Last Writes

by Catherine Aird

  ‘She does own her own house, after all, though,’ pointed out Paula practically, again sticking to the point. She had travelled a long way to be there today and had to get back that night to her husband and three children and said so now. What she didn’t tell them was that the aforementioned husband had taken to the whisky bottle and was slowly and surely ruining the family financially and emotionally as he descended into alcoholism. ‘If it did come to a residential home,’ she offered, ‘Aunt Maude wouldn’t be short of capital.’

  ‘Oh, she’s well minted, all right. I grant you that. And if it comes to the crunch, she’s got a GSOH, too,’ said Martin, giving a wicked grin. He turned to the others. ‘In case you two don’t know it, the letters GSOH stand for “Good Sense Of Humour” in all those advertisements for dating services for partners you see in the newspapers.’

  ‘Really?’ said Paula stiffly. Her brother Martin had just parted acrimoniously – and expensively – with his wife. This probably meant that he was now looking for another one – or a new companion, anyway. He must have been scanning the newspaper pages carrying advertisements for New Relationships headed ‘Women Seeking Men’ or even perhaps put one in himself in the ‘Men Seeking Women’ column.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Martin. ‘And for your information, sister dear, OHOC is their shorthand for having your own home and car.’

  Paula had no doubt that Martin would be wanting to meet someone to whom that would apply since his former wife had decided that possession was nine points of the law and throughout the divorce proceedings had made it abundantly clear that she had no intention of moving out of the matrimonial home. And, moreover, hadn’t done so.

  ‘That would be a pretty dangerous thing to do,’ put in their cousin Gerald. He was a cautious man, an accountant by profession, and certainly couldn’t by any stretch of the imagination be said to have a Good Sense Of Humour. He owned his own home, though, and more than one car but was definitely not in search of a wife. He had one already although he didn’t care to tell the other two about her notable extravagances and the delusions of social grandeur that he was finding it very hard to keep up with money-wise, qualified accountant or not.

  ‘Never give anything away, especially information,’ quoted Martin lightly. ‘I agree – people should be much more careful in those advertisements.’

  ‘Perhaps their own home and car is all they have to offer,’ murmured Paula. She wondered idly if Martin himself was actually doing any advertising on his own behalf: if so, he was probably describing himself as ‘Active, fun-loving and handsome’. She thought ‘Broke, ex-divorcee with expensive tastes’ would be nearer the mark but she did not say so. Instead she added her own credo: ‘I expect a good sense of humour makes up for most things.’ That it failed to do so when dealing with her husband’s condition was something that was becoming more and more apparent.

  ‘Well, Aunt Maude has got her own home anyway,’ said Gerald prosaically. ‘Thank God she was sensible enough to give up driving before driving gave her up. I know she hasn’t got a car any longer because she told me she’d sold it and bought some more of those ghastly plants with the money.’

  ‘It’s a nice house, too,’ said Paula, ignoring tempting conversational byways and still sticking resolutely to the matter in hand. ‘She’s always kept it in good condition.’

  ‘And whatever you say it’s not being sold for all the money to be spent on care home fees,’ declared Martin firmly. He brightened and said, ‘Perhaps we should send her off to a granny-grabbing party and let someone else look after her instead of us.’

  ‘What on earth is …’ began Paula. She subsided when she realised he was only pulling her leg.

  ‘Are you sure we shouldn’t be talking about a nursing home rather than a residential one?’ said Gerald, always a worrier. ‘I mean if she’s started to fall about already one of these fine days she’s going to break something and they won’t keep her in a care home if she does that.’

  Paula groaned. ‘And nursing homes are twice as expensive as residential ones.’

  ‘What Aunt Maude needs,’ pronounced Martin, ‘is someone to come and live with her as a companion or something – all found, of course.’

  ‘Then I WLTM them,’ said Paula swiftly. When her cousin, Gerald, looked totally blank she explained, ‘I think it stands in those advertisements for “Would Like To Meet”. Martin’s living in the past. People like that just don’t exist any more. All the spinster nieces of the old days have gone the way of all flesh.’

