by Carola Dunn
“Thank you, Inspector, but I’ll drop in at the Vicarage to see if there’s anything I can do to help.” As he stooped to crank the engine, she added innocently, “If you’re quite sure you don’t need the rest of my information about the doctor and Mrs. Burden, and the other people on the lists?”
Alec raised laughing grey eyes to heaven, but forbore to intervene. Flagg cranked the engine to life, then straightened with a sigh. He glanced from Daisy, who smiled sweetly, to Alec and back.
Sighing again, he opened the car door and said, “All right, hop in.”
Daisy hopped.
On the way, she pointed out the dwellings of Miss Prothero, Sam Basin, and Mrs. Molesworth. Turning right down the near side of the village green, Flagg asked impatiently, “But what about Dr. Padgett? What’s this vital information I need before talking to him?”
“Actually, I was thinking more of Mrs. Burden,” Daisy admitted. “The doctor is a charming gentleman, with a practice which includes the best people—best meaning superior in birth and fortune, not necessarily in character, of course. My sister says he also does a great deal of panel work, though.”
“Sounds like an exemplary character,” said Alec, ironically.
“Been getting anonymous letters,” Flagg pointed out. “Maybe he’s a wife-beater or a secret toper.”
“Or he wasn’t always so exemplary,” Daisy suggested. “A doctor’s in a delicate position. If he loses his patients’ trust, he loses his livelihood.”
The Ford stopped opposite the duck pond on the lower corner of the green, in front of a large Georgian house veiled with neatly trimmed Virginia creeper. A gleaming brass plate on one brick gatepost announced Old Well House; a second, on the other post, gave the doctor’s name and surgery hours.
“You’ll wait here, Daisy,” Alec decreed in his no-nonsense voice. “You’re the only one who can swear to Padgett’s having received a letter, and I don’t want him to have the least inkling of where we got our information.”
Though Daisy felt quite safe now that he was here, the memory of her former fears stopped the protest on her tongue. She even tilted her hat forward and turned away her head, feigning fascination with a pair of white ducks and a plump grey goose on the pond, while Alec and Flagg walked up the short drive.
They were back in a couple of minutes. “Padgett’s been called out to an emergency,” said Alec, getting back into the car.
Flagg cranked again. “Tell us about Mrs. Burden, Miss Dalrymple,” he invited when he took his place behind the wheel.
As they drove around the bottom of the green, past the station road and the Hop-Picker, and up the other side, Daisy described her chat with the postmistress. She became more and more convinced the woman was hiding something. “It could be that she felt she ought not to have talked about Post Office business, but she got jolly nervous and cut me off pretty sharply in the end.”
“You led her on to say more than she meant to,” said Flagg with a hint of admiration, “and quite neatly.”
“She must hear loads of gossip in the shop,” Daisy pointed out, “so she’d have the material to write the letters. I should think she must be well enough educated to write correctly, or she couldn’t run the business, but I don’t know that it would occur to her to deliberately spell wrong.”
“No, that’s rather a sophisticated touch,” Alec agreed.
“And the way she talked wasn’t really as if she’d written them herself. So more likely she’s been getting them. Either that, or her daughter has, unless she suspects her daughter wrote them. Winifred’s the sulky, grudge-against-the-world sort who might, and she runs the telephone exchange so she must hear all sorts of things, if she listens in.”
“As most of ’em do,” said Flagg cynically. “Amazing what folks’ll say on the telephone, knowing perfectly well there’s a pair of ears in the circuit.”
“All very true,” Alec said dryly, “but could either of them have left the shop for long enough to murder Professor Osborne? When’s early closing?”
“Today,” said Daisy, vexed with herself for missing the obvious. “The exchange doesn’t close down, of course.”
Flagg was unruffled. “Well, that’s as may be, and two suspects the fewer’s all to the good. But Mrs. Burden told you she’d noticed those envelopes, and with any luck she’ll remember at least some of the people they were addressed to.” He drew up in front of the shop.
“Shall I come in?” Daisy asked, dying to but not wanting to press her luck. “Unlike Mrs. LeBeau, Mrs. Burden didn’t unbosom herself to me. She isn’t exactly going to fall on my neck.”
