by R. W. Heber
“In my plot it was supposed to be Mrs. Worthington,” Dee Dee remarked to Jim. “I’d completely forgotten about that until your daughter reminded me.”
“No such thing happened in the re-enactment,” Hamish insisted.
“Very little that was accurate did,” Jim countered him, “As you know yourself. And I don’t imagine Morton was deceived by your supposed movements either.”
“I don’t know what you mean.” Hamish flushed. “I did what I actually did. Went downstairs for coffee.”
“Who d’you imagine you’re fooling?” Dulcie asked wearily.
“Talking of deception,” Gilroy interrupted, “you told me a pack of lies, McMountdown. There was no Lloyds call for money today.”
“I’d been assured there would be,” Hamish protested. “I resent that remark and I demand an apology.”
“What was your cut going to be?”
“He wasn’t getting a cut,” Dulcie said. “He was saving his own skin.”
“Surely,” Loredana said, worried by this attack on Hamish in spite of their quarrel, and switching the subject to the night-dress, “the mysterious woman must have been Adrienne?”
At last Jim became totally serious. “Before we carry this joke any further,” he said, “we ought all to recognize that if Adrienne is innocent, then Welch’s killer must be one of us.”
A hush fell over the room.
“That’s quite a challenging statement,” Dulcie observed. “True, furthermore.”
“Adrienne is a most unlikely killer. Unless, of course, she had set up her insurance scheme with the intention of killing her husband this weekend, but I think not. Would she have bought new clothes for the occasion? Hardly. I’m sure she intended simply to have an enjoyable time, in spite of her husband’s business purposes.”
“But something got in the way,” Hamish observed.
“The business got in the way,” Jim said curtly, “because there were only two things Welch was serious about, and as Priscilla just told us, they were money and sex.”
“Which brings us back to night-dresses,” Priscilla said, with a totally false laugh.
“Come to think of it, everyone had lace night-dresses,” Loredana suggested, widening the field of suspects.
“Except for me,” Jemma said. “And if you had one, it was underneath your dressing-gown.”
“So you’re ruling out the men?” Dulcie asked Jim.
“Since Lord Gilroy was asleep around that time and we’ve exonerated the butler, and Hamish was down in the kitchen, that only leaves myself.” Jim paused. “Oddly enough, Welch had threatened me the night before.”
“Why?” Dulcie asked sharply.
“He knew my profession and I knew he’d been suspected of insurance fraud. He told me to keep my nose out of his business here.”
“George made enemies unnecessarily. He was very stupid over that.”
“Which led to his death, d’you think?”
“Possibly.” Dulcie became guarded and again a hush fell on the room.
“Well,” said Priscilla, making Dee Dee wince at yet another intervention, “as it wasn’t me who went to his room at seven-ten, who was it?”
“How do we know it wasn’t you?” Loredana asked.
“Because Priscilla’s night-dress had a blue ribbon through its lace and the woman’s didn’t,” Jemma said. “In fact, your spare one looks more like it than anyone’s.”
“How do you know I have a second one? How can you possibly know?”
“I saw it in your room when I went for your book,” Jemma said simply.
“You sneaky little bitch!” Loredana exploded, then knew she had over-reacted and said with enforced calm, “I always wear a gown over my night-dress.” Everyone was watching her. “Anyway, why should I have gone to George’s room, for heaven’s sake?”
“I think,” Jim said, all eyes now on him, “that you went because your horoscope told you that Saturday was a day for decisions.”
Loredana gave a little cry. “It’s true. It did. But it was nothing to do with George. It was deciding to run away with Hamish.”
“Since Hamish’s wife was throwing him out because of his affair with you, was that such a difficult decision?”
“That is true,” Dulcie confirmed in a very level voice. “I was, and I still am.”
“And Welch swore to sue him for fraud if the contract wasn’t signed. It had not been signed. Dulcie told Hamish that late on Friday night, before she fell asleep. Lord Gilroy was being difficult over the terms.”
