Murdering Ministers

by Alan Beechey

  How did the strychnine get into the glass?

  Did the strychnine get into the glass?

  Well, yes. The police scientists had found it there, with Tapster’s dying spit. But was it the only source? What if Tapster had ingested the poison earlier, within the fatal ten to twenty minutes needed for it to take effect, which meant it had to be after he had walked into the church that morning? What else could he have eaten? Maybe he chewed a breath mint or munched on a stale Jaffa Cake while he was taking a piss—no, when the pathologist sliced open the dead man’s stomach, he found only his breakfast. Then maybe that trace of breakfast honey he licked from his fingers was big enough to hold the fatal dose of strychnine, or maybe…

  “Breakfast!” he exclaimed.

  “It’s coming, sweetie, don’t get your undies in an uproar,” called Susie, attempting to beat a large cast-iron frying pan into submission.

  “Thank you, Susie, but I have to pass. I need to go somewhere.”

  “Really?” she said in a disappointed voice, as he jumped up from the table and headed for the hallway telephone before the smoke caused his eyes to water. “Then did I solve the mystery again?”

  “Naturally.”

  “Oh, good,” she chuckled, reaching for the kitchen fire extinguisher as a precaution.

  ***

  An hour later, Oliver was sitting in another kitchen, waiting for Effie. He was hungry, but he had already guessed that the pantry had been emptied of anything readily edible, and an inspection proved him right.

  He had last been in the manse only two days earlier, but a tour of the upstairs today revealed a marked deterioration in tidiness, even though the house’s only regular occupant was still in prison. The disorder had to be the result of a thorough search by Detective Inspector Welkin’s minions, no doubt sanctioned by a warrant issued after Piltdown was formally arrested, on suspicion of being the murderer of Nigel Tapster.

  Whoever had searched downstairs had been less disruptive, perhaps conscious that the reception rooms and kitchen were often in the service of the church. Or perhaps somebody else had come in and tidied up afterwards. Oliver knew the church could not afford to provide its minister with a housekeeper, but it was possible that a benevolent churchgoer knew about the unlocked side door, which he had used himself a few minutes earlier.

  The doorbell rang. He walked through the house and pulled Effie inside as quickly as possible, out of the morning’s freezing rain. She kissed him once—deep and crisp and even was the description that sprang to his mind—then pushed him away.

  “We’re alone, but I’m on duty,” she explained as he led her back to the kitchen. “So that was my compromise.” She glanced at the room. “I see the lads have been through here.”

  “How can you tell?”

  Effie ran a hand along the front edge of the sink. “It’s been dusted,” she said, holding up a powdery finger.

  Oliver sat down on a kitchen chair and gestured for her to take another seat at the table. She draped her coat over the chair, but began to wander around the room.

  “I took Uncle Tim’s advice,” he began. “I slept on it. And I woke up this morning with an idea or two that I’d like to bounce off you. If I’m right, this may get us closer to wrapping up more than one case.”

  Wrapping up. Blast, would he still have time to think of, purchase, and wrap a gift for Effie before the end of the day? She had paused behind him.

  “Dearest Oliver,” she said thoughtfully. “One of those cases must be Tapster’s murder. Would I be right in thinking that Tina Quarterboy’s disappearance is the other one?”

  “Yes.”

  “Aha. Take off your glasses,” she said, strolling enticingly around him.

  “What?”

  “Take off your glasses,” she repeated seductively. He removed his cheap spectacles, a precaution he often followed before he and Effie indulged in some serious mutual lip manipulation. Perhaps, out of advance gratitude for his help with Tina, she had reconsidered her earlier compromise?

  Puzzled, he watched Effie’s dim outline dart across the room and grab something from the kitchen sink. He only just had time to fling his arms over his head before she began to flog him across his shoulders with a tea towel.

