The Poison Pen

by Evelyn James

  As she spoke Mrs Grimes moved to one side and Clara appeared in the doorway. There was a collective gasp from the old women.

  “What have you done?” Heather scowled at her daughter.

  Mrs Grimes was cowed and hung her head. Clara merely looked at the scene before her and remembered the part in Macbeth where the eponymous main character stumbles over the three witches. The lack of a cauldron was the only missing element.

  “Good morning ladies,” she said.

  “And you can leave at once!” the woman on the right of the fire pointed a crooked finger at Clara. “I have seen you peering in windows! Wicked girl! Wicked!”

  “I have no intention of leaving,” Clara said firmly. “I have an important matter to discuss with you all.”

  “You can say nothing we want to hear, get out of our house!” Heather growled. “We shall have no silly, nosy girl interfering in our lives!”

  “I am afraid your own actions have brought me here,” Clara said quite calmly, she was actually starting to enjoy herself. “I suppose I ought to thank you for my letter.”

  “Letter?” Heather snorted. “We never sent you a letter.”

  But she looked shaken; there had been a hesitation before she spoke.

  “I think you did,” Clara responded. “As you sent the others. If we want to talk about wickedness, I think we need look no further than yourselves.”

  “What lies! Get your filthy tongue out of my house!” one of the Cotterleys – the oldest by Clara’s guess – was gesticulating at her with a clenched fist and spitting out her words. “You are just a witch young lady, a witch!”

  Heather was twitching with bottled fury, her head trembled strangely, like it was about to fall off. Clara knew she had hit a nerve.

  “Shall we cease the name calling? It really is quite childish,” she said firmly. “Let me lay my cards on the table. I have been given a series of vile letters written to people in this road, accusing them of terrible things. I have also been given a sample of your handwriting, Heather Cotterley, and I have a witness who will testify that she believes the letter written to her daughter could only have been sent by you.”

  Maggie Cotterley gave a nasty hiss.

  “Maud Harris!”

  Clara smiled. Another nail in the coffin. The women were really quite foolish in their spite.

  “I have all the evidence I need to go to the police and demand they arrest you all for causing a nuisance.”

  Heather Cotterley sank back into her chair, looking stunned. The only person to speak was the third sister.

  “You evil cow!” she spat, “Attacking innocent old ladies who just want to be left alone…”

  “Diana, be quiet,” Heather snapped.

  Diana, the third and eldest Cotterley sister, glowered in response.

  “You always lacked backbone,” she snapped back at her sister. “She has nothing but suspicions. Let her go to the police, they will do nothing!”

  “On the contrary, they will come to this house and press charges against you. You will all have to appear in court, though Heather, as the author of the letters, will be deemed the most culpable.”

  “Hah, you can threaten us all you want…”

  “Diana!” Heather growled. “She has caught us out!”

  Diana glared at her sisters, an evil look coming across her face. She folded her crabbed hands over her chest.

  “I didn’t write any letters. Don’t know what she is talking about,” she said with a straight face, looking directly into Heather’s eyes.

  “So that’s how it is? Throw me to the lions, would you?” Heather retorted. “Is that what sisterly love comes down to?”

  Diana gave a shrug and a complacent look, indicating she was unmoved. Clara found the anger and hatred between the sisters remarkable; they seemed to despise each other as much as they despised their neighbours. How anyone could willingly live in such an unpleasant household astounded her, though it did go some way to explaining why the sisters had turned all their negativity into letter writing. It was clearly a release from the misery of their existence together.

  “I will only go to the police if I have to,” Clara said, restoring their attention to her. “My sole goal in coming here was to inform you the game was up and that you are to stop this evil nonsense at once.”

  “How can the truth be evil?” Maggie said abruptly. “Secrets are evil, truth is not.”

  “It is when you warp it to your own designs,” Clara corrected her. “Besides, much of your prose was little better than vicious gossip. The truth of your words was extremely limited.”

