Murder in the Village: A Diane Dimbleby Cozy Mystery

by Penelope Sotheby

  “Me, Vera, and Sally saw them run away. We were having morning tea at Vera’s and saw the two masked men run down the street towards a car. They got in and drove off, and we called the police. As we waited for the police to arrive, we started talking about what we had seen. Even though they didn’t take the masks off, we were certain we recognized one of them. I don’t remember who said his name first, but as soon as it came up, we all agreed for different reasons on who it was. You see, he had this run like he was favouring his right leg. One man in Apple Mews matched that run, had the same height, and had an unhealthy disrespect for the law: Frank Parker. Nasty piece of work he was. I could tell you stories.”

  “Who’s Sally?” interrupted Diane, not wanting to miss any detail of the recollection.

  “Sally Pitman. We three had been friends from early on, but we drifted apart after this. I don’t know if we knew we were lying or what happened next. There was awkwardness when we met from then on. Anyway, so the police arrived, we give our statements, and we all say who we saw. We just omitted that we didn’t actually see his face. But we were certain it was Frank Parker.

  That afternoon, the Police picked Frank up and took him in for questioning. By the next morning he had been charged, and within a month he was on trial. We gave evidence, told the jury who we saw, and that seemed to seal the deal. His only defence was that he had been at home alone that morning. After he had been found guilty, the judge gave him twenty-five years in prison, a little extra on account of his previous record. He left the courtroom cursing me and the girls, saying he’d deal with us. ‘Lying is a crime,’ was the last thing he yelled as the bailiffs dragged him through the door to the holding cells.

  And now he’s back to get us. He’s already managed poor old Vera, and there’s only the two of us left.”

  The sobs began again, the recollection deteriorating into the present and the waiting peril of Frank Parker. Diane was still processing the information that had just been poured into her brain and only half-heartedly patted the weeping woman on the knee.

  “What’s Sally’s number?” she blurted out suddenly, almost unaware that she was the one who had spoken. “Have you called her?”

  “What? No, I didn’t believe it was true. It can’t be. He’d be sixty now, no fit state to….” A thought occurred to Penelope, something that to her tied it all together and made the situation so much more real. “But poison. Anyone can drop some poison in a drink, can’t they, old or young.” Her round cheeks drained of colour and sank inward as her jaw fell. “He’s back. He’s back, and he’s going to kill us all.”

  “We’ve got to check on Sally, just as soon as we’ve got you to safety,” said Diane.

  “You can’t call her,” Penelope said. “Sally doesn’t have a phone. She’s gone reclusive, a bit bitter too. Never leaves the house. She has Tommy Giles bring her groceries every week.”

  “Then we’ve got to get around there and warn her.”

  Diane pulled out her mobile phone and called Albert who was standing on the doorstep in moments.

  “But Diane, I can’t leave you here alone if the killer’s coming,” said Albert after Diane’s brief synopsis had ended with her telling him to get the Inspector immediately.

  “We’ll be safe in here,” she replied. “Now hurry.”

  Diane relocked the door and went back to Penelope, streaks of tears leading down to pools of darkness on her blouse. Something was tapping at the back of Diane’s skull. There was some information that was trying to make itself known, but it wasn’t going to come easily. It was like a couple of pieces needed to move around to free up the information to come to the fore.

  They sat for ten minutes in silence. Penelope stared at the wall opposite, flinching with every creak of the house and tick of the mantel clock. Diane paced the kitchen, a thumb and forefinger rubbing across her brow, trying to ease the knot that was binding up the new information.

  Finally, a knock on the door broke them both out of their private worlds and Diane, armed with a carving knife, peered through the peephole in the door. Albert was standing red-faced and shoulders heaving with Inspector Crothers, who had a look of extreme irritation upon his face.

  “I have a lot of work to do, Ms. Dimbleby. This had better be important.”

