Shades of Murder (18 page)

‘Ask him!’ She flung out a hand and pointed at William Oakley. ‘Ask him about his behaviour. I saw him carrying on with Daisy Joss with my own eyes and I spoke very sharply to the girl about it. There were others knew about it, too. Poor Mrs Oakley told me herself, the day she died, that she intended to dismiss Daisy the very next morning.’

Mr Green knew he held the whip hand. ‘Mrs Button, you are free with your claims that others knew. But no one but yourself has actually made such claims public.’

Mrs Button, despite her emotion, had become aware of the displaced wig. She raised a hand and pushed it back into place. ‘Other servants knew, but they’ll be afraid for their situations and not want to speak up!’ She spat the words defiantly. ‘And as for gentlemen, they don’t go telling tales on one another, do they? It doesn’t mean they haven’t got tales they could tell.’

The public liked that. Several jury members smiled. But Stanley wrote on the notepad,
I said she’d go to pieces
. He pushed the pad towards the Reuter’s man so that he could read it.

‘Calm yourself, Mrs Button,’ urged Mr Green duplicitously. He was clearly delighted. ‘Let us return to the evening in question. You have said you heard your employer go up to bed shortly before ten o’clock.’

The witness confirmed this warily.

‘But you yourself didn’t go up until eleven. What were you doing during that hour?’

‘My duties,’ said Mrs Button loftily. ‘I had to check that the skivvy had washed the dishes properly and not broken anything. I mixed up a hot drink for the girl who had a cold. It was lemon juice and honey. I stood over her while she drank it. Then Mr Watchett, the gardener, came in about vegetables. I sat for a while drawing up plans for meals the next day and writing a note for the washerwoman. Then I went up to bed myself, or I started to—’

Mr Green interrupted. ‘Yes, quite. Let us stay in the kitchen for a while, if we may. What time did Watchett the gardener arrive?’

Mrs Button looked uncertain and said she couldn’t rightly say. Possibly half-past nine.

‘This seems to me very late,’ said Mr Green. ‘How long did he remain?’

‘Half an hour, perhaps a bit longer,’ confessed Mrs Button.

Mr Green smiled at her, something which appeared to fill her with
alarm. ‘To discuss vegetables? A fascinating subject indeed to have taken you both so long. Did you discuss anything else?’

Mrs Button was belatedly learning to be careful. ‘I asked after Mrs Watchett. She has trouble with her legs. They swell up something dreadful, full of water, and the doctor was to draw it off.’

‘So you discussed Mrs Watchett’s legs and vegetables. You also discussed the family which employed you both, perhaps?’

Mrs Button rightly divining which way the wind was blowing, said promptly, ‘No, sir. I don’t gossip.’

But she was in Mr Green’s toils.

‘But if Watchett arrived at half-past nine, as you’ve told this court, and remained over half an hour, he was presumably there when you heard Mr Oakley go up to bed? Something which happened, you said, shortly before ten o’clock.’

Mrs Button said she supposed so.

‘You suppose so?’ Mr Green would let nothing escape him. ‘But it must have been so. I find it strange, Mrs Button, that in the middle of this animated conversation about vegetables and Mrs Watchett’s infirmity, you heard Mr Oakley go upstairs.’

‘Well, I did,’ said Mrs Button sourly.

‘And remarked upon it to Watchett?’

‘I may have done so, sir.’

‘And did you,’ asked Mr Green, ‘also remark that it was an early hour for your master to retire?’

Mrs Button repeated that she may have done.

Mr Green hovered, a small furry predator about to sink sharp teeth into its prey. ‘Did you tell Watchett about Mrs Oakley’s pain from her drawn tooth? That she, too, had retired early because of it?’

‘Yes, I believe I did,’ said Mrs Button cautiously. But it was clear she knew her caution came too late. ‘But only to say the poor lady was suffering greatly.’

‘And you still claim,’ Mr Green asked silkily, ‘that you did not discuss the family?’

Distressed, Mrs Button protested, ‘That is not fair, sir.’

‘We are not concerned with fairness but with fact,’ she was told. ‘Now then, while Watchett—’

Taylor, the prosecution counsel, was also well aware that things weren’t going his way. He uttered a dignified protest. ‘My lord, the defence is seeking to confuse the witness and trail red herrings of the most blatant kind.’

The judge had his own doubts. ‘Is all this business about the gardener relevant, Mr Green?’

‘It is, indeed!’ said Mr Green firmly. ‘As I shall demonstrate.’

‘Well, demonstrate it quickly,’ ordered the judge.

