Inkier Than the Sword (The Falconer Files Book 3)

by Andrea Frazer

  ‘Nothing to report really, though, except for a few people mentioned the previous tenant of number six Prince Albert Terrace – a woman called Marilyn Slade. It seems that she cleared out rather suddenly, and you know how people like to call on their two old friends, Rumour and Gossip.’

  ‘Go on, Green,’ Falconer encouraged him. The constable had a nice turn of phrase, sometimes, that he appreciated.

  ‘In the end, it seems that she has neither been foully murdered, nor been abducted by either aliens or sinister foreign agents. Word is, she left to nurse her mother, who was suffering from early onset Alzheimer’s – poor cow!’

  ‘Which one?’ Carmichael asked, entering the conversation with what seemed a totally unrelated question.

  ‘Both!’ was Green’s cryptic reply, which he gave without batting an eyelid. ‘I’m surprised you haven’t heard about her already, sir. It seems she used to do a few hours for that craft shop on the High Street – Knitty-Gritty it’s called.’

  ‘I know!’ exclaimed Falconer with a vehemence that surprised the constable. ‘Oh, it’s not you, it’s the name, and the couple that runs – if that’s the right word – the craft shop. They’re a couple of drunks who are never sober for long enough to know which way is up. I’d be surprised if they even remember her if she’s been gone longer than a week.’

  ‘Like that, is it?’

  ‘Very like that, Constable. I wouldn’t be surprised to find either or both of them dead or in rehab by Easter, they’re that bad. Still, I’ll soon be shot of them, when this case gets solved.’

  His optimistic statement belied his lack of confidence. He intended to do a summary of everything they had learnt so far when he got home, and he wasn’t feeling confident that the solution would be staring him in the face, at the end of it. But first things first – he had a little experiment to conduct when he got home, concerning the honesty of a certain bunch of pussycats.

  Chapter Twelve

  Find the Lady (Or Other Culprit)

  Saturday 9th January–evening

  I

  The first thing Falconer did when he got home, after pouring himself a gin and tonic, was to remove three fat prawns from his fridge and sandwich them between two plates, which he placed on the work surface where he could observe them from his second-favourite chair in the sitting room. He’d sit and sip his chilled reward, in his pleasantly warm room, and solve a domestic crime before he did anything else. He still could not believe that his beloved Mycroft was a thief, not after all the time they had been together.

  After all, Tar Baby and Ruby were fairly recent additions to his household, only tolerated because they had belonged to someone he had recently fallen for. It would never have worked out for them, but when the cats had found themselves abandoned he had felt obliged to step into the breach and give them a home in remembrance of what might have been.

  When they had first moved in he had been an emotional mess and their demands – no, their simple needs – and their mere presence, had driven him to distraction, so set in his ways with his ‘only cat’ was he, but he was gradually getting used to seeing them around, and even developing a grudging affection for them. But he would not tolerate them stealing his food – even if he should have stood his salmon steak in the microwave for safety, a little demon voice taunted him from the depths of his thoughts.

  After only ten minutes, while he was still sunk in thoughts about his feelings towards the two cats who had invaded his home, not to mention disturbed his well-ordered routine, there was a definite sound of plate upon plate, and he started, and turned his head towards the kitchen doorway.

  And there was the culprit, caught, red-pawed, in the act of attempted theft – no, of actual theft! Tar Baby had managed to slide one plate across the other with a deft paw and, at this very moment, had a succulent prawn in his jaws, and was preparing to flee through the cat-flap with his booty.

  Falconer’s rise from the chair hastened the cat on his way into the garden and, mystery solved, he rewarded Ruby and Mycroft (who were sitting innocently on the kitchen floor looking upwards hopefully) with the other two fishy morsels. His neighbour had been perfectly correct when he had identified Tar Baby as the thief, but now he knew for certain a feeling of guilt crept over him.

