Inkier Than the Sword (The Falconer Files Book 3)

by Andrea Frazer

  ‘I say, old son, that’s a bit strong, isn’t it? I may be a bit of a lush, but I wouldn’t lie about something this serious!’

  ‘Which is exactly what a congenital liar would say in the circumstances! That’s enough, for now Mr Littlemore,’ the inspector shot out, noticing that Malcolm Littlemore was gathering all the alcohol in his bloodstream for a good old ‘frank and explicit exchange of views’.

  The sound of the vacuum cleaner grew louder as it approached ever nearer, yet not too loud to drown out what was being said. A few heads turned, concerned that Falconer had not silenced it, not stopped it interrupting them and intruding on what felt like the privacy of an almost secret meeting, but he ignored it, and continued.

  ‘You, Mr Crawford: you intrigued us for a while, and we spent some time considering you in the part of murderer. No! Don’t speak! We gave up that idea fairly quickly, having decided that you were much too much of a cold fish to let anyone get under your skin enough to do what was done to Hermione Grayling.

  ‘We looked at all of you, wondering if you were strong enough, both physically and mentally, to commit such a horrific crime, but I won’t dwell on that any longer, as there was one person we had not considered, and whom we should have taken more seriously …’

  He broke off, as the droning noise became loud enough to make continuing, an impossibility, and looked to Carmichael to get up and turn the machine off, indicating to its operator that he could do without the noise.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you my fifteenth guest for this evening, and the murderess of Miss Hermione Grayling: Mrs Hilda Pounce.’

  There was a chorus of ‘noes’, and ‘nevers’, and Hilda Pounce assumed the expression of a rabbit caught in the headlights of a car. But this didn’t last for long, as she made a bolt for the door, her face suddenly screwed into a grimace of rage.

  Carmichael was ready for her and sprang after her, to be aided at the door by PC Green, who had been keeping an eye on things standing well-obscured by the darkness outside. They both made a grab for her, It still needed the two of them to subdue her and get the hand cuffs on, the honours being done by PC Starr, who was there for form’s sake, as it was a woman who was being arrested.

  ‘Take her round to the car, Green, and caution her. Oh, and thanks for being on the ball,’ said Falconer, after cautioning the furious Hilda Pounce.

  ‘There’s no ‘round to the car’, sir. Most of this lot must’ve come by car, and there was nowhere for us to park on the waste ground. We’ve had to leave the car outside the chippy. Sorry about that, but there was nowhere closer,’ explained PC Green, with a rueful smile.

  Falconer sighed. Would nothing in this damned rural area ever go right for him? Instead of the discreet arrest, there would now be a right song and dance – for Hilda was not going to go quietly down to the chip shop which, at this time of night, would no doubt be full of people back from work and wanting their cod and chips double-quick.

  He’d be a laughing stock when this got out.

  II

  It was very late before they had Hilda Pounce processed and locked up for the night, but Carmichael did not have the patience to wait until the morning for an explanation. Falconer had been singing from his own personal hymn sheet, and Carmichael, when the moment came, had known neither the words nor the tune. He made a quick phone call to Kerry before they left the station, to tell her not to wait up for him, and they drove in their separate cars to Falconer’s house, lights already on for security purposes, courtesy of a couple of timer devices.

  The three cats welcomed them both ecstatically, as if they had not seen a living soul for months ( cats and dogs are such liars when it comes to embarrassing their owners), and they had to fight their way through a furry barrier before they could settle down with a glass of beer each, and actually discuss what had happened at the library that evening.

  ‘What on earth was going on there, sir? You never said you had a soul in mind as the culprit, yet you went ahead and organised that meeting. What did you think you were going to do? Bluff the murderer out into the open?’

