6 - Superfluous Death

by Hazel Holt

  ‘No, he was far too wrapped up in her, whoever she was. I did hope to get a good look at her when they got up to leave,’ Anthea said, ‘but Celia wanted a spoon for her coffee and didn’t know where to get one—honestly, she’s getting very vague, I really do worry about her sometimes—so I had to fetch it, and when I got back they’d gone.’

  ‘How maddening,’ I said. ‘Did you tell Carol?’

  Anthea hesitated. ‘Well, I did think of it, but then I thought it wasn’t any of my business, and besides there might have been nothing in it and I’d have looked like some sort of busybody, so in the end I didn’t. Poor Carol,’ she sighed. ‘I’m glad I didn’t now. If there had been anything in it at least she was spared that sort of worry.’

  ‘Still,’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t think there was anything in it. I mean, not Ronnie! I expect it was just someone he met at the conference who was going back sort of the same way—or something like that.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Anthea said reluctantly. ‘As you say, Ronnie Graham isn’t really the sort of person who’d be up to any sort of hanky-panky.’

  The old-fashioned phrase stayed with me through Chris’s talk and I found it difficult to concentrate on the problems of creating a scientific fantasy world when certain all-too-human fantastic scenarios were jostling about in my mind. Could Ronnie have had an assignation with someone? Could he, indeed, have been enjoying a weekend of illicit passion instead of improving his management techniques at the Birmingham Conference Centre? It really did seem highly improbable. But if he had ... A burst of laughter from the audience, indicating that Chris’s talk was going well, brought me back to the matter in hand and I tried to concentrate on what he was saying so that I could at least make relevant congratulatory remarks at the appropriate time.

  It was a good talk and, after Michael had set the ball rolling with the first question (‘Would you like to live in the fantasy world you’ve created?’), the whole occasion went with a swing.

  As we milled around the paperback copies of Chris’s books, hopefully laid out for potential purchasers, I drew Anthea to one side and said, ‘Did Carol ever give you any sort of hint that she was worried about Ronnie—well—straying?’

  ‘No.’ Anthea was quite emphatic. ‘I don’t think such an idea ever crossed her mind. Well, would it? Anyway, it’s all water under the bridge now. Liz! Are you coming back with me or what?’

  Michael, Chris and Liz stayed in Taviscombe for a drink (‘And we’ll probably get something to eat as well, Ma, so don’t bother about getting anything for us’) and I went home alone to brood about this unexpected piece of information I’d been given and to wonder how—if at all—it fitted into the jigsaw that was the problem of Carol’s death.

  Chris went back to his prep school (‘I can’t tell you how marvellous it is to escape into the grown-up world, even for a weekend!’) on Sunday afternoon and on Monday morning, after I’d remade the bed, I decided to give the spare room what is generally known as a Good Turn-Out. Firmly switching on the Hoover (the quickest way of driving an over-inquisitive Foss from the room), I vacuumed and polished and washed down paintwork in a positive frenzy and, driven on by the resultant glow of virtue, I even embarked on yet another attempt at clearing out the second wardrobe that contains garments I hardly ever wear but can’t bring myself to throw away.

  Such a job can be immensely time-wasting. Each garment is absolutely swathed in memories and can provoke any amount of vague day-dreaming. There was that pale blue pleated dress and jacket, for instance, that I’d bought for the wedding of a distant cousin and never worn again, but which, in some mysterious way, I felt might come in for some similar occasion (though it never had and that was—goodness!—ten years ago), a grey and white polished cotton summer dress with a pattern of mimosa flowers I’d bought the year before Michael was born (and which I probably couldn’t get into now, though I’d never put it to the test) and which I kept for general sentimental reasons; a silk blouse Peter had brought me back from Ite b’aly years ago and really worn out, but kept for the aforementioned reasons; a good camel skirt, definitely too tight but not thrown out because the material was so good and I Might Do Something With It (though I knew I never would). And there, in a heavy plastic bag, was my mother’s fur coat, grey squirrel and I would certainly never wear it, but you can’t even give fur coats to Oxfam—or anywhere nowadays and I couldn’t just chuck it out.

