by Anne Morice
‘One might have assumed, as Mrs Fellowes did, that she had already left for the race course.’
‘Leaving no one at all in charge? She’s not unprofessional in that way, only in taking on too many jobs and not having time to do more than half of them properly. Besides, until half past three, at the earliest, there would have been nothing whatever for her to do when she got there. Nowhere to sit around and gossip with the other jockeys, for instance. All the women riders were herded into a space about half the size of this room. You couldn’t imagine them spending more time there than it took to change into their silks.’
‘If you turn out to be right,’ Robin said, ‘one thing I find inexplicable is that she told Symington in advance that she would not be riding his mount. I take it that’s how you account for his reaction when you told him that she would be?’
‘Yes, and it would also account for Mr God telling me later that there’d been some bother with the stewards. Obviously, after I spoke to him, he’d tried to get in touch with Louisa, to warn her that the horse had been scratched and, having failed, was in terror that she would turn up, all smiles, to receive his final instructions. However, I don’t find it inexplicable and I don’t put it down to sportsmanship either. It’s more likely that she realised that letting him know in good time would create far less sensation than just not turning up when the time came. Neither he nor anyone else had seriously expected her to ride today, so there’d have been no surprise or comment, if she hadn’t. With any luck, it could have been as late as seven o’clock before anyone realised she had gone, giving her a start, I must point out, of something like eight hours.’
After a glance at the telephone by his hand, the Superintendent said:
‘Well, you seem very confident about this, Mrs Price, and, as you know, I’m taking it seriously enough to follow it up. Two of my men are on their way there now, so we should be hearing something in a few minutes.’
‘And I trust I shan’t have wasted your time. I don’t think so. There have been too many pointers along the way for today’s misunderstanding not to have its place in the scheme. The only unknown quantity, in my opinion, is whether she was on her own, or whether . . .’
The sentence was never completed because his hand had jumped to the telephone, as it hiccoughed on the first ring.
COMING HOME
‘What did the Fellowes have to say about their visit to Young Mr Winthrop yesterday afternoon?’ I asked at dinner, which, considering she had only had two hours’ notice, was well up to Mrs Parkes’s standard.
‘They denied it absolutely, or rather she did. Charles was hardly allowed a word in edgeways.’
‘Did she get away with it?’
‘She didn’t do badly. When told that two people answering to their description had been seen by a reliable witness going into the house, she gave a merry trill of laughter and said: “Oh, you can’t mean dear old Miss Smiley? Don’t tell me she’s still alive! She must be well over eighty and blind as a bat, poor dear! So sad really, these lonely old people, living in the past, as so many of them do.”’
‘Was that an accurate description?’
‘There was enough in it to serve her purpose, I daresay. The constable gave it as his opinion that there was nothing much wrong with her mind, but it has to be said that she didn’t recognise the Fellowes by name, although she must have met them often enough. In any case, I doubt if Wilkins will think it worth pursuing now.’
‘All the same, I bet it was them and it would be nice to know what took them there. Maybe I’ll ask Avril one of these days. Like all good cruise passengers, we’ve promised to keep in touch and meet for lunch in London.
I shall put it to her that she and Charles were more worried than they wanted us to know about their possessions turning up intact after the house was burnt down and that the Godstow fire had given the knife another twist. Her taking it for granted when she answered the Superintendent’s call that his business concerned stolen property, rather than murder, shows where her mind was concentrated. I shall also suggest that they had begun to be afraid that they were victims of a carefully planned fraud, whereby selected, temporarily unoccupied houses, known to contain works of art or other valuables, were first looted and then set on fire, thus ensuring that the rest of the contents would also be destroyed.’
‘What would have been the purpose of that?’ Toby asked. ‘Why bother?’
