A Picture of Murder

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A Picture of Murder Page 16

by T E Kinsey


  We weren’t without additional visitors for long, though. While Lady Hardcastle and I were sitting down to a surprisingly delicious lunch in the dining room – Zelda and Cheetham had declined the invitation to join us – the doorbell rang again. This time it was Inspector Sunderland. I showed him through to the dining room.

  ‘Ah, Inspector,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘Do come in and sit down. Have some lunch – there’s plenty.’

  ‘Thank you, my lady,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t normally, but I’ve been on the go all morning and I confess to being more than a little peckish.’

  ‘Help yourself,’ she said. ‘Try the venison pie. It’s one of Miss Jones’s finer creations.’

  He took the proffered slice of pie and helped himself to a few of the other delights that Miss Jones had managed to procure.

  ‘It’s a joy to see you, as always,’ said Lady Hardcastle, ‘but I’m beginning to wish we could meet more often under less distressing circumstances.’

  ‘I’m beginning to feel the same.’

  ‘Would you like to examine the “scene of the crime”?’

  ‘There’s no rush. I’ll have a quick glance before I go, but I don’t think it will tell me anything that isn’t already in Constable Hancock’s report. He’s a plodder, but a reliable one.’

  ‘He’s a poppet,’ she said. ‘How are the rest of your enquiries proceeding? Has Simeon found anything?’

  ‘Poor old Gosling. He’s having no luck with this case at all. There was a delay in getting the body to the mortuary yesterday – I gather the van broke down – and by the time it arrived, he was out on another matter. He was planning to start work on Newhouse today, but there was an outbreak of something nasty at the police station out in St George so he had to minister to the sick.’

  ‘“Something nasty”?’

  ‘I’m not certain you’d want details while we’re eating,’ he said.

  ‘Ah, right you are. A touch of the colly-wobbles, as Nanny used to say?’

  ‘More than a touch, and more than a slight wobble. I don’t envy Gosling at all. But it means that we’re no closer to a precise cause of death for Mr Newhouse, and young Miss Selwood will have to remain a mystery for a little while longer as well.’

  ‘Surely, “being stabbed through the heart” is widely accepted as a potentially terminal event,’ I said.

  ‘You’d be right to think so,’ he said. ‘But without a police surgeon’s report we can’t be certain. “I”s have to be dotted and “t”s crossed. I’ve seen more than one case where a man was poisoned in one street, stabbed in another, and his body dumped in the next. Only a thorough post-mortem examination can tell us for certain.’

  ‘He’s not wrong, Flo,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘And we know he was stabbed before he was dressed in those clothes – no hole in his jacket or waistcoat, remember? – so there’s no way to know for sure whether he was already dead by the time his chest was pierced.’

  ‘If those blasted mortuary men hadn’t been so officiously efficient, Gosling would have seen the body in situ,’ said the inspector. ‘That would surely have told him something.’

  ‘They arrived here promptly this morning, too,’ I said.

  ‘If only they were as good at delivering bodies to the mortuary as they are at picking them up from the murder scene,’ he said, ‘we’d have more than half our answers by now, I’m sure of it. Ah, well, it can’t be helped, I don’t suppose.’ He drew his notebook from his jacket pocket and flicked through it, looking for an empty page. ‘What were your thoughts on the death of Miss Selwood?’

  ‘It looked for all the world as though it were another kinematograph killing,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll wager that’s what the newspapers will be calling it by tomorrow. I gather you’ve got Dinah Caudle staying in the village so there’s little chance of keeping any of this quiet.’

  ‘She seems very keen to cover the story and to make it as sensational as possible,’ I said. ‘But back to the body. She was sprawled on the floor with a half-eaten apple in her hand. It might be that she wasn’t killed by a poisoned apple just like her character in the moving picture, but we were certainly supposed to think she was.’

  ‘There were no other marks or wounds on her body?’ he said. ‘No signs of a struggle?’

  ‘None that I could see. Her head and face were unmarked and the kitchen was very much as we’d left it.’

  ‘How was she dressed?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said.

  ‘Was she in her night attire?’

  ‘Ah, I see. No, she was wearing the same clothes as when she and the other “film folk” went out for the evening.’