Mr Green, suitably chastened, hurried to make his point. ‘Mrs Button, we’ve established that you and the gardener were together in the kitchen for much of the evening, after you’d sent the skivvy home and the sick housemaid to bed. Did you offer your visitor any form of sustenance?’

‘He had a piece of my Madeira cake,’ said Mrs Button with a slight air of pride.

It came before the proverbial fall.

‘Very nice,’ said Mr Green. ‘And perhaps a glass of Madeira wine to go with it?’

‘No, sir, it was sherry,’ Mrs Button was betrayed into saying.

Mr Taylor had closed his eyes and appeared to be praying. He could see his case beginning to crumble as when the first incoming waves lap at a child’s sandcastle on the shore.

‘Sherry?’ cried Mr Green, bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet. ‘Aha! You and Watchett were sampling your master’s sherry while you were discussing vegetables and Mrs Watchett’s legs!’

‘It was the kitchen sherry,’ argued Mrs Button. ‘I keep it for the trifle.’

But Mr Green rolled merrily onward. ‘So after some time gossiping with Watchett and drinking sherry, the gardener went home to his long-suffering wife and you went up to bed. I put it to you, Mrs Button, that your wits were sadly fuddled by then.’

‘If you mean I was drunk,’ cried Mrs Button, ‘you’re wrong! I only had the one glass.’

Stanley Huxtable wrote,
Laughter in court
. As order was being restored, he leaned towards the Reuter’s man and whispered, ‘That’s it – you owe me a pint.’

When Markby had returned from the football match on Saturday evening, after a detour via his sister’s home, he’d found Meredith sitting in the kitchen, a glass of wine before her. Her expression was unusually closed and angry, her mouth set, her eyes imperfectly shuttering inner turmoil. His first impulse was to wonder whether this had anything to do with him. He glanced at his wristwatch. Was he late? Had he promised to take her out somewhere this evening? Good God, why was he thinking like this? This was how it had been when he’d been married to Rachel, evening after evening coming home to find storm cones hoisted.

‘What’s up?’ he asked cautiously.

‘Nothing,’ she said automatically.

‘Why do women always say that when it’s obviously not true? Here you are, hunched over a bottle, drowning your sorrows—’

‘One glass!’ she protested indignantly. ‘I was just having one glass to help me think.’ She tossed back her fringe of dark brown hair and made an obvious effort to sound normal. ‘Good game?’

‘Middling,’ he replied. ‘Paul was happy enough. His team won. Mind if I join you?’ He fetched himself a glass and poured wine into it. ‘Cheers!’ He saluted her. ‘Now tell me.’

‘Don’t want to,’ she mumbled, avoiding his gaze.

‘Confession is good for the soul. It can’t be that bad, surely?’

‘Don’t you believe it. I made a complete idiot of myself this afternoon.’

‘Went shopping and bought the wrong dress?’ He expected these words to be received as an insult but if he couldn’t get her talking by just asking, he had to resort to trickery.

As anticipated, she snapped out of her introverted cocoon. ‘Do me a favour, Alan! I’ve done that often enough but I wouldn’t brood over it for the rest of the day. I’d stick it at the back of the wardrobe with all the other bad buys. I meant what I said. I made a fool of myself. I screwed up good and proper. I was so stupid! I should never have let Juliet talk me into it.’

‘Right.’ Markby set down his wine. ‘And what did Juliet talk you into exactly?’

Colour entered her pale cheeks. ‘She persuaded me to ask Jan Oakley here to tea so that I could talk sweet reason to him. As if anyone could do that!’ Meredith said wrathfully. ‘I didn’t tell you about it, Alan, because I had misgivings about the whole idea and I thought you’d say I was crazy – and you’d have been right. Although you did say yourself, in The Feathers, that perhaps Jan hadn’t understood the situation. So I thought I’d just explain it to him.’

‘So what happened?’ Markby asked patiently.

She scowled. ‘None of it went according to plan. I asked him about his claim on Fourways and he blithely dismissed it! Said he had no intention of pursuing it. So then I asked whether he still wanted a share in the sale price and again, he dismissed that. Said it would be nice if his cousins were generous but he quite understood their situation.’

‘It sounds,’ Markby said, ‘as if he was already very reasonable and you had nothing to do.’

‘He was crafty, not reasonable. He took the wind out of my sails and left me nothing to talk to him about.’ Morosely she added, ‘I can’t really blame Juliet. I knew it was a bad idea from the start. I should’ve had the strength of my own convictions and refused point blank.’ She fell silent.

