Last Writes

by Catherine Aird

  The detective constable looked puzzled. ‘How will it help if we find what the poison was in, sir?’

  Sloan sighed. ‘Because, Crosby, whoever poured the potassium cyanide onto the old lady’s piece of cake will have had to handle the container him or herself. And drop the stuff on her slice from whatever it was in behind her back and out of sight of the other two.’

  ‘Fingerprints, then,’ offered the detective constable, adding, ‘and we’ve got those from all three of them.’

  ‘They can hardly have worn gloves in the process, can they?’ sighed Sloan. Detective Constable Crosby had never been considered the sharpest knife in the drawer: it was just the inspector’s bad luck that there had been no one else on duty and available when the call to Church Hill Cottage had come in. ‘Certainly not indoors on a warm afternoon. Even the old lady would have noticed those let alone the other two, unless that is they were all in it together, which I doubt.’

  ‘Tricky,’ agreed Crosby, ‘because they wouldn’t have had that long to operate.’

  ‘No, and if they could have done that without leaving any traces of their DNA on whatever the cyanide was in – let alone fingerprints – then I’m a Dutchman.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘At least they couldn’t very well have swallowed it, whatever it was. Even an empty container would have been too dangerous by half to do that.’

  ‘And we know for sure that none of them had anything on their persons before we let them go because I was there,’ agreed Crosby. ‘They were all thoroughly searched from head to toe.’

  ‘Thanks to Polly Perkins as well,’ said Sloan piously, giving credit where credit was due. Woman Police Sergeant Perkins had thoroughly examined a still-distraught Paula before she left her aunt’s sitting room and was absolutely certain that there was nothing at all that could conceivably have had poison in it on or about her person.

  Crosby shuffled the pile of papers that had accumulated on the desk between them and said wistfully, ‘It’d be nice to catch out that team that searched the premises, sir, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘I would remind you, Crosby,’ responded Detective Inspector Sloan stiffly, ‘that the function of policing is to catch the perpetrator of a crime, not to undermine the work of one’s colleagues.’

  ‘It must be somewhere, all the same, that container that had the poison in it,’ muttered Crosby.

  ‘True, Crosby. Very true.’ He sat back in his chair.

  ‘A cup of tea, sir?’

  ‘The best idea you’ve had so far, Crosby.’

  The constable scraped his chair back and got to his feet. ‘Back in a jiffy, sir,’ he promised.

  Sloan leant further back in his chair and considered the investigative trilogy of means, motive and opportunity once more. In this case motive and opportunity could be said to apply equally to all three cousins. The means of conveyance, though, still remained obscure and not yet associated with any one of them.

  ‘Here we are, sir.’ The constable arrived back with a tray of tea and a couple of buns. He set it down and then fished in his pocket for something. ‘Time to take my hayfever stuff.’

  Sloan helped himself to a cup of tea from the tray while Crosby opened a box and took out a capsule. ‘Have a bun, too, sir. I’ll just sink this and then I’ll grab mine.’

  ‘No, you won’t Crosby,’ said Sloan suddenly, rising to his feet and pushing his own cup of tea to one side. ‘You’ll put that teacup down and come with me. At once. I’ve just remembered something.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ He scrambled up. ‘Of course, sir. Where to, sir?’

  ‘Church Hill Cottage, Cullingoak,’ snapped Sloan. ‘Now, stop talking and get moving. There’s no time to lose. Oh, and pick up a murder bag.’

  They were nearing the village before Crosby ventured to ask what it was that the detective inspector had remembered.

  ‘That gelatine is a protein,’ replied Sloan.

  No wiser, the constable stayed silent until the police car was approaching Church Hill Cottage. ‘Dynamic entry, sir?’ he asked hopefully. Crosby enjoyed battering doors down.

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Sloan as the police car drew up in front of the cottage. ‘Follow me, Crosby.’

  ‘Where to now, sir?’ he asked as Sloan undid a seal on the front door.

