And, yes, damn it, if Jamieson’s not at work in the gardens themselves, where will he be?
The answer arrived, clear as a bell, into her mind.
Why, somewhere round the back of the big house taking shelter, of course.
She swung round and marched off.
*
She found old Mr Jamieson sitting comfortably in the shelter of the open door of a shed behind the big house, looking across, no doubt, at the kitchens area. Perhaps, she thought, just inside, there’s a store room where, back in August, someone fulfilling an early order reached down a new bottle of Campari. Or perhaps not.
But, placidly smoking a pipe and watching the rain ruffle the puddles and soak into a big heap of white-bleached sweetpea haulms uprooted earlier, Jamieson — it must be him — was not at all the figure from the past she had imagined. No sodden sacking on his shoulders, no straw-bound corduroys. Instead he was enveloped in a shell suit in the brightest of reds.
‘Mr Jamieson?’ she asked as a formality.
‘That’s me.’
‘I wonder, could I have a word with you?’
‘I’m here, and I’m not going to give myself rheumatics going about in this rain.’
Harriet laughed.
‘It’s probably what I’ve done, though,’ she said. ‘I never thought to bring a mac when I started out.’
‘Oh, yes? And where were you going then?’
She was taken aback for an instant.
‘I was going to find you, Mr Jamieson,’ she confessed.
‘Well, you found me.’
Is he going to return minimal answers to everything I ask? Am I going to get nowhere for a second time today after little Jakey?
But she persisted.
Keep the conversation going. Don’t let him have time to wonder why this middle-class lady is asking him questions. Especially as I’d find it awkward to produce my customary I am a police officer.
‘I was speaking to Mrs Upchurch the other day, Mr Jamieson, and she told me you had worked for her once, but before that you had been employed here, when it was St Aldred’s School.’
‘Nasty place.’
He shot up into a sudden stiff-backed position. His shell suit top crackled.
‘St Aldred’s?’ she asked. Harriet felt the trail she had hoped to find go flicking out in front of her. ‘It was a nasty place, despite its reputation?’
‘I said nasty.’
How to get him a bit more forthcoming?
‘From what I heard from Mrs Upchurch about St Aldred’s,’ she began. And switched, recollecting in a flash how Mrs Upchurch had sharply dispensed with the old gardener’s services. ‘Though I must say,’ she hastily went on, ‘she’s not a lady I much cared for.’
‘Tight-fisted bitch. I could tell you a thing or two about that one.’
It’s worked. It’s working. Now let’s hear his thing or two and just hope they lead from bad-lad Godfrey Upchurch to the masters at St Aldred’s in its prime.
‘I’m interested.’
She made herself look as if, bright-eyed, she would be fascinated by every word he was going to say.
‘Had a boy at the school. She tell you that?’
‘She did indeed.’
‘All right then, I’ll show you the other side of the coin. Young Godfrey, she made him out to be a little saint. I’ll bet she still did that to you.’
‘Yes, yes. She did.’
‘Well, he was a wee devil. I know the St Aldred’s masters were a strict lot, some of ‘em delighting in it. But that Godfrey — not that they ever called him Godfrey in those days, all surnames then — he deserved everything he got. I don’t mind a bit o’ naughtiness in a young ‘un, but he was more than naughty. He was as bad as bad can be. I tried once to put a bit o’ sense into him, took him aside — into this very shed here, as I recall — and told him how if he didn’t mend his ways pretty soon he’d ruin his whole life. And you know what he did, the wicked imp of Satan? He went and tried to make his form master, Mr Grigson, believe I’d taken him in here and done what they call nowadays indecently assaulted him.’
A grunt of a laugh.
‘Of course, in them days nobody got so hot under the collar about a thing like that. So, even if Mr Grigson had believed him, he wouldn’t have done anything about it. Delighted in doing his share of assaulting himself, with the cane, from all I heard.’
I wonder ... Harriet thought. I wonder if, straight away, I’ve lighted on the very man that I hoped I might.
