Wading Into Murder

by JOAN DAHR LAMBERT

  “I’m looking into it,” the policeman assured her blandly. “Don’t you worry yourself, M’am. You’ve had a nasty bump, the Doctor says.”

  “But I have to worry,” Laura insisted. “Never mind my head. The point is that Richard and another man, he’s a policeman too I think, are still in the cellar, and some criminals were about to come down, people who spoke a strange language, and they’ve already killed one woman – no, two women now…”

  Her voice dwindled away again as she saw the doctor and the policeman exchange a guarded look. This one was in even worse shape than they had feared, the look said, a real crazy. They’d call a psychiatrist next. She could hardly blame them. The story sounded unbelievable even to her.

  A telephone rang shrilly and the policeman hustled to pick it up. She saw his face change as he listened. He looked first unbelieving, then astonished and then chagrined. When he replied, however, his voice was crisp and serious.

  “Tell them I’ve got her,” he said. “She’s here safe and sound at the station. Found her wobbling along on a bicycle with a concussion. Says two men are in the cellar of the old church, the little one on Cob Lane.”

  Laura tried not to cry. That must mean someone had called, someone was looking for her, maybe Violet…

  The policeman came over to her. “Sorry, M’am,” he said, sounding genuinely contrite. “Didn’t realize who you were, or what had happened. I’ll get my men over to that church right away.”

  “Thank you,” Laura breathed, and felt tears roll down her cheeks despite her best efforts to control them. “Oh thank you so much. I didn’t think anyone would ever believe me. Please hurry, though. Richard and the other man really are in danger, and that poor woman’s body is down there too...”

  “Not an easy story to believe, or so I gather,” the doctor said cryptically, with a curious glance at Laura. Snapping his bag shut, he addressed her sternly. “You’ve got a concussion, young lady, not a bad one but no more wobbling about on a bicycle or any other strenuous activity. Sleep and rest is the remedy. I’ll come have a look at you in a day or two. Where are you staying?”

  Laura provided the information, marveling at the thought that a doctor might still come to a bedside, and then remembered she was leaving tomorrow. “The tour group leaves for Bath in the morning,” she said forlornly. She had looked forward to playing invalid for a while. Tired didn’t begin to describe the current state of her body and mind.

  “The group might be leaving, but you’re staying put for a day or two, young lady,” the doctor replied tartly. “Bouncing around these roads on a bus is not recommended with a concussion like yours.”

  “I’ll see what I can arrange,” Laura answered meekly, and yawned.

  The next hours passed in a blur. Laura was aware that the policeman helped her up and into a waiting car, and that to her relief no one was around when she arrived at the hotel and stumbled upstairs to her room. There, a young woman who was either a nurse or a policewoman - Laura wasn’t sure and didn’t care as long as she could lie down - calmly and efficiently helped her out of her grubby clothes, wrapped her in a freshly laundered and marvelously clean-smelling terrycloth robe and led her to the bed. Laura sank into it, felt hands pull up the duvet and fell gloriously asleep.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  When she woke again, Violet was looking down at her. Her normally cheerful face was haggard, her forehead creased with worry. Memory suddenly returned, and Laura tried to sit up. For all she knew, Richard and the new bus driver were still in that cellar, being tortured. She hadn’t managed to tell anyone anything last night; she had just fallen asleep and left them there.

  “Did you find Richard and the new bus driver?” she asked anxiously. A wave of dizziness and a pounding head sent her back against the pillow.

  “We did,” Violet assured her. “They are both safe and sound, if a little the worse for wear. Our gallant Wells police found them enjoying beer and chips left by your captors, who unfortunately for us – if not for the men - had vanished into the night.

  “Thank heaven!” Laura suddenly felt better, well enough to realize she was ravenous. She wished she had a cup of tea and something to eat.

  As if by magic the young woman who was either nurse or policewoman appeared holding a tray laden with tea makings and small sandwiches. She set it down on the table beside the bed and helped Laura to raise herself very slowly to a position just high enough so she could drink and eat.

