6 - Superfluous Death

by Hazel Holt

  ‘Right, then,’ Roger said. ‘Someone came to see her at about eleven o’clock. We know that she had coffee and cake, perhaps her visitor did, too—coffee, at least, though probably not the cake—then whoever it was washed up their own cup and saucer and put it away, leaving just the one lot of crockery on the draining board so no one would know she’d had a visitor. I mean, they’d have no idea that she’d just been talking to you on the phone—’

  ‘I know what it was!’ I broke in excitedly. ‘I knew something wasn’t quite right. It’s been niggling away at me!’

  ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

  ‘Those things on the draining board,’ I said. ‘She wouldn’t have left them like that.’

  We both turned and looked at the cup, saucer and plate neatly upended.

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’ Roger asked.

  ‘She’d have used the dishwasher. There, look, on the other drainer.’

  I pointed to a small dishwasher ensconced on the right-hand draining board. ‘It’s one I used to have, but when Michael came home to live after he left college it was too small so I got a larger one and passed this on to Miss Graham. She was very thrilled and always used it.’

  ‘I see.’ Roger opened the door of the little machine and we looked inside. There was a mug, a small jug, a plate and a cup and saucer. All of them had been used but not washed up.

  inteng Roman">The mug would be her hot milk from last night and the rest would be from the morning,’ I said. ‘She’d have put them in here after breakfast. She put the things in during the day as she used them and then washed the whole lot up after supper.’

  ‘Well done, Sheila!’ Roger smiled at me. ‘I knew that bringing you along here was a good idea! Now we can have these checked and eliminated so that we can be almost certain that the poison was in the cake or coffee she had some time after eleven o’clock.’

  ‘And whoever murdered her thought they were being so clever,’ I said, ‘washing up the cup and things so neatly, just as they imagined she might have done. I don’t suppose it occurred to them that an elderly person like Miss Graham would have a dishwasher and it’s not immediately obvious what it is, sitting on the draining board like that.’

  ‘Who knew about the dishwasher?’ Roger asked. ‘I suppose her nephew would have known?’

  ‘I expect she would have mentioned it to him,’ I said, ‘but, of course, men never really take in domestic details like that, especially from an old person like Miss Graham, who did rather go on about things.’

  ‘And the little cakes,’ Roger said. ‘You think someone brought them for her?’

  ‘Oh yes. And I’d think, wouldn’t you,’ I went on, ‘that it must have been this same person, the one who tidied away the crockery?’

  ‘It seems probable.’

  We stood for a moment in silence, both of us staring at the sink as if somehow it could tell us who had been there that morning.

  ‘Beware the Greeks bearing gifts,’ Roger said thoughtfully. ‘It must have been someone who knew about her love of cakes.’

  ‘It’s horrible,’ I said vehemently, ‘to bring her something like that, something they knew she loved, and use it to poison her!’

  ‘Murder is horrible,’ Roger said, ‘however it’s done. Still, I do agree that it was a particularly cynical sort of method.’

  I thought of how delighted Miss Graham would have been with the almond tarts and imagined her picking one up with exclamations of pleasure, taking a bite and tasting the almond flavouring ...

  ‘Would it have been quick?’ I asked. ‘The poison, I mean. Would she have suffered much?’

  ‘No, it would have been quick.’

  ‘I wonder why the murderer left the other cakes?’ I asked. ‘Why not take them away?’

  ‘I think you’ll find,’ Roger said, ‘that the remaining cakes will be perfectly all right. I think it was just the one that was poisoned, so there would be no need to dispose of the others, they’d just be—well—cakes in a tin.’

  I thought about this for a moment and then I said, ‘Of course, normally it would have been Dr Cowley who’d have been called in and he would probably just have signed the death certificate. After all he was her doctor. And I daresay any other doctor but Dr Barton might have done so too. I mean, she was old and frail, it might easily have been a heart attack. Or they might have waited for Dr Cowley to see her when he got back from Dulverton. But Dr Barton would have been delighted to put something over on Dr Cowley—he really dislikes him—and anyway, he’s so pernickety and insists on doing every little thing strictly by the book! It was pure chance really that the murder came to light.’

  ‘Mmm, yes,’ Roger said absently. ‘I must let the scene of crime people loose now—fingerprints, checking the crockery and food, and so on—but I wanted you to have a quick look round first before anything was disturbed. Now, I suppose I must get on and check where everyone was.’

