The Poison Pen

by Evelyn James

  “You recognised it?”

  “To a degree. We used to get Christmas cards until they shut themselves away from the world. I suppose it is five years since I last had any form of communication with them.”

  “And I don’t suppose you kept any of these cards.”

  “No,” Maud shrugged. “Why would I? They are the sort of people you avoid if you can. I don’t know what turned them so bitter, well, sometimes I think I do. I imagine Heather being widowed young made them angry. They are the sort of people who think the world owes them something and that they are the only people to ever have a grave misfortune befall them. Heather’s husband died in the same accident as their brother. The two men were out on a barge with a lot of other people for a pleasure trip. The barge capsized. Officially it was said there had been too many people on board. I hear tell the Cotterleys went into such a fury people thought they had gone insane. They raged at the company who rented out the barge, at the poor souls who survived the calamity, even the vicar who took the funeral! They screamed at him that they would never forgive God for taking their menfolk. Oh, it was quite the drama.”

  “Did Heather have a daughter?”

  “Yes, Yvetta. Poor girl was always under her mother’s tyranny. First chance she got she married.”

  “Would that be to a Mr Grimes?”

  “Thomas Grimes, yes. He’s a butcher and a very nice fellow. But he won’t have anything to do with his mother-in-law or her sisters. Did Janice tell you about Miss Grimes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Takes after her grandmother, that one,” Maud shook her head sadly. “You see, Yvetta would let her daughter, Ellen, visit the Cotterleys all the time, and they skewed her thinking with all manner of fancies. I dare say they encouraged her little fling too. The man had a bit of money, and the Cotterleys only ever think of money, you aren’t anyone if you haven’t a few shillings in your pocket. Yvetta married beneath herself, or so they felt. They wanted more for little Ellen. So she got in with this gentleman who was having troubles at home. I think they believed his tall tales about getting a divorce and marrying the girl. This was during the war and he was an officer in the army too. Their heads were quite turned.”

  “But he didn’t divorce his wife?”

  “Oh, he did, eventually. But he never married Ellen Grimes. No, he found some pretty girl with air for brains and a good inheritance. I hear tell he moved to the South of France with her and wastes his time and her money in the sun all day. You see, he never had the money the Cotterleys imagined, it was all façade. Little Ellen was disgraced and moved away. That must be over two years ago now.”

  “What was the name of the married man?”

  “He was a Major in the army. Let me think. Yes, he was Major Dennis.”

  “Does his former wife still live around here?”

  “I believe so, everyone was very kind to her, you see. And she did better out of the divorce than Major Dennis banked on. Her name was Eva Dennis, but she must have reverted to her maiden name now, which I don’t remember.”

  “I imagine all this turmoil upset the Cotterley sisters deeply.”

  “Oh yes, and they attacked my daughter for it!” Maud clenched her fists angrily. “My Janice kept well out of it, but they blamed her anyway. Said she had spread lies about Ellen because she was jealous of her being courted by a Major, and if she had not done so, then Ellen would not have had to move away. I never heard such rot! As if Ellen’s activities had not been noticed by others. My Janice married a good man. He’s a plumber and keeps a sound roof over their heads. But the Cotterleys think he is worthless because he doesn’t work in an office. They assume Janice must be unhappy because her husband is a workman. As I say, they are all about money and snobbery.”

  They had come to the corner of the road. Maud stopped and indicated she was to head right, while Clara was headed left.

  “Thank you for the information, Mrs Harris. Should I have any more questions, might I call on you?”

  “Of course. I have no qualms talking about them. Janice is so worried they will cause her more trouble, so she won’t say anything.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “Well, I say they need reminding they can’t go around treating people like dirt.”

