False Accusations: Nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide... (Willowgrove Village Mystery Book 1)

by Cora Harrison

  Without a word Sergeant Dawkins held it up. Rosie gave it an indifferent glance. ‘That’s my mother,’ she said. ‘She’s dead, isn’t she? I saw her before. On that morning. I knew that she was dead as soon as I saw her. Jenny should have told me.’

  ‘Who is Jenny? And why should she have given Rosie warning about her dead mother?’ Dr Rowling asked the question as soon as Rosie had been taken away.

  ‘Jenny is Rosie’s sister,’ explained Flora. ‘She went off to Majorca on the morning that her mother was murdered.’

  ‘Before the death took place,’ put in Sergeant Dawkins and Flora allowed that to pass. It was, after all, only a guess on her part that Ian could have been easily fooled by Jenny into thinking that he had seen Mrs Trevor.

  ‘I just don’t get it,’ said Doctor Rowling, ‘she showed no emotion at all.’

  ‘No guilt,’ Flora put in, eyeing Sergeant Dawkins.

  ‘No sorrow, either,’ he reminded her. ‘Don’t you think that a daughter should feel sorrow for a mother who is obviously dead? She recognised straightaway that the woman is dead.’

  ‘Yes, but,’ Flora struggled to try to explain Rosie — difficult to do as she wasn’t altogether sure that she fully understood her herself. ‘You see Rosie lives in a strange world. Things only touch her if they are something to do with herself. She doesn’t feel any emotion otherwise. I remember once that Jenny had a bad accident in the playground; she fell off a wall and banged her head hard against the concrete. She was knocked unconscious for a few minutes and all her friends were terrified. Three or four kids came flying over to my office, screaming for me to come. I got my secretary to phone Mrs Trevor. Mrs Trevor had to take her to the hospital and I kept Rosie at school until her mother came back. The strange thing was that Rosie never expressed any worry whatsoever about Jenny, though a few of her friends went home in tears. Even when Mrs Trevor turned up eventually with Jenny wearing a spectacular bandage, Rosie wasn’t interested. She was telling her mother about the game that I had played with her after everyone else went home.’

  Sergeant Dawkins nodded. ‘She’s not a psychopath or anything, is she?’ he asked with a look of interest.

  ‘No, of course not.’ Flora felt annoyed at his lack of understanding. ‘I’m just trying to explain to you that Rosie expressing no interest in her mother’s death is nothing unusual. She’s been like this all of her life. In fact, I don’t think her reaction to the photograph proved anything one way or the other — nothing except that Rosie is a very strange young person.’

  ‘I see,’ he said and made a note. He sounded quite indifferent and Flora was not sure whether she had done harm or good to her cause. Sergeant Dawkins was not the sort of man who thought around a problem. His mind was fixed rigidly. She got to her feet and picked up her handbag.

  ‘You will let me know when you have managed to contact a psychiatrist,’ she reminded him and waited until he had made a note.

  Chapter 17

  ‘Terribly hot, isn’t it?’ The traffic warden standing beside Flora waiting for the lights to change had her eyes fixed on a waitress carrying some tall glasses out to the customers seated outside The Blue Door. The restaurant across the road, like most others during this hot summer, had put tables and chairs out on the pavement, in the continental style and Flora, as she murmured something in reply noticed Jenny, wearing black trousers and a black T-shirt, was seated beside a good-looking young man at one of them.

  ‘That’s the daughter of the poor woman who was smothered in her own bed. Terrible wasn’t it? My son, William, told me all about it. He knows the fellow next to her. Jason Osmotherley. Jason was very upset, so my William told me. The girl looks terrible, doesn’t she? Her sister is supposed to be the one that did it. Not right in the head, the sister, so I’ve heard.’ With a friendly nod of her head and a quick glance at her watch, t the traffic warden crossed over and then sped off down a side road, checking a line of cars on a stretch of two-hour parking.

  Flora hesitated for a while, looking over at the two figures. Jenny did look very, very pale. Funnily enough there was more of a resemblance between the two sisters now than Flora had ever noticed before; Jenny appeared frail and tearful rather than wearing her normal air of practicality and competent.

