by L. A. Nisula
My last visit, I hadn’t seen much of the shop, but now as I looked around, I saw that despite being small, it was quite well stocked. The cakes were easy to find near the back of the shop, alongside a small selection of tins of tea. I considered getting some tea as well—murders always seemed to require vast amounts of tea— and noticed the shelf above contained several tins of Mrs. Quimby’s Quality Tinned Fruit, which made me wonder if that was what I would find in the cakes and if I wanted to risk it.
“They’re all safe enough, dear. He gets them from Mrs. Greene down the way, and she uses fruit from their farm.”
“None of us would risk them if they used any of that tinned stuff.”
I turned to see three ladies behind me, the tallest one reminding me of Mrs. Parnell who owned a shop on Paddington Street and always seemed to know all of the gossip, although she looked nothing like her. “Thank you. I wasn’t sure whether to risk it.”
“Of course,” the third one, who was younger and seemed a bit flighty, said. “It’s hard to know when you’re new in the area.”
I knew they were trying to determine who I was, and why I was farther in the shop than needed to buy a quick sandwich. “And as we’re only here for a few days... My landlady is borrowing Oakwood Cottage from Mrs. Foster.”
“Ah, so you’re the one who found him.”
Of course that was what they’d been wondering. I nodded and hoped that was enough, as I wasn’t in the mood to give details.
“That must have been terrifying for you,” the one who reminded me of Mrs. Parnell said.
I generally found it was not good to mention that any corpse I found was nowhere near my first body. “It wasn’t how we’d planned to start our holiday.”
“I should think not. I mean, what would one even do in such a circumstance?”
“We sent for the police.”
“I suppose that was clever.”
Until I’d come to Eybry, I wouldn’t have called it clever, more the most logical thing to do, but I decided nodding quietly was again the best response.
“I’ve heard someone from Scotland Yard’s already been summoned,” said the one who’d told me the cakes were safe. She looked at me as she said it, and I couldn’t tell if it was simply because she thought the others already knew this information or if she wanted to be certain I did. I wondered if I ought to introduce myself and hopefully be able to collect names, but the one who reminded me of Mrs. Parnell went on without giving me the chance.
“Well, that’s hardly surprising, considering Mr. Hoyt’s position in the area.”
“What position? Married to the owner of the pub?”
“He does know everyone from his selling days, don’t forget,” the one I’d thought was flighty said, also glancing in my direction.
“No matter what, I’m sure it will be solved quickly now that they have someone competent coming down,” the one who reminded me of Mrs. Parnell said, ending the matter.
All three of them turned back to me. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to say, so I tried for a noncommittal, “I’m sure whoever they send will be very good,” then changed the topic back to the safe subject of cake. “Is the walnut or the Battenberg better, do you think?”
Two said “Battenberg” at the same time the third said “Walnut,” leaving me no choice but to take both and avoid offending anyone.
As I paid for my cakes, I found myself wondering if the discussion of Scotland Yard had been simple gossip, or if it had been meant as some sort of warning to me. If so, Mrs. Albright had been right, and I was a suspect, at least among the villagers. Not that I thought they really thought either of us had killed Mr. Hoyt, but we were convenient and would be leaving eventually, leaving them free to speculate without the inconvenience of us being around to contradict them or make them feel guilty. I was beginning to hope for a Scotland Yard man to sort the whole thing out.
~ * ~ * ~
The walk back to the cottage was uneventful, which should have told me something would be wrong when I got there, but I was so busy trying to figure out what, if anything, I had learned in the village that I was through the garden gate before I noticed Inspector Wainwright standing on the small front step of Oakwood Cottage with the irritated look of someone who’d been waiting longer than they’d anticipated. I took that to mean Mrs. Albright was out, as she would have let him in to see the crime scene hoping it would be the quickest way to be rid of him, which it probably was. He straightened as I approached and held up his warrant card.
Not who I was hoping for when I’d been pinning my innocence on the Scotland Yard man, and most definitely not whom I wanted to see at teatime, but at least he would investigate. He was probably here to warn me off the case. At least we would be on the same page for once. “Hello, Inspector. I take it you’re the Scotland Yard man everyone keeps talking about? Coming to see the crime scene?”
“Partly, yes.”
So he was warning me off. “Well, I suppose you know where it is. I was just going to have tea.” I unlocked the front door for him then started around the house and through to the kitchen to put the box of cakes down on the table. I waited, fully expecting Inspector Wainwright to follow me around. When he didn’t, I looked out to the front parlor and saw he was still standing in the entryway. “Did you want some tea?”
Inspector Wainwright didn’t turn to answer. Strangely enough, he also didn’t move to the hearth rug and start looking over the crime scene. “Miss Pengear, if you would sit over there, I have a few questions I would like to ask you.” He pointed to the chair near the staircase.
He didn’t complain, which was my first clue that something was off. “You’d like to— Inspector, am I a suspect?”
“If you would, Miss Pengear.”
“I am a suspect. That’s why you were holding your warrant card out. I thought that was odd, considering we both know I know who you are. But you can’t seriously think I killed that man.”
