Furious Old Women

by Bruce, Leo

  Mr Gorringer was the first to fall into his little trap.

  “For once, Deene, you reduce speculation to a minimum. It was, of course, the unbalanced younger sister, Miss Flora Griggs, who poisoned the unfortunate woman. You have mildly deceived us by suggesting that she has passed out of the affair.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Phoebe Thomas. “It was Mrs Rumble.”

  Carolus shook his head.

  “Oh no,” he said. “You might have ruled those out from the fact that I have dropped the case. It was Millicent Griggs.”

  “But …” began Mr Gorringer.

  “I think you are forgetting,” said Carolus firmly, “that very important information given me by Mrs Rumble which I scrupulously repeated to you before dinner. ‘There was a bottle nearly a third full’, she said on the morning Grazia was found dead. ‘I told you she hadn’t touched it since the other one died’.”

  “Millicent Griggs went to see Grazia, not, I am convinced, for any wish for reconciliation but with about as much hatred and malice in her heart as a woman well could have. Millicent was, as we have already seen, a hateful and malicious woman. She came away from that first meeting and Mrs Rumble described her vividly—‘All flushed up, she was, besides, I could smell her breath.’ So after a lifetime’s teetotalism, on which she held the strongest possible views, she had accepted some gin from Grazia. Why?

  “Her words to her sister when she reached home were significant. Reported by Flora Griggs, they were ‘she told me we should not for ever suffer, that we should be able to stand against the wiles of the devil’. Flora Griggs was sure that there had been no real reconciliation. Rumble, in fact, heard Millicent use stronger terms to Flora on that day when she returned from her last visit to Grazia. Woe unto the wicked, it shall be ill with her. For the doing of her hands shall be done unto her. But Millicent had seen the cupboard in which the gin was kept, had seen the characteristic Horsely’s bottle. Moreover she knew from Dr Pinton that Minerval in conjunction with alcohol, both even mildly in excess, could prove fatal, for as Dr Pinton told the Coroner, he gave his warning whenever he prescribed Minerval, even when he regarded such a warning as no more than a formality. She had a way of revenge ready to her hand and to this bigoted and abnormal woman such a revenge was justified.

  “That she put it into action we know. The manager of Forster’s Stores in Burley said: ‘the lady who was murdered ‘—he was referring to Millicent Griggs—’ had been a customer of ours ever since I came to the shop as a boy. She has never been known to order anything alcoholic till about a week before her death. Then she came in and asked me for a bottle of the same’—that was Horsely’s gin—‘for purely medicinal purposes’. It would have been more accurate to say for purely homicidal purposes.

  “During that week, too, she had to ask Dr Pinton for an extra supply of Minerval, giving the excuse of having lost her own. In reality she had used at least six, probably more tablets to doctor the gin which she was going to place in Grazia’s cupboard during her second visit in place of the one she had seen there on her first.

  “She had to depend on guesswork here and decide about how much gin there would be in the bottle by the time she paid her second visit. I think she judged well or was lucky, for Grazia never noticed it if the level was different.

  “So she called again, armed with the large bag we have heard about, in which lay an oval bottle one-third full of Horsely’s gin fortified with Minerval in lethal quantity. It was not difficult to change the bottles and depart. It was also an almost unprovable murder. If she had lived she could not, probably, have been charged with it, though she never dreamed that Grazia’s death would be delayed by ten days and her own would intervene.

  “But the fact that murder could never have been proved does not mean that it could not be fairly easily deduced. To anyone who had the facts of the case it should not have been difficult to see not only that Grazia was murdered but by whom and how.”

  Mr Gorringer shook his head.

  “I’m bound to say it eluded me,” he admitted. “But in view of the evidence you have quoted, especially of the manager of Forster’s Stores, I see that I was wrong in suspecting the younger sister. But in one little matter, Deene, you have surely deceived us. You described Detective Inspector Champer as saying to you derisively: ‘You are not going to tell me you accept the police explanation of events? One murder, one attempted suicide and one accident?’ To which you replied in the affirmative. Was not that almost … cheating?”

  “Not at all. Those are exactly my explanations. But not in that order, headmaster.”

  “Bravo!” said Mr Gorringer and in a rare moment of abandon emptied his glass.