‘This Mr Grigson,’ she ventured, ‘he sounds like a real teacher of the old school, drumming Latin and that sort of thing into boys’ heads or, as you said, at the end of his cane.’
‘That’s him.’
‘And strict about everything, you said?’
He hadn’t. Or not explicitly. But that’s what I want to know about.
‘Oh, yes. Great one for good behaviour was Mr H.F. Grigson — Old Heffalump was what the boys used to call him, on account of those initials — and with him it was all what a gentleman should do and what a gentleman never should.’
With every new revelation, Harriet felt increasingly certain she had found the man she had been looking for, the Schoolmaster, writer of highly moralistic letters to the Star, full of threats of punishment for the wicked.
Too good to be true finding him as easily, she asked herself. Am I being absurdly over-eager?
No, even if I am, this ex-schoolmaster ought at least to be eliminated from the inquiry.
‘Tell me, is Mr Grigson still alive, still about in Birchester?’
‘Couldn’t say.’
Is it back to monosyllables now?
‘You haven’t heard of him at all? Not since the school closed down?’
‘Not likely to, am I? Him the gentleman, me the gardener.’
‘No. No, I suppose not.’
She thought for a moment. Time to go? Right, it is. I’ve found out what I wanted, as much as I’m likely to get.
‘I’ve enjoyed our chat,’ she said. ‘But I see the rain’s beginning to ease off, so I’d better be on my way.’
She gave her shell-suited informant a quick, friendly smile and went.
Thoughts racing.
Chapter Twenty-One
There proved to be only one H.F Grigson on the Birchester electoral roll when at home that afternoon Harriet consulted it. Herbert Fitzwalter Grigson lived in the Meads, in one of the better parts in that nowadays very mixed area, a small enclave at some distance from where Mrs Upchurch was holding out against encroaching yobdom. Its wide roads were still, she remembered, lined by houses named The Laurels, The Hollies, The Cedars ...
It was, she found, from Wistaria House that H.F Grigson went out to cast his votes, if he ever took part in democratic elections.
All right, she said to herself, so now probably I know where to find the man who has attempted to usurp the Poisoner in order to harangue in the Star such inhabitants of Birchester who displease him. And, in doing that, he has seriously hampered the investigation into the real poisonings. But what am I to do about him? Go to Commander Rance and finally tell him what I believe? Should I? Ought I to?
She sat in silence, the computer screen in front of her glowing with its extract from the electoral roll halted at Grigson. The minutes passed.
But at last, with a heave of a sigh, she submitted to what she knew to be her duty, whether an off-sick police officer or not.
She tapped at the buttons on the phone, picked it up.
‘I want to speak to Commander Rance of the National Crime Squad. It’s Detective Superintendent Martens.’
‘Commander Rance has left urgently for London, ma’am,’ the man on the switchboard answered. ‘Can I put you through to another member of his team?’
‘No. No, thank you. But put me on to Detective Superintendent Murphy, if he’s there.’
‘Here almost twenty-four hours a day, ma’am.’
‘Right. But, no, on second thoughts I’ll
drop in and speak to him face-to-face.’
*
The reward of virtue, Harriet said to herself, entering forbidden Waterloo Gardens central police station and making her way up to Pat Murphy’s office. While the jealous cat’s away, sick-leave police officers can play.
But her appearance in the office seemed not to be altogether welcome to Pat.
‘You shouldn’t be here.’
‘But who’s away down in London? And, now I think of it, what’s he doing down there? Has there been some development?’
‘Well now, it just so happens that Mr Rance had been looking over the statements the Met people took after that woman, Margery Plummer, was poisoned. And he didn’t think they matched up to his own high standards.’
Harriet was tempted to say, How could they? But she decided that might embarrass Pat even now.
‘Listen, Pat,’ she said instead. ‘I think I’ve made a discovery.’
‘Of a way to hurry on convalesence, is it?’
‘Damn convalescence. No, Pat, it’s this. I know now who it is who’s been writing those letters to the Star. And it’s not the Poisoner.’
