With what motive? Or was it going to prove one of those motiveless crimes that strangely surfaced every now and then? He thought of the seventeenth-century poisoner, Madame de Brinvilliers, who had run round the hospitals of Paris poisoning people for ‘practice’. Practice was a motive of a kind. Was it one here?
But this was all speculation. Let the evidence lead the way. He considered the evidence. The forensics, for much of which he was still waiting, and might go on waiting unless he pressed, the photographs and diagrams contained in the Scene of Crime report, and the testimony of Mrs Brocklebank. Not much.
He knew the man in charge of the case and had asked (as head of the TAS) to be kept in touch with developments. He didn’t think he would be.
But that worked both ways. He might not do much talking back himself.
He might urge Lane to pick up what he could, Lane was a great scrounger of information.
The telephone rang.
Christopher Court, MP, had no difficulty in getting straight through on the telephone to Chief Superintendent Coffin once he had decided it was to him he wished to speak. Being an MP still carried some weight; he was PPS to a powerful minister at Defence, and the threat of the General Election had rolled away for the time being: he was someone to heed.
‘Hello? Chris Court here.’ He was always polite and easy on the telephone. It was a learned skill. ‘Chief Superintendent? We met briefly at the Pitts’ party. That last party.’
‘I remember.’ John Coffin was in his office crouched in the imitation Bauhaus chair which did not really accommodate his bulk and certainly did not offer the comfort it promised. He was doing three tasks at once: checking the statements of witnesses in a report being prepared for the Public Prosecutor and at the same time turning over the photographs and diagrams of the house in Church Row which the SOCO had put together. He was staring at a photograph of the whole dead group. In colour. Those were two jobs. The third was to talk to the man who had been in love with Irene Pitt.
‘I know your sister. We met in New York.’
‘Lætitia? Half-sister.’ Why did he say that? He didn’t have to explain Letty. He might have had to explain his mother’s activities, but she was dead. In a brief space of time, she had scattered offspring around the country and omitted to let any of them know each other. A real wanderer, and he looked for a sign of her inheritance in himself. Couldn’t find any, unless bad luck with love and marriage was one. Come to think of it, it probably was.
‘I’d like to talk to you.’
‘Yes, certainly, Mr Court. Would you like to drop in? Name your time.’
‘Oh, Christopher, please. Could you come here? Whitehall Court?’
‘Right.’ See a man in his own background, you learn something about him.
‘Only thing is: I share this flat with another MP.’ He sounded nervous. ‘Still, he’s not here at the moment.’
‘It’d have to be this evening, I’m afraid. Can’t get away before.’
Coffin had a desk full of work. But he could not take his eyes off the photograph in front of him. There was something about it that tugged for attention.
‘Could it be … not exactly unofficial, but will you have to bring another officer with you?’
‘I can come on my own.’ Coffin kept his voice noncommittal. ‘I couldn’t pass over anything you told me, though.’
‘Of course not. Wouldn’t want it. Come and have a bite with me. I’m not bad on grilling a steak.’ Chris Court’s voice was lighter, as if now he had got the conversation under way, he felt better. Coffin wondered what he had to say. As far as he knew, the MP had not been interviewed about the case. Not that his name had been kept out exactly. At least once a gossip columnist had run a story about ‘the lonely and about to be divorced MP for Roundhead East’ in a column next to the story about Irene Pitt and her husband. You could read between the lines and many would. He flipped over the pages of the report he was reading. No, the MP had not been visited, but his name was mentioned. He went back to the photograph.
‘I’ll do that.’ They fixed a time. Not too late, Chris Court said, as he would have to listen for the Division bell and might have to run for it.
Coffin’s eye rested on a detail in the photograph. He forgot, momentarily, about the MP and what he might have to say. Now he knew what he found interesting in it.
