The Magic Chair Murder

by Diane Janes

  ‘I’ve added John James, the membership secretary, for the same reason as Tom.’

  Mo laughed. ‘Don’t tell me he’s got a wife hidden away at home too?’

  ‘No. He had a room on the downstairs corridor. Oh, yes – and he’s one of the few people who would definitely have known which room Linda Dexter was in, because he organized room allocations with the hotel.’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s particularly significant. What’s his motive?’

  ‘He hasn’t got one. In fact, I don’t think he’d ever met Linda prior to that weekend, because the conference was the very first society event that he had ever attended.’

  ‘Did you notice anything about him on the Friday evening? Was he paying her a lot of attention?’

  Fran thought hard. ‘If he was, I don’t remember. No, hang on a minute, he wasn’t even there. A couple of delegates didn’t turn up until Saturday morning, and I think he was one of them. I remember Miss Robertson introducing him to me when I was on my way out of the dining room, after breakfast. She knew him from executive committee meetings, you see.’

  ‘That must put him out of it. Who else is there?’

  ‘Marcus Dryden. He keeps the hotel, would have known the room allocations and probably wouldn’t have wanted Linda’s revelations about the magic chair to come out. The hotel is his livelihood. It doesn’t exactly sit in on the normal touring route, so they rely quite a bit on the Barnaby connection. It’s mentioned in all their advertising.’

  ‘He sounds like a definite possibility.’

  ‘The snag is that Marcus Dryden would have to have known in advance what was in Linda’s paper.’

  ‘Perhaps he did.’

  ‘I don’t think so. I don’t think anyone else really knew what she’d turned up until Tom and I read through all her notebooks.’

  ‘But if they didn’t know what she was going to say in advance, why would they have murdered her? It doesn’t make sense, Fran.’

  A knock at the front door interrupted them. Ada’s workmanlike shoes could be heard on the stone flags of the hall and then, as she opened the door, a familiar deep voice reached them through the sitting-room door. Fran rose to her feet at once. ‘It’s all right, Ada,’ she called. ‘Show Mr Dod straight in. Hello, Tom, what on earth are you doing here?’

  ‘I’ve been visiting some damson growers up the Lyth Valley and realized that I was virtually passing the end of the road, so I thought I would come and report back from my latest visit to Furnival Towers. I’m sorry to come barging in like this, Mrs Gallimore.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Mo said. ‘We already know each other, and please drop this Mrs Gallimore business and call me Mo – everyone does. Well, everyone who’s halfway worthwhile, anyway.’

  ‘Mo’s as intrigued to hear anything new as I am,’ Fran said. ‘Ada.’ She turned to the young woman who had followed the visitor into the room and was about to bear his hat off to the hall stand. ‘Please can you bring in a fresh pot of tea and a cup for Mr Dod – and if there is any of that delicious fruitcake left, please bring that in too. Now then.’ She turned her attention back to Tom again. ‘Do sit down and tell all.’

  Tom took a vacant armchair and began. ‘Well, I had to go up to see a grower on the Fylde, so I made a bit of a diversion and called in for lunch at Furnival Towers en route. The place was really quiet, so I managed to engage old Dryden in a long chat in the bar, before I ate. I was pretty straight with him, actually. I said that I’d read Linda’s research, gave him the gist of it, then asked him if he thought there was anything in it, and if so, whether it could make a difference to him and the business if it got around?’

  ‘Gosh! That was jolly direct. What did he say?’

  ‘I nearly fell out of my seat, because he just laughed and said that he had suspected for years that the magic chair was a fake. “My father was a canny old fellow,” he said. “There must have been some story about a possible Robert Barnaby connection, and the old boy evidently read some of the books and installed an appropriate piece of furniture – it wouldn’t surprise me if he hadn’t had it made specially – and, of course, the rest is history. When Hugh Allonby came round, asking about the Barnaby connection, Father was still in charge and it was a marriage made in heaven, really – each used the other. Hugh’s books were always on sale in the hotel; the hotel was name-checked as the epicentre of all things Barnaby. A mutually lucrative exercise.”’

