‘Full marks for security,’ quipped Rattigan.
The front door was opened by a very large but well-proportioned woman in tweed skirt and Fair Isle jumper.
‘You’ll be Scotland Yard,’ she told them. ‘I’m Rosie Falkner. Come on in.’
Introductions completed they left their overcoats and hats in the high-ceilinged hall; its ornate staircase and panelled walls speaking of more prosperous times.
‘They’re mostly in the parlour,’ said Rosie. ‘Did you want me to call the others?’
‘If you’d be so kind,’ said Felix. ‘I’d like to speak to them all together first, if I may. Before we go in, can you store these chaps somewhere handy until I need them? It might be a bit daunting to have four policemen descend on them at once. I’ll keep Sergeant Rattigan by me; he’s my muse and scribe.’
‘I’ll put them in the kitchen,’ smiled Rosie; her interested gaze meeting that of the equally Brobdingnagian Rattigan. She pushed opened the kitchen door. ‘Kettle on the range, gentleman. Caddy on the shelf, milk in the jug. Make yourselves at home.’
They found the parlour quite filled with people.
‘These ladies are my sisters, Delia and Beatrice,’ said Rosie, working her way round the room. ‘This is my brother Harry and his wife Helen, and over there are their children Archie, Lydia and Ethel. Ethel is the one on the sofa with our cousin, Doctor Charles Bartlett. Walter, his father, is on the arm of the armchair, and sitting in it is Florence Gray, Alf Brown’s fiancée. Alf has popped back to his farm but is also staying here at present, as requested.’ She turned as another man and woman entered the room. ‘And this is my other sister, Alison, with her friend Albert Little. And none of us, Mr Felix, is a poisoner, including Alf Brown.’
‘Hear, hear,’ muttered Walter.
Felix smiled. ‘No-one would be happier than me to confirm that fact, Miss Falkner. Let us hope that I can. However, I know many of you are eager to return to your jobs and professions, so I shall waste no time in commencing this investigation. Is there anywhere suitable for conducting interviews? I shall need to talk to each of you privately and take your statements as to what you witnessed here, or, indeed, did not.’
‘We’ve found you a room, and lit a fire,’ said Rosie. ‘Come on, I’ll show you.’
‘He seems all right,’ said Harry, when they’d gone. ‘Not some grim-faced martinet anyway.’
‘He’s terribly handsome, don’t you think?’ said Lydia. ‘Nice eyes.’
‘All the better to see you with,’ said Walter, widening his own.
Charles was heard to mutter something to Ethel, causing her to giggle.
‘That’s all right, then,’ said Helen cynically, ‘polite with nice eyes. Let’s just hope he’s a fast worker.’
‘I’ve seen him before,’ said Charles.
‘Oh, where?’
‘The hospital. He was pointed out to me. I don’t know why he was there. On a case, I suppose. His father is, or was, a well-known London surgeon, for what it’s worth.’
‘Sounds posh for a copper,’ observed Albert. ‘Anyway, I’m off. Back to where I belong.’
‘Albert, don’t go,’ said Beatrice. ‘There’s no need to now, after all. You’ll be much more comfortable here than on Jeremy’s floor.’
‘That’s what I told him,’ said Alison.
Albert glanced sourly at Walter. ‘You won’t be wanting a jailbird in the house. Might pinch the family silver.’
◆◆◆
‘This’ll suit us very well,’ said Felix, glancing around the room. ‘But isn’t it someone’s bedroom?’
‘It was Mother’s, said Rosie. ‘I hope you don’t mind. She’d broken a femur and was in plaster so we moved her down here for Christmas. Normally it’s the study, and not much used. We’ll take the bed out later. It’s got to go back up anyway.’
‘Please don’t do that on our account, Miss Falkner,’ said Felix. The table and chairs are all we need. Perhaps an extra chair. When did she break her leg?’
‘During that really cold spell at the end of November. She slipped on some ice and fell out of the hayloft. She was very active before that.’
‘She couldn’t get around much in plaster, presumably?’