  I sighed. What with memories of one sort or another there didn’t seem to be anything I could dispose of. As usual, I’d end up by closing the wardrobe door and leaving everything for another six months or so, until my conscience nagged me into having yet another go. I shuffled the hangers forward to get to the back and found, lurking behind a beige two-piece with white trimming (Jilly’s Christening, over twenty-five years ago), a grey woollen coat that I’d completely forgotten about. I took it out and shook it. It was perfectly wearable, I decided. I remembered now buying it in London in 1982 when Rosemary and I had gone up for a matinee (Private Lives, was it? or Blithe Spirit, definitely Coward). I remembered I’d seen the coat in Dickins and Jones and bought it on an impulse and then had to cart it to the theatre with me and stuff it awkwardly under the seat. Definitely wearable, nice and full and comfortable, and really quite stylish, I couldn’t think why I’d abandoned it. And it wasn’t a boring ordinary grey, it was a sort of greenish grey ...

  A greyish—greenish-grey—coat and a mass of fair hair. A picture grew in my mind of Ronnie leaning across the narrow table of the service station restaurant and talking to Jenny Drummond.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I sat down on the newly made bed and thought. Certainly it would fit. Jenny had been going to visit her aunt near Worcester (she’d told me that on the day in the supermarket when I’d seen her wearing the greyish-green coat) just about the time Ronnie was supposed to be in Birmingham. They’d have left separately, of course, and met up at the M5 service station. I don’t suppose Anthea would have recognized Jenny, since, as far as I know, their paths have never crossed and I don’t think she’s ever met her. So Ronnie and Jenny met and went off somewhere (perhaps to some romantic Cotswold village) for a few days ...

  But even as I worked it out I couldn’t believe that Jenny, so bright, young and attractive, could ever have had an affair with a dim creature like Ronnie—it just wasn’t possible! But the feeling that they had met secretly continued to grow on me and I sought around for other possibilities. Perhaps—yes—perhaps Jenny was Carol’s long-lost daughter? She was about the right age and she came from approximately the same area. Say she’d tracked Carol down and come to Taviscombe on purpose to look for her mother, or maybe she’d found out by accident who her mother was when she was already here ...

  She might not have wanted to confront Carol directly and chose to approach her through Ronnie; therefore she would have needed to see him without Carol knowing.

  I tried to remember what Jenny had told us about her family that evening she’d come to supper. If my theory was correct, she’d have known by then about Carol being her real mother, so was all that stuff about her childhood true, and the person she mentioned actually her adoptive mother, or had she made the whole thing up?

  I got up and went to look out of the window, hoping to clear my mind which was, by now, thoroughly confused. There’d been quite a hard frost in the night and the plants in the borders were rimed with white. There were tracks across the whitened lawn where the dogs had been rushing about in their first early morning excitement and a crowd of small birds were pushing and shoving to get at the seed I’d put out on the bird table. This was mounted high up on a wall where Foss couldn’t get at it, and, as I watched, a grey squirrel lowered itself carefully down from the top of the wall, spreadeagled for greater purchase against the flat, vertical surface, and neatly landed on the bird table, where it drove the birds away and settled down to eat the seed, stuffing it into the pouches of its cheeks with what seemed to me an expression of triumph. I ban
ged on the window, but the squirrel took no notice and I thought that perhaps, in a way, he deserved to get away with his ill-gotten gains as a reward for his ingenuity.

  The line between ingenuity and deviousness is a narrow one, and what one might applaud in the animal kingdom should not necessarily be praised in human beings. Murder, for instance, however cleverly planned, was certainly to be abhorred. I thought again of Carol’s death. Ronnie was the obvious beneficiary, unless Carol had left something to her daughter and her daughter was aware of the fact.

  If Jenny was Carol’s daughter, working in the office of Ronnie and Carol’s solicitor, she’d have had access to Carol’s will and would also have been very well aware of the enormous amount of money that Ronnie now had in prospect. That would fit. But the money was Ronnie’s and if Jenny was going to kill Carol for her share of it, surely it would be logical to kill Ronnie first, and then Carol, when she’d inherited it ... I pulled myself up with a start. I was thinking of Jenny as a murderer. Yet, as I pushed the thought away, it kept returning. Jenny was a very self-possessed young woman, ambitious and apparently determined to make her way in the world. Looking back over our conversations I recognized that she had an eye for the material value of things, she wanted the good things of life. Still, that didn’t make her a murderer.

