A Meddler and her Murder

by Joyce Porter

  Miss Jones could hardly wait for him to finish. ‘Well,’ she burst in excitedly, ‘as a matter of fact, I have passed the time of day with the poor girl at least twice!’

  ‘You never told me that, Bones!’ The Hon. Con’s satisfaction at having set the law on the bungalowers was evaporating like the steam from a toasted tea-cake.

  Miss Jones was very off-hand. ‘ Oh, didn’t I, dear?’ She turned back to Sergeant Fenner, quite forgetting that she had promised to die of mortification if ever she was forced to meet him again. ‘I used to meet her round the shops, you know, and after a bit we began nodding to each other and saying good morning. If I’d known she was going to be murdered, of course, I’d have made a point of having a proper conversation with her. However, it’s no good crying over spilt milk, is it? I barely knew her, and the Honourable Constance had no acquaintance with her at all. In fact,’ – Miss Jones laughed gaily – ‘I doubt if she’s ever so much as set eyes on her.’

  ‘Bones,’ boomed the Hon. Con in a last ditch effort to avert disaster, ‘ pull your skirt down! You’re showing all your legs.’

  It was to no avail. Sergeant Fenner, shaking off his lethargy and not sparing so much as a single lascivious glance at Miss Jones’s legs, was staring accusingly at the Hon. Con. The Hon. Con sighed. She knew – none better – how the police mind worked. They looked for discrepancies and here was that knuckle-headed Bones presenting them with a great fat one on a plate.

  ‘I thought, Miss Morrison-Burke,’ said Sergeant Fenner, ‘that you said you knew Miss O’Coyne?’

  The Hon. Con looked him straight in the eye and shook her head.’ ’ Fraid you must have misunderstood me.’

  ‘I doubt it I remember your words quite clearly. You said you knew the girl but not as well as you knew Mrs Hellon. It was when we were standing outside the Hellons’ house only this morning.’

  ‘Oh, that can’t be right!’ Miss Jones wasn’t going to sit idly by while even so charming a policeman as Sergeant Fenner called the Hon. Con a liar. ‘I doubt if the Honourable Constance has ever so much as seen Mrs Hellon. I’m quite certain she wouldn’t even recognize her if she passed her in the street.’

  ‘Bones,’ said the Hon. Con grimly, ‘why don’t you go and make us all a nice cup of coffee?’

  Sergeant Fenner, however, declined the coffee and, for once, made a proper note in his notebook. It was concise: ‘Hon. C. M-B concealing friendship with deceased from Jones???’. Even Sergeant Fenner realized it was a very trivial point but detective work is made up of such minutiae and the police were in possession of certain information about the murder which prompted the sergeant not to leave this particular stone unturned.

  ‘I wonder, Miss Morrison-Burke,’ he said slowly, the change in his manner penetrating through even to Miss Jones, ‘If you could give me some idea of your whereabouts at the time of the murder?’

  ‘Can’t do that, can I?’ chuckled the Hon. Con, openly contemptuous of such a crude trap.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Don’t know what time the murder was committed, do I, old bean?’

  ‘Well, shall we say between eleven o’clock last night and one o’clock this morning.’

  ‘Golly!’ said the Hon. Con hardly able to conceal her astonishment at the ease with which she could extract vital facts from Sergeant Fenner.

  ‘Are you experiencing any difficulty in remembering where you were at that time?’

  ‘’Course not!’ The Hon. Con’s bottom was getting uncomfortably warm so she removed herself from in front of the fire and joined an apprehensive Constable Peach on the settee. ‘ I was in bed.’

  ‘Any witnesses ?’

  Luckily, the Hon. Con enjoyed a joke, even when it was slightly saucy. She let off an appreciative whoop of laughter and smacked Constable Peach a bruising blow on the knee. ‘He’s a cheeky devil, isn’t he?’ Having thus shown Constable Peach what it is that separates the men from the boys, she returned to Sergeant Fenner’s question. ‘There’s old Bones, she’ll give me an alibi.’

  Miss Jones twisted her hands unhappily. ‘Well, of course, I’m sure you were there, dear, but I didn’t actually see you, did I?’ She, too, turned to Sergeant Fenner. ‘I had been out to Bingo in the Church Hall, you see, and the Honourable Constance had already retired to bed by the time I came in.’ She watched anxiously as Sergeant Fenner wrote this down.‘Naturally I didn’t disturb her.’

