by Joyce Porter
‘Really?’ said Miss Jones through pursed lips. ‘ Well, things were different in those days.’
‘More’s the pity,’ agreed the Hon. Con sadly. ‘In any case the Hellons aren’t what you might call out of the top drawer, are they? Good sound middle class – that’s about their mark.’
This, Miss Jones insisted, was precisely the point she was making. The lower classes and, exceptionally, the aristocracy might indulge in orgies of blood letting but this was not the way of the backbone of the country.
‘What about Crippen?’ demanded the Hon. Con.
Miss Jones saw that the Hon. Con. was in one of those moods and began to gather up the dirty dishes. ‘Tea or coffee, dear?’
‘Coffee.’ The Hon. Con got to her feet too and, typically empty-handed, followed Miss Jones out into the kitchen to continue the argument. ‘Hellon’s got to be looked at, you know. They reckon he was away from home last night but that only makes it look more suspicions, doesn’t it? Alibis,’ she explained as she leaned up against the fridge and watched Miss Jones put the kettle on and get the jar of instant out of the cupboard, ‘are there to be broken.’
‘Yes, dear,’ said Miss Jones, humouring the Hon. Con with an obviousness that was irritating. ‘Well, you have your ideas and I have mine.’ She started in on the washing up while she waited for the kettle to boil.
The Hon. Con’s bottom lip stuck out ‘That’s the blooming trouble,’she grumbled. ‘Too many ideas and no flipping facts.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Miss Jones rather spitefully as the Hon. Con handed her the tea towel, ‘ your policemen friends will be able to help.’
The barb bounced off the Hon. Con’s elephantine hide. She had convinced herself by now that she was working hand in glove with the police and was concerned only to correct the misapprehension that Miss Jones was apparently laboring under. I’m supposed to be helping them, Bones,’ she explained earnestly, ‘not the other way round. Think I might pop over and see the Spennymoors this afternoon.’
‘The Spennymoors?’
‘Well, they live practically opposite the Hellons, don’t they? And you know what a couple of nosey beggars they both are. They’ll know what’s cooking if anybody does.’
Miss Jones’s mind dwelt on dirty windows. ‘What time were you thinking of going, dear?’
‘Soon as I’ve had my coffee,’ said the Hon. Con, who hadn’t forgotten the windows either. ‘Speed is of the essence.’
Things didn’t move quite as quickly as that, though. Before the Hon. Con could set out for Sneddon Avenue again she found she had quite a lot of preparations to make. There were pencils to sharpen, maps to draw and detective details to enter in a little notebook. No, she was certainly not, she informed Miss Jones tartly, just pottering about. On the contrary, she was engaged in the kind of essential preliminary work that every detective was obliged to undertake, however much they might prefer to be doing some undemanding domestic chores around the house.
Miss Jones retreated upstairs in something of a huff, a condition which was not improved by the Hon. Con bawling instructions after her on the care and preservation of wash-leathers. The windows benefited, though, and it was while she was rubbing away furiously at those in the Hon. Con’s bedroom that she, too, paused in her labours as something outside caught in turn her eye. It was the last of the Morrison-Burkes herself, moving stealthily down the back garden and carrying an open clasp knife in her hand. At first Miss Jones didn’t pay too much attention, imagining that the Hon. Con was merely after one of the innumerable cats or children which regularly infringed her living space from those nasty little new bungalows. It was only when the Hon. Con’s ample behind had been looming up over one particular flowerbed for some considerable time that Miss Jones became suspicious. She opened the window.
‘Constance,’ she called, ‘what are you doing?’
The Hon. Con rose two feet in the air, spraying daffodils as she went.
Although she now knew perfectly well exactly what the Hon. Con had been doing, Miss Jones was determined to hear the confession straight from the guilty lips. ‘What,’ she repeated icily, ‘are you doing?’
‘Doing?’
‘Yes, doing, dear! With my King Alfred’s!’
‘Oh, those,’ said the Hon. Con, gazing at the hacked-off daffodils as though she had never seen them in her life before. ‘Well, can’t just go round to the Spennymoor’s empty-handed can I? It’d look very odd. I mean, I haven’t exchanged a word with either of ’em for a month of Sundays.’