‘Obviously, one reason would be to delay for as long as possible the discovery that part of the contents was undamaged and in the hands of the master-minding fence. It was sheer chance, or maybe lack of discipline on the part of one of the thieves, hoping to set up a little private business for himself on the side, which revealed that the Fellowes’ house had been burgled before it was burnt down. I can imagine that a secondary motive would have been to make it that much harder for the police to identify the gang. No finger prints, for a start, and I’ve heard that even the print of the blade that was used to force an entry can be a dead give-away. Besides, the really professional thieves concentrate on one particular category, such as jewellery or cash, leaving all the rest strictly alone. So this naturally gives them a sort of label and serves to narrow the field of likely culprits. Sending the whole lot up in flames would have wiped out that disadvantage and given them anonymity.’
‘And you think that clever little Mrs Fellowes would have worked all this out for herself?’
‘Yes, I do, and that as a consequence, in their own case at least, she had begun to be afraid that someone in her husband’s firm, perhaps even one of their own sons, might have been involved, if not directly then as an innocent dupe. Naturally, she hesitated to confide such doubts and fears to Robin, knowing what that could lead to, so she decided to begin by having a chat with Young Mr Winthrop.’
‘What would he have been able to tell her?’
‘I’m not sure and perhaps she wasn’t either, but we do know, for a start, that she’d remembered there’d been a similar incident a few years earlier and it may well have been in a house whose sale his firm was negotiating. I shall remind her that in those days Irene Gayford was his junior partner and that it was not long afterwards that his secretary was murdered.’
‘To all of which,’ Robin said, ‘she will reply at great length and with the utmost candour and amiability, and at the end of it you will have learnt nothing more than you know already.’
‘Yes, but it will be a pleasure to watch her skating over the surface and afterwards I shall reward her for her candour and amiability by assuring her that she and Charles were in no way responsible for Young Mr Winthrop’s accident.’
‘Why should she feel that they were?’
‘It might have occurred to her that, had they not prevented his setting forth to the market at his usual time, he might never have found himself in the path of that lorry and would have returned home, safe and sound for tea. I shall explain that when she rang him yesterday morning to fix the appointment, the call was intercepted and that this, combined with the fact that he was known to have been trying to get in touch with Robin, had made his death inevitable.’
‘I should be interested to know whether you suspected right from the start that Louisa was behind it. I shan’t bother to ask, though, because I know you would say yes, in any case.’
‘No, I couldn’t do that, Toby, because once or twice I went badly astray. That was mainly your fault.’
‘Yes, I knew it would turn out that you had nothing to blame yourself for.’
‘It was when you were building up your case against Anthony. It shook me for a time and it shows how difficult it must be for juries to reach the right verdict. But then, when I had my talk to him this morning and he kept putting his great foot in it, I realised he was incapable of all those underhand tricks you had accused him of. Jimmie was a much worse problem.’
‘Why Jimmie?’
‘Because he’s so much more wayward and imaginative and, allowing for that extraordinary tale about
breaking into his father’s house being true, it would have been in character to have tacked on the extra bit about the bloodstained shirt, in order to provide himself with an alibi for Verity’s murder. At least, that’s how I was afraid the Superintendent would see it; just a wild story to account for the missing half hour, and why I kept quiet about it. Things would have got completely out of hand if it had then come out that he had a motive.’
‘I simply don’t understand what you’re talking about. How could it have come out that he had a motive for murdering someone he hadn’t set eyes on until three days ago?’
‘That’s what we were meant to think, but it wasn’t true. It was stupid of me not to have seen it the first time he walked into the hotel. I’ve got used to susceptible females goggling at him, but Verity’s reaction was really over the top. It wasn’t until I remembered that Bobbie was the other person to have uttered that doom laden phrase “two or three years ago” that anything clicked.’
‘Why, what happened to her two or three years ago?’