  Flora hesitated; then decided to join them. This was a good way of reopening acquaintanceship with Jason Osmotherley without any questions about why he had suddenly decided not to visit Rosie. He seemed immersed in his conversation with Jenny and was unlikely to want to get into any explanations in front of her.

  Jason looked most taken by his companion, Flora thought, as she went towards them. Jenny however, hardly seemed aware of him as she stared miserably into her coffee cup.

  Jenny jumped up when she saw Flora coming and greeted her with great warmth. She even kissed Flora on the cheek which took her somewhat aback as she was not used to being saluted like that by former pupils. Jason, Flora thought, was less pleased at the meeting but he concealed the look of annoyance very quickly and welcomed his former headteacher with a respectable show of courtesy.

  ‘Jason will have to get back to work in a minute,’ said Jenny quickly.

  ‘No hurry. May I get you a cup of coffee, Mrs Morgan?’

  ‘That would be lovely,’ Flora said. The coffee in this particular restaurant was disgusting, but Flora didn’t want Jason disappearing before she had a chance to talk to him.

  ‘Oh, Mrs Morgan, I’m very frightened about Rosie,’ Jenny blurted out as soon as he had gone over to the counter.

  So am I, was Flora’s thought, but she said nothing. She would allow Jenny to give expression to all of her fears and doubts. As usual, everyone was worrying about Rosie and poor Jenny, her mother murdered and her sister in jail, was not being attended to at all.

  ‘You’ve been in to see her,’ Flora said aloud. ‘Could you get any sense out of her then?’

  ‘I was scared to question to her,’ admitted Jenny. ‘I was afraid of what she might say. That policewoman sticks to her closer than glue. I just kept chatting to her about Majorca and about clothes, stuff like that. She didn’t do it, Mrs Morgan, did she? She couldn’t have, could she?’

  Flora had never seen Jenny like this before, she thought. The girl was certainly in a state of terror and desperation. She looked as if she had not slept the night before. Her blue eyes were strained and heavily shadowed. Poor Jenny, Flora thought as she patted her hand comfortingly; she has always had to bear the burden of Rosie. From the day that she had come to school she had shown herself to be mature and competent, always able to interpret for Rosie, to console her, to organise her. Rosie had spent an extra year in the junior infants and from then on, partly because of the small numbers in the school which resulted in mixed age classes, and partly because she had seemed to benefit so much from her sister’s presence, Rosie and Jenny had spent the whole of their primary school life in the same classroom. It might have been wiser to separate them, Flora thought now, perhaps even to send Rosie to secondary school a year ahead of Jenny, but somehow Rosie’s needs always came first and Jenny’s second. She patted the hand again and Jenny gave her a grateful look.

  ‘Poor mum. It’s so awful,’ she sighed. ‘She always did worry about Rosie, you know. I remember her once even when she went away for a weekend — a romantic weekend, I thought at the time — it was when I was about seventeen — and she insisted on giving me the phone number of the hotel in case anything went wrong with Rosie. Told me not to hesitate to ring her. Kept on asking me if I was going to be all right with Rosie. Poor Mum!’ Jenny gave a heavy sigh and sipped at her cool drink, blinking hard.

  ‘Jenny, there is nothing that you can do for Rosie at the moment and you need to try to put it out of your mind as much as you possibly,’ Flora told her. ‘Have you gone back to work?’

  ‘No,’ Jenny sounded startled at that. ‘I should be away on holiday and of course with Rosie and all…’ Her voice trailed off and then she said bravely, ‘I will have to
arrange the funeral. I was going to talk to you about that, Mrs Morgan. I think that it might be better if Rosie doesn’t come. Goodness knows what she might suddenly come out with!’

  ‘Yes, I think that you are right. I’ll explain it to Sergeant Dawkins. I’ll say that Rosie’s reaction might be unpredictable, might embarrass or shock some elderly people. I think that while you are arranging the funeral you’d be better off back at the travel agency, keeping busy. You’re staying at your flat, are you?’

  Jason had arrived back with her coffee and Flora was startled to see a look of intense anger in his eyes as Jenny, with a quick sidelong glance at him, murmured a ‘yes’.

  What was going on here? Flora wondered. She remembered Jason and his rages, his complete disregard for other children’s point of view. Flora suspected that he and Jenny might have been sleeping together before all this happened and Jenny didn’t want him in the flat these days. That would be quite likely, Flora thought if her mother really had not liked Jason. Or did the break up come sooner?

