by Ruth Rendell
The morning being better – a pale, sickly sun was shining and making quite attractive tints on the undersides of black clouds – he thought they might go on the beach. But Cecily had other plans. She got him to take her to Tarrington, and in the little shopping centre she left him to his own devices which included buying two pairs of thicker socks. After that, because it was raining again, there was nothing to do but sit in the car park. She kept him waiting two hours.
‘What d’you think?’ she said. ‘I found that chemist, the one that sold Rupert Moore the wasp killer that hadn’t got cyanide in it. And, would you believe it, it’s still the same firm. The original pharmacist’s grandson is the manager.’
‘I suppose,’ said Hugh, ‘that he told you his grandfather had made a deathbed confession he did give Moore the cyanide after all.’
‘Do try not to be so silly. I already knew they had cyanide wasp killer in the shop. It said so in the library book. This young man, the grandson, couldn’t tell me much, but he did say his grandfather had had a very pretty young girl assistant. How about that?’
‘I’ve noticed that very pretty young girls often do work in chemist’s shops.’
‘I’m glad you notice something, at any rate. However, she is not the one. The grandson knows her present whereabouts, and she is a Mrs Lewis. So I shall have to look elsewhere.’
‘What d’you mean, the one?’ said Hugh dismally.
‘My next task,’ said Cecily, taking no notice, ‘will be to hunt for persons in this case of the name of Jones. Young women, that is. I know where to begin now. Sooner or later I shall root out a girl who was an assistant in a chemist’s shop at the time and who married a Jones.’
‘What for?’
‘That right may be done,’ said Cecily solemnly. ‘That the truth may at last come out. I see it as my mission. You know I always have a mission, Hugh. It was the merest chance we happened to come to Northwold because Diana Richards recommended it. You wanted to go to Lloret de Mar. I feel it was meant we should come here because there was work for me to do. I am convinced Moore was guilty of this crime, but not alone in his guilt. He had a helper who, I believe, is alive at this moment. I’d like you to drive me to Clacton now. I shall begin by interviewing some of the oldest inhabitants.’
So Hugh drove to Clacton where he lost a pound on the fruit machines. Indefatigably, Cecily pursued her investigations.
Mrs Jones came back from morning service at St Mary’s and although she was a good walker and not at all tired, for she had slept well ever since she came to Northwold, she sat down for half an hour on her favourite seat. Two other elderly people who had also been in church were sitting on Jackson (‘In memory of Bertrand Jackson, 1859–1924, Philanthropist and Lover of the Arts’). Mrs Jones nodded pleasantly at them; but she didn’t speak. It wasn’t her way to waste in chat time that was more satisfactorily spent in reminiscence.
A pale grey mackerel sky, a fitful sun. Perhaps it would brighten up later. She thought about her daughter who was coming to lunch. Brenda would be tired after the drive, for the children, dears though they were, would no doubt be troublesome in the car. They would all enjoy that nice piece of sirloin and the Yorkshire pudding and the fresh peas and the chocolate ice cream. She had got in a bottle of sherry so that she and Brenda and Brenda’s husband could have a glass each before the meal.
Her son and daughter had been very good to her. They knew she had been a devoted wife to their father, and they didn’t resent the place in her love she kept for her darling. Not that she had ever spoken of him in front of their father or of them when they were small. That would have been unkind and in bad taste. But later she had told them about him and told Brenda, in expansive moments, about the long-past happiness and the tragedy of her darling’s death, he so young and handsome and gifted. Perhaps, this afternoon when the rest of them were on the beach, she might allow herself the luxury of mentioning him again. Discreetly, of course, because she had always respected Mr Jones and loved him after a fashion, even though he had taken her away to Ipswich and never attained those heights of talent and success her darling would have enjoyed had he lived. Tranquilly, not unhappily, she recalled to her mind his face, his voice, and some of their conversations.
Mrs Jones was disturbed in her reverie by the presence of that tiresome woman. She had seen her before, hanging about on the promenade and once examining the seat Mrs Jones thought of as her own. An ugly, thin, neurotic-looking woman who was sometimes in the company of a sensible elderly man and sometimes with that shameless scrounger, old Cottle’s boy, whom Mrs Jones in her old-fashioned way called a barfly. Today, however, she was alone and to Mrs Jones’s dismay was approaching her with intent to speak.
