The Scold's Bridle (2 page)

"She kept her papers very neat," said Mrs. Spede eventually, after receiving some sort of permission to speak from her husband. "It'll all be in the papers." She nodded towards the desk and an oak filing cabinet. "In there some place. Very neat. Always very neat."

"Don't you know her daughter's name?"

"Mrs. Lascelles"," said the man after a moment. "Joanna." He tugged at his lower lip which drooped oddly as if it had been tugged many times before. With a petulant frown his wife smacked him on the wrist and he tucked the offending hand into his pocket. They were very childlike, thought Cooper, and wondered if Mrs. Gillespie had employed them out of compassion.

"And the granddaughter's name?"

"Miss Lascelles," said Mrs. Spede.

"Do you know her Christian name?"

"Ruth." She consulted with her husband behind lowered lids. "They're not nice, either of them. The Mrs. is rude to Mr. Spede about his gardening and the Miss is rude to Jenny about her cleaning."

"Jenny?" he queried. "Who's Jenny?"

"Jenny is Mrs. Spede."

"I see," said Cooper kindly. "It must have been a terrible shock for you, Jenny, to find Mrs. Gillespie in her bath."

"Oh, it was that," she howled, grabbing her husband's arm. "A terrible, terrible shock." Her voice rose on a wail.

With some reluctance, because he feared an even louder outburst, Cooper took the polythene bag containing the Stanley knife from his pocket and laid it across his broad palm. "I don't want to upset you any more, but do you recognize this? Is it a knife you've seen before?"

Her lips puckered tragically but she stopped the wailing to nudge her husband into speech. "The kitchen drawer," he said. "It's the one from the kitchen drawer." He touched the handle through the bag. "I scratched an h'aitch on it for 'house.' The one I keep in the shed has a gee on it for 'garden.' "

Cooper examined the crude "h" and nodded as he tucked the bag back out of sight into his pocket. "Thank you. I'll need the one from the garden for comparison. I'll ask an officer to go out with you when we've finished." He smiled in a friendly way. "Now, you presumably have keys to the house. May I see them?"

Mrs. Spede drew a string from around her neck, revealing a key that had lain within the cleft of her bosom. "Only me," she said. "Jenny had the key. Mr. Spede didn't need one for the garden." She gave it to Cooper and he felt the warmth of her body seeping into his hand. It repelled him because it was damp and oily with sweat, and this made him feel guilty because he found them both deeply unattractive and knew that, unlike Mrs. Gillespie, he could not have tolerated them about his house for even half an hour.

Mathilda Gillespie's nearest neighbours lived alongside her in a wing adjoining the house. At some stage Cedar House must have been one residence, but now a discreet sign indicated the door to Wing Cottage at the western end of the building. Before Cooper knocked on it, he walked along a gravel path to the rear corner and surveyed the patio at the back, neatly bordered by tubs of everlasting pansies, beyond which a clipped box hedge separated this garden from the expanse of lawn and distant trees that belonged to Cedar House. He felt a sudden envy for the occupants. How dreary his own small box was by comparison, but then it was his wife who had chosen to live on a modern estate and not he. He would have been happy with crumbling plaster and a view; she was happy with all mod. cons and neighbours so close they rubbed shoulders every day. It was a policeman's lot to give in to a wife he was fond of. His hours were too unpredictable to allow him to impose his own yearning for isolation on a woman who had tolerated his absences with stoical good humour for thirty years.

He heard the door open behind him and turned, producing his warrant card from his breast pocket, to greet the fat elderly man who approached. "DS Cooper, sir, Dorset police."

"Orloff, Duncan Orloff." He ran a worried hand across his wide, rather pleasant face. "We've been expecting you. Dear me, dear me. I don't mind admitting Jenny Spede's howling is a little difficult to take after a while. Poor woman. She's a good soul as long as nothing upsets her. I can't tell you what it was like when she found Mathilda. She came rushing out of the house screaming like a banshee and set her wretched husband off in sympathy. I realized something dreadful must have happened which is why I phoned your people and an ambulance. Thank God they came quickly and had the sense to bring a woman with them. She was really quite excellent, calmed the Spedes down in record time. Dear me, dear me," he said again, "we live such a quiet life. Not used to this sort of thing at all."

