The Poison Pen

by Evelyn James

  “Thank you for your time Mrs Mann,” Clara stood. “I am off to see the Livingstones next.”

  “Oh, a lovely couple!” Zelda clapped her hands. “Even considering…”

  She bit her lip. Clara waited for an explanation.

  “Well,” Zelda was glancing around again, as if the furniture or wallpaper might save her from the blunder. “Well, Mr Livingstone’s father, as I hear it, was a businessman with interests abroad. He married a Caribbean woman!”

  “Is that a problem?” Clara asked innocently.

  “Not to me!” Zelda said quickly. “I am an enlightened woman. I vote, you know! But some people resent Mr Livingstone being so, ahem, coffee-coloured.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind,” Clara said, imagining it was Mr Livingstone’s hue that had been targeted in the letter to him. She had only met Mrs Livingstone at Mrs Hampton’s gathering, and the woman had apologised for no longer having the poison pen letter she was sent. Her husband had burned it.

  Clara said her goodbyes to Zelda Mann, a promise being extracted from her, as she left, that she would, most assuredly, attend Zelda’s next exhibition. Clara walked down the road four houses to the home of Mr and Mrs Livingstone and rang the doorbell. Mrs Livingstone answered the door dressed rather smartly for an afternoon at home; she was even wearing a string of pearls. Clara guessed she had dressed up for the interview.

  Clara was shown to the back parlour where Mr Livingstone was pacing back and forth in a grey pin-stripe suit. He turned as Clara entered. Mr Livingstone hesitated a moment, then offered his hand to shake.

  “Thank you for coming, Miss Fitzgerald,” he said in the King’s English.

  “I hope I have not caused you any inconvenience,” Clara indicated Mr Livingstone’s suit.

  “Oh, no bother. I was due a day off. Lily will tell you I work too hard.”

  “That he does,” Mrs Livingstone came into the room behind Clara and smiled at her husband.

  “What sort of business are you in?” Clara asked curiously as she was offered a chair.

  “Imports, mainly. Chocolate, coffee, sugar. All the glories of the East Indies,” Mr Livingstone rolled his eyes and made a motion to the colour of his skin. “We do quite well. Father thinks I am ‘slumming it’ having this quaint terrace in Brighton.”

  “But it is most delightful,” Mrs Livingstone interrupted. “I couldn’t stand having a huge house to run. All those empty rooms! Ghastly! This is perfect.”

  Mr Livingstone gave the shrug of a spouse who knows when to lose a battle.

  “I suppose we ought to get down to business,” Mr Livingstone sank into a chair. His wife offered tea to Clara, but she declined, having drunk two cups already with Zelda.

  “Let’s begin with the basic details. When did you receive the letter, if you can recall?” Clara asked.

  “Oh, I can recall,” Mrs Livingstone’s previously light and happy tone suddenly became hard and bitter. Her smile faded and her face seemed to lose its softness, to be replaced by a grey hardness. “It was the 3rd of October. Charlie was at work as usual in London,” She motioned to her husband. “I had been working through the household bills when the post came. The maid brought a bundle of letters to me, mostly the usual thing. There was only one which was written in a hand I didn’t recognise. I put it to one side and went through the important letters first. I almost forgot about it, in fact. It wasn’t until the evening, around the time I expect Charlie home, that I remembered it and became curious.

  “Dinner was just being put on the table when I sat down to read it. It was an obnoxious catalogue of insults and lies! I had only just finished it when Charlie came in and saw my face. I must have looked ghastly, I felt awful, like someone had struck me. Without a word I gave him the letter and he read it. He was furious. He took the letter and threw it straight into the fire.”

  Mr Livingstone was nodding along with his wife’s story.

  “I suppose I should have kept it, but I saw the look on my wife’s face and I just wanted to destroy the hurtful thing,” Charlie Livingstone sighed. “It’s not the first time I have been sent such things. I have learned to grow impervious to the insults people fling at someone because they are the wrong colour. I went to a boys’ school where everyone was whiter than white. I endured all the usual slings and arrows schoolboys throw at someone who is different. But, to see how it affected my wife! That upset me more than the words themselves.”