  “Oliver…Chrysostom…Swithin!” she fumed, punctuating each name with a highly accurate thrash of the cloth. “If you know where Tina Quarterboy is and you’ve been holding out on me, I swear I’ll stuff the turkey with you! Or vice versa!”

  She switched her target area and swatted his unprotected kneecaps several times. Then she paused, out of breath, glaring at him.

  “Can I answer now?” he whimpered, lowering his arms cautiously. Effie thought for a second, then nodded.

  “I didn’t figure it out until I woke up, I promise. And the very first thing I did was call you and get you to meet me here.”

  “Why here?” she demanded.

  “Because Tina has been here.”

  “I know she’s been here—Tish Belfry told me her fingerprints were all over the sitting room piano. Piltdown was the local vicar. He had a lot of his parishioners in for tea.”

  “No, no, I mean Tina’s been here since she ran away,” Oliver answered swiftly, choosing not to correct Effie’s religious terminology. “In this house. In this kitchen. That’s what I wanted to tell you, in private, so you wouldn’t have to let Welkin know that I’ve been helping.”

  A well-aimed flick of the tea towel cracked uncomfortably close to his left ear. “Oliver,” she said in a cold, low voice, “I don’t give an aerial knee-trembler who gets the fornicating credit for this, just as long as we deliver this frightened, pregnant teenager to a doctor sooner than is humanly possible, and I get to go home and spend some quality Yuletide with whatever’s left of my boyfriend. Now talk.”

  “Fair enough. You see, I woke up thinking about breakfast.”

  “What?” she asked, with a flawless balance of menace and astonishment.

  “Breakfast,” he repeated. “Even though I still haven’t had any, incidentally. And it was appropriate to both cases, but I’ll start with Tina—Nigel Tapster’s already dead, he won’t mind waiting.”

  “Will you please get to the point!” Effie was wrapping the tea towel around her hand, testing her grip.

  “Well, when I came here last Thursday, after visiting Tapster, I spent a merry half-hour with Paul doing the washing up at that very sink, possibly employing that very tea towel. He hadn’t touched the dishes since the previous Sunday. But on Monday afternoon, when I was getting Paul a change of clothes, I noticed that his breakfast things from the previous day were already washed up.”

  “Perhaps you shamed him into turning over a new leaf?”

  Oliver snorted scornfully. “Not Paul. He only had a short time between finishing his breakfast and starting the morning service in the church. I can guarantee that he wouldn’t have used that time to do the washing up. And nobody was supposed to have been in the house since Sunday morning, including Paul, who’s been under arrest. Also, his bed was made—trust me, no single man living alone would stop on a Sunday morning to make his bed. Certainly not one whose drawers are as untidy as Paul’s. I’m referring to his chest of drawers, of course.”

  Even at a less tense moment, Effie would have ignored the joke. “So you think Tina Quarterboy is Paul’s phantom housekeeper?” she asked.

  “Yes. The one time I saw her, she couldn’t do enough to help him in the kitchen.”

  “And she’s been hiding out here in the manse all the time?”

  Oliver shook his head. “I don’t think she’s been spending her nights here, and she’s certainly not here now—I checked all through the house before you arrived. But I do think she’s been raiding the larder when she got hungry. She must have known about the unlocked side door. Remember Paul’s apologies on Saturday for being unexpecte
dly out of Jaffa Cakes and other foodstuffs that he thought he had? And I’m sure I heard someone moving about downstairs when I was here on Monday. That must mean Tina’s somewhere in this area, and if she’s stealing food she’s probably not staying in somebody’s home.”

  “That would tie in with the complaints I was getting yesterday about milk and other groceries disappearing from doorsteps in the neighborhood,” Effie speculated. “If you’re right, I bet Tina herself is responsible for the thefts.”

  She dropped the tea towel on the table. “You can put your glasses on,” she said, resuming her catlike prowling of the kitchen. “I’ve decided to like you again.”

  “So did I help?” Oliver asked her eagerly.