  ‘The garden room. This way, Crosby.’ Sloan pushed open the doors to the room and straightaway made for the serried ranks of insect-eating plants.

  ‘What are you looking for, sir?’ asked the constable uneasily.

  ‘The Nepenthes coccineas,’ said Sloan absently, his eyes roving up and down one of the trestle tables. ‘Or perhaps the Sarracenia drummondii. You can ignore the others, Crosby.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said the constable, showing every sign of ignoring all the plants. ‘Thank you, sir.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan wasn’t listening. He was walking up and down the garden room looking for the group he wanted. He stopped abruptly. ‘Come over here, Crosby. This is where they are. The lidded pitcher plants. Dozens of them.’

  Manifestly uninterested, the detective constable ambled over towards Sloan. ‘Sir?’

  ‘I think, Crosby, you might find the remains of a gelatine capsule in one of these little fellows. Lift its lid very gently and look inside. You begin looking in them here at this end of the bench and I’ll start at the other end. Give me a shout if you see it.’

  Crosby lifted the lid of the first plant and peered in. ‘All there is in this one, sir, is some water.’

  ‘Not water, Crosby. A solution of pepsin.’

  ‘Really, sir,’ he said, the yawn in his voice there if not openly expressed.

  ‘For drowning the insects in,’ said Sloan. ‘Neat system, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Crosby lifted the lid on the next plant, peered inside it and then let the lid fall back again.

  ‘You see,’ explained Sloan, ‘pepsin is an enzyme that breaks down protein in slightly acid conditions and insects supply the protein the plant needs.’

  ‘And gelatine is protein,’ chanted Crosby, a lesson remembered.

  ‘Exactly. Now, keep looking for the remains of a gelatine capsule in the pitcher part of the plant.’

  In the event it was Sloan himself who peeped into a fine plant of the Nepenthes coccinea family and saw something there that was most definitely not insectivorous. Reaching for the murder bag, he picked out a pair of tweezers and retrieved two halves of an empty, clear capsule. Laying them carefully on some tissue, he said, ‘That’s good. No sign of any denaturing of the gelatine by the pepsin yet.’ He looked up and grinned. ‘There would have been if it had been in your stomach, Crosby, or we had left it in this plant too long. All we need now is to know whose fingerprints are on it and Bob’s your uncle.’ He lifted the lid of the pitcher plant and then very gently let it close again. ‘An open and shut case, you might say.’

  THESE FOR REMEMBRANCE

  ‘Wendy, is that you? Henry here. Can you hear me all right? It’s rather a bad line. Look, would it be all right if I came down to Berebury next Friday for the weekend? To see the children and so forth.’

  ‘Of course, dear,’ responded Henry Tyler’s sister immediately. ‘The children will be so pleased to see you again and all that’s happening here is that Tim will be playing cricket on the Saturday afternoon.’

  ‘Nothing changes, does it?’ said Henry affectionately. Tim Witherington was Wendy’s husband and village cricket on a Saturday afternoon was part of the very fabric of English society – an English society that Henry Tyler was labouring at his desk at the Foreign Office to preserve. That certain other forces were striving at this moment with equal determination to destroy it he left unsaid even though Herr Adolf Hitler’s intentions in this respect were becoming clearer and clearer as time went by.

  ‘I’ll be coming down on the Friday afternoon,’ he said to Wendy. ‘That’s if the plane from Cartainia gets back to London in time on Thursday evening for me to write my report before I catch the train.’


  ‘Cartainia?’ she said uncertainly. ‘Henry, I don’t like your flying to all these funny places – especially just now.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Wendy. Cartainia isn’t the other side of the world. It’s still in Europe, remember.’

  ‘Only just and anyway that’s really not a lot of consolation these days, is it?’ she said dryly. ‘It seems that it’s Europe where all the trouble happens to be at the moment.’

  ‘I agree Cartainia might properly be described as being on the very fringes of Continental Europe,’ he conceded. This, although he did not tell his sister, was one of the emollient phrases he had briefed his minister to use when he accompanied him on his visit to its capital that week.

