by Morgana Best
“He’s already on the town council,” I pointed out.
Aunt Agnes made a sound of dismissal. “No, Valkyrie, I mean political aspirations in the sense of Federal politics. Anyway, he’s always on TV going on about family values. In fact, that’s his platform—strong morals and family values. It wouldn’t do if it got out that he’d been having an affair with Karen Cosgrove. His wife’s on a lot of charity boards. It wouldn’t go down at all well.”
“How did you find out it was him?” I asked her.
“We actually found the DVD, and we watched it.”
“You watched the sex tape?” Linda asked with a giggle.
“Yes, I did,” Aunt Agnes said. “I thought I’d seen everything, but that tape was something else! He would be most upset if it was leaked to the press.”
“Then it makes more sense if he was the killer,” I said. “Out of everybody, he had the most to lose.”
“As far as we know,” Aunt Agnes said. “There could be people with other motives and we just don’t know about them yet.”
I nodded, and then realised she couldn’t see me. “Fair enough, but it kind of absolves Karen.”
“Why do you say that?” Linda asked me.
“Why would Karen want to murder the blackmailer now? Her husband is already out of the way in prison awaiting trial, and it’s her lover who would be implicated.”
“Maybe she doesn’t want her lover implicated, and maybe she took matters into her own hands,” Agnes said.
I rubbed my forehead. “Yes, of course, you’re right. I haven’t been sleeping well since Lucas has been away, and it must be affecting my thinking. Anyway, we don’t have to stake out Karen anymore, do we?” I asked hopefully.
“No,” Aunt Agnes said. “If Linda wouldn’t mind taking you back to the shopping centre, I think Dorothy, Maude, you, and I should pay a little visit to Franklyn Sutton.”
“What? Actually visit him in his office?”
“Yes.”
I was surprised. “What do you plan to say to him?”
“I don’t have any plans. I’m going to wing it.” With that, she hung up.
“That doesn’t sound good to me,” I said to Linda, who had already started the engine and was turning the car around. “If he’s the murderer, then he might come after us if he knows we’ve got evidence against him.”
I repeated the sentiments to Aunt Agnes after Linda left me at the shopping centre, but she remained unmoved. “He can’t murder the four of us,” she said.
“Why not?” I said with a shrug.
Aunt Agnes patted my shoulder. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Don’t we need an appointment or something?” I said, hoping we would so I could avoid seeing him.
“We’ll try to get in now,” she said.
The other aunts were in agreement with her, so I had no choice but to follow. There was no receptionist at the front desk in the tiny office. I noted it wasn’t far from Karen Cosgrove’s nail salon and was down a corridor that led to a wall cupboards, which I assumed were full of cleaning implements. Aunt Agnes ran a bell on the desk.
A man stepped out. I recognised him at once as Franklyn Sutton. He was tall and well built, and wearing a sickly smile and an ill-fitting suit. “Hello, ladies. What can I do for you?”
Aunt Agnes shot him a wide smile. “I wonder if you could spare us a few minutes of your time? Your receptionist doesn’t appear to be here.”
“Oh, she’s not full-time,” he said. “Sure, I’m happy to help my constituents. Please come through to my office.” He nodded at each one of us in turn.
We walked into his office. There were only three chairs opposite his desk, so he popped back out and returned with a chair from the tiny waiting room.
The office was entirely depressing, painted a shade somewhere between dirty cream and murky grey. There was a window, but it was small and didn’t afford much light even with the curtains opened as he had them now. Several cream filing cabinets sat around the room and perched on top of the one in the corner was a dead potted plant.
“Terrible fires we’ve had lately,” he said.
Aunt Agnes agreed. “Yes. Hopefully, we’ll have some rain soon and it will clear the air. The smoke is coming from south of Taree.”
The man smiled again. “Well, what can I do for you ladies? Are you here to complain about the Prime Minister?” He leant across the desk and gave us a huge wink. “I have to support him, of course, but…” He let his voice trail away and winked again.