  ‘Not like you to go in for the double entendre, old girl,’ murmured Martin sotto voce as Paula flushed.

  ‘I would say that there would be plenty from the sale of the house to pay for care fees for a number of years,’ said Gerald prosaically, not part of that exchange. ‘I could do some sums, if you like.’

  ‘She’s not going into care whatever you come up with,’ persisted Martin mulishly.

  Gerald raised his eyebrows in much the same way as he did when his clients finally confessed not only to having salted away their surplus funds in tax-free offshore islands but absent-mindedly also having forgotten to tell either him or the relevant authorities about them. He had his ready-made speech about rendering unto Caesar that which was Caesar’s honed to a fine point when this happened but he had nothing to say now.

  ‘That’s all very well, Martin …’ began Paula.

  Gerald coughed. ‘Although I do believe these days in some counties their social services visit people at home to keep them out of these care places. That can’t cost as much, surely?’

  ‘It doesn’t,’ said Martin flatly.

  Paula stirred and said, ‘The problem then is what happens when that’s not enough. They can’t stop people either falling down or wandering and that’s when the real trouble begins.’

  ‘Coffee, anyone?’ said Martin, ducking the issue. ‘Then I think we’d better get going. Brace yourselves for the cousinage having seedcake at Church Hill Cottage.’

  Paula gave a little giggle. ‘It ought to be Garibaldi biscuits.’

  ‘Come again?’ said Martin.

  ‘Don’t you remember? We used to call them squashed fly biscuits.’

  Gerald gave an unexpected chortle. ‘I’d forgotten those. Nasty chewy things.’

  ‘You’ll have to feed them to those awful flycatcher plants of Aunt Maude’s, Martin,’ said Paula, amused, ‘and find out what they think of them.’

  In the event Aunt Maude didn’t offer them Garibaldi biscuits but there was a cake on the table when they arrived. Paula thought she caught a glimpse of mould at one edge of it, confirming what she had long suspected – that Aunt Maude’s eyesight wasn’t good any longer. There was more than one cobweb festooned across the corners of the room. Those, too, had clearly not been noticed by the old lady.

  Martin had spotted them. ‘It’s a straight fight for any flies in the house between the spiders and the plants,’ he hissed under his breath as Aunt Maude tottered out of the sitting room to make the tea. ‘My money’s on the spiders – quicker on the uptake.’

  ‘Let me help you carry the teapot,’ called out Paula after her.

  ‘I’m quite all right, dear, thank you,’ said their aunt firmly. ‘I can manage quite well. There’s plenty of life in the old girl yet, you know.’

  Nevertheless Paula rose and held the door open behind her aunt, averting her eyes as Aunt Maude came back into the sitting room with the heavy teapot swivelling about on a tea tray, the tea spilling out of the spout as it tilted dangerously to one side.

  ‘Now then, my dears, tea first and then you must come and take a look at my little darlings,’ said Aunt Maude, pointing to the open doors that led to the garden room and the several trestle tables beyond loaded with green, flowerless plants. She only got half the tea into the cups, the rest going either into the saucers or onto the tea tray as the teapot waved about uncertainly above them. ‘Sugar, anyone?’ she asked, quite oblivious of the fact that some of the tea
had gone into the sugar bowl too.

  ‘I’ll help myself,’ said Martin hastily, getting up and crossing over to the table. ‘Let me cut the cake, Aunt, while you pour. I’m on my feet, anyway.’

  The old lady did not demur at this and Martin, his back to the other two and his aunt, carefully cut four slices. He handed these round on plates, taking one himself and leaving one for his aunt. Maude insisted, though, on handing Paula her tea, the cup wobbling noisily in the saucer as she did so. The strain was too much for Gerald who nipped quickly behind her and collected his own cup and saucer before she could turn round again.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Paula, mentally debating whether she should emulate Queen Victoria, similarly caught in awkward circumstances, and drink from the saucer, (calling it an old-style ‘dish of tea’ the while), or simply toss the tea from the saucer back in the cup when her aunt wasn’t looking. In the event she tipped the tea back into the cup from the saucer, slipping behind her aunt’s back to do so while their hostess tottered towards her own chair. Paula examined her own slice of cake surreptitiously before she bit into it, hoping that Martin, too, had spotted the mouldy bits and cut the cake accordingly.

