Village Affairs

by Cassandra Chan

  Carmichael thanked her and, after glancing at the label, passed the bottle to Gibbons, whose heart took a leap when he saw it. It was Seconal.

  “This is a rather old-fashioned medication,” said Carmichael. “Is there some reason you take it, rather than one of the newer drugs?”

  She shrugged. “I got the prescription years ago,” she answered. “I’ve never used it every night or anything like that, just occasionally when I’m too wrought-up to sleep. My doctor has mentioned other sleeping medications, but this has always worked for me. I didn’t want to change.”

  Carmichael nodded. “I see. And how do you take the pills?”

  She stared at him as if he had gone mad. “I swallow them down with some water,” she answered.

  “I only ask,” said Carmichael, smiling, “because some people have trouble swallowing tablets, and you might have needed to mix them up in something.”

  “Oh. No, I’ve never had difficulty that way.”

  “Well,” said Carmichael, “I think that’s all for the moment, then.” He rose. “Thank you for your help, Miss Bonnar. We may have additional questions later, but we’ll be off now.”

  He shook hands all round, collected Gibbons, and retreated.

  “Well, said Watkinson brightly when the door had closed behind the policemen, “that’s over.”

  “Thank God,” she said. “I need a drink. A good, stiff one.”

  “All right,” he said, moving to fetch it for her. “But don’t forget there’s still one hurdle to go, Joan.”

  “One hurdle? Oh, you mean the media.”

  “After that you can relax and drink all you want.”

  She grimaced. “Not if I don’t want to be hungover at the funeral tomorrow,” she said. “God, how I wish we could keep the press away from that. It’s going to be bad enough as it is, with Eve there and never having met me.”

  Watkinson handed her a neat scotch. “It won’t be so bad,” he said reassuringly. “All you have to do is give her your condolences and wait through the ceremony. I’ll have a car waiting to nip you away at the earliest opportunity. And you’re bearing up beautifully, Joan. This will be easy as pie compared to some of the other things you’ve had to go through.”

  “You mean Gene,” she said dully. She had gulped down half the whisky and seemed calmer. “That was different, Ned. He was … well, I’ve had one great love in my life and I’m old enough now to know that kind of thing only happens once. But Charlie had never really got over his first wife, so we were in the same boat. We thought we could be … comfortable together. I expect,” she added bitterly, “that was foolish. Joan Bonnar is not a comfortable sort of person to be.”

  “You’ve had some rotten breaks, that’s all,” insisted Watkinson. He patted her arm and rose. “I had best go tell the reporters you’ll speak to them in, say, an hour. I do think it’s best to get it all over with at once, unless you really want to wait until later.”

  “No,” she answered. “No, you’re right, let’s get it over with. You can come and tell me what I ought and ought not to say while I’m repairing my make-up. But, Ned,” she added sharply, “I will not see them here.”

  “No, of course not,” he said. “I’ll make arrangements for somewhere in the village. We’ll drive down. You just sit for a minute and collect yourself, and I’ll be right back.”

  She nodded and he left her, sipping scotch and staring out the window.

  Carmichael paused in the hallway, his eyebrows drawn together in a thoughtful frown. “On the face of it,” he said, “it’s difficult to see how Bingham could have taken the stuff by accident. But she could have murdered him deliberately, Gibbons.”

  “How do you figure that, sir?” asked Gibbons. “She was being interviewed at seven o’clock when he died.”

  “But she didn’t need to be there,” answered Carmichael. “She could have arranged to meet him at the townhouse after her interview, making certain she’s late coming back. And in the meanwhile, she leaves out something he’ll be sure to eat or drink while he’s waiting for her, thoroughly lacing it with Seconal.”

  “But she couldn’t be sure where she would find the body, sir,” said Gibbons, like Carmichael keeping his voice low lest they be overheard. “What about Watkinson?”