  Clara said farewell and they parted company. As she walked on into the dark night, she found her thoughts returning to Constable Brompton. She wondered how he was. It was probably too soon to pay him a call, but it was tempting, nonetheless. She resisted the urge. She should get home and have some dinner, warm herself, and prepare for tomorrow. She was certain she was on to something with the Cotterley sisters, but pinning them down was going to be a challenge and, until she did, they were free to spread their venom. So far no one had come to harm because of it, but if the letters continued she could not be certain that would last. She mused on the strangeness of people all the way home.

  Chapter Seventeen

  When Clara rose the next morning, the post had already arrived. She picked it up from the door mat and joined Tommy in the parlour, where he was devouring a plate of toast. Clara used a knife from the table to slit open the letter. She already recognised the handwriting on the envelope and knew what to expect;

  Dear Miss Fitzgerald,

  We find ourselves wondering what sort of woman takes delight in interfering in other peoples’ business? We have come to the conclusion you are a busybody and a gossip. Interfering in other people’s lives is wickedness! Instead of prying into the business of others, you would make better use of your time finding a husband, before you are too old to be a bride. You are already past the first blush of youth, wait any longer and no man will show the slightest interest in you. As for this detective lark, it is really disgraceful, and the sign of a woman of low moral fibre. We only state this in the hope you might improve yourself.

  Clara laughed.

  “Talk about the kettle calling the pot black!” she showed the letter to Tommy, who took it with far less complacency.

  “Who do they think they are?” he snapped.

  “Oh, I expected it,” Clara smiled. “I would have been disappointed had they not sent me one. I do rather feel it is lacking the gusto of the others. But, then again, I suppose they know only a very little about me.”

  Clara took some toast and examined the next letter on the table. The handwriting on this one was not familiar, but it was locally posted. Clara slipped the knife into the envelope and opened it.

  “Ah, good! It is a letter from Colonel Fairbanks asking me to call on him sometime today,” Clara took note of the address. “Goodness, if I am to get to him and be back in time for my appointment with Mr Johnson I really shall have to dash. I am going to have to invest in a bicycle.”

  Tommy raised his eyes and looked dubious.

  “I remember the last time you were on a bicycle.”

  “You get better with practice,” Clara said confidently. “Well done on finding Herbert, by the way, not just for his expertise, it’s nice that you two can catch up. You were good friends.”

  “We were,” Tommy agreed. “I hope we still are. Chalk and cheese we might be, but somehow we rub along well.”

  “Did he really call me interfering?” Clara asked after a moment.

  “And precocious.”

  Clara gave a decisive nod.

