by Emily Organ
Everyone’s heads turned from side to side as they glanced between the Colonel and the waitress, each keen to spot a family resemblance.
“Thank you, Colonel,” said Churchill. “I appreciate that the information you have just shared is an enormous embarrassment to your family of landed gentry.”
“I have no wish to dwell on it any further,” said the colonel. “Please continue.”
“I wonder, Colonel Slingsby, whether you had any idea that the revolver which has been missing from your gunroom was found beneath a caravan at Cherrybrick Farm,” said Churchill.
“What?” The colonel gave a look of horror and indignation.
“What?” Inspector Mappin repeated.
“It may be another gun entirely,” continued Churchill. “But I’m assuming it’s the same one. There can’t be many Webley revolvers lying hidden about this village.”
“Where is it now?” asked the colonel.
“In the drawer of my desk for safekeeping. Inspector Mappin has the key to the drawer. You’ll no doubt wish to dust it for fingerprints, Inspector.”
Inspector Mappin gave an officious nod.
“But how did it get there?” asked the colonel.
“Perhaps your great-niece can tell you,” said Churchill.
He glared across the room at his great-niece. “Kitty?” he barked.
“I don’t know nothin’ about it!” she protested.
“Do you know anything about it, Colonel Slingsby?” asked Inspector Mappin. “Did you plant it there?”
“Plant it? Why would I want to do that?”
“What did you remove from Mr Harding’s cookshop, Colonel?” asked Churchill.
“Wh-what?” he replied, not sure who to look at during this unexpected inquisition. “Why are you firing all these questions at me all of a sudden?”
“While Mr Harding was under arrest, Miss Pemberley and I saw you remove something from his cookshop. Was it the gun?”
“The what? The gun? In the cookshop? No! Good grief, woman. No!”
“What was it, then?”
“My bag. My valise! Mr Harding had borrowed it to take some money to Mr Rumbold in. It wasn’t the full amount but he’d hoped it would go some way to paying off his debts. I was simply collecting the valise because I needed it so I could give Kitty her money.”
“And there was nothing in the bag when you retrieved it?”
“No, it was completely empty! A darned useful bag for carrying money, actually. That’s why I went to collect it. I could hardly ask Mr Harding for it, could I? He was in the cells.”
“Is the colonel the murderer, Mrs Churchill?” asked Mrs Thonnings.
“No. He almost certainly had someone do his bidding for him,” said Inspector Mappin. “His great-niece, I imagine. The gun was found on her family farm, after all. She did it.”
“I never done it!” Kitty shook her head. “No, I never! It weren’t nuffink to do wiv me! I didn’t even know ’em!”
“Ah, but your great-uncle did,” said Inspector Mappin, “and he gave you the instruction to murder them!”
“No, it ain’t true!”
“Codswallop!” spat the colonel.
“I’m afraid it is indeed codswallop, Inspector,” said Churchill. “The colonel and his great-niece are entirely innocent. The person you need to place in handcuffs today is Mrs Bramley.”
Chapter 49
Churchill had prepared herself for the incredulous snorts and derisory comments that inevitably followed her surprising revelation.
“The little old lady who runs this place?” laughed Chief Inspector Llewellyn-Dalrymple.
“Your laughter merely confirms why you never had any hope of solving this crime, Chief Inspector,” retorted Churchill.
All eyes were now on Mrs Bramley. She opened her mouth to speak, then thought better of it. Suddenly, her face turned red and she spun around to run out of the room. Mr Harding stuck his foot out and she tripped over it, falling to the floor.
“You’re under arrest, Mrs Bramley!” said Inspector Mappin, knocking into tables as he charged across the room to handcuff her. Churchill allowed him a generous amount of time to enjoy his proud moment.
“What are you doing, Mappin?” asked Llewellyn-Dalrymple. “There’s no evidence that this old lady has done anything wrong!”
“Mrs Churchill was right the last time she named the killer,” replied the inspector, “so I thought I’d better make the arrest before Mrs Bramley got away. We can release her again if Mrs Churchill is mistaken.”
“And complete all the paperwork that comes with a wrongful arrest?” scorned the chief inspector, his moustache bristling.
“They all ‘ad it comin’ to ‘em!” snarled Mrs Bramley as she tried to shrug off Inspector Mappin, her wrists handcuffed.
Llewellyn-Dalrymple raised an eyebrow at this. “By Jove,” he commented. “Perhaps Mrs Churchill really is onto something?”
“It was just a little idea I had,” she replied. “Shall I explain?”
“Yes, we all want to hear it!” said the colonel.
“Well, the answer to this lies with a man I’ve never met and who is sadly deceased,” said Churchill. “His name was Barney Bramley, and he was the dear husband of Mrs Bramley for forty years. She told me they never once exchanged a cross word.”