  It was his own fault, really. Maybe Mycroft would never have done such a thing, but to leave such tempting seafood items out on the work surface, and not expect them to be touched when he came home from work, with three cats in and out of the house all day, really was expecting too much. He would make sure that he defrosted any future temptations behind a closed glass door, and would not put his felines under so much pressure not to behave the way a cat behaves naturally, in the future.

  II

  Putting a coquille St Jacques and a couple of small potatoes in the oven, he fetched his briefcase from the hall, began to spread papers across the kitchen table and, grabbing a spiral notepad and pen, began to collate what he had learnt so far.

  First, he divided his suspects – the members of the cards club, for he had decided that the culprit lay in that membership – into two groups: the Fox and Hounds group, which he thought of as the slightly younger and trendier group, for no better reason than that same description applied to the pub, and the Ox and Plough group, slightly older in the main, and a little old-fashioned – again, like the pub they met in.

  Of the Fox and Hounds group, only two members – Tilly Gifford and Elizabeth (formerly Buffy) Sinden had received poison pen letters. Four members of the group from the Ox and Plough, however, had received letters, and Hermione had one to herself in her typewriter, unfinished, when she was murdered. That letter was obviously her cover. If she received one too, how could she be responsible for the others?

  But everyone had seemed so fond of her. It seemed difficult to believe that someone who was regarded with universal affection should harbour such darkness in her heart towards those who regarded her as a friend. If she really felt like that, would she actually stroll into the Ox and Plough and casually order six bottles of champagne to share with them? Would that make her the kind of person who had instructed the landlord always to keep half-a-dozen of her favourite brand on ice, just in case she had something to celebrate with her friends? Was she the sort of person who would write a note that would drive one of her (so-called) friends to suicide?

  This approach was obviously getting him nowhere, and Falconer tore a sheet from his notepad, threw it in the general direction of the rubbish bin, and decided to approach things from a different angle, and examine everyone’s alibis, starting with Tilly and Tommy Gifford. Well, they were a complete washout. He knew that Tommy had been at work that day, and had caught the eight o’clock train to London. And Tilly had been at the doctor’s surgery at a quarter to nine.

  What about Roma and Rodney Kerr? He’d learnt from more than one source that Rodney Kerr was on the same train as Tommy Gifford, bound for the capital on a buying – or at least, ordering – trip. Roma had apparently spent the morning helping Elizabeth Sinden undergo a complete change of sartorial image, so that was two more from that group accounted for.

  Bryony Buckleigh claimed to have been doing her shopping in Market Darley and, having met the lady, he was sure that, if asked, she could produce a string of shop assistants who had spoken to or seen her yesterday morning.

  The only people left in the Fox and Hounds group were the Littlemores, who claimed to have been stocktaking. This might even be true, for the only other alternative Falconer could think of was that they had been pissed out of their heads again. Anyway, if one of them had tried to sneak up on Hermione Grayling in the state he had found them in on two occasions, it would sound like an elephant approaching through thick undergrowth. No way could one of that pair have caught as astute a woman as Hermione Grayling off her guard to that extent.

  But he was forgetting – she had been sedated with Valium, and was probably deeply asleep when she was attacked with such murderous force. She would h
ave been incapable of reacting to a real elephant charging through thick undergrowth, with her in its sights. Whoever had administered that sedative had done so to make her, literally, a sitting target, unable to move, cry out, or fight back in any way to save herself. That really had been evil!

  Sedation aside, however, he still didn’t think it had anything to do with the Littlemores. Even if one of them had been in a drunken rage with her, they wouldn’t have had the nous to have gone in earlier and slip her a sedative, then returned later to sink a billhook into her skull: that was a non-starter of an idea.

  And that was the whole of the Fox and Hounds group accounted for. Two poison pen letters between them, and each and every one of them with an alibi for the time of the murder. Damn! He’d have to move on to the group that met at the Ox and Plough, but at least this group looked a little more promising, at first glance. Four members had received unpleasant epistles, and one, only half-born, had awaited him, in the clutches of the ancient Underwood in Hermione’s ‘author-torium’ – what a truly ghastly word that was!