  ‘Have you ever been to Majorca, Jason?’ Flora asked chattily. It would be, she thought without remorse, interesting to see his reaction.

  ‘Yes,’ he muttered. ‘I went last Easter.’ He shot Jenny another angry glance which Flora absorbed as she sipped her coffee. Jenny, Flora knew, had been to Majorca last Easter. Rosie had told her that. Perhaps Jason had accompanied her on that occasion but had not been allowed to do so on this time. Perhaps Jenny had got tired of him and now had other fish to fry. Her thoughts went again to Benjamin Rice.

  ‘Yes, well, Jenny, I do really think that you should see if you can go back to work and at least do a few days now, just to stop you brooding over all of the problems and the terrible things that have happened.’ Flora’s eyes went to the travel shop across the road, a few doors down from the police station. ‘Is that where you work?’ she asked and then after Jenny’s nod, she said, ‘Why don’t you pop over and see what they say? Would you like me to go with you? I could explain things for you, if you like.’ Flora half rose and that did the trick. The tone of authority, responded to with absolute obedience for six years in childhood, remains singularly potent. Jenny, instantly, got to her feet.

  ‘Oh, no, I’ll go myself. You’re probably right, Mrs Morgan. This awful business is just going round and round in my head. I’d probably better off taking phone calls and chatting to the other girls. I’ll go now. I was just wondering…’ She hesitated for a minute and then said with a rush, ‘What about Rosie? Should I go in and see her again today?’ She glanced across at Jason, as though about to ask a question, a favour, perhaps, and he averted his eyes.

  ‘I think you should leave Rosie to me,’ Flora said decisively. ‘You’re quite right; it’s hard to say the correct thing to her. I’ll pop in and out once or twice a day and I’ll let you know if there is anything for you to do. Write your number for me here like a good girl, and the number of the travel agency.’

  As Jenny was doing that, quickly and efficiently, as always, Flora gulped down the rest of the coffee, or was it tea? It would be hard to tell, as the overall taste was faintly sour, and very unpleasant. Flora got to her feet and said, ‘I’ll walk back to the shop with you, Jason. I’m going that way.’ She noted the quick flash, almost of apprehension, but then he smiled affably, got to his feet and pulled out her chair neatly as she was standing up. Quite a ladies’ man, she thought.

  ‘Your mother and father are both well, are they?’ Flora queried as they walked along.

  ‘They’re in great form.’ He smiled at her as if Flora were a desirable young woman. He had always had charm; not all of it was false. He had, Flora always thought, a genuine desire to see everyone around him happy. The only trouble was that first and foremost he wanted Jason Osmotherley to be happy. Once that was achieved, he was pleased for the peripheral crowd to share in his feelings of wellbeing.

  ‘How is Anthony?’ Flora asked.

  Jason stiffened. ‘All right,’ he said harshly. ‘I don’t see much of him, to tell you the truth.’

  ‘Did he come to the party on Willow Island, the night before Mrs Trevor was killed?’ Flora watched him carefully.

  He gave an uneasy laugh. ‘Big crowd there. Didn’t notice him. Suppose so.’

  ‘I haven’t seen him for some time,’ she said casually. ‘I suppose I’d hardly know him now. You’ve all grown up so much.’ Flora endeavoured to give the nostalgic smile of a sentimental old teacher. ‘Still, it’s nice that you are still friendly with Jenny, she needs the support of old friends just now…’

  He didn’t reply to that, just gave her an angry glance which surprised her. Usually he was very smooth and concealed his spurts of temper in front of anyone who mattered. But that ability seemed to have deserted him at the moment. In any case, Flora couldn’t see what there was to object to in her last remark, so it must have been the query about Anthony that annoyed him. Of course, there had always been an uneasy relationship between Jason and his twin brother, Anthony. Anthony had done very well at secondary school and was now studying law at university. Jason, on the other hand, had left school at the first available opportunity, worked for a while at his father’s butcher shop. According to Paula, that hadn’t worked out. Jason and his father had not got on well and so he found an apprenticeship in Brocklehurst. If he did well, he might take over the Osmotherley Butcher’s Shop. One of the older boys had gone to Australia and the other had taken over his father’s farm. Jason would be the butcher for the village. Anthony, presumably, would have to get a job when he left university. So why did Jason look so angry at the mention of Anthony. The twins had both gone their own way; presumably the way that they wanted to go. The Osmotherleys were not the sort of people to have put pressure on either of them.

