Murder Included

by Cannan, Joanna

  Treadwell assented, and Sir Charles led the way to the sitting-room, unlocked the door and stood aside while Price went in. ‘Will you be needing me?’ he asked. ‘If not, I’d like to get a little breakfast inside me.’

  ‘Just a moment,’ said Price without mercy, and read the note through. ‘Just one question, Sir Charles: is there anything in this note which suggests to you that it was, or was not, written by Lady d’Estray?’

  ‘I read it through quickly and swallowed it whole,’ said Sir Charles, coming across to the table. ‘But my stepdaughter appeared on the scene, and she picked holes in it — said there were grammatical errors that her mother couldn’t have made, and insisted that someone else had written it. I must confess that I pooh-poohed the idea, but now … I’m completely confused, but perhaps there was something in it?’

  ‘What were these errors?’

  ‘Who it may concern … that, of course, should be whom. Then, in the case of Mrs Scampnell … my wife had a definite aversion to in the case of … almost a mania.’

  ‘I don’t see anything wrong with it myself,’ said Price. ‘It’s very usual.’

  ‘Well, it shouldn’t be,’ said Sir Charles. ‘It’s what they call jargon. Then somewhere there’s a comma where there should be a semi-colon or a colon, and at the end there’s hung where it should be hanged.’

  ‘I see that. But it’s a very common mistake.’

  ‘Possibly. But the point is that my wife didn’t make common mistakes. She’s a writer, and not only a writer but a stylist; she’s particularly keen on good English and correct punctuation — a little too fussy, it’s always seemed to me. As I say, I was shocked and upset and I didn’t, at the time, attach much importance to what the child was saying; then she made a scene and I sent her upstairs to the nursery. But in view of what’s happened since, I’m convinced she was right — this was never written by Barbara Sallust.’

  ‘The fact that it’s not signed points that way too,’ Price said. ‘It suggests that the writer was afraid to attempt a forgery of Lady d’Estray’s signature. I cannot deny, Sir Charles, that, at any rate in the case of Miss Hudson, the evidence against your wife was stronger than against any other individual — motive particularly. Now we must look elsewhere. That housemaid — she prepared the Ovaltine; but had she any knowledge of typewriting? It is obvious that this note was not typed by a person without prior knowledge of a machine.’

  ‘I can’t believe that Beatrice ever learnt typewriting. She came here at fourteen. Admittedly, she prepared the Ovaltine, but there was that door which my wife heard open and close. I didn’t go to her room. We had — er — said good night earlier. It must have been the murderer.’

  Price said, ‘To return to the typewriting: Mr Rose and Mr Scampnell, as business-men, would be conversant with the machine, and probably Flight-Lieutenant Marvin; most young fellows can type after a fashion. Mrs Rose — what was she before she married — a secretary, perhaps? Miss Rattray? Apparently she doesn’t have to earn her living. You won’t take it amiss if I ask you whether you can type, Sir Charles?’

  ‘I type with two fingers, but quite adequately, well enough to have done this,’ said Sir Charles.

  ‘Your son?’

  ‘About the same. Patricia’s hopeless. She tried to type a circular about the riding stables, but my wife had to do it in the end.’

  ‘The butler?’

  ‘Not that I’ve heard.’

  ‘That boy?’

  ‘Eric? No. He came straight here from school.’

  ‘He doesn’t attend night school or classes of any kind in his spare time?’

  ‘I’m sure he doesn’t. Most of his spare time is spent with my stepdaughter. She’s teaching him to ride.’

  ‘Well,’ said Price, squaring his narrow shoulders, ‘I shall have this machine gone over for finger-prints; up to date we’ve had no luck with them, but we may be fortunate; it’s not easy to typewrite in gloves, and a person handling the machine and the paper might possibly forget afterwards exactly where he had placed his hands. But I anticipate more useful results from a talk with Lady d’Estray: she must have some idea of why an attack was made on her, unless, of course, we are dealing with a maniac.’

  ‘I think that’s what we are doing,’ said Sir Charles.

  ‘Most unlikely,’ said Price. ‘A homicidal maniac might kill with his hands or with some instrument, but not by poison. I’ll lock this room up again, and while I’m waiting to see Lady d’Estray, I wonder if a little something could be provided to pacify the inner man?’

