Murder Fantastical

by Patricia Moyes

  At this point he paused to take a much-needed breath, but Henry had no time to say more than, “Major Manciple, I…” before the flood was unloosed again.

  A post-mortem indeed? And why, might George be allowed to ask? Was Henry suggesting that Aunt Dora had been murdered? While Raymond Mason had committed suicide, at the range of a hundred yards or more? Was that it? Really, George began to think that his brother Edwin had been quite right when he expressed doubts as to Henry’s mental stability. Good God, if anybody had been murdered, it was Mason, wasn’t it? George knew that he, George, was not considered to be very bright, but he at least had eyes and ears in his head and could use them. Henry could rest assured that never, under any circumstances, would the family consent to a post mortem on Aunt Dora. Thompson had signed the death certificate, hadn’t he? Everything was straightforward and above board, and things were worrying enough for Violet as it was. He certainly wasn’t going to have her upset by nonsense of this sort, and…

  He was interrupted by the arrival of Violet, flustered as usual, and apologizing to Henry for having been detained by some household chore. It was not until she was actually inside the room that she appeared to realize that she had interrupted a tirade. However, one look at her husband told her all. Abruptly she switched her attention from Henry to Major Manciple, and said, “What’s the matter, George?”

  “Matter? Nothing. Nothing whatsoever, my dear. Now, just you go and…”

  “Of course there’s something the matter,” said Mrs. Manciple. She did not speak sharply, but with the calm conviction of one in full grasp of the facts. “You are all upset, George. I haven’t seen you like this since Mr. Mason complained to the Council about the range.”

  “That has nothing to do with it,” said Major Manciple crossly.

  Violet appealed to Henry. “Will you tell me, Mr. Tibbett? What has been happening?”

  “Don’t say a word, Tibbett,” rapped out the Major.

  Henry said, “I was just telling your husband that I’m not satisfied that Miss Dora Manciple’s death was entirely natural.”

  To his surprise Violet Manciple said at once, “Oh, I am glad that you feel that, Mr. Tibbett. I absolutely agree with you.”

  “Violet,” began the Major on an explosive note.

  His wife took no notice. Addressing herself to Henry, she said, “She used to have these attacks, you see, but this was different. If only I hadn’t had that wretched meeting about the Fête, I might have—but by the time I went up to her, it was too late. And I couldn’t make the Doctor understand that it wasn’t just an ordinary attack. To tell you the truth, Mr. Tibbett, I’ve been trying to pluck up my courage to ask you if we couldn’t have a post-mortem examination. She—it was almost as though she’d been drugged, you see.”

  Henry nodded. “I think she very likely was,” he said. “She never took sleeping pills, did she?”

  “Sleeping pills? Oh, certainly not. She always slept like a log. But in any case, the Doctor told me that she must on no account ever be allowed to take even the mildest of barbiturates. He said that with her heart in its present state…”

  “Did the other members of your family know this, Mrs. Manciple? That sleeping pills could be dangerous for Aunt Dora, I mean.”

  “Of course,” said Violet at once. “Everybody knew, because it’s so easy to get medicines mixed up, and we had to be especially careful. You see, Ramona takes sleeping pills—far too many, in my opinion, but I suppose it’s none of my business. And so does George, of course.”

  “Do you, Major Manciple?” Henry asked.

  George Manciple was now the color of a ripe tomato. “What if I do?” he demanded. “Thompson prescribed them a few months ago, when I was so worried over the Mason business. I don’t see that it has anything to do with…”

  “I suppose,” said Henry, “that anybody could have gotten at your bottle of pills? Or at Lady Manciple’s?”

  “I suppose so. Mine are in my bathroom cabinet. Thought they were safe enough there, because Aunt Dora had her own bathroom. Never used ours. Heaven knows where Ramona kept hers. But if you’re suggesting that Aunt Dora deliberately went and took sleeping pills, when she knew very well that Thompson had forbidden them…”

  “I’m not suggesting anything of the sort, I’m afraid,” said Henry. “I wonder if you’d go and take a look at your bottle of pills, Major Manciple, just to see if any are missing.”