  “She said he brought up the food, lad. He probably stopped off for it while she went on to the house. It would give her enough time to drag the body into the bedroom, if it wasn’t there already.” Carmichael considered. “If Watkinson left her at half nine, she might just have made it here before Mrs. Eberhart saw the light in Bingham’s cottage at eleven thirty.” He frowned. “But then how would she get back? I can’t see her coming over here, to three people who clearly don’t like her, even if two of them are family.”

  “But we already know they’d lie for her,” pointed out Gibbons. “They already have, when I asked about Bingham’s girlfriend. And, remember, sir, only the twins were here. Mrs. Potts was at her sister’s.”

  “That’s true,” said Carmichael. “Well, if she did come to them, they could have driven her back that night. Or she might have taken the train, if she were disguised. We’ll have to find out when she was first seen on Monday—you can get that from the press agent. And we’ll have to check out the parking situation around her flat.”

  Gibbons had been thinking. “There’s no reason to think Watkinson is out of it,” he said. “I don’t mean for the actual murder, but what do you think a press agent’s first reaction would be on encountering a dead body in his famous client’s house?”

  A slow smile spread over Carmichael’s face. “To cover it up,” he answered.

  “Exactly, sir. She might even have counted on that. If he believed Bingham had had a heart attack, he might well have been willing to help her move the body and thus leave her name out of it. And he could have driven her back.”

  “That does leave us with those bicycle tracks, though,” said Carmichael. “They wouldn’t have needed the bike. On the other hand, we’ve never been sure the bicycle was connected with the murder.”

  “No, sir.” Gibbons hesitated. “But do you think she did do it, sir?” he asked.

  Carmichael gave him a wry smile. “I don’t know,” he answered. “It’s the devil, having to deal with a professional actress. Well, we’d best finish up here. Mrs. Potts is probably in the kitchen—you look for her, and I’ll find the twins. We need to find out whether or not they knew where Bingham was going on Sunday.”

  The kitchen was a large one with a blue-and-cream tiled floor and a good deal of highly polished copper hanging from the ceiling. A long butchers-block table ran down the middle of the room and Mrs. Potts was seated at it on a stool, looking over the paper and drinking a cup of coffee. She looked up as Gibbons came in and said, “I expect you’ve seen her then?”

  There was no mistaking who she meant.

  “Yes,” answered Gibbons. “I’ve just come to put one or two questions to you.”

  She nodded, her long face somber. “Well,” she said, “I’m sorry we couldn’t tell you before, but there it is: she would have taken our heads off. Would you like a coffee?”

  Gibbons said he would and seated himself on a second stool while she fetched it.

  Mrs. Potts had left Chipping Chedding on Sunday before Bingham and so had no knowledge of his departure or plans. But she admitted that, had she known, she would have assumed he was going to visit Miss Bonnar. She paused and then added, “We all liked Charlie. There was a bit of constraint after he took up with Miss Bonnar—well, there was bound to be. The twins don’t think much of anybody who would marry their mother and you can’t blame them. Still, we all felt that if she had to get married again, Charlie was a good sort.”

  “But it must have been difficult, having her down here so much more often than usual?” suggested Gibbons, accurately picking up on what she had left unsaid.

  “Difficult isn’t the word for it,” she said grimly. “And the very idea that she’d move ba
ck here after they were married! I nearly had a fit and Julie almost fainted away. It may be her house, but it’s been our home—the twins have always lived here, ever since they were babies. I confronted Charlie about that,” she added, “and he was decent, I must say. Said as how he’d work something out.”

  “That was good of him.”

  “Yes. As I said, he was a good sort.” She shrugged.

  “So really,” pursued Gibbons, “you had no objections to the marriage beyond that?”

  “No. Why should I? It’s no business of mine who she marries.”

  “But they seemed happy together?”

  “Oh, yes. They were very affectionate and all that. Not,” she added hastily, “that they were all over each other. They were a bit past that, it wouldn’t have been seemly.” She made a face. “Not that I think it’s seemly at any time of life. We had all that with Mr. Sinclair—she couldn’t take her eyes off him and he was the same. Tiresome, I call it. But it wasn’t like that with Charlie.”

