‘I want to ask you something. How did you know where I was?’
‘Ah well – you always keep a rack of keys above your desk in the gallery. I knew you were looking after Lily’s keys. I saw her key had gone.’
‘Simple.’
‘Yes. I don’t suppose I was the only one.’
‘When you know the answer.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Not everyone knows where I keep my keys. Or has a chance to see them.’
‘Plenty do in the gallery. Besides …’ She hesitated.
‘Well?’
‘You wrote to Dougie – sent him something.’
‘My work on the catalogue.’
‘I saw the envelope, guessed from the postmark. You aren’t very good at hiding, love.’ Cassie asked anxiously, ‘Are you all right? Has anything happened? Shall I come round?’
‘No, nothing. See you tomorrow.’ Edwina put the receiver down on a still protesting Cassie.
No, nothing was wrong. Only that someone close enough to me to read my habits and see my mail has been in my home.
‘I excuse you, Cassie,’ she said aloud. ‘And you, Alice. You are my friends; I have to believe in you. But otherwise, nobody.’
Someone is after me, someone who knows me well, perhaps very well. A friend, a lover, an ex-lover, because there had been some. But whose face fitted?
‘There is one thing that comforts me: there cannot be any real connection between the deaths of Luke and Pickles Dover. It must be coincidence.’
Within a few days the link between the death of Luke and the murder of Miss Dover had become established.
On that day Ginger Drury became fully conscious and able to talk. She wanted to talk.
Her eyes opened, and she muttered something. The nurse bent over her. Ginger had been stirring, opening her eyes and muttering at intervals all day. They were anxious to establish how lucid she was; from the X-rays they expected brain damage.
But Ginger’s eyes, although bloodshot and bruised, were focused on the nurse.
She can see me anyway, the nurse decided. She was a little creature with auburn hair who might have merited Ginger’s nickname herself.
‘You don’t mind, dear, do you?’ continued Ginger.
‘No, of course not.’
The woman police officer sitting on a chair in a corner of the cubicle stirred. She too had an interest.
‘I need to talk.’
The policewoman came nearer the bed but Ginger took no notice. Only the nurse seemed within her range of vision – or, perhaps, caring.
‘I’ve been thinking … Hold my hand, will you?’ The little nurse did so; she had been on special duty with Miss Drury for some days now and had come to like her patient who remained as polite and co-operative as was possible while being exceedingly ill. ‘There is something I want to tell you.’
The policewoman rustled her notebook; the nurse gave her a warning glance.
‘I’ve forgotten for the moment.’ Ginger Drury closed her eyes. ‘I’ve been thinking about it. I shall remember in a moment.’
The nurse waited a while, then she turned to the other woman. ‘She’s gone again.… You’ll have to wait.’
With a small resigned sigh, hardly audible, the policewoman went back to her corner.
They returned to this scenario every so often over the next few days. Of the actors, only the patient remained the same, the others came and went as duty times changed. Finally, the original pair at the first wakening were reunited.
‘She does mean it?’ murmured the policewoman.
‘Oh yes. But don’t count on anything.’
‘As if I would,’ muttered the policewoman as they took up their usual appointed places.
When Ginger opened her eyes this time, she smiled. ‘ Have I been asleep long?’
‘Some time,’ agreed the nurse kindly.
‘But I’ve remembered what I wanted to say … I’ve been thinking about it all the time …’ Her eyelids fluttered.
‘Don’t go off again, dear.’ The nurse put a hand softly on her patient’s wrist. ‘Who am I? Do you know who I am?’
This was a question that Ginger had hitherto been unwilling or unable to answer. Today was different.
‘Nurse,’ she said. A nurse. Must be. Don’t know your name.’
‘Good girl.’
‘Old lady,’ corrected Ginger with a faint smile.
‘You are better.’
‘I could do with a drink.’
‘I’ll get you one.’
A faint squeak of protest came from the policewoman’s corner. She wanted talking first. But the nurse had been well trained; she got not only a drink
but the doctor.
The doctor examined Miss Drury and afterwards said that a few
minutes’ conversation could be allowed.
There was something faintly ridiculous about this permission as
Ginger had been talking all the time.
As the policewoman struggled to keep up with the flow, some
of it repetitive, she wished vainly now that Ginger had waited for
the arrival of her senior officer.
She got one word clear, though, because it came out often, and
that was Black.
Blackmail. Or black-coated?
Ginger, who was struggling gamely, sometimes got the words
confused.
The police put in quite a lot of time, listening to Ginger, because what she had to say came only in snatches. They had questions to ask as well, for which opportunities had to be sought. It all needed patience. They used only one questioner because, as they soon discovered, Ginger did not like, nor the medical staff welcome, a constant flow of new faces. So stamina was required as well.
Alpha Morris had both qualities and to spare; she had come back into the Force after raising her own family where bringing up two sons and a daughter had taught her to go without sleep and still be alert. Tolerant and gentle, she was also patient and persistent. Alpha was well-known to the hospital staff even before the days with Ginger began.
