6 - Superfluous Death

by Hazel Holt

  ‘Especially,’ Michael said, ‘if she isn’t the murderer after all.’

  Tessa began to make ominous coughing noises.

  ‘Oh, there now!’ I cried. ‘She’s going to be sick. Oh dear, too late! Go and get some newspapers and a cloth—there’s one under the sink. I told you not to give her those peanuts! Honestly, Michael, I don’t believe you ever listen to a single word I say.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  I saw Roger the next morning when I was out shopping, but fortunately he was on th< wangNew/font>e other side of the road so I didn’t have to speak to him. I didn’t feel the time was ripe to present him with what he might well consider to be a wild and untenable theory. Still, I was rather curious to know how far the police had got with their investigations and what lines they were following up, so I was pleased to run into Jilly in Boots. She was trying to heave a large pack of nappies off the shelf with one hand while keeping hold of Delia and trying to rock the pram, in which Alex was loudly expressing his annoyance at whatever it is that makes babies suddenly howl.

  ‘Here, let me.’ I took the nappies in one hand and Delia’s hand in the other, while Jilly leaned forward to make soothing noises at Alex, who, as soon as his mother’s face appeared, leaning over him, ceased crying abruptly and gave her an enchanting gummy smile.

  ‘Baby,’ Delia said to me confidentially. ‘Crying,’ she explained. ‘Lot of crying.’ She fixed her clear-eyed gaze upon me. ‘Deela not cry, Deela good.’

  ‘Not always,’ her mother said, ‘alas.’

  ‘Two of them must be quite a handful,’ I said.

  ‘Well, Mother’s marvellous, she helps a lot, and Alex really isn’t too bad. At least we usually manage to get a reasonable night’s sleep. Which is just as well, with poor Roger coming in at all hours.’

  ‘A policeman’s lot is not a happy one?’ I suggested.

  ‘Well, he is rather worried about this case. Poor Miss Graham was bad enough, but now this perfectly horrible thing on Bonfire Night. All those people injured—the children—Delia ...’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘To put people’s lives, especially children’s lives, at risk like that ... Roger must feel it’s important to catch whoever did it really quickly, to put people’s minds at rest.’

  ‘Yes.’ Jilly hesitated. ‘There’s been a bit of unpleasantness in the local press, which upset him rather. Well, you know how hard he works, Sheila, and how conscientious he is. He doesn’t talk about it much, but I think he’s beginning to wonder if there might have been two separate killers. I mean—poison and explosives! So different, it doesn’t really seem like the same person, does it?’

  ‘I see what you mean,’ I said. ‘Does he have anyone in mind? For either murder?’

  ‘He hRom face="Tiasn’t said. Actually, he’s so dead tired when he gets in he doesn’t have time to do more than have a quick meal and zonk out. Then in the mornings I’m busy with these two. Honestly, I believe I’ve had more conversation with the milkman than I’ve had with Roger these last weeks!’

  ‘The lot of a policeman’s wife ...’ I said.

  Jilly gave me a rueful smile. ‘Oh well, I went into it with my eyes open. I knew what the job was like before I married him, so I can’t complain.’

  Delia, who had detached herself from my hold, and all this while had been hanging over Alex in the pram in an attitude of sisterly affection, suddenly took the blue woolly rabbit that was lying beside him on the pram cover and flung it on to the ground.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Jilly sighed, picking up the rabbit. ‘Sibling rivalry time! I’d better get these two back home before Delia really gets started! Nice to have had a chat. You and Michael must come to supper one evening, when things aren’t quite so hectic. You haven’t even seen the house properly yet!’ She grasped her daughter’s hand firmly and expertly hitched the brake off the pram with her foot. ‘Say goodbye, Delia.’

  ‘Bye, bye, bye, bye, bye,’ Delia chanted looking back at me over her shoulder as they made their way towards the cash desk.

  So I still didn’t know who Roger suspected. Perhaps he was baffled, a word much used about the police in newspaper crime reports of my youth. As for the theory that there were two murderers, I dismissed it. Certainly the two methods, poison and explosive, were different, but given a really clever murderer (like Jenny, for instance), that difference was simply another example of the intelligence and, indeed, adaptability—if one could use the word in such a context—involved in planning and executing the crimes.