The soup tureen was in front of Edward Pitt, the curving silver ladle on the table by his plate. He had served the soup himself. He must have been the last to drink it. He might even have been standing up as he tasted the first mouthful. First mouthful, last mouthful.
Had he been watching the others, before he took his own spoonful?
Coffin thought he would be glad to have the full postmortem results on each body to know exactly how much poison was inside each stomach. They had all taken enough to kill, that was sure.
Strange way to commit murder and then suicide, he reflected, putting potassium cyanide in the curry soup. Mask the flavour, of course.
Which did seem to point to someone who knew about the curry soup being prepared for supper. Someone who could get at the soup, too.
It was a smoky hot evening when the two men met, but the flat where the MP lived was cool and dark. If he shared it with someone there was no sign of the other man; but perhaps the whole place was rented furnished and what Coffin could see, heavy leather sofas and hunting prints, was some third party’s scheme of decoration. Court destroyed this idea as he poured out drinks.
‘My wife did the flat. She’s an interior decorator. I think she was having a joke at my expense when she did it.’ He sounded weary. ‘She knows I’m allergic to horses and can’t fire a gun.’
Coffin took his drink, which was comfortably cool in the glass. ‘Has it been done long?’ The furnishings did not look new, but elegantly worn and homely. But perhaps that was the effect aimed at.
‘About five years.’ Court took up his own drink. The marriage must have been in trouble even then, he thought, and he hadn’t known. You never read the signals right. But in the final analysis it had been he who wanted out.
To John Coffin’s eye the other man still seemed nervous. This was interesting since he was on Coffin’s list of suspects.
He waited. Court plunged straight in, with the air of someone getting something disagreeable over. ‘I was going to marry Irene. I suppose you knew that?’
‘I did.’ Lætitia had told him, apart from the general gossip on the subject.
‘We had agreed to wait until they all came back from the States.’ He was still speaking jerkily. ‘I didn’t want that. Naturally. But it was the way it was.’
‘You’re still married?’
‘Yes. As you obviously already know.’ Coffin nodded, without speaking. ‘The arrangement suited my wife. She’s going to remarry too. It was all quite friendly. Or I thought it was. I thought it was what Edward Pitt wanted.’ He got up and started to walk around the room. Obviously he had come to the heart of what he wanted to say. ‘But when they came back from New York, Edward was quite different. Hostile. Angry.’ He took some of his drink as if it was bitter in his mouth. ‘Of course, you can never tell with people like that.’
Coffin said nothing. Can’t you indeed, he thought. If Edward Pitt picked up that in you, no wonder he was angry.
‘He wasn’t going to let go easily. I don’t think he was going to let Irene come to me.’
‘Was anything said?’
‘No, Irene said I was imagining things. I don’t think so. I didn’t like his mood. I told her so, but she just laughed. Said she could handle him.’
‘Is that all?’
‘She admitted he was quarrelling with her. Nastily, she said, and he had never been that before. And then of course all this business with the girl complicated things.’
‘Are you telling me that you think Edward Pitt killed his family?’
‘I’m saying that I think he could have done.’
Coffin considered. After all
, Edward Pitt’s name was on his own private list of suspects. But so too was that of Court himself. ‘Got anything more definite than mere feeling?’
Through the open window floated the sound of traffic, and then above this the boom of Big Ben sounding the hour.
‘I’ll just get us something to eat. Are you hungry? I am.’
In a housewifely kind of way, Court went out to the kitchen, returning with a plate of sandwiches. ‘Brown bread with smoked salmon, white bread with turkey. Sorry not to produce steak, but I didn’t have time.’
He grinned, suddenly looking younger. ‘We owe these to Bob Mackintosh who shares this flat with me. His girlfriend runs a catering business.’
Coffin took a sandwich and waited. He was getting to know the way this man worked. In a second or two he would come out with something. Might be good material, might not. He took a bite: the turkey was smoked also.
