Shades of Murder (34 page)

This fragment from a spartan childhood passed by Juliet unheeded.
She sat up with a start. ‘We’re got to get rid of Minchin and Hayes!’

‘We can’t,’ said Meredith. ‘I’d like to, just as you would. But they’re here and we’ve got to watch out for them.’

Juliet leaned forward, her long braid of hair hanging over one shoulder. She pushed her spectacles up the bridge of her nose with a forefinger. They all waited.

‘They’re here,’ said Juliet, ‘until this is solved. Then they’ll go. So we’ll solve it and it’ll be goodbye, Doug Minchin!’

‘You have a way of simplifying things,’ Meredith told her crossly, ‘when they aren’t simple.’

‘It seems perfectly straightforward to me.’ Juliet’s attention was now fully on Meredith. ‘Oh, come on, Meredith. You’re the one with the experience in these matters.’

‘All right, all right!’ Now they were all three looking at her expectantly. Meredith drew a deep breath. ‘We know where the arsenic came from. What we need to know is how Jan came to swallow it.’

‘And who slipped it to him,’ said Juliet.

‘If we know how he came to take it, we maybe able to work out who gave it to him.’ Meredith looked across the room to Damaris. ‘Could you bear to go through the events of that Saturday again?’

Damaris glanced at her sister. ‘If it would help, I could. But I don’t know—’

Florence said quietly, ‘It’s all right. If you must, you must.’

‘Well,’ began Damaris, ‘Jan was perfectly all right in the morning. He was all right at lunchtime. In the afternoon he went to see you, Meredith. He came back very pleased with himself.’

‘He did?’ asked Meredith, startled. ‘I threw him out. He – um – misbehaved.’

‘I’m not surprised to hear it. Behaving badly was Jan’s special gift,’ Damaris told her with asperity. ‘He broke into my grandfather’s desk in the study and went through the papers we keep in there. Ron saw him through the window and told Alan about it. As far as we can make out, he read the copies of our wills – not that we’d ever have changed them in his favour! But Jan being Jan, he’d probably persuaded himself that he could talk us round. He had sort of – faith – in himself.’

Damaris considered the matter. ‘I really think he lived in a world of his own, you know. This business of the will and his right to a share in the house . . . You may have asked him to leave, Meredith, but I dare say, in his own mind, he’d decided the visit was a roaring success. Ron Gladstone keeps saying he thought Jan mentally unstable. “Potty” is
Ron’s word for it. I have to say I wonder if Ron isn’t right.’

‘If it helps,’ Meredith told her, ‘Superintendent Minchin thinks much the same way. Anyway, he was all right during the day, and I agree, he was perfectly all right when he was visiting me. He certainly wasn’t ill. So we need to concentrate on the late afternoon and evening. I understand you both went shopping in the afternoon?’

‘Yes, that’s our usual occupation on a Saturday afternoon. Kenny Joss brought us back in his taxi. Jan was here—’ Damaris paused and frowned. ‘We didn’t see him at first. We didn’t see him until Kenny had left. We were in the kitchen and he came in. We told him we were going to make our evening meal and he went off to watch the early evening news on the television, in here.’ Damaris pointed at the television set in the corner. ‘Later he went out, to The Feathers to get himself something to eat. That was the arrangement. Florence and I sat in here until he came back and then we went to bed. He was still in here when we went upstairs.’

They were coming to the difficult bit. Meredith and Juliet could see Damaris bracing herself. Florence sat very still, her eyes fixed on her thin hands, clasped in her lap.

‘I don’t know exactly what woke me. It must have been a noise made by Jan. There was a crash, something falling. I came downstairs and found him in the hall. He’d knocked over the telephone table. I realise now he was dying. I think I knew it then. I called the ambulance, but I knew it was no good. Chiefly I was worried that Florence might hear and come down. I was more worried about her than about Jan. That sounds unkind but it’s true.’

‘I wonder,’ Meredith ventured, ‘if we might walk it through.’

‘Walk?’ Damaris looked puzzled but then grasped her meaning. ‘Oh, yes, stage a reconstruction . . . Well, through here in the hall, then.’

‘I’ll stay here, if you don’t mind.’ Florence’s voice was barely audible. ‘I wasn’t there. I didn’t see. I can’t help.’

In the gloomy hall Damaris stood by the telephone table and pointed to the floor. ‘He was lying here. His head was here and his feet about there. I was halfway down the stairs at least before I saw him.’