  ‘I might tell you, Carmichael, that tonight I was realising an ambition I have cherished since I was a mere stripling. I started to read the books of one Mrs Christie, Agatha that is, when I was about thirteen, and developed a longing to conduct the denouement of a murder case in a library, just the way Hercule Poirot did in fiction. Tonight, I got the opportunity. Yes, it may have been a public library, and not in a vast old country house, but it did it for me. I can file tonight’s experience away with ambitions achieved. Now, what did you ask me? Did I mean to bluff the murderer out into the open? Not at all, Carmichael: not at all. The solution came to me in a flash, when we were at the Butterys’ this morning,’ Falconer replied, putting down his glass on a table, so that Mycroft could curl up in his lap. ‘The poison pen letter they received was typed, like the one in Hermione Grayling’s Underwood.’

  ‘And?’ Carmichael still wasn’t any the wiser.

  ‘Just because it was in her typewriter, doesn’t mean she typed it, does it?’

  ‘And you think that the Pounce woman typed it?’

  ‘I do, Carmichael. The doctor’s given her a sedative for tonight, but we’ll do a taped interview tomorrow, and it’ll all come out.’

  ‘Do you mean she typed it after the woman was dead? But why? Hermione Grayling was responsible for all the other letters.

  ‘No she wasn’t, Carmichael. Let me start at the beginning, and then tell the story the way I see it. Hilda Pounce has never achieved anything, done anything, or made anything of her life. She was one of life’s underdogs, just a cleaner, who wasn’t always treated with the respect that she thought she deserved, and the resentment must have built up in her mind to bursting point.

  ‘Bursting point for her being an explosion of poison pen letters, which she delivered herself, having constructed them from old publications that she had cleared out of Hermione Grayling’s house. If we’d suspected her earlier, we could have searched her property from top to bottom, and we’d still never have found any evidence, because it’s winter, and she could simply burn all the magazines and newspapers she’d cut out letters from on her open fire.

  ‘But surely someone would have seen her going to people’s houses.’ Carmichael was not convinced.

  ‘Yes, they probably did see her, and what did it mean to them? Nothing, Carmichael! Absolutely nothing! She was the cleaning lady. She went to people’s houses to work. That was what she did. As a cleaner, she was completely invisible, like the postman, the milkman, and the paperboy. We see them all the time, but if we didn’t see one of them on a particular day, we wouldn’t really remember, because they’re just part of the everyday scenery to us.

  ‘Her husband was an agricultural worker, and used to do a little gardening after he retired, so no doubt she has quite a collection of what we would consider to be dangerous weapons in her shed at the back of her house.

  ‘I must admit I had a bit of a chat with her while we were going through all the paperwork, and I managed to learn a bit about the things I didn’t understand and, even though it was off the record, I have no doubt that she’ll cough the lot tomorrow. That woman has worked like a slave all her life, and I think she’s actually looking forward to a rest in prison.

  ‘She was out seven days a week sometimes, doing stuff for others who had so much more than her, and over the years she’d picked up all these little titbits to their discredit. She’d been brought up in the Strict and Particular ways, but it seemed so unfair that she should graft so hard, while all these sinners lived the life of Riley. Then one day she just snapped. She thought she’d teach the lot of them to feel a mite of guilt for their past misdeeds, and a little bit of fear, knowing that someone else knew their secrets.

  ‘You know how she reacted, just to bringing her library books back a little late. She thought it would go down in writing that she had done wrong. When she twigged that the typeface
could point the finger at her, and that she’d be marked down as a blackmailer, that would be her finished. Not only would she never get work again, or get a reference worth a light, but she’d probably go to prison as well, and have a criminal record for the rest of her days.

  ‘I think that’s where her logic blew her mind. She reasoned that if she killed Hermione Grayling and left a part-finished letter in the machine to Hermione herself, then it could prove to be the perfect murder. She believed there was no way of tracing her to the deed, as she wasn’t timetabled to go there that day, and that Hermione would take the blame for the letters, and she could just forget it all, and get on with life as normal – almost as if she could wipe it from her mind and it wouldn’t, therefore, count. It does have a sort of mad logic to it, when you consider it.

