Furious Old Women

by Bruce, Leo

  “Here is Mrs Stick,” said Carolus. “No doubt she will tell you what she is going to give us.”

  “Well, I tried to make it a nice simple appetizing dinner, Sir,” said Mrs Stick, addressing the headmaster. “Knowing you was to have a murder after it, as you might say. There’s a consummay de vollile, some little lobster booshays because there was only the one lobster at Thompsons and I don’t like going anywhere else. Then a bit of roast duck and a little sweet soofflay to finish with.”

  “Delectable,” pronounced the headmaster. When Mrs Stick had left them he continued: “You are fortunate indeed, my dear Deene, in your employment of the Sticks. At School House, naturally, with thirty boarders, we have perforce a plainer regimen. Mrs Gorringer, in spite of the large staff we employ, tells me that even in the holidays it would be wellnigh impossible with all her culinary resources to provide her guests with a meal such as Mrs Stick creates single-handed. She can produce, she says in her inimitable way, quoting Dr Johnson, a good enough dinner but not a dinner to ask a man to. Your adroit housekeeper never fails you.”

  Nor was there anything to criticize in Mrs Stick’s achievement that evening though she herself was not satisfied. “I thought the duck was done to death,” she confided in Carolus afterwards and when he said “perhaps it was”, she told him his mind ran on such things. She had meant it was over-cooked.

  But at last came coffee and an old Armagnac, cigars, peace and expectation.

  “Come, Deene. We are all ears. Who killed Millicent Griggs?”

  “You will have found it strange that I retired from this case before revealing the truth. But to defend myself I must remind you of what kind of woman this was. Even her own sister, Mrs Bobbin, spoke of her as ‘mean and sanctimonious’ and said that she was ‘unbearable’ with Naomi Chester, ‘inquisitive’ with a ‘mean and nasty mind’. The vicar’s wife went further. Millicent was ‘kind to no one but herself, generous only to gain her own ends’, hypocritical, narrow-minded, self-centred and bigoted. She was also, Mrs Waddell said, capable of murder. Rumble, who was not an unkindly disposed man, used an unprintable word for her and added ‘mean with her sisters and everyone else’. He was even more damning when he said—‘always right, if you know what I mean. Do anyone a nasty turn’. Commander Fyfe said she was unpopular, ‘a woman of insatiable curiosity of a most unsavoury kind’. The ‘woman known as Flo’, another critic wholly without malice, said Millicent had a ‘nasty, dirty mind’ and gave me examples of it which she said would ‘turn me up’ and I’m bound to say they nearly did. I had the impression from the first that Millicent Griggs was a horror and everything I heard about her confirmed it.”

  “Still,” argued Mr Gorringer, “does that justify you in shielding her murderer, Deene? You have so often made it clear that murder itself, irrespective of the characters of perpetrator or victim, must be exposed. Where is the consistency in your behaviour?”

  Carolus ignored this.

  “Everyone spoke with frank dislike of Millicent,” he went on,” except the one person of whom one would expect it, Naomi Chester. That roused my curiosity at once. Why did Naomi lie to me? What was she trying to conceal? Whom was she shielding? I started investigations with these questions very much in my mind.

  “I had to do some spade-work which I have not bothered to record. That is one of the disadvantages of being at odds with the CID man investigating, as I was in this case. Had John Moore been in charge I should have been given details of the movements of certain persons which in this case I had to discover for myself.

  “Though I never for a moment suspected Naomi of the murder of Millicent Griggs….”

  “Why not?” asked Dr Thomas.

  “Well, Lance, one must allow something to one’s instincts. Heaven knows I have had surprises enough in the cases I have investigated and am prepared to believe pretty well anything of anyone. I don’t even say that I thought it impossible that Naomi should have bashed Millicent over the head—nothing in human nature seems impossible—but I do say that I could not suspect her of it. On the other hand she knew more than she would say.

