Murder Included

  ‘Hullo, Kate! Come in,’ said Bunny.

  ‘Hullo, my lady,’ Kate responded warmly.

  ‘This is Detective-Inspector Price, Kate.’

  ‘Good afternoon, sir,’ said Kate, looking at Bunny.

  ‘Good afternoon, Kate. I understand from Miss Blythe that last Sunday you happened to overhear a conversation between Miss Margot Rattray and the late Miss Hudson. Will you tell us about it?’

  Kate, patting her curls, said, ‘I wasn’t listening. I’d been washing up the oddsies and then I rinsed through the tea-towels and then I went to ’ang them out on the line in the yard, and it was just about the time they come back from church and I could ’ear Miss ’Udson talking. I wasn’t listening …’

  ‘Just a moment,’ said Price. ‘Where exactly is the yard you refer to?’

  Bunny said, ‘If you’re facing the house, on the right side of it there’s a wall with an arched gateway in it. The gateway leads into the yard — the tradesmen’s vans go in that way and the kitchen quarters open out into it. If one wants a little exercise after church, one comes back through the woods and to get to the house one passes the gateway.’

  ‘I see. And are you sure it was Miss Hudson’s voice you heard, Kate? Think carefully.’

  ‘I ’eard her first, and then I see ’er go by — ’er and Miss Rattray. Rowing they was. Miss ’Udson says, “It’s disgustin’. Besides the relationship, ’e’s years older than you are.” Miss Rattray she says, “If anything’s disgustin’, it’s the way you’ve spied on me.” Miss ’Udson says, “I’ve told you before — it was a pure chance that I ’eard what I did. Now, Margot, don’t be a silly girl,” and after that I couldn’t ’ear no more — they went on past the gate and their voices faded away.’

  ‘And what interpretation did you put upon this conversation, Kate?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘What did you think they were rowing about?’ Bunny said. ‘Well,’ said Kate, ‘’aving ’eard the word disgustin’, I thought it must be something in the way of sex, but when I mentioned it to the others, they come down on me like a ton of bricks, and my Auntie, she said that what Miss ’Udson was referring to was the disrespectful way that Miss Margot went on with ’er stepfather — calling ’im Scamp and all that. I didn’t think so. I thought both Miss ’Udson and Miss Margot sounded too wild, but it’s no use arguing with the old brigade, so I kept my mouth shut.’

  ‘Thank you, Kate. That’s a great help to me,’ said Price, and when the girl had gone out and Sir Charles had reappeared, he pronounced, ‘She was right, of course. Miss Hudson must have discovered and was expressing her disapproval of Miss Rattray’s intrigue with her stepfather. Miss Rattray resented her remarks … not a very convincing motive …’

  ‘But don’t you see,’ Bunny burst out, ‘if Elizabeth had been alive when Cecily was murdered, she would have been able to point to the culprits at once? She had to die first. The poison was brewed for Cecily, but it was no use killing Cecily while Elizabeth was alive to tell us that Margot and Scamp were in love. What’s foxed us all along was our idée fixe that Cecily was killed because she knew something about Elizabeth’s murder — whereas it was really the other way round: Elizabeth would have known something about Cecily’s murder. We got our tenses mixed …’

  ‘That’s all pure supposition, Barbara,’ said Sir Charles.

  ‘It’s supposition,’ said Price, ‘but it’s also the logical explanation of Miss Hudson’s murder. The Scampnells no doubt anticipated our error; it was obvious that we should form the conclusion that we did — that Mrs Scampnell knew too much — and that in consequence we should look for Miss Hudson’s enemies rather than for Mrs Scampnell’s — Margot Rattray spared no pains to draw my attention to the slight domestic friction between Miss Hudson and yourself, Lady d’Estray.’

  ‘She was clever,’ said Bunny. ‘I doubt whether the business of the flasks would have led to much. It was just a little sound — the shutting of a door — which betrayed her. It’s always the silly little things that matter ...’

