Murder in the Mail: A Diane Dimbleby Cozy Mystery

by Penelope Sotheby

  Cars filled only half of the spaces when Diane pulled behind the building. She selected a spot next to a small Fiat that she had seen outside her house when she left that morning, which had to be Monica’s car. The parking angle was almost diagonal across the spot and Diane almost clipped the jutting bumper as she turned in. She was even more alarmed when she saw that the driver’s door had been left slightly ajar.

  “The poor girl,” thought Diane. “I abandoned her in a more fragile frame of mind than I thought.”

  Locking her car, she walked around and hip-checked the Fiat’s door shut with a satisfying crunch. She could see that the backseat was a mess of clothes, food packets, and other detritus that young people seemed to accumulate in cars. Diane wondered what satisfaction there was in accruing such a mess before she realized that it was more of an “out of sight, out of mind” situation than deeper insight into Monica’s psych.

  Beside the door was a long metal plate that housed six dingy white buttons with a scratched transparent slide next to each. Four of the slides had names underneath, slanting handwriting of a barely legible nature on misshapen pieces cut from notebook paper. A circular grille sat underneath the buttons, and when Diane poked at one of the buttons, a tinny facsimile of Monica’s voice came through.

  “Yes?” The voice sounded apprehensive.

  “Hell dear. It is me, Diane. I would like a word with you if you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Oh,” came the surprised response. “Okay. You can come in, the front door is never locked.”

  Diane felt a little let down having expected the standard buzzer sound of someone being given access to a building, something she had seen so often in films and used a few times in her writing.

  “Who leaves the main door to a building open in this day and age?” she mused as she turned the large circular knob, her knuckles breaking away a few flakes of paint.

  The entrance hall ran far back into the building, the cracked white tile sliding past two locked doors that faced each other, a large staircase and to a third locked door at the far end of the hall. A table stood behind the door with six pigeonholes for mail. The holes were numbers 1 through 6, and only 4 and 5 had any mail remaining.

  The locks on the door to Diane’s right crunched and the white panel door cracked open slowly before swinging wide to reveal Monica dressed in baggy sweatpants and t-shirt. Her hair appeared to be in the same state as Diane had last seen her in her kitchen that morning. Her eyes darted along the hallway before waving Diane inside.

  As Diane stepped into a studio apartment that closely resembled the back seat of Monica’s car, the door closed sharply, with several locks clicking into place like obedient guards clicking their heels.

  “Should I be happy to see you?” Monica stood with her back to the door, leaning slightly as if bracing for impact.

  “Not really,” said Diane, letting her eyes drop. “We have found the owner of the finger. She was dead, I’m afraid.”

  “That’s who they found at the lake earlier?” Monica reached into her sweatpants pocket and produced a phone that she immediately started flicking at with a finger.

  “Yes. I found the poor girl. Such a horrible thing.”

  Monica looked up, her finger frozen in mid-air.

  “They know who did it though, right?”

  “Well, that’s why I’m here. I want to go back through everything. There seems to be something I’m missing, or that I missed.”

  “But what about the Inspector?”

  “He has his own line of inquiry right now.”

  “So we’re on our own here then? No visitors?”

  Diane looked at Monica whose eyes were wide, partially with hope and partially with something Diane thought might be fear.

  “Correct,” said Diane brusquely, turning to find a chair and only seeing a high tide of clothes.

  Monica walked over to a pile of sweatshirts and pushed them aside to reveal an armchair that faced a similarly swamped bed. Manoeuvring through the mess, Diane lowered herself into the chair, gingerly straightening her right leg. Monica flopped onto the bed and lounged onto her side, hand under her head.

  “I’ve told you everything, I think,” said Monica. “I just got the box and brought it to you. Not much else to tell you.”

  “And that’s where I feel we need to start,” replied Diane. “You’re sure that there is no reason to send the finger to you? A spurned lover? A jilted co-worker?”

  Monica shook her head, waves of her hair slipping across her face.

  “No one. I haven’t dated in about a year. You don’t meet many guys around here that can sweep a girl off her feet in the pub.”

  Diane nodded sagely, having seen the courtship antics of young folk around Apple Mews.

  “Then why?” she said absently, letting her eyes drift across a torn poster of Jimi Hendrix in gaudy colours to a shadowy patch of wall just beneath the ceiling. It was a few minutes before Monica coughed gently and Diane realized that she had drifted into her mind.

  “Maybe it was meant for one of your friends, sent via you?” she enquired. “Maybe a card fell out in the hallway or…” Diane looked around the room and wondered if a dropped card would ever be found again.

  “I don’t think so, I was pretty shaken up when I opened the box, I kind of dropped it on the table in the hall. Then I called Tommy and came straight over to you.”

  “Where was the box when you first saw it?”

  “On the table out there.” Monica motioned her free hand limply towards the door.

  “On the table?”