  I said as much to Michael when he came in that evening.

  ‘Ah, well now,’ Michael said, coming into the kitchen where I was getting supper and leaning against the sink. ‘There’s a snag. Well, two snags, actually, depending on which unlikely theory you favour.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ I said, ‘that sounds dampening.’

  ‘It is, I’m afraid. Item: I looked up Carol’s will and there’s no reference to any daughter whatsoever. She left everything she had to Ronnie and he—I looked up his as well—left everything to eve up his her.’

  ‘Bother! So what’s the other snag?’

  ‘Item: there’s no way Jenny could have murdered Miss Graham, because on the morning in question she had clients absolutely non-stop all morning—I looked up her list.’

  ‘Perhaps she cancelled them?’ I suggested.

  ‘Wouldn’t have made any difference. If she was going out she’d have had to pass the beady eye of our Josie, who, as you know, doesn’t miss a trick. By various devious means, which I won’t go into, I quizzed said Josie and she’s perfectly certain that Jenny didn’t go out that morning. So there you are—up the creek without a suspect.’

  The water in the potato saucepan boiled over on to the stove with a hiss and I turned the heat down and reached for a cloth to mop up the mess.

  ‘So she couldn’t have killed Miss Graham.’ I moved Michael away from the sink and ran some water over the potatoey cloth and wrung it out. ‘But she could still have murdered Carol. Perhaps Roger’s right and there were two murderers. Say Jenny killed Carol and Ronnie killed Miss Graham.’

  ‘But he was in bed with a bad go of flu,’ Michael protested.

  ‘We’ve only got his word for that,’ I said.

  ‘And Carol’s.’

  ‘He may have had flu but still have been able to get up and go over to his aunt’s.’

  ‘But, Ma, can you see him doing such a thing! I mean, Ronnie!’

  ‘I agree that he’s not the likeliest murder suspect, but, if I’m right about Jenny, she was the one who planned it, made the cakes, got the digitalis—Ronnie simply did what she told him.’

  ‘I don’t know. It all seems a bit—’

  ‘Just imagine Ronnie totally under Jenny’s spell and everything falls into place.’

  ‘Ye-es, I suppose so.’

  ‘It has to be, unless Ronnie did kill Carol as well, in that half-hour before the CPRE meeting that hasn’t been accounted for. It has to be Ronnie somehow, either with Jenny or on his own. There’s simply no one else it could be.’

  ‘I suppose you’re right, but there’s no way you can prove it.’

  ‘No way at all,’ I said regretfullyid y yo. I took the parsnips over to the sink to drain them. ‘Supper’ll be in about ten minutes, if you want to go and change.’

  I turned the theories and bits of fact over and over in my mind the next day, but succeeded only in working myself up into a state of frustration. When I feel like that I usually find myself a household task I particularly dislike and tackle that, so at least I feel I’ve achieved something. The kitchen floor was looking pretty messy, what with spillage from the stove, dogs’ paw marks, crumbs and general grot, so I got out the bucket and mop, shut the dogs out of the kitchen and set to work. By the time I’d finally got the whole thing clean (how I resent the casual way those brightly smiling women in television advertisements sail through these tasks, when I, with exactly the same branded products, make such heavy weather of them) I ha
d decided to abandon the whole mystery and let Roger solve it all by himself.

  I opened the kitchen door to speed up the drying process and Foss walked in. With exquisite precision he left a line of muddy paw prints in a neat diagonal across the floor. He then jumped up on to the worktops and, walking round, completed the trail, so that it looked like an eccentric design thought up by some way-out interior decorator.

  I took a deep breath, counted to ten and decided to go out. I’d see if Rosemary felt like coffee and a slice of carrot cake at the Buttery. But it was obviously going to be one of those days. When I put the key in the door of the car it wouldn’t open. I opened the passenger door and leaned across to try from the inside, but to no avail; the wretched thing was broken. Feeling grateful that there was no one to see me, I hitched up my skirt and with infinite difficulty climbed across the central console into the driver’s seat and drove off to see my friendly neighbourhood garage man.