‘That’s quite obvious, dear,’ said Miss Jones nastily. ‘Otherwise you would know that they have the finest display of spring blooms in the entire town. Whatever the Spennymoors may or may not be short of, it is not daffodils!’
The irate scream to which this statement rose at the end was not lost upon the Hon. Con. ‘Oh, well,’ she said, ‘if that’s the way you feel about it, I won’t bother.’
Miss Jones could cheerfully have strangled her. ‘You’ve cut them now! They’re no good to anybody in that condition.’ Miss Jones saved the unkindest shot in her locker until just before she banged the window down. ‘We shall have to buy some flowers for the altar at St Boniface’s now.’
‘Oh, blimey,’ muttered the Hon. Con to herself as she gathered up the daffodils, ‘some people don’t half like to make a fuss.’
Eve Spennymoor was a good-natured, easy-going woman who frequently referred to herself as being fair, fat and forty without expecting to be contradicted. Sexually she was still very attractive and was not unused to being the target of the usual propositions and advances. Even she, however, was momentarily at a loss when she opened her front door and found the Hon. Con, grinning sheepishly and proffering a fistful of tatty looking flowers which were – to one of Eve Spennymoor’s horticultural standing – little short of an insult. She accepted them graciously, though, telling herself that it was the thought that counts. This disconcerting reflection brought on a fit of the giggles and, to hide her confusion, she involuntarily took a step backwards and buried her face in the daffodils.
Quick as a wink the Hon. Con accepted the invitation and was over the doorstep, stripping of her ex-American officer’s raincoat. ‘Got so many daffs this year,’ she explained awkwardly, ‘that it seemed a pity to let ’em go to waste.’
‘They’re lovely,’ said Eve Spennymoor, trying to hold them so that they didn’t droop so obviously. ‘ I’ll just put them in some water.
The Hon. Con followed her into the kitchen. ‘Hubby home?’ she asked as she settled herself down at the table.
‘No,’ said Eve Spennymoor, and then added hurriedly, just in case her worst fears were justified, but I’m expecting him back any minute.’
‘Jolly dee!’ said the Hon. Con. ‘Both keeping fit, are you?’
‘We’re fine, thanks.’ Eve Spennymoor deposited the daffodils in an earthenware jug, ready to be dumped out on the compost heap as soon as the Hon. Con left. ‘Er – how’s Miss Jones?’
‘Has her ups and downs,’ said the Hon. Con gloomily. ‘Matter of fact, I’m a bit in the old dog house at the moment.’
‘Are you?’ If she tells me that the Jones woman doesn’t understand her, thought Eve Spennymoor hysterically, I’ll die. She turned away and got down an apron decorated with a large fig leaf. ‘Would you like a cup of tea, Connie?’
Connie would, but she refused to be diverted from her muttons. ‘It’s this business over at the Hellons you know.’
‘The murder?’
The Hon. Con nodded. ‘Old Bones doesn’t want to know anything about it. Thinks it’s vulgar. You know how prunes and prisms she gets at times.’ When the Hon. Con had an axe to grind, she ground it unscrupulously. ‘Me, I believe in facing up to facts, however sordid.’
‘Er – yes.’ Eve Spennymoor wasn’t quite sure what they were talking about but she was prepared to humour the Hon. Con. You got on quicker that way.
‘I mean,’ pursued the Hon. Con doggedly, ‘you ca
n’t just ignore a murder, can you?’
‘Certainly not with that mob hanging around across the road,’ agreed Eve Spennymoor. ‘They’ve even got the television there now.’
‘Saw ’em when I came past,’ sniffed the Hon. Con. ‘Refused to be interviewed, of course. Wouldn’t have minded so much if it had been the BBC but I’m blowed if I’m going to appear sandwiched between advertisements for bird-seed.’ Too late she remembered that the Spennymoors were the devoted owners of a budgerigar. ‘How is Pinchmewell, by the way?’ she asked hurriedly.
‘He feels this cold weather terribly, poor love,’ cooed Eve busy maintaining Totterbridge’s standards by producing a selection of Ye Olde Paisterie Cooke Shoppe’s cakes. They had been left over from last week’s bridge afternoon but looked no worse than they did when they were fresh. ‘Shall we go through into the lounge, Connie? We shall be able to watch the show at the Hellons’ from there.’
