Murder Strikes Pink

by Josephine Pullein-Thompson

  ‘Yes, we know about that,’ said Flecker, ‘but luckily for Miss Scott she wasn’t at the show on Saturday, so we don’t have to delve quite so deeply into her affairs.’

  ‘She was at the show on Saturday,’ Betty Pratt sounded venomous. ‘She was wearing dark glasses and a navy blue dress, but I spotted her in the crowd. She was watching T.T.’s horses, and smiling all over her face each time young Billy Brown hit a fence.’

  ‘Well, I told you that I didn’t take to her,’ said Browning as the car lurched down Brake Lane.

  ‘Mmm?’ asked Flecker absentmindedly. ‘Oh, you mean Miss Scott. Yes, well we can’t take her to task now, she’ll be at the funeral.’ He shuffled through his envelopes. ‘I really don’t see that the Browns can have come prepared to repay any sarcastic remarks with hydrocyanic acid.’

  ‘No more do I. Who says they did?’ asked Browning.

  ‘No one; I’m trying to save the ratepayers’ petrol by convincing myself that we needn’t pay the Browns a visit at this stage anyhow. Oh come on, we’ll go to Down End Farm and have a poke round.’

  ‘One other thing,’ said Browning as he carefully negotiated the ruts and potholes of Brake Lane. ‘We don’t seem to have your mackintosh.’ Flecker turned and looked guiltily at the back seat. ‘No,’ he admitted, ‘we haven’t, I must have left it at the Chesterfields’; never mind, we can collect it tomorrow.’

  ‘And suppose there’s another downpour like the one we had this morning?’ asked Browning reproachfully.

  ‘Oh well,’ answered Flecker, losing interest, ‘I shall just have to get wet.’

  At Down End Farm Browning, having been briefed to look for any brewing apparatus or suspicious bottles, departed on a systematic search of the piggeries and chicken houses, while Flecker wandered through the deserted stables and the tack-denuded saddle-room. He found nothing but half-empty bottles of horse remedies which smelt very much as he expected horse remedies to smell, and then collecting a broom and shovel he went across to the house. He stood looking at it, wondering whether anxiety over a dwindling bank balance and growing unhappiness were all that had gone on there; or whether in that little red box of a house, the small element of free choice which is allowed us in life had been snatched at and used for impulsive evil or perhaps for a more sinister and premeditated plan. He sighed and made for the back door, reminding himself that owing to bonfires and compost heaps, country dustbins were generally less repulsive than town ones.

  The Keswick dustbin was only half full. Flecker tipped the contents out and found among the eggshells and empty spaghetti tins — evidence of Marion’s frugal living — a large metal object wrapped in newspaper.

  ‘What have you got there?’ asked Browning, joining him.

  ‘Some sort of saucepan,’ answered Flecker as a large double boiler emerged from the newspaper. The two men stood looking at it doubtfully. Flecker removed one of the small brown grains which adhered to the inside of the pot.

  ‘Linseed,’ Browning told him. ‘You cook it up and feed it to horses; it makes their coats shine.’

  ‘Well, let’s see if it leaks,’ said Flecker, advancing on the water-butt which was brimming with water after the rain. He filled both halves of the double boiler and held them out one in either hand. Browning bent down and inspected them carefully. ‘Not a drop,’ he said, when a couple of minutes had passed. ‘Now what did she throw that away for?’

  Flecker tipped out the water, reunited the two halves and handed the pot to Browning. ‘Stick it in the car, please,’ he said and turned back to the scattered contents of the dustbin. He was just shovelling in the last shovelful of garbage when Browning reappeared round the corner of the house, coughed warningly and announced, ‘Here’s Mr. Keswick, sir.’

  Laurence Keswick was wearing a dark suit and black tie and he carried a suitcase. His long face was cold and hard with anger. He put the suitcase down beside the dustbin.

  ‘I thought the Benign Father Figure or the Avuncular Attitude or whatever it was, was too good to be true,’ he said disagreeably. ‘I might have realised that all the concern about my wife was just a faked-up job to get the place empty so that you could have a good snoop round. “Poor Mrs. Keswick on the verge of a breakdown”,’ he mocked bitterly.

