A Picture of Murder

by T E Kinsey

  I directed the constable into the kitchen, where he made a great show of minutely examining the body and its surroundings while scribbling in his notebook. Meanwhile, I lit the range and set a kettle to boil.

  The telephone rang, so I left the constable to his investigations and went to answer it.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Chipping Bevington two-three.’

  ‘Ah, Miss Armstrong,’ said the familiar voice of Inspector Sunderland. ‘Good morning to you.’

  ‘And good morning to you, Inspector,’ I said. ‘Would you like to speak to Lady Hardcastle?’

  ‘I’d be delighted to, as always, but there’s no need if she’s busy. I’m quite confident that you can tell me what’s going on just as well as she.’

  ‘Thank you kindly,’ I said. I curtseyed sarcastically (if a curtsey can be sarcastic) but realized he couldn’t see me.

  ‘Hmm,’ he said. Perhaps he could see me, after all. ‘The message I got from the desk sergeant here was that there’d been another death.’

  Not for the first time that morning, I recounted the events surrounding – and following – my discovery of Euphemia Selwood’s body.

  The inspector listened attentively and then said, ‘It sounds as though you have everything in hand. I can’t get there until this afternoon so I’m relying on you and Lady Hardcastle to . . . to help the local bobbies gather as much evidence as possible. Dr Gosling is busy with another case so he’ll not be able to come out to you at all. Can you get Sergeant Dobson to arrange for the van to pick up the body?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Is there anything in particular you want us – I mean the local police – to look out for?’

  ‘I’m sure they’ll think of everything,’ he said with a chuckle. ‘Just make certain not to lose the apple. If it’s in her hand, the mortuary boys might take it away with them and then there’s a fair chance we’ll never see it again. Prise it free and wrap it in brown paper. But handle it with extreme care – if it’s poisoned like the one in the moving picture, it could still be dangerous. I’ll collect it when I call and then I can make sure that it gets to Dr Gosling for analysis.’

  ‘Right you are, Inspector,’ I said.

  ‘And make sure you bag up the rest of the apples, too, if there are any. If there’s a possibility that the one she was eating was poisoned, there’s no reason to suppose that the rest weren’t. Again, handle them with care.’

  ‘Of course. Anything else?’

  ‘No, that should do it. I’ll leave everything else up to you and I’ll be with you after lunch.’

  We said our goodbyes and I returned the earpiece to its hook. I liked to imagine that it was grateful for the gentler way I treated it.

  I returned to the kitchen to find that Lady Hardcastle was already hard at work supervising the constable’s investigative efforts. The kettle was boiling.

  ‘Did neither of you think to take the kettle off the stove?’ I said.

  ‘It’s only just come to the boil, dear,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘We knew you would return soon enough.’

  I harrumphed and set about making some tea for us all.

  ‘I think you ought to make sure that the apple is properly examined,’ she said to Constable Hancock. ‘If our suppositions are correct and these deaths are linked to the moving picture, then that should turn out to be the murder weapon.’

  ‘That was the inspector on the telephone, my lady,’ I said. ‘He asked that we wrap the apple in brown paper so that he can take it back to Dr Gosling.’

  ‘Great minds and all that, eh?’ she said.

  ‘Apparently,’ I said. ‘Although I’m also given to understand that fools seldom differ.’

  ‘That, too. Could you pass me a couple of spoons, please? I should be able to get it free without touching it.’

  I hurried to the dining room and grabbed two soup spoons from the sideboard. On my way back, I searched Lady Hardcastle’s study for some brown paper.

  ‘I thought soup spoons would be better,’ I said upon my return. ‘They’re flatter so they should do less damage to the fruit.’

  ‘Smart as a whip, that girl,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘Wouldn’t you agree, Constable?’

  ‘I always said you was both the cleverest people I ever met.’

  ‘Oh, you are a poppet,’ she said. ‘But we stumble through as best we can, just like everyone else does.’

  ‘You speak for yourself, my lady,’ I said.

  ‘Quite right,’ she said. ‘I stumble through, but Armstrong here is a towering genius. I don’t know what I’d do without her.’

