‘But I wasn’t here, Inspector,’ he said affably. ‘I took the opportunity of my wife’s absence in Poole to go for a long walk.’
There was a gasp from the doorway. ‘Duncan!’ declared Violet. ‘How can you tell such lies? You never go for walks.’ She advanced into the room like a small ship under sail. ‘And don’t think I don’t know why you’re lying. You can’t be bothered to assist the police in their enquiries, just like you haven’t been bothered all along. Of course he was here, and of course he will have heard Jane and Ruth. We always heard Ruth when she came back. She and her grandmother couldn’t be in a room together without arguing, any more than she can be in a room with her mother without arguing. Not that I altogether blame her. She wants love, poor child, and neither Mathilda nor Joanna were capable of such an emotion. The only people Mathilda had any fondness for were the Blakeneys, you know, the artist and his wife. She used to laugh with them, and I think she even took her clothes off for him. I heard her in her bedroom, being very coy and silly, saying things like “Not bad for an old woman” and “I was beautiful once, you know. Men competed for me.” And that was true, they did. Even Duncan loved her when we were all much younger. He denies it now, of course, but I knew. All us girls knew we were only second best. Mathilda played so hard to get, you see, and that was a challenge.’ She paused for breath and Cooper, who was beside her, smelt the whisky on her lips. He had time to feel sadness for this little woman whose life had never blossomed because she had lived it always in the shade of Mathilda Gillespie.
‘Not that it matters,’ she went on. ‘Nothing matters that much. And it’s years since he lost interest. You can’t go on loving someone who’s rude all the time, and Mathilda was always rude. She thought it was funny. She’d say the most appalling things, and laugh. I won’t pretend we had a close relationship, but I did feel sorry for her. She should have done something with her life, something interesting, but she never did and it made her bitter.’ She turned a severe gaze on her husband. ‘I know she used to tease you, Duncan, and call you Mr Toad, but that’s no reason not to help find her murderer. Murder is inexcusable. And I can’t help feeling, you know, that it was particularly inexcusable to put that beastly scold’s bridle on her head. You were very upset when she put it on you.’ She turned back to Charlie. ‘It was one of her horrible jokes. She said the only way Duncan would ever lose weight was if he had his tongue clamped, so she crept up behind him one day when he was asleep in the garden with his mouth open and popped that horrid rusty thing over his head. He nearly died of shock.’ She paused for another breath but this time she had run out of steam and didn’t go on.
There was a long silence.
‘I suppose that’s how you put it on her,’ murmured Charlie finally, ‘when she was already asleep, but I’d be interested to know how you gave her the barbiturates. The pathologist estimates four or five and she would never have taken that many herself.’
Duncan’s gaze rested briefly on his wife’s shocked face, before shifting to Cooper’s. ‘Old women have two things in common,’ he said with a small smile. ‘They drink too much and they talk too much. You’d have liked Mathilda, Sergeant, she was a very amusing woman, although the memory of her was a great deal more attractive than the real thing. It was a disappointment coming back. Age has few compensations, as I think I told you.’ His pleasant face beamed. ‘On the whole I prefer male company. Men are so much more predictable.’
‘Which is convenient,’ remarked Cooper to the Blakeneys in Mill House kitchen that evening, ‘since he’ll probably spend the rest of his life in prison.’
‘Assuming you can prove he did it,’ said Jack. ‘What happens if he doesn’t confess? You’ll be left with circumstantial evidence, and if his defence has any sense they’ll go all out to convince the jury Mathilda committed suicide. You don’t even know why he did it, do you?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Doesn’t Violet know?’ asked Sarah.
Cooper shook his head, thinking of the wretched woman they’d abandoned at Wing Cottage, wringing her hands and protesting there must be some mistake. ‘Claims she doesn’t.’
‘And you didn’t find the diaries?’
‘We never really expected to. He’d have destroyed them long ago.’
‘But there’s so much unexplained,’ said Sarah in frustration. ‘How did he get her to take the sleeping pills? Why did he do it? Why didn’t Violet wake up? Why didn’t he tell you Ruth had been there if he wanted her implicated? And then the bit I really don’t understand – why on earth did Jane have a row with Mathilda that day?’
