The Lavender Lady

by Faith Martin

  Nevertheless, whilst I will do my best to make sure that Effie doesn’t come to any harm, either physical, mental or emotional, whilst she’s with us, neither is it fair that we be held responsible for her well-being.

  At some point, I am going to have to have a talk with her about whether or not she really feels ready, given the circumstances, to carry on with us in our investigations. And if she decides to leave us, it will be very disappointing but understandable. We’ve all grown to like Effie very much, and under normal circumstances, I believe she could become a very valuable and respected member of our team.

  But if she is certain that she wants to carry on, and convinces me that she is not putting herself under unnecessary pressure by taking on this new project at this particular time in her life, then I really can’t see any good reason for asking her to leave.

  I shall, of course, have to discuss this further with the others, but I’m pretty sure that their joint thinking on this will run along pretty much the same lines.

  But from now on, I shall be watching her closely.

  * * *

  Effie had invited her friend over for lunch, and whilst the quiche Lorraine was cooking, she had lured her outside to help her pick some flowers for the table, hoping to lull her sharp-witted friend into a sense of false security before she started probing her for information. So far she’d managed to steer the conversation towards causes of death in the elderly and now on to what GPs were supposed to do if they had any suspicions about a patient’s sudden demise.

  But clearly she hadn’t been as subtle as she’d thought.

  ‘What?’ she said now, all wide-eyed innocence.

  ‘Don’t give me all that “who, me?” nonsense, Effie James,’ Penny said, arching one dark eyebrow ferociously. ‘I know you too well. What’s with all the questions? And don’t try and fob me off with the excuse that we’re just talking generally. Or that you’re just being curious. It’s clear you’ve got something specific in mind.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Effie said with a grin. Clearly she’d been rumbled. Not that she’d ever expected to get away with it for long — Penny was far too smart for that. Besides, as she’d quickly discovered, it simply wasn’t possible to get the specific answers to the questions she needed without making it clear which way her mind was running.

  ‘My eye, you don’t!’ Penny said, stuffing more daffodils willy-nilly into the vase, making Effie wince and surreptitiously rearrange them into a more pleasing alignment. ‘Talking about heart conditions in general, you might have got away with. And even, at a push, how often we GPs have had to sign death certificates. But when you start talking about poison . . .’

  ‘I was only saying that isn’t it interesting and a little scary, how so many garden plants are poisonous,’ Effie said, her smile widening even further at her friend’s sceptical look. ‘And they are, aren’t they?’

  Penny shook her head, and reached for a bright red tulip. As Effie watched nervously, her friend eyed the vase and plonked it down at the back, not only where it couldn’t be seen but where its large blowsy petals would soon open and get crushed.

  ‘You might just as well come out and tell me what this is all about. I’m not feeding you any more information until you do,’ Penny warned her as Effie rescued the tulip and put it in pride of place front and centre, where it deserved to be. ‘And then you can feed me. That quiche smells like it’s done and I’m starving. And if I’m going to have my brains picked without being paid for my expert time, I expect at least to be given a glass of wine with my lunch.’

  ‘Deal,’ Effie said quickly.

  Soon the two women were seated at the table, eating their quiche and salad and drinking the promised wine, as Effie told her all about Claudia Watkins. Since she’d sworn to be discreet, she didn’t go into details about the C-Fits or Corwin’s investigation, which Penny didn’t like at all. Naturally, she was more interested in ghost hunting than in old ladies dying of heart attacks.

  But once she had finished explaining the circumstances of Claudia’s death, Penny grew more serious and thoughtful.

  ‘You think she might have been murdered, don’t you?’ her friend said flatly, making Effie look at her nervously.

  The last thing she wanted was for her friends to start thinking she’d gone off her rocker. She already had Duncan keeping an underhanded eye on her mental state. She definitely didn’t want another friend — and a GP friend at that — to start looking at her funny.

  ‘Pen, I never said that,’ she began cautiously, but Penny held her hand up and stopped her before she could carry on.