  ‘That little chap with the garrotte in that alley off St Martin’s Lane would have seen you off, for a start,’ I said.

  ‘Gracious, yes,’ she said. ‘I’d forgotten him. What on earth were we doing there?’

  ‘Looking for a way to break into the Garrick Theatre.’

  ‘Oh, yes, we were, weren’t we? We never did get to the bottom of why that Prussian chap bought tickets for that one particular box every night for a month.’

  ‘If it wasn’t an elaborate plan for an assassination, I still say he was just sweet on one of the players.’

  ‘There were some very pretty boys and girls in the company, weren’t there?’

  ‘There were. But the lad with the garrotte wasn’t so handsome.’

  ‘Especially not after his encounter with you, dear,’ she said. ‘You sorted him out good and proper. There you are, Constable, without young Florence here, I’d be dead in an alley between Charing Cross Road and St Martin’s Lane. She’s a . . . marvel.’

  This last pause was occasioned by the effort required to free the murder weapon from the victim’s rigor mortis grip.

  ‘There,’ she said. ‘Now, let’s wrap that up for Simeon and we can have a cup of tea. You’ll join us, Constable?’

  ‘Don’t mind if I do, m’lady. Although, I’d prefer it if we could drink it somewhere else.’ He nodded towards the body on the floor.

  ‘Of course, of course. There’s nothing else for us to do here.’

  A key rattled in the servants’ door, followed by a few polite but firm knocks.

  ‘That’ll be Edna or Miss Jones,’ I said. ‘The other two aren’t due for another hour and they don’t have a key.’

  ‘I think we ought to declare the kitchen out of bounds for the morning,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘But Edna and the Grange contingent will have plenty to do elsewhere.’

  I drew the bolt and let Edna in.

  ‘Is the lock broke?’ she said as she bustled in and took off her coat.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said, trying to block her way through to the kitchen before I’d had a chance to tell her what was going on.

  ‘I put the key in the lock – habit, like – but it didn’t turn. Then when I tried the door I found you’d thrown the bolt. So I wondered if the lock were broke.’

  ‘Not as far as I know,’ I said. ‘I assumed it had been locked as usual. I never checked.’

  ‘Then why was it bolted? You never leaves it bolted, else we wouldn’t be able to get in.’

  Yet again, I explained what had happened.

  We withdrew to the dining room. Ordinarily we would have been in the morning room, what with it still being morning, but the crime board was in the dining room as usual and Lady Hardcastle wanted to show the constable how we were getting on. While she was going through the runners and riders, I popped back to the kitchen to fetch the tea tray.

  On my way back, I stopped in the drawing room to offer a cup to Edna, who was, quite understandably, rather shaken by the morning’s events. I put an extra couple of lumps of sugar in her cup and told her to sit for a while – she looked ashen.

  ‘I’ll be all right, my lover,’ she said. ‘Just ’ad a bit of a shock is all. I found our ma when she died, but she was old and frail. It was her heart. I a’n’t never seen nothin’ like that, though. That poor girl. So young. So beautiful. Poisoned just the same as Phoebe in that movin’ pict
ure. They says they’s evil, and I’m startin’ to reckon they might be right. I reckon they might even have conjured up evil spirits with it. What if they’ve come to possess someone? What if the Devil hisself has taken hold of that Zelda woman and made her into a real witch? She could be actin’ all this out without even knowin’ it.’

  I let her ramble on. There wasn’t much I could say yet to counter her fears apart from, ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, don’t be so stupid,’ but I knew that wouldn’t really help. Instead, I said, ‘Are you certain you wouldn’t prefer to go home? Dewi and Dora will be here soon. I’m sure we can manage without you for one day.’

  ‘You’re very kind, but I can’t leave you with they. That Dora child will go to pieces soon as she finds out what’s happened. And if she don’t, she’ll pretend to, just to try to skive for the day. You’ll be even more shorthanded.’

  I remembered how Dora had laid it on with a trowel when there had been a murder at The Grange. Edna was right – she would make every effort to turn the tragedy into a day off.

  ‘I can’t say I disagree with you,’ I said. ‘So, thank you. But if it all gets too much, just let me know.’