  ‘You were out all evening, Miss Jones?’

  ‘From about seven o’clock,’ agreed Miss Jones faintly. ‘ I got back just after ten.’

  ‘Nothing fit to watch on the telly, you see,’ explained the Hon. Con, ‘so I thought I might as well hit the sack.’

  Sergeant Fenner nibbled moughtfully at the end of his pencil and, apparently, switched to another tack. ‘Did either of you see Miss O’Coyne earlier in the evening? Say from about six o’clock onwards ?’

  The two women shook their heads.

  ‘She wasn’t playing Bingo,’ said Miss Jones. ‘Well, the young people don’t, do they? They don’t seem to be interested, even when it is for such a good cause.’ She was suddenly desirous that Sergeant Fenner should appreciate she hadn’t been gambling for her own pleasure. ‘It’s the church roof. We need five thousand pounds and …’

  ‘Quite,’ said Sergeant Fenner and looked at the Hon. Con. ‘ How about you, miss?’

  ‘Told you,’ said the Hon. Con frowning. ‘Matter of fact, I didn’t leave the house at all yesterday, except when I nipped out into the garden for five minutes or so round about eight o’clock to set the cat traps.’

  Sergeant Fenner knew he was going to regret it but he asked just the same. ‘The cat traps, miss?’

  ‘Garden’s swarming with the nasty brutes,’ said the Hon. Con. ‘Got to do something to keep ’em down or they’ll take us over. Never saw a cat,’ she added darkly, ‘before they stuck those crummy bungalows up.’

  ‘I see,’ said Sergeant Fenner briskly. ‘Well, now, to get back to …’

  ‘My own invention,’ said the Hon. Con, nudging Constable Peach to ensure that he at least was giving her his undivided attention. ‘I bait ’em with sardines. Dashed expensive, I don’t mind telling you, but a chap’s got to protect his property.’

  Constable Peach smiled weakly and went pinker than ever. ‘Know anything about cats?’ demanded the Hon. Con. Constable Peach shook his head.

  ‘Pity! I could do with a bit of advice. The traps are jolly ingenious, though I do say it as shouldn’t, but they don’t seem to catch many cats. Matter of fact,’ – Constable Peach had a kindly face and the Hon. Con decided to come clean – ‘I haven’t actually caught any yet. Trapped a sort of human baby thing once but I had to hand that back, of course. Its mother played merry hell, as though it was my fault the kid had wolfed down the best part of a tin of sardines. Well, I don’t take that kind of talk from anybody, never mind some peasant living in those crummy …’

  Sergeant Fenner’s patience when dealing with members of the general public was proverbial but even he had his breaking point. Directing a look of the utmost dislike at poor Constable Peach, he got rid of the cats and returned to the murder.

  ‘Look,’ snorted the Hon. Con, suspecting that she was being brow-beaten and returning to her stand on the hearth rug, ‘I keep telling you. Bones and me had an early supper about six and then Bones beetled off to her blessed Bingo. I pottered around a bit, went out to bait the cat traps, watched some rubbish or other on the box and then went to bed. How could I have seen the O’Coyne girl?’

  ‘She didn’t come here to the house, by any chance?’

  ‘Of course she didn’t! The Hon. Con was getting more than a little irritated. ‘ What should she come here for?’ An idea struck her. ‘ Wasn’t she at the Hellons’?’

  ‘It was her evening off,’ said Sergeant Fenner absently, staring down at his notebook. ‘She got two evenings a week off and last night was one of them. According to Mrs Hellon, she went off, much as usual
at about half past six. So far we haven’t been able to discover where she went or how she spent the time until she returned.’ He sighed and shut his notebook. ‘Oh, well, I expect we shall find out in due course.’

  ‘Meanwhile,’ said the Hon. Con, glowering balefully, ‘ you’ve written my name down on your list of suspects.’

  ‘Oh, come now!’ Sergeant Fenner smiled mechanically. ‘ There’s nothing personal about it. We’re asking everybody the same sort of questions. It’s just routine.’

  ‘Routine, my foot!’ bellowed the Hon. Con, stung to the quick by Sergeant Fenner’s black disloyalty. ‘You’re accusing me of murder, you rat!’