  “I was angry, so, so angry,” Mrs Livingstone added. “I was just so furious that someone would dare to say those things. Had they been in the room at the time, I swear I would have slapped them!”

  Lily Livingstone was a fighter and she now radiated righteous indignation. Clara was confident that, should she find the culprit behind the letters, Lily Livingstone would make them wish they had never learned to write.

  “I don’t need to know the contents of the letter,” Clara told them. “Unless you think it might offer some clue as to who was behind it?”

  “The insults were fairly standard,” Mr Livingstone shook his head. “They did not require any insider knowledge, if that is what you mean. It largely referred to marrying monkeys and people returning to the jungle they came from.”

  “Deeply unpleasant,” Clara concurred, understanding fully why Mrs Livingstone was so furious. She would have felt the same. “Can you think of anything that happened before the letter arrived that might have triggered the writer to compose such a thing? Some of the letters seem to be responses to the person involved having a success of some kind, or something new happening in their lives?”

  The Livingstones glanced at one another.

  “I can’t think of anything,” Lily said. “Everything was ordinary.”

  “Father had just secured a deal to supply Fry’s with cocoa beans, but no one in Brighton knew of it,” Charlie added.

  “It was just a thought,” Clara said. “And you can’t think of anyone who might have sent the letter?”

  The Livingstones could not. Clara brought the interview to a close, promised to keep them informed of developments and then went back out into the road. It was drawing close to four o’clock and she had no more appointments for the day. Clara decided to head home and mull over what she had learned so far. As she was walking along, she heard the clack of a woman’s shoes behind her, and suddenly Mrs Wilton was at her side.

  “Well, Clara?”

  Mrs Wilton had a way of inserting herself into a case as if she was Clara’s assistant or, worse, a fellow private detective.

  “I have hardly begun,” Clara answered.

  “Who have you spoken to?” Mrs Wilton probed. “That was the Livingstones’ house, so clearly you have met them. Nice couple. Mr Livingstone can make a cup of coffee you would die for. He insists on putting cream in it, would you believe? The first time I tried it I was quite sceptical, but it really was delightful. Much better than milk.”

  Clara let Mrs Wilton ramble on; it was easier than having to answer her questions.

  “So what did you learn from them?” Mrs Wilton pressed.

  “All my interviews are conducted in complete confidence,” Clara told her firmly.

  “Naturally. But do you have any suspects in mind yet?”

  Clara had to admit she didn’t.

  “So far the information contained in the letters is neither very secret or of a nature that implies someone who knew the victims extremely well. I fear our poison pen is a mere gossip, who picks up random stories circulating the neighbourhood, and then regurgitates them in nasty letters.”

  “Oh dear, that isn’t helpful,” Mrs Wilton was puffing slightly as she tried to keep up with Clara’s brisk pace. “It could be anyone then?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there anything these letters can tell us about them?”

  “Well, they are a person who is bitter and spiteful,” Clara said, “They probably like hearing bad things about people because it makes them feel better about their own lives. I ima
gine they feel they have not achieved what they should have in life. Perhaps they feel the world has been unkind to them. The sort of person who puts someone else down because they feel inadequate in themselves.”

  “Oh dear, I know several people who fit that description,” Mrs Wilton tutted to herself. “Is there nothing else?”

  Clara considered, then a thought struck her.

  “Some of the terms and phrases in the letters seem rather old-fashioned. The sort of thing a person of my grandmother’s generation would use. That could mean we are dealing with an elderly person.”

  Again Mrs Wilton shrugged and sighed.

  “The world is full of elderly people.”

  “Yes, but only a handful are cruel enough to want to deliberately hurt others.”

  “I shall keep my ears open for information!” Mrs Wilton assured her stoutly.

