by Carola Dunn
Daisy took the other chair. “I know of at least two other recipients,” she said, exaggerating a bit since she couldn’t be certain of the brigadier. “I’m pretty sure there are more. May I see the envelope?”
The writing was exactly like that of Johnnie’s letters. The postmark was earlier that very day. When Mrs. Burden glanced at her desk, this and any similar envelopes must just have left it in the postman’s bag.
“I shan’t ask who else is being victimized,” said Mrs. LeBeau, the unfolded letter in her hand, “though your presence and knowledge lead to certain conjectures. I hope you don’t expect to read this.”
“No,” Daisy said reluctantly. “You’ve read all of them?”
“Yes. They all say much the same in different variants of foulness. I shall destroy this at once, as I did the rest.”
“Forgive me, but may I ask why you go on reading such frightful stuff when you know pretty much what each new one will say?”
“Because, my dear Miss Dalrymple, I’m afraid that sooner or later there will be a demand for money in exchange for silence, and that if I fail to respond … Well, my reputation may be already tarnished in Rotherden, but I’m still received in decent houses. It would be painful to lose that. I’d hate to have to move. More important, if word spread beyond this little community, there’s someone else who could be badly damaged.”
“You mean … ?” Daisy ventured.
“My lover,” the Merry Widow said flatly. “Despite any conclusion you may have drawn from what you’ve been told, I’m not wildly promiscuous. I have a satisfactory arrangement with a gentleman of whom I’m very fond. His wife, on the other hand, flits from man to man. Incidentally, she knows about us, and is mildly amused by our faithfulness to each other. His position is such that divorce would ruin him even more surely than exposure of an … irregular liaison.”
“I see. Does he know about the letters?”
“No. Nor have I any intention of worrying him with them.”
Daisy nodded. “Thank you for being so frank. I’ll be frank in return. I’ve been asked to try to find out privately who’s writing these beastly things. I don’t know if I’ve any chance of success, but obviously the more information I have the better.”
“Rather you than the police,” Mrs. LeBeau said irresolutely. “But if you succeed, what next?”
“Frankly, I haven’t thought that far ahead. I suppose it would be up to J—to the person who asked me to investigate. He’s no keener for publicity than you are. Nor can I see that I need tell him you’re another victim.”
“Doubtless he suspects. Unless he suspects me of being the writer?”
“No, he told me he couldn’t believe you’re the Poison Pen.”
“Poison Pen!” Mrs. LeBeau shuddered. “What a dreadful term, but horridly apt. A pen dipped in venom. Let’s hope it doesn’t lead to worse.”
“You mean, that he or she doesn’t go on to blackmail?” Daisy asked.
“There’s that. But what I was thinking of was that one of the victims may discover the writer before you do, and take violent steps to silence the Poison Pen.”
5
Home from the shop, Brigadier Lomax picked up the morning post from the silver salver on the hall table. As usual he grumbled to himself about its lateness: Rotherden was at the end of the rural route. Carrying the letters, he went on to the gun-room. With the house full of his offspring and their hangers-on, it was the only place he could be fairly sure of peace and quiet.
He tossed the letters on the table. Taking from his pockets his tobacco pouch and the tin of tobacco he had just bought, he transferred the contents of one to the other. Gold Flake would have to do until his own blend arrived from Fribourg and Treyer in London.
Dammit, Rosa ought to have sent in the order sooner! Just because he forgot to tell her he was nearly out …
He took his favourite pipe down from the wall rack, filled it, and struck a match. His hand trembled as he held the flame to the bowl. What he needed was a stiff peg, but the sun was still below the yardarm.
On the third match the tobacco caught. Puffing, the brigadier turned to the post.
Rosa and the children had already taken any addressed to them. In the old days, when a man was master of his household, no one would have dared to touch the post before the paterfamilias had gone through it. Things weren’t what they used to be.
Flicking through the pile, his liver-spotted hand—was it really his, that shaky old-man’s hand?—stopped on a cheap white envelope crudely addressed in block capitals, in pencil. Another of the confounded things! He ripped it open, tearing the letter inside.
