The Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas and Other Mysteries

by E. X. Ferrars

  “But I hadn’t, exactly. It was just that I had found her in my room, when I had never known her to go upstairs before. And she seemed so embarrassed at my finding her there.”

  Michael started to say something violent, but stopped himself and a new expression came suddenly to his face.

  “And there has been some trouble about some jewellery, Fogden said? Then I think we’ll take a quick look in your room.”

  Keeping Isobel’s hand in his, he strode towards the door.

  Dick Fogden was still in the chair by the telephone, his face in his hands. He raised it as they came in and went up the stairs.

  “The tragedy is that Alison didn’t need Jean,” he said in a curiously absent tone, as if he were really talking to himself. “She had me. She always had me. And if only she’d been satisfied with me, she could have sent Jean away.”

  In Isobel’s room, Michael started a swift search, which would have produced total chaos among Isobel’s belongings if he had not almost at once found what he was looking for. This was an earring, a small topaz surrounded by pearls, which was lying in a corner of a drawer, among Isobel’s handkerchiefs.

  She exclaimed when she saw it and Michael said grimly:

  “It isn’t yours, is it?”

  “No,” she said. “It’s Mrs. Buckle’s. I’ve seen her wear these earrings.”

  “I thought so,” he said. “So now we know why she looked embarrassed when you found her in here. She had set a nice little trap for you just as she did for Connie. You had been pinching her jewellery, you see? ‘Such a nice girl,’ that’s what she would have said, ‘but a bit of a kleptomaniac. So sad – all the fault of an unfortunate home.’ And, of course, she wouldn’t have prosecuted, but just kindly sent you home with a ruined character. And sister Jean would have had to stay on with her. Only something went wrong about that and Jean – ”

  He stopped, because of something that he saw in Isobel’s eyes. His arm went round her.

  “Don’t look like that,” he begged. “You couldn’t possibly have guessed what she was like. Jean was probably justified in whatever she did. Now let’s look for the other earring. It must be around here somewhere.”

  But it was not. They found it a little later, but not in Isobel’s room. It was in the sitting-room, near Mrs. Buckle’s body, while in other parts of the room, as if they had been flung down in rage or terror, were some other pieces of jewellery – a gold bracelet, a garnet brooch, a ruby ring.

  “You see, it wasn’t a thief, was it?” Dick Fogden said, watching from the doorway as Michael found these things, but left them lying where they were. “If it were, he wouldn’t have left those things behind. And I’ve just looked round – there’s no sign of anyone having broken in. It was Jean who did it.”

  Isobel listened and wondered. Had Jean been so passionate and violent that she had brutally killed the sister whose dependence on her was keeping her from the man she loved? The person to whom she had said:

  “If you love me, you must try to understand that it is really impossible for me to leave my sister as things are at this moment!”

  Why, Jean had even telephoned Dick Fogden and asked him to come over to see that Isobel was all right. For a murderess that had certainly been very considerate.

  But Jean, in her way, had always been considerate. Hadn’t she put the sausages in the oven and set the time-switch, so that Isobel would not have had to cope with murder on an empty stomach? Another odd thing for a murderess to do. People who commit murder are not usually kindly friends who, immediately after the crime, think of the small services, such as setting a time-switch to leave a meal ready...

  The time switch...

  Startled by a new idea, Isobel went swiftly into the kitchen. The automatic switch on the cooking stove, she saw, had been set to turn the oven off at eight o’clock and the cooking-time had been set for half-an-hour. So the oven would have been turned on at half-past seven. That meant that almost the last thing Jean had done before leaving the house to catch the seven-forty bus to Wallcliff, was to set that switch.

  She could not have done it earlier in the day, because it was impossible to set the switch for more than twelve hours ahead. If she had done so, the oven would have been turned on at half-past seven yesterday evening. The sausages would have been cooked last night and cold this morning.

  Was it conceivable that Jean, after a quarrel with her sister – a quarrel so violent that Mrs. Buckle had been knocked down and had died and the room had been wrecked – had gone into the kitchen and, in her thoughtful way, set the time switch? Why should she have done such a thing at such a time? It was ridiculous. She would have been too agitated.

  “Michael,” Isobel called. “Come here – I want to show you something.”

  Michael understood quickly enough what she meant and, a little later, it was he who made the local police understand it.

  Mrs. Buckle’s death, he told them, must have happened after Jean had left for London. The sisters had had a quarrel about the jewellery, probably because Jean had caught her sister hiding it in Isobel’s room and had then decided to leave.

  On the telephone this morning Jean had told Dick Fogden that she had thought that to leave was the only thing to do.

  So she had gone to London. The quarrel between the two sisters, deadly as it could have been, could still have been a quiet one. When Jean had said her last word, she could have packed quite calmly and prepared to leave and, just before going, could have put the sausages in the oven and set the time-switch. That would not have been impossible. She had done it to make things easier for Isobel next morning, when Isobel found herself unexpectedly, having to cope with an angry and vengeful Alison Buckle.

  An elderly detective-inspector, with a quiet, watchful manner, listened, nodded non-committally, said, “Perhaps, perhaps – ” and presently went away to make certain discoveries of his own, aided by the police surgeon.