  “Well, I’d say a more intensive search of this neighborhood is warranted,” she conceded. “I’ll have to see who Welkin can spare this morning. We’ll need to check sheds and garages, empty houses, old warehouses, that sort of thing.”

  “How about the church next door? The side door to the building and the side door to the manse are practically in line. Tina could easily get from one to the other by climbing over the fence, and she wouldn’t have to show her face on the street.”

  “Yes, but the church is kept locked, isn’t it? And I don’t know where she could hide in there. She disappeared Friday morning. The building was in use Saturday—we were there, remember?—and it’s been a crime scene since Sunday afternoon. Even the Plumley plod would have noticed signs of an illegal occupant.”

  Oliver stood up and produced a key, which he dangled in front of her face. “Want to check?” he asked.

  ***

  The cavernous church was cold and damp. Since Oliver and Effie did not know where the light switches were located, they sat in the gloom, in the same rear pew where Effie had witnessed the Communion service three days earlier. A tour of the rooms behind the sanctuary had failed to produce Tina.

  “Where did you get the key?” she asked softly, maintaining the obligatory reverent hush. “Paul said he’d lost his set.”

  “I called on Barry Foison before I went to the manse. Oona answered the door. She’s not the worst thing a man could lay eyes on first thing in the morning,” he added mischievously.

  “You were a busy little bee before I arrived,” Effie muttered. “So how about breakfast?”

  “Oh splendid, if you have time,” Oliver said gratefully, reaching for his coat. “I’m starving.”

  “I meant you were going to tell me how breakfast affects the Tapster case,” she said. He dropped his coat.

  “It’s about the traces of honey on Tapster’s fingers,” he began. “I first thought he had besmirched himself when he was sweetening his breakfast tea, just as he did that evening when I went to see him. But then yesterday, Barry Foison told me that Tapster went to the toilet just before the Communion service on Sunday morning.”

  “We think that’s why he went out of the church, but nobody’s one hundred percent sure. Why?”

  “Tapster was a cleanliness freak. If he had gone to take a pee, he would certainly have scrubbed his hands clean afterwards.”

  “Then where did the honey come from?”

  Oliver stared ahead at the dim outlines of table and chairs on the deserted platform, trying to conjure the ghostly figures of the suspects and their victim performing the solemn Communion rite, like a clutch of Banquos taking their places at a feast. “If I want to kill someone with strychnine,” he continued, “I need to disguise its bitter taste. There are classic cases of murderers using brandy or other alcoholic drinks to slip it to their victims. Then Communion wine, perhaps? The problem is that Diaconalist Communion wine contains no alcohol. And while strychnine is a fairly fast-acting poison, we’re all agreed that Nigel’s symptoms appeared too soon after he had drained his glass.”

  He turned to Effie. “But what better medium for strychnine than a taste of honey? Tasting much sweeter than wine. If the poison is already dissolved in something when it’s administered, the body will absorb it more quickly. It should work in about ten minutes.”

  “But, Ollie,” she said impatiently, “we always come back to the same objection. The pathologist found strychnine in Nigel’s glass. And we know he drank from it, because it also contained traces of his saliva.”

  “Yes, I’ve been thinking about that. How did that saliva get into the glass? The communicants get a thimbleful of wine in a tiny shot-glass. They don’t sip it daintily—they drain it at one go, like Cossacks drinking a vodka toast, although they balk at tossing the glasses into the fireplace. They certainly don’t gargle with the blood of Christ and then dribble half of it back into the glass. Unless, of course, something makes them. Such as the first onset of the effects of strychnine, administered ten minutes earlier. An involuntary cry of pain or a loss of sensation in the jaw.”

  “But if the strychnine was administered earlier, how did it get in the glass?”

  “Spat out with the wine and the saliva. Some of the strychnine-laced honey could easily have stuck to the inside of Tapster’s mouth, washed out when he drank the sacrament.”