  ‘You mean breakfast? Yes, of course. We’ll go down to the dining-room. On Sundays it’s served from nine onwards, but Benson will find us something. How about Treadwell?’ Treadwell, Benson told them, had already been provided with a snack and had driven away with the cup from Lady d’Estray’s bedroom: and Beatrice, he told them, would like to see the Detective-Inspector as soon as convenient: she was upset, naturally, it being she who had prepared the Ovaltine. Price said he would see her as soon as he had finished breakfast, but as he was masticating his last mouthful of toast Bunny, wearing corduroy slacks and a canary-coloured polo-necked jersey, came in. Sir Charles got up, but after one glance, averted his eyes from her. He had been wondering whether it would be best to apologize for his suspicions at the first opportunity, or to ignore all that and try to get back to their old terms in the excitement of following up new clues, but here she was again in a sweater and slacks and sandals on a Sunday … Now nothing would induce him to apologize, he thought; he’d had every reason to suspect her, and, even though the detective seemed to have eliminated her, one couldn’t be sure … she was very clever.

  ‘Any coffee left? I could do with another cup,’ said Bunny.

  Price glanced at Sir Charles. ‘With your permission, Sir Charles, I think it would be best if we went to the study — your guests may be down soon, and the less they know the better.’ Bunny said, ‘Okay. Anyhow it will soon be time for elevetises.’ Sir Charles said, as he had said before, ‘If you ate a normal breakfast, you wouldn’t need to feed again at eleven.’ Bunny shrugged. Sir Charles could have slapped her.

  In the study, from which Sylvia, carrying a housemaid’s box, fled at their approach, Sir Charles said to Price, ‘Shall I leave you?’ but Price said, ‘Not unless you wish to,’ so he stayed and sat down in the armchair, while Price sat at the table and Bunny perched on the club fender. Price began, ‘Now, Lady d’Estray, can you tell me anything about the note, which was found in your typewriter?’

  ‘I’d never heard of it until now when Beatrice brought in my breakfast. She told me Sylvia had found it. When Lisa and I left my sitting-room last night there was nothing in the typewriter. I haven’t done any work — I haven’t been able to — since Elizabeth was poisoned.’

  ‘Now, Lady d’Estray, I want you to think very carefully: this attack on you may have been made merely to divert suspicion from the murderer; or it may have been made because, as in the case of Mrs Scampnell, you were in possession of some vital piece of information, in which case the suicide note was written in order to kill two birds with one stone, i.e. to prevent you passing on what information you possessed and to preclude any further investigation. The former I think unlikely — as far as I am aware I have divulged no suspicions.’

  ‘If you treated the others as you treated me …’ said Bunny.

  Price blushed, or, rather, two reddish spots appeared on his cheek-bones. Sir Charles looked intently at his Sunday shoes.

  ‘Lady d’Estray, this is a very intricate case, and the lack of evidence, the absence of motive … well … it was unfortunate for all parties that only in your case was there evidence both of motive and opportunity. I hope you will forget that now.’

  ‘Of course. Homer nods,’ said Bunny pleasantly.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘We all make mistakes. Actually last night I did learn something — very little — I can’t see how it fits in. Anyhow, I promised not to tell
anyone.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Barbara,’ and, ‘Lady d’Estray, this is a murder case,’ said Sir Charles and Price simultaneously.

  ‘Would you mind if I spoke to Lisa?’

  ‘If you made a promise to Lisa, it’s ridiculous to bother about it,’ said Sir Charles irritably. ‘You’re her mother; she’s only a child, and there are lives at stake — really, Barbara, do behave sensibly.’

  Bunny had stretched out a hand to the bell-push beside the fireplace, and the silence that followed was broken by the entrance of Benson. ‘Benson, will you send Lisa here at once, please? I expect she’s in the stables.’

  ‘Just a moment — I believe she’s in the boot-room, my lady.’

  ‘Helping Eric clean the shoes, I suppose. Nice company and an elegant occupation for a young lady on a Sunday morning,’ said Sir Charles disapprovingly.

  ‘The better the day, the better the deed,’ said Bunny at random.

  Lisa came in. She wore dungarees. She smiled at her mother, but her face was still swollen and her eyes red with crying. A smear of shoe-polish across her cheek confirmed her stepfather’s supposition.