  ‘You don’t have to be so defensive, Effie,’ she said gently. ‘I’m not going to tell you that you’re being stupid or over-imaginative. I’m not Michael.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sorry,’ Pen said at once, looking contrite. ‘But he did tend to put you down . . . No, sorry, forget I said that,’ she said and waved her wine glass gently in the air as a means of calling pax. ‘Let’s concentrate on your old lady, shall we?’

  ‘She’s not mine,’ Effie said, choosing to ignore her friend’s comment on her late husband. She’d become adept at avoiding thinking about things that upset her, finding it was by far the best way to get along. And she wasn’t about to change the habit of a lifetime now.

  ‘So, run me through the suspects and why it’s led you to thinking of foul play,’ Penny said briskly.

  So Effie did, listing all her suspects, motives and making light of her night spent playing Sherlock Holmes instead of sleeping. And she was genuinely glad to get someone with a mind like Penny’s on board. Logical, clever, experienced and able to cut through all the extraneous stuff and get to the heart of the matter — if ever someone could show her how woolly-minded she was being, it was Pen.

  ‘Hmmm. Well, it’s intriguing, I agree,’ Penny said, surprising her somewhat.

  She’d expected her friend to be much more dismissive of her theories. ‘But I don’t quite see how I can help. I don’t know what sort of heart condition Claudia had, so I can’t tell you how likely or unlikely it is that she would have died suddenly. But if her GP signed off on it, I can promise you that he or she thought it was all clear-cut and above board.’

  Effie nodded. ‘Yes, I thought as much,’ she agreed mildly. She hadn’t exactly expected Pen to criticize her unknown colleague, after all. ‘But, given the tremendous amount of pressure you doctors are under nowadays, what with so many patients to see and all the paperwork, and the pressure on you to keep people out of A & E and what have you. Isn’t it just possible that . . . well . . .’ Effie trailed off, trying to find a tactful way of putting it.

  ‘You mean could the old lady’s doctor have missed something due to being so tired or overworked? Or that he or she had simply been in too much of a hurry to get on to the next case, so they just signed off on it without bothering to be too diligent?’ Penny asked dryly, then shrugged. ‘Sure it’s possible. But it’s still unlikely.’

  ‘And if she’d been smothered with a pillow, say, would there have been many outward signs of it?’ Effie persisted.

  Penny smiled around a forkful of iceberg lettuce. ‘Probably. You’ve been watching too much television, Effie,’ she warned her. ‘It’s harder to get away with murder than you might suppose.’ Then she chewed, swallowed, speared a piece of cucumber, and added thoughtfully, ‘Cyanosis would have been present, but then if the old lady had a heart condition, blueness to the lips wouldn’t have been unexpected. But there would still have been a redness at certain points on the face. And no matter how old or frail you are, if you have your air supply cut off, you’re going to struggle like crazy, so there’s bound to be some bruising. And even if the bruises hadn’t had time to become apparent at the time the doctor was called out, you could be sure that they would come out afterwards — overnight or one or two days later maybe. And by then the undertaker would have noticed and he would have called the police out pretty sharpish,’ Penny added
firmly. ‘On the whole, morticians are a sharp and canny bunch, since they’ve seen it all. I had a friend in that business once and the tales he could tell . . .’ Penny caught her friend’s horrified expression and abruptly stopped. ‘No. Sorry!’ she said with a shamefaced grin. ‘On the whole, Effie, as entertaining as it might be to think that you’ve wandered into an Agatha Christie novel, I still think it’s highly unlikely that your old lady was murdered.’

  Effie nodded with a sigh. ‘Yes, that’s what I thought too, deep down.’

  Penny speared a tomato, then frowned at it. ‘Mind you, having said all that, what you said just now about how many common or garden plants are poisonous reminds me. Your old lady with a heart condition — the chances are that she was on some form of cardiac glycosides.’

  ‘If you say so,’ Effie said.

  ‘Digitoxin, digitalin, digitonin, gitoxin and gitalonin, that sort of thing,’ Penny tossed off the complicated words with ease. ‘What does that remind you of?’

  ‘A big bowl of alphabet soup?’