  Effie considered this for a few seconds. “It’s like the stage-trick that Tim told us about,” she declared. “A classic case of misdirection. Everybody thinks the poison was put in the wine, but it’s already hard at work in the victim’s digestive tract.” She playfully ruffled Oliver’s untidy fair hair. “Okay, Ollie, is this the point where I sit back baffled while you amaze me by naming the killer?”

  “Hardly,” he lamented, “since I still have no idea how the honey was slipped to Tapster or who did the slipping.”

  Effie threw an arm around his shoulder and hugged him awkwardly. “Hey, your mission was to exonerate Paul Piltdown, and if you’re right—and please note I’m saying ‘if’—Paul is clearly innocent.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I was here, remember? I was off chasing Tina when Tapster first exhibited signs of poisoning. But if the strychnine was administered ten minutes earlier, then I was a witness. And I could swear that Paul didn’t have any contact with Tapster during the critical period.”

  “What can you remember?”

  Effie let go of him and sat forward in the pew, gripping the back of the row in front, as if riding a roller coaster. “I didn’t get here until the final hymn,” she reported. “It was ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem,’ one of my favorites. After it ended, Paul said a benediction, then we all sat and prayed. He walked through the church to the narthex, behind us, and some other people got ready to leave, including Heather Tapster. Oh, Dougie Dock and some Sunday School kids came in through the door on the right, the pulpit side.”

  “When did you first spot Tapster?”

  “I don’t remember seeing him until he emerged from the back room, through the door on the left—this was after Heather had departed. She’d been in the church the whole time, anyway, playing the piano. The deacons milled around at the front of the church until Paul returned from the narthex.”

  “Would Paul have had time to slip down that alleyway to the side entrance, meet Tapster, and then run back again?”

  Effie’s curls shook dismissively.

  “The deacons all took their places on the platform,” she continued. “Oh, Nigel Tapster had to get the piano stool, because Cedric Potiphar was an unexpected visitor to the stage, and they had run out of the ceremonial chairs.”

  “Ah, ze old poisoned piano stool ploy,” Oliver said with a grin and an unimpressive French accent.

  “Hardly, I didn’t see Nigel chewing it. Well, the Communion service started, Nigel sang his song and…Wait!”

  Her voice echoed off the bare walls.

  “You’ve remembered something?” he asked.

  She cocked her head on one side. “Nigel’s guitar was out of tune,” she stated.

  “So it was the previous week. The guy had Van Gogh’s ear fo
r music. Did he make a big song and dance about tuning the instrument, complete with silly jokes?”

  “Yes. Only I remember that he was looking really pained, just before he started singing.”

  “You’re quite sure it wasn’t just after?” Oliver asked sardonically.

  “No, he was grimacing, wincing as he strummed the guitar. But it was in tune by then, so that can’t have been a reaction to what he was hearing.”

  “Although it might have been a response to a sudden nasty taste in his mouth?”

  “Yes!” she cried. “And that was also the point when I saw him suck on his finger—or maybe he was trying to brush away a strand of sticky honey he’d found on his lips.”

  “How much time passed before the first visible sign of poisoning?”

  “Oh, at least ten minutes. There were a lot of prayers in between. Your friend Paul can really let rip when he wants to, and there were long readings as part of the order of service. Yes, Nigel must have eaten the poison at the very beginning of the service, just before his song. Possibly slightly earlier. The killer must have been counting on the fact that Nigel was giving a public performance—he couldn’t stop and spit out whatever was tasting so foul, he’d just have to swallow it and get on with the show!”

  “But you didn’t see him put anything in his mouth?”

  She thought hard. “No,” she concluded sadly.

  They sat in silence, oppressed by the drabness of their surroundings. There had been no Christmas tree erected in the church, and there were no signs yet of any preparation for the evening’s service. A shifting in the low rain clouds caused the space to brighten, but only momentarily. Effie stretched self-indulgently, craning her neck back over the pew and staring at the balcony above her.