‘Yes, there was something.’ Court also took a sandwich, he held it in his hand. ‘Funny, isn’t it? Smoking cigarettes is bad for you, but anything smoked to eat is fine. All right. He was interested in poisons. I saw a book on poisons on his library table the day of that party where we met. You were there with your sister.’
‘Letty and I met there. Surprise to me.’ He got out a notebook. ‘Tell me the name of this book.’
‘The Book of Poisons by Gustave Schenk.’ It wasn’t much, but it was something.
‘I’ll check to see if it’s still there.’
‘He’d been reading it. Well, someone had.’
‘To wipe out almost your whole family suggests someone in an abnormal state of mind.’
‘He wasn’t normal, no.’
Coffin wished he had observed Edward Pitt more closely on that evening, but he had been so taken up with Letty.
‘I am sure Irene was coming round to knowing that. She was more and more worried. And then she had the worry about Nona.’
‘Yes, that was a bad business. You think it contributed to Edward Pitt’s state of mind?’
‘Irene was worried about the girl before that happened. It was part of it. The reason they decided to send the girl away, but Irene had something else on her mind.’
‘Did she tell you what?’
‘She told me something. It was something connected with three students who rented their house some years ago.’
Coffin raised his head alertly.
‘She asked me to inquire about the case. She thought I might know the right channels.’
‘She could have asked me.’
Court shrugged. ‘She wanted to know more about the student who killed himself.’
‘Malcolm Kincaid?’
‘That was the name. He poisoned himself.’
The words dropped into the room, like hard pebbles.
‘So he did,’ said Coffin.
‘Irene had an idea, I don’t know where she got it from, that a child, or a young person, came into the case somehow. She asked me to find out. I did. One of my research assistants did some investigation. And yes, the police did think that a young person, sex unknown, had been on the scene of the suicide. Fiona, that’s my assistant, was not told any more. I passed it on to Irene.’
‘Where did Mrs Pitt get this idea about the child?’
Court shrugged.
‘And what did she say when you told her what your assistant had found out?’
‘Not much. I supposed she meant Nona. But she did not actually admit it. Could have been the boy. All Irene said to me was that what worried her was that “she had said nothing to her”. It must have been Nona.’
The figure of the dead girl seemed to move before them.
‘She was a beautiful girl,’ said Coffin. ‘What was she like?’
‘I hardly got to know her,’ he said quickly, looking away. ‘She was a child when they went off, and then grew up quickly in New York. Or that was the way it seemed. But she had character, and if she had a secret, I would say she could keep it.’
They finished their drinks and almost silently ate their way through the plate of sandwiches.
‘I’ll find out what the local police know,’ said Coffin as he left.
‘I expect they know more than they told Fiona.’
‘Probably. But thanks for telling me all this.’
‘It may mean nothing. But I wanted you to know.’
For the first time, Coffin saw the signs of grief on Christopher Court’s face.
So Coffin went back and early next day started his own questions. He went straight to Bernard Jones. He had something to discuss with Paul Lane, but Jones first about the Kincaid death.
He got Jones on the telephone and at home. A young voice answered the telephone, a lad, but willingly went away to get his father. Bernard had had his breakfast but had not yet turned his mind to the day. A process which went slowly these days. By the sound of it, he was in the middle of shaving. So Coffin had to work on him a bit first to get him to think laterally. Or to think at all.
‘Oh, you’re on about that again? Don’t know why it interests you so much.’
Coffin was silent. Why he was interested was his own affair at the moment. If Bernard came across with anything good, then he would go to the archives and read the files himself.
‘Yes,’ said Bernard, dragging in the recesses of a memory which, like his stomach, was capacious but had to be treated carefully. ‘Yes, I remember now. There was some talk of a kid having disturbed the body. Nothing to do with the suicide, of course, just having been there. Probably the first person to discover the body.’
‘What was the evidence?’ It might not be important to him, but he wanted to know.
‘Think it was sweetpapers and a comic dropped at the scene. We thought it indicated a youngster.’