‘Do excuse me for speaking to you but I’ve seen you here so often.’
‘Oh, yes?’ said Mrs Jones. ‘I’ve seen you too. I’m afraid I have to go now. I’ve guests for lunch.’
‘Please don’t go. I won’t keep you more than a moment. But I must tell you I’m terribly interested in the Moore case. I can’t help wondering if you knew him, you’re here so much.’
‘I knew him,’ said Mrs Jones distantly.
‘That’s terribly exciting.’ And the woman did look very excited. ‘I suppose you first met him when he came into the shop?’
‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Jones and she got up. ‘But I don’t care to talk about it. It’s a very long time ago and it’s best forgotten. Good morning.’
‘Oh, but please . . . !’
Mrs Jones ignored her. She walked far more rapidly than usual, breathing heavily, along the path towards the old town. She was flustered and upset and very put out. To rake up all that now just when she was thinking of the lovely events of that time! For that day, though not, she hoped, for the future, the encounter had spoiled the seat for her.
‘Had a good day with Cottle?’ said Hugh.
‘Don’t speak to me about that man. Can you imagine it, I gave him a ring and a woman answered! She turned out to be some creature on holiday like us who was taking him to Lowestoft in her car. I could come too if I liked. No, thank you very much, I said. What about my finding the girl called Jones? I said. And he was pleased to tell me I was getting obsessional. So I gave him a piece of my mind, and that’s the last of Arnold Cottle.’
And the last of his ten pounds, thought Hugh. ‘So you went on the beach instead?’
‘I did not. While you were out in that boat I researched on my own. And most successfully, I may add. You remember that old man in Clacton, the one in the old folks’ home? Well, he was quite fit enough to see me today, and I questioned him exhaustively.’
Hugh said nothing. He could guess which of them had been exhausted.
‘Ultimately,’ said Cecily, ‘I was able to prod him into remembering. I asked him to try and recall everyone he had ever known called Jones. And at last he remembered a local policeman, Constable Jones, who got married in or around 1930. And the girl he married worked in a local chemist’s shop. How about that?’
‘You mean she was Moore’s girlfriend?’
‘Isn’t it obvious? Her name was Gladys Palmer. She is now Mrs Jones. Moore was seen about with a girl in Clacton. This girl lived in Clacton and worked in a Clacton chemist’s shop. Now it’s quite evident that Moore was having a love affair with Gladys Palmer and that he persuaded her to give him the cyanide from the shop where she worked. The real evidence is that, according to all the books, that was one of the few chemist’s shops from which Moore never tried to obtain cyanide!’
‘That’s real evidence?’ said Hugh.
‘Of course it is, to anyone with any deductive powers. Gladys Palmer took fright when Moore was found guilty, so she married a policeman for protection, and the policeman’s name was Jones. Isn’t that proof?’
‘Proof of what?’
‘Don’t you ever remember anything? The barman in that Cross Keys place told us the old woman who sits on the Rupert Moore seat was a Mrs Jones.’ Cecily smile
d triumphantly. ‘They are one and the same.’
‘But it’s a very common name.’
‘Maybe. But Mrs Jones had admitted it. I spoke to her this morning before I went to Clacton. She has admitted knowing Moore and that she first met him when he came into the shop. How about that? And she was very nervous and upset, I can tell you, as well she might be.’
Hugh stared at his wife. He didn’t at all like the turn things were taking. ‘Cecily, it may be so. It looks like it, but it’s no business of ours. I wish you’d leave it.’
‘Leave it! For nearly fifty years this woman had got off scot-free when she was as much guilty of the murder of Mrs Moore as Moore was, and you say leave it! It’s her guilt brings her to that seat day after day, isn’t it? Any psychologist would tell you that.’
‘She must be at least seventy. Surely she can be left in peace now?’