  “I shall take it all as a compliment. Take care, see you at teatime,” with that she was out the door and heading for the outskirts of town yet again.

  ~~~ * ~~~

  Colonel Fairbanks had retired to Brighton after a lifetime of living in a city. The clean air (so the doctors had assured him), would do his lungs the world of good, and the fresh, clean waters (if he would only partake in them), would work wonders on his grumpy digestive system. Fairbanks had heeded certain portions of the advice, and had bought a nice villa-style house at the very edge of town. He had good views of the countryside all around him, and plenty of fresh air. But he took exception to bathing in seawater,
or (Heaven forbid!) actually drinking it, and had not even taken a stroll on Brighton’s famous beaches since his arrival. He was much more content to sit in his garden, smoking a large pipe full of the filthiest tobacco, and imagining himself away to the dingy streets of London and the crimes he had once been summoned to solve.

  He was a man who was bored. Bored by the peace and quiet. Bored by the inactivity. Bored by rounds at the golf course or lunch at his club. Bored, bored, bored! Retirement, Fairbanks finally concluded after a year of tedium, was all right for some, but not a man like himself, who loved the thrill of adventure and the drama of a good hunt. But there was nothing else for it. A man doesn’t leave the Force then ask for his job back. A man must lie in the bed he makes for himself, and so Fairbanks was making the best of things.

  His letter all those months back to the Gazette, had been written on one of his dark days, when he was sick and tired of doing nothing. Constable Brompton’s accident had struck him as suspicious but, with no way back into the Force (lest he be called an interfering old policeman who should leave the real work to younger men) his only option was to write a letter to the paper, and hope to attract attention. At the time it had failed. No one was interested in the ramblings of an old man. He had let the matter drop, however much his old detective’s nose hated to do so, and went back to learning how to grow roses. It seemed the thing to do when one was retired.

  Clara’s letter had, therefore, taken him by surprise. He was delighted that at last someone was taking him seriously and wrote back to her at once. Her arrival at his home that morning only added to his good humour. She had arrived in good time for a leisurely brunch (something the Colonel had developed a habit for when his working hours had often seen him out before the crack of dawn) and he explained the concept of his mid-morning indulgence as he led her through to a warm parlour.

  “Brunch, is the meal between breakfast and, as the Americans call it, lunch. I supposed it is rather the morning equivalent of supper. I always insist on crumpets and bacon rolls. Followed by a substantial walk around the neighbourhood. One must always pay for one’s sins with hard work,” The Colonel patted his stomach which, while by no means the svelte belly of his youth, remained trim despite his gargantuan appetite. “When one is retired, one has a lot of time for walking.”

  The Colonel almost sighed mournfully, then remembered he had a guest present. Fairbanks held to the principle that one never showed unhappiness before a stranger.

  “I assume you came to the police after a spell in the army?” Clara asked as they settled before a comforting fire and awaited the arrival of brunch.

  “Slightly more complicated than that,” Colonel Fairbanks smiled. “I entered the police in 1868, just as a constable. They were very different days then. I lost my patience with the job, and left to join the army. I had some money behind me, from my late uncle, and was able to buy a commission. Two decades later and I was a Colonel with a touch of malaria that made continued campaigning out in foreign climes rather unpalatable. I spoke to a few friends in high places, and was side-stepped into the police force as a Chief Inspector. It was the role I had always wanted. For the next twenty years I plumbed the depths of London’s criminal underworld, solving everything from petty theft to murder. Then they suggested I retire and make way for a younger man,” Fairbanks shrugged his broad shoulders. “Experience, it appears, counts for very little when age is a consideration.”

  “You miss policing?”

  “I can’t deny it. I have a mind for puzzles, always have.”

  The crumpets and bacon rolls arrived. The Colonel took a toasting fork from the fireplace and impaled a soft crumpet on the end, before propping it before the fire. Meanwhile he offered Clara a roll.

  “And you Miss Fitzgerald? What brings you to this business?”

  “I suppose a mixture of curiosity, nosiness and a desire to help people,” Clara replied.

  Colonel Fairbanks liked the answer.

  “And you are looking into the matter of Constable Brompton’s accident?”

  “I have been asked to make discreet enquiries, yes. Which is why your letter intrigued me.”

  The Colonel nodded.

  “I still believe what I stated last summer. There was something wrong about that incident.”

  “I concur, but perhaps you will explain your reasons for thinking that, and what you know of the matter?”

  Colonel Fairbanks retrieved the toasted crumpet and dropped it onto a plate for Clara, before starting another. He was delighted to at last have an audience for his suspicions.

