Murder of the Bride (16 page)

Paternity

After a quick bowl
of lukewarm curry and a few poppadoms, Rex decided to have
another stab at Dudley Thorpe while Dartford was calling St. Ives. Preoccupied with the Worley murder, Lucas had not yet informed Dudley that his wife might have been making the story up about the kidnappers.

Undeterred by the mute hostility Rex felt directed at him from the young man, he sat opposite him and leaned forward, hands clasped loosely between his knees. “I wonder if I might have a few more minutes of your time.”

“I've told you and your police friends everything relevant to my wife's situation and to the murder enquiry. And now we're stuck here even longer on account of Mr. Newcombe's death. I'm losing count, mate. And I told you—I have nothing relevant to add.”

“Well, it can be hard to know what is relevant,” Rex submitted. “For example, what if I were to tell you that Timmy is not the father of Polly's baby?”

“What?” Dudley asked, jolted upright on the sofa. “Whose is it, then?”

“Yours.”

“Not true!”

Rex knew Donna wasn't stupid and would have at some time
come up with an explanation for the check to Dr. Forspaniak in
Derby. Why else would her husband have written out a large amount of money to a gynecologist without her knowledge?

“I think your wife may have an inkling about the baby,” Rex told Dudley. “PC Perrin is looking into her kidnapping, but it's possible Donna may have concocted the story to get back at you.”

“Wouldn't surprise me.”

“I'm assuming Polly refused to have an abortion and you never confessed to your brother the baby was yours.”

“Prove it. We're twins.”

“Not identical, only fraternal, so paternity could be proved. What if Timmy was incapable of producing a child due to complications from mumps in adolescence?”

Dudley stared at him dumbfounded. “How do you know?”

“It's not how I know that matters as much as who else knows.”

“He has one atrophied testicle, but that wouldn't make him completely impotent.”

“Why was Timmy not inoculated against mumps?”

“He was ill at the time. And then he contracted mumps when he was fourteen, and he became really ill. That's when our mum got him Monty, because Timmy was contagious and couldn't leave the house. I was immune as I'd had my jabs. How did you find out about the baby?”

Rex could not tell him about the scribble in his son's medical records noting the necessity for a MMR vaccine, “
viz. TPT
”—in other words, referencing Timothy P. Thorpe, the child's uncle, who'd had serious complications from mumps. Nor could he divulge the doctor's telltale expression of surprise regarding Polly's pregnancy.

“It started with a hunch,” was all Rex told Dudley. “That item you sent Dave to retrieve, is it something that could point to you as the dad?”

Dudley swore to himself and slumped back on the sofa. His white shirt sleeves were rolled up, darkly matted forearms culminating in strong, tanned hands and, Rex noted with interest, healthy pink nails growing out of perfect half moons.

“It meant nothing for either of us,” Dudley said in a hoarse voice as a tremor rippled across his shoulders. “She was on the rebound from Mack Simmons. It was just a bit of fun.”

A bit of fun with fatal consequences? Rex wondered. “What were you hiding at your mother's house?”

“A letter, if you must know. From Polly.”

“Do young people still write letters?” Rex asked with a measure of surprise.

“She sent a copy of the ultrasound with it. She said she couldn't get rid of the baby once she'd seen it. I'd offered to pay for a termination even though I wasn't entirely sure it was mine.”

“And you kept the letter and ultrasound. Sentimental reasons?”

Dudley slid back further into the sofa and leaned his head on the backrest, staring up into the open pyramid of the ceiling. “I don't know why I kept them. I suppose it felt wrong to throw something like that out with the rubbish. I couldn't keep them at my house; Donna likes to snoop. There's a space under the floorboards in my old room where I used to hide stuff growing up.”

“Do your mates know that Polly's baby is yours?”

“No chance. And Dave won't peek. The envelope's sealed. He doesn't know what it's about. No one knows except Polly and me. And she wouldn't tell anyone, least of all her mother who hates me—hated me—and her blabbermouth friend Amber.”

“Who's in love with you.”

Dudley grimaced. “I wouldn't get with that ugly chick if she was the last woman on earth.”

Rex stifled a harsh response to the man's callousness. “Polly didn't want to hurt her best friend by confiding she was having an affair with you, and she couldn't risk her mother finding out. She led Amber to believe she was still seeing Simmons behind her mother's back. But it will no doubt be confirmed shortly that he moved to Cornwall
in the middle of September, which means he can't be the baby's fa
ther.”

“Well, maybe it's someone else's.”

“I think you know that's not the case.”

“What's going to happen now?” Dudley asked in a tone which conveyed a calm sense of fatality.