  ‘What have you been doing to yourself?’ asked Bunny.

  ‘At an unearthly hour this morning I was involved in a difference of opinion with some half-wits. I hope they’re sorry now,’ said Lisa, with a baleful glance at Sir Charles.

  ‘Well, we’ll skip that,’ said Bunny hastily. ‘Have you heard what’s happened?’

  ‘I read the note. I knew you hadn’t written it. I knew that someone had tried to poison you, but the beasts made me stay upstairs until the police came, and then Benson told me. I’ve bitten that beast, Patricia …’

  ‘Well, you shouldn’t have. But never mind that now; it’s over. What I want to know is how you-know-who is feeling about you-know-what this morning? I heard more about it last night in another way and it might be important.’

  ‘Oh, when he heard about you he decided to tell at the first opportunity. He says that there are always being miscarriages of justice, but he’d swing for you gladly. Shall I fetch him?’

  ‘Please, Lisa.’

  ‘What,’ asked Sir Charles, ‘is all this nonsense? We’re wasting time.’

  ‘It’s Eric, the boy who helps Benson,’ said Bunny to Price. ‘He knows something connected with Mrs Scampnell’s murder. On the other hand — well, here he is. I’ll tell you the rest later.’

  Eric’s hands were clenched at his sides. His face was pale and determined.

  ‘Well,’ said Price, ‘so you know something? Whatever it is, why did you keep it to yourself? — that’s what’s called suppressing evidence.’

  Eric said, ‘It never come into my ‘ead till yesterday, when they were talking it over in the ’all, and I’d ’ardly figured it out when off you went, so I told Miss Lisa, and she asked to tell ’er Mum, but they wasn’t to tell anyone else till I’d seen the meanin’ on it. It’s about them flasks …’

  He told his story. ‘Yes … yes …’ said Price and at the end he said, ‘Yes, that’s useful; but it would have been more useful last night — this morning we’ve other clues to think of, unless, of course, it’s this matter which Lady d’Estray intends to amplify?’

  ‘It is,’ said Bunny.

  ‘All right, boy, you can cut along now; but don’t go far: we may want you again. And the same applies to you,’ he added, spying Lisa, who had slipped back into the room and was effacing herself beside a bookcase.

  The children went out, and Bunny began, ‘After I’d seen Lisa into bed last night and left Babette with her and heard her lock her door, it occurred to me that if I had a talk with Margot Rattray I might possibly hear more about the flasks without breaking the promise I’d made to Lisa and Eric. I’d got a good excuse to go to her room — where, as you probably know, she and her stepfather had had dinner — because it was really only decent to ask if she was all right, or if there was anything I could do — I ought to have gone before. On my way I found Beatrice filling hot-water-bottles in the upstairs pantry and that was when she promised me the Ovaltine and told me not to let it get cold. The Scampnells were both in Margot’s bedroom, sitting and grieving over the fire, and I managed to linger a bit, and at last I got the conversation — rather clumsily, I’m afraid — round to the flask. They said that there was only one, dating from her days in India, and I must say I believed them; in fact I remember thinking, damn Eric and his silly story, as I went back along the corridor. I expect you think so, too; I expect there’s nothing in it really. If Eric was right and they were lying, it would mean … well, husbands do poison their wives, of course, but Elizabeth was poisoned too.’

  ‘It’s only the boy’s word against theirs,’ said Sir Charles. ‘He probably sees himself as Dick Barton, wants to take a hand in solving the mystery and has invented the whole affair.’

  ‘That’s what I thought last night,’ said Bunny, ‘but now there’s been this attack on me, and really the only reason for it that I can think of is the question I asked the Scampnells about the flasks. Beatrice or Sylvia might be able to help us. They may have seen the two flasks when they did the room.’

  ‘I’m inclined to agree with Sir Charles that the boy is romancing,’ Price said with less than his usual confidence. ‘Husbands have poisoned their wives, as you say, Lady d’Estray, but that doesn’t account for Miss Hudson’s murder. Further, has there ever been the slightest suggestion that the Scampnells’ marriage was an unhappy one?’

  ‘I always thought that they got on very well,’ admitted Bunny, ‘but I had a gossip with Beatrice while she was filling the hot-water-bottles, and she didn’t agree. She said she’d heard things.’