  “Thought you’d be hungry when you woke up,” Violet told her with a chuckle, noting Laura’s rapturous expression, “so I sent Rachel to the kitchen for some goodies.”

  “You’re a mind reader,” Laura answered as she sipped gratefully at the hot tea Rachel had poured for her and gobbled down a watercress sandwich.

  Her appetite abruptly vanished as she remembered Peg. “The bag lady, Peg,” she asked. “Did you take her out of there too? I can’t bear to think of her still lying in that cold damp cellar.”

  “We did,” Violet answered. “She’s going to have a fine funeral, Richard tells me. Everyone in Glastonbury wants to contribute.”

  Laura smiled. “Maybe I’ll go, too,” she said, and took another bite.

  “If you feel strong enough,” Violet said, “I want to hear what happened to you and ask some questions. Once again, we need all the information you can give us.”

  “Fire away,” Laura answered. “But first, what time is it?”

  “About ten o’clock in the morning,” Violet answered. “An excellent time to re-awaken from your long overdue sleep, which I am heartily glad you had after your adventurous evening. That’s what I want to hear about first.”

  “I suspect your sleep is even more overdue,” Laura replied with a critical look at her friend. “Have you been to bed at all?”

  “Well, not exactly,” Violet demurred. “Snatched a nap here and there. It was a busy night in our department too.”

  “I want to hear about that if you can talk, but I’ll give you what I know first,” Laura answered, and related with reasonable coherence what had happened since her interview with the police and her abduction by Abdul. Violet was especially interested in the conversations she had overheard from the cellar and her impressions of the woman who seemed to be in charge and the man who had come in later.

  “I call them the icy lady and the pugnacious man,” Laura summed up. “She sounded as if she has ice in her veins and he sounded totally ruthless.”

  Violet also wanted to know what Richard had been told. “Why do you want to know that?” Laura asked curiously. “Surely, he isn’t a suspect?”

  “Richard is a journalist,” Violet replied wryly, “which means a person who is expert at extracting information from other people by any means they can dream up, legitimate and otherwise, and at writing up the results in lurid prose.”

  “But Richard really is interested in helping to solve the case,” Laura objected.

  Violet shot her a cynical look. “Perhaps that’s true,” she admitted. “The problem is that it’s difficult to write up a story like this one, complete with titled lady, young celebrity, innocent American tourist who is abducted, murder in a famous garden and an international kidnapping gang, without sensationalism. From my point of view, writing any kind of story, exaggerated or otherwise, is not a help right now.”

  Laura was abashed. “I never thought of that,” she admitted. “I’ll ask Richard not to write anything, at least for the time being.”

  “It’s an excellent idea to ask,” Violet agreed, “but I suspect you’re a bit late. For a man who has an even worse concussion, your friend Richard has been remarkably busy. As far as I can tell, he’s been typing all night, when he wasn’t extracting information from people. Perhaps his former paper in London speedily renewed his contract when he dangled this bait in front of them.”

  “I’m such an innocent,” Laura said in vexation. “Never again will I tell anyone anything, for any reason.”

  Lady Longtre
e poked her head in the door. “Is a visitor permitted?” she inquired blandly. “Or must I consign myself to the dreary sitting room forever?”

  “Come right in,” Violet invited. “I’m sorry to have you all cooped up. As soon as we’ve got Abdul behind bars, you’ll be able to move around more. We thought we had him before, but he eluded us with help from some forceful friends.”

  Laura sighed. “If only I’d managed to escape without being seen you would have caught Abdul in the act – and the pugnacious man and icy lady, whoever they are.”

  Lady Longtree’s face lit up with interest. “The icy lady and the pugnacious man?”

  Laura clapped a hand to her mouth. Less than one minute after promising never again to tell anyone anything, she had provided the canny old lady with two valuable snippets of information.