  ‘And it was extremely fortunate that you were upstairs at the precise moment when the door closed,’ Price told her. ‘We found an empty workbag near the sink, which indicates that Miss Rattray was tidying up there. Half-an-hour later, even in the event of our attention being drawn to the east wing, we should have found nothing.’ He rose. ‘I must be wending my way now. I’ve a couple of men still searching the Scampnells’ rooms, so I shall be calling back later.’

  As the door closed behind him, Sir Charles said, ‘Thank God. Thank God, it’s over.’

  ‘But it isn’t,’ said Bunny. ‘This has happened. It isn’t one of your detective stories: you can’t shut the book with a snap when you’ve found out who dunnit; there’s no well-trained author in charge to spare you the anti-climax.’

  ‘Well, naturally,’ said Sir Charles, ‘we haven’t heard the last of it. There’s the trial to come, and I daresay there’ll be a lot of unwelcome publicity. What I meant was that we’ve finished with the terrible suspense and suspicion …’

  Before she laughed, cried, or started to throw around the Minton tea-service, Bunny, murmuring something about a rest before dinner, fled the room.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  IT was already spring there. Mimosa was flowering; on the terrace the air was sweet with the scent of it and the scent of the pine-woods on the headland, thrust out into the shining blue waters of the bay. If you climbed the inconsequent little paths up the hillside behind the village and looked from some vantage point into the wild and riven heart of the Esterels, there was a streak of snow to be seen here and there on the higher ranges, and beyond them, secure as yet from the flow of springtide, the white mountains of Dauphiny and Savoy. In England, thought Bunny, coming out on the terrace, leaning on the balustrade and looking down into the water — in England it would be raining, a cold rain that at Aston would blow across the Park and beat on the windows of the dining-room, where Patricia, with a cold in her head and chilblains on her toes, and Sir Charles, with a twinge in his back and a letter from his bank manager in his pocket, would be eating eggs and bacon in the silence which it’s best to keep at an English breakfast-table. Her mind went back to her first mornings at Aston, when, determined to carry out her intention of providing a background of English home life for her daughter, she had risen from her bed punctually at half past seven, dressed herself in a tweed skirt, laced-up shoes, a ‘twin-set’, and a string of pearls, and descended into the icy diningroom, where, over congealing kippers, tasteless tea, and toast that made your gums bleed, she was ignored by Charles and Hugo, put right by Patricia, and crushed on every subject she introduced by Elizabeth Hudson. The first time that she had had breakfast brought to her bedroom, Sir Charles had sent Nanny to take her temperature, so she had had to admit that she was, as he later summed it up, reverting to her sloppy continental habits. What bliss it was now, Bunny thought, looking across the placid bay to the village, the row of humble little shops, the white church of St Laurent, the Poisson d’Or, standing in a semi-circle round the harbour, gay with the emerald, saffron, scarlet and sky-blue and turquoise-blue of the fishing-boats, beached for repainting on the strip of sand — what bliss it was to come back to your own design for living, to your gimcrack villa, your slipshod existence, your friends without background, as Charles had phrased it in the course of their parting scene in the Residents’ Lounge of the old-established hotel in Kensington, where they had stayed during the trial. Apparently he had never dreamed that she might leave him; she’d had reason to complain of his lack of faith, he admitted, but he had apologized handsomely, and suspecting your wife of murder had never been mooted as grounds for divorce, even by that A. P. Herbert fellow. But Bunny wouldn’t argue, or, as he put it, listen to reason; she had simply said that she had lost the affection and respect which, as he’d known, was all that she’d felt for him. And on the evening of the day when the death sentence was passed on Margot Rattray and her accomplice,
and only half-an-hour after the scene in the Residents’ Lounge, Bunny had slipped out of the hotel, and it wasn’t until Sir Charles got back to Aston and learned that Lisa had left the same day and taken Babette with her, that he realized this was no tantrum, but the end of his marriage. He had written then, but of things which to her had no meaning; he could have wrung her heart if he had said he missed her, but he wrote of gossip in the county, of the laughing-stock she’d made him, of dragging his name in the mud and setting a bad example to the lower classes. She hadn’t replied: you couldn’t reply to Winchester and New College, and beneath all that there was no one but the Judas she had surprised at her cupboard. She hoped that he’d not write again … and down the steps came Lisa, carrying a letter, the square solidity of which proclaimed the country of its origin, even to Bunny’s myopic eyes across the terrace.