“My name is Agnes Jasper, and these are my sisters, Dorothy and Maude. This is our niece, Valkyrie.”
“Pepper,” I said automatically.
“We own the Mugwort Manor Bed and Breakfast.”
I noticed a flicker of recognition cross his face, followed by something else—maybe alarm?
“We had a boarder, Ethelbert Jones, was murdered on our premises not too long ago.”
He nodded slowly. “Oh yes, a terrible business.” He shook his head. “A terrible business.”
“And his wife died the other day. Her name was Euphemia.”
He looked shocked. “Euphemia is dead?”
Aunt Agnes nodded. “Did you know her?”
He almost fell over himself saying he didn’t. “No, no, no. I had heard of her, of course, because her husband was murdered and it made the news. I have to know about these things, you see. But I’ve never met her.” Gone was his false charm, to be replaced by tension.
“The police said it was natural causes,” Aunt Agnes continued.
He nodded. “Yes, very sad. Maybe the stress of her husband’s murder took its toll on her.”
Aunt Agnes shook her head. “To the contrary, we are convinced she was murdered.”
“Murdered?” he repeated. “But didn’t you just say the police said it was natural causes?”
“The police didn’t do a post-mortem or even take toxicology samples,” Aunt Agnes said. “They didn’t see a bullet wound or a stab wound, so they assumed it was natural causes. It was the wrong assumption, of course.”
“I don’t see how I can help you,” he said slowly. “Do you want me to speak to the police and ask them to open a case?”
Aunt Agnes did not answer his question, but said, “It was well known that her husband, Ethelbert, was murdered because he was blackmailing Killian Cosgrove and Mrs Mumbles.” She looked at him for a response, but there wasn’t one. She pushed on. “And so we think that another blackmail victim murdered Euphemia.”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t think I’m following you,” Sutton said in clipped tones.
“Why don’t I come straight to the point?” Aunt Agnes said.
He leant back in his chair. “Please do.”
Aunt Agnes took the DVD case from her handbag and pushed it across the table to him. “Well then, to come straight to the point, we are asking you if you murdered Euphemia Jones.”
He picked up the DVD case, looked at it, and dropped it like a hot potato. “Who are those people?” he said, his eyes darting wildly from side to side.
“We know it’s you,” Aunt Agnes said. “We watched the sex tape.”
Sutton’s hand flew to his throat. “You did?” he squeaked. “What do you want from me?”
Aunt Maude spoke for the first time. “We don’t want to blackmail you or anything like that, if that’s what you’re thinking. We just want to know whether you murdered Euphemia.”
Sutton landed his chair with a thud. “Of course, I didn’t murder her! This can’t get out. If my wife found out…” His voice trailed away. I noticed his hands were shaking.
“We’re not going to tell your wife or tell the police, unless we find out you were the one who murdered Euphemia,” Agnes said.
“You’re not going to blackmail me?”
The aunts shook their heads.
“You’re not going to tell my wife? Or tell the police?”
Aunt Agnes leant across the desk and drummed her fingers on the
mouse pad sitting opposite her. “Listen, we’re not going to tell anybody, but you have to convince us you didn’t murder Euphemia Jones. Do you have an alibi?”
“When did she die?” he asked.
“Four days ago,” Aunt Maude said.
He looked up at the ceiling. “I wasn’t in town that day.”
“Where were you?” Agnes asked him.
“I drove to Newcastle and back that day. I had a political meeting there.”
“What time did the meeting start?”
“It started at nine, and went all morning.”
Aunt Agnes took out a notepad and wrote it down. “I see. Thanks for your help.”
He reached for the DVD, but Aunt Agnes snatched it. “We won’t tell anyone; you can rest assured of that, but we are keeping it for insurance. We’ve made several copies and we have given them to our lawyers in case anything were to happen to us.”
“I’m not a murderer,” he squeaked.
“Let’s hope so.” With that, Aunt Agnes stood up. We all stood up and followed her out.
When we were back in the hallway, Aunt Maude asked, “What do you make of that?”
“We’ll have to check out his alibi,” Aunt Agnes said, “but I doubt it will be at all revealing.”