The Hon. Con came to her feet like a heavyweight boxer hearing the bell. ‘Allow me to carry the tray for you, Eve, m’dear!’
They settled themselves down in the lounge window while Pinchmewell, the budgerigar, chirped moronically to himself in his cage.
‘Garden of Eden’s looking jolly nice,’ said the Hon. Con, softening up her hostess before getting down to some hard pumping.
Eve Spennymoor simpered, pleased in spite of herself not so much by the compliment as by the way it was phrased. She liked it when her friends played The Game. She and her husband had never been able to get over the coincidence that one of them was called Adam and the other Eve – some unkind people had even suggested that this was the only reason they married in the first place – and over the years they had exploited this happy juxtaposition to the full. The ramifications were endless and predictable. There was the budgerigar;, Pinchmewell. They called their house Paradise Cottage and planted the garden with ten different varieties of apple trees. When they gave a dinner party; roast ribs of beef were sure to be on the menu and Adam professed great interest in his collection of editions of Paradise Lost. Then they’d once had a black cat called Satan but that, mercifully, had died. After twenty solid years of it, most of the Spennymoor’s friends were beginning to find the whole thing pretty tedious and even the Hon. Con, who enjoyed a joke as much as the next man, considered that they went a bit too far. ‘I’m telling you,’ she had once announced to Miss Jones, ‘the day they buy themselves a snake, I’m crossing ’em off my Christmas card list!’
But, as she sat blowing on her tea, the Hon. Con had no intention of bringing her big guns to bear on what was after all a very harmless fixation. She had bigger fish to fry. ‘Suppose you knew the Hellon woman quite well,’ she observed.
‘I wouldn’t call her bosom exactly,’ said Eve Spennymoor. ‘Of course, she’s a good ten years younger than me and that makes a difference.’
‘That’d put her about forty, then?’ mused the Hon. Con.
‘That’d put her about thirty-five, Connie, dear! But, whatever her age is, she’s not really my type. Too intellectual for potty old me! And, of course, she’s absolutely neurotic about that baby so we haven’t much in common.’ The Spennymoor union had not, in spite of considerable efforts, been blessed by any little Cain or Abel. ‘As a matter of fact,’ – Eve Spennymoor gave vent to a rich chuckle – ‘I get on much better with her husband. He’s a bit of a dog underneath, old Gilbert is!’
‘Is he?’ The Hon. Con looked down her nose.
‘Not the sort of chap I’d like to get caught up a dark alley with!’ Eve Spennymoor’s eyes were twinkling. ‘ I can’t think how on earth he ever got himself hitched up with Josie.’
‘That’s Mrs Hellon’s monnicker?’
‘Yes. Short for Josephine. Well, I do know how he got hitched up with Josie, actually. She was his secretary. One of those office romances you hear about. They’ve been married for ten years or more, you know, and this baby’s turned their lives upside down. Frankly, I think it was a bit of a mistake. They aren’t the parental type, either of them. They used to have a service flat up in town, you know, and most of the time she used to travel around with him. He’s something to do with antiques – values them and acts as an agent for several big American museums. Goes abroad a lot and Josie used to go with him, but her getting herself pregnant put a stop to that. Then they decided that London was no place to bring a baby up and they moved down here for the good country air and everything and bought that house. They seem to be very nicely off.’
‘What about the au pair girl? Did you know her?’
‘Not really, but I’ve seen her knocking about often enough. I can’t think why Josie ever bothered with them. They all seem to be more damned trouble than they’re worth. This one who’s died was the third and, according to Josie, she was the worst of the bunch. Bone idle and an appetite like a horse. Josie was always grumbling about her. With’ – Eve Spennymoor cocked her head on one side – ‘good reason, if you ask me.
‘Oh?’
‘Have another cake, Connie.’
‘Ta! Now, you were saying about the girl?’
‘Oh,’ – Eve Spennymoor leaned back in her chair – ‘she was one of those hard, greedy little bitches. The sort that can send some men right out of their minds. You know, full of rich, Eastern promise but never letting the poor devils get their teeth in the chocolate.’
‘A tease?’ asked the Hon. Con, groping a little.
