6 - Superfluous Death

by Hazel Holt

  6 - Superfluous Death

  Hazel Holt

  Coffeetown Press (2011)

  * * *

  Sheila Malory is once again involved in a murder case when an elderly woman dies in suspicious circumstances. Dr Crowley wants to convert his property and he evicts Miss Graham. She is then found poisoned and another murder follows rapidly. Someone will stop at nothing to achieve their aims.

  Superfluous Death

  Hazel Holt

  Seattle, WA

  Published by Coffeetown Press

  PO Box 70515

  Seattle, WA 98127

  For more information go to: www.coffeetownpress.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Cover design by Sabrina Sun

  Photograph of JoJo the Cat by Nancy Johnson

  First published in 1995 by Macmillan London

  an imprint of Macmillan General Books

  Superfluous Death

  Copyright © 2012 by Hazel Holt

  ISBN: 978-1-60381-140-8 (Trade Paper)

  ISBN: 978-1-60381-141-5 (eBook)

  Produced in the United States of America

  For my son Tom

  since it was a vain attempt to match his prodigious literary output that got me into this situation in the first place

  Chapter One

  ‘Professional people are getting dreadfully lax nowadays,’ Mrs Dudley said, spreading honey on to a scone with a slightly tremulous hand. ‘Do you know, Dr Masefield came to see me the other day wearing a sports jacket!’

  I expressed suitable horror at the enormity of this sartorial lapse. I have found, over the years, that it’s generally easier to agree with Mrs Dudley’s pronouncements rather than to present any other point of view, which she would, in any case, totally ignore.

  ‘When I was a girl,’ she went on, ‘Dr Campbell—he was Scottish, but from a very good family, his mother was a cousin of the Earl of Dunbar, I believe—wore a frock-coat. And, even after the war, Dr Browning always wore a dark suit.’ She wiped the traces of honey off her fingers with a small, finely embroidered linen napkin. ‘I asked Dr Masefield if he was going fishing, but he appeared not to take my point.’

  Mrs Dudley is perhaps the most difficult of what my son Michael calls my Coven of Old Ladies, but since she is the mother of my best friend, Rosemary, I do try to visit her fairly often. And in a way, in spite of certain irritations, I find it comforting, as a middle-aged widow, to step back into the past and be with someone who remembers me as a child and still thinks of me as a young person. It’s pleasant, too, in what has become for everyone these days a very busy and often stressful life, to go out to tea occasionally in the old-fashioned way. Tea with Mrs Dudley is always a traditional occasion with bread and butter, scones (in the summer) or crumpets (in the winter), home-made jam and at least three kinds of cake made by her elderly slave Elsie, whose Victoria Sandwich is acknowledged to be the finest in the whole of Taviscombe.

  ‘Dr Masefield is not particularly satisfactory in other ways,’ Mrs Dudley continued. ‘He completely failed at first to diagnose what was wrong with me when I had that terrible gastric trouble last year.’

  That trouble, as Rosemary told me with some asperity, was caused by Mrs Dudley eating four scones, thickly spread with strawberry jam and clotted cream, followed by a large slice of coffee and walnut cake, and Dr Masefield’s final diagnosis (‘A touch of gastric flu—there’s a lot of it about just now’) had been, given his knowledge of Mrs Dudley’s intractable determination to ignore all advice she didn’t wish to take, a masterpiece of diplomacy.

  ‘You have Dr Macdonald, of course,’ she went on. ‘I did go to him for a short time but he was never what I would call satisfactory.’

  Mrs Dudley, as a private patient (‘I believe you get what you pay for in this life and I do feel that one’s health is too important to be left in the hands of the—what is it they call it?—the National Health Service’), tended to shop around, as it were, for her medical advisers. Fortunately Taviscombe, because it is a seaside town with a high proportion of geriatrics, has a great many doctors to the square mile. Mrs Dudley has worked her way through most of them by now.

  ‘All this new-fangled nonsense he goes in for,’ she said scathingly. (Dr Macdonald now has his patients’ records on a computer.) ‘And all this going off on courses’—a wealth of scorn in the word—‘instead of looking after his patients properly. I’m sure if your poor mother had had proper medical attention from some reliable doctor she would have been with us today.’

