by Tessa Arlen
The shock of Letty’s death hadn’t cleared Grable’s head completely, and the brandy had simply added to her loquacity. “She has her hands full with Sir Basil,” she explained. “Has a bit of a wandering eye. Nice enough old chap, but it must be hard to be an aging roué—and even harder to be his mistress. On top of that, Vera’s senior, the commanding officer at White Waltham, is a real bear.”
I tried not to react to this rather revealing remark about Sir Basil, especially as I was having lunch with him tomorrow.
“I’ll return your bike tomorrow,” I said as she turned away to open the door. She gave a dismissive wave at the bike and stumbled on the threshold. “Second turn on the right. G’night, Poppy.”
I put Bess’s noxious bone in the front basket of the bike, and with her dancing in front me, backward, we started on our way.
After a few minutes of pedaling I realized that my front wheel was all over the place. You’re drunk! Ilona was laughing. What a lightweight: one martini and half a glass of wine. Try eating something when someone offers you a cocktail next time! I concentrated on keeping my front wheel as straight as I could, and with Bess anxiously trotting alongside, looking up at the basket, we set out for the only inn in Didcote.
* * *
* * *
FIVE MINUTES OF hard pedaling uphill did the trick. As we came level with the airfield, I felt less thickheaded, and my eyes had adjusted to the dark. I could see the outline of the airfield’s largest hangar, the one where Mac Wilson had confronted us, shadowed against the night sky.
Bess stopped, her alert ears pricked forward, and her hackles came up. She growled. “Shush, Bessie. No bark,” I said automatically, because for an instant, a fraction of an instant, the flair of a pair of headlights came through the trees in just one brief flash, lighting up the grass track beneath them. They flared once and were instantly doused. They were blackout headlights shielded to aim downward, but in that split second in the dark of the night they were glaringly bright. I stopped, stood astride my bike, and peered down the grass track that led from the lane to the hulk of the hangar.
I heard a voice raised in question. And then silence. Bess trotted forward. “Come,” I whispered frantically. “Stay!” To my relief she stopped, sniffed the air, and then came back to me. The last thing in the world I needed was to have a conversation with a man like Mac Wilson.
SIXTEEN
I MUST HAVE BEEN MORE TIRED THAN I THOUGHT BECAUSE IT WAS half past eleven when I swerved up the short drive from the lane to the inn. To my relief the Alvis was parked outside the door. Griff was back!
I pushed open the door as quietly as I could and fumbled my way into the dense black fug of the inn’s hall. Bess, with her enviable doggy night vision, pattered ahead of me as I bumped my hand along the wall to turn the corner from the hall into the lounge. The inn smelled of stale beer, cigarettes, and turnip soup. Not a particularly appealing combination, but it was almost like coming home after my long, cold ride down the endless dark of the lane.
We were welcomed by the light from the still-glowing fire at the end of the room, and the outline of Griff slumped in a chair, legs thrust out in front of him. His head was turned to one side at an uncomfortable angle. I stopped and listened to his even breathing. He was asleep—I reached down to restrain Bess as she lunged forward to say hullo.
There is no pretense in a sleeping face. And in the last of the firelight Griff looked probably much as he had done at eight. His dark straight brows and forehead were smooth, and in repose his mouth, usually so expressive, was slack. I felt like an intruder, standing there watching him in defenseless rest. I stepped back and said his name. “Griff? Griff!” Bess stood up on her hind legs and lovingly started to wash the hand that dangled over the arm of the chair.
“What?” His eyes opened, startlingly bright in his pale face. “Poppy!” He smiled and my heart leapt into my mouth. He reached out his hand for mine and then awoke fully. “Was I sleeping? Must have dropped off. What time is it?” He sat forward in his chair.
“Half eleven.” I put a log on the fire and sat down in the chair next to his.