  ‘Have you spoken to Mrs Wheatley yet?’ I asked. ‘She lives in the flat above.’

  ‘Yes,’ Roger replied. ‘I did have a brief word. She says she was out all morning.’

  ‘Well, I couldn’t get any reply from her flat when I was trying to get in to Miss Graham,’ I said. ‘Where was she, anyway?’

  ‘Shopping, she said, just around the town. Why? Do you have any reason to think that she could have had any possible motive to kill Miss Graham? She doesn’t look a likely suspect, on the face of it.’

  I told him about how Dr Cowley’s plans for a nursing home at Kimberley Lodge had included Mrs Wheatley and what her background had been.

  ‘Good heavens!’ he said. ‘What extraordinary things you and Rosemary uncover when you set your minds to it. I almost feel sorry for the woman!’

  ‘Oh well,’ I laughed, ‘that’s Taviscombe for you. Now you know what you’re getting into, moving here. You’ll be under the microscope, too.’

  Chapter Seven

  When I called for Mrs Dudley . Nto take her to the Arts Society lunch she gave me one of her quick, appraising, critical looks and I was immediately aware that I should have worn my better suit, that the collar of my blouse wasn’t properly ironed and that I was not wearing a hat. Mrs Dudley was wearing a hat, of course, and her suit was very expensive indeed. As I helped her into the car and tucked the walking stick that she now reluctantly used in beside her she said, ‘So poor little Miss Graham has got herself murdered.’

  She made it sound as though it was somehow Miss Graham’s fault.

  ‘Well,’ she continued, ‘they won’t need to look far to find out who did that.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘Dr Cowley, of course. He needed her out of the way for that scheme of his, so he simply swept her aside!’ She waved a gloved hand in a contemptuous gesture.

  ‘I don’t think it can have been him,’ I said. ‘It was his day for the Dulverton surgery.’

  ‘He may have said that.’ Mrs Dudley was unwilling to relinquish a good suspect for a trivial little thing like a fact. ‘But can we believe him?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’m sure Roger will investigate his alibi very thoroughly.’

  ‘Yes, and that’s another thing,’ Mrs Dudley said, pursing her lips. ‘I can’t say I’m particularly pleased that he is involved in this affair. No one in our family has ever been connected with anything like that.’

  ‘But it’s his job,’ I said as patiently as I could. ‘That’s what he has to do.’

  ‘I abhor violence,’ she went on, as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘I have always been very sensitive to that sort of thing.’

  This from Mrs Dudley, who was as tough as old boots.

  ‘Now that he and Jilly will be living in Taviscombe and it is known that he is related to me, well, I shall expect a very high standard of behaviour from both of them.’

  I was saved from having to comment on this by our arrival at Brunswick Lodge where the lunch was to be held. A rather nice Georgian building, it is owned by the
local council and used by the various cultural societies in Taviscombe for meetings, concerts and art exhibitions. Today trestle tables, laden with a substantial buffet lunch, had been set out in the main double drawing room. Mrs Dudley surveyed the scene with a practised eye.

  ‘I shall go and sit at that little table by the window,’ she said, ‘and perhaps, Sheila, you will be good enough to fetch me something to eat—just a very little. You know that I have positively no appetite these days. Oh, and on your way tell Christine Shrewsbury that I want a word with her.’

  Thus dismissed, I passed on her command to the hapless Christine, who groaned and said, ‘Oh, Lord! What have I done now?’ and made my way to the table of food. I was piling a plate high with quiche, salmon tartlets, anchovy rolls and other goodies (I paid no attention to Mrs Dudley’s claim to a bird-like appetite, knowing just how voracious it really was) when a voice behind me said, ‘Don’t tell me you’re going to eat all that lot!’

  It was my friend Sybil Jacobs.

  ‘Goodness, no, this isn’t for me, it’s for Mrs Dudley. Hang on a sec while I take it over to her. I want to ask you about what’s been arranged for the concert on the twenty-ninth.’

  I picked up a glass of wine and took it and the plateful of food to the table by the window, where Mrs Dudley paused briefly in her harangue of the wretched Christine to acknowledge me (‘Thank you, Sheila dear, how kind. Though you know I am not allowed to eat anchovy—still, as you’ve brought it ...’), and I thankfully made my escape.