“Fiddlesticks!” said the chief inspector.
“Only it may not be; they were certainly very devoted to one another. I haven’t learned a great deal about Mr Bramley, but I do know that he loved Battenberg cake and dreamt of eating a carrot cake, which he had specifically grown carrots for. Sadly, that never happened because he never managed to grow carrots properly. He wasn’t even able to grow a marrow. Despite his lack of gardening success he loved the pastime so much that he applied to join the Compton Poppleford Horticultural Society. Not just once, but… how many times was it, Colonel Slingsby?”
He gave an awkward cough before answering. “Twenty-two.”
“Thank you, Colonel. That concurs with what I read in the minutes from the Compton Poppleford Horticultural Society meetings. Over a period of ten years, Mr Bramley applied to join the society twenty-two times, and each time he was refused.”
“It broke ’is ’eart!” Mrs Bramley cried out. “They told ’im ’e weren’t good enough! Again and again and again!”
“You see before you a woman scorned,” said Churchill, pointing at Mrs Bramley. “A woman who wanted nothing more than her husband’s happiness. In fact, the minutes of the meetings reveal that she tried to attend herself a number of times in order to plead her husband’s case. But what happened, Colonel?”
“I’m afraid the door was closed in her face.”
“That’s how they treated her,” said the detective sadly.
“Women aren’t allowed to join the horticultural society,” added the Colonel.
“How very welcoming of you,” said Churchill. “Only Mrs Bramley didn’t want to join herself; she was merely trying to help her husband.”
“Our members must demonstrate some degree of horticultural skill,” added the colonel.
“’E would of learnt it!” Mrs Bramley cried out. “They could’ve taught ’im!”
“However, none of this justifies the cold-blooded murder of three men, Mrs Bramley,” said Churchill. “It seems that after your husband’s death, you grew determined to exact your revenge on certain members of the horticultural society. You were happy to bide your time, watching and waiting for the perfect opportunity to arise.
“I think you lurked in the dark at those allotments and observed the argument between Mr Williams and Mr Rumbold. Now I don’t know where Mr Williams had placed the colonel’s revolver while he was arguing with Mr Rumbold—”
“In ‘is shed,” replied Mrs Bramley. “I saw ‘im put it in there.”
“I see. And my guess is that you crept in and purloined it while the men argued?”
“It was when Rumbold was leavin’. Tubby was followin�
� after ‘im hollerin’ somethin’ at ‘im. That’s when I got it.”
“And on his return you shot him?”
Mrs Bramley gave a shrug.
Churchill gave a sad sigh. “A few nights later you must have followed the drunken Mr Rumbold, Mr Downs and Mr Harris when they left the pub, clutching your frying pan in your hands. You probably hadn’t decided which of them you were aiming for; it would simply have to be the one who was left on his own. Unfortunately for Mr Rumbold, it was him. A few blows from the frying pan were probably enough to stun him, and after that you tied his arms and legs together and pushed him into the duck pond along with the aforementioned frying pan. As for the unfortunate Mr Williams, I don’t know exactly when you poured fungicide into his scrumpy, but I’m certain that you carried out the act and waited for him to slowly drink himself to death.
“As for the evidence, your fingerprints are no doubt on the revolver you hid under Grandpa Flatboot’s caravan, knowing that it would be discovered there before long and would naturally implicate the Flatboots. Your fingerprints are probably all over the bottles of fungicide and jars of scrumpy, too. What’s more, there are two frying pans hanging on your kitchen wall, but there are three hooks. One of those hooks is empty, which suggests to me that a frying pan is missing. And you also invented a witness.”
“What you talkin’ about?”
“The man who claimed to have seen the murderer leaving the scene after Mr Williams’s and Mr Rumbold’s deaths. The one you said was normal-looking, normal height and normal weight with a square chin, spectacles and brown hair. Apparently, he was a bit of a bore, with a penchant for cricket and egg sandwiches, though he never ate the crusts. That description matches no one in this village, Mrs Bramley. And it was odd that you seemed unable to remember his name. That was because he didn’t exist, wasn’t it? You only told us about him to throw us off the scent.”
“It ain’t true!”
“What’s his name, then?”
“Can’t remember. Somethin’ Perkins.”
“Rubbish! I’ll tell you something, though, Mrs Bramley.”
“What?”
“I think I’ve solved the case of the money that went missing from your till.”
“Who done it?”
“Not Miss Flatboot, if that’s what you were thinking. It was him!” Churchill pointed at Mr Harding.
“Me?” He grinned, then his face grew serious again.
“Every time you visited these tea rooms, Mr Harding, you claimed that Kitty had short-changed you. You’d give her a sixpence and claim it had been a shilling, and generally confused the girl so much with all sorts of coins that each time you came out with more money than you’d gone in with.”
“Jeffrey!” scolded Mrs Thonnings.