  ‘Do you know when they returned?’

  ‘Not before we’d gone to bed, certainly.’

  ‘And when was that?’

  ‘What would you say, my lady?’ I said. ‘Midnight?’

  ‘Then or then-abouts,’ she said. ‘We had some overnight guests and we were up yarning, but I don’t think it was much past midnight.’

  ‘More guests?’ said the inspector.

  ‘Yes. You might remember them: Skins Maloney and Barty Dunn.’

  ‘The musicians from Clarissa Farley-Stroud’s engagement party,’ he said. ‘Charming rogues. Or roguish charmers. I could never fathom quite which.’

  ‘A little of both, I think,’ she said. ‘They were stranded nearby when their train broke down, or so they said, so we invited them to stay the night.’

  ‘Most convivial,’ said the inspector as he made a note. ‘So you retired at around midnight and didn’t hear the . . . What did you call them? The film folk?’

  ‘That’s them.’

  ‘Thank you. You didn’t hear the film folk return. So shall we allow, perhaps, an hour for you to ready yourself for bed and fall into a deep enough sleep that you’d not hear three people let themselves in?’

  ‘That sounds reasonable,’ she said.

  ‘Which means that they probably didn’t come home before one in the morning. We should give Mr Cheetham and Miss Drayton at least the same amount of time to raid your decanter for a nightcap and get off to bed, leaving Miss Selwood alone in the kitchen with a hankering for a late-night snack. She eats a poisoned apple and dies on the kitchen floor sometime between, let’s say, two and three.’

  ‘Why not later?’ I asked.

  ‘She was in her clothes,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘If it were any later, the chances are that she would be in her nightgown. She went looking for her snack before bed.’

  ‘Quite so,’ said the inspector. ‘And then Miss Armstrong found the body at about six o’clock.’

  ‘I did,’ I said.

  ‘With the apple in her hand?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Is that significant?’

  ‘Possibly. One would expect it to have rolled away as she fell. She wouldn’t have a tight enough hold on it once she was dead.’

  ‘Unless the poison caused some manner of spasm,’ suggested Lady Hardcastle.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said.

  ‘It was still tightly in her grasp when I pried it out to give it to Simeon,’ she said. She looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘But that can’t be right. I presumed it was rigor mortis, but we’re guessing that she died no earlier than two o’clock. I removed the apple at around . . . What would you say, dear? Eight?’

  ‘A little earlier, I think,’ I said.

  ‘I telephoned shortly after seven,’ said the inspector. ‘If that’s any guide.’

  ‘Let’s call it half-past seven, then, just for the sake of argument. She’d been dead no more than five hours by our current reckoning, and she was stiff as a board.’

  ‘Rigor mortis,’ I said.

  ‘No, full rigor mortis takes about twelve hours. After less than five, only the small muscles would be affected.’

  ‘You’re right,’ said the inspector. ‘I’m impressed. How did you . . . ?’

  ‘One picks these things up, dear. You know how it is,’ she said
offhandedly.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Most people don’t pick these things up. I’m most definitely impressed. This certainly is a queer one. We need Dr Gosling’s report more than ever.’

  ‘He’ll get the job done, Inspector, don’t worry. I’ve known Simeon for many, many years. He likes to play the bumbling duffer – he imagines it to be charming, which I suppose it is, up to a point – but he’s as sharp as anyone you’ve ever worked with. He’ll not let you down.’

  ‘I’d rather formed that impression myself, actually. He’s a good man.’

  ‘He is.’

  ‘How’s your “crime board” coming along?’ he said.

  ‘I thought you’d never ask,’ she said. ‘Carry on with your sandwich – I believe it’s one of Old Joe’s famous doorstops from the Dog and Duck – and we’ll take you through it.’

  For the next half an hour, she and I did just that.

  ‘I knew I could rely on you two,’ said the inspector when we had finished listing the runners and riders. ‘Since I’m here for the afternoon, I’d like to speak to a few people. And I have my own transport, too, so there’s no need to rush.’

  ‘You managed to borrow Dr Gosling’s motor car, then?’ I said.