  Albert helped Penelope make a pot of tea, which really entailed her directing him absently around the kitchen. Diane took the Inspector into the living room and relayed the story that she had heard.

  “So you see, Inspector, we have to talk to Sally Pitman immediately. She could be in terrible danger.”

  Inspector Crothers shook his head slowly and looked to be trying to restrain his temper.

  “Not from Frank Parker, she isn’t,” he said. “Frank Parker died in prison twenty years ago.”

  Chapter 5

  “Are you completely sure, Inspector?”

  “Quite sure,” he replied. “It was one of my first assignments when I was promoted to Detective Constable. Fell in the shower and cracked his head on the tile floor. He never regained consciousness, and there was no evidence of foul play. But we had to look into it because there had been some bad blood between him and a small-time gangster. All the evidence pointed to an accident.”

  “You’re quite sure it was him? No chance of a switch in the hospital?”

  “None. They had a guard on him, just in case, and I saw the body after he died. Frank Parker, it most definitely was.”

  Diane disappeared into the kitchen and returned with the threatening letter.

  “Then who could have sent this?”

  Inspector Crothers retrieved some gloves from his pocket and held the corner of the letter with the blue neoprene. He stared intently at it for a moment before placing it on the coffee table.

  “It could have been anybody, but I’ll have my forensics guys look it over. Only you and Mrs. Kendall have touched it, correct?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “Still, there’s no sign of who the sender could be and any fingerprints would need to be in the database to get a match.”

  “It’s someone that had to know about the trial though, that’s for sure.” Diane’s forefinger was tapping her lip in a thoughtful way when the Inspector’s mobile phone tweeted to life. He rose and left the room to answer the call. Diane could hear his voice become increasingly excited as the call progressed, and when he returned to the room, his demeanour had changed considerably. There was a small smile on his face, and he strode with a definite purpose.

  “We’ve just found the same letter at Mrs. Gilbert’s house. Identical in every way.” He snatched up the letter again and deposited it into an evidence bag. “I need to get this to my forensics boys right away.”

  “But Inspector,” said Diane, “We might now be a step ahead. Put a guard on Mrs. Kendall and Sally Pitman. They’re next on the killer’s list.”

  Rising from her chair, Diane made for the door, pushing past the Inspector with some haste.

  “Talking to Sally Pitman has become of supreme importance,” she said over her shoulder. She called for Albert and told him to stay with Penelope until a constable arrived. “Keep her safe.”

  Albert picked up a nearby broom and rested it against his shoulder in the manner of a soldier on parade and marched into the dining room where poor Penelope Kendall was stirring her tea without any obvious sign that she actually knew what it was.

  “Come along Inspector,” said Diane as she opened the front door, Inspector Crothers staring at her from the living room doorway with his phone to his ear.

  Diane was already halfway across town when the Inspector had caught up with her. Constable Jackson and another from Shrewsbury had arrived, and he had dispatched one with the letter back to the forensics team’s van. He had left Martin Jackson with Albert and Mrs. Kendall and given instructions to let no one but the other constable into the house until the Inspector returned.

  “Did he have any family?” asked Diane as the Inspector strode along bes
ide her.

  “Frank Parker? His wife had died a few years before he got put away, and his young son went into the foster system when Frank went to jail. He would have only been four or five at the time. I don’t know if we traced him or not, that wasn’t part of my job.”

  “Was there anyone else that comes to mind? Friends or family?”

  “No one that I can think of, but I’ve got the boys in Shrewsbury looking over the old case files if they can find them. Part of our storeroom burnt down about ten years ago, and we’re still cataloguing what went missing.”

  “And the big question Inspector: why now? Why start all of this now? It’s been thirty years. We have only half of the motive, it seems.”

  “I can’t be certain Diane, but the anniversary of Frank’s death might be around this time. It was twenty years ago, and I remember it being summertime. I’ve got people looking for the details of that too.”