  This group really consisted of Hermione’s chosen few, and her relationships with them were much more deeply rooted than with the members of the other group. Three of them, in fact, she had known since schooldays, or shortly afterwards, if his memory served him correctly. Were there any old grudges to be unearthed, there?

  Yes, indeed there were.

  At this point he left the table, took a bowl of salad out of the fridge, and removed the rest of his meal from the oven. Got to feed the inner man, he thought, or the brain will seize up. As he ate, he pondered the main items being examined for fingerprints. He had little hope they would find any, but he thought that someone may recognise the billhook. He must take it a-visiting when it had finished its sojourn in the laboratory.

  The letters too probably had nothing to offer in the way of fingerprints corroborating that they were sent by Hermione Grayling – the general public was just too well-informed these days. It must have been great, he speculated, to have been a policeman when fingerprints were first recognised as evidence, but their existence and importance were not a matter of public knowledge.

  The envelopes were a different matter. They would give up the titles of the publications from which the letters that constructed their contents had been cut. That in itself should confirm that it was Hermione behind them. And there was the fact that they had not been posted, but delivered by hand, so it was obviously someone local.

  Here he pulled himself up short. They knew that Hermione Grayling was responsible for the poison pen letters: they had found one half-finished in front of her dead body. Shaking his head to clear his thoughts, he continued with his meal, ignoring the mews of the cats, who were pleading that they hadn’t had anything to eat for days and were dying of starvation. Little liars!

  Returning to his notebook after he had rinsed off his plate and put it in the dishwasher, he was aware that somewhere in the far distance – in the farthest regions of his mind – there was an alarm bell ringing, trying to warn him that he had missed something: something that he had not realised the significance of; something small and obvious that was right under his nose. But it was no use chasing it, for it would slide away and hide from him. He would just have to wait for it to swim into his conscious mind in its own time, for it wouldn’t be hurried.

  III

  Falconer recalled very well a conversation during the course of which he had learnt that Hermione, like Tar Baby, had been a bit of a ‘tea leaf’, back in her younger days. There were four in that group who had known each other since youth – Hermione Grayling, Dimity Pryor, Charles Rainbird, and Vernon Warlock.

  Vernon had been the one at that time so distantly past who had wanted to write, and who had developed his first plot, confiding the details, maybe to all of them, but certainly to Hermione. Falconer suffered a rare moment of insight, imagining Vernon Warlock as a young man, full of plans for his career as a writer, sure of where his future lay, and full of hopes and dreams.

  Then the unthinkable happened. Hermione – his dear friend Hermione – had stolen his plot, written it as a book herself, duly got it published and, from there, had metamorphosed into the writer that he should have been, getting the praise and plaudits that should have been his by rights. She had stolen not only his thunder, but his entire life, when looked at like this.

  Suddenly the whole situation became real for Falconer: the depth of feeling, the sense of betrayal – the whole devastating incident, brutal, dishonest; the act of a traitor or an enemy, not a friend. He’d looked at it previously as something that had happened a long time ago, but old sins have long shadows, and maybe Vernon Warlock still cherished revenge in his heart. She’d become a well-known writer, with holiday homes all over the place: he’d become a dealer in second-hand books – a nobody, in short.

  Vernon had claimed to be at work when Hermione was murdered, but there were no witnesses to this. He could easily have put a notice on the door stating that he had popped out for five minutes and would be back soon, and got himself up to The Spinney. If he’d gone up Farriers Lane and down Tuppenny Lane, he would have passed only three houses, and once out on the Market Darley Road, would have needed only to cross the road to enter the grounds of The Spinney. There was little likelihood of him being seen and, if he was, he could always have made his excuses, and tried again another day. Vernon Warlock was a definite possibility as a suspect.