“You scoundrel,” snarled the colonel.
“You stole from a widow, Mr Harding,” added Churchill.
Mutters of disapproval wafted around the room.
“A murdering widow!” protested Mr Harding, but everyone ignored him.
“All of this makes me extremely angry,” said Churchill. “Why can’t people just be nice to each other?” She picked up her handbag. “Let’s go, Miss Pemberley. Our work here is done.” She walked over to the door. “Come over with the little key for my desk drawer when you’re ready, Inspector Mappin.”
“I will do, Mrs Churchill.”
Chapter 50
“Sterling work, Mrs Churchill. Sterling work,” said Chief Inspector Llewellyn-Dalrymple, sipping a glass of champagne.
“Does this look like your Webley, Colonel Slingsby?” asked Inspector Mappin, holding it beneath the colonel’s nose in a gloved hand.
“I do believe that’s the fellow,” replied the colonel. “Good to have him back.”
“But it’s a murder weapon,” protested Pemberley. “Do you really want it back?”
“Doesn’t bother me,” said the colonel. “Guns are designed to shoot things. Otherwise they wouldn’t be doing their job, would they?”
Churchill shook her head in bemusement and drained her glass. She glanced at her watch and wondered when everyone would be kind enough to leave her office.
“It’s quite astonishing really,” said Chief Inspector Llewellyn-Dalrymple. “You ladies don’t look capable of cracking a multiple murder case.”
“So you’ve intimated on many occasions, Chief Inspector.”
“Never fails to amaze me. You certainly gave the boys in blue a run for their money.”
“Perhaps the boys in blue need to stop underestimating little old ladies.”
The chief inspector gave a laugh.
“Well done, Mrs Churchill!” enthused Mrs Thonnings, perching herself on Churchill’s desk. “You really are terribly clever at this sort of thing. You will let me know when you next need help with a case, won’t you?”
“Next time we need help, yes. Most of the time I have all the help I need, however.”
“Really?”
“Yes, in the shape of Miss Pemberley over there. I may be the large, noisy one, but she does more than her fair share of the work, and I don’t want to be the one who gets all the credit.”
Everyone raised their glasses to thank and congratulate Miss Pemberley. The slender secretary gave a half smile and pretended to drop a pencil on the floor so that she could hide beneath her desk.
“Why’s my picture on the incident board?” asked Colonel Slingsby.
“Everyone was a suspect at one time or another.”
“Suppose they had to be. Fortunately you picked a flattering photograph of me. I’m quite proud of that one, remember the day it was taken.”
“So, what of the Compton Poppleford Horticultural Society now, Colonel?” asked Churchill.
“It’ll be disbanded now. We’re three men down and our reputation has been badly tarnished in the process. To be honest with you, I never did go in for gardening very much. The society meetings were just a way to pass the time.”
“Have you ever done any gardening?”
“No, never.”
“Interesting. So a keen, though slightly inept, gardener named Barney Bramley wasn’t permitted to join, while you were able to become president of the society and judge of the annual show even though you’d never gardened before and had little interest in the subject.”
“Yes.”
“That doesn’t seem very fair.”
“It doesn’t really, does it? I suppose it’s the way the class system works in this country. Anyway, I’d better be off. Anyone want Pattison to drop them anywhere?”
The remaining guests nodded and filed out after the colonel, at which point Pemberley reappeared from beneath her desk.
“I’m exhausted, Pembers,” said Churchill once they had all left. “Solving a case really takes it out of you, doesn’t it?”
“Oh yes. Atkins used to reward himself by taking a nice holiday somewhere.”
“Where did he usually like to go?”
“Somewhere warm. St Tropez, Biarritz. Sometimes he’d fly further afield to Marrakech or Bermuda.”
“Oh, would he? Well, I should think we could manage a day trip to Weymouth tomorrow. How do you fancy that?”
“I would love that, Mrs Churchill. We could even bicycle out from there to Portland Bill.”
“I’m afraid there are no bicycles allowed, Pemberley. And I have banned the contraptions from all future investigations.”
“That’s a shame. How about a donkey ride on the beach instead?”
“That would be lovely. I may even be able to squeeze into an old pair of jodhpurs. Shall I give them a whirl?”
“I would forget about the jodhpurs and ride side-saddle instead, Mrs Churchill.”
“It all sounds perfectly delightful. Sun, sea and sand and nothing at all to do with onions, mud, allotments, more mud, revolvers, duck ponds, colonels, frying pans, cookshops, orange hair, cheap blouses and tea rooms. It’s going to be a long time before I can enjoy a visit to a tea room again Pembe
rs.”
Pemberley gasped. “But tea rooms are your favourite places Mrs Churchill! How will you manage in the meantime?”
“I’ll find a way Pembers. Churchy always finds a way.”
The End
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