  ‘Mother was perfectly happy with Dr Macdonald and so am I,’ I said.

  ‘Not that his partner Dr Frobisher is any better,’ Mrs Dudley went on as if I had not spoken. ‘Drink, of course. I’ve seen him several times coming out of the King’s Head.’

  ‘Perhaps he had been visiting a patient there,’ I suggested, more to keep the conversation going than with any expectation that Mrs Dudley would accept my explanation.

  ‘No doubt that is what he would have us believe,’ she said darkly, ‘but I know better.’

  Mrs Dudley makes a practice of knowing better than anyone else.

  ‘Of course, the real drinker was old Dr Bright. You remember when he ran into another car that night at Sully Corner and was prosecuted for drunken driving!’

  This incident, which forms part of the folklore of Taviscombe much discussed even now by the older ladies of the town, had happened when I was ten. Mrs Dudley has this habit of treating me simultaneously as a child and as a contemporary, which is sometimes confusing.

  ‘Then there was Dr Phillips, now that was quite a while ago, during the war—he left his wife and went off with a Land Girl. I was really shocked—he seemed a thoroughly nice man, very sympathetic when I was so dreadfully upset that time Rosemary had scarlet fever. It just shows,’ she concluded triumphantly as if summing up a judicial inquiry, ‘you can’t really trust any of them.’

  She raised a silver cake-slice ceremoniously above Elsie’s cherry and walnut cake and cut a large wedge. My capacity for cake is not what it was in the days when, as a hungry schoolgirl, I used to go to tea with Rosemary, but I know my duty and I began to work my way through it as Mrs Dudley continued her survey of the Taviscombe medical scene. She progressed relentlessly through the years up to the present day, finding in them all some fatal flaw.

  ‘Dr Morris never listens properly to what you say to him. I never cared for his manner, very abrupt. But he is in any case a rather common sort of man. It really is amazing the sort of people who are allowed into the medical profession these days! They’re all young boys, and there is scarcely a doctor in Taviscombe now who could be described as a gentleman.’

  ‘There’s Dr Cowley,’ I suggested.

  ‘Dr Cowley!’ Mrs Dudley gave me a sharp look. ‘My dear Sheila, I wouldn’t go to Dr Cowley if he was the last doctor on earth! I grant you he’s not young—I suppose he must be nearly seventy now—and his manners are perfectly respectable, but, well, think of Mrs Endicott, and Mrs Faversham-Browne! Quite large sums of money they left him, I believe. You will never persuade me that he didn’t hasten their ends, poor souls. And there was old Miss Benson—that was never properly cleared up. You wouldn’t remember that—it was years ago. The nephew went to court, you know, claimed undue influence. Of course Dr Cowley got away with it, that sort always do, but his practice
has fallen off quite considerably since then! No, I find Dr Cowley a very questionable sort of person.’

  Loth as I always am to agree with any pronouncement of Mrs Dudley, I do feel as she does about Dr Cowley. He is, it must be admitted, a perfectly respectable man in late middle-age, with a style which his elderly patients (and they are all elderly, the young finding him old-fashioned in his manner and his methods) seem charmed by. I have always found his turn of speech fulsome and somehow distasteful. ‘Smarmy,’ my friend Rosemary says in her usual robust way, and it does rather sum him up.

  ‘I must say I don’t particularly care for him myself,’ I said, surreptitiously loosening the belt of my skirt to accommodate the cherry and walnut cake.

  ‘And I believe he’s after that house on West Hill,’ Mrs Dudley said. ‘You know, where the Martins used to live.’

  Dr Cowley was a great purchaser of property. In addition to his own handsome house in Park Walk he owned several other houses in the town.

  ‘I hadn’t heard that,’ I said, intrigued as always by Mrs Dudley’s ability to be first with any piece of news or gossip. ‘But he already owns one house on West Hill—Kimberley Lodge. It’s divided up into flats. Miss Graham lives in one of them.’