“Damn right I was,” Gilroy cut in.
“Trevor had seen through you at last and was going to boot you out,” Jim continued to address Loredana remorselessly in the same very quiet voice that he had used professionally with fraudsters. “You were foul to him once too often. You wanted Hamish. You wanted him desperately, but not penniless. Not when you adore Versace dresses and Bruno Magli shoes. You’d realized weeks ago that Welch would have to be dealt with. This weekend brought it to a crunch.” He turned to Hamish. “Or possibly you cooked up the scheme to kill him. You’re a cold-enough and hard-enough person.”
“It’s not true.” Loredana had gone extremely pale. “How dare you accuse me!”
“You know what I believe you did? It was neat, simple and ingenious. You put poison in your own teapot, then took your tray down the passage, perhaps with your dressing-gown over your arm, and knocked on Welch’s door. That was when my daughter caught a glimpse of your back. You took in your tray, told him you’d brought his tea and spun him some story about why you were there. Perhaps you asked if he’d got the contract signed. Probably he said no, then made a grab for you, but you evaded him, because your night-dress had certainly not been not torn.”
“It had not,” Jemma affirmed, earning a furious look from Loredana, but no comment.
“Doing that was taking a risk, but with luck everyone else would be in their rooms. Your luck held. You escaped and returned to your room, with the dressing-gown on. Within minutes Welch was dead. When the screaming started you came back, wearing your other night-gown. Now came the riskiest part. You had to retrieve your own tray before anyone discovered that he had one inside his room and the other was still outside. You went down for breakfast earlier than anyone else and on the way down you passed Welch’s room, darted in and took your own tray down to the kitchen to ensure the pot and cup were washed up. But you did one last thing before going down. You poured out some tea into what had been Welch’s proper cup and left it there outside his room, so that the maid would assume that he had drunk his tea and finished with it. That was intelligent.” Jim turned to Hamish and said sardonically, “I assume you thought of that?”
“I’ve never heard such a cock-and-bull story in my life,” Hamish protested.
“But how do you know what did or didn’t happen,” Jim said equably, “when first you were with your wife and after that in the kitchen, fetching coffee?”
“You know perfectly well I was with Loredana.” Hamish turned to his wife. “Sorry, Dulcie,” he said, as if everyone did not know this already, and sounding every bit as sincere as a traffic cop apologizing for fining a driver.
“And what else did the horoscope say?” Dulcie asked frigidly. “Kill George now before he sues?”
“What with?” Hamish asked, while Loredana began to cry softly. “It’s a marvelous theory, it’s worthy of Agatha Christie, but it’s nonsense. Where did the poison come from?”
“From the Lion Park.” Jim took the tiny bottle out of its envelope and held it up in its tissue. “When Loredana stole some of the tranquillizer she poured the small amount she took into this. There were several of these bottles in the laboratory.”
“I’ve never seen it before,” Loredana sobbed. “How can you be so cruel! It’s all lies.”
“Probably poor Ted Matthews told you it was lethal to a man. So fast that it’s a favourite for vets committing suicide. That sparked the idea that it could be used on We
lch. You had no idea exactly how, you acted on instinct.”
“How can you say these things!” Loredana screamed.
“I’m not listening to any more of these slanders.” Hamish got up. “The police have made an arrest. We had nothing to do with George’s death.” He took Loredana by the arm. “Come on, darling. We’re leaving.”
But, to Dee Dee’s surprise as much as everyone else’s, Gilroy was faster. He reached the dining-room door well ahead of them and barred their way.
“Do you have any proof at all?” he asked Jim.
“There’ll be fingerprints on the bottle. With luck hers will show through below the maid’s.” He looked at Loredana with something close to pity. “Throwing the bottle into the library waste-basket was about as stupid a way of trying to throw suspicion on someone else as I can think of.” He saw from Hamish’s furious expression that he thought so too.