  Flecker replaced the dustbin lid in silence. Keswick’s remarks had angered him, but he recognized that the man was in a towering rage.

  ‘Anyway don’t you need a search warrant for this sort of thing?’ asked Keswick, pointing at the dustbin.

  ‘I can get a search warrant easily enough,’ answered Flecker, ‘but I’d still come and look in your dustbin, which is what you’re really objecting to.’ He pushed ineffectually at his hair. ‘We can’t get away from the fact that Miss Thistleton was murdered. It’s my job to find the murderer and if that entails looking in dustbins I’ve got to do it. What’s the point of my worrying Mrs. Keswick with it?’

  ‘And why should my wife be worried because you look in our dustbin?’ demanded Keswick aggressively.

  ‘I don’t know,’ answered Flecker, ‘except that she very obviously is worried by the whole case.’

  Keswick was still slightly nonplussed by this remark when Flecker asked, ‘When was the dustbin last emptied?’

  Keswick thought. ‘Monday,’ he answered and then added with a schoolboy sneer, ‘So you see you’re too late. All those great bottles of prussic acid are already on the rural district rubbish dump.’

  Flecker produced an envelope and made a note. ‘Are you going to stay here?’ he asked in equable tones.

  ‘Yes, subject to police approval, of course,’ Keswick answered sarcastically.

  ‘You’ll find the electricity turned off at the main switch beside the meter, sir,’ Browning told him. ‘When Mrs. Keswick left I thought it best to be on the safe side.’

  ‘And took a quick look round the larder for prussic acid at the same time, I suppose,’ observed Keswick scathingly. ‘Another Judas-kiss.’

  Flecker looked at him thoughtfully. ‘Well, sir, we won’t keep you,’ he said in his most formal police tones. Browning took up the broom and shovel as Keswick, without another word, let himself into the house.

  ‘Whew! He was in a temper and no mistake,’ observed Browning as they climbed into the car.

  ‘Did he see the cooking apparatus?’ asked Flecker.

  ‘No, I’d just put it away in the car when he drove up. Mind you, he wasn’t in a very good humour from the first; you could see it wasn’t going to take much to set him off.’

  ‘Well, if he didn’t see our cooking pot I don’t think there’s any need to rush into action,’ Flecker decided thoughtfully. ‘Back to Hamberley. We’ll go through the gestures of using our office.’

  ‘Just right for a nice cup of tea,’ observed Browning cheerfully.

  Flecker arranged the double boiler in the ‘In’ tray, his bundle of envelopes in the ‘Out’. ‘Not much to show for two days’ work,’ he observed, seating himself at the desk and picking up the telephone to ask if Superintendent Jackson could spare him a few minutes. Jackson could, and shaking off Browning, who wanted him to drink his tea first, Flecker set off through the labyrinthine passages. Jackson was surprised by his request for a good veterinary surgeon who specialized in horses.

  ‘The local firm has a very good name,’ he said, pulling his nose gently. ‘Mr. Frogmorton himself deals with horses, I believe, at any rate he was down as honorary veterinary surgeon at the Upshott Show.’

  ‘We’ll try him then,’ decided Flecker. ‘It’s really a botanical query, but I think he’s more likely to provide an off the cuff answer than our lab boys.’

  Jackson pushed the telephone across the desk. ‘Help yourself,’ he said, and with a glance at a list of numbers, ‘Hamberley 215.’

  Frogmorton was eventually located at home. He had a slow, portly voice and he listened to Flecker’s question, whether flax was one of the many cyanogenetic plants and, if so, whether it was possible to release hydroc
yanic acid from its fruit — linseed — in silence.

  ‘Funny you should ask that,’ he replied. ‘We had a case a few months ago — last season — well, in January, to be exact. A client of ours lost a horse through feeding badly prepared linseed. Yes, it contains cyanogenetic glycoside and a liberating enzyme which under certain conditions becomes active and releases hydrocyanic acid. The normal procedure when preparing linseed for a mash is to boil it for at least ten minutes, this destroys the releasing enzyme. This client of ours put the linseed on to cook, but apparently the fire must have gone out underneath it, without anyone realizing it, and the stuff just soaked in warm water. Next day they fed the pony a substantial dose of prussic acid and that was that.’