  They parted at the turning in the road and Clara headed for home. She was starting to feel alarmed at the anonymity a person could maintain when writing such venomous letters. How was she to trace this person and stop them? Without more clues as to their identity, they were free to carry on tormenting the residents of Brighton. But then again, perhaps Mrs Prinner could offer the solution? If Mrs Wilton was right, that woman knew a lot more than she was letting on. Unfortunately that meeting was for another day and for the time being Clara had a number of other people to talk to. Perhaps there was some clue she had yet to see. Perhaps the letter writer had slipped up somehow? She just had to hope their success would make them careless. Now, what were the odds of that?

  Chapter Seven

  “Alfie Ling!” Annie slammed a bowl of boiled potatoes down on the dining room table.

  Clara always thought Annie would make a good avenging angel; she was a small woman, the sort most people overlooked, but she had a good heart and an iron-will, and she could smell trouble a mile off. She had had a look of deep thought on her face ever since she had learned that Clara was looking for a corrupt policeman. It had made her small lips purse into a wasp-sting of red.

  “Alfie Ling?” Clara asked cautiously, she recognised the name.

  “Look no further than him for your dodgy bobby,” Annie told Clara firmly. “Trouble since the day he was born, that one.”

  “I believe I met him last year during my investigations into the death of Mrs Greengage,” Clara helped herself to potatoes.

  “You did indeed. How he ever made it into the police force Heaven only knows!” Annie was bristling, her neat hands agitating over the carrots she was trying to serve. “That boy never had no good in him. He was a thief and a thug from the day he could crawl. He stole my mother’s washing line once! Hung it in his own backyard and claimed his own wastrel mother had bought it! As if she ever cared about washing. The line still had my father’s shirt on it!”

  Annie bustled off for the gravy boat, puttering to herself.

  “I think she has a grudge against Alfie Ling,” Tommy said quietly across the dinner table.

  “She could have a point though,” Clara responded. “Does a man go from a childhood of petty crime to a lifetime of upholding the law?”

  Annie returned with the gravy.

  “And another thing, Ethel, who as works for the Wilkinsons at number 12, swears on her life she saw Alfie Ling having tea and cake with Mavis Palmer. And we all know what she does for a living. Now, what’s a policeman doing with the likes of her?”

  “You have a point Annie, but a man’s past is just that, in the past.”

  “Hmph!” Annie snorted indignantly, before taking her place at the table.

  It had taken Clara weeks to persuade Annie to eat dinner with them at the table. She decided she didn’t want to ruin that by pushing her point too hard.

  “However, it would be worthwhile discovering how Alfie made it into the police force. Clearly someone ignored his past record, if they checked at all,” Clara said to mollify her. “As suspects go, he is certainly the obvious choice.”

  “What about interviewing that colonel I mentioned?” Tommy piped up. “He seemed to have some serious suspicions.”

  “I’ll need to track him down first. The paper didn’t give an address.”

  “I can do that,” Tommy said confidently, “while you talk with Farmer White.”

  “Lord, it’s a long journey to his farm,” Clara gave a groan. “Perhaps I can borrow a bicycle?”

  They had just begun to discuss the logistics of travelling to Mr White’s farm when the doorbell rang.

  “Goodness! Who calls during dinner time?” Annie complained as she got up to answer it.

  “White is the nearest you have to an eyewitness,” Tommy continued to say as Annie left the room. “Perhaps he saw or heard more than he shared with the paper?”

  “Yes. It is such a shame that Brompton’s mind is so damaged. If only he could tell me what he had stumbled upon that made him a target!” Clara thought of that poor young man in the hospital, he was happy in his own way, but his life had been radically altered by one act of violence. “But, I suppose if he could, he would still be in danger from those who wished to silence him.”

  At that moment Annie returned.

  “It’s Oliver Bankes.”

