The Diane Dimbleby Murder Collection Volume 2

by Penelope Sotheby

  He reached the open front door, glancing back regularly at Diane to make sure she hadn’t passed the boundary, and yelled into the building, “Has anyone seen Inspector Crothers?”

  Diane heard some replies, though she wasn’t able to determine their content. The man stood at the door conversing with someone out of sight for a moment before the Inspector peered around the door frame, a look of exasperation on his face.

  ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠

  Albert put down the tea and biscuits roughly on the dressing table. He put his hands under the tabletop and tried to lift it, straining with his legs. It didn’t move, his bones creaking more loudly in his ears than the wood.

  He opened each of the wardrobe doors and peered inside, looking for anything that might hold a door shut, or be wielded as a weapon. All he saw were precisely stacked items of clothing, dresses on hangars, and boxes and boxes of shoes, not a dagger-like stiletto amongst them.

  “What are you doing?” questioned Penelope as she rose from the bed, Albert’s rudeness at rifling through her private belongings disturbing her out of her melancholic daze.

  “I need a…” replied Albert, “I need a…” The sentence never seemed to complete because he wasn’t sure what he was looking for anymore.

  He squatted down beside the bed, rested his back against the mattress and pushed, hoping secret caster wheels lurked under the solid wooden bed frame. He felt something give, but his joy was short-lived when he realized it was just the mattress slipping over the base.

  “There’s got to be something,” he said as he stood, scanning the room for weapons.

  ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠

  Inspector Crothers listened to what Diane had uncovered, clearly sceptical at first but gaining interest as she explained how the pieces fit together. He interrupted her twice with a question which she rolled over like a tank would a daisy.

  She was starting to get a little frantic again, and it made her testy and abrupt. She had expected Albert to call by now, and there had been no word, either good or bad.

  When she concluded with the name of the killer, the Inspector paused as if his back had gone into spasms. Then, with a curse word that would have drawn a rebuke from Diane at any other time, he reached for his phone.

  ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠

  Albert was completing his second full rotation in an effort to find something weapon-like when he heard a thud downstairs, followed by the sound of falling pottery. He stopped his spinning and wandered to the door, ready to peer out and ask about the noise. There was a commotion on the staircase and a uniformed form stood in the bedroom doorway.

  “Well, it looks like the time for subtlety is over,” said Martin Jackson as he raised a long sharp knife from his side.

  Albert backed away around the bed, getting between Mrs. Kendall and the knife.

  “Don’t be a hero. Just let me deal with her and you can go on home. She’s the last one. I only wanted the three of them.” Martin took a step into the room, twisting the shining blade in the air. “You know what she did, they all did.” His tone was mild, like he was explaining how to tie a shoelace.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Albert, one hand behind him to guide him along the wall of wardrobe doors. “You can’t do this.”

  “Of course I can. I’ve already done it twice. One more isn’t going to take much. Do you think they’d ever let me out of prison after the other two anyway? My future is set, so I can take either her or both of you, and it won’t make any difference.”

  Martin approached two more steps as Albert backed into the edge of the dressing table.

  “So save yourself, old man. I’ll get her either way. Why be in the way when…”

  Albert swung a mug he had gripped behind him, the hot tea flashing out of the cup and into the face of Martin.

  “Run,” yelled Albert to Penelope as he hurled the mug after the tea at Martin’s face.

  Penelope scrambled over the bed and through the doorway. Albert tried to follow, but Martin swung the knife wildly in front of him, cursing as he did, trying to blink his scorched eyelids. Albert grabbed the second mug and threw it at the knife hand, which got another yelp from Martin who hugged the hand to his chest in pain. Albert dropped his shoulder and rammed into Martin’s side, knocking him against the wall, clearing Albert’s path to the stairs.

  He stumbled across the landing and down the stairs, expecting a knife to slip through his shirt and into his back at any moment. Penelope was in the hallway below trying to drag an unconscious Dan Jenkins away from the door, his body sitting upright against their way out.

  As Albert stepped off the bottom stair, he heard Martin grunt behind him, snarling in rage from the landing above.

  Grabbing Penelope’s hand, Albert dragged her into the living room, slamming the solid door shut behind them. There was no lock on the door, so Albert braced himself against it, holding the handle up to try to stop Martin from opening it.

  “The window,” he hissed at Penelope, who was standing in the centre of the room, clearly in the grip of panic. “Get out the window.”

  A bang shook the door and jolted through Albert’s frame, his muscles and bones protesting at the sharp treatment.

  “I’m going to kill you both,” screamed Martin from the hallway, his pretence of sanity shed like snakeskin. He rammed himself against the door again, the wood creaking under the assault.

  Albert did his best to brace his foot against a cabinet, his shoes slipping a little further over the carpeted floor with every new assault. Penelope was working on the window latch, but it looked like years of painting over the join had sealed the window to the frame as well as if it had grown as a single piece of wood.

  She hammered at it with her hands in vain.

  Another shock rang through the door, and Albert’s knees buckled, unable to hold against the stress any longer. One more push and there would be nowhere to run.