  Yet I somehow felt that for all her apparent warmth and her pleasant manner there was something ruthless about her. Certainly it was easier to imagine her killing Carol in that particularly cold-blooded way than poor ineffectual Ronnie, for example. She seemed to be a practical girl and highly intelligent, so that the actual construction of the fatal rocket would have been perfectly well within her capabilities. And she definitely had the opportunity to plant it.

  I tried to remember in detail what had happened that night. She would have noticed that Carol had left her fireworks unattended when she went off to talk to Dick Mabey and that was her chance. While she hadn’t actually asked Michael to go all the way back to the car for her gloves, she’d made it impossible for him not to do so. And I’d made it easier for her by going off too—though I’ve no doubt she’d have found a perfectly plausible excuse to get me out of the way. Then she simply added the doctored firework to the pile on the ground and left it to do its deadly work without any thought of the havoc and destruction it could cause to innocent bystanders as well as to her intended victim. Could she have been so coldblooded and uncaring?

  I heard in my mind the tone of her voice as she had spoken about her mother (or adoptive mother) and her aunt. There had been no warmth there, no real affection. Even her description of going home at lunchtime to look after her invalid mother now lacked the ring of truth. Was it perhaps just a story devised to win sympathy, rather than an actual task cheerfully undertaken in the spirit of love?

  What I had to do now was to find out if Carol had left her daughter anything in her will. I’d ask Michael when he came home.

  ‘Jenny! Oh come on now, Ma! You really have flipped your lid this time.’ Michael stared at me in total astonishment. ‘What on earth made you come up with a wacky theory like that?’

  ‘I just put two and two together and made a sort of leap.’

  Michael snorted. ‘Leap? A running jump! No, really, Ma!’

  ‘Have you seen Carol’s will?’ I asked.

  ‘No, Edward’s dealing with that, nothing to do with me.’

  ‘But you could get a look at it?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, yes, I could, but honestly—’

  ‘If I’m wrong then no one will know, and if I’m right then we’ll have helped to catch a murderer.’

  ‘I wish you could hear yourself! Jenny a murderer!’ Michael laughed derisively.

  ‘Well, then,’ I said, ‘who do you think is more capable of murder, Jenny or Ronnie? There really aren’t any other alternatives, are there?’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘Just because she’s a young and pretty girl. “Look like the innocent flower but be the serpent under it.” ’

  Michael groaned. ‘Not Macbeth again. When you start quoting Macbeth you’re always trying to justify some weird, outrageous theory!’ He got up and picked up my sherry glass. ‘Do you want another one, or is all this nonsense the result of too much of this particular amber liquid?’

  ‘I know it sounds fantastic at first,’ I said patiently, ‘but just think it out. It does all fit.’

  ‘Only if you force pieces in that don’t really go, like you used to do with my jigsaws when I was little and wouldn’t go to bed until they were finished!’

  He picked up the bottle of sherry and refilled the glass.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘the money belongs to Ronnie, not Carol. So where’s your theory now?’

  ‘But Ronnie’s ut noa very weak character,’ I replied earnestly. ‘If Carol had left her something in her will, Jenny could easily persuade Ronnie to make it quite a large sum now that he’s got all that money. She could say that that’s what Carol would have wanted. Or’—I thought of something else—‘Ronnie’s very conventional. She could have blackmailed him, by saying that she’d tell everyone that she was Carol’s illegitimate daughter. He’d hate that.’

  Michael sat quietly for a moment, eating peanuts and stroking Tessa who had come across and was leaning heavily and lovingly against his knees.

  I had a sudden qualm. ‘Are you fond of her?’ I asked. ‘Jenny, I mean. Have I been plunging about in my usual stupid fashion and upset you?’