  ‘But surely,’ Fran said, ‘all that was going to be ruined once Linda’s research is made public?’

  ‘Dryden doesn’t think so. He said, “It takes more than a few facts to destroy a legend.”’

  ‘I can see that,’ Mo said thoughtfully. ‘The link between Robert Barnaby and Furnival Towers must appear in thousands of newspaper articles and magazines by now. You could never correct every one of them.’

  ‘That’s perfectly true,’ Tom said, ‘but not exactly the whole story. Dryden said something else which struck a chord with me. “People want to believe it’s the real magic chair,” he said. And I think he’s right. A few people might say, “Oh, it’s not the real place,” or “it’s not the real chair,” but the majority want to see the chair and want to believe that Barnaby himself once sat in it. They don’t want truth, they want fairy dust. They won’t go digging around in the archives to check whether Linda is right or not. They will choose to assume that she’s got it all wrong.’

  Fran nodded, recalling that she had entertained similar thoughts herself. ‘So you think the Drydens really aren’t at all bothered about Linda’s research? Are you sure he wasn’t just bluffing?’

  ‘No, I genuinely don’t think he’s worried by the results of Linda’s research or its publication. What he’s not a bit happy about is the hotel being associated with a suicide or a murder. “Wrong sort of publicity attracting the wrong sort of interest,” was the way he put it.’

  ‘So Marcus Dryden is hardly likely to be our murderer,’ said Mo. Fran noted the ‘our’. For all the mockery, she knew that Mo was becoming increasingly intrigued.

  Aloud, Fran said, ‘So Mr Dryden turns out to be not much use after all.’

  ‘Not as a suspect, no, but something else came out of the conversation which was very interesting.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘It was perfectly obvious that nothing I said about Linda’s research was news to Marcus. He already knew what was going to be revealed in that talk – Marcus is a member and he would have got the programme like everyone else, but the programme only carried the title of the lecture – The Magic Chair: Fact or Fiction. In the context of Barnaby’s work, that’s open to a whole variety of interpretations. You wouldn’t be able to guess from the title that the contents would completely debunk the provenance of a piece of furniture.’

  ‘But how could he possibly have known what Linda was going to say?’

  ‘After we’d been chatting for a while, I said that he didn’t seem surprised by what I’d told him, and he said that he wasn’t because he’d been tipped off in advance. Apparently none other than the Robert Barnaby Society’s Ninny-in-Chief, Mrs Sarah Ingoldsby, had contacted him about a week before the conference. “Wittering on” were his exact words. Mr Dryden might flatter dear Mrs Ingoldsby to her face, but it was pretty obvious from the way he spoke about her that he finds her as irritating as just about everyone else does, and he was therefore perfectly willing to be bitchy behind her back. First of all, Dryden reckons that Mrs Ingoldsby isn’t actually involved with the Barnaby archive and hasn’t been for quite a while, which of course fits perfectly with the attitude of the museum director when he spoke with me last week. I reckon our Mrs Ingoldsby has tried to keep this under wraps, because she’s always gained a lot of kudos within the society thanks to her supposed connection with the archive. She gets an honorary membership and an automatic place on the executive committee off the back of it, and that must help to convince the unseen Mr Ingoldsby that she is an essential fixture at every meeting, which of cours
e provides the perfect cover for her involvement with Hugh Allonby.’

  ‘But how does she get away with it?’ Mo asked. ‘Surely people must find out if they get in touch with this museum place?’

  ‘Most of the membership would be none the wiser, because the woman still works at the museum in some capacity. It’s easy enough to keep up the pretence that she is still involved with the Barnaby archive because the majority of enthusiasts are perfectly happy to leave any actual research to other people. But, of course, people will occasionally find her out, as Linda Dexter obviously did.’

  ‘She wouldn’t like it to get around that she isn’t the queen bee at Vester House.’ Fran’s tone was thoughtful. ‘Sarah Ingoldsby has rubbed an awful lot of people up the wrong way, ever since the society got started. She can be quite nasty when she gets her claws out. I reckon there would be more than a few members happy to see that free membership and automatic committee place stopped if they realized that she was getting it under false pretences.’