Cooper glanced at Jack, then took out his cigarettes. ‘I can make a guess at some answers,’ he said, planting a cigarette in the side of his mouth and flicking his lighter to the tip. ‘Both Mathilda and Violet liked a tipple in the evening and they both drank whisky. I think the chances are it was Mathilda who first introduced Violet to it, made it respectable as it were in the face of Duncan’s disapproval, but in any case Violet was certainly in the habit of dozing off in her armchair. The night Mathilda died, Violet went out for the count during Blind Date which comes on at six thirty or thereabouts, woke up briefly some time after ten o’clock, when Duncan shook her and told her she was snoring through Match of the Day, went up to bed and slept like the dead for the rest of the night.’ He tapped ash into his cupped palm. ‘That was definitely no doze. That was a barbiturate-induced stupor which is why Duncan leaving the room wouldn’t have wakened her. I think he greeted Violet when she got home after a tiring day in Poole with a stiff whisky, laced with sleeping tablets, waited till she fell asleep, then trotted next door and used the same concoction on Mathilda. She kept the drink in the kitchen. How simple just to say: Don’t stir yourself. Let me do the honours and get you a top-up.’
‘But where did he get the sleeping pills from? He’s on my list and I’ve never prescribed any for him or Violet.’
‘Presumably he used the ones you prescribed for Mrs Gillespie.’
Sarah looked doubtful. ‘When could he have taken them, though? Surely she’d have noticed if any were missing.’
‘If she did,’ he said dryly, ‘then she probably assumed it was her own daughter who was responsible. With Mrs Lascelles’s sort of dependence she must have been raiding her mother’s drug cupboard for years.’
Jack looked thoughtful. ‘Who told you?’
‘As a matter of fact, you did, Jack. But I wasn’t too sure what she was on until we searched the house yesterday for the diaries. She’s not very good at hiding things, but then she’s damn lucky she hasn’t fallen foul of the police before. She will, though, now that the money’s dried up.’
‘I didn’t tell you anything.’
Cooper tut-tutted. ‘You’ve told me everything you know about Mrs Lascelles, right down to the fact that you, personally, despise her. I stood and looked at her portrait while we were discussing Othello and Iago, and all I could see was a desperately weak and fragmented character whose existence – ’ he used his hands to depict a border ‘ – depends on external stimulation. I compared the pallid colours and the distorted shapes of Joanna’s portrait with the vigour of Mathilda’s and Sarah’s and I thought, you’ve painted a woman without substance. The only reality you perceive is a reflected reality, in other words, a personality that can only express itself artificially. I guessed it had to be drink or drugs.’
‘You’re lying through your teeth,’ said Jack bluntly. ‘That bastard Smollett told you. Dammit, Cooper, even I didn’t see all that and I painted the bloody picture.’
Cooper gave a deep chuckle. ‘It’s all there, my friend, believe me. Mr Smollett told me nothing.’ His face sobered. ‘But you had no business withholding that information, either of you, not in a murder enquiry.’ He looked at Sarah. ‘And you should never have confronted her with it the other afternoon, if you don’t mind me saying so, Doctor. People like that are shockingly unpredictable and you were alone in the house with her.’
&nbs
p; ‘She’s not on LSD, Cooper, she’s on Valium. Anyway, how do you know I confronted her with it?’
‘Because I’m a policeman, Dr Blakeney, and you were looking guilty. What makes you think she’s on Valium?’
‘She told me she was.’
Cooper raised his eyes to heaven. ‘One day, Dr Blakeney, you will learn not to be so gullible.’
‘Well, what is she on then?’ demanded Jack. ‘I guessed tranquillizers, too. She’s not injecting. I sketched her in the nude and there wasn’t a mark on her.’
‘It depends what you were looking for. She’s rich enough to do the thing cleanly. It’s dirty needles and dirty lavatories that cause most of the problems. Where did you look anyway? Arms and legs?’ Jack nodded. ‘The veins around her groin?’
‘No,’ he admitted. ‘I was having enough trouble as it was, I didn’t want to encourage her by staring at the damn thing.’