  “My dear man, I don’t count them. They’re not poisonous.”

  “But at least you’d know whether the bottle was full or half full or…”

  “As a matter of fact,” Manciple conceded with a bad grace, “now you come to mention it, I should have a brand-new bottle. I ran out last week, and Thompson wrote me a new prescription. Maud and Julian got the new tablets from the druggist yesterday morning. So…”

  He ambled out of the room, leaving the sentence unfinished.

  Violet Manciple said, “Do you know for certain that Aunt Dora had taken…?”

  “We can’t possibly know for certain until after the postmortem,” said Henry.

  Violet nodded, gravely.

  “But I can tell you that there were traces of barbiturate in the glass which Miss Manciple used at lunch yesterday.”

  Mrs. Manciple looked puzzled. “Where is that glass, do you know, Mr. Tibbett? I was certain I had taken it out of the dining room, but when I came to do the washing up yesterday evening I couldn’t find it anywhere. I thought perhaps it was broken.”

  Henry said, with some embarrassment, “I’m afraid I am the guilty party, Mrs. Manciple. I took the glass from the kitchen while you were upstairs. I wanted to have it analysed, you see, and I didn’t want to upset you unnecessarily…”

  “So you suspected,” said Violet, “Even yesterday.”

  “Yes,” said Henry. “So…”

  The door opened and Major Manciple came back. He walked jauntily, carrying a small package in his hand. Triumphantly, he said, “Here you are! See? Still done up in the druggist’s wrapping. Seal not even broken. Are you satisfied now?”

  “Let’s open the wrapping, all the same,” said Henry. “Somebody might have…”

  “Of all the nonsense!” cried George Manciple in great good humor. “Still, if it makes you happy…” He broke the small red seal and unwrapped the white paper. “There!” He held out a small bottle, a bottle which Henry recognized as being identical with the one he had taken from the kitchen shelf on the previous day. The top of the bottle was sealed with plastic, and it was full of small white pills.

  “I’ll have to take those pills away for analysis, I’m afraid,” said Henry, “but it certainly looks as though…”

  The telephone cut him short in mid-sentence. Violet hurried out into the hall to answer it, leaving the door open.

  “Hello—Yes—Yes, Ramona dear—How kind of you to ring—Oh, yes, we’re managing—No, no, of course not—Tell Claud he mustn’t dream of… Yes, Friday—at least, as far as I know—Yes, Friday at half-past two at the parish church, and afterward at the crematorium—yes, of course we’ll be delighted to put you both up—What? Oh…”

  She caught her breath as if in dismay, and the two men in the drawing room exchanged a glance. Then Violet recovered and went on.

  “Yes, I’ll—I’ll look, of course—Where did you see them last? I see—well, certainly I’ll… Yes, dear—no, no, it’s no trouble—I mean, it may be import… That is, you must want them—I’ll look—Yes—Good-bye, Ramona…”

  She hung up and came back into the drawing room. “That was Ramona,” she said.

  “We had gathered that,” said George. “What did she say?”

  “She was calling about—about the funeral, and so on. I told her…” She glanced in inquiry at Henry. “I suppose the funeral arrangements can go ahead, Mr. Tibbett?”

  “As far as I know,” said Henry. “There’s no need to change anything at this point.”

  “Get on with what Ramona said,” put i
n George Manciple impatiently.

  “Well, then she said, just as an afterthought, had I seen her sleeping pills?”

  Major Manciple took a step toward his wife.

  Violet continued, “She said she had had an almost full bottle, which was on the table beside her bed. She hadn’t noticed when she was packing, but when she got back to Bradwood, she found she didn’t have them. She thinks she must have forgotten them, and that they are still on her bedside table. But…” Violet looked at Henry with a desperate sort of appeal. “But I’ve just been cleaning out the room they had, and there’s nothing there. Nothing at all.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “I CAN’T UNDERSTAND IT, Tibbett,” said Sir John Adamson. “I simply can’t. I thought the whole thing was over and done with.”