  “People should be more honest then, and that would prevent gossip,” Heather was regaining some of her composure.

  Clara was determined she would not slip the noose.

  “Gossip is the work of bored, sad little people who are so unhappy in their lives they take it out on others.”

  “Unhappy?” Heather snapped. “You are the one who is unhappy, running around playing detective. I know your sort, young lady, can’t find a decent man so you poke your nose into everyone else’s affairs.”

  “I do not care what you think,” Clara said, realising at the same instant that she meant the words too. “I have no need for your approval or, for that matter, anyone else’s. I help people, which is more than can be said for you.”

  “Oh, so you are better than us?” Heather laughed. “That is rich. I imagine you think you are being very clever. Well, let me tell you, any woman with a brain would see you and feel embarrassed to share the same gender! I have never known such a disgrace to walk into my house before!”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way. Perhaps if you had realised there was more to being a woman than simply finding a husband and having children, you would not be so bitter now. But that is really not my problem. My problem is that you have spent your time persecuting your neighbours. You have driven one man to his death. Mr Johnson hung himself because of the letter you sent.”

  Diana gave a malicious smile.

  “Did he, now? Man had no courage, good riddance.”

  The look Clara turned on the nasty old woman actually gave Diana cause to shrink back a little.

  “What business was it of yours? Enough of this! You are clearly irredeemable, the lot of you. I shall leave this house and inform all your neighbours of what you have been doing and, should you send any more letters, they will know at once where to come to respond to them.”

  “You can’t do that,” Maggie pressed her hands to her mouth. “They will all know. They will talk about us.”

  “As you deserve,” Clara scowled. “You are guilty of murder in my eyes, but a court of law will never convict you of it. All I can do is make your guilt known to your neighbours, and hope the shame of being so discovered will temper your actions in the future.”

  “You can’t do that, please,” Maggie begged. “They will come to the door!”

  “And what did you expect when you began this malicious spree of letter writing? You invade their homes and their lives. They have the right to respond.”

  The sisters fell into silence. There was nothing else to say. Not one of them was prepared to say they were sorry for what they had done (not that any one of them was sorry), but still, the thought of being discovered was awful.

  “The only question I have is why you changed your handwriting for Miss Wicks? All the other letters were clearly written by Heather. So why was Miss Wicks’ letter different?” Clara asked.

  Maggie gave her a puzzled look.

  “We never wrote one of the letters to Miss Wicks.”

  “Maggie, you are an idiot,” Diana wagged a gnarled finger at her.

  “Why?” Maggie’s tear-filled eyes turned to her sister.

  “You just implied you had written the others,” Clara explained, not that such a mild statement would stand up in court, of course.

  “But…” Maggie glanced at Heather. “I thought she knew we had written the letters?”

&n
bsp; “She suspected, you just confirmed it,” Heather told her coldly.

  Maggie put her hands back to her mouth and winced.

  “Maggie is right on one thing,” Heather, the most rational of the three, looked at Clara. “We have never written anything malicious to Miss Wicks.”

  Clara filed that piece of information away. So who had written Miss Wicks’ letter?

  Mrs Grimes was by now looking deeply upset and agitated. She was convinced that, sooner or later, her mother and aunts would turn on her for bringing Clara into their house. She desperately wanted to make her exit. Clara had achieved all she could with the Cotterleys, anyway. They were neither remorseful nor inclined to apologise for their actions, but she was confident they would not risk writing anymore letters. The result would be a crowd of angry people on their doorstep, and they wouldn’t want that. Clara decided it was time to leave.

  Mrs Grimes showed her out. The Cotterleys were silent. Outside the front door Mrs Grimes burst into tears.

  “I shall never be welcome here again,” she sobbed.

  Clara hardly thought that much of a thing to cry over. She patted the woman’s arm comfortingly.

  “Never mind, they will still need their shopping.”

