Scold's Bridle

by Walters, Minette

  She handed him the glass. "Who from?"

  "Unsigned."

  "What does it say?"

  "That you murdered an old man called Victor Sturgis for his walnut desk."

  Sarah pulled a wry face. "Actually, he did leave me a desk and it's a rather nice one, too. The matron at the nursing home gave it to me after he died. She said he wanted me to have it. I was very touched." She lifted weary eyebrows. "Did it say how I murdered him?"

  "You were seen suffocating him."

  "It makes a weird sort of sense. I was trying to prise his dentures out of his throat. The poor old boy swallowed them when he dozed off in his chair." She sighed. "But he was dead before I even started. I had a vague idea of trying mouth-to-mouth if I could unblock his airway. I suppose, from a distance, it might have looked as if I were suffocating him."

  Cooper nodded. He had checked the story already. "We've had a few letters, one way and another, and they're not all about you." He took an envelope from his pocket and handed it to her. "This is the most interesting. See what you make of it."

  "Should I touch the letter?" she asked doubtfully. "What about fingerprints?"

  "Well, that's interesting in itself. Whoever wrote it wore gloves."

  She took the letter from the envelope and spread it on the table. It was printed in block capitals:

  RUTH LASCELLES WAS IN CEDAR HOUSE THE DAY MRS. GILLESPIE DIED.

  SHE STOLE SOME EARRINGS. JOANNA KNOWS SHE TOOK THEM. JOANNA

  LASCELLES IS A PROSTITUTE IN LONDON. ASK HER WHAT SHE SPENDS HER

  MONEY ON. ASK HER WHY SHE TRIED TO KILL HER DAUGHTER. ASK HER WHY

  MRS. GILLESPIE THOUGHT SHE WAS MAD.

  Sarah turned the envelope over to look at the frank mark. It had been posted in Learmouth. "And you've no idea who wrote it?"

  "None at all."

  "It can't be true. You told me yourself that Ruth was under the watchful eye of her housemistress at school."

  He looked amused. "As I told you, I never set much store by alibis. If that young lady wanted to sneak out I can't see her housemistress stopping her."

  "But Southcliffe's thirty miles away," Sarah protested. "She couldn't have got here without a car."

  He changed tack. "What about this reference to madness? Did Mrs. Gillespie ever mention to you that her daughter was mad?"

  She considered this for a moment. "Madness is a relative term, quite meaningless out of context."

  He was unruffled. "So Mrs. Gillespie did mention something of the sort?"

  Sarah didn't answer.

  "Come on, Dr. Blakeney. Joanna's not your patient so you're not giving away any confidences. And let me tell you something else, she's not doing you any favours at the moment. Her view is that you had to kill the old lady PDQ before she had time to change her will back, and she isn't keeping those suspicions to herself."

  Sarah fingered her wine glass. "The only thing Mathilda ever said on the subject was that her daughter was unstable. She said it wasn't Joanna's fault but was due to incompatibility between Mathilda's genes and Joanna's father's genes. I told her she was talking rubbish but, at the time, I didn't know that Joanna's father was Mathilda's uncle. I imagine she was concerned about the problems of recessive genes but, as we didn't pursue it any further, I can't say for sure."

  "Inbreeding, in other words?"

  Sarah gave a small shrug of acquiescence. "Presumably."

  "Do you like Mrs. Lascelles?"

  "I hardly know her."

  "Your husband seems to get on with her well enough."

  "That's below the belt, Sergeant."

  "I don't understand why you're bothering to defend her. She's got her knife into you right up to the hilt."

  "Do you blame her?" She leaned her chin on her hand. "How would you feel if in a few short weeks, you discovered that you were the product of an incestuous relationship, that your father killed himself with an overdose, that your mother died violently either by her own hand or someone else's and that, to cap it all, the security you were used to was about to be snatched away and given to a stranger? She seems remarkably sane to me in the circumstances."

  He took a drink from his glass. "Do you know anything about her being a prostitute?"

  "No."

  "Or what she spends her money on?"

  "No."

  "Any ideas?"

  "It's nothing to do with me. Why don't you ask her?"