‘And you’ve come here to tell me all about it, after finding out our Commander Rance is in London. The man on the switchboard had a word with me after you’d phoned.’
He grinned.
‘We have our sources of information, you know.’
‘Right. And I have come to tell you, rather than Rance, what I’ve found out, or what I think I have. Who else should I tell, since I’m debarred from taking action myself?’
‘So it’s action you’re wanting?’
‘It bloody well is. Listen, you know that as soon as I’d read the original of Mentor’s first letter to the Star I had my suspicions that it had been written by someone like an old-fashioned schoolmaster. Then when you, you Pat Murphy, sent me to visit Lady Bell I learnt something more, something that advanced my investigation.’
‘The lady I unofficially asked you to call on, as a favour, advanced your investigation?’
‘All right. What Lady Bell happened to mention was that the Majestic Club was once the home of a private school, St Aldred’s. And I thought that if Mentor was the man who put that vomiting agent into Sir Billy Bell’s champagne at the prize-giving, then he almost certainly would have known how to sneak in there by the back way, and as quickly slip out again.’
‘So he would, so he would,’ Pat said. ‘But I have to tell you, as a matter of fact, when you were poisoned we looked into the possibility of the Poisoner getting to you in that way. But we decided it was not at all likely, not at all. It’s a bit of a warren of a place, the back parts of that old house. And we thought anyone new coming in there would find it all but impossible to slip in and out, especially on that busy holiday Monday with kitchen staff hurrying here and there.’
‘All right, so you agree all the same it could be a possibility at the time Sir Billy died.’
‘I just might, if it’s you asking.’
‘Okay. So this afternoon I went there, and — ’
‘Wait a minute. You went there? You went to the Club? To the very place where you were nearly done to death?’
‘Yes, I did. I had to.’
‘And what happened? What happened when you saw that recliner, there where I’d had it put when I did my bit of a reconstruction?’
‘Well, you’ll be pleased to hear I saw the recliner, I saw the very table where my cough-mixture soda was, and I didn’t turn a hair.’
‘Did you not?’
An undertone of scepticism in the question brought her down to earth.
‘Well, it’s true that I didn’t turn a hair when I’d got in as far as that. But actually when I first came to the gate I had a pretty bad panic attack. Still, I got over it and I found the fellow who used to be the groundsman at St Aldred’s. And we had a bit of a chat.’
‘Did you indeed? I wonder why.’
Harriet was checked by the lightly humorous question. The answer she would have to give Pat was not one he was going to accept very easily.
‘You wonder why,’ she said. ‘Well, I’ll tell you. It was so that I could learn something about the teaching staff at St Aldred’s in those days. And what did I discover? That there had been a particularly strict master on the staff called Mr Grigson, H.F. Grigson in fact. And just half an hour ago I learnt from the electoral roll that H.F. Grigson lives in a place called Wistaria House. It’s in the Meads.’
‘So?’
‘Well, Pat, I think that H.F. Grigson is, not the Poisoner, but the man who has claimed in the Star to be responsible for all the murders, including the non-murder of Sir Billy.’
‘Ah, I have it now, the action you’re wanting taken. You want me to go harum-scarum over to this house of his, tyres screeching as if Commander Rance himself was in it, and arrest a harmless old citizen?’
‘No, Pat, not that, as you well know. But I do want you to go and interview this Mr Grigson. Surely he’s worth at least questioning? I mean, he precisely fits the bill as Mentor. And if Mentor is not the Poisoner himself, but someone who’s simply taken advantage of all the deaths for his own ends, and I believe that’s what’s happened, then shouldn’t he be eliminated as soon as possible? To clear the field?’
‘Harriet, I’m sorry to tell you, but once more you’ve heaped up a great castle of suppositions, and if anyone so much as touched a stone of it the whole thing would crumble away to nothing, so it would.’
For a moment she just stood there. She guessed she must be pouting like an unjustly reprimanded schoolgirl.
Then she admitted to herself that perhaps Pat’s view of it all had some truth in it.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘If you won’t follow it up, you won’t.’
Now it was Pat’s turn to look at her.