  “So did I,” said Henry. It was only teatime, but he felt very tired already. “But there it is. There were traces of barbiturates in both the specimens of lemonade that I sent for analysis. It’s true that I poured the lemonade from the jug into a bottle which had previously contained Major Manciple’s pills, so that proves little, one way or the other. But the barbiturate in the drinking glass can’t be accidental. Dr. Thompson has confirmed that even a small amount of the drug would have been fatal to Miss Manciple with her heart condition. And Lady Manciple’s sleeping pills have disappeared; there’s no sign of them, and nobody at Cregwell Grange will admit to having seen or touched the bottle, though they all agree that they knew of its existence. Well, as I told you, Major Manciple finally agreed to a post-mortem examination, and—there’s the result.” Henry tapped the file which lay on Sir John’s desk. “Miss Manciple died from heart failure as a direct result of swallowing a couple of sleeping pills, which would not have harmed any ordinary person. They were undoubtedly administered in the lemonade.”

  “Why, Tibbett? That’s what beats me. Why?”

  “I can only suppose,” said Henry, “that it was because Miss Manciple had announced her intention of having a talk with me later in the day.”

  “About the supernatural manifestations of parrots? Bah!” said Sir John forcefully.

  Henry sighed. “I know, sir,” he said. “It does sound silly when you put it like that, but…”

  Sir John picked up a metal ruler and began beating a tattoo on the leather desk top. “Mason,” he said, “let’s get back to Mason. That’s why you’re here, after all. Let’s have an end to this hedging and ditching. Tell me straight out what happened to Mason.”

  Henry hesitated for a moment. Then he said, “I think that Raymond Mason’s death was accidental.”

  “You mean, somebody killed him by mistake? Is that it?”

  “No.”

  “Then what in heaven’s name…”

  “I think that he killed himself by mistake.”

  For a moment it seemed that Sir John would explode. Then, with a great effort at self-control, he said, “I think you will have to make yourself a little clearer, Tibbett.”

  Henry grinned. “Certainly,” he said. “I’ll start at the beginning—or as near the beginning as I’ve been able to trace so far. Raymond Mason wanted to buy Cregwell Grange.”

  “We all knew that.”

  “He wanted to buy it with a sort of desperation, something far more powerful than the ordinary desire of a man who has seen a house that suits him and hopes to get it. For some reason Cregwell Grange had become an obsession with Raymond Mason.”

  “Wanted to establish himself as a landed gent.” said Sir John. He laughed shortly. “Some hope!”

  Henry looked at him. “Yes,” he said. “Well, he started by making a generous offer for the house, and when it was turned down he increased his bid. Apparently it took some time to penetrate Mason’s brain with the fact that George Manciple was simply not prepared to sell at any price. This undoubtedly infuriated Mason, and made him more determined than ever to get the Grange for himself.

  “His next line of attack was to try to make George Manciple’s life such misery that he would be happy to sell the place and move to get a little peace and quiet. Mason’s best hope lay in getting the shooting range banned, because he was shrewd enough to realize that it was Major Manciple’s chief joy in life and that without it he might well be tempted to—anyhow, Mason failed. Major Manciple had too many friends in high places.”

  Sir John cleared his throat noisily and said, ‘Very interesting theory. Go on.”

  “Mason’s next gambit,” said Henry, “was to propose to Miss Maud Manciple. A pretty far-flung hope that was, but she’s a beautiful girl and I imagine that he really fell in love with her. No reason why he shouldn’t have. Unfortunately for him, she was secretly engaged already, and he was not only turned down and snubbed in what must have been a very hurting manner, but he was insulted and even threatened by her fiancé. After that, I think he got really desperate. He was determined to get his own back from the Manciple family, to get them out of that house at all costs.”

  “That’s all very well,” said Sir John, “but how did he think he was going to do it?”