He rubbed the top of his head. “I couldn’t decide whether to be worried about you or not. I thought of coming over to the cottage and then decided I might be interrupting something important. That you might think I was interfering. I finally came to the conclusion that if you weren’t home by midnight, I would drive over and carry you off to hospital to have your stomach pumped.” He was laughing; whether it was with real relief or because he always chooses to make light of things I had no idea.
“When did you get back?”
He looked at his watch. “About half an hour ago. Your uncle Ambrose is a nice old gent underneath all those penetrating questions, by the way.”
“And Cadogan?”
He whistled: his expression for amazement or derision. “What a blowhard.”
“A what?”
“A talkative know-it-all. What the man doesn’t know could be written on the head of a pin.”
“Did he know anything about the sort of poison we are interested in?”
He ran his hand through his hair. “Oh yeah, but so much of it, it made my head spin. The biggest problem with academics is that they love to hear themselves talk.” Griff lifted a tired face and smiled. “Your uncle explained that I was interested in poison, and Cadogan just took off. I tried to guide him toward giving me useful information, but it was impossible. It was like someone had flipped a switch. He started with cyanide: sodium cyanide, potassium cyanide, hydrogen cyanide. HCN is obtained by acidification of cyanide salts, by the way. And that was just for openers. Then he went on to arsenic.”
“Does cyanide have violent symptoms?” I asked.
“Yes, both symptoms and death sound exhausting and probably look awful. Cadogan’s endless list of conventional toxins, as he called them, all have two things in common: they act within minutes, and they are rough on the digestive organs. Lots of mess.” He shrugged his shoulders, his palms held upward. “From everything he told me, it doesn’t appear that either of our Attagirls could have been poisoned. Especially, Cadogan says, by something a layman could get hold of. England has regulated its citizens’ ability to get their hands on arsenic and strychnine. Even homemade poisons from plants that grow here along the hedgerows—hemlock, belladonna, and digitalis—have violent effects and act quickly.” I could tell he was trying to let me down gently.
“Are there any poisons that are not quite so immediate and . . . milder in their symptoms?”
“Nope, ’fraid not. Cadogan does have a pal who specializes in medicinal herbs that can be used as poisons if given in large doses. He said he’d give him a try for us.”
I tried to be gracious about Griff’s news. But it was difficult when I remembered June and her friends’ devastation at hearing about Letty’s death, and the anger that had sprung up between Annie and Grable as they tried to understand what had happened to Edwina before her crash. The misery that Vera Abercrombie went through when one of her “girls” was killed in an accident. I also remembered Zofia, downing martinis and dwelling on happier days before her husband was killed, and her toast to Edwina. I had rushed back to Didcote, determined that Zofia was the murderer’s next victim, and discovered that, unlike Edwina, who had been persecuted with vicious poison-pen letters, Zofia was one of life’s survivors. A chilling thought occurred: had she pushed her poisoned breakfast toward Letty? Was Zofia capable of murdering two of her friends?
“Perhaps we asked the wrong question. Perhaps we should have asked about poisons that disorient rather than kill,” I said helpfully, and then wished I hadn’t spoken. He had driven for miles today to have dinner with two old codgers, and if I knew the Travellers, the menu would have been uninspiring at best.
“How was Uncle Ambrose?” I asked out of politeness.
“He interrogated me on my
interests. Did I shoot? Oh, too bad. What about hunt? Oh really, never? Not even pheasant? What did I do when I wasn’t flying? In the end I told him I played bridge and that seemed to make him happy. He was a huge improvement on Cadogan.”
I felt utterly depleted by disappointment that his trip to London hadn’t yielded anything other than he had revised his original opinion of Ambrose from arrogant imperialist to an old fuddy-duddy who thought shooting pheasant was good sport.
“Perhaps I should make some coffee?”
“If I drink any more of that stuff I don’t think I’ll survive. Tell me about your evening. How did you get on with the Attas?”