"No one is," said Cooper. "You've been told what's happened, I suppose."

He wrung his hands in distress. "Only that Mathilda's dead. I kept the Spedes here until the police car arrived-thought it best, really, what with them collapsing in heaps about me-mind you, I wasn't going to let my wife downstairs till it was safe-one can't be certain about things-anyway the uniformed chaps told me to wait until someone came to ask questions. Look, you'd better come in. Violet's in the drawing-room now, not feeling too well in the circumstances, and who can blame her? Frankly, not feeling a hundred per cent myself." He stood aside to let Cooper enter. "First door on right," he said. He followed the policeman into a cosy, over-furnished room with a television on low volume in the corner, and bent over the prostrate figure of wife on the sofa. "There's a Sergeant to see us," he said, raising her gently to a sitting position with one hand and using the other to swing her legs to the floor. He lowered his large bulk on to the sofa beside her and gestured Cooper towards an armchair. "Jenny kept screaming about blood," he confided unhappily. "Red water and blood. That's all she said."

Violet shivered. "And Jesus," she whispered. "I heard her. She said Mathilda was 'like Jesus.'" She raised a hand to her own bloodless lips. "Dead like Jesus in blood red water." Her eyes filled. "What's happened to her? Is she
really
dead?"

"I'm afraid she is, Mrs. Orloff. It's only approximate, but the pathologist estimates the time of death between nine o'clock and midnight on Saturday." He looked from one to the other. "Were you here during those three hours?"

"We were here all night," said Duncan. He was clearly drawn between his own perceived good taste of not asking questions and an overwhelming need to satisfy a very natural curiosity. "You haven't told us what's happened," he blurted out. "It's much, much worse if you don't know what's happened. We've been imagining terrible things."

"She hasn't been
crucified
, has she?" asked Violet tremulously. "I said she's probably been crucified, otherwise why would Jenny have said she looked like Jesus?"

"I said someone had tried to clean up afterwards," said Duncan, "which is why there's red water everywhere. You hear about it every day, old people being murdered for their money. They do terrible things to them, too, before they kill them."

"Oh, I do hope she wasn't
raped
," said Violet. "I couldn't bear it if they'd raped her."

Cooper had time to feel regret for this elderly couple who, like so many of their peers, lived the end of their lives in terror because the media persuaded them they were at risk. He knew better than anyone that statistics proved it was young men aged between fifteen and twenty-five who were the group most vulnerable to violent death. He had sorted out too many drunken brawls and picked too many stabbed and bludgeoned bodies from gutters outside pubs to be in any doubt of that. "She died in her bath," he said unemotionally. "Her wrists were slit. At the moment the pathologist is inclining towards suicide and we are only asking questions to satisfy ourselves that she did in fact take her own life."

"But Jesus didn't die in his bath," said Violet in bewilderment.

"She was wearing a scold's bridle on her head with flowers in it. I think perhaps Mrs. Spede thought it was a crown of thorns." It made no sense otherwise, he thought.

"I
hated
that thing. Mathilda was always
very
peculiar about it." Violet had a habit, Cooper noticed, of emphasizing words she thought important. "It must have been suicide, then. She wore it when her arthritis was bad. It took her mind off the
pain
, you know. She always said she'd kill herself if it got so bad she couldn't stand it." She turned tear-filled eyes to her husband. "Why didn't she call out to us? I'm sure there's
something
we could have done to help."

"Would you have heard her?" asked Cooper.

"Oh, yes, especially if she was in the bathroom. She could have rattled the pipes. We'd certainly have heard
that
."

Cooper transferred his attention to Mr. Orloff. "Did you hear anything at all that night?"