  I made my more modest choice of food and went and sat down beside Sybil, at a table well away from the window. After we had thoroughly thrashed out the concert arrangements and dealt with the criminal inadequacy of the booking committee, Sybil said, ‘I was so sorry to hear about poor Miss Graham. And you found her, too. It must have been a dreadful experience.’

  ‘It was,’ I replied. ‘Perfectly horrible.’

  ‘I’m sure you coped splendidly. I shouldn’t have had the least idea what to do.’

  ‘I just called her doctor.’

  ‘Oh, yes, of course. She had Dr Cowley, didn’t she? I can’t stand the man—he’s Pauline’s doctor, you know. She thinks he’s marvellous.’

  There was a wealth of scorn in Sybil’s voice but this didn’t really surprise me. Pauline was her elder sister. They shared a house and, although they were basically very fond of each other, they argued incessantly and one of them only had to hold an opinion on any subject for the other promptly to take the opposite view.

  ‘Yes, he is,’ I replied, ‘but it was his day for going to his surgery at Dulverton so Dr Barton came instead.’

  ‘Oh, that man! I can’t stand him either,’ said Sybil vehemently stabbing a small sausage with a cocktail stick. ‘He was really disagreeable when he came to see Pauline once when Dr Cowley was away, counting out the tablets she was to take as if I was a complete fool who couldn’t be trusted to give my own sister her medicine!’

  ‘Oh, he’s fearfully pernickety,’ I agreed, ‘and a very brusque manner!’

  ‘Hang on, though,’ Sybil said. ‘Which day was this?’

  ‘When Miss Graham ... When she died? It was last Monday. Why?’

  ‘But Dr Cowley wasn’t in Dulverton then, not in the morning at any rate, because I saw him in Taviscombe.’

  ‘What?’ I looked at her in amazement. ‘What time was this?’

  ‘Umm. Let me see.’ She took a bite from a vol-au-vent. ‘Ugh, sardine, I loathe sardines!’ She pushed the plate away and thought for a moment. ‘It must have been about eleven, because I had to be at the dentist at eleven and I was late because Pauline couldn’t find the books she wanted me to take back to the library, wouldn’t you know! And I’d had to park the car at the bottom of West Hill because you can never find anywhere to park outside Mr Flecker’s.’

  ‘You mean you saw him on West Hill!’ I exclaimed. ‘Dr Cowley? At eleven o’clock?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ I persisted.

  ‘Positive. He almost knocked me down. I was just stepping off the pavement when he came round the corner, going much too fast, too old to be driving, if you ask me, and sped on up West Hill. I was really quite shaken!’

  ‘Good gracious,’ I said. ‘How odd.’

  ‘Oh well, he is, isn’t he? I said to Pauline, why don’t you have Dr Masefield like me? Such a nice young man. I do think it’s important to have a young doctor. It stands to reason; they’re always much more up to date and know what all the latest medicines are and modern treatments. Dr Cowley’s so old fashioned I’m surprised he isn’t still using leeches! Oh yes, talking about old-fashioned things, I found a lovely new name the other day.’ Sybil and I collect odd or unusual house names, of which there’s a plentiful supply in Taviscombe. ‘One of those little semis in Falkener Road. It’s called “Elsinore”!’

  ‘Goodness!’ I exclaimed. ‘What do you think their home life is like! I saw a nice one in Taunton last week: one of the terraced houses down by the station is called “Valhalla”!’

  ‘There’s optimism for you,’ Sybil laughed. ‘Or would it be complacency?’

  She turned to put her plate on the table. ‘Oh dear, I think Mrs Dudley’s beckoning you.’

  All the time I was dancing attendance on Mrs Dudley I was turning over in my mind the fact that Dr Cowley had been in Taviscombe at just about the time when Miss Graham was murdered. Indeed, I was so abstracted that I allowed Iris Marshall to corner me and found myself agreeing to give a talk on ‘anything to do with literature, we leave it to you’.

  ‘I’ve a good mind to talk to them about some obscure modern South American novelist they’ve never heard of,’ I said viciously to Michael that evening.

  ‘You never read modern novels, South American or otherwise,’ he replied. ‘Anyway, I’m sure you’ve got something tucked away in your desk that will do.’