  Penny grinned. ‘And if I were to say Scrophulariaceae?’

  ‘I’d say bless you and pass you a tissue.’

  ‘Come on, Effie, think! What’s growing in profusion on your back wall near the greenhouse?’

  ‘Foxgloves,’ Effie said promptly, then blinked. ‘Of course. You get digi . . . whatsits from foxgloves, don’t you? I remember that, because a friend of Michael’s had an irregular heartbeat and he took . . . digoxin, was it?’

  Penny nodded. ‘Exactly. The chances are your old lady was taking something provided by the good old foxglove. And like most medication, it’s imperative that she had just the right dose. Too much, and the medicine becomes poison. Of course, that’s only speculation,’ she added primly.

  But Effie had no patience with speculation right then. ‘So if she were on some kind of . . . cardiac glycosides, and she was somehow fed more of it, say from foxgloves, then it would cause her heart to stop?’ she persisted.

  ‘Whoa! Hold on a minute, not so fast.’ Penny grinned at her. ‘First of all, it’s not as easy as all that. You can’t just go into your back garden, pick some foxglove leaves and then mush them down into paste and turn it into a liquid by pouring boiling water on it! Nobody in his or her right mind would drink it! For a start, it would taste foul! Nor could you just sprinkle the leaves into a salad and try to get it into somebody’s system that way. The raw plant is an emetic.’

  ‘A what-ic?’

  ‘It would make you sick, and thus eject the poison before it could take effect,’ Penny said succinctly.

  ‘Oh,’ Effie said, wishing she hadn’t had a second slice of quiche.

  ‘No, it would have to be distilled and refined,’ Penny mused. ‘That way, during digestion it would produce aglycones and a sugar. The aglycones would then affect the heart muscles, slowing the heart down. And acceleration of the heart ahead of this sometimes leads to it being wrongly said to increase the heart rate.’

  Effie swallowed. ‘Er, Penny, if you don’t mind, I’d rather not have a medical lecture just now. Fascinating as it all is, mind.’

  ‘Oh, sorry. I do that sometimes — go off on a tangent. I keep forgetting that not everybody speaks medicalese. Drives Patrick wild.’

  Effie’s sympathies, for once, were with Penny’s other half. ‘So, if I’ve got this right,’ she set out clearly, ‘Claudia was almost certainly taking some kind of digitalis-based heart pills. And if someone was able to distil and refine some plant material from any old foxglove growing in their garden, they’d be able to produce a poison capable of killing her?’

  ‘Yes,’ Penny said cautiously. ‘But it would take some doing. You’d have to have some prior experience of that sort of thing or do your homework pretty thoroughly. You’d need to gain a fairly good knowledge of both chemistry, botany, and the distilling process — it wouldn’t be something you could just do on the spur of the moment. You can’t just make these things up as you go along! But even supposing you could make the stuff, and ended up with a little bottle of clear liquid, you’d still have to find a way of slipping it to the old lady,’ Penny pointed out, ‘and in a way that wouldn’t make her suspicious. You couldn’t just pour a bit in a cup of tea, for instance. I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure it would still be detectable by taste. Your old lady would just spit it out, perhaps thinking the milk was off or something. I’m not so sure about food, though,’ Penny mused, but by now Effie was barely listening to her. ‘If you mixed it in with something really pungent, say curry, or . . .’

  Her friend’s words had by now receded into a vague hum as Effie sat staring down at her plate.

  Because it had just occurred to her that she knew someone who would have had no trouble at all in making up such a concoction.

  She would even have had the perfect method of delivering it too, and without incurring any risk to herself. What’s more, Claudia would ingest it in a way that nobody would ever question or even think about — including Claudia herself.

  The trouble was, the person Effie had in mind wasn’t even on the list of potential murderers because she had no reason at all for wanting Claudia Watkins dead.

  Did she?

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Jasmine Carteret looked up as the bell over her shop door tinkled cheerily, and a bright smile crossed her face as she recognized Effie.

  ‘Hello. Lily of the valley hand cream, wasn’t it? How was it? No problems, I hope?’