‘Yes,’ said Coffin thoughtfully. He would consult the archives himself, thinking over what Bernard had recalled.
Which was almost accurate, and almost enough. But when Coffin checked in the records, intact but dusty, he found that the comic was not a comic but a girls’ magazine. One aimed at the teenage market. And the sweetpapers were not sweetpapers but the cover from an expensive brand of chocolate. Someone had not been very intelligent, he thought.
It could have been the Pitt girl.
Malcolm Kincaid had died from potassium cyanide. And so had the Pitts.
Had the girl found the poison, kept it, and then used it? Or, if she had kept it, had someone else in that family, possibly the father, come by it and used it? Which of them had been reading The Book of Poisons?
It was a question to ask, and no doubt this time, one which should be asked. Answering would be something else again.
Meanwhile, he had other questions on that strangely linked case of the murder of William Egan by his son-in-law, Terry Place.
Nothing was certain. They might yet discover that someone else was guilty, but he did not think so. Terry it was, but he wished the man would come round and answer questions. One of them, anyway, he could put to Lane.
This, with other and routine business, took him half a morning, during which Inspector Lane was out of the office on other business and the two young sergeants were in and out all the time; they seemed to work as a unit. Lane had his own small office but was rarely to be found in it.
Early in the afternoon he heard his voice and went in to put his question. ‘Oh yes, money,’ said the Inspector briskly. ‘I’m glad you’re asking. I’ve been wondering about that myself. Yes, both Place and Egan had considerable sums stowed away from various jobs. Or they should have had, because we never laid our hands on it. Even allowing for what they would have lost on laundering the proceeds, there should have been a tidy sum. I’ve been wondering where it was now.’ Which meant that he had been giving it considerable quiet thought. ‘There weren’t many people that pair trusted.’
‘I thought my memory hadn’t played me wrong.’ He clearly remembered noting the size of Egan’s haul. ‘Especially about Bill Egan.’
‘Oh yes.
That was why he had it in for you for putting him away. He got a long sentence. All that lovely money and he couldn’t touch it. But, as it happened, he got out a bit sooner than expected. Quite a bit sooner. That must have been a shock to Place.’
‘Yes, he saved that warder.’
‘That’s right, and got his sentence reduced for doing it. Although I did hear that accident wasn’t entirely kosher.’
‘The warder bought a new house, has he?’
‘He may have been hoping to. No luck there now with Egan gone.’
‘He might try Mrs Egan.’
Lane just laughed.
‘Whom did those two men trust? Would Egan have left it with his daughter?’
‘Doubt it. Not much love lost there.’
‘What about Terry Place, would he trust his wife?’
‘No, but he’d trust his sister.’
‘And Egan seems to have trusted Rhoda Brocklebank.’
‘So he did.’
‘And Rhoda Brocklebank and Roxie Farmer and Shirley Place have all been spending money,’ said Coffin. ‘With a free hand.’
The two men stared at each other.
‘I suggest we talk with all these three women. I’ll take Rhoda Brocklebank,’ said Coffin. ‘And you can have the other two.’
So that could be one little mystery rolled up.
If he got the answers he expected, that Rhoda had kept William Egan’s money in some hiding place and that Roxie had been looking after her brother’s moneybags, and that all three women had been spending what they were supposed to be hoarding, then he knew what was causing the atmosphere he had picked up at Roxie’s house.
It was shared guilt.
At this point the young sergeant, David Evans, strolled into the room. He had been keeping a watch on Terry Place at the hospital. There was a uniformed constable by the bed all the time, but David Evans was hanging about as an unofficial extra. He was not exactly made welcome, but it was recognized that the TAS outfit had an interest.
‘He’s come round,’ he announced. He was excited, but not wishing to show it.
‘And?’
‘He more or less admits that he fired first.’
‘What does that mean?’ demanded Coffin.
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