‘So you were on the stairs when you were struck? And from behind?’
But about this Ginger was not sure, sometimes she thought one thing and sometimes another. This was understandable, the doctors said, because more than one blow had been struck and the first blow of all had probably been delivered from the front. Then as she fell she had been struck at the base of the skull.… This was the blow that alarmed them: a miracle she had not died on the spot.
‘So you saw someone?’ Alpha pursued gently.
Ginger assented to this and added a murmur of her own.
‘Black was he? A black man?’
Ginger corrected this.
‘Blackish? What does this mean, dear?’
Another low murmur, Ginger gripped Alpha’s hand tight.
‘Black-dressed? Wearing black clothes?’
‘All dressed up and nowhere to go,’ said Ginger clearly.
Alpha sighed. ‘ Here we go again.’
Miss Drury had a way of drifting off into nonsense talk before
losing her grip altogether and going silent. Whether she was asleep
or unconscious when she was silent Alpha had not established, but
she thought neither. Ginger was just trying to get the words sorted
out, that was her belief; she had real speech problems.
She was nearly always worth listening to, though; the essential
sharpness and chirpiness of Ginger came through even these short
bursts. She had seen something that she meant to get across.
‘Blackness,’ she said clearly the next time she felt like having a
conversation.
‘Yes, I got that, dear,’ said Alpha.
The black bit she had certainly got down in her notes, whatever
Miss Drury meant by it. Black, blackness and variants of it kept
being tried out.
be edited out of it by Alpha Morris who was convinced that this
was not what her friend (Ginger counted as a friend by now)
meant. But the blackmailer crept back in; he was Ginger’s King
Charles’s head and every so often she would have him in.
So conscientiously Alpha went back and inserted the blackmailer
back into her notes.
There he was encountered by her superior officer who had sources
of information she was not privy to. He was investigating the death
of Miss Dover with his usual thoroughness.
He found himself believing in both the black figure and the
blackmailer, although he had reason to believe they were not the
same man.
He had a question he needed to put to Ginger himself if she could answer it. By this time she was somewhat steadier in her witness. There was even a faint suggestion that she was beginning to enjoy the court around her.
‘Are you there, love?’ he asked.
Ginger heard that and was able to answer with great clarity that she was not his love. The spontaneous cry of pleasure with which the nurse greeted this did not quite please the inspector, even though he knew that it was happiness at Ginger’s returning speech that was being expressed and no criticism of him.
‘I shouldn’t have said that,’ he decided. ‘She’s younger than I thought and a good-looking woman beneath all those bruises and swellings.’ Ginger had two swollen yellow-and-blue rings round her eyes where most of the blood had congregated, but was now ebbing away.
‘Sorry. Here I am, let’s start again.’ He let a pause take place, he knew you had to take things slowly. ‘Now, there was someone on the stairs; we won’t go into the question of colour, I think I’ve got it clear … And, of course, it was dark on the stairs—’ Like Canon Linker he had caught the essential darkness of the scene. Picked it up somehow and felt it creeping into his own mind. It really had been a rotten business, that attack on the two women on the stairs of their own home. ‘You were struck on the head and fell.’ She had fallen down the stairs and into a corner where the staircase twisted. Part of her injuries had been due to this fall. Deep trauma, the surgeons called it. ‘Now, although your consciousness came and went and you felt unable to move, you did take in certain things … Your assailant stayed on the stairs …?’
It seemed to be what Ginger was saying, and was, anyway, confirmed by forensic evidence. The attacker had crouched on the stairs waiting for Pickles. It looked as though Pickles was the real victim. Ginger had just got in the way. Perhaps she had even been attacked by mistake. There was an indication of this in the way she had been attacked: there were bruises on her neck where it looked as if the murderer had started to strangle her and then thought better of it when he saw her face.
Little by little he drew all this out of Ginger. ‘And did you know this person who attacked you? Recognise him in any way?’
Ginger was flagging by now, it had been a long session for her, even though her physical resources had been carefully monitored by the nurse. Alpha too, still sitting there, knew the signs of fatigue.
‘All dressed up and nowhere to go,’ said Ginger decisively. She closed her eyes.
But the inspector wasn’t having this; he had superiors on his tail and thought he detected more reserves of energy in Ginger than Alpha (he could see her fussing) allowed.
‘Did you know your attacker?’
‘Not known … Saw.’ Ginger started to talk.
This was what Ginger had wished to confess: the killer had been a customer. One of those customers of whom Ginger did not approve because they came with the wrong motives. Not looking for health but stimulants. This man had wanted an aphrodisiac and Pickles had supplied a potent preparation of cantharides procured (never say how) from Hong Kong. Taken in small doses, it was a diuretic; taken in larger doses, it might be sexually helpful but it was certainly poisonous.
The inspector took this in with some relish; he was not concerned with the death of Luke Tory but he knew what had killed him: cantharides.
He gave Ginger’s hand a little pat. ‘Just a bit more. Important, Miss Drury, or I wouldn’t bother you.’
Ginger opened her eyes as widely as she could manage to show willing.
