Deadly Stuff

by Joyce Cato

  Jenny nodded. ‘OK. Like I said, Maurice was clever. He needed a murder weapon, and that was the first obstacle to overcome. Maurice himself was middle-aged and slightly overweight and out of shape. Simon Jenks, in contrast, was younger and fitter. So, the direct approach was no good – the old blunt instrument, or knife, or what-have-you. The chances of Simon being able to defend himself and overcome any attacker made that far too risky. So Maurice must have looked around for a far simpler and safer method, and found an obvious solution in his mother’s heart medication. A quick trawl on the internet would tell him how much was needed to be fatal, and a large enough dose would make it quick acting, and all without too much mess. So, poison it was.’

  ‘That makes sense,’ Trevor conceded. ‘But just how did he expect to make Simon Jenks drink it?’

  ‘Ah, well, again, he had to be clever,’ Jenny agreed. ‘He knew what Jenks wanted – which was to have Laura Raines free to marry himself, thus securing his own future, and he intended to play on that. That’s why he stole his wife’s mobile phone just before leaving for the conference. It wouldn’t have been hard for a man like Raines, used to arranging clandestine love affairs himself, to find out about their plans to spend the week in Hayling Island. If he himself was going away on a conference, they were bound to want to spend the time together themselves anyway. So this presented him with the perfect opportunity to set up both his own alibi and separate the two of them long enough for the murder to take place. I don’t know how, exactly, he came to know that they’d be travelling down separately, but he must have done, because he sent the text to Jenks using his wife’s mobile, asking him to detour to the college.’

  Trevor thought about that for a moment, and then nodded. ‘OK. As I said before, Jenks would have recognized the number as being hers,’ he agreed. ‘Even if Laura had told him that she’d lost her usual phone and had given him the number of her new pay-as-you-go, he might simply have assumed that she’d found it again.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘But hang on,’ Trevor said. ‘Surely he must have known that Maurice was at a conference in Oxford? Getting a text from her asking him to go to a college there – surely alarm bells would have rung?’

  Jenny smiled. ‘Maybe. Or maybe he didn’t know where the conference was. I don’t suppose they made a habit of talking about her husband when they were alone together! You’ll have to ask him,’ Jenny said. ‘It could be that he thought she was being spontaneous. Or maybe he did know, and thought that she’d arranged for them all to meet, and discuss a divorce. That, I think, was certainly what Maurice would have had him believe.’

  ‘Sorry, you’re losing me again,’ Peter Trent complained.

  ‘Well, let’s go back to being Maurice then,’ Jenny said patiently. ‘You’ve got your victim away from your home territory, and you’ve set up your alibi. You’ve just lured your victim to you, and now you need to get him to drink a poisoned cup of coffee. How do you do that, except by either putting the man at ease – which may not be easy under the circumstances – or by putting him off his guard by giving him the one thing that he so desperately wants.’

  Jenny smoothed her skirt down with her fingers and frowned thoughtfully. ‘Of course, a lot of this is pure guesswork on my part, but I think Maurice intended to play it very cleverly indeed. I think he intended to greet his wife’s lover with every sign of cordiality and sophistication. Play the man of the world. Dole out the old “let’s be civilized about this” card. He’d have explained that he knew about their affair, and that divorce was probably the best way out, and that he wasn’t going to make a fuss, and so on and so on. Then casually pour out two cups of coffee and hand one over, and glance at his watch and say how he had to get along to a lecture or something, but perhaps he could pass along his thoughts to Laura when he saw her, and all that; they’d have to get together and iron out the details. Jenks, who’d be only too relieved to find the embarrassing obstacle of the husband was being taken out of the picture in such an agreeable way, would be taken off guard. Why not have a friendly cup of coffee with the man – after all, he was in the middle of a busy college, in broad daylight, with an affable and reasonable-sounding man. Why would he suspect anything? He wasn’t to know that Maurice had arranged the time and place very carefully indeed so that they wouldn’t be disturbed.’

  ‘Ah! All that stuff about arranging a lunch for the stallholders,’ Peter Trent said, with a knowing nod. ‘Yes, everyone said how such generosity and thoughtfulness on his part was out of place.’