“The final act,” Rex replied. “And then the curtain will come down.”

“On who?” Dudley asked grimly.

“M” for Murderer

Dartford crossed to inspector
Lucas in perplexed excitement.
Leaving Dudley anxiously brooding, Rex joined them in time to hear the sergeant recount his telephone conversation with Mack Simmons.

“He moved to St. Ives on the thirteenth of September and hasn't been out of Cornwall since,” Dartford stressed. “He's been busy setting up shop and got married meantime. Simmons said Carter had made it quite clear he was never to return to Aston, and he had no desire to anyway. Said he's happy with his missus, has a child on the way, and business is ticking over very nicely, thank you.” The sergeant closed his notebook. “Mack Simmons bears no grudges, says the windfall was a blessing. I don't think he's our
M
.”

He wasn't the father of Polly's baby either, Rex added to himself. Dr. Williamitis had confirmed her due date as late June, by then making it nine and a half months since Carter had run Mack Simmons out of town.

“With Simmons out of the picture, my guess is the grease spot on the note is something Newcombe used to oil the clocks he worked on,” the inspector said. “That would suggest he received the letter at his home in Romania.”

“No mail to his London hotel,” the sergeant corroborated. “No calls either—I checked,” he pre-empted Lucas, who had opened his mouth to speak. “And he didn't own a laptop, so—”

“There is one other person whose name begins with
M
that we know was at Worley Station this morning,” Lucas interjected. “Meredith Matthews. Plus she was in the reception room taking care of the victims around the time the figures went missing from the cake.” The inspector turned to Dartford. “We should question her again. She seems pretty sharp, that one. And she's been keeping a low profile, as has her boyfriend.”

“Meredith has no motive that I can see,” Rex countered. “In any
case, the body was on the tracks before her train arrived. Mabel Thorpe, our third
M
, is a more likely suspect. She's no stranger to arsenic.”

“Why would Mabel Thorpe want to kill her own grandchild?” the inspector asked doubtfully.

“‘Aye, there's the rub,' to quote Hamlet,” as Rex frequently did, since murder mystery cases made for a quantity of doubt and indecision, especially this one. “But if poor wee Timmy was cuckolded …”

“Oh, enough of the Elizabethan twaddle, Graves,” the inspector exclaimed with an irritable shake of his container of aspirin. “The case is complicated enough in plain English.”

“Mabel seems devoted to her other two grand-bairns, but she may have known that Polly's child was not Timmy's,” Rex said in plain Scottish.

“It's not? Oh ruddy hell,” the inspector responded glumly. “This
case is murkier than a cesspit. Whose is it, then?”

“Dudley's. He admitted as much.”

“There's a lot pointing to Dudley. But if Mabel Thorpe knew the baby was Dudley's, she still wouldn't want to poison it, would she?”

“She may be laboring under the misapprehension that the child is Mack Simmons'. Everyone knew about Polly and Mack.”

“It's all circumstantial,” Lucas lamented. “The most incriminating evidence is the letter
M
.
I'd like a bit more to go on. Have everyone submit a sample of their handwriting using phrases from the two notes,” he instructed his sergeant. “That'll test the culprit's nerves. If it can be proved Mabel was the messenger in both cases, we have our murderer, or at least a co-conspirator.”

“It is possible Newcombe was in contact with the groom's mother,” Dartford acknowledged, absently scratching the root of a cauliflower ear. “He may've wanted to find out the lie of the land before barging back into his first family's lives.”

“Why not contact his sister?”

“Gwen told me he hadn't been in touch with her in ten years,” Rex supplied. “And from what I gather, she wasn't in constant contact with the Newcombe family.”

Lucas gave the orange splodges on his face a vigorous rub. “According to the catering staff, Mabel Thorpe arrived at Newcombe Court at eight to help out with preparations for the reception and left shortly after nine to meet the aunt at Derby Station at 9:45. That gave her enough time to meet Newcombe off his 9:15 train at Worley first.”

“Even if she was late reaching Derby Station, Gwen wasn't on the train anyway, so nobody was the wiser,” Rex contributed.

“Get the remaining guests to write both right and left-handed,” Lucas directed the sergeant. “One by one in the kitchen. Hopefully we'll have more success with the writing samples than with the photos. Shame no one shot a consecutive video of the latter part of the reception.”

Rex joined the guests from Polly's old school. Clive had left some time earlier with his tail between his legs after protesting his ignorance of Jasmina's involvement in the crimes. Helen was dozing on a fireside sofa next to Diana Litton, who flashed a fuchsia smile at him. Of those present, she seemed the least affected by the drawn-out investigation.