Duncan gave the question long and thoughtful consideration. "Our days are very uneventful," he said apologetically. "All I can say is that if we had heard something, we'd have acted"-he spread his hands in a gesture of surrender-"like this morning when Jenny started screaming. There was nothing like that on Saturday."

"Yet you both assumed she'd been murdered by a gang. You mentioned 'they.' "

"It's difficult to think straight when people are screaming," he said, reproaching himself with a shake of the head. "And to be perfectly honest; I wasn't at all sure the Spedes themselves hadn't done something. They're not the brightest couple as you've probably discovered for yourself. Mind you, it wouldn't have been intentional. They're foolish, not dangerous. I assumed there'd been some sort of accident," he spread his palms on his fat knees, "I've been worrying that I should have gone in to do something, saved her perhaps, but if she died on Saturday...?" His voice tailed off on a query.

Cooper shook his head. "You couldn't have done anything for her. What about during the daytime? Did you hear anything then?"

"On Saturday, you mean?" He shook his head. "Nothing that leaps to mind. Certainly nothing unsettling." He looked at Violet as if seeking inspiration. "We notice if the bell rings in Cedar House, because it's very rare for Mathilda to have visitors, but otherwise"-he shrugged helplessly-"so little happens here, Sergeant, and we do watch a lot of television."

"And you didn't wonder where she was on Sunday?"

Violet dabbed at her eyes. "Oh, dear," she whispered, "could we have saved her then? How
awful
, Duncan."

"No," said Cooper firmly, "she was certainly dead by three o'clock on Sunday morning."

"We were friends, you know," said Violet. "Duncan and I have known her for fifty years. She sold us this cottage when Duncan retired five years ago. That's not to say she was the
easiest
person in the world to get on with. She could be very cruel to people she didn't like, but the trick with Mathilda was not to
impose
. We never did, of course, but there were those who did."

Cooper licked the point of his pencil. "Who for example?"

Violet lowered her voice. "Joanna and Ruth, her daughter and granddaughter. They
never
left her alone, always complaining, always demanding money. And the vicar was shocking." She cast a guilty glance at her husband. "I know Duncan doesn't approve of tittle-tattle but the vicar was always pricking her conscience about the less well off. She was an
atheist
, you know, and very rude to Mr. Matthews every time he came. She called him a Welsh leech. To his face, too."

"Did he mind?"

Duncan gave a rumble of laughter. "It was a game," he said. "She was quite generous sometimes when he caught her in a good mood. She gave him a hundred pounds once towards a centre for alcoholics, saying there but for the grace of her metabolism went she. She drank to deaden the pain of her arthritis, or so she said."

"Not to excess, though," said Violet. "She was never
drunk
. She was too much of a lady ever to get drunk." She blew her nose loudly.

"Is there anyone else you can think of who imposed on her?" asked Cooper after a moment.

Duncan shrugged. "There was the doctor's husband, Jack Blakeney. He was always round there, but it wasn't an imposition. She liked him. I used to hear her laughing with him sometimes in the garden." He paused to reflect. "She had very few friends, Sergeant. As Violet said, she wasn't an easy woman. People either liked Mathilda or loathed her. You'll find that out soon enough if you're planning to ask questions of anyone else."

"And you liked her?"

His eyes grew suddenly wet. "I did," he said gruffly. "She was beautiful once, you know, quite beautiful." He patted his wife's hand. "We all were, a long, long time ago. Age has very few compensations, Sergeant, except perhaps the wisdom to recognize contentment." He pondered for a moment. "They do say slitting the wrists is a very peaceful way to die, although how anyone knows I can't imagine. Did she suffer, do you think?"

"I'm afraid I can't answer that, Mr. Orloff," said Cooper honestly.

The damp eyes held his for a moment and he saw a deep and haggard sadness in them. They spoke of a love that Cooper somehow suspected Duncan had never shown or felt for his wife. He wanted to say something by way of consolation, but what could he say that wouldn't make matters worse? He doubted that Violet knew, and he wondered, not for the first time, why love was more often cruel than it was kind.