  ‘Right you are, m’dear. Just let I sit here with a cuppa for ten minutes and I’ll be right as ninepence. You go and do what you needs to do.’

  I was about to say something encouraging and uplifting when the doorbell rang. With a sigh and an it-never-ends raise of the eyebrows to Edna, I went to answer it.

  It was the two mortuary men.

  ‘Mornin’, missus. Got a body for us?’ said the driver’s mate.

  I briefly considered chiding him to be a bit more respectful but, again, I thought it would probably be unhelpful. Instead, I said, ‘Bring your stretcher round to the side entrance. I’ll let you in.’ I pointed to my left, indicating the path that ran around the outside of the house.

  Constable Hancock supervised the removal of the body and returned to the dining room. His tea had gone cold.

  ‘I reckon I ought to be gettin’ along now,’ he said. ‘Sergeant Dobson will be expectin’ me back now the body’s gone. Thank you for keepin’ me posted with your whatsitsname . . . crime thingummy. Most instructive. I shall let the sergeant know. He loves to hear how you civilians is thinkin’ about these things.’

  ‘Give him my regards, won’t you?’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘And please let him know that Inspector Sunderland is intending to visit the village this afternoon. I’m sure he already knows, but it doesn’t hurt to make sure.’

  ‘Right you are, my lady,’ he said. ‘I’ll bid you both good day. Cheerio now.’

  I showed him out.

  ‘Any sign of the film folk?’ said Lady Hardcastle when I returned to the dining room. ‘“Film folk”. I’m going to have to drop that moniker – there’s only two of them left. I don’t quite know how we’re going to break this one to them.’

  ‘It’ll be a blow,’ I said. ‘They both loved Euphemia. We need to find out who’s doing this before anyone else gets hurt.’

  ‘We do. Leave me to ponder a while, would you? I’d like to spend some time with the crime board – perhaps something will come to me if I just let my mind wander.’

  ‘Certainly,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you for elevenses?’

  ‘Of course. Can’t miss coffee and cake. Oh, and if Zelda or Cheetham surface, please send them in here. I ought to be the one to tell them.’

  I returned to the kitchen so as to be on hand when the Grange contingent arrived. Miss Jones, trooper that she was, agreed that the kitchen shouldn’t be used until it had been thoroughly examined by the inspector and then thoroughly scrubbed. Preferably more than once. And with the strongest soap she could find.

  Edna offered to help, and they had just started on the task when Dora and Dewi let themselves in through the side door. I agreed with Edna’s prediction that Dora would attempt to use the shock and distress occasioned by the death of another houseguest to swing the lead, and I had prepared a little speech intended to convey sympathy for her feelings while leaving her in no doubt that she’d be expected to press on regardless. As it turned out, Edna had things well under control.

  ‘What’s goin’ on?’ asked Dora, after she had hung her coat in the boot room. ‘What’s everyone doin’ in here?’

  ‘Please, sit down, Dora,’ I said. ‘You, too, Dewi. I’m afraid we have some more bad news.’

  They did as they were asked.

  ‘When I came down this morning,’ I continued, ‘I found Miss Euphemia Selwood lying on the kitchen floor. Dead.’

  Dora let out a little squeal. ‘Oh my good gracious,’ she said. And then began to wail.

  ‘Pull yourself together, girl,’ said Edna sharply. ‘You barely knew the woman.’

  ‘Yes . . . but . . .’ sobbed Dora.

  ‘Yes but nothin’,’ said Edna. ‘We’s all sad – she was a lovely young lady – but there i’n’t no good’ll come of you carryin’ on like that.’

  ‘I don’t think I can carry on.’

  ‘Oh, do be quiet,’ said Edna. ‘I’ve known you since you was a babber and you was always a lazy little beggar. You’ve spent your whole life tryin’ to avoid doin’ what you ought, and it’s about time you stopped gettin’ away with it. We’ll have a nice cup of tea to calm us all down, and then we’re goin’ to buckle down and get on with it.’

  Dora sniffed. ‘How did she die?’ she said.

  ‘We think it was a poisoned apple,’ I said.

  This brought forth fresh howls of anguish.