‘I’m afraid it’s much too late for that, Hugh. There must be an inquiry, all the facts must come out. I have written three letters, one to the Home Secretary, one to the Chief Commissioner at Scotland Yard, and a third to the author of this very incomplete book. There they are on the dressing table. Perhaps you’d like to look at them while I have my bath.’
Hugh looked at them. If he were to tear them up she would only write them again. If he walked into the bathroom now and dislodged the heater from the wall and it fell into the water, and she died and it was called an accident . . . The letters would never be sent, he could have his workshop back, he could chat up pretty girls who worked in chemist’s shops and go on holiday to the Costa Brava and be free. He sighed heavily and went down to the bar to get a drink.
Thank goodness, thought Mrs Jones, that woman wasn’t anywhere to be seen this morning. The intrusion of yesterday had upset her for hours, even after Brenda arrived, but she was getting over it now. Unfortunately in a way, the weather had taken a turn for the better, and several of the seats were occupied. But not Rupert Moore. Mrs Jones sat down on it and put her shopping bag on the ground at her feet.
She was aware of the proximity of the barfly who was sitting on Lubbock (‘Elizabeth Anne Lubbock, for many years Headmistress of Northwold Girls’ High School’) and with him was a different woman, much younger than the other and very well dressed. With an effort, Mrs Jones expelled them from her mind. She looked at the calm blue sea and felt the warm and firm pressure of the oak against her back and thought about her darling. How sweet their love and companionship had been! It had endured for such a short time, and then separation and the unbearable loneliness. But she had been right to marry Mr Jones, for he had been a good husband and she the wife he wanted, and without him there would have been no Brian and no Brenda and no money to buy the house and come here every day to remember. If her darling had lived, though, and the children had been his, and if she had had him to sit beside her on his seat and be the joy of her old age . . .
‘Do forgive me,’ said a voice, ‘but I’m a local man myself, and I happened to be in Lowestoft yesterday and someone told me they’d heard you’d come back to this part of the world to live.’
Mrs Jones looked at the barfly. Was there to be no end to this kind of thing?
‘I’ve seen you on this seat and I did wonder, and when this friend in Lowestoft told me your present name, all was made plain.’
‘I see,’ said Mrs Jones, gathering up her shopping bag.
‘I want you to know how greatly I admire his work. My father had some charming examples of it – all sold now, alas – and anyone can see that this seat was made by a craftsman compared with the others.’ Her stony face, her hostility, made him hesitate. ‘You are,’ he said, ‘who I think you are, aren’t you?’
‘Of course I am,’ said Mrs Jones crossly, another morning spoilt. ‘Arthur Sarafin was my first husband. And now I really must be on my way.’
Paintbox Place
Elderly ladies as detectives are not unknown in fiction. Avice Julian could think of two or three, the creations of celebrated authors, and no doubt there were more. It would seem that the quiet routine of an old woman’s life, her penchant for gossip and knitting and her curiosity, born of boredom, provide a suitable climate for the consideration of motive and the assessment of clues. In fiction, that is. Would it, Mrs Julian sometimes wondered, also be true in reality?
She took a personal interest. She was eighty-four years old, thin, sharp-witted, arthritic, cantankerous and intolerant. Most of her time she spent sitting in an upright chair in the bay window of her drawing room in her very large house, observing what her neighbours got up to. From the elderly ladies of mystery fiction, though, she differed in one important respect. They were spinsters, she was a widow. In fact, she had been twice married and twice widowed. Could that, she asked herself after reading a particularly apposite detective novel, be of significance? Could it affect the deductive powers and it be her spinsterhood which made Miss Marple, say, a detective of genius? Perhaps. Anthropologists say (Mrs Julian was an erudite person) that in ancient societies maidenhood was revered as having awesome and unique powers. It might be that this was true and that prolonged virginity, though in many respects disagreeable, only serves to enhance them. Possibly, one day, she would have an opportunity to put to the test the Aged Female Sleuth Theory. She saw enough from her window, sitting there knitting herself a twinset in dark blue two-ply. Mostly she eyed the block of houses opposite, on the other side of broad, tree-lined Abelard Avenue.