  Actually, he is. Friendly, that is. He’s a jolly Brummie, who has long since accepted with good-natured tolerance that I never, ever, open the bonnet of my car and have no wish to know what goes on inside there. As long as the machine goes every time I turn the little key then I’m perfectly satisfied. Any information about revs or mpg or whatever, I regard as unnecessary refinements. I prepared to throw myself on his mercy.

  ‘Oh, Ray,’ I said ingratiatingly, ‘do you think you could do something about the door-lock on the driver’s side? It seems to be broken.’

  He made his usual reassuring noises and disappeared into the bowels of the workshop, re-appearing to say that Terry would soon have it sorted and would I like to wait or go and do some shoppido andng? It was now raining quite hard outside and looked pretty dismal so I elected to wait. I sat down on one of the two black leatherette seats and opened a copy of What Car?, which seemed to be the only entertainment available.

  I was just depressing myself by checking the secondhand value of my car, when I heard Ray talking to another customer.

  ‘It’s almost ready for you, Mr Graham. Barry’s just giving it a road test now. He won’t be long, if you’d just like to sit down and wait.’

  Ronnie Graham came over and sat down in the other chair next to mine. He seemed to be taken aback when I lowered my copy of What Car? and he saw that it was me.

  ‘Oh,’ he stammered. ‘Sheila! What a surprise.’

  ‘Hello, Ronnie. How are you?’

  ‘Me? Oh, I’m fine. Well, not fine exactly ...’

  He looked really awful. He’d looked ill after Miss Graham died, but he seemed even worse now. His face was an unhealthy putty colour, the bones standing out almost skeletally, and his eyes were red-rimmed, as if he hadn’t been sleeping. Actually he looked only half awake, as if he was moving around in a dream.

  ‘I was so very sorry about Carol,’ I said. ‘It was a terrible thing.’

  ‘Yes, terrible ...’ His voice trailed away again.

  ‘How are you managing?’

  ‘Managing?’ He looked at me vaguely.

  ‘I mean, cooking, looking after yourself generally.’

  He gave a wan little smile. ‘Oh, I manage, thank you.’

  ‘I don’t suppose the police have any idea?’ I said tentatively.

  He shook his head. ‘Not as far as I know. They haven’t said anything.’

  ‘It must have been especially awful for you, coming so soon after Miss Graham’s death.’

  There was a flicker of interest, of awareness in his eyes, bin deathut he replied in his usual flat tones, ‘Yes, it’s all been—terrible.’

  ‘Of course you weren’t there—at the recreation ground, I mean. It was so sudden. We were all so shocked, well, you can imagine, Michael and I’—I paused for a fraction of a moment—‘and Jenny.’ Now there was a stiffening, a tenseness. ‘Jenny Drummond—I think you know her?’

  ‘Jenny Drummond,’ he spoke the name slowly, as if it was strange to him.

  ‘Yes. I expect you know her from the Natural History Society and the Badminton Club. She’s quite a friend of Michael’s.’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course, Jenny Drummond.’ His voice was flat again, though I felt with some effort.

  ‘She was with us, Michael and me, just before it happened.’

  Again, I thought I saw tenseness and now a sort of apprehension. He didn’t say anything and I went on: ‘From what I hear, someone put a rocket that had been tampered with—explosives and things, I believe—in with the others. What a dreadful thing! And what a miracle that more people weren’t killed—though quite a few were injured—children, too ...’ I felt that I was playing a fish on a line. ‘How could anyone do such a thing!’

  ‘Dreadful.’ The voice was almost a whisper now and I had to strain to hear it.

  ‘Still, I expect the police will be on to something soon.

  I’m sure explosives and things can be traced.’

  He was silent, fidgeting with his hat, one of those waterproof Barbour caps, which was beaded with raindrops that slowly rolled down off the cap and on to the floor.

  ‘And have the police any more news about poor Miss Graham?’ I tried another tack.

  He shook his head. ‘No, I’ve heard nothive ied anong.’

  ‘Of course, you had that dreadful go of flu just then,’ I said. ‘It was a particularly virulent kind, I believe. Poor Dorothy Browning had it over a month ago and she’s still not right, even now. Actually, if you don’t mind my saying so, Ronnie, you don’t look at all well yourself. Have you seen your doctor?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ His voice was louder and more assured. ‘Dr Masefield’s been very good. He’s been to see me quite often.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘He’s very good about calling. Actually, he called to see me the morning poor Aunt Mabel died.’