  Michael smiled affectionately. ‘You do rather dash into things on an impulse, don’t you? No, it’s not that. I quite like Jenny, she’s good company and fun to go out with, but there’s something unsympathetic there. And,’ he said, giving me a quizzical look, ‘I don’t just mean her not being obsessively fond of animals, which is obviously what put you against her! But there’s some sort of—oh, I don’t know, an aloofness, lack of—I don’t know what—her manner’s warm and friendly, I grant you, but I think there’s a coldness, a sort of calculation underneath. She just might be capable of doing something unkind or unfeeling to further her own interests.’

  He gave Tessa a handful of peanuts (strictly forbidden) and she gazed up at him adoringly.

  ‘Oh, Michael,’ I exclaimed, ‘I wish you wouldn’t. You know peanuts make her sick! Still,’ I continued, ‘I’m glad about that—you’re not being involved with her in any way.’

  Michael laughed. ‘Involved! You can’t make me believe you wouldn’t have known if there’d been anything like that going on—you, with your CIA training! Seriously, though. I don’t think the business about being Carol’s daughter really stands up. It’s too full of coincidences. Anyway’—he paused for a moment as a thought struck him—‘what about Miss Graham?’

  ‘Miss Graham?’

  ‘She was murdered too, remember. How would you fit that into your little theory?’

  For a moment I was nonplussed. I drank the remains of my sherry and tried to sort things out in my mind.

  ‘Got it,’ I said. ‘It means jettisoning the long-lost daughter theory and going back to Ronnie.’

  Michael raised his eyebrows enquiringly. ‘Ronnie?’

  ‘Yes. I abandoned the idea of Jenny and Ronnie having an affair because—well, it just didn’t seem possible. On an emotional level, as it were. But say Jenny knew about Miss Graham and the Trust. Could she have done?’

  Michael thought for a moment. ‘Well, yes, she could. Come to think of it, she was the one who looked up Miss Graham’s lease. She’d have been through the file then. So she’d have known about the Trust and the possibility of the land purchase; the buyer was just starting to make noises then. And Jenny is a very bright lady; she could well have put two and two together—’

  ‘And realized,’ I broke in, ‘that it was possible that Ronnie might be a very rich man one day when his aunt died! Well!’

  We looked at each other. ‘Ronnie would have been a pushover for a girl like her,’ I said.

  ‘Wouldn’t have stood a chan
ce,’ Michael agreed, ‘if she’d set out to get him.’

  ‘She joined the Natural History Society,’ I pointed out. ‘I never really felt it was her thing but it gave her a chance to get to work on him when Carol wasn’t there. And badminton, too. Didn’t you tell me at the beginning there was some talk of a mysterious boyfriend who nobody had seen?’

  ‘That’s right. And, come to think of it, on that bird-watching thing she seemed to be avoiding Ronnie. I mean, he spoke to her once and she made some excuse and moved away. I thought at the time it was because he was such a bore, but I suppose she didn’t want anyone t wang o connect them.’

  ‘I suppose they met at her flat,’ I said. ‘Poor old Ronnie! He must have been quite besotted!’

  ‘Besotted enough for him to have known about the murders?’ Michael asked.

  ‘I wonder.’ I thought for a moment. ‘She’s clever enough to have involved him in some way so that she’d have an extra hold over him. I mean, even Ronnie would have wondered who killed his wife and his aunt and he’d have been sure to suspect Jenny. If she’d made him an accomplice—in however small a way—then he couldn’t ever voice his suspicions.’

  ‘That’s right. And he had to be above suspicion because of being the main beneficiary from Carol’s murder, so he had to have a really good, strong alibi.’

  ‘Goodness, yes,’ I said. ‘Jenny must have been pretty fed up when that committee meeting was held up and people were milling about everywhere. That certainly reduced the credibility of Ronnie’s alibi, though I’m still not sure that the police know about that. I mean, I only found out because of what Jack said.’

  ‘How about the police, then?’ Michael said. ‘What are you going to do about Roger?’

  I got up and picked up our empty glasses. ‘I’ve got no proof, of course, and I can’t really go to Roger with just a lot of unconfirmed theories. No, perhaps I’ll just go on poking about, with your help, until I find something really concrete. See if you can have a look at Carol’s will, just in case. Meanwhile, be careful what you say to Jenny at work. We don’t want her to know that we suspect her.’