by Amanda M Grant
I do not know why I have such a fancy for this little café. I have never been there, of course, and shall never visit in person unless my present circumstances take a dramatic and unexpected turn. But still I dream. The librarian here let me have a copy of its menu, which she downloaded off their website. I was so taken with it that, on my next allocated library slot, I persuaded her to print copies of their photo gallery too. Alas, prison resources do not stretch to a colour printer, but I can flesh out the details in my imagination. I spend many an hour poring over these pages, limited as they are, wondering which cake or pastry I would choose first and whether I might plump for a pot of their Earl Grey or be more adventurous from their Italian coffee options.
It was in a similar café that I met my first husband, the dull but affluent Roger. After some considerable research, I’d discovered the quaint Café Du Coin on a leafy side-street in the town of Harrogate. My practice, in those days, was to visit the café on a daily basis alternating between mid-morning and early afternoon. It soon became apparent that the morning crowd was generally of a more promising nature, new retirees with time on their hands and money in their pockets. The afternoon visitors were less prepossessing: harassed businessmen; nouveau riche housewives; precocious school students. I switched to mornings only, ingratiating myself with the café owner, Nazim, who took to reserving the window-seat table for me, the one which gave the best views onto the small park opposite. And it was from that very table I spied Roger, lumbering across the grass, his large, black umbrella inverted in the wind. He twice attempted to rectify the situation but to no avail. And thus, he entered the café sopping wet and in desperate need of a table. As luck would have it, Café Du Coin was exceptionally busy, it being a Friday before the Bank Holiday Weekend. I flashed a warm and welcoming smile in Roger’s direction, ostentatiously removed my handbag and other belongings from the empty seat opposite me and beckoned him over. How easy it all was. I knew Roger’s type, of course, I’d taken out various subscriptions to golfing magazines, the Financial Times, The Lady. Over the course of the next few weeks, I slowly and skilfully reeled him in until, shortly before Roger’s seventieth birthday, the grand proposal was made. And, oh, how happy he was at my eager acceptance, how jubilant to think he’d landed the perfect catch. I allowed him that fantasy at least.
Life with Roger was as tedious as one would expect, but he was a man of impeccable manners, good taste and an open wallet so I had little to complain about. We lasted a good six months before I began to hatch my plans for his demise. He’d altered his will in my favour almost upon our return from honeymoon, a tiresome week in St Andrews, and I calculated that an unfortunate incident in the second half of the year would be unlikely to draw much attention. And thus it was that ‘Operation Stair Carpet’ was unleashed on my unsuspecting soon-to-be former husband.
Over a period of weeks, I’d loosened the stair rod on the top of the landing to such a degree that the carpet provided the perfect trip hazard. On the day of Roger’s decease, I’d prepped the kitchen for my alibi and arranged several books and files of Roger’s on the top few stairs to further impede his descent. A slight nudge from behind sent him clattering down the Axminster, leaving him in an unceremonious heap at the bottom. Timing was the key to the next step of the plan. I stepped over my dying husband and headed to the kitchen where I proceeded to bake the two batches of drop scones I’d prepared earlier. Once they were out of the oven and on the cooling racks, I checked that Roger had breathed his last then called for an ambulance. How awful I felt, I told the nice ambulance driver, and to think I was busy baking in the kitchen and didn’t hear the accident. He passed me more of the sickeningly sweetened tea he’d made, and I finished off my warm scone, rich with melted butter.
My second husband was even easier to trick. I’d studied the obituary columns for a few months before settling on the recently widowed Gianni Mancini, owner of Mancini’s hotel and restaurant chain. Gianni resided at his main hotel in Richmond-upon-Thames. I discovered he breakfasted in the hotel’s tearoom between nine and ten each morning. By now, I had the money to look at ease and dress the part for such a prestigious venue, and I was soon inveigling myself into Gianni’s affections. We honeymooned in Venice, enjoying the delights of afternoon tea at Caffè Florian each day before taking a gondola back to our hotel. Dinners were always splendid affairs – Gianni was a brilliant food and wine expert – and I truly believe we could have been happy together had it not been for his annoying snoring and roving eye.
On our return to Richmond, I began to put my next plan into action. ‘Operation Freezer’ was a simple affair with minimum advanced planning. Three weeks before his departure date, I persuaded Gianni to host a party to celebrate our first anniversary. The guest list was considerable and the menu ambitious. Would it be a good idea to store our food in the unused walk-in freezer in the basement, I’d pondered aloud. Keep the contents a secret lest light-fingered members of staff helped themselves from our supplies. And so it went, until the fateful night I’d marked on my calendar. Gianni and I dined late in his suite, finishing our meal with copious glasses of a particularly good port. I suggested, apropos of nothing, that I would like nothing more than to show him the latest item I’d purchased for the party. The frozen centrepiece, a pair of ice swans, had arrived earlier and I so wanted him to see it. How easily the lies came then. The delivery had been made to the rear doors when the staff were in their daily briefing. I hadn’t even unwrapped it. How romantic to share this moment together.