‘No, she was pretty helpless really. Dr Absalom made her stay in bed until just before Christmas. When she first came down, we made her a sort of wheelchair out of a handcart – she wouldn’t accept a proper one – but she was starting to get around on two sticks.’
‘Her mind was all right was it?’
‘Heavens yes. Sharp as a tack.’
‘Did you love your mother, Miss Falkner?’
Rosie smiled sadly. ‘I suppose you’ll be asking all of us that. I did love her, yes, but I didn’t always like her very much. None of us did. You may as well know that, as you’ll find out anyway. She treated us like children and we could never do anything right. She was very opinionated and always knew best and woe betide you if you crossed her. My brother couldn’t stand it and ran away to the war. He didn’t have to go, being agricultural, but he enlisted immediately. He never came back to farming.’
‘One assumes he got on with her all right latterly, since he’s here?’
‘Oh yes. They motor up fairly often, now they’ve got a car.’
Felix turned to Rattigan. ‘I think we’ll make this lady our first interviewee since we’ve got her. Is that all right, Miss Falkner?’
‘Might as well,’ agreed Rosie. ‘You’ll want another chair. I’ll fetch one. No, it’s all right. I’ll do it.’
Chapter Nine
‘. . . which makes you the second eldest,’ said Felix, scanning Rattigan’s preliminary notes. ‘Do you see yourself as spokeswoman for your siblings?’
‘Not really,’ said Rosie. ‘I just happen to be the largest and noisiest. Delia is the quiet one, Beatrice is the clever one and Alison is the feminine one. You won’t see all that, of course, you’ll just see our size.’
‘Not at all, Miss Falkner,’ smiled Felix. ‘Detectives can see into your very soul. Were you shocked at your mother’s death? Could you have conceived of it happening that way?’
‘Yes, we were very shocked,’ said Rosie. ‘We’re still shocked. I can imagine someone losing their temper and pushing her down the stairs or something, but not poison. You have to plan that in advance, don’t you? You have to think, I’m going to kill that person. It’s a dreadful thing and you wonder how anyone can do it.’
‘Whom do you think did it, then,’ said Felix, ‘if you don’t believe it was anyone in this house?’
‘It must have been some mad person, surely? Someone who wanted to poison a complete stranger. It would be easy to doctor a chocolate, put it back in the box and slip it back on sale. It must happen.’ She observed him doubtfully for a moment. ‘I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, Mr Felix, especially under the circumstances. You might think we should be in mourning and everything, but now she’s dead I think we’re all a bit relieved. We wouldn’t have wished it on her, obviously, but we feel that we’ve got our lives back. We felt it to some extent when she broke her leg and couldn’t boss us about – not easily anyway – and would have felt the same if she’d got ill and died instead of being murdered. It’s not really any different is it, from that point of view? We’d have felt right hypocrites, sitting around weeping in black. I would anyway. Can you understand that?’
‘Perfectly,’ said Felix. ‘I commend your honesty. What about your father? When did he die, if you don’t mind me asking?’
Raising an eyebrow, Rosie calculated. ‘Eighteen ninety-two, I think. Why?’
‘Can you remember him? You’d have been twelve.’
‘Yes, perfectly.’
‘What was he like?’
Rosie waggled her head considering her reply. ‘He drank and chased women and my parents used
to fight all the time, but he was always kind to us. So, if you’re going to ask — yes, I loved him too.’
‘Violent?’
‘Not to us. But he was a huge, fierce-looking man, rather frightening if you didn’t know him, which is where we get it from, of course. Our size, I mean.’
Seeing her glance at Rattigan, Felix smiled. ‘Fear not, Miss Falkner, my sergeant is none of those things. Unless he does them in secret. How did your father come to die so young? Or was he much older than your mother?’
‘He was forty, I think. No-on knows what he died of. We found him dead in a field. The drink probably. Mother had a horror of it; she wouldn’t allow it in the house.’
‘Yet she married him.’