  The police surgeon gave it as his opinion that Mrs. Buckle had not been dead for more than an hour or two. The death was due to an accident.

  “Anyway,” Michael said later to Isobel, when the police had gone away again, taking Mrs. Buckle’s body with them, “it was through that little bit of thoughtfulness of Jean’s and your realising what it meant, that it was obvious that Jean was not responsible for her sister’s death. You made us all stop and think and then start looking for other evidence, which proved that it was Mrs. Buckle herself who smashed up the room.”

  “But why did she do it?” Isobel’s voice was puzzled.

  She looked up from the packing which she had started to do as soon as the police had allowed it.

  “Doesn’t it look as if she was setting a trap for Jean?” Michael said. “Something like the ones she had set for Connie and you, only worse – much worse. Attempted murder would have been the charge she would have threatened to bring against Jean and I’m not sure, but I think she might actually have done it, if she hadn’t tripped over the flex of the reading-lamp, hit her head on the fender and died.”

  “But that wouldn’t have brought Jean back to live with her.”

  “Perhaps it was never that that really mattered.”

  “I don’t understand,” Isobel said.

  “Perhaps I don’t, either,” Michael said. “It’s just that – well, I think Mrs. Buckle may have wanted more than anything else to stop Jean doing the living that she couldn’t do herself. In fact, I think it wasn’t her love for Jean that drove her to do what she did, but a desperate jealousy of Jean’s health and freedom. Perhaps I’m all wrong. But suppose we leave all that to the police? The question is now – ”

  He hesitated, frowning at Isobel suddenly, as if he were about to find fault with her.

  “You haven’t a job any longer and you don’t like your home. So the question is, where do you go from here?”

  “I thought perhaps you were going to decide that for me,” Isobel answered, holding up her hands to him. He caught them, pulled her to her fee
t and into his arms. Isobel knew that she had just walked into another trap. She knew, too, that this time she had done it with her eyes open and she could not imagine ever wanting to escape.

  STOP THIEF!

  Roger Gates put the mowing-machine away in the garden shed. Coming out of the shed and closing its door, he stood still for a moment, drawing in one or two deep breaths. The air was full of the scent of new-mown grass, the most exquisite scent, he thought, in the world. Today had been the first time that he had mown the grass since the winter. For the last months he had occasionally managed to find a little work to do in the garden, but this Saturday morning had been the first time since the end of November that he had been able to spend some hours exerting himself fully, surrounded on all sides by the lovely beginnings of springtime.

  The forsythia was a burst of yellow at the bottom of the garden. The early clematis, hanging in great clumps on the wooden fence that sur- rounded the garden, was a glory of tender pink. The daffodils that crowded thickly in the beds that bordered the neat lawn that he had just finished mowing were at their best. The aubretia in thick cushions of purple brightened the rockery. Even the pasque-flowers were in the midst of their brief flowering. After the meagre patches of colour given to the garden during the winter by the yellow jasmine and the winter-flowering cherry, there was a wealth of it that filled Roger with deep content. There had never been anything imaginative in the design of the garden, but simply a richness of blossoming, specially in this lovely month.

  Going to the back door of the house, through which he always came out into the garden, he pushed it open, stepped inside and climbed out of the wellingtons that he had been wearing. His slippers were there where he had left them when he went out, beside the doormat. He put them on and was just about to go to the sink to wash his hands when an extraordinary thing struck him. On the table was a packet of cigarettes.

  His wife, Coralie, had never smoked and he himself had not smoked for ten years.

  He looked at the packet with a puzzled frown, wondering how it could have got where it was. Then a possible explanation struck him and when he had washed his hands he walked along the passage to the living-room, where, as he had expected, he found Coralie and said cheerfully, “Hallo, have we had a visitor?”

  But Coralie was not quite in the state that he had expected. He had thought that he would find her sitting by the fire with sherry and glasses on a tray by her side, waiting for him. But although she was sitting by the fire, there was no sherry there and she did not look round at him when he came in. Instead she simply stared with a curious blankness into the fire. Also she was wearing her overcoat and her fur-lined boots, as if she had only just got in from her visit to the village shop. But he knew that she had set out even before he had started out into the garden and that had been over two hours ago. The only explanation that he could think of was that she had stopped in at some neighbour’s house for a coffee and had only just got home. But that did not explain why she had brought cigarettes back with her.

  Coralie was forty, three years younger than he was himself. She was a slender, delicate-looking woman, with smooth fair hair that she wore brushed straight back from her face and coiled into a loose knot on her neck. Her face was oval, still pale from a recent illness, with grey eyes fringed with long lashes, and to Roger she was as beautiful as when he had met her first. That had been six years ago. They had got married only three months after that meeting and together had chosen this house in the village of Lexlade, which was three miles from the town of Allingford, where Roger had recently been appointed manager in the bank in different branches of which, in different parts of the country, he had spent all his working life. It had been a deep satisfaction to him to arrive in Allingford, for it had been a return to where life had begun for him. He had been born there, had been educated in its comprehensive and had had his first very junior job there.