  ‘I found out that the Valium she used to sedate Hermione Grayling was originally prescribed for her husband when he was having episodes with his ‘glass back’, and she actually typed the letter in the machine while Hermione was out for the count, and then gave her that radical centre parting.’

  ‘Sir!’ exclaimed Carmichael, giving his boss a glare. ‘That was in very bad taste!’

  ‘It was, wasn’t it? Now, where was I? Oh, yes: she wasn’t supposed to go to The Spinney that day, as I just said, so that’s why she went, if you see what I mean – to avoid us suspecting her. She just bluffed her way in, saying she’d left her scarf there, and then offered to make a cup of tea while she was there. She did this in her rubber gloves, and Hermione didn’t suspect a thing, being used to seeing her in the things all the time.’

  ‘Why did she give her the Valium, sir? I don’t understand that bit. It’s hard enough to think of someone other than Miss Grayling being responsible for the letters, without being all confused with sedatives and the like.’ Carmichael was struggling.

  ‘Because she said she couldn’t face doing it while Hermione Grayling was conscious, which makes sense of a sort, but she nevertheless cold-bloodedly sat down at the same table as her comatose employer, put a sheet of paper into the woman’s typewriter, and wrote the final poison pen letter, just to shake us off the scent.

  ‘She said she only did for Hermione because she – Hilda – had used the typewriter for the letter she’d posted through the Butterys’ door. That tiny action sealed Miss Grayling’s fate. The Butterys’ letter was typewritten because she was fed up with all the fiddling around with cutting out letters, and using tweezers and the like, to construct them, then she had second thoughts when it was much too late. As I said just now, if the typeface was traced to Miss Grayling’s machine, it would soon become obvious that the owner of that machine was not responsible for any of the letters, and that would leave old Pounce in the frame.’

  ‘Why wasn’t she splattered with blood, sir? A blow like that wouldn’t leave her squeaky clean, as we can both witness, having gone into that room.’

  ‘Simple, Sergeant. She brought an extra set of clothes with her – her very oldest, I should imagine – for she’s not a woman to waste anything useful. She changed into them, whacked Miss Grayling, having wiped the keys of the typewriter clean after her decoy epistle, took the clothes home in the big canvas bag she always has in her bicycle basket, and then burnt the evidence on her open fire. Job done! And she almost got away with it, because I was too thick to see a clue right out in the open.

  ‘Everyone calls her Potty Pounce, you know. Well, sometimes there can be more truth in a nickname than one realises. And she was always there. She works for, or has done, in the past, for most of them, and she was even in the pub the night of Hermione’s champagne celebration, giving the cellar a good going over, Thursday being a slack night usually. She managed, by judicial timing of going up and down stairs, to overhear the bulk of their conversation, and not one of them even noticed her. She really was invisible, like domestic staff in Victorian times.’

  ‘And what about the people who didn’t get letters? Was there a reason for that, or was it something she intended to get round to, when she had time?’

  ‘They were people who had been kind to her in the past, and she didn’t want to appear ungrateful. Dimity Pryor, for instance, would make occasional gifts from the charity shop to her, no doubt paid for out of her own pocket, but carefully chosen, good-quality things that Hilda would not have ordinarily have been able to afford.

  ‘It was something similar with Roma Kerr, as well. She often passed new garments on to Hilda if they were a little shop-soiled, and couldn’t be returned to the wholesaler.

  ‘The Littlemores occasionally got her to ‘blitz’ their place – it was all extra money – and she never left their house without a generous payment for her time and effort, and a bottle of sherry or port.

  ‘Craig Crawford had foiled a bag-snatcher in Market Darley where she was shopping one day, and returned her bag to her intact, with nothing stolen. I think she sees him as a bit of a hero.

  ‘And Bryony Buckleigh, a really sympathetic soul, used to sit with Hilda’s Bert when his glass back was playing up, keeping him company sometimes, when Hilda had a particularly full schedule, and would have had to leave him on his own all day.