  “I was convinced moreover that it was through her that the body was disposed of, for it was fairly plain that Grey had been responsible for this. At about half-past three a telephone call was received for him at the home of Commander Fyfe, where he was working. The number of people who knew he was there must have been limited, for it had been arranged by Fyfe only on the previous evening. Mrs Fyfe thought the voice was that of an elderly woman—exactly the impression that would be given by a young woman trying to disguise her voice.

  “Laddie Grey said that when he reached the phone no one answered, but it is noteworthy that he immediately packed up his work and left. Naomi was seen in the village by several witnesses who stressed that she was ‘hurrying’ towards her home. By her own admission Grey came to her home about four, or, it would seem, straight from his work.

  “Whatever it was Naomi told Grey it was sufficient to set him in action. At half-past four a light was seen by Dundas Griggs in the house Crossways, but no one would answer his repeated ringing at the door. He walked round the house but found everything locked, even the garage.

  “When Dundas Griggs returned to the house at 5.15 he found no light but heard what can only have been someone who had a key of the back door opening the garage from within and wheeling out a motor-cycle, locking the garage doors after him, wheeling a motor-cycle down the road and starting it up some yards away. I believe—and I will tell you why in a moment—that the person Griggs heard was Laddie Grey and that in the sidecar of his motor-bike was the body of Millicent Griggs.

  “One must not count too much on witnesses’ estimate of time but a few minutes later Mugger and the woman known as Flo were interrupted by a motor-cycle appearing at the top of Church Lane and throwing its single headlight on them. I know from Lovibond the electrician that Grey was short of a bulb in the light on his sidecar so there is no reason to think that the single light was not his. Seeing them he rode away and presumably returned later.

  “It would rather naturally have occurred to Grey that the best place to get rid of a corpse was in the open grave in the churchyard for, as I heard from my useful informant Mr Lovibond, Grey used to help Rumble in his work as sexton. He would also have known where Rumble kept his spade and would have been in the furnace room a number of times.

  “I was certain that Millicent was already dead when she was taken from Crossways, for a sheet had been snatched from one of the beds in order to staunch the blood. This sheet was found with her jewellery and money in the loft of the furnace room.

  “Why, you may ask, if Grey had not murdered Millicent did he bother to remove her jewellery? Knowing Rumble’s precision in the matter of the depths of graves he may have thought there was a chance at least of the body being discovered before Chilling’s funeral, and played for safety. Robbery would be thought the motive and later he could remove and destroy the jewellery.

  “He finished his task at about six, at least if the motorbike which the vicar heard start up in Church Lane at that time was his. We know that it was an exceptionally dark night so it had not been difficult to keep his movements, except on his motor-bike, unseen.

  “I never thought it very likely that Millicent left the house that afternoon, for someone would have seen her. The only reason suggested for her doing so was the church brass and this we know from Mrs Rumble had not been cleaned. But if her dead body had been taken, it occurred to me, the shoes would have remained clean till she was put in the grave. It was thinking about this which caused me to make that lucky shot about galoshes. As soon as Naomi was asked she thought she had made a blunder. Instead of saying calmly that they were upstairs so that if Millicent went out that afternoon it was without them, she foolishly denied that they were in the house, then put them to be found at the back of the church. You may remember how confused she was when, an hour after my questions, I met her coming away from the church in whic
h she had probably just dumped the galoshes.

  “That was foolish. If Millicent had worn them to the church that afternoon she would not have removed them while she was cleaning the brass. And they certainly would not have remained unperceived by Mrs Rumble for several days, including the Saturday on which she cleaned the church.

  “But again why? Why had Naomi put herself and the man she loved in this very serious danger if neither of them was guilty of the murder?

  “Let us go back to that afternoon. Flora went out before half-past two, leaving Millicent and Naomi together in the house.