  ‘That’s most enlightening,’ said Flecker. ‘If it’s not professionally unethical can you tell me the client’s name?’

  ‘Yes, it was a woman called Pratt. Keeps a stable of jumping ponies which her daughters ride. They’re a pretty shiftless lot, but this wasn’t altogether their fault. It’s not generally known that, given certain circumstances, linseed can become poisonous.’

  ‘You mean that horse people generally don’t know about it?’ asked Flecker.

  ‘A lot of them don’t. But the ones round here do now; I’ve seen to that. I didn’t want it happening again.’

  ‘You’ve explained it to all the horse owners in the neighbourhood as you have to me?’ asked Flecker.

  ‘Yes, that’s about it.’

  ‘To the Keswicks and the Chesterfields and Miss Scott?’

  ‘Yes, they’re all clients of ours. I don’t think we’ve missed out any of the locals. Most of’em have probably been told two or three times as I told my staff to make a point of mentioning it too.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  FLECKER had spent most of Thursday evening sitting in a secluded corner of the lounge bar with a pint of beer and a volume of Theodora Thistleton’s scrapbook. Browning, having looked briefly through the endless photographs of horses jumping, horses held by T.T. — tall, gaunt and unsmiling — bored horses waiting, while Christina Scott leaned down to take a large cup from some dignitary, and groups of prize-winning horses smugly conscious of their rosettes, had grown tired of his Chief s silent preoccupation and had disappeared upstairs to watch television. Now, eating his way through a substantial breakfast, he complained bitterly of the inadequacies and inaccuracies of a crime film. Flecker, never at his best in the morning, replied vaguely until Browning, swallowing his last mouthful of tea, inquired what the plans for the day entailed.

  ‘We’re going to act in accordance with the popular police image,’ Flecker answered. ‘Tearing ourselves from our usual occupations of hounding motorists and kicking nuclear disarmers we’re going to bully defenceless women; Mrs. Keswick about the double boiler and Miss Scott about her unconfessed visit to the Upshott Show.’

  ‘Ah well, they’ve asked for it; they should have told the truth in the first place,’ said Browning.

  ‘“Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled”,’ observed Flecker gloomily. ‘Sometimes I wish I’d chosen a different profession.’

  ‘Well, you’re not the only one,’ Browning announced cheerfully as he got to his feet. ‘Still we have our good times —’

  At Frailford Farm house, Hugh Chesterfield opened the front door and his already sullen face took on an expression of mingled apprehension and dislike when he saw who the callers were. Hearing that they wished to see Marion Keswick he showed them into the sitting-room, and, eyeing doubtfully the parcel which Browning carried, he said he would fetch her. Browning freed the double boiler from its brown paper and placed it on a table. Flecker wandered round the room looking at the books, mostly complete sets of the classics or Book Society choices. When Marion came in she was wearing her tussore-coloured slacks and an old shirt. She had blue paint on her hands and a smudge of it across her face. Flecker, watching her entrance from the far end of the room, felt certain that she had seen and recognized the double boiler, but she ignored its presence and began to talk with nervous rapidity. ‘I decided that it was no use my sitting about being a blot so I’ve been helping Sarah with her jumps — painting the dragon’s teeth.’ She held up her hands. ‘They say professional house painters never spill a drop on themselves so you can see how much of an amateur I am.’

  Flecker came across to the table. He pointed to the double boiler. ‘We found this in your dustbin; why did you throw it away?’

  Marion looked at him defiantly. ‘It leaks,’ she answered.

  ‘Oddly enough it doesn’t,’ he told her. ‘We’ve tested it. It doesn’t leak at all.’

  ‘I’m sure it does. It leaked all over the cooker and you know what it is with electricity. If you get the works wet the fuse blows and since the electricity people always put the fuse boxes in such inaccessible places — ours can only be reached by a left-handed giant — I didn’t want that to happen so I slung the pot out. Anyway with no horses there wasn’t much point in keeping it,’ she added on second thoughts.

  ‘Did you know that hydrocyanic or prussic acid could be released from linseed?’ Flecker asked her.

  ‘No.’ Marion was white-faced but still defiant.

  ‘Mr. Frogmorton is sure that he told you, but perhaps it was only your husband?’

  ‘I’m equally sure that he didn’t tell either of us,’ answered Marion firmly.