  ‘Oh no,’ Effie said at once. She hadn’t, in fact, used her purchase from Jasmine’s shop yet, and now she wasn’t sure that she ever would.

  She entered rather nervously, and glanced around. ‘I was looking for a birthday present for a friend,’ she began with her pre-prepared lie. ‘One of her favourite scents is sweet peas, but you never seem to see anything made out of them in the shops.’

  ‘No, you won’t,’ Jasmine agreed. ‘It’s a very hard scent to replicate, perfume wise, and because it’s so delicate, it doesn’t translate so well into soaps and talcs, either.’

  ‘Ah, that would explain it.’ Effie nodded. ‘And I don’t suppose you have, er . . . managed to produce anything yourself?’ she waffled on, wondering how on earth she was going to question this woman without Jasmine realizing what she was doing. It was all very well to acknowledge that Jasmine Carteret had both the know-how and the means of poisoning someone. It was another thing entirely to actually set about trying to determine whether or not she had.

  ‘Oh no, I’m afraid not.’ Jasmine laughed.

  Today she was wearing a flowing caftan in crimson and emerald green, and when she laughed, her double chin wobbled alarmingly. With her bright friendly eyes and easy smile, she looked as harmless as a big, somnolent tabby cat.

  ‘Much as I appreciate the vote of confidence in me, I’m not that good,’ she said with a grin. ‘We may have been taught the basics by Mum, and I’ve been in the business for twenty years now, but that doesn’t mean that I can just conjure up whatever I might feel like. I’m not a world-class chemist — or an alchemist, come to that! Worse luck.’ She sighed. ‘Mind you, I suppose a thin, milk-like lotion might just be doable,’ she carried on thoughtfully. ‘And like you said, a lot of people do like the scent of sweet peas, so there’d probably be a good call for it. If—’

  But the economical viability of a possible new range for the herbalist didn’t interest Effie much. In fact, she was hardly listening at all now, for one thing that Jasmine had just said had reached out and grabbed her by the throat.

  ‘We?’ she echoed, interrupting her rudely in mid-flow. And when Jasmine broke off and looked at her, clearly puzzled, she said sharply, ‘You said that “we” were taught by your mother?’

  ‘That’s right. Mum ran a shop much like this one in Harrogate when we were young,’ Jasmine said. ‘We grew up helping her out, mostly making the stock rather than serving in the shop.’

  ‘I see, yes,’ Effie said, a shade impatiently. ‘When you say “we
,” you meant . . . ?’

  ‘Me and my brother Clive,’ Jasmine clarified, sounding more than a little perplexed now. Whilst she was clearly the sort of person who was open and friendly and probably saw nothing wrong in happily chatting away about anything and everything, Effie was clearly making even Jasmine wonder where she was going with this.

  Effie tried to relax a little. ‘But he obviously didn’t go into the family business like you did?’ She forced her voice to become light, and merely casually curious.

  ‘Oh no. He quickly saw that there wasn’t enough money to be made as a small independent trader.’ Jasmine laughed. ‘Even as a boy, Clive was more interested in the commercial and economical side of the business. Which suited me just fine — I was always more about making things. Which is why you’ve got me intrigued now about sweet peas.’

  But Effie had no interest in sweet peas right then.

  ‘But your brother helped out in the production side too?’ she mused, and as Jasmine looked at her, clearly becoming more puzzled than ever, said hastily, ‘The last time I was here you were telling me about how the St John’s wort pills were made. With gelatine and pill moulds? I found it all so fascinating. So I suppose that Clive would know how to do that too, would he?’

  ‘Oh yes. Sometimes, if I’ve got a really big run of pills on, he’ll still come over and give me a hand out back,’ Jasmine said. ‘Mind you, I don’t ask him that often. He grumbles about it for days afterwards. Says I should expand and pay someone else to do the grunt work. I tell him he’s missing the point, and that the real pleasure about running a small business like this is to be hands on. I don’t want to be a big, money-worshipping corporation! But there’s not much use arguing with him. I’m afraid my brother is wedded to Mammon.’