  Violet laughed at her dismay. “You can talk all you want to Olivia. She isn’t under suspicion, except of bending rules that do not happen to suit her, such as creeping back into closed gardens and crawling under police tapes and into crime scenes when the urge to do a bit of detecting comes over her.”

  “I only stayed a short time and I took care not to touch anything,” Lady Longtree stated demurely. “I wasn’t quite sure I had the full picture of the cottage in my mind, so naturally I had to go there again.”

  Laura laughed. “I would have come too if I hadn’t been detained elsewhere. What did you find out?”

  “I found that as I had suspected, a pair of large feet in street shoes had entered the cottage earlier, and that something heavy had been dragged across the floor,” Lady Longtree answered.

  Laura closed her eyes to blot out an image of Amy’s lifeless body being hauled across the floor and focused on the large feet. Maybe they belonged to the pugnacious man. His feet had sounded big when he had thumped toward the cellar. But who was he, and how did he fit into the case? Could he be the person who had shot Amy?

  “Do the police know who shot Amy,” she asked Violet.

  “We are still investigating,” Violet replied briefly. That sounded like the kind of statement one gave to reporters, Laura thought, and decided not to inquire further.

  “I gather everyone is still here,” she commented instead. “I thought we were heading back to Bath.”

  “Dr. Bernstein is being held for questioning,” Violet answered, again without elaboration. “The rest of us are staying here for another night or two while the police gather more information on the case. It’s easier to keep an eye on everyone that way,” she explained blandly.

  “And in your case, we added an extra precaution.” She gestured to Rachel. “This is Rachel. She will keep an eye on you as well as acting as nurse, which she also is. Where you go, she goes, right on your heels. You can talk freely to her, and to William and Olivia. No one else on the tour is fully cleared. I suspect they will all be up here soon, clamoring to hear about your adventures.” She grinned. “You can entertain yourself during your convalescence by creating alternate stories to satisfy them.”

  “You shouldn’t be talking too much anyway,” Rachel cautioned. “You’ve still got a concussion.”

  “I feel much better,” Laura assured her. “That food revived me. I have a very hard head, too.”

  “In that case I shall prolong my visit so I can hear the full account of your recent adventures,” Lady Longtree said placidly, and sat down by the bed.

  Violet rolled her eyes. “Go right ahead - as long as Laura feels up to repeating that hair-raising – and at times hilarious - tale. I’m on my way to check out some sightings on Abdul, though I doubt they will come too much. He seems to have gone underground for the moment, wherever underground is.”

  “Bath, I imagine,” Laura said to Violet’s vanishing back. “Try the coffee shop where we first saw him. He might use that as a base. He might have keys to the houses where we’ve seen the father, too. They could be working together.”

  Violet turned. “Good suggestions,” she answered, looking impressed. “You definitely have the makings of a detective. See you later.”

  “An excellent investigator,” Lady Longtree pronounced when Violet had gone. “I have great faith in her.”

  “You know Violet, then,” Laura said. “I mean who she is really.”

  “Yes, my dear, I do. I thought there was something unusual about Violet from the beginning - appearing suddenly like that, and on this particular tour. So I asked her. I tend to just ask, you see. It often works best. After that we rather put our heads together,” she finished vaguely.

  Laura decided to imitate the tactic. She wasn’t sure the direct approach would work in reverse, considering Lady Longtree’s ability to prevaricate, but she had little to lose by trying.

  “Why are you and William on this tour?” she asked bluntly. “Why are you still investigating, letting William investigate, after two murders, three murder attempts at least, and the probability of a great deal of unwelcome publicity?”

  Lady Longtree looked down at her hands. “I asked for that, didn’t I? I must be losing my touch. At any rate, those are valid questions and I wish I could answer them fully, but until this case is resolved I cannot.

  “First, though, to relieve your mind, William is being watched carefully for his own safety, and Violet is encouraging him to finish his diagrams about where people were at various times. She says they will be extremely helpful. William adores that sort of challenge and it has the added benefit of keeping him busy inside the hotel.

