by Carola Dunn
“Did you take a powder?” Daisy asked.
“Not then. I don’t like to take them too often, and I was so exhausted I felt sure I’d sleep without. I did go to sleep quickly, but not soundly. You know how it is when you have bad dreams and you keep half waking, not quite sure if you’re still dreaming? That’s how it was. Then I did wake up, completely, and looked at the clock. It has luminous hands. It was well past one and the light on the landing showed under the door.”
“You had turned it off?”
“No, I left it on for Francis, but he’d have turned it off when he came to bed. Electricity costs money.” Her mocking tone suggested she was quoting an oft-repeated and much-despised dictum. “In spite of which, I turned on the bedside lamp. His bed was empty. I tried to go to sleep again, but then I thought maybe he’d taken the powder and fallen asleep at the kitchen table. It seems silly now, but I worried about what Mrs. Bates would think when she found him in the morning.”
“You English!” Sakari exclaimed. “Always worrying about what the servants will think. It is futile.”
“Yet one does,” said Mel.
The Indian attitude towards servants might add an interesting sidelight to her article, Daisy thought.
“Francis would have been mortified,” said Mrs. Walker, “and he was difficult enough to live with already. So I went down. I opened the kitchen door. You’ve all smelt gas. You can’t imagine what it’s like to breathe in a lungful. Somehow I managed to slam the door shut. For a while, I don’t know how long, I couldn’t do anything but choke and wheeze.”
Involuntarily, Daisy raised her hand to her throat as if she were having trouble breathing. So did Mel and Sakari. They exchanged rueful glances. If Mrs. Walker was lying, she was doing it very well.
“I wasn’t thinking very clearly,” she went on, “as you can imagine. I don’t remember wondering what had happened.”
“It didn’t cross your mind that the major was committing suicide?” Daisy asked, more than a trifle incredulous.
Mrs. Walker shook her head. “All I could think about was that the more gas kept pouring into the kitchen, the more likely the whole house would blow up. I had to turn it off. I’d read somewhere about tying a wet cloth over one’s mouth and nose in case of fire. I don’t know if it’s of any use against gas, but that’s what I did. I soaked one of the hand towels in the downstairs cloakroom—you know the sort, linen with one corner embroidered. With that across my face, I dashed into the kitchen, holding my breath, and turned off the gas tap.”
“And saw the major.”
“Yes, I saw him, of course. Should I have tried to help him? I barely got myself out of there. I breathed some more gas and went through the whole choking thing again, nausea too. I couldn’t go back in. It was much too late for him, anyway. For the room to be so full of gas, he must have been breathing it for an age.” She was silent for a long moment. “Until he stopped breathing.”
Silence again.
“What’s hard to understand,” said Daisy, “is why he’d choose that way out. He was so very soldierly. Why didn’t he shoot himself?” Like an officer and a gentleman, she thought but didn’t say.
Horribly, Gwen Walker started to laugh. There was more than a touch of hysteria in her laugh, and more than a touch of bitterness. “Soldierly!” she spat out. “He fooled everyone, didn’t he? Me too, for long enough to marry the war hero. Francis never saw a battlefield in his life. Army Service Corps, he was. He never even crossed the Channel. And somehow he succeeded in going into the War poor and coming out well off.”
This time the shocked silence was filled with halfincredulous disgust. Melanie broke it.
“He sold military supplies?” she asked tentatively, as if she thought she must have misunderstood.
“‘Diverted’ them. That’s how he put it. He couldn’t resist boasting to me, knowing I wouldn’t give him away. But he never really believed he’d got away with it, whence the penny-pinching. And thence”—she looked at Melanie—“my expertise in forging his signature.”
“So you did write the suicide note,” said Daisy.
“Oh yes. I knew, from the cushions he’d taken into the kitchen to make himself comfortable, that he’d been to his den. When I recovered enough to move, I went in there and found the note he’d written. He said he was doing it because I had betrayed him and murdered my lover and he couldn’t stand the disgrace. The bastard!”