Eve Spennymoor looked at her with admiration. ‘That’s just it, Connie! I couldn’t have expressed it better myself. I’ve watched her walking down the avenue here dozens of times with everything swaying in all directions. She looked a proper little sex pot, what my husband and his mates call a ‘‘right good lay’’. But you’d only got to look at her face. Believe me, anything that young tart surrendered would have to be well and truly paid for first.’
The Hon. Con screwed her face up in a worried frown. ‘Do you think this could be a sex crime, Eve?’
‘Good heavens,’ – Eve Spennymoor stared at her in astonishment – ‘it never crossed my mind that it could be anything else! I just assumed that the little Jezebel had finally met up with a man who wouldn’t take no for an answer.’
The Hon. Con was saved from the embarrassment of having to pursue this theme further by the arrival of a car which turned expertly into the short drive of Paradise Cottage and disappeared into the garage.
‘That’s Adam!’ Eve Spennymoor glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. ‘ He’s early.’
They heard doors banging away in the back of the house and a moment or two later Adam Spennymoor came into the lounge. He wasn’t pleased to find that his wife was entertaining a visitor but he covered up well and said most of the right things before collapsing with a great show of weariness into a nearby chair.
‘Well,’ said his wife, ‘some folk have it easy, I must say!’
Adam Spennymoor elaborately stifled a yawn. ‘For all the good I was doing in the office, I thought I might as well pack it in and come home. I could hardly keep my eyes open.’ He pulled himself into a more erect position in his chair. It’s an early night for me tonight.’
‘It’s a good thing he’s his own boss, isn’t it?’ Eve asked the Hon. Con with a smile. ‘Otherwise we’d be facing an irate employer as well as the workhouse.’
‘Huh,’ grunted the Hon. Con with some feeling, ‘never met a starving accountant yet! What’s the matter with him? Worn out with carrying the money he wrings from his clients to the bank?’
‘That’ll be the day! No, he’s worn out because he spent last night tom-catting it on the tiles, the dirty old man! God only knows what time he got in. I make him sleep in the spare room when he comes crawling back after midnight.’
‘I was in before half-past twelve,’ said Adam irritably. ‘I told you that.’
‘You also told me you were out in the country seeing some farmer or other about his capital gains tax, lover boy’ retorted his wife, half teasing, ‘and I’m not sure I
believe that either.’
Adam Spennymoor leaned his head back and closed his eyes, letting his face and body sag unattractively. The Hon. Con looked at him in some surprise. It wasn’t like Adam. Normally he kept his. double chin and rudimentary paunch under strict control. He enjoyed being thought of as ‘one of the boys’ and ‘ a bit of a lad’ and generally comported himself with a vigour designed to belie his fifty-odd years. The Hon. Con wondered if he was ill. Not that she was any expert, but to her he looked more worried than tired as he claimed. Business difficulties, perhaps?
The subject of her interest opened one eye, found himself under observation and made an effort to pull himself together. ‘Any tea left in that pot?’ he asked.
‘I’ll make some fresh,’ said Eve Spennymoor. ‘I could do with another cup myself. Connie and I have been nattering ourselves hoarse about the murder.’ She picked up the tea pot and headed for the kitchen. ‘Why don’t you have a cake while you’re waiting, Adam? And offer Connie some more, too!’
Adam Spennymoor dragged himself to his feet and took his wife’s place at the table. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said examining Ye Olde Paisterie Cookes Shoppe’s wares with a lack lustre eye, ‘ they were all talking about it at lunch in the Club. This month’s seven day wonder.’
‘Rotten business,’ commented the Hon. Con as she sank her teeth into an eclair with a bloom like a ripe Victoria plum on the chocolate. ‘Young girl like that.’
‘Yes. She was a sweet kid, too.’
‘’Spect you knew her quite well, what with living opposite and everything.’ The Hon. Con concealed the subtlety of this probe by innocently licking the cream off her fingers.
‘Oh, not really. Given her a lift into town a couple of times when she was going shopping. She was talking about making a move, you know. Asked my advice.’ He sighed. ‘ Pity she didn’t, poor little devil.’
‘She was thinking of leaving the Hellons?’
‘Well, it was no job for a smart, attractive girl like her, was it? She could have done a sight better for herself than that I mean, most of these au pair girls put up with the work and the conditions and the pocket money salary because they want to learn English, but that didn’t apply in Terry’s case. With her looks and her figure and her vitality she could have got a job anywhere.’