  ‘For you, from England,’ said Lisa.

  ‘Put it down somewhere,’ said Bunny fearfully.

  ‘I wondered if it was to say that they’ve sent off Romanee Conti. They must have got the cheque by now,’ said Lisa wistfully.

  ‘All right. Let me look,’ said Bunny.

  The d’Estrays, Elizabeth Hudson included, had done their best to cure her of her silly habit of puzzling over envelopes when it was the work of a second to tear them open and resolve the problem. She looked at the postmark and said, ‘London, E.G … forwarded from Aston … typed … it doesn’t look very inviting, does it?’ and then she turned it over and read from the back, ‘Derwent, Derwent and Battismore. Weren’t they the Scampnells’ solicitors?’

  ‘Yes, they were. Oh, do open it. Perhaps the Scampnells have left you a fortune to make up for trying to murder you,’ said Lisa, hopping with excitement.

  ‘I think murderers’ estates are confiscated, aren’t they?’ said Bunny, and she opened the letter and there were several sheets of thin lined paper and a covering letter from Derwent, Derwent and Battismore, baldly stating that ‘the enclosed’ had been received by them for forwarding. ‘The enclosed’ was written in a clear, thick, square handwriting, which was unfamiliar to Bunny, so she turned to the signature, which, without preamble, was ‘Margot Rattray’. Date and address had also been omitted, and the letter sharply began:

  LADY D’ESTRAY,

  I know you told us all to call you Bunny, but it is such a ridiculous name for a woman of your age, and anyhow, now that you know that I did my best to finish you off, I don’t suppose you would be so keen on it. I am writing to you against all the rules and regulations because at my trial my lawyers would hardly let me say anything, when I tried to explain I was told just to answer the questions, and I am sure people got the wrong impression and thought I was just a frightened person muddling along, whereas really those last days at Aston were simply glorious, and if I had the chance to live them again I should act in exactly the same way. You may be very clever and able to write books and get yourself talked about, but you’ll never know what it is to have the power and the courage to get rid of those who stand between you and your happiness; you didn’t think of killing that cow of a Hudson, you only whined when she bullied you; but I killed her as soon as she annoyed me. Though you’ve got brains, you haven’t got my strength of character; you just drift along — you don’t act, like me.

  I’m a very extraordinary person. Most people think they love their mothers, even if they really hate them; but I’m clear-sighted, I can face facts and I’ve always known that I hated mine. When I was told that she had remarried, I hated her more than ever — nothing’s sillier than the way that middle-aged women go on thinking that they’re attractive to men. Scamp fell madly in love with me at first sight. He wasn’t in love with her at all — who could be? — but she ran after him quite shamelessly and practically tricked him into marrying her. Out of loyalty to her, Scamp didn’t speak for ages, but one day he let something slip, which showed me that he loved me, and I realized that all the time I’d been in love with him. Let me tell you, Lady d’Estray, that when a person of my strength of character falls in love it’s not the namby-pamby kind of a thing you're used to — it’s a grand passion sweeping everything else aside. Scamp and I couldn’t just run away together because she had control of my father’s money, and though Scamp got a stingy salary from his directorship, his family are Quakers, and if there had been a “scandal” they would have forced him to resign from the Board. You couldn’t expect two people madly in love to live the rest of their lives at your dreary guest house and watch her spending money right and left on horses and hunting so that soon there would have been hardly anything left for us to inherit, even if — as we always hoped — she was killed in a hunting accident.