  Chapter Five

  Miss Jones, pleasantly flustered by the proximity of not one, but two members of the opposite sex, had quite failed to appreciate the drift of Sergeant Fenner’s questions. When the penny finally dropped, she got very agitated and quite went off the sergeant again. Oh, she told herself, the Hon. Con was right. Men were awful! She threw her natural reticence to the winds and tried to persuade Sergeant Fenner that the Hon. Con could not possibly have entertained a visitor without her realizing the fact immediately on her return from the Bingo session.

  ‘The Honourable Constance is so messy, you see, sergeant,’ she explained. ‘Cushions displaced here, crumbs on the floor there. The toilet paper hanging down in shreds to the floor. Honestly, you can track her right round the house with no trouble at all. She can’t even open the front door without kicking the mat to one side so I always know if anyone’s called while I’ve been out. And those cat traps of hers – I always know when she’s been setting them because, apart from the tins in the disposal bucket, the sink is invariably swimming with sardine oil. I’ve spoken to her about it several times, of course, but one might as well talk to a brick wall for all the notice she takes. You must believe me! If a mouse had set foot in the house last evening, I would have known it.

  ‘I’m sure you would,’ said Sergeant Fenner soothingly, considerably more impressed with Miss Jones’s skill as a detective than he was with the Hon. Con’s. He had his hand on the front door knob and had been waiting for a break in the tirade so that he could take his leave. It’s just that we know what a kindly interest Miss Morrison-Burke takes in young girls and we wondered if she’d ever – well – befriended Miss O’Coyne. It would have been perfectly natural if she had, wouldn’t it? I mean, the girl was very young and all alone in a strange country.’

  ‘Wish I had,’ the Hon. Con chipped in regretfully. ‘She might have been alive now if I’d palled up with her, eh?’

  ‘You mustn’t blame yourself, Miss Morrison-Burke,’ said Sergeant Fenner, beginning to turn the knob.

  ‘Thing is, I haven’t done much in that line since I packed in running the local Girl Guides.’

  ‘Well, you haven’t had time, have you, dear? Not since you started being a detective.’ Miss Jones sighed and shook her head. ‘The day just isn’t long enough for all the Honourable Constance’s activities.’

  ‘No,’ said Sergeant Fenner and got the door open. ‘Well, thank you both very much for your help. I’m sorry we had to trouble you.’

  ‘No trouble, sergeant,’ said the Hon. Con as Constable Peach, eyes averted, slid past her. ‘You know you can always count on me!’ she called as the two detectives went hell for leather down the garden path.

  ‘Goodnight, ladies!’

  The Hon. Con stared longingly after them and then reluctantly closed the front door and began to shoot the bolts back into place. Miss Jones was still experiencing little quivers of indignation but the Hon. Con, being of a more buoyant constitution, had got around to treating the whole incident as a bit of a jape. Not, admittedly, a jape in the very best of taste but then old Fenner was not to be judged by standards applicable to artistocratic undergraduates depositing chamber pots on the Martyr’s Memorial.

  ‘He’s only a working-class lad,’ she excused him to Miss Jones. ‘Got to expect him to be pretty crude.’

  ‘Crude?’ sniffed Miss Jones. ‘If I were in your shoes, Constance, I should seriously consider reporting him to his chief constable. After all, you are the daughter of a viscount.’

  ‘Oh, pish!’ The Hon. Con modestly shrugged off her noble birth.

  ‘We’re no different from you ordinary people, really. Can’t expect any preferential treatment in these egalitarian days.’

  They had moved into the kitchen and Miss Jones was engaged in measuring out the cocoa while keeping one agitated eye on the milk pan. She was not too busy, however, to neglect an opportunity of making hay while the sun shone. ‘ Well, Constance, dear,’ she said, ‘I hope that now you have seen Sergeant Fenner in his true colours you’ll have nothing more to do with him.’

  ‘Eh?’

  Miss Jones recognized that she was in a rather distraught state but she did wish the Hon. Con would stop saying ‘ eh?’ like that. It was such a vulgar expression. Still, this was no time to worry about the Hon. Con’s lack of refinement. ‘You’re surely not still thinking of co-operating with the police after the way they’ve treated you tonight, dear?’

  ‘Oh,’ said the Hon. Con floundering for a moment ‘Ah well – that’s all part of the act, isn’t it? I’m more what they call an undercover agent. They’ve got to pretend to treat me like the rest of the plebs otherwise it’d blow the gaff.’

  ‘I don’t think Sergeant Fenner was pretending when he asked you to produce an alibi, dear, and I don’t think you thought he was either. You went quite ruby-coloured in the face.’