  “Something caused Naomi to stay there after her time. Flora said the washing-up was done before she left. However conscientious Naomi might be I was sure that Millicent found some excuse to keep her there. Eventually, when she felt that I knew most of the truth, Naomi told me what it was. She complained about the staircase. Knowing her proclivity for asking questions, we may guess that she stood near the girl on the stairs, making one of her rather nasty cross-examinations. That was the tall stone staircase that rose from the hall. Then—’ Did you actually do anything to her?’ I asked Naomi. ‘I never touched her’, she said. ‘It was only the bucket of water’.

  “In itself, you see, it was only what Millicent deserved, a bucket of dirty water thrown over her. But it had the most terrible consequences. The old woman, standing probably a step or two lower than Naomi and receiving that water in her face, lost her balance, failed to find the balustrade with her hand as she fell, and tumbled backwards down the tall staircase to her death. Naomi, exasperated beyond patience, had meant only to throw water at her and as a result of it she found herself alone in the house with the dead body of Millicent. What she did then we know. Let’s have a drink, shall we?”

  It was nearly eleven o’clock and the five people in Carolus’s sitting-room had scarcely moved for an hour. It was time to ease the tension and have a whisky or a brandy and soda.

  20

  MR Gorringer was of course the first to speak.

  “In a sense I am relieved,” he said, ‘that what appeared to be a terrible and violent crime was done without the baleful intentions one had feared. But …”

  “But you feel it’s rather an anti-climax, headmaster? What you had supposed murder was no more than an accident. Is that it?”

  “Far be it from me to regret such a thing,” said Mr Gorringer. “But I must say I had imagined something worse. Even when you had convinced me that Millicent Griggs died in her own house I imagined some intruder….”

  “In that case you will be yet more disappointed in the gruesome incident in the church tower.”

  “Gruesome indeed,” postulated Mr Gorringer.

  “Not so very gruesome,” said Carolus, “except as it relates to the state of mind of Flora Griggs. And since it appears that she has quite recovered, that in itself concerns us less. In her last letter to me, in fact, Mrs Bobbin, while showing that her resentment has in no way abated, speaks of Flora’s happier and more level-headed state of mind as one of the few brighter aspects of the business. She is, Mrs Bobbin says, a completely different person and has developed something very like a sense of humour with which to view the bi-partisan antics of the vicar. This may be due to the shock of her fall, but I prefer to think that it has come about because she has been relieved of the baleful influence of the older sister. For many years she was under the malign domination of Millicent and now she begins to show her own pleasant character.

  “Her fall, was of course, an accident but I’m afraid her intention in climbing the tower may have been suicidal. Whether or not she would in fact have carried out that intention it is not for us to judge. She passes out of the case, that rare and I must say welcome person, one who is better and happier for having been in contact with murder.”

  “So having disposed of these two most sinister-seeming mysteries as mere accidents,” said Mr Gorringer loftily, “I suppose you will tell us that Grazia Vaillant committed suicide?”

  “Oh no,” said Carolus. “Grazia Vaillant was murdered.”

  The headmaster made a sound like ‘Ttsschk!’

  “That should have been obvious almost at once. Mrs Rumble told me that there was less than a third of a bottle of gin left in Grazia’s cupboard. I doubt if Grazia, who by then was a fairly hardened gin-drinker, could have got drunk on that, or if drunk would have swallowed an overdose of sleeping-pills. Besides, Minerval was more a habit of hers than gin, though she rarely took it in excess of one tablet at a time. Her last tube had been prescribed and bought from the chemist by Mrs Rumble a week before her death and contained ten tablets which, as Mrs Rumble said, ‘she must have been taking’ during that week. Mrs Rumble had noticed on the day previous to her death that there were only two tablets left in the tube. So that we can reasonably assume that all that could have been self-administered by Grazia Vaillant that evening was a third of a bottle of gin and two Minerval tablets. Or possibly three or even four Minerval tablets if she took the two which Flora Griggs gave her. These would probably have done her no harm and certainly would not have killed her.

  “Besides, there is no reason to suspect her of wanting to take her own life. With the death of Millicent Griggs the long struggle for supremacy in the parish was ending in her favour. ‘There was nothing wrong when I left that afternoon. In fact she was quite excited about getting a statue on the altar of the side-chapel’. So said Mrs Rumble and I see no reason, in this matter, to doubt her. No, Grazia was murdered.