  “Oh yeah. The outside door stays open all of the time so the postie can come in and drop off everyone’s mail. The box was on the table, not in my pigeon hole. I only opened it because my name was on it.”

  Diane nodded slowly, her mind again drifting. There seemed a glitch in her thoughts, as if a missing part was allowing an engine to grind away without actually doing the work it was designed for. She decided to change tack and see where it took her.

  “I saw on the doorbells that there are six rooms here. Do you know everyone?”

  “Mostly, though people drift in and out quite a lot. We’ve only just filled the last room, it had been vacant for a while. Nice girl as far as I can see.” Diane was talking absently, having pulled her phone up to her face again.

  “Oh, I saw two missing names on the buzzers outside.”

  “One of them is Malcolm. He’s been here longer than me, but he refuses to put his name on the door. I’m pretty certain I saw him in a tinfoil hat the other day, which kind of explains a lot. The new girl would be the other. She’s called Melissa I think.”

  There was a pop in Diane’s head as the missing gear slotted into place. Engines started to strain, and data began to be crunched. She sounded out the name softly, as if the repetition would help with her recall.

  “Melissa. Melissa. Melissa. Why does that name sound familiar?”

  “She’s only been here a week or so. Don’t see her much though, keeps to herself mostly. She’s been gone most days though.”

  The engine stopped, and the output registered clearly in Diane’s mind – the Hargrave girls.

  “Do you know her last name?” she barked sharply. Her eyes focused quickly upon Monica and she leaned forward with anticipation.

  “No clue,” said Monica anticlimactically. “But you can check her mail if you want. She hasn’t picked it up yet. She leaves early every morning for work, I guess.”

  Diane pulled her aching leg under herself, levered herself upwards and went to the door. A few seconds elapsed as she looked over the door locks and tried to work them so that they were all unlocked at the same time. Monica appeared behind her and with the deftness of a magician had the door pulled open.

  They reached the pigeon holes, and Monica pointed to the number 5.

  “That’s Melissa’s.”

  Diane hesitated briefly, realizing that if she was wrong, she would be violating the privacy of someone
and handling their mail. The risks of not doing so outweighed this worry however, and she reached for the stack of mail.

  The first piece was for a Mr. Herbert Homburg. Monica said that he had moved out over a year ago, but they kept putting his mail back into the mail system. Every six weeks another piece would appear.

  The next was a W. Penny. Monica didn’t know the name but assumed it must have been a tenant before she arrived.

  “I get mail for three or four different people every week. For all the Post Office or I know, they disappeared without a trace.”

  Finally, the third piece held a handwritten change of address, forwarded from an address in Shrewsbury. Diane showed the letter to Monica, who took a couple of steps backwards and sat on a step of the stairs.

  “Melissa Hope,” said Diane. “That finger was meant for her, not you.”

  Chapter 6

  “Of course, of course!” exclaimed Diane. “This is the Hargrave girls all over again.”

  Monica stared dumbly from her perch on the stairs, the letter still held up in front of her.

  “The who?”

  “The Hargrave girls. They were a couple of teachers that both worked at my school years ago. Audrey and Alison. But you know, being in a school, the students only knew them both as Miss Hargrave. I can’t tell you the number of times I had confused parents come to me during a parents’ evening to complain,” Diane lowered the tone of her voice and altered her accent slightly, “That Miss Hargrave doesn’t know who my son is. She should be fired, not knowing her students. Claimed my boy wasn’t in her class. Said there was another Miss Hargrave. I gave her a piece of my mind.”

  Diane chuckled softly to herself and shook her head at the memory. Her hand still held the other mail with assorted recipients and tapped it rapidly on the edge of the wooden table.

  “Couldn’t tell you the number of times. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me earlier.”

  “But what are the odds?” asked Monica.

  “Exactly,” said Diane. “What are the odds? That’s what makes it so unusual and has taken us so long. We are running behind, and I must tell the Inspector.”

  Diane dropped the mail and reached for her phone, a slight tremor betraying her excitement.

  ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠

  The doctors had given the Inspector the all-clear to talk to Gary, but with the stern warning that if their patient became over-taxed, they would remove the Inspector by brute force if necessary. The Inspector had nodded politely and they had vacated the room, leaving him and Gary alone as walls of instrumentation hissed, beeped, and blipped.

  “I’m Inspector Crothers.” He waved identification in front of Gary’s face. Gary blinked his eyes blearily and tried to focus on the waving ID while the Inspector watched his face.

  “No faking there,” thought the Inspector.

  Gary opened his mouth to speak but coughed instead, which led to a wince and a hand grasping at the side of his head. The Inspector grabbed a small plastic cup from the nightstand and leaned into the bed slightly to put it to the patient’s lips. Gary sipped rapidly at the slow trickle from the cup then laid back upon several pillows, his tongue passing slowly over parched lips as he crushed his eyes shut.