  “No rows?”

  “None that I knew about. They were happy together in a quiet sort of way.”

  Gibbons paused and sipped his coffee, thinking. “Is the household here completely dependent on Miss Bonnar financially?” he asked.

  Mrs. Potts didn’t like the question, he could tell, but she answered gruffly, “More or less. The twins have what their father left them, but that’s not much. Miss Bonnar pays my salary and gives them an allowance. It’s generous, I’ll give her that.”

  “Neither of the Bensons work then?”

  She might have been a tigress whose cubs he was attacking.

  “They do a lot of work in the parish,” she said huffily. “And Julie takes care of the horses herself—up every morning at dawn, she is. You can’t call that nothing. They certainly don’t sit about on their backsides—I didn’t bring them up that way.”

  “Of course not,” said Gibbons soothingly. “I was only wondering if they could have moved elsewhere if they’d had the inclination, or whether they were tied to jobs here.”

  She was placated, although there was still a dangerous glint in her eye. “They could move,” she said. “But why should they want to? Or have to? Even if Miss Bonnar had moved in with Charlie, she wouldn’t have stayed. She never does.”

  Gibbons hesitated. “She’s impulsive, you mean?”

  “That’s right. She may have had some idea of living the quiet life down here with Charlie, but she’d have been bored soon enough. Not with Charlie, I don’t mean, but with the reality of life in a small village. She’d have been off after a couple of months of it.”

  “So then it wouldn’t have surprised you to hear that she’d had a change of heart and called the wedding off ?” asked Gibbons.

  Mrs. Potts looked taken aback. “Certainly it would have,” she contradicted. “I’ve just finished telling you they were happy together. She can be impulsive, but that’s not to say she always is. I don’t think she agreed to marry Charlie on impulse. It wasn’t a whirlwind romance kind of thing at all.”

  Which, reflected Gibbons, did not bode well for her having murdered him, if Mrs. Potts was right in her observations.

  Carmichael was in the stables, watching Julie Benson currycomb a bay mare. He could not recollect ever having been in a stable before, and he found it much cleaner than he would have supposed. The floor of the aisle looked to have been recently scrubbed, and the smell of hay, horses, and saddle soap, while strong, was nevertheless a good, fresh smell.

  He had found James Benson in the study, but he had seemed reluctant to speak to the chief inspector without his sister. Yet now they had found her, James did most of the talking, while Julie kept her attention on the mare and only occasionally contributed to the conversation.

  “We didn’t know Charlie had gone off on Sunday,” said James in answer to Carmichael’s query. “But if we had known, I would have assumed he’d gone to see Mother.”

  Julie nodded her agreement. “I don’t think he often left Chipping Chedding except to see her,” she added.

  “Tell me,” said Carmichael. “Did you like Charlie?”

  “Oh, yes,” said James. “We thought he was a bit of an ass for wanting to marry Mother, of course, but he was a good enough sort otherwise.” He laughed. “We rather suspected that he had proposed more out of a desire for money than for connubial bliss, but obviously we were wrong about that.”

  “I don’t know that I really believed that about the money,” said Julie. “I just couldn’t think of what else the attraction would be.”

  Carmichael thought that here they did their mother an injustice. She might not be much of a maternal figure, but she was an attractive and captivating woman by any man’s standards.

  “Then you were unaware that Mr. Bingham had money of his own?” he asked.

  They both nodded. “It was a big shock when the news came out,” said James. “We’d no idea. We’d been down to his cottage once or twice, and I still find it hard to believe.”

  “But your mother must have known?” pursued Carmichael.

  James shrugged. “If she did, she never told us.”

  “Did you have any objections to the marriage apart from the money?” asked Carmichael.

  “No, no,” said James. “We didn’t object to the marriage at all, even if he did want her money. I mean, they were happy together so far as I could see.”