  They crossed Haniford Street and made for a row of prim cottages, picturesque in their rose-covered walls and thatched roofs. The gardens out of the front of each cottage were a delightful mix of flowers and shrubs, tended with love and care, which added to the old country village feel of the street.

  Diane waved to Mr. Cuthbert, who was out pruning his bushes. They exchanged pleasantries as Diane and the Inspector powered past and headed for Sally Pitman’s house.

  As they approached, Diane had the distinct impression of stepping into a fairy tale rife with gingerbread houses and enchanted roses. Sally Pitman’s garden and house were beautifully maintained; the bushes were trimmed, but with a wild look to them. The front of the house had the gleam of new paint as did the garden gate that led into this small wonderland. As the house was the end of the row, the garden continued around the side and to the back, a line of pristine ceramic slabs marking the path through the immaculate lawn.

  Inspector Crothers gingerly grabbed the bronze door knocker as if concerned his finger oils might tarnish the spotlessness of it. Three solid raps on the door were not met with any response.

  “She can be a cantankerous old woman,” whispered Diane. “I’d be surprised if she would even talk to you.”

  Another group of brisk raps were again met with silence from within.

  “You stay on the door, Diane. I’ll nip around the rear to see if the back door is open.”

  Diane knocked again while the Inspector trod carefully to avoid stepping on the grass and disappeared around the ivy-covered wall.

  Flipping open the letter box, Diane peered into the hallway beyond and then yelled, “Sally, it’s Diane Dimbleby. Are you home?”

  Her voice barely seemed to make it into the house, thick rugs and hanging tapestries absorbing the sounds before they could disturb the rest of the space. She was just about to knock again when she heard a pop followed by a shower of glass onto tile. A door banged, wood against marble, and footsteps crunched over the remains of the window.

  “Sally? Sally, are you alright?” yelled Diane through the letterbox opening.

  There was a commotion inside followed by rapid footsteps.

  The front door moved away from her, revealing the Inspector standing on the threshold.

  “We’re too late.”

  ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠

  Sally Pitman lay crookedly upon the dining room floor, her legs turned at angles only death would allow. There was a look of surprise upon her wizened face as if the afterlife wasn’t what she had been expecting. The frail figure was wrapped in a quilted dressing gown, her pink nightshirt peeking out from underneath. A knife with an ornate handle protruded from a scarlet stain in the left breast.

  Inspector Crothers had called down to the fête to get another team to the cottage. He wanted all of the evidence he could find. Events were getting ahead of him and he hated playing catch up when murder was involved. He also had Diane call Albert to find out the situation at the Kendall household, and he had said that the two Constables were standing guard on Penelope, who they had moved to an upstairs bedroom for safety.

  He left the dining room and walked delicately through the lower room of the cottage, careful not to disturb anything that might be evidence. It was clear to him that Mrs. Pitman had been disturbed by an intruder in the night and, upon closer inspection of the house, he had found a window in the conservatory with a broken latch. Muddy footprints in the flowerbed below the window had been scratched through with fingers so that a detailed print would be nearly impossible. Similar tampering with physical evidence had occurred to the footprints through the house. The intruder had known he would have time to get rid of evidence. The smell of bleach from the kitchen sink suggested an attempt to clean surfaces and the floor to get rid of any possible foreign DNA. This killer was thorough and wasn’t rushed, which made the manner of the murder peculiar.

  Someone this methodical would be prepared, would have come with a murder weapon and the old woman wouldn’t have stood any chance at all. But as it was, he killed her with a letter opener, one that looked like it might have been used by the old woman as a means of self-defence when she found her home violated.

  “Was it poison, Inspector?” Diane had asked him.

  Why wasn’t it poison? Speculation led the Inspector to consider that it could have been the weapon that the killer brought, a vial of death to add to the old lady’s teapot so that when she died, he would be long gone and perhaps there would be a misdiagnosis of a heart attack. But he had been heard, and Sally Pitman had come down to confront the intruder. Then a struggle she couldn’t win, the knife taken from her and used to replace the poison’s task.