The ugly word broke on a sob and she started crying in earnest. Daisy pressed a handkerchief into her hand and looked at the others. Mel seemed stunned; it was all too much for her gentle nature. Sakari’s dark eyes were alight with speculation.
She caught Daisy’s glance and said softly, “Well, sleuthhound, what is your opinion?”
By unspoken consent, they both rose and moved to the far end of the room.
“I think she’s telling the truth,” said Daisy. “What she’s said answers so many odd questions which needed explaining. Alec may be able to pick holes in her story, but I can’t see any at present.”
“So the major killed himself. Did he also kill Talmadge?”
“As she wrote in her note?”
“Oh, did she?”
“Alec told me so. But I think it was a bit of tit-for-tat and mostly to satisfy the police. I doubt she believes it, or she would have made a point of it to us.”
“This sleuthing is very complicated,” Sakari complained.
“Alec would say I’m just theorizing wildly. The major as murderer just doesn’t feel right to me. I can’t even see him as brave enough to confront Talmadge, let alone kill him. He shot his bolt when he stole the supplies bound for our men in the trenches.”
“Thus it seems to me also.”
“Who do you think did it, then, Sakari?”
“From the start I have theorized wildly. Shall I tell you who was my first guess?”
“Yes, who?”
Sakari glanced at the others. “I do not wish to malign an innocent person. I will whisper the name.” She leant close and whispered.
Daisy stared at her, sinking into the nearest chair as the leftover pieces of the jigsaw puzzle fell neatly into place. At last the picture was complete.
“It seems so obvious now, darling.” Daisy had inveigled Alec into the major’s den when he arrived at the Walkers’.
“What does?” he demanded impatiently, and Tom Tring’s moustache twitched.
Ernie Piper’s murmur was not quite sotto voce: “Whatever it is, it’s bound to be right.”
“As Sakari says, it’s the only solution that is psychologically sound.”
This time Tom snorted audibly, but whether in amusement or scepticism Daisy wasn’t sure. Ernie looked rather dismayed.
Alec looked furious, his dark brows gathering in a thundercloud above hail grey eyes. “Great Scott, Daisy, you’ve been discussing the case with your friends? I thought I could at least trust you not to do that!”
“I haven’t told them a thing, darling,” Daisy said with perhaps not quite one hundred per cent accuracy. “Like the rest of St. John’s Wood, they’ve read every newspaper they could lay their hands on. They know the people involved, better than I do, having lived here longer. And I thought you’d be pleased that I asked them to come with me when Mrs. Walker insisted on seeing me. After all, if she’d been the murderer, I might have been done in by now.”
Gritting his teeth in a way that would have made his deceased dentist cringe, Alec said, “So you’ve taken her under your wing now.”
“No. She’s really behaved rather badly, much worse than Daphne. But I don’t believe she’s killed anyone. Wait till you hear her story.”
“That is what I came here for!”
“I know, darling. Just let me finish first.”
“As far as I can see, you haven’t even started yet.”
“Well, you keep interrupting. Why don’t you sit down and stop towering over me?”
With a resigned sigh, Alec sat and motion
ed to Tring and Piper to do likewise.
“Where’s Sergeant Mackinnon?” Daisy asked. She wasn’t exactly postponing the moment when she had to expose her theory to the experts, she just wondered.
Tom answered. “When his super heard the chief was applying for a warrant, he found another job for him.”
“Did you get a warrant, darling?”
“Yes. There’s quite enough evidence against Mrs. Walker to persuade a judge. Whether it’s enough for a jury, in the teeth of a good defence lawyer, I’m less certain. Which is why I have to talk to her before I serve the damn thing, and why I’m giving your ideas a hearing. Or hoping to. For pity’s sake, Daisy, get on with it.”
Daisy took a deep breath. “Right-oh. First I have to tell you—with Gwen Walker’s permission—that she was the veiled lady in the alley.”