  ‘What on earth’s the matter now?’ said Edna, whose tone had left ‘sharp’ some way behind and was now sailing in the direction of ‘downright irritated’.

  ‘I brought them apples,’ said Dora.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ I said. This was fresh news.

  ‘There wasn’t no apples in the house so I brought ’em down from The Grange. I loves apples. I could’ve eaten the poisoned one. It could’ve been me lyin’ there dead.’

  ‘We can but dream,’ said Miss Jones quietly.

  Dora affected not to have heard.

  ‘I’d like you to speak to Inspector Sunderland when he gets here,’ I said. ‘He’ll want to know where they came from.’

  Dora was thunderstruck. ‘You don’t mean you reckons I done it?’

  I suppressed a smile and decided to torment her a little. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it does look a little suspicious, doesn’t it? We had no apples in the house, you bring them, and then poor Euphemia takes a bite and falls down dead.’

  ‘But . . . you can’t really think . . .’ She began wailing again.

  Miss Jones rolled her eyes. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I can’t be hangin’ around here all mornin’ if the kitchen’s out of commission. We’ll need to see what Mr Holman can do for us.’

  ‘You have that venison pie,’ I said.

  ‘I do,’ she said. ‘So we shouldn’t need much. I can’t wait for it to be delivered, though, so I shall have to go into the village to fetch it.’

  ‘Perhaps you could take Dora with you if you has a lot to carry,’ said Edna with more than a trace of hopefulness in her voice. ‘Keep an eye on her, mind – she’s likely to scarper now she knows the rozzers are on to her.’ She winked, but the joke was lost on Dora, who let out a fresh wail.

  Throughout all of this, Dewi had maintained a stoic silence. It wasn’t until the two huntresses had set out in search of food that he finally said, ‘I’m sorry to hear about Miss Euphemia. I liked her. She was kind.’

  ‘And pretty,’ I said.

  He blushed. ‘Beautiful.’

  I patted his hand.

  ‘I’d better go and see to Mr Cheetham,’ he said. ‘He’ll be upset, an’ all, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  Edna, too, left to set about some important task or other, leaving me alone with my now-cold tea. Time to see if the remaining film folk had risen.

  They had. They were full of bubbling enthusiasm, falling over each other to tell us about the ma
ssive audience for the second screening of The Witch’s Downfall. Against our expectations, it had proven even more popular and successful than before. We let them talk themselves out and then I excused myself and left Lady Hardcastle to the difficult task of breaking the bad news.

  While I put together a light breakfast for Mr Cheetham and Miss Drayton, Lady Hardcastle explained the morning’s grisly discovery. As predicted, they took it very badly indeed, with Zelda letting out an anguished shriek that I heard from the kitchen. Once again, they retreated to the sanctuary of the morning room together. I took in their food and left them to their grief.

  Skins and Barty were the last to rise and were equally shocked by the news.

  ‘You should have woken us,’ said Skins.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘But what would you have done?’

  ‘I s’pose you’re right,’ he conceded. ‘You all right, mate?’

  ‘Eh?’ said Barty.

  ‘Are you all right? You took a shine to young Phemie, didn’t you? I know that look.’

  ‘I did, yes. It’s a bit of a blow, to be honest. I’ve been told to sling my hook many a time, but no girl’s ever got herself murdered just to avoid me.’

  The distress and tearfulness that had pervaded the house must have had more of an effect on me than I imagined – that’s the only reason I can give for my sudden fit of giggles.

  ‘You’re a breath of fresh . . . something or other, Mr Dunn,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Think nothing of it,’ he said. ‘Is there anything else we can do before we leave?’

  ‘No, but you’ve brightened my day. Miss Jones has been out scouring the village for comestibles if you have time to stay for lunch.’

  ‘Not sure we do,’ said Skins. ‘There’s a Gloucester train at one forty-four and I told the bloke with the cart to come and pick us up . . . well, about now, actually.’

  It would have been wonderful to report that the doorbell rang at that precise moment but, sadly, it didn’t. We had time to get Dewi to retrieve the boys’ instruments from storage and say our goodbyes before ‘the bloke with the cart’ rang the doorbell and took them off to Chipping Bevington and points north. I was sad to see them go.