  “Very sensibly,” said Henry. “He went back to the shooting range idea. Previously he’d claimed that the range might, in theory, be dangerous—and he’d been overruled. Now, supposing that an accident should take place on the range, a potentially fatal accident. Not all Major Manciple’s influential friends would be able to defend it then. Naturally, Mason knew all about Manciple’s patent tennis-ball traps, just as everyone else did. He also found it quite easy to filch one of Manciple’s guns in order to do some experiments.”

  “How on earth do you know all this?”

  “Major Manciple had reported a gun missing a couple of weeks ago and I found it in Mason’s house. There was a piece of string still tied around the trigger. Mason had obviously been experimenting with firing it by remote control.”

  Sir John was beginning to look interested. “Had he, by Jove? And did it work?”

  “I think it did,” said Henry. “It doesn’t take any great pressure on the trigger to fire the gun, just a short, sharp pull. Mason’s idea, as I see it, was to stage an accident, with himself cast in the role of potential victim, who might easily have been maimed or even killed but for a lucky chance.”

  “Taking a bit of a risk, wasn’t he?”

  “Oh, no. He had it all worked out. His idea was that at a time when he knew Major Manciple to be down at the range a shot should be fired which might have hit somebody in the drive. In fact, the errant shot would be fired out of the window of the downstairs lavatory, that little Gothic slit that looks out into the shrubbery beside the front door. Mason himself, the possible victim, would be in the drive, but by great good fortune he would be protected by the open hood of his car, which he would have happened to raise in order to investigate a fault in the engine, a fault which, of course, he had engineered himself. Protected by a ton and a half of Mercedes Benz, he would have been perfectly safe. But the bullet would have struck the car, providing just the evidence Mason needed. Manciple’s shooting range would never have survived an incident like that.”

  “Who was to fire the shot then? Did he have an accomplice?”

  “No, no. I told you, he was experimenting with remote control. In fact, before leaving the Grange that day he spent quite a long time in that downstairs cloakroom, much longer than would have been required in the normal course of nature, as Mrs. Manciple noticed; but of course she would never have mentioned so indelicate a matter if I hadn’t dragged it out of her. Actually, of course, Mason was rigging up the gun. He had it pointing out of the window with a string around the trigger attached to one of Manciple’s spring traps.

  “We’ll never know exactly how the gun was supported, because Mrs. Manciple tidied up the cloakroom and put everything away before I realized the significance of it. One thing is clear, however. Those traps work off a burning fuse. As Mason left the cloakroom, he lit the fuse. He knew exactly how much time that would give him before the trap sprang and fired the gun. I im
agine that he intended the gun to fall back into the cloakroom; he could easily enough have found an excuse to go in there afterward and tidy everything up. But as it happened, he must have found it necessary to prop up the gun with something solid, another box or a book, perhaps. So, when the gun jumped backward with the recoil, it hit against this solid object and fell forward instead and out of the window. Mason hadn’t counted on that.”

  “He hadn’t counted on killing himself, either,” said Sir John. “What went wrong?”

  “Aunt Dora,” said Henry.

  “Aunt Dora?”

  “I think,” said Henry, “that Mason was genuinely fond of the old lady. In any case it was no part of his plan that anybody should get hurt, let alone killed. He had the hood of the car open; he was snugly protected behind it, just waiting for the shot, when Aunt Dora came out of the house and down the steps, waving her pamphlets at him. Mason must have been appalled. She was walking directly through the line of fire only a few feet from the gun. Mason knew that she was deaf and wouldn’t hear if he called to her. There was no way of stopping her except by signs, and that meant coming out into the open himself. She told me that when he saw her coming, he ran out from behind the car, obviously alarmed and waving his arms at her. He was trying to warn her to go back. Mercifully, she stopped, but he had no time to get back into shelter before the gun went off. And so he was killed—accidentally. The fact that the single bullet got him through the head and killed him outright was just simple bad luck.”