“Why not?” Dorothy asked her.
“His alibi simply means he was in Newcastle at the time Gorgona died, which means he couldn’t have injected her with poison on that day. It’s possible she was poisoned by something in the cottage that she had eaten the day before, for all we know. Maybe, she had been eating the poisoned substance over a period of days. In fact, he could have visited her the day before and he could have given her a poisonous substance. I’m afraid alibis aren’t much help when we don’t know when the poison was administered or even what it was.”
“It will take a week to get the results back from the lab. However, Pillsbury will be back at the morgue this afternoon,” Dorothy said. “Is the plan still to get some of Gorgona’s hair?”
“Yes, and there’s a lab in Lismore,” Aunt Agnes said. “We will send it by express post, and it will arrive tomorrow, but that lab too can take up to a week to process samples. It tests for arsenic but no other poisons.”
“If it wasn’t arsenic or one of the substances the other labs test for, then how do we find out what the poison was?” I asked her.
We all looked at each other in silence. Our investigation wasn’t going at all well.
Chapter 12
We drove to the morgue on the other side of town. “I didn’t know Pillsbury was a cosmetician,” I said to Aunt Maude.
“Yes, he works for that funeral company that Jezabeth is using for her mother’s funeral,” Maude said, although of course we all knew that already. “I didn’t put two and two together at first.”
“How many morgues are there in this town?” I asked.
“The hospitals have them, of course, but Pillsbury told me that there are a few smaller, privately owned ones owned by the funeral companies in town. They’re basically just freezer rooms—nothing fancy.”
“I wouldn’t think that could be a full-time job for Pillsbury,” Aunt Agnes said.
“I have no idea,” Aunt Maude said with a shrug. “I don’t really care, to be honest. I just thought he’d make a good sugar daddy.”
Aunt Agnes and Aunt Dorothy exchanged glances. I thought it best not to comment. Aunt Agnes stopped the car opposite a small, pale green building at a crossroads. We were about to get out of the car when Aunt Agnes screeched, “Freeze!” followed by, in more measured tones, “Quick! Get back in the car.”
We all did as she asked. “Look, Gorgona and Jezabeth have just come out.”
“Wow, that was lucky,” I said. “Imagine if they had caught us in there.”
“More to the point, what were they doing in there?” Agnes said.
“I suppose we’ll find out soon enough.”
“Duck!” Agnes said.
We all ducked. “My legs are cramped! When can I stick my head up?” Dorothy asked after an interval.
“Hush,” Aunt Agnes hissed. “I’ll take a little peek.” She raised her head a little and then ducked back. “Just give it another minute or so. They’re getting in a car now.”
After Dorothy complained again, Agnes looked once more. “The coast is clear,” she said with a sigh of relief. “They’ve gone.”
“Do you think they saw us?” Maude asked.
“I don’t think so,” Agnes said. “They’re both too self-absorbed to notice anything much apart from themselves.”
We crossed the road and hurried into the big green building which also housed a lawyer’s office and a dentist. I shuddered as I walked past the dentist. Maude opened the door to the little morgue and ushered us inside.
Pillsbury was standing there, looking at his clipboard. He looked up and smiled when he saw Maude. “Oh, it’s lovely to see you all,” he said although he addressed that comment to Maude.
Maude came straight to the point. “We just saw our cousin, Jezabeth, come in here with her daughter. What did they want?”
“They came in here to make sure Euphemia Jones could not be viewed by anyone.” His face fell. “I’m afraid they specifically mentioned you, Maude, and your lovely sisters.”
“Our cousin isn’t exactly a nice woman,” Maude said.
Pillsbury nodded slowly. “So, is this just a social call?”
Aunt Agnes stepped forward. She took a deep breath, and then said, “Dorothy, Maude, and I believe Euphemia Jones was murdered. The police were dismissive and said it was natural causes, but we are certain she was poisoned.”
Pillsbury looked shocked. “Poisoned, you say?”