“Getting anywhere?” she asked.

“We may have an answer soon.” He sat down in a wing armchair beside Roger Litton's.

“No good deed goes unpunished,” Diana's bald-headed husband proffered peevishly. “I wish I hadn't agreed to escort the Welsh woman partway up the steps. That makes me a person of interest in the case. Most of the other guests got to go home.”

Rex rifled through his notes, reminded of something.
The fat one
in the floaty mauve dress
, as the DJ had described Aunt Gwen in answer to his question about whether he had seen a short, dark-haired woman going up the tower steps. Harry's reply in the interrogative, which had not fully registered with Rex at the time, implied that he might have seen more than one short, dark-haired
woma
n—the other being Mabel Thorpe. “I wonder,” he mur
mured,
chewing thoughtfully on the cardboard corner of his notebook cover.

“What do you wonder?” Helen murmured, coming out of her doze.

“How would you describe Mabel Thorpe?”

His fiancée stretched and yawned. “Short, middle-aged brunette.”

“And Gwendolyn Jones?”

“The same, but rounder.”

“Exactly so.” The DJ might have seen both women enter the
stairwell at around the crucial time. Rex spun his pencil in the air and caught it adroitly. Helen eyed him with suspicion and, arranging
herself more comfortably against the sofa cushions, closed her lids.

“You were probably the last person to see her alive before she met her killer at the top of the tower,” Rex told Litton.

“Yes, I know,” the teacher agonized. “If I'd gone all the way up I would have seen the murderer, and Polly's aunt might still be alive.” He mopped his shiny dome with a red polka-dot handkerchief. “But, hang it all, I'm sick and tired of all the police interviews. We've been sitting here for hours.”

“Not much longer, Roger,” his wife consoled him.

Rex didn't have the heart to tell them about the writing test in store. The sergeant had already rounded up the family members. “Diana, when you mentioned the Borgias earlier and referred to arsenic being called ‘inheritance powder,' it made me think of Mithridates.”

Helen moaned in her sleep. She didn't open her eyes. He directed his attention back to the history teacher, who had straightened into a more alert posture on the sofa.

“Did it now?” she said approvingly. “And what can you tell me about the ancient king of Pontus?”

“That he was paranoid about being poisoned by claimants to his throne and had slaves taste his food. He concocted an antidote made out of honey, and if I'm not mistaken—”

“You are never mistaken,” Helen mumbled, apparently not asleep
after all.

“This is going back to my early school days,” Rex informed
Diana Litton. “But I seem to remember that the wily old king is credited with having tried to acquire immunity to poisoning by building up a tolerance to it.”

Diana extended her hands in quiet applause. “Very good, Rex. You must have a phenomenal retentive memory.”

“Like an elephant,” Helen remarked placidly from the cushions.

“Why are we discussing ancient history?” Roger Litton demanded querulously.

“We're trying to establish who might have been immune to the arsenic introduced into the cake,” Rex explained. “The only people who ate the top tier and didn't end up in hospital were Mabel Thorpe and her son.”

“Timmy was sick,” Diana pointed out.

“Aye, enough to avert suspicion. Mabel may have just pretended to eat the cake, but chances are she had some.”

“Where would she have procured arsenic?”

“Possibly from her late husband's supply. He had been taking it as a cure of last resort for his leukemia. My suspicion is Mabel Thorpe laced her morning tea with it, and Timmy's as well.”

This was as reasonable an explanation as any for why Mabel had hand-washed the cups, saucers and tea spoons while the rest of the breakfast items had been left in the dishwasher.

“Timmy can't have been in on the plot to murder his wife and child,” Diana insisted. “I simply cannot believe it of him. He worships Polly.”

“I never saw such a mismatched pair,” Roger Litton remarked. “Polly is fun and spontaneous, Timmy so serious. Attraction of opposites, do you suppose?”

“But if Mabel Thorpe wanted Timmy to inherit Newcombe Court,” Litton's wife asked Rex, “why not just murder Tom and Victoria Newcombe? And, I suppose, Aunt Gwen, for good measure?”

“That, Diana, was the stumbling block in the Mabel theory
until I made a few discoveries.”

“Well, I hope all will be revealed soon,” the history teacher said when no further information was forthcoming. She sighed softly. “Perhaps it's just as well Tom Newcombe didn't make it to the wedding. What a shock it would have been to see his estranged wife and daughter poisoned and his sister's skull crushed on the back patio. Any news on Polly and the baby's progress?”

“Not since Timmy reported the baby was in stable condition.”

“That's one piece of good news for Timmy.”

Until he gets the news about whose baby it actually is, Rex thought. Now for the fireworks.