“Aha!”
“The letter Talmadge wrote to her, the one Daphne saw, didn’t say good-bye, it asked her to come. She says he was pretty keen on her and wanted to see her one last time. When she arrived, he was anxious because he’d just finished with a patient and wasn’t sure whether Nurse Hensted was still in the waiting room and might overhear them.”
Alec sat up straight. “Go on.”
“So he spoke quietly as he told her about Daphne and the baby. He said he had to do the decent thing, but he was frightfully upset at parting with her. She decided he might feel better if she wasn’t too kind, so she told him she’d had enough of him and never wanted to hear from him again. And she’s pretty sure she raised her voice when she said it.”
“Ah!” said Tom Tring.
Daisy looked round at Piper. He had taken out his notebook and was scribbling furiously.
“Don’t write this down, please, Mr. Piper, but I seem to recall telling you, Alec, that Raymond Talmadge probably had to beat off applicants for the position of mistress.”
“Someone else told me something of the sort, too,” Alec admitted. “I can’t remember who, or exactly what they said, but I do recall having a feeling I’d learnt something significant and being unable to pin it down.”
“And Daphne once mentioned, in passing,” she went on, “that Miss Hensted was ‘nuts on’ her husband. I didn’t see the significance.”
“Which was? Where does it lead you, Daisy?”
She had hooked him, but whether she could sustain his interest with what followed was another matter. “Now, the next bit is pure speculation.” She was not surprised when his brows met again, but at least he was still listening. “Suppose Miss Hensted overheard. Suppose she decides her chance has come. She will be his consolation! She waits till she’s sure Mrs. Walker has left—all she’d have to do is stick her head out of the waiting room door to the drive and watch. Then she goes through to the surgery and passionately offers her all.”
“And he rejects her,” said Alec.
Daisy frowned at him, for a change. “In the meantime, he has settled himself in his chair and donned the mask. Another woman might be repulsed by the grotesque sight, but she sees it daily. When she declares herself, he has already turned on the gas and the oxygen and breathed a whiff. He doesn’t merely reject her. He laughs at her.”
Alec slowly nodded. “I myself saw her violent reaction when Hilda Kidd laughed at her.”
Tom focussed on the practical: “The nurse, of all people, knows what to do to kill with that apparatus, and where to find the bandages and sticking plaster.”
“And a nurse, of all people,” Daisy said, “learns to watch with cool composure as someone dies.”
EPILOGUE
Daisy didn’t hear the end of the story, or as near as it came to an end, till late the following Monday. In the interim, Alec told her nothing of his investigations. On Monday he came home late, having eaten in the canteen, and slumped in his favourite chair in the living room.
“Get me a whisky, love,” he asked, most unusually. “It looks as if you were right,” he went on when she came back from adding water to the amber liquid.
Daisy sat down on the sofa with her legs curled up under her in a most unladylike pose she would not have ventured in her mother-in-law’s presence. Nor her own mother’s, come to that. “You’ve arrested Nurse Hensted?”
“No such luck. She left her digs the day Creighton settled with her, although she’d paid her rent to the end of the month. Cashed his cheque and cleaned out her bank account. A nice sum, nearly two hundred pounds, saved in dribs and drabs over the years.”
“Which shows she isn’t the kind of person to waste her rent money by moving out early.”
“Exactly. She gave the landlady her parents’ address in Bishop’s Stortford as a forwarding address. Tom went down to see them, but they hadn’t heard from her since Christmas. Kept herself to herself, they say. Respectable people. They put us on to other relatives. No one’s seen hide nor hair of her.”
“What about the nurses’ agency?”
“We found their name and address in Talmadge’s papers. She hasn’t been back since they sent her to him three years ago, nor has she approached any of the other agencies in town. Have you any idea how many nurses’ agencies there are in London?”
“Not the foggiest, darling.”
“No doubt Piper could give you the exact figure. He visited them all.”