  ‘Servants’ gossip,’ scornfully exclaimed Sir Charles.

  ‘All the same, it would be advisable to hear it,’ Price told him. ‘Also I would very much like to ascertain the truth about those flasks. We’ll have the head housemaid in and question her, if Lady d’Estray would be so good as to press the bell.’

  Beatrice, standing stiffly in her blue print dress and old-fashioned starched white apron, said, ‘I wanted to see you, Inspector; I wanted to tell you that it was me that prepared the Ovaltine, but I didn’t put nothing in it, and I wouldn’t of, either, seeing as I took to Lady d’Estray the first time I set eyes on her and stood up for ’er when the others said she wasn’t what they was used to and no better than a foreigner, which they did — if you’ll excuse me, my lady — until they got to know your ladyship better and took back their words.’ Beatrice paused to draw breath, but before anyone else could speak, she continued, ‘Miss Lisa’s always been a favourite with me, too; I like that little thing, and I think Miss Patricia and Nanny treated ’er abominable this morning, keeping ’er in the nursery when all she wanted was to set ’er mind at rest about ’er Mum.’

  ‘Listen, Beatrice,’ said Bunny. ‘Nobody thinks for one moment that you put anything — even if there was anything — in the Ovaltine. As for Patricia, she was only doing what her father told her, and I understand that Lisa bit her, which wasn’t very nice. What the Detective-Inspector wants to know is about Mrs Scampnell’s flasks …’

  ‘You looked after her bedroom, I believe,’ Price said quickly. ‘You must have seen her hunting-flasks — had she one, or a pair of them?’

  Bunny’s heart was racing. Sir Charles sat upright, though his tired white face still wore a look of scorn. For, a maddening moment Beatrice stood silent, her china blue eyes fixed and stupid.

  ‘The shelf above the wash-basin,’ she said at last, ‘was cluttered up with ’is shaving-tackle and medicines — aperients mostly. She kept ’er things on the dressing-table: not the chest of drawers with the little round mirror on it — ’e used that for ’is combs and brushes — but the proper dressing-table. There was ’er tortoise-shell set there — brushes and an ’and-glass and a powder-box, but no flasks. Ah, it was on the marquetry chest of drawers that she kept ’em, along with ’er ’unting-whip from India; that
was gold-mounted and too good to be left in the ’arness-room unless it was locked up at night, which Miss Patricia wouldn’t agree to.’

  ‘You say “she kept them”. Do you mean there were two of them?’

  ‘That’s right. Awkward things they are, out of their cases. She used to stand them up, but me and Sylvia were afraid of them toppling over, and we always laid them down again.’

  ‘I want you to cast your mind back to yesterday morning. How many flasks were on the chest of drawers then?’

  Beatrice reflected, ‘Let me see … Mr Scampnell, ’e was going to the meet by car with young Margot, so ’e was out of the room earlier than usual, and after we’d made the beds we finished the whole room off before we started on the others. Sylvia did the wash-basin and then ran the ’oover over the carpet while I dusted, and we was talking about the inconvenience caused by people dawdling in their bedrooms instead of coming down to breakfast at the right time. No, there wasn’t any flasks on the marquetry chest of drawers; the ’unting-whip ’ad gone, and all I ’ad to do was to pick up a photo of some blacks ’olding an ’orse and it was a clear sweep for the duster.’

  ‘Thank you, Miss Blythe,’ said Price. ‘That’s very valuable. Now I trust that you will be good enough to afford us additional assistance. In your opinion, were Mr and Mrs Scampnell a happy couple?’

  Beatrice said carefully, ‘I never saw ’im raise ’is ’and to ’er, that I can say; but I’ve ’eard ’im say nasty things both to ’er face and be’ind ’er back — ’orrible sarky things. “’Ere comes the Unspeakable” I’ve ’eard ’im say to Miss Margot, and I’ve ’eard ’im call ’er a stingy old bitch and an ugly ’orse-mad old skinflint — to ’er face that was. She could be spitey, too, but in a more lady-like fashion. I’ve ’eard ’er say, “All this comes of marrying into the middle-classes,” and — if you’ll excuse me, Sir Charles — I’ve ’eard ’er call ’im a bloody little tradesman.’