  Aunt Maude sat down at last, peered short-sightedly round at them and said, ‘How nice to see you all. Now, have you all got everything you need?’

  ‘Everything, Aunt Maude, thank you,’ said Paula politely.

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ said Gerald.

  ‘Did you make the cake yourself?’ asked Martin, looking innocent.

  ‘Oh, yes, dear, although,’ she said doubtfully, ‘I’m afraid I mightn’t have given it long enough in the oven. It’s a bit undercooked in the middle.’

  ‘I quite like sad cake,’ said Paula gamely, the cake being definitely still very moist in the centre. Making conversation was proving much more difficult than she had expected and none of them liked to be the first to bring up the question of care of any sort.

  In the event there was no need. Aunt Maude went back to her own chair and facing the three younger ones, took a sip of her tea and then, always a good trencher-woman, a couple of big bites out of her slice of the cake.

  As Martin told Detective Inspector Sloan from ‘F’ Division of the Berebury Constabulary not very long afterwards, his aunt began to complain of pain in her throat and suddenly struggled to get her breath and then before she could speak again she had tumbled to the floor. ‘And then, Inspector, she started to have convulsions. She was trying to talk but no words came.’

  ‘We thought she’d had a stroke,’ said Gerald, older than the other two and more experienced in both life and death. ‘She had quite a high colour – her face went a sort of rose-pink.’

  ‘Then she seemed to fall in to something like a coma,’ volunteered Paula, still in something of a daze herself. ‘And she died in no time at all.’

  ‘We’d sent for an ambulance straightaway, of course,’ said Gerald a trifle defensively.

  ‘They were very quick in coming, thank goodness,’ contributed Paula. She was sitting, pale-faced in her chair, her hands trembling slightly now and her eyes full of unshed tears.

  The ambulance men had been very quick in sending for the police, too.

  Very quick indeed.

  ‘We wondered at first about getting her out into the fresh air,’ said Martin to Inspector Sloan, ‘but she died before we got her further than the garden room and the ambulance men wouldn’t move her afterwards. They said we weren’t to touch her either.’

  ‘I see, sir.’ The detective inspector made another note. He had already examined the garden room and noted that one of the trestle tables had been pushed roughly to one side. An amateur gardener himself, he had noted, too, the plant collection there with more than passing interest – and less revulsion than the deceased’s relatives. He spotted several varieties of sundew with their hairy leaves designed to trap and digest insects. There was a group of Venus flytraps on another table and a whole assembly of pitcher plants, too, every one of them neatly labelled. Specialist was the word that came into his mind rather than anorak.

  ‘And we didn’t,’ insisted Gerald firmly. ‘Touch her, I mean.’

  ‘And I also understand that none of you was alone with her here at any time,’ said the inspector, looking round. There would be a better place to interview them all separately later but probably not a better time than here and now.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Gerald, looking round at the others. ‘Isn’t it?’

  Paula and Martin nodded in agreement. Martin said, ‘All three of us arrived together and we hadn’t any one of us left this room. There hadn’t really been any time.’

  ‘None at all, actually,’ confirmed Gerald.

  ‘We hadn’t even got as far as her garden room until we carried her in there,’ said Paula tremulously. Still choking back tears and searching for comfort, she added, Pollyanna-like, ‘At least she died at home and among her precious plants. I know that’s just what she would have wanted.’

  What the police wanted was something quite different.

  ‘And I don’t mean just knowing the motive,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan to Detective Constable Crosby when, after a lot of hard work, they came together the next day to review the case. ‘There’s means and opportunity as well.’

  ‘No shortage of motive anyway, sir,’ agreed Crosby readily. ‘None at all, in fact. The deceased’s solicitor confirms that they are each due to receive an equal proportion of her estate and from what I have established already they all three of them could do with getting their hands on their share as soon as possible.’ The constable, who was unmarried, added, ‘Matrimonial trouble, one way or another, the lot of them.’