  ‘Exactly!’ Mrs Dudley said triumphantly. ‘The Martins’ house backs on to that one. I had heard that he’s thinking of putting the two together and making them into a nursing home. He could make a fortune!’

  ‘Goodness!’ I exclaimed. ‘Another nursing home!’

  Taviscombe is rich in such places, but, I have to admit, there’s always room for one more.

  ‘But two of the flats are occupied,’ I protested, ‘and I don’t imagine he could get possession very easily.’

  ‘Oh, poor little Miss Graham could go at any time,’ Mrs Dudley said dismissively. ‘She’s nearly ninety and she’s had a weak heart for years. One bad attack of this summer flu that’s about just now would finish her off.’

  Mrs Graham was only a few years older than Mrs Dudley and, although a little frail, she was by no means at death’s door. Mrs Dudley, convinced of her own immortality, tended to view members of her own generation as inferior specimens liable to succumb to any passing ailment.

  ‘Anyway,’ I said, reluctantly drawn into this speculation, as one always is with Mrs Dudley, ‘there’s Mrs Wheatley in the other flat. She’s only about my age and I haven’t heard that she’s moving.’

  ‘Oh, I daresay he’ll find some way of getting rid of her,’ Mrs Dudley said airily. ‘Besides, she has a very dubious reputation, as you know.’

  Mrs Wheatley was reputed to be the mistress of ‘a wealthy businessman from Bristol’ who was alleged to have ‘set her up’ in the flat she now occupied. There was no actual evidence for this, other than her appearance (obviously expensive, too smart for Taviscombe clothes and rather too much make-up, worn even when shopping early in the day), and the occasional visits she was seen to receive from an elderly man, who might perfectly well have been a relation. However, the fact that she didn’t go to church, shunned Taviscombe society in general and had refused (though perfectly politely) to take part in the many bazaars, bring-and-buy sales and coffee mornings that formed the basis of Taviscombe life, naturally made her an object of suspicion and speculation among Mrs Dudley’s circle of friends. Actually, she had always seemed a perfectly nice woman who greeted me civilly enough whenever I happened to meet her going out of Kimberley Lodge when I was visiting Miss Graham. But I knew that it would be useless to suggest such a thing to Mrs Dudley.

  I said as much to Rosemary when I met her outside Woolworths the following day.

  ‘Oh, Mother gets more impossible every day!’ she exclaimed. allywhoaimed. Do you know, she’s decided she has to have a new outfit for the Conservative Ladies’ Lunch. I mean, she’s got a wardrobe full of things she’s hardly ever worn! So I’ve got to go to Estelle’s to look for something suitable and then take a selection for her to try on and she probably won’t like any of them so I’ll have to take them all back again and Estelle will look at me, you know the way she does!’

  Estelle, who ran Taviscombe’s most exclusive dress shop, knew Mrs Dudley of old and knew that she would, in the end, buy one, or even two horrendously expensive garments, but her scornful manner was always extremely daunting to all but the strongest spirits and I felt deeply sorry for Rosemary, caught between such a Scylla and Charybdis, her mother and Estelle.

  ‘Oh, poor you!’ I said sympathetically. ‘Her things are so expensive nowadays. I never go there except sometimes when she has a sale, and she despises sale customers so much that she actually leaves them all to that wretched downtrodden assistant, so one is safe from her contempt!’

  ‘Mother could perfectly easily go herself, she’s quite well now, but she’s got into the way of having things brought to her—like royalty, you know—so she’s not going to give that up in a hurry!’

  ‘Is it true, though,’ I asked, reverting to the subject on my mind, ‘that Dr Cowley’s going to open a nursing home?’

  ‘Well, Mother’s usually right about things like that,’ Rosemary said, stepping back out of the way of a shopping basket on wheels imperfectly controlled by an elderly woman, whose progress was already impeded by a small and excitable dog. ‘It would make sense, I suppose, him being a doctor and so forth. And he’s got just the sort of horrid ingratiating way with him that would go down well with the patients’ relatives, I should think.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ I said. ‘I do hope poor Miss Graham has a proper lease. I must ask Michael. I think it’s his firm that acts for her. Actually, I must go and see her soon, poor soul. Her rheumatism has been quite bad and she hasn’t been able to get out much lately.’