  ‘Oh, tosh!’ said the Hon. Con. ‘Anyway, I’m not chucking the old towel in now, just when it’s getting interesting.

  ‘Here,’ – she broke off to supervize the making of her nightcap – ‘don’t let all the blooming skin go in my mug, Bones!

  Miss Jones meekly took the offending skin for herself. I’m sorry, dear’ she apologized, ‘but I’m really finding this whole affair most upsetting.’

  ‘Can’t think why. My investigations are proceeding like a house on fire. Look what we’ve found out tonight, just by sitting there and keeping our mouths shut while old Fenner did all the jawing.’ This wasn’t quite how the evening appeared in retrospect to Miss Jones but she hadn’t the energy to argue.‘We know what time the girl was murdered and we know that she’d been out all evening. Now,’ – the Hon. Con wiped a cocoa moustache off with the back of her hand and then wiped the back of her hand on the seat of her pants – ‘what does that suggest to you, Bones?’

  Miss Jones fancied she knew what was expected of the Watsons of this world. ‘I’m afraid it doesn’t suggest anything, dear.’

  ‘No,’ agreed the Hon. Con moodily, ‘it doesn’t suggest much to me, either. Her being out for the evening might have something to do with the murder or, on the other hand, it might not’ She sighed theatrically. ‘Ah, well, time will no doubt tell.’

  ‘Have you finished with your mug, dear?’ Sometimes, especially when she was feeling low, Miss Jones saw life as one unending round of washing-up.

  ‘Just a sec!’ The Hon. Con drained the dregs of her cocoa and then surrendered herself to an enormous yawn. It was only a quarter to ten but she’d had a tiring day. ‘Think I’m for the Land of Nod,’ she grunted, belatedly covering her mouth with her hand. ‘You’ll see to the locking up, will you Bones? And don’t forget to stick the guard in front of the fire, there’s a good chap!’

  It may seem rather heartless of the Hon. Con to have gone off to bed like this, leaving her chum to do all the work, but – as the Hon. Con would have been the first to point out – she couldn’t be expected to do everything. Only those who have been private detectives know what an exhausting profession it can be and, in times of crisis, we must all make sacrifices. In any case, when on the following morning the Hon. Con bounced down to breakfast full of the joys of spring, Miss Jones doubtless considered that the extra burdens which had been placed on her were well worth while. With ten hours of deep and uninterrupted sleep under her belt, th
e Hon. Con was in cracking form and attacked her All Bran with gusto.

  ‘Mrs Urquhart!’ she announced as the first mouthful went down.

  Miss Jones put the tea pot down until her hand had stopped trembling. ‘Mrs Urquhart, dear?’ she echoed in a choked voice.

  ‘Going to see her this morning,’ nodded the Hon. Con happily.

  ‘About the murder?’ quavered Miss Jones.

  ‘Of course! What else? You want to get a grip on yourself, Bones!

  I’m hardly likely to be paying a social call on old Ma Urquhart, now am I?’

  ‘No, dear,’ agreed Miss Jones, miserably trying to recall the precise reason for the flaming row which had developed the last time the Hon. Con and Mrs Urquhart had met. Was it about dustbins or the annual meat and potato pie supper for the bell ringers at the church?

  The Hon. Con was using the butter knife again to dig out the marmalade. ‘ I shall have to think up some excuse for calling,’ she commented with a chuckle. ‘Haven’t so much as seen the old trout for at least three years.’

  ‘I’m afraid there are no daffodils left,’ said Miss Jones getting what little comfort she could from the mild sarcasm.

  ‘Oh, I’ll think of something, said the Hon. Con cheerfully. ‘Don’t you worry your head about it. By the way, Bones,’ she added, her manner becoming more severe, ‘you forgot to remind me about the cat traps last night.’

  At the moment, cats – trapped or otherwise – were the least of Miss Jones’s worries. ‘Have you really got to go and see Mrs Urquhart, dear?’

  ‘Lives next door to the scene of the crime, doesn’t she?’

  ‘But she won’t know anything about it.’

  ‘Oh, won’t she? Just because she never goes out nowadays doesn’t mean she isn’t still all there with a cough-drop. What she doesn’t see for herself through that sitting-room window of hers, those two old parlour maids tell her. You mark my words, she’ll have more info on the O’Coyne girl than her own mother.’