Inspector Flagg regarded her, his face bland but for the twinkle in his eye, very reminiscent of the way Tom Tring generally looked at her. Daisy decided he was beginning to get her measure.
“What do you reckon, sir?” he said to Alec. “It seems to me, Mrs. Burden will deny everything, likely as not, unless we have Miss Dalrymple on hand to remind her of what she said about the envelopes.”
“As you choose, Inspector,” Alec said with a wry smile. “But Daisy, you stay out of things unless you’re needed.”
“Yes, Chief,” said Daisy.
They went into the shop. Mrs. Burden was at the Post Office counter, registering a letter for a stout, smart matron she addressed as Mrs. Lympne. Daisy recognized her from a previous visit, when she and her husband had dined at Oakhurst. Not wanting to get caught in a chat, Daisy went to the other counter and started looking through the box of picture postcards. She glanced round as someone else stepped up to the counter.
“Mrs. Gresham, how do you do! I’ve been hoping to see you, to apologize for not turning up at the meeting.”
The farmer’s wife smiled at her. “From what I hear, you have every excuse in the world, Miss Dalrymple. I’m sorry, though. I was looking forward to hearing your talk. Another time, perhaps.”
“Win, come and lend a hand,” Mrs. Burden called just then. Daisy looked back to see Mrs. Lympne’s back departing and Alec and Flagg standing at the Post Office counter.
Winifred slouched through from the exchange. “Who’s first?” she enquired uninterestedly.
“Help Mrs. Gresham,” Daisy said. “I haven’t made up my mind yet.”
“I’ll take a box of puppy worming pills, please.”
“Mu-um, where’re the worming pills?”
But Mum was leading the detectives into the store-room at the back. Regretfully Daisy decided she had better wait until called.
“They’re over there, down near the bottom.” Mrs. Gresham leaned forward and pointed at the shelves behind the counter. “The white box with ‘Padgett’s’ in blue and a picture of a dog.”
Winifred crouched with a grunt, rose with a groan, and slapped a small box on the counter. “Tenpence ha’penny.”
The picture looked just like Tinker Bell. An idea occurred to Daisy. “You have puppies?” she asked.
“Five, in need of homes.” Mrs. Gresham handed over a shilling and dropped her penny ha’penny change in her purse. “I don’t know what Ellie found to mate with but they’re no good as farm dogs. My Amos is too soft-hearted to drown them, I’m glad to say.”
“No promises,” said Daisy, “but if Alec—my fiancé—agrees, I’ll bring my stepdaughter-to-be to see them.”
“Miss Dalrymple!” Flagg stood at the store-room door. “If you wouldn’t mind stepping this way?”
Daisy most certainly wouldn’t mind. She said a hurried goodbye to Mrs. Gresham, and followed the inspector into a small room even more crammed with goods of every size, shape, and description than the shop. Just inside the door, Mrs. Burden sat on a cardboard box labelled BOURNEVILLE COCOA, stacked on another marked COLMAN’S MUSTARD. Looking frightened but stubborn, she let out a little gasp when she saw Daisy.
Alec, leaning against the nearest shelves, towered over her. “Mrs. Burden seems to have had a lapse of memory, Miss Dalrymple,” he said. “I hope you can jog it for us.”
Daisy sat
down on a box of Lifebuoy soap. “You talk to so many people every day, Mrs. Burden,” she said encouragingly, “you can’t possibly remember every conversation. We were chatting about how badly written addresses often are. You mentioned as an example those in pencil, which are hard to read even when they’re written in capitals. And you said they’re infrequent, but that recently—”
“Oh those letters!” Mrs. Burden seized on the excuse to get out of the corner she had painted herself into with her flat denial of all knowledge. “What about them?”
“We want to know,” said Flagg, “who they were addressed to.”
“I don’t know that I ought …”
“We can get a warrant.”
“Oh no!” The shopkeeper looked as if she might faint.
“Not an arrest warrant,” Daisy said quickly, “just some sort of official permission for you to tell the police.”