How best to describe three—no, four—very strong women who were still struggling to accept Edwina’s accident and, as I left, had been knocked sideways with the new horror of Letty’s death? “They are doing their best to put a brave face on things. You know”—I smiled—“it’s how we are.” Griff had once referred, obliquely, to our island reticence as cold reserve.
“Did you manage to find out what they thought about Edwina and her death, how they really feel?” he asked hopefully. “Anyone have a reason to want her dead?”
“Yes and no,” I said, remembering Zofia’s passionate recounting of her history. “Zofia has lost so much of her life, and has learned to cope with it on the face of things. But she had three large martinis and was a bit . . . inebriated, so she revealed a lot more than I think she would normally.”
“Polish reserve,” muttered Griff.
“Not a scrap of reserve about Zofia. But I bet she would be good at keeping secrets if it mattered. I got the feeling that she was pretty cut up about Edwina’s death: she raised a glass and toasted her as ‘the kindest woman in England,’ with the greatest sincerity and respect, even if she was three sheets to the wind at the time.” I saw the lovely pale face and the large shining eyes. “She would either tell you everything that came into her head,” I said as I thought it through, “or you would have to dig really deep and still be left wondering what else she was concealing.”
“Enigmatic?” Griff asked.
“Yes, very enigmatic.” I nodded. “But she’s also an extrovert—in a reclusive sort of way.”
He laughed. “And the other three?”
I thought about the face-to-face falling-out of Annie and Grable. There had been nothing reserved or reticent about my evening with the cottage’s inmates.
“Four,” I replied. “When I arrived, Sir Basil was hard on my heels with a very expensive bottle of wine, which he left with us. He didn’t stay long. But his relationship with them is pretty informal, almost as if he was one of them.”
This brought about some raised eyebrows. Griff sat forward in his chair. “How do you mean ‘one of them’? He must be more than twice their age.”
“Well, Annie, Grable, and Zofia were all in their nightclothes when I got there and didn’t turn a hair about Sir Basil marching in with his bottle of wine. I think he is a regular visitor at the cottage.” I shrugged. “They were back from working long hours and were just relaxing: washing their hair and making dinner.”
He sat up straight, his eyes round as he tried not to laugh. “Nightclothes?” he asked, and then seeing my confused expression: “You mean robes, don’t you?”
“Robes?” There had been nothing ceremonial about their appearance.
He snapped his fingers to wake up his memory. “Those heavy plaid things that wrap around you and are tied by cord belt with a tassel, the ones you wear over thick cotton pajamas in unheated English houses in the winter?”
“Yes, dressing gowns, what else could I mean?”
He passed a hand over his eyes and his shoulders shook with inner laughter. “God, I must be really tired. From the way you described it, I thought for a moment that they were all floating around in filmy negligees with those little swansdown thingamabobs on their feet.”
It was my turn to stare. “Who on earth wears those?”
“Barbara Stanwyck in Remember the Night.”
“Oh, a film,” I said dismissively, because we all know how true to life they are, and Barbara Stanwyck was hardly the yardstick for English middle-class propriety.
“A movie—if Barbara Stanwyck stars in it, it’s definitely a movie. So, there they all were, wrapped up in plaid blankets . . . and Sir Basil arrives and gives them a bottle of wine. Did he drink it with you? How long did he stay?”
“No, he didn’t drink it with us. He just popped in. Apparently he often drops a bottle of wine off on a Saturday night.” I caught his puzzled expression. “It struck me as odd too.” I frowned. “It’s not the sort of thing a real gentleman would do: arrive unannounced in a houseful of young, attractive women in their dressing gowns with a present of wine. Not even a close uncle or an older male cousin would do that—in my experience, anyway.”
He bowed his head to starchy manners. “Anything else that struck you as odd?”
“Yes, since June of this year someone was sending Edwina anonymous letters. Nasty ones. And the last one accused her of making up her Luftwaffe attack story.”
A long whistle. “Now, there’s something. Were they threatening? ‘I will tell everyone you lied about your attack, unless you . . .’” He waved his right hand in a circular motion. “Was she being blackmailed?”