  ‘Yes, Vicki Voight and several of the others mentioned how unusual it was for him not to take the first lecture,’ Trevor agreed. ‘I see what you mean. He’d arranged for all the conference-goers to be elsewhere.’

  ‘The time he’d given Jenks to meet him was also carefully arranged so that most of the college staff would either be in the kitchens or cleaning rooms,’ Jenny pointed out. ‘As soon as I heard all that, I knew that Maurice Raines was the only one who could have made all the arrangements to pan out so that he had the half hour alone in hall between eleven-thirty and twelve.’

  ‘Because he was arranging that time in order to kill his rival,’ Trevor said, with something like awe. ‘The audacity of the man.’

  ‘Yes. Well, to a certain extent,’ Jenny agreed. ‘But in reality, he wasn’t running that much of a risk. Supposing someone had seen them together. What would they have seen? Two men, enjoying a cup of coffee. So what?’

  ‘Ok, but once Jenks collapsed after drinking said coffee, Maurice would be well and truly up the creek if someone had come across them,’ Trevor pointed out.

  ‘Ah, but that’s where the stuffed bear comes in,’ Jenny said, making the inspector grit his teeth in vexation.

  ‘There you go with the stuffed bear again,’ he snapped. ‘Just what in hell has the stuffed bear got to do with it?’

  Jenny blinked. ‘Well, the actual bear, not a lot, really, I suppose,’ she admitted candidly. ‘But the crate it came in, well, that’s another matter.’ She shook her head with a wry smile. ‘Suppose you saw Maurice Raines wheel in a large crate on a porter’s trolley at the beginning of that day, and saw him take out the stuffed bear as part of the his opening remarks. Then, a little later, saw the same Maurice Raines wheeling out the same crate on the same porter’s trolley and take it back to his van in the car-park. What would you think?’

  Trevor ran a weary hand over his face. ‘That he was just getting it out of the way again. Yes, of course. In reality, he’d be getting rid of the body. All along that’s been worrying me – how he intended to do that. After all, you can’t just walk through the college with a dead man on your shoulder, can you?’

  ‘Hardly,’ Jenny agreed softly. ‘So. You’re Maurice Raines, you’ve just successfully poisoned your wife’s lover, and now you need hide the evidence of that as fast as you can, but you’re also stuck with a body, in the middle of a large hall, where you could be discovered at any minute. What can you possibly do?’

  ‘You stuff the body as quick as winking into a handy crate, and Bob’s your uncle,’ Peter Trent agreed. ‘Not only do you minimize the risk of being caught with a dead man, it’s also a handy way of moving the corpse at the same time.’ He shook his head. ‘In a way, you can’t help but admire the man, can you?’

  ‘After that, all he needed to do was take the crate with the body in it to his van, and then, later that night probably, bury Simon Jenks’s body somewhere,’ Jenny sighed. ‘I expect he’d already done his homework and had a place all picked out. Oxfordshire is a large and rural county, after all. Plenty of woods and out of the way fields to choose from. It wouldn’t be beyond Maurice to find a good place to put the body where it wouldn’t be found.’

  ‘And hey presto,’ Trevor agreed heavily. ‘Exit one inconvenient rival. And if his wife, or the police, kicked up a fuss – yes, you were innocently elsewhere, with witnesses to prove it.’

  ‘It should have worked, put like that,’ Peter said. ‘Bu
t it didn’t, did it?’ He looked at the inspector, who was obviously thinking the same thing.

  ‘Jenks must have cottoned on to something not being right,’ Trevor said heavily. ‘Perhaps he got suspicious about the coffee. Laura Raines might have told him about Maurice’s preference for tea, and he wondered why he was drinking coffee instead. Or perhaps some of the crushed up pills floated on the top, or it smelt funny or … I dunno. Something must have alerted him anyway. An instinct, perhaps.’ The inspector got to his feet and began to pace. ‘It makes sense. It explains why the killing itself had all the hallmarks of an unpremeditated crime, whilst all the other clues pointed towards a carefully laid out plan. With the careful murder Maurice had planned collapsing, he was forced to act on the spur of the moment. Jenks must have challenged Raines about what he was playing at, and Raines wasn’t convincing enough in his denials. So Raines grabbed the fleshing tool in order to finish Jenks off that way, they grappled, and, like you said, Miss Starling,’ – Trevor looked at her with a nod of approval – ‘Maurice Raines, being the less fit and older of the two, came off worst.’