“That’s right, ma’am, but it’d waste time, and there’s a murderer on the loose.”
Though hardly reassured by this announcement, Mrs. Burden pulled herself together. “I’m sure I don’t want to obstruct the police. Let me think. Well, there was Lord John for one, I’m sorry to say, miss. And that Mrs. Willoughby-Jones who thinks she’s so superior, always carping at other people. Mrs. LeBeau, Miss Prothero that’s her next-door neighbour, Miss Hendricks … Let me see. Oh, Brigadier Lomax and that writer he let his cottage to. And the doctor, I’m sorry to say. That’s all that comes to mind just now, but I think there’s more.”
“Yourself?” said Flagg.
“No!”
Flagg glanced at Alec, who shook his head slightly and asked, “Have you any idea who might have written the letters, ma’am?”
“The amount of gossip in this village,” said Mrs. Burden bitterly, “it could’ve been anyone.”
So she did get one, Daisy thought, while the inspector asked when the first lot of letters had been posted. That question, she realized, everyone had forgotten to pose to Mrs. LeBeau.
“First I noticed was the middle of July. You’ll have to let me go now,” Mrs. Burden insisted as the bell in the shop rang. “I’ve customers to be seen to.”
“Just one more question, for now. Where were you yesterday afternoon between two o’clock and half past three?”
“Here, where d’you think?” She pushed past him, calling, “I’ll be right with you!”
“Should we talk to the girl?” Flagg asked Alec.
“Not now, I think. Mrs. Burden has given us plenty to be getting on with. We can always come back later. Let’s try the doctor again. His nurse thought he wouldn’t be gone long.”
They went out through the shop. Mrs. Burden, busy with a customer, did not so much as glance their way.
In the car, Daisy said, “I’m sure she got a letter, and whoever wrote it, she blames it on Mrs. Willoughby-Jones.”
“Oh, undoubtedly,” Alec agreed, “but I see no need to press the poor woman about it unless we get no lead elsewhere. What can you tell us about Mrs. Willoughby-Jones?”
“She’s one of the Vicarage tea-and-scandal set.” Daisy described the forthright termagant. “Whatever she found out about Mrs. Burden, she would have taxed her with it to her face, and tattled to the rest of the old cats.”
Flagg stopped the Ford outside Old Well House again. This time Dr. Padgett’s Humber stood in the drive. “Caught him,” said the inspector with satisfaction. “You coming in, Miss Dalrymple? Now we have another source of information about his letters, you’re quite safe, wouldn’t you say, sir?”
“I dare say, but there’s no good reason to give for her presence.”
“I’ll think of something. Miss Dalrymple’s got insight, sir, and I’d give a deal to hear what she makes of his story.”
Daisy did her best to look modest.
Alec resignedly assented, and they went into the doctor’s waiting room. The sole occupant, a shabby, weatherbeaten old man bent with rheumatics, glared at them. “We’ll wait our turn,” Flagg soothed him. From the inner room came a baby’s wail.
Ten minutes later, Padgett was free. If he was surprised to see Daisy, he did not show it. He was all charm to her, man to man with Alec—introduced as both her fiancé and a Scotland Yard detective—and gravely professional with Flagg, as he ushered them through to the private side of the house, into an elegant, expensively furnished drawing room. The voices of small children came from the garden beyond the open windows.
“I need your medical report on the murdered gentleman, sir,” Flagg opened, “but first we’d like to make sure your recollection of your movements in the graveyard chimes with Miss Dalrymple’s.”
Padgett smiled at Daisy. “Miss Dalrymple was most particular that I must be careful not to destroy any clues.” He described circling between the tombstones, crouching by the professor’s head, returning by the same route. Then, before she could stop him, he divulged her sudden faintness and his supporting her to the church porch.
“Daisy, you never told me!” Alec exploded.
“You couldn’t expect me to admit to being such a frightful drip,” she retorted. “Anyway, it was only for a moment. Dr. Padgett offered to go to the Vicarage to tell the vicar—”
“So you were quite certain of the identity of the deceased, sir?”