  ‘Actually, no. We sent Gosling out to St George in a Black Maria in case they needed to move any of the prisoners, but I didn’t need his motor car after all. We have one at the station now for CID’s exclusive use. Arrived yesterday. I was surprised by how fast one can get here.’

  ‘Poor Simeon,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘He was never the adventurous type. We shouldn’t rag him too much about it.’

  The inspector made a face that rather eloquently conveyed, ‘Just you wait until you’re in a hurry to get somewhere and you have Gosling driving you,’ without his actually having to say anything. What he did say, as he consulted his ever-present notebook, was, ‘I’ll need a few words with the surviving film folk. I’m very interested to meet this Aaron Orum character. And I suppose I ought to speak to Dinah Caudle, though I know from previous encounters that she’ll probably just irritate me.’

  ‘You’re not an admirer?’ I said.

  ‘She has plenty of those without needing an old fogey like me,’ he said. ‘It’s her manner that grates on me. I can’t put my finger on it.’

  ‘She didn’t impress me much, if it’s any consolation,’ said Lady Hardcastle.

  ‘It doesn’t do to talk about people behind their backs, I know, but she gets on my nerves. And her infatuation with Orum does her no favours at all. It seems a bit grubby for someone in her position to be fawning over an old roué like that.’

  ‘What about the Hugheses?’ I asked.

  ‘Those two get on my nerves as well,’ he said.

  ‘Understandably,’ I said. ‘But will you be speaking to them?’

  ‘I shall have to speak to them in case they witnessed anything,’ he said. ‘Though I strongly doubt that they had anything to do with it. They are, as the phrase has it, “known to the police”, but for the most part they’re just a confounded nuisance. I’d hound them off the streets if it were up to me. The trouble is that one of an Englishman’s most treasured freedoms is the freedom to make a confounded nuisance of himself, so we’re obliged to let them get on with it.’

  ‘The vicar said the same thing,’ I said. ‘But they can’t be as simplistic and simple-minded as they make out, surely. And even if all they want really is to save us all from our own sins, they can’t have been happy to find that the second showing of The Witch’s Downfall was even more popular than the first. Would that drive them to serve up another warning?’

  ‘You might have to track them to their lair in Bristol,’ said Lady Hardcastle.

  ‘Might they have decamped?’ he asked.

  ‘They had a bit of a run-in with the vicar’s wife’s dog earlier,’ she said.

  ‘The vicar set the dog on them?’

  ‘Heavens, no. He was just playing. He’s an adorable creature – the dog, I mean, although the vicar is quite charming in his own way – but he has a tendency to become overexcited. He’s not fully aware of the effects of his size and strength. And. Well . . .’

  ‘He knocked the Hugheses and their claque on their bums,’ I said. ‘It was like a giant game of skittles.’

  ‘I wish I’d seen it,’ he said with a vengeful smile. ‘I doubt the new King’s Police Medal can be awarded to dogs, and especially not civilian ones, but I’m tempted to buy the hound a nice bit of steak. Many’s the time I’ve wanted to knock that lot down. He’s done the Force a great service.’

  ‘Is there anything you’d like us to do while you’re carrying out all these interviews?’ asked Lady Hardcastle.

  ‘You’re welcome to accompany me if you wish,’ he said. ‘I always appreciate your insights. I’ll set Dobson and Hancock to work speaking to witnesses. Anyone in the village who went to these moving picture shows or who was at the local pub might have seen something. It’s boring work but that’s what they’re paid for. Oh, actually, you might be able to help there a little. Are you still good friends with Lady Farley-Stroud?’

  ‘I am, yes.’

  ‘If I might prevail upon you to try to get an account of the two evenings from her, that would be most helpful. I think she’d be more forthcoming if you were to speak to her.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Now?’

  ‘No, she can wait. I want to speak to Cheetham first.’

  I set about clearing the dining table.

  Chapter Ten

  Mr Cheetham and Miss Drayton were sitting in silence in the morning room. He was poring over a chaotic array of typewritten sheets of foolscap, while she was crocheting what looked like a shawl. Or a blanket. Or possibly part of a waistcoat. Her movements were jerkily anxious and she dropped more than one stitch in the few moments I was there.