Loredana began to protest and then to weep. “You’re inventing it all. I hate you.”
“Well,” Dee Dee said decisively. “I think we should call the police. It’s not as though there aren’t enough of them around.”
17
“WE’D NEVER get a conviction on the fingerprints alone,” Morton was saying to Timmins, “and that pair are rock-solid in their denials. The woman Loredana claims she was given the stuff legitimately by the keeper to put down her cat, which is why her fingerprints are on the bottle, and the maid stole it from her.”
“The maid could have done,” Timmins commented “She had the opportunity. The problem is motive. Why kill a man simply because he goosed you? Mrs. Welch had much more reason.”
“It doesn’t begin to add up.” Morton sifted through his voluminous papers on the case. “It’s a hell of a pity all these tests take so long.”
It was late Tuesday morning and much had happened. The poison that killed Welch had been positively identified as veterinary tranquillizer. The pathologist confirmed that it was very likely to have been administered in tea. Welch would have died almost instantaneously and there was little possibility that the poison had been administered earlier, since it was present in his blood, but not in his urine.
Nearly all Jim Savage’s suppositions had been shown as correct. Traces of the drug had been found in the tiny laboratory bottle. Loredana and Hamish were now “helping police with their inquiries,” in the understated British phrase. Adrienne had been released. Priscilla had been warned against ever starting a fire again and been put on a train home. Dulcie had also gone home to discuss what to do next about their respective spouses with Trevor. Jim had wondered, idly, if those two would end up getting together. Now that Trevor had recovered his nerve, he could be a different man. But that was irrelevant speculation. The reality was that everyone except the Savages had left Wittenham Park.
“You reckon that Mr. Savage is right, sir?” Timmins asked.
“One hundred percent, damn him. I’m going to talk to him again.”
It was stupid to be resentful, and Morton knew it was, but he could not help himself. However, he would do his best to conceal his feelings.
“Could we go over the way you saw events once again?” Morton asked Jim, when coffee had been brought to the library, which he had chosen deliberately because he wanted the Savages to feel relaxed. He was confident that they could not have been connected with the crime, save as observers.
“The key was the way people kept acting out of character,” Jim explained. “Lord and Lady Gilroy never did that. They were consistent from the moment the weekend began. They loathed Welch and they hated having to sell their land. They made no secret of it. The rows we heard before and after dinner on the Friday night were all about pressurizing them.”
“Unpleasant, but not criminal,” Morton observed.
“You’d be the best judge of that,” Jim said tactfully. “It was when Gilroy refused to sign that things went wrong.”
“In what sequence?”
“Dulcie McMountdown tried to engineer a compromise. Her final act was to take the amended contract to Welch at around eleven P.M., urging that this was the best she could achieve. He told her it wasn’t good enough. She left him, incidentally taking the drugged cocoa—a complete red herring so far as any investigation was concerned. Everything Priscilla Worthington did confused the issue. She’d been asked to make the weekend dramatic and found herself unable to stop.
“She’s one from the cuckoo’s nest,” Jemma said.
“Anyway,” Jim continued, “Dulcie had already told Hamish that she’d had enough and was going to divorce him. Before she fell asleep she warned him that Welch was still going to sue him for fraud over Lloyds.”
“Could Welch have done that?” Morton was no expert on the convolutions of the insurance market.
“Managing agents have been sued. Fraud, incompetence and malpractice are the words.”
“And then?”
“As we know, once his wife was asleep, Hamish sneaked out along the passage to Loredana’s room.”
“We heard him go past, didn’t we, Daddy?” Jemma confirmed.
“We heard someone go past our doors. Presumably him. When he told Loredana that Dulcie was definitely throwing him out and Welch would be suing him, they evolved their plan.”
“None of which can be proven?” Morton asked.