  ‘Is there much money involved?’ Mo asked.

  ‘Virtually none.’ This from Tom. ‘A single membership costs twenty-five shillings a year. Committee members only get travelling expenses and there are no other perks. But with Sarah Ingoldsby, I’d say that there’s a whole package of other things. The complimentary membership is nothing – the loss of status would hurt her more. She’s a sad little woman who’s worked all her life behind the scenes in a museum, but then, with the formation of the Robert Barnaby Society, she suddenly became a big fish in a little pond. More importantly, if she lost her place on the committee, she would lose the cover story that she uses in order to conduct her affair with Hugh Allonby.’

  ‘If this woman is having an affair with the chairman, then presumably she was spending the night with him,’ Mo ventured. ‘Which means that if she was the murderer, he’s got to be in on it too.’

  ‘Two people would actually make sense,’ Tom said, ‘because of the car. Linda’s car was found at the scene, so either the murderer had to make a long walk back or there was a car driven by a second person which would bring both parties back to the hotel after Linda’s car had been torched.’

  ‘That’s good thinking. But how did Sarah Ingoldsby find out what was in Linda’s paper?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ Tom said. ‘When you want to look at something from the Vester House archives, you have to fill in a request slip. I suppose those slips are filed somewhere, which means that when Sarah Ingoldsby got back from her holiday she probably found out that Linda had been visiting the museum behind her back. Then she would have received the conference programme and seen the title of Linda’s lecture. At that point, she could have gone back to those request slips, and she or Hugh Allonby could have had a look at the same material as Linda had and worked out what Linda was going to say.’

  ‘Which would have provoked big-time wittering,’ said Fran. ‘So the Dryden clan are looking less and less likely, but Ingoldsby and Allonby as a double act would work.’

  ‘We were talking about Fran’s list of suspects when you arrived,’ Mo said, giving her friend a mischievous look which Fran attempted to ignore.

  ‘Jolly good show,’ Tom said. ‘Do let me in on the picture.’

  ‘Well, there’s Stephen Latchford.’ Fran began to outline her argument while trying to ignore Mo’s face-pulling.

  ‘And of course there’s you,’ Mo put in cheerfully when Fran had finished. ‘But only on the basis that you had a room in the downstairs corridor.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ Tom seemed completely unfazed by his inclusion on the list. ‘Though it has occurred to me that while proximity would be useful, it isn’t essential. The important thing would be to know where the room was, and you could easily find that out.’

  ‘By asking at Reception,’ put in Mo.

  ‘Too obvious. Why not just wait until Linda was going to her room, then discreetly follow her and watch where she went? If anyone queried what you were doing, you could pretend that you’d lost your way. You could say that you didn’t know the layout of the place or had forgotten that your room was upstairs, instead of downstairs where it was last year, or basically make any old excuse at all. It’s the Barnaby Society. Fifty per cent of the membership are as mad as hatters, so no one’s going to query the idea of someone forgetting where their room is located. Oh, and if being on the same corridor gets you on to the list, I suggest you add dear old Miss Leonard and Miss Coward, because they had the room right next to mine.’

  TWENTY-SIX

  ‘He didn’t do it,’ Mo said as soon as Fran returned to the sitting room after seeing her latest visitor out. ‘He’s just too nice.’

  ‘I bet Ethel Le Neve thought Crippen was nice too. ’Specially when he gave her his dead wife’s fur coat.’

  ‘How creepy is that? To find out that the chap you’ve moved in with has murdered his wife?’

  ‘Well, if you ask me, there’s more than a chance that she was in on it all along.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Ethel le Neve. Do try to keep up.’

  ‘It’s the alcohol intake rotting my brain cells. Or maybe I just need another top-up.’

  ‘Don’t worry. Ada’s gone for her bus but I can take a hint,’ Fran said over her shoulder as she headed into the kitchen to fetch the bottles and glasses.