YOU DESGUSTING OLD TOPER, YOU HAD WHISKY ON YOUR BREATH IN CHURCH ON SUNDAY. ONE OF THESE DAYS YOU’LL DROP THE COLLEXION PLATE. YOU’VE GOT A FILTHY TEMPER WHEN YOU’RE DRUNK. EVERYONE KNOWS YOU HIT YOUR WIFE. REPENT!
“Pah!” Brigadier Lomax ripped letter and envelope to shreds and buried them in the waste-paper basket.
He wondered uneasily if it was true everyone knew he had slapped Rosa. She made him furious with her whining. Did he really need another nightcap, indeed! That was for him to decide. Dammit, it was a man’s prerogative to keep his womenfolk in order, but one didn’t want everyone talking about it.
Besides, he had said he was sorry, hadn’t he? She had no need to go running to talk to Osborne about it, devil take it! Someone must have overheard her, the vicar’s busybody wife, or their maid, or one of those wretched old women with nothing better to do who always hung about clergymen. That was the sort who wrote anonymous letters, by Jove.
If he could just lay hands on that damned letter writer …
Defiantly he reached for the tantalus, poured a good-sized tot of scotch, and swallowed it down. Then he went over to the gun rack and took down a double-barrelled shotgun. His hands steady now, he loaded it, stuffed several cartridges into his pocket, and stalked out through the French doors.
Sam Basin rode his Wooler motor-cycle home from Ashford for his midday dinner. Setting it up on its stand, the large young man took a clean rag from his pocket and lovingly polished the dust off the bright yellow mudguards and petrol tank.
What a corker! Still as shiny as the day he’d bought her, and running smooth as silk, he made sure of that.
He patted her tank and went into the cottage. Mum had his dinner ready, a nice shepherd’s pie, crisp on top and sizzling hot inside, with plenty of gravy. Poor old Dad had to make do with bread and cheese in the hop-fields. Catch Sam getting stuck as a farm labourer—no fear!
Elbows on the kitchen table, he ate hungrily, while his mother pottered around making tea, pouring it into the big, thick mug, taking a plum pie from the Aga.
“Cor, Mum, you done us proud.”
“Might as well use the oven while it’s hot,” she said. “You want a piece now?”
“Nah, save it for tea.” Sam swallowed the last of his tea, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, and stood up. “I got to get back.”
“Here, if I wasn’t forgetting, a letter come for you. You got yourself a girl in town, our Sam?”
“Nah, I got better things to do with my money than taking girls to the pictures. Give it here, then.”
He glanced at the envelope and the shepherd’s pie turned to lead in his stomach. Another one of those bloody letters! Well, he bloody well wasn’t going to read this one. They all said the same, didn’t they?
All right, so he’d done a bit of fiddling, a few jobs on the side. What harm if he charged people a bit less for repairs and pocketed the lot now and then, when the boss was over in Hythe at the new garage? Wyndham was a bloody plutocrat, he’d never miss a few quid.
But Mr. Wyndham wouldn’t look at things that way if someone told him. Might even call in the coppers. At the very least, it’d be back to the hop-fields for Sam.
Which of the bloody fools he’d done a favour for was writing the letters? Or was the bugger stupid enough to boast about the deal he’d got, and someone else did the w
riting? If Sam found out who it was, he’d soon show him which side his bread was buttered!
With a surly grunt, he stuffed the envelope in his pocket and stamped out. Revving the Wooler savagely, he raced off down the village street with the engine roaring.
Piers Catterick whistled tunelessly as his fingers flew over the keys. Words flowed, and the pile of manuscript beside the typewriter grew visibly.
When things went badly, he thought he’d go mad, stuck in this bucolic paradise. When things went well, he knew he had been right to leave town. How could one produce novels of steamy rustic lust stuck in a bedsitter in Bloomsbury? At least, he never had any trouble getting up steam—the trick was to stay on the right side of the Lord Chamberlain; no use getting one’s books banned, like Lawrence’s Rainbow. But his exile was adding an authentic rural flavour to his writing which was bound to improve already respectable sales.