Gianni entered the freezer first, eager to get the unveiling over so he could go to his bed. I lingered by the door, ostensibly ensuring it didn’t close accidentally, and urged him to go to the large box at the very back.
Breakfast in bed arrived at ten the next morning. The girl who brought it asked if I knew where Gianni was as he hadn’t shown up at his usual table. I suggested we check in his room where, unsurprisingly, the detritus from last night’s meal still lay and there was no sign of Gianni. A thorough search of the hotel threw up no clues until the assistant manager suggested we check the basement freezer as it had been turned on in recent weeks. How grateful I was for his intervention. And there we found poor frozen Gianni, curled up in a ball like a baby. I almost felt sorry for him.
The police asked the usual questions of me and the hotel staff, but it was plain to all that my drunken husband had simply locked himself in the freezer. A terrible accident. I was inconsolable and retreated to our house in Berkshire.
Life was comfortable and I really didn’t intend to marry again for fortune’s sake. Until Francis accosted me in the small, waterside tea-room I often frequented. I looked sad, he said, no-one should eat alone on a beautiful day. Francis was dashing, I admit, with the loveliest of lilting Irish accents. He owned a large family pile by the coast in Galway. We could go there after the wedding, he’d promised.
But there was no stately home, no Irish fortune. I’d been duped. Hoist with my own petard, so to speak. I’m of the firm opinion that murder is best done in cold blood. No element of passion, no heat of revenge should spoil the cool calculation, or mar the detailed plotting. And that was my undoing. In haste, I sought a fitting end to my mendacious husband. How grateful I was that my nemesis had his own Achilles’ heel: a nut allergy. He barely tasted the almonds in the cake I’d made as the thick, cloying icing he liked hid the flavour so well. How red his face went, how large his eyes. I turned away in the last minutes, unable to bear the weight of his accusatory stare. I phoned the ambulance almost immediately, as any wife would.
The ambulance was accompanied by a police car, which was, they assured me, common practice. I feigned the usual shock and disbelief, but something in the young sergeant’s eye alerted me to potential trouble. The post-mortem was conclusive: anaphylactic shock. Again, I showed my incredulity that such an event could occur under my roof. I was required to attend at the police station to answer a few questions. My mobile phone and computer were taken for analysis.
Apparently, we all leave a vast digital footprint behind us as we go. And mine was, to say the least, revelatory. I’d researched how long it took for a body to freeze to death, the incidences of fatalities by falling down the stairs … nut allergies. My fate was sealed.
So here you find me, sharing my cell with the bovine Sandra, who talks of nothing much of worth. I’ve learnt about her Gary and his psoriasis, how her Cheryl has another one on the way, what’s happening in her favourite soap operas. She sits opposite me at our little table for two, slurping her instant noodles from their plastic pot. The room is suffused with the smells of rank curry sauce and Sandra’s cheap deodorant. And I imagine myself back at Florian’s with an Aperol spritz listening to the orchestra play Verdi and Puccini, or I look again at the photos of the little café, picturing an encounter between myself and an unsuspecting prey. Ah, but it can never be.
Sandra found religion recently, which makes her presence in our shared cell an intolerable burden on me. It is not so much the hymn singing, though she is as tuneless as one would predict, but more the relentless talk of repentance and guilt. Sometimes, at night, she lies on the bunk below muttering prayers for her family and, though she assumes I can’t hear her, for me. I wonder if I’d miss Sandra’s company. The days would drag, perhaps, if I were sharing with one of the surlier types, and I would certainly not wish to be paired with someone of an aggressive bent. At least I have my library days, my books, my little café dreams.
But then Sandra kneels by her bunk, rolls of fat spilling out over her prison-issue sweatpants, and I feel the bile rising. She pulls her greasy hair into a ponytail, fastening it with a cheap elastic band. Then she reaches for the rosary she stows in a sock under her pillow, clutches it in her grubby little hands, and turns to me imploringly.
‘Is it all right if I pray aloud, Mary?’
She begins, ‘Our Father,’ and I watch her rolling the beads between her fingers as if her life depended on it. Then she clasps her hands in prayer, fingers pointed to the heavens. Stumpy fingers for one so large in girth. They remind me somehow, disgustingly, of mushrooms.
Nottinghamshire-based Amanda M Grant has been writing short stories for competitions since completing her MA in Creative Writing in 2019. She should be working on her novel, but the challenge of writing to tight deadlines with imposed genres is what motivates her. Her interests include WW1, the Victorians and psychopathy, all of which find their way into her writing.