There were six of them, all joined together, all exactly the same. They all had three storeys, plate-glass windows, a bit of concrete to put the car on, a flowerbed, an outside cupboard to put parcels in and an outside cupboard to put the rubbish sack in. Mrs Julian thought that unhygienic. She had an old-fashioned dustbin, though she had to keep a black plastic bag inside it if she wanted Northway Borough Council to collect her rubbish.
The houses had been built on the site of an old mansion. There had been several such in Abelard Avenue, as well as big houses like Mrs Julian’s which were not quite mansions. Most of these had been pulled down and those which remained converted into flats. They would do that to hers when she was gone, thought Mrs Julian, those nephews and nieces and great nephews and great nieces of hers would do that. She had watched the houses opposite being built. About ten years ago it had been. She called them the paintbox houses because there was something about them that reminded her of a child’s drawing and because each had its front door painted a different colour, yellow, red, blue, lime, orange and chocolate.
‘It’s called Paragon Place,’ said Mrs Upton, her cleaner and general help, when the building was completed.
‘What a ridiculous name! Paintbox Place would be far more suitable.’
Mrs Upton ignored this as she ignored all of Avice Julian’s remarks which she regarded as ‘showing off’, affected or just plain senile. ‘They do say,’ she said, ‘that the next thing’ll be they’ll start building on that bit of waste ground next door.’
‘Waste ground?’ said Mrs Julian distantly. ‘Can you possibly mean the wood?’
‘Waste ground’ had certainly been a misnomer, though ‘wood’ was an exaggeration. It was a couple of rustic acres, more or less covered with trees of which part of one side bordered Mrs Julian’s garden, part the Great North Road, and which had its narrow frontage on Abelard Avenue. People used the path through it as a short cut from the station. At Mrs Upton’s unwelcome forebodings, Avice Julian had got up and gone to the right hand side of the bay window which overlooked the ‘wood’ and thought how disagreeable it would be to have another Paintbox Place on her back doorstep. In these days when society seemed to have gone mad, when the cost of living was frightening, when there were endless strikes and she was asked to pay 98 per cent income tax on the interest on some of her investments, it was quite possible, anything could happen.
However, no houses were built next door to Mrs Julian. It appeared that the ‘wood’, though hardly National Trust or an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, wa
s nevertheless scheduled as ‘not for residential development’. For her lifetime, it seemed, she would look out on birch trees and green turf and small hawthorn bushes – when she was not, that is, looking out on the inhabitants of Paintbox Place, on Mr and Mrs Arnold and Mr Laindon and the Nicholsons, all young people, none of them much over forty. Their activities were of absorbing interest to Mrs Julian as she knitted away in dark blue two-ply, and a source too of disapproval and sometimes outright condemnation.
After Christmas, in the depths of the winter, when Mrs Julian was in the kitchen watching Mrs Upton peeling potatoes for lunch, Mrs Upton said: ‘You’re lucky I’m private, have you thought of that?’
This was beyond Mrs Julian’s understanding. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I mean it’s lucky for you I’m not one of those council home helps. They’re all coming out on strike, the lot of them coming out. They’re NUPE, see? Don’t you read your paper?’
Mrs Julian certainly did read her paper, the Daily Telegraph, which was delivered to her door each morning. She read it from cover to cover after she had had her breakfast, and she was well aware that the National Union of Public Employees was making rumbling noises and threatening to bring its members out over a pay increase. It was typical, in her view, of the age in which she found herself living. Someone or other was always on strike. But she had very little idea of how to identify the Public Employee and had hoped the threatened action would not affect her. To Mrs Upton she said as much.
‘Not affect you?’ said Mrs Upton, furiously scalping brussels sprouts. She seemed to find Mrs Julian’s innocence uproariously funny. ‘Well, there’ll be no gritters on the roads for a start and maybe you’ve noticed it’s snowing again. Gritters are NUPE. They’ll have to close the schools so there’ll be kids all over the streets. School caretakers are NUPE. No ambulances if you fall on the ice and break your leg, no hospital porters, and what’s more, no dustmen. We won’t none of us get our rubbish collected on account of dustmen are NUPE. So how about that for not affecting you?’