‘His feet were pointing towards the kitchen door?’ Meredith looked down the long narrow hallway to the door at the far end.

‘Yes. The kitchen door was open. There was a broken tumbler and spilled water near it. He must have fetched himself a drink but he dropped it.’ Damaris waved a hand vaguely. ‘I suppose he wanted to telephone for help.’

Meredith frowned. ‘Telephone himself? He didn’t call out to you to help him?’

Damaris shook her head in a bewildered way. ‘I suppose he thought I mightn’t hear him. It’d be quicker to call for help directly himself. The ambulance came quite quickly and took him away. I went upstairs to tell Florence he’d been taken ill.’

‘What about the broken tumbler?’

‘Oh, that. I picked that up, of course. I couldn’t leave broken glass lying around. I’m not sure now when I picked it up. Whether it was while I was waiting for the ambulance or afterwards, when I went to the kitchen to make us a cup of tea, for the shock.’

Juliet asked, ‘When you came downstairs, how many lights were on?’

Damaris said promptly, ‘The hall light, the sitting-room light and the kitchen.’

‘So he’d been in all three places.’ Meredith fell silent. ‘He was watching television in the sitting room. He went to the kitchen for a glass of water . . .’

Damaris began, ‘There was . . .’ and broke off.

Juliet reached out and touched her arm. ‘What is it? What have you remembered?’

‘It isn’t important.’ Damaris looked a little embarrassed. ‘But you’re right, I had forgotten. When I went to fill the kettle to make tea, there was a knife lying in the sink. I was surprised because Florence and I had washed up our supper things and we don’t usually miss anything.’

‘You are sure,’ Juliet asked her, ‘that it was left over from your supper?’

‘Oh, I think so. It had savoury spread on the blade. We had some on toast.’

‘The savoury spread?’ Meredith asked quickly.

Damaris sighed and shook her head. ‘It was one of the things the police took away. It must have been all right or they’d have said so. Anyway, Florrie and I ate it and we were all right.’ She looked anxiously from one to the other of them. ‘Do you think I should have told the police? It’s such a small detail.’

‘It might be worth mentioning the next time you see either Minchin or Hayes,’ Meredith told her. ‘Best to tell them everything, just to keep on the right side of them.’

‘Well, it doesn’t help us,’ said Juliet crossly. ‘If he didn’t take the arsenic in some way here, he didn’t take it at The Feathers and he didn’t take it at your place, Meredith, where on earth
did
he take it?’

Meredith said thoughtfully, ‘Where – and how?’

Without warning, Damaris chanted in a soft sing-song, “Their names are What and Why and When, and How and Where and Who?’

Meredith felt a prickle run up her spine, it sounded so eerie. Damaris looked from one to the other of them and seeing their startled faces, flushed. ‘Kipling,’ she explained awkwardly.

‘He’s not going to help us, either,’ muttered Juliet.

‘Vicar’s round the back of the house somewhere,’ said Mrs Harmer. ‘He’s tinkering with that contraption of his.’

Knowing that Minchin’s plan was to talk to Meredith that morning, Alan Markby had betaken himself to the vicarage. James Holland was the one person left, he reflected grumpily as he pressed the big old bellpush, with whom he could discuss the Oakleys without appearing to trespass on Minchin’s turf. His assault on the bellpush had triggered a jangling response in the depths of the house. Markby studied the frontage of the building while he waited for someone to answer the call.

Like Fourways, the vicarage had been built in an age when a gentleman and his family required space in order to pursue a gracious lifestyle and could afford the necessary domestic staff to support the same. Both the vicarage and Fourways had survived into an age in which lifestyles had changed beyond recognition, servants had all but disappeared, and ease of maintenance was the watchword.

Now there was only Mrs Harmer, who reigned from breakfast-time to mid-afternoon, and that because the vicar was a bachelor. She kept tidy in an erratic but sufficient way that part of the house in which he lived: one reception room (the smallest) functioning as both sitting and dining room, kitchen, study, bedroom and bathroom. Four more bedrooms, Markby knew, were closed up and empty, home only to spiders. In the disused drawing room, dustsheets covered old-fashioned furniture inherited by the present vicar from his predecessor who’d died in harness. In addition, up in the attics were the tiny rooms where long-vanished maids had slept.

What to do with the vicarage was a regular subject of discussion at parish meetings. There was a movement afoot to sell it off and buy a small modern house for the priest. Opposition came in the shape of another party which feared selling it off would herald unwelcome change in the centre of the town. It had been suggested that the unused part of the house be turned into a self-contained flat in which some suitable
person, a curate for example, could be lodged. Unfortunately, there was no curate and in any case, the cost of transforming the rooms was held to be too high.