  The Inspector paused when he realized his thoughts were leaning towards the perpetrator being a man. He was thinking ‘he this’ and ‘he that. But poison, that was predominantly the tool of female killers. A quiet killer is much suited to a more womanly manner.

  He quickly thought back through all of the women that had been involved in the case from the fête onwards. Diane Dimbleby was the obvious one and, as much as he liked her; she couldn’t be ruled out. Jilly Newman had been sitting right next to Vera Gilbert when she had been poisoned. She could have slipped something into her drink without her knowing. Daphne Foster had been at the table too, and although not as close as Jilly, she could still have handed a poisoned food to Mrs. Gilbert. And, of course, there was Penelope Kendall. What better way to draw attention away from yourself as the killer than to make yourself a possible target? Housebreaking seemed a little beyond the physical capabilities of Mrs. Kendall, but he couldn’t rule her out based only on what he had seen that day.

  There were too many suspects and not enough evidence.

  In the kitchen rubbish bin, the Inspector found another letter, identical to the others in every way. The untidy childish hand, the short accusing message. The killer had left it which suggested he or she knew there was no evidence to be found on it. Except for the message itself. It spoke of someone that knew Frank Parker, knew the trial, and could wait twenty years to avenge his death.

  The squeal of tires outside told him that the team had arrived, and he left through the back door with its broken pane to get them to where they were needed.

  ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠

  Diane walked back through the village alone. The Inspector had not let her into the cottage which, as much as she wanted to look around, had been the right thing for him to do. She was disappointed that they hadn’t been in time to save the poor woman, but from what the Inspector had described, she had been dead for many hours when they arrived.

  She wandered down the line of cottages, sirens wailing in the distance, and turned left up a tree-lined road that led a little out of town towards the church. She intended to head to Penelope Kendall’s house again and retrieve Albert now that there was a significant police presence, but that meant heading back towards the bustle of the village. She needed peace, a place of calm that she could think. There was information sloshing around inside her head like the bilge water in a lifeboat on a stormy ocean.r />
  The greenery of the trees overhung the road from both sides, shading it entirely from the sun. The gentle rustle and chirp of squirrels from above had been a happy memory from her childhood in Apple Mews; the walk to church on Sunday mornings during the summer seeming to be a part of the world that worry and fear could not touch.

  It occurred to Diane that the vicar might be a good person to talk to if he had returned or been released from the fête. He had been there a good many years and knew the churchyard and the village population as well as anyone.

  Trees parted ahead as a low stone wall blocked further progress for the road. A gateway stood open onto the graveyard, and beyond the great walls of the church tower rose into the air. The spire didn’t seem as big to her anymore, her younger self-thinking that the top could pierce the clouds above, touching the very base of Heaven.

  Passing through the gate from the road, Diane always thought that being upon hallowed ground seemed different somehow. As if the consecration made the area impervious to the outside world, time slowed and stopped as you approached the church. What had been during your great-grandparents’ time would still be during your great-grandchildren’s and beyond.

  Gravestones and obelisks of various stones rose from the ground all around the path to the main door of the church. The older graves with their worn lettering and eroded images could be distinguished from a distance by the same dark local stone, the only thing available before marbles and granites had been imported from other areas to adorn the resting places of the dead.

  Weeds squeezed between the cracks in the pathway. Diane always found it amazing that amongst all the death and man’s attempts to control it, the natural world still found a way to get a foothold and take a small piece back for itself.

  The main door to the church had always been unlocked when she was younger to allow a place of sanctuary for those that needed it. Dark times could visit a soul at any hour of day or night, and that was the domain of the church to assist in. However, when Diane tried the great iron ring that was the handle, the heavy wood-planked door did not move. A spate of theft over the years had led to the church being locked whenever the vicar or the verger was not in attendance, and it told Diane all she needed to know.