  “Finding Amy rather dampened his taste for detecting anyway,” she added with a sigh. “The reality is so much more horrible, especially to the young.”

  “I’m glad,” Laura said bluntly. “I worried about him terribly.”

  “I too,” Lady Longtree agreed. “It is just as well this way.

  “But back to your questions: I can only ask for patience in explaining why we are on this tour, as I gather William did. You see, I could put a great many people in danger if I spoke prematurely, one of them a…a dear friend.”

  She looked down at her hands again, searching for words. “It is a matter of needing to know, to find resolution and justice, or at least closure. One could also say it is a matter of honoring what might be a memory, though I hope it will prove to be more than that. I must know. William must know. We cannot get on with our lives until this matter is resolved. So we came and we will stay until it is finished.

  “As for the publicity, we will simply have to endure it.” Lady Longtree looked up at the ceiling and blinked. Her chin set at a stubborn angle, but her face was tragic. Laura thought she was holding back tears, and felt tears come into her own eyes.

  “It’s all right,” she said gently. “I don’t really need to know. And I’m truly sorry all of this has been so hard for you and William.”

  Lady Longtree essayed a smile. “It has been difficult at times,” she admitted, and blinked hard again.

  “I think, you know, that we should be finding out who the man with big feet is,” she added, changing the subject completely.

  “The pugnacious man,” Laura suggested immediately, and launched once more into the tale of her abduction, her wobbly escape on the bicycle and her desecration of the policeman’s boots. Lady Longtree was soon laughing, and Laura was glad.

  “Have you any idea who the woman you heard – the icy lady you called her – could be?” Lady Longtree asked when her laughter subsided.

  “Claudine is the only one I can think of,” Laura replied. “It could be her with yet another accent, but it didn’t sound like her. The woman I heard was very much in charge, or thought she was, and Claudine doesn’t strike me as the authoritarian type. The voice wasn’t right, either. The icy lady had a shrill voice now that I think about it. Shrill and hard, like steel. It frightened me.”

  She slid back against the pillow to relieve the pounding in her head. “If only I could figure out who she is, and who the pugnacious man is, I might get somewhere,” she grumbled. “But no one on the tour
is quite right for either of them.”

  “Mr. Takara?” Lady Longtree asked. “He has unusually large feet for a man of his size.”

  Laura shook her head and immediately regretted it. “He could be the brains behind the organization, but I don’t think he’s the pugnacious man.”

  She sat up suddenly and clutched her head again. “The blue jeans man,” she blurted. “The one William saw. Did he say what he looked like?”

  “A large man,” Lady Longtree answered instantly. “He was taller than Abdul, well-built with light brown hair and grey-blue eyes. English looking, that ruddy face, you know. I believe he even wore a tweed jacket.”

  Laura groaned. If she had thought to ask that question before she could have saved a lot of speculation. He definitely sounded like the pugnacious man.

  Against her will, she yawned ferociously and felt her eyes begin to close. “That’s him, I’m sure,” she murmured.

  “I imagine so,” Lady Longtree agreed, and stood to leave. “It is time for you to sleep. When you awaken, you will feel like yourself again,” she announced positively. “Then you must be very careful, my dear, never to be alone. Someone seems to want you out of the way rather badly, though at this point I’m not certain he or she wants to do you any lethal harm. The difficultly is that once a murder has been committed, whether or not it was a mistake, a second murder seems less onerous. So do be careful. Rachel will keep an excellent eye on you, I’m sure.” With a wave, she went briskly out the door.

  “Thanks a lot,” Laura murmured to her retreating back. “It’s good to know someone really doesn’t want to murder me even as they try to.” She frowned, wondering what Lady Longtree had meant about the murder being a mistake.

  “Quite a lady,” Rachel observed. “She seems to know a good deal about the case, too. Very clever, I should say. And she may be right. If those people really did want to kill you, they would have succeeded by now, I should think.”

  “You mean they’re just trying to scare me so I’ll get out of the way?”