  “It only would have mattered to us,” said Julie, moving round to the horse’s other side, “if Charlie had been truly odious, or if they were fighting all the time. You can’t think how disruptive that sort of thing is. But they were quiet together, as James says.”

  “I understand Miss Bonnar has been visiting here regularly since she became involved with Mr. Bingham,” said Carmichael. “Did she always let you know when she was coming?”

  Both twins made a face at the mention of their mother’s visits, and James replied dryly, “Oh, she’d always ring up and let us know. She likes to have everything ready for her.”

  “But you weren’t expecting her last weekend?”

  “No.” James shook his head. “Not a peep out of her.”

  “You remember, James,” said Julie. “She said she wouldn’t be coming last weekend because of all the engagements she had on Monday. She moaned and groaned about missing Charlie.”

  “That’s right,” said James. “I’d forgotten.”

  “I see,” said Carmichael. “By the way, I take it you’ve both been to your mother’s house in London?” They looked surprised, but nodded. “Is there a usual place to park?”

  “It depends on the time of day,” said James. “I’ve been pretty lucky—I practically always find a place on the square. Or if Mother’s got her car in the garage, one can use her space. Why do you ask?”

  Carmichael smiled. “Just trying to put the odds and ends together,” he answered. “If Charlie did go to see your mother last Sunday, I want to know where he left his car.”

  “Oh.”

  James lost interest, turning to watch his sister run a brush down her horse’s flank. They both seemed perfectly at ease, and if they had helped their mother escape after she had killed her fiancé, Carmichael could not tell.

  CHAPTER 11

  Bethancourt spent Sunday glued to Astley-Cooper’s side, worried that his gregarious friend might let the cat out of the bag before the police were ready to make their move. Astley-Cooper was clearly bursting with the news and his part in it, and Bethancourt was nearly certain he would at least have told the vicar at church that morning but for his own restraining influence.

  Dinner at Stutely Manor was early on Sundays on account of Astley-Cooper’s weekly chess game with the vicar, and it was after the meal that Bethancourt discovered a message from Gibbons informing him that Joan Bonnar had arrived and that he and Carmichael were setting out for the farmhouse. Reassured that loose tongues could no longer imperil the investigation, Bethancourt took Cerberus out to have a walk in the park and watch the s
unset. The Cotswold Hills were peaceful in the gloaming and he breathed in the clean country air appreciatively, thinking that he really ought to get out of London more often.

  He lingered until the first stars came out, shining brightly in the absence of city lights, and then he called to his dog and began to stroll back. Astley-Cooper had put on the outside lights and the old house looked truly grand. Bethancourt paused to drink in its aged beauty, resting a hand on Cerberus’s head, before continuing on up the path, the great dog beside him.

  He let himself in quietly, hanging his jacket on the old-fashioned coat rack and taking a moment to admire the linen-fold paneling of the great hall—a superb example of its kind—before going to see if the vicar had yet arrived.

  He found Astley-Cooper and Tothill in the study, seated one on either side of a games table, and talking animatedly. A chessboard was set up between them, but most of the antique ivory pieces were still in their box to one side.

  Tothill looked up and grinned at him as he came in.

  “Is it true?” he asked. “Did Clarence here really find Charlie’s mystery lady all on his own?”

  “He did indeed,” answered Bethancourt, smiling at his host.

  Astley-Cooper attempted to look modest, but failed almost completely.

  “Well, really,” he said, “I might never have thought of it at all if I hadn’t run into the Bensons the other morning. Julie happened to mention,” he said to Tothill, who had not already heard the story several times during the course of the day, “that their mother was coming down today, and I just thought to myself, ‘My, she’s been down a lot lately—really, more than she’s ever been since she bought the property all those years ago.’”

  Bethancourt felt as though he ought to warn Tothill that nothing was confirmed as yet, but found he hadn’t the heart to throw even the slightest amount of cold water on Astley-Cooper’s accomplishment. Instead he went to help himself to a drink, half-listening to the two men’s conversation as they continued to set up their chessboard, even though he had heard most of it before.