  I made a batch of scones to take to Miss Graham. She’s quite fit really and can look after herself perfectly well, but she is an absolutely terrible cook, always has been—she and my mother used to have little jokes about it—and, since she has a sweet tooth, she is very appreciative of any homemade goodies one may take.

  ‘Oh, my dear Sheila,’ she said as she put the scones into a tin, ‘what a treat! I’ve got a niclutve got e pot of gooseberry jam that I got at last month’s bring-and-buy sale at the Church Hall. They’ll be lovely with that. Now do come and sit down and tell me all about what Michael is doing these days. Of course he’s with Drayton and Decker now, isn’t he? You must be so pleased he followed in dear Peter’s footsteps.’

  ‘Yes, it’s marvellous that that seems to be what he wants to do. I’m so lucky that he loves being here in Taviscombe; so many young people seem to want to live in London, or even abroad.’

  ‘Well,’ Miss Graham said, ‘Taviscombe has always been good enough for me.’

  ‘Me too,’ I said, looking out of the large window at the sea stretching far away to the horizon, with hills and promontories misty in the distance. ‘We’re so lucky to live in such a beautiful place.’

  ‘That’s what I was saying to Ronnie the other day,’ Miss Graham said. ‘He was talking about moving to Manchester, if you please. I said to him “You won’t like it there, a big city like that!” ’

  Ronnie was Miss Graham’s nephew, who owned the larger of the two shoe shops in Taviscombe.

  ‘Why Manchester?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, something about a shop there that might be a good business prospect. I’m afraid I didn’t really understand what it was all about. But I do know he would miss the countryside and the birds—he’s such a keen bird-watcher.’

  ‘Well,’ I said reasonably, ‘they do have countryside up there—it’s not far from the Lake District, you know—and probably birds as well, and I daresay business would be better for him in a large city.’

  ‘Oh, no.’ Miss Graham shook her head dismissively. ‘He wouldn’t like it at all! No, it’s that wife of his, she’ll never be satisfied until she gets him up north somewhere. I always said it was a mistake for him to marry a northerner.’

  Ronnie’s wife Carol came from Staffordshi
re, but to Miss Graham anywhere beyond Bristol was irretrievably ‘northern’ and, as such, suspect.

  ‘He seems to be doing quite well in Taviscombe,’ I said. ‘I mean, there usually seem to be several customers in the shop whenever I go by and there’s always a good selection of larger sizes and Carol is very helpful about ordering things.’ I spoke with feeling since I have what are known as ‘difficult’ feet.

  dth="34gn="justify">‘Oh well,’ Miss Graham said grudgingly, ‘I suppose she’s quite useful in the shop and it does save him having to pay another assistant, but she’s a terrible one for laying down the law. The poor boy can’t call his life his own, either at home or in the business!’

  I made little murmuring noises as if in agreement, but in my opinion it’s only Carol’s efficiency and determination that keeps that particular business going. Although I’m sure he has a sweet nature (he’s very kind to his aunt), Ronnie has always seemed a rather dreary man, colourless and ineffectual, who needs a good push from a stronger personality to achieve anything at all.

  ‘So are they going?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, nothing’s settled,’ she replied. ‘I think she went up there to look at the property but I don’t think they’ve made an offer yet.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I hope for your sake that they don’t go. You’d miss Ronnie if he was that far away.’

  ‘Indeed I would. He’s such a thoughtful boy. I know I can always call on him if I want any little job doing; he put a plug on my new kettle the other day—it’s so awkward getting anything like that done if you live alone. You can’t get a Man in to do it. I mean, they don’t like coming out for a little thing like that.’

  Miss Graham got up from her chair.

  ‘Talking of which,’ she said, ‘do let me get you a cup of coffee.’ She trotted off into the kitchen and I stood by the window watching the seagulls wheeling and swerving in the blue summer sky. Below, the tide was out and tiny figures walked upon the beach or engaged in aquatic activities at the water’s edge.