  “Take your time,” said the Inspector, who hoped that his statement would be ignored. Time was not his friend. Sergeant Webster had called and given him more bad news. The mailman that delivered the finger hadn’t actually delivered the finger. He swore that he had never seen a box. A call to the sorting office found that any packages would have been X-rayed, and they would surely have noticed a finger even before it left the building. That left the only option being that the perpetrator had delivered the box himself. Another lead gone to the pyre. He had Sergeant Webster order a car to go past Monica Hope’s building every half hour, just to keep an eye on it, but it was probably already too late. He was running out of options, and he really needed to hear what Gary had to say.

  “I’m sorry,” croaked Gary as he opened his eyes and made a visible effort of focusing on the Inspector.

  “The doctors told you where you are.”

  Gary nodded slowly.

  “What do you recall before you woke up here?” The Inspector had deliberately kept his question vague to allow Gary to pull up memories that were untainted by anything the Inspector said.

  “I don’t…” Gary paused, his eyes shut again.

  Inspector Crothers waited, the smell of disinfectant prickling his nostrils. A porter wheeled someone past the large windows; the constable stood outside the door watching them intently.

  “Shelly…” Gary said the name and the Inspector realized it was not a question. He turned back to see Gary staring into his face, his eyes widening in horror. “Shelly.”

  ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠

  Diane put the phone back into her pocket.

  “No answer,” she said as she creased her forehead in thought. “It’s becoming a habit for him.”

  “What do we do now?” asked Monica. She had gotten to her feet and begun pacing the hallway.

  “Melissa isn’t home, you said.”

  “That’s right. The policeman wanted to talk to her, but she wasn’t in her room. I haven’t seen her come back, but I haven’t been keeping my eye out completely.”

  “Alright, let’s give her a knock and find out. Lead the way.”

  Monica took the stairs two at a time leaving Diane behind to hobble upward, her injured ankle slowing her usually lively step.

  The hallway at the top of the stairs was similar to that on the ground floor with the exception of a worn and tattered beige carpet that covered the floor. Three doors came off the hallway, and Monica made for the one at the rear of the house, an off-white wood panel door with a black number hanging loosely from a single screw.

  Monica waved Diane over as she pressed her ear to the door. Diane gave her a questioning look, and Monica shrugged.

  “Only one good way to find out,” said Diane before rapping her knuckles heavily upon the painted wood. Monica pressed her ear against the door again, and they both waited in silence. After a minute, Monica leaned back.

  “Not a sausage.”

  The pair retreated along the hallway and down the stairs, returning to their previous spots around the mail table. Diane picked up the mail she had left on the tabletop and began fanning through it.

  “What else do you know about her?” asked Diane as she dropped several envelopes into a pigeonhole.

  “Nothing really. She’s new, and she works all day, and I’ve only seen her as we passed at the front door a couple of times. Hi and bye, you know.”

  “Would anyone else in the building know her?”

  “I doubt it. Everyone keeps to themselves mostly. It’s not like we invite each other around for dinner. We get on with our own lives.”

  Diane let out a sigh, partly in exasperation and partly at the isolated worlds people seemed to live in these days. She continued to flick through the pile of mail until something caught her eye. With thin fingers, she plucked the corner of an envelope free and began to examine it. Before long she pulled her phone from her pocket again and began typing.

  “I think we may have a lead,” she said to Monica, who was sitting on the step once more with her chin resting in her hand and a distant look in her eyes. Diane pushed the envelope at her and continued fiddling with her phone.

  “This address is scribbled on the envelope,” said Monica.

  “Exactly. And the original address has been scribbled over, badly. But that was Melissa’s old address, I would bet.” Diane put her phone to her ear, and Monica could hear the buzz of a ringing phone. “I’m calling the phone number for that address, and we shall see what we shall see”

  The conversation was brief. Diane explained that she was looking for Melissa Hope, as her mail - a tax return - had been delivered to the wrong house and she wanted to contact her to make sure it got directly into her hands, instead of back into the incompetent m
ail service. Diane was suitably derisive and after a little back and forth, the person on the other end of the phone line, Melissa’s old housemate, told her that she would be at the flower shop on the main street where she had taken a job.

  Diane tried the Inspector again, but yet again his phone went to a full mailbox. After throwing her hands into the air, she and Monica got into Diane’s car and drove to the florist.

  It was approaching 6pm and the traffic through town was light, so they made good time and pulled up outside the flower shop while the lights were still on. There was a CLOSED sign on the door. Diane marched up to the glass door and gave three sharp knocks. She could just see a movement of shadows through an arch in the back of the store, but no one came to see who was knocking.

  Diane persisted and knocked three more times, then another three times until a head appeared around the side of the archway. Tight brown curls on a round middle-aged face. The face mouthed “We’re closed” at Diane and waited to see that she understood and was going to leave. Diane did nothing of the sort and knocked some more. She hoped that the person in the back would see her glasses and think that she could not see past the end of her nose. Most people thought that about her, and she did not work to dissuade them. Every time someone underestimates you, you gain an advantage, she had told herself long ago.