Die Laughing (22 page)

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Authors: Carola Dunn

BOOK: Die Laughing
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“Good reason? Yes, the best of reasons. I went to see Raymond.”
“Oh dear!”
“He wrote saying he had to talk to me, and I was to go in the back way. We didn't usually meet in his house, but I'd done it once before, when we first … I knew the way, through the alley and the garden. He was waiting at the door, and he hurried me into his surgery. What a place to be told you're not wanted any longer!”
“Why didn't he just write to tell you it was over?”
“He wanted to see me one last time. He was really rather keen on me. I liked him a lot, and we had lots of fun together, but on my part it wasn't exactly a grand passion. I suppose that makes it worse, in a way.”
Daisy's agreement remained tactfully unspoken. “Fun” didn't seem to her an adequate excuse for infidelity. “What happened?” she asked.
“He was in a bit of a dither, because he'd had some difficult patients and the last had only just left. He kept telling me to speak quietly because he wasn't sure whether the nurse was still in the waiting room, and the servants might come downstairs at any moment. Of course, they could have seen me coming up the garden path—he hadn't thought of that.” She shrugged. “Actually, he was pretty upset about having to say good-bye, so I dare say he wasn't thinking too clearly at all.”
“
Having
to say good-bye?”
“His wife was going to have a baby. Is going to. Ray said he had to stand by her, it was the only decent thing to do. That was all right with me. All good things come to an end. But poor Ray was frightfully hangdog about the whole business, so I thought it might make it easier for him if I wasn't too kind and understanding. I told him in no uncertain terms that I'd had enough of him and never wanted to see or hear from him again.” She bit her upper lip. “And I never did. I flounced out, and he must have gone straight to his ‘cheerer-upper.'”
“His …?”
“That's what he called that damned gas.” Her voice rose. Her back was slightly turned towards the other two, and she seemed to have forgotten their presence. Daisy could see Sakari, who was listening avidly, but not Mel, who was no doubt trying not to listen. Gwen Walker continued, more and more agitated. “When I heard he was dead, I hoped it was an accident but I was afraid he'd killed himself. Why do they think he was murdered?”
“They have evidence,” said Daisy. This was not the moment to boast that she had discovered the evidence.
“I never even dreamt it was murder until your husband started asking questions. After that, Francis couldn't pretend any longer that he didn't know about Raymond and me. I told him it was all over before Ray died, and that was when he convinced himself that I'd killed him. He wouldn't believe me.” She bowed her head and covered her face with her hands. “He wouldn't believe me, so why should anyone else? I can't prove I didn't.”
“It's a pity you lied to the police. It makes it harder for them to believe anything you tell them now.”
“I realize that now. I haven't been able to think straight for days. But lying about where I was is the least of it.” She reached for the cigarette box, took one out and lit it, then left it to die in the ashtray. “I've been abysmally stupid.”
Stupid seemed a peculiar way to describe murdering one's husband. “What have you done?” Daisy asked.
The sitting-room door opened. In came Mrs. Bates with a tray. “Coffee, madam.”
“But—”
“I asked if you wanted coffee and you said yes, madam.” She set the tray on the table and departed.
Blast the woman, Daisy thought, hoping the interruption was not going to put an end to the flow of confidences.
E
xasperated, Gwen Walker rolled her eyes at Daisy. “It's no earthly use arguing with the woman. She never listens to a word I say unless she wants to. If she thinks I ought to offer my guests coffee, coffee they shall have. Will you have a cup, Mrs. Fletcher? Mrs. Prasad, Mrs. Germond, may I offer you coffee?”
The four cups on the tray had reminded Mrs. Walker of the other two, and there wasn't much chance now that her apparent frankness would continue. Daisy swallowed a sigh as Sakari joined them eagerly, Melanie reluctantly. At least Mel was far too polite to refuse to accept coffee from someone she knew to be a forger and suspected of being a murderer. A snub would turn the probability of no new revelations into a certainty.
Pouring coffee, dealing with sugar and hot milk, Mrs. Walker was the complete gracious hostess. She passed a plate of simply delicious, crisp, orange peel-flavoured biscuits, homemade. Daisy decided Mrs. Bates had her good
points after all, but for the next few minutes the talk was all of unsatisfactory servants.
Listening, Daisy made mental notes of one or two points for her article, despite her impatience. She was beginning to despair, though, when the front doorbell rang.
Mrs. Walker stopped with a gasp in the middle of a sentence and turned so pale Daisy was afraid she might faint. They sat in stiff silence, the word “Police” unspoken on everyone's lips.
The housekeeper took her time answering the bell. At last they heard her footsteps in the hall. The front window was open, and through it came a man's voice. “Snyder, miss, of the
Daily Graphic
. Now, you look like an intelligent woman. I expect you can tell me all about what's going on here.”
