Nest of Vipers mb-55
Page 21
‘Oh, yes. I remembered that milk bottles left on the doorstep are a suspicious circumstance, so early on the Tuesday morning, knowing I could get in by the back door because I had left that way, I went along and found, to my horror, not one milk bottle, but two. The bottle I’d picked up on Monday morning must have been left on Sunday and he hadn’t bothered to take it in. Well, I shoved both bottles into my brief case – luckily it’s a roomy one – made sure nobody was about, went in again by way of the alley and the back door, which, of course, I knew I’d left unlocked, dumped the bottles and scarpered.’
‘Well, after all, it was suicide,’ said Laura defensively, when she heard the story. ‘If he rushed her and spiked himself on the knife she happened to be holding, he took a calculated risk and bought the result.’
‘Quite. She needs not this spirited defence from you. I accept that that is what happened, although I do not believe it.’
‘What will she do now? I’m desperately sorry for the poor blighter.’
‘She has her health, her work, and, when she comes to think things over, the satisfaction of having rid the world of one of the wickedest individuals who have ever lived. Not that I wish to exaggerate, of course, but the police are still checking the facts with regard to the disappearance of those schoolgirls.’
‘Do you think he had some idea that Minnie was double-crossing him?’
‘I think he distrusted her from the moment she took up residence in the bungalow.’
‘But why?’
‘She was there for one reason only, it seems to me.’
‘To push her claim to the Jacobson-Dupont property by looking for a lost will?’
‘Exactly. From that time onwards he suspected that she was putting her own interests before his and, with the police hot on his trail, he could not afford to have a traitor or even a dissident in his camp. I think he came more than once by night to the bungalow, no doubt to put his case. Mr Shard, the self-appointed spy, knew of those meetings and, although he refused to name the man to me, claiming that he did not know who it was, I am perfectly certain that he did know. He had attended at least two of the Satanist meetings and must have heard Bosey speak at them.’
‘But didn’t you tell me that Shard accused Piper of the murder?’
‘Mr Piper was, unwittingly perhaps, the cause of envy and jealousy. Miss Nutley seems to have done her utmost to throw suspicion on him, although I think she regretted it later and, as for Shard, well, Mr Piper is everything which Shard is not – frank, athletic, good-looking, and (more than this) very attractive to two tall women, Niobe Nutley and Elysée Barnes. Shard was once engaged to a girl whom unkind acquaintances referred to as his “beanstalk”. He broke off the engagement in consequence.’
‘Poor little runt!’
‘Pity is not akin to love, especially when it is couched in those terms.’
‘Sorry. But I am truly sad about him, same as I am about Billie Kennett.’
‘Billie Kennett? Ah, yes. The devil-marks on Elysée Barnes’s fair body were the last straw, I think. She got the truth out of Elysée and brooded on it until she was ripe for murder. Ah, well, she has been faithful to her Cynara – in her fashion.’
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[April 11, 2007]
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