What was it Lomax called those black and white birds? Magpies, that was it. And the rhyme: “ … Three for a girl, four for a boy …” He could weave that in somewhere, add a nice little touch of primitive superstition.
Rum old boy, the brigadier. He had been rather shocked when he found out the sort of books Piers wrote, but then some busybody tried to get him to turf out his literary tenant and he dug in his heels.
Piers caught himself staring out of the window at the chimney-pots of the brigadier’s house, visible between the trees. Elms. Be precise.
Turning back to the typewriter, he reread his last paragraph, and picked up a pencil. Rooks in the elms, not black birds in the trees. Vermin, Lomax said. Come to think of it, those distant bangs which had diverted Piers’s attention from his work could be the brigadier taking a gun to the rooks or some other pest. Before he came to live in the country, Piers had not realized the extent of the constant slaughter that went on even outside the hunting and shooting seasons. Hares, otters, badgers—all torn to pieces in the name of sport.
A moue of distaste on his long, pale face, he unfolded his long, weedy body from his chair. He had lost his train of thought; time for lunch. Gathering up the pile of discarded manuscript pages to bung in the waste paper basket downstairs, he trotted down, remembering for once to bend his head to dodge the low beam.
Several letters had fluttered through the letter-box an hour ago. With a feeling of conscious virtue for having let them lie unread so long while he wrote, Piers scooped them up from the doormat. A gratifying number of friends wrote regularly: long, self-consciously literary epistles with one eye on possible future publication. Edgbaston and Jill threatened to come down for a few days. Oh Lord, they were arriving in the morning! He couldn’t put them up; they’d have to stay at the Hop-Picker. There was something from his editor, and …
“Hell, not another of those confounded diatribes! Damnation,” he swore again as he gave himself a paper-cut tearing open the envelope.
Yes, the same stuff again, “ … FILTHY … PERVERTING YOUTH … CORRUPTING SOCIETY …”
He read no further but dropped letter and envelope in the wpb.
Who was harassing him? Some prude from the Victorian Dark Ages, who didn’t understand the need for modern literature to expand its horizons—yet who used pretty vile language in his denunciations. Perhaps the person, unnamed by Brigadier Lomax, who had tried to persuade Piers’s landlord to eject him from the cottage?
Piers found himself actually shaking with anger. It was an unfamiliar emotion. His set prided themselves on a cool, sophisticated approach to life, reserving the passions for the imaginary characters in their books. A bad review meant merely that the critic was jealous or deluded—not worth getting hot and bothered about.
But the letters had Piers hot and bothered. Though he did not for a moment repent or regret what he wrote, their vicious nastiness unsettled him and—ultimate sin—made it difficult for him to concentrate on his work. Who in blazes was writing the confounded things, depriving a waiting world of another masterpiece from his pen? He’d like to wring his—or her—unenlightened neck.
Murder … there was a thought. Perhaps he should throw in a good juicy murder, a crime of passion. No need to sink to the level of a detective story, ending tritely with a confession and an arrest.
His anti-hero would bump off the prudish old maid who interfered with his seduction of the luscious dairy-maid, Piers decided. Now, how to set up the dreadful deed so that he would not be caught?
The usual pre-lunch rush came to an end. Mrs. Burden said to her plump, pasty-faced daughter, “Watch the shop for a minute, Win, I’m going out the back.”
“I have to mind the exchange, don’t I,” Winifred said sullenly.
“It doesn’t exactly keep you busy, with so few telephones in the village! If someone rings up, of course you have to help them, but just keep an eye on things in here.”
Without waiting for an answer, she went out of the back door. What was the name of those pills she had seen advertised? “Peevish, anaemic girls needed,” the advert started. Something about pale, fretful, cross, can’t get on with Mother. It sounded just like Win. Dr. Williams’ Pink Pills, that was it. She’d get hold of some, put them in Winifred’s bedtime cocoa if the girl wouldn’t take them.
Still and all, she had worse problems than a surly daughter.