Inspector Wainwright sighed. “Personally, no, if you were going to kill someone you would be more subtle and clever than to strangle him then repeatedly beat him around the head and neck. Besides, I am quite sure you understand the concept that murder will out, and that makes you far less likely to commit one.”
I wondered if he’d noticed that he’d just told me how the murder had been committed, saving me the trouble of asking, and if that had been intentional or not. It wasn’t like him to share information, but it also wasn’t like him to let something slip unintentionally.
“But professionally, I have been given information by several people which points to you. I would not be doing my job if I did not treat this information impartially and investigate it, even when I have a wronged wife, multiple revenge-seeking husbands, and a long list of women unaware there was a long list to look into. Now if you would describe your movements for the past two days.”
“Past two days? Don’t you know when he died, then?”
“Miss Pengear.”
It seemed we were both losing patience with the investigation, quite a feat as he’d just started his part in it. “If you want me to sit in that particular chair, I’ll have to come all the way around. As you can see, Sergeant Harris has the doorway between the kitchen and the sitting room blocked off. But I can tell you from here, I spent all of the day before yesterday in London. Mrs. Albright can vouch for most of it; I was in and out of the flat getting ready to come down here. Yesterday, I was at Paddington Station to catch the nine-thirty to Kingham, I have the ticket somewhere, then a Mr. Westin brought us to the cottage, which was locked up, so we spent a good bit of time trying to figure out where Mrs. Otway was with the key. We finally got in around two and found the body, then spent most of the afternoon and evening being pestered by one policeman or another.”
“And this morning? Even you could hardly have spent the entire morning buying teacakes.”
“If you must know, I’ve been following the movements of your corpse.”
“As it
seems he was killed a couple hours after he returned to the village, that can hardly have taken all morning.”
“I meant his movements postmortem. He was surprisingly mobile for a corpse.”
Inspector Wainwright finally looked up at me, trying to figure out if I was joking, I think. I stared back until he realized I wasn’t.
“Shall I keep calling across the crime scene, or would you like to come around and have a cup of tea?”
Inspector Wainwright sighed and moved as if he were going to come through the sitting room to the kitchen, which was, of course, the most logical way to go except for the crime scene tapes. Then he rolled his eyes and went out the front door. At least he was annoyed with someone else for a change. I fixed a second cup of tea and waited for him to make his way around the cottage and find the kitchen door.
When he came through the kitchen door, he continued as if our conversation hadn’t been interrupted. “So you came to the one house in the village with a corpse because?”
“Mrs. Albright’s friend owns it, the cottage, not the corpse, and loaned it to her.”
“So Mrs. Albright is here?”
“She is. Staying here, I mean. She must have gone out while I was re-creating Mr. Hoyt’s very active morning.”
“After he was killed.”
“Yes, as I said, surprisingly mobile.” I gave Inspector Wainwright a moment to ask what I had found but was not at all surprised when he didn’t. Since he also did not ask anything else or get up and leave the room, I took that to mean he wanted to hear about my morning and put the second cup of tea and a slice of Battenberg cake in front of him and told him everything I had found out about Mr. Hoyt’s postmortem journey from the flat above Mr. Elliott’s cheese shop to my sitting room. Inspector Wainwright continued to look put out, but he did take quite detailed notes and even ate the slice of cake, which I took to mean he’d been too busy investigating himself to eat.
When I’d finished, Inspector Wainwright sighed but didn’t close his notebook. “And I suppose you’ve already compiled a list of suspects.”
“Not really. Anyone in Mr. Elliott’s flat would seem to be the place to start, but I don’t particularly like them as suspects. I made a good bit of noise in the shop trying to get some assistance at the counter. If they’d been guilty, I would have thought someone would have come down right away to get rid of us. I mean the stairs to the flat are right near the door to the sales area of the shop. I could easily see some of the locals who know them well going and knocking on the door to the flat or even going right in to fetch them, particularly if they thought someone there had lost track of time and would miss a good bit of the midday business.”
“But you didn’t go up.”
“Now I wish I would have. Then the corpse would have been found there instead of my sitting room, I’d be able to access the kitchen without walking outside, and you wouldn’t be sitting there sipping tea.”
“I agree that would be a better state of affairs. You would also have seen if there was some other reason preventing them from coming down to tend to customers, say being covered in blood or having just figured out how to move the body and not wanting someone to put down their end.”
I almost laughed at the idea of Mr. Elliott and his clerks each holding one of Mr. Hoyt’s limbs, preparing to carry him off, only to have me open the door because I wanted a sandwich.
Inspector Wainwright surprised me by asking, “Lord Hector and Mr. Briggs?”
So he really did want my opinion of the players. “I had thought so, particularly if they were drunk when it happened, but it would be quite a coincidence for the body to end up in their side yard after they’d already disposed of it once. And they don’t seem to go near the village that often, so it would have been inconvenient for them to leave him at Mr. Elliott’s.”
“Unless they did go into the village to meet with him and killed him then. Or the residents of Mulberry Cottage might have suspected something when they left him there.”