  It was my idea to kill her. In spite of his great love for me Scamp was shocked at first, but I managed to talk him round. Elizabeth Hudson, who was always gassing away about botany, told me about the dropwort when I was out for a walk with her, and I went back in the dark and dug it up and at night in your upstairs pantry I prepared it on Mother’s picnic stove. That was on Saturday night, and on Sunday the Hudson grabbed me when we came out of church and made me walk home with her. The spying devil had found out that Scamp and I were in love, and she gave me a lecture and said that unless I promised to give him up and go away and get a job she would tell her dear Cecily — as if one could stop the earth moving round the sun or water flowing downhill, as I told her. I promised to think over what she said and give her my decision on Monday. At first I was taken aback, for obviously if I killed Mother that night and the doctor smelt a rat and the police were called in, Elizabeth would tell them about me and Scamp and they would guess at once who had done it. An ordinary person would have given up the plan — Scamp wanted to — but I simply decided to kill Elizabeth and get her out of the way before killing Mother. Actually it was a stroke of genius, because everyone, including you, who are supposed to be so clever, was silly enough to look for someone with a motive for killing Elizabeth, and you thought Mother was killed because she knew something about Elizabeth’s murder, instead of the other way round. All the poison I got ready for Mother I had to use for Elizabeth; fortunately I had some of the roots left, and I hid them in the east wing — I had had the key of the door for ages, because Scamp and I used to go there when Mother was out riding, and you thought we were having a nice walk in Bottom Wood. What a mistake! After all the fuss about the Hudson, I hid the stove in the east wing, too, and I got the rest of the poison ready there, when you were all asleep and snoring. As you heard at my trial, Mother had always had two hunting-flasks — they were a relic of those days in India that she used to tell us about until we could have screamed with boredom — and so, of course, it was child’s play for me to change the flask I had got ready for the one she had, when she came upstairs from breakfast to put the finishing touches to her ridiculous and most unbecoming hunting clothes. Everything went like clockwork and, as I’d expected, that half-witted detective was racking his feeble brains to find out who could have tampered with the flask while it was in the dining-room, and then you came and asked us whether Mother had had a pair of flasks, and that upset poor Scamp; he had had a tiring day, and of course men are more highly strung than women are. He said he wouldn’t be able to sleep for worrying, so I said I’d put some of the poison into the cup of Ovaltine, which you had been silly enough to mention — you see, my Lady d’Estray, if you are really strong you have no troubles or worries. I made no more fuss about killing the people who were in my way than you would about stepping on a beetle. I knew you would be ages in your bath — you always are — so I had plenty of time to slip into the east wing and get the poison and, of course, I had a good excuse ready in case I met anyone as I went to your bedroom. The only trouble I had was with Scamp. He was against killing you at first — he said that you were the one the detective suspected and if you were dead he would begin to look round for another suspect, and then I got the magnificent idea of the confession. While you were lying and soaking in your bath, I slipped along the pa
ssage and emptied a jolly good dose of my patent medicine into your Ovaltine, and much later I took your typewriter into the east wing and Scamp and I typed your confession. I enjoyed that. If I had been able to travel about and see things as you have I daresay I should have written as well or better than you can; my work would have been stronger than yours, anyway, because I could have written of the passionate feelings of men and women, instead of a lot of silly nonsense about flowers and kids and cats. If you had drunk your Ovaltine, everyone would have believed that you were responsible for the poisonings, and Scamp and I would have gone away to the wonderful life we had planned for ourselves in South Africa; but through no cleverness of your own, but just because you are so fussy about food and the Ovaltine wasn’t hot enough, you didn’t drink it, and so you have spoilt two lives and brought to an end one of the greatest love-stories of the world — a much greater one than you, with your shallow mind, could even begin to write. One consolation is that with all your faults you are intelligent enough to realize what you’ve done, and I hope and believe that the rest of your trivial future will be poisoned by the thought that however many books you write or husbands you marry, you will never experience — because you’re incapable of it — the crowded hours of glorious life for which I am now perfectly content to pay the penalty.

  Bunny, as she had finished reading each page of the cheap writing-paper, had handed it to Lisa, and as she waited for Lisa to finish, too, she was wondering whether Margot had felt relieved when she had heard that the death sentences had been reduced to imprisonment for life, or if she had felt cheated of the climax of the drama she had devised. Then Lisa, sighing and shuffling the pages together, said, ‘Poor thing! There go we, if it wasn’t for our glands.’

  ‘Come off it, Lisa,’ said Bunny. ‘That letter: it’s like a medieval stained-glass window depicting some descent to hell — it’s crowded with the old, old sins, the good old simple scarlet sins: Envy and Greed, Pride, Hatred, Malice, Lust. Margot was wicked.’