  Hmm, Flora thought as she walked back to the carpark, collected her car and drove back to Willowgrove, interesting! She decided to buy a couple of steaks and invite Paula over for dinner. It was her husband’s darts’ night, so that meant that Paula and Flora could have a nice comfortable chat together.

  And the Osmotherley Butcher Shop kept excellent steaks.

  ‘I saw Jason today,’ Flora said to Mrs Osmotherley as soon as she got into the shop.

  ‘You must be in Brocklehurst a lot these days,’ Mrs Osmotherley replied, wiping her hands on the striped apron that covered her massive form and leaning her elbows on the counter, ready for a good gossip. ‘Poor little Rosie,’ she added. Mrs Osmotherley had six children, but she had plenty of room in her heart for all the children in the village. She was a nice woman. Flora liked her and was always amused by her matter-of-fact attitude to her sons.

  ‘And Jenny,’ Flora said, watching her carefully. ‘It’s hard on her, too.’

  Mrs Osmotherley’s face changed a little. ‘Ah, that one will look after herself,’ she said. Her lips tightened and then relaxed. She sighed heavily. ‘You’re right of course,’ she said. ‘It’s is hard on her as well. I’m sorry I sounded a bit sharp, but there’s such trouble between my lads about her. I wish she’d make up her mind to have one or the other, or neither, not keep them both dangling. Still, she’s young, I suppose, and we were all a bit like that when we were her age.’ She lowered her voice, casting a quick glance towards the back of the shop where the noise of chopping showed that her husband was working in there. ‘You wouldn’t believe it, but there was a time that I had the choice between the butcher and the baker and the greengrocer.’

  ‘I’d believe it all right.’ . There was a lively, flirtatious manner about Mrs Osmotherley and she would probably have had a great figure before pregnancies broadened her. ‘So Jenny has been playing the field, has she?’

  ‘Well, she had Jason dancing attendance on her at Easter. He had a big row with Mrs Trevor. She more or less told him to his face that he wasn’t good enough for Jenny and that she was going to put a stop to it. Of course, Jenny had her own flat at Brocklehurst by then and I don’t suppose she took too much notice of her mother. They even
went off on a holiday together. I don’t suppose Mrs Trevor knew about that, Jason warned me to say nothing. I don’t think that he would have told even me, except that he couldn’t help boasting when Anthony was around.’

  ‘How long did that affair last?’ Mrs Trevor, thought Flora, was a very different mother to the easy-going Mrs Osmotherley. The dead woman had, thought Flora, a great influence over Jenny. Sadly, it had always seemed as though Jenny was forever striving to please her mother, striving to get a little bit of attention for herself. It would be a mistake to underestimate the influence that Mrs Trevor had over Jenny. Somehow, thought Flora, although Jason was not academic, she would be surprised if he had not realised that Mrs Trevor was a dangerous opponent to his desires of wooing Jenny.

  ‘I’d say that they were together in her flat for a couple of weeks afterwards, Jason didn’t bring his washing home at weekends and that wasn’t like him,’ said Mrs Osmotherley shrewdly. ‘And then last weekend he came home in a terrible mood. Anthony was here that weekend, too. He’s had a summer job picking fruit at the farm down the road, before he got that job in the solicitor’s office. It was Jenny who got that for him, of course. She got tired of Jason and took up with Anthony.’

  ‘They used to be great friends, Jenny and Anthony, when they were at primary school,’ remarked Flora. Anthony, she thought privately, was much more suited to Jenny than the beefy Jason who valued brawn over brains. Jason, though, was the more handsome of the two and she was not surprised when Mrs Osmotherley waved aside childish friendships.

  ‘Well, it’s caused trouble, I can tell you that, Mrs Morgan. The two of them had a terrible fight up in Anthony’s bedroom on Saturday and I heard Jenny’s name mentioned. And then, guess what, my bold Anthony makes up some excuse about staying with a friend in Brocklehurst and packs his bag and off he goes. He was at Jenny’s flat, of course. Jason told me that when he came home the following weekend.’