Inside the lean-to W.C. built on behind the shop, she latched the door securely and threw the bolt for good measure. From the pocket of the pink seersucker overall she wore in the shop to keep her frock clean, she took a cheap white envelope.
What had young Master Derek’s auntie wanted, asking all those questions? Was she really just interested because she was a writer, or had she guessed something? Several envelopes just like this one had gone to Lord John. Whatever the horrible letters inside said, he surely’d never tell his sister-in-law, but he maybe had let drop a hint by mistake.
Had Mrs. Burden led Miss Dalrymple to suspect she was getting them, too? For just a moment, it would have been that easy to confess, but she’d pulled herself together all right. If anyone found out …
Times were hard, and making ends meet was harder. She had a daughter to provide for. Alfie was a fat lot of help, so pleased with himself for making sergeant he stayed on in the regular army when everyone else’s husbands got demobbed. He hardly ever sent a penny home.
So what if she did forget to take her thumb off the balance and shaved half an ounce off a pound of cheese now and then? She only ever short-measured them as could afford it. It wasn’t as if she got much custom from the Willoughby-Joneses, either, having all their groceries delivered from Ashford.
Anyway, how did Mrs. Willoughby-Jones know her maid hadn’t eaten a slice before she weighed the slab and ran tattling to her mistress? Mrs. Willoughby-Jones had a nerve, coming into the shop and making a big song and dance over half a mouthful of Cheddar. Good job no one else was around, but the old battle-axe could’ve told anyone.
Not that Mrs. Burden had failed to defend herself. She’d cut a wedge, then weighed it, she explained. Her eye was pretty good. If she’d forgotten to mention it had come out just a bit under—well, often enough it was as much over, and the fuss people made if you tried to charge them!
Was it Mrs. Willoughby-Jones writing these letters that made you feel all shaky inside? Or was it someone else? The harridan had had two or three herself, though not today, but that could be a false trail to mislead her vengeful victims. Mrs. Burden stared at the pencilled address on the envelope by the dim light from the high slit windows. She knew most people’s writing in the village, but this was unrecognizable.
Without opening it, she ripped up the envelope and its contents. The little pieces fluttered as she dropped them into the toilet bowl. She had to bend down to pick up several which went astray.
Pulling the chain, she watched the damning words swirl and disappear. If only she could flush the writer away so easily!
If she knew who it was, she thought bitterly, if she could only be sure, someone just might find rat poison in their n
ext packet of sugar.
The letters came in bunches, according to Mrs. Burden. Mrs. LeBeau had received one by the morning post. Had Johnnie?
Walking up the drive, slowly because of the hill and the midday heat, Daisy half hoped poor Johnnie had been spared this time. However, if a new one had come, it might offer some unmistakable clue to the identity of the Poison Pen.
She wondered whether Mrs. Burden had guessed that the ill-written envelopes were the work of an anonymous letter writer. Her manner had been a bit odd. Perhaps it was just the embarrassment of a conscientious post office employee caught revealing more than she ought about the confidential business of the Royal Mail.
Or could Mrs. Burden be victim? In that case, she must be able to recognize the envelopes, so she would know exactly who the other victims were.
Maybe she was the Poison Pen herself, Daisy thought with a flash of excitement. The postmistress was in the perfect position both to hear all the village gossip—her daughter might listen to and report telephone conversations, too—and to insert the letters into the mail with no fear of discovery. But surely she would have guarded her tongue more carefully. More likely she was indeed another victim, one with a better chance than most of discovering the identity of her tormentor.
Still, she had to be added to the list of suspects, which was beginning to grow unmanageably long.
Before her tea at the Vicarage, Daisy had better try to eliminate the old man at the lodge, she decided with a sigh. She would have a shot, though she rather doubted Mr. Paramount would allow her across the threshold, in view of her relationship to his hated nephew.
Johnnie was out for the day, taking the turn of a sick colleague on the Bench. He took his duties as Justice of the Peace very seriously, whatever the Poison Pen’s opinion of his qualifications. He had left the house, as had Daisy, before the morning post’s late arrival. She saw a pile of letters waiting beside the vase of dahlias on the table as she stepped into the coolness of the hall.