  “I am no Sherlock Holmes,” he began. “But I found, from just the little I read in the papers, that the case made no sense as an accident. Let’s begin with the lane Constable Brompton was traversing, now, I went and took a look, and it is not the sort of track any driver would negotiate at speed without good reason. It bends and twists, have you seen it?”

  “Yes, and it didn’t strike me as a good road to drive fast down.”

  “And at night, too,” Fairbanks talked with his hands, his forgotten crumpet burning in the fire. “But, by some stroke of good fortune for our driver, or so it would seem, he happened to come across Constable Brompton on the one spot where the road briefly becomes straight and allows the driver a chance to accelerate. Coincidence or design? Now, the driver didn’t stop, but that is not entirely uncommon. Reckless drivers also tend to be the least concerned by the consequences of their actions. However, the car must have been badly damaged. The force of the impact alone should have dented the bonnet, not to mention it must have caused the car to veer, possibly hitting one of the stone walls that edges the lane. When I went to the spot just a couple of weeks after the incident I spotted red paint on the stone wall. I would suggest that our car was red and collided with that wall before driving off.”

  “A red car with considerable damage to the front end should be reasonably easy to find, you would imagine,” Clara said.

  “Clearly you have had the same thought as me, Miss Fitzgerald – where is the car? If it belonged to someone local, or even a visitor to the area, you would have thought someone would have noticed it. The car would have needed to be taken straight to a garage, yet, from the enquiries I have made, no mechanic has tended to such a car. It seems to have just vanished.”

  “Highly suspicious.”

  “Yes. Of course, we might argue the person was fearful they would be identified by the damage to the car, and drove to a distant garage, but I suspect the vehicle would have been in rather a poor condition to drive. Even if the impact made by Brompton had not damaged something mechanical, the collision with the wall certainly would have. It almost seems as if the person driving the car was able to make it disappear. Perhaps into a barn or something similar? Somewhere it could be hidden while it was fixed and perhaps the paint colour changed.”

  “As far as I am aware, there is no one in Brighton who owns such a car,” Clara said carefully. “And a visitor would not have access to a hiding spot on such short notice.”

  “Unless they had planned to run down Constable Brompton, and had made suitable advance arrangements.”

  Clara thought about this for a moment. Her conversation with Farmer White had convinced her all the more that Brompton’s misfortune was more than just an accident, but so far she had no hard evidence to back up her suspicions.

  “I mulled the matter over with the fellows at my club,” Fairbanks continued. “According to them, there are ten households in the vicinity of the town that own cars. Two of which are red. One happens to belong to a golfing chum, and I see his car every week when I go to play a round. It is in pristine condition, not a scrape or a bump, and, if I am honest, the owner is not the sort to drive above 10mph at his worst. The second belongs to a woman, a little sporty thing, the car, that is. When I made further enquiries I found it had suffered a problem with the engine at the time of the accident and had been waiting to be fixed for nearly a month. She, or anyone else, could not have
driven it that night.”

  “So we must assume the car was not local.”

  “Yes, which makes it even stranger that it just disappeared with no one seeing it. Someone, you would imagine, would see a badly damaged red car leaving the area of Brighton. They would have had to stop for petrol, at least.”

  “It could be they travelled at night and were lucky,” Clara said, deciding to air out all possibilities.

  “There is one other thing,” Fairbanks paused as the smell of burning crumpet reached his nose. He pulled the toasting fork out of the fire with a mild curse and removed the blackened crumpet, tossing it onto the hearth stone. As he began toasting another he continued. “When I was in London, we saw a number of cases just like this, we called them ‘hits and runs’. They became extremely popular among the criminal fraternity as a means of getting rid of someone.”

  “Really?” Clara was intrigued.

  “You see, if you stab or shoot a man, it is very difficult to convince anyone it was an accident. But run a man over with a car and, if you are caught, you can say to a judge that you never saw the fellow in the dark, or he just stepped off the pavement in front of you. It is much harder to prove it wasn’t an accident. And it can mean the difference between a prison sentence and the hangman’s noose.”

  “Yet there still remains the question, why?” Clara retrieved the crumpet from the fire herself this time, before it burned. The Colonel thanked her with an abashed smile.

  “Miss Fitzgerald, can you provide any insight into why someone would wish to harm Brompton?”

  Clara drew in a breath – could she?

  “Brompton seems to remember very little about his life before the accident. It is possible he stumbled across something he shouldn’t have,” Clara refrained from suggesting police corruption, though she had no doubt the shrewd Colonel had already suspected as much.

  “I might be reading too much into this whole affair,” Colonel Fairbanks admitted, buttering his slightly singed crumpet. “But the majority of road accidents are very clear-cut. You know who must have been behind it almost at once. To me, this whole thing reeks of organised crime.”