“I didn’t get that impression. Grable described them as spiteful, that they were probably written by a lonely village spinster who was not right in the head, but . . .” I saw Annie and Grable at the kitchen table leaning forward angrily as they argued. “Annie disagreed with Grable, quite forcefully. She said they had been written to purposefully undermine Edwina’s confidence. The pair of them got pretty hot under the collar about the writer’s intentions. But the one thing they both agreed on was that Edwina was drinking heavily, or at least more than she usually did, and she was much worse after she got the letter about making up her Luftwaffe experience . . .”
Griff slapped his thigh with his hand. “There is something wrong here, isn’t there? After Cadogan’s dissertation on poison, I was all for calling it a day. But someone had it in for Edwina. Someone wanted to knock her off her perch, and they did such a good job, they made her crash. Why the bottom lip?”
“What?”
“I could ledge a quarter on it.”
The Edwina I had met had made me feel that I didn’t quite measure up: often a tactic of the underconfident. But after I had listened to Grable’s account of her drinking and her anxiety, I saw her as a deeply unhappy and overburdened young woman.
“I agree that the anonymous letters were probably a strategy to undermine Edwina’s self-confidence, or at the very least to make her jumpy and appear to be unhinged, but she didn’t seem anxious after lunch.” I saw her again, strolling out to her aircraft to make her demonstration flight, so relaxed I almost expected her to pick daisies on the way. “During lunch that day, she had seemed preoccupied. Perhaps she was bored with having to wait around to do her solo flight, but I would not have said anxious. I think she was looking forward to showing us how good she was. She had a sort of lazy, almost insolent attitude.
“After listening to Grable and Annie arguing about these letters, and why they were written, as well as the effect they had on her . . .” I paused because I wanted to get this bit right. “I think Edwina was dealing with a very complicated situation, but there was nothing about the heavy drinker in her when I met her. How did she seem to you?”
He looked down for a moment, and when he looked up, his eyes met mine with absolute sincerity.
“I thought she was . . .” He hesitated. “At first, I thought she was a bright, outgoing girl, but I have no idea whether she was genuinely confident or not; it was hard to tell. I felt as if . . . she was playing a part. As if she was playing at being . . . a femme fatale. That in her mind she was this sexy, powerful woman who was always in charge: the one with a
ll the answers.”
There was a long silence: the fire subsided into a heap of glowing embers, Bessie yawned, and I waited.
“I think you are talking about two different things, Poppy. You are trying to figure out what her state of mind was in the days before the crash, and her relationship with the people she worked and shared her life with. My experience of her when we first arrived was something different. I was a diversion and an opportunity for her to show everyone in the mess that day that she was still a force to be reckoned with. She was playing the part of what we call a ‘man-eater’ in America, which is neither attractive to most men nor the behavior of a confident woman. I am much more interested in her relationship with her girlfriends. What did June have to say about the anonymous letters?”
I was glad we had cleared up that little point.
“June wasn’t there. She arrived after Grable, Annie, and I had eaten dinner and they were arguing about the letters. June had spent the evening at the mess, and it was there that Vera had made the announcement of Letty’s death.” I described June’s desperate arrival at the cottage. “She was devastated. They all were, because . . .” I had to pause to steady my voice. There were few women in the world with Letty’s genuinely good heart. “Because Letty was the best of them all: genuine, thoughtful, and kind. I left just after that.”
Bess yawned again and I looked at my watch. “It’s after midnight,” I said and felt the last of my energy and concentration ebb away. “But before we call it a night, I saw something rather odd on my way back to the inn.” And I described the brief flare of lights by the hangar, and the very human exclamation that followed it.
* * *
* * *
I AWOKE WITH a headache. It was still dark. Bess was lying heavily on my stomach and the room was stuffy and airless. I switched on my bedside light; it was half past two. I was desperately thirsty: somewhere in this untidy little room was my tooth mug.