‘Right,’ said Markby. ‘I’ll go and find him.’

‘He gets covered in oil and stuff.’ Mrs Harmer’s pinafored figure bristled with righteous resentment and it wasn’t all directed at the vicar. She didn’t like being brought from work to answer the door, not even for a senior police officer.

‘He comes in my kitchen to wash his hands and makes the soap all dirty and the towel. I’ve said to him I don’t know how many times, it’s not right, a man of God riding round on the devil’s machine.’

‘Devil’s machine?’ queried Markby.

‘Motorbike!’ snapped Mrs Harmer as if he were being deliberately awkward. ‘No good ever came of motorbikes. He needs to get himself a little car. I keep telling him.’

‘Everyone needs a hobby,’ said Markby in a misjudged attempt to calm her.

‘Hobby?’ Mrs Harmer took a yellow duster from her apron pocket and shook it so violently it snapped like a whiplash. Dust flew out of it. ‘Hobbies are for people who have nothing else to do. I never had time for no hobbies.’

‘Oh? Someone told me you make homemade wines,’ Markby remarked innocently.

She turned turkey-red and stuffed the duster back in her apron. ‘Oh, did they, indeed? Well, sometimes I make a few bottles but only when I’ve got the soft fruit to spare . . . so as it doesn’t go to waste. That’s no more a hobby than bottling fruit or making chutney with it, or freezing it like everyone does these days. I thought,’ said Mrs Harmer fiercely, ‘you came to see the vicar? Not take up my time chatting about hobbies.’ She pointed majestically to the corner of the building. ‘You can go round the back and then straight down the path to the garage.’

The door was slammed in his face.

Markby made his way down the path through the overgrown vicarage garden. Here the parallel with Fourways was even more obvious and poignant. The grounds were extensive but there was no Ron Gladstone here to tend them, even in part. Where once there would have been lawns and flowerbeds there was now only rough grass. Behind a brick wall had lain a vegetable garden, but that was now a wasteland of broken glasshouses, collapsed cucumber frames and rampant weeds. There was even the remains of a tennis court. Its asphalt surface was pitted and
cracked, allowing thistles to take root.

He found James Holland busy, as he’d been warned, with his motorcycle. It had been wheeled out of the prefabricated garage, which leaned precariously to one side, and stood propped up in a patch of sunlight. The vicar’s burly figure bent over it as he ministered to its needs as tenderly as a mother over the crib of a newborn babe.

‘Mrs Harmer doesn’t get any mellower with age,’ Markby said to him, by way of greeting, as he neared.

‘Hello there, Alan. No, she doesn’t, but she has a kind heart. What’s more, she’s looked after the vicarage for years. She’s been here far longer than I have. She cared for my predecessor for thirty years.’

‘Good God. How old is she?’

‘That’s a secret,’ said the vicar with a grin. ‘No one’s allowed to know that.’

‘I mistakenly let slip that I knew one of her other secrets. I mentioned the wine-making,’ Markby admitted.

James Holland gave a guffaw. ‘You won’t be forgiven!’ He straightened up and wiped his hands on a filthy rag. ‘Is this a social visit, or am I subject to police enquiries?’

‘Not from me,’ Markby said. ‘Our biggest case at the moment, Jan Oakley’s murder, is in the hands of others. I’ve been sidelined.’

James Holland scratched his nose thoughtfully. When he took his hand away, a black streak ran across the bridge of it. ‘Juliet was telling me about Minchin and Hayes. She seems to have taken against them. What are they really like?’

‘Extremely capable,’ said Markby. ‘And I begin to suspect Doug Minchin of not being without a sense of humour, though he works hard at hiding it. He’s what Mrs Harmer would probably call “deep”. He favours bright shirts and the hard man approach.’ Markby smiled. ‘He operates like a conjurer. He gets you looking one way when actually you should be looking the other.’

‘You don’t resent him, then?’ James twitched a bushy eyebrow.

‘Of course I do – did. No, not the man. I resent being told I can’t run an investigation. But then, my basic responsibility is to see that someone runs it efficiently and as I say, Doug Minchin is certainly doing that.’ Markby paused. ‘I do resent that I can’t visit the Oakley sisters. I’ve been visiting them on and off since I was about eight years old. Now it would look as if I were straying on Minchin’s turf. How are they? That’s what I really came to ask you about.’