‘She almost lost the light of her life. She told me that Jimmie had fallen heavily for a girl he’d met in Bath, which is where Verity used to stay with her grandmother. She became pregnant, though, or said she had, and had expectations of marriage, which he had no intention of fulfilling. He dropped her and scurried home to mother. Irresponsible, you may say, and you’d be right, but at least Verity had plenty of money and was old enough to know her way around.’
‘But I still don’t understand what made you so sure that she was the girl.’
‘Well, for one thing, it explained his equivocal behaviour to Stephanie. He obviously didn’t care a farthing for her, but he put on a tremendous act whenever they were together in public. One theory was that it was done to ingratiate himself with his father, but, once I got the hang of it, I realised that it was much more likely to have been for Verity’s benefit. His way of signalling that his affections were engaged elsewhere and it was no use her trying to re-kindle old fires. Once I’d got that sorted out, I was able to cross him off my list.’
‘I would have expected it to move him to the top of your list. Supposing Verity had refused to be fobbed off so easily and was blackmailing him by threatening to tell his father that she was the mother of the Godstow grandson? That really would have been a motive.’
‘No, it wouldn’t. He didn’t give a damn what his father thought of him. Besides, it wasn’t Verity’s murder that bothered me, only the fear of his getting involved in a lot of interrogation and suspicion and all the repercussions that would have brought crashing down on Bobbie. After all, it was his idea, not mine, to go into the summer house, which would have been a fatuous thing to do if he’d known she was lying dead inside it. My real fear was that he might have had some hand in the conspiracy that Pauline had got caught up in and that it was he, and not Anthony, who was parading a false excuse to keep an eye on what Robin was up to. When I saw that it was just a warning to Verity not to waste her time hanging around the stage door on her afternoon off, everything fell into place, which was a big relief. It would be hateful to think that anyone who loved cricket could be mixed up in crime.’
‘So, apart from those two minor aberrations, you never put a foot wrong?’
‘Oh yes, my worst failure was with Jake. If only I’d paid closer attention to what he told me on that first afternoon, when he was patching up the summer house, it would have saved endless wasted time later on. Unfortunately, I was so intent on finding ways to alleviate the tedium of the countryside that I seized on the first whiff of intrigue that was wafted my way and magnified it into a completely false situation.’
‘Yes,’ Robin said, ‘I do remember thinking at the time that the explanation you had hit on was unworthy of you. What was it really all about, do you suppose?’
‘I think Jake and Verity must have met there secretly to concoct ways and means to get rid of you and me, without actually damaging the hotel’s reputation. It was soon afterwards that we had the first of that long series of minor mishaps, which I now regard as having been designed to make our lives uncomfortable.’
‘I realised from the moment Jake recognised me in the dining room that I had ceased to be a favoured guest, but could he seriously have imagined that, having come here to re-open enquiries into Pauline’s murder, I could be induced to drop the idea because of a radio left on all night, a dearth of coat hangers, or a faulty stove?’
‘No, of course not, but I think he could have borne it better if you’d been staying somewhere else and not on his own premises. Your presence made him uneasy because he was terrified of Louisa committing some indiscretion.’
‘You mean he suspected all along that she’d killed Pauline?’
‘No, I doubt that. I do think he had begun to be afraid that she was mixed up in it in some way, but perhaps nothing more definite than that. Otherwise, he would never have then proceeded to hand me her motive on a plate. He could not have relied on my being so dim as not to recognise it for what it was, unless he’d failed to recognise it himself.’
‘And what was it?’ Toby asked.
‘Oh, that she’d always had dreams of being the chatelaine of some vast country house, with her own horses in her own stables. Jake said they’d achieved it by a combination of hard work on his part and business acumen on hers, but I ask you! There they were, running a tiny pub in a seedy part of Chissingfield and serving lunch and dinner in a dining room probably no larger than this one. It would have taken them years and centuries to earn enough capital to set themselves up in that style.’
‘But Jimmie told us his father was backing them?’