  Coralie was a Londoner and still liked to spend an occasional day in London, having lunch with some old friend and doing a little shopping, but, like him, she had fallen in love with the charming house in the village and had entered with enthusiasm into village activities. Not that she had been able to take much part in them for the last two months, for she had had a difficult time recovering from her illness. It was taking much longer than anyone had anticipated. But of course at forty it was not to be expected that she would recover like a young woman from the danger and tragedy of a very painful miscarriage.

  He repeated what he had said as he came into the room. “Have we had a visitor?”

  She turned her head to look at him with a vagueness that he was startled to find a little frightening.

  “Not that I know of,” she said.

  “No one’s been in to see us this morning?” he asked.

  “Not unless it was while I was out shopping. Why?”

  “Ah, perhaps that’s what it was. You were out shopping and I was in the garden and...” But it did not feel right. “It’s just those cigarettes on the kitchen table. I wondered how they got there.”

  “Oh.” There was concentration in her great eyes, the vagueness had gone. “Yes, of course you saw them.”

  “Well, how did they get there? I mean, did someone leave them, or did you get them for someone, or what?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I – I found them.”

  “Found them in the kitchen?”

  “No, in my pocket. My coat pocket.” She patted the pocket of the coat that she was still wearing. “In here.”

  “But when?” He was bewildered.

  “After I came out of the shop. I put my hand in my pocket to get my handkerchief and there they were.”

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “How did they get there?”

  “I don’t know.” Her voice was dull, as if she were not much interested. She stood up. “I’ll get the sherry.”

  “Just a minute,” he said. “You don’t mean you think someone slipped them into your pocket as a kind of trick?”

  “There was no one else in the shop. No, of course I took them myself, but I don’t know why.”

  She left the room and after a few minutes returned without her overcoat and having changed from her boots into slippers, and carrying a tray with the sherry and glasses on it.

  In a strange way it disturbed Roger more that she looked entirely her normal self than it would have if she had shown some sign of mental disturbance, for while she had been out of the room he had been trying to make himself face the fact that the aftermath of that miscarriage might perhaps be a breakdown of some kind. Once or twice during the last few weeks he had feared it, but her occasional fits of strangeness had always passed off quite quickly and he had hoped that they were at an end.

  She poured out the sherry, sank back in her chair by the fire and smiled.

  “Did you have a nice morning in the garden?” she asked.

  “Yes, yes, but did you pay for them, Coralie? The cigarettes.”

  “How could I when I didn’t know I had them?” She laughed. “Anyhow, one packet of cigarettes, they won’t miss them.”

  He sat down in the chair facing hers across the fireplace, sipped his sherry and fell silent.

  Next morning she would not go to church with him. She said that she had slept very badly and had a headache, but when he suggested that he should stay at home with her she was very insistent that he should go as usual. When the service was over the vicar, who stood outside the doorway chatting to his parishioners as they left, asked him if Mrs. Gates was not well. All Lexlade knew of her illness, just as they had known before it of the somewhat surprising fact that in her middle age she had become pregnant.

  “Thank you,” Roger said. “Not too grand, as a matter of fact. But she just needs a bit of rest. It’s nothing to worry about.”

  “And that job in London,” the vicar said. “Have you made up your mind about it? Are you leaving us?”

  “Good Lord, no. Not for anything.” The news that Roger had been off
ered an appointment as manager of a bank in Battersea had somehow spread through the village, though he had hardly given it a thought. Of course it would have meant promotion and a higher salary, though the advantages of that might have been cancelled by the increased cost of living in London. But it would also have meant leaving the small community in which he had lived very happily for these last few years, and the garden that now was really repaying all the hard work that he had put into it. But it had to be admitted that the way that the rumour had spread was his own fault. He had boasted about the offer to one or two people over drinks in the Red Lion. Perhaps, though he could not remember doing so, he had spoken about it to the vicar himself.

  “Well, I’m delighted to hear it,” the vicar said. “You’d have been sorely missed here. And please give my best wishes to Mrs. Gates.”

  Roger went on through the old churchyard to the gateway and across the village green to his home. As he went he wondered what Coralie had done with the packet of cigarettes and on an impulse, before going into the house, he looked into the dustbin that stood beside the back door. The packet was there, which on the whole relieved him.

  It was two days later that the second packet of cigarettes appeared.

  Like the one before, he found it on the kitchen table when he returned in the evening from the bank in Allingford. He had just put the car away in the garage and taken a short stroll round the garden, enjoying the wonderful softly scented sense of returning life around him, then he went into the house, as usual when he had been in the garden, by the back door, and saw the cigarettes on the table before him.

  A different brand this time, he thought. Not that he was up to date about such things nowadays, but the packet looked different. He suddenly became aware of a faintly sick feeling. He might have put the thing in the dustbin straight away, but found that he felt an extraordinary reluctance to touch it. He felt a similar reluctance to talk about it when he went into the sitting-room and found Coralie in her usual chair, quietly knitting. She had always done a good deal of knitting and was very skilled at it, a result of which was an accumulation of jerseys and cardigans, some of them for him, in the chest of drawers in their bedroom.