  As she entered the kitchen, she thought she saw a movement in the garden, but when she turned to face the window properly there was nothing there. Must have been a bird, she thought, flying low and glimpsed momentarily from the corner of her eye. Back in the sitting room, as she set down her cargo and began to pour, she said, ‘In a way, that’s what happened to Linda Dexter. Her ex-boyfriend turned out to be a murderer. I suppose a thing like that would affect you for ever – change your whole outlook. It’s no wonder her marriage failed and she became … well … almost a recluse, in a funny sort of way.’

  ‘It was an odd kind of life,’ Mo mused. ‘Just pursuing your passion for children’s books. I mean … it wouldn’t have done for most people. Though I suppose if you’ve got the money you can do whatever you want. Didn’t you say that she travelled quite a bit?’

  ‘Exactly. I suppose we wouldn’t think it was so odd if, say, she had been a massively wealthy tennis fan who followed the stars around the world, showing up at every major tournament.’

  ‘You’re right. Different people have different passions.’

  ‘Or obsessions.’

  ‘Quite. And although it wouldn’t seem important to anyone else, being perceived as the source of all knowledge about Robert Barnaby and at the top of the pecking order within the Robert Barnaby Society could be massively important to a person like this nasty Allonby man and his sneaky little accomplice.’

  Both women paused to sip their drinks, then Mo asked, ‘Do you honestly still think that it was an inside job?’

  Fran hesitated. ‘It sounds farfetched, but so far as we can see there’s nothing else in Linda’s life to provide a motive. She scarcely had a private life. She had pots of money but there’s no jealous husband or lover who might benefit.’

  ‘What about the ex-husband?’

  ‘Oh, Tom’s already looked into that and he’s definitely dead – a motoring accident, several years back. The sister gets the money but, as we all agreed, it’s hard to see how the sister could have pulled off an abduction and murder from the Furnival Towers Hotel. The Harpers don’t even own a motorcar. We just don’t have any realistic suspects beyond the society itself, and the suspects that we do have, have jolly puny motives.’

  ‘It’s a massive coincidence,’ Mo mused. ‘Being involved in a sensational murder case and then getting murdered yourself.’

  ‘Except that in real life coincidences happen all the time. When I was a child, two separate families in the village each lost a child in drowning accidents, a few years apart, at almost exactly the same spot in the river. What are the odds of that?’

  ‘Really? I suppose it depe
nds how dangerous the river was at that point.’

  ‘That’s just it. The river wasn’t dangerous there. We all went to bathe there in summer, when I was a child, but it seems to have been a freak accident in both cases. Lightning striking twice and all that.’

  ‘Goodness, how awful.’

  ‘I’m just nipping up to the bathroom,’ Fran said. In fact, her trip upstairs had a secondary purpose, as she did not want Mo to drive home after several gins and decided that it would be a good idea to check that the spare room bed was ready for an overnight visitor, just in case it was needed. Sometimes she left the spare-room door open by mistake and Mrs Snegglington took advantage of the situation for an impromptu grooming session, leaving a carpet of cat hair all over the quilt, but on this occasion Fran found that all was well. As she crossed the room, she paused to look out into the lane. Mo’s car was parked on the little grassed area to the side of the cottage, where she always left it so as not to obstruct the occasional passing traffic, but to Fran’s surprise there was now a second car parked in the lane. It was not directly outside the cottage, where it would be obviously noticeable to the occupants, but a little way down the hill, where it was partially screened by the start of the hedgerow. She might not have noticed it at all but for the angle of the evening sun reflecting off the bonnet.

  Someone out for a walk, perhaps? Trippers did leave their cars in the most inconvenient of places, but now that she had focused on it properly she could clearly make out the bulk of a person occupying the driver’s seat. Someone was sitting out there, watching the house.

  She hesitated for a moment, then stepped back into the room, just in case her outline was visible at the window. Better not to give away that she had noticed anything. Once she had cautiously withdrawn a couple of feet, she raced downstairs, not daring to shout, almost falling into the sitting room, where an astonished Mo said, ‘What on earth’s up?’

  ‘There’s someone outside. I think I caught a glimpse of them prowling round the garden earlier on. I saw something when I went into the kitchen, but I thought I was imagining it. Then I just looked out from upstairs and there’s a car, half hidden, out in the lane.’