  ‘If you didn’t know about the lethal potentialities of linseed why did you throw the double boiler away?’ asked Flecker.

  ‘Because it leaked,’ she answered with desperate obstinacy.

  ‘It does not leak.’ Flecker’s voice was coldly patient. ‘Do you want me to give you a demonstration of its watertightness? I will if you like. Sergeant Browning and I filled both halves with water and neither of them leaked.’

  ‘That’s right, madam,’ Browning added his testimony. ‘We’ve examined them both most carefully.’

  ‘Well, then, it must have boiled over on the cooker and that must have given me the impression that it leaked,’ said Marion.

  Flecker tugged at his hair in an exasperated gesture. ‘I wish you’d try to help, Mrs. Keswick,’ he said and then, when Marion turned her face away from him and remained obstinately silent, he added, ‘Well, I’m no third degree merchant; if you won’t help I shall have to go and find someone who will.’ He turned for the door and then asked over his shoulder, ‘Did you know that Miss Scott was at the show on Saturday?’

  ‘Christina at the show? But she told Charity —’ Marion paused, ‘I expect I’ve got it all wrong.’

  ‘No, I don’t think you have.’ Flecker grinned at her suddenly. ‘I’m offering consolation; I didn’t want you to think you were the only one telling the police whopping great lies.’

  Charity Chesterfield was waiting in the hall, her broad, plain, cheerful face screwed into unaccustomed lines of apprehension and dismay. ‘I couldn’t help overhearing you. The door was open. But it couldn’t be Marion, I’m sure it couldn’t be. Somebody must be doing these things to make you suspect her.’ The words came out disjointedly as though her mind was elsewhere.

  ‘Did Mr. Frogmorton tell you about the lethal potentialities of linseed?’ asked Flecker.

  ‘Yes, but I didn’t connect it with Theodora’s death; I suppose because of the almonds that were in Marion’s mackintosh.’

  ‘Yes, quite,’ said Flecker, opening the front door. ‘Well, goodbye.’ Browning, who was trying to return the double boiler to its wrappings, hurried after him.

  ‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ he said when he had stowed the boiler into the back of the car and taken the driving seat, ‘I don’t like the look of this at all. She’s in it up to the neck and yet you can’t exactly blame her; she’s only trying to keep her husband and that’s natural in a woman after all.’

  ‘Two wrongs don’t make a right,’ observed Flecker primly as he scuffled among his envelopes. ‘Or, in other words, you can’t hope to preserve the sanctity of marriage by the mor
tal sin of murder. Come on, let’s see what Miss Scott has to say for herself,’ he added, stuffing the envelopes into a pocket.

  They found Christina. Dressed in jeans, jodhpur boots, a short-sleeved shirt and with a scarf tied over her head, she was standing in her small, neat stable-yard watching her girl groom direct a jet of cold water from a hose-pipe down the foreleg of a very resigned-looking horse.

  ‘What have you got there,’ asked Browning, ‘a bit of a sprain?’

  ‘No, he’s throwing a splint; it’s quite maddening. We’ve had one thing after another with him the whole season. I had expected to win the Foxhunter at Upshott with him and then this cropped up.’

  ‘And Miss Elizabeth Pratt triumphed instead,’ observed Flecker.

  ‘Yes. And she won again next time out at Grinley,’ said Christina. ‘I don’t know where Mrs. Pratt picked up that little horse, but for the sort of price she generally pays she got hold of a really good one. Anything with a pop in it costs at least three hundred pounds and I wouldn’t have thought you’d find a good novice like that under six or seven hundred. And you’re not going to tell me that the Pratts have a third of that in the bank; she can’t have — she owes money all over the place. Of course I daresay his legs are a bit suspect; I hear that they had to withdraw him from the Grade C on the Saturday at Upshott, but it can’t have been much for he was as right as rain at Grinley.’

  ‘A mystery in fact,’ said Flecker, producing his envelopes and making a note. ‘I really came to ask you where you were on Saturday, Miss Scott?’

  ‘Here,’ answered Christina without hesitation. ‘I spent the day at home.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s tiresome. Can you think of anyone who called or telephoned or exchanged information on the weather over the gate?’

  ‘No, I don’t remember anyone coming.’