Aunt Agnes nodded solemnly. “We came here to sneak a piece of her hair so we could send it away for sampling to prove she had been poisoned.”
“But hair doesn’t test for many poisons,” Pillsbury said. “You’d be much better off with a toxicology report.”
“And how do we get one of those done?” Agnes asked him.
He looked over the top of his glasses. “I don’t think you can. Not unless you’re a police officer or the like.”
“Precisely. That’s why we need to take a hair sample. I know it doesn’t test for all the poisons, but at least we could discount arsenic.”
Pillsbury tapped his chin. “Arsenic. What were her symptoms?”
“She complained of feeling very ill and said she had terrible stomach pains.”
“That was it?” Pillsbury looked most disappointed.
“I’m afraid so.”
Pillsbury put down his clipboard. “Then it could have been anything really, any poison. Anyway, ladies, I am afraid I can’t let you take a sample of Mrs Jones’s hair, not after her daughter and granddaughter specifically asked me not to.”
Maude sidled up to him and gave him what she no doubt imagined was a seductive smile. “But they’re not benefactors of the will and my sisters and I are,” she said. “Doesn’t that count for anything?”
Pillsbury looked discomfited. “I’m afraid not. It would only be of use if the will said you could take some of her hair, but obviously it didn’t, so I have to abide by the wishes of the next of kin.”
“Quite right,” Aunt Agnes said. “Well Maude, you stay here and have a little chat with Pillsbury and we’ll wait for you in the car.”
Maude made to follow us, but Agnes clamped a hand on the shoulder. “We don’t mind. There is no need to protest. We will wait in the car.”
It took a few moments for Agnes’s wishes to dawn on Maude. “Oh, I see,” she said, nodding slowly as she spoke.
When Pillsbury wasn’t looking, Aunt Agnes made a kissing motion with her lips. Maude looked puzzled. Agnes took me by the arm and ushered me outside. “Okay, I’m hoping Maude gets the hint to keep Pillsbury occupied and then you can go in and cut some of Euphemia’s hair.”
“Why me?” I protested. “Why can’t you do it?”
“Because
you’re younger and more agile than we are,” Aunt Agnes said with a smile. She handed me a small pair of scissors. “Don’t be too fussy about it. Just cut some off.”
“What if Pillsbury sees me?” I said.
“Valkyrie, it is imperative that you get some of that hair, whether he sees you or not. Get the hair first and worry about him seeing you later. If the worst comes to the worst, use your vampire speed.”
I rolled my eyes. “This really isn’t fair.”
Aunt Agnes waved her hand at me and gave me a gentle shove. The front door was still open a little. I poked my head around and peeped inside. Aunt Maude had Pillsbury in a passionate embrace, but she had one eye fixed on the door. I gave her a little wave. With her one hand behind Pillsbury’s neck, she waved me into the next room.
I dropped to the ground and crawled as fast as I could into the other room. I thought the door opening might alert Pillsbury, but he didn’t seem to notice.
Once inside the room, I stood up. It was a plain white room with stainless steel drawers, no doubt filled with bodies, just like on TV shows. I crossed to the nearest one and opened it. There, to my horror, was Euphemia Jones. I don’t know what I had expected. She looked pretty good for a dead person. I grabbed the scissors and cut off a huge chunk of her hair and popped it in the plastic bag Aunt Agnes had given me. I shoved the bag in my pocket and pushed the drawer shut.
“Is somebody in there?” I heard Pillsbury say.
“I didn’t hear anything,” Maude said.
I looked around for a hiding place and noticed a door at the back of the room. I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed it before. I ran over to it. It was locked from the inside, so I quickly flipped the lock and let myself out.
I at once tripped over a rubbish bin at the back door. It fell to the ground with a loud clatter. Okay, it was time to use my vampire speed. I hightailed it out of there. When I reached the road, I resumed my normal pace and walked over to Aunt Agnes’s car. “Here you are,” I said handing Agnes the bag.
“My goodness gracious me, Valkyrie, did you leave her any hair at all?”
“You said not to be too fussy about it,” I said.