‘He said he thought it must be so, but he got it wrong, as usual. Everything Mr God told me on the night of his birthday party made it plain that he would never have invested money in such an enterprise. The horses alone, I might tell you, eating their heads off all through the winter, would have made it totally uneconomic and he wouldn’t have touched it with a barge pole wrapped in the Financial Times.’
‘So it is your guess that she set to and raised the money in some other way? Presumably, by acting as informant to one of the more raffish customers of the Weston Arms during one of his spells out of prison?’
‘Yes, and the first move was to befriend Pauline, who had access to all the right sort of knowledge. She hit on a rather brilliant way of doing it too. It would have started, I expect, when she put her name down on Winthrop and Gayford’s books, as a prospective buyer. Then she got to hear about Pauline’s history and it was she who talked her into laying all the ghosts by taking up riding. Anthony had the impression that it was a young man who’d done that, but I expect Pauline referred to someone called Lou, which he took to be a shortened form of Lewis. Anyway, for a time the scheme worked splendidly, Louisa getting the information she needed and passing it on to her customer and Pauline cantering over the heath for all she was worth. But then . . .’
‘You must bear with me,’ Toby said, ‘if the tribulations of the past few days have brought me to premature senility, but what sort of information are we talking about?’
‘The inside kind. Naturally, everyone for miles around knew when some grand expensive house came on the market, either for sale or rent, but in one or two cases Pauline’s knowledge was far more detailed and extensive than the general one, which was quite enough for Louisa’s purpose. She wasn’t out for huge sums of money, just a thousand or two every now and then, to keep her solvent, when circumstances provided the right opportunity. And that was where Pauline was so useful. Every detail of position and surroundings was recorded in her office files and she knew as much about the lay-out of the rooms and what they contained as if she had walked over every inch of them herself. Indeed, as we know from Anthony’s experience, she doubtless had walked over every inch of some of them, more than once. She was equally well informed about such extras as the whereabouts and movements of the owners, who had charge of the keys at any given time and how diligent such guardi
ans were likely to be, as well as the workings of the burglar alarm system. It was a complete dossier, containing everything the successful burglar needed to know and eventually, as I was about to say, Pauline must have grasped the connection and begun to realise that there might be something fishy about this friendly interest Louisa took in all the minutest details of her job. It began to worry her and she finally found the courage to speak out. There may even have been hints that she intended to pass on the news to her employer. Anyway, she said enough to convince Louisa that she would never be safe so long as Pauline was alive.’
‘But how was it done? How did she persuade Pauline to cancel the visit to her aunt and where did she go instead?’
‘Oh, I think I’ve worked that out. By this time, you see, the money had started to roll in and she’d raised enough to get her hands on Mattingly Grange. There was still a lot more needed for conversion and so on, but in the meantime she and Jake were doing what they could by way of decorating and putting the garden in order, in their spare time. Obviously, their headquarters during this period would have been the flat over the stables, but owing to the demands of their calling they could never both be there at the same time for more than a few hours. So the day came when she told Jake she intended to take a couple of days off and get stuck into some big job, but would be back on Friday, in plenty of time for the race meeting rush. All this, I must remind you, was ten days before Pauline’s murder was discovered.’
‘And what would she have told Pauline?’
‘Suggested that she should spend part of her holiday at the flat and, in return for a little home decorating, which we know to have been one of her accomplishments, Louisa would lay on an intensive course of riding and jumping. She would hire a couple of hacks and they would set off at dawn, when no one was about to catch them at it. It had to be kept a secret, you see, because Pauline hadn’t told any of her other friends about this new craze of hers. She was still afraid of breaking down and losing her nerve, which would have left her feeling more humiliated than ever. What, of course, happened is that Louisa picked her up on her way to the station, as arranged, took her to the flat, finished her off and during the night heaved her into the Land Rover and deposited her on the heath, covered by a sheet of tarpaulin. The next morning she turned up, bright and smiling, to resume her duties at the Weston Arms. What do you think of that?’