“No, that was a statement on their womanizing, both on Mr. Hoyt and the current residents of the lodge.”
“And did they give you an alibi?”
“The ladies? Not really. They had been on their way into the village when they found him, so they were inside getting ready to leave when he was left there.”
“But didn’t see who brought him. And before Mulberry Cottage was the churchyard.”
“The vicar was away. Mr. Reynolds didn’t give a particularly good reason for being there. He said he was going to arrange a donation to the poor baskets, but when I said I’d mention it to the vicar, he was not pleased.”
Inspector Wainwright wrote something down. “And it was Mr. Elliott who moved him there.”
“That’s right.”
Inspector Wainwright closed up his notebook and stood. “So I merely have to determine if he was killed in the flat above the cheese shop or elsewhere, who killed him, and when it was done. I have your address here and in London. Normally I would ask to stay in the area, but in this case, returning to London is fine so long as you go to the Paddington Street residence. If you have no other information, then I will bid you good-day.”
“Where are you going?” Not that I wanted him to stay, but it would tell me where his investigation was going.
“To check alibis in Eybry. As I said, good-day.”
I thought he might be worried that I would ask to go with him, not that I would, but I thought it best to stop asking questions then and allow him to pursue whatever he was planning on investigating. It would keep him out of my way, at least. He must have appreciated it. At least he surprised me by putting his empty plate and cup in the sink as he left.
Inspector Wainwright had barely been gone five minutes, most likely just long enough to get down the front path and on his way down the lane, when the kitchen door opened again and Mrs. Albright came in.
“I am sorry to have left you with him, Cassie, but I just couldn’t face him yet. I was at Mrs. Otway’s trying to get any local gossip in case it pointed to any suspects.”
“That’s fine. He was almost civil. He actually took notes on my morning and everything.”
“Then you found something?”
While Mrs. Albright fixed a cup of tea and I unboxed and sliced the walnut cake, I told Mrs. Albright about Mr. Hoyt’s exciting morning.
When I’d finished, Mrs. Albright shook her head. “All of those people found a body and not one of them thought to go to the police?”
“I know. In London, it might not be that shocking, but here?”
“Unless they think they know who did it and want to protect them. Still, all those people.”
That piqued my interest. “So you heard some interesting gossip?”
“I did. And there is a suspect in local circles. Mrs. Hoyt.”
“Because of his affairs?”
“That’s what they’re saying, but there’s a definite financial undertone to it.”
“The pub?”
She nodded. “It seems it used to be a very respectable place under her father, one that anyone in the village could be comfortable going to, and quite profitable since it did such a good trade. When she inherited, he took over and began using it as a meeting place for his cronies. And between the lost business and the free drinks, it’s failing, at least according to rumor. With her back in charge, she can go back to running it as her father did.”
I chased the last few crumbs of walnut cake around my plate. “I suppose it’s too much to hope they’ll tell Inspector Wainwright, although that does seem to be the way his thoughts are going. Has someone at least told Sergeant Harris?”
“Not likely. It seems they consider it justified.”
I sighed. “I suppose we’ll have to tell one of them, then. I wonder if Inspector Wainwright brought Constable Edwards or Constable Kittering with him.” The two of them normally worked with Inspector Wainwright and were far easier to talk to than he was.
“I didn’t h
ear anything, but if he did, he’s probably got them out investigating.”
I took another slice of cake. It wouldn’t be hard to find out if they were around, and either one of them would listen to my information.
Mrs. Albright refilled our cups. “You see what this means, don’t you?”
“More time with Inspector Wainwright?”
“That, yes. But didn’t I say you couldn’t let this one alone? If there’s even the appearance of an official investigation into one of us, the gossips will think there must be something to investigate. If the killer isn’t caught, we’ll be an easy scapegoat for them, which will give them plenty of gossip that will draw attention away from Mrs. Hoyt and her motives. You met those ladies in the shop. It won’t end there.”
“I knew I shouldn’t have come to a place called Slaughter.”
Mrs. Albright got up to refill the kettle. “Technically, we’re in Eybry.”
“I would probably have been fine in one of the Slaughters, then.”
Mrs. Albright smiled at my attempt at humor.
I got up from the table. If I was going to investigate, then I had better start. And the place to start seemed to be making certain Inspector Wainwright had all the facts. If I was lucky, he might solve the whole thing once he had them, and I could go back to my holiday. Although if Mrs. Hoyt was the killer and I helped expose her, I might have to take my vacation somewhere far away. “Do we need anything from the village?”
Mrs. Albright started poking through the cupboards. “There’s always tea. Investigations do seem to need tea. Oh, you bought some already. If you go by the bakery, some bread for the morning would be good. Perhaps something for tonight.”
“I’ll see if anything catches my eye.”
Chapter 11
AS I WALKED BACK TO EYBRY, I thought over what I knew of the case. I had the whole morning in question more or less sorted out, except for the very important bit where Mr. Hoyt had been murdered. There had to be something there that would point to the killer, I just needed to find it.