‘Did you eat anything on the stairs?’
‘What I want to tell you,’ said Ginger as clearly as she could, which was not so very clear, ‘is that the black figure ate a cake. Iced. It was not me.’
‘That’s it,’ said the inspector. ‘Imagine you seeing that. Eat he did. Killed Miss Dover and then ate an iced bun.’
On her way home on the day of her murder, Pickles had bought four hard iced buns. The icing was thick, rich and firm, a speciality of the baker, and one of which Ginger was particularly fond. They had been a peace-offering from the errant Pickles.
The buns had spilled out of the bag on to the stairs as she fell. After killing Pickles, the killer had sat on the stairs eating his way through the buns.
Yes, said the medical experts when consulted, a stress reaction: the body would be crying out for sugar. He probably couldn’t stop himself.
Pickles had bought four buns. Two had been eaten, a third, half-eaten, had been left behind, and the fourth had been untouched.
In the icing were the clearly defined marks of the killer’s teeth: he had a rather individual bite with separated front teeth. Teeth prints can be as individual as fingerprints.
In another case, another killing, but across London, there had been a piece of cake with teeth marks on it. At Lily’s wedding reception where Luke Tory had downed his dose of poison, someone had left a piece of wedding cake in Cassie’s kitchen with the teeth marks clearly visible. This piece of cake had been collected and preserved by the police team when it went over Cassie’s premises. It hadn’t looked important, but you could never tell, so it had been duly placed in a plastic bag and the teeth marks noted and measured. All that could be done with those teeth marks had been done.
There was one last question that the inspector got in before Miss Drury fell into a natural sleep.
‘Did you know the identity of your attacker?’
‘Not me. No. But I think Pickles did.’
This answer was, in some short time, passed on to the teams investigating the death of Luke Tory. It confirmed what the teeth marks were telling them.
In spite of the conclusion Edwina had come to, the two deaths were now firmly linked together. Not two cases but one, not two murderers but only one.
Chapter Ten
Between the murderer and his victim there has, at some point, to be a common fantasy land through which they walk. It is when their paths cross that murder can take place. Luke Tory had had a fantasy that he could enter into other people’s lives, pilfering their secrets and taking money for keeping them; he used the money to surround himself with the kind of possessions he liked, beautiful, desirable objects. He was running into trouble with his blackmailing of the policeman Edward Miller (because Miller was going to tell in the end) when his path crossed that of his murderer. The murderer’s fantasy was also one of entering other people’s lives; in this case not for profit but to wound and control. It was because the murderer’s fantasy had a stronger hold that it ended with a killing. Luke’s fantasy that he could extract money from the killer for not exposing the acts (which Luke had discovered) had been countered by the killer’s stronger need to get on with what he was doing. His dream world was the more active and the more hostile: he killed to keep it going.
The murderer’s fantasy had to be like this, because it was a creative dream, working towards a definite end.
Pickles’ fantasy was at once more innocent and more dangerous. If she had not been killed now, she would have been damaged badly at some other time. She was operating on the margin of too many disturbed persons’ dream worlds. She was probably des
tined to die violently and might easily have taken Ginger with her. Underneath, Ginger had always been aware of this chance.
Pickles’ fantasy was that she was in charge, could hand out benefits and punishments as she thought fit. In short, that she could use the rules of life as suited her: she was the judge and, just before her death, had given notice that she meant to hand out a judgement of guilty. The murderer also thought you could use the rules as suited you, was also determined to be in charge, and was nastier and quicker about it than was Pickles. In other words, they were a threat to each other.
Edwina crossed paths with the murderer because she was a love object and the murderer was in love; magnificently, religiously, and more than somewhat madly, in love.
The possible identification of the murderer of Luke Tory with the killer of Miss Dover was not known to Alice or Cassie or Edwina. Canon Linker and Bee were equally in the dark. But everyone was questioned about the piece of cake and the news about the half-eaten iced bun soon spread among those most interested, in the form of a half-believed rumour.
It had a strange effect on the three women. Almost with a click there was a circuit going between them again. The telephone lines were kept busy.
A telephone call to Edwina was preceded by a short one between Alice and Cassie.
‘We’ve got to tell her.’
‘Yes.’ Alice was thoughtful about it. ‘I don’t want to.’ Her voice dropped away as it always did when she was doubtful; Cassie could hardly hear it. ‘Alice going Mouse’ was what she called it.
‘Oh come on.’
‘I’m thinking.’
‘You told me, remember?’
‘Only because you knew.’ Alice could not keep the note of surprised indignation out of her voice, it still rankled.
‘You’d been sending out signals for quite a time,’ said Cassie. ‘ I could read them.’
‘Perhaps Edwina could too, then.’ The thought appalled Alice. Edwina represented standards and a way of life that she respected without aspiring to. She knew that beside Edwina she was shoddy stuff, but just knowing Edwina had raised her quality. One of her strongest reasons for paying Luke to keep quiet was so that Edwina would not know what she had done.
Death in the Garden Page 15