“Not absolutely, no,” Padgett said, “but if I’d found the vicar at home it would have become obvious. I told Barton I was going, went, found Osborne out, and returned to Miss Dalrymple. I had my rounds to do, so I couldn’t wait for your arrival, Inspector.”
No word of his dash to escape Mrs. Osborne, Daisy noted.
He gave his medical report next. Daisy tried not to listen to the details, giving her attention to a magnificent, green-eyed, silver Persian which strolled in just then. Going straight to Padgett, it leapt into his lap, and he fondled its ears as he spoke. The main part of his evidence was that when he examined the body, at about twenty past three, Professor Osborne had been dead for at least half an hour but not more than an hour.
“That agrees with our other information, sir,” said Flagg. “You’ll understand that I have to ask where you were between two and three o’clock yesterday. Just routine.”
“I left Lower Foxwood Farm at five past two. I noticed particularly because I was reckoning how long a nap I’d have time for, having been up half the night. I must have got home by twenty-five past at the latest—I spoke to our parlourmaid, Nancy, she might know. Went straight upstairs, took off my shoes and jacket, and slept like a log till the call came through from young Master Derek just after three.”
Thirty-five minutes to dash up to the church, bump off the professor, and dash home again. He would have to have set up a meeting. If he had murder in mind, why such a public place? No, the murderer surely came upon Professor Osborne by chance, Daisy thought, as Flagg recorded Padgett’s answer without comment.
“But of course I had no conceivable motive,” the doctor finished. “I don’t suppose I’d exchanged more than a couple of dozen words with the chap in my life.”
“We’ve reason to think the murder may be connected with a spate of anonymous letters,” Flagg said deliberately. “And we know you to be one of the victims of the Poison Pen.”
Padgett paled. The cat miaowed indignantly, as if his caressing hand had abruptly tweaked its ear. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he blustered, apologetically smoothing the offended feline’s fur.
He liked cats but disliked dogs. Daisy had a sudden vision of his avoiding Tinker Bell’s friendly lick. Tinker … so like the dog on the packet of pills Mrs. Gresham bought … the words on the packet … “Padgett’s Patent Puppy Worming Pills,” said Daisy. “‘Gentle but thorough.’”
Alec and Flagg stared at her as if she had run mad, but the doctor slumped with a groan.
Dr. Robert Padgett, M.D., was sole heir to the Padgett puppy-wormer fortune. The pills had paid for a public school education, medical training, and the purchase of a profitable practice. They
also paid for the ambitious young man to move in fashionable circles. There he had met and fallen wildly in love with Miss Henrietta Bevis, third daughter of a County family with more pride than money.
Puppy worming pills—of all the nauseating ways to make a fortune. Unmentionable in polite company! Hetta refused to marry him unless he swore to cut himself off from all social intercourse with his plebeian, nouveau riche parents. (The purse-strings, naturally, were not to be severed.)
“There’s enough from them to live on in comfort, but I always wanted to be a doctor,” Padgett said, adding even more defensively, “I go to see them regularly. Hetta won’t let the children see them. In fact, they don’t know that set of grandparents is still alive.”
“If they’re such a secret,” Alec said, stony-faced, “who in the village might have found out? You’ve told nobody?”
“Just one … My parents are getting older, you see. They desperately want to know their grandchildren. One evening at the Lomaxes, I must have had a glass too much of the brigadier’s excellent port and I found myself asking the vicar’s advice. Of course I should have known what a man of God would say … But I couldn’t bring myself to hurt Hetta so. She would be devastated.”
“Could anyone have overheard you?” Flagg asked neutrally.
Padgett shook his head. “Lomax was practically comatose. The ladies were playing whist, and Lympne was watching over his wife’s shoulder, giving her bad advice. Yet I can’t believe Osborne would have told anyone! He’s a clergyman, and a good fellow, to boot.”
Alec and Flagg exchanged a glance. Flagg wound up the interview with a warning that the doctor would be called at the inquest in Ashford next day. They left him sunk in gloom and went out to the car.
“The Reverend told his wife,” said Flagg.