  Martin seemed to sense his imminent victory as he laughed hard and loud.

  “You could have lived you, stupid old man,” he cackled.

  Albert reached for a solid bronze statuette, either to defend himself or to hurl at the window as he tried to brace himself one final time. Penelope was staring out the window as if trying to capture one last vision of the world beyond.

  There was banging behind the door and shouts from outside. Blue lights washed through the living room, and shadows sprang around like fleeing sprites. A smash of glass came from the back of the house in the direction of the kitchen.

  Martin bellowed, and Albert heard his feet stomp rapidly down the hallway, the clack of the bead curtains marking his passage. There was a yell, the sounds of a scuffle followed by a series of grunts and snarls that sounded like Martin.

  A figure sprang across the living room window silhouetted by the lights outside causing Penelope to squeal and tumble backward onto the settee. The blue light canted and shifted around the eyes as it passed through thick lenses.

  “Diane!” cried Albert, suddenly realizing the Police had arrived. He picked himself up off his knees that growled at him for the trouble he had put them through. There was a knock on the living room door.

  “It’s Inspector Crothers. You’re safe to come out. We have him.”

  ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠

  Diane spent five minutes explaining what had happened to Albert, and he spent five minutes describing his failed plans. Penelope Kendall was tended to in a police car by a paramedic, her quivering lip the only movement on her face where her eyes stared at the headrest of the driver’s seat.

  “I’ll take that,” said Inspector Crothers reaching out to Albert, who still held the bronze statuette in his hand. “We don’t need a burglary in amongst all this too.”

  “So he was the son of the man that died in jail?” asked Albert.

  “Oh yes,” said Diane. “He came back here a few years ago after entering the Police force. His adopted family had changed his name to theirs, but he never forgot the early y
ears of his life. At some point, he must have looked up his father’s case and decided there was some justice to be handed out.”

  “But why did he wait so long? He could have spread it out over years and no-one would have been any the wiser.”

  “Ah, well,” said the Inspector, “Today appears to have been the twentieth anniversary of his father’s death. It’s odd why criminals wait for such moments, but its approach seemed to trigger something in him that set him on the path to murder.”

  “The sins of the past never really disappear, I suppose,” lamented Albert.

  Raised voices came from the alley, feet scuffing against the cobbled ground. Martin Jackson emerged first, a trickle of blood coming from his lip and arms cuffed behind him. He struggled with the two officers that were escorting him, each with a firm grip around a bicep.

  “I almost had them all,” he yelled at Diane and Albert, “and now she’s going to get away with what she did. You helped save her from their lies.”

  Diane turned her back to Martin, grabbing hold of Albert’s arm and marched him down the street away from the police vehicles.

  “Goodbye, Constable,” said Diane as she walked away, raising a single hand to wave at the chained figure that receded behind them.

  The End of Murder in the Village

  Murder in the Mail

  Chapter 1

  She stared down at the crumpled body, a life discarded like a used tissue. Dark pools oozed from holes that she couldn’t see. A hand lay within the spreading red, the clawed fingers looking as if caught in a moment in time, trying to scoop the fluid back into the veins.

  The dagger fell from her slick fingers, clanking heavily upon the floor, the knell of a hellish bell of death.

  Diane leaned back into her chair, the hard wooden back creaking as she did so. Circulation resumed to her legs again with a splash of tingling in her toes. She smiled at the monitor.

  “I probably shouldn’t enjoy it as much as I do,” she said to the small dog curled up on one of her feet.

  Rufus raised his greying chin enough to cast a suspicious eye over his human.

  “Don’t look at me like that. It’s not like I’m becoming Countess Bathory. Though a good bath sounds perfect right…”

  A huff came from the dog, clearly unimpressed by the explanation.

  “You should be an interrogator with a look like that. Stone-cold Rufus, dog-tective extraordinaire.”

  Seemingly pleased with his new title, Rufus laid his head back down upon Diane’s foot and fell quickly to sleep. Diane took a sip of tea, though it was starting to get cold. Writing always distracted her, got her caught up such that she forgot anything else around her.

  The wind brushed fat raindrops against the window as she stared out into the garden. Puddles had formed along the gravel pathway to the shed, which looked hazy through the downpour. The deep grey clouds moved ponderously, as if dragging so much rain was a burden or penance.

  “These are the best days for writing murder,” she thought.

  A blinking light drew her attention back to her desk. Diane picked up her phone that had been laying face-down on a stack of unedited papers, its flashing light informing her that she had messages. Diane liked mobile phones in the sense that information and people were only a few taps away at any moment. But if concentration was needed then she found them distracting, as though it was her little master and she must be ready to do its bidding at the drop of a hat. So she usually turned the sound off and flipped it over while writing until the writing trance had taken hold of her. When this happened, only detonations of a thermonuclear kind could rouse her before she had completed a chapter.