  ‘Potassium cyanide kills very quickly,’ remarked Sloan, squinting down at one of the reports. ‘That’s why some of those defendants at the Nuremberg Trials had glass capsules of it parked in their mouths against a guilty verdict. It’s highly soluble in almost anything liquid.’

  ‘Forensics say that the cake was really moist in the middle – quite underdone, in fact – and that’s what did the trick,’ offered the constable. ‘It was still a bit damp. Me, I like cakes that way. More filling.’

  ‘Secret agents used to be given the poison, too, in case they were ever caught and tortured.’ Sloan trawled through his memory. ‘I think they were supposed to crush the glass with their teeth when danger threatened and it would dissolve in their saliva and kill them.’

  ‘And she got it from the piece of cake,’ reported Crosby. He pushed a piece of paper in Sloan’s direction. ‘At least that’s what the forensic chemists say about what was in all those evidence bags we sent them.’

  Sloan also read what the forensic chemists had to say about the availability of one the most deadly of poisons. It seemed to turn up in a wide variety of places from metal-cleaning to apricot and almond stones. He flipped through the pages of his notebook. ‘According to what each of the three of them who were there said …’

  ‘And are prepared to swear to,’ supplied Crosby, who had taken down the statements.

  ‘… they all had a chance of doctoring her piece of cake without either of the others seeing them do it. Literally behind the old lady’s back,’ Sloan added gloomily.

  The detective constable nodded and patted his notebook. ‘That’s right, sir. I’ve got it all written down here.’

  ‘One at a time, too,’ mused Sloan. ‘First Martin cuts the cake out of sight of the others, then Gerald collects his tea from the tray himself and after that Paula goes behind the deceased’s back to pour some of her tea back into her cup from the saucer. Or so she says,’ he said, automatically adding the policeman’s customary caveat. ‘The two men don’t seem to have bothered about there being tea in their saucers.’

  The detective constable, who didn’t trouble about tea that had slopped over in his saucer either, handed over a couple more documents to Sloan. ‘Our famous specialised search team – they’re a cocky lot, aren’t they, sir? Think they’re God
’s gift to detectives, they do …’

  ‘Never mind about that, Crosby,’ Sloan said repressively.

  ‘Well, they went through the sitting room and that garden room – thank goodness those awful plants haven’t got flowers, my hayfever’s been terrible this week – without finding anything at all that showed any sign of having held cyanide.’ He had tried to write down something about a fine-tooth comb in his report but placing the hyphen had troubled him. ‘They examined all the ground outside the windows, too, in case it – whatever it was – had been chucked out of one of them. Nothing there either.’

  ‘No broken glass at all anywhere?’ asked Sloan, still withholding comment on the Force’s subsection devoted to leaving no stone unturned in their searches – and, of course, the furthering of their own reputation within the constabulary.

  ‘Not a single shard, and they said to tell you that they were very sorry but that it didn’t happen often that they didn’t find anything at all.’

  ‘There must have been something,’ said Sloan irritably. ‘Even those insect-eating plants couldn’t have dissolved glass.’

  Crosby turned over yet another report. ‘The doctor said there was nothing like that in her mouth when he did the post-mortem.’

  Sloan sniffed. ‘Potassium cyanide, I would remind you, Crosby, is not the sort of substance you carry in your bare hands if you want to live.’

  ‘No, sir.’ The detective constable looked up and said, ‘Although if it’s for suicide and you can hide enough of it in a phial in your mouth without anyone seeing it’s there, then you can’t need a lot of it to do the trick.’

  ‘Got it in one, Crosby. You don’t.’ Sloan waved one of the other reports in front of him. ‘At least that’s what Forensics say here.’

  ‘So, sir,’ he said slowly, ‘is what we’re looking for what the cyanide was in? The vehicle, you might say …’

  ‘It is,’ said Sloan weightily. ‘We’ve got the motive and the opportunity. What we want now is the means of delivering justice to the culpable, otherwise known as hard evidence.’