her steps through the building. The policeman was gone and Stan's side ward had been cleaned out ready for the next patient. She went to the office and spoke to the ward sister, new since the night shift. When Suzie explained who she was, the sister produced a small bag with Stan's phone and wallet. There were no clothes and no mention of a missing shirt. Stan was in the mortuary and Suzie asked to see the doctor's death certification. It was timed an hour after she left the ward and referred to death caused by carcinoma and injury trauma to the pelvis and hip.

"Will there be a post mortem?" she asked the nurse.

"Not in these situations. With such aggressive cancers, the body just gives up. It's not important to know which of your husband's cancers killed him."

She searched the nurse's face and the nurse looked back unblinkingly, without any secret message of complicity. So the doctors had fucked up too and couldn't be bothered to see that Stan had been murdered. Life is cheap. She wouldn't go to prison, and that meant she had to take charge of the rest of her life.

Eleven: Life after death

It needed time for Suzie to find her bearings. She took a month's holiday and walked the Coast to Coast path, following Stan's footsteps. It would have been good to have done it with Stan, but she enjoyed herself for the first time since the murders. At the site of his fatal accident she left a letter buried under a stone in which she had written the apology she never had a chance to give to him.

When she got home, she found she had lost interest in her job and the large death in service payment from Stan's pension fund allowed her to give it up. The house was inextricably associated with Stan and she couldn't bring herself to use the sitting room, although Clifford's blood was long gone. She sold up, moved to London and found a poorly paid job as legal advisor for a charity working to help young offenders. The work absorbed her completely and she met many admirable and generous people, including many charming men. Occasionally she went out for a meal with one, but had a reputation for being rather a dry stick with an ironic tongue. Every year she went on a walking holiday, the last year being the GR20 through the mountains of Corsica. Stan would have loved it.

About a year after the drama, she received an invitation to a memorial service for Clifford. She thought hard about what to do and decided she must go. It was held in St George's Catholic Cathedral, Southwark, and there must have been five hundred people there. Clifford, it seems, had been an important man. She watched Clifford's family and listened to the eulogies and couldn't relate them to the man she had known so imperfectly. Afterwards there was a reception at a local hotel, but she went back to work instead.