“I suppose she’d have to use her real name because of references and her registration papers.”
“Presumably, but Ernie described her anyway, without result. She had quite distinctive features.”
“Quite pretty. As far as looks go, she had no reason to despair of Talmadge’s attentions.”
“Mrs. Talmadge and her servants confirm that she seemed to be keen on him, and the landlady says she mentioned once or twice how handsome he was. We’re assuming your theory is correct as to motive, but it’s lucky that’s one thing we don’t have to prove. Means and opportunity she had, and her subsequent actions are definitely indicative of guilt.”
“She’s completely disappeared? Surely you’ll find her sooner or later.”
“Oh, we know where she went.”
“Where? Is this tit for tat, darling?”
Alec grinned. “Of course not. Such childishness is beneath me. I’m just telling it as it happened. When Ernie drew a blank at the last agency, the woman suggested Brenda Hensted might have found a job through the agony column in the Times. We went through the back numbers. You’d be amazed at how many elderly invalids in comfortable circs are urgently in need of nursing care, other staff kept.”
“No, I wouldn’t. I imagine there’s quite a high attrition rate, invalids being notoriously crabby. Nurse Hensted swore she’d rather go back to hospital work than be at an invalid’s beck and call.”
“Yes, Ernie has it down in black and white. Yet she didn’t even try for a hospital position, which the agency said she would have found at once, registered nurses being in short supply. So the Times adverts were worth a try.”
“Don’t tell me you talked the editor of the Times into violating the sacred secrecy of the Box Number?” asked Daisy, awed.
“Rather than try, we started by ringing up the few advertisers who gave telephone numbers. It was late Saturday afternoon by then, though, and hard to get hold of people. As it turned out, the chap we wanted had gone down to his constituency.”
“A Member of Parliament?”
“Whose invalid mother-in-law departed on Thursday to take the waters in Baden-Baden. In a wheelchair pushed by Miss Hensted.”
“She’s gone abroad! Oh, Alec! I’m surprised she had a passport.”
“As an MP he was able to get her one in a couple of days. She rang up about the job on Monday evening.”
“A few hours after Talmadge’s death!”
“She went for an interview and was hired on Tuesday, a few hours after Creighton paid her off and wrote a reference for her. They caught the boat train on Thursday and by now they’ll be in Baden.”
“Surely the German police can arrest her for you, da
rling?”
“Germany’s in too much of a mess these days to count on anything. I’m told France hasn’t actually made a grab for that bit of the country, at least not yet, though Baden’s not far from the French frontier. It’s supposed to be safe from the chaos because the spa earns so much foreign currency no one can afford to muck about with it. But it’s easy enough for anyone to disappear into the surrounding area, and thence who knows where. Our MP just received a desperate cable from mama-in-law saying please send a new nurse. Miss Hensted has vanished.”
“Oh, darling!”
“Not one of my greatest successes,” Alec said wryly. “There were too many obvious suspects. I never even looked at the nurse.”
“More whisky?”
He laughed. “No, it’s not bad enough to drive me to drink. Let’s go to bed.”
On the way up the stairs, Daisy said, “I went to see Daphne Talmadge today.”
“Yes? You’re not going to change your mind and tell me she or Creighton did it!”
“No, darling. Apparently the baby-to-be is out of danger. They’re so happy about it, she and Lord Henry.” She slipped her arm through his. “Alec, what would you think about giving Belinda a little brother or sister?”
“Suits me,” said Alec.
ALSO BY CAROLA DUNN
The Daisy Dalrymple Mysteries
Death at Wentwater Court
The Winter Garden Mystery
Requiem for a Mezzo
Murder on the Flying Scotsman
Damsel in Distress
Dead in the Water
Styx and Stones
Rattle His Bones
To Davy Jones Below
The Case of the Murdered Muckraker
Mistletoe and Murder
DIE LAUGHING. Copyright @ 2003 by Carola Dunn. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