  Clara stood from the table at once and smiled at the unexpected arrival. Oliver had visited her nearly every day while she was recuperating from her illness; their friendship had grown over pear drops and local gossip. Oliver had made a point of keeping Clara well informed about the activities of Brighton, knowing she would be going insane without being able to venture out and discover what was going on for herself. Any good private detective has to have a fine ear for rumours, innuendoes and gossip. Oliver had been Clara’s supplier for all the while she was unable to get out of bed. She was pleased to see him now, they had not spoken since Sunday, and she had to admit she missed their afternoon chats. But as she smiled at Oliver, she saw the look of dismay on his face.

  “I can’t stay long,” Oliver said apologetically. “Dad’s in quite a state, I don’t like to leave him alone for the moment. He received this, this morning.”

  Oliver dropped a letter onto the table. Clara recognised the handwriting at once. She opened the envelope and read the contents.

  Dear Mr Bankes,

  You are a dirty old man! We see the girls coming to your house and we know just the sort of pictures your kind take of women. You are nothing but a piece of filth and a disgrace to the neighbourhood. It would be better for everyone if you were to leave and take your disgusting habits elsewhere. If you do not go at once, we shall be forced to report your activities to the police. Not that you deserve any mercy. It is men like you who are ruining the young women of today and, we are agreed, you should be hanged for your crimes! We expect you to leave shortly and take your shame elsewhere.

  “Oh dear,” Clara put the letter on the table. “It’s one of the nastier ones I have read.”

  “It upset father a great deal, I thought his heart was going to stop,” Oliver shook his head sadly. “I know he is a bit of a rogue, but he wouldn’t…”

  Oliver paused, looking morose.

  “He is very worried, which makes me wonder if there is a grain of truth to this story.”

  “Tell him not to fret,” Clara instructed firmly. “The writer of this letter is not going to go to the police, else they risk exposing themselves too. It is an empty threat, though upsetting nonetheless.”

  Clara thought about where Oliver’s father lived, she had been to the house once or twice before. It happened to be around the area where the other victims lived, and the wording of the note – a disgrace to the neighbourhood – suggested to Clara that the writer lived there too.

  “I said I had to bring this to you at once,” Oliver said. “He was in rather a state and I had to persuade him not to burn it, but in the end I think he understood. I best get back to him, he was white as a sheet when I left.”

  “Take care Oliver, if there is anything you need you know where we are,” Clara
said goodbye as Oliver hurried off, then she returned to the table and picked up the letter again.

  “Have you noticed,” Tommy leaned over the table, “how the letter writer always uses the term ‘we’ when describing themselves.”

  “Yes. I thought maybe it was affected, like the Royal ‘we’.”

  “Or it could be simpler than that. Maybe there isn’t just one writer?”

  “The letters are all written in the same hand, I double-checked that.”

  “But, perhaps there is more than one person composing the material?”

  Clara stared at the letter.

  “A couple, perhaps? One writing the letter, the other suggesting the content?” She grimaced. “Two people so warped as to invent this rubbish.”

  “Do you think any of it is true?” Annie was standing at the end of the table looking worried. “I mean, the stuff about Mr Bankes?”

  Clara started to say ‘no’, then she recalled the unfortunate incident last summer when Mr Bankes had been caught red-handed taking some indiscreet photographs at the fairground.

  “That’s what I thought,” Annie said, catching the look that crossed Clara’s face. “I don’t like to say this because I think Oliver is a really nice man, but, Clara, should you be associating with someone who has such a father as that?”

  “Annie!” it was Tommy who reacted before Clara did. “Oliver is a good fellow and can’t help what his father does or doesn’t do!”

  “Well, no…” Annie admitted.

  “Oliver is a dear friend,” Clara added. “I shan’t abandon him because of a silly letter.”

  Annie was silent a moment, but her lips were pursed.

  “I was just thinking of your reputation,” she said softly.

  “You sound like the poison pen!” Tommy responded gruffly, he rarely argued with Annie, but on this occasion he was riled by her words.