Mrs. Bates said not a word but the door closed with a thud. Definitely she had her good points.
Melanie moved swiftly to the window, closed it, and pulled the orange-and-black jazz-print curtains across, then turned on the electric light. As she returned to her seat, Gwen Walker started to cry.
Sakari reached over to pat her hand. “It is better to get it off your chest,” she advised, “if I have the correct idiom.”
“Francis refused to believe I hadn't killed Raymond.” The words came fast now, punctuated by sniffs. “We were sitting in the kitchen, drinking that ghastly Ovaltine he's … he was so keen on, and he said he was too upset to sleep. He asked for one of my sleeping powders. He wanted to take it in his Ovaltine, so I went up and got one for him. Then I went back up to bed.”
“Did you take a powder?” Daisy asked.
“Not then. I don't like to take them too often, and I was so exhausted I felt sure I'd sleep without. I did go to sleep quickly, but not soundly. You know how it is when you have bad dreams and you keep half waking, not quite sure if you're still dreaming? That's how it was. Then I did wake up, completely, and looked at the clock. It has luminous hands. It was well past one and the light on the landing showed under the door.”
“You had turned it off?”
“No, I left it on for Francis, but he'd have turned it off when he came to bed. Electricity costs money.” Her mocking tone suggested she was quoting an oft-repeated and much-despised dictum. “In spite of which, I turned on the bedside lamp. His bed was empty. I tried to go to sleep again, but then I thought maybe he'd taken the powder and fallen asleep at the kitchen table. It seems silly now, but I worried about what Mrs. Bates would think when she found him in the morning.”
“You English!” Sakari exclaimed. “Always worrying about what the servants will think. It is futile.”
“Yet one does,” said Mel.
The Indian attitude towards servants might add an interesting sidelight to her article, Daisy thought.
“Francis would have been mortified,” said Mrs. Walker, “and he was difficult enough to live with already. So I went down. I opened the kitchen door. You've all smelt gas. You can't imagine what it's like to breathe in a lungful. Somehow I managed to slam the door shut. For a while, I don't know how long, I couldn't do anything but choke and wheeze.”
Involuntarily, Daisy raised her hand to her throat as if she
were having trouble breathing. So did Mel and Sakari. They exchanged rueful glances. If Mrs. Walker was lying, she was doing it very well.
“I wasn't thinking very clearly,” she went on, “as you can imagine. I don't remember wondering what had happened.”
“It didn't cross your mind that the major was committing suicide?” Daisy asked, more than a trifle incredulous.
Mrs. Walker shook her head. “All I could think about was that the more gas kept pouring into the kitchen, the more likely the whole house would blow up. I had to turn it off. I'd read somewhere about tying a wet cloth over one's mouth and nose in case of fire. I don't know if it's of any use against gas, but that's what I did. I soaked one of the hand towels in the downstairs cloakroom—you know the sort, linen with one corner embroidered. With that across my face, I dashed into the kitchen, holding my breath, and turned off the gas tap.”
“And saw the major.”
“Yes, I saw him, of course. Should I have tried to help him? I barely got myself out of there. I breathed some more gas and went through the whole choking thing again, nausea too. I
couldn't
go back in. It was much too late for him, anyway. For the room to be so full of gas, he must have been breathing it for an age.” She was silent for a long moment. “Until he stopped breathing.”
Silence again.
“What's hard to understand,” said Daisy, “is why he'd choose that way out. He was so very soldierly. Why didn't he shoot himself?”
Like an officer and a gentleman
, she thought but didn't say.
Horribly, Gwen Walker started to laugh. There was more than a touch of hysteria in her laugh, and more than a
touch of bitterness. “Soldierly!” she spat out. “He fooled everyone, didn't he? Me too, for long enough to marry the war hero. Francis never saw a battlefield in his life. Army Service Corps, he was. He never even crossed the Channel. And somehow he succeeded in going into the War poor and coming out well off.”
This time the shocked silence was filled with halfincredulous disgust. Melanie broke it.
“He sold military supplies?” she asked tentatively, as if she thought she must have misunderstood.
“‘Diverted' them. That's how he put it. He couldn't resist boasting to me, knowing I wouldn't give him away. But he never really believed he'd got away with it, whence the penny-pinching. And thence”—she looked at Melanie—“my expertise in forging his signature.”
“So you did write the suicide note,” said Daisy.
“Oh yes. I knew, from the cushions he'd taken into the kitchen to make himself comfortable, that he'd been to his den. When I recovered enough to move, I went in there and found the note he'd written. He said he was doing it because I had betrayed him and murdered my lover and he couldn't stand the disgrace. The bastard!”
The ugly word broke on a sob and she started crying in earnest. Daisy pressed a handkerchief into her hand and looked at the others. Mel seemed stunned; it was all too much for her gentle nature. Sakari's dark eyes were alight with speculation.