  Mrs Grimes took this as a minor consolation. Clara left her mulling over the future and headed directly to Mrs Wilton. There would be no one better to spread the discoveries she had made then the biggest gossip in town. At least Mrs Wilton didn’t use her talents maliciously – well, mostly.

  She was met at Mrs Wilton’s door by a maid of better class and manners than Mrs Wilton’s last one, and was shown into a sitting room. Mrs Wilton had a villa on the cliffs overlooking the sea, and the rooms were considerably brighter and airier than those Clara had just left. She stood at the window and stared out at the grey sea, awaiting Mrs Wilton. The woman arrived wearing a pinny and gardening gloves.

  “I was making a start on the flowers for this month’s arrangements in church,” she explained. “It is challenging to get a suitably attractive display with so little growing at the moment.”

  Clara acknowledged that would be a problem for Brighton’s avid flower arrangers.

  “I have news.”

  “I thought you might. After that business with Mr Johnson, I hoped you would be able to resolve matters swiftly. I quite liked the poor man. He sold me a lovely green house last year.”

  “Well, I know who has been writing the letters and I have just approached them and insisted they stop. You are free to tell everyone that the Cotterley sisters were behind this whole fiasco.”

  “Those heartless beasts!” Mrs Wilton’s mouth dropped. “I knew they had long ago lost their souls, but to think they were behind such evil! What did they say?”

  “Very little. They denied it, but the evidence was overwhelming. Should the letters reappear you will know who to complain to. I have told them I will be informing all their neighbours of their actions.”

  “I bet that displeased them!”

  “They were not impressed,” Clara smiled. “One odd thing, however. They deny sending a letter to Miss Wicks, yet she clearly received one.”

  “She came to the meeting,” Mrs Wilton nodded. “Now you mention it, it does strike me as strange she would receive a nasty letter from them. The Cotterleys were always staunch allies with Miss Wicks. Peas in a pod, you might argue. I believe Miss Wicks took against them when they shut themselves away and stopped writing to her. They failed to send her a Christmas card one year and she took it rather badly. But, of course, nothing she could do with them shut away in their house. I don’t think harsh words were ever spoken. Miss Wicks just accepted they had abandoned her.”

  “That would explain her response when I mentioned their names to her. But if they are not responsible for Miss Wicks’ letter, then the only other possibility is that someone else used the excuse of the poison pen letters to write their own unpleasant missive to her.”

  “Oh no, does that mean we have another letter writer to worry about?”

  “I doubt it. I think this was a one off act of spitefulness or even revenge. Has Miss Wicks caused anyone great offence?”

  “She is hardly the most pleasant of women,” Mrs Wilton grimaced. “That being said, she rarely causes real trouble. I could think of a list of people she has had cause to complain to, but no one I could specifically say held a grudge against her.”

  “Then I shall have to pay her another call,” Clara decided reluctantly. “Well, I must get on Mrs Wilton. Can I rely on you to spread the word?”

  “Naturally,” Mrs Wilton assured her. “Thank you, my dear.”

  Clara took her leave and headed into town. Miss Wicks could wait; she had other, much more serious, business to attend to.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The police station was relatively quiet for a Saturday. Clara showed her special identification card that allowed her access to the archives, and the Desk Sergeant reluctantly allowed her through. Clara mused that, should the Desk Sergeant prove to be the traitor in the ranks, it would be her pleasure to unmask him. She doubted she was that lucky.

  She headed down to the archives and found herself standing on the spot where she had found Constable Brompton. The concrete floor had been scrubbed and there was no trace of blood, but there was still a clear space that indicated where he had been sitting. Poor Brompton, what had he discovered? Clara stepped around the spot and was about to head to ‘C’ section, when she was surprised to see she was not alone. A young man was taking files out of boxes. He was in police uniform, but had discarded his jacket while working in the basement. The archives room being right next to the boiler room meant it was the warmest place in the station. In fact, it was rather overheated, so it was natural to discard the jacket.