  ‘She only sent letters to people who had slighted her in some way, or dispensed with her services in the past. And apart from the letters and the murder, she really was a very honest woman. Patience Buttery mentioned that when Mrs Pounce returned her library books late and had to pay a fine, she was truly mortified, and even returned later in the day, sort of hoping that something could be done about it.’

  ‘That doesn’t alter the fact that she killed one of the country’s most popular authors,’ Carmichael commented in a disapproving voice.

  ‘Yes, she did indeed. And she even gave the kitchen what she called ‘a lick and a promise’ before she left the scene of the crime.’

  ‘Yet they do say that the pen is mightier than the sword, sir,’ offered Carmichael with a little smile.

  ‘Not in this case,’ replied Falconer.

  ‘And hardly a sword.’

  ‘Or a pen.’

  ‘But it’s certainly inkier.’

  ‘I think that should be ‘more inky’, Carmichael.’

  ‘No, sir. Inkier. Definitely!’

  Epilogue

  Change In The Air

  Spring

  The entire police staff of the station were crammed in to Superintendent ‘Jelly’ Chivers’ office, there being no room for the civilian staff, in whom Chivers took little interest. Whatever this was about, they would be the last to know. His expression, as he surveyed them all from behind his desk, was one of hard-nosed determination, thinly disguised by a veneer of concern.

  Clearing his throat at a volume which would silence the hubbub of speculation that filled the room at the moment, he fixed them with an ‘I don’t like this any more than you do’ glare, and began to address them.

  ‘I know there has been a lot of speculation and general talk, both here and at Carsfold, and you would be perfectly correct if you assumed that there was change in the air. We live in difficult times, financially, and sacrifices have to be made, at all levels, in our lives.

  ‘I’m sure you’ve all had to make cuts in your housekeeping budgets, as food prices have risen, as has Mrs Chivers, with much GBH of the earhole for me.’ He paused to allow a little chuckle of concurrence, going for a jokey approach, with a bit of ‘we’re all in this together, lads’ for good measure.

  ‘The police force, along with everything else that is funded by the public purse, also has to pull in its horns, so there will be changes in the near future. The intention is to reorganise and streamline the force, to make it more effective: to cut budgets without cutting services.

  ‘Now, the Chief Constable and I, along with a number of other senior and experienced officers, have considered long and hard about how we can achieve the goals we have been set by the government, and we think we have come up with a plan that will satisfy not only our Westminster masters, but you, as
well as Joe Public.

  ‘What we are proposing to do is to practically dorm the station at Carsfold. It has few staff and quite a lot of under-used space, and most of the work in the district filters through this station. It has, therefore, been suggested that Carsfold operate with a skeleton staff, and during office hours only. Outside of these times, the public will be expected to contact us here.

  ‘The unused rooms in the Carsfold station will be taken over to be used as a paper archive for the area, as so many of our records have not yet been digitised. We have far too much paper stored here, taking up far too much room. Carsfold has its own stock of old paper records, and so do all of the other tiny rural stations. These will now be combined in one archive, in one place, easy to access, and easy to use.’ ( Who did he think he was kidding?) ‘The extra space created here will give us extra office space for those personnel to be transferred.

  ‘Details have not been finalised for who goes where, but what is certain, is that PC Green and PC Starr will both be joining us, and very welcome additions they will be.’ Here, he smiled, to show that he wasn’t really the big bad wolf. ‘There should be a few more additions to our number from other rural locations, and CID will, after the builders have finished the alterations, have its own room. It’s possible that there could be an addition to its number.

  ‘As for existing staff, please let me assure you that everything possible will be done to retain those who wish to continue on the payroll. Until final decisions are made, however, no one’s future is certain, not even my own.

  ‘Now, I’m not going to ask you if you have any questions, because you probably have dozens, but I won’t be able to answer them until the whole plan is finalised. Thank you very much for your time. Now off you go to serve your public, and thank you for your patience. Mind how you go.’