  “We know of only two people who were in her house that afternoon, Mrs Rumble and Miss Flora Griggs, but we have no means of knowing who, if anyone else, was admitted. On the other hand we can see how easy it was to poison her. She always had the same kind of gin and took the same kind of tranquillizers. A combined overdose of these two would be fatal. All a would-be murderer had to do was to provide himself or herself with a bottle containing the amount of Horsely’s gin which approximately was left in Grazia’s bottle and dissolve in it say half a dozen Minerval tablets. Grazia Vaillant mixed enough lime juice with her gin to kill the taste and would swallow this fatal mixture quite readily. It would not kill her at once but within an hour or two, unless she called assistance, she would be dead.

  “She was anxious that no one should know she had taken to drinking gin in secret. That is the worst of this repulsive puritan doctrine of guilt about alcohol. Convince someone that it’s wrong to drink, ignoring the lessons of the First Miracle and the Last Supper, and you can create a secretive drunkard, morally undermined, from someone who in openly enjoying a glass of wine would be a balanced and temperate person. Grazia’s secret guzzling of raw spirit disguised by ersatz lime juice laid her open to murder.

  “What is more, the murder would be difficult to detect and almost impossible to prove. She herself could be relied on to throw the poisoned bottle into the deep well outside her back door where it would sink and lie with all the other bottles which had once contained Horsely’s gin, the specially-shaped oval bottles so easy to slip into a bag or shopping basket. She herself would wash the glass which had contained the fatal mixture, as she always washed away the traces of gin before leaving the glass in the sink. And even if she were overcome before she had done these things, her murderer would be difficult indeed to identify.

  “We knew, in this case, that the motive could not be simple robbery, as was suspected in the case of Millicent Griggs, for the house had not been broken into and nothing had been stolen. Although the expression on her face was one of fury it might merely have been at the thought of death. We know she grew violent when she had been drinking. And we had become accustomed to meeting very angry old ladies in this case.

  “So for me it became, as these things so often are, a matter of motive. But a more complicated one than I had previously met. There were not the usual persons with obvious motives standing round, the relatives who would inherit money, the man remorselessly blackmailed, the third party in a love-triangle. The motives which one h
ad to suggest for the murder of Grazia Vaillant were farfetched.

  “The only persons, so far as we know from the details given to the Coroner, who could be said to have expectations under Grazia’s will were Mrs Rumble and the two clergy of the parish, the Reverend Bonar Waddell and the Reverend Peter Slipper. Unless you add persons who make suspicion fantastic, like those connected with the various-church charities who would see them flourish, the choirmaster, the members of the Boy Scout Troup and so on, the two clergymen and the sexton’s wife alone could benefit financially by Grazia’s death.

  “The only other possible motive seemed to be sheer hatred. We know that for years the sisters Griggs had hated Grazia Vaillant with all their natures and all the fervency of their religious beliefs, and that the surviving sister still hated her. We may suspect that Mrs Waddell nursed a strong detestation for Grazia. There may have been others whose hatred was better concealed. And since one at least of those who hated Grazia at the time of her death was a rich woman one could not altogether rule out the possibility of another person bribed.

  “But in compensation for all this vagueness in the matter of motive I knew certainly the cause of Grazia’s death and this gave me certain hard facts about the murderer. He or she had to have the following:

  A knowledge that Grazia was secretly drinking Horsely’s gin.

  The knowledge that for some time she had been taking Minerval. (This, of course, so that when it was found she had died from an overdose, suicide would account for it.)

  Access (even if only for a moment) to the cupboard in which she kept her gin.

  Access to a sufficient quantity of Minerval.

  The ingenuity to substitute poisoned for unpoisoned gin in an identical bottle.

  An opportunity of doing so.

  A motive.

  “There was really only one person who fitted all seven conditions.”

  Carolus paused and lit a new cigar.