‘She wanted to farm; it was her whole life. She used to say that she’d married the farm really but was obliged to take him as well, along with the other livestock. She was always saying things like that. She hated him. After he died, she just carried on as if he’d never existed. That might have been all right if she’d got on with our men but I’m sorry to say she didn’t. She treated them dreadfully, and one by one they drifted away. Eventually we had to do everything ourselves. We couldn’t manage all three-hundred acres, or anything like it, so Alf Brown’s father suggested he rent some of it from us and Alf still does. Eventually we persuaded her to take on poor Jeremy, who’s got a gammy leg. She was horrid to him and worked him nearly to death and when he got ill, she tried to sack him, though we managed to prevent that.’ She looked him firmly in the eye. ‘Perhaps you can begin to see, Mr Felix, why we felt about her the way we did. But we didn’t poison her; she was still our mother.’
Felix nodded sympathetically. ‘A sad tale. What about Mr Brown, your tenant? Did she get on all right with him, before this accusation? Any tensions?’
‘None at all, oddly enough. It’s strange to hear him described as a tenant, though of course that’s what he is. He’s a good man and a good friend to us. I don’t know why mother picked on him; it’s ridiculous. We can only think the poison was affecting her mind.’
Felix nodded. ‘Tell me about the poisoning. Exactly what happened, in your own words. Were you there?’
◆◆◆
‘The usual, is it?’ said Stanley Craddock. Not waiting for an answer, he reached above him for Alf Brown’s tankard, hanging with the others over the bar.
Alf shook his head. ‘Make it a double whiskey and we’ll go from there.’
‘That bad, eh?’
‘You know she accused me of poisoning her?’
‘She never did!’
‘Oh yes. With her dying breath it was. I ask you, why would I want to do that, of all people? I’ve never done her any harm, that I know of, and I’ve done a few favours for them, over the years. Why, I even cleared their track for them after the snow. We did give her some of those chocolates, but so did other people. They were all over the place, and people eating them. She even offered me one from the poisoned box; something with nuts in, it was. I genuinely thought I was a goner for a few minutes there. Bloody terrifying. Florrie would have been a widow again before we were even married. She offered Florrie one too, but she refused, thank God.’
‘How’s she taking it?’
‘Gone a bit quiet, unsurprisingly. Fortunately, she’s made a friend, Harry’s eldest girl, and she gets on all right with Harry and Helen, and Walter of course, so I cleared off for a few hours. We’re not supposed to leave the house but I’d have gone mad, sitting there with nothing to do. You haven’t met Harry, have you? He’d be before your time. I’d have brought him down for a pint if things had been different.’
‘You know Scotland Yard’s arrived? They’ve booked rooms here.’
Alf straightened in surprise. ‘Now he tells me! No, I didn’t. What’s he like?’
‘Seems all right. Friendly sort of chap. Not what you’d expect really. Dresses like a country squire and sounds like one. Got three plainclothes sergeants with him.’
‘Four of ’em, eh?’ said Alf cynically. ‘D’you think they mean business?’
◆◆◆
The sisters were sitting together at the kitchen table, apart from Delia, who was chopping vegetables.
‘You’d do better to ask what he didn’t want to know,’ said Rosie, stirring her tea. ‘Everything I’ve done and everything I’ve seen and everything I’ve thought, right back to Mother’s tumble. He even asked about Father; what he was like and everything. He has a way about him, that one. You find yourself telling him things you normally wouldn’t.’
‘You didn’t mention the letters?’ said Beatrice anxiously.
‘No, of course not. We agreed.’
‘What letters?’ said Alison.
‘Sorry,’ said Delia, ‘you weren’t here. We agreed not to tell him about Mother pinching our letters.’
‘And replying to them,’ said Beatrice. ‘No-one need know about that, and they won’t if we don’t tell them. He might think we’d do her in for something as wicked as that, and we don’t want him getting ideas, do we?’
‘You didn’t, I suppose?’ said Alison. ‘Any of you?’
‘Didn’t what?’
‘Do her in.’
‘Alison Falkner!’ cried Delia.
‘Well, someone did,’ said Alison matter-of-factly. ‘I had dark thoughts myself, I was that angry.’
‘You wouldn’t actually have done it though, would you?’ said Rosie. ‘That’s the difference.’