Cooper nodded. ‘I found half a pharmacy under her floorboards, including tranquillizers, barbiturates, amphetamines and sizeable quantities of heroin and syringes. She’s chronically addicted, I’d say, presumably has been for years. And, I’ll tell you this for free, her mother’s allowance alone couldn’t possibly have funded what she’d got stashed away, and nor could fancy flower arranging. I think Duncan and Violet’s anonymous letter said it all, Joanna is a high-class prostitute turning tricks to fund a very expensive habit, begun, I would guess, when she married Steven Lascelles.’
‘But she looks so . . .’ Sarah sought for the right word, ‘unsullied.’
‘Not for much longer,’ said Cooper cynically. ‘She’s about to discover what it’s like to live in the real world where there’s no Mathilda to keep the coffers topped up. It’s when you get desperate that you start getting careless.’ He patted Sarah’s hand. ‘Don’t waste your sympathy on her. She’s been a taker all her life and, rather belatedly, her mother has forced her to face up to it.’
Of all absurd things, Gerald has developed a conscience. ‘No more, Matty, please,’ he said, bursting into tears. ‘We’ll go to hell for what we’ve done.’ The ingratitude of the man beggars belief. Does he think I get any pleasure from being pawed by a drooling half-wit? It’s Father’s doing, of course. He lost his temper yesterday and started calling Gerald names. Now Gerald says he’s going back to the slut down the road who first seduced him, and this time he says he’ll marry her. ‘Grace will give Gerry a baby, Matty,’ he blubbered, ‘and Gerry wants a baby.’ Why, oh why, was my grandfather so stupid? How much more sensible it would have been to weather the embarrassment of certifying Gerald than to pretend to the world he was normal.
I sought out Father in the library, drunk as usual, and told him bluntly that Gerald wasn’t playing any more. ‘You’re such a fool,’ I stormed at him. ‘Grace won’t be bought off a second time. Don’t imagine she hasn’t guessed by now that she’ll get more by marrying Gerald than by taking your bribes.’ Father cringed away from me as he always does. ‘It’s not my fault,’ he whined, ‘it’s your grandfather’s fault. He should have mentioned me by name in his will instead of referring to Gerald’s nearest male relative.’ I could have murdered him then. The same old story, never his fault, always someone else’s. But in one way he’s right. Why did my grandfather create a trust to prevent his idiot first-born disposing of his wealth without clarifying that my father must inherit afterwards? And why did it not occur to him that Gerald might repeat the terms of the will parrot-fashion to any scheming little bitch who cared to listen? Grace must have worked out by now that Gerald is worth marrying just to produce a son who will inherit everything. I suppose my grandfather had no idea that imbeciles were so interested in sex nor, indeed, that they were capable of fathering children.
I made Father wear the scold’s bridle all evening and he’s promised to hold his tongue in future. Gerald, of course, whimpered in the corner, afraid that I would make him wear it, too, but I promised that if we heard no more talk of going to live with Grace, I would be nice to him. Now he is pliable once more.
How strange it is that these two, without a brain between them, can see the scold’s bridle for the humiliation it is, while Duncan, who has some pretensions to intelligence, is disgustingly excited by it. For Gerald and Father it is a necessary penance for the sins they wish to commit. For Duncan, it is a fetish that unlocks his potency. He is invariably aroused by wearing it. But what a gutless worm he is. He begs me on his knees to marry him while he allows Violet and her parents to continue with the marriage arrangements. He is not prepared to risk losing her miserable dowry, unless he is first assured of mine.
I could never marry a man who takes pleasure in his own humiliation, for then there would be no pleasure left to me. I can only love them when they cringe. Still, it is odd how many men find cruelty attractive. Like dogs, they lick the hand that whips them. Poor Violet. I have planted fantasies in Duncan’s mind that she can never satisfy. Well, well, what a very amusing thought that is. I really couldn’t bear to see them happy. But then I can’t bear to see anybody happy . . .
Nineteen
SARAH TOPPED UP their wine glasses and viewed the empty bottle with a wry look. ‘Thank God my poison is legal,’ she murmured. ‘I know damn well I need an external stimulant to make the miseries bearable. Did you take her heroin off her, Cooper? She’ll be in a desperate state if you did.’