‘Harriet,’ he said at last. ‘I’m going to speak to you like your parish priest, not that you’d have any such thing. But pay attention. “If you won’t, you won’t,” you said to me. Well, I’m telling you that you won’t, either. You will-not make a fool of yourself by taking the law into your own hands. It’s not your task to investigate the poisonings, and well you know it. So don’t. Just go home and tell your troubles to John. And then go to bed, right?’
*
Damn it, Harriet thought to herself as she sat at supper with John. Pat was right. I have been behaving like an idiot.
‘John,’ she said, riding full-tilt over a long, husbandy explanation of the difference between the detective story and the crime novel. ‘John, am I still really not capable of making logical decisions about ... well, damn it, about the Poisoner investigation? I mean, this afternoon I had what I suppose was a panic attack, a full-scale one, when I went back to the Club. I meant to tell you that I wanted to go, but — ’
‘But somehow you hoped to go without me knowing? You went, and now you’re telling me about it because you’re suddenly afraid your brain isn’t working normally. Which, of course, it isn’t. Some of the time. You’d be very lucky if it was. Remember, your Dr Dalrymple said you’d need three months before you were fully recovered.’
‘Sorry I broke into your interesting disquisition, darling.’
John grinned.
‘No, I wasn’t giving you a subtle rebuke. I’m used to having my disquisitions, if that’s what they are, rudely interrupted. But, no. I was telling you the truth, as I see it. You’re not as fit as, from time to time, you deceive yourself into thinking you are. You really ought not to do anything but take it easy. Fifty or sixty Agatha Christies await. Well, say, twenty really good ones.’
‘Thank you, but no. Can’t you point me to something not about murder?’
‘Hm. Let me see. How long ago was it that you last read Middlemarch?’
‘Oh, blush, blush, I never have.’
‘George Eliot’s great contribution to the novel? You should bury yourself in it straight away, even though, now I come to think of it, it does have a murder in it, or a sort
of murder. Crime raising its universal head.’
‘Very good, sir.’
But even as she sat there, head theatrically bowed over her bowl of kiwi-and-grapes fruit salad, a very different resolve came into her mind.
*
John left the house next morning rather later than usual. Harriet, waiting for him to go before she made the telephone call she wanted him on no account to hear, crept to the bedroom door and opened it to see what it was that had delayed him. It was the visiting nurse who, a few minutes earlier, had gone through her by now customary, almost perfunctory, bedside checks.
Her voice now came floating up.
‘You know, Mr Piddock, I think I ought to tell you it isn’t really necessary for me to come every day now. Your wife’s temperature has been normal for more than a week and her blood pressure’s just as steady.’
‘Yes,’ John was answering, ‘I’ve realized she’s been nearly back to her old self for some time. But, you know, the Greater Birchester Police medical officer told her that she shouldn’t expect to be fully fit for as much as three months. So perhaps you had better keep coming. But, shall we say, only twice a week?’
‘Very well. Best to be on the safe side. And it is always possible that if she gets into a serious accident of some sort, in the car or even just tripping up over something and hurting herself badly, she could be sent, well, right back.’
And on and on the medical platitudes went, pit-a-pat. Harriet, crouched on the side of the bed, did her best to let them go by in patience. But her best was hardly good enough. By the time she heard the front door close definitively behind them both she was in a good, healthy rage.
But she counted to five, and then made it ten, before she seized the phone, still thinking how ridiculously fussy the two of them were, and jabbed out the number of her former station in B Division.
To her deep-running delight she found an old friend, Detective Sergeant Watson, was there in the CID room and not at the moment engaged with anything more urgent than going through the left-hand pages of his notebook to make out his expenses claim.
He was happy to be taken away from that task to meet for coffee at the nearby new Starbucks.
Entering the place, Harriet was at once sharply reminded of how, shortly after her return from St Oswald’s, Miss Earwaker, on the way to their first unsuccessful hunt for monkshood, had taken her into somewhere similar, after the noise of the traffic all round the battered little Honda had become too much for her fragile nerves.
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