  ‘Mr Cheetham?’ I said quietly.

  He glanced up from his work. He looked pale and drawn. ‘Please, call me Nolan. I think we’re long past stuffy formalities by now.’

  ‘Certainly, Mr Cheetham. Inspector Sunderland is here from the Bristol CID. He would like a word with you in the dining room.’

  ‘Just give me a moment to tidy this lot away,’ he said, indicating the jumble of papers. ‘I’ll be with you presently.’

  We were sitting around the dining table when he finally poked his head round the door. Luckily, Edna had brought in the coffee tray and I was busy pouring us all a cup, so we didn’t look too much as though we were staging a tableau of that Yeames painting.

  ‘Please come in and sit down,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘Inspector, this is Mr – or do you prefer Colonel? – Cheetham. Mr Cheetham, this is Inspector Sunderland of the Bristol CID.’

  ‘Colonel is more of an honorary title these days,’ said Cheetham. ‘How do you do, Inspector?’

  ‘How do you do, Mr Cheetham?’ said the inspector. ‘You have my condolences on the deaths of your two friends.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Cheetham.

  ‘I don’t wish to cause any further distress, but would you mind recounting the events of the past couple of evenings for me, please? I’m trying to build as detailed a picture as I can.’

  ‘Certainly, Inspector,’ said Cheetham. ‘Where would you like me to start?’

  ‘Lady Hardcastle and Miss Armstrong have given me a clear account of Tuesday evening as they saw it. They arrived at the hall after you’d been there for a while.’

  ‘We were setting up our equipment, yes.’

  ‘Did you have any trouble on the way in?’

  ‘From the protesters? We were treated to a small amount of ill-informed abuse but nothing serious.’

  ‘What sort of abuse?’

  ‘Oh, the usual. Ungodly this, satanic that, thou shalt not . . . You know the sort of thing.’

  ‘I’m afraid I do,’ said the inspector as he carried on making his customarily thorough notes. ‘Did anyone make any specific threats?’

  ‘Other than
eternal damnation, you mean?’

  ‘Other than that, yes.’

  ‘No. There was some snarling and a little pushing and shoving, but no one said they would kill any of us.’

  ‘Who pushed and shoved?’

  ‘Hughes,’ said Cheetham. ‘I’ve encountered him before. He likes to portray himself as doing God’s work, but he’s a nasty little thug at heart.’

  ‘I can’t disagree with you,’ said the inspector. ‘The show went well, I hear.’

  ‘Very well indeed. You know, a lot of people have given up on the idea of taking this sort of show to the villages. There are dedicated picture houses in the cities now, and anyone who wants to tour tends to stick to the larger towns. But I think this is where you get to meet the real audience, the real people of England.’

  It’s where you meet the yokels who don’t get out much and will lap up any mediocre fare, I thought, but his friends had been killed so I kept it to myself.

  ‘And after the show,’ said the inspector, ‘you retired to the Dog and Duck, is that correct? That’s where Lady Hardcastle’s account ends.’

  ‘Ah, yes, you came home, didn’t you, my lady? Well, we were all but dragged to the local pub by an exuberant crowd, who insisted on treating us all night. The place was packed to the rafters.’

  ‘No one stood out? No one seemed suspicious?’

  Cheetham laughed. ‘There was no one skulking about in the background, twirling his moustaches, you mean?’

  ‘Or stroking his beard,’ said the inspector.

  ‘Ah, you mean my nemesis, the evil Aaron Orum?’

  ‘He was there?’

  ‘With his latest paramour, we assumed. I caught a glimpse of them in the other bar.’

  ‘Who’s this paramour?’ asked the inspector. ‘Is she on our list?’

  ‘The newspaper girl,’ said Cheetham. ‘Came here yesterday with her prim little notebook and her insinuations.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the inspector. ‘Dinah Caudle of the Bristol News. Is there a romantic link?’

  ‘Difficult to say, sir,’ I said. ‘They were sitting together in the snug when I saw them earlier that day, but they’re fellow residents of the pub. It might be improper in some circles for a man and a woman to be drinking together in a public house, but they could scarcely ignore each other, either.’

 

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