‘I don’t know, to be honest. Not poison anyway. But if it was one of us, they’d do well to own up, so we can protect them. What have you done with the sergeants?’
‘John and Paul? He asked me to send them in.’
‘John and Paul, is it now!’
‘They’re nice chaps; notwithstanding appearances in John’s case. He’s married to another photographer, you know. She’s quite well-known, apparently.’
‘I’m surprised he’s married to anyone,’ said Rosie. ‘He looks like he’d cut your throat for tuppence.’ She turned to Alison. ‘You don’t really think it was one of us, do you?’
◆◆◆
Sergeant Nash knocked on the parlour door and stuck his head round it. ‘Fingerprints now being taken in the dining room, ladies and gentlemen, if you would be so kind.’
‘All of us?’ asked Harry. ‘Children too?’
‘If you please, sir. For elimination purposes, you know.’
‘Let’s get it over with,’ sighed Helen. ‘Come on you two.’
‘Thank you, Miss Falkner,’ said Yardley, who was working at the dining-room table. ‘A nice, clear one. Three more here for you, Nash.’
‘Do they vary, then?’ asked Ethel, as Nash’s camera flashed nearby.
‘Oh yes, considerably. And as people get older their prints can wear out, like the treads on a car. You next, Doctor?’
‘What are mine like?’ asked Alf.
Yardley smiled. ‘I wouldn’t advise you to take up housebreaking, sir — very distinctive.’
◆◆◆
‘This is terribly naughty, you know,’ said Florence, glancing at her bedroom door. ‘I feel like a scarlet woman.’
‘Nice naughty?’ enquired Walter, sliding a hand up her thigh.
Florence feigned to consider the matter. ‘Um, yes, I’d say so, all in all. Mind my stocking!’
‘Going to marry me, then?’
‘I suppose I better had. As long as you promise to shower me with furs and jewellery and take me to exotic places.’
‘Harrogate is exotic.’
‘Well, it’s a start, I suppose. Better than Arnoldswell anyway.’ She kissed him again. ‘It’s a bit awkward, though, isn’t it? I was hoping you’d take me away from here, and now we’re forbidden to leave.’
‘Which I will do, naturally. I wonder what would happen if w
e just pushed off? We could collect your belongings while he’s conveniently stuck here, and simply carry on.’
‘They might drag us back in handcuffs. That would be too awful. I suppose they can’t connect you with this business, can they?’
Walter sighed. ‘Possibly they can, in a manner of speaking. I’m hoping they won’t think of it.’
‘What!’ Pushing him away, Florence abruptly sat up. ‘Walter Bartlett, please don’t tell me you’re a poisoner!’
Walter chuckled. ‘Hardly that. I’d best explain.’
‘I think you’d better had! No, listen! He’s back.’
‘Damn!’
Chapter Ten
‘Where have you been, Mr Brown?’ said Felix severely. ‘You were instructed not to leave the house.’
‘Yes, but I only popped home,’ said Alf. ‘I’ve a farm to run, you know. I couldn’t see there was any harm in that. There’s no telephone here, so I had to go in person.’
‘There is a reason for these things, sir, and it could be said that Mrs Falkner accused you of murder, which is a very serious matter. However, take a seat. We’ll leave your personal details until the end, I think. Cigarette?’
Alf took one. ‘Thank you, Chief inspector, but it wasn’t quite like that, was it? One could equally interpret Mrs Falkner’s words as meaning that my actions, in her eyes, led to her being murdered. Not the same thing at all.’
‘Yes, we do realise there are other possible interpretations. Any idea what actions those might be?’
Alf shook his head. ‘I’ve no idea, frankly.’
‘All right, let’s start at the beginning. How did you come to be here on Boxing morning?’
‘We were invited to Christmas dinner and it was suggested we eat with them again on Boxing Day. There would have been no-one at home to keep the place warm so we agreed to stay the night. Not that it was much of an improvement.’
‘That being you and your fiancée?’
‘Mrs Florence Gray, yes.’
Death Among the Kisses (The Inspector Felix Mysteries Book 10) Page 6