  "I have. She told me to mind my own business."

  Sarah chuckled. "I'd have done the same."

  He stared at her. "Has anyone ever told you you're too good to be true, Dr. Blakeney?" He spoke with a touch of sarcasm.

  She held his gaze, but didn't say anything.

  "Women in your position drive their husband's car through their rival's front door, or take a chainsaw to the rival's furniture. At the very least, they feel acute bitterness. Why don't you?"

  "I'm busy shoring up my house of cards," she said cryptically. "Have some more wine." She filled her own glass, then his. "It's not bad, this one. Australian Shiraz and fairly inexpensive."

  He was left with the impression that, of the two women, Joanna Lascelles was the less puzzling. "Would you have described yourself and Mrs. Gillespie as friends?" he asked.

  "Of course."

  "Why 'of course'?"

  "I describe everyone I know well as a friend."

  "Including Mrs. Lascelles."

  "No. I've only met her twice."

  "You wouldn't think it to listen to you."

  She grinned. "I have a fellow-feeling with her, Sergeant, just as I have with Ruth and Jack. You don't feel comfortable with any of us. Joanna or Ruth might have done it if they didn't know the will had been changed, Jack or I might have done it if we did. On the face of it, Joanna appears the most likely which is why you keep asking me questions about her. I imagine you've quizzed her pretty thoroughly about when she first learnt who her father was, so you'll know that she threatened her mother with exposure?" She looked at him enquiringly, and he nodded. "At which point, you're thinking, Mathilda turned round and said, any more threats like this and I'll cut you out altogether. So, in desperation, Joanna dosed her mother with barbiturates and slit the old lady's wrists, unaware that Mathilda had altered the will already."

  "What makes you think I don't feel comfortable with that scenario?"

  "You told me Joanna was in London that night."

  He shrugged. "Her alibi is very shaky. The concert ended at nine thirty which meant she had plenty of time to drive down here and kill her mother. The pathologist puts the time of death somewhere between nine p.m. on the Saturday night and three a.m. the following morning."

  "Which does he favour?"

  "Before midnight," Cooper admitted.

  "Then her defence barrister will tear your case to shreds. In any case, Mathilda wouldn't have bothered with pretence. She'd have told Joanna straight out she'd changed the will."

  "Perhaps Mrs. Lascelles didn't believe her."

  Sarah dismissed this with a smile. "Mathilda always told the truth. That's why everyone loathed her."

  "Perhaps Mrs. Lascelles just suspected that her mother might change the will."

  "It wouldn't have made any difference as far as Joanna was concerned. She was preparing to use her father's codicil to fight her mother in court. At that stage, it didn't matter a twopenny damn who Mathilda left the money to, not if Joanna could prove she had no right to it in the first place."

  "Perhaps it wasn't done for money. You keep wondering about the significance of the scold's bridle. Perhaps Mrs. Lascelles was revenging herself."

  But Sarah shook her head. "She hardly ever saw her mother. I think Mathilda mentioned that she came down once in the last twelve months. It would be a remarkable anger that could sustain itself at fever pitch over such a lengthy cooling period."

  "Not if Mrs. Lascelles is unstable," murmured Cooper.

  "Mathilda wasn't killed in a mad frenzy," said Sarah slowly. "It was all don
e with such meticulous care, even down to the flowers. You said yourself the arrangement was difficult to reproduce without help."

  The Sergeant drained his glass and stood up. "Mrs. Lascelles works freelance for a London florist. She specializes in bridal bouquets and wreaths. I can't see her finding a few nettles and daisies a problem." He walked to the door. "Good night, Dr. Blakeney. I'll see myself out."

  Sarah stared into her wine glass as she listened to his footsteps echoing down the hall. She felt like screaming, but was too afraid to do it. Her house of cards had never seemed so fragile.

  There was a conscious eroticism to every movement Joanna made and Jack guessed she had posed before, probably for photographs. For money or for self-gratification? The latter, he thought. Her vanity was huge.