  ‘You could almost make out a case for self-defence on young Simon Jenks’s part,’ Peter Trent put in generously. ‘After all, the man had tried to murder him.’

  Jenny coughed gently. She really did hate to be a party-pooper, but really, she couldn’t let them go on getting excited like this.

  ‘I thought we’d already established that when Simon Jenks left the hall, he didn’t have a bloodstain on him,’ she pointed out. ‘So just how did he fight with Maurice Raines and stab him without getting evidence all over him?’

  The two policemen stared at her. It took a few seconds for it to sink in, and when it did, the inspector began to feel distinctly sick again. ‘Are you saying…’ Trevor Golder said faintly, then trailed off, unable to put it into words.

  Jenny Starling smiled sadly. ‘That Jenks isn’t the killer of Maurice Raines? Yes, I’m afraid so. The evidence only points one way, doesn’t it? Jenks followed what he thought were Laura Raines’s instructions to meet her in the hall of the college, but found instead a man’s dead body. He took one look and fled.’ Jenny sighed in sympathy. ‘His mind must have been a whirl of conflicting thoughts on that ride down to the south coast. On the one hand, it looked as if Laura had set him up for something; on the other hand, he wouldn’t really believe it. He must have known she was in love with him. And when he got to the hotel and told her what had happened, Laura must have realized from his description and the name of the college, that it was her husband who was dead, and believed that Simon had killed him. What a rough twenty-four hours those pair must have had of it – each suspecting the other, but each with their own reasons for not wanting to believe it. And now they’re both in the cells, wondering what’s happening.’

  ‘Forget about them!’ Trevor snapped with a total lack of sympathy. ‘Are you saying that knowing all this … knowing what Maurice planned to do, and about the poison, and the bloody stuffed bear, and all the rest of the shenanigans, we’re still no closing to knowing who actually killed Maurice?’

  ‘Oh no,’ Jenny said, genuinely shocked. ‘I’ve had an idea who must have killed Maurice for a day or so now, but,’ she added, luckily not noticing how the inspector’s hands clenched and unclenched into white-knuckled fists, ‘I had no idea until about half an hour ago, why he was killed.’

  Inspector Golder pushed to one side his fantasies of fastening his hands around her neck and giving it a good shake, and said sweetly, ‘And do you think you would be so kind as to share that with us too, Miss Starling?’

  Whereupon Jenny Starling beamed a bright and lovely smile on him, and did just that.

  The afternoon sun was just beginning to cool when the Greater Ribble Valley and Jessop Taxidermy Society began to pack their collective bags and start to leave Oxford. Well, all but one of them, anyway.

  Jenny was in the outer quadrangle, standing next to James Raye and thoroughly kissing him a fond goodbye. Eventually, she stepped back and gave a satisfied sigh.

  James smiled down at her. ‘I’ve left a present for you in your van. I hope you don’t mind.’

  ‘Of course I don’t,’ she said, stepping back as he opened the car door, and then bending down to kiss him again through the open window once he was settled behind the steering wheel. ‘See you in three weeks’ time.’

  He did up his seat belt and blew her a kiss before driving away.

  She was still waving to him when she saw Inspector Golder and Sergeant Trent pull up in the inspector’s car and park in a space a little further down. Both men climbed out and beckoned her over, then watched as she approached.

  She could tell from the satisfied look on the inspector’s face that things had gone well.

  ‘So she confessed?’ Jenny said, before either one could greet her.

  ‘Yes. Just as we hoped she would when confronted with it,’ Trevor said. ‘Although I’m still not sure how you came to the conclusion that Pippa Foxton was the killer.’

  Jenny shrugged modestly. ‘Well, really, when it came down to it, it was simple. Everyone else really did have a cast-iron alibi. Vicki couldn’t possibly have got out of that lecture room without being seen, and poor Art obviously didn’t climb out of his window or become invisible and get past his secretary. Once the married woman and her lover were out of the equation … well, that only left Ian and Pippa. Of the two of them, Ian couldn’t possibly have done it. He was demonstrating a stuffing technique at the time, and was being closely watched by his students for every moment.’

  ‘But we thought his alibi was Pippa’s too,’ Trevor said.