She caught Daisy's glance and said softly, “Well, sleuthhound, what is your opinion?”
By unspoken consent, they both rose and moved to the far end of the room.
“I think she's telling the truth,” said Daisy. “What she's said answers so many odd questions which needed explaining. Alec may be able to pick holes in her story, but I can't see any at present.”
“So the major killed himself. Did he also kill Talmadge?”
“As she wrote in her note?”
“Oh, did she?”
“Alec told me so. But I think it was a bit of tit-for-tat and mostly to satisfy the police. I doubt she believes it, or she would have made a point of it to us.”
“This sleuthing is very complicated,” Sakari complained.
“Alec would say I'm just theorizing wildly. The major as murderer just doesn't feel right to me. I can't even see him as brave enough to confront Talmadge, let alone kill him. He shot his bolt when he stole the supplies bound for our men in the trenches.”
“Thus it seems to me also.”
“Who do you think did it, then, Sakari?”
“From the start I have theorized wildly. Shall I tell you who was my first guess?”
“Yes, who?”
Sakari glanced at the others. “I do not wish to malign an innocent person. I will whisper the name.” She leant close and whispered.
Daisy stared at her, sinking into the nearest chair as the leftover pieces of the jigsaw puzzle fell neatly into place. At last the picture was complete.
 
 
“It seems so obvious now, darling.” Daisy had inveigled Alec into the major's den when he arrived at the Walkers'.
“What does?” he demanded impatiently, and Tom Tring's moustache twitched.
Ernie Piper's murmur was not quite sotto voce: “Whatever it is, it's bound to be right.”
“As Sakari says, it's the only solution that is psychologically sound.”
This time Tom snorted audibly, but whether in amusement or scepticism Daisy wasn't sure. Ernie looked rather dismayed.
Alec looked furious, his dark brows gathering in a thundercloud above hail grey eyes. “Great Scott, Daisy, you've been discussing the case with your friends? I thought I could at least trust you not to do that!”
“I haven't told them a thing, darling,” Daisy said with perhaps not quite one hundred per cent accuracy. “Like the rest of St. John's Wood, they've read every newspaper they could lay their hands on. They know the people involved, better than I do, having lived here longer. And I thought you'd be pleased that I asked them to come with me when Mrs. Walker insisted on seeing me. After all, if she'd been the murderer, I might have been done in by now.”
Gritting his teeth in a way that would have made his deceased dentist cringe, Alec said, “So you've taken her under your wing now.”
“No. She's really behaved rather badly, much worse than Daphne. But I don't believe she's killed anyone. Wait till you hear her story.”
“That is what I came here for!”
“I know, darling. Just let me finish first.”
“As far as I can see, you haven't even started yet.”
“Well, you keep interrupting. Why don't you sit down and stop towering over me?”
With a resigned sigh, Alec sat and motioned to Tring and Piper to do likewise.
“Where's Sergeant Mackinnon?” Daisy asked. She wasn't exactly postponing the moment when she had to expose her theory to the experts, she just wondered.
Tom answered. “When his super heard the chief was applying for a warrant, he found another job for him.”
“Did you get a warrant, darling?”
“Yes. There's quite enough evidence against Mrs. Walker to persuade a judge. Whether it's enough for a jury, in the teeth of a good defence lawyer, I'm less certain. Which is why I have to talk to her before I serve the damn thing, and why I'm giving your ideas a hearing. Or hoping to. For pity's sake, Daisy, get on with it.”
Daisy took a deep breath. “Right-oh. First I have to tell you—with Gwen Walker's permission—that she was the veiled lady in the alley.”
“Aha!”
“The letter Talmadge wrote to her, the one Daphne saw, didn't say good-bye, it asked her to come. She says he was pretty keen on her and wanted to see her one last time. When she arrived, he was anxious because he'd just finished with a patient and wasn't sure whether Nurse Hensted was still in the waiting room and might overhear them.”
Alec sat up straight. “Go on.”
“So he spoke quietly as he told her about Daphne and the baby. He said he had to do the decent thing, but he was frightfully upset at parting with her. She decided he might
feel better if she wasn't too kind, so she told him she'd had enough of him and never wanted to hear from him again. And she's pretty sure she raised her voice when she said it.”
“Ah!” said Tom Tring.
Daisy looked round at Piper. He had taken out his notebook and was scribbling furiously.
“Don't write this down, please, Mr. Piper, but I seem to recall telling you, Alec, that Raymond Talmadge probably had to beat off applicants for the position of mistress.”
“Someone else told me something of the sort, too,” Alec admitted. “I can't remember who, or exactly what they said, but I do recall having a feeling I'd learnt something significant and being unable to pin it down.”
“And Daphne once mentioned, in passing,” she went on, “that Miss Hensted was ‘nuts on' her husband. I didn't see the significance.”

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