  The trip there was ostensibly to lay a wreath on the Cartainia war memorial recording those lost in 1918 in one of the last battles of the Great War when a battalion from the Scottish Fearnshire Regiment had joined forces with the tiny Cartainian Army to fight off an invader. The Fearnshires had been thrown into the battle so commemorated at the last minute and thus sustained casualties too.

  The fact that there were therefore many of their names on the memorial as well as Cartainian ones was the ostensible reason for Henry’s Minster being there. In reality the visit was for the British government to garner as much information as possible about the future intentions of the Cartainian government and its people should a new war come.

  Military historians, inured to bigger engagements, were inclined to describe the battle as a minor skirmish but to the Cartainians it had been a glorious victory and an occasion when they and the British had stood together side by side against a common enemy.

  And won.

  The situation was quite different now. Cartainia’s delicate position on the extreme edge of Eastern Europe was less assured – but much more strategic. Certain hostile powers were eyeing its undefended little borders with the interest of a raptor, whilst Britain had more than a passing concern that it remained as neutral as possible for as long as possible at this important juncture in world history.

  It was the current international detente that had led to Henry Tyler as well as his minister laying a wreath on the cenotaph commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the battle. The soldier who should have been doing so – the Colonel-in-Chief of the Fearnshire Regiment – was presently with his regiment and heavily engaged in training activities somewhere unspecified in Scotland and not available for any ceremonial duties farther afield than Edinburgh Castle. So Henry was standing in for him.

  The Prime Minister of Cartainia was the first to place his wreath. This had been ceremonially handed to him by his Foreign Secretary, Stephan Kiste, a big fellow with prominent duelling scars on his cheeks, and a man said to be the prime minister’s rival for power in the country.

  Henry’s minister had duly laid his wreath next to that already placed at the foot of the war memorial by the prime minister, an enigmatic politician sitting firmly – if warily – on the fence, watching and seemingly waiting to see which of the great powers would annexe Cartainia first and prepared to respond in the way which suited his own position best.

  Henry’s own minister had his wreath – a tasteful ring of Flanders poppies set in a base of laurel leaves – equally ceremonially handed to him by His Excellency the British Ambassador. Henry didn’t need telling that ‘Our Man in Cartainia’ was a wily diplomat of great experience. The ambassador had already made the Foreign Office well aware that his every movement in Cartainia was being watched, his post intercepted, his conversations overheard by microphone and his telephone calls monitored. Not unnaturally, this absence of good communications was making getting reliable information out of the country and back to Whitehall extremely difficult.

  The British minister, immaculately dressed in black jacket and spongebag trousers, had stepped forward, placed the wreath in exactly the right place, stood back, bowed his head in silent tribute for exactly the right length of time and even more cleverly managed to walk backwards to his allotted place beside the Prime Minister of Cartainia without looking round.

  Next to come forward with his wreath paying tribute to the fallen soldiery of yesteryear was a much-bemedalled and grey-whiskered field marshal representing the Cartainian army, his wreath of entwined ivy leaves being handed to him by a uniformed cadet.

  The last wreath of all – the one that had originally been intended to be laid by the Colonel-in-Chief of the Fearnshire Regiment – was handed to Henry by an anonymous young man who emerged out of the little crowd round the cenotaph and pressed it into Henry’s hand. The young man wasn’t in uniform – something which seemed to surprise the field marshal who peered at him myopically. Indeed, the man looked rather as if he had got his best suit on and a somewhat crumpled one at that.

  Henry himself did not recognise the man as coming from the Embassy and shot an enquiring glance at the ambassador. His Excellency, though, had had a rigorous education on the playing fields of Eton and his face betrayed no sign of a response whatsoever.

  Henry took the wreath – a totally unexpected circlet of unusually colourful flowers – and proceeded towards the memorial with it. It crossed his mind that it might have been wired as a bomb to blow them all to perdition but nothing untoward happened when he propped it against the granite of the memorial. He, too, bowed, waited and then returned to his position while the prime minister stepped onto a podium, adjusted the microphone and began to deliver his speech.