  “Good morning,” Clara said.

  The young man looked up. He had brown hair and hazel eyes. His smile was pleasant.

  “Good morning, you must be Miss Fitzgerald.”

  Clara admitted she was.

  “I’m Constable Tilney. They sent me down to sort some files. It’s quiet today.”

  “I noticed.”

  Tilney picked up a stack of cardboard folders he had just finished sorting from the box.

  “Excuse me, would you, these belong at the far end,” Trimley headed towards the back of the room, while Clara headed in the opposite direction.

  ‘C’ section was one long row of shelves lined with boxes from floor to ceiling. Clara looked at the amount of files sitting on the shelves and her heart sank. Lost needles and haystacks sprang to mind. There were also lots of unsorted boxes of files on the floor before the shelves. As Clara tried to edge nearer to the shelved files her foot caught on one of these loose boxes and caused it to tip over. Files scattered across the floor. Clara sighed and bent down to right the box. It was as she did so, that she noticed the small red dot on the very edge of the box. She peered a little closer. It was a speck of blood. This was the box Brompton had been leaning over when he was struck on the head! Which meant one of these scattered files might be just the one he was looking for!

  Clara started to gather up the files, reading the names on them as she went. None rang any particular bell until she picked one up with the name ‘Chang’ written on it. The first name, written just after the surname in smaller letters, was ‘Brilliant’.

  Clara stared at the file. Brompton had not been telling her she had a good chance of finding the clue to his assault in the files, he had been giving her the name of the person she should be looking for. Brilliant Chang.

  Opening the file there was a headshot of an Asian man, turned slightly away from the camera and clearly taken at some social event, for he was in evening dress. It was the man Clara had met in the foyer of the hotel asking after Mrs Welk. Rapidly she read the details in the file. Male. Asian. Aged 35. 5ft 6in. Resided in England since 1907. Arrested for supplying cocaine 1908, 1909, 1910. Last conviction 1910, two years hard labour. Suspected of running drug traffick
ing ring.

  The file was flimsy and low on information after 1910, except for a list of sightings of Chang at various high class parties and society meetings. He was also implicated in the untimely death of the actress Billie Carleton (who had perished from a drug overdose), but once again Chang had managed to slip the grasp of the authorities. Now he had turned up in Brighton and his name was on Constable Brompton’s lips. A coincidence? Clara didn’t think so.

  Clara carefully gathered up the other folders and put them back in the box, as she did so she heard footsteps approaching. She slipped Brilliant Chang’s file under her coat just as Tilney came around the corner. He saw her righting the box she had knocked over.

  “Sorry, constable,” Clara beamed at him. “I caught the box with my foot. I’ve put them back as they were.”

  “It’s a bit cluttered in here,” Tilney nodded. “Were you looking for something in particular?”

  “Why, yes,” Clara had already thought up the perfect excuse. “I was hoping to find a police report on an accident that happened back in the 1870s. A barge sank and people drowned. One of the men on board had the name of Cotterley.”

  “1870s?” Constable Tilney pursed his lips. “That’s a long while back. Sometimes our older records are destroyed or sent to our central archives in London.”

  Tilney moved between the boxes and thumbed along the shelf. Clara stood pretending to be patiently waiting when, in fact, she was burning with nerves that he might notice she had slipped a file beneath her coat. In the hot room it was rather odd she should still be wearing it and she was beginning to overheat.

  “Ah, Cotterley,” Tilney took down a file and presented it to Clara. “This looks like it.”

  Clara accepted the folder and flicked it open with the pretence of interest. Had she wanted to further delve into the Cotterleys’ tragic past she would have been sorely disappointed. The file contained a single sheet of paper with a very brief report on the barge accident. There was a reference number for further information. Clara couldn’t help herself.

  “What does this mean, Constable Tilney?”