  Who next? He decided to take a look at Charles Rainbird. What had he heard about him and Hermione? Yes, that they had gone out together – were an item for a short time in their youth, although no one had mentioned why they had ceased to be an item.

  Having met Charlie Rainbird, Falconer had a fair idea. The man was gay, in Falconer’s opinion, although not in any overt way, but it was obvious to a policeman who had his ‘gaydar’ switched on, and that was a piece of mental equipment that one needed in the force. Identifying a person’s sexuality at little more than a glance could be the difference between diffusing a situation, and someone getting a knife in the guts, as a homophobe with a bellyful of beer and his dander well and truly up didn’t care who got it, so long as it dissipated his own anger and hatred. He realised that he may, of course, be judging Rainbird wrongly; the man may, in fact, be bisexual, but that would have made no difference to Hermione. It would not have been compatible with her plans for life and, in fact, nobody had matched up to her expectations in the end, and she had spent the rest of her life as a spinster.

  As the evidence of Rainbird’s sexuality was not something that had been spread abroad for public consumption, he assumed that this was a secret that Hermione had held in trust for him all these years. Yes, it may just be an assumption on his part, but his gut instinct told him that he had made the right call. Now, what was Mr Charles Rainbird up to yesterday morning? Why, he too was at work. Apparently.

  How simple, again, to place a note on the door, and walk openly up the Market Darley Road to the general store to buy his copy of the local newspaper. No one would even notice him doing that, or make a note of it, it was such an innocent action. The Spinney was only a few yards further along the road on the opposite side. How simple it would have been to cross over and, if anyone saw him or spoke to him, to just call in and say hello, and leave it till another time.

  He probably hated the fact that Hermione held the secret of his sexuality in the palm of her hand, and could change everyone’s opinion of him in just one sentence. Rainbird, like Vernon Warlock, had motive and opportunity. Falconer would work on the means later. And give forensics a jog. He’d still had no information as to fingerprints, or about the publications mutilated to produce the letters.

  He had a muse about Dimity Pryor next. She had said that she and Hermione had been best friends, even at school. From what Miss Pryor had said, Hermione was a bit of a one for the boys back then, but she, Dimity, had only ever had one boyfriend. And Hermione had stolen him from right under her very nose. How that must
have rankled, that her best friend, who had the pick of the boys, should steal the only one that Dimity was ever interested in. Then, apparently Hermione had cast him aside, saying she’d only stolen him to prove that he was a two-timer.

  That must have been cold comfort to the young Dimity, who had no idea that the two of them would be life-long maiden ladies. She must have felt that her world was at an end, the way young people always over-dramatise things, thinking that they will actually die if such-and-such a thing does, or doesn’t, happen. Magnify that through a lifetime of spinsterhood, and you had a jolly good motive for murder. Gosh, he was going great guns on this group. Now, who was left?

  Monica and Quentin Raynor were practically on the spot, and Monica had received a letter. He had a fair idea of the subject matter for Vernon and Quentin’s letters, but no idea about Monica’s. He assumed, estate agency being a dirty business sometimes, that it could have been about dodgy dealings sometime in the past, or about her fidelity. He knew a flirt when he saw one, and was particularly susceptible to spotting marital tension.

  The latter, though, he dismissed out of hand. The tension between them didn’t seem the sort that existed due to the discovery of an affair, so he was going to plump for dodgy dealings on the property market in the past, something he might have to examine more closely, if he found no culprit elsewhere.

  That left him with Gabriel Pryor, who had committed suicide, and Craig Crawford, who was obviously a social inadequate, unable to deal with relationships with real people, and hiding instead in his toy railways and pretend landscapes. He appeared to have no close friends. Crawford had not received a letter but, rather like Gabriel Pryor, his only social outlet was the cards club. Falconer considered him a non-starter in the role as first murderer.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Time Out

  Sunday 10th January