  ‘Like Canon Chasuble’s sermon on the manna in the wilderness, suitable for any occasion? Oh, I daresay I can fudge something up, but it’s a nuisance. What was extraordinary was the fact that Sybil Jacobs saw Dr Cowley in Taviscombe, actually on West Hill, on the morning Miss Graham was murdered, when he was supposed to be in Dulverton.’

  Michael stopped winding new strapping round the handle of his badminton racquet and looked up.

  ‘The plot thickens! Are you going to tell Roger?’

  ‘Well, I think I should, don’t you?’ I said.

  ‘Of course, go and do it now.’

  I looked at the clock. ‘They’ll still be having supper. You know Jack never gets back until after eight. I’ll leave it for a bit C its N.’

  I was restless, though, and couldn’t settle to anything so that Foss, who had hoped for a quiet evening sitting on my lap, jumped down with a cry of annoyance and went and sat on the window sill, where he sat lashing his tail, to the imminent danger of a rather nice Rex begonia that stood in a pot there.

  Michael stood up and waved the mended racquet in the air experimentally.

  ‘There, that’ll have to do. I really need a new one, but they’re so expensive. Oh, by the way, Ma, can I bring Jenny back for supper tomorrow? We’re both playing in the quarter-finals of the tournament and afterwards is always a bit of an anti-climax.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I said, instantly diverted from thoughts of my telephone call to Roger. ‘What shall I get to eat?’

  ‘Oh, anything will be fine,’ Michael said unhelpfully. ‘Right. I’m off now to see if Gerry’s managed to set up that clay shoot for Saturday. Won’t be late.’

  I was glad that Michael’s friendship (I supposed one might call it that) with Jenny was progressing. She seemed a nice girl and would surely divert his thoughts from the absent Helen. I wondered about the boyfriend, but perhaps that was an invention of Michael’s to stop me making ‘plans’.

  When I rang through to Rosemary’s I got Roger straight away so I didn’t have to explain why I was calling to anyone else; I wasn’t sure
if Roger had told the family that he was involving me, however minimally, in the investigation.

  ‘Oh, Roger, sorry to bother you at home. But I just learnt today that Dr Cowley was around in the West Hill area at about the time Miss Graham was killed.’

  I told him what Sybil had told me and was pleased to hear his exclamation of surprise.

  ‘Are you sure? Is this Sybil Jacobs reliable? I mean, she couldn’t be mistaken?’

  ‘Oh, Sybil is very beady-eyed,’ I said. ‘Anyway, she dislikes Dr Cowley and you know how aware you always are of people you dislike. Anyway, he nearly ran her over so she jolly well noticed him then!’

  ‘And this was about eleven o’clock?’ Roger asked.

  ‘Yes. She knew the time because she was rushing to keep an appointment at the dentist. So what about Dr Cowley? Did he say that he was in Dulverton all the time?’

  ‘He said he took his surgery there from nine until ten and then did visits in the area,’ Roger said thoughtfully. ‘He gave me a list of patients he visited, but I haven’t got round to checking them yet.’

  ‘Well, he could get back from Dulverton to Taviscombe in about forty-five minutes, I suppose. Not much less, really, because it’s a narrow, winding road and you can’t go fast. So that’s an hour and a half travelling back and forth,’ I said. ‘Then talking to Miss Graham and doing all the business with the coffee and cakes; it would have taken most of the morning. Surely he couldn’t hope to get away with such a dodgy alibi!’

  ‘Well,’ Roger said, ‘I’ll get over to Dulverton first thing tomorrow morning and check those patients and then see what Dr Cowley has to say. Thank you, Sheila. You really do provide a marvellous information-gathering service! I’ll let you know what happens.’

  It wasn’t until almost tea-time the next day, when I was just putting the finishing touches to a lemon tart I was making for supper, that Roger called back.

  ‘I checked the patients Dr Cowley said he saw. There were only two of them. One was an old man, living alone in a cottage miles from anywhere and very vague. He couldn’t say whether Dr Cowley came before or after lunch. He thinks it was after, but since he has it—bread and cheese, I gather—at about eleven-thirty that wasn’t much help. The other one, a woman, very deaf, said the doctor didn’t come until the afternoon, but said he’d come in the morning and she hadn’t heard the bell!’