  Since this was delivered mainly in Cartainian, a language with which Henry was not familiar, and was almost certainly self-serving to a high degree, he turned his mind back to the curious wreath he himself had been given to place at the foot of the memorial. It stood out from the others, being a great mixture of flowers rather than leaves. It certainly didn’t accord with Milton’s poem ‘Lycidas’ and its famous lines ‘Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more / Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere’.

  He continued to consider the wreath’s curious composition while the prime minister droned on. It was comprised of a strange medley of flowers – some wild, some cultivated. He recognised a Guelder rose and next to it a harebell and then a shaft of goldenrod – not considered mourning plants any of them in his book. Perhaps such things were different in Cartainia. He would ask the ambassador, always supposing he got the opportunity to talk to him.

  Henry stared down at the wreath for a long time, well aware that some of its flowers were far removed from those usually ordered by embassies the world over as suitable for a solemn occasion. Idly he started to list them in his mind, playing a sort of Kim’s Game to himself as the prime minister spoke on. Some, he noted, must have been especially procured for the occasion since they were out of season and he would have thought not native to Cartainia anyway.

  A civil servant to his fingertips, what crossed Henry’s mind first of all about the wreath was the cost. He hoped there wouldn’t be a Parliamentary Question on his return about what some Member of Parliament would be bound to describe as outrageous extravagance in these hard times. On second thoughts he decided that the expense of the wreath must have been sanctioned by the ambassador – or at the very least by one of his underlings – and nobody at the British Embassy in Cartainia was likely to make mistakes. Indeed, the staff on station there had been hand-picked for demanding duties at a difficult time in an uncertain posting.

  His thoughts were briefly interrupted by an outburst of cheering from some of the crowd. Henry decided that the prime minister must have said something particularly martial – the British Ambassador’s expression was too inscrutable to decode – and went back to thinking about the wreath and memorising what it contained.

  Just as he did get a chance at the reception after the ceremony to start to ask the ambassador about the wreath, that most accomplished of diplomats appeared to spot someone else at the far side of the room with whom he positively must have a word. He politely excused himself before speeding off, saying softly over his shoulder as he went, ‘There’s r
osemary, there’s rue’. Henry, nobody’s fool, did not repeat the question, merely placing the quotation as coming from Hamlet.

  The incongruities of the wreath were still on his mind the next day when he got down to his sister’s house in the little market town of Berebury in the county of Calleshire. After supper was over and the children had been packed off to bed Henry sat down with his sister and brother-in-law in their comfortable sitting room. Tim Witherington set about lighting his pipe, while Wendy got out a pile of mending.

  ‘What on earth’s that?’ asked Henry as she produced from her work basket something wooden resembling a large toadstool.

  ‘It’s called a mushroom and it’s for darning,’ she said placidly, slipping it inside one of Tim’s socks and picking up a long darning needle. ‘I’m always mending the heels. I don’t know what he does with his socks but they wear out in no time. Now tell me, Henry, how did your visit to Cartainia go?’

  ‘That’s if he’s allowed to talk about it, dear,’ her husband reminded her. ‘The poor chap may be silenced by the Official Secrets Act or something.’

  ‘Nothing like that, I promise you,’ Henry assured her. ‘In fact I would have said the entire Cartainia press was there, together with at least one reporter from a Scottish newspaper.’

  ‘Ah, yes, the Fearnshires,’ said Henry’s brother-in-law knowledgeably. He had been wounded in 1918 in the March Retreat and had a slight limp to prove it.

  ‘The Flowers of the Forest,’ murmured Wendy absently, selecting a skein of wool and holding it against the sock to match the colour.

  ‘Indeed they “are a’wede awae”’, said her husband, the old soldier, completing the melancholy quotation about the casualties of the Battle of Flodden Field.

  ‘The Fearnshires lost a lot of men in the Cartainian action,’ said Henry, coming back to the present, ‘and I had to place their wreath for them.’ He explained about the odd blooms of which it had been composed.