  ‘I know. That stumped me at first,’ Jenny agreed. ‘Your own inquiries put them together all morning. It wasn’t until I talked to Ian myself, and learned a bit more about the minutiae of that morning, that I realized what had actually happened. I have to say, he was very uncommunicative and suspicious of me at first, which is why I started talking about stuffed tigers to begin with,’ she grinned, ‘but once he was relaxed and talking freely, I slowly got around to getting him to describe that morning’s class in more detail. It quickly became obvious that his small number of students were all clustered around the table and utterly intent on what they were doing. None of them would have noticed when Pippa, getting bored with being ignored, slipped out.’

  ‘She was running a risk there though, wasn’t she?’ Peter Trent mused, and Jenny shot him a surprised look.

  ‘Well, not really. I mean, she didn’t leave the room intending to kill anyone, did she, so what did it matter, at the time, if anyone had noticed and commented on it?’ Jenny said flatly. ‘It was just sheer bad luck that she then ran into Maurice, on his own like that, in the hall.’

  Peter smacked his own forehead. ‘Of course. Sorry, I keep forgetting. It was a totally spur of the moment thing, wasn’t it? She didn’t make any plans at all.’

  Jenny smiled her forgiveness at him. ‘Did it go down as I thought?’ she asked eagerly. She’d not have been human if she hadn’t been curious to know just how accurate her prediction had been.

  It was Trevor Golder, now in a benevolent mood, who nodded. ‘It was almost exactly as you said, Miss Starling,’ he confirmed.

  A day had passed, and Pippa Foxton had been arrested, and her confession was down in black and white. The lawyers at the Crown Prosecution Service, not to mention his own bosses, were all looking on him favourably, so he was in a good mood, and willing to be magnanimous by filling her in.

  ‘She’d just left her boyfriend to his acolytes, and was feeling bored, as you thought,’ he confirmed, and was going back to her room when she spotted Maurice alone in the hall, and decided to have things out with him.’ Trevor explained. ‘She wasn’t to know, poor girl, just what a bad time she’d chosen for it.’

  Jenny heaved a massive sigh. ‘No. Maurice would have been all worked up, waiting for Jenks to arrive, and wouldn’t want to be bothered with Pippa just then.’ She paused del
icately. ‘I take it Pippa has confirmed what she wanted from him?’

  Again Trevor nodded. ‘That she thought that he was her natural father? Yes. You were right about that too.’

  Jenny sighed sadly. ‘As soon as Ian said that Pippa had grown up in Wither Sedgewick, it clicked. Someone had told me earlier that Maurice had grown up there as well, and that he had a reputation for getting the local young women into the family way.’

  ‘Pippa’s mother apparently got drunk on her ruby wedding, and told her that her dad wasn’t, well, her real dad,’ Peter Trent took over. ‘She started by tracking down Maurice Raines and getting close to him. We couldn’t tell, from speaking to her whether she was fascinated or repelled by him.’

  ‘No, I can imagine,’ Jenny said with a small shudder. ‘I suppose she cultivated Ian Glendower simply as a way to get an introduction to the society, and thus access to Maurice?’

  ‘She admitted as much. And said that, almost instantly, Raines started coming on to her,’ Trent confirmed, with a moue of distaste. ‘That carries some nasty psychological baggage whichever way you cut it, and I reckon the shrinks are going to use it as a basis for a plea of diminished responsibility.’

  Jenny sighed. ‘Well, who’s to say they’re not right? She always struck me as being rather unstable anyway.’

  ‘The way she tells it, she came upon Maurice in hall, and tried to talk to him about her mother,’ Trevor Golder put in.

  ‘She thought that in making the big dramatic statement that she was his long-lost daughter, it would be all hearts and flowers, or at any rate, have some sort of major impact on him,’ Trent added. ‘If you ask me, she watched too much daytime television. I think she saw herself as starring in her own soap opera, and expected Maurice to play the role of contrite father.’

  ‘But he didn’t?’ Jenny asked sadly.

  ‘No. Maurice only wanted to bundle her out of the way, saying that they’d talk about it later. Of course, we know why that was: he was desperate to get rid of her before Simon Jenks showed up, and he only had a little time to do it. By that time, he must have been well worked up.’