Markby eyed her thoughtfully. It was unlike her to let anger simmer on like this. He asked, as casually as he could, refilling her glass as he spoke, ‘Anything else happen?’

She gave a little jump and the wine splashed. ‘No. What else could happen? I just felt a fool. I don’t like that. No one does.’

‘True,’ he agreed. ‘I just wondered whether Oakley might have introduced some other subject.’

‘No, he didn’t – because I threw him out!’ There was manifest satisfaction in the way she expressed the last words.

‘Wasn’t that a bit drastic? If he was being as co-operative as you say, agreeing to everything?’

She flushed again. ‘I meant, I showed him out. He didn’t stay long. I realised he was too devious to have any sensible discussion with him, so I got rid of him.’

She was a rotten liar, Markby reflected. He could make a pretty good guess at what had happened. Oakley had made a pass at her. If she didn’t want to tell him about it, she wouldn’t. He was angered, not by her failure to confide in him, but by the combination of elements which had led up to the present situation: Juliet’s original request, Meredith’s
agreement, and finally, Oakley’s behaviour. When he next saw Oakley he’d have a few straight words to say to him. In the meantime . . .

‘For goodness sake,’ he said, ‘stay clear of Juliet Painter. She’s got Jan Oakley on the brain.’

Meredith’s look changed to one of some embarrassment. ‘I did ring her – I had to. She was expecting me to report. I told her what he said. She thinks . . .’

‘Go on,’ Markby sighed. ‘What does Juliet think now?’

‘She thinks Jan’s got some other plan up his sleeve. That’s why he’s no longer making an
open
claim on Fourways or the money from the sale. He’s realised it’s counter-productive. She doesn’t think for one minute he’s given up.’

‘Whatever Jan is up to, we’ll find out about it in due course,’ Markby told her. ‘Now then, let’s go out somewhere and enjoy the rest of the evening. Forget Oakley. He really isn’t worth worrying about.’

Sometimes our words come back to haunt us. It was certainly Markby’s experience on the following Monday when he arrived in his office. He was a little later than usual. He’d stopped off to make a couple of out-of-office calls and it was almost eleven. Every officer he passed on his way to his office appeared to be holding a cup of coffee.

‘Anything of interest happen over the weekend?’ he asked Inspector Pearce who’d appeared and was hovering in the doorway. A stain on his shirt indicated Pearce had already had his coffee.

‘Coroner’s office rang,’ said Dave Pearce diffidently. ‘They reckon they might have a suspicious death. The chap died in the hospital on Saturday night, apparently of some form of poisoning. Dr Fuller conducted the postmortem at eight this morning. You know how he likes to make an early start.’

Pearce spoke with the voice of one who’d been called out at this unreasonable hour more than once and required to stand by why Fuller made his dissection. ‘Get ’em on the slab, get ’em opened up and get ’em out of the way!’ was Fuller’s motto. Markby, who’d also suffered from Fuller’s addiction to crack-of-dawn autopsies in his time, nodded in sympathy.

‘Dr Fuller confirms poison though he’s not sure yet what it is. He’s told the coroner’s office that though he wants confirmation, he thinks it’s one for us. He’s sent samples for analysis to Dr Painter.’

‘That’ll keep Geoff Painter happy,’ commented Markby. He hung up his Barbour and turned round. ‘Poison makes a change. Funnily enough,
we were discussing the subject at Painter’s house recently. We commented that poison has got rarer as a weapon. Do we have a name for the victim?’

Pearce consulted a scrap of paper in his hand. ‘Chap called Jan Oakley.’

‘What?’

At the tone of the superintendent’s voice, Pearce looked up in alarm. ‘Oakley, sir. He was a Polish national here on a visit, which may complicate things. He was staying with relatives near Bamford, at a house called Fourways.’

‘I know it,’ Markby said bleakly. ‘I also knew – I met this fellow Oakley.’

‘Oh, crikey,’ said Pearce.

‘To put it mildly, Dave. What happened?’

Pearce set the piece of paper down on the desk in a tentative way. ‘We’ve only got the bare essentials, sir, as I said. It started with a 999 call late on Saturday night, asking for an ambulance to go to the house. The caller was a Miss Damaris Oakley, an elderly woman. She said a guest in the house had been taken ill. When the paramedics got there they saw the chap was in a bad state, but they didn’t want to alarm the old girl. He was taken straight to hospital but pronounced dead ten minutes after arrival. Postmortem’s routine in that case but the hospital thought it might be poison of some sort. Sorry, that’s all I’ve got from the coroner’s office at the moment. I don’t suppose they know any more. We’re all waiting on Fuller and Dr Painter.’