  An early morning message from Albert wished her a good morning and gave some brief details of his day ahead. He was in Somerset for the week visiting his daughter’s family, and they were off to the seaside at Weston-super-Mare for the day. He had talked about moving down there for the fresh sea breezes and relaxing pace of life, and Diane could tell he had been probing gently to see if she might have an interest in it. She had always been non-committal on the idea, replying that Apple Mews was sedate enough for her. Still, the sea had an allure that she didn’t mind daydreaming about; perhaps in a small cottage on a hillside overlooking the ocean, a small beach a short walk away down a private path, calm summers and howling winters. She found herself grinning at the idea again. Those thunderous skies as the sea tried to reclaim the land, lashing at the shore with mindless fury. Maybe, someday.

  There was a message from Sissy Monroe. In the usual Sissy manner, she had taken up three texts with her message and it was only to say that she had another rumour about Douglas MacDonald and his fortune. Diane scanned the message and spotted the words, “Pools winner”, “murdered his neighbour”, and “Japanese sword”. In a usual Diane manner, she promptly deleted the message and stored the précis in her mental list of MacDonald conspiracy theories. There was always a chance that one of them would make a good story. There was a lot less chance that any were true.

  She browsed her outline for the chapter, checking off the areas she had already covered and looking through what was to come. There was something about the overall scope of the book that she wasn’t comfortable with, but putting her finger on it was going to be as difficult of a time as Miss Charleston would have solving the case.

  Rufus snorted as his breathing became deeper and his paws buffeted Diane’s foot as he chased rabbit criminals over grassy fields.

  Diane let her mind drift, the patter of rain on the house hypnotizing her. The body on the floor. Discovered. What next? Who would be there next? What would I do in a similar situation? She had to tangle the story, hide the plot that she already knew behind false motives and secondary plots. The killer was known and had to become lost again.

  The doorbell rang. Diane took a moment to wonder who it could be on such a horrid day.

  Rufus rolled onto his feet and yipped at the intruder. The rabbits had escaped, and he was not pleased. He made a slow amble to the arch leading to the hallway followed by some more barking, showing his disapproval.

  The bell rang again. And again. The ringer pressed the button repeatedly, almost frenziedly.

  Diane wrapped her dressing gown tightly around her and walked carefully past her vicious guardian. The ringing disturbed Diane with its ferocity, and she checked through the peephole in the centre of the solid white door.

  The fish-eye lens of the peephole showed a panorama of Diane’s front yard through the sheets of falling rain. On her front step stood a young woman; strands of brown hair were matted across her face and shoulders. She was dressed in a long blue waterproof poncho, though the hood had been ignored, with light brown slacks that were darker below the knee from the rainwater and sodden light brown shoes.

  “My dear, you’re drenched,” said Diane as she swung the door open. “You’ll catch a death out in this weather like that. Come inside, quickly.”

  The dripping woman squelched into the entranceway, and Diane immediately took her poncho, hanging it from a rack behind the door. She ushered the woman into the living room and grabbed a large towel from an airing rack in the kitchen. Rufus made for the kitchen table where she lay, keeping an alert eye on the living room beyond.

  “Here you are. Now, what are you doing out on a day like this?”

  “You are Miss Dimbleby, aren’t you?” asked the girl. She looked at Diane with her large brown eyes wide under thin dark eyebrows. Her olive skin glistened as the light of the living room caught droplets of rain.

  She held the towel that Diane had given her like she wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. She had a nervous tension about her that disquieted Diane a little, but she made sure to stand near to the fireplace and the ornamental poker that rested on a rack near it.

  When Diane nodded, the girl said shakily:

  “Oh, Miss Dimbleby, I need your help.”

  Her shoulders sank in relief, and she raised her left hand that had been partially hidden behin
d her leg. A white box rested in her palm which she extended towards Diane.

  “I---I don’t know what to do.”

  Diane tentatively took the proffered box and examined it closely as she drew it to her. It was an ordinary plain white box of thin cardboard. She weighed it in her hand and didn’t feel any noticeable extra weight inside.

  “What have we here?” she enquired. “Let’s have a cup of tea and discuss what this is all about.”

  Leading her guest into the kitchen, Diane placed the box on the table and made for the kettle. A scrape of chair legs and a low rumble from Rufus told her that the girl had taken a seat.

  “My name’s Monica, Miss Dimbleby. Monica Hope. I’m friends with Rose O’Dowd, Tommy Giles’s girlfriend. They’ve spoken about you and what you…” She paused, deliberating her next word, “do.”

  “Ah yes, Tommy. You’re not from Apple Mews, are you?”

  “No. Rose and I went to college together, but I’m from Ironbridge.”

  “And you’ve come to me with this package.”

  “Oh, Miss Dimbleby, I don’t know what to do,” she repeated, a slight quiver returning to her voice. “I got up this morning and picked up my mail and this box was with it.”

  Diane placed a steaming cup of tea before Monica, along with a bowl of sugar and a creamer jug. She took a seat opposite and slid the box in front of her.

  “And you opened the box?”

  Monica seemed to turn a faint shade of green at the mention of it and just nodded.

  “Do you mind if I...?”

  This got no response, Monica instead deciding to stare into the swirl of cream in her tea.