‘No,’ he admitted, ‘but you can keep that information to yourselves.’
‘You’re a very kind man,’ she told him.
‘I’m a realist,’ he corrected her. ‘If Joanna had murdered her mother then I was in a stronger position keeping what I knew up my sleeve than showing my hand before I had to. She would have been very vulnerable to police questioning if we could have charged her with possession and murder both at the same time.’
‘You’re such a bad liar,’ said Sarah fondly. ‘You’re not going to charge her at all. Will you even tell her you know?’
But Cooper sidestepped that question. ‘We were talking about how Duncan murdered Mathilda,’ he said. ‘So where were we?’
‘With Mathilda being immensely suspicious when he came through the back door uninvited and offered to top up her whisky,’ said Sarah dryly.
‘Oh, yes, well he wouldn’t have gone that way. He’d have rung the front door bell. It was quite safe. Violet wasn’t going to hear anything, not if she was snoring her head off in front of the television, and I’m sure he had a very convincing reason for knocking on Mathilda’s door at seven o’clock on a Saturday evening. He did know a great deal about her life, after all, any bit of which he could tap into as an excuse. She would have to have been deeply paranoid to lock her door against a neighbour she saw almost every day.’ Absent-mindedly, he tapped more ash into his palm then turned it upside down to scatter it on the floor. ‘Once he’d given her the whisky, and watched her drink it, he made his excuses and left. He’s a cautious man and he didn’t know how effective the sedative would be, plus he needed to be sure Violet really was dead to the world and hadn’t heard the bell ringing. Presumably if he’d found her semi-conscious, he’d have abandoned the project as being too dangerous and, by the same token, he wanted Mathilda well and truly under before he put the scold’s bridle over her head.
‘From then on, it would all have been very straightforward. He checked on Violet, donned a pair of gloves, collected the appropriate weeds from the garden – he wouldn’t have done that during daylight hours in case someone saw him and put two and two together when they heard about Mathilda’s flower arrangement. Then he let himself in again, this time through Mathilda’s back door, took the Stanley knife from the kitchen drawer, checked Mathilda was asleep, took the weeds, the knife and the scold’s bridle upstairs where he left them on the dressingtable, filled the bath, then went back down to collect Mathilda. All he had to do was scoop her up in his arms, put her on the lift, take her upstairs and undress her.
‘The time would have been approximately nine thirty, we think, whi
ch has made the pathologist very happy. He always favoured earlier rather than later, particularly as Mathilda wouldn’t have died immediately.’ He cast about in his mind again for the thread of where he had been. ‘Right, so once he’d undressed her, he placed her in the warm bath, put the scold’s bridle on her head, slit her wrists and then arranged the nettles and daisies in the head-band, probably using the sponge to wedge the gap. Then all he had to do was leave the whisky glass beside the empty sleeping-pill bottle, remove the diaries, wipe the key clean for safety’s sake and replace it, before going home to Violet and the television. He undoubtedly took the poor woman to task the next morning over her drinking being so bad that she’d passed out the night before, or she might have told us earlier that she’d been asleep instead of going along with Duncan’s story that there had been no sound from next door.’ He massaged his chin. ‘She’s a very pliable woman and, in fairness to her, it obviously never occurred to her that he could have murdered Mathilda. I think she prompted him to write us the anonymous letter because she felt so guilty about letting Mathilda down.’ He flicked a glance at Jack. ‘She overheard her crying that time you went round to show her the painting, and she’s convinced herself that if she’d only spoken to her then she might have prevented the murder.’
He saw the look of puzzled enquiry on Sarah’s face, and ploughed on relentlessly. ‘As far as Ruth and Jane are concerned, Duncan didn’t want to tell us about them being in Cedar House that day because he couldn’t afford to draw attention to how much could be heard through the walls. But Violet gave him the perfect opportunity to involve Ruth when she overheard a row between Joanna and Ruth in their hall. She consulted Duncan about the wisdom of reporting it and, while he flatly refused to let her come in person, to avoid any unpleasantness, as he put it, he didn’t object to an anonymous letter, although he insisted on wearing gloves to avoid us tracing it through the fingerprints. Violet thought that was very exciting,’ he concluded with heavy irony.
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