  I looked at him sharply, wondering if he had given me this piece of information deliberately, but he was looking down at his cap again and I couldn’t see his face properly.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you must take care of yourself. You’ve been through a dreadful time. Have you any idea what you’ll do?’

  ‘Do?’

  ‘About the shop and everything.’

  ‘Oh.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I haven’t really thought about it. It’s all been so ...’

  His voice was muffled and he looked out of the window, where a couple of seagulls were swooping down on something they hoped was edible with raucous cries. The grey, rainy day outside and the melancholy cries of the birds depressed me. It all seemed hopeless. No doubt Roger knew about Dr Masefield’s visit (Ronnie would never have mentioned it, knowing it could be checked, if it wasn’t true), which presumably gave him an alibi for the time of Miss Graham’s death. That was obviously why the police had never followed up Ronnie as a suspect. In my own plunging about, as Michael called it, I’d overlooked that point.

  ‘There you are, then, Mrs Malory.’ Ray appeared, holding out my car keys. ‘Terry’s fixed it for now, but I think we’d better order a new lock, just to be on the safe side. I’ll give you a bell when it’s in.’ I thanked him profusely and took the keys.

  ‘Goodbye, Ronnie,’ I said. ‘Do let me know how things go, won’t you? And, of course, if there’s anything I can do.’

  He got to his feet awkwardly. ‘Thank you very much, Sheila. That’s very kind of you.’

  As I always do when I want to brood about anything, I drove down to the sea front. I sat in the car, watching the tide slowly coming in and covering the sand and the shingle, the lumps of seaweed and the general detritus—plastic bottles, old iron spars, d i gebits of fishing net, lumps of concrete smoothed by the waves—removing all traces of man-made objects as if they’d never been.

  So Ronnie had an alibi for the time of Miss Graham’s murder and no doubt Roger had checked on the hiatus at that CPRE meeting—I felt I mustn’t underestimate Roger’s thoroughness again—and presumably he’d be able to account for his time then, so he couldn’t have been at the recreation ground
at the time of Carol’s death, either. He was in the clear. And yet ... His manner just now had been evasive. It wasn’t, I was sure, just his way of coping with an intrusive, pestering female. There had been real fear there—that is always unmistakable—and he had reacted to Jenny’s name with more than the sort of embarrassment he might have shown if he had simply been having some sort of affair with her. And Jenny, although she had no actual alibi for Carol’s death, certainly had a cast-iron one for the morning Miss Graham died.

  My mind twisted and turned, mulling over these things, until suddenly a thought presented itself, as thoughts sometimes do, right out of the blue. I examined it carefully and saw that it was more than a thought, it was a possibility.

  ‘There now,’ I said aloud. ‘I wonder if ...’

  I turned the key in the ignition and drove slowly home.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I managed to catch Michael, on the wing, as it were, that evening when he came home to change and collect his badminton things.

  ‘Michael, which office does Jenny have at work?’

  ‘Which office? Oh, Ma, have you seen my clean white socks—those towelling ones with the blue tops?’

  ‘Hang on, they’re still in the dryer, I think. Yes, here you are. So which office?’

  ‘Oh yes. It’s that tiny little one on the ground floor at the back, near the old kitchen. A real hell-hole in summer, poor girl. Why do you want to know?’

  ‘I thought it might be. Well ...’

  The telephone rang and Michael dashed off to answer it. When I went into the hall a few minutes later he was putting on his socks and talking into the phone which was wedged under his chin.

  ‘OK. I’ll bring it along this evening. Bye. Sorry, Ma, I’ve got to dash. Have you seen that copy of the Shooting Times I had yesterday? I promised to take it in tonight for Jonah.’

  He darted into the sitting room and I heard various things being turned over rather violently until he emerged with the periodical in his hand, gave me an airy wave and disappeared into the night. I went into the sitting room, restored various cushions and small objects to their proper places, poured myself a glass of sherry and began to piece together a sequence of events.