“It’s informed supposition. But what transpired supports it. Take Loredana’s behaviour. Why, when her affair with Hamish was so secret, did she insist on telling me how she had found true love at last? Because they were each other’s alibis, that was the reason. What is less explicable is that accident on the back stairs yesterday.”
“I think they genuinely had quarrelled,” Jemma said.
“Perhaps they were getting the wind up after the inspector’s questioning,” Jim said. “Or else Hamish was trying to back out of the affair now that his own problems were solved and that Trevor had woken up to what was going on.”
“They were certainly nervous,” Morton agreed. One of the few complete conversations that his bugging device in the library had picked up was that one, but nothing had been said that could incriminate either Hamish or Loredana. Not that he intended Savage to know this.
“I suspect it all lies in Loredana’s character,” Jim suggested. “She’s a creature of instinct, of impetuous action. Jemma, remember how she insisted on having the ‘gazelle-like’ role at the start, and all the fuss about knowing Africa? She likes dramas. She might well have persuaded Hamish before they arrived that Welch had to be killed. Look at it from her point of view. She was bored stiff with her husband, who didn’t earn enough to indulge her and was often away and she’d taken up with Hamish.”
“Who wanted an easy lay, but not a divorce,” Jemma said.
“Exactly. Hamish didn’t intend to burn his boats with Dulcie. He was having a very satisfactory love affair on the side. Divorce is expensive, and anyway, he probably had no thought of actually marrying Loredana. She’s not the most intelligent woman in the world, whereas Dulcie is extremely switched on.”
“That would figure, Daddy,” Jemma said. “He’s a calculating so-and-so.”
“But this weekend changed everything. He was being divorced, and he was being sued. It had become a now-or-never situation. If she could possibly do so, Loredana had to bounce him into total commitment. She’d acquired the poison, almost by chance. The next stimulant was the horoscope. Last night she didn’t even try to deny the influence that had on her. That made her decide to act.”
“Horoscope?” Morton queried.
“She had taken her stars for the month out of a magazine,” Jemma explained, “the usual spiel. The astrologer said Saturday was a day for decisive action for future happiness.”
“You might just break her down over that,” Jim suggested. “It’s a very weak point in her psychology.”
“So you think the horoscope decided her to kill Welch?” Morton asked.
“I think she’d thought about how to deal with him a lot. The po
ison practically fell into her lap. The horoscope convinced her that she had to act at once after she heard that Gilroy hadn’t signed the contract. The horoscope said Saturday and she sees everything in immediate terms. I believe she then talked Hamish into their using the poison. And once he was party to a murder she’d got him where she wanted him. Or thought she had.”
“You don’t think he planned it?” Morton suggested.
“He could have done. He’s one of those Dr. Crippen characters,” Jemma said. “Totally cold, totally calculating.”
“Either way,” Jim said, “she then went through the routine we’ve already discussed and poisoned Welch very successfully. Hamish certainly took no risk himself. But she overdid it with the maid when she eventually took the tray down. Having said she wanted to help the staff, she couldn’t resist explaining exactly how she wanted her breakfast done. Result? The maid remembers that she came down at least twenty minutes before anyone else. She had to if she was going to be unobserved going into Welch’s room again. But pretending to be helpful to the staff was entirely out of character. Just as it would have been out of character for Welch to put his dirty tea-things out in the passage, where we all saw them and were fooled into assuming it was the tray he had actually used.”
“Her only problem was that I saw her go into his room the first time,” Jemma said, “although I didn’t recognize her night-dress until I saw it later.”
“It was both premeditated and an opportunist murder,” Jim said. “And she took a lot of trouble to cast suspicion on Adrienne.”
“I couldn’t go on holding Mrs. Welch,” Morton admitted. “Her fingerprints were on the contract, but so were several others.”
“Adrienne was a worried woman,” Jim said. “She’d been worried about what her husband was letting himself in for the night before, because she knew what financial trouble he was in. When she first found him dead she saw the contract on his bedside table and must have snatched it with the idea of destroying it if necessary.”