  She was obsessed with Mathilda's bed and Mathilda's bedroom, aping her mother's posture against the piled pillows. Yet the contrast between the two women could not have been greater. Mathilda's sexuality had been a gentle, understated thing, largely because she had no interest in it; Joanna's was mechanical and obtrusive, as if the same visual stimuli could arouse all men in the same way on every occasion. Jack found it impossible to decide whether she was acting out of contempt for him or out of contempt for men in general.

  "Is your wife a prude?" she demanded abruptly after a long period of silent sketching.

  "Why do you ask?"

  "Because what I'm doing shocks you."

  He was amused. "Sarah has a very open and healthy libido and far from shocking me, what you're doing offends me. I resent being categorized as the sort of man who can be turned on by cheap pornographic posturing."

  She looked away from him towards the window and sat in strange self-absorption, her pale eyes unfocused. "Then tell me what Sarah does to excite you," she said finally.

  He studied her for a moment, his expression unreadable. "She's interested in what I'm trying to achieve in my work. That excites me."

  "I'm not talking about that, I'm talking about sex."

  "Ah," he said apologetically, "we're at cross purposes then. I was talking about love."

  "How very twee." She gave a small laugh. "You ought to hate her, Jack. She must have found someone else or she wouldn't have kicked you out."

  "Hate is too pervasive," he said mildly. "It leaves no room for anything else." With an idle flick of his fingers he tossed a torn page of his sketchpad towards her and watched it flutter to the bed beside her. "Read that," he invited. "If you're interested, it's my assessment of your character after three sittings. I jot down my impressions as I go along."

  With a remarkable lack of curiosity-most women, he thought, would have seized on it with alacrity-she retrieved it and gave a cursory glance to both sides of the paper. "There's nothing on it."

  "Exactly."

  "That's cheap."

  "Yes," he agreed, "but you've given me nothing to paint." He passed her the sketchpad. "I don't do glossy nudes and so far that's all you've offered me, bar a dreary and unremitting display of Electra complex, or more accurately demi-Electra complex. There's no attachment to a father, only a compulsive hostility towards a mother. You've talked about nothing else since I've been here." He shrugged. "Even your daughter doesn't feature. You haven't mentioned the poor kid once since she went back to school."

  Joanna got off the bed, wrapped herself in her dressing-gown and walked to the window. "You don't understand," she said.

  "Oh, I understand," he murmured. "You can't con a conman, Joanna."

  She frowned. "What are you talking about?"

  "One of the most colossal egos I've ever come across, and God knows I should recognize one when I see it. You may persuade the rest of the world that Mathilda wronged you, but not me. You've been screwing her all your life," he tipped a finger at her, "although you probably didn't know until recently just why you were so damn good at it."

  She didn't say anything.

  "I'll hazard a guess that your childhood was one endless tantrum, which Mathilda attempted to control with the scold's bridle. Am I right?" He paused. "And then what? Presumably you were bright enough to work out a way to stop her using it."

  Her tone was frigid. "I was terrified of the beastly thing. I used to convulse every time she produced it."

  "Easily done," he said with amusement. "I did it myself as a child when it suited me. So how old were you when you worked that one out?"

  Her peculiarly fixed gaze lingered on him, but he could feel the growing agitation underneath. "The only time she ever showed me any affection was when she put the scold's bridle over my head. She'd put her arms about me and rub her cheek against the framework. 'Poor darling,' she'd say, 'Mummy's doing this for Joanna.' " She turned back to the window. "I hated that. It made me feel she could only love me when I was at my ugliest." She was silent for a moment. "You're right about one thing, it wasn't until I found out that Gerald was my father that I understood why my mother was afraid of me. She thought I was mad. I'd never realized it before."

  "Didn't you ever ask her why she was afraid?"

  "You wouldn't even put that question if you'd really known my mother." Her breath misted the glass. "There were so many secrets in her life that I learnt very rapidly never to ask her anything. I had to make up a fantasy background for myself when I went to boarding school because I knew so little about my own." She dashed the mist away with an impatient hand and turned back into the room. "Have you finished? I've things to do."

  He wondered how long he could stall her this time before the demands of her addiction sent her scurrying for the bathroom. She was always infinitely more interesting under the stress of abstinence than she ever was drugged. "Southcliffe?" he asked. "The same school Ruth's at now?"

  She gave a hollow laugh. "Hardly. Mother wasn't so free with her money in those days. I was sent to a cheap finishing school which made no attempt to educate, merely groomed cattle for the cattle market. Mother had ambitions to marry me off to a title. Probably," she went on cynically, "because she hoped a chinless wonder would be so inbred himself he wouldn't notice the lunacy in me." She glanced towards the door. "Ruth has had far more spent on her than I ever had, and not because Mother was fond of her, believe me." Her mouth twisted. "It was all done to stamp out the Jew in her after my little faux pas with Steven."

  "Did you love him?"

  "I've never loved anyone."

  "You love yourself," he said.

  But Joanna had already gone. He could hear her scrabbling feverishly through the vanity case in the bathroom. For what? he wondered. Tranquillizers? Cocaine? Whatever it was, she wasn't injecting it. Her skin was flawless and beautiful like her face.

  Sarah Blakeney tells me her husband is an artist. A painter of personalities. I guessed he would be something in that line. It's what I would have chosen myself. The arts or literature.

  "I have heard of your paintings too, well enough. God hath given you one face and you make yourselves another. " Funnily enough, that might have been written for Sarah. She projects herself as a frank and open person, with strong, decided views and no hidden contradictions, but in many ways she is very insecure. She positively loathes confrontation, preferring agreement to disagreement, and will placate if she can. I asked her what she was afraid of, and she said: "I was taught to be accommodating. It's the curse of being a woman. Parents don't want to be left with spinsters on their hands so they teach their daughters to say yes to everything except sex."

  Times haven't changed then ...

  *8*

  Sarah was waiting outside the doorway of Barclays Bank in Hills Street when Keith Smollett arrived. She had her coat collar pulled up around her ears and looked pale and washed out in the grey November light. He gave her a warm hug and kissed her cold cheek. "You're not much of an advertisement for a woman who's just scooped the jackpot," he remarked, holding her at arm's length and examining her face. "What's the problem?"

  "There isn't one," she said shortly. "I just happen to think there's more to
life than money."

  He smiled, his thin face irritatingly sympathetic. "Would we be talking Jack by any chance?"

  "No, we would not," she snapped. "Why does everyone assume that my equanimity depends on a shallow, two-faced skunk whose one ambition in life is to impregnate every female he meets?"

  "Ah!"

  "What's that supposed to mean?" she demanded.

  "Just, ah!" He tucked her hand into his arm. "Things are pretty bad at the moment, then?" He gestured towards the road. "Which way to Duggan's office?"

  "Up the hill. And, no, things are not pretty bad at the moment. At the moment things are pretty good. I haven't felt so calm and so in control for years." Her bleak expression belied her words. She allowed herself to be drawn out on to the pavement.

  "Or so lonely, perhaps?"

  "Jack's a bastard."

  Keith chuckled. "Tell me something I don't know."

  "He's living with Mathilda Gillespie's daughter."

  Keith slowed down and eyed her thoughtfully. "Mathilda Gillespie as in the old dear who's left you her loot?"

  Sarah nodded.

  "Why would he want to live with her daughter?"

  "It depends who you listen to. Either because he feels guilty that I, his greedy wife, have deprived poor Joanna of her birthright, or he is protecting her and himself from my murderous slashes with a Stanley knife. No one appears to give any credence to the most obvious reason."

  "Which is?"

  "Common-or-garden lust. Joanna Lascelles is very beautiful." She pointed to a door ten yards ahead. "That's Duggan's office."

  He stopped and drew her to one side. "Let me get this straight. Are people saying you murdered the old woman for her money?"

  "It's one of the theories going the rounds," she said dryly. "My patients are abandoning me in droves." Dampness sparkled along her lashes. "It's the absolute pits if you want to know. Some of them are even crossing the road to avoid me." She blew her nose aggressively. "And